swift-moving escort created a wake of curiosity and alarm that blacked out all else.
There was some shouting from behind, and a quartet of warriors dropped out of step and turned to await their pursuers. One was the man with the mace, and Stenwold took a good look at it as he was hustled past. Despite the alien light, he was now sure it was gold. Gold-plated, surely? But he had already seen a great deal of ornament and finery so far, suggesting it could be solid. If the sea-kinden could mine gold in such quantities, what could they possibly want with the land?
He mentally kicked himself for thinking like a Helleron merchant. If they had that much gold, it could hardly form the basis of their currency. If they even use a currency.
Then they were back in the tunnels again, but pausing, clustered together as a knot of little pallid men wove around them. The newcomers’ white skin was intricately tattooed, their faces devoid of expression. There was something disconcerting about them in their silence and their purpose: they seemed just the fingers of some greater unseen hand. Whoever they were, Chenni and her warriors stayed quite still as they passed, obviously not wanting to jostle them.
Stenwold heard her say, after the small men had moved on, ‘And where are they going? What’s got them riled?’
‘Never worth trying to second-guess them,’ the lean man replied. ‘Let’s just hope it’s none of our business.’
Shortly after that they began heading down and down, and the quality of the chambers they passed through was definitely deteriorating. There were no more great markets, but Stenwold spotted plenty of people, many of them looking like cousins of Chenni. They stared a lot, and there was tension in the air. The lights grew fewer and further between, and still they were going downwards.
How large is this colony? he wondered. Where is the sea from here? In what direction is Collegium?
There was another of the armoured men ahead like a living door, already lumbering aside to let them pass, and then the escort was breaking up, the various warriors trudging off on their own errands, until just the original trio delivered Stenwold into a long, low room. There was only one lamp, a broad disc set into the ceiling, which rippled slightly with odd movements of its contents. The washed-out light it cast showed Stenwold a single figure at the room’s far end, seated in a great stone throne carved into a basket of interlocking loops. This delicate- looking framework seemed incapable of supporting him, for he was big enough for three, and his armour made him even more so. As they got closer Stenwold saw it was not composed of the shell segments of the warriors but of some other, paler material. This warlord wore no helm, revealing a narrow head as bald as Chenni’s, heavily ridged across both brow and jaw, with a low crest drawing the skin tight over the crown of his skull. His nose and mouth were small, his eyes deep-socketed and suspicious, while his skin was the brownish-yellow colour of old bones.
‘Chief, this here’s the land-kinden’s War Maker, or that’s what it sounded like,’ Chenni announced. ‘Land- kinden, I give you Rosander, Nauarch of the Thousand Spines Train.’
Rosander stood up, and the plates of his mail grated across one another with a sound neither like metal nor shell. Stenwold stared at him in silence.
‘This all they had?’ the Nauarch grunted.
‘They had a hairy little shrimp about my size,’ Chenni told him. ‘Just him and fatty here. Fatty says he’s in charge. You know how Arkeuthys reckoned he’d grabbed their leaders.’
‘Leaders of what?’ Rosander spat contemptuously, fixing Stenwold with a doubtful gaze. ‘You look like some Gastroi weed-farmer to me, landsman.’
Stenwold glanced about. He had been left alone standing in the middle of his room, his escort having stepped away from him. He squared his shoulders. ‘I’m happy to say I don’t even know what that is.’
Unexpectedly, Rosander smiled, showing square, yellowing teeth. ‘You’re the leader of the land- kinden?’
‘We have no single leader,’ Stenwold told him.
Rosander made a face at that, the corners of his mouth turning down. ‘Well, I know what that’s like. Still, you’ll tell me about your people’s weapons, no doubt, and how many warriors they can muster. In time, you will, anyway.’
Stenwold took a step towards him, waiting for the guards to tense in readiness. They did not, and no wonder, for Rosander looked as though he could have torn the Beetle prisoner in half with his gauntleted hands. The colourless light fell on the incised planes of his armour, and Sten-wold’s impossible suspicion grew and grew. Stone? Stone mail. How can you carve stone into a suit of armour?
‘Nauarch Rosander,’ he said, trying hard to copy Chenni’s intonation that stressed the middle syllable of the name, ‘it seems you bear my people some ill will. I am a diplomat, a statesman. We are from different worlds, worlds that have not touched until now. I cannot see what quarrel can have arisen between us.’
He tried to draw back as the Nauarch’s arm moved but, in mid-speech, he was too late to avoid the hard pinch as the forward-jutting claw of Rosander’s gauntlet snagged his arm. The big man now held one of those hooked knives in his hand, its point upwards, and the edge rested lightly against Stenwold’s wrist, his hand pincered neatly between its metal blade and the gritty hardness of the claw.
‘In the Benthic trains we have no time to be subtle,’ Rosander growled. ‘When a man insults me, or fails me, or endangers my people, I take his hand off and abandon him in the wastes. Do not tell me that we have no quarrel, landsman.’
It was very easy to imagine one twitch of Rosander’s arm crushing Stenwold’s wrist, slicing through flesh and snapping bone. He remained very still. ‘Then we do have a quarrel, it would seem,’ he said quietly. ‘Tell me how I can lay it to rest.’
Rosander’s tiny eyes frowned at him from beneath heavy brows. ‘Well he sounds like nobody I ever heard before,’ he remarked to Chenni. ‘He can only be a landsman, though he’s not what I expected. Can he be speaking the truth? Can they really have forgotten?’
Chenni shrugged her hunched shoulders. ‘Chief, if they take it from you, you remember. If you take it from them, well, maybe it doesn’t stick in your mind so much.’
‘What have we taken from you?’ Stenwold demanded, as urgently as he dared. ‘Why would you send your warriors against us?’
‘To take it back,’ Rosander replied shortly and, when Stenwold’s baffled expression remained, he went on, ‘To take it all back, the home of our ancestors, the place you drove us from – or so they tell me.’
He searched the Beetle’s face for some sign of understanding, but all Stenwold could say was, ‘When?’
‘When history began, when the Seven Families arose,’ the Nauarch said slowly, speaking words containing the rhythm of ritual. ‘We were driven into the sea, and only the beasts of the sea saved us. We found our paths. We built. We journeyed. We lived within our hosts. We dwelt in shadow. We are greater now than ever we were when your people drove us into the waves. We have never forgotten, though. Always we have the Littoralists to remind us, telling the old tales.’ The spade-toothed smile returned. ‘I wouldn’t care so much, landsman, for it’s all history to me, but my warriors are restless and the Edmir has promised me my war.’
There was movement behind them, and Stenwold felt a slight tightening of the grip on his wrist, a slight wetness of blood where the dagger’s edge dug in. He did not dare turn.
‘I bring a message from the Edmir,’ said a woman’s voice trying to sound calm.
‘And you are…?’ Rosander addressed the speaker. ‘No, you must be Claeon’s latest pet.’
‘I am Haelyn, his majordomo. For now.’
That smile again. ‘Until he tires of you?’
‘Indeed, Nauarch, but until then he has asked me to enquire after an errant prisoner who may have escaped from his oubliette.’
‘Did he put it in those words, little majordomo?’
‘He left the wording to me.’
Rosander laughed at that, and when his armour rattled Stenwold saw that it was indeed stone. He recalled how fast the man had moved to seize his hand.
‘It so happens we have caught this strange creature,’ the Nauarch declared, releasing Stenwold’s wrist abruptly. Stenwold risked a glance behind, and saw what he thought might be the same woman that Rosander’s raiders had been menacing earlier.
The sea-kinden continued their careful pantomime. ‘This creature here would match the description,’ Haelyn
