Red Seas Under Red Skies: The Gentleman Bastard Sequence, Book Two (Gentleman Bastards 2)

First had come an interminable interval spent stumbling around in stifling darkness, pulled and prodded along by captors who seemed to be in some haste. Next, there was indeed a boat ride; Locke could smell the warm salt mists rising off the city’s harbour, while the deck swayed gently beneath him and oars creaked rhythmically in their locks.

Eventually, that too came to an end; the boat rocked as someone rose and moved about. The oars were drawn in and an unfamiliar voice called for poles. A few moments later, the boat bumped against something and strong hands again hoisted Locke to his feet. When he’d been helped from the boat to a firm stone surface, the hood was suddenly whisked off his head. He looked around, blinked at the sudden light and said: ‘Oh, shit.’

At the heart of Tal Verrar, between the three crescent islands of the Great Guilds, lay the Castellana, fortified estate of the Dukes of Tal Verrar centuries earlier. Now that the city had dispensed with titled nobility, the mansion-covered Castellana was home to a new breed of well-heeled gentry - the Priori councillors, the independently rich and those guildmasters whose social positions required the most ostentations displays of spending power.

At the very heart of the Castellana, guarded by a moat of empty air like a circular Elderglass canyon, was the Mon Magisteria, the palace of the Archon - a towering human achievement springing upward from alien grandeur. An elegant stone weed growing in a glass garden.

Locke and Jean had been brought to a point directly beneath it. Locke guessed that they stood within the hollow space that separated the Mon Magisteria from the surrounding island; a million-faceted cavern of darkened Elderglass soared upward around them, and the open air of the upper island lay fifty or sixty feet above their heads. The channel that the boat had travelled through wound away to his left, and the sound of the lapping water was drowned out by a distant rumbling noise with no visible cause.

There was a wide stone landing at the base of the Mon Magisteria’s private island, with several boats tied up alongside it, including an enclosed ceremonial barge with silk awnings and gilded woodwork. Soft blue alchemical lamps in iron posts filled the space with light, and behind those posts a dozen soldiers stood at attention. Even if a quick glance upward hadn’t told Locke the identity of their captor, those soldiers would have revealed everything.

They wore dark-blue doublets and breeches, with black leather bracers, vests and boots all chased with raised designs in gleaming brass. Blue hoods were drawn up around the backs of their heads and their faces were covered with featureless oval masks of polished bronze. Grids of tiny pinholes permitted them to see and breathe, but from a distance every impression of humanity was erased - the soldiers were faceless sculptures brought to life.

The Eyes of the Archon.

‘Here you are then, Master Kosta, Master de Ferra.’ The woman who’d waylaid Locke and Jean stepped up onto the landing between them and took them by the elbows, smiling as though they were out for a night on the town. ‘Is this not a more private place for a conversation?’

‘What,’ said Jean, ‘have we done to warrant our transport here?’

‘I’m the wrong person to ask,’ said the woman as she pushed them gently forward. ‘My job is to retrieve, and deliver.’

She released Locke and Jean just before the front rank of the Archon’s soldiers. Their own disquieted expressions were reflected back at them in a dozen gleaming bronze masks.

‘And sometimes,’ said the woman as she returned to the boat, ‘when guests don’t come back out again, my job is to forget that I ever saw them at all.’

The Eyes of the Archon moved without apparent signal; Locke and Jean were enveloped and secured by several soldiers apiece. One of them spoke - another woman, her voice echoing ominously. ‘We will go up. You must not struggle and you must not speak.’

‘Or what?’ said Locke.

The Eye who’d spoken stepped over to Jean without hesitation and punched him in the stomach. The big man exhaled in surprise and grimaced, while the female Eye turned back to Locke. ‘If either of you causes any trouble, I’m instructed to punish the other one. Do I make myself clear?’

Locke ground his teeth together and nodded.

A wide set of switchback stairs led upward from the landing; the glass underfoot was rough as brick. Flight by flight the Archon’s soldiers led Locke and Jean up past gleaming walls, until the moist night breeze of the city was on their faces once again.

They emerged within the perimeter defined by the glass chasm. A guardhouse stood just on their side of the thirty-foot gap, beside a drawbridge currently hauled straight up into the air and set inside a heavy wood frame. Locke presumed that was the usual means of entrance to the Archon’s domain.

The Mon Magisteria was a ducal fortress in the true Therin Throne style, easily fifteen storeys high at its peak and three or four times as wide. Layer after layer of crenellated battlements rose up, formed from flat black stones that absorbed the fountains of light thrown up by dozens of lanterns burning on the castle’s grounds. Columned aqueducts circled the walls and towers at every level, and decorative streams of water cascaded down from sculptures of dragons and sea monsters set at the fortress’s corners.

The Eyes of the Archon led Locke and Jean toward the front of the palace, down a wide path dusted with white gravel. There were lush green lawns on either side of the path, set behind decorative stone borders that made the lawns resemble islands. More blue-robed and black-armoured guards in bronze masks stood unmoving along the path, holding up blackened-steel halberds with alchemical lights built into their wooden shafts.

Where most castles would have a front gate the Mon Magisteria had a rushing waterfall wider than the path on which they stood; this was the source of the noise Locke had heard echoing at the boat landing below. Multiple torrents of water crashed out of huge, dark apertures set in a line running straight up the castle wall. These joined and fell into a churning moat at the very base of the structure, a moat even wider than the glass-sided canyon that cut the castle grounds off from the rest of the Castellana.

A bridge, slightly arched, vanished into the pounding white waterfall about halfway over the moat. Warm mist wafted up around them as their party approached the near end of this bridge, which Locke could now see had some sort of niche cut into it, running right along its centre for its full visible length. Beside the bridge was an iron pull-chain hanging from the top of a narrow stone pillar. The Eye officer reached up for this and gave it three swift tugs.

A moment later there came a metallic rattling noise from the direction of the bridge. A dark shape loomed within the waterfall, grew and then burst out toward them with mist and water exploding off its roof. It was a long box of iron-ribbed wood, fifteen feet high and as wide as the bridge. Rumbling, it slid along the track carved into the bridge until it halted with a squeal of metal-on-metal just before them. Doors popped open toward them, pushed from the inside by two attendants in dark-blue coats with silver-braid trim.

Locke and Jean were ushered into the roomy conveyance, which had windows set into the end facing the castle. Through them, Locke could see nothing but rushing water.

When Locke and Jean and all the Eyes had stepped into the box, the attendants drew the doors closed. One of them pulled a chain set into the right-hand wall, and with a lurching rumble the box was drawn back to where it had come from. The waterfall pounded off the roof; the noise was like being in a carriage during a heavy storm. As they passed through it, Locke guessed that it was fifteen to twenty feet wide. An unprotected man would never be able to pass beneath it without being knocked into the moat, which he supposed was precisely the point.

That, and it was a hell of a way to show off.

They soon pushed through the other side of the falls. Locke could see that they were being drawn into a huge hemispherical hall, with a curved far wall and a ceiling about thirty feet high. Alchemical chandeliers shed light on the hall, silver and white and gold, so that the place gleamed like a treasure vault through the distortion of the water-covered windows. When the conveyor box ground to a halt, the attendants manipulated unseen latches to crack open the forward windows like a pair of giant doors.

Locke and Jean were prodded out of the box, but more gently than before. The stones at their feet were slick with water, and they followed the example of the guards in treading carefully. The waterfall roared at their backs for a moment longer, and then two huge doors slammed together behind the conveyor box and the deafening noise became a dull echo.

Some sort of water engine could be seen in a wall niche to Locke’s left. Several men and women stood before gleaming cylinders of brass, working levers attached to mechanical contrivances whose functions were well beyond Locke’s capability to guess. Heavy iron chains disappeared into dark holes in the floor just beside the track the huge wooden box rode along. Jean, too, cocked his head for a closer look at this curiosity, but once past the danger of the slick stones, the soldiers’ brief spate of tolerance passed and they shoved the two thieves along at a good clip once again.

Through the entrance hall, wide and grand enough to host several balls at once, they passed at speed. The hall had no windows open to the outside, but rather artificial panoramas of stained glass, lit from behind. Each window showed a stylized view of what would be seen through a real hole cut in the stone - white buildings and mansions, dark skies, the tiers of islands across the harbour, dozens of sails in the main anchorage.

Locke and Jean were escorted down a side hall, up a flight of steps and down another hall, past blue-coated guards standing stiffly at attention. Was it Locke’s imagination, or did something more than ordinary respect creep into their faces when the bronze masks of the Eyes swept past them? There was no more time to ponder, for they were suddenly halted before their evident destination. In a corridor full of wooden doorways, they stood before one made of metal.

An Eye stepped forward, unlocked the door and pushed it open. The room beyond was small and dark. Soldiers rapidly undid the bonds around Locke and Jean’s wrists, and then the two of them were shoved forward into the little room.

‘Hey, wait just a damn-’ said Locke, but the door slammed shut behind them and the sudden blackness was absolute.

‘Perelandro,’ said Jean. He and Locke spent a few seconds stumbling into one another before they managed to regain some balance and dignity. ‘How on earth did we attract the attention of these bloody arseholes?’

‘I don’t know, Jerome.’ Locke emphasized the pseudonym very slightly. ‘But maybe the walls have ears. Hey! Bloody arseholes! No need to be coy! We’re perfectly well behaved when civilly incarcerated.’

Locke stumbled toward the remembered location of the nearest wall to pound his fists against it. He discovered for the first time that it was rough brick. ‘Damnation,’ he muttered, and sucked at a scraped knuckle.

‘Odd,’ said Jean.

‘What?’

‘I can’t be sure.’

‘What?’

‘Is it just me, or does it seem to be getting warmer in here?’