‘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.
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.