Before it could take a step towards the girl, Tynisa had jabbed it in the back with her blade, sinking only inches into its leathery hide, and a pair of crackling blasts of stingshot had struck it across the chest from the Wasp soldiers now entering the fray. It charged them furiously, and Tynisa saw them raise their swords as they stood in the doorway that led to the deck. Founder meanwhile had loosed his crossbow again at some new target, and Tynisa whirled around to see.
The newcomer was a broad man, clad head to foot in pearl-sheened armour and brandishing some kind of slender lance. From his build alone, Tynisa would have thought him a Beetle. Bradawl lunged at him, his blade scraping off the unknown intruder’s mail. In the next moment, the narrow point of the lance had swept forwards to touch Bradawl’s waiting shield. There was a sharp crack and a bitter smell, and Bradawl was thrown back across the room as though he had been struck with a hammer.
Tisamon was on his feet again, approaching the newcomer cautiously. Founder was still crouching behind his desk, hastily reloading his bow. He looked up at the armoured man and shouted something that included the words, ‘She’s mine!’
The room was now getting very crowded, however spacious it had at first appeared. Tynisa cut across behind Tisamon to get closer to the girl, who was pressed as far into the corner as she could manage.
‘We’re leaving,’ she decided aloud. She saw that the Wasps had finished off the second huge man and were now taking cover behind furniture, trading shots with the little crossbowmen. ‘Tisamon!’ she shouted. The Mantis was still standing between Founder and the armoured man, and Tynisa realized that she did not know how far his honour would stretch when it came to fulfilling this supposed contract to protect the Beetle.
The doorway to the deck above was blocked with Wasps, although the monstrous crossbows of the small intruders were taking a toll on them. There was only one other exit from the room and it involved going out the way all their enemies were coming in.
Tynisa darted forward, forcing the issue. The armoured man turned clumsily as she approached, lunging out for her with the lance. Tisamon took the chance he had thus given her, driving his blade home at the shoulder joint of the man’s armour. It bit, but not deeply enough.
She ducked under the sweeping lance, saw its tip charring a line across the wooden wall. There was a leather pipe connecting it to the man’s back, she noticed, and with a flick of her blade she cut it in half.
She was never sure, thinking back, whether that was the right thing to have done, for she felt instantly as though she had been punched hard, and there came a flash of blue-white light that seared all other details of the room from her mind for a second. Then she was lying on the ground, her head spinning, and the palm of her sword hand was raw and burnt, even the grip of her sword blackened. The armoured man lay on his back across the room from her, already struggling to get up with the help of his small servants.
‘Come on!’ she shouted to the Spider girl, and she saw fear and desperation fighting in the girl’s expression, then desperation finally winning out. She dashed on past the armoured man in a sudden access of courage, but then a gauntleted hand closed on her ankle as she ran.
It was Founder who caught her, before she struck the floor, and Tisamon drove the point of his claw down into the gauntlet to break its grip, and then lashed a backhanded blow into the face of the man’s helm.
The helm cracked, not like metal but like a shell, and the face beneath it was pure Beetle-kinden, though pale as a drowned man’s and twisted in utter fury. The hollow voice emerging from behind the helm became recognizable words: ‘She is ours! You savages cannot take her!’
‘Go!’ Tynisa urged the girl, leading, the way to the front hatch. She had to pass the point where the intruders had come up through, and what she saw down there thoroughly frightened her.
A hole had been chewed in the bottom of the gondola, some machine or creature tunnelling up through the earth below to penetrate the wooden hull, but the tunnel was now entirely awash with water.
Even as she watched, there was a man down there, another of the huge, hook-handed creatures. As it half-swam and half-clambered to the surface, it was surrounded by a silvery nimbus that vanished as soon as it broke the water.
Tisamon was past her now, at the hatch, but he stared at it helplessly. It had been meant for Apt hands, and he could not manage the catches.
Founder literally pushed him out of the way. Behind them they could hear the last of his soldiers and guards being finished off.
He then had the hatch open, flinging it wide with a shout, as a bolt of energy struck him full in the chest, knocking him backwards to the ground, his face fixed in a rictus of shock.
There were Wasp soldiers gathered outside, not those in the pay of the Consortium but the sort Tynisa was more used to.
There was no time to check whether Founder was still alive. Tisamon simply leapt out through the opening, dropping the ten feet of space to land in the midst of them, lashing out at them even as he fell. Two of the Wasp soldiers spun away from him, wounded, while the others scattered, seeking for cover from which to shoot.
Tynisa grabbed the Spider girl, who looked utterly horrified, and slid down the sloping hull, trusting to her Art to slow her fall. Her burden was no help at all, just clinging to her as though she had never climbed a wall in her life.
When it was obvious the girl would not do anything as sensible as run for her life, Tynisa had to drag her three streets away to relative safety before turning back for Tisamon. He was already coming, though, running after them at top speed.
‘Where are the Wasps?’ Tynisa asked him.
‘They encountered our friends from inside,’ was all he said. He glanced away from her to the Spider girl, and Tynisa could see that he wanted to say that she would have been better left behind, but even so he was curious about her. Before he could speak, they heard shouting nearby, and the crackle of a Wasp sting.
‘Away,’ he decided, and they ran off into the muddy streets of Jerez, the Wasps taking to the air behind them.
Nivit was out consulting with his sources but Gaved was supposed to be busy hiding people. He was nominally hiding Thalric, who was both an ungracious guest and an unwilling fugitive. The former Rekef man stalked about Nivit’s premises, prying into the information broker’s records and frightening Skrit. It was obvious that he would decide to leave soon, and then Gaved would get to find out whether he himself would decide to restrain the man, or even be able to.
When the knock on the door came, it was a relief to all of them. Gaved looked through the crack and then opened up hurriedly, bundling Tynisa and Tisamon into the room, and one more fugitive as well.
‘No time to stop,’ Tynisa declared. ‘We have some Wasps to mislead. They’re out searching for us and I don’t want them looking here. Take care of the girl until we get back.’ She looked from Thalric to Gaved, getting little response, and then she and the Mantis were gone, the door swinging shut behind her.
‘“Take care of the girl”?’ Thalric snorted. ‘Are we running a Helleron whorehouse now?’ The new arrival looked at him in alarm, and then turned to Gaved and instantly flinched away from him as well. He saw her face.
He took a deep breath, feeling his heart lurch, and wondered at the vagaries of fate. It was the same girl, of course, unmistakable from the portrait, the one that the strangers had offered such a high reward for. Here she was in the flesh.
His first thought was of the bounty and how happy Nivit would be with this catch. It was the automatic reflex in his trade. His second reaction was to actually look closely at this wretched creature that parties unknown were so desperate to recover.
She was definitely something like Spider-kinden, but Gaved had travelled widely enough to note subtle differences: her skin was remarkably pale, her hair an odd compromise between gold and silver, and her eyes almost the same gleaming colour. Just as with the picture that was so uncannily lifelike, he was forced to conclude that
she was not quite like any Spider-kinden he had ever seen, any more than she suited the Beetle-kinden clothing she had been dressed in, that now hung sopping wet about her due to the rain.
And she was clearly terrified, wide-eyed and trembling, which in a Spider would have indicated a remarkable lack of control, and of course she was not painted or made up as Spider-kinden, both men or women, almost always would be. She was a mystery indeed, but he could not rid himself of the thought that she was a potentially profitable one.
Thalric had approached her with a slightly disdainful look. ‘And who are you?’ he asked her. She flinched back from him, and resisted his attempt to relieve her of her soaking cloak, wrapping it about herself even more tightly.
‘My name is Cap… is Thalric,’ announced the ex-Rekef officer, neither harshly nor kindly. ‘Tell me who you are, and why they brought you here.’
Gaved leant close, intrigued, seeing something in Thalric’s tone catch with her.
‘Sef,’ she said, and then repeated herself at Thalric’s frown. ‘My name. Sef.’
Not a Spider-kinden name, that, but I wasn’t really expecting one, Gaved decided.
‘So what significance are you in this, Sef?’ Thalric pressed. ‘Speak, now.’
‘I don’t know,’ the girl mumbled. ‘They took me and brought me.’
‘She’s a slave,’ said Gaved, and Thalric raised an eyebrow at him.
‘Oh yes?’
‘You’re talking like a master, she’s answering like a slave,’ the hunter explained. ‘She’s got the strangest accent I ever heard, but some things just don’t change wherever you go.’ Her accent is the same as her Beetle master’s, and I’d never heard the like of that from anywhere either.
‘The Empire’s a big place,’ Thalric said, studying Sef again. Her lips were pressed tightly together and she was trembling still.
‘You’d have to go a long way,’ Gaved told him, ‘to find an accent I didn’t recognize. Spotting the differences is part of my stock in trade. She’s certainly from nowhere near here. So whose slave are you, girl? Where did you run from?’ He could not quite match Thalric’s authority, and eventually the other man repeated his question for him.
The word she said, unfamiliar and spoken in her unusual accent, that stretched some vowels and clipped others, meant nothing to them, but Gaved translated it as something like ‘Scolaris’, which could conceivably be the name of some Spider city-state.
‘Where’s that, somewhere in the Spiderlands?’ Thalric asked her, and she shook her head mutely. Thalric hissed in annoyance and moved forwards – just a brief abortive movement – and Sef fell back, shielding her head as if waiting for a blow.
There was a long pause, Thalric considering her with contempt, then he shrugged. ‘We’ll wait for the Mantis and his get to come back. Then they can explain why they’ve foisted this simpleton on us.’
He stalked off to peruse some more of Nivit’s records and Gaved tentatively approached the girl, crouching down and then sitting himself close to her, his back resting against the rough-cast wall.
‘All right, then, Sef,’ he said softly, not looking at her. ‘So you’re a runaway slave. And your masters are after you.’
He had intended no more than to state the obvious, but he caught her look and it shook him. He knew the plight of the fugitive. He had lived the chase vicariously from following the trail of the hunted slave, the deserter, the thief. He knew the fear of capture, but the panic, the sheer terror on Sef’s face, cut into him like a blade. She gazed at him with horror, and she looked around Nivit’s hut with horror, and on the very ground and air as though it was a nightmare that she could not break free from. He had never before witnessed such cringing fear, until the moment her masters were mentioned, when it doubled and redoubled in her expression. She would be screaming now, he thought, if she dared, and so instead she was screaming inside.
He felt a sudden pang inside him – a brief moment of pain and regret. ‘They turned up here, you see, with your picture and a comfortable reward,’ he said, as gently as possible.
Something twisted within her, hunching her over so that her hair concealed her features. He could hear the violent shuddering of her breath.
‘You might as well know that I’m a hunter. I track people down for money. I don’t often get them delivered to me like this, but that’s what I do. So tell me what I should be doing next.’
He thought she merely shrugged, but then saw her shoulders quiver again, and caught a glimpse of tears on her half-hidden face. She was definitely not Spider-kinden, at least not of any breed he knew, for she would not have lasted a day in the Spiderlands.
‘But if you tell me just exactly what you are and where you come from, maybe I’ll come up with a reason to change my mind.’ He thought of what Nivit might say to that, and felt wretched for it. It seemed his curiosity had overmastered his habitual greed but, beyond that, the strangeness of her had got to him.
He gave her time, let her think, whilst Thalric cast occasional sharp glances at him, as though he was making her some kind of improper proposal. Probably thinks I’m letting the race down by talking to lesser kinden.
‘I come from Scolaris,’ Sef whispered.
‘That doesn’t help me, girl. I’ve never heard of it. How far? In which direction?’
‘It is down there.’ She gestured. ‘In the water. In the lake.’
Gaved felt his stomach suddenly twist with something like vertigo. In the tense and unpleasant silence that followed he remembered Nivit’s dark words about the lights beneath Lake Limnia. Impossible. He saw that Thalric had now stopped reading and was looking over at them, his expression frozen. Impossible. But he had already spent too much time here in Jerez and around the lake. Go to any of the Skaters’ wretched drinking holes, find a bandy-legged creature too drunk to stand upright. They would soon tell you about the lights in the lake, about the boats that went missing, the strange wreckage sometimes found, all the other stories that the Empire had long dismissed as yet more lies such as the Skater-kinden delighted in telling, for no other reason than that falsehood was in their blood.
Do I really want to know this? ‘There’s… a city in the lake?’ Gaved enquired carefully.
‘Three,’ Sef said tonelessly. ‘Genavais, Peregranis and Scolaris.’
‘Spider cities,’ Gaved said.
‘Once,’ Sef confirmed in a whisper. ‘But not since the masters came.’
‘This isn’t making any sense,’ Thalric snarled, disgusted. ‘She’s mad. She must be.’
She could be mad. Gaved looked into Sef’s frightened face and decided he could believe that. It would be the easiest way to explain her, too… save for those others who were so desperate to regain her. Three cities that he had never heard of? Three cities in the lake…
He began to stand up, and she suddenly caught at the sleeve of his long coat, so that he froze halfway.
‘I want to tell you,’ Sef hissed urgently, ‘because they don’t want you to know. They will kill me just because they don’t want you to know.’
Gaved looked towards Thalric, but the ex-Rekef man simply shrugged and went back to his reading. Gaved slowly sat down again.
‘So tell me then,’ he said.
‘Ours. They were our cities,’ said Sef, keeping her voice very low, as though she was afraid that her pursuers would hear her from somewhere else in Jerez, or across the silent surface of Lake Limnia. ‘We tell ourselves, mother to daughter. They were our cities, and the masters were once our slaves, long ago.’
‘What masters?’ Thalric demanded. ‘What slaves?’
Gaved sent him an angry look, but behind it he was still pondering. ‘Beetle-kinden,’ he then said. ‘The man who came to us was Beetle-kinden, coming out of a wet night, all armour and no cloak… Well, if he’s from the lake he wouldn’t need to worry about getting rained on.’
‘Beetle-kinden…’ Thalric started off derisively, but then clearly thought about it, and Gaved gue
ssed the path his mind was taking.
‘In the bad old days, the Apt races were nothing but slaves in many places, before the revolution.’
‘Revolution, yes.’ Sef was looking from Gaved’s face to Thalric’s. ‘Our cities, that we made, that we wove and filled with air, but then they cast us down. We tell each other all of this, mother to daughter. They chained us with their machines and their weapons. They sat where we had sat, and cast us down to where they had once been.’
‘Only justice,’ said Thalric dryly. ‘Anyway, the Spiders of the Spiderlands seem to be doing well enough for themselves, so this lot must have been an inferior breed.’
‘Or just lacking enough space to manoeuvre,’ Gaved said softly. ‘Cities beneath the lake, and not great cities, surely – where could they go, when their slaves rose up against them?’
‘You’re speculating.’
Gaved nodded. ‘And all we have is her word, and all that’s probably made of is whatever folk tales she’s cobbled together. Still…’ He sensed the lake outside, that great expanse of water stretching past the horizon, unplumbed, marsh-edged, a haunt of Skater bandits and monstrous creatures.
‘It’s nonsense and she’s mad,’ Thalric declared, though a little uneasily.
‘Please,’ Sef said, tugging again at Gaved’s sleeve. ‘they will come for me. They will take me back.’
‘You escaped all this,’ Thalric pointed out. ‘So it can’t be that difficult. But why haven’t we heard of this before.’
‘I was supposed to die,’ Sef said simply. ‘Master Saltwheel had us taken to his testing grounds, to his laboratory. We were supposed to die, to be killed by his weapon. But it ruptured the wall of the city. The others died, but I grasped the air and held it to me, and then I swam. The others died or were caught, but I swam and swam towards the light. We have escaped before. Into the lake itself, the caves or the deep water. They sniff us out, though. They always bring back the bodies, for everyone to see. There is nowhere safe between the walls of our world that we may hide from them. So I… I came up to gather air. I knew that Master Saltwheel would hunt me down, so I left that world.’
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