The Sea Watch

Eight

‘Boats are like the kinden that make them,’ Tomasso expounded. Around them, the crew of the Tidenfree was casting off. From below decks the surprising sound of a solid little engine was thudding, dragging the ship backwards out of dock, whilst a half-dozen Fly-kinden had fluttered aloft, ready to bring out sail. A remarkably stocky woman was ordering them about in a voice that would have done credit to a leadshotter.

Stenwold nodded politely, sensing that Tomasso’s metaphor was about to give his people a rough time.

‘Beetle boats,’ Tomasso continued, sure enough, ‘are fat and solid and slow, begging your pardon.’ He grinned a glint of gold Stenwold’s way. ‘Spider ships are pretty and they move well, but they’re far too clever and they can never go anywhere the straight way. Mantis boats are quick and vicious, and it’s impossible to steer them anywhere.’

That brought a bark of unmeant laughter from Stenwold, although he felt guilty about it afterwards. Tomasso’s smile widened.

‘And what about Fly-kinden ships, Master Tomasso?’ Stenwold asked him. ‘Tell me about those, will you not?’

‘Oh, they’re fast, Master Maker, and they’re good for any seas, and they’ll make use of any trick to get where they’re going.’

Stenwold looked astern, seeing the Collegium harbour receding. This was the first time he had ever gone to sea. His travelling had been towards the Empire, always.

‘If you plan on killing or kidnapping me, now’s the time,’ he said evenly.

Tomasso roared with laughter that was twice as big as he was. ‘Oh, surely, Master Maker, surely, but we’re as good as our word. You can give us something that only a high-up of Collegium can, and it’s something that we can’t steal. In return we can get you to places that only a third-generation villain knows about. Now, come.’ He strutted across the deck, beckoning Stenwold to follow. The swell was building, now that they were beyond the sea wall, and the Beetle had to reach out for his balance a little before he was able to proceed. He heard a little smirking from the crew.

‘People you should know,’ Tomasso called back to him. ‘At the tiller is our sailing master, Gude.’ He indicated the broad Fly woman, who gave Stenwold a stony nod. ‘If she ever tells you to do anything aboard this ship, then you do it. I may be the head of the family, but once we’re under sail, her voice overrules mine.’ Gude’s stern demeanour made Stenwold believe it.

‘You’ve met Despard, of course. She’s below at the moment with the engine, and that’s her doman. Your other chaperone is…’ Tomasso glanced about, and then bellowed, ‘Laszlo! Get your backside on deck!’

‘Right behind you, chief.’ The young Fly dropped from the rigging without warning, making Tomasso’s hand twitch for his knife-hilt.

‘You, you troublemaker, can look after our guest, and make sure he doesn’t end up over the rail. Laszlo’s our factor, Master Maker. He buys and sells ashore. While we’re on board, though, he might as well look after you, so ask him for anything you need.’

‘Thank you.’

‘And I meant it about the rail. This ship wasn’t designed with your kinden in mind.’ Tomasso’s gaze took in a railing that would come up to Stenwold’s knee.

A ship designed for people half my size who can fly. He made the requisite mental adjustments.

‘Oh, and you should meet Fernaea as well, to make sense of some answers I’ll give to some questions you’ll certainly ask a little later,’ the bearded Fly continued, dragging Stenwold, and Laszlo, back towards the bows again, where stood the grey-robed Fly girl who had been tending to the sleeping old man on the Floating Game. ‘Fern, this is Master Stenwold Maker, magnate of Collegium.’

She nodded at him, as reserved and close-faced as her Moth-kinden name suggested.

‘She’s… a seer,’ Stenwold guessed.

‘Oh, well done. You’re a man of uncommon experience, then, for a Beetle?’

‘You might say so,’ agreed Stenwold. Fernaea was staring at him, defensive and tense, and he wondered what mischance had brought a Moth-trained magician into the ragged crew of a pirate ship. Nothing happy, that was certain.

‘What about your…?’

‘My uncle, you mean. Himself,’ Tomasso finished. ‘Isseleema’s an old friend, which means that, when she’s accepted a hefty purse to look after Himself, I can be reasonably sure that’s just what she’ll do.’ His cheer vanished abruptly. ‘Time, Master Maker, it’s just a myth to a lout like Laszlo here, but you and I are old enough to hear its wings on the air. Himself… Himself has time sitting, counting by his bedside, and there’s no magic nor artifice on all the wide seas that can do anything about that.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Stenwold said automatically.

‘We’re all sorry,’ Tomasso acknowledged. ‘But it’s my job to find us a future, and if the best means to that is helping you, then here’s my hand on it.’

He didn’t offer his hand, so Stenwold chalked that one up to Figures of speech (Fly-kinden pirates). While he was doing so, Tomasso looked him up and down critically.

‘You’ll pass, for where we’re going. For such a Big Man you dress down nicely.’

Stenwold was wearing his hard-weather gear: a suit of reinforced canvas and leather with toolstrips and pouches, such as an artificer would wear to go to war in. He had an oilcloth cloak over that, to keep as much of the sea out as would prove practical. The Fly-kinden around him all wore long-coats, or what amounted to long-coats on them: shiny with wax and oil, wool-lined on the inside, appropriate clothing for the rain and the cold wind. Most also had a woollen cap on, save for Laszlo, sporting a leather helm, and Gude, who went bare-headed, the breeze tugging ineffectually at her short light-dyed hair.

‘You’re armed?’ Tomasso asked, and when Stenwold twitched back his cape to show his sword-hilt, the Fly sniffed. ‘Anything else?’

‘In my luggage,’ Stenwold allowed.

‘Good. The port we’re headed for, it’s not good to be too subtle about these things.’

‘And where are we headed, Master Tomasso?’

‘Kanateris.’ The name meant nothing to Stenwold, save maybe for its last syllable.

‘Is that near Seldis?’ He racked his brains for the ports along the Silk Road.

‘Oh, we’re not pointing ourselves east, Master Maker. That’s the long way round.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re an educated man, so you see the same maps I do. It’s quicker to cut straight south, if you want to see where the Spiders live.’

Which is correct, of course, and yet we don’t. Stenwold had learned that, and not questioned it, because sea travel had never been of interest to him. It goes to show how knowledge is never wasted. One of the College’s mottos, that, and how very true. ‘Enlighten me,’ he said.

The Tidenfree was making good headway now, the coastline receding smartly. He would have said, the familiar coastline, but of course he was no seagoer, so it could have been Solarno or Seldis or some city on the moon for all he would recognize the view.

‘Laszlo.’ Tomasso singled out the younger Fly. ‘Make yourself useful to Master Maker. I need to go and plot our course with Gude.’

The young Fly strutted up to Stenwold, the salt wind tugging at his coat. ‘You want the secret, Master?’

‘Is it a secret?’

‘Oh, isn’t it? But if the chief says tell, I’ll tell. Where would you sail, in order to do business with the Spider-lands, Ma’rMaker?’ Laszlo gestured expansively, as if trying to encompass all of creation with his hands. His rapid speech condensed ‘Master Maker’ into a babble. ‘Why, down the coast, of course, hoping the ships of Felyal and Kes aren’t too hungry, past the forts of of Everis and into Seldis or Siennis, a long old way. And there you’d trade with Spiders who’d charge a fortune for the goods up the Silk Road, yet pay a pittance for yours, for the chief occupation of everyone in those cities is taking bribes and levying taxes. Believe me, I know. Or, if you were a foolish man, you’d take your ship down the desert coast and look to sell to the Spiderlands direct. Know what happens to people who do that?’

‘They don’t come back,’ Stenwold suggested.

Laszlo nodded energetically. ‘Not cos the Spiders are mean, you understand, but it’s a death warrant to go that way and trade, not knowing how they do things. Eventually you bribe too much or too little, bribe the wrong man, say something you never realized was an insult, fail to compliment the women, drink in the wrong taverna. The next day, well, you’re lucky if you’re in chains and gone from being a trader to being stock in trade, if you get me. So your lot, all you get are the dog-ends from Seldis, and at a ruinous poor price, too.’

‘But you know how to get on with the Spiders?’

‘We could sail along the desert coast with no trousers and we’d get away with it,’ Lazslo replied. It was hard to tell just how old he was. He looked like a man of twenty years, but his enthusiasm was six years younger. ‘However, we don’t need to. There are two reasons why even those who know better still sail the coast road to Seldis, Ma’rMaker. Firstly, once you’re out of sight of the coast, it’s cursed hard to plot a course just by sun and stars. You reach the far shore and you’re a hundred miles from where you should be, and you with your water running low, and who knows what family owns the next port. More than that, there are the weed seas. The sea’s got forests, like the land does, with weed so tall it reaches from where the sun don’t shine all the way to the open air. Your ship gets caught in that, there’s no steering out of it, and then you starve or die of thirst or… well, they say there’s things that live there that’ll soon put you out of your misery. Other problem is the weather. It’s rare enough to get across without a storm, and I’d bet you a bit to a Helleron central that we’ll see one this trip. Tear a ship apart, bring the mast down on you, rip your sails off, they can. Wind, lightning like the sky’s on fire, waves that come between you and the sun-’

‘Sea-kinden,’ Gude interrupted unexpectedly.

Laszlo snorted. ‘Nobody believes in sea-kinden,’ he said. ‘And, with all that storm going on, who’d need them? Faced with that kind of weather, the coast road looks awfully inviting.’

‘But you’ve got a way through?’ Stenwold prompted.

‘Oh, surely,’ Laszlo confirmed. ‘Come up and stand by Gude now, Ma’rMaker.’

‘Stenwold. Just call me Stenwold,’ the Beetle insisted, clumping up from the deck level to the wheel. Gude gave Laszlo a warning glare, but he ignored her blithely.

‘Now, I’m betting you know what these toys are,’ he said.

They were battered and weather-worn, not the workshop-mint pieces that he had seen previously, but Stenwold was artificer enough to pick them out. ‘I see an absolute clock and a gimballed compass,’ he said.

‘And with their help, and charts, and a reckoning taken from the sky, and some fairly taxing mathematics, Ma’r Stenwold, we find our way to wherever we want to be.’

‘And you also calculate your way through storms, do you?’

Laszlo still smiled, but abruptly it was the smile of an older man. ‘Oh, Master Stenwold Maker, this is the other part of the secret.’ He leant close, forcing Stenwold to bend nearer to him. ‘Do you believe in magic?’ he said.

Stenwold paused a long while before answering. His instinct was ‘No,’ of course, and nearly any other Beetle would not have hesitated to say so, but he had seen too much, encountered too many other kinden. ‘Yes,’ he said at last, and reluctantly.

Laszlo’s smile changed again, without moving, like the sea colours in the sunlight. ‘Well,’ he said, with a little less flippancy and a little more respect. ‘Magic? Now there’s something. I personally find it hard to credit, but there comes a point when you have to say, “I see that something’s making something happen, whether it’s magic or not.” Yes?’

‘Yes,’ Stenwold agreed.

‘Well, when we hit a storm, as I reckon you’ll be seeing, we ship the mast and Despard sets the engine to run, but it’s Fern there who calls the course. She’s a dab hand at reading storms, Ma’rMaker. But this is how the Bloodfly and his crew have skipped the seas for a generation now, ever since your lot first built those clocks. We never put out without an artificer and a seer, and a halfway decent backup for both, and with that we’re as free as anyone in this world, and we’ll take you to Kanateris in a fifth of the time, and you’ll find all the answers that there are to be had.’

Jodry Drillen was celebrating. He had a great deal to celebrate, having beaten Helmess Broiler, and a handful of other hopefuls, to be appointed the new Speaker for the Assembly. Moreover, his agents across the city had already begun to characterize his spell in office in glowing terms, before the ink was even dry on his letters of appointment. Not for him the fate of poor old Lineo Thadspar, who had lived to see his city under siege, his world shattered by war, and who had died without seeing it put right. Jodry was a man bringing peace and prosperity, people were telling one another excitedly – as though he had come with both commodities in a bag, to be given out in handfuls. Just now, everyone loved fat, jovial, avuncular Jodry Drillen, and he was capitalizing on it for all he was worth.

Arianna had to admit there were worse people to throw a party. Jodry was a good host: neither gaudy in his ostentation, nor parsimonious in his hospitality. He trod a fine enough line that a Spider-kinden could come to his grand townhouse and be neither offended nor bored. She had to admire his choice of guests, too: there was a delicate balance of Assemblers, ambassadors, magnates and wits, enough to keep the conversation moving. A few of his selections betrayed Jodry’s barbed sense of humour, for there was one of the interchangeable Vekken there, awkwardly unarmed but standing in one corner with clenched fists, no doubt complaining inside his head to his colleagues elsewhere in the city. The loathing in his eyes was not for any of his Collegiate hosts, but for the Tseni woman Jodry had brought in to balance him. It was a bold move of Jodry’s but, surrounded by such cheer and licence, the two Ants were cowed into keeping their dislike to a civil silence.

Even better, and greeted lavishly when he walked through the door, Helmess Broiler himself had been invited. As Jodry had made this publicly known, his adversary could not have stayed away without being jeered at. His arrival, to the covered smiles of at least half the room, had displayed a kind of wounded dignity. The sparkling, bejewelled woman on his arm had also served to deflect the mockery. Only Arianna smiled further on seeing her. Oh you have a Spider-kinden woman on your arm, do you? It’s a shame that Beetle eyes aren’t so good for the fine details, Master Broiler, for she’s no true-blood Spider. There’s some halfway blood in that one. The thought was petty but, following Stenwold’s departure, she had a fair store of pettiness to expend, and she was not sparing with it.

There had been a string of entertainers performing in the house’s large common room, Fly acrobats and jugglers, an old Spider-kinden man who sang, then a pair of Beetle clowns whose satirizing would have offended half the room, Jodry included, had it not been done so cleverly. Now a tall, sallow woman came up, that Arianna recognized as a Grasshopper-kinden, either an imperial fugitive or a rare traveller from the Commonweal. She carried some elongated stringed instrument, which she tuned with a few practised tweaks of her fingers. Arianna decided that she had heard enough music for one evening, it never being one of her joys, so she slipped out and up the stairs to the roof garden. Here, against a tastefully gaslit trellis maze of twining plants, a few other guests had taken refuge, either for trysts or private words. Arianna found a stretch of balcony between two spiny-leaved shrubs and looked out over the sleeping city: the streets of Collegium picked out in lamps and lit-up windows.

It was strange to think that Stenwold was not in the city. It made her wonder why she herself still was.

She heard someone step behind her and she tensed out of old instinct. Once a spy… The needles of bone that her Art gifted her with had already sprung from her knuckles.

‘Missing Master Maker, my dear?’

She straightened at the tone, because there were different kinds of authority. Some were assumed, like the titles that the Beetles loved to bedeck each other with. Some were innate.

‘Lord-Martial Teornis,’ she said, turning. She had seen him before, greeting Jodry. Their host had been resplendent in a white robe draped with folded cloth of gold, whereas Teornis, ever the gracious guest, had come dressed one step down, in a robe of black hung with red but in the same Collegium style. If there was a circlet of rubies half hidden amid the dark curls of his brow, well, he wore it well and he would be forgiven it. For a man who could have stolen the evening from under Jodry’s feet, it was pure diplomacy.

She felt dowdy in comparison with him. She had been too long away from her own kind, and too lowly and poor, even then.

‘I should probably tell you not to “lord” me, but frankly it’s a pleasure to find someone who gets our titles right. I’ve been Master-lord-magnate-chief-Spider too often in recent months. These Beetles can never understand the virtues of simplicity.’

She smiled, still shy of him. He was Aristoi, a scion of the Aldanrael family that held a solid slice of the power and influence in Seldis and Siennis. Her family had been nothing, mere dirt compared to him, hoi polloi of the worst order. When she was still young, they had become nothing more than dust at last, caught in the jostling of two noble houses and milled like flour.

‘I’m surprised to catch you alone, my dear, for I hear you’re quite the social celebrant these days. Old Stenwold’s been a good step for you to climb.’

‘I doubt he’d like to be described that way,’ she replied defensively.

‘Come now.’ Teornis stepped forward, almost close enough to brush her shoulder as he stood beside her at the balcony rail. ‘Quite a sight, these Beetle cities. All that heavy stone, all those glorious artificial lamps. Such a contradictory people.’

She felt frozen by his closeness. It was not a matter of attraction although, had he wished, no doubt he could have drawn her to him. It was pure, rank fear, the fear that any low-birth Spider-kinden learned, if they survived. Do not tangle with the Aristoi. Obey them, respect them, but, most of all, avoid them. You are nothing to them. Her mother’s voice, her dead mother who should have listened better to her own advice.

‘But we were talking about the social advantages of bedding Stenwold Maker,’ he continued, still looking out at the city. His smile was patiently amused, as though watching a clever child perform some prodigal task. ‘You can’t be so very touchy about that, surely? Sentiment?’

‘You’d pretend we have no feelings, Lord Teornis?’ she asked, forcing the words. In that moment she wanted him to drop this pretence, to turn on her like a lord of the Aristoi and cast her aside like the ragged renegade she was. Instead he smiled at her, as genuine a smile as anyone ever practised in the mirror.

‘We alone are gifted, amongst all the kinden, are we not? We feel as much as they, we love, we hate, we take joy, and yet we never lose our minds or practicalities amid the sea of our emotions. Small wonder that, alone of all the rulers of the old times, we still possess our palaces and our slaves. Feel what you want for Stenwold Maker, my dear, but don’t let that cripple you.’

‘And I thought you liked Stenwold.’

He laughed at that, with unfeigned delight as far as she could tell. ‘Oh, I do, truly. He’s a remarkable man. He’s more than half Spider, inside his head. A loyal ally, a man of principle, a halfway decent intelligencer, and an inspiration to his underlings. The man’s a constant source of amusement. I don’t mock you, Arianna. If you were going to ride to prominence on the wings of a Beetle, you chose the right man.’

She folded her arms. It was impossible to believe he was not still making fun of her, despite the sincerity in his expression. ‘I’m glad you approve.’

‘One might ask where now, of course?’ He was gazing over the city again, lost in contemplation. ‘You must feel the sides of your cage here begin to chafe – being what you are.’

‘And what am I, Lord Teornis?’ she demanded, expecting him to name her low-born, fugitive, a whore even, waiting for him to put the blade in.

‘A Rekef spy.’

That left her speechless, and her expression made him grin boyishly.

‘Oh, not now, not any more. My dear girl, you look so horrified that I almost wonder if I’ve hit on something I’d not known. No, no, we all know you’ve put away the old black and gold since the war, but still, do you imagine anyone’s forgotten?’

All she could think was that he was going to discredit her somehow – some way of ruining Stenwold. ‘So what?’ she got out. ‘It’s no secret.’

‘Nor is it a criticism,’ he rebuked her gently. ‘A Rekef-trained agent with a working knowledge of the Wasp intelligence networks, Master Maker’s lucky to have you. Assuming, of course, that he’s putting all that fine training of yours to work.’

Again she was silent, though for different reasons. She had never noticed any of Teornis’s agents watching her, she had not felt anyone fingering the pages of her life. Of course, given who he was, she would not have done.

‘Owing to certain… developments within the Empire we’ve lost a fair few of our deep-cover people within the Rekef. Either dead or forced to flee. Bothersome, as I’m sure you can imagine, since Master Maker and I agree that the Empire won’t be mending its nest for ever.’

This time he waited until the prolonged silence forced some words out of her.

‘Are you making me an offer, Lord Teornis?’

He looked directly at her. ‘Girl, you’re clearly very resourceful. You escaped the Spiderlands. You survived the Empire. You maintained a cover here in Collegium, and you led one of this city’s cleverest sons about by the nose. You then dropped the black and gold and lived to tell about it, and you’re currently living the high life as a socialite and a war hero. Not a bad run, given the start the world gave you. So why be surprised if my family can see a use for your talents?’

‘You want me to leave Stenwold?’

He shook his head, his smile sardonic. ‘Oh, dear, no. Think before you speak, dear girl. You’d be so much less use to us if you did that.’ He held up a hand. ‘Before we witness any upsurge of sentiment, I’ll stress my hope that Maker would never find out. Under ideal conditions, he’d enjoy a long life and go to his grave without suspecting. We’re allies, after all, and, more than that, I like the man, but that doesn’t mean that my family wouldn’t relish having someone close to him who can, let’s say, make the occasional well-timed suggestion.’

‘Well, Lord Teornis, forgive me if I haven’t had your upbringing,’ Arianna replied. There was not much room at the balcony between Jodry’s foliage, but she put what distance she could between them. ‘I, however, must talk in more mercantile terms. How much did you imagine you could buy me from him for?’

‘Adoption,’ he said, and in the quiet that followed he beckoned over one of Jodry’s servants to light his pipe. It was a Beetle habit, and not even a sophisticated one, except when Teornis was involved. She imagined, numbly, that the practice would suddenly become fashionable now. The smoke from the brass bowl of his pipe was sweet, not the old burnt smell from Stenwold’s study.

‘Of course I’m serious,’ he continued at last. ‘It’s a fair price in exchange for what you’ve built here in Collegium. If I set the best of my agents on to it, they’d never quite reach the heights of influence you can now command, not if they slept with the entire Assembly, men and women of all kinden. And besides, aren’t you bored? To be servant of just one master: what Spider was ever happy with a life that uncomplicated? And I’d rather you wrote your reports for me, rather than sending them back to your former Rekef masters. At least Stenwold and I are on the same side.’

‘Adoption…’ she murmured. Nobody belonging to another kinden could quite understand the scale of it: he might as well have offered her the moon. It meant nobility. It meant that she would become Arianna of the Aldanrael. It meant filling all those gnawing absences that had plagued her childhood.

‘Think about it,’ Teornis urged her. ‘You don’t need to make a decision now. In fact, you might never have to choose between old Stenwold and me. Report to me, live with him, and let’s do our work as though we were partners in the same business. I’d hope the time might never come when you would have to discover where your true loyalties lie.’

He gave her a brief bow – more than a jumped-up commoner should ever have merited – and then he was off to greet some Assembler in warm tones.

Arianna clung to the balcony as though she were drowning.

Stenwold was not taking well to seaborne life. The motion of the boat kept him constantly off balance, and he had already almost pitched over the side more than once. He now sat miserably before the mast as the Fly-kinden crew flew and skittered across the woodwork all around him. Three days out now and, according to Tomasso, making good time towards this mythical Kanateris, there was nothing to see but sea.

That was what he found most disturbing: horizon to horizon there was only the sky and the waters. It felt like falling. My kinden must be more earth-bound than I thought. Give me a dozen seers and seven different clocks and compasses, and I’d still be hugging the coast, thank you very much. He couldn’t see that the Flies would fare any better than he would, if some catastrophe should suddenly strike the ship. He doubted that any human being alive would have the stamina to make it ashore from here.

‘’Ware weather!’ came the shrill call from the bows. Stenwold’s head jerked up. The little robed figure of Fernaea had its arms outstretched, facing along the ship with her face shadowed by her cowl, a Moth-kinden in miniature.

‘What course?’ Gude bellowed back.

‘Two points starboard and tie everything down!’ the Fly seer returned. Stenwold noticed Gude take a deep breath.

‘You heard her! Get everything ready for the Lash!’

The crew, who had seemed to be busy enough a moment before, were abruptly in a frenzy. They swarmed across the deck, leaving nothing loose behind them, in such a fervour that Stenwold was mildly surprised not to find himself stowed in a locker.

He stood up, leaning on the mast for purchase. ‘What should I do?’ he asked.

Laszlo touched down beside him, without warning. ‘Depends, Ma’rMaker. You reckon you’re any good at climbing rigging?’

‘I’ve been nothing but ballast so far.’

‘Ballast? Good nautical term,’ Laszlo grinned.

‘What’s the Lash, Laszlo?’

The grin widened, though not without a little tension underlying it. ‘It’s the sea out hereabouts, Maker, when the storm takes it. It’s why nobody but us does anything so stupid as venture this way. Come forward a moment.’ He skipped off, leaving Stenwold to lumber behind him, up to where Fernaea was standing.

‘What’s the news, Fern? How long?’ Laszlo was asking.

She had her hands on the railing, staring ahead, but she glanced back as he hailed her. Stenwold was almost surprised to see that she had blue eyes, rather than the white orbs of a Moth. ‘See for yourself,’ was all she said.

The sky ahead of the Tidenfree was fast losing the light. A darkness was gathering there like a swarm of locusts, a great weight of cloud blotting out the blue. The wind was freshening, too, gusting now as a pale harbinger of the storm.

Stenwold could think of nothing but the occasion when they had destroyed the Pride, in the yards outside Helleron. The rail automotive’s engine had called up a storm when it exploded, returning its lightning to the sky.

The crew behind him were furling the sail. They no longer coursed freely through the air but swung from rope to rope of the rigging, and he saw the wind contending with them over the disposition of the canvas. Seeing the crew down on deck securing themselves with lines, Stenwold pointed to them.

‘Should I be doing that?’ He found that he had to raise his voice a little, as the lines all around them started to keen as the wind tugged at them.

‘Can you fly?’ Laszlo demanded.

‘No!’

‘No point, then. You’d end up in the sea and we’d never be able to haul you out during the Lash. At least we folk can just drag along in the air like a kite until we’re hauled in. Mar’Maker, maybe you’d better get below.’

Stenwold bared his teeth. ‘Is there nothing I can do? I’m sick of being luggage.’ He ducked as something swung close to his head, and then Tomasso had skidded to a halt beside them.

‘Someone go kick that idiot Despard,’ the bearded Fly shouted. ‘Because the sail’s down but the engine isn’t up, and we’ve got about ten minutes to put that right.’

Laszlo and Stenwold exchanged glances. Overhead, the day was being blotted into dusk by the clouds’ vanguard.

‘Now that I can help with,’ the Beetle declared, and hurried as best he could towards the hatch, watching Laszlo disappear through it ahead of him with enviable speed.

He had got just three steps down towards the cramped confines below, when something solid struck the ship and sent every plank, spar and line thrumming. Stenwold’s boots skidded from under him and he took the rest of the stairs all at once, keeping his feet at the bottom by jamming his arms against the narrow walls. Laszlo was hovering in the air before him, utterly still though the walls of belowdecks lurched about him,

‘What was that?’ Stenwold demanded, although he already knew, in truth.

‘That was the Lash!’ Laszlo told him, already retreating down the little wooden corridor, and Stenwold followed, bending almost double. He could hear others of the crew pitching below: heading, he guessed, for the cargo hold to tie everything down and get themselves out of the weather. He just hoped the weather didn’t come indoors after them.

They were abruptly in a room large enough for him to stand in, and his best guess was that it was at the very stern of the ship. From the fittings about the walls, he saw that there had been a big steam engine in here once, but the oil-burner they had hauled in to replace it was half the size, leaving enough room for even a Beetle-kinden to get round it. The engine was a Collegium-made piece, modified over and over by small and nimble fingers. Despard was half obscured by it, artificer’s goggles down over her eyes and a wrench in one hand.

‘Chief wants to know why so quiet,’ Laszlo told her cheerily.

She shot him a vile look that the goggles only helped send on its way. ‘Seized up since we left harbour, can you believe?’

‘I can believe chief wants it working right now, Despot.’ Laszlo’s sanguine calm was already getting on Stenwold’s nerves and, from her present reaction, he wondered how Despard had managed to share a ship with him so long.

‘Can I help?’ he asked.

‘You know engines?’ she snapped back.

He bit down on the part where he reeled off his College accredits and just said, ‘Yes. What can I do?’

‘Give me tools when I ask for them, hold things down where I tell you, and punch Laszlo in the face if he so much as opens his mouth.’ She ducked back behind the engine.

The ship lurched again, and stayed lurched, the room canting twenty degrees off vertical. Stenwold proceeded hand over hand, hanging from the remnants of the old steam engine, finding Despard’s tools as her tight voice rapped out a demand. He could hear the whole Tidenfree complaining as the wind dragged at it, timbers shifting one against the other. The floor beneath him was never still, jumping and sloping without pattern. Each time it moved, the two Fly-kinden were momentarily airborne, wings blurring by pure instinct, keeping them steady. Stenwold could only cling on and curse the limitations of his kinden.

‘Stand back!’ Despard shouted. Stenwold did his best, squeezing himself into a corner as she dragged down on a lever with all her weight, wings flurrying for extra purchase.

With a roar the engine came alive, filling the room with the smell of burning. From above, Stenwold could hear Fernaea’s voice somehow, high and clear even over the tearing wind that was making every rope on the ship shriek and sing. Even Gude’s bellowing replies were lost, but the seer’s directions rode the wind like a nightmare. Stenwold imagined her clinging to the very point of the prow, the stormwinds catching and dragging at her grey robe, eyes facing the skies, and somehow, somehow, working some magic to find their way through the storm. And backed by good Collegium artifice, no less. These Flies have stolen the best of both worlds. No wonder they’ve survived on the seas for three generations.

The Tidenfree shuddered again, the vibration of the engine merging with the shaking of the timbers as the ship began abruptly turning into the wind. There was a sound like a great vat boiling over, hissing and steaming, and a moment later Stenwold realized that it was the ferocity of the rain pounding the decks above him. The ship boomed hollowly as another fist of wind struck it, and water was running down the stairs and washing round the soles of his boots.

‘Are we sinking?’ he cried.

‘Just the rain, Ma’rMaker!’ Laszlo assured him. ‘If it gets too bad, we’ll pump.’

Stenwold had gone to the entrance, hunching over with the vague intention of going up on deck. The two Flies shouted at him.

‘I can’t just stay here,’ he said. The sound from above was unimaginable, the wind shrieking through the lines, the waters crashing and thundering. He could not imagine what it might look like from abovedecks. If he discovered three sea monsters tearing the vessel apart between their pincers, he would not have been surprised. Still, it could not be worse than being trapped down here and not knowing. The very planks beneath his feet were grinding and shifting, never level, tilted now this way, now that. The sea: he could feel the sea trying to get him, with teeth and claws grating on the other side of the hull.

‘You’ll be over the side in an instant, if you go up there!’ Laszlo warned him. ‘Most of the crew will be below now. Only Fern and Gude and maybe a couple more to help Gude with the oar. Everyone else will be down in the hold or the cabins.’

‘What if we sink?’ Stenwold demanded.

‘Then we drown!’ Despard snapped. Stenwold felt his legs give way as the floor shifted again. Abruptly he was sitting down in the water that washed back and forth in sympathy with the waves outside. It shows how much we turn our back on the sea. He had never thought of drowning, not once, but now the idea seemed so terrifying to him that his innards were locking up with it. He had thought to die on a sword’s point, perhaps, or burned by the sting-fire of a Wasp, or falling from the sky with the tatters of an airship’s gasbag torn open above him, but not this: not dragged into the pitch cold dark of the sea.

‘Where will the wind take us?’ he demanded. ‘To what shore?’

‘The wind takes us nowhere while this engine’s running!’ Despard declared.

‘Other than that,’ Laszlo added, ‘to no shore any man knows. When the Lash is driving, it’ll drag you all the way out into the grand ocean. If you’re lucky, your corpse might wash up on the Atoll Coast, but other than that… nobody ever sees you or your sails again. Some say there’s a whole graveyard of broken ships out there, far past the horizon. Maybe some day we’ll go look.’

Stenwold clung to the old engine fittings. It was not illness that afflicted him, not the sea-malady he had heard of. Beetles had iron stomachs, as a rule, and even the pitching of the waters was not undoing his constitution. No, his sickness was entirely bred of fear. We have no business being out here. I have no business being out here. Beetles were never meant to go to sea and Master Failwright could go hang himself, if he wasn’t already dead. Why did I think this was a good idea?

‘Tell me…’ He had to speak, had to wrench his mind away from thoughts of the grasping waters. ‘The Atoll Coast, you’ve been there?’ A casual conversation, save that he was shouting at the top of his voice to get the words heard over the storm.

‘Not us!’ Despard called back. ‘Himself did a lot of business there, I think, but the chief’s contacts are mainly down the Strand.’

‘She means the Spiderlands coast, Ma’rMaker,’ Laszlo put in. The floor was abruptly sloping a good thirty degrees the other way, and Stenwold clung on gamely to avoid sliding away into what was now the low corner of the room. The two Flies had merely taken to the air briefly again: every time the ship around them shifted and shook, their wings flickered to lift them from the deck and keep them stable. They did it without even thinking, a Fly-kinden’s version of sea-legs. Stenwold was bitterly envious.

‘You never went to Tsen, then?’ he asked. Tsen. Collegium politics. The business with the Vekken. Anything else but the sea. Not the drowning hungry sea, at all.

‘Never. Heard of it, though,’ Laszlo stated. ‘Why?’

‘I heard they have some… interesting boats there,’ Stenwold got out. The water was like a little river flowing into the room now. Despard flitted over to the engine and began making adjustments.

‘They’re mad there,’ she called over her shoulder.

‘Submersibles!’ Stenwold shouted, like a curse.

‘Come over here, Beetle, and make yourself useful!’ was her answer to that. He hauled himself towards her, half falling down, half climbing up. He saw that she had rigged up something with a handle.

‘You use those big arms of yours to get this going!’ she ordered him. ‘Pump, Beetle, pump!’

‘Where does the water go?’

‘Out! There’s a set of double-lock valves. Don’t worry, it all goes out and nothing gets in.’ As he started working the pump, surprisingly heavy work for something manufactured for Fly-kinden, she yelled, conversationally, ‘Submersibles, is it?’

‘I hear so!’

‘Well, I heard the same,’ she admitted. ‘Never believed it, though. You hear all sorts of odd about the Atoll Coast. Himself told Tomasso something, ’cos now he won’t go near it. Different world, they say. Ports that aren’t on any maps! Sea reaches that eat up ships! Sea-kinden, that sing you on to rocks and then pick your bones!’

Stenwold let the solid routine of the pump engross him, yet he could see it having no effect on the water swirling about his boots. For all he knew, it was just a joke at his expense – or simply to keep his mind busy. He tried to think about the Tseni ambassadors, the Tseitan, the damage it would do if the Vekken now walked away from Collegium. He found that, just then, he didn’t care. He could return home to find the black and gold waving over the Amphiophos, and all he would care about would be that he was back on dry land.