The space below had only two rooms, one of which housed the engine. The other, Rosander saw as they reached the foot of the stairs, had a table set out, and furniture that he identified after a moment as designed for sitting on. Apparently these land-kinden believed that there really was something to talk about. Surrender terms, perhaps? Or maybe this Stenwold will sell his people yet.
‘Come on, then,’ Chenni prompted. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got.’
Stenwold paused, then called back up. ‘Jons! Are you done there?’
‘As much as,’ came the reply.
‘Would you come down here and show Mistress Chenni how the engines work?’
‘With pleasure.’ A moment later they heard the man stomping above their heads, and then he was letting himself down the ladder.
‘We should talk,’ Stenwold told Rosander, gesturing at the table. ‘Amongst the land-kinden, one debates with one’s enemies around a table, to try and find another solution than war.’
Rosander grunted and went over to one of the chairs, reaching out for it and turning it between armoured finger and thumb. As Stenwold headed about the far side of the table, the giant Onychoi brought his fist down on it, with no great display of force, and instantly reduced it to matchwood.
‘Got anything stronger, or should I stand?’ he growled.
Stenwold, not the least put out, sat down across from him. ‘You are Rosander, Nauarch of the Thousand Spines Train.’
‘Well done.’ Rosander put his helm down on the table. ‘What do you want, Stenwold Maker? Amongst the sea-kinden, the Kerebroi may talk and talk, but we act. Debate is a coward’s excuse for putting off the strike.’
‘I’m sorry that you feel that way,’ Stenwold replied. ‘Nauarch, you are not Claeon.’
Rosander’s lips twisted into an unwilling smile. ‘Nicest thing anyone’s said about me for at least a moon,’ he shot back. ‘So what?’
‘I mean you are not consumed by malice, nor are you terrified of losing your power. You are secure in what you possess, whereas Claeon is not.’
‘A fair assessment.’
‘Neither, unless I guess wrong, are you one of the Littoralist movement,’ Stenwold went on. ‘You don’t lap up all that business of theirs about the destiny of the sea-kinden to reclaim the land from the hated land-kinden, who drove your ancestors from it a thousand thousand years ago, or whatever.’
‘Fools and madmen,’ agreed Rosander.
‘So, why do you make yourself my people’s enemy?’ Stenwold asked him.
Rosander shrugged, stone pauldrons moving massively. ‘I bear your kinden no ill will. Surrender to me and you’ll not be ill-treated, though we’ll be disappointed if we don’t get our fight. As you say, I’m no tyrant, but I am an adventurer, Maker. And now I know the land is there for the taking, that is the new adventure I choose. To be the man that conquers the land! To be remembered for ever as he who took that great step.’ Rosander was grinning even at the thought. ‘And my Train would follow me even beyond the sea, despite all the tales they have been told at their mother’s tit. I would reward them for that loyalty, because I would make them all princes of the land, with landsmen to wait on their every need. And I would do this, Maker, because I can.’
There was now an odd vibration running through the wood of the vessel, which he assumed to be the engine working. ‘If your servant has any ideas about taking us elsewhere, be assured my people have orders to hole this barque and take it to the bottom, if necessary,’ he warned Stenwold. Listening out, he could hear voices over the rumble of the engine: Maker’s man explaining something to Chenni. ‘I thought it was the sails that made these things go, anyway. Obviously I was misinformed.’
The hull lurched slightly beneath him, not enough to make him shift his balance, but a new movement he did not entirely like. ‘Maker,’ he cautioned softly, ‘do you think I cannot kill you if you’ve planned some treachery?’
‘With ease,’ Stenwold Maker agreed, although there was a tension to him that Rosander could clearly read. ‘Perhaps… some fresh air, maybe?’
The hull shuddered and swung again and Rosander nodded. ‘You go in front of me, Maker, and gather your servant up too. I suddenly suspect that you are trying to be clever, and that may in turn mean that you’re being unwise.’
‘Jons!’ Stenwold called out. ‘Bring Mistress Chenni above decks, if you would.’
‘That time already, is it?’ the other landsman replied. ‘Well then, little miss, if you’d come with me.’
Rosander waited at the foot of the steps for his aide, who came pattering around from behind the landsmen, looking enthusiastic.
‘It’s a fine piece,’ she said. ‘Not clockworks at all, but burning some kind of oily stuff to make it go. Knocks Mandir’s tricks into a barrel. We should certainly get one.’
‘Yes, but what is it doing?’ Rosander stressed.
She goggled up at him. ‘Why, it’s… working.’ She frowned.
‘Go on up, Nauarch. You shall see all,’ Stenwold Maker said softly.
Rosander glared at him and stomped up the steps, heedless of the tortured sounds they made as his weight bent and bowed them.
‘If you think…’ he started, but it was never clear what he imagined Stenwold might think, because his voice trailed off.
The slack, bellying fabric he had taken for sails had grown taut now, forming a great rounded bulk above them. And the sea…
The sea was gone. There was no horizon. Rosander stormed towards the rail, furious… and stopped dead.
There was the sea, still, but it was a dark canvas far below them, glittering with pinpoints of reflected sunlight. He could see no sign of his people, or even their vessels. Instead the water was fast giving way to something lighter: green and grey and dusty tan. The land.
‘We are not just land-kinden, you see,’ Stenwold remarked quietly, beside him. ‘We are air-kinden also.’
Rosander’s gauntleted hand lashed out and grabbed him by the arm, painfully tight. ‘Take us back,’ he hissed. ‘Take us back down, now.’
‘Oh, we will. This is no kidnapping. You can see for yourself we are in no position to overpower you,’ Stenwold assured him, his voice catching slightly with the pressure of that grip. ‘But look, there is your new kingdom. There is the land.’
Despite himself, Rosander found his eyes drawn to the great expanse that now filled the whole of their view, stretching as far as his eyes could squint in the bright, dry light.
‘There is my city,’ Stenwold, pointed. ‘There is white Collegium, your intended victim. But inland of Collegium lies the city of Sarn, where the soldiers of the Ant-kinden march, and they would march to our defence, as would other allies. The Vekken from down the coast, for example, and the Tseni by sea. Who knows who else?’
Rosander made a growling sound in his throat, whereupon Stenwold spoke swiftly on, ‘But the warriors of the Thousand Spines are fierce and brave, so perhaps you would best all who came against you, and then capture my city. But my city is not the land, Rosander, for beyond Sarn there is the city of Helleron, many tens of miles further inland, where they mine and smelt and craft – our own version of the Hot Stations. That marks the edge of the Lowlands, which is the region I call home.’ The landscape was still passing swiftly beneath them, with no sign that it would come to an end any time soon. ‘But perhaps, eventually, you would prevail, Rosander. Perhaps. So I must tell you that, beyond Helleron, there is the Empire of the Wasps, a warlike nation that in size is greater than all the Lowlands. Then there is the Three-City Alliance and the Disputed Principalities, and of course, if you go north past the great ridge, the Commonweal, vast and ancient, greater than all the rest. All this might you conquer – in twenty years or fifty years of never seeing the sea.’
Rosander’s grip on his arm was looser now, the Nauarch staring out at the dust-hazy horizon.
‘And even then,’ said Stenwold, ‘you would not have conquered the land. To the east of the Empire, to the north of the Commonweal, to the south of the Spiderlands, the land goes on, with more and more peoples to resist you, and still no end in sight. My people have charted their own courses for five hundred years, and our maps do not define how far the land goes, any more than yours can delimit the sea. What would you conquer, Nauarch? All your warriors, all the warriors of a hundred such trains, would be lost for ever in just a fraction of all that land.’