From a futon, which was a piled mess of quilts and sheepskins, projected a slender blue-white arm, and a limp hand hanging down. I gasped. Cyan!

She sat upright among cushions, her head lolled back and away from me, her legs apart and her skirt rucked up. A thin man lay on the floor at her feet, head back and foam dried into a crust around his mouth. He was stone dead.

OK. This is nothing to do with me.

Yes, it is. She’s Lightning’s daughter!

I stretched a leg down the steps and shuffled in on my backside. The dead man was lying wedged between the wall and the futon. He must have had a fit and thrashed around because he’d kicked a potbellied stove free of its tin flue. It stood at an angle on its platform. I turned him over; he was so stiff that when I propped him on his side, his arm stuck up in the air. His blank eyes no longer stared at the ceiling but at me instead. I checked his dog tag-his name was Sharny. As I did so, something fell to the floor and rolled across the rag-rug. I leant down and felt around until my fingers closed on a glass hypodermic. Sharny’s sleeves were unbuttoned; I pushed one up. His arm was covered in red pinpoints, packed so densely his veins had collapsed, looking like they were open to the air. The skin inside his elbow was juicy with infection.

Shit, shit, shit. Not cat, surely? Not Cyan? When I use, I try to space out the tracks so that they can’t be seen when I’m at the podium, to keep the veins fat and easy to hit. Sharny, on the other hand, had sunk lower than the dregs.

I turned Cyan’s face towards me gently. Her eyes were rolled back, only showing white slivers under half-closed lids. Her lips were blue, she was hardly breathing; just a little sigh every so often. Two sips of the air, another ragged sigh with a high-pitched whistling sound. From elbow to shoulder her right arm was a solid bruise. I loosened the tourniquet above her elbow, hooked my thumbnail in it and pushed it down. I could only see one needle mark in the crook of her arm but that didn’t necessarily mean this was her first time.

I tried to ignore the thought of her fast dropping into unconsciousness, helplessly watching Sharny’s avid experimentation with the needle in the back of his cold hand.

I pressed my finger inside her fingers, waiting for a grasp response but nothing happened. ‘Cyan, can you hear me? Breathe. Breathe in. And out. Again. Keep going. Can you squeeze my finger? No? OK…’

I must get her outside, into fresh air. I lifted her; she folded like silk, gave every impression of being dead. I laid her completely relaxed body on the bedspread and wrapped it around her.

A table beside the stove caught my attention. It carried a decanter of water, a spoon, a razor and an unfolded paper of fine white powder standing in a peak. Some had been nicked away.

I recognised it immediately. It called me like a lover and the next second I was down on my hands and knees. Don’t look at it! I thought; steady! Turn away. If I so much as touch it I’ll be hooked again. I’ll be hooked before I know it! Where did Cyan get cat? Where the fuck did she get so much? I felt sick and giddy. I knew I was going to pick it up. I moved with no volition of my own; the drug there on the table had more control over my limbs than I did.

Let me explain what craving is. Craving is when your friend manages to talk you out of the corner and gets you to put the knife down. Craving is when you ask to be locked in, because otherwise you’d fly all night from the court to score. Craving is when you wear your fingernails to bloody stumps trying to pick the lock.

What was she doing, playing with cat? But they hadn’t called it cat or scolopendium. What was their word? Jook? Jook, don’t you know, it’s the latest thing, all the rage. If I just take a little bit no one will mind. The Emperor won’t be able to tell. Shut up and help Cyan. I realised I had been holding my breath for so long my ribs were hurting. I swallowed hard, then stood up. Very slowly and judiciously I refolded the fat wrap of cat and dropped it into my pocket, where it burned.

I bundled Cyan out of the double door, hoisted her onto my shoulder and jumped onto the bank in a bound that set the pool of lamplight lapping up and down. It slid up the inside of the bridge’s brick arch, then quickly down to the mooring loops. Viscid water sloshed around the Tumblehome’s ridged hull.

I lay her on the ground and checked her. She had stopped breathing. Her eyes had receded into round hollows as if her skull was rising to the surface. Shit. This isn’t just a dead faint, it’s respiratory failure. I tilted her head back, fingered her mouth open, pinched her nose and blew into her mouth. Her chest rose. I rocked back on my heels watching it fall gently, then blew again.

Her lips were soft, but her mouth was rank with beer, smoke and the metallic taste of death. I had to blow hard to overcome the resistance from the air inside her; my cheeks prickled and my jaw started aching. Her hair brushed my cheek every time I put my head down, but it stank of stale cigarettes. She was only a child, just as when I saved her from the shipwreck. Her chest rose, I looked sideways down the length of her body, between her breasts falling back from the bodice collar as she exhaled.

She twitched, but it must have been nerves, because she definitely wasn’t anywhere near consciousness. She gasped and began to breathe for herself again. Thank fuck. ‘Well done, girl,’ I said as I wrapped her up. ‘Keep breathing.’

I had been working so hard keeping her alive that I hadn’t been aware of my surroundings. Footsteps were running over the bridge. A boot ground on the path in front of me. I realised I’d seem like a mugger hunched over his victim, so I looked up-into the baby-blue eyes of Rawney Carron.

Two men I hadn’t seen before stood either side of him. Movement at the edges of my vision told me three more had closed in behind me. They held naked broadswords, their hair was tied back into tarred pigtails. They couldn’t be sailors, because sailors, doctors and armourers are professions safe from the draft. Ex-dock workers, then, and probably owlers, a very dedicated breed of nocturnal smuggler.

‘Is this your fyrd squad?’ I asked Rawney, calmly keeping anger out of my voice. ‘Were you coming back to check on her or to collect your payment?’

Rawney spat, ‘Comet, don’t you just know everything?’

‘Let me go, quick-she’s dying!’

‘We won’t let you arrest us.’

‘Look. I don’t care if you’re dealing. I won’t report you. Even though you’ve done this.’

Rawney shook his head. They knew that to be caught in Morenzia would be their end. One by one they’d be carted to the scaffold, bound to a cart wheel and every bone in their body, ending with their skulls, systematically broken by blows from a mace. What they don’t know is I never turn dealers in. The only time I confiscate cat from soldiers is when I’m in short supply myself.

I stood up, palming the flick knife from my boot. ‘This is an emergency!’ ‘No!’

Exasperated, I said, ‘I know two cartels that run “Ladygrace Fine” in from Brandoch. I know Emmer Rye fences everything coming into Galt. I don’t know you, so you must be kids.’

‘Fuck you. You’re one man against six. And you’re not much of a man anyway!’

‘Don’t mess about.’

The legs of one soldier were starting to bend with fear. He never thought he’d see an Eszai so close in his lifetime, let alone face one with drawn sword. I could see Rawney trying to balance this against the fact I was obviously drunk and apparently unarmed. He jerked his head and said, ‘Kill him.’

I whooshed my wings open, yelled, ‘In San’s name, with god’s will-get out of my way!’

The man on Rawney’s left and the three behind me turned and ran.