by Tim Clare
An islet rolled past on their starboard side, covered in three burnt-out shells of huts. A banner hung over the ruins, black paint on a white background, but she did not recognise the alphabet, let alone the words. A symbol had been daubed onto the canvas: an image of a hand in an inverted triangle.
Delphine caught movement from the corner of her eye. A small, sleek cutter was closing astern, its bone-white headsails luffing in the heightening wind. A squat, flat-headed vesperi in a blue sash and long sleeveless blue tunic hailed Butler in clickspeak. Three other vesperi sat in the boat, dressed in blue and carrying guns.
Butler kept his gaze fixed on the stilt city ahead. Delphine wasn’t sure if he’d noticed them.
The cutter pulled nearer until the two craft were almost touching. Very slowly, Delphine slid her hand to her machine pistol. She kept it just below the gunwale, out of sight.
The flat-headed vesperi leaned over and rapped the side of the cabin with a quarterstaff. Delphine flinched.
Butler pumped his wings. He kept one hand on the tiller and did not look down. His lips and noseleaf flexed; she caught snatches of clickspeak as it dipped into audible register. The flat-headed vesperi rapped the cabin again. Butler said something short and made a sweeping gesture with his free hand.
A film of sweat was forming between Delphine’s palm and the pistol grip. What the hell was he playing at? The three vesperi sitting in the boat seemed eerily at ease, one gazing out across the river, another picking at his fangs. The guns in their laps looked crude, but at this range it hardly mattered.
The flat-headed vesperi stepped back. The cutter trimmed its sails and fell abaft, jibbing back upriver. Delphine exhaled heavily, slumping forward.
She took a minute to get her breath back, then walked across the roof to join Butler at the stern.
‘What was that about?’ she said, trying to hide the tremor in her voice.
Butler rolled his eyes and tutted. ‘Money. They were shaking us down for port taxes.’
‘Why didn’t you pay them?’
He looked at her like she was mad. ‘They’re not real tax collectors, you imbecile. Just thugs. Hawser clique. There. Your first bit of local knowledge. Hawsers run the docks. Usually more civil than that. Must be new recruits.’
‘How did you make them go away?’
‘I told them we’d already paid our taxes, and if they wanted to check our papers they were welcome to accompany us to Middle Sister Island.’
‘What’s on Middle Sister Island?’
‘Patience,’ he said, and smiled at some private joke. ‘Strange, though. Never been that brazen before. Something’s brewing.’
As the rain grew heavier he spread his wings, sheltering them both. The few children still flying over the river alighted and sought cover. Smaller trees began bowing their heads.
He eased off on the throttle. Ahead, a shifting carpet of boats bumped and knocked. The river was choppy with rain, traffic-clogged. Plank piers stretched out across the dancing water, funnelling boats into lanes. Punts, rowboats, junks and sampans were moored together three deep. Vesperi in blue smocks strode from craft to craft as easily as if they were walking across flagstones, yelling and click-chirruping, halting some boats while beckoning others into nooks. Each carried a telescopic wooden pole with an attachment like a shepherd’s crook at the end, which they used to pull boats in to dock.
Delphine watched in a kind of daze, noting how their taloned toes gripped rowlocks, their ears swivelling in different directions. Somehow the otherness of Butler she had assimilated and repressed returned now she saw them in number, just as she had as a girl on that window ledge in Alderberen Hall. But – and the realisation came with such clarity that for a moment, she wondered if the wine fruit was not finished with her – it was not their otherness which disturbed her.
It was their sameness.
The little tics – the pulling tight of rainskins, the yawns, the scowls. Ordinariness. Empathy rose in her like a kind of nausea. These creatures. These people.
Butler slowed the boat to a crawl. To starboard, the muddy shore of an islet held a pod of six giant, boat-sized turtles, all moored by big iron staples riveted to their soft shells.
Rain drummed on thousands of planks and roofs. Reed-thatched huts stood twenty, thirty feet above the river on stilts. The boat passed beneath a rope bridge on which a huge bearded lizard with orange scales lay basking, rain streaming from its cranial frills and segmented tail.
The growl of the engine echoed off seaweed-smothered pilings. Rigging, canvas and boardwalks were clotting together into a canopy that blotted out light. Ahead, lapping brown water vanished into darkness. Rain was filling the bottom of their boat with bilge water. The pilings grew closer, bigger. Milky lights flared out of the darkness before vanishing. The scent of the undercity was a brackish stew of loam, algae and piss.
A shadow rolled over the boat. The rain cut off. They continued into darkness.
Somewhere under the stilt city, they cut the engine. Delphine could not see her hands. She felt the boat drifting.
She listened. She heard herself breathing, the gentle slap of water against pilings.
A tick-tick-tick rang through the hollow blackness. Butler was echolocating.
The boat struck something with a dull boom. The deck rocked; Delphine clutched the side to stop herself falling in. She heard footsteps on the cabin roof.
Indistinct shuffling. Sounds tickling the edge of her hearing.
A rectangle of light expanded above. Iron hooks dropped on stout ropes. A trio of teenaged human girls with short-cropped hair and cut-off trousers rappelled down and dived into what Delphine now saw was thick and oily water. They swam under the keel, then surfaced on the opposite side and scrambled aboard, passing the ropes round the boat in a big loop. They slotted the hooks into metal rings woven into the ropes then, rat-wet and dripping, shinned back up the lines.
Butler locked the tiller. He lit a cigarette, scratched behind his ear and blew smoke up towards the hatch.
‘Everyone hold onto something.’
Delphine gripped the taffrail. From above she heard the rak-a-clack of gear teeth and pinions. The ropes tightened. Wet fibres creaked.
The boat jerked, resisting. Her foot skidded. The boat tipped. She dropped to her knees, locked her arms under the rail. The boat rose, water drooling from the hull. Below, she saw her silhouette reflected in a square of dirty light. Her gut lurched. Alice was on the foredeck, peering over the side of the boat, eyes wide.
The rattle of labouring gears grew louder. They passed through a hatchway into a low-raftered boathouse lit by oil burners in long, fluted glass mantles. Boats sat in rows on wooden chocks, draped with tarpaulins. Three massive winches hung over the hatchway.
Butler stepped off the stern onto the boathouse floor. His tall ears twitched.
‘Wait,’ he hissed. He held up a palm, took a step forward.
‘Hello?’ he called. His hand slid to the shoulder holster beneath his kaftan. ‘You can come out. I hear you. It’s Butler.’
A figure emerged from the shadow of a carved wooden pillar. She was a little shorter than Delphine, with long sable hair tending to curls. She wore a fleece-lined waistcoat over a suit of thin crimson fabric, fastened to the trousers with a row of brass buttons. Lamplight picked out gold teeth and a red glass eye in the left socket. Her left arm terminated in a steel tomahawk head. Her left foot clacked as she set it down, sprung black iron cleats cushioning a skeletal prosthesis.
‘Oh, it’s you.’ Butler glanced about. ‘Where’s Tammuz?’
She reached up with her axe-hand and swept a twist of hair out of her eye. She looked all of sixteen.
‘You lied to me.’
Butler pulled on his cigarette and looked askance. ‘Probably.’
The girl took a step with her metal leg. ‘Are you afraid of death, Mr Bechstein?’
Butler was still for a very long time. Delphine could hear him breathing. He narro
wed his eyes.
‘I don’t know what you think you know . . .’
The girl snapped her fingers. Tarpaulins flipped back from the parked junks and barges and a dozen human and vesperi guards rose, aiming carbines. The three teenaged boathands drew blunderbuss pistols.
The girl raised her axe-hand. ‘Anything you want to say?’
Delphine shot a glance down the boat at Alice, who had dropped to a crouch.
Butler regarded the girl with a look of weary boredom. ‘Not to you, Ms Colstrid.’
The axe-hand dropped. Twelve carbines fired. The force of the shots threw him back against the boat. He bounced off the hull and hit the floor.
Gunsmoke hung in the air. Carbine levers cha-chucked as guards chambered fresh rounds.
Delphine stared. Butler’s body lay in a widening pool of blood.
The girl’s prosthetic leg clack-clack-clacked as she walked to the body. She nudged the head with a cleat; it slid limply. She wrinkled her nose.
‘Please. Call me Agatha.’
CHAPTER 10
THE DEEP AND SECRET THINGS
(Twenty-three years before the inauguration)
The trail to Dr Noroc’s Mill was poorly maintained, a dirt track smothered by roots and lianas, swallowed by sinkholes, and hinted at by flooded wheelruts boiling with silverflies. Hagar tried to ignore a growing tightness in her chest. Räum jounced and thundered beneath her, saddlebags slapping against his flanks, his muscular, double-jointed legs driving him forward through deepening mud. A translucent canopy of leaves stained the sun orange. Low branches snatched at her hat and lashed at her face.
The stream she usually navigated by had swollen in the unseasonably late rains, changing its course and draining into the Underkills below. Hagar feared they were lost. The whole point of placing Dr Noroc’s facility at such a remove was isolation – for almost half the year it was cut off from the wider world, just like her old abbey in winter – but as Räum followed the trail north Hagar wondered whether she had been too covetous of her treasure hidden in a field.
The stream flowed fast and clay-brown, creaming over the top of a rotten trunk that had collapsed across its banks. She chose a spot farther upstream where the bank gently sloped and jade butterflies flitted amongst flowers with sagging red mouths. Hagar urged Räum into the water, stropping her fingers through his neck plumage to soothe him. He could run across a battlefield without hesitation – in each of his lives his training had featured weeks of running trenches at the Académie, flanked by students banging pots and blowing horns – but he hated rivers and pools where the water was too turbid to judge depth. A brave bird he was – had always been – but not foolish.
Hagar felt the current pushing round her ankles, shoving at Räum’s flank, cool and insidious. Insects rasped against her cheeks. Then he was up onto the opposite bank, his scimitar foretalons slapping in the mud, her saddlebags jankling with kit. She patted his withers, digging into the stirrups as the ground steepened. Räum began taking the hill in a zigzag, clambering over the spreading roots of giant christwoods. She could tell he enjoyed the challenge of it, and she nickered little nonsenses to encourage him.
Only when they crested the hill and saw the iron gates, wedged between stone walls choked with vines, did the weight in her heart finally ease. In the ten years since her last visit, the forest had reclaimed the facility as its own, twining lianas through cracks in the stonework, deepening the drifts of wild ferns and orchids so the place looked more like an ancient temple than a house of science. That was good – it served her purpose, having the facility fuse with its surroundings, no longer appearing alien or noteworthy. The only hint to its true nature capped the very tops of the walls: spikes of dirty glass.
Räum was lagging as they approached the gates. She had ridden him hard, and he had worked without complaint. He embraced suffering with a holy eagerness.
She tugged his leather reins and he came to a halt before the chained gates. There were neither wheelruts nor footprints. Around the entrance, the ground was overgrown with clumps of purple doomlilies. Idly, she wondered whether an aboveground entrance was strictly necessary. She supposed it had been useful, before the nature of the work changed.
There was no bell to ring, no sentry in evidence. She eased Räum down into a squat and hopped onto the crumbly damp earth.
The air was humid, fragrant with a heady perfume. Her boots wheezed as she approached the gates. Through the black bars she saw the courtyard, the doors and shuttered windows of Unit One.
Shrubs had pushed up between the paving slabs, with plump, bristled, tuber-like bodies and spreading carnelian blooms. Where was Noroc?
She gave the gate a shove. It did not budge – gave no indication it had ever budged. Two halves of an embossed plaque came together at the centre to form the legend: Sagesse et Sacrifice.
She let go, scabs of rust crumbling under her fingers. She unfastened her belt, with all its clattering boxes and holsters, tossed it through, then squeezed after it. For all the disadvantages of her perpetually juvenile body, it was at least easy to manoeuvre.
Unit One was a two-storey barn of black brick and dark timbers, flanked on the extreme edges of the courtyard by long huts: Units Two, Three and Four. She squinted at the shutters for signs of movement. The main doors opened and a guard stepped out in blue overalls and black boots with steel toecaps. He pointed a carbine at her head.
‘How did you get in?’ He spoke through the grille of a gas mask. His eyes were hidden behind smoked lenses.
Hagar liked the masks. They lent the staff a certain familiarity when she returned, even as she knew that all but the most senior researchers had rotated out since her last visit. No one lasted here long.
The masks were pure safety theatre. The mesh over the mouth kept out most large particulates, and the goggles offered limited protection, but given the nature of the work, they were largely irrelevant. Their main function, aside from offering the menials a sort of talismanic reassurance, was to separate staff from test subjects.
And perhaps, she thought, as she observed the inebriated sway in the guard’s stance, to separate the person from their actions. Uniforms were a kind of exemption.
‘Hagar Ingery,’ she said, deciding that provoking this individual was unwise. ‘I’m here to see Dr Noroc.’
The guard did not move.
‘How did you get in?’ he said, voice muffled.
‘The gate was locked. I squeezed through.’ She spread her arms, showcasing her slight physique. ‘Would you fetch the doctor, please?’
The leather mask wore its permanently blank, faintly quizzical expression. His carbine muzzle loomed broad and black.
‘Wait there.’ The guard turned.
He walked into the building and slammed the door. She heard him locking it behind him. She glanced back at Räum, who had tucked his short wings and dipped his head. He was watching her, waiting for permission to sleep.
She tickled a sweet acorn out of her belt pouch and tossed it underarm, through the bars of the gate. Her throw went wide. Räum traipsed over to where the treat had landed. He drilled into the leaves with his sharp straight beak, tilted his bald head back, and swallowed.
‘Ah, the good sister returns.’
She turned to find Dr Noroc descending the facility steps, smearing his palms down his overalls and wearing that wry crease of a smile that always sat low on his face. His circular spectacles caught light flashing through the high branches, turning to pieces of silver.
He took them off and wiped them on his overalls – a futile gesture in the sweltering autumnal humidity. His eyes were pink and his flesh was pallid; since she had last seen him, grey threads had appeared in his combed-flat hair. Still, he did not appear burdened, nor troubled to see her. Indeed, there was something childlike in the way he reached for her hand, held it in his palm and studied it, running his thumb over the backs of her knuckles, gently, inquisitively applying pressure to each before leading her to
wards the door.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘Let me show you what you’ve missed.’
The doctor’s assistant, a slight, wan girl with forearms wrapped in smokelorist bracelets, brought sweet tea into a cramped, windowless office on the first floor. Hagar noticed a tremor in the girl’s hands, the wooden beads chattering as she set two glasses and a jug down on the table. The jug had chunks of ice floating in it – produced, Hagar supposed, by the hugely expensive equipment necessary to keep the facility running.
The office stank of smoke and unwashed bodies. A glazed clay ashtray shaped like a riverboat stood on the table corner, heaped with crushed-out cigarettes from the old world. The softwood panels of the wall were scarred with dents and long gouges.
Dr Noroc sat with his fingers spliced, one ankle resting on the opposite knee. The arms of his chair had the stuffing pulled out and the fabric lay limp and ragged. He tapped his thumbs together, gazing into a corner, then looked up slyly.
‘You know, while you’re here, I’d like to take an impression of your teeth.’ He leaned over and began to pour himself a tea. ‘It’ll take barely a minute. We’ve a wonderful new medium for making casts.’
As she opened her mouth to speak, he tilted his head, peering inside. His eyes brightened.
Hagar smeared a palm over her lips. ‘They’re the same as they’ve always been.’
‘Exactly.’ He nodded vigorously, sitting back in his chair. ‘Exactly.’
Hagar did not quite understand what the doctor was insinuating. She poured herself a glass from the heavy, cool jug. She felt Dr Noroc watching her as he sipped his tea, examining, quantifying. The flesh on the back of her neck prickled.
‘Your letter implied you’ve made progress,’ she said, trying to move the conversation away from her physical appearance.
His smiled, and his eye ticked. ‘We’re always making progress, Hagar. Always. If an outcome cannot be replicated, this is information that refines our understanding. If a sample does not perform as we expect, it is not the sample which is at fault, but our expectations. Ours is a slow, slow practice – a fealty to clearsightedness, a constant realigning of our beliefs with reality.’
