The Sea Watch sota-6

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The man arose from the chair and stalked over to where the guards held Teornis. ‘Why does this amuse you, land-kinden? Do you not know what you see?’

  Teornis replied slowly and clearly, to overcome the difference in their accents. ‘I had thought, when I was first brought to your city, that my life had reached its worst day. But there is always another step down, it seems.’

  The man considered him for a moment, without any sign of having understood his words, and then a muscle twitched at the corner of his mouth.

  Good, Teornis thought. More to work with.

  A nod of the man’s head, and Teornis was bundled over to one of the frames. They had to bend him back to secure him there, the ropes tight at his wrists and ankles, and the contours of the frame stretching his joints. He had been expecting that, though, and he kept the despair at arm’s length for another turn.

  ‘Is this for pleasure, or something to do with Aradocles?’ he ventured, hoping that he recalled the name correctly. The man with the pearl torc had been poring over the rack of knives, but now he went very still. Without looking back, he growled, ‘What do you know of that name?’

  ‘Your woman, in the cells, gave it to me,’ Teornis told him. ‘Would I be in the presence of the Edmir, then?’

  The man did turn at that, although he had a knife in his hand as he did so. ‘I am the Edmir Claeon, undisputed ruler of all Hermatyre, land-kinden. Choose your next words carefully.’

  The trio of abductors did not care much for bundling Stenwold up to hide him from the masses. The huge, armoured man brought up the rear, so that if Stenwold slowed a step he would be bounced forward by that broad, shell-clad chest. The lean, bald pugilist went ahead, sheer belligerence radiating from his every joint. Chenni pattered along beside him, almost companionably.

  Use your eyes, Stenwold told himself. Remember everything you see. From the ramp they shouldered through a series of tunnels lit only sporadically by the phosphorescent blisters. The workmanship, if it was workmanship, was all of the same organic style, with no defined edges, not a single visible tool-mark. Once or twice they ran into one of the Spider-looking people, dressed poorly, just a loincloth and less jewellery in most cases, and these moved out of their way hurriedly and offered them no resistance. Through it all, the armoured form behind them clumped on so stolidly that Stenwold began to wonder if it was not some impossibly advanced automaton. Then the bald man ahead called out a remark Stenwold didn’t catch, and a grunt of hollow laughter came from the armoured one’s helm.

  Now they were moving upwards, Stenwold stumbling and slipping on the slick stone surface, until they had come out into a larger chamber, a space divided into four lobes by curved ribs that rose to a point in the ceiling. There, a half-dozen of the broad, mailed figures were stood as if spoiling for a fight. Their clawed gauntlets held hooked daggers and forward-curving, heavy-ended swords, and one carried a beaked maul whose head looked like twenty pounds of gold capped with bronze. They had corralled in three others: two of the Spidery sort and a woman of another kinden yet again, whose skin kept coursing with pale colours, white and blue.

  ‘We’re moving!’ Chenni announced to them. ‘Thank these people for their hospitality here and let’s be going.’

  The warriors made a ponderous turn, with a scrape and slide of their shelly armour, and then the entire party, with Stenwold now in its midst, was making what appeared to be a quick exit. Their armour blocked much of his view of wherever they were going next, those enormous rounded pauldrons forever in danger of smashing him in the face. For all their bulk, the big men managed a solid, tireless progress, and they gave the impression that precious few barricades could have slowed them down.

  ‘I don’t suppose I can ask where we’re going?’ he got out, despairing of even being heard.

  ‘Man in charge,’ replied Chenni’s voice from somewhere above and behind him. Stenwold had been wondering how she avoided being crushed underfoot, but now he craned his neck back to see her perched on the shoulder of one of her cohorts. ‘When you get there, land-kinden, maybe you’ll not be so eager to find out,’ she added.

  Joy.

  They pushed on through a great hall that seemed very elaborately carved or crafted, and for a moment he thought he glimpsed some kind of statuary around them. Then there was a brief shout and a scuffle. He saw tall, thin men with spears being shunted effortlessly out of the way, and sensed that his abductors’ onward progress was aided by the fact that nobody actually wanted to start a fight, that all here were supposed to be on the same side, so it would have gone badly for anyone striking a blow in anger.

  And then they were out into the open air.

  Not the open air. Of course not. For a moment the sense of space and light had deceived him. The light was nothing more than the glowing bulbs, although for a second the bluish shade had seemed too wholesome to be anything other than day. He had a glimpse of a great many people hurrying out of the way of his escort, faces of kinden he did not know, or kinden that looked familiar but were not. He caught glimpses of temporary structures, something like a marketplace perhaps, or the shantytown of refugees that he had seen around Sarn during the war. He got no sense of a mood that would have allowed him to distinguish between those extremes, for his 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 confirmed. ‘I have men outside, waiting to escort him back.’

  The man of Rosander’s kinden who had been with Chenni earlier was abruptly standing behind the newcomer, blotting out the light.

  ‘You’re sure the Edmir would not prefer that I keep him? It seems foolish for him to trust his prisons, if men like this can so easily walk out of them.’

  Stenwold saw Haelyn’s skin flush and dance with nervous colours. ‘Alas,’ she said, keeping her chin high, looking Rosander straight in the eye, ‘I fear he would be most displeased with that.’ Displeased with me, was the meaning obvious in her bearing.

  Stenwold glanced back at the Nauarch and thought he saw some sympathy register in that narrow face.

  ‘You are worth more than your master,’ the big man rumbled. ‘Take your prisoner. Inform Claeon that I will speak to all his charges soon. If not, then my train may become restless yet again, and there are more ways than one to make him “most displeased”.’

  ‘Thank you, O Nauarch,’ Haelyn replied, and Rosander pushed Stenwold, almost gently, towards her.

  ‘Your Edmir had better place more guards upon his oubliettes,’ Rosander commented. ‘For if another prisoner were to escape, we might start losing confidence in him.’

  Haelyn looked hard at Stenwold, obviously seeing something as strange in him as he saw in all his current surroundings. Then she was heading carefully around the hulking warrior, and Stenwold felt he had no choice but to follow.

  Twenty

  When Stenwold was returned to the oubliette, the smashed grate had been replaced and the Edmir’s guards lowered him back in, under Haelyn’s watchful eye. Stenwold had noticed, while still up above, that their original quartet of warders had now been doubled. He wondered whether that would deter Rosander, should the man want another chat.

  ‘Where’s Teornis?’ was the first thing he asked.

  Laszlo shook his head grimly. ‘Didn’t bring him back, not yet.’

  ‘They may not, ever,’ Paladrya’s ghostly voice spoke from the gloom. ‘The Edmir has certain… tastes. With two land-kinden in hand, he may choose to test his third one to destruction. He believes that enjoying the pain of others is a prerogative of rulers.’

  She had appeared from the dark, her skin losing its stone colours. Stenwold
pointed a finger at her, angry with her because he had no other target. ‘You!’ he snapped, and she flinched. ‘Start telling me something useful.’ When she just stared at him he went on, ‘To start with, tell me about this nonsense that we’re supposed to have driven you into the sea.’

  ‘It is nonsense,’ she agreed, which was the last thing he had expected to hear. ‘Just an old, old story, and one that nobody cares about, except the Littoralists. Nobody else believes it now.’

  ‘Your Rosander seemed to believe it,’ Stenwold retorted hotly but, even as he said it, he was not sure it was true. Rosander had just been passing on the myth, and Stenwold knew a hollow excuse for warfare when he heard it.

  ‘I could not say what the Nauarch believes,’ Paladrya said meekly. ‘In truth, I would guess that we did once live on the land, for although we have Art to breathe the water, this air is still more natural to us. Our home is here, though. It was not long ago that anyone claiming that we should go back to the land would have been laughed out of the colony, and the Littoralists were considered a bad joke. But now the Edmir humours them, and gives them power. Now people who laugh at them often meet a bad end. And then there is Rosander,’ she added. ‘Rosander has been promised his war…’

  ‘A war on my people,’ Stenwold confirmed.

  ‘Any war, but Claeon finds in your people an enemy fit to match Rosander’s power.’

  Stenwold sought out Paladrya’s pale face, trying to maintain his ire, but his basic decency was already sapping it, telling him that this woman was not, herself, deserving of it. He sighed deeply. ‘Look, tell me some of the things that you just take for granted here, will you? What’s an Edmir. What’s a Nauarch? What’s going on between Rosander and this Claeon? How does this place work? Can you teach me that without just muddying the waters?’