‘The hatches have water-locks,’ Paladrya explained. ‘Unless you possess the Art, and know where to pull, they will not open for you. I’m sorry.’
‘The Art?’ said Laszlo grimly.
‘The Kerebroi Art,’ she confirmed. ‘The gripping Art.’
Stenwold recalled how the guards’ hands had latched on to him, raising weals on his skin and biting into his clothes. He heard Laszlo curse in frustration, his earlier confidence utterly misplaced, and Stenwold half expected him to take wing again and start battering about the top of his cell in a desperate bid to find a way out.
The next moment they heard raised voices, and then a group of people approaching above, some of them with very heavy footfalls indeed. The guards reappeared, and not alone. All four men were trying to keep a trio of newcomers out, but they were severely out-sized. The figure in the lead was huge, easily as wide as two of the guardsmen together, and armoured in a suit of curving, overlapping plates. There was no scrape or clatter of metal about him, so Stenwold guessed that it was chitin mail, or whatever local substitute they used here. Nothing of the man was exposed, from his clumping, segmented boots all the way up to his massively broad pauldrons and the surprisingly small full-face helm that allowed only a slit to observe the world through. The guards kept shouting at him, trying to bar his way but obviously unwilling to start anything violent. The enormous man just shouldered forward, one plodding step after another, until he was standing at the foot of the ramp. He raised both hands up to shoulder height, and the guards backed off hurriedly, for his gauntlets each bore a forward-hooking claw that jutted a good six inches from the knuckles.
Behind the huge man, almost in his shadow, came two others. One was Fly-size, bald-headed and hunchbacked, wearing only some kind of short smock. The other was as tall as anyone there, lean and muscled and as bald as his smaller companion, with some kind of Art-growth protruding about his fists.
‘You dare defy the Edmir?’ one of the guards was berating them. ‘Do you think he will sit still for this insurrection within his colony?’
‘The Nauarch just wants to talk to a land-kinden. Is that so bad?’ said the smallest figure, who appeared to be in charge. With a start Stenwold realized he recognized that voice: the pilot who had transported them to this place, in that cramped and blood-lit submersible. He craned his neck to get a better look. She had something at her belt, some unfamiliar-looking bundle, but when he saw it more clearly he felt that it must be something like an artificer’s toolstrip. Apt, he decided, but only her? The guards, in their kilts and barbaric splendour, seemed unlikely candidates for engineers, and the small woman’s two companions looked no better suited. When he had looked out over that crowded chamber earlier, there had been nothing to suggest any mechanical industry going on here and, under the sea, how could it? And yet that submersible… someone had made that. Maybe she is some freak, a solitary maverick.
‘The Nauarch can go peel himself,’ growled one of the other guards, perhaps unwisely. In an instant the lean, bald man had struck him, punching the offender in the jaw, and whipping his head round with the force of it. The victim collapsed back into his fellows and then slumped to the floor.
The other guards had knives out then, the same broad, hooked blades Stenwold had seen before. Against the armoured giant and the horn-fisted man they seemed paltry.
‘If you slay us, we who are servants of the Edmir, you will never set foot in this colony again,’ one of the guards warned desperately.
‘And wouldn’t that be a shame,’ said the Fly-sized woman. ‘Now, your Edmir said something to me when we brought these land-kinden in. Some of our bannermen wanted to do the Nauarch’s will by taking a landsman away with them, there and then, and ol’ Claeon, he said that my Rosander wouldn’t tear up their alliance just because a few of our people got killed. Well, I reckon that’s true, but it cuts both ways. The Edmir finds you torn apart and hung about like bunting, he’s not going to go to war with Rosander over it. You Kerebs are hardly important enough, so keep out of our way and hush your mouths.’
She then looked down for the first time, to see the two land-kinden. To Stenwold’s chagrin she addressed the Fly. ‘You’re the boss here?’
‘Oh, that would be grand,’ said Laszlo acidly, still smarting from his failed escape attempt.
‘I am War Master Stenwold Maker of Collegium.’ Stenwold spoke up to draw her attention to himself. He did not like where this might be going, and if someone else out there wanted to torture the land-kinden, then it would not be Laszlo’s back bared for the lash.
‘That sounds very high and mighty,’ the woman remarked, and her name came back to Stenwold: Chenni.
‘I would be glad to act as ambassador to your leader,’ he announced.
She smirked at that. ‘Well, that’s just dandy.’ Her head snapped up again to focus on the guards. ‘Get this open,’ she commanded.
They stared at her sullenly, the three of them still standing upright. They had given up on evicting the intruders from the oubliette, but that was a different thing to actively helping them.
‘None of you?’ Chenni prodded, and then sighed. ‘Well, I was just trying to make it easy for you.’ She stood back, gesturing to the tall, lean man. ‘Do the honours.’
The bald pugilist flexed his arms and rolled his shoulders, crouching down before the hatch to Stenwold’s cell. His fists were huge, with a chitinous shell formed over their knuckles and a vicious, backwards-pointing spike alongside the edge of his palms. As Stenwold watched, the spikes flexed, snapping forward like daggers, and then slowly folding back again. As Art-grown weapons went, they were as formidable and complex as he had ever seen.
While reflecting on that, he missed the motion. The man above him became a blur, and the grating smashed into fragments that rained down on Stenwold, rebounding painfully from his head. He ended up half- sitting against the cell wall, arms raised for protection, surrounded by hand-sized fragments of shattered stone. Numbly he noted that they were hollow: honeycombed with irregular chambers like magnified pumice. Probably not heavy at all, just held tight by this ‘water-lock’ thing until…
He looked up wonderingly. The man was now extending a shell-knuckled hand down towards him. ‘Don’t make me come down and get you,’ he warned, and Stenwold did not need to be told twice. He reached tentatively up, feeling the strength in the other man’s grip, and then the mailed giant had taken hold of his comrade and, between them, Stenwold was dragged up through the ruins of the hatch. The edges of it were razor-jagged, ripping his clothes and grazing his skin, but his new captors obviously cared nothing for his comfort, dumping him at their diminutive leader’s feet.
‘Someone wants to meet you, landsman,’ Chenni told him, and then instructed her companions, ‘Pick him up and carry him. We’re moving out.’
Nineteen
As soon as they had him beyond the oubliette, they had bundled Teornis in hood and cloak again. He made no attempt at a struggle, sensing that his captors were all too eager to inflict some punishment on him. He tried to keep track of turns, of slopes up and down, but this place, this Hermatyre, seemed to have been laid out by madmen, and within moments he had lost all track of where he was, what direction they had taken. He sensed few other people nearby, though, so either the passage of the guards was being given a wide berth or they were using some secluded back way.
They do not want any of us seen. No doubt the land-kinden would cause quite a stir. And that was another piece to work with: firstly a division between the factions of their captors, then a separation between the captors and the general populace. This was all grist to Teornis’s mill, which was good because that mill had been perilously short of material to feed it for too long now.
He had said a lot to Stenwold that his family would have frowned on. He now played out the recriminatory interview in his head: his mother or his eldest sister glowering down at him.
You revealed the family’s plans to your enemies. That is outright betrayal, either one of them would accuse him.
We were trapped in a cave beneath the sea, with no hope of ever leaving it, he heard his own voice replying.
