Dragonfly Falling (17 page)

The skies were full. He
found himself dropping to one knee, a hand up to shield him. The skies were
crowded tonight with a host of madmen out for blood. There were Wasp soldiers
darting and passing there above, and the spear-wielding savages in their
howling hosts. From the rooftops of nearby houses, from the ground and the
still-standing wall, Ant crossbows were constantly spitting. As Totho’s wild
gaze took in the archers, he saw that most were merely in tunics, others were
near naked. They were citizens, off-duty soldiers, the elderly or children no
more than thirteen straining to recock their bows by using both hands.

The skies were busy with
more than just flying men. Even as Totho watched, a great dark shape cut
through a formation of the Wasp light airborne, its powering wings sounding a
metal clatter over all the rest. Totho saw the flash of nailbows from within
and knew it must be a Tarkesh orthopter. More of the machines flapped, some
loosing their weapons against the airborne while others were dropping
explosives on attackers beyond the wall.

Beyond the wall: there
were more, then. Totho craned up and saw the trebuchet on Parops’s tower pivoting,
leaning at an angle, launching a missile past the section of wall that still
held the gate. Then something thundered over it, and there was the flash of
incendiaries that briefly silhouetted the siege weapon in sharp detail. Moments
later it was on fire, and Totho saw one of its crew drop blazing down onto the
soldiers fighting below. He hoped Parops was well clear.

The juddering machine
flew on, a great ugly heliopter clinging to the air with its three labouring
rotors. It would have been a simple matter to dispatch it with artillery or
with the orthopters but the Wasps had given Tark all manner of distractions
tonight.

Totho raised his
crossbow, but the sky was such a jumble that he could find no sense in it. He
fell back against the tower wall, feeling the stones shift against one another.
He had never been intended to see this: it was a world the sedate College had
no words for.

Cheerwell
,
he cried in his mind, but no doubt she had already forgotten him in his
self-imposed exile.

Skrill crouched beside
him, tracking a passing Wasp with her bow and sending the arrow off, a hiss of
annoyance already on her lips as she saw her shot fall short. Totho himself
could not even manage to shoot, though. The assault on his senses was
overwhelming.

He had put his sword
into Captain Halrad, all those tendays before, put it right into his back as
they had escaped the
Sky Without
. The first blood he
had ever shed and it had been spilled for Che Maker. He had been there, as one
of Stenwold’s men, but only for Che.

He had fought in
Helleron and then tracked her into the very Empire, stealing into the
Governor’s Palace in Myna. He had used this same crossbow to kill Wasps there,
and it had been to rescue Che, to bring her safely home.

But in gaining her he found
he had lost her. Her heart had been stolen from him. Stolen, because she had
barely met the other man, Achaeos, the Moth-kinden deceiver. And in the end,
for her sake, he had left to go along with Salma, to go to war.

He knew a great tide of
despair that almost eclipsed him, and when it receded he found himself
standing, shooting into the soldiers passing overhead, dragging the lever back
over and over until the wooden magazine was empty, and then reaching for
another from his bag.

Outside the city wall
the advancing infantry of the Empire was almost untroubled, as the defenders
sent their missiles at the flying corps or at Anadus’s Ant-kinden. Captain
Anadus’s men had not been able to press into the breach, for the Tarkesh were
holding them at bay, although the carnage on both sides was unspeakable. The
very bodies of the dead were now starting to clog the gap. This was the ancient
war that the Ant-kinden had always waged upon themselves. Shield rammed against
shield, neither side would give an inch.

Drephos’s new engine was
almost at the gates, shielded from above by a great curved iron coping. It was
a lead-shotter in essence, a siege engine that should launch great
powder-charged balls of stone or metal. Drephos, however, had given it a new
purpose.

Captain Czerig himself
had taken on this duty, along with two of his artificers. The three of them now
sheltered under the eaves of the machine’s metal roof, and guided it forwards
until it was mere feet away from the gate. Behind them came a mass of Wasp armoured
infantry, bristling with spears and desperate to join the fight.

The sound of missiles
above them was more persistent now. If the Tarkesh got a siege engine to bear
on them it would be over. The Tarkesh had other things to think about, he knew.

The Wasp army had
ramming engines, of course, but they traditionally relied on their engines’
power to push through the barriers. Drephos had a better plan, though. Czerig
gave the signal and his artificer had the great machine ratchet back, cogs and
gears moving the foot-thick arm into place. There was a firepowder charge in
the chamber that could have hurled a stone from the Wasp camp all the way over
Tark’s walls, but its force would now be concentrated into the three-knuckled
metal fist. Czerig did not like Drephos: the man made him shiver to his very
core. Nevertheless, there was no denying his skill as an artificer.

‘Stand clear,’ he said,
and his men scurried back, raising round shields against the engine itself in
case it failed.

He took a deep breath and
released the catch. The powder exploded, swathing them instantly in thick, foul
smoke, and the trapped power of the charge went into the ram that punched
against the gates of Tark. Czerig heard them bend inwards, heard the crunch of
ruined wood, the snap of metal fixings.

His artificers were
already moving to draw the ram back and put a second charge in place. Something
heavy struck the coping above and bounded off, either engine-shot or a stone
hurled from the walls. Czerig remained phlegmatic: the ram would succeed or
fail, he himself would live or die. He was a slave of the Wasps without hope of
freedom and he found he cared little enough.

Across the field his
fellow slaves of war were marching into battle, dwarfing the Wasp soldiers all
around them. The giants were striding forth and Captain Czerig felt a stab of
sorrow. They were so wretched, he knew: they hated the fighting even more than
he did, had less hope even than he.

In his heart he wished
them luck – or a swift death.

There were a dozen of them
only, half of their kinden’s unwilling contingent currently serving with the
Wasp Fourth Army. As tall as two men, as broad as three, sporting massive slabs
of metal armour and thick sheets of studded leather that would crush a normal
warrior, they bore great spade-headed spears and seven-foot shields of metal
and wood. They now moved with five-foot strides towards the walls of Tark. Mole
Cricket-kinden they were and, like the other Auxillians, they were slaves whose
families were held hostage to their loyal service. Few and reclusive, to them
it seemed that they had always been slaves to someone or other. They had
laboured and built for the Moth-kinden and Spiders when the world was younger
and the revolution still a dream, but at least their masters had known where
their true skills lay. Now the Wasp-kinden had garrisoned their towns and their
mines, and turned them into warriors.

There was some shot
coming from the city walls now and they put their shields up, feeling the metal
shudder as crossbow bolts bounced from them. Their kind were onyx-skinned and
pale-haired, huge and strong, but, though they were armoured like automotives,
a keen shot with a crossbow could finish them, just like any mortal man.

But their present
enemies were creatures of the surface and the sun, while the Mole Crickets saw
better at night than in daylight. They were closing on the walls.

Their leader glanced
left, seeing old Czerig with the ram and that the gates were almost broken
through. No doubt it was important to the Wasps that all these holes be made in
one go. He had no wish to learn strategy himself.

A fistful of grenades
suddenly landed all around them, dropped from an orthopter already burning,
even as it passed overhead. An instant volley of explosions erupted about them,
killing three and wounding another, denting and splitting shields. The
remainder picked up their pace. Their orders were to go through the wall, they
knew, and then through the men beyond.

None of them would
survive. So much seemed certain. The Mole Cricket leader braced himself as the
great stones loomed before him.

Pardon
this violence
, he said silently, dropping his spear and shield. His
great chisel-nailed hands found the gaps between the stones, and he called upon
his ancestors, called upon the Art they had given him. The stones within his
grasp – and those his brothers grasped – began to soften and to shift.

Totho found himself
crouching against some of the fallen wall, frantically slotting another
magazine in place and knowing he was almost out of ammunition. Skrill was
behind him, her back to his, sending sporadic arrows up at the enemy. More and
more Ants were coming to help hold the breach, and even Totho could see how the
attacking force was being made to give ground, every inch of it bought in
blood. Above them the cavalry had arrived, Ant-kinden soldiers riding great
winged insects, cumbersome in flight as they buzzed ponderously through the
darting Wasp airborne. Each flying beast had a big repeating crossbow mounted
above its thorax and soon the newcomers were taking a savage toll of the enemy.

Knowing that Salma was
up there somewhere, Totho just hoped he would be safe, but he could spare him
no further thought.

Yet more Ant-kinden were
coming to join the defence. Some had brought packs of giant ants under leash,
drawn from the nest of tunnels beneath the city. The creatures were the guards
and soldiers of the nest below, and another resource the city could barely
spare, but they had stings and jagged mandibles. As soon as they were within sight
of the enemy their leashes were loosed, and they scuttled towards the foe with
jaws gaping in idiot threat.

Totho tried to track
another Wasp soldier while the man darted overhead, hands spitting golden fire.
Then one of the Wasp heliopters rumbled past, and Totho noticed it was failing,
one of its rotors torn and still. The ponderous, blocky machine limped through
the air, tilting and tilting further. One of the great flying insects was
clinging to its side, riderless, peeling at the metal casing with its jaws.
Then it went out of sight over the rooftops, but Totho felt it come down, felt
the ground shake and heard the sudden blast as its engine ruptured and its fuel
exploded. Looking over the rooftops he saw the night was punctuated by a dozen
red gleams where Tark was burning.

There was a sudden sense
of movement around him, Ants pushing into him, wordless but eyes wide as some
unheard alarm went through their heads.

A bright light, a sound
– he was lifted up by a great hand. He heard Skrill scream and then . . . and
then . . . Nothing.

*

Totho’s head was
ringing, and he did not know why. He was aware of lying on some uneven surface
and there seemed to be a great deal of noise and confusion going on. He sat up,
clutching his head, and then saw what he was lying on.

Bodies.

He was lying on corpses,
dead Ant-kinden from Tark, dead Wasp-kinden from the Empire. He stumbled to his
feet, fell over almost immediately. His artificer’s coat was bloody and ragged,
and he picked a metal shard from it curiously. All around him a lot of people
were rushing back and forth, but he felt it was his duty as an artificer to
identify the piece of metal he had found.

It looked like the sort
of fragment that would be left behind by an exploding grenade, he thought. A
crude ball-type grenade, not one of the hatched-metal ones the Beetles made in
Helleron.

Awareness ran through
him like a swordblade: Tark; the siege; the night attack.
It
was still going on.
He must have been knocked flat by an explosion.

‘Skrill?’ he shouted, remembering
how she had been there with him. ‘Skrill?’ but there was absolutely no chance
of being heard. Even his own voice sounded muted and far away. Another thirty
or forty Ant soldiers went charging past, trampling their own dead. Some
stopped to shoot upwards, and he fell to his knees once again, looking into
that asylum sky full of fighting men, beasts and machines.

Hands found him and
helped him to his feet. He leant back into them, feeling shaken and sick, the
impact of the grenade still thundering in his head.

‘Che!’ he got out. ‘You
found me.’

‘You better get your
head on straight!’ And Che turned into Skrill, her voice high with fear.
‘Where’s your piece?’

He looked around, but
Scuto’s marvellous crossbow was now nowhere to be seen. He plucked another – a
Tarkesh soldier’s – from its dead owner’s hand, dragging a quiver off a second
body.

They had moved further
from the breach, he saw, but the gate itself was now open. Or rather there were
splintered pieces of it left barely clinging to the hinges. There was the great
engine there that had powered through the gateway before it had finally been
stopped and disabled. Ants and Wasps were fighting there. Totho stumbled
towards the machine.

‘Where’re you going?’
Skrill shouted after him. She had lost her bow, he noticed. She should find
herself a crossbow as he had, but of course she surely derived from some
primitive old race that didn’t know about crossbows and how clever they were.

The ramming engine was
partly blocking the gateway. Wasp spearmen were trying to push through, but the
Ants were holding them back. The engine itself looked really interesting,
though, and that seemed the most important thing to Totho’s addled mind. As the
Ants swarmed around it, he struggled to make his way to its battered head. It
had not been intended for this use, he now saw. Some brilliant hand had
cunningly reshaped it.