Dragonfly Falling Read Online Free PDF Page A

gates, you know, and shall we say critical
reception was lukewarm. That’s because it was beyond my experience, and I
couldn’t capture it. And so that’s my reason, as good as any other – and it’s a
poor one, I know.’
    ‘You are quite mad,’
Parops told him.
    ‘Probably. However, my
own kinden are very good at squeaking out at the last minute, and there are
still a few grains of sands in the glass. You never know, perhaps I’ll reclaim
my heritage after all.’
    ‘Don’t leave it too
long,’ Parops warned, and then some fresh word came to him, invisible through
the crowded air of the city. ‘They have taken the ambassadors in, at last,’ he
announced.
    When Skrill came running
back she was ducking low amidst the sprays of man-high sword-grass. Her
progress involved a series of sudden dashes across less covered ground, moving
with her long legs at a speed Salma knew he himself could not have matched. Then
she would freeze into immobility, hunched under cover, an arrow already fitted
to her bowstring. He and Totho were dug in together beneath one of the great
knots of grass that arched over them with its narrow, sharp-edged fronds. They
watched Skrill’s punctuated progress impatiently.
    Then she had flung
herself to a halt beside them, bowling into them in a flurry of loose earth.
She was a strange creature, halfbreed of Mynan Soldier Beetle and something
else, and with no manners or education to recommend her, but she had led them
flawlessly to within sight of the Wasp army as if she knew every inch of the
terrain.
    ‘What did you see?’
Totho asked her.
    ‘Did you see her – or
the Daughters?’ Salma interrupted.
    She gave him a
wide-eyed, mocking look. ‘Did you perchance not notice those many thousand
soldiers out there, Your Lordship? Wherever your glittery lady is, she ain’t
paradin’ herself about their camp, now, is she? So no, I din’t happen to meet
her and invite her over here for a pint and a chat.’ She shook her head, one
hand coming up to tug at her pointed ears as though trying to make them longer.
‘I didn’t even get close to the camp because they got a thousand men on sentry
duty, or that’s like it looked to me. A whole ring of them, and earthworks,
palisade, even little lookie-outie towers. And the sky! Don’t even get me
started. If you was thinkin’ about just swanning in with those wings of yours
you best put that candle right out. They got men circlin’ and circlin’ like
flies on a tenday-dead corpse. They plainly reckon the Ants’ll give ’em grief –
and why not? I would, if I was runnin’ things at Tark Hall.’
    ‘Ants are too straight
for that, aren’t they?’ Totho asked. ‘I thought they’d just line up and fight.’
    ‘Don’t believe it,
Beetle-boy,’ she told him. ‘Ants’ll play the dirty tricks same as anyone. They
do war , Beetlie, and war means day and night work.
Nobody ever won a war just by fighting fair.’
    ‘Don’t call me that,’
Totho said, for the nicknames she used were starting to gall him. ‘I’m no more
a Beetle than you are a . . . a whatever it is you are, or aren’t.’
    ‘Am I a Beetle? No. Is
His Lordship a Beetle? No. Then you get to be Beetle-boy unless we can get a
better Beetle than you,’ she told him without sympathy.
    ‘Will the pair of you
be—’ Salma had started to hiss, and then the Wasps were in sight, skimming at
just a man’s height and touching the tops of the sword-grass as they came. In
that same moment they had clearly spotted the three spies.
    There were half a dozen
of them, light airborne out merely on a scouting mission, but Wasps were a
pugnacious lot and never ones to shirk a fight. Their leader shouted an order
and two of them broke off, arrowing back towards their camp. The others sped
towards Salma with swords drawn and palms outstretched to unleash their energy
stings.
    Skrill shot one straight
off, leaping up with her sudden speed and loosing an arrow that split the
second