Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dragonfly Falling

Always the figure was a fraction faster than her attacks, displaying Tisamon’s cold rage, or the face of Thalric with the fires of the Pride reflecting in his eyes. Her adversary was every man she had ever fought, every man she had loved or hated, one at once and all together, a shifting chimaera of faces and styles and blades. He was the half-breed gang-leader Sinon Halfways with his marble skin, and Captain Halrad who had tried to own her; beautiful Salma who she had yearned for and yet who had never given himself to her; Stenwold, who had hidden her past from her; Tisamon, always Tisamon.

And then, there was an instant in which the face was a woman’s, and she could not have said if it was her own, or that of her mother, and she lunged with a wild cry and felt the rapier’s keen-edged blade lance through living flesh.

She was lying on her side before the idol, and the world seemed to be fading in and out around her so that she could almost see through the trees. There was a whispering chorus in her mind, but no words, just a susurrus of constant, muddled thoughts. She was exhausted: every muscle burned and twitched with it. The rapier’s hilt was still tight in her hand, and she felt it almost as the clasp of a lover.

Her head swam, but she seemed to understand things she had not comprehended before, though she knew this knowledge would leave her when she regained her full wits. In that drifting but infinitely lucid state she saw how Tisamon must be able to call his blade to him, and how Achaeos had known where Che and Salma were being taken, and many other things.

And there was a figure kneeling by her now, a Mantis woman with silver hair, proffering an ornate bronze bowl gone green in places over the years. She took it without hesitation, sitting up to drink, and she knew it was rich mead mixed with the blood of whoever or whatever she had slain before the idol, and the ichor, freely given, of the great mantis.

And it was bitter and sharp, and it burned her, but she forced it down, because it was strength, and skill and victory.

And when she awoke again, as dawn crept between the trees, there was something sharp cutting into her closed left hand. A brooch of a sword and a circle: the token of the order of Weaponsmasters.

*

Tisamon was waiting for her on the beach, and when she saw his face she realized that he had not been certain, despite all his promises to Stenwold, whether he ever would see her again.

She now wore the badge of his order on her arming jacket, and when the thought occurred, Did I really fight. she had only to touch the rents that the unknown blade had cut there, almost through to the skin. She was left only with the question, What was it that I fought? What blood did I drink?

The thought had come to her of those shadow-creatures in the Darakyon forest that she had seen that once when Tisamon led her through its margins. They had known his badge and his office, and stayed their hands for him.

There was a darkness at the heart of Parosyal, she understood, and it was best not to ask questions.

Tisamon’s eyes flicked from the brooch to her face, and he smiled just a little. She knew he would never ask, just as she could not ask him about his own experience all those years ago.

‘There is a boat that will take us over to Felyal before noon,’ he told her.

‘What do you hope to accomplish there?’ she asked him.

He shrugged. ‘Perhaps nothing, but I will see what can be done. It will not be easy for you.’

‘This will help?’ She touched the brooch lightly.

‘It will keep them from killing you out of hand,’ he told her, ‘but you may still have to prove yourself to my people — as may I. With last night behind you, I have no doubt that you can.’

‘You don’t strike me quite as bandits,’ said Salma. ‘Or perhaps you’ve not been in the trade long.’

The brigand leader shrugged. ‘There are two or three that have.’ He had given his name as Phalmes, and the total of his band was fifteen men and one Ant-kinden woman. They had a fire lit in a farmhouse that had been torched at least a tenday before, and the band of refugees was huddled close together in their midst, watching them suspiciously. Sfayot played pipe, though, keeping time on a drum with his foot, and his daughters danced. It entertained the bandits, but Salma found it lifeless compared to other dances he had seen.

‘Most of us are getting out from under the Empire,’ Phalmes said. ‘Deserters like me and some slaves. Others are rustics running away from home, or who’ve been burned out. The Empire’s on the march and that pushes a tide of flotsam ahead of it. We’ve got to live, and banditry’s as good a living as any.’

‘I’ve seen bandits,’ Salma observed. ‘It’s a wretched life.’

‘I imagine you have, being from where you’re from,’ Phalmes agreed. ‘And I’d ask just what a Commonwealer like you is doing so far from home. Not great travellers normally, your people.’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘It’s going to be a long night.’

‘Tell me a short one first,’ Salma said. ‘How do you come to know the Commonweal?’

Phalmes just smiled sourly, and Salma immediately understood. ‘You fought there?’

‘Five years of the Twelve-Year War,’ the bandit agreed. ‘After they drafted me for their Auxillians. I was apprenticed for a mason, before that. So much for the futures we think we’ll have. So tell me, Commonwealer, tell me your long story.’

And Salma told him, the bones of it anyway. He could not place any real trust in this man, he knew, and so he held off the names and the details, but he told Phalmes about the College and about his being recruited by a Beetle spymaster. He recounted his journey on the Sky Without and their escape, and their foundering in Helleron. He told of the betrayal and their capture by the Wasps.

Phalmes had listened without interruption, but it was when the tale reached Myna that he held a hand up. ‘How long ago?’ he asked hoarsely. ‘When was this?’

Salma counted back. ‘A couple of months at most, since I was held there. Then my friends got me out — and the governor was killed, I heard.’

‘The Bloat?’ Phalmes said. ‘They killed him?’

‘Yes. And I met the woman who is running the resistance there. She was freed at the same time I was.’

‘She? What’s her name?’

‘Kymene. Do you know her?’

Phalmes shook his head. ‘Heard of her, though. So your lot let her out. Well, now, that’s bought you safe passage and a half, more than any song and dance.’

The elder of Sfayot’s girls came, then, and sat down next to Phalmes, who regarded her without expression.

‘Your father sent you here to me?’

She nodded, watching him.

‘There’s a man with a realistic view of the world,’ said Phalmes tiredly. ‘Your friend here has just bargained your freedom, girl.’

She shrugged. ‘We knew he would.’

‘And why’s that?’ Phalmes asked her, like a man humouring a child.

‘Because he is such a man,’ she said. ‘My father has keen sight.’

Salma shifted uncomfortably. ‘It was nothing but chance.’

She shook her head stubbornly, and then turned her attention to Phalmes. ‘What will you do?’ she asked him. ‘Your men are unhappy. They fear the Wasps.’

‘Do they, now?’

‘They should,’ she told him. ‘My father has seen it. They are just north of here. The great city of the chimneys has fallen to them already.’

‘Does she mean Helleron?’ Phalmes demanded.

‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it,’ Salma said, and then reconsidered. ‘Or no, I’d heard that northwards wouldn’t be a good destination. I hadn’t thought. Things are moving fast, then?’