The Tropic of Eternity

by Tom Toner

  Another tried his luck as soon as the noise was over, skirting the boundaries of the territories, dithering at the fateful moment and falling prey to an outstretched hand. Ghaldezuel used the time to decide his next move; too far and he might slip up; too close and he’d have to battle interlopers for the rest of his stay. He selected a particularly weak-looking creature about ten strides away, noticing how the thing’s territory (a rough hexagon scratched out in charcoal) backed onto another’s: room, perhaps, for expansion.

  Ghaldezuel allowed another couple past him, watching the first get snatched up, and took his chance. He pounced, leaping onto the warm body of a recent kill, aiming a quick kick into the head of the murderer and landing in his space. Ghaldezuel punched the Ringum quickly in the throat, aware that the baying of the crowd had increased around him, and shuffled in a tight circle, having lost his bearings for a moment. He saw the weakling a few feet away and bounded into the neighbouring territory.

  He scampered, one foot in each space, dodging grasping hands until he could jump the final few feet. The weakling squealed and bared his teeth. Ghaldezuel ignored the show and wrapped his hands around the youngster’s neck, hurling him backwards into a scrum of clutching fingers.

  When the deed was done, he stood, breathing heavily, flushing as the place broke into sudden applause. It didn’t last long: another member of his gang had just tried their luck, taking the space alongside the Ringum with a messy kill and earning another, softer ovation.

  Ghaldezuel cleared his patch, shoving the previous occupant’s personal effects to one side and sitting down. Judging by the hill of bones piled in each corner, nobody would be coming to collect the rubbish. Across from him, a Quetterel swept its territory with an improvised broom, muttering. Ghaldezuel imagined shoving someone hard enough to create a domino effect, perhaps instigating a full-on war as everyone stumbled into one another’s spaces.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” his neighbour said quietly. Ghaldezuel turned. A yellow-bearded Lacaille was holding out a small bucket of white chalkpaint. “That’s why the moat’s there. Any rioting and they flood the place.”

  He must have seen Ghaldezuel’s incredulous look as he took the bucket and repainted the border of his space. “Truly, they do. It’s happened twice before.” He raised his eyes to the lowest of the grey shanty slopes, just visible through the rain and the concrete slabs. “To be below the waterline is to be forgotten, as the old Lacaille saying goes. We are drowned souls already.”

  A month later, his time served, Ghaldezuel gave the older Lacaille his floor space. Vibor—banged up for a year after seducing one of the Sigour’s wives—let him through, shoving a letter into his hand so that they might meet again.

  Ghaldezuel took a last moment to paint out his own name, doubling Vibor’s territory. The Quetterel swept harder, watching the transaction with resentment.

  When he found her again she’d moved district, squirrelling herself away into another alley much the same as the last. Ghaldezuel had wondered then if she didn’t want to see him, if she’d been trying to get away. The child—nut-brown, blind and premature—had died, of course, and together they pushed it into a crack in the wall, sealing it up, Jathime following him warily into the half-light of the alley and into the rest of his life.

  JATHIME

  The slow, cold blue light outside had brightened just enough to see by. Ghaldezuel ran his tongue along his yellowed teeth, climbing out of bed and peering at himself in the bullet-pocked cuirass that served as a mirror. The sores on his top lip had only partially healed, the culprit never returning for the poisoned bowl of blood he’d left out these last few nights. Ghaldezuel picked the bowl up and slung the blood away, kicking it back under his bed.

  After washing his armpits with lagoon water from a bucket, he stepped into the cold light by the balcony so that he could begin the process of bleaching his fangs with tooth paint. When he was done, he stuck out his tongue, observing in the faint reflection that it was coated with a layer of white-green slime, and rooted in his bag for the old bottle of perfume he’d carried with him these last six years. He dabbed some of the oil sparingly around his ears and scraped his tongue clean with the flat of his knife, reflecting that, barring the odd dip in cold water, it must have been at least six months since he’d abluted in any meaningful way. Pocketing the knife, he went to work inspecting his overgrown netherparts, combing them a little and dabbing on more of the perfume. He went and squatted on the Pong bin, a tin bucket tied to the balcony railings, shivering in the morning air.

  The radio relay crackled from his helmet on the table and he started, almost knocking the bucket over. She was here.

  A twinkling white dot, coming in low over the lagoon. No ships were allowed anywhere near Napp now that the city was cut off, and Ghaldezuel’s pulse quickened as he heard the unsynced groan of lumen turrets across the city sighting on the approaching speck. Squeaky shouts across the balconies began calling them off. He exhaled, unclasping his hands, and sat back to wait.

  The sun still hadn’t risen, and out of the deep blue the little speck of light grew brighter, its structure visible at last. It was a brand-new Lacaille vessel, a Poacher, by the look of it, built for the latter stages of the war. He’d asked for only the very best. His eyes followed the ship’s wobbling progress across the sky, its noise falling over the still city, a stripe of black exhaust recounting the ship’s journey across the wastes of Milkland.

  Then it was dropping towards his rooftop, wind snapping the holey curtains and shuddering the buildings. Ghaldezuel covered his ears, smiling, and watched the Poacher settle, a long, white spear of plated iron carbuncled with weaponry at one end. Its engines roared tropical blue and cut, dumping it the last few feet to the rooftop and shuddering its extended legs. Ghaldezuel uncovered his ears and climbed over the railing, walking quickly towards the opening doors.

  He envisaged the look on her face as he stepped into the ship’s dim shadow, smiling nervously, rearranging his perpetually wild hair. It had been three years, one month and twenty-seven days since last they’d seen each other; a quick, fumbling middle-of-the-night goodbye as the Vulgar closed in.

  A silhouette against the bright interior, fussing with something. Ghaldezuel squinted.

  Vibor, his old friend, came down ahead, waving and grasping Ghaldezuel’s hand.

  “She’s had a hard journey, but will be glad to see you,” he said, throwing his bags in exquisite slow motion to some waiting Lacaille. “I see you weren’t exaggerating about this place,” he added, examining the languid motions of his own hand.

  Ghaldezuel patted his old friend on the shoulder, making his way with a jog up the ramp to greet her. He entered the ship, the rank sweat and fishy rubber of a long journey watering his eyes, grinning as she came wandering along the corridor, face bathed in magnesium light.

  The Bult lady Jathime had changed, he saw, fattened a little by the years of waiting, aged perhaps by worry, her white gown ripped anxiously by her own long nails. Spotting his reflection in a reflective panel, Ghaldezuel understood that he himself was no catch; even with his yellow satin finery he cut a scrawny and bedraggled figure, careworn from his wanderings across the Firmament.

  Her large slanted eyes, rimmed with those exquisitely long Bult lashes, looked warily at him before some light of recognition came into them. He saw that she was wearing the pendant he’d asked her nephew Tzolz to pass on. She touched it absently as she looked at him.

  Ghaldezuel was the first to reach out, taking one of her long, three-fingered hands. It was cold and clammy. “I’ve missed you,” he whispered in Bult, unsure how to hold her after so much time apart, his mind reeling at the anticlimax of it all.

  Vibor was waiting for them at the bottom of the ramp, suitably distracted by the strange properties of the city. Ghaldezuel led her down, watching her step in case she tripped, and into the cool early morning air. When the soldiers saw her, they quickened their pace, carting the baggage away
across the rooftop.

  He released Jathime’s cold hand, pulling her slowly into his awkward embrace.

  *

  “So, in six months, the Lacaille have requisitioned every major Vulgar territory and habitat outside of Drolgins and Filgurbirund, killing the Vulgar Kings Kimmus and Borlo in battle and incarcerating Wilemo II in the delightful prison of Fizesh,” Vibor said over his limewine, smiling at their shared rememberings of the place. “They have effectively won the war single-handedly.”

  Ghaldezuel nodded, head in his hands, eyes fixed on Jathime’s door.

  “The Melius warlord Cunctus, meanwhile, has staged a small incursion on Drolgins while its king, Paryam, is on the run, taking a middlingly defended city and executing Andolp the Stupid, an aristocrat of little worth. For this he wants a quarter share in Filgurbirund, half of Drolgins and to be proclaimed acting Satrap of the whole Investiture— by the Lacaille, I might add, an empire responsible for his incarceration only a few years before?”

  Ghaldezuel’s tired gaze shifted to his friend, eyes crinkling into a smile.

  “What is more, he has made you grand-marshal of his New Investiture, and you, in turn, are naming me marshal of Milkland while you and Jathime take up a more comfortable residence on Filgurbirund, in the as-yet-unconquered northern capital of Hauberth Under Shiel.” He took another swallow, raising a finger. “And that’s still not all.” He placed the cup back down. “A Threen witch believing herself able to commune with invisible Spirits lives with you in your apartments.” At this point, Vibor cocked his head, a disbelieving look on his old face. “And Cunctus, riding around the Lagoon of Impio on the back of a Cethegrande, no less, is now pillaging his newly conquered countries and generally stirring up trouble among the beasts of the deep.” He licked his lips and took another sip of the wine. “Do I understand correctly? Have I got it all?”

  “Where do you think King Paryam’s run off to?” Ghaldezuel asked, taking a sip from his own cup, smiling.

  Vibor stared at him a moment, then lowered his eyes to the battered old table. “The new Pifoon Firmament, almost certainly. Whether he can convince them to let him into one of their Vaulted Lands before they seal them up is another matter.”

  “Cunctus is confident, says he’s got a way to crack each of ’em open like a nut. The Lacaille will give him what he wants for it.”

  Vibor arched his wispy eyebrows. “Ah yes, this Mirror thing? The Amaranthine treasure? I heard that only works on location, as it were.”

  “I don’t think Lacaille high command fully understand it. Cunctus has it in his rooms—he even let me look in it.” Vibor stilled. “And?”

  He hesitated, not wishing to be made fun of. “It’s real.”

  His marshal’s eyes narrowed. “What did you see?”

  He’d known something was amiss the moment he’d entered Cunctus’s rooms. Cunctus sat, brooding, in a specially enlarged chair by the window, his lips wet with drool. Ghaldezuel had paused, ears pricked. The room felt full, somehow, as if packed with people, and yet only he and the Melius were present. Upon one of Cunctus’s red, baked-clay walls hung a glossy silver bauble, its fish-eye reflection taking in the whole chamber. Ghaldezuel remembered the shock as he’d realised what he was seeing: it was the fabled Magic Mirror, and in its wide, silver eye floated a reflected throng of ghosts.

  “I saw all the Vulgar people that had ever lived in or entered that room,” he said to Vibor. “A hundred years of activity, all moving, talking, doing everything at once.”

  Vibor sat back, ears flattening. “Could you hear them?”

  “Faintly,” he said, remembering. “Nothing sensible, though. They were all talking at the same time.”

  Vibor took a minute to absorb the story, finally glancing up to the gloom of Ghaldezuel’s ceiling. “All of it . . . captured in the surfaces, in the walls, ready to be unlocked.” His eyes widened. “Could Cunctus look into it and see us here? Could he hear us talking?”

  Ghaldezuel shook his head, silencing him with a flattened hand. “He wants it so that he can unlock the Amaranthine Incantations. Besides—it’s you I had in mind to guard this treasure.”

  The wizened old Lacaille refilled his cup, blowing out his cheeks. “He’ll come for it, though, won’t he? When Moso has fallen—and it will fall—he’ll come back here, and he’ll want me to give it to him—”

  “Vibor,” Ghaldezuel soothed, interrupting him, “Cunctus trusts me.” He studied the grime he’d missed beneath his nails that morning. “He has a great capacity for kindness, I think.”

  “Really? You honestly believe what you’re saying?”

  Ghaldezuel could see the old Lacaille had supped enough limewine. There were good drunks and bad drunks, and most Lacaille (unlike the jolly Vulgar, who held their wine beautifully) were of the bad sort.

  “Yes, I do. He is not an experienced commander, by any means, but he’s wise enough to know what he doesn’t know, so to speak, and to let others get on with things.”

  “Hmm.” Vibor stared into his wine. There was a worm at the bottom. “I think you’ll be sorely disappointed in the not too distant future. They always change once they’ve got what they want.”

  “He’s right,” said Nazithra from somewhere in the warm shadows, when Vibor had gone. Ghaldezuel ought not to have been surprised—Cunctus had stipulated that she, as an Oracle, be given free run of the place—but she always seemed to find him when he was deep in thought.

  He looked at her, the glint of those huge, nebulous eyes watching him like a snake.

  “Let me bring my friends here, to talk with you. You might like what they have to say.”

  Ghaldezuel sat up. “Who am I to stop them? Why don’t they just come?”

  “This city is a soul trap,” she explained, as if to an idiot child. “Enter and they’d be stuck for good. They can only come in”—she gestured lasciviously at her scrawny hips—“in a body. I will give them mine for the day.”

  He glanced away, exhaling. “Put some clothes on when you do, will you?”

  He tapped gently on the door and pushed his way inside. Bult didn’t like to be surprised; he’d once thought of wearing a bell around his wrist, deciding in the end that it wouldn’t suit him. All that frantic clapping—the way most superstitious Prism warded off spirits and demons, Bult especially—perhaps that came about from some ancient truce, an accord between predator and livestock.

  Ghaldezuel went and sat down at the foot of the little bed, already knowing from the stillness of the shape beneath the furs that she was awake and listening.

  “Whiom iem?” he asked. Aren’t you happy to be here?

  The shape made no sound. He’d worried the slow, syrupy air of the city might make her sick; perhaps bringing Jathime to this place had been a mistake, after all.

  “I’ve missed you,” he repeated, glancing at the cracked tiles of the floor.

  Nothing. He was conscious that Cunctus’s rooms next door were empty, should he need to sleep—the Melius had offered them to him as a sort of bridal gift, gratefully turned down—but he sensed that going away would only alienate her further, and the trip would mean nothing.

  Ghaldezuel rubbed the auburn fur between his fingers, realising it might well be Cethegrande hair. “All that mattered to me was that you were safe.” He glanced up at the ceiling, hearing the faint screams of revelry: they wouldn’t be so happy if they knew there was a Bult in their fair city. “It won’t be for long, I promise you; soon we’ll be able to leave, if we wish, perhaps go back to the Whoop together, or make our home somewhere in the New Firmament. The choice is yours.”

  He looked at her silent face—those long, long lashes. It was the beautiful, careworn face of death, the last thing many had ever seen.

  What most people didn’t know was that Bult women, though they showed little in the way of emotion, possessed a deeply buried interest in pretty things. Ghaldezuel had swiftly risen through the ranks after he’d left Fizesh, first robbing each of the w
all ships and then becoming their chief protector. He began to buy Jathime things that she liked. Saving enough Truppins bought him training in the Op-Viem—the knight school—until he was proficient enough be knighted properly by the Chamberlain of Etzel, leaving the small moon at last and taking a disguised Jathime with him to neighbouring Pruth-Zalnir, where they could live without fear for the very first time.

  He remembered their first clumsy coupling, scared half to death that she would bite too hard and find him to her liking. He’d hidden a dagger nearby, just in case. Her nephew came for her one night, as Ghaldezuel had known he would, and he’d woken to find a lanky shadow at their door.

  “Where is Tzolz?” she asked quietly, startling him, apparently reading his mind.

  He glanced down at her. The question he’d dreaded. “He’s safe, I promise. He went to find something for me, remember? I expect he’s there by now.”

  “Where?” she repeated, voice muffled by the furs.

  “The Last Harbour,” he said, “one of the Zelio moons. Perhaps we’ll go to him when this is all over.”

  “Perhaps,” she echoed, this time in Lacaille, her eyes closing. “Will we go, we will, when over-oo is.” She wasn’t fluent in his language but liked its sounds, building them occasionally into nonsense sentences that made him love her even more.

  FIRST STEPS

  Sotiris watched the Vulgar fall, tumbling doll-like down the hill. He watched until the small person was nothing but a dot of distant colour, still rolling and flailing, then lost from sight. A wicked thing, clearly sent after him by Aaron; Sotiris was glad to be rid of it.

  He sat, looking out at the never-ending landscape, following the progress of the path as it wound mile after mile between stands of murky trees, the luminous, ruler-straight lines of artificial canals bisecting its wanderings until it was nothing but a suggestion that divided the land. Seven, maybe eight hundred thousand miles, he thought, attempting to make some sense of the incredible distance.