‘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 have 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.