Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dragonfly Falling

It was dark now, and so dark between the trees, beneath the knotted and tangled canopy, that even her eyes could not penetrate it. She felt her way by touch as much as sight, and still went on, knowing only that she was being led.

She had lost sight of the ones leading her, or they had gone ahead or gone out of her mind. She was alone, and yet she could sense they were still there. She was totally at their mercy, lost in this torturous place.

When had the night grown so dark? She wondered if there was ever day in here. She had to force her way through the trees at times, through gaps a Fly would fight to negotiate, and at others there was a great cathedral of space about her, a cavern of twisted boughs and green air.

This was no natural place, and surely no place for her. She knew now that this had been a dreadful mistake. On whose part? On Tisamon’s, for certain, and he had gone. She had lost sight of him.

Because she was on her own now. He had told her as much. This she must do alone . He could not be there to hold her hand.

Father!

But what a man to have as a father — cold as ice, distant, bloody-handed. No, Stenwold was her father, in all but the blood. Stenwold the civilized, city-dwelling, scholar and philosopher. Stenwold the kind, the understanding. She had been raised in Collegium, studied in the white halls of the College itself. What madness had brought her here, into this maze of green and black?

She stumbled down a dip, splashed through a stream, took a second to look about her, but it was still no use. She had the sense of things moving, urging her on, but nothing came clearly to her eyes.

If she stopped now, she would be lost for ever. They would never find her bones.

The madness that brought her here was one she carried with her. It was the madness that took her when she drew a blade in anger. A cold madness like her father’s. Because she loved it: not killing for its own sake but killing to prove her skill. Killing to prove her victory. Blood? She was steeped in it.

With that same thought came the faintest glimpse of one of her escorts, a brief shadow between the trees, and she knew it was not human at all.

She rushed forwards to keep pace, struggling up the steep bank that the stream had cut, hauling herself up by the hanging roots it had exposed.

And she was there — and she saw the idol.

An idol? There was no other word for it. A worm-eaten thing of wood, taller than she was by at least two feet, with two bent arms outstretched from it, a great cruciform monument so worn by time that no detail of it could be made out clearly. Even the trees had been cleared from around it, or perhaps they had never taken root there.

This was it. She was at the heart of the Mantis dream, the centre of the island, the centre of the forest, of the kinden’s heartwood.

She approached the looming thing slowly, stepping over the lumped ridges of roots, feeling movement in the trees all around. They were watching her, and waiting. What was she to do? What was she to make of this. thing?

Close now, almost within arm’s reach. She had never believed in magic but something coursed from this crude and decaying image, some distant thunder beyond hearing, a tide that washed over her, lifting her and dragging at her.

She put out a hand to it. Would it be sacrilege or reverence, to touch this thing? What light the revenant moon could give her was shy of it, but her eyes hoarded the pale radiance against the darkness and she drew her hand back sharply. The idol was crawling with decay and rot. Worms and centipedes coursed through its crumbling wooden flesh. Beetles swarmed at its base, and their fat white grubs, finger-long, put their heads into the night air and wove about, idiot-blind. It was festering with voracious life, perishing even as she watched it. She saw then where new wood had been added as the thing fell apart, making good and making good but never replacing the dark and rotten heart of the effigy, so that whatever was jointed in was simply further prey for the rot, over and over, decade after decade.

And she saw that was the point, that the thing before her, a dead image, was also a living thing, a festering, fecund thing, life consuming death and death consuming life.

She took her knife from her belt. She had seen gouges where the thing’s breast would be, if the angled spars that jutted from it were arms. This was the test, was it? She raised the blade.

She felt the power, that invisible tide, as it rose to a peak about her. Above her thunder rumbled in a clear sky.

And she stabbed down.

She did not believe in magic, but lightning seared across the stars in the moment that her knife bit into the worm-eaten wood — and she saw the second idol, the glare of the lighting burned it on her eyes: the tall, thin upright, the two hooked arms.

The flash had blinded her, but she sensed it move ever so slightly, swaying side to side, and she froze.

Not an image, but the original. Even without sight, she saw it in her mind. That triangular head eight feet from the ground, vast eyes and razoring mandibles, and the arms, those spined and grasping arms. An insect larger than a horse, easily capable of snatching her in its forelimbs and crushing her dead, scissoring into her with its jaws. They killed humans, in the remote places where they still lived. They killed even people who came hunting them with bows and spears. Everyone knew this.

Was she supposed to kill it now? She blinked furiously, seeing only shapes, blurs, and she felt it move again, swaying slightly, fixing her with its vast, all-seeing eyes.

And she stood still and waited, the knife useless in her hand.

It was close. She could see the shifting motion as its arms flexed on either side of her. She was almost within its embrace.

Sister.

The voice came like a stab of pain in her skull.

Sister.

She could see enough now, the towering, swaying mantis before her. The voice seared through her, but she knew it was some latent Art awakening, just for this moment. The Speech — she had heard of this: Art little seen these days, but to command the creatures of one’s kinden was known. To hear their simple animal voices and to order them. but not this-

Sister, you have come far.

They were not human words. Some other intelligence was prying into her skull, forcing itself upon her, and her poor mind was forming the words as best it could.

You have come to prove yourself.

Had she? She had forgotten why she had come.

Turn, sister , the voice speared into her mind, and she turned and saw him there.

He was just a moving shape in the darkness, leading with the tip of a blade splashed pale silver by the moon. Her rapier had cleared its scabbard even as she saw him, and she felt the shock of contact, real as real, heard the scrape and clatter as the metal met.

He drove her before him, lancing and slashing in dazzling, half-seen patterns, a shadow-shape that she could not pin down. Her body knew the dance, though, or at least her sword did. Even as she felt the rapier vibrate with her parries, it was as though she was feeling its history, all the swift patterns it had ever moved through, as though the fight she was engaged in was running along grooves worn deep by centuries of use.

And she stared at the face of her opponent, which shifted and blurred before her, and tried to read it, but it changed and changed again. Now she was fighting Tisamon, his blade the darting metal claw, and murder on his face as he tried to blot out the unforgivable crime of having sired her. Now it was Bolwyn, whose shifting visage masked the faceless magician who had betrayed them in Helleron. He was Piraeus, seething with hate for her, treacherous and mercenary but poised and skilled despite it. The blade cut close to her face, and then she felt it pluck at her arming jacket, not deep enough to draw blood, but close enough.