Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
‘Nemoctes!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll drown—!’
‘Just follow!’ the other man snapped back at him, pushing ahead. Stenwold caught fragments of combat as they passed, glimpses snatched between one improvised piece of wall and the next: Onychoi and Echinoi locked together, tearing and clawing and chopping, shelly armour cracking, orange skin torn and hewn, all of them now chest-deep in water that swirled with their blood. There were things in that water, that bumped and jostled Stenwold invisibly and, almost as much as the rising tide, he had a sudden fear of a lopped-off Echinoi hand seizing him, digging its thorns into his skin and climbing up his body towards his face. It became harder and harder to force his way ahead even with Nemoctes, shield now slung across his back, half-dragging the land-kinden in his wake. Stenwold finally let go the useless splinter of spear and fumbled for the caul, though realizing that it was good for mere minutes of breath.
Please not a drowning death
, he kept telling himself.
The sting of a Wasp, the poison of an assassin, the steel of a treacherous Mantis, a snapbow bolt, anything but this, anything.
He would never touch the sea again, he swore, if only he was allowed back onto land. No boats, no ships, not even any long baths.
If there are any of Achaeos’s old powers that can hear me, let me die a dry death!
Something started grappling at him, and he let out a cry of panic at the thought that it might be those Echinoi hands, the writhing severed limbs come to drag him down. Then he realized that he had been stumbling forward with his eyes closed, consumed by his own fear, and it was only Nemoctes trying to wrestle the caul over his head. The water was now up to his chin.
‘We’re going under!’ the Pelagist warned him sharply. ‘Just let yourself go limp. Don’t fight me and I will take you out!’
He managed to get the translucent hood over Stenwold’s head and then, with one swift motion, jerked him off his feet.
Stenwold initially kicked out, but something came to him, some last kernel of self-possession, so that when Nemoctes towed at him, he folded himself into a ball, arms and legs tucked in as though he was an infant in the womb. He had only the loosest idea of what followed, feeling a sudden rush of current against him, Nemoctes holding him firm despite it. Then there were no walls about them, and the armoured man was swimming upwards with sure, powerful strokes, dragging Stenwold towards his companion, his beast, the living thing that Wys’s submersible was just the empty shell of. A round, calm eye with a pinhole of a black pupil watched him pass, holding court amid a riot of pale tentacles, and then they found ingress via a pulsing hole where the thing’s body met the edge of its shell, and Stenwold entered Nemoctes’s domain.
It was not like the cramped space in which Gribbern had lived out his life, nor the great window on to the world that was Lyess’s world. It was a house of many rooms, each one smaller than the last, and all cluttered with the memorabilia of Nemoctes’s life. There were shells and skulls on the opal-white walls, and weapons and armour too, undoubtedly relics of past conquests. There were arrangements of gold and precious stones that would have beggared some Collegium magnates. There were statues and figurines, most no more than a hand’s breadth high, fashioned in jade and jet, pearl and soapstone, depicting warriors and beautiful women, stern tyrants and rampant beasts. Many of these figures were so stylized that Stenwold could not recognize the kinden represented, or sometimes even the subject matter. Above all, there were racks and racks of the sea-kinden’s thick paper, some pages bound into sheaves, some simply lying loosely in stacks. The unfamiliar script on them gave no suggestion as to whether they were fables or histories or collections of trade accounts.
Stenwold slowly uncurled, letting the last dregs of the sea run off him. He removed the caul from his head, knowing that he had escaped the ocean’s drowning death once more, but that his luck in that respect could not last for ever.
‘I have to get to land,’ he got out.
‘It seems that way,’ came Nemoctes’s voice.
Stenwold sat up to see the man untying his armour, plate by plate, setting each piece carefully aside.
‘What will you do with me?’ Stenwold asked him.
Nemoctes shrugged. ‘Matters have become more complicated since last we spoke. The Hermatyre politics, that’s one thing, but there have been . . . other developments. There is another conclave of those that bear Claeon no love, but perhaps you will be more than just a commodity.’
‘Really?’ Stenwold held on to no hope. ‘Nemoctes . . .’ it was a dangerous question, but the sights he had seen during the attack on the Hot Stations would not leave him alone, ‘did you lead the Echinoi there?’
At last the Kerebroi stopped, his breastplate lifted half away. ‘The Hot Stations are used to Pelagists warning them of visitors, be they Echinoi raiders or the Benthic Trains. I did not lead them there, nor could I, but I asked my people to remain silent. I am not proud, but Mandir challenged me, and all my kind, when he removed you from my protection. I felt honour bound to secure your escape, and I saw no other means.’
Stenwold nodded bleakly, wondering if he should feel the weight of all those deaths on his conscience too. In truth he had been a prisoner too long – of Claeon, of Mandir, of the sea itself – and now had had precious little sympathy to spare.
Save for Tseitus perhaps, who thought I had come to rescue him. Tseitus who would never see the sun again.
Stenwold shook his head wearily, the brutal violence of the last hour still echoing in the back of his mind.
Tseitus who deserved better.
‘The Echinoi . . .’ he said slowly. ‘Will they destroy the Stations? Will they
win
?’ And when Nemoctes just shook his head, Stenwold pressed on, ‘Then I don’t understand. What was the point for them, even? They died. I saw them killed, and they didn’t even seem to care.’
‘You saw precious few die, I’d say,’ Nemoctes told him. He had taken up a decanter of silver, wrought into the perfect shape of a conch, and now poured Stenwold a measure into a cup like an eggshell.
Stenwold took the drink gingerly. ‘I saw them die, hacked to pieces.’ The liquid was fierce and bracing, a like strong fortified wine.
‘Hacked and dead are different things.’ His armour gone, Nemoctes eased himself down to the floor, his back against the curving wall. He looked a lot older, then, than Stenwold had assumed, for the mail had lent him a tenuous strength. ‘They do not feel pain like us. They do not bleed like us.’ He gave Stenwold a level glance. ‘Like us people of the sea, anyway. I cannot vouch for your kind, but I’d wager you’re more like us than like the Echinoi. They have become lost in their Art, grown too much like their creatures. For them, wounds that would kill a man three times over will seal up within their flesh, and they can lose arms, legs, who knows what else, and grow back what was lost. Some even say that their limbs, severed from them, grow entire new bodies. Some say raids like these are how they get more Echinoi, that they have grown so far away from us that they have no children amongst them at all. Certainly they live wholly without air, and there is not a Pelagist, even, who can claim to have seen any but the full-grown monsters you met. They are our plague, and I feel sick that I may have aided them in any way.’ He drained his cup, tilted his head up to gaze at the arched ceiling. The sense of movement was distant, and Stenwold had to concentrate hard to feel the beast that carried them coursing smoothly through the waters. They might almost be in some scholar’s windowless study, or some magnate’s private room.
‘You’ll be returning to your land soon,’ Nemoctes told him, still staring upwards.
Stenwold was suddenly alert, feeling hope clutch at him with thin fingers. ‘You know . . . ?’
‘Things have changed,’ the sea-kinden told him, ‘as you’ll see. Wys wants you returned, I know, and so do I and mine, and now I think Heiracles will find his wishes of less importance than before. Tell me, would you try to find the heir, if you could?’
It was a subject that Stenwold had given much thought to, as he scribed and sketched for Mandir. If he were free, if that mad dream ever came to pass, would he not rather blot the sea-kinden from his mind, like a nightmare? Surely he would not spend a precious minute beneath the sky in seeking to help them.
‘Yes,’ he said, without hesitation, drawing Nemoctes’s questioning gaze.
‘Even if you had escaped with Wys, and been taken straight home without these interruptions?’ the sea-kinden probed, his wry smile showing that he knew full well what the plan had been.
‘Even then,’ Stenwold told him. ‘I have my reasons.’
‘Of that I have no doubt.’ Nemoctes nodded slowly. ‘It will be a while of travelling, to reach our outpost – a place at the edge of Hermatyre’s domain, where Heiracles has supporters but Claeon, I hope, has none. A place near the cliffs that rise towards your land. You’ll need some sleep, between now and then.’
After he had slept, tired enough by then to drown any dreams that hovered, and after the horror of the Echinoi was far enough behind them, Stenwold asked about Lyess.
Nemoctes grunted as soon as the name was uttered. He was sitting cross-legged at the broadest end of his suite of chambers, presumably in communication with the creature that was carrying them. ‘I know less than you think,’ was all he said.
‘Has she . . . there must have been others . . . ?’
‘That she has travelled with? Not that I’ve known, and I’ve known her for a good many moons. She owes me no great favours. Why she broke her lifelong rule, I cannot say.’ Nemoctes sighed. ‘She . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘She asked after you, when you were in the Stations. She has been . . . distracted. Not seeming herself. As if I were any judge of what her “self” should be like.’
A hundred questions warred in Stenwold’s mouth, but he let none of them out. Somewhere out there, surely not far in terms of how the Pelagists measured their vastly travelled lives, floated her glowing garden and the impossible glory that was her companion.
Waiting for him? Somehow he was sure of it. The thought set his pulse racing, but mostly in fear of what he did not understand.
Why do I care? I do
not
care. The lonely, alien woman has a claim on my sympathy, no more. So what is this? What is this . . . ?
The place Nemoctes ferried him to was like Hermatyre writ small. Somehow some Archetoi builders had picked this barren knoll on the sea floor as their project, and now the twisted spires of a new colony had formed, a solitary hall compared to Hermatyre’s sprawling city.
The Archetoi were much in evidence inside, passing on their wordless errands, their eyes not deigning to follow or acknowledge their visitors. They were pallid little men and women, their skins tattooed with intricate, accreated patterns, going about their business in a world that barely admitted the existence of the rest of humanity.
They ran into Wys’s crew first, just as recently arrived. She gave Stenwold a slightly exasperated look: here was a man who could have been home by now, had he jumped left instead of right. Laszlo had a grin for him, though, albeit a strained one. He was looking pale as a sea-kinden himself by now, and gaunt with it. Stenwold remembered Mandir saying how landsmen never lasted long in the Stations.
We are not meant to be here, and our bodies know it. The gloom, even the air, it is all a slow poison to us.
‘What’s this in aid of ?’ Wys demanded of Nemoctes, who was clad in his mail once more. ‘More Kerebroi games?’ Phylles and Fel squared off behind her, their belligerence dominating her small stature.
‘For once the games have grown too large for anybody to control,’ Nemoctes told her. ‘Not Claeon nor Heiracles nor I.’ He led the way through to the vaulted, cavernous, empty heart of the new colony. The ceiling was heavy with projecting stalactites and fins that would in time become the pillars and walls of the structure’s internal architecture, but for now all that the Archetoi had constructed was a shell. Beneath that arching space two groups stood with a distinct distance between them. One was a rabble of Kerebroi, Heiracles at their head and Paladyra in their midst like a valuable hostage. And the other . . .
Laszlo, with better eyes, gave out a whoop so fierce that Stenwold at first took it for a war cry. Then the Fly was airborne, taking one great leap before descending upon an equally small figure there, clutching her in his arms and laughing madly. Only after she had fought him off did Stenwold recognize her.
‘Hammer and tongs,’ he said hoarsely, ‘it’s Despard.’ He stumbled forward a few steps, staring at the engineer of the
Tidenfree
as she tried to extricate herself from Laszlo’s embrace. Then Stenwold noticed the other two.
Slouching at the back, looking like a man wholly out of his depth in more ways than one, was a lean Beetle youth that Stenwold identified as Maxel Gainer, Tseitus’s former apprentice and the builder of the
Tseitan
, which went at least partway towards explaining how he and Despard happened to be here. Their choice of travelling companion, however, was an unexpected one.
She stood in her scale cuirass, in her gold armlets and silver headband, as arrogantly poised as she had been in the College, as she had been aboard
Isseleema’s Floating Game
. It was Kratia of Tsen, whose last encounter with young Master Gainer had nearly been a murderous one. Stenwold approached her falteringly, frowning.