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
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.
