Fair Rebel

by Steph Swainston

  CHAPTER 2

  Swallow’s manor house,

  Awndyn-on-the-Strand, April 2039

  The air in the drawing room was like old corked wine. It seemed darker in here, now it was no longer lit by Swallow’s bright personality. She had truly illuminated wherever she was: every situation she enlivened, and now there was just the dark, heavy furniture and a musty smell of dried flowers.

  Wittol, the manager of the Bank of Hacilith Moren, welcomed us, and straight away obsequiously ushered Saker and Eleonora into the adjoining dining hall, where documents were spread out on the table. He shut the door with an unctuous click, leaving me and Tern alone with Bunting, Swallow’s Steward.

  Bunting was as Awian as they come. He was in shirt and waistcoat, and had draped his overcoat on the back of the chaise-longue, under the diamond-paned bow window. His broadsword was tied into the scabbard with black crepe, and gold cord with acorn knots draped from its hilt. He toyed with them nervously. We unsettled him.

  He was telling us how he discovered Swallow dead: ‘I was the first to find her … I was coming to advise her that dinner was ready and she … she was just there, sitting in that chair.’ He pointed to a great desk against the far wall. It was polished walnut, its roll top pushed back, and many small, empty pigeonholes and ivory-handled drawers circled like theatre balconies the expanse of its writing surface. Green leather, edged with gold tooling, it was matched on the seat of a chair pulled out from under the arch of the desk, and you could see the impression, where Swallow always sat. The morning sun shone through the leaded glass and cast a network of shadows over it. Atop the desk was a metronome (stopped), a rosin pot full of pens, and a coffee mug on a coaster. That was all.

  ‘She was sitting on the chair, but resting face-down on the table, her head in her arms.’

  We approached the table respectfully. The musty smell was stronger here. ‘At first I thought she was asleep. She was lying on her score … She’d been working on that symphony all year. So I put my hand on her shoulder to wake her … she was cold.’

  He caught his breath and continued. ‘She was cold and very pale. I’d never seen anyone so white. I turned her over and felt for her pulse … nothing!’

  He pointed to the mug. ‘That was the poison she drank. And she must have kept writing the score while the poison acted on her because … look …’ He picked up the sheaf of paper and sure enough you could see where her hand had begun to shake because the notes were ill-formed, and the pressure of the pen became lighter until they were just little flecks with their tails at the horizontal. Lighter and lighter, smaller and smaller, until they stopped in the middle of a phrase.

  ‘She never stopped trying,’ I said.

  ‘She died with a pen in her hand,’ said Bunting. His tone was accusatory and then he blushed. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Tern took the manuscript from him and studied it intensely. I was more interested in the mug. The musty smell emanated from it. I picked it up and sniffed it: inside was a dark brown residue, like coffee grinds. It was redolent of dead leaves and long-abandoned houses. I didn’t know what poison it was – and because I know all there is to know about drugs and poisons, this was very disconcerting.

  ‘Who killed her?’ I exclaimed.

  ‘It was suicide, Jant,’ Tern said soothingly.

  ‘Could anyone have put this in her drink?’

  Bunting shook his head and brushed his damp palms on his backside. ‘No, Comet. She made it herself.’ He showed us a copper kettle in the fireplace. ‘She often boiled water there and made tea or coffee. She made this the same way.’

  ‘Could someone have come in and poisoned her drink?’

  ‘Well … I suppose it’s possible. I was in the kitchen, so was the cook. I hadn’t seen Swallow since breakfast. She demanded privacy when she composed.’

  ‘And she didn’t keep many servants.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I want to question them. One at a time.’

  ‘Jant,’ Tern said. ‘What are you talking about? Swallow killed herself – we know why.’

  ‘We think we do. But I’ve never smelt anything like this. I can’t identify it. So where did it come from? Where did she get it? … If it is an infusion I suppose it might be hemlock gone stale. Look,’ I said to Bunting, ‘decant it into a bottle for me. I’ll take it to analyse.’

  Bunting ran his hand through his hair, forcing it up into sweaty peaks, and regarded me with untold misery. In the silence a clock ticked in the cloakroom. All was now passing into the hands of Saker and Eleonora: the linenfold wall panelling that smelt of beeswax, the stone-mullioned windows grouped in sixteens and thirty-twos, the plasterwork ceiling with its small pendentives, and the writing desk, against which leant Swallow’s walking stick.

  No fire was lit in the hearth, but the April morning was beginning to warm. Sparks of dust danced through a shaft of light, each one flashing golden, enjoying brief fame, before randomly rejoining the shadow.

  ‘It’s taking a long time,’ said Bunting.

  ‘It’s a big business.’

  He nodded with the carelessness of despair. ‘I suppose you see a lot of mortals die.’

  ‘Thousands,’ said Tern. ‘But rarely this way.’ She rearranged her fur stole around her dainty shoulders, and the nets and silks of her long skirt, damp at the hem from the beach, swept the floor as she went to sit on the chaise longue.

  ‘What was Swallow like in the last few months?’ I asked Bunting.

  ‘Bitter! Well … ever since Thunder’s Challenge she’d been bitter. More and more so until it consumed her. For a decade, Comet, she bottled her fury up inside. She was bound to kill herself … I’m afraid … with hindsight …’ She kept biting her lip and her eyes glittered. ‘I’ve never seen anyone so angry.’

  ‘Quietly angry?’

  ‘Ferociously. It scared us.’

  ‘Did she take it out on you?’ asked Tern.

  ‘No, no. She was good to us. It was the Emperor she hated. Begging your pardon, my lady. She hated the Castle. All immortals. And then maybe she turned to hating herself.’

  I was growing tired of pacing back and forth on the oak floorboards, the green Ghallain rug. After Thunder’s Challenge, I should have come to visit Swallow. But the Emperor had given me so many orders I’d never had chance. And I think she wouldn’t have agreed to see me anyway. Not while suffering such all-consuming fury.

  The hall door unlocked and the bank manager emerged, closely followed by Eleonora and Saker. Mr. Wittol of Hacilith was so gaunt that his black silk coat seemed to flow into the hollow of his abdomen, and almost disappeared from view before resurging over his bony hips. His trousers seemed to hang loose without any legs in them at all. With a reserved and aquiline air he contemplated us before announcing, ‘The Manorship of Awndyn is now the property of their Majesties the King and Queen of Awia.’ And he gave a bow which set the rose-gold tags on his watch chain jingling.

  CHAPTER 3

  Mine Twenty, ‘Thunder’s Salient’, The Lowespass Front, June 2040

  The cannons started at dawn. I was circling over the field artillery on the furthest right flank where Capelin Thunder sat on horseback between his teams of gunners. The outermost six-kilo gun fired and recoiled. Men clustered in, white coats like mites, heaved it into position and, while sponge and ramrod flashed, the next one in the line boomed and reared.

  I leant against the wind. It rippled my shirt as I turned. This was going to be a hot day – and hard work. The line of cannons stretched along the front of the Paperlands, three kilometres from here to Cyan at the mouth of Valley Twenty in the centre, another three beyond her to Tornado on the left wing where, with six-kilo shot, he too was pounding the fuck out of the Paperlands.

  The breeze ripped the smoke from the cannons. By the time Thunder’s third had fired, the first had reloaded. Along the ground below me a hundred barrels spat flame and rebounded.

  The din was overwhelming. Even fifty metres above the
m my ears were starting to ring and in a few minutes I’d be deafened. I held my wings straight and chandelled up, faster on the southern turn. Smoke whipped back towards the Wall. And from the vast wilderness of the Paperlands it brought the smell of Insects … They were massing.

  We were ten kilometres into the Paperlands. We’d left our static gun emplacements far behind. I saw them in the distance, on this side of the Wall. Their bunkers gleamed when the sun flashed on the twelve-kilo siege guns lurking inside.

  Already Thunder’s battery was cracking the walls of the Insects’ tunnels. Their pointed pagoda roofs, like whipped-up meringue peaks pink in the morning light, were beginning to shatter. Their tough, fireproof paper walls were breaking with a fibrous texture between papier-mâché, ceramic and bone.

  Antennae flicked out of a crack. A triangular head emerged. Two gold-brown legs like blades scrabbled out. An Insect the size of a horse pulled itself through with antlike dexterity. It ran a few steps, feelers swivelling, scented the men of the gun teams, and bolted at them.

  Another followed it out of the breach, then another. Then thousands tore down their own cell wall to attack. For an instant I glimpsed them crammed together inside. They struggled to widen the breach, and out they poured!

  I swooped low and smoke snatched over my wings. It stung my eyes and blotted my throat. I sucked a breath, flew into the smoke bank. Thick black fumes enclosed me completely, stinking of sulphur. There was Capelin’s white horse, glowing as if luminous; he sat like a sack of rice. He couldn’t see the Insects. He couldn’t see a damn thing. I called to him and he yelled at his aides. They galloped away down the line, bugles trilling. I’d sighted bugs and the cannon must change to canister.

  Or they’d be overrun. I cut up through the cloud, out into the blinding sun, bleeding off my speed as I rose until, for an instant, I hung motionless in the air. Tens of thousands of Insects were bristling, erupting out of their broken tunnels.

  I tilted forwards into a glide and whooshed down the line with the booming, bucking guns zipping past one by one below me.

  Six men to each. There’s a loader hefting a red canvas bag of powder. In it goes, shoved down by the ramsman. There’s another, loading a tin of canister shot. He’s double-shotting it. They all are!

  A hundred thousand Insects will run this gauntlet. Here’s a gun ready loaded, the ventsman is piercing the touchhole and setting the fuse. Now all the guns ahead were primed and ready, the artillerists in position. Each firer held a linstock with the slow fuse snaked around it, hissing invisible-pale.

  I viewed our whole trap, so cleverly designed only Thunder had the chutzpah to try it. We force the Insects to run, and we don’t have to move. If all goes well, as he insists it will, we’ll funnel them along the face of the Paperlands and into Valley Twenty.

  Our fifty thousand men were drawn up in ranks facing the white sea of the Paperlands. I glimpsed Saker’s colours, then Cyan’s, rippling above the infantry opposite the entrance to the valley, and Eleonora’s swan flying in the heavy cavalry some distance to the rear.

  All this is land we’ve reclaimed and cleared of Paper. Along a twenty kilometre front Thunder has wrested a band ten kilometres deep, and on a morning like this I feel it’s possible to beat the bugs all the way back to Lazulai.

  That’s the last cannon, a gap, then archers. There’s King Saker on his white stallion with an arrow at string. I swooped low, dared lower, making smooth movements with my legs to steer, and my next beat touched the tassel-fringe of the sky-blue flag of Awia, hanging limp on its eagle-topped pole. Saker raised his hand in the air and my feathers whisked over it as I passed above him.

  The archers gawped up in wonder. Silver sallets became pale faces, open mouths. They were wishing their wings weren’t useless.

  ‘Eyes forward!’ he bellowed.

  The ground in front of each man stubbled with arrows he’d planted there. They looked to the Wall as I hissed away. On their horizon a pall of smoke was growing and they knew the Insects were coming.

  A cannon, a gap, and Cyan’s muskets. Cyan Lightning by her sunburst flag in the centre. She’d witnessed my dive over the archers and I could see her grin from here. She gripped her musket by the small of the stock, and brandished it. She was sitting an immense destrier that dwarfed the mounts of the colour ensigns and the lines of the two ranks before her. Her horsehair crest ruffled in the breeze. She tilted up her face as I sailed over, and I looked down into the ammo box on the saddle bow, between her armoured thighs.

  Her infantry are deployed in line, one battalion three ranks deep. I felt their grim silence, their muskets loaded and ready, behind the first rank of pikemen in armour – no helmets but full harness.

  Next along the line, more six-kilo cannons with their teams waiting, ramrod and linstock in hand, water buckets at the ramsmen’s feet. Then the array continues, Awian archers, then line battalions of Tanager musket fyrd, artillery, Eske musket fyrd, all the way to the west wing where Tornado’s cannon is blowing breaches in the paper.

  Behind us the squares of cavalry waited almost indolently, casual confidence in the attitude of Eleonora’s lancers and, behind them, the limber teams waiting to pull the field guns home, when we’ve funnelled a hundred thousand Insects into one little valley of death.

  I sped up the line. Tornado’s cannon were booming without pause. I rose to glimpse their pall of smoke.

  A six-kilo ball hit the peak of an Insect’s tunnel, smashed it, and great shards of the dried saliva spun into the air. The roundshot bounced up, spinning, flew in an arc over the Paperlands and crashed into the roof of the cells again, splintered a hole, bounced, smashed down again further on, bounced a third, and a fourth time, and dropped out of sight in a crevasse crust of Paper. From each strike, a network of cracks spread over the cells and tunnels.

  Insects were pouring from the breaches. The batteries were swopping to canister and were blowing bugs apart. I had a second for a breath, plunged into their wall of fumes.

  Wreaths of earthy rotten-egg smoke tore away before my eyes. A thinner patch, then another bank – it tumbled from the maw of every cannon. Men closed on one, shoved the wet sponge down its muzzle. The volume of the hiss amazed me, but they’re already deaf.

  As the ramsman sluiced it out, the ventsman with a glove put his thumb over the vent hole. His teammate was heaving the next bag of powder from the cart. Working intently they didn’t see me as I glided in and alighted on the bare ground.

  Tornado was standing in the stirrups, bending this way and that in the most incredible shapes as he tried to see through the smoke. He had a telescope closed in his hand.

  ‘Pointless using that!’ I shouted.

  He jumped and wheeled his horse around. ‘Jant! Are Insects out at Thunder’s end?’

  ‘Yes! The same as yours!’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Fifty thousand to run. I saw them. They stretched back, it seemed to Murrelet!’

  ‘Ours are running.’

  I coughed uncontrollably. ‘You’re getting fifty thousand too. For a kilometre into the Paperlands, they’re crowding five deep!’

  He glanced at his nearest gun, which was shoving in canisters. Bits of fuse and burning wadding littered the ground around us. ‘I hope the centre holds.’

  ‘It will,’ I shouted. ‘I’ll be there.’

  ‘If Insects turn at all, they’ll turn at Cyan.’

  ‘She’ll stand.’

  Tornado jabbed his carbine in the direction of the Insects. We could see thin limbs running in the smoke. They became clearer, a cannon boomed, and pieces of carapace flew in the air.

  ‘Watch ’em down the line!’ Tornado yelled.

  ‘I will.’ I spread my wings.

  ‘Jant!’ He bellowed. ‘Bring up shot wagons till there’s none left. I want lancers here before that happens. If they’re not here we’ll be mincemeat!’

  ‘You’ll have the Queen’s Own Rachiswater,’ I said.

  ‘As long
as they get here!’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And limber teams!’ he yelled after me.

  Sure. Sure. If we don’t drag the field guns out at the same time as we pull back the wing, stray Insects will chew their wheels off. That was the least of my trouble.

  I flew up, feeling smoke clotting on my skin. The cannon crews’ hands and faces were black, their white coats smudged, protection against the sparks but soaked with sweat. Here and there greaves flashed in the oppressive darkness as leg-armoured men plunged their ramrods.

  But it was working. I gained height above the spreading pall and saw the Insects charging out of it. The first were lengths ahead, then came a running mass of giant ants, packed so closely they looked fused together. The swarm went on and on, issuing from the smoke, charging at full pelt down the line of guns. Every Insect could smell other spattered Insects. Their fear kept them running, and when they crossed the line of sight of each cannon the firer dipped his taper, lit the fuse, and blew a great hole in the mass.

  So a wave of bombardment started down the front of the Paperlands. As Insects ran, the cannon roared, one then the next, then the next, and kept booming as more seethed past. From the left and right wings, to the middle, we were forcing them into the centre and into the valley.

  Valley Twenty is a tight u-shaped natural gorge that Insects had filled with their cells and tunnels centuries ago when they took this land. Capelin Thunder and Kay Snow believed it would contain them for twenty hours only, that’s all we need, because underneath it we’ve built the largest bomb ever made.

  The Insects’ red-brown shells were being blasted apart. Their legs were shattering in the air, heads severed and compound eyes fragmented, lengths of gut ribboning out as the canister raked them.