Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Sea Watch

Stenwold nodded, not trusting himself to speak. It means nothing, the better part of his mind insisted. At this remove, what difference can it make? But he was a scholar – a tactician, a spymaster and a statesman yes, but a scholar first. He wanted to know what guilt and what blood stained the hands of all those on the land.

‘Kneel,’ she instructed him and, when he raised his eyebrows at that, she cocked her head to one side and smiled, though it was an awkward attempt at the expression. ‘Or you will fall,’ she explained, ‘when my companion touches your mind.’

Suddenly he was less keen to know. The pulsating, curving walls around them seemed to loom always on the point of closing in. ‘My mind? Can you not simply tell…?’

‘You have called on the memories of ancient days, Stenwold Maker. Do you not wish to share them, now that they are laid before you?’ That smile was still there, and as false as ever, but there were real feelings behind it, though terrible feelings. To kneel before her would be to open himself to more than old memories, he realized. There was a need in her, that was desperate, yearning and predatory. She had put her barbs in him before, to lure him back to her, yet he felt bleakly that it was nothing of Stenwold Maker that she sought. It was merely that he was the first, the only, human being that she had shared her domain with, and after he had gone, she had been lonely.

But I do want to know! And would it be such a crime to toy with her affections, to profess things he did not feel, in order to discover what no man of Collegium had ever known before?

‘Come, Stenwold.’ She held out a hand to him, the skin so delicate that he could almost see her bones through it. He remembered now what it had been to touch her, and how he had felt as her power, her enchantment, had encroached on him.

A lifetime of that? A forever of being slave to her magic, a slave to the sea?

‘Can you not… just tell me?’ he asked plaintively, staring at the proffered hand.

‘Words are but sounds,’ she told him simply. ‘In the deep, words are nothing. Sight is nothing. There is only feeling and knowledge. Would you turn away the gift of pure knowledge?’ And, as he hesitated still, two words forced themselves out from her resolve: ‘Please, Stenwold.’

He knew then how it would be a crime, a terrible crime, to buy her knowledge with false coin – and a crime that would come with its own form of punishment. If he knelt before her, if he even took her hand, it would be as if he had signed a contract, made a vow. From that point on, the very creature that contained them would enforce her right, more terribly than any bride’s father in dragging him to his nuptials.

‘I can’t.’ He heard his words and watched her face, half expecting that it would remain calm as ever even so.

‘You must!’ she insisted. ‘You are mine! I marked you as my own. You have thought of me, only of me!’ Her features twitched and quivered, without ever forming a coherent expression.

‘No longer,’ he explained. ‘Perhaps the land air has washed all the sea from me.’ Or perhaps the Monarch was right, and I have been saved by my admiration for another. But he said none of that.

‘But you want to know,’ she insisted, and her hand, still offered to him, kept clenching and unclenching.

‘I do, but I cannot meet your price, Lyess.’

For a second she stared at him, and some emotion flowered at last in her face. It was rage, pure rage, as callow and raw as a youth’s, flooding through her and contorting her features until her perfect teeth were bared, her eyes turning into daggers.

‘No!’ she shrieked, and lunged towards him faster than he had expected. The hand that had been offered to him was at his throat in an instant, still feeling cool and slick. He stumbled back, and she went with him, until she had him pressed against the yielding flesh of the wall. He had a hand on her wrist by that point, and her grip was not strong, but then something writhed against his neck, something in her palm, and he went very still.

Phylles’s Art, he thought, having seen the lashing barbs of Wys’s crew-woman kill their share of victims, and now it seemed that Lyess’s kinden possessed a similar weapon. Thinking of the curtain of stinging tendrils her companion trailed behind it, he realized that he should have guessed at that before.

‘You are mine,’ Lyess insisted. Against her so-pale face, in the grey-white light, it was hard to tell if she was weeping or not, but her voice suggested it. ‘I was led to you! You were given to me!’

‘By who?’ got out Stenwold. ‘Nemoctes?’

‘Nemoctes?’ she spat. ‘What would he know? He is so concerned with Edmirs and heirs and doing right. Do you think I was close by to save you, by chance? It was destiny! It was pure destiny!’ She pushed him back against the wall again, but there was very little strength to her, even in her rage. Only the poisoned sting in her palm held him captive.

‘What destiny?’ he asked, in his most calming voice.

‘The Seagod said,’ she told him. ‘The Seagod promised. It sent me to rescue you.’

Stenwold recalled that vast segmented shadow, that clawed silhouette. Even as a landsman, even as an Apt landsman, he had felt a power off the Seagod, radiating an all-encompassing awareness that no mere beast could own. ‘It saved us from the Menfish,’ he said softly.

‘It told me of you when I travelled in the deep places,’ Lyess whispered reverently. ‘It spoke of the landsman, and told me where I must be – and when. I hated it then, for we Pelagists must be free above all, but then we took you within ourselves, and I… I have never… never known…’

Never known being close to another human being, Stenwold finished inwardly, but the scholar in him enquired, ‘What could this Seagod want with me? It makes no sense? Why would it care?’

Abruptly she was holding his face between both her hands, drawing him close to her, almost close enough to kiss. ‘It told me of you,’ she whispered. ‘There is blood coming from the land: a great outpouring of blood that shall wash over everything until it comes to where the land meets the sea. The sea is great, but that blood is the blood of ages past, and if it is not stopped on land, there will be no end to it. In the end, the sea itself shall be red with it, and all that we are shall be destroyed, even to the furthest Pelagists, even to the Seagod itself. If it can be stopped at all, then you are the man who might do so. So, I must save you from Arkeuthys, and take you with me, admit you to where no trespasser has ever been suffered, where only the distant voices of my fellow Pelagists have ever spoken. Thus you were given into my care. So you are mine.’

Stenwold was frowning at her. And where have I heard prophecy like that before, talk of blood on blood? ‘I cannot be yours, Lyess,’ he said, as gently as he could. He felt her Art writhe and twitch against his face.

‘I will kill you,’ she breathed. ‘Do you think I cannot?’

‘And what will become of this prophecy then? And your Seagod, too?’

‘Must I care?’ she hissed. ‘Must I believe in prophecy? I want! I have never wanted before. If you cannot be mine, then I shall kill you.’ But, even as she said it, the wrath began ebbing from her, like a high tide that time could not sustain. Her shoulders shook, and she collapsed against him.

‘It’s not fair,’ he heard her say. ‘I asked for none of this. For all my life I needed no one. Now how shall I live, knowing that there is more?’

He wanted to tell her that there would be others, that he was Stenwold Maker of Collegium, who believed in neither prophecy nor destiny, and was not worth such despair or longing. He said nothing, though, but let her sag into his arms, the porcelain-delicate translucence of her, and held her close until the distant, transmitted tones of Nemoctes’s voice came, querulous and faint, to announce that Arado-cles’s army was preparing to march.