Tynisa could sense something else now, the same presence that had caused the stag to turn at bay. It was not the predator though that was surely up to making a meal of the huge beetle but something beyond it.

'Do your own people live here, Whitehand?' she hissed at Isendter from the corner of her mouth.

'Once they did,' he replied, which was the worst answer for her to hear. She had known places before where the Mantis-kinden had once lived, but dwelt no more. Sometimes they remained there, even though their living bodies had departed. She had not expected to find such a place in the Commonweal.

Another few steps in and she had pa.s.sed Alain, usurping his place within reach of the insect's killing arms. As she held up her tiny needle of a sword, a subtle succession of sounds behind told her that Alain had made good his retreat, and was being drawn away by Isendter.

Which just leaves me, she thought. She heard the creak of the bow again, and knew it was Orian, and that the young n.o.bleman was intending to do something n.o.ble and foolish. She thrust her left hand back towards him, palm out: Wait!

No arrow sped past, although the insect's head was c.o.c.ked to one side now, the mandibles twitching like knife-tipped fingers. Slowly she reached for her brooch, tugged it from her jacket and held it up at arm's length. You recognize this, don't you? her gesture said.

Its triangular head tilted further forward, and she somehow knew that it was regarding the Dragonfly-kinden arrayed behind her. 'They are under our protection,' she murmured, knowing that Isendter was still there and ready to back her up. The overarching mantis swayed again, as though trying to study the situation from all points of view.

Then it was picking its way backwards, with its killing arms still raised, until it reached a precise distance from her where their circles of influence no longer intersected. Whereupon it dropped down and moved off unhurriedly between the trees, a long, dark insect that was soon lost amid the confusion of trunks.

In its place, Tynisa now saw what she had known must be there. Twenty yards behind where the mantis had reared up was a circular clearing. It was not large, and the vegetation had made ample inroads into recolonizing it, but the weathered stump at its centre had been a totem once, such as she had seen far south of here on the same night she had earned the badge that was still clutched in her left hand.

A Mantis-kinden ritual site. Any questions she might have had about whether the Commonwealer Mantids were substantially different from their Lowlander kin were now answered. Blood had been spilled here, year after year, and though the Mantis-kinden had moved on, their legacy remained.

And then she saw him, hovering grey in the air above the ruined idol. Filmy and translucent he might be, but unmistakable. She risked a glance at Isendter, then at Alain, and it was clear that neither of them could see. Only she could preceive how, coalescing into view within the Mantids' sacred place here, was her father. Not that bloodied walking corpse that had lurked at the edge of her vision since his death, its outlines rendered barely human by the hacking treatment the Wasps had inflicted. This was the man unwounded and whole, for all that the trees showed through him, and though she stared and stared, he did not vanish, but grew stronger, heartbeat to heartbeat.

There was a moment when her three imagined haunters encroached on her, looming at her shoulders Achaeos with his load of guilt, Salma's bright smile, slaughtered Tisamon. In contrast to it, though, they were faint echoes. She had known hardship and horror, loss and remorse. She had seen her father hacked to death, had lost her beloved, had dealt a friend a mortal blow, and small wonder that she had peopled her world with reminders. Only now did she realize that they had been merely her crutch, forever distracting her, forever swatting her mind away.

She appreciated how far she had been from being mad until now, for the momentary glimpses of those three dead men were nothing in comparison to this. My father. Tisamon.

He was gazing at her with that smile he sometimes wore as he fought. How hard he must have fought, indeed, to claw his way back thus from death. She wanted to drop to her knees, but instead she found that she was holding her stance, keeping her blade up ready to fight.

I do not believe in magic. But those words became a distant, waning refrain, banished utterly as soon as she heard his familiar lost voice inside her head.

My daughter, spoke Tisamon. I am proud of you. I have so much left to teach you.

He had his hand held out towards her, and she had a dreadful sense of vertigo, as though she stood at a cliff edge, with a fathomless void below her, and she was leaning out . . . and leaning out, and . . .

Surely this is a terrible mistake. The dead must stay dead. But he was her father, and she was far from home and lost, and more in need of help than she had ever been.

She reached and took his hand.

Twenty-Three.

The fires would be seen for miles, making a statement that Dal had not quite wanted yet, but the fire-starters had intended just that, and he had not felt it politic to stop them.

Dal Arche had not known this village's name before he arrived here, or at least he had not been sufficiently interested to find out. Sara Tela was the name they had later supplied to him, though a piece of knowledge growing fast obsolete. All the houses were alight by now, those nearest the storehouse just starting to catch fire, whilst the first couple to be torched were blazing skeletons, with their outer shutters peeled away, and the inner walls merely ragged strips of charred wood. The wholesale destruction was a little ahead of schedule, for sparks were already drifting on to the storehouse's sloping roof even as his people were still loading up inside. There was food here, and wine, jars of kadith, bales of silk and cotton, all of it intended for onward barge to Leose. Unexpectedly there was also a small trove of old gold: inscribed lozenges dulled by time that had surely been pilfered by the local headman from some nearby ruin or mound. This discovery had put new heart into Dal's men, who had been less and less enthusiastic about this particular plan.

'Speed it up!' he shouted, letting his wings whisk him on to the storehouse roof, stamping on a few embers as he landed. His watchman was already there, the lean Gra.s.shopper-kinden named Soul Je, one of the three companions who had accompanied Dal Arche since before he came to resume this bandit life.

'Any sign?' Dal asked him.

The Gra.s.shopper shook his head. He had kept an arrow nocked to his longbow, but his chief purpose was keeping watch. When Dal arrived here, he had antic.i.p.ated the possibility of someone taking notice. With the smoke forming a pillar all the way to the sun, such attention was guaranteed.

For the last tenday, Dal had been just testing the waters of brigandage. First there had been a few isolated individuals: a crofter, a herdsman, Dal's band making free with what little they possessed, slaughtering animals for meat, taking their food and drink. Dal had gathered around twenty men by that point and the pickings had been slim, even if their victims had been quick to surrender them.

Then there had been the attack on a convoy of pack-crickets led by a Dragonfly functionary bringing in some taxes. He had a quartet of Gra.s.shopper guards escorting him, but Dal's people had caught them utterly by surprise, leaping or flying from all around with bows drawn back. The tax-gatherer had sat glumly by and watched the bandits whoop and cheer as they salvaged this unexpected haul. When they were done, Dal had considered letting his people shoot the witnesses, as many had wished to, but had ruled against it. Word was going to spread in any event, and if he got a reputation that suggested surrender was useless, then a great many such fights might get a good deal harder to win.

He had taken his men to ground after that, let them enjoy the meagre spoils in the heart of a small wood while he planned his next move.

It reminded him of the way it had been after the war. The Wasps had changed his life, but he could not say whether that was for the better or not. Before the war he had been a woodsman, hunting and tracking game to keep his village fed, spending his days out of doors and his nights in a variety of beds a loner, but not an outsider, and with more than a few admirers. It was a better living than many enjoyed, surely. The village headman had not bothered him, and the nearest n.o.ble had barely troubled the headman. It was a way of life that had been turning its slow circles for ever, and could have done so for ever more or so it seemed to all concerned.

Then the Wasp Empire had mounted its grand invasion a people and a nation that n.o.body in Dal Arche's village had ever heard of, and originating so many miles away it might have been something out of a folk tale until, that is, the prince's recruiters came. There was to be a levy, and the headman had been given a quota: young men and women to be sent off to the war.

Some had volunteered, most had been put forward by others or decided by the headman's fiat. The old man had even sent his own son, acting from faith or guilt. They had been supplied with spears and padded cuira.s.ses, and Dal had brought along his little woodsman's bow. And so they had gone to war.

Of those young men and women conscripted into the Commonweal's grand army from Dal's village, only Dal himself survived. The others had died, almost all together, charging the Wasp lines: scorched by stings, lanced by crossbow bolts, butchered by the sword. Only Dal, the archer, had lived, to be taken up by the princes and put into another force. He had been one of several such archers, but he had been a swifter flier and a better shot, and more than that, he had come to understand that few of the n.o.bles directing the battles had the slightest idea of what they were doing. The Wasps had come against them with their flying machines and their automotives, their ordered formations, their ballistae and their stings. In return, the Commonweal had brought its ma.s.sed ranks of spears, its vast, untrained and frightened peasant levy, within which, studded like gems, were the glittering retinues of individual n.o.bles and princes.

Dal never went home again. He did not want to look into the faces of villagers he had grown up with, and see their eyes accuse him of the crime of being the only man to return. Nor could he go back to being a simple woodsman.

He had sworn that he would never be the subject of princes again.

After the war the Commonweal was a different place. The Monarch's lands had already possessed their share of vacant provinces, gone to seed without a n.o.ble's ruling hand and becoming a haunt for the lawless and the wild. The war had killed off many of the old families, and at the same time released onto the land far too many men who had known war, and would not take up the plough again.

Dal had thus become a bandit, and a leader of bandits. Then he had been caught, not by some aggrieved prince but by the Empire, near whose borders he had strayed. Escaping eventually from Imperial custody, he and three comrades had tried to make a living by hunting down fugitives, but business had been bad, and princes were poor paymasters. In the end it had been the free outlaw's life again for Dal.

He remembered Siriell, and how she had been building her own princ.i.p.ality in miniature: yoking together violent men like Dal and making them work in partnership, laying the foundations of a community.

So much for that.

A few days ago he had acquired another thirty men, the first batch that Mordrec and the others had recruited, so he had decided it was time to go hunting once more. They had found a barge heading for Leose and captured it there had been no guards, for word of Dal's activities was slow in spreading, and there had been little brigandage in these parts for years, thanks to Siriell's moderating influence. Dal had thought the barge attack had pa.s.sed without bloodshed, but then the barge's master, for inexplicable reasons, had attacked one of the brigands as they were exploring the hold. In the fracas that followed, five of the barge's crew of six had been killed, but Dal shed no tears for them. If it was useful to have a reputation that said those who surrendered would live, it was similarly useful to make it known that those who resisted would die. That was the code of wise robbers by land and sea all over the world. As a compromise, he had let the final bargeman go unharmed, just to spread the tale.

The barge had originally been heading here to Sara Tela, and Dal and a few companions had then seen it to its destination. On arrival the headman had come down to the quay with his servants and household, eager to get the goods unloaded and ready for the tax collectors. Sara Tela was a wretchedly poor place, Dal had noted, the houses small and shabby, the land around it half barren, the fields mean. He had grown up in just such a place, living on land that could barely support the people farming it, let along a hierarchy of increasingly distant n.o.bles.

Even as the man approached, Dal had put an arrow into the headman, before the eyes of his family and followers. Some of the rest had fled, others had tried to fight, but the bandits outnumbered them, and had arrows already nocked. It had been a short and miserable piece of business, and most of the locals had not run, but simply watched, not remotely minded to step in to save their headman or his henchmen, and maybe curious as to what Dal would do next. They had gathered their children close to them and watched. We are poor, their silence seemed to say. Will you take that from us, too?

A ripple had gone through them when Dal had sent his Scorpion lieutenant, Ygor, over to the storehouse to force open the door. Barad Ygor was a showman at heart and, after severing the rope ties with his claws, he had thrown the door wide and stepped back dramatically.

Now Dal Arche's followers were finishing up their looting, taking everything of value and loading it on the barge, before burning whatever was left behind. Those villagers who had fled would find all the days and months of their lives undone, and perhaps they would starve. Where would they go? Perhaps they would seek solace from their betters, begging at the steps of the n.o.bility whose solemn duty was to provide for them and protect them. Dal did not rate their chances highly, for he had seen the face of the n.o.bility, and by actions such as this he was going to hold a mirror up to it.

See what your rulers truly are, he thought. I have seen, and so shall you.

He would wager that the Salmae would be slow to offer succour to those he was now making homeless, but they would be quick to avenge this slight on their honour and this infringement of their feudal rights, just as they had not been able to leave Siriell's Town alone and in peace.

Soul Je jogged him with an elbow abruptly. Company was approaching: a party of riders galloping alongside the ca.n.a.l towards the blazing buildings.

Dal squinted, and counted half a dozen. A quick glance at the sky showed no sign of dragonfly-riders up there, nor had there been time for cavalry to come all the way from Leose itself. This must be some band of Mercers who happened to be in the area, perhaps investigating Dal's earlier misdeeds.

He kicked off from the roof and landed in the village's heart, surrounded by the collapsing skeletons of houses and a flurry of glowing embers. 'Get it stowed right away. They're coming!' he shouted, and his people, new and old, doubled their pace, practically throwing everything on to the barge. The draught-nymph was already in place ready to drag the bulky craft back the way it had come, though of course the riders could outstrip it easily.

There were Mercers and Mercers, Dal knew. If this little band turned out to be the Monarch's own those wandering hero-magistrates who kept the peace, helped the needy, defended the weak, and put people like Dal Arche in his place then his plan was sunk even before it could get under way. The Monarch had such good intentions, Dal knew, and would be horrified to learn that a peasant woodsman was gnawing at the fabric of Commonweal society in such a way. The Monarch was far, far away, though. The Monarch also, in Dal's firmly held belief, reserved righteous indignation for the unruly peasants of this world, and turned a blind eye to the evils of the great and the good unless they ventured into outright treason.

The Monarch dispatched Mercers across the Commonweal to do her will, but the Commonweal was vast, and they were few. So it was that each n.o.ble house maintained its own elite, and called them Mercers for all that the t.i.tle had never been earned. Dal was betting a great deal that these riders were locally grown. They would still be well trained and equipped, with glittering armour of steel and chitin, with bows and swords and majestic steeds. They would also be equipped with a thousand years of tradition telling them how much better they were than the wretches who dared offend against the natural order of the world.

Dal shrugged his recurved bow off his shoulder, one hand selecting an arrow from his quiver.

The Commonweal had always had brigands, like a beast had ticks. They had included disaffected peasants, criminals, the estranged and the misfits. They had preyed on good and honest folk, and the princes had hunted them down and brought justice back to the land. Everyone knew that, of course.

There were fewer stories about those times when a n.o.ble had gone bad: second sons and daughters not content to be left without an inheritance, the cruel, the mad, the feuding those who rallied evildoers about them and set themselves up as petty tyrants. It was considered bad luck to tell stories about such fallen princes, in case their virtuous kin should take offence.

Dal watched as the band of hors.e.m.e.n galloped closer to the burning village, while sparks drifted either side of him or landed, stinging, on his skin. The now-empty storehouse would catch fire soon enough, completing his day's work.

It was always the case: a few of Dal's people had not withdrawn soon enough, still chasing some last piece of loot, or just believing they knew better. One of them caught an arrow in the chest, the lead Mercer standing up in the saddle to loose it without his mount's speed slackening at all. The rest scattered as the six riders thundered between the burning ruins of the houses, aiming directly for the barge.

In the past, brigands had been nothing but angry, maladjusted farmers, with perhaps the odd woodsman amongst them who could string a bow. Mercers, even the local kind, were a constant terror to them. Even now the stragglers among Dal's people were fleeing in all directions, while the Mercers rode past them, turning in the saddle to aim and loose arrows at every target, and hitting them more often than not.

Dal took careful aim and loosed, too, but the rearmost rider shouted a warning even as he did so. The shaft struck the approaching woman's shimmering breastplate and glanced off, knocking her sideways and half out of the saddle. A moment later, she had taken to the air, as did half the others.

Soul Je took careful aim and put a three-foot shaft through the Mercer woman, striking an inch over her breastplate's collar and plucking her out of the sky. Dal's shaft was supposed to have provided the signal, but it was her blood that prompted the brigands to counterattack.

Of those fleeing to the barge, perhaps a dozen had courage enough to turn around and face the horses, bending bows and setting spears. Amongst them was the Wasp, Mordrec, his hands flashing fire as the Mercers came on. On all sides, though, Dal's people were suddenly springing from behind bushes, from the perilous shadows of burning buildings, from the waters of the ca.n.a.l itself. Arrows danced and sang through the air, mostly to no avail, but three separate shafts managed to strike the same man and throw him from his saddle. He was still alive as he hit the ground, his mail preserving him from the onslaught of the flimsy hunting bows most of the bandits carried. Then there were spearmen converging on him, three or four of them together, and within six or seven stabs they had found some part of him the armour did not cover.

The other Mercers were circling, two on horseback still and two in the air. Had they chosen to flee then, they would have got away with it. Dal could see their faces, though, and realized that they could not believe what was happening to them that peasants were taking such liberties with their lives.

Dal Arche selected another arrow, then waited for a target to present itself. He saw one of the horses rear and fall as Mordrec's sting lashed into it. The rider tried heading for the sky but one of Dal's men struck him across the back with a cudgel, and another, a Gra.s.shopper, leapt high in the air and grabbed hold of him, bringing the stunned man down to earth again. Another Mercer had gone down with a crossbow bolt in the leg, courtesy of Barad Ygor, and now Ygor's pet scorpion was busy savaging the victim, claws prying apart mail and plates to get at the meat beneath.

Dal Arche sighted carefully, as calm as a man on a practice range, and sent a shaft through one of the fliers' throat even as the Mercer was drawing back his own bowstring.

Their final opponent was ascending, up and up, still staring downwards in incredulous horror. Dal called up his own wings, but Soul was aiming, string pulled back beside his ear as he sighted almost into the sun. The arrow leapt from his bow, so fast as to seem invisible, and all Dal saw was the shuddering impact, and then the Mercer was tumbling from the heavens.

In the old days, bandits had been those unable or unwilling to live under the rule of princes, and perhaps that had not changed. What had changed, though, was the number of disgruntled peasants who had been ripped from their land and forced to fight in a war, who had seen their friends and comrades and families cast away in one doomed battle after another, as the Empire ground its way across the Commonweal map. They had died in their droves, those levies of the Commonweal, given spears but no training and scattered like chaff against the greatest armies of the world. Those who had survived, though . . .

Those that survived had learned soldiering the hard way. Men like Dal Arche himself, baked hard in the fires of war, tough men with sharp edges. They had lasted out the war itself and then found they could not go home, either because it was now beneath the Imperial flag, or because they had changed so much in character that nowhere in the Commonweal seemed like home to them.

They were the men who had learned what comes of following princes.

When the fighting was over, Dal flew down to confer with his lieutenants, as the rest of his men prepared the barge for its departure.

'We won't get it that easy again,' Mordrec remarked.

'When have we ever had it easy?' Dal asked him. 'I want you three to go back south and keep recruiting. We'll need more men.'

'The Salmae are going to be riled,' noted the Wasp. 'We're sure we know what we're doing?'

Dal looked from face to face. 'The Salmae have already shown us that they won't accept us as neighbours. They wrote that message clear enough. Now we've sent them our reply, in proper n.o.ble language.'

'We've declared war,' Mordrec translated.

'That's what I said,' agreed Dal, seeing Soul Je, who seldom spoke, nodding in agreement.

Dal turned to view his followers, casting his gaze over all of them. The new faces, those who had formerly been the peasants of Sara Tela, were staring at the dead Mercers with a world of possibilities in their eyes.

Twenty-Four.

Salme Ela.s.s, Princess of Leose, felt herself poised on the brink of a great height, and the time had come to cast herself from it.

She sat in the chamber she governed from: not for her a garden, like Felipe Shah, but a high-ceilinged room where lofty windows let in coloured shafts of light that crossed each other like sword blades. There was a warrior statue on either side of her, the kind that the ancient magicians of her people had supposedly been able to imbue with life in order to defend their royal charges. All lost, she thought. Yet another thing lost, and n.o.body will do anything to stop these sands running through our fingers.

There were some, she knew, who had already grown sick with that loss, so that they turned away from the destiny that princes lived for. Felipe Shah had grown weak after the war, cut so deep by his losses that he feared to take any action, lest some further calamity befall him. Lowre Cean was another, although Ela.s.s still had a use for him.

And the Monarch is a third. A strong Monarch would make a strong Commonweal, but there was only silence from Shon Fhor. The land might as well now be leaderless.

It is time for someone of will and ambition to take a stand and recover what we have lost. The Commonweal can rise again, but those of us who are not grown palsied by doubt must act.

On either side of the two statues stood her chief servants: Isendter Whitehand, her champion, and Lisan Dea, her seneschal, both of them bound to her by the iron chains of loyalty. Both also thinking they knew best, but they were not prince or princess. They were not even Dragonfly-kinden, merely servants.

The brigands to the south were growing bold, no doubt expecting the usual Mercer patrols in response, just enough manpower diverted in their direction to make their raids difficult and costly and persuade them to look elsewhere for their loot. Thus the Commonweal had been dealing with its internal problems for years, either letting the villains run riot in abandoned provinces, or pa.s.sing them on to a neighbour, who pa.s.sed the problem on in turn, all motivated by some hope that time itself would smooth over the growing cracks.

No more. Ela.s.s had already sent out summonses to those minor n.o.bles who she knew would heed her, and would therefore act. They were few enough, a half-dozen tiny families with a handful of house guards and a minuscule levy available to them. There were others, though, who had the resources but lacked the will. She needed a standard to inspire them, for the name of the Salmae was not yet great enough in its own right.

Ungrateful wretches, she thought bitterly. Her husband had died in the war, and her eldest son, too, and then her middle son had been taken by Felipe and sent to die in the Lowlands. And still they will not rise up at my bidding.

It would be different, she knew, if it were Lowre Cean sounding the horn and leading the charge. The old man's name still carried weight, one of the few Commonweal leaders who had won any significant victories against the Empire. The effort of it had worn Lowre out, though, since he had lost his lands, his wife, his adored son. Even though he lived on Salmae soil, and by her graces, he would not draw his sword for her.

Until now, I hope, for something had changed. The girl had come, the one who had been trailing Alain's footsteps so much. Ela.s.s was unsure of the Lowlander's significance, but apparently Felipe Shah had been much impressed with her, and now she was part of old Lowre's household, and obviously held in some esteem. Then there had been that business with the dance, and some piece of drama at Alain's idiot hunt. She had made a name for herself, and it was not hard to see the direction her affections were pointed in.

It would not be the first time that Alain had come back with some beggar girl following at his heels, believing . . . what? Believing that the sanct.i.ty of princes would make her an exception, Ela.s.s supposed. And of course, they had no princes in the Lowlands, no royal blood, nothing but a grubby overcla.s.s of merchants, so she understood. The Spider girl would never be a suitable match for Alain, but likewise she would never understand the barriers between them. But she might be useful: a tool to take in hand and turn against the world, for old Lowre Cean was sentimental, and had clearly taken the girl to heart. Where a princess's pleas might fall on deaf ears, the same words from Maker Tynise could sway him. So long as Ela.s.s could control her. So long as Alain had not already overplayed his part.

The n.o.bility of the Commonweal observed complex strata of love-play, tiers and hierarchies, subtle distinctions, all the soft arts and their related games the degrees of distance and attachment. There were the casual attractions, involving a single meeting and a parting, and no more. There were the soul-mates married and matched and bound together. There were the comrades enjoying a closeness of delicate balance not to be marred by fierce pa.s.sions but no less a bond of love. The Spider girl hardly merited either of the last two, but Ela.s.s could only hope that her son had not already made of Tynisa the former already had her and had done with her leaving nothing that Ela.s.s could use.

For of course there was another relationship, to be held close and yet not touched: that of the useful servant, the special tool that will only be persuaded by promises. And let Alain remember his station, what he is and what she is, and not raise her too high nor cast her too far away . . .

'You are sure she will come here?' she asked, speaking into the silence that had held sway for more than an hour now, while she reflected.

'My divination tells me so and soon. Today most likely,' Lisan Dea replied.

'Then you must be ready to greet her,' Ela.s.s instructed, with a gesture of dismissal. Lisan was unhappy about the business, she knew, but it was not her seneschal's place to comment on the designs of her betters.