Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
‘Leave that to me,’ Wys announced. ‘I’ll put Fel and Phylles on to them. Any trouble and they’ll end up in the broth.’
‘What a pleasant thought,’ Diamedes said. The local broth was a Stations speciality, made with the bitter, boiling water issuing from the vents the place was built around. It was clearly not to the Kerebroi’s taste.
‘Our time is up,’ Nemoctes decided. ‘I will have one of my people pass word, if our distraction is to happen. For now, Haelyn, return to your people, and Wys, follow her up. And landsman, back to your minders before they lock you up again.’
When Laszlo returned, Stenwold was bending morosely over some half-sketched plans, whilst Tseitus had a clockwork unravelled on the table and was moving the cogs about like game pieces. The two artificers looked up to see the small man ushered in by Mandir’s guards. It had become clear by halfway through their first meeting that there was no actual love lost between the Beetle and the Ant. Despite all logic, Tseitus still resented being left to rot beneath the sea, and he had further made no secret of his contempt for Stenwold’s admittedly rusty mechanical skills. On the other hand, Tseitus had never even heard of a snapbow, which invention had reached Collegium after his entombment beneath the waters.
Still, the two of them had one shared interest, which was escaping, and it appeared that the Fly-kinden would be the key to that if anyone would. They waited until the Onychoi had retreated, allowing Laszlo time to uncloak and scratch miserably at his stubbling head, but they were both anxious to hear any news he had to offer.
‘I hope you appreciate what I’m doing for you,’ was all he said at first. ‘This itches like a bastard.’
‘A small sacrifice,’ snapped Tseitus. ‘What is their plan?’
Laszlo shot him a level glance and addressed himself to Stenwold. ‘Well, we had a talk – Wys and Nemoctes and Heiracles’s people and I – and the most of them couldn’t find their arse with both hands if there was a crab hanging off it, to be honest, Mar’Maker. Heiracles and his lot, I wouldn’t trust ’em with a bent pin. Nemoctes has something up his sleeve that he thinks we won’t like, which in itself ’s something I don’t like. He seems honest enough, but his people have no clout here, and so he’s waiting for something to happen. I think he expects that Mandir’s people will all go peer out of the windows at the same time long enough for us to simply walk out. I’ve seen the Man’s operation from inside, and it isn’t tight, but it’s definitely tighter than that. But he obviously believes something’s coming. So Wys and I have made our own plans, and sod the rest of them.’
‘Plans,’ Stenwold said, hoping that the Fly knew what he was talking about. ‘What plans?’
‘It’s all about the Gastroi. You know them?’
‘Peasants,’ said Tseitus contemptuously.
Stenwold frowned. He had seen them; big, lumbering men and women, heavy-footed, grey-skinned, doing menial work and heavy labour that the Onychoi obviously wouldn’t touch. They seemed unlikely rescuers.
‘The Ant’s half right,’ Laszlo said. ‘Peasants – farmers, a lot of them, or herders and gatherers. From Hermatyre, too, a fair few. Loads of them live on all those little farms and stations scattered near the colony, Wys tells me. Only Claeon has ’em strung up regularly for a pastime. Just peasants, like our man says, and that’s certainly what Claeon thinks. A lot of them have been turned off their farms or just run away – run here. And they don’t like Claeon one bit, but they’re loyal to Hermatyre otherwise. They want to see Hermatyre in good hands again.’
‘And . . . ?’ Stenwold watched him narrowly, seeing Laszlo squirm a little.
Here it comes.
‘Wys and I, we kind of said that if we could get free, we’d be off to find this Aradocles.’
‘Who everyone thinks is dead,’ Stenwold pointed out. ‘Who may well
be
dead, for that matter.’
‘But we are off to do that, aren’t we? I mean, that was your plan, wasn’t it?’ Laszlo pressed.
‘That was my excuse for talking them into putting us ashore,’ Stenwold allowed. ‘But as for actually finding him . . .’
‘Oh, well, I told them that, anyway, and so did Wys,’ Laszlo said, a little awkwardly. ‘They’re . . . loyal, you see. They hate Claeon because he’s a nasty-minded critter, but they want the boy back, and
they
don’t believe he’s dead.’
‘Where is this getting us?’ Tseitus demanded. ‘So you’ve swayed the rabble? Does that mean they fight? Will they cast down Mandir? No.’
‘No,’ Laszlo agreed, ‘but they’ve got all kinds of Art, these Gastroi. I’ve watched them work. They’ve got this thing they do with their hands, so that they can just carve into stone or metal, or what have you, and cut it like it’s clay. All these pieces that the Hot Stations are made of, they’re Gastroi-cut. And that means that when Wys tips them the word, when Nemoctes’s moment comes, we’re not waiting around for the rescue party. We’re going out the back way, and stuff the lot of them. Then Wys will get us out, and we’re not
anyone
’s prisoners any more.’
‘And you trust Wys, do you?’ Stenwold asked. ‘Only, our record with these sea-kinden is poor, to say the least.’
‘Oh, she’s
my
kind of sea-kinden,’ Laszlo assured him.
Tseitus snorted and ostentatiously went back to playing with his cogs. Stenwold sighed and put his head in his hands.
‘Hold together, Mar’Maker,’ Laszlo told him. ‘I’ve got myself out of worse than this.’
That made the Beetle lift his head. ‘Really?’
‘No, but I’m always after improving my record. It’ll happen.’
‘Let’s hope so. I won’t be able to stall Mandir for long. He’s an artificer himself. Whatever I give him must be fit for the purpose, or he’ll know.’
‘You look like you’re losing sleep over it, if I can say so, Mar’Maker.’
Stenwold smiled without humour. ‘Oh, sleep I have. Dreams, I have. I think the dreams wear me down more than the waking.’ He shook his head. ‘I think she
did
something to me,’ he added, almost in a whisper.
When Laszlo frowned at him, though, he just waved the thought away.
Claeon burst in, with two guards at his back. It was hard to tell, in that first glimpse, whether he was angry over something in particular, or whether it was merely his sporadic ill temper being given its head. Teornis continued reclining, watching carefully, for to leap to his feet, he decided, would suggest guilt. He had nothing to be guilty about, and no advantage to be gained from feigning it. He donned an enquiring smile.
Claeon jerked his head towards the Spider, and his guards, a pair of sinuous Kerebroi with curved knives, went over and hauled the prisoner to his feet, twisting his arms painfully back. Teornis remained calm, trusting to his assessment of his captor. He had met with Claeon enough times to read the sea-change of the man’s moods. This was not the end, just the Edmir throwing some childish tantrum. He told himself that, if his death was due, here, he would see it in Claeon’s eyes.
‘You can find the brat Aradocles, is that what you’re telling me?’ the Edmir spat at him, hands clenching over and over. In fact it had been days ago that they had last spoken the missing heir’s name, but Teornis had left the dart there, in Claeon’s mind, securing it with a little Art to make sure it would fester, and now at last the suppurating fruit had come to light.
‘If he still lives, if the dry land has not finished him, I pride myself that I will find him for you,’ Teornis said. He had devised a particular way, by now, of speaking to Claeon: it mingled respect and self-confidence, none of the insolence that would start the man off, but none of the habitual cringing of the sea-kinden staff around him. So far, it had seemed to work.
‘You’ll succeed, where Pellectes’s people have failed – have failed over moons and moons of searching.’ Claeon pushed the Spider in the chest, hard enough to wrench his pinioned shoulders.
‘But you must have guessed what I have guessed, where Pellectes is concerned,’ Teornis said smoothly, hoping that nobody present was a Littoralist.
Claeon’s eyes narrowed, and for a moment his arm twitched with the desire to hit somebody, with the Spider as the most obvious target, but a little rare self-control stayed his hand. ‘So tell me what you
guess
, land-kinden.’
‘Pellectes is mad, to start with,’ said Teornis, thinking privately that he had yet to meet any sane sea-kinden. ‘But mad in a strange way. Let us be frank, Edmir, you do not believe this business about ancient persecutions from the land or, if you believe, you do not much care. Why should you? The land is a harsh mistress. Why make war and shed blood just to scratch out a living there? But to Pellectes this is the All – the great All transcending logic or reason. All his power and influence, his hold over his followers, comes from this great plan for revenge, and he believes in it, he really does. I’d have thought he was just using the lie for his own purposes but, having met him, he’s quite mad and believes every word he says.’
‘And yet he has had agents on the land, and your people never suspected.’
‘No more we did, but I didn’t say he was incapable, just mad as a clam.’ A brief moment of wondering over whether clam-kinden actually existed passed him by. ‘He doesn’t follow you merely because you’re the rightful Edmir of Hermatyre,’ the foreign words came quite naturally to him now, ‘but because you can give him what his madness wants: the land. You, for your part, couldn’t care less about the Littoralist dream, but the land’s a good playground for your allies, and your woman, whatever her name was, she sent the boy there. To die, perhaps, but, without a corpse, who knows?’ Claeon was getting impatient again, so Teornis hurried his speech. ‘Why would Pellectes tell his agents to hunt the boy down? Or to tell you about it, if by chance they found him? He worries that, with Aradocles put in the ground – fed to the fish, whatever – you’ll not need him any longer, you’ll not further his goals. I’ll wager his agents have not so much as looked. They’re all preparing for their glorious invasion.’
There was a moment of utmost balance, as Claeon’s bleak temper teetered between a surge that would earth itself only through Teornis and a rage aimed securely at the Littoralists. Spider eyes watched the thoughts fall into place, the balance tilt, the anger slide inexorably away from him in other directions. With a brutal jab of his chin, Claeon signalled for Teornis’s release.
‘How can I trust you?’ he growled.
‘One service Pellectes’s people have done you, at least, is they have confirmed my credentials. Those people up there are my enemies, too. Moreover, you’ll surely be sending me under an escort. I’d expect nothing less. I will prove myself to you, Edmir, by divining the fate of your missing nephew. If you want, I will then ensure that he stays missing until the end of time. After that, let us talk about Rosander’s campaign there for, with my help, he’ll grab enough of the land to keep even Pellectes satisfied. Everyone wins except our enemies, and is that not the best way, always?’
He expected Claeon to go off and think it all over again, as he had so many times before, but unwished-for developments had obviously arisen, and Teornis guessed that Stenwold was still free, still flouting Hermatyre’s reach.
‘What will you need?’ Claeon growled.
‘The name of Pellectes’s agent, and how to make contact, together with whatever escort you choose to send with me. Your Kerebroi – your Krakind here – can pass for my people, and whilst that won’t make them locally popular, they’ll at least be taken as land-kinden. I can advise on suitable cloaks and clothes and the like. No Onychoi, though. Just between you and me, to a landsman’s eye they look freakish.’
Claeon actually chuckled at that. ‘Oh, to me also, much of the time. No, we’ll keep them out of it. Even my own Onychoi would rather be with Rosander, I sometimes feel. I can’t trust them. I can’t trust any of them.’
Looking into the man’s small eyes, seeing them stare out of Claeon’s heavy face like desperate prisoners, Teornis knew how those Onychoi felt. On land they always said, ‘Never trust a Spider’, and yet people always did, because his kinden were so good at gaining trust. Still, amongst the Spiders themselves, the value of trust was well known. A Spider-kinden Aristos chose servants and slaves well, and treated them in a way that invited loyalty, respect, even love. Claeon’s tyranny would have seemed risible if he hadn’t held Teornis’s life in his grasping, whip-loving hands.
‘I can wait no longer,’ the Edmir whispered, and Teornis wondered if he even realized he was speaking aloud. ‘The boy, the cursed boy, he haunts my dreams. Even the chance, the
chance
that he might live . . . and return . . .’ Those eyes, that had retreated a little into themselves, suddenly blazed out again with renewed fervour. ‘And if it becomes known that he died on the land, where that traitress Paladrya sent him, that he was torn apart and eaten by the land-kinden – well, then perhaps Rosander shall have plenty of volunteers for his stupid war. We’ll have the whole sea under arms before we’re done!’ He was smiling joyously now, and Teornis joined him with a strained rictus of a grin, because his complicity was obviously expected.
And then came the fateful words. ‘You shall go with the tide, over the Edge and on to the land,’ Claeon promised him. ‘You shall go tonight.’
Teornis had not been clear on how his re-entry into polite society was likely to be accomplished, conjuring images of riding into Collegium harbour on the back of a giant squid or some such, like an allegorical figure from one of the Spiderlands’ more outré operas. The messenger sent to fetch him, however, was not from the ranks of Claeon’s regulars, but one of the stunted little Onychoi people. He had taken little note of them, seeing that Claeon’s people found them a nuisance underfoot and deemed them a class of menials mostly to be kept outside the palace. His ear for voices was good, though, and when she addressed him he recalled her.