No Present Like Time (44 page)

Wrenn struck out with his fists at the soldiers trying to calm him. He fainted, so they picked him up and I led them to the
Stormy Petrel.

I
picked up a sheaf of arrows and a bottle of water, and my horn that I sound to give commands on the battlefield. I flew back to Fifth Street and landed near Lightning. He looked exhausted but grateful as I sprinted past, called, “Gio’s dead!” dumped the ammunition and bottle while still running, took off.

I swept low over the rebels and shouted, “Gio has fallen; give yourselves up!”

The whole front of the column who had seen the duel, and several more, especially the girls, surrendered to the Awndyn Fyrd. The rear dissolved, rebels becoming looters or fugitives. Many became disoriented and I saw them running farther into the meshed streets. But the leaderless center of the column and the men who had killed Mist knew they were doomed. A new sort of aggression flared among them, affected by desperation, the strangeness of Capharnaum and the rum they had drunk.

There was a tangible atmosphere of possibility and menace. Instantly the five hundred rebels in the main street acted as if they were a single being, powerful, euphoric with it, and mad. I sensed their vigor and my pulse raced. Anything could happen; everything was happening—the riot obeyed no laws at all. The youths were at home with it; it was their atmosphere. They ran in large ragged groups. They all thought: why not take the wealth that surrounds us, in an abundance we’ve never been allowed before? The strength of individuals was nothing compared with the violence of the crowd—they tore the shopfronts apart. They were bent on spending everything in the town in one hysterical surge. They brought out bakers’ trolleys and smashed them into caryatid statues. They infected each other to screaming pitch rejoicing at their own bodies’ force, their freedom and their sudden riches. No future prospects Capharnaum could offer them were as good as the fun they could have trashing it. From the air I saw a mass of people sweeping away from the boulevard. They spiraled around ransacked shops like the eye of a storm.

T
he burning crag’s jumping unnatural light lit the quay. Gio’s men were now just pirates, plundering the surrounding houses. They dragged out tables, threw lamps into sheets and bundled them up. Fights broke out between them: men stabbed and punched each other over any precious-looking metal. They broke furniture and hefted the pieces as clubs.

Bricks were hurled against the houses’ upper windows, and when a Capharnai man leaned out and shouted, they threw bricks at his face. The pirates gathered cutlery and amphorae but discarded them when gold gleamed. So much gold, it was like the Castle’s treasury. They hastily lashed together enormous packs of objects with their belts. When each had plundered all he could carry, he set off to the
Pavonine
leaving wailing and raging Capharnai families behind them.

Some Capharnai defended themselves. A group of fishermen threw a huge weighted net over thieves escaping from a house. As they struggled under it, the fishermen stabbed them with marlin-spikes and tridents that sloughed dried white scales.

A group of Trisian lads came out of one house carrying sacks to loot food, kicking the door of a restaurant. Thick olive-oil smoke ribboned from its cellar grating. Little fires had been kindled at irregular intervals on the boulevard. The rioters set alight waste bins and chairs; I could see no reason why, apart from the lust to cause as much havoc as possible. I yelled, “Stop destroying this wonderful town!” The ones that heard me started laughing.

T
here was no hope of catching the rioters without abandoning our own wounded men. I ordered the fyrd to pull back to the
Petrel.
At the foot of the gangplank the Awndyn unit had formed a barricade. They leveled pikes above a shield wall. Some fyrd regrouped there, but in equal numbers those who spied the gold were unlinking their shields and deserting to join the looters. Archers on the
Petrel
’s fore-and rear-castles sent sporadic volleys down at the pirates crossing the quay, who had no choice but to run through the hail of arrows to the
Pavonine.

Thieves poured up the
Pavonine
’s gangways carrying their prizes or dragging their wounded friends. I flew over the
Stramash
and
Cuculine,
puzzled; their decks were on the same level as the water. They had been scuttled; they sat empty and perfectly upright, their keels on the sea bed. Their main decks were swamped with lapping waves, from which their castles projected like four square islands.

The crews of all three ships were at work unfurling and setting the
Pavonine
’s sails. Others, yelling, waved their friends aboard. Poleaxes and spears looked like metal hackles standing up on the ship’s back.

I glided above
Pavonine
’s deck and saw Tirrick, and Cinna. Tirrick had Cinna Bawtere at rapier point, forcing him to steer the ship. Cinna clung to the wheel, shaking visibly, his porcine face set in a grimace. Tirrick, however, smiled rapaciously. He shouted, “Climb aboard! We’ll sink the
Petrel,
then pack provisions and sail for Awndyn! I’ll be the next Serein and fatty will be the next Mist!”

Cinna glanced up at me and scowled. He had a length of chain around his middle, worn by fearful sailors so if they fell overboard their suffering would have a quick end.

I shouted, “Cinna, don’t you dare leave!”

He told me to go and do something unspeakable with a goat.

Sailors on the harbor cast
Pavonine
’s mooring ropes loose and swarmed up. The ship grated along the quayside with looters still chucking bags onto the deck and catching lines to haul themselves up.

Those left behind turned their attention to the
Petrel.
Small groups of rebels gathered out of range on the villa verandas; they began to coalesce, ready to attack the
Petrel
’s gangway in a desperate bid to hijack her. I thought of Rayne; I would not let anyone hurt the Doctor. She was my adviser, Lightning’s confidante and devoted friend. Lightning would be even more shattered than he already is, if anything happened to Rayne.

I have seen Mist die and Serein badly wounded. I have left Lightning faltering his way through the outskirts of town. The only books to escape the firestorm are in my pocket. I don’t know how many Trisians have succumbed but their houses, their shops and the harbor are despoiled. Cinna was sailing off with their belongings, surrounded by pirates and protected by Tirrick. The remnants of Gio’s men were completely beyond control. Our forces were disheartened and either retreating or deserting.

I needed everyone in the riot to listen to me, to stop and look up so I could shatter the hysteria that gripped them. I must attract their attention with a gesture more powerful than Gio’s last stand. But how? None of my battlefield horn signals mean anything now. I couldn’t drop rocks accurately onto
Pavonine
from above the archers’ range.

I shouted, swooped acrobatically and landed on the main street, but although the rebels heard me they paid no attention and simply ran away. What was I to do—pursue them one by one? Infuriated by our failure, realizing that we were stranded, I felt my scolopendium clock running down. A cold shiver washed over me; the long muscles twitched in my arms. Oh god, not
now.
If Tarragon surfaced she could soon put an end to the
Pavonine,
but that wouldn’t stop the fighting on land that second by second was becoming bloodier. I needed Tarragon, her car or a congregation of Tine, a sea krait…A sea krait! Did I dare speak to the kraits? I thought: I can
use
the Shift to stop the sacking of Capharnaum!

I
flew to
Petrel
and landed on the half-deck. Rayne had transformed the main area below me into a field hospital, and she was extremely busy. Wounded men were being brought in and laid on camp beds between the masts and hatchways. Rayne bent over one, whose blood pooled in the brown stretcher. Her assistant struggled with the breastplate strap, having to pull tighter in order to release it through the buckle. Rayne said, “No! Tha’ sucking wound—ignore the res’.” She slipped a gauze pad under the edge of his armor and pressed on a jagged gash in his ribs. The soldier struggled. Rayne grasped his hand firmly and he lay still. Then his hand relaxed out of hers.

I watched as I retrieved my envelope of cat from my cabin, and I saw it all. Rayne looked into his eyes as he died. She often did that with the mortals for whom, no matter how hard she tried, she could not prevent death. She wants to glimpse the change as their eyes set. I once thought her obsession was compassion, now I think it’s just her insatiable curiosity. She wants to see what they’re seeing, she wants to know all that they suddenly know. It’s understandable because people are always inquisitive about what they can’t do. Or maybe, and although it’s morbid I wouldn’t rule it out, Rayne is fond of being the last thing a man sees as he quits the world. One day her curious face might fill my field of vision, through a bloodred filter.

I ducked into Ata’s office; the bottle of brandy stood on her table. Through the stern windows I saw the
Pavonine,
nearly stationary against an onshore breeze. Her sailors swarmed on the high aft castle, adjusting some timbers—the long beam of a trebuchet. I said aloud, “Bloody fuck, not another catapult.” It could even be the one we saw being dragged along the Remige Road. It had two large wooden treadmills set upright on either side. A sailor crawled into each wheel and walked them around; others on the outside pushed to winch the arm back. It was so long it overhung the poop deck steps. Another pair of men lowered a ball into the sling. Tirrick gave a shout, the arm kicked up to one side of the mizzenmast, and the stone flew through the air.

It overshot
Petrel
and crashed into the roof of one of the harbor villas. Cinna’s sailors busily set about winding a windlass to decrease the trebuchet’s throw. Shit, if we ever needed Lightning’s professional opinion it was now.

I dashed out of the cabin and called to Rayne, “They’re taking potshots at us! Move down below—and stay there till I bring reinforcements. Don’t abandon ship unless they hole the hull. If you must go to land, ask the officer of the Awndyn Fyrd lamai to give you some cover.”

I heard Rayne ordering that her patients be taken to the living deck; I did not have much time. I tipped a fistful of cat out of the envelope. It ran like fine sugar between my fingers as I sifted it into the brandy glass. I tapped my hand on top to knock the powder out of the damp lines on my palm. Then I uncorked the brandy and sloshed it in. The crystals eddied and spun. I drank it down right to the dregs of undissolved powder where the brandy had not penetrated between the dry grains. I put the glass down with a click.

That was a massive overdose. Through the windows broadsword fighters battled at the junction of the boulevard. Pikes held the gangplank secure but only one line of fyrd remained behind them.

The metal clashes muted suddenly, as if at a distance; the bustle of the surgery shrank to background. My own breaths boomed loud and blood pressure rumbled in my ears. It is coming on.

Pavonine
turned her slender stern to me and the flat towers of her soot-spotted sails. Her reflection vanished. The image of the quay wall and houses ripped away. The sea moved, silver but featureless. It wasn’t reflecting; it should be mirroring the sky.

The waves slowed to the consistency of treacle.
Pavonine
lifted and fell again hours later. Another round shot slowed until it was almost floating; it tracked a lingering trajectory through the air and disappeared at the water’s surface in front of the window.

I’m going under. I slipped to my knees, trailing my fingers down the dirty panes. If I concentrate on breathing I’ll never remember how to. I could no longer kneel. I lay down, one arm extended. The bracelets on the other wrist pressed into my cheek, my sword belt dug into my hips.

Black haze filled my vision from the edges to the center. I thought with a sudden flush of panic: I haven’t taken anywhere near enough. This will never work. I need more—

I
set off flying over Epsilon’s savanna toward Vista Marchan and the old Insect bridge. Hundreds of meters below, Tarragon’s gold car left the edge of the market and followed, accelerating until it was directly below me. The car kept pace, a tiny shining rectangle on the immense plains, leaving a straight dark green track as it flattened the grass. I could see Tarragon in her short red dress glancing up at me.

I slowed, let the car race ahead and then swooped down, speeding faster as I lost height, and catching up with it from behind. I swept over it, lifting my legs so my dangling feet didn’t hit the headrest, and then lowered my pointed boot toes onto the front seat next to Tarragon. She looked ahead, keeping the car speeding straight. I crouched and pulled my wings in unevenly, wiggled to sit down. I pointed at the gray Insect bridge.
“Go!”

Tarragon clenched the wheel, rocked her body forward and slammed her foot to the floor.

The towers of Vista Marchan shimmered and cohabited the space where only the flourishing grassland was supposed to be. A warm wind blew directly from them, drying my eyes. Nowhere in the Fourlands has such a parched, relentless wind. Tarragon glanced at me, complaining, “I’ve been looking everywhere. What’s happening, Jant? I swam into harbor and saw stones falling through the water around the hull of your boat.”

“We’re under attack. The other ship’s throwing them. Rayne’s on the
Petrel
—and so am I.”

Tarragon gnashed her Shark’s teeth angrily. Her shape flickered violently between being a prissy lady and a vicious fish. “What a waste of scholarship! I will flip their boat into flotsam!”

“It’s even worse: the library’s on fire—one thousand years of wisdom lost forever. We’ll never know what essential works are gone for good. Mist Ata’s dead. Oh—was that gargantuan shark you?”

“Yes. I followed a schooner that I sent to sail alongside your ship on a Shift sea. You asked me for help so I chartered it as a guard.”

“God, Tarragon; you’re big.”

“Big-ish. Do you want me to bite your enemies’ keel out from under them?”

“Even if you do, the pirates ashore will keep fighting and they’re killing the islanders. The Trisians will still resist the Castle after this. No amount of talking will bring them around because after Gio’s lies they’re never going to believe any Fourlander again. We can’t win. The only way I can think to take control of this riot is to stage a spectacle so incredible that both sides forget their differences. Sea kraits live far from land, don’t they?”

Tarragon said, “Yes. They wouldn’t eat humans, not worth the energy. They live in the deep ocean; when they slough their skins they scratch themselves on the continent’s roots shelving up from the abyss.”

“Well, I want a sea krait.”

“You want to save them! Are you sure?”

“Only if they agree to the deal. The stinguish told me their ocean dried up, and you said they needed a safe haven. Kraits can come to live in the Fourlands’ sea on the condition that they obey me.”

I
braced myself as we rushed onto the wide bridge. Our wheels hummed as they sped over the irregular surface. I could see the striations where individual Insects had added their masticated wood pulp. The bridge’s stringy supports of hardened spit whooshed by on both sides. Looking between them I saw the savanna drop below us as we labored up to the apex.

We crested the summit buffeted by Vista’s breeze that blows across worlds, and for one glorious moment I could see the whole of the sprawling market.

Then it had gone; we were in the world of Vista. The wind howled through the top of the bridge. Below us, it blew the top layer of flaking sand across the wasteland as fine crystal dust, drifting onto high dunes against the base of the sea wall.

Many white tracks converged on Vista Marchan city; from up here they resembled the rays of a star. Its cluster of pale blocky towers appeared suspended in mirages and pooled in bent light across the entire wasteland.

I had not seen any place like this before. We descended past the towers that I realized were higher than the Throne Room spire. I was overawed and shaking as we rolled to a halt on top of Vista’s great sea wall. On either side of us were empty, sand-choked dockyards and piers with long, dry barnacled ladders that stopped short of the ground.

I
looked out over the salt flats, to see Epsilon as a translucent illusion, a lush plain and thriving market lying at forty-five degrees through the white wasteland.

Tarragon said, “Aren’t Insects fascinating creatures? That’s the Vista desert. It used to be the ocean floor.” Her car’s wheels pulled the grit into tracks as we drove along the top of the immense wall. The salt-bleached streets were devoid of movement. The only living things in Vista were myself and Tarragon; her fin annoyingly brushed my thigh as she operated the controls. Paper Insect cells meshed between and hung like gray lace around the worn concrete buildings.

“I’m sorry to bring you so far,” she added. “Your trip home will cause you substantial distress.”

Rust stains ran down the dock wall from flaking iron rings bolted into the top. Sea-level markers and fading numerals were stenciled in a script twice my height. We stopped and stared out at the vanished ocean. The white sky and sand stretched away as far as I could see: two parallel planes meeting at the horizon. Occasional patches discolored the dunes’ glaring surface, chemicals and oil seeping up from below. A stagecoach that must have belonged to a recent tourist lay derelict and half-full of sand. The tops of its spoked wheels showed through the surface of a hard-packed ridge.

Behind us was the city, faceless towers and blanched walls abraded with centuries of windblown sand. Spiral steps emerged like spinal columns from their broken shells. Rusted girders jutted out of the fortieth floors—metal thinned to perforated wafers. There was no sound but the breeze skipping salt crystals over the dry ocean floor and concrete promenade. It was completely outside my experience. I said, “It’s not beautiful. It’s…”

“A desert, Jant. Lots of sand.”

“Tarragon,” I said impatiently. “Capharnaum is burning!”

She tutted but moved quickly, taking a gold pocket watch from a box that was part of the car’s fascia. She clicked its glass case open and I saw that it wasn’t a watch at all. Inside was a gold mechanism and a wire gauze that securely held down a fat black fly, twice the size of a bluebottle. It buzzed energetically, sounding as if it was trying to drill through its gold cage. Tarragon said, “It’s amazing what you can purchase from the Tine in Epsilon market if you have enough meat.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a Time Fly. They have a way of avoiding being squashed or eaten. They can jump a split second back in time, up to the point at which they emerged from the pupa. This Time Fly hatched in Vista Marchan and has been imprisoned here ever since. I’m taking you back there; we will turn back time until the tide comes in. Wind it for me, will you?”

I turned the contraption’s little gold key, just like a watch, and the gauze began to put pressure on the trapped insect. It felt threatened and tried its method of escape, but because the mechanism snared it, it carried its threat along. It took us, too, and it went
fast.
Really fast.

For a few minutes, nothing changed. I twisted around and looked behind at the town. The buildings could be a little less gray, less dilapidated.

There was a blurring at street level around the car, as if I could see colored air swirling. Tarragon said, “They’re city people, in their everyday lives or fighting Insects, moving back in time too fast to see.”

She patted my arm and pointed to the horizon. Prodigious steel ships began to rise from the areas of oily discolored sands. Sand dusted away from them, revealing masts and wheelhouses then unearthed long hulls lying on their sides. The sand’s surface darkened to pale gray and began to glisten. Then shallow blue pools appeared in the lowest linear sand ripples, where I had not noticed hollows before. The long pools swelled and coalesced, turning the summits of the sand ripples into islands and building up around the dunes. Water ran together around them, darker blue as it deepened.

The ripples were all covered, the sea level climbed, the dunes were dispersed islands. Just a few islands left; then the sea covered the final dune. The ocean kept rising, closer to the bottom rungs of the ladders, bearing upright the drab metal ships.

Color poured into the sky. From monochrome it became pale, then bright blue. The automobile’s highly polished gold chassis reflected it. The Time Fly in the watch whined with effort. It was now a young imago, its wings crumpled and damp, as it had been when someone imprisoned it. Its six thin legs scraped against the watch’s shiny inside surface.

Suddenly the Insect bridge vanished. Fresh paper, it disappeared in jerky stages from the foot of the arch to its zenith. Waves hit the harbor wall and climbed its sea-level gauge, higher and higher. The steel ships disappeared instantly; instead the ocean spat out white boats that bobbed at anchor. The rings in the dock wall were glossy; Vista Marchan’s towers were complete and spotless, glass walls reflecting the sun. The buzzing in the watch stopped abruptly, and everything was clear and still. It was a beautiful day. Men and women in orange tabards and yellow helmets went about their business at the docks, blissfully unaware of the annihilation that will happen when the Insects’ bridge crashes through.

Tarragon showed me the watch; it was empty. She said, “In a factory in Vista, the Time Fly’s just been hatched.”

A
n almighty wave reared from the middle of the ocean and cascaded into harbor, diminishing every second, until it lapped at the wall as a gentle ripple. A vast green-and-blue-striped snake’s head and upper body erupted from the ocean, spattering us with spray and blotting out the sun. Its head was four times bigger than a caravel, the solid muscle trunk of its monstrous body as thick as one of the towers behind me.

The glossy snake lowered its flat, pointed head onto the promenade. The harbor workers seemed annoyed but were too polite to say anything. Tarragon and I climbed out of her car. “God-who-left-us,” I gasped.

“No, it’s just a snake.”

“Shit…How many are there?”

“Sh!” Tarragon chided. “Their population numbers less than a thousand.”

The sea krait’s bulk stretched into the distance. It meandered in colossal hundred-meter curves like the Moren River. A ship steered away from its side, panicking and belching smoke. Around half a kilometer from shore, the krait dipped underwater and the same distance farther away a striped conical island trailed back and forth in the frothing sea—the flattened tip of its tail.

We stood in front of the snake’s slightly domed yellow eye. Its vertical slit pupil was the height and width of my body. Its head was covered in bright scales the size of a table top. Black skin showed between them, looking like stitching around the square scales on its closed lips. A deeply forked black tongue darted out of the tip of its snout and flickered around us. It didn’t touch me but I sensed the motion of the air a centimeter away from my face and I felt its moistness. The snake darted its tongue back into the hole in its top lip, which was big enough for me to have crawled through.

Tarragon said, “Jant, may I introduce you to the king of the sea kraits?” She addressed the beast: “Your Heinouss, this is a messenger from the Emperor of the Fourlands who could soon be your Emperor too, if you agree to his terms…Jant, talk to him; he can hear you with his tongue.”

The snake turned its enormous head on one side like a keeling carrack, and rubbed its closed mouth on the promenade. With the grating of a thousand millstones, it scraped great grooves into the cement and uprooted the iron mooring posts on either side. Its eye moved back and forth, appraising me.

I declared, “Tarragon will show you the direction to the Fourlands’ ocean. You and your people can live there if you promise me three things. First, destroy the ship called
Pavonine
afloat in the center of the harbor, that Tarragon will show you. Second, after that don’t damage any other vessels or harm any people. Live in the depths and stay away from the shoreline, so you’ll be less likely to cause accidents. Third, our world is threatened by the Insects too; that makes us allies and in the future I might call on you for help again, via Tarragon.”

All the time, the krait’s pennant-tongue flicked in and out of its long colubrine smile, picking up vibrations in the air. It was tasting my words. It twisted its head looking for Tarragon and slithered dangerously close to crushing her car before she ran around in front of its eye. It hissed, and I felt its hot, fishy, miasmic breath blow from the arched hole in its lip.

“What is it saying?” I asked.

Tarragon said, “He wants to know if your sea is of sufficient size. I don’t think the Fourlands’ ocean is roomy enough to hold every one of the sea kraits. I will tell him that there’s only space to allow a few of them through. That way at least some will escape the disaster and their species will survive.”

The snake’s glistening body writhed along its whole visible length. Tarragon gave me an encouraging look. “The King accepts. He is convinced of your honesty; he says he can taste it.”

“How do I know whether to trust a sea snake?”

Tarragon laughed. “You have a Shark’s word that you can.”

The meanders of the krait’s kilometer-long body drew tighter and closer together as it pulled its head back and smoothly submerged under the water. I stared at it, openmouthed.

“You will see him once more,” said the Shark. “Goodbye, Jant. I have to act as their guide and we have rather a long way to swim in this delicious water. Still, we’ve plenty of time.” Her red dress turned gray, and stippled to continuous sharkskin all over her body. She walked to the very edge of the massive wall, hooked her bare toes over and raised her shagreen hands above her head.