the abyss, but they are human still, even she, and they were never meant for such privation.
Did they take this burden on willingly? Or did we drive them to it? Is it true, this story that they tell?
‘Lyess,’ he said. She simply eyed him, saying nothing, so he pressed on. ‘You spoke about memory, that your beast here has no mind, but only a kind of, what, collective memory?’
She nodded cautiously, as though regretting having mentioned it.
‘How far back does it go?’ he pressed her.
‘Far,’ she said, which was all he should have anticipated.
‘They tell it, in Hermatyre, that the reason you sea-kinden are down here at all is because you were thrown off the land. By my people, I suppose – my dim and distant predecessors. Does this memory reach that far back?’
‘Perhaps,’ she said.
‘Would you see…? I have to know. If it can be known at all, I must know whether it’s true.’ Surely it can’t be guilt I feel over this? Or is it indignation at being falsely accused? Is it because I was once a historian that I can’t just dismiss it just as ‘all a very long time ago’?
‘I can listen to the echo,’ she said. ‘I may hear what you wish to know. There are no guarantees but, if we meet again, then perhaps I shall tell you.’
He nodded, dissatisfied but sensing he would get nothing more. Apparently ransacking the memories of the jellyfish nation would take some time.
By then they had a companion in the waters, some kind of squid-headed snail, and a man in armour came swimming towards them effortlessly. As a hole began to form in the floor of their chamber, Lyess knelt down calmly and waited, as though Stenwold had simply ceased to be present.
The water beyond Lyess’s sanctum was so clenchingly heavy that Stenwold could barely draw breath. Against that, it was warm, and grew warmer as they neared the Hot Stations. Nemoctes had to drag him through two inundated chambers before they found what was obviously a makeshift hatch, comprising just a hinged round plug set off-centre in an uneven wall. When it was levered outwards and open by someone within, a great deal of water cascaded through, carrying Stenwold along with it. He ended up on the floor with water draining away on all sides, at the feet of a broad Onychoi who was wrestling the hatch into a position where the sheer pressure of water would keep it secure.
It was baking hot, Stenwold noticed, and the Onychoi wore nothing but a loincloth. He wondered how Nemoctes could stand there dressed in his armour and not sweat himself to death. Except, of course, it’s not metal armour; it’s some weird thing they extrude, or whatever the term is. Wearily he clambered to his feet, tugging at the neck of his tunic. There were a good dozen people in immediate view, mostly attending to leaks, and they were all dressed in just enough clothing to cover their modesty, but even so Stenwold felt self-conscious. Going without shoes was bad enough. Going bare-chested would seem positively barbaric.
Nemoctes was watching him closely. And is that all these Pelagics do? Little had been said before – Lyess’s obstinate silence having made things awkward – but Stenwold sighed wearily and asked, ‘What now?’
‘Come with me,’ Nemoctes instructed him.
‘Will that markedly improve my situation?’ Stenwold asked him acidly.
‘Will it see you home, you mean? I hope so, but I make no promises,’ the Pelagist replied. ‘However, I can swear it will do you another form of good.’ He turned and headed past the toiling construction workers, whereupon Stenwold, as so often recently, had little enough choice but to follow him.
The chamber beyond was broad and long, though with a perilously low ceiling propped up by a dozen slanting pillars. It all looked rather slipshod and hastily built, and that very departure from the organically smooth perfection of sea-kinden design might have been welcome, save for the weight of water beyond. ‘I suppose you can’t persuade your Builder-kinden to come out this far,’ Stenwold observed.
‘One cannot get the Arketoi to go anywhere.’ Nemoctes tossed the words back over his shoulder. ‘They build where they will, and others are drawn there to live as their guests. There have always been little hand-made outposts in the depths, places at which my people gather, where the Benthists stop off to trade, where loners go who want nothing to do with any other folk. The Hot Stations are something different. New.’
Stenwold had more questions, but they had now come out into a much grander chamber, which seemed a slum and a ghetto and a market all in one. People of many kinden had gathered here, dumped a sack of goods and a tattered bundle of possessions down, and made it their home. The place boasted a mad assortment of hastily- tacked up screens of the brightly coloured cloth the sea-kinden produced, choked with the sounds and smells of what must have been two hundred people all busy at something. There was food being prepared, mostly in the nature of raw and salted fish, and people haggling over it, and over tools and clothes, leathery paper, elaborate jewelry. A thin Kerebroi woman was tattooing the expansive back of an Onychoi man with an abstract pattern of vibrant colours, using nothing but her bare hands. Another Onychoi, one of the small ones, sat cross-legged under a ragged awning with a pair of full bowls placed beside him. A faint tracery was taking shape within them as he practised his Art.
Then someone was rushing at Stenwold, pushing through the crowd at waist level, and for a moment he was instinctively reaching for the sword he had not worn in many days.
‘Mar’Maker!’
The Fly-kinden was grinning at him like fury, standing before Stenwold with his hands on his hips, as proud as if he was the new master of all they surveyed.
The Beetle smiled down at him wanly. ‘I hope you’ve had a smoother journey than I did, Laszlo.’
‘Oh, more than that, far more than that,’ the Fly promised him, and then cast a look up at Nemoctes. ‘You go in front, shelly. Master Maker and I need to catch up.’
Nemoctes merely looked amused at this, and obligingly led the way, several steps in advance. Stenwold leant down to catch Laszlo’s following words.
‘You see,’ the little man was saying. ‘You recall Wys, right? Her that sprung us from Hermatyre?’
‘The mercenary,’ Stenwold confirmed.
‘Very mercenary,’ agreed Laszlo. ‘And she’s got her eyes open, that one. She’s not scared of the land, and she doesn’t want to make war on it neither. Trade, Mar’Maker, that’s what she’s after, and she says she’ll pitch us up overwater just as soon as she can. Whatever happens, whatever this fellow and that slimer Heiracles and the rest settle on, you do your best to get yourself out of here on Wys’s barque.’
‘But will Wys go against her employers?’ Stenwold pressed, deciding this all sounded much too convenient.
‘Heiracles, she doesn’t like. Nemoctes she likes, a bit – and so do I, I think – but he’s not paying. She knows that if we get something going, her lot and my lot, then everyone will become very rich, and maybe she can set up some place just like this. They say the Man, the one who runs the Stations, he was just a freelance like her once.’
They had caught up with Wys, by then, and Nemoctes was greeting her gravely. The twin shadows of Fel and Phylles were at their accustomed places, one behind either shoulder of their diminutive captain. Stenwold offered the woman a nod, and she grinned at him from a face filled with avarice. Laszlo’s words seemed to be written there in a clear script, and Stenwold felt his heart pick up, at a ray of sunny hope that had somehow found its way down here to the depths.
But play it calmly, he told himself, and he hoped Laszlo would do the same. If the other sea-kinden became suspicious, then not even Wys would be able to make a clean break from them.
‘I’ve been going mad waiting for you to get here,’ Laszlo said. ‘We’ve been here, what… four days, I reckon, maybe more.’
‘There was some trouble.’ Stenwold’s tone did not invite question. In his mind he saw again, briefly, the blood-clouded waters where Gribbern had met his end.
‘Well, keep our wits about us, and trouble might be a thing of the past, or at least this kind of…’ Laszlo trailed off. ‘Ah, curse it.’
It took Stenwold a moment to see what had gone wrong. Wys had drawn a blade, her face suddenly wiped clear of humour. Fel and Phylles were already stepping forwards, forming up in front of her. Nemoctes’s expression, as he turned back towards the landsmen, was startled.
A hand came down on Stenwold’s shoulder, and drove him to his knees with the armoured weight of it. Abruptly, monolithic mailed Onychoi were shouldering aside the crowd, approaching from all quarters. Laszlo
