Fair Rebel

by Steph Swainston

  Over Old Town, the blocks of the university like a sliding puzzle. A flock of pigeons beat up from the surrounding rooftops and sped round and round. The university’s spire like a lance passed below me. I leant right and turned, bleeding off my speed, over lecture hall, labs, the refectory, and brought the spire in front of me again. Then, wings flexing, adjusting constantly, I balanced against the buffeting breeze and brought myself vertical. I grabbed the thick iron spike, stepped onto its narrow base and stood atop the tower.

  The tapering spike was cold and rough and smelt of weather-beaten metal. Its base just wide enough for the arch of one foot. I hung onto it and looked down the precipitous drop of the university’s tower and all its windows, to the roofs of the Medical Faculty.

  The Vermiform hung from my pocket, waving wildly.

  ‘Do you like flying?’ I asked it.

  It threshed its worms in great excitement.

  ‘Well, have a good look. That pointed roof is Rayne’s house. It’s the oldest building in the city. It’s wood and the rest is stone. That oval roof is the lecture theatre. Bit different from the Front, isn’t it?’

  The flow of Old Town murmured below us. The city carried on as normal, which seemed so strange. I’d expected the bombs to have stopped everything. I expected the streets to be empty and everyone inside, like Micawater. But I could see yellow melons on the first market stall beyond the corner, students sitting with their bikes flat on the grass. I don’t wonder the gypsies have forgotten what Eszai are for. May the Insects break through here, swarm the whole city, chew it to buttresses of paper anchored to the tower. Then they’d remember why they need us.

  We need Rayne. I tucked the Vermiform back in my pocket and jumped off the tower. Spiralled down. Landed in a crouch. I climbed the steps to the lecture hall and paused outside its double doors. The Doctor’s voice was in full flow inside ‘—Will attack the soft parts of one’s abdomen but these will be covered in armour so you find—’

  I crashed the doors open and walked in. Benches tiered down to the lecture floor, where Rayne stood next to a dissecting table with an Insect on it.

  ‘Comet!’ she said.

  The students in the benches strained round. I descended the steep stairs past them, to her side. ‘You’re burnt,’ she said.

  I stretched out a wing and spoke to her behind it. ‘We must evacuate the building now. Everyone.’

  She saw my expression, dropped her ichor-covered hacksaw and raised her arms. ‘Year Three, the lecture is over. File out quietly, quickly, and in order.’

  A clatter as they swept away their notebooks and picked up their bags.

  ‘Tell them to go as far from campus as possible.’

  Rayne raised her eyebrows but complied. ‘Leave Goldthread!’

  ‘Go into town! Tell everyone you meet to do the same!’

  They looked at each other, deathly quiet, and left speedily, glancing back at me. The door banged behind the last of them.

  Rayne said, ‘Jant, this had better be good!’

  ‘Bombs could be planted here.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Very likely.’

  She smeared her hands down the front of her apron and looked about. Beside us, she’d neatly cut in half the giant Insect on its metal table and dissected it to show its mangle of ganglia. The rest of its tangled white nervous system unravelled like string onto the floor and into the hollow cores of its severed limbs. At the back, beside the blackboard, Insects were piled ready for dissection; the air was thick with their coppery, acidic smell and that of formaldehyde.

  ‘Why would anyone want to bomb a Year Three lecture?’

  ‘Swallow wants to kill every Eszai.’

  ‘Swallow? The singer? She’s dead.’

  ‘She faked it!’

  ‘Dead is dead, Jant. I—’

  I took the old woman’s hand and pulled her to the side door that I knew led into her house. She didn’t resist but trotted after me. By the door I trod something underfoot that compressed with a crackle. It was a brown paper fuse. It ran from the corner of the door, half a metre, into the pile of Insects. ‘Look!’

  I knelt down, grasped the fuse and yanked it hard. It came free and the top Insect slid off the pile and thumped to the ground. I dashed to it: lying on its side, it was spilling black powder out of its thick, hollow thorax. I rocked it over and powder poured out onto the floorboards. Large blasting grains had been packed tightly inside the exoskeleton, and a hole drilled into the shell to take the fuse.

  ‘It’s full of powder,’ I said.

  ‘This one is, too,’ said Rayne. ‘And this!’

  ‘Swallow turned Insects into bombs.’

  ‘To kill me?’

  ‘Yes, Ella.’

  She pulled herself up to her full height. ‘While I stood lecturing?’

  ‘Yes!’

  I rubbed the paper fuse-covering between my thumb and forefinger, and felt the hard string inside. Black powder grains flaked from the glue-covered twine and sprinkled out of the end of the sheathing, like pepper.

  ‘Ten Insects for the students to dissect. In fifteen minutes I’d have given them out …’

  ‘Come on!’

  I hastened her ahead, through the door, and suddenly we were in the most incredible museum, the passage to her house. I followed the fuse from the Insects – it ran, in rough-and-ready fashion, down the first dimly-lit side-aisle, at the base of the shelves, and looped up through an open sash window.

  I ran to it. The fuse hung out, onto Goldthread Street, and dangled behind a privet bush, behind the black iron railings. The normal passers-by strolled up and down the wide pavement outside – and any one of them could be a bomber in disguise.

  Rayne joined me. ‘The usual suppliers delivered the Insects this morning.’

  I turned to her wrinkled face. ‘Did delivery men cart them in?’

  ‘And carried them into the lecture hall, yes.’

  ‘Were they gypsies?’

  ‘All carters are, round here.’

  I stared past her, at the shelves packed with specimen jars, preserved in alcohol and formalin, the chests and cabinets and boxes.

  The crammed chaos surrounded us. Jars of organs white with age, floating within their crimped ducts and lace-snaked membranes. Glassware stored in crates with straw. This bloody museum of Rayne’s and her seventh-century house were tinder and neat alcohol. One grenade through one of these windows, and the whole lot would go up.

  I pulled her through the museum, past jars containing every anatomical peculiarity collected over a thousand years. A hand with six fingers, a curled-up foetus, the skeleton of a man whose skull bulged bone, dust caught in its shrubby growths.

  We emerged into her house. Her study, where sunlight from the little side-street beamed through the slatted shutters. A tome lay open on her desk, covered with Insect dissection diagrams, and her lecture notes.

  I dragged her to the door but she pulled free. She ran from display case to sideboard. ‘What to take? What to take?’

  ‘We haven’t time!’

  ‘It’s irreplaceable!’

  She ran to the bookshelves beside her bed in the corner. Wildly scanned the titles. ‘Some dead singer can’t—!’

  ‘She doesn’t care!’

  Rayne stepped up onto the crochet cover of her bed, reached high and grabbed an old book from the end of the shelf above it, then barged out into the street.

  With my next breath I caught an oddly familiar smell, and it stopped me dead. I turned, and traced it to Rayne’s desk. I stood there, still, like a Rhydanne hunter, and inhaled long through my nose. An image formed in my mind – the dregs in Swallow’s coffee mug. The same musty odour. I followed the scent among the formalin, camphor, turpentine and old plaster, to an envelope on her desk. It was open, full of dried leaves.

  I picked it up and sniffed it. As I did so, behind me was a crash! of window glass, the chink of a bottle breaking, and kerosene blue with flame slooshed out of
the window aisle, across the bare museum floor. The flames seized onto the lowest shelves, crackled up the edge of the first display case.

  I stuffed the envelope in my pocket and darted out, to Rayne on the far pavement. I grabbed her with both hands, hugged her and bent over her, my cheek on her hard bun.

  Rayne on the lecture floor would have been thrown against the pews by the shockwave, speared with fragments of shell.

  She battered the inside of my wing. ‘Jant! Let me see!’

  I unwrapped her, revealing her face staring up. ‘It won’t blow! You took the fuse from the bugs!’

  ‘It’s burning!’

  She tried to push my wing down, but wasn’t strong enough, and simply crushed the feathers on my forearm. I lowered it, while keeping the other folded tight around her, and let her see.

  The front of her half-timbered house looked completely normal. My feathers bent against her stained linen dress and apron. She glared like a gladiator’s grandmother, the book under her arm. A cart went past.

  Then, through the window, the daffodil light flared.

  ‘Someone threw a lit bottle of kerosene through the window. Did you see who?’

  She pointed up the alley, to the junction with Goldthread Street, the main road faced with the museum’s windows, and the high walls of other faculty buildings. ‘How could I? It’s round the corner!’

  Flame filled the bow-windows of her little house. Smoke was pouring from under the eaves. The bull’s-eye panes began to crack – and then smoke, stinking of boiling formaldehyde, began flowing out of an open window, high in the lecture theatre behind the museum.

  Rayne watched in horror, her mouth agape, a black slit, her hands hooked over my wing.

  ‘My collection! My books! …Fifteen hundred years!’

  She sagged. I shuffled my wings under her armpits and pulled her back from the junction, away from the heat.

  A crowd was gathering, people running out of the university buildings along Goldthread. I yelled at them, ‘Go that way! Go to Godwit Street! Go to Southgate!’

  Then clanging of bells, hooves and wheel-rims on the cobbles. Two fire engines galloped past the junction, and drew up their horses by the museum main entrance. They stopped, stared at the flames, realised there was bugger all anyone could do, and started moving the people back.

  I shouted to a fireman. ‘Evacuate everyone! There’s gunpowder inside!’

  ‘Yes, Comet!’

  Rayne squirmed. ‘Jant … Oh, Jant. I would have been in that …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You have … been in one?’

  ‘The explosion on Cullion Pier, four days ago.’

  ‘Your voice is hoarse.’

  ‘The air was fire. I breathed it in. I’ve been coughing blood.’

  She stared at her house. ‘…Who patched you up like that?’

  ‘Some quack on the flagship.’

  Her house had become a furnace. Tiles were falling off the burning rafters, leaving black fingers within the leaping flames. Then, with a sudden thunder, the roof caved in, and a huge mass of alcohol-yellow fire stretched to the sky.

  Flames were roaring out of the windows and licking up the outside wall of the lecture theatre, and starting to catch. You could hear retorts from inside as the last of the jars burst. Flames streaked up, then a triple detonation as the heat reached the Insect bombs and set them off.

  I had to get her out of this ancient little side-street. I started to lead her down to the junction with Sinter, so we could turn back onto Godwit Street – and a gigantic explosion boomed beyond the lecture theatre. We flinched together, against the wall. It shattered all the windows, and blasted the glass against the History Faculty opposite. Men and women still pouring out of the building were caught in the flying shards, and started screaming.

  ‘The library!’ yelled Rayne.

  Another explosion behind it smashed a column of flame into the air, the height of the University’s spire. Black smoke braided up, and in the hot air just kept climbing. We could hear screams and cries coming from behind her burning house.

  ‘The dispensary!’ Rayne tore at my wing to be free, but I held her.

  A double explosion, louder still. Crump-crump! Fragments of tile and brick flew into the sky, and two trunks of solid fire thrust up above the roof of the lecture hall. They twisted, vanished, but the smoke continued to an extraordinary height. A weird, complete silence. Long enough for Rayne to look at me, perplexed. Then began more screaming, shrieking in a voice ripped with agony. And the ineffectual firebells rang again.

  Rayne screamed. ‘The patients! It was the hospital! The hospital!’

  And she fainted in my arms.

  I carried the Doctor to a hotel I knew nearby, because it was the nearest place I could think of that might be safe. I lay her on the bed and drew up the blankets. Then I reported to Governor Aver-Falconet, and helped the Zascai as much as I could. By the time I returned to the hotel, dusk was gathering but you wouldn’t know it – the Faculty of Medicine was still blazing. It filled the air with haze. From my window high over Old Town I watched fire engines from every part of Hacilith clustering around it. They seemed tiny, pointless. It was worse than Wrought. The firemen gave up on it immediately and started soaking down the buildings of the Science Department, Insect testing labs, Graduate School and the surrounding houses.

  I pushed up the sash window and a breeze buffeted in, carrying shouts and bustle, the stench of smoke, burning creosote, the sulphur trace of blasting powder. I sat on the sill and watched.

  I usually feel safe by open windows. They afford a chance of escape into the high air. They offer me a chance to fly and see what’s happening. But now my friend, the air, was tainted with the scent of cooked flesh, and I didn’t want to see what was happening because it was too horrible. How could Swallow bomb the hospital? How could she murder hundreds of innocent mortals simply for the chance to kill Rayne?

  Rayne was the most valuable human being in the Fourlands. Rayne had never hurt Swallow; damn it, she’d saved Swallow’s life once by instructing me how to treat her Insect injuries. Had Swallow forgotten that? Had she totally lost her mind?

  Behind me, Rayne stirred and murmured. She was an indistinct shape in the dark room.

  ‘Hush, Ella,’ I said.

  ‘The patients!’

  ‘I’ve got you a coach and—’

  She sat bolt upright. ‘Jant, is that you?’

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Have you been to see the hospital?’

  ‘Yes. And the dispensary. There weren’t many survivors. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘I had them moved to Fiennafor.’

  ‘Ward Twelve?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She sighed and sank down again. ‘Good,’ she murmured, and flaked out. An hour passed. I sat with my legs drawn up and my long, pale bare arms on my knees, wondering where Swallow was and what bombs I couldn’t hear were triggering now. The firemen relinquished the glowing embers of the science complex and I saw the red light reflecting on their helmets as they moved back and forth, sealing off the streets leading to Galt.

  It must have been nine p.m. when Rayne woke. This time she burst out of bed and stood facing me, a short silhouette. ‘Where in San’s name am I?’ she demanded.

  ‘ “The Exile” in Little Awia.’

  ‘A hotel?’

  ‘Yes, and I want you to—’

  ‘I need to see my hospital!’

  ‘It’s gone, Rayne. It’s still burning. Look.’ I beckoned her to the window and she propped her hands on the sill and leant out, drinking the estuary air with its morbid stench. The lines on her forehead deepened.

  ‘Oh … I can smell it.’

  ‘It burnt down the Department of Future Studies as well. Godwit Street. Half of Goldthread Street, the accommodation block. They stopped it before it lit up the rest of Old Town.’

  ‘And my house?’

  ‘Burnt to
the ground. I’m sorry …’

  ‘Pshaw!’ She prodded me in the chest with a withered finger. ‘I was bound to lose it at some point. It was just a matter of when and how! All my books are copied in the Castle’s library … And … and … Fifteen hundred years of samples! …I’ll just have to start collecting them again!’ She drew back from the window and looked at me directly. ‘How could a musician turn out the Lights of Reason?’

  ‘San refused her entry to the Circle, so she’s set bombs everywhere. Cyan—’

  ‘Yes. I felt that … I was right in the middle of a chest operation, pretty bad time to feel the Circle break. I spent the whole night crying … She was my friend.’

  ‘Wrought, Cullion. Now here.’

  ‘Then there’ll be more?’

  ‘Yes. She recruited gypsies to do it. At the Awndyn Music Festival.’

  ‘A festival!’

  ‘Rayne, these gypsies are alienated. They don’t fit into the world – they were looking for a place – but the world won’t accommodate them … They weren’t dishonest people, to begin with …’

  ‘No …’

  ‘No, damn it, I think it’s the world that’s dishonest. They start with honest expectations and the world just tramples them. So the Roses have turned to Swallow. She gave them friendship. They’re musical people, and her music’s enthralling. I expect the festivals have given her chance to feed them her nonsense, her spiel about how much San wronged her – and they’ve lapped it up. They agree with her. They think immortality’s her due.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Didn’t you receive my telegraph?’

  ‘I did, but …’

  ‘Then why didn’t you return to the Castle?’

  She shrugged. ‘Jant, I’ve so much work to do. I must put my patients first, even now. I’m going to Fiennafor to treat them.’

  She turned and staggered, which alarmed me off the windowsill. She has the resolve of an Eszai, but unfortunately with the body of a seventy-eight year old. ‘You’re in shock,’ I said.