with fury, right before him.
‘You dare not mock!’ the man shouted in his face.
‘I dare,’ Rosander growled.
Pellectes’s nostrils flared. ‘Your ancestors were driven, too. You too have lost a homeland. It is your duty, carried down from parent to child across all the centuries, to reclaim it. It is your destiny to be the agent of our return. How dare you jest at such? What would you say to your ancestors, when you mock their spilt blood?’
‘I’d tell them they were weak fools to be pushed around, and that I like the sea just fine. Don’t try to infect me with your cant. My bannermen and I, we want conquest and plunder. Keep your ideology to yourself.’
‘You must not sully the cause-!’ Pellectes started ranting, and then stopped. Teornis had watched Rosander draw a knife, a remarkably understated move for so huge a man. His arm, encumbered by all that weight of stone, had struck swiftly nonetheless. He had the curved blade pressed against one side of the Kerebroi’s throat, the curved claw of his gauntlet alongside the other. Two tiny trickles of blood patterned Pellectes’s neck. The Littoralist had gone very still, eyes almost out of his head with compounded rage and fear.
‘Good. Now keep silent,’ Rosander addressed him, and turned his wrist to take the knife away. The Littoralist stepped back shakily, hands going to the two shallow, bleeding nicks.
‘Have this one make arrangements then,’ the Onychoi instructed Claeon, jabbing at Teornis with the blood- tipped spike. ‘Make it soon, though. Any longer and my train will be on their way. They’re not meant for this colony life, and neither am I.’
He turned and lumbered away, trailing faint motes of stone dust.
Pellectes bared his teeth after him. ‘The barbarian!’ he spat. ‘Edmir, there must be some other way to further our cause. Must we rely on such ignorant beasts?’
Claeon folded his hands before him. ‘But I do rely on him, Pellectes. I need him, alas.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Moreover I only need you because you’re of some use to him, and so if he decides to separate your babbling head from your shoulders, I shall cheer him to the echo. You listen to me, now. It was I who made your worthless Littoralists something more than a laughing stock in Hermatyre, and I can undo that just as easily, if you cease to be of use. Do what I say and don’t cross me, or I’ll have Arkeuthys eat the lot of you – and a sour stomach that would give him, no doubt.’
Pellectes kept his peace stiffly, mortally offended but not deigning to make a reply. Claeon shook his head dolefully. ‘Honestly, Pellectes, do you really believe all that business? About the land being a place of plenty? I’m reliably informed it’s horrible up there.’
‘When we retake our ancestral home, it will become paradise again,’ Pellectes replied, with absolute conviction.
‘Whatever you say. I’ll have a message for your spy soon enough. Now get out of the palace and go back to your wretched followers.’ He waited until the Littoralist had stalked off, and then turned to Teornis. ‘You see what I must deal with? Having brutes and madmen as my allies.’
Neither of whom you make much effort to keep as allies, Teornis considered, but he nodded sympathetically. ‘You’ll want a message from me,’ he noted.
‘As soon as we can find some way that you can write it.’ Claeon shook his head, for it had proved an unexpected barrier. The Kerebroi wrote in some incomprehensible fashion that involved setting patterns down somehow on the thick paper they processed from pressed seaweed. Furthermore, the characters they used were wholly unfamiliar to Teornis, which had quite thrown him. He had never even considered there being a different manner of writing, but the squiggles and half-pictures of the sea-kinden held no meaning for him whatsoever.
That had its advantages, of course. His own script would baffle them equally, so he need have no fear of Claeon or Pellectes deciphering his codes. His messages would reach his own people pristine, and full of hidden meaning.
‘And the other matter…’ Claeon said, with uncharacteristic delicacy. ‘Aside from Rosander’s war, what about the… lost boy?’
‘Well, I’m not sure what resources my people will have to hand, without my guidance, but I will have them start the search,’ Teornis assured him. And they will find nothing save tantalizing hints that require a greater knowledge to pursue.
And then I shall be out of this foul, damp, barbarous place, and I shall find this prince of theirs if he is to be found, and we shall then see if I cannot make sure Claeon will live in fear for the rest of his days.
Helleron. In this alien place, the familiar name sounded strange inside his head. It’s Helleron-under-Sea, it really is.
The chimneys were the most obvious parallel. They were twisted columns of stone, impossibly taller than any real factory stacks could be, and what they were gouting could not, of course, be black smoke, but it looked like it, and the shimmer in the water around them was like the heat haze from a foundry or a forge. Other columns around them also mirrored the chimneys, save that they sprouted broad fans or beating arms at irregular intervals. It was a Helleron dreamscape, a nightmare reflection.
At the foot of the chimneys lay the town, and it was a town. Stenwold would accept no substitute, certainly not the sea-kinden word ‘colony’. This community was not grown by Archetoi, nor was it made from the scooped- out armour of sea-things. Men and women had built this. They were building it still. Even if the pieces that they were assembling it from were of shell and accreated strangeness, even if the crafts they were using would have mystified an honest Collegium carpenter, still they were assembling a kind of shanty town of interconnected hovels, and it would have sat nicely at the rear of a factory in the Helleron slums. Scuto could have lived here, he thought, but the idea of thorny Scuto struggling with a caul was too much.
The Hot Stations were lit like a town, too. The globes and baubles of soft light were everywhere, but not as though they had grown there. They were tacked on unevenly, or bobbed at the end of lines like luminous balloons, but the intent was plain to Stenwold: street lighting just like the gaslamps of home. The seabed all around was brightly lit, and there were other little clusters of lamps visible in the darkness beyond, perhaps mining or salvage operations, weed farms or Benthist outposts, who knew? In the ambient light, Stenwold saw other chimneys, as tall and crooked as these smokers but quite dead: hollow spires of marbled stone rising above a bare skeleton of the township, which was even now being removed piecemeal to its new location. Stenwold thought he could discern more exhausted chimneys beyond that. The Hot Stations was a movable feast, it appeared.
There was a remarkable bustle out here. Construction gangs surged between the current township and its deceased echo, bringing over everything that was worth rescuing and finding somewhere new to secure it. The workers were mostly either the diminutive Onychoi or some other kinden, big and grey and heavy-footed, who seemed to be doing most of the nailing down. The simple sight of people doing something as mundane as putting up buildings almost brought a tear to Stenwold’s eye. The waters above were not empty either, for there were plenty of swimmers, squid-riders, a half-dozen submersibles carved out of straight or spiral shells, and a broad scattering of domesticated sea life. Nothing ventured too close to the black-belching chimneys, where the water shimmered and twisted like the air above a fire. The ‘hot’ of the Hot Stations was obviously not to be taken lightly.
There were no others like Lyess and her companion, he saw, and he sensed that she was not happy to be here. He turned and found her staring at him again. There was something desperate about her, but she did not know what she wanted, only that her way of life up till now had been punctuated, mangled by the imposition of a surly, brooding land-kinden.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said to her, although he was not entirely sure what for. She said nothing in return, did not stir. He sensed that she was searching for words and finding none. That she will miss me? That she is now well rid of me? That she wishes Arkeuthys had simply eaten me, and spared her this disruption to her life?
‘I am here,’ she said at last, to his puzzlement, until a faint hollow voice answered her.
‘I shall come to you.’ Stenwold recognized Nemoctes’s vicarious tones. ‘You have done well.’
Lyess’s face developed a new expression and, as it did Stenwold realized that she had never truly shown anything of herself in her features before now. It was not pride at having served Nemoctes well, but abject misery, unfiltered and unadulterated. It washed over her and was gone in moments, leaving her face a calm mask with those intent, all-encompassing eyes, but that racked expression would stay in Stenwold’s mind for a long time.
Oh, they have made many sacrifices, he thought in sudden understanding, to come to an agreement with the sea monsters they live with. They can survive out in the furthest reaches of the sea, travel the darkest pits of
