‘I’m sorry,’ Stenwold said automatically.
‘We’re all sorry,’ Tomasso acknowledged. ‘But it’s my job to find us a future, and if the best means to that is helping you, then here’s my hand on it.’
He didn’t offer his hand, so Stenwold chalked that one up to Figures of speech (Fly-kinden pirates). While he was doing so, Tomasso looked him up and down critically.
‘You’ll pass, for where we’re going. For such a Big Man you dress down nicely.’
Stenwold was wearing his hard-weather gear: a suit of reinforced canvas and leather with toolstrips and pouches, such as an artificer would wear to go to war in. He had an oilcloth cloak over that, to keep as much of the sea out as would prove practical. The Fly-kinden around him all wore long-coats, or what amounted to long-coats on them: shiny with wax and oil, wool-lined on the inside, appropriate clothing for the rain and the cold wind. Most also had a woollen cap on, save for Laszlo, sporting a leather helm, and Gude, who went bare-headed, the breeze tugging ineffectually at her short light-dyed hair.
‘You’re armed?’ Tomasso asked, and when Stenwold twitched back his cape to show his sword-hilt, the Fly sniffed. ‘Anything else?’
‘In my luggage,’ Stenwold allowed.
‘Good. The port we’re headed for, it’s not good to be too subtle about these things.’
‘And where are we headed, Master Tomasso?’
‘Kanateris.’ The name meant nothing to Stenwold, save maybe for its last syllable.
‘Is that near Seldis?’ He racked his brains for the ports along the Silk Road.
‘Oh, we’re not pointing ourselves east, Master Maker. That’s the long way round.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re an educated man, so you see the same maps I do. It’s quicker to cut straight south, if you want to see where the Spiders live.’
Which is correct, of course, and yet we don’t. Stenwold had learned that, and not questioned it, because sea travel had never been of interest to him. It goes to show how knowledge is never wasted. One of the College’s mottos, that, and how very true. ‘Enlighten me,’ he said.
The Tidenfree was making good headway now, the coastline receding smartly. He would have said, the familiar coastline, but of course he was no seagoer, so it could have been Solarno or Seldis or some city on the moon for all he would recognize the view.
‘Laszlo.’ Tomasso singled out the younger Fly. ‘Make yourself useful to Master Maker. I need to go and plot our course with Gude.’
The young Fly strutted up to Stenwold, the salt wind tugging at his coat. ‘You want the secret, Master?’
‘Is it a secret?’
‘Oh, isn’t it? But if the chief says tell, I’ll tell. Where would you sail, in order to do business with the Spider-lands, Ma’rMaker?’ Laszlo gestured expansively, as if trying to encompass all of creation with his hands. His rapid speech condensed ‘Master Maker’ into a babble. ‘Why, down the coast, of course, hoping the ships of Felyal and Kes aren’t too hungry, past the forts of of Everis and into Seldis or Siennis, a long old way. And there you’d trade with Spiders who’d charge a fortune for the goods up the Silk Road, yet pay a pittance for yours, for the chief occupation of everyone in those cities is taking bribes and levying taxes. Believe me, I know. Or, if you were a foolish man, you’d take your ship down the desert coast and look to sell to the Spiderlands direct. Know what happens to people who do that?’
‘They don’t come back,’ Stenwold suggested.
Laszlo nodded energetically. ‘Not cos the Spiders are mean, you understand, but it’s a death warrant to go that way and trade, not knowing how they do things. Eventually you bribe too much or too little, bribe the wrong man, say something you never realized was an insult, fail to compliment the women, drink in the wrong taverna. The next day, well, you’re lucky if you’re in chains and gone from being a trader to being stock in trade, if you get me. So your lot, all you get are the dog-ends from Seldis, and at a ruinous poor price, too.’
‘But you know how to get on with the Spiders?’
‘We could sail along the desert coast with no trousers and we’d get away with it,’ Lazslo replied. It was hard to tell just how old he was. He looked like a man of twenty years, but his enthusiasm was six years younger. ‘However, we don’t need to. There are two reasons why even those who know better still sail the coast road to Seldis, Ma’rMaker. Firstly, once you’re out of sight of the coast, it’s cursed hard to plot a course just by sun and stars. You reach the far shore and you’re a hundred miles from where you should be, and you with your water running low, and who knows what family owns the next port. More than that, there are the weed seas. The sea’s got forests, like the land does, with weed so tall it reaches from where the sun don’t shine all the way to the open air. Your ship gets caught in that, there’s no steering out of it, and then you starve or die of thirst or… well, they say there’s things that live there that’ll soon put you out of your misery. Other problem is the weather. It’s rare enough to get across without a storm, and I’d bet you a bit to a Helleron central that we’ll see one this trip. Tear a ship apart, bring the mast down on you, rip your sails off, they can. Wind, lightning like the sky’s on fire, waves that come between you and the sun-’
‘Sea-kinden,’ Gude interrupted unexpectedly.
Laszlo snorted. ‘Nobody believes in sea-kinden,’ he said. ‘And, with all that storm going on, who’d need them? Faced with that kind of weather, the coast road looks awfully inviting.’
‘But you’ve got a way through?’ Stenwold prompted.
‘Oh, surely,’ Laszlo confirmed. ‘Come up and stand by Gude now, Ma’rMaker.’
‘Stenwold. Just call me Stenwold,’ the Beetle insisted, clumping up from the deck level to the wheel. Gude gave Laszlo a warning glare, but he ignored her blithely.
‘Now, I’m betting you know what these toys are,’ he said.
They were battered and weather-worn, not the workshop-mint pieces that he had seen previously, but Stenwold was artificer enough to pick them out. ‘I see an absolute clock and a gimballed compass,’ he said.
‘And with their help, and charts, and a reckoning taken from the sky, and some fairly taxing mathematics, Ma’r Stenwold, we find our way to wherever we want to be.’
‘And you also calculate your way through storms, do you?’
Laszlo still smiled, but abruptly it was the smile of an older man. ‘Oh, Master Stenwold Maker, this is the other part of the secret.’ He leant close, forcing Stenwold to bend nearer to him. ‘Do you believe in magic?’ he said.
Stenwold paused a long while before answering. His instinct was ‘No,’ of course, and nearly any other Beetle would not have hesitated to say so, but he had seen too much, encountered too many other kinden. ‘Yes,’ he said at last, and reluctantly.
Laszlo’s smile changed again, without moving, like the sea colours in the sunlight. ‘Well,’ he said, with a little less flippancy and a little more respect. ‘Magic? Now there’s something. I personally find it hard to credit, but there comes a point when you have to say, “I see that something’s making something happen, whether it’s magic or not.” Yes?’
‘Yes,’ Stenwold agreed.
‘Well, when we hit a storm, as I reckon you’ll be seeing, we ship the mast and Despard sets the engine to run, but it’s Fern there who calls the course. She’s a dab hand at reading storms, Ma’rMaker. But this is how the Bloodfly and his crew have skipped the seas for a generation now, ever since your lot first built those clocks. We never put out without an artificer and a seer, and a halfway decent backup for both, and with that we’re as free as anyone in this world, and we’ll take you to Kanateris in a fifth of the time, and you’ll find all the answers that there are to be had.’