No Present Like Time (7 page)

The local resentment of Awian refugees was worse than I thought. It made me angry—they weren’t to blame for being made homeless by the Insect swarm. In fact, I thought guiltily, the swarm had largely been my fault. I knew that Tern was trying to persuade the Wrought armorers back to continue their vital tradition in her manor. Her blacksmiths worked extremely hard wherever they had been forced to settle.

The Swindlestock Bar was dead center of the artists’ quarter. It was built inside the mouth of a gigantic Insect tunnel, like a gray hood with a rough, deeply shadowed papier-mâché texture. The tunnel had been cut from the Paperlands and shipped south for building material; the nightclub’s front projected from its opening, with two stories of green-glazed bricks and black beams. Paper curved down to the ground, looking like a huge worm cast. Windows had been cut in it. Outside the door, a sloughed Insect skin hung in an iron gibbet, its six spiked legs sticking out. It was transparent brown and gnarled; it revolved slowly, a dead weight in the sea breeze.

I know some clubs in Awndyn that could be described as meat markets. This was more of a delicatessen. Green light so pale it was almost gray reflected on the water pooled between the cobbles. The vague and eerie light came from cylindrical glass jars by the club’s open door—larvae lamps—lanterns full of glow-worm larvae. The doorman picked one up and shook it to make it brighter.

The brewers nodded at the doorman and walked straight in. Inside, the floor was malachite-colored tiles, the decor ebony with a matte shine. In a deep fireplace sea-driftwood burned with copper-green sparks. A lone musician up on the stage was salivating into a saxophone. He played exceptionally; he must have been one of Swallow’s students. The larvae lamps emphasized his sallow face as he leaned across their shifting light. He paused, recognizing me, and his eyebrows sprang right into his hairline, then he started up another low, sexy drone, playing his very best as if I was a talent spotter.

The brewers vanished into the press of bodies around the stage. Dunnock turned to me and pointed at the ceiling. “Check upstairs. They ask to see track marks,” he added, agitated. “You’re not wearing a sword.”

I raised a hand to calm him. “I don’t need a sword to arrest the likes of Bawtere.”

“Wow. They’re never going to believe this back at the vats.”

“Keep it a secret!” I said. I elbowed through the dancers’ slow jazz wave to the stairs. They creaked as I climbed them. At the top, a bull’s-eye lantern swung in front of my face, startling me, and a voice rasped, “Oo’s that? One for Cinna?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Oo is it?”

“His boss.” I deliberately looked straight at the lantern because I know that my Rhydanne eyes reflect. Cinna’s flunky must have seen them shine as two flat gold discs. His chuckle stopped abruptly.

“All right, Comet,” he whispered. “You want t’see Cinna?”

“Of course,” I said.

“Just…wait a minute, please…Shit, a fucking immortal…He’s a fucking immortal…” The voice trailed off, and then returned. “Come through, Comet.”

He beckoned me along the dingy corridor, then through a beautiful door inset with opal to a big black and white room. In the middle of the square chamber stood a vast carved table. Its rectilinear designs were echoed on printed six-panel paper screens that folded like concertinas along the dim walls.

Cinna Bawtere had no friends, only collaborators. He was fat but suave, with a receding hairline and flabby, incandescently red lips like a couple of cod fish lying in the bottom of a boat. He had a dueling scar like a dimple by his mouth, suggesting that long ago his skin hadn’t been pasty, his belly protruding and his chin double. But these days Cinna could get out of breath playing dominoes. People worked for him now, and his big hands had lost all the cuts and calluses they had when he was a sailor. He was a tactless, feckless, reckless individual with an ego the size of Awia and a conscience the size of a boiled sweet. Cinna’s extras included a cutting-edge understanding of chemistry as it applied to narcotics, and of the law and how to break it. His wings were speckled; every fifth feather had been bleached. He wore new blue jeans and a patterned cherry silk dressing gown. Like so many ugly men, he was fond of good clothes.

I sat in an engraved chair and hooked my wings over the low back. “How great a sense of hearing do the walls have?”

“It’s all right. We’re totally alone.” Cinna gave me a hard stare from the other side of the table. Eventually he said, “You haven’t visited for a long time, Comet.”

“Four years isn’t a long time to me.”

He creased into his chair. “By god, and you look Just The Same as you did when I first saw you, twenty years back.” He gave a little smile. “I thought you’d forgotten me, because I hadn’t heard any word since the Battle Of Awndyn.”

“So how is business?”

Cinna raised his hands to indicate the shadowy room. “As good as you see it.”

“Cinna, I’m here to tell you that I won’t turn a blind eye to your dealing any longer.”

His round shoulders sagged. He scooped a packet of cigarettes from the table, poked one out and lit it. “I’d been expecting this. So it’s finished? The game’s over?”

“If you continue and you’re caught, you can’t invoke my name; I won’t help you. If you keep selling contraband to Mist’s sailors and she complains to me, the next time you see an Eszai he’ll be with a fyrd guard to seize you.”

“Now, Jant, how disappointing after all this time!”

I shrugged. “I want you to go back to legitimate trade. Why not?”

Cinna placed both hands flat on his polished table. “Because it’s Not That Easy! This latest ‘paper tax’ from the Castle caused an uproar in Hacilith. You should hear the merchants muttering. All the money’s sent to Awia.”

“You know there’s a worthwhile cause. We need to break down the Insects’ Paperlands there.”

“Well, why can’t that kingdom look after itself?”

“For god’s sake, they’re doing all they can. Awia will repay its debts in full; you mortals just can’t see the long term.”

“Oh, I understand,” said Cinna. “But I hope Eszai realize how quickly Plainslanders forget Insects once the immediate threat cools off.”

“Look, you have to stop dealing. In Hacilith now, the punishment for pushing cat is death. I’ve seen dealers broken on the wheel. In Awia they just jail them for life.”

He nodded. “Well, ergot pastilles are all the kids want these days. They have no taste.” He wallowed over to a side table where there was a decanter of port and some crystal glasses. He poured one for me.

“To the Emperor,” I said, and drank.

He topped up my glass. “And another toast. To all the kids who ever sang protest songs against the old king’s draft.”

I put the glass down. “It’s the Empire’s war,” I said evenly. “Let’s talk business, not nostalgia. I know how you feel about the past but I have to obey the Emperor’s command.”

“You singled me out and saved me because I was an Independent, Deregulated Pharmaceutical Retailer,” he said. It was true; I wanted a dealer and I found Cinna trustworthy, who owed me his life and his livelihood. Once I got my fingers around the edges of his ego, he was a business partner more loyal than a fyrd captain. “Do you know it’s twenty years ago almost to the day, when you appeared with a handful of draft notices,” he continued. Worry lines on his forehead came and went as he talked. “Nailed on the lifeboat house door—lists of families to contribute to Tornado’s division. My mother wanted to hide us but I knew how relentless you were. She showed us a trapdoor to the coal cellar, but, god-who-left-us, what use is that against someone who knows every Trick In The Book?”

I swirled beeswing in the glass, embarrassed on his behalf that he would rather hide than fight.

“You took my brother. He was killed at Lowespass. All they could find of him to bury was a handful of feathers; the Insects cemented the rest into their Wall.”

“Many people die in Lowespass.”

Cinna grimaced and picked at one of the spots around his mouth. “Jant, I remember we had to line up in the courtyard—you were there checking names off on a list. You looked younger than me and I hated you, the way schoolkids hate swots. You looked as calm as a merchant checking sacks of corn, a buyer at a livestock market—”

“As if I’d done it a thousand times before.”

“Yeah. It made me want to strangle you, and you looked so frail I was sure I could. My brother knew what I was thinking; he elbowed me in the ribs and said Comet’s Two Hundred Years Old! Knowing that I wouldn’t stand a chance. Then he climbed onto the cart bench with the rest of the stevedores and that was the last I ever saw of him. Taken away to the General Fyrd. Every one of the five hundred men in his morai were slaughtered.

“Well now I’ve witnessed Insects flatten Awndyn I can understand why we need to keep the Front—but back then I’d never seen one and it took me fifteen years to recover. Your frozen age is so misleading, it makes us mortals underestimate you. You can run faster than a deer, but you just looked like a Bloody College Kid.

“We know the effect scolopendium has on the people who trade it, let alone the users. I haven’t sought friendship or lovers—just money—thinking that at any second the governor’s fyrd could snatch me away.”

I glanced up from the mediocre port. Cinna was not known to be a man of great imagination. “What are your plans?” I asked. I knew he would find it hard to relinquish his beautiful suite. He had become too much of a
bon viveur.
He was too fat to return to life as a sailor, honest or otherwise. “Are you holding any now?”

“I’ve a quarter kilo of Galt White to sell, and that will be The Last Deal. Maybe.”

“Let me take it off your hands.”

“Oh ho!” He pointed a finger over the top of his wine glass. “I thought there was another reason for this visit! Once an addict, always an addict!”

“That’s not true, Cinna. Besides, it’s not for my use.”

“Well, I don’t know anybody else who buys in quarter-k quantities. Not even Lady Lanare when she’s poisoning her whole family.”

“Are you selling or not?”

Cinna chortled.

“It’ll be the last time I ever buy cat.”

Cinna chortled with wicked glee.

He unlocked a panel in the wall and scooped out a large white paper envelope. He gave it a shake to settle its contents, then pushed it to me across the table.

I rubbed it, feeling the fine powder inside. “Go first,” I said.

He held his palms up. “You know I don’t do that. I can’t stand the hallucinations.”

“This time you do.”

He dipped his finger in it. “Damn you, Eszai.”

I knew that my tolerance would have decreased, so I took just the edge of a fingernail full and licked it. It spread on my tongue, tasted numb, slightly grassy with a crystalline metal-salt edge. This was snap-condensed. Fuck, it was good. I closed my eyes in shame as I realized what I’d done. It was five long years since I last tasted scolopendium.

“You look like the Archer tasting fine wines. It’s Pure As Darkling Snow,” he assured me, hands wide in a ham actor’s gesture. “We make it using your technique, no one else can match the quality.”

“Yes, this will help. At least until we reach the island,” I said. Cinna gave me an odd look. I explained rapidly, “No, not Grass Isle, I mean Tris. Mist told us a strange tale of a new island three months’ east of Awndyn. She tells of a fascinating culture and mouth-watering fruit like, like apples that look like pine cones. Six months’ leave from the Castle! Unless it’s some kind of mirage caused by sailors drinking their own piss. Think what it means, and not just for bored Eszai, for everyone!…But, knowing Ata, we won’t make it out of the bay before something awful happens.”

I huffed out a breath and stood up. The weight of the envelope seemed correct. I had a feel for it, like a longtime card sharp knows by touch how many cards are in a deck. I dropped it into my satchel and reached for Cinna’s packet of cigarettes, slid them toward me and pocketed them too. “Thanks. Now may I have a lantern? I’m needed back at the manor house.”

“Ah-ah. That’s a thousand pounds please, Comet. And unfortunately checks drawn on the defunct Bank of Wrought are not welcome at Bawtere Unlimited Imports.”

I haggled down this outrageous price, that would only be right for Lowespass, to a more reasonable eight hundred and eighty pounds. I counted out nine hundred from my wallet and Cinna swept the money away.

I noticed that, out of the pound coins he gave me for change, the majority were Awian, embossed with Tanager’s swan. From the other three of the Fourlands’ mints, there was only one each with the Summerday scallop shell and Hacilith fist, and a couple of the Eske mint’s “daffodils.” Currency was supposed to be produced at the same rate throughout the Fourlands, as advised by the Castle. I hoped that Awia hadn’t responded to its adversity by minting more money. It would be a typical Zascai way of thinking, a short-term solution that would just drag Awia further into the mire.

Cinna’s bristle-chinned henchman returned with the bull’s-eye lantern, muttering, “Thought Rhydanne could see in t’ dark.”

Cinna is one of the few dealers I know who has not ended up using. They take to it because drug-dealing is so wrong and they find that scolopendium is a very tempting, potent salve for all misdemeanors and open emotional wounds. However, Cinna had always stayed at the money-worshiping stage, a bit like myself when I lived in Hacilith. He was from one of the Morenzian villages and had worked hard to escape. I didn’t blame him; the Morenzian industries, law courts and markets were all in the city. The intellect of the country was leached by Hacilith’s University and its Moren Grand Theater monopolized the fame, leaving the surrounding villages lackluster and dull.

Cinna knew that everything he is or owns he has built himself on a precarious base. He is always waiting for the tiny push from an Eszai or governor that will send the whole card tower tumbling back into the dirt. “Taking cat is a waste of all-too-precious time,” he said. He held the door open for me and added, “But I have thought what immortality truly means, Jant. I’d do drugs too.”