Fair Rebel

by Steph Swainston

  Saker crouched and wiped his hand over its surface. The dust smeared away and gold tesserae glittered. ‘This was above the first arch.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But it was my friend. All the hours I spent looking at it!’

  ‘I know them by heart, too.’

  ‘She did this!’ He glanced down into the excavation where you could see part of the east aisle blocked to the ceiling. A worker was hurrying bits of vaulting into the bucket. ‘It’s a … It’s a … mass grave. Look. Someone’s squashed! One of the gallery archers …’ He pointed to a hank of hair, broken feathers, tail of a red coat, sandwiched in the debris above long drips of drying blood. ‘The poor man.’

  ‘We can’t dig them out yet, or it’ll undermine the rubble.’

  By the winch a number of tools were spread on a blanket. Saker selected a pair of pliers. Then he sat down on the mosaic, pulled his wing in front of him, and with his left hand pressed it strongly onto his knee.

  ‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘You’re not doing that.’

  ‘I am. I want my array back.’

  ‘Hadn’t you better help with the rescue?’

  He was too traumatised to reply. I said, ‘I’m going to answer the telegraph. I’ll tell Leon you’re all right.’

  ‘Don’t tell her I’m immortal!’

  He rubbed the skin hummocked over the quills, to stop it sticking. I could see them all the way up, lying parallel, like pens in a rack. Then he clamped the pliers to his first primary feather, and pulled it out. Agony flared on his face but he made no sound. He dropped the carbonised plume, fastened the pliers to the next, and pulled experimentally. Then with all his strength and a little twist, rived it out, and swore.

  Each flight feather has a nerve, and is connected to the bone. They sit through a band of tough membrane, which keeps them stiffly in place and will also turn them, like the tape on a window blind, depending on how you hold your wing. If he plucks them out, new feathers will start to grow back, which is faster than waiting a year for them to moult through. But pulling them off the bone and through this membrane really fucking hurts.

  He squared up to the pain. Like some catharsis it brought him round, woke him up. ‘And I’m not riding through Awia looking like this!’

  ‘Through Awia?’

  ‘To the Front. I’m going to secure the Castle. Then I’ll lead the fyrd to reinforce Hurricane. Ah, shit, that hurts! We must show everyone the Castle hasn’t fallen! We still fight for them. We’re not beaten!’

  He pulled one out and threw it down, wiped his hand across his eyes and reverently pressed his palm to the mosaic. In the dust he left a handprint wet with tears. He clamped the pliers to the next feather so firmly it squashed the shaft, rived it out smoothly and dropped it on the pile. ‘Ah – shit! We have to show our purpose! We have to stop the Insects … And Eleonora is there. I have to explain … don’t I?’

  He plucked a quill and flinched. Every feather was twice the width of a pen, nearly a metre long and burnt free of barbs. Their ends had curled, but every tip was like a clean, fresh nib, hollow with white lines inside, where the pulp had dried in its early growth. They were mature and didn’t bleed, but his wing twitched with each one, and its hand must be numb by now. Damn it, he was making my eyes water.

  He yanked a feather out that still had a bit of vane adhering, held it up and spun it between thumb and forefinger. ‘Here’s enough to fletch an arrow. With it I’ll shoot Connell.’

  ‘She’s gone from the tower. I don’t even know if she’s alive,’ I said.

  He threw it down. ‘Then we might never know. Can you imagine the devastation on its way …? The factions that’ll arise the second this sinks in? We’ll never deal with them. The Circle will never work together, without San!’

  Since he has forty flight feathers in all, he was giving himself a long ordeal and it made me squeamish. The sensation’s awful – like drawing teeth – the pain shoots up the nerve. ‘Ah – shit! That hurt even more!’

  ‘You’re not pressing hard enough.’

  ‘The skin’s burnt.’

  ‘At least—’

  ‘No! No drugs. No brandy.’ He paced the crest of the rubble and sat down again, set his teeth and pulled the last primary, then started down the arm on the secondaries in a rhythm. Then the tertiaries one after another; they came out more easily, but he had to twist round to reach the last.

  He threw down the pliers and flexed his wing. It looked stumpy, and the burnt covert feathers hardly hid the empty follicles – a line of hollow skin tubes like the round holes of a harmonica. He looked down into the pit while he tucked it behind him and spread the other wing across his knee. Then he picked up the pliers, leant his strength onto the ruined flight feathers, and began tearing them out.

  At length there was a grunt and a scraping from the crevice leading to the throne. Another grunt, and a flash of light. One filthy and deeply-lacerated hand emerged from the tiny hole and with precision placed a mining lamp on the ground. Then another hand … both arms bent and pressed palms against the column and ceiling boss, pushed, and Kay Snow slid himself out of the passage with the fluidity of a squat octopus unfurling from its lair.

  His workmen stopped, while Kay sat cross-legged and turned off his lamp. His calm and factual voice belies a great energy: ‘Jant. Go fetch Rayne, because I saw the Emperor.’ He shook his head. ‘I hope she’ll tell me how to move them without killing them. If you could only see!’

  Saker tossed a stone into the pit and immediately had Kay’s attention. ‘Describe it,’ he said.

  Kay stood with balletic grace and assumed a position like a bear hug. ‘Tornado saved the Emperor. He’s bent over San in the throne, protecting him. He placed his arms around the Emperor as the roof fell on them. San’s squashed between Tornado’s body and the back of the throne. The blocks of the ceiling, the spire, bent the flames of the throne, caging them in. It looks like a claw. It made an airspace, only eighty centimetres clearance, but above the flames and all around is solid rubble. Their legs are buried in it. Your Shift worms are moving it quickly, Jant. They’re dumping it in the cistern – they’re amazing – they’re working like a living net.’

  He pulled himself into a crouch. ‘There’s … less space than this. No room to move, no air. If I dig rock out, more will fall, so I’m letting the worms carry it away. I was breathing all the Emperor’s air, so I left.’

  ‘What injuries?’

  He hesitated. ‘Tornado has a broken skull. Blood is weeping from his eye. San has a crushed arm, maybe. I can hardly see him. But their legs …’

  ‘What do their legs look like?’

  ‘Jam, gentlemen. Jam.’

  CHAPTER 43

  Raising San

  It was midnight by the time Kay had cleared the roof fall sufficiently to move the Emperor. By that time, Mist Fulmer had arrived, and Tern had ridden back from Demesne.

  At midnight, Rayne and I were watching on top of the rubble. Saker and Kay were down in the pit. The sky brewed an unsettling dark purple, clogged opaque with smoke and dust, and the black Berm Lawns milled with lanterns like fireflies.

  A queue of carts formed a chain of lights, moving one by one away to the Dace Gate, through the crowd that Mist had cordoned back from their path. Their lamps illuminated fractions of cartwheel and horsehide. As they emerged into the floodlights on the Dace Gate, they segued into whole horses and tumbrils, each with a man on the driving seat and a full load of limestone rubble glimmering with fragments of mosaic.

  There was Halliwell, driving a cart carrying one of the moulded bases that once held a column. I recognised curved fragments of the aisle lierne ribs, a piece of the quatrefoil piercing that had topped one of the windows above the gallery. They were carting it out and dumping it in a huge pile by the river.

  Rayne and I looked down into the part of east aisle that had been cleared. The marble floor slabs corniced over the great drop into the cisterns, covered with grit and dust. Our atte
ntion was fixed on the passage leading to the Throne, in which a single lamp flickered.

  Kay slithered out of it and blinked up at us backed by the floodlight. ‘Jant! You should have seen the Vermiform bend back the rays of the Throne!’

  ‘Do you want stretchers?’

  ‘Don’t stand so close to the edge. Bits are falling in. No, no stretchers. Watch this!’

  A thick tendril of woven worms erupted from the passage, wrapped around a fallen column, and more worms crawling onto it caused the cable to reel, and carried out the huge form of Tornado, completely encased in worms as if sewn into a net. The cable grew strands, braced them against the ground and raised Tornado’s body to us. His bulk reflected darkly on the shattered mosaic as it rose. It crested the edge, curved towards us, and the Vermiform deposited him carefully on a backboard stretcher that Rayne had specially made.

  Rayne picked up the glass drip bottle that Kay had fixed into Tornado’s rotund arm, and held it high. The Vermiform drew back like a shrivelling vine, seemed to suck itself into the passage, and emerged a few seconds later, bearing as if in a seed pod the broken body of our Emperor.

  It raised San to us, deposited him with utmost care on a backboard, and drew away. Rayne and I gasped. Kay had pinned a cloth over the Emperor’s face, but the rest of his narrow body, brown with dried blood, tapered to his legs. They were crushed to a thinness I’d not thought possible. His trousers were flat and his white riding boots mangled where slabs of the mosaic had smashed his fibulae into minute fragments. Kay, following Rayne’s advice, had tied tourniquets at the top of both thighs and affixed a needle and drip bottle into the Emperor’s arm.

  Rayne lifted the cloth covering his face and recoiled. ‘Jant? Go! Go!’

  I raised my carriage lamp and strode down the rubble. Her men, behind me, lifted San’s stretcher and followed. Rayne walked swiftly beside them, and through the crowd we passed.

  The cordon restrained them but faces leant in. Gibbous faces pressed together. A solid wall of faces shocked, faces terrified, bloated into my narrow ellipse of light. They loomed parchment-yellow, palisaded, and passed into darkness. Men and women had come to watch and help. Journalists, Demesne townspeople, everyone who could find a horse had raced for a chance to glimpse the Emperor’s body, to say they were present on this night San might live or die, as the ink of history scrawled across the page. They’d pushed their children forward of the crush and my light reflected on their hair, on eyeglasses in the crowd. Lanterns glimmered and, as we passed, separated into feeble glows in anxious hands. I swept on with half-spread wings, ahead of the stretcher-bearers. Their feet whisked the grass and San’s blood pattered off the taut canvas.

  Once I rode ahead of San’s glorious entry into Lowespass. Now I lit his way to the grave. The terrified crowd seemed the host of those who had died before, reconstituted from the soil of Lowespass or scraped themselves out of the Insect Wall to crawl here, to catch one baleful glimpse of the Emperor who’d sent them to their fates for fifteen hundred years.

  We passed Harcourt in a meteor-trail of light. Rayne ran ahead and called to Fulmer, who hooked open the hospital’s double doors, illuminating the garden of dust-shrouded flowers. I stood back as the stretcher team angled up the ramp.

  ‘Don’t hit the walls!’ Rayne yelled.

  They handled the Emperor’s stretcher into one of the white wards, dazzling bright, and slid it onto a table. Rayne bawled at her orderlies without taking her eyes from San. ‘Boiling water! Cold water! Antiseptic! Gauzes!’

  They flew about.

  ‘Jant, Fulmer, out of here! Stop idiots coming in!’

  She pulled the cloth from the Emperor’s face, flung it at me, and closed the doors. Alone in the tiled corridor, Fulmer and I regarded each other. The cloth was stained with blood, in a vague imprint of the Emperor’s face. I shoved it in my pocket.

  Some of the crowd had ventured into the hospital garden. We shooed them out and I set my lantern on the wall. Fulmer lit a cigarette and paced back and forth, guzzling it.

  Saker arrived, bearing the front of Tornado’s stretcher, with two strong soldiers on the rear poles. As they passed I saw stained glass glittering in Tornado’s skin, and clear fluid running from his ear. They carried his body into the hospital, then Rayne ejected Saker the same way we had been.

  He approached; the mortar dust that clung to every dewy grass blade had left cement streaks on his boots. ‘What are you doing?’ he said.

  ‘The fucking foxtrot,’ said Fulmer. ‘What do you think?’

  Saker put his hands in his back pockets, looked up at the starless sky and exhaled one of those long Awian sighs where you empty your lungs, then the airsacs in your back and long bones.

  ‘Rayne will revive the Emperor,’ I said.

  ‘If there’s any chance.’

  The night breeze pulsed and cooled us. The lanterns of the vast and silent horde speckled the ground to the foot of the curtain wall. The great monolith of the South Façade stood solitary against the plum-coloured clouds. A faint anaemic reflection of light twinkled high in the hook of the great rose window. On the Dace Gate the floodlights, like sprigs of laburnum, cast an amber glow on the heads and shoulders of the sentries beneath their steel stalks. In the arc of my lamplight, carefully-tended pansies had been trampled thick with damp grey ash, the crushed grass gave off the scent of scolopendium and San’s blood drops timed the path. The white doves of the Throne Room tower huddled together on the hospital roof, homeless and traumatised. Rayne’s nurses had drawn the curtains and figures moved purposefully behind them, but we’d no way of knowing what was happening inside.

  ‘Fuck it,’ said Saker.

  ‘The mot juste,’ said Mist.

  I said, ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘What we’re best at. Jant, send out news that the Emperor is safe.’

  ‘No. He’s dying. Do you want me to lie?’

  ‘Since when did you have qualms about that? And tell these rubberneckers they’re better off in bed. Leave the fyrds to me. Mist, ask Hayl to arrange horses – can she manage a thousand? – I’m taking the warriors north tomorrow and we’ll look the part. I want every flag flying that isn’t covered in this grey shit.’ He set off, and glanced over his shoulder. ‘I’m going to pick up my other rifle and I swear to god, if I find even a half-decent bow in this wreckage, I’ll give you Micawater.’

  ‘Saker—’

  ‘Lightning. Call me Lightning.’

  CHAPTER 44

  San’s Ward

  At dawn, I watched from the telegraph cabin as Lightning assembled the Eske Fyrd on the Berm Lawn. I’d been awake all night, driving the semaphore as fast as it would go, relating the news. Tern and Jackdaw were asleep in the room below, and the deeply-shadowed pit of the excavation lay silent, but over in Carillon, Kay’s team was digging deep for Gayle the Lawyer, with the help of the Vermiform.

  Lightning watched the troops filing out of the gate and then he strode towards the hospital. I brought the control knobs together and down, folding the paddles to rest, and saw Binnard do the same. I slipped out of the cabin, jumped off the roof and glided over the soldiers’ lines. I landed beside Lightning, halfway down the hospital path. He wore travelling clothes, his coat covered his wings; he still reeked of burnt feathers.

  He knocked on the hospital door. We waited, and the first blood-red arc of the sun began to show above the Dace Gate. Without a breath of wind, the smoke still drifting out of Simurgh rested in a hammock haze between the towers of the curtain wall.

  The door opened and Rayne tottered out. She looked up at Lightning and recoiled as if struck. Then she peered closely at his face and the lines on her forehead pulled together. ‘You look different,’ she said. ‘Look at you, Saker; you’ve changed.’

  ‘It’s been fifteen years,’ he said softly.

  ‘Fifteen years …’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ he said. ‘Tell me how the Emperor is.’

  She slapped
him hard across the face. ‘Doesn’t matter? Of course it does! You did this, you arse. This!’ She thrust a finger at the ruins. ‘You brought Swallow here. You lent her hope. You gave her a taste of our lives. Of course she’d want more! So look at the devastation! San’s … San’s … Oh, god! Why did you show her the cistern? Just because you like red-haired amazons! Just because you liked the racket she made!’

  ‘That slap,’ he said. ‘I deserved it.’

  She slapped him harder. ‘You deserve two!’

  ‘Very well. I deserve two.’

  ‘Are you accepting the role San’s given you?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, Ella … I’ll do what I think San would want.’

  ‘It’s the only way,’ she said.

  ‘If I uphold the Empire and San regains consciousness, he’ll make Eleonora immortal.’

  I said, ‘Zascai will question your place.’

  ‘Then I’ll run a fucking tournament … sometime.’

  Rayne raised her hand to the wrinkles at the corner of his eye. ‘Saker. Do you remember when I pulled you from under that chariot?’

  ‘… Yes …’

  ‘I told you then, we didn’t belong in the mortal’s world any longer. I said they would never understand us again. They couldn’t. But ever since, you’ve tried to be part of it. Tried to play the prince! I’m the only one who understands you; you’re the only one who knows me. You were my only solace, my only confidant, my best friend. For fourteen hundred years! And what did you do? Walk away!’

  ‘Ella, I—’

  ‘Without a backward glance! Without a thought! Chasing your stupid ideas! A life alone stretched out ahead of me – you left me alone forever.’

  ‘I’m not clear what “forever” is, now.’

  She really tried to slap him, but he caught her hand.

  ‘Didn’t I save your life?’

  ‘Twice.’

  ‘Yes, twice! I revived you from the brink – but you walked away! You left to waste yourself for a dumb idea! I didn’t! Now your stupid ideals have destroyed the whole Empire!’ Completely exhausted, she started crying, and he hugged her close, like a contrite son.