No Present Like Time (41 page)

“I would if I could see a bloody thing. If there’s two Eszai there’ll be more, see? The whole Circle might be here.”

“Gio’s
not
dead! His orders are to stay put.”

“I gave up all that order crap last year. Come on, think what we can pick up on our way to the ship.”

Gio Ami emerged from the Senate House hefting a large rectangular shield which had a metal bracket to hold and a big padded hook for his upper arm to bear the weight while carrying it. He immediately sheltered behind a pillar, sword drawn. He seemed dazed and was hangover-pale; I could not decide whether the poison was working on him with reduced efficacy, or whether he was sick with tension. He bent nearly double to yell, “I’m here! I’m well. Look!”

“Shoot him,” I told Lightning.

Lightning dipped his head, trying to see Gio. I leaned out and shouted at the crowd, “Tornado’s coming. Mist is sailing half the Castle’s fleet into harbor! Thirty caravels full of fyrd and an Eszai on each ship!”

Gio’s adherents drew toward him but the woman beckoned people to join her. “Come on, we must reach the boats before Tornado arrives.” They surged toward the boulevard.

Gio tried again: “Come back! Listen, they’ll hang you as pirates! I’ll pay you an equal share of everything in this town! There are no more ships! Alone, you’ve no chance against Mist!”

I stuck my head out. “Tornado’s fyrd will arrest anyone who stays with Gio! He’ll be brought to justice!” I withdrew rapidly as an axe smashed into the window frame and fell onto the people beneath. I remarked to Lightning, “Gio can’t stop them leaving. I’ve managed to split them up.”

“Good.” He sighed.

A young swordsman gestured up at my window and babbled something vehemently. Gio shook his head but his friend continued to remonstrate. Gio pointed his rapier. “No, Tirrick!”

Tirrick looked at Gio, seeing a dirty and disheveled figure, and he must have realized at the same time as I did that Gio was not poisoned; it was his paranoia making him act as cautiously as if he was really feeling symptoms. I said, “I think Ata’s right—Gio is mad.”

Lightning said, “Maybe, but fortunately Wrenn is even madder.”

Tirrick glanced at the guards standing by the library entrance, and then ran past Gio into the Senate House.

“Now the fencing masters are arguing between themselves.”

Lightning bit his lips together. “I have always disliked Gio Ami because he professes to be a man of honor but he only lives by the codes that suit him—like his damn Ghallain traditions. He was married once, you know; if he still was then perhaps we would be spared this. But he feigned respect for the peninsula custom. They receive a candle as a gift on their wedding day. If they argue in the following years, they must light the candle and leave it burning for a time corresponding to the length of the argument. So, when it is burned down completely, the couple are automatically considered divorced. It happened to Gio. He called his wife a troublemaker, separated her from the Circle, and home she rode to find her friends aged and infirm, or dead and buried. Poor lady.”

I strained to see farther down the boulevard. White puffs of smoke like cotton bolls were rising from the base of the hill, where the harbor wall was hidden behind lines of houses. “I think Mist’s signaling. She must have figured that it’s all gone wrong. I bet she’s burning canoes…I just don’t know if the signal is for me or the
Petrel.
”

Lightning watched the stairwell sourly. He said, “Like amateurs we chose a stronger bow than we could manage and missed the mark. If I don’t survive, Jant, will you remember to take my message?”

I nodded, dumbstruck. I had never heard a fatalistic word from Lightning before.

T
he sky above the Senate was pale gray now; I was able to distinguish the features of the people below. A dark coat became burgundy red, drab showed as light blue, a boy’s hair was highlighted with henna. Dawn permeated a pallid, cloudless winter day.

I looked to the sea again and gave a yelp. The beacon islet was now dimly discernible, the surf breaking on its seaward shore. Heeling around it with four masts in full sail was a ship tiny with distance. She headed into harbor at a great rate of knots, her long pennants snaking. “The
Petrel
! See, the
Petrel
’s coming in!”

Lightning sighed with relief. A few minutes later, some lads in padded jackets hurtled up the boulevard, pushed eagerly to Gio. Gio listened, then waved them aside and called out, “This is it! We must meet the Castle’s flagship. I tell you, there’s only one caravel. There are two Eszai aboard and we’ll overwhelm them. Let me have the satisfaction of dealing with Wrenn—and your prize is the
Stormy Petrel
!”

The crowd yelled. Gio lifted his shield and hastened across the square, shouting his rabble into a formation akin to a fyrd division. The Ghallain swordsmen he arranged at the front, then the biggest, roughest men, the Hacilith boys and a couple of harridan girls at the rear.

But the swordsmen at the library door refused to move and glowered when Gio beckoned to them. His authority had gone but he pretended that it didn’t matter, gave up and returned to the thick column.

Lightning thought aloud: “I can improve the odds for Wrenn and Ata.” He instantly flexed his bow and loosed. A man at the head of the column reeled with a scream and fell, the arrow through his thigh. Lightning selected another shaft from the quiver at his hip, let fly and the astonished lad behind the first man yowled and squatted to the ground. I could barely see the arrow projecting from his leg above the knee. Lightning started counting backward from thirty, “Twenty-eight, twenty-seven…” as he lamed each of the men along the nearest edge of the formation, who were arranged like targets in a gallery.

Hearing their screams, the column flashed shields along its length. It surged away from us, bending and abandoning the wounded men, leaving around twenty sprawling and crawling on the mosaic. One man cried loudly as he snapped the fletchings off the arrow and pulled the shaft out through his thigh.

Gio, invisible behind his shield, led his file to the boulevard. They emptied very quickly out of the square, hurried between the slender stone walls and snaked around the hairpin bends. They left the battered mosaic empty; Alyss and the Insects were carious with missing tesserae. Litter was stacked up in the corners against the library and ash blew out of the cooling bonfire into the colonnade. Lightning cleanly and methodically shot down the rearmost rebels in the column, hitting the left thigh of each man. “You, four; and you, three…two…one. There. That’s all the arrows I dare to spend. Is this not disagreeable work?”

Some footsteps scuttled on the floor below us. Lightning called, “Join our gathering, by all means. But please introduce yourselves so I know who I’m shooting.”

A movement at the Senate House caught our attention. A swordsman began to back out, lugging one of Gio’s heavy coffers between himself and his friend. Another followed, and a fourth, until all the chests and ornate boxes containing Gio’s fortune were lined up on the mosaic.

Lightning asked, “What are those?” but I hardly heard him because I was seething with anger. Tirrick, the goateed little creep, was stealing the treasure and I could do nothing about it.

The senators were next to stumble out of the door at the foot of the pillars. A frightened youth in a pale tunic, then a dumpy old man were corralled by the swordsmen. Vendace came out last, reluctantly, being goaded by Tirrick behind him. The tall, wiry Trisian leaned his head at a strange angle because Tirrick held a dagger across his throat. Tirrick shoved him out onto the mosaic, and looked straight up at our window with a bold smile.

T
hey’re parading the senators where we can see them,” I said.

“Tirrick,” said Lightning. “I know the type. Privileged but strident and embittered, the youngest son of a minor noble.” He licked his fingers and held them out of the window to judge the breeze. Then his fingertips rasped over the arrow fletchings and settled on the string. Tirrick angled his dagger across Vendace’s scrawny neck and called, “We’ll kill one of these for every shot you loose!”

Vendace rolled his eyes and stamped his foot. His brown arms were rigid by his sides.

I said, “The boxes are full of money. I think the swordsmen will take it to the ship, with the senators as hostages to shield themselves. It’s our chance to escape. Oh fuck, no it isn’t…”

Around twenty swordsmen ran out of the colonnade, carrying lamps and oil jugs with spouts. Lightning drew on them but saw Tirrick’s blade bite against Vendace’s skin, and didn’t loose. The guards around the library door let them speed through. Crashes came up from below, smashing pottery, rustling and tearing.

A heavy thump shook the floor as the men pulled a bookshelf over. I heard them kicking the scrolls into heaps. “They’re going to burn the library!” I darted to the stairs and called down, “Stop! In the name of San and the will of god. How
dare
you?”

A voice shrugged, “Come out and be executed or stay there and char.”

But these are books—all the books of Tris. “You
must
not,” I yelled desperately.

A blue-gray twist rose from the stairwell like cigarette smoke. Within seconds it widened to fill the whole well. From the window I saw the swordsmen pouring out onto the mosaic, shoving the guards back in their haste to escape. “The fire’s caught! Ready yourselves, they have to surrender. It’s going up!”

Smoke billowed past me in a thick stream and drifted along the ceiling. Lightning released the tension on his bowstring. “We have to break out. There are a dozen fencing masters. We can deal with them, but the senators will die.”

“The books!” I wailed. “I can’t leave—”

“Don’t be stupid!”

“Maybe there’s another way down.” Gray wreaths shrouded the rafters completely and were descending extremely quickly to fill the room. I fumbled through a stack of leather-bound books on the table and slipped them into my coat pockets. I picked up the lantern. “Wait here. I’ll check the far end.”

Lightning began coughing loudly. I called, “Stoop low. Slouch down under it.” I had been in a burning building before and, as far as I knew, he had not. But my lungs hurt as I sucked smoke and I started choking more than him.

I had to save the books, as many as I could carry. I strode down the aisle snatching them from the shelves. I stuffed one in my waistband, another in my belt. I had no time to translate the titles; I couldn’t see with the smoke stinging my eyes. I didn’t know what I was snatching. I piled them frantically in the crook of my left arm, discarded a heavy tome, selected two more haphazardly. I thought, I’m rescuing a handful of volumes at random to represent the total knowledge of an entire culture. Which were most worthwhile? Were these engineering, cookery or poetry? Or even bloody fiction? I had no way of judging. I spat out the cloying smoke and the stack buckled in my arms. I reached the end of the library—which was just a blank wall—and I dropped all the books with a series of thuds.

Recognizable but horribly out of place, gray mottled, fibrous drapes strung between the last two bookcases: Insect paper. They looked folded but were as hard as concrete. They curved up from the shelves and blurred into the smoke creeping down from the beams.

Two long, brown forelegs emerged from the nest. The Insect’s black spiny foot clicked down onto the floor between my boots, and its three claws articulated shut. I backed into the opposite bay.

The Insect ducked its triangular head and slipped out from between the bookcases. Its eyes’ tessellations reflected the lamp-lit swirling smoke. It brushed a fringe on its front right leg over them. It must have pulled out Wrenn’s rapier, because the hole through its thorax was now a deep concavity filled with smooth new shell. It had sloughed its skin and was even bigger than I remembered. The high joints of its back legs loomed out of the smoke.

Two club-shaped black palps shuffled like a pair of hands rubbing together. They retracted and the scissor jaws opened and shut. It lifted a foreleg and cleaned its single crooked antenna through filaments inside its knee.

Lightning flexed his bow and spoke with his lips to the string, “Step aside.” Through the smoke he was just a silhouette blurred by the tears streaming from my eyes. I pressed my coat cuff to my nose and mouth. In another thirty seconds the room would be full and I could hear crackling from below.

“Wait!” The Insect stood still, close enough for me to see the scars and impressions I had made with my axe. A row of black spines four-wide supported the upper surface of its striped abdomen. The pale underside pulsed as it curled its abdomen under itself, pumping air through its spiracles which were wide open.

“Wait. It doesn’t like the smoke.”

Its antenna flicked forward, sensing for the clean air. It jolted into an involuntary crouch. “It’s going to run—let it pass!”

The Insect leapt. It hurtled past Lightning, stretched its full length and reached over the handrail, down into the stairwell. Its back sword-shaped femurs kicked and claws scrabbled on the blistering varnish, then it disappeared into the gusting smoke. I ran after it instantly; Lightning seemed bewildered so I grasped his arm and urged him to the steps.

We took deep breaths and plunged down. I patted my hair—it felt so hot I thought it was alight. Lightning held his hand over his mouth and the tip of his bow rattled off the ceiling. The steep steps were opaque with smoke. Perspiration and tears trickled down my face.

We stumbled to the ground floor, onto ten centimeters of fallen books. They slid over each other, making the floor slippery. I led Lightning around the tall shapes of leaning shelves. We crushed scorching scrolls underfoot with a sound like old Insect shell. Even now I was torn with the desire to rake them up. The fire’s crackling built into a steady sibilance and its raw orange light leapt behind the smoke, illuminating the surfaces of the billowing wreaths.

Lines of yellow flame spread between the parquet blocks. By the windows, flames began to lengthen and bend as air flow sucked them out of the shutters.

“Can’t breathe,” I said weakly. “Where’s…the fucking door?” The unbearable heat singed my feathers, my reddened skin stung. The pages of open books on the floor around us were curling and turning brown spontaneously. I saw one burst into flame.

I pointed to the rectangle of pale morning light; we rushed through without readying our weapons. Getting out of the smoke was all that mattered.

The men who had been guarding the door were spilt on the mosaic in a fan of visceral blood. We crossed the threshold with smoke pouring out above us. One had died quickly, eyes open, from a horrible gash that opened his belly to the sternum. Another crumpled in a red pool so thick the Insect must have severed an artery, though I couldn’t see the wound. The arm of a third man lay beside a rapier some way off.

The Insect did not pause to clean its mandibles. It was confused by the scents and invigorated by the fresh air. Its six feet left prints, its knee joints bunched and separated as it dashed toward the senators and swordsmen. Their white clothes reflected in its directionless eyes. Their mouths were round in astonishment. Every one of the swordsmen bolted, including Tirrick, leaving the senators in the Insect’s path.

Lightning leaned into his bow and bent it fully with the strength of his shoulders. The broadhead point drew back to the grip. Across the square the Insect reared up before Vendace. Lightning straightened his fingers, released the string with a crack and the arrow whistled past me.

The Insect’s foreclaws lashed the air in front of Vendace, then it fell sideways. It curled on its right side, the arched plates of its abdomen sliding over each other as it coiled and throbbed. A spasm went through it that flexed all its joints and pulled its limbs in, like the legs of a dead crab. They steepled angularly together, its feet drawn up to the six semi-translucent ball joints under its thorax. By the sunken ring at the base of its feeler, Lightning’s arrow shaft made a second antenna. The shell gaped around it, an open crack showing an organ of dark brown gel deep inside.

The senators gazed at it, and at the library. All the erudition of Tris was rising with the fire. I faced the intolerable furnace as if it was a punishment and spread my wings to accept and be consumed by it. Rolls of heat belched out, shelves split with creaks and thuds. Tremendous flames raged through the library I respected so much; I felt sick in the pit of my stomach.

“Shira!” Lightning called. “Come here, why are you standing so close? It’s falling apart!”

“No. The books are burning…What has Gio
done
?”

“Get a grip! Speak to the senators.”

I was numbly aware of Lightning ushering the Trisian leaders to the boulevard. Behind us, the coffers lay forgotten. I thought, if I live through this I’ll claim them. The Trisians would disregard the treasure as dross, so I relinquished it for the time being, avoided the dead Insect and stepped over three or four agonized rebels with arrows in their thighs, and ran to catch up with them. They were hurrying down the path with appalled backward glances.

Vendace was holding one of the senators tightly, a young lady. She was kicking and biting, frenziedly struggling and pulling in the direction of the library. I ran to help but Vendace snapped at me, “She’s Danio’s successor. Don’t let her go; she’ll run in to the fire. Every time you come here, you put an end to our librarians!”

We tried to calm the hysterical girl. I explained to Lightning, who said candidly, “I know how she feels. People pass away, there are always more, but the books are irreplaceable. They’re the immortal part of Zascai—how many lifetimes are burning to cinders in there?”

I said to Vendace, “You saw how Gio’s men treated you. They’re causing this catastrophe, not us. We’ll deliver you from them before they destroy the rest of town. Lightning shot the Insect dead. We were sent to protect you from it and from Gio; he’s a wanted criminal in the Fourlands.”

Vendace, mystified, turned his pinched, resilient face from myself to the Archer. The Senate had prized Gio’s rhetoric so highly that they found it hard to trust our actions. As I walked quickly they pressed close, trying to hear over the sound of the blaze. With an earsplitting screech and crash, the library roof caved in at its midpoint. Timbers dangled like fingers from both sides. Glowing tiles slid into the fissure, adding to the noise; the rumble grew to a roar. Sparks whirled up and fell on the roof of the Senate House. It was hypnotic.

Lightning said, “Jant, tell them that I’ll see them to a safe place, then I’ll clear looters from the avenue as far as the rear of Gio’s column.”

I asked, “Are you well enough?”

“I believe so.”

“Then I’ll fly over Mist and Serein, and join you on the main road.”

An elderly senator with a rookery voice coughed. “
What
is going on? Where’s Gio?”

I changed language and said, “He’s causing the mayhem—I’m going to find out. Lightning will help you, if you please lead him to a place of refuge. I’m sorry, I am really sorry.”

Vendace pointed a shaking finger at the Amarot. Flames were now lapping on the Senate House roof. Driven to incandescence by the wind, the fire spread to the apartments on its upper story and began to engulf them. “No amount of apologizing will ever repair that sacrilege!”

When we reached the base of the crag, Vendace directed Lightning toward a road called First Street. I left them, and as soon as I carved into the air I found myself battling against the wind being sucked into the inferno. It whipped around the crag in one-hundred-kilometer-per-hour gusts, causing a swirling column of vertical flame to rise eighty meters above the devastated library.

S
moke layered and drifted out at the height of the Amarot. It completely blocked the sunrise and shadowed the town. Burning embers were falling into the gardens of the villas below. The whitewashed walls looked gray and the boulevard was littered with spoil and broken furniture dragged out by the rebels; here and there lay the bodies of the Trisians who had tried to stop them.

Sleepy residents stumbled into the street, looking up at the crag and trying to understand. At the edge of town, people panicked and began moving toward the harbor. I saw Capharnai of all ages responding to a call to make a bucket chain. About two hundred people filled pails, pans and bowls from cisterns and carried them up the winding road to the Amarot, but the air was unbreathable; the rising heat and wind stopped them before they reached the mosaic. A few of the lamed rebels who were still lying among the boxes of money, writhed as they inhaled smoke. Their clothes and hair caught fire spontaneously.

I soared higher, because I was alarming the Capharnai and they were wasting their time watching me. I lost sight of the peach-colored sky beyond the edges of the smoke pall. Flocks of pigeons sped around the tiny rooftops, grouping to roost, confused by the eerie eclipse light. Dawn would not end; the light was dim, as if it was still seven
A.M
.

The looters were fanning out through the top of town, kicking in doors and pulling shutters off their hinges, leaving a wake of debris, barking dogs and half-eaten food.

Pages and whole blackened pamphlets, scroll fragments burned thin, jostled up in the smoke then fell on the town as hot ash. The residue of hundreds of thousands of books was raining over Capharnaum. The gloaming light and the roar of the library added to the rebels’ edginess. It was much louder than the sound of the wind on my wings.