‘It is an excavation, past the desert margin beyond Irroven. Scholars from our academies have been digging there nigh on ten years now. Nobody’s ever seen anything quite like it.’
Stenwold frowned, not perceiving anywhere relevant this was taking them, but he let the man speak. In truth, Teornis’s calm, conversational tones were helping a lot to ease his own disturbed mind, and perhaps the Spider knew it.
‘There was a city there once, how long ago I cannot say, save that no Spider histories record it. No modern-day city is nearby, and the region has a poor reputation, for the sensitive. In uncovering the streets of this old ruin, our academics found something appalling, fascinating – a massacre.’
‘No need to go digging for that. I could point you to plenty in our lifetimes,’ Stenwold remarked sourly.
‘It looked as though some invading force had overrun the walls, killed every living thing and then left the place to the desert. But the true surprise was in the nature of the bones unearthed. Bones of people, certainly, but bones of animals as well. Horses and goats and sheep, but also… other kinds of animals. Dozens of kinds of animals, freakish and unheard-of creatures. I have seen some of the pictures the scholars drew, to represent what they believed these dead beasts looked like. The world is best off without them: monsters such as you cannot imagine, horned and tusked and fanged. But dead, all dead, their bones lying where they fell, in the centre of a city lost to all maps. Their last stand, perhaps – but against who?’
Stenwold shivered, throwing the unpleasant images off. ‘What’s your point?’ he asked.
‘My point is that the world holds stranger things in it than we know. Even these sea-kinden are closer kin to us than whatever race lived in that dead city. Our chiefest captors here were enough like me that I must even accept them as some lost offshoot of my people. So, let us inventory what we know of them, and a plan may then suggest itself.’
‘We know precious little,’ Stenwold complained. ‘Not least, we know no reason why they should wish us any harm – we who have not so much as looked at them before.’
‘Start smaller,’ Teornis suggested. ‘Let us look at our current lodgings. What does this place suggest, to you?’
Stenwold frowned again, putting a hand to the nearest column of his cell. He felt the smooth, rounded, stone, formed as though it had once flowed like water and then set. ‘No seams,’ he said. ‘This is all of a piece.’
‘Have you ever seen a Mole Cricket sculpture?’ Teornis put in. ‘They could build this, I think, with their Art.’
‘Caves,’ Laszlo said unexpectedly. When they prompted him, he elaborated, ‘There are sea caves I’ve seen, like this. I don’t know how it works, but it’s like the stone’s dripping from the ceilings. You get spines and pillars, and all sorts, just like it was all frozen in mid-thaw. Only, I’d not put money on getting a lot of close-together little cells like this formed out of it.’
‘Sea caves…’ Stenwold felt a sudden irrational twitch of hope. ‘Could we be… there’s a lot of coast lies east and west from Collegium. There must be a lot of caves that nobody’s ever gone to.’ His mind was recalling to him that arched space that their captors had let them gaze out on, surely too great to be some little cave tucked into a cliff, but he overrode the thought. ‘Perhaps we’re even in easy march of Collegium, if only we could break out and-’
‘You are not near your home.’ The unfamiliar voice startled all three of them to silence. It was a woman’s voice, accented like their captors’, save that it was not coming from above, but from down there amongst the cells.
Stenwold scanned the dim vaults uselessly, seeing the dark shapes of Teornis and Laszlo, but no other. A moment later, Teornis’s voice snapped out, ‘Show yourself, if you please.’
Stenwold saw nothing immediate, but he caught Laszlo’s sudden intake of breath.
‘You are land-kinden? Truly?’ the woman’s voice resumed.
‘My lady, we are,’ Teornis confirmed, with some noticeable respect. ‘I am the Lord-Martial Teornis of the Aldanrael, and this is War Master Stenwold Maker of Collegium. His comrade is not known to me.’
‘Laszlo, off the Tidenfree,’ the Fly piped up, not to be outdone. ‘Pleased to meet you, Ladyship.’
Stenwold caught a glimpse of movement, and located a shadow that must be her: the tenant of another cell of this stone honeycomb. ‘Then I am Paladrya,’ she told them simply, ‘and whatever ranks or titles I once had, I am shorn of them now, and I can offer you only my apologies, my most sincere apologies, for the harm that I have done you.’
‘What harm might that be, Bella Paladrya?’ Teornis asked her softly.
‘It is my doing you are here,’ she told them. ‘It is my doing that your people are in danger. All that now befalls you is my fault.’
Eighteen
When he had taken hold of this colony of Hermatyre, after the troubles had been put down, he had asked the builders if they would open out a section of this antechamber of his so that he could see the waters.
With their skill and their Art, they had bidden the substance of Hermatyre retreat, and in its place they left the transparency of membrane, so that he who claimed, at least, to be their lord and master could view this broad slice of his domain. In truth, of course, the builders had no masters, no lords, save perhaps the unknown plan or design that induced them to tolerate all the trespassers – the Obligists – who dwelt here under the roofs that they created. On those few occasions in Hermatyre’s history when an Edmir had displeased the builders, his reign had ended then and there, and it did not help that none could say for sure just what their errors had been. The Edmir Claeon, as with all those before him, therefore trod a careful path that he would never know the precise boundaries of.
But I pushed far to claim this throne, he considered, and every day I must push further to hold it. The name ‘Rosander’ came to him and he scowled. If only things were otherwise I’d leave that tiny bald head of his out for the fish to clean. But Rosander was a necessary evil, one it seemed that, each day, a little more time and effort went into handling. But now we have the land-kinden, and everything will change. Rosander will have his war and then be out of my way.
The view through his transparency was of the mottled sea floor, some distance below him, and stretching away until even Claeon’s eyes could see no more. It was far from featureless because, beyond the boundaries that the builders had set on Hermatyre, there were outposts, weed farms, lobster runs, all the complex play of labour that furnished the people of Hermatyre with what they needed to survive. Save for the builders, of course, for the builders lived by their own graces, and cared nothing for those that eked out a living within their creations. So why do they tolerate us, if they do not need us? It was the question preoccupying every Edmir since the first, and Claeon would not be the one to answer it.
Something monstrous and vast moved across his field of vision, blotting out the rounded shells of farms and the coloured sparks of the limn-lights. Claeon watched as the great coiled length coursed across his view, waiting again until the great leviathan had bunched itself together in a vast knot of limbs and baggy, creased flesh, and then drifted back to press a broad, yellowish eye to his window. This view, this transparent membrane, was one of Claeon’s private pleasures. His people were not permitted to swim up to ogle their ruler, and there were guards outside to enforce his whims. Some creatures of Hermatyre did not consider themselves bound by such laws, however. Just now, Arkeuthys was letting Claeon know of his desire for a conversation.
Claeon had heard of how it was, for other kinden, when they used the Speech-Art. Their charges were dumb brutes with simple desires, and they were easily instructed, chided and controlled. Claeon’s people had always suffered a more challenging relationship with their own beasts, for the great octopuses of the reef had minds that could reason like a man’s, and as for Arkeuthys… Arkeuthys was well over a century old, the largest, wisest and most ancient of his kind, and the undisputed ruler of all his people. Arkeuthys was another necessary evil without whom Claeon would not stand where he now stood.