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 missing 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.
