Dragonfly Falling

‘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.

Seven

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.

The Emperor was breaking his fast in company today. Often he dined with concubines, sometimes generals or advisers that he wished to favour. Once in a tenday, though, he made a point of sending for his sister. She was installed in a palace of her own across the city that was as much a padded prison as anything else. He knew that to arrive here on time for a dawn breakfast she would be roused from her bed not long after midnight. After all, the daughter of the Empire must be correctly dressed and perfumed and painted.

As Emperor he took his victories where he wanted, so here she was.

They sat at a table, almost within reach of one another, and servants scuttled to serve them with seedcakes and new-baked bread and warm honeydew. The city beyond was waking up, a hundred dashes of glitter showing his subjects taking to the air. None of the airborne would approach the palace, of course. There were guards enough on the tier above them who would shoot any intruder without question.

And one more guard, of course, to stand uncomfortably close behind his sister, to remind her of her situation.

‘Your name came up in council again,’ he remarked, sipping his honeydew. He seemed all ease here, slouching in his chair, smiling at the servants. She, on the other hand, sat with a spear-straight back, eating little and delicately. Eight years his junior, barely a woman, she had been living in fear now for half her life.

‘General Maxin wishes, I think, to be remembered to you.’

He was adept at reading her. Now, seeing her lips tighten, he broadened his own smile. There was a name she was unlikely to forget. Three brothers and a sister that had separated the two of them in age had all fallen, if not to Maxin’s knife then to his orders.

‘I am sure,’ she said, ‘that I am grateful to the general for his concern.’

He laughed politely. ‘Dear sister Seda, they are all so anxious that you find some direction in your life.’

‘I am touched.’ Seda took a minute bite of seedcake, her eyes never leaving his hands, watching for any signal to the guard hovering behind her. ‘Although I can guess at the direction they have in mind.’

‘They don’t understand how it is between us,’ Alvdan continued. A servant brought him more bread and buttered it for him.

‘I am not sure that I do, Alvdan.’ She sensed the guard shift behind her and added, ‘Your Imperial Majesty.’

‘They think I am so soft-hearted. They agonize over it, that the Emperor of the Wasps should have such a flaw in his character,’ he told her.

‘Then you are right that they clearly do not understand you.’

‘Insolence, sister Seda, does not become one of our line,’ he warned her.

She lowered her head but her eyes stayed with his hands.

‘You and I understand each other, do we not?’ he pressed.

‘We do. Your Majesty.’

‘Tell me,’ he said. She glanced up at him, and he repeated, ‘Tell me. I love to hear the words from you.’

For a second she looked rebellious, but it passed like the weather. ‘You hate and despise me, Majesty. Your joy is in my misery.’

‘And an Emperor deserves all joys in life, does he not,’ he agreed happily. ‘My advisers and their plans! They do not understand your potential. Last year they were plotting to marry you off, to make an honest wife of you. They do not realize that you are not like other women of our race. You are no mere adornment for some man. You are a weapon, and if your hilt were in a man’s hand he would turn your edge on me. I think General Maxin would marry you himself, if I was mad enough to let him.’