that way and trade, not knowing how they do things. Eventually you bribe too much or too little, bribe the wrong man, say something you never realized was an insult, fail to compliment the women, drink in the wrong taverna. The next day, well, you’re lucky if you’re in chains and gone from being a trader to being stock in trade, if you get me. So your lot, all you get are the dog-ends from Seldis, and at a ruinous poor price, too.’
‘But you know how to get on with the Spiders?’
‘We could sail along the desert coast with no trousers and we’d get away with it,’ Lazslo replied. It was hard to tell just how old he was. He looked like a man of twenty years, but his enthusiasm was six years younger. ‘However, we don’t need to. There are two reasons why even those who know better still sail the coast road to Seldis, Ma’rMaker. Firstly, once you’re out of sight of the coast, it’s cursed hard to plot a course just by sun and stars. You reach the far shore and you’re a hundred miles from where you should be, and you with your water running low, and who knows what family owns the next port. More than that, there are the weed seas. The sea’s got forests, like the land does, with weed so tall it reaches from where the sun don’t shine all the way to the open air. Your ship gets caught in that, there’s no steering out of it, and then you starve or die of thirst or… well, they say there’s things that live there that’ll soon put you out of your misery. Other problem is the weather. It’s rare enough to get across without a storm, and I’d bet you a bit to a Helleron central that we’ll see one this trip. Tear a ship apart, bring the mast down on you, rip your sails off, they can. Wind, lightning like the sky’s on fire, waves that come between you and the sun-’
‘Sea-kinden,’ Gude interrupted unexpectedly.
Laszlo snorted. ‘Nobody believes in sea-kinden,’ he said. ‘And, with all that storm going on, who’d need them? Faced with that kind of weather, the coast road looks awfully inviting.’
‘But you’ve got a way through?’ Stenwold prompted.
‘Oh, surely,’ Laszlo confirmed. ‘Come up and stand by Gude now, Ma’rMaker.’
‘Stenwold. Just call me Stenwold,’ the Beetle insisted, clumping up from the deck level to the wheel. Gude gave Laszlo a warning glare, but he ignored her blithely.
‘Now, I’m betting you know what these toys are,’ he said.
They were battered and weather-worn, not the workshop-mint pieces that he had seen previously, but Stenwold was artificer enough to pick them out. ‘I see an absolute clock and a gimballed compass,’ he said.
‘And with their help, and charts, and a reckoning taken from the sky, and some fairly taxing mathematics, Ma’r Stenwold, we find our way to wherever we want to be.’
‘And you also calculate your way through storms, do you?’
Laszlo still smiled, but abruptly it was the smile of an older man. ‘Oh, Master Stenwold Maker, this is the other part of the secret.’ He leant close, forcing Stenwold to bend nearer to him. ‘Do you believe in magic?’ he said.
Stenwold paused a long while before answering. His instinct was ‘No,’ of course, and nearly any other Beetle would not have hesitated to say so, but he had seen too much, encountered too many other kinden. ‘Yes,’ he said at last, and reluctantly.
Laszlo’s smile changed again, without moving, like the sea colours in the sunlight. ‘Well,’ he said, with a little less flippancy and a little more respect. ‘Magic? Now there’s something. I personally find it hard to credit, but there comes a point when you have to say, “I see that something’s making something happen, whether it’s magic or not.” Yes?’
‘Yes,’ Stenwold agreed.
‘Well, when we hit a storm, as I reckon you’ll be seeing, we ship the mast and Despard sets the engine to run, but it’s Fern there who calls the course. She’s a dab hand at reading storms, Ma’rMaker. But this is how the Bloodfly and his crew have skipped the seas for a generation now, ever since your lot first built those clocks. We never put out without an artificer and a seer, and a halfway decent backup for both, and with that we’re as free as anyone in this world, and we’ll take you to Kanateris in a fifth of the time, and you’ll find all the answers that there are to be had.’
Jodry Drillen was celebrating. He had a great deal to celebrate, having beaten Helmess Broiler, and a handful of other hopefuls, to be appointed the new Speaker for the Assembly. Moreover, his agents across the city had already begun to characterize his spell in office in glowing terms, before the ink was even dry on his letters of appointment. Not for him the fate of poor old Lineo Thadspar, who had lived to see his city under siege, his world shattered by war, and who had died without seeing it put right. Jodry was a man bringing peace and prosperity, people were telling one another excitedly – as though he had come with both commodities in a bag, to be given out in handfuls. Just now, everyone loved fat, jovial, avuncular Jodry Drillen, and he was capitalizing on it for all he was worth.
Arianna had to admit there were worse people to throw a party. Jodry was a good host: neither gaudy in his ostentation, nor parsimonious in his hospitality. He trod a fine enough line that a Spider-kinden could come to his grand townhouse and be neither offended nor bored. She had to admire his choice of guests, too: there was a delicate balance of Assemblers, ambassadors, magnates and wits, enough to keep the conversation moving. A few of his selections betrayed Jodry’s barbed sense of humour, for there was one of the interchangeable Vekken there, awkwardly unarmed but standing in one corner with clenched fists, no doubt complaining inside his head to his colleagues elsewhere in the city. The loathing in his eyes was not for any of his Collegiate hosts, but for the Tseni woman Jodry had brought in to balance him. It was a bold move of Jodry’s but, surrounded by such cheer and licence, the two Ants were cowed into keeping their dislike to a civil silence.
Even better, and greeted lavishly when he walked through the door, Helmess Broiler himself had been invited. As Jodry had made this publicly known, his adversary could not have stayed away without being jeered at. His arrival, to the covered smiles of at least half the room, had displayed a kind of wounded dignity. The sparkling, bejewelled woman on his arm had also served to deflect the mockery. Only Arianna smiled further on seeing her. Oh you have a Spider-kinden woman on your arm, do you? It’s a shame that Beetle eyes aren’t so good for the fine details, Master Broiler, for she’s no true-blood Spider. There’s some halfway blood in that one. The thought was petty but, following Stenwold’s departure, she had a fair store of pettiness to expend, and she was not sparing with it.
There had been a string of entertainers performing in the house’s large common room, Fly acrobats and jugglers, an old Spider-kinden man who sang, then a pair of Beetle clowns whose satirizing would have offended half the room, Jodry included, had it not been done so cleverly. Now a tall, sallow woman came up, that Arianna recognized as a Grasshopper-kinden, either an imperial fugitive or a rare traveller from the Commonweal. She carried some elongated stringed instrument, which she tuned with a few practised tweaks of her fingers. Arianna decided that she had heard enough music for one evening, it never being one of her joys, so she slipped out and up the stairs to the roof garden. Here, against a tastefully gaslit trellis maze of twining plants, a few other guests had taken refuge, either for trysts or private words. Arianna found a stretch of balcony between two spiny-leaved shrubs and looked out over the sleeping city: the streets of Collegium picked out in lamps and lit-up windows.
It was strange to think that Stenwold was not in the city. It made her wonder why she herself still was.
She heard someone step behind her and she tensed out of old instinct. Once a spy… The needles of bone that her Art gifted her with had already sprung from her knuckles.
‘Missing Master Maker, my dear?’
She straightened at the tone, because there were different kinds of authority. Some were assumed, like the titles that the Beetles loved to bedeck each other with. Some were innate.
‘Lord-Martial Teornis,’ she said, turning. She had seen him before, greeting Jodry. Their host had been resplendent in a white robe draped with folded cloth of gold, whereas Teornis, ever the gracious guest, had come dressed one step down, in a robe of black hung with red but in the same Collegium style. If there was a circlet of rubies half hidden amid the dark curls of his brow, well, he wore it well and he would be forgiven it. For a man who could have stolen the evening from under Jodry’s feet, it was pure diplomacy.
She felt dowdy in comparison with him. She had been too long away from her own kind, and too lowly and poor, even then.
‘I should probably tell you not to “lord” me, but frankly it’s a pleasure to find someone who gets our titles right. I’ve been Master-lord-magnate-chief-Spider too often in recent months. These Beetles can never understand the virtues of simplicity.’
She smiled, still shy of him. He was Aristoi, a scion of the Aldanrael family that held a solid slice of the power and influence in Seldis and Siennis. Her family had been nothing, mere dirt compared to him, hoi polloi of
