The Benthists were swarming to the defence: armoured Onychoi lumbering forth with mauls and swords and the reinforced claws of their Art, while their own creatures snapped and clipped at the enemy with their great claws. They snipped off the spikes of their attackers and pincered through their questing limbs, but Stenwold saw several of the ponderous crustaceans overwhelmed by the crawling onslaught, enwrapped by razor-coated arms and then somehow simply taken apart, pieces of leg and shell drifting off between the assailants in a pale cloud.
The human protagonists were no less savage. Here an Onychoi took his enemy’s arm between claw and dagger, and severed it neatly at the shoulder. There one of the attackers brought the honed tip of his blade to bear in cracking through a defender’s breastplate. The worst thing was the pace of conflict, for it was all so slow, so weighted down by the water, as though they were enacting some leisurely and complex dance, fighting and dying at such a leaden pace that every victim must have had ample time to contemplate his unavoidable fate.
‘What are they?’ Stenwold asked, indicating the aggressors.
‘Echinoi,’ Lyess told him. ‘Sometimes they attack the colonies, and they say that’s the only reason the Builders tolerate anyone else within their homes. The Echinoi are everyone’s enemies. They were first in the sea, the memories say. We other kinden drove them into the deeper places, and they have never forgotten. Some say they possess colonies in the great uncharted wastes, but I have heard of nobody who has seen such things for themselves.’
They drifted on over the sluggish melee, and soon the carnage was left behind in the gloom, only the train’s winking lights remaining as distant star-like testimony. Stenwold continued watching for a long time, and saw several of them wink out. Not for the first time did he consider what a terrible thing it would be, to die out here.
Then there were the fish, or at least they looked like fish to Stenwold. He became aware of them only when the progress of Lyess’s companion changed, becoming more laboured, and his own stomach told him they were descending fast. He looked about, to find Lyess seeming in a panic, staring about her. There was a dawning light above, like the first silver echo of sunlight, but it was fading, even as he noticed it.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked, but then he spotted them: sleek grey darts swooping about them, lunging in towards the bell above, and then twitching away. There were a half dozen of them attacking from all sides, one after another, and always from above, so that Stenwold thought it would make more sense to get to the surface to protect her companion’s top, but instead they continued dropping through the water as swiftly as they could.
The fish were never still, but kept ducking beneath the jellyfish’s rippling mantle, each in turn virtually putting a narrow eye up against its transparent flanks. Stenwold’s own gaze met theirs, and he experienced a distinct shock of contact, like meeting the stare of some intelligent but utterly inhuman entity. Worse was the expression about the intruders’ mouths.
‘Cursed fish was smiling at me,’ he said, shaken.
‘They are Menfish,’ Lyess spat angrily, and her companion shuddered under a renewed assault. ‘They are a bane on the Pelagists. They attack us whenever they can. They think like humans, even though they are nothing but fish, and they hate us.’
‘Can they harm us?’ Stenwold asked her. The incessant lunging attack of the Menfish was becoming swifter and more violent.
‘They could damage my companion so that we cannot go further, and then they will cut through to us. We must go deep, as they are creatures of the surface.’
Then the Menfish suddenly scattered, all three vanishing into the dark water. It gave Stenwold no relief, since it was all too clearly a flight from some worse monster.
For a moment the travellers held their place in the water, the ragged-edged dome above them expanding and contracting silently. Then a shadow coursed past them, a great armoured form of which Stenwold caught only glimpses: a segmented carapace, paddle-like limbs and tail, folded pincers like the largest of all scorpions. It utterly dwarfed them, and it seemed to Stenwold that it would have dwarfed almost anything.
Lyess was on her knees, staring at the thing as it passed. She was saying something over and over, almost under her breath. Stenwold bent close to hear her, and caught the words, ‘Gods of the sea.’
‘Gods?’ he repeated numbly. The monster of monsters was coming back, making another inquisitive pass. He saw compound eyes, larger than he himself was, glitter in the jellyfish’s light, as something behind that broad grid of facets considered him and weighed him, and determined his fate.
‘We call them so.’ Lyess was almost breathless. ‘We meet them seldom. Sometimes they kill us, us Pelagists, but more often they let us live. They are the real powers of the deeps.’ Her previous reserve had been stripped from her. Fear and exhilaration raced each other across her face, where Stenwold saw colours – grey and red and deep blue – surface and fade within her skin.
‘Do they have’ – he hardly dared ask – ‘a kinden?’
‘Nemoctes believes they do,’ she whispered. ‘He says that a Pelagist he knew once travelled to the deep places, to some tiny colony where only we and fugitives go. He told how an Onychoi came in like none he’d ever seen before, half again as tall as a normal man, and clawed, no kinden that he’d seen before or since. He swore that it was Seagod-kinden.’
The plated shadow was now receding away on its own inscrutable errands, and in its absence Stenwold could not help thinking, Sailors’ tales, as above, so below? But he could not deny the fact of the Sea-god, and if it was not actually a god, then perhaps he had no wish to meet anything yet more godlike. Let us be thankful that the sea keeps its greatest mysteries hidden.
It was not long after that she woke him, hovering over and almost touching his face, until the sense of her presence broke him from his slumber.
‘The Hot Stations,’ she announced. ‘We have arrived.’
He sat up to see the striking, turbulent vista beyond the clouded walls of Lyess’s companion, and the word that sprang unstoppably from his lips was, ‘Helleron.’
Twenty-Seven
‘I see you no longer trust me,’ Claeon snapped.
Rosander, Nauarch of the Thousand Spines Train, had arrived in full armour, its stony plates grating constantly against one another. The Onychoi gave such an impression of concentrated weight that Teornis was surprised he didn’t fall straight through the floor. Tiny traces of powder sparkled in the air where newer pieces of his mail were still establishing their fit against their neighbours. Beside him the Spider-kinden and Claeon and another Kerebroi man all looked like so many children.
‘Claeon,’ Rosander murmured, ‘if the sea were filled with trust, from the depths up to the sunlight, there would not be sufficient trust for me to trust you.’ His hard, narrow face broke into an equally hard smile. ‘Besides, I must get used to carrying the weight in the air. When my campaign starts, there will be little chance to let the water bear it. So, tell me, when will that be?’
‘It would be sooner had your fools not let the land-kinden escape,’ Claeon accused, but Rosander was having none of it.