‘The Nauarch just wants to talk to a land-kinden. Is that so bad?’ said the smallest figure, who appeared to be in charge. With a start Stenwold realized he recognized that voice: the pilot who had transported them to this place, in that cramped and blood-lit submersible. He craned his neck to get a better look. She had something at her belt, some unfamiliar-looking bundle, but when he saw it more clearly he felt that it must be something like an artificer’s toolstrip. Apt, he decided, but only her? The guards, in their kilts and barbaric splendour, seemed unlikely candidates for engineers, and the small woman’s two companions looked no better suited. When he had looked out over that crowded chamber earlier, there had been nothing to suggest any mechanical industry going on here and, under the sea, how could it? And yet that submersible… someone had made that. Maybe she is some freak, a solitary maverick.
‘The Nauarch can go peel himself,’ growled one of the other guards, perhaps unwisely. In an instant the lean, bald man had struck him, punching the offender in the jaw, and whipping his head round with the force of it. The victim collapsed back into his fellows and then slumped to the floor.
The other guards had knives out then, the same broad, hooked blades Stenwold had seen before. Against the armoured giant and the horn-fisted man they seemed paltry.
‘If you slay us, we who are servants of the Edmir, you will never set foot in this colony again,’ one of the guards warned desperately.
‘And wouldn’t that be a shame,’ said the Fly-sized woman. ‘Now, your Edmir said something to me when we brought these land-kinden in. Some of our bannermen wanted to do the Nauarch’s will by taking a landsman away with them, there and then, and ol’ Claeon, he said that my Rosander wouldn’t tear up their alliance just because a few of our people got killed. Well, I reckon that’s true, but it cuts both ways. The Edmir finds you torn apart and hung about like bunting, he’s not going to go to war with Rosander over it. You Kerebs are hardly important enough, so keep out of our way and hush your mouths.’
She then looked down for the first time, to see the two land-kinden. To Stenwold’s chagrin she addressed the Fly. ‘You’re the boss here?’
‘Oh, that would be grand,’ said Laszlo acidly, still smarting from his failed escape attempt.
‘I am War Master Stenwold Maker of Collegium.’ Stenwold spoke up to draw her attention to himself. He did not like where this might be going, and if someone else out there wanted to torture the land-kinden, then it would not be Laszlo’s back bared for the lash.
‘That sounds very high and mighty,’ the woman remarked, and her name came back to Stenwold: Chenni.
‘I would be glad to act as ambassador to your leader,’ he announced.
She smirked at that. ‘Well, that’s just dandy.’ Her head snapped up again to focus on the guards. ‘Get this open,’ she commanded.
They stared at her sullenly, the three of them still standing upright. They had given up on evicting the intruders from the oubliette, but that was a different thing to actively helping them.
‘None of you?’ Chenni prodded, and then sighed. ‘Well, I was just trying to make it easy for you.’ She stood back, gesturing to the tall, lean man. ‘Do the honours.’
The bald pugilist flexed his arms and rolled his shoulders, crouching down before the hatch to Stenwold’s cell. His fists were huge, with a chitinous shell formed over their knuckles and a vicious, backwards-pointing spike alongside the edge of his palms. As Stenwold watched, the spikes flexed, snapping forward like daggers, and then slowly folding back again. As Art-grown weapons went, they were as formidable and complex as he had ever seen.
While reflecting on that, he missed the motion. The man above him became a blur, and the grating smashed into fragments that rained down on Stenwold, rebounding painfully from his head. He ended up half-sitting against the cell wall, arms raised for protection, surrounded by hand-sized fragments of shattered stone. Numbly he noted that they were hollow: honeycombed with irregular chambers like magnified pumice. Probably not heavy at all, just held tight by this ‘water-lock’ thing until…
He looked up wonderingly. The man was now extending a shell-knuckled hand down towards him. ‘Don’t make me come down and get you,’ he warned, and Stenwold did not need to be told twice. He reached tentatively up, feeling the strength in the other man’s grip, and then the mailed giant had taken hold of his comrade and, between them, Stenwold was dragged up through the ruins of the hatch. The edges of it were razor-jagged, ripping his clothes and grazing his skin, but his new captors obviously cared nothing for his comfort, dumping him at their diminutive leader’s feet.
‘Someone wants to meet you, landsman,’ Chenni told him, and then instructed her companions, ‘Pick him up and carry him. We’re moving out.’
Nineteen
As soon as they had him beyond the oubliette, they had bundled Teornis in hood and cloak again. He made no attempt at a struggle, sensing that his captors were all too eager to inflict some punishment on him. He tried to keep track of turns, of slopes up and down, but this place, this Hermatyre, seemed to have been laid out by madmen, and within moments he had lost all track of where he was, what direction they had taken. He sensed few other people nearby, though, so either the passage of the guards was being given a wide berth or they were using some secluded back way.
They do not want any of us seen. No doubt the land-kinden would cause quite a stir. And that was another piece to work with: firstly a division between the factions of their captors, then a separation between the captors and the general populace. This was all grist to Teornis’s mill, which was good because that mill had been perilously short of material to feed it for too long now.
He had said a lot to Stenwold that his family would have frowned on. He now played out the recriminatory interview in his head: his mother or his eldest sister glowering down at him.
You revealed the family’s plans to your enemies. That is outright betrayal, either one of them would accuse him.
We were trapped in a cave beneath the sea, with no hope of ever leaving it, he heard his own voice replying.
That is no excuse, would come the severe response – and it was true. To talk so carelessly, even when all was lost… But, then, Stenwold Maker, that plodding, workmanlike intelligencer, would never believe the real driving force behind Teornis’s need to speak. He would only have heard the usual light tone of voice, never guessing how brittle it was: the low, low ebb of the worst hour of Teornis of the Aldanrael.
Despair. I’ve never before known despair. It is not a feeling Aristoi are supposed to harbour. He tried to feel blithe about it, but the hand of that alien emotion still lay heavy on his shoulder. It had touched him first there on the barge, when he had realized how grievously he had miscalculated. I got it wrong, after so long. Did I underestimate the Beetle? No, rather I overestimated him. I did not fear his treachery, and thus overlooked the fact that there are more ways than one to be betrayed. Lured out to a death-ship, outwitted by that dull blade of a Mantis. Oh, Teornis had a further score Dragonfly-kinden waiting on his ship, who had taken flight for the barge as soon as they saw the trouble, but that was not the point. He had been outmanoeuvred. He had slipped during the Dance. It was gauche and clumsy, and had torn a rent in a self-image that had been twenty years in the making.
And then here, this grim place; these dour, cruel people. A captive, for reasons he could not understand, of a people whose existence he had been blissfully unaware of. A man dragged from the Dance he knew into another where the steps were strange, and performed for the highest stakes. He was so ignorant here.
And so he had despaired, and made his confession to Stenwold Maker, who had then seemed the only familiar face in the whole world.