Dal watched as the band of horsemen galloped closer to the burning village, while sparks drifted either side of him or landed, stinging, on his skin. The now-empty storehouse would catch fire soon enough, completing his day’s work.
It was always the case: a few of Dal’s people had not withdrawn soon enough, still chasing some last piece of loot, or just believing they knew better. One of them caught an arrow in the chest, the lead Mercer standing up in the saddle to loose it without his mount’s speed slackening at all. The rest scattered as the six riders thundered between the burning ruins of the houses, aiming directly for the barge.
In the past, brigands had been nothing but angry, maladjusted farmers, with perhaps the odd woodsman amongst them who could string a bow. Mercers, even the local kind, were a constant terror to them. Even now the stragglers among Dal’s people were fleeing in all directions, while the Mercers rode past them, turning in the saddle to aim and loose arrows at every target, and hitting them more often than not.
Dal took careful aim and loosed, too, but the rearmost rider shouted a warning even as he did so. The shaft struck the approaching woman’s shimmering breastplate and glanced off, knocking her sideways and half out of the saddle. A moment later, she had taken to the air, as did half the others.
Soul Je took careful aim and put a three-foot shaft through the Mercer woman, striking an inch over her breastplate’s collar and plucking her out of the sky. Dal’s shaft was supposed to have provided the signal, but it was her blood that prompted the brigands to counterattack.
Of those fleeing to the barge, perhaps a dozen had courage enough to turn around and face the horses, bending bows and setting spears. Amongst them was the Wasp, Mordrec, his hands flashing fire as the Mercers came on. On all sides, though, Dal’s people were suddenly springing from behind bushes, from the perilous shadows of burning buildings, from the waters of the canal itself. Arrows danced and sang through the air, mostly to no avail, but three separate shafts managed to strike the same man and throw him from his saddle. He was still alive as he hit the ground, his mail preserving him from the onslaught of the flimsy hunting bows most of the bandits carried. Then there were spearmen converging on him, three or four of them together, and within six or seven stabs they had found some part of him the armour did not cover.
The other Mercers were circling, two on horseback still and two in the air. Had they chosen to flee then, they would have got away with it. Dal could see their faces, though, and realized that they could not believe what was happening to them – that peasants were taking such liberties with their lives.
Dal Arche selected another arrow, then waited for a target to present itself. He saw one of the horses rear and fall as Mordrec’s sting lashed into it. The rider tried heading for the sky but one of Dal’s men struck him across the back with a cudgel, and another, a Grasshopper, leapt high in the air and grabbed hold of him, bringing the stunned man down to earth again. Another Mercer had gone down with a crossbow bolt in the leg, courtesy of Barad Ygor, and now Ygor’s pet scorpion was busy savaging the victim, claws prying apart mail and plates to get at the meat beneath.
Dal Arche sighted carefully, as calm as a man on a practice range, and sent a shaft through one of the fliers’ throat even as the Mercer was drawing back his own bowstring.
Their final opponent was ascending, up and up, still staring downwards in incredulous horror. Dal called up his own wings, but Soul was aiming, string pulled back beside his ear as he sighted almost into the sun. The arrow leapt from his bow, so fast as to seem invisible, and all Dal saw was the shuddering impact, and then the Mercer was tumbling from the heavens.
In the old days, bandits had been those unable or unwilling to live under the rule of princes, and perhaps that had not changed. What had changed, though, was the number of disgruntled peasants who had been ripped from their land and forced to fight in a war, who had seen their friends and comrades and families cast away in one doomed battle after another, as the Empire ground its way across the Commonweal map. They had died in their droves, those levies of the Commonweal, given spears but no training and scattered like chaff against the greatest armies of the world. Those who had survived, though…
Those that survived had learned soldiering the hard way. Men like Dal Arche himself, baked hard in the fires of war, tough men with sharp edges. They had lasted out the war itself and then found they could not go home, either because it was now beneath the Imperial flag, or because they had changed so much in character that nowhere in the Commonweal seemed like home to them.
They were the men who had learned what comes of following princes.
When the fighting was over, Dal flew down to confer with his lieutenants, as the rest of his men prepared the barge for its departure.
‘We won’t get it that easy again,’ Mordrec remarked.
‘When have we ever had it easy?’ Dal asked him. ‘I want you three to go back south and keep recruiting. We’ll need more men.’
‘The Salmae are going to be riled,’ noted the Wasp. ‘We’re sure we know what we’re doing?’
Dal looked from face to face. ‘The Salmae have already shown us that they won’t accept us as neighbours. They wrote that message clear enough. Now we’ve sent them our reply, in proper noble language.’
‘We’ve declared war,’ Mordrec translated.
‘That’s what I said,’ agreed Dal, seeing Soul Je, who seldom spoke, nodding in agreement.
Dal turned to view his followers, casting his gaze over all of them. The new faces, those who had formerly been the peasants of Sara Tela, were staring at the dead Mercers with a world of possibilities in their eyes.
Twenty-Four
Salme Elass, Princess of Leose, felt herself poised on the brink of a great height, and the time had come to cast herself from it.
She sat in the chamber she governed from: not for her a garden, like Felipe Shah, but a high-ceilinged room where lofty windows let in coloured shafts of light that crossed each other like sword blades. There was a warrior statue on either side of her, the kind that the ancient magicians of her people had supposedly been able to imbue with life in order to defend their royal charges. All lost, she thought. Yet another thing lost, and nobody will do anything to stop these sands running through our fingers.
There were some, she knew, who had already grown sick with that loss, so that they turned away from the destiny that princes lived for. Felipe Shah had grown weak after the war, cut so deep by his losses that he feared to take any action, lest some further calamity befall him. Lowre Cean was another, although Elass still had a use for him.
And the Monarch is a third. A strong Monarch would make a strong Commonweal, but there was only silence from Shon Fhor. The land might as well now be leaderless.
It is time for someone of will and ambition to take a stand and recover what we have lost. The Commonweal can rise again, but those of us who are not grown palsied by doubt must act.
On either side of the two statues stood her chief servants: Isendter Whitehand, her champion, and Lisan Dea, her seneschal, both of them bound to her by the iron chains of loyalty. Both also thinking they knew best, but they were not prince or princess. They were not even Dragonfly-kinden, merely servants.
The brigands to the south were growing bold, no doubt expecting the usual Mercer patrols in response, just enough manpower diverted in their direction to make their raids difficult and costly and persuade them to look elsewhere for their loot. Thus the Commonweal had been dealing with its internal problems for years, either letting the villains run riot in abandoned provinces, or passing them on to a neighbour, who passed the problem on in turn, all motivated by some hope that time itself would smooth over the growing cracks.