Dangerous Offspring

by Steph Swainston

  The Insect landed squarely on the shields–which angled in different directions under its scrabbling feet. It slid off and the whole thing collapsed–the Insect came down in the middle, tangled in the cart and spilling arrows everywhere. Before it could right itself, the men crowded around and I saw their swords flashing as they rose and fell.

  I looked down the road, seeing Tornado’s shield lines coming around the corner. They were clearing Insects before them, pushing them forwards. Insects were bracing their powerful legs on the shields’ rims, tearing at the spears, trying to crawl up the sides of the buildings, slipping over discarded wings and backing, backing, backing, as the shield wall advanced.

  Tornado was walking in the gap between the first and second lines. His company was also five deep. Each line was of shield bearers and spearmen arranged alternately to thrust their spears over the tops of the shields. Those in the last line walked backwards to deal with Insects running up behind them.

  Five lines isn’t many. I’ve seen this formation twenty deep when we were clearing Insects from Awian towns.

  Tornado’s lines were approaching one of the radial roads. Tornado boomed, ‘Cover right junction!’

  The men who heard him repeated it at a shout. It made them focus, it bound them together and those at the back heard the concerted yell. They pulled their shields in and advanced towards the street corner. Tornado called, ‘Line one, continue! Line two, stack to right!’

  Behind the first line, line two began to dissolve their line across the road and instead queued up behind the right end of the first line. As they approached the junction, the men in the first line looked down the side road, saw it was crawling with Insects, and called, ‘Ten Insects, right!’

  The queue of shield bearers and spearmen together dashed out from behind the first line and ran across the side road, turning as they ran to face the Insects in it. They filled the side road wall-to-wall, spacing themselves out. They slammed their shields together. ‘Ho!’

  The Insects forced against the shield wall but the spearmen had them under control so quickly Tornado didn’t have to detach another line to stand behind them. He left them blocking the road and all the other lines marched across the junction.

  The shield wall was left defending the junction, a vital position for the overall strategy. They shifted their weight from foot to foot, rubbed their bruised arms and hands and stared up at me. When more Insects hove into view they shouted to steady their nerves. Insects are deaf so our shouts mean nothing to them, but the men needed to reassure themselves over the unearthly buzzing.

  A hiatus in the Insect storm, and I was aloft. I flew over the camp and saw the extent of the devastation. The tents outside the town wall were flattened, plastered in mud. Their drainage ditches had collapsed into brooks of sludge. Shining carapaces bobbed in the moat’s coffee-coloured water.

  Around twenty soldiers were constructing a pyre outside the gate. Bodies were laid side by side next to the woodpile to be cremated. No one buries corpses in Lowespass because Insects simply unearth them.

  A squad of ten women were stripping armour, belts, boots and identification tags from the bodies, leaving only the clothes on. A girl crouched, entering the details in a ledger, because armour and weapons are reissued to new fyrd and she would send any money and jewellery to the family of the deceased.

  Men were looping ropes around dead Insects and dragging them out of the gate, hefting them onto a pile beyond the pyre.

  A fireman was unwinding the leather pipe from his flamethrower, a cart carrying a metal cylinder of neat alcohol and rape oil. He directed the nozzle while his mate pumped the handle. They sprayed liquid flame onto the Insect carcasses. Insects are supposed to be deterred by the smell of burning chitin but I’ve never seen any evidence of it.

  I hastened south to the Castle for the rest of the day and all night, rehearsing in my head what I was going to say to the Emperor. I couldn’t see the horizon, so I tried to keep the strain on both wings the same and maintained a straight line. I navigated south carefully, checking the sultry stars by my compass.

  Their constellations reflected like scattered salt on my oiled wings. I have always been convinced that stars are an illusion, just like rainbows, because no matter how high I fly they never seem any nearer. The spaces between them mesmerised me and I flew on, composing my report to the Emperor in my head. I wondered what to do if Frost’s madness worsened. I couldn’t think of any way to ease the pressure on her, because she was the only one of us who really understood the dam.

  I didn’t know Frost’s pre-Castle name but I have heard how she joined the Circle. She won her Challenge in 1703. She had lived all her life in Brandoch, where she founded the Riverworks Company in partnership with her husband.

  Brandoch town is built on a little rise so low as to be almost indistinguishable from the rest of the drowned fenland. In Frost’s day it flourished because it overlooked the only passage through the Moren Delta deep enough for carracks. Frost and her husband laboured in the manorship’s tradition of reclaiming low-lying land from the sea which often flooded it: every one of its polder fields are man-made. They worked as a brilliant team, draining and shoring the marshy levels with dykes and long, raised roads.

  Frost only sought the Castle when her husband fell ill with malaria. She realised that if she could make him immortal she had a chance of saving him. She is the most selfless of us all.

  Her predecessor, Frost Pasquin, set her the Challenge of moving a fyrd division across the Oriole River using nothing but their own manpower and the materials to hand in Lowespass. Pasquin had been working at the front for too long and had lost touch with the rest of the world. He had not been aware of his Challenger’s area of expertise and he was surprised at how gladly she accepted the competition.

  Pasquin took eight days to build an ingenious pontoon bridge of pine and cowhide, with a load-bearing weight enough for the five hundred men. Then it was the Challenger’s turn.

  She moved the river. She surveyed it, dug a short channel and ran it into an old meander. Her husband lay on a stretcher and watched her silently, growing ever weaker while she worked day and night for five days solid. He was forbidden to help her by the Castle’s rules even if he had been well enough. The river altered its course and flowed a little south of the camp of fyrdsmen. They didn’t have to walk a step; Pasquin’s bridge was left high and dry.

  The Emperor asked Pasquin if he could return the river to its original course. But Pasquin couldn’t, and had to admit he was beaten.

  Frost’s husband died the same night. She won her place in the Circle but all she would say was that she had failed to save him. She became locked in mourning and refused herself any pleasure.

  The changes in people’s characters cannot be divorced from the changes in their bodies. An adolescent is passionate and changeable because of his changing body, not just his lack of experience. An octogenarian is fatalistic since he can feel his body failing, and knows it prefigures his death, not solely because he has seen friends die. Middle-aged mortals change more slowly than the very young and very old, so their characters are more stable. And we Eszai never age at all, so aspects of our characters are also fixed.

  Moreover, I doubt any Eszai really grows up while the Emperor San is our immortal father. They preserve their identities against the grind of long centuries, and by their quirks they distance themselves from the crowds. So, Frost still retains the attitude of mourning. She lives for her work but complains she can’t achieve as much working alone. She leaves the fruits of genius scattered through the Fourlands, like the tidal mills of Marenna Dock, the Anga Shore breakwater on the Brandoch coast, and a hundred six-sailed wind pumps along Miredike and Atterdike that drain the malaria swamp.

  Frost is, without doubt, a genius. The traits of genius often coincide with madness, but that isn’t strange, because if genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains, then you tell me what madness is.

  CHAPTER 13


  I flew out of the dawn, into the Castle, my heart racing. I soared in over the curtain wall, bleeding off my downwind speed, and all the Castle’s quadrangles opened up as I passed over. Hidden inside and between its buildings, they revealed themselves to me.

  I ignored the confusing levels of the roofs slipping away under me; the shallow lead cones of the six Dace Gate towers ascending in size from the bastions in the moat to the enormous barbican. I focused on the spire of the Throne Room as I glided over the Berm Lawns. The spire filled my vision–I flared my wings, swept up close to its wall and landed on a gargoyle projecting from halfway up.

  The wind gusted; I steadied myself against the stone, turned around on my narrow perch and braced myself with one foot either side of the drainage channel. It was blocked with moss, pigeon shit and the grit weathered out of the stone. I kicked it clear with my toe and the black water spattered down onto the Throne Room’s sheet lead roof. I looked out down its length towards the North Façade; pinnacles and the tops of flying buttresses emerged at intervals around its edges.

  Every gargoyle was different, arcing out to my left and right in a ring around the spire, with bulbous human faces and lolling tongues. The one I was standing on had a round, white pigeon’s egg in a nest of twigs amassed in the joint of its wing swept back to the wall. I always felt as if their flamboyant features had been carved for me. It seems too much effort to craft such inventive expressions, when the only people who will ever see them are me and the steeplejacks. Still, if a stone mason with carte blanche can’t have fun, who can?

  I shook out my wings, hopped off the gargoyle and spiralled steeply down to the Berm Lawns.

  The door at the end of the Simurgh Wing was locked. Typical. I can’t be expected to carry keys to all of the damn doors. I hammered on it but no one was within corridors’ distance.

  I sprinted around the side of the building, on the grass between it and the Harcourt Barracks, past the armoury, the hospital and its herb garden. I sped onto the avenue bordered with tall poplars and ran down it, automatically avoiding the few uneven flagstones. The magnificent fronts of the Breckan and Simurgh Wings grew before me, with cool, modern open arches. I hastened through the space between them, taking the formal entrance through the Starglass Quadrangle.

  I rushed past astronomical and horological instruments, on the main path between their large, square enclosures. The dew made the flint cobbles set in concrete at the edge of the path as shiny and slippery as ice.

  The gleaming Starglass Clock struck ten as I passed. I counted its chimes almost subconsciously. The last one remained hovering in the air and seemed to grow louder, with a note of defiance, before fading.

  Kings and governors and their retinues sometimes process along this route to the Throne Room when seeking the Emperor’s counsel. I hurtled through the massive portal. Its deeply carved tympanum panel showed San entering the Castle to stay for all perpetuity. I crossed into the narrow passage around the Throne Room.

  Two guards with halberds stood always by its entrance. They took one look at me, unshaven and panting manically, ‘The Messenger!’

  ‘The Messenger!’

  ‘Let me through!’ I cried.

  They pushed the doors wide across their polished arcs of stone.

  The Emperor was sitting in the sunburst throne, and all was quiet behind the screen. He has resided in the Castle, seeing no more of the outside world than is visible from the walls, for fifteen hundred years.

  I paused for breath, insignificant in size beside the column of the first arch. I leant forward, hands on knees, to catch my breath, and I was still trying to formulate what to say.

  Diagonal shafts of sunlight so bright they looked solid, shone down from the east wall’s Gothic windows, high above the arcade of arches and the balcony where ten Imperial Fyrd bowmen stood in silence. Motes of dust and old incense in the air enjoyed brief fame, transformed to flecks of gold as they floated through the beams.

  Without looking up or giving any indication that he had noticed my presence, the Emperor said, ‘Come here, Comet.’

  I shuddered. I strode down the scarlet carpet to the dais, so quickly through strips of light and shade that they flickered red in my eyes. I passed haughty Awian eagles, rearing Plainslands horses and Hacilith fists between the arches. All the Fourlands’ heraldry was bold in the stained-glass windows behind the Emperor.

  The sunburst, a solid electrum screen behind the marble throne, was polished to a mirror radiance and its rays haloed the throne for a metre on all sides. It rested on its lowest two points and, since the Emperor was sitting, his head was in the exact centre of the sun disc. Every beam extending out around him reflected me indistinctly as I approached.

  ‘My lord Emperor!’ I knelt at the foot of the dais, peppered with yellow light from the rose window. I was panting too much to continue.

  The Emperor said calmly, ‘The Circle broke. Hayl, Thunder and Gayle are dead. Do you know what killed them?’

  ‘My lord, something awful’s happening. They were all at Slake Cross–and Insects are flying!’

  ‘Flying?’

  ‘Yes, my lord. A gigantic mating flight, over the lake and the town.’

  I looked up, but the light was in my eyes and I couldn’t see the Emperor’s face. He sat in the shade under an octagonal marble vault that stretched high above him into the traceried interior of the spire, like the inside of a gigantic lantern. The white marble throne was imposing, but not so big that it diminished his form. His ancient broadsword and shield hung on its back. I was very glad I couldn’t read his expression.

  His knurled hands, raised bone covered with ancient thin skin like batwings, uncurled from the scrolled armrests as he stood up. He came to the edge of the dais. ‘Tell me all.’

  I recounted everything, and ended, ‘If the flight has stopped, the others will have cleared the town by now. There must be millions of Insect eggs in the lake…’ I hesitated, nervously. ‘Have I made sense, my lord? Have I been completely clear?’

  ‘This is unprecedented,’ the Emperor said.

  I bowed my head, frightened. Could this be new even to San?

  The Emperor said nothing. He stood in thought, tall and gaunt, with perfect stature, his hands clasped behind his back. His white hair hung straight to the level of his shoulders, his sarcenet robes hung straight to the floor. His clothes were the style of the time he founded the First Circle and was proclaimed Emperor. He wore no crown, never anything but plain white, apart from the robe’s wide embroidered collar with panels of colourless jewels.

  San looked up to the gallery and called, ‘Summon the captain of the Imperial Fyrd!’

  He unfastened his cloak at the shoulder, took it off and placed it on the cushion of the throne. He lifted the broadsword from the back of the throne and wrapped its belt around his waist.

  I gasped–my hand covered my mouth–I couldn’t believe I was seeing this. He had never so much as touched the sword before, and now he really was buckling it on. He tucked the strap end through and the sword hung at his side, in the folds of his robe.

  The Imperial Fyrd captain ran in, down the side aisle. I waited in stunned silence, hearing his footsteps approach behind the piers of the arches. He knelt beside me. He was shaking, staring, and so pale I thought he was going to faint.

  The Emperor took his round sunburst shield from the back of the throne and slipped his arm through it. He stood with the shield held fittingly. ‘Is my horse ready?’

  The captain was too terrified to speak, but he gave an obeisant nod.

  The Emperor said, ‘The people need my direction. Assemble all the Imperial Fyrd on the Berm Lawns. Fetch my armour and the locked chest from the treasury. Make haste! I will lead you to the front. Bring the fastest horses; for speed we will overnight at manor houses and we ride without pause. Comet?’

  ‘My lord?’ I managed, dry-mouthed.

  ‘Call up the fyrds. All of them, from every manor. Every battalion, every d
ivision, every company, every squad. Signal Slake Cross to warn them of our arrival. Then you will meet us at the town.’

  San stepped down from the dais, passed us, walked through the first arch to the small door to his private apartments. He shut the door behind him.

  Noises began to resound from up on the balcony; a crash as one of the archers fainted. The others dropped their bows and turned to each other open-mouthed, seeking an explanation–as if they could ever begin to explain San’s actions.

  My insides seemed to liquefy. I risked a glance sideways; the captain’s eyes were shut, his jowly face hung forwards. He whispered, ‘San is leaving the Castle. It’s the end of the world.’

  Commotion on the balcony as the archers started gabbling hysterically, mouthing reassurances, anticipating the imminent arrival of god. They rattled down the turret stairs and sped out to spread the news.

  I slowly rose to my feet. The captain turned dark blue eyes up to me. ‘Why Slake Cross? Is that where god–?’

  I was brusque, since I was just as scared. ‘You have your orders. Put nonsensical myths out of your mind and do what the Emperor said.’

  ‘Is it the end of the world?’

  ‘We can’t change what’s happening. Do your job and I’ll do mine; it’s all we’ll be remembered for.’

  The Castle suddenly seemed very empty; the archers had gone and the Throne Room was deserted for the first time since the Pentadrica fell. I glanced at the five columns in the apse behind the throne: an azurite column for Awia, jade for the Plainslands, porphyry for Morenzia, haematite for Darkling, and a new, solid gold column for Tris.

  I ran to Lisade, the Castle’s library. It takes all the books and journals of the Fourlands–the Emperor is believed to read every one. I ran past the Lawyer’s vacant rooms, up to the semaphore tower recently built for me on the roof. I had brought the idea of the semaphore back from Tris, figuring that if I didn’t then someone else would Challenge me with it later. I had employed several Trisians to handle the network which is being installed across the Fourlands. Its instant communication posed no real threat to my position since the Messenger must be at least as much a diplomat as an errand runner.