Dragonfly Falling

Adrian Tchaikovsky Dragonfly Falling

For many years the Wasp Empire has been expanding, warring on its neighbours and enslaving them. Having concluded its Twelve-Year War against the Dragonfly Commonweal, the Wasps have now turned their eyes towards the divided Lowlands.

Stenwold Maker realized the truth of the Empire’s power when it seized the distant city of Myna. Since then he has been sending out covert agents to track the progress of an enemy whose threat his fellow citizens will not recognize.

Among these agents are his niece Cheerwell, his ward Tynisa, the exotic Dragonfly prince Salma, a humble half-breed artificer Totho. and staunchest of his allies is the terrifying Mantis warrior Tisamon.

But can their efforts bring the Lowlands to their senses before it is all too late?

One

The morning was joyless for him, as mornings always were. He arose from silks and bee-fur and felt on his skin the insidious cold that these rooms only shook off for a scant month or two in the heart of summer.

He wondered whether he could be accommodated somewhere else — as he had wondered countless times before — and knew that it would not do. It would be, in some unspecified way, disloyal. He was a prisoner of his own public image. Besides, these rooms had some advantages. No windows, for one. The sun came in through shafts set into the ceiling, three dozen of them and each too small for even the most limber Fly-kinden assassin to sneak through. He had been told that the effect of this fragmented light was beautiful, although he saw beauty in few things, and none at all in architecture.

His people had been building these ziggurats as symbols of their leaders’ power since for ever, but the style of building that had reached its apex here in the great palace at Capitas had overreached itself. The northern hill- tribes, left behind by the sword of progress, still had their stepped pyramids atop the mounds of their hill forts. The design had changed little, only the scale, so that he, who ought to expect all things as he wanted, was entombed in a grotesque, overgrown edifice which never truly warmed at its core.

He slung on a gown, trimmed with the fur of three hundred moths. There were guards stationed outside his door, he knew, and they were for his own protection, but he felt sometimes that they were really his jailers, and that the servants now entering were merely here to torment him. He could have them killed at a word, of course, and he needed to give no reason for it, but he had tried to amuse himself in such capricious ways before and found no real joy in it. What was the point in having the wretches killed, when there were always yet more, an inexhaustible legion of them, world without end? What a depressing prospect: that a man could wade neck-deep in the blood of his servants, and there would still be men and women ready to enter his service more numerous than the motes of dust dancing in the shafts of sunlight from above.

His father had taken no joy in the rank and power that was his. His father had run through life, never taking time to stop, to look, to think. He had been born with a sword in his hand, if you believed the stories, and with destiny like an invisible crown about his brow. The man in the fur-lined gown knew what that felt like. It felt like a vice around the forehead forbidding him rest or peace.

His father had died eight years ago. No assassin’s blade, no poison, no battle wound or lancing arrow. He had just fallen ill, all of a sudden, and a tenday later he just stopped, like a clock, and neither doctor nor artificer could wind him up again. His father had died, and in the tenday before, and the tenday after, all of his father’s children bar two, all of this man’s siblings bar one, had died also. They had died by public execution or covert murder, for good reason or for no reason other than that the succession, his succession, must be undisputed. He was the eldest son, but he knew that the right of primogeniture ran thin where lordly ambitions were concerned. He had spared one sister only, the youngest. She had been eight years old then, and something had failed in him when they presented him with the death warrant to sign. She was sixteen now, and she looked at him always with the carefully bland adoration of a subject, but he feared the thoughts that swam behind that gaze, feared them enough to wake, sweat-sodden, when even dreaming of them.

And the order lay before him still, to have her removed, the one other remaining member of his bloodline. As soon as he had a true-blood son of his own it would be done. He would take no pleasure in it, no more than he would take in the fathering. He understood his own father’s life now, whose shadow he raced to outreach. Yet how envied he was! How his generals and courtiers and advisers cursed their luck, that he should sit where he did, and not they. Yet they could not know that, from the seat of a throne, the whole weighty ziggurat of state was turned on its point, and the entire hegemony’s weight from the broad base of the numberless slaves, through the subject peoples and all the ranks of the army to the generals, was balanced solely upon him. He represented their hope and their inspiration, and their expectations were loaded upon him.

The servants who washed and dressed him were all of the true race. At the heart of a culture built on slavery there were few outlander slaves permitted in the palace, for who among them could be trusted? Besides, even the most menial tasks were counted an honour when performed for him. Of foreign slaves, there were only a handful of advisers, sages, artificers and others whose skills recommended them beyond the lowly stain of their blood, and though they were slaves they lived like princes while they were still of use to him.

His advisers, yes. He was to speak with his advisers later. Before that there were matters of state to attend to. Always the chains of office dragged him down.

Robed now as befitted his station, his brow bound with gold and ebony, His Imperial Majesty Alvdan the Second, lord of the Wasp Empire, prepared to reascend his throne.

*

The Emperor kept many advisers and every tenday he met with them all, a chance for them to speak on whatever subject they felt would best serve himself and his Empire. It was his father’s custom too, a part of that clamorous, ever-running life of his that had taken him early to his grave as the Empire’s greatest slave and not its master. This generation’s Alvdan would gladly have done without it, but it was as much a part of the Emperor as were the throne and the crown and he could not cut it from him.

The individual advisers were another matter. Each ten-day the faces might be different, some removed by his own orders, others by his loyal men of the Rekef. Some of his advisers were Rekef themselves, but he was pleased to note that this was no shield against either his displeasure or that of his subordinates.

Some of the advisers were slaves, another long tradition, for the Empire always made the best use of its resources. Scholarly men from conquered cities were often dragged to Capitas simply for the contents of their minds. Some prospered, as much as any slave could in this Empire, and better than many free men did. Others failed and fell. There were always more.

His council, thus gathered, would be the usual tedious mix. There would be one or two Woodlouse-kinden with their long and mournful grey faces, professing wisdom and counselling caution; there would be several Beetles, merchants or artificers; perhaps some oddity, like a Spider-kinden from the far south, a blank-eyed Moth or similar; and the locals, of course: Wasp-kinden from the Rekef, from the army, diplomats, Consortium factors, members of high-placed families and even maverick adventurers. And they would all have counsel to offer, and it would serve them more often than not if he followed it.

His progress into the room was measured in servants who opened the doors for him, swept the floor before his feet, removed his outer robe and the weight of the crown. Others were serving him wine and sweetmeats even as he sat down, food and drink foretasted by yet more invisible underlings.