'Never ask a lady's age, Jant. I'm three years older now.'

'Your beauty increases.'

Eleonora strode towards me with hauteur. Her gloves covered her arms up to the shoulder and the level of her bulging b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Her voice was fleshy; 'It will look better if you join the party.'

'I like it out here.'

'Why do you always sit near sheer drops?'

'They attract me.'

She turned from the gardens and looked at the palace front. On both sides of us, its crescent wings curled forward, clasping the gardens' falcate terraces between them. 'It looks like a snail sh.e.l.l.'

'I think it's spectacular. The Rachiswaters had taste.'

My snub didn't bother her. 'Yes. They're almost legend alreadybut we're still here, making history.'

'You've achieved a lot.'

'Oh, there's still so much remaining.'

I drained my gla.s.s and picked another from the tray on the floor. The rumours about Eleonora had piqued my interest. (Why, oh why, did I drink so much that night?) I'd heard that she likes to watch maids tie each other up, that she spends afternoons arranging footmen in interesting patterns for her pleasure, or she calls up gladiators three at a time, two to hold her legs open and the most well-endowed to f.u.c.k her.

I'd have to sleep with her, of course; or at least trythe Queen of Awia would be the biggest notch on my bedpost.

She said, 'Did you receive my letter? I mentioned I always noticed you.'

I contrived to look nonplussed. 'I always noticed you, too.'

'You always notice everybody.'

'But I notice you more.'

She said, 'Jantbe careful or you'll appear desperate.'

'I thought I appeared like an Insect.'

She eyed my skew-whiff antennae. 'Where's your wife?'

'In the' I gestured at the maze.

'Oh. With someone?' She suddenly sounded predatory. She leant over the bal.u.s.trade and shouted down to the water terrace, 'Let it spray!'

A footman dressed as a s.h.i.+p's captain turned a silver wheel on a polished pipeline and all the fountains sprang up in the gardens. Shrieks from the maze as its water jets spurted. They latticed across its annular marble entrance, trapping everyone inside.

Eleonora laughed. 'Now, feline-with-feathers...' She studied every part of my body, imperiously spinning her mask. 'Such long wings. Such a sculpted back. I bet you f.u.c.k so athletically...you can make me come so hard I see gold flashes...Can you?'

I didn't meet her eye. 'Eleonora, I'm the Messenger at your beck and call but I'm not your call boy.'

'Pity. Still, there are others. Merganser's here but he's not as good as you're said to be.' She turned away.

'No!' I said. 'Wait.'

She gave a sidelong glance. 'Go to the Onyx Room...no, that's occupied. Go to the Topaz Room, remove your clothes and fold them on the chair. Then kneel on the bed. Await me there.' And she was gone, like a caravel in full sail back into the party.

Eszai have seen most things but I'd never encountered anyone like Eleonora before. (My curiosity will be the death of me.) Some Awians were starting to object to her hedonistic rule, for all that she saved them from the Insects two years before. If the previous King, now exiled in Summerday, living in a garret and writing bad poetry, ever had offspring who could claim the throne, then Eleonora would need to spend even more on guards and spies.

I turned a handstand and walked on my hands through the party, and I ran up to the room. A bottle of wine was already opened for me.

The warm summer evening backlit the curtains drawn over open windows. Eleonora kept me waiting. When she entered, she seemed pleased that I was kneeling. She swung the door shut behind her and fiddled with her skirt. It fell to the ground, revealing her bodice and some riding boots extending over her knees, tight to the shape of her legs.

I could only see her silhouette as she crossed in front of the curtains, tapping the stem of her mask on her gloved hand.

She started to lick my feathers; she ran them through her mouth and tongued between them until I was in ecstasy.

'Put your hands on the bedpost.'

'Whyhey!' She grabbed my b.a.l.l.s.

'Put your hands on the bedpost!'

I followed her command. 'Why? b.l.o.o.d.y let go!' Before I had finished protesting she whisked a cord around my wrists, tied an ingenious knot and bound my hands to the post.

I struggled, but I couldn't free them. I leant forward and bit the cordbut she was pulling another one from under the pillow. She looped it around my wings, leant back and pulled it tight.

I gasped, beginning to lose the feeling in my wings' fingers. 'What are you doing?'

'Now you can't cover your pretty backside with your wings, when I sodomise you with my riding crop.'

'What?Ow!' She cracked me across the backside. It wasn't her maskshe was holding a whip! She pa.s.sed it over my mouth and I tasted the leather, and felt the little gold ferrule on the end. Suddenly I was dangerously sober. 'Let me go!'

'Please let me go, my lady.'

'Ow!...My lady.'

Eleonora smiled. 'You're a fast learner. Not so loud or they'll hear you downstairs. If you dare kick, I'll call for an audience.'

She tilted her head, appreciating her handiwork, studying me closely. She stroked the whip into my a.r.s.e crack and ran it up and down. I pleaded, but it delighted her; no matter what I said she wouldn't let me free.

She bent her knee up between my thighs and pressed it on the inside of my legs. The spa.r.s.e light picked out s.h.i.+ny creases in the leather. She pushed me flat and straddled my a.r.s.e, riding my cheeks as if f.u.c.king me until my backside was wet with her juices. My c.o.c.k stiffened despite myself as it rubbed against the sheets.

Her breathing quickened. I heard her sigh and felt her shudder.

Thenoh, but I won't go into itshe...no, I can't say...What am I telling you this for, anyway?

Finally she left me kneeling, my c.o.c.k sore from her quick, expert tugs, because she didn't like the way I kept growing soft. She had flicked my come out of me and it was helplessly dripping off my chest. I felt as if I had been milked, and my a.r.s.e was...raw.

She said, 'I'll send word around the party to come up and view you.'

'No!'

'Yes. They would laugh to see the Messenger so...compromised. Oh, and your wife's downstairs, isn't she?'

'Please, Eleonora.'

Smack!

'Ow! Please, my lady.'

She lowered her mask onto my face and pulled its string tight, restricting my vision to a few centimetres of rucked sheet and my breathing to a warm hiss. She sighed with a beautiful facsimile of sadness, 'Now you're used up. I'll have to leave you on your knees until you're ready again.'

'Again?' I whispered, m.u.f.fled.

'I'm taking your clothes, so even if you bite yourself free you won't be able to leave the room. Unless you want to join the party naked, on a leash?'

'No!'

'I will leave the door unlocked. Anyone could come in...I'll leave it to chance.'

She slipped out of the range of my vision. Music leaked in from the party, then the door clicked shut. Rays filtered through the curtains. Flies buzzed in the open window and landed on me. They puddled their sucker mouthparts on my skin. The tracks of their feet tickled me infuriatingly as they crawled, but I was too abandoned in my shame to shake them off. I felt squandered...And I felt beaten...I was tricked. Deceived. Eaten.

Hours later Eleonora returned, dropped my clothes on the floor, and untied me without a word.

CHAPTER 17.

I flew reconnaissance flights over the seemingly never-ending procession of troops. Far below me, the Peregrine General Fyrd were marching into the gate. Behind their line came the Summerday Select Fyrd, clad in dirty brigandines that had once been saffron yellow. They were driving oxen pulling room-sized espringals on wheels, capable of shooting a vireton spear through the Insect Wall. The Summerday Select were excellent at demolis.h.i.+ng Insect paper and they knew the whole front well.

Behind them came the s.h.i.+vel Select, mustered weeks before for the advance. Their columns were in close order between the lines of outriders and, further off in the distance, another body of men whose colours I couldn't see. I winged closer and looked down to the road. After the leaf-green of s.h.i.+vel rode the crimson column of the Imperial Fyrd.

The Emperor had kept cohesion in their formation and the five hundred men rode perfectly s.p.a.ced. All the other fyrds had become one ma.s.s, trailing baggage carts tens of kilometres behind.

I glided lower and saw the Emperor. He was leading, on his black stallion, and the diffuse sunlight gave his figure an unnatural luminosityhe was wearing full plate. Two spearmen rode behind him on either side, each steadying with one hand his pennant in his saddle rest. Reflections darted from their helmets. Their banners with the Castle's red sun on yellow flickered forward above them.

I wheeled away and found Tornado with a division of hors.e.m.e.n patrolling the road's north verge. I half-folded my wings and came tearing down helter-skelter a hundred metres in a few seconds, rocking and side-slipping, legs dangling, to the ground.

Tornado looked down from his enormous, ivory-clad saddle. His worn armour had a raised design that replicated the st.i.tches and hemming of denim.

I said, 'The Emperor's in sight.'

'How far?' he boomed.

'About five hours away.'

'You tell Lightning that I will go to escort him.'

'Of course.'

'The Imperial Fyrd will be looking to me for their lead.'

I heard the excitement in his voice; he was absolutely prepared for some unspecified apotheosis. 'You want to stay close to San in case he conjures up G.o.d, or something.'

Tornado smiled. 'My place is at his right hand, whatever happens. No Insect or madman will harm him in Lowespa.s.s, where I was born and bred. He'll be safe like he was inside the Castle's walls. And you, Comet; you'd better make sure everyone hears his words. And, like, acts on them.'

'Lightning and I will come out, too.'

'I'll be first to San's side...I'll be certain to witness any revelation.'

'What revelation?'

'Any revelation!' His s.h.i.+re horse started forward.

Great, I thought. Now we begin to jockey for position in serving San. Nothing short of G.o.d returning would quench our b.l.o.o.d.y egos. I knew Lightning likes to see himself as San's second in command but now he was anxious that the Circle had failed, and Tornado's grim-faced but calm faith and certainty of his role gave him a rock-sure composure. He doesn't understand that it is often the beliefs we hold most adamantly that turn out to be wrong, because we never examine them.

I sped back to town. More sprinting along the streets, knocking on doors, a few breathless words at each one. Lightning, with Cyan unwillingly in tow, was at the top of the gatehouse.

The large square windows in its overhang were a good vantage point. Lightning and Cyan were watching Insects running among the straggling troops, dropping into quarries. They scurried, carried on their long legs over the uneven ground. They bit experimentally at abandoned carts. When the wind gusted in our direction, we could hear them crunching as they chewed up the wood's surface in long lines. They methodically gathered b.a.l.l.s of grey pulp in the palps behind their jaws and then rushed away to plaster it along an edge of the Wall.

They tugged at bodies on the ground, cutting them up and carrying them to the lake. The lake glimmered brown as if the wet land had been sc.r.a.ped flat. Dark patches of carca.s.ses and vegetation floated on its surface. On occasional gusts we smelt it; and it turned my stomach. The rotting, waterlogged corpses stank, a bloated, gutsy miasma as thick as gravy. Above the lake, the atmosphere was so solid with the smell you could slice it. It intruded into everything and was destroying our morale.

The wooden room at the tower top always smelled of tar. I leant on the windowsill as I told Lightning the news. He rubbed his eyes and said, 'Ask Wrenn and Lourie to increase guard on the road and I'll send them mounted archers. We'll go out to greet the Emperor.'

A stablehand brought our horses and we set off from town. The last of the Peregrine General Fyrd were coming into the gate. 'Those are my men,' Cyan said.

'Not yet, they aren't,' Lightning told her. 'I called them up with Micawater and I integrated them with my battalions.'

'Why are they all archers?'

'You will mainly field archers. Every man in Awia from eleven years old drills in archery every Sunday. I had that law pa.s.sed centuries ago. Select longbow men train every day, shooting volleys together.'

'Awndyn doesn't,' Cyan said.

'Only Awia trains so thoroughly. The General Fyrd from Hacilith don't drill at all because Aver-Falconet doesn't want proficient soldiers in the city.'

Cyan's oval face was wind-burnt and coppery and, despite herself, she had an interested s.h.i.+ne in her eyes which I found compelling. She kept watching the troops. A small gap and the next set started past, bleary-eyed from sleeping in camps, and with moustaches and beards, not like clean-shaven Awians. She peered at them. 'Who are these?'

Lightning said, 'Can't you see their standard?'

'Yes...just. So?'

'So who is it?'

'Green, with a white splodge.'