And what is that? pried the thoughts of Arkeuthys.
Why, that I am not Claeon, Aradocles told the creature drily. Surely you cannot claim that you actually liked my uncle?
Arkeuthys began abruptly jetting backwards in the water, as Nemoctes reported, coiling and pulsing until he hung over the defenders. In Aradocles’s mind, though, echoed the faint suggestion of laughter.
It was only when Aradocles’s troops entered Hermatyre that Stenwold realized just how messy things could have become. The city possessed dozens of the double-doored hatches, but each outer one could have been held with ease by just a few spearmen, and then again at the inner door. There were no defenders in evidence, though. Stenwold himself had watched as Arkeuthys had drifted over Claeon’s marshalled forces, expecting a sudden charge, the first blood of the war. There had been a change plain to see in the enemy army, though, a ripple of shock passing through them. As the attackers had drawn closer Stenwold had witnessed a great deal of the sea-kinden’s busy underwater hand-speech as Krakind Kerebroi – the kin of Aradocles and Claeon – passed on news to their allies of other kinden.
And the defending force had soon begun to break up. Individuals had sidled off, and then whole troops of them, the majority of the defenders simply giving up and going home. Some even left their weapons behind: spears driven point-first into the seabed or the falx swords abandoned. The octopuses – all of Arkeuthys’s crawling, lurking kindred – had simply slithered away across the great gnarled dome of the colony, leaving the way clear.
Some of the defenders had not disbanded, though. A number had come to join the attackers, gladly switching sides for no reason that Stenwold could understand just then. Others, however, had remained under arms, and they hurried back into Hermatyre, desperate to get inside its coral walls before the heir’s forces reached them. There were not enough that they could have held the city, however, even if they could have been sure of support from the rest of the populace.
Aradocles’s forces began the slow process of filing into the colony, streaming in through every entrance and forming up in their separate detachments, braced for Claeon’s counterattack. For Stenwold, this was the longest part of the assault, watching the foot-soldiers of the assault force queue and mill until their own turn came. Hermatyre had not been built with such a grand number of visitors in mind.
‘I suppose, if we’d needed, we could have used the Gastroi to cut our way in,’ he suggested. The looks he received from the others revealed nothing but horror.
‘You cannot cut,’ Paladrya told him, as if even the mention of the word was sacrilege. ‘The Builders, the Arketoi, would be angered.’
Stenwold remembered those pale little tattooed men, the mysterious kinden who had constructed Hermatyre and all the other colonies across the seabed. ‘I didn’t see any of them in the battle line,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think they really, well, noticed this kind of thing.’
‘Battles? Politics?’ Paladrya replied. ‘Oh, sometimes they do, and woe betide anyone who attracts their attention. Break any of the substance of Hermatyre, though, and you’d never be able to go near a colony ever again. The entire kinden, they’d know.’
At last it was Stenwold’s turn, and he took up his caul and let Paladrya pull him over to the city’s stone outer skin and help guide him inside. He had come this far, and he wanted to see this finished.
The army had divided into different cohorts, and now the Pelagists’ far-speech would not help them for, of Nemoctes’s people, only the man himself was entering the colony. Meanwhile each cohort, entering by a different gate, would start moving through the twisting paths of Hermatyre, seeking out resistance wherever it was to be found.
Stenwold himself followed close behind Aradocles, with Paladrya to one side of him and Phylles to the other. He had never gained much of a sense of Hermatyre’s layout before, while being bundled through the streets by Claeon’s men or Rosander’s, but now he had a chance to appreciate the colony’s bizarre architecture, its curious beauty and its utterly alien design. A living city, surely, or one that had been grown and then died, as more city was grown on top of it, over and over. Within that stratified crust, the colony was expressed in diverse hollows: chambers as small as a cramped room or as great as a city square; the walls patterned, segmented, moulded into symmetrical designs of unknown import in the secret architectural language of the Builders. The tunnels interlinking the chambers led up and down seemingly at random: ribbed passageways of stone winding and twisting like worms through the city’s heart. Everywhere there was limn-light, those coloured globes of radiance that the sea-kinden crafted for lamps, casting dim-coloured veils across the pale stone, and across the grim faces of the invaders.
They had expected Claeon’s people to fight them from room to room, but there was barely any resistance, just a few straggling defenders caught up by the attackers’ tide. The residents of Hermatyre watched Aradocles and his people pass, making no move to stop them, but nor did they cheer. Instead they waited, untrusting and unsure, to see the outcome. Stenwold was reminded that Aradocles had been absent for years, and their memory of him was of a mere youth, and not a king. Rightful heir he might be, but these people had been living under Claeon’s capricious and heavy-handed rule, and they had no guarantee that the Edmir’s nephew would prove any better.
And then they came out upon a vista that Stenwold did recognize, at last. Here he had returned, by all the strange roads that fate had led him along, to the Cathedra Edmir, the heart of Hermatyre, the great plaza that gave onto the gates of the Edmir’s palace complex. This was the place that he had first been dragged to, feeling bewildered and battered, for his first introduction to the sea-kinden. This was where Paladrya had been imprisoned since Claeon’s suspicion fell upon her, until Wys’s people had broken them both out.
And this was where the Edmir’s loyalists had chosen to make their stand, and there were many. All Claeon’s remaining supporters were assembled here, every villain and sycophant who had prospered so much under his reign that their lives would be forfeit if he fell. All the cruelty, the greed, the petty tyranny and casual brutality that had grown fat under Claeon’s rule had now gathered to defend him, knowing that they were dead men otherwise.
Some remained within the palace, others were lined up outside it: Dart-kinden and Krakind Kerebroi, Onychoi large and small, a few that were kin to Phylles even. They stood in clumps, forming an uneven battle line: some with mauls or falxes, others with hooked knives, but most of them with spears. Some had weapons that Stenwold took for lances at first, but then he noticed that, instead of a head of metal or bone, they had something else twined around the shaft like a living thing.
‘Well,’ he murmured to Paladrya, ‘I think this is as far as words and peace take us,’ to which she nodded soberly.
Forty-Five
‘What are they waiting for?’ Pellectes demanded. The Littoralist leader clutched a spear in both hands, peering out over the heads of the warriors lined up in front of the palace. ‘He has more men than we do, doesn’t he? Or does he?’ He craned left and right, trying to see clearer without exposing himself to the eyes of the enemy.
‘This is but part of the boy’s force,’ growled Claeon sourly. Since the bulk of Hermatyre’s defenders had betrayed him – since Arkeuthys had betrayed him! – he was running out of options. ‘The other packs of vagabonds are combing the streets even now.’
‘Then what are we waiting for?’ Pellectes demanded, almost jostling Claeon as the two of them stood at the back of their forces, in the gaping entryway of the palace itself. ‘Why not attack now? We have more warriors than he does, I think. Yes, I’m sure of it.’