Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
‘Someone wants to meet you, landsman,’ Chenni told him, and then instructed her companions, ‘Pick him up and carry him. We’re moving out.’
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.
Or perhaps his family might have understood if they could be persuaded to see that this fat, balding Beetle was a worthy adversary after all, was in fact a man fit for the Dance. There was a camaraderie, after all, between those that took a turn together out on the floor. One did not
hate
one’s greatest enemies. One thanked them, for making life worth living.
‘Let him see,’ said a voice, and the hood jerked from his head, as the cloak was ripped away.
The room was not large, around the same size as the chamber he had seen above the cells, and of a similar construction: windowless and low-ceilinged, irregular in outline, but someone had been busy here, devising furnishings. There were frames of some yellowish, bone-like material, hung with loops of greenish rope. There was a rack of gleaming blades, curved and jagged, and another one of whips, single- and many-headed. Seeing it all, Teornis laughed.
He sensed his captors drawing back from him in surprise and he glanced around at them: the near-Spider faces narrowed in suspicion, hands on the hilts of knives as though he had become a dangerous threat all of a sudden. He chuckled again, for good measure.
‘Such mirth,’ said the same voice. Teornis looked away from the guard to see the speaker, seated in a chair built from curving sections of shell that glistened with mother-of-pearl. It was the same man who had given them that one snatched glimpse of the undersea marketplace, for Teornis recognized the pearl crescent of his torc, the hide cloak, the exquisite goldwork. He was powerfully built, broad at the waist, and his beard and curling hair gleamed with a rainbow of oils in the wan light. Teornis stared him in the eye, registered the face with its hooked nose, the dark eyes, all the lines of casual cruelty, and decided that no true Spider would have such truths written so plainly on his features for all to see.
The man arose from the chair and stalked over to where the guards held Teornis. ‘Why does this amuse you, land-kinden? Do you not know what you see?’
Teornis replied slowly and clearly, to overcome the difference in their accents. ‘I had thought, when I was first brought to your city, that my life had reached its worst day. But there is always another step down, it seems.’
The man considered him for a moment, without any sign of having understood his words, and then a muscle twitched at the corner of his mouth.
Good
, Teornis thought.
More to work with.
A nod of the man’s head, and Teornis was bundled over to one of the frames. They had to bend him back to secure him there, the ropes tight at his wrists and ankles, and the contours of the frame stretching his joints. He had been expecting that, though, and he kept the despair at arm’s length for another turn.
‘Is this for pleasure, or something to do with Aradocles?’ he ventured, hoping that he recalled the name correctly. The man with the pearl torc had been poring over the rack of knives, but now he went very still. Without looking back, he growled, ‘What do you know of that name?’
‘Your woman, in the cells, gave it to me,’ Teornis told him. ‘Would I be in the presence of the Edmir, then?’
The man did turn at that, although he had a knife in his hand as he did so. ‘I am the Edmir Claeon, undisputed ruler of all Hermatyre, land-kinden. Choose your next words carefully.’
The trio of abductors did not care much for bundling Stenwold up to hide him from the masses. The huge, armoured man brought up the rear, so that if Stenwold slowed a step he would be bounced forward by that broad, shell-clad chest. The lean, bald pugilist went ahead, sheer belligerence radiating from his every joint. Chenni pattered along beside him, almost companionably.
Use your eyes
, Stenwold told himself.
Remember everything you see.
From the ramp they shouldered through a series of tunnels lit only sporadically by the phosphorescent blisters. The workmanship, if it was workmanship, was all of the same organic style, with no defined edges, not a single visible tool-mark. Once or twice they ran into one of the Spider-looking people, dressed poorly, just a loincloth and less jewellery in most cases, and these moved out of their way hurriedly and offered them no resistance. Through it all, the armoured form behind them clumped on so stolidly that Stenwold began to wonder if it was not some impossibly advanced automaton. Then the bald man ahead called out a remark Stenwold didn’t catch, and a grunt of hollow laughter came from the armoured one’s helm.
Now they were moving upwards, Stenwold stumbling and slipping on the slick stone surface, until they had come out into a larger chamber, a space divided into four lobes by curved ribs that rose to a point in the ceiling. There, a half-dozen of the broad, mailed figures were stood as if spoiling for a fight. Their clawed gauntlets held hooked daggers and forward-curving, heavy-ended swords, and one carried a beaked maul whose head looked like twenty pounds of gold capped with bronze. They had corralled in three others: two of the Spidery sort and a woman of another kinden yet again, whose skin kept coursing with pale colours, white and blue.
‘We’re moving!’ Chenni announced to them. ‘Thank these people for their hospitality here and let’s be going.’
The warriors made a ponderous turn, with a scrape and slide of their shelly armour, and then the entire party, with Stenwold now in its midst, was making what appeared to be a quick exit. Their armour blocked much of his view of wherever they were going next, those enormous rounded pauldrons forever in danger of smashing him in the face. For all their bulk, the big men managed a solid, tireless progress, and they gave the impression that precious few barricades could have slowed them down.
‘I don’t suppose I can ask where we’re going?’ he got out, despairing of even being heard.
‘Man in charge,’ replied Chenni’s voice from somewhere above and behind him. Stenwold had been wondering how she avoided being crushed underfoot, but now he craned his neck back to see her perched on the shoulder of one of her cohorts. ‘When you get there, land-kinden, maybe you’ll not be so eager to find out,’ she added.
Joy.
They pushed on through a great hall that seemed very elaborately carved or crafted, and for a moment he thought he glimpsed some kind of statuary around them. Then there was a brief shout and a scuffle. He saw tall, thin men with spears being shunted effortlessly out of the way, and sensed that his abductors’ onward progress was aided by the fact that nobody actually wanted to start a fight, that all here were
supposed
to be on the same side, so it would have gone badly for anyone striking a blow in anger.
And then they were out into the open air.
Not the open air. Of course not. For a moment the sense of space and light had deceived him. The light was nothing more than the glowing bulbs, although for a second the bluish shade had seemed too wholesome to be anything other than day. He had a glimpse of a great many people hurrying out of the way of his escort, faces of kinden he did not know, or kinden that looked familiar but were not. He caught glimpses of temporary structures, something like a marketplace perhaps, or the shantytown of refugees that he had seen around Sarn during the war. He got no sense of a mood that would have allowed him to distinguish between those extremes, for his swift-moving escort created a wake of curiosity and alarm that blacked out all else.
There was some shouting from behind, and a quartet of warriors dropped out of step and turned to await their pursuers. One was the man with the mace, and Stenwold took a good look at it as he was hustled past. Despite the alien light, he was now sure it was gold.
Gold-plated, surely?
But he had already seen a great deal of ornament and finery so far, suggesting it could be solid. If the sea-kinden could mine gold in such quantities, what could they possibly want with the land?
He mentally kicked himself for thinking like a Helleron merchant. If they had that much gold, it could hardly form the basis of their currency.
If they even use a currency.
Then they were back in the tunnels again, but pausing, clustered together as a knot of little pallid men wove around them. The newcomers’ white skin was intricately tattooed, their faces devoid of expression. There was something disconcerting about them in their silence and their purpose: they seemed just the fingers of some greater unseen hand. Whoever they were, Chenni and her warriors stayed quite still as they passed, obviously not wanting to jostle them.
Stenwold heard her say, after the small men had moved on, ‘And where are
they
going? What’s got them riled?’
‘Never worth trying to second-guess them,’ the lean man replied. ‘Let’s just hope it’s none of our business.’
Shortly after that they began heading down and down, and the quality of the chambers they passed through was definitely deteriorating. There were no more great markets, but Stenwold spotted plenty of people, many of them looking like cousins of Chenni. They stared a lot, and there was tension in the air. The lights grew fewer and further between, and still they were going downwards.
How large is this colony?
he wondered.
Where is the sea from here? In what direction is Collegium?
There was another of the armoured men ahead like a living door, already lumbering aside to let them pass, and then the escort was breaking up, the various warriors trudging off on their own errands, until just the original trio delivered Stenwold into a long, low room. There was only one lamp, a broad disc set into the ceiling, which rippled slightly with odd movements of its contents. The washed-out light it cast showed Stenwold a single figure at the room’s far end, seated in a great stone throne carved into a basket of interlocking loops. This delicate-looking framework seemed incapable of supporting him, for he was big enough for three, and his armour made him even more so. As they got closer Stenwold saw it was not composed of the shell segments of the warriors but of some other, paler material. This warlord wore no helm, revealing a narrow head as bald as Chenni’s, heavily ridged across both brow and jaw, with a low crest drawing the skin tight over the crown of his skull. His nose and mouth were small, his eyes deep-socketed and suspicious, while his skin was the brownish-yellow colour of old bones.