Dragonfly Falling

And it was so cold. Thalric was muffled in four cloaks and layers of woollens beneath, yet the chill air cut through it all, an invisible blade that lanced through the open structure of the Cloudfarer and put a rime of white frost on him, and painted his breath into white plumes before the wind whipped it away.

They would reach Collegium faster than any messenger, eating up any lead that Stenwold had built, so that despite Thalric’s detour to Asta it was anyone’s guess who would arrive first. They were so high, up in the very icy roof of the sky, that no flying scout would spy them. Even telescopes might not pick out their silvery wings against the distant vault of the heavens.

And as he suffered through this ordeal, from the cold and the wind, he hunched forward to catch te Berro’s fleeting words, for these were his instructions, his mission, and he would need to remember them.

‘You’re a lucky man,’ the Fly said, shouting over the gale. ‘Rekef can’t spare an operative of your experience simply for a disciplinary trial. Lowlands work to be done all over the place. You get a second chance. Don’t waste it.’ They had worked together before, Thalric and te Berro, and a measure of respect had grown between them.

‘We’ll put you down near Collegium,’ te Berro continued. ‘Make your own way in. Meet with your agents there. There can be no unity allowed for the Lowlands. There are two plans. The first is swifter than the second, but you are to enact both of them if possible. Even if the first succeeds, the second will also help the war effort.’

And te Berro had explained to him then just what those plans were, and whilst the first was a commonplace enough piece of work, the second was a sharp one and the scale of it shook him a little.

‘It shall be done,’ he assured the Fly, as the Cloudfarer continued its swift, invisible passage over the Lowlands so far beneath them.

*

He walked into Collegium without mishap, entering at the slow time near noon when the city seemed to sleep a little. Collegium had white walls but the gates had stood open for twenty years, had only been closed even then because the Ants of Vek had harboured ambitions to annexe the Beetle city for themselves. There was a guard sitting by the gate, an old Beetle-kinden who was dozing a little himself. Collegium was not interested in keeping people out. If it had been, then he might not have needed to destroy it.

Thalric had been granted a short enough time in the city when he was here last. Two days only and then he had been bundled onto a fixed-wing flier to go and catch Stenwold Maker on the airship Sky Without. At that thought he tried to discern where the airfield lay from here and see whether the great dirigible was moored there today, but the walls were too high, the buildings looming above him, for much of Collegium was three-storey, and the poorer districts were four or five. He knew that the Empire had much to learn here. The poor of Collegium cursed their lot and complained and envied, but they had never witnessed how the poor of Helleron lived, or the imperial poor, or the slaves of countless other cities.

If we destroy Collegium, will we ever regain what is lost in the fires? Because it was not only a matter of writing down some secret taken from one of the countless books in the College library. This was a way of life, and it was a good thing to have and, like all good things, the Empire should have it. Imperial citizens should benefit from the knowledge of the men and women who had built this place.

But the second plan that te Berro had given him would kill all that, and he had his orders.

The kernel of discontent that had been within him for a while now gave him a familiar kick, but he mastered it. If the Empire wanted things in such a way, the Empire would have it. He was loyal to the Empire.

He stopped so suddenly in the street that a pair of men manhandling a trunk barged into him and swore at him before they passed on.

What a heretical idea. Better keep that one hidden deep in one’s own thoughts. To even think that loyalty to the Empire, to the better future of the Empire, was not the same as loyalty to the Emperor’s edicts or to the Rekef’s plans, well, that sort of thinking would get a man on the interrogation table in a hurry. He had avoided a well-deserved reprimand for failing at Helleron and he wasn’t about to start playing host to that kind of thought now, that was just asking for trouble.

But in the deepest recesses of his mind the idea turned over, and waited for another off-guard moment.

There had been Rekef agents before him in Collegium, of course. Whilst the Inlander branch of the Empire’s secret service purged the disloyal at home, the Outlander had been seeding the cities of the Lowlands with spies and informants. Thalric had made contact with them when he was here last but their networks were four years old. Thalric sent Fly messengers across the city with innocuous letters into which codewords had been dropped like poison into wine. Those men and women the Rekef had infiltrated into this city had been making everyday lives for themselves. Now that was to end. He was calling them up.

He met with them in a low sailors’ taverna near enough to the docks for them to hear the creak of rigging through the windows. It was a place where people would forget who it was that met with who, or what business might have been done there — and that was just as well, too. They made an ill-assorted quartet.

The most senior was a lieutenant in the Rekef, and when Thalric had needed a pair of assassins to catch Stenwold Maker in his home he had gone to Lieutenant Graf, trueblood Wasp-kinden, who was working here as a procurer for the blades trade. That, in local parlance, meant that he made introductions between fighting men and prospective patrons, and it put Thalric’s operation here on a sound footing straight off. Graf was a lean man, his face marred by a ragged sword-scar from brow to chin that Thalric knew for a duelling mark from the man’s days in the Arms-Brethren. The eye traversed by that scar was a dark marble of glass.

The other three were all unranked on the Rekef books, mere agents. Hofi was a Fly-kinden who cut the hair of the rich and shaved the mighty, and Arianna was a Spider and a student of the College. The fourth man, Scadran the halfbreed, worked as a dockhand, catching all the rumours going in and out from both ways down the coast. Wasp blood adulterated with Beetle and Ant, his heavy features displayed the worst of all three to Thalric’s eyes, but he was a big man, a brawler. That might be useful, in the end.

He had them at a corner table, drawn far enough from the others that low voices would not carry. They had come in plain garb and armed and they looked at him expectantly. If he sent them out into the city to kill that very night, they would be ready.

‘Tell me about Stenwold Maker,’ he said.

Lieutenant Graf glanced at the others and then spoke. ‘He arrived the day before you, sir. Quite a tail of followers, too.’

‘Was there a Mantis-kinden with them?’ Thalric asked. His mind returned abruptly to the night battle at the engine works at Helleron that had seen the Pride destroyed. There had been a Mantis there, making bloody work of every man who came against him — until Thalric had burned him. Tisamon, Scyla’s reports had named him, and his daughter had been Tynisa. Tynisa, who had very nearly done for Thalric when he came to finish the matter. In his heart he had hoped that the man had died from his wound, but Graf’s next words surprised him not at all.

‘Yes, sir, his name is Tisamon. I’ve learned he was a student at the College many years ago, at the same time as Maker. Even from back then, he had a reputation.’

‘And well deserved,’ Thalric confirmed. ‘What movements?’

‘Maker’s settling his men in. He’s applied to speak before the Assembly, but that’s likely to take a few days. He’s not exactly popular. A maverick, they think, and he leaves his College duties too often. They’ll stall him with bureaucracy for a while, maybe even a tenday, before they let him in. A slap on the wrist.’

‘And the rest?’

‘Many of the others are now at the College,’ Arianna said. ‘Some are in the infirmary, in fact. They brought some wounded with them from Helleron. There’s a monstrous little wretch with them, though, some spiky kinden I’ve never seen before, and he’s been going about the factories a lot, the engine yards and the rail depot.’

‘That would be Scuto,’ Thalric explained, ‘Stenwold’s deputy from Helleron. He’s an artificer, I understand, so some of that might just be professional curiosity.’ Thalric remembered his one meeting with Stenwold Maker, a few brave words over a shared drink: two men in the same work on opposite sides, but common ground nonetheless; they were two soldiers who had suffered the same privations under different flags.

And now I stalk him to his lair, and I must destroy him. Because I must believe he would do the same to me, I shall feel nothing.

‘I have your orders,’ he addressed the foursome. ‘We’ll need armed men, Lieutenant — and craft from the rest of you. Stenwold Maker is not long for this world.’