cautioned her.
‘You cannot keep the landsmen here, not now. If you tried to do so by force, not only would you fail, but you would show yourself no better than Claeon.’
A brief fragment of expression appeared on Heiracles’s face, before he stifled it, but yet it spoke eloquently. He was a man with few illusions, and a great cynicism about others that he assumed was shared by others about him. The idea that anyone might seriously believe that there was any difference between Heiracles’s base nature and that of Claeon was obviously a new concept to him. Seeing that bitterness there, so briefly unveiled, Stenwold understood that such a difference did indeed exist, for all that it was whittled down moment to moment by the promise of power.
Paladrya took a deep breath. ‘I believe Aradocles is alive, because I cannot bear to believe anything else,’ she continued. ‘If so, he will return eventually. His heritage will compel him. Perhaps he will indeed bring a landsman army to retake his birthright. Perhaps he will have grown hard, toughened by the hostile land, so that even Rosander will fear him. Who can say what his exile will have made of him? But he will remember me, Heiracles. If he lives, however far he is grown from the boy I knew, I cannot but think that he will remember me. That being so, would you rather he returned to lead his friends against Claeon, to reclaim his throne and reward those who have been loyal to him, or would you prefer he returned later to confront whoever might have unseated his uncle, and whoever might have had his old tutor executed? What will you say to him then? And do you think you will ever sway the people’s love so greatly that you shall be safe from its retribution? You are not Claeon. Do not fashion yourself in his image.’
And Stenwold, the veteran of a hundred speeches, found himself wishing to applaud her. Even surrounded by her jailers, she was one of the most impassioned advocates he had ever heard. The young prince had a fine tutor, he thought, and if Heiracles does not agree, then I will take her from him and free her. I will go so far, before I leave the sea, however much I loathe it.
He felt something tear asunder within him, at that silent vow, the great weight of the ocean pressing down, eager to keep him to itself, and something else perhaps, some stab of anger and loss that was not in any way his own.
‘If the heir returned,’ Heiracles pronounced carefully, ‘he would know me as his most faithful subject.’ Everything had drained from his expression but the pragmatism. Chief adviser to a young ruler was not such a poor position, that look said. The ambitions for kingship had sunk without so much as a ripple, and he had recovered his statesman’s poise with an ease that would do justice to either a Collegiate Assembler or a Spiderlands Aristos.
Stenwold’s relief at the man’s response was disproportionate. ‘Then I shall need Paladrya,’ he declared.
‘Of course.’ Heiracles moved aside with grace, and the woman stepped tentatively free, moving with steps as halting as an automaton to Stenwold’s side, as though she feared being called back at any moment. He put a hand out towards her as she reached him, and she took it gladly, anchoring herself to his party.
‘Nemoctes, for the assistance of your people, I thank you,’ Stenwold said formally. As he thought of leaving here, of returning home, he felt not clear joy, but a muddied, unsettled sense of displacement. But that is what I want. What could hold me here, and yet… ‘I intend to return,’ was all he said, and the Pelagist nodded, frowning at him.
‘I shall see you to your land. Perhaps there shall be others also, who will guard your journey.’
Stenwold felt something kick inside him, some irrational surge of emotion, misplaced and out of character. Stay. He fought it down. I cannot… I have work to do.
‘How can we know that you’ll find the boy?’ Heiracles demanded, seeing Stenwold about to leave with his prized hostage.
‘Because your own agents shall come with me, if they’re willing,’ Stenwold replied.
‘What agents?’ the Kerebroi demanded. His followers became abruptly restless behind him at the mere thought of a land voyage.
Stenwold glanced towards Laszlo, who nodded back, grinning.
‘Mistress Wys,’ the Beetle said, ‘do you dare come with me – you and your fellows?’ He watched the question sink in. Phylles’s scowl deepened, Fel was blankly hostile as usual, but Wys’s face showed every stage of a progression from surprise to fear, to rising eagerness.
‘To the shore, land-kinden?’ she said. ‘To bring back the true Edmir? Sounds like the sort of job that reputations are built on, does it not?’
‘You are mad,’ Heiracles told her flatly. ‘Mad or a Littoralist,’ which latter was clearly worse.
‘Neither, in fact, but you’ll have heard how we Small-claws are always on the lookout for the next new thing,’ she told him levelly. ‘Now, you’ll retain me as your agent?’
‘If you’re insane enough to go, woman, then go with my blessing,’ Heiracles said acidly.
‘So go now,’ Nemoctes echoed, his resonant voice breaking in. ‘I do not like to think how long Claeon’s agents will take to track down this meeting, as they did the last.’ His eyes met Stenwold’s. ‘Good luck, landsman.’
‘Your lad can come with us,’ Wys suggested.
‘This one’s going nowhere but in the Tseitan,’ Despard declared firmly, glaring at the Smallclaw woman and holding fiercely on to Laszlo’s arm.
The other Fly was already shaking his head. ‘No, you take Master Maker,’ he told her. ‘I trust Wys, here.’ He winked. ‘We have business.’
Despard stared at him as though he had lost his mind. ‘And if I have to tell Tomasso that I lost his nephew to business?’ she demanded.
‘Then he’ll understand,’ Laszlo pointed out.
‘Nemoctes is right,’ Stenwold told them all. ‘Let’s go now while the tide is good.’
Thirty-Three
The interior of the Tseitan had been meant to carry two passengers without luxury. With four inside it was low and cramped and stifling, even though one of them was a Fly-kinden. Still, Stenwold’s heart soared as they put out from the little colony’s dock. It was not just that they were going home to the light and the sky, but the sculling of the Tseitan’s swimming limbs, rowing the machine through the water with swift, sure strokes, produced a rhythm that felt more natural by far than the fluid jettings of Wys’s machine or the eerie glide of Nemoctes’s beast. This was good Collegium engineering.
And you can see where you’re going, too. It had been so strange to be conveyed by Gribbern in a windowless space within the flesh of a sea-monster. Even Nemoctes’s chambers had been like an ornamented coffin. True, it was dark down here, where the sun could not reach, but the limn-lights of the colony shed a pale- blue radiance on their departure. Stenwold saw Wys’s submersible bobbing and wavering in the water before the clockwork and the pumps got under way and it surged off, impossibly buoyant, into the dark.
‘How did you even make contact,’ Stenwold asked, as the Tseitan pursued it, ‘let alone find where I would be?’ His body felt strange, as though being twisted by degrees in an invisible grip. The sea-kinden had warned him, though: it was their ‘equalization’ being reversed, some other piece of business that all the land-kinden had apparently had to go through, to reach the sea bed.
‘As for finding you, we had to rely on them to bring you to us,’ came Kratia’s clear tones. ‘I had planned to invoke the office of an envoy, but these sea-kinden of yours seem an uncivil band of rogues. The people of Grande Atoll possess some manners, at least. The local politics have played into our hands, though, I see, or we’d never have got you back.’
‘In a way,’ Stenwold admitted. ‘Or perhaps it is better to say that we have caught them at their worst, under the hand of a tyrant. They might have been smoother-mannered under their previous ruler, and I hope they will be so under the next.’
‘You intend to restore this heir to them?’ she asked him.
‘If he still lives to be restored.’ The possibility that Aradocles would be years dead, slain by the terrors of the
