Dragonfly Falling (51 page)

‘There are other flying
machines as well,’ ventured an elderly Beetle woman Stenwold could not recall,
save that she had something to do with the airfield. ‘Some two dozen of various
designs that have been brought within the city. With the assistance of Master
Greatly’s force we might at least harry them during their advance.’

‘And meanwhile I can
train new pilots for the other machines,’ added Joyless Greatly.

‘Do so,’ Stenwold
agreed. ‘More, please. Anyone?’

‘Excuse me, Master
Maker.’ The speaker was an Ant-kinden with bluish skin, and Stenwold had no
idea even where he came from, never mind who he was. He was no warrior, though,
despite his race. Inactivity had left him thin from the chest up and broad
below.

‘Yes, Master . . . ?’

‘Tseitus, Master Maker.’
The Ant’s gaunt face smiled. ‘I have an aquatic automotive which, Master Maker,
I have been working on for many years.’

‘One boat, Master
Tseitus—’

‘Not a boat, Master
Maker.’ Tseitus glanced around suspiciously at the others as though they would,
at this late juncture, seek to steal his idea. ‘It goes
beneath
the waters.’

Stenwold stared at him.
‘A submersible automotive?’

‘She is beautiful,
Master Maker.’ Tseitus’s eyes gleamed. ‘I have taken her into Lake Sideriti.
You would not believe what wonders there are beneath the waters there—’

‘But for now you’ll put
her into the city’s service?’

‘This city is my life,
Master Maker. And if there might be any funding, in the future, for my
project—?‘

‘Yes, yes,’ Stenwold
said hurriedly. ‘Let us just save the city first, and then I cannot imagine
that the Assembly will not reward its saviours. Your submersible boat, what can
it do?’

‘Go beneath the waters,’
repeated Tseitus, and then after a brief, awkward pause, ‘Drill into the hulls of
their ships. Attach devices that others here may devise. Is there some
explosive that may work underwater?’

‘I haven’t—’ Stenwold
started but, as though summoned magically by the concept, one of the other
artificers was already raising a hand.

At dusk, Akalia called
for the Vekken artillery to be stilled. There was no sense wasting their
ammunition in speculative and inaccurate night-time shooting. By the last
light, her spotters had confirmed some light damage to the west wall where she
had been heaping most of her missiles: some ragged holes punched in the
crenellations, and a few patches that might repay a barrage over the next few
days and even open up the whole wall. And once the wall was down in even one
place her real assault could begin.

There had not been a
single answering shot. It had been somewhat vexing the way most of the
artillery positions atop the wall had been protected from her own, but it made
little enough difference if they were content to hide behind their walls until
she battered them down.

There would be
casualties to the Collegium artillery when the assault went in, but no war was
without casualties and her men understood that.

They
cannot have the range to match us
, one of her commanders had suggested.
She could only shrug at him. For whatever reason, though, the Collegium
artillery had remained silent.

Her commanders had
secured the camps, in the highly unlikely event that the Beetle-kinden were
planning some kind of night raid, and so finally she retired to her tent. The
Wasp-kinden Daklan wished to speak with her, she knew. She had considered
letting the foreigner stew but decided that, as matters were progressing so
well, it would do her good to remind him of the superiority of those he was
allying his Empire to.

‘Commander Daklan,’ she
addressed him, and then looked to the other man. ‘And it is Commander Thalric,
is it not?’

‘It is, Tactician,’
Thalric said. It pleased Akalia that he did not try to deny the Ant rank. In
her mind she was doing him more honour than he deserved.

‘And you are pleased
with what you have seen, so far?’ she asked the two Wasps. ‘Your vengeance
against Collegium will soon be accomplished, will it not?’

‘Indeed, Tactician,’
said the other one, Daklan.

‘One might wonder what
the foolish Beetles have done, to inflame such a far-off enemy,’ she said, her
eyes narrowing.

‘You know the
Beetle-kinden, how they can never leave well enough alone,’ Daklan said
quickly. ‘The Empire has its actions focused east of here, as you know, and it
seemed likely to us that Collegium would interfere in some way.’

‘They are a pack of
meddling old men,’ Akalia agreed derisively. ‘Look at what they have done to
Sarn, and in so short a time. They’ve gelded an entire city with their absurd
ideas!’

‘True, and well put,’
Daklan concurred. She sneered at his ingratiating manner, but it was fitting,
she supposed. It was certain that they feared her and wished her to think well
of them.

‘Tell me, Tactician,’
said the other one, Thalric. ‘How do you consider that first bombardment? It seemed
to be a little . . . unorthodox to me.’ Daklan glanced at him sharply, perhaps
because this was something they had agreed to leave unsaid, but Akalia
shrugged. ‘You are imprecise with your words, Commander Thalric. With us
Ant-kinden you must say what you mean. What do you mean?’

Thalric was ignoring
Daklan’s frown. ‘Their wall artillery, Tactician.’

‘That was curious,’ she
agreed. ‘I have asked my artificers for possible causes. It may be that they
have let their artillery become useless with age, although that seems unlikely
even for Collegium. However, they are not a valorous race. Perhaps their
engineers did not dare take to the walls to man them under our shot.’

‘Perhaps that is it,’
Thalric said, but she could see a look on his face that she did not like.

‘You are here only on
sufferance,’ she reminded them. ‘I shall have no impertinence from you
foreigners.’

‘Of course not,’ Daklan
said quickly. ‘We are merely . . . unused to such a great display of artillery.
Our wars work in different ways.’ She saw Thalric’s face twitch at that
sentiment, but she could not read his reaction.

‘You are dismissed,’ she
told them suddenly. It was late, anyway, and she would need a rested night, to
command on the morrow. She must consider what to do with these Wasp-kinden,
too. Perhaps it might be best if they became casualties of war. She watched
them walk away, a tension between them, men who would be arguing as soon as
they were out of her sight. Another divided and chaotic kinden, then. When the
time came they would be no match for the perfect order of Vek.

Akalia went straight to
her tent and had a slave unbuckle her armour. Then she fell asleep in
anticipation of the morning’s work.

She was awakened
instantly by the first crash and sat bolt-upright, feeling the ground shake
beneath her. Her entire camp was awake, but for a terrifying moment nobody knew
what was going on.

Sentries
report!
Her mind snapped out, but there was no answer amongst the babble
of replies. Her sentries knew of no attack, and yet the camps were under
attack. Men were dying, snuffed out instantly, but very few of them. Instead
she was hearing a waxing tide of alarm from her engineers, from her artificers.

What
is going on?
she demanded of them, sensing them rush about in the
darkness, that clouded, moonless pitch-darkness. Fires were being lit, men were
rushing into formations with still no idea of what was going on. One unit of a
hundred men was abruptly half its number down, a great rock having found them
in the night, crushing the heart from their battle order.

Report!
she demanded once more.
I will have executions for this. It
is intolerable.

Then the word came
rushing through the army like wildfire. Their artillery was being destroyed.

How?
she demanded.
How are they attacking us?
It must be
men, some stealthy team sent out, but even as she thought that, the ground
shook once again.

And the impossible
answer came back,
They are shooting from the walls
.

For a moment she could
not think. She had no answers, and none of her officers had any answers, and so
the entire army was paralysed by indecision. The ground shook again, and once
more, and the artificers’ minds passed on to her the sound of smashed wood and
crushed metal.

At last the only
remaining course came to her.
Move the artillery back.
Disassemble it if it cannot be moved!

On the walls of
Collegium the artillery had either been winched back up or uncovered, and now
the artificers of the most learned city in the Lowlands practised their art.
All day they had taken their measurements and worked out their angles. Men used
to the classroom and the lectern had crouched behind battlements and scribbled
their calculations. Some of them had died, crushed by shot, raked by stone
splinters. Now the fruits of those labours were borne on the air by the engines
of Collegium. The night was almost moonless, and small specks of fire were all
that was revealed to them of the Vekken encampment, but the engineers and
artificers of Collegium held lamps by their sheets of calculations and adjusted
their angle and elevation by minute degrees.

And the catapults and
ballistae, leadshotters and trebuchets of the Collegium walls spoke together,
flinging hundredweights of stone and metal at the invaders.

Some of them missed, of
course, either by chance or bad calculation, but all around the city the Vekken
army was awoken by the sound of its own siege emplacements being destroyed:
trebuchets splintering under blindly targeted rocks, and leadshotters ripped
apart by explosive-headed ballista bolts. The thinking men and mathematicians
of Collegium, carefully and without passion, set about undoing any gains that
the Vekken army had made during the previous day.

When dawn came, it was
clear that more than three-quarters of the artillery the Vekken had so carefully
placed the previous day had been smashed beyond hope of repair, and although
the invading army had more to bring forward, it seemed any chance of simply
knocking down Collegium’s walls had been dealt a fatal blow.

In his dream Achaeos was
deep within the Darakyon: not on the outskirts, where he had taken Che to show
her the darkness of the old world, but in the heart of it, where he had been
just that once before. He was there, in the crawling, twisted heart of the
shadow-forest, whose inhabitants he had impudently demanded aid from – whose
inhabitants had arisen to his call, but not at his command. The cold of their
touch as they had then rifled through his mind was still burned on his memory
like a brand. And in return for showing him the way to where Cheerwell was
imprisoned, they had exacted a price.

He
owed
them, and such debts were always honoured, and seldom repaid happily.

In his dream, Achaeos
stood surrounded by the knotted and gnarled trunks of the Darakyon’s tortured
trees, and he had seen, with the night-piercing eyes of his kinden, the things
that dwelt under their shadow. Never had he more wanted to experience the
blindness, the darkness, that other kinden complained of. These denizens had
been Mantis-kinden once, he knew. Something of that remained, but it was
overwritten in a heavy hand by crawling thorns, by pieces of darkly gleaming
carapace, by the spines of killing arms, by rough bark and tangling vines and
glittering compound eyes.

They were legion, the
things of the Darakyon, and they stared at him mutely. Their whisper-voice –
pieced together from all the cold, dry sounds of the forest – was silent. There
was a message, though, in their wordless scrutiny of him. He sensed reproach.
He had disappointed them.

In his dream he cried
out to them, demanding to know what it was he had done, or had not done, and
still they stared, and their meaning decayed from mere dissatisfaction to
despair. No words yet, but he heard them clearly still, from the very way they
stood:
Why have you forsaken us? Why have you failed us?

‘What must I do?’ he
demanded of them. ‘Tell me what has gone wrong.’

Overhead, in the gaps
between the twining branches, the sky flashed with lightning, back and forth:
the night riven over and over with golden fire, yet never a rumble of thunder
to be heard.

They pointed, each and
every one of them, fingers and claws and crooked twigs dragging his attention
towards one tree, that seemed the same as all the rest, and he strained his
eyes to see their meaning.

Something bloomed on the
shrivelled bark of that trunk, and at first he thought it was a flower, a dark
flower that shone wetly as the lightning danced. Then it quivered and ran,
thick and flowing, down the tree’s length, and he saw that it was blood. Of all
the horrors of the Darakyon he recalled, this was new – this was unique to his
dreaming.

Achaeos opened his mouth
to question, but he saw now that
all
the trees,
every tree in the forest’s dark heart, and then all the trees beyond, were
bleeding, the stuff welling up from invisible wounds and coating the trunks,
pooling and oozing on the forest floor. Overhead the bright lightning lashed
back and forth, gold on black, gold on black.

He stepped back as that
encroaching red tide reached him, but it was rolling forth on all sides, and
the things of the Darakyon were melting into it, still regarding him with an
air of betrayal.

‘What?’ he called out to
them, and it seemed that his Art-made wings opened without him willing them, so
that he was lifted high into the stormy sky, seeing the Lowlands spread beneath
him: the Lowlands and then the Empire and the Commonweal and beyond. The stain
spread out from the Darakyon, the tide of blood heedless of boundaries and city
walls: Helleron and Tharn were gone, Asta and Myna. Now, across the map that
was so impossibly presented to him, fresh wounds appeared in the face of the
world – Capitas, Collegium, Shon Fhor, Seldis – cities drowned in blood that
arose in fountainheads from the depths of the earth, and in those wounds there
were crawling things like maggots, long twining many-legged things that should
never have been allowed back into the light.