The Sea Watch

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘A very fair question, but the answer lies below the waves and not above it,’ the Spider replied.

  ‘We were snatched from our ship by your sea monster,’ Stenwold explained, unable to keep a shudder from his voice. Even to think of that moment, the creature’s arm coiled about his leg, the sudden lurch, the waters closing over his head . . .

  ‘But I see this is not some prison made especially for landsmen, then,’ Teornis intervened brightly. ‘You are a native yourself, I perceive. Are the sea-kinden so very law-abiding that you are their one criminal? What are your circumstances, that you must endure our company?’

  Stenwold could make her out more clearly now. She looked very pale against the surrounding gloom, the sallow lights catching her skin. Like all the sea-people she wore very little, just a kilt and a cloth pulled about her breasts. Her appearance was gaunt, and the way she held herself showed a woman hurt and vulnerable.

  ‘This is the Edmir’s own oubliette,’ she pronounced. ‘These spaces are reserved for those valuable enough to keep, and too dangerous to ever let loose. I am here because I am a traitor to the Edmir, and yet . . . and yet he has not steeled himself to kill me.’

  ‘This Edmir, he’s your lord, is he? The ruler of this place?’ Teornis pressed, and Stenwold had to strain to see her nod. The Spider continued, ‘And what is this place? What is it called? If it is no cave, then what is it?’

  ‘This is the colony of Hermatyre,’ she told them, obviously considering the words self-explanatory.

  ‘A town?’ Teornis asked and, when she did not respond, ‘There are many people in this colony of yours?’

  ‘Oh, thousands,’ she told them. ‘Hermatyre is the largest of all the colonies, and that’s not counting the Benthist trains.’

  ‘Well, who’d count them?’ said Teornis drily, still chipping away at his bafflement. ‘Excuse us for these questions, but we find ourselves strangers and prisoners in a very hostile place, and you are the first person who has had pleasant words for us.’

  ‘Why are you to blame for us being here?’ broke in Stenwold, perhaps impoliticly. ‘Or do you take that back now, now that we are none of your . . . Aradoces, or whatever the name is.’

  ‘I am to blame,’ she confirmed sadly. ‘It was I who turned the Edmir’s eyes towards the land. I have endangered not only you but all your kinden . . .’ She stopped fearfully, and at that point Stenwold heard movement above. Before his eyes, Paladrya faded, her pale skin greying until, lost in the dimness, she had blended with the stone around her. What good can it do her, he wondered, since she is still in her cell? He guessed this hiding Art was pure reflex, her last attempt at defence, slipping beneath the notice of her captors so as to escape one more beating, or worse.

  A knot of the sea-kinden had entered the room from above and were peering down at them through the gratings: four men and a woman, gold ornamentation glittering in the sick light against fish-white skin and lustrous dark hair. ‘Land-kinden,’ one of the men called.

  ‘We hear you,’ Teornis said.

  ‘You are the leader here?’ they asked him.

  ‘No one else is.’ Teornis risked a glance at Stenwold, while squaring his shoulders. The unspoken thought was there: I will meet this, whatever they intend. Stenwold wondered whether the thought of poor Arianna’s fate lay behind the man’s bravery, and he was seeking to make amends.

  The sea-kinden hauled up the stone grille, and Stenwold realized that nothing but the hatch’s own weight kept it in place: no locks or latches. He wondered if he might be able to shoulder it open, if he managed to climb up there. The grille looked like a four-inch thickness of stone, and must be a prodigious weight, but surely not impossible to shift.

  Teornis held his arms up towards the gap, and they could just reach down to take hold of his wrists and haul him out, his boots kicking at the sides to stop him being scraped against the stone. He stood in their midst like some lord, with nothing of the captive about him, and for a moment they hung back a little uncertainly. Then their spokesman smacked him across the side of the head, and another shoved him in the back, making him stagger, and they jeered at him as they manhandled him out of sight.

  Stenwold hoped the Spider’s considerable resourcefulness would help him survive whatever was to come. But, of course, he is Teornis of the Aldanrael, so he’ll come back on a litter carried by a dozen virgins. The sentiments rang hollow, though, and Teornis, his enemy of only the day before, had now become one of the most familiar points in Stenwold’s world.

  Laszlo let out a long sigh. ‘And then there were two, Ma’rMaker. I’m of a mind to go scout out this Hermitty place, before they drag me off as well.’

  Stenwold made a wry face. ‘Sounds like a grand plan, Laszlo. Perhaps I’ll go with you once I’ve picked up some Mole Cricket Art and can walk through walls or something.’

  ‘Fly-kinden Art beats all,’ Laszlo announced. ‘But we were talking to the lady. Hey, lady, you still there?’

  Stenwold was watching for it now, and saw how Paladrya now paled and shaded gradually from stone-colours to the pallid white that served these sea-kinden for skin tone. It was nothing like the Art Danaen had used to become so very still that Stenwold had overlooked her: this was simply a camouflaging, a blending of shades.

  ‘I am here,’ she told them.

  ‘What will happen to Teornis?’ Stenwold demanded of her.

  She looked downwards. ‘I cannot say, for I do not know what they want, of you. Possibly they will torture him, if the Edmir is so inclined, or if they think that he knows anything of Aradocles.’

  ‘We know nothing of him – assuming it’s even a him,’ Stenwold told her. ‘Why should we?’

  ‘Because, some years ago, I took him to the shore and sent him away on to your land, to escape the Edmir. I had hoped he would come back, perhaps with an army of land-kinden, but I have heard nothing. I hoped that you . . . that he had sent you here.’

  Stenwold shook his head wearily. Other people’s problems, he thought, as though I don’t have enough of my own.

  ‘Lady, if I walked out from here, what would I see?’ Laszlo interrupted.

  ‘We are beneath the Edmir’s palace,’ she told him. ‘There are many tunnels down here, and quarters for his most trusted servants and guards, and rooms for his pleasures.’ There was a catch in her voice on that last word. Torture, Stenwold at once surmised, remembering her mention of it, and then he looked at Paladrya again and guessed that she had undergone her share of that treatment as well.

  ‘And then?’ Laszlo pressed her eagerly.

  Looking at him, the ghost of a fond smile appeared on her face. ‘And then, small one, you would come to the main halls of the palace, and from there it would be but a step to the Cathedra Edmir. And from there to anywhere in Hermatyre that you might choose, if you but knew anywhere – or anyone.’

  Laszlo nodded, obviously seriously considering this further. ‘Well since our hosts have seen fit to give me a cloak, how much would I stand out, up there? I saw a few fellows around my size, when we looked out over the market or whatever you had there.’

  ‘You might be taken for a Kerebroi child, perhaps, or one of the Smallclaw-kinden,’ Paladrya guessed. ‘Although you have hair, and none of the Onychoi do.’

  Stenwold could only blink at these unfamiliar terms, but Laszlo shrugged casually.

  ‘I’ll try and keep my head covered,’ he said. ‘Now, let’s see about this grating.’

  Stenwold folded his arms, and watched as Laszlo’s wings flared in the dimness, and took him to the top of his own cell, until he was clinging to the grille.

  He heard Paladrya gasp in astonishment ‘That is your Art?’ she said in awe. ‘But that is amazing, impossible . . .’

  ‘Lady, that’s just flying,’ Laszlo replied offhandedly. ‘Still, I reckon your fellows up there wouldn’t expect me to end up at this end of the bottle.’ He had twisted himself now until he had his feet firmly anchored against the wall, his should
ers pressed to the grille. For a moment he paused, breathing heavily, then his wings flared and flickered, spread out flat against the grating, and he used all their upward force to push at it.

  It did not move. He might as well have been trying to pry the stone of the bars apart.

  Laszlo collapsed back to the cell’s floor with an expression of astonishment. ‘Well, I thought I’d at least shift it a bit. How much can it weigh?’ he muttered.

  ‘The hatches have water-locks,’ Paladrya explained. ‘Unless you possess the Art, and know where to pull, they will not open for you. I’m sorry.’

  ‘The Art?’ said Laszlo grimly.

  ‘The Kerebroi Art,’ she confirmed. ‘The gripping Art.’

  Stenwold recalled how the guards’ hands had latched on to him, raising weals on his skin and biting into his clothes. He heard Laszlo curse in frustration, his earlier confidence utterly misplaced, and Stenwold half expected him to take wing again and start battering about the top of his cell in a desperate bid to find a way out.

  The next moment they heard raised voices, and then a group of people approaching above, some of them with very heavy footfalls indeed. The guards reappeared, and not alone. All four men were trying to keep a trio of newcomers out, but they were severely out-sized. The figure in the lead was huge, easily as wide as two of the guardsmen together, and armoured in a suit of curving, overlapping plates. There was no scrape or clatter of metal about him, so Stenwold guessed that it was chitin mail, or whatever local substitute they used here. Nothing of the man was exposed, from his clumping, segmented boots all the way up to his massively broad pauldrons and the surprisingly small full-face helm that allowed only a slit to observe the world through. The guards kept shouting at him, trying to bar his way but obviously unwilling to start anything violent. The enormous man just shouldered forward, one plodding step after another, until he was standing at the foot of the ramp. He raised both hands up to shoulder height, and the guards backed off hurriedly, for his gauntlets each bore a forward-hooking claw that jutted a good six inches from the knuckles.

  Behind the huge man, almost in his shadow, came two others. One was Fly-size, bald-headed and hunchbacked, wearing only some kind of short smock. The other was as tall as anyone there, lean and muscled and as bald as his smaller companion, with some kind of Art-growth protruding about his fists.

  ‘You dare defy the Edmir?’ one of the guards was berating them. ‘Do you think he will sit still for this insurrection within his colony?’

  ‘The Nauarch just wants to talk to a land-kinden. Is that so bad?’ said the smallest figure, who appeared to be in charge. With a start Stenwold realized he recognized that voice: the pilot who had transported them to this place, in that cramped and blood-lit submersible. He craned his neck to get a better look. She had something at her belt, some unfamiliar-looking bundle, but when he saw it more clearly he felt that it must be something like an artificer’s toolstrip. Apt, he decided, but only her? The guards, in their kilts and barbaric splendour, seemed unlikely candidates for engineers, and the small woman’s two companions looked no better suited. When he had looked out over that crowded chamber earlier, there had been nothing to suggest any mechanical industry going on here and, under the sea, how could it? And yet that submersible . . . someone had made that. Maybe she is some freak, a solitary maverick.

  ‘The Nauarch can go peel himself,’ growled one of the other guards, perhaps unwisely. In an instant the lean, bald man had struck him, punching the offender in the jaw, and whipping his head round with the force of it. The victim collapsed back into his fellows and then slumped to the floor.

  The other guards had knives out then, the same broad, hooked blades Stenwold had seen before. Against the armoured giant and the horn-fisted man they seemed paltry.

  ‘If you slay us, we who are servants of the Edmir, you will never set foot in this colony again,’ one of the guards warned desperately.

  ‘And wouldn’t that be a shame,’ said the Fly-sized woman. ‘Now, your Edmir said something to me when we brought these land-kinden in. Some of our bannermen wanted to do the Nauarch’s will by taking a landsman away with them, there and then, and ol’ Claeon, he said that my Rosander wouldn’t tear up their alliance just because a few of our people got killed. Well, I reckon that’s true, but it cuts both ways. The Edmir finds you torn apart and hung about like bunting, he’s not going to go to war with Rosander over it. You Kerebs are hardly important enough, so keep out of our way and hush your mouths.’

  She then looked down for the first time, to see the two land-kinden. To Stenwold’s chagrin she addressed the Fly. ‘You’re the boss here?’

  ‘Oh, that would be grand,’ said Laszlo acidly, still smarting from his failed escape attempt.

  ‘I am War Master Stenwold Maker of Collegium.’ Stenwold spoke up to draw her attention to himself. He did not like where this might be going, and if someone else out there wanted to torture the land-kinden, then it would not be Laszlo’s back bared for the lash.

  ‘That sounds very high and mighty,’ the woman remarked, and her name came back to Stenwold: Chenni.

  ‘I would be glad to act as ambassador to your leader,’ he announced.

  She smirked at that. ‘Well, that’s just dandy.’ Her head snapped up again to focus on the guards. ‘Get this open,’ she commanded.

  They stared at her sullenly, the three of them still standing upright. They had given up on evicting the intruders from the oubliette, but that was a different thing to actively helping them.

  ‘None of you?’ Chenni prodded, and then sighed. ‘Well, I was just trying to make it easy for you.’ She stood back, gesturing to the tall, lean man. ‘Do the honours.’

  The bald pugilist flexed his arms and rolled his shoulders, crouching down before the hatch to Stenwold’s cell. His fists were huge, with a chitinous shell formed over their knuckles and a vicious, backwards-pointing spike alongside the edge of his palms. As Stenwold watched, the spikes flexed, snapping forward like daggers, and then slowly folding back again. As Art-grown weapons went, they were as formidable and complex as he had ever seen.

  While reflecting on that, he missed the motion. The man above him became a blur, and the grating smashed into fragments that rained down on Stenwold, rebounding painfully from his head. He ended up half-sitting against the cell wall, arms raised for protection, surrounded by hand-sized fragments of shattered stone. Numbly he noted that they were hollow: honeycombed with irregular chambers like magnified pumice. Probably not heavy at all, just held tight by this ‘water-lock’ thing until . . .

  He looked up wonderingly. The man was now extending a shell-knuckled hand down towards him. ‘Don’t make me come down and get you,’ he warned, and Stenwold did not need to be told twice. He reached tentatively up, feeling the strength in the other man’s grip, and then the mailed giant had taken hold of his comrade and, between them, Stenwold was dragged up through the ruins of the hatch. The edges of it were razor-jagged, ripping his clothes and grazing his skin, but his new captors obviously cared nothing for his comfort, dumping him at their diminutive leader’s feet.

  ‘Someone wants to meet you, landsman,’ Chenni told him, and then instructed her companions, ‘Pick him up and carry him. We’re moving out.’

  Nineteen

  As soon as they had him beyond the oubliette, they had bundled Teornis in hood and cloak again. He made no attempt at a struggle, sensing that his captors were all too eager to inflict some punishment on him. He tried to keep track of turns, of slopes up and down, but this place, this Hermatyre, seemed to have been laid out by madmen, and within moments he had lost all track of where he was, what direction they had taken. He sensed few other people nearby, though, so either the passage of the guards was being given a wide berth or they were using some secluded back way.

  They do not want any of us seen. No doubt the land-kinden would cause quite a stir. And that was another piece to work with: firstly a division between the factions of their c
aptors, then a separation between the captors and the general populace. This was all grist to Teornis’s mill, which was good because that mill had been perilously short of material to feed it for too long now.

  He had said a lot to Stenwold that his family would have frowned on. He now played out the recriminatory interview in his head: his mother or his eldest sister glowering down at him.

  You revealed the family’s plans to your enemies. That is outright betrayal, either one of them would accuse him.

  We were trapped in a cave beneath the sea, with no hope of ever leaving it, he heard his own voice replying.

  That is no excuse, would come the severe response – and it was true. To talk so carelessly, even when all was lost . . . But, then, Stenwold Maker, that plodding, workmanlike intelligencer, would never believe the real driving force behind Teornis’s need to speak. He would only have heard the usual light tone of voice, never guessing how brittle it was: the low, low ebb of the worst hour of Teornis of the Aldanrael.

  Despair. I’ve never before known despair. It is not a feeling Aristoi are supposed to harbour. He tried to feel blithe about it, but the hand of that alien emotion still lay heavy on his shoulder. It had touched him first there on the barge, when he had realized how grievously he had miscalculated. I got it wrong, after so long. Did I underestimate the Beetle? No, rather I overestimated him. I did not fear his treachery, and thus overlooked the fact that there are more ways than one to be betrayed. Lured out to a death-ship, outwitted by that dull blade of a Mantis. Oh, Teornis had a further score Dragonfly-kinden waiting on his ship, who had taken flight for the barge as soon as they saw the trouble, but that was not the point. He had been outmanoeuvred. He had slipped during the Dance. It was gauche and clumsy, and had torn a rent in a self-image that had been twenty years in the making.

  And then here, this grim place; these dour, cruel people. A captive, for reasons he could not understand, of a people whose existence he had been blissfully unaware of. A man dragged from the Dance he knew into another where the steps were strange, and performed for the highest stakes. He was so ignorant here.