The Sea Watch

Twenty-Seven

‘I see you no longer trust me,’ Claeon snapped.

Rosander, Nauarch of the Thousand Spines Train, had arrived in full armour, its stony plates grating constantly against one another. The Onychoi gave such an impression of concentrated weight that Teornis was surprised he didn’t fall straight through the floor. Tiny traces of powder sparkled in the air where newer pieces of his mail were still establishing their fit against their neighbours. Beside him the Spider-kinden and Claeon and another Kerebroi man all looked like so many children.

‘Claeon,’ Rosander murmured, ‘if the sea were filled with trust, from the depths up to the sunlight, there would not be sufficient trust for me to trust you.’ His hard, narrow face broke into an equally hard smile. ‘Besides, I must get used to carrying the weight in the air. When my campaign starts, there will be little chance to let the water bear it. So, tell me, when will that be?’

‘It would be sooner had your fools not let the land-kinden escape,’ Claeon accused, but Rosander was having none of it.

‘My bannermen did what they could,’ the big Onychoi replied, implacable. ‘Your beast let one go and your Dart-kinden the other. I see you have somehow managed to retain the third.’ He glanced briefly at Teornis, without much apparent interest. ‘Or were you about to hand him over to someone else? Me, perhaps.’

‘This man is not for you to torture.’ Claeon paced the chamber, which was part of his own suite of rooms. The curved walls were ornamented in golden arabesques that Teornis found beautiful in their execution, but gauche in their effect.

‘You think of torture,’ Rosander murmured. ‘Don’t colour me with your pastimes. I might be able to hold him more securely than you, however.’

Claeon rounded on him furiously, storming up to the man’s immense bulk as though about to break his hand on that stone carapace. ‘Do not be impudent! I am Edmir here! You are strong, Rosander, but do not think, here in the heart of my palace, that you can mock me.’

Rosander looked down at a man who was a fraction of his size, and he sighed slowly. ‘The Shell Hunters Train has been trading at Hermatyre during these last few days. Yesterday, twenty of my bannermen asked my permission to take their retinues and depart with the Hunters when they leave.’

Claeon narrowed his eyes. ‘And you refused?’

‘And I gave them my blessing, for they would go whatever I said, and I would rather they came back to me, when next we meet, than cut all their ties to the Thousand Spines. My people are bored, Claeon. They want to move on. I want to move on. Give me my war. Give me this landsman, to start with.’

Claeon held up a hand to silence him. ‘This one is special. This one will be more use to you alive and happy than would any number of corpses or prisoners. You know Pellectes, of course?’

This was the fourth man, another Kerebroi. The stranger was taller than Claeon, leaner save for having something of a belly. His long hair and beard were lustrous with a shiny greenish hue that Teornis hoped was merely cosmetic.

It was not clear from Rosander’s blank expression whether he knew Pellectes or not, so Claeon went on: ‘He is the leader of the Littoralists, and his people are already up above, learning about our enemy.’ He turned to address Pellectes. ‘Rosander will be the agent of our return to the land.’

‘So it is foretold,’ Pellectes breathed.

Teornis found his eyes meeting Rosander’s in a shared look of exasperation. The Onychoi shifted stance in a further chafing of armour, his pose subtly suggesting that his patience was waning fast. ‘Tell me then,’ he said, ‘what’s so special about this land-kinden.’

‘He claims that the land-kinden that we have been spying on are at war with another tribe of landsmen, and that he himself is a member of this other tribe,’ Claeon declared, dismissing with a wave of his hand any number of centuries of landbound politics.

‘And it is true,’ Pellectes assured them eagerly. ‘My own agent within their colony has confirmed it.’

Rosander took two clumping steps forward to stand before Teornis. ‘What can you do for us, then?’

The Spider looked the huge man directly in the eye. ‘I have agents in Collegium, their colony. I can compromise their defences, guide your soldiers, identify their leaders. It would appear we have a common enemy.’

Rosander’s gaze weighed him up, the resulting assessment uncertain. He looked sidelong at the green-bearded Littoralist. ‘So where does your orthodoxy feature, in all this?’ he grunted. ‘First time I’ve heard your lot ever talk of friendly land-kinden.’

‘But it is so,’ announced Pellectes. ‘For just look at him! He is almost kin to us Kerebroi. It is clear that these are our cousins, who somehow avoided the great purge and fled to the further reaches of the land, to find safety. Now we can strike together against our persecutors.’

The Onychoi made a disparaging noise. ‘Sounds convenient,’ he remarked.

‘It is not convenient,’ Pellectes snapped back at him. ‘We have a duty to our ancestors to avenge the wrong done to us. Those that forced us from our homes must now be punished and destroyed. We will reclaim our birthright.’

The dry stare of Rosander swung back to Teornis. ‘Anything up there look like my brother, landsman?’

‘Not that I ever saw,’ Teornis told him easily.

‘Good. I’d hate to have to kill any bastard as tough as I am.’ Rosander looked back to find Pellectes shaking with fury, right before him.

‘You dare not mock!’ the man shouted in his face.

‘I dare,’ Rosander growled.

Pellectes’s nostrils flared. ‘Your ancestors were driven, too. You too have lost a homeland. It is your duty, carried down from parent to child across all the centuries, to reclaim it. It is your destiny to be the agent of our return. How dare you jest at such? What would you say to your ancestors, when you mock their spilt blood?’

‘I’d tell them they were weak fools to be pushed around, and that I like the sea just fine. Don’t try to infect me with your cant. My bannermen and I, we want conquest and plunder. Keep your ideology to yourself.’

‘You must not sully the cause-!’ Pellectes started ranting, and then stopped. Teornis had watched Rosander draw a knife, a remarkably understated move for so huge a man. His arm, encumbered by all that weight of stone, had struck swiftly nonetheless. He had the curved blade pressed against one side of the Kerebroi’s throat, the curved claw of his gauntlet alongside the other. Two tiny trickles of blood patterned Pellectes’s neck. The Littoralist had gone very still, eyes almost out of his head with compounded rage and fear.

‘Good. Now keep silent,’ Rosander addressed him, and turned his wrist to take the knife away. The Littoralist stepped back shakily, hands going to the two shallow, bleeding nicks.

‘Have this one make arrangements then,’ the Onychoi instructed Claeon, jabbing at Teornis with the blood-tipped spike. ‘Make it soon, though. Any longer and my train will be on their way. They’re not meant for this colony life, and neither am I.’

He turned and lumbered away, trailing faint motes of stone dust.

Pellectes bared his teeth after him. ‘The barbarian!’ he spat. ‘Edmir, there must be some other way to further our cause. Must we rely on such ignorant beasts?’

Claeon folded his hands before him. ‘But I do rely on him, Pellectes. I need him, alas.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Moreover I only need you because you’re of some use to him, and so if he decides to separate your babbling head from your shoulders, I shall cheer him to the echo. You listen to me, now. It was I who made your worthless Littoralists something more than a laughing stock in Hermatyre, and I can undo that just as easily, if you cease to be of use. Do what I say and don’t cross me, or I’ll have Arkeuthys eat the lot of you – and a sour stomach that would give him, no doubt.’

Pellectes kept his peace stiffly, mortally offended but not deigning to make a reply. Claeon shook his head dolefully. ‘Honestly, Pellectes, do you really believe all that business? About the land being a place of plenty? I’m reliably informed it’s horrible up there.’

‘When we retake our ancestral home, it will become paradise again,’ Pellectes replied, with absolute conviction.

‘Whatever you say. I’ll have a message for your spy soon enough. Now get out of the palace and go back to your wretched followers.’ He waited until the Littoralist had stalked off, and then turned to Teornis. ‘You see what I must deal with? Having brutes and madmen as my allies.’

Neither of whom you make much effort to keep as allies, Teornis considered, but he nodded sympathetically. ‘You’ll want a message from me,’ he noted.

‘As soon as we can find some way that you can write it.’ Claeon shook his head, for it had proved an unexpected barrier. The Kerebroi wrote in some incomprehensible fashion that involved setting patterns down somehow on the thick paper they processed from pressed seaweed. Furthermore, the characters they used were wholly unfamiliar to Teornis, which had quite thrown him. He had never even considered there being a different manner of writing, but the squiggles and half-pictures of the sea-kinden held no meaning for him whatsoever.

That had its advantages, of course. His own script would baffle them equally, so he need have no fear of Claeon or Pellectes deciphering his codes. His messages would reach his own people pristine, and full of hidden meaning.

‘And the other matter…’ Claeon said, with uncharacteristic delicacy. ‘Aside from Rosander’s war, what about the… lost boy?’

‘Well, I’m not sure what resources my people will have to hand, without my guidance, but I will have them start the search,’ Teornis assured him. And they will find nothing save tantalizing hints that require a greater knowledge to pursue.

And then I shall be out of this foul, damp, barbarous place, and I shall find this prince of theirs if he is to be found, and we shall then see if I cannot make sure Claeon will live in fear for the rest of his days.

Helleron. In this alien place, the familiar name sounded strange inside his head. It’s Helleron-under-Sea, it really is.

The chimneys were the most obvious parallel. They were twisted columns of stone, impossibly taller than any real factory stacks could be, and what they were gouting could not, of course, be black smoke, but it looked like it, and the shimmer in the water around them was like the heat haze from a foundry or a forge. Other columns around them also mirrored the chimneys, save that they sprouted broad fans or beating arms at irregular intervals. It was a Helleron dreamscape, a nightmare reflection.

At the foot of the chimneys lay the town, and it was a town. Stenwold would accept no substitute, certainly not the sea-kinden word ‘colony’. This community was not grown by Archetoi, nor was it made from the scooped-out armour of sea-things. Men and women had built this. They were building it still. Even if the pieces that they were assembling it from were of shell and accreated strangeness, even if the crafts they were using would have mystified an honest Collegium carpenter, still they were assembling a kind of shanty town of interconnected hovels, and it would have sat nicely at the rear of a factory in the Helleron slums. Scuto could have lived here, he thought, but the idea of thorny Scuto struggling with a caul was too much.

The Hot Stations were lit like a town, too. The globes and baubles of soft light were everywhere, but not as though they had grown there. They were tacked on unevenly, or bobbed at the end of lines like luminous balloons, but the intent was plain to Stenwold: street lighting just like the gaslamps of home. The seabed all around was brightly lit, and there were other little clusters of lamps visible in the darkness beyond, perhaps mining or salvage operations, weed farms or Benthist outposts, who knew? In the ambient light, Stenwold saw other chimneys, as tall and crooked as these smokers but quite dead: hollow spires of marbled stone rising above a bare skeleton of the township, which was even now being removed piecemeal to its new location. Stenwold thought he could discern more exhausted chimneys beyond that. The Hot Stations was a movable feast, it appeared.

There was a remarkable bustle out here. Construction gangs surged between the current township and its deceased echo, bringing over everything that was worth rescuing and finding somewhere new to secure it. The workers were mostly either the diminutive Onychoi or some other kinden, big and grey and heavy-footed, who seemed to be doing most of the nailing down. The simple sight of people doing something as mundane as putting up buildings almost brought a tear to Stenwold’s eye. The waters above were not empty either, for there were plenty of swimmers, squid-riders, a half-dozen submersibles carved out of straight or spiral shells, and a broad scattering of domesticated sea life. Nothing ventured too close to the black-belching chimneys, where the water shimmered and twisted like the air above a fire. The ‘hot’ of the Hot Stations was obviously not to be taken lightly.

There were no others like Lyess and her companion, he saw, and he sensed that she was not happy to be here. He turned and found her staring at him again. There was something desperate about her, but she did not know what she wanted, only that her way of life up till now had been punctuated, mangled by the imposition of a surly, brooding land-kinden.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said to her, although he was not entirely sure what for. She said nothing in return, did not stir. He sensed that she was searching for words and finding none. That she will miss me? That she is now well rid of me? That she wishes Arkeuthys had simply eaten me, and spared her this disruption to her life?

‘I am here,’ she said at last, to his puzzlement, until a faint hollow voice answered her.

‘I shall come to you.’ Stenwold recognized Nemoctes’s vicarious tones. ‘You have done well.’

Lyess’s face developed a new expression and, as it did Stenwold realized that she had never truly shown anything of herself in her features before now. It was not pride at having served Nemoctes well, but abject misery, unfiltered and unadulterated. It washed over her and was gone in moments, leaving her face a calm mask with those intent, all-encompassing eyes, but that racked expression would stay in Stenwold’s mind for a long time.

Oh, they have made many sacrifices, he thought in sudden understanding, to come to an agreement with the sea monsters they live with. They can survive out in the furthest reaches of the sea, travel the darkest pits of the abyss, but they are human still, even she, and they were never meant for such privation.

Did they take this burden on willingly? Or did we drive them to it? Is it true, this story that they tell?

‘Lyess,’ he said. She simply eyed him, saying nothing, so he pressed on. ‘You spoke about memory, that your beast here has no mind, but only a kind of, what, collective memory?’

She nodded cautiously, as though regretting having mentioned it.

‘How far back does it go?’ he pressed her.

‘Far,’ she said, which was all he should have anticipated.

‘They tell it, in Hermatyre, that the reason you sea-kinden are down here at all is because you were thrown off the land. By my people, I suppose – my dim and distant predecessors. Does this memory reach that far back?’

‘Perhaps,’ she said.

‘Would you see…? I have to know. If it can be known at all, I must know whether it’s true.’ Surely it can’t be guilt I feel over this? Or is it indignation at being falsely accused? Is it because I was once a historian that I can’t just dismiss it just as ‘all a very long time ago’?

‘I can listen to the echo,’ she said. ‘I may hear what you wish to know. There are no guarantees but, if we meet again, then perhaps I shall tell you.’

He nodded, dissatisfied but sensing he would get nothing more. Apparently ransacking the memories of the jellyfish nation would take some time.

By then they had a companion in the waters, some kind of squid-headed snail, and a man in armour came swimming towards them effortlessly. As a hole began to form in the floor of their chamber, Lyess knelt down calmly and waited, as though Stenwold had simply ceased to be present.

The water beyond Lyess’s sanctum was so clenchingly heavy that Stenwold could barely draw breath. Against that, it was warm, and grew warmer as they neared the Hot Stations. Nemoctes had to drag him through two inundated chambers before they found what was obviously a makeshift hatch, comprising just a hinged round plug set off-centre in an uneven wall. When it was levered outwards and open by someone within, a great deal of water cascaded through, carrying Stenwold along with it. He ended up on the floor with water draining away on all sides, at the feet of a broad Onychoi who was wrestling the hatch into a position where the sheer pressure of water would keep it secure.

It was baking hot, Stenwold noticed, and the Onychoi wore nothing but a loincloth. He wondered how Nemoctes could stand there dressed in his armour and not sweat himself to death. Except, of course, it’s not metal armour; it’s some weird thing they extrude, or whatever the term is. Wearily he clambered to his feet, tugging at the neck of his tunic. There were a good dozen people in immediate view, mostly attending to leaks, and they were all dressed in just enough clothing to cover their modesty, but even so Stenwold felt self-conscious. Going without shoes was bad enough. Going bare-chested would seem positively barbaric.

Nemoctes was watching him closely. And is that all these Pelagics do? Little had been said before – Lyess’s obstinate silence having made things awkward – but Stenwold sighed wearily and asked, ‘What now?’

‘Come with me,’ Nemoctes instructed him.

‘Will that markedly improve my situation?’ Stenwold asked him acidly.

‘Will it see you home, you mean? I hope so, but I make no promises,’ the Pelagist replied. ‘However, I can swear it will do you another form of good.’ He turned and headed past the toiling construction workers, whereupon Stenwold, as so often recently, had little enough choice but to follow him.

The chamber beyond was broad and long, though with a perilously low ceiling propped up by a dozen slanting pillars. It all looked rather slipshod and hastily built, and that very departure from the organically smooth perfection of sea-kinden design might have been welcome, save for the weight of water beyond. ‘I suppose you can’t persuade your Builder-kinden to come out this far,’ Stenwold observed.

‘One cannot get the Arketoi to go anywhere.’ Nemoctes tossed the words back over his shoulder. ‘They build where they will, and others are drawn there to live as their guests. There have always been little hand-made outposts in the depths, places at which my people gather, where the Benthists stop off to trade, where loners go who want nothing to do with any other folk. The Hot Stations are something different. New.’

Stenwold had more questions, but they had now come out into a much grander chamber, which seemed a slum and a ghetto and a market all in one. People of many kinden had gathered here, dumped a sack of goods and a tattered bundle of possessions down, and made it their home. The place boasted a mad assortment of hastily-tacked up screens of the brightly coloured cloth the sea-kinden produced, choked with the sounds and smells of what must have been two hundred people all busy at something. There was food being prepared, mostly in the nature of raw and salted fish, and people haggling over it, and over tools and clothes, leathery paper, elaborate jewelry. A thin Kerebroi woman was tattooing the expansive back of an Onychoi man with an abstract pattern of vibrant colours, using nothing but her bare hands. Another Onychoi, one of the small ones, sat cross-legged under a ragged awning with a pair of full bowls placed beside him. A faint tracery was taking shape within them as he practised his Art.

Then someone was rushing at Stenwold, pushing through the crowd at waist level, and for a moment he was instinctively reaching for the sword he had not worn in many days.

‘Mar’Maker!’

The Fly-kinden was grinning at him like fury, standing before Stenwold with his hands on his hips, as proud as if he was the new master of all they surveyed.

The Beetle smiled down at him wanly. ‘I hope you’ve had a smoother journey than I did, Laszlo.’

‘Oh, more than that, far more than that,’ the Fly promised him, and then cast a look up at Nemoctes. ‘You go in front, shelly. Master Maker and I need to catch up.’

Nemoctes merely looked amused at this, and obligingly led the way, several steps in advance. Stenwold leant down to catch Laszlo’s following words.

‘You see,’ the little man was saying. ‘You recall Wys, right? Her that sprung us from Hermatyre?’

‘The mercenary,’ Stenwold confirmed.

‘Very mercenary,’ agreed Laszlo. ‘And she’s got her eyes open, that one. She’s not scared of the land, and she doesn’t want to make war on it neither. Trade, Mar’Maker, that’s what she’s after, and she says she’ll pitch us up overwater just as soon as she can. Whatever happens, whatever this fellow and that slimer Heiracles and the rest settle on, you do your best to get yourself out of here on Wys’s barque.’

‘But will Wys go against her employers?’ Stenwold pressed, deciding this all sounded much too convenient.

‘Heiracles, she doesn’t like. Nemoctes she likes, a bit – and so do I, I think – but he’s not paying. She knows that if we get something going, her lot and my lot, then everyone will become very rich, and maybe she can set up some place just like this. They say the Man, the one who runs the Stations, he was just a freelance like her once.’

They had caught up with Wys, by then, and Nemoctes was greeting her gravely. The twin shadows of Fel and Phylles were at their accustomed places, one behind either shoulder of their diminutive captain. Stenwold offered the woman a nod, and she grinned at him from a face filled with avarice. Laszlo’s words seemed to be written there in a clear script, and Stenwold felt his heart pick up, at a ray of sunny hope that had somehow found its way down here to the depths.

But play it calmly, he told himself, and he hoped Laszlo would do the same. If the other sea-kinden became suspicious, then not even Wys would be able to make a clean break from them.

‘I’ve been going mad waiting for you to get here,’ Laszlo said. ‘We’ve been here, what… four days, I reckon, maybe more.’

‘There was some trouble.’ Stenwold’s tone did not invite question. In his mind he saw again, briefly, the blood-clouded waters where Gribbern had met his end.

‘Well, keep our wits about us, and trouble might be a thing of the past, or at least this kind of…’ Laszlo trailed off. ‘Ah, curse it.’

It took Stenwold a moment to see what had gone wrong. Wys had drawn a blade, her face suddenly wiped clear of humour. Fel and Phylles were already stepping forwards, forming up in front of her. Nemoctes’s expression, as he turned back towards the landsmen, was startled.

A hand came down on Stenwold’s shoulder, and drove him to his knees with the armoured weight of it. Abruptly, monolithic mailed Onychoi were shouldering aside the crowd, approaching from all quarters. Laszlo darted straight upwards, taking them by surprise. He had a knife out, but no way of putting it to much use. Stenwold tried to twist out from under the leaden grip but it closed hard on his shoulder, grating the bones, and hauled him upright again. He struck out at where his attacker’s head must be, best guess, and the impact on his elbow numbed his whole arm, the sand-coloured armour feeling hard as bronze.

Nemoctes was striding forward. He held a twisted pick-like weapon in his hand, and demanded, ‘What is this? Release that man!’ At his raised voice, other people took notice, and Stenwold saw several people slip from the crowd to stand near him. They were Kerebroi, mostly, although one was a dark-skinned woman with a white-speckled scalp, who might easily have been Gribbern’s cousin.

‘Easy, now, easy.’ The speaker slipped out from between two of the Onychoi, pausing before Stenwold to look up at him admiringly. ‘No need to get the axe out, Nemoctes. You know all’s fair in business.’

Nemoctes looked at the newcomer coldly: a little Onychoi man as bald as the rest of them, save for bushy eyebrows as extravagant as a moth’s antennae. He was loaded with gold, about his neck, about his hands, with a veritable belt of interwoven chains and bracers so finely shaped into minutely detailed seascapes that each one of them would probably have persuaded a Helleron magnate to part with his most profitable factory. A swatch of purple cloth, worn over one high shoulder like a half-cloak, completed the overall impression of an extremely successful self-made man.

‘Since when do you stand in the way of the Pelagists, Mandir?’ Nemoctes asked him quietly. ‘Are you so sick of receiving our custom?’

‘Don’t be angry, old wanderer.’ Mandir waved his hands dismissively. ‘You’ve not outstayed your welcome, so come and go as you please. Your prisoners, though… well, consider them now freed for the greater good.’

Fel and Phylles stood either side of Nemoctes now, both obviously looking for an opening, but there were a good eight or nine of the giant Onychoi and they were all armoured head to foot, their gauntlets vicious with spikes.

‘You see,’ said the extravagantly dressed little man, ‘we like Pelagists here, and Pelagists like us. You got any idea how many of your Deepclaw lot have traded in their old beasts for crawlers manufactured right here? The Hot Stations are the next great wave, old wanderer. There’s nothing like us anywhere. And so long as I’m the Man of the Stations, the Stations will run according to my rules.’

‘And what rule is it that has resulted in this?’ Nemoctes demanded.

Mandir pointed a lazy finger up to where Laszlo still hovered. ‘Land-kinden are considered the property of the Man, old wayfarer.’

‘I never heard that rule before.’

‘You never brought me any land-kinden before. The little one with the disregard for where the floor should be has been here a few days, now, long enough for my people to spot he was something special. Now this other fellow turns up, and I’m taking them off your hands, old wanderer. You don’t need to worry about them any more.’

‘I had not thought,’ Nemoctes said, his voice sick with anger, ‘that Claeon’s reach extended so far.’

‘Claeon?’ Mandir squawked. ‘Oh, piss on Claeon. If it’s Hermatyre you’re worried about then, trust me, I’ll keep them well out of Claeon’s grasp. They won’t be safer anywhere in all the oceans than with me. Now, how about you and Wys and the rest run along, and everybody can stay friends.’

‘This isn’t over,’ Nemoctes promised darkly.

‘Nothing ever is,’ Mandir told him cheerfully. ‘That’s what life’s about, isn’t it?’ As the Onychoi closed ranks about Stenwold, Mandir glanced up again. ‘Now you, the amazing, impossible Smallclaw, you feel like coming down?’

‘Feel like coming up here to get me?’ Laszlo taunted him, although Stenwold could see that he felt the strain of hanging in the air like that.

Mandir signalled, and one of his Onychoi raised some device. It was a tube of steel – or something very like steel – with two broad grips, and Stenwold understood it immediately, even though he could not have guessed at the principles on which it worked. The simple way it was held told him all he needed. It was the first ranged weapon he had yet seen in sea-kinden hands. The aperture, at the end directed towards Laszlo, was big enough to put a fist into.

‘I don’t want to hurt anyone,’ the Man of the Stations continued reasonably, ‘but I can’t have you rushing about the place doing impossible things, and making it look untidy. So come down and join your friend before this becomes a regrettable incident.’

Stenwold thought that Laszlo might make a go of it then, just dart off across the wide chamber, moving faster than the cumbersome weapon could follow, but instead he dropped to the ground meekly and walked into the grasp of one of the Onychoi. He managed a covert glance up towards Stenwold, though, and winked at him.

My man on the inside, is it? Stenwold reflected, without much hope. Shame we’re now both in the same inside. Betrayed and captured when I’m scarcely inside the door. I was right, this place is just like Helleron…