The Tropic of Eternity

by Tom Toner

  He began to walk, stepping gingerly onto the incline and starting his slow descent of the path. With each fumbling step, he felt the beginnings of a light-headed joy. Something had just happened, something he felt deserved more thought, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember what it was. Down and down, the path through the meadows feeling steeper with each step, and he recalled only that he had come here from the woods—one moment he was pushing through their wintry tangle, the next here he was. Deeper still and he remembered he had just seen Iro, hanging in her cage over the moonlit falls. He stared up at the incongruous, faded blue sky, the light of a missing sun beating down across his brow, and wondered how in the world he might have got here. But the thought of his sister spurred him on, and he walked more quickly, the insects flitting among the folds of his nightgown, clambering up his legs. Soon all he could recall was that he’d awoken in a large four-poster bed sitting in the middle of a meadow, the journey between here and there clipped as neatly as if by a pair of scissors and thrown aside. It was a wonderful feeling, this empty-headedness, and he marvelled at the sudden notion that perhaps the eldest Amaranthine (whatever they were), when they succumbed to madness, actually welcomed and enjoyed it. He paused on the hill, pleasantly warm and blissfully empty of peripheral thoughts, wondering whether he ought to stop and get his bearings.

  “No,” he said aloud, continuing the descent. “That’s just what he’d want me to do.”

  Sotiris spared the trees above him one more glance, astonished at how far he’d come, trying to remember if he’d ever really been there at all. The sight of the thorny forest triggered phantom thoughts; the sensation that he had not been alone up there, though he was damned if he could remember who was with him.

  Iro, the forest whispered, and he made his mind up then and there, resolving to keep going and never look back.

  MOSO

  The Wilhelmina floated above the night-dark sea, its glossy, oil-coloured finish reflecting the myriad stars over southern Drolgins.

  Cunctus and Scallywag lay floating in the great blue central chamber, the golden pilot’s node having retreated up into a glowing, rotating cathedral ceiling full of burnished, sculpted stars. It was the most soothing place Cunctus had ever been, he reflected, reclining against Scallywag’s belly and watching the stars moving on their clockwork-esque rotations. He almost didn’t want to leave. Scallywag clearly liked it, too, and his blue eyes were heavy-lidded and sleepy when he looked at his master. The warm, wet smell of him reminded Cunctus of other places, other lives. They lay together, time itself apparently standing still, knowing there was almost nowhere safer or more impregnable in all the known galaxy.

  “We’ll try on your new outfit tomorrow, hmm?” he said in Leperi, scratching Scallywag gently behind the ear. The fantastical suit—a long, stretchy tube of translucent material like the shed skin of some monstrous, otherworldly snake—lay rolled up in his bags in one of the staterooms, one of the fabulous treasures they’d found in the freshly opened Sepulchre. The skin appeared to be impervious not just to the rat droppings beneath the Thrasm but also to everything they could throw at it, weaponry of every kind ricocheting like water. Cunctus had tried it on, breathing the strange, tingly cocktail of mist exuded from inside the bulging helmet, and had found to his delight that it did much, much more than just protect its occupant.

  “I love you, boy,” he whispered, planting a small kiss on the sleeping Cethegrande’s flank, then lay back and gazed with tear-rimmed eyes at the ceiling. He thought of Ghaldezuel, perhaps sitting up this night in his rooms in Napp, organizing the minutiae of Cunctus’s new empire. Of course he’d been sceptical at first, when the Lacaille had wandered into their camp, but now he couldn’t be more proud of his new marshal. “You’re all good boys,” he said into the quiet. “Good boys.”

  Cunctus and Scallywag travelled at the head of a column of hundreds, swimming out into open waters for the first time so that they could be joined by rickety sea ships and a squadron of jets, even a subship from Wime. The Cethegrande was wearing his special suit of translucent scales, ready for whatever the Vulgar had to throw at him. Moso, visible as a pale, heat-smeared line of sea wall, lay only a mile away.

  So far, thirteen ports had yielded within the month, pledging whatever hotchpotch soldiers they could, with more towns—their mayors hearing of a force sailing up towards the equatorial capital—already radioing their support for Cunctus and his troops. Nilmuth, the last stop before Drolgins’ capital, had capitulated almost immediately when its barracks of freeVulgar mercenaries had threatened to mutiny, chanting Cunctus’s various names and throwing open the gates. Its famous fortress now flew the Cunctite flag, a plain yellow banner already decorating wide swathes of southern Drolgins.

  Cunctus, clad this morning in pale iridium plate armour and sitting hunched in the saddle as Scallywag picked up speed, had just received good wishes from Ghaldezuel, back in Napp, and grinned from ear to ear as he hoisted his Amaranthine sword. The wail of horns and clang of bells echoed from his ships across the water, followed shortly by the musical whine of the Wilhelmina, flying fat and terrifying overhead. Cunctus twisted in the saddle, eyes searching the procession, gauging the moment, and patted Scallywag’s head.

  The Cethegrande skimmed the surface of the water with a dash of roaring spray and soared into the sky, the delighted cries of the Vulgar aboard the ships following them into the air. Cunctus’s heart hammered as he clung on, the reins knotted tight around his wrists, quite unprepared for the sheer power of Scallywag’s new suit. The flying Cethegrande rolled in the air and swept back down towards the flotilla, the wind thundering in their ears.

  A volley of guns opened up in support, the surprised elation of his forces palpable across the air, the yellow-daubed Voidjets banking to fly alongside. Cunctus whooped, eyes squeezed tight against the rush of wind, happier than he’d ever thought possible; his veins felt thick with sugar, his teary eyes prisming the view into a beautiful kaleidoscope of mirrored, repeated worlds.

  Wiping his eyes, he spied a handful of paler shapes like sunken ships waiting at Moso’s estuary mouth. So there was a trap after all.

  “Cethegrandes ahead,” he said shakily into his radio, surprised that the three dukes of Moso had a rapport with any beasts of the lagoon. The escort of jets rolled, roaring down to follow the coastline. When they were nearly overhead, somehow undisturbed by anti-aircraft fire, they loosed their wobbling, twinkling bombs across the port. Cunctus reined in Scallywag, slowing him in the air, and watched the detonations erupting along the sea wall, the crump of the blasts reaching them a moment later. The shapes beneath the water were engulfed, only one managing to dart off into the depths before the last bomb fell.

  “Clear for entry,” he said with satisfaction, soaring back down towards his ships as they churned into port. “Drop me near the walls,” he yelled against the wind, tugging one of Scallywag’s ears. The Cethegrande wove above the destruction, passing between two smouldering towers, wrapping them both in smoke. Scallywag descended until he was almost touching the hot concrete of a dock, angling so that Cunctus could untangle himself from the reins and jump the six feet to the ground. He slapped Scallywag’s rump and the beast swept back into the sky, a blazing, reflective serpent shape zooming overhead to rejoin the jets. Cunctus unsheathed his jewelled sword and lumbered along the smoking mess of the concourse between a scraggly avenue of crisped, browning water palms. Something wasn’t right. An unexploded Lacaille fizzbomb the size of a Melius had lodged in the shattered cement just ahead. Cunctus crept forward, placing his ear against the bomb’s tin casing, listening to its grumblings, and moved on.

  He climbed a little of the blasted wall, scrabbling up a shifting avalanche of rubble, until he could see the city itself.

  Moso, spread across the floodplain beneath a hot white sky, had been devastated. Dirty smoke hung in slanting columns above the city, the pinkish fires left over from the fizzbombs still glowing in several districts.<
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  Cunctus unclipped his faceplate, wheezing, and dropped the sword. The bastards had lied to him. They’d already bombed the city.

  “Fuckers!” he screamed, booting the sword from the wall and watching as it clattered noisily down to the dock. Along the sea wall his flotilla had begun to unload, a twinkling throng of tin-armoured Vulgar swarming into the harbour. The jets screamed overhead, dashing past the sea wall and inland towards Moso, clearly noticing by now that the city was already in ruins.

  Cunctus scrambled back down to the waterfront and sat heavily, his legs crossed.

  “I’m going to rip Lazan’s f-fucking—”

  He hesitated, noticing as the water rose around the dock with the slop of a large swell. A shadow flitted through the sea, tracing the crescent of the empty harbour towards him, a wave surging before it. Cunctus stood, groping for his missing sword. He reached instead for his lumen pistol, aiming quickly and firing into the sea. Puffs of vapour exploded around the rushing form, either missing it entirely or enraging it further as it picked up a roaring speed. Cunctus fired until he no longer had time to move out of the way. The Cethegrande swept past in a blaze of white surf, angling its tail against the water to throw a wave of spray across the dock, dashing Cunctus into the lagoon.

  He tumbled uselessly in the huge eddy of water, the shock and breathlessness of the cold taking over until he could right himself and struggle to the surface, his armour weighing him down so that he continually bobbed and spluttered, desperately trying to loosen the buckles. He gazed around him, head dipping again under the water, and saw the Cethegrande’s great bubble-wreathed shape angling in his direction once more. It was an adult, twice Scallywag’s size.

  A trap a trap it was a trap, his mind screamed, the iridium armour dragging him down.

  The creature circled, and Cunctus rose again, gasping, above the surface, having loosened and at last unbuckled his plackart. The beast was playing with him, isolating him from the port. He pulled off his greaves and ducked his head under again.

  The thing had circled closer while he was on the surface, and Cunctus saw in the underwater light how its sunburned head was snarled all over with the pink and white scars of battle, one eye socket puckered and empty. As it opened his mouth, Cunctus saw that the beast’s incisors were all shattered, like shards of pointed yellow crockery.

  It grinned at him, circling again, and Cunctus knew he only had one chance. He struck out, swimming as hard as he could for the rocky edge of the port. From the corner of his eye he saw it dart after him, rising from below.

  Five feet. Four. Cunctus grasped the concrete with his gauntlets and hauled himself out, feeling the mighty swell as it rose up beneath him.

  He rolled, the Cethegrande bursting from the water, lunging across the dock with a grotesque wiggle of his belly. Cunctus staggered to the wall, clambering until he reached the top and swinging his leg over as the Cethegrande barrelled into it, loosing rubble. He heard the beast’s grunting, rasping breaths as it flopped and scrabbled at the base of the wall, looking down to see the creature’s huge pale eyes fixed on him.

  A silent breath of wind stirred the concrete dust into an eddy then, and the Cethegrande blinked frantically. Cunctus watched in wonder as its face peeled and fell away, cut neatly through the middle of the skull to reveal a marbled, cabbage-like cross-section of brain and bone already welling with blood. The Cethegrande’s body accompanied the portion of its head, falling back down the wall and coiling heavily at the bottom, its flipper hands still flexing their claws, a greenish spurt of excrement spraying out from between its short back legs and decorating the dock.

  Cunctus took a huge, gusting inhalation of breath, looking up to see the Wilhelmina slipping silently over the port towards him, its shadow darkening the dock.

  *

  They surrounded the body, a team of Vulgar hauling it over onto its belly. It was Howlos, he who had lain waste to the harbour at Hangland during the Forest War a few summers ago. He was more than twice Scallywag’s size, a mottled pink and brown hulk of a thing patterned with scraggly tufts of blond hair. Scallywag himself had surfaced some distance off and wallowed in the shallow water near a few wrecks, a pair of Vulgar legs still poking from the corner of his mouth.

  “Chamberlain Lazan,” Cunctus said, retrieving his Amaranthine sword and poking it into the severed head’s one good eye, shoving the bloody ruin across the concrete with a grunt of effort. “It could only have been Lazan who sent him, knowing I’d be coming this way.”

  He sheathed the sword, looking at his soldiers, wondering if he could trust any of them. Fortune, that abstract God of luck he had come to thank and pray to, was not a Melius concept, but a Prism superstition. Cunctus understood he had been overconfident at a time when it was most dangerous to be so. He would not make that mistake again. He would live by his old Melius doctrines, believing in what he could see, and touch.

  Further down the harbour, three rusty straddle cranes rose fifty feet over the water. A person hung from each crane at a great height, swaying rather dramatically in the wind. It was the three dukes—the city’s masters. After the abdication of King Paryam, however, Cunctus supposed they’d effectively controlled the entire moon.

  Cunctus glowered at them. One duke was missing his head and had instead been strung up by an arm. Even from such a great distance, his superior Melius eyes could make out what had been done to them, their britches pulled down around their ankles. He glared at them and he hated them, not for who they had once been, but for what they stood for.

  The Lacaille owned Drolgins now.

  THE RADIANT

  Furto only became aware that he’d reached the top as he stepped awkwardly onto level ceramic, having trodden with downcast eyes for much of the day. He blinked and looked around, the interminable fever dream of climbing step after step apparently over.

  They had reached the very tip of the Snowflake’s point, where it connected with the newer addition of the Radiant, the stair levelling out and descending between a broad ring of the vast black trees.

  The heat was insufferable, distorting the view beyond into a wavering, baking shimmer. Furto was already drenched with sweat. He stopped for breath, mopping his damp hair back and shaking the sweat from his fingertips, his salt-stung eyes trying to focus past the shimmer at the expanse of the Radiant draped out before them: a star-shaped plaza five miles in diameter, ringed with black coppices of trees. At its centre, blurred beyond comprehension, grey patterns marched, rippling, around a central, blindingly white dais. The Osseresis that had made it to the top with them—elongated charcoal smudges, all gangly arms and legs—broke their silence, chattering animatedly.

  “What’s wrong with my eyes?” muttered Veril from further back. “I can’t see anything.”

  “Now do you believe me?” wailed Slupe, who, Furto remembered, had been complaining of the same condition for a day or more, unheeded.

  Furto stared off into the distance, picking out only a muddled blur of colours. He rubbed his sweat-slick eyes but it made no difference: the blazing whiteness of the stair had blinded them, like a field of snow. He glanced around, watching the blurred forms of the others staggering around the plinth at the top of the stair, bumping into black Osserine forms. He could only tell who was who by the colours of their shabby old Voidsuits.

  Gramps appeared before them, a sinuous, grey-green shape against the white. “Come, there’s shade below.”

  They passed down through the trees, hands upon one another’s shoulders, until they were descending a shit-caked spiral stair to the massive white porcelain basin of the Radiant itself. The heat further down struck Furto like a series of progressively more violent slaps. Below he could see the roiling mass of grey, the stench of musky bodies and faeces rising to greet them, understanding that it was the thousands of petitioning Osseresis. Furto’s damaged eyes moved past them to the dais at the crowd’s centre. There was a trailing shadow there, emanating from something standing at the mid
dle. A huge, distorted voice, like that of a loudspeaker, bellowed over the crowd. As they moved closer, he saw that the shadow belonged to a golden blur.

  “The Invigilator’s not a mammal . . . not, uh, Osseresis, is she?” the fuzzy shape of Drazlo asked.

  “No, no,” replied Gramps, not looking at them, his mind apparently elsewhere. “Not Osseresis.”

  Closer still, they were privy to a loud exchange in that same amplified speech: a large, winged Osseresis was mid-petition at the front of the crowd, its squeaking, slobbering voice broadcast over the basin. After a burbled sentence that seemed to contain no pauses, the air went still, the blurred crowd expectant. Then the figure on the dais bellowed into life, its reply booming over them.

  Soon they were among the seething crowd, the air thick and stinking, creatures peeling apart to watch them.

  “Come on, forward,” Gramps hissed, shoving Furto, who had begun to hang back, rudely from behind. They found themselves stumbling, exhausted and half-blind and immersed in sweaty scent, through the columns, hundreds of beady golden eyes swivelling in their direction. Furto huddled against Drazlo, a palpable aura of jealousy surrounding their arrival; many here had waited all season, only for Gramps’ party to push their way through.

  Whiteness began to show through the shambolic cluster of legs and arms as they came to the head of the column. Then they were pushed out in front of the Osseresis and chivvied by Gramps all the way to the foot of the raised dais, its occupant looming over them.

  Furto stared up at the hazy form, eyes watering. Its rasping breath drowned the sound of their footfalls. Without preamble from Gramps, the Invigilator opened what must have been its mouth and began to speak, the force of its bellows stabbing like daggers into Furto’s ears. Its words were at first nonsense-speak, onomatopoeic slaps and splats, until Furto began to recognise the Reflective language from the previous night, and found suddenly that he could understand it again.