Maker, I do regret it. I even spoke up against it, but when the matriarchs of the Aldanrael command, I must obey. I’m surprised you haven’t fathomed it yet. Trade, Stenwold – it’s as tawdry as that. Collegium relies heavily on trade coming through Helleron, both by rail and air. Even when the Empire had taken the place, there was still a surprising traffic continuing between your kinden’s cities. However, during that occupation the sea trade increased in leaps and bounds. Your man Failwright and his people did well then, as did many of my own people. It’s clear as glass that Helleron will surrender again, the moment the Empire so much as looks west. All we wanted, once that moment came, was to be in a position to profit from having an absolute control of the sea lanes – nothing more sinister, more dramatic, or more worthy than that. As I say, I myself felt it was beneath us and that there were better ways of exploiting our relationship with Collegium, but my damn-fool cousins decided they wanted to play pirate. Frank and honest enough for you?’
‘And Arianna?’ The words came out before Stenwold could stop them. ‘Why…?’ But he let the sentence tail off and die, not wanting to hear his own voice tremble.
‘Because I offered her the chance to live as a Spider should, and not as some surrogate Beetle-kinden,’ Teornis explained. ‘If it is any consolation to you, I was never sure truly whether I had her. I don’t think she was sure, either.’
‘It’s no consolation.’
‘Still, there may be grounds there for some reconciliation, in the unlikely event that we ourselves ever see land or daylight again. After all, our current circumstances surely put such matters into perspective.’
‘She’s dead. Danaen killed her.’
Teornis allowed a respectful interval to pass by before he responded to that. His eventual comment was, ‘Well, I suppose I can claim my share of blame in that. I put her there, with a blade in her hand.’
Stenwold had no response to that, and an uncomfortable silence fell. In the end it was Laszlo who took up the slack.
‘I’m sorry, Ma’rMaker. I had an arrow ready for her myself, when she put her knife to you, but I held off. I didn’t think you’d want. ..’
‘Thank you,’ said Stenwold emptily. ‘But I suppose Teornis is right. In the face of this’ – he made a gesture that their eyes would pick out better than his own – ‘it all of it seems a little pointless.’
‘Sea-kinden…’ Teornis pronounced. ‘Well, my excuse is that it is hard to account in one’s plans for the formerly mythological.’
Laszlo laughed bitterly. ‘All those old maps,’ he said. ‘Sailors’ stories. The sea-kinden – they say you could hear them singing out of the weed forests or from old rocks, to lure ships to their doom, you know? The maps, sometimes they would have them drawn on the empty spaces: beautiful girls down to the waist but, like, lobsters or something underneath. Bit daft, if you ask me.’
‘Abominations, they would call those,’ Teornis clarified, ‘and merely an artistic convention. But these sea- kinden here are real enough, and human enough. Your people have no records of such, Stenwold?’
‘Not that I’ve ever heard. Possibly our mariners have stories, as Laszlo says, but none that came to me.’
‘And so we go on pushing at the borders of the world, until we wish we’d left them well alone,’ the Spider intoned softly, obviously quoting from some source Stenwold was unfamiliar with. ‘Did you ever hear of the City of Bones, either of you?’
Laszlo anwered no, and Stenwold shook his head, trusting to the Spider’s eyes to catch the gesture. His own vision was slowly adjusting to the pallor of the lamps, not to the gloom, so much, but the strange tricks they played with shape and shadow.
‘It is an excavation, past the desert margin beyond Irroven. Scholars from our academies have been digging there nigh on ten years now. Nobody’s ever seen anything quite like it.’
Stenwold frowned, not perceiving anywhere relevant this was taking them, but he let the man speak. In truth, Teornis’s calm, conversational tones were helping a lot to ease his own disturbed mind, and perhaps the Spider knew it.
‘There was a city there once, how long ago I cannot say, save that no Spider histories record it. No modern-day city is nearby, and the region has a poor reputation, for the sensitive. In uncovering the streets of this old ruin, our academics found something appalling, fascinating – a massacre.’
‘No need to go digging for that. I could point you to plenty in our lifetimes,’ Stenwold remarked sourly.
‘It looked as though some invading force had overrun the walls, killed every living thing and then left the place to the desert. But the true surprise was in the nature of the bones unearthed. Bones of people, certainly, but bones of animals as well. Horses and goats and sheep, but also… other kinds of animals. Dozens of kinds of animals, freakish and unheard-of creatures. I have seen some of the pictures the scholars drew, to represent what they believed these dead beasts looked like. The world is best off without them: monsters such as you cannot imagine, horned and tusked and fanged. But dead, all dead, their bones lying where they fell, in the centre of a city lost to all maps. Their last stand, perhaps – but against who?’
Stenwold shivered, throwing the unpleasant images off. ‘What’s your point?’ he asked.
‘My point is that the world holds stranger things in it than we know. Even these sea-kinden are closer kin to us than whatever race lived in that dead city. Our chiefest captors here were enough like me that I must even accept them as some lost offshoot of my people. So, let us inventory what we know of them, and a plan may then suggest itself.’
‘We know precious little,’ Stenwold complained. ‘Not least, we know no reason why they should wish us any harm – we who have not so much as looked at them before.’
‘Start smaller,’ Teornis suggested. ‘Let us look at our current lodgings. What does this place suggest, to you?’
Stenwold frowned again, putting a hand to the nearest column of his cell. He felt the smooth, rounded, stone, formed as though it had once flowed like water and then set. ‘No seams,’ he said. ‘This is all of a piece.’
‘Have you ever seen a Mole Cricket sculpture?’ Teornis put in. ‘They could build this, I think, with their Art.’
‘Caves,’ Laszlo said unexpectedly. When they prompted him, he elaborated, ‘There are sea caves I’ve seen, like this. I don’t know how it works, but it’s like the stone’s dripping from the ceilings. You get spines and pillars, and all sorts, just like it was all frozen in mid-thaw. Only, I’d not put money on getting a lot of close-together little cells like this formed out of it.’
‘Sea caves…’ Stenwold felt a sudden irrational twitch of hope. ‘Could we be… there’s a lot of coast lies east and west from Collegium. There must be a lot of caves that nobody’s ever gone to.’ His mind was recalling to him that arched space that their captors had let them gaze out on, surely too great to be some little cave tucked into a cliff, but he overrode the thought. ‘Perhaps we’re even in easy march of Collegium, if only we could break out and-’
‘You are not near your home.’ The unfamiliar voice startled all three of them to silence. It was a woman’s voice, accented like their captors’, save that it was not coming from above, but from down there amongst the cells.
Stenwold scanned the dim vaults uselessly, seeing the dark shapes of Teornis and Laszlo, but no other. A moment later, Teornis’s voice snapped out, ‘Show yourself, if you please.’
Stenwold saw nothing immediate, but he caught Laszlo’s sudden intake of breath.
‘You are land-kinden? Truly?’ the woman’s voice resumed.
‘My lady, we are,’ Teornis confirmed, with some noticeable respect. ‘I am the Lord-Martial Teornis of the Aldanrael, and this is War Master Stenwold Maker of Collegium. His comrade is not known to me.’
‘Laszlo, off the Tidenfree,’ the Fly piped up, not to be outdone. ‘Pleased to meet you, Ladyship.’
Stenwold caught a glimpse of movement, and located a shadow that must be her: the tenant of another cell of this stone honeycomb. ‘Then I am Paladrya,’ she told them simply, ‘and whatever ranks or titles I once had, I am shorn of them now, and I can offer you only my apologies, my most sincere apologies, for the harm that I have done you.’
‘What harm might that be, Bella Paladrya?’ Teornis asked her softly.
‘It is my doing you are here,’ she told them. ‘It is my doing that your people are in danger. All that now befalls you is my fault.’
