Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dragonfly Falling

But today at the depot had come a messenger from a different direction.

‘Sperra, she. ’ Scuto took a deep breath and tried to stop his voice shaking. ‘She was at the palace, so she heard it right there, when the Queen did. Helleron has fallen.’

Che gaped at him. ‘Helleron fallen?’

‘A Wasp army turned up at their doorstep. Not even the ones fighting Tark, but a whole other army. They’ve put the city under martial law and commandeered the foundries. Helleron is now part of the Empire.’

‘Hammer and tongs,’ whispered Che. She glanced at Achaeos. His face was closed, expressionless, and she knew he would be thinking of his own mountain city, Helleron’s close neighbour.

‘They knew,’ he said. ‘This is the information the Arcanum had received. This is the threat to our people that has made them join us.’ He bared his teeth, abruptly feral. ‘We warned them that the Wasps would come. An army on the wing, come to Tharn to finish what your people started. The final end of the Days of Lore.’

‘That isn’t fair,’ Che protested.

‘Nothing’s fair,’ he said bitterly.

‘But your people, they’re magicians. They can see the future. They must have seen some way out of this.’

Achaeos would not meet her eyes. ‘You have more faith in them than I do.’

Che embraced him, and he let himself be clasped to her, laid his head on her shoulder. She looked over at Scuto’s dull countenance.

‘What does it mean?’ she asked him. ‘What now?’

‘It changes everything,’ Plius said from behind. He finally had his pipe lit and now did not know what to do with it.

Scuto shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said miserably. ‘I don’t know what to think. None of you understand. Helleron. filthy place. Corrupt, hypocritical. But it was my city . I was born in the Empire, you understand, and never stayed two nights in the same place till I was ten. Helleron was the only place that ever took me in. And I had to fight for elbow room even there. I had to break heads and cut throats in my time. But it had a place for me that I could carve out. Founder’s Mark, even when the Wasps razed my place and scattered my people, I was always going to go back .’

‘My home too,’ Sperra said quietly. ‘More than Merro ever was.’

‘It’s all falling apart,’ Scuto whispered. ‘Collegium under siege, Tark falling. Helleron taken. Where next? What happens now? Can we ever pull it back from the edge?’

The question hung in the air. Nobody had any answers.

Salma awoke because it was cold, the night cloudless above, and he fought to recall where he was, and then realized that he did not know.

Where is this place? The gloom of the tent of the Mercy’s Daughters had become the dark of night, the stars visible above him. He lay on sandy ground with only a thin blanket.

Where is she? Grief in Chains, or Aagen’s Joy, or. no, it was coming to him.

They had been moving him. Night, again, and it must have been earlier this same night — or last night, was it? But he had been taken from the Daughters’ huge tent.

She had been there. He recalled her face, her eyes, radiant. Moth eyes knew no darkness, but hers could stare straight into the sun. She had touched his hand as they took him out. She had said. what had she said?

He could not recall it. It was stripped from him along with his health and his strength. The bandages were still tight about his chest, the line of the wound, that she had sealed with her fingers, pulled tautly as he moved, now secured with compresses and surgical silk.

He looked around. There was a scrap of waxing moon up there, enough for his eyes, and there was a fire nearby. They were in a hollow but the warmth was fast leaching out from it, so the cold had sunk into his bones. He made an attempt to crawl closer to the fire, and found he could do that, just. He was capable of it.

He saw Nero, curled up like a child, and indeed looking very like a child bundled in his cloak. A bald child, yes, and to be frank an ugly one, but even his belligerent features attained a kind of innocence in sleep.

Beyond Nero’s sleeping form there were two Wasp soldiers in armour. Salma felt his world drop away from him, and he was instinctively groping for a sword that was not there. He sat up, too fast, and hissed in pain, and they looked over at him. One was young, perhaps even younger than he was. The other was greying, forty at least in age, a peer for Stenwold.

‘Easy there,’ the younger one said. ‘How much do you remember?’

‘Who are you?’ Salma demanded, although he knew he could make no demands that he could enforce.

‘My name is Adran,’ said the younger of the soldiers. ‘This is Kalder.’

‘Lieutenant Kalder,’ the older man rumbled in a particularly deep voice. ‘We’re still in the army, boy.’

‘You’re Salma, right?’ Adran nodded absently. ‘So what do you remember?’

Salma acknowledged the point. ‘Assume I remember nothing.’

‘Then you’re out,’ Adran told him. ‘They got you out.’

‘They?’

‘The halfbreed artificer did it,’ said Lieutenant Kalder. ‘Arranged for it, anyway. He’s got some pull, that one, for all that he’s just a piebald bastard.’

‘Halfbreed?’ Totho? And it came back to him then, what Totho had done for him, the price that had been paid for Salma’s life and liberty. So the artificer Kalder meant was the other one, the man who had wanted to keep Totho as his slave.

‘So why are you.? What are you going to do with us?’

‘You don’t need to worry,’ Adran said, but Salma shook his head.

‘What is going on? I see Wasp soldiers before me. Look at me, I’m in no position to cause you any trouble, so at least tell me the truth.’

Adran and Kalder exchanged looks.

‘You probably think we’re all monsters in the Empire,’ said the younger man.

Thinking of Aagen, Salma said, ‘Not necessarily, but until proved otherwise.’

‘Right.’ Adran poked at the fire. ‘Have you heard of the Broken Sword?’ Kalder started to speak, but Adran continued, ‘He might have done, if he was in the Twelve-Year War.’

‘He’s too young for that,’ Kalder objected.

‘I’ve never heard of any Broken Sword,’ Salma told them.

‘It’s. We’re a group within the Empire, who don’t altogether agree with what it’s doing. Don’t get me wrong. I’m proud to be Wasp-kinden. But things are changing, and never for the better. We’ve always fought. We’re a martial people, just like the Ant-kinden or the Soldier Beetles of Myna. Back before the unification and the Empire, though. we might have lived in hill-forts and stolen each other’s daughters and cattle, but it was different then. It was. natural, almost.’ His halting way of exploring what he was trying to say reminded Salma unbearably of Totho.

‘The Empire, though, it’s wrong. The way it works now, the way it has to keep expanding, further and further, just to stop everything collapsing. You might not realize it, but every Wasp-kinden freeman past thirteen is in the army, and has a rank, and can be sent hundreds of miles away from home because the Emperor wants to bring some foreign city under his control. Nobody gets to choose otherwise. And then there are all the Auxillians, who have it even worse.’

‘The people you go and fight don’t exactly have a good time of it either,’ Salma said weakly.

‘No, they don’t,’ agreed Adran. He had a tremendous sincerity about him, and that in turn reminded Salma of Che, when she was on some moral mission or other. What Adran was saying really mattered to him.

‘The Empire imposes its will on dozens of other kinden, and it destroys them by making them behave like us. And that’s wrong. It’s evil, in fact, and by making us do its work, it makes all of us evil.’ He glanced at Kalder. ‘Or that’s what I think, anyway.’