Dragonfly Falling (44 page)

‘You
think
he’s quite a well-known one?’ Drephos sounded
amused. ‘How well known can he be, if you only think it?’

‘I don’t know about
art,’ said Totho stubbornly. ‘And I don’t know why he’s here, either.’ He
turned to the Fly-kinden. ‘Were you captured in the assault?’

‘Not exactly.’ Nero’s
wan smile remained. ‘I came here to find out what had happened to you, as a
matter of fact.’

‘Something which the soldiers
who captured him did not quite understand,’ Drephos explained. ‘However, he
kept repeating your name and eventually word came through to me.’

‘Since when the quality
of hospitality around here has definitely improved,’ Nero put in, rubbing his
wrists for emphasis. ‘Well, here’s a decent sight. You came through without a
scratch, it seems.’

‘Without more than a
lump,’ Totho confirmed. ‘But why did you come here? They could easily have
killed you.’

Nero shrugged off the
risks of it, but the gesture was unconvincing. He had not wanted to come, Totho
could sense, yet he had been forced to, and by what other than his own
conscience? ‘My old friend Sten, you see, we go way back,’ he said, sounding
almost embarrassed about it. ‘We’ve been through a lot, him and me, what with
the College and all.’ He glanced at Drephos. ‘Stop me if this is getting too
sentimental or unmilitary for you.’

‘Say all you want,
Master Nero. Knowledge is never wasted,’ said the Colonel-Auxillian.

‘Well then, there was a
caper that Stenwold and the others went in for, a long time ago, pretty much
the last – the second to last, really – that we did together back then. It’s
history now, but it involved these fellows.’ He jerked a thumb back at the Wasp
soldiers nearby. ‘And it was too hot for me. I bugged out of there quick
enough, told him it wasn’t for me. I missed the fun, and then things went sour.
Lost one good friend, and another died soon after. And I never forgot how I
left them to it, because I didn’t like the odds. I know people think my kinden
are a spineless bunch, and mostly they’re right, but it still didn’t sit well.
Then, when you and the lad there turned up in Tark, I told myself I’d look
after you, keep you on track. And a right job I made of that, too. So here I am
still trying to put things right.’

‘You didn’t have to
come,’ Totho reproved him. ‘I’m . . . holding out fine.’ He took a deep breath.
‘And Salma is . . . well, he didn’t make it.’

Nero looked up at
Drephos. ‘Shall I say it, or is it going to get me shot?’

‘Say all you wish,’
Drephos told him. ‘I have only refrained from mentioning it because I assumed
you would prefer to break the news yourself.’

Nero nodded, his mere
expression making it plain he did not trust Drephos one inch.

‘The thing is, lad,’ he
said, ‘Salma’s still here. He made it, all right – though only just. He’s alive
and here in the camp.’

Salma was asleep when
Totho came to see him. Nero and the others kept their distance, even Drephos,
as he went to kneel at his friend’s bed.

Only a very slight rise
and fall of Salma’s chest betrayed the life within him. His once-golden skin
was now leaden pale, his cheeks sunken and his lips shrivelled like an old
man’s. It was hard to see here the laughing, smiling fighter, the nobleman from
a far foreign land, who had once brightened the austere halls of the Great
College.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Totho
murmured quietly, so as not to wake him. He was acutely aware of all the others
nearby, two hundred laid out in this tent alone. All casualties of the war, in
one way or another. Most were Wasps, but there were others too: Bee-kinden like
Kaszaat, ruddy-skinned Ants, even a couple of Fly messengers who had not flown
swiftly enough. Many there, he saw, carried terrible burns caused by the
incendiaries, and the Wasp officers’ lack of concern for their own men.

Totho returned to
Drephos and the others. There was a woman now standing there with them, a
severe-looking Wasp-kinden who was scowling at the master artificer.

‘Totho,’ Drephos said,
‘this gentle lady is Norsa, the Eldest of Mercy’s Daughters in this camp.
Norsa, this young man was a companion of the Commonwealer lying over there.’

Norsa turned a stern eye
on Totho, who tried to face up to it. ‘He will live,’ she said flatly. ‘He will
recover, now, although at first only
she
kept him
with us at all.’ She pointed and Totho followed her extended finger to see a
robed woman passing along the line of beds, bearing a basin of water. Her eyes
were white, and her skin glowed through a rainbow of colours. Totho had never
seen her before but, from Salma’s words, he knew who this must be.

‘So he found her, at
last,’ he murmured. ‘Thank you for aiding him, lady. I realize he is your
enemy.’

‘I have no enemies,’
Norsa replied sharply. ‘Mercy’s Daughters give aid to whoever they will,
however the Empire may take issue with us. Suffice to say that the imperial
army knows your friend is here.’

Totho’s stomach lurched
with the thought and he turned to Drephos. ‘Then you must have known!’

Totho caught a sardonic
smile from under the hood. ‘Norsa here holds me to blame for the injuries done
to many of these men. I hear no news from her Daughters, and I heard none from
any other quarter. Just be grateful that Master Nero himself thought to look
here.’

‘But when he recovers,’
Totho said, ‘they’ll . . .’

Drephos finished for him
grimly. ‘Take him? Question him? Torture him and then enslave or kill him? Yes,
they will, for that is their way. A waste of healing, in my opinion.’

‘I do not even recognize
that sentiment,’ Norsa snapped at him, ‘although if you were the patient I
might make an exception, Colonel-Auxillian.’

Totho glanced from
Drephos to Nero, and then back across the room to the unconscious Salma, and
realized that some part of his mind had a plan and a decision already prepared
for him.

‘Colonel Drephos,’ he
said, although he had found his thought already. ‘I need to speak with you. I
think you know what about.’

*

Salma drifted in and out
of wakefulness. Sometimes he recalled who he was, where he was, and sometimes
he did not, perhaps blessedly. He existed in a blurred greyness that was pulled
taut between the light of Grief in Chains and the darkness of the void that was
still hungry for him.

On one occasion he
opened his eyes and found himself looking straight into the face of the man on
the next bed. He was a Wasp-kinden with his head bandaged low so as to cover
one eye, the wrappings crisp and clean, having just been changed. When he saw
Salma looking at him, the other man grinned weakly.

‘You,’ he said, in a
voice just loud enough for Salma to hear, ‘are so cursed lucky.’

Salma tried to make a
sound, but nothing audible came out. In truth he did not feel so very lucky.

‘You should be dead,’
the soldier continued, his whispering voice obviously the best he could manage.
‘I saw you drop. You were fighting like a maniac but someone got you, and you
fell, and that should have been the end of you. I was behind. I saw the point
come clean through you, you bastard. She came for you, though, and you were
dead, even then, but she came for you as though she knew what had been going
on. She ran out and lit the place up and put her hands on you. And you stopped
bleeding, right there and then.’ He coughed, a wretched, scratchy sound. ‘And
she’s been with you every day, using her Art to keep you alive. I don’t know
what you mean to her but you’re a lucky bastard, so you are.’

Salma tried to speak
again, and this time a distant croak emerged, quieter even than the wounded
soldier’s. ‘I came here for her.’

The man’s one eye
studied him for a minute, before he said, ‘Well she’s certainly worth that.’

‘Salma?’

He had been asleep, or
at least drifting somewhere else, but there was a new voice now, and it carried
his name to him.

‘Salma, you have to wake
up now.’

It was not
her
voice and he did not want to wake up. When he had
opened his eyes last, she had been standing there, staring at him. Expression
was hard to fathom from those dancing colours, from those eyes, but his heart
had leapt painfully just to see her.

He had found her. She
had found him. In this mad, war-struck world, they had found each other.

She had sat down at the
edge of his bed and, although it was a flimsy folding piece that should have
tipped immediately, she barely moved it, making him doubt his senses. He had
reached out, though, and she had taken his cold hand in both her warm ones,
warm like the sun on a summer’s day.

‘Why are you here?’ she
had asked him. ‘Why did you come?’

‘I couldn’t stay away,
knowing that you were here,’ was his whisper. ‘Aagen . . . I spoke to Aagen.’

‘Did you—?’

‘No. We parted on good
terms.’ His voice was strengthening, as though healing energies were passing
through her hands and into him. Perhaps they were, either by Ancestor Art or by
plain magic.

‘You should not have
come.’

The ghost of his old
smile appeared briefly. ‘Why?’

‘You are hurt. You were
already in the hands of death when I found you. All I have done since barely
kept you with me.’

‘But I am with you.’ He
was staring at her face. She was beautiful and it was not merely the ordinary
human beauty of Tynisa. She was Butterfly-kinden and they were beautiful with
the timeless perfection of a sunset or a spring day. He yearned for her even
though she was already there right beside him.

She had shaken her head.
‘Then I myself have done this to you. I never intended this.’

‘No—’ But something had
come to mind, something the Moth-kinden man had said, or that Che had claimed
on his behalf. ‘They said . . . did you enchant me? Is this . . . what I feel
now, just glamour?’

Her hand had touched his
face and he felt a warmth flooding there, and also peace and safety. ‘I put a spell
on you,’ she had confirmed. ‘We were penned there as slaves, before the great
machines of the Wasps, and I saw your face and knew you were a good man. I
needed the help of a good man so I put a spell on you, that still held strong
when we were taken by their devices to the city of the slaves. But then you
needed help yourself, and I took my spell away. I have no spell on you now.’

Staring at her, he had
not known what to think, because his heart still reached for her and he wanted
to touch her, to stroke that rainbow skin.

‘Then I must love you,’
he had said in wonderment, and realized that all this while some part of him
had believed Che’s claim that it was no more than a spell that made him act
this way. Now he discovered it was him, nothing but his own heart.

‘Salma! Please wake up!’

He snapped from the
reverie – and saw she was not here. Instead there was a man standing by his
bed, and it took Salma rather too long to recognize his face.

‘Totho . . . ?’

‘Yes, Salma, it’s me.’

‘What . . . what in the
world are you wearing?’

Salma registered the
tunic Totho now wore, black, and edged with strips of black and gold. It was
crossed with two leather belts, one for his tools and the other serving as a
baldric for his sword.

‘Listen to me, Salma,
because we don’t have much time,’ said Totho. ‘You have to listen and
understand what I’m saying. I’m getting you out.’

‘Out?’

‘Out of here. Because
the girl might have saved your life, but you’re still not safe. In fact if you
stay here you’ll certainly die. The Wasps are just waiting until you’re well
enough to interrogate.’ Totho gave a brief bark of laughter in which the strain
he was under emerged clear enough. ‘What a world! They’re waiting for your
wound to heal so they can tear you apart. You know how much they hate your
kinden. Half of their men here fought in your Twelve-Year War.’

‘So be it,’ said Salma
tiredly.

‘No!
Not
so be it! Aren’t you listening, Salma? I’ve bought you
out. There’s a man, an artificer here, and he wants my service, and he says he
can get you out of here.’

‘You trust him?’

‘Enough for this, at
least. You remember Nero? Nero’s going with you. He’ll look after you until
you’re strong again.’

‘I
can’t
leave, Totho.’

Totho glowered at him.
‘It’s the girl? That dancing girl? Listen, Salma, they are going to
kill
you, as slowly as they can. Would she want that?
Because she won’t be able to stop them. This nursing order of hers might get to
choose whose wounds it heals, but it’s got no such say over the fit and well.
I’ve paid the asking price, Salma. I’ve sold myself just to buy you life.’

‘No!’ The effort racked
Salma with pain, and he knew that everyone down the length of the hospital tent
would be staring. ‘Totho, no—’

‘This way you survive,
and live free, and I . . . live too. It’s not so bad. I won’t be a slave,
quite. And who knows what could happen?’
And it’s not as if
I had much to go back to
, Totho added to himself.
And
this way, Che won’t detest me any more than she already does, because at least
I won’t have left you to die, Salma.

‘Totho, you can’t do
this,’ Salma said urgently, feeling himself worn out just by the effort of this
conversation. ‘I’m not worth your doing this—’

‘Shut up!’ Totho
snapped, shocking him into silence. ‘Shut up, Salma, because I have already
done this. I have put on their colours and apprenticed myself to these
monsters, and I have done it for you, and if you tell me now that you’re not
worth it, just
what
have I done all that for?’ His
fists were tightly clenched and Salma saw him anew then: not the shy, awkward
youth always tagging along behind Che, but the man that same youth had forged
into.