Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Sea Watch

‘Claeon!’ Aradocles called out again. ‘Do you fear me so much, uncle?’

Claeon ground his teeth angrily.

It was over in a moment. The spearman had reached the fore, and now had the spear cocked back for casting in one smooth motion.

There was a sharp snapping noise, and the Dart-kinden dropped, stone dead with a hole punched through his armour.

Utter silence descended, the sea-kinden on both sides staring. Claeon saw, though. He saw, in the front rank of the insurgents, there was a broad, dark, balding man of foreign features, a man who had once been confined in Claeon’s clutches, inside his very oubliette. Now the man had one hand directed forward, with some small rod in its grip, too tiny to be any serious weapon save that he had simply pointed it at the spearman, and the spearman had died.

‘The land-kinden,’ Pellectes moaned, and Claeon saw at last how the man really did believe his own fictions. In the mind of Pellectes, the land-kinden were the great monsters, the eternal enemy, the things that would get you if you erred. A sheen of sweat had broken out on the man’s high forehead, and he kept pointing with a shaking hand. ‘The land-kinden!’ he gasped again, as though the arrival of just one was enough to stave in the walls of Hermatyre.

‘Kill him!’ Pellectes shrieked, pointing a quivering hand that encompassed both the landsman and Aradocles, and a dozen people around them. ‘Kill him now! Or we’re all doomed!’ He shoved at shoulders, kicked and pushed and yelled, and then some of the defenders were surging forward, and then more and more who were out of earshot of Pellectes but saw the advance and assumed an order had been given, and then the entire mass of defenders was moving forth to do battle away from the protection of the palace.

‘Claeon, we must destroy the land-kinden!’ Pellectes cried out, and turned to see the Edmir backing away. The head of the maul dragged along the palace floor, and the plates of Claeon’s beautifully crafted armour scraped and slid, but Claeon’s face was ashen, and he backed and backed, and then he turned and ran into the palace.

Stenwold expected commands to be shouted, for the front rank of the insurgents to raise a fence of spear-points against the enemy, but it seemed to him that the entire force suddenly went to pieces, shouting challenges and war cries, half of them rushing forward, half of them standing still to receive the charge.

‘Get behind me, land-kinden!’ Aradocles snapped at him, readying his sword. For a horrible moment Stenwold thought the youth, carrying all that priceless royal blood, was about to rush headlong into the fray, but, even if he had intended to, his own followers got in his way, meeting the onrushing loyalists and clashing fiercely with them. Stenwold had seen the sea-kinden of the Hot Stations in their bloody hacking at the Echinoi, and he had seen their swift cavalry actions in the open sea, but here he saw the Kerebroi fighting their with own kind, and it was savage.

They were swift and lithe, these sea-kinden, and they were not soldiers such as the Ants or the Wasps might field. Instead they reminded Stenwold only of the old Inapt of the land, of the Mantids and the Moths. They descended on one another as individuals, fought a hundred separate duels and shifting skirmishes. Here Dart-kinden spearmen leapt at one another, spinning and turning, clashing shafts against one each other, sweeping their weapons’ butts around and lancing with the bone needles of their heads. Greatclaw Onychoi, hulking in their grand suits of armour, laid about with mauls and their terrible curved swords, the falxes that could shatter mail or bones with a single ponderous stroke. Others carried deadlier weapons: staves about which were twisted stinging cells that lashed and stabbed at their foes across a man’s length of space, killing with agonizing venom the moment they struck. They were good only for a single death, though, and soon abandoned, their wielders reversing the same weapons to present spearheads to the enemy. Around them a great number of the sea-kinden had resorted to daggers. Krakind ripped and tore at one another with their hooked blades, and sometimes just with the tearing Art of their bare hands. Swiftclaw Onychoi, Mantis-lean creatures that were kin to Fel, hammered and punched with their spines or with narrow-bladed stilettos. Those few of Phylles’s kinden walked through the fighting like bleak death, the stingers of their hands shooting left and right, and held off only by the greater reach of spearmen. Phylles herself was gone, lost sight of in the fury of the fighting, but Stenwold had no doubt that she was doing more than her fair share of the killing.

It was just what Aradocles had wanted to avoid. It was what might have happened on so much grander a scale outside the colony, if the great army of the defenders had not disbanded.

The heir himself waited. He had his Helleron-made shortsword in his hand, watching the ebb and flow of the convoluted melee. Stenwold had by now lost track of who was on whose side, but all the locals seemed to know.

A spearman leapt at the heir from the press, screaming a battle cry. Stenwold’s hand moved and the man was thrown back, the retort of the little snapbow lost amid the shouting. His hands reloaded mechanically. Aradocles glanced back at him, expressionless, and then nodded.

‘Land-kinden, follow me,’ he instructed. ‘We go to find Claeon.’

Stenwold had been in more than a few fights in his life, from seedy knifings in the back streets of Helleron, through skirmishes with enemy agents in a dozen cities, all the way to the hammer of war brought by the Wasps against Myna or the Vekken against Collegium. Never a fight like this, though. For him the melee had become something surreal and dreamlike. He was surrounded by sea-kinden: he and Paladrya ringed by Aradocles’s most fervent followers. The prince, the young Edmir himself, simply forged ahead, leading with his blade, but never needing to bloody it. On either side, the spearmen of his vanguard pressed forth, desperate to keep pace with their leader. They could not protect him, though, constantly moving as he was, and yet he was not touched, nor did he strike a single blow.

Stenwold, having long lost track of who was insurgent and who were those still clinging to Claeon, simply judged everyone by watching Aradocles. Those that raised a weapon against him, those that he levelled his sword at, they died, the snapbow punching them from their feet without their ever understanding what it was that killed them. Aradocles surged forward, dragging his warriors with him, and Stenwold shot and reloaded, shot and shot and reloaded, over and over. The range of his weapon was a little less than twenty feet at most, as he leant round Aradocles to take aim. His victims were busy concentrating on the young heir, barely understanding at first that the stubby twin-barrelled piece in Stenwold’s hand was a weapon at all. Here in Hermatyre they had nothing like it.

He had brought a sufficiency of snapbow bolts.

Ah, but this would be different in the Hot Stations, Stenwold admitted to himself, finding plenty of time for reflection in that almost casually bloody advance. A few of those spring-bows, those harpoon-launchers of Mandir’s, would lay us low in short order. We catch the sea-kinden here at the very turning point of Aptitude. But clearly the Man of the Hot Stations was jealous with his inventions, and none had made it as far as Hermatyre, and so the little device that Totho had crafted for his old mentor, that little trinket of murder, brought death like a plague upon Aradocles’s enemies.

Had there been more Greatclaw Onychoi there with their heavy mail, then Stenwold might not have had such an easy time, but the Kerebroi relied on speed and close-in fighting, and none of them was faster than a snapbow bolt.