The Sea Watch sota-6

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Now,’ she said, and then enquired: ‘Where’s the little one?’

  The boy let his Art flow from him, the dark colours running like paint until he had recovered his pale skin. Cynthaen watched cautiously. This was obviously Art she had never witnessed before.

  The land-kinden woman now dropped something at their feet, pieces of a strange material, crawling with straps. When she realized they did not know what to do with them she uttered a tired sound and took the boy’s feet in her hands, heedless of Marcantor’s twitch at such presumption. The heavier piece went under his sole, and the straps held it to his foot. It felt exceedingly strange. He saw that Cynthaen herself wore something different, an enclosing sheath of skin that went almost to her knee.

  The two Dart-kinden copied the arrangement, with varying success, so that Cynthaen had to correct their crossed and twisted strapping. Marcantor sat very still as she attended to him, but the boy saw his hands constantly clenching, the palms rough with the teeth of his Art. She saw it, too, and grinned up at him wickedly.

  ‘Don’t spoil too much for a fight, tall one,’ she advised him. ‘For my kind, that’s wooing.’

  Once she was done, she took out something else, a hood of stiff skin. She passed it to the boy. ‘Wear it – in case of my people. Now we’d best move. Dawn’s getting close.’

  ‘The sun?’ the boy asked.

  She gave him a look. ‘That’s what we mean when we say dawn, boy.’

  She led them faster this time, although they kept slipping and skidding in their new footwear. They saw no sign of her mysterious, hostile people, but the boy had the sense that she was forever on the lookout for them, deliberately choosing a path to avoid them. All was not peace and harmony amongst the land-kinden.

  When the sun came, it was a slow brightening through the trees, first on one side only, and then on all sides. The harsh chill slunk resentfully away, and gradually the night noises gave place to more and different sounds made by the beasts of the day. The boy spotted almost none as large as the swiftclaw-thing of the night, only heard them go quiet as he and the Dart-kinden passed, and then pick up their lives behind them. Once or twice there was the shape of an armoured thing clattering between the plants, or hanging off them. Of smaller things there were legion, and mostly creatures of the air, darting and diving and swarming, glittering in the first light, or clinging to twigs to soak up the sun’s warmth.

  Cynthaen picked up the pace yet again, until there was a noticeable thinning of the plants around them, a brightening of the light. The heat, where it fell on cloth and skin, was beginning to swelter. The boy saw ahead of them shapes that were obviously not made by nature but by man.

  They broke from the trees and were immediately within a gathering of structures that had clearly been put up by some craft or labour, but the boy could not understand how. They appeared so crude as to be the work of halfwits: everything was flat, angular, glaringly ugly, made of blocks and beams that seemed barely finished. He looked on them with horror and could not stop himself from asking, ‘Is this where your kinden live?’

  ‘Mine?’ Cynthaen glanced back at him. ‘Oh, this is none of mine. Don’t like it, eh? Then maybe there’s some hope for you. They call this place Arvandine. They have built it as close as they dare without risking our wrath.’ She led them down paths running between the blocky buildings, ignoring those few residents they met on the way. The denizens of Arvandine were of a quite different kind to Cynthaen: most seemed burly and dark, heavy-bodied men and women bearing burdens of various kinds. One other was almost as dark, but as tiny as a Smallclaw, his head barely reaching to the height of the boy’s chest, barely to the Dart-kinden’s waists. In a moment this little man, seeing Cynthaen striding straight towards him, had flashed a blur of dancing Art from his back and thrown himself into the air. The boy gasped at this prodigy, staring upwards, watching the man vanish over the rooftops.

  The land-kinden are also air-kinden. That great unbounded void above them, that had gone from freezing cold to throbbing heat with the coming of the sun, was a slave to these strange and terrible people.

  ‘Here.’

  The shabby-looking place they had fetched up beside was a little bigger than most, but no lovelier to look on. Cynthaen banged at a door, while the boy could only think, How can they live in such ugliness? Even the forest would be better. Cynthaen’s kinden have the right idea.

  On the eighth rattling bang, the door was jerked open. A squat, slope-shouldered, dark-skinned man stood there, wearing a sleeved robe that he clasped tight about his broad waist.

  ‘What?’ he roared. ‘What is it that can’t wait for a civilized hour?’ His speech was different to the land-kinden woman, a little slower, with the vowels dragged out, but no easier to follow.

  ‘Master Panhandle.’ Cynthaen addressed him with obvious scorn.

  ‘Penhold,’ he corrected her. He had not even spared a look at her companions. ‘What is it, fishwife?’

  ‘I have a gift for you,’ Cynthaen told him. ‘Your luck has come in with the tide this morning.’

  The dark man scowled at her. ‘Make sense,’ he said.

  ‘I bring three new members for your household,’ she told him. ‘Rejoice, therefore.’

  He stared at her, and the boy wanted to feel sorry for him, but the fact that he himself was being palmed off onto this huge stranger, who obviously bore Cynthaen no love, eclipsed all other considerations.

  ‘Who…?’ Penhold glanced past the woman, to see the two Dart-kinden, and then the boy. His face froze, hiding anything that might move behind it. ‘Since when did the Mantis-kinden traffic in people?’ he enquired slowly, but it was clear that his mind was more concerned with the problem of what this boy and his escort might be.

  ‘You will take them in,’ Cynthaen told him. ‘Give them a home. Feed them. Work them, if you will. The two tall ones look like they could carry a load.’

  The Dart-kinden bristled at that comment, but even Marcantor could tell how everything now hung in the balance.

  ‘And why should I do so?’ the big man asked.

  ‘Because I shall bring to you four swords, Panhandle, Mantis-forged rapiers, no less. I know what riches that can bring you.’

  Panhandle, or Penhold, stared at her. ‘You have no four swords.’

  ‘I will have.’

  ‘You are a catcher of fish.’

  ‘I am a warrior.’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘Six.’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘Four. Of the very best.’

  His eyes flicked again to the boy and the two warriors, as though weighing their worth, and then back to Cynthaen. Something passed between them, some familiarity that made the boy realize that their sparring words hid a longer association than he had guessed.

  ‘I’ll bring you a fish, too, if you want,’ Cynthaen told him flippantly.

  ‘There’s no market for fish.’ Panhandle shook his head. ‘What am I letting myself in for? Who’s after them?’

  ‘No one on the earth is hunting them,’ Cynthaen replied, and to the boy the deception seemed glaring. Perhaps it was to Panhandle as well, but if so his face hid it well. He squinted at the two warriors first. ‘You’ll stand guard, I’d guess,’ he decided. ‘Guard a shipment, a warehouse? Warriors, in short.’

  Santiren nodded shortly. ‘We can, once our charge here is safe. We shall not need charity.’

  Penhold’s eyebrows had risen as he heard her speak, her accent as strange to him as his own was to her. ‘And no questions asked, I’m sure,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Well, then. I am Ordly Penhold, merchant of Collegium. What shall I know you as?’

  ‘Santiren,’ the Dart-kinden woman replied. ‘And this is Marcantor.’

  ‘And a boy,’ Ordly Penhold observed. ‘Your servant, is he?’

  ‘I am no servant,’ the boy snapped. It had been a long march over a foreign land, passed hand to hand, losing his beloved Paladrya. ‘I am Aradocles. I a
m the…’ He stopped at Santiren’s warning hiss. A whirl of faint colour danced on his skin: shame. I am hunted, that is what I am.

  There was nothing on Penhold’s face to suggest he had understood their exchange but, when he spoke, he said, ‘Well now… Arad Oakleaves, is it? Perhaps we’ll call you Master Oakleaves. Almost a Collegium name that, and a lad like you’s better without something too grand.’

  Aradocles looked him in the eyes, and saw a man old enough, and wise enough, and outright foreign enough, as not to be easily read.

  ‘Ordly Penhold…’ He corrected himself, copying the man’s own term of address. ‘Master Penhold. Thank you for taking me into your household. I shall do what I can to requite you.’

  Only a few scant years later, General Tynan and the Imperial Second Army defeated the Mantids of the Felyal, burned out their holds, drove them from the forest ahead of his swiftly advancing army, and put to the torch every village and trading post they came across. Nor was Arvandine spared.

  Two

  To an outsider it would have seemed that the politics of Collegium were of least interest to the politicians themselves. There had been some few moments of silence known to fall during the Collegiate Assembly – they had mostly occurred during the war when to speak into that sudden chasm would have been to volunteer. Business as usual was the constant mutter and murmur of deal-making, deal-breaking, jokes and snickering, and a hundred separate commentaries about current affairs. All too often the only person paying attention to the matter being spoken on was the speaker himself. Sometimes not even that was the case.

  ‘Your big moment soon enough,’ Jodry Drillen observed. An experienced Assembler knew how to utter a few low words, amid that babble, which would carry clearly to someone close by, or even to someone halfway around the great bank of stone seats. Drillen, with a voice honed in the lecture theatres of the College, was such a man. Stenwold, sitting two tiers further down and three to the left, heard him precisely and glanced up to see the paunchy, richly dressed man smiling down at him.

  And I am in his party, am I not? Stenwold knew it. Just sitting here was enough to tell people that he had at last cast his lot. He had never actually taken such a step, it seemed, and yet the men above and below and to either side of him were all supporters of Drillen’s faction. The Assemblers were men and women with enough time on their hands to find significance in anything. In the Assembly, just sitting down was a political act.

  It went deeper than that, of course, for Stenwold and Drillen had made deals together behind closed doors. Despite the secrecy it was, paradoxically, well known. There had been an expedition dispatched in Stenwold’s name that people had recently started calling ‘the Drillen expedition’. It had, rumour suggested, been a great success. Rumour also preceded the expedition’s return to Collegium by several days.

  Stenwold sat there, surrounded by Drillen’s creatures, with an aching void inside him because he had not yet had a chance to confirm some of those rumours. There were a few matters manifestly known about the returning expedition: one College scholar had died, and the Empire had somehow been involved. But Stenwold’s interest, for once, shrugged off the political on behalf of the personal.

  What has happened to my niece?

  He had been given no chance yet to speak to the returning scholars. Drillen had grabbed them yesterday at dusk, the moment they arrived. Stenwold had been forced to put his official position ahead of all his personal demands and speak instead to the Vekken ambassadors. What he had heard so far had confirmed his worst fears: Che had not returned with them.

  Drillen had promised him access to the two surviving scholars tonight. That was all Stenwold could think about, yet here he was in the Assembly with his name listed to speak.

  The Assembly had not seemed itself since Lineo Thadspar died, everyone agreed. Still, while Collegium had been under siege or busy negotiating the Treaty of Gold, that had not seemed to matter. All hands were on the tiller, and pulling the same way. Only with the return of peace had the chaos come crawling in. Without an appointed Speaker the Assembly was deteriorating into name-calling, special interests and personal feuds.

  Most of the personal feuds revolved around the identity of the new Speaker. The casting of Lots, the formal process whereby the citizens of Collegium voted in the leaders they deserved, was open all this tenday and Stenwold had already made his choice. Nine Assemblers had put themselves forward as candidates, and Jodry Drillen was one of the front-runners. He was a man with plenty of manifest flaws, to Stenwold’s eyes. He was not reliable, trustworthy or honourable. His scholarship had been surrendered to his political ambitions. His patriotism was as fluid as his waist, dependent on his own station within the state. He was nevertheless, Stenwold was forced to admit, the best of a bad field.

  We should select someone at random, plucked out of all the citizens of Collegium, he thought, and not for the first time. In the absence of a Speaker the role had devolved to the Administrar of the College, as tradition dictated. This meant the task fell on a beaky middle-aged man by the name of Master Partreyn, whose main ambition had hitherto extended to ensuring that the College had sufficient supplies of paper and ink. Used to conducting his life in a quiet monotone, he was usually hoarse through shouting by mid-afternoon, and today it seemed as though the Assembly had a never-ending stream of business. Assemblers would soon start skulking off into the early evening, their patience with democracy exhausted.

  Partreyn looked over his scroll where, Stenwold knew, the various Assemblers who wished to take up their fellows’ time would be listed, in Partreyn’s own neat script. Stenwold’s name was amongst them today, to report on the current position with Vek.

  To report success, or some grain of it – and won’t that be far less well received than failure. Not so long since the Ant-kinden of Vek had brought an army up to Collegium’s gates. Wounds from the Vekken siege were still open. People had lost relatives and businesses and property, and gained nothing but scars. News of a glimmer of hope for peace with that violent city would sit badly with many.

  But it is essential, because of the Empire: the Wasp Empire, which had not been standing still since the inconclusive end to the war. Latest news from Stenwold’s agents said that all of the renegade Imperial governors had been pacified and that, of the lands in Imperial hands before the war, only the Three-City Alliance and the Border Principalities remained unbowed. And when they come for us, we must not risk having an enemy to our west.

  ‘I have Stenwold Maker,’ Partreyn got out, forcing his voice over the hubub. There were some cheers, some groans, for Stenwold had never been shy of forcing his company on these men and women. Stenwold pushed himself to his feet, ready to descend and take the floor. Someone else was shouting, though, voice rising high over the general din.

  ‘No! No! This is quite intolerable!’ It was a bony Beetle-kinden man who looked slightly Stenwold’s senior, sitting near the front row of seats. Several of the men and women beside him began adding their voices to his. He clearly seemed to be the spokesman for some small faction of his own, but Stenwold could not place him.

  Partreyn’s reply was entirely unheard by anyone further back, but the bony man caught it.

  ‘Three days!’ he shouted. ‘On the list, three days running, and no time to hear me speak! Do you think my business is not already so injured that I can spare time from it? Hammer and tongs, but you’ll hear me speak!’

  ‘Master Failwright!’ Partreyn’s ragged voice rose in pitch. ‘I cannot guarantee-’

  ‘Where’s Maker’s name on yesterday’s list, eh?’ Failwright, whoever he was, had a fine screeching voice for such debate. ‘Nowhere! Mine’s there, not his. Let him wait for the morrow then! Let me speak and be done! Is it so that just because a man goes to the wars, he must always have his way? Are we an Ant-kinden state now? I have business that the Assembly must hear!’

  Partreyn looked up and down his list as though he were a seer consulting omens. Stenwold glanced
back, and saw Drillen making motions that he should start his speech. And I could. I could just start shouting with the rest of them, until people started to listen – if they ever did. There were some others, mostly those who saw Stenwold or Drillen as rivals, who were now calling on Failwright to be given the floor. More though, whom Stenwold guessed as merchants and magnates who, presumably, opposed Failwright, were demanding that Stenwold speak. A few opportunists were now trying to demand that they speak instead. Had there been an elected Speaker, this would never have happened, but Partreyn had neither the formal nor the personal authority to control it.

  At last the wretched Administrar looked towards Stenwold with a despairing expression, and Stenwold sat down, sparing his voice the battle. Drillen shot him an interrogating glance and Stenwold leant back to say, ‘There’s nothing that can’t wait for tomorrow, and I’d rather not lose what I have to say in the backbiting that’ll follow this. It’ll keep.’

  Failwright, having abruptly been ceded the floor, seemed uncertain of what to do with it. He glowered defensively at the Assembly from beneath bushy eyebrows. The hum of conversation waxed.

  ‘So who is he?’ Stenwold asked.

  ‘Shipping, must be,’ Drillen decided. ‘That’s Ellan Broadrey and old Moulter on either side of him, and they’re both dock-merchants.’

  Stenwold settled back, preparing himself for a piece of mercantile tedium. The commercial activities of Collegium’s magnates had always left a sour taste in his mouth, since there were enough of them who had made a fine profit from the Empire before the war.

  Failwright glared around him with a belligerent scowl, as though expecting to be evicted at any moment. Stenwold could not recall ever seeing him before, and guessed he was that kind of Assembler who, once elected, never came to the Amphiophos unless his own interests were threatened. As they were under threat now, apparently.