Fair Rebel

by Steph Swainston

‘But that makes the barrel clog up with burnt powder.’

  ‘Not so much if it’s just a quarter-turn. Then, arrows have points, so I thought, what if musket balls had points? I made a conical ball with a hollow base to expand and grip the rifling. You’ve seen it make a big hole in an Insect. Your arrows cut, this punches. You know a bug can take dozens of arrows … they cut so cleanly, sometimes they go straight through. This stops them dead. It bounces around inside and churns them to milkshake.’

  ‘They’re well balanced,’ said Saker.

  ‘I try.’

  ‘They’re beautiful.’ He kissed her. ‘Now, look, Cy. Just because you’ve made elegant rifles doesn’t mean you’ve finished. Your work’s never finished.’

  ‘I know, dad.’

  ‘San wants to kill millions of Insects, not one at a time. You’ll still lose a Challenge on rate of fire. You must put as much effort into finding a solution as the centuries I invested in making the perfect bow.’

  And they fell to technical discussion again. I left them and flew to Eleonora, then to Thunder who was supervising the withdrawal, then back to camp, where Tern was waiting.

  CHAPTER 5

  Tern Wrought

  The campfires of the fyrd shone brighter as evening drew in. In the western sky, from the direction of Ressond, that ominous bank of cloud rolled closer. It mimicked the jagged horizon of the Paperlands below it, and the sun’s red disc sank into it, through the haze.

  Tern let me into our blockhouse, one of the few stone-built huts in the camp, constructed by Snow’s men while they dug the mine and happily yielded to us by Kay Snow, who’ll do anything for my glamorous wife. I wish I could be with Tern all the time, but my work prevents me.

  She gave me a kiss. ‘Last night I dreamt we were in Wrought together.’

  ‘Oh, kitten. We’ll go to your place when this is over.’

  ‘When must I leave?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning at four. I’ve got you a lancer escort. The next camp is bigger than this, but it’s still a bit basic.’

  ‘Basic.’ She slid her hands down and unbuttoned my shirt, slipped it off and flung it on the chair. ‘I’m used to basic, campaigning with you.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘ “Basic” will never be a successful trend in Awia.’ She put her palms to my cheeks and kissed me. While pressing her tongue between my lips, her hand left my face, and I felt her deftly undo my trouser buckle and buttons.

  ‘Kitten. Kitten. Have you been bored?’

  ‘Not bored. I’ve been watching you fly.’

  She helped me take off my boots and breeches, and naked apart from my briefs I had a quick wash and blew the black soot out of my nose. I knelt in front of the stove, creaked its door open and fed it with the last of the firewood.

  The fluting double-whistle of the wind picked up under the corrugated iron roof. Tern shed her riding trousers and joined me on the fur rug. We shared a pot of stew that Tré Cloud had sent, and a little wine. We were so ravenous it tasted fantastic.

  ‘I saw you talking to Cyan,’ Tern said.

  ‘She’s been with Saker all day.’

  ‘Have you noticed how much she looks like her mother?’

  ‘She’s got the blue eyes. She looks like Ata, and sounds like him.’

  ‘If she grows any older, she’ll look strikingly like Ata.’

  ‘She won’t grow older.’

  ‘She will, one day.’

  ‘I need a bath,’ I said. ‘I stink of bugs and gunpowder … and sweat.’

  ‘I like it.’

  ‘Oh, love. What would I do without you?’

  She started to massage my shoulders. I sighed, laid on the rug and opened my wings. The wind rose to a scream. Outside, the fyrd would be extinguishing their campfires and battening down their pavilions. In our stove, the timber crackled, the wind drew sparks up the chimney. I opened the vents and the fire jumped high.

  Pink and orange flames roved around the seasoned wood, and the curved base of each was blue. Heat like liquid poured from the stove; the smell of hot iron and warm feathers pervaded our windowless little room.

  Tern dug her fingers into my hard muscle. ‘The bomb makes me nervous,’ she said.

  ‘When Thunder lights the fuse we’ll be ten kilometres away.’

  ‘But we’re nearly on top of it now. If it ignites, we’d be dead.’

  ‘Oh, very.’

  ‘And Tornado’s fighting Insects in the main chamber? With his axe? In armour? Without a single spark?’

  I looked up at her and shuddered.

  The wind rose to a hurricane. It gusted rain in parallel bars across the valley, and outside only the swinging storm lanterns pricked the blackness. A crescendo of spiral whistling shrilled around the end of the building, and moaned under the roof. We listened to gusts beating at an insane speed over the Paperlands, which the Insects had denuded of anything that might stand in its way. The flames cracked and popped, blustering like pennants.

  Tern glided her hands over my shoulders and started massaging my wings. The wind crashed, battering the iron door as if desperate to enter. It fluted along the walls. I lay head on arms, feeling my body relax under her expert strokes, and listened to rain prickling, dripping off the overhang.

  ‘Do you always fight in this?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘The weather must have been different when Murrelet was the capital.’

  ‘You told Cyan that Murrelet was full of jewels.’

  ‘I only said jewels are the only things Insects haven’t eaten. I said that if people fled in a hurry they might have left treasures behind. Oh, Jant. My beautiful snow leopard … The front of you looks Rhydanne and the back looks Awian …’

  ‘Deeper. Ah … yes …’

  Gusts broke around the building. The wind seethed rain at the door, and the room drew like a chimney. The fire whistled and the smell of wood smoke relaxed Tern. Straddling my backside she leant forward until I could feel her breasts on my naked back, between my wings. She began to kiss the nape of my neck.

  The flames, now orange, had already broken the logs down into little squares, and pink light whirled and coruscated within them. Small flames crept and flickered over them. The bottle of wine lay empty beside us.

  Tern slipped her hand under my hips and grasped my cock. I was already hard but she pressed and pulled gently and I grew harder. I put my hand behind me, between her legs and she pushed against me.

  The storm gathered itself for a manic assault and bashed across the camp, launched torn tents and ropes against the wall. Rain smashed into the side of the house, blew in streaks from the gable end. And the door flew wide.

  Capelin Thunder strode in, his beard and bald head streaming.

  Tern screamed and jumped up, her blouse unbuttoned and her breasts free.

  He raised his lamp and stared at us witheringly.

  ‘You could knock!’ Tern yelled.

  ‘Comet, my plans are ruined. Follow me!’

  ‘What? The bomb?’ I wrapped the rug round my waist.

  ‘Everything is spoilt! Two years’ work down the drain!’

  Water ran off his oilskin and pattered on the floor. His tabard and leggings were so saturated they stuck to him. He motioned with the lamp. ‘I must show you!’

  ‘Fuck you, you can tell me!’

  Tern padded round him, buttoning her blouse, tried to shut the door and jumped back with a curse. Outside was his bodyguard in full tunnel armour, beaded with rain, reflecting the scudding moonlight. She slammed the door.

  In Thunder’s other hand he held a long, wooden ladle, which he flourished emphatically. ‘The bomb will not work! The explosion will not happen! We have been deceived!’

  I got to my feet. He swept the ladle doorwards. ‘To the mine! I will elucidate!’

  ‘I don’t want to go underground. Insects can scent us better than we can see them.’

  Tern brushed past me and whispered, ‘Do they have sex on Tris?’


  ‘No. It got in the way of declamation.’

  Thunder’s noble and well-proportioned face has nevertheless a long and narrow nose. It evenly tapers until the tip of it tilts, smoothly diagonal, as if sliced off by a knife. Down this nose he now looked at me with utmost scorn. ‘Comet, you must tell everyone I cannot detonate the charge. The bomb has been sabotaged. Oh, you philistines, that my work should be ruined on the cusp of my great success by fools! Fools and their cupidity! You must recount it to the Emperor. You must witness for yourself!’

  I picked my breastplate from my kit bag and offered it to Tern, its straps hanging. ‘All right. Harness me up.’

  CHAPTER 6

  Into the tunnels

  Waves of rain swept across the path. Water was bouncing off the ground – up to my full height was whiteout. Thunder’s guards were blurred silver-grey shapes, following behind us as he led the way with his lamp held high. We stepped up onto the slick duckboards.

  Rain battered against us, stinging our faces. We strode hastily, heads lowered, seeing the shining slats of the duckboard and the pocked puddles on the pebbles beneath, from which rain was washing all the gritty soil.

  Thunder’s baggy eyes were rimmed with purple, his head shed water like a boiled egg, his beard was yellow in the lamplight. I could hear nothing but the rage of the rain, and gusts nearly buffeted us off our feet. We struggled against it. Thunder’s oilskin flapped like wings, hurling drops into my face.

  We passed lines of tents, where fyrdsmen had pulled the guy ropes wringing taut, and were lying on their camp beds clutching the frames. Very occasionally, in the outer rows, a light flickered within, sometimes showing the silhouette of a man whetting his sword, cleaning his musket, or, in one case, smooching a fyrdswoman.

  The remaining Select were lean and efficient. What had wrecked our plans? What was Thunder talking about? Why had seeing my wife half-naked passed without comment when any other male would give his right ball for the privilege?

  The wall dividing our camp from the entrance to Mine Twenty reared ahead, like a close-packed forest’s edge. Lamps glimmered by its picket door within the main gate, and the wind whipped to me the hot, fishy smell of their whale oil. Guards with Insect spears opened the gate, and I followed Capelin through.

  The wind cut across the bare ground outside. It forced rain into the joints of my plate, which overlap sleekly, for ease of movement, and I felt it soaking through the padding snap-fastened inside. Water poured off my pauldrons and down my wings I clenched to my back. They’re too long to be fully armoured, and I dreaded Insects getting behind me, grabbing my feathers and tearing up under my pauldrons to my skin.

  The Paperlands rose black against the sky. The hills to the west were bleak and utterly bare; rain rattled over us, giving us the sense of vast space. From here these hills march unbroken to Ressond, where the gales blow even stronger, and ultimately to Darkling. Under a hunter’s moon I saw their profile in shades of grey, as clear as day. Dust-coloured light slipped over their slopes as if groping them, darker and darker into the distance: felt-grey, slate-grey, moonlit patches on the smooth inclines, lying one behind another like the backs of a school of whales.

  Thin clouds chased across the sky, whipped to impossible speed. Behind them very bright stars and the full moon shone dazzling. The flapping pennants around the mine mouth were going wild, shredding themselves. And the copper smell of bugs was very strong indeed.

  Thunder shouted, ‘How fast is this wind?’

  The irrelevancies of his questions puzzle me. ‘About a hundred and thirty kilometres an hour!’

  ‘Can you fly in it?’

  ‘I’d go a hundred and thirty kilometres an hour in that direction!’

  ‘What effect does it have on Insects?’

  ‘None. Why?’

  ‘I just wanted to know.’

  Hallooing before him, we reached the pool of light at the mine mouth. Two spotlights roved ahead of us and picked out the path. With every step now, the duckboards bounced up and down, pressing into the eroded ground. Soldiers were clustered around the mine mouth, and their pikes prickled.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  The mouth of Mine Twenty was a desperate outpost. A few big tents, all empty, stood alongside the duckboards, and the mouth of the Insect tunnel gaped ahead, an arched passage of their white saliva mottled with the corpses they’d built in.

  Six horses in pairs were miserably labouring on the boards of a huge treadmill. Its windlass turned, winding a thick cable in from the tunnel mouth, where a pair of iron rails on sleepers led into the darkness.

  The company of fyrdsmen parted to let us through. I passed between human bodies a little shorter and more thickset than I am, steel plate limbs and the astringent smell of sweat, paraffin from the lamps. Then the point of the arch passed overhead, and we were in the tunnel.

  The wind’s roar ceased immediately; we stumbled forward and halted on the tracks. Thunder raised his lantern so it illuminated his bulging brow and eyes reddened by the lashing rain.

  ‘No firearms?’

  ‘I left my pistol at the blockhouse.’

  ‘Good. Drugs?’

  ‘Damn you, it’s none of your business.’

  ‘Comet, twenty Insects have broken in so far but the situation is worsening. I planned for them, but … you will see. Come on.’

  The tunnel walls arced up either side of us, until, overhead, their inward curves met in a thick ridge or seam, where Insects once stood on their hind legs to fill in the ceiling of the tunnel. Where the walls were saliva they were smooth, rippled in shell-like curves as the Insects, sometime in the tenth century, had pasted on layer after layer. But, embedded in this matrix, they had used everything they could find. Bones protruded. Skulls, petrified in the spit, randomly studded the walls, some with their eyeholes glassed over, their teeth coalesced. Here was a whole horse’s spine, very rusted swords trapped in the white glaze, spear points without shafts. We passed horse shoes sealed behind it, then pieces of what must have been its rider. Then a stone ballista ball, cemented into the central seam, as if still in flight.

  Walking down the incline, we passed underground, and safety lamps on poles provided a dim glow. We passed a section where hundreds, no, thousands of Awian skeletons glued together formed the entire tunnel. They were articulated, intact; they’d once been people who screamed and struggled as they were dragged here alive and sealed in.

  Thunder raised his lantern so it enhanced and shadowed the stacked, crammed skeletons. ‘The kourai.’

  ‘They’re not the kourai, Capelin. You live too much in books.’

  ‘Well, then. The people of Murrelet.’

  ‘So? So what?’

  ‘The further north we go, the further back in time.’

  I couldn’t see the point of a history lesson when Insects were digging to kill us this very second. We’re five hundred years’ too far south for the kourai, and these are too well-armed. I tapped my ice axe on my gauntleted palm and strode ahead. ‘Keep quiet, and try not to smell.’

  ‘I don’t smell!’

  ‘Oh, great philosopher, if a Rhydanne can smell you, the Insects can.’

  We hurried down the tunnel. The debris of ancient battles stopped when we were far enough underground for the Insects not to have dragged them, and the walls became earth, hardened by their saliva. Thunder had reinforced the ceiling with iron props every ten paces. Alongside the wall ran the fuse he’d laid, in its waterproof tube that looked like a ceramic drainpipe, which led from the enormous charge all the way out to Main Camp.

  We walked on the sleepers between the rails, where the cable from the windlass was moving all the time until a set of wagons slid towards us out of the darkness. Thunder gestured me back and we stood against the wall. The wagons, hitched together, rattled past us. In each one lay a dead man with his throat and face torn off.

  Capelin hastened on, grimly. I killed an Insect for him and we
passed a guard of miners. They’re pale and battlestressed-looking men with a handful of words apiece, but they’ve the courage of polecats. Little Kay Snow the Sapper recruits them from the silver mines of Carniss and the coal pits of Wrought. When I’d wondered why they worked without complaining, Kay had laughed at me. ‘Like I used to,’ he said. ‘It’s all they know.’

  We eased round deliberate zigzags excavated to contain the blast, and down the last length of tunnel. Water oozed from the ceiling and ran down the walls. The sliding door to the main chamber was in sight, when three Insects scrabbled out of the ceiling and fell on me.

  The first reared up – I went underneath, straight into its grasp and rammed the ice axe crossways into its jaws – they closed reflexively and I whipped my katana out of its scabbard and sliced its head off.

  The two behind it grabbed me together. Up went my katana single-handed, my hand on the rayskin grip, and swept through both sets of antennae, and stuck in the tunnel wall. My arm out to the right, I had to let it go.

  With my ice axe I bashed at one forehead plate, denting the shell. Another blow backed by my weight, cracked it between the Insect’s eyes, I got my fingers into the gap and pulled, it widened showing the green-white membrane damp and wrinkled like the flesh of a roast chestnut. I spun the axe round and jammed the point on its shaft into the crack, raked it back and forth pushing it deeper until the Insect spasmed and jerked back.

  The third one had hold of my left side, its jaws raking my gorget, seeking purchase, legs razoring off feather fragments, its compound eyes a centimetre from my face. The very tip of its jaw pressed my neck and immediately I felt the hot wetness of blood.

  I flapped hard, and its forelegs stretched out as I pulled against them. I chopped through the joints of all four feet, hurtled backwards, dragged my sword out of the wall, and swung it into its neck. The blade bit, and jammed. Sawing it with both hands I cut through, it swept out the other side – and stuck in the fucking wall.

  The second one grabbed me again. I freaked out for a second and when I recovered I was smacking it in the maxillae with my ice axe, driving it back against the wall until its head was severed but for one strand, and it collapsed in a copious pool of ichor.