noticed that I’ve taken a shine to you. You’re not so different to us, for all you’re clueless. I keep wanting to shave your head in order to make a civilized man of you, but otherwise you’re just a human being, like we all are.’
A fair sight more than you or your crew, Laszlo thought, but he just nodded diplomatically.
‘Heiracles, Nemoctes, and Claeon even, none of them have the brains of a stone,’ Wys observed thoughtfully. ‘What do they see in you? That you’re either a threat, or something to conquer, or some kind of, what, captive militia to rule the colony with? No, no, no, stupid, all of them. I’ve seen you. You go and talk to Spillage like you’re an engineer. Your clothes are in a poor state, and you wear more of them than anyone could want, but I can see they were tailored well enough. Your people have potential.’
‘Well, thank you,’ said Laszlo acidly, and she put up a warning hand before his face instantly.
‘You just rein in that tongue and listen to someone when they’re telling you something to your advantage,’ she snapped. ‘Wouldn’t it be a tragedy if we never got to the Stations at all, but left you somewhere where you could just kick off for home, up above the waves?’
His breath caught and he wanted to shake her, to clutch her tight. ‘Home?’ he whispered.
‘Your people make things differently to us. That means they must make different things from ours,’ she said. ‘Things we’ve never seen. Things that are common as dirt to you will be like crab’s ink down here,’ she said, which he assumed was a rare or non-existent commodity. ‘Things we take for granted, well, your lot’d tear each other apart for them. You see where I’m going with this?’
‘Trade,’ he replied.
‘Surely, trade,’ she agreed. ‘Stuff Heiracles and stuff their war, I say. If your people, your family, were of a mind for barter, then why not? All anyone’s ever said about the land was that it was death, that the landsmen – if there even were any – were murdering savages, and that everything up there was like poison. Now here you are, and if we haven’t managed to poison you, I reckon you’re not likely to poison us. So how about we forget the Stations and start making some money?’
‘What about Master Maker?’ Laszlo asked her.
‘Nothing to do with me,’ she said. ‘Heiracles will sell him somewhere, or Nemoctes, or who knows what. This is between you and me, Laszlo.’
Home. My family. This was the best offer he was likely to get and surely, once there, he could do something to rescue Stenwold…
That seemed unlikely, he had to admit. By the time any reliable contact was established between the Tidenfree crew and Wys’s people, Stenwold would have gone on to whatever fate the sea held in wait for him.
Inwardly, Laszlo swore.
‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ he said slowly, ‘but I do have to get Master Maker out. It’s not right, otherwise. But, listen, if we both get up on to land, then I promise you’ve got a deal. My chief’ll be happy for it. You’d like him – he’s just your sort of person. We’re like you, kind of, my family. We’re all making our own way in the world, too. Get us both back, and you’ve got yourself a deal.’
Wys remained expressionless for a moment, wholly impossible to read, but then she smiled unexpectedly. ‘You’re a tricky little pismire, you are,’ she told him. ‘Well, I reckon it’s the Stations then, and there we’ll see what we can’t do for your friend.’
Travelling with Lyess was strangely like riding in the cabin of an airship. Despite the labouring bell of the creature above them, it was impossible to tell whether they were making headway or just being coasted along by the current flowing outside. For all the creature’s size, they were like a speck of nothing amid the vastness of the ocean. By Sten-wold’s reckoning, most of the time they might as well be stalled in place and going nowhere.
To relieve the sameness of their voyaging, he tried meditating on Art, something he had not done in a decade. He was unsure what malformed Art might come to a man, locked down here in the depths, but the gentle rhythm of the huge jellyfish was conducive to letting his mind wander, and at least it passed the time. Sometimes, when he came to himself, though, he found Lyess sitting right next to him, a fraction of an inch from touching – and watching him, always watching.
She is lonely, he understood sadly. She had not realized how lonely she was until I gave her something to contrast it with.
When the sea did give his eyes something to feast on, the meals it provided sat ill with him. On one occasion they saw a battle, or at least something like a battle. A Benthic train straggled out in a long dark line against the grey mud of the sea bottom, comprising a chain of armoured beasts and the occasional equally armoured machine. Against them had come a tide of orange and red, and at first Stenwold could not discern what he was looking at. It seemed to be a sea of spines and spikes, a crawling carpet of points and jagged edges. Then his eyes began to single out movement, and he saw that the attackers were great thorny starfish – many-fingered, creeping monsters – along with some that resembled simply impossible balls of lance-like skewers, advancing like tight-knit units of pikemen. In amongst these thronging creatures were men, lithe men with orange skins that seemed likewise rough and spined. Wearing piecemeal armour of bronze, wielding spears and forward-curving swords, they threw themselves at the Benthists in a berserk fury, their animals surging on every side.
The Benthists were swarming to the defence: armoured Onychoi lumbering forth with mauls and swords and the reinforced claws of their Art, while their own creatures snapped and clipped at the enemy with their great claws. They snipped off the spikes of their attackers and pincered through their questing limbs, but Stenwold saw several of the ponderous crustaceans overwhelmed by the crawling onslaught, enwrapped by razor-coated arms and then somehow simply taken apart, pieces of leg and shell drifting off between the assailants in a pale cloud.
The human protagonists were no less savage. Here an Onychoi took his enemy’s arm between claw and dagger, and severed it neatly at the shoulder. There one of the attackers brought the honed tip of his blade to bear in cracking through a defender’s breastplate. The worst thing was the pace of conflict, for it was all so slow, so weighted down by the water, as though they were enacting some leisurely and complex dance, fighting and dying at such a leaden pace that every victim must have had ample time to contemplate his unavoidable fate.
‘What are they?’ Stenwold asked, indicating the aggressors.
‘Echinoi,’ Lyess told him. ‘Sometimes they attack the colonies, and they say that’s the only reason the Builders tolerate anyone else within their homes. The Echinoi are everyone’s enemies. They were first in the sea, the memories say. We other kinden drove them into the deeper places, and they have never forgotten. Some say they possess colonies in the great uncharted wastes, but I have heard of nobody who has seen such things for themselves.’
They drifted on over the sluggish melee, and soon the carnage was left behind in the gloom, only the train’s winking lights remaining as distant star-like testimony. Stenwold continued watching for a long time, and saw several of them wink out. Not for the first time did he consider what a terrible thing it would be, to die out here.
Then there were the fish, or at least they looked like fish to Stenwold. He became aware of them only when the progress of Lyess’s companion changed, becoming more laboured, and his own stomach told him they were descending fast. He looked about, to find Lyess seeming in a panic, staring about her. There was a dawning light above, like the first silver echo of sunlight, but it was fading, even as he noticed it.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked, but then he spotted them: sleek grey darts swooping about them, lunging in towards the bell above, and then twitching away. There were a half dozen of them attacking from all sides, one after another, and always from above, so that Stenwold thought it would make more sense to get to the surface to protect her companion’s top, but instead they continued dropping through the water as swiftly as they could.
The fish were never still, but kept ducking beneath the jellyfish’s rippling mantle, each in turn virtually putting a narrow eye up against its transparent flanks. Stenwold’s own gaze met theirs, and he experienced a distinct shock of contact, like meeting the stare of some intelligent but utterly inhuman entity. Worse was the expression about the intruders’ mouths.
‘Cursed fish was smiling at me,’ he said, shaken.
‘They are Menfish,’ Lyess spat angrily, and her companion shuddered under a renewed assault. ‘They are a bane on the Pelagists. They attack us whenever they can. They think like humans, even though they are nothing but fish, and they hate us.’
‘Can they harm us?’ Stenwold asked her. The incessant lunging attack of the Menfish was becoming swifter and more violent.
