from one end of the horizon to the other, and not a sail to sully the endless waves.
Still, it was sweet. It was a pleasure he had taken for granted all his life, but it was so sweet now.
How long he lay there, his tattered clothes drying, stiff with salt, he could not have later said, but at last the thing beneath him began to move, to subside slowly into the water. Damn her, he thought, instantly bitter. Was this so hard? Is Nemoctes’s schedule so rushed? Do we not have ‘time’? He tugged on the caul and slipped back into the sea, knowing that he would have no option save to return to that captivity or else to drown. This time the sea-monster’s tentacles brushed him forward in rippling eddies, almost dragging him to the point where the open mouth waited to swallow him again. Cursing all sea-kinden he dragged himself through, feeling it close so swiftly that the cold, gelid flesh of it slobbered against his foot.
He gave out a cry of disgust and turned to glare at Lyess. ‘What news?’ he ordered of her. ‘I assume there must have been some news, that we must now hurry to these Hot Stations?’
Kneeling with head bowed, her hair flowing over her face, Lyess made no answer.
‘Speak to me,’ he insisted. ‘What has happened that we have to go under again?’
‘We had to descend,’ she confessed, very softly, and then looked up at him. Stenwold heard himself make a strange sound. Her skin, the skin of her face, was cracked and wrinkled, as though she had aged decades. ‘The sun harms us,’ she told him. ‘My companion and I, we cannot bear its touch.’
Would you like me to show you the sun? she had asked. He felt ill. ‘Your face… will you…?’
‘I will be well soon,’ she assured him. ‘But the sun will kill us if we let it. That has been known. We are much more of the sea than the other sea-kinden. To us, the land is only an echo in the memories. We were the first – or almost the first.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
She just stared blankly back at him and asked, ‘What for?’
Laszlo woke at the words ‘Hey, land-kinden’, finding that he understood them, and his current situation, without any clutching confusion. He was lying in one of the cargo nets that draped the interior of Wys’s barque, and had found it served as a hammock by any other name. He opened an eye to find Phylles regarding him suspiciously.
‘Someone here you should see, Wys says,’ the Polypoi woman told him. She kept her distance, mostly, and he guessed it was because she was unsure of what dangerous Art he might possess. Which would be a wise thought, if I was something other than a Fly.
He dropped down from his roost with a flicker of wings that made Phylles back up several steps more, then saw immediately who she had meant. Wys and Fel were both standing near the hatch, along with a tall, broad- shouldered man in armour.
‘Who’s he?’ the Fly asked. ‘How’d he get here?’ Phylles flicked a finger past his shoulder, towards the window. There was something hanging in the water, and Laszlo had to stare at it a while before he understood. It was of almost the exact size and shape as the submersible, save that it was still living. Where Wys had placed her hatch sprouted the head and arms of a sea monster, The eye was enormous and white, with a tiny pinprick of a pupil, set beneath a mottled leathery flap that looked to Laszlo like some kind of poorly fitting cap. There was a forest of writhing tendrils in front of the eye, far more than any creature could surely find a use for. Compared to Arkeuthys, Laszlo decided, it looked placidly inscrutable, as though it knew a great deal that it wasn’t letting on about.
He marched over to Wys, determined to see what madman had come sailing to them aboard such a beast. The newcomer looked as though he was some kind of Kerebroi, and a powerful and elegant one, at that. His skin was darker than Paladrya’s, or that of the oubliette guards: the sort of faded brown that bones turned to out in the desert. He had a high forehead, long black hair curling from a widow’s peak, and his beard gleamed with oils. His armour impressed Laszlo the most, if only because it was comprehensible to him as something that could be manufactured and worn. The individual pieces had obviously been accreated: moulded out of something like crabshell into the form of breastplate, shoulder-guards, greaves and the like, and fantastically wrought into the shape of waves and sea-wrack, scallops and coiled snails. But at least it was a suit of plate armour such as land- kinden might wear, rather than the monstrous, all-encompassing carapaces of the Onychoi. Hanging from a loop at his waist was a truly nasty-looking weapon, a crowbar crossed with a pickaxe, that must be of some use in levering both men and monsters out of their shells. There was also a shield slung across his back.
He was possibly the most normal person that Laszlo had seen in some while.
‘Little land-kinden,’ Wys gestured, ‘meet Nemoctes.’
Laszlo gave the man a grudging nod. He remembered that name, at least, from their interrupted conference.
Nemoctes regarded him evenly. ‘Greetings to you, land-kinden.’
‘The name’s Laszlo. Where’s Master Maker?’ Laszlo saw no particular reason to be polite about it.
‘Safe,’ Nemoctes assured him. ‘As safe as we can make him. There were complications or I would have sent word earlier.’
‘What complications?’ Laszlo wanted to know.
‘Gribbern is dead, but another who heeds me rescued your friend,’ Nemoctes declared. ‘They head for the Hot Stations – as I discover Wys had already guessed. We will hold a fresh conclave there, beyond Claeon’s reach.’
‘Good for you,’ Laszlo replied stubbornly. He half hoped the man might take offence, showing what he was made of, but Nemoctes simply nodded.
‘It’s war, isn’t it?’ Wys said unexpectedly. ‘Any way you look at it, Hermatyre’s going to fight with itself.’
A shadow crossed Nemoctes’s face. ‘If these land-kinden can secure the heir for us, then perhaps the bloodshed will be little, and within the palace only. Otherwise… it may be a uncertain situation indeed, if Heiracles raises the mob in his own name.’
Wys made a rude noise. ‘I’d not follow Heiracles out of the sun unless he paid me. I don’t know what they think of him in Hermatyre, but I don’t reckon it’s much.’
‘You may be right.’ Nemoctes shrugged, the plates of his armour scraping. ‘My people have helped him as much as we can, and more than we should in some cases. We have no army to fight on his behalf, though, and nor would we, anyway. I do not care, myself, what blood runs in his veins, but enough others do, and therefore will not accept him even though they bear Claeon no love.’
‘Maybe I’ll start trading out of Deep Seep soon,’ Wys mused. ‘Don’t recall anybody caring much about wars down there.’
‘Too cursed cold down there, is the reason,’ Phylles muttered, and Wys nodded glumly.
‘Well, you go talk to your folks,’ she told Nemoctes. ‘We’ll see you inside the Stations, and then we’ll see what’s where.’
The tall man nodded, and opened the hatch, stepping into the small room beyond. Once he was gone, Wys sighed long and deep. When she looked up, her eyes were bright, though.
‘Fel, Phylles, Lej,’ she addressed them, even the unseen mechanic, ‘It’s one of those times.’
‘You mean where we either get rich or dead?’ Phylles asked sourly.
‘We’ve been rich so far, haven’t we? And not dead even once?’ Wys was grinning. ‘With such a record, how can we go wrong?’
Both Phylles and Fel were still looking highly unenthusiastic, so she dismissed them with a wave of her hand. ‘Land-kinden,’ she beckoned, ‘Laszlo, come to the window with me. Let’s see Nemoctes off.’
Laszlo followed her over to the far end of the chamber. Nemoctes must already have reached his mount, for now the creature was lazily departing, retreating ponderously backwards off into the darkness.
‘Tell me about your people, landsman,’ Wys prompted him.
‘You mean my kinden?’
‘I mean your people. There are some folks up there who’d want you back, yes? Someone must have shed a tear when your barque docked again at your colony, and you weren’t on it.’
‘My family,’ Laszlo replied. Or at least they’d better have, rotten bastards.
‘Pay to get you back, I’d wager,’ Wys considered.
Laszlo shot her a sidelong look but she was watching the passing waters idly. ‘They would, at that,’ he informed her, though with the same mental caveat as before.
She nodded. ‘I’m a woman used to making my own way in the world, Laszlo,’ she said, ‘and you may have
