Free No Present Like Time by Steph Swainston Page A

need a sword to arrest the likes of Bawtere.”
    “Wow. They’re never going to believe this back at the vats.”
    “Keep it a secret!” I said. I elbowed through the dancers’ slow jazz wave to the stairs. They creaked as I climbed them. At the top, a bull’s-eye lantern swung in front of my face, startling me, and a voice rasped, “Oo’s that? One for Cinna?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Oo is it?”
    “His boss.” I deliberately looked straight at the lantern because I know that my Rhydanne eyes reflect. Cinna’s flunky must have seen them shine as two flat gold discs. His chuckle stopped abruptly.
    “All right, Comet,” he whispered. “You want t’see Cinna?”
    “Of course,” I said.
    “Just…wait a minute, please…Shit, a fucking immortal…He’s a fucking immortal…” The voice trailed off, and then returned. “Come through, Comet.”
    He beckoned me along the dingy corridor, then through a beautiful door inset with opal to a big black and white room. In the middle of the square chamber stood a vast carved table. Its rectilinear designs were echoed on printed six-panel paper screens that folded like concertinas along the dim walls.
    Cinna Bawtere had no friends, only collaborators. He was fat but suave, with a receding hairline and flabby, incandescently red lips like a couple of cod fish lying in the bottom of a boat. He had a dueling scar like a dimple by his mouth, suggesting that long ago his skin hadn’t been pasty, his belly protruding and his chin double. But these days Cinna could get out of breath playing dominoes. People worked for him now, and his big hands had lost all the cuts and calluses they had when he was a sailor. He was a tactless, feckless, reckless individual with an ego the size of Awia and a conscience the size of a boiled sweet. Cinna’s extras included a cutting-edge understanding of chemistry as it applied to narcotics, and of the law and how to break it. His wings were speckled; every fifth feather had been bleached. He wore new blue jeans and a patterned cherry silk dressing gown. Like so many ugly men, he was fond of good clothes.
    I sat in an engraved chair and hooked my wings over the low back. “How great a sense of hearing do the walls have?”
    “It’s all right. We’re totally alone.” Cinna gave me a hard stare from the other side of the table. Eventually he said, “You haven’t visited for a long time, Comet.”
    “Four years isn’t a long time to me.”
    He creased into his chair. “By god, and you look Just The Same as you did when I first saw you, twenty years back.” He gave a little smile. “I thought you’d forgotten me, because I hadn’t heard any word since the Battle Of Awndyn.”
    “So how is business?”
    Cinna raised his hands to indicate the shadowy room. “As good as you see it.”
    “Cinna, I’m here to tell you that I won’t turn a blind eye to your dealing any longer.”
    His round shoulders sagged. He scooped a packet of cigarettes from the table, poked one out and lit it. “I’d been expecting this. So it’s finished? The game’s over?”
    “If you continue and you’re caught, you can’t invoke my name; I won’t help you. If you keep selling contraband to Mist’s sailors and she complains to me, the next time you see an Eszai he’ll be with a fyrd guard to seize you.”
    “Now, Jant, how disappointing after all this time!”
    I shrugged. “I want you to go back to legitimate trade. Why not?”
    Cinna placed both hands flat on his polished table. “Because it’s Not That Easy! This latest ‘paper tax’ from the Castle caused an uproar in Hacilith. You should hear the merchants muttering. All the money’s sent to Awia.”
    “You know there’s a worthwhile cause. We need to break down the Insects’ Paperlands there.”
    “Well, why can’t that kingdom look after itself?”
    “For god’s sake, they’re doing all they can. Awia will repay its debts in full; you mortals just can’t see the long