The Sea Watch

Part Two
The Abyss Gazes Also
Sixteen

The first thing that came to him as he awoke was the warmth of the muggy, humid air. It had a scent to it of sweat and the sea. His leg ached and burned, and he recalled how he had hacked at it in his haste, as it had been tugged and mauled by…

The sea monster, thought Stenwold. Hammer and tongs, it’s swallowed me.

Other fragments of his situation began to touch him, one by one. He was lying on a curving, hard surface, not cold like metal but feeling more like bone or shell. His uneasiness increased. There was a pulsing sound in the air, heavy and insistent, and with each pulse the floor jerked, and his innards told him that he was in motion.

He was soaked to the skin. Somehow, perhaps because the air seemed saturated with water, that sensation came to him only just before he opened his eyes.

Opening his eyes was not an improvement.

There was light, but like no light he had ever seen before. It was an oppressive reddish-purple, and he could see very little by it. His face was shoved close against the curving inside of whatever held him, be it beast or box.

He tried to keep still, to avoid awakening the further ire of the sea monster, but the horror of his situation clung to him, refusing to be dislodged. Caught by that obscene tentacle, hauled towards the waters, the desperate struggle to free himself, the yawning maw of the ocean.

Arianna.

Her face as Danaen had run her through. Arianna who had tried to betray him, but had not been able to. Arianna who had died in a final act of loyalty, but died nonetheless.

With that he could no longer keep it in. At first his shoulders shook, and then his whole body. He tried to reach out, to grasp at the insides of the monster to stop the upwelling of emotions, but he found he could not move his hands, which were pinioned behind him. A shudder racked him, and Stenwold wept for dead Arianna, and for his exchange of the sun for the bowels of a beast.

There was a sound nearby, over that relentless, slightly erratic pulsing. Only a moment later did he realize that it was speech. It was weirdly drawn out and accented, and he caught not a word, but it was a human voice. He tried to twist round, only to find himself tied or webbed with leathery, slightly pliable ropes. The voice continued, joined by another, still uttering words he could not quite catch. He forced himself to calm down. Where there are live men, there is hope, and they do not sound as though they expect to be consumed. The tone of the speakers was jarringly conversational. Stenwold took hold of his grief and loss and fear, and this time he forced it down, steadied himself, and listened.

They were speaking familiar words, he finally realized, but with a strange inflection. He caught the odd piece of meaning, and then put together strings of words at a time, until he heard:

‘… Not what I looked for in a land-kinden at all. Such ugly things, these two, anyway. Why these?’

‘Ask Arkeuthys,’ the other voice said, or that is what Stenwold thought he heard. He was unsure, until the first voice answered, whether it was a name, or simply a phrase he had not understood.

‘You ask him,’ said the original speaker. His voice was a little higher than the second one. He sounded younger.

‘You’ve never talked to Arkeuthys, have you?’ said the older-sounding voice, a man’s voice as were they both, although Stenwold had not been sure of that initially. ‘You’re scared?’

‘I don’t need to talk to him to be scared,’ said the younger. ‘Seeing him’s enough.’ Stenwold was following their talk more easily now. They sounded close enough to be crouching just behind him, speaking only loud enough to be heard over the…

Over the engine… The revelation surged through him. No heartbeat this, but some manner of engine. He had heard nothing like it before, but he was more and more sure that the sound was mechanical in nature, and part of nothing living, for all it had no definite rhythm. He had already identified that each thundering pulse jerked them forwards, and could only guess at the means of propulsion that he bore baffled witness to.

One of the men gave out a ragged groan, without warning, and for a moment Stenwold thought the other must have stabbed him. Then there was some ragged breathing, and the younger voice continued, ‘Arkeuthys says…?’

Stenwold took a deep breath and gave a determined twist at whatever held him, resulting in him flopping onto his back, crushing his bound arms beneath his own weight, He had a brief view of the pale curve of a close ceiling, with some kind of lamp shedding the sanguine light, and then he heaved himself round again so that he was facing away from the wall.

There was far less space here than he had first thought. The erratic surge of the engine had given the cramped chamber a false sense of distance. Instead, he now found himself staring at Teornis.

The Spider lord was awake but lay very still, so Stenwold guessed he had been playing dead for the benefit of their captors. He had opened his eyes as Stenwold moved, though, and now he winked once, very deliberately. His fine clothes were torn, and his hands were also bound. So, this was not a Spider plot, then, but who…?

Beyond Teornis were two men, obviously the two speakers. The ceiling was low enough to have them kneeling, and the bloody light made things uncertain, but Stenwold thought they were pale-skinned and dark-haired. There was a younger and an older one, as he had surmised, and they made surely the strangest pair ever to be crewing any kind of automotive.

They were savages. That was his instant first thought. They were barbarians, primitives from some underdeveloped tribal land. They wore almost no clothing beyond kilts that extended to mid-thigh, but they made up for that in other finery. On his arms, the younger man wore some bracers that were inscribed with elaborate arabesques, and a torc encircled his neck. The older had metal tracery running all the way from wrist to elbow, work as delicate and intricate as Stenwold had ever seen, as light and complex as if it had grown there frond by frond. His collar was comprised of more of the same, an expanse of branching and rejoining tendrils of metal that covered most of his shoulders and upper chest. About his brow, his long hair was confined by a twining band of the same material. It was impossible to be sure in the strange light, but something about the glint of it suggested gold to Stenwold – gold in a quantity to make a Spider Aristos raise an eyebrow, and of a workmanship to match anything he could imagine man or machine achieving.

The younger man was lean and slender, and he had a short beard cut square, of the same dark lustre as his hair. His senior was paunchier, broad across his bare midriff, more jowly about the face, and with a beard that had been carefully styled so that it curved upwards and rolled into itself. Beyond all this, though, came the revelation that, despite Teornis’s captivity, these were Spider-kinden.

Or no, they were not exactly Spider-kinden, not quite, but there was a similarity between their faces and Teornis’s that showed them to be some sort of kin, some offshoot of the same root-stock, linked by a trick of ancestry.

And an errant thought occurred to him, Have I not seen this before in someone recently, that I took for a Spider? But he could not pin down the idea and it soon escaped him.

‘Arkeuthys says…’ the older man stammered. He was looking strained, to Stenwold’s eye. ‘He says he saw their two leaders trading insults, and it was these two he grabbed.’

‘And what about the other one? Did you-?’

‘Of course I did.’ The older man glared at his fellow. ‘He says it’s just some land-kinden who got in the way. He cut Arkeuthys, the little one did.’

‘So we don’t need him, then?’ To Stenwold’s alarm, the younger man took a knife from his waistband, a vicious-looking weapon with a wicked inward curve. Stenwold craned his neck to follow the man’s gaze, and spotted a third captive: the tiny trussed form of Laszlo, looking bruised and still unconscious.

The older man’s eyes abruptly moved to meet Sten-wold’s own, and there was a shock of alien contact, reinforced by Stenwold’s meanwhile working out who ‘Arkeuthys’ must be. Of course, there was an Art for speaking with beasts, though you seldom heard of it these days. But one could only speak with animals appropriate to one’s people…

Founder’s Mark! he whimpered inwardly. These are sea monster-kinden.

Noting his distress, the man with the coiled beard smiled. ‘Kill the little one now. He can’t be worth much,’ he said.

‘Hoi!’ This was a new voice, emerging from somewhere ahead, towards the vehicle’s direction of travel. ‘None of that!’

‘Keep out of it,’ the older man snapped.

‘Nobody’s killing anyone!’ the new voice insisted. It was a higher pitch than theirs, clearly a woman’s voice, but high even for that. Her accent was slightly different, too, drawling the vowels less, but also stressing her words in unexpected places. Stenwold found it even harder to follow.

‘Arkeuthys says-’ one of the first two began to argue.

‘Don’t care. If we’ve got three land-kinden, then we bring all three land-kinden back to the colony, alive.’

The look on the face of the older man showed resentment and loathing. ‘I am the voice of the Edmir here.’

‘And I’m the handler of this barque,’ the woman shot back.

‘So?’

‘So if you even want it to get as far as your Edmir’s city, you keep me sweet, or I’ll push off for the Stations or Deep Seep, or wherever I choose.’

‘You wouldn’t dare-’

‘And furthermore,’ the woman’s voice continued, ploughing straight over the older man’s words, ‘if you suggest killing someone just because they’re small, then I’ll get Rosander to pincer your piss-damn arms off at the elbows, got it?’

The look on the man’s face was, Stenwold found, exactly the look of a Spider thwarted by someone undesirable. ‘The Edmir shall hear of this, Chenni,’ he growled.

‘I’ll pit your chief against mine, any day,’ the woman jeered at them. ‘And at least tell me you equalized them. Did you do that one thing right?’

‘As they’re not crushed and dead, of course we did,’ the younger man spat back. ‘We know our business. You keep to yours!’

The one thing that came through, across this chasm of different cultures, was the thought: They are divided. Even here, trapped and grieving and, he had no doubt about it, in some kind of submersible automotive deep beneath the waves, he had a tiny spark of hope. If there were factions, there would be politics and, whatever his talents, he was a statesman.

And they would let Laszlo live, and that gave him an ally. And maybe Teornis as well, for all that they look like Spiders. These are no more his people than mine.

Then the older man snarled with frustration and signalled for his colleague to put away the knife and, to enact that frustration, he kicked Teornis in the kidneys and then stamped on Stenwold’s gashed and abused leg. The sudden flare of pain was savage enough to rip consciousness away from him.

He awoke again to a firm and nudging pressure against his better leg, slowly jolting him from the morass of oblivion. He opened his eyes to see the grim reddish light, and shut them again. The nudging continued. It felt like a foot.

Arianna. The thought came to him from nowhere, a thought orphaned and without issue, passing him like the lights of a distant ship. He clenched his fists, feeling them tug and stretch at the stuff that was binding them.

‘Maker.’ The voice was soft, barely on the edge of hearing.

‘Teornis?’ he murmured in reply, as quietly as he could, trusting to the Spider’s hearing.

‘None other,’ came the response. ‘Our jovial friends have gone fore. How much of their talk did you hear?’

‘Some. I understood less, though. And you?’

‘The same. However, they’re a bloody-handed lot, it’s clear.’ Stenwold had to strain his ears to hear the calm, measured tones. ‘And Apt, it seems, for I take this to be a machine of some kind.’

‘That’s my guess, though the walls and floor are made of nothing I’ve ever seen manufactured.’ There was movement from nearby, and they fell silent at once. Stenwold heard two people, he assumed the same two, shuffle up closer and hunker down.

‘What’s the order?’ enquired the younger voice.

‘Get them cloaked and hooded. The Edmir wants nobody to set eyes on the land-kinden. He’ll send men to take them directly to his cellars.’

There was a little shifting around, and Stenwold heard the younger man whisper, ‘What if she wants them for Rosander?’

The older man let out a long breath. ‘We’d better hope the Edmir gets more men to us quicker than the Nauarch can.’

Absently, Stenwold wondered whether his own future would be more secure in the hands of this Edmir or the one they called Rosander. He recalled that their pilot, who had spared Laszlo’s life, had been acting for Rosander, but he had a gloomy suspicion that there were no such thing as safe hands now waiting to receive the captive landsmen.

Waiting where? Where in all the maps are they taking us? But there were no answers to that, no more than there were maps.

The lurching motion of their craft was slowing, he noticed, accompanied by a few bucking shifts of direction. His stomach clenched at the realization that, whatever port they were heading to, they were shortly due to arrive.

They suddenly plunged – there was no other word for it. It was as if they were in a flier that had abruptly lost its grip on the air. Stenwold heard one of their captors groan at the motion, that had sat quite easily with the Beetle. Inapt are they? Then, just as suddenly, they were rising, the curious vessel bucking a little against some external current, their unseen pilot wrestling, no doubt, with the levers.

A moment later the lurching of the engine ceased, the interior becoming vastly silent without it, and the motion of their conveyance, that had been so strange, became jarringly familiar. They were bobbing on calm water, just as if they were in nothing more than a rowing boat.

‘Fat one first,’ Stenwold heard quite distinctly, accent or no, and then their hands were on him. In the cramped space they were awkward with him, and it was plain they were trying to hurry as well. Stenwold let his body go intentionally slack, but after they had fumbled him a second time, they did something to their hands – something he instinctively recognized as Art – so that they latched onto his clothes and skin with a painful sureness. As they hauled at him, he felt as though they were going to rip strips of his hide off, and he yelled with pain and started cooperating with them as best he could. They laughed at that, and he wondered if they had known that he was awake all the time.

‘Hood him,’ snapped the older man, just as the light ahead changed in character from the infernal red of the vessel’s innards to something greenish-blue, no more natural but considerably more pleasant. A moment later some kind of bag was dragged over Stenwold’s head, the texture of it unpleasantly slick, after which he had to rely on guidance from his captors to get him out of whatever hatch the vessel possessed and onto stone that was worked in some smoothly undulating pattern.

They hurriedly dumped him, and he heard the younger man call out, and others coming over. There was a rapid conversation that he did not catch, save for several mentions of the name ‘Rosander’ again, and the instruction, ‘Watch him.’ Then he guessed his two captors were returning inside for Teornis and Laszlo.

The surface beneath him had felt like stone but, as his questing hands examined it, it had a peculiar texture to it, the polished surface still bearing faint indentations and pockmarks. The air about him was neither hot nor cool, laden with a kind of stagnant damp, and he could smell fish, and the sea, and the men around him possessed an oily, fishy odour of their own, which was unlike anything he had come across before.

Something dropped across his legs, making him cry out in pain. The unseen burden writhed and slid off him, and he guessed from its size that it was Laszlo. Then he heard approaching feet, and a current of agitation ran through his unseen guards. Someone barked something that could only have been a challenge, and then the shouting started.

Stenwold tried his best to follow what was being said, but the words escaped him, too fast and too foreign to make any sense. A pattern came to him, though, of thieves bickering over the spoils. And I’m a spoil. He could pick out the voice of the older man who had ridden in the submersible with them, and there were a lot of other voices backing his case. The opposing camp seemed to have far fewer participants, but their voices were of a very different character, certainly not the near-squeak of their pilot. In fact, their bass rumble put him in mind of very large men indeed, as big as Scorpions or even Mole Crickets.

He heard, in the midst of this cacophony, the distinctive sound of steel, the touch of blades: not put to use, yet, but sliding across one another, ready for blood. He scraped his head across the ground, trying to dislodge the bag, but it was no use. This is maddening.

Then there was a sharp rapping, surely a staff against the stone floor, and quiet followed meekly in its wake. Stenwold heard enough shuffling to imagine the two warring parties separating reluctantly.

‘That is quite enough,’ someone said, a new voice that was clearly used to being obeyed. ‘Now, who leads these… ah, and is it Chenni I see there?’

There was a pause, and then the high tones of their pilot. ‘Aye, your Eminence.’ She sounded flustered, if Stenwold was any judge.

‘Kindly tell your Nauarch, my ally the good Rosander, that he need have no fear. He may approach me for speech with the land-kinden at any time.’ The new voice spoke smoothly, but then it gained a new edge: ‘And if your bannermen do not disperse this moment, do not think that Rosander can save them from being dismembered, joint by joint.’

‘You…’ Whatever Chenni was about to say, she clamped down on it.

‘I don’t dare?’ The new voice was dangerously soft again. ‘Your Rosander is not the sentimental fool you take him for. He’d not wish to upset me for a few worthless lives like these. Be thankful that you yourself are currently somewhat more dear to him than most. Now go. Your services with your machine are appreciated, but it is time for you and yours to quit this place and bother me no more.’

After the scuffling and shuffling that surely meant Chenni and her ‘bannermen’ dispersing, the order came, ‘Get them to their feet.’ Stenwold was unceremoniously hauled upright, supported between two men, and a moment later he was being hustled forward, stumbling over the unseen ground. He could only hope that Laszlo and Teornis were still nearby. The route was complex enough that he lost track entirely of how many turns they took, save that their journey was more often upwards than not, struggling and slipping on ramps of grooved stone that his boots could not properly grip. His captors were ruthless in their progress, using their Art to maintain their sticky grip on him whenever he threatened to fall.

At last they stopped, and he had the sense of a large space echoing with a murmur of voices. A council chamber? A court of law? Am I to be tried for the crime of being land-born?

‘Land-kinden,’ said the leader’s voice more softly, ‘from here you shall go to the cells, beneath my great halls, and I cannot say if you shall ever venture forth from them again. I think it only fair, therefore, that you see, just this once, some small piece of your people’s doom.’

A moment later the bag was dragged from Stenwold’s head. He closed his eyes, anticipating a shock of sunlight, but instead there was an overcast, almost twilightish gloom, relieved only by patches of wan light, globes of blue-green or green-white or purplish-red. Those lights went back and back, though, and multiplied with distance. Stenwold found himself standing on the brink of a balcony of moulded stone, looking down into a vaulted space between curved walls swelling in the shadows and then narrowing to a pointed ceiling, which some half-seen walls were seamed into radial symmetry by elegant buttresses, as though they were standing within a vast stone gourd. Even in the dim light, Stenwold saw that, between the ridges, the ceiling and walls were folded and worked until they seemed more like the natural interior of some great shell than the work of hands. Below them a multitude bustled in the many-coloured dusky light, figures large and small, and none seen clearly, but no glimpse of any looking like kinden Stenwold knew. There were figures as small as Flies, or as large as Mole Crickets, or as slender as Mantids, and most of the throng wore little for garments – kilts, cloaks, perhaps a sash. A few clumped through the crowd in armour that made them seem as ponderous and powerful as automotives, broader across the shoulders than Stenwold was tall.

He glanced to either side, finding Teornis and Laszlo staring as aghast as he. Their captors mostly resembled the men from the submersible – the not quite Spider-kinden. The women amongst them were high-cheeked, fair and lustrous of hair, the men with elaborate beards, and all of them decked out in gold and a dozen kinds of precious stones that Stenwold could not identify. Others, standing like servants and subordinates, were taller and thinner, lightly armoured in breastplates and tall helms of what might be chitin or even boiled leather. These were cloaked and held long spears, and their faces, hollow-cheeked and elongated, were unlike any kinden Stenwold knew.

At his shoulder stood a man he immediately knew as the leader. He, too, was of the Spider-kin people and, although they were all attired like Aristoi, this man boasted an additional level of luxury. His dark, curled hair was shot through with a coiling net of gold and glinting gems and he wore gold leaf, like tattoos, from wrist to shoulder of both arms. His cloak was fashioned from the hide of some beast, picked out in curving abstracts of shimmering colours, and his torc was a crescent moon of mother-of-pearl that gave back all the colours of the unhealthy lamps.

‘What think you, O land-kinden?’ he asked, keeping his voice still low. ‘Do you like your new home?’

‘There has been a mistake. We’re not your enemies…’ Stenwold started hurriedly but, at a gesture, the bag was jammed over his head again, and he was marched away.