able to do something lots of other people can’t. Like you. You know what I’m saying.’ He meant Aptitude, of course. Laszlo was trying to put together a picture of how many people were actually Apt down here. He had the impression that the talent was mostly confined to the Onychoi, and there were obviously a lot of them who, like Wys, were Apt but had never really thought about mechanical things, and therefore tended to assume there was some impenetrable mystery about them. Laszlo’s casual acceptance of the submersible’s workings had got him a great deal of unearned respect from Lej, even though he was in no real position to help out. It was not that his knowledge of artifice – minimal as it was – would not have been some use; it was just that the gear trains that kept the barque moving were made with someone like Lej in mind, and Laszlo would barely have been able to wrestle a single gear about. Even winding the engine was done by hand and by the sheer power in Lej’s broad shoulders.
‘Here’s Herself,’ Lej murmured, pointing to where Wys and the others were just emerging from the inner reaches of the spiralled train.
Laszlo chuckled, drawing a curious glance from the mechanic. ‘We say that, sometimes,’ he explained. ‘We’d say “Himself’s in a bad mood” or something. Odd that you do, too.’
Lej gave him a long, considering look. ‘Land-kinden, I don’t know why you and me, we even understand a word each other says,’ he remarked.
Laszlo stared at him, startled by the thought. Words were words, after all. They meant… They had meaning. Intrinsic meaning. He was sure he had read that, somewhere.
Fel and Phylles were both laden down with sacks and jars and strangely moulded pearly containers. Wys was in deep conference with an Onychoi woman of Lej’s kinden, who seemed to be wearing overalls done up at all the joints, and overlaid by piecemeal armour. She was just as broad and heavily built as the male of the species, and Lej had identified her as Epiphona, the Nauarch of the Three Red Fish train. Sure enough, several of the armoured draft-beasts sported simple square banners with a trio of crimson dots. To Laszlo’s eyes there appeared little fish-like about the emblems.
Epiphona watched Wys’s hands carefully as the tiny woman’s fingers flew in the hand-speech these people used when outside under the open water. Her own hands moved in return, just a few signs but decisively. A moment later Wys and her crew were heading back towards the submersible.
‘Must have got some bargains,’ Lej mused. ‘She looks happy.’
Laszlo had seen the stuff they used as money: leathery pieces of thick, uneven paper printed with fantastical designs. Apparently Hermatyre just churned this stuff out to the Edmir’s order, and anyone working for the city got rewarded with some. Laszlo had opined that it must be easy to make your own, and had learned that there was some complicated business with the ink and the patterns, so that even a skilled accreator would have difficulty in duplicating them. It seemed a mad system to him, but he decided he would have to take their word for it. After all, they were clearly not going to be moving to the Helleron gold standard any time soon.
Shortly afterwards, Wys and the others came stomping inside, the dregs of seawater running off them. They had food, she announced, and some fresh-woven clothes, and something called ‘leitwater’ for Lej, which was apparently strong drink of some kind. Lej then asked a lot of questions about vintage, which boiled down to finding out which individual had distilled the stuff out of seawater. The thought made Laszlo feel quite ill, as there were surely lots of unpleasant things in seawater, and every fool knew it was poison to drink it. Still, these people were insane enough to actually live in the sea, and even breathe it on occasion, so he shouldn’t be surprised at this fresh example of their lunacy.
‘Any word?’ he demanded of Wys, as soon as he could get a word in.
‘Hmm?’ Wys raised her feathery eyebrow, the only tufts of hair on her head. ‘Oh, of your friend? Nothing. They’ve met a few Pelagists, but none that recently, and it’s not likely the news would be bandied about that freely. Don’t worry, they’ll find us.’ She smiled at him, obviously believing that she was being reassuring. ‘Nothing bad will have happened to him. He’s probably reached the Stations already.’
He remembered the darkness closing on him.
He remembered something lancing into his side, a feeling like burning, then fighting to breathe.
The surging, hanging bulk of Arkeuthys rolling forward in the water, like an angry cloud, tentacles reaching out but then suddenly recoiling.
Himself rushing upwards through the water, dragged by the thing in his side, into…
Stenwold remembered…
Light.
And woke to it, bright enough to claw at the edge of his eyelids. He lay on a yielding surface, and felt a dull ache in his side where something had pierced him. The light was so white, he could see it despite his closed eyes. White and bright and pure, like nothing he had seen since they took him away from the sun.
For a moment he thought… but he was not back on land. There was no fresh breeze, no open space. Around him the damp, neutral air reverberated to a soft, rhythmic sound, like a rush of water heard from three rooms away. A submersible, it must be…? But not like the jetting dart they had kidnapped him in, nor even Wys’s coiled home. There was motion evident in the padded surface beneath him, but it was different to the almost violent stop-start of siphons that Lej had shown him earlier.
He opened his eyes, or tried to. The light was just too bright. He was surrounded by glare. He raised a hand to blot it out, feeling his joints ache. Something in him was ready for a sharp stab of hurt in his side, but there was now only the distant and fading memory of pain.
Yet another strange place. Every time I ever try to understand.. . Chenni’s barque, then the oubliette, Wys’s vessel, the shell-house, the claustrophobic cabin behind the head of Gribbern’s poor sea monster… and now this. Where was this?
I hope Laszlo did better than this. I hope Teornis did, too, wherever he is. He felt that he would have kissed Teornis, to see him just then, enemy or not.
He finally risked peering through his fingers. Everything around him seemed to glow pale, as though he was sitting under the full moon. There were arching walls around him – no, a dome, a dome above. The walls kept undulating softly. He could make out grey shapes within them, worms and sacs and…
Like intestines. Those dim forms within the translucent walls were like the guts of some creature, and beyond them was…
The sea. The water. He spotted the darting forms of fish as they approached to butt at the light. He looked down.
Looking down was definitely a mistake. There was less light emanating from down there. The floor was nigh on transparent, and below was only sea – yet not only sea. There was a drifting trail there, too, like the forest of weeds but floating, hanging in the water, going on for ever and for ever until the white light could no longer penetrate. Strings and coils and glittering strands of jewels. Tentacles.
Not a submersible. He held himself very still. That there was air here, and not simply some kind of digestive juice, suggested he was now the guest of some other type of sea-kinden, but that failed to inspire him with any great confidence. He saw a fish darting in amongst those lazy strands. A single touch, a mere brush against the slimmest tendril and the creature was twitching, spasming and then still, stuck somehow on the near-invisible thread. Then the creature he was inside began to haul up the line, contracting and contracting again, as it dragged its victim in smoothly towards some hidden orifice.
Just like me? He remembered that lance of pain, that tug. How can they live like this? Why don’t they go mad with revulsion? Everything here is so hideous!
‘Tell me how you feel.’
His head moved automatically to find the source of the voice.
‘Oh,’ gaped Stenwold.
She was not hideous. She was anything but hideous, and he knew instantly what land-kinden her people must once have been cousin to. Those blank white eyes, that pale skin that shone softly, constantly brushed with muted sheens like mother-of-pearl. He remembered the girl that Salma had loved, who had once been known as Grief in Chains, and who had danced and been ethereally beautiful – somehow not fit for Stenwold’s or Salma’s world of blood and war. This woman was the same. She was more so. Her skin was so alabaster-pale that he dared not look too closely lest he discern her organs beneath it and, besides, her skin was all that she possessed, that and her long, pale hair that rippled and twitched as though it felt the sea current shifting beyond those filmy walls. She knelt, sitting on her heels, and stared at him with those huge, featureless eyes and no expression at all
