On the second day I headed towards Awia, passing over the bleak hills of upper Fescue, where the Brome stream meets the Rill and the Foss and becomes the Moren River. Rayne should have reached the Shivel coach stop by now. I hoped Cyan still didn’t look two days dead when she arrives at Slake Cross or Rayne is going to have a hard time explaining it to Lightning. I just hope he doesn’t connect me with Cyan’s condition.
The air was sluggish so I concentrated on its changing shapes as I flew past the quarries at Heshcam and Garron on the Brome stream. The Brome’s peaty water, the colour of beer, tumbled out of ghylls between rounded hills topped with millstone grit crags like pie crusts.
Cyan needs to learn who she is. She’s as confusing as a shot of pure cat in fourth-day withdrawal. I just hope her experience has taught her not to take the stuff again.
Tapering black chimneys poked up from a cleft between two hills. That’s my next landmark-Marram mining town. I flapped towards it tiredly, noticing my shadow on the hillside far to my right.
Marram was tucked in a valley and the roofs and chimneys of the lead and stannary furnaces seemed to take up most of it. I came in very low over the surrounding grey-purple slag heaps. A massive lead crushing wheel turned slowly in an overshot sluice, around which spots of red and yellow were the woollen shawls, head scarves and wide trousers of women picking ore fragments from the machine’s trays.
I flapped overhead and they all looked up, began shoving each other and pointing me out. The women seemed glad of a break; they started leering and catcalling. One or two had wings but most were human and they were all very raucous.
One spread her arms and yelled, ‘Hey, Comet, where are you sleeping tonight?’
‘Wherever they leave me, lover!’
They doubled up with laughter. God, I thought, I can tell this is Fescue.
I couldn’t gain height and I flapped around low, making a complete fool of myself until I remembered the smelting furnaces. I circled the tall chimneys and went up like a kite on their updraught.
The roofs of Marram began to spin under me; the smoke-stained houses built in close terraces, the steep narrow roads with ridged cobbles so horses could find purchase. At the edge of town I went over the long, bronze-green roofs of the communal latrines which, by law, all the townspeople had to use. Marram villagers save everything; even barrels of urine for use in alum extraction and the nightsoil to spread as fertiliser on their sparse oat fields.
Higher on the rock face planks and girders shored up a five-metre-wide mine mouth. A dirty piebald pony walked round and round, tethered to a pump capstan at the pit head. The men were all underground already, rooting out copper, tin and lead. These Marram villagers were hollow-eyed and blue-toothed from shale dust and lead fumes, but they were wealthier than the farmers of the Plainslands. Everyone here could own his own house: Lord Governor Darne! Fescue keeps the trade for metals fair.
I was covering distance extremely quickly now, about a hundred kilometres an hour, and in a straight line. On the twisting dirt track roads below, people take a day to travel as far as I can in thirty minutes. I passed into Awia and over Cushat Cote village on Micawater manor’s southern border. I flew past Cushat’s ‘naming court’ house, a courtroom where an Awian marriage judiciary meet. They settle disputes as to which of the two married couples’ families is the wealthier-a hot topic for status-obsessed featherbacks as the richest bequeaths its name to the children.
The Circle broke.
I blacked out-for a second-came to so quickly I was still gliding, fifty metres lower in a steep dive. The ground filled my vision. I straightened my flight, brought the horizon level, wondering what the fuck had happened.
It had been the Circle, surely? The Circle had just stopped. One of my colleagues had died-I couldn’t tell which one. Or maybe-shit-maybe the Emperor has found out I’ve been in the Shift and that jolt was him dropping me from the Circle. Could I be mortal again?
I held my arms out and looked at my hands. Could time be passing for me? I had no way of telling. I can’t feel the Circle like the most experienced Eszai sometimes do. I was shaking but I pulled on the air and began to ascend.
The Circle broke.
A second time. It reformed promptly and I spun out of my fall yet lower in the sky. I yelled, ‘What’s happening?’
The Circle broke.
With a slow sense of void so horribly vacant I screamed. I blanked out for a few seconds and found myself descending still lower. My wingtips touched treetops on each down beat.
I gained height, bracing myself in trepidation of it happening again. Three times! Who’d been killed? Which of us-Lightning? Serein? Frost? The last one had died horribly slowly.
What could injure three Eszai in close succession so badly that the Circle couldn’t hold them? In what circumstances could the skill and strength of three of my friends be useless? They were surrounded by troops and fortifications. Could it be a fyrd revolt?
Perhaps I was lucky not to be there. I found myself sobbing, feeling light and drifting. A second of time had passed for me, for all of us, before San reformed the connections. It felt awful, much like the shock on hearing the news that someone you love has died-which is not fair considering that few Eszai love anyone apart from their spouses.
I examined myself. Did I feel tired? Could anyone badly hurt be pulling on the Circle? I couldn’t tell.
Shit, shit, shit. Another disaster at Slake Cross and I’m not there. The Emperor will have felt it and he’ll be expecting me to come and tell him why-and I don’t know! He’ll find out I wasn’t at the front!
I was cold with rising panic but I forced myself to concentrate. I’m in deep trouble-and so is Lightning-assuming he’s still alive. I spoke aloud: ‘There’s no time to hesitate. I must reach Slake, find out what’s happening, then race back to the Castle and take San the news. I’ll have to outpace all the dispatch riders and reach the Castle before them, because if any beat me there and tell the Emperor I was absent, he’ll have my balls.’
Where the fuck was I, anyway? I looked down on the valley. The oblique morning light cast a shadow of one valley side across the other and the stone buildings of Cushat Cote village at the bottom were still in darkness. The border of Awia. Having got my bearings, I turned sharply. I must steel myself to be prepared for anything. I beat my wings powerfully and flew my fastest towards Slake Cross.