The Sea Watch sota-6

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The Benthists were swarming to the defence: armoured Onychoi lumbering forth with mauls and swords and the reinforced claws of their Art, while their own creatures snapped and clipped at the enemy with their great claws. They snipped off the spikes of their attackers and pincered through their questing limbs, but Stenwold saw several of the ponderous crustaceans overwhelmed by the crawling onslaught, enwrapped by razor-coated arms and then somehow simply taken apart, pieces of leg and shell drifting off between the assailants in a pale cloud.

  The human protagonists were no less savage. Here an Onychoi took his enemy’s arm between claw and dagger, and severed it neatly at the shoulder. There one of the attackers brought the honed tip of his blade to bear in cracking through a defender’s breastplate. The worst thing was the pace of conflict, for it was all so slow, so weighted down by the water, as though they were enacting some leisurely and complex dance, fighting and dying at such a leaden pace that every victim must have had ample time to contemplate his unavoidable fate.

  ‘What are they?’ Stenwold asked, indicating the aggressors.

  ‘Echinoi,’ Lyess told him. ‘Sometimes they attack the colonies, and they say that’s the only reason the Builders tolerate anyone else within their homes. The Echinoi are everyone’s enemies. They were first in the sea, the memories say. We other kinden drove them into the deeper places, and they have never forgotten. Some say they possess colonies in the great uncharted wastes, but I have heard of nobody who has seen such things for themselves.’

  They drifted on over the sluggish melee, and soon the carnage was left behind in the gloom, only the train’s winking lights remaining as distant star-like testimony. Stenwold continued watching for a long time, and saw several of them wink out. Not for the first time did he consider what a terrible thing it would be, to die out here.

  Then there were the fish, or at least they looked like fish to Stenwold. He became aware of them only when the progress of Lyess’s companion changed, becoming more laboured, and his own stomach told him they were descending fast. He looked about, to find Lyess seeming in a panic, staring about her. There was a dawning light above, like the first silver echo of sunlight, but it was fading, even as he noticed it.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked, but then he spotted them: sleek grey darts swooping about them, lunging in towards the bell above, and then twitching away. There were a half dozen of them attacking from all sides, one after another, and always from above, so that Stenwold thought it would make more sense to get to the surface to protect her companion’s top, but instead they continued dropping through the water as swiftly as they could.

  The fish were never still, but kept ducking beneath the jellyfish’s rippling mantle, each in turn virtually putting a narrow eye up against its transparent flanks. Stenwold’s own gaze met theirs, and he experienced a distinct shock of contact, like meeting the stare of some intelligent but utterly inhuman entity. Worse was the expression about the intruders’ mouths.

  ‘Cursed fish was smiling at me,’ he said, shaken.

  ‘They are Menfish,’ Lyess spat angrily, and her companion shuddered under a renewed assault. ‘They are a bane on the Pelagists. They attack us whenever they can. They think like humans, even though they are nothing but fish, and they hate us.’

  ‘Can they harm us?’ Stenwold asked her. The incessant lunging attack of the Menfish was becoming swifter and more violent.

  ‘They could damage my companion so that we cannot go further, and then they will cut through to us. We must go deep, as they are creatures of the surface.’

  Then the Menfish suddenly scattered, all three vanishing into the dark water. It gave Stenwold no relief, since it was all too clearly a flight from some worse monster.

  For a moment the travellers held their place in the water, the ragged-edged dome above them expanding and contracting silently. Then a shadow coursed past them, a great armoured form of which Stenwold caught only glimpses: a segmented carapace, paddle-like limbs and tail, folded pincers like the largest of all scorpions. It utterly dwarfed them, and it seemed to Stenwold that it would have dwarfed almost anything.

  Lyess was on her knees, staring at the thing as it passed. She was saying something over and over, almost under her breath. Stenwold bent close to hear her, and caught the words, ‘Gods of the sea.’

  ‘Gods?’ he repeated numbly. The monster of monsters was coming back, making another inquisitive pass. He saw compound eyes, larger than he himself was, glitter in the jellyfish’s light, as something behind that broad grid of facets considered him and weighed him, and determined his fate.

  ‘We call them so.’ Lyess was almost breathless. ‘We meet them seldom. Sometimes they kill us, us Pelagists, but more often they let us live. They are the real powers of the deeps.’ Her previous reserve had been stripped from her. Fear and exhilaration raced each other across her face, where Stenwold saw colours – grey and red and deep blue – surface and fade within her skin.

  ‘Do they have’ – he hardly dared ask – ‘a kinden?’

  ‘Nemoctes believes they do,’ she whispered. ‘He says that a Pelagist he knew once travelled to the deep places, to some tiny colony where only we and fugitives go. He told how an Onychoi came in like none he’d ever seen before, half again as tall as a normal man, and clawed, no kinden that he’d seen before or since. He swore that it was Seagod-kinden.’

  The plated shadow was now receding away on its own inscrutable errands, and in its absence Stenwold could not help thinking, Sailors’ tales, as above, so below? But he could not deny the fact of the Sea-god, and if it was not actually a god, then perhaps he had no wish to meet anything yet more godlike. Let us be thankful that the sea keeps its greatest mysteries hidden.

  It was not long after that she woke him, hovering over and almost touching his face, until the sense of her presence broke him from his slumber.

  ‘The Hot Stations,’ she announced. ‘We have arrived.’

  He sat up to see the striking, turbulent vista beyond the clouded walls of Lyess’s companion, and the word that sprang unstoppably from his lips was, ‘Helleron.’

  Twenty-Seven

  ‘I see you no longer trust me,’ Claeon snapped.

  Rosander, Nauarch of the Thousand Spines Train, had arrived in full armour, its stony plates grating constantly against one another. The Onychoi gave such an impression of concentrated weight that Teornis was surprised he didn’t fall straight through the floor. Tiny traces of powder sparkled in the air where newer pieces of his mail were still establishing their fit against their neighbours. Beside him the Spider-kinden and Claeon and another Kerebroi man all looked like so many children.

  ‘Claeon,’ Rosander murmured, ‘if the sea were filled with trust, from the depths up to the sunlight, there would not be sufficient trust for me to trust you.’ His hard, narrow face broke into an equally hard smile. ‘Besides, I must get used to carrying the weight in the air. When my campaign starts, there will be little chance to let the water bear it. So, tell me, when will that be?’

  ‘It would be sooner had your fools not let the land-kinden escape,’ Claeon accused, but Rosander was having none of it.

  ‘My bannermen did what they could,’ the big Onychoi replied, implacable. ‘Your beast let one go and your Dart-kinden the other. I see you have somehow managed to retain the third.’ He glanced briefly at Teornis, without much apparent interest. ‘Or were you about to hand him over to someone else? Me, perhaps.’

  ‘This man is not for you to torture.’ Claeon paced the chamber, which was part of his own suite of rooms. The curved walls were ornamented in golden arabesques that Teornis found beautiful in their execution, but gauche in their effect.

  ‘You think of torture,’ Rosander murmured. ‘Don’t colour me with your pastimes. I might be able to hold him more securely than you, however.’

  Claeon rounded on him furiously, storming up to the man’s immense bulk as though about to break his hand on that stone carapace. ‘Do not be imp
udent! I am Edmir here! You are strong, Rosander, but do not think, here in the heart of my palace, that you can mock me.’

  Rosander looked down at a man who was a fraction of his size, and he sighed slowly. ‘The Shell Hunters Train has been trading at Hermatyre during these last few days. Yesterday, twenty of my bannermen asked my permission to take their retinues and depart with the Hunters when they leave.’

  Claeon narrowed his eyes. ‘And you refused?’

  ‘And I gave them my blessing, for they would go whatever I said, and I would rather they came back to me, when next we meet, than cut all their ties to the Thousand Spines. My people are bored, Claeon. They want to move on. I want to move on. Give me my war. Give me this landsman, to start with.’

  Claeon held up a hand to silence him. ‘This one is special. This one will be more use to you alive and happy than would any number of corpses or prisoners. You know Pellectes, of course?’

  This was the fourth man, another Kerebroi. The stranger was taller than Claeon, leaner save for having something of a belly. His long hair and beard were lustrous with a shiny greenish hue that Teornis hoped was merely cosmetic.

  It was not clear from Rosander’s blank expression whether he knew Pellectes or not, so Claeon went on: ‘He is the leader of the Littoralists, and his people are already up above, learning about our enemy.’ He turned to address Pellectes. ‘Rosander will be the agent of our return to the land.’

  ‘So it is foretold,’ Pellectes breathed.

  Teornis found his eyes meeting Rosander’s in a shared look of exasperation. The Onychoi shifted stance in a further chafing of armour, his pose subtly suggesting that his patience was waning fast. ‘Tell me then,’ he said, ‘what’s so special about this land-kinden.’

  ‘He claims that the land-kinden that we have been spying on are at war with another tribe of landsmen, and that he himself is a member of this other tribe,’ Claeon declared, dismissing with a wave of his hand any number of centuries of landbound politics.

  ‘And it is true,’ Pellectes assured them eagerly. ‘My own agent within their colony has confirmed it.’

  Rosander took two clumping steps forward to stand before Teornis. ‘What can you do for us, then?’

  The Spider looked the huge man directly in the eye. ‘I have agents in Collegium, their colony. I can compromise their defences, guide your soldiers, identify their leaders. It would appear we have a common enemy.’

  Rosander’s gaze weighed him up, the resulting assessment uncertain. He looked sidelong at the green-bearded Littoralist. ‘So where does your orthodoxy feature, in all this?’ he grunted. ‘First time I’ve heard your lot ever talk of friendly land-kinden.’

  ‘But it is so,’ announced Pellectes. ‘For just look at him! He is almost kin to us Kerebroi. It is clear that these are our cousins, who somehow avoided the great purge and fled to the further reaches of the land, to find safety. Now we can strike together against our persecutors.’

  The Onychoi made a disparaging noise. ‘Sounds convenient,’ he remarked.

  ‘It is not convenient,’ Pellectes snapped back at him. ‘We have a duty to our ancestors to avenge the wrong done to us. Those that forced us from our homes must now be punished and destroyed. We will reclaim our birthright.’

  The dry stare of Rosander swung back to Teornis. ‘Anything up there look like my brother, landsman?’

  ‘Not that I ever saw,’ Teornis told him easily.

  ‘Good. I’d hate to have to kill any bastard as tough as I am.’ Rosander looked back to find Pellectes shaking with fury, right before him.

  ‘You dare not mock!’ the man shouted in his face.

  ‘I dare,’ Rosander growled.

  Pellectes’s nostrils flared. ‘Your ancestors were driven, too. You too have lost a homeland. It is your duty, carried down from parent to child across all the centuries, to reclaim it. It is your destiny to be the agent of our return. How dare you jest at such? What would you say to your ancestors, when you mock their spilt blood?’

  ‘I’d tell them they were weak fools to be pushed around, and that I like the sea just fine. Don’t try to infect me with your cant. My bannermen and I, we want conquest and plunder. Keep your ideology to yourself.’

  ‘You must not sully the cause-!’ Pellectes started ranting, and then stopped. Teornis had watched Rosander draw a knife, a remarkably understated move for so huge a man. His arm, encumbered by all that weight of stone, had struck swiftly nonetheless. He had the curved blade pressed against one side of the Kerebroi’s throat, the curved claw of his gauntlet alongside the other. Two tiny trickles of blood patterned Pellectes’s neck. The Littoralist had gone very still, eyes almost out of his head with compounded rage and fear.

  ‘Good. Now keep silent,’ Rosander addressed him, and turned his wrist to take the knife away. The Littoralist stepped back shakily, hands going to the two shallow, bleeding nicks.

  ‘Have this one make arrangements then,’ the Onychoi instructed Claeon, jabbing at Teornis with the blood-tipped spike. ‘Make it soon, though. Any longer and my train will be on their way. They’re not meant for this colony life, and neither am I.’

  He turned and lumbered away, trailing faint motes of stone dust.

  Pellectes bared his teeth after him. ‘The barbarian!’ he spat. ‘Edmir, there must be some other way to further our cause. Must we rely on such ignorant beasts?’

  Claeon folded his hands before him. ‘But I do rely on him, Pellectes. I need him, alas.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Moreover I only need you because you’re of some use to him, and so if he decides to separate your babbling head from your shoulders, I shall cheer him to the echo. You listen to me, now. It was I who made your worthless Littoralists something more than a laughing stock in Hermatyre, and I can undo that just as easily, if you cease to be of use. Do what I say and don’t cross me, or I’ll have Arkeuthys eat the lot of you – and a sour stomach that would give him, no doubt.’

  Pellectes kept his peace stiffly, mortally offended but not deigning to make a reply. Claeon shook his head dolefully. ‘Honestly, Pellectes, do you really believe all that business? About the land being a place of plenty? I’m reliably informed it’s horrible up there.’

  ‘When we retake our ancestral home, it will become paradise again,’ Pellectes replied, with absolute conviction.

  ‘Whatever you say. I’ll have a message for your spy soon enough. Now get out of the palace and go back to your wretched followers.’ He waited until the Littoralist had stalked off, and then turned to Teornis. ‘You see what I must deal with? Having brutes and madmen as my allies.’

  Neither of whom you make much effort to keep as allies, Teornis considered, but he nodded sympathetically. ‘You’ll want a message from me,’ he noted.

  ‘As soon as we can find some way that you can write it.’ Claeon shook his head, for it had proved an unexpected barrier. The Kerebroi wrote in some incomprehensible fashion that involved setting patterns down somehow on the thick paper they processed from pressed seaweed. Furthermore, the characters they used were wholly unfamiliar to Teornis, which had quite thrown him. He had never even considered there being a different manner of writing, but the squiggles and half-pictures of the sea-kinden held no meaning for him whatsoever.

  That had its advantages, of course. His own script would baffle them equally, so he need have no fear of Claeon or Pellectes deciphering his codes. His messages would reach his own people pristine, and full of hidden meaning.

  ‘And the other matter…’ Claeon said, with uncharacteristic delicacy. ‘Aside from Rosander’s war, what about the… lost boy?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure what resources my people will have to hand, without my guidance, but I will have them start the search,’ Teornis assured him. And they will find nothing save tantalizing hints that require a greater knowledge to pursue.

  And then I shall be out of this foul, damp, barbarous place, and I shall find this prince of theirs if he is to be found, and we shall then see if I
cannot make sure Claeon will live in fear for the rest of his days.

  Helleron. In this alien place, the familiar name sounded strange inside his head. It’s Helleron-under-Sea, it really is.

  The chimneys were the most obvious parallel. They were twisted columns of stone, impossibly taller than any real factory stacks could be, and what they were gouting could not, of course, be black smoke, but it looked like it, and the shimmer in the water around them was like the heat haze from a foundry or a forge. Other columns around them also mirrored the chimneys, save that they sprouted broad fans or beating arms at irregular intervals. It was a Helleron dreamscape, a nightmare reflection.

  At the foot of the chimneys lay the town, and it was a town. Stenwold would accept no substitute, certainly not the sea-kinden word ‘colony’. This community was not grown by Archetoi, nor was it made from the scooped-out armour of sea-things. Men and women had built this. They were building it still. Even if the pieces that they were assembling it from were of shell and accreated strangeness, even if the crafts they were using would have mystified an honest Collegium carpenter, still they were assembling a kind of shanty town of interconnected hovels, and it would have sat nicely at the rear of a factory in the Helleron slums. Scuto could have lived here, he thought, but the idea of thorny Scuto struggling with a caul was too much.