Briefly, then, because the memory’s painful – Cyan took my good friend Saker’s title as the immortal Archer, and his rooms in the Castle. She stayed seventeen – and he began to age … As an Eszai – ‘immortal’ in Awian – she abides by the Emperor’s command. I took her under my wing and showed her the Castle. She matured into a delightful woman, thoughtful and courteous, but most people still say Saker’s the rightful Archer and Cyan an impostor. She’d inherited his steady hand and eye, and tried to supplant his vast experience with her innovation. I think her position’s the most tenuous of us all in the Circle, and she thinks so, too. She attracts more Challengers than I’ve ever seen before. She’s hammered by them: she has to hold competitions yearly to shoot against hundreds of men who are convinced they can beat her, and so take her position and her immortality. If she wasn’t such an accurate shot, she’d have lost already, so accuracy is the Challenge she sets. The constant anxiety of keeping her immortality spurs the hard graft of her invention.
‘You can’t hit that with an arrow,’ she said.
‘No,’ said Saker.
‘Not even on a good day.’
He laughed. ‘Stop rubbing it in.’
‘You’re beaten on distance. Admit it.’
‘All right. For the first time ever, I’m beaten on distance. Not on speed, and not on accuracy under two hundred metres. Give me another go.’
She passed him the rifle and he weighed it in his hand. ‘It’s coming along.’
‘It beats the musket.’
‘Ha. Longbows beat muskets. It’s my bow you need to beat.’ He reached out with a wing and brushed her shoulder. ‘I’m proud of you, Cyan.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I mean it. You’re breaking ground. Every time I see this, it’s better.’ He looked into the telescope mounted on top. ‘The sight’s off-centre.’
‘It compensates.’
‘I understand. I wind this? Right. But I don’t need it. What if it gets clogged with mud?’
‘Flick it down …’
He sighted along the barrel, pulled the trigger with a sharp crack, and down on the road a big Insect in a cage wagon blasted against the bars. The Insects trapped in the wagons behind it went crazy, ripping at their bars, trying to run from the scent of its blood.
Saker hooted with excitement.
She said, ‘I told you! I told you what it does to bugs!’
They hugged each other, transformed by enthusiasm. ‘Reload it! Reload it!’
I burst out laughing.
‘What are you cackling at, Jant?’ Cyan said, reaching for her cartridge box.
‘First he coached you, now you’re coaching him. Team Micawater.’
Since there can only be one Eszai for each position, my suggesting she was backed by a team, though it’s true, was an insult. ‘There’s no team,’ she said, coldly. ‘There’s just me.’
‘There’s just Cyan Lightning,’ said Saker.
‘The Castle funds this,’ she said.
‘Yes, but it’s Saker’s knowhow,’ I said.
‘It’s all published. Anyone can read my treatises. Anyone can practise. Anyone can apply.’
‘Boy, do they ever,’ said Cyan.
He did the L-thing with his hand again, and grinned down at the Insect that had collapsed in a tipi of legs. The wagon driver and several other men were peering into the cage trying to figure out why it had imploded.
I said, ‘Using a secret weapon that no one else in the Fourlands possesses, is against the rules, I’m sure.’
‘It’s not secret. San doesn’t allow us to keep work secret. I’ve published the design and pretty soon Challengers will catch up.’ She pulled the mashed percussion cap off the nipple and flung it down the escarpment. ‘Then there’ll be a level playing field again. …I’m sick of looking over my shoulder all the time. I’m sick of Challengers. What’s the point of being immortal if you’re too stressed to enjoy it?’
‘One reason I keep going with the drugs.’
‘Jant, you never had a Challenger you couldn’t wipe the floor with.’
‘I mean, I have to live with a bunch of strung-out Eszai.’
‘It’s all right for you! You can fly!’
‘Cyan,’ Saker said warningly.
‘Sorry. Sorry, Jant. Sorry, dad.’ She bit the end off the cartridge and poured the powder down. ‘It’s wearing, that’s all. San realised a Challenge with muskets is practically random. The ball will fly anywhere, that’s no way to decide immortality and San’s going to insist on a fair Challenge. Which is a relief, in a way … When it was fifty/fifty time and again I knew I was only keeping my place by luck.’
‘Cy …’
‘Dad,’ she said truthfully. ‘It’s awful.’
‘Yes. It is.’
‘I stand a better chance of winning with this, than with a musket. Winning fairly.’
Saker stooped to the box, slipped out a cartridge and turned it in his hands. ‘Jant, the muskets and rifles aren’t just for Cyan but for the world. And in the long run, who wins? The Castle wins. We improve at killing Insects. That’s the point. We gain ground, we save lives.’ He glanced at the dome of Murrelet, a golden stud far into the Paperlands. ‘That’s our purpose. Your purpose. You Eszai … My darling, give Jant a go.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘It’s not really me.’
‘That’s what I thought! But it’s kind of addictive.’
‘Obsessive, you mean, Saker. Obsessive.’
Cyan ripped the cone-shaped ball from the cartridge and rodded it down. She has a very pleasant voice. ‘The bar’s being raised higher year after year. I have to keep up with it. I have to do what it takes. Anything it takes to win. I have to use any advantage, the wind, everything …’
‘Of course, Cy.’
‘If I don’t seize the advantage, someone else will. I know the people coming up behind me. I know the competition closing in.’
‘We’ll watch them.’
‘The margins are too close!’
‘It’s all right,’ Saker assured her. His voice strung with the old obsession. ‘We’ll keep publishing your scores. If at nine hundred metres they’re out by fifty centimetres, the bastards will know there’s no point in Challenging you.’
‘Nine hundred metres?’ I said.
‘Jant, I can kill Insects at a kilometre,’ she said. ‘I’ve been practising. Right here … here on this crag where potential Challengers can see me. To psych them out.’ She glared at me piercingly, and for a second looked just like her mother.
‘Your reloading rate really is terrible,’ said Saker.
‘Well, I’m talking to him!’
She clicked the rod into its clip, thumbed the hammer and offered me the rifle. ‘Kill the bug in the last cage.’
I scanned the queue of wagons dubiously.
‘That’s a big one,’ said Saker.
‘They all look tiny.’ My nails ticked on the metal. I hugged the butt to my shoulder and laid my cheek to the stock. The Insect cages appeared in the sight, jiggling about.
Immediately Cyan switched her attention to her father. ‘I shortened the barrel to drop the weight. And I—’
I said, ‘Cyan, I don’t know what to do.’
‘Jant hasn’t got It,’ she said to Saker.
‘I’ve known that for a long time.’
She came to my side and fiddled with the sights. Her blonde hair in a ponytail smelt of soap and the stone of Lowespass. ‘Look for the spot.’
‘The flaw in the glass?’
‘It’s not a flaw, it’s an etching. Place it over the Insect.’
I let my breath out halfway and squeezed the trigger. The butt slammed into my shoulder, the retort cracked in my ear, and the Insect slammed messily against the rear bars of its cage.
Saker hooted and jumped. In a quick and quite spectacular gesture, he simultaneously slapped me on the shoulder and fanned out his wing to whack Cyan on hers.
I couldn’t help hooting too.<
br />
She laughed. ‘Look at you! The King of Awia and the Emperor’s Messenger. Seventeen hundred years between you, and you’re like schoolboys!’
‘I don’t think I killed it. I just … Wow. That’s one unhappy hexapod.’
‘Well done!’ said Saker.
‘Not bad,’ said Cyan. ‘For someone who grew up with a stone spear.’
‘Very cool.’
‘It is “very cool”!’ he said. ‘Reload it!’
She shook her head. She tilted the box and you could see there weren’t many cartridges left. She slung it on her back and set off down to the tent. Saker laughed at the people fuming around their cage containing the kicking Insect, and followed her.
‘There’ll be another gale tonight.’ I said. ‘The wind’s gone westerly. See the cloudbank?’
‘Oh,’ said Saker dismissively. ‘It always does that on a June night.’
‘June. Gales. Gotcha,’ said Cyan.
‘No, it’s going to rain like Ghallain. Then what will your musket fyrd do?’
‘Integrate with my bowmen.’ She ducked into the tent.
There was a camp chair outside with a fantastic view of the troops moving away in open order lines below us. The Paperlands filled the whole horizon. Saker spread his wings and seated himself. ‘Hacilith men! If you draft them from the same factories, they have some cohesion. But if their powder’s wet, they’ll run. When they shoot, they move like snails. They drop their percussion caps, they fire out their ramrods. When they catch the Fear, they’re off like greyhounds and I have to back them. Jant, it seems to me just another way of getting archers killed. All this unnecessary complication. Her cartridges are too expensive to manufacture and they don’t work in the rain? In the rain! This is fucking Lowespass, not Tambrine.’
A servant appeared with coffee on a silver tray, and we gazed out at the Paperlands. Its peaks and troughs, like a solidified cloudscape, shone with the dull lustre of eggshell tainted the colour of apricot by the morning light.
On the horizon, like a breaching whale, rose the great ruined dome of Murrelet Palace. It glowed where the gilt still clung to it in patches. The northern half had broken open, fallen sheer and lay in shadow. I’d flown out there once, where nothing moved but Insects.
The dome was buttressed by strands of Paper, as if it was rising from a net, as if it was bulging upwards and stretching them. The surrounding roofs and upper storeys of the ancient city hardly emerged from the mass. Insects had macerated their timbers and they had collapsed, fifteen hundred years ago.
Cyan joined us, sitting cross-legged in her combat trousers, and dunked a biscuit in her coffee. The roseate light played over the Paperlands.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘It was, once,’ said Saker.
‘Do you think we’ll ever get there?’
‘Not in my lifetime.’
‘We will! We will!’ she punched his ankle. ‘You’re going to see it!’
‘This is a very exposed position. The sooner we’re out of here, the better.’
‘Tern says Murrelet’s full of jewels!’
‘Jant brought her the Filigree Spider.’
‘She told me that you flew there,’ Cyan said to me.
‘I landed on the dome.’ I described how gigantic the dome is, and how I’d climbed down through the hole, into the upper room of the palace, but it had been the middle of the night and I hadn’t seen much more than the cone of rubble. I’d found the Filigree Spider brooch – two drop-cut emeralds formed the head and abdomen of a spider made of silver filigree – and I’d given it to Tern as a courtship gift. When we married, she bought me the pub in Scree, and I named it the Filigree Spider in honour of the jewel. It was very selfless of Tern to buy me a drinking den at six thousand metres altitude, which she would never see.
‘My great-grandmother’s family left that city,’ Saker told Cyan.
‘Who were they?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Merchants turned warriors.’
‘To fight the Insects?’
‘Yes. They had been clever enough to leave first. They retreated to make a stand in east Mica valley. More refugees from Murrelet poured in, and they defended them from the Insects. Everyone turned warrior back then, but they couldn’t save Murrelet … not the manor nor King Murrelet, his family, nor the city … when it fell San led soldiers to rescue it …’
‘Yes?’
‘They’re all paper now.’
‘And that was five-four-nine?’
‘Mm. Yes … Forty years before I was born.’
‘Then what happened?’
He laughed. ‘Cy, look! You can see for yourself.’
She helped herself to another biscuit. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘If anyone can clear the Paper, Thunder can!’
‘I told you I’m impressed. I never thought I’d set foot on this crag again. I remember being … down there.’ He pointed out, to where Insects’ cells folded into the next shallow valley. ‘A thousand years ago. We used to call it Mistral’s Dip.’
His daughter looked at him in awe. ‘Were you shooting?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘But you had to retreat?’
‘We lost it in nine-eighty.’
‘Wow. Have you seen Thunder’s bomb?’
He shook his head.
‘Jant?’
‘No.’ I said, ‘Tornado’s fighting hard down there. I’m of more use in the sky.’ I resist going underground as much as possible, because when I can’t spread I feel claustrophobic. Most people involved in planning and digging the mine were human. The Awians were largely of the opinion that they’d shoot or impale any Insects you want, but were buggered if they were descending underground.
‘I’ve seen it,’ said Cyan. ‘It’s going to be great! It’ll be the biggest explosion ever. It’ll be the biggest sound ever made! San will hear it at the Castle. At the Castle!’
So I had told the journalists. The fuse runs ten kilometres south of here, to Capelin’s Main Camp. It’s packed full of reporters. When he lights the fuse at six a.m. tomorrow, them, and me, Cyan and Saker, will be lying on the ground.
‘It’s huge!’ she enthused. The sun had evenly tanned her skin café au lait, and the hairs of her arms were bleached white over it. Her eyes were bright ocean blue. ‘Forty thousand barrels of powder. Two thousand tonnes, Jant! It’ll blow the roof off the chamber and vaporise the valley.’ She thrust her fist at the sky, picturing the solid column of fire that would burst from the ground. ‘All the Insects we’ve chased into the valley will be blown to pieces.’
‘To pieces!’ said Saker, making it a toast.
‘Not to pieces. Into hot gas instantaneously. A hundred thousand at one go!’ She bounded to her feet and threw her arms wide at the panorama. ‘Feast upon it! This’ll be the last time you see it! When we march back tomorrow it’ll be a crater!’
Thunder said it will take two days to cool. Valley Twenty and this camp will be gone. Nothing will remain but a crater a kilometre in diameter, and no Insect will survive within an eight k radius. The shockwave will smash their tunnels, the ground will be clear.
‘Two hundred kilometres of reclaimed land!’ she said.
‘Probably more. Other Insects will flee the vibration.’
‘Then we set up lines before they run back. They rebuild their Wall further north, and we’re thirty kilometres closer to Murrelet and all the jewels!’
Saker smiled at her. ‘Cy, only fifteen years ago we thought we could clear the Paperlands by water, and it went wrong. So now we’re trying fire.’
‘You old cynic. It’ll work!’ She pointed at him and danced a sidestep. ‘I have a present for you!’
She raced into the tent. Saker returned to watching the troops. He wore a dark red shirt, the lacings deliberately loose to be unrestrictive when he draws, the rolled sleeves tight over his biceps. He still had a bracer on his forearm and wore a short, archer’s sword on a buckled hanger. The rising wind
swept grit across the escarpment and when we squinted against it I noticed the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes.
The land we’ve reclaimed is utterly unliveable, of course. Insects even chew the soil and suck out the goodness. From the margin of the Paperlands to the stone walls around the camp and mine mouth, Insect-gnawed duckboards zigzagged between great pits from mortar explosions. Sirocco’s grenade fire had burnt great black swathes, scattered with wadding and bits of carapace. Along the front of the Paperlands, a huge band of dead arthropods marked where we’d stood this morning.
Cyan came out of the tent, carrying a long box of polished mahogany. She placed it on her father’s lap. ‘A gift,’ she said, with affection. ‘From Lightning, to the King of Awia. At Thunder’s Salient, while it still exists.’
Saker flipped the clips on the box and opened it. A sincere smile spread over his face, ‘Oh, Cyan. Thank you!’
‘Because when I was twelve years old, you gave me a recurve bow, I give you the fifteen millimetre calibre Pattern 2040 rifled musket.’
‘I’m touched. They’re …’
I peered over his shoulder. In the green baize interior of the case lay two exquisite rifles, just like hers. Their walnut stocks were chequered, the steel sideplates extravagantly engraved with his coat of arms.
‘They’re beautiful!’
‘Isn’t that your Awian philosophy? If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing beautifully? … When I said they were for you, I couldn’t hold the craftsmen back.’
‘But why two?’
‘Because someone can reload for you while you aim, and then swap them, see?’
‘Cyan, I am so proud of you.’
She wiggled her head and whisked her ponytail. ‘I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. Though I’d rather you didn’t tell my Challengers … that all I’ve done is apply everything you’ve published on archery, to the musket.’
Saker traced the winged hounds that supported his escutcheon.
She said, ‘Arrows fly more accurately than musket balls, because they spin in the air. So I took Thunder’s idea of rifling from his cannon.’
Fair Rebel Page 4
