Dangerous Offspring

by Steph Swainston

  The pub’s fittings were the most up-to-date design but the floor was sticky with spilt drinks. Square columns were bolted to the walls, all painted black but with gold lightning flashes and pointed feathers on the tops. A strikingly graceful fresco of a deer chased by hundreds of hounds fled along the walls. All the way to the rear wall the hind ran with the hounds ever at her throat and, below her outstretched legs, on a leather sofa stained with nicotine, sat Cyan.

  CHAPTER 6

  Oh, no. I could hear Cyan’s voice from the doorway. She was too conspicuous, blissfully unaware she could be attracting every thief and rapist in Galt. She was recounting an anecdote at the top of her voice to a group of students and she hadn’t noticed me, so I approached slowly, watching.

  Cyan was no longer a child. Her blonde hair hung perfectly straight to the level of her bodice top. Its straps and laces showed and so did her armpit hair. Her short skirt kept riding up and she kept pulling it down. Her stockings plunged into huge black boots. She didn’t have wings, she took after her mother, and she was willowy; slighter and more hourglass-shaped than an Awian woman.

  At her hip hung a dagger, tied into its scabbard as city law dictated, and the most impressive little compound bow I have ever seen hung off the chair arm in a lacquer holster. Under the table a waxed cotton quiver held enough arrows to depopulate the whole bar. Didn’t she know it was illegal to carry a bow openly in the city?

  I hadn’t seen Cyan since her mother’s funeral. Her very poise seemed to have changed; a vehemence had taken root in her previously innocent adventurousness. This was the girl I used to tickle until she was helpless with giggling. This was the girl I picked up off the shipwreck years ago–but of course she wouldn’t remember. I watched covertly, feeling special, slightly dizzy having flown such a great distance and having walked into the city-dwellers’ trivial little world. There was no way they could understand or even acknowledge my effort. To them I just appear.

  As she talked animatedly an enormous ruby pendant on a gold chain rolled back and forth above her flattened breasts. Fortunately some of the other women’s glass costume jewellery was just as ostentatious, but you didn’t have to look closely to tell that Cyan’s ruby was real.

  She was surrounded by lots of girls, who must mistakenly think she could arrange a rendezvous with Lightning. They started to notice me and one by one slunk or darted back to their tables. She didn’t look up until I was directly opposite her and the last of her court sloughed away leaving just one rugged-looking fyrdsman.

  Cyan jumped nearly clear of the cushions in surprise. ‘Jant! Come here, come here and sit down! Why have you come all this way? Never mind; the coolest Eszai will make my night complete!’

  I sank into an armchair on the other side of the table. Everyone’s eyes were prickling from the corners of the room. Cyan was overjoyed. ‘Let me introduce you. Rawney, this is the Comet Jant Shira. He flies in from the Castle to see me. Sometimes he carries ice down from Darkling for our drinks…Jant, this is Rawney.’

  ‘Rawney what?’

  ‘No. Rawney Carron.’

  ‘Very Morenzian. Pleased to meet you.’ Rawney Carron ignored the hand I offered him and glowered at me. He seemed to have claimed ownership of Cyan. He was not tall so I guessed he was city born and bred. He wore fyrd fatigues with the murrey fist blazon of Hacilith sewn on the breast and he also had it tattooed on his arm. He had a weightlifter’s build and he clearly fancied himself.

  ‘He’s a corporal,’ said Cyan. ‘And this…er…that was Sharny. He seems to have gone. Well, never mind. What are you doing here? Did Daddy send you? And why do you have soot on your eyes? Oh, it’s make-up.’

  Rawney sniggered.

  ‘Shut it,’ I told him. I was not prepared to take any cheek from a fyrdsman. ‘Cyan, this time I’m here to bring you home.’

  ‘She wants to stay,’ said Rawney.

  ‘Go and join the rest of your squad,’ I told him.

  ‘I haven’t got one yet. I have to press a General Fyrd squad tonight.’

  ‘Are you going to the front?’

  ‘Yes. I’m looking forward to it. It’s better than working in the docks. It’s an adventure.’

  ‘Good.’ I gave him a grin.

  Only the musters of Hacilith pressgang fyrd, and I knew Rawney must be professional Select Fyrd because only Select can be officers of any rank in either fyrd. He leant back on the couch and put his arm behind Cyan. I shuffled forward, as if to protect her.

  ‘Did Daddy send you?’ she repeated.

  ‘As a matter of fact I suggested it to him. Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m having a great time!’

  ‘Do you have lodgings?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And money?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Daddy gave me pocket money for the tour, and I can always draw on my account. He fills it up now and again. He’s loaded.’

  ‘In that case I’ll have a double whisky,’ I said.

  ‘Fine.’ Cyan shook a five-pound coin from her purse.

  ‘Ask him to fetch them.’ I nodded and smiled at Rawney, and pushed the coin towards him.

  ‘Rawney, go and bring some whisky, another wallop for me and get yourself a jug of beer. They don’t take orders at your table here,’ she added to me. ‘It isn’t that Awian.’

  Rawney lumbered off to the bar. I called after him, ‘And a couple of baskets of chips!’

  ‘I wonder where you put it all, you’re so thin.’

  ‘I fly,’ I said shortly. ‘Cyan, why did you run away? Lightning’s worried sick. And don’t you know it’s illegal to carry bows in the city?’ I took it off the chair arm and slipped it under the couch. ‘What are you doing here? You have to come home.’

  She looked me over. ‘There’s no such thing as “have to”. I am not going back to Micawater or Awndyn. Not ever. No way. You can’t make me.’

  ‘Yes, I can, actually. What are you doing with that hulk?’

  ‘Rawney? He’s gorgeous.’

  ‘He’s dim. Lightning wants you to come to the front. We’re about to advance at Frost’s lake.’

  ‘That old eel-eater. I don’t want to go to the damn dam. I want to stay here.’

  ‘You’re not lodging with that Morenzian meathead, are you?’

  ‘That’s none of your business! Hmm…I don’t think I’ll tell you, because you’ll just flutter off back to Daddy and spill the beans. I know what I’m doing.’

  ‘Do you really?’

  ‘I was fed up with dull old Awndyn.’ She sighed. ‘I had to get away. Away from obligation! I want to stay here and live it up for a few months. I have a freedom here I never had with Swallow, with Daddy; they’re all living in a dream world. They have no idea how the real world works. This is the real world–’ Her gesture took in the bar and what little of East Bank was visible through the window ‘–This is where the real people are.’ She lit a cigarette and narrowed her eyes against the smoke. ‘I know I’m lucky and I can do anything, but I just haven’t made my mind up yet.’

  ‘Please come back.’

  ‘Don’t be crap, goat-breath. You do what you want, you always told me that. Why shouldn’t I?’

  I was frustrated that I had to spell this out: ‘Hacilith is dangerous.’

  ‘Yeah!’

  ‘You can’t be Rawney’s girlfriend. You might pretend but you’ll never really understand him.’

  She smiled sweetly. ‘I can play him along for kicks. He worships the ground I walk on.’

  I hissed, ‘No. You might think that, but he reckons you’re his girl. If you try to leave him, he might hurt you.’

  ‘Whatever gave you that idea?’ she said, shocked.

  ‘Oh, Cyan. Please be careful. You might find it hard to get rid of the likes of him. He knows he can’t really have you, so instead he could try to make your life misery. He could blame you for the fact that he’s Insect fodder and you’re glittering with rubies.’

  ‘I don’t think so.�
�

  ‘Oh, yes. Worse still, if he believes you’re something you’re not, he could chase you unto the last of his energy and be prepared to die for what his imagination makes you into. He’d love to marry the heir to Peregrine.’

  I glanced over to the bar but fortunately Rawney was taking a long time. He was chatting with a skinny, wasted-looking guy. I took a sip of Cyan’s ‘wallop’–ginger beer that was more beer than it was ginger–and went on; ‘You’ll never understand what Hacilith is like under the surface. It’s impossible, but try to grasp that I’m telling you this from my own experience. My image isn’t just an image, Cyan; I witnessed the last days of the East Bank gangs.’ I pushed my coat off my shoulder so she could see the circle with six spokes that our gang leader had carved there. ‘The other gang, the Bowyers, had arrowheads scarred on their forearms. We used to flay them off and stick them to the door of our warehouse.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Yes. Well, I suppose I should never have tried to encroach on their patch. When they caught any of us, they dumped us in the canal lock. When we caught any of them, we nailed them to the struts of a waterwheel. Hence the Wheel.’ I took her hand and traced the furrows of my scar with her finger.

  ‘I can feel it.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  She didn’t know whether to believe me or not. ‘Didn’t the constables do anything?’

  ‘Oh, I always tipped off the constables. But they left them revolving round and round for a few hours before they took them down…The Bowyers eventually traced where I lived. I came home one night and found my shop on fire. I ran in, trying to find my master…’ I continued sadly as I put my coat back on. ‘He was called Dotterel. I tried to run upstairs but the steps were burning through. I expect–I hope–he died of smoke suffocation long before the flames reached the second floor…’

  Cyan said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I couldn’t feel grief back then, only despair. It was the next inevitable avalanche to happen to me. What sort of life was Hacilith, anyway? My girlfriend pulled me out of the shop as it rose in flames about me and, right then, we determined to leave Galt. We took the road that went left over Pityme Bridge and we realised that even the Castle was possible.’

  I never tell Zascai that I used to be a drug dealer, but I let them know my unfortunate adventures. It makes me seem so much more talented for having escaped them.

  Cyan said, ‘Hacilith must have changed.’

  ‘Yes, it’s different now. The underworld is more inconspicuous and a damn sight more complicated, but it hasn’t gone away.’

  She took a sip of her drink and rolled her eyes. ‘Oh god. If that’s your advice, I don’t need it. I don’t want Daddy’s advice either, and I certainly don’t want Swallow the mad diva’s homespun instruction. I thought better of you. Let me make my own mistakes!’

  ‘You don’t want Lightning’s advice? Fourteen hundred years of it?’

  ‘Fourteen hundred years of boredom, more like!’

  ‘You’ll inherit Peregrine when you’re twenty-one,’ I said.

  ‘That’s what I’m running away from! My true place in life, huh. How can I be an Awian lady when I don’t feel Awian at all? Not that being wingless matters; Awians will accept me and anyway, they don’t have a choice. But I don’t feel I belong anywhere. Daddy gave me this–’ She hooked her fingers under the chain of her ruby pendant as if she was about to rip it off and throw it away. ‘He says it’s an heirloom. But I don’t belong in Micawater either. “Come home,” you tell me, but just where home is, I can’t say. Morenzia is the only country that’s free.’

  ‘Don’t say that in front of Lightning.’

  ‘Just five families in Awia own eighty per cent of the land. Morenzians don’t have such a silly aristocracy. They don’t have to bow and scrape. You don’t know what it’s like to be a girl stuck in Awndyn.’

  I nodded. That much was true.

  ‘Hacilith is so big! There are so many people my age! I never had friends in Awndyn. But, god, Jant, what does that mean to you? You’re bloody ancient. The Castle protects you, just like Daddy.’

  ‘You should have seen me at Slake Cross trying to hold my guts in with one hand.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Sorry.’ She pinched her cheek and wiggled it. ‘You think you see a girl but looking out of these eyes is a very experienced woman, in experience terms at least as old as you are. Well, nearly. I’ve travelled all over the place.’

  ‘Did you go or were you taken?’

  Her eyebrows drew together. I continued, ‘You haven’t been south of Awndyn before and you haven’t been north of Micawater.’

  ‘I’m here of my own accord now. So don’t misunderestimate me. Take Rawney, I only met him four days ago and he says he will do anything for me. He can get anything for me, even jook. He helped me move onto the Tumblehome.’

  ‘Is that where you’re staying?’

  ‘Oh…Yeah, it is, actually. So let me express myself. I’m not going to be cooped up in Awndyn with the mad diva.’

  Rawney returned with the drinks but without any food. He didn’t give Cyan her change either but she didn’t notice. He put a whole bottle of cheap whisky down in front of me. ‘There! Get your talons round that!’

  ‘I don’t have talons,’ I said indignantly, but he continued to stare rudely while I poured a glass. I stared back, and he looked away.

  People naturally resent anybody who gives them orders and Zascai are especially resentful of good-looking immortals who can fly. Rawney was trying to find something to feel superior about and, as usual for such people, he was concentrating on my Rhydanne heritage. There is not much in my appearance and bearing for Morenzians to identify with; all that is human in me, I have learnt. They characterise Rhydanne as a bunch of hopeless drunks; the fact that one might flap down from the mountains and start giving them commands is a further affront to their dignity. Also, if he is like most Zascai, he will think of me as the voice of the Emperor and be doubly afraid. Mortals often assume that because I have the Emperor’s ear I am somehow closer to him than other immortals. That isn’t true, and anyway why would San send me to spy on someone like Rawney?

  Cyan gave an embarrassed giggle. ‘It’s so strange to be talking to one of Daddy’s workmates.’

  I said, ‘As the future Governor of Peregrine, you’ll get used to it.’

  ‘How many times have I got to tell you? I don’t want to be governor! I hate feeling the weight of Daddy’s expectations on me all the time! It’s all right for you, flying around and never counting the cost. I’m not impressed with his plans for me. I have different plans. How dare he assume my tastes are the same as his? He doesn’t even know me!’

  ‘But you used to love hunting in Peregrine,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I know. Weird, isn’t it? It became overfamiliar, I suppose. It disappointed me. I don’t want to see all those same faces again.’ She turned to Rawney. ‘Jant used to frustrate the fuck out of me with all his exciting plans I wasn’t allowed to realise. I loved his tales of faraway places. Now I’m in one!’

  That made me smile. ‘Lightning would be furious if he knew you were sitting in a bar.’

  ‘Huh. Him. He doesn’t understand what’s real in life. He’s stuck with his sense of honour. I think we should feel first and act on our feelings instead. I wanted someone to know my mind, Jant. No one in Awndyn could, so it’s me who has to change. I thought: if I don’t change, I’ll die. But now the future has opened up wide!’

  I poured more whisky. Every spoilt teenager talks like this, and Cyan was in full flow. ‘I’ve got my enthusiasm back. I used to feel dormant, as if I was waiting to start my own life. I was breathless and apprehensive, but I was ready and now things are starting to happen! My hatred of Awndyn wound me up like a spring and shot me out to Hacilith. I’m not stopping now.’

  I said, ‘You might find the front just as refreshing. Have you ever seen a live Insect? No? Well, I can show you things even more exciting than Hacilit
h.’

  She glanced at Rawney. ‘Bring him, too,’ I said. ‘Lightning will love him.’

  She said slowly, ‘Hacilith is more cleansing. I can get lost here. Nobody knows who I am.’

  ‘I think they do!’

  ‘Bollocks, Jant. Bollocks. Listen. There are three sorts of people: the ones in Awndyn or Micawater don’t have to ask who one’s father is, because they know and they take it for granted. Then I travelled a bit and met the sort, like in Aver-Falconet’s household, who do think it’s important to ask who one’s father is. They’re surprised and a bit scared when I tell them, because they don’t really know what to say. They think they should treat me with kid gloves. I hate them. Then there are the real people, like these Morenzians. It never occurs to them to ask; as far as they’re concerned it’s a meaningless question. They treat me the same as any other girl.’

  ‘That’s the problem.’

  Rawney said nothing but became gradually redder and redder in the face until he burst. ‘You know fuck all, immortal! You left this town! You hit the big time. Yeah, you went away and won immortality and married money. So what are you doing here? Why have you come here? Go fuck off back to the Castle. Go on–get out! You don’t belong here with your fucking smart comments and your weird old-fashioned clothes!’

  I tilted my head and gave him a good look with my cheekbones. If he wanted a fight I could shove my axe up his arse in three moves. ‘I swear,’ I said softly. ‘If we didn’t send the people of Hacilith to fight Insects, they’d be fighting each other.’

  Rawney flinched, glanced at Cyan and rallied. ‘Look, babe, we’re talking to a madman. A real creep. He’s two hundred years old and he’s not going to die so he must be mad compared to us mortals. He has nothing to do with us.’

  Cyan pursed her lips. ‘It is off-putting that he always looks the same. It reminds me of when I was small.’

  I sighed, sick of invective. ‘Please, Cyan. I don’t want to leave you here. I can’t tell Lightning this.’