The Sea Watch

Twenty-Five

‘I thought we didn’t like Benthists,’ Laszlo complained, in tones intended to be heard in the engine chamber. There was a questioning grunt from Lej, up above, and Laszlo repeated himself louder.

He heard a scuffle and a scrape, and then the huge engineer let himself down into the submersible’s main compartment. ‘Why’d you say that?’ Lej asked.

‘Well, Rosander’s lot,’ Laszlo pointed out, ‘they’re Benthists, right? Onychoi?’

‘Surely,’ said Lej, obviously puzzled by his attitude. He lumbered over to join Laszlo at the window. Outside, the rugged, rocky mud of the seafloor played host to an entire Benthist encampment, its long line of animals and conveyances coiled into decreasing loops that presumably put the most vulnerable in the centre. There were over two score of gigantic armoured beasts, all pincers and legs and craggy carapaces, each one burdened with bulging nets of cargo or peaked howdahs made of shell and fishskin, some drawing laden travois. As well as the animals, Laszlo observed some kind of automotive there as well, a great bronze walker made into the form of a stylized lobster, which was splendid enough that he guessed the Benthist chief – their ‘Nauarch’ – must travel on it. Above them a dozen or so squid-riding Kerebroi traced graceful paths, darting off into the darkness beyond the train’s lamps and then arcing back, obviously watching for danger. A single submersible sailed with them, a slender thing made out of a razor shell that could only just have fit a single pilot of Wys’s size.

‘Rosander we don’t like. Benthists we’re happy with. Onychoi? I’m Onychoi. Wys is. Fel is,’ Lej rumbled. ‘Nothing wrong with Onychoi. Nothing wrong with Kerebroi. People are people. Just certain individuals we’re not so keen on. Besides, we’re for hire. Not our job not to like people.’

Wys, Fel and Phylles were outside there amongst the Benthists with Heiracles’s chest of money, apparently trading for something. The sight of the Benthist camp had been wholly welcome to them.

‘Problem with Rosander,’ Lej continued, choosing his thoughts carefully, ‘is that he doesn’t act like a Benthist. The Thousand Spines have been in and around Hermatyre for years now. Benthists should be on the move. Nobody’s happy with them just sitting there.’

Laszlo nodded, still staring out at the busy caravan. The Benthists were out in force, certainly. Parties of them kept appearing from the gloom, tracking their way across the ocean wastes. Laszlo assumed they had been off fishing or foraging or something. The seabed looked so inhospitable he was amazed that there could be enough there to keep so many mouths fed. He guessed that there must be at least four hundred Benthists in sight, with who could know how many more off scavenging. Most of them were Onychoi: plenty of people resembling Lej, both in and out of their massive suits of armour. Others were of Wys’s kindred, diminutive crouched forms scuttling or sculling everywhere, checking the animals and goods. All of them seemed to be wearing a great deal more clothes than the people of Hermatyre, but perhaps the open water was cold whereas the colony was muggily warm. After a while Laszlo was able to pick out a scattering of other kinden: aside from the Kerebroi sea-cavalry above, he spotted a few people like Paladrya in amongst the heavy, broad forms of the Onychoi, and a couple of others he simply couldn’t place. There was even a thickset young man who could have been Phylles’s brother, lounging atop one of the beasts, with his back against some kind of extraordinary flower-like outgrowth that waved a hundred tendrils on the unseen current.

When he mentioned this to Lej, the big man shrugged.

‘Why not?’ he asked, with his customary patience. ‘Someone wants to ride with the Benthists, why not? The life’s not easy. Easier in a colony, for all you have to do things in a certain way. But freer out with the Benthists. Sometimes that’s what people want: not all fenced about by walls, not to go drifting about alone like a Pelagist. Some people like it that way.’

‘Did you ever do that? Travel with a train?’ Laszlo asked him.

‘Born in one,’ Lej confirmed. ‘Got off at the Station, when I was fourteen. Worked there, got trained. Here, now.’

‘You like machines?’

‘Surely.’ Lej grinned, which transformed his face, made him look younger and more human. ‘Good to be able to do something lots of other people can’t. Like you. You know what I’m saying.’ He meant Aptitude, of course. Laszlo was trying to put together a picture of how many people were actually Apt down here. He had the impression that the talent was mostly confined to the Onychoi, and there were obviously a lot of them who, like Wys, were Apt but had never really thought about mechanical things, and therefore tended to assume there was some impenetrable mystery about them. Laszlo’s casual acceptance of the submersible’s workings had got him a great deal of unearned respect from Lej, even though he was in no real position to help out. It was not that his knowledge of artifice – minimal as it was – would not have been some use; it was just that the gear trains that kept the barque moving were made with someone like Lej in mind, and Laszlo would barely have been able to wrestle a single gear about. Even winding the engine was done by hand and by the sheer power in Lej’s broad shoulders.

‘Here’s Herself,’ Lej murmured, pointing to where Wys and the others were just emerging from the inner reaches of the spiralled train.

Laszlo chuckled, drawing a curious glance from the mechanic. ‘We say that, sometimes,’ he explained. ‘We’d say “Himself’s in a bad mood” or something. Odd that you do, too.’

Lej gave him a long, considering look. ‘Land-kinden, I don’t know why you and me, we even understand a word each other says,’ he remarked.

Laszlo stared at him, startled by the thought. Words were words, after all. They meant… They had meaning. Intrinsic meaning. He was sure he had read that, somewhere.

Fel and Phylles were both laden down with sacks and jars and strangely moulded pearly containers. Wys was in deep conference with an Onychoi woman of Lej’s kinden, who seemed to be wearing overalls done up at all the joints, and overlaid by piecemeal armour. She was just as broad and heavily built as the male of the species, and Lej had identified her as Epiphona, the Nauarch of the Three Red Fish train. Sure enough, several of the armoured draft-beasts sported simple square banners with a trio of crimson dots. To Laszlo’s eyes there appeared little fish-like about the emblems.

Epiphona watched Wys’s hands carefully as the tiny woman’s fingers flew in the hand-speech these people used when outside under the open water. Her own hands moved in return, just a few signs but decisively. A moment later Wys and her crew were heading back towards the submersible.

‘Must have got some bargains,’ Lej mused. ‘She looks happy.’

Laszlo had seen the stuff they used as money: leathery pieces of thick, uneven paper printed with fantastical designs. Apparently Hermatyre just churned this stuff out to the Edmir’s order, and anyone working for the city got rewarded with some. Laszlo had opined that it must be easy to make your own, and had learned that there was some complicated business with the ink and the patterns, so that even a skilled accreator would have difficulty in duplicating them. It seemed a mad system to him, but he decided he would have to take their word for it. After all, they were clearly not going to be moving to the Helleron gold standard any time soon.

Shortly afterwards, Wys and the others came stomping inside, the dregs of seawater running off them. They had food, she announced, and some fresh-woven clothes, and something called ‘leitwater’ for Lej, which was apparently strong drink of some kind. Lej then asked a lot of questions about vintage, which boiled down to finding out which individual had distilled the stuff out of seawater. The thought made Laszlo feel quite ill, as there were surely lots of unpleasant things in seawater, and every fool knew it was poison to drink it. Still, these people were insane enough to actually live in the sea, and even breathe it on occasion, so he shouldn’t be surprised at this fresh example of their lunacy.

‘Any word?’ he demanded of Wys, as soon as he could get a word in.

‘Hmm?’ Wys raised her feathery eyebrow, the only tufts of hair on her head. ‘Oh, of your friend? Nothing. They’ve met a few Pelagists, but none that recently, and it’s not likely the news would be bandied about that freely. Don’t worry, they’ll find us.’ She smiled at him, obviously believing that she was being reassuring. ‘Nothing bad will have happened to him. He’s probably reached the Stations already.’

He remembered the darkness closing on him.

He remembered something lancing into his side, a feeling like burning, then fighting to breathe.

The surging, hanging bulk of Arkeuthys rolling forward in the water, like an angry cloud, tentacles reaching out but then suddenly recoiling.

Himself rushing upwards through the water, dragged by the thing in his side, into…

Stenwold remembered…

Light.

And woke to it, bright enough to claw at the edge of his eyelids. He lay on a yielding surface, and felt a dull ache in his side where something had pierced him. The light was so white, he could see it despite his closed eyes. White and bright and pure, like nothing he had seen since they took him away from the sun.

For a moment he thought… but he was not back on land. There was no fresh breeze, no open space. Around him the damp, neutral air reverberated to a soft, rhythmic sound, like a rush of water heard from three rooms away. A submersible, it must be…? But not like the jetting dart they had kidnapped him in, nor even Wys’s coiled home. There was motion evident in the padded surface beneath him, but it was different to the almost violent stop-start of siphons that Lej had shown him earlier.

He opened his eyes, or tried to. The light was just too bright. He was surrounded by glare. He raised a hand to blot it out, feeling his joints ache. Something in him was ready for a sharp stab of hurt in his side, but there was now only the distant and fading memory of pain.

Yet another strange place. Every time I ever try to understand.. . Chenni’s barque, then the oubliette, Wys’s vessel, the shell-house, the claustrophobic cabin behind the head of Gribbern’s poor sea monster… and now this. Where was this?

I hope Laszlo did better than this. I hope Teornis did, too, wherever he is. He felt that he would have kissed Teornis, to see him just then, enemy or not.

He finally risked peering through his fingers. Everything around him seemed to glow pale, as though he was sitting under the full moon. There were arching walls around him – no, a dome, a dome above. The walls kept undulating softly. He could make out grey shapes within them, worms and sacs and…

Like intestines. Those dim forms within the translucent walls were like the guts of some creature, and beyond them was…

The sea. The water. He spotted the darting forms of fish as they approached to butt at the light. He looked down.

Looking down was definitely a mistake. There was less light emanating from down there. The floor was nigh on transparent, and below was only sea – yet not only sea. There was a drifting trail there, too, like the forest of weeds but floating, hanging in the water, going on for ever and for ever until the white light could no longer penetrate. Strings and coils and glittering strands of jewels. Tentacles.

Not a submersible. He held himself very still. That there was air here, and not simply some kind of digestive juice, suggested he was now the guest of some other type of sea-kinden, but that failed to inspire him with any great confidence. He saw a fish darting in amongst those lazy strands. A single touch, a mere brush against the slimmest tendril and the creature was twitching, spasming and then still, stuck somehow on the near-invisible thread. Then the creature he was inside began to haul up the line, contracting and contracting again, as it dragged its victim in smoothly towards some hidden orifice.

Just like me? He remembered that lance of pain, that tug. How can they live like this? Why don’t they go mad with revulsion? Everything here is so hideous!

‘Tell me how you feel.’

His head moved automatically to find the source of the voice.

‘Oh,’ gaped Stenwold.

She was not hideous. She was anything but hideous, and he knew instantly what land-kinden her people must once have been cousin to. Those blank white eyes, that pale skin that shone softly, constantly brushed with muted sheens like mother-of-pearl. He remembered the girl that Salma had loved, who had once been known as Grief in Chains, and who had danced and been ethereally beautiful – somehow not fit for Stenwold’s or Salma’s world of blood and war. This woman was the same. She was more so. Her skin was so alabaster-pale that he dared not look too closely lest he discern her organs beneath it and, besides, her skin was all that she possessed, that and her long, pale hair that rippled and twitched as though it felt the sea current shifting beyond those filmy walls. She knelt, sitting on her heels, and stared at him with those huge, featureless eyes and no expression at all on her face.

‘What…?’ he managed. He felt as though he had been off-balance for days now, reeling from one incomprehensible sight to another, as though any moment he would be out in the water again, in a cell, or in the jaws of a monster. He was shaking and, as he noticed it, the shaking became worse and he could not stop it. All he could do was just stare bleakly back at this sea-kinden woman.

‘Tell me how you feel,’ she repeated.

He opened his mouth to frame an answer, but even posing the question to himself made it impossible to utter. Lost, he thought. I feel lost. And he was truly lost. No other son of Collegium had ever been so adrift, surely. I want to go home. Not because he was War Master Stenwold Maker, hero of Collegium, who would save his city from the Spiders as he had, somehow apparently, saved it from the Vekken and the Wasps. He wanted to go home for the same reason a wayward child cries for its mother. I want to see something familiar. Walls, doors, roofs, my friends. Not… The image of Gribbern’s death appeared abruptly in the front of his mind: the blindly mechanical apparatus of the crab’s mouthparts going about their delicate work of ripping a man to shreds and consuming him. As he recoiled from the thought, his mind’s straining seams finally sprang. They all came out, all the old faces. Tisamon, you bastard, where are you when I need you? Nero sketched slyly, he who had died hundreds of miles astray in Solarno… Salma, Totho, Tynisa… The dead and the lost.

Arianna. He relived her death, Danaen’s cruel blade separating her from her life’s last seconds with typical Mantis precision. Arianna who had betrayed him and betrayed for him and tried to kill a general for him, and who might even have loved him, in some brief moment between wars.

He was aware that he was falling sideways, but his arms were too busy trying to hold himself together. The surface that he fell on to rippled with alien life as he landed, and he wished it would swallow him up, absorb him, divide him from this killing ache of loss just as the Mantis blade had severed Arianna from him.

He felt her presence, then: delicate fingers trailing across the tattered clothing over his back, exploring textures tentatively, unsure quite what to do with him. When they touched skin they shrank away. She might almost have been floating in the air above him, as he shuddered with pent-up grief. Some instinct or memory had obviously touched her, for her arms were then around him, an encircling embrace only an inch from contact, head bent low so the fronds of her hair twined slowly, blindly about him. He shook and sobbed under her tentative guardianship, and at last, when it had all been wrung out of him, and sheer exhaustion triumphed over the draining wells of emotion, he slept.

He awoke to voices, and for a moment he was kicking frantically in Gribbern’s tiny cramped cabin, because it was the distant echo of Nemoctes drifting to him from far away… and when she answered, when his mysterious benefactress spoke, he recognized her voice from the ghosts that had haunted Gribbern, in those last headlong moments before he and his mount had died. ‘I am near,’ she had assured him, but she had not been quite near enough.

‘He returns to us,’ she said now, without looking round at him, somehow sensing even the opening of Stenwold’s eyes. She was sitting, her knees drawn close to her chin, facing away from him.

‘Stenwold Maker of the land-kinden, do you hear me?’ came the scratching sound that distance and their Art made of Nemoctes’s voice.

‘And if I do?’ Stenwold replied weakly.

‘He hears,’ the woman confirmed.

‘I am glad that you still live, land-kinden.’

‘I’m not sure I share that pleasure,’ Stenwold told the air. ‘What do you want?’

There was a pause after she had relayed his words, and then Nemoctes said, ‘I have told Lyess to bring you to the Hot Stations. We will meet there – with Heiracles and other loyalists if possible. Claeon will not dare act too openly for fear of the Man.’ That one word was spoken as a title of some weight. ‘I will find your friend, the other land-kinden. He will be brought to you there.’

‘Good,’ Stenwold responded, thinking that was the least they could do if they could not take him home. Then shame struck him, and he muttered, ‘I’m sorry about your friend.’

‘As am I,’ and so he was, for Nemoctes’s bitter sadness could be heard quite clearly. ‘Sorrier still as I am the cause, the one who has brought some of my fellow Pelagists into this conflict. I do not intend to see any more of my people slain – or any others under my care, yourself included.’

‘Then take me to the land,’ Stenwold demanded promptly. ‘Free me.’

He did not hear Nemoctes’s sigh, but his mind inserted it into the pause that followed. At last the unseen sea-kinden said, ‘If I was free myself to act, then I would hold no prisoners. Freedom is the life of a Pelagist, so I would never willingly deny it to any. I can only pledge that Heiracles and his people must advance some definite cause against you, or purpose for you, otherwise I shall return you to your people myself, and your friend also. No more waiting. No more holding you behind their backs in case of need.’

Perhaps that was fair, and a fine thing to promise, but Stenwould could not find it so. ‘Well,’ he said, without direction. ‘And what now?’

‘You shall be in the Hot Stations as soon as time and the currents allow,’ Nemoctes told him. ‘Until then, Lyess shall care for you. There are few dangers in the ocean likely to trouble her, I hope.’

Stenwold remembered how Arkeuthys had flinched back, stung by the tendrils of whatever sea-monster he was now travelling in. Under other circumstances, he would have wondered at how much more closely these sea-kinden lived with the creatures whose Art they bore, how much more they relied on them, and had been affected by them in turn. As it was he just felt the whole situation somehow vile. Then the woman – Lyess he assumed – turned about to stare at him again, milky arms wrapped about her knees.

‘I… suppose we are to be companions for a while, then,’ he said awkwardly. An answering expression came to her face, but it was one for which he had no name. It was not joy, certainly, at this prolonging of his company. It was closer to fear, perhaps, but a fear of something the land did not encompass. ‘How long is it to these Stations? You have supplies, I take it?’ He looked about the bell-shaped chamber, with its rippling walls, seeing there was no place that cargo might be stored. In fact he could see clean through to the sea, in all directions.

‘We will provide,’ she replied.

He guessed that ‘we’ included her creature, whose busy flesh surrounded them. The thought made him shudder and he shuffled forward, and at once she drew back from him, hands extended out a little, as though she was a Wasp who might sting. That wordless expression on her face intensified.

‘What?’ he asked her, having no reserves of patience to spare her feelings. ‘What is it?’

‘I have not borne one like you. I have not admitted one like you to this place. Ever.’

‘That’s hardly surprising,’ he said dismissively, ‘since, for some reason, we land-kinden don’t like to come down here very much…’

But she was already shaking her head. ‘I… have had no guests at all. I am not like Nemoctes, to have many dealings with the Obligists. I have only the voices of my peers. We travel far and deep, we Pelagists. There may be years without meeting any other. Some of us that drift in the furthest currents never meet another of their kinden – of any kinden. We are made to be solitary throughout the great width of the sea. I am not used to… not being alone. Even with other Pelagists we have met only briefly, before we have passed on our ways. Even my mother and my children… There are only the voices – the Far-speech of our Art. I have lived in a world of voices for so long. It is… difficult to know another face.’

There was a question in his mind ever since he had deciphered Gribbern’s mutterings, and he had never had the chance to ask it of poor Gribbern. ‘This Art of yours, it is through your creatures? Do they talk mind to mind at such a distance?’

‘No,’ she said simply. ‘You are thinking of Pserry, perhaps. Pserry had a mind, although only Gribbern and his kin could speak to it. That is a different Art, the speaking-with-beasts. My companion here,’ and her arm encompassed all that was around them, ‘has no voice, no mind. So we are a different partnership.’

That plural was beginning to make him feel uncomfortable. ‘But how can you direct it?’

‘We are joined, but there is only one “I”. I am Lyess, so we are Lyess. There is no other mind, only an echo. An echo within a great space of memory.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Mind is the enemy of memory, sometimes. There is a great memory, a memory of thousands of years. It speaks very faintly, so faintly that even Nemoctes’s voice – that we heard just now – would drown it out. There is no other voice, though, when I am here alone, and so, if I listen carefully, I can hear that memory. It is an ancient memory. Our kind are amongst the oldest, the very oldest of them all.’

Some vague ramblings of the less reputable Collegium philosophers were recalled to Stenwold: mutterings about insect race memories, of a great space of conjoined mind that the animals somehow existed in, or else what was it that people connected to, when they called upon their Art? Last generation’s crackpot theories… He looked into her face, pale and delicate and beautiful, as Grief in Chains had been beautiful, and could believe almost anything.

I feel that Rosander and Paladrya were like brother and sister to me in the face of this. ‘But how, then?’ he pressed on. ‘Art is from the beast, from the perfect and ideal concept of the beast – if you believe that. Fly-kinden can fly, because flies can fly.’ His words obviously bewildered her but he forged ahead. ‘How can you use this Far-speech? What could cause you to learn such powers?’

‘Loneliness, land-kinden,’ she told him. ‘Nothing but loneliness, here in the long dark night of the sea.’