‘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.
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!’
