Steph Swainston - No Present Like Time

Tarragon clenched the wheel, rocked her body forward and slammed her foot to the floor.

The towers of Vista Marchan shimmered and cohabited the space where only the flourishing grassland was supposed to be. A warm wind blew directly from them, drying my eyes. Nowhere in the Fourlands has such a parched, relentless wind. Tarragon glanced at me, complaining, “I’ve been looking everywhere. What’s happening, Jant? I swam into harbor and saw stones falling through the water around the hull of your boat.”

“We’re under attack. The other ship’s throwing them. Rayne’s on the Petrel -and so am I.”

Tarragon gnashed her Shark’s teeth angrily. Her shape flickered violently between being a prissy lady and a vicious fish. “What a waste of scholarship! I will flip their boat into flotsam!”

“It’s even worse: the library’s on fire-one thousand years of wisdom lost forever. We’ll never know what essential works are gone for good. Mist Ata’s dead. Oh-was that gargantuan shark you?”

“Yes. I followed a schooner that I sent to sail alongside your ship on a Shift sea. You asked me for help so I chartered it as a guard.”

“God, Tarragon; you’re big.”

“Big-ish. Do you want me to bite your enemies’ keel out from under them?”

“Even if you do, the pirates ashore will keep fighting and they’re killing the islanders. The Trisians will still resist the Castle after this. No amount of talking will bring them around because after Gio’s lies they’re never going to believe any Fourlander again. We can’t win. The only way I can think to take control of this riot is to stage a spectacle so incredible that both sides forget their differences. Sea kraits live far from land, don’t they?”

Tarragon said, “Yes. They wouldn’t eat humans, not worth the energy. They live in the deep ocean; when they slough their skins they scratch themselves on the continent’s roots shelving up from the abyss.”

“Well, I want a sea krait.”

“You want to save them! Are you sure?”

“Only if they agree to the deal. The stinguish told me their ocean dried up, and you said they needed a safe haven. Kraits can come to live in the Fourlands’ sea on the condition that they obey me.”

Ibraced myself as we rushed onto the wide bridge. Our wheels hummed as they sped over the irregular surface. I could see the striations where individual Insects had added their masticated wood pulp. The bridge’s stringy supports of hardened spit whooshed by on both sides. Looking between them I saw the savanna drop below us as we labored up to the apex.

We crested the summit buffeted by Vista’s breeze that blows across worlds, and for one glorious moment I could see the whole of the sprawling market.

Then it had gone; we were in the world of Vista. The wind howled through the top of the bridge. Below us, it blew the top layer of flaking sand across the wasteland as fine crystal dust, drifting onto high dunes against the base of the sea wall.

Many white tracks converged on Vista Marchan city; from up here they resembled the rays of a star. Its cluster of pale blocky towers appeared suspended in mirages and pooled in bent light across the entire wasteland.

I had not seen any place like this before. We descended past the towers that I realized were higher than the Throne Room spire. I was overawed and shaking as we rolled to a halt on top of Vista’s great sea wall. On either side of us were empty, sand-choked dockyards and piers with long, dry barnacled ladders that stopped short of the ground.

Ilooked out over the salt flats, to see Epsilon as a translucent illusion, a lush plain and thriving market lying at forty-five degrees through the white wasteland.

Tarragon said, “Aren’t Insects fascinating creatures? That’s the Vista desert. It used to be the ocean floor.” Her car’s wheels pulled the grit into tracks as we drove along the top of the immense wall. The salt-bleached streets were devoid of movement. The only living things in Vista were myself and Tarragon; her fin annoyingly brushed my thigh as she operated the controls. Paper Insect cells meshed between and hung like gray lace around the worn concrete buildings.

“I’m sorry to bring you so far,” she added. “Your trip home will cause you substantial distress.”

Rust stains ran down the dock wall from flaking iron rings bolted into the top. Sea-level markers and fading numerals were stenciled in a script twice my height. We stopped and stared out at the vanished ocean. The white sky and sand stretched away as far as I could see: two parallel planes meeting at the horizon. Occasional patches discolored the dunes’ glaring surface, chemicals and oil seeping up from below. A stagecoach that must have belonged to a recent tourist lay derelict and half-full of sand. The tops of its spoked wheels showed through the surface of a hard-packed ridge.

Behind us was the city, faceless towers and blanched walls abraded with centuries of windblown sand. Spiral steps emerged like spinal columns from their broken shells. Rusted girders jutted out of the fortieth floors-metal thinned to perforated wafers. There was no sound but the breeze skipping salt crystals over the dry ocean floor and concrete promenade. It was completely outside my experience. I said, “It’s not beautiful. It’s…”

“A desert, Jant. Lots of sand.”

“Tarragon,” I said impatiently. “Capharnaum is burning!”

She tutted but moved quickly, taking a gold pocket watch from a box that was part of the car’s fascia. She clicked its glass case open and I saw that it wasn’t a watch at all. Inside was a gold mechanism and a wire gauze that securely held down a fat black fly, twice the size of a bluebottle. It buzzed energetically, sounding as if it was trying to drill through its gold cage. Tarragon said, “It’s amazing what you can purchase from the Tine in Epsilon market if you have enough meat.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a Time Fly. They have a way of avoiding being squashed or eaten. They can jump a split second back in time, up to the point at which they emerged from the pupa. This Time Fly hatched in Vista Marchan and has been imprisoned here ever since. I’m taking you back there; we will turn back time until the tide comes in. Wind it for me, will you?”

I turned the contraption’s little gold key, just like a watch, and the gauze began to put pressure on the trapped insect. It felt threatened and tried its method of escape, but because the mechanism snared it, it carried its threat along. It took us, too, and it went fast. Really fast.

For a few minutes, nothing changed. I twisted around and looked behind at the town. The buildings could be a little less gray, less dilapidated.

There was a blurring at street level around the car, as if I could see colored air swirling. Tarragon said, “They’re city people, in their everyday lives or fighting Insects, moving back in time too fast to see.”

She patted my arm and pointed to the horizon. Prodigious steel ships began to rise from the areas of oily discolored sands. Sand dusted away from them, revealing masts and wheelhouses then unearthed long hulls lying on their sides. The sand’s surface darkened to pale gray and began to glisten. Then shallow blue pools appeared in the lowest linear sand ripples, where I had not noticed hollows before. The long pools swelled and coalesced, turning the summits of the sand ripples into islands and building up around the dunes. Water ran together around them, darker blue as it deepened.

The ripples were all covered, the sea level climbed, the dunes were dispersed islands. Just a few islands left; then the sea covered the final dune. The ocean kept rising, closer to the bottom rungs of the ladders, bearing upright the drab metal ships.