The Sea Watch

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘But Teornis wants to talk,’ Jodry prompted.

  ‘Supposedly.’ Stenwold took a deep breath.

  ‘You cannot talk with Spiders,’ Danaen spat scathingly. ‘Every word is a lie. Every promise is made to be broken. The only peace to be had with Spiders is after you’ve killed them.’

  Jodry coughed. ‘Yes, well, for my part I say we have to meet with him. He won’t want a fight, so we can surely find some way through this mess that doesn’t see a hundred ships blockading our harbour and landing soldiers all the way down the coast. The Spiderlands is vast, Stenwold. We have no idea what they might send. They have plenty of artificers amongst their subjects, too. Don’t think it will just be sailing ships and swords.’

  Danaen was scowling at Jodry, and looking daggers at Arianna as well. The two Flies sat back, waiting to be of some use. Stenwold put a hand to his forehead. ‘I will meet with him,’ he stated.

  The Mantis made a hissing sound. ‘If you so much as hear them speak, they will corrupt you, – or kill you. There is no dealing with them, save with a blade.’

  ‘That is not our way,’ Stenwold snapped, with enough authority to beat her down. ‘This situation is slipping out of control. Spider-kinden who have lived in Collegium all their lives are fearing to show their faces in the streets. Honory Bellowern, of all the cursed people, sent me a message of support from the Empire, in our time of need, and if this cannot be resolved – if Spider sails reach our harbour – then no doubt the Eighth Army will march into Myna so as to bring that support so much the closer. We have to act, therefore. I will meet with Teornis.’

  ‘Stenwold Maker, listen to me,’ the Mantis declared fiercely. ‘I will kill Teornis of the Aldanrael.’

  Stenwold stared at her. ‘I don’t . . .’

  ‘I will take a score of my people and I will go to where he is, and kill him and his servants and guards and all who lodge with him,’ Danaen stated flatly. ‘That is the only way to negotiate with Spiders.’

  ‘And what will that accomplish?’ Stenwold demanded. ‘We’re not at war with just Teornis, we’re at war with his whole cursed family. All that would achieve is ensure that we would never again be able to negotiate any kind of peace.’

  Danaen folded her arms sullenly. ‘Where will you meet him then? How will you deal with him? He will twist your mind with his Art. He will have his agents hiding, ready to poison you or slay you.’

  ‘Some neutral party, perhaps, to mediate . . . ?’ Jodry started.

  ‘Who?’ the Mantis snapped at him. ‘Who, indeed, that they have not bought? Who, that you can fully trust? You can trust only my kind, to be rid of all the influence of his kinden, and we say kill.’

  ‘And who could we trust with the knowledge of what would be said at such a meeting. No third parties, Jodry. If we do talk to Teornis then we must talk fully and frankly.’

  ‘Well, then,’ the Speaker for the Assembly looked grim, ‘the Mantis is right, Sten. How could you be sure it wasn’t a trap?’

  ‘Arianna says he won’t just have me killed out of hand, since it’s not their way,’ Stenwold told him.

  ‘With respect, Master Maker,’ Tomasso put in, ‘their way is to win.’ He had sat in silence for a long time while the others talked, with Laszlo fidgeting at his side. Now his voice drew their attention. ‘Spiders play Spider games with each other, and the top Aristoi will tell you how they keep to their little rules. But, Master Maker, those rules are only for those at the very top, only for the people that move the pieces around.’

  Stenwold thought of Teornis’s earlier note, welcoming him to the Dance. Or was that just to lull me into a false sense of security? Do I really believe that a Spider Aristos would consider me an equal?

  ‘And besides,’ Laszlo put in, ‘doesn’t mean they don’t off each other sometimes.’

  Stenwold opened his mouth, then closed it again, the words gone. After a pause he said, ‘There must be a way. I want to believe that Teornis just wants a way to back out gracefully, without making himself look a fool before his family. But I see what you say.’ He sighed. ‘There must be a way,’ he said again.

  ‘Perhaps it will come to us,’ Jodry said thoughtfully. ‘Some place, some mediator, some guarantee of safety. Let me think about it. I’m sure something will spring to mind.’

  ‘Well, if not, then the armada,’ Stenwold agreed. ‘While you’re racking your brains, spare a thought for our sea defences too.’

  After his informant had left the parlour, Helmess Broiler settled down on his couch thoughtfully. ‘Who would have thought . . . ?’ he kept repeating to himself. Elytrya draped herself across the back of the couch and traced her fingertips across his scalp, waiting patiently for him to unpack his thoughts to her.

  ‘This whole Spiderlands business has taken me quite by surprise,’ he told her eventually. ‘In this life you learn to be wary of apparent good fortune, especially where a Spider is involved. However, perhaps life has finally decided to give back to me some of what Stenwold Maker has taken away.’

  ‘Perhaps killing that man Failwright was a mistake,’ Elytrya suggested.

  ‘Apparently not, for they’re blaming the Aldanrael for it, and that makes me a very happy man.’ Helmess poured her some wine. It was a good Spiderlands vintage, and he reckoned that it would be in short supply soon. ‘You had better keep yourself indoors for the moment,’ he added. ‘After all, I know you’re no Spider-kinden, but the general populace of Collegium are unlikely to be as enlightened in that particular respect as I am.’

  ‘So there will be war,’ she observed. ‘You people always seem to be having wars.’

  ‘Only because Maker insists on dragging us into them,’ Helmess retorted. ‘Well, let him try to drag himself out of this one. He’ll find it won’t be so easy.’ He paused, thinking. ‘Although he has a clever mouth on him, does Maker, and I can’t deny it. I don’t think we can allow him and Teornis to hammer out an accord. That wouldn’t suit us at all, now, would it?’

  ‘You want your Spider fleet to come sailing into the harbour here, do you?’ she said, gently mocking.

  ‘Why not? Would a few dozen wooden ships pose any difficulties for your warriors?’

  She snorted. ‘Rosander’s Greatclaw-kinden would sink every last one of them before they had any idea what was going on.’

  ‘Well, then, you may even become the heroes of the hour, until everyone realizes that you’re not stopping with just the Spiders.’ Helmess laughed. ‘We must try to arrange for Maker to be standing front and centre when that happens. Have him hold out his hand in friendship. I want to see Rosander pincer it off at the wrist.’ Abruptly his mood darkened. ‘Or maybe not. Maker’s too clever by half, and he could talk a Fly out of the sky. I think maybe the Spiders should do him in.’

  ‘That would make sense,’ she agreed. ‘Why should Failwright be the only martyr?’

  He laughed at that. ‘Oh, yes, a martyr. I’ll pay for the statue myself, once he’s dead.’

  Elytrya studied his expression. ‘And you have a plan.’

  ‘I may have.’ Helmess nodded. ‘I think I need to set up a meeting, as a concerned and patriotic Assembler of Collegium. Our little informer must needs earn his keep. Go and fetch him back in again, would you?’

  She straightened up and glided over to the door, while Helmess’s eyes followed her every move. I am doing well out of this deal, he considered. She was no true Spider-kinden but she was as beautiful as they, and with a liquid, sly grace that he actually preferred. And as duplicitous as any Spider, no doubt, but that just adds to the thrill.

  She brought in the neatly dressed young Beetle man, and Helmess addressed him from the couch. ‘Master Cardless.’

  Stenwold’s servant gave Helmess a polite little bow. He had proved to be quite the find: a well-educated man who had been dismissed from a good position in Helleron after certain irregularities had turned up in his master’s finances. Bitter and ambitious, he had arrived in Collegium prudently after t
he war, just when old Maker had been looking for a new servant. Helmess had leant on a few acquaintances to provide Cardless with glowing references, whereupon Maker had taken him on without a thought. Moreover, Helmess was sure that Cardless was an exemplary servant, with not a financial irregularity to be seen. After all, he was now drawing two salaries without even having to put a hand into another man’s pocket.

  ‘I have a job for you, Cardless,’ Helmess informed him. ‘Something a little more than your usual watch-and-report.’

  The servant’s stance altered in a way that indicated, though with impeccable politeness, that special duties carried an additional charge.

  Helmess smiled sourly. At least he is predictable in his villainies. ‘Oh, you’ll get yours, don’t worry, but I want you to bring me that Mantis woman you mentioned to me.’

  ‘Danaen, Master Broiler?’ Cardless wrinkled his nose. ‘That savage?’

  ‘None other,’ Helmess confirmed. ‘Tell her I’m a concerned citizen that wants to talk about the evil Spiders, and who better than their traditional enemies to set me straight, eh?’

  ‘Very good, Master Broiler,’ Cardless agreed. His answering smile was superior enough that Helmess decided to take him down a peg.

  ‘And now you’re asking yourself whether I’ve ever wondered if you’ll sell me back to Stenwold Maker,’ he guessed, seeing the truth of the accusation instantly written across the other man’s face.

  ‘Master Broiler, I would never—’

  ‘Save it. I know you,’ Helmess cut him off. ‘Understand this: Stenwold Maker is an honest man, and he’d have no time for a traitor in his own house, confessed or not. The best you’d get out of him then is a kick out the door and a bad reference. You keep doing what I tell you, Cardless, and you’ll profit from it, so don’t get any clever ideas. Now go find me that Mantis-kinden. I’ll see her tomorrow, if you can arrange it.’

  After Cardless had gone, Helmess stretched out luxuriously, feeling very pleased with himself.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Elytrya asked him, ‘and not tonight?’

  ‘I prefer to do dark deeds in daylight,’ Helmess murmured. ‘People aren’t expecting them then. Besides, I thought you and I could explore a different branch of villainy tonight, no?’

  ‘I must say, our Master Maker is rather getting into the spirit of things,’ was Teornis’s remark, when Arianna had finished recounting her news. The Spider lord’s townhouse had changed since she had last seen it. The calibre of his staff was subtly different now: fewer fancily dressed Fly-kinden menials and more obviously armed men. She had spotted at least a half-dozen Kessen Ant-kinden – mercenaries she presumed – standing alert with repeating crossbows in hand, and there were some newcomers as well: arrogant, strutting Dragonfly-kinden wearing armour of chitin and wooden plates. Those on the roof had extravagantly recurved longbows, and those indoors carried single-edged swords. They were an import from some satrapy of the Spiderlands where the Aldanrael held sway.

  ‘Of course,’ Teornis went on, ‘he’s still a Beetle, plodding and cautious and devoid of style.’ He was sitting at a desk, leafing through papers, and in that looked to Arianna like any Beetle merchant or academic. When he glanced up to meet her gaze, however, she noticed the quirk at the corner of his mouth, and realized he was doing so deliberately for his own amusement. Or for mine. Very few outsiders understood that a great deal of what comprised a Spider-kinden was a sense of humour, especially when times were hard. The ability to step on to the scaffold and offer one last jest to the crowd was the mark of a true Aristos.

  ‘He will agree to meet if terms can be proposed that will satisfy his people.’

  ‘Meaning the mad Mantis,’ Teornis sighed, and the smile slipped. ‘Whatever terms we baffle Maker into offering, I’ll see her dead. Let them be ignorant savages in their own forests all they want, but when they kill one of my blood, then blood shall follow. They think that they have a sole monopoly on grievance and revenge? Well, I look forward to giving that creature Danaen a real reason to hate my kind. I’ll strip her skin off, an inch at a time, and make her eat the flesh of her followers.’ The words were matter-of-factly spoken, his eyes fixed on her face to gauge her reaction.

  ‘She’s nothing to me,’ Arianna told him. ‘I’m sure she’d kill me in an instant if she thought Stenwold wouldn’t know about it. It wouldn’t matter how loyal I was, or to whom, because to her I’m just another Spider.’

  ‘It’s Maker’s error to employ such volatile servants,’ Teornis agreed. ‘Well, now, I shall find some convenient place that even the Mantis cannot object to. Let me confront Maker face to face, and we shall see what he will not do to avoid another war. My agents are already abroad in the city, stirring up fear, turning the people’s anger away from our kinden onto their reckless leaders. Soon he’ll accept any terms I offer him just to avoid a riot.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Arianna said, before she thought about it. There was a moment of silence in which Teornis’s expression revealed nothing of his own thoughts. And so at last I act like something more than a mere servant, she considered. You promised me adoption into the family, Teornis. Don’t forget that.

  He nodded shortly. ‘You’re right, of course. I do our Master Maker wrong. He’s better than that, and he won’t bend so easily. He listens to that fat fool Drillen, though, and Drillen is just a . . . what are those flying machines? He’s just a great bloated airship buoyed up by the opinion of the hoi polloi. Once they turn on him, he’ll soon force Maker’s hand.’

  Arianna nodded cautiously. ‘That seems likely.’ And so Jodry Drillen’s life is saved, because his cowardice is more useful to us alive than his death is as a warning. She found herself surprisingly relieved, having not realized how she had grown so used to the portly Assembler.

  ‘I will need a little acting out of you, at some point, if things come to it,’ Teornis informed her. ‘Maker has other traits than his plodding to recommend him as an opponent. For a start, he is sentimental. It is a noble quality, perhaps, but a true manipulus should know when to abandon sentiment. If my enemy put a knife to the throat of my sister, or my mother, then I would demonstrate my love of family in the vengeance I took thereafter, not in bending the knee then and there. Maker is not like this, as we have seen.’

  Arianna had a sense of what was coming, and shifted uncomfortably.

  ‘Who does Maker hate most in all the world?’ Teornis asked abruptly.

  ‘I’d have said it was the Empire, until just a tenday ago. Now maybe it’s you,’ said Arianna, testing how frank she could be with him.

  ‘Oh, no, no, no. The Empire, always the Empire,’ reprimanded Teornis. ‘The reason he’s so agitated by this current tangle is that it distracts the attention of the city from the Empire. He wants us as allies, in the end. So he’ll scheme for that, tell us all his tedious rote about common enemies, over and over again. He hates the Empire far more than us, and with good reason. They’re unpleasant fellows, at the best of times, and their manners are even worse than the Beetle-kinden. But . . . But he put himself in their hands, of his own free will, for your sake.’

  ‘That was then.’

  ‘Oh, my dear, no. He did it then, and he will do it again now, if need be. For you, my dear one, only for you. If Stenwold Maker proves himself devoid of reason, and will not nod his head like a good loser, then it’s time to threaten what he holds dearest: you yourself, – you and only you. Play along, if it comes to that. I know you can.’

  And how far will such playing have to go? Will I have to keep acting even while you cut my throat? But he did not seem to think he was asking anything unusual, just one more deception.

  ‘Of course,’ she replied.

  ‘Of course,’ he echoed. ‘But it may not come to that. On the other hand, it may go considerably further.’ Teornis shook his head, looking genuinely regretful. ‘There is one other little duty you may have to shoulder, if things proceed to their worst. I’d rather not impose it on you, and I swear I�
�ll do what I can to find any other way, but I shall be honest with you in this. You may have to kill him.’

  She said nothing, and kept her expression as still as she could.

  ‘Inelegant, I know,’ he said, apparently in the belief that he was mirroring her thoughts.

  I told Stenwold it would not come to that, she reflected. To simply eliminate an opponent is graceless, for the Aristoi, until they have ripped everything else from him. But, of course, how better to demonstrate that a man has nothing left, than to have his death come by the hand of the one closest to him? Oh, yes, that would be elegance indeed.

  ‘I would rather not have you break cover in such a gauche manner,’ Teornis drawled. ‘However, certain circumstances may require it, so I give you fair warning. Stenwold Maker is not the only one who might need to fear violence at our negotiations.’

  ‘Stenwold wouldn’t—’

  ‘Oh, surely he himself wouldn’t,’ Teornis agreed, ‘but I want your blade at his throat if anyone in his party would.’ Seeing her expression he smiled again. ‘I understand how you must feel about this, my dear, but you perhaps have been living amongst their kind for too long. You have forgotten your true self. When your shell of Beetle-ness has been cast aside, you shall emerge as the pure Spider, I assure you, and such thoughts will no longer trouble you.’

  Helmess returned home later than he had planned, delayed by unwelcome business. Honory Bellowern had summoned him peremptorily to another meeting at Helmess’s other townhouse. This time the Imperial Beetle’s manner had been shorn of the sly, his usual cunning almost submerged by the great tide of good fortune that had swept him up.

  ‘Well now, are you ready to receive the benefits of a friend of the Empire? They may be yours sooner than you think,’ Honory had declared, the moment they were alone together.

  ‘You mean this business with the Spiderlands,’ had been Helmess’s reply, sounding as disdainful as he could manage. In truth he suspected that the rift between Stenwold and the Aldanrael was far more of a boon to his own plans than to anything the Empire might be seeking, but he kept that well and truly to himself.