Then there was a sharp rapping, surely a staff against the stone floor, and quiet followed meekly in its wake. Stenwold heard enough shuffling to imagine the two warring parties separating reluctantly.
‘That is quite enough,’ someone said, a new voice that was clearly used to being obeyed. ‘Now, who leads these… ah, and is it Chenni I see there?’
There was a pause, and then the high tones of their pilot. ‘Aye, your Eminence.’ She sounded flustered, if Stenwold was any judge.
‘Kindly tell your Nauarch, my ally the good Rosander, that he need have no fear. He may approach me for speech with the land-kinden at any time.’ The new voice spoke smoothly, but then it gained a new edge: ‘And if your bannermen do not disperse this moment, do not think that Rosander can save them from being dismembered, joint by joint.’
‘You…’ Whatever Chenni was about to say, she clamped down on it.
‘I don’t dare?’ The new voice was dangerously soft again. ‘Your Rosander is not the sentimental fool you take him for. He’d not wish to upset me for a few worthless lives like these. Be thankful that you yourself are currently somewhat more dear to him than most. Now go. Your services with your machine are appreciated, but it is time for you and yours to quit this place and bother me no more.’
After the scuffling and shuffling that surely meant Chenni and her ‘bannermen’ dispersing, the order came, ‘Get them to their feet.’ Stenwold was unceremoniously hauled upright, supported between two men, and a moment later he was being hustled forward, stumbling over the unseen ground. He could only hope that Laszlo and Teornis were still nearby. The route was complex enough that he lost track entirely of how many turns they took, save that their journey was more often upwards than not, struggling and slipping on ramps of grooved stone that his boots could not properly grip. His captors were ruthless in their progress, using their Art to maintain their sticky grip on him whenever he threatened to fall.
At last they stopped, and he had the sense of a large space echoing with a murmur of voices. A council chamber? A court of law? Am I to be tried for the crime of being land-born?
‘Land-kinden,’ said the leader’s voice more softly, ‘from here you shall go to the cells, beneath my great halls, and I cannot say if you shall ever venture forth from them again. I think it only fair, therefore, that you see, just this once, some small piece of your people’s doom.’
A moment later the bag was dragged from Stenwold’s head. He closed his eyes, anticipating a shock of sunlight, but instead there was an overcast, almost twilightish gloom, relieved only by patches of wan light, globes of blue-green or green-white or purplish-red. Those lights went back and back, though, and multiplied with distance. Stenwold found himself standing on the brink of a balcony of moulded stone, looking down into a vaulted space between curved walls swelling in the shadows and then narrowing to a pointed ceiling, which some half-seen walls were seamed into radial symmetry by elegant buttresses, as though they were standing within a vast stone gourd. Even in the dim light, Stenwold saw that, between the ridges, the ceiling and walls were folded and worked until they seemed more like the natural interior of some great shell than the work of hands. Below them a multitude bustled in the many-coloured dusky light, figures large and small, and none seen clearly, but no glimpse of any looking like kinden Stenwold knew. There were figures as small as Flies, or as large as Mole Crickets, or as slender as Mantids, and most of the throng wore little for garments – kilts, cloaks, perhaps a sash. A few clumped through the crowd in armour that made them seem as ponderous and powerful as automotives, broader across the shoulders than Stenwold was tall.
He glanced to either side, finding Teornis and Laszlo staring as aghast as he. Their captors mostly resembled the men from the submersible – the not quite Spider-kinden. The women amongst them were high-cheeked, fair and lustrous of hair, the men with elaborate beards, and all of them decked out in gold and a dozen kinds of precious stones that Stenwold could not identify. Others, standing like servants and subordinates, were taller and thinner, lightly armoured in breastplates and tall helms of what might be chitin or even boiled leather. These were cloaked and held long spears, and their faces, hollow-cheeked and elongated, were unlike any kinden Stenwold knew.
At his shoulder stood a man he immediately knew as the leader. He, too, was of the Spider-kin people and, although they were all attired like Aristoi, this man boasted an additional level of luxury. His dark, curled hair was shot through with a coiling net of gold and glinting gems and he wore gold leaf, like tattoos, from wrist to shoulder of both arms. His cloak was fashioned from the hide of some beast, picked out in curving abstracts of shimmering colours, and his torc was a crescent moon of mother-of-pearl that gave back all the colours of the unhealthy lamps.
‘What think you, O land-kinden?’ he asked, keeping his voice still low. ‘Do you like your new home?’
‘There has been a mistake. We’re not your enemies…’ Stenwold started hurriedly but, at a gesture, the bag was jammed over his head again, and he was marched away.
Seventeen
They uncovered his head again somewhere else, somewhere far less spacious that was reached by descending an incline. The glistening lamps shone a sallow greenish-yellow here, and the floor was set with intricate, irregular stone gratings. Even here in this oubliette, the walls and ceiling were ridged and patterned, painstakingly carved into organic whorls and ridges with such all-encompassing detail that at last Stenwold began to think in terms of ‘grown’ rather than ‘made’. Half their guards had gone, leaving a handful of bearded men still holding on to them. Stenwold saw Teornis glancing about brightly, putting on an optimistic expression that Stenwold was sure he could not genuinely be feeling.
‘Separate cells,’ instructed the leader’s voice. Stenwold followed the sound of it to see his shadowy form standing in an archway, just a dark shape in the darkness, there for a moment, and then turning to vanish off into the gloom.
For a moment Stenwold could see no cells, but then one of their guards pried open a floor-grate. Beneath them was a dank space enclosed by bars that were just folds and pillars of stone, some miserable grotto that combined the worst qualities of underwater and under the earth.
Teornis went first. He accepted it gracefully, stepping to the edge like a man going defiant to the gallows. One of their guards raised a hooked knife, and Stenwold felt a moment’s panic before the man merely severed Teornis’s bonds, before moving on to free the wrists of the other two.
‘Thank you,’ the Spider said, impeccably courteous.
‘He didn’t say to cut them loose,’ another guard objected angrily.
‘He didn’t say not,’ replied the man with the knife. ‘If they’re land-kinden, where are they going to go?’
When the angry one still looked stubborn, the knifeman poked Stenwold in the gut with a finger. ‘You, fat man, you know where you are?’
Stenwold shook his head dumbly.
‘Let them have their hands, poor lost bastards,’ the knifeman declared, and Stenwold only belatedly recognized an awkward sympathy on his face. ‘Look at them, their whole world’s been cracked open.’
There was some laughter over this, even from the angry man, but the man with the knife didn’t join in. As Teornis let himself down into his cell, another grate was levered up for Laszlo. The Fly-kinden looked so rebellious, Stenwold wondered if he might suddenly take wing and go… where? For their captors were correct, of course: Laszlo might buzz and batter his way through these sculpted halls forever. At last he climbed down into the hole, and only as his grate was lowered again did Stenwold note, He didn’t fly. Does that mean he’s hurt? No, clever lad, he doesn’t want to show them that he can. For, of course, not one of the sea-kinden they had seen, amongst that briefly glimpsed bustle, had been airborne. It’s good to have a secret in reserve.