Dragonfly Falling

Two

To live in an Ant-kinden city was to understand silence, and he had spent time in a few. There was the silence of everyday tasks which meant that one heard only the slaves cluttering about, whispering to one another. There was the silence of the drilling field where there were marching feet and the clink of armour but never a raised voice or a shouted command: five hundred soldiers, perhaps, in perfect formation and perfect order. There was the silence after dark when families sat together with closed lips, while the slaves stayed huddled in their garrets or outbuildings.

Then there was this silence, this new silence. It was the silence of a city full of people who knew that the enemy, in its thousands, was camped before their gate.

Nero hurried through this silence bundled in his cloak. All around him the city of Tark was pacing along at its usual speed. At the sparse little stalls local merchants handed over goods wordlessly, receiving exactly the correct money in return. Children ran in the street or played martial games and only the youngest, eight years old or less, ever laughed or called out. Men and women stood in small groups on street corners and said nothing. There was an edge to them all and, in that unimaginable field extending between their minds, there was a single topic of unheard conversation.

It was once different, of course, in the foreigners’ quarter where he was lodging. A tenday ago it had been a riotous bloom of colour, penned in by the Ant militia but shaped by countless hands into a hundred little homes away from home. Now there was a hush over that quarter as well because all but the most stubbornly entrenched residents had fled.

And I should have gone with them.

He had been in Tark a year, not long enough to put down roots, but at the same time perhaps the longest he had spent anywhere since Collegium.

What keeps me here?

Guilt, he decided. Guilt because he knew this day would come, when the gold and black horde would pour into the Lowlands, and he had done nothing. He had walked away, once the knives were out, and not looked back.

He attracted little notice from the locals, for he was well known in this part of the city, which meant in any part, given that the local opinion of him could be passed mind to mind as easily as passing a bottle in a taverna. They looked down on him because he was a foreigner, and a Fly-kinden, and an itinerant artist. On the other hand he had friends here and he stayed out of trouble, and therefore he was tolerated. Not that staying out of trouble was an infallible recipe: three tendays before, a house had been robbed beyond the foreigners’ quarter. The militia, unable to track down the culprit, had simply hanged three foreigners at random. Visitors, they were saying, were there only on sufferance and were expected to police themselves.

He was an ugly little man, quite bald and with a knuckly face: a heavy brow and broken nose combined with a pugnacious chin to make a profile as lumpy as a clenched fist. Fly-kinden were seldom the most pleasant race to look at, and his appearance was distinctly nasty. If he had been of any other kin he would have hulked and intimidated his way through life, but no amount of belligerent features could salvage him from being only four feet from his sandals to the top of his hairless head.

His name was Nero and he had made a living for the last twenty years as an artist of such calibre that his name and his work could open select doors all across the Lowlands. In his own mind that was just a sideline. In a land where most people never saw much beyond their own city’s walls, unless for commercial purposes, he was a seasoned traveller. He rolled from city to city by whatever road his feet preferred, imposed on the hospitality of whoever would take him in, and did whatever he wanted.

Which brought him back to the present, because he now wanted, if his continuing presence was anything to go by, to be involved in a siege and bloody war. He himself was unclear on this point, but so far he had not felt inclined to leave, and shortly he suspected that he would not be able to do so without being shot out of the sky by the Wasp light airborne.

Ahead of him the city wall of Tark was a grand pale jigsaw puzzle of great stones, adorned with its murder holes, its crenellations, passages and engines of destruction. In its shadow the Ant-kinden were calm. This wall had withstood sieges before when their own kin of other cities had come to fight against them, just as Tarkesh armies had been repulsed by the walls of those kinfolk in Kes or Sarn.

Nero knew that the army now outside was not composed of Ant-kinden, and would not fight like them. Whenever he had that thought, he had a terrible itching to be gone, and yet here he still was.

Parops was of unusual character for an Ant, especially an officer. His friendship with Nero had begun on rocky ground when the universal grapevine had informed him that the woman picked out as his mate was sitting nude before the Fly’s easel, and he was a joke across the city before he had stormed across to remonstrate. Ant pairings were a strange business, though, made for the convenience of the city and the furtherance of children, and they lacked the personal investment, the jealousies and passions, of other kinden. In truth, after their coupling was achieved, the two of them had grown bored of one another. Nero had been one of a line of diversions she had taken up.

And of course Parops had been expected to kill the Fly on the spot, both by his mate and the city at large. Not from rage, for Ants were rarely given to it, but for the affront to his racial, civic and personal dignity. Instead, he had passed most of the night up on the roof by Nero’s side, looking out over the city and talking about other places.

Parops was a wild eccentric by Ant standards, which meant that he entertained unusual thoughts occasionally. His natural intelligence had brought him just so far up the ladder of rank and he knew that he would never receive further promotion. In the opinion of his superiors he was not wholly sound. So here he was, a tower commander on the walls of Tark, a position considered more bureaucratic than military until now. Now he stood at the arrowslit window of his study and looked down over the chequer-board of the Wasp army. The late sunlight played on his bleached skin.

‘How are the negotiations going?’ Nero enquired, for a Wasp embassy had been admitted to the city earlier that day. While Parops was not privy to their debate, news of its progress loomed large in the collective mind of the city, silently passed from neighbour to neighbour in rippling waves of information.

‘Still keeping them waiting,’ the Ant explained.

‘It’s their prerogative,’ Nero allowed. ‘So what are they doing meanwhile?’

‘There are some Spider-kinden slavers left in the city,’ Parops said, ‘and some of them have Scorpion-kinden on their staff. It seems that the Scorpions and the Wasps go way back, mostly in the same trade, so we have people paying the Scorpions for their recollections. The Royal Court is busy putting the picture together.’

‘How seriously are they taking it?’

‘There are thirty thousand soldiers at our gates,’ Parops pointed out.

‘Yes, but you know how politics goes. Everyone’s city is the greatest, and everyone’s soldiers are invincible, at least until they get vinced.’

Parops nodded. ‘They’re taking it seriously, plentifully seriously. They’ve gone to the tunnels and spoken to the nest-queen herself, woken up the flying brood. They’re putting in readiness every machine that can take to the air. Everyone who can pilot a flier or handle artillery is getting marching orders, and it’s crossbows for everyone else. It’s a flying enemy we face, and that much we understand. It’s something new.’

And Ants did not like new things, Nero reflected, but at least the complacency had gone. The ant nest beneath the city, which produced domesticated insects that laboured for their human namesakes, was a valuable resource. To utilize the winged males and females as mounts of war would kill off an entire generation of them, a tragedy of economics which meant they were only brought out in the worst of emergencies. The Royal Court of Tark had finally conceded that this was nothing less.

‘You’ve had some dealings with these Wasps,’ Parops noted.

‘As few as I could but, yes, a long time ago.’

‘Tell me about the other kinden they have in their army. Have they formed an alliance against us?’

‘The Wasp Empire doesn’t do alliances,’ Nero said with a harsh laugh. ‘Those are slaves.’

‘They arm their slaves?’ The Ants of Tark, as with Ant-kinden almost everywhere, kept slaves for the menial