The Sea Watch sota-6 Read online

  ‘And where might the Bolas Islands be?’ he asked them. ‘Except on the other side of the Lash, that is?’

  ‘The Strand,’ Laszlo said, ‘as the long coast of the Spiderlands is called, has an enormous bay bitten out of the middle of it. The biggest Spider cities are located there, and all the major houses have holdings scattered about that bay. It’s about as big across as… oh, say the distance from Collegium to Vek. And a bit more, maybe. Anyway, the line of this bay must continue on under the water, like it’s a big bowl on the seabed, because there are shoals you have to watch for and, around the rim, some little fingers of it stick up above the sea. That’s the Bolas Islands, and on the biggest of those is Kanateris.’

  ‘What is it? Some noble’s retreat?’

  ‘Oh they’d love that.’ Laszlo’s intolerable grin grew ever wider. ‘No, Kanateris is pirate country. All the seaborne scum of the Spiderlands ends up there eventually, either to buy or sell.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Stenwold went to lean on the rail, and found it too low, of course. He settled for resting a foot on it, holding on to one of the shrouds of the jib for balance. The wind was steady and the sea was calm enough as a result. ‘And the Spider nobles, they just put up with that, do they?’ He saw from the Fly’s face that he was being foolish to ask, even before Laszlo answered.

  ‘There’s not a noble house that doesn’t keep a few privateers on the books, that call themselves pirates. Everyone says how terrible that Kanateris exists, but nobody does anything about it. This is the Spiderlands, Ma’rMaker, and they’re awfully clever about everything they do.’

  ‘I suppose…’ Stenwold paused, frowning. ‘Do I hear… music?’

  ‘That you do,’ Laszlo confirmed.

  It drifted towards them over the waters, as they neared the island and started cutting across the wind. At first he caught only tattered snatches of it, a melody and harmony he could not make out. Then they were past the island’s near point and tacking into the land-cupped harbour. The chief of the Bolas Islands was a mountain jutting from the waters, its slopes thick with tenacious greenery. In the centre of the bay was Kanateris, a town smeared up across two hundred yards of rock, and it was singing.

  Stenwold heard some strange, shifting pattern of strings at the heart of it, switching and changing tone in a pattern that followed no laws of music he knew. Above it, though, he heard two score instruments adding their voices, and each in perfect pitch with the others, each following the strings and working out fantastic elaborations on the simple, erratic changes. The sound swelled and broadened as they neared, woodwind and strings and horns each succeeding the last, and being succeeded, but the tune evolving and evolving again from moment to moment. It became vast and intricate and sad and wise, that music, like nothing tame Collegiate ears had ever heard: music made for and by men and women who lived in a world older and more vibrant than his own.

  Inapt music, he reflected. Collegium scholars might debate, but Stenwold knew for sure that, just as he knew how to fix a slipped gear or work a lock, so there were some things his own life would never quite encompass. He did not have to believe in magic to sense swathes of life that he would never truly enter. Even as Gude and the crew could move with the sea, and handle a sail with an instinct that no Apt mariner could quite match, so too was this astonishing lift and crescendo of music, that washed over him and through him, belittled him and humbled him, and spoke in a hundred voices, only a dozen of which he could understand. He felt something catch in his heart, catch and then pass on, as if to say, I have moved you: I hold you in the palm of my hand, and yet you cannot hear me, not truly.

  As the Tidenfree tacked back again, the music reached its utmost, the notes hanging in the air over the island like a vast, invisible cloud. Then it began dying away, even as the sails were being furled, even as a low galley ploughed out to meet them and pilot them the last stretch of the way. Stenwold realized that the last of the underlying strings had gone, and from that cue the other musicians ceased one by one, each one drawing their line of the symphony to its conclusion. He was now close enough to see a few musicians up on the rooftops, packing away their instruments, making ready to start the day.

  Even Laszlo had fallen silent in the face of that, and his voice held some last trace of reverence although, Apt as he was, he too was denied the music’s full breadth. ‘They string a couple of harps up, either side of the bay,’ he explained. ‘When the wind catches them, they sing and, if you’ve the ear for it, you can tell what the day’s weather will be, just from the pitch and sound. Of course, after a while people began playing along. They love their music, the Spiders, and any musician who’s particularly good can find herself a patron that way. So it got more and more, I reckon, until every morning most Spider ports greet the dawn like that. Quite something, isn’t it?’

  Stenwold didn’t trust himself to speak.

  ‘The Spiders have a special name for your kinden,’ Laszlo added. ‘They call you the “noisy, silent people”.’

  Still half-lost in the music’s last fading echoes, Stenwold nodded. ‘They may have a point.’ For a moment he and Laszlo stayed silent in the bows, as the oarsmen of the galley hauled away at the sweeps to bring the Tidenfree into dock. They were chained to their oars, Stenwold noted grimly, but then he should not be surprised at that.

  Looking from the toiling rowers on the galley to the town itself, he found his eye being led up and up. Kanateris was just strewn up the mountainside, as though all the buildings had been originally heaped at the top and left to distribute themselves all the way to the waterline.

  Seeing the direction of his gaze, Laszlo put in, ‘So, you can’t fly then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you do that trick where you climb up the sheer walls?’

  ‘Not that either. Never an Art I thought I’d have much use for.’

  ‘Splice me, Ma’rMaker, but what can you do?’ the Fly exclaimed.

  ‘Tread up stairs for as long as it takes.’ He gave a brief laugh. He was remembering Myna, which had also been a stepped city, albeit of a kinder gradient. He recalled the mad flight from the invading Wasps so long ago, how Tisamon had hauled and bullied him up step after step. If only I could have predicted what I’d face, one day, I’d not have complained.

  ‘Listen up!’ came Tomasso’s voice from the stern. The Tidenfree was now at one of the spindly piers that Kanateris extended into the water like long, rickety legs. Two of the crew were tying up, and their chief had just thrown a few coins down to the tug galley. Now he had his arms clasped behind his back, surveying his followers and looking every bit the pirate captain. When he had their attention, he went on: ‘Laszlo, Piera, you two and I will take our passenger to where he might learn what he needs to know. For the rest of you, nobody goes ashore. I want all hands waiting to take us away from here quickly, just in case. I don’t recognize most of the sails here.’

  He met Stenwold amidships, where a plank had been put out to reach the pier. ‘Master Maker, perhaps you should go arm yourself fully?’

  ‘Three or four weapons is this season’s Kanaterese fashion,’ Laszlo added.

  Stenwold nodded and was halfway to the hatch just as Despard appeared, staggering under the burden of his piercer.

  ‘I took the liberty,’ she grunted, proffering it with difficulty. The hefty, four-barrelled thing was almost as big as she was.

  ‘You certainly did,’ he agreed. He lifted it away from her to reveal a grin almost as big as Laszlo’s.

  ‘It’s a beauty,’ she announced, though it was clear that neither Tomasso nor Laszlo were overly sure of what it was. ‘Marlwright-Verwick design, isn’t it?’

  I never met an artificer but they loved explosive weapons, Stenwold considered. ‘You know more than me, anyway,’ he remarked. She had loaded it well, he saw, for the four javelin-like bolts were neatly placed. He rested the piercer on his shoulder, thinking it would be a strange thing to walk into a town like this, sword, piercer and miniature sna
pbow. He felt like a brigand. Still, Tomasso had two long knives and a handful of throwing blades stashed in his belt, and Laszlo had armed himself with a bladed hook on the end of a rope – a Fly weapon that Stenwold had no fond memories of.

  Piera turned out to be a sullen-looking Fly girl wearing a corselet of leather and chitin scales. She had a strung shortbow straining over one shoulder, and a fistful of stubby arrows thrust into one of her tall boots. A jagged scar across her forehead said that she was no stranger to a brawl.

  ‘Don’t we look the fearsome raiders,’ Tomasso declared. ‘Come on, Master Maker, let’s find you your answers.’ And he led the way to shore, over the timbers of the pier that creaked alarmingly when Stenwold followed.

  ‘Why no shore leave, chief?’ Laszlo asked as they set foot on to the brief strip of grey sand that served Kanateris as a beach.

  ‘Fern said “Old Friends” when I asked her about the future,’ Tomasso revealed. Seeing Stenwold’s look he grimaced. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t look to divination if we were off Collegium’s coast, Master Maker, but here in the Spider-lands I’ve learned to trust it. In this part of the world there’s scarce a ship’s captain that’ll put out to sea without a fortune teller’s seal on it.’

  There had been a brief bustle about the piers themselves, as the early risers from two dozen craft of around the Tidenfree’s size began stretching and yawning and calling lazy insults to one another. The streets themselves, steep tiers of uneven steps that Stenwold trod carefully, seemed mostly deserted. What he had at first taken for buildings were mostly little more than booths and shacks: cloth over timbers that were set into the sheer rock. Each was covered up with an identical grey screen that billowed slightly in the dawn breeze. Those few locals that were out so early looked ragged and dirty, obviously those who could not even boast a roof of canvas for the night. Still, they were Spider-kinden mostly, and that drew stares from Stenwold. Back in Collegium the least of the Spiders graciously deigned to pose as equals with College masters and town magnates. Now he saw why there were so many of their kind scattered across the Lowlands, away from their homelands. Here were Spiders of no family or import, the lowest and the meanest. What nearly broke the heart was that they were still beautiful, men and women both. They stood there in their tatters with their grimy, exposed skin, and he saw beggars that would have provided a graceful ornament to any Collegium Assembler’s arm. When they caught and held his gaze he guessed that begging was not their only source of income. But, then, Collegium morality has never applied to the Spiders.

  Something stirred near his foot and he jumped back, as hairy, spindly legs abruptly hooked up under one of the booths’ screens. In an instant there was a big grey spider there, as large as any of the Tidenfree’s crew, industriously unravelling and consuming the curtain’s threads to reveal the booth’s interior. He gazed up along the vertiginous street and saw that almost every booth now boasted a worker, carefully undoing what must have been an evening’s patient work.

  His expression drew a smirk from Laszlo.

  ‘Easy, Ma’rMaker,’ the Fly said, ‘they’re only house-spiders.’

  ‘Every spider of that size or larger within a tenday’s walk of Collegium was hunted down generations ago,’ Stenwold grunted. ‘You can still find old houses where the nursery has a grill over the window, for fear of them.’

  ‘Oh, a shame, that is,’ Tomasso spoke from over his shoulder, as they laboured up the slope. ‘There’s never an animal anywhere that’ll train up as well as a spider, and they find all manner of use for them in these parts. In fact, most Spider-kinden sea-captains will take a couple of fellows like these for the topmast. Curse it, but I remember when we were duelling ships in a storm with Ebris of the Ganbrodiel. One time we passed close enough to loose arrows at him, as he tried to board us, and I saw a nest of little beasties up in his rigging, mending his sails and straightening his lines.’

  Stenwold knew that he should not find this at all surprising or upsetting, since his own kind, with their Art, had domesticated so many different beetle species, after all. Still, there was none amongst those beetles that might creep up the wall one night, poisoned fangs aglitter…

  ‘Of course, everyone’s heard at least one story of someone who got dead drunk around here,’ Laszlo said cheerily, ‘And then they fell asleep in the gutter and someone found them next morning, drained like last night’s wineskin. But that’s just stories.’

  ‘You’re not helping,’ Stenwold told him. Laszlo’s answering grin replied that he knew it full well.

  Now, a hundred trudging steps up, the flimsy shacks either side of them were giving way to something more permanent. At least there were roofs on many of the little huts, made of thin strips of tightly interwoven wood. Still they had no stouter walls than cloth could supply them, and the only protection they had from any curious neighbour with a knife would be whatever arachnid sentry happened to be crouching alertly within.

  Kanateris was waking up now. The network of streets clinging to the island’s rocky sides filled up quickly, and Stenwold witnessed a strange dance of precedence, of people moving aside for each other to a pattern he could not discern. Everyone in the port except himself seemed to know exactly who to give way to and who to brazen past, and he could only stumblingly follow Tomasso’s lead. Every so often he saw an unresolvable difference, two groups that would not give way. Then hands found there way to sword hilts, insults were called, cloaks thrown back to show knives and armour. He saw no blood spilt, though. Always someone decided the game was not worth it.

  Because the streets were narrow he was frequently shouldered into one stall or another, enduring a moment of entreaty from its owner before they could get on their way again. Once he found himself surrounded by wicker cages, each one with its eight-legged denizen, whilst a Spider-kinden man in gleaming silks tried to persuade him that he badly needed such a guardian to watch over him as he slept. A second time he found himself walled in by fantastically complex tapestries, and the woman there offering to weave his future for him. Seeing her work, so full of symbols and allegory that he could not begin to guess at, he could almost believe it was true.

  The people of Kanateris proved a varied lot. Most were Spiders, but Stenwold reckoned almost half were of other kinden: Flies and Grasshoppers, Ants of strange cities and a good few he did not recognize. Once they quickly whisked themselves out of the way of a veiled Spider lady whose two guards were Mantis-kinden with pale, pearly skin, and who wore ornate silver slave-bracers as if they were a mark of pride.

  Looking back down towards the water he almost fell. The cavernous drop behind them seemed to drag at him. He had not realized they had climbed so high.

  ‘How far up are we going?’ he asked.

  ‘How far in,’ Tomasso corrected. ‘Your own people may give place to those with the highest houses, but here it’s who’s nearest the centre that’s important. Anyway, we’re close now.’ He stopped by the entrance to some kind of tavern, whose interior reached further back than Stenwold expected, cut into the rockface. It was sheer gloom inside, with only a few sulking lamps to ward off utter darkness.

  ‘Hoi, Grampos!’ Tomasso hailed, and there followed a disturbance inside, someone pushing their way through the half-dark between close-packed bodies. What emerged, like a grub into the sun, was something like a Spider-kinden: a man of their general look, but burlier and longer of limb. He was stripped to the waist, his exposed body almost woolly with coarse dark hair.

  ‘Well, if it’s not Skipper Tomasso,’ the man Grampos observed neutrally. He had hobbled, on his way out, and Stenwold saw that one of his ankles had been ruined a long time ago. The image of a slave’s shackles was unavoidable.

  ‘Grampos, does Tyresia the Prophetess still keep to her old haunts?’ Tomasso asked him.

  ‘Moonlight Circle now,’ Grampos replied. Stenwold had to fight with his accent to wrest sense from the words.

  The answer seemed to please Tomasso, anyway, and he flipped t
he retreating Grampos a coin, before they continued on their way. ‘She’s getting on in the world,’ the Fly captain commented. ‘Always good news that, when someone owes you a favour.’

  ‘Prophetess?’ Stenwold said doubtfully. ‘I’m not sure…’

  ‘Master Maker, these are the Spiderlands. Real magicians, if you accept there being such, would never be so coarse as to announce it. So: anyone calling herself a prophetess is something else entirely.’

  Their course changed now, creeping between stalls perched along precipitous ledges, or even heading down a few steps – heading further in.

  They found Tyresia within a great tent of coloured silks, which was pitched to one side of a broader street. Her enclosed space was nonetheless cool and light, with shimmering clear panels set into the woven ceiling. She was an elegant Spider-kinden woman who looked to Stenwold’s eyes to be of at least middle years, and was therefore surely much older. She wore a plain robe of golden brown, with a single brooch shaped like a butterfly her only ornament, and thereby made the simplicity seem sumptuous. Tomasso and his party waited at a polite distance while she finished her conversation with a pair of copper-skinned men Stenwold identified as Fire Ants. Money changed hands, given not to Tyresia herself but into the palm of a Fly-kinden girl who fluttered out from a back room on cue. Then the Spider matriarch reclined back on her couch and waved Tomasso over.

  There was another couch, but Tomasso sat on the floor, leaving a low table between him and his hostess. Stenwold, glad of a respite for his legs, lowered himself down beside Tomasso, while Laszlo lounged in the entrance, close enough to hear what was being said. A scrabble from above indicated that Piera had taken up a watch from somewhere around roof level.

  The Fly servant, or at least so Stenwold hoped she was, came out with a tray of small cups. There were rooms and rooms extending behind Tyresia, Stenwold saw, but only odd glimmers or shafts of light gave anything away about them. When he looked down again there were two thimble-sized receptacles before him, one steaming with something dark, the other containing something clear.