by Tim Clare
Delphine felt chills. Adrenaline blurred the edges of her vision. She remembered the crunch as his face had struck the van door. Something had broken, yet in all the fuss she had not questioned it. Come to think of it, she had never seen him eating.
‘But you’ve always known what I am.’ A rise in volume indicated he was addressing Ms Rao over the radio. ‘And I’ve not defected from SHaRD. Not . . . knowingly.’
Agatha shook her head and gave him a pitying smile. ‘The camp told us what happened.’
He squinted. ‘What . . . happened at the camp?’
‘You killed half the guards and escaped with all the weapons you could fit in one boat.’
‘No, we didn’t,’ said Delphine.
Several carbines swung to target her.
‘Delphine. I thought he might have killed you all.’
‘As if I’d give him the chance! And there wasn’t this . . . massacre. We left under perfectly ordinary circumstances.’ She pointed at Butler. ‘And I did not know he was one of those, those . . .’ She thought of Father, burning. ‘He lied to me, too. But we didn’t kill anyone.’
‘I didn’t lie,’ said Butler out of the corner of his mouth. ‘You never asked me.’
Agatha studied Delphine for a few moments. She turned to Alice.
‘What’s your story?’
Alice pressed her lips together. ‘Well . . . I didn’t ask to come, but I’m not a hostage or anything. And I didn’t see anybody get shot.’ She glanced at the glassy pool of blood. ‘Except Butler, just now. Your waistcoat is very nice, by the way.’
Agatha looked momentarily confused. She blinked and turned back to Butler.
‘You haven’t responded to radio hails for weeks.’
‘It’s broken!’ said Delphine.
‘Someone sabotaged it,’ said Alice.
‘Go. See for yourselves.’ Butler gestured towards the stern. ‘If you can fix it I’d be most grateful.’A long pause. Delphine could feel the carbineers’ gazes burning into her.
‘Search the boat,’ said Ms Rao.
Agatha took a deep breath through her nostrils. She signalled to Delphine and Alice.
‘Step off, please.’
Delphine gave the carbineers a wary glance, then stepped down onto the plank floor. Alice did the same, the boat groaning in its harness. Agatha nodded to the three female deckhands with the blunderbuss pistols. They holstered their weapons on their belts and boarded the vessel at the foredeck.
‘Wait.’
They froze.
‘Is the lanta there?’
Agatha glanced around. ‘No sign.’
Another pause. ‘Be careful.’
‘Ms Rao, if I may,’ began Butler loudly, ‘what exactly are you hoping to find?’ He hooked a finger into one of the holes in his kaftan. ‘A large cache of guns and ammo, presumably?’
During the lag, Delphine thought she could hear a faint, whispering hiss, but it might have been the sea.
‘Please be quiet, Butler,’ said Ms Rao. ‘Let them do their jobs.’
‘I just . . .’ He winced, touching a fist to his lips. ‘Do you really think I’d bring it all straight to our boathouse, knowing you could radio ahead to warn them? Doesn’t my being here at all strike you as a little . . . tactically suboptimal?’
This time the delay went on for a clear fifteen seconds.
‘Your objection has been noted.’
The three deckhands began rummaging through cargo crates inside the boat.
‘I mean, forgive me, ma’am . . . I know brazen stupidity and I are on nodding terms, but don’t you think, given my track record, I might at least, oh, stash the weapons in the jungle before we made port, and take moorings that belonged to someone other than allies of the people I’d just betrayed?’ He swept his arms out. ‘For example?’
As he turned, all twelve carbines zeroed in on his head again. He rolled his eyes. ‘And, by the way, you can point those guns at me all you like. I heal all wounds and I can’t feel pain. All you’ll achieve is making my robe slightly more tattered. Sooner or later you’ll run out of bullets.’ He took a step forward. No one fired. He glanced at Agatha. ‘Did she tell you all the stories about me?’
Agatha looked him up and down. She licked her gold molars.
‘I heard the one where they burned you on a pyre. I always thought it deserved a better ending.’
She spun on her heel and strode towards Delphine. Delphine took a step back and nearly fell through the gap between the boat and the floor. Sprung cleats bit into the boards. Agatha stopped, lifting her axe-hand till the cool flat of the blade came to rest under Delphine’s chin.
Agatha narrowed her eye. ‘And how many bullets can this one take?’
Delphine saw herself reflected in the girl’s glass eye – her distended, toothy grimace an unconvincing attempt to mask her fear. Memories of shame and powerlessness burned like acid in her belly. She felt old, but also very young.
‘Don’t hurt her,’ said Butler.
Agatha turned towards him, the axe pressed to Delphine’s jaw. ‘You’re not in a position to make demands.’
Delphine dropped to one knee. She shoved Agatha’s axe-hand, grabbed her by the shoulder and twisted her round, tripping her. As she stumbled Delphine locked an arm round her throat and pressed the tip of the sickle to her jugular. She gave the blade a push, felt Agatha twitch.
‘Weapons down, please,’ she said.
Several carbineers swung their aim from Butler to Delphine. She planted her knee in the base of Agatha’s spine and forced her to kneel. Delphine’s heart was thundering. She could barely hold her hand steady. She cleared her throat. ‘Sorry, just to be clear I’m implying I’ll kill her if you don’t put your guns down this bloody instant.’
‘Agatha? What’s going on?’
Butler looked at Agatha. ‘I think they’re waiting for a cue.’
Delphine felt the weight of multiple guns pointing at her head. She gritted her teeth, waiting for the muzzle flash.
‘Agatha. What’s happening?’
Agatha took a long in-breath.
‘Guns down,’ she said.
Hesitantly, the carbineers began lowering their weapons.
‘Tell them to line up in front of the boats,’ said Butler. ‘Hands flat on their heads.’
‘You heard him,’ said Agatha.
The guards started clambering out of the boats. They were human, harka and vesperi, all clad in simple one-piece overalls. Delphine was no good at judging vesperi or harka ages, but the humans looked no older than Agatha – sixteen at most. As they stepped into the light, they winced, dropping their gazes; unarmed and flushed from cover they looked grimy, callow and sheepish.
A thump came from the boat behind her. She glanced over; the three deckhands were filing onto the foredeck, hands above their heads. Behind them, floating in the air, was a matt-black pistol.
God bless Martha.
Delphine stood. Slowly, she removed her hand from Agatha’s throat. Agatha staggered away, tugging at her collar, scowling. Butler watched approvingly.
‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s a bit more civil, isn’t it?’
Butler and Ms Rao talked for over an hour. He allowed Agatha’s crew to transfer the boat onto wooden chocks and perform a thorough search of its contents. Agatha herself muttered a couple of orders to her deckhands and retreated through a hatch. Delphine, Alice and Martha sat together on a stack of planks, Delphine smoking, Martha brewing a round of sugary coffees on their little gas burner.
As the adrenaline left her body, Delphine felt exhausted. She kept replaying Butler’s wounds healing. Somewhere under his clothes was that tumorous growth, packed with writhing white grubs – the promise of eternal youth, in return for bearing his pain. How old was he really?
‘Well,’ Ms Rao was saying, ‘this is troubling. Very troubling indeed.’
‘The idea that I’d turned traitor must have seemed appealing by comparison.’
�
��It would certainly have been neater.’ Some clattering. A long delay. ‘Look. I’m not sure how secure this line is.’
‘Understood.’
‘In light of recent developments, I’ve urgent housekeeping to attend to. If our organisation has been compromised, it stands to reason that I may face infiltrators on this side of the threshold. Continue as planned. Meet our contact in Fat Maw. You’re authorised to offer whatever is necessary in return for good intel leading to our acquisition of a live, viable godfly. We’ll formulate a plan for your return in due course.’
‘Yes ma’am.’
‘You should know I told all staff everything. About your past as Lord Cambridge, and your abilities. They needed to know in case they had to capture you.’
‘Well, that is . . . inconvenient.’
‘Yes. Yes, it is. So be discreet when you move through the city. Word may spread.’
‘I’ll be all right.’ He glanced at Delphine. ‘I have backup.’
The sun heated the wet city to a steaming swelter. Butler led Delphine and Alice out through a hatch into a mass of cabins.
He had swapped his bloodied kaftan for a simple hooded tunic with slits in the back for his wings, and he moved with the grace of a local, picking his way over half-finished ropes, heaps of netting, stacked driftwood, small spreading fruit trees planted in the hollow clay heads of idols, and tethered lizards basking in the thick heat. Delphine could barely keep up. All available ground had been built on, porches and awnings conjoining like the jungle canopy. Roofing materials ranged from rush thatch and sheet metal through to glossy dark leaves or stuff cannibalised from boats – a sampan sawed into sections, or sail canvas stretched over the ribs of a keel to form a huge tent. Windmills turned upon masts, vanes churning as sunlight flashed off their wet blades.
Here and there walls had slogans daubed on them, or symbols. Gradually, the cramped huts opened out and the boardwalks grew busier. Boulevards ran between rows of cabins, rumbling with hand-carts, foot traffic and the occasional fox or lizard on a leash. Butler crossed a narrow rope bridge over a canal, sampaneers ducking as they sculled their single-oared craft underneath. The bridge yawed sickeningly as Delphine edged after him, exaggerating her missteps into swings.
The press of bodies was overwhelming. She had never liked cities – the rush and impatience. To be honest, the presence of people.
The street grew increasingly crowded. Delphine dug her nails into her palms. Someone clipped her arm and she nearly swung for them. She took a deep breath, squeezed through a clench of bodies . . .
. . . and found herself standing on a wide, half-empty wharf. Ahead spread a flat, bottle-green bay dotted with sails and steamships. A cool breeze bathed her damp skin, ruffled her hair.
Half a mile out, a reef of chunky bruise-black rock created a breakwater. The bay was enclosed by the pincers of two narrow headlands, sheltered across its mouth by three small islands. To her left, the stilt city curved for miles, its maze of wharves and piers eventually becoming a solid stone quay with warehouses and chalk white jetties. Behind it, Fat Maw rose in a sprawl of winding streets and mismatched architectural styles, red roofs and white render, grey turrets and black timbers, towards a summit capped with a long silver spire that caught the midday sun, burning like a star.
She exhaled. Her shoulders sagged.
Butler stopped to get water from a standpipe fed by big rooftop rainwater tanks. Next door was what appeared to be a temple: a small square building, surrounded by a low stone wall, open to the ocean. Carved timber pillars supported a steeply pitched roof covered in bark shingle. The sides of the pillars facing the sea had worn down to smooth curves, but the leeward sides depicted vesperi, humans, lanta and harka clad in gowns and feathers and jewels and wreathes, dancing and embracing. Delphine ran her fingers over the grooves. Some of the images looked quite saucy.
Inside the temple, upon a plinth, was a stone statue of a harka sitting crosslegged, hands joined in his lap, clad in robes and wearing a crown. Some people were placing offerings in depressions at the statue’s feet: garlands of flowers, fruit and what looked like dead animals.
Delphine felt as if she ought to pray. She rested her brow against the pillar, gazing down at her boots. She did not believe in any god, not really, though she sometimes caught herself wishing. She had always admired Martha and her fellow lanta’s fondness for Christian ritual – how they had absorbed Bible stories and scripture, how they had risen each morning, like little monks and nuns, to gather in the living room and pray silently. Yet she was not sure they believed in it, not in a literal way. She had asked Martha once or twice, and had received vague, circular answers, as if Martha did not understand the question. The lanta – which is to say her lanta, the ones who had lived in England with her and Mother and Algernon – seemed to crave that point of communion, that shared observance, but she suspected the attendant doctrine was irrelevant. Their prayers and contemplation and evenings of listening to Algernon read from the Bible were more in praise of their old friend Henry than God – a practice sustained because they knew it would have pleased him. In a sense, it had been their way – and Delphine’s too – of keeping Henry alive.
But here she was, in a vital, obedient body, feeling the wind prickle the nape of her neck on the shore of a world she had almost stopped believing in. Alice standing a few yards away. Impossibility upon impossibility. That counted for something, didn’t it?
‘You all right?’ said Alice, shielding her eyes from the sun.
‘Yes, thank you, love.’ And, for that moment (what a queer, miraculous thing!), she was.
Perhaps it was healthy to set aside a corner of one’s mind for the irrational. Such small acts of defiance kept reality supple. But such danger, too. A dance on the edge of a volcano. All life’s sweetest gifts – love, imagination, wonder, hope – lay adjacent to madness.
In the end, she closed her eyes and said thank you.
Butler bought them lunch from a vesperi trader in a long rush cloak. Gondolas were moored up and down a pontoon dock, colourful produce laid out in heaps on mats. The air was a din of trilling song and clicks and cries – she caught snatches of French and English, and other languages she did not recognise. A great living stink rose from the water, its surface confettied with fruit peels, fragments of wood and fish bones floating on a scum of oil. Birds like fat, filthy geese fought over scraps, each waggling the stumps of crooked vestigial wings beneath their larger flight wings.
The trader handed Butler several big leaves fastened with dried grass, and a vine covered in closed green buds, which he wound round a stick before passing over.
They sat in the shade of the boardwalk, on a plank bench between piers. Delphine opened her leaf. Inside was a tepid porridge of brown grains with nuts and chunks of fish. She ate with her fingers. It was oddly sweet, but she was almost shaking with hunger. Butler lit a cigarette and stared out into the bay.
After a while he said: ‘I have to visit someone in the high town. It’s probably best I go alone.’
‘You lied to us,’ said Delphine.
‘No. There were just things I didn’t mention.’
‘Because you knew if you told me we’d never come.’
‘My past is none of your business.’ He looked away. ‘Listen. If base camp sabotaged our radio and gave a false story to England that means the threshold is under hostile control. We can’t go home. So you’d better decide whether you’re prepared to work with me or whether you want us to go our separate ways.’
Delphine snapped off one of the green buds. ‘Why are you afraid of her?’
‘Who?’
‘Ms Rao.’ The bud crunched under her molars. It had a buttery, hazelnutty flavour. ‘She says jump, you say how high. You’re a peer, aren’t you? What are you scared of?’
‘Nothing. What you perceive as fear is simply an unwillingness to play the usual games of dominance and submission. My alliance with Ms Rao gives me access to resources and communicati
on networks. I cooperate because she’s useful to me.’
‘She’s got something on you. More than just your secret.’
He glanced at her, and, to her surprise, smiled. ‘You genuinely can’t imagine working with someone unless they were threatening you, can you?’
She snapped off another bud, her cheeks burning. ‘Fine. Who’s this contact we have to go see?’
‘A person of influence. But I think it would be best if—’
‘I’m coming.’
‘Delphine,’ said Alice.
‘He said I have to work with him. Here I am. I’m no use unless I learn how things work.’
‘Just hear him out.’
‘No,’ said Butler. ‘It’s fine. She’s right. Can’t learn it all from bloody primers. And . . .’ He grimaced as if tasting something sour. ‘You’ve proven you’re at least borderline competent in a pinch. Both of you have.’ He stood. ‘Let’s head back to the boat and change into something more appropriate.’
The restaurant spilled out across the cobbles, tables and chairs arranged close together and shaded by palm leaf awnings decked with paper lanterns and poppets made of twigs and twists of seagrass. The clientele was largely human and harka. Teapots sat on every table, beside ashtrays and dishes of coloured ice. People smoked and chattered and ate with their hands, passing plates in a kind of bucket-chain system that seemed to obviate the need for waiters.
‘Remember,’ said Butler out the corner of his mouth, ‘do. Not. Speak.’
He wore sleek royal purple trousers that tapered at the knee, a silver belt buckle and a single-breasted waistcoat of deep caramel.
Delphine stuck close behind him, dressed in a vest and shorts, and a loose, light, poppy-blue cloak that hid the machine pistol strapped to her hip. Alice and Martha were back at the boathouse, unloading.
She was finding it hard to concentrate. The smell of seared, smoked cuts of meat made her mouth water.