The Sea Watch (51 page)

Stenwold remembered how Arkeuthys had flinched back, stung by the tendrils of whatever sea-monster he was now travelling in. Under other circumstances, he would have wondered at how much more closely these sea-kinden lived with the creatures whose Art they bore, how much more they relied on them, and had been affected by them in turn. As it was he just felt the whole situation somehow vile. Then the woman – Lyess he assumed – turned about to stare at him again, milky arms wrapped about her knees.

‘I . . . suppose we are to be companions for a while, then,’ he said awkwardly. An answering expression came to her face, but it was one for which he had no name. It was not joy, certainly, at this prolonging of his company. It was closer to fear, perhaps, but a fear of something the land did not encompass. ‘How long is it to these Stations? You have supplies, I take it?’ He looked about the bell-shaped chamber, with its rippling walls, seeing there was no place that cargo might be stored. In fact he could see clean through to the sea, in all directions.

‘We will provide,’ she replied.

He guessed that ‘we’ included her creature, whose busy flesh surrounded them. The thought made him shudder and he shuffled forward, and at once she drew back from him, hands extended out a little, as though she was a Wasp who might sting. That wordless expression on her face intensified.

‘What?’ he asked her, having no reserves of patience to spare her feelings. ‘What is it?’

‘I have not borne one like you. I have not admitted one like you to this place. Ever.’

‘That’s hardly surprising,’ he said dismissively, ‘since, for some reason, we land-kinden don’t like to come down here very much . . .’

But she was already shaking her head. ‘I . . . have had no guests at all. I am not like Nemoctes, to have many dealings with the Obligists. I have only the voices of my peers. We travel far and deep, we Pelagists. There may be years without meeting any other. Some of us that drift in the furthest currents never meet another of their kinden – of any kinden. We are made to be solitary throughout the great width of the sea. I am not used to . . . not being alone. Even with other Pelagists we have met only briefly, before we have passed on our ways. Even my mother and my children . . . There are only the voices – the Far-speech of our Art. I have lived in a world of voices for so long. It is . . . difficult to know another face.’

There was a question in his mind ever since he had deciphered Gribbern’s mutterings, and he had never had the chance to ask it of poor Gribbern. ‘This Art of yours, it is through your creatures? Do they talk mind to mind at such a distance?’

‘No,’ she said simply. ‘You are thinking of Pserry, perhaps. Pserry had a mind, although only Gribbern and his kin could speak to it. That is a different Art, the speaking-with-beasts. My companion here,’ and her arm encompassed all that was around them, ‘has no voice, no mind. So we are a different partnership.’

That plural was beginning to make him feel uncomfortable. ‘But how can you direct it?’

‘We are joined, but there is only one “I”.
I
am Lyess, so
we
are Lyess. There is no other mind, only an echo. An echo within a great space of memory.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Mind is the enemy of memory, sometimes. There is a great memory, a memory of thousands of years. It speaks very faintly, so faintly that even Nemoctes’s voice – that we heard just now – would drown it out. There is no other voice, though, when I am here alone, and so, if I listen carefully, I can hear that memory. It is an ancient memory. Our kind are amongst the oldest, the very oldest of them all.’

Some vague ramblings of the less reputable Collegium philosophers were recalled to Stenwold: mutterings about insect race memories, of a great space of conjoined mind that the animals somehow existed in, or else what was it that people connected to, when they called upon their Art? Last generation’s crackpot theories . . . He looked into her face, pale and delicate and beautiful, as Grief in Chains had been beautiful, and could believe almost anything.

I feel that Rosander and Paladrya were like brother and sister to me in the face of this.
‘But how, then?’ he pressed on. ‘Art is from the beast, from the perfect and ideal concept of the beast – if you believe that. Fly-kinden can fly, because flies can fly.’ His words obviously bewildered her but he forged ahead. ‘How can you use this Far-speech? What could cause you to learn such powers?’

‘Loneliness, land-kinden,’ she told him. ‘Nothing but loneliness, here in the long dark night of the sea.’

‘How long to these Stations?’ Stenwold asked her, looking out at the passing sea that was lit only by the illumination from Lyess’s steed, the thing she called her companion.

‘Time,’ she said, and when he looked exasperated she just tilted her head to one side. ‘We shall take you there, land-kinden. We shall sleep and wake, and sleep and wake, and more . . . and we shall be there.’

‘What am I supposed to do before then?’ he asked her.

‘Rest,’ said Lyess simply. ‘Claeon shall not trouble you while you are in my care, nor shall Rosander’s bannermen find you. Rest, and watch the waters pass.’ Her voice became musical when she spoke at length, like a crystal chime. It seemed to reverberate about the chamber, as though arising from the substance of the creature that carried them.

‘Your waters give me no joy,’ he told her, brooding on them. A school of fish flurried past, each one with mirror-scaled sides that scattered the light back at him. He had no doubt that they would suffer their share of casualties once they encountered the deadly train beneath. The fact that their substance, peculiarly processed by Lyess’s creature, would later feed him made him feel ill.

‘That is sad,’ she told him, staring intently at him again. Sometimes she patrolled the circumference of the chamber, one outstretched hand leaving a ribbon of colour flowing along the wall wherever she touched it. Sometimes she just knelt as if she were meditating. She seldom blinked, and her eyes were almost always fixed on him. She did not know what to do with him, but sharing her domain plainly unsettled and fascinated her.
She does not even care that I am from the land
, Stenwold thought.
She would stare at any of the sea-kinden just the same.

‘I am not meant to be in this place,’ he told her. ‘This . . .’ – his hand described the great emptiness about them, above and below and to all sides – ‘this just seems like a desert to me, a desert of water.’
Give me the spires of Collegium over this. Hammer and Tongs, give me a Wasp slave camp, even!
A pair of legs and a quick mind might free him from the Wasps. Here the only way of escape was to drown.

‘There is much to see, if you but wait,’ she promised him. ‘There is beauty in many forms, and struggle also. But, most of all, there is calm. Calm is something you have experienced little of, I think.’

He could not help looking at her, as she spoke to him.
Beauty, yes, but surely not to touch.
She looked delicate as glass, ready to shatter in a man’s hands, but he remembered how she had put her arms about him, before, and he had sensed far more strength hovering there than he would have guessed from her looks. That had been a strange gesture for one who had known so little of society. Perhaps some instincts persisted despite all the degrees of separation the sea and a difference of kinden could impose.

‘The thing I most want to see is something the sea cannot provide,’ he told her. The thought occurred that he must seem a dour guest, but she had it in her power to return him to land, he was sure – yet she would not. He was a prisoner, still, albeit of a different oubliette.

‘Would you like me to show you the sun?’ she asked him.

He felt something within him come close to breaking apart. ‘Yes.’ It was barely a whisper.

He felt a change, then, in the ceaseless pulsing of the creature around them . . . an ascension, perhaps? The dim sea told nothing of it, uniform in its obscurity.
What time of day or night is it, even? How can she even know there will be a sun? I have almost stopped believing in it, almost begun to think the sun is one of those myths of the Days of Lore – like the great Moth magics in the stories.

Her ceaseless regard was beginning to unnerve him, but his eyes were already tired of the depthless water, the obscure shapes that marred the translucent walls of this latest prison.
What could make anyone seek out this way of life? They must have been desperate. Perhaps we did drive them to it, after all?

‘Rest,’ she told him. ‘I will wake you.’

It was clear that they were not soaring upwards on swift wings so, with his back to Lyess, he lay down on his side, feeling the surface give and stretch unpleasantly beneath him. He closed his eyes against the persistent light and fought for some kind of sleep. His body rhythms were hopelessly adrift by now, and he had no idea how many days had passed in the world above. These sea-kinden seemed to have some clock to live their lives by, but it escaped him. Without sunrise and sunset, he was lost in time.

He was later never quite sure whether he truly slept, that time, only that he was suddenly aware of her being close, and surely some time must have passed. He opened an eye and saw her, at the corner of his vision, crouching over him. For a moment he wanted to kick out at her, nightmare thoughts of her draining his blood as the Mosquito-kinden did in the stories, but he held still and forced himself to turn his head and look at her.

She was already moving back even as he did so. Her hair, which had hung down over her face, recoiled first and seemingly of its own accord, retreating from him to loop itself about her shoulders. For a second, his world was captured in her eyes, huge and sightless, and deeper than the sea could ever be. Then she had withdrawn, back across the chamber floor almost bonelessly. ‘We are here,’ she announced.

‘Where?’

‘Above.’

He looked up, and almost cried out. There was light, but it was not just that cold, sterile light given off by her creature. There was a
blue
above him that he had almost forgotten, and he lunged to his feet, one hand extended as if he could grasp the sun and hold it close to him, take it down to burn away all the horrors of the depths.

‘I have to go outside,’ he told her. ‘Please, I have to
feel
the air.’

She had retreated all the way across the chamber from him now, as though he had suddenly become a dangerous madman. He did not notice any signal from her, and certainly she did not voice her permission, but there was an opening now, where a moment before the floor had been unmarred. Water was instantly washing about his ankles, and he knew he would somehow have to swim – out from under the monster’s bulk – but in that moment he did not care about its stinging tendrils, or the drag of the water, or his own inability. He pulled the caul over his head and simply dropped through the gap into the sea.

For a moment he was sinking, but he was still within a forest of tentacles, and they allowed him purchase. He struggled through them, finding that a path opened whichever way he turned, fighting his way through the dense geography of the creature’s underside, knowing only that the air was there somewhere beyond, if he could only reach it.

There came a moment when there was nothing above him but the water, and Stenwold kicked and scrabbled, flopping and grasping his way up along the curve of the creature’s side, until his head broke the lapping surface of the water and he could pull the caul from his face.

It was a bright day: the sky was near cloudless and the Lash was not clogging the horizon. Stenwold Maker fought his way up on that rubbery, giving slope and, from there, on to that scant section of Lyess’s companion that broke the surface Once there he collapsed onto his back, arms outstretched and looking into the vast, welcome emptiness of the sky, smelling the fresh salt air.

If I could only fly
, the thought came to him. But he knew the answer to that one: if he could fly, he could maybe escape Lyess, but never the sea. He could not know what direction to go in, and nobody, of any kinden whatsoever, could possess the stamina to make it to land from this remote spot. There was nothing but water from one end of the horizon to the other, and not a sail to sully the endless waves.

Still, it was sweet. It was a pleasure he had taken for granted all his life, but it was so sweet now.

How long he lay there, his tattered clothes drying, stiff with salt, he could not have later said, but at last the thing beneath him began to move, to subside slowly into the water.
Damn her
, he thought, instantly bitter.
Was this so hard? Is Nemoctes’s schedule so rushed? Do we not have ‘time’?
He tugged on the caul and slipped back into the sea, knowing that he would have no option save to return to that captivity or else to drown. This time the sea-monster’s tentacles brushed him forward in rippling eddies, almost dragging him to the point where the open mouth waited to swallow him again. Cursing all sea-kinden he dragged himself through, feeling it close so swiftly that the cold, gelid flesh of it slobbered against his foot.

He gave out a cry of disgust and turned to glare at Lyess. ‘What news?’ he ordered of her. ‘I assume there must have been some news, that we must now hurry to these Hot Stations?’

Kneeling with head bowed, her hair flowing over her face, Lyess made no answer.