Dangerous Offspring Part 8

I lay her on the ground and checked her. She had stopped breathing. Her eyes had receded into round hollows as if her skull was rising to the surface. s.h.i.+t. This isn't just a dead faint, it's respiratory failure. I tilted her head back, fingered her mouth open, pinched her nose and blew into her mouth. Her chest rose. I rocked back on my heels watching it fall gently, then blew again.

Her lips were soft, but her mouth was rank with beer, smoke and the metallic taste of death. I had to blow hard to overcome the resistance from the air inside her; my cheeks p.r.i.c.kled and my jaw started aching. Her hair brushed my cheek every time I put my head down, but it stank of stale cigarettes. She was only a child, just as when I saved her from the s.h.i.+pwreck. Her chest rose, I looked sideways down the length of her body, between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s falling back from the bodice collar as she exhaled.

She twitched, but it must have been nerves, because she definitely wasn't anywhere near consciousness. She gasped and began to breathe for herself again. Thank f.u.c.k. 'Well done, girl,' I said as I wrapped her up. 'Keep breathing.'

I had been working so hard keeping her alive that I hadn't been aware of my surroundings. Footsteps were running over the bridge. A boot ground on the path in front of me. I realised I'd seem like a mugger hunched over his victim, so I looked upinto the baby-blue eyes of Rawney Carron.

Two men I hadn't seen before stood either side of him. Movement at the edges of my vision told me three more had closed in behind me. They held naked broadswords, their hair was tied back into tarred pigtails. They couldn't be sailors, because sailors, doctors and armourers are professions safe from the draft. Ex-dock workers, then, and probably owlers, a very dedicated breed of nocturnal smuggler.

'Is this your fyrd squad?' I asked Rawney, calmly keeping anger out of my voice. 'Were you coming back to check on her or to collect your payment?'

Rawney spat, 'Comet, don't you just know everything?'

'Let me go, quickshe's dying!'

'We won't let you arrest us.'

'Look. I don't care if you're dealing. I won't report you. Even though you've done this.'

Rawney shook his head. They knew that to be caught in Morenzia would be their end. One by one they'd be carted to the scaffold, bound to a cart wheel and every bone in their body, ending with their skulls, systematically broken by blows from a mace. What they don't know is I never turn dealers in. The only time I confiscate cat from soldiers is when I'm in short supply myself.

I stood up, palming the flick knife from my boot. 'This is an emergency!' 'No!'

Exasperated, I said, 'I know two cartels that run "Ladygrace Fine" in from Brandoch. I know Emmer Rye fences everything coming into Galt. I don't know you, so you must be kids.'

'f.u.c.k you. You're one man against six. And you're not much of a man anyway!'

'Don't mess about.'

The legs of one soldier were starting to bend with fear. He never thought he'd see an Eszai so close in his lifetime, let alone face one with drawn sword. I could see Rawney trying to balance this against the fact I was obviously drunk and apparently unarmed. He jerked his head and said, 'Kill him.'

I whooshed my wings open, yelled, 'In San's name, with G.o.d's willget out of my way!'

The man on Rawney's left and the three behind me turned and ran.

Rawney snarled and drew his dagger. I flicked my knife. The big man next to him chopped with his sword but I was already inside his reach and up against him. I hugged my arm round him, pulled him close and drove my knife deep into his heart. Blood forced thickly up the runnel, like rising mercury.

Before it reached the handle he became a dead weight. I stepped back and let him crumple.

Rawney was running, putting ground between us as fast as he could. I sprang over the dead soldier. I pouncedcaught a fistful of Rawney's hair at the nape of his neck. He cried out. I dragged his head back and pushed my knife's point alongside his windpipe. He stumbled to his knees and I followed him down, my arm tense against his s.n.a.t.c.hing hands, careful not to sever the artery. When the knife was in deep enough I levered it to the horizontal and pulled it towards me. I cut neatly through his windpipe from behind.

Rawney worked his mouth but had no air to scream. He put his hands to his throat, ducked his chin. Blood sprang out like red lips. The ends of the tube snicked as they rubbed together. He drew his next breath through the cut and it whistled.

I booted him in the solar plexus and he doubled up. He turned his head away and the stretched skin parted, laying bare more of the cords in his neck, slick gleam of a vein and the rings of cartilage above and below his severed windpipe.

I hissed, 'You're to blame! You f.u.c.king killed Cyan! You can't be her boyfriend. You're sc.u.m. Like me. See? Eszai don't do this...' I crouched and leant onto him, weighting him down. With four quick slashes I drew a square around his fyrd tattoo. I sunk my fingernails under one edge, peeled the skin off, and I stuck it to the ground in front of his frantic eyes. 'But gangsters do. Never push cat on my turf! '

Rawney bubbled. His lungs were filling with blood. Huge amounts of bright pink aerated foam frothed between his fingers clutching his throat, and bearded him down to the waist.

I lifted Cyan and jumped up fluidly into a sprint down the towpath. Behind me I heard the strangled liquid gargle, gargle, gargle, of Rawney trying to breathe through his slit throat.

I ran. I ran along the slippery pavements, over the open drains. Above the roofs the moon gave a sick light through the clouds. I swear, anyone who ever bared his teeth at me has had them kicked in, and anyone who ever bared his neck to me has had his throat bitten out.

I sped south, away from the ca.n.a.l, pa.s.sing a sign pointing to the Church of the Emperor's Birthplace. I ran beside the tiny portion of the original town wall that still remainsbecause no one had yet built over it. I pa.s.sed through Watchersgate, the one surviving town gate, useless in its broken piece of north wall, with grooves where its portcullis had been. Life-sized statues with raised arms stood on top. They once held spears as if defending the town, but the spears were removed a hundred years ago after one fell off and, dropping twenty metres, transfixed both the Awian amba.s.sador and his horse.

The venerable astrolabe clock high in Watchersgate's tower was called 'The Waites'. Its iron rods started to grind as I pa.s.sed and it querulously struck two. The d.a.m.n thing was attached to a mechanical organ that played automatically at dawn to wake the town's workers. If they didn't pay their taxes it was left tinkling continually to remind them. It only had one hand, because back when Hacilith was a walled town, the hour was all you needed to know.

Cyan was still locked off deep in a tiny, animal part of her brain. I didn't know if she would ever come out, or if what crept back out would still be Cyan. I was terrified for herand for myselfhow the f.u.c.k was I going to explain this to Lightning?

'Cyan, scolopendium is powerful s.h.i.+t. n.o.body knows better than me on this subject, n.o.body! When I overdosed the Circle always bailed me out. I based my life round that cycle of "feel good, feel bad". But you can't shrug it off like I can. I've seen what it does to Zascai who don't respect it. I've seen too many die. Stupid girl! What did you do it for? You've got to be already screwed up if you're taking to drugs. Some people need it but what pain could you have?

'Oh, G.o.d, oh G.o.d. Don't worry, Cyan, I won't let you die. I'm the one who's good at becoming addicted, not you. I'm the one who leaves used needles around the place. I wake up junk sick. I punish myself for taking it by taking more. I'm the one who shoots enough to kill a destrier, not you. You'll be fine...Nearly there...keep breathing...please keep breathing...Oh, G.o.d. Why did you come here in the first place? The city is a cess pool, where the same s.h.i.+t goes round and round and round!'

I continued blethering in low and high Awian, then in Morenzian and its old and middle forms, Plainslands and its Ghallain and Ressond dialects, ancient pre-vowel-s.h.i.+ft Awian, Trisian and Scree. I could tell I was closing in on the university, because the number of brothels was increasing.

Five minutes and eleven languages later I reached the south end of Old Town, and the curlicued gates of Hacilith University, the oldest university in the world.

The university's gates were always open, just as the Castle's gates are always open. Its red oriflamme pennant flew from a pole beside them, representing the light of knowledge. I sped through the gates, ignoring the porters shouting behind me.

I flitted into the shadow of a residential hall and quietly along the path, leaning sideways to counteract Cyan's weight. Her stockinged feet jutted out in front from the end of the bedspread roll.

The university buildings were older as I neared its centre. Joss stick smoke caught at the back of my throat. Student poverty everywhere smells of cheap incense and burnt toast. Light diffused from oilcloth windows, each of which gave onto a different student's room. They were silentnot tranquilominously dead quiet so I feverishly envisioned every undergraduate inside had been murdered in a different way. But worse stillthey were cramming for exams. My imagination removed the outer wall, so each square room was suddenly visible in a cutaway like pigeonholes. Each room has a lamp, a book-laden table, a chair, a scholar sitting pen in hand. One lies on the bed, one sits on the floor. Each one works by himself, no one talks to another. Hundreds of individual student's lives are separated in tiny rooms in a huge building; they reminded me of polyps in a coral.

I clattered through a courtyard, past a marble statue of the founder, so ancient it wore a doublet and hose. An old professor stood in its shadow with two prost.i.tutes, male and female, on the plinth in front of him. They were stroking his bald head and I heard their silky voices, 'You're s.e.xy...you're so s.e.xy...' The don was shaking but I couldn't tell whether it was from fear or excitement. They didn't look up as I hurtled past.

Now in the very centre of the university I came to an unsurfaced track. I slowed my pace in awe, feeling as if I had walked back in time. Stony and yellow in the lamplight the track ran for a few hundred metres and stopped at the perimeter fence. It did not join nor bear any resemblance to any road in the modern Hacilith street plan. The city I knew had been built around it and the university's buildings now hemmed it in. It was sixteen hundred years olda road when Old Town was all of Hacilith, the only town in Morenzia, and the country was ruled by a king from a palace G.o.d-knows-where in Litanee. The wattle-and-daub houses along the track had decayed over a millennium ago, but the College of Surgeons survived.

I walked across and jumped the remains of a deep stone gutter. It once drained stinking effluent from the boilers that had reduced cadavers of paupers and rarities to skeletons for teaching aids. I hammered with my free hand at a nail-studded door. 'Rayne! Rayne! Help!'

Cyan's body convulsed and she vomited down my back. 'Oh, G.o.d! Well, better out than in, I suppose...Ella Rayne! Open up!'

Rayne's squat, square tower was once the College of Surgeons. Other faculties, refectories and dorms had gradually aggregated around its revered centre of learningthe university formed in much the same way as flowstone in a Lowespa.s.s cave. It was officially founded in the fifteenth century, only because it was no longer convenient for the faculties to ignore each other.

The tower's sixteen hundred years gave it a serious gravity. The newer buildings would have overshadowed it if the university had not built them at a respectful distance. Small bifora windows let meagre light into its upper level where a three-tiered lecture hall, now disused, once doubled as a dissecting room and operating theatre. Its roof was flat and its walls unmasoned stone, apart from the deep arch around the door decorated with several bands of zigzag carving. Ironically, given Rayne's origins, the university had presented the building to her, and when she was not at the Castle or the front she lived here among her cabinet of curiosities.

A shutter slid open and Rayne peered out through its iron grille. 'Comet!' She clanged the shutter and creaked the door open. 'Wha' are you doing here?'

'Thank f.u.c.k!' I pushed past her into the room, seeing stacks of chests and medicine boxes packed ready for removal.

Rayne said, 'You're supposed t' be a' th' dam. My carriage is on i's way. Wha'you're covered in blood!'

She grasped her brown skirts and hurried after me, as I loped through the museum and a doorway leading to her bedroom. Her pudgy, purplish feet bulged out between her sandal straps. She had been seventy-eight for fourteen hundred and five years, the oldest Eszai, and the oldest person in the world apart from the Emperor himself.

I strode to her box-bed, set into a deep niche in the wall hidden by a curtain. I laid Cyan down gently inside it, on the crochet blanket, and unwrapped her. Rayne saw a patient and immediately hastened to examine her with quick, expert movements, while she bombarded me with questions: 'She's no' bleeding. Whose blood is i' then? Wha's happened t' th' la.s.s?'

'She's Lightning's daughter,' I said, swaying.

Rayne stopped and looked up at me. 'Cyan Dei?'

'Cyan Peregrine.'

'Has she been mugged? No. There's no concussion. I's drugs, isn' i', Jant?'

'Cat.'

She knelt and turned Cyan on her side to prevent her swallowing her tongue. She observed the girl's violet-grey face, her clicking, shallow breathing. She pressed her dimpled fingers against Cyan's neck for her pulse. 'Obstruc'ed air pa.s.sages. Bradycardia. Cla.s.sic scolopendium poisoning. Wha' have you done t' her?'

'It's not my fault.'

'Yes, i' is. Of course i' is! How did you give her i'?'

'It wasn't me!'

'You're a born liar! You're tot'ring, yourself! Oh, Jant, I hoped you wouldn' take i' again. I hoped you'd learned your lesson. You can' be bored, you should be occupied wi' t' dam.'

'I haven't touched cat for five years!'

'You haven' made t' decade. You're no' truly cured.'

'Please,' I begged Rayne. 'Don't jump to conclusions.' The appeal to objectivity quietened her long enough for me to shoehorn a word in. 'Cyan did it to herself. I wasn't there. She bought it from a Zascai, c.o.c.ktailed with alcohol and G.o.d knows what else. A knackered old junkie showed her how to shoot it and for all I know they shared a needle. At any rate, it was back-flushed. I found her already under. I gave her the kiss of life and I'm still trying to get her taste out of my mouth! I killed the dealer' I tugged my s.h.i.+rt demonstratively, pulling the material, hard with clotting blood, from where it had stuck to my chest.

'You murdered a Zascai?'

'I never murdered a Zascai who wasn't the better for it.'

's.h.i.+'. If t' Emperor finds ou', he'll...'

'n.o.body is going to find anything out. Are they?'

'I'

'Are they, Rayne?'

'No.'

'He was a corporal and he'd turned his whole squad into a gang. They probably were, before they were recruited. f.u.c.k...Select Fyrd pressganging street sc.u.m. If I catch any of them again I'll pump them full of twenty poisons...Anyway, they didn't know that I'm twice as fast as a human. Well, nearly, 'cause I am the worse for drink but I'm not stoned.'

'No. You're replacing one drug with another.' Rayne had her back to me but I saw her expression reflected in the mirror by the bed. She was preoccupied with Cyan.

In Rayne's white bedroom, the eye slid along arrangements of objects as smoothly as a scale of music. Models used for teaching stood on the mantelpiece; large anatomical figures of a man and woman, accurate and to scale. There were painted clastic models of torsos with removable organs like a jigsaw, and a 'wound man' demonstrating various injuries.

Mice were carved seamlessly onto the furniture, scurrying up the chair legs and nibbling the table edge. But netting held the far wall together: ancient goat hair and wood laths showed through the flaking plaster. A bookcase dominated the cornerthe books she had writtenand it was buckling under the sheer weight of paper.

Cyan wants experience. She'll run headlong into ordeals like this and each one will chop a bit off her teenage enthusiasm until it's down to adult size. I looked at her slack face and burned with fury. 'Is this what you b.l.o.o.d.y want? Tell me, does it make your party go with a swing? People like Rawney don't want you. He wants to be like you! I know, I always did! Did you think it was funny? Well, it's really f.u.c.king hilarious. Look at me; I'm laughing!'

'Jant...' Rayne said.

'It's fine to be an outsider by choice, but if you get addicted you'll be an outsider by necessity! Then you'll be the loneliest posh minx in the world!'

'Calm down! OK, Jant, you're no' t' blame. I believe you.'

I pulled up a three-legged stool and sat down heavily, legs apart, wings splayed to the floor. I stripped my vomit-covered s.h.i.+rt off and scratched at the bald spots in the pits of my wings. 'Can you bring her round?'

'We may jus' have t' wai'.' Rayne rang a small hand bell. She asked her servant to go across to the medical faculty and bring atropine, and some clean clothes for me.

'I'll do it,' I offered. 'I'm faster.'

'She knows her way through t' complex. And I don' trus' you wi' th' key t' th' vaul's.' Rayne filled a gla.s.s of water, took a dropper from the drawer and began to drip water onto Cyan's lips. 'I used t' do this for you, when you had i' bad.'

I huffed. The last time I fell asleep under the influence, Wrenn and Tornado shaved my head and painted me blue. I woke up shackled to the prow railings of the Sute Ferry. I haven't taken cat since. You can face down death, by choosing the harder alternative. Not that I'm overly brave or more than usually lucky; I simply never believed death was an option so I never took it. 'You can't begrudge me a little escape now and again. I'm immortal, I need to lose track of time.'

'You risk losing too much.'

'Yeah, well, the only excitement in immortality is a possibility of loss.'

Rayne grunted vaguely.

I indicated the anatomical male carving. 'He's well-endowed, isn't he?'

She looked up. 'No, tha's t' average size.'

I was never any good at waiting. I paced through to the museum and stood blinking until my eyes adjusted. Rayne's museum, representing her workshop through the ages, was a vast collection so tightly packed together it overwhelmed. Candlelight reflected on the curved surfaces of gla.s.s jars, thousands of different sizes, and on the sliding door of a materia medica cabinet with tiny square drawers for herbs. What to look at first? Here and there I noticed an object because of its special rarity: a two-headed foetus floating in a jar; or its great size: a broken sea krait tooth; or its beauty: a baby vanished to nothing but a three-dimensional plexus of red and blue veins and arteries to show the dissector's skill; or its ghastliness: the preserved face of a child who died of smallpox. Some objects caught my eye because they were ill.u.s.trated in the etched plates of books I'd read.

I stepped back, trying to perceive an order to the collection. In the centre a grey stone fireplace housed a copper alembic with a spout, resting on a little earthenware furnace with a bellows handle projecting. It was for fraction-distilling aromatic oils. The lintel above it bore the deeply incised and gilded legend: 'Observe nature, your only teacher.'

I looked at the anatomical preparations: dense white shapes in jars, organs folded, wrinkled or bulging, or feathery and delicate like branching lungs. Alcohol preserved specimens like paperweights, of this or that organ in sagittal or cross section. Living with these, Rayne must see people as machines, nothing but arrangements of tissues and liquids, interesting puzzles to solve. She also knows that individuality is mostly skin-deep because, inside, people are all the same. Rayne and Frost, I reflected, had many traits in common.

Her reference collection was ordered by pathology. Some samples were hundreds of years oldthe only immortality available to Zascai by virtue of their interesting ailments. The sufferers usually readily agree to be preserved; it's all one to them whether their useless remains are placed in the ground or in a jar. The only exception are Awians, who prefer to be interred in tombs as florid as they can afford, as if they want to take up s.p.a.ce forever.

A gla.s.s case housed a collection of surgical instruments past and presentsteel bone saws and silver catheters, water baths for small dissections. Rayne kept somelike cylindrical saw-edged trepanning drills and equipment for cupping and blood lettingto remind the world of the doctors' disgusting practices to which she put an end when she joined the Circle.

A six-fingered hand, a flaky syphilitic skull. A hydrocephalic one five times normal size, and the skeleton of a man with four wings growing out of his chest.

Rayne uses me in demonstrations when I'm available. I pose at the front of the auditorium while she lectures the students on how weird I am, or on her great achievement in healing my Slake Cross injuries. One day my skeleton might stand here to be prodded by subsequent generations, my strong, gracile fingers adapted for climbing, my curve-boned wings articulated to stretch full length to their pointed phalanges.

Beside the door I'd come in by stood a large showcase of chipped stone arrowheads, which Rayne had arranged into an attractive pattern. She buys them for a few pence each from boys who pick them up on the Awndyn Downs. There was also a 'piece of iron that fell from the sky onto s.h.i.+vel'. On the other side of the door a skeleton inhabited a tall cabinet; its label said: 'Ancient Awian, from a cave in Brobuxen, Ressond'.

Over two thousand years the grey smell of old bone and neat alcohol had saturated the tower's very fabric. It was a haze of carbolic and formalin. Spicy volatile notes of orange and clove must be the essential oils Rayne had most recently prepared.

I examined the labelled majolica jars: oenomel, rodomel and hippocras; storax, orchis and sumac. Patent medicines crusted or deliquesced in slipware pots. Their names skipped off the tongue like a schoolyard rhyme: Coucal's Carminiative Embrocation; Popinjay Pills for Pale People; Ms Twite's Soothing Syrup; Cornstock Electuary; Emulsion Lung Tonic; World-Famed Blood Mixture; Dr Whinchat of Brandoch's Swamp-root Kidney Cure; Fruit Salt; Spa Mud; Abortion Lotion; Concentrated Essence of Cinnamon for Toothache; Confection of Cod Livers; Balsamic Elixir for Inflamed Nipples; Bezon & Bro. Best Beet Juice. A pot with a spout: Goosander Lewin's Improved Inhaler. Preparation of Bone Marrow: an Ideal Fat Food for Children and Invalids; Odiferous Maca.s.sar for Embellis.h.i.+ng the Feathers and Preventing Them Falling Out.

'I' doesn' work,' Rayne said.

'What, any of it?' I asked, but I turned and saw she was referring to the atropine, which her servant had brought, and she had mixed a miniscule amount with the water drops she was squeezing into Cyan's mouth. 'This should work. Why doesn' i'?' she said, annoyed. 'I' brings you round, on t' times I try i' wi' you. I daren' give her more than this. Do you know how much she took?'

'No...' I suddenly remembered I had the wrap in my pocket. I stopped moping around the museum and joined her in the bedroom. 'But I can a.s.say it. I picked up her scolopendium from the barge.'

'Of course, you would.'