Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dragonfly Falling

Oh, Totho could string a sequence of events together, surely. The horror of speculation was wondering what he did not know. Whose bodies now lay amongst the Sarnesh dead on the battlefield? Stenwold perhaps? Tynisa?

Perhaps the Moth Achaeos had perished too.

That thought sent an ugly little thrill through him. If Achaeos was dead.

But Che would be dead all too soon, once they had finished cutting and twisting her flesh. General Malkan’s interrogators would undoubtedly want to know everything she could tell them about Sarn, in preparation for his next campaign.

Totho stood and watched Drephos in conversation with one of Malkan’s officers. The general himself was conducting any communications through intermediaries at the moment. That was, Totho had realized eventually, because he was embarrassed. Anyone with eyes could see that Drephos had turned the battle for him, turned the iron tide at the point when Malkan’s men were at their weakest. Drephos had broken the Ant advance and given the Wasps new heart.

Or rather , Totho thought wryly, I did, and nobody knows .

How happy he was for that, and it was not that Drephos had snatched the praise from him, but Totho had hidden away from it, for he had witnessed as closely as he cared the monstrous effects that his inventions had on meat and metal.

Amongst primitive peoples, like the Mantis-kinden, contracts and agreements were sealed with a drop of blood. Well, his contract with Drephos and the Empire was well and truly sealed. He was wading in it, up to his waist already, and with further still to go. And here was Che, suddenly come like his conscience to remind him of all that he had betrayed.

It would serve her right. He hardened his heart. She had never taken the time to think about what she was getting into. Or perhaps it would be a form of justice on Stenwold for sending his own niece into the tempest. Or on the wretched Moth for luring her from safety into this dangerous place. Justice for someone, surely. And that would make some sense of it all.

‘Totho?’

He looked up sharply, seeing Kaszaat walking towards him with concern in her eyes.

‘You’re brooding more than usual. What’s wrong?’

Now here was a woman worth his attention, he told himself. Not too proud to lie with a halfbreed. And she obviously cared about him.

Because Drephos told her to.

‘Totho, what’s wrong?’

She reached out, and he flinched away without thinking.

The look of hurt on her face could have been genuine, and he realized how much he had been poisoned by Drephos, by the Empire, so that he would never be able to be sure with her — or with anyone else — what was real and what was feigned. He had been adopted into a world where everything was weighed in objective scales, valued coldly and then put to work. His credit here was his artificer’s skill and, though he had valued that more than anything, he found it was short measure for his whole life. He was now merely a pair of hands to make, a mind to create: not Totho of Collegium but some working annexe to Drephos’s ambition.

And is that so bad? Because he had lived his entire life, surely, on similar terms. He had worked with the debased currency that his mixed blood could buy him. He had worked twice as hard as his peers, getting half as far. Men with less talent at their graduation than he had possessed from the start had walked straight from the College into prestigious positions of wealth and respect, whereas he, with only real skill to his name, had been accorded nothing. Even amongst Che and Stenwold and the rest he had been the fifth wheel that nobody really needed.

Well, at least here he was needed, and if he was to be valued merely as a commodity, at least Drephos had placed that value high enough to spare Salma’s life in exchange.

But that deal was done, and he had nothing left to barter for Che. I cannot save her.

A simple thing to say, and surprisingly easy.

I cannot just let her die, without a word.

And there was the barb that now caught him. Must he plunge a blade into his own guts by revealing to her what he had become? Or instead live with that emptiness inside him, that lack of a final meeting with her before the end? Or do I merely want her to see that at last I’ve made something of my life?

He clenched his fists, and his mind conjured up the last throes of the doomed Sarnesh charge, bright blood springing from sheared metal as the bolts drove home.

I am become the destroyer. What can I not do? What limits me now?

Che heard the hatch move, but no sun flooded in. Clearly night had come and she had not realized.

One man only, this time, with a covered lantern giving out a fickle light, but her eyes saw him well enough.

She could not be sure of his identity until he had stopped. It was a young man, broad-shouldered and sturdy-framed and marked by mixed blood, and she did not quite know him. She saw the trappings: a toolbelt such as he had always wanted and could never afford, black and gold clothes, a sword and a rank badge. She recognized none of that. It was only when he stood in the cellar, on the other side of the bars, that she was sure.

‘Totho.?’ Her voice emerged in a quaver, not quite believing what she saw. ‘Is it you? It can’t be you.’

He stared at her, and his features were harder than she remembered. Still, there had been harsh times for both of them since they last parted.

‘Totho, don’t just stand there. You have to let me out. You must know what they’ll do to me.’

His face tightened further. ‘I don’t have the keys,’ he muttered, and continued to stare.

‘Totho. what are you doing here?’ she asked. ‘You went off to Tark. why are you wearing that. uniform?’

‘Because it is mine,’ he stated, and she began to feel her brief surge of hope draining away.

‘You mean. how long?’

He realized that she was seeing their history together unravel backwards, trying to recast him as a spy during all that time, because poor Che didn’t realize that people changed.

‘Since Tark,’ he said. He found it mattered to him that she knew she had already cast him off before he had found his new calling.

‘But why?’ she said, still trying to whisper but her indignation getting the better of her. ‘They’re the enemy, Totho! They’re monsters!’

He felt his anger grow in him. ‘I did it to save Salma,’ he snapped, ‘because otherwise they would have killed him. Or don’t you think that was worth it? Perhaps I should have just died alongside him.’

‘But that’s. ’ She gaped at him. ‘But you’re free,’ she said, still determinedly marching up the wrong street. ‘You could run, surely, run to Collegium and tell them what happened here.’

‘You have absolutely no idea what happened here.’ He felt she was trivializing the sacrifice he had made, and suddenly he was on fire with it. He had never impressed her as a companion, as a warrior, most certainly not as a prospective lover, for all that she had once been life and breath to him. ‘Do you want to know,’ he asked her, voice shaking slightly, ‘what happened here?’

‘I don’t understand, Totho.’

‘ I happened here, Che. That’s the simplest thing. Those dead Ants out there — I killed them. When the city of Sarn falls it is I who will break it. When this army or another like it is at the gates of Collegium, it will be me , do you understand? When the Lowlands becomes just the western wing of the Empire, then by rights my name should be on the maps.’

She was backing away from the wooden bars. ‘Totho?’

‘All my doing, Che.’ As she retreated so he had moved up to the bars himself, gripping them as though he were the prisoner here. ‘What your uncle dismissed as a toy back in Collegium, they have made into a weapon here. You remember how I always wanted to make weapons? Well now it’s happened, and my weapons win wars.’