northern landscape revealed more snow on the mountaintops than a tenday ago. The Lowlanders knew nothing like this in their dry land of bronze and dun and yellow.
He had ridden out and through the fields, and through the small villages built of golden wood that stood safe within sight of the castle. On the horizon was the shadow of the Gis’yaon Hold where he had guested twice with the Mantis-kinden, renewing the bonds of fealty and solidarity between them and the Principality of Roh — and through Roh to the Monarchy itself.
As he passed through these villages, the people bowed to him in honour and respect, and his horse tossed her head in reply.
Last winter the predators had come down from the hills, and Salma had ridden out with Felipe Shah to deal with them. The body of the Commonweal was groaning with parasites, and those parasites were brigands. In its thousand-year history there had been times of strength and times of recession, but never such a difficult time as this. The Monarch’s realm was patchworked with rot like a blighted leaf. Some roads were so preyed upon that even the Crown’s own messengers could not pass safely. There were loyal principalities cut off from the court by lawless lands. Some castles were the home only of robber barons who played at the prince but were nothing more than bandits grown fat unopposed.
And Felipe and Salma and their men had gone to fight, from horseback, from the air, with spear and punch- sword and bow, because the principality was like a garden, and a gardener had a duty to ensure the health of his charges.
Duty and responsibility, of course. A duty to protect those in the principality who could not protect themselves, because Salma was a Prince Minor of the Commonweal.
The next day, Phalmes rode along next to Sfayot’s cart and spoke to Salma, although it was at Sfayot’s eldest daughter that he looked most. Nero sat up beside Sfayot himself, in between his occasional flights about the surrounding countryside.
‘Did you ever hear about the Mercers?’ Salma asked.
‘How could I not?’ Phalmes said. ‘While fighting in the Commonweal, you got to hear a lot about the cursed Mercers.’
‘And?’
‘And what? I could never work them out. Your people, your peasantry, seemed to worship everything they did, but the pissing
‘Thousands, really, but you would have seen few enough’ Salma said. ‘They do more than fight invaders, though. In fact that’s barely what they do at all. They protect the Commonweal, and that means mostly from its own worst impulses. They go wherever brigands have made the roads unsafe, where princes are cruellest to their subjects, or have rejected the wisdom of the Monarch. And they work against invaders, and their agents, but they defend the Commonweal first and foremost. They are heroes.’
Phalmes shrugged. ‘Well, you asked me what I knew about them. So what of it?’
Salma smiled slightly. ‘Where will you be in five years, Phalmes?’
‘In an unmarked grave, probably,’ replied the ex-bandit. ‘Possibly the same in just five days. It’s an uncertain time. I’d prefer to go. ’
‘Home?’
‘Myna, yes. But I can’t see that happening.’ A shadow crossed his face, and Sfayot’s eldest inched forward to look at him more closely. ‘Ever,’ he added. ‘Even if Kymene starts a revolution, the Wasps will only put it down within a month, or even a year, and what difference would that make? And then everything will just be worse. So, if I do live out five years? Who knows? I don’t feel that I myself have much of a choice in the matter.’
‘And if I gave you a choice?’ Salma said.
Phalmes frowned at him. ‘Meaning what?’
‘I’m a prince,’ Salma reminded him.
‘Good for you, Your Worship. So what?’
‘In the Lowlands they don’t understand it. In the Empire too I’d guess. I’d almost forgotten it myself, but I am a prince and that still means something, wherever I am.’
The messenger brought Totho to a long practice hall attached to one of Drephos’ newly commandeered factories. There were targets of wood fixed to the far wall down a long arcade, scuffed and scratched and painted with range-markers.
The master artificer was there already, along with his entire cadre of followers and a few Wasp soldiers as well. Totho found himself the last to arrive. There was no resentment, though, only a barely concealed excitement about them. Totho sought out Kaszaat but her expression conveyed a warning.
Drephos was smiling, as lopsided as ever. He had his hood fully back, with no cares about his malign features amongst his own people. In his hands was the snapbow.
Totho had originally called it an airlock bow in his designs but, after the sound that it made, the term snapbow had stuck, from the artificer’s old habit of calling any kind of ranged weapon a ‘bow’ of some sort, despite the lack of arms or string. This was the tweaked and adjusted article, perhaps destined to undergo another iteration, perhaps to be presented as finished. Each of Drephos’s artificers had been given a chance to make further changes and test them. The last day or so had already seen a dozen separate prototypes tried and forgotten.
Now Drephos proffered the weapon and he took it, feeling how light it was, a sleek and deadly-feeling creation, like a predatory animal that found its prey by sight from on high. The curved butt fitted to his shoulder and armpit to steady it, and he was able to look down the slender length of the barrel, using a groove in the folded crank of the air battery itself to correct his aim.
‘Any complaints, Totho?’ Drephos asked him.
‘It’s beautiful, Master,’ Totho said, wonderingly.
‘You have the best of them, as is only fitting,’ Drephos said. At his gesture the big Mole Cricket-kinden began handing out the others, until all the artificers had a newly finished snapbow in their hands.
‘We are almost at the end of our stretch of road with this device,’ Drephos told them all. ‘Next will be the training sergeants. General Malkan is preparing to march, but he is leaving me two thousand men here and every factory in Helleron if I need it. When we walk out from here, if we are satisfied, this entire city will be devoted to your invention. It’s a rare privilege.’
‘I understand, Master.’ There was something he was missing, he knew, some underlying tension he could not account for. He glanced at Kaszaat and saw that she alone of them was not smiling. ‘We’re here for the final tests?’ he asked.
‘We are,’ Drephos said, and signalled to the soldiers. One of them went to the far end of the range and pulled a door open.
There were two dozen people behind the door, and they were pushed out onto the range quite quickly by Wasp soldiers, who closed the doors and stood nearby, hands open and ready. Totho frowned. Afterwards it would appal him that it took him so long to work out what was going on.
They were Beetle-kinden, mostly, with a few halfbreeds or Flies, and they looked as though they were going to a costume party all dressed like warriors. Some wore leather cuirasses or long coats, others had banded mail, or breastplates, or chain hauberks in the Ant style. There was even Spider-made silk armour and a suit of full sentinel plate that the wearer could hardly move in. None of them was armed.
‘What. what’s going on?’ Totho asked.
‘We are going to test your invention,’ Drephos explained, ‘and you should have the honour of going first.’
He knew even then, but he said, ‘I don’t understand.’
‘You have made a machine for killing people, Totho,’ Drephos said gently. ‘How else can it be tested?’
It was a long time with him staring at those confused men and women before he said, ‘But I can’t just. shoot at them. They’re. ’
