‘With ease,’ Stenwold Maker agreed, although there was a tension to him that Rosander could clearly read. ‘Perhaps… some fresh air, maybe?’
The hull shuddered and swung again and Rosander nodded. ‘You go in front of me, Maker, and gather your servant up too. I suddenly suspect that you are trying to be clever, and that may in turn mean that you’re being unwise.’
‘Jons!’ Stenwold called out. ‘Bring Mistress Chenni above decks, if you would.’
‘That time already, is it?’ the other landsman replied. ‘Well then, little miss, if you’d come with me.’
Rosander waited at the foot of the steps for his aide, who came pattering around from behind the landsmen, looking enthusiastic.
‘It’s a fine piece,’ she said. ‘Not clockworks at all, but burning some kind of oily stuff to make it go. Knocks Mandir’s tricks into a barrel. We should certainly get one.’
‘Yes, but what is it doing?’ Rosander stressed.
She goggled up at him. ‘Why, it’s… working.’ She frowned.
‘Go on up, Nauarch. You shall see all,’ Stenwold Maker said softly.
Rosander glared at him and stomped up the steps, heedless of the tortured sounds they made as his weight bent and bowed them.
‘If you think…’ he started, but it was never clear what he imagined Stenwold might think, because his voice trailed off.
The slack, bellying fabric he had taken for sails had grown taut now, forming a great rounded bulk above them. And the sea…
The sea was gone. There was no horizon. Rosander stormed towards the rail, furious… and stopped dead.
There was the sea, still, but it was a dark canvas far below them, glittering with pinpoints of reflected sunlight. He could see no sign of his people, or even their vessels. Instead the water was fast giving way to something lighter: green and grey and dusty tan. The land.
‘We are not just land-kinden, you see,’ Stenwold remarked quietly, beside him. ‘We are air-kinden also.’
Rosander’s gauntleted hand lashed out and grabbed him by the arm, painfully tight. ‘Take us back,’ he hissed. ‘Take us back down, now.’
‘Oh, we will. This is no kidnapping. You can see for yourself we are in no position to overpower you,’ Stenwold assured him, his voice catching slightly with the pressure of that grip. ‘But look, there is your new kingdom. There is the land.’
Despite himself, Rosander found his eyes drawn to the great expanse that now filled the whole of their view, stretching as far as his eyes could squint in the bright, dry light.
‘There is my city,’ Stenwold, pointed. ‘There is white Collegium, your intended victim. But inland of Collegium lies the city of Sarn, where the soldiers of the Ant-kinden march, and they would march to our defence, as would other allies. The Vekken from down the coast, for example, and the Tseni by sea. Who knows who else?’
Rosander made a growling sound in his throat, whereupon Stenwold spoke swiftly on, ‘But the warriors of the Thousand Spines are fierce and brave, so perhaps you would best all who came against you, and then capture my city. But my city is not the land, Rosander, for beyond Sarn there is the city of Helleron, many tens of miles further inland, where they mine and smelt and craft – our own version of the Hot Stations. That marks the edge of the Lowlands, which is the region I call home.’ The landscape was still passing swiftly beneath them, with no sign that it would come to an end any time soon. ‘But perhaps, eventually, you would prevail, Rosander. Perhaps. So I must tell you that, beyond Helleron, there is the Empire of the Wasps, a warlike nation that in size is greater than all the Lowlands. Then there is the Three-City Alliance and the Disputed Principalities, and of course, if you go north past the great ridge, the Commonweal, vast and ancient, greater than all the rest. All this might you conquer – in twenty years or fifty years of never seeing the sea.’
Rosander’s grip on his arm was looser now, the Nauarch staring out at the dust-hazy horizon.
‘And even then,’ said Stenwold, ‘you would not have conquered the land. To the east of the Empire, to the north of the Commonweal, to the south of the Spiderlands, the land goes on, with more and more peoples to resist you, and still no end in sight. My people have charted their own courses for five hundred years, and our maps do not define how far the land goes, any more than yours can delimit the sea. What would you conquer, Nauarch? All your warriors, all the warriors of a hundred such trains, would be lost for ever in just a fraction of all that land.’
‘I could take just your city,’ argued Rosander, almost desperately.
‘And we will fight you,’ Stenwold said. ‘And who can say how that fight would go? You would make many early gains, no doubt, by striking from the waters where we could not reach you, but we have submersibles now, and eventually you would find that we would carry the war down to you. But what of it? Win or lose, what would you achieve in conquering a mere fistful of earth, against all this?’
For a long while Rosander stared out over the rail of the Windlass at the wider world beyond, and Stenwold stepped back, out of the clutch of his now-loose fingers, and let him look. After a moment, the diminutive form of Chenni went to her leader, putting a small hand up to reassure him.
Jons Allanbridge shook his head as Stenwold came over, leaving the giant sea-kinden at the rail.
‘I thought he was going to throw you over the side,’ he said.
Stenwold shrugged. ‘It was always a risk.’
‘So why did you not have some lads with snapbows and nailbows to do the bastard over once we got aloft?’
‘Because that might precipitate the very war that I’m trying to prevent. By my assessment he’s not a tyrant, nor even a conqueror like the Wasps are – or as the Vekken were! – and, if I can shake hands with the Vekken, then I owe it to Rosander, if nothing else, to offer him my hand now.’
The great form at the rail turned to him and said, ‘And what exactly do you offer?’
‘Help us take Hermatyre,’ Stenwold said instantly. ‘Depose Claeon with your own hands. Can you really say that wouldn’t give you pleasure?’
Rosander stared at him levelly. ‘Invade the sea on behalf of the land-kinden? I think not.’
‘Not a land-kinden will be present, save perhaps for myself,’ Stenwold assured him. ‘Retake Hermatyre for its true heir.’
The Nauarch snorted incredulously, then he frowned. ‘You mean it, don’t you? You’ve found him? I always thought Claeon’d had him killed years back.’ For a moment he seemed to be weighing up the very thought of it, but: ‘No, not for Aradocles, and not for you.’ He held up a hand, forestalling Stenwold’s objections. ‘If I’d wanted Hermatyre, I’d have taken it by now, and Claeon couldn’t have stopped me. There are those amongst the Thousand Spines that have been pressing me to do just that – to sack the greatest city of the sea. My people resent being made to wait on Claeon’s pleasure every bit as much as I do. Claeon promised-’
‘You have seen the truth of what he promised,’ Stenwold interrupted.
‘I have.’ Rosander looked down at Chenni, or maybe at his own feet. ‘I have stayed my hand from Hermatyre, simply because what my warriors would leave of it would not be Hermatyre any more. I have a fondness for the place, despite its poor taste in rulers.’
‘So what will you do?’ Stenwold asked him.
‘I will take my warriors back to the depths, where we belong. We will tread the deep paths again, and fight the Echinoi, and terrorize the small colonies, and be as we were meant to be. But maybe we will return to Hermatyre soon, to buy and sell, and I would not be heartbroken if we found some other Edmir on the throne.’
Forty-Three
Daven tugged his hood a little higher, for all he and his fellows were in a private room in the Fair Licence, a respectable merchant’s taverna within sight of the College. It was not that it was so very difficult, to be a Wasp in
