Something pale and shapeless passed in a flurry beyond the far side of Wys’s submersible, lit momentarily by the vessel’s limn-lights. Stenwold had a brief glimpse of the bar-shaped pupil of a great mottled eye, an eye he had seen before.
‘Arkeuthys,’ he murmured. The agent of his capture had returned to prevent his escape.
Then the Tseitan jerked and shuddered, resounding under the crack of an impact. ‘Are we shot?’ Despard demanded, eyes wide.
Gainer was wrestling with the controls, trying to keep the vehicle on a level course. A moment later there was a second knock, throwing them to one side, and Stenwold understood: the Dart-kinden were lancing towards them, making swift dives and then breaking their spears against the Tseitan’s shell.
‘Gainer, what’s the hull made of?’ he demanded.
Their pilot bared his teeth. ‘Magnaferrite over pumice-steel,’ he snarled out, all of which material was after Sten-wold’s day, as far as artificing went.
‘That’s strong? They’re sticking spears into us.’
‘Spears?’ Gainer let out a strained laugh. ‘Let them jab at the body all they want, just please let them steer clear of the legs.’
The thought sent a chill through Stenwold. Damage a few of the Tseitan’s six paddles and the ship would become helpless prey for Arkeuthys, or it would drift and sink, becoming nothing but an elaborate tomb.
‘Gain height,’ he suggested. ‘They may not like the sun.’
‘It’s nighttime,’ Despard interrupted, and Stenwold blinked in genuine surprise. It had been a long time since he had needed to know.
Another impact came, sounding from right beside the portholes and sending them lurching downwards for a moment, before Gainer could correct them. ‘No worries about the glass,’ the artificer said, without having to be asked. ‘Thick enough that a snapbow couldn’t break it, and I know that ’cos I tested it with one.’
They had a mad, wheeling view of Wys’s barque, almost on its side but making steady progress, dancing through the water with its pumps rippling in a blur. The Dart-kinden cavalry were pale streamered arrows dashing past it, always breaking away just before striking, their mounts bucking angrily.
Their world, their view, was suddenly blotted from sight. The coiled ridges of a shell surged in front of them, and Gainer cried out and hauled at the sticks to steer them away. They were nearly upside down as they wheeled past the monster’s head, itself almost the size of their vessel, with a squid trapped and thrashing within the beast’s net of slender arms. Then the giant creature had coursed away, slipping backwards and downwards through the water, and dragging its prey with it.
‘What… what was that?’ Despard squeaked.
‘Nemoctes,’ Stenwold told her, ‘and be glad he’s ours.’ And let’s hope he’s already put the call out to any other Pelagists in the area, because we need all the help we can get.
Another dart flashed past their ports, its rider yanking it around even as it passed, too close for a spear charge.
‘Pull away!’ Stenwold said automatically, but Gainer pulled the wrong way, and something heavy and soft impacted with them: the rider’s mount itself.
Abruptly they were diving, dragged initially by the creature’s weight, then by its own efforts as it tugged at them. There was a hideous screeching, scratching sound from all about them, like nails on glass, as the creature’s tentacles took hold. Two or three unrolled across the viewports, their undersides lined not with suckers but with barbed hooks, like little claws, that scratched white lines down the glass as they writhed for purchase. Somewhere around the middle of the ship, above them, came a hollow boom, and then the sound of something strong and savage scoring and gnawing at the metal.
‘What are you waiting for?’ Despard yelled at Gainer.
‘I’m done! It’s ready!’ he shouted back. ‘Arms in, everyone, arms in!’
‘What?’ Stenwold goggled at him.
‘Don’t touch the walls, Master Maker!’
Stenwold pulled his elbows in, still insisting he be told what was going on, and then Gainer hollered, ‘Now!’ Despard, behind them, slammed down the lever she had been poised beside, and for a second every inch of the Tseitan’s interior was lit by an uncompromising white radiance.
Stenwold cried out, sure that something had exploded inside the engine. His eyes momentarily blazed with reversed images, then he saw, through the ports, that the tentacles were gone, A moment later a long, bleached form could be seen drifting away, down and away, its tentacles a peeled-back mess, with a separate, smaller body falling beside it.
‘What just happened?’ he asked, almost reverently, as Gainer dragged them up out of their dive.
‘It’s a kind of side effect of the engine, which we discovered when we built her,’ the pilot said, almost cheerily. ‘The engine has a lot of magnets in her, so if you’re not careful, you can build up quite a charge differential between the nose and the tail. One of Master Tseitus’s apprentices was almost killed, you know, when we discovered that from the original.’
‘Are you telling me that…?’
‘For a bit of a second the hull was working like a lightning engine,’ Gainer confirmed. ‘It’s a design flaw, but I reckoned it might come in useful some day.’
‘Master Tseitus would be proud of you,’ Stenwold said. It probably wasn’t true, as Tseitus had reserved his pride for his personal consumption. Still, the lad deserved it, and Tseitus deserved to be remembered fondly. The old man’s antisocial and cantankerous side could be lost to history.
‘I hope so,’ Gainer said, and then exclaimed, ‘Hammer and tongs, what’s that?’
They were in sight of Wys’s ship again, but something was dreadfully wrong. For a moment Stenwold thought it had somehow become malformed, but then he realized the truth, and his heart lurched. Curled about the contours of the submersible were the many arms of Arkeuthys. The great octopus held the ship helpless in its grip, and no doubt that great shearing beak was already trying to crack its way in to reach the morsels inside.
‘That’s…’ Stenwold ran out of words.
‘That looks mighty like what got you into all this in the first place,’ Despard filled in for him. ‘I got one quick look at it, up top. Didn’t want another, to be honest.’
‘Do we need them?’ Kratia asked coolly.
‘Yes!’ Stenwold roared at her, and Despard snapped ‘Laszlo’s in there!’ little fists bunched as though she was going to attack the Ant there and then.
‘Ram it,’ Stenwold suggested. ‘Can we ram it?’
‘Be like a flea up against that thing,’ Gainer said, but his expression was solid determination. ‘But we’ve been saving a little something, haven’t we?’ He had already set a course towards the stricken submersible.
‘Are you telling me this ship’s armed?’ Stenwold asked him. ‘Did we authorize that, back at the College?’
‘Master Maker, you were grabbed by an arse-bastarding sea monster,’ Despard reminded him. ‘You think we’d come out here without something?’
Their view of the leviathan and the submersible wheeled and circled as Gainer fought to keep the Tseitan on a straight course. ‘Just like a snapbow,’ the pilot murmured between clenched teeth. ‘Like a real big snapbow with a point on it that you wouldn’t believe.’
‘Don’t hole their ship, then,’ Stenwold cautioned. ‘Why are we twisting around so much?’
Gainer was backing the Tseitan now, the paddles reversing their sweep, then pushing forward again, jockeying the vessel in the water as more Dart-kinden flashed past. ‘To aim the bolt,’ the Beetle youth explained, ‘have to aim the whole ship.’
The piercing eye of Arkeuthys was staring straight at them, as Gainer tugged and cajoled the Tseitan into line. Stenwold gazed at it, seeing, in that orb bigger than his own body, the creature’s icy concentration – even as its many arms twined and snaked for better purchase, over the shell of Wys’s submersible.
‘You’re there now,’ Despard insisted. ‘Right there. Just shoot the cursed thing!’