Slowly she raised it, and Stenwold heard Destrachis curse. He struggled on up the hill, and before he was halfway he observed that another dozen men and women had darted up into the air and begun dropping towards them or nocking shafts.
Felise sprang up too, her sword nipping arrows from her path. Stenwold raised the piercer and pulled the trigger, igniting the firepowder in all four chambers at once.
The actual damage that it did was so small – most of the bolts went wide and only one of the oncoming attackers was punched from the air, a three-foot bolt through his groin. The sound, though – the instant he loosed they scattered across the sky in all directions, without plan or pattern, till a moment later they had regrouped 200 yards away in a cluster circling another hilltop.
They have never heard such a noise, he realized. He crouched and set to reloading, pulling bolts out of his pack and slotting them into place.
The Spider joined them on the hill’s crest. ‘That got their attention,’ Destrachis remarked, for the dozen were already being joined by more, their number swiftly doubling. Stenwold grimly went on reloading, because at this point he felt he might as well, for all the difference it would make. ‘Why did they attack us like that?’ he demanded. ‘I thought the Commonweal was supposed to be . . . civilized.’
‘They are renegades, brigands,’ Felise declared implacably, watching the swirling storm of her fellow Dragonflies. ‘This is an abandoned province.’
‘Now you tell us.’
‘You were the one who got a good look at the castle,’ Destrachis reminded him. ‘You couldn’t tell us that it was a ruin?’
‘I don’t know what a Commonweal castle is supposed to look like,’ Stenwold snapped back at him, standing ready with the loaded piercer in his hands.
‘More of them off to our right,’ Destrachis noted, and Stenwold turned wearily to look.
It appeared that the real problem had now arrived, summoned conveniently by the roar of his piercer. Seven or eight Dragonfly-kinden on horseback were galloping the winding path between the hills, fully armoured in sparkling plate.
‘Right, now,’ he began carefully, ‘how we’re going to play this is . . .’
He got no further. Felise thrust her sword into the air and cried out something, a shriek almost without words at first, as savage and unexpected as the piercer’s voice a moment before. When she called out again, though, at the top of her voice, he heard words that meant nothing to him:
‘Mercre Monachis!’ she cried. ‘Mercers to me!’
* * *
Stenwold had never seen such horses. In the Lowlands horses were draught animals, or else bred for hides and meat, and far and few were the animals worth riding. The Dragonfly cavalry possessed such animals as he had never imagined: sleek and long-legged, dark-coated, long-necked. Their eyes seemed to glow with more intelligence than any mere beast should have, and they had fought boldly alongside their masters, dancing about the aerial mêlée and dashing in to kick and stamp on any of the enemy who dropped momentarily from the sky.
Their riders wore armour much like Felise’s, though none quite as complete: most had sections of leather or cloth showing between the iridescent metal plates. They had the same style of sword as she did, too, in addition to their spears and bows.
She called them Mercers, and the name rang a faint bell in Stenwold’s memory.
‘They’re the arm of the Monarch and they go back centuries,’ Destrachis explained to him quietly, walking along behind him with these riders all around them. ‘Mercre was their founder, and was a high prince – the second son of the Monarch of the time. These days they trek all over the Commonweal putting right whatever goes wrong. If you ask me, they’re the only thing holding most of the place together. Only they can’t be everywhere at once, or even most places, so we’re lucky they happened to be nearby.’
The Mercers had made short work of the brigands, killing many and driving others off to find refuge in the ruined castle. Felise Mienn, for one moment stripped of her madnesses by this return to her own past, had requested their further aid and they had agreed to escort the Lowlanders to Suon Ren.
Jons Allanbridge was somewhere above them, floating the Maiden awkwardly as it limped through the sky. He would soon have been prey for bandits had they left him there – as he had demanded – to repair his ship. The Mercers had stared up at the airship in wide-eyed silence. It was obvious that they had never seen anything of the type before and clearly they did not much like it.
The Lowlanders had been blown off course further than they had thought, Stenwold discovered, for Suon Ren was now actually south for them. It seemed they had crossed the border into an entirely different province, one that had lain largely vacant for many years. The lead Mercer informed him that the ruling family had died during the war, but Stenwold could read between the lines well enough to understand that the ‘family’ had probably been no more than one or two even before then. This land had been failing inexorably and the war had only added a final full stop to its history.
Felise was now riding silently ahead of them, her moment of glory spent. Her mount belonged to a Mercer who had been killed in the fight, and whose body, slung over another woman’s horse, indicated the only loss they had taken in routing the bandits. Destrachis kept a worried eye on Felise, who seemed to have sunk back totally into herself.
‘Are you now wishing you’d not come?’ Stenwold asked him.
‘I had to do something,’ he said. ‘I still cannot know if it was the right thing.’
They travelled on for days. At one point, Stenwold had suggested that the Lowlanders should all go in the airship, to keep pace with the fleeter riders, but the Mercers had balked at that. They did not yet know what to make of their visitors, these people from places they had never heard of, and they were not keen to see them vanish off into the sky. Stenwold wondered if this was because nobody in Suon Ren would later believe their story, without he and his companions presenting the proof.
On reaching Suon Ren, Stenwold had expected another castle, but what he found there was the sheer antithesis of so much stone. Seeing it, he wondered if the Common-weallers even built those massive edifices any more. It seemed as though it might have been a phase that this great sprawling state had gone through in its more energetic youth, before settling down to an existence of quiet contemplation.
Contemplation was very much the sense he gained of Suon Ren: contemplation and wary watchfulness. Coming in from high ground, Stenwold had plenty of time to puzzle over it. The town itself was surrounded by a series of small, round platforms set atop high poles, and several of these had figures perched on them to gaze out across the carefully stepped farmlands. Many of these watchers were children, insofar as Stenwold could judge their scale, yet the platforms had no rungs or steps to reach them. They were clearly a flier’s vantage point without the effort of hovering in the air. A subtle distance from the outlying buildings of the town ran two canals, with wooden slipways that were currently untenanted. Stenwold had no sense of whether boats visited here every day, or every tenday, or only twice a year, or never. Suon Ren seemed shorn of any concept of time or its passage.
Stenwold had expected some central palace or hall as a focal point. Instead, what must have been the local lord’s dwelling was set a little apart from the town, on a hill overlooking it. It was built to four storeys, and seemed like the empty ghost of the castle they had seen earlier – half of the lower two floors seeming solid, but the rest, and all the upper floors, just isolated panels and scaffolding, as though the place was still being constructed. The very highest floor, elegantly supported and buttressed, seemed to be some manner of garden, with vines and garlands of flowers spilling over the edge to dangle in a fringe around it.
Beyond the watch platforms, the town was mostly empty space. The centre of it, a large proportion of the ground area of Suon Ren, was a simple open circle that might have been marketplace, assembly point or fighting ring – or all or none of
them. The houses stood far apart, and there was no attempt at streets. Light and space dominated everywhere, the houses themselves built as open as possible. All were overshadowed by roofs made from flat wood and sloping in the same direction, so that there was always a higher end and a lower. Beneath the high end the walls lay open more than halfway to the ground, leaving a gap between wall-top and eaves that flitting Dragonflies could easily enter and leave by. Destrachis explained that inside there would be an outer room, in a ring shape, left open to the air save when it was shuttered against the worst of weathers. Yes, the door was that slot up there, beneath the roof, but the walls could all be moved and rearranged, for ground-walking visitors. Stenwold had difficulty understanding it all for, while Collegium was a city of the earth, Suon Ren owed more to the sky.
Encircled by the outer room, Destrachis continued, there would be the inner space where the family slept, protected from cold and weather. It all looked very fragile to Stenwold, as though the storm that had caught them overhead should have blown the entire town away.
At the far end of Suon Ren, its southern edge, there was a surprise waiting. There were three buildings that seemed to lurk self-consciously on the town’s periphery – all of them heavy and ugly and closed in. They were typical Beetle-style structures that might have been lifted straight from Collegium or Helleron.
‘What are those?’ he turned to ask the lead Mercer.
The woman looked down on him with surprise, as though he should know the answer already. ‘Your embassy, foreign master.’
There they met a man, a Beetle-kinden named Gramo Galltree, an old man with wispy white hair, dressed in the Dragonfly manner of a simple knee-length tunic and sleeveless robe. He received them standing barefoot in his small garden, and had not seemed surprised to encounter his countrymen so far from home. Instead he ushered the two other Beetles inside the largest of the three squat buildings standing nearby.
‘The little one over there is a Messenger’s Guild stopover,’ he explained. ‘Only a handful of them to be found in the whole Commonweal, but those Flies get everywhere. That’s how I ended up here – by following them. A whole other world, the Commonweal, and who’d have believed it?’
‘And that other building?’ Stenwold enquired.
‘Ah, well . . .’ Gramo stopped in the doorway, gazing at the medium-sized edifice that abutted the embassy. ‘I haven’t been inside there for a good while, but it used to be . . . Well, it used to be my workshop. I had this idea, when I came here . . . you know, to introduce a little sophistication, Collegium know-how . . . But I just sort of, well, lost interest – don’t think I’ve got the knack any more.’
Felise Mienn had not gone off with the Mercers, nor would she enter the embassy either. Instead she remained outside as though standing on guard, her hands resting on her sword-hilt. Destrachis sat outside with her, and it seemed to Stenwold that none of the tension had gone out of the doctor. He was still waiting for something dramatic from his patient.
‘When did you first arrive here?’ Stenwold asked their host. The interior of the embassy revealed the entire history of the man since he had arrived: the style and tastes of a cluttered Collegium house picked apart into the sparse and well-spaced preferences of a Commonwealer. The room he took his visitors over to had a heavy wooden desk and chair clogging one wall, but Gramo himself just sat down in the centre without thinking. Like the Fly-kinden, it seemed Commonwealers preferred using the floor, and to keep their rooms as free of furniture as possible.
The old man was counting to himself, his lips moving silently. ‘That must have been . . . oh, a good twenty years ago. At least twenty years.’
‘And who appointed you ambassador for the whole Lowlands?’ Jons Allanbridge demanded. He was in an irritable mood, concerned for the integrity of his ship, and he was suffering this delay in his repairs with ill grace.
‘Well,’ Gramo said, apologetically, ‘I thought it might be useful in case . . . just in case. And they have been very good to me, the Commonwealers. I did send letters back to the College, to say that I was here, you know, if they ever needed me.’ He looked from one face to the other, hopefully. Stenwold could imagine what reaction such missives would have received in the more conservative halls of the College.
‘So tell me,’ Gramo said, ‘what has brought you so far, then?’
It seemed he had not heard of the war, although he had heard of the Empire.
‘I don’t really know what to say,’ he admitted, when Stenwold had run through an accelerated history of the last year in Collegium. ‘It all seems to have happened so suddenly.’
‘It occurs to me,’ Stenwold told him, ‘that you now have a chance to make good your position here, Master Galltree. We need to speak urgently to the local Dragonfly lord, Felipe Shah.’
Gramo nodded. ‘Well, I knew that. I knew that even before I saw you. They told me, you see.’
His visitors exchanged glances.
‘Told you what? That we were coming?’ Stenwold asked. ‘But they couldn’t have known.’
Gramo’s smile was that of either a gleeful child or a senile old man. ‘Course they couldn’t, course they couldn’t, yet they do. They know so many things here. Didn’t believe it myself, at first, but you live with people long enough, you realize that most of it comes true whether you believe it or you don’t. They told me to prepare for guests almost a tenday ago, they did. Why, the Prince himself will send for you shortly.’
‘We won’t bother getting settled then,’ Allanbridge growled.
‘But I have already prepared beds. Several beds, since they didn’t say how many.’ Gramo made vague gestures to suggest the other rooms of his embassy. Seeing their uncertain expressions he explained, ‘When I say shortly . . . perhaps that is not as short here as I remember it being in Collegium.’
True to the old man’s words, no summons had come for them by nightfall. Allanbridge had elected to return to his precious Buoyant Maiden as the sky grew dark, but Stenwold felt that he had to humour Gramo, at least. The old man had been patiently waiting here for this kind of responsibility since before Stenwold had first locked horns with the Empire in his youth.
He spent an awkward night trying to cope with Commonweal sleeping arrangements, and soon came to the conclusion that the Dragonflies must until recently have slept in trees, and only just discovered the ground. As a result, a Commonweal bed was a kind of string net slung between two supporting beams of the house, like a sailor’s hammock, and throughout the night he had pitched and swung in it, and fell out of it, until he decided to sleep on the floor and to the wastes with protocol. When morning came, the searing sunrise washed into the house by every unshuttered window, as though Gramo had deliberately tried to make the place as airy as the homes of his hosts. Dawn brought Stenwold awake as readily as if it had slapped him. With every part of him aching, he sat up abruptly, cursing all the Commonweal and all ambassadors-gone-native.
He was not alone, he discovered. Kneeling in a corner, his back resting against the wall, was Destachis.
‘What is it about Spider-kinden,’ Stenwold muttered to himself, ‘that they just don’t respect privacy?’
‘She’s gone,’ said Destrachis.
Stenwold looked at him blearily.
‘Gone,’ Destrachis repeated. ‘Gone without a word.’ The extent of his hurt was evident in his dishevelled clothes, his uncombed hair – a Spider without his customary armour against the world.
‘Felise?’ Stenwold asked.
‘Of course Felise. Who else?’
‘Gone where? To do what?’
‘Just gone,’ Destrachis said. ‘Master Maker, I have to go after her.’
‘Destrachis, she’s with her own people now,’ Stenwold said. ‘That means she can come and go as she pleases, surely—’
‘Last night she was uneasy, unhappy. Perhaps too many memories were coming back at once.’ Destrachis bit at his lip. ‘But to go – just go without a word. Something must hav
e happened.’
‘You don’t think . . .’ Stenwold let the sentence trail off, unwilling to voice it, but no one else would. ‘You think she’s killed someone,’ he said.
Destrachis stared at him, the truth of that suggestion written on his face for even Stenwold to see. ‘I had thought . . . that her own people might bring her stability. When she was with the Mercers, it was as though she had never been hurt. But I saw it in her yesterday . . . it was all coming back, eating away at her.’
‘What will they do if she has killed someone? What do you know of Dragonfly justice?’
‘Dragonfly justice is swift and as fair as the prince that makes it,’ said Destrachis. ‘Also, that’s irrelevant. Felise Mienn is not sane, so they will not punish her. Madness is . . . special to them. They will try to contain her, but . . .’ His face creased. ‘They are strange, when it comes to madness. They revere it.’
‘First things first,’ said Stenwold. ‘Let’s go and see if anything has actually happened, then we can worry about the repercussions.’
They found Gramo Galltree, self-styled ambassador, tending the small herb garden at the back of his embassy. He bobbed and smiled a greeting at them as they approached. Their host had still been awake when Stenwold retired, so it was unclear whether he had slept at all.
‘The Mercer noblewoman?’ he said, when they asked him. ‘They came for her late last night.’
‘Came? Who came?’ Destrachis demanded.
‘A messenger from the Prince himself,’ Gramo said. ‘Apparently someone wished to speak with her.’
‘Then maybe she’s still there,’ Stenwold reasoned. Destrachis merely shook his head but said nothing.
‘You are also sent for,’ the Beetle ambassador said. ‘At your convenience.’
‘Prince Shah?’ Stenwold enquired.
Gramo chuckled indulgently. ‘Prince Felipe, you mean, but no, not him. Another at the castle requests your presence, perhaps even the same as sent for your friend. In your own time, though. When you are ready.’
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