Steph Swainston - Dangerous Offspring

Cyan was still locked off deep in a tiny, animal part of her brain. I didn’t know if she would ever come out, or if what crept back out would still be Cyan. I was terrified for her-and for myself-how the fuck was I going to explain this to Lightning?

‘Cyan, scolopendium is powerful shit. Nobody knows better than me on this subject, nobody! When I overdosed the Circle always bailed me out. I based my life round that cycle of “feel good, feel bad”. But you can’t shrug it off like I can. I’ve seen what it does to Zascai who don’t respect it. I’ve seen too many die. Stupid girl! What did you do it for? You’ve got to be already screwed up if you’re taking to drugs. Some people need it but what pain could you have?

‘Oh, god, oh god. Don’t worry, Cyan, I won’t let you die. I’m the one who’s good at becoming addicted, not you. I’m the one who leaves used needles around the place. I wake up junk sick. I punish myself for taking it by taking more. I’m the one who shoots enough to kill a destrier, not you. You’ll be fine…Nearly there…keep breathing…please keep breathing…Oh, god. Why did you come here in the first place? The city is a cess pool, where the same shit goes round and round and round!’

I continued blethering in low and high Awian, then in Morenzian and its old and middle forms, Plainslands and its Ghallain and Ressond dialects, ancient pre-vowel-shift Awian, Trisian and Scree. I could tell I was closing in on the university, because the number of brothels was increasing.

Five minutes and eleven languages later I reached the south end of Old Town, and the curlicued gates of Hacilith University, the oldest university in the world.

The university’s gates were always open, just as the Castle’s gates are always open. Its red oriflamme pennant flew from a pole beside them, representing the light of knowledge. I sped through the gates, ignoring the porters shouting behind me.

I flitted into the shadow of a residential hall and quietly along the path, leaning sideways to counteract Cyan’s weight. Her stockinged feet jutted out in front from the end of the bedspread roll.

The university buildings were older as I neared its centre. Joss stick smoke caught at the back of my throat. Student poverty everywhere smells of cheap incense and burnt toast. Light diffused from oilcloth windows, each of which gave onto a different student’s room. They were silent-not tranquil-ominously dead quiet so I feverishly envisioned every undergraduate inside had been murdered in a different way. But worse still-they were cramming for exams. My imagination removed the outer wall, so each square room was suddenly visible in a cutaway like pigeonholes. Each room has a lamp, a book-laden table, a chair, a scholar sitting pen in hand. One lies on the bed, one sits on the floor. Each one works by himself, no one talks to another. Hundreds of individual student’s lives are separated in tiny rooms in a huge building; they reminded me of polyps in a coral.

I clattered through a courtyard, past a marble statue of the founder, so ancient it wore a doublet and hose. An old professor stood in its shadow with two prostitutes, male and female, on the plinth in front of him. They were stroking his bald head and I heard their silky voices, ‘You’re sexy…you’re so sexy…’ The don was shaking but I couldn’t tell whether it was from fear or excitement. They didn’t look up as I hurtled past.

Now in the very centre of the university I came to an unsurfaced track. I slowed my pace in awe, feeling as if I had walked back in time. Stony and yellow in the lamplight the track ran for a few hundred metres and stopped at the perimeter fence. It did not join nor bear any resemblance to any road in the modern Hacilith street plan. The city I knew had been built around it and the university’s buildings now hemmed it in. It was sixteen hundred years old-a road when Old Town was all of Hacilith, the only town in Morenzia, and the country was ruled by a king from a palace god-knows-where in Litanee. The wattle-and-daub houses along the track had decayed over a millennium ago, but the College of Surgeons survived.

I walked across and jumped the remains of a deep stone gutter. It once drained stinking effluent from the boilers that had reduced cadavers of paupers and rarities to skeletons for teaching aids. I hammered with my free hand at a nail-studded door. ‘Rayne! Rayne! Help!’

Cyan’s body convulsed and she vomited down my back. ‘Oh, god! Well, better out than in, I suppose…Ella Rayne! Open up!’

Rayne’s squat, square tower was once the College of Surgeons. Other faculties, refectories and dorms had gradually aggregated around its revered centre of learning-the university formed in much the same way as flowstone in a Lowespass cave. It was officially founded in the fifteenth century, only because it was no longer convenient for the faculties to ignore each other.

The tower’s sixteen hundred years gave it a serious gravity. The newer buildings would have overshadowed it if the university had not built them at a respectful distance. Small bifora windows let meagre light into its upper level where a three-tiered lecture hall, now disused, once doubled as a dissecting room and operating theatre. Its roof was flat and its walls unmasoned stone, apart from the deep arch around the door decorated with several bands of zigzag carving. Ironically, given Rayne’s origins, the university had presented the building to her, and when she was not at the Castle or the front she lived here among her cabinet of curiosities.

A shutter slid open and Rayne peered out through its iron grille. ‘Comet!’ She clanged the shutter and creaked the door open. ‘Wha’ are you doing here?’

‘Thank fuck!’ I pushed past her into the room, seeing stacks of chests and medicine boxes packed ready for removal.

Rayne said, ‘You’re supposed t’ be a’ th’ dam. My carriage is on i’s way. Wha’-you’re covered in blood!’

She grasped her brown skirts and hurried after me, as I loped through the museum and a doorway leading to her bedroom. Her pudgy, purplish feet bulged out between her sandal straps. She had been seventy-eight for fourteen hundred and five years, the oldest Eszai, and the oldest person in the world apart from the Emperor himself.

I strode to her box-bed, set into a deep niche in the wall hidden by a curtain. I laid Cyan down gently inside it, on the crochet blanket, and unwrapped her. Rayne saw a patient and immediately hastened to examine her with quick, expert movements, while she bombarded me with questions: ‘She’s no’ bleeding. Whose blood is i’ then? Wha’s happened t’ th’ lass?’

‘She’s Lightning’s daughter,’ I said, swaying.

Rayne stopped and looked up at me. ‘Cyan Dei?’

‘Cyan Peregrine.’

‘Has she been mugged? No. There’s no concussion. I’s drugs, isn’ i’, Jant?’

‘Cat.’

She knelt and turned Cyan on her side to prevent her swallowing her tongue. She observed the girl’s violet-grey face, her clicking, shallow breathing. She pressed her dimpled fingers against Cyan’s neck for her pulse. ‘Obstruc’ed air passages. Bradycardia. Classic scolopendium poisoning. Wha’ have you done t’ her?’

‘It’s not my fault.’

‘Yes, i’ is. Of course i’ is! How did you give her i’?’

‘It wasn’t me!’

‘You’re a born liar! You’re tot’ring, yourself! Oh, Jant, I hoped you wouldn’ take i’ again. I hoped you’d learned your lesson. You can’ be bored, you should be occupied wi’ t’ dam.’

‘I haven’t touched cat for five years!’

‘You haven’ made t’ decade. You’re no’ truly cured.’

‘Please,’ I begged Rayne. ‘Don’t jump to conclusions.’ The appeal to objectivity quietened her long enough for me to shoehorn a word in. ‘Cyan did it to herself. I wasn’t there. She bought it from a Zascai, cocktailed with alcohol and god knows what else. A knackered old junkie showed her how to shoot it and for all I know they shared a needle. At any rate, it was back-flushed. I found her already under. I gave her the kiss of life and I’m still trying to get her taste out of my mouth! I killed the dealer-’ I tugged my shirt demonstratively, pulling the material, hard with clotting blood, from where it had stuck to my chest.