‘Your Eminence?’ the man enquired.
‘Come here,’ Claeon bid him curtly, and Pellectes crossed the throne room to the window with obvious unwillingness.
‘You must rally your people,’ Claeon continued, with false heartiness. ‘Have you not heard that all our freedoms are under threat? Call on your Littoralists. They shall be chief amongst my armies.’
‘Your Eminence,’ Pellectes demurred, ‘we are visionaries, idealists, but we are no warriors.’
Claeon had seized the Littoralist’s arm in an instant, and Haelyn saw the flesh go white under the Edmir’s grip. ‘Oh, but you have spoken so boldly of invading the land, of thus taking what is ours by right! You talk such a fight as all the world has never seen, Pellectes!’ Claeon’s tight smile was painful to behold. ‘Have I not supported your cause? Have I not even enlisted Nauarch Rosander and primed him to carry the Littoralist banner on to the shores of the land?’ He yanked the taller Kerebroi close, the smile becoming a snarl almost without transition. ‘And do you believe, if the boy should triumph, he will have any time for your nonsense? Do you not think, instead, that there are plenty of tattle-tales in this colony who would be only too happy to point out to him those who once had my ear, and shared my confidences? You have more enemies than you know, Pellectes, and if I am undone, you yourself shall never step safely in Hermatyre again. Now, go arm your people, every one of them, for you have as much to lose as I do!’
He hurled the man from him, sending the Littoralist sprawling on the floor, and Haelyn watched Pellectes stumble back to his feet, already running for the door.
Even at that moment one of his guards returned and the Edmir bellowed furiously at him, ‘Where is Rosander?’
‘Edmir, he musters his Thousand Spines already,’ the guard promised him, and at that, Claeon smiled.
‘Do your people believe in destiny and prophecy and that kind of thing?’ Stenwold asked, trying his best to sound casual. He was back in Wys’s submersible again, which he trusted in a battle more than Nemoctes’s living vessel. Wys made a face at that question. ‘Destiny? Not likely. Destiny’s what you make for yourself. Ain’t that right, Spillage?’
‘Sounds right to me,’ came the voice of the Greatclaw engineer from above.
Phylles was looking less certain, though, so Wys prodded her. ‘Don’t tell me you’re still hung up on all of that stuff?’
The Polypoi woman looked stubborn, so Wys explained. ‘Her folk are all about omens and telling the future, sitting and seeing what the currents send past them, cryptic messages from the dead, all that rot. But we civilized her – or at least I thought we’d civilized her.’
All around them the dark sea seemed studded with stars: the limn-lights suspended from the larger craft and creatures in Aradocles’s fleet.
Paladrya laid a hand on Stenwold’s shoulder, and he smiled.
‘Say what you like,’ she addressed them all, ‘we all have destinies, and those destinies can be uncovered. I have seen it done.’
‘Reckon the lad’s destiny is to win this battle, then?’ Wys asked her. ‘’Cos if we could know that beforehand, I’d feel a lot easier.’
‘What about prophecies delivered by a Seagod?’ Stenwold chanced. That drew a long silence from all of them.
‘Right,’ said Wys at last. ‘Seagods? Prophecies? You’ve been drinking with Pelagists too much, is what that is.’
Stenwold looked to Paladrya, but she shook her head. ‘Stories only,’ she told him. ‘Such prophecies have led to the founding of colonies – or their destruction. I’ve never met anyone who’s even seen a Seagod. And Wys is right – Pelagists delight in telling tall stories to us Obligists from the colonies.’
‘I saw a Seagod once,’ came Lej’s voice from above, but Wys gave a rude snort and told him that he certainly hadn’t.
It was not long after that before pale light began to leach into the darkness outside, outlining what Stenwold might have thought of as a horizon, under more civilized conditions. Before that, all had been as dark as midnight, with only the limn-lights of their fellow travellers to provide a shifting constellation around and below them. Now there was a growing radiance ahead, and Stenwold realized it must be Hermatyre.
‘I hope the boy knows what he’s doing,’ Wys muttered, uncharacteristically fretful. Stenwold expected Paladrya to leap to her protege’s defence, but she was merely biting at her lip, looking worried.
‘He’s shifting,’ Wys noted a moment later. ‘Make sure you stay with him.’
It had been Aradocles’s contribution to ocean skirmish to use the Pelagists and their far-speaking Art. Stenwold knew that Salma had done the same with Ant-kinden, using their mindlink to coordinate the various wings of his army. Here, in the crushing, soundless depths, there was no tradition of military coordination. Each warrior fought alone and fell alone, guided only by his personal tactical sense. Aradocles had split up his force into detachments, each with a Pelagist at its heart. He himself rode with Nemoctes, hidden within the living shell. Wys’s barque, the dead exterior of a similar creature with a clockwork engine installed, tacked and bobbed to keep up as Nemoctes adjusted his course towards the colony. All around them the army shifted and swirled, following the glowing bells of jellyfish, the mud-crawlers, the nautili, as they followed their leader’s orders and came about.
Hermatyre was soon the brightest thing in the sea, shedding varicoloured radiance into the inky water. That radiance showed how the water before the colony was busy, seething with mustering bodies. The pale pens of squid darted or hovered in glimmering schools, each with its lance-wielding rider. Untidy ranks of Kerebroi spearmen, nimble and lightly armoured, clustered and straggled across the seabed between the city and its enemies. The armoured forms of crabs and lobsters squatted, claws drawn in like shields, the long spiny whips of their antennae twitching at the drifting of the currents.
And then there were the octopuses, Arkeuthys’s people. Scores of them clustered across the face of the colony. None was as large as their master, but one in three was a match in size for Wys’s submersible. Squinting into the underwater radiance, Stenwold saw metal and pale shell glinting: spikes and blades crudely made, tentacles coiling about makeshift hilts. He remembered the Tseitan’s battle with Arkeuthys, and the great sea-monster taking their harpoon and using it as a spear. Did we teach them that?
Stenwold had only the loosest notion of how many dissidents Heiracles had managed to muster. ‘How do the numbers look?’ he asked, for it seemed to him that there were a great many who had rallied to Hermatyre’s defence.
‘We’re short of theirs,’ Wys replied bluntly, her small hands clenched into fists, and Stenwold could see her now wondering whether she had made the right decision.
‘But we fight on the side of the true heir,’ Paladrya insisted loyally, although her face seemed bloodless. ‘Who would fight so hard on behalf of Claeon?’
‘Well, let’s hope they know we’ve got the true heir with us, because I don’t see them trailing banners with his face on,’ Wys told her. ‘Oh, I’m getting less fond of this… and there are Rosander’s lot, of course.’ Something went out of her expression. ‘Piss on it,’ she said, almost sadly.
A column of armoured crustaceans was emerging around the Hermatyre’s lumpy, coral-encrusted curve. They trudged out before the defenders, ten abreast at least, and around them marched Rosander’s warriors of the Thousand Spine Train. Almost all of them were Onychoi of one sort or another, many armoured in colossal plate, proceeding with a strangely ponderous dignity. There were other kinden among their number, too: squid-riders, Kerebroi, even a few Pelagists and some of Phylles’s kin. Their passage stirred up the mud beneath, as though the seabed smoked beneath their feet.
And they kept coming, this column emerging inexorably into view, tens and tens and then hundreds of men and women and beasts, until Stenwold felt weak just to watch them. ‘So many,’ he whispered, and Wys gave him a wry look.