Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Sea Watch

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 its 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.

‘I think it’s weather reports. Here, where the armed ship was lost, I think he’s marked “no storm” but I’m not honestly sure. I need to speak to him…’ There was the sound of someone at the door, the neatness of its closing bringing the name ‘Cardless?’ to Stenwold’s lips. A moment later the servant found them.

‘What says Master Failwright?’ Stenwold asked him. ‘Delighted to receive the attention, no doubt?’

‘Unfortunately Master Failwright was not at home,’ Card-less reported.

‘You left my message?’

‘I did. However, it appears that Master Failwright is considerably overdue. He did not return to his house or his offices last night, and none of his associates knows of his whereabouts.’