Heirs of the Blade

Two

Salma, Prince-Minor Salme Dien: the only Commonwealer student to attend at Collegium in living memory. He had been sent there because the Commonweal had lost its war with the Wasp-kinden, and Prince-Major Felipe Shah had foreseen that the Lowlanders might become allies against a common enemy. The boy had come to Collegium in his grand finery, with his exotic manners and his golden skin and his inimitably mocking smile.

That year at the College, he and Tynisa had danced around each other like two moths circling the same lantern, closer and closer and yet… always when she felt she could reach out and find his hand extended back towards her, he was away again. She wove her webs but never caught him. Always his dance took him away from her, until it was she who followed him, trying to match his steps.

But she would have had him eventually, she knew. Given time, shielded from distraction, he would have been hers. This was an article of faith with her.

But Salma had been distracted along the way by a Butterfly-kinden dancing girl who seemed to change her name every other day, but these days just called herself Grief, as though she had some kind of monopoly on that emotion. Tynisa had never believed in magic, but she found that she could readily concede that Salma had been enchanted by the glow-skinned Butterfly witch.

Even then, she had known in her deepest heart that it would not last. Salma was a fighter, a flier, a man who lived his life without chains. He would need more in the end. He would come back to Tynisa, who alone could match him in all things.

The Empire had not given him the chance, though. Salma, because of who he was and the society that had given birth to him, had become a rallying point for the dispossessed and the refugees. He had led his makeshift army against the Imperial advance, and there, crossing blades with a Wasp general, he had died. And thus the adamantine cord of their joint destiny, which she was sure had been on the very cusp of drawing them close again, had been parted for ever

She awoke with a start, baffled by the curving contours of the room about her, by the turbulent swaying of her surroundings. Most of all she awoke into the evaporating sense of Salma. Sometimes she dreamt of him rather than of the others, and those dreams were warm and bright. Waking from them cut as deep as any number of nightmares.

He was there as she woke. She did not see him, but his presence was unmistakable, sitting on the edge of her bed and watching her sleep. She even reached a hand out and, in the uncertainty of waking, fully believed that she would touch his golden skin.

The weakness came upon her which had oppressed her since everything had gone so fatally wrong. For a moment she could not move, could not stand, could not even bear to think. Some part of her tried its very hardest not to be.

But the world would not oblige, and she understood that she was still aboard the Windlass, of course, and it was aloft. Catching her balance against the constant shifting motion, she went aloft to find Allanbridge at the wheel. Normally she would have been woken by the Windlass ’s oil-drinking engine, but today the airship was moving under clockwork power alone, and using as little of that as Allanbridge needed to keep the craft steady. Instead, most of the work was being done by the burner hoisted up beneath the balloon. The aviator had tried to explain how it all worked, how there was some special gas in the canopy that pulled up, and how it pulled up more when it was heated, but none of it had made a great deal of sense to Tynisa.

Now, though, whatever the gas was, it was pulling like a team of draught beetles, and the Windlass was ascending with all the ponderous grace of a Collegium matron taking to the air. The cracked and riven wall of the Ridge coursed past them to port, and it seemed that at any moment the airship would be dashed against it, its balloon ruptured and hull smashed to splinters, but Allanbridge knew his trade, and so the Windlass maintained her steady climb.

‘Suon Ren’s just over the edge?’ Tynisa asked him.

‘A little further than that, but close enough,’ he agreed. ‘I’ll put you down in sight of it.’

Tynisa glanced up at the looming curve of the balloon above. ‘I thought you weren’t welcome there. If you’re in sight of the city, then they’ll be able to see that,’ pointing at the great swell of inflated silk above them.

Allanbridge shrugged, his expression closed. ‘Your man there, Felipe Shah, he’s progressive, so if he looks out of the window and sees an airship, he won’t think the sky’s falling on his head – not unless it’s black and yellow, anyway. As for the rest of them, you’d be surprised what they can make themselves not see.’

They cleared the crest of the Ridge shortly after, and suddenly the sky was whole again, the late autumn sun crisp and clear over them. Allanbridge made adjustments that sent the Windlass scudding over a rugged landscape of abrupt hills and heavy jutting outcrops of stone. It looked to Tynisa almost as if some great cresting wave of rock had been rolling forward with the intention of burying the Lowlands for ever, but here it had frozen in a rubble of stony foam.

She watched shadows duck and bob as a trio of bees, bigger than she was, bumbled over the rough ground. ‘Where are the people?’ she asked. The land was green enough, but wild and devoid of human life.

‘Commonweal’s a big place, girl,’ Allanbridge told her. ‘Galltree told me that the locals reckon it drives you mad to live too close to the edge. Given most of ’em can fly, seems strange to me. Maybe the lords and princes and what have you spread that word, to stop people getting ideas about heading off elsewhere, eh?’

Soon after, the Windlass was making her leisurely way over irregular fields ribbed by the plough. Some were deformed by the contours of the land, but a little further on the land had been cut to fit them, each hill stepped and tiered so that, from their lofty perspective, the land appeared as a series of concentric rings.

‘There,’ Allanbridge prompted. ‘See there?’

‘What’s that?’ She spotted a little arrangement of buildings ahead, though still nothing much that she would call civilization.

‘It’s Suon Ren, girl.’

‘That’s a village.’

‘It’s Suon Ren,’ Allanbridge repeated. ‘Round these parts, that kind of place qualifies as a centre of trade and culture.’

At this distance it was hard to tell, but there were just three stone-built structures that looked like civilization to her. Beyond that, there stood some absolute fantasy of a building on a hill overlooking the rest, four floors high, but most of it either wooden-walled or with no walls at all, and crowned with an overflowing roof garden that cascaded trailing vines and creepers halfway to the ground. All the rest of the place was a loose-knit circle of small dwellings around a central space, nothing but little slant-roofed wooden buildings, and each far enough from its neighbours that the community seemed a collection of hermits. North of it all, the sun caught two silver lines that must be rivers, save that they were too straight to be natural. On one, a long boat of some kind was making a slow, sail-less progress.

Allanbridge was now guiding the Windlass down by some complex artifice, cutting even the clockwork and letting the vast bulk of the airshop ghost silently along, its keel almost brushing the flattened peaks of hills. At the last, he did something that caused a rattling within the ship’s bowels, and shortly after that they had dragged to a stop.

For a moment the Beetle aviator stared at her, his face fought over by expressions of sympathy and dislike. At last he sighed, plainly about to make some gesture he fully expected to regret. ‘I’m heading north, you hear me? Siriell’s Town, it’s called. No place that Felipe Shah and his like would be seen dead in, either. North of here the land runs lawless – or else the only law is Siriell’s, and she’s no noblewoman nor princess.’

Tynisa was not even trying to keep the look of disdain from her face. Those were the same people that Salma’s family must have fought against, the enemy of the Commonweal before the Empire came. But Master Allanbridge needs his profits, is that it?

‘Look…’ Allanbridge got out a scroll and a reservoir pen and began sketching, quick, rough outlines. ‘Here’s us, Suon Ren there.. . canals, you see them north of us… hills… woods, just the basics, the lie of the land. There’s no road, but if you keep to this course’ – a dotted line on the map – ‘you’ll see Siriell’s Town soon enough. Can’t miss the place.’ He thrust the makeshift map at her as though it was a weapon, making some part of her instinctively twitch for her sword. ‘Going to be doing business there, and then a round of some other contacts in the vicinity, and then back there to pick up what goods I’ve asked after. Then I’m gone, set for Collegium, and won’t be in these parts for half a year at least.’ When she still seemed not to understand him he sighed mightily and went on. ‘You’ll want back. This Commonweal is a madhouse. You come find me at Siriell’s Town, I’ll take you back home, and maybe neither of us need to mention this entire journey.’

‘I won’t be going back,’ she told him firmly.

‘I’m just saying.’ When at last she took the map from him, Allanbridge stepped back, plainly indicating that his work was done.

Minutes later she was standing on the earth of the Commonweal, and the Windlass was receding like a dream.

She set a good pace for Suon Ren, keeping her eye on the three stone-built structures that clustered together as though ready for an attack by the savages. As she grew nearer, the closing of distance mended some of her initial impression. The Commonweal houses were delicate, looking as though a strong wind would blow them away, but equally it was plain that they had been where they were for a long time. One moment she was the surrogate child of Beetles, born to stone and brick and tile, amid the foundries and the factories and the bustle of industry. Then some inner voice in her called out to awaken her vision, and she saw Suon Ren as its makers had intended.

The graceful dwellings of the Commonwealers were built from wood, true, but also from artistry and exacting skill. Each was like a puzzle-box, its walls composed of sliding panels so that this building was open down half one side, the next one open from halfway up to its roof, the very boundaries mobile and changeable. The roofs were each a single slope, and all sloping in the same direction, as though the entire town was a field of flowers angled at the sun.

She saw it then, although she could never have put it into words. She saw the world from which Salma had sprung.

The largest of the three stone-built structures would be the Lowlander embassy, self-proclaimed, and that was where she went first, waiting at every moment to be challenged by the locals. She knew that the Commonweal enforced its own isolation. She knew that theirs was not a society devoid of martial prowess. Any moment, she expected winged challengers to drop from the skies to arrest her.

Instead, she walked through the scattered buildings of Suon Ren as though in a dream, and nobody so much as looked at her – rather, they ignored her pointedly. She was not part of their world. The Dragonfly-kinden peasants toiling in the fields, the lookouts atop tall platforms, the citizens of Suon Ren as they strolled between its buildings, or spoke together in low voices, they none of them admitted to her existence.

She found the Collegiate ambassador outside the embassy. Stenwold had mentioned this man, one Gramo Galltree, an academic long forgotten in his home city and now on a one-man diplomatic mission. He was an old Beetle-kinden, his hair white and wispy, his dark face creased by time and the sun. He could have been any elderly merchant or College lecturer, save that he stood with the ease of a younger man, and he wore a yellow knee-length tunic with a dark green sleeveless robe over it, clothes in the Dragonfly style. After she had stood, for some minutes, watching him tend a little vegetable garden, he looked up and bobbed his head at her, seeming unsurprised to find her there.

‘Master Galltree?’ she asked, and saw him instantly revise his opinion as he heard her accent.

‘Ah, official business, then?’ He carefully leant his rake against the embassy wall. ‘I apologize. There are a few communes of Spider-kinden here in the Commonweal, so I’d thought you were local. Please, please, I’m a terrible host. Won’t you come in? You have letters for me perhaps?’

Before she could stem the flow of his words, he was bustling inside, forcing her to either follow him or abandon him.

‘So, what matters has the Assembly sent you to me about?’ His voice drifted from some other room as she entered. The interior of the embassy had once been dominated by a few items of Collegiate furniture, making her wonder just how grand Galltree’s enterprise had originally been, when he arrived here decades before. Everything had now been shoved back against the wall, though, and mostly shunted together into one corner, so as to leave as much open space as possible. The windows were thrown open to try and counterbalance the heaviness of the stone walls, and those walls were hidden behind light hangings in tans and faded reds. The overall impression was that Galltree seldom thought much about his original home.

He bustled back in, even then, carefully holding a steaming pot and a little tripod, and set them up in the centre of the floor, as though he was going camping. He sat down, with remarkable ease for a man of his years, and gestured for her to join him. Everything about him, and about her surroundings, was subtly off, with nothing working as she expected, and she felt obscurely threatened, keeping a hand on her rapier hilt for comfort. In the corner of her eye was the suggestion of spectres waiting for their moment: her doubts and fears in a grey robe, with a blank-eyed, accusing face.

‘My name is Tynisa Maker,’ she told him. ‘I’m Stenwold’s ward.’

He nodded amiably, as if he had expected no less. ‘I knew that Master Maker would not forget Collegium’s most far-flung outpost. He sends word?’

Galltree’s expression was painfully earnest, and Tynisa took a moment to reorder her words. She was no emissary, yet surely she would secure an audience more swiftly if everyone assumed she was. She would never have to claim it as a fact, when Galltree already seemed to have made the assumption. ‘I wish an audience with Prince Shah,’ she told him.

He looked a little disappointed that he was not being let in on her supposed official business, but he nodded amiably enough, filling a couple of shallow cups from the pot, and then let a little wrapped package steep in each of them. ‘I cannot say whether Prince Felipe is in residence at the moment. He has been in and out, as we say, in the last month or so, visiting his fealtors to the west mostly. However, let us sup, and then we can present ourselves – and at least let the castle staff know that a dignitary from Collegium is here.’

The drink tasted mostly like some sort of soup, surprisingly rich and savoury. ‘Kadith,’ Galltree explained. ‘Very popular with the nobility. Each breeds his own, you see, with different herbs and grasses. It’s quite a commodity for barter between provinces.’ Seeing her frown he hooked out his little bundle. ‘The larvae build their little homes from what plants are given them, you see, so the flavour varies from pond to pond.’

‘Oh, caddis,’ she declared, as sudden understanding came to her. The strangeness of it was lost in the fact that the drink was so good. She had the errant thought, We should import this to Collegium, before she reminded herself that she was not going back there.

They passed amongst the dispersed buildings of Suon Ren, the locals breezing past, but ignoring her, and barely acknowledging Galltree himself. Tynisa had a sense of their contentment, everything around them part of a grand and changeless pattern that had endured for centuries – a pattern she had yet to earn a place in. An echo of Salma glittered and danced amongst them, teasing her memory for once without drawing blood. The Commonwealers walked, meditated or wrote, practised their archery or took off into the sky on shimmering wings. There was precious little talk at all between them, as though everything worth saying had already been thoroughly discussed by their grandparents’ parents. Aside from a single man hammering away at a forge on the edge of town, the loudest thing in Suon Ren was the younger children, who chased about between the buildings in some game that involved tagging one another and then running away. Tynisa smiled to watch them, until she heard one child cry out, while tagging another, ‘You’re the Wasp! You’re the Wasp!’

‘The war never came this far, did it?’ she asked Galltree, realizing, as she did, that her knowledge of Commonweal geography was almost entirely lacking.

‘No indeed,’ he replied, ‘but many of Prince Felipe’s people travelled to meet it.’

Then they were ascending the rise that led to the castle, and Tynisa began to appreciate what a bizarre folly the place truly was. The structure seemed to make do with half the walls of any other building – not that whole sides of it were open but, instead, great sections of its exterior, at various heights, had simply been omitted, allowing both sight and access into the building’s interior. Much that was there was strewn with green, a profusion of vines tumbling in a verdant mane from some manner of roof garden, and other gardens within, also, to merge seamlessly with the outside. There were inner walls, too, but they were no more complete than the outer, so that, looking into the heart of the castle, Tynisa experienced a feeling not unlike vertigo – finding her Lowlander sense of boundaries and borders constantly violated.

Gramo stopped abruptly, and for a moment she could not work out why. Only after a moment’s reflection did she guess that a few more steps would actually have brought them notion-ally within, a separate space whose limits were entirely invisible to her.

‘Do we… Is there a bell we ring?’ she asked.

‘We wait,’ Gramo advised. ‘You must realize, the Commonwealers do not have that sense of urgency you may recall from Collegium.’

She could see people further within, who she guessed were servants busy about the tasks of maintaining the place, but none of them seemed to see her. The unseen walls of this place evidently blocked her from their notice.

With a little creaking of joints, Gramo seated himself. ‘Ah, but there is no such thing as idle time in the Commonweal. This is a time to reflect and to meditate upon one’s life.’

The idea brought a sour taste to Tynisa’s mouth. I have no more need of that kind of introspection. Anything but. ‘I can’t see how this sort of building can have stood them much stead during the war,’ she remarked, to burn away the silence.

‘Oh, this is no castle, in that sense,’ Gramo admitted. ‘This is Prince Felipe’s new home, built after the loss of his family’s original seat of power. There is little enough change in the Commonweal, but this is a new… interpretation, shall I say, of their architecture. Mind you, I’m afraid their stone castles hardly fared better than this one would. Perhaps that’s the point.’

There was a flurry of wings and a Dragonfly landed a few yards away, a lean man with high cheekbones and hollow cheeks, his hair a steely grey. As he approached them, he moved like a man in his prime, and nothing in his manner or stance suggested age. His clothing was in green and blue, a robe and under-robe as Gramo wore, but of far finer quality, being silk embroidered with gold. For a moment, Tynisa thought that this must, in fact, be the prince unexpectedly answering his own door.

‘Seneschal Lioste,’ Gramo named him. ‘You do me much honour with your presence.’

‘Ambassador,’ the seneschal replied, neither warmly nor coldly, but a simple statement of fact. His eyes flicked to Tynisa questioningly.

‘Ah, well.’ Gramo gestured vaguely in her direction, ‘we have a visitor from the Lowlands, as you may guess. She is sent by Master Stenwold Maker, who visited with the prince so recently.’ The full year that had passed did not make a dent in that ‘recent’, Tynisa guessed. ‘Tynisa Maker is here to pay her formal respects to the prince, or to his retinue during his absence.’

Seneschal Lioste stared at her and said nothing.

‘Your prince, of course, welcomed Master Maker on his visit, as did the Monarch, since when your prince has taken a refreshingly open stance, of course, towards my homeland,’ Gramo went on, hands worrying at the cloth of his robe. The Dragonfly glanced at him, face carefully blank, and then his eyes returned to Tynisa.

‘Mistress Maker is here at his behest – Master Maker’s, that is – formal greetings from the Lowlands… in this new, this day and age …’ Gramo faltered to a stop.

‘Prince Felipe has yet to return,’ the seneschal said, and Tynisa decoded his expression at last. Here was a man faced with something that he had no idea what to do with.

‘Mistress Maker was hoping to be admitted to the castle,’ Gramo tried gamely. ‘Master Maker, when he was here, was summoned, of course …’

‘Master Maker had brought home one of the Monarch’s subjects,’ the Seneschal reminded him, apparently seizing on something that he at last understood. It was plain that, however progressive the prince himself might be, in his absence his staff fell back on what they knew. ‘My prince shall return to Suon Ren shortly. Perhaps the Spider-kinden shall be sent for in due course.’ He was meticulously polite in words, manner and expression, but Tynisa could almost see the panic leaking out at the edges. The idea of allowing a stranger, a foreigner, into Felipe’s home behind his master’s back was obviously more than the seneschal could countenance.

Descending back towards the embassy, Gramo was full of apologies, defending the natural reticence of the Dragonflies, assuring her that the prince himself would send for her eventually. ‘You must get used to the slower pace, is all it is,’ he explained. ‘One does not rush, here.’

Gramo prepared her a room at the embassy, which mostly involved hooking up a hammock-like affair for her to sleep in. Her new chamber was dominated by a solid Collegium desk, the sort that a well-to-do academic would write his memoirs on. She was willing to bet it had seen no use in ten years, and there was no chair.

They ate later, still no word having come from the castle. Gramo prepared a meal of beans and roots and other vegetables, his choice of spices too subtle for her palate, the flavours seeming bland or else more bitter than she was used to, the variety broad, the quantities mean. Everything came from his own garden behind the embassy. He appeared to be entirely self-sufficient.

‘What about the people of Suon Ren?’ Tynisa pressed him. ‘Surely they don’t just ignore you?’

‘Oh, they’re very good,’ he protested. ‘The prince invites me to his castle sometimes. There are recitals, music, theatricals… Hunts and dances also, although I am somewhat unsuited to such diversions. It’s just,’ the old Beetle smiled wistfully, ‘I can never be one of them. It is not that they keep me out… only, I cannot fly with them, cannot think with them. I have become as much a Commonwealer as any son of Collegium, but it is not enough sometimes. And then there are their beliefs… Of all things, it saddens me most that, being Apt, I cannot understand them.’

His words baffled Tynisa. ‘Surely you don’t believe in ghosts and magic,’ she stated. Inwardly, something twisted awkwardly at the thought. Tisamon, her father, had believed in such things, and in his company she had occasionally witnessed too much: sights that still hung on her mind the next morning, ones that sunlight could not dispel. She had been brought up and tutored by the practical people of Collegium, though, who believed in nothing that artifice and philosophy could not confirm with experimental proof. She had learned every year in College that there was no such thing as magic, for all that the old Inapt kin-den might claim otherwise. Magic was a crutch, a convenient excuse to cover all manner of crimes: A magician made me do it.

Gramo gave her a weak smile. ‘Of course, of course, and yet… I see the Dragonfly-kinden live every day of their lives as though magic was a real force, as potent and wild as the weather. I have come to terms with it. I do not pretend to understand it, but at the same time I will not mock them for it. And I have found that I cannot explain the way… everything works here, the chances and the odd coincidences, that they call fate and predestination. It seems to serve them well enough.’

Or it did until the Wasp armies reached them, was Tynisa’s thought, but she left it unspoken.

‘Who can say what may be true, so far away from Collegium’s white walls?’ the old Beetle murmured softly, and in his voice there was a young man’s longing, for far vistas and lost secrets, and for the world to be something grander than it was.

At the evening’s end, when Gramo had tidied away the supper bowls, he stopped her just as she was retiring to bed.

‘You’re not here on official business, are you?’ he said sadly.

She shook her head. ‘I mean neither you nor any other here any harm, I swear, but I do need to speak to the prince.’ Because I have burned all my other bridges, and this tenuous link with Salma is the only thing I have left.

‘May I ask what has brought you here, perhaps?’

She was at first not going to answer, but the shadows seemed to be building in the room around him as the fire guttered, and there were silhouettes there, clawing their way out of the grave of her mind. ‘Three dead men,’ she told Galltree shortly, then retreated to her hammock.