The Sea Watch sota-6

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Nemoctes,’ Gribbern said, then.

  ‘Speak.’

  ‘Reckon I have to break in here. We’re not alone.’

  There was a moment as Stenwold and the far-off Nemoctes considered these same words.

  ‘We are followed,’ Gribbern explained, and there was the faintest tremor in his voice.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Nemoctes demanded, with Stenwold joining in, ‘Followed how? By who?’

  ‘Pserry says it’s Onychoi,’ Gribbern reported. ‘Not so far behind and tracking us through the weed.’

  ‘Speed?’ Nemoctes pressed.

  ‘Oh, reckon it’s close to ours,’ Gribbern said miserably. ‘Three, maybe four of them.’

  ‘Head deep and keep moving,’ ordered the tiny, Art-born voice. ‘I am coming for you now. I am not so far away.’

  ‘Don’t think I’m so worried about them,’ Gribbern muttered. ‘Pserry reckons they’ve been behind us since we set off, and getting no closer nor further, and we can run for longer than they can, but Pserry says there’s something else now, something moving in the weed above us, keeping pace.’ His voice jumped in pitch, just for a moment.

  ‘Stay calm, Gribbern,’ Nemoctes told him. ‘I am closing. I will be with you.’ There was a quality to those remote tones, though, that cut through the confidence he was trying to instil. Neither Stenwold nor Gribbern remarked on it, but they were both thinking the same thing: He is not so close. He is too far. Stenwold had no idea, in truth, what distance separated them from the invisible Nemoctes, but Nemoctes obviously knew, and his own voice betrayed him.

  ‘Don’t reckon anyone else is out there, then?’ Gribbern said. There was a faint tremble against Stenwold’s back, something being held in. ‘Who hears me?’

  A new voice picked up immediately, sounding like an old woman’s: ‘I hear you, old Gribbern. I’m on my way.’

  ‘I’m close by Hermatyre,’ said another voice, overlapping, young and harsh this time. ‘Can you turn for me?’

  ‘Don’t think I can, at that,’ said Gribbern gloomily. ‘Onychoi’ll have me if I do anything but head straight.’

  ‘I am near,’ said a new voice, and the sound of it raised the hairs on Stenwold’s neck: a woman’s voice but strange and ethereal, as though it had been made solely to be heard disembodied and ghostly. ‘I am coming.’

  ‘Only…’ Gribbern choked on the word, and then continued gamely, ‘Only Pserry’s telling me there’s something real big over us, and I’ve got a nasty feeling…’

  ‘I’m on my way, so just keep moving,’ Nemoctes insisted. Other voices added their encouragement, but Stenwold could feel Gribbern shaking.

  ‘Nemoctes,’ the sea-kinden whispered. ‘Pserry’s scared.’

  ‘I’m close now,’ Nemoctes said, but there was a haggard edge to his words.

  ‘Gribbern, be strong,’ said the strange woman’s voice.

  Stenwold could clearly hear Gribbern’s breathing growing quicker and more ragged as though the exertions of his beast were transmitting themselves to him. Pserry was definitely moving faster now, the gentle rocking motion becoming a bouncing jolt as the creature scuttled between the weed stalks.

  ‘Land-kinden,’ Gribbern said, sounding immensely calm, ‘reckon you’d better take that caul up.’

  ‘What good will that do?’ Stenwold asked. Caught up in the other man’s fear, he had not been thinking of himself. Now the appalling weight of water returned to mind, the drowning crush of it. How long would the caul give him? Five minutes? Less? ‘Gribbern, I cannot survive out there.’

  ‘Take it up, is my advice. Maybe Nemoctes… in time, maybe.. .’ Abruptly he lurched forwards, as though stabbed. ‘Nemoctes!’ he hissed. ‘They sent Arkeuthys!’

  Stenwold felt the same blade of horror in his own gut. It was the sea monster, the great sea monster whose horrifying eye had observed him on the deck of the barge, whose many arms had plucked him down into this cursed world. Arkeuthys, the name that inspired terror even in its own allies.

  ‘Gribbern, listen to me,’ Nemoctes was saying, though in truth neither of them was listening to him. ‘Keep straight, let the weed protect you. Even Arkeuthys… Gribbern, hold out! Just hold out!’

  A moment later Stenwold was slung sideways as Pserry turned without warning, the entire bulk of the creature slewing sideways and then taking off again, even faster than before. ‘What is it? What happened?’ Stenwold shouted, but Gribbern had no words for him. With equal suddenness Pserry turned again, practically bounding over the uneven seabed, jostling and bouncing its two passengers.

  Gribbern cried out.

  Stenwold slammed backwards into him, their little boxlike world abruptly jolted forwards so that for a moment the wall Stenwold was facing had become the ceiling, and Pserry’s tail must have been pointing straight up. Then they landed in a great clatter, and began scrabbling desperately away again. For a moment Stenwold thought they had pitched down a crevasse, but then his heart went cold.

  It almost had us then, he realized. The monster was right above them.

  ‘Not going to let you down,’ Gribbern said, though whether it was spoken to Stenwold or Pserry or the absent Nemoctes was unclear. The woman’s voice was still saying something, but Stenwold could not catch it. Gribbern turned to him, twisting round awkwardly, his shoulder clipping Stenwold’s chin. ‘Put the caul on!’ he insisted. ‘Put it on!’

  He had meanwhile taken up something, some kind of weapon, from the clutter lying around them, some kind of beaked mace.

  Stenwold dragged the caul over his face as Pserry lurched over some obstable. Stenwold could almost hear the frantic skitter of legs.

  A moment later the chamber was full of water, of the sea rushing in. It hammered Stenwold onto the floor, but Gribbern was manhandling him, shoving him towards the abruptly opened hatch. Stenwold went through in a tangle of limbs, flailing wildly into the open water, almost dragging the caul from his head in an instinctive terror of drowning. He had expected pitch-dark, but there were lights here, gleaming globes the size of a man which were tethered throughout the weed, illuminating its tangled, claustrophobic snarl of waving green.

  Stenwold touched the seafloor, kicked off without meaning to, his arms waving helplessly. He saw Gribbern, the mace like an anchor drawing him down to the mud, his coat spilling out around him.

  He saw Pserry: the valiant beast was still scurrying, its bluntly curved head shoving onwards through the weeds, but there was a greater shadow around it, a multitude of arms folding the weed out of the way. Vast and formless, it hung impossibly over the fleeing creature, and Stenwold had to remind himself that Pserry was the size of a big hauling automotive, and so Arkeuthys was…

  The seething coils of the enormous sea monster struck, all together, ripping Pserry from the seabed, turning the wretched beast half upside-down. Stenwold caught a blurred glimpse of that great slit-pupilled yellow eye, and a scything beak like a giant’s shears. He felt the crack as those jaws hit home, crushing down on Pserry’s side, grinding through the thrashing creature’s shell. Again and again Arkeuthys’s severing beak descended, with Pserry’s limbs flailing futilely, until the water all about the monster was strewn with pieces of cracked armour and broken legs.

  Gribbern gave Stenwold a shove, bowling him along through the weed. There was no word for the expression on the sea-kinden’s face, but his free hand was making some signal, some piece of sign language whose meaning was clear. Go!

  Go where? The interior of the caul was already feeling dangerously close. Then Gribbern’s next shove turned Stenwold around, and he saw the problem. Arkeuthys had not come alone, of course.

  The Onychoi were picking their way between the weed stalks: massively armoured men, as broad as they were tall, perched on high-stepping, sidestepping crabs that would have measured a quarter of Pserry’s size. Gribbern pushed Stenwold again, and then turned, the beak-headed mace raised in his fists. Stenwold was fumbling for a weapon, a knife, anything, but unlike L
aszlo he had not re-armed himself since their capture. He had nothing but his bare hands.

  One of the Onychoi jumped down from his high seat and fell slowly to stand before Gribbern. He had a sword of sorts, a heavy, streamlined thing with a forward-curving, pick-like point. Despite his almost graceful descent, he stumbled slightly as his feet touched the bottom, and Gribbern did not let him recover, swinging the mace in a ponderous arc so that the beaked point, with all that weight behind it, chipped into the Onychoi’s shoulderguard. The impact barely rocked the inhumanly broad figure, and then his sword was sweeping down in a cleaving stroke, all appearing so gradual that it was as though they had choreographed it beforehand. Gribbern, using some Art to gain solid purchase on the seafloor, managed to twist out of the weapon’s path, and then his lazy backswing caught the Onychoi’s helm, lashing it sideways.

  The pincer caught Gribbern’s free arm without warning, moving more swiftly and deftly than either of the men. The Onychoi’s mount had taken a delicate step in and plucked its master’s opponent neatly out of the duel. A moment later the second claw caught Gribbern about the waist and closed hard enough that the water instantly filled with a ballooning cloud of blood.

  Stenwold screamed in grief and horror and tried to flee, struggling and kicking at the water and the mud. He saw the Onychoi begin to move towards him, each stride resembling a leisurely leap. The sickly light of the lamps was becoming much brighter, showing him far more than he wanted to see. The crab was busy feeding, a dozen mouthparts working industriously, shredding the remains of a tattered grey coat. The Onychoi took another step and paused, sword cocked back. Everything was light. Even the weed was glowing.

  But it was not the weed. A draping curtain swept over Stenwold, a veil of tendrils that gleamed with their own pale luminescence. Some were so slender he could barely see them, others were coiled into drifting helixes or ornamented with lacy frills. His breath was growing laboured now. The caul had done almost all it could for him.

  The Onychoi was retreating now, fumbling backwards towards his mount. Stenwold took no joy in it for, above the crab-riders, the louring cloud that was Arkeuthys boiled forward in a flurry of tentacles.

  It touched the first outpost of that shimmering wall and instantly recoiled as though slapped, the great, fluid bulk of the monster flailing and contracting into itself. The one great eye that was turned towards them flared in almost-human rage and pain.

  Stenwold, growing faint, fell back, let himself drift, and looked upwards.

  The moon, he thought, as the world fell away from him. The moon has come to save me…

  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. ‘W
e’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.