She could not decide whether he was truly angry, and it seemed neither could he. His words made her think, though, and made her feel sad.
‘I’m not short of injured friends,’ she admitted. ‘Perhaps I’m just bad luck for others.’
‘A carrier of it, then, that never feels the ill effects,’ he said. ‘Cheerwell?’
‘Call me Che.’
He blinked at her.
‘If you’re going to call me anything more familiar than “Mistress Maker”, call me Che. Because you cannot imagine the burden of going through life with a name like Cheerwell.’
For a long moment he just stared at her, then, uncontrollably, the corner of his mouth quirked upwards. ‘I suppose I can’t,’ he conceded.
‘Thalric . . .’ she started, then stopped and considered. ‘Thalric. I see you’ve found a niche here. If Achaeos gets healed, and he and I leave Tharn . . . there’s nothing to stop you staying behind.’
The smile was gone, the tentative anger along with it. ‘Nothing except my own people.’ At last he sat down again, one hand idly knocking a few scrolls from the desk. ‘I have a death sentence, Cheer . . . Che. Che, then. Eventually, quite soon even, I’m bound to meet someone who knows me. Someone from the Rekef, someone from the army, just . . . someone. I have tried, I won’t deny it, to find my way back to them.’ His new smile was composed only of bitterness. ‘I tried that in Jerez. I tried to sell the Mantis and the others. I tried to be loyal to the Empire. But the Empire didn’t want my loyalty. The man I approached recognized me and tried to kill me. That could have happened here. It still might with every new arrival, or perhaps somewhere in the garrison here is a hidden Rekef Inlander agent who, any day now, will look on “Major Manus” and think the name Thalric. Do you know what I really am, Che?’
She shook her head wordlessly.
‘I am a spymaster, a major in the Rekef Outlander. An imperial intelligencer, that is what I’ve spent my life being. Only now they won’t let me. And I was good, very good, at my job. I’ve been sorting through all these reports, and thinking: “I must tell them this,” or “the next step should be that,” and realizing that I can’t. I cannot tell them anything and, even if I could, they would not thank me. Instead they would have me on crossed pikes. I cannot use my skills on behalf of my Empire any more, so I’ve been sitting here torturing myself with my pretending.’
‘I’m sorry.’
She expected him to sneer at that, but he nodded soberly. ‘You probably are, at that. However did you get yourself mixed up in all of this?’
‘I am Stenwold’s niece.’
He looked back at the desk, the papers, and she knew better than to interrupt him. Some train of thought was now running its course in his mind, some weighty decision that had been weighed up delicately before she came in.
‘Szar is in revolt,’ he said at last.
‘I don’t—’
‘The city of Szar is in open revolt against the Empire,’ he told her. ‘Thousands of soldiers are therefore being diverted to put down the Bee-kinden with extreme force. Many of them are soldiers that would otherwise be heading west even now.’
She nodded slowly. Her mind’s map was hazy on precisely where Szar was, but she appreciated the point he made.
Thalric took a deep breath. ‘The city of Myna, of fond memory, is on the point of insurrection as well.’
‘Myna? That’s Kymene—’
‘Yes, it is. Myna teeters. The garrison has been weakened, with troops heading north-west for Szar. Still, the Empire has an iron hold on the city. So, do the Mynans risk everything with another upheaval?’
‘What are you saying?’ she asked, because it was obvious that something else lay hidden behind his words.
‘I am saying,’ he said slowly, the words forcing themselves out of him, ‘that if some agents of the Lowlands were to find their way to Myna, and there tell the Mynans that they are not alone, that the Lowlands struggled too, and Szar, and Solarno, that the imperial forces were stretching themselves thinner every day, then they would surely rise up where otherwise they might not dare.’
She stood up slowly. ‘You’re suggesting that . . . what? I? We? We? Achaeos can’t possibly travel.’
‘Achaeos is at least safe here amongst his own people,’ Thalric said. ‘But yes, we could fly to Myna in that ridiculous barrel of yours and stir up the pot. Because, if there’s nothing else on this world I can still do, I can play conspiracy with the best of them, and whilst the Mynans won’t ever trust me, they might trust you.’
‘I don’t want to leave Achaeos . . .’ But already the idea was growing on her. ‘I’ll have to speak with him,’ she ended lamely.
‘Of course,’ said Thalric. ‘But soon, as we must be swift. If the Mynans delay until after Szar is put down, it will all be for nothing.’
‘I will speak to him. Yes, I’ll speak to him now,’ she said, already reaching the doorway of the room. She looked back at him once, and he wondered what she saw there: someone almost an ally, or just a burnt-out Wasp spymaster?
But I still possess the craft. Indeed I cannot keep it from working. He was betraying the Empire every moment, with every breath, and yet he could look in the mirror and betray Stenwold Maker just as easily. I have now found my vocation. I have more faces than shape-changer Scyla ever had.
Eight
There had been a day and a night of sheer panic, as the fragile form of the Buoyant Maiden was hurled back and forth by storm winds the like of which Stenwold had never known. He had now been given a full chance to get acquainted, though. As the only Apt passenger, it had fallen to him to remain on deck with Jons Allanbridge, tying off lines, strengthening stays, doing what little could be done to stop the little airship simply flying apart, or the gondola parting company with the balloon and the machine ceasing to be anything but a collection of airborne detritus.
‘Wouldn’t we be safer going down?’ he had shouted at Allanbridge.
The other Beetle, still winching doggedly, had yelled back, ‘What do you think I’m trying to do? I’ve let the gas go as far as I dare, but the wind’s still keeping us up!’
Stenwold had wondered whether, if the storm succeeded in tearing them from the canopy, the gondola would have just gone sailing on, unsupported, as if tossing on an invisible sea.
Later on, Jons had been actively trying for all the height he could inject into his Maiden, generating new gas as swiftly as he could, because there had been a dark wall blotting out the horizon, and it had been the Barrier Ridge, the colossal cliff-scarp that delineated the Commonweal’s southern edge.
Then, some time towards dawn, the winds had eased and Allanbridge had sent him below. He had collapsed beneath the hatch, bone-weary and aching in every joint, his hands raw, knuckles scraped, and with a massive flowering bruise across his forehead where he had been thrown into the side rail which, thankfully, had been sturdy enough to restrain him.
Now he woke, to find the wind was gone, or gone enough that he could no longer hear it. The gondola was moving badly, however: not coasting on the air as it had done, but instead rocking and swaying from side to side.
It seems we are not in the air any more. He forced himself to go back up the ladder, pushing the hatch open. The sunlight that greeted him was bright, with a blue sky beaming through a lattice of branches.
The balloon of the Maiden was up there too, he saw. Punctured by a few of the boughs, it had been pushed all the way over to one side on the straining ropes, but it still seemed to be holding its shape. Stenwold hauled himself further up onto the deck, which was swinging gently from its cradle of branches.
‘Where in the wastes are we?’ he muttered, staring about him. The landscape was steeply hilly, but clearly something strange had happened to it in the past, because a great many of the hills had been truncated, and their tops flattened, the sides stepping in tiers down towards the valleys. Agriculture? he wondered, though only grass and bushes grew there now, the latter suggestin
g that a good many years had gone by since this land was ever farmed.
We were going north, he recalled. We had passed Dorax and Mount Hain, and I saw . . . I’m sure I saw the Barrier Ridge. What else could it have been? So are we in the Commonweal now, or were we blown aside? He turned about, clambering up the sloping deck to see if any familiar landmarks were still in view, but the storm must have carried them further than he thought. Their tree was one of about a dozen bare-limbed giants, lofty enough to have the Maiden’s gondola dangling from its lowest branches, and yet still a good ten feet in the air. There was the dense line of a forest on one horizon, but he could not tell if it was composed of the same monsters or of lesser trees.
What he did see, though, was . . .
He was familiar with the concept of them, of course, but they were simply not found in any of the lands he knew. The Lowlands had its fortified city-states, walled villages or military outposts, palisades and armed camps. What it did not have were castles, though. The Ant-kinden model of fortification, which informed all of Lowlands military design, was calculated to protect the whole community, not just provide a defensible centre surrounded by an open settlement. Nor was there ever an isolated bastion rising out of the wilderness. But here was a castle, soaring six storeys high, constructed of white, featureless stone, with a jaggedly asymmetrical crown of turrets that closed in on the centre, so that those within could not only see clearly over all the surrounding landscape, but could protect themselves against airborne attack.
The structure stood about half a mile away, Stenwold guessed, but it was hard to tell, for the scale of it troubled him. He had no idea how big such edifices were supposed to be.
Of course the Commonweal was huge, and all subject to a single monarch. Such an absolute ruler would perhaps need castles to control those broad holdings.
‘All right, Maker?’
He jumped at Allanbridge’s voice. The aviator was descending the ropes from the balloon.
‘How bad is it?’
‘A day or two to patch her, add another one for the three days it’ll take to generate the gas to refill her.’
‘I’m sorry about the Maiden,’ Stenwold started, but Allanbridge shrugged it off.
‘We’ve had worse, she and me.’ He looked bag-eyed and tired and Stenwold realized he had not slept at all since the storm started. ‘I never did the Commonweal run before, and I should have listened more to them that had. They told me that, around the Barrier Ridge, the weather got choppy.’
‘Choppy,’ Stenwold echoed – and then: ‘We’re in the Commonweal, are we?’
‘We are indeed,’ came Destrachis’ voice. Stenwold turned to see the Spider climbing up through the hatch. He had a bandage about his head, showing that even those below had not come through the storm unscathed. Felise was already on deck ahead of him, standing at the rail but disdaining to hold to it, and looking out over the landscape.
‘I don’t suppose you know where we are, exactly?’ the Spider doctor asked. ‘The Commonweal’s rather a big place.’
‘None of this looks familiar to you?’ Stenwold asked him.
‘The Commonweal’s at least half as big again as all the Lowlands put together, Master Maker. I can’t claim to know more than a fraction of it by sight. All I can say is that we can’t be too far north, because there’s no snow on the ground still – but that’s hardly helpful news.’
‘You’ve got time enough stranded here to ask the locals,’ Allanbridge pointed out. ‘After that, if you could bring some of them back here to help us out of the tree, it would make my life a lot easier.’
Stenwold nodded, looking over at the castle, wondering who it had been defended from and whether its inhabitants had even heard of the Lowlands. More to the point, whether the inhabitants had spotted the pale balloon of the airship caught, like an errant moon, in the tree, and what they might think if they had.
‘We’ll go down,’ he confirmed. ‘We need to know how much further to Suon Ren, and whether we’re even still on course. Jons, I’ll leave you alone to make your repairs. Destrachis and Felise, it’s now time to earn your keep.’
‘They don’t make their terrain easy to walk over, in the Commonweal,’ commented Stenwold, after he had hauled himself up yet another series of weed-infested steps. The Commonweal plants growing here amidst the unruly grass all bristled with little hairs that brought him out in a rash, so that he had to wear his heavy artificer’s gloves to pull himself up the tiered slope.
They seemed no nearer to the castle than before. As seen through his spyglass, of course, it had not seemed so far.
Now they stood on top of another hill, because winding their way along the lower ground looked to be a recipe for continually going astray. The land around looked so alien to him, cut as it was into descending terraces. ‘Why can’t they just leave their hills alone?’
Destrachis gave him an odd look. ‘This is farmland, Master Maker.’
Stenwold gave him a doubtful glance. ‘Well, it’s a lovely crop of weeds they’ve got left over from last year, is all I can say.’
‘Well, it was once farmland,’ Destrachis admitted. ‘Not tended in the last five years, surely. I wonder where precisely we are.’
‘Quite.’ Stenwold set off down the next hillside, treading in a series of bone-jarring thumps. He had heard of step-agriculture, of course. Che had explained that the Moth-kinden practised it, through lack of space. He had expected the great and unindustrialized Commonweal to be more . . . natural, though. Here every part of the landscape had been modified by man’s hand before being left, it seemed, to grow wild once more. He even thought that he had spotted, from one hilltop, a waterway cutting straight as a die through the undulating landscape. Canals? They possessed no automotives, no rails, so canals he could understand, but to chop up what must be several square miles of hill-country in this way seemed absolutely insane. ‘They’ve got plenty of space here, it seems to me. Why can’t they just put up with the odd slope?’
Destrachis shrugged, his longer legs managing the constant drops in level more easily. In fact Stenwold was the only one of them having any significant trouble.
‘Efficiency,’ remarked Felise Mienn, which surprised Stenwold enough that he stopped in his tracks. It was, he realized, the first word she had said since they set off. No, it was the first word he had heard her say since he returned from Sarn.
‘Where there are many people to feed it is more efficient,’ she continued, in the tone of a schoolteacher. ‘These steps were first cut many centuries ago, each generation of the peasantry repairing and restoring the work of their fathers and mothers.’
‘Many people?’ Stenwold glanced at Destrachis, who was peering around about the landscape, looking uneasy.
Felise stared at him, and Stenwold had no idea whether she even understood his words.
‘I don’t like it either,’ agreed the Spider. ‘You had a good look at the castle, though, and it seems the only landmark hereabouts. I hope we’ve not ended up crossing over into the Wasp-occupied provinces or something. That would be amusing, don’t you think?’
‘We are being watched,’ Felise commented, without emotion.
‘Where?’ Instantly Stenwold’s hand had fallen to the toy he had brought along from Collegium, and that was now slung, barrels facing upward, on his back.
‘Left and left of ahead,’ the Dragonfly replied.
Stenwold took a moment to work that out and risked a covert look. ‘I don’t see anyone.’
‘They are there.’
‘Probably just some people from the castle, come to see the newcomers.’ Stenwold descended another step awkwardly. ‘Or guilt-ridden peasants come to continue the work of their fathers and mothers.’
‘The castle is deserted,’ announced Felise with absolute certainty.
‘How . . . Do you know this place?’ Stenwold asked her.
‘Master Maker,’ Destrachis said, with a strange tone to his voice, ‘when you were eyeing the
castle through that magnifying machine, you did at least notice whether it is actually inhabited, yes?’
‘It’s still standing.’
‘Castles do that, Master Maker.’ The Spider pursed his lips. ‘They do that even when they’ve not been lived in for fifty years – or not been lived in by those that they were made for.’
Stenwold unshipped the piercer from his back, checking that the four long quarrels were still loaded in place. Half a dozen figures had sprung up on to the top of the nearest hill overlooking them. They were Dragonfly-kinden, for certain, five men and a woman wearing cloth armour that was bulked out with sewn-in metal plates. Some had spears and others had short-bladed punch-swords. Two carried tall bows.
Stenwold swallowed anxiously, because they did not look friendly. ‘Good morning,’ he called. ‘We are only travellers looking for—’
The arrow cut straight at him. Not a warning shot or a slip, but a casual attempt at murder even before he had finished speaking. All he could do was fall backwards, the head of it snagging the leather of his shoulder. In that same instant, four of the Commonwealers had leapt into the air, wings sparking to life, and now dropped towards them.
They stooped faster than Stenwold could watch, but what rose to meet them was not the ground but Felise. Without any transition she went from stillness to a blur, sword clear and cloak thrown back, passing through the attackers in the air, to land beyond them, close to the archers who had remained behind. Of the four who had leapt, two were dead before any of them reached the ground.
The archers instantly loosed at her and one arrow glanced off her armour, while the other sprayed in splinters from her sword blade, and then she was at work, killing both of them before they could even drop their bows and take up blades. Seeing that, the two survivors were in the air again, darting off and away. Stenwold assumed that Felise would follow them, for her wings hummed and danced across her back, but she simply stood there, on the hill’s crest between the two dead archers, her sword ready in her hand.
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