‘What if we sink?’ Stenwold demanded.
‘Then we drown!’ Despard snapped. Stenwold felt his legs give way as the floor shifted again. Abruptly he was sitting down in the water that washed back and forth in sympathy with the waves outside. It shows how much we turn our back on the sea. He had never thought of drowning, not once, but now the idea seemed so terrifying to him that his innards were locking up with it. He had thought to die on a sword’s point, perhaps, or burned by the sting-fire of a Wasp, or falling from the sky with the tatters of an airship’s gasbag torn open above him, but not this: not dragged into the pitch cold dark of the sea.
‘Where will the wind take us?’ he demanded. ‘To what shore?’
‘The wind takes us nowhere while this engine’s running!’ Despard declared.
‘Other than that,’ Laszlo added, ‘to no shore any man knows. When the Lash is driving, it’ll drag you all the way out into the grand ocean. If you’re lucky, your corpse might wash up on the Atoll Coast, but other than that… nobody ever sees you or your sails again. Some say there’s a whole graveyard of broken ships out there, far past the horizon. Maybe some day we’ll go look.’
Stenwold clung to the old engine fittings. It was not illness that afflicted him, not the sea-malady he had heard of. Beetles had iron stomachs, as a rule, and even the pitching of the waters was not undoing his constitution. No, his sickness was entirely bred of fear. We have no business being out here. I have no business being out here. Beetles were never meant to go to sea and Master Failwright could go hang himself, if he wasn’t already dead. Why did I think this was a good idea?
‘Tell me…’ He had to speak, had to wrench his mind away from thoughts of the grasping waters. ‘The Atoll Coast, you’ve been there?’ A casual conversation, save that he was shouting at the top of his voice to get the words heard over the storm.
‘Not us!’ Despard called back. ‘Himself did a lot of business there, I think, but the chief’s contacts are mainly down the Strand.’
‘She means the Spiderlands coast, Ma’rMaker,’ Laszlo put in. The floor was abruptly sloping a good thirty degrees the other way, and Stenwold clung on gamely to avoid sliding away into what was now the low corner of the room. The two Flies had merely taken to the air briefly again: every time the ship around them shifted and shook, their wings flickered to lift them from the deck and keep them stable. They did it without even thinking, a Fly-kinden’s version of sea-legs. Stenwold was bitterly envious.
‘You never went to Tsen, then?’ he asked. Tsen. Collegium politics. The business with the Vekken. Anything else but the sea. Not the drowning hungry sea, at all.
‘Never. Heard of it, though,’ Laszlo stated. ‘Why?’
‘I heard they have some… interesting boats there,’ Stenwold got out. The water was like a little river flowing into the room now. Despard flitted over to the engine and began making adjustments.
‘They’re mad there,’ she called over her shoulder.
‘Submersibles!’ Stenwold shouted, like a curse.
‘Come over here, Beetle, and make yourself useful!’ was her answer to that. He hauled himself towards her, half falling down, half climbing up. He saw that she had rigged up something with a handle.
‘You use those big arms of yours to get this going!’ she ordered him. ‘Pump, Beetle, pump!’
‘Where does the water go?’
‘Out! There’s a set of double-lock valves. Don’t worry, it all goes out and nothing gets in.’ As he started working the pump, surprisingly heavy work for something manufactured for Fly-kinden, she yelled, conversationally, ‘Submersibles, is it?’
‘I hear so!’
‘Well, I heard the same,’ she admitted. ‘Never believed it, though. You hear all sorts of odd about the Atoll Coast. Himself told Tomasso something, ’cos now he won’t go near it. Different world, they say. Ports that aren’t on any maps! Sea reaches that eat up ships! Sea-kinden, that sing you on to rocks and then pick your bones!’
Stenwold let the solid routine of the pump engross him, yet he could see it having no effect on the water swirling about his boots. For all he knew, it was just a joke at his expense – or simply to keep his mind busy. He tried to think about the Tseni ambassadors, the Tseitan, the damage it would do if the Vekken now walked away from Collegium. He found that, just then, he didn’t care. He could return home to find the black and gold waving over the Amphiophos, and all he would care about would be that he was back on dry land.
Nine
Helmess Broiler reclined awkwardly. He was not a slender man, and Beetle seating tended towards straight-backed wooden chairs, which made his shoulders and neck ache after too long. He was too ungainly to lounge on couches like a Spider-kinden, and he could hardly squat on the floor like a Fly. Instead he had invested in a big padded chair, called a College chair locally for its associations with an academic’s study. It was not overly dignified, for an Assembler, but it was at least comfortable. His consolation was that Elytrya would come and sit at his feet, in what he could think of as an adoring manner. He could put a hand down and stroke the coiled waves of her hair, which was pleasant enough.
In such a way did he greet Forman Sands when the killer was ushered into his sitting room. Sands was dressed noncommittally but well, the picture of a modest but tasteful tradesman. It gave Helmess a certain pleasure to know that, had any unwanted company burst into his house just then and discovered his hired murderer in the antechamber, they would have found Sands perusing his books or admiring his art. It was so good to know that the man was civilized.
‘Have you news to please me, Sands?’ he asked.
Sands shook his head, face set: the modest tradesman about to report that the goods were not yet in stock. ‘We put out, went halfway to Vek, Master Broiler. No sign of them.’
Broiler played magnanimity well, if only because Elytrya had given him foreknowledge of Stenwold’s elusiveness. He waved a gracious hand. ‘Well, there will be other chances. You’ll get your claws into Maker sooner or later, either on land or on sea.’
‘As you wish, Master Broiler,’ Sands said, with a brief bow. ‘You have anything more for me?’
‘Just wait on… no, hold. I’d be grateful if you had someone go to the dockside and see if Maker’s ship is known, at all. I do have to wonder who he’s playing with these days.’
‘I’ll attend to it myself,’ Sands promised, still the pleasant man of business. He did not even cheapen their conversation by asking for money. He knew Helmess was good for it, and honest men of commerce did not need to sully themselves with such details unless it was absolutely necessary. He really is quite the find, Helmess thought, as Sands backed out of the room. Where else would I find a killer that I could introduce to my mother?
‘All as you said,’ he noted. ‘You’re sure your people went both ways along the coast? East and west?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Elytrya assured him. ‘And there were ships, but not one of that description. Otherwise your Master Maker would be having his bones picked by the crabs even now. He has some clever friends, I think.’
‘You think they set him down on land somewhere close? Maker was an intelligencer in the war, so he might be trying to follow Failwright’s trail covertly, while people think he’s gone. No doubt he’ll turn up in Collegium wearing a different hat and asking questions. I should have had Sands keep an eye out for him.’
‘Or…’ she leant back against his legs as he trailed a finger down the angle of her jaw.
‘Or?’
‘Or they went to sea, Helmess. Just out to sea.’
He pondered the thought. Before embarking on this campaign with her he had researched his ground as a good Beetle academic should. He knew the routes that ships took between Collegium and any port worth naming. He had first assumed Stenwold was going to his friends in Vek, and had posted Sands to catch him there if Elytrya’s allies failed. Still, caution was a virtue, and her friends had been waiting for that little Fly boat on the other route too, in case Maker had been heading for Kes or the Fly warrens, or even the Spiderlands.
Instead that ship had simply vanished, or gone nowhere. But nobody just goes out to sea.
‘Or they went out to sea,’ he allowed, reflecting that he had been living with a lot of impossibilities, recently. ‘But what in the world for? What does Maker expect to find out there?’
