Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
He glanced to either side, finding Teornis and Laszlo staring as aghast as he. Their captors mostly resembled the men from the submersible – the not quite Spider-kinden. The women amongst them were high-cheeked, fair and lustrous of hair, the men with elaborate beards, and all of them decked out in gold and a dozen kinds of precious stones that Stenwold could not identify. Others, standing like servants and subordinates, were taller and thinner, lightly armoured in breastplates and tall helms of what might be chitin or even boiled leather. These were cloaked and held long spears, and their faces, hollow-cheeked and elongated, were unlike any kinden Stenwold knew.
At his shoulder stood a man he immediately knew as the leader. He, too, was of the Spider-kin people and, although they were all attired like Aristoi, this man boasted an additional level of luxury. His dark, curled hair was shot through with a coiling net of gold and glinting gems and he wore gold leaf, like tattoos, from wrist to shoulder of both arms. His cloak was fashioned from the hide of some beast, picked out in curving abstracts of shimmering colours, and his torc was a crescent moon of mother-of-pearl that gave back all the colours of the unhealthy lamps.
‘What think you, O land-kinden?’ he asked, keeping his voice still low. ‘Do you like your new home?’
‘There has been a mistake. We’re not your enemies . . .’ Stenwold started hurriedly but, at a gesture, the bag was jammed over his head again, and he was marched away.
They uncovered his head again somewhere else, somewhere far less spacious that was reached by descending an incline. The glistening lamps shone a sallow greenish-yellow here, and the floor was set with intricate, irregular stone gratings. Even here in this oubliette, the walls and ceiling were ridged and patterned, painstakingly carved into organic whorls and ridges with such all-encompassing detail that at last Stenwold began to think in terms of ‘grown’ rather than ‘made’. Half their guards had gone, leaving a handful of bearded men still holding on to them. Stenwold saw Teornis glancing about brightly, putting on an optimistic expression that Stenwold was sure he could not genuinely be feeling.
‘Separate cells,’ instructed the leader’s voice. Stenwold followed the sound of it to see his shadowy form standing in an archway, just a dark shape in the darkness, there for a moment, and then turning to vanish off into the gloom.
For a moment Stenwold could see no cells, but then one of their guards pried open a floor-grate. Beneath them was a dank space enclosed by bars that were just folds and pillars of stone, some miserable grotto that combined the worst qualities of underwater and under the earth.
Teornis went first. He accepted it gracefully, stepping to the edge like a man going defiant to the gallows. One of their guards raised a hooked knife, and Stenwold felt a moment’s panic before the man merely severed Teornis’s bonds, before moving on to free the wrists of the other two.
‘Thank you,’ the Spider said, impeccably courteous.
‘He didn’t say to cut them loose,’ another guard objected angrily.
‘He didn’t say not,’ replied the man with the knife. ‘If they’re land-kinden, where are they going to go?’
When the angry one still looked stubborn, the knifeman poked Stenwold in the gut with a finger. ‘You, fat man, you know where you are?’
Stenwold shook his head dumbly.
‘Let them have their hands, poor lost bastards,’ the knifeman declared, and Stenwold only belatedly recognized an awkward sympathy on his face. ‘Look at them, their whole world’s been cracked open.’
There was some laughter over this, even from the angry man, but the man with the knife didn’t join in. As Teornis let himself down into his cell, another grate was levered up for Laszlo. The Fly-kinden looked so rebellious, Stenwold wondered if he might suddenly take wing and go . . . where? For their captors were correct, of course: Laszlo might buzz and batter his way through these sculpted halls forever. At last he climbed down into the hole, and only as his grate was lowered again did Stenwold note,
He didn’t fly. Does that mean he’s hurt? No, clever lad, he doesn’t want to show them that he can.
For, of course, not one of the sea-kinden they had seen, amongst that briefly glimpsed bustle, had been airborne.
It’s good to have a secret in reserve.
‘Now you, big man,’ said the man with the knife. Another pit was yawning for Stenwold.
‘Are you permitted to hear me speak?’ Stenwold enquired, without hope.
‘Say what, now?’ The knifeman frowned at him. Stenwold repeated himself slowly, and the other shook his head without rancour.
‘You speak all you like to the Edmir, when he comes for you. Now get in.’
Stenwold peered down, aware that little of the unwholesome light would reach him, down there.
At least Teornis and Laszlo can see better in the dark. I shall be blind.
The space was not great: enough room to sit down with his legs bent but certainly not enough to lie flat. The drop to the floor was about eight feet, he guessed.
Hands took hold of him and, rather than be cast into that stony grave, he lurched forward, took hold of the edge, and lowered himself gradually down.
The grating was dropped above him, making surprisingly little sound, then the guards padded off, their bare feet almost silent on the stone.
The gloom was all-pervasive, for the loathsome little lights seemed to illuminate nothing but themselves. In lieu of anything else, Stenwold fixed his gaze on them, seeing that they did not even flicker, just gave out their steady, sickly glow.
More like the phosphorescence of a fungus than a real lamp.
After a moment he heard a dry chuckle that he identified as Teornis’s. He reached towards the sound, his hand encountering the slick and uneven stone columns that stood boundary between his cell and the next. ‘What?’ he demanded. ‘What’s so funny?’
‘I was just thinking,’ Teornis’s calmly amused tones issued from the murk, ‘that even War Master Stenwold Maker of Collegium can’t blame this one on the Empire.’
How can he stay so calm?
But, of course, such grace in the face of adversity was part of the Spider way. They must maintain face until the very last. With that thought, something subsided within Stenwold, and he felt the Spider’s example lending him a tenuous stability. The humour in Teornis’s remark abruptly came to him, and he even managed a wretched laugh.
‘That’s better. I thought we’d lost you,’ the Spider Aristos remarked. Stenwold thought that he now could just make out the other man’s form moving amid in the forest of lumpen pillars.
‘So, about this honest and frank discussion we were having,’ Stenwold ventured, and guessed that the other two prisoners managed to raise their spirits a little at that, from Laszlo’s snickering and the Spider’s polite laugh.
‘Yes, we made a hash of that, didn’t we?’ Teornis admitted. ‘Or, well . . .’
‘Or I did,’ Stenwold declared flatly.
‘Ma’rMaker, that isn’t so . . .’ Laszlo rushed to his defence.
‘It was Danaen that broke the truce, and it was my decision to bring her along,’ Stenwold observed.
And there, it is out, and I feel better for owning up to it.
‘Danaen’s your Mantis, I take it,’ Teornis said. ‘Well, you’re not the first taken in by the stories they tell about themselves, all guts and honour. They even believe it themselves, most of the time, but they’re human just as we all are. Just as, I hope, our captors are. It was also your idea to hold our little meeting afloat, I recall.’
‘Actually . . .’ Stenwold frowned, ‘that was Danaen also.’
Teornis left a pause before answering. ‘I don’t quite know what to make of that.’
‘Those Felyal Mantids, Ma’rMaker, they’re all sorts of boatmen,’ Laszlo said slowly. ‘Those longships of theirs turn up all over. Maybe . . .’
‘Maybe they sold us to the sea-people,’ Stenwold finished. ‘I find it hard to credit, but . . .’
‘But here we are now,’ Teornis finished for him. ‘Perhaps it was just too much temptation after I trusted my life to their forbearance. Ah, well, a lesson learned, although it’s hard to see what use one might make of such a lesson now.’
Stenwold grasped at the intervening bars, feeling the texture of the ridged stone smooth beneath his hands. ‘Honest and frank, Teornis? You’re still willing to talk?’
‘Talk all you wish, Master Maker.’
‘Then tell me
why
.’ When Teornis did not immediately reply he pushed further. ‘Were the Aldanrael so disillusioned by our trade agreements and treaties that they had to push us into war?’
‘Ah, that,’ said the Spider, as though it was nothing, merely some child’s game from long ago. ‘Master Maker, I do regret it. I even spoke up against it, but when the matriarchs of the Aldanrael command, I must obey. I’m surprised you haven’t fathomed it yet. Trade, Stenwold – it’s as tawdry as that. Collegium relies heavily on trade coming through Helleron, both by rail and air. Even when the Empire had taken the place, there was still a surprising traffic continuing between your kinden’s cities. However, during that occupation the sea trade increased in leaps and bounds. Your man Failwright and his people did well then, as did many of my own people. It’s clear as glass that Helleron will surrender again, the moment the Empire so much as looks west. All we wanted, once that moment came, was to be in a position to profit from having an absolute control of the sea lanes – nothing more sinister, more dramatic, or more worthy than that. As I say, I myself felt it was beneath us and that there were better ways of exploiting our relationship with Collegium, but my damn-fool cousins decided they wanted to play pirate. Frank and honest enough for you?’
‘And Arianna?’ The words came out before Stenwold could stop them. ‘Why . . . ?’ But he let the sentence tail off and die, not wanting to hear his own voice tremble.
‘Because I offered her the chance to live as a Spider should, and not as some surrogate Beetle-kinden,’ Teornis explained. ‘If it is any consolation to you, I was never sure truly whether I had her. I don’t think she was sure, either.’
‘It’s no consolation.’
‘Still, there may be grounds there for some reconciliation, in the unlikely event that we ourselves ever see land or daylight again. After all, our current circumstances surely put such matters into perspective.’
‘She’s dead. Danaen killed her.’
Teornis allowed a respectful interval to pass by before he responded to that. His eventual comment was, ‘Well, I suppose I can claim my share of blame in that. I put her there, with a blade in her hand.’
Stenwold had no response to that, and an uncomfortable silence fell. In the end it was Laszlo who took up the slack.
‘I’m sorry, Ma’rMaker. I had an arrow ready for her myself, when she put her knife to you, but I held off. I didn’t think you’d want . . .’
‘Thank you,’ said Stenwold emptily. ‘But I suppose Teornis is right. In the face of this’ – he made a gesture that their eyes would pick out better than his own – ‘it all of it seems a little pointless.’
‘Sea-kinden . . .’ Teornis pronounced. ‘Well, my excuse is that it is hard to account in one’s plans for the formerly mythological.’
Laszlo laughed bitterly. ‘All those old maps,’ he said. ‘Sailors’ stories. The sea-kinden – they say you could hear them singing out of the weed forests or from old rocks, to lure ships to their doom, you know? The maps, sometimes they would have them drawn on the empty spaces: beautiful girls down to the waist but, like, lobsters or something underneath. Bit daft, if you ask me.’
‘Abominations, they would call those,’ Teornis clarified, ‘and merely an artistic convention. But these sea-kinden here are real enough, and human enough. Your people have no records of such, Stenwold?’
‘Not that I’ve ever heard. Possibly our mariners have stories, as Laszlo says, but none that came to me.’
‘And so we go on pushing at the borders of the world, until we wish we’d left them well alone,’ the Spider intoned softly, obviously quoting from some source Stenwold was unfamiliar with. ‘Did you ever hear of the City of Bones, either of you?’
Laszlo anwered no, and Stenwold shook his head, trusting to the Spider’s eyes to catch the gesture. His own vision was slowly adjusting to the pallor of the lamps, not to the gloom, so much, but the strange tricks they played with shape and shadow.
‘It is an excavation, past the desert margin beyond Irroven. Scholars from our academies have been digging there nigh on ten years now. Nobody’s ever seen anything quite like it.’
Stenwold frowned, not perceiving anywhere relevant this was taking them, but he let the man speak. In truth, Teornis’s calm, conversational tones were helping a lot to ease his own disturbed mind, and perhaps the Spider knew it.
‘There was a city there once, how long ago I cannot say, save that no Spider histories record it. No modern-day city is nearby, and the region has a poor reputation, for the sensitive. In uncovering the streets of this old ruin, our academics found something appalling, fascinating – a massacre.’
‘No need to go digging for that. I could point you to plenty in our lifetimes,’ Stenwold remarked sourly.
‘It looked as though some invading force had overrun the walls, killed every living thing and then left the place to the desert. But the true surprise was in the nature of the bones unearthed. Bones of people, certainly, but bones of animals as well. Horses and goats and sheep, but also . . . other kinds of animals. Dozens of kinds of animals, freakish and unheard-of creatures. I have seen some of the pictures the scholars drew, to represent what they believed these dead beasts looked like. The world is best off without them: monsters such as you cannot imagine, horned and tusked and fanged. But dead, all dead, their bones lying where they fell, in the centre of a city lost to all maps. Their last stand, perhaps – but against who?’