No Present Like Time

by Steph Swainston

  I knew every landmark-the white fences along the “racehorse valley” racetracks that Eske is famous for, their stables where destriers are bred. A line of tall poplars by Dace River; farther on in the forest smoke straggled from a charcoal burner’s shack. I concentrated on keeping the horizon level to fly straight, but in the evening I was grounded by a heavy hailstorm and, annoyingly, had to spend the night in the Plover Inn on the Remige Road. If this was a routine journey I would sleep in the woods because, since I’m Rhydanne, temperatures have to be much below freezing before I start to feel cold.

  By the following afternoon I could see the faintly lilac-gray Awndyn downs in the distance. Cobalt manor’s hops fields and oast houses dotted the downs; a bowl-shaped pass resolved into the coast road. Finally I crested the last hill-and there was the sea. The gray strip of ocean looked as if it was standing up above the land, ready to crash down onto it.

  Every window in Awndyn-on-the-Strand was brassy with the setting sun. The town’s roofs slanted in every crazy direction. The manor house stood on a grassed-over rock-and-sand spit jutting out into the sea. It had tiny clustered windows and tall thin octagonal chimneys with diagonal and cross-hatched red brickwork. I glided down through another sleet shower so strong I had to close my eyes against it, and landed on the roof of a fish-and-chip takeaway. I waited till the squall stopped spitting wet snow, then climbed down from the chip shop and walked into town, crossing the shallow, pebbled stream on a mossy humpbacked bridge. The Hacilith-Awndyn canal ran beside it into an enormous system of locks and basins packed with barges.

  A creative cosmopolitan atmosphere hung over Awndyn, with a smell of cedarwood shavings and stale scrumpy. It was the only Plainslands town to prosper after the last Insect swarm, profiting from the merchant barges that paid tolls to navigate the locks and carracks with full coffers anchoring in the port. It was well positioned to make use of all their raw materials. Swallow, the musician governor, had encouraged a bohemian community; artists and craftsmen were welcome in the tiny crumbling houses and ivy-shaded galleries. Artisans’ slow and friendly workshops overhung the shambling alleys; glass-blowing and marquetry, cloisonné and ceramics, leather-work, woodturning and lapidary, musical instruments and elegant furniture were crafted there.

  I was prospecting for drugs, just as a gold miner follows rules to find deposits. Scolopendium is illegal everywhere except the Plainslands-in Awia the laws have been tight for fifty years and counting; in Hacilith’s deprived streets the problem is at its most serious; and at the Lowespass trenches its use is tackled very severely. But centipede fern grows wild in Ladygrace, the sparsely populated foothills of southern Darkling. The governor of Hacilith tried to pay the Neithernor villagers to burn the moorland hillsides and destroy the plants but thankfully they never succumbed to the offer. Scolopendium extracted from the fern fronds flows out of Ladygrace together with more well-known drugs, and addicts’ money is sucked back in along the same routes. The ban is almost impossible to enforce.

  To find scolopendium in a town look for boundaries, for example the edge between rich and poor districts, or between streets of different trades-where houses begin at the edge of the market or where at night people empty from cafés into clubs. The prospector should investigate places where newly arrived travelers are lingering. Longshoremen with cargoes from Hacilith are the most promising, because a handful of cat hidden in a cabin is worth twice as much as a richly stocked hold. When I was a dealer I witnessed even the most scrupulous merchants give in to greed. I determined not to buy from the pushers at the dockside, but they would only be a couple of links down the chain from one of the more powerful traffickers I know.

  Buildings give clues: dirty windows and peeling paint in a rich district, or a tidy house in the middle of a slum. This is because they are houses where business is done. When I’m hooked, I read the signs subconsciously; a sixth sense guides me to a fix.

  I walked past clustered half-timbered buildings with warm red brick in herringbone designs. Stonecrop grew out of the walls that were topped with triangular cerulean-blue tiles and bearded with long, gray lichen. The town looked like a grounded sunset.

  Following my rules brought me to the quayside. Awndyn harbor was a mass of boats. At low tide they all beached, propped up against each other, and fishermen walked across their wooden decks from harbor wall to sand spit. At full tide they all sailed together, a flotilla of bottle green and white, Awndyn’s dolphin insignia leaping on prows and mastheads. As dusk fell, I watched them unloading, passing meters of loose netting in human chains to the jetty, where boys rocked wooden carts on iron wheels back and forth to get them moving on the rails. The boys were paid a penny a half day to shunt the heavy carts to a warehouse where fisherwives unloaded the catch into crates of salt and sawdust.

  After dark it began to drizzle sleet. The road was plastered in a thin layer of wet brown mud. I walked along the seafront and passed the Teredo Mill, a tall cider mill with peeling rose-pink window frames, dove-holes in diamond shapes in its ochre-colored walls. It was roofed with white squares cut from sections of Insect paper. Last harvest’s apples had been pressed so the intense sweet smell that hung around the mill in autumn was replaced by the heady reek of fermentation.

  A group of young apprentice brewers were sheltering in the underpass where a path ran under the waterwheel’s cobbled sluice. The wheel was raised from its millstream and clean water flowed along the conduit above their heads. They were smoking cigarettes after a day’s work. One of the promenade street lamps cast my shadow long across the road. The brewers regarded me curiously. The youngest had dyed purple hair, baggy checkered trousers and a black coat that reached the floor. I checked him out for the marks of an addict, drew a blank. Well, I haven’t hit gold but I’m very close. We fell into the quiet of mutual examination, until he nudged his friend and bowed. He walked over the road to me. “Comet?”

  “Yes?”

  “It is…it is you?” He looked back to his friends, who all made “Go on” motions.

  I didn’t want their presence to scare away the sort of character I was really looking for. I was about to tell him to get lost but something of my Hacilith self was reflected in him. He didn’t know what to say-there was awe in his eyes like tears. His coworkers crowded around with eager expressions. They were a little too well-heeled to be true rebels. “So you’ve met the Emperor’s Messenger,” I said. “How can I help you?”

  “Did you see the duel between Gio and Wrenn?”

  “What’s the new Serein like?”

  “Tell us the tactic he used!”

  “Tell us if he’s married,” a girl said. Her lanky body had a passing resemblance to a Rhydanne woman and momentarily I had to control myself.

  “I just flew here…” I said.

  “Is it true there’s never been a Swordsman as good as Wrenn?”

  I tried, “I’ve just returned from Darkling. Let me tell you-”

  “I don’t believe Wrenn taught himself. He must be a genius!”

  “My name’s Dunnock,” said the boy with purple hair. “I study music-in the governor’s arty set, but she demands a lot of her circle.”

  Wonderful, I thought; other Eszai have the Fourlands’ best vying to be trained by them in the Select Fyrd; I attract gangs of disaffected youth. I tried a simple approach. “Actually the Governor sent me to find a man called Cinna Bawtere. I’ve been ordered to arrest him. Have you heard of him?”

  “What if we have?”

  “Why do you want to arrest him?”

  I rounded on Dunnock. “Show me where his lair is these days.”

  The brewers, now quiet, ushered me through the underpass. My leather-soled boots squeaked on the tiling; then we turned left on Seething Lane away from the sea, past the puppet-maker’s shop and into the artists’ quarter.

  Shop signs projected above doorways: CROSSBOW CLOCKWORK LTD and FYRD RECRUITMENT LOWESPASS VICTORY HOUSE. APPLEJACK AND FINE TEREDO CALVADOS. Bleak graffiti sporadi
cally decorated the walls between them, declaring, “Ban the Ballista” and “¡Featherbacks go home!”

  The local resentment of Awian refugees was worse than I thought. It made me angry-they weren’t to blame for being made homeless by the Insect swarm. In fact, I thought guiltily, the swarm had largely been my fault. I knew that Tern was trying to persuade the Wrought armorers back to continue their vital tradition in her manor. Her blacksmiths worked extremely hard wherever they had been forced to settle.

  The Swindlestock Bar was dead center of the artists’ quarter. It was built inside the mouth of a gigantic Insect tunnel, like a gray hood with a rough, deeply shadowed papier-mâché texture. The tunnel had been cut from the Paperlands and shipped south for building material; the nightclub’s front projected from its opening, with two stories of green-glazed bricks and black beams. Paper curved down to the ground, looking like a huge worm cast. Windows had been cut in it. Outside the door, a sloughed Insect skin hung in an iron gibbet, its six spiked legs sticking out. It was transparent brown and gnarled; it revolved slowly, a dead weight in the sea breeze.

  I know some clubs in Awndyn that could be described as meat markets. This was more of a delicatessen. Green light so pale it was almost gray reflected on the water pooled between the cobbles. The vague and eerie light came from cylindrical glass jars by the club’s open door-larvae lamps-lanterns full of glow-worm larvae. The doorman picked one up and shook it to make it brighter.

  The brewers nodded at the doorman and walked straight in. Inside, the floor was malachite-colored tiles, the decor ebony with a matte shine. In a deep fireplace sea-driftwood burned with copper-green sparks. A lone musician up on the stage was salivating into a saxophone. He played exceptionally; he must have been one of Swallow’s students. The larvae lamps emphasized his sallow face as he leaned across their shifting light. He paused, recognizing me, and his eyebrows sprang right into his hairline, then he started up another low, sexy drone, playing his very best as if I was a talent spotter.

  The brewers vanished into the press of bodies around the stage. Dunnock turned to me and pointed at the ceiling. “Check upstairs. They ask to see track marks,” he added, agitated. “You’re not wearing a sword.”

  I raised a hand to calm him. “I don’t need a sword to arrest the likes of Bawtere.”

  “Wow. They’re never going to believe this back at the vats.”

  “Keep it a secret!” I said. I elbowed through the dancers’ slow jazz wave to the stairs. They creaked as I climbed them. At the top, a bull’s-eye lantern swung in front of my face, startling me, and a voice rasped, “Oo’s that? One for Cinna?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Oo is it?”

  “His boss.” I deliberately looked straight at the lantern because I know that my Rhydanne eyes reflect. Cinna’s flunky must have seen them shine as two flat gold discs. His chuckle stopped abruptly.

  “All right, Comet,” he whispered. “You want t’see Cinna?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Just…wait a minute, please…Shit, a fucking immortal…He’s a fucking immortal…” The voice trailed off, and then returned. “Come through, Comet.”

  He beckoned me along the dingy corridor, then through a beautiful door inset with opal to a big black and white room. In the middle of the square chamber stood a vast carved table. Its rectilinear designs were echoed on printed six-panel paper screens that folded like concertinas along the dim walls.

  Cinna Bawtere had no friends, only collaborators. He was fat but suave, with a receding hairline and flabby, incandescently red lips like a couple of cod fish lying in the bottom of a boat. He had a dueling scar like a dimple by his mouth, suggesting that long ago his skin hadn’t been pasty, his belly protruding and his chin double. But these days Cinna could get out of breath playing dominoes. People worked for him now, and his big hands had lost all the cuts and calluses they had when he was a sailor. He was a tactless, feckless, reckless individual with an ego the size of Awia and a conscience the size of a boiled sweet. Cinna’s extras included a cutting-edge understanding of chemistry as it applied to narcotics, and of the law and how to break it. His wings were speckled; every fifth feather had been bleached. He wore new blue jeans and a patterned cherry silk dressing gown. Like so many ugly men, he was fond of good clothes.

  I sat in an engraved chair and hooked my wings over the low back. “How great a sense of hearing do the walls have?”

  “It’s all right. We’re totally alone.” Cinna gave me a hard stare from the other side of the table. Eventually he said, “You haven’t visited for a long time, Comet.”

  “Four years isn’t a long time to me.”

  He creased into his chair. “By god, and you look Just The Same as you did when I first saw you, twenty years back.” He gave a little smile. “I thought you’d forgotten me, because I hadn’t heard any word since the Battle Of Awndyn.”

  “So how is business?”

  Cinna raised his hands to indicate the shadowy room. “As good as you see it.”

  “Cinna, I’m here to tell you that I won’t turn a blind eye to your dealing any longer.”

  His round shoulders sagged. He scooped a packet of cigarettes from the table, poked one out and lit it. “I’d been expecting this. So it’s finished? The game’s over?”

  “If you continue and you’re caught, you can’t invoke my name; I won’t help you. If you keep selling contraband to Mist’s sailors and she complains to me, the next time you see an Eszai he’ll be with a fyrd guard to seize you.”

  “Now, Jant, how disappointing after all this time!”

  I shrugged. “I want you to go back to legitimate trade. Why not?”

  Cinna placed both hands flat on his polished table. “Because it’s Not That Easy! This latest ‘paper tax’ from the Castle caused an uproar in Hacilith. You should hear the merchants muttering. All the money’s sent to Awia.”

  “You know there’s a worthwhile cause. We need to break down the Insects’ Paperlands there.”

  “Well, why can’t that kingdom look after itself?”

  “For god’s sake, they’re doing all they can. Awia will repay its debts in full; you mortals just can’t see the long term.”

  “Oh, I understand,” said Cinna. “But I hope Eszai realize how quickly Plainslanders forget Insects once the immediate threat cools off.”

  “Look, you have to stop dealing. In Hacilith now, the punishment for pushing cat is death. I’ve seen dealers broken on the wheel. In Awia they just jail them for life.”

  He nodded. “Well, ergot pastilles are all the kids want these days. They have no taste.” He wallowed over to a side table where there was a decanter of port and some crystal glasses. He poured one for me.

  “To the Emperor,” I said, and drank.

  He topped up my glass. “And another toast. To all the kids who ever sang protest songs against the old king’s draft.”

  I put the glass down. “It’s the Empire’s war,” I said evenly. “Let’s talk business, not nostalgia. I know how you feel about the past but I have to obey the Emperor’s command.”

  “You singled me out and saved me because I was an Independent, Deregulated Pharmaceutical Retailer,” he said. It was true; I wanted a dealer and I found Cinna trustworthy, who owed me his life and his livelihood. Once I got my fingers around the edges of his ego, he was a business partner more loyal than a fyrd captain. “Do you know it’s twenty years ago almost to the day, when you appeared with a handful of draft notices,” he continued. Worry lines on his forehead came and went as he talked. “Nailed on the lifeboat house door-lists of families to contribute to Tornado’s division. My mother wanted to hide us but I knew how relentless you were. She showed us a trapdoor to the coal cellar, but, god-who-left-us, what use is that against someone who knows every Trick In The Book?”

  I swirled beeswing in the glass, embarrassed on his behalf that he would rather hide than fight.

  “You took my brother. He was killed
at Lowespass. All they could find of him to bury was a handful of feathers; the Insects cemented the rest into their Wall.”

  “Many people die in Lowespass.”

  Cinna grimaced and picked at one of the spots around his mouth. “Jant, I remember we had to line up in the courtyard-you were there checking names off on a list. You looked younger than me and I hated you, the way schoolkids hate swots. You looked as calm as a merchant checking sacks of corn, a buyer at a livestock market-”

  “As if I’d done it a thousand times before.”

  “Yeah. It made me want to strangle you, and you looked so frail I was sure I could. My brother knew what I was thinking; he elbowed me in the ribs and said Comet’s Two Hundred Years Old! Knowing that I wouldn’t stand a chance. Then he climbed onto the cart bench with the rest of the stevedores and that was the last I ever saw of him. Taken away to the General Fyrd. Every one of the five hundred men in his morai were slaughtered.

  “Well now I’ve witnessed Insects flatten Awndyn I can understand why we need to keep the Front-but back then I’d never seen one and it took me fifteen years to recover. Your frozen age is so misleading, it makes us mortals underestimate you. You can run faster than a deer, but you just looked like a Bloody College Kid.

  “We know the effect scolopendium has on the people who trade it, let alone the users. I haven’t sought friendship or lovers-just money-thinking that at any second the governor’s fyrd could snatch me away.”

  I glanced up from the mediocre port. Cinna was not known to be a man of great imagination. “What are your plans?” I asked. I knew he would find it hard to relinquish his beautiful suite. He had become too much of a bon viveur. He was too fat to return to life as a sailor, honest or otherwise. “Are you holding any now?”

  “I’ve a quarter kilo of Galt White to sell, and that will be The Last Deal. Maybe.”

  “Let me take it off your hands.”

  “Oh ho!” He pointed a finger over the top of his wine glass. “I thought there was another reason for this visit! Once an addict, always an addict!”