The Sea Watch

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Chief wants to know why so quiet,’ Laszlo told her cheerily.

  She shot him a vile look that the goggles only helped send on its way. ‘Seized up since we left harbour, can you believe?’

  ‘I can believe chief wants it working right now, Despot.’ Laszlo’s sanguine calm was already getting on Stenwold’s nerves and, from her present reaction, he wondered how Despard had managed to share a ship with him so long.

  ‘Can I help?’ he asked.

  ‘You know engines?’ she snapped back.

  He bit down on the part where he reeled off his College accredits and just said, ‘Yes. What can I do?’

  ‘Give me tools when I ask for them, hold things down where I tell you, and punch Laszlo in the face if he so much as opens his mouth.’ She ducked back behind the engine.

  The ship lurched again, and stayed lurched, the room canting twenty degrees off vertical. Stenwold proceeded hand over hand, hanging from the remnants of the old steam engine, finding Despard’s tools as her tight voice rapped out a demand. He could hear the whole Tidenfree complaining as the wind dragged at it, timbers shifting one against the other. The floor beneath him was never still, jumping and sloping without pattern. Each time it moved, the two Fly-kinden were momentarily airborne, wings blurring by pure instinct, keeping them steady. Stenwold could only cling on and curse the limitations of his kinden.

  ‘Stand back!’ Despard shouted. Stenwold did his best, squeezing himself into a corner as she dragged down on a lever with all her weight, wings flurrying for extra purchase.

  With a roar the engine came alive, filling the room with the smell of burning. From above, Stenwold could hear Fernaea’s voice somehow, high and clear even over the tearing wind that was making every rope on the ship shriek and sing. Even Gude’s bellowing replies were lost, but the seer’s directions rode the wind like a nightmare. Stenwold imagined her clinging to the very point of the prow, the stormwinds catching and dragging at her grey robe, eyes facing the skies, and somehow, somehow, working some magic to find their way through the storm. And backed by good Collegium artifice, no less. These Flies have stolen the best of both worlds. No wonder they’ve survived on the seas for three generations.

  The Tidenfree shuddered again, the vibration of the engine merging with the shaking of the timbers as the ship began abruptly turning into the wind. There was a sound like a great vat boiling over, hissing and steaming, and a moment later Stenwold realized that it was the ferocity of the rain pounding the decks above him. The ship boomed hollowly as another fist of wind struck it, and water was running down the stairs and washing round the soles of his boots.

  ‘Are we sinking?’ he cried.

  ‘Just the rain, Ma’rMaker!’ Laszlo assured him. ‘If it gets too bad, we’ll pump.’

  Stenwold had gone to the entrance, hunching over with the vague intention of going up on deck. The two Flies shouted at him.

  ‘I can’t just stay here,’ he said. The sound from above was unimaginable, the wind shrieking through the lines, the waters crashing and thundering. He could not imagine what it might look like from abovedecks. If he discovered three sea monsters tearing the vessel apart between their pincers, he would not have been surprised. Still, it could not be worse than being trapped down here and not knowing. The very planks beneath his feet were grinding and shifting, never level, tilted now this way, now that. The sea: he could feel the sea trying to get him, with teeth and claws grating on the other side of the hull.

  ‘You’ll be over the side in an instant, if you go up there!’ Laszlo warned him. ‘Most of the crew will be below now. Only Fern and Gude and maybe a couple more to help Gude with the oar. Everyone else will be down in the hold or the cabins.’

  ‘What if we sink?’ Stenwold demanded.

  ‘Then we drown!’ Despard snapped. Stenwold felt his legs give way as the floor shifted again. Abruptly he was sitting down in the water that washed back and forth in sympathy with the waves outside. It shows how much we turn our back on the sea. He had never thought of drowning, not once, but now the idea seemed so terrifying to him that his innards were locking up with it. He had thought to die on a sword’s point, perhaps, or burned by the sting-fire of a Wasp, or falling from the sky with the tatters of an airship’s gasbag torn open above him, but not this: not dragged into the pitch cold dark of the sea.

  ‘Where will the wind take us?’ he demanded. ‘To what shore?’

  ‘The wind takes us nowhere while this engine’s running!’ Despard declared.

  ‘Other than that,’ Laszlo added, ‘to no shore any man knows. When the Lash is driving, it’ll drag you all the way out into the grand ocean. If you’re lucky, your corpse might wash up on the Atoll Coast, but other than that . . . nobody ever sees you or your sails again. Some say there’s a whole graveyard of broken ships out there, far past the horizon. Maybe some day we’ll go look.’

  Stenwold clung to the old engine fittings. It was not illness that afflicted him, not the sea-malady he had heard of. Beetles had iron stomachs, as a rule, and even the pitching of the waters was not undoing his constitution. No, his sickness was entirely bred of fear. We have no business being out here. I have no business being out here. Beetles were never meant to go to sea and Master Failwright could go hang himself, if he wasn’t already dead. Why did I think this was a good idea?

  ‘Tell me . . .’ He had to speak, had to wrench his mind away from thoughts of the grasping waters. ‘The Atoll Coast, you’ve been there?’ A casual conversation, save that he was shouting at the top of his voice to get the words heard over the storm.

  ‘Not us!’ Despard called back. ‘Himself did a lot of business there, I think, but the chief’s contacts are mainly down the Strand.’

  ‘She means the Spiderlands coast, Ma’rMaker,’ Laszlo put in. The floor was abruptly sloping a good thirty degrees the other way, and Stenwold clung on gamely to avoid sliding away into what was now the low corner of the room. The two Flies had merely taken to the air briefly again: every time the ship around them shifted and shook, their wings flickered to lift them from the deck and keep them stable. They did it without even thinking, a Fly-kinden’s version of sea-legs. Stenwold was bitterly envious.

  ‘You never went to Tsen, then?’ he asked. Tsen. Collegium politics. The business with the Vekken. Anything else but the sea. Not the drowning hungry sea, at all.

  ‘Never. Heard of it, though,’ Laszlo stated. ‘Why?’

  ‘I heard they have some . . . interesting boats there,’ Stenwold got out. The water was like a little river flowing into the room now. Despard flitted over to the engine and began making adjustments.

  ‘They’re mad there,’ she called over her shoulder.

  ‘Submersibles!’ Stenwold shouted, like a curse.

  ‘Come over here, Beetle, and make yourself useful!’ was her answer to that. He hauled himself towards her, half falling down, half climbing up. He saw that she had rigged up something with a handle.

  ‘You use those big arms of yours to get this going!’ she ordered him. ‘Pump, Beetle, pump!’

  ‘Where does the water go?’

  ‘Out! There’s a set of double-lock valves. Don’t worry, it all goes out and nothing gets in.’ As he started working the pump, surprisingly heavy work for something manufactured for Fly-kinden, she yelled, conversationally, ‘Submersibles, is it?’

  ‘I hear so!’

  ‘Well, I heard the same,’ she admitted. ‘Never believed it, though. You hear all sorts of odd about the Atoll Coast. Himself told Tomasso something, ’cos now he won’t go near it. Different world, they say. Ports that aren’t on any maps! Sea reaches that eat up ships! Sea-kinden, that sing you on to rocks and then pick your bones!’

  Stenwold let the solid routine of the pump engross him, yet he could see it having no effect on the water swirling about his boots. For all he knew, it was just a joke at his expense – or simply to keep his mind busy. He tried to think about the Tseni ambassadors, the Tseitan, the damage it
would do if the Vekken now walked away from Collegium. He found that, just then, he didn’t care. He could return home to find the black and gold waving over the Amphiophos, and all he would care about would be that he was back on dry land.

  Nine

  Helmess Broiler reclined awkwardly. He was not a slender man, and Beetle seating tended towards straight-backed wooden chairs, which made his shoulders and neck ache after too long. He was too ungainly to lounge on couches like a Spider-kinden, and he could hardly squat on the floor like a Fly. Instead he had invested in a big padded chair, called a College chair locally for its associations with an academic’s study. It was not overly dignified, for an Assembler, but it was at least comfortable. His consolation was that Elytrya would come and sit at his feet, in what he could think of as an adoring manner. He could put a hand down and stroke the coiled waves of her hair, which was pleasant enough.

  In such a way did he greet Forman Sands when the killer was ushered into his sitting room. Sands was dressed noncommittally but well, the picture of a modest but tasteful tradesman. It gave Helmess a certain pleasure to know that, had any unwanted company burst into his house just then and discovered his hired murderer in the antechamber, they would have found Sands perusing his books or admiring his art. It was so good to know that the man was civilized.

  ‘Have you news to please me, Sands?’ he asked.

  Sands shook his head, face set: the modest tradesman about to report that the goods were not yet in stock. ‘We put out, went halfway to Vek, Master Broiler. No sign of them.’

  Broiler played magnanimity well, if only because Elytrya had given him foreknowledge of Stenwold’s elusiveness. He waved a gracious hand. ‘Well, there will be other chances. You’ll get your claws into Maker sooner or later, either on land or on sea.’

  ‘As you wish, Master Broiler,’ Sands said, with a brief bow. ‘You have anything more for me?’

  ‘Just wait on . . . no, hold. I’d be grateful if you had someone go to the dockside and see if Maker’s ship is known, at all. I do have to wonder who he’s playing with these days.’

  ‘I’ll attend to it myself,’ Sands promised, still the pleasant man of business. He did not even cheapen their conversation by asking for money. He knew Helmess was good for it, and honest men of commerce did not need to sully themselves with such details unless it was absolutely necessary. He really is quite the find, Helmess thought, as Sands backed out of the room. Where else would I find a killer that I could introduce to my mother?

  ‘All as you said,’ he noted. ‘You’re sure your people went both ways along the coast? East and west?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Elytrya assured him. ‘And there were ships, but not one of that description. Otherwise your Master Maker would be having his bones picked by the crabs even now. He has some clever friends, I think.’

  ‘You think they set him down on land somewhere close? Maker was an intelligencer in the war, so he might be trying to follow Failwright’s trail covertly, while people think he’s gone. No doubt he’ll turn up in Collegium wearing a different hat and asking questions. I should have had Sands keep an eye out for him.’

  ‘Or . . .’ she leant back against his legs as he trailed a finger down the angle of her jaw.

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Or they went to sea, Helmess. Just out to sea.’

  He pondered the thought. Before embarking on this campaign with her he had researched his ground as a good Beetle academic should. He knew the routes that ships took between Collegium and any port worth naming. He had first assumed Stenwold was going to his friends in Vek, and had posted Sands to catch him there if Elytrya’s allies failed. Still, caution was a virtue, and her friends had been waiting for that little Fly boat on the other route too, in case Maker had been heading for Kes or the Fly warrens, or even the Spiderlands.

  Instead that ship had simply vanished, or gone nowhere. But nobody just goes out to sea.

  ‘Or they went out to sea,’ he allowed, reflecting that he had been living with a lot of impossibilities, recently. ‘But what in the world for? What does Maker expect to find out there?’

  When Stenwold came to his senses, the world seemed unnaturally calm. The boards beneath him clung together still. He heard the wash of water, the creak of timber and rope and the sounds, surprisingly few, of the Tidenfree’s crew going about their business. After the Lash it seemed like another world.

  The storm had been no brief squall, either, He had not realized, after they had the engine working again, and the ship was shouldering through the waves by main force, that they would have to keep at it hour after hour through the embattled seas. Night had come, and only the compass had kept their course through the darkness, the clouds that swallowed the moon, the wind and surging seas that dragged them this way and that. From his labouring post within the engine room, Stenwold had seen none of it, but he could see in his mind’s eye how tenuous was the path the Fly-kinden were treading. They relied on Fernaea to give them a course, using whatever doubtful tricks and sleights the Moth-kinden had taught her in their far mountain retreats. She called out, high over the storm, to Gude and her crew at the steering oar. Gude was Inapt, too, and Laszlo had claimed that the best seafarers all were, that they retained some instinctive connection with wave and weather that the Apt could not match. Still, for that very reason, Gude could not read the compass nor set a course by it. The ship’s second artificer had been clinging up there beside her, taking the readings from clock and compass rose, and relaying them in a manner that Gude and Fern could master. It was a lunatic’s dream, and the thought had loomed large in his mind throughout the night that it would only take one of these small mariners to misjudge, and the land would never again feel the tread of Master Stenwold Maker, nor even know his fate.

  Still, some other part of him could not help but feel a grudging admiration. Fly-kinden, they’ll cheat and exploit anything, even the basic laws of nature.

  He could not say for sure when the storm had finally abated, or when they had passed through it. He had been at the pump in the engine room, and the work that had seemed trivial at first had become crucial soon enough. Even with the hatches bolted down, enough water came in from above to swamp them. Despard was continually at the engine, hovering above it much of the time with utter concentration. Laszlo apparently knew just enough of the trade to act as the absolute last-ditch, stand-in, backup artificer, or at least enough to pass her the tools Despard cried out for as she made adjustments and small repairs, wings blurring here and there, while the engine laboured on.

  There was no rest. Stenwold pumped away the water until his arms burned, and then he pumped some more. He had done the work of two Fly-kinden at a time, and he had carried on doing it all night. I may not fly. I may be huge and heavy and slow. I can work, though. Beetle-kinden won no sprints at the Collegium games, but give them a track long enough and they would be lumbering on when even the fleetest of their competitors had fallen.

  Still, he was not young and his endurance had its limits. He could not say when he had reached these, for his memories had become fragmented by fatigue. He only knew that he was waking up now, feeling every part of him complain, feeling his arms scream at him for the abuse he had heaped on them. He was rousing from an exhausted sleep, who knew how long after, and the storm had passed.

  He lay on the floor of the engine room, half curled protectively about the engine. He winced at that. Had something slipped a gear then he would have known about it the hard way. There was a slight pressure against his kidneys which he identified as Despard, fast asleep while sitting up, and using him as a broad pillow. He was loath to wake her but, now that he had returned to consciousness himself, every part of him that was crushed against the hard boards was letting him know about it. He shifted as carefully as he could, hoping he would be able to let her down gently, still sleeping. At the first movement, she twitched and gave a small cry, instantly on her feet – no, not her feet, but airborne for a moment, then coming down a yard a
way from him.

  ‘Beetles,’ she said, still half asleep, but in unmistakable tones of disdain. She yawned and stretched, grimacing. ‘Don’t like Beetles, as a rule. Big, clumsy bastards. You’re all right. Can find a use for you.’

  Stenwold sat up slowly, regretting every inch of it. ‘That’s from the orphanage, then, that you don’t like us?’

  He heard the tiny whisper of a knife clearing its sheath. Despard was in the air again, hovering inches above the deck, staring down at him. ‘How do you know . . . ? What did I say?’

  He looked sadly at the tiny knife she held, wondering what untold miseries he had just unwittingly brought back to life. ‘A Fly with a Beetle name? There’re only so many ways that can come about. A student of mine, a half-breed, he’s gone through life with a Fly name for the same reason. Not that he ever disliked Flies, to my knowledge.’

  She touched down on the floor again, carefully putting the little blade away and seeming embarrassed by her reaction. ‘Only natural,’ she said. ‘After all, we’re much nicer, as everyone knows.’ Her bleak smile belied it. ‘Believe me, the wedding was the first good thing that happened to me in all my life.’

  Stenwold frowned, still intent on the slow and painful business of getting to his feet. ‘Wedding?’

  It took her a moment to catch his puzzlement. ‘Family, Maker. We’re all family here. That’s how the Bloodfly business works. That’s how you get a third-generation pirate like Tomasso. So, if someone can do something useful, like fix an engine, or like Fern’s charlatanry, then you get them hitched. Believe me, at the time it was a good deal.’

  Stenwold, upright now, tried to stretch, calling on all the Art of his ancestors just to straighten his arms. ‘Who’s the lucky fellow?’ A thought struck him. ‘It’s not Laszlo, is it?’

  Despard burst into a peal of incredulous laughter that utterly erased her earlier brooding, and then there came a voice from outside the room, ‘Please, Ma’rMaker, I have standards,’ and Laszlo himself slipped in. From his bright smile to his clean clothes there was no suggestion that he had actually been on the same vessel with them the previous night. He was almost painful to look at in his neatness. ‘You might want to come up on deck now, Ma’rMaker. We’re in sight of Kanateris.’