"Dangerous Offspring" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swainston Steph)

CHAPTER 1

I woke. I tried to sit up and banged my head hard on a wooden plank above me. Shit, had they put me in a coffin already?

I was curled up tightly in a tiny space, tense with suppressed panic. I calmed down, relaxed and remembered where I was. It isn’t 1925, it is the year 2025, and we are six kilometres south of the Wall in Slake Cross town. I had been sleeping folded up on the lowest shelf of an enormous bookcase. My wings extended, half-spread, taking up metres of the paved stone floor.

Frost, the Architect and owner of the bookcase, was sitting behind her table a few metres away. She glanced down. ‘It’s nearly nine o’clock, Jant. We only have an hour until the meeting, remember?’

I unpacked my long legs, stood and stretched, attempting to tie my hair back so I could see her.

Frost sounded curious: ‘Did you have bad dreams again? Was it the nineteen twenty-five massacre?’

‘Yes. I have flashbacks every time I come here. God, I hate this place.’

‘I’m not surprised you have bad dreams if you sleep on a shelf. Sometimes I forget you’re a Rhydanne but then you do something really bizarre. Tornado and Lightning haven’t been bothered by nightmares.’

‘They weren’t eviscerated, and besides, they remember worse disasters.’ I hooked my thumb in the pocket of my jeans and pulled the waistband down to show the old knotty scar that curved up the left side of my stomach.

‘Yeuch. Still, you should have got over it by now. Have you been under the influence?’

‘No.’ Not since that last handful of mushrooms anyway, and whatever I’d washed them down with. ‘I’m clean.’

‘Well, being “clean” seems to have done wonders for your vanity.’

I had unfolded a little mirror to check the kohl around my eyes. My irises were dark green like bottle glass, the pupils vertical like a cat’s, backed with a light-reflecting membrane. It’s a Rhydanne trait. So are my silver bangles and a brightly coloured serape shawl wound around my waist, its indigo tassels hanging down. But I am half Awian and at the moment my clothes are too; well-tailored boot-cut riding trousers. The faience beads and broken buzzard feathers in my black hair. Then there was the natty slashed shirt I picked up in Wrought, through which I was windburnt, so now with the sleeves rolled, my arms were brindled and spotted. I had spent the last six months carrying messages for Frost and constant flying had honed me down to bone and muscle. I feel so much better these days and everyone can see how much better I look.

I stretched my wings and Frost watched the workings of the joints, unfortunately not with the eye of a woman who finds them attractive, but as a fascinated engineer. Frost, through and through a Plainslander, was a human without wings. She looked to where the limbs, as thick as thighs, joined to me above the small of my back. The muscles around my sides, attached to the tops of my hips, drive them.

I folded them both neatly so the quills lined up, like organ pipes emerging from delicate, corrugated skin. The limey Lowespass water had dulled my feathers.

Frost sat behind a rough table in the middle of the hall, with a large brass coffee pot at hand. Propped up against it was her small and extremely threadbare soft toy rabbit with one eye. It had been a present from her husband more than three hundred years before. The coffee pot and the rabbit weighted down a stack of papers, a mound of dog-eared textbooks and notes, all in Frost’s handwriting but some of the paper was ancient. An enormous chart of the Oriole River valley curled off the table at either end. Fiendish equations were pencilled across it; underscoring, memos and neat, blocky doodles. Her genius calculations were written in lines; tiny numbers and letters. There were all sorts of little triangles there too. I appreciated the little triangles.

Frost presided over this orderly mess, a double-handled glazed mug cradled in her square palms. Her round face was slightly blotchy without any trace of make-up and her nose was red. Dryness lines bunched together around her eyes and two vertical creases between them made her look fearsome, but they were caused by peering into windswept trenches, not by scowling. She had a bulky brown ponytail with a few grey hairs twisted and tethered behind her head with a clip. Wiry strands fizzed out of it, around her broad forehead and the pencil wedged behind her ear.

The arms of Frost’s chunky cardigan were rolled back into bunches above her elbows. Its wool was pilled and marred with snags. She had knotted a kerchief around her neck and her big thighs in comfortable trousers fitted into the seat of her camp chair. Frost was not concerned with the niceties of dress and she only ever wore black. Her feet, in thick socks and steel-toed boots, rested alongside a stack of architectural plans on graph paper taped to drawing boards.

The hall was thirty metres long, echoing and austere; its half-round ceiling arched above us like the inside of a barrel. Since Frost had begun to use it as her office, she had covered its trestle tables with samples of masonry; keystones, voussoirs and coping stones milled into interesting shapes. There were metal boxes-dumpy levels for surveying, pattress plates for strengthening brickwork, a basket of red-painted corks to measure water flow and an intricate scale model of the dam. The oil lamps hanging from the brick vault had just been lit as evening was wearing on and, against April’s chill, a fire was set in the hearth. Frost’s assistants were pulling some benches into rows. I reflected that her world is rather more practical than mine.

She said, ‘Lightning and the Queen are out walking on the dam. They’ve been there since dawn; they said it was the best vantage point to decide how to position the fyrd. Can you fly over there and ask them to join us?’

I mimicked the Queen’s decadent voice, ‘Oh, my darling, must I?’

Frost’s mouth twitched. A smile only escaped her when her guard was down. ‘You’ve got her beautifully. Yes, you must. I mean she must. She probably finds it as tiresome as I do.’

‘Have you seen any reporters yet?’

‘God, no. Most of them are waiting in the Primrose. You know I don’t like talking to them. They twist everything I say and I can tell they’re not really interested. They wouldn’t get even the most basic facts wrong if they were. I don’t know why I bother holding press conferences. Everybody apart from journalists finds the dam self-evident, and their waffling questions always lead me away from the point.’

‘I’ll make sure it goes smoothly.’

She pulled her oversized cardigan closed and sipped her coffee. ‘This is the culmination of years of work since I unveiled the model. The dam has occupied my every waking hour…and my sleep too. But I doubt the reporters care. They look for other stupid stories and then concentrate on the wrong one. They’ll chase off after any scandal no matter how momentous the occasion.’

I said, ‘It’s all right. Don’t worry, just leave them to me. I’m used to keeping them in check. If they ask me a question I can’t answer, I’ll bring you in.’ I waved my hand in the air and Frost stared at it. I dug it into my pocket. ‘I’ll find a quick flight refreshing. The dam breaks up the air in interesting ways. It is a masterpiece.’

‘Oh, yes! It really is the most efficient structure! There’s never been a dam with the functional strength of this one, there’s never been a lake so capacious!’ Keen enthusiasm lit her face. She had been boring people on the subject of river engineering for three hundred and fifty years and this was her greatest project. ‘It makes Micawater Bridge look like an apprentice piece! Every engineer said I was being over-ambitious, but the figures were sound. So is the actualisation! They said it was impossible. They said, “You might hold the model in your hands but you’ll never raise the biggest construction of all time right on the Insects’ doorstep.” Three years later, I took them for a tour! Since the Wrought blast furnaces are operational again I’ve had iron for the rack and pinion cast in segments and assembled here, an elegant solution, you must admit, and you should look out for the way I’ve bridged the walkway above the overflow conduit so-’

‘Frost, please…’

‘I thought you liked it.’

‘I do, but you’ve just asked me to call in Lightning and Eleonora.’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, chastened. ‘So I did.’

I blew her a kiss with both hands that became a mock bow. ‘See you in an hour, OK?’

I walked out to the cobbled central courtyard, enclosed on its three other sides by the cookhouse, mess room and tavern. Each was built of limestone blocks and roofed with lauze; thick, heavy slabs that looked shaggy, like the boughs of a fir tree.

The buildings were pierced with arched alleys, three in each side, just wide enough for one man at a time. They were designed to stop all but the smallest Insects reaching this square, a final refuge if the town’s outer defences were ever penetrated.

The plain hall had fulfilled many purposes over the years: a hospital, a headquarters for immortals, and it was now Queen Eleonora Tanager’s temporary residence and Frost’s office. Frost’s orange banner ran along the length of the roof: ‘Riverworks Company Est. 1692’ in bold black letters. Beside it flew Tanager’s swan pennant, Micawater’s argent mascle on an azure field, and the Awian white eagle on sky blue.

Soldiers had gathered outside the Primrose Tavern opposite. They sat on stools made from barrels to watch two immortals sparring in the middle of the square. The Swordsman, Serein Wrenn, was fighting the Polearms Master, Lourie Hurricane. They had an Eszai competitive edge to their play; they both knew that if they weren’t training, somewhere a potential Challenger was.

Lourie Hurricane was a quiet perfectionist, a tall man from Plow who used to be a vavasour cart-driver before he became immortal. Serein Wrenn, on the other hand, was short and stocky and had the silliest haircut of all the Eszai-waxed up into short spikes with bleached tips. His narrow sideburns tapered into a little chinstrap beard.

Wrenn had come forward and beaten the previous Serein in a fair Challenge, according to the Castle’s rules, only five years ago. Many still said that his predecessor was the more steadfast fighter, but Wrenn was quick with the desperate gambit. He had frequently been Challenged until word of his flair spread. He had latched on to Lourie; I think he admired Lourie’s ascetic, taciturn poise. In the depths of his aplomb Lourie might have been grateful; it is always the case that Eszai lose friends but gain sparring partners. These two were often seen together arguing monomaniacally as to whether glaives or broadswords were the better weapons.

There were both objects of great amusement to the other immortals seated nearby watching them fight: Tornado the Strongman, the Sapper, the Artillerist, and Gayle Holthen the Castle’s Lawyer who also acted as provost for the fyrd. She was a smart, cosmopolitan woman who had joined the Circle after a full career as a judge.

Lourie swept his glaive in balletic circling moves, not one millimetre out of the perfect sequence. He dipped the two-metre pole, swept the pointed blade under Wrenn’s feet. Wrenn jumped it. Its hook caught behind his shin as he landed. Lourie tugged the pole with a grace that belied his strength. Wrenn hopped and let the hook slip out under his foot.

Gayle laughed and clapped her hands, bringing the Cook out of the tavern to watch.

All fifty immortals were arriving. I had been calling them up one by one, either from the Castle or wherever they’d been pursuing their interests elsewhere. Those involved in advance planning had been here for a month but all would be assembled by the end of the week.

Immortals, called Eszai in the low Awian language, are people proven to be the best in the world at their chosen profession. We all play our parts in the battle, because the Emperor San joins us to the Circle and shares his immortality with us as long as we lead the war. Here at the front we have overall authority, even over governors and the Queen; but elsewhere, or in issues not connected with the war we can do no more than advise them. Likewise, San’s word is advice to the world but to us it is law.

Wrenn deflected Lourie’s blade. Lourie pulled it back, grinding its rebated edge, and thrust the metal-clad base of the pole. Wrenn parried it with a full-strength clash. The mortals watching gasped, but we Eszai knew Lourie’s great skill; we’d seen it a hundred times before.

The Castle saves the very best and improves on it gradually, incrementally; little is ever lost. I’ve been Comet for two hundred years, the fastest Messenger of all time. I’m a freak, yes, but it means I get to live forever.

I turned to the wall behind me, took a grip on the rough stone and pulled myself up. I climbed swiftly past the doorway and the plaque above it; the only decoration in the town. Its sgraffito red plaster, incised through to the white layer underneath, depicted the Castle’s sun-in-splendour standard, surrounded by an inscription: ‘In memory of the battle at Slake crossroads, one night in the ongoing war. 4981 Plainslanders, Awians and Morenzians died on the l2th of April 1925.’

As if we need to be reminded, I thought as I pulled myself over the guttering and scrabbled up to the apex of the roof. Balancing there, I looked down on the mortal soldiers outside the pub and I suddenly realised they did need to be reminded. The massacre was three generations in the past, long out of their living memory. It meant nothing to them but a date in a schoolbook. I stepped lightly along the ridge, thinking for the first time that I had more in common with the other Eszai than with the mortals, the Zascai, who had no idea what it was like to stumble through the middle of a massacre. I contemplated with dread that no matter how much effort I put in to knowing every up-to-date trend in Zascai fashion and the developments in their business, the gap between us was steadily widening. Well, I decided, it isn’t inevitable that I will become as out of touch as Frost or Lightning. I must simply try harder; it’s my profession after all.

From the rooftop I saw the series of concentric squares in which the town was laid out. The buildings around the courtyard formed the first of three rings. Behind them ran a wide road, then another ring comprising the smithy, workshops, food, livery and ammunition stores, since Slake Cross is the supply base for all of western Lowespass. Every junction was staggered to prevent any Insects that might get in running straight to the heart of the town.

The smell of hot iron rose from the blacksmith’s shop, mingling with the yellow-hay stink of horse turds on the road and the washy smell of potatoes boiling in the cookhouse adjoining the hall.

Below, the innkeeper thwacked a brass tap with a mallet to drive it into an enormous keg of beer. His blows rang around the square together with the wail of the innkeeper’s squab and its mother shushing as she tried to calm it. She held it inside her cream shawl, against her breasts. It flailed one naked pinion with three pointed fingers like the wing of a plucked chicken. ‘Squab’ is Morenzian slang for Awian babies before they are fledged, and it was probably crying from the itching as its pinfeathers were starting to push through.

The long buildings of the third ring were barracks to billet ten thousand troops. I could see the stone cisterns on the shower blocks’ roofs, replenished by recent rainstorms. The Awian soldiers had added a sauna and a talcum bath: conditions are bad enough at the front without suffering from lice in your wings.

Then came the stables and allotments, in shadow at the foot of the curtain wall. Mangy apple and hazelnut trees bowed over cramped, tilled plots with green shoots-hardy runner beans and turnips. The soldiers supplemented their diet by growing vegetables but they were only permitted to do so inside the walls because any kind of plant attracts Insects.

A few metal cages beside them each contained an Insect the size of a warhorse. Their jaws and antennae were bound with wire; they were soon to be sold and carted south to the Rachiswater amphitheatre. Their scent set mastiffs barking on the far side of town.

Towers reinforced the exterior curtain wall at intervals along its length and at all four corners. It was tall, height being more important against the Insects than thickness, and it extended below ground to stop them undermining it. Roofed wooden walkways overhung the tops of the walls along their lengths. The single gate faced north towards the Paperlands. A guard with a jaunty crest on her helmet stared out of the large, square windows in the gatehouse tower.

These military towns-Slake Cross, Frass and Whittorn-had been designed by Frost soon after her initiation to the Circle. She became a great favourite with the troops who no longer had to construct open air camps. Each town was in essence a fort, with a shifting population of fyrd and the people who supply them: quartermasters, fletchers, sutlers and male and female prostitutes.

Slake Cross gave me a sinking feeling like the cold trepidation you feel on returning to a place you knew long ago. All your friends have moved on; their houses have strangers in them now. Even the routes you used to walk have changed, because the pubs you knew have been boarded up and cafés opened where they shouldn’t be. The last time I was here I was completely screwed up, living on drug time, time measured by needles and veins, not real time at all, and I scarcely noticed how bleak and utilitarian the place was.

I concentrated on the far end of the roof, breathing calmly like a gymnast on the high bar, arms out for balance. I started running, opened my wings and their fingers spread automatically. They dragged, pulling me back, and I pushed at the tiles to find more speed. I lengthened my stride, faster still. I reached the end of the roof, sprang into the air, pulled my legs up and swept my wings down powerfully.

When I begin to fall I always-because I have the same instinct as everyone-expect to hit the ground immediately as if I’ve merely tripped. But I keep falling, feeling nothing under my feet but more thin air.

Two more desperate beats, and I strained my body upwards in a graceful curve. My wingtips came together in front of my face, then I pushed away and I was no longer falling. I stretched out my legs, lying horizontally.

The people below saw the soft inside surface of my black sickle wings, the sun shining through their trailing edges. I felt air spilling off every flight feather. Their hard and sharp leading edges rasped louder as I beat harder and gained height. I scraped over the tavern’s ridge, pushed off with my palms and started laughing ecstatically as I flapped over the road, the barrack ring, the curtain wall and out of town.

The Lowespass Road ran straight as a rule. Its cobbled, slightly convex surface was crispy with hoof prints in reddish clay mud. Water filled its drains; since the completion of the dam the whole countryside was like a puddle and pools had begun to appear all over the place.

From the air, Slake Cross looked like a square grey archery target lying on the contours of the pale green valley side. I looked back to the gatehouse. The gate, twice my height, was crisscrossed with deep iron strips. Shallow troughs scarred between them where Insect mandibles had reached through to scrape the old timber. On my right stretched the Lowespass Road and ahead the reservoir glimmered, flat and silver. I was heading towards the Insects’ Paperlands covering the entire north bank of the river and as far as I could see into the distance, like a white sheet drawn over the land.

Strong gusts kept me flying low, no more than twenty metres from the ground where I could follow a direct path with the minimum effort. I flew over the crossroads with the smaller Glean Road along which troops arrive from western Awia. The Slake Cross monument, a smooth obelisk, stood there on grass scattered with yellow primroses-fragile blooms transplanted from the river bank before the flooding process began. Ointment made from them is a sovereign salve for wounds, and they had become a symbol of the massacre.

The uncompromising hills were always striding along the horizon, their stony summits rose to mid-sky and framed Lowespass valley. Further east at Miroir there were exposed tracts of moorland covered in peat bogs. Pondskaters V-rippled over black gullies of acidic stagnant water and mosquitoes whined over patches of spongy sphagnum moss among the heather. At this end of the valley the soil was thin. Thistles and ragwort sprouted in the clints and grikes of the limestone pavements. Caves riddled the valley floor. For thousands of years the rainwater has been carving faults in the rock into fathomless potholes and massive chambers, where drops precipitate strange and magnificent formations like the Throne Room columns. The Insects’ own tunnels join the system; it does no good to think about it.

Slake Cross town itself is built over a resurgence of an underground stream, so it never lacks fresh water. Frost has used dye to investigate the routes of the system. She started messing about with the water table and everyone watched, unnerved, as the level in the deep well rose to its very brim.

The road crossed uneven ground, slicing through the outcrops, and a larger quarry had scarred the side of a big knoll. I glided over its levelled area where carts were parked, completely covered with hardened white lime dust.

I passed some lime kilns in the side of a cutting; room-sized stone ovens with ragged chimneys, now cold and empty, with charcoal heaps growing damp outside their mouths. Frost had constructed them and employed the stokers; as soon as she knew she had enough cement she had moved them to work on the dam itself. A high wall protected a stand of pine trees, which grew relatively quickly and Frost used for building material.

On the north side of the road was the first of a series of static catapults called petraries, set into a concrete platform slick with pools of green algae. Its waxed wooden beam and sturdy foundations glistened, beaded with rain water. Its cable had been removed and the counterweight box was empty. Barbed wire rolls stacked haphazardly beside its pyramid of ammunition stones. Far off I could just see the nearest peel tower, a link in the chain stretching from Frass to Summerday to monitor Insect activity.

At the river I altered my course, heading upstream to the dam. Bulrushes bowed to the water’s creased surface as the wind ruffled through reed beds on the south bank. Its other bank was nothing but mud mashed with three-clawed footprints: Insects had stripped the vegetation bare.

Frost’s workings began and the ground changed abruptly. Her company had done nothing less than remodel the valley. Cart tracks criss-crossed the bank; water in their ruts reflected the sky. Broken shovels, dirty string and red striped ranging rods littered the ground, with abandoned workmen’s huts, empty burlap bags, splays of spilt gravel.

The overturned earth was glutted with beige specks-calcined bone fragments-some recognisable as ribs or skulls; the remains of generations of men and women. There were pieces of archaic armour and broken Insect shells, which don’t easily decay but weather to porous shards. The Insects have been creeping or swarming southward over fifteen hundred years. In response, we constantly move men and supplies to the front to stop them, on such a massive scale that I fancy all the Fourlands will eventually erode and end up here as a series of hills.

The river banks straightened, reinforced by walls of metal mesh boxes full of rubble. The river flowed more slowly but its level had hardly dropped. Frost couldn’t allow it to dry up because, since Insects can’t swim, the Oriole River was our main defence.

I approached the dam from the front, its stone face a gigantic sloping wall. The ends tapered down and curved towards me like horns. The outflow hole at its base looked like a giant blank eye. A fortified winch tower stood on the crest above it, holding the mechanism to raise the gate. The walkway ran through the tower, blocked with formidable portcullises on entry and exit, so Insects could not cross from the Paperlands.

Lightning and Eleonora were two tiny figures beside it, looking down from behind the split-timber fence. The wind’s speed was increasing over the smooth outflow platform. Air hit the wall and hurtled up its slanting surface. I lay with my wings outstretched and let it carry me-square blocks and mortar streaked down past my eyes-I could have filed my nails on them.

Along the whole length of the dam the wind went rocketing up the incline faster and faster until it burst vertically from the edge of the walkway around Lightning and Eleonora and up into the sky.

I soared rapidly past them, hearing the last exchange of their conversation, ‘-This could be the answer.’

‘Perhaps. I just wish that we’d thought of it before.’

I found the right balance to hang motionless above their heads. My shadow fell over them and my boot toes dangled at the level of their faces. They drew back and shaded their eyes, seeing me suspended in the middle of six metres of glorious wingspan.

The enormous lake formed from the backed-up Oriole River spread out behind the dam. On its north bank the water lapped and merged into the mazes of Insects’ paper cells; irregular, many-sided boxes ranging from the size of a cupboard to that of a house. Passages wound between them, some covered with pointed roofs, the rest open to the air. They looked like ceramic fungi, or geometric papier-mâché termite mounds.

The lake stood cold and mirror-reflective in the fresh morning light. A swathe of ripples dimpled across its middle, broken by white, angular peaks projecting from the surface: the tops of flooded Insect buildings.

Insects had built and abandoned walls five times as the water level rose. Their tops contoured the irregular lake margin like tree rings. Our old camp and the shakehole that destroyed it were somewhere on the lakebed, completely papered over.

I could just see the Insects’ new wall on dry ground ten kilometres distant, beyond the marshes. They had instinctively joined the new stretch to the immense Wall that seals them in, protecting their Paperlands from coast to coast of the entire continent.

I let the wind blow me backwards over the walkway. Little by little I flexed my wings closed and descended. I bent my knees, absorbed the shock, and landed in a crouch with my stiff feathers brushing the paved track on my either side.

I stood and bowed to Queen Eleonora Tanager. She kissed me on both cheeks and studied my face at leisure. ‘How are you, darling? Oh, Jant, flying makes you so cold.’

Her attar of roses perfume enveloped me, calling to mind the rose-scented letters that she used to send. They were always crinkled and salty, having been written on her most recent lover’s sweaty back. Eleonora was arguably the world’s most powerful mortal, but she was shod with scandal; she was no good at delicacy and even worse at tact.

I stepped away and looked at the reservoir’s breathtaking expanse. ‘It’s incredible,’ I said. ‘I admit I had my doubts. But from up here you can see the extent of Frost’s vision. I feel privileged to be part of it.’

Lightning, the Castle’s Archer, said seriously, ‘Well, I hope it is not just the latest of the thousand plans we have tried and had to put aside.’

Eleonora shivered. She was wearing Lightning’s long, fur-lined overcoat and, statuesque as she was, it nearly fit her. Her scale armour glittered underneath. Awians sometimes wear full plate, but prefer their traditional scale mail and I can understand why because plate is horribly restrictive.

She had tipped her helmet back from her head and it hung upside down from a strap showing its green satin lining. It had eye holes and a nosepiece in the Awian style. Its copper-pink horsehair crest rustled against her back and nearly touched the ground. Her chain mail coif and scale shirt were copper-coloured too, and damascened with a raised pattern of feathers matching her greaves and vambraces. She had pulled out her satin undershirt a little between each joint.

Eleonora had a wide, prominent face with a delicate, tip-tilted nose. I should say she was good-looking but she had a sly and filthy smile. Her ecru wings were naturally a different colour than her close-cropped dark hair, a phenomenon so rare I had never seen it before.

I said, ‘Queen Eleonora, I don’t know if you realise the time but you’re already late for the press conference and Frost sent me to call you back.’

‘Oh, I suppose we must attend,’ she said huskily. She set off along the walkway, between the sheer drop on one side and the lapping water on the other. She strode with a slow, shapely-legged pace; from the deliberate way she carried herself it was clear she was used to being looked at.

She continued to enthuse as we joined her. ‘If this works we have a way of destroying the Paperlands completely. The effect’s there, right before our eyes! The Insects move out of the flooded area, make a new Wall and retreat behind it. Of their own accord, without any resistance!’

‘Then we drain the area and in we go!’ I said.

‘Let us concentrate on clearing this patch first,’ said Lightning.

Eleonora smiled. ‘It all depends on infantry. We’ll position them while Frost empties the lake. Isn’t that right?’

‘Yes.’ Lightning indicated the town squatting in the mid-distance. A constant queue of mules and baggage carts plodded towards it, bringing provisions and tackle in preparation to set up the camp that would soon be surrounding it. Outriders protected the convoy, riding in formation at specified distances from the road as soon as they entered Lowespass. We had not yet mustered the main body of the cavalry, because they consume a tremendous amount of fodder. In the other direction a tumbrel cart of manure was setting out from the stables towards the pine plantation. ‘We will position twenty battalions of Select, wielding axes, there…and there.’

I said, ‘It’ll be very muddy once they start to march.’

Lightning said, ‘That is an understatement. Think what it’ll be like for the battalions in the rear after the first ten thousand have walked over it in front of them. We will need a whole division to lay duckboards as they go. We will progress slowly across the drained lakebed, keeping in line, chopping down the Insects’ buildings. Without…’ He savoured the words: ‘Without any expectation of casualties at all.’

‘I’ve never been in an Insect cell before,’ Eleonora said thoughtfully. ‘But they’re too close together to take horses through.’

Lightning said, ‘When we reach the new Wall, we will secure the area, continue to dismantle the cells and bring up some trebuchets. The Queen’s lancers will patrol and act as rearguard.’

The wind was ruffling Lightning’s dark blond feathers and making them stand upright. Irritated, he shook his wings out and folded them tightly. I can’t believe he gave Eleonora his coat. Doesn’t he know her reputation? I looked at him carefully, thinking that even he must be aware of the ribald rumours. Eleonora was the only child of Lord Governor Osprey Tanager, who was killed by Insects twenty years ago, the last of that family. When she was not at the front she held court in Rachiswater Palace, but as soon as she had rebuilt her family’s manor house she intended to restore the capital of Awia to Tanager, as it was in 1812 before the Rachiswaters took the throne.

The lake reflected the banded mackerel sky, with thin clouds the grey-purple colour of an artist’s paintbrush water. Trochanter, the morning star, was growing fainter. Below, the surface of the river winding east towards Lowespass Fortress had an oily, rainbow scum of old poison washing out from the Wall.

We crossed a bridge over the dry overspill chute and descended to the shore. The two soldiers guarding the access to the walkway uncrossed their spears promptly and we passed between them.

A beacon basket full of twigs and hay stood next to a large bell on a pole and my semaphore device set at neutral. Their metal stands prevented Insects eating them. Eleonora’s bodyguard of four Tanager Select lancers sat obediently at attention on their warhorses. She appraised them out of habit: their embossed armour, the woollen cloaks hanging to their stirrups, their helmets with blue and white striped horsehair crests and fluttering muslin streamers. They love ornamentation, do Awians.

Eleonora’s horse waited between them. The silver inlaid armour on his head was richer than anything I owned. The chafron plate beaked over his nose came to a point; the crinet covering his neck was steel openwork, scallop-edged like batwings. Lightning’s horse was drab in comparison. Eleonora greeted them enthusiastically, ‘Hello, Perlino! Hello Balzan!’

Perlino looked skittish at my scent. He put his ears back and flared his nostrils imperiously. ‘I don’t like you, either,’ I told him.

Eleonora patted his neck and he nuzzled her hand.

I said, ‘It isn’t my fault most horses are afraid that Rhydanne want to chase them down and eat them.’

‘Maybe I should take Perlino to Darkling and give him a sniff of pure Rhydanne for comparison. Then he’d appreciate you.’ She fitted her toe into a stirrup, swung herself onto the horse. She sat straight, holding the reins loosely. Perlino high-stepped with his strong front legs, in rein-back, then Eleonora made him pirouette.

She leaned from the saddle and prodded my chest, ‘Race you!’ She tapped Perlino’s flank and was away down the track. Her bodyguard looked at each other and followed suit, standing on their stirrups, their lances tilting backwards in their saddle rests.

Lightning hesitated, surprised, then stepped up astride Balzan, drew his reins left, turned and sped after her. They picked up the pace from a gallop to a charge; I watched them disdainfully until they were just dots above clouds of spray. Then I sighed, shook my wings open and ran to take off.