Ecanath tuam cai sanhizerai and all that. Oh, by the way, tell your wife I play four-of-a-kind in spades.
Yours,
Mist Fulmer Harandis
Admiral of the Fleet for the Eternal Emperor San
The curlicues on his signature took up half the page. The other letters weren’t so hot a lead. I wrote statements for the Wrought Standard and Moren Intelligencer and sent them by courier. Then I went up to my telegraph on the roof of Lisade and rattled off messages to Aver-Falconet, Saker and Tern. I love being in my telegraph hut with a cold beer and a fine commanding view of the Castle, all the way out to the semaphore at Binnard. I like to imagine the guys in Binnard One thinking, ‘Oh, shit,’ when I flex my callsign. Wake up, suckers! This is genuine Rhydanne Speed!
Saker bunged a reply down the line while I was coding Tern’s. I replied, he answered and we kept going all night. Look what I’ve saddled myself with – the addictive love of talking to my friends, but also the vacuum attraction into the always-eager lugholes of four nations … god knows how many millions of people.
Before, I hadn’t been so aware of their constant greedy listening. Newspapers don’t suck me dry the same way, their timelag gives me breathing space. But with the telegraph I feel the weight of people listening, an attendant hush from the extremities of the continent, a void I ache to fill with sound. I sit watching, like a spider with my fingers on the web, and read the chatter of four lands pouring information like colour into my black-and-white, rounding out my worldview.
I didn’t move a muscle but for my arms sweeping the levers across the console, until the sky began to wake. The darkness diluted to pale powder blue and the Throne Room’s spire and roof seemed cut-outs against it. The moon’s silver disk, consumed by verdegris, hung directly beside the spire that bisected the air through my right windowpane, springing at the sky like a frozen fountain.
I reluctantly scraped my soul off the semaphore line, poured it back in, signed off, relinquished the console to Jackdaw and tore myself away to the kitchens. ‘Tré! Tré! Rustle me up a cooked breakfast.’
Tré Cloud the Quartermaster looked up from the cast-iron range that ran the length of one wall. ‘Jant! Bit early for you, isn’t it?’
‘I’ve been awake all night.’
‘How very Eszai. Don’t start pulling on the Circle, because I for one can’t stand it.’
‘I was driving the telegraph.’
‘Your telegraph. You’re swopping one drug for another. Here, have a coffee. Wedge open the crack of dawn.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Hall serves at five. Can’t you wait?’
‘No.’
‘What do you want in this cooked breakfast?’
‘Everything.’
Tré sighed and beckoned a couple of maids. I sat down at the massive, bare wood table, which was frayed with knife scars and smelt of pastry. Tré organises all the supplies for the Castle and for thousands of fyrd at the battlefront, and only rarely does cooking himself. He’s friendly and usually flays me for news. This time he noticed my bloodshot eyes and cut me a bit of slack.
I feel like I’m two men. One is slick, formal, public-facing, strumming the semaphore to send out San’s orders, letting its two-thousand-kilometre serpent suckle at his chest. The other wants to crawl into a quiet room to think about Cyan. Maybe shoot some scolopendium. Definitely get drunk. I won’t even have chance to mourn her, will I? Because the Castle’s split me between being Jant and Comet, and now I must be Comet.
‘Here. One Tré special, done to a turn.’ He slipped a platter of rashers and eggs in front of me and presented me with a fork. ‘Bacon is not well-known to cure battle stress, but I’ll try.’
‘Do you think I’ve got battle stress?’
‘The kitchen is eighty metres long, Jant. You were doing the thousand metre stare.’
‘It’s Cyan,’ I said. ‘She was killed.’
‘I know, I felt it. I dropped all the goddamn orders.’
I related everything while I pushed bacon around my plate with the fork. I didn’t feel like eating after all. There’s no swift cure for battle stress. We move men who’ve become terrified of Insects off the front line and put them in support roles, because if you send them home they suffer more long-term trauma, thinking Insects are invincible and seeing them everywhere. Those men you can never re-enlist, because they think they’ve failed.
‘I haven’t failed,’ I said aloud.
‘Jant, nobody’s saying—’
‘The gypsy bitch killed Cyan! Then I let her escape. Of course I’ve failed!’
The windows above the row of sinks looked out onto Carillon court, and down the length of the room ran scrubbed cupboard doors. Beside us, a fire-blackened hearth gaped in a brickwork chimney arch, fettered by the clockwork mechanism that turns spit roasts for the Castle’s feasts. Its iron spikes and bars were spotlessly clean, but the aroma of browned meat-jelly, gravy and suet flour permeated the very fabric of the room. At the end, where the storerooms began, a small army of cooks were washing potatoes in the sinks. At the draining boards girls were clinking stacks of dishes.
Behind them, a very fat little boy sitting on an upturned pail was fishing into the floor. He wore dungarees, and held his rod straight, and his line led directly into the tiles, a hallucination that made my eyes water.
‘What,’ I said slowly, ‘Is that?’
Tré followed my gaze. ‘Oh,’ he said apologetically. ‘He’s my son.’
‘You can see it?’
‘Of course I can see him. He’s my son!’
I couldn’t spot a resemblance. Tré was sinewy, crew-cut, with sunken cheeks and a square jaw. He works flat out – arguably he toils the longest hours of any Eszai, which is saying something. The chubby boy was greasy-haired, his forehead knotted with habitual disobedience. I trailed down the kitchen to him and knelt where his line ran into the floor. A tile had been prised up, and through the hole I could only see a deep, black space. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘Fishing,’ said the boy.
I accepted that as a fair response for having asked a stupid question.
‘He’s fishing,’ said Tré, appearing beside me like a stork. ‘It’s a long way down.’
‘A very long way,’ said the boy.
‘How far?’
The boy said nothing.
‘Gabby,’ Tré addressed him. ‘Talk to the Messenger.’
‘How much line have you reeled out?’
No answer.
‘Gabby,’ said Tré. ‘Talk to Jant and I’ll make you a plate of chips.’
‘About twenty metres,’ said the boy.
‘What!’
‘I catch custard fish.’
I looked up. ‘He catches carp,’ Tré rectified. ‘Blind white carp. About this big’: he held his hands half a metre apart.
I peered into the hole but saw not a glimmer of light. ‘What’s down there?’
‘The old cisterns of the Pentadrica. All this place is built on Pentadrica palace, you know. The Throne Room was originally Alyss’ stateroom, before San extended it. Down there are the palace cisterns – the kitchen was built on top.’
‘Wow.’
‘And the Dining Hall, and this end of Carillon.’
I began to envisage the floor as just a thin, tiled crust that could crumble at any time, tipping me into a limitless void. I backed from the hole lest my weight should break it open, and the boy chuckled.
‘They left cisterns?’ I said. ‘I thought we just had wells.’
‘Oh, all the wells drop down into it.’
‘How did you find out?’
Tré shrugged. ‘I’ve always known.’
‘Well, I had no idea!’
He shook a thin finger at the prised-up quarry tile. ‘Jant, you don’t haunt the kitchens much. I’ve defended my place in the Circle for three centuries and I know every millimetre of the Castle and demesne.’
‘Give me that.’ I reached o
ut to one of the maids who was drying a spoon. She tossed it to me and I held it above the hole. Dropped it. The spoon turned over and over, falling into the void.
We waited.
We waited.
‘Did you hear anything?’ said Tré.
‘Sh …’
Nothing.
‘You’re ruining my fishing,’ said the boy.
We never heard a splash. ‘How deep is it?’ I asked him. ‘How deep is the water?’
‘Dunno.’
‘And how often do you catch these custard fish?’
‘’Bout once a day.’
Carp, so long-bereft of light they’d lost their colour and their sight. Reduced to ghosts but for the bulk of their pale muscle, had they been swimming in the pitch darkness beneath our feet for two thousand years? I sat back on my haunches. The Vermiform gave me a sharp jab in the chest, then swayed out of my pocket, observing everything, but fortunately Tré was too involved with his intractable son to notice.
The worms had been so quiet I’d forgotten they were there. I supposed they’d been spying on everything. I took a handful of coffee and sugar sachets from the pot on the table, poured some sugar in my pocket for the Vermiform and stuffed the rest in my pack. These sachets of concentrated coffee match the stuff Tré brews for caffeine content and almost for taste. You’re supposed to squeeze them into a cup of hot water, though recently I’ve taken to ripping them open in-flight and sucking them down, it’s more convenient.
I said goodbye to him and the boy who had resumed ignoring me. I don’t know where the child had come from because Tré Cloud has always stayed single but occasionally has a fling with a cook. Maybe also once with Ata because, for reasons never disclosed, a hundred years ago Shearwater Mist called him out for a duel. Mist beat him all the way around Carillon, and would have skewered him conclusively if Gio hadn’t run in and disarmed them both.
I went out and took off, rejoicing in my strength. The cool air had no lift whatsoever. I flapped over Monument Courtyard, up past the cliff of the Throne Room’s North Façade, over the white limestone lantern that’s the base of the great spire, directly above the Emperor’s Throne, the place where the prime meridians cross, the centre of the world.
The tower ascends, more slender as it rises seventy metres, through stages of complicated openwork, a stone lace of quatrefoils. Gargoyles lean from its four corners up to the last stanza of false arches, beloved roost of my good self and a host of small white doves, from which pinnacles ascend like a marble arpeggio to the final smooth spire, long and tapering-thin. It ends in a spike, like a lance, bearing the huge gold sunburst boss – which shines like a second sun by day, and reflects the stars after nightfall. You can see it for a hundred kilometres across the Plainslands, and you know the Emperor holds our existence firm in his hands beneath.
It’s breathtaking. It dwarfs you. I’ve lived here two hundred years and every time I fly over I see new details. It never ceases to uplift you and flatten you into insignificance at one and the same time.
I flapped over three more steps of delicate buttresses, flying higher, over the Throne Room’s roof and away over the Plainslands.
And here I must ask you old hands to let your attention wander, again, while I bring the newcomers up to speed. I can fly because I’m half Awian, and so have wings like another, longer, pair of arms jointed from my back just below my shoulderblades. Awian bodies – some say, their minds as well – preserve the accoutrements of flight, but they can no longer fly. But I’m from the high cordillera, and my mother was a Rhydanne huntress, a lithe mountain people adapted for running to hunt and to mate, and for survival at high altitude among the granite and ice. My father was an Awian trader who caught her one day – I’ll never know how – but probably it was nasty, because it was the only time my grandmother ever witnessed Awians, and she spoke of them in the plural.
My wings are lengthier than normal, influenced by my leggy Rhydanne build, and with my Rhydanne fitness I can use them to fly. I have the fortune of being a freak. None of us really reach the Castle without a jolt of the wheel of fortune, and how can you separate fortune and brilliance? Our stories are varying combinations of the staple of hard, hard work with various degrees of the garnish of natural talent, and luck … and sometimes privilege, too.
I’m grateful to the Emperor for providing a sanctuary for us, and such a nonpareil Castle, a community where we can give the world our knowhow. The Castle rescued me from my drug turf wars and the murder scene of Felicitia. It rescued Sirocco Tassy, who was trapped as an apprentice blacksmith to a very hard master. Otherwise no one would have heard of us. Our talent would’ve been wasted. San allows us to fulfil our potential, he gives us the scope to work, the freedom to stretch our wings.
We glory at the fact we come from every kind of background and every goddamn era, and San helps us work together, keeps us in check but gives us chance, so the world benefits from our service. Otherwise, Ella Rayne would have died a servant in the mid-six hundreds, Kay Snow would have died a labourer in the eighteenth-century tin mines, and Tornado would have fought as a mercenary in Lowespass until the end of his days.
So the Castle raised us from our terrible lives. Because to hate where your life’s heading but just wait patiently until it’s over, is the philosophy of the whore. You can hide your face in your wing and wait till the world’s finished shafting you, taking its pleasure on your body, soul and time – or you can go looking for the Castle.
The Emperor tries to keep the paths to the Circle clear for all, but even he can’t remove the hand of chance. I used to think he was the only man who could halt the wheel of fortune and turn it as he wills, but I’m older now and I know better.
After five hours slogging across the Plainslands I picked up the onshore breeze and smelt the fresh, salt sea. North of Cobalt Head, the wind had flattened the clouds to a thick bank on the horizon, poison blue and broiling like spit in lamp oil, in which inkblot birds fought for movement.
I glided over the seacliff and it dropped away beneath me, a hundred metres to the white-topped waves curling in on a full tide. Ahead, the gunship Gerygone rested at anchor with the potential of a panther.
Over the next half hour I battled against the wind, closed the distance and began to recall her gigantic size. Gerygone’s ochre-striped hull was longer than three Stormy Petrels moored nose-to-tail, the biggest ship ever built. She packed the firepower of Lowespass keep, and her four naked masts pinned the sky. Mist Fulmer the Sailor must have seen me because a line of flags tugged up to the foremast: At last! What kept you?
Closer, and I saw him at the bow rail. He hailed me with his soigné cigarette. I settled into a glide, brought the hull below me, opened flat the decks, let all the staring faces pass under me, then the mast heads like the tallest trees of the forest. The lookout ducked, the ship dropped behind; I turned with the wind and let it speed me back over the topmasts. Against the repoussé water, traced the fine line of Fulmer’s smoke.
Very few Awians smoke because it fucks their bodies up so much. But those who do, really go for it. Having twice the air capacity and exchange of a human, it gives us quite a kick. The idea is to keep fresh air in your airsacs while using your lungs to smoke, but Fulmer isn’t into harm reduction and more often uses both. Smoking is a sea trader’s habit, given that tobacco’s grown in Peregrine and shipped to Hacilith, but Fulmer hates to display his origins. Given that – and the fact that it’s not a welcome vice in the court of Awia – he’d have stopped by now if he wasn’t hopelessly addicted.
Fulmer very much wants to be part of Eleonora’s court, the playboy of the eastern ocean, but his background makes him an outsider. He’s assumed the chipper brand-new slang of her closest set, and sounds like the louchest of the in-crowd swells on a club night, which I find a bit much. I curled down the leeward side of Gerygone and balanced in the air at the level of his face. Vast as the ship was, she fitted him as if tailored.
‘What ho! What ho
! Jant, it is a rare pleasure! Well, maybe not so rare but still very much a pleasure. Hop aboard!’
I stepped onto the deck. Fulmer drew on his cigarette in an amber holder and exhaled a cloud of smoke. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘How’s your thalassophobia?’
‘I’m not afraid of Gerygone – but we have to search her.’
‘Why? I felt the Circle break … It took me flat aback. Tell me all: who died? What’s happening?’ He ushered me towards his cabin. ‘After you, please, consider yourself my guest. The sun is over the yard arm, is it not?’
CHAPTER 19
Rich and Strange
Mist Fulmer, immaculately coiffured and spotlessly dressed, poured me a gin and tonic in his cabin. He passed me the glass, then seated himself in great style in a gimballed chair at his navigation desk and surveyed me critically: my ten-year-old t-shirt and leather jacket.
‘Bally hell,’ he breathed. ‘It must be serious.’
I recounted everything. On hearing of the Litanee he jumped up and ordered his first mate to search the ship for bombs and the crew for tattoos. On hearing of the destruction of Wrought he whipped out another cocktail cigarette and lit it with a handsome silver lighter. ‘I’m very sorry for Tern. She must be suffering. We want to know why these terror-mongers … Terrorists, want to kill you. We need to catch one in flagrante … I’m glad I can help.’ He glanced at a pocket watch. ‘If the smugglers follow the same routine tonight as for the last three, they’re due in two hours. Time for some chow?’
‘Yes!’
‘On Gerygone, there’s no such thing as a ship’s biscuit.’ He leant back, snapped his fingers, and a valet began bringing in sea bass en croute sauce mireille, and the best fruit of Lakeland Awia.
‘Fulmer, are you sure they’re smuggling gunpowder?’
‘Bless you. They’re too far away to be sure.’
‘I can fly over them and drop a grenade.’
‘No. I want that schooner. She’s new to me. I don’t know who paid for her but she’s a goer. I fancy adding her to the fleet.’ He adjusted the cigarette in its holder. ‘They’ll surrender when they see Gerygone. Smugglers always do … Now jolly well pin back your lugs, you big seagull. I placed a company of marines at the harbour in Cullion. They’re ready to pounce tonight, when the smugglers land. Their captain wants you to join the fun – if you apprehend them, you can discover their contact ashore. I will tack after their schooner in Gerygone and catch her simultaneous. Very good?’
Fair Rebel Page 19
