Those proposals sorted through, he looked at his share of the endless supply of progress reports. All over the city there were men and women who had tasks allotted to them according to their talents. Builders carved trenches and earthworks; merchants stockpiled food and munitions; Company officers trained their recruits; smiths turned over their workshops to make snapbow bolts and clerks tallied how much of everyone else’s industry the city might need. A legion of planners and doers greased the wheels of Collegium’s amateur war machine, and when they had done their part, or when they encountered difficulties that blocked their way, they wrote it all down and it came to Stenwold or Jodry or a few others.
Stenwold sat patiently, leafing through them, eyes skipping over the words from long practice, pausing only where some problem had clearly identified itself, annotating and making recommendations, or passing the issue on to someone better suited. He seldom had to think much about each issue, but there was plenty to get through and, if he did not finish, there would be even more on the morrow.
He had lost track entirely of how much time had gone by, when there was a respectful cough from the doorway.
‘It’ll have to wait,’ he said, without looking up. Another half hour and I’ll have this done, and then I can sleep. And then. .
‘Master Maker, look at you,’ came a familiar, gruff voice. ‘Who’d have thought it: You, lord of all you survey, up to your nose in papers like some book-keeper’s clerk.’
‘Tomasso.’ Stenwold looked up to see the black-bearded Fly-kinden grinning at him. At least the man’s lightness of tone was guarantee that some other unlooked-for disaster was not about to come thundering down on him. ‘What do you want?’
‘Wys has been in with another shipment,’ the Fly ex-pirate explained. Wys was his opposite number beneath the waves, an enterprising Sea-kinden who was nominally Tomasso’s wife, by some bizarre pirate custom.
‘Have you. .?’
‘I’ve sent it on to the workshops, never you mind,’ Tomasso assured him. The shipment would consist of machine parts and the superior almost-steel that the Sea-kinden produced.
‘Then. .?’ Stenwold gestured at the paperwork. ‘It’s just, I have a lot to get through.’
For a painful moment he saw himself through Tomasso’s eyes, the ex-pirate looking at him and seeing a man of action and adventure crippled and pared down to this thing of paper and sums. Tomasso’s smile changed, less flippant, more calculating. ‘Put it down, Master Maker, just for one evening.’
‘It’s not as easy as that-’ Stenwold stopped talking immediately, because a woman was peering shyly around the doorframe, her expression equal parts trepidation and concern.
He almost kicked over his chair in getting to his feet, then stood there, feeling embarrassed by the vigour of his reaction, watching her even as she was watching him.
Her name was Paladrya, and she was Sea-kinden — although to the uninitiated she could pass as a Spider woman. When he had first met her they had both been prisoners, and torture and deprivation had left her bruised and gaunt. The marks of that ill-treatment were still there in the lines on her face, but she was now adviser to the new Sea-kinden ruler, and those days of incarceration and false accusations were behind her.
Tomasso slipped away while they were still gazing at each other, leaving Paladrya to walk carefully into the room, as though feeling out the borders of Stenwold’s domain. He remembered their last parting, the mutual realization that they were creatures of different worlds. The crushing, lightless depths of the sea filled him with horror and despair, whilst the parched and barren land was utterly inhospitable to one of her people. And here she was.
‘Wys said you were fighting,’ she said, stopping out of arm’s reach.
And in the end, being people of responsibilities and both well past the impetuous foolishness of youth, they had parted. She had sent letters, and so had he, but neither of them had made much headway with the alphabet of the other. What words they had exchanged that way had remained simplistic and unsatisfying. With a Beetle’s Apt pragmatism, Stenwold had resigned himself to the task in hand — knowing that he would live with a little piece of himself forever out of balance, because of her, but aware that he could live that way for as long as was needed. He had assumed that she would have said the same.
‘Not me personally. They wouldn’t let me go. But fighting, yes.’ The paperwork lurked at his elbow, waiting to drag him down once again. ‘And soon to resume, I believe.’
‘I just. .’ A pause. ‘I forced Wys to bring me. She didn’t want to — and Aradocles almost forbade me. But I had to come. Stenwold.’
‘It’s good to see you.’ Weak words, he realized, but he did not know what to do with her, or where he was with her, and it was plain that she was caught in the same no-man’s land. His mind sprang formal options at him: show her the College, the preparations, the soldiers drilling. Talk to her in bluff, unconcerned tones of the war to come, to lay her mind at rest. Draw her into discussions of politics, land and sea.
Instead, he found himself standing very close to her, his hand just brushing her pale cheek. Her expression held a great deal of fear but, in amongst her fear of the land and its dangers, there was fear for him.
‘We will hold, don’t worry,’ he told her. ‘I could show you a hundred things — inventions, fortifications, engines — that would convince you how we will hold. We have thrown them back twice before. We shall do so again.’
She was Inapt, of course, so all his inventions and engines would mean nothing to her, but perhaps she had some touch of prophecy about her, because his words failed to reassure.
‘I think of you a great deal in Hermatyre,’ she whispered. ‘Aradocles could use your counsel and your artifice, and I. . Do you dream of the sea, Stenwold?’ She must have seen it in his eyes: the nightmares he had still of chasmic depths, the churning tentacles of sea-monsters, drowning in the dark.
He saw, in her face, that she had faced just such fears in coming here, and only out of concern for him; a kind of selfish madness gripped him, and he said, ‘When this is done, I will come to you.’
The words hung there between them, and he was shaken by his pledge, despite the vast weight of war that now stood between him and any chance of fulfilling the promise. He was shocked by the words, but he could not disown them. To his great surprise, they were sincere. To the pits with the city and its government and Jodry Drillen. When the Wasps were beaten back, he had earned himself a retirement. Thinking of those midnight waters was less terrible now, with Paladrya there beside him. He would adapt. Beetle-kinden always did.
The paperwork was abruptly an unbearable burden, and he found that he was no longer shackled to it. ‘Let’s leave here,’ he decided. ‘This is no place to be.’ Collegium, even under threat of war, offered a hundred diversions and yet, just then, the only place he wanted to take her was home.
Seven
‘Who’s this headed over?’
Tynisa had been staring at the trees, trying to feel some sense of connection, to open up to her own Mantis-kinden blood, and now the unwelcome voice of Thalric pulled her from her reverie. She was supposed to be keeping watch, just as he was, but the great brooding expanse of the Etheryon-Nethyon forest had drawn her attention away. In there are my people, she had tried to tell herself, but she did not quite believe it. Her father, Tisamon, had been a poor adherent of the Mantis-kinden way — and the fact that her mother had been Spider-kinden, the Mantids’ traditional enemies, was evidence of that. Tynisa herself could pass easily for one of her mother’s kin, but the bloody-handed Mantis way of doing things had lived close to the surface in her for a long time. She had only recently reined it in and brought under control.