Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
‘Of course I did.’ The older man glared at his fellow. ‘He says it’s just some land-kinden who got in the way. He
cut
Arkeuthys, the little one did.’
‘So we don’t need him, then?’ To Stenwold’s alarm, the younger man took a knife from his waistband, a vicious-looking weapon with a wicked inward curve. Stenwold craned his neck to follow the man’s gaze, and spotted a third captive: the tiny trussed form of Laszlo, looking bruised and still unconscious.
The older man’s eyes abruptly moved to meet Sten-wold’s own, and there was a shock of alien contact, reinforced by Stenwold’s meanwhile working out who ‘Arkeuthys’ must be. Of course, there was an Art for speaking with beasts, though you seldom heard of it these days. But one could only speak with animals appropriate to one’s people . . .
Founder’s Mark!
he whimpered inwardly.
These are sea monster-kinden.
Noting his distress, the man with the coiled beard smiled. ‘Kill the little one now. He can’t be worth much,’ he said.
‘Hoi!’ This was a new voice, emerging from somewhere ahead, towards the vehicle’s direction of travel. ‘None of that!’
‘Keep out of it,’ the older man snapped.
‘Nobody’s killing anyone!’ the new voice insisted. It was a higher pitch than theirs, clearly a woman’s voice, but high even for that. Her accent was slightly different, too, drawling the vowels less, but also stressing her words in unexpected places. Stenwold found it even harder to follow.
‘Arkeuthys says—’ one of the first two began to argue.
‘Don’t care. If we’ve got three land-kinden, then we bring
all
three land-kinden back to the colony, alive.’
The look on the face of the older man showed resentment and loathing. ‘
I
am the voice of the Edmir here.’
‘And I’m the handler of this barque,’ the woman shot back.
‘So?’
‘So if you even want it to get as far as your Edmir’s city, you keep me sweet, or I’ll push off for the Stations or Deep Seep, or wherever I choose.’
‘You wouldn’t dare—’
‘And
furthermore
,’ the woman’s voice continued, ploughing straight over the older man’s words, ‘if you suggest killing someone just because they’re
small
, then I’ll get Rosander to pincer your piss-damn arms off at the elbows, got it?’
The look on the man’s face was, Stenwold found, exactly the look of a Spider thwarted by someone undesirable. ‘The Edmir shall hear of this, Chenni,’ he growled.
‘I’ll pit your chief against mine, any day,’ the woman jeered at them. ‘And at least tell me you equalized them. Did you do that one thing right?’
‘As they’re not crushed and dead, of course we did,’ the younger man spat back. ‘We know our business. You keep to yours!’
The one thing that came through, across this chasm of different cultures, was the thought:
They are divided.
Even here, trapped and grieving and, he had no doubt about it, in some kind of submersible automotive deep beneath the waves, he had a tiny spark of hope. If there were factions, there would be politics and, whatever his talents, he was a statesman.
And they would let Laszlo live, and that gave him an ally.
And maybe Teornis as well, for all that they look like Spiders. These are no more his people than mine.
Then the older man snarled with frustration and signalled for his colleague to put away the knife and, to enact that frustration, he kicked Teornis in the kidneys and then stamped on Stenwold’s gashed and abused leg. The sudden flare of pain was savage enough to rip consciousness away from him.
He awoke again to a firm and nudging pressure against his better leg, slowly jolting him from the morass of oblivion. He opened his eyes to see the grim reddish light, and shut them again. The nudging continued. It felt like a foot.
Arianna.
The thought came to him from nowhere, a thought orphaned and without issue, passing him like the lights of a distant ship. He clenched his fists, feeling them tug and stretch at the stuff that was binding them.
‘Maker.’ The voice was soft, barely on the edge of hearing.
‘Teornis?’ he murmured in reply, as quietly as he could, trusting to the Spider’s hearing.
‘None other,’ came the response. ‘Our jovial friends have gone fore. How much of their talk did you hear?’
‘Some. I understood less, though. And you?’
‘The same. However, they’re a bloody-handed lot, it’s clear.’ Stenwold had to strain his ears to hear the calm, measured tones. ‘And Apt, it seems, for I take this to be a machine of some kind.’
‘That’s my guess, though the walls and floor are made of nothing I’ve ever seen manufactured.’ There was movement from nearby, and they fell silent at once. Stenwold heard two people, he assumed the same two, shuffle up closer and hunker down.
‘What’s the order?’ enquired the younger voice.
‘Get them cloaked and hooded. The Edmir wants nobody to set eyes on the land-kinden. He’ll send men to take them directly to his cellars.’
There was a little shifting around, and Stenwold heard the younger man whisper, ‘What if
she
wants them for Rosander?’
The older man let out a long breath. ‘We’d better hope the Edmir gets more men to us quicker than the Nauarch can.’
Absently, Stenwold wondered whether his own future would be more secure in the hands of this Edmir or the one they called Rosander. He recalled that their pilot, who had spared Laszlo’s life, had been acting for Rosander, but he had a gloomy suspicion that there were no such thing as safe hands now waiting to receive the captive landsmen.
Waiting where? Where in all the maps are they taking us?
But there were no answers to that, no more than there were maps.
The lurching motion of their craft was slowing, he noticed, accompanied by a few bucking shifts of direction. His stomach clenched at the realization that, whatever port they were heading to, they were shortly due to arrive.
They suddenly plunged – there was no other word for it. It was as if they were in a flier that had abruptly lost its grip on the air. Stenwold heard one of their captors groan at the motion, that had sat quite easily with the Beetle.
Inapt are they?
Then, just as suddenly, they were rising, the curious vessel bucking a little against some external current, their unseen pilot wrestling, no doubt, with the levers.
A moment later the lurching of the engine ceased, the interior becoming vastly silent without it, and the motion of their conveyance, that had been so strange, became jarringly familiar. They were bobbing on calm water, just as if they were in nothing more than a rowing boat.
‘Fat one first,’ Stenwold heard quite distinctly, accent or no, and then their hands were on him. In the cramped space they were awkward with him, and it was plain they were trying to hurry as well. Stenwold let his body go intentionally slack, but after they had fumbled him a second time, they did something to their hands – something he instinctively recognized as Art – so that they latched onto his clothes and skin with a painful sureness. As they hauled at him, he felt as though they were going to rip strips of his hide off, and he yelled with pain and started cooperating with them as best he could. They laughed at that, and he wondered if they had known that he was awake all the time.
‘Hood him,’ snapped the older man, just as the light ahead changed in character from the infernal red of the vessel’s innards to something greenish-blue, no more natural but considerably more pleasant. A moment later some kind of bag was dragged over Stenwold’s head, the texture of it unpleasantly slick, after which he had to rely on guidance from his captors to get him out of whatever hatch the vessel possessed and onto stone that was worked in some smoothly undulating pattern.
They hurriedly dumped him, and he heard the younger man call out, and others coming over. There was a rapid conversation that he did not catch, save for several mentions of the name ‘Rosander’ again, and the instruction, ‘Watch him.’ Then he guessed his two captors were returning inside for Teornis and Laszlo.
The surface beneath him had felt like stone but, as his questing hands examined it, it had a peculiar texture to it, the polished surface still bearing faint indentations and pockmarks. The air about him was neither hot nor cool, laden with a kind of stagnant damp, and he could smell fish, and the sea, and the men around him possessed an oily, fishy odour of their own, which was unlike anything he had come across before.
Something dropped across his legs, making him cry out in pain. The unseen burden writhed and slid off him, and he guessed from its size that it was Laszlo. Then he heard approaching feet, and a current of agitation ran through his unseen guards. Someone barked something that could only have been a challenge, and then the shouting started.
Stenwold tried his best to follow what was being said, but the words escaped him, too fast and too foreign to make any sense. A pattern came to him, though, of thieves bickering over the spoils.
And I’m a spoil.
He could pick out the voice of the older man who had ridden in the submersible with them, and there were a lot of other voices backing his case. The opposing camp seemed to have far fewer participants, but their voices were of a very different character, certainly not the near-squeak of their pilot. In fact, their bass rumble put him in mind of very large men indeed, as big as Scorpions or even Mole Crickets.
He heard, in the midst of this cacophony, the distinctive sound of steel, the touch of blades: not put to use, yet, but sliding across one another, ready for blood. He scraped his head across the ground, trying to dislodge the bag, but it was no use.
This is maddening.
Then there was a sharp rapping, surely a staff against the stone floor, and quiet followed meekly in its wake. Stenwold heard enough shuffling to imagine the two warring parties separating reluctantly.
‘That is quite enough,’ someone said, a new voice that was clearly used to being obeyed. ‘Now, who leads these . . . ah, and is it Chenni I see there?’
There was a pause, and then the high tones of their pilot. ‘Aye, your Eminence.’ She sounded flustered, if Stenwold was any judge.
‘Kindly tell your Nauarch, my ally the good Rosander, that he need have no fear. He may approach me for speech with the land-kinden at any time.’ The new voice spoke smoothly, but then it gained a new edge: ‘And if your bannermen do not disperse this moment, do not think that Rosander can save them from being dismembered, joint by joint.’
‘You . . .’ Whatever Chenni was about to say, she clamped down on it.
‘I don’t dare?’ The new voice was dangerously soft again. ‘Your Rosander is not the sentimental fool you take him for. He’d not wish to upset me for a few worthless lives like these. Be thankful that you yourself are currently somewhat more dear to him than most. Now go. Your services with your machine are appreciated, but it is time for you and yours to quit this place and bother me no more.’
After the scuffling and shuffling that surely meant Chenni and her ‘bannermen’ dispersing, the order came, ‘Get them to their feet.’ Stenwold was unceremoniously hauled upright, supported between two men, and a moment later he was being hustled forward, stumbling over the unseen ground. He could only hope that Laszlo and Teornis were still nearby. The route was complex enough that he lost track entirely of how many turns they took, save that their journey was more often upwards than not, struggling and slipping on ramps of grooved stone that his boots could not properly grip. His captors were ruthless in their progress, using their Art to maintain their sticky grip on him whenever he threatened to fall.
At last they stopped, and he had the sense of a large space echoing with a murmur of voices.
A council chamber? A court of law? Am I to be tried for the crime of being land-born?
‘Land-kinden,’ said the leader’s voice more softly, ‘from here you shall go to the cells, beneath my great halls, and I cannot say if you shall ever venture forth from them again. I think it only fair, therefore, that you see, just this once, some small piece of your people’s doom.’
A moment later the bag was dragged from Stenwold’s head. He closed his eyes, anticipating a shock of sunlight, but instead there was an overcast, almost twilightish gloom, relieved only by patches of wan light, globes of blue-green or green-white or purplish-red. Those lights went back and back, though, and multiplied with distance. Stenwold found himself standing on the brink of a balcony of moulded stone, looking down into a vaulted space between curved walls swelling in the shadows and then narrowing to a pointed ceiling, which some half-seen walls were seamed into radial symmetry by elegant buttresses, as though they were standing within a vast stone gourd. Even in the dim light, Stenwold saw that, between the ridges, the ceiling and walls were folded and worked until they seemed more like the natural interior of some great shell than the work of hands. Below them a multitude bustled in the many-coloured dusky light, figures large and small, and none seen clearly, but no glimpse of any looking like kinden Stenwold knew. There were figures as small as Flies, or as large as Mole Crickets, or as slender as Mantids, and most of the throng wore little for garments – kilts, cloaks, perhaps a sash. A few clumped through the crowd in armour that made them seem as ponderous and powerful as automotives, broader across the shoulders than Stenwold was tall.