After he had slept, tired enough by then to drown any dreams that hovered, and after the horror of the Echinoi was far enough behind them, Stenwold asked about Lyess.
Nemoctes grunted as soon as the name was uttered. He was sitting cross-legged at the broadest end of his suite of chambers, presumably in communication with the creature that was carrying them. ‘I know less than you think,’ was all he said.
‘Has she… there must have been others…?’
‘That she has travelled with? Not that I’ve known, and I’ve known her for a good many moons. She owes me no great favours. Why she broke her lifelong rule, I cannot say.’ Nemoctes sighed. ‘She…’
‘Yes?’
‘She asked after you, when you were in the Stations. She has been
… distracted. Not seeming herself. As if I were any judge of what her “self” should be like.’
A hundred questions warred in Stenwold’s mouth, but he let none of them out. Somewhere out there, surely not far in terms of how the Pelagists measured their vastly travelled lives, floated her glowing garden and the impossible glory that was her companion.
Waiting for him? Somehow he was sure of it. The thought set his pulse racing, but mostly in fear of what he did not understand. Why do I care? I do not care. The lonely, alien woman has a claim on my sympathy, no more. So what is this? What is this…?
The place Nemoctes ferried him to was like Hermatyre writ small. Somehow some Archetoi builders had picked this barren knoll on the sea floor as their project, and now the twisted spires of a new colony had formed, a solitary hall compared to Hermatyre’s sprawling city.
The Archetoi were much in evidence inside, passing on their wordless errands, their eyes not deigning to follow or acknowledge their visitors. They were pallid little men and women, their skins tattooed with intricate, accreated patterns, going about their business in a world that barely admitted the existence of the rest of humanity.
They ran into Wys’s crew first, just as recently arrived. She gave Stenwold a slightly exasperated look: here was a man who could have been home by now, had he jumped left instead of right. Laszlo had a grin for him, though, albeit a strained one. He was looking pale as a sea-kinden himself by now, and gaunt with it. Stenwold remembered Mandir saying how landsmen never lasted long in the Stations. We are not meant to be here, and our bodies know it. The gloom, even the air, it is all a slow poison to us.
‘What’s this in aid of?’ Wys demanded of Nemoctes, who was clad in his mail once more. ‘More Kerebroi games?’ Phylles and Fel squared off behind her, their belligerence dominating her small stature.
‘For once the games have grown too large for anybody to control,’ Nemoctes told her. ‘Not Claeon nor Heiracles nor I.’ He led the way through to the vaulted, cavernous, empty heart of the new colony. The ceiling was heavy with projecting stalactites and fins that would in time become the pillars and walls of the structure’s internal architecture, but for now all that the Archetoi had constructed was a shell. Beneath that arching space two groups stood with a distinct distance between them. One was a rabble of Kerebroi, Heiracles at their head and Paladyra in their midst like a valuable hostage. And the other…
Laszlo, with better eyes, gave out a whoop so fierce that Stenwold at first took it for a war cry. Then the Fly was airborne, taking one great leap before descending upon an equally small figure there, clutching her in his arms and laughing madly. Only after she had fought him off did Stenwold recognize her.
‘Hammer and tongs,’ he said hoarsely, ‘it’s Despard.’ He stumbled forward a few steps, staring at the engineer of the Tidenfree as she tried to extricate herself from Laszlo’s embrace. Then Stenwold noticed the other two.
Slouching at the back, looking like a man wholly out of his depth in more ways than one, was a lean Beetle youth that Stenwold identified as Maxel Gainer, Tseitus’s former apprentice and the builder of the Tseitan, which went at least partway towards explaining how he and Despard happened to be here. Their choice of travelling companion, however, was an unexpected one.
She stood in her scale cuirass, in her gold armlets and silver headband, as arrogantly poised as she had been in the College, as she had been aboard Isseleema’s Floating Game. It was Kratia of Tsen, whose last encounter with young Master Gainer had nearly been a murderous one. Stenwold approached her falteringly, frowning.
‘I give up,’ he said, stopping a few paces away from her. ‘I just don’t understand. Why are you here?’
‘Don’t thank her!’ Despard snapped, at his elbow. ‘You want to thank anyone, thank us. When we heard that you’d gone under, someone just happened to remember what you said that time when you were asking about the Tseni and their underwater boats. Only they didn’t think to bring one with them, so we had to take your lad there’s, instead.’ She gave Laszlo a push, sending him tottering away, but there were tears glinting at the corners of her eyes. ‘We didn’t believe you were dead. Not after what she said. We had to look.’
‘“What she said”?’ Stenwold repeated. ‘What did “she” say, Kratia?’ He glanced back at Heiracles. ‘How are you even free? I’m not overly impressed by sea-kinden hospitality so far, begging your pardons, Master Nemoctes and Mistress Wys.’
Kratia gave him a level look and took out a damp-looking scroll from her belt. It was a moment before Stenwold realized what was wrong with the sight: it was the pulpy sea-kinden paper in the hands of a landswoman. The script on it, surrounded and framed by many-coloured arabesques, remained illegible to him.
‘My people had their war with the sea long ago. We have not forgotten, for all that we might like to. This names me ambassador of Tsen to the peoples of Grande Atoll and the greater seas,’ Kratia declared simply.
‘Lucky you had it with you,’ Stenwold told her hollowly.
‘War Master, if you had known what lay beneath, would you have set foot on a ship, any ship, without such credentials?’
He shivered. ‘Point taken.’ Behind him he heard some of Heiracles’s people start to shift, and he turned to them, feeling all the might of the Lowlands and beyond arrayed in just those four figures behind him. He had been a prisoner, a fugitive, a slave for a long time. His entire life as he had known it – as an Assembler, a War Master, a spymaster – had been taken from him like a stolen robe. Now he felt it across his shoulders once again, and he almost wept for it: to have power, even a little power, over his own destiny once more.
‘So, what now?’ he asked them. ‘Heiracles, Nemoctes, what now? We are not so ignorant, it would appear. Or at least there are those on land who are far less ignorant than me. There will be others back on land with an interest, too. Despard and Laszlo have a large family. What now?’
Nemoctes was smiling, but the careful immobility of Heiracles’s face showed that he had been outmanoeuvred.
‘Have you forgotten Rosander?’ he hissed, ‘and Claeon’s invasion? Do you really think your people are safe, now? Claeon will care nothing for that document, or the distant frown of Grande Atoll. That place is no more than a name to us.’
‘I have forgotten nothing,’ Stenwold replied. ‘My people are in more danger than you know. We land-kinden are quite capable of making our own lives difficult enough. But we go home, we go to the land. If my home was in flames and soldiers were waiting to put me on crossed pikes, we would go home nonetheless.’ The words caused him a stab of pain, the thought of Lyess never to be seen again, never to be touched. For a moment her presence seemed so strong that the soft light of her companion’s silver-clear flesh seemed to shine on them like the moon. No, he told himself, clinging to what he knew, what he believed in. ‘No, we go home.’ He looked up, managing a small smile for Nemoctes’s benefit. ‘Now let us talk about Aradocles.’
There followed perfect silence. Stenwold looked from face to face, amongst Hieracles’s delegation, and for a moment he could not find her, and his heart lurched with sudden fear. Then at last he found her, in the shadow of the others. Her eyes drew him to her. She was the only one of Heiracles’s people whose expression had not grown hooded at the name of the heir.