Steph Swainston - No Present Like Time

“Tirrick,” said Lightning. “I know the type. Privileged but strident and embittered, the youngest son of a minor noble.” He licked his fingers and held them out of the window to judge the breeze. Then his fingertips rasped over the arrow fletchings and settled on the string. Tirrick angled his dagger across Vendace’s scrawny neck and called, “We’ll kill one of these for every shot you loose!”

Vendace rolled his eyes and stamped his foot. His brown arms were rigid by his sides.

I said, “The boxes are full of money. I think the swordsmen will take it to the ship, with the senators as hostages to shield themselves. It’s our chance to escape. Oh fuck, no it isn’t…”

Around twenty swordsmen ran out of the colonnade, carrying lamps and oil jugs with spouts. Lightning drew on them but saw Tirrick’s blade bite against Vendace’s skin, and didn’t loose. The guards around the library door let them speed through. Crashes came up from below, smashing pottery, rustling and tearing.

A heavy thump shook the floor as the men pulled a bookshelf over. I heard them kicking the scrolls into heaps. “They’re going to burn the library!” I darted to the stairs and called down, “Stop! In the name of San and the will of god. How dare you?”

A voice shrugged, “Come out and be executed or stay there and char.”

But these are books-all the books of Tris. “You must not,” I yelled desperately.

A blue-gray twist rose from the stairwell like cigarette smoke. Within seconds it widened to fill the whole well. From the window I saw the swordsmen pouring out onto the mosaic, shoving the guards back in their haste to escape. “The fire’s caught! Ready yourselves, they have to surrender. It’s going up!”

Smoke billowed past me in a thick stream and drifted along the ceiling. Lightning released the tension on his bowstring. “We have to break out. There are a dozen fencing masters. We can deal with them, but the senators will die.”

“The books!” I wailed. “I can’t leave-”

“Don’t be stupid!”

“Maybe there’s another way down.” Gray wreaths shrouded the rafters completely and were descending extremely quickly to fill the room. I fumbled through a stack of leather-bound books on the table and slipped them into my coat pockets. I picked up the lantern. “Wait here. I’ll check the far end.”

Lightning began coughing loudly. I called, “Stoop low. Slouch down under it.” I had been in a burning building before and, as far as I knew, he had not. But my lungs hurt as I sucked smoke and I started choking more than him.

I had to save the books, as many as I could carry. I strode down the aisle snatching them from the shelves. I stuffed one in my waistband, another in my belt. I had no time to translate the titles; I couldn’t see with the smoke stinging my eyes. I didn’t know what I was snatching. I piled them frantically in the crook of my left arm, discarded a heavy tome, selected two more haphazardly. I thought, I’m rescuing a handful of volumes at random to represent the total knowledge of an entire culture. Which were most worthwhile? Were these engineering, cookery or poetry? Or even bloody fiction? I had no way of judging. I spat out the cloying smoke and the stack buckled in my arms. I reached the end of the library-which was just a blank wall-and I dropped all the books with a series of thuds.

Recognizable but horribly out of place, gray mottled, fibrous drapes strung between the last two bookcases: Insect paper. They looked folded but were as hard as concrete. They curved up from the shelves and blurred into the smoke creeping down from the beams.

Two long, brown forelegs emerged from the nest. The Insect’s black spiny foot clicked down onto the floor between my boots, and its three claws articulated shut. I backed into the opposite bay.

The Insect ducked its triangular head and slipped out from between the bookcases. Its eyes’ tessellations reflected the lamp-lit swirling smoke. It brushed a fringe on its front right leg over them. It must have pulled out Wrenn’s rapier, because the hole through its thorax was now a deep concavity filled with smooth new shell. It had sloughed its skin and was even bigger than I remembered. The high joints of its back legs loomed out of the smoke.

Two club-shaped black palps shuffled like a pair of hands rubbing together. They retracted and the scissor jaws opened and shut. It lifted a foreleg and cleaned its single crooked antenna through filaments inside its knee.

Lightning flexed his bow and spoke with his lips to the string, “Step aside.” Through the smoke he was just a silhouette blurred by the tears streaming from my eyes. I pressed my coat cuff to my nose and mouth. In another thirty seconds the room would be full and I could hear crackling from below.

“Wait!” The Insect stood still, close enough for me to see the scars and impressions I had made with my axe. A row of black spines four-wide supported the upper surface of its striped abdomen. The pale underside pulsed as it curled its abdomen under itself, pumping air through its spiracles which were wide open.

“Wait. It doesn’t like the smoke.”

Its antenna flicked forward, sensing for the clean air. It jolted into an involuntary crouch. “It’s going to run-let it pass!”

The Insect leapt. It hurtled past Lightning, stretched its full length and reached over the handrail, down into the stairwell. Its back sword-shaped femurs kicked and claws scrabbled on the blistering varnish, then it disappeared into the gusting smoke. I ran after it instantly; Lightning seemed bewildered so I grasped his arm and urged him to the steps.

We took deep breaths and plunged down. I patted my hair-it felt so hot I thought it was alight. Lightning held his hand over his mouth and the tip of his bow rattled off the ceiling. The steep steps were opaque with smoke. Perspiration and tears trickled down my face.

We stumbled to the ground floor, onto ten centimeters of fallen books. They slid over each other, making the floor slippery. I led Lightning around the tall shapes of leaning shelves. We crushed scorching scrolls underfoot with a sound like old Insect shell. Even now I was torn with the desire to rake them up. The fire’s crackling built into a steady sibilance and its raw orange light leapt behind the smoke, illuminating the surfaces of the billowing wreaths.

Lines of yellow flame spread between the parquet blocks. By the windows, flames began to lengthen and bend as air flow sucked them out of the shutters.

“Can’t breathe,” I said weakly. “Where’s…the fucking door?” The unbearable heat singed my feathers, my reddened skin stung. The pages of open books on the floor around us were curling and turning brown spontaneously. I saw one burst into flame.

I pointed to the rectangle of pale morning light; we rushed through without readying our weapons. Getting out of the smoke was all that mattered.

The men who had been guarding the door were spilt on the mosaic in a fan of visceral blood. We crossed the threshold with smoke pouring out above us. One had died quickly, eyes open, from a horrible gash that opened his belly to the sternum. Another crumpled in a red pool so thick the Insect must have severed an artery, though I couldn’t see the wound. The arm of a third man lay beside a rapier some way off.

The Insect did not pause to clean its mandibles. It was confused by the scents and invigorated by the fresh air. Its six feet left prints, its knee joints bunched and separated as it dashed toward the senators and swordsmen. Their white clothes reflected in its directionless eyes. Their mouths were round in astonishment. Every one of the swordsmen bolted, including Tirrick, leaving the senators in the Insect’s path.