‘And after that?’ Stenwold prompted. ‘You have a plan?’
‘Don’t reckon it’s up to me to be coming up with plans. Reckon that Heiracles fellow, he’ll go speak to Nemoctes or someone else, depending on who’s closest, and the word will get passed on.’
‘You could always take me to the land’s edge,’ Stenwold suggested. ‘Since I’m obviously an inconvenience to you, what’s there to lose?’
Gribbern harrumphed. ‘Besides from the fact that I don’t reckon it’s a good idea, on account of how a lot of people might get annoyed at me, Nemoctes included, Pserry couldn’t manage it. There’s the land-wall in the way: too steep to climb, and there’s no way we’re swimming it. Besides, I rightly hear that going close to the land is just inviting death. No sense in taking chances, say I.’
‘Landwall?’ Stenwold asked, baffled.
‘Surely.’ Gribbern twisted round against his back, so as to peer at him. ‘You know all this, rightly? I’m sure it pleases land-kinden to play all kinds of games with us regular folk.’
‘I know nothing,’ Stenwold said, with patience. ‘Please educate me.’
‘Well landwards of here there’s a great wall where the seabed just rises on up and up. Now Pserry can’t make it, can’t swim so well, but I hear some can swim so close to the surface that they get over it, while some of the Onychoi can go climbing it. Takes many days, they tell me. But up there the water’s shallow, shallower and shallower and not healthy to be in, and then comes the land. Dreadful place, so I’m told, nothing but the emptiness above, and it’s cold and dry and hot and dry all the time, they say.’
Laszlo told me… he said, ‘the Shelf,’ Stenwold recalled abruptly. We were anchored at the edge of the shelf, where the water got deeper. A picture arose in his mind of the Barrier Ridge, the great cliffs that served as the border between the Lowlands and the Commonweal. Perhaps this land-wall, this Shelf, was another such, but wholly under the sea, forming an instinctive border to the sea-kinden world.
Only they can swim over it… but then we can fly over the Barrier Ridge, but few enough do it, because the Commonweal’s strange and unwelcoming and there’s nothing we want there.
‘Then… how tall’s this weed?’ he asked, trying to assess it.
‘All the way to the top, or so they say,’ came the vague reply, and then Gribbern was mumbling again, holding some curious little conversation with himself. Stenwold began to wonder whether it was Pserry that he was confiding in.
Let’s hope Laszlo got clear as well – and Paladrya. He wondered what would happen to Paladrya now. He had wanted to reassure himself that her life could only get better now that she was out of from Claeon’s clutches, but he did not trust Heiracles one inch. The man was too much like the Spider Aristos he resembled, and Stenwold had no doubt that if it became convenient to denounce Paladrya as regicide and traitress then Heiracles would do so without compunction. The thought upset him, for the Krakind woman had a rare strength in her, to have endured so much in Claeon’s dungeons.
‘Master land-kinden,’ Gribbern said abruptly. ‘You know anything about Littoralists?’
‘Only what you people have told me,’ Stenwold said, reflecting, And that’s little enough. ‘They’ve got a grudge against the land, it seems, want to go back there and wipe my people out, that kind of thing. Don’t tell me you believe that business, how we forced your ancestors into the sea?’
‘Don’t rightly know and don’t see that it matters these days, anyway,’ Gribbern replied. ‘Way I see it, we got ourselves the best of the bargain. Still, I hear them Littoralists got loud voices in Hermatyre these days.’
Stenwold grunted. Why am I answering these questions about their own world?
There was a little more murmuring and then, ‘They got people in your places, the Littoralists?’ Gribbern pressed.
‘How would…’ Stenwold frowned. ‘Yes, I’d say they must have. It wasn’t chance that saw me snatched down here. Someone tricked us into going by boat, and someone was ready for us when we did.’
Gribbern made a mournful sound, whispering to himself again, and Stenwold was unable to stave off the impression that the other man was relaying everything he said. To his animal? Surely not. He tilted his head back, trying to pick out individual words.
‘It sounds as though Claeon is well established there,’ he heard, but the voice was faint and hollow, a deep-voiced man speaking from a great distance. It was not Gribbern.
Stenwold felt his stomach twist, abruptly feeling the cramped space behind him contained more than merely Gribbern’s hunched form. ‘Who said that?’ he demanded. ‘Who’s there with you?’
‘Don’t see anyone here with me but you,’ Gribbern answered, maddeningly slowly. ‘But I was talking to Nemoctes.’
‘Who… how?’
‘Just Art, land-kinden,’ Gribbern told him, as though enlightening Stenwold was a personal tragedy. ‘Only Art. We spend so much of our lives alone, we Pelagists – or we Profundists, as I say. We spend our time so many leagues from one another, and you can go years in the deep places, in the far reaches of the sea, and never see a beast or barque that another human being lives in. We sit well with solitude, we do, but still we cannot pretend that we do not miss the voices of our fellows. We have an Art, is all, all of us drifting kinden. We speak to one another from time to time.’
‘How far?’ Stenwold asked him. Is there anything like this amongst the kinden I know? But he knew there was not. This was not the Mindlink of the Ants: the distances were too great, and Stenwold had actually heard Nemoctes’s voice. The sea-kinden had another impossible trick up their sleeves.
‘Oh, it varies,’ Gribbern said placidly. ‘Perhaps you should talk to Nemoctes yourself. It might be of some use. I’ll pass on what you say to him. Nemoctes, I’m letting you talk to him now.’
The faraway voice came, from some indefinable point before Gribbern. ‘Land-kinden, do you hear me?’
‘My name is Stenwold Maker.’
‘He says his name’s Stenwold Maker,’ Gribbern murmured. ‘Sounds a strange kind of name to me. Over-fancy, I’d say. Still, what do I know?’
‘I am Nemoctes, Stenwold Maker,’ spoke the voice. Even tiny and echoing, it gave Stenwold the impression of a confident and powerful man.
‘You’re the leader of these Pelagists?’ Stenwold asked, Gribbern’s low voice shadowing his words.
‘There is no such thing,’ said the absent Nemoctes, sounding amused, ‘but enough of them will listen to me. I represent some of us who have come to dislike Hermatyre under its current rulership.’
‘Nemoctes,’ Stenwold said, with as much patience as he could muster, ‘I appreciate there’s all kinds of politics going on down here, but it’s nothing to do with me, and it’s nothing to do with my people. All I want to do is go home.’
There was a pause as Gribbern relayed that message faithfully, and then a longer one, while Stenwold had nothing to do but stare at the confining walls of Gribbern’s cramped home. At last Nemoctes replied. ‘I understand that,’ he said. ‘If it were as simple as you say, then I would take you to the shore myself, but what you say is not true. You yourself have confirmed it. Claeon has an interest in your world. The Littoralists are already spying there, and no doubt they have gathered allies. Whether it is war against you, or a plot to bring your people here to serve him, Claeon intends no good, and you are part of his plans. I regret, I deeply regret, but I cannot just let you return.’
‘If something is going on up above,’ Stenwold insisted, ‘then the best way to deal with it is to let me go up there and sort it out. I don’t want sea-kinden agents amongst my people, any more than you do, and nothing that Claeon might be planning is going to mean any good for us. Let me help you by acting where you cannot.’