Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dragonfly Falling

Kymon had been there, the lean old Ant-kinden become a soldier again after years in an academic’s robe, and Stenwold even found Cabre in the crowd, bandaged and burned but alive. When her tower had fallen she had escaped through a window so small that only a Fly-kinden could have managed it. Others had not been so lucky.

And Stenwold had made his excuses as soon as he could but found he had nowhere to go. Not his own house, certainly. They would find him there, and bother him with papers and charts when he really had nothing further to contribute. He needed a break. Most of all, he needed someone to talk to.

‘Has anyone been to see her?’ he asked the warden.

‘No one except the staff,’ the man said. ‘I go in and talk to her a little, sometimes.’

‘Good,’ said Stenwold. ‘What about charges?’

‘None,’ the warden said. ‘She’s your collar, War Master. They’re leaving her to you.’

‘Don’t call me that, please.’

The warden looked surprised, himself obviously a man who would love such a grand title. He shrugged and unlocked the door of the cell.

She was being well enough looked after, he saw. Save for the bolted shutters on the window the room beyond the locked door hardly seemed a prison at all. There was a rug on the floor, a proper bed, even a desk provided with paper and ink. For confessions, perhaps? Last testimonies and defiant speeches? This was certainly not the room of a common felon. Stenwold had made no particular arrangements, but he wondered whether his recent rise through the city’s hierarchy had effected this good treatment.

‘Hello Stenwold,’ said Arianna. She was sitting on the bed, dressed in her old student’s robes, her arms wrapped about herself. ‘I wondered when you would. ’ She stopped herself. ‘I suppose I wondered if , really.’

Stenwold crossed slowly and turned the desk chair to face her, lowering himself wearily into it. ‘Things have been difficult,’ he said.

‘I’ve heard.’

‘But you can’t imagine,’ he said. ‘Just two days now and — the College halls have become infirmaries, and every student who ever studied medicine is there, doing what little can be done. And there are artificers that have fought all day who will now be working all night, on the artillery, on the walls. There were girls of fifteen and men of fifty who were out on the walls today and many, enough, who never came back to their mothers or their husbands or wives. And the Ants keep coming, over and over, as if they don’t care how many of them it takes. And they’ll get over our walls if they have to make a mound of their own dead to do it. Have you heard that?’

Numbly she shook her head.

‘And I. I’m here because — who else can I tell? I’ve sent them all away, my friends, and I keep asking myself whether it was to help, or just because I wanted to try and keep them safe. Because I have a record, there. I have a real history of sending people off to keep them safe. I even seem to have thought that two of them might be safe at Tark.’

For a long time he sat in silence, grasping for more words and finding none, until she said, ‘Stenwold — what’s going to happen to me? You can tell me that, can’t you?’ She bit at her lip. ‘I keep expecting your Mantis friend to turn up as my executioner.’

‘Or your Wasp friends to pull you out,’ he said bitterly. ‘No, that’s right, you told Tisamon you were fighting amongst yourselves, you. imperial agents.’

‘Rekef,’ she said. ‘Say it. I was a Rekef agent, Stenwold. Not a proper one. Not with a rank, or anything. But I was working for them. And, yes, we fought. We tried to kill a man called Major Thalric.’ She watched his reaction carefully. ‘You remember him?’

‘We’ve met,’ Stenwold allowed. ‘I wish. I wish it was so simple that I could just. ’

‘ Believe me? But of course, I’m a Spider and I’m a traitor. Twice a traitor therefore. I’m sorry, Stenwold, really I am. I. seem to have done a very good job of cutting myself off, here.’

He looked at her, at the misery in her eyes, the hunched shoulders, and knew that he would never be able to discern what was truth and what was feigning. By race and profession she was doubly his better at that game.

‘There were three of us in the plot,’ she said slowly. ‘If it helps explain. It happened when Thalric told us the Vekkens were getting involved.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t understand. You were working against us. You sold us out to the Empire. I don’t understand why the change of heart.’

‘Because the Empire is different,’ she told him flatly. ‘We were expecting an imperial army to take Collegium. Not this year, probably not even next, but eventually. And the Empire conquers , and if you conquer, then you make sure that you leave the place standing so you have people left to push around. They would probably even have let the College go on, so long as they got to control what was being taught. And Collegium would still be Collegium, only with a Wasp governor and Wasp taxes, and Wasp soldiers in the streets. That’s what we thought. But the Vekken hate this place. It’s a reminder of a defeat, so they’ll not leave a stone standing given the chance. And that made us think and realize just what the stakes were. And we broke away, Hofi, Scadran and I. We tried to kill Thalric when he came to brief us. We killed his second, but the man himself was too good for us. He got the other two, and I’d have been next if your Mantis hadn’t found me. Lucky for me, wasn’t it? A quick and private death swapped for a public execution. Or perhaps just death at the hands of the Vekken when they burn this place around me.’ She stood up suddenly, and he knew she was going to ask for his help, to demand it, to impose on him in the name of the lies she had once shared with him. But the words dried in her throat and she just made a single sound, a wretched sound.

‘I cannot vouch for the Vekken, or the Empire,’ he said. ‘There will be no execution here. Even in these exceptional times, the Assembly won’t break a habit of ten years just for you. The irony is that you’d probably be exiled, eventually, but that currently presents us with technical difficulties.’

Her fists were clenched, and he saw the small claws there slide in and out of her knuckles. There was more in her eyes than mere pleading, and he felt her Art stir there, the force of it touch his mind, trying to turn him, to make him like her and pity her. That Art was weak, though, sapped by her own despair, and he shrugged it off almost effortlessly.

‘You know. I could have easily killed you,’ she got out.

‘I’d guessed it. You cannot spin that into an obligation.’

‘No.’

‘Do you regret not doing it?’

She stared at him. She was obviously at the very end of her leash, stripped of her strategies and schemes, more and more transparent in her desperation. ‘No,’ she said, and he wished that he could believe her.

He felt a sickening lurch inside him at the thought of what he was going to do, all the perils and unspeakable foolishness of it. Tisamon, for one, would never speak to him again.

‘You’re being held here to my order, and therefore I’m going to set you free,’ he said, speaking fast so that he could get the words out before he changed his mind.

She was silence itself, awaiting his next words.

‘What more do you want me to say?’ he asked her. ‘You’re going free. No conditions. You’ve already been questioned, and I have no more questions for you. I’m not even going to ask you to go back to the Rekef and work against them on my behalf, even if you could. I cannot know the truth of it now; I would not know the truth of it then. I. just. You can walk out of here as soon as I tell the warden, and I’ll tell him as soon as I leave.’ He got to his feet, feeling ill and sad. ‘Which is now.’