Dragonfly Falling (28 page)

‘Your Majesty,’ said
Salma, ‘I would go with your men, if I may?’ The tacticians studied him,
narrow-eyed, and he shrugged. ‘For one, I can fly. I can see better in the
darkness than your people. And I am a sworn enemy of the Wasps.’

‘We have favourable
reports of your fighting in the recent attack.’ The King nodded. ‘You indeed
have talents we lack. Very well. And your comrade?’

‘No—’ Salma started,
but, ‘Yes,’ said Totho.

Salma goggled at him,
wrong-footed for once, and Totho felt obscurely proud of that. ‘I may not be
the fighter that Salma here is,’ he said, ‘but I am an artificer of the
College, and destroying the airships is an artificer’s work.’

‘You must stay always
with our people,’ the King warned him. ‘They will know each other’s minds, but
not yours. You must not stray from them.’

‘I will do what is asked
of me,’ Totho confirmed, and realized Salma was still staring at him, shaking
his head slightly. ‘I have one other request for Your Majesty, though.’

‘What request is this?’
The King and his staff were all suspicion again.

‘There was a halfbreed
scout captured with us, when your soldiers took us in,’ Totho explained. ‘Her
name is Skrill. Please let her out of the city when we start on our sally, so
that she can head for Collegium and inform Master Maker what’s happening here.
He is trying to organize an army against the Wasps, I think, and he may be able
to help, so he needs to know exactly what’s going on here.’

There was a long silence
between the tacticians then, as they passed their narrow thoughts back and
forth, trying for a consensus. Eventually, the King nodded slowly.

‘It shall be so,’ he
said.

‘Would you mind
explaining to me just exactly what you’re doing?’ Salma demanded, once they
were back in their rooms in Parops’s slightly skewed tower.

‘I don’t mind at all,’
said Totho. ‘If you don’t mind answering the same question first.’

‘I am going out to
fight,’ Salma said, ‘because I have been trained to fight, and because the
Wasps are the enemies of my people, and most of all because I know how to look
after myself—’

‘That’s not it at all,’
said Totho. He now felt drained and miserable. The prospect of tonight’s
activities oppressed him, and he sensed that he had been robbed of choice from
the moment he had set foot in Tark.
My last real choice was
to leave Che to the Moth.
And what a good choice that had been.

‘
What’s
not it?’ and even to Totho, who had no great ear for such things, Salma sounded
evasive.

‘You don’t care about
Tark. No, that’s unfair – but you sold yourself long to the Ants. You can
fight, but you’re no good at destroying airships.’

‘The Moths of Tharn can
destroy mine-workings. I witnessed that in Helleron.’

‘Because they’ve practised,
they’ve learned particular things by rote. That’s not the same,’ Totho said.
‘But here you are charging out to fight thirty thousand Wasp-kinden, and you
don’t care about Tark enough to do that. You’re looking for her, the dancing
girl.’

Salma was quiet for a
long time before finally getting his words in order. ‘You know, Toth, I really
do underestimate you sometimes.’

‘All the time,’ said the
artificer. ‘Everyone does. You’ve not spoken of her, barely mentioned her,
since the Ants caught us. I knew, though – I knew you hadn’t forgotten. I never
saw her but I hope she’s worth it.’

‘I dream about her,’
Salma said, surprising him. ‘I can’t put her out of my mind. Whenever I’m
active, doing something, I’m all right, but then in the pauses she comes back
to me. I didn’t even know her for long, and yet . . . here I am.’ He gave Totho
a solemn look. ‘I suppose that we’re not so very different in that, since
you’re in love with Che.’

Totho nodded glumly.
‘Since almost the moment I met her. Only, Stenwold doesn’t much like the idea .
. . I even got the courage to ask his blessing, back in Myna, and he didn’t say
anything much, but his face . . . you could tell. And then that cursed Moth, he
just turns up from nowhere as though he’s her best friend in the world. And as
soon as we got the two of you from the prison he was all over her. You must
have seen it.’

‘I did,’ Salma admitted.
‘I had other things on my mind, but I saw it.’

‘And she . . . she liked
him, I could tell. But it’s like Tynisa and the boys from the College. They go
to her because she’s . . . graceful and . . . elegant . . . and sometimes she
leads them on. But I can’t believe that
creature
feels anything for Che . . . and I tried to tell her how I felt, but she didn’t
understand, and it all became . . . I just couldn’t stand . . .’ He found that
he was sniffling now and wiped his eyes and his nose furiously. ‘And so I just
left, put a note by her pillow and left. I . . . I feel gutted, literally
gutted, Salma. Like my insides have been ripped out of me. I’m just hollow. And
now all this . . . all the killing, the destruction. You know how I’ve always
wanted to design weapons?’

‘I didn’t, but go on.’

‘I
should
feel that it’s wrong – after I’ve seen what those weapons can do. And yet . . .
and yet people would still kill each other with sticks and stones if they
didn’t have anything else. With their bare hands even. And it would be
pointless, so pointless. I . . . I almost think that only the weapons make it
all worth anything. At least something is learning from the whole bloody
business. The people remain the same, killing and dying and dying and killing,
but at least the weapons get better.’

Salma gave him a
doubtful look. ‘I don’t think Che would like to hear that.’

‘No, I’m sure she
wouldn’t.’ Totho rubbed at his face, as if trying to erase some unseen stain.

Salma decided to come to
the point. ‘Listen, Toth, when Skrill makes her move, you should go with her.
Get out of here and get back to Stenwold. The Ants have artificers enough. Go
back to Stenwold. And to Che, even.’

But Totho was shaking
his head. ‘You haven’t thought it through, Salma. Sorry, but you haven’t. What
am I supposed to say to her? Yes, I left you on an ill-planned mission that
seemed certain to see you dead. Yes, I just ran, at that point, and made sure
that my skin stayed whole. That, you see, would look particularly impressive.
Che likes you. You and she went through a lot together. When you decided to
come here on this fool’s mission she was furious, and it was because she was
frightened for you. She doesn’t like me half as much, I think, nor would she
have shed as many tears for me. So if I go back with that story, that I left
you to your fate, how could I look her in the face? I know it’s not practical,
and I’m supposed to be a practical man, but that’s how it is.’

‘Then don’t leave, just
stay here. Stay in the city and wait,’ Salma said. ‘You don’t need to go
tonight.’

‘It makes no difference,
because I’d still be in the same position. Anyway I don’t think you’ll be
coming back here afterwards.’

‘You can’t think I’d
just grab Grief and abandon you here.’

‘No,’ Totho said, ‘that
isn’t what I think at all.’

‘Then . . .’ Salma
thought about it. ‘Oh, I see.’

‘This is a fool’s
mission, and these Ants are fools. They didn’t understand a word of what you
said, or what I said. They have no concept of an enemy that is so much stronger
than they are. Their mission tonight will not succeed.’

‘I thought in Collegium
they didn’t believe in destiny.’

‘We believe in the odds,
Salma,’ Totho said, ‘and I do not believe that we will win, tonight. I really
do not believe that we will survive.’ He sounded distant, almost trancelike.

‘Well if you believe
that,’ Salma told him, ‘then the question is back on the table. Why are you
coming with me? Or is
that
why? Is that it?’

‘I do not have that
courage, or that cowardice, whatever it is,’ Totho said, ‘to turn the blade
upon myself. But I have . . . nothing left, Salma. I have nothing left. And so
I’ll let the Wasps do it instead, if it’s all right with you. And if I can help
you out, or even help the bloody ignorant Tarkesh, then that’s good too. But I
am turning into something strange that I do not like. And so I think it best
that I go with you tonight, and best of all if I do not return.’

Salma had no reply for
that, trying to see through the clouds hanging about this man to the student he
had once known. Totho had always been gloomy, it was true. He had always been
shielding his halfbreed nature against the world – and then there had been his
infatuation with Che, which had not helped. Tark had been the forge, though,
that had taken the decent ingredients of the man and botched them into
something flawed and strangely made.

We
can win, tonight
, Salma told himself. His own race were slow to admit to
the impossible, and the histories of the Commonweal were rife with accounts of
one man standing off a hundred, of bridges held by a mere handful, of one
assassination bringing down an army or a principality.

We
can win
, he thought again, trying to convince himself, but in that
moment he felt very far from home and the things he knew, surrounded by hard
stone and jagged metal, and afraid.

‘So how do we get
outside the walls without the Wasps spotting us?’ Salma asked.

Their leader was Basila,
who had interrogated him when he first came to Tark, and then bedded him
shortly afterwards. Now she was attired in dark cloth over metal-reinforced
leathers, hooded and with a scarf ready to cover her lower face. Both her blade
and her exposed skin were blacked.

‘Do you think the
Wasp-kinden are the only people who have ideas?’ she asked contemptuously. ‘We
are ready for this possibility.’

Salma had accepted an
arming jacket from them, and a better-balanced sword, but they had no bows in
the whole of the city. For Totho they had found artificers’ leathers and
another repeating crossbow, not as fine as Scuto’s had been, but a serviceable
machine nonetheless.

‘Follow, and you will
see.’ Basila led the way, and the two of them fell in with her dozen Ant
soldiers all clad as she was. Skrill hopped along at the back, her arm still
bound up, looking nervous.

‘Listen, Your Highness,’
she said. ‘I ain’t sure about this.’

‘Just get to Stenwold,’
Totho insisted. ‘Tell him what’s going on.’

‘And what if the Wasps
see me?’

‘Then run,’ Salma said.
‘I’ve seen how you run. You’ve a turn of speed a horse would envy. Wasps tire
fast once in the air, most of them. So run and keep running, and hope.’

‘Hope,’ she echoed,
without much of it in her voice.

They entered one of the
city barracks, and almost immediately were heading underground, down into
rounded tunnels that the insect colony must have dug under Tarkesh orders.

Nero and Parops had been
there to see them off, like a mismatched pair of mourners. Parops had just
clasped Salma’s hand and wished him luck. There had been little enough hope in
his eyes either.

Underground, Salma had
no way of keeping track of where they were heading. The Ants seemed to be
finding their way simply by touch, for it was so dark that even his keen eyes could
make nothing of it. Often they heard the scratchings and skitterings of insects
as they scurried out of their way ahead.

‘Here,’ Basila’s voice
came to him, and Salma knew they had stopped when he ran into the back of the
man preceding him.

A lantern glowed into
life, the dimmest of faint glows. There were two Ant-kinden waiting for them
there who had probably even been guiding Basila in with their minds’ voices.
They carried shovels, and Salma now saw that the tunnel ceiling had a shaft dug
into it, with metal bars serving for handholds.

‘We have these radiating
in every direction from the city,’ Basila told him. ‘The Wasps have no watch
near this one, yet it is close enough to their camp to strike there before we
are seen. The Wasps have little light beyond their camp, and we know they do
not see well in the dark, no more than we do. These men and I, we have stayed
in darkness below the ground since the plan was conceived, making our eyes
fitter for this moment.’

One of the Ant engineers
was now crawling up the shaft, legs straddling the gap at a painful-looking
angle. He began to dig up at the earth above, showering dirt down on them.

‘The earth left is
shored up, enough to bear the weight of a man,’ Basila told them, ‘but we will
be digging through in minutes. Then we begin.’

She and her team bore
their swords, together with little crossbows that were double-strung to give
them the power of a normal bow whilst being small enough to shoot one-handed.
They had little wheel-locks set above the handle to tension the sprung steel
arms.

The Ants waited in
silence as the engineer above them dug towards the surface. Totho and Salma
exchanged glances, but at this stage neither had anything to say.

Then the lamp was
extinguished, and Salma realized the man digging above them must be nearly
through. He put a hand to his sword, made sure it was loose enough in its
scabbard.

There was a final rattle
of earth and the engineer came back down, and went past them with his colleague
and, without a word, off into the dark tunnels. Basila was ascending already,
hand over hand in a perfect rhythm that all her team picked up, each man
climbing with his hands almost under the boots of the man before, and yet not
one slip, not one hand trodden on, until they were all above and it was time
for Salma and Totho to follow them with far less assurance.

Basila looked between
them. ‘From now on,’ she instructed in a low voice, ‘there is no more speaking.
I will hear nothing from you, nor you from me. Watch what we do and follow it.
No more than that.’