The Sea Watch

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘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.

  ‘Get them cloaked and hooded. The Edmir wants nobody to set eyes on the land-kinden. He’ll send men to take them directly to his cellars.’

  There was a little shifting around, and Stenwold heard the younger man whisper, ‘What if she wants them for Rosander?’

  The older man let out a long breath. ‘We’d better hope the Edmir gets more men to us quicker than the Nauarch can.’

  Absently, Stenwold wondered whether his own future would be more secure in the hands of this Edmir or the one they called Rosander. He recalled that their pilot, who had spared Laszlo’s life, had been acting for Rosander, but he had a gloomy suspicion that there were no such thing as safe hands now waiting to receive the captive landsmen.

  Waiting where? Where in all the maps are they taking us? But there were no answers to that, no more than there were maps.

  The lurching motion of their craft was slowing, he noticed, accompanied by a few bucking shifts of direction. His stomach clenched at the realization that, whatever port they were heading to, they were shortly due to arrive.

  They suddenly plunged – there was no other word for it. It was as if they were in a flier that had abruptly lost its grip on the air. Stenwold heard one of their captors groan at the motion, that had sat quite easily with the Beetle. Inapt are they? Then, just as suddenly, they were rising, the curious vessel bucking a little against some external current, their unseen pilot wrestling, no doubt, with the levers.

  A moment later the lurching of the engine ceased, the interior becoming vastly silent without it, and the motion of their conveyance, that had been so strange, became jarringly familiar. They were bobbing on calm water, just as if they were in nothing more than a rowing boat.

  ‘Fat one first,’ Stenwold heard quite distinctly, accent or no, and then their hands were on him. In the cramped space they were awkward with him, and it was plain they were trying to hurry as well. Stenwold let his body go intentionally slack, but after they had fumbled him a second time, they did something to their hands – something he instinctively recognized as Art – so that they latched onto his clothes and skin with a painful sureness. As they hauled at him, he felt as though they were going to rip strips of his hide off, and he yelled with pain and started cooperating with them as best he could. They laughed at that, and he wondered if they had known that he was awake all the time.

  ‘Hood him,’ snapped the older man, just as the light ahead changed in character from the infernal red of the vessel’s innards to something greenish-blue, no more natural but considerably more pleasant. A moment later some kind of bag was dragged over Stenwold’s head, the texture of it unpleasantly slick, after which he had to rely on guidance from his captors to get him out of whatever hatch the vessel possessed and onto stone that was worked in some smoothly undulating pattern.

  They hurriedly dumped him, and he heard the younger man call out, and others coming over. There was a rapid conversation that he did not catch, save for several mentions of the name ‘Rosander’ again, and the instruction, ‘Watch him.’ Then he guessed his two captors were returning inside for Teornis and Laszlo.

  The surface beneath him had felt like stone but, as his questing hands examined it, it had a peculiar texture to it, the polished surface still bearing faint indentations and pockmarks. The air about him was neither hot nor cool, laden with a kind of stagnant damp, and he could smell fish, and the sea, and the men around him possessed an oily, fishy odour of their own, which was unlike anything he had come across before.

  Something dropped across his legs, making him cry out in pain. The unseen burden writhed and slid off him, and he guessed from its size that it was Laszlo. Then he heard approaching feet, and a current of agitation ran through his unseen guards. Someone barked something that could only have been a challenge, and then the shouting started.

  Stenwold tried his best to follow what was being said, but the words escaped him, too fast and too foreign to make any sense. A pattern came to him, though, of thieves bickering over the spoils. And I’m a spoil. He could pick out the voice of the older man who had ridden in the submersible with them, and there were a lot of other voices backing his case. The opposing camp seemed to have far fewer participants, but their voices were of a very different character, certainly not the near-squeak of their pilot. In fact, their bass rumble put him in mind of very large men indeed, as big as Scorpions or even Mole Crickets.

  He heard, in the midst of this cacophony, the distinctive sound of steel, the touch of blades: not put to use, yet, but sliding across one another, ready for blood. He scraped his head across the ground, trying to dislodge the bag, but it was no use. This is maddening.

  Then there was a sharp rapping, surely a staff against the stone floor, and quiet followed meekly in its wake. Stenwold heard enough shuffling to imagine the two warring parties separating reluctantly.

  ‘That is quite enough,’ someone said, a new voice that was clearly used to being obeyed. ‘Now, who leads these . . . ah, and is it Chenni I see there?’

  There was a pause, and then the high tones of their pilot. ‘Aye, your Eminence.’ She sounded flustered, if Stenwold was any judge.

  ‘Kindly tell your Nauarch, my ally the good Rosander, that he need have no fear. He may approach me for speech with the land-kinden at any time.’ The new voice spoke smoothly, but then it gained a new edge: ‘And if your bannermen do not disperse this moment, do not think that Rosander can save them from being dismembered, joint by joint.’

  ‘You . . .’ Whatever Chenni was about to say, she clamped down on it.

  ‘I don’t dare?’ The new voice was dangerously soft a
gain. ‘Your Rosander is not the sentimental fool you take him for. He’d not wish to upset me for a few worthless lives like these. Be thankful that you yourself are currently somewhat more dear to him than most. Now go. Your services with your machine are appreciated, but it is time for you and yours to quit this place and bother me no more.’

  After the scuffling and shuffling that surely meant Chenni and her ‘bannermen’ dispersing, the order came, ‘Get them to their feet.’ Stenwold was unceremoniously hauled upright, supported between two men, and a moment later he was being hustled forward, stumbling over the unseen ground. He could only hope that Laszlo and Teornis were still nearby. The route was complex enough that he lost track entirely of how many turns they took, save that their journey was more often upwards than not, struggling and slipping on ramps of grooved stone that his boots could not properly grip. His captors were ruthless in their progress, using their Art to maintain their sticky grip on him whenever he threatened to fall.

  At last they stopped, and he had the sense of a large space echoing with a murmur of voices. A council chamber? A court of law? Am I to be tried for the crime of being land-born?

  ‘Land-kinden,’ said the leader’s voice more softly, ‘from here you shall go to the cells, beneath my great halls, and I cannot say if you shall ever venture forth from them again. I think it only fair, therefore, that you see, just this once, some small piece of your people’s doom.’

  A moment later the bag was dragged from Stenwold’s head. He closed his eyes, anticipating a shock of sunlight, but instead there was an overcast, almost twilightish gloom, relieved only by patches of wan light, globes of blue-green or green-white or purplish-red. Those lights went back and back, though, and multiplied with distance. Stenwold found himself standing on the brink of a balcony of moulded stone, looking down into a vaulted space between curved walls swelling in the shadows and then narrowing to a pointed ceiling, which some half-seen walls were seamed into radial symmetry by elegant buttresses, as though they were standing within a vast stone gourd. Even in the dim light, Stenwold saw that, between the ridges, the ceiling and walls were folded and worked until they seemed more like the natural interior of some great shell than the work of hands. Below them a multitude bustled in the many-coloured dusky light, figures large and small, and none seen clearly, but no glimpse of any looking like kinden Stenwold knew. There were figures as small as Flies, or as large as Mole Crickets, or as slender as Mantids, and most of the throng wore little for garments – kilts, cloaks, perhaps a sash. A few clumped through the crowd in armour that made them seem as ponderous and powerful as automotives, broader across the shoulders than Stenwold was tall.

  He glanced to either side, finding Teornis and Laszlo staring as aghast as he. Their captors mostly resembled the men from the submersible – the not quite Spider-kinden. The women amongst them were high-cheeked, fair and lustrous of hair, the men with elaborate beards, and all of them decked out in gold and a dozen kinds of precious stones that Stenwold could not identify. Others, standing like servants and subordinates, were taller and thinner, lightly armoured in breastplates and tall helms of what might be chitin or even boiled leather. These were cloaked and held long spears, and their faces, hollow-cheeked and elongated, were unlike any kinden Stenwold knew.

  At his shoulder stood a man he immediately knew as the leader. He, too, was of the Spider-kin people and, although they were all attired like Aristoi, this man boasted an additional level of luxury. His dark, curled hair was shot through with a coiling net of gold and glinting gems and he wore gold leaf, like tattoos, from wrist to shoulder of both arms. His cloak was fashioned from the hide of some beast, picked out in curving abstracts of shimmering colours, and his torc was a crescent moon of mother-of-pearl that gave back all the colours of the unhealthy lamps.

  ‘What think you, O land-kinden?’ he asked, keeping his voice still low. ‘Do you like your new home?’

  ‘There has been a mistake. We’re not your enemies . . .’ Stenwold started hurriedly but, at a gesture, the bag was jammed over his head again, and he was marched away.

  Seventeen

  They uncovered his head again somewhere else, somewhere far less spacious that was reached by descending an incline. The glistening lamps shone a sallow greenish-yellow here, and the floor was set with intricate, irregular stone gratings. Even here in this oubliette, the walls and ceiling were ridged and patterned, painstakingly carved into organic whorls and ridges with such all-encompassing detail that at last Stenwold began to think in terms of ‘grown’ rather than ‘made’. Half their guards had gone, leaving a handful of bearded men still holding on to them. Stenwold saw Teornis glancing about brightly, putting on an optimistic expression that Stenwold was sure he could not genuinely be feeling.

  ‘Separate cells,’ instructed the leader’s voice. Stenwold followed the sound of it to see his shadowy form standing in an archway, just a dark shape in the darkness, there for a moment, and then turning to vanish off into the gloom.

  For a moment Stenwold could see no cells, but then one of their guards pried open a floor-grate. Beneath them was a dank space enclosed by bars that were just folds and pillars of stone, some miserable grotto that combined the worst qualities of underwater and under the earth.

  Teornis went first. He accepted it gracefully, stepping to the edge like a man going defiant to the gallows. One of their guards raised a hooked knife, and Stenwold felt a moment’s panic before the man merely severed Teornis’s bonds, before moving on to free the wrists of the other two.

  ‘Thank you,’ the Spider said, impeccably courteous.

  ‘He didn’t say to cut them loose,’ another guard objected angrily.

  ‘He didn’t say not,’ replied the man with the knife. ‘If they’re land-kinden, where are they going to go?’

  When the angry one still looked stubborn, the knifeman poked Stenwold in the gut with a finger. ‘You, fat man, you know where you are?’

  Stenwold shook his head dumbly.

  ‘Let them have their hands, poor lost bastards,’ the knifeman declared, and Stenwold only belatedly recognized an awkward sympathy on his face. ‘Look at them, their whole world’s been cracked open.’

  There was some laughter over this, even from the angry man, but the man with the knife didn’t join in. As Teornis let himself down into his cell, another grate was levered up for Laszlo. The Fly-kinden looked so rebellious, Stenwold wondered if he might suddenly take wing and go . . . where? For their captors were correct, of course: Laszlo might buzz and batter his way through these sculpted halls forever. At last he climbed down into the hole, and only as his grate was lowered again did Stenwold note, He didn’t fly. Does that mean he’s hurt? No, clever lad, he doesn’t want to show them that he can. For, of course, not one of the sea-kinden they had seen, amongst that briefly glimpsed bustle, had been airborne. It’s good to have a secret in reserve.

  ‘Now you, big man,’ said the man with the knife. Another pit was yawning for Stenwold.

  ‘Are you permitted to hear me speak?’ Stenwold enquired, without hope.

  ‘Say what, now?’ The knifeman frowned at him. Stenwold repeated himself slowly, and the other shook his head without rancour.

  ‘You speak all you like to the Edmir, when he comes for you. Now get in.’

  Stenwold peered down, aware that little of the unwholesome light would reach him, down there. At least Teornis and Laszlo can see better in the dark. I shall be blind. The space was not great: enough room to sit down with his legs bent but certainly not enough to lie flat. The drop to the floor was about eight feet, he guessed.

  Hands took hold of him and, rather than be cast into that stony grave, he lurched forward, took hold of the edge, and lowered himself gradually down.

  The grating was dropped above him, making surprisingly little sound, then the guards padded off, their bare feet almost silent on the stone.

  The gloom was all-pervasive, for the loathsome little lights seemed to illuminate nothi
ng but themselves. In lieu of anything else, Stenwold fixed his gaze on them, seeing that they did not even flicker, just gave out their steady, sickly glow. More like the phosphorescence of a fungus than a real lamp.

  After a moment he heard a dry chuckle that he identified as Teornis’s. He reached towards the sound, his hand encountering the slick and uneven stone columns that stood boundary between his cell and the next. ‘What?’ he demanded. ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘I was just thinking,’ Teornis’s calmly amused tones issued from the murk, ‘that even War Master Stenwold Maker of Collegium can’t blame this one on the Empire.’

  How can he stay so calm? But, of course, such grace in the face of adversity was part of the Spider way. They must maintain face until the very last. With that thought, something subsided within Stenwold, and he felt the Spider’s example lending him a tenuous stability. The humour in Teornis’s remark abruptly came to him, and he even managed a wretched laugh.

  ‘That’s better. I thought we’d lost you,’ the Spider Aristos remarked. Stenwold thought that he now could just make out the other man’s form moving amid in the forest of lumpen pillars.

  ‘So, about this honest and frank discussion we were having,’ Stenwold ventured, and guessed that the other two prisoners managed to raise their spirits a little at that, from Laszlo’s snickering and the Spider’s polite laugh.

  ‘Yes, we made a hash of that, didn’t we?’ Teornis admitted. ‘Or, well . . .’

  ‘Or I did,’ Stenwold declared flatly.

  ‘Ma’rMaker, that isn’t so . . .’ Laszlo rushed to his defence.

  ‘It was Danaen that broke the truce, and it was my decision to bring her along,’ Stenwold observed. And there, it is out, and I feel better for owning up to it.

  ‘Danaen’s your Mantis, I take it,’ Teornis said. ‘Well, you’re not the first taken in by the stories they tell about themselves, all guts and honour. They even believe it themselves, most of the time, but they’re human just as we all are. Just as, I hope, our captors are. It was also your idea to hold our little meeting afloat, I recall.’