Dragonfly Falling (15 page)

She stared, waiting for
more, and he smiled, suddenly.

‘Your man’s been posted
way out west of here. Do you know a city called Collegium?’

She shook her head. ‘I
shall find it, though.’

‘I don’t doubt it.
You’ve got quite the way of asking questions.’

She merely nodded, and
cleaned her blade on Fraywell’s tunic before returning it to its scabbard.
‘West. Collegium. Well I must go then,’ she announced, and was at the door of
Fraywell’s hideout before his voice called her back.

‘You know . . . you’re a
remarkable person,’ he said. She turned, frowning. One hand was close to her
sword. She sensed a trap here. At her expression he put his own hand up to
forestall her.

‘I’ve been all over the
Lowlands,’ he explained. ‘I can do business in Collegium. If you wanted a
guide, I could go with you.’

Her hostile expression
remained. ‘Why?’

‘Because when I look at
you, I recognize something. I see someone who’s lost everything, and yet lost
nothing.’ He was not telling her why, she could see. It was just words.

She found her hand now
on her sword’s hilt, her heart speeding all of a sudden, and something
clamoured away at the back of her mind.

‘I used to be someone of
consequence, down south,’ Destrachis continued, watching her face intently.
‘Not Aristoi, but not far off, but now look at me: some Beetle gangster’s
errand boy and quacksalver, betraying one brute for another at the drop of a
kerchief. I lost it all, you see. You, at least, have retained a purpose.’

She stared at him. She
could not discern his meaning.

‘I can get you to
Collegium the fastest way, and that way, you might actually catch this fellow
of yours, instead of just walking his trail.’ His eyes flicked over hers,
reading her carefully – or at least what was left of her that was legible.

‘What do you want from
me?’ she asked him outright.

‘I don’t know,’ he told
her, ‘but probably I’ll think of something. Perhaps there’s someone I want dead.
Perhaps it’s just money.’

‘I will not give myself
to you,’ she told him.

His eyebrows twitched.
‘Never entered my mind.’ He said it so smoothly that she knew it was a lie.

He claimed he could
speed her progress, he could take her to Thalric. Then she could finish this
hunt. The thought sent a shiver through her, oddly discomfiting, but the offer
seemed too good to ignore.

And she could always
kill him if she had to.

She nodded curtly, and
the deal was done.

Doors had been opening
recently to Stenwold that he had not guessed at. In all his years of lecturing
at the College, of hand-picking some few students each year who might be able
to serve his cause, he had never believed that he was being
listened to
.

Now he was a cause in
his own right. His name had been passed from student to student, year to year.
The more the Assembly and the other Masters looked down on him, the more he had
become something like a folk hero.

These last few days he
had found that he need not simply wait on the indulgence of the Assembly. If
they would still not hear him he need not let his voice go rusty.

Arianna, of course, was
the architect of it all. He had not imagined it possible, otherwise, that so
many of those bored faces he recalled from his years of teaching could have actually
paid so much attention.

In these last few days
he had twice gone with Arianna to some low dive – a taverna’s back room once,
and then an old warehouse near the docks – where he had met them. A dozen the
first time, and then in the warehouse three score of them. They believed him
because they had heard of the siege of Tark that was even then under way. They
had heard disturbing news from Helleron. They had heard other rumours, news
even to him. Some were Spider-kinden and had watched the imperial shadow
encroach south-west towards their borders. Some even had some snippets of the
Twelve-Year War the Wasps had waged against the Commonweal.

They watched with
shining eyes as he told them the truth, the scale of the imperial threat: unity
or slavery.

That became the slogan
and they left with it on their lips. Yes, they were mere students, young men
and women whose idealism had not yet been calloused by the everyday world. They
were merchants’ sons and daughters, youngsters from the Ant city-states, Flies of
good family from Merro, paupers on scholarships from Collegium’s orphanages and
poorhouses. But they were not powerless: they could watch for him and spread
word for him.

And they would fight for
him, if worst came to worst. He knew he did not want them to do so, but many of
them had held a blade before, the Ant-kinden certainly. Some were duellists of
the Prowess Forum, some were artificers and all of them had volunteered to put
what they had at his disposal.

Tisamon’s words of not
so long ago came back to him. Stenwold had become what he hated, the Mantis had
said. He had become a spymaster sending the young to die for him. Times had
changed even since those words were spoken. The first blood had been shed by an
imperial army in the Lowlands.
Unity or slavery.
These young men and women might be the first stones to precipitate an
avalanche.

In his dreams, he saw
flames erupting in the Collegium streets he knew so well, young men and women
with blades and crossbows. Stenwold awoke with the sound of clashing steel
fading in his mind.

The Wasps knew that
Collegium
must
fall, for it was the key to the soul
of the Lowlands. They had tried once. They would try again. Stenwold stared at
the dark ceiling of his room, seeing through the slats in the shutters that dawn
was still distant.

They would try again
soon. Sands in the hourglass had become a constant hissing and hissing of lost
time. It was an hourglass in a dark room, though, so he could not see how much
sand was left.

He moved to turn over
and realized that she was beside him. The last hours of the previous night fell
back on him and he opened his eyes wide.

There had been cheering
for him, at the warehouse: all those bright-eyed faces. Unity or slavery! He
had left for his own rooms feeling ten years younger, buoyed up in spite of
himself. He was not alone now, and neither was Collegium.

Back at his house there
had been wine. Tisamon and Tynisa had not stayed long. They had been on their
way elsewhere, some Mantis training session. He had found himself alone with
Arianna, drinking wine and talking about old times. An old man’s failing, yes,
although he still did not actually think of himself as
old
– though perhaps no longer young. An old man’s failing nonetheless, and yet she
had listened. He had talked about his own College days, his travels; about Nero
the artist, of whom she had heard; then, darkly, of the fall of Myna; the Wasp
plans he had seen; his own personal experience of their ambitions.

How she had listened,
and it had seemed to him that her eyes had shone more brightly than any of the
other students’, and at the last he had convinced himself that there was more
than simple zeal behind their gleam.

It had been a while
since he had last slept with anyone – not that it was an excuse to say so. When
he was a student himself there had been the usual ill-conceived liaisons, and
after that a few tentative, short-lived ventures. Later there had been the
occasional affection purchased on a commercial basis from a professional. His
raising of Tynisa and Cheerwell and his crusade against the Empire had taken up
all his time and his energy, until the latter endeavour had somehow led him to
this place.

Well,
there goes my place at the College.
Or perhaps not, because he would not
be the first by any means. He had always reserved his greatest contempt for
Masters who preyed on their students in such a way, and now a clear pane of
glass through which he could shine his judgement had become a mirror for
himself.

But
it wasn’t like that
. But of course it was like that. He was a College
Master and she a student. He had plied her with wine, until her judgement had
been sufficiently afloat that a night with him had seemed irresistible, or at
least grimly inevitable. True, that was not what his blurry memories of the previous
evening were saying, but it must have been what happened, by any objective
standard.

She shifted slightly,
the curve of her back pressing against him, moving her feet, surprisingly cold,
to curl about his ankle. Despite all he had just thought, he felt himself
stirring. Oh, it was the dream, though, wasn’t it? The dream all young Beetle
lads had, when coming to the College. For they were the sons of tradesmen and
merchants and artificers, and they would go home to wed a respectable Beetle
wife, most likely. It was ever the dream, to sleep with a Spider-kinden woman
before you die.

And
I could die any day now
, he told himself. Some part of Stenwold that was
still the custodian of his schoolboy ego was crowing, distantly, for all the
immorality of it.

She moved again and then
turned restlessly, as though she knew what he was thinking, throwing an arm
across his broad chest, and hooking a smooth leg across his. He closed his eyes
but the responses of his body were beyond his ability to master. He gently freed
his arm and fed it around her shoulders, and she nestled closer to him. He was
able to put off thinking about what her reaction might be when she fully woke.

Waking past midnight,
with the bulk of Stenwold sleeping beside her, her thoughts had been bittersweet.
She had now done what the job required of her. He had moved and groaned on top
of her, and she had considered him analytically, like a whore not yet wholly
jaded.

Beetle
men
! she had thought and, though he was strange for a Beetle, seeing
further, thinking more, in this way he was just like the rest of them.

Arianna, with the
stillness of the night about her, considered her options, for her brief from
Thalric had not taken her this far. His instructions had been limited to the
student meetings she had lured Stenwold to. She knew her trade, though: she was
Spider-kinden, after all. For Thalric to instruct her would have been as
pointless as her giving an Ant counsel on going to war.

And Thalric had not said
to kill the man, but here was her chance, and there would never be a better
one. Thalric might be planning Stenwold’s capture perhaps, his interrogation,
but she knew with cold certainty that if she came to him with Stenwold’s blood
on her hands Thalric would not turn her away.

She slipped from beneath
the sheets without disturbing him. He had drunk a lot, last night, but Beetle
constitutions were sturdy. It had certainly not hindered his later performance.

It would be the work of
a moment to take up her dagger and put it through his ear. Forty years of life
and learning brought to a certain point and then cut off.

Would he boast, she
wondered, if he survived to see the morning? Would he tell his College peers of
his prowess? Or that evil-eyed Mantis friend of his? She thought not, because
even in so few days she had come to know Stenwold Maker.

With her bare feet she
searched her discarded robe for the blade, feeling along the braided cord of
her belt. The work of a moment to kill him, the work of another to slip from
the window and vanish into the night. Thalric would be surprised but pleased.

But the dagger was not
there. She narrowed her eyes so as to pick out her pale robe in the darkness.
She knelt by it, feeling. She had shrugged the garment off for him, not in
haste, measuring his reaction as she unfurled her bare skin piece by piece. She
did not recall the weapon dropping away, so it must still be here.

She stopped, clutching
the robe to her. She was suddenly afraid, but it was a moment before she could
pin down the cause.

The door was ajar, just
a sliver. The doors in this house were all kept ajar, she recalled. Of course
they were. They were Beetle doors with complicated catches. She could never
have opened them if they were fully shut. The locking mechanism, simple though
it might be, would have baffled her.

As it would also baffle
the Mantis, since they were similarly of the old Inapt strain who had been left
behind by the revolution. Spider-kinden might bar their doors, or fasten them
with hooks, but never some twisting turning thing like this device. And so the
doors were all ajar, because of Stenwold’s household, and of her.

Knowing that, feeling
across the floor for a blade that was not there, she abruptly
knew
. Standing, with the cool of the night on her skin,
she looked across the room, seeing just a little in the faintest of moonlight
from between the shutters. She and Stenwold were alone.

But
he
had been here and he had taken her knife. As tactfully and gracefully as that,
because he was a Mantis and he did not trust her. She did not fear that he had
broken her cover. It was all merely part of the loathing his kinden had for
hers.

She saw now, in her
mind, that gaunt shadow appearing in this room as she slept peacefully; his
closed face, looking from Stenwold to her. He might have had his metal claw on
his wrist. He could have killed her. She would not have known and she had not
even woken. Instead, he had withdrawn. Stenwold’s misplaced respect had kept
him from ending her, but he did not trust her. He had removed her blade.

Arianna felt a strange
feeling of relief. This was not over Tisamon’s forbearance, she realized, but
because she would not now stand over Stenwold’s sleeping form with that blade
in her hand, having to make that choice. The emotion took her by surprise.
Surely she would not hesitate, but . . . how the man spoke! He had been to so
many places, seen so many things. Now he had come to what he considered was
home but he was wrong. She could hear the words he left unsaid almost more
clearly than those he actually spoke. He was an outsider in his own city. He
had made himself someone apart. He was struggling to save something that had
already shunned and snubbed him. Yet Collegium had such a broad palette of
colours to it that he had never quite noticed how he was not a native any
longer.