‘Chief Landsman,’ she said, ‘your barque awaits.’
She was the pilot of the machine that brought us here, he remembered. She’s one of Rosander’s people. Am I being kidnapped again?
At his doubtless dubious expression she sneered. ‘We’re doing a little shallow-water testing, Chief Landsman. Claeon’s got a mob waiting to go up with us, and you, too, they say.’
‘And Claeon’s not here to tell me that himself?’ Teornis enquired cautiously.
Her mouth twisted sardonically. ‘You want to go poke him, see what he says? Or you want out of here?’
She was hard to read, barriers of class, kinden and culture all intervening, and it was a difficult decision for him to say, ‘Well lead on then, Chenni.’ She looked surprised that he had picked up her name, but just beckoned him to follow.
There was no hulking escort of Onychoi warriors waiting outside, though they had not been shy of forcing their way into Claeon’s halls before. For Teornis, the lack of options was the frustrating thing. If things took a turn for the worse, he had so little to fall back on. He could not even run for it, for where could he go? The killing sea bounded everything here, so he was made a prisoner by the mere fact of his land-bound ancestry.
‘You’re quite the favourite of the Nauarch Rosander, I understand,’ he said to her, for there might be some small advantage in starting up a rapport. He employed his Art then, casting it over her, tweaking her perceptions of him to make her friendlier, him more trustable. It was something as natural to him as breathing by now, and he hardly knew he was doing it.
‘I give him what he wants,’ she shot back over her high shoulder, and then, perhaps sensing how this could be misconstrued, ‘I make things, build things. I’m chief of his mechanics.’
The word meant nothing to Teornis, of course, save that it smacked of artificing. Another barrier between them, but this time one of aptitude. I wonder if Claeon has any idea what is brewing amongst these ugly people? No doubt the Moth-kinden remained similarly clueless. Of all the old overlords, only Teornis’s kinden had retained their mastery over the Apt unscathed, and only because they had such a keen understanding of a basic human nature that remained unchanged by machines or magic.
‘We’ll be swimming back to shore in one of your devices, then?’
‘Part-swim and part-crawl. I need to test something,’ she replied with more enthusiasm. ‘My people have spent what seems like a whole moon in recalibrating the gear weightings to work out of water, but we’ve sorted it now, looks like. Everything meshes neatly and nothing’s going to snap.’
‘That sounds good,’ said Teornis, letting such talk wash over him. The essence of artifice, as far as he was concerned, was to have someone else understand it.
Sooner than he had thought, they were out of the palace, and true enough there was a mob of Kerebroi waiting there, eight of them: six men and two women. They were loaded with gold, their skin tattooed, hair in loose curls, and the men with elegantly curled beards. And if there’s a sight more likely to stand out in Collegium, it could only be an entire Imperial army, Teornis decided, but he knew he would be equal to this task. And, besides, he wouldn’t need to place much trust in them. He was more worried about their resemblance to him having them seen as a bizarre Spider-kinden fancy-dress attack force. When I’m back on land, when I’m beneath the blessed sky, in the free air, let me start to worry about that.
There were more Onychoi to be seen ahead. Chenni’s party was approaching some kind of dock, such as the one they had arrived by. Teornis expected to see the same slender underwater boat bobbing in the water, but instead there was something that he at first took to be a crab, and then interpreted as some kind of armoured automotive. Its body was comprised of an enormous rounded shield, the tips of many legs just visible beneath its rim. Behind the shield was some manner of machinery that then trailed off into the balancing spine of a long, stiff tail. Teornis was no assessor of vehicles, but it was all built to the heavy, bulky scale of the Onychoi themselves, and the shield looked thick enough to ward off artillery.
‘Your barque, Chief Landsman,’ Chenni announced proudly. ‘We’ll have it towed upwards and over the Edge, and after that it’ll walk up to shore, sweet as you like.’
‘You can’t just take that into Collegium harbour,’ Teornis told her.
‘Oh, no worries there. There’s a little cove we know, and we’re meeting Claeon’s spy there, the Littoralist.’ She said the last word with marked disdain. ‘Now, you get stowed in. Not much room in there for you and the crew, but you’ll bear a little discomfort, I’m sure, to get where you’re going.’
‘Oh, that I will,’ Teornis assured her.
That the sea-kinden had achieved a genuine state of Aptitude was amply proved by the nausea and discomfort that the latter part of the journey caused him. The first leg of it, and by far the swiftest, was smooth but tedious, as the automotive was carried up from the depths by what Teornis assumed was one of the Kerebroi’s beasts, or some other swimming thing of great strength, that he never saw. When he commented that this looked like a flaw in their machine’s design, the little Onychoi, who were all elbows and knees alongside him in the cramped cabin, explained that the vessel would be quite able to crawl the vertical height of the sea-cliff if needed, but that would add days to their journey. After that they started telling him all manner of complex details of their conveyance, and Teornis nodded along, as though any of it made sense to him. And yet they have the belief that land-kinden are Apt, evidently, he decided, after over an hour of this. He insinuated his question into the conversation, singling out Chenni and casting a little more of his Art over her, to draw out the details.
‘Oh, we go to the Stations often enough,’ she said. ‘Been hearing odd snips about land-kinden since long before you turned up.’
Intriguing, but hardly useful, Teornis considered. Nonetheless he filed it away for later consideration.
The journey back to land was slower than his original entry into the sea world. The knife-like underwater boat that had nipped them away from the fight on the barge had been a fleet little thing. Whatever submerged convoy they were now travelling in took a good two days at their best speed to clear the Shelf – or the Edge as the sea-kinden called it – and then it was a long, stomach-knotting crawl across the seabed towards where breakers marked the boundaries of the two worlds. Teornis ate with the crew, listened to their chatter, watched their constant mothering of the mechanisms of their automotive as it dragged and lurched over the uneven seafloor. The mood was high, the engineering apparently performing.
‘You look pasty, landsman. No hurling up in here,’ Chenni warned him.
‘It’s nothing.’ He did not want to admit to his Inaptitude.
‘It’s the equalization, is what it is,’ she told him, surprising him. At his querying look she went on, ‘When you got brought down here, Claeon’s men used their Art on you. It’s as old as breathing, that one – when you go from the shallows to the depths, see, you need equalizing, or you die. Nasty death, too. Now we’re headed up again, it’ll reverse itself, but you’ll feel rough if it’s your first time, and maybe travelling this way’ll make it worse. Felt a little queasy myself, the first time we took one of these up top.’