The Krakind let their discussions run on, till most of the Pelagists gave up on the whole business and went off to tend to their machines or their animals. Stenwold now looked up as he heard one approaching him.
‘Nemoctes,’ he named the arrival.
‘Stenwold Maker.’ Nemoctes was wearing his shell mail, the same shield slung across his back. ‘I have a message for you.’
Something twisted inside Stenwold. ‘From…?’
‘Her, yes. Lyess.’ Nemoctes looked troubled. ‘She told me that you’d put a question to her, before you left, and that her companion has the answer now. She told me also that you were coming back to us. She seemed very sure of that.’
Stenwold nodded tiredly. ‘Take me to her.’
‘You need not, if you do not wish it,’ Nemoctes cautioned. ‘She is
… behaving strangely. I have never before known her like this. Something has changed with her.’
‘Take me to her,’ Stenwold repeated, and levered himself to his feet. Nemoctes’s expression darkened but he nodded, gesturing for Stenwold to follow him.
On the way to the hatch, Paladrya approached him, her expression suddenly one of alarm, and he wondered what she had guessed at, and by what means. She reached out a hand to him and he touched fingers briefly, feeling like a man going to his own execution.
He found that his memories had strayed, during that period when Lyess and her domain had been so much on his mind. In his thoughts, during his incarceration at the Hot Stations, during the flight in the submersible, he had recalled pure light, as though he had travelled with Lyess in a room full of windows: as though the clean sunlight had shone in from every point.
Now, standing before her again after so long, he discovered that his mind had glossed over the shapes in the translucent material of the creature around them: the coils and sacs and organs casting their shadows through the ambient glow. His mind had rewritten the place, gilded and edited it until he found he recalled something like a domed hall of lucent marble, when all along he had been dwelling within the guts of a monster.
Lyess, though, his memories had not needed to alter: beautiful as a statue and just as cold; blank-eyed as a Moth-kinden, or as the Monarch of Princep Salmae. He could feel the shreds of old glamour stir at the sight of her, her skin paler than alabaster, her form so perfect in its curves and in its grace that she seemed more the work of some arch-genius artificer than a product of nature. About her shoulders her hair stirred and waved under unfelt currents.
‘You came back,’ she said. He could not read her face because, like an Ant-kinden, she had lived all her life in a communion that had never needed facial expressions. Unlike the Ants, though, that communion had denied any human contact, until now.
‘Nemoctes said you had an answer for me,’ he said slowly, thinking carefully on his words lest he commit to something without realizing.
‘You asked me to seek out the memories of our ancestors,’ she told him. ‘You wished to know if the Littoralists were right and if your forebears drove ours from the land.’
Stenwold nodded, not trusting himself to speak. It means nothing, the better part of his mind insisted. At this remove, what difference can it make? But he was a scholar – a tactician, a spymaster and a statesman yes, but a scholar first. He wanted to know what guilt and what blood stained the hands of all those on the land.
‘Kneel,’ she instructed him and, when he raised his eyebrows at that, she cocked her head to one side and smiled, though it was an awkward attempt at the expression. ‘Or you will fall,’ she explained, ‘when my companion touches your mind.’
Suddenly he was less keen to know. The pulsating, curving walls around them seemed to loom always on the point of closing in. ‘My mind? Can you not simply tell…?’
‘You have called on the memories of ancient days, Stenwold Maker. Do you not wish to share them, now that they are laid before you?’ That smile was still there, and as false as ever, but there were real feelings behind it, though terrible feelings. To kneel before her would be to open himself to more than old memories, he realized. There was a need in her, that was desperate, yearning and predatory. She had put her barbs in him before, to lure him back to her, yet he felt bleakly that it was nothing of Stenwold Maker that she sought. It was merely that he was the first, the only, human being that she had shared her domain with, and after he had gone, she had been lonely.
But I do want to know! And would it be such a crime to toy with her affections, to profess things he did not feel, in order to discover what no man of Collegium had ever known before?
‘Come, Stenwold.’ She held out a hand to him, the skin so delicate that he could almost see her bones through it. He remembered now what it had been to touch her, and how he had felt as her power, her enchantment, had encroached on him.
A lifetime of that? A forever of being slave to her magic, a slave to the sea?
‘Can you not… just tell me?’ he asked plaintively, staring at the proffered hand.
‘Words are but sounds,’ she told him simply. ‘In the deep, words are nothing. Sight is nothing. There is only feeling and knowledge. Would you turn away the gift of pure knowledge?’ And, as he hesitated still, two words forced themselves out from her resolve: ‘Please, Stenwold.’
He knew then how it would be a crime, a terrible crime, to buy her knowledge with false coin – and a crime that would come with its own form of punishment. If he knelt before her, if he even took her hand, it would be as if he had signed a contract, made a vow. From that point on, the very creature that contained them would enforce her right, more terribly than any bride’s father in dragging him to his nuptials.
‘I can’t.’ He heard his words and watched her face, half expecting that it would remain calm as ever even so.
‘You must!’ she insisted. ‘You are mine! I marked you as my own. You have thought of me, only of me!’ Her features twitched and quivered, without ever forming a coherent expression.
‘No longer,’ he explained. ‘Perhaps the land air has washed all the sea from me.’ Or perhaps the Monarch was right, and I have been saved by my admiration for another. But he said none of that.
‘But you want to know,’ she insisted, and her hand, still offered to him, kept clenching and unclenching.
‘I do, but I cannot meet your price, Lyess.’
For a second she stared at him, and some emotion flowered at last in her face. It was rage, pure rage, as callow and raw as a youth’s, flooding through her and contorting her features until her perfect teeth were bared, her eyes turning into daggers.
‘No!’ she shrieked, and lunged towards him faster than he had expected. The hand that had been offered to him was at his throat in an instant, still feeling cool and slick. He stumbled back, and she went with him, until she had him pressed against the yielding flesh of the wall. He had a hand on her wrist by that point, and her grip was not strong, but then something writhed against his neck, something in her palm, and he went very still.
Phylles’s Art, he thought, having seen the lashing barbs of Wys’s crew-woman kill their share of victims, and now it seemed that Lyess’s kinden possessed a similar weapon. Thinking of the curtain of stinging tendrils her companion trailed behind it, he realized that he should have guessed at that before.
‘You are mine,’ Lyess insisted. Against her so-pale face, in the grey-white light, it was hard to tell if she was weeping or not, but her voice suggested it. ‘I was led to you! You were given to me!’