The Sea Watch

Thirty-Two

Stenwold turned the next corner and found himself facing a battle. There was at least a score of Mandir’s warriors in furious close conflict with a mob of Echinoi, both sides hacking at each other with single-minded loathing. He splashed and stumbled across behind them, utterly unnoticed, but there were more of the invaders hot on his trail. He had a moment to consider who his enemies were: those who would enslave him or those who would probably just kill and eat him. In the end, the closer kinship won out.

‘Behind you!’ he yelled at them, as his pursuers closed.

Two or three of the Greatclaw had just finished tensioning their bows, and at Stenwold’s warning they turned, craning past their shoulder-guards to spot the new enemy. The explosive retort of their weapons could be heard even over the melee, a pair of Echinoi hurled from their feet on the instant, one to lie still with half its head missing, the other to twitch and hiss, while its thorned hands plucked at the bolt sunk squarely in its chest. Of the remainder, all but one turned their attention from Stenwold to face this new challenge, descending on the armoured sea-kinden as savagely as beasts but utterly silent.

That one pursuer would be enough, though. Stenwold gripped the broken spearshaft, torn between fight and flight, as the single Echinoi made a slow approach, heedless of its brethren’s success or failure. Eyes that were black and featureless examined Stenwold, and perhaps the creature noted that he was different, not its kind’s usual prey. Perhaps not, but its rough-skinned visage held no expressions that Stenwold could put a name to. It hefted its bronze sword, elegantly wrought into a forward curve, and went for him.

Since its failure against the Onychoi armour he had almost forgotten the little snapbow, but Totho had made the weapon with two barrels, and one might still be loaded. He brought it up even as the Echinoi closed and dragged on the trigger.

There was a muted click, no charge in the air-battery, even if a bolt was in place. Then that sinuous blade was descending on him. He caught the blow on his makeshift staff, but its impact splintered the spear-shaft almost in two, In desperation he lashed the crooked rod across the Echinoi’s face, snapping the weapon entirely but barely making the sea-kinden flinch. The creature swung at him again, overcompensating still in the thin air, and he saved himself by lurching backwards, tripping in the surging waters and tumbling from his feet. The scythe-like edge of the enemy blade passed inches from him as he toppled back. He still held two feet of haft, and he lunged with it as though it was a good Lowlander shortsword, but the jagged point only skidded off the Echinoi’s coppery cuirass, and then just as uselessly from its rugged skin. The sword flashed down again.

Something the colour of bone put itself in the way and the Echinoi’s blade skittered from a shield of yellowing shell. An armoured form was stepping over Stenwold in one solid stride, shoving the shield in the Echinoi’s face and pushing it back. Nemoctes – it was Nemoctes, come from nowhere. He held a weapon like a hook-billed pick in his hand and, as he fended off the Echinoi’s next strike he drove the point into his enemy above the neckline of its armour with a grunt of effort. Keeping its sword away with his shield’s edge, Nemoctes changed grip on his weapon’s haft, ducked low and then put all his strength into wrenching it upwards. Even over the general row of battle, Stenwold heard the splintering of bone as the deep-buried point dragged its way free through the top of the Echinoi’s ribs. Then Nemoctes had cast the injured creature away, taking its last weak swing against his greaves.

‘Get up,’ he snapped at Stenwold. His dark face was grim, splashed with blood.

‘I have to get to Laszlo,’ the Beetle told him, clambering to his feet out of the water, for what seemed the hundredth time. ‘Laszlo.. . Wys…’

‘You have to get out,’ Nemoctes interrupted him. ‘Anything else is a luxury.’ The armoured sea-kinden strode ahead through the water, away from the melee, not even glancing back to see if Stenwold followed.

He followed. He had no other choice.

If I could have got out with Laszlo and Wys, he thought bitterly, Laszlo said she’d take us straight to the surface, to Collegium. But where will Nemoctes take me?

Ahead he saw movement, and fumbled to raise his piece of broken spear. There was no enemy, though, but a rolling tide of water, coursing waist-high towards him. Nemoctes just forged on into it, taking the brunt of the water with his shoulder, with Stenwold standing in his shadow, clinging to the man’s arm to keep his feet. Everywhere abruptly seemed to be filling up fast, meaning the Echinoi must have cut a fresh gash in the brittle skin of the Hot Stations.

‘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.

‘I give up,’ he said, stopping a few paces away from her. ‘I just don’t understand. Why are you here?’

‘Don’t thank her!’ Despard snapped, at his elbow. ‘You want to thank anyone, thank us. When we heard that you’d gone under, someone just happened to remember what you said that time when you were asking about the Tseni and their underwater boats. Only they didn’t think to bring one with them, so we had to take your lad there’s, instead.’ She gave Laszlo a push, sending him tottering away, but there were tears glinting at the corners of her eyes. ‘We didn’t believe you were dead. Not after what she said. We had to look.’

‘“What she said”?’ Stenwold repeated. ‘What did “she” say, Kratia?’ He glanced back at Heiracles. ‘How are you even free? I’m not overly impressed by sea-kinden hospitality so far, begging your pardons, Master Nemoctes and Mistress Wys.’

Kratia gave him a level look and took out a damp-looking scroll from her belt. It was a moment before Stenwold realized what was wrong with the sight: it was the pulpy sea-kinden paper in the hands of a landswoman. The script on it, surrounded and framed by many-coloured arabesques, remained illegible to him.

‘My people had their war with the sea long ago. We have not forgotten, for all that we might like to. This names me ambassador of Tsen to the peoples of Grande Atoll and the greater seas,’ Kratia declared simply.

‘Lucky you had it with you,’ Stenwold told her hollowly.

‘War Master, if you had known what lay beneath, would you have set foot on a ship, any ship, without such credentials?’

He shivered. ‘Point taken.’ Behind him he heard some of Heiracles’s people start to shift, and he turned to them, feeling all the might of the Lowlands and beyond arrayed in just those four figures behind him. He had been a prisoner, a fugitive, a slave for a long time. His entire life as he had known it – as an Assembler, a War Master, a spymaster – had been taken from him like a stolen robe. Now he felt it across his shoulders once again, and he almost wept for it: to have power, even a little power, over his own destiny once more.

‘So, what now?’ he asked them. ‘Heiracles, Nemoctes, what now? We are not so ignorant, it would appear. Or at least there are those on land who are far less ignorant than me. There will be others back on land with an interest, too. Despard and Laszlo have a large family. What now?’

Nemoctes was smiling, but the careful immobility of Heiracles’s face showed that he had been outmanoeuvred.

‘Have you forgotten Rosander?’ he hissed, ‘and Claeon’s invasion? Do you really think your people are safe, now? Claeon will care nothing for that document, or the distant frown of Grande Atoll. That place is no more than a name to us.’

‘I have forgotten nothing,’ Stenwold replied. ‘My people are in more danger than you know. We land-kinden are quite capable of making our own lives difficult enough. But we go home, we go to the land. If my home was in flames and soldiers were waiting to put me on crossed pikes, we would go home nonetheless.’ The words caused him a stab of pain, the thought of Lyess never to be seen again, never to be touched. For a moment her presence seemed so strong that the soft light of her companion’s silver-clear flesh seemed to shine on them like the moon. No, he told himself, clinging to what he knew, what he believed in. ‘No, we go home.’ He looked up, managing a small smile for Nemoctes’s benefit. ‘Now let us talk about Aradocles.’

There followed perfect silence. Stenwold looked from face to face, amongst Hieracles’s delegation, and for a moment he could not find her, and his heart lurched with sudden fear. Then at last he found her, in the shadow of the others. Her eyes drew him to her. She was the only one of Heiracles’s people whose expression had not grown hooded at the name of the heir.

‘Mistress Paladrya.’ The small, brave smile she managed for him provided a calming reassurance out of all proportion, focusing his mind and banishing distraction. ‘You took your boy Aradocles to the land, to be out of Claeon’s reach. Having met with the Edmir’s assassins in the Hot Stations, I now appreciate your caution. I know what the land means to your various kinden. I know also, from Mandir himself, that there are exceptions. You had reason to believe the boy would stand more chance of survival in the sun and air than anywhere beneath the waves.’

From behind Heiracles’s shoulder and penned in by the man’s servants, she nodded. Her gaze was fixed on Stenwold with a look of absolute intensity.

Stenwold took a step forward, and he felt and heard the other landsmen shift behind him, moving slightly too, as if backing him. They are not Tisamon but it is good to have friends. ‘Will you come to the land now, to see if he can be found and returned to his people?’ he asked her boldly, as though her captors were not there.

‘Yes,’ she said, simply.

‘This is not acceptable,’ Heiracles snapped. ‘The people of Hermatyre are… changeable. I must have something to win them over with, if we are to oust Claeon. This woman is notorious-’

‘As the killer of the young Edmir,’ Stenwold finished for him. ‘I recall it. However, she did not kill him, and he may not be dead. I have witnessed enough to know that the true heir would rally your people far more effectively than any show trial.’ He glanced at Nemoctes, then at Wys and her people. Heiracles had brought eight flunkies with him, armed with the sea-kinden’s curved knives, so Stenwold weighed numbers and the will to fight, wondering who could be relied on to take a side. ‘If Aradocles himself were here, you would support him, would you not, Heiracles?’ he asked, in tones dripping with reason.

He saw the battle on the man’s lean face, revealing the bitter ambition that the true heir’s long absence had fostered. Clearly he had lived the last five years believing the lad dead, and therefore himself the next in line if only Claeon could be removed. Paladrya and her evidence had clearly been not been welcome. Just as well he wanted her for the people to tear apart, or she would surely be dead already, Stenwold considered.

‘Heiracles,’ came Paladrya’s soft voice.

His head jerked towards her, while still keeping the land-kinden in view. ‘You have no voice in this,’ he cautioned her.

‘You cannot keep the landsmen here, not now. If you tried to do so by force, not only would you fail, but you would show yourself no better than Claeon.’

A brief fragment of expression appeared on Heiracles’s face, before he stifled it, but yet it spoke eloquently. He was a man with few illusions, and a great cynicism about others that he assumed was shared by others about him. The idea that anyone might seriously believe that there was any difference between Heiracles’s base nature and that of Claeon was obviously a new concept to him. Seeing that bitterness there, so briefly unveiled, Stenwold understood that such a difference did indeed exist, for all that it was whittled down moment to moment by the promise of power.

Paladrya took a deep breath. ‘I believe Aradocles is alive, because I cannot bear to believe anything else,’ she continued. ‘If so, he will return eventually. His heritage will compel him. Perhaps he will indeed bring a landsman army to retake his birthright. Perhaps he will have grown hard, toughened by the hostile land, so that even Rosander will fear him. Who can say what his exile will have made of him? But he will remember me, Heiracles. If he lives, however far he is grown from the boy I knew, I cannot but think that he will remember me. That being so, would you rather he returned to lead his friends against Claeon, to reclaim his throne and reward those who have been loyal to him, or would you prefer he returned later to confront whoever might have unseated his uncle, and whoever might have had his old tutor executed? What will you say to him then? And do you think you will ever sway the people’s love so greatly that you shall be safe from its retribution? You are not Claeon. Do not fashion yourself in his image.’

And Stenwold, the veteran of a hundred speeches, found himself wishing to applaud her. Even surrounded by her jailers, she was one of the most impassioned advocates he had ever heard. The young prince had a fine tutor, he thought, and if Heiracles does not agree, then I will take her from him and free her. I will go so far, before I leave the sea, however much I loathe it.

He felt something tear asunder within him, at that silent vow, the great weight of the ocean pressing down, eager to keep him to itself, and something else perhaps, some stab of anger and loss that was not in any way his own.

‘If the heir returned,’ Heiracles pronounced carefully, ‘he would know me as his most faithful subject.’ Everything had drained from his expression but the pragmatism. Chief adviser to a young ruler was not such a poor position, that look said. The ambitions for kingship had sunk without so much as a ripple, and he had recovered his statesman’s poise with an ease that would do justice to either a Collegiate Assembler or a Spiderlands Aristos.

Stenwold’s relief at the man’s response was disproportionate. ‘Then I shall need Paladrya,’ he declared.

‘Of course.’ Heiracles moved aside with grace, and the woman stepped tentatively free, moving with steps as halting as an automaton to Stenwold’s side, as though she feared being called back at any moment. He put a hand out towards her as she reached him, and she took it gladly, anchoring herself to his party.

‘Nemoctes, for the assistance of your people, I thank you,’ Stenwold said formally. As he thought of leaving here, of returning home, he felt not clear joy, but a muddied, unsettled sense of displacement. But that is what I want. What could hold me here, and yet… ‘I intend to return,’ was all he said, and the Pelagist nodded, frowning at him.

‘I shall see you to your land. Perhaps there shall be others also, who will guard your journey.’

Stenwold felt something kick inside him, some irrational surge of emotion, misplaced and out of character. Stay. He fought it down. I cannot… I have work to do.

‘How can we know that you’ll find the boy?’ Heiracles demanded, seeing Stenwold about to leave with his prized hostage.

‘Because your own agents shall come with me, if they’re willing,’ Stenwold replied.

‘What agents?’ the Kerebroi demanded. His followers became abruptly restless behind him at the mere thought of a land voyage.

Stenwold glanced towards Laszlo, who nodded back, grinning.

‘Mistress Wys,’ the Beetle said, ‘do you dare come with me – you and your fellows?’ He watched the question sink in. Phylles’s scowl deepened, Fel was blankly hostile as usual, but Wys’s face showed every stage of a progression from surprise to fear, to rising eagerness.

‘To the shore, land-kinden?’ she said. ‘To bring back the true Edmir? Sounds like the sort of job that reputations are built on, does it not?’

‘You are mad,’ Heiracles told her flatly. ‘Mad or a Littoralist,’ which latter was clearly worse.

‘Neither, in fact, but you’ll have heard how we Small-claws are always on the lookout for the next new thing,’ she told him levelly. ‘Now, you’ll retain me as your agent?’

‘If you’re insane enough to go, woman, then go with my blessing,’ Heiracles said acidly.

‘So go now,’ Nemoctes echoed, his resonant voice breaking in. ‘I do not like to think how long Claeon’s agents will take to track down this meeting, as they did the last.’ His eyes met Stenwold’s. ‘Good luck, landsman.’

‘Your lad can come with us,’ Wys suggested.

‘This one’s going nowhere but in the Tseitan,’ Despard declared firmly, glaring at the Smallclaw woman and holding fiercely on to Laszlo’s arm.

The other Fly was already shaking his head. ‘No, you take Master Maker,’ he told her. ‘I trust Wys, here.’ He winked. ‘We have business.’

Despard stared at him as though he had lost his mind. ‘And if I have to tell Tomasso that I lost his nephew to business?’ she demanded.

‘Then he’ll understand,’ Laszlo pointed out.

‘Nemoctes is right,’ Stenwold told them all. ‘Let’s go now while the tide is good.’