Inversions by Iain M. Banks Read Free Book Online Page A

Heroic Romance, this was it. Come to that, a hard bench, a tepid cup of leaf and one of the Doctor’s recommended medical texts would have seemed like bliss to me, compared to this.
    ‘Filthy weather, eh, Oelph?’
    ‘Yes, mistress.’
    They do say the weather has been much more violent since the fall of the Empire, which is either Providence punishing those who helped overthrow it, or an Imperial ghost exacting revenge froze beyond the grave.
    The cur who had lured us into this absurd mission was a hobble-legged child from the Barrows. The palace guards hadn’t even let her into the outer bastion. It had been sheer bad luck that some fool of a servant, bringing the guards a note of instruction, had overheard the brat’s preposterous pleadings and taken sympathy on her, coming to find the Doctor in her workshop mortar and pestling her pungently arcane ingredients with my help and report that her services were requested. By some bastard from the slums! I could not believe it when she agreed. Couldn’t she hear the storm groaning round the lanterns in the roof above? Hadn’t she noticed I’d had to light all our lamps in the room? Was she deaf to the gurgle of drain water in the walls?
    We were on our way to see some destitute breed who were distantly related to the servants of the Mifelis, the chiefs of the trader clan the Doctor had worked for when she had first come to Haspide. The King’s personal physician was about to pay a call in a storm, not on anyone noble, likely to be ennobled or indeed even respectable, but on a family of slack-witted all-runt ne’er-do-wells, a tribe of contagiously flea’d happen-ills so fundamentally useless they were not even servants but merely the hangers-on of servants, itinerant leeches on the body of the city and the land.
    Coinless and hopeless, to be short about it, and even the Doctor might have had the sense to refuse but for the fact that she had, bizarrely, heard of this sickly urchin. ‘She has a voice from another world,’ she’d told me as she’d swirled on her cloak, as though this was all the explanation required.
    ‘Please hurry, mistress!’ wailed the whelp who’d come to summon us. Her accent was thick and her voice made irksome by her disease-dark snaggle teeth.
    ‘Don’t tell the Doctor what to do, you worthless piece of shit!’ I told her, trying to be helpful. The lame brute ducked and hobbled away in front, across the glistening cobbles of the square.
    ‘Oelph! Kindly keep a civil tongue in your head,’ the Doctor told me, grabbing her medicine bag back from me.
    ‘But mistress!’ I protested. At least, though, the Doctor had waited until our limping guide was out of earshot before chastising me.
    She screwed up her eyes against the lashing rain and raised her voice above the howl of the wind. ‘Do you think we can get a cab?’
    I laughed, then turned the offending noise into a cough. I made a show of looking around as we approached the lower edge of the Square, where the lame child had disappeared down a narrow street. I could just make out a few scavenging people scattered along the eastern side of the Square, flapping back and forth in their rags as they collected the half-rotted leaves and rain-sodden husks which had been blown there from the centre of the Square, where the vegetable market had been. Not another soul to be seen. Certainly not a cabbie, rickshaw puller or chair carrier. They had more sense than to be out in weather like this. ‘I think not, mistress,’ I said.
    ‘Oh dear,’ the Doctor said, and seemed to hesitate. For one wonderful moment I thought she might see sense and return us both back to the warmth and comfort of her apartments, but it was not to be. ‘Oh well,’ she said, holding the top of her cloak closed at her neck, settling her hat more firmly on her gathered-up hair and putting her head down to hurry onwards. ‘Never mind. Come on, Oelph.’
    Cold water was creeping down my neck. ‘Coming,