Fair Rebel

by Steph Swainston

  ‘Don’t you dare tell me what state I’m in! Have you explained this to Aver-Falconet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because other Eszai have houses in town.’

  ‘I’ve checked them. I don’t think they’re at home.’

  ‘Are you sure? Simoon brought his carriage by, yesterday. I don’t want to lose Simoon – he’s holding half the world together.’

  ‘He’ll have left for the Castle. I’ve a coach waiting to take you there.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, reluctantly. ‘But I’m going via Fiennafor Hospital, Ward Twelve.’

  ‘You’re putting your life at risk.’

  ‘That’s what I do.’

  I sighed. I couldn’t dissuade the Doctor from her duty. ‘Come on then … No, hang on a minute. Tell me what these are.’ I brought the envelope of dry leaves from my pocket, opened it with a squeeze, and gave it to her.

  ‘You took these from my desk?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Quick thinking.’

  ‘None better.’

  She pursed her lips. She tapped the leaves onto her smooth palm and the fusty smell rose from them. ‘…Well, they aren’t inherently valuable. Not like the book I saved … which is the only surviving copy of a Trisian treatise on medicine.’ She fetched it from the bedside table and sat down on the duvet. ‘In fact, ah … here we are … it mentions this leaf.’

  She found the correct page and passed the book to me. It illustrated a plant like a bay tree, whose small, stiff leaves, dried dark brown, were indisputably the leaves she now held. ‘Atheudos,’ I read.

  ‘Atheudos. Yes, Capelin brought them for me. He knew I’d be interested and over the last few years we’ve been researching it together. This stuff has fascinating potential.’

  I came to sit beside her. ‘Really? What?’

  ‘It can cool people down. I don’t know a better way of describing it. Jant, we think it might be applicable for the treatment of severely wounded soldiers. An infusion of the leaves lowers the patient’s metabolic rate to the point where he enters a deep hibernation. Breathing becomes depressed, bradycardia ensues and body temperature falls. He—’

  ‘Goes cold,’ I said.

  Rayne stared at me.

  ‘As if she was dead.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Swallow!’ I jumped up and bounded around the room. ‘Swallow faked her death, and this is the drug she used! It’s the same smell!’

  ‘It only comes from Tris.’

  ‘Rayne, the clippers leave monthly.’

  She looked concerned. ‘Who would use …? No, Jant. No. It’s very difficult to bring the patient round again. In rats we’ve had mixed success. The dosage is extremely tricky.’

  ‘To Swallow that wouldn’t matter.’

  ‘She’d have to be desperate.’

  ‘She’s always been desperate. For recognition, for eternal life, and now for revenge! It matters nothing to her if she has to die to achieve it.’

  ‘That would be insane.’

  ‘She’s just blown your hospital up. What more proof do you need?’

  Rayne dropped the leaves into the envelope.

  ‘She must have drunk them like tea,’ I said, and described what I’d seen in her study.

  ‘Then she is insane. The properties and dosages are unresearched. She could have died … I’m surprised she hasn’t.’

  I took the envelope and sniffed it. ‘Oh, Rayne. A new drug. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘You! You have enough problems with Scolopendium intricans.’

  I felt a twist of envy at the fact she didn’t trust me, but related so well to Capelin. Theirs was a meeting of very great minds, to which I wasn’t invited. ‘You know I’m interested. I used to be a pharmacist.’

  ‘No. You used to be a drug pusher. It was a long time ago. Now we need you sober.’

  ‘Ella, I wouldn’t …’

  ‘Are you taking cat at the moment?’

  ‘I’m drinking it.’

  ‘I thought you must be. Or you wouldn’t be flying with your wings scorched to bits.’

  ‘I’m in control.’

  ‘Jant, you can’t control it. You know that.’

  ‘I’m high-functioning. I—’

  ‘Ha. Sometimes you don’t function at all.’ She sighed. ‘All right. Stay on a low dose. Pause a minute before each one, and realise you don’t have to pick up the needle. You’ll get enough pain relief and the sensation you crave from drinking it. Remember your tolerance has dropped. I’ll help you kick it again … if we get through this.’

  ‘Thanks, Ella.’

  ‘Your burns are superficial.’ She walked to the window and stared out. ‘Atheudos is not an abuseable drug. If Swallow used it, someone would’ve had to keep her warm until the effect wore off. She would have to be resuscitated with very great care.’

  ‘Connell. Connell must have done it. Taken her body away in the gypsy wagon. Shit! I wonder whose body they put on the pyre?’

  Bang! sounded down in the street, and in at the window. Dust puffed on the frame. I grabbed Rayne and pulled her back into the room.

  She flailed, off balance in my wings. ‘What was that?’

  ‘Musket shot.’

  A chunk of stone had been blown from the edge of the frame. Its chipped surface showed white.

  Rayne narrowed her crinkled eyes. ‘Did someone just shoot at me? Did they? Why me?’ She flared into anger and yelled at the window: ‘I’ve been saving your lives! Since the year six twenty! I run the field hospitals! I cured the Fescue Plague! And your stupid cholera! And your stupid-stupid smallpox! … Jant! Stop it with the fucking feathers!’

  I released her and approached the window. The glimmering city extended before me. Taking care not to show myself I leant on the wall beside it and peered out obliquely. Below were the grey mansard roofs on the other side of the street, their chimney stacks and balconies. Not a soul to be seen; the street was deserted and, of the upper storey windows I could see, most had their curtains drawn and only a few were backlit. The angle of the shot showed that it had come from the roof of one of the merchants’ houses.

  ‘I can’t see anyone.’

  Rayne was standing in the darkness. ‘I saved hundreds of thousands of lives and they shot at me …’

  ‘You’re an Eszai.’

  ‘But I work for them.’

  ‘Being immortal is a death sentence now. See? I don’t want you to go to Fiennafor. I want you to gallop for the Castle with the coach blinds drawn.’

  ‘No. My patients need me.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Even if those bastards shoot me. I care for my patients till the end of my life. And for my doctors and staff who’ll be injured. Show me your coach.’

  I ushered her down the square stairwell with its polished brass frieze, across the marble lobby and out to the porte-cochère. I held the door open for her, and she spoke to the coachman, gathered up her skirt and stepped in with buttoned boots. I passed her my pistol, a handful of percussion caps and a handful of cartridges. She put them in her pockets and turned the pistol in her lap. I tried to show her how to use it, but she brushed me away.

  ‘I know, I know. Same as a musket.’ She primed it expertly, then lowered the hammer. ‘You don’t think I’d let a new weapon appear without learning it, do you?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Cock, ball, nipple and touch hole. I need no further evidence that guns were invented by men.’

  ‘By Equinnes, actually.’

  ‘Typical men and their typical bloody killing machines. Now I have to discover how to treat gunshot wounds.’ She raised a hand to my cheek and I felt her fingertips hover a millimetre from my skin. ‘This will fade. In a couple of days the heat will radiate away. That blister might scar, but none of the rest will. It will itch; don’t scratch it. Keep putting cold water on it and drink salt-sugar water, too. Do you have another of these?’

  ‘I’ve got a flick knife.’

/>   ‘Jant, be careful …’

  ‘The driver’s name is Halliwell. He often works for me. He drives like the wind and he’ll take you wherever you want.’

  ‘Good boy. I’ll see you at the Castle.’

  I stepped back and slammed the door. The brake blocks lifted from the great spoked wheels. Halliwell cracked his whip and the coach drew away. I watched them speed to a canter. No rear window, just the anonymous chassis and Halliwell’s three-tiered capecoat. At the end of the street they reached a gallop and slewed round the Camber Road junction and out of sight, bound for Fiennafor.

  CHAPTER 29

  Parkour

  Swallow’s marksman can’t target me the way I move. I drew down, cat-leapt, grabbed the edge of the hotel porch and swung up onto it. Crouched in a puddle on its flat roof and jumped again. With a little height, now I can fly. Went straight up, two beats, landed on the roof of the opposite house. Jumped, three beats, landed on the incline of the hotel roof, ran up over the ridge and slid down the other side, gained speed, jumped the guttering and took off.

  I kicked off the ridge of a warehouse, grabbed a pipe sticking out of the next wall and swung round it, into the air, then flapped to the ruins of the Science Department and let its hot air lift me.

  It bore me up steadily, like smoothly-rounded hands beneath my wings. Held them out straight, glorying in my strength, though I was breathing smoke again and coughing. I turned inside the thermal and bumped higher. The fire engines shrank away, far below, and the men were tiny now.

  I rode the thermal until I spread out the city. Table-tops of smoke beneath me obscured Old Town, blurred Galt and Piteem; far below them, the streetlights glimmered like stars on the earth, more constant between the rising palls.

  A bright flash to my right, and boom! Smoke torused out in a patch, and seemed to fall, then I saw the flicker of flames. That’s the heart of Fiennafor. The Crescent – it must be the Lawyer’s house.

  A bigger flash – further off, the afterimage danced on my eyes, and bang! echoed off Fiennafor’s rooftops like a whipcrack. Bankyn Street. The Architect’s house.

  A flash – in the haze on the outskirts. White light leapt – and again! – That was a big double blast! Simoon’s mansion in Moren Wells.

  I heard screaming from the ones below me, then the reverberations of Simoon’s explosions rolled like thunder over Hacilith.

  Simoon’s and Serein’s were two black patches where the lights had extinguished, but Gayle the Lawyer’s house was blazing, illuminating the white stone façade of the adjoining houses on the Crescent, the curved road in front of them. Turmoil below me as people spilled out.

  What could I do? I had to reach the Castle. I let the fire fall to my right and behind me, streets netting away like black capillaries, and flew on, over Piteem’s terraces and the canal a strip of dark reflection.

  I dropped Camber Bridge out of sight then, after a while, the last lights of the city, and was over the farmland. The Vermiform hung out of my pocket.

  ‘Shit,’ I said. ‘Did you see that?’

  It flurried affirmatively in the cold air.

  There was no breeze and my ruined feathers hissed with regularity. I stretched for the greatest arc each flap. The river transformed from turbid mud into a silver pennant, passing distant on my left between silhouette trees and bushes.

  I replayed the conversation I’d had in The Exile Hotel with Rayne. She’ll find it difficult to leave Fiennafor now, because Gayle’s blast has probably blocked Fienna Road, and Ward Twelve was already packed full.

  Someone had tried to shoot her from the roof of Milvus Street. Well, you didn’t have to be a Rhydanne to climb up there. It was probably one of the gypsies. That street was studenty, shabbily-respectable; the tall, eighteenth-century houses of Awian ex-pats who’d brought their silk weaving to Hacilith. ‘The Exile’ used to be their workshop for winding gold and silver thread.

  ‘The Exile’ was a fifth-century story they love, and he was Elland Gleana, a Morenzian whom a quirk of history turned into a featherback hero. When the Pentadrica fell, the Morenzians and Awians tore it up between them. The King of Morenzia was first to advance into the country, which is now Shivel, I’m flying over, and Eske a little further on. He seized all the land his army could hold. And he sent Elland Gleana, his finest, most trusted warrior, with fifty thousand men to annexe the very best land, where Micawater now lies.

  But Elland saw Awian refugees streaming from the Insects. He witnessed bugs killing them by the hundred thousand, and he refused to fight the Awians who were suffering as the first swarm obliterated town after town. He joined forces with the ragged remnant of their army and turned his men on the ranks of his own king, and forced the Morenzians back to Hacilith.

  ‘The Awians should have northern Pentadrica,’ Elland said. ‘They need it. They’ve nowhere else to go.’

  Well, such treason couldn’t stay unpunished, so one night the Morenzian king sent soldiers to capture Elland in his camp. They dragged him behind six white horses to Hacilith and threw him before the king. The king exiled him to Addald Island at the tip of the Ghallain Peninsula, where Elland Gleana lived alone for the rest of his days. He built a driftwood cabin in the windswept scrub above the sea rocks and every so often his faithful wife rowed from Ghallain to bring him provisions, for the great warrior was reduced to living on gulls’ eggs and seaweed.

  The Awians celebrate Elland Gleana as one of their finest heroes. To do the correct thing and then be punished for it seems, to me, to be the lot of heroes in any age.

  I picked up the lights of Basilard town, then dropped them off behind me as I brought up the lights of Pinchbeck. Pinchbeck slipped behind and I flew in a trance.

  When had I eaten last? When had I slept?

  A fire to my right jolted me awake. Was it Shivel manor? The town? I beat rapidly over the lightless farmland, drawing the fire closer, as if reeling it in. As the perspective changed, it split into two large fires, and I saw the light flickering on tree trunks and uplighting the canopy of the woods around it.

  The lamps of Shivel separated away to the right, the fires were raging deeper in the forest. The air smelt sweet, the smell of malted barley – it was Tornado’s brewery.

  Underlit smoke was pouring up, shadows flickered – now and then I saw figures clustering round. The flames illuminated the fronts of their faces and chests, making them look two-dimensional.

  I focussed on the fire; it destroyed my night vision. I misjudged my height. Raked over the topmost branches, just one black sheet. I whistled down in a sheer glide into the firelight and crashed into the clearing.

  I knelt in the heat, winded, and in front of me the brewery’s main building and maltings were leaping with flames. Smoke was writhing out of the granary, through the brewhouse itself, and through the open, sliding gate I saw the vats steaming. The front had blown off Tornado’s house – bricks were scattered all over the grass.

  The fire throbbed and leant against the darkness. Every time it flared up, it cast a rapid light between the trees, illumined the ground, vanished. Then long, sharp shadows broke in and rushed right up to the fire, as if battling it.

  The bunch of people watched without lifting a finger and, though I knew they couldn’t do anything, it made me angry.

  ‘Do you want marshmallows to toast?’ I yelled.

  A gap opened in their midst, and through it I saw Tornado. He was sitting on a chunk of brickwork, head in hands. The flames grew momentarily weaker, the circle of light contracted and cast into darkness his shaved head, broad nose, eyepatch, and huge arm muscles. The flames roared high and brightly lit his bunched-up thighs, ripped jeans, and some little guy behind him, tugging at his back.

  ‘Tawny!’

  He emerged from his hands. His round, red face was streaming with sweat. ‘Shira.’ He tried a smile. ‘Strongman Beer’s off the menu.’

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘We were making really good stout …’ he coughed, v
omited, and jerked his thumb at the wreckage.

  I reached him and smelt the powder smoke and his sweat-soaked leather waistcoat. The soldier probing his back was actually a huge man, but Tornado dwarfed him. He moved away to let me see. The back of Tawny’s waistcoat and t-shirt had been blown to shreds, and his flesh was a mass of small, deep pits where shrapnel had riddled him. The worst was above his shoulder blade, where the corner of a brick was embedded in his trapezius muscle. The triangular wound was bleeding profusely.

  ‘Can you help?’ he mumbled, with a hitch of pain and very morosely. ‘Because Lyme’s being fucking useless.’

  ‘I’ll try.’ I dropped my pack and picked out one of my ampoules. I scratched the seal off and tried to give it to him, but I had to crouch and shake him before his hand unfolded. ‘Drink this,’ I said. ‘Half of it.’

  The phial looked tiny in his fingers – miraculous how he could manipulate something so small. He knocked it back. ‘Tastes of grass.’

  ‘Yes, it does.’

  His body relaxed. He slumped forward, elbows on his massive thighs, and the piece of brick jutted further from his muscle. ‘ ’S amazing,’ he slurred.

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Can’t feel nothing.’

  ‘Good.’

  I flicked my knife and rasped the point on the surface of the brick. You have to do this quickly.

  I poured water all over the wound, slipped my blade under the edge of the brick, and levered. Tornado howled. The brick popped out, leaving raw lips of flesh, and bounced off somewhere. I tipped water into the deep, pointed pit it had left, and blood welled up and ran down his back. He flexed his shoulder, which pumped out the blood in the wound, and it filled up again instantly.

  ‘Felt it, then.’

  ‘Don’t move until I dress it. Can you feel pain now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I might die of the medication, but I sure killed all the pain,’ I murmured.

  ‘Jant,’ he said. ‘I can’t hear you. I’ve been half-deafened … I think I can ride, though.’