Dragonfly Falling (5 page)

To one side stood the
acknowledged champion of the Prowess Forum. He was Mantis-kinden, as the very
best of the best always were. They were born with blade-skill in their blood:
it was the Ancestor Art of their nation. They came to the College sporadically,
one or two in every year. When they fought they inevitably claimed the prize,
and then mostly they left. Piraeus of Nethyon had stayed on, however,
preferring the life of a champion of Collegium to anything his homeland might
offer. He made his living in private duel and by hiring out his skills to any
duelling house so desperate for victory as to show the bad form of buying in a
champion. Nor had he been short of offers this last year, for winning had
ousted taking part as the fashionable thing. Now many magnates of Collegium
kept duelling teams to further their prestige.

But the crowd were here
to see more than a haughty Mantis-kinden win yet another bout. Enough of them
had gathered there to see his opponent. The less charitable said that they
wanted to see her before some stroke dealt by Piraeus ruined her, for he was a
misogynist at the best of times, and this match . . . The Mantis-kinden saved
their utmost barbs of loathing for one target. Why they hated the Spider-kinden
quite so much was lost in time, but they did, and they never forgot a
grievance.

Like most Spider-kinden,
she was beautiful. She was also unusual in that she was a daughter of
Collegium, not some arrogant foreigner. The name on the lips of the crowd as she
entered was ‘Tynisa’. Properly she was Tynisa Maker, but she was so obviously
none of the old man’s blood that just the one name sufficed.

Piraeus was tall and
lean, his face chiselled with distaste. The bruises he had given Tynisa when
they had last met had healed, and it was obvious he was ready to gift her with
another set. She was shorter than he and slighter, an eyecatching young woman
with her fair hair bound into a looped braid and her green eyes dancing.

There was something in
the way she stood that told the best of them this was going to be a new kind of
contest. She did not stand like a Prowess duellist or like a Spider-kinden. In
her time away from the city she had learned something new.

She had learned who she
was and what blood ran in her veins, but only Tynisa and two spectators there
knew it.

Kymon called for silence
once more, striking the two practice swords together in a dull clatter of
bronze-covered wood.

‘I shall not ask again!’
he bellowed. ‘Silence now, or this match shall not take place!’

At long last the crowd
quieted, under threat of its entertainment being removed. Kymon nodded heavily
and passed the swords out. They were, in the hands of these fighters, graceless
things. Those two were meant for swords more slender and crafted of true steel.

‘Salute the book!’ Kymon
directed, and they turned to the great icon carved at one wall of the forum and
raised their blades.

‘Clock!’ barked the
Master of Ceremonies and stepped back hurriedly. Neither of them moved even as
the ponderous hands of the mechanical timepiece ground into motion. For a long
moment, to the hushed anticipation of the crowd, they merely faced each other.
Tynisa studied Piraeus’s face and knew that, while she was seeing just what she
had seen before, he could tell how she had changed.

But he was proud, and he
was a blur of motion as he now came for her, his ersatz blade swinging in tight
arcs to trap her.

She gave before him,
barely parrying, making the fighting-circle her world, backing around it so the
darts and sweeps of his sword clove empty air. She thought he might get angry,
since she had seen him provoked before, but he retained his icy calm and his
moves became tighter and tighter, and she was going to have to do something
soon . . .

In a sudden flurry she
had taken his sword aside and in that instant she was on the offensive. She did
not keep it long, but after that it was anybody’s. She and Piraeus circled,
stopped, circled back. The air between them rattled with the clash of their
blades. The audience were on the edge of their seats but the two combatants had
forgotten them. Their world had contracted to that duelling ring. The Prowess
Forum with its clock and book had ceased altogether to exist for them.

He never gave up
pressing his attack, for he knew the natural order of things was for him to
advance, his foe to give way before him. He tried and he tried to turn the
fight back to that familiar territory. He had done it before when, not so very
long ago, he had beaten her two strikes to none. Now she was holding him off,
constantly turning his attacks into her own. Her guard was iron. He could not
breach it, no more than she could break his.

And the thought came to
Tynisa,
If these were live blades, I’d have killed him by
now.
Her own Mantis blood was rising in her and she saw Piraeus then as
his own kind would.
Look at this coward playing with
children.
He was all skill and poise, but the pride of his heritage had
died within him.

So
let’s call it real.
And she gave her blood full rein. The orderly,
calculated exchange of the Prowess Forum fell in pieces around them. She cut
straight through, his blade passing inches from her face, and the point of hers
rammed into his stomach.

He doubled over, hit the
ground shoulder-first, and it took all of her will’s work to hold back a second
strike that would have broken his neck in lieu of opening his throat. She
stepped back carefully with the slight, sad thought that she could not return
to this place. Her skills, once made here, had been reforged in blood, in the
outside world. The reflexes and instincts honed between life and death were not
tame beasts for her to teach tricks to.

Piraeus was slowly
getting up, trying to catch his breath. She waited for him, motionless, and
amongst the crowd not a word, not a fidget.

He lunged at her, as
swift a move as they had yet seen, and it would have caught her if she had been
a mere duellist. She had moved before her eyes had registered his strike, the
point of his sword missing by inches. She struck him a numbing rap to the elbow
that sent the blade tumbling from his hand.

After she had left, with
the crowd baying her name, standing on the seats and cheering, few had eyes to
watch Piraeus stand up again. His face was thunderous as he rubbed his injured
arm. He made to leave by another door but a voice stopped him. The doors to the
Prowess Forum were left open always, and there was another Mantis-kinden
lounging there, a man older than he in an arming jacket of green.

‘An interesting fight.’

Piraeus narrowed his
eyes. ‘The fight isn’t over.’

‘Yes it is.’ The older
man pushed himself off the wall, and Piraeus noticed that he had a claw over
his right hand, a glove of metal and leather with a blade that jutted a foot and
a half from the fingers. It was the weapon of choice for Mantids from the old
days, and Piraeus recognized the stranger’s sword-and-circle brooch a moment
later.

‘Weaponsmaster,’ he
stated, and it was obvious he had never met one before.

‘We live yet,’ the man
acknowledged. ‘You’re not going after her, Piraeus.’

‘She’s a Spider.’
Piraeus’s face twisted. ‘I’ll have her in the next pass, don’t you worry, and
I’ll have her with steel.’

‘No, you won’t.’

The young duellist shook
his head, missing something, he knew. ‘Are you
protecting
her? She’s Spider-blood. She’s our enemy.’

‘She’s
my
blood, boy,’ the old man said, and let that sink in.

Piraeus’s look of
bafflement slowly decayed into horror. ‘But she—’

‘What, boy? You’ve a
problem with me? Want to call me out, I’ll wager?’

‘I don’t even know who
you are.’

‘I am Tisamon, and I
earned this badge and this claw, and she is of my blood. You should keep that
in mind before you say anything else.’

The name bit into the
youth’s memory, Tisamon saw. Piraeus had heard of him, even it was just through
Collegium’s duelling circles. There had been a time when Tisamon, too, had
played with his skills just like this young man.

‘So it would be unwise
of you to take this further with Tynisa,’ he said. ‘Lick your wounds and learn
from them, but if you come after her with a real blade in your hands—’

‘You’ll be there,’ spat
Piraeus, disgusted.

Tisamon smiled slightly.
‘I won’t need to be. She will.’

‘Why all the hurry?’ Che
complained. Almost as soon as she had left the Prowess Forum, hastening to
congratulate Tynisa, she had run into one of her uncle’s agents. The big Ant
called Balkus, who in Helleron had seemed just a part of that city’s gritty tapestry,
looked woefully out of place amidst the understated order of Collegium.

‘If you move quick, they
can’t follow you so easily,’ was all he said, so Che was forced to jog after
him.

It was strange to be
back after seeing what she had seen. Collegium, with its peace, its petty
one-upmanship, its learning, all seemed like a mummer’s show where the
backcloth could be torn down at any moment to reveal the chaos behind. She knew
that Stenwold wanted to speak before the Assembly, who were currently snubbing
him, but he had not let his plans wait on them. He had not told her what they
were, either, or what role she might play in them. Instead he had closeted
himself away with Scuto, or else he had gone on rambling and random hikes about
the city with Balkus or Tisamon watching over him. It was probably all to
confuse their watchers but it served to confuse Che just as well.

Was she herself under
surveillance? With the thought she began scanning the faces, but Collegium was
a diverse city and the native Beetle-kinden played host to people from all over
the Lowlands and beyond. Even here, making her rapid progress down the Haldrian
Way that led to the metal market, she could pick out every kinden that called
the Lowlands home, together with a mix of halfbreeds, and a few others that
might be other kinden entirely, from distant lands. Any one of them could be an
imperial agent, and she knew it was more likely to be some innocuous-looking
Beetle wood-seller than that Wasp-kinden man on the street corner perusing a bookseller’s
discounted stock.

It was a strange
feeling, exciting and uneasy, to think that she could be important enough to be
watched.

Balkus abruptly turned
into the shop beside the bookseller and, when she moved to follow him, he
signalled for her to continue on down the Haldrian. With no idea of where she
was going, she kept wandering, with less and less enthusiasm, through the
bustle until he caught up with her again.

‘Wanted to see if we
were being followed,’ he explained, his thoughts obviously on the same tracks
as hers.

‘And were we?’

‘No bloody idea,’ he
admitted. ‘I’m not so good at all the sneak stuff. A fighter, me.’

And he was. She had seen
enough evidence of that. The voice of his nailbow, spitting its powder-charged
bolts with a sound like thunder, remained with her from the battle around the
great railway engine called the
Pride
.

‘Here,’ he said at last
and ducked into a little taverna that seemed mostly deserted. The owner, a
greying Beetle-kinden, nodded cheerily to him, and did not object when he
hurried Che into a back room. She had a brief glimpse of a Fly-kinden in a
broad-brimmed hat, sitting apparently asleep at one table, who was one of her
uncle’s men here. He had one eye still slightly open, enough to watch the door.

‘So what is going on?’
she demanded, and fortuitously it was Stenwold himself beyond the door to
answer her questions.

She was reminded of the
Taverna Merraia, where she and her friends had been briefed by Stenwold the
first time, then sent off at short notice to Helleron and the first step in a
course of events that had brought her betrayal, slavery, love, and the stain of
a dead man’s blood on her hands.

Balkus sat down by the
door and unslung his nailbow, taking up a filthy rag in a vain effort to clean
it out. Stenwold sat at a table with a mess of papers strewn across it. Beside
him was thorny Scuto and Sperra, a young Fly-kinden woman who was still
recovering from the injuries she received during the
Pride
battle. Across the table sat Achaeos, and Che went over to him instantly. She
was aware, as she was still always aware, of their eyes on her as she hugged
him. They certainly made an odd pair. Partly it was that she was broader than
he was, and not so much shorter, for the Moths were a slight kinden, but mostly
it was because Moths generally resented Beetles, despised them and loathed them
for their invasive technologies and their crass profiteering. In truth, Achaeos
was no different, for he had fought her race over the mines at Helleron. He
would make an exception for her, though, having already done many things and
travelled a great many miles specifically for her sake.

‘We move within the next
hour,’ Stenwold announced. ‘They’ve been watching me close enough but we’re in
the clear here, and when we leave it’ll be underground. By the time they pick
me up again, we’ll be in business.’

‘You’ve a plan,’ Achaeos
observed.

‘We’ve always got a
plan,’ Scuto agreed. ‘And just like before, last minute’s best.’

‘When we leave here,
Scuto is taking the rail to Sarn,’ Stenwold explained. ‘I will see the
Collegium Assembly soon enough, and if I have to tattoo the threat of the Wasp
Empire on every Assembler’s forehead to get my point across, I’ll do it. But
Collegium cannot stand alone. Sarn has been our ally now for just a little while,
but the Ants of Sarn have proved themselves faithful before. They came to
relieve the siege when Vek had us invested. We need them to rally to our flag
now too. Scuto, you’ve still got your contacts in Sarn, yes?’