I focused on the banner, soared round and set down on the roof of the winch tower. I slipped to the parapet, between its beacon and enormous warning bell. I looked around; the timber fence along the walkway had completely disappeared. Insects had chewed the stakes down to pulpy stumps.
I looked down the faces of the winch tower. Both its portcullises were down, blocking the walkway on both sides. Both tracks were covered with larvae; they clustered around the grating trying to get through, but it was thick metal mesh and the gaps were too small. Adult Insects on the side nearest the Paperlands were chewing the bars fruitlessly.
A rhythmic clanging echoed from inside the tower. I listened carefully; it was heavy and sharp, metal against stone, and muffled as if coming from a distance, which was strange because it was directly below me.
I shimmied over the parapet and kicked a louvre through. I swung one leg inside, ducked my head under the top lintel and sat straddling the ledge, hunched half in, half out of the tower. I looked down.
The tower had no floors-it was one great, hollow dark space filled with machinery. Some candle lights flickered far below me on the ground. The scale of the crowded shafts and cogs interlaced with each other completely took my breath away.
I soon distinguished the mechanisms. On the walls below my window and opposite were fixed those needed to work the two portcullises-spindles wound with the last couple of loops of rope, and greased metal runners. The larvae’s short, whisker-like antennae poked between the bars of both gates and their jaws flashed out, tearing at the air.
The mechanism to raise the dam gate was even more impressive. Only Frost’s dedication could have designed it, and only the effort it took to have drawn it together could have made her love it as much as she did. The shafts were painted black, but their naked steel working surfaces shone with oil. The inside of the tower looked like that of a windmill in which all the wheels and beams and pegs had turned to metal.
The square floor was paved and on either side were circular, stone-rimmed holes from which thick cables ran, like ship’s ropes. They were tarred and very taut. They led up to a horizontal brass roller and were wrapped around it at both ends. It looked like the spindle used to raise water from a well, but on a massive scale. The roller was braced with girders attaching it to all four walls, secure at head height. Its vertical wheel meshed with a complicated system of gears onto a horizontal capstan carrying a chain. Lots of tackle to harness horses lay tangled, attached to the free end of the chain.
Frost was down there, dwarfed by the machinery. I could see her rounded shoulders and bandanna; she had taken her helmet off. I shouted down but she couldn’t hear me. She was bent double, peering into a square hole in the floor. Its trapdoor was open and it was big enough for one man to fit down at a time. The clanking resounded from deep underground.
Several soldiers were distributing gear piled by the walls. A big man beside Frost held a rope around his waist with both hands. The end disappeared into the shaft, and he was lowering it.
I climbed down the rough wall and ran to her. ‘Frost?’
‘Jant!’ She stood upright and stretched, her hands in the small of her back. Her face was streaked with dirt and her brigandine jacket hung open. She had stuffed her brown velvet rabbit under its fastening flap and its head nodded comically at her bosom.
‘Jant, we lost our horses. We couldn’t bring them in. We had to leave them outside and the Insect young just ripped them apart.’
‘I saw it,’ I said.
‘We needed horses to raise the gate and open the dam. Now we can’t.’ Without looking she slapped her hand onto the weighty rope. ‘See?’
‘Shit!’
‘Yes. Shit. But I think I’ve figured a solution.’
‘What are you going to do?’
She pointed down the maintenance shaft. A line of brackets bolted to the wall formed a ladder leading into the depths. A murky flicker of lamplight came and went down there.
‘Climb down and I’ll show you.’
‘I’d rather not.’
‘Come on. There are ten men crammed in the gate chamber but you can hang on the ladder.’
‘No, no. I don’t have time. I have to get back to the Emperor and tell him what you’re doing.’
The rope around the soldier’s waist tugged twice, pulling his hand, and he began hauling something up. Frost said, ‘Now we’ve made a start, I can rig a block-and-tackle to make raising the spoil easier. This is your last load doing it the hard way.’
‘As you say.’ He grinned at her. He seemed in good spirits.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked again.
She stamped her steel-toed boot on the paving stone. ‘If you went down into the chamber, you’d see the top of the gate emerging from the floor, with the ropes attached to it. Millions of tonnes of water are pressing on the gate, keeping it shut. So we are digging down on either side of it.
‘We are going to provide a new passage for the water over the top of the gate, then down into the original outlet pipe. Of course we’re digging on the downstream side first to open up the passage to the face of the dam. Then I’ll ask them to excavate the other side. Water will burst up, fill the chamber and drain away down the downstream side, out through the face of the dam, like it’s supposed to. We will drain the lake, lads! You’ll be heroes!’
The men broke out in optimistic smiles.
I said, ‘Really? Won’t the water gush back up the shaft?’
Frost’s lips set thin. ‘No.’
‘But-’
‘Sh!’ she snapped. ‘I’ll put a lid on it, or something.’ She took my sleeve and turned me away from the toiling fyrdsmen. ‘Not in front of them. Don’t ask any questions, just spread the news as to what I’m doing.’
I said, ‘The downstream face is covered with larvae too. I expect some will have crawled up the passage.’
She stared at me, then nodded. ‘Oh-when we break through? Yes, some might crawl into the chamber but we have our pickaxes. And the water will flush the rest out. I left a few stores here but we don’t have many spades. Fly thyself to the town and bring us more supplies.’
‘There’s a limit to the weight I can carry.’
‘Yes, of course. Bring what thou canst, thou wilt have to make a few trips. I want water, clean fresh water-’ she gestured in the direction of the lake ‘-because my men can’t drink that muck and this is thirsty work. They’re afforst from the ride, and forspent already.’
‘Frost, the first law of communication is to speak the same language as the person you’re speaking to.’
‘Sorry. You know what I bloody mean. Bring some more lanterns, another couple of spades because we don’t have enough to go around, and some food.’ She dithered. ‘Oh, and can you bring me some coffee too?’
‘Sure.’
‘I can make it on the stove. It’s going to be a long night and I think I’m going to need it. We’ll keep digging until we make the breakthrough. The men have to remove all the cladding from the floor of the chamber with muscle power alone; there’s no way we can use acid down there.’
I shook my head. ‘You’re mining out the core of your own dam?’
‘No. I’m just making two little holes, one either side of the gate.’
‘But whoever’s trapped in the chamber will-’
‘Will be able to climb to safety up the brackets,’ she said firmly. ‘Now, do you have a pen and paper? I need to write a message to the Emperor. Go and fetch the water bottles, and when you return I’ll have it ready for him.’
I nodded to her, then quickly scaled the tower wall, slipped through the window and felt the pull as my wings took my weight. I flew back to Slake Cross.
The town was a collage of hideous sights. It was incredibly crowded; people were still coming in from the battlefield but they were also drawing back behind the town’s walls out of the canvas city. We had no chance of holding the palisade and camp against the approaching larvae. They could climb, and they could swim, too, so the moat was useless. The tower tops bristled with soldiers ready to repulse them.
I ran towards the centre square and the water pumps, passing stretcher-bearers carrying horrifically injured men. They left trails of blood through the streets already slippery with mud and horse dung. Exhausted soldiers crowded the staircases and corners, trying to summon the last reserves of energy. Some were chewing handfuls of hazelnuts, their iron rations. The walking injured leant against walls waiting for their friends to bring them pannikins of stew. Soldiers bare to the waist were queuing endlessly outside the shower block. Its doors were wide-men too tired to undress were standing clothed under the flow of water.
More queues of thousands: up to the enormous cooking pots on a table under an awning. Under the Cook’s cornucopia banner, his assistants were doling out tremendous quantities of bean stew to whoever was well enough to take it. Soldiers were waiting in line holding their bowls.
As I passed them, Tre Cloud darted out. ‘The Swordsman’s lost his leg!’ he cried. ‘Featherback lancers just carried him in.’
‘Is he conscious?’
‘I’d say. He’s bawling blue filth.’
I set off sprinting to the hospital. I could hear the screaming from a street away. I skirted round wounded men laid side by side on stretchers in the street against its wall, and entered onto a floor slick with red. Gore was spattered up the walls to above head height. Doctors were concentrating on their immediate patients and yelling for assistance, dressings, fresh water. Nurses carrying pitchers or bandage rolls shouldered past each other, dashing through the maze of beds.
All around me men were lying, moaning, crying. One reached out and grabbed my belt. I looked down at him, and as I did so, he died.
I slipped on blood, distracted by the tremendous variety of injuries. There were lots of empty eye sockets, or men with bandages over their eyes, because larvae had pulled their eyes out. There were plenty of men with cloth wrapped around bloody stumps; adult Insects had lopped off arms and legs. There were wounds to the throat, to the groin, to joints that were less protected by plate. Along the walls slumped hundreds of men with extreme exhaustion and dehydration-every one being given litres and litres of salty water. One porter with a mop was ineffectually stirring the pools of glutinous blood on the flagstones. It reflected the camp beds along the wall.
Lying in a corner there was a man whose face had been chewed down to the bone on his forehead and cheeks-I could see into his mouth. And in another corner-something so terrible I quickly blotted it from memory.
I saw Wrenn-lying by the wall, on a stretcher bed extending towards the middle of the room. Three lancers in plate were holding him down, one on his either shoulder and one on his leg. His other leg was nothing but a bleeding stump, bitten off below the knee. He was kicking it in the air and drops of blood were spattering on the soldiers. He was yelling, his mouth a black oval, his cheeks stretched and eyes slitted. Where his shin should be, I saw the white ends of neatly severed bone.
They had stripped him down to his padded gambeson but he still had armour on his uninjured leg. He was covered in many smaller excruciating wounds, bleeding heavily through tears in the jacket. Most of them were deep punctures, where larvae’s fangs had slid in like curved smooth thorns, but they were nothing compared to what had happened to his leg.
Rayne was resuscitating a man with a crunchy broken jaw and a mushy nose. She left him to her assistant and dashed over, leaving sticky footprints.
She gave Wrenn an injection into the crook of his arm, pressed a cotton pad on the place, withdrew the needle. She quickly dropped some clear liquid on a white tile, and mixed it with a drop of blood pricked from one of the three soldiers who looked most like him. The mixture did not go grainy but stayed smooth, so she patted the windowsill for the lad to sit up there, and she rigged up a waxed cotton tube that would transfer blood down from his arm into Wrenn’s.
Wrenn was yelling all the time. ‘No! Put me back on the field! Leave me there! I want to be left! Bitch!’
She grasped his hand and he tried to fend her off, but he calmed a little as the scolopendium took effect. ‘Leave me! I can’t be Eszai any more! Let me die!’
‘Let him die unbeaten,’ I said.
Wrenn glanced in the direction of my voice, with unfocused eyes, and smeared blood across his cheek with the back of his hand.
Rayne was furious, ‘Ge’ ou’ of t’ way, Jant!’
‘He can’t be the Swordsman now. He’ll die anyway. Let him die without the indignity of being beaten by a Challenger.’
‘There’s more t’ life than tha’!’
‘I’ve never had pain like this before!’ The fear was stronger than the agony in his voice. ‘And…and…Oh, god, I’m so bloody cold.’
He turned his head and spoke to empty space: ‘Skua? You can’t be. You died…I lost Sanguin. I left it out there…’ He stared, glazed-eyed, and then passed out.
Rayne pointed to a tourniquet on his thigh, and looked at the soldier on the window ledge. ‘Did you pu’ tha’ on?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. You did t’ righ’ thing.’
Wrenn’s stump was bone surrounded by meaty pulp. The end of the artery dangled, swaying loosely and dribbling blood. Rayne pinched the end and expertly wound turns of silk thread around it-four, five, six times. She tied the thread and then smeared on an ointment of turpentine and phenol, with tansy extract. Then she bound a poultice loosely around it. The poultice, a pad of spongy elder pith wrapped in linen, had been steam-cleaned then infused with a lot of rose honey.
She stepped back and surveyed her work. ‘I can feel him pulling on t’ Circle. This could’ve killed any other Eszai bu’ Wrenn. He’s such a figh’er. Wha’ are you doing here? Have you brough’ a message?’
‘No. I’m passing through. Do you have anything to tell Frost or San?’
She shook her head. She was untying the tourniquet from Wrenn’s thigh. ‘You’re no’ encouraging, Jant. Saying “leave him”! How dare you!’
‘But how can he swordfight now?’ I protested. ‘Even if he survives, he’ll lose his place in the Circle to the first Challenger who comes along.’
‘I’ve deal’ with maimed Eszai hundreds of times. I know I’m righ’.’
‘I’d hate to be forced back to obscurity,’ I said. ‘Wrenn is the same. Do you expect him to win duels on a wooden leg?’
Rayne said, ‘Stranger things have happened.’
I huffed. ‘A Swordsman with one leg? How likely is that?’
Rayne said, ‘Look. There are all kinds of freakish abilities in t’ Circle. We even have a man who can fly. Tha’s pret’y damn weird.’
I took her point. She continued, ‘He migh’ go on for a year or even more before get’ing bea’en. He may well have t’ come t’ terms wi’ being mortal again. Bu’ a’ least he’ll have more life. He can change his outlook. He can change from being t’ Swordsman t’ someone else. I am giving him time t’ think. Once he thinks abou’ i’, he’ll thank me for no’ let’ing him die. They always do. As long as they can continue t’ live wi’ digni’y, and have the chance t’ die peacefully in bed surrounded by grandchildren, i’s bet’er than dying on the field. Isn’ i’? Dying in shi’ and confusion means nothing. You gain nothing. He’ll prefer living and growing old t’ dying in bat’le. If he wan’s to die in bat’le he can do i’ later. He needs time t’ clear his mind. No ex-Eszai has ever told me any differen’.’
‘He’s gashed here as well.’ I pointed to a deep, narrow cut above the knee of his severed leg. The black tip of a broken Insect mandible stuck out.
‘T’ poleyne plate mus’ have come off his knee. Tell Sleat those clips don’ work. A shard is still in there. I’m going t’ take i’ ou’. T‘ soldiers tried t’ pull i’ ou’ and i’ broke.’
Insect mandible shards are much worse than their leg spines. I know many people living with Insect spines embedded in their bodies. If Rayne can’t extract them without causing further damage, she leaves them in. But jaws are highly septic, considering what Insects eat, and broken pieces will rankle in wounds and cause fatal septicaemia. I helped Rayne as she began to operate to extract the shard.
She eased the blood-hardened cloth away from his skin. Then she took a scalpel from the steamed-clean tray and made a cross-shaped incision at the point where the mandible had gone in, widening the cut. She squirted spirits of wine into the wound with a syringe, and grasped the end of the triangular shard with forceps. It had one very sharp edge, and to prevent it cutting Wrenn’s flesh when she drew it out, she took a little hollow steel cylinder like a straw with an open slot along its length. She slid the tube onto the shard’s sharp edge. Then she drew it out firmly and smoothly along its path of entry. In time with his heartbeat, blood welled up, overran the camp bed and pattered on the floor. Rayne rinsed out the wound and put a dressing on it.
Then she detached the tube from the arm of the soldier who was giving Wrenn his blood. He looked very pale and weak by this stage. She nodded to him. ‘You can go. Take a sip of juice, over there…Then go and ea’ mea’ and drink a lo’ of water, and have a res’.’
The dazed soldier wandered off. Rayne crooked her thumb at Wrenn. ‘Even if their blood is incompa’ible you can risk i’ once, but a second time would be fatal.’
She felt his pulse with a couple of twiggy fingers on his neck. ‘No’ a’ home.’
‘When will he wake up?’
‘Could be any time. Migh’ not. But if I know Wrenn, he’ll wake as soon as he can. Tha’ one never gives up.’
‘We’ll see.’
‘And i’ makes a difference from having t’ cure him of VD.’ She smiled without any trace of humour. Invisible flies were buzzing around my head. I hunched my shoulders and an avid pain ran between my wings; I stretched them against the stiffness.
Rayne wiped her hands on a cloth. ‘I have Tornado in here as well, you know.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘He lost an eye.’ She pointed across the room to where Tornado was sitting on another stretcher bed, with his head in his hands. Bandages covered his eye. He was stripped to the waist-you could reconstruct the battles of eight centuries from the scars on his body.
‘What! By a larva?’ If they could wound even Tornado, the Vermiform was right; we were finished.
‘No. In the crush someone’s spear went into his eye. Don’ talk t’ him. He’s very pissed off about i’-he’s embarrassed, too.’
‘I told him not to advance.’
‘If you remind him of tha’, he’ll punch you. Fescue’s jus’ lef’ here, dead. And Vir Ghallain has been mauled. From wha’ I’ve seen, they’ve los’ him too.’
‘I’ll speak to his Select.’
Rayne beckoned a doctor. ‘Watch over Serein and remove his armour.’ Then she turned to her next patient. She wouldn’t be diverted until all that could be done had been done.
I set off towards the water pumps where containers were stacked. I filled as many as I could carry and slung them around my body on two crossed leather straps. As I left, the last of Tanager’s lancers raced in. They didn’t seem to be bringing many survivors-some injured men rode pillion, but others were little more than chewed parcels, slung over saddlebows.
I flew bottles of water, packets of food and enough coffee to keep Frost going out to the dam for the next two hours. I even managed a couple of spades for which Frost was even more grateful than the coffee. Each time, the spoil heap by the portcullis had grown. By the fifth or sixth time I climbed through the window of the winch tower, it had completely blocked the portcullis and was slumping through to the walkway. Inside, a chain of men were passing buckets along and the one at the end threw the dirt onto the mound.
I sat on the ledge and hooked the supplies on a winch that Frost had rigged up. One of the soldiers lowered them, hand-over-hand, while I climbed down the wall.
Soldiers stood around the machinery, leaning on it to eat the latest packet of bread. They had all kept their helmets on for protection underground, and they were filthy; their faces black with dirt and glossy with sweat. They were surprisingly cheerful, though; I took their measure as I approached Frost.
She was sitting on a pile of burlap sacks, intent on her writing. Her jaw was clenched so tightly she had dimples in her cheeks. Tears ran down both sides of her nose.
She had a climbing rope wrapped around her waist, through a metal loop and coiled on the floor. She had obviously found it easier to abseil down the shaft, and the soldiers looked as if they would be happy to belay her anywhere.
I touched her shoulder and she jumped. ‘Jant? Wait, I’m finishing this letter. For the…will of god…and the…pro-tect-ion of the Circle,’ she pronounced as she wrote, and signed it. ‘Arch-it-ect for the Sovereign…Emperor San…and Chief Eng-in-eer of River-works Com-pa-ny.’ She blew on the paper, then folded it and dripped candle wax along the fold.
I said, ‘I brought more bread. It’s all I can carry.’
She nodded, and bellowed down the maintenance shaft, ‘Change of shift! Come up, the kettle’s boiled!’
She tittered hysterically, hyperventilated a few breaths, and checked herself. Her teeth were edge-on-edge, her forehead furrowed.
I offered her a muddy loaf. She wiped the tears away with her brigandine cuff and shook her head contemptuously. ‘No! No more time off!’ She sat down on the sacks. ‘Will you take the note to San?’
‘Yes. Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine. There’s no problem. I don’t know why you think there’s a problem, because there isn’t.’ I could hear the steel in her voice. She was showing both her personalities at once. Her extreme stress had laid them bare in front of me and it was like talking to two different people. I didn’t know whether to speak to the tearful, emotional woman or the single-minded engineer; whether to give her a comforting hug or a quadratic equation.
She took her bandanna off-her hair flowed loose, matted with mud. She blew her nose on the bandanna and stuffed it in her pocket. ‘Right! Comet, we have broken through into the downstream passageway. We’ve made a big hole in the maintenance chamber floor that the water will drain through. Now we are digging on the other side of the gate where the tunnel’s full of water. If we can keep up this rate, I expect to make a breakthrough sometime in the early hours of the morning…and the lake will start to drain…’ She turned to the men preparing to take the place of the even grimier diggers climbing out of the shaft. ‘Do ye hear that? The faster you shovel, boys, the more lives you will save! People out there are being savaged! Your fellow fyrdsmen are dying in whole battalions! Insect spawn are crawling all over the town and more of the…horrible things…are coming out of the lake every minute. Accept victory, and we will win. We will do what we set out to do!’
The men cheered.
She gave them a smile, then drew me aside to the spoil heap. Her eyes were bloodshot and brimming. ‘My last p-project. Riverworks’s final contract will be successful. The Emperor must then c-complete our plan and advance the t-troops over the lakebed…’ She caught a breath. ‘…And kill all the larvae we leave stranded in the mire. You must give him this-’ She handed me the letter.
‘Of course.’
She looked at me levelly, she seemed to have swung round to a calm phase. ‘Describe to the Sapper exactly what I am doing. Tell him the Glean Road will be passable but the Lowespass Road will not. The waters will take two days to subside. Will you tell him that?’
‘Of course.’
‘I never-ah-oh, Jant, I never built the basin for a hydraulic jump this huge…It’s…’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, yes, I’m fine. You must also send a semaphore to Summerday…Tell them to evacuate.’
‘Most of the Summerday people are here,’ I said. ‘The governor has been fighting.’
‘I know. But some are left in the town, and you must evacuate them.’
‘Why?’
She glanced over to the wall, on the other side of which was the lake. She breathed out the breath she had been holding for a few seconds, and tittered. Then she panted another breath. ‘When the lake drains, their…streets might flood.’
‘Might?’ I had never known her to be so unspecific.
‘Mm. Tell them to get out, immediately. And tell Mist to move the ships he has in the river mouth. I don’t remember who Mist is at the moment; I mean, what his real name is…So many come and go. But if he’s the Sailor, he’ll be able to do it.’
‘I’ll tell them.’
She nodded slowly. ‘Then goodbye, Jant.’
‘See you, Frost.’
I turned to go, but she clenched my hand. ‘Goodbye. Goodbye, Comet.’
Tears rolled unnoticed down her cheeks. She bit on her bottom lip, then smiled at her workers gathered around the hearth. ‘Oi! Shift B! Did I give you five minutes or five hours? Go back down there and dig faster!’
I climbed up the wall. As I slipped through the window, one leg in, one leg out, I looked down to see her sitting on the sandbags. She had taken the brown velvet rabbit from her lapel and was holding in both hands, looking at it as if in silent conversation.
Dusk was obscuring the gruesome remains. Larvae were crawling everywhere, covering the uneven ground sickeningly swiftly, and gathering in hordes around any flesh they could find.
I only saw adult Insects in the distance towards Plow-they were already moving on. I wondered why and then I saw larger larvae among the rest-the second moults. They moved nearly as fast as adults, eating their smaller brethren. Maybe the adults were leaving because they feared their own growing spawn turning on them.
I noticed one about to shed its skin and circled low, watching. It suddenly raised its head and froze. I could see through its shell; a slimy bulk was moving inside, pressing uneasily against the surface as if struggling to get out.
Its thorax split down the midline. A pale bulge pushed out through the crack and arched up: the new thorax. The nymph pulled back and withdrew its head from inside the head of the empty carapace. Its chitin was almost white; its legs looked soft as it clasped its empty shell, standing on top. It had a dented, unfilled look but it arched its back and pulled its abdomen free of the casing. As I watched, it began to harden, turning darker brown. The hollows in its abdomen filled out and rounded; its short antennae began to move.
I hastened to the town. The Emperor was sitting in the hall, surrounded by a crowd of people, giving out commands to Eszai and Zascai alike. I pushed through them and gave Frost’s letter to him. He read it, then nodded gravely. ‘Thank you for bringing this, Comet. There is no need for you to visit the dam again. You should have your wounds seen to now.’
I repeated Frost’s words to the Sapper, who received them with his usual glum acceptance. I gave her message to the semaphore operator and watched him begin to pull the levers to move the semaphore arms that would send the order to evacuate, hundreds of kilometres down the valley to the governor’s steward.
I returned to the hospital, where a doctor cleaned and bandaged my bitten foot, though it was so swollen he had to cut the boot off. He checked my wrenched limbs and said I would be all right if I looked after myself. Not a chance. I am growing experienced enough to realise that if you wait, the pain will go. Long life gives you an ability to weather anything.
I told the journalists that no news was to be given out in any form. Then for hours I did the rounds to see if anyone needed the Messenger. Rayne just shooed me away.
Tornado was too humiliated to speak to anyone. Lightning had been the last to leave the field and he was organising archers on the ramparts. That reminded me-what about his daughter? Nobody had taken Cyan any news. From her confinement in the peel tower she would have seen the whole battle taking place.
I missed a gust and had to wait for the next. Go! Now! I took off from the gatehouse and looked back once I had gained height. It was one a.m. and, through the pitch dark, hails of incendiary missiles poured from the towers. Larvae covered the walls. Men on the walkways were tussling with them. The lamps on the curtain wall only illuminated a few metres of churned mud, the moat and the innermost fallen tents.
Cyan had put a light in her window to guide me in. I landed on the plank and stepped down into the room. Cyan bolted towards me and threw her arms around me, sobbing into my chest. ‘Oh! Terrible…it was terrible.’
‘It still is,’ I said, trying to disentangle myself.
‘I saw everything.’ She pointed out to the sea of mud. ‘I watched it happen. I felt so powerless. I saw all those people dying-I tried to look away but I just kept watching!’
She thumped my chest. I caught her wrists gently. She looked up at me as if seeing me for the first time. She began to cry in earnest. ‘The Insects…they…They would have killed me, too!’
‘Yes. Hey, shush! Sh-sh, little sister. Crying doesn’t suit you.’
She stepped back, wiped her eyes and glared at me. ‘I’m Lady Peregrine. I can cope with it.’
‘Remains to be seen.’
‘Is Daddy all right?’
‘I think so.’
‘Not that I care, of course.’
‘Oh no. Course not.’
‘What’s happening down there now?’
‘Well, the larvae are growing. The Eszai are picking mandible shards out of each other. The mortals are shrieking and dying.’ I told her what had happened to Wrenn, Tornado and Hurricane, and Frost trapped inside her dam, digging into its rubble core. Cyan grew more and more alarmed. I said, ‘But this is the safest place to be. We’ve lost the canvas city already; the larvae are scaling the town walls. I don’t know if they will crawl all the way up this tower but if they do, look-here’s my axe-you can cut them off the walls as they come up to the window. Don’t let them get close because their jaws pincer out.’
Cyan sat down, on the bedspread smudged with old sleep. ‘Oh, god, Jant…if I had been down there, I…’
I sat beside her and spread my wing around her. ‘You shouldn’t have watched.’
She turned and hugged me, her face pressed to my throat. ‘I don’t need protecting,’ she whispered, and I felt her lips move against my skin. She looked down at my trousers, ripped and scratched and plastered with mud, Insect and human blood.
‘Oh god. What happened to your foot?’
‘It’s nothing. Don’t worry.’
She kissed my neck and I smelt the hot, comforting scent of her little body. Her hair was so silky it was like putting my hand into a cool stream of water. She began to stroke my feathers. ‘Is it all right now?’
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘Can’t you regroup and…?’
‘There are too many. We’re totally fucked; I don’t know what the Emperor can do.’
I knew I smelt overpoweringly of fresh sweat. That, or something else, was having a strange effect on her. The ache of my muscles and the stinging of all my little scratches began to feel triumphant. I was so tired I felt light; she started caressing me and her touch loosened the tired muscles in my back. The world closed down to this room; this bed and Cyan. Nothing else existed.
‘Mmm…mmm…I need to do this…’
‘It’s the crisis…Mmm… think nothing of it…Oh god; touch my wings.’
‘Your body’s so taut. You’re like a racehorse…With too many limbs…Shit. I didn’t mean to say that. Comet…’
‘Most girls call me Jant. It’s useful to have two names.’
I felt my cock straining at my underwear. I shuffled to free it and it pointed straight up inside my trousers. Cyan saw the bulge and said, ‘Oh. I…’
We were both minded how much her father would hate us to do this, and that made us want to do it more. ‘Do you want me?’ I asked.
She wouldn’t meet my eye. ‘Yes…but I’m inexperienced.’
I blinked. I hadn’t expected her to be a virgin. I don’t know why; I suppose because she had seemed so adventurous-she’d always been surrounded by admirers.
‘I’ll be careful…’
‘Yes, OK.’
‘There’s just this, here.’ I guided her hand to my crotch and she felt the stiffness through the cotton. Her fingers moved up my cock as if she was trying to find an end to it. I took off my trousers and briefs and let her take it tentatively in her hands. ‘It’s smooth,’ she said.
‘Yes. Not like that; like this…ah…’
Her bodice lacings had come loose and her undershirt was open. Her breasts had fallen a little outward, pressing against the stiff panels, caged in by the criss-cross lacings. I could see their curves but their nipples were hidden.
‘I’m good at giving pleasure. I’ll make you feel amazing. You’ll feel like you’re floating.’
‘Oh.’ She remembered. ‘It’s not safe.’
‘You’re safe with me.’
I pushed her gently down until she was lying on her back. I put my head under her skirt, into the darkness between her thighs and kissed their soft skin. I licked the silk of her panties. I poked my tongue around them and started licking her. She gasped and flinched but I calmed her with whispers. I soon found out that she was on her period, a little string sticking out of her. That explained why her scent was so beguiling. Women are most sensual when it’s their time of the month.
I pushed her skirt up, her panties down and kept licking. She wasn’t used to it; she wriggled and whined and kept looking down at me, one arm across her face, biting her shirt sleeve. I must be giving her so much pleasure…and soon it will be my turn.
The muscles in her legs tensed. Her thighs became more and more rigid, until they were like steel. She grunted and her body stiffened. She clamped her thighs around my head so tightly I nearly suffocated. Then she cried out and all her tension released at once.
I looked up, bedraggled with her juices. Cyan gasped, with an expression of wonder, pure bliss, and started laughing. Her face was open and unguarded for the first time; it was so wonderful I started laughing too. At that moment the chessboard beside the bed slid off its table with an almighty crash.
The chess pieces rolled all over the floor. The floor began to shake. No, the whole building was shaking; I could feel the vibrations. ‘What’s that?’ Cyan shrieked.
The lamp on the window ledge flickered. ‘What’s happening?’ She sat up and drew the blanket round her.
She said something else, but I wasn’t listening. I was backing into the doorway of the staircase leading to the roof-the spiral steps wound up into their turret behind me. It’s happening again. This is nineteen twenty-five all over again, and the ground’s giving way. It was that night when-
I woke, and lay in my camp bed in the dark tent, listening.
‘Jant!’ Cyan was yelling at me. ‘Jant! Don’t go crazy! What are you doing?’ Her voice took on a hysterical edge. ‘Snap out of it!’
I snapped. I dashed across to the window and grabbed the lamp. If the earth really was falling in and we were locked in the tower I couldn’t see how we could survive.
We both looked round as one of the vixen guardswomen appeared in the doorway. She threw something I couldn’t see. It bounced off my foot and by the time I had located it on the floor she had disappeared. It was a key.
The crashing roar grew and grew. It was composed of hundreds of other noises: a gravelly sliding crunch. A landslide…I knew this had to be a landslide…There was the din of rock cracking, thuds as individual stones tore loose and fell. The long hiss of earth shifting; the tremendous roar of water.
Through it we heard the bell on the top of the winch tower clanging; madly, unevenly. Dang…dong. Dang! Dong! No one was ringing it-it was tolling of its own accord.
We strained to see. From far out in the darkness came a sense of motion, commotion; gigantic shapes moving. It was like listening to a ship in distress, beyond the mudflats, sinking in the dead of night.
The lights on the tower seemed to tilt, rush forward and down; then they vanished. The deafening roar of a mighty, mighty wave thundered towards us. We could see nothing.
The roar swept past us, obliterating all other noise. The churning of foam and swoosh of falling water resounded on every side.
‘The dam!’ I yelled. I felt crushed and hopeless-a sensation I recognised-the Circle was breaking. Frost-what is she going through out there? It started slowly creeping up-came on in a rush.
I felt the Circle go dead. Frost’s link had gone and I was loose again. We were aging. I felt separate and lonely without the other Eszai to back me up. Mortals must feel like that all the time…I had forgotten what it was like to feel mortal.
The Circle reformed, gently. I could almost feel the Emperor soothe it back into existence. Why had he left us falling apart into nothingness for so long, like beads slipping off a string? Had he been asleep? Was he deliberately reminding us of mortality?
I was kneeling on the floor. The shock had dropped me to my hands and knees and I was looking at a patch of floorboards covered in dried herbs. Their crispy leaves were sticking to my palms.
I had felt Frost dying. By god, what had happened to her? I couldn’t tell if the overwhelming, crushing sensation of darkness had been her experience, or if it was my imagination.
‘Get up!’ said Cyan.
The roar of the wave went on and on. It passed us and we heard it receding into the distance. Another noise followed, the same volume, still loud enough to shake the tower-the rush of water swirling in spate, out of control.
Cyan stepped squarely in front of me, shouting, ‘Jant! What’s wrong with you? Stand up!’
‘The Circle broke,’ I murmured.
‘Daddy!’ she screamed, and started crying in terror. ‘What’s happened to Daddy?’
‘Sh! It wasn’t Lightning. He’s in town.’
‘How do you know?’
‘It was Frost. I knew what she was doing…She broke the dam.’
I felt different, and I realised that I was actually feeling the Circle. It was the Circle that had changed. Its sensation was subtle, just background; then it had gone. No one can feel the Circle or distinguish individuals in it unless its equilibrium was disturbed. I realised I was so used to its ever-present sensation that I had taken it for granted, and now I was feeling it’s slightly altered shape. Frost’s qualities had gone, and the combined effects of everyone else’s, whether enhancing or cancelling each other out, had settled into a new equilibrium.
‘Frost was in the Circle when I joined,’ I said. ‘I was always aware of her without knowing.’
‘Look!’ She pointed down. The spent flood waters, hissing and edged with foam like a wave running onto a beach, poured up to the base of the tower and broke around it. We watched the level start to nudge up the wall.
Our lamp reflected parts of the water’s surface rushing past. It picked out eddying lines as flickers of silver and eel-like flashes. It was moving so fast it was backing up its own bulk into peaks and troughs of great, corrugated standing waves.
Continuous rapids hurtled over where I knew farms had been, now reduced to rubble. The rock outcrops were drowned metres deep. We looked out to Slake-the wide expanse of churning, crinkling flood waters between us and the town reflected its lights.
There was nothing left but water. Everything had been swept away. Everything in the path of the massive wave had vanished and we could hear nothing over its roar.
‘“The waters will take two days to subside,”’ I repeated.
‘What?’ said Cyan.
‘That was Frost’s message. She worked it all out.’
Cyan sought out my hand. She sighed, head bowed, looking at the gushing torrent. We stood next to each other, hand in hand in the warm night, and watched out of the window until the faintest light of dawn began to splinter onto the floodwaters.