Claeon!’
His eyes narrowed abruptly, and she stopped. ‘Who let them in, Haelyn?’
‘Who let who in?’
‘When they stole those land-kinden from my oubliette, when they took my dear Paladrya from me, who let them in? Who was it who betrayed me? I am betrayed, and who better for that than one who held my utmost confidence?’
Until then, he had only the faintest suspicion, his paranoia seeking any target, but now he saw the faintest flush of colours swirling over her skin. A flinch, a twitch of guilt, revealed even under the shadows of her Art, and he knew.
‘Traitor!’ he shrieked, and in the next moment he was running at her, maul upraised. She retreated upwards beside the throne, shouting his name, but he was done with that – done with her. His majordomos always failed him, sooner or later. Well, this last one would not survive him. He would regret only that he could not finish her off properly, and at his leisure, but perhaps it was fitting that his last act as Edmir should be a brutal one.
She dodged behind the throne, and his next swing smashed the back of it in a cloud of fragments, obliterating its beauty in a single moment. He would indeed be the last Edmir to govern Hermatyre from that seat. Haelyn retreated and retreated, but Claeon was mad with fury now, whirling the maul about him, cracking dents in the floor, in the walls, until at last she tripped and fell.
She screamed, and he savoured it, standing over her with the comforting weight of the maul in his hands. It was grimed now with pulverized coral, but he’d wash that off soon enough. He raised it high.
Her eyes had slipped away from the weapon, from his own gaze. She was staring now at something beyond him. He was a fool for doing so, but he could not stop himself craning around to look.
The Arketoi stood there, some half-dozen of them: pallid little hairless men and women, tattooed and almost naked, as like unto each other as siblings. They stared at him wordlessly, for they never spoke. Even as he watched, a few more of them trickled into the throne room, twisting their way through the walls, walking somehow in between the infinitesimal spaces between the dead coral. Some had gone over to the door, and were examining its smashed hinge.
‘Do not touch that! Do not heal it!’ Claeon protested. The majority of the Arketoi just stared at him reproachfully. ‘What do you want?’ he demanded.
‘You hurt the colony,’ Haelyn whispered. ‘You hurt them.’
Claeon snarled. ‘It’s my colony! I’m the Edmir!’ But he saw Haelyn’s face and her immediate reaction. It’s their colony. It always has been. We are but guests.
The Arketoi began shuffling towards him, and he threatened them with his maul. One by one, they raised their hands towards him, as if in salute.
‘Get back!’ Claeon howled. He struck one a blow with the maul – not solidly, but the little man was such a frail piece of work that he crumpled immediately. The others simply came on at him, reaching out with their pale fingers. More and more of them crept into the room from every crack and corner, from nowhere at all. There were twenty – no thirty, at least – all focusing only on Claeon.
He swung the maul to all sides of him, catching another pair, but then they reached him, and Haelyn screamed again, not from fear for herself but for what they then did.
When Aradocles, Stenwold and Paladrya finally entered the throne room, through a perfectly functional door, they discovered Haelyn pressed against one wall, hands covering her mouth, and, in the centre of the room, nothing but the rough shape of a man – as though a statue had been abandoned to the ocean many decades past, and become thoroughly encrusted over by barnacles and coral.
Forty-Six
‘You know what you’re doing, of course,’ remarked Tomasso philosophically.
Stenwold just shrugged, his eyes fixed on the sea. Overhead the Tidenfree’s sails bellied and flapped, lowered halfway and turned from the wind so that the crew could let down the ship’s boat in safety.
‘Still in sight of Collegium harbour, as well,’ said the Fly captain, approvingly. ‘A right piece of theatre. I’ll wager they’re cramming the sea wall with telescopes in their hands. You’re a man with a knack for building your own legend.’
‘I never wanted a legend,’ Stenwold said softly. ‘If I could have lived my whole life merely as a tinker and a scholar, that would have suited me.’
Tomasso made a rude noise, and then said, more solicitously, ‘You don’t want anyone along with you? You’re sure, now? I’ve got good hands here, who’d gladly do it. Stab me, but Laszlo would come, if only he had four whole limbs. I’d not be able to keep him back. Prefers you to me, these days.’
‘We went through a lot together,’ said Stenwold fondly. ‘No – no others. Anyone with me is a hostage being handed to the enemy.’
‘Well, then,’ said Tomasso. ‘Ready the boat. Master Maker’s fixing to leave us.’
Parting had been hard, after all that dagger work had been done. Aradocles had wanted him to stay just a little longer. There was to be a procession, a ceremony, where the boy would make pledges to the people of Hermatyre such as an Edmir had never offered before. He was going to make Salma proud of him, Stenwold knew. He would rule the colony as a true Commonweal prince, whose first concern must always – or should always – be for the well-being of his subjects.
But Stenwold could hear a clock ticking in the back of his mind. How long for them to raise their grand armada, and sail on Collegium? How long for the Black and Gold to take note and start their next grand war? He had made his apologies, after begging one simple audience with the new Edmir. After that, he had headed for the water, where Wys’s submersible was waiting to carry him, as swiftly as possible, back to his home.
The ratcheting of the hoist brought him back to the here and now. Despard the artificer was supervising the little tub’s swinging, positioning it over the water beyond the rail’s edge. This was a tiny little boat for a big Beetle man, but it was not as though he would need to do much rowing in it. His destination was coming to him.
He cast another look at the sea, and then back to Tomasso. ‘You’re sure you can get under way in time?’
‘We’ll go wide, let the engine take us into the wind,’ the Fly explained. ‘We’re faster than any of theirs, towards that point of the compass. Don’t you worry about us, Master Maker.’
‘Stenwold. Call me Stenwold, Tomasso. If anyone’s earned that, you and your people certainly have.’
Tomasso had been there, of course, at the urgent and secret meeting Stenwold had called as soon as he struck land. It had been a matter of putting his affairs in order, of making sure that everything was set and in place, in case… well, just in case.
Tomasso and Wys, and an increasingly incredulous Jodry Drillen, these had been his co-conspirators. A precious two hours of his life had been spent explaining to the Speaker for the Assembly just who Wys was, and where she came from. At the end of that, Jodry had been sitting back in his seat, mouth hanging open, the frontiers of his world now pushed beyond the horizon in an unexpected direction.
‘Just what am I expected to do with all of this?’ he had demanded of Stenwold. And then Stenwold had told him, laid it out for him: the secret deal that he had told nobody of until then. Tomasso and Wys had been given their first hearing of it then, as well, and Stenwold had been desperately trusting to his assessment of them – that what he was offering would be appealing enough, and that they were honest enough, to make it work. Honest enough in their own way, of course, for a pirate and a mercenary. Stenwold had always found himself mixing with people like that, whose lives were bought and sold. He knew two types: those that wanted enough, and those that wanted it all. He could only hope he was right in assuming that Tomasso and Wys were amongst the first and not the second.
‘You’re happy with the arrangements?’ he asked, stepping out into the Tidenfree’s little boat. He knew that it was too late now, if Tomasso decided to change the deal, but he felt driven to ask, even so.
‘Oh, you’re right there, Stenwold,’ the black-bearded Fly agreed with a grin. ‘You came through for us, all right – and then some.’ There had been all the respectability that a Fly-kinden family could dream of, as part of
