Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dragonfly Falling

For a second the big Beetle did not quite know what to make of it, this drawn-looking invalid threatening him with. what? With nothing. Then he grinned.

‘A lesson for boys that won’t do what they’re told,’ he said, and he picked Salma up effortlessly, huge hands agony about his ribs, and Salma poked him in the face.

The world was briefly a very painful and noisy place, and then dark, blessedly dark and quiet.

He came to with the sense that little time had passed. There was an awful lot of noise nearby, but the pain in his chest and abdomen was too much for him to focus on it. Nero was kneeling beside him, asking over and over if he was all right.

There should have been another blow coming from Cosgren, but there was nothing. Perhaps the beating had finished, in which case he had got away lightly, but Cosgren would still be free to pursue his tyranny unchecked.

The sounds were screaming, he realized, and a man’s, not the child’s.

‘What’s going on, Nero?’

Nero grimaced. ‘You. kind of cut him, Salma. Don’t look so confused. That’s what you meant, right?’

‘Cut him? What.?’

Nero took one of Salma’s hands and brought it before his face. The first thing he saw was that it was covered in blood. Then he saw the claw, a sickle-shaped thing that curved from his thumb. Even as he watched it retracted back until there was barely a sign of it. Curiously, he flexed it back and forth, and felt its companion on his other hand do the same.

‘I never had these before. When.?’

‘I noticed them on you back in the tent of the Daughters,’ Nero told him. ‘I couldn’t remember then whether you’d had them before.’

There was a sudden shifting around them, of people coming together. Salma turned over and forced himself to sit up. Cosgren was standing, one hand clapped to a face slick and red. His eye, his one remaining eye, was staring madly.

‘You little bastard.’ The voice was choked with pain.

Salma saw a movement beside him, a glimmer of metal. The Roach man had drawn a thin-bladed knife, hiltless but sharp. They had all gathered around him, even the Fly gangsters. When Cosgren took a step forward, a flung stone bounced off his shoulder.

Half weeping with the pain he stared at them: the Fly gang, the Beetle mother, the ex-slaves and the Roach family. By that time, Nero had his own long knife out, and was holding it casually by the tip, ready to throw.

Cosgren snarled something — something about their not wanting his leadership, then let them starve — and he stumbled out away from them, off into the barren terrain.

Tension began to leach out of the refugees. The Roach man knelt by Salma, offering him some water that he took gratefully. Behind their father, his two daughters stood, staring curiously.

Salma glanced around at the others. The Flies had gone back into their exclusive huddle as though nothing had happened. The three slaves had drifted away as well, and he saw that they had found their own new hierarchy, with the Spider as their spokesman, as though they were still compelled to live within rules of obedience.

He should feel weak after his exertions, he knew, but he felt stronger than he had in days.

The next day there were bandits. A dozen rode in, half of them mounted two to a horse. Their leader, though it was little satisfaction to see, was wearing Cosgren’s leather coat.

He was a Beetle himself, or nearly. His skin was a blue-black that Salma recognized from his recent travels. The refugees had been travelling at the wagon’s steady pace, most walking but Salma lying in the bed of dry grass it carried, staring up at skies that promised unwelcome rain before nightfall. Then the thunder of hoofs had come to them, and they had stopped dead, and most of them had looked to Salma.

Am I riding here on the wagon because I am weak, or because I have become their leader now? They needed no leader — except perhaps in moments such as this. Salma got down, pleased to find his legs holding him without a tremor, and watched as the intruders’ eight horses made a very crude semicircle before the wagon. The draft-beetle hissed at them, swaying its jaws from side to side, but the bandit leader ignored it, looking over the ranks of the refugees.

‘Let’s keep it simple,’ he said. ‘These are troubled times, nobody’s where they wanted to be, everyone’s a victim, so on, so forth.’ He spoke with the accent Salma recalled, and refined enough that he seemed testament to his own words, a man not originally cut from this kind of crude cloth. ‘So let’s see what you’ve got. Let us just take our pick and then you can go on your way.’

Salma looked over the bandit’s men. They were a motley band, but not as raggedly dressed as might be expected. These were not just desperate scavengers driven to robbery. Most had some kind of armour: leather jerkins and caps, padded arming jackets, even one hauberk of Ant-made chain. There were axes and swords amongst them, and a halfbreed at the back, who looked to have Mantis blood, had a bow ready-strung with an arrow nocked. Salma’s own army had some knives, some clubs, and the staff that Sfayot the Roach had cut for him.

He leant on it now, grateful that it would disguise how weak he really was. ‘So what do you imagine we have?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps you think that we all had time to pack, before we were driven out, before we escaped.’ Salma planted his staff in the ground, firmly enough. ‘If you’re slavers then we will fight you, and you can sell our corpses for whatever they’ll bring you. But if it’s goods you want, we have none. Less than none. Come down here and see for yourself.’

‘We’re not slavers,’ the bandit leader replied. ‘Too many of us have been on the wrong end of that market to risk trying to sell there.’ He smiled, teeth flashing in his dark face. ‘Commonwealer, aren’t you? I’ve known enough of your kind in my time.’ He swung off his horse, and Salma heard the clatter of a scale-mail cuirass beneath Cosgren’s coat. Without needing orders, two of his fellows got down off the horse they shared, and the three of them walked past Salma to peer into the wagon.

‘You’re slaves yourselves?’ Salma asked. As his fellows prodded through the grass in the bed of the wagon, the leader turned back to say, ‘Some of us.’

Salma had spotted the colours of that scale-mail, then, and the design of the sword the man bore. ‘You’re an Auxillian,’ he said.

For a long moment the bandit leader regarded him fixedly, until at last he said, ‘So?’

‘There are no friends to the Empire here,’ Salma explained. ‘I was a prisoner in Myna myself, once.’

‘There’s nothing but the wagon,’ one of the bandits said. ‘And even that’s nothing you could borrow money on.’

‘Excuse me, sir,’ said the Roach Sfayot. ‘But we have nothing, no goods. No food, even, until we stop for the evening and forage.’

‘You have women,’ the bandit leader noted. ‘Roach-kinden, isn’t it?’

Sfayot regarded him narrowly, waiting.

‘You sing, dance? Anything? Only I remember your lot as being musical.’

Sfayot nodded slowly.

‘Well then we’ll deal,’ the bandit leader decided. ‘We have a commodity for trade: safe passage on this road. In return, you’ll trade us some entertainment. And we’ll break our bread together, or whatever you can find. And then we’ll decide what we’re going to do with you.’

The morning began bright and cloudless, and Stenwold had the dubious pleasure of being able to see it. Balkus had kicked at his door an hour before dawn, and then carried on kicking until Stenwold had arisen.

Now he was in his temporary base in the harbourmaster’s office, the harbourmaster himself having taken ship at the first word of the Vekken advance. Around him were his artificers, his messengers, and a fair quantity of others whose purpose and disposition he had no ideas about. Balkus stood at his shoulder like some personification of war, his nailbow in plain view, and Stenwold tried to imagine what would happen when the naval attack actually took place.