Adrian Tchaikovsky - Blood of the Mantis

Taki hopped out of the cockpit and shouted to the nearest artificer, ‘Get the chutes replaced and her engine wound and ready to go! Now, man! There’s no time to lose!’

As the startled engineer jumped up and ran over to obey, Taki collapsed onto her knees, her legs no longer able to support her.

There was a new clock counting away inside her head. It said: How long can Che survive out there? She kept insisting to herself that Che was still alive. Taki was not even considering the possibility of her friend dying in the air, dying in the crash landing or overshooting the island to plough into the Exalsee. Che might be trapped in the wreckage, though, and would almost certainly be injured. How long, how long?

‘Taki!’

She watched the Dragonfly-kinden Dalre approach, looking exasperated.

‘Where the reaches you been? I been looking all over.’

‘Look right here and you’d have found my Esca was out,’ she snapped at him. ‘Draw your own conclusions.’

‘Domina wants to see you.’

‘It will have to wait.’

Dalre sighed, and dropped down so that he could talk to her face to face. ‘Look, little one, I know you’re her favourite, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to come when she calls. She wants to see you now. In fact she wanted to see you three hours ago. She’s going spare, little one.’

Taki stared at him. ‘That bad? Really?’

‘Oh yes. Stuff is going on.’

‘Very nice. Very specific.’ Taki cast an agonized look back at the Esca . It would take them a little while to rewind her, to replace the chutes. She would have to make it quick, very quick. She would tell Genissa just that.

Leaning on Dalre’s shoulder, she got to her feet. Her legs were still very shaky from all the pedalling.

‘I’ll go to her now. You don’t need to escort me,’ she told the Dragonfly sharply. His doubtful look suggested that he wasn’t sure she could even walk.

‘Hey!’

She looked up and saw the foreigner, Nero, appear at the hangar’s mouth. Her heart sank.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked, and then, inevitably, ‘Where’s-?’

‘Come with me,’ she urged him. ‘I may need your help.’

And she did. In fact she had to lean on him while her legs recovered. Meanwhile she told him everything: about the Wasp attack, the possible fate of Che. ‘How strong a flier are you?’

Nero considered. ‘Not strong enough to get out that far,’ he admitted. ‘Not my strong suit, is flight.’

‘And you’re wounded too.’

‘A scratch.’

‘You were lucky to get away with just that.’

‘You know the old Art – our kinden’s trick with danger,’ he told her, and she did. Even as the assassin had drawn back his blade, Nero must have sensed it and known to flick himself out of the way. He was clearly only annoyed that the blade should have cut as deeply as it had. ‘I can look after myself. Che, on the other hand-’

‘I know, and I did my best,’ she said, more heatedly than she had meant.

‘No criticisms. If you want me with you whenever you go out, though-’

‘Can you fly a machine, at least?,’ she interrupted. ‘I’ll need another pilot. From what I saw, the Stormcry ’s beyond fixing, and I don’t want to head out there in something that can’t fight off the Wasps off if they attack again.’

‘Yes… the Wasps,’ replied Nero flatly.

‘What is it?’

‘I’m sure Domina Genissa will tell you.’

Everything hurt, as Che woke up. She was aware of that before she opened her eyes or paid any heed to what was going on around her. Everything hurt: her head, her back, her legs, her arms. Her left hand hurt particularly, but it was just a louder voice at the back of a clamouring crowd.

Her mind searched for explanations and she was reminded of one fateful night when she and Totho and Salma, and some girl that Salma had been wooing, had set out on an all-night drinking session. The following morning had hurt about as much as this one.

She had been in the fixed-wing, she recalled… the Wasps had been attacking her. She remembered the steam engine exploding behind her, the wood of the flier catching alight, the poor Stormcry burning. A piece of the fragmenting engine casing had struck the back of her head, after it spent most of its force on the panel it had burst through.

The machine had been dying fast, falling towards the island below. In a mad access of energy, half-dazed and working on automatic, she had torn off her harness and thrust herself out of the cockpit, flaring her wings into being to catch the air.

She had not considered the speed the flier was going, so she had been caught by the wind instantly, buffeted along the entire length of the Stormcry ’s anguished hull, seared by the erupting flames and choking in smoke, and then she had been falling end-over-end towards the island, her wings still flickering in and out of sight, catching her for a moment each time and then vanishing, unable to bear the strain. She had fallen thus in fits and starts.

She now opened her eyes.

She was caught in a tree. That was what struck her most. She was wedged in the crook of a tree, which probably accounted for much of the pain. There was smoke in the air, and she was afraid that she knew what that meant. As a Beetle girl properly brought up, what she felt about that was guilt. She had gone and broken their fixed-wing and she hoped that Taki and the Destiavels would not be too angry with her, but there hadn’t seemed much option at the time.

Around the tree that she was snagged in were several others similar, and beyond those, even more trees and the faint suggestion of a grey stone edifice uphill from her. She recalled her view of the island from the air as forested, quite densely. Ideally she should now get herself either to the wreck of the Stormcry or somewhere else where a rescuer might spot her from the air. The ruin that she had seen capping the island would be the most obvious place to head for.

Of course the Wasps might also be looking for her. They could already be searching the island, so she would have to be careful. First, though, she would have to get herself out of this tree.

As she shifted, the branch supporting her gave way almost immediately, which solved that particular problem. Her wings caught her this time, and she landed heavily on the forest floor, but without any further apparent damage.

She stood up, wincing, and began trudging towards the sight of stone through the trees. It was her only landmark, everything else being quite foreign to her. The trees were of a type she had never seen before and she had no idea what else might exist here. It was not an island large enough to support some huge monster, she decided – then she decided that the huge monster might like to go off and swim and eat fish, and therefore could be very big indeed.

She tried to creep forward silently but the forest betrayed her at every step. She was just not physically built for such furtiveness. In the end, between the shifting carpet of leaves and the increasing gradient, she had to barge forward as best she could, and who cared about the noise she made? Then she found herself facing grey stonework.

A building, indeed, but now most definitely a ruin. Catching her breath, one hand on the tumbled stone of a wall, the scholar rose within her. Old, very old, she realized, for there was probably as much of it hidden beneath moss and drifted leaves and soil as there was still exposed. It put her in mind of a fallen tower she had seen some ten miles north of Collegium, beside the Sarnesh rail-line. The architectural style was subtly different, but the age-born devastation very similar. That other tower had been a ruin before the revolution, six centuries ago and more. This building could be just as old, long undisturbed and decaying on this island.