Then, one afternoon when they were in sore need of food and shelter, one of Phalmes’s scouts reported back that there was a small village ahead. They had been following the Sarn–Helleron railroad, and it was some little hamlet built around a rail siding. Passenger trains had stopped here, so there would be inns, farmland, an engineer’s workshop with a single enterprising artificer. But there had been little traffic of late, and most of the opportunists had headed away, looking for fatter pastures, leaving only a skeleton of a place, inhabited by those that could not or would not leave.
Phalmes gave a signal and the bandits began to ready their weapons.
‘What are you doing?’ Salma asked him.
‘We need food,’ Phalmes said. ‘What’s more, there are roofs out there that we can make use of.’
‘There will be no pillaging here,’ Salma told him. ‘There’s no need for that.’
‘You’re right, so long as the locals there are sensible.’ The Mynan gave him a hard smile. ‘So long as they understand that we have the power to take, all we need to do is ask.’
‘Let me at least talk to them first,’ Salma insisted.
‘Whatever you want,’ said Phalmes with a shrug. ‘But those around you now are your people. They’re looking to you to provide, like my men look to me. They’re short of everything and hungry each evening. What are you going to do about that?’
Salma looked out at the village and thought, Was it Cosgren that brought me to this? It had to be something more, but he could not put his finger on the moment when he had shouldered this responsibility. It was now on his shoulders, nonetheless.
It did not turn out as Salma had planned, none of it.
They had gone to the village, all of his ragged band: the farmwife and her child, the Fly gangsters and the escaped slaves, Sfayot and his daughters and – like a dark and brooding tail – Phalmes’s deserters and brigands. The village would have no wish to play host to such a pack of vagabonds, and yet the numbers Salma led in were great enough that they could hardly resist.
Taking Phalmes and Nero along with him, Salma had met with the village headman and bartered for food. Some of his barter had been in coin, some in promised labour, or services. He was aware that he had desperately little to offer and that, even with Nero’s practised haggling, they should have been turned away immediately. Instead, the headman made an offer that was generous by any means, and Salma understood then how he was participating in banditry. Banditry of a civilized sort, but Phalmes’s men were all well armed, and this village was small.
They would camp within the village boundaries, Salma explained. They would chop the promised wood, draw the promised water, all the other meaningless tokens of their agreement. The headman tried to wave it away, but Salma had insisted.
He had not intended to become a brigand, but it seemed that it was easier than he had guessed to slip into that trade.
He had not intended to defend the village, either, but nevertheless it had happened. He had less control over his fate than he had ever imagined.
The real brigands had come thundering down on the settlement at night, with swords and burning brands. There were a score and a half of them and they were not here to make deals, or even to threaten or intimidate. They came for quick loot, a handful of whatever they could grab.
Instead they found Salma and his followers. Even while the villagers were putting their children out of the way, reaching for their staves and spears, Salma was rousing his band, sending them out with blades and sticks and bows. He went out himself, too, seeing by the slice of moon far better than the attackers, making savage work with the staff that Sfayot had made for him, and then ultimately just with the claws of his thumbs.
He discovered he was strong enough to fly again, using his wings to leap into his enemies, kicking and raking, and then jump back before they realized what was happening.
These were the sort of mixed ruffians he remembered from Helleron: Beetles and rogue Ants and halfbreeds, driven but disorganized. The fighting was fierce.
When they were finally chased away, at least half their number struck down, Salma walked amongst his own people to assess the damage. Two of Phalmes’s men were dead, and one of the Fly-kinden youths. Others were wounded, and Sfayot and his daughters did what they could with charms and herbs and bandages made from torn and boiled cloth.
Then Salma went to face the headman.
‘We did not bring them down on you,’ he said because, all through the fight, that had been his thought, of what the villagers must surely believe.
‘I did not believe you had,’ said the headman, a Beetle-kinden, like most of the villagers. There was a cut across his balding scalp that one of his own people had bandaged. ‘Why did you come here?’
Salma shrugged. He was feeling haggard and worn down and his wound ached. ‘We saw your houses and we were hungry.’
‘Take the food,’ the headman said. ‘I have some money, too. We have done well here until the troubles.’
Salma wanted to refuse, but he thought of Phalmes and knew that he had at least that much responsibility – even to bandits and deserters.
The dawn brought a sight that made him shiver. Without ever discussing it, his followers had taken the arms and armour of the slain bandits. The Fly-kinden had swords and daggers now, and the Beetle-kinden farmwife had a crossbow. The three slaves had covered their tunics with studded leather hauberks. Sfayot’s eldest daughter had a short-hafted axe thrust through her belt. She had accounted for herself well with slung stones, the previous night.
Phalmes approached Salma and held a shortsword out to him, hilt first.
‘I saved this one,’ he said. ‘I know a bit about swords and here’s a good one. Helleron-made, and they know their business there.’
Salma accepted it gratefully. The balance was good, better than the Wasp-kinden weapon he had carried for so long. It felt good to have a proper sword in his hand again.
Two nights after the village he dreamt of home: riding out of the elegant palace of Suon Ren in the Principality of Roh, and seeing the landscape spread out before him in gentle tiers that centuries of careful cultivation had made into a picture of perfect beauty: the green and gold of the fields under the blue of the sky. It was autumn, near harvest, and the cold breeze that was blowing promised an early end to those warm days. The 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.
Where now is that golden sound our strings once gave unto the dawn? had sung the old minstrel at Felipe’s court.
Where now is the ancient blade for many years so boldly drawn?
The mist of autumn leaves its tears,
The weeping of the ending year,
Of maidens for their husbands lost, of children into darkness born.
And Fe
lipe 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 Mercers weren’t averse to cutting throats when it came to it. Nobody wanted to fight them. At least there weren’t so many of them.’
‘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 . . .’
‘Troublemakers,’ Drephos said crisply. ‘The lazy, the malcontents, the unskilled, the grumblers – all those picked for me by my foremen, though fewer than I had hoped. Still, it will have to be a sufficient sample for this test, because we have little time.’
‘But they’re people!’ Totho said.
‘Are they any more people than the soldiers your weapons will be used against? Did you think you could bring such a weapon into the world and keep your hands clean?’ Drephos asked him. ‘I hate hypocrisy, Totho, and I will not tolerate it. Too many of our trade are ashamed of what they do, and try to distance themselves. You must be proud of what you are. War and death are the gearwheels of artifice, remember? This is meat, useless and replaceable meat, no more.’ His gauntleted hand fell on Totho’s shoulder paternally. ‘You have made this beautiful device. You must be the first to give it purpose. Now load it.’
His hands trembling, Totho thumbed back the slot at the breech of the weapon and slipped a finger-length bolt into place, the missile’s presence closing the slot automatically. He remembered a sleepless night designing that very mechanism, with Kaszaat breathing gently beside him. He was thinking, I will not do it. I will not do it, but his fingers completed the now-familiar task with a minimum of fuss.
‘Charge it,’ Drephos said quietly. Totho’s hand was already on the crank, and five quick ratchets of it pressurized the air in the battery.
‘Ready your bow,’ Drephos said, and slowly he raised the snapbow, feeling its snug and comfortable
fit against his shoulder. I will not do it, his mind sang again.
‘Shoot,’ Drephos said, and Totho was frozen, his fingers on the release lever. ‘Shoot!’ the master artificer said again, but he could not. He was shaking, his aim veering. The range of targets at the far end of the hall had not yet realized what was going on.
‘This is a test, Totho, a test to see whether what I purchased was worth the price. Remember our bargain. Your friend is alive and free, and in return you are mine.’ And on that word his metal hand clenched on Totho’s shoulder like tongs, and Totho pressed the trigger.
The explosive snap of the release of air echoed down the length of the hall. He had been aiming, perhaps unconsciously, at the most heavily armoured target, the man (or was it a woman?) in the heavy sentinel plate. Now he saw the clumsy figure fall backwards. He could hope that just the impact against the metal might have knocked it over, but there was no movement, and he thought he saw a clean hole had been thrust through the steel.
‘Loose at will,’ Drephos decided, quite satisfied, and all around them the artificers loaded and shouldered their weapons.
Totho lay sleepless in the dark and he shook. His mind’s eye was glutted with the work of those few seconds, the ears still ringing with the discrete ‘snap-snap-snap’ as his inventions – the work of his own mind and hands – had gone about their purpose.
Drephos had been ecstatic, declaring the test a complete success. Even at the range they were firing, the bolts had not scrupled to pierce plate armour or punch through rings of chainmail. Only the Spider-kinden silk armour had at all slowed them down, the fine cloth twisting about the spinning missiles and preventing them penetrating. They spun, of course, because of the spiral grooving Totho had instituted on the inside of the snapbow barrels, giving the weapons greater range and accuracy. It had been an innovation that Scuto had made to Balkus’s nailbow, he recalled.
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