Cyan’s body convulsed and she vomited down my back. ‘Oh, god! Well, better out than in, I suppose…Ella Rayne! Open up!’

Rayne’s squat, square tower was once the College of Surgeons. Other faculties, refectories and dorms had gradually aggregated around its revered centre of learning-the university formed in much the same way as flowstone in a Lowespass cave. It was officially founded in the fifteenth century, only because it was no longer convenient for the faculties to ignore each other.

The tower’s sixteen hundred years gave it a serious gravity. The newer buildings would have overshadowed it if the university had not built them at a respectful distance. Small bifora windows let meagre light into its upper level where a three-tiered lecture hall, now disused, once doubled as a dissecting room and operating theatre. Its roof was flat and its walls unmasoned stone, apart from the deep arch around the door decorated with several bands of zigzag carving. Ironically, given Rayne’s origins, the university had presented the building to her, and when she was not at the Castle or the front she lived here among her cabinet of curiosities.

A shutter slid open and Rayne peered out through its iron grille. ‘Comet!’ She clanged the shutter and creaked the door open. ‘Wha’ are you doing here?’

‘Thank fuck!’ I pushed past her into the room, seeing stacks of chests and medicine boxes packed ready for removal.

Rayne said, ‘You’re supposed t’ be a’ th’ dam. My carriage is on i’s way. Wha’-you’re covered in blood!’

She grasped her brown skirts and hurried after me, as I loped through the museum and a doorway leading to her bedroom. Her pudgy, purplish feet bulged out between her sandal straps. She had been seventy-eight for fourteen hundred and five years, the oldest Eszai, and the oldest person in the world apart from the Emperor himself.

I strode to her box-bed, set into a deep niche in the wall hidden by a curtain. I laid Cyan down gently inside it, on the crochet blanket, and unwrapped her. Rayne saw a patient and immediately hastened to examine her with quick, expert movements, while she bombarded me with questions: ‘She’s no’ bleeding. Whose blood is i’ then? Wha’s happened t’ th’ lass?’

‘She’s Lightning’s daughter,’ I said, swaying.

Rayne stopped and looked up at me. ‘Cyan Dei?’

‘Cyan Peregrine.’

‘Has she been mugged? No. There’s no concussion. I’s drugs, isn’ i’, Jant?’

‘Cat.’

She knelt and turned Cyan on her side to prevent her swallowing her tongue. She observed the girl’s violet-grey face, her clicking, shallow breathing. She pressed her dimpled fingers against Cyan’s neck for her pulse. ‘Obstruc’ed air passages. Bradycardia. Classic scolopendium poisoning. Wha’ have you done t’ her?’

‘It’s not my fault.’

‘Yes, i’ is. Of course i’ is! How did you give her i’?’

‘It wasn’t me!’

‘You’re a born liar! You’re tot’ring, yourself! Oh, Jant, I hoped you wouldn’ take i’ again. I hoped you’d learned your lesson. You can’ be bored, you should be occupied wi’ t’ dam.’

‘I haven’t touched cat for five years!’

‘You haven’ made t’ decade. You’re no’ truly cured.’

‘Please,’ I begged Rayne. ‘Don’t jump to conclusions.’ The appeal to objectivity quietened her long enough for me to shoehorn a word in. ‘Cyan did it to herself. I wasn’t there. She bought it from a Zascai, cocktailed with alcohol and god knows what else. A knackered old junkie showed her how to shoot it and for all I know they shared a needle. At any rate, it was back-flushed. I found her already under. I gave her the kiss of life and I’m still trying to get her taste out of my mouth! I killed the dealer-’ I tugged my shirt demonstratively, pulling the material, hard with clotting blood, from where it had stuck to my chest.

‘You murdered a Zascai?’

‘I never murdered a Zascai who wasn’t the better for it.’

‘Shi’. If t’ Emperor finds ou’, he’ll…’

‘Nobody is going to find anything out. Are they?’

‘I-’

‘Are they, Rayne?’

‘No.’

‘He was a corporal and he’d turned his whole squad into a gang. They probably were, before they were recruited. Fuck…Select Fyrd pressganging street scum. If I catch any of them again I’ll pump them full of twenty poisons…Anyway, they didn’t know that I’m twice as fast as a human. Well, nearly, ‘cause I am the worse for drink but I’m not stoned.’

‘No. You’re replacing one drug with another.’ Rayne had her back to me but I saw her expression reflected in the mirror by the bed. She was preoccupied with Cyan.

In Rayne’s white bedroom, the eye slid along arrangements of objects as smoothly as a scale of music. Models used for teaching stood on the mantelpiece; large anatomical figures of a man and woman, accurate and to scale. There were painted clastic models of torsos with removable organs like a jigsaw, and a ‘wound man’ demonstrating various injuries.

Mice were carved seamlessly onto the furniture, scurrying up the chair legs and nibbling the table edge. But netting held the far wall together: ancient goat hair and wood laths showed through the flaking plaster. A bookcase dominated the corner-the books she had written-and it was buckling under the sheer weight of paper.

Cyan wants experience. She’ll run headlong into ordeals like this and each one will chop a bit off her teenage enthusiasm until it’s down to adult size. I looked at her slack face and burned with fury. ‘Is this what you bloody want? Tell me, does it make your party go with a swing? People like Rawney don’t want you. He wants to be like you! I know, I always did! Did you think it was funny? Well, it’s really fucking hilarious. Look at me; I’m laughing!’

‘Jant…’ Rayne said.

‘It’s fine to be an outsider by choice, but if you get addicted you’ll be an outsider by necessity! Then you’ll be the loneliest posh minx in the world!’

‘Calm down! OK, Jant, you’re no’ t’ blame. I believe you.’

I pulled up a three-legged stool and sat down heavily, legs apart, wings splayed to the floor. I stripped my vomit-covered shirt off and scratched at the bald spots in the pits of my wings. ‘Can you bring her round?’

‘We may jus’ have t’ wai’.’ Rayne rang a small hand bell. She asked her servant to go across to the medical faculty and bring atropine, and some clean clothes for me.

‘I’ll do it,’ I offered. ‘I’m faster.’

‘She knows her way through t’ complex. And I don’ trus’ you wi’ th’ key t’ th’ vaul’s.’ Rayne filled a glass of water, took a dropper from the drawer and began to drip water onto Cyan’s lips. ‘I used t’ do this for you, when you had i’ bad.’

I huffed. The last time I fell asleep under the influence, Wrenn and Tornado shaved my head and painted me blue. I woke up shackled to the prow railings of the Sute Ferry. I haven’t taken cat since. You can face down death, by choosing the harder alternative. Not that I’m overly brave or more than usually lucky; I simply never believed death was an option so I never took it. ‘You can’t begrudge me a little escape now and again. I’m immortal, I need to lose track of time.’

‘You risk losing too much.’

‘Yeah, well, the only excitement in immortality is a possibility of loss.’

Rayne grunted vaguely.

I indicated the anatomical male carving. ‘He’s well-endowed, isn’t he?’

She looked up. ‘No, tha’s t’ average size.’

I was never any good at waiting. I paced through to the museum and stood blinking until my eyes adjusted. Rayne’s museum, representing her workshop through the ages, was a vast collection so tightly packed together it overwhelmed. Candlelight reflected on the curved surfaces of glass jars, thousands of different sizes, and on the sliding door of a materia medica cabinet with tiny square drawers for herbs. What to look at first? Here and there I noticed an object because of its special rarity: a two-headed foetus floating in a jar; or its great size: a broken sea krait tooth; or its beauty: a baby vanished to nothing but a three-dimensional plexus of red and blue veins and arteries to show the dissector’s skill; or its ghastliness: the preserved face of a child who died of smallpox. Some objects caught my eye because they were illustrated in the etched plates of books I’d read.