The Sea Watch sota-6

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘I suppose, if we’d needed, we could have used the Gastroi to cut our way in,’ he suggested. The looks he received from the others revealed nothing but horror.

  ‘You cannot cut,’ Paladrya told him, as if even the mention of the word was sacrilege. ‘The Builders, the Arketoi, would be angered.’

  Stenwold remembered those pale little tattooed men, the mysterious kinden who had constructed Hermatyre and all the other colonies across the seabed. ‘I didn’t see any of them in the battle line,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think they really, well, noticed this kind of thing.’

  ‘Battles? Politics?’ Paladrya replied. ‘Oh, sometimes they do, and woe betide anyone who attracts their attention. Break any of the substance of Hermatyre, though, and you’d never be able to go near a colony ever again. The entire kinden, they’d know.’

  At last it was Stenwold’s turn, and he took up his caul and let Paladrya pull him over to the city’s stone outer skin and help guide him inside. He had come this far, and he wanted to see this finished.

  The army had divided into different cohorts, and now the Pelagists’ far-speech would not help them for, of Nemoctes’s people, only the man himself was entering the colony. Meanwhile each cohort, entering by a different gate, would start moving through the twisting paths of Hermatyre, seeking out resistance wherever it was to be found.

  Stenwold himself followed close behind Aradocles, with Paladrya to one side of him and Phylles to the other. He had never gained much of a sense of Hermatyre’s layout before, while being bundled through the streets by Claeon’s men or Rosander’s, but now he had a chance to appreciate the colony’s bizarre architecture, its curious beauty and its utterly alien design. A living city, surely, or one that had been grown and then died, as more city was grown on top of it, over and over. Within that stratified crust, the colony was expressed in diverse hollows: chambers as small as a cramped room or as great as a city square; the walls patterned, segmented, moulded into symmetrical designs of unknown import in the secret architectural language of the Builders. The tunnels interlinking the chambers led up and down seemingly at random: ribbed passageways of stone winding and twisting like worms through the city’s heart. Everywhere there was limn-light, those coloured globes of radiance that the sea-kinden crafted for lamps, casting dim-coloured veils across the pale stone, and across the grim faces of the invaders.

  They had expected Claeon’s people to fight them from room to room, but there was barely any resistance, just a few straggling defenders caught up by the attackers’ tide. The residents of Hermatyre watched Aradocles and his people pass, making no move to stop them, but nor did they cheer. Instead they waited, untrusting and unsure, to see the outcome. Stenwold was reminded that Aradocles had been absent for years, and their memory of him was of a mere youth, and not a king. Rightful heir he might be, but these people had been living under Claeon’s capricious and heavy-handed rule, and they had no guarantee that the Edmir’s nephew would prove any better.

  And then they came out upon a vista that Stenwold did recognize, at last. Here he had returned, by all the strange roads that fate had led him along, to the Cathedra Edmir, the heart of Hermatyre, the great plaza that gave onto the gates of the Edmir’s palace complex. This was the place that he had first been dragged to, feeling bewildered and battered, for his first introduction to the sea-kinden. This was where Paladrya had been imprisoned since Claeon’s suspicion fell upon her, until Wys’s people had broken them both out.

  And this was where the Edmir’s loyalists had chosen to make their stand, and there were many. All Claeon’s remaining supporters were assembled here, every villain and sycophant who had prospered so much under his reign that their lives would be forfeit if he fell. All the cruelty, the greed, the petty tyranny and casual brutality that had grown fat under Claeon’s rule had now gathered to defend him, knowing that they were dead men otherwise.

  Some remained within the palace, others were lined up outside it: Dart-kinden and Krakind Kerebroi, Onychoi large and small, a few that were kin to Phylles even. They stood in clumps, forming an uneven battle line: some with mauls or falxes, others with hooked knives, but most of them with spears. Some had weapons that Stenwold took for lances at first, but then he noticed that, instead of a head of metal or bone, they had something else twined around the shaft like a living thing.

  ‘Well,’ he murmured to Paladrya, ‘I think this is as far as words and peace take us,’ to which she nodded soberly.

  Forty-Five

  ‘What are they waiting for?’ Pellectes demanded. The Littoralist leader clutched a spear in both hands, peering out over the heads of the warriors lined up in front of the palace. ‘He has more men than we do, doesn’t he? Or does he?’ He craned left and right, trying to see clearer without exposing himself to the eyes of the enemy.

  ‘This is but part of the boy’s force,’ growled Claeon sourly. Since the bulk of Hermatyre’s defenders had betrayed him – since Arkeuthys had betrayed him! – he was running out of options. ‘The other packs of vagabonds are combing the streets even now.’

  ‘Then what are we waiting for?’ Pellectes demanded, almost jostling Claeon as the two of them stood at the back of their forces, in the gaping entryway of the palace itself. ‘Why not attack now? We have more warriors than he does, I think. Yes, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘And we’d be shorn of our walls, open to attack on all sides. No, all they have to do is wait.’ Claeon had come to the fight prepared, clad head to foot in armour of bone-coloured shell that had been minutely accreated to fit every line of his body. The bronze-beaked gold head of his maul rested on the ground before him.

  His fingers itched to stick hot knives into Aradocles, his wretched nephew. To have had so much, and then so great a fall, all because of one sickly boy. If only it had been his own agents who had first located the heir, out there on the hostile land. How could it all go so wrong?

  ‘Something’s happening,’ Pellectes said suddenly, and Claeon leant forward to see a figure stand forward from the throng of insurgents.

  ‘Is that him?’ the tall Littoralist asked, frowning.

  Claeon stared at the Krakind youth’s face for a long time before nodding. Yes, that was the visage, that was the look of his nephew, for all that exile on the land had toughened and leathered him.

  A sudden strike now? he considered. With Aradocles dead, numbers would barely matter. What would the invaders be fighting for? The true bloodline would rest only in Claeon.

  ‘Where is Claeon?’ the boy out in front demanded. He wore no armour, and carried merely a short-bladed sword of unfamiliar design. ‘Claeon, my uncle, come forth!’

  A lot of Claeon’s men were now looking back at him, but the Edmir made no move to present himself, scowling silently within his helm as Aradocles called him out.

  ‘Come to me, uncle! Let us not waste the lives of our people. Will you not fight me? Will you not decide this by single combat?’

  No armour, and just that brief sword, but the boy was young and strong, and Claeon was no great warrior. And, besides, one look at me and they’d rush at me, tear me to pieces. Why should I trust this boy’s honour? Or even his control of his own forces? Claeon leant forward until he could murmur to the nearest of his men.

  ‘I promise great riches to any man who can send a spear into that strutting youth,’ he spat. ‘Shed his blood for me, and I shall reward it.’

  Throwing spears was an uncommon art amongst the sea-kinden, as it was near-useless in the water, but there were a few who had made a practice of it to better surprise unwary opponents. Of these, one man at least was bold enough, or desperate enough, to listen to the Edmir’s promises. A lean, sinewy Dart-kinden, clad in a breastplate of overlapping scallop-shells, shouldered his way forward between his fellows.

  ‘Claeon!’ Aradocles called out again. ‘Do you fear me so much, uncle?’

  Claeon ground his teeth angrily.

  It was over in a moment. The spearman had reached the for
e, and now had the spear cocked back for casting in one smooth motion.

  There was a sharp snapping noise, and the Dart-kinden dropped, stone dead with a hole punched through his armour.

  Utter silence descended, the sea-kinden on both sides staring. Claeon saw, though. He saw, in the front rank of the insurgents, there was a broad, dark, balding man of foreign features, a man who had once been confined in Claeon’s clutches, inside his very oubliette. Now the man had one hand directed forward, with some small rod in its grip, too tiny to be any serious weapon save that he had simply pointed it at the spearman, and the spearman had died.

  ‘The land-kinden,’ Pellectes moaned, and Claeon saw at last how the man really did believe his own fictions. In the mind of Pellectes, the land-kinden were the great monsters, the eternal enemy, the things that would get you if you erred. A sheen of sweat had broken out on the man’s high forehead, and he kept pointing with a shaking hand. ‘The land-kinden!’ he gasped again, as though the arrival of just one was enough to stave in the walls of Hermatyre.

  ‘Kill him!’ Pellectes shrieked, pointing a quivering hand that encompassed both the landsman and Aradocles, and a dozen people around them. ‘Kill him now! Or we’re all doomed!’ He shoved at shoulders, kicked and pushed and yelled, and then some of the defenders were surging forward, and then more and more who were out of earshot of Pellectes but saw the advance and assumed an order had been given, and then the entire mass of defenders was moving forth to do battle away from the protection of the palace.

  ‘Claeon, we must destroy the land-kinden!’ Pellectes cried out, and turned to see the Edmir backing away. The head of the maul dragged along the palace floor, and the plates of Claeon’s beautifully crafted armour scraped and slid, but Claeon’s face was ashen, and he backed and backed, and then he turned and ran into the palace.

  Stenwold expected commands to be shouted, for the front rank of the insurgents to raise a fence of spear-points against the enemy, but it seemed to him that the entire force suddenly went to pieces, shouting challenges and war cries, half of them rushing forward, half of them standing still to receive the charge.

  ‘Get behind me, land-kinden!’ Aradocles snapped at him, readying his sword. For a horrible moment Stenwold thought the youth, carrying all that priceless royal blood, was about to rush headlong into the fray, but, even if he had intended to, his own followers got in his way, meeting the onrushing loyalists and clashing fiercely with them. Stenwold had seen the sea-kinden of the Hot Stations in their bloody hacking at the Echinoi, and he had seen their swift cavalry actions in the open sea, but here he saw the Kerebroi fighting their with own kind, and it was savage.

  They were swift and lithe, these sea-kinden, and they were not soldiers such as the Ants or the Wasps might field. Instead they reminded Stenwold only of the old Inapt of the land, of the Mantids and the Moths. They descended on one another as individuals, fought a hundred separate duels and shifting skirmishes. Here Dart-kinden spearmen leapt at one another, spinning and turning, clashing shafts against one each other, sweeping their weapons’ butts around and lancing with the bone needles of their heads. Greatclaw Onychoi, hulking in their grand suits of armour, laid about with mauls and their terrible curved swords, the falxes that could shatter mail or bones with a single ponderous stroke. Others carried deadlier weapons: staves about which were twisted stinging cells that lashed and stabbed at their foes across a man’s length of space, killing with agonizing venom the moment they struck. They were good only for a single death, though, and soon abandoned, their wielders reversing the same weapons to present spearheads to the enemy. Around them a great number of the sea-kinden had resorted to daggers. Krakind ripped and tore at one another with their hooked blades, and sometimes just with the tearing Art of their bare hands. Swiftclaw Onychoi, Mantis-lean creatures that were kin to Fel, hammered and punched with their spines or with narrow-bladed stilettos. Those few of Phylles’s kinden walked through the fighting like bleak death, the stingers of their hands shooting left and right, and held off only by the greater reach of spearmen. Phylles herself was gone, lost sight of in the fury of the fighting, but Stenwold had no doubt that she was doing more than her fair share of the killing.

  It was just what Aradocles had wanted to avoid. It was what might have happened on so much grander a scale outside the colony, if the great army of the defenders had not disbanded.

  The heir himself waited. He had his Helleron-made shortsword in his hand, watching the ebb and flow of the convoluted melee. Stenwold had by now lost track of who was on whose side, but all the locals seemed to know.

  A spearman leapt at the heir from the press, screaming a battle cry. Stenwold’s hand moved and the man was thrown back, the retort of the little snapbow lost amid the shouting. His hands reloaded mechanically. Aradocles glanced back at him, expressionless, and then nodded.

  ‘Land-kinden, follow me,’ he instructed. ‘We go to find Claeon.’

  Stenwold had been in more than a few fights in his life, from seedy knifings in the back streets of Helleron, through skirmishes with enemy agents in a dozen cities, all the way to the hammer of war brought by the Wasps against Myna or the Vekken against Collegium. Never a fight like this, though. For him the melee had become something surreal and dreamlike. He was surrounded by sea-kinden: he and Paladrya ringed by Aradocles’s most fervent followers. The prince, the young Edmir himself, simply forged ahead, leading with his blade, but never needing to bloody it. On either side, the spearmen of his vanguard pressed forth, desperate to keep pace with their leader. They could not protect him, though, constantly moving as he was, and yet he was not touched, nor did he strike a single blow.

  Stenwold, having long lost track of who was insurgent and who were those still clinging to Claeon, simply judged everyone by watching Aradocles. Those that raised a weapon against him, those that he levelled his sword at, they died, the snapbow punching them from their feet without their ever understanding what it was that killed them. Aradocles surged forward, dragging his warriors with him, and Stenwold shot and reloaded, shot and shot and reloaded, over and over. The range of his weapon was a little less than twenty feet at most, as he leant round Aradocles to take aim. His victims were busy concentrating on the young heir, barely understanding at first that the stubby twin-barrelled piece in Stenwold’s hand was a weapon at all. Here in Hermatyre they had nothing like it.

  He had brought a sufficiency of snapbow bolts.

  Ah, but this would be different in the Hot Stations, Stenwold admitted to himself, finding plenty of time for reflection in that almost casually bloody advance. A few of those spring-bows, those harpoon-launchers of Mandir’s, would lay us low in short order. We catch the sea-kinden here at the very turning point of Aptitude. But clearly the Man of the Hot Stations was jealous with his inventions, and none had made it as far as Hermatyre, and so the little device that Totho had crafted for his old mentor, that little trinket of murder, brought death like a plague upon Aradocles’s enemies.

  Had there been more Greatclaw Onychoi there with their heavy mail, then Stenwold might not have had such an easy time, but the Kerebroi relied on speed and close-in fighting, and none of them was faster than a snapbow bolt.

  At one point the defenders, almost in the entryway of the palace itself, had formed up a respectable row of spears, the Dart-kinden standing side by side with a discipline the rest of the field had not witnessed. Aradocles paused, glancing back at Stenwold, who merely nodded.

  The young Edmir pointed his blade like a wizard from the Bad Old Days, some Moth Skryre bringing down a curse on his enemies. He pointed his blade, and a man in the centre of the line pitched backwards. He pointed again, and the next man’s helm cracked, a small hole drilled neatly into the skull beneath, which became a gap the size of a fist in the back of the luckless man’s head. The fatal sword selected a third target. By now Stenwold found he could load his snapbow without even looking at his hands, but then it had always been the genius of Totho’s weapon t
hat any fool could become proficient with it after only a little practice.

  A Kerebroi man, a lean figure with a greenish beard, was now trying to hold the defending spearmen together. Aradocles singled him out emotionlessly. In the last moment before Stenwold followed suit, the enemy leader met the landsman’s gaze, his face twisting into a mask of fear and loathing. Then Stenwold’s shot took him in the temple, snapping his head back, his body vanishing behind the rank of his followers.

  The spear line broke apart, the lean and swift Dart-kinden falling into a chaos of struggling warriors trying to get out of the path of that deadly blade – and Aradocles advanced up the steps of the palace.

  A shock went through the enemy. Stenwold saw it in their movements, as though a school of fish suddenly changed direction, all at the same time. Looking across the battle from the elevation of the steps, he realized that another contingent of Aradocles’s followers had finally arrived from the left, Nemoctes, in his mail and shield, driving a wedge through the weakened defenders. The battle had come to a close then and there, with his flanking assault, and Claeon’s wretches were being killed if they tried to resist, disarmed if they surrendered. Many who surrendered were still killed, Stenwold noticed, a hundred grievances and revenges being written out in blood. There was nothing he could do about it, and this was hardly a vice found only beneath the waters.

  ‘Claeon!’ Aradocles called out again, and entered into the palace – making it his own even as he did so.

  Claeon descended hurriedly, wondering just how long Pellectes’s incompetent defence would hold the bastards back. Time enough for an escape, perhaps, if an escape was possible. Out into the open sea, head off into the depths. Someone will take me in. Some Benthist train, some minor colony out there. Then I’ll raise a warband and I’ll come back here. I’ll have that boy’s head on a spear, I swear it!