Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dragonfly Falling

‘All the time,’ said the artificer. ‘Everyone does. You’ve not spoken of her, barely mentioned her, since the Ants caught us. I knew, though — I knew you hadn’t forgotten. I never saw her but I hope she’s worth it.’

‘I dream about her,’ Salma said, surprising him. ‘I can’t put her out of my mind. Whenever I’m active, doing something, I’m all right, but then in the pauses she comes back to me. I didn’t even know her for long, and yet. here I am.’ He gave Totho a solemn look. ‘I suppose that we’re not so very different in that, since you’re in love with Che.’

Totho nodded glumly. ‘Since almost the moment I met her. Only, Stenwold doesn’t much like the idea. I even got the courage to ask his blessing, back in Myna, and he didn’t say anything much, but his face. you could tell. And then that cursed Moth, he just turns up from nowhere as though he’s her best friend in the world. And as soon as we got the two of you from the prison he was all over her. You must have seen it.’

‘I did,’ Salma admitted. ‘I had other things on my mind, but I saw it.’

‘And she. she liked him, I could tell. But it’s like Tynisa and the boys from the College. They go to her because she’s. graceful and. elegant. and sometimes she leads them on. But I can’t believe that creature feels anything for Che. and I tried to tell her how I felt, but she didn’t understand, and it all became. I just couldn’t stand. ’ He found that he was sniffling now and wiped his eyes and his nose furiously. ‘And so I just left, put a note by her pillow and left. I. I feel gutted, literally gutted, Salma. Like my insides have been ripped out of me. I’m just hollow. And now all this. all the killing, the destruction. You know how I’ve always wanted to design weapons?’

‘I didn’t, but go on.’

‘I should feel that it’s wrong — after I’ve seen what those weapons can do. And yet. and yet people would still kill each other with sticks and stones if they didn’t have anything else. With their bare hands even. And it would be pointless, so pointless. I. I almost think that only the weapons make it all worth anything. At least something is learning from the whole bloody business. The people remain the same, killing and dying and dying and killing, but at least the weapons get better.’

Salma gave him a doubtful look. ‘I don’t think Che would like to hear that.’

‘No, I’m sure she wouldn’t.’ Totho rubbed at his face, as if trying to erase some unseen stain.

Salma decided to come to the point. ‘Listen, Toth, when Skrill makes her move, you should go with her. Get out of here and get back to Stenwold. The Ants have artificers enough. Go back to Stenwold. And to Che, even.’

But Totho was shaking his head. ‘You haven’t thought it through, Salma. Sorry, but you haven’t. What am I supposed to say to her? Yes, I left you on an ill-planned mission that seemed certain to see you dead. Yes, I just ran, at that point, and made sure that my skin stayed whole. That, you see, would look particularly impressive. Che likes you. You and she went through a lot together. When you decided to come here on this fool’s mission she was furious, and it was because she was frightened for you. She doesn’t like me half as much, I think, nor would she have shed as many tears for me. So if I go back with that story, that I left you to your fate, how could I look her in the face? I know it’s not practical, and I’m supposed to be a practical man, but that’s how it is.’

‘Then don’t leave, just stay here. Stay in the city and wait,’ Salma said. ‘You don’t need to go tonight.’

‘It makes no difference, because I’d still be in the same position. Anyway I don’t think you’ll be coming back here afterwards.’

‘You can’t think I’d just grab Grief and abandon you here.’

‘No,’ Totho said, ‘that isn’t what I think at all.’

‘Then. ’ Salma thought about it. ‘Oh, I see.’

‘This is a fool’s mission, and these Ants are fools. They didn’t understand a word of what you said, or what I said. They have no concept of an enemy that is so much stronger than they are. Their mission tonight will not succeed.’

‘I thought in Collegium they didn’t believe in destiny.’

‘We believe in the odds, Salma,’ Totho said, ‘and I do not believe that we will win, tonight. I really do not believe that we will survive.’ He sounded distant, almost trancelike.

‘Well if you believe that,’ Salma told him, ‘then the question is back on the table. Why are you coming with me? Or is that why? Is that it?’

‘I do not have that courage, or that cowardice, whatever it is,’ Totho said, ‘to turn the blade upon myself. But I have. nothing left, Salma. I have nothing left. And so I’ll let the Wasps do it instead, if it’s all right with you. And if I can help you out, or even help the bloody ignorant Tarkesh, then that’s good too. But I am turning into something strange that I do not like. And so I think it best that I go with you tonight, and best of all if I do not return.’

Salma had no reply for that, trying to see through the clouds hanging about this man to the student he had once known. Totho had always been gloomy, it was true. He had always been shielding his halfbreed nature against the world — and then there had been his infatuation with Che, which had not helped. Tark had been the forge, though, that had taken the decent ingredients of the man and botched them into something flawed and strangely made.

We can win, tonight , Salma told himself. His own race were slow to admit to the impossible, and the histories of the Commonweal were rife with accounts of one man standing off a hundred, of bridges held by a mere handful, of one assassination bringing down an army or a principality.

We can win , he thought again, trying to convince himself, but in that moment he felt very far from home and the things he knew, surrounded by hard stone and jagged metal, and afraid.

‘So how do we get outside the walls without the Wasps spotting us?’ Salma asked.

Their leader was Basila, who had interrogated him when he first came to Tark, and then bedded him shortly afterwards. Now she was attired in dark cloth over metal-reinforced leathers, hooded and with a scarf ready to cover her lower face. Both her blade and her exposed skin were blacked.

‘Do you think the Wasp-kinden are the only people who have ideas?’ she asked contemptuously. ‘We are ready for this possibility.’

Salma had accepted an arming jacket from them, and a better-balanced sword, but they had no bows in the whole of the city. For Totho they had found artificers’ leathers and another repeating crossbow, not as fine as Scuto’s had been, but a serviceable machine nonetheless.

‘Follow, and you will see.’ Basila led the way, and the two of them fell in with her dozen Ant soldiers all clad as she was. Skrill hopped along at the back, her arm still bound up, looking nervous.

‘Listen, Your Highness,’ she said. ‘I ain’t sure about this.’

‘Just get to Stenwold,’ Totho insisted. ‘Tell him what’s going on.’

‘And what if the Wasps see me?’

‘Then run,’ Salma said. ‘I’ve seen how you run. You’ve a turn of speed a horse would envy. Wasps tire fast once in the air, most of them. So run and keep running, and hope.’

‘Hope,’ she echoed, without much of it in her voice.

They entered one of the city barracks, and almost immediately were heading underground, down into rounded tunnels that the insect colony must have dug under Tarkesh orders.

Nero and Parops had been there to see them off, like a mismatched pair of mourners. Parops had just clasped Salma’s hand and wished him luck. There had been little enough hope in his eyes either.