was childlike in that moment, desperate to make his words become true against all odds. It should have been true, Stenwold thought. There should have been a Collegium army at his back. They should have Mandir in irons, his guards scattered across the waters. It should have been that way, and not this shabby slavery.
‘We thought you were dead,’ Stenwold told the man softly. ‘We all assumed, when you never returned…’
‘Learned a lot from this one even before we got him home,’ Mandir explained, perpetually jolly. ‘His barque, well… took us half a year to understand it, but we knew just from that that he was special. Not disappointed since, either. Our man here’s a genius. You should learn something from him.’
‘Tseitus,’ said Stenwold, ‘just what is it they make you do?’
One bluish hand waved vaguely at the heaped papers. ‘Designs. Sketches. They want machines, submersibles, automotives. It’s new to them, you see, and they weren’t very good at it. They were still… oh, you know, they hadn’t refined their equations, regarding all the old principles of mechanics, but they’re a bright lot and they’re learning. So I draw for them, and some of them have even learned our writing.’
‘You help these people?’ Stenwold wanted to know. ‘Willingly?’
‘And so will you,’ Mandir told him, ‘and your little friend.’ He prodded Stenwold in the waist. ‘Everyone works. No work, no food. You’d be surprised how quickly you see just how reasonable I’m being. Your friend here, as I now see he is, would be dead without us, just like all you land-kinden who end up down here.’
‘Not me,’ Stenwold snapped at him. ‘Not Laszlo, either. We were dragged down here against our will.’
To his surprise, this made a difference to Mandir. He saw the man at least weighing the information up, revealing the first spark of decency he had observed in the Stations’ master. Ultimately, though, Mandir’s decision was, ‘Then you’re unlucky, and I’m sorry, but you’re much too valuable to us. We need people like you and I can’t pass that up.’ He nodded, as though convincing himself. ‘I’ll leave you here to renew your acquaintance. Tseitus will show you what we need.’
‘This complete separation of land and sea is a fiction,’ Tseitus was explaining the next day. The subject had arisen after several pointed remarks about there being no intended rescue. Stenwold, in short temper, had declared that nobody had even known that there was a here down below that he could be rescued from, but Tseitus was not going to relinquish his grievance that easily. He was the first land-kinden, other than Laszlo, that Stenwold had seen for a tenday, but any joy in that encounter was being eroded by the same ascerbic, self- involved attitude Stenwold recalled from the war.
The war where he did us such good service, he reminded himself, trying to pay more attention. It was difficult, though.
‘Your servant’s a mariner, so ask him about sea-kinden,’ Tseitus threw at him.
Laszlo had been lounging at the entrance to their workroom, chatting to a couple of Onychoi around the same size as himself. He glanced back and shrugged. ‘Stories, Mar’Maker, nothing but. You hear some fellow talk, who spotted people in the waves during a storm, or heard some woman singing, out where there wasn’t anyone. Beautiful maids with hind ends of lobsters or cuttlefish or whatnot. Me, I never believed it.’
‘That’s because you’re Apt,’ Tseitus told him, having divined this from Laszlo’s interest in his sketches. ‘If you had Inapt crew with you, they’d be more credulous. Normally that’s a poor quality, and why I never really took to the Inapt, but in this case they’d be right.’ He jabbed Stenwold in the chest with a thin blue finger. ‘Your old masters, the Moths, I’ll wager they had links with the sea peoples. Just a shame they never told you about it. In Tsen we always knew better.’
‘You’re probably right,’ Stenwold mumbled. He had pointedly refused to participate in Tseitus’s work yesterday, and had just as pointedly not been fed. Hunger had then given him strange dreams.
‘They say here that the land means death, but it’s a nonsense. Aside from Mandir’s mercy missions, I hear of certain cults and societies that hold links with the land, and therefore certain of your Lowlanders that keep faith with the sea. It wouldn’t surprise me.’
‘Well it surprised me,’ Stenwold declared, trying to put a note of finality into his voice, but Tseitus was not accepting it.
‘You’ve never been to the Atoll Coast, have you?’ the Ant asked.
‘To Tsen? No, my interests always lay eastwards,’ Stenwold admitted. There was a dream that kept recurring to him, tearing rents in his sleep and troubling his peace of mind, and he was not quite sure what to make of it. It had been intense, all the more so for a man who seldom recalled such nightly servings of his imagination. A passionate dream, it had been, but it had not involved Arianna, there in his mind. It had not even been like the shameful and lurid thoughts his mind had imposed on Atryssa, Tisamon’s beloved, when they had all still been young. Instead, the slender figure that had recently walked through his mind had been that of Lyess of the Medusoi, with her skin so pale as to be near-translucent, her white eyes so wide. It seemed perverse of his mind to conjure such a scene, after the days the pair of them had spent in sullen silence within the chambers of her companion, but in the dream he recalled that almost-embrace, at his lowest ebb, when he had been dragged half-drowned aboard her. In the dream, though, she had broken her awkward reserve and her touch had been cool and yielding, while her arms, her lips, the coils of her hair…
Tseitus snorted. ‘The east,’ he said derisively, as though the whole business of the Wasp Empire would have looked after itself had Stenwold only put his priorities straight. ‘You Lowlanders live such soft lives,’ he accused. ‘Collegium is all luxury: a port city so surrounded by green farmland that your kinden even turn your nose up at fish. Ridiculous! The Atoll Coast is harsh and Tsen, Seym, Cerrih, all of them have to look to the sea. We know the sea-kinden.’
Stenwold stared at him. Seeing his expression, Tseitus snorted with satisfied disdain. ‘You know, of course, where the name “the Atoll Coast” derives, Maker?’ Tseitus was clearly the sort of lecturer that College students loathed. ‘Why, because there are islands all along the sea’s edge, hundreds of them, and mostly windswept rocks. But yet – they are not rocks: they are coral. There are reefs and reefs, Maker, so that navigators and ships’ pilots find themselves in a sought-after and well-rewarded profession. Those reefs are not mere stone, you understand.’
‘Arketoi…’ Stenwold murmured.
‘The colony of Grande Atoll is some leagues outside of Seym Harbour,’ Tseitus told him. ‘They are not so shy, there. Not so very long ago, we learned that land- and sea-kinden meeting means only trouble: a war between worlds that washed earth and water both with blood. After that, over these last centuries, there has been some small contact. I will not say that land and sea go hand in hand, but we have diplomats, even a little carefully controlled trade. We have little they want, though. This’ – he waved his hand to indicate what Stenwold assumed was the Hot Stations in its entirety – ‘is different. This Aptitude, this lust for artifice, Grande Atoll would not understand. They are all Inapt there, I think, or else just ignorant.’ As he spoke, he continued sketching deftly with the strangely shaped reservoir pen the sea-kinden had made for him. ‘You don’t realize, Maker… you don’t realize at all.’
Blank white eyes, and a touch like silk…
Stenwold blinked at the old Ant. ‘What don’t I realize?’
From the doorway there came a sudden bellow of laughter. Laszlo had enlisted one of the broad-shouldered guards into whatever conversation he was having there. Stenwold saw him gesturing some point and then Tseitus made a loud click of annoyance with his tongue. A moment later the little party, Laszlo included, had stepped outside, smirking.
‘You don’t realize how lucky we land-kinden were to have got there first. Oh, perhaps there’s something about the land that inspires progress, I won’t deny. Certainly I understand that the people of Grande Atoll consider the land a very hostile place: too hot, too cold, too barren. The sea provides them with everything they need, whereas we must struggle. But had it been any other way round…’
‘What?’ Stenwold demanded, feeling abruptly combative. ‘I’ve seen sea-kinden engineering. It’s nothing special, apprentices are set harder tasks – and that’s with you and your predecessors filling in the gaps for them, no less.’
‘You miss the point,’ argued Tseitus with scholarly derision. ‘I would guess that Aptitude here has been widespread for less than a century, or at least they made no use of it before then. They are behind, Maker. They are centuries behind us. No wonder their work looks clumsy. Consider their natural advantages, though, and you will see that if it were we who happened to be behind, the gap would now be that much the greater. Consider their methods of manufacture.’
