Dangerous Offspring

by Steph Swainston

  I clattered through a courtyard, past a marble statue of the founder, so ancient it wore a doublet and hose. An old professor stood in its shadow with two prostitutes, male and female, on the plinth in front of him. They were stroking his bald head and I heard their silky voices, ‘You’re sexy…you’re so sexy…’ The don was shaking but I couldn’t tell whether it was from fear or excitement. They didn’t look up as I hurtled past.

  Now in the very centre of the university I came to an unsurfaced track. I slowed my pace in awe, feeling as if I had walked back in time. Stony and yellow in the lamplight the track ran for a few hundred metres and stopped at the perimeter fence. It did not join nor bear any resemblance to any road in the modern Hacilith street plan. The city I knew had been built around it and the university’s buildings now hemmed it in. It was sixteen hundred years old–a road when Old Town was all of Hacilith, the only town in Morenzia, and the country was ruled by a king from a palace god-knows-where in Litanee. The wattle-and-daub houses along the track had decayed over a millennium ago, but the College of Surgeons survived.

  I walked across and jumped the remains of a deep stone gutter. It once drained stinking effluent from the boilers that had reduced cadavers of paupers and rarities to skeletons for teaching aids. I hammered with my free hand at a nail-studded door. ‘Rayne! Rayne! Help!’

  Cyan’s body convulsed and she vomited down my back. ‘Oh, god! Well, better out than in, I suppose…Ella Rayne! Open up!’

  Rayne’s squat, square tower was once the College of Surgeons. Other faculties, refectories and dorms had gradually aggregated around its revered centre of learning–the university formed in much the same way as flowstone in a Lowespass cave. It was officially founded in the fifteenth century, only because it was no longer convenient for the faculties to ignore each other.

  The tower’s sixteen hundred years gave it a serious gravity. The newer buildings would have overshadowed it if the university had not built them at a respectful distance. Small bifora windows let meagre light into its upper level where a three-tiered lecture hall, now disused, once doubled as a dissecting room and operating theatre. Its roof was flat and its walls unmasoned stone, apart from the deep arch around the door decorated with several bands of zigzag carving. Ironically, given Rayne’s origins, the university had presented the building to her, and when she was not at the Castle or the front she lived here among her cabinet of curiosities.

  A shutter slid open and Rayne peered out through its iron grille. ‘Comet!’ She clanged the shutter and creaked the door open. ‘Wha’ are you doing here?’

  ‘Thank fuck!’ I pushed past her into the room, seeing stacks of chests and medicine boxes packed ready for removal.

  Rayne said, ‘You’re supposed t’ be a’ th’ dam. My carriage is on i’s way. Wha’–you’re covered in blood!’

  She grasped her brown skirts and hurried after me, as I loped through the museum and a doorway leading to her bedroom. Her pudgy, purplish feet bulged out between her sandal straps. She had been seventy-eight for fourteen hundred and five years, the oldest Eszai, and the oldest person in the world apart from the Emperor himself.

  I strode to her box-bed, set into a deep niche in the wall hidden by a curtain. I laid Cyan down gently inside it, on the crochet blanket, and unwrapped her. Rayne saw a patient and immediately hastened to examine her with quick, expert movements, while she bombarded me with questions: ‘She’s no’ bleeding. Whose blood is i’ then? Wha’s happened t’ th’ lass?’

  ‘She’s Lightning’s daughter,’ I said, swaying.

  Rayne stopped and looked up at me. ‘Cyan Dei?’

  ‘Cyan Peregrine.’

  ‘Has she been mugged? No. There’s no concussion. I’s drugs, isn’ i’, Jant?’

  ‘Cat.’

  She knelt and turned Cyan on her side to prevent her swallowing her tongue. She observed the girl’s violet-grey face, her clicking, shallow breathing. She pressed her dimpled fingers against Cyan’s neck for her pulse. ‘Obstruc’ed air passages. Bradycardia. Classic scolopendium poisoning. Wha’ have you done t’ her?’

  ‘It’s not my fault.’

  ‘Yes, i’ is. Of course i’ is! How did you give her i’?’

  ‘It wasn’t me!’

  ‘You’re a born liar! You’re tot’ring, yourself! Oh, Jant, I hoped you wouldn’ take i’ again. I hoped you’d learned your lesson. You can’ be bored, you should be occupied wi’ t’ dam.’

  ‘I haven’t touched cat for five years!’

  ‘You haven’ made t’ decade. You’re no’ truly cured.’

  ‘Please,’ I begged Rayne. ‘Don’t jump to conclusions.’ The appeal to objectivity quietened her long enough for me to shoehorn a word in. ‘Cyan did it to herself. I wasn’t there. She bought it from a Zascai, cocktailed with alcohol and god knows what else. A knackered old junkie showed her how to shoot it and for all I know they shared a needle. At any rate, it was back-flushed. I found her already under. I gave her the kiss of life and I’m still trying to get her taste out of my mouth! I killed the dealer–’ I tugged my shirt demonstratively, pulling the material, hard with clotting blood, from where it had stuck to my chest.

  ‘You murdered a Zascai?’

  ‘I never murdered a Zascai who wasn’t the better for it.’

  ‘Shi’. If t’ Emperor finds ou’, he’ll…’

  ‘Nobody is going to find anything out. Are they?’

  ‘I–’

  ‘Are they, Rayne?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He was a corporal and he’d turned his whole squad into a gang. They probably were, before they were recruited. Fuck…Select Fyrd pressganging street scum. If I catch any of them again I’ll pump them full of twenty poisons…Anyway, they didn’t know that I’m twice as fast as a human. Well, nearly, ‘cause I am the worse for drink but I’m not stoned.’

  ‘No. You’re replacing one drug with another.’ Rayne had her back to me but I saw her expression reflected in the mirror by the bed. She was preoccupied with Cyan.

  In Rayne’s white bedroom, the eye slid along arrangements of objects as smoothly as a scale of music. Models used for teaching stood on the mantelpiece; large anatomical figures of a man and woman, accurate and to scale. There were painted clastic models of torsos with removable organs like a jigsaw, and a ‘wound man’ demonstrating various injuries.

  Mice were carved seamlessly onto the furniture, scurrying up the chair legs and nibbling the table edge. But netting held the far wall together: ancient goat hair and wood laths showed through the flaking plaster. A bookcase dominated the corner–the books she had written–and it was buckling under the sheer weight of paper.

  Cyan wants experience. She’ll run headlong into ordeals like this and each one will chop a bit off her teenage enthusiasm until it’s down to adult size. I looked at her slack face and burned with fury. ‘Is this what you bloody want? Tell me, does it make your party go with a swing? People like Rawney don’t want you. He wants to be like you! I know, I always did! Did you think it was funny? Well, it’s really fucking hilarious. Look at me; I’m laughing!’

  ‘Jant…’ Rayne said.

  ‘It’s fine to be an outsider by choice, but if you get addicted you’ll be an outsider by necessity! Then you’ll be the loneliest posh minx in the world!’

  ‘Calm down! OK, Jant, you’re no’ t’ blame. I believe you.’

  I pulled up a three-legged stool and sat down heavily, legs apart, wings splayed to the floor. I stripped my vomit-covered shirt off and scratched at the bald spots in the pits of my wings. ‘Can you bring her round?’

  ‘We may jus’ have t’ wai’.’ Rayne rang a small hand bell. She asked her servant to go across to the medical faculty and bring atropine, and some clean clothes for me.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I offered. ‘I’m faster.’

  ‘She knows her way through t’ complex. And I don’ trus’ you wi’ th’ key t’ th’ vaul’s.’ Rayne filled a glass of water, took a dropper from the
drawer and began to drip water onto Cyan’s lips. ‘I used t’ do this for you, when you had i’ bad.’

  I huffed. The last time I fell asleep under the influence, Wrenn and Tornado shaved my head and painted me blue. I woke up shackled to the prow railings of the Sute Ferry. I haven’t taken cat since. You can face down death, by choosing the harder alternative. Not that I’m overly brave or more than usually lucky; I simply never believed death was an option so I never took it. ‘You can’t begrudge me a little escape now and again. I’m immortal, I need to lose track of time.’

  ‘You risk losing too much.’

  ‘Yeah, well, the only excitement in immortality is a possibility of loss.’

  Rayne grunted vaguely.

  I indicated the anatomical male carving. ‘He’s well-endowed, isn’t he?’

  She looked up. ‘No, tha’s t’ average size.’

  I was never any good at waiting. I paced through to the museum and stood blinking until my eyes adjusted. Rayne’s museum, representing her workshop through the ages, was a vast collection so tightly packed together it overwhelmed. Candlelight reflected on the curved surfaces of glass jars, thousands of different sizes, and on the sliding door of a materia medica cabinet with tiny square drawers for herbs. What to look at first? Here and there I noticed an object because of its special rarity: a two-headed foetus floating in a jar; or its great size: a broken sea krait tooth; or its beauty: a baby vanished to nothing but a three-dimensional plexus of red and blue veins and arteries to show the dissector’s skill; or its ghastliness: the preserved face of a child who died of smallpox. Some objects caught my eye because they were illustrated in the etched plates of books I’d read.

  I stepped back, trying to perceive an order to the collection. In the centre a grey stone fireplace housed a copper alembic with a spout, resting on a little earthenware furnace with a bellows handle projecting. It was for fraction-distilling aromatic oils. The lintel above it bore the deeply incised and gilded legend: ‘Observe nature, your only teacher.’

  I looked at the anatomical preparations: dense white shapes in jars, organs folded, wrinkled or bulging, or feathery and delicate like branching lungs. Alcohol preserved specimens like paperweights, of this or that organ in sagittal or cross section. Living with these, Rayne must see people as machines, nothing but arrangements of tissues and liquids, interesting puzzles to solve. She also knows that individuality is mostly skin-deep because, inside, people are all the same. Rayne and Frost, I reflected, had many traits in common.

  Her reference collection was ordered by pathology. Some samples were hundreds of years old–the only immortality available to Zascai by virtue of their interesting ailments. The sufferers usually readily agree to be preserved; it’s all one to them whether their useless remains are placed in the ground or in a jar. The only exception are Awians, who prefer to be interred in tombs as florid as they can afford, as if they want to take up space forever.

  A glass case housed a collection of surgical instruments past and present–steel bone saws and silver catheters, water baths for small dissections. Rayne kept some–like cylindrical saw-edged trepanning drills and equipment for cupping and blood letting–to remind the world of the doctors’ disgusting practices to which she put an end when she joined the Circle.

  A six-fingered hand, a flaky syphilitic skull. A hydrocephalic one five times normal size, and the skeleton of a man with four wings growing out of his chest.

  Rayne uses me in demonstrations when I’m available. I pose at the front of the auditorium while she lectures the students on how weird I am, or on her great achievement in healing my Slake Cross injuries. One day my skeleton might stand here to be prodded by subsequent generations, my strong, gracile fingers adapted for climbing, my curve-boned wings articulated to stretch full length to their pointed phalanges.

  Beside the door I’d come in by stood a large showcase of chipped stone arrowheads, which Rayne had arranged into an attractive pattern. She buys them for a few pence each from boys who pick them up on the Awndyn Downs. There was also a ‘piece of iron that fell from the sky onto Shivel’. On the other side of the door a skeleton inhabited a tall cabinet; its label said: ‘Ancient Awian, from a cave in Brobuxen, Ressond’.

  Over two thousand years the grey smell of old bone and neat alcohol had saturated the tower’s very fabric. It was a haze of carbolic and formalin. Spicy volatile notes of orange and clove must be the essential oils Rayne had most recently prepared.

  I examined the labelled majolica jars: oenomel, rodomel and hippocras; storax, orchis and sumac. Patent medicines crusted or deliquesced in slipware pots. Their names skipped off the tongue like a schoolyard rhyme: Coucal’s Carminiative Embrocation; Popinjay Pills for Pale People; Ms Twite’s Soothing Syrup; Cornstock Electuary; Emulsion Lung Tonic; World-Famed Blood Mixture; Dr Whinchat of Brandoch’s Swamp-root Kidney Cure; Fruit Salt; Spa Mud; Abortion Lotion; Concentrated Essence of Cinnamon for Toothache; Confection of Cod Livers; Balsamic Elixir for Inflamed Nipples; Bezon & Bro. Best Beet Juice. A pot with a spout: Goosander Lewin’s Improved Inhaler. Preparation of Bone Marrow: an Ideal Fat Food for Children and Invalids; Odiferous Macassar for Embellishing the Feathers and Preventing Them Falling Out.

  ‘I’ doesn’ work,’ Rayne said.

  ‘What, any of it?’ I asked, but I turned and saw she was referring to the atropine, which her servant had brought, and she had mixed a miniscule amount with the water drops she was squeezing into Cyan’s mouth. ‘This should work. Why doesn’ i’?’ she said, annoyed. ‘I’ brings you round, on t’ times I try i’ wi’ you. I daren’ give her more than this. Do you know how much she took?’

  ‘No…’ I suddenly remembered I had the wrap in my pocket. I stopped moping around the museum and joined her in the bedroom. ‘But I can assay it. I picked up her scolopendium from the barge.’

  ‘Of course, you would.’

  I sighed. ‘Just don’t let me put my fingers in my mouth.’ I cautiously brought out the wrap–the sight of it triggered my craving and damp sprang up on the palms of my hands. Truly we are nothing but chemicals.

  ‘Don’ give in,’ said Rayne, over her shoulder.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. ‘I…I can’t…’

  ‘So you’ll give in? Think of t’ disadvantages–look a’ her! Remember how bad you feel for six months after kicking. You’re doing well now; each time you ge’ clean i’s for slightly longer. The balance has tipped.’

  I calmed myself, thinking; no one is asking me to do without it permanently. I said, ‘It’s cooked at source somewhere in Ladygrace. But is it cut?’

  The rounded hills of Ladygrace, where scolopendium fern grows, have that name because as you approach from a distance their profile looks like a voluptuous woman lying on her back with her knees in the air. The most difficult part of the route is shipping the finished product across the Moren estuary. It never occurred to me, when I was ripping off Dotterel’s shop and selling at the wharves, how much more money I could have made smuggling by air.

  I poured water into another glass and delicately shook the paper over it. Grains fell out and dissolved on impact with the surface, leaving no residue. Even the largest had gone before it fell half a centimetre through the water column.

  ‘Shit, it’s pure. Maybe eighty to ninety per cent…If I hadn’t used for a while I wouldn’t shoot this.’

  Rayne said, ‘If Cyan was buying, I think she could prob’ly afford pure.’

  ‘That’s what killed Sharny. He wouldn’t have been used to it. He didn’t even have time to take the tourniquet off…’ I imagined him thinking–some bastard’s cut this–then the fact it isn’t cut hits with full strength. His hands clench, he struggles for breath but it’s clear there won’t be a next one.

  Feeling suddenly nauseous I dumped it in the fire and wiped my hands. ‘It’d lay me out.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘A day and a half. Is she likely to die?’

  ‘I can’ tell. But if s
he does i’s no’ my faul’.’

  ‘I’m fucked. What will Saker do when I tell him his only daughter is in a coma from a massive overdose? I’m the only junky he knows. He’ll shoot me!’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘When I first saw her I drooled like a dog on a feast day. I thought she was feek! She was a mink!’ I ran out of slang and just scooped a feminine body out of the air with a couple of hand movements. ‘But now she looks like a corpse! They called it jook, not cat, or I would have known!’

  We called the stuff cat because it makes you act like one, roaming all night on the buzz at first, then languid and prone to lying around.

  ‘Did you jus’ throw i’ all away?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The night wore on, mercilessly. I put on the clothes the servant had found for me, though they were not svelte enough to fit–I have to have clothes made to measure–and the shirt was red. Red is not my colour at all. I ate some bread, but it didn’t cure my hangover. The liquor settled in my gut, leaching water from my body and diluting it. The water I drank turned straight into piss and I was still so dehydrated my tongue clacked on the roof of my mouth like a leather strap. I felt as if my skin was drying; my fingertips were wrinkled and a headache like a steel band tightened round my temples. My heartbeat shook my whole body, and I scarcely knew what to do with my hands.

  Pit.

  I looked up. ‘What’s that noise?’

  ‘I don’ hear any noise,’ Rayne said.

  ‘That noise like water drops?’

  ‘Look around,’ she said. ‘My collections are valuable.’

  I did so and noticed a movement on the first turn of the spiral steps where the staircase rose into the gloom. A worm was crawling there. As I watched, another one fell from the upper floor. It wriggled to the edge of the step, tumbled over and dropped onto the step below. Pit. Another one fell. Pit, pit. The worms began descending the steps with a determination I could only attribute to one thing. They were dropping faster now, like the first giant drops of a rainstorm. Pitpitpitplopplopplopplopplop, in ones and twos, linked together. The austere steps began to disappear under their pink flesh.