‘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 melee 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.