Dangerous Offspring Read Online Free PDF Page B

set into a concrete platform slick with pools of green algae. Its waxed wooden beam and sturdy foundations glistened, beaded with rain water. Its cable had been removed and the counterweight box was empty. Barbed wire rolls stacked haphazardly beside its pyramid of ammunition stones. Far off I could just see the nearest peel tower, a link in the chain stretching from Frass to Summerday to monitor Insect activity.
    At the river I altered my course, heading upstream to the dam. Bulrushes bowed to the water’s creased surface as the wind ruffled through reed beds on the south bank. Its other bank was nothing but mud mashed with three-clawed footprints: Insects had stripped the vegetation bare.
    Frost’s workings began and the ground changed abruptly. Her company had done nothing less than remodel the valley. Cart tracks criss-crossed the bank; water in their ruts reflected the sky. Broken shovels, dirty string and red striped ranging rods littered the ground, with abandoned workmen’s huts, empty burlap bags, splays of spilt gravel.
    The overturned earth was glutted with beige specks–calcined bone fragments–some recognisable as ribs or skulls; the remains of generations of men and women. There were pieces of archaic armour and broken Insect shells, which don’t easily decay but weather to porous shards. The Insects have been creeping or swarming southward over fifteen hundred years. In response, we constantly move men and supplies to the front to stop them, on such a massive scale that I fancy all the Fourlands will eventually erode and end up here as a series of hills.
    The river banks straightened, reinforced by walls of metal mesh boxes full of rubble. The river flowed more slowly but its level had hardly dropped. Frost couldn’t allow it to dry up because, since Insects can’t swim, the Oriole River was our main defence.
     

    I approached the dam from the front, its stone face a gigantic sloping wall. The ends tapered down and curved towards me like horns. The outflow hole at its base looked like a giant blank eye. A fortified winch tower stood on the crest above it, holding the mechanism to raise the gate. The walkway ran through the tower, blocked with formidable portcullises on entry and exit, so Insects could not cross from the Paperlands.
    Lightning and Eleonora were two tiny figures beside it, looking down from behind the split-timber fence. The wind’s speed was increasing over the smooth outflow platform. Air hit the wall and hurtled up its slanting surface. I lay with my wings outstretched and let it carry me–square blocks and mortar streaked down past my eyes–I could have filed my nails on them.
    Along the whole length of the dam the wind went rocketing up the incline faster and faster until it burst vertically from the edge of the walkway around Lightning and Eleonora and up into the sky.
    I soared rapidly past them, hearing the last exchange of their conversation, ‘–This could be the answer.’
    ‘Perhaps. I just wish that we’d thought of it before.’
    I found the right balance to hang motionless above their heads. My shadow fell over them and my boot toes dangled at the level of their faces. They drew back and shaded their eyes, seeing me suspended in the middle of six metres of glorious wingspan.
    The enormous lake formed from the backed-up Oriole River spread out behind the dam. On its north bank the water lapped and merged into the mazes of Insects’ paper cells; irregular, many-sided boxes ranging from the size of a cupboard to that of a house. Passages wound between them, some covered with pointed roofs, the rest open to the air. They looked like ceramic fungi, or geometric papier-mâché termite mounds.
    The lake stood cold and mirror-reflective in the fresh morning light. A swathe of ripples dimpled across its middle, broken by white, angular peaks projecting from the surface: the tops of flooded Insect buildings.
    Insects had built and abandoned walls five times as the water level