She took a moment to consider that, still chewing at the fish. Outside, her mount jetted nervously back and forth, and she sent out an Art-thought to calm it.
Your meaning?
Meaning? I mean just what I say. Something new. His signing was unmistakable, emphatic. Tell me, you keep the old bargains?
She stiffened when she saw the hand-signs. The old bargains: it was not a subject her people, the particular families of her people, spoke of, but it was little surprise that Caractes knew of them. The old man was aware of a great deal he had no business knowing. His gaze was fixed on her, now, eyes nested within creases, but sharp as spearpoints for all that.
We try, was all she responded, at last.
You fail, he jabbed back at her.
She kicked off from her place beside him, abruptly angry. You know not what you speak of.
A single slash of his hand cut her off. You fail, or they fail, he elaborated, exaggerating his gesture for the ‘they’. Either in their tribute, or your harvest.
It is not as it once was. For generations now it has not been so. Contact has been less and less. It is their failure, not ours.
Perhaps they do not see it so, was his return comment on that, and then he was standing, staring upwards as though he could see through the dead old shell above him.
Each day it comes, his hands said, as he continued looking up. With a scrabble and a kick, he hauled himself out from under the dead crab’s shadow, leaving her no option but to follow.
He pointed, and at first she saw just two lights – two limn-lamps she supposed – being dragged through the water above them. Then her vision compensated for distance and the dark, and she realized they were eyes.
Her mount was beside her immediately, and she put a hand out to comfort it, still staring. There is something new under the sea, the old man had said, and here it was – like nothing she had seen. It came sculling through the water on jointed legs, but like no swimming crab or shrimp she had ever seen, lazily coasting along with steady strokes of its six paddle-ended limbs.
From over the Edge? she signed, and Caractes nodded grimly. Then he added, to her surprise, You speak to any Pelagists recently?
A few.
Go find them again. Tell them to pass this on. I hear from them about land-kinden. I don’t know why they talk to me about land-kinden. I never wanted to know. I hear, though, and now I see.
That is not land-kinden, her hands insisted. It is some Onychoi beast, some new kind, strayed from some other sea, perhaps.
He made a derisive gesture. Look, only look, he insisted. See what is there, not what you want. Take your steed and go closer, if you dare.
That last remark stung her, so she took to the saddle and sent her mount speeding backwards in a wide, rising circle, keeping her eyes on the gently rowing creature above. It was large, she saw, but not so very large as all that. She had a backswept holster of spears beside her, and she fingered one speculatively. A great sea-beast with glowing eyes, she thought. That would fetch a great deal at Hermatyre, dead or alive.
She readied a spear and peered into the nearest burning eye, and saw the faces, and understood what Caractes had meant.
A moment later she was lancing off through the sea, as fast as her beast would take her. Caractes was right. She could not go to Hermatyre with this news, not given the Edmir’s nature and history. She must go to those who had the knowledge and impartiality to deal with this. She must find a Pelagist and pass on the word.
‘Now, you must be wondering just what’s going on, land-kinden,’ Mandir addressed them, marching proudly in front of his mob of guards as though he was the tallest denizen of the Hot Stations.
‘Not really,’ Stenwold said tiredly. ‘It’s becoming depressingly familiar.’
‘Nobody understands the value of you people,’ Mandir threw over his shoulder.
Stenwold tried to stop walking, after that one remark, but one of the Onychoi just shoved him onwards. The heat, which had been merely oppressive, was becoming unbearable. Stenwold’s ears were expecting the ring of hammer on anvil any moment, but of course they had nothing so wholesomely familiar down here. ‘What do you mean?’ he demanded. ‘Since when were you familiar with people like us?’
Mandir chuckled indulgently. ‘You think you’re the first land-kinden we’ve had down here? Think again. It’s been a good two dozen we’ve seen, over the years.’
‘You’ve got two dozen land-kinden here?’ Stenwold asked, aghast.
‘Well, no, not at the moment. Most of your kind don’t take to life down here.’ Mandir gave them an awkward smile over his shoulder. ‘The food, sometimes, or maybe being cooped up. Some of them turned out to be of no use at all, so it’s a gamble, you see, whether you two can do what I need or not. Or some of them tried to escape, which never goes down well, but a few managed to live here a while before they… failed to thrive. I hope you’ll be more of those. I hope you’ll be happy here, for that matter. You do right by me, and you’ll get anything you ask for – except out.’
Stenwold exchanged grim looks with Laszlo. ‘So I’m to be your slave, am I?’
Mandir turned aside abruptly. Apparently they were nearly at their destination. ‘Now, I know that word,’ he said. ‘Another of your kind threw it at me. She wasn’t happy here, I’m sad to say, but if it makes the place feel more like home, then consider yourselves now my slaves.’ He was grinning broadly and Stenwold honestly could not say whether he expected them to thank him, or whether he was just being sly.
‘I don’t understand,’ the Beetle said flatly. ‘As far as I know, we’re the first of our kind to have been subjected to this place. Or have you been kidnapping people from our ships as well?’
‘You wound me,’ Mandir said, walking up to him cockily. He was half Stenwold’s size, and only the clustering armoured hulks all around saved him from a broken neck. ‘Rescued, landsman, rescued. You people build your little floating barques, but they don’t all stay afloat. I have my own people waiting up there beyond the Edge, my scavenging parties, and when the waves are high they keep an eye out. Sometimes they’re lucky and they find some of your people about to meet the sea the hard way. So we rescue them. For a while, anyway – if they’re useful. I do hope you’re going to be useful. We have it hard here at the Stations. Everybody works. A lot of your people died from not being able to work.’
Stenwold shook his head. ‘And what possible work could you need us for?’
‘I’ll let our resident expert explain,’ Mandir replied. ‘Now you’re here, you can be his slave. You’ll find he’s a tough one. A couple of years we’ve had him now. Of course, he’s one of the useful ones, best we’ve ever had. You listen to him and show yourself a little willing, and maybe life with us won’t be so bad.’ His expansive gesture narrowed unexpectedly into a simple pointing finger. ‘Through here now.’
Stenwold and Laszlo were bustled into an irregular-shaped chamber, its walls and lumpy ceiling cobbled together from disparate pieces, just like the rest of the Hot Stations. What struck Stenwold first was the furniture. It was the sort you’d get if you had described a workbench and a table and some chairs to a blind man, and had him construct them out of organic detritus, but the concept behind them was clear enough. Paper, or the stuff that passed for sea-kinden paper, was heaped in thick stacks everywhere, some of it blank and some of it densely scribbled over with designs.
There was a man present, staring at them. For a moment Stenwold just looked bleakly back, unable to quite understand what he was seeing. The stranger’s bluish-white skin was wrinkled and creased, his bare chest showed every rib, the stomach below it withered like a paunchy man gone thin. His hair was long and dirty-white, falling past his shoulders, and he sported a short and ragged beard that showed the scars of sporadic attempts to prune it. He was an Ant-kinden, a Tseni Ant-kinden – there was no mistaking it.
‘War Master Maker?’ the old Ant croaked. A bulky stylus had dropped from his hand on seeing the new arrivals.
It was the voice that confirmed it. Before hearing him speak, Stenwould would never have placed him.
‘Master Tseitus?’ he breathed, still not quite believing it.
‘I knew,’ the Ant breathed. ‘I knew you’d come for me, after all this time. I knew you’d come to rescue me.’
He said this despite the wall of mailed Onychoi that stood at Stenwold’s back, despite Mandir’s grin. His face
