Dragonfly Falling

‘Haroc? What is there to say about Haroc?’

Almost theatrically, Lorica glanced about her and back up the stairs, making sure they were not observed. ‘You should know, sir. it means nothing, I’m sure, but you should know: he has been with Major Daklan a very long time, and he’s no scribe. His writing is poor, he has others transcribe it instead. He comes from a different branch of the service.’

‘What branch is that?’ Thalric asked.

‘Your guess, Major, but I wouldn’t trust him.’ She was looking earnestly into his face. ‘I’m no fool, Major, and I know that, when the Vekken campaign’s done, there’ll be no use for me here. Daklan will soon cast me off. He might even throw me to the soldiers here. They’d love to have a halfbreed woman to abuse. You can change that, Major.’

‘Yes, I can,’ he agreed. He looked at her, trying to see beyond the bloodline. She should not be unattractive, he supposed, but the mixture of her heritage was stamped on every feature, nothing quite as it should be. Still, it did not diminish her usefulness nor, he now supposed, her loyalty.

‘I always have uses for good agents, Lorica,’ he told her. ‘Stay true to me and you’ll be rewarded.’

Twenty

Totho was well enough to walk about the next day, but the Wasps kept a close eye on him. He gathered that Drephos was busy with his Colonel-Auxillian duties, whatever they were. The halfbreed artificer seemed to have carved out a strange niche for himself within the imperial army. Totho could see in their faces that the Wasps looked down on him, and yet they deferred to him, and it was not just patronizing. They clearly feared him. Totho did not know yet whether that was fear of the man’s own vengeance or what he could call down on them from the higher ranks.

Totho’s only real contact had been with Drephos’s female assistant. Her name was Kaszaat, and she came from the city of Szar, far to the north, near where the border of the Commonweal had stretched before the Twelve-Year War redrew all the maps in the Empire’s favour. She was Bee-kinden, he discovered.

‘Are you. Drephos’s slave?’ he asked her, in truth having assumed it.

She gave him a cold look. She was perhaps five years his senior and had not made up her mind about him, whether he was a man or a boy, or to be spoken freely to. ‘I am not a slave,’ she said sharply. ‘I am an artificer.’

‘I have not seen many women here. I didn’t mean. ’ He had seen precisely two other women and, from the way they had been treated, realized they were being kept as slaves and for one purpose only. ‘Does that mean you’re. part of their army?’

‘There is no other way,’ she confirmed. ‘Drephos is colonel of the Auxillians and I am a sergeant. So I can tell the common soldiers what to do.’

‘Does that work?’ he asked, wide-eyed.

She was about to snap at him again, but in the end she smiled a little, understanding his point. ‘Sometimes, but they do not like it. I am a woman, after all. And inferior of race they claim. They would have the same problem with you, for you are mixed-blooded. But you, too, shall have rank, and so they must obey you, in the last.’

‘I. ’ He hung his head. ‘I cannot join up with Drephos. The Wasps are conquerors, tyrants. They’re evil.’

‘No such thing,’ she said briskly. ‘There is no good, no evil, only men who do this thing or that thing. And the Wasps, yes, they do terrible things, things more terrible than you will have ever witnessed. And they do this because they can. And yet anyone else who could, they would do these same things. And so the Wasps are not special, not evil. They are just the strongest. There will come a day when it is no longer so, and then terrible things shall be done back to them, perhaps by those they have conquered.’

‘Like your people?’ he asked, and her eyes narrowed, all of a sudden.

‘Foolish words!’ she told him, but her eyes warned: dangerous words.

He occupied a sectioned-off area of a tent, with a straw mattress and a lamp. There were soldiers beyond, always watching him. Totho might just possibly have crept out, but then he would be right in the middle of a camp full of Wasps. If he tried to escape they would kill him.

Salma would have tried, of course, taking to the air the instant he was outside. He could have seen his way in the dark and outpaced any Wasp airborne sent after him. And of course, Salma was dead.

There was a hollow sinking in Totho’s chest, each time he remembered that. He had let Salma die. It had been his own idea to come out here, that idea the Ants had so naA?vely taken up. It was almost as though he had killed Salma with his own hands.

‘I cannot ever join with the Empire,’ he replied at last, not emphatically but hopelessly. ‘I have lost too much to them.’

Her hand moved so fast he jerked back, expecting to be slapped, but instead she caught his left ear in a pincer grip and dragged his head down to face her. He twisted with pain and surprise, goggling at her foolishly.

‘You know nothing,’ Kaszaat hissed. ‘So your people, who are not even truly your people, may fall to the Wasps. But they are no warriors. Most likely they will surrender, and be spared. My people fought the Wasps, year to year, for three years, through all our farms and forts and villages and to the gates of our city of Szar. We are loyal. We would die for our Queen. My father, my mother, uncles, aunts, all gave their lives. Flying into battle. Running into battle. Crossbow, pike and axe. Fight and then fight again. Over and over the Wasps stormed our walls. They must take Szar. It is the gateway to the Commonweal. They did many things. They stood up our fallen on stakes and spears. They poisoned our water. They butchered whole villages to make us surrender. Then they won. Our Queen was stolen away. She is made to be a slave-wife, a concubine to their Emperor. So we became them, and must take their orders and be their soldiers. They rule Szar now, and kill anyone who even speaks against them. They take our men for their armies, and spend our lives like water pissed on dry sand. They cripple us with their taxes. They take everything we have, everything we make or grow. We work in their factories. We make their weapons and armour. We mend their machines. We fight and die for them in places like this Tark, which we did not even know exists, and so many of us, so many of us shall never see our families and the walls of our beloved city again.’ She was staring into his eyes, from just inches away. He looked for tears but saw not one.

‘And I work for Drephos, because it is better than not. Because of all the masters in the Empire he is best, because I am an artificer and he treats me as an artificer — not as a woman, not as a slave. So do not tell me how you hurt so very badly, and cannot work for the Wasps. Because you know nothing, Totho of Collegium. You have no understanding.’

And she released him and spun away, about to leave his little partitioned room then pausing at the door, as if thinking better of it. She did not turn round, though, and he wondered whether she had said more than she meant. He put a hand to his aching ear.

‘You’re right,’ he admitted. ‘I suppose I’ve. Well, in Collegium even a halfbreed can train as an artificer. I can’t imagine. however did Drephos manage it?’

‘He once escaped the Empire, he told me once,’ she said, turning back to him. ‘To where, I do not know, but when he had learned, he came back to them, because. ’

‘Because where else could he truly ply his trade?’ Totho realized.

A Fly-kinden messenger put his head about the partition just then, muttering something to Kaszaat.

‘He has sent for you,’ she told Totho. ‘There is something he wishes you to see.’

She followed the Fly outside, and Totho felt he had no option but to follow.

He had clearly lost all track of time, for he had expected early morning and yet it was dusk already, making him wonder how long he had slept, how many hours were missing.

He already felt a traitor to himself and to his friends. They were treating him here like some honoured guest, instead of Totho the halfbreed. He should have been put in chains, as Che had been.

Or killed, as Salma had been.

The Fly led them to a roughly built gantry that made a tottering tower twenty feet, at least, in height, but close to he saw the joints were solid, the structure thrown up hurriedly but with a kind of stubborn care. He guessed then that it had been Kaszaat’s people who had been put to work here. It was not the hands of untrained