savage scoring and gnawing at the metal.
‘What are you waiting for?’ Despard yelled at Gainer.
‘I’m done! It’s ready!’ he shouted back. ‘Arms in, everyone, arms in!’
‘What?’ Stenwold goggled at him.
‘Don’t touch the walls, Master Maker!’
Stenwold pulled his elbows in, still insisting he be told what was going on, and then Gainer hollered, ‘Now!’ Despard, behind them, slammed down the lever she had been poised beside, and for a second every inch of the Tseitan’s interior was lit by an uncompromising white radiance.
Stenwold cried out, sure that something had exploded inside the engine. His eyes momentarily blazed with reversed images, then he saw, through the ports, that the tentacles were gone, A moment later a long, bleached form could be seen drifting away, down and away, its tentacles a peeled-back mess, with a separate, smaller body falling beside it.
‘What just happened?’ he asked, almost reverently, as Gainer dragged them up out of their dive.
‘It’s a kind of side effect of the engine, which we discovered when we built her,’ the pilot said, almost cheerily. ‘The engine has a lot of magnets in her, so if you’re not careful, you can build up quite a charge differential between the nose and the tail. One of Master Tseitus’s apprentices was almost killed, you know, when we discovered that from the original.’
‘Are you telling me that…?’
‘For a bit of a second the hull was working like a lightning engine,’ Gainer confirmed. ‘It’s a design flaw, but I reckoned it might come in useful some day.’
‘Master Tseitus would be proud of you,’ Stenwold said. It probably wasn’t true, as Tseitus had reserved his pride for his personal consumption. Still, the lad deserved it, and Tseitus deserved to be remembered fondly. The old man’s antisocial and cantankerous side could be lost to history.
‘I hope so,’ Gainer said, and then exclaimed, ‘Hammer and tongs, what’s that?’
They were in sight of Wys’s ship again, but something was dreadfully wrong. For a moment Stenwold thought it had somehow become malformed, but then he realized the truth, and his heart lurched. Curled about the contours of the submersible were the many arms of Arkeuthys. The great octopus held the ship helpless in its grip, and no doubt that great shearing beak was already trying to crack its way in to reach the morsels inside.
‘That’s…’ Stenwold ran out of words.
‘That looks mighty like what got you into all this in the first place,’ Despard filled in for him. ‘I got one quick look at it, up top. Didn’t want another, to be honest.’
‘Do we need them?’ Kratia asked coolly.
‘Yes!’ Stenwold roared at her, and Despard snapped ‘Laszlo’s in there!’ little fists bunched as though she was going to attack the Ant there and then.
‘Ram it,’ Stenwold suggested. ‘Can we ram it?’
‘Be like a flea up against that thing,’ Gainer said, but his expression was solid determination. ‘But we’ve been saving a little something, haven’t we?’ He had already set a course towards the stricken submersible.
‘Are you telling me this ship’s armed?’ Stenwold asked him. ‘Did we authorize that, back at the College?’
‘Master Maker, you were grabbed by an arse-bastarding sea monster,’ Despard reminded him. ‘You think we’d come out here without something?’
Their view of the leviathan and the submersible wheeled and circled as Gainer fought to keep the Tseitan on a straight course. ‘Just like a snapbow,’ the pilot murmured between clenched teeth. ‘Like a real big snapbow with a point on it that you wouldn’t believe.’
‘Don’t hole their ship, then,’ Stenwold cautioned. ‘Why are we twisting around so much?’
Gainer was backing the Tseitan now, the paddles reversing their sweep, then pushing forward again, jockeying the vessel in the water as more Dart-kinden flashed past. ‘To aim the bolt,’ the Beetle youth explained, ‘have to aim the whole ship.’
The piercing eye of Arkeuthys was staring straight at them, as Gainer tugged and cajoled the Tseitan into line. Stenwold gazed at it, seeing, in that orb bigger than his own body, the creature’s icy concentration – even as its many arms twined and snaked for better purchase, over the shell of Wys’s submersible.
‘You’re there now,’ Despard insisted. ‘Right there. Just shoot the cursed thing!’
Gainer made a noncommittal grunt, but he was reaching up for a lever above his head. Stenwold glanced back, seeing the Fly’s agony of worry for Laszlo, as against Kratia’s bland indifference.
Gainer made a tiny adjustment to their heading with his off hand. Stenwold, peering ahead again, saw the enormous eye narrow, and abruptly Arkeuthys had abandoned its victim, casting the submersible end over end, away from it. Somehow it had guessed what even the human sea-kinden had not: the threat that the land-kinden could muster at range.
Gainer shouted ‘No!’ and hauled down on the lever. The Tseitan bucked with the force as a silvery missile flashed in the dim light, leaping like a living thing towards the retreating octopus.
It struck. It must have struck. Suddenly the sea was boiling black. Blood! Stenwold thought at first, but it was ink, of course. First to emerge from that angry cloud was Wys’s ship, canted to one side but with its siphons pulsing constantly, limping through the water but still intact. A stream of gleaming bubbles from its side looked like little enough, and Stenwold knew that Wys would have all hands to the pumps to keep the seawater where it belonged.
Then, behind it, Arkeuthys broke from its own screen of ink like a many-armed and angry god, its flowing form vast and all-encompassing. One tentacle was wrapped about the shaft of Gainer’s bolt, which it must have hauled out from its flesh, from wherever it had struck.
‘Time for your second shot,’ Stenwold said tensely.
‘There is no second shot,’ Gainer stated.
‘I don’t suppose that you have any suggestions, from your city’s long experience?’ Stenwold put to Kratia.
‘Don’t start sea wars with the sea-kinden.’ She seemed utterly composed, hands clasped on her knees, resigned to their collective fate.
For a time, an unknown time, they all hung there: the Tseitan seemingly motionless despite Maxel Gainer back-paddling as fast as he could, Wys’s injured submersible, and the great dark-flushed tangle of Arkeuthys looking like some indecipherable glyph in a lost language.
Then the great octopus was retreating, rippling and rolling backwards, away from them, and there was light, a pale, pure light all around.
I am here.
Stenwold jumped and stared at the others, looking for some evidence of those words in their faces. I cannot have heard that. I cannot… there is no way.
As the first streamers of glittering lace brushed past the carapace of the Tseitan, he heard Kratia – Kratia of all of them – utter an oath almost reverently. Then Lyess’s lambent, pulsing companion dragged a stinging curtain between them and the roiling form of Arkeuthys.
Stenwold assumed the monster would flee, as it had done after the death of Gribbern, but this time the octopus just hung there in the water, glaring balefully as the last shreds of its ink cleared. Wys’s barque remained stationary too, its lamps still blazing brightly, while Stenwold thought he saw a moving shadow at the fading perimeter of the light that was Nemoctes’s home turning restlessly in the water.
If we move from her shadow, we expose ourselves, Stenwold thought. Unless… He wondered just how far Arkeuthys’s understanding went. How human was its mind, of what breadth of vision?
Then the great sea monster was on the move, surging and rippling its way up through the water. Instantly Lyess’s glowing companion began ascending, as slow and graceful as an airship lifting off. Arkeuthys was close, moving faster, hovering immediately above. Stenwold saw Lyess’s light flash on something bright.
The octopus struck almost gingerly, extending to the very limit of its reach so as to be sure that none of that stinging veil so much as touched it. The tentacles were no longer simply lashing whips: gripped in one of them was the Tseitan’s harpoon, while another held a Dart-kinden lance. Stenwold saw them dig in, carve through the soft flesh of Lyess’s companion, hesitant jabs and slices as the octopus manhandled the unfamiliar implements. He remembered the Menfish, how they had struck and struck from above, aiming at the jellyfish’s blind spot.
