Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Sea Watch

‘Reckon the lad’s destiny is to win this battle, then?’ Wys asked her. ‘’Cos if we could know that beforehand, I’d feel a lot easier.’

‘What about prophecies delivered by a Seagod?’ Stenwold chanced. That drew a long silence from all of them.

‘Right,’ said Wys at last. ‘Seagods? Prophecies? You’ve been drinking with Pelagists too much, is what that is.’

Stenwold looked to Paladrya, but she shook her head. ‘Stories only,’ she told him. ‘Such prophecies have led to the founding of colonies – or their destruction. I’ve never met anyone who’s even seen a Seagod. And Wys is right – Pelagists delight in telling tall stories to us Obligists from the colonies.’

‘I saw a Seagod once,’ came Lej’s voice from above, but Wys gave a rude snort and told him that he certainly hadn’t.

It was not long after that before pale light began to leach into the darkness outside, outlining what Stenwold might have thought of as a horizon, under more civilized conditions. Before that, all had been as dark as midnight, with only the limn-lights of their fellow travellers to provide a shifting constellation around and below them. Now there was a growing radiance ahead, and Stenwold realized it must be Hermatyre.

‘I hope the boy knows what he’s doing,’ Wys muttered, uncharacteristically fretful. Stenwold expected Paladrya to leap to her protege’s defence, but she was merely biting at her lip, looking worried.

‘He’s shifting,’ Wys noted a moment later. ‘Make sure you stay with him.’

It had been Aradocles’s contribution to ocean skirmish to use the Pelagists and their far-speaking Art. Stenwold knew that Salma had done the same with Ant-kinden, using their mindlink to coordinate the various wings of his army. Here, in the crushing, soundless depths, there was no tradition of military coordination. Each warrior fought alone and fell alone, guided only by his personal tactical sense. Aradocles had split up his force into detachments, each with a Pelagist at its heart. He himself rode with Nemoctes, hidden within the living shell. Wys’s barque, the dead exterior of a similar creature with a clockwork engine installed, tacked and bobbed to keep up as Nemoctes adjusted his course towards the colony. All around them the army shifted and swirled, following the glowing bells of jellyfish, the mud-crawlers, the nautili, as they followed their leader’s orders and came about.

Hermatyre was soon the brightest thing in the sea, shedding varicoloured radiance into the inky water. That radiance showed how the water before the colony was busy, seething with mustering bodies. The pale pens of squid darted or hovered in glimmering schools, each with its lance-wielding rider. Untidy ranks of Kerebroi spearmen, nimble and lightly armoured, clustered and straggled across the seabed between the city and its enemies. The armoured forms of crabs and lobsters squatted, claws drawn in like shields, the long spiny whips of their antennae twitching at the drifting of the currents.

And then there were the octopuses, Arkeuthys’s people. Scores of them clustered across the face of the colony. None was as large as their master, but one in three was a match in size for Wys’s submersible. Squinting into the underwater radiance, Stenwold saw metal and pale shell glinting: spikes and blades crudely made, tentacles coiling about makeshift hilts. He remembered the Tseitan’s battle with Arkeuthys, and the great sea-monster taking their harpoon and using it as a spear. Did we teach them that?

Stenwold had only the loosest notion of how many dissidents Heiracles had managed to muster. ‘How do the numbers look?’ he asked, for it seemed to him that there were a great many who had rallied to Hermatyre’s defence.

‘We’re short of theirs,’ Wys replied bluntly, her small hands clenched into fists, and Stenwold could see her now wondering whether she had made the right decision.

‘But we fight on the side of the true heir,’ Paladrya insisted loyally, although her face seemed bloodless. ‘Who would fight so hard on behalf of Claeon?’

‘Well, let’s hope they know we’ve got the true heir with us, because I don’t see them trailing banners with his face on,’ Wys told her. ‘Oh, I’m getting less fond of this… and there are Rosander’s lot, of course.’ Something went out of her expression. ‘Piss on it,’ she said, almost sadly.

A column of armoured crustaceans was emerging around the Hermatyre’s lumpy, coral-encrusted curve. They trudged out before the defenders, ten abreast at least, and around them marched Rosander’s warriors of the Thousand Spine Train. Almost all of them were Onychoi of one sort or another, many armoured in colossal plate, proceeding with a strangely ponderous dignity. There were other kinden among their number, too: squid-riders, Kerebroi, even a few Pelagists and some of Phylles’s kin. Their passage stirred up the mud beneath, as though the seabed smoked beneath their feet.

And they kept coming, this column emerging inexorably into view, tens and tens and then hundreds of men and women and beasts, until Stenwold felt weak just to watch them. ‘So many,’ he whispered, and Wys gave him a wry look.

‘What, you thought there was only a thousand of the bastards? Just a name, landsman, just a name.’

‘Look.’ Paladrya was pointing, but it was not clear at what. Then Wys had seen it, too, rushing over to the panes of her viewport to get a better look. Stenwold remained baffled, unable to see anything in this advancing horde beyond the doom of their plans.

‘It is all the Thousand Spines,’ Phylles explained to him quietly. Her eyes were still intent on the scene outside.

‘Well, yes, that’s the problem, isn’t it?’ Stenwold suggested.

‘No, land-kinden, all of them. All their goods, their wagons, their creches, their infirmaries, everything that they need to live, out in the depths.’

Stenwold frowned, trying to understand it. True, a great many of the crawling beasts were heavily laden, but he had assumed that was the norm for this place and these people. ‘Then…?’

But by then it was clear. The direction that Rosander’s Benthists was taking would neither draw them up before the city nor crash into the advancing dissidents. Instead they were simply going away, heading off across the seabed towards the depths, resuming the Benthist life after living so long on Claeon’s promises.

‘Save me from sea-kinden with a sense of drama,’ Stenwold murmured, but then Paladrya was hugging him, hard enough to drive half the breath from his body.

‘You did it!’ she shouted. ‘You drove away Rosander!’

He put an arm about her, finding that the gesture could be both affectionate and comradely, without any awkwardness. ‘Just talk, that’s all it was. The sort of talk my people are good at, though.’

She kissed him, without warning or apparent premeditation, and their eyes locked, Paladrya seeming more startled by it than Stenwold himself.

‘I don’t want to piss on your party, or anything, but there’s still more of Claeon’s lot than of us,’ Wys pointed out sourly.

Stenwold eyed the defenders, seeing them eddy and mill aimlessly now that the Thousand Spines were abandoning them. More of them than the attackers, yes, but not so very many more that victory would be swift for them. In fact, this looked like a recipe for a bloody and mutually destructive contest. He shivered at the thought.

The attackers’ advance became swifter now, and he could see the defenders forming into a rabble of a line, ready to receive them. Then something detached itself from the pitted surface of Hermatyre, and rippled towards them in a flurry of tentacles. Stenwold found that he recognized it: not only because it was far larger than any other of its kind there, but from its very attitude, the pale and rubbery hide laced with scars, those great flat-pupilled, white eyes.