Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dragonfly Falling

‘You didn’t have to come,’ Totho reproved him. ‘I’m. holding out fine.’ He took a deep breath. ‘And Salma is. well, he didn’t make it.’

Nero looked up at Drephos. ‘Shall I say it, or is it going to get me shot?’

‘Say all you wish,’ Drephos told him. ‘I have only refrained from mentioning it because I assumed you would prefer to break the news yourself.’

Nero nodded, his mere expression making it plain he did not trust Drephos one inch.

‘The thing is, lad,’ he said, ‘Salma’s still here. He made it, all right — though only just. He’s alive and here in the camp.’

Salma was asleep when Totho came to see him. Nero and the others kept their distance, even Drephos, as he went to kneel at his friend’s bed.

Only a very slight rise and fall of Salma’s chest betrayed the life within him. His once-golden skin was now leaden pale, his cheeks sunken and his lips shrivelled like an old man’s. It was hard to see here the laughing, smiling fighter, the nobleman from a far foreign land, who had once brightened the austere halls of the Great College.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Totho murmured quietly, so as not to wake him. He was acutely aware of all the others nearby, two hundred laid out in this tent alone. All casualties of the war, in one way or another. Most were Wasps, but there were others too: Bee-kinden like Kaszaat, ruddy-skinned Ants, even a couple of Fly messengers who had not flown swiftly enough. Many there, he saw, carried terrible burns caused by the incendiaries, and the Wasp officers’ lack of concern for their own men.

Totho returned to Drephos and the others. There was a woman now standing there with them, a severe-looking Wasp-kinden who was scowling at the master artificer.

‘Totho,’ Drephos said, ‘this gentle lady is Norsa, the Eldest of Mercy’s Daughters in this camp. Norsa, this young man was a companion of the Commonwealer lying over there.’

Norsa turned a stern eye on Totho, who tried to face up to it. ‘He will live,’ she said flatly. ‘He will recover, now, although at first only she kept him with us at all.’ She pointed and Totho followed her extended finger to see a robed woman passing along the line of beds, bearing a basin of water. Her eyes were white, and her skin glowed through a rainbow of colours. Totho had never seen her before but, from Salma’s words, he knew who this must be.

‘So he found her, at last,’ he murmured. ‘Thank you for aiding him, lady. I realize he is your enemy.’

‘I have no enemies,’ Norsa replied sharply. ‘Mercy’s Daughters give aid to whoever they will, however the Empire may take issue with us. Suffice to say that the imperial army knows your friend is here.’

Totho’s stomach lurched with the thought and he turned to Drephos. ‘Then you must have known!’

Totho caught a sardonic smile from under the hood. ‘Norsa here holds me to blame for the injuries done to many of these men. I hear no news from her Daughters, and I heard none from any other quarter. Just be grateful that Master Nero himself thought to look here.’

‘But when he recovers,’ Totho said, ‘they’ll. ’

Drephos finished for him grimly. ‘Take him? Question him? Torture him and then enslave or kill him? Yes, they will, for that is their way. A waste of healing, in my opinion.’

‘I do not even recognize that sentiment,’ Norsa snapped at him, ‘although if you were the patient I might make an exception, Colonel-Auxillian.’

Totho glanced from Drephos to Nero, and then back across the room to the unconscious Salma, and realized that some part of his mind had a plan and a decision already prepared for him.

‘Colonel Drephos,’ he said, although he had found his thought already. ‘I need to speak with you. I think you know what about.’

*

Salma drifted in and out of wakefulness. Sometimes he recalled who he was, where he was, and sometimes he did not, perhaps blessedly. He existed in a blurred greyness that was pulled taut between the light of Grief in Chains and the darkness of the void that was still hungry for him.

On one occasion he opened his eyes and found himself looking straight into the face of the man on the next bed. He was a Wasp-kinden with his head bandaged low so as to cover one eye, the wrappings crisp and clean, having just been changed. When he saw Salma looking at him, the other man grinned weakly.

‘You,’ he said, in a voice just loud enough for Salma to hear, ‘are so cursed lucky.’

Salma tried to make a sound, but nothing audible came out. In truth he did not feel so very lucky.

‘You should be dead,’ the soldier continued, his whispering voice obviously the best he could manage. ‘I saw you drop. You were fighting like a maniac but someone got you, and you fell, and that should have been the end of you. I was behind. I saw the point come clean through you, you bastard. She came for you, though, and you were dead, even then, but she came for you as though she knew what had been going on. She ran out and lit the place up and put her hands on you. And you stopped bleeding, right there and then.’ He coughed, a wretched, scratchy sound. ‘And she’s been with you every day, using her Art to keep you alive. I don’t know what you mean to her but you’re a lucky bastard, so you are.’

Salma tried to speak again, and this time a distant croak emerged, quieter even than the wounded soldier’s. ‘I came here for her.’

The man’s one eye studied him for a minute, before he said, ‘Well she’s certainly worth that.’

‘Salma?’

He had been asleep, or at least drifting somewhere else, but there was a new voice now, and it carried his name to him.

‘Salma, you have to wake up now.’

It was not her voice and he did not want to wake up. When he had opened his eyes last, she had been standing there, staring at him. Expression was hard to fathom from those dancing colours, from those eyes, but his heart had leapt painfully just to see her.

He had found her. She had found him. In this mad, war-struck world, they had found each other.

She had sat down at the edge of his bed and, although it was a flimsy folding piece that should have tipped immediately, she barely moved it, making him doubt his senses. He had reached out, though, and she had taken his cold hand in both her warm ones, warm like the sun on a summer’s day.

‘Why are you here?’ she had asked him. ‘Why did you come?’

‘I couldn’t stay away, knowing that you were here,’ was his whisper. ‘Aagen. I spoke to Aagen.’

‘Did you-?’

‘No. We parted on good terms.’ His voice was strengthening, as though healing energies were passing through her hands and into him. Perhaps they were, either by Ancestor Art or by plain magic.

‘You should not have come.’

The ghost of his old smile appeared briefly. ‘Why?’

‘You are hurt. You were already in the hands of death when I found you. All I have done since barely kept you with me.’

‘But I am with you.’ He was staring at her face. She was beautiful and it was not merely the ordinary human beauty of Tynisa. She was Butterfly-kinden and they were beautiful with the timeless perfection of a sunset or a spring day. He yearned for her even though she was already there right beside him.

She had shaken her head. ‘Then I myself have done this to you. I never intended this.’

‘No-’ But something had come to mind, something the Moth-kinden man had said, or that Che had claimed on his behalf. ‘They said. did you enchant me? Is this. what I feel now, just glamour?’

Her hand had touched his face and he felt a warmth flooding there, and also peace and safety. ‘I put a spell on you,’ she had confirmed. ‘We were penned there as slaves, before the great machines of the Wasps, and I saw your face and knew you were a good man. I needed the help of a good man so I put a spell on you, that still held strong when we were taken by their devices to the city of the slaves. But then you needed help yourself, and I took my spell away. I have no spell on you now.’