The Sea Watch

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Claeon jerked his head towards the Spider, and his guards, a pair of sinuous Kerebroi with curved knives, went over and hauled the prisoner to his feet, twisting his arms painfully back. Teornis remained calm, trusting to his assessment of his captor. He had met with Claeon enough times to read the sea-change of the man’s moods. This was not the end, just the Edmir throwing some childish tantrum. He told himself that, if his death was due, here, he would see it in Claeon’s eyes.

  ‘You can find the brat Aradocles, is that what you’re telling me?’ the Edmir spat at him, hands clenching over and over. In fact it had been days ago that they had last spoken the missing heir’s name, but Teornis had left the dart there, in Claeon’s mind, securing it with a little Art to make sure it would fester, and now at last the suppurating fruit had come to light.

  ‘If he still lives, if the dry land has not finished him, I pride myself that I will find him for you,’ Teornis said. He had devised a particular way, by now, of speaking to Claeon: it mingled respect and self-confidence, none of the insolence that would start the man off, but none of the habitual cringing of the sea-kinden staff around him. So far, it had seemed to work.

  ‘You’ll succeed, where Pellectes’s people have failed – have failed over moons and moons of searching.’ Claeon pushed the Spider in the chest, hard enough to wrench his pinioned shoulders.

  ‘But you must have guessed what I have guessed, where Pellectes is concerned,’ Teornis said smoothly, hoping that nobody present was a Littoralist.

  Claeon’s eyes narrowed, and for a moment his arm twitched with the desire to hit somebody, with the Spider as the most obvious target, but a little rare self-control stayed his hand. ‘So tell me what you guess, land-kinden.’

  ‘Pellectes is mad, to start with,’ said Teornis, thinking privately that he had yet to meet any sane sea-kinden. ‘But mad in a strange way. Let us be frank, Edmir, you do not believe this business about ancient persecutions from the land or, if you believe, you do not much care. Why should you? The land is a harsh mistress. Why make war and shed blood just to scratch out a living there? But to Pellectes this is the All – the great All transcending logic or reason. All his power and influence, his hold over his followers, comes from this great plan for revenge, and he believes in it, he really does. I’d have thought he was just using the lie for his own purposes but, having met him, he’s quite mad and believes every word he says.’

  ‘And yet he has had agents on the land, and your people never suspected.’

  ‘No more we did, but I didn’t say he was incapable, just mad as a clam.’ A brief moment of wondering over whether clam-kinden actually existed passed him by. ‘He doesn’t follow you merely because you’re the rightful Edmir of Hermatyre,’ the foreign words came quite naturally to him now, ‘but because you can give him what his madness wants: the land. You, for your part, couldn’t care less about the Littoralist dream, but the land’s a good playground for your allies, and your woman, whatever her name was, she sent the boy there. To die, perhaps, but, without a corpse, who knows?’ Claeon was getting impatient again, so Teornis hurried his speech. ‘Why would Pellectes tell his agents to hunt the boy down? Or to tell you about it, if by chance they found him? He worries that, with Aradocles put in the ground – fed to the fish, whatever – you’ll not need him any longer, you’ll not further his goals. I’ll wager his agents have not so much as looked. They’re all preparing for their glorious invasion.’

  There was a moment of utmost balance, as Claeon’s bleak temper teetered between a surge that would earth itself only through Teornis and a rage aimed securely at the Littoralists. Spider eyes watched the thoughts fall into place, the balance tilt, the anger slide inexorably away from him in other directions. With a brutal jab of his chin, Claeon signalled for Teornis’s release.

  ‘How can I trust you?’ he growled.

  ‘One service Pellectes’s people have done you, at least, is they have confirmed my credentials. Those people up there are my enemies, too. Moreover, you’ll surely be sending me under an escort. I’d expect nothing less. I will prove myself to you, Edmir, by divining the fate of your missing nephew. If you want, I will then ensure that he stays missing until the end of time. After that, let us talk about Rosander’s campaign there for, with my help, he’ll grab enough of the land to keep even Pellectes satisfied. Everyone wins except our enemies, and is that not the best way, always?’

  He expected Claeon to go off and think it all over again, as he had so many times before, but unwished-for developments had obviously arisen, and Teornis guessed that Stenwold was still free, still flouting Hermatyre’s reach.

  ‘What will you need?’ Claeon growled.

  ‘The name of Pellectes’s agent, and how to make contact, together with whatever escort you choose to send with me. Your Kerebroi – your Krakind here – can pass for my people, and whilst that won’t make them locally popular, they’ll at least be taken as land-kinden. I can advise on suitable cloaks and clothes and the like. No Onychoi, though. Just between you and me, to a landsman’s eye they look freakish.’

  Claeon actually chuckled at that. ‘Oh, to me also, much of the time. No, we’ll keep them out of it. Even my own Onychoi would rather be with Rosander, I sometimes feel. I can’t trust them. I can’t trust any of them.’

  Looking into the man’s small eyes, seeing them stare out of Claeon’s heavy face like desperate prisoners, Teornis knew how those Onychoi felt. On land they always said, ‘Never trust a Spider’, and yet people always did, because his kinden were so good at gaining trust. Still, amongst the Spiders themselves, the value of trust was well known. A Spider-kinden Aristos chose servants and slaves well, and treated them in a way that invited loyalty, respect, even love. Claeon’s tyranny would have seemed risible if he hadn’t held Teornis’s life in his grasping, whip-loving hands.

  ‘I can wait no longer,’ the Edmir whispered, and Teornis wondered if he even realized he was speaking aloud. ‘The boy, the cursed boy, he haunts my dreams. Even the chance, the chance that he might live . . . and return . . .’ Those eyes, that had retreated a little into themselves, suddenly blazed out again with renewed fervour. ‘And if it becomes known that he died on the land, where that traitress Paladrya sent him, that he was torn apart and eaten by the land-kinden – well, then perhaps Rosander shall have plenty of volunteers for his stupid war. We’ll have the whole sea under arms before we’re done!’ He was smiling joyously now, and Teornis joined him with a strained rictus of a grin, because his complicity was obviously expected.

  And then came the fateful words. ‘You shall go with the tide, over the Edge and on to the land,’ Claeon promised him. ‘You shall go tonight.’

  Teornis had not been clear on how his re-entry into polite society was likely to be accomplished, conjuring images of riding into Collegium harbour on the back of a giant squid or some such, like an allegorical figure from one of the Spiderlands’ more outré operas. The messenger sent to fetch him, however, was not from the ranks of Claeon’s regulars, but one of the stunted little Onychoi people. He had taken little note of them, seeing that Claeon’s people found them a nuisance underfoot and deemed them a class of menials mostly to be kept outside the palace. His ear for voices was good, though, and when she addressed him he recalled her.

  ‘Chief Landsman,’ she said, ‘your barque awaits.’

  She was the pilot of the machine that brought us here, he remembered. She’s one of Rosander’s people. Am I being kidnapped again?

  At his doubtless dubious expression she sneered. ‘We’re doing a little shallow-water testing, Chief Landsman. Claeon’s got a mob waiting to go up with us, and you, too, they say.’

  ‘And Claeon’s not here to tell me that himself ?’ Teornis enquired cautiously.

  Her mouth twisted sardonically. ‘You want to go poke him, see what he says? Or you want out of here?’

  She was hard to read, barriers of class, kinden and culture all intervening, and it was a difficult decision for
him to say, ‘Well lead on then, Chenni.’ She looked surprised that he had picked up her name, but just beckoned him to follow.

  There was no hulking escort of Onychoi warriors waiting outside, though they had not been shy of forcing their way into Claeon’s halls before. For Teornis, the lack of options was the frustrating thing. If things took a turn for the worse, he had so little to fall back on. He could not even run for it, for where could he go? The killing sea bounded everything here, so he was made a prisoner by the mere fact of his land-bound ancestry.

  ‘You’re quite the favourite of the Nauarch Rosander, I understand,’ he said to her, for there might be some small advantage in starting up a rapport. He employed his Art then, casting it over her, tweaking her perceptions of him to make her friendlier, him more trustable. It was something as natural to him as breathing by now, and he hardly knew he was doing it.

  ‘I give him what he wants,’ she shot back over her high shoulder, and then, perhaps sensing how this could be misconstrued, ‘I make things, build things. I’m chief of his mechanics.’

  The word meant nothing to Teornis, of course, save that it smacked of artificing. Another barrier between them, but this time one of aptitude. I wonder if Claeon has any idea what is brewing amongst these ugly people? No doubt the Moth-kinden remained similarly clueless. Of all the old overlords, only Teornis’s kinden had retained their mastery over the Apt unscathed, and only because they had such a keen understanding of a basic human nature that remained unchanged by machines or magic.

  ‘We’ll be swimming back to shore in one of your devices, then?’

  ‘Part-swim and part-crawl. I need to test something,’ she replied with more enthusiasm. ‘My people have spent what seems like a whole moon in recalibrating the gear weightings to work out of water, but we’ve sorted it now, looks like. Everything meshes neatly and nothing’s going to snap.’

  ‘That sounds good,’ said Teornis, letting such talk wash over him. The essence of artifice, as far as he was concerned, was to have someone else understand it.

  Sooner than he had thought, they were out of the palace, and true enough there was a mob of Kerebroi waiting there, eight of them: six men and two women. They were loaded with gold, their skin tattooed, hair in loose curls, and the men with elegantly curled beards. And if there’s a sight more likely to stand out in Collegium, it could only be an entire Imperial army, Teornis decided, but he knew he would be equal to this task. And, besides, he wouldn’t need to place much trust in them. He was more worried about their resemblance to him having them seen as a bizarre Spider-kinden fancy-dress attack force. When I’m back on land, when I’m beneath the blessed sky, in the free air, let me start to worry about that.

  There were more Onychoi to be seen ahead. Chenni’s party was approaching some kind of dock, such as the one they had arrived by. Teornis expected to see the same slender underwater boat bobbing in the water, but instead there was something that he at first took to be a crab, and then interpreted as some kind of armoured automotive. Its body was comprised of an enormous rounded shield, the tips of many legs just visible beneath its rim. Behind the shield was some manner of machinery that then trailed off into the balancing spine of a long, stiff tail. Teornis was no assessor of vehicles, but it was all built to the heavy, bulky scale of the Onychoi themselves, and the shield looked thick enough to ward off artillery.

  ‘Your barque, Chief Landsman,’ Chenni announced proudly. ‘We’ll have it towed upwards and over the Edge, and after that it’ll walk up to shore, sweet as you like.’

  ‘You can’t just take that into Collegium harbour,’ Teornis told her.

  ‘Oh, no worries there. There’s a little cove we know, and we’re meeting Claeon’s spy there, the Littoralist.’ She said the last word with marked disdain. ‘Now, you get stowed in. Not much room in there for you and the crew, but you’ll bear a little discomfort, I’m sure, to get where you’re going.’

  ‘Oh, that I will,’ Teornis assured her.

  That the sea-kinden had achieved a genuine state of Aptitude was amply proved by the nausea and discomfort that the latter part of the journey caused him. The first leg of it, and by far the swiftest, was smooth but tedious, as the automotive was carried up from the depths by what Teornis assumed was one of the Kerebroi’s beasts, or some other swimming thing of great strength, that he never saw. When he commented that this looked like a flaw in their machine’s design, the little Onychoi, who were all elbows and knees alongside him in the cramped cabin, explained that the vessel would be quite able to crawl the vertical height of the sea-cliff if needed, but that would add days to their journey. After that they started telling him all manner of complex details of their conveyance, and Teornis nodded along, as though any of it made sense to him. And yet they have the belief that land-kinden are Apt, evidently, he decided, after over an hour of this. He insinuated his question into the conversation, singling out Chenni and casting a little more of his Art over her, to draw out the details.

  ‘Oh, we go to the Stations often enough,’ she said. ‘Been hearing odd snips about land-kinden since long before you turned up.’

  Intriguing, but hardly useful, Teornis considered. Nonetheless he filed it away for later consideration.

  The journey back to land was slower than his original entry into the sea world. The knife-like underwater boat that had nipped them away from the fight on the barge had been a fleet little thing. Whatever submerged convoy they were now travelling in took a good two days at their best speed to clear the Shelf – or the Edge as the sea-kinden called it – and then it was a long, stomach-knotting crawl across the seabed towards where breakers marked the boundaries of the two worlds. Teornis ate with the crew, listened to their chatter, watched their constant mothering of the mechanisms of their automotive as it dragged and lurched over the uneven seafloor. The mood was high, the engineering apparently performing.

  ‘You look pasty, landsman. No hurling up in here,’ Chenni warned him.

  ‘It’s nothing.’ He did not want to admit to his Inaptitude.

  ‘It’s the equalization, is what it is,’ she told him, surprising him. At his querying look she went on, ‘When you got brought down here, Claeon’s men used their Art on you. It’s as old as breathing, that one – when you go from the shallows to the depths, see, you need equalizing, or you die. Nasty death, too. Now we’re headed up again, it’ll reverse itself, but you’ll feel rough if it’s your first time, and maybe travelling this way’ll make it worse. Felt a little queasy myself, the first time we took one of these up top.’

  ‘You have many of these devices?’ Teornis asked Chenni. Before her words he had assumed this was some singular prodigy.

  ‘Oh, a good dozen already, and more on the way. Our long stop in Hermatyre has been good for the manufactory. Otherwise, doing things on the move is always difficult. Of course, when we come for real, we’ll have the beasts with us to break up whatever your land lot have built, and carry it away.’

  Teornis reminded her that it was not ‘his’ land lot after all, but she shrugged expressively.

  ‘Makes little difference to me, honestly,’ she told him. ‘I just know Rosander wants action. Too long in a colony’s making him and his lads go half-crazy. But now we’ve got this war that Claeon and the Lits have hatched for us. Something different, at least. Raiding the land-kinden’s probably more fun than raiding another train. Easier too, I reckon.’

  And yet you haven’t asked why Claeon’s so happy to leave it to you, Teornis thought. He pictured an octopus, exploring warily with its tentacles, then a crab just blundering in sideways, pincers raised in belligerent threat. We become them, after long enough. We become our ideal form. My good luck that Spiders are both patient and cunning. I’ll have them all in our web yet, beetles and sea monsters, too.

  It was from the heavier going that Teornis guessed they were close to land, the tilt that showed him the seafloor was now a steepening slope. Then he heard the surface waves battering at the met
al of the thing’s nose, while the gears began making very different sounds. The half-dozen Onychoi became tense, waiting for something to give, but their forward progress, though slower, never stopped as the monstrous machine dragged itself doggedly on to the beach. Chenni let out a whoop of triumph, and for a moment the little half-naked people were hugging each other in an orgy of congratulation.

  ‘We’re ashore?’ Teornis pressed, when he could finally get anyone’s attention.

  ‘Oh we are that, Chief Landsman,’ Chenni told him. ‘So time for you to make your exit.’

  They had to open the hatch for him, of course, and then it was an undignified crawl underneath the rear rim of the machine’s great curved hood, on hands and knees through the wet, weed-slick sand, before he could get clear. He did not care. Beneath a cloud-ragged midnight sky, he stood and stretched, with only the solid ground beneath him, only the air above. To not be trapped in a bubble at the bottom of the sea: whoever could have thought that this would ever be the limit of my ambition?

  His confederates, Claeon’s men, crouched, waiting for him, in the surf as though clinging desperately to the last of their world. Whatever they had been promised, to break such a great taboo, they looked less sure of it now. Still, he would not want to be the one to return instead to Claeon, whose temper was less mythic than the deadly, inhospitable land ahead of them, but made up for that by being far more immediate.

  Teornis approached them with a smile. ‘Which of you leads, here?’ he asked. It took some time for one of the men to come forwards.

  ‘I am senior here,’ the Kerebroi announced, already shivering in the cold night air, clad in nothing but his loincloth and ornaments. ‘I am Geontes.’ He was a man who looked close to Teornis’s own age, but broader at the waist, as all his kind seemed to be after reaching a certain point in their lives. His beard dripped miserably.

  ‘Well, Geontes, we will have to make a landsman out of you – out of all of you,’ Teornis told him, with a kindly smile. ‘You can hardly walk into Collegium dressed like the richest beggar in the Lowlands. Assuming you didn’t freeze to death before you got there.’