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.’
Twenty-Six
‘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.