No Present Like Time (46 page)

I didn’t know what to say or who to believe. I searched around for more evidence of our goodwill, took the books from my pockets and gave them to Danio’s successor, who was still choking back sobs. “Here…”

“Oh, thanks,” she said sarcastically, looking at the titles.

“The Castle’s Doctor is here; she’ll help your doctors with the wounded Capharnai. Her knowledge and supplies will be useful. We’ll repair the damage that has been done, as far as we can. If you need grain ships I shall send them. The Circle is at your command; whatever you think about the Emperor’s history and motives, I promise you we will work day and night.”

I thought, we have brought them misrule. Our presence has made Tris grow out of childhood to delinquent adolescence. But scolopendium was still hitting me in waves of sickness and bliss. I was simply glad to be alive, one of the lives remaining.

O
ur soldiers, seeing Lightning on the quayside, approached him. But he was feverish, so he simply sat down and left me to give the commands while Rayne tended to him. I told the Awndyn Fyrd captain to round up the rebels and put them in the hold. Then came Viridian, Ata’s daughter, who had collected the gory pieces of her mother’s body. She insisted that Mist Ata Dei be buried at sea, with the respect that was due to a famous explorer and the Circle’s Sailor.

I said, “It’s terrible that Mist can never know how Tris turns out.”

Lightning glanced over the broken paving stones, the trebuchet shot and abandoned gold loot on the harbor pavement. His gaze loitered on the sea that splintered the dawn light. He was now as suspicious of the ocean as I used to be, and I loved it because it was not the same sea now the kraits swam in its depths. “Yes, it is, Comet. And I wonder if the Empire will ever regain a vestige of normality.”

T
HE
C
ASTLE
, J
ANUARY
2021

T
he paths under the Finial’s arches were slippery with snow that had partially melted and then frozen again. The translucent footprints preserved the detailed marks of boot treads and hobnails. Frost rime edged the stone leaves on the Architect’s Tower, and icicles so long you could spit Insects with them hung from the Bridge of Size, which took the cobbled Eske Road across the Moren River. On the lawns between the Simurgh Wing and outer wall, two centimeters of snow were sealed beneath a centimeter of sparkling ice, blue in the early morning light.

I waited outside the Throne Room in the small cloister, staring out of one of its pointed glassless windows. I was contemplating the fact that if you put the world’s finest—athletically or intellectually—into one Castle and let it stew for a thousand years, the results will not always be palatable.

Looking south between the outer wall and palace, the roof had been rebuilt on the Harcourt Barracks, where the Imperial Fyrd are based. Men were repairing the Dace Gate barbican, and all along the curtain wall flags flew at half-mast.

Next to me, on the spandrels between the little arched windows, were green-men carvings, dead faces with branches growing out of their loose decaying mouths. Their sole purpose was to remind us that one day we will die and be nothing but plant food. It is a thought that spurs Eszai to keep their places in the Circle and mortals to do great deeds and join them, or be remembered for their great deeds alone.

Tris would take years to recover from the damage Gio caused. Lightning, Wrenn, Rayne, Viridian and I had left the island one month after the riot. I last saw it diminishing in the distance under a sunset pink from the amount of soot and burned book dust high in the air. “Ata’s sunsets,” the Capharnai have come to call them.

Lightning was staying at Awndyn convalescing, and with Wrenn’s help he was arranging for a monument to be built on Grass Isle in honor of Ata. Thousands of her extended family had gathered there; I found the way her whole network had clung together rather alarming. But most of all I felt sympathy for Lightning because he also had to find some way of explaining it to Cyan.

I had spent yesterday relating the battle to San, the ensuing riot and the debt we owe to the fifth land: Tris, manorship of Capharnaum. I was now to answer for giving the sea kraits a lodging in our world.

I looked up as Rayne emerged from the Throne Room. “Now i’s your turn,” she said. “I told San everything I witnessed.”

“You told him about Vista Marchan?”

“Yes, but I couldn’ tell if he was surprised.”

I said, “It’s hard to believe I’m not the only Eszai who knows about the Shift. And to find out that
you
have taken cat.”

Rayne grinned like a crack in a walnut, showing mottled gums. “When I were a girl. I was a lass once, Jant; isn’t tha’ amazing? Rumors were rife a’ t’ university about i’s effects. I only experimen’ed once, in a spiri’ of scientific inquiry; I didn’ like t’ hallucinations because they were extremely intense. When I saw t’ snake I though’ i’ were like t’ krai’ I saw when I dreamed I was walking in Vista. Then I though’: hmm, that was under the influence of t’ fern scolopendium too. Jant, I
wanted
t’ go t’ Tris. I wanted t’ keep abreas’ of new discoveries. But t’ mos’ interes’ing thing I learned wasn’ Trisian; I have reconsidered my hypothesis.”

I sighed. “People can learn to meditate their way through the Shift worlds. I doubt I’ll ever be successful at it, but you might be able to—you’re good enough to feel the Circle.”

We looked at each other, wondering if the Emperor himself might have visited the Shift. For all we knew, he might walk there nightly, observing the Insect hordes preparing to burst through into different parts of the Fourlands.

“I have no desire to go back to the Shift, Rayne. Ever since seeing the King krait, how powerful he was, the beauty of his striking colors, and how content and happy the stinguish are, I feel freed from my craving. I’m ready to straighten out. When I’m through withdrawal and recovered from the trauma, I’m going to spend Gio’s treasure on Wrought.”

“For t’ stability of Awia.”

“To win Tern back.”

“You know, Tern felt t’ Circle break. She said tha’ she worried herself sick with t’ though’ tha’ i’ was you. She asked t’ Emperor if you had died and if she was aging, bu’ he wouldn’ tell her.”

I was aware that San was waiting. I pointed to the Throne Room door. “Come with me. I don’t want to walk in there by myself.”

We progressed down the scarlet carpet and through the portal in the screen like a couple about to be married: Rayne in her shawl that had seen better days at the turn of the millennium and me in a new shirt and waistcoat, with a long velvet scarf, fine black eyeliner and my hair cut so short it was cruel to my sharp-boned face.

Rayne curtsied and seated herself on the bench and I knelt before the dais. The shining sunburst behind the Emperor’s throne reflected light in all the zestful colors of the stained glass windows.

“Comet,” San said. “You brought serpents from the Shift to infest our ocean. I cannot think of anything more dangerous and irresponsible than your playing with the boundaries and indigenes of worlds.”

I bowed my head. “Tris is part of the Fourlands; the Fourlands is part of the Shift. They’ve always affected each other. As far as Insects, maritime creatures and…and myself are concerned, it’s a continuum.”

“The snakes will pose as big a problem in the sea as Insects do on land!”

“My lord, I assure you they won’t attack us. They only eat the huge whales that never come near land.”

“And do we not need the whales and shoals? Furthermore the sudden appearance of a sea serpent will threaten people’s very perception of reality.”

I was still desolated that Capharnaum library and its precious manuscripts had been lost. I looked up to let the Emperor perceive my anger. He couldn’t expel me from the Circle so soon after Gio’s rebellion. Although there was much less unrest in the Fourlands now, a bibliophile Messenger can be just as dangerous as a vengeful Swordsman. The Emperor needed me, a Trisian scholar known to the Senate and the sea beasts, and, though unwilling, his loyal servant all year. He sent us out to deal with battles and infernos and he offered no reward, just the measly Castle grant and yet more lifetime. I wondered again about his motivations, but no matter how much I cared I could do nothing. If I angered San he would make me mortal, and without him the Fourlands would be swamped by Insects.

I thought of the picture in the history book, showing San as an unassuming sage-turned-soldier. I spoke with determination: “I know that my decision was best. It saved us and Capharnaum. We stopped Gio, and the Senate will be governors of Tris. You gave me to understand that we should use whatever means necessary, and calling the kraits was the right thing to do…” My voice crawled slower and slower and dried up like a snail on a dirt track.

“You sound unrepentant, Comet.”

“My lord.” I fixed my gaze on the apse where the fifth land’s column should be.

The Emperor understood and regarded me for a long time. “Whatever happens, we can do little about sea kraits at the moment. If mariners and whalers sight them, hopefully they will believe that kraits have continually inhabited our sea. There have always been legends of monsters.” He paused. “Comet, you will not tell anyone of the Shift.”

“I promise.”

“I doubt a debauchee such as yourself can keep his word! How many times has the Circle brought you back from the Shift when you would otherwise have died? Immortality was not meant for that purpose, Comet. Next time I am afraid the Circle will not be able to hold you. One more fatal overdose will indeed be fatal.”

The rest of the world would believe that scolopendium had at last killed me. I fiddled with my earring, thinking that anyway my private playground was somehow spoiled, now that I knew other Eszai had visited it. The meaning of Epsilon had changed and I no longer had a yearning to go there, especially after my experience trying to Shift home. I didn’t think I was going to miss it.

I said, “I can do without it. I don’t want to be addicted anymore; I want to be cured. The last thing Mist said to me was, ‘Stop sulking, Jant.’”

Rayne stepped in on my behalf: “I’ll look after him and treat t’ condition. I don’ think he will go back to scolopendium again. T’ prognosis is excellen’.”

The Emperor said with a warm tone, “Well, I thank you, Comet. Despite your injudicious decision with the sea kraits, your service to the Fourlands has been invaluable. Now go with Rayne, and in the fullness of time you will invite the Trisians to compete in a games for the Sailor’s position. You will send mortal emissaries who weren’t involved to talk at length with the Senate, to invite them here and reduce tensions in Capharnaum.”

I bowed and took my leave. I paced past the screen and the first of the Zascai benches. San’s voice called from behind me, “What of Gio Ami’s fortune?”

I stopped dead.
Damn.
I turned around slowly and slunk back, as the Emperor continued, “That which you salvaged from the Senate House square? Rayne told me that she saw you leading a retinue of servants dragging metal coffers up to your apartments.”

Was there nothing San didn’t know? I imagined my hard-won plunder disappearing into the Castle’s vaults, or being divided up into projects that I would never see. I sighed, resigned. “My lord, what do you want me to do with Gio’s treasure? I intended it for Wrought.”

“In that case, Messenger, I believe it would be best if you keep it.”

T
ern walked through the ruined square, the walls of which are now just shapes of drifts. Snow piled up ever higher by the Northwest Tower. She climbed its staircase, cased in ice. The door of my apartment closed and she let her long coat fall to the floor. I lay naked in bed and watched her. I have plenty still to fight for but also plenty to celebrate.

I had arranged Gio’s treasure around the room. Gold chains hung from the mirror, silver plates gleamed on the mantelpiece. Stacks of bar silver armored the fireplace, constellations of coins glittered on the rug. I had draped the four-poster bed entirely in jewelry. Tern came to examine the riches; she stroked them and she began to smile.

Her fingers on my skin left delicious tracks of sensation, like sparks. I told her she was beautiful. She ducked under the sheet, tented it over her shapely shoulders. I threw my head back and howled.

A
little while later, someone rattled the door handle, but it was locked.

Thank you to Simon Spanton and Diana Gill. I am incredibly grateful to my agent Mic Cheetham for her help and support. Many thanks to M. John Harrison and to Richard Morgan for giving me time. Thank you to Stuart Huntley of The Schoole of Defence for some of the moves in the Chapter 1 duel. Thank you to Chris Jackson and the crew of MV
Chalice
for minke whales and sea eagles. Thanks to Lynn Bojtos, Cath Price and Gillian Redfearn for hanging out at the Castle. Love and thanks to Brian for everything—touché!

S
TEPH
S
WAINSTON
was born in 1974 and comes from Bradford, England. She studied archaeology at Cambridge University and then worked as an archaeologist for three years, gaining a masters of philosophy from the University of Wales.

She also worked as a researcher in a company that develops herbal medicines. Her current job is in defense research.

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