on her face.
‘What…?’ he managed. He felt as though he had been off-balance for days now, reeling from one incomprehensible sight to another, as though any moment he would be out in the water again, in a cell, or in the jaws of a monster. He was shaking and, as he noticed it, the shaking became worse and he could not stop it. All he could do was just stare bleakly back at this sea-kinden woman.
‘Tell me how you feel,’ she repeated.
He opened his mouth to frame an answer, but even posing the question to himself made it impossible to utter. Lost, he thought. I feel lost. And he was truly lost. No other son of Collegium had ever been so adrift, surely. I want to go home. Not because he was War Master Stenwold Maker, hero of Collegium, who would save his city from the Spiders as he had, somehow apparently, saved it from the Vekken and the Wasps. He wanted to go home for the same reason a wayward child cries for its mother. I want to see something familiar. Walls, doors, roofs, my friends. Not… The image of Gribbern’s death appeared abruptly in the front of his mind: the blindly mechanical apparatus of the crab’s mouthparts going about their delicate work of ripping a man to shreds and consuming him. As he recoiled from the thought, his mind’s straining seams finally sprang. They all came out, all the old faces. Tisamon, you bastard, where are you when I need you? Nero sketched slyly, he who had died hundreds of miles astray in Solarno… Salma, Totho, Tynisa… The dead and the lost.
Arianna. He relived her death, Danaen’s cruel blade separating her from her life’s last seconds with typical Mantis precision. Arianna who had betrayed him and betrayed for him and tried to kill a general for him, and who might even have loved him, in some brief moment between wars.
He was aware that he was falling sideways, but his arms were too busy trying to hold himself together. The surface that he fell on to rippled with alien life as he landed, and he wished it would swallow him up, absorb him, divide him from this killing ache of loss just as the Mantis blade had severed Arianna from him.
He felt her presence, then: delicate fingers trailing across the tattered clothing over his back, exploring textures tentatively, unsure quite what to do with him. When they touched skin they shrank away. She might almost have been floating in the air above him, as he shuddered with pent-up grief. Some instinct or memory had obviously touched her, for her arms were then around him, an encircling embrace only an inch from contact, head bent low so the fronds of her hair twined slowly, blindly about him. He shook and sobbed under her tentative guardianship, and at last, when it had all been wrung out of him, and sheer exhaustion triumphed over the draining wells of emotion, he slept.
He awoke to voices, and for a moment he was kicking frantically in Gribbern’s tiny cramped cabin, because it was the distant echo of Nemoctes drifting to him from far away… and when she answered, when his mysterious benefactress spoke, he recognized her voice from the ghosts that had haunted Gribbern, in those last headlong moments before he and his mount had died. ‘I am near,’ she had assured him, but she had not been quite near enough.
‘He returns to us,’ she said now, without looking round at him, somehow sensing even the opening of Stenwold’s eyes. She was sitting, her knees drawn close to her chin, facing away from him.
‘Stenwold Maker of the land-kinden, do you hear me?’ came the scratching sound that distance and their Art made of Nemoctes’s voice.
‘And if I do?’ Stenwold replied weakly.
‘He hears,’ the woman confirmed.
‘I am glad that you still live, land-kinden.’
‘I’m not sure I share that pleasure,’ Stenwold told the air. ‘What do you want?’
There was a pause after she had relayed his words, and then Nemoctes said, ‘I have told Lyess to bring you to the Hot Stations. We will meet there – with Heiracles and other loyalists if possible. Claeon will not dare act too openly for fear of the Man.’ That one word was spoken as a title of some weight. ‘I will find your friend, the other land-kinden. He will be brought to you there.’
‘Good,’ Stenwold responded, thinking that was the least they could do if they could not take him home. Then shame struck him, and he muttered, ‘I’m sorry about your friend.’
‘As am I,’ and so he was, for Nemoctes’s bitter sadness could be heard quite clearly. ‘Sorrier still as I am the cause, the one who has brought some of my fellow Pelagists into this conflict. I do not intend to see any more of my people slain – or any others under my care, yourself included.’
‘Then take me to the land,’ Stenwold demanded promptly. ‘Free me.’
He did not hear Nemoctes’s sigh, but his mind inserted it into the pause that followed. At last the unseen sea-kinden said, ‘If I was free myself to act, then I would hold no prisoners. Freedom is the life of a Pelagist, so I would never willingly deny it to any. I can only pledge that Heiracles and his people must advance some definite cause against you, or purpose for you, otherwise I shall return you to your people myself, and your friend also. No more waiting. No more holding you behind their backs in case of need.’
Perhaps that was fair, and a fine thing to promise, but Stenwould could not find it so. ‘Well,’ he said, without direction. ‘And what now?’
‘You shall be in the Hot Stations as soon as time and the currents allow,’ Nemoctes told him. ‘Until then, Lyess shall care for you. There are few dangers in the ocean likely to trouble her, I hope.’
Stenwold remembered how Arkeuthys had flinched back, stung by the tendrils of whatever sea-monster he was now travelling in. Under other circumstances, he would have wondered at how much more closely these sea- kinden lived with the creatures whose Art they bore, how much more they relied on them, and had been affected by them in turn. As it was he just felt the whole situation somehow vile. Then the woman – Lyess he assumed – turned about to stare at him again, milky arms wrapped about her knees.
‘I… suppose we are to be companions for a while, then,’ he said awkwardly. An answering expression came to her face, but it was one for which he had no name. It was not joy, certainly, at this prolonging of his company. It was closer to fear, perhaps, but a fear of something the land did not encompass. ‘How long is it to these Stations? You have supplies, I take it?’ He looked about the bell-shaped chamber, with its rippling walls, seeing there was no place that cargo might be stored. In fact he could see clean through to the sea, in all directions.
‘We will provide,’ she replied.
He guessed that ‘we’ included her creature, whose busy flesh surrounded them. The thought made him shudder and he shuffled forward, and at once she drew back from him, hands extended out a little, as though she was a Wasp who might sting. That wordless expression on her face intensified.
‘What?’ he asked her, having no reserves of patience to spare her feelings. ‘What is it?’
‘I have not borne one like you. I have not admitted one like you to this place. Ever.’
‘That’s hardly surprising,’ he said dismissively, ‘since, for some reason, we land-kinden don’t like to come down here very much…’
But she was already shaking her head. ‘I… have had no guests at all. I am not like Nemoctes, to have many dealings with the Obligists. I have only the voices of my peers. We travel far and deep, we Pelagists. There may be years without meeting any other. Some of us that drift in the furthest currents never meet another of their kinden – of any kinden. We are made to be solitary throughout the great width of the sea. I am not used to… not being alone. Even with other Pelagists we have met only briefly, before we have passed on our ways. Even my mother and my children… There are only the voices – the Far-speech of our Art. I have lived in a world of voices for so long. It is… difficult to know another face.’
There was a question in his mind ever since he had deciphered Gribbern’s mutterings, and he had never had the chance to ask it of poor Gribbern. ‘This Art of yours, it is through your creatures? Do they talk mind to mind at such a distance?’
‘No,’ she said simply. ‘You are thinking of Pserry, perhaps. Pserry had a mind, although only Gribbern and his kin could speak to it. That is a different Art, the speaking-with-beasts. My companion here,’ and her arm encompassed all that was around them, ‘has no voice, no mind. So we are a different partnership.’
That plural was beginning to make him feel uncomfortable. ‘But how can you direct it?’
‘We are joined, but there is only one “I”. I am Lyess, so we are Lyess. There is no other mind, only an echo. An echo within a great space of memory.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Mind is the enemy of memory, sometimes. There is a great memory, a memory of thousands of years. It speaks very faintly, so faintly that even Nemoctes’s voice – that we heard just now – would drown it out. There is no other voice, though, when I am here alone, and so, if I listen carefully, I can hear that memory. It is an ancient
