‘So I’d be watching your back. It’ll be just like the war.’
‘I need someone to keep an eye on things here while I’m away.’
‘So get Jodry Drillen to do that,’ she said stubbornly. He saw in her mind then the time he had left her behind for his futile journey to the Commonweal, before the Wasp siege of Collegium.
‘I don’t trust Drillen, not enough to act as my eyes,’ Stenwold told her. ‘Would you?’
‘So,’ she said. She was angry with him, still looking for a way to crack his resolve. ‘Where now, Stenwold?’
He was intending to stay silent, but he saw her tensing up. ‘If I told you that a pack of Fly-kinden was going to show me where the pirates are, would you believe me?’
‘What have you got yourself into?’ Her face was closed tight now. For a moment he was going to relent. I’ll talk the Tidenfree crew into it somehow, why not? Why not bring her along? He was on the brink.
‘I’ll be fine.’ His words came out automatically. That old reassuring tone that had ceased to work on Cheerwell by the time she was fifteen, let alone on a Spider-kinden. I don’t want you to get hurt, he thought, but he knew from experience this was an argument that carried no weight with her.
His conversation of last night recurred to him, seeming dreamlike now, with a grinning Tomasso hearing him voice his doubts: And I’m supposed to believe that the moment I go hunting pirates, I should find pirates already hunting me?
‘Oh no, Master Maker,’ Tomasso had said to him. ‘We’ve had our eyes on three or four of your Assemblers for days now. My Laszlo’s been watching your home. You were just the first that came to the negotiating table, as it were.’
Stenwold then wondered: Did they kill Failwright? But if so, they were playing more double games than he could interpret. His instincts had told him that these friendly, open, heavily armed folk were being straight with him, solely because they were admitting to so much.
‘And what do you mean by respectability?’ he had asked them. ‘Quantify it, Master Tomasso. Has the bottom fallen out of the pirate way of life? My sources say not.’
The bearded Fly had glanced about at his family. ‘A life of iniquity is all very well, Master Maker. We’ve taken ships off the Atoll coast and the Silk Road and the Bay of the Mark and not three leagues from where we sit, but there’s no future in it and there never will be. We live well day to day, but no better generation to generation, and one day our luck will run out and we’ll either sink or swing. When Himself here breathes his last, it’s down to me to lead the family, and I want to lead them somewhere else than out to sea. You’re a big man in Collegium, Maker. Don’t tell me that you can’t buy us some respectability.’
‘In exchange for what?’ Stenwold had asked. ‘What do you have for me?’
‘Come with us to where the pirates drop their anchors, Master Maker,’ Tomasso had said. ‘I mean the real pirates, the free thieves of the sea that you won’t find drinking in a Collegium taverna. If the answers to all your questions are to be found anywhere, we can find the people who know them for you.’ He had smiled again, broad and villainous and honest as a knife. ‘Pay us for value received, Master Maker.’ With the unspoken words, and if you don’t pay up, we have ways of making you.
‘Stay here,’ Stenwold told Arianna. ‘Stay and keep watch for me. If you want to watch my back, watch it here where I know I have enemies.’
‘I’m going on a journey,’ Stenwold explained. The alarm in Jodry Drillen’s eyes was gratifying.
‘Going where? For how long?’
Stenwold shrugged. ‘Two tendays perhaps, three. A sea voyage.’
‘A what? Why?’ Stenwold had caught Jodry in the Speaker’s office, where the man was no doubt deciding on the colour of the new furnishings. Now the fat Assembler looked abruptly like the boy caught trying out his father’s outsized sword. ‘Stenwold… a sea voyage?’
‘For my health,’ replied Stenwold implacably. It was unfair of him, he knew. He was taking out on Jodry his own guilt over leaving Arianna. Jodry Drillen, new Speaker for the Assembly. He’s earned a little unfairness.
‘This isn’t Failwright’s lunacy is it?’
‘Why? Is it catching?’
‘Stenwold, stop doing that!’ Jodry snapped. ‘You can’t go. I need you here.’
‘You don’t need me now. You’re Speaker.’
‘Not all the Lots are in.’
‘You’ve beaten Helmess Broiler by a comfortable margin already. You don’t need me so badly you can’t spare me for two tendays.’
Jodry looked wildly about him, putting Stenwold in mind of a big bumbling fly trying to find its way out of a sealed room. ‘The Vekken!’ he got out. ‘Who’s going to deal with them when you’re away?’
‘They’re behaving themselves nicely.’
‘They’re not! They want to see me!’ Jodry exclaimed. ‘Me and you,’ he added awkwardly after a pause.
A worm of disquiet twisted inside Stenwold. ‘About what?’
‘I’ve no cursed idea. They’re your Vekken.’
That Vekken accord, the piece of botch-job diplomacy that Stenwold had been working on for so long, was still important. Stenwold’s lifetime had seen two Vekken wars, though he could barely recall the first save as an inexplicable period of fear and commotion during his youth. ‘What have you done to sour them, Jodry?’
‘Oh no.’ The fat man shook his head hard enough to make his jowls wobble. ‘Not me. I leave them to you, but this morning I find two of them bothering my secretary for an appointment. You tell me why.’
Stenwold grimaced. Part of him wanted to leave Jodry to fight his own battles for once, but this situation needed him. ‘We’ll see them immediately,’ he decided. ‘Send a man for them now.’
‘But-’
‘I board ship before dusk, Jodry. If you want my help with the Vekken, then you’re more likely to get it while I’m still on land.’
After Jodry had sent his Fly-kinden secretary buzzing off to locate one of the Vekken, the Assembly’s most likely new Speaker turned back to Stenwold, and eyed him narrowly.
‘What’s got into you?’ he asked. ‘What’s going on?’
Stenwold stared at him for a long while. I mostly trust you, he thought, but not quite that last bit, Jodry. I’m not so convinced of my own judgement where it comes to assessing my own kinden. He realized, with a start, that Tomasso the pirate had inspired more instinctive trust in him than this Beetle-kinden of notable family who had done Stenwold nothing but good. But Tomasso made no attempt to hide what he is, whereas Jodry’s whole career is based on impressions and pretences. The sour afterthought was unavoidable. And so is my own.
Jodry was frowning. ‘First you’re about to laugh at me, and now you look like you want to kill me. Stenwold… Is this about your niece?’
‘What do you know about my niece?’
‘I know she didn’t come back from Khanaphes, but Master Gripshod didn’t pass her name to me along with Manny Gorget’s, so I’m assuming she’s still somewhere amongst the living.’ The concern in the man’s jowly face was genuine, in so far as Stenwold could tell.
‘Trust me in what I’m doing.’ Stenwold dodged the question nimbly. ‘Trust me that I believe it to be in Collegium’s best interests.’
Jodry sighed. ‘Well, your record is good in that respect. I just hope that what you believe matches what you actually find there.’
The Fly-kinden returned just then, and behind him, walking with a smart military step, was one of the Vekken. The city of Vek had sent four ambassadors, men similar enough in appearance to be brothers, short, stocky, strong-framed, pitch-skinned. Stenwold was able to tell them apart now, from long afternoons of unrewarding negotiations.
‘Termes,’ he greeted the man.
‘Master Maker.’ Something had happened on the Khanaphes expedition to change the Vekken’s view of Stenwold. When their two delegates had returned, and shared their thoughts with their comrades, a breach seemed to have been made in their blank hostility. All of a sudden they could look at him without reaching for their swords and, when he spoke, they listened. Jodry was right in that.