Dragonfly Falling (12 page)

‘She’s armed,’ Tisamon
said, sounding less certain now.

‘She has a knife. I
wouldn’t advise anyone over the age of ten to go about the city without a knife
these days.’ Stenwold realized that Tisamon’s attention was focused on him now,
rather than on Arianna.

‘I was . . .’ Stenwold
looked down at the rounded bulk of his own body, so inadequately hidden by the
sheet. ‘I was just retiring . . .’ he began lamely, acutely aware that the
harsh lines of Tisamon’s customarily severe expression were trembling a little.

‘Retiring with . . . ?’

‘No!’ More harshly than
Stenwold had meant. ‘Or at least not knowingly.’

‘So,’ Tisamon’s mouth
twisted. ‘What does she want?’

‘Good question.’
Stenwold looked at the girl.

‘I want to help,’ she
stated.

‘Help how?’ He had his
tunic on again, which felt like armour beyond steel plates under the gaze of
this young woman. Here in his study, the desk between them, he could feel a
little more like the College Master and less the clown. She sat demurely where
he had placed her but there was merriment still dancing in her eyes.

‘Everyone knows how
you’ve been to the east. Everyone knows there are enemies waiting there. I
mean, the Empire, that you taught us about in history. Nobody else has ever
dared point the finger. None of the other masters would even answer my
questions. And yet it was always there, and those soldiers – the Wasp-kinden –
had come from there for the games. And that’s when a few of us started to
realize that you’d been telling the truth all this time. That those men weren’t
here just for the sake of peace and trade.’

‘Some people believed
me, anyway,’ Stenwold said heavily, ‘understood that they are the threat I made
them out to be. But the Assembly? Perhaps not.’

‘I believe you,’ she
said, without hesitation. She was staring at him so earnestly that he became
acutely aware of how young she was, how old he was. She was an odd specimen for
a Spider. Her coppery hair was cut short in a local style, and she had freckles
that made her look even more desperately earnest. He found himself looking at
her in a different light: how very slender she was, how pale the skin of her
bare arms where the short sleeves of her robe ended.

He gave himself a mental
shake. ‘Why?’ he asked, re-focusing.

‘Because for one, my
people are good at reading truth and falsehood, and I believe that when you’re
up before us students telling us all this, you are sincere, that you know what
you’re talking about. Since you left for wherever you went, we’ve all had a
chance to see the Wasp-kinden at large in Collegium. Oh, they’re on their best
behaviour and they’ve always got gold ready to pay for breakages, but they’re .
. . ugly, do you know what I mean? Not physically, but something inside them.
And the way they brawl. A little drink and a harsh word, and they’ll fight to
kill. I know one student of the College who was killed in a taverna, only the
Wasp officers paid out gold to keep it quiet. And they’re all trained soldiers,
which is just what you said, too. Every one of them, even the artificers, even
the diplomats who speak to the Assembly.’

‘Arianna . . . you
Spider-kinden have never cared much what wars have racked the Lowlands,’
Stenwold said. ‘So why—?’

‘You think I’m here on
behalf of my people?’ she asked him incredulously. ‘You think I’m some agent of
the Aristoi? That . . . that would be grand, Master Maker.’ Bitterness was rife
in her tone now. ‘But I’m not Aristoi. I’m of no great family to help me get
anywhere in the world. I’m the last daughter of a dead house, and all we had
left went to pay my way into the College. This is my home, Master Maker. The
College is all I have. And you, to me you are the College.’

In the face of all that
solemn youth, he could only swallow and stare.

‘Most of the Masters
just get lost in their own disciplines, Master Maker . . . Stenwold. May I . .
. ?’

He found that he had
nodded.

‘They don’t care, you
see, what happens elsewhere. And some others are worse, lots of the ones in the
Assembly, they look only to their pockets and their social station, and little
else . . . I’ve seen enough of that snobbery in Everis where I grew up. But
everyone knows it’s
you
who has gone out there and
seen the world. And you’ve come back with a warning, and nobody is listening to
you. But a lot of us students do. Master . . . Stenwold. I want to help you.’

‘How?’ he asked.
Suddenly the words were difficult to reach for. ‘What do you . . . how can you
help me?’

She moistened her lips
with her tongue, abruptly nervous. ‘I . . . I hear things, see things. I
learned to stay out of the way, back home, so I’m good at not being seen. You .
. . that was one reason I came through your window like that. So that you’d see
. . . so you’d know.’

‘I understand,’ he said,
thinking,
One reason? And what are the others?
He
did not want to involve this young girl in what was about to happen and yet she
was so desperate to help, and if he now said no? Why, she would surely go off
and do something rash on her own, just to prove herself to him. Just as
Cheerwell would have done, doubtless.

And he
could
use her, certainly.

She reached out and put
a hand on his, a touch that dried his throat suddenly.

‘Please,’ she said, and
he found that he could not refuse.

‘It’s wonderful, isn’t
it!’ Cheerwell exclaimed. ‘I don’t often get the chance to travel by rails.’
She had taken the bench end closest to the open window, watching the dusty
countryside pass by, feeling the wind blast at her face. The rumble of the
automotive’s steam engine tremored through every fibre of her being. Out there,
craning forward to peer along the carriage’s length, she could see the duns and
sand-colours of the land turning into the green marshes that surrounded Lake
Sideriti, whose eastern edge the rail line would skirt, posted up on pillars to
keep it clear of the boggy ground.

Achaeos huddled beside
her, wrapped in his cloak and looking ill. It was the smell of the automotive,
or the motion, or all of it. This was not a way that Moths travelled
comfortably, and he could not even fly alongside. The carriage had no ceiling,
just an awning to cover the seats in case of rain, but the steam automotive
made such pace that if Achaeos went aloft he would get swept away, left behind.

Beneath her feet,
through the slatted floor, Che could see the ever-turning steel wheels strike
occasional sparks along the rails, and the ground in between hurrying past in a
constant blur. This truly was the travel of the future, she decided, and even
though Achaeos disliked it so much, they would reach Sarn in two days. Even Fly
messengers took the rail these days to retain their boasted speed of delivery.

On the bench in front of
them Sperra slept fitfully, leaning against the carriage wall. Che had
carefully shuttered that part of the window closest to her, in case the little
Fly-kinden should stir in her sleep and just pitch straight out of it. She was
still not entirely recovered from her injuries at Helleron, poor woman, but it
had been her decision to join Scuto in his journey to Collegium. The Thorn Bug
himself was off inspecting the engine, Che gathered. He might be an agent in
Stenwold’s spy army but he remained an artificer first and foremost.

Of course that made her
think of Totho, and she suddenly found no pleasure either in the journey or the
machine that transported them.

Poor Totho, who had left
them for the war at Tark for one reason only. She herself had never fully told
Stenwold the truth, although he had probably guessed most of it. Only Achaeos
and she knew with utter certainty. Totho had left them because he could not
bear to be with her without having her affection. For that reason he had come
all the way from Collegium to Helleron with her. He had come to rescue her from
the Wasps, travelled into the Empire itself, for no other cause, and she had
never seen it because she had never looked. There had been Salma to worry
about. There had been Achaeos, too, who had become bound to her by forces she
could not explain, and who she loved.

Poor Totho had fallen
between the slats of her life and only in his misplaced farewell letter had he
been recalled to her guilty attention.

She had told him
casually,
You are like a brother
, and she, who had
experienced her share of rejections and even derision, knew just what that felt
like. Yet how easily the words had slipped out from her.

There had been no word
yet from Tark. That the siege had started seemed clear, but Totho and Salma
should have kept a safe distance away, watching the moves of Ant and Wasp like
a chess match. Yet they should have been able to send word somehow. Which meant
that something had gone wrong, and poor clumsy Totho, who had never been able
to look after himself, not really, was there in the middle of it.

She put her arm round
Achaeos, and hugged him to her. His blank eyes peered at her from beneath his
hood.

‘You’re thinking about
him again,’ he noted.

‘I am, yes.’

‘No doubt we will find
word from him when we return,’ he said weakly. Sickened by their method of
travel, he was not in much of a position to offer comfort.

The first margin of Lake
Sideriti was passing them by now. The water was stained a bright turquoise by
the sun and the plants that lived in it, as though beneath the surface was a
great blue jewel that caught and reflected the light. Even Achaeos perked up
somewhat at that sight.

‘They don’t make ’em any
more like this old girl!’ came Scuto’s voice as he rejoined them, pushing his
way down the carriage’s length to the amazement and disgust of the other
passengers. He had his cloak flung mostly back, so the full spiky grotesquerie
of his face and hunched body was there for anyone jaded enough to want to
peruse it. Even his garments only emphasized the lumpy form beneath them, torn
in a hundred places by his hooked spines. ‘I ain’t never had a chance before to
see one of these up close and working.’

‘Scuto,’ she said, but
he had seen the radiance of the lake, dotted with reed islands, that stretched
virtually from their window to the horizon.

‘Well if that don’t beat
the lot of ’em,’ he murmured, sitting down beside Sperra. She shifted sleepily,
jabbed herself on his spines and woke with a start.

‘Wretched spickly
bastard,’ she muttered, stretching and thus pricking herself again with a
curse. ‘Are we there yet?’

‘Look,’ Che gestured,
and the Fly glanced over the lake without much interest.

‘Lovely. Can I go back
to sleep now?’

‘You got no heart,’
Scuto told her.

‘You can tell that, can
you?’ She rubbed her arm where he had pricked her. ‘You’re a wretched
nail-studded menace, that’s what you are.’

Cheerwell knew very
little about her, other than she had worked for Scuto for years now. She was no
artificer, but she was Apt and a good hand with a crossbow. She had some
doctoring skills as well and a bag of salves and bandages, and so she must have
trained a little. Fly-kinden got everywhere in the Lowlands and did all manner
of work, legal or not, but Che realized that she had never really got to know
one well. They tended to keep to their own kind and stay out of the way of
larger folk. Sperra was about typical of her race: standing a few inches under
four feet in her sandals, with a lean, spare frame. She kept her hair quite
long but tied behind her, and she wore dark, unassuming clothes without any finery
or ornament. Everyone claimed that Flies liked valuables, preferably those
belonging to others. Whether they wore them openly in their own communities of
Egel or Merro to the east, she did not know, but she could never recall seeing
a Fly-kinden flaunting any such treasures.

To
the east . . .
Of course, if Tark fell, then Egel and Merro, those two
Fly-kinden warrens in the Merraian hills, would lie in the path of the
encroaching army. Would they merely hide in their homes? Would they take up
what they could carry and flee? They were no fighters, certainly not before an
army of such magnitude. She wondered whether this thought was at the back of
Sperra’s mind too.

We
are all at risk here: Achaeos’s people, Sperra’s and mine. Even Tisamon’s
precious Mantis-kinden cannot stay apart from this.

The sun was lowering in
the sky and the gleam of Lake Sideriti grew duller, the beautiful allure of its
waters dimming and dimming as the night loomed in the eastern sky.

They called Capitas the
City of Gold, but it was only at dawn that the name struck true. The tawny
stone it was built from, which had gnawed up quarry after quarry in the
hillsides to the north, took that moment’s morning light and glowed with it.
After that it was just stone.

This artificial flower
of the Empire was young enough that old men could remember when the river wound
untroubled past the hills and the homes of herdsmen. Alvdan’s father had
planned the city and seen most of it built before his death. Alvdan himself had
let the architects and craftsmen follow the same plans, another binding promise
he had inherited from his father’s reign. Even now, if he chose to look for it,
he would see scaffolding where the Ninth Army barracks were still being
constructed.

But he liked the place
at dawn. Now here he was, breakfasting on his balcony and looking down the
stepped levels of the great palace and over the elite of his subjects. Capitas
was a place that could never have grown naturally. The land was insufficient to
support it. It was the heart of Empire, though, and the taxes and war plunder
of the Wasp-kinden flowed relentlessly to it. If they did not then the Rekef
would soon ask why.