the booths’ screens. In an instant there was a big grey spider there, as large as any of the Tidenfree’s crew, industriously unravelling and consuming the curtain’s threads to reveal the booth’s interior. He gazed up along the vertiginous street and saw that almost every booth now boasted a worker, carefully undoing what must have been an evening’s patient work.
His expression drew a smirk from Laszlo.
‘Easy, Ma’rMaker,’ the Fly said, ‘they’re only house-spiders.’
‘Every spider of that size or larger within a tenday’s walk of Collegium was hunted down generations ago,’ Stenwold grunted. ‘You can still find old houses where the nursery has a grill over the window, for fear of them.’
‘Oh, a shame, that is,’ Tomasso spoke from over his shoulder, as they laboured up the slope. ‘There’s never an animal anywhere that’ll train up as well as a spider, and they find all manner of use for them in these parts. In fact, most Spider-kinden sea-captains will take a couple of fellows like these for the topmast. Curse it, but I remember when we were duelling ships in a storm with Ebris of the Ganbrodiel. One time we passed close enough to loose arrows at him, as he tried to board us, and I saw a nest of little beasties up in his rigging, mending his sails and straightening his lines.’
Stenwold knew that he should not find this at all surprising or upsetting, since his own kind, with their Art, had domesticated so many different beetle species, after all. Still, there was none amongst those beetles that might creep up the wall one night, poisoned fangs aglitter…
‘Of course, everyone’s heard at least one story of someone who got dead drunk around here,’ Laszlo said cheerily, ‘And then they fell asleep in the gutter and someone found them next morning, drained like last night’s wineskin. But that’s just stories.’
‘You’re not helping,’ Stenwold told him. Laszlo’s answering grin replied that he knew it full well.
Now, a hundred trudging steps up, the flimsy shacks either side of them were giving way to something more permanent. At least there were roofs on many of the little huts, made of thin strips of tightly interwoven wood. Still they had no stouter walls than cloth could supply them, and the only protection they had from any curious neighbour with a knife would be whatever arachnid sentry happened to be crouching alertly within.
Kanateris was waking up now. The network of streets clinging to the island’s rocky sides filled up quickly, and Stenwold witnessed a strange dance of precedence, of people moving aside for each other to a pattern he could not discern. Everyone in the port except himself seemed to know exactly who to give way to and who to brazen past, and he could only stumblingly follow Tomasso’s lead. Every so often he saw an unresolvable difference, two groups that would not give way. Then hands found there way to sword hilts, insults were called, cloaks thrown back to show knives and armour. He saw no blood spilt, though. Always someone decided the game was not worth it.
Because the streets were narrow he was frequently shouldered into one stall or another, enduring a moment of entreaty from its owner before they could get on their way again. Once he found himself surrounded by wicker cages, each one with its eight-legged denizen, whilst a Spider-kinden man in gleaming silks tried to persuade him that he badly needed such a guardian to watch over him as he slept. A second time he found himself walled in by fantastically complex tapestries, and the woman there offering to weave his future for him. Seeing her work, so full of symbols and allegory that he could not begin to guess at, he could almost believe it was true.
The people of Kanateris proved a varied lot. Most were Spiders, but Stenwold reckoned almost half were of other kinden: Flies and Grasshoppers, Ants of strange cities and a good few he did not recognize. Once they quickly whisked themselves out of the way of a veiled Spider lady whose two guards were Mantis-kinden with pale, pearly skin, and who wore ornate silver slave-bracers as if they were a mark of pride.
Looking back down towards the water he almost fell. The cavernous drop behind them seemed to drag at him. He had not realized they had climbed so high.
‘How far up are we going?’ he asked.
‘How far in,’ Tomasso corrected. ‘Your own people may give place to those with the highest houses, but here it’s who’s nearest the centre that’s important. Anyway, we’re close now.’ He stopped by the entrance to some kind of tavern, whose interior reached further back than Stenwold expected, cut into the rockface. It was sheer gloom inside, with only a few sulking lamps to ward off utter darkness.
‘Hoi, Grampos!’ Tomasso hailed, and there followed a disturbance inside, someone pushing their way through the half-dark between close-packed bodies. What emerged, like a grub into the sun, was something like a Spider-kinden: a man of their general look, but burlier and longer of limb. He was stripped to the waist, his exposed body almost woolly with coarse dark hair.
‘Well, if it’s not Skipper Tomasso,’ the man Grampos observed neutrally. He had hobbled, on his way out, and Stenwold saw that one of his ankles had been ruined a long time ago. The image of a slave’s shackles was unavoidable.
‘Grampos, does Tyresia the Prophetess still keep to her old haunts?’ Tomasso asked him.
‘Moonlight Circle now,’ Grampos replied. Stenwold had to fight with his accent to wrest sense from the words.
The answer seemed to please Tomasso, anyway, and he flipped the retreating Grampos a coin, before they continued on their way. ‘She’s getting on in the world,’ the Fly captain commented. ‘Always good news that, when someone owes you a favour.’
‘Prophetess?’ Stenwold said doubtfully. ‘I’m not sure…’
‘Master Maker, these are the Spiderlands. Real magicians, if you accept there being such, would never be so coarse as to announce it. So: anyone calling herself a prophetess is something else entirely.’
Their course changed now, creeping between stalls perched along precipitous ledges, or even heading down a few steps – heading further in.
They found Tyresia within a great tent of coloured silks, which was pitched to one side of a broader street. Her enclosed space was nonetheless cool and light, with shimmering clear panels set into the woven ceiling. She was an elegant Spider-kinden woman who looked to Stenwold’s eyes to be of at least middle years, and was therefore surely much older. She wore a plain robe of golden brown, with a single brooch shaped like a butterfly her only ornament, and thereby made the simplicity seem sumptuous. Tomasso and his party waited at a polite distance while she finished her conversation with a pair of copper-skinned men Stenwold identified as Fire Ants. Money changed hands, given not to Tyresia herself but into the palm of a Fly-kinden girl who fluttered out from a back room on cue. Then the Spider matriarch reclined back on her couch and waved Tomasso over.
There was another couch, but Tomasso sat on the floor, leaving a low table between him and his hostess. Stenwold, glad of a respite for his legs, lowered himself down beside Tomasso, while Laszlo lounged in the entrance, close enough to hear what was being said. A scrabble from above indicated that Piera had taken up a watch from somewhere around roof level.
The Fly servant, or at least so Stenwold hoped she was, came out with a tray of small cups. There were rooms and rooms extending behind Tyresia, Stenwold saw, but only odd glimmers or shafts of light gave anything away about them. When he looked down again there were two thimble-sized receptacles before him, one steaming with something dark, the other containing something clear.
Thanking the Spider kindly, Tomasso knocked back first one then the other, in quick succession, as did she. Trusting to his race’s noted constitution, Stenwold did the same.
He had hoped for drinking chocolate, a Spider-kinden delicacy currently popular in Collegium, but his nose gave him the lie even before he tasted it. The hot liquid was bitter enough for him to suspect poison, then the clear one was harsh enough to clean spoons with, evaporating from his throat in a freezing mist. Just as he was about to gag, or possibly beg for a doctor, a marvellously warm and soothing aftertaste followed. He suspected that his expression must be causing some well-hidden amusement while, from his companions’ faces, they might have been drinking plain water.
‘How is my cards partner these days?’ Tyresia asked politely.
‘Getting old,’ Tomasso admitted. ‘Lady, each time I visit, another winter has passed for me, so how is it that they never touch you?’ The words were neither hurried nor sincere, but Tomasso was obviously following some prescribed code of etiquette. There then followed further careful compliments from each to each, feigned humility, enquiries after old friends. Stenwold knew enough about Spider-kinden to know that an ‘old friend’ or a ‘dance partner’ was an enemy of some sort, whereas a ‘card player’ was, if not a friend, then at least an acquaintance that the speaker was not currently at war with.
