The Sea Watch

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘That we are,’ Stenwold confirmed.

  ‘This must all be complete babble to you, then?’ she observed.

  Stenwold laughed at that, although Paladrya flinched as he did so. ‘Oh, you could say that. But this Aradocles of yours isn’t dead, not the way she tells it. That’s the story the Edmir’s put out, is it?’

  Wys’s smile grew cynical. ‘Sounds like some things are the same, land or sea, but I believe he’s dead, anyway. He disappeared: great big hunt on for, oh, two years or so – where was the missing heir? Then word came out there’d been some dirty business in the palace. One of the lad’s own staff, his tutor, had done for him. They had her killed, they said, and Claeon went from being regent to Edmir. Big ceremony, not that any of us got invited. But it was her.’ She jabbed a finger at Paladrya. ‘They led her through the streets with a chain about her neck. I was there for that. I remember her face.’

  ‘She swears she took him onto the land,’ Stenwold stated.

  ‘Hah, well, good as dying, that, isn’t it . . . ?’ He saw the new thoughts crowding into Wys’s mind even as she said it. ‘So Claeon’s swiping land-kinden, is he?’

  Stenwold mutely gestured at himself and Laszlo. The small woman looked thoughtful. ‘We’ve taken on more than we thought, here,’ she muttered. ‘For a start, I didn’t believe you were really landsmen. I’d thought that was just a Littoralist story. Spit me, what are we involved in here?’

  ‘Oh you think you’ve got problems?’ Laszlo remarked, and she chuckled at that, looking him up and down.

  ‘We should shave you, boy,’ she told him. ‘Could make a Smallclaw of you yet. Spit me, I’m minded to hand your big friend and the Traitress over and hold on to you. A man who can hang in mid-air like that would be worth his keep.’ The eye she turned on him was so cheerfully acquisitive that Laszlo could find no ready reply.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Stenwold asked. ‘Now we’ve got the threats of execution out of the way, can you tell us?’ In his arms, Paladrya struggled to sit up, still shaking slightly. Now he saw her in the stronger light of the ship’s interior, she was clearly a woman ill used, and ill used for some time. There were marks on her pale skin that even her Art could not hide, and she was gaunt and hollow-eyed.

  ‘Just a place, some farm my paymaster’s commandeered. Owners are sympathizers, probably. This is political. It’s more important for you to know who you’re going to get handed over to, than where the deal’s done. I’d guess they’re some of the old Edmir’s party – Claeon’s brother’s lot. After all, it’s only because of the Thousand Spine mob that they didn’t wind Claeon’s guts out on a spear, whether Aradocles was dead or not.’

  Thousand Spine . . . That’s . . . Stenwold fought for the correct words. That’s Rosander’s train, his warband or whatever. That means Claeon took over, and he used Rosander as muscle, yes. So now I’ve got Obligists who live in the city – the colony – and I have Benthists who don’t, only some Benthists, like Rosander, do because they’re invited, and the Obligists are split into rival camps anyway . . . He clenched his fists in frustration, because he was trying to understand the result of millennia of divergent history, and he had to get it right. His life would depend on it.

  ‘Wys,’ he addressed her, and she nodded. ‘Wys, your people are . . . where do you fit in?’

  ‘Freeloaders, landsman. And we don’t fit in. We don’t take to the open seas, and we don’t live in the colonies, we just take our opportunities. Me, Phylles, Fel and that useless bastard Lej up in the engines, we’re Wys’s Hunters.’

  ‘Mercenaries,’ Stenwold agreed, and when she looked blank he added, ‘For money? You understand money, here?’ He suddenly thought of the wealth of precious metal he had seen, but Wys was nodding.

  ‘Of course we have money – what do you think we are? Mercenaries . . .’ It was clear the word was new to her. ‘Oh, I like that.’

  ‘There can’t be many like you,’ Stenwold said. Particularly if you don’t even have a word for what you are.

  ‘Money’s only good at a colony,’ Wys agreed, ‘and there’s not so many things an Obligist needs to hire someone from outside for. We’re a select group.’

  And I’ll wager you’re bandits whenever the money dries up, Stenwold reflected. ‘Are we free to wander on your ship?’

  ‘Our barque?’ Wys’s gesture took in the limited coil of the living space. ‘Don’t get in Lej’s way, don’t annoy Phylles, and Fel will be watching you. Aside from that, you’ve a little while till we arrive. We’re fighting against current to get there. I’d advise sleep, but it’s your call.’ With that pronouncement, she did something quick and complicated with one of the nets on the wall, and turned it into a hammock. She bundled herself into it fully clothed, or at least without removing her brief tunic, and was apparently asleep in an instant.

  Stenwold and Laszlo exchanged glances. ‘We’re getting somewhere, slowly,’ the Beetle murmured.

  ‘In understanding these madwigs, maybe.’ Laszlo shrugged. ‘No closer to getting back to the light and air, though, Ma’rMaker.’

  Stenwold nodded. In truth he was trying not to think about that. It was hard to retain any composure when his mind was playing host to the yawning chasm that lay between him and home. I think if I saw some black-and-yellow down here, I’d embrace it. But, no, Teornis was right. Even the Empire can’t reach us down here.

  And if the sea-kinden reach upwards? He had no idea of their capabilities, though they had enough aptitude to make these submersibles, however the ships worked. They produced the light and, somehow, the air . . .

  ‘The air . . . ?’ He frowned. ‘Paladrya . . .’

  She was watching him fearfully, as though bracing herself for a blow. She had not, he guessed, found much to trust or like in people since her incarceration.

  And she had been Claeon’s lover, she said. And she’d betrayed him for this Aradocles, and then Claeon found out, and locked her up, and worse . . .

  And where in the bloody world has this Aradocles been, if she pitched him landwards years ago? The obvious answer loomed, but he fought it down. If this heir is dead, that’s no use to me. But if he can be found . . .

  It was the bait for his hook, in order to catch some chance of getting back home. Surely they would want their precious heir returned to them? But first he had to understand them, lest he put a foot wrong, and this abyssal world then swallow him for good.

  ‘Paladrya, tell me about the air,’ he said gently.

  ‘I don’t understand.’ It was clear in her expression.

  ‘You people can breathe underwater. Why haven’t I just drowned? Why keep those caul things?’

  A flicker of something like humour crossed her face, which must have been a rare visitor of late. ‘You mustn’t take offence,’ she said, ‘but the cauls are for children. It is the earliest Art any of us learn, but not before the age of six, perhaps, or seven . . . so we have the cauls. The Benthists developed them, they claim. They need them more, when they’re travelling.’

  Stenwold let the subject of the Benthists go by for the moment. ‘But the air,’ he pressed her. ‘Air goes stale, even my people know that. How are you . . . are you making air? You have machinery of some kind?’ It can’t be an Apt solution, unless they’ve been Apt for, what, thousands of years, long enough to be forgotten by the rest of us, all ties with the land severed.

  ‘We accreate it, of course,’ she said, voice tailing off by the end of the sentence when the word made no impact on him. ‘Accreation,’ she enunciated, as though to a fool or small child. ‘We extract it from the water.’

  ‘There’s no air in water,’ Laszlo jeered, ‘Or else you wouldn’t drown.’

  She gave the Fly a level stare. ‘There is indeed air to breathe in the water, if you possess the Art to free it. It’s the simplest form of accreation.’

  Stenwold and Laszlo exchanged looks. ‘What else can you . . . accreate?’ the Beetle enquired slowly.

  ‘There are m
any things in the water,’ she told him, ‘if you can but draw them out. The limn-lights, for example, are simple work.’ A twitch of her hand took in the pale globes illuminating the inside of the submersible. ‘But most of what we need, we make – we accreate. Shell, bronze, gold, membrane, stone, all of it can be formed by someone with the skill and Art for it. Some things the sea makes for us, like the shell that this barque is made from, but almost everything else is made by accreation.’

  ‘So you just, what, conjure all your raw materials out of the water?’ Stenwold asked incredulously.

  ‘Raw materials?’ she asked, frowning again.

  ‘Ask him this question,’ broke in a new voice. Phylles had come back, and Stenwold guessed that the curved nature of the ship meant that no conversation could be private. The purple-skinned woman crouched on her haunches, still trying to look angry but obviously intrigued. ‘How do you people ever craft things on land, land-kinden, if you don’t accreate from the sea?’

  ‘We . . . make things,’ Stenwold said unhelpfully. ‘Someone mines the raw materials – the metal ore say – from underground, and then it gets smelted into the metal, and maybe cast in a mould, or else a smith beats it into a shape and finishes it off, or perhaps a machinist cuts the metal into the right shape, if it’s precision work . . .’ He broke off, for she had drawn a knife out. Only later he would remember that she needed no knives to fight with. She laid the blade before him, and he saw it was four inches of razor-sharp bronze with a hilt fashioned of some pearly shell.

  ‘So you people would, what, get a lump of bronze, and just sort of force it into looking like a knifeblade?’ she asked him, sounding utterly disbelieving.

  ‘Well, heat it up and beat it flat, over and over . . .’ And I’ve seen not a single fire, not a naked flame, and what on earth would they burn here, unless they can ‘accreate’ coal or something. The cells weren’t warm, but they weren’t cold either, they don’t have much need of clothing other than for a minimal modesty . . . they can’t make fire. They make things without fire. ‘And you . . . don’t do that?’

  Her face was doing something strained, and he realized she was not-quite-laughing at him. ‘Beat it flat? Like with a rock or something? Over and over . . . ?’ She lost the battle and a delighted crow of derision erupted from her. Stripped of her customary ill humour she looked even more like a discoloured Beetle-kinden from some far-off city.

  ‘Very funny,’ Laszlo snapped angrily. ‘And you do better, do you?’

  She gave him a pitying look. ‘Man in the Hot Stations made this for me. They’re good with metal there. I told him what I wanted, and he set out a tank, and I came back three days later and he’d got the blade formed. I did the hilt myself. I make most of the fittings round here.’ She took up the knife, and Stenwold saw that the blade was plain, but the grip was lightly incised with intricate, geometrical patterns that were picked out with verdigris as neatly as though jade had been inlaid. Which she made by this accreation, he realized. Not cut, not carved, but simply laid in as part of her plan, as she sieved the materials from the seawater. He recalled all that fantastically intricate jewellery he had seen in Hermatyre. So they can just grasp gold from the sea, and shape it how they will without need of the whitesmith’s art. I wonder if they realize they could just buy themselves a chunk of the land, no need for invasion?

  And what are the limits of this Art of theirs? The question inevitably followed on from his previous thoughts. What could they not make?

  Phylles was still smirking at him, but there was a degree of uncertainty behind her expression, that had perhaps underlain her earlier hostility as well. She’s scared of us, Stenwold saw. We are land-kinden, and we are strange to her. ‘Do you believe that my ancestors drove yours off of the dry land?’ he asked her. ‘Do you dream of going back?’

  ‘I saw the land once,’ she told him flatly, raising her belligerence like a shield. ‘Up on the surface, while cack-handed Lej was getting this thing moving again. Dry and barren, it was, and I could feel my skin cracking just being up there, out of the water. You’re welcome to it, land-kinden. Just don’t you lot try coming down here.’

  She stormed off again, heading up the slope where their engineer had appeared from. Stenwold smiled slightly after her. She might be a sea-kinden of some unspecified type, but he had met a lot of other people like her, as easily offended and overly defensive. He decided he knew how to handle Phylles, whatever she was.

  ‘Right,’ he said vaguely, glancing up at the bald Mantis-cousin, Fel. Throughout the conversation the man had not offered a single contribution, just standing there with his arms hanging loose by his sides, as though he would be fighting at any moment. Very like a Mantis. ‘No chance of anything to eat, I suppose?’ he asked. ‘Anything that’s not fish, ideally, although I accept there’s small chance of that.’

  For a moment Fel just looked at him, with the spikes on his fists flexing slightly, but then he stepped sideways and started rummaging one-handed in one of the cargo nets.

  ‘Do you feel able to answer more questions?’ Stenwold asked Paladrya. ‘It sounds as though whoever hired these mercenaries isn’t going to kill you out of hand at any rate.’

  She was still pressed against him, held in the embrace of one arm. She had stopped shaking, but he had the sense of keeping stable some very precious, fragile thing. ‘Ask,’ she said quietly. ‘I cursed you to this, by my interference, so I will make amends any way I can.’

  ‘Well, then . . .’ For a second Stenwold floundered in the ocean of his own ignorance. ‘This Hermatyre that the Edmir rules . . . there are other colonies, there must be . . . ?’

  ‘There are,’ she agreed. ‘There is Deep Seep, down in the dark and the cold. There is Grande Atoll, I have heard, beyond even that . . . and the Pelagists tell of colonies further still.’

  ‘And Hermatyre’s relations with them? Might there be allies against Claeon? He doesn’t sound the diplomatic type,’ Stenwold mused. Paladrya was already giving him what had become her usual look, when he said something that puzzled her.

  ‘Relations?’ she asked. ‘Well, there is some trade. The Benthist trains call at those places, sometimes, and there are the Pelagists . . .’

  ‘But surely they care, if their neighbour is taken over by a tyrant?’ Stenwold pressed.

  ‘Why?’ she said simply.

  ‘Well . . . what if Claeon decided to take over this Deep Seep, as well, and sent an army over?’

  ‘This happens on land?’

  ‘It happened to my home city – colony – very recently.’

  She flinched at the thought. ‘It takes the Benthist trains many moons to travel between colonies, even if they follow direct paths, and usually their chief interests are in scavenging the depths. The Pelagists are swifter, but even they . . . they are so thinly scattered that to see five of them in one place is cause for surprise. How should such a thing be accomplished?’

  ‘A desert,’ interjected Laszlo soberly. He was obviously quicker to grasp the idea than Stenwold. ‘The sea floor is a desert. These Benthists are like nomad tribes – like the Scorpions in the Dryclaw, say. You exchange a few messages, a little trade, some raiding probably, but each colony’s got to shift for itself alone, I reckon. Which means that each colony’s also its own worst enemy, come to that. Which gives us this mess we’ve run into. Lady, tell us something we need to know, will you?’

  ‘Speak,’ Paladrya invited. Fel was back with them then, no doubt disappointed that they had not tried to take advantage of his being distracted. He handed them strips of something tough and stringy. Stenwold tried it cautiously, and found it infinitely welcome, just like dried beetle jerky and, best of all, only tasting very slightly of fish. I suppose a lobster is just an aquatic beetle, when it comes down to it.

  ‘Tell us about your kinden, your sea-kinden,’ Laszlo continued, and in the Fly’s face was the avid look of a traveller learning something that nobody else of his country has ever known. ‘These fami
lies of yours . . . ?’

  ‘The Seven Families, yes,’ Paladrya echoed, ‘although that’s just tradition. There are always rumours of other families, other kinden within the families we know . . . in the deep places, in the far places, other colonies . . .’

  ‘Hold.’ Stenwold put a hand up, glancing at their guard. ‘No chance of something to write with, and write on? I should be making notes, at least.’

  Fel looked as though he had been asked for the moon on a stick, but after a moment he brought over a rounded sheet of thin, leathery cloth, and a thin seashell that had been capped with something like horn. There was ink inside it that wrote somewhat messily, as though Stenwold was scribing on blotting paper, but it was not so different from the reservoir pen sitting on his desk back in Collegium. The letters he formed, though, were obviously unfamiliar to his hosts. Well, I suppose that, whenever they were exiled down here, it must have occurred before literacy was well established.

  ‘The Seven Families,’ Paladrya repeated, and Stenwold remembered that she had been a tutor, once. ‘First of the Seven is the Kerebroi, who rule the colony of Hermatyre and all its farms and land,’ she recited as if by rote. ‘Of the Kerebroi, we Krakind are the mightiest, but those who are Dart-, or Sepia-, or Wayfarer-kinden are our cousins, and ought not to be slighted that they lack our skill at governance.’

  There was a snort from Phylles, who had come back down to hear the lesson. She obviously had other ideas about the predilections of the Krakind.

  ‘Hold on,’ Laszlo said, holding a hand up just like a schoolboy. ‘Krakind, you said, as in “kraken”?’

  ‘What’s kraken?’ Stenwold asked him.

  ‘Well, Mar’Maker, that beast that hauled our arses down here would be a kraken to most mariners, and no mistake. You hear stories, you know? Like how they’re supposed to be really smart, rescue drowning sailors and all that . . . Guess that’s a load of rot, then.’ He raised his eyebrows at Paladrya. ‘So you’re one of them, are you? Octopus-kinden?’

  She nodded. ‘As is Claeon, as is Aradocles, and their royal line which has governed Hermatyre for eleven generations.’