Dragonfly Falling (sota-2) by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Author:Adrian Tchaikovsky [Tchaikovsky, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf_fantasy

*

Salma drifted in and out of wakefulness. Sometimes he recalled who he was, where he was, and sometimes he did not, perhaps blessedly. He existed in a blurred greyness that was pulled taut between the light of Grief in Chains and the darkness of the void that was still hungry for him.

On one occasion he opened his eyes and found himself looking straight into the face of the man on the next bed. He was a Wasp-kinden with his head bandaged low so as to cover one eye, the wrappings crisp and clean, having just been changed. When he saw Salma looking at him, the other man grinned weakly.

‘You,’ he said, in a voice just loud enough for Salma to hear, ‘are so cursed lucky.’

Salma tried to make a sound, but nothing audible came out. In truth he did not feel so very lucky.

‘You should be dead,’ the soldier continued, his whispering voice obviously the best he could manage. ‘I saw you drop. You were fighting like a maniac but someone got you, and you fell, and that should have been the end of you. I was behind. I saw the point come clean through you, you bastard. She came for you, though, and you were dead, even then, but she came for you as though she knew what had been going on. She ran out and lit the place up and put her hands on you. And you stopped bleeding, right there and then.’ He coughed, a wretched, scratchy sound. ‘And she’s been with you every day, using her Art to keep you alive. I don’t know what you mean to her but you’re a lucky bastard, so you are.’

Salma tried to speak again, and this time a distant croak emerged, quieter even than the wounded soldier’s. ‘I came here for her.’

The man’s one eye studied him for a minute, before he said, ‘Well she’s certainly worth that.’

‘Salma?’

He had been asleep, or at least drifting somewhere else, but there was a new voice now, and it carried his name to him.

‘Salma, you have to wake up now.’

It was not her voice and he did not want to wake up. When he had opened his eyes last, she had been standing there, staring at him. Expression was hard to fathom from those dancing colours, from those eyes, but his heart had leapt painfully just to see her.

He had found her. She had found him. In this mad, war-struck world, they had found each other.

She had sat down at the edge of his bed and, although it was a flimsy folding piece that should have tipped immediately, she barely moved it, making him doubt his senses. He had reached out, though, and she had taken his cold hand in both her warm ones, warm like the sun on a summer’s day.

‘Why are you here?’ she had asked him. ‘Why did you come?’

‘I couldn’t stay away, knowing that you were here,’ was his whisper. ‘Aagen… I spoke to Aagen.’

‘Did you-?’

‘No. We parted on good terms.

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