The Sea Watch

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Now the other woman was coming down the ramp, also lashing out with her bare hands. She drove two of the guards before her and, although they had blades out, they were keeping well out of her reach, so much so that the bald man killed both of them from behind before they realized how far down they had backed away. They got a spine in the back of the neck each, as brutal and surgically precise a blow as anything Stenwold had ever seen.

  There were no more guards, after that. The final man had been going after the small woman with his curved dagger when he had trod over Laszlo’s cell and the Fly had snagged his foot through the grate, tripping him. The woman’s steel had done the rest. Now she was looking down at Laszlo as he hovered at the very top of his cell, desperate to be out of it.

  ‘Well, that settles that,’ the little bald woman said shakily, staring at the blur of the Fly’s wings. ‘They really are land-kinden, not just hoaxes.’

  ‘Time,’ grunted the bald, Mantis-looking man, and the small woman nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘Right, Phylles, open up the lids.’

  The other woman, who had created such an affray with the guards, came to crouch by Stenwold’s cell. He looked up at her curiously. On the one hand she was a kinden he had not seen before, not the Spider-like elegance of Paladrya or the guards, nor possessing Rosander’s squat bulk. Yet from another point of view, she was familiar. She wore more clothing than the other locals, to start with. Whilst practically every other sea-kinden went about in a state of indecent undress, by Collegium standards, this woman was wearing a long leathery coat over some kind of tunic and, although she was barefoot, she wore something approaching breeches too. She was heavily built, her hair spikily short, and her skin looked bruise-purple in the fickle light. In her face and build, though, she was not unlike Stenwold himself, not unlike all those Beetle-kinden he knew back under the sun. Although it meant nothing, although she would be no more a Beetle than Paladrya was a Spider, the sight gave him heart.

  ‘Stop staring,’ she growled at him, and put her hands to the grating. She closed her eyes for a moment, feeling it out, and then had it lifted off without effort. She reached a hand down to him, grinning, and seemed surprised when he took it. Only then did he remember the way that the guards had been trying to keep clear of her touch. Something squirmed within her grip, and he nearly let go, but some obscure sense of keeping face made him hold on. She hauled grimly, and he kicked and scrabbled at the stones to help her, and between them they soon had him lying gasping on his belly on the oubliette floor, legs still dangling down into his cell. By the time he had found his feet, Laszlo was free as well, and had taken up one of the dead guards’ knives.

  ‘Now, come on,’ the small woman urged them, her voice low and urgent.

  ‘And who says so?’ Laszlo demanded. He was keeping his distance from the newcomers but had dropped out of the air.

  ‘Some weighty people want you out of here,’ she said, squaring up to him, meeting him eye to eye.

  ‘So maybe we’ll make our own way.’

  ‘Laszlo,’ Stenwold struggled into a sitting position, ‘where would we go?’

  The Fly looked unhappy. ‘What about her?’ he asked, pointing downwards.

  ‘Time, Wys,’ the bald man repeated pointedly. He was already standing near the top of the ramp, half crouching in the shadow of the doorway.

  ‘Her who? Who else is down there?’ The small woman – Wys? – squinted at where Laszlo was pointing. Paladrya’s skin shimmered reluctantly before she let herself be seen.

  ‘You a land-kinden?’ Wys asked doubtfully.

  ‘I am not,’ answered Paladrya.

  ‘Then you’re not in my brief. Let’s go, landsmen—’

  ‘She stays, I stay,’ Laszlo said stubbornly. ‘She’s a prisoner too.’

  A pair of men arrived above, not expecting trouble, perhaps merely come to investigate where the guards had gone. Stenwold caught only a brief glimpse of them before the bald man struck. His hands lashed out, blurring with speed. Stenwold didn’t notice whether it was dagger-points or the spikes of the man’s Art, but he had taken the unsuspecting pair down in an instant. He looked pointedly down at the others.

  ‘Get her up, Phylles,’ Wys said, exasperated.

  Phylles gave the world a look of resentment and frustration, and hauled the grate off Paladrya’s cell, reaching down to pull her up with a lot less effort than she had Stenwold.

  ‘Spit me,’ Wys said, staring. ‘It’s the Traitress.’

  In the brief silence that followed Stenwold tried to catch Paladrya’s reaction to this accusation, but she would not meet his eyes.

  ‘Oh, we’ll bring her too, all right. There’ll be a nice bonus when we hand her over,’ Wys said enthusiastically. ‘Now, let’s move. Any funny business and we’ll be delivering a land-kinden with one arm or something.’ She was pattering up the ramp even as she spoke. Phylles meanwhile gestured for the land-kinden and Paladrya to follow.

  When Stenwold got close he whispered, ‘Traitress?’ but the woman would not answer him.

  They passed through the vacant guard room, strewn with oddments of jewellery and clothing that must have belonged to the dead men below. On a flattened-off lump of stone that protruded directly from the floor there was some kind of board, showing a series of concentric rings marked into segments, and black and red stones were arranged partway through an unfamiliar game.

  Stenwold tried to recall the route that Chenni’s party had taken earlier, and realized quickly enough that they were not following it. Instead they seemed to be heading downwards, and he had the feeling that they were going yet deeper into the Edmir’s palace – or whatever edifice they were in. When he tried to ask questions, he got such a vicious look from the bald man that the words died in his throat. Paladrya looked drawn and frightened.

  Brigands, he thought, mercenaries. But they were well-connected ones. They obviously had some kind of seal or document they had used to get into the cells, even if it had not quite convinced the sentries. And they were cursed quick in dealing with the guards, after that. He bore the deceased men no love, but the ferocity with which Phylles and the bald man had culled the oubliette’s warders was chilling.

  Then the passage they had been following came to a strange kind of end in a round wall with a star shape incised into it. Stenwold did not interpret it as a door until Wys pushed at it, and it split into tooth-shaped sections that folded away from them. There was a small room beyond, with an identical kind of hatch, making it seem a pointless little antechamber to Stenwold.

  When they were inside, Wys hauled on one of the curled-back fangs, and the door they had entered through flexed shut again, moving like a living thing. A strange premonition came to Stenwold and he pointed, ‘What’s through there?’

  ‘The sea, idiot,’ the small woman told him, and moved towards the second hatch. Stenwold had a moment of lurching horror, then he had almost hurled himself at Wys. The bald man snagged his belt halfway and hauled him back, but he still clipped the small woman’s shoulder, staggering her. She had her knife out instantly, and Stenwold saw the bald man’s spiked fist poised above his face. Laszlo’s blade was in his hand as well, and Phylles had a hand out towards him, eerily reminiscent of a Wasp about to sting.

  ‘We’ll drown!’ Stenwold choked. ‘The sea . . . We’ll drown. You’ll drown us.’

  For a moment Wys stared at him, open-mouthed, then her eyes flicked to her comrades. ‘Spit me,’ she said. ‘Piss-damn land-kinden. This job just gets more stupid.’

  ‘Cauls,’ the bald man suggested.

  Wys smirked at that, then nodded. ‘Stay here, watch them,’ she said, and then had the first toothy door open again, and was scuttling away.

  Twenty-One

  Their ship was a shell. His wonder at the sight of it, hanging in the pale glow of the colony like a spiral moon, was all that stopped Stenwold from going out of his mind.

  Wys had come back quickly, too quickly, which suggested that the m
issing prisoners, and the slaughter of the guards, had not gone unnoticed. Stenwold guessed that the Edmir’s pursuers were expecting them to attempt a flight into the colony proper, not to use this marine exit, but the thought surely would not evade them for long.

  ‘Get these over their heads,’ the small woman snapped impatiently. A moment later, the woman called Phylles was trying to drag a bag of clear membrane over Stenwold’s face. He tried to fight her off and she jammed an unkind knee into his stomach, then unrolled the filmy material so that his head was entirely within it. It smelled like rotting fish and the waxy membrane made a blur of the world beyond, and he tried to pry it off, convinced he could not breathe. Phylles hit him again, unsympathetically, and he gasped, finding out that the bag did not cling to his face, and that there was a little air sharing its interior with him.

  He had meanwhile lost track of what else was going on, so the wash of water caught him by surprise. He tried desperately to kick himself away from it, but Phylles held on to his collar, and he was buffeted fiercely as the room filled up within moments. Her bare feet seemed somehow glued to the floor, and she handled him as though he was a kite in a high wind, until the inflowing current had subsided. Then she began grimly dragging him away, and the walls receded behind them, until he realized that they were outside the colony and under the vast weight of the water.

  It was hard to breathe then, not from the caul – which had puffed out against the sea – but from the cold, clenching weight of ocean all around him. He had closed his eyes when the water came at him, and he only opened them again after he had re-established a rhythm to his breathing. To his astonishment the membrane about him, which had made his vision so smudged and grainy in the air, showed his surroundings crystal-clear.

  Behind them the colony glowed out a thousand colours. His heart skipped to see it, looking so alien and beautiful. Yes, for all that he had been its captive, he could not deny that it was beautiful. It was huge, too. The irregular, bulging walls rose up and up, in towers and domes and spires and intricate skeletons of white stone, draped with fronds and frills and gills of waving plantlife, and all illuminated by great bulbous lamps of ghostly greens and bloody reds, brooding purples and violently bright blues. For a moment he forgot about the fathoms of water around him, the monsters that swam in it, the horror of drowning, just gazing at that sight that filled his whole horizon. The colony was a city. The colony was immense.

  The colony was alive, he saw then. It was alive in that sea life swarmed across it. The lights picked out a million sparks of fish in ever-changing constellations, the clinging slick hands of octopuses, high-stepping crabs picking their way sideways up the colony walls, shrimp the size of a man’s arm darting here and there in a flurry of beating legs. The colony was alive beyond all this, though, for its outer walls were built of life: cells and cells of it, each with its rosette of tiny arms. When a fish skimmed the stone, he saw a flurry of motion as the colony-builders dragged their tendrils in, then spread them out again once the intruder had passed.

  Builders, Stenwold thought. Their builder-kinden, the . . . the Archetoi, Paladrya said. Surely not . . . ? But he thought of the smashed grating, and how it had been nothing but a honeycomb of hollows within. Cells built on cells built on cells, until . . . The magnificence, the overwhelming sight before him, showed how far that ‘until’ had gone.

  Then Phylles was yanking him along and, in her sure grip, he turned helplessly in the water and saw the ship.

  He understood, then, the peculiar internal geometry of the vessel that had kidnapped them here. The sea-kinden did not build what nature itself could build better. Wys was already swimming swiftly ahead of them, where her destination hung in the sea, pale and banded in the suffused glow of the colony Hermatyre. It was a coiled spiral, and Stenwold had seen such adorning pendants in the Collegium marketplace, brought in by beachcombers and of a size to fit neatly within a man’s hand. Perhaps something like this washed up occasionally, whole or in pieces. A lucky beachcomber could have lived inside it.

  Phylles reached her arms about his chest, linked her hands together, and then kicked off towards the shell, giving him a better view of it. The cavity that the shell’s original owner would have occupied served as a hatch now, with some manner of artful contrivances flanking it. Opposite that, at the rear, a circular stencil of sections had been cut out and covered over with something transparent, and a pale light could be seen glimmering from within. He tried to make out a propeller or limbs, or any other propulsion device, but there was nothing there he recognized.

  Wys had already disappeared through the shell’s entrance, towing Laszlo, and the bald man shepherded Paladrya after them. Stenwold felt Phylles give an extra kick to propel them inside, and he was let go within a narrow, circular-sided chamber. He found that he himself was having to breathe heavily by now, although she had done all the work. Collegium scholars had known for years that the goodness in the air, necessary to keep a flame or a man alive, could be used up, so he guessed that the caul was nearing the end of its effectiveness. He understood the purpose of this small room, though, even before the water drained swiftly from it, and he had the filmy hood off before Phylles could help him with it.

  ‘You,’ she said accusingly, ‘are pissing difficult to move.’

  Still feeling the bruises, he looked back at her stubbornly.

  Wys had opened another of those segmented doors, and beyond lay what must be the vessel’s main chamber, a long, upward-curving room lit by two of the phosphorescent lamps. There were nets hung on the walls, with a few bundles slung inside them, but otherwise it seemed a bare sort of place.

  ‘Lej?’ Wys called. ‘Lej? Hey, Spillage! ’

  Something loomed ahead of them, and Stenwold recoiled from it before realizing what it was: the head and shoulders of another man of Rosander’s kin, but poking vertiginously down from beyond the upward curve of the ceiling.

  ‘Chief ?’ the apparition said.

  ‘Get us moving,’ Wys told him shortly, and he instantly withdrew into the upper reaches of the vessel.

  ‘What will you do with us?’ Paladrya asked. She had her arms wrapped about herself in the very picture of dripping misery.

  Wys grinned unpleasantly. ‘With these two land-lads, I’ll be handing them over, and I’ve not the faintest clue why someone wants them, save that they’ll do better for being out of Claeon’s raspy little hands. For you, woman, I’d guess a traitor’s death, and why not?’

  Paladrya dropped to her knees and then fell over on to her side, and Stenwold thought that she had somehow willed her own death in preference to execution. She was still breathing, though, and her eyes were wide open. When he knelt beside her she only shook her head, saying, ‘I’m sorry.’

  Phylles put a hand on his shoulder, to haul him off, but Laszlo stepped in between them, wings flickering momentarily, and she backed off, obviously unsure about land-kinden Art.

  ‘Leave her alone. What’s she done to you?’ the Fly demanded.

  ‘She gave Hermatyre to Claeon,’ Phylles spat.

  ‘Oh, and you’re all such concerned citizens, are you?’ Laszlo, half her size, stood with hands on hips defiantly.

  Wys snorted in amusement. ‘He’s got you there.’

  Phylles glared at her, and then at Laszlo. ‘Well, she’s a murderess,’ she declared, although without much conviction. Stenwold guessed he had witnessed only a fraction of the blood on her hands.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Paladrya said, so quiet only Stenwold heard.

  Laszlo, meanwhile, was obviously spoiling for a fight. ‘And you’re a charitable institution now, are you? And all those guards you and him chucked around, they’re all sitting up again with headaches, are they?’

  ‘We rescued you!’ Phylles yelled at him indignantly.

  ‘No, you didn’t.’ Laszlo folded his arms, chin jutting pugnaciously. ‘You’re going to sell us to someone else, right? If this is a proper rescue, take us to Collegium docks, please.�
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  ‘She said she didn’t kill anyone,’ Stenwold said loudly, because what little patience Phylles possessed was obviously being eroded by the moment. The woman glared at him, and he saw something move in her hands, as though she held some twisting creature there. A moment later she had stomped off along the upward curve of the deck.

  ‘The Traitress can say what she likes, but she killed the real Edmir,’ Wys said, not unsympathetically. ‘I’m no Obligist. The little sprat was probably an obnoxious turd and deserved it, but a death’s a death.’

  ‘Aradocles,’ Stenwold pronounced slowly. Under his arm, Paladrya nodded weakly. Stenwold felt slow-witted, continually numbed and baffled by his surroundings, to not have perceived the link. ‘This Aradocles was the Edmir?’

  ‘Would have been, surely, after his father died,’ Wys replied, frowning.

  ‘His father?’ It took a moment for Stenwold to catch up. Hereditary titles. He understood that the Commonweal managed things in the same way, and of course there was the Imperial family of the Wasp-kinden, but really . . . government by bloodline? Neither the Wasps nor the decaying Dragonfly state encouraged him to place any faith in it.

  Abruptly the giant shell containing them shuddered and lurched, and Stenwold knew they were under way. He looked to the window ahead, cut into the shell’s rear face, and saw the seabed beneath them recede. We’re going backwards, he thought, and felt the same intermittent surges of motion that had confused him in Chenni’s smaller vessel.

  Wys wore a strange expression. ‘Spit me, but you really are land-people?’ She glanced from him to Laszlo.