No Present Like Time (6 page)

A
shower of sleet fell at dawn, covering the stable courtyard with lumpy, slushy ice. Shallow puddles in its gutters looked gray as laundry water. Darker clouds smeared in the overcast sky above the large square forecourt. The sparrows that infested the eaves and stalls shouted out a dawn chorus. Warm air steamed from three pairs of thoroughbred horses harnessed to a gleaming coach. Lightning’s carriage was waiting to carry him and Wrenn to Awndyn. It would take them three days to reach the coast, so they had planned to spend the first night at Eske manor, enjoying the hospitality of Cariama Eske.

There was a clock tower on an arch above the main gate. I landed in front of its peacock-blue dial, which showed eight
A.M.
, and watched Wrenn and Lightning sheltering from the rain inside the nearest stable while their belongings were loaded onto the coach. Mist had said we could bring no more than one sea chest each, but my rucksack and Wrenn’s small knapsack were so meager—since I travel light and Wrenn was poor—that Lightning allowed himself more luggage.

The coachman stooped to check the bits in the mouths of the dapple gray mares and ran the reins through brass rings on the center bar. His scarf and thick buttoned coat made him look portly. He held the coach door open; Wrenn jumped up and struggled inside. Wrenn obviously didn’t know about the steps, which Lightning kicked out from under the polished splashboard. Wrenn settled himself on the seat and removed his woolly liripipe hat. He was obviously feeling self-conscious; I doubted that he had ever been in a coach before. He had changed his clothes—the ones he wore in the ceremony were discarded to show his entrance to a new life. The coachman slammed the door and pulled a leather strap to lower the window. He leaned in, exchanged some words with Lightning, then climbed up to his bench, took the whip in his left hand and flicked the reins. “Hoh!”

The whole heavy rig rolled forward with the clop of clean hooves, a hiss of water from the wheels. The mares with braided manes shook their heads trying to see around their blinkers. They walked to the gates; I saw their six broad backs, then the dark red shining lacquer of the coach’s roof loaded with wooden chests pass beneath me under the arch. The wheels sucked up sleet from the ground, spraying it into the air above them, leaving two tracks of paving clear from slush.

W
renn twisted around to stare at me through the back window, one elbow on the tan leather. I wished that I could hear their conversation on the journey. Lightning paid Wrenn more attention than he paid me, offering the same time-refined advice. But I wanted to reach Awndyn before the coach did. I jumped off the clock tower.

My wings’ muscular biceps, as thick as thighs bunched together, creasing the middle of my back, then separated as I pulled my wings down in the laborious effort of sustained beating. My long wings are pointed and fairly narrow, good for gliding but taking off is as hard as sprinting. I can usually settle into a rhythm that uses less energy but it’s still like running a marathon.

I love long-distance journeys; I can stretch out along the route. I relaxed and leaned into the first of the long kilometers. The coach-and-six sounded hollow over the stable’s wide drawbridge across the second moat and out of the Castle’s complex. They passed the paddocks with steaming dung heaps and soggy plowed fields, joined the Eske Road and entered the oak forest that comprised most of that manor.

I flexed my wings in and rolled once, twice, risked a third although I fell fifty meters each time. I opened my wings hard against the rushing air. High above the coach I rolled wing over wing, watching the even horizon turn a full three hundred and sixty degrees.

Then I set out for the coast. Diagonal lines of sunlight slanted down, patchily highlighting the level, loamy fields of the plains around the Moren. When flying from manor to manor I find it useful to follow one of the straight military roads that the Castle commanded to be built between towns for the movement of troops. But to fly cross-country I pick a point on the horizon, a notch or a hummock, and head directly toward it. The notches become vales, the hummocks turn into hillsides. When I become tired I fly a more convoluted route to find and climb onto thermals to rest.

At a height of two hundred meters I don’t see individual tree tops, just a mass of twigs and pine needles. The slate roofs of the towns are scaly patches that look flat among the forest’s green-brown froth. The houses built from local stone were camouflaged in the landscape, and I passed over hunting lodges without seeing them. Towns all seemed the same from the air; I hardly distinguished between them. My travels have taught me that people everywhere are intrinsically the same: well-disposed to me as Comet.

The same would not be true for Tris. I considered the events of the last two days as I flew. No one could predict what the Trisian people would make of us; I hoped that I could communicate with them. I was terrified of the hated uncharted ocean. The things that swam and slapped suckers on ships’ sides beggared any description—behemoth serpents and sentient giants amassed from the rotting bodies of drowned sailors.

I wondered what to do about Tern. At this very moment she could be stroking Tornado’s wingless back, hewn muscles, shorn head, and I had to leave on some damn godforgotten ship! I imagined her sitting on the palm of his hand and he lifts her up to kiss her. Away at sea I was powerless to stop this latest outbreak of her infidelity; it might deepen and then what would I find on my return? Tern married into the Circle through Tornado, myself divorced and having to live next door to my beautiful ex-wife for all eternity?

I
knew every landmark—the white fences along the “racehorse valley” racetracks that Eske is famous for, their stables where destriers are bred. A line of tall poplars by Dace River; farther on in the forest smoke straggled from a charcoal burner’s shack. I concentrated on keeping the horizon level to fly straight, but in the evening I was grounded by a heavy hailstorm and, annoyingly, had to spend the night in the Plover Inn on the Remige Road. If this was a routine journey I would sleep in the woods because, since I’m Rhydanne, temperatures have to be much below freezing before I start to feel cold.

By the following afternoon I could see the faintly lilac-gray Awndyn downs in the distance. Cobalt manor’s hops fields and oast houses dotted the downs; a bowl-shaped pass resolved into the coast road. Finally I crested the last hill—and there was the sea. The gray strip of ocean looked as if it was standing up above the land, ready to crash down onto it.

Every window in Awndyn-on-the-Strand was brassy with the setting sun. The town’s roofs slanted in every crazy direction. The manor house stood on a grassed-over rock-and-sand spit jutting out into the sea. It had tiny clustered windows and tall thin octagonal chimneys with diagonal and cross-hatched red brickwork. I glided down through another sleet shower so strong I had to close my eyes against it, and landed on the roof of a fish-and-chip takeaway. I waited till the squall stopped spitting wet snow, then climbed down from the chip shop and walked into town, crossing the shallow, pebbled stream on a mossy humpbacked bridge. The Hacilith-Awndyn canal ran beside it into an enormous system of locks and basins packed with barges.

A creative cosmopolitan atmosphere hung over Awndyn, with a smell of cedarwood shavings and stale scrumpy. It was the only Plainslands town to prosper after the last Insect swarm, profiting from the merchant barges that paid tolls to navigate the locks and carracks with full coffers anchoring in the port. It was well positioned to make use of all their raw materials. Swallow, the musician governor, had encouraged a bohemian community; artists and craftsmen were welcome in the tiny crumbling houses and ivy-shaded galleries. Artisans’ slow and friendly workshops overhung the shambling alleys; glass-blowing and marquetry, cloisonné and ceramics, leather-work, woodturning and lapidary, musical instruments and elegant furniture were crafted there.

I
was prospecting for drugs, just as a gold miner follows rules to find deposits. Scolopendium is illegal everywhere except the Plainslands—in Awia the laws have been tight for fifty years and counting; in Hacilith’s deprived streets the problem is at its most serious; and at the Lowespass trenches its use is tackled very severely. But centipede fern grows wild in Ladygrace, the sparsely populated foothills of southern Darkling. The governor of Hacilith tried to pay the Neithernor villagers to burn the moorland hillsides and destroy the plants but thankfully they never succumbed to the offer. Scolopendium extracted from the fern fronds flows out of Ladygrace together with more well-known drugs, and addicts’ money is sucked back in along the same routes. The ban is almost impossible to enforce.

To find scolopendium in a town look for boundaries, for example the edge between rich and poor districts, or between streets of different trades—where houses begin at the edge of the market or where at night people empty from cafés into clubs. The prospector should investigate places where newly arrived travelers are lingering. Longshoremen with cargoes from Hacilith are the most promising, because a handful of cat hidden in a cabin is worth twice as much as a richly stocked hold. When I was a dealer I witnessed even the most scrupulous merchants give in to greed. I determined not to buy from the pushers at the dockside, but they would only be a couple of links down the chain from one of the more powerful traffickers I know.

Buildings give clues: dirty windows and peeling paint in a rich district, or a tidy house in the middle of a slum. This is because they are houses where business is done. When I’m hooked, I read the signs subconsciously; a sixth sense guides me to a fix.

I walked past clustered half-timbered buildings with warm red brick in herringbone designs. Stonecrop grew out of the walls that were topped with triangular cerulean-blue tiles and bearded with long, gray lichen. The town looked like a grounded sunset.

Following my rules brought me to the quayside. Awndyn harbor was a mass of boats. At low tide they all beached, propped up against each other, and fishermen walked across their wooden decks from harbor wall to sand spit. At full tide they all sailed together, a flotilla of bottle green and white, Awndyn’s dolphin insignia leaping on prows and mastheads. As dusk fell, I watched them unloading, passing meters of loose netting in human chains to the jetty, where boys rocked wooden carts on iron wheels back and forth to get them moving on the rails. The boys were paid a penny a half day to shunt the heavy carts to a warehouse where fisherwives unloaded the catch into crates of salt and sawdust.

A
fter dark it began to drizzle sleet. The road was plastered in a thin layer of wet brown mud. I walked along the seafront and passed the Teredo Mill, a tall cider mill with peeling rose-pink window frames, dove-holes in diamond shapes in its ochre-colored walls. It was roofed with white squares cut from sections of Insect paper. Last harvest’s apples had been pressed so the intense sweet smell that hung around the mill in autumn was replaced by the heady reek of fermentation.

A group of young apprentice brewers were sheltering in the underpass where a path ran under the waterwheel’s cobbled sluice. The wheel was raised from its millstream and clean water flowed along the conduit above their heads. They were smoking cigarettes after a day’s work. One of the promenade street lamps cast my shadow long across the road. The brewers regarded me curiously. The youngest had dyed purple hair, baggy checkered trousers and a black coat that reached the floor. I checked him out for the marks of an addict, drew a blank. Well, I haven’t hit gold but I’m very close. We fell into the quiet of mutual examination, until he nudged his friend and bowed. He walked over the road to me. “Comet?”

“Yes?”

“It is…it is you?” He looked back to his friends, who all made “Go on” motions.

I didn’t want their presence to scare away the sort of character I was really looking for. I was about to tell him to get lost but something of my Hacilith self was reflected in him. He didn’t know what to say—there was awe in his eyes like tears. His coworkers crowded around with eager expressions. They were a little too well-heeled to be true rebels. “So you’ve met the Emperor’s Messenger,” I said. “How can I help you?”

“Did you see the duel between Gio and Wrenn?”

“What’s the new Serein like?”

“Tell us the tactic he used!”

“Tell us if he’s married,” a girl said. Her lanky body had a passing resemblance to a Rhydanne woman and momentarily I had to control myself.

“I just flew here…” I said.

“Is it true there’s never been a Swordsman as good as Wrenn?”

I tried, “I’ve just returned from Darkling. Let me tell you—”

“I don’t believe Wrenn taught himself. He must be a genius!”

“My name’s Dunnock,” said the boy with purple hair. “I study music—in the governor’s arty set, but she demands a lot of her circle.”

Wonderful, I thought; other Eszai have the Fourlands’ best vying to be trained by them in the Select Fyrd; I attract gangs of disaffected youth. I tried a simple approach. “Actually the Governor sent me to find a man called Cinna Bawtere. I’ve been ordered to arrest him. Have you heard of him?”

“What if we have?”

“Why do you want to arrest him?”

I rounded on Dunnock. “Show me where his lair is these days.”

The brewers, now quiet, ushered me through the underpass. My leather-soled boots squeaked on the tiling; then we turned left on Seething Lane away from the sea, past the puppet-maker’s shop and into the artists’ quarter.

Shop signs projected above doorways:
CROSSBOW CLOCKWORK LTD
and
FYRD RECRUITMENT LOWESPASS VICTORY HOUSE
.
APPLEJACK AND FINE TEREDO CALVADOS
. Bleak graffiti sporadically decorated the walls between them, declaring,
“Ban the Ballista”
and
“¡Featherbacks go home!”