Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
All around him they were fighting, Teornis’s people and his own. He heard the explosive snap of Padstock’s bow, and her voice calling out, ‘
Through the Gate!
’ which must have bewildered everyone there save for her own followers. The Dragonflies were aloft, sending down shaft after shaft at any Mantis that offered a clear target.
Teornis went down without warning. Stenwold thought he had been shot, then that a Mantis had got him, for his Kessen bodyguards were being overwhelmed, though they put up a stubborn and furious fight. Then Stenwold saw, and the sight made his stomach lurch.
Something had grabbed Teornis by the leg. Something like a leathery cable had snagged his ankle and was hauling him towards the rail. He had his rapier out, but its narrow blade was ill-suited to cutting, and his people were too busy fighting to hear his cries for aid. The sight was so horrible that Stenwold himself made a move towards him, with no other aim in mind but the rescue of his enemy.
In a flurry of wings, Laszlo landed beside him. ‘I’ll head for the
Tidenfree!
’ the Fly called out.
‘Laszlo, look!’ But, when Stenwold pointed, the terrible eye was gone. The Fly skipped into the air a moment later, eager to be away, and an arrow zipped past close to where he’d been.
Stenwold turned to find himself not five feet away from Arianna, with his sword to hand. Her knife was still out, his blood decorating the edge. Their eyes met.
Something slapped at his leg and, assuming it was an arrow, he dropped into a crouch, one hand raised uselessly to ward off the next. A moment later he was sprawled on his back, the breath exploding from his body. He kicked out desperately, feeling a tightness about his calf, almost losing hold of his sword.
A sudden contraction hauled him two feet along the deck towards the railing and he realized that
it
had him.
Stenwold jackknifed up, crying out as he saw the thick tentacle that had snaked across the deck to encircle his leg. He lashed at it with his blade, just as a new convulsion rippled down the length of it, and he was dragged another half-body length towards the sea.
His nerve broke. The thought of that eye, belonging to some unspeakable sea-thing lurking just beyond the barge’s rail, the thought of all that
water
, that all-consuming depth just yards away, was too much. Stenwold screamed in revulsion and fear, and hacked wildly at the grasping tentacle. His first blow glanced off its thick, oozing hide, while his second merely gashed open his own thigh. Another tug hauled him inexorably closer to the edge. He cast about wildly, still shouting for aid. He saw one of Padstock’s company go down, spitted by an arrow. The Mantids were finishing off the Ants, and some were sending arrows up at the circling Dragonflies.
Teornis—
With a snarl of pure futile savagery, Teornis vanished over the barge’s side, his rapier spinning from his hand. A moment later Stenwold’s free foot kicked against the wooden rail.
He tried to brace himself against it, feeling the appalling strength as the monster’s muscles seethed and pulsed. He hacked again, barely penetrating the creature’s thick skin.
‘Ma’rMaker!’ Laszlo was beside him in an instant. The Fly’s expression showed that, life of piracy or no, he had never encountered anything such as this before. His dagger was out in an instant, though, and he laid hands on the coils wrapped around Stenwold’s leg and began cutting. He should have been halfway to the
Tidenfree
by now, but Stenwold had never been so glad to have his orders disobeyed.
Another surge of strength sent agony tearing through his leg and made the railing creak and splinter. Laszlo was using both hands to drive the dagger deeper, now, heedless of whether it skewered Stenwold as well.
‘One moment, Ma’rMaker,’ the Fly hissed between his teeth. ‘Just one moment . . .’
His eyes met Stenwold’s, and there was a moment of shared horror between them as another leathery whip crawled over the side and lashed itself about his chest. Laszlo opened his mouth to yell, but in the next second he was airborne, not by his own wings but whipped from the deck in a single convulsive spasm, and a second later the sea had claimed him.
Stenwold struck the limb that held him a solid blow, aiming for where the Fly’s knife had scored its skin. It tugged yet again, and this time the railing half gave way. He had no wits left now for tactics or clear thinking; the sword was forgotten. Stenwold was clawing at the deck with both hands, a pointless struggle to stay clear of the dark and hungry ocean. He began howling something, some desperate plea. There was nothing left of War Master Maker but a sheer dread of the deep.
A hand grasped his wrist and hauled on it. He looked up into the fear-twisted face of Arianna.
‘I have you!’ she shouted.
‘Don’t let go!’ He was weeping, trying to kick out with his snared leg, trying to dig his nails into the wood, all craft and Art lost to him.
‘I have you, Sten!’ she cried again, dragging at him, stealing back precious inches from the sea. ‘I’m sorry, Sten,’ she was saying. ‘I’m so sorry!’
Stenwold saw the sword’s point leap from her chest before he realized what it was. For a moment it was simply an image he could not make sense of, just as that great yellow eye had been. Then Arianna arched back, blood exploding from her lips, her grip gone from his wrist. As she fell, she revealed Danaen behind her, grinning like a madwoman, arms bloody to the elbows. She spared a moment to catch Stenwold’s gaze, and her expression was pure triumph.
He screamed in grief and rage and terror at her, and then the tentacle hauled once again, and he slid past the broken rail and into the sea.
The first thing that came to him as he awoke was the warmth of the muggy, humid air. It had a scent to it of sweat and the sea. His leg ached and burned, and he recalled how he had hacked at it in his haste, as it had been tugged and mauled by . . .
The sea monster
, thought Stenwold.
Hammer and tongs, it’s swallowed me.
Other fragments of his situation began to touch him, one by one. He was lying on a curving, hard surface, not cold like metal but feeling more like bone or shell. His uneasiness increased. There was a pulsing sound in the air, heavy and insistent, and with each pulse the floor jerked, and his innards told him that he was in motion.
He was soaked to the skin. Somehow, perhaps because the air seemed saturated with water, that sensation came to him only just before he opened his eyes.
Opening his eyes was not an improvement.
There was light, but like no light he had ever seen before. It was an oppressive reddish-purple, and he could see very little by it. His face was shoved close against the curving inside of whatever held him, be it beast or box.
He tried to keep still, to avoid awakening the further ire of the sea monster, but the horror of his situation clung to him, refusing to be dislodged. Caught by that obscene tentacle, hauled towards the waters, the desperate struggle to free himself, the yawning maw of the ocean.
Arianna.
Her face as Danaen had run her through. Arianna who had tried to betray him, but had not been able to. Arianna who had died in a final act of loyalty, but died nonetheless.
With that he could no longer keep it in. At first his shoulders shook, and then his whole body. He tried to reach out, to grasp at the insides of the monster to stop the upwelling of emotions, but he found he could not move his hands, which were pinioned behind him. A shudder racked him, and Stenwold wept for dead Arianna, and for his exchange of the sun for the bowels of a beast.
There was a sound nearby, over that relentless, slightly erratic pulsing. Only a moment later did he realize that it was speech. It was weirdly drawn out and accented, and he caught not a word, but it was a human voice. He tried to twist round, only to find himself tied or webbed with leathery, slightly pliable ropes. The voice continued, joined by another, still uttering words he could not quite catch. He forced himself to calm down.
Where there are live men, there is hope, and they do not sound as though they expect to be consumed.
The tone of the speakers was jarringly conversational. Stenwold took hold of his grief and loss and fear, and this time he forced it down, steadied himself, and listened.
They were speaking familiar words, he finally realized, but with a strange inflection. He caught the odd piece of meaning, and then put together strings of words at a time, until he heard:
‘. . . Not what I looked for in a land-kinden at all. Such ugly things, these two, anyway. Why these?’
‘Ask Arkeuthys,’ the other voice said, or that is what Stenwold thought he heard. He was unsure, until the first voice answered, whether it was a name, or simply a phrase he had not understood.
‘
You
ask him,’ said the original speaker. His voice was a little higher than the second one. He sounded younger.
‘You’ve never talked to Arkeuthys, have you?’ said the older-sounding voice, a man’s voice as were they both, although Stenwold had not been sure of that initially. ‘You’re scared?’
‘I don’t need to talk to him to be scared,’ said the younger. ‘Seeing him’s enough.’ Stenwold was following their talk more easily now. They sounded close enough to be crouching just behind him, speaking only loud enough to be heard over the . . .
Over the engine
. . . The revelation surged through him. No heartbeat this, but some manner of engine. He had heard nothing like it before, but he was more and more sure that the sound was mechanical in nature, and part of nothing living, for all it had no definite rhythm. He had already identified that each thundering pulse jerked them forwards, and could only guess at the means of propulsion that he bore baffled witness to.
One of the men gave out a ragged groan, without warning, and for a moment Stenwold thought the other must have stabbed him. Then there was some ragged breathing, and the younger voice continued, ‘Arkeuthys says . . . ?’
Stenwold took a deep breath and gave a determined twist at whatever held him, resulting in him flopping onto his back, crushing his bound arms beneath his own weight, He had a brief view of the pale curve of a close ceiling, with some kind of lamp shedding the sanguine light, and then he heaved himself round again so that he was facing away from the wall.
There was far less space here than he had first thought. The erratic surge of the engine had given the cramped chamber a false sense of distance. Instead, he now found himself staring at Teornis.
The Spider lord was awake but lay very still, so Stenwold guessed he had been playing dead for the benefit of their captors. He had opened his eyes as Stenwold moved, though, and now he winked once, very deliberately. His fine clothes were torn, and his hands were also bound.
So, this was not a Spider plot, then, but who . . . ?
Beyond Teornis were two men, obviously the two speakers. The ceiling was low enough to have them kneeling, and the bloody light made things uncertain, but Stenwold thought they were pale-skinned and dark-haired. There was a younger and an older one, as he had surmised, and they made surely the strangest pair ever to be crewing any kind of automotive.
They were savages. That was his instant first thought. They were barbarians, primitives from some underdeveloped tribal land. They wore almost no clothing beyond kilts that extended to mid-thigh, but they made up for that in other finery. On his arms, the younger man wore some bracers that were inscribed with elaborate arabesques, and a torc encircled his neck. The older had metal tracery running all the way from wrist to elbow, work as delicate and intricate as Stenwold had ever seen, as light and complex as if it had grown there frond by frond. His collar was comprised of more of the same, an expanse of branching and rejoining tendrils of metal that covered most of his shoulders and upper chest. About his brow, his long hair was confined by a twining band of the same material. It was impossible to be sure in the strange light, but something about the glint of it suggested gold to Stenwold – gold in a quantity to make a Spider Aristos raise an eyebrow, and of a workmanship to match anything he could imagine man or machine achieving.
The younger man was lean and slender, and he had a short beard cut square, of the same dark lustre as his hair. His senior was paunchier, broad across his bare midriff, more jowly about the face, and with a beard that had been carefully styled so that it curved upwards and rolled into itself. Beyond all this, though, came the revelation that, despite Teornis’s captivity, these were Spider-kinden.
Or no, they were not
exactly
Spider-kinden, not quite, but there was a similarity between their faces and Teornis’s that showed them to be some sort of kin, some offshoot of the same root-stock, linked by a trick of ancestry.
And an errant thought occurred to him,
Have I not seen this before in someone recently, that I took for a Spider?
But he could not pin down the idea and it soon escaped him.
‘Arkeuthys says . . .’ the older man stammered. He was looking strained, to Stenwold’s eye. ‘He says he saw their two leaders trading insults, and it was these two he grabbed.’
‘And what about the other one? Did you—?’