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.’
