‘Gainer, bring us up, point us at the monster,’ he ordered. ‘Bring us so we’re looking to pin it between us and her.’
‘Us and…?’ Gainer began to ask, but Stenwold snapped at him, ‘Just bring us up!’ The pilot quickly tugged at the sticks, sending the Tseitan climbing up the ladder of lights that formed Lyess’s long train.
The jellyfish was already shuddering. Arkeuthys could not risk getting close enough for a decisive strike, but it was gaining in dexterity, carving its way in minute portions towards the woman hiding within. Stenwold gritted his teeth, keeping his eyes fixed on the carnage. We are ascending too slowly. He stared into the gleaming flesh of the quivering creature, hoping to catch a glimpse of Lyess.
Then a blunt, heavy shape jetted swiftly across the flailing, translucent bell. There was no art to Nemoctes’s attack. His creature was no match for Arkeuthys. Still, it was large, and it was armoured, and he directed it straight at the octopus with all the speed its siphon could give it. Arkeuthys recoiled, attack momentarily forgotten. Arms lashed out, briefly wrapping about the ridged, coiled shell, and then casting Nemoctes aside with a single muscular convulsion, sending the ponderous creature end over end away from them, no doubt making a chaos of all Nemoc-tes’s carefully hoarded history.
Then the octopus returned to its task, but now found the Tseitan waiting for it.
‘Master Maker, there’s nothing!’ Gainer was saying. ‘No second bolt, and we’ve not the charge for another magnetic shock.’
‘Aim us, level us at it like a crossbow,’ Stenwold insisted. ‘Just as if we had another harpoon to take it between the eyes. Get us as steady as you can.’
‘That makes us an easy target,’ Kratia warned.
‘Do you think it would have any difficulty snatching us from the water when it decides to?’ Stenwold asked her.
‘That is true.’
The narrowed eye of Arkeuthys bored into them, its twin scalpels poised at arms’ ends. Gainer fidgeted and twitched at the controls, until they were absolutely centred on that alien gaze.
With a spasm of rage that seemed all too human, the octopus was abruptly streaming away in, a flurry of tentacles. Then it was gone, lost to the black abyss.
Stenwold settled back, feeling a great wave of relief wash over him. He could not tell if it was for himself, his return to the land now secured, or if it was because Lyess and her companion still lived.
‘Let’s go home,’ he said softly. ‘Only home.’
And in the depths of his mind he heard her soft voice. You shall come back to me, come back to me, some day.
Part Three
Footprints in the Sand
Thirty-Four
Using compass and clock and all the tricks that the Tidenfree crew had perfected over the years, Despard guided them home. After they had passed the reach of the Shelf, which the sea-kinden had called the Edge, they led rather than followed, with Gainer steering the Tseitan in slow, paddling circles from time to time to check that the bobbing shell of Wys’s submersible was still behind them. The journey was long, and they had come to the surface several times to take in fresh air, the Tseitan lying like a basking thing in the swelling water, whilst the other vessel listed alarmingly beside it, never intended to be brought up to the air. Still, Wys’s crew was able to provide food and freshly accreated water, for the Tseitan had little room for provisions, what with Stenwold’s bulk added to its complement.
At last, though, they came up in sight not only of land but of the city itself: a flare of white stone against a dusk-darkened coast. Gainer guided them in on the wrong side of the sea-wall, where those intent on underhand business moored under the deflected and well-remunerated eyes of the port authorities. The waves were high, though, so no other ship had dared the mooring that night. There were therefore no witnesses as the Tseitan rose to the surface, and none to see the rounded bulk of a much larger vessel break the water beside it.
Despard ascended, clutching a rope ladder, which burden her wings just sufficed to take to the top of the wall. There she secured it and let it down with a flourish. It had been agreed that Gainer would shortly take the Tseitan back to its College docks, but for now, Stenwold did not want every scholar and Master to hear of his return, if for nothing else than to avoid the interminable round of questions that his reappearance would spark off. Gainer would therefore keep quiet while, in the meantime, Stenwold would slip into his own city. That was the plan.
Stenwold ascended the rope ladder with more ease than he had descended it all that time ago, when stepping on to the deck of Isseleema’s Floating Game. Kratia followed him up, with more ease still. As he hauled himself over the top of the wall he saw that the sky was fast greying into twilight: not a glorious red butcher’s sunset, not a fiery evening to send comfort to herdsmen and sailors, not a sunset to put Moths and Mantis-kinden to prophesying death and loss. The dusk was pale, almost colourless, the sun on the very point of shrugging its way behind the horizon, almost nonchalantly and without an ounce of showmanship. Stenwold felt something catch in his throat, and tears sprang to his eyes. He fell to his knees on the wall’s hard stonework, for it was the most beautiful sight he had ever seen.
There was a soggy-sounding scuffle and Laszlo landed beside him, streaming wet but grinning like a madman. Stenwold looked up at him: the one person who had shared his ordeal.
‘Mar’Maker,’ Laszlo nodded, agreeing.
‘You’re a credit to your family,’ Stenwold told him.
The rope ladder was still jerking and tugging, so Stenwold turned to put an arm down to aid Wys, who was scaling it awkwardly, one rung at a time, her eyes focused fiercely on her hands. She took his help gladly when she was high enough, collapsing beside him with ragged breaths.
‘You… you are mad people,’ she said indistinctly. ‘Why’s it so pissing cold?’
Of course, she was wearing just a shift and, of her crew, only Phylles was remotely respectably dressed. ‘Despard,’ Stenwold decided, ‘we’ll need clothes for our guests.’ He looked down at his own feet, calloused and bare. ‘And try for some sandals at least, or we’ll all be lame before we reach my house. And tell Tomasso everything you can. Between you and Laszlo here, I owe your crew more than I can count.’
She nodded, looking suitably pleased, and set off into the air in an instant. Wys watched her go with wide eyes.
‘Land,’ she said. ‘This is land, then.’ Her gaze shifted from the seaward horizon, turning inland to the shadowed roofs of Collegium. ‘I’m not ready for this.’
‘In my own city, we receive ambassadors from Grande Atoll, sometimes,’ Kratia observed. ‘They do not die, of being on land, though they must make certain adjustments. You will not die of it either.’
Wys sat up, nodding. ‘Nobody will believe me, that I have seen this,’ she said, with a slight smile.
Fel hauled himself up over the edge and crouched there, the spikes on his hands flexing and twitching. Wys reached out and squeezed his arm. He had come wearing his mail, as he had donned it to fight the Echinoi, and his expression was strangely familiar to Stenwold. Only later that night did the connection come to him, for Fel’s face was not so unlike a Mantis-kinden’s features, and Stenwold had seen that look before, that war between fear and determination, when Tisamon had faced something he reckoned as magic. It spoke of a superstitious awe and terror.
‘I must pass on the news of our success to our coalition,’ Kratia announced. For a moment Stenwold was thrown, thinking that surely she could speak such words to her sisters even from here, but then he understood: Of course, she must tell the Vekken.
‘Tell them I shall recompense them, and yourself, in any way I can, beyond the trade with Collegium. I pay my debts.’
‘We know it,’ she told him. ‘Do not think we shall not call upon you for this marker. There are storms
