The Sea Watch

Forty-Four

Haelyn had not wanted to bring Claeon the news. It had seemed a good moment, after the report came to her, for her to abandon her post and seek anonymity within the twisted chambers of Hermatyre. Being Claeon’s major-domo was a career that promised no longevity, but she had already lasted longer than most. Telling a paranoid tyrant that his enemies really were moving against him seemed like suicide to her.

Yet here I am, and she knew it was through pure self-interest. When this was over, she wanted to be alive, yes, but she also wanted the gratitude of the winner. If she abandoned Claeon now, and he triumphed, then she would undoubtedly regret it. There would be resentful hands enough to drag her from whatever hiding place and cast her in front of his throne. Worse, if she stepped into the crowds now, and the insurrectionists won, then Heiracles, of notoriously short memory, would have forgotten her assistance long before she was able to make a claim on his generosity. She must stay the course, and hope that Hermatyre fell to the attackers before Claeon’s madness killed her.

But first she would have to survive this moment. ‘Your Eminence, great Edmir,’ she began.

Claeon sat hunched on his throne. His mood had been foul of late. He had known that Heiracles and the other malcontents were mustering, and although he had sent his soldiers out to break heads and shed blood, the insurrectionists had evaded them easily. Worse, a number of his own people had not come back at all, and Haelyn strongly suspected that they had cast their lot with the other side.

He was glowering silently at her now, waiting for her to speak on. There were two Dart-kinden guardsmen at the door, and at a word they would have her on the floor, their spears crossed over her neck. Then Claeon would climb down from his throne, knife in hand and full of bravery against a helpless victim.

‘They’re coming, aren’t they?’ he asked, his voice very soft, and to her surprise she thought she heard fear in it. What has he heard? The rumour was rampant throughout the colony that Aradocles had returned, but nobody knew for sure if it was true, not even she.

‘Our scouts confirm it, Edmir,’ she reported, bracing herself, but the explosion of anger never came. Instead he crouched motionless upon his throne, one hand gripping the coral of it painfully hard.

‘Guards,’ he said, no shout but just a flat command. Even as Haelyn flinched, he instructed them, ‘Have all my warriors prepare for war. Spread the word through the colony, that all those who can fight must now show their loyalty to the true bloodline. Have them arm themselves, have them rouse their beasts. Our colony is under threat from greedy, violent men who seek to depose the rightful Edmir, men who seek to sully this throne with their ignoble, unworthy heritage.’ He stood up, and for a moment he seemed cloaked with an authority that Haelyn had never witnessed before. ‘Tell them that Hermatyre will stand or fall through their resolve. Have them make ready, therefore. And send for Rosander and Pellectes. I will have orders for them, too. We will crush this rabble, this pack of upstarts with their pretender heir.’

The guards marched out swiftly to bear their leader’s words to his people. Claeon took a few steps away from the throne, suddenly a smaller man, divested of majesty. ‘Mine,’ he whispered. ‘Mine. What I have taken must not be taken from me.’ His narrowed eyes found Haelyn again. ‘What do the Arketoi?’

‘The Arketoi?’ she asked, baffled. ‘Nothing. No more than they ever do. They build. They repair.’

‘Good.’ He seemed more comforted by this news than she had expected, and strode past her, his progress jerkily swift, out of the throne room and into the antechamber with its great window. ‘Where are you?’ he demanded of the view outside – and almost at once it was occluded by a coiling bulk that half crawled, half slid from somewhere above. A vast, penetrating eye pressed itself to the clear membrane.

‘Arkeuthys,’ Claeon addressed it, ‘rally your people. All that we rule is under threat. Draw them from every crevice, every crack. Bring all of your kin, arm them and direct them. To war, Arkeuthys, to war!’

What words the great octopus might have then sent back, through Claeon’s Art-forged link, Haelyn could not guess, but a moment later the beast had thrust itself away from the colony’s uneven stone and was jetting off into the black void.

There was a light cough from the doorway, and Haelyn saw Pellectes there. The green-bearded Littoralist leader looked awkward and out of place, giving Haelyn the distinct impression that he had been interrupted in the middle of preparing his own exit.

‘Your Eminence?’ the man enquired.

‘Come here,’ Claeon bid him curtly, and Pellectes crossed the throne room to the window with obvious unwillingness.

‘You must rally your people,’ Claeon continued, with false heartiness. ‘Have you not heard that all our freedoms are under threat? Call on your Littoralists. They shall be chief amongst my armies.’

‘Your Eminence,’ Pellectes demurred, ‘we are visionaries, idealists, but we are no warriors.’

Claeon had seized the Littoralist’s arm in an instant, and Haelyn saw the flesh go white under the Edmir’s grip. ‘Oh, but you have spoken so boldly of invading the land, of thus taking what is ours by right! You talk such a fight as all the world has never seen, Pellectes!’ Claeon’s tight smile was painful to behold. ‘Have I not supported your cause? Have I not even enlisted Nauarch Rosander and primed him to carry the Littoralist banner on to the shores of the land?’ He yanked the taller Kerebroi close, the smile becoming a snarl almost without transition. ‘And do you believe, if the boy should triumph, he will have any time for your nonsense? Do you not think, instead, that there are plenty of tattle-tales in this colony who would be only too happy to point out to him those who once had my ear, and shared my confidences? You have more enemies than you know, Pellectes, and if I am undone, you yourself shall never step safely in Hermatyre again. Now, go arm your people, every one of them, for you have as much to lose as I do!’

He hurled the man from him, sending the Littoralist sprawling on the floor, and Haelyn watched Pellectes stumble back to his feet, already running for the door.

Even at that moment one of his guards returned and the Edmir bellowed furiously at him, ‘Where is Rosander?’

‘Edmir, he musters his Thousand Spines already,’ the guard promised him, and at that, Claeon smiled.

‘Do your people believe in destiny and prophecy and that kind of thing?’ Stenwold asked, trying his best to sound casual. He was back in Wys’s submersible again, which he trusted in a battle more than Nemoctes’s living vessel. Wys made a face at that question. ‘Destiny? Not likely. Destiny’s what you make for yourself. Ain’t that right, Spillage?’

‘Sounds right to me,’ came the voice of the Greatclaw engineer from above.

Phylles was looking less certain, though, so Wys prodded her. ‘Don’t tell me you’re still hung up on all of that stuff?’

The Polypoi woman looked stubborn, so Wys explained. ‘Her folk are all about omens and telling the future, sitting and seeing what the currents send past them, cryptic messages from the dead, all that rot. But we civilized her – or at least I thought we’d civilized her.’

All around them the dark sea seemed studded with stars: the limn-lights suspended from the larger craft and creatures in Aradocles’s fleet.

Paladrya laid a hand on Stenwold’s shoulder, and he smiled.

‘Say what you like,’ she addressed them all, ‘we all have destinies, and those destinies can be uncovered. I have seen it done.’

‘Reckon the lad’s destiny is to win this battle, then?’ Wys asked her. ‘’Cos if we could know that beforehand, I’d feel a lot easier.’

‘What about prophecies delivered by a Seagod?’ Stenwold chanced. That drew a long silence from all of them.

‘Right,’ said Wys at last. ‘Seagods? Prophecies? You’ve been drinking with Pelagists too much, is what that is.’

Stenwold looked to Paladrya, but she shook her head. ‘Stories only,’ she told him. ‘Such prophecies have led to the founding of colonies – or their destruction. I’ve never met anyone who’s even seen a Seagod. And Wys is right – Pelagists delight in telling tall stories to us Obligists from the colonies.’

‘I saw a Seagod once,’ came Lej’s voice from above, but Wys gave a rude snort and told him that he certainly hadn’t.

It was not long after that before pale light began to leach into the darkness outside, outlining what Stenwold might have thought of as a horizon, under more civilized conditions. Before that, all had been as dark as midnight, with only the limn-lights of their fellow travellers to provide a shifting constellation around and below them. Now there was a growing radiance ahead, and Stenwold realized it must be Hermatyre.

‘I hope the boy knows what he’s doing,’ Wys muttered, uncharacteristically fretful. Stenwold expected Paladrya to leap to her protege’s defence, but she was merely biting at her lip, looking worried.

‘He’s shifting,’ Wys noted a moment later. ‘Make sure you stay with him.’

It had been Aradocles’s contribution to ocean skirmish to use the Pelagists and their far-speaking Art. Stenwold knew that Salma had done the same with Ant-kinden, using their mindlink to coordinate the various wings of his army. Here, in the crushing, soundless depths, there was no tradition of military coordination. Each warrior fought alone and fell alone, guided only by his personal tactical sense. Aradocles had split up his force into detachments, each with a Pelagist at its heart. He himself rode with Nemoctes, hidden within the living shell. Wys’s barque, the dead exterior of a similar creature with a clockwork engine installed, tacked and bobbed to keep up as Nemoctes adjusted his course towards the colony. All around them the army shifted and swirled, following the glowing bells of jellyfish, the mud-crawlers, the nautili, as they followed their leader’s orders and came about.

Hermatyre was soon the brightest thing in the sea, shedding varicoloured radiance into the inky water. That radiance showed how the water before the colony was busy, seething with mustering bodies. The pale pens of squid darted or hovered in glimmering schools, each with its lance-wielding rider. Untidy ranks of Kerebroi spearmen, nimble and lightly armoured, clustered and straggled across the seabed between the city and its enemies. The armoured forms of crabs and lobsters squatted, claws drawn in like shields, the long spiny whips of their antennae twitching at the drifting of the currents.

And then there were the octopuses, Arkeuthys’s people. Scores of them clustered across the face of the colony. None was as large as their master, but one in three was a match in size for Wys’s submersible. Squinting into the underwater radiance, Stenwold saw metal and pale shell glinting: spikes and blades crudely made, tentacles coiling about makeshift hilts. He remembered the Tseitan’s battle with Arkeuthys, and the great sea-monster taking their harpoon and using it as a spear. Did we teach them that?

Stenwold had only the loosest notion of how many dissidents Heiracles had managed to muster. ‘How do the numbers look?’ he asked, for it seemed to him that there were a great many who had rallied to Hermatyre’s defence.

‘We’re short of theirs,’ Wys replied bluntly, her small hands clenched into fists, and Stenwold could see her now wondering whether she had made the right decision.

‘But we fight on the side of the true heir,’ Paladrya insisted loyally, although her face seemed bloodless. ‘Who would fight so hard on behalf of Claeon?’

‘Well, let’s hope they know we’ve got the true heir with us, because I don’t see them trailing banners with his face on,’ Wys told her. ‘Oh, I’m getting less fond of this… and there are Rosander’s lot, of course.’ Something went out of her expression. ‘Piss on it,’ she said, almost sadly.

A column of armoured crustaceans was emerging around the Hermatyre’s lumpy, coral-encrusted curve. They trudged out before the defenders, ten abreast at least, and around them marched Rosander’s warriors of the Thousand Spine Train. Almost all of them were Onychoi of one sort or another, many armoured in colossal plate, proceeding with a strangely ponderous dignity. There were other kinden among their number, too: squid-riders, Kerebroi, even a few Pelagists and some of Phylles’s kin. Their passage stirred up the mud beneath, as though the seabed smoked beneath their feet.

And they kept coming, this column emerging inexorably into view, tens and tens and then hundreds of men and women and beasts, until Stenwold felt weak just to watch them. ‘So many,’ he whispered, and Wys gave him a wry look.

‘What, you thought there was only a thousand of the bastards? Just a name, landsman, just a name.’

‘Look.’ Paladrya was pointing, but it was not clear at what. Then Wys had seen it, too, rushing over to the panes of her viewport to get a better look. Stenwold remained baffled, unable to see anything in this advancing horde beyond the doom of their plans.

‘It is all the Thousand Spines,’ Phylles explained to him quietly. Her eyes were still intent on the scene outside.

‘Well, yes, that’s the problem, isn’t it?’ Stenwold suggested.

‘No, land-kinden, all of them. All their goods, their wagons, their creches, their infirmaries, everything that they need to live, out in the depths.’

Stenwold frowned, trying to understand it. True, a great many of the crawling beasts were heavily laden, but he had assumed that was the norm for this place and these people. ‘Then…?’

But by then it was clear. The direction that Rosander’s Benthists was taking would neither draw them up before the city nor crash into the advancing dissidents. Instead they were simply going away, heading off across the seabed towards the depths, resuming the Benthist life after living so long on Claeon’s promises.

‘Save me from sea-kinden with a sense of drama,’ Stenwold murmured, but then Paladrya was hugging him, hard enough to drive half the breath from his body.

‘You did it!’ she shouted. ‘You drove away Rosander!’

He put an arm about her, finding that the gesture could be both affectionate and comradely, without any awkwardness. ‘Just talk, that’s all it was. The sort of talk my people are good at, though.’

She kissed him, without warning or apparent premeditation, and their eyes locked, Paladrya seeming more startled by it than Stenwold himself.

‘I don’t want to piss on your party, or anything, but there’s still more of Claeon’s lot than of us,’ Wys pointed out sourly.

Stenwold eyed the defenders, seeing them eddy and mill aimlessly now that the Thousand Spines were abandoning them. More of them than the attackers, yes, but not so very many more that victory would be swift for them. In fact, this looked like a recipe for a bloody and mutually destructive contest. He shivered at the thought.

The attackers’ advance became swifter now, and he could see the defenders forming into a rabble of a line, ready to receive them. Then something detached itself from the pitted surface of Hermatyre, and rippled towards them in a flurry of tentacles. Stenwold found that he recognized it: not only because it was far larger than any other of its kind there, but from its very attitude, the pale and rubbery hide laced with scars, those great flat-pupilled, white eyes.

Arkeuthys.

The sea-monster that had dragged him down into this nightmare world the first time. All across the surface of Hermatyre, the smaller octopuses were now squirming into the water, fanning out across the defenders, coming to rest on the seabed or simply undulating back and forth. Arkeuthys just hung there before the attackers, though, like a vast tentacled skull, as the attackers’ advance began to slow to a crawl. The reputation alone, the very name of the great monster, seeped into each mind like a curse.

Aboard Nemoctes’s companion, Aradocles lifted his head.

‘It’s the big beast, Arkeuthys,’ Nemoctes suppied, watching through the eyes of the creature that carried them. The Pelagist was fully geared for war, shell armour and shield and hook-headed axe.

‘Oh, I know that,’ said the heir of Hermatyre softly. It had been a long time since he had used the Art of Speech, years indeed since he had been close enough to one of Arkeuthys’s brood. Now he felt the mind of the creature just like a sun, burning away in the water with the malevolent fire of its long years. The octopuses, the Krakind’s namesake beasts, were more than mere animals. They were guardians and patrons to the humans who claimed kinship with them, and in return the beasts lived longer and longer, lifespans stretching from the brief span allotted to their lesser cousins until they could count their years as men did, or longer. As they aged, they grew wiser, too, more cunning in the ways of the world, and of humanity. They had always been a force here, in Hermatyre, a silent but influential counsel in the affairs of the Edmirs.

Arkeuthys, sent out Aradocles, into the watery void. Hear me.

He was not sure that he had properly recaptured the Art of it, until that slow voice came back, sounding like stone grating on stone. So, you have returned after all.

Did you ever doubt it?

It would not be the first time, Arkeuthys replied, that rumours of you have stirred up fools. I have personally defended your honour by putting down such lies. Has the idiot Heiracles not told you of his previous attempts at unseating your rightful blood? Or would he perhaps clothe himself in virtue now, as though it could be accreated, like metal or shell?

I have no illusions about Heiracles, Aradocles replied. The presence of Arkeuthys in his mind was vast and heavy, and it made his knees want to buckle, his bowels to loosen. But he stood all the straighter, under the force of that vast scrutiny. Heiracles knows his place, now.

And do you? There was bleak amusement in the great monster’s thoughts. Your rabble cringes from me even now. What did you expect, Aradocles?

From them? That they would follow me this far – and further, as they must. Aradocles took a deep breath, sensing the abyss beneath him that he must plumb. And from you? Obedience, as due to your rightful Edmir.

There was a very long pause indeed, and the eventual response was not words at all, but a feeling that indicated amusement – only amusement.

Hear me, Arkeuthys, Aradocles persisted. You served my father well, and you are a great ruler of your own people. After I was lost to Hermatyre, when I was believed dead, you then served my uncle. Why should you not? He was thought by all to be the rightful Edmir of Hermatyre, so it was not your place to question him. Now you know the truth of my return, why should you not serve your rightful lord, and turn from the false one?

He sensed the quality of the silence change at the far end of his link with Arkeuthys. At last the great beast murmured, Claeon has valued my support, and given me much freedom. He has made me a very Edmir of my people, as he is Edmir of yours.

As he was, corrected Aradocles sharply. Arkeuthys, you are your people’s ruler. It has never been the place of the Kerebroi to interfere in such matters. Do you think I would try to unseat you because you have served others in my family? Only continue to serve my family still, and why should I bear you any grudge?

And the baffled reply followed fast on the heels of his words. But your people will remember only too well what I have done in Claeon’s name, little one.

They will remember that it was done in Claeon’s name, that is all. And if they should ever complain, well, if they would have me as their Edmir, then they will live by my decision.

The attacking force’s advance had stopped entirely now. All eyes, on both sides, were fixed on the giant octopus, as it undulated slightly between both lines, its eyes narrowed to the merest of slits.

Claeon would not make such a generous offer, nor would your father, if they found themselves in your place. You must be aware of the reality of what I have done, of the weapon I have made myself in Claeon’s hands against those who resisted his rule.

I have spent time amongst strange people, Aradocles replied simply. I have learned new arts. Their word for this is amnesty, and that is what I offer. Do you see its meaning, here in my mind?

I do…

Then speak to the Krakind Kerebroi gathered amongst the defenders. Tell them one thing only. Tell them I have returned, the true heir, to claim my throne. Do this, and you shall remain to me as much as you ever were to Claeon – and with one advantage more.

And what is that? pried the thoughts of Arkeuthys.

Why, that I am not Claeon, Aradocles told the creature drily. Surely you cannot claim that you actually liked my uncle?

Arkeuthys began abruptly jetting backwards in the water, as Nemoctes reported, coiling and pulsing until he hung over the defenders. In Aradocles’s mind, though, echoed the faint suggestion of laughter.

It was only when Aradocles’s troops entered Hermatyre that Stenwold realized just how messy things could have become. The city possessed dozens of the double-doored hatches, but each outer one could have been held with ease by just a few spearmen, and then again at the inner door. There were no defenders in evidence, though. Stenwold himself had watched as Arkeuthys had drifted over Claeon’s marshalled forces, expecting a sudden charge, the first blood of the war. There had been a change plain to see in the enemy army, though, a ripple of shock passing through them. As the attackers had drawn closer Stenwold had witnessed a great deal of the sea-kinden’s busy underwater hand-speech as Krakind Kerebroi – the kin of Aradocles and Claeon – passed on news to their allies of other kinden.

And the defending force had soon begun to break up. Individuals had sidled off, and then whole troops of them, the majority of the defenders simply giving up and going home. Some even left their weapons behind: spears driven point-first into the seabed or the falx swords abandoned. The octopuses – all of Arkeuthys’s crawling, lurking kindred – had simply slithered away across the great gnarled dome of the colony, leaving the way clear.

Some of the defenders had not disbanded, though. A number had come to join the attackers, gladly switching sides for no reason that Stenwold could understand just then. Others, however, had remained under arms, and they hurried back into Hermatyre, desperate to get inside its coral walls before the heir’s forces reached them. There were not enough that they could have held the city, however, even if they could have been sure of support from the rest of the populace.

Aradocles’s forces began the slow process of filing into the colony, streaming in through every entrance and forming up in their separate detachments, braced for Claeon’s counterattack. For Stenwold, this was the longest part of the assault, watching the foot-soldiers of the assault force queue and mill until their own turn came. Hermatyre had not been built with such a grand number of visitors in mind.

‘I suppose, if we’d needed, we could have used the Gastroi to cut our way in,’ he suggested. The looks he received from the others revealed nothing but horror.

‘You cannot cut,’ Paladrya told him, as if even the mention of the word was sacrilege. ‘The Builders, the Arketoi, would be angered.’

Stenwold remembered those pale little tattooed men, the mysterious kinden who had constructed Hermatyre and all the other colonies across the seabed. ‘I didn’t see any of them in the battle line,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think they really, well, noticed this kind of thing.’

‘Battles? Politics?’ Paladrya replied. ‘Oh, sometimes they do, and woe betide anyone who attracts their attention. Break any of the substance of Hermatyre, though, and you’d never be able to go near a colony ever again. The entire kinden, they’d know.’

At last it was Stenwold’s turn, and he took up his caul and let Paladrya pull him over to the city’s stone outer skin and help guide him inside. He had come this far, and he wanted to see this finished.

The army had divided into different cohorts, and now the Pelagists’ far-speech would not help them for, of Nemoctes’s people, only the man himself was entering the colony. Meanwhile each cohort, entering by a different gate, would start moving through the twisting paths of Hermatyre, seeking out resistance wherever it was to be found.

Stenwold himself followed close behind Aradocles, with Paladrya to one side of him and Phylles to the other. He had never gained much of a sense of Hermatyre’s layout before, while being bundled through the streets by Claeon’s men or Rosander’s, but now he had a chance to appreciate the colony’s bizarre architecture, its curious beauty and its utterly alien design. A living city, surely, or one that had been grown and then died, as more city was grown on top of it, over and over. Within that stratified crust, the colony was expressed in diverse hollows: chambers as small as a cramped room or as great as a city square; the walls patterned, segmented, moulded into symmetrical designs of unknown import in the secret architectural language of the Builders. The tunnels interlinking the chambers led up and down seemingly at random: ribbed passageways of stone winding and twisting like worms through the city’s heart. Everywhere there was limn-light, those coloured globes of radiance that the sea-kinden crafted for lamps, casting dim-coloured veils across the pale stone, and across the grim faces of the invaders.

They had expected Claeon’s people to fight them from room to room, but there was barely any resistance, just a few straggling defenders caught up by the attackers’ tide. The residents of Hermatyre watched Aradocles and his people pass, making no move to stop them, but nor did they cheer. Instead they waited, untrusting and unsure, to see the outcome. Stenwold was reminded that Aradocles had been absent for years, and their memory of him was of a mere youth, and not a king. Rightful heir he might be, but these people had been living under Claeon’s capricious and heavy-handed rule, and they had no guarantee that the Edmir’s nephew would prove any better.

And then they came out upon a vista that Stenwold did recognize, at last. Here he had returned, by all the strange roads that fate had led him along, to the Cathedra Edmir, the heart of Hermatyre, the great plaza that gave onto the gates of the Edmir’s palace complex. This was the place that he had first been dragged to, feeling bewildered and battered, for his first introduction to the sea-kinden. This was where Paladrya had been imprisoned since Claeon’s suspicion fell upon her, until Wys’s people had broken them both out.

And this was where the Edmir’s loyalists had chosen to make their stand, and there were many. All Claeon’s remaining supporters were assembled here, every villain and sycophant who had prospered so much under his reign that their lives would be forfeit if he fell. All the cruelty, the greed, the petty tyranny and casual brutality that had grown fat under Claeon’s rule had now gathered to defend him, knowing that they were dead men otherwise.

Some remained within the palace, others were lined up outside it: Dart-kinden and Krakind Kerebroi, Onychoi large and small, a few that were kin to Phylles even. They stood in clumps, forming an uneven battle line: some with mauls or falxes, others with hooked knives, but most of them with spears. Some had weapons that Stenwold took for lances at first, but then he noticed that, instead of a head of metal or bone, they had something else twined around the shaft like a living thing.

‘Well,’ he murmured to Paladrya, ‘I think this is as far as words and peace take us,’ to which she nodded soberly.