Dragonfly Falling

He was not alone.

In the darkness, with even the moon tightly shuttered out, he felt fear. A Vekken assassin? A Wasp assassin? Thalric, perhaps? He had been given no time, these past days, to brood on such danger. What better opportunity than this to do away with him? Stenwold reached for his sword and recalled that it was still with his coat, ten yards and as good as a thousand miles away.

And then another part of his mind whispered something. Was it a familiar sound, or a scent, that informed it?

‘Arianna?’ he said hoarsely. When there was no reply he fumbled for a lantern and lit it with three strokes of his steel lighter, his hands trembling.

She was sitting at the end of his bed, a young and slender Spider girl with ginger hair cut short, gazing at him with wretched indecision.

‘Did. they send you to.?’ he got out.

‘No,’ she whispered. ‘Stenwold, I. didn’t have anywhere else to go.’

Ludicrously, he felt his unbelted breeches slipping, and tugged them up hurriedly. ‘But. you could have escaped?’

‘The Vekken would have killed me if they caught me — all the more so because Thalric is with them now. And. I have nowhere to go, Stenwold. I am outcast from my homeland and a traitor to the Rekef. And to you, also. I have nobody left to turn to.’

‘Except me?’

She looked up at him. He momentarily thought that she might try to flirt with him, or speak of the connection they supposedly had shared, but there was now nothing but mute pleading in her eyes.

‘Arianna, I-’

‘You can’t trust me, I know. I could be an assassin. I could still be spying for the Rekef. Stenwold, I am at the end of everything now, and I have no more. Because I tried, in my stupid, small way, to save Collegium — and I got it wrong, just like everything else.’

He put the lantern on his reading table, words failing him. There was too much, far too much, going on within him. He no longer felt tired, but more wide awake than he had been in days. He was trying now to navigate through a maze of pity, caution and a lecherous recollection of their time together that shocked him with its potency. He had thought himself past such yearnings, and yet seeing her here, against all odds and beyond any common sense, was an aphrodisiac, a tonic to an aging man.

If she is my enemy, I cannot give in to these feelings. And if she was truly as desperate as she claimed, how wrong would it be to take advantage of that? Of Arianna the student of the College.

But, also Arianna of the Rekef, the imperial spy gone off the rails. Impossibly, the thought of the risk she could present only seemed to spur some part of him on.

She stood up abruptly. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I–I thought. I have no right. ’

Without warning she was trying to dart past him, but he caught her by the shoulders and held her there, practically in the doorway. ‘Wait. ’ he began.

The lanternlight brought out the glint of tears in her eyes, and he knew that she could feign it all, being what she was, but his heart almost broke with the strain of it.

She stared up at him, the small breasts beneath her tunic rising and falling. ‘Stenwold. ’

I am carving my own coffin. Perhaps it was the fatigue of these last days, or the need to find some spark of life in such dark times, but he had now lost the reins that could hold his desires in check. He bent down almost fearfully, as though she were venomous, but he still kissed her, and she thrust her lips up towards him.

When he awoke the next morning and he turned over to find her there, warm and soft and alive, sharing his bed, it all flooded back in on him, the pleasure he had taken, for which a price was surely yet to be paid. Yet this morning, with the Vekken army already assembling for its next assault, he felt more rested, more vital, than he had in so very long.

Then there was someone rapping on his front door downstairs, and he foresaw the chain of circumstance exactly: Balkus answering the door and lumbering upstairs to deliver some message, then not comprehending why his employer was sleeping with an enemy agent. He pushed himself out of bed and slung a robe on.

He hurried downstairs in time to intercept Balkus, recognizing the thin, bent figure that had come to see him this morning.

‘Doctor Nicrephos?’ Stenwold asked blankly. Could matters be so desperate that they were drafting such an ancient Moth as this to be a messenger? ‘Is it the wall? What news?’

‘Master Maker. Stenwold,’ Doctor Nicrephos hovered awkwardly on the threshold. ‘We have known each other for. ’

‘We’ve done business for years,’ Stenwold agreed. ‘But why.?’

‘I need your help,’ the old Moth said, ‘and I know no one else who might even listen. Tell me, what do you know of the Darakyon?’

The Vekken woke like clockwork. Thalric had witnessed it each morning of the siege. Each morning, at precisely an hour before dawn, every single soldier in their army arose and drew on his armour, buckled on his sword. No words, no sound but the clink of mail. Walking down their lines of tents, Thalric felt a shiver at the sheer brutality of their discipline, that strode roughshod over everything in its path.

Except perhaps this siege was starting to tell on them, he reflected. This morning they seemed a touch off- kilter, their timing fouled by something. A few of them were even running late, hurrying with their buckles, no doubt under the withering scorn of their peers.

For some reason the Ant-kinden had passed a troubled night, he decided, and that was curious. Still, the siege had been now many days in the making. The casualties amongst the Vekken had been, in Akalia’s words, ‘acceptable’, though, to Thalric’s eyes, seeming far too high if these Ants were as good as they were supposed to be. Even Ant-kinden would get their edges blunted eventually, under such punishing treatment. Still, it seemed strange that, on this morning, a malaise should be so marked amongst them.

Ant-kinden, he thought, mockingly. They even go off the rails in unison.

He saw Lorica threading her way through the Vekken towards him, unconsciously falling in with their mechanical rhythm, getting in no one’s way and finding her path without having to seek it. She too looked out of sorts, though, and was frowning.

‘Something wrong?’ he asked her.

‘Possibly.’ She rubbed the back of her neck, her eyes still heavy with lost sleep. ‘You should know, Major. There’s been a visitor to the camp.’

‘Speak.’

‘A Fly-kinden messenger came in, for Major Daklan’s ears only.’

Thalric let his breath out in a long sigh. ‘That could mean many things.’

‘He was from the Empire, I’m sure of it,’ Lorica told him. ‘Imperial Fly-kinden have a kind of a look, and they hold themselves a different way. They know they’re onto a good thing.’

Thalric nodded. Outside his tent he could now hear the louder pieces of Vekken artillery launching at the walls of Collegium. The actual fighting was just a distant murmur beyond.

‘You’ve cast your lot,’ he told the halfbreed. ‘I don’t know if you’ll regret it, but I hope not.’

‘I respect you, Major Thalric,’ she said candidly. ‘And I hope you value me, since Major Daklan certainly doesn’t. Do you know what’s going on, sir?’

‘For certain? No.’

‘But you suspect.’

‘I have seen this before, and too many times,’ said Thalric, wearily thinking, And most of the time I have been on the other side of it. Secret messages from the Empire, and for Daklan’s ears only. ‘Perhaps it’s nothing significant.’

‘You don’t believe that, sir.’

‘No, I don’t, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.’ He stood, shaking his head. ‘How do you think the siege is going, Lorica?’