Dragonfly Falling

‘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.