Adrian Tchaikovsky: Dragonfly Falling

He had them at a corner table, drawn far enough from the others that low voices would not carry. They had come in plain garb and armed and they looked at him expectantly. If he sent them out into the city to kill that very night, they would be ready.

‘Tell me about Stenwold Maker,’ he said.

Lieutenant Graf glanced at the others and then spoke. ‘He arrived the day before you, sir. Quite a tail of followers, too.’

‘Was there a Mantis-kinden with them?’ Thalric asked. His mind returned abruptly to the night battle at the engine works at Helleron that had seen the Pride destroyed. There had been a Mantis there, making bloody work of every man who came against him — until Thalric had burned him. Tisamon, Scyla’s reports had named him, and his daughter had been Tynisa. Tynisa , who had very nearly done for Thalric when he came to finish the matter. In his heart he had hoped that the man had died from his wound, but Graf’s next words surprised him not at all.

‘Yes, sir, his name is Tisamon. I’ve learned he was a student at the College many years ago, at the same time as Maker. Even from back then, he had a reputation.’

‘And well deserved,’ Thalric confirmed. ‘What movements?’

‘Maker’s settling his men in. He’s applied to speak before the Assembly, but that’s likely to take a few days. He’s not exactly popular. A maverick, they think, and he leaves his College duties too often. They’ll stall him with bureaucracy for a while, maybe even a tenday, before they let him in. A slap on the wrist.’

‘And the rest?’

‘Many of the others are now at the College,’ Arianna said. ‘Some are in the infirmary, in fact. They brought some wounded with them from Helleron. There’s a monstrous little wretch with them, though, some spiky kinden I’ve never seen before, and he’s been going about the factories a lot, the engine yards and the rail depot.’

‘That would be Scuto,’ Thalric explained, ‘Stenwold’s deputy from Helleron. He’s an artificer, I understand, so some of that might just be professional curiosity.’ Thalric remembered his one meeting with Stenwold Maker, a few brave words over a shared drink: two men in the same work on opposite sides, but common ground nonetheless; they were two soldiers who had suffered the same privations under different flags.

And now I stalk him to his lair, and I must destroy him. Because I must believe he would do the same to me, I shall feel nothing.

‘I have your orders,’ he addressed the foursome. ‘We’ll need armed men, Lieutenant — and craft from the rest of you. Stenwold Maker is not long for this world.’

To live in an Ant-kinden city was to understand silence, and he had spent time in a few. There was the silence of everyday tasks which meant that one heard only the slaves cluttering about, whispering to one another. There was the silence of the drilling field where there were marching feet and the clink of armour but never a raised voice or a shouted command: five hundred soldiers, perhaps, in perfect formation and perfect order. There was the silence after dark when families sat together with closed lips, while the slaves stayed huddled in their garrets or outbuildings.

Then there was this silence, this new silence. It was the silence of a city full of people who knew that the enemy, in its thousands, was camped before their gate.

Nero hurried through this silence bundled in his cloak. All around him the city of Tark was pacing along at its usual speed. At the sparse little stalls local merchants handed over goods wordlessly, receiving exactly the correct money in return. Children ran in the street or played martial games and only the youngest, eight years old or less, ever laughed or called out. Men and women stood in small groups on street corners and said nothing. There was an edge to them all and, in that unimaginable field extending between their minds, there was a single topic of unheard conversation.

It was once different, of course, in the foreigners’ quarter where he was lodging. A tenday ago it had been a riotous bloom of colour, penned in by the Ant militia but shaped by countless hands into a hundred little homes away from home. Now there was a hush over that quarter as well because all but the most stubbornly entrenched residents had fled.

And I should have gone with them.

He had been in Tark a year, not long enough to put down roots, but at the same time perhaps the longest he had spent anywhere since Collegium.

What keeps me here?

Guilt, he decided. Guilt because he knew this day would come, when the gold and black horde would pour into the Lowlands, and he had done nothing. He had walked away, once the knives were out, and not looked back.

He attracted little notice from the locals, for he was well known in this part of the city, which meant in any part, given that the local opinion of him could be passed mind to mind as easily as passing a bottle in a taverna. They looked down on him because he was a foreigner, and a Fly-kinden, and an itinerant artist. On the other hand he had friends here and he stayed out of trouble, and therefore he was tolerated. Not that staying out of trouble was an infallible recipe: three tendays before, a house had been robbed beyond the foreigners’ quarter. The militia, unable to track down the culprit, had simply hanged three foreigners at random. Visitors, they were saying, were there only on sufferance and were expected to police themselves.

He was an ugly little man, quite bald and with a knuckly face: a heavy brow and broken nose combined with a pugnacious chin to make a profile as lumpy as a clenched fist. Fly-kinden were seldom the most pleasant race to look at, and his appearance was distinctly nasty. If he had been of any other kin he would have hulked and intimidated his way through life, but no amount of belligerent features could salvage him from being only four feet from his sandals to the top of his hairless head.

His name was Nero and he had made a living for the last twenty years as an artist of such calibre that his name and his work could open select doors all across the Lowlands. In his own mind that was just a sideline. In a land where most people never saw much beyond their own city’s walls, unless for commercial purposes, he was a seasoned traveller. He rolled from city to city by whatever road his feet preferred, imposed on the hospitality of whoever would take him in, and did whatever he wanted.

Which brought him back to the present, because he now wanted, if his continuing presence was anything to go by, to be involved in a siege and bloody war. He himself was unclear on this point, but so far he had not felt inclined to leave, and shortly he suspected that he would not be able to do so without being shot out of the sky by the Wasp light airborne.

Ahead of him the city wall of Tark was a grand pale jigsaw puzzle of great stones, adorned with its murder holes, its crenellations, passages and engines of destruction. In its shadow the Ant-kinden were calm. This wall had withstood sieges before when their own kin of other cities had come to fight against them, just as Tarkesh armies had been repulsed by the walls of those kinfolk in Kes or Sarn.

Nero knew that the army now outside was not composed of Ant-kinden, and would not fight like them. Whenever he had that thought, he had a terrible itching to be gone, and yet here he still was.

Parops was of unusual character for an Ant, especially an officer. His friendship with Nero had begun on rocky ground when the universal grapevine had informed him that the woman picked out as his mate was sitting nude before the Fly’s easel, and he was a joke across the city before he had stormed across to remonstrate. Ant pairings were a strange business, though, made for the convenience of the city and the furtherance of children, and they lacked the personal investment, the jealousies and passions, of other kinden. In truth, after their coupling was achieved, the two of them had grown bored of one another. Nero had been one of a line of diversions she had taken up.