Steph Swainston - Dangerous Offspring

‘You murdered a Zascai?’

‘I never murdered a Zascai who wasn’t the better for it.’

‘Shi’. If t’ Emperor finds ou’, he’ll…’

‘Nobody is going to find anything out. Are they?’

‘I-’

‘Are they, Rayne?’

‘No.’

‘He was a corporal and he’d turned his whole squad into a gang. They probably were, before they were recruited. Fuck…Select Fyrd pressganging street scum. If I catch any of them again I’ll pump them full of twenty poisons…Anyway, they didn’t know that I’m twice as fast as a human. Well, nearly, ‘cause I am the worse for drink but I’m not stoned.’

‘No. You’re replacing one drug with another.’ Rayne had her back to me but I saw her expression reflected in the mirror by the bed. She was preoccupied with Cyan.

In Rayne’s white bedroom, the eye slid along arrangements of objects as smoothly as a scale of music. Models used for teaching stood on the mantelpiece; large anatomical figures of a man and woman, accurate and to scale. There were painted clastic models of torsos with removable organs like a jigsaw, and a ‘wound man’ demonstrating various injuries.

Mice were carved seamlessly onto the furniture, scurrying up the chair legs and nibbling the table edge. But netting held the far wall together: ancient goat hair and wood laths showed through the flaking plaster. A bookcase dominated the corner-the books she had written-and it was buckling under the sheer weight of paper.

Cyan wants experience. She’ll run headlong into ordeals like this and each one will chop a bit off her teenage enthusiasm until it’s down to adult size. I looked at her slack face and burned with fury. ‘Is this what you bloody want? Tell me, does it make your party go with a swing? People like Rawney don’t want you. He wants to be like you! I know, I always did! Did you think it was funny? Well, it’s really fucking hilarious. Look at me; I’m laughing!’

‘Jant…’ Rayne said.

‘It’s fine to be an outsider by choice, but if you get addicted you’ll be an outsider by necessity! Then you’ll be the loneliest posh minx in the world!’

‘Calm down! OK, Jant, you’re no’ t’ blame. I believe you.’

I pulled up a three-legged stool and sat down heavily, legs apart, wings splayed to the floor. I stripped my vomit-covered shirt off and scratched at the bald spots in the pits of my wings. ‘Can you bring her round?’

‘We may jus’ have t’ wai’.’ Rayne rang a small hand bell. She asked her servant to go across to the medical faculty and bring atropine, and some clean clothes for me.

‘I’ll do it,’ I offered. ‘I’m faster.’

‘She knows her way through t’ complex. And I don’ trus’ you wi’ th’ key t’ th’ vaul’s.’ Rayne filled a glass of water, took a dropper from the drawer and began to drip water onto Cyan’s lips. ‘I used t’ do this for you, when you had i’ bad.’

I huffed. The last time I fell asleep under the influence, Wrenn and Tornado shaved my head and painted me blue. I woke up shackled to the prow railings of the Sute Ferry. I haven’t taken cat since. You can face down death, by choosing the harder alternative. Not that I’m overly brave or more than usually lucky; I simply never believed death was an option so I never took it. ‘You can’t begrudge me a little escape now and again. I’m immortal, I need to lose track of time.’

‘You risk losing too much.’

‘Yeah, well, the only excitement in immortality is a possibility of loss.’

Rayne grunted vaguely.

I indicated the anatomical male carving. ‘He’s well-endowed, isn’t he?’

She looked up. ‘No, tha’s t’ average size.’

I was never any good at waiting. I paced through to the museum and stood blinking until my eyes adjusted. Rayne’s museum, representing her workshop through the ages, was a vast collection so tightly packed together it overwhelmed. Candlelight reflected on the curved surfaces of glass jars, thousands of different sizes, and on the sliding door of a materia medica cabinet with tiny square drawers for herbs. What to look at first? Here and there I noticed an object because of its special rarity: a two-headed foetus floating in a jar; or its great size: a broken sea krait tooth; or its beauty: a baby vanished to nothing but a three-dimensional plexus of red and blue veins and arteries to show the dissector’s skill; or its ghastliness: the preserved face of a child who died of smallpox. Some objects caught my eye because they were illustrated in the etched plates of books I’d read.

I stepped back, trying to perceive an order to the collection. In the centre a grey stone fireplace housed a copper alembic with a spout, resting on a little earthenware furnace with a bellows handle projecting. It was for fraction-distilling aromatic oils. The lintel above it bore the deeply incised and gilded legend: ‘Observe nature, your only teacher.’

I looked at the anatomical preparations: dense white shapes in jars, organs folded, wrinkled or bulging, or feathery and delicate like branching lungs. Alcohol preserved specimens like paperweights, of this or that organ in sagittal or cross section. Living with these, Rayne must see people as machines, nothing but arrangements of tissues and liquids, interesting puzzles to solve. She also knows that individuality is mostly skin-deep because, inside, people are all the same. Rayne and Frost, I reflected, had many traits in common.

Her reference collection was ordered by pathology. Some samples were hundreds of years old-the only immortality available to Zascai by virtue of their interesting ailments. The sufferers usually readily agree to be preserved; it’s all one to them whether their useless remains are placed in the ground or in a jar. The only exception are Awians, who prefer to be interred in tombs as florid as they can afford, as if they want to take up space forever.

A glass case housed a collection of surgical instruments past and present-steel bone saws and silver catheters, water baths for small dissections. Rayne kept some-like cylindrical saw-edged trepanning drills and equipment for cupping and blood letting-to remind the world of the doctors’ disgusting practices to which she put an end when she joined the Circle.

A six-fingered hand, a flaky syphilitic skull. A hydrocephalic one five times normal size, and the skeleton of a man with four wings growing out of his chest.

Rayne uses me in demonstrations when I’m available. I pose at the front of the auditorium while she lectures the students on how weird I am, or on her great achievement in healing my Slake Cross injuries. One day my skeleton might stand here to be prodded by subsequent generations, my strong, gracile fingers adapted for climbing, my curve-boned wings articulated to stretch full length to their pointed phalanges.

Beside the door I’d come in by stood a large showcase of chipped stone arrowheads, which Rayne had arranged into an attractive pattern. She buys them for a few pence each from boys who pick them up on the Awndyn Downs. There was also a ‘piece of iron that fell from the sky onto Shivel’. On the other side of the door a skeleton inhabited a tall cabinet; its label said: ‘Ancient Awian, from a cave in Brobuxen, Ressond’.

Over two thousand years the grey smell of old bone and neat alcohol had saturated the tower’s very fabric. It was a haze of carbolic and formalin. Spicy volatile notes of orange and clove must be the essential oils Rayne had most recently prepared.

I examined the labelled majolica jars: oenomel, rodomel and hippocras; storax, orchis and sumac. Patent medicines crusted or deliquesced in slipware pots. Their names skipped off the tongue like a schoolyard rhyme: Coucal’s Carminiative Embrocation; Popinjay Pills for Pale People; Ms Twite’s Soothing Syrup; Cornstock Electuary; Emulsion Lung Tonic; World-Famed Blood Mixture; Dr Whinchat of Brandoch’s Swamp-root Kidney Cure; Fruit Salt; Spa Mud; Abortion Lotion; Concentrated Essence of Cinnamon for Toothache; Confection of Cod Livers; Balsamic Elixir for Inflamed Nipples; Bezon & Bro. Best Beet Juice. A pot with a spout: Goosander Lewin’s Improved Inhaler. Preparation of Bone Marrow: an Ideal Fat Food for Children and Invalids; Odiferous Macassar for Embellishing the Feathers and Preventing Them Falling Out.