No Present Like Time (11 page)

Tarragon called to a whole congregation of Tine kneeling on the shore, “Hey, see my passenger? He runs marathons! He can sprint as fast as a car!”

The Tine paused and stared. They gestured to each other, howled and ran directly at us. “Hurry!” I yelled. “Hurry up!”

Tarragon stopped the car. “Will yourself home.”

Through rising panic I forced myself to stay calm and yearned, forced, demanded myself back to my body. Tarragon tapped a finger on her forehead and repeated the dictum, “Shift by meditation. Not sensation!”

The Tine were almost upon us.

The dark shore twitched in and out of focus, then a wave of distortion rolled through it. Tarragon’s face and the gold vehicle belched into disturbing shapes. They dissolved to gray. To black.

My stomach creased with fear; I closed my eyes. And when I opened them again, slowly and stickily, I was back in my cabin, lying on the floor.

I
woke with the green taste of bile in my mouth, curled up so tightly I ached. Shit, I almost got eviscerated. I clenched my fists. Tarragon almost had me killed.

I rolled onto my back and contemplated the too-close ceiling. A gentle sighing must be the wind on the mainsail, and that constant slap and hiss will be the prow cutting small waves. There were no other sounds, so it was probably nighttime. These deductions left me feeling rather proud but I sensed that the cabin had become a little bit narrower. It had changed shape—it was also longer. There was not enough room to open even the tips of my wings. What the fuck was going on?

I lit a candle and held it up. The walls were painted blue, not black, the portholes were square with white borders. It was a different cabin. Could I have Shifted back to the wrong place? Panicking, I ran my fingernails between the planks, brushed my hand along the shelves: nothing. Where were my wraps? Where were all my fucking wraps? I saw my rucksack, seized it and rummaged through it. The fat envelope containing scolopendium had gone. “Damn you, Ata!” I shouted. “Damn you, damn you, damn you!”

There was a knock on the cabin door. “Go away!” I yelled.

I rubbed the hem of my coat and felt nine hard paper squares still sewn in. Thank god, they had missed some!

Cold air gusted into the cabin as a stocky figure pushed the door open with his shoulder. I saw Serein’s silhouette, a round head with spiky hair. Behind him, dull blue inky dawn clouds packed the vast sky. He sat in the doorway, legs out onto the half deck, huddling in his greatcoat. “Comet,” he said. “You weren’t well.”

“Is that understatement a new type of sarcasm you’re experimenting with?”

“For god’s sake, Comet. You look like you’ve been dragged through a battlefield backward. Mind you, I’ve been seasick. The sailors started laying bets on the number of times I would puke over the taffrail. Mist told me you don’t get seasick. She explained about scolopendium.”

“I see.” I took a swig of water from my leather bottle. “I suspect that I am on the
Melowne
?”

The Swordsman nodded. “We rowed you across from
Petrel.
You were out cold.”

“What! A rowing boat? So close to the waves? What if it had capsized?” Drowning while unconscious was too awful to contemplate.

“Ata said you could have this berth because you filled the other one up with drugs. Drugs aren’t an answer, Jant. What are you doing that for when you’re an Eszai?”

“What happened to my wraps and the envelope?” I said threateningly.

“We threw them overboard.”

“Shit.”

The Swordsman sounded both disgusted and surprised that an Eszai would knowingly use cat. “How much did you take?”

“As much as I could.” I wriggled out of the constrictive cabin and pulled myself up, water bottle in hand. I scraped a match, lit one of the cigarettes I had stolen from Cinna and sipped at it. I blew the smoke out of my nose and coughed. I was never going to be any bloody good at smoking. It doesn’t agree with Rhydanne as they are accustomed to thin air. I only do it rarely, when I’m under extreme duress, because if I ever got hooked it would destroy my ability to fly.

Wrenn joined me at the rail, standing upwind of the smoke. “Are you all right? Apart from being dark and moody, I mean.”

I said, “I loathe this bloody floating coffin of a boat.”

“It’s a ship.”

“
She’s
a ship. Apparently it’s female. I hope all her masts don’t break off when they fuck in the shallows.”

The Swordsman fell quiet, looking at the midnight-blue water. The waves swept up into points, lapping and sidestepping. Their ridges looked like cirques of the Darkling Mountains. Apart from a sailor manning the wheel and a watchman at the prow, all was quiet. Only knavish sailors, rakish swordsmen and drug-addled Rhydanne are about at this hour.

“The
Stormy Petrel
’s close by,” he said, pointing forward at two faint lights, one red, one white, which rose and fell gently. The dawn clouds were gradually becoming paler, but the
Petrel
’s sails and hull were blurred, a drifting perse-gray shape. The ships creaked continually, and when they weren’t creaking they groaned and flapped and sighed. They were like animals talking to each other.

“Hm. I’m surprised Lightning and Mist can bear being on the same boat.”

“Can you see who’s at the helm?”

I glanced at him. “Rhydanne can’t see in the dark, Wrenn; that’s just a story. In fact I have crap night vision. Rhydanne eyes reflect to cut out snow glare so I don’t get blinded. It’s not much of an advantage at sea level…”

“Really?”

“Yeah. While I’m putting to rest myths about Rhydanne, you should know that they don’t turn into lynxes on their birthdays. They can’t survive being frozen solid and thawed out again. And they’re not cannibals, whatever Carniss may say.” I lit another cigarette with the stub of the first. “As for the bit about shitting in little pebbles like goats do, I reserve comment.”

“I didn’t mean to be nosy. I’m sorry.”

“You should be. I stay smooth-skinned, mind. It would take me weeks to grow as much stubble as you.”

Wrenn rubbed his chin. I turned back to the cabin thinking that I needed more time to recover. From behind me Wrenn said, “What’s it like up there? In Darkling, I mean. Is it true Rhydanne don’t talk to each other at all?”

Much as I wanted a few hours alone, that made me smile. I said slowly, “Oh, they say all they need to. But that’s not much compared with flatlanders, for sure. Even Scree village was only built by accident—it started out as a cairn. There was a tradition that every traveler puts a stone on the pile when he goes past. So it grew, very gradually, into a pueblo with rooms and an inn. Rhydanne come to the village every winter, when any person can occupy any room. They all get snowed in and drink themselves legless. In summer, they leave the rooms empty. The conditions make Rhydanne very self-reliant; they can’t act in large groups. When an avalanche destroyed my shieling I couldn’t find anyone to help me…The cornices were hanging waiting for the slightest shock. Eilean was crushed by the barrage and the whole valley changed shape.”

I hung on to a rowan tree’s upturned roots as the mountainside liquefied and tabular ice thundered down. The air filled with powder snow. The next day saw me scrabbling at the granite debris until my fingers split, trying to dig her out.

I smirked. “She’s still up there under tons of rock, flat as a waffle.”

“That’s terrible. I’m so sorry.”

I huffed and tapped ash off the cigarette. “I hated them. I grew up too slowly for Rhydanne and in the end I’d no love of their way of life. But Darkling paled into insignificance when I went to Hacilith and fell in with the Wheel. They were named from their habit of nailing enemies to the waterwheels of the city. The weird thing was that I was happy as a chemist’s apprentice and I didn’t need a gang’s protection until I joined them. The longer you live, the more scars you gather, see?” I traced my fingertip over the deep scarification on my right shoulder, a circle with six spokes, the initiation to the gang.

“Shit, Jant. That’s terrible…”

Felicitia pulled apart the hilt and suede sheath of a hunting knife until its long steel emerged. It was unbelievably sharp: Felicitia had a lot of time to spare. His hands shook and he fumbled as he traced the lines drawn on with lipstick. My washed-out feeling of suspense tipped into agony. Unlike tattoos it was not superficial; it was deep. It could not be dealt with lightly. I swear the first cut went straight to the bone. My hands were bound behind me to a cast-iron chair in a beer garden. I struggled, and when I started screaming they gagged me.

I stumbled home, leaving a trail of blood that rats scented, scurrying out from refuse piled on street corners. I dressed the wound myself, though my fingers slipped into and through the lacerated flesh.

“It didn’t hurt as much as Slake in ’twenty-five though,” I said, pushing my T-shirt up so he could see the remains of an Insect bite, a sixty-stitch-long scar that curved into the left side of my belly, ending in a puckered mark where its mandible hit my lowest rib. “I held my guts in with one arm. I crawled a meter, collapsed and started to drown in the mud.”

“God. Slake Cross Battle. I heard stories…”

“Well, I took all the cavalry but none of them had mounts. Every man was sliced to bits. That’s why we introduced testing the ground with poles for Insect tunnels before we camp. The Doctor knew I was still living but god knows how she found me because she said I was nearly buried. She pushed all my innards back in and stacked my stretcher on the cart. Because the Circle holds us, we can gain consciousness with life-threatening wounds and no desire to witness them. That got me back on scolopendium again but it also won Tern’s attention. I was in hospital for a year; I kept turning up the drip’s dial and passing out until Rayne threatened to take me off painkillers. While convalescing I began to panic that I had lost the ability to fly. I tried to glide out of the hospital window and ripped all my stitches…Zascai were queuing up to Challenge me but, true to the rules, San held them off until I had recovered. Lucky you, Wrenn; Insect battles to look forward to.”

“I get it. You’re scarred by living an adventurous life. The same will happen to me…You’re brave, Jant.”

I am? “Well, not so brave as to duel with Gio,” I said, and we stood for a while in an uncertain quiet. I found talking like this reassuring—I had almost forgotten about the Aureate.

I lit a third cigarette but simply held it. I wondered how long it would take for me to fill the entire sky with smoke. When immortals think those things we are not being entirely whimsical. “Couldn’t you sleep?” I asked. I was fully aware that Wrenn had been left here to keep an eye on me.

“No. I keep thinking about this island. Then I got too excited and had to come up here to cool down. I can’t wait to see Tris.”

“Personally I think it’s Mist’s plan to take all her enemies on one ship and scuttle it. I warn you, she’s very dangerous.”

“But gorgeous.”

I glanced at him. “So Ata has her hooks in you already? She’s certainly beautiful; it’s all the more reason to be wary. Even Lightning was taken in by her deceit, her callous human inventiveness and her beauty. She probably put you here on
Melowne
so he can’t advise you, or to preserve her mystique. She plans centuries ahead; you haven’t been alive long enough to think on our timescale.”

I ground the cigarette into a flurry of sparks on the rail and flicked it into the sea. “Do you want to explore this boat?”

“Oh, yes!”

I
raised the grating and trotted down the open-plank steps, looking around. Wrenn followed with his lantern. The
Melowne
’s hundred sailors were asleep. They mumbled and stirred in white canvas hammocks that hung three deep on the left and right of the deck, leaving a clear walkway down the center. Some of the Plainslanders were snoring. Awians sleep on their fronts or their sides so they hardly ever snore. The deck stank of sweat, damp linen and the brown-sugar smell of cheap beet rum; a bowl full of laurel leaves intended as air freshener just added its own scent to the reek. Five porthole shutters on each wall were bolted shut.

“Don’t disturb them,” I whispered. “Let’s go down a level.” I tried to move, and couldn’t. Wrenn was standing on my feathers, bending the quills over the edge of the steps.

“Oops, sorry.” He shuffled back. I put a finger to my lips and descended through the second hatchway. This level was pitch dark but the air smelled better, heavy with camphorwood, pine sap, oak sawdust and quality leather. I investigated some kegs stenciled “Grass Isle,” and Wrenn reclined on a pile of sacks of dried beans and rice, swinging his lantern about. The deck was packed floor to ceiling with well-stowed sacks and oil flasks, as far as the light could reach. “We’re under the waterline here,” he said.

“Don’t.” I shuddered, thinking how the sea’s pressure might cave in the hull, squashing it like an eggshell.

“Mist says this is the orlop deck, for stores and dunnage. The hold’s below us; that’s the lowest level.”

“What the fuck is dunnage?”

Wrenn shrugged. I levered a lid plank off the nearest cask. “Wine, Wrenn, look at all this wine! Half of Lightning’s cellar must be in here.”

He picked up a chunk of cheese covered in wax paper. “Breakfast!”

“This one’s rum.” I dipped a rationing cup in another barrel.

“I’ve found salted meat, oranges, a barrel of sauerkraut. What’s ‘portable soup’?”

We forced our way between the racks. I climbed on top of the hogsheads and walked along, hunched over, brushing the ceiling, but the deck was so crammed we couldn’t go more than a few meters. Wrenn sat back on the ladder, I leaned on the wooden pump pipe next to it, and we nibbled handfuls of booty—me with chocolate and rum; Wrenn with dried fruit, bread and water.

“There’s another grid,” I said. “Let’s go down again.”

“It’s locked, see?” Wrenn crouched and turned over a padlock.

“I should be able to crack that,” I said, wanting to impress the Swordsman, although I was not sure why. I put a hand to the small of my back, selected one of the smallest secondaries, gripped it and pulled. Flight feathers are very strongly attached so I had to give it a hard wrench to pull it out, teeth gritted because it hurt. It dragged the flesh, just like pulling a fistful of hair. It came out leaving a hollow funnel of skin from which another pinfeather would grow in a couple of months.

The quill was old and did not bleed. I flattened its translucent-cream point, and jiggled it about in the lock, turning clockwise and pressing hard to poke the tumblers around. I remarked, “People say I had a misspent youth, but no other Messenger has so many useful talents to place at the Emperor’s service.”