Twenty

When Stenwold was returned to the oubliette, the smashed grate had been replaced and the Edmir’s guards lowered him back in, under Haelyn’s watchful eye. Stenwold had noticed, while still up above, that their original quartet of warders had now been doubled. He wondered whether that would deter Rosander, should the man want another chat.

‘Where’s Teornis?’ was the first thing he asked.

Laszlo shook his head grimly. ‘Didn’t bring him back, not yet.’

‘They may not, ever,’ Paladrya’s ghostly voice spoke from the gloom. ‘The Edmir has certain . . . tastes. With two land-kinden in hand, he may choose to test his third one to destruction. He believes that enjoying the pain of others is a prerogative of rulers.’

She had appeared from the dark, her skin losing its stone colours. Stenwold pointed a finger at her, angry with her because he had no other target. ‘You!’ he snapped, and she flinched. ‘Start telling me something useful.’ When she just stared at him he went on, ‘To start with, tell me about this nonsense that we’re supposed to have driven you into the sea.’

‘It is nonsense,’ she agreed, which was the last thing he had expected to hear. ‘Just an old, old story, and one that nobody cares about, except the Littoralists. Nobody else believes it now.’

‘Your Rosander seemed to believe it,’ Stenwold retorted hotly but, even as he said it, he was not sure it was true. Rosander had just been passing on the myth, and Stenwold knew a hollow excuse for warfare when he heard it.

‘I could not say what the Nauarch believes,’ Paladrya said meekly. ‘In truth, I would guess that we did once live on the land, for although we have Art to breathe the water, this air is still more natural to us. Our home is here, though. It was not long ago that anyone claiming that we should go back to the land would have been laughed out of the colony, and the Littoralists were considered a bad joke. But now the Edmir humours them, and gives them power. Now people who laugh at them often meet a bad end. And then there is Rosander,’ she added. ‘Rosander has been promised his war . . .’

‘A war on my people,’ Stenwold confirmed.

‘Any war, but Claeon finds in your people an enemy fit to match Rosander’s power.’

Stenwold sought out Paladrya’s pale face, trying to maintain his ire, but his basic decency was already sapping it, telling him that this woman was not, herself, deserving of it. He sighed deeply. ‘Look, tell me some of the things that you just take for granted here, will you? What’s an Edmir. What’s a Nauarch? What’s going on between Rosander and this Claeon? How does this place work? Can you teach me that without just muddying the waters?’

‘I was a tutor, once,’ Paladrya said sadly.

‘And I was a student. We’re well met, therefore, so tell me.’

‘This is the colony of Hermatyre. There are other colonies, but none are close by. The sea . . . perhaps it is different on land, but the seabed is mostly barren, deserted. It is hard to live, in those great expanses, and dangerous. So, whenever the builders found a colony, there are many who come—’

‘Builders?’ Stenwold interrupted. ‘Explain builders. Who builds? Your people?’

‘The Arketoi,’ she told him. ‘They build the colonies, layer on layer. They are always building them, over and over. They are the start of it all. In the distant past they began to form Hermatyre, and then my kinden came, and all the others, the great families.’ She was scanning his face for signs of understanding. ‘Ways of life,’ she told him. ‘It is not easy to live in the open water, as I have said. Few are the kinden who can manage alone. Those who live in the colony are called Obligists.’

‘That’s a kinden?’ he asked, bewildered.

‘No, no. It is just a way of life. The Obligist path is to live within the colonies that the Archetoi build. Obligist because we are obligated to them: everything we have we owe to them.’

‘They are your masters? This Claeon . . . ?’

‘No, no,’ she repeated, clearly finding it hard to accommodate his level of ignorance. ‘They barely notice us, do not care at all for us. Certainly they do not rule us. They simply create these spaces into which we creep to live our lives, and where we hope not to offend them. When the colony is attacked, as when the Echinoi raid, then we defend our homes with our lives, and perhaps that is all the builders see in us: expendable soldiers who will die for their creations. Who can fathom their minds?’

‘I’m finding it increasingly difficult to fathom even your mind,’ Stenwold said acidly, and immediately regretted it as she flinched. ‘So Claeon’s not an Architect? So what is he, then? Where does he come in . . . and Rosander?’

‘Claeon is Edmir. The Edmir rules the colony, or at least the Obligist population within it, the Kerebroi and Onychoi and all the other great families.’

Stenwold just stared at her pointedly, and he had the sense that she was trying to work out where best to start. Even the youngest child she might have taught would take for granted matters that were a complete mystery to these land-kinden.

‘I am of the families of the Kerebroi. The kinden of the family of the Kerebroi are the majority here in Hermatyre. Claeon is Kerebroi, but of the royal line, and he is Edmir over the colony. Also in Hermatyre there are others. There are the kinden of the families of the Onychoi. Rosander is of the Onychoi, as were his servants that took you from Claeon’s care.’

Stenwold seized on that. ‘Rosander is Nauarch of the . . . of the something train.’

‘The Thousand Spines. Rosander and his people are Benthists. They travel the wastes, where they scavenge and trade. Normally they would arrive at a colony like this and be gone back into the darkness, but Rosander’s people have been here for five years now. Claeon brought them. Claeon keeps them here.’

‘And they’re getting restless,’ Stenwold saw. ‘Rosander has a lot of warriors, yes? His people are fighters by nature. And I’d guess yours aren’t?’

She nodded. ‘You begin to understand it, land-kinden. Claeon lets the Littoralists speak to Rosander of their ancient, stupid grievances, and then Rosander plans his conquests. He has been to the land already, so they say.’

Stenwold shivered at that. Is this a serious threat? He imagined Rosander’s giants ranged against snapbows. How strong was that armour? But then they’re hardly likely to issue a formal declaration of war. He wondered how much of the dockside and the riverfront a determined raiding party of Rosander’s creatures could strip bare before anyone could work out what was going on. And then back into the sea before anyone understood . . . and beyond any retribution.

He felt as though he should say something positive. ‘We must do something,’ or, ‘We have to get out of here’ or suchlike, but the sheer impossibility of the challenge rose up against him, trapped here in an oubliette beneath a palace in some kind of colony beneath who could know how many leagues of sea.

‘I have met Rosander,’ he said slowly. ‘Now tell me of Claeon.’

‘Edmir of Hermatyre, usurper and tyrant,’ she said softly. ‘My lover, once.’

He let that sink in. ‘I suppose that came to an end when he threw you in here.’

He saw her pale hands gripping the stone bars of her cell. ‘No, land-kinden, it stopped when he discovered that I had betrayed him – when he had me whipped, when he had me raped.’ Her voice was flat and toneless. ‘But he must feel something for me, even now, for though I have been kept here two years, I am still alive. He has not ordered my death, nor broken my bones, nor harmed me beyond repair.’ Her voice threatened to break at last, but she held it together mercilessly. ‘No doubt you have no such people where you come from. Please believe that, of my kinden, of all the sea-kinden, Claeon is a poor ambassador. And even he was not so, once. When his brother lived, before temptation was put before him, he was . . . a different man.’

Stenwold had more questions, but in the face of such misery he had not the heart to ask them.

Claeon re-entered the chamber, looking in a rather worse temper than before. Teornis braced himself. He had been left strapped to the whipping frame since the Edmir had been called from the room. Some development had obviously displeased him in the meantime, which doubtless boded no good for Teornis’s future health. The interruption had occurred just after a few lashes of the whip, which Teornis had tried to bear manfully, and which had doubtless been meant as a polite introduction to the Edmir’s hospitality. Teornis suspected that Claeon now intended to start a more meaningful conversation, probably with the knives he seemed so keen on fondling.

Well, I have had a chance to prepare my speeches, O Edmir, he considered. Let us now see whether there is anything left of my skills.

The most wretched aspect of it was that all he felt for Claeon was contempt. Oh, it was not that a Spider-kinden would never stoop to a little torture for a pastime, but it would either be simply a pastime, or it would be the serious interrogation of a knowledgeable but stubborn prisoner. If their positions were reversed, and if Teornis had captive an ambassador from a hitherto unguessed-at culture who might know all the secrets under the sea, then he would not waste time in indulging some petty personal inclination for inflicting pain. Either he would have a skilled professional torturer sifting through every nerve and fibre of Claeon’s being for what he knew, or he would be plying his own charm to win over the stranger to the cause of the Aldanrael. Since this second option plainly had not occurred to the Edmir, it would be up to Teornis now to place that thought in his mind.

Claeon stared at the Spider’s arched form, but his mind was for the moment elsewhere. ‘I would give a great deal,’ he muttered, ‘to have that oaf Rosander here in this room and at my mercy.’

Teornis took a deep breath. His back still stung, from the ministrations of the lash, and his joints and muscles were sorely strained from having hung here for so long. With an ease born of long practice, he expelled the discomfort from his mind, made of his voice a pleasant thing and said, ‘There is one other, I think, you’d rather have here than just me.’

Claeon started at his words, and Teornis thought, Not used, I think, to having the meat address him. I must work fast before he decides I’m better off without a tongue. ‘I can get Aradocles for you. How would that please you, O Edmir?’

The expression on Claeon’s face became instantly guarded. ‘You do not even know who Aradocles is,’ he accused.

‘True, save that I know he has escaped you, therefore he is your enemy.’

Claeon was stalking closer. His hand brushed down the line of knives, twitching at them, but none of them had found his grip yet. ‘No doubt you think I would send you back up to the land on receiving your word of honour to return with the boy. You land-kinden must be very simple.’

Oh. indeed. ‘I expect you would send some of your warriors along with me,’ Teornis said mildly. ‘But I can give you something more than that, to prove my good faith.’ His reasonable tone, not pleading, not desperate, nor distorted by fear, was intriguing the man. My fish is on the very point of the hook.

Claeon did not speak, but he nodded by a fraction of an inch as if to say, go on.

‘Allow me to make a presumption, O Edmir,’ Teornis put forward. ‘I may be wrong, but you are in a splendid position to educate me if that is the case.’

An unwilling smile tugged at Claeon’s mouth, almost lost amid the wealth of his beard. ‘Then presume,’ he prompted.

‘Your monster took us from our ship near one particular city – colony – picked out of the length of a very extensive coastline.’ Teornis watched the man’s face to make sure that words like ‘coastline’ had meaning here. ‘Why would you be concerned with that one place, considering you are the lord of the sea?’ he added, assessing Claeon as a man not immune to flattery. ‘It must be because you have an interest there. But what interest? Can it be linked with the disappearance of your enemy Aradocles on to the land?’

‘I see Paladrya betrays me even from my oubliette,’ Claeon growled. ‘She talks too much to you, too little to me, even when I have her here in this very room. She claims she does not know where the boy went, having left such decisions to the servants that fled with him. Still, this land-colony is the closest place of any size to where she confessed she took him. Why should your colony not feel my wrath, if it shelters my enemies?’

‘Why indeed?’ Teornis forced a smile. ‘Especially as it is not my colony.’

‘Explain yourself,’ Claeon snapped.

‘Willingly. My own colony lies a great distance from that place, but a quarrel has grown between my people and the locals. When your monster captured us, we were meeting to argue over our differences.’ He made his smile broader. ‘I see you don’t believe me, and if our positions were reversed I’d be doubtful too.’ And may our positions be reversed one day, O Edmir, and you shall then see how a truly civilized kinden takes revenge. ‘You must have agents in that colony, though, or how else could you have known where we would be? Since you have your people hidden there, in that place, send to them, I beg you. Send to them and ask them how matters stand between that colony and the Spiderlands. Ask them about me, Teornis of the Aldanrael, and see what they say.’

Claeon studied him for a long time, and now his expression became as hooded and hidden as that of any Spider Aristos. At last he called out, and another man of his kinden came in, clearly one of his guards.

‘Take this prisoner to one of the upper chambers,’ the Edmir murmured. ‘Have him fed, but watched and guarded carefully.’ He cocked an eye at Teornis. ‘If what you have said is true, you’ll have no objection if I replace you with one of your cell-mates, no doubt?’

‘They are my enemies, just as they are yours,’ Teornis said, and if he felt a stab of shame, it was lost in the physical relief of being released from his bonds.

‘Day or night, do you reckon?’ Laszlo asked.

Stenwold prodded unenthusiastically at the bowl of something unfamiliar that had been passed down to him. His stomach, only a moment ago a riot of hunger, suddenly had other business. Whatever it was smelt of fish – or even more of fish than everything else here – but had the consistency of porridge.

He pondered the Fly’s question, and realized with alarm that he had no idea. ‘I . . .’ He could not bring himself to admit that his internal clock had not survived the loss of the sun. ‘Day,’ he concluded, sounding as confident as he could.

‘It is night.’ Paladrya had relapsed back into stone colours, and her voice rose ghostly from the gloom. ‘The tides sweep towards the sea’s edge. The nautili rise from the deep places.’

‘How can you tell?’ Stenwold demanded. ‘Why would you people even need to know?’

‘We feel the moon as it passes above. We feel the sea enliven with a thousand thousand growing things in the sunlight. We feel the cold creep in as the darkness rises from the depths, where it lives always,’ she stated.

Stenwold shivered. The thought, I’m going to die here, surfaced in his mind, and he watched it bobbing there like a drowned thing before it sank once more. Die, without ever seeing the sun again, without ever seeing Cheerwell or being there when the Wasps come again. Die without ever seeing Arianna, but then that has become a given. A shudder racked him, of loss and loathing. He was aware of Laszlo watching him with concern, and wished that Fly-kinden eyes were not so sharp in the dark.

They heard sounds above, then. They had more visitors, it seemed. Stenwold stood up, hoping that it would be Teornis being returned to them at last, but there was a conversation going on above, something more than just dropping off a prisoner.

‘Change of shift?’ Laszlo suggested quietly. He was standing, too, braced for action, ready to employ his Art. Stenwold wasn’t sure, but he suspected the Fly was going to try some impossible piece of theatrics if the cells were opened, jumping the eight or ten guards above, in a bid to gain the pitiful span of freedom it would win him. He knew he should dissuade his companion, but the voice in his head was telling him that it would be better, surely, to be killed in some futile endeavour than to rot away down here in the dark.

‘Then you take it up with the chief,’ he heard a woman’s high-pitched voice say. ‘You read what’s there, and if you want to go interrupt him when he’s getting himself all worked up, then fine.’

‘Since when are you on the staff?’ one of the guards demanded, and then, ‘Hey, I asked you—!’ There was someone already halfway down the ramp before the first guard got to them. Stenwold thought it was Chenni at first, but then he saw it was another woman of her kinden, diminutive and hunched.

‘In case you hadn’t noticed,’ the woman said, turning with raw vitriol in her voice, ‘the chief’s staff changes with every phase of the moon, mostly because they get on his nerves all the time by not doing what they’re told.’ The guard loomed over her, but she seemed utterly unflapped.

‘Three of you – for two prisoners?’ another guard objected. The ramp was getting cluttered now. There were at least four of the jailers there, and a sharp-faced man a little taller than they were, also as bald as half these sea-people seemed to be. Another knot of guards was gathered about someone else still at the top of the ramp.

‘You don’t think we can handle them?’ the woman asked, stepping down off the foot of the ramp and forcing a pair of the guards to follow her.

‘Himself’s just doubled the watch here,’ her opponent objected. ‘Doesn’t make sense, him just sending three . . . three I-don’t-know-what-you-are’s to take care of this pair. They’re important, these are.’

‘All the more reason for you to do what you’re told. You’ve seen the orders,’ the woman rejoined.

Stenwold was becoming very aware of Laszlo. The Fly had gone very tense, and now he half flew, half climbed to the top of his cell, where he waited silently, obviously ready to act on the instant. Something’s up. The guard had been listening to the woman’s words, but Stenwold realized that Laszlo had been reading something into her tone. Something was not ringing true. Something was up.

‘Look, I’m not having this,’ the chief guard decided. ‘Maybe Himself has a few Onychoi on the staff to do the dull jobs, but I never heard of him hiring a Polyp.’ He gestured back up the ramp. ‘I mean, why would anyone?’

‘Because we can do this!’ snapped another woman’s voice, and abruptly two of the guards at the top of the ramp were falling, just dropping down into the oubliette itself. They were twitching as they hit the ground, spasming and fitting.

The chief guard was shouting some kind of oath as he pulled his knife from his belt-loop. The small woman was marginally quicker, whipping out her own dagger and ramming it hard into his groin, and then into his throat, to choke off his scream. On the ramp it became utter chaos. The bald man had gone into a frenzy, lashing out at all around him with his bare hands. Stenwold recognized his kinden as like the man with Chenni, who had smashed the cell grating with his bare hands. The newcomer had the same Art-bulked fists, with his spines set forwards like knives, and he carried a pair of stilettos jutting upward in his hands as well. As he fought, Stenwold spotted the kinship he had missed before: just as Paladrya’s people resembled Spiders, so this man was a cousin to Mantids.

Now the other woman was coming down the ramp, also lashing out with her bare hands. She drove two of the guards before her and, although they had blades out, they were keeping well out of her reach, so much so that the bald man killed both of them from behind before they realized how far down they had backed away. They got a spine in the back of the neck each, as brutal and surgically precise a blow as anything Stenwold had ever seen.

There were no more guards, after that. The final man had been going after the small woman with his curved dagger when he had trod over Laszlo’s cell and the Fly had snagged his foot through the grate, tripping him. The woman’s steel had done the rest. Now she was looking down at Laszlo as he hovered at the very top of his cell, desperate to be out of it.

‘Well, that settles that,’ the little bald woman said shakily, staring at the blur of the Fly’s wings. ‘They really are land-kinden, not just hoaxes.’

‘Time,’ grunted the bald, Mantis-looking man, and the small woman nodded enthusiastically.

‘Right, Phylles, open up the lids.’

The other woman, who had created such an affray with the guards, came to crouch by Stenwold’s cell. He looked up at her curiously. On the one hand she was a kinden he had not seen before, not the Spider-like elegance of Paladrya or the guards, nor possessing Rosander’s squat bulk. Yet from another point of view, she was familiar. She wore more clothing than the other locals, to start with. Whilst practically every other sea-kinden went about in a state of indecent undress, by Collegium standards, this woman was wearing a long leathery coat over some kind of tunic and, although she was barefoot, she wore something approaching breeches too. She was heavily built, her hair spikily short, and her skin looked bruise-purple in the fickle light. In her face and build, though, she was not unlike Stenwold himself, not unlike all those Beetle-kinden he knew back under the sun. Although it meant nothing, although she would be no more a Beetle than Paladrya was a Spider, the sight gave him heart.

‘Stop staring,’ she growled at him, and put her hands to the grating. She closed her eyes for a moment, feeling it out, and then had it lifted off without effort. She reached a hand down to him, grinning, and seemed surprised when he took it. Only then did he remember the way that the guards had been trying to keep clear of her touch. Something squirmed within her grip, and he nearly let go, but some obscure sense of keeping face made him hold on. She hauled grimly, and he kicked and scrabbled at the stones to help her, and between them they soon had him lying gasping on his belly on the oubliette floor, legs still dangling down into his cell. By the time he had found his feet, Laszlo was free as well, and had taken up one of the dead guards’ knives.

‘Now, come on,’ the small woman urged them, her voice low and urgent.

‘And who says so?’ Laszlo demanded. He was keeping his distance from the newcomers but had dropped out of the air.

‘Some weighty people want you out of here,’ she said, squaring up to him, meeting him eye to eye.

‘So maybe we’ll make our own way.’

‘Laszlo,’ Stenwold struggled into a sitting position, ‘where would we go?’

The Fly looked unhappy. ‘What about her?’ he asked, pointing downwards.

‘Time, Wys,’ the bald man repeated pointedly. He was already standing near the top of the ramp, half crouching in the shadow of the doorway.

‘Her who? Who else is down there?’ The small woman – Wys? – squinted at where Laszlo was pointing. Paladrya’s skin shimmered reluctantly before she let herself be seen.

‘You a land-kinden?’ Wys asked doubtfully.

‘I am not,’ answered Paladrya.

‘Then you’re not in my brief. Let’s go, landsmen—’

‘She stays, I stay,’ Laszlo said stubbornly. ‘She’s a prisoner too.’

A pair of men arrived above, not expecting trouble, perhaps merely come to investigate where the guards had gone. Stenwold caught only a brief glimpse of them before the bald man struck. His hands lashed out, blurring with speed. Stenwold didn’t notice whether it was dagger-points or the spikes of the man’s Art, but he had taken the unsuspecting pair down in an instant. He looked pointedly down at the others.

‘Get her up, Phylles,’ Wys said, exasperated.

Phylles gave the world a look of resentment and frustration, and hauled the grate off Paladrya’s cell, reaching down to pull her up with a lot less effort than she had Stenwold.

‘Spit me,’ Wys said, staring. ‘It’s the Traitress.’

In the brief silence that followed Stenwold tried to catch Paladrya’s reaction to this accusation, but she would not meet his eyes.

‘Oh, we’ll bring her too, all right. There’ll be a nice bonus when we hand her over,’ Wys said enthusiastically. ‘Now, let’s move. Any funny business and we’ll be delivering a land-kinden with one arm or something.’ She was pattering up the ramp even as she spoke. Phylles meanwhile gestured for the land-kinden and Paladrya to follow.

When Stenwold got close he whispered, ‘Traitress?’ but the woman would not answer him.

They passed through the vacant guard room, strewn with oddments of jewellery and clothing that must have belonged to the dead men below. On a flattened-off lump of stone that protruded directly from the floor there was some kind of board, showing a series of concentric rings marked into segments, and black and red stones were arranged partway through an unfamiliar game.

Stenwold tried to recall the route that Chenni’s party had taken earlier, and realized quickly enough that they were not following it. Instead they seemed to be heading downwards, and he had the feeling that they were going yet deeper into the Edmir’s palace – or whatever edifice they were in. When he tried to ask questions, he got such a vicious look from the bald man that the words died in his throat. Paladrya looked drawn and frightened.

Brigands, he thought, mercenaries. But they were well-connected ones. They obviously had some kind of seal or document they had used to get into the cells, even if it had not quite convinced the sentries. And they were cursed quick in dealing with the guards, after that. He bore the deceased men no love, but the ferocity with which Phylles and the bald man had culled the oubliette’s warders was chilling.

Then the passage they had been following came to a strange kind of end in a round wall with a star shape incised into it. Stenwold did not interpret it as a door until Wys pushed at it, and it split into tooth-shaped sections that folded away from them. There was a small room beyond, with an identical kind of hatch, making it seem a pointless little antechamber to Stenwold.

When they were inside, Wys hauled on one of the curled-back fangs, and the door they had entered through flexed shut again, moving like a living thing. A strange premonition came to Stenwold and he pointed, ‘What’s through there?’

‘The sea, idiot,’ the small woman told him, and moved towards the second hatch. Stenwold had a moment of lurching horror, then he had almost hurled himself at Wys. The bald man snagged his belt halfway and hauled him back, but he still clipped the small woman’s shoulder, staggering her. She had her knife out instantly, and Stenwold saw the bald man’s spiked fist poised above his face. Laszlo’s blade was in his hand as well, and Phylles had a hand out towards him, eerily reminiscent of a Wasp about to sting.

‘We’ll drown!’ Stenwold choked. ‘The sea . . . We’ll drown. You’ll drown us.’

For a moment Wys stared at him, open-mouthed, then her eyes flicked to her comrades. ‘Spit me,’ she said. ‘Piss-damn land-kinden. This job just gets more stupid.’

‘Cauls,’ the bald man suggested.

Wys smirked at that, then nodded. ‘Stay here, watch them,’ she said, and then had the first toothy door open again, and was scuttling away.