Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
‘What are they?’ Stenwold asked, indicating the aggressors.
‘Echinoi,’ Lyess told him. ‘Sometimes they attack the colonies, and they say that’s the only reason the Builders tolerate anyone else within their homes. The Echinoi are everyone’s enemies. They were first in the sea, the memories say. We other kinden drove them into the deeper places, and they have never forgotten. Some say they possess colonies in the great uncharted wastes, but I have heard of nobody who has seen such things for themselves.’
They drifted on over the sluggish melee, and soon the carnage was left behind in the gloom, only the train’s winking lights remaining as distant star-like testimony. Stenwold continued watching for a long time, and saw several of them wink out. Not for the first time did he consider what a terrible thing it would be, to die out here.
Then there were the fish, or at least they looked like fish to Stenwold. He became aware of them only when the progress of Lyess’s companion changed, becoming more laboured, and his own stomach told him they were descending fast. He looked about, to find Lyess seeming in a panic, staring about her. There was a dawning light above, like the first silver echo of sunlight, but it was fading, even as he noticed it.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked, but then he spotted them: sleek grey darts swooping about them, lunging in towards the bell above, and then twitching away. There were a half dozen of them attacking from all sides, one after another, and always from above, so that Stenwold thought it would make more sense to get to the surface to protect her companion’s top, but instead they continued dropping through the water as swiftly as they could.
The fish were never still, but kept ducking beneath the jellyfish’s rippling mantle, each in turn virtually putting a narrow eye up against its transparent flanks. Stenwold’s own gaze met theirs, and he experienced a distinct shock of contact, like meeting the stare of some intelligent but utterly inhuman entity. Worse was the expression about the intruders’ mouths.
‘Cursed fish was
smiling
at me,’ he said, shaken.
‘They are Menfish,’ Lyess spat angrily, and her companion shuddered under a renewed assault. ‘They are a bane on the Pelagists. They attack us whenever they can. They think like humans, even though they are nothing but fish, and they hate us.’
‘Can they harm us?’ Stenwold asked her. The incessant lunging attack of the Menfish was becoming swifter and more violent.
‘They could damage my companion so that we cannot go further, and then they will cut through to us. We must go deep, as they are creatures of the surface.’
Then the Menfish suddenly scattered, all three vanishing into the dark water. It gave Stenwold no relief, since it was all too clearly a flight from some worse monster.
For a moment the travellers held their place in the water, the ragged-edged dome above them expanding and contracting silently. Then a shadow coursed past them, a great armoured form of which Stenwold caught only glimpses: a segmented carapace, paddle-like limbs and tail, folded pincers like the largest of all scorpions. It utterly dwarfed them, and it seemed to Stenwold that it would have dwarfed almost anything.
Lyess was on her knees, staring at the thing as it passed. She was saying something over and over, almost under her breath. Stenwold bent close to hear her, and caught the words, ‘Gods of the sea.’
‘Gods?’ he repeated numbly. The monster of monsters was coming back, making another inquisitive pass. He saw compound eyes, larger than he himself was, glitter in the jellyfish’s light, as something behind that broad grid of facets considered him and weighed him, and determined his fate.
‘We call them so.’ Lyess was almost breathless. ‘We meet them seldom. Sometimes they kill us, us Pelagists, but more often they let us live. They are the real powers of the deeps.’ Her previous reserve had been stripped from her. Fear and exhilaration raced each other across her face, where Stenwold saw colours – grey and red and deep blue – surface and fade within her skin.
‘Do they have’ – he hardly dared ask – ‘a kinden?’
‘Nemoctes believes they do,’ she whispered. ‘He says that a Pelagist he knew once travelled to the deep places, to some tiny colony where only we and fugitives go. He told how an Onychoi came in like none he’d ever seen before, half again as tall as a normal man, and clawed, no kinden that he’d seen before or since. He swore that it was Seagod-kinden.’
The plated shadow was now receding away on its own inscrutable errands, and in its absence Stenwold could not help thinking,
Sailors’ tales, as above, so below?
But he could not deny the fact of the Sea-god, and if it was not actually a god, then perhaps he had no wish to meet anything yet more godlike.
Let us be thankful that the sea keeps its greatest mysteries hidden
.
It was not long after that she woke him, hovering over and almost touching his face, until the sense of her presence broke him from his slumber.
‘The Hot Stations,’ she announced. ‘We have arrived.’
He sat up to see the striking, turbulent vista beyond the clouded walls of Lyess’s companion, and the word that sprang unstoppably from his lips was, ‘Helleron.’
‘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.’