darted straight upwards, taking them by surprise. He had a knife out, but no way of putting it to much use. Stenwold tried to twist out from under the leaden grip but it closed hard on his shoulder, grating the bones, and hauled him upright again. He struck out at where his attacker’s head must be, best guess, and the impact on his elbow numbed his whole arm, the sand-coloured armour feeling hard as bronze.
Nemoctes was striding forward. He held a twisted pick-like weapon in his hand, and demanded, ‘What is this? Release that man!’ At his raised voice, other people took notice, and Stenwold saw several people slip from the crowd to stand near him. They were Kerebroi, mostly, although one was a dark-skinned woman with a white- speckled scalp, who might easily have been Gribbern’s cousin.
‘Easy, now, easy.’ The speaker slipped out from between two of the Onychoi, pausing before Stenwold to look up at him admiringly. ‘No need to get the axe out, Nemoctes. You know all’s fair in business.’
Nemoctes looked at the newcomer coldly: a little Onychoi man as bald as the rest of them, save for bushy eyebrows as extravagant as a moth’s antennae. He was loaded with gold, about his neck, about his hands, with a veritable belt of interwoven chains and bracers so finely shaped into minutely detailed seascapes that each one of them would probably have persuaded a Helleron magnate to part with his most profitable factory. A swatch of purple cloth, worn over one high shoulder like a half-cloak, completed the overall impression of an extremely successful self-made man.
‘Since when do you stand in the way of the Pelagists, Mandir?’ Nemoctes asked him quietly. ‘Are you so sick of receiving our custom?’
‘Don’t be angry, old wanderer.’ Mandir waved his hands dismissively. ‘You’ve not outstayed your welcome, so come and go as you please. Your prisoners, though… well, consider them now freed for the greater good.’
Fel and Phylles stood either side of Nemoctes now, both obviously looking for an opening, but there were a good eight or nine of the giant Onychoi and they were all armoured head to foot, their gauntlets vicious with spikes.
‘You see,’ said the extravagantly dressed little man, ‘we like Pelagists here, and Pelagists like us. You got any idea how many of your Deepclaw lot have traded in their old beasts for crawlers manufactured right here? The Hot Stations are the next great wave, old wanderer. There’s nothing like us anywhere. And so long as I’m the Man of the Stations, the Stations will run according to my rules.’
‘And what rule is it that has resulted in this?’ Nemoctes demanded.
Mandir pointed a lazy finger up to where Laszlo still hovered. ‘Land-kinden are considered the property of the Man, old wayfarer.’
‘I never heard that rule before.’
‘You never brought me any land-kinden before. The little one with the disregard for where the floor should be has been here a few days, now, long enough for my people to spot he was something special. Now this other fellow turns up, and I’m taking them off your hands, old wanderer. You don’t need to worry about them any more.’
‘I had not thought,’ Nemoctes said, his voice sick with anger, ‘that Claeon’s reach extended so far.’
‘Claeon?’ Mandir squawked. ‘Oh, piss on Claeon. If it’s Hermatyre you’re worried about then, trust me, I’ll keep them well out of Claeon’s grasp. They won’t be safer anywhere in all the oceans than with me. Now, how about you and Wys and the rest run along, and everybody can stay friends.’
‘This isn’t over,’ Nemoctes promised darkly.
‘Nothing ever is,’ Mandir told him cheerfully. ‘That’s what life’s about, isn’t it?’ As the Onychoi closed ranks about Stenwold, Mandir glanced up again. ‘Now you, the amazing, impossible Smallclaw, you feel like coming down?’
‘Feel like coming up here to get me?’ Laszlo taunted him, although Stenwold could see that he felt the strain of hanging in the air like that.
Mandir signalled, and one of his Onychoi raised some device. It was a tube of steel – or something very like steel – with two broad grips, and Stenwold understood it immediately, even though he could not have guessed at the principles on which it worked. The simple way it was held told him all he needed. It was the first ranged weapon he had yet seen in sea-kinden hands. The aperture, at the end directed towards Laszlo, was big enough to put a fist into.
‘I don’t want to hurt anyone,’ the Man of the Stations continued reasonably, ‘but I can’t have you rushing about the place doing impossible things, and making it look untidy. So come down and join your friend before this becomes a regrettable incident.’
Stenwold thought that Laszlo might make a go of it then, just dart off across the wide chamber, moving faster than the cumbersome weapon could follow, but instead he dropped to the ground meekly and walked into the grasp of one of the Onychoi. He managed a covert glance up towards Stenwold, though, and winked at him.
My man on the inside, is it? Stenwold reflected, without much hope. Shame we’re now both in the same inside. Betrayed and captured when I’m scarcely inside the door. I was right, this place is just like Helleron…
Twenty-Eight
It was not true that Caractes was known as the most unsociable man in the sea, but that was only because he stayed out of the way of so many that few even knew of him at all. He was an ancient Polypoi, his skin turned from purple-red almost to grey-blue with age, his hair not cropped in the fashion of his kind but grown out into a long white mane and beard that twitched and curled against the current. He lived at the foot of the cliffs they called the Edge, in the shadow of a great crab shell, that was the relic of a battle of his middle-age, which he had stubbornly dragged there after a moon’s worth of travel. His only companion was his beast, which made its home atop the shell, and there sieved the current with its waving, stinging tentacles.
Few of the sea-kinden lived so close to the Edge. It was considered a place of ill-fortune by most of them. A freak current or grand tide could wash away anyone venturing too close to the surface, perhaps casting them onto the deathly shoreline, there to die of thirst or heat, or be taken and eaten by the savage land-kinden. So the stories went, and since the beginning of recorded time the Edge had marked the limit of the sea-kinden world for all but the mad, the overly adventurous, the Littoralists, and a few select families of hunters and gatherers.
Some of these last still remained, although their trade had declined from generation to generation, so that those who still tried their luck in the shallow waters above were few indeed. Yet, those that held to their old ways found occasional cause to visit Caractes, as did a few of the Pelagists whose yearnings for travel took them not down to the depths but up to skirt the very periphery of the land.
He had a visitor now, and in truth he had wanted one – had impatiently waited for one, for the first time in years. A lean, long-legged Dart-kinden woman had come to his home, leaving her squid mount to hover and seek prey well out of reach of the giant anemone atop Caractes’s crabshell house.
The house had no walls, just that hollowed-out carapace propped up with stones, and their speech was conducted by signs: the second language that most sea-kinden learned from infancy, knowing how to perform their first hand gestures before even uttering their first words.
Caractes. She assembled the name from its separate syllables. How do you fare?
Lerean, he greeted her. Troubled.
Old? with a little mockery in her hands.
He glowered at her, his corona of hair lashing about his face. She was just a third of his age, which made her past her prime for a Dart-kinden, but they tended to age late, and all at once, and she was still swift and strong. You sit with me and wait, and we’ll see.
What? She eyed him suspiciously. They had only met three times before, over five years, and he was a mad old hermit, after all. Caractes pulled himself back under the cover of the shell, where his hands located a wrapped package of pressed fish, and then mutely offered her a piece. She took it and chewed, reclining down beside him in a single elegant motion.
This had better not be some late tide of romance, her hands warned him drily.
He sourly raised one shaggy eyebrow. I have daughters twice your age, he told her. There is something new under the sea.
