Dangerous Offspring

by Steph Swainston

  ‘Remains to be seen.’

  ‘Is Daddy all right?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Not that I care, of course.’

  ‘Oh no. Course not.’

  ‘What’s happening down there now?’

  ‘Well, the larvae are growing. The Eszai are picking mandible shards out of each other. The mortals are shrieking and dying.’ I told her what had happened to Wrenn, Tornado and Hurricane, and Frost trapped inside her dam, digging into its rubble core. Cyan grew more and more alarmed. I said, ‘But this is the safest place to be. We’ve lost the canvas city already; the larvae are scaling the town walls. I don’t know if they will crawl all the way up this tower but if they do, look–here’s my axe–you can cut them off the walls as they come up to the window. Don’t let them get close because their jaws pincer out.’

  Cyan sat down, on the bedspread smudged with old sleep. ‘Oh, god, Jant…if I had been down there, I…’

  I sat beside her and spread my wing around her. ‘You shouldn’t have watched.’

  She turned and hugged me, her face pressed to my throat. ‘I don’t need protecting,’ she whispered, and I felt her lips move against my skin. She looked down at my trousers, ripped and scratched and plastered with mud, Insect and human blood.

  ‘Oh god. What happened to your foot?’

  ‘It’s nothing. Don’t worry.’

  She kissed my neck and I smelt the hot, comforting scent of her little body. Her hair was so silky it was like putting my hand into a cool stream of water. She began to stroke my feathers. ‘Is it all right now?’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’

  ‘Can’t you regroup and…?’

  ‘There are too many. We’re totally fucked; I don’t know what the Emperor can do.’

  I knew I smelt overpoweringly of fresh sweat. That, or something else, was having a strange effect on her. The ache of my muscles and the stinging of all my little scratches began to feel triumphant. I was so tired I felt light; she started caressing me and her touch loosened the tired muscles in my back. The world closed down to this room; this bed and Cyan. Nothing else existed.

  ‘Mmm…mmm…I need to do this…’

  ‘It’s the crisis…Mmm…. think nothing of it…Oh god; touch my wings.’

  ‘Your body’s so taut. You’re like a racehorse…With too many limbs…Shit. I didn’t mean to say that. Comet…’

  ‘Most girls call me Jant. It’s useful to have two names.’

  I felt my cock straining at my underwear. I shuffled to free it and it pointed straight up inside my trousers. Cyan saw the bulge and said, ‘Oh. I…’

  We were both minded how much her father would hate us to do this, and that made us want to do it more. ‘Do you want me?’ I asked.

  She wouldn’t meet my eye. ‘Yes…but I’m inexperienced.’

  I blinked. I hadn’t expected her to be a virgin. I don’t know why; I suppose because she had seemed so adventurous–she’d always been surrounded by admirers.

  ‘I’ll be careful…’

  ‘Yes, OK.’

  ‘There’s just this, here.’ I guided her hand to my crotch and she felt the stiffness through the cotton. Her fingers moved up my cock as if she was trying to find an end to it. I took off my trousers and briefs and let her take it tentatively in her hands. ‘It’s smooth,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Not like that; like this…ah…’

  Her bodice lacings had come loose and her undershirt was open. Her breasts had fallen a little outward, pressing against the stiff panels, caged in by the criss-cross lacings. I could see their curves but their nipples were hidden.

  ‘I’m good at giving pleasure. I’ll make you feel amazing. You’ll feel like you’re floating.’

  ‘Oh.’ She remembered. ‘It’s not safe.’

  ‘You’re safe with me.’

  I pushed her gently down until she was lying on her back. I put my head under her skirt, into the darkness between her thighs and kissed their soft skin. I licked the silk of her panties. I poked my tongue around them and started licking her. She gasped and flinched but I calmed her with whispers. I soon found out that she was on her period, a little string sticking out of her. That explained why her scent was so beguiling. Women are most sensual when it’s their time of the month.

  I pushed her skirt up, her panties down and kept licking. She wasn’t used to it; she wriggled and whined and kept looking down at me, one arm across her face, biting her shirt sleeve. I must be giving her so much pleasure…and soon it will be my turn.

  The muscles in her legs tensed. Her thighs became more and more rigid, until they were like steel. She grunted and her body stiffened. She clamped her thighs around my head so tightly I nearly suffocated. Then she cried out and all her tension released at once.

  I looked up, bedraggled with her juices. Cyan gasped, with an expression of wonder, pure bliss, and started laughing. Her face was open and unguarded for the first time; it was so wonderful I started laughing too. At that moment the chessboard beside the bed slid off its table with an almighty crash.

  The chess pieces rolled all over the floor. The floor began to shake. No, the whole building was shaking; I could feel the vibrations. ‘What’s that?’ Cyan shrieked.

  The lamp on the window ledge flickered. ‘What’s happening?’ She sat up and drew the blanket round her.

  She said something else, but I wasn’t listening. I was backing into the doorway of the staircase leading to the roof–the spiral steps wound up into their turret behind me. It’s happening again. This is nineteen twenty-five all over again, and the ground’s giving way. It was that night when–

  I woke, and lay in my camp bed in the dark tent, listening.

  ‘Jant!’ Cyan was yelling at me. ‘Jant! Don’t go crazy! What are you doing?’ Her voice took on a hysterical edge. ‘Snap out of it!’

  I snapped. I dashed across to the window and grabbed the lamp. If the earth really was falling in and we were locked in the tower I couldn’t see how we could survive.

  We both looked round as one of the vixen guardswomen appeared in the doorway. She threw something I couldn’t see. It bounced off my foot and by the time I had located it on the floor she had disappeared. It was a key.

  The crashing roar grew and grew. It was composed of hundreds of other noises: a gravelly sliding crunch. A landslide…I knew this had to be a landslide…There was the din of rock cracking, thuds as individual stones tore loose and fell. The long hiss of earth shifting; the tremendous roar of water.

  Through it we heard the bell on the top of the winch tower clanging; madly, unevenly. Dang…dong. Dang! Dong! No one was ringing it–it was tolling of its own accord.

  We strained to see. From far out in the darkness came a sense of motion, commotion; gigantic shapes moving. It was like listening to a ship in distress, beyond the mudflats, sinking in the dead of night.

  The lights on the tower seemed to tilt, rush forward and down; then they vanished. The deafening roar of a mighty, mighty wave thundered towards us. We could see nothing.

  The roar swept past us, obliterating all other noise. The churning of foam and swoosh of falling water resounded on every side.

  ‘The dam!’ I yelled. I felt crushed and hopeless–a sensation I recognised–the Circle was breaking. Frost–what is she going through out there? It started slowly creeping up–came on in a rush.

  I felt the Circle go dead. Frost’s link had gone and I was loose again. We were aging. I felt separate and lonely without the other Eszai to back me up. Mortals must feel like that all the time…I had forgotten what it was like to feel mortal.

  The Circle reformed, gently. I could almost feel the Emperor soothe it back into existence. Why had he left us falling apart into nothingness for so long, like beads slipping off a string? Had he been asleep? Was he deliberately reminding us of mortality?

  I was kneeling on the floor. The shock had dropped me to my hands and knees and I was looking at a patch of floorboards covered in dried
herbs. Their crispy leaves were sticking to my palms.

  I had felt Frost dying. By god, what had happened to her? I couldn’t tell if the overwhelming, crushing sensation of darkness had been her experience, or if it was my imagination.

  ‘Get up!’ said Cyan.

  The roar of the wave went on and on. It passed us and we heard it receding into the distance. Another noise followed, the same volume, still loud enough to shake the tower–the rush of water swirling in spate, out of control.

  Cyan stepped squarely in front of me, shouting, ‘Jant! What’s wrong with you? Stand up!’

  ‘The Circle broke,’ I murmured.

  ‘Daddy!’ she screamed, and started crying in terror. ‘What’s happened to Daddy?’

  ‘Sh! It wasn’t Lightning. He’s in town.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It was Frost. I knew what she was doing…She broke the dam.’

  I felt different, and I realised that I was actually feeling the Circle. It was the Circle that had changed. Its sensation was subtle, just background; then it had gone. No one can feel the Circle or distinguish individuals in it unless its equilibrium was disturbed. I realised I was so used to its ever-present sensation that I had taken it for granted, and now I was feeling it’s slightly altered shape. Frost’s qualities had gone, and the combined effects of everyone else’s, whether enhancing or cancelling each other out, had settled into a new equilibrium.

  ‘Frost was in the Circle when I joined,’ I said. ‘I was always aware of her without knowing.’

  ‘Look!’ She pointed down. The spent flood waters, hissing and edged with foam like a wave running onto a beach, poured up to the base of the tower and broke around it. We watched the level start to nudge up the wall.

  Our lamp reflected parts of the water’s surface rushing past. It picked out eddying lines as flickers of silver and eel-like flashes. It was moving so fast it was backing up its own bulk into peaks and troughs of great, corrugated standing waves.

  Continuous rapids hurtled over where I knew farms had been, now reduced to rubble. The rock outcrops were drowned metres deep. We looked out to Slake–the wide expanse of churning, crinkling flood waters between us and the town reflected its lights.

  There was nothing left but water. Everything had been swept away. Everything in the path of the massive wave had vanished and we could hear nothing over its roar.

  ‘“The waters will take two days to subside,”’ I repeated.

  ‘What?’ said Cyan.

  ‘That was Frost’s message. She worked it all out.’

  Cyan sought out my hand. She sighed, head bowed, looking at the gushing torrent. We stood next to each other, hand in hand in the warm night, and watched out of the window until the faintest light of dawn began to splinter onto the floodwaters.

  CHAPTER 24

  MODERATE INTELLIGENCER

  TROOPS ADVANCE INTO DEVASTATED VALLEY

  Exclusive special report by our own correspondent in Slake Cross

  I stand on the observation platform of Tower 10, a sturdily built peel tower close to Slake Cross. Beside me stands a veteran artillerist of the Lowespass Select, calling out directions to his trebuchet team in their bombardment position–a makeshift construction of logs and sandbags providing a stable platform on the soggy ground. Another barrel of burning pitch jerks up into the sky, joining half a dozen more, as they crash down on a distant ridge of paper.

  Two days have passed since the dam collapsed and the waters have now receded sufficiently to allow infantry to advance. I am further forward than any journalist has been so far. Only the cooperation of the enlightened artillerist has got me past the provosts, passed off as part of his battery. At such elevated points alone can any real picture of the situation be gained; the land is an otherwise flat quagmire, nearly devoid of vegetation and dotted with thousands of dirty pools. Divisions advance cautiously over this ground, pioneers laying brushwood tracks for the fyrd to follow.

  A Plainslands unit clears the way north of us, their spears audibly ‘popping’ eggs that have been scattered by the dam collapse. To my left flamethrower crews are moving forward under the guidance of the Sapper. Occasional bursts of fire mark their encounter with a clutch of undeveloped Insect larvae still wriggling in a pool. The same scene is being re-enacted all the way along a twenty-kilometre front. It is strangely orderly because it is, with few alterations, the plan envisaged years ago.

  The intention then, though, was to drain the lake gradually. The Castle has confirmed that Frost sacrificed herself deliberately to destroy her own creation. The gates could not be opened with Insects freely swarming over the dam. Frost’s terrifying calculation was that only by engineering a collapse from inside the dam could the lake be emptied. In a single catastrophic torrent, adult Insects have been drowned, their eggs have been left to wither in the sun and their hideous young have been smashed by debris or washed into the sea’s fatal salinity.

  The mood of the troops, though, is sombre. This promised bloodless advance has proved to be anything but. Their mood stands in stark contrast to the optimistic banter when they, the largest force mustered in the Empire’s history, prepared to attack three days ago. Many dwell on lost comrades, the casualties of the recent battle greatly exceeding those of the famous defeat one hundred years ago. Their exact numbers will not be known for weeks; the remains have been swept away by the inundation, complicating the sad task. The immortals have also suffered heavily, adding Hurricane and Frost to their losses, with Serein critically injured.

  Still more wonder what the recent changes in the Insects portend. Whilst the horrific larvae are now lying dying or dead, many are openly sceptical of the Castle’s assurances that the mating flights were caused by the dam. The Castle has abandoned plans for any such future constructions and claims there will be no future flights. So far it is too early to tell. Surely there deserves to be a full public inquiry as soon as possible?

  Reports from the surrounding areas are still sketchy as the signalling network was badly damaged and large parts of the Lowespass Road have been washed away. Comet has flown reconnaissance missions as far as Summerday. He reports the town walls saved it from the force of the break wave but with the surrounding country it is inundated, with thirty centimetres of water in the streets. Thousands of farmsteads and fortifications along the entire valley have been destroyed and fatalities are high. Few casualties are reported in Summerday owing to the successful evacuation efforts.

  Rayne, fearing outbreaks of disease, has requested that the inhabitants of the region do not return yet. Only fyrd are permitted into the devastated area; priority is being given to hunting surviving larvae, most of which have been spread over a wide area. In the meantime the civilians are facing a bleak existence, cast on to the charity of others.

  Of the dam itself, nothing remains apart from two low mud hillocks scarcely a man’s height. The sluice gate was discovered in the ruins of a peel tower forty kilometres further down the valley.

  Tomorrow, the Emperor will lead a ceremonial advance to the drained lake bed, land lost to the Empire for a century. There he will formally reclaim the ground as far as the river and annex it to Lowespass manor. Two hundred square kilometers will be reclaimed from the Insects. Most General Fyrd units will remain for two months to secure the area and rebuild defences. Only then will standing garrisons take over and the fyrd be disbanded. If the land can be kept, and the Insects’ aversion to running water raises the hope it can be, it is the first successful advance in over three centuries.

  Perhaps this, then, is Frost’s ultimate triumph. How reasonable was her brave notion that the Castle could defeat the Insects? For the second time in a decade a plan has met with a bloody check in the mandibles of our enemies. Frost, in her ambitions and her actions, had overstretched herself–but that is no more than the world expects its immortals to do.

  Kestrel Altergate,

  Eske, June 13th

  * * *

  You are cordia
lly invited to Micawater Palace for the Challenge of Cyan Peregrine to Lord Governor Lightning Micawater, which will be held in the palace grounds, on August 12th this Year of Our War two thousand and twenty-five.

  The Challenge will be preceded by two days of events and feasting.

  All other Challengers for the position of Lightning this quarter-year may submit their Challenges in advance so they may shoot in competition with Lightning preceding the Challenge of Cyan Peregrine.

  RSVP to Lightning at Micawater Palace

  * * *

  CHAPTER 25

  Two months later, I was standing on the roof of Lightning’s palace, feasting my eyes on its fabulous vista. I slid down from its ridge to the balustrade, knocking off a couple of tiles. The groundsman, far below me on the terrace, waved his fist; so I gave him a cheerful salute. The view was so amazing, and the summer sun so hot, that I wanted to see Lightning’s majestic tournament from above.

  I leant against the slope of the pediment, in the shadow of the gold ball on its point. The tiles beneath my feet were hand-made to look like feathers; the chimneys behind me were collected in refined plain pillars.

  Everybody who was anybody was here, and some people who were nobody at all. Coaches were arriving continually, through the Lucerne Gate and down the Grand Walk to the front of the palace. The Walk was wide enough for three coaches abreast to drive between the double rows of pollarded elms. In the middle each coach reached a marble statue on a plinth of Lightning’s mother with a winged stag. They trotted around it on either side and parked next to each other on the vast gravel semicircle in front of the portico.

  I walked along the balustrade, onto the end of the portico and peered over. I could just see Harrier on the front steps, welcoming in the latest batch of visitors. His age was showing; he had grey hair above his ears. He gave each guest a key on a ribbon and ushered them into the cool shadow of the exedra porch. They entered under the pediment, between its four fluted columns with drooping plume capitals, into the house.