He tried to keep still, to avoid awakening the further ire of the sea monster, but the horror of his situation clung to him, refusing to be dislodged. Caught by that obscene tentacle, hauled towards the waters, the desperate struggle to free himself, the yawning maw of the ocean.
Arianna.
Her face as Danaen had run her through. Arianna who had tried to betray him, but had not been able to. Arianna who had died in a final act of loyalty, but died nonetheless.
With that he could no longer keep it in. At first his shoulders shook, and then his whole body. He tried to reach out, to grasp at the insides of the monster to stop the upwelling of emotions, but he found he could not move his hands, which were pinioned behind him. A shudder racked him, and Stenwold wept for dead Arianna, and for his exchange of the sun for the bowels of a beast.
There was a sound nearby, over that relentless, slightly erratic pulsing. Only a moment later did he realize that it was speech. It was weirdly drawn out and accented, and he caught not a word, but it was a human voice. He tried to twist round, only to find himself tied or webbed with leathery, slightly pliable ropes. The voice continued, joined by another, still uttering words he could not quite catch. He forced himself to calm down. Where there are live men, there is hope, and they do not sound as though they expect to be consumed. The tone of the speakers was jarringly conversational. Stenwold took hold of his grief and loss and fear, and this time he forced it down, steadied himself, and listened.
They were speaking familiar words, he finally realized, but with a strange inflection. He caught the odd piece of meaning, and then put together strings of words at a time, until he heard:
‘… Not what I looked for in a land-kinden at all. Such ugly things, these two, anyway. Why these?’
‘Ask Arkeuthys,’ the other voice said, or that is what Stenwold thought he heard. He was unsure, until the first voice answered, whether it was a name, or simply a phrase he had not understood.
‘You ask him,’ said the original speaker. His voice was a little higher than the second one. He sounded younger.
‘You’ve never talked to Arkeuthys, have you?’ said the older-sounding voice, a man’s voice as were they both, although Stenwold had not been sure of that initially. ‘You’re scared?’
‘I don’t need to talk to him to be scared,’ said the younger. ‘Seeing him’s enough.’ Stenwold was following their talk more easily now. They sounded close enough to be crouching just behind him, speaking only loud enough to be heard over the…
Over the engine… The revelation surged through him. No heartbeat this, but some manner of engine. He had heard nothing like it before, but he was more and more sure that the sound was mechanical in nature, and part of nothing living, for all it had no definite rhythm. He had already identified that each thundering pulse jerked them forwards, and could only guess at the means of propulsion that he bore baffled witness to.
One of the men gave out a ragged groan, without warning, and for a moment Stenwold thought the other must have stabbed him. Then there was some ragged breathing, and the younger voice continued, ‘Arkeuthys says…?’
Stenwold took a deep breath and gave a determined twist at whatever held him, resulting in him flopping onto his back, crushing his bound arms beneath his own weight, He had a brief view of the pale curve of a close ceiling, with some kind of lamp shedding the sanguine light, and then he heaved himself round again so that he was facing away from the wall.
There was far less space here than he had first thought. The erratic surge of the engine had given the cramped chamber a false sense of distance. Instead, he now found himself staring at Teornis.
The Spider lord was awake but lay very still, so Stenwold guessed he had been playing dead for the benefit of their captors. He had opened his eyes as Stenwold moved, though, and now he winked once, very deliberately. His fine clothes were torn, and his hands were also bound. So, this was not a Spider plot, then, but who…?
Beyond Teornis were two men, obviously the two speakers. The ceiling was low enough to have them kneeling, and the bloody light made things uncertain, but Stenwold thought they were pale-skinned and dark-haired. There was a younger and an older one, as he had surmised, and they made surely the strangest pair ever to be crewing any kind of automotive.
They were savages. That was his instant first thought. They were barbarians, primitives from some underdeveloped tribal land. They wore almost no clothing beyond kilts that extended to mid-thigh, but they made up for that in other finery. On his arms, the younger man wore some bracers that were inscribed with elaborate arabesques, and a torc encircled his neck. The older had metal tracery running all the way from wrist to elbow, work as delicate and intricate as Stenwold had ever seen, as light and complex as if it had grown there frond by frond. His collar was comprised of more of the same, an expanse of branching and rejoining tendrils of metal that covered most of his shoulders and upper chest. About his brow, his long hair was confined by a twining band of the same material. It was impossible to be sure in the strange light, but something about the glint of it suggested gold to Stenwold – gold in a quantity to make a Spider Aristos raise an eyebrow, and of a workmanship to match anything he could imagine man or machine achieving.
The younger man was lean and slender, and he had a short beard cut square, of the same dark lustre as his hair. His senior was paunchier, broad across his bare midriff, more jowly about the face, and with a beard that had been carefully styled so that it curved upwards and rolled into itself. Beyond all this, though, came the revelation that, despite Teornis’s captivity, these were Spider-kinden.
Or no, they were not exactly Spider-kinden, not quite, but there was a similarity between their faces and Teornis’s that showed them to be some sort of kin, some offshoot of the same root-stock, linked by a trick of ancestry.
And an errant thought occurred to him, Have I not seen this before in someone recently, that I took for a Spider? But he could not pin down the idea and it soon escaped him.
‘Arkeuthys says…’ the older man stammered. He was looking strained, to Stenwold’s eye. ‘He says he saw their two leaders trading insults, and it was these two he grabbed.’
‘And what about the other one? Did you-?’
‘Of course I did.’ The older man glared at his fellow. ‘He says it’s just some land-kinden who got in the way. He cut Arkeuthys, the little one did.’
‘So we don’t need him, then?’ To Stenwold’s alarm, the younger man took a knife from his waistband, a vicious-looking weapon with a wicked inward curve. Stenwold craned his neck to follow the man’s gaze, and spotted a third captive: the tiny trussed form of Laszlo, looking bruised and still unconscious.
The older man’s eyes abruptly moved to meet Sten-wold’s own, and there was a shock of alien contact, reinforced by Stenwold’s meanwhile working out who ‘Arkeuthys’ must be. Of course, there was an Art for speaking with beasts, though you seldom heard of it these days. But one could only speak with animals appropriate to one’s people…
Founder’s Mark! he whimpered inwardly. These are sea monster-kinden.
Noting his distress, the man with the coiled beard smiled. ‘Kill the little one now. He can’t be worth much,’ he said.
‘Hoi!’ This was a new voice, emerging from somewhere ahead, towards the vehicle’s direction of travel. ‘None of that!’
‘Keep out of it,’ the older man snapped.
‘Nobody’s killing anyone!’ the new voice insisted. It was a higher pitch than theirs, clearly a woman’s voice, but high even for that. Her accent was slightly different, too, drawling the vowels less, but also stressing her words in unexpected places. Stenwold found it even harder to follow.
‘Arkeuthys says-’ one of the first two began to argue.
‘Don’t care. If we’ve got three land-kinden, then we bring all three land-kinden back to the colony, alive.’