Salute the Dark

Then, some time towards dawn, the winds had eased and Allanbridge had sent him below. He had collapsed beneath the hatch, bone-weary and aching in every joint, his hands raw, knuckles scraped, and with a massive flowering bruise across his forehead where he had been thrown into the side rail which, thankfully, had been sturdy enough to restrain him.

Now he woke, to find the wind was gone, or gone enough that he could no longer hear it. The gondola was moving badly, however: not coasting on the air as it had done, but instead rocking and swaying from side to side.

It seems we are not in the air any more. He forced himself to go back up the ladder, pushing the hatch open. The sunlight that greeted him was bright, with a blue sky beaming through a lattice of branches.

The balloon of the Maiden was up there too, he saw. Punctured by a few of the boughs, it had been pushed all the way over to one side on the straining ropes, but it still seemed to be holding its shape. Stenwold hauled himself further up onto the deck, which was swinging gently from its cradle of branches.

‘Where in the wastes are we?’ he muttered, staring about him. The landscape was steeply hilly, but clearly something strange had happened to it in the past, because a great many of the hills had been truncated, and their tops flattened, the sides stepping in tiers down towards the valleys. Agriculture? he wondered, though only grass and bushes grew there now, the latter suggesting that a good many years had gone by since this land was ever farmed.

We were going north, he recalled. We had passed Dorax and Mount Hain, and I saw… I’m sure I saw the Barrier Ridge. What else could it have been? So are we in the Commonweal now, or were we blown aside? He turned about, clambering up the sloping deck to see if any familiar landmarks were still in view, but the storm must have carried them further than he thought. Their tree was one of about a dozen bare-limbed giants, lofty enough to have the Maiden’s gondola dangling from its lowest branches, and yet still a good ten feet in the air. There was the dense line of a forest on one horizon, but he could not tell if it was composed of the same monsters or of lesser trees.

What he did see, though, was…

He was familiar with the concept of them, of course, but they were simply not found in any of the lands he knew. The Lowlands had its fortified city-states, walled villages or military outposts, palisades and armed camps. What it did not have were castles, though. The Ant-kinden model of fortification, which informed all of Lowlands military design, was calculated to protect the whole community, not just provide a defensible centre surrounded by an open settlement. Nor was there ever an isolated bastion rising out of the wilderness. But here was a castle, soaring six storeys high, constructed of white, featureless stone, with a jaggedly asymmetrical crown of turrets that closed in on the centre, so that those within could not only see clearly over all the surrounding landscape, but could protect themselves against airborne attack.

The structure stood about half a mile away, Stenwold guessed, but it was hard to tell, for the scale of it troubled him. He had no idea how big such edifices were supposed to be.

Of course the Commonweal was huge, and all subject to a single monarch. Such an absolute ruler would perhaps need castles to control those broad holdings.

‘All right, Maker?’

He jumped at Allanbridge’s voice. The aviator was descending the ropes from the balloon.

‘How bad is it?’

‘A day or two to patch her, add another one for the three days it’ll take to generate the gas to refill her.’

‘I’m sorry about the Maiden,’ Stenwold started, but Allanbridge shrugged it off.

‘We’ve had worse, she and me.’ He looked bag-eyed and tired and Stenwold realized he had not slept at all since the storm started. ‘I never did the Commonweal run before, and I should have listened more to them that had. They told me that, around the Barrier Ridge, the weather got choppy.’

‘Choppy,’ Stenwold echoed – and then: ‘We’re in the Commonweal, are we?’

‘We are indeed,’ came Destrachis’ voice. Stenwold turned to see the Spider climbing up through the hatch. He had a bandage about his head, showing that even those below had not come through the storm unscathed. Felise was already on deck ahead of him, standing at the rail but disdaining to hold to it, and looking out over the landscape.

‘I don’t suppose you know where we are, exactly?’ the Spider doctor asked. ‘The Commonweal’s rather a big place.’

‘None of this looks familiar to you?’ Stenwold asked him.