The Sea Watch

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Your waters give me no joy,’ he told her, brooding on them. A school of fish flurried past, each one with mirror-scaled sides that scattered the light back at him. He had no doubt that they would suffer their share of casualties once they encountered the deadly train beneath. The fact that their substance, peculiarly processed by Lyess’s creature, would later feed him made him feel ill.

  ‘That is sad,’ she told him, staring intently at him again. Sometimes she patrolled the circumference of the chamber, one outstretched hand leaving a ribbon of colour flowing along the wall wherever she touched it. Sometimes she just knelt as if she were meditating. She seldom blinked, and her eyes were almost always fixed on him. She did not know what to do with him, but sharing her domain plainly unsettled and fascinated her. She does not even care that I am from the land, Stenwold thought. She would stare at any of the sea-kinden just the same.

  ‘I am not meant to be in this place,’ he told her. ‘This . . .’ – his hand described the great emptiness about them, above and below and to all sides – ‘this just seems like a desert to me, a desert of water.’ Give me the spires of Collegium over this. Hammer and Tongs, give me a Wasp slave camp, even! A pair of legs and a quick mind might free him from the Wasps. Here the only way of escape was to drown.

  ‘There is much to see, if you but wait,’ she promised him. ‘There is beauty in many forms, and struggle also. But, most of all, there is calm. Calm is something you have experienced little of, I think.’

  He could not help looking at her, as she spoke to him. Beauty, yes, but surely not to touch. She looked delicate as glass, ready to shatter in a man’s hands, but he remembered how she had put her arms about him, before, and he had sensed far more strength hovering there than he would have guessed from her looks. That had been a strange gesture for one who had known so little of society. Perhaps some instincts persisted despite all the degrees of separation the sea and a difference of kinden could impose.

  ‘The thing I most want to see is something the sea cannot provide,’ he told her. The thought occurred that he must seem a dour guest, but she had it in her power to return him to land, he was sure – yet she would not. He was a prisoner, still, albeit of a different oubliette.

  ‘Would you like me to show you the sun?’ she asked him.

  He felt something within him come close to breaking apart. ‘Yes.’ It was barely a whisper.

  He felt a change, then, in the ceaseless pulsing of the creature around them . . . an ascension, perhaps? The dim sea told nothing of it, uniform in its obscurity. What time of day or night is it, even? How can she even know there will be a sun? I have almost stopped believing in it, almost begun to think the sun is one of those myths of the Days of Lore – like the great Moth magics in the stories.

  Her ceaseless regard was beginning to unnerve him, but his eyes were already tired of the depthless water, the obscure shapes that marred the translucent walls of this latest prison. What could make anyone seek out this way of life? They must have been desperate. Perhaps we did drive them to it, after all?

  ‘Rest,’ she told him. ‘I will wake you.’

  It was clear that they were not soaring upwards on swift wings so, with his back to Lyess, he lay down on his side, feeling the surface give and stretch unpleasantly beneath him. He closed his eyes against the persistent light and fought for some kind of sleep. His body rhythms were hopelessly adrift by now, and he had no idea how many days had passed in the world above. These sea-kinden seemed to have some clock to live their lives by, but it escaped him. Without sunrise and sunset, he was lost in time.

  He was later never quite sure whether he truly slept, that time, only that he was suddenly aware of her being close, and surely some time must have passed. He opened an eye and saw her, at the corner of his vision, crouching over him. For a moment he wanted to kick out at her, nightmare thoughts of her draining his blood as the Mosquito-kinden did in the stories, but he held still and forced himself to turn his head and look at her.

  She was already moving back even as he did so. Her hair, which had hung down over her face, recoiled first and seemingly of its own accord, retreating from him to loop itself about her shoulders. For a second, his world was captured in her eyes, huge and sightless, and deeper than the sea could ever be. Then she had withdrawn, back across the chamber floor almost bonelessly. ‘We are here,’ she announced.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Above.’

  He looked up, and almost cried out. There was light, but it was not just that cold, sterile light given off by her creature. There was a blue above him that he had almost forgotten, and he lunged to his feet, one hand extended as if he could grasp the sun and hold it close to him, take it down to burn away all the horrors of the depths.

  ‘I have to go outside,’ he told her. ‘Please, I have to feel the air.’

  She had retreated all the way across the chamber from him now, as though he had suddenly become a dangerous madman. He did not notice any signal from her, and certainly she did not voice her permission, but there was an opening now, where a moment before the floor had been unmarred. Water was instantly washing about his ankles, and he knew he would somehow have to swim – out from under the monster’s bulk – but in that moment he did not care about its stinging tendrils, or the drag of the water, or his own inability. He pulled the caul over his head and simply dropped through the gap into the sea.

  For a moment he was sinking, but he was still within a forest of tentacles, and they allowed him purchase. He struggled through them, finding that a path opened whichever way he turned, fighting his way through the dense geography of the creature’s underside, knowing only that the air was there somewhere beyond, if he could only reach it.

  There came a moment when there was nothing above him but the water, and Stenwold kicked and scrabbled, flopping and grasping his way up along the curve of the creature’s side, until his head broke the lapping surface of the water and he could pull the caul from his face.

  It was a bright day: the sky was near cloudless and the Lash was not clogging the horizon. Stenwold Maker fought his way up on that rubbery, giving slope and, from there, on to that scant section of Lyess’s companion that broke the surface Once there he collapsed onto his back, arms outstretched and looking into the vast, welcome emptiness of the sky, smelling the fresh salt air.

  If I could only fly, the thought came to him. But he knew the answer to that one: if he could fly, he could maybe escape Lyess, but never the sea. He could not know what direction to go in, and nobody, of any kinden whatsoever, could possess the stamina to make it to land from this remote spot. There was nothing but water from one end of the horizon to the other, and not a sail to sully the endless waves.

  Still, it was sweet. It was a pleasure he had taken for granted all his life, but it was so sweet now.

  How long he lay there, his tattered clothes drying, stiff with salt, he could not have later said, but at last the thing beneath him began to move, to subside slowly into the water. Damn her, he thought, instantly bitter. Was this so hard? Is Nemoctes’s schedule so rushed? Do we not have ‘time’? He tugged on the caul and slipped back into the sea, knowing that he would have no option save to return to that captivity or else to drown. This time the sea-monster’s tentacles brushed him forward in rippling eddies, almost dragging him to the point where the open mouth waited to swallow him again. Cursing all sea-kinden he dragged himself through, feeling it close so swiftly that the cold, gelid flesh of it slobbered against his foot.

  He gave out a cry of disgust and turned to glare at Lyess. ‘What news?’ he ordered of her. ‘I assume there must have been some news, that we must now hurry to these Hot Stations?’

  Kneeling with head bowed, her hair flowing over her face, Lyess made no answer.

  ‘Speak to me,’ he insisted. ‘What has happened that we have to go under again?’

  ‘We had to descend,’ she confessed, very softly, and then looked up at him. Stenwold heard himself make a strang
e sound. Her skin, the skin of her face, was cracked and wrinkled, as though she had aged decades. ‘The sun harms us,’ she told him. ‘My companion and I, we cannot bear its touch.’

  Would you like me to show you the sun? she had asked. He felt ill. ‘Your face . . . will you . . . ?’

  ‘I will be well soon,’ she assured him. ‘But the sun will kill us if we let it. That has been known. We are much more of the sea than the other sea-kinden. To us, the land is only an echo in the memories. We were the first – or almost the first.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  She just stared blankly back at him and asked, ‘What for?’

  Laszlo woke at the words ‘Hey, land-kinden’, finding that he understood them, and his current situation, without any clutching confusion. He was lying in one of the cargo nets that draped the interior of Wys’s barque, and had found it served as a hammock by any other name. He opened an eye to find Phylles regarding him suspiciously.

  ‘Someone here you should see, Wys says,’ the Polypoi woman told him. She kept her distance, mostly, and he guessed it was because she was unsure of what dangerous Art he might possess. Which would be a wise thought, if I was something other than a Fly.

  He dropped down from his roost with a flicker of wings that made Phylles back up several steps more, then saw immediately who she had meant. Wys and Fel were both standing near the hatch, along with a tall, broad-shouldered man in armour.

  ‘Who’s he?’ the Fly asked. ‘How’d he get here?’ Phylles flicked a finger past his shoulder, towards the window. There was something hanging in the water, and Laszlo had to stare at it a while before he understood. It was of almost the exact size and shape as the submersible, save that it was still living. Where Wys had placed her hatch sprouted the head and arms of a sea monster, The eye was enormous and white, with a tiny pinprick of a pupil, set beneath a mottled leathery flap that looked to Laszlo like some kind of poorly fitting cap. There was a forest of writhing tendrils in front of the eye, far more than any creature could surely find a use for. Compared to Arkeuthys, Laszlo decided, it looked placidly inscrutable, as though it knew a great deal that it wasn’t letting on about.

  He marched over to Wys, determined to see what madman had come sailing to them aboard such a beast. The newcomer looked as though he was some kind of Kerebroi, and a powerful and elegant one, at that. His skin was darker than Paladrya’s, or that of the oubliette guards: the sort of faded brown that bones turned to out in the desert. He had a high forehead, long black hair curling from a widow’s peak, and his beard gleamed with oils. His armour impressed Laszlo the most, if only because it was comprehensible to him as something that could be manufactured and worn. The individual pieces had obviously been accreated: moulded out of something like crabshell into the form of breastplate, shoulder-guards, greaves and the like, and fantastically wrought into the shape of waves and sea-wrack, scallops and coiled snails. But at least it was a suit of plate armour such as land-kinden might wear, rather than the monstrous, all-encompassing carapaces of the Onychoi. Hanging from a loop at his waist was a truly nasty-looking weapon, a crowbar crossed with a pickaxe, that must be of some use in levering both men and monsters out of their shells. There was also a shield slung across his back.

  He was possibly the most normal person that Laszlo had seen in some while.

  ‘Little land-kinden,’ Wys gestured, ‘meet Nemoctes.’

  Laszlo gave the man a grudging nod. He remembered that name, at least, from their interrupted conference.

  Nemoctes regarded him evenly. ‘Greetings to you, land-kinden.’

  ‘The name’s Laszlo. Where’s Master Maker?’ Laszlo saw no particular reason to be polite about it.

  ‘Safe,’ Nemoctes assured him. ‘As safe as we can make him. There were complications or I would have sent word earlier.’

  ‘What complications?’ Laszlo wanted to know.

  ‘Gribbern is dead, but another who heeds me rescued your friend,’ Nemoctes declared. ‘They head for the Hot Stations – as I discover Wys had already guessed. We will hold a fresh conclave there, beyond Claeon’s reach.’

  ‘Good for you,’ Laszlo replied stubbornly. He half hoped the man might take offence, showing what he was made of, but Nemoctes simply nodded.

  ‘It’s war, isn’t it?’ Wys said unexpectedly. ‘Any way you look at it, Hermatyre’s going to fight with itself.’

  A shadow crossed Nemoctes’s face. ‘If these land-kinden can secure the heir for us, then perhaps the bloodshed will be little, and within the palace only. Otherwise . . . it may be a uncertain situation indeed, if Heiracles raises the mob in his own name.’

  Wys made a rude noise. ‘I’d not follow Heiracles out of the sun unless he paid me. I don’t know what they think of him in Hermatyre, but I don’t reckon it’s much.’

  ‘You may be right.’ Nemoctes shrugged, the plates of his armour scraping. ‘My people have helped him as much as we can, and more than we should in some cases. We have no army to fight on his behalf, though, and nor would we, anyway. I do not care, myself, what blood runs in his veins, but enough others do, and therefore will not accept him even though they bear Claeon no love.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll start trading out of Deep Seep soon,’ Wys mused. ‘Don’t recall anybody caring much about wars down there.’

  ‘Too cursed cold down there, is the reason,’ Phylles muttered, and Wys nodded glumly.

  ‘Well, you go talk to your folks,’ she told Nemoctes. ‘We’ll see you inside the Stations, and then we’ll see what’s where.’

  The tall man nodded, and opened the hatch, stepping into the small room beyond. Once he was gone, Wys sighed long and deep. When she looked up, her eyes were bright, though.

  ‘Fel, Phylles, Lej,’ she addressed them, even the unseen mechanic, ‘It’s one of those times.’

  ‘You mean where we either get rich or dead?’ Phylles asked sourly.

  ‘We’ve been rich so far, haven’t we? And not dead even once?’ Wys was grinning. ‘With such a record, how can we go wrong?’

  Both Phylles and Fel were still looking highly unenthusiastic, so she dismissed them with a wave of her hand. ‘Land-kinden,’ she beckoned, ‘Laszlo, come to the window with me. Let’s see Nemoctes off.’

  Laszlo followed her over to the far end of the chamber. Nemoctes must already have reached his mount, for now the creature was lazily departing, retreating ponderously backwards off into the darkness.

  ‘Tell me about your people, landsman,’ Wys prompted him.

  ‘You mean my kinden?’

  ‘I mean your people. There are some folks up there who’d want you back, yes? Someone must have shed a tear when your barque docked again at your colony, and you weren’t on it.’

  ‘My family,’ Laszlo replied. Or at least they’d better have, rotten bastards.

  ‘Pay to get you back, I’d wager,’ Wys considered.

  Laszlo shot her a sidelong look but she was watching the passing waters idly. ‘They would, at that,’ he informed her, though with the same mental caveat as before.

  She nodded. ‘I’m a woman used to making my own way in the world, Laszlo,’ she said, ‘and you may have noticed that I’ve taken a shine to you. You’re not so different to us, for all you’re clueless. I keep wanting to shave your head in order to make a civilized man of you, but otherwise you’re just a human being, like we all are.’

  A fair sight more than you or your crew, Laszlo thought, but he just nodded diplomatically.

  ‘Heiracles, Nemoctes, and Claeon even, none of them have the brains of a stone,’ Wys observed thoughtfully. ‘What do they see in you? That you’re either a threat, or something to conquer, or some kind of, what, captive militia to rule the colony with? No, no, no, stupid, all of them. I’ve seen you. You go and talk to Spillage like you’re an engineer. Your clothes are in a poor state, and you wear more of them than anyone could want, but I can see they were tailored well enough. Your people have potential.’

  ‘We
ll, thank you,’ said Laszlo acidly, and she put up a warning hand before his face instantly.

  ‘You just rein in that tongue and listen to someone when they’re telling you something to your advantage,’ she snapped. ‘Wouldn’t it be a tragedy if we never got to the Stations at all, but left you somewhere where you could just kick off for home, up above the waves?’

  His breath caught and he wanted to shake her, to clutch her tight. ‘Home?’ he whispered.

  ‘Your people make things differently to us. That means they must make different things from ours,’ she said. ‘Things we’ve never seen. Things that are common as dirt to you will be like crab’s ink down here,’ she said, which he assumed was a rare or non-existent commodity. ‘Things we take for granted, well, your lot’d tear each other apart for them. You see where I’m going with this?’

  ‘Trade,’ he replied.

  ‘Surely, trade,’ she agreed. ‘Stuff Heiracles and stuff their war, I say. If your people, your family, were of a mind for barter, then why not? All anyone’s ever said about the land was that it was death, that the landsmen – if there even were any – were murdering savages, and that everything up there was like poison. Now here you are, and if we haven’t managed to poison you, I reckon you’re not likely to poison us. So how about we forget the Stations and start making some money?’

  ‘What about Master Maker?’ Laszlo asked her.

  ‘Nothing to do with me,’ she said. ‘Heiracles will sell him somewhere, or Nemoctes, or who knows what. This is between you and me, Laszlo.’

  Home. My family. This was the best offer he was likely to get and surely, once there, he could do something to rescue Stenwold . . .

  That seemed unlikely, he had to admit. By the time any reliable contact was established between the Tidenfree crew and Wys’s people, Stenwold would have gone on to whatever fate the sea held in wait for him.

  Inwardly, Laszlo swore.