Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Sea Watch

‘You cannot cut,’ Paladrya told him, as if even the mention of the word was sacrilege. ‘The Builders, the Arketoi, would be angered.’

Stenwold remembered those pale little tattooed men, the mysterious kinden who had constructed Hermatyre and all the other colonies across the seabed. ‘I didn’t see any of them in the battle line,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think they really, well, noticed this kind of thing.’

‘Battles? Politics?’ Paladrya replied. ‘Oh, sometimes they do, and woe betide anyone who attracts their attention. Break any of the substance of Hermatyre, though, and you’d never be able to go near a colony ever again. The entire kinden, they’d know.’

At last it was Stenwold’s turn, and he took up his caul and let Paladrya pull him over to the city’s stone outer skin and help guide him inside. He had come this far, and he wanted to see this finished.

The army had divided into different cohorts, and now the Pelagists’ far-speech would not help them for, of Nemoctes’s people, only the man himself was entering the colony. Meanwhile each cohort, entering by a different gate, would start moving through the twisting paths of Hermatyre, seeking out resistance wherever it was to be found.

Stenwold himself followed close behind Aradocles, with Paladrya to one side of him and Phylles to the other. He had never gained much of a sense of Hermatyre’s layout before, while being bundled through the streets by Claeon’s men or Rosander’s, but now he had a chance to appreciate the colony’s bizarre architecture, its curious beauty and its utterly alien design. A living city, surely, or one that had been grown and then died, as more city was grown on top of it, over and over. Within that stratified crust, the colony was expressed in diverse hollows: chambers as small as a cramped room or as great as a city square; the walls patterned, segmented, moulded into symmetrical designs of unknown import in the secret architectural language of the Builders. The tunnels interlinking the chambers led up and down seemingly at random: ribbed passageways of stone winding and twisting like worms through the city’s heart. Everywhere there was limn-light, those coloured globes of radiance that the sea-kinden crafted for lamps, casting dim-coloured veils across the pale stone, and across the grim faces of the invaders.

They had expected Claeon’s people to fight them from room to room, but there was barely any resistance, just a few straggling defenders caught up by the attackers’ tide. The residents of Hermatyre watched Aradocles and his people pass, making no move to stop them, but nor did they cheer. Instead they waited, untrusting and unsure, to see the outcome. Stenwold was reminded that Aradocles had been absent for years, and their memory of him was of a mere youth, and not a king. Rightful heir he might be, but these people had been living under Claeon’s capricious and heavy-handed rule, and they had no guarantee that the Edmir’s nephew would prove any better.

And then they came out upon a vista that Stenwold did recognize, at last. Here he had returned, by all the strange roads that fate had led him along, to the Cathedra Edmir, the heart of Hermatyre, the great plaza that gave onto the gates of the Edmir’s palace complex. This was the place that he had first been dragged to, feeling bewildered and battered, for his first introduction to the sea-kinden. This was where Paladrya had been imprisoned since Claeon’s suspicion fell upon her, until Wys’s people had broken them both out.

And this was where the Edmir’s loyalists had chosen to make their stand, and there were many. All Claeon’s remaining supporters were assembled here, every villain and sycophant who had prospered so much under his reign that their lives would be forfeit if he fell. All the cruelty, the greed, the petty tyranny and casual brutality that had grown fat under Claeon’s rule had now gathered to defend him, knowing that they were dead men otherwise.

Some remained within the palace, others were lined up outside it: Dart-kinden and Krakind Kerebroi, Onychoi large and small, a few that were kin to Phylles even. They stood in clumps, forming an uneven battle line: some with mauls or falxes, others with hooked knives, but most of them with spears. Some had weapons that Stenwold took for lances at first, but then he noticed that, instead of a head of metal or bone, they had something else twined around the shaft like a living thing.

‘Well,’ he murmured to Paladrya, ‘I think this is as far as words and peace take us,’ to which she nodded soberly.

‘What are they waiting for?’ Pellectes demanded. The Littoralist leader clutched a spear in both hands, peering out over the heads of the warriors lined up in front of the palace. ‘He has more men than we do, doesn’t he? Or does he?’ He craned left and right, trying to see clearer without exposing himself to the eyes of the enemy.

‘This is but part of the boy’s force,’ growled Claeon sourly. Since the bulk of Hermatyre’s defenders had betrayed him – since Arkeuthys had betrayed him! – he was running out of options. ‘The other packs of vagabonds are combing the streets even now.’

‘Then what are we waiting for?’ Pellectes demanded, almost jostling Claeon as the two of them stood at the back of their forces, in the gaping entryway of the palace itself. ‘Why not attack now? We have more warriors than he does, I think. Yes, I’m sure of it.’

‘And we’d be shorn of our walls, open to attack on all sides. No, all they have to do is wait.’ Claeon had come to the fight prepared, clad head to foot in armour of bone-coloured shell that had been minutely accreated to fit every line of his body. The bronze-beaked gold head of his maul rested on the ground before him.

His fingers itched to stick hot knives into Aradocles, his wretched nephew. To have had so much, and then so great a fall, all because of one sickly boy. If only it had been his own agents who had first located the heir, out there on the hostile land. How could it all go so wrong?

‘Something’s happening,’ Pellectes said suddenly, and Claeon leant forward to see a figure stand forward from the throng of insurgents.

‘Is that him?’ the tall Littoralist asked, frowning.

Claeon stared at the Krakind youth’s face for a long time before nodding. Yes, that was the visage, that was the look of his nephew, for all that exile on the land had toughened and leathered him.

A sudden strike now? he considered. With Aradocles dead, numbers would barely matter. What would the invaders be fighting for? The true bloodline would rest only in Claeon.

‘Where is Claeon?’ the boy out in front demanded. He wore no armour, and carried merely a short-bladed sword of unfamiliar design. ‘Claeon, my uncle, come forth!’

A lot of Claeon’s men were now looking back at him, but the Edmir made no move to present himself, scowling silently within his helm as Aradocles called him out.

‘Come to me, uncle! Let us not waste the lives of our people. Will you not fight me? Will you not decide this by single combat?’

No armour, and just that brief sword, but the boy was young and strong, and Claeon was no great warrior. And, besides, one look at me and they’d rush at me, tear me to pieces. Why should I trust this boy’s honour? Or even his control of his own forces? Claeon leant forward until he could murmur to the nearest of his men.

‘I promise great riches to any man who can send a spear into that strutting youth,’ he spat. ‘Shed his blood for me, and I shall reward it.’

Throwing spears was an uncommon art amongst the sea-kinden, as it was near-useless in the water, but there were a few who had made a practice of it to better surprise unwary opponents. Of these, one man at least was bold enough, or desperate enough, to listen to the Edmir’s promises. A lean, sinewy Dart-kinden, clad in a breastplate of overlapping scallop-shells, shouldered his way forward between his fellows.