Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dragonfly Falling

Despite their engine, the Wasps had not made it through the gate, though the gap between the strained hinges was choked with their corpses and their enemies’. Besieger and besieged lay over and beside one another in a frozen jumble of black and silver, black and gold, pale skin and the dark stains of dried blood.

And beyond there, the wall gave out entirely of course. Here was where it had started, and at the broken edge of stone closest to him he could see some of the lower stones squeezed out of shape where the reagent of the Wasps had softened and distorted them. Here was where the defenders’ main force had met the Ants of Maynes, and the slain were piled so high that Totho could not see past them to the field beyond. There was no sense to be made of it, this tangle of arms and legs, shields and swords. It was like one of those clever pictures where a series of shapes interlocks so perfectly that there is no gap between them that does not form another shape, another Ant body. He found himself backing away from the sight but, even as he did, he was thinking, Meat, just meat. The Ant-kinden had been killing each other like this since history cared to record. If the Wasps wanted to join in that pointless bloody round, why should they be dissuaded? The Tarkesh were fighting for their homes now, but how many years would he have to track back before he found them assaulting another city’s gates? Certainly, had Totho been caught outside their walls at any other time, halfbreed and foreigner that he was, he would have been chained as a slave here without hesitation. There could be no special plea for Tark’s virtue.

Something was moving amongst the dead: he saw children, searching over the bodies of both their own kin and the enemy. He watched them, saw them gathering crossbow quarrels that had not been broken, saw them pulling swords from cold hands, meticulously undoing the buckles of armour. They called out to each other to announce their finds. It shocked him at first, to hear those thin, high voices in this silent place. They were too young, he realized, to have learned the Ancestor Art of the Ants, so they must have been taught these words by their parents, mouth to ear, before they would be able to speak them back mind to mind.

They were gathering only what was valuable. Not the mere flesh that was spent, not even the purses or effects of the dead. Only the harder metals, that could be used again or smelted and reforged. It seemed to him so fitting, what they did, for they were cogs, and war was the machine. Here on the battlefield was where the machine’s wheels ground hardest, where the metal met and the end process was written in bodies and blood. Had he not seen, in Helleron, where the raw materials of war were cast, all the swords and bolts and engines? Here was where the process came full circle, where the discarded pieces of a war were made as new, ready to go back into the mix. Only the meat, transient and replaceable, would not be saved. There was always more of that. Meanwhile, here came Ant-kinden soldiers to carry the stripped corpses to the pyres, and who knew whether the next ones to fall in this very place would be the same men who now hauled the bodies away? Interchangeable, the living and the dead. All meat.

He had not intended, when he left the others, to see this. His world had been complete without this. He had been happy in his ignorance, for ignorant Totho had been. But he was an artificer and this war was an artificer’s thing, a mechanical process cranked over and over by the constant refinement of the weaponsmith and the armourer, the automotive engineer and the volatiles chemist. Seen in that light, in that harsh but clear light, the whole business became somehow admirable. If he looked past the meat, contrived not to see it, then it was just another process that sharpened and honed itself each time it was set in motion.

‘Hey, Beetle-boy!’

He looked up without curiosity to see Skrill picking her way over to him, with Salma following a little way behind. Her arm was bandaged tightly, bound up in a sling. ‘I ain’t pulling any bow no time soon,’ she informed him. ‘Got me good, they did. Thought they’d got you too, when you took off.’

Totho merely shook his head. It seemed so long since he had spoken that the words had dried up inside him, making him envy the Ant-kinden and their voices of the mind.

‘Well, if this ain’t a right mess,’ Skrill decided, dismissing the butchery with that. The air was thickening with flies, an intrusion Totho had not noticed before, from the littlest ones to fist-sized blood-drinkers. Where do they come from? Was there some machine churning them out? Surely all these insects had not been just waiting around in Tark for a massacre.

‘The Ants think they won, last night,’ Salma said, ‘though I’m not so sure. The Wasps eventually pulled back, but to their own tune, not ours.’ He used to smile a lot, Totho remembered, but his face was tired now, without even the ghost of that grin left.

‘They’re all over the gaps in the wall, our lot, putting up stuff to fill ’em,’ Skrill added. ‘Ain’t going to make much difference is my thinking.’

‘Parops reckons they can hold against one more attack before the Wasps take the wall, anyway,’ Salma continued. ‘Their soldiers got the measure of the Wasp infantry last night, and the Tarkesh think they’re superior. If the Wasps want the wall they’ll have to pay for it, or that’s what they’re saying.’

Totho surprised himself by laughing. Salma stared at him.

‘What? Is something funny?’

‘You,’ said Totho, feeling his voice rasp in his throat. ‘You, fighting an Ant war. Where’s Parops?’

Wordlessly, Salma pointed to where a squad of Ants was labouring at one edge of the breach, fixing stone and wood into place to make some kind of a barricade.

‘Let’s talk to Parops,’ said Totho, but Salma gripped him by the shoulder.

‘Are you hurt, Toth?’

The halfbreed artificer looked him right in the eye, but without quite focusing. ‘I’ve just. seen. Salma, I made a mistake. You know why I came?’

‘I think I do.’

‘How could.? Surely this isn’t what I meant, by coming here.’

Salma let out a long breath. ‘I don’t think anybody meant this. I never saw it, but I heard reports during the Twelve-Year War. There were single days of fighting that you could have fitted these corpses into five times. And if Tark falls, then where next? Helleron? Collegium? This is why we have to fight them.’

Totho shook his head, feeling it throb in response. ‘If we wanted to stop this, then we should just not fight them at all. We should just give in. But we don’t, and so we don’t want to stop it. We fight them to create war, and this’ — a vague gesture across the strewn ground — ‘is just a byproduct. War is what it’s about, and we all work hard at it.’

‘Listen to you, Beetle-boy,’ Skrill said nervously. ‘You got knocked on the head or something?’

‘There may have been a grenade,’ Totho said vaguely. ‘Close, perhaps. We should speak to Parops.’ Without a further look at them he wandered away.

Parops glanced up as they came over. Helping build barricades, he still had his armour on and it was still unfastened at the back. In all the night’s chaos there had been nobody yet to secure it for him. Nero was sitting nearby, watching the busy activity but pointedly taking no part in it.

‘You’re wasting your time, Commander,’ Totho announced for all to hear. Parops raised an eyebrow.

‘And why’s that?’ he asked. Salma came up quickly and took Totho’s arm.

‘He’s taken a beating,’ he explained. ‘You shouldn’t mind him.’

‘They won’t come in by this door. They wanted to draw you out. I’ve understood it,’ Totho explained.