Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dragonfly Falling

At last the only remaining course came to her. Move the artillery back. Disassemble it if it cannot be moved!

On the walls of Collegium the artillery had either been winched back up or uncovered, and now the artificers of the most learned city in the Lowlands practised their art. All day they had taken their measurements and worked out their angles. Men used to the classroom and the lectern had crouched behind battlements and scribbled their calculations. Some of them had died, crushed by shot, raked by stone splinters. Now the fruits of those labours were borne on the air by the engines of Collegium. The night was almost moonless, and small specks of fire were all that was revealed to them of the Vekken encampment, but the engineers and artificers of Collegium held lamps by their sheets of calculations and adjusted their angle and elevation by minute degrees.

And the catapults and ballistae, leadshotters and trebuchets of the Collegium walls spoke together, flinging hundredweights of stone and metal at the invaders.

Some of them missed, of course, either by chance or bad calculation, but all around the city the Vekken army was awoken by the sound of its own siege emplacements being destroyed: trebuchets splintering under blindly targeted rocks, and leadshotters ripped apart by explosive-headed ballista bolts. The thinking men and mathematicians of Collegium, carefully and without passion, set about undoing any gains that the Vekken army had made during the previous day.

When dawn came, it was clear that more than three-quarters of the artillery the Vekken had so carefully placed the previous day had been smashed beyond hope of repair, and although the invading army had more to bring forward, it seemed any chance of simply knocking down Collegium’s walls had been dealt a fatal blow.

In his dream Achaeos was deep within the Darakyon: not on the outskirts, where he had taken Che to show her the darkness of the old world, but in the heart of it, where he had been just that once before. He was there, in the crawling, twisted heart of the shadow-forest, whose inhabitants he had impudently demanded aid from — whose inhabitants had arisen to his call, but not at his command. The cold of their touch as they had then rifled through his mind was still burned on his memory like a brand. And in return for showing him the way to where Cheerwell was imprisoned, they had exacted a price.

He owed them, and such debts were always honoured, and seldom repaid happily.

In his dream, Achaeos stood surrounded by the knotted and gnarled trunks of the Darakyon’s tortured trees, and he had seen, with the night-piercing eyes of his kinden, the things that dwelt under their shadow. Never had he more wanted to experience the blindness, the darkness, that other kinden complained of. These denizens had been Mantis-kinden once, he knew. Something of that remained, but it was overwritten in a heavy hand by crawling thorns, by pieces of darkly gleaming carapace, by the spines of killing arms, by rough bark and tangling vines and glittering compound eyes.

They were legion, the things of the Darakyon, and they stared at him mutely. Their whisper-voice — pieced together from all the cold, dry sounds of the forest — was silent. There was a message, though, in their wordless scrutiny of him. He sensed reproach. He had disappointed them.

In his dream he cried out to them, demanding to know what it was he had done, or had not done, and still they stared, and their meaning decayed from mere dissatisfaction to despair. No words yet, but he heard them clearly still, from the very way they stood: Why have you forsaken us? Why have you failed us?

‘What must I do?’ he demanded of them. ‘Tell me what has gone wrong.’

Overhead, in the gaps between the twining branches, the sky flashed with lightning, back and forth: the night riven over and over with golden fire, yet never a rumble of thunder to be heard.

They pointed, each and every one of them, fingers and claws and crooked twigs dragging his attention towards one tree, that seemed the same as all the rest, and he strained his eyes to see their meaning.

Something bloomed on the shrivelled bark of that trunk, and at first he thought it was a flower, a dark flower that shone wetly as the lightning danced. Then it quivered and ran, thick and flowing, down the tree’s length, and he saw that it was blood. Of all the horrors of the Darakyon he recalled, this was new — this was unique to his dreaming.

Achaeos opened his mouth to question, but he saw now that all the trees, every tree in the forest’s dark heart, and then all the trees beyond, were bleeding, the stuff welling up from invisible wounds and coating the trunks, pooling and oozing on the forest floor. Overhead the bright lightning lashed back and forth, gold on black, gold on black.

He stepped back as that encroaching red tide reached him, but it was rolling forth on all sides, and the things of the Darakyon were melting into it, still regarding him with an air of betrayal.

‘What?’ he called out to them, and it seemed that his Art-made wings opened without him willing them, so that he was lifted high into the stormy sky, seeing the Lowlands spread beneath him: the Lowlands and then the Empire and the Commonweal and beyond. The stain spread out from the Darakyon, the tide of blood heedless of boundaries and city walls: Helleron and Tharn were gone, Asta and Myna. Now, across the map that was so impossibly presented to him, fresh wounds appeared in the face of the world — Capitas, Collegium, Shon Fhor, Seldis — cities drowned in blood that arose in fountainheads from the depths of the earth, and in those wounds there were crawling things like maggots, long twining many-legged things that should never have been allowed back into the light.

The next morning Achaeos looked more pale and drawn than Che had ever seen him.

‘Still not sleeping?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘Sleeping, but dreaming.’ He sat down heavily beside her. ‘The Darakyon. Something troubles it. It. wants something of me, but I cannot make it out. The voices are confused.’

Che regarded him, worried. ‘And if you could, would you do so?’

He stared dully about the taverna’s common room, which was now mostly empty. ‘I must, for I owe a debt — and the things of the Darakyon are creditors I cannot ignore. But I cannot hear them clearly, and so I cannot act.’

Scuto and Sperra were already breakfasting. Neither of them looked much better than Achaeos did. I should feel as bad , Che knew. It had not sunk in, though, what might be happening to her own home. She wondered if the Vekken had reached the walls. That seemed very likely.

Be safe, Uncle Sten , she willed silently, for he would always forget that he was no soldier. She had visions of him striding along the walls of Collegium and waving a defiant blade at the Ant horde.

There had been Sarnesh soldiers assembling for two days now, forming up their expedition, their automotives, their artillery and supply train. They would go by rail about half of the way, but closer to the siege the Vekken were likely to have undermined the tracks, and the army would proceed on foot. Nobody could march like the Ant-kinden, though. They were tireless on campaign and they would send the Vekken back home stinging.

An officer came into the taverna that very moment and marched over to them, his chainmail clinking. He looked about the table and said, ‘Which one of you is named Sperra?’ An unnecessary question, because it was a Fly-kinden name, and she was the only Fly there.

She raised her hand timidly, and the Ant looked at the rest of them. ‘You must come with me. Your associates also. If any of these here claim not to be your associates, then they will be taken into custody pending investigation.’