The Tropic of Eternity

by Tom Toner

  Something rustled in the drifts and he picked up his pace, wincing at the pain in his ankle and waist. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he might have broken a rib, too. A lonely, mournful cry drifted through the columns of trees ahead and he changed direction, moving towards a source of silvery light.

  The other Hedron Stars cast more than enough of a glow for his large Vulgar eyes to see by: a silvery pink light that suffused the world at the bottom of the trees. Maril found himself walking on harder ground, though the heaps of dead flotsam were no less abundant, and between small valleys of wrinkled, coral-like fungus. It was hard to be sure in the starlight, but it looked like the same stuff he’d eaten before. He made his way through the mist-shrouded valleys, steadying himself with a hand, stopping to rest after fifteen minutes and becoming conscious of the cold immediately. He had to keep moving, had to keep warm.

  Maril blundered forward, blowing into his hands, stirring up some slow, sleepy flotsam that must still have been dying. The cloud of little creatures fluttered before him, catching the starlight, leading him on into a colder, more open space.

  As soon as they reached the colder air, the flotsam swirled into the wind, as if making one last hopeless dash for the warmth of the treetops. Maril watched them billowing into the darkness like the spray of an inverted silver waterfall, the sigh of their minute wings calming his nerves.

  But then the breeze strengthened, the hairs on his arms rising, and a huge dim shape appeared in the silver mist, swooping low through the rising cloud of flotsam. Maril ducked as the batlike shape of the Osseresis swept overhead, the wind of its passing almost knocking him off his feet. Another dived into the flotsam cloud, its mouth agape, hoovering up as much as it could before banking and rising back into the darkness. Then two more, their claws extended, came thundering down in a blast of air from their flapping wings. They landed, black ghosts in the silver, jaws snapping randomly at the flotsam. Maril found himself surrounded by their dashing shapes, the winds of multiple arriving Osseresis buffeting him to the ground.

  A shadow spotted him and flew low, snatching his wrist in its claw. Maril screamed as he was lifted through the flotsam cloud and into the silvery blackness, flying between the branches of the immense trees. It dropped him at last, his stomach rising in his throat, and he landed with a bruising thump.

  He was in a soft, hair-matted heap among the starlit caves of what looked to be a gigantic subterranean roost. Grotesquely fat Osseresis slithered around, flexing their wings and turning their golden eyes on him; from the oily sheens of their fur they must have fed well this season. Maril winced and shifted onto his good arm, sensing thousands of flotsam fluttering around in his stomach; he must have gulped a goodly amount in the struggle, or they had consciously flown inside him to get away from their predators.

  He sat up, raising a tentative hand to the nearest of the black beasts. It sidled over, clearly not knowing what to make of him. The Osseresis licked its drooling chops and took a quick, sharp nip at Maril’s good arm, pulling him over onto his side, then regarded him contemplatively and grasped him in its talons, lifting him into the air.

  Maril was swept up into the darkness, higher and higher until the air currents grew warmer again and the purple glow had returned to the sky. They soared out over the trees, the painterly hint of the Snowflake stretching out beneath them, and plummeted past one of its arms, diving. Maril must have blacked out, for when he came around again they were far below the great artificial world, falling away through warm, flotsam-choked air. The Hedron Stars appeared to lie not in the Void at all, but in their own great atmosphere. He twisted in the talons’ grip, trying to see where they were going, and spotting far below the colossal, crown-shaped structure of something bigger than all the Snowflakes put together. He felt suddenly light-headed again, and knew no more.

  INGMUTH

  Scallywag swam through the morning half-light, passing stands of brooding palms and junk-strewn mud, the lights of little hovels twinkling from the shore. Vulgar people had begun running alongside since Draalie, and Cunctus could see a procession of dozens following the black line of the beach, their thin cries reaching him across the distance. Through the night he’d spotted the lights of Lacaille Voidships dashing above the coastline, watching some of the larger vessels scorching in from the upper atmosphere, and a sense of unease was building in his gut. That premonition of their laughter filled his stomach again, twisting it in anguished knots.

  The black mud of the shore drew closer as Scallywag slithered through the shallows, the harbour appearing around the spit. The clouds of marsh skits intensified in the rosy-pink morning air. Scallywag reared his massive head out of the water, glancing around, and twisted to meet Cunctus’s gaze.

  “This is it,” he said, patting his friend and looking into his piggy blue eyes. “Let’s get your brekky sorted.”

  The Cethegrande wove into port, swimming up to the jetties between the tall house ships. Cunctus spied the small white figure of the Lacaille chamberlain already looking out for him, a crowd of local Vulgar waiting behind. At the sight of the approaching Cethegrande they surged forward, a line of Lacaille soldiers doing their best to hold them back. Cunctus levered himself stiffly from Scallywag’s shoulders and clambered onto the rotten steps of the jetty.

  The Lacaille stepped up to meet him as the crowd began to softly chant his name. Cunctus, Cunctus. He felt as if he was on stage; hundreds of eyes watched them from the teetering sea ships on either side of the jetty.

  He stretched, acknowledging the crowd with a wave, and returned his attention to the small, plump Lacaille. “Chamberlain Lazan?”

  Lazan bowed, distracted for a moment by Scallywag looming in the water near the jetty. “Come riding in on your Wiro, have you? How romantic.”

  Cunctus made no comment, remembering the Lacaille’s fairy-tale monsters. It was the image he’d hoped for, though he would never admit that to Lazan.

  The chamberlain looked up at him, smirking. “It is good to match a face to a name at last. All that mystery, all that theatre. You ought to’ve introduced yourself sooner.”

  Cunctus was probably responsible for fifty or sixty thousand Lacaille deaths, all in all. They’d have to forget that fairly quickly if they wanted what he had.

  “Nothing personal, Lazan,” he said, stifling a yawn.

  The chamberlain’s blue eyes glittered. “Oh no, nothing personal. Not to me, anyway.”

  They walked together along the shabby promenade, the crowd still chanting his name.

  “And what news of your King Eoziel and his campaign for the Amaranthine? Does he prevail?”

  “I’m certain he does,” Lazan said stiffly. “Word does not travel well from the Firmament these days.”

  Scallywag glided beneath the water, parallel with the dock as they walked, one submerged eye tracking Lazan. The Cethegrande’s wake bobbed every boat it passed, whipping their chanting occupants into a frenzy. Cunctus turned to watch as big sloppy buckets of meat were brought out to the jetty. “I’d stand back if I were you,” he said to Lazan.

  “There’s no point sugaring it, Cunctus,” said the chamberlain over the noise of the crowd and Scallywag writhing in the water, his jaws filled with thrown meat. “We could’ve bombed your kingdom of Napp into the lagoon. Eoziel could be wearing a necklace of your teeth by now. If you didn’t have half the Investiture ready to drop everything and follow your cause—”

  Cunctus regarded him without expression. “Don’t forget my Magic Mirror, Chamberlain. You’ll be needing that, too, I imagine, if you want to last even a minute against those Pifoon in the Vaulted Lands.”

  Lazan circled him, studying his height, his scars. “You’re a Firstling, aren’t you? The smallest breed of Melius?”

  “I think there are smaller folk out towards Ingolland, on the Westerly Isles.”

  Lazan ignored his answer. “You were such a nuisance, before your capture. That raid you pulled in Baln nearly bankrupted us before the
war even got started. If it were up to me”—he shook his flabby, pointy-eared head, mouth set—“if it were up to me . . .”

  Cunctus smiled his toothy smile, great shaggy head cocked, pink eyes filled with good humour.

  Lazan sobered a little, clearing his throat and stepping back. “You’d better know that the equatorial capital of Moso is putting up fierce resistance. We’re going to fizzbomb the city’s eastern districts in five days.” He shrugged, affectedly playful. “Be there if you want, it’s up to you. Just don’t get in our way.”

  “Oh, I’ll be there,” Cunctus said, lifting a leg to inspect the sole of his grubby foot. He’d trodden on a piece of glass. “At the head of . . .” He mimed counting on his twelve fingers. “Ninety thousand freeVulgar soldiers, enough that you needn’t drop a single bomb; their chanting of my name alone will be fit to crack the walls.”

  His words hung in the insect-dense air, the sun rising over the hills.

  “But what then?” Lazan asked, his eyes narrowed. “Do you know much about long campaigns? I don’t suppose you do.” He fished a tarnished metal tin from his inside pocket and produced an exquisite silver-painted Lacaille spitette, closing the tin again without offering one to Cunctus. “Could you stand there and tell me a single thing about upper-troposphere flight, heavy-gauge lumen guns, battery coordination, Canolis fuel yield”—he paused, dashing the coated end of the spitette across his belt, igniting it—“superluminal navigation, ship-to-ship collaring . . .” He took a drag, exhaling sweet smoke into the wind. “Or will you simply follow our convoys, stirring up the populace and claiming each victory as your own?” He blew another plume of smoke into the breeze, observing the marsh skits alighting on the back of his hand and touching the spitette’s glowing tip to each of their wings. “Have you even been anywhere near Drolgins before? Do you know a single local dialect?” The chamberlain held his hand flat, collecting the burned insects. “Perhaps it’s best if you let us fight this war alone and take what’s rightfully ours. Nobody would begrudge you that.” He looked up. “Then, when Eoziel rules over Filgurbirund, and all your past misdeeds are forgotten, you could come and claim your leftovers.” Lazan swept his hands clean of the dead insects at last—a little show Cunctus fancied he might have planned in advance—and smirked at him. “Just a thought.”

  Cunctus observed him with that same pitiful half-smile, concentrating hard on hiding the steady boiling of his blood; his army, still only a force of five thousand garrisoned at Napp, would need to be swelled straight away and the Wilhelmina sent into active duty immediately. Cunctus studied the fat of Lazan’s hairy neck, knowing how easy it would be to send the Lacaille a message then and there. Instead, he rubbed his hands together and strode out towards the nervous Lacaille soldiers, gazing at the massed crowd still yelling his name. He straightened from his usual hunch until he was more than twice the height of everyone present.

  “Vulgar of Ingmuth!” he said in pitch-perfect Middle Ingwese. “You are my first stop on a long and glorious road, and I shall remember your hospitality for as long as I live.” He saw that the crowd had grown, now filling the shambolic streets beyond the harbourside.

  “Come! Touch me if you like, don’t mind the soldiers. Let your children forward to meet my Scallywag here. He won’t bite.”

  The children came scuttling out, ducking beneath the soldiers’ arms. Scallywag rolled in the water, eyeing them hungrily as he exposed his blotchy pink belly. The soldiers—having given up holding people back despite Lazan’s frosty glare—finally allowed the adults through, and a horde of gabbling Vulgar surrounded Cunctus. He held his head high and shut his eyes, smiling as they clambered all over him, perching on his shoulders and outstretched arms.

  Lazan watched for a while, entranced, the spitette forgotten in his fingers until it was snatched away by a child. “I have a ship,” he called, “to talk somewhere a little less overlooked.”

  “No thank you, Lazan,” Cunctus said, his eyes still closed, “places to be.”

  The chamberlain pursed his little hairy lips. “I’d like to talk more, before we go our separate ways.”

  Cunctus opened his eyes and glared at him, evaluating. “Show him your trick, Scallywag!”

  The Cethegrande surged his tail through the sea, deluging Lazan with water. The crowd roared with laughter, applauding. Cunctus watched with a smile, enjoying the sight of the most powerful Lacaille on Drolgins drenched and dripping.

  As he turned to head into the port, Lazan spoke to his retreating back, his voice queerly flat amid the hubbub. “Don’t you forget about me, Cunctus.”

  UNZAT CITY: 14,621

  The city of Unzat—translated directly in Lacaille as the “unflat” city—was the gigantic remnant of a concrete meltwater well standing desolate on the cold, dry plains of Dozo, in the country of Etzel. Its tapering grey box shape, sloping inwards to a central reservoir ten miles to a side, was home to almost forty million Lacaille, their dwellings lining the steep cement sides. Along each flat-topped wall of the four-sided city ran an ice-rimed canal, its banks coated with snow, and upon each canal sailed a procession of wooden freighters and houseboats working their slow way along the wall until they could round the corner and start anew, not returning to their original mooring for eight weeks at a time.

  Once a month, the sky over Dozo darkened, the gale of sleet blotted for a day by the arrival of the Lesser Batyem, an ex-battleship and goods vessel dropping in from the larger ports of Harp-Zalnir. Gangs across the city watched to see at which of Unzat’s corners the colossal ship would land, and which of the merchant vessels would arrive to take their fill.

  Ghaldezuel was known as Speechless back then, for his taciturn ways. At the wiry age of eleven he was already a killer, fighting his way across the Slant with his childhood gang, the Ghosts.

  That was the year he discovered her in the darkness of an alley, she a decade older at least and already having born a child: a trembling, starving apparition in the dark. He’d found her by following the stench of death—already strong in any Lacaille city—and the little trail of chewed bones. She’d been living in a crack in the concrete, nursing a squealing Bultling the size of a finger, only leaving to hunt stray Lacaille at night. Maternal instinct, apparently, was strong even in such creatures; the need to hold, to embrace, passed down through all the galaxy’s mammalian life. Ghaldezuel had looked in at her and almost ended her life there and then. A lone Bult, however terrifying, could not survive for long in established Prism worlds—they were anathema, shot and stuffed and paraded around town. Ghaldezuel had seen his fair share of their desiccated corpses strung from the city’s flags, marvelling, like the rest of them, that the devils were real.

  The ship never docked, sailing through the white days and freezing nights. Its decks were lined with iron spikes, watchtowers and bolt turrets, shifts of hired Great Companies in the pay of the Batyem taking turns at the helm.

  It was two days’ climb from the rainy tenements of Lower Unzat up to the canals, the Ghosts knocking on doors as they went, collecting simple wooden spring guns, hard black bread and vinegary wine.

  Ghaldezuel made his way through the dripping shanties, snow from the upper reaches turning to rain around them, pausing to look back at the far-off district in which his own home lay, where the Bult lady and her child waited for his return. On his shoulder he clutched a bundle of washing, the weight of six hidden rifles forcing him to stoop. Sometimes he stopped for a breather, his eyes wandering, as they often did each day, down to the base of the city. There, ringed by a moat of cold, filthy water, lay the prison of Fizesh; the place he and all the boys would end up, he supposed, whether they liked it or not.

  Cold, grey night descended over the concrete slopes, the snow thickening as they reached the top. Here the houses were a little finer, possessing tin-sheet walls and slabplastic roofs, jauntily coloured to dispel the depression of the place. Fires beckoned them from the windows, drinkers pissing out of doorways and wetting the boy
s’ feet as they stumbled past. Cooking and effluent merged into one hanging stink, their stomachs snarling.

  At the canal bridge they looked down, eyes gleaming in the radiance of Pruth-Zalnir, at the glowing banks of snow. The ship, twinkling with soft lights, was making its ponderous way upstream towards them.

  Ghaldezuel loaded his wooden spring gun and drew a breath as the ship slid by beneath, sensing that he had come to a fork in fate, and jumped.

  The prison of Fizesh was situated well beneath the lowest, poorest tenements of Unzat. Inside the cold moat at the base of the well city was an island, its basements bored into the concrete, nothing but a ceiling of iron beams to keep out the sleet.

  Ghaldezuel had heard of the Thrasm, the Firmament’s notorious prison—everyone had: that nightmarish oubliette for troublesome Prism where they gave you no food or water or light, the Amaranthine expecting you to take what you needed from the blood and bones of other prisoners. Here they were more lenient, but an inmate still had to work for his keep.

  Across a large, dimly lit floor scratched and painted with a network of unintelligible hieroglyphs, a hundred or so pairs of eyes turned to watch his arrival. Drizzle floated between the concrete beams of the ceiling, illuminated like constellations in the pale shafts of light. Ghaldezuel stopped at the entrance, feeling the press of youngsters behind him, understanding that the hieroglyphs were markings, territorial borders as intricate as any Lacaille country. He lifted his head to the wet air and met their gazes; many were scarcely older than he—twelve, perhaps thirteen—with a few old lifers scattered among them.

  Someone growled behind him and he stepped aside, allowing the younger Lacaille in first. The youngster (Ghaldezuel knew his face from somewhere down-slope) shoved past, stepping rather unwisely onto the first piece of marked floor, a space about six feet across and home to a feral, cross-eyed thing that must have been half-Zelio.

  Instantly the queue-barger’s foot was pulled out from under him. Ghaldezuel and the others hung back, watching the slow, almost ticklish death as he was pinned down, writhing, his eyes gouged swiftly out of his head.