Dragonfly Falling (82 page)

She was the only one
now, though – the only prisoner they had taken out of those that had failed and
fallen in the Battle of the Rails.

When she had tumbled
from the stalled automotive, she had her blade ready in her hand, certain that
death was moments away. She had imagined herself then as a Tisamon or a Salma,
ready to die striking a blow and enjoy a soldier’s honourable end.

But all around her the Wasps
were swarming along the rails, blackening the sky above. These men, who had
been fleeing so recently, were back, with a vengeance that could be sated only
with blood. Everywhere, Wasp soldiers were stooping on the survivors to
slaughter them. They hacked down the Sarnesh field surgeons whether or not they
lifted blades against them. They killed the wounded, swiftly and brutally, just
as their comrades were doing over all the battlefield.

She had felt the sword
slip from her fingers, her mind filled with the horror of it, and she realized,
then, that she had been lying to herself for a long time. This was the real
face of war, and she could never be a true soldier.

Che had stood there
motionless, unnoticed and unthreatened, with the Wasps massing back and forth
all about her. It had been that total stillness that saved her, though her head
had spun. The stillness, and her empty hands, until at last a Wasp had dropped
before her, seeing a wide-eyed, unarmed Beetle girl, assuming her a slave,
perhaps. He had called two of his comrades to wrestle her away, and she had not
resisted them. A moment before, she had wanted to die as brave warriors died,
but when she saw what that looked like, repeated over and over all around, she
very much wanted to live.

She had not necessarily
accomplished that, either. She had been confined in here more than a day, now,
and they had given her water but no food. She could hear, from sounds above,
that the Wasps were resetting their camp, and seemed in no hurry to chase the
Sarnesh back to their city walls, but nobody had come to question her, or
rescue her, or even to look at her.

Slavery
,
she told herself. Would it really be so bad? Perhaps some kind master would buy
her. After all, she had a Collegium education. Perhaps she could teach Wasp
children.

She knew that a life of
slavery could be bad, and she knew equally that there were worse fates by far.

There was a rattle at
the hatch above, chilling her heart, because her water bowl was still
half-full.

There had been
pitch-darkness in the cellar before, which would have been a terror to her if
her Art had not penetrated it and allowed her to see. The sheet of sunlight
that now splashed down the stone steps was a harsh glare at first, and she
shaded her eyes. She heard sandalled feet descending and forced herself to
look.

A Wasp soldier was
peering doubtfully at her, by the bluish light of a mineral-fuel lantern.

‘This is her,’ he said,
to someone standing above him, and then came all the way down to the cellar
floor to make room.

The man following took
the stairs awkwardly, limping and holding to the wall. He wore no Wasp uniform,
being swathed instead in a hooded robe, and he seemed to need no lantern when
he peered at her.

‘Just one prisoner,’ he
said tiredly. ‘Well the intelligencers will suffer more than I. And she will be
theirs, I suspect, unless I press my claim on Malkan. You say she had some
tools on her?’

‘Only a few, sir,’ the
soldier below him said, ‘not a full artificer’s set, but she is a Beetle, sir.
They’re reckoned good with machines.’

‘Not without proper
tools, they’re not,’ grumbled the hooded man. ‘She’s probably a worthless slave
or something. Or did I hear that the Sarnesh keep no slaves?’ He glanced up at
a third man who was standing higher on the steps, and obviously saw him shake
his head. To Che this last imperial was just a slouching silhouette.

‘You don’t want her,
then?’ the soldier pressed, and Che felt her throat go dry. She had little idea
of what they were talking about, but she feared what any Wasp intelligencer
might do with her.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ she
got out. ‘I am a scholar of the College. I know history, politics, economics—’

‘Are you an artificer?’
asked the robed man sharply, as though speaking to an idiot child.

‘I have studied
mechanics a little . . .’ She was crippled with honesty even at this moment.

For a moment he studied
her. ‘No. Let them rack her for answers. I won’t deprive General Malkan of
her.’ With halting steps he turned round and made his way back up towards the
sunlight.

It was only when they
had gone, and taken most of her hope with them, that she realized that they had
not all been strangers.

Why
here?
It seemed impossible. The sight of her echoed in his mind. Che,
down below behind the timber bars.

Oh, Totho could string a
sequence of events together, surely. The horror of speculation was wondering
what he did not know. Whose bodies now lay amongst the Sarnesh dead on the
battlefield? Stenwold perhaps? Tynisa?

Perhaps the Moth Achaeos
had perished too.

That thought sent an
ugly little thrill through him. If Achaeos was dead . . .

But Che would be dead
all too soon, once they had finished cutting and twisting her flesh. General
Malkan’s interrogators would undoubtedly want to know everything she could tell
them about Sarn, in preparation for his next campaign.

Totho stood and watched
Drephos in conversation with one of Malkan’s officers. The general himself was
conducting any communications through intermediaries at the moment. That was,
Totho had realized eventually, because he was embarrassed. Anyone with eyes
could see that Drephos had turned the battle for him, turned the iron tide at
the point when Malkan’s men were at their weakest. Drephos had broken the Ant
advance and given the Wasps new heart.

Or
rather
, Totho thought wryly,
I did, and nobody knows
.

How happy he was for
that, and it was not that Drephos had snatched the praise from him, but Totho
had hidden away from it, for he had witnessed as closely as he cared the
monstrous effects that his inventions had on meat and metal.

Amongst primitive
peoples, like the Mantis-kinden, contracts and agreements were sealed with a
drop of blood. Well, his contract with Drephos and the Empire was well and
truly sealed. He was wading in it, up to his waist already, and with further still
to go. And here was Che, suddenly come like his conscience to remind him of all
that he had betrayed.

It
would serve her right.
He hardened his heart. She had never taken the
time to think about what she was getting into. Or perhaps it would be a form of
justice on Stenwold for sending his own niece into the tempest. Or on the
wretched Moth for luring her from safety into this dangerous place. Justice for
someone, surely. And that would make some sense of it all.

‘Totho?’

He looked up sharply,
seeing Kaszaat walking towards him with concern in her eyes.

‘You’re brooding more
than usual. What’s wrong?’

Now here was a woman
worth his attention, he told himself. Not too proud to lie with a halfbreed.
And she obviously cared about him.

Because
Drephos told her to.

‘Totho, what’s wrong?’

She reached out, and he
flinched away without thinking.

The look of hurt on her
face could have been genuine, and he realized how much he had been poisoned by
Drephos, by the Empire, so that he would never be able to be sure with her – or
with anyone else – what was real and what was feigned. He had been adopted into
a world where everything was weighed in objective scales, valued coldly and
then put to work. His credit here was his artificer’s skill and, though he had
valued that more than anything, he found it was short measure for his whole
life. He was now merely a pair of hands to make, a mind to create: not Totho of
Collegium but some working annexe to Drephos’s ambition.

And
is that so bad?
Because he had lived his entire life, surely, on similar
terms. He had worked with the debased currency that his mixed blood could buy
him. He had worked twice as hard as his peers, getting half as far. Men with
less talent at their graduation than he had possessed from the start had walked
straight from the College into prestigious positions of wealth and respect,
whereas he, with only real skill to his name, had been accorded nothing. Even
amongst Che and Stenwold and the rest he had been the fifth wheel that nobody
really needed.

Well, at least here he
was
needed, and if he was to be valued merely as a
commodity, at least Drephos had placed that value high enough to spare Salma’s
life in exchange.

But that deal was done,
and he had nothing left to barter for Che.
I cannot save
her.

A simple thing to say,
and surprisingly easy.

I
cannot just let her die, without a word.

And there was the barb
that now caught him. Must he plunge a blade into his own guts by revealing to
her what he had become? Or instead live with that emptiness inside him, that
lack of a final meeting with her before the end?
Or do I
merely want her to see that at last I’ve made something of my life?

He clenched his fists,
and his mind conjured up the last throes of the doomed Sarnesh charge, bright
blood springing from sheared metal as the bolts drove home.

I am
become the destroyer. What can I not do? What limits me now?

Che heard the hatch
move, but no sun flooded in. Clearly night had come and she had not realized.

One man only, this time,
with a covered lantern giving out a fickle light, but her eyes saw him well
enough.

She could not be sure of
his identity until he had stopped. It was a young man, broad-shouldered and
sturdy-framed and marked by mixed blood, and she did not quite know him. She
saw the trappings: a toolbelt such as he had always wanted and could never
afford, black and gold clothes, a sword and a rank badge. She recognized none
of that. It was only when he stood in the cellar, on the other side of the
bars, that she was sure.

‘Totho . . . ?’ Her
voice emerged in a quaver, not quite believing what she saw. ‘Is it you? It
can’t be you.’

He stared at her, and
his features were harder than she remembered. Still, there had been harsh times
for both of them since they last parted.

‘Totho, don’t just stand
there. You have to let me out. You must know what they’ll do to me.’

His face tightened
further. ‘I don’t have the keys,’ he muttered, and continued to stare.

‘Totho . . . what are
you doing here?’ she asked. ‘You went off to Tark . . . why are you wearing that
. . . uniform?’

‘Because it is mine,’ he
stated, and she began to feel her brief surge of hope draining away.

‘You mean . . . how
long?’

He realized that she was
seeing their history together unravel backwards, trying to recast him as a spy
during all that time, because poor Che didn’t realize that people changed.

‘Since Tark,’ he said.
He found it mattered to him that she knew she had already cast him off before
he had found his new calling.

‘But why?’ she said,
still trying to whisper but her indignation getting the better of her. ‘They’re
the enemy, Totho! They’re monsters!’

He felt his anger grow
in him. ‘I did it to save Salma,’ he snapped, ‘because otherwise they would
have killed him. Or don’t you think that was worth it? Perhaps I should have
just died alongside him.’

‘But that’s . . .’ She
gaped at him. ‘But you’re free,’ she said, still determinedly marching up the
wrong street. ‘You could run, surely, run to Collegium and tell them what
happened here.’

‘You have absolutely no
idea what happened here.’ He felt she was trivializing the sacrifice he had
made, and suddenly he was on fire with it. He had never impressed her as a
companion, as a warrior, most certainly not as a prospective lover, for all
that she had once been life and breath to him. ‘Do you want to know,’ he asked
her, voice shaking slightly, ‘what
happened
here?’

‘I don’t understand,
Totho.’

‘
I
happened here, Che. That’s the simplest thing. Those dead Ants out there – I
killed them. When the city of Sarn falls it is I who will break it. When this
army or another like it is at the gates of Collegium, it will be
me
, do you understand? When the Lowlands becomes just the
western wing of the Empire, then by rights my name should be on the maps.’

She was backing away
from the wooden bars. ‘Totho?’

‘All my doing, Che.’ As
she retreated so he had moved up to the bars himself, gripping them as though
he were the prisoner here. ‘What your uncle dismissed as a toy back in
Collegium, they have made into a weapon here. You remember how I always wanted
to make weapons? Well now it’s happened, and my weapons win wars.’

Backing against the far
wall of her cell, she stared and saw him at last, as not friend, nor lover, but
enemy.

‘You?’

‘All me.’ Now he had her
attention, his lust for recognition was leaching out of him, leaving only a
hollow bitterness. ‘So I can’t just walk away from this, Che. I have
become
this. I have paid in blood, and none of it my own.’

‘Oh, Totho . . .’

He waited for her
condemnation that he surely deserved, the last gasp of her defiance before the
interrogators pried it out of her.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘I’m so sorry.’ And the expression on her face told him, beyond any shadow or
suspicion, that her concern was purely for him, for her lost friend.