A knot of the sea-kinden had entered the room from above and were peering down at them through the gratings: four men and a woman, gold ornamentation glittering in the sick light against fish-white skin and lustrous dark hair. ‘Land-kinden,’ one of the men called.
‘We hear you,’ Teornis said.
‘You are the leader here?’ they asked him.
‘No one else is.’ Teornis risked a glance at Stenwold, while squaring his shoulders. The unspoken thought was there: I will meet this, whatever they intend. Stenwold wondered whether the thought of poor Arianna’s fate lay behind the man’s bravery, and he was seeking to make amends.
The sea-kinden hauled up the stone grille, and Stenwold realized that nothing but the hatch’s own weight kept it in place: no locks or latches. He wondered if he might be able to shoulder it open, if he managed to climb up there. The grille looked like a four-inch thickness of stone, and must be a prodigious weight, but surely not impossible to shift.
Teornis held his arms up towards the gap, and they could just reach down to take hold of his wrists and haul him out, his boots kicking at the sides to stop him being scraped against the stone. He stood in their midst like some lord, with nothing of the captive about him, and for a moment they hung back a little uncertainly. Then their spokesman smacked him across the side of the head, and another shoved him in the back, making him stagger, and they jeered at him as they manhandled him out of sight.
Stenwold hoped the Spider’s considerable resourcefulness would help him survive whatever was to come. But, of course, he is Teornis of the Aldanrael, so he’ll come back on a litter carried by a dozen virgins. The sentiments rang hollow, though, and Teornis, his enemy of only the day before, had now become one of the most familiar points in Stenwold’s world.
Laszlo let out a long sigh. ‘And then there were two, Ma’rMaker. I’m of a mind to go scout out this Hermitty place, before they drag me off as well.’
Stenwold made a wry face. ‘Sounds like a grand plan, Laszlo. Perhaps I’ll go with you once I’ve picked up some Mole Cricket Art and can walk through walls or something.’
‘Fly-kinden Art beats all,’ Laszlo announced. ‘But we were talking to the lady. Hey, lady, you still there?’
Stenwold was watching for it now, and saw how Paladrya now paled and shaded gradually from stone-colours to the pallid white that served these sea-kinden for skin tone. It was nothing like the Art Danaen had used to become so very still that Stenwold had overlooked her: this was simply a camouflaging, a blending of shades.
‘I am here,’ she told them.
‘What will happen to Teornis?’ Stenwold demanded of her.
She looked downwards. ‘I cannot say, for I do not know what they want, of you. Possibly they will torture him, if the Edmir is so inclined, or if they think that he knows anything of Aradocles.’
‘We know nothing of him – assuming it’s even a him,’ Stenwold told her. ‘Why should we?’
‘Because, some years ago, I took him to the shore and sent him away on to your land, to escape the Edmir. I had hoped he would come back, perhaps with an army of land-kinden, but I have heard nothing. I hoped that you… that he had sent you here.’
Stenwold shook his head wearily. Other people’s problems, he thought, as though I don’t have enough of my own.
‘Lady, if I walked out from here, what would I see?’ Laszlo interrupted.
‘We are beneath the Edmir’s palace,’ she told him. ‘There are many tunnels down here, and quarters for his most trusted servants and guards, and rooms for his pleasures.’ There was a catch in her voice on that last word. Torture, Stenwold at once surmised, remembering her mention of it, and then he looked at Paladrya again and guessed that she had undergone her share of that treatment as well.
‘And then?’ Laszlo pressed her eagerly.
Looking at him, the ghost of a fond smile appeared on her face. ‘And then, small one, you would come to the main halls of the palace, and from there it would be but a step to the Cathedra Edmir. And from there to anywhere in Hermatyre that you might choose, if you but knew anywhere – or anyone.’
Laszlo nodded, obviously seriously considering this further. ‘Well since our hosts have seen fit to give me a cloak, how much would I stand out, up there? I saw a few fellows around my size, when we looked out over the market or whatever you had there.’
‘You might be taken for a Kerebroi child, perhaps, or one of the Smallclaw-kinden,’ Paladrya guessed. ‘Although you have hair, and none of the Onychoi do.’
Stenwold could only blink at these unfamiliar terms, but Laszlo shrugged casually.
‘I’ll try and keep my head covered,’ he said. ‘Now, let’s see about this grating.’
Stenwold folded his arms, and watched as Laszlo’s wings flared in the dimness, and took him to the top of his own cell, until he was clinging to the grille.
He heard Paladrya gasp in astonishment ‘That is your Art?’ she said in awe. ‘But that is amazing, impossible…’
‘Lady, that’s just flying,’ Laszlo replied offhandedly. ‘Still, I reckon your fellows up there wouldn’t expect me to end up at this end of the bottle.’ He had twisted himself now until he had his feet firmly anchored against the wall, his shoulders pressed to the grille. For a moment he paused, breathing heavily, then his wings flared and flickered, spread out flat against the grating, and he used all their upward force to push at it.
It did not move. He might as well have been trying to pry the stone of the bars apart.
Laszlo collapsed back to the cell’s floor with an expression of astonishment. ‘Well, I thought I’d at least shift it a bit. How much can it weigh?’ he muttered.
‘The hatches have water-locks,’ Paladrya explained. ‘Unless you possess the Art, and know where to pull, they will not open for you. I’m sorry.’
‘The Art?’ said Laszlo grimly.
‘The Kerebroi Art,’ she confirmed. ‘The gripping Art.’
Stenwold recalled how the guards’ hands had latched on to him, raising weals on his skin and biting into his clothes. He heard Laszlo curse in frustration, his earlier confidence utterly misplaced, and Stenwold half expected him to take wing again and start battering about the top of his cell in a desperate bid to find a way out.
The next moment they heard raised voices, and then a group of people approaching above, some of them with very heavy footfalls indeed. The guards reappeared, and not alone. All four men were trying to keep a trio of newcomers out, but they were severely out-sized. The figure in the lead was huge, easily as wide as two of the guardsmen together, and armoured in a suit of curving, overlapping plates. There was no scrape or clatter of metal about him, so Stenwold guessed that it was chitin mail, or whatever local substitute they used here. Nothing of the man was exposed, from his clumping, segmented boots all the way up to his massively broad pauldrons and the surprisingly small full-face helm that allowed only a slit to observe the world through. The guards kept shouting at him, trying to bar his way but obviously unwilling to start anything violent. The enormous man just shouldered forward, one plodding step after another, until he was standing at the foot of the ramp. He raised both hands up to shoulder height, and the guards backed off hurriedly, for his gauntlets each bore a forward-hooking claw that jutted a good six inches from the knuckles.
Behind the huge man, almost in his shadow, came two others. One was Fly-size, bald-headed and hunchbacked, wearing only some kind of short smock. The other was as tall as anyone there, lean and muscled and as bald as his smaller companion, with some kind of Art-growth protruding about his fists.
‘You dare defy the Edmir?’ one of the guards was berating them. ‘Do you think he will sit still for this insurrection within his colony?’