The Sea Watch

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Go on, though,’ Stenwold prompted. ‘The Seven Families?’

  ‘Next is the Onychoi, the people of the claw,’ she told them. ‘Some live within the colonies, but most are Benthists, travelling the ocean floor. Many live in the Hot Stations now, I’m told. You have met Rosander, and Wys, and Fel here. They are all Onychoi of one kind or another.’

  That’s a lot of variety to fit in just one kinden, Stenwold thought, contrasting Wys and Rosander. Or, no, they’re not kinden, but several kinden all within the one family: crabs and shrimp and whatever Fel happens to take after, I suppose, but they’re all kin. I suppose that means they’re the closest kin to us, as well, of all the sea-kinden.

  ‘Next come the Archetoi, who build the colonies and allow us to live within them,’ Paladrya went on, her voice acquiring a sing-song pattern, a rhyme for children. ‘They are the Builders, and worthy of honour, and none who relies on the colonies should offend them or stand in their way, for we survive by their grace. After the two great families and the Builders, there are also the lesser kinden,’ Here Paladrya threw a very pointed look at Phylles. The dark-skinned woman scowled but said nothing, as Paladrya went on, ‘There are four of them, and usually the Polypoi are counted first of these.’

  ‘You leave me out of this,’ Phylles said gruffly. ‘I don’t want any part of your stupid Obligist hierarchies.’

  ‘The Polypoi are lonely and self-reliant,’ Paladrya went on, and then Phylles broke in with, ‘Loners. Loners, not lonely. We do just fine on our own.’

  ‘Perhaps you can set the record straight after we’re done,’ Stenwold suggested, which drew her frown on to him.

  ‘No skin off my nose whether you get a proper education,’ she told him, and made a great show of stomping off again.

  Paladrya took a deep breath. ‘Well, the Polypoi live beside the colonies, mostly, in outlying farms and homesteads, or just on their own like hermits. Or sometimes there are Onychoi hermits, and the Polypoi live near them. We claim that they are lonely, or why else would they stay just outside, rather than simply going on their own ways?’

  There was a sound of derision from elsewhere in the vessel, but Stenwold gestured for Paladrya to continue.

  ‘Then there are the Medusoi, who constantly travel the oceans, and have little to do with the colonies at all. They are the greatest of the Pelagists, meaning those who swim freely, although there are Kerebroi and Onychoi who also feel no ties to a colony or train. The Medusoi are strange and dangerous. Sixth of the Seven Families are the Gastroi, the lowly. The Gastroi live mostly outside the colonies, but they keep the farms and herds that feed us. They are quiet and uncomplaining and dutiful, and in turn we must protect them from the dangers of the sea. They are also skilled at accreating, and at working the shells and stones that the sea leaves us with.’

  She appeared to have finished there, so Stenwold indicated on his fingers that even land-kinden could count to seven. She had become something brighter for a brief moment, given the chance to teach, but now she retreated into herself again.

  ‘The Seventh family is . . . different. Those I have told you about, they are part of our society, even peripherally. Even the Medusoi recognize where they fit in and, although they are dangerous if crossed, they will not seek out danger. The Echinoi are different, however. The Echinoi have no laws. We do not even know if they have language. They are . . . something other than human, it is said. Some claim they resided within the sea long before the other families came, and resent us for our intrusion. Certainly they, of us all, have no need of air. How their children manage, we cannot guess. The Echinoi are the spine-kinden, and they roam the vastness of the seabed. When their bands find victims – a farm, a train, even a whole colony – they attack without mercy. They are the enemies of us all. Hope that you never see them, land-kinden. They would not care who or what you were. They would feast on your bones.’

  ‘Lovely,’ Laszlo muttered darkly. ‘Just when you thought you were surrounded by thoroughly unpleasant people, there’s worse.’

  Fel had remained blank throughout Paladrya’s lecture but, at that, he smiled, showing neat, predatory-looking teeth.

  Twenty-Two

  ‘How does it go?’ Stenwold asked. He had left Paladrya asleep, and Laszlo picking over the vessel’s cargo nets, while he clambered and slithered until he could get within sight of what he took to be the engine room. It was tucked into the innermost coiling of the vessel’s shell, and Wys’s engineer seemed barely able to fit there. It was the first time Stenwold had seen one of the big Onychoi unarmoured, and the man still looked very broad at the shoulders. He was probably a full foot taller than Rosander, too, and would have given a Mole Cricket-kinden a fair run in a wrestling match. One careless backhand would have sent Stenwold himself rattling all the way back along to the vessel’s entrance hatch, and probably worse, too, because there was a great serrated claw curving from the back of each hand. The spiked gauntlets of Rosander’s banner-men had obviously sheathed Art-grown weapons like these. The man’s name was Lej, Stenwold recalled, or possibly Spillage.

  ‘Go?’ The engineer turned to him questioningly. That face was frightening at first, tucked between those bunched shoulders, with a ridged and hairless skull and a heavy jaw. Lej possessed the mildest blue childlike eyes that Stenwold had ever seen, though, which somewhat took the edge off his grim visage. ‘Oh, heap big magic, Lowlander,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  Stenwold raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, I see you’ve got a spring-wound clockwork behind you, that’s feeding tension into two separate engines for some reason. What I can’t work out is what the engines are doing to make the submersible move like this.’ If any vessel he knew were to make progress in this lurching series of thrusts, he would have sent it back to the dockyard for repairs.

  Lej was staring at him, jaw actually dropping. ‘You’re Able?’ he said.

  ‘Apt, yes. There’s a lot you don’t know about the land. Almost everything, for a start. The same’s true of what I know of the sea.’

  The Onychoi was now grinning, showing teeth like yellowed pegs. ‘Oh, landsman, there’s precious few who’d know this was even an engine. Oh, I’m impressed. I really am impressed. Do you have these gear-trains, then, where you’re from?’

  ‘Clockwork? Certainly. They’re . . . new, then?’

  ‘This barque was fitted out just two years back,’ Lej told him. ‘But they’ve been making these engines for . . . what, six, eight years? The first ones were rubbish, though, between you and me. Swimming was better. It’s only in the last few years they sorted out the strain ratios, and the like. I hear some of the designs coming from the Hot Stations these days are slick, real slick.’ Here was an engineer talking about engines, and Stenwold had a moment of utter dislocation. I could be in the College workshops right now. I can almost hear Totho in this sea-kinden’s voice.

  ‘So what happened to start it off?’ he asked. They can’t have gone from Inapt to Apt in just eight years. It must have been there long before, waiting for a trigger, something . . .

  ‘Springs,’ Lej informed him. ‘The idea’s been about since before I was born, the way they tell it, but it’s about getting a good enough spring to hold the tension. The Hot Stations, now, they worked out how you accreate spring-steel, like we’ve got here. Before that you had to do it by tensioning shell or bone, and that gets you nowhere, frankly. Come here and see.’

  Stenwold tried to approach, but skidded on the curve of the shell. A broad hand grabbed his shoulder and stopped him sliding away out of sight entirely.

  ‘Why’ve you got those things on your feet? No wonder you can’t stand up properly,’ Lej enquired. He meant Sten-wold’s boots, and with that came the understanding why, however over- or under-clad, everyone in this undersea world went barefoot, for almost all of the floors Stenwold had been sliding about on were smoothly uneven. Cursing himself for a slow student, he unlaced his boots and threw them off, hearing his footwear bang an
d rattle all the way down to the main hold.

  ‘Look at that,’ Lej observed. ‘Land-kinden got toes, too.’

  With the new traction from his bare feet, Stenwold was able to clamber closer. ‘I see your spring,’ he said, privately thinking how this would all barely pass for a prentice-piece back in Collegium, ‘but what is it powering. Propellers? Legs? How does this shell move?’

  ‘Like it did when it was alive,’ Lej replied, obviously puzzled. ‘How else?’

  ‘I have not the first idea how shells move,’ Stenwold told him. Natural history was never my strong point, and who’d have thought it would be a matter of life or death one day?

  ‘Siphons,’ Lej explained, and saw that the word carried no meaning. ‘We pull in water at the front, and then squirt it out of the siphons, left and right, to make us go forward. If we want up or down it gets harder. We either flood the inner chambers, or get some air into ’em. Smooth, eh?’

  If only I was not a prisoner. If only Collegium was not under threat from land and sea. If only . . . For he was seeing something here: he was seeing history. The sea-kinden had discovered their aptitude, and Stenwold was witnessing what must be the first stages of a technical explosion like the revolution that had freed his own people from the yoke of the Moths five centuries before. ‘It’s very impressive,’ he said, suddenly feeling hollow. ‘Thank you for showing it to me.’

  He slid carefully back down to the main chamber, where Laszlo eyed him expectantly, but Stenwold just managed a wry smile and found himself somewhere to sit, resting his back against the sloping wall as best he could.

  I cannot say what might happen, if it came to war between us and the sea-kinden. They have the advantage of surprise, and they have unknown Arts, and for a long while we would be unable to strike back. He reflected, oddly, about the Moth-kinden of Tharn during the war, and what they must have felt when, after generations of mounting attacks against the Helleron mining concerns, a Wasp airfleet had arrived on their doorstep. We would manufacture our battle submersibles, no doubt, even if they drove us from Collegium entirely. In time, we would take the war to them. Whatever the upshot, whether we turned them back, or whether they claimed the coast from us for ever, this moment of theirs, this delicate unfurling of their new way of life, would be crushed in the fray. There is so much to learn here that we will never know if Rosander gets his war.

  He saw that Wys had now woken up and was standing before the many-paned viewport cut into what was either the fore or the aft of the shell, depending on how flexible his thinking was. Stenwold took a moment to admire the workmanship, where some tireless craftsman had sawn out a hundred interlocking gaps in the foot-thick hull, each one then covered over with some transparent material that had no doubt been accreated into place. The spars and struts left between the panes were cut into curls and spirals, the entire design a thoughtless work of art. The sea-kinden, with their very industry governed by imagination rather than the hard labour of hands, seemed incapable of achieving anything plainly or simply.

  ‘Wake up your new friend,’ Wys instructed him, gesturing at Paladrya.

  ‘We’ve arrived?’

  ‘Close on. You’re about to become someone else’s problem.’

  The window showed them approaching some kind of wedge-shaped bivalve shell, one of as massive proportions as the vessel they were travelling in and picked out by bulbous, fading swirls of phosphorescence. Beyond it was a dark wall that Stenwold assumed was just empty water at first, but then he noticed a slight motion caught by the luminescence shed from their ship, and he sucked in his breath.

  ‘Weed seas,’ Laszlo murmured, beside him. ‘How many ships have run foul of those? These ones must go all the way to the surface?’ The barrier was a wall of weed, a dense forest of anchored fronds that dangled upwards towards the unseen, distant air.

  ‘Reaching for the sunlight,’ Wys confirmed. ‘How else?’ A frown. ‘Or do you not—?’

  ‘Yes, we grow crops. It is one of the primitive skills we land-kinden have mastered. Along with wearing shoes and not living in the arse-baiting sea,’ Laszlo snapped pointedly. ‘You are really getting on my nerves, you know that?’

  ‘Laszlo—’ Stenwold started, because Fel and his killing fists were very close, and he had lost track of where Phylles was, and it was not so very long ago that sea-kinden had been debating how expendable Laszlo was. Wys was laughing, though, a hand pressed to her mouth to hold it in.

  ‘You’re priceless,’ she told Laszlo, fondly patronizing. ‘I’d love to keep you. Business intervenes, though.’

  They had pulled nearer to the shell, which was now turning out to be considerably larger even than the ship. Stenwold saw motion near the base of it, where an octopus of considerable size was squatting in a rosette of coiled tentacles, one baleful eye regarding them. Something else dashed past the window, and he received only the blurred impression of some dart-like shape with trailing streamers, and a figure impossibly mounted upon it.

  ‘That’s our patron’s steed, I reckon,’ Wys observed. Phylles had come out from some hidden nook, and padded across to her, peering outside.

  ‘Looks it,’ she agreed. ‘And that’s . . . Pelagists of some sort. What are we into here?’

  As their viewpoint rounded the shell, she had picked out another sea-monster lurking there. This one looked at least more acceptable to Stenwold: something like a flattened woodlouse with an anchor-shaped head. It was comparable in size to Wys’s submersible.

  ‘You people ride these monsters?’ Laszlo demanded.

  ‘Well, yes, on them or inside them, for those without the know-how to work one of these beauties,’ Wys replied, patting the shell-ship’s hull. ‘How else to get about? It’d take for ever to swim. Spillage, hold us here!’

  There was a vaguely affirmative noise from above, and for the next few minutes the submersible jockeyed about in the water, shifting from side to side, and then dropping a good distance quite suddenly. Bubbles flashed past the window on their long journey back to the mother air.

  Phylles was at the land-kinden’s elbow, proffering a limp handful of translucent membrane. Stenwold accepted the caul from her reluctantly. Travelling in this machine, for all its strange construction and motive power, had seemed the closest to normal life since the monster Arkeuthys had ripped him from the barge.

  Stenwold was readier this time, when the rush of water coursed over him. As Phylles took hold of him, he did his best to kick a little, to help her progress, but he remained little more than inconvenient baggage, bobbing and twisting at the end of her arm. He gained confused views of the coiled submersible, and then of the great stony mound they were heading for. The place had a single hole cut into it – at the hinge where the two halves of the shell met – and they entered through another pair of twin hatches. Just like a lock, Stenwold decided, thinking of canals and water levels, only more so. How do they make the doors work? The doors here were not those neatly folding segments, but a kind of curved plug of thick, whorled stone, or possibly just more shell. The inner surfaces, he noticed, were slick with mucus that sealed them wetly against the open sea.

  The shell-house’s innards were lit in dull shades of blue by a dozen small lamps, and a ramp carved out from the building’s inner wall curled down from the hatchway to the floor below. The place was cluttered with bales of what Stenwold took to be dried weed, and at first there was no welcoming party to be seen. Wys did not seem discouraged by that, and led them down to stand in the midst of the little empty space available. Stenwold glanced left and right, and saw Fel and Phylles watching warily.

  ‘Let’s get this over with,’ Wys called out. ‘Some of us have other business.’

  The figure that stepped out was one of the Kerebroi, Paladrya’s people. He was tall and lean, with a hooked nose and a magnificent beard ending in twin forks that coiled like ram’s horns. His hair, above a high forehead, was swept back in elegant waves. Beyond a cloak and a kilt, all he wore was a fortune in gold
and jewellery, his bare chest almost hidden by an entire vest of linked pearls.

  ‘You have the Edmir’s prisoners?’ he asked suspiciously. Stenwold now saw movement behind him: four or five very tall, thin men and women wearing peaked helms, breastplates and greaves of some pale substance. They carried spears with long needle points, but held them loosely, without threatening Wys’s party.

  ‘You doubt me?’ Wys asked. ‘I’m hurt. I have more than that, councillor. I have land-kinden.’

  The tall man’s hooded eyes narrowed. ‘You no doubt imagine I will pay more if I believe so.’

  ‘Oh, boss,’ Wys said, ‘I’ll hold you to the asking price, but these are the real deal. You, boy, do your trick.’

  Laszlo glared at her but, after Fel had prodded him, he let his wings flare and ascended halfway to the distant, gloom-shrouded ceiling. The expressions on the faces of the spearmen were caught between fear and wonder, but their master merely nodded, still frowning.

  ‘As good as your word,’ he said. ‘And your reward is well earned in this case. Would you stay with us for word of another assignment?’

  ‘Pay me for this one first,’ Wys growled. ‘And, while you’re at it, how much for her?’

  She hauled on Paladrya’s hand, dragging the woman forwards. The tall man’s eyes widened for a moment, his mask of disinterest slipping.

  ‘You?’

  ‘Heiracles,’ she named him dully.

  Two of the thin guardsmen had levelled their weapons, on her appearance. Stenwold saw something barbed squirming alongside the narrow spearpoints.

  ‘What is this?’ Heiracles demanded.

  ‘From the Edmir’s private cells – not dead at all,’ Wys elaborated.

  ‘Well, then, that can be rectified. My people will be glad indeed to know that justice was truly brought upon the Traitress. We always suspected that Claeon lied.’ He nodded at his men. ‘Kill her. We’ll preserve her head for proof.’