says…?’
Stenwold took a deep breath and gave a determined twist at whatever held him, resulting in him flopping onto his back, crushing his bound arms beneath his own weight, He had a brief view of the pale curve of a close ceiling, with some kind of lamp shedding the sanguine light, and then he heaved himself round again so that he was facing away from the wall.
There was far less space here than he had first thought. The erratic surge of the engine had given the cramped chamber a false sense of distance. Instead, he now found himself staring at Teornis.
The Spider lord was awake but lay very still, so Stenwold guessed he had been playing dead for the benefit of their captors. He had opened his eyes as Stenwold moved, though, and now he winked once, very deliberately. His fine clothes were torn, and his hands were also bound. So, this was not a Spider plot, then, but who…?
Beyond Teornis were two men, obviously the two speakers. The ceiling was low enough to have them kneeling, and the bloody light made things uncertain, but Stenwold thought they were pale-skinned and dark- haired. There was a younger and an older one, as he had surmised, and they made surely the strangest pair ever to be crewing any kind of automotive.
They were savages. That was his instant first thought. They were barbarians, primitives from some underdeveloped tribal land. They wore almost no clothing beyond kilts that extended to mid-thigh, but they made up for that in other finery. On his arms, the younger man wore some bracers that were inscribed with elaborate arabesques, and a torc encircled his neck. The older had metal tracery running all the way from wrist to elbow, work as delicate and intricate as Stenwold had ever seen, as light and complex as if it had grown there frond by frond. His collar was comprised of more of the same, an expanse of branching and rejoining tendrils of metal that covered most of his shoulders and upper chest. About his brow, his long hair was confined by a twining band of the same material. It was impossible to be sure in the strange light, but something about the glint of it suggested gold to Stenwold – gold in a quantity to make a Spider Aristos raise an eyebrow, and of a workmanship to match anything he could imagine man or machine achieving.
The younger man was lean and slender, and he had a short beard cut square, of the same dark lustre as his hair. His senior was paunchier, broad across his bare midriff, more jowly about the face, and with a beard that had been carefully styled so that it curved upwards and rolled into itself. Beyond all this, though, came the revelation that, despite Teornis’s captivity, these were Spider-kinden.
Or no, they were not exactly Spider-kinden, not quite, but there was a similarity between their faces and Teornis’s that showed them to be some sort of kin, some offshoot of the same root-stock, linked by a trick of ancestry.
And an errant thought occurred to him, Have I not seen this before in someone recently, that I took for a Spider? But he could not pin down the idea and it soon escaped him.
‘Arkeuthys says…’ the older man stammered. He was looking strained, to Stenwold’s eye. ‘He says he saw their two leaders trading insults, and it was these two he grabbed.’
‘And what about the other one? Did you-?’
‘Of course I did.’ The older man glared at his fellow. ‘He says it’s just some land-kinden who got in the way. He cut Arkeuthys, the little one did.’
‘So we don’t need him, then?’ To Stenwold’s alarm, the younger man took a knife from his waistband, a vicious-looking weapon with a wicked inward curve. Stenwold craned his neck to follow the man’s gaze, and spotted a third captive: the tiny trussed form of Laszlo, looking bruised and still unconscious.
The older man’s eyes abruptly moved to meet Sten-wold’s own, and there was a shock of alien contact, reinforced by Stenwold’s meanwhile working out who ‘Arkeuthys’ must be. Of course, there was an Art for speaking with beasts, though you seldom heard of it these days. But one could only speak with animals appropriate to one’s people…
Founder’s Mark! he whimpered inwardly. These are sea monster-kinden.
Noting his distress, the man with the coiled beard smiled. ‘Kill the little one now. He can’t be worth much,’ he said.
‘Hoi!’ This was a new voice, emerging from somewhere ahead, towards the vehicle’s direction of travel. ‘None of that!’
‘Keep out of it,’ the older man snapped.
‘Nobody’s killing anyone!’ the new voice insisted. It was a higher pitch than theirs, clearly a woman’s voice, but high even for that. Her accent was slightly different, too, drawling the vowels less, but also stressing her words in unexpected places. Stenwold found it even harder to follow.
‘Arkeuthys says-’ one of the first two began to argue.
‘Don’t care. If we’ve got three land-kinden, then we bring all three land-kinden back to the colony, alive.’
The look on the face of the older man showed resentment and loathing. ‘I am the voice of the Edmir here.’
‘And I’m the handler of this barque,’ the woman shot back.
‘So?’
‘So if you even want it to get as far as your Edmir’s city, you keep me sweet, or I’ll push off for the Stations or Deep Seep, or wherever I choose.’
‘You wouldn’t dare-’
‘And furthermore,’ the woman’s voice continued, ploughing straight over the older man’s words, ‘if you suggest killing someone just because they’re small, then I’ll get Rosander to pincer your piss-damn arms off at the elbows, got it?’
The look on the man’s face was, Stenwold found, exactly the look of a Spider thwarted by someone undesirable. ‘The Edmir shall hear of this, Chenni,’ he growled.
‘I’ll pit your chief against mine, any day,’ the woman jeered at them. ‘And at least tell me you equalized them. Did you do that one thing right?’
‘As they’re not crushed and dead, of course we did,’ the younger man spat back. ‘We know our business. You keep to yours!’
The one thing that came through, across this chasm of different cultures, was the thought: They are divided. Even here, trapped and grieving and, he had no doubt about it, in some kind of submersible automotive deep beneath the waves, he had a tiny spark of hope. If there were factions, there would be politics and, whatever his talents, he was a statesman.
And they would let Laszlo live, and that gave him an ally. And maybe Teornis as well, for all that they look like Spiders. These are no more his people than mine.
Then the older man snarled with frustration and signalled for his colleague to put away the knife and, to enact that frustration, he kicked Teornis in the kidneys and then stamped on Stenwold’s gashed and abused leg. The sudden flare of pain was savage enough to rip consciousness away from him.
He awoke again to a firm and nudging pressure against his better leg, slowly jolting him from the morass of oblivion. He opened his eyes to see the grim reddish light, and shut them again. The nudging continued. It felt like a foot.
Arianna. The thought came to him from nowhere, a thought orphaned and without issue, passing him like the lights of a distant ship. He clenched his fists, feeling them tug and stretch at the stuff that was binding them.
‘Maker.’ The voice was soft, barely on the edge of hearing.
‘Teornis?’ he murmured in reply, as quietly as he could, trusting to the Spider’s hearing.
‘None other,’ came the response. ‘Our jovial friends have gone fore. How much of their talk did you hear?’
‘Some. I understood less, though. And you?’
‘The same. However, they’re a bloody-handed lot, it’s clear.’ Stenwold had to strain his ears to hear the calm, measured tones. ‘And Apt, it seems, for I take this to be a machine of some kind.’
‘That’s my guess, though the walls and floor are made of nothing I’ve ever seen manufactured.’ There was movement from nearby, and they fell silent at once. Stenwold heard two people, he assumed the same two, shuffle up closer and hunker down.
‘What’s the order?’ enquired the younger voice.
