The Sea Watch Read online

  ‘No, chief, but—’

  ‘So no argument.’ A gesture from Sands sent the man off. He then carefully tucked the book away in the folds of his robe, after marking his page. It was difficult to exist as an intelligent man on Collegium’s underside. Collegium preached virtue, humanism, the duty of people to work for each other’s benefit, or so the College philosophers claimed. Only thus would the lot of people everywhere, of all kinden and social classes, be improved. Charity and consideration were the watchwords. Even the most grasping of Beetle magnates made a public show of open-handedness. How, in the face of that, could Sands justify himself: the robber and the killer, the agent of corruption?

  He had studied long and hard, with the assistance of Spiderland philosophers who had written on the same issues a century ago. They had all manner of glib answers for the conscientious Beetle: good deeds could only exist against a background of evil, the actions of predators promoted excellence in their prey, complacency was ever the enemy of progress. Sands was all the while constructing his own philosophy of the virtue of criminality. Day by day, book by book, he was justifying his own existence.

  And when I am an old man, I shall publish, he thought, but, for now, business intervenes.

  His Fly-kinden scout, Filipo, dropped down nearby. ‘Coming right now,’ he reported curtly. Somehow the Fly-kinden never seemed bothered about right and wrong; Sands envied them such freedom.

  ‘Keep watch,’ he directed, and then stepped out into the street.

  It was late. His sources had been keeping good track of his target, who was obliging enough to make appointments that continued past dusk. He was hurrying home now, and heading through a good enough area of town. Sands’s cronies were twitchy, out of place, while Sands himself was not. No watchman, seeing him there, would have cast a suspicious eye over him: a tall almost-Beetle in neatly folded robes, the very picture of a well-to-do middle merchant or scribe, or else the servant of some wealthy man.

  Sands saw his assignation hurrying towards him, a thin Beetle with an agitated step, wrapped up in his own worries, clutching a satchel to his chest. Sands stepped half into his path without attracting his attention, and had to resort to calling out the man’s name.

  ‘Master Failwright?’

  The shipping merchant stopped, snapped out of his own thoughts, peering at Sands. He saw a respectable, mild-featured Beetle, at least so far as the dusk revealed to him.

  ‘Do I know you?’ he asked, suspicious but not alarmed.

  ‘Master Failwright, I am sent from Master Mendawl.’

  ‘I know Master Mendawl,’ Failwright allowed.

  ‘Your words at the Assembly have disturbed him, Master Failwright. He was hoping to discuss them with you,’ Sands said, and saw how a spark of hope lit up in the man’s eyes.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Failwright was saying. ‘I knew someone would take notice. Let Maker and Broiler and the others stew. He’ll see me tonight?’

  ‘He stays up for you in a hostelry near here,’ Sands confirmed. ‘I’m only glad I found you.’

  Failwright nodded, a man with a mission. ‘Take me to him,’ he directed, and Sands’s hand offered the side-street to him. Sands’s accomplices had made themselves shadows, and Failwright marched along happily under his direction.

  It was simple enough, for Sands had a speed that belied his size. As soon as Failwright was in the shadows, he had a hand over the man’s mouth. His other hand, the Spider-Art spines jutting from his knuckles, jabbed twice, once above each kidney, small spots of red spreading in the man’s robes. With practised smoothness, Sands spun the man about, slammed his back against a wall and rammed his claws up into Failwright’s throat.

  The man’s eyes were wide, his struggles disjointed. The injuries in themselves, even the last one, were not fatal, but Sands’s claws ran with poison. He held his victim firmly while the toxin did its work, locking the man’s muscles, a joint at a time, then freezing his breath. He stuck in a few more doses, just to be sure. Beetles were a tough breed, even scrawny merchants like this one.

  When Failwright had finally stopped twitching, Sands removed his hand. The man was still alive, just, but not for long. There were a few red specks on Sands’s robes, but otherwise it was a remarkably clean way to end a life. Sands’s Beetle underling approached cautiously.

  ‘Into the river with him,’ Sands instructed, and held out a pouch that the man gratefully accepted. Filipo landed nearby, ready for his cut. Sands left the pair to it. He had a client to see.

  It is all justified, he thought. We are the surgeons hacking off the dead flesh. It was not done for a political cause, for he was no revolutionary. It was done for the sheer sake of it, the philosophical necessity of honing the blade of civilization. He tested that phrase in his mind, found it good, and continued on his way a happy man.

  Helmess Broiler had a polished repertoire of smiles for all occasions, but he saved the genuine ones for moments like this.

  She stepped down the stairs of his townhouse as though the simple descent was an indecent act, pausing halfway to lean on the banister and grin down at him. She loved him to be duplicitous, he knew. The fact that he had been fencing with the Imperial Bellowern, whilst all the while playing a larger game was meat and drink to her. It was one of the many ways she resembled a Spider-kinden.

  It had always been thus, it was true, but formerly it had been a shady habit practised behind closed doors. Beetle men of status and of power, for all that they mostly had wives and families and the like, found in themselves a yearning to exercise their potency through other channels. Mistresses were well known, scandalous when exposed, yet ubiquitous amongst a certain class of Assembler and merchant. A clever young Spider girl or handsome youth who came to Collegium would not lack for opportunity. Oh, it was not always a Spider-kinden, but that was the archetype: beautiful and dangerous and irresistibly charming.

  Then Master Stenwold Maker had come along, taking up with a girl young enough to be his daughter and parading her around as though she were one of his war honours. Where there might easily have been a tide of disapproval and horror, instead there had been a strange kind of relief. Master Maker was a war hero, the people’s darling who could, just there and then, do no wrong. Keeping a young lover must be all right, therefore. This was, Helmess reflected, the one service the wretched old warmonger had ever done for his fellows.

  ‘Elytrya,’ he uttered her name, as she looked fondly down on him.

  ‘You keep them dancing,’ she observed, and took her time coming down the rest of the steps towards him. He could watch her for ever, he decided.

  It was not that she was a Spider-kinden. It was that she was not a Spider-kinden, although she resembled them enough to pass as such. That she avoided other Spiders was not unusual, for Spider-kinden were their own worst enemies, so that many ending up in the Lowlands were fugitives from one political struggle or another. If her eyes were of a strange shade and larger than usual, her hair more elaborately curled, then they just assumed that Spiders, with their cosmetics, could do a great deal with their appearance. She was the best thing in Helmess’s life, and he loved her, because he loved power, and saw in her his chance to recapture it.

  Honory Bellowern had been right: Helmess was much fallen from his former heights, and in no position to withstand a rumour campaign or slanderous accusation about his association with the Empire, especially if that accusation happened to be true. Being in possession of all the facts, the Empire might believe that it owned him. However, their facts were now out of date, for Helmess Broiler had been cultivating other friendships.

  He had no idea how long she had been in Collegium before approaching him, how long she had spent adjusting to the differences, understanding what must have been a bewilderingly alien way of life. She had once let slip that her people, her faction, had kept agents in this city for generations, in readiness for what was due to happen so very soon.

  When she had come to him first, with her fl
attery and her promises, she had played at being the Spider-kinden adventuress, whilst sounding him out. Physical attraction had lured him from the start, but she had gauged him well enough, and soon enough, to know it would not hold him. Instead she had appreciated that his working with her, with her unfathomable allies, represented a return to power for him, a power untainted by the Wasp Empire. She had made him an offer too attractive to turn down, and told him a secret truth that he was still trying to digest.

  She leant in towards him, wrapping herself about his arm, resting her head on his shoulder. The invisible events of her plot, their plot, were beginning to unfold, in the far, dark places. She had only told him so much, but he could guess much more. The thought that he was the sole Collegiate man to be party to such an abominable act was as sexually exciting as the feeling of her warm body now pressed against him.

  There was a knock at the door, but he had already briefed his servants and they let the man straight in. Helmess Broiler’s needs for this breed of agent were scant, but a successful merchant was occasionally forced to take decisive action. Forman Sands was always his first choice: not only was the man discreet and reliable, but there was no other paid killer in Collegium who managed to look like a respectable cartel clerk and could make educated after-dinner talk like a College scholar.

  ‘Master Broiler,’ Sands said, with a careful nod, first to his employer, and then to his employer’s mistress.

  ‘Your news?’

  ‘It’s done.’ Sands held out Failwright’s satchel, which Broiler accepted. It was bulging with scrawled scrolls, the last symptoms of Failwright’s fatal curiosity.

  ‘You’re a good man, Sands,’ Helmess remarked.

  ‘I like to think so, Master Broiler.’ Sands took the purse from Helmess’s servant almost as an afterthought, as though this wasn’t about the money at all.

  When the killer had gone, Elytrya hugged Helmess close. Failwright and his annoying questions were done with.

  ‘Do you mean,’ he asked her softly, ‘to silence an inconvenient question, or to raise yet more? Members of the Assembly cause ripples, when they fall.’

  ‘Either will serve,’ she assured him. ‘We know that either will serve.’

  Five

  Is this any more honest than my time with the Rekef?

  The copper magnate Brons Helfer and his wife were doing their best to be good hosts. Their spacious drawing room was painted blue, with frescos on two facing walls which Arianna had carefully complimented. They were in the ‘Seldis style’, which worked out as a bastard approximation of last generation’s Spiderlands artists, but hamfistedly rendered by Beetle copyists. Her compliments, not only insincere but downright false, had been gratefully received, for was she not the great Spider lady?

  She was not, of course, and never had been. Her family had been hoi polloi of the coarsest character, but in the Spiderlands even the peasantry schemed and feuded. Her departure at a tender age had been prompted by the ruin of her parents, culminating in the death of her mother in a duel. At fifteen Arianna had nothing but her kinden to recommend her, as she scrounged and pilfered her way north up the Silk Road.

  There the Rekef had found her, buying her from a fellow Spider, a slaver whose men had snapped her up one night. The Rekef had been explicit and detailed on what other interested parties might have acquired her, that night, what other fates could have befallen her – and might still, if she did not show how very grateful she was to them.

  Thereafter she had been trained, and they had infiltrated her into Collegium with some fake recommendations, but always with a Wasp lieutenant holding her reins. She might be street scum, but she was Spider street scum, which endowed her with a kind of tarnished nobility in Collegium.

  Darla Helfer was chattering to her energetically about something, the magnate’s wife in full flow as she tried to show their distinguished guest how sophisticated her hostess could be. The woman was plain, stout, wearing fine clothes without flair. Arianna could make homespun look like silk, whereas Darla accomplished the opposite and never knew it. Arianna had just enough self-knowledge, enough bitterness about her past, for her not to enjoy the contrast.

  And yet these Beetles run the world and, as with their clothes, they never see themselves for what they are. On another wall there hung a small sketch, a copy of a Spider arabesque. It had been produced by some complex device that had rendered a perfect duplicate, line for line, in exacting strokes, the creation of some artificer nephew of the Helfers. The family connection was the only reason it was on display: no other attention was drawn to it. The Helfers plainly regarded it as a piece of mundane trickery, but to Arianna it was infinitely fascinating that these people’s machines could accomplish such a thing. It impressed her more than all the derivative clowning on display elsewhere in the room. If only they would learn to be themselves, what could they not accomplish? She wondered how much blame her own people should accept for that. The Spider-kinden’s very essence was to shine at the expense of others. It was easier to stand tall if you convinced everyone else to kneel.

  She had made quite a comfortable home for herself amongst these people. She had backed the right man, becoming a war hero in her own right. People still remembered the moment she had turned up at the breach with her bow and arrows to fight for the city. Nobody seemed to remember that she had betrayed them all first, before turning on her fellow betrayers.

  She herself could not quite recall standing there with Stenwold when the Vekken came through the breach. It seemed something that a character in a play might have done, or perhaps in some garish Beetle romance. Had her life seemed so cheap to her, just then? Perhaps it had, for she would have been left with precious few options had Collegium fallen.

  It was near evening when she finally got away from the Helfers, with promises to pass on their regards to Stenwold. To the ‘War Master’ as they still said, but she would do them the service of editing their words. It was a title Stenwold had always loathed.

  Cardless was off on some errand, when she reached home. Technically her real ‘home’ was across town, a fictional separation she had devised for the peace of mind of Stenwold’s ailing niece. A selfless decision? No – for the niece’s peace of mind was Stenwold’s, and Stenwold’s was her own. Her position, comfort and opportunities in Collegium were irrevocably tied to him. Recently, the niece had been considerate enough to absent herself, so Arianna drifted between her own residence and Stenwold’s as the mood took her.

  She wondered what mood she would find him in, being a man of more emotional layers than Beetles were generally accorded, by Spider reckoning. The College demagogue gave way to the clever spymaster, with the inspirational war leader waiting ever in the wings. She had met him, she reflected, at the best of times: he had been all these things.

  Now the war had stalled, waiting on like a trained dragonfly up high, and the sharper facets of his life had been carefully packed away, oiled and padded against rust. The sober spymaster lurked behind the throne, while the frustrated statesman took his seat, ground down daily by all the minutiae of a world that was no longer under the immediate shadow of the black and gold. Stenwold the warmonger, they had once called him, and now she could almost feel him daring the Empire to bring back its armies, if only to rekindle that old fire.

  She pushed open the door of his study, and stopped short.

  He was hunched over the desk, and did not even look up at her. With a lens to one eye, he was poring over a single scroll with immense concentration. She felt a quickening in her heartbeat, out of nowhere, that took her back two years.

  This was not the bored Stenwold reading Assembly minutes, nor the frustrated Stenwold sifting through correspondence from the ingratiating and the insincere. War Master Stenwold Maker, the intelligencer and hero of Collegium, had again taken up his old lodgings in the forefront of Stenwold’s mind. When he finally looked up, as she stepped into the room, she recognized it in his eyes, that unsheathed edge of a brain working to i
ts fullest.

  ‘What do you make of this?’ He thrust the scroll towards her without preamble. The gesture made her smile. His squabblings with the Assembly, his reluctant arrangements with men like Jodry Drillen, he did not involve her in. It was not that she could not have helped somehow, but that he was ashamed of such dealings, ashamed of having to bend his own rules to get what he wanted. Now he was the spymaster again, and she was a spy, and he was including her.

  She took the scroll, cast her eyes down the lines of crabbed handwriting, led by his annotations. ‘I was never a paper spy,’ she warned him. ‘They saved me for field duties, you know.’

  The They was the Rekef, but neither of them needed to mention that name, and they had buried it between them before the war’s end.

  ‘Even so,’ he prompted, and she nodded.

  ‘This is Failwright’s grievance, is it?’

  ‘His notes, his summary. Ships out of Collegium heading east. Their captains, their cargoes, their fates, and . . .’

  ‘Their investors,’ she noted. ‘Who stood to lose money on the deal.’ It would not have been instantly visible, amidst Failwright’s baffling columns, save that Stenwold had marked it all out, name by name.

  ‘Are you sure you’re not just seeing a pattern where none exists? Or that Failwright wasn’t?’

  ‘No, I’m not sure at all,’ Stenwold admitted. ‘After all, the sea trade is an uncertain business. There are pirates, there are storms. Ships are lost, sometimes. Such information gets blurred by pure happenstance.’ He rubbed at the stubble on his chin. ‘But Failwright and his faction were taking it very seriously. Look, a few months ago they sent some ships out with mercenaries on board. Here, look . . . and here. Not touched, not touched, and . . . and then one lost utterly.’ Stenwold shook his head. ‘And, at the same time, three ships travelling without guard are boarded by pirates.’

  ‘What’s this column here?’ Arianna’s finger marked out one line of scribbled notes.