Nine

Helmess Broiler reclined awkwardly. He was not a slender man, and Beetle seating tended towards straight-backed wooden chairs, which made his shoulders and neck ache after too long. He was too ungainly to lounge on couches like a Spider-kinden, and he could hardly squat on the floor like a Fly. Instead he had invested in a big padded chair, called a College chair locally for its associations with an academic’s study. It was not overly dignified, for an Assembler, but it was at least comfortable. His consolation was that Elytrya would come and sit at his feet, in what he could think of as an adoring manner. He could put a hand down and stroke the coiled waves of her hair, which was pleasant enough.

In such a way did he greet Forman Sands when the killer was ushered into his sitting room. Sands was dressed noncommittally but well, the picture of a modest but tasteful tradesman. It gave Helmess a certain pleasure to know that, had any unwanted company burst into his house just then and discovered his hired murderer in the antechamber, they would have found Sands perusing his books or admiring his art. It was so good to know that the man was civilized.

‘Have you news to please me, Sands?’ he asked.

Sands shook his head, face set: the modest tradesman about to report that the goods were not yet in stock. ‘We put out, went halfway to Vek, Master Broiler. No sign of them.’

Broiler played magnanimity well, if only because Elytrya had given him foreknowledge of Stenwold’s elusiveness. He waved a gracious hand. ‘Well, there will be other chances. You’ll get your claws into Maker sooner or later, either on land or on sea.’

‘As you wish, Master Broiler,’ Sands said, with a brief bow. ‘You have anything more for me?’

‘Just wait on . . . no, hold. I’d be grateful if you had someone go to the dockside and see if Maker’s ship is known, at all. I do have to wonder who he’s playing with these days.’

‘I’ll attend to it myself,’ Sands promised, still the pleasant man of business. He did not even cheapen their conversation by asking for money. He knew Helmess was good for it, and honest men of commerce did not need to sully themselves with such details unless it was absolutely necessary. He really is quite the find, Helmess thought, as Sands backed out of the room. Where else would I find a killer that I could introduce to my mother?

‘All as you said,’ he noted. ‘You’re sure your people went both ways along the coast? East and west?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Elytrya assured him. ‘And there were ships, but not one of that description. Otherwise your Master Maker would be having his bones picked by the crabs even now. He has some clever friends, I think.’

‘You think they set him down on land somewhere close? Maker was an intelligencer in the war, so he might be trying to follow Failwright’s trail covertly, while people think he’s gone. No doubt he’ll turn up in Collegium wearing a different hat and asking questions. I should have had Sands keep an eye out for him.’

‘Or . . .’ she leant back against his legs as he trailed a finger down the angle of her jaw.

‘Or?’

‘Or they went to sea, Helmess. Just out to sea.’

He pondered the thought. Before embarking on this campaign with her he had researched his ground as a good Beetle academic should. He knew the routes that ships took between Collegium and any port worth naming. He had first assumed Stenwold was going to his friends in Vek, and had posted Sands to catch him there if Elytrya’s allies failed. Still, caution was a virtue, and her friends had been waiting for that little Fly boat on the other route too, in case Maker had been heading for Kes or the Fly warrens, or even the Spiderlands.

Instead that ship had simply vanished, or gone nowhere. But nobody just goes out to sea.

‘Or they went out to sea,’ he allowed, reflecting that he had been living with a lot of impossibilities, recently. ‘But what in the world for? What does Maker expect to find out there?’

When Stenwold came to his senses, the world seemed unnaturally calm. The boards beneath him clung together still. He heard the wash of water, the creak of timber and rope and the sounds, surprisingly few, of the Tidenfree’s crew going about their business. After the Lash it seemed like another world.

The storm had been no brief squall, either, He had not realized, after they had the engine working again, and the ship was shouldering through the waves by main force, that they would have to keep at it hour after hour through the embattled seas. Night had come, and only the compass had kept their course through the darkness, the clouds that swallowed the moon, the wind and surging seas that dragged them this way and that. From his labouring post within the engine room, Stenwold had seen none of it, but he could see in his mind’s eye how tenuous was the path the Fly-kinden were treading. They relied on Fernaea to give them a course, using whatever doubtful tricks and sleights the Moth-kinden had taught her in their far mountain retreats. She called out, high over the storm, to Gude and her crew at the steering oar. Gude was Inapt, too, and Laszlo had claimed that the best seafarers all were, that they retained some instinctive connection with wave and weather that the Apt could not match. Still, for that very reason, Gude could not read the compass nor set a course by it. The ship’s second artificer had been clinging up there beside her, taking the readings from clock and compass rose, and relaying them in a manner that Gude and Fern could master. It was a lunatic’s dream, and the thought had loomed large in his mind throughout the night that it would only take one of these small mariners to misjudge, and the land would never again feel the tread of Master Stenwold Maker, nor even know his fate.

Still, some other part of him could not help but feel a grudging admiration. Fly-kinden, they’ll cheat and exploit anything, even the basic laws of nature.

He could not say for sure when the storm had finally abated, or when they had passed through it. He had been at the pump in the engine room, and the work that had seemed trivial at first had become crucial soon enough. Even with the hatches bolted down, enough water came in from above to swamp them. Despard was continually at the engine, hovering above it much of the time with utter concentration. Laszlo apparently knew just enough of the trade to act as the absolute last-ditch, stand-in, backup artificer, or at least enough to pass her the tools Despard cried out for as she made adjustments and small repairs, wings blurring here and there, while the engine laboured on.

There was no rest. Stenwold pumped away the water until his arms burned, and then he pumped some more. He had done the work of two Fly-kinden at a time, and he had carried on doing it all night. I may not fly. I may be huge and heavy and slow. I can work, though. Beetle-kinden won no sprints at the Collegium games, but give them a track long enough and they would be lumbering on when even the fleetest of their competitors had fallen.

Still, he was not young and his endurance had its limits. He could not say when he had reached these, for his memories had become fragmented by fatigue. He only knew that he was waking up now, feeling every part of him complain, feeling his arms scream at him for the abuse he had heaped on them. He was rousing from an exhausted sleep, who knew how long after, and the storm had passed.

He lay on the floor of the engine room, half curled protectively about the engine. He winced at that. Had something slipped a gear then he would have known about it the hard way. There was a slight pressure against his kidneys which he identified as Despard, fast asleep while sitting up, and using him as a broad pillow. He was loath to wake her but, now that he had returned to consciousness himself, every part of him that was crushed against the hard boards was letting him know about it. He shifted as carefully as he could, hoping he would be able to let her down gently, still sleeping. At the first movement, she twitched and gave a small cry, instantly on her feet – no, not her feet, but airborne for a moment, then coming down a yard away from him.

‘Beetles,’ she said, still half asleep, but in unmistakable tones of disdain. She yawned and stretched, grimacing. ‘Don’t like Beetles, as a rule. Big, clumsy bastards. You’re all right. Can find a use for you.’

Stenwold sat up slowly, regretting every inch of it. ‘That’s from the orphanage, then, that you don’t like us?’

He heard the tiny whisper of a knife clearing its sheath. Despard was in the air again, hovering inches above the deck, staring down at him. ‘How do you know . . . ? What did I say?’

He looked sadly at the tiny knife she held, wondering what untold miseries he had just unwittingly brought back to life. ‘A Fly with a Beetle name? There’re only so many ways that can come about. A student of mine, a half-breed, he’s gone through life with a Fly name for the same reason. Not that he ever disliked Flies, to my knowledge.’

She touched down on the floor again, carefully putting the little blade away and seeming embarrassed by her reaction. ‘Only natural,’ she said. ‘After all, we’re much nicer, as everyone knows.’ Her bleak smile belied it. ‘Believe me, the wedding was the first good thing that happened to me in all my life.’

Stenwold frowned, still intent on the slow and painful business of getting to his feet. ‘Wedding?’

It took her a moment to catch his puzzlement. ‘Family, Maker. We’re all family here. That’s how the Bloodfly business works. That’s how you get a third-generation pirate like Tomasso. So, if someone can do something useful, like fix an engine, or like Fern’s charlatanry, then you get them hitched. Believe me, at the time it was a good deal.’

Stenwold, upright now, tried to stretch, calling on all the Art of his ancestors just to straighten his arms. ‘Who’s the lucky fellow?’ A thought struck him. ‘It’s not Laszlo, is it?’

Despard burst into a peal of incredulous laughter that utterly erased her earlier brooding, and then there came a voice from outside the room, ‘Please, Ma’rMaker, I have standards,’ and Laszlo himself slipped in. From his bright smile to his clean clothes there was no suggestion that he had actually been on the same vessel with them the previous night. He was almost painful to look at in his neatness. ‘You might want to come up on deck now, Ma’rMaker. We’re in sight of Kanateris.’

‘Already?’ Stenwold levered himself forward step by strained step.

‘Well, you don’t think we’d go through all that if it wasn’t quicker, do you?’ the Fly asked, hopping ahead of Stenwold, then up the steps and into the half-light.

They were under sail again, the crew buzzing about the rigging keeping everything shipshape, Stenwold assumed, whatever that meant. Off the port bow he saw land as a darker shadow against the lightening sky.

‘Dawn over the Bolas Islands,’ Laszlo proudly announced.

Stenwold glanced about, seeing Tomasso standing on the aft deck once more. Gude still had the oar, and Stenwold wondered if she ever tired, or whether she had taken the Lash in shifts along with her fellows. Of the more fragile Fernaea, Stenwold saw no sign, and he guessed that she was exhausted by her card-tricks throughout the storm.

‘And where might the Bolas Islands be?’ he asked them. ‘Except on the other side of the Lash, that is?’

‘The Strand,’ Laszlo said, ‘as the long coast of the Spiderlands is called, has an enormous bay bitten out of the middle of it. The biggest Spider cities are located there, and all the major houses have holdings scattered about that bay. It’s about as big across as . . . oh, say the distance from Collegium to Vek. And a bit more, maybe. Anyway, the line of this bay must continue on under the water, like it’s a big bowl on the seabed, because there are shoals you have to watch for and, around the rim, some little fingers of it stick up above the sea. That’s the Bolas Islands, and on the biggest of those is Kanateris.’

‘What is it? Some noble’s retreat?’

‘Oh they’d love that.’ Laszlo’s intolerable grin grew ever wider. ‘No, Kanateris is pirate country. All the seaborne scum of the Spiderlands ends up there eventually, either to buy or sell.’

‘Hmm.’ Stenwold went to lean on the rail, and found it too low, of course. He settled for resting a foot on it, holding on to one of the shrouds of the jib for balance. The wind was steady and the sea was calm enough as a result. ‘And the Spider nobles, they just put up with that, do they?’ He saw from the Fly’s face that he was being foolish to ask, even before Laszlo answered.

‘There’s not a noble house that doesn’t keep a few privateers on the books, that call themselves pirates. Everyone says how terrible that Kanateris exists, but nobody does anything about it. This is the Spiderlands, Ma’rMaker, and they’re awfully clever about everything they do.’

‘I suppose . . .’ Stenwold paused, frowning. ‘Do I hear . . . music?’

‘That you do,’ Laszlo confirmed.

It drifted towards them over the waters, as they neared the island and started cutting across the wind. At first he caught only tattered snatches of it, a melody and harmony he could not make out. Then they were past the island’s near point and tacking into the land-cupped harbour. The chief of the Bolas Islands was a mountain jutting from the waters, its slopes thick with tenacious greenery. In the centre of the bay was Kanateris, a town smeared up across two hundred yards of rock, and it was singing.

Stenwold heard some strange, shifting pattern of strings at the heart of it, switching and changing tone in a pattern that followed no laws of music he knew. Above it, though, he heard two score instruments adding their voices, and each in perfect pitch with the others, each following the strings and working out fantastic elaborations on the simple, erratic changes. The sound swelled and broadened as they neared, woodwind and strings and horns each succeeding the last, and being succeeded, but the tune evolving and evolving again from moment to moment. It became vast and intricate and sad and wise, that music, like nothing tame Collegiate ears had ever heard: music made for and by men and women who lived in a world older and more vibrant than his own.

Inapt music, he reflected. Collegium scholars might debate, but Stenwold knew for sure that, just as he knew how to fix a slipped gear or work a lock, so there were some things his own life would never quite encompass. He did not have to believe in magic to sense swathes of life that he would never truly enter. Even as Gude and the crew could move with the sea, and handle a sail with an instinct that no Apt mariner could quite match, so too was this astonishing lift and crescendo of music, that washed over him and through him, belittled him and humbled him, and spoke in a hundred voices, only a dozen of which he could understand. He felt something catch in his heart, catch and then pass on, as if to say, I have moved you: I hold you in the palm of my hand, and yet you cannot hear me, not truly.

As the Tidenfree tacked back again, the music reached its utmost, the notes hanging in the air over the island like a vast, invisible cloud. Then it began dying away, even as the sails were being furled, even as a low galley ploughed out to meet them and pilot them the last stretch of the way. Stenwold realized that the last of the underlying strings had gone, and from that cue the other musicians ceased one by one, each one drawing their line of the symphony to its conclusion. He was now close enough to see a few musicians up on the rooftops, packing away their instruments, making ready to start the day.

Even Laszlo had fallen silent in the face of that, and his voice held some last trace of reverence although, Apt as he was, he too was denied the music’s full breadth. ‘They string a couple of harps up, either side of the bay,’ he explained. ‘When the wind catches them, they sing and, if you’ve the ear for it, you can tell what the day’s weather will be, just from the pitch and sound. Of course, after a while people began playing along. They love their music, the Spiders, and any musician who’s particularly good can find herself a patron that way. So it got more and more, I reckon, until every morning most Spider ports greet the dawn like that. Quite something, isn’t it?’

Stenwold didn’t trust himself to speak.

‘The Spiders have a special name for your kinden,’ Laszlo added. ‘They call you the “noisy, silent people”.’

Still half-lost in the music’s last fading echoes, Stenwold nodded. ‘They may have a point.’ For a moment he and Laszlo stayed silent in the bows, as the oarsmen of the galley hauled away at the sweeps to bring the Tidenfree into dock. They were chained to their oars, Stenwold noted grimly, but then he should not be surprised at that.

Looking from the toiling rowers on the galley to the town itself, he found his eye being led up and up. Kanateris was just strewn up the mountainside, as though all the buildings had been originally heaped at the top and left to distribute themselves all the way to the waterline.

Seeing the direction of his gaze, Laszlo put in, ‘So, you can’t fly then?’

‘No.’

‘Can you do that trick where you climb up the sheer walls?’

‘Not that either. Never an Art I thought I’d have much use for.’

‘Splice me, Ma’rMaker, but what can you do?’ the Fly exclaimed.

‘Tread up stairs for as long as it takes.’ He gave a brief laugh. He was remembering Myna, which had also been a stepped city, albeit of a kinder gradient. He recalled the mad flight from the invading Wasps so long ago, how Tisamon had hauled and bullied him up step after step. If only I could have predicted what I’d face, one day, I’d not have complained.

‘Listen up!’ came Tomasso’s voice from the stern. The Tidenfree was now at one of the spindly piers that Kanateris extended into the water like long, rickety legs. Two of the crew were tying up, and their chief had just thrown a few coins down to the tug galley. Now he had his arms clasped behind his back, surveying his followers and looking every bit the pirate captain. When he had their attention, he went on: ‘Laszlo, Piera, you two and I will take our passenger to where he might learn what he needs to know. For the rest of you, nobody goes ashore. I want all hands waiting to take us away from here quickly, just in case. I don’t recognize most of the sails here.’

He met Stenwold amidships, where a plank had been put out to reach the pier. ‘Master Maker, perhaps you should go arm yourself fully?’

‘Three or four weapons is this season’s Kanaterese fashion,’ Laszlo added.

Stenwold nodded and was halfway to the hatch just as Despard appeared, staggering under the burden of his piercer.

‘I took the liberty,’ she grunted, proffering it with difficulty. The hefty, four-barrelled thing was almost as big as she was.

‘You certainly did,’ he agreed. He lifted it away from her to reveal a grin almost as big as Laszlo’s.

‘It’s a beauty,’ she announced, though it was clear that neither Tomasso nor Laszlo were overly sure of what it was. ‘Marlwright-Verwick design, isn’t it?’

I never met an artificer but they loved explosive weapons, Stenwold considered. ‘You know more than me, anyway,’ he remarked. She had loaded it well, he saw, for the four javelin-like bolts were neatly placed. He rested the piercer on his shoulder, thinking it would be a strange thing to walk into a town like this, sword, piercer and miniature snapbow. He felt like a brigand. Still, Tomasso had two long knives and a handful of throwing blades stashed in his belt, and Laszlo had armed himself with a bladed hook on the end of a rope – a Fly weapon that Stenwold had no fond memories of.

Piera turned out to be a sullen-looking Fly girl wearing a corselet of leather and chitin scales. She had a strung shortbow straining over one shoulder, and a fistful of stubby arrows thrust into one of her tall boots. A jagged scar across her forehead said that she was no stranger to a brawl.

‘Don’t we look the fearsome raiders,’ Tomasso declared. ‘Come on, Master Maker, let’s find you your answers.’ And he led the way to shore, over the timbers of the pier that creaked alarmingly when Stenwold followed.

‘Why no shore leave, chief ?’ Laszlo asked as they set foot on to the brief strip of grey sand that served Kanateris as a beach.

‘Fern said “Old Friends” when I asked her about the future,’ Tomasso revealed. Seeing Stenwold’s look he grimaced. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t look to divination if we were off Collegium’s coast, Master Maker, but here in the Spider-lands I’ve learned to trust it. In this part of the world there’s scarce a ship’s captain that’ll put out to sea without a fortune teller’s seal on it.’

There had been a brief bustle about the piers themselves, as the early risers from two dozen craft of around the Tidenfree’s size began stretching and yawning and calling lazy insults to one another. The streets themselves, steep tiers of uneven steps that Stenwold trod carefully, seemed mostly deserted. What he had at first taken for buildings were mostly little more than booths and shacks: cloth over timbers that were set into the sheer rock. Each was covered up with an identical grey screen that billowed slightly in the dawn breeze. Those few locals that were out so early looked ragged and dirty, obviously those who could not even boast a roof of canvas for the night. Still, they were Spider-kinden mostly, and that drew stares from Stenwold. Back in Collegium the least of the Spiders graciously deigned to pose as equals with College masters and town magnates. Now he saw why there were so many of their kind scattered across the Lowlands, away from their homelands. Here were Spiders of no family or import, the lowest and the meanest. What nearly broke the heart was that they were still beautiful, men and women both. They stood there in their tatters with their grimy, exposed skin, and he saw beggars that would have provided a graceful ornament to any Collegium Assembler’s arm. When they caught and held his gaze he guessed that begging was not their only source of income. But, then, Collegium morality has never applied to the Spiders.

Something stirred near his foot and he jumped back, as hairy, spindly legs abruptly hooked up under one of the booths’ screens. In an instant there was a big grey spider there, as large as any of the Tidenfree’s crew, industriously unravelling and consuming the curtain’s threads to reveal the booth’s interior. He gazed up along the vertiginous street and saw that almost every booth now boasted a worker, carefully undoing what must have been an evening’s patient work.

His expression drew a smirk from Laszlo.

‘Easy, Ma’rMaker,’ the Fly said, ‘they’re only house-spiders.’

‘Every spider of that size or larger within a tenday’s walk of Collegium was hunted down generations ago,’ Stenwold grunted. ‘You can still find old houses where the nursery has a grill over the window, for fear of them.’

‘Oh, a shame, that is,’ Tomasso spoke from over his shoulder, as they laboured up the slope. ‘There’s never an animal anywhere that’ll train up as well as a spider, and they find all manner of use for them in these parts. In fact, most Spider-kinden sea-captains will take a couple of fellows like these for the topmast. Curse it, but I remember when we were duelling ships in a storm with Ebris of the Ganbrodiel. One time we passed close enough to loose arrows at him, as he tried to board us, and I saw a nest of little beasties up in his rigging, mending his sails and straightening his lines.’

Stenwold knew that he should not find this at all surprising or upsetting, since his own kind, with their Art, had domesticated so many different beetle species, after all. Still, there was none amongst those beetles that might creep up the wall one night, poisoned fangs aglitter . . .

‘Of course, everyone’s heard at least one story of someone who got dead drunk around here,’ Laszlo said cheerily, ‘And then they fell asleep in the gutter and someone found them next morning, drained like last night’s wineskin. But that’s just stories.’

‘You’re not helping,’ Stenwold told him. Laszlo’s answering grin replied that he knew it full well.

Now, a hundred trudging steps up, the flimsy shacks either side of them were giving way to something more permanent. At least there were roofs on many of the little huts, made of thin strips of tightly interwoven wood. Still they had no stouter walls than cloth could supply them, and the only protection they had from any curious neighbour with a knife would be whatever arachnid sentry happened to be crouching alertly within.

Kanateris was waking up now. The network of streets clinging to the island’s rocky sides filled up quickly, and Stenwold witnessed a strange dance of precedence, of people moving aside for each other to a pattern he could not discern. Everyone in the port except himself seemed to know exactly who to give way to and who to brazen past, and he could only stumblingly follow Tomasso’s lead. Every so often he saw an unresolvable difference, two groups that would not give way. Then hands found there way to sword hilts, insults were called, cloaks thrown back to show knives and armour. He saw no blood spilt, though. Always someone decided the game was not worth it.

Because the streets were narrow he was frequently shouldered into one stall or another, enduring a moment of entreaty from its owner before they could get on their way again. Once he found himself surrounded by wicker cages, each one with its eight-legged denizen, whilst a Spider-kinden man in gleaming silks tried to persuade him that he badly needed such a guardian to watch over him as he slept. A second time he found himself walled in by fantastically complex tapestries, and the woman there offering to weave his future for him. Seeing her work, so full of symbols and allegory that he could not begin to guess at, he could almost believe it was true.

The people of Kanateris proved a varied lot. Most were Spiders, but Stenwold reckoned almost half were of other kinden: Flies and Grasshoppers, Ants of strange cities and a good few he did not recognize. Once they quickly whisked themselves out of the way of a veiled Spider lady whose two guards were Mantis-kinden with pale, pearly skin, and who wore ornate silver slave-bracers as if they were a mark of pride.

Looking back down towards the water he almost fell. The cavernous drop behind them seemed to drag at him. He had not realized they had climbed so high.

‘How far up are we going?’ he asked.

‘How far in,’ Tomasso corrected. ‘Your own people may give place to those with the highest houses, but here it’s who’s nearest the centre that’s important. Anyway, we’re close now.’ He stopped by the entrance to some kind of tavern, whose interior reached further back than Stenwold expected, cut into the rockface. It was sheer gloom inside, with only a few sulking lamps to ward off utter darkness.

‘Hoi, Grampos!’ Tomasso hailed, and there followed a disturbance inside, someone pushing their way through the half-dark between close-packed bodies. What emerged, like a grub into the sun, was something like a Spider-kinden: a man of their general look, but burlier and longer of limb. He was stripped to the waist, his exposed body almost woolly with coarse dark hair.

‘Well, if it’s not Skipper Tomasso,’ the man Grampos observed neutrally. He had hobbled, on his way out, and Stenwold saw that one of his ankles had been ruined a long time ago. The image of a slave’s shackles was unavoidable.

‘Grampos, does Tyresia the Prophetess still keep to her old haunts?’ Tomasso asked him.

‘Moonlight Circle now,’ Grampos replied. Stenwold had to fight with his accent to wrest sense from the words.

The answer seemed to please Tomasso, anyway, and he flipped the retreating Grampos a coin, before they continued on their way. ‘She’s getting on in the world,’ the Fly captain commented. ‘Always good news that, when someone owes you a favour.’

‘Prophetess?’ Stenwold said doubtfully. ‘I’m not sure . . .’

‘Master Maker, these are the Spiderlands. Real magicians, if you accept there being such, would never be so coarse as to announce it. So: anyone calling herself a prophetess is something else entirely.’

Their course changed now, creeping between stalls perched along precipitous ledges, or even heading down a few steps – heading further in.

They found Tyresia within a great tent of coloured silks, which was pitched to one side of a broader street. Her enclosed space was nonetheless cool and light, with shimmering clear panels set into the woven ceiling. She was an elegant Spider-kinden woman who looked to Stenwold’s eyes to be of at least middle years, and was therefore surely much older. She wore a plain robe of golden brown, with a single brooch shaped like a butterfly her only ornament, and thereby made the simplicity seem sumptuous. Tomasso and his party waited at a polite distance while she finished her conversation with a pair of copper-skinned men Stenwold identified as Fire Ants. Money changed hands, given not to Tyresia herself but into the palm of a Fly-kinden girl who fluttered out from a back room on cue. Then the Spider matriarch reclined back on her couch and waved Tomasso over.

There was another couch, but Tomasso sat on the floor, leaving a low table between him and his hostess. Stenwold, glad of a respite for his legs, lowered himself down beside Tomasso, while Laszlo lounged in the entrance, close enough to hear what was being said. A scrabble from above indicated that Piera had taken up a watch from somewhere around roof level.

The Fly servant, or at least so Stenwold hoped she was, came out with a tray of small cups. There were rooms and rooms extending behind Tyresia, Stenwold saw, but only odd glimmers or shafts of light gave anything away about them. When he looked down again there were two thimble-sized receptacles before him, one steaming with something dark, the other containing something clear.

Thanking the Spider kindly, Tomasso knocked back first one then the other, in quick succession, as did she. Trusting to his race’s noted constitution, Stenwold did the same.

He had hoped for drinking chocolate, a Spider-kinden delicacy currently popular in Collegium, but his nose gave him the lie even before he tasted it. The hot liquid was bitter enough for him to suspect poison, then the clear one was harsh enough to clean spoons with, evaporating from his throat in a freezing mist. Just as he was about to gag, or possibly beg for a doctor, a marvellously warm and soothing aftertaste followed. He suspected that his expression must be causing some well-hidden amusement while, from his companions’ faces, they might have been drinking plain water.

‘How is my cards partner these days?’ Tyresia asked politely.

‘Getting old,’ Tomasso admitted. ‘Lady, each time I visit, another winter has passed for me, so how is it that they never touch you?’ The words were neither hurried nor sincere, but Tomasso was obviously following some prescribed code of etiquette. There then followed further careful compliments from each to each, feigned humility, enquiries after old friends. Stenwold knew enough about Spider-kinden to know that an ‘old friend’ or a ‘dance partner’ was an enemy of some sort, whereas a ‘card player’ was, if not a friend, then at least an acquaintance that the speaker was not currently at war with.

He had not yet heard Tomasso ask a question at all, but abruptly Tyresia laughed, as free and innocent as a young girl, putting one hand to her mouth to stifle it. ‘Forgive me, my dear, forgive me. You mean the Barbarous Coast, do you not?’

That drew a sour look from Stenwold which surely did not go without notice, but Tomasso was nodding amiably enough. ‘I have set sail there of late, it’s true.’

‘Oh you poor dear, how can you stand it?’ Tyresia shook her head sadly. ‘Alas, I do not make enquiries that way, these days. So little of interest ever happens there. Since I came to the Moonlight Circle I have had my eyes on wider horizons.’

Tomasso ran his fingers through his beard. ‘Of course, one such as you is highly regarded in your profession, so your lessers must all know you.’

‘And I know them,’ she finished. ‘You would be wise to speak with Albinus, dear heart. He has a feeler or two still in that direction.’

Tomasso nodded. ‘Perhaps our paths shall cross some day.’ Even as he got to his feet, though, Tyresia held a hand up. The gesture was so direct that it put Stenwold on his guard.

‘Because I love you, little one, know that Ebris of the Ganbrodiel is in port.’

‘Does he know I am?’ Tomasso had gone very still.

‘Not from me, dear one, but he will know your hull when he sees it. I’m surprised that you did not recognize his.’

‘Ah, well, last time we met, I gave him a gift of firepowder that fair burned his ship out from under him. I’d guess he has a new one now.’

‘He sails the Storm Locust,’ she confirmed. ‘Take care, little one. I don’t want to hear that you have come to grief.’

The path to Albinus took them in an arc all round Kanateris, slowly closing back towards the docks. Tomasso seemed tense now, and he and his crewmates kept a constant eye on the sky. Stenwold did even not need to ask. It had become clear that there was precious little brotherhood amongst pirates.

They ducked inside a chocolate house situated barely twenty yards above the quay, before plunging into smoke-perfumed darkness. Stenwold just let Laszlo tug him along by the sleeve, unsure whether this was their destination or whether they were merely sidestepping some danger. Abruptly they were up against a door, and it was a moment before Stenwold realized the significance. It was the first actual door that the town had presented him with. No spider had woven this.

‘Skipper Tomasso of the Tidenfree, buying,’ the Fly called out, knocking. A moment later came the click of a latch. The lamplight that fell on them was not bright, but it seemed blinding after the gloom. Beyond was a little room done up in a Lowlander style, even down to the solid chairs and a desk. The guards standing by at the far wall were Bee-kinden, but of no city that Stenwold could name. Seated at the desk, Albinus himself was an Ant. He was aptly named, for his skin was ghostly in the lamplight, his hair colourless to the point of transparency. His eyes were a stark, unhealthy pink, raw as those of a man after a night’s hard drinking.

He grinned at them without humour. ‘Skipper,’ he acknowledged with a nod towards the other seats. ‘Kind of you and your purse to come pay me a visit.’

Tomasso remained standing, but Stenwold was not too proud to rest himself. His first thought was that Albinus, robbed of the colouring of his brothers, must be a man without a city, a renegade. It was perhaps what he was intended to think, but he had been around the Vekken for too long to believe it. He knew Ants now: it was the brotherhood inside their heads, not mere skin pigment, that made them what they were. Knowing that fact, and hearing the man’s speech, he guessed that Albinus was probably still on the payroll of the city of Kes. That island nation would have an interest in keeping an eye on the Spiderlands trade routes, and what better disguise for a patriotic spy than to pose as a freelance one?

There was no sign of the elegant niceties that Tomasso had employed on Tyresia. ‘You’re the man to talk to about Lowlander shipping, they say?’

‘They’re kind to say it,’ Albinus replied. When he smiled, his deathly white face was like a skull. ‘The Tidenfree sails the Strand, does she not? Why would you want to know?’

‘Perhaps the Strand is a little prickly these days.’

The Ant nodded, as if satisfied with that. ‘So ask, Skipper.’

‘I hear someone’s throwing their weight around against the Collegium boats.’ Tomasso’s accompanying gesture seemed to make Stenwold his co-conspirator, just some Beetle profiteer who didn’t care about harming his own kin. ‘Now, if I’m going to cut myself a slice of the Barbarous Coast, I want to know who might come looking for me. Or else maybe I’ll just offer my ship to them, if they’re recruiting.’

‘They’re not, Skipper. They have all the hands they need.’ Albinus’s voice remained flat, but Stenwold’s heart leapt just at the words. He was right. Failwright had the right of it. There is a conspiracy. His fingers clutched at the arms of his chair, but he made himself sit still.

‘Then tell me who to steer my course clear of. How much for it, Albinus?’

The Ant calculated silently for a moment. ‘Two-thousand-yard. And don’t try haggling, little man. We Ant-kinden have no patience for it.’

Tomasso gave no reaction, but Laszlo could not keep in a whistle of appreciation. Whatever the currency, it was clearly a great deal of money.

‘I have . . .’ he started, thinking of the Helleron-minted coins in his purse.

‘I pay him. You pay me later,’ Tomasso cut him off. ‘Just remember our agreement.’ He signalled, and Laszlo came forward and started counting out big coins, twice the size of a Helleron central and looking like solid gold. He stopped at twenty, making two neat stacks of them.

‘The name?’ Tomasso prompted.

Albinus smiled his death’s-head grin. ‘The Aldanrael,’ he said.