Read Online No Present Like Time by Steph Swainston - Free Book Online Page A

me that people everywhere are intrinsically the same: well-disposed to me as Comet.
    The same would not be true for Tris. I considered the events of the last two days as I flew. No one could predict what the Trisian people would make of us; I hoped that I could communicate with them. I was terrified of the hated uncharted ocean. The things that swam and slapped suckers on ships’ sides beggared any description—behemoth serpents and sentient giants amassed from the rotting bodies of drowned sailors.
    I wondered what to do about Tern. At this very moment she could be stroking Tornado’s wingless back, hewn muscles, shorn head, and I had to leave on some damn godforgotten ship! I imagined her sitting on the palm of his hand and he lifts her up to kiss her. Away at sea I was powerless to stop this latest outbreak of her infidelity; it might deepen and then what would I find on my return? Tern married into the Circle through Tornado, myself divorced and having to live next door to my beautiful ex-wife for all eternity?
     

    I knew every landmark—the white fences along the “racehorse valley” racetracks that Eske is famous for, their stables where destriers are bred. A line of tall poplars by Dace River; farther on in the forest smoke straggled from a charcoal burner’s shack. I concentrated on keeping the horizon level to fly straight, but in the evening I was grounded by a heavy hailstorm and, annoyingly, had to spend the night in the Plover Inn on the Remige Road. If this was a routine journey I would sleep in the woods because, since I’m Rhydanne, temperatures have to be much below freezing before I start to feel cold.
    By the following afternoon I could see the faintly lilac-gray Awndyn downs in the distance. Cobalt manor’s hops fields and oast houses dotted the downs; a bowl-shaped pass resolved into the coast road. Finally I crested the last hill—and there was the sea. The gray strip of ocean looked as if it was standing up above the land, ready to crash down onto it.
    Every window in Awndyn-on-the-Strand was brassy with the setting sun. The town’s roofs slanted in every crazy direction. The manor house stood on a grassed-over rock-and-sand spit jutting out into the sea. It had tiny clustered windows and tall thin octagonal chimneys with diagonal and cross-hatched red brickwork. I glided down through another sleet shower so strong I had to close my eyes against it, and landed on the roof of a fish-and-chip takeaway. I waited till the squall stopped spitting wet snow, then climbed down from the chip shop and walked into town, crossing the shallow, pebbled stream on a mossy humpbacked bridge. The Hacilith-Awndyn canal ran beside it into an enormous system of locks and basins packed with barges.
    A creative cosmopolitan atmosphere hung over Awndyn, with a smell of cedarwood shavings and stale scrumpy. It was the only Plainslands town to prosper after the last Insect swarm, profiting from the merchant barges that paid tolls to navigate the locks and carracks with full coffers anchoring in the port. It was well positioned to make use of all their raw materials. Swallow, the musician governor, had encouraged a bohemian community; artists and craftsmen were welcome in the tiny crumbling houses and ivy-shaded galleries. Artisans’ slow and friendly workshops overhung the shambling alleys; glass-blowing and marquetry, cloisonné and ceramics, leather-work, woodturning and lapidary, musical instruments and elegant furniture were crafted there.
     

    I was prospecting for drugs, just as a gold miner follows rules to find deposits. Scolopendium is illegal everywhere except the Plainslands—in Awia the laws have been tight for fifty years and counting; in Hacilith’s deprived streets the problem is at its most serious; and at the Lowespass trenches its use is tackled very severely. But centipede fern grows wild in Ladygrace, the sparsely populated foothills of southern Darkling. The governor of Hacilith tried to pay