Dragonfly Falling

mercenaries and malcontents at short notice. If, however, I am met with a less than friendly reception tomorrow then I have orders to take this city by force. It would make me unhappy if that should come to pass. To assuage my unhappiness I should be forced to ensure that every one of you that I see before me now would be taken and executed in some suitably complex manner. Your families, your business associates, your servants and employees would all then be seized by our slave corps and sent to the most distant corners of the Empire to die in misery and degradation. Before that I would have to see to it that your wives and daughters, even your mothers if still alive, would suffer beneath the bodies of my men, and that your sons were mutilated in the machines of my artificers. I would destroy you so utterly that none would ever dare speak your names. I would remove you from the face of the world, and reshape your city entirely to my wish. Have I made myself clear concerning the precise options you must choose between?’

Greenwise silently watched the three Wasps leave. Just three, he thought. There were a dozen men with crossbows in the retinues assembled behind him. They could have stretched General Malkan headlong on the ground and his bodyguards too, but nobody had any illusions about the consequences of that.

He looked around at his own men, who were uncertain and unhappy, and beckoned to a Fly-kinden lad in the fore. Around him the conversation, the inevitable murmur of conversation, had started. He heard one man say, almost apologetically, how he had been trading with the Empire, and they had always settled their accounts admirably.

‘A military presence would mean that we would not need to worry about. ’ started Scordrey, and tailed off because they had never had to worry about anything, until General Malkan and his twenty-five thousand.

‘The Consortium of the Honest have always seemed sound merchantmen,’ said Halewright slowly.

‘We would be able to expand our business into eastern markets much more easily,’ another added.

Greenwise turned to the Fly-kinden, stooping to speak quietly to him. ‘Are you in any doubt,’ he said, ‘about the response of the Council of Helleron to that general tomorrow?’

The diminutive Fly-kinden always seemed younger than they were, and this one looked barely fourteen, but the world of cynicism in his voice surprised even Greenwise. ‘Master Artector, no, sir.’

Greenwise nodded. ‘Then you must fly to Collegium, by whatever means you can, and tell the Assembler Stenwold Maker that Helleron has fallen to the Empire, and without a single blow being struck.’

‘I am gone, sir.’ The Fly-kinden took wing instantly, hovered for a second, and then darted off across the city. Nobody paid him any notice, and there were similar messengers lifting from the ground all around to their masters’ orders.

And Greenwise Artector turned his attention back to his peers, and to their slow and patient rationalization of the decision they had already made. The decision he, too, had made, for he was no hero, and he had his own lucrative business to safeguard.

Twenty-Two

Parops’s mind, like his city, was on fire. It was a clearing house for a thousand voices: his own calling to his men, keeping them in order; the soldiers with him, relaying their positions from every side; the watchers looking out for the next bomb to fall from the distantly circling airships; the civilians fleeing their homes; the civilians trapped in their homes and who could not escape. Tark was built of stone, but when the bombs exploded overhead they deluged streets in fiery rain that scorched in through shutters and doors, flooded the rooms beyond, and burned and burned. The substance being used was stickier than oil and it clung to walls, to armour and especially to flesh. It did not keep burning for long but even water would not kill it.

Through this constant cacophony the order came to him to fall back immediately. He knew that two score of his soldiers were busy trying to free trapped civilians but he passed the call on, leaden-hearted. Orders were reaching him directly from the Royal Court now, the King’s own voice issued them. Even Parops, who thought further and wider than most of his kin, would not dare ignore a royal command.

Fall back to Fourteenth-Twenty-ninth! he instructed his detachment, slinging his shield up on his back. Just then another incendiary charge struck, only two streets away, igniting at barely over roof level, and he felt its impact amongst the men of Officer Juvian, heard the exclamations of fear and horror as it consumed the officer himself and two dozen of his men, scorching the street clean of them. Tears shone bright on Parops’s face, but he had his duty. As an Ant-kinden of Tark, he would never shirk it.

His men began falling back in good order. About half of them were regular infantry, properly armed and armoured. The rest were drafted citizens, for every Ant was trained to use a sword from the youngest age. These militia had no shields, but they had no armour to slow them either, and armour proved no protection against this incendiary deluge.

He had lost his tower, almost the first structure to fall. During the evacuation, half of Parops’s staff had succumbed to shot or flame, not just soldiers but his messengers, his clerks, his quartermaster. As soon as Parops was clear he had new duties forced on him: to take command of a hastily formed body of men, to oppose the Wasp advance. Yet his progress had been retreat after retreat. He knew that several of the other detachments were advancing slowly and that there must be some grand plan that the Royal Court was working towards, but he himself was not privy to it. He must only hope that it was a good one, so that if he was called upon to give his life for his city, it would not be in vain.

He had always thought himself a bit of a philosopher amongst his people, a man who questioned where others never thought to. Now he discovered that he was, after all, just a soldier. If the orders came to die for Tark, he would do it and gladly. He surprised himself with the thought.

‘I’ve been looking all over for you!’

A blur of motion above, and Parops only just gave the order in time for them to stay their hands before Nero would have been transfixed by a dozen crossbow bolts.

‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded of the Fly.

The bald man shrugged his shoulders, settling on a windowsill one floor up. ‘Looking for you, you fool! What the blazes are you up to?’

‘Obeying orders,’ Parops told him shortly. ‘You should move back — we’re the front line here.’

‘Oh, I know that.’ Nero wore a padded cuirass, that was an arming jacket meant for a child of twelve, and a short-bow was slung over his shoulder.

‘You’re no soldier!’ Parops insisted. ‘You’ll get killed if you stay here, probably by us. Go find yourself somewhere safe!’

‘You tell me where that might be, and I’ll go there,’ Nero said.

Parops wanted to argue, but orders came through again at that instant: Commander Parops. Advance.

He spared one more upward glance at Nero, then sent this command onwards, watching his men come out from their shelters, from side streets and within buildings. Those armed with shields formed up to the fore, and the rest quickly crowded in behind. Parops took his place, as naturally as any of them. It seemed he had always been trying to find his place in his own city, and it was terrible that only a disaster such as this could show it to him.

But they were now advancing, as ordered, and he knew that the detachments on either side, that were within the reach of his mind, were doing likewise. Ahead he could see a flitting of black and yellow as the Wasps spotted them and began to get into order. They were lightly armoured advance troops, and many were already taking to the air. The first bolts of energy spat towards the front rank of Parops’s men, most falling short and fading, and one crackling impotently against a shield.

At a thought relayed from himself the third rank passed their shields up and forward, making a second level of defence against shot from the air. The second rank then levelled crossbows through the gap between the two lines of shields.

Fire at will. Target the airborne, he instructed them, and the crossbows began sounding off with dull clacks. Their range was further than the Wasps’ Art-born weapons, and men began to tumble from the sky ahead of them.

‘Parops, the airships!’ he heard Nero shouting. He had one of his men near the back look up for him, his own