The Sea Watch sota-6

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  He had a visitor now, and in truth he had wanted one – had impatiently waited for one, for the first time in years. A lean, long-legged Dart-kinden woman had come to his home, leaving her squid mount to hover and seek prey well out of reach of the giant anemone atop Caractes’s crabshell house.

  The house had no walls, just that hollowed-out carapace propped up with stones, and their speech was conducted by signs: the second language that most sea-kinden learned from infancy, knowing how to perform their first hand gestures before even uttering their first words.

  Caractes. She assembled the name from its separate syllables. How do you fare?

  Lerean, he greeted her. Troubled.

  Old? with a little mockery in her hands.

  He glowered at her, his corona of hair lashing about his face. She was just a third of his age, which made her past her prime for a Dart-kinden, but they tended to age late, and all at once, and she was still swift and strong. You sit with me and wait, and we’ll see.

  What? She eyed him suspiciously. They had only met three times before, over five years, and he was a mad old hermit, after all. Caractes pulled himself back under the cover of the shell, where his hands located a wrapped package of pressed fish, and then mutely offered her a piece. She took it and chewed, reclining down beside him in a single elegant motion.

  This had better not be some late tide of romance, her hands warned him drily.

  He sourly raised one shaggy eyebrow. I have daughters twice your age, he told her. There is something new under the sea.

  She took a moment to consider that, still chewing at the fish. Outside, her mount jetted nervously back and forth, and she sent out an Art-thought to calm it.

  Your meaning?

  Meaning? I mean just what I say. Something new. His signing was unmistakable, emphatic. Tell me, you keep the old bargains?

  She stiffened when she saw the hand-signs. The old bargains: it was not a subject her people, the particular families of her people, spoke of, but it was little surprise that Caractes knew of them. The old man was aware of a great deal he had no business knowing. His gaze was fixed on her, now, eyes nested within creases, but sharp as spearpoints for all that.

  We try, was all she responded, at last.

  You fail, he jabbed back at her.

  She kicked off from her place beside him, abruptly angry. You know not what you speak of.

  A single slash of his hand cut her off. You fail, or they fail, he elaborated, exaggerating his gesture for the ‘they’. Either in their tribute, or your harvest.

  It is not as it once was. For generations now it has not been so. Contact has been less and less. It is their failure, not ours.

  Perhaps they do not see it so, was his return comment on that, and then he was standing, staring upwards as though he could see through the dead old shell above him.

  Each day it comes, his hands said, as he continued looking up. With a scrabble and a kick, he hauled himself out from under the dead crab’s shadow, leaving her no option but to follow.

  He pointed, and at first she saw just two lights – two limn-lamps she supposed – being dragged through the water above them. Then her vision compensated for distance and the dark, and she realized they were eyes.

  Her mount was beside her immediately, and she put a hand out to comfort it, still staring. There is something new under the sea, the old man had said, and here it was – like nothing she had seen. It came sculling through the water on jointed legs, but like no swimming crab or shrimp she had ever seen, lazily coasting along with steady strokes of its six paddle-ended limbs.

  From over the Edge? she signed, and Caractes nodded grimly. Then he added, to her surprise, You speak to any Pelagists recently?

  A few.

  Go find them again. Tell them to pass this on. I hear from them about land-kinden. I don’t know why they talk to me about land-kinden. I never wanted to know. I hear, though, and now I see.

  That is not land-kinden, her hands insisted. It is some Onychoi beast, some new kind, strayed from some other sea, perhaps.

  He made a derisive gesture. Look, only look, he insisted. See what is there, not what you want. Take your steed and go closer, if you dare.

  That last remark stung her, so she took to the saddle and sent her mount speeding backwards in a wide, rising circle, keeping her eyes on the gently rowing creature above. It was large, she saw, but not so very large as all that. She had a backswept holster of spears beside her, and she fingered one speculatively. A great sea-beast with glowing eyes, she thought. That would fetch a great deal at Hermatyre, dead or alive.

  She readied a spear and peered into the nearest burning eye, and saw the faces, and understood what Caractes had meant.

  A moment later she was lancing off through the sea, as fast as her beast would take her. Caractes was right. She could not go to Hermatyre with this news, not given the Edmir’s nature and history. She must go to those who had the knowledge and impartiality to deal with this. She must find a Pelagist and pass on the word.

  ‘Now, you must be wondering just what’s going on, land-kinden,’ Mandir addressed them, marching proudly in front of his mob of guards as though he was the tallest denizen of the Hot Stations.

  ‘Not really,’ Stenwold said tiredly. ‘It’s becoming depressingly familiar.’

  ‘Nobody understands the value of you people,’ Mandir threw over his shoulder.

  Stenwold tried to stop walking, after that one remark, but one of the Onychoi just shoved him onwards. The heat, which had been merely oppressive, was becoming unbearable. Stenwold’s ears were expecting the ring of hammer on anvil any moment, but of course they had nothing so wholesomely familiar down here. ‘What do you mean?’ he demanded. ‘Since when were you familiar with people like us?’

  Mandir chuckled indulgently. ‘You think you’re the first land-kinden we’ve had down here? Think again. It’s been a good two dozen we’ve seen, over the years.’

  ‘You’ve got two dozen land-kinden here?’ Stenwold asked, aghast.

  ‘Well, no, not at the moment. Most of your kind don’t take to life down here.’ Mandir gave them an awkward smile over his shoulder. ‘The food, sometimes, or maybe being cooped up. Some of them turned out to be of no use at all, so it’s a gamble, you see, whether you two can do what I need or not. Or some of them tried to escape, which never goes down well, but a few managed to live here a while before they… failed to thrive. I hope you’ll be more of those. I hope you’ll be happy here, for that matter. You do right by me, and you’ll get anything you ask for – except out.’

  Stenwold exchanged grim looks with Laszlo. ‘So I’m to be your slave, am I?’

  Mandir turned aside abruptly. Apparently they were nearly at their destination. ‘Now, I know that word,’ he said. ‘Another of your kind threw it at me. She wasn’t happy here, I’m sad to say, but if it makes the place feel more like home, then consider yourselves now my slaves.’ He was grinning broadly and Stenwold honestly could not say whether he expected them to thank him, or whether he was just being sly.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ the Beetle said flatly. ‘As far as I know, we’re the first of our kind to have been subjected to this place. Or have you been kidnapping people from our ships as well?’

  ‘You wound me,’ Mandir said, walking up to him cockily. He was half Stenwold’s size, and only the clustering armoured hulks all around saved him from a broken neck. ‘Rescued, landsman, rescued. You people build your little floating barques, but they don’t all stay afloat. I have my own people waiting up there beyond the Edge, my scavenging parties, and when the waves are high they keep an eye out. Sometimes they’re lucky and they find some of your people about to meet the sea the hard way. So we rescue them. For a while, anyway – if they’re useful. I do hope you’re going to be useful. We have it hard here at the Stations. Everybody works. A lot of your people died from not being able to work.’

  Stenwold shook his head. ‘And what possible work could you need us for?
’

  ‘I’ll let our resident expert explain,’ Mandir replied. ‘Now you’re here, you can be his slave. You’ll find he’s a tough one. A couple of years we’ve had him now. Of course, he’s one of the useful ones, best we’ve ever had. You listen to him and show yourself a little willing, and maybe life with us won’t be so bad.’ His expansive gesture narrowed unexpectedly into a simple pointing finger. ‘Through here now.’

  Stenwold and Laszlo were bustled into an irregular-shaped chamber, its walls and lumpy ceiling cobbled together from disparate pieces, just like the rest of the Hot Stations. What struck Stenwold first was the furniture. It was the sort you’d get if you had described a workbench and a table and some chairs to a blind man, and had him construct them out of organic detritus, but the concept behind them was clear enough. Paper, or the stuff that passed for sea-kinden paper, was heaped in thick stacks everywhere, some of it blank and some of it densely scribbled over with designs.

  There was a man present, staring at them. For a moment Stenwold just looked bleakly back, unable to quite understand what he was seeing. The stranger’s bluish-white skin was wrinkled and creased, his bare chest showed every rib, the stomach below it withered like a paunchy man gone thin. His hair was long and dirty-white, falling past his shoulders, and he sported a short and ragged beard that showed the scars of sporadic attempts to prune it. He was an Ant-kinden, a Tseni Ant-kinden – there was no mistaking it.

  ‘War Master Maker?’ the old Ant croaked. A bulky stylus had dropped from his hand on seeing the new arrivals.

  It was the voice that confirmed it. Before hearing him speak, Stenwould would never have placed him.

  ‘Master Tseitus?’ he breathed, still not quite believing it.

  ‘I knew,’ the Ant breathed. ‘I knew you’d come for me, after all this time. I knew you’d come to rescue me.’

  He said this despite the wall of mailed Onychoi that stood at Stenwold’s back, despite Mandir’s grin. His face was childlike in that moment, desperate to make his words become true against all odds. It should have been true, Stenwold thought. There should have been a Collegium army at his back. They should have Mandir in irons, his guards scattered across the waters. It should have been that way, and not this shabby slavery.

  ‘We thought you were dead,’ Stenwold told the man softly. ‘We all assumed, when you never returned…’

  ‘Learned a lot from this one even before we got him home,’ Mandir explained, perpetually jolly. ‘His barque, well… took us half a year to understand it, but we knew just from that that he was special. Not disappointed since, either. Our man here’s a genius. You should learn something from him.’

  ‘Tseitus,’ said Stenwold, ‘just what is it they make you do?’

  One bluish hand waved vaguely at the heaped papers. ‘Designs. Sketches. They want machines, submersibles, automotives. It’s new to them, you see, and they weren’t very good at it. They were still… oh, you know, they hadn’t refined their equations, regarding all the old principles of mechanics, but they’re a bright lot and they’re learning. So I draw for them, and some of them have even learned our writing.’

  ‘You help these people?’ Stenwold wanted to know. ‘Willingly?’

  ‘And so will you,’ Mandir told him, ‘and your little friend.’ He prodded Stenwold in the waist. ‘Everyone works. No work, no food. You’d be surprised how quickly you see just how reasonable I’m being. Your friend here, as I now see he is, would be dead without us, just like all you land-kinden who end up down here.’

  ‘Not me,’ Stenwold snapped at him. ‘Not Laszlo, either. We were dragged down here against our will.’

  To his surprise, this made a difference to Mandir. He saw the man at least weighing the information up, revealing the first spark of decency he had observed in the Stations’ master. Ultimately, though, Mandir’s decision was, ‘Then you’re unlucky, and I’m sorry, but you’re much too valuable to us. We need people like you and I can’t pass that up.’ He nodded, as though convincing himself. ‘I’ll leave you here to renew your acquaintance. Tseitus will show you what we need.’

  ‘This complete separation of land and sea is a fiction,’ Tseitus was explaining the next day. The subject had arisen after several pointed remarks about there being no intended rescue. Stenwold, in short temper, had declared that nobody had even known that there was a here down below that he could be rescued from, but Tseitus was not going to relinquish his grievance that easily. He was the first land-kinden, other than Laszlo, that Stenwold had seen for a tenday, but any joy in that encounter was being eroded by the same ascerbic, self-involved attitude Stenwold recalled from the war.

  The war where he did us such good service, he reminded himself, trying to pay more attention. It was difficult, though.

  ‘Your servant’s a mariner, so ask him about sea-kinden,’ Tseitus threw at him.

  Laszlo had been lounging at the entrance to their workroom, chatting to a couple of Onychoi around the same size as himself. He glanced back and shrugged. ‘Stories, Mar’Maker, nothing but. You hear some fellow talk, who spotted people in the waves during a storm, or heard some woman singing, out where there wasn’t anyone. Beautiful maids with hind ends of lobsters or cuttlefish or whatnot. Me, I never believed it.’

  ‘That’s because you’re Apt,’ Tseitus told him, having divined this from Laszlo’s interest in his sketches. ‘If you had Inapt crew with you, they’d be more credulous. Normally that’s a poor quality, and why I never really took to the Inapt, but in this case they’d be right.’ He jabbed Stenwold in the chest with a thin blue finger. ‘Your old masters, the Moths, I’ll wager they had links with the sea peoples. Just a shame they never told you about it. In Tsen we always knew better.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ Stenwold mumbled. He had pointedly refused to participate in Tseitus’s work yesterday, and had just as pointedly not been fed. Hunger had then given him strange dreams.

  ‘They say here that the land means death, but it’s a nonsense. Aside from Mandir’s mercy missions, I hear of certain cults and societies that hold links with the land, and therefore certain of your Lowlanders that keep faith with the sea. It wouldn’t surprise me.’

  ‘Well it surprised me,’ Stenwold declared, trying to put a note of finality into his voice, but Tseitus was not accepting it.

  ‘You’ve never been to the Atoll Coast, have you?’ the Ant asked.

  ‘To Tsen? No, my interests always lay eastwards,’ Stenwold admitted. There was a dream that kept recurring to him, tearing rents in his sleep and troubling his peace of mind, and he was not quite sure what to make of it. It had been intense, all the more so for a man who seldom recalled such nightly servings of his imagination. A passionate dream, it had been, but it had not involved Arianna, there in his mind. It had not even been like the shameful and lurid thoughts his mind had imposed on Atryssa, Tisamon’s beloved, when they had all still been young. Instead, the slender figure that had recently walked through his mind had been that of Lyess of the Medusoi, with her skin so pale as to be near-translucent, her white eyes so wide. It seemed perverse of his mind to conjure such a scene, after the days the pair of them had spent in sullen silence within the chambers of her companion, but in the dream he recalled that almost-embrace, at his lowest ebb, when he had been dragged half-drowned aboard her. In the dream, though, she had broken her awkward reserve and her touch had been cool and yielding, while her arms, her lips, the coils of her hair…

  Tseitus snorted. ‘The east,’ he said derisively, as though the whole business of the Wasp Empire would have looked after itself had Stenwold only put his priorities straight. ‘You Lowlanders live such soft lives,’ he accused. ‘Collegium is all luxury: a port city so surrounded by green farmland that your kinden even turn your nose up at fish. Ridiculous! The Atoll Coast is harsh and Tsen, Seym, Cerrih, all of them have to look to the sea. We know the sea-kinden.’

  Stenwold stared at him. Seeing his expression, Tseitus snorted with satisfied disd
ain. ‘You know, of course, where the name “the Atoll Coast” derives, Maker?’ Tseitus was clearly the sort of lecturer that College students loathed. ‘Why, because there are islands all along the sea’s edge, hundreds of them, and mostly windswept rocks. But yet – they are not rocks: they are coral. There are reefs and reefs, Maker, so that navigators and ships’ pilots find themselves in a sought-after and well-rewarded profession. Those reefs are not mere stone, you understand.’

  ‘Arketoi…’ Stenwold murmured.

  ‘The colony of Grande Atoll is some leagues outside of Seym Harbour,’ Tseitus told him. ‘They are not so shy, there. Not so very long ago, we learned that land- and sea-kinden meeting means only trouble: a war between worlds that washed earth and water both with blood. After that, over these last centuries, there has been some small contact. I will not say that land and sea go hand in hand, but we have diplomats, even a little carefully controlled trade. We have little they want, though. This’ – he waved his hand to indicate what Stenwold assumed was the Hot Stations in its entirety – ‘is different. This Aptitude, this lust for artifice, Grande Atoll would not understand. They are all Inapt there, I think, or else just ignorant.’ As he spoke, he continued sketching deftly with the strangely shaped reservoir pen the sea-kinden had made for him. ‘You don’t realize, Maker… you don’t realize at all.’

  Blank white eyes, and a touch like silk…

  Stenwold blinked at the old Ant. ‘What don’t I realize?’

  From the doorway there came a sudden bellow of laughter. Laszlo had enlisted one of the broad-shouldered guards into whatever conversation he was having there. Stenwold saw him gesturing some point and then Tseitus made a loud click of annoyance with his tongue. A moment later the little party, Laszlo included, had stepped outside, smirking.