The Modern World (14 page)

She turned the last card in the line.

‘That one … thatsh the jug of beer.’

Rawney said, ‘Well, that has to be a lucky card for Rhydanne.’

‘Mm.’

‘So everything will turn out well,’ Cyan exclaimed, getting carried away. ‘I’ll be successful in making my own way in the world. It’s beer not Micawater wine!’

‘There isn’t a card for wine,’ I murmured.

‘I’ll learn who I am. If it really did depend on blood, Lightning would know me better, wouldn’t he? I might have inherited one or two family traits, but I’ll rediscover them myself!’

So you should, I thought. My mind’s sky had thoroughly clouded over. I closed my eyes.

Cyan leant and whispered in my ear, ‘I’m living my own life from now on, where and how I choose to. Tell Daddy to forget about me. In a couple of hundred years, he will. It’s the only way.’

I woke up. The pub was unlit and deserted. An uneasy lamplight shining under the landlord’s door illuminated the shapes of chairs placed on the tables and textured lines drawn by the broom in the stickier patches on the floor. Towels hung over the pump handles.

Shit. I am absolutely pissed … and I’ve lost Cyan. She’s given me the slip. Oh, shit, I had her, and I … she … Rawney got me drunk! The bastard, and I fell for it!

I staggered over to the bar and stuck my head under a tap, pumped water into my face. The landlord must have left me sleeping there while he closed up the bar around me. Of course, he wouldn’t have dared to wake an Eszai.

I wrestled with the door bolts. Outside, the misty drizzle gave everything a slick sheen. I turned my coat collar up, but it soaked through the denim, wetting me as effectively as pouring rain.

Galt was very dark, none of the lamps were lit and the shops’ upper stories had closed their shutters. All I had to see by were occasional chinks of light between them.

*

Now I was back to playing hide and seek with the little cow across the entire city.

All the oil lamps stood disused, their glasses fly-spotted and filthy. Whale oil was scarce these days, reserved for lighting homes, not streets. It had soared in price since some enormous sea snakes had taken up residency in the ocean. Their main source of food seemed to be whales.

The paving of the plaza outside the bar was covered in a sheen of water, mixed with mud trekked in from the towpath. I looked down, at the palimpsest of footprints spreading out from the door. Could it be possible to track Cyan? I searched around and found the fine mud drawn into a distinctive print of a thick-soled boot, too small for a man. Those are Cyan’s expensive boots. I followed them slowly, careful not to miss any. They were few and far between, but if they were hers she seemed to have walked along the towpath.

I carried on, beside the dark canal, shunning the varicose hookers and their crisp pimps revealed by the night. The mud squashed under my boot soles. I was heading east towards Old Town, but I wasn’t out of Galt yet, and horrible sights loomed in alleys and alcoves. I passed quickly by a whore with bare breasts and ragged shorts, her razor ribs showing through the stretch marks on her sides.

I lost the trail under furrowed bike ruts and glanced all around, overly aware of how Rhydanne I looked. I learnt how to track on visits to the mountains. Veering towards the canal, a smooth leather imprint with a firm, mannish step could be Rawney’s. Yes, there was one partially obscuring Cyan’s smudged trace. I continued, thinking; I really tried not to be like a Rhydanne in Hacilith but other people’s expectations kept throwing me back on it. I often found myself playing out the solitary self-centred flightiness they expected. But what the fuck, it meant they gave me leeway. They might be patronising but they also didn’t expect too much, and they left me free to do what I liked.

There was a strong smell of fried food grease, as if every citizen had scoffed a newspaper-full of chips, then belched simultaneously. I passed
out of Galt into Old Town. The canal basin has obliterated most of it, but the remaining buildings, replaced many times over, are still so close together there isn’t room to fit one more between them. Awian towns are sometimes destroyed by Insects and rebuilt in one go, but here old buildings persist, with a mishmash of modern styles between them. New houses spring up in the wake of fires and the residents continually improve their city so much of Old Town was quite new. I ran under the merchants’ tall houses. Their baroque gables sprouted pulleys and platforms to bring in goods they store in their own attics. I walked by the mooring of the River Bus that shuttles to Marenna Dock on the west bank. I passed a roast chestnut stand littered with paper bags and dripping with rain. I cut past Inhock Stables, making the rum-sellers’ pannier donkeys bray uneasily. Horses were tethered here, since they weren’t allowed in Old Town’s narrow streets.

I passed the wharfinger’s office and came to a deserted part of the navigation, heading towards a footbridge. I swore as I walked; the whisky was smearing all my thoughts together and the rain was getting worse. All storms arrive first in Hacilith from the sea, all seasons seemed to start here too, and the spring rain fell with a vengeance.

The gutters drained into the soupy canal basin where timber narrow boats were moored. Some were impossibly shiny, others rotting hulks. Several were a full thirty metres, others no more than boxes. Their curtains were closed and they were silent. The darkness muted their paint to different shades of grey.

I went under the bridge, lit by the lamps of a narrow boat moored on its own. The tracks ran into a mass of scuffed ground, so many other prints I couldn’t tell what had happened at all. Some led back towards Galt; Rawney’s was among them but Cyan’s weren’t. She had stopped here – or the men had carried her.

I searched for her tracks further away, my task made easier by the lights on the boat. In fact, the rotund lamps at its prow and stern were glowing as brightly as if there was a party on board, but it was quiet. Who would desert a boat and leave its lamps burning?

The small barge was bottle green with red panels and brass trim. Its tiller was polished with use and wound with ribbons, and by it hung a bell to sound instructions to the locksmen. I casually looked down to its bow, just above the level of the quayside paving stones. Red and white diamonds like sweets decorated the top of its transom, either side of the nameplate that read:
Tumblehome
. Underneath in small white capitals: Carmine Dei. Registered: Old Town.

I crouched down to the leaded windows. A rug had been tacked
over them on the inside. I tapped the glass and called, ‘Cyan! Hey, Cyan? Rawney?’ Silence.

I listened, aware of all the sounds of the night – at a distance the noise of Old Town had merged into a low murmur. Ducklings were cheeping, somewhere in the undergrowth on the far bank. I called, questioningly, cheerfully, politely, and finally with a firm demand, but it only produced more silence.

I’m the Emperor’s Messenger and I’m not standing for this! I grabbed the rail on its roof and jumped onto the flat ledge running all the way round the boat. It bobbed slightly and I felt its keel bump off the fetid slime of the canal bed. I really cannot stand boats. I could all too easily imagine it turning turtle, pitching me into the black water. I edged towards the stern, feeling my boots grip on the grit embedded in its paint.

I stepped down onto the stern deck, ducked under the tiller, and pushed open the varnished, cupboard-like doors. I wedged into the little entrance. The air inside was warm and stuffy.

I looked down into a long rectangular room. A draught of wind blew in past me and started tinkling some capiz shell mobiles. Discs of coloured glass clattered against the windows. A hanging lantern with moons and stars cut out of its sides sent their projections spinning round the walls.

From a futon, which was a piled mess of quilts and sheepskins, projected a slender blue-white arm, and a limp hand hanging down. I gasped. Cyan!

She sat upright among cushions, her head lolled back and away from me, her legs apart and her skirt rucked up. A thin man lay on the floor at her feet, head back and foam dried into a crust around his mouth. He was stone dead.

OK. This is nothing to do with me.

Yes, it is. She’s
Lightning’s daughter
!

I stretched a leg down the steps and shuffled in on my backside. The dead man was lying wedged between the wall and the futon. He must have had a fit and thrashed around because he’d kicked a potbellied stove free of its tin flue. It stood at an angle on its platform. I turned him over; he was so stiff that when I propped him on his side, his arm stuck up in the air. His blank eyes no longer stared at the ceiling but at me instead. I checked his dog tag – his name was Sharny. As I did so, something fell to the floor and rolled across the rag-rug. I leant down and felt around until my fingers closed on a glass hypodermic. Sharny’s sleeves were unbuttoned; I pushed one up. His arm was covered in red pinpoints, packed so densely his veins had collapsed,
looking like they were open to the air. The skin inside his elbow was juicy with infection.

Shit, shit, shit. Not
cat
, surely? Not
Cyan
? When I use, I try to space out the tracks so that they can’t be seen when I’m at the podium, to keep the veins fat and easy to hit. Sharny, on the other hand, had sunk lower than the dregs.

I turned Cyan’s face towards me gently. Her eyes were rolled back, only showing white slivers under half-closed lids. Her lips were blue, she was hardly breathing; just a little sigh every so often. Two sips of the air, another ragged sigh with a high-pitched whistling sound. From elbow to shoulder her right arm was a solid bruise. I loosened the tourniquet above her elbow, hooked my thumbnail in it and pushed it down. I could only see one needle mark in the crook of her arm but that didn’t necessarily mean this was her first time.

I tried to ignore the thought of her fast dropping into unconsciousness, helplessly watching Sharny’s avid experimentation with the needle in the back of his cold hand.

I pressed my finger inside her fingers, waiting for a grasp response but nothing happened. ‘Cyan, can you hear me? Breathe. Breathe in. And out. Again. Keep going. Can you squeeze my finger? No? OK …’

I must get her outside, into fresh air. I lifted her; she folded like silk, gave every impression of being dead. I laid her completely relaxed body on the bedspread and wrapped it around her.

A table beside the stove caught my attention. It carried a decanter of water, a spoon, a razor and an unfolded paper of fine white powder standing in a peak. Some had been nicked away.

I recognised it immediately. It called me like a lover and the next second I was down on my hands and knees. Don’t look at it! I thought; steady! Turn away. If I so much as touch it I’ll be hooked again. I’ll be hooked before I know it! Where did Cyan get cat? Where the fuck did she get so
much
? I felt sick and giddy. I knew I was going to pick it up. I moved with no volition of my own; the drug there on the table had more control over my limbs than I did.

Let me explain what craving is. Craving is when your friend manages to talk you out of the corner and gets you to put the knife down. Craving is when you ask to be locked in, because otherwise you’d fly all night from the court to score. Craving is when you wear your fingernails to bloody stumps trying to pick the lock.

What was she doing, playing with cat? But they hadn’t called it cat or scolopendium. What was their word? Jook?
Jook, don’t you know
,
it’s the latest thing, all the rage
. If I just take a little bit no one will mind. The Emperor won’t be able to tell. Shut up and help Cyan. I realised I had been holding my breath for so long my ribs were hurting. I swallowed hard, then stood up. Very slowly and judiciously I refolded the fat wrap of cat and dropped it into my pocket, where it burned.

I bundled Cyan out of the double door, hoisted her onto my shoulder and jumped onto the bank in a bound that set the pool of lamplight lapping up and down. It slid up the inside of the bridge’s brick arch, then quickly down to the mooring loops. Viscid water sloshed around the
Tumblehome’
s ridged hull.

I lay her on the ground and checked her. She had stopped breathing. Her eyes had receded into round hollows as if her skull was rising to the surface. Shit. This isn’t just a dead faint, it’s respiratory failure. I tilted her head back, fingered her mouth open, pinched her nose and blew into her mouth. Her chest rose. I rocked back on my heels watching it fall gently, then blew again.

Her lips were soft, but her mouth was rank with beer, smoke and the metallic taste of death. I had to blow hard to overcome the resistance from the air inside her; my cheeks prickled and my jaw started aching. Her hair brushed my cheek every time I put my head down, but it stank of stale cigarettes. She was only a child, just as when I saved her from the shipwreck. Her chest rose, I looked sideways down the length of her body, between her breasts falling back from the bodice collar as she exhaled.

She twitched, but it must have been nerves, because she definitely wasn’t anywhere near consciousness. She gasped and began to breathe for herself again. Thank fuck. ‘Well done, girl,’ I said as I wrapped her up. ‘Keep breathing.’

I had been working so hard keeping her alive that I hadn’t been aware of my surroundings. Footsteps were running over the bridge. A boot ground on the path in front of me. I realised I’d seem like a mugger hunched over his victim, so I looked up – into the baby-blue eyes of Rawney Carron.