Salute the Dark (14 page)

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.

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.