Steph Swainston - Dangerous Offspring

The chess pieces rolled all over the floor. The floor began to shake. No, the whole building was shaking; I could feel the vibrations. ‘What’s that?’ Cyan shrieked.

The lamp on the window ledge flickered. ‘What’s happening?’ She sat up and drew the blanket round her.

She said something else, but I wasn’t listening. I was backing into the doorway of the staircase leading to the roof-the spiral steps wound up into their turret behind me. It’s happening again. This is nineteen twenty-five all over again, and the ground’s giving way. It was that night when-

I woke, and lay in my camp bed in the dark tent, listening.

‘Jant!’ Cyan was yelling at me. ‘Jant! Don’t go crazy! What are you doing?’ Her voice took on a hysterical edge. ‘Snap out of it!’

I snapped. I dashed across to the window and grabbed the lamp. If the earth really was falling in and we were locked in the tower I couldn’t see how we could survive.

We both looked round as one of the vixen guardswomen appeared in the doorway. She threw something I couldn’t see. It bounced off my foot and by the time I had located it on the floor she had disappeared. It was a key.

The crashing roar grew and grew. It was composed of hundreds of other noises: a gravelly sliding crunch. A landslide…I knew this had to be a landslide…There was the din of rock cracking, thuds as individual stones tore loose and fell. The long hiss of earth shifting; the tremendous roar of water.

Through it we heard the bell on the top of the winch tower clanging; madly, unevenly. Dang…dong. Dang! Dong! No one was ringing it-it was tolling of its own accord.

We strained to see. From far out in the darkness came a sense of motion, commotion; gigantic shapes moving. It was like listening to a ship in distress, beyond the mudflats, sinking in the dead of night.

The lights on the tower seemed to tilt, rush forward and down; then they vanished. The deafening roar of a mighty, mighty wave thundered towards us. We could see nothing.

The roar swept past us, obliterating all other noise. The churning of foam and swoosh of falling water resounded on every side.

‘The dam!’ I yelled. I felt crushed and hopeless-a sensation I recognised-the Circle was breaking. Frost-what is she going through out there? It started slowly creeping up-came on in a rush.

I felt the Circle go dead. Frost’s link had gone and I was loose again. We were aging. I felt separate and lonely without the other Eszai to back me up. Mortals must feel like that all the time…I had forgotten what it was like to feel mortal.

The Circle reformed, gently. I could almost feel the Emperor soothe it back into existence. Why had he left us falling apart into nothingness for so long, like beads slipping off a string? Had he been asleep? Was he deliberately reminding us of mortality?

I was kneeling on the floor. The shock had dropped me to my hands and knees and I was looking at a patch of floorboards covered in dried herbs. Their crispy leaves were sticking to my palms.

I had felt Frost dying. By god, what had happened to her? I couldn’t tell if the overwhelming, crushing sensation of darkness had been her experience, or if it was my imagination.

‘Get up!’ said Cyan.

The roar of the wave went on and on. It passed us and we heard it receding into the distance. Another noise followed, the same volume, still loud enough to shake the tower-the rush of water swirling in spate, out of control.

Cyan stepped squarely in front of me, shouting, ‘Jant! What’s wrong with you? Stand up!’

‘The Circle broke,’ I murmured.

‘Daddy!’ she screamed, and started crying in terror. ‘What’s happened to Daddy?’

‘Sh! It wasn’t Lightning. He’s in town.’

‘How do you know?’

‘It was Frost. I knew what she was doing…She broke the dam.’

I felt different, and I realised that I was actually feeling the Circle. It was the Circle that had changed. Its sensation was subtle, just background; then it had gone. No one can feel the Circle or distinguish individuals in it unless its equilibrium was disturbed. I realised I was so used to its ever-present sensation that I had taken it for granted, and now I was feeling it’s slightly altered shape. Frost’s qualities had gone, and the combined effects of everyone else’s, whether enhancing or cancelling each other out, had settled into a new equilibrium.

‘Frost was in the Circle when I joined,’ I said. ‘I was always aware of her without knowing.’

‘Look!’ She pointed down. The spent flood waters, hissing and edged with foam like a wave running onto a beach, poured up to the base of the tower and broke around it. We watched the level start to nudge up the wall.

Our lamp reflected parts of the water’s surface rushing past. It picked out eddying lines as flickers of silver and eel-like flashes. It was moving so fast it was backing up its own bulk into peaks and troughs of great, corrugated standing waves.

Continuous rapids hurtled over where I knew farms had been, now reduced to rubble. The rock outcrops were drowned metres deep. We looked out to Slake-the wide expanse of churning, crinkling flood waters between us and the town reflected its lights.

There was nothing left but water. Everything had been swept away. Everything in the path of the massive wave had vanished and we could hear nothing over its roar.

‘“The waters will take two days to subside,”’ I repeated.

‘What?’ said Cyan.

‘That was Frost’s message. She worked it all out.’

Cyan sought out my hand. She sighed, head bowed, looking at the gushing torrent. We stood next to each other, hand in hand in the warm night, and watched out of the window until the faintest light of dawn began to splinter onto the floodwaters.

MODERATE INTELLIGENCER

TROOPS ADVANCE INTO DEVASTATED VALLEY

Exclusive special report by our own correspondent in Slake Cross

I stand on the observation platform of Tower 10, a sturdily built peel tower close to Slake Cross. Beside me stands a veteran artillerist of the Lowespass Select, calling out directions to his trebuchet team in their bombardment position-a makeshift construction of logs and sandbags providing a stable platform on the soggy ground. Another barrel of burning pitch jerks up into the sky, joining half a dozen more, as they crash down on a distant ridge of paper.

Two days have passed since the dam collapsed and the waters have now receded sufficiently to allow infantry to advance. I am further forward than any journalist has been so far. Only the cooperation of the enlightened artillerist has got me past the provosts, passed off as part of his battery. At such elevated points alone can any real picture of the situation be gained; the land is an otherwise flat quagmire, nearly devoid of vegetation and dotted with thousands of dirty pools. Divisions advance cautiously over this ground, pioneers laying brushwood tracks for the fyrd to follow.

A Plainslands unit clears the way north of us, their spears audibly ‘popping’ eggs that have been scattered by the dam collapse. To my left flamethrower crews are moving forward under the guidance of the Sapper. Occasional bursts of fire mark their encounter with a clutch of undeveloped Insect larvae still wriggling in a pool. The same scene is being re-enacted all the way along a twenty-kilometre front. It is strangely orderly because it is, with few alterations, the plan envisaged years ago.

The intention then, though, was to drain the lake gradually. The Castle has confirmed that Frost sacrificed herself deliberately to destroy her own creation. The gates could not be opened with Insects freely swarming over the dam. Frost’s terrifying calculation was that only by engineering a collapse from inside the dam could the lake be emptied. In a single catastrophic torrent, adult Insects have been drowned, their eggs have been left to wither in the sun and their hideous young have been smashed by debris or washed into the sea’s fatal salinity.