not seek out danger. The Echinoi are different, however. The Echinoi have no laws. We do not even know if they have language. They are… something other than human, it is said. Some claim they resided within the sea long before the other families came, and resent us for our intrusion. Certainly they, of us all, have no need of air. How their children manage, we cannot guess. The Echinoi are the spine-kinden, and they roam the vastness of the seabed. When their bands find victims – a farm, a train, even a whole colony – they attack without mercy. They are the enemies of us all. Hope that you never see them, land-kinden. They would not care who or what you were. They would feast on your bones.’
‘Lovely,’ Laszlo muttered darkly. ‘Just when you thought you were surrounded by thoroughly unpleasant people, there’s worse.’
Fel had remained blank throughout Paladrya’s lecture but, at that, he smiled, showing neat, predatory- looking teeth.
Twenty-Two
‘How does it go?’ Stenwold asked. He had left Paladrya asleep, and Laszlo picking over the vessel’s cargo nets, while he clambered and slithered until he could get within sight of what he took to be the engine room. It was tucked into the innermost coiling of the vessel’s shell, and Wys’s engineer seemed barely able to fit there. It was the first time Stenwold had seen one of the big Onychoi unarmoured, and the man still looked very broad at the shoulders. He was probably a full foot taller than Rosander, too, and would have given a Mole Cricket-kinden a fair run in a wrestling match. One careless backhand would have sent Stenwold himself rattling all the way back along to the vessel’s entrance hatch, and probably worse, too, because there was a great serrated claw curving from the back of each hand. The spiked gauntlets of Rosander’s banner-men had obviously sheathed Art-grown weapons like these. The man’s name was Lej, Stenwold recalled, or possibly Spillage.
‘Go?’ The engineer turned to him questioningly. That face was frightening at first, tucked between those bunched shoulders, with a ridged and hairless skull and a heavy jaw. Lej possessed the mildest blue childlike eyes that Stenwold had ever seen, though, which somewhat took the edge off his grim visage. ‘Oh, heap big magic, Lowlander,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
Stenwold raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, I see you’ve got a spring-wound clockwork behind you, that’s feeding tension into two separate engines for some reason. What I can’t work out is what the engines are doing to make the submersible move like this.’ If any vessel he knew were to make progress in this lurching series of thrusts, he would have sent it back to the dockyard for repairs.
Lej was staring at him, jaw actually dropping. ‘You’re Able?’ he said.
‘Apt, yes. There’s a lot you don’t know about the land. Almost everything, for a start. The same’s true of what I know of the sea.’
The Onychoi was now grinning, showing teeth like yellowed pegs. ‘Oh, landsman, there’s precious few who’d know this was even an engine. Oh, I’m impressed. I really am impressed. Do you have these gear-trains, then, where you’re from?’
‘Clockwork? Certainly. They’re… new, then?’
‘This barque was fitted out just two years back,’ Lej told him. ‘But they’ve been making these engines for… what, six, eight years? The first ones were rubbish, though, between you and me. Swimming was better. It’s only in the last few years they sorted out the strain ratios, and the like. I hear some of the designs coming from the Hot Stations these days are slick, real slick.’ Here was an engineer talking about engines, and Stenwold had a moment of utter dislocation. I could be in the College workshops right now. I can almost hear Totho in this sea-kinden’s voice.
‘So what happened to start it off?’ he asked. They can’t have gone from Inapt to Apt in just eight years. It must have been there long before, waiting for a trigger, something…
‘Springs,’ Lej informed him. ‘The idea’s been about since before I was born, the way they tell it, but it’s about getting a good enough spring to hold the tension. The Hot Stations, now, they worked out how you accreate spring-steel, like we’ve got here. Before that you had to do it by tensioning shell or bone, and that gets you nowhere, frankly. Come here and see.’
Stenwold tried to approach, but skidded on the curve of the shell. A broad hand grabbed his shoulder and stopped him sliding away out of sight entirely.
‘Why’ve you got those things on your feet? No wonder you can’t stand up properly,’ Lej enquired. He meant Sten-wold’s boots, and with that came the understanding why, however over- or under-clad, everyone in this undersea world went barefoot, for almost all of the floors Stenwold had been sliding about on were smoothly uneven. Cursing himself for a slow student, he unlaced his boots and threw them off, hearing his footwear bang and rattle all the way down to the main hold.
‘Look at that,’ Lej observed. ‘Land-kinden got toes, too.’
With the new traction from his bare feet, Stenwold was able to clamber closer. ‘I see your spring,’ he said, privately thinking how this would all barely pass for a prentice-piece back in Collegium, ‘but what is it powering. Propellers? Legs? How does this shell move?’
‘Like it did when it was alive,’ Lej replied, obviously puzzled. ‘How else?’
‘I have not the first idea how shells move,’ Stenwold told him. Natural history was never my strong point, and who’d have thought it would be a matter of life or death one day?
‘Siphons,’ Lej explained, and saw that the word carried no meaning. ‘We pull in water at the front, and then squirt it out of the siphons, left and right, to make us go forward. If we want up or down it gets harder. We either flood the inner chambers, or get some air into ’em. Smooth, eh?’
If only I was not a prisoner. If only Collegium was not under threat from land and sea. If only… For he was seeing something here: he was seeing history. The sea-kinden had discovered their aptitude, and Stenwold was witnessing what must be the first stages of a technical explosion like the revolution that had freed his own people from the yoke of the Moths five centuries before. ‘It’s very impressive,’ he said, suddenly feeling hollow. ‘Thank you for showing it to me.’
He slid carefully back down to the main chamber, where Laszlo eyed him expectantly, but Stenwold just managed a wry smile and found himself somewhere to sit, resting his back against the sloping wall as best he could.
I cannot say what might happen, if it came to war between us and the sea-kinden. They have the advantage of surprise, and they have unknown Arts, and for a long while we would be unable to strike back. He reflected, oddly, about the Moth-kinden of Tharn during the war, and what they must have felt when, after generations of mounting attacks against the Helleron mining concerns, a Wasp airfleet had arrived on their doorstep. We would manufacture our battle submersibles, no doubt, even if they drove us from Collegium entirely. In time, we would take the war to them. Whatever the upshot, whether we turned them back, or whether they claimed the coast from us for ever, this moment of theirs, this delicate unfurling of their new way of life, would be crushed in the fray. There is so much to learn here that we will never know if Rosander gets his war.
He saw that Wys had now woken up and was standing before the many-paned viewport cut into what was either the fore or the aft of the shell, depending on how flexible his thinking was. Stenwold took a moment to admire the workmanship, where some tireless craftsman had sawn out a hundred interlocking gaps in the foot- thick hull, each one then covered over with some transparent material that had no doubt been accreated into place. The spars and struts left between the panes were cut into curls and spirals, the entire design a thoughtless work of art. The sea-kinden, with their very industry governed by imagination rather than the hard labour of hands, seemed incapable of achieving anything plainly or simply.
‘Wake up your new friend,’ Wys instructed him, gesturing at Paladrya.
‘We’ve arrived?’
‘Close on. You’re about to become someone else’s problem.’
The window showed them approaching some kind of wedge-shaped bivalve shell, one of as massive proportions as the vessel they were travelling in and picked out by bulbous, fading swirls of phosphorescence. Beyond it was a dark wall that Stenwold assumed was just empty water at first, but then he noticed a slight motion caught by the luminescence shed from their ship, and he sucked in his breath.
