by Tom Toner
“Come on then, Waggle,” he said, kicking his spurs into the Cethegrande’s suited flanks, “let’s go and get those Filgurees.”
But the beast refused to budge, its eyes staring distantly out at the steam-shrouded ruins. Cunctus leaned forward in the saddle, pulling Scallywag roughly by the ear. “Come on!”
The Cethegrande rose onto its stubby hands, heaving off the saddle and dumping Cunctus roughly to the ground. It swung around to face him.
Cunctus climbed to his feet, opening his faceplate and staring up at his old friend.
“What’s got into you?” he managed between breaths, gauntlets extended, soothing. Scallywag’s pale, wolfish eyes shone through the gloom. Cunctus knew instinctively that he ought to lower his gaze, but did not.
“I’m in charge here!” he shouted, blinking at the sweat and steam beading in his bushy eyebrows as he weathered the beast’s stare. “Don’t you look at me like that!”
He fingered the hilt of his sword, wondering if it could even pierce that translucent suit, the first shiver of fear trembling in his legs.
The first accounts to be intercepted by the Lacaille, who had sent every soldier they had straight to the steam-shrouded ruins of Hauberth, were contradictory at best, as panic spread within Cunctus’s ranks.
Though they varied, two things were constantly repeated; firstly, that soon after the detonation of the skycharge the Amaranthine ship had tipped and fallen, as if suddenly powerless, and ploughed into the Ninleyn Hills, north of the city.
Chamberlain Lazan tried to imagine the second as he listened to the reports, savouring the scene. The Vulgar mercenaries had come upon the Cethegrande, Scallywag, in the murk of steam that still settled in the shanties. And, like any beast with a kill, it would not let them approach.
The creature, they said, had bitten Cunctus in half at the waist, and had swallowed his plackarted torso in one great gulp.
But somehow, incredibly, the act hadn’t killed him outright.
They’d heard him screaming, in the beast’s throat, screaming all the way down.
RELEASE
Lazan came early the next morning, faster than word could travel, his ship arriving on the rooftop amid a flurry of activity.
Ghaldezuel watched him through the window as he acclimatised himself to the slowness of the city. He had no idea if Cunctus was even still alive, though the Lacaille chamberlain’s sudden presence here told him enough.
They clapped the salute together, two Lacaille easy in each other’s company after so much time among different breeds.
“You don’t know how glad I was to hear he’d appointed one of ours to look after Napp,” Lazan said, sipping his wine and smiling, clearly pleased to be speaking his own language. Ghaldezuel watched him study the bubbles, the sensations of the city still astounding him. “I suppose you’re used to all this slow motion by now?”
Ghaldezuel topped him up, waving away the lingering help. “I rather like it.”
Lazan was studying him in the sunlight. “So he’s dead,” he said flatly. “I’m sure you suspected as much.”
Ghaldezuel poured himself a drink at last, carefully replacing the lid on the jug.
“Humility is an act, in my view,” said Lazan, leaning back in his chair and observing him through narrowed eyes. “It lasts only as long as it’s needed.” He grinned wolfishly. “With that in mind, we thought we’d offer you the kingship of the whole moon of Drolgins, seeing as you already have a hold here.”
Ghaldezuel nodded, a numbness settling within him. It was as the Spirits had said. They had seen it. Somehow, they had seen it all.
Lazan poured a slop of his drink into Ghaldezuel’s, the Lacaille equivalent of the Amaranthine toast. “My congratulations.”
They gazed out at the city for a while. The heat of the day gave the place a murky, baked look, all browns and pinks and creams.
“It wasn’t me that offed him, you know,” Lazan said suddenly, without glancing up.
No, said deep, invisible voices in the room, startling Lazan into knocking his drink. It shattered languidly across the floor.
We did.
Lazan stared, scandalised, at Ghaldezuel.
He had achieved enough.
Ghaldezuel walked stiffly down the city steps. The memories of Cunctus striding slowly up them amid the piles of corpses appeared fresh in his mind. He was suitably distracted, thinking on how much could change in just thirty-five days and nursing a strange pain behind his eyes, when the crack of a shot startled him out of his thoughts. He saw Mumpher as he felt the thud of something strike him above the knee. Ghaldezuel pulled out his own lumen pistol and fired off a shot, the beam burning a hole in Mumpher’s ear.
The Wulm fled along the steps, taking a side bridge to the rooftops and then onto the walls. Ghaldezuel tracked him with his pistol, noticing as Mumpher hobbled that he wore a glinting bracelet.
It took Ghaldezuel a moment to place the item. It had been on Andolp’s wrist when he’d been killed. He swore, holstering the pistol: the last surviving plans for the Shell. He’d forgotten about them.
He knelt, rolling up his britches to examine the damage and turning his leg to inspect the back of his knee. As he’d suspected, the bolt had lodged there. He sat down heavily, keeping a wary eye out for Mumpher in case he returned, placing pressure on his bleeding leg.
The pain grew suddenly worse, making him cry out. Ghaldezuel had been shot twice before but it had never felt anything like this. He broke out in a sweat as the pulsing heat of the wound increased, as if the bolt were being physically dragged out of his body.
It was. He saw the bulge of it as it worked its way back through the muscle, its glinting end rising like a metal worm from the bloody hole. Then it was pushing, turning like a screw. A final wobble and it dropped out of his leg, the wound steaming inexplicably and filling with clear liquid. A froth of vapour hissed out of the hole, the most painful part of the whole bizarre process so far. Ghaldezuel clutched the hissing mess as it sizzled like meat on a griddle, eventually moving his hand to inspect the flesh beneath.
He had been healed.
He half-lay, half-sat, staring at the pink new skin where the hole had been, before reaching and collecting the bolt, examining it as if it might hold some answer.
Surprise, a croaking voice said in his throat, working his larynx. We worked out how to do it, Ghaldezuel. You’re ours now.
THE VIZIER
The Westerling court could only be reached at low tide, when a wide, shining expanse of marble road appeared in the salt marshes around the island city known as the Alchazar Mount.
Pentas walked with Xanthostemon at the head of the group, Jatropha having been forced to leave the Corbita at the edge of the rock pools due to the fragility of the ancient road. Walking with them, their heads lowered, were the last of the day’s pilgrims, come to feed the Westerling king, Levisticum. They were masked and wrapped in charcoal-grey cloaks. In their hands they held brightly wrapped packages tied with fancy bows—the offerings for the king’s table. Pentas eyed their crude, homemade efforts, wondering if it had ever occurred to them that their king might be able to afford to feed himself.
The sun was slanting low into their eyes by the time they came before the ramparts of the tidal palace, burning a line across the surface of the shimmering marsh. Jatropha had warned them all: it would not be simple, and it would not be quick. The Westerlings wouldn’t just give Arabis back, at least not without ample compensation. To prepare for their arrival, Xanthostemon had sent his cousin, Tragopogon, ahead; the young man ought to have arrived here some days ago, but they’d heard nothing.
“Pentas,” Jatropha said suddenly from the back of the procession. She turned, meeting her sister’s surprised eye.
She shuffled aside to let everyone past, joining him.
“They’re not to know who you are,” he said. “Understand?”
She glanced up at the Mount, feeling a flash of rage. Somewhere in there her dau
ghter was waiting for her. The Amaranthine had clearly never had a child: to be asked to wait, to twiddle her thumbs during negotiations, it just wasn’t possible. “I’ll do my best,” she snapped, making her way back to Xanthostemon’s side.
They’d first seen the Mount from the dusty-pink fields along the coast, taking the old road down to the shore where the cockle fishers moored their ships. The city looked more than decrepit; it looked like a stack of greyish crockery about to slide over, propped up here and there with rickety wooden buttresses and towers. Indeed, the castle was precisely that, having been built upon the remnants of its predecessors, themselves already subsiding badly into the sea. When I was younger, Jatropha had said as they made their way down, we all thought the world was going to end, sooner or later. But it never did; the new just piled on top of the old, as it always had, and the world carried on.
Nobody watched them as they proceeded inside the place, passing from blinding sun into cool darkness, the smell of salt winds replaced with damp stone. Nobody was searched, not a single gift checked. They made their way up a broad flight of steps, shuffling slowly with everyone else, watching their footing. The pilgrims had begun talking animatedly as they arrived inside and were now breaking into snatches of song. Beneath their gilded, bestial masks, the people here were said to be incredibly ugly.
“What about the king’s safety?” she whispered to Eranthis. “Can anyone just give him something, and he’ll eat it?”
“He doesn’t eat it,” Jatropha butted in, waiting until the slowest of the masked pilgrims had passed them by. “They throw it all away.”
The four of them shuffled further in, keeping to the rear of the crowd. Xanthostemon looked especially tense and drawn, having not slept well. Eranthis glanced at him, hoping to catch his eye, but the man appeared focused on his Westerly manners and was gazing at the floor.
His thoughts seemed to weigh like a brick around his neck, his posture sinking to a stoop since Eranthis had first met him. Losing Arabis and his cousin in the space of a week, not to mention the implications of Lycaste’s innocence, had aged him, she thought. Eranthis shuddered again at the thought of what Lycaste must have been through and hoped this would all be over soon, one way or another.
Their climb took them in a spiral around the outer walls, passing through high, vaulted rooms where light streamed in from open windows. The Mount’s interiors were just as wonky and subsided as its walls, slanted this way and that as if the whole place could collapse at any moment, slipping into the sea.
The crowd came to a stop in a bowed-looking place of sagging, stained walls grown from an inferior stone. Everyone’s eyes remained downcast, so it was only Jatropha’s party that noticed the grandeur of the ceiling. Propping up the castle’s insides was a complex of enormous beams, each carved from deep cherry-pink wood. Eranthis wrinkled her nose even as she absorbed the beauty of the dim place: there was a pungency here, as if the people of the court had been caught short once too often and relieved themselves in the corners. The smell of sour urine was so strong in places that it appeared to be seeping from the wood. As the crowd passed through the hall, she leaned closer to sniff a glossy, sculpted beam, recoiling at once.
They came at last to a lighter, somewhat cleaner-smelling place. Eranthis squinted at the bright evening sun that streamed over the crowd, glancing up to see that half of the westward-facing wall was made up entirely of beautifully distorted syrup-crystal windows, the substance so thick that they’d pooled at their bases. The view looked out across the marsh to the edges of the twinkling sea, dappled with dozens of bobbing Westerling ships.
They waited, feet aching, breathing the musky scent. Whispers and coughs were amplified in the sunlit hall. Soon a recurrent theme was running through the conversations.
“What are they saying?” Eranthis asked Jatropha.
“He’s not in,” replied Xanthostemon at her side. He sighed, an edge in his voice when he spoke. “We’re going to have to wait.”
The pilgrims passed their useless gifts to a small group of smiling guards, the youngest of them touching a finger to their brows in place of an averted glance, then shuffled around to move despondently back the way they’d come.
To Eranthis’s relief, Jatropha had written ahead and booked them heinously expensive lodging on the Mount, so they wouldn’t have to cross the rising tide back to the Corbita. Their party had taken up the whole top floor, some wiry Ingolland mercenaries and Cursed folk hired to keep watch at the stairs.
She felt a strange peace, though they were far from home and dry, as she leaned on a windowsill still warm from the evening sun. Arabis was safer, she supposed, than at any point since her capture, and it was a fine place to stay, overlooking the tidal lands that stretched out into the Atlas Sea, feeling the twilight come breathing in through their windows. Spring was here, she noted, listening to the conversations of the birds carrying on the breeze. They were preparing for the great Wooing, a time when messenger birds grew too distracted for their work, losing or even chewing up letters to build their nests. Everything sent in the post, including silk, could usually at this time of year be found hanging discarded in the trees, or woven into birds’ houses, and so, in conjunction with the ever-strengthening Eyrall wind, it was often considered the season of luck. This gave Eranthis, usually the pragmatic sort, a strange hope as she looked down across the fortress walls to the night-blue sea.
She turned as Jatropha came in, a soft presence she wouldn’t have noticed had she not grown used to it over the months.
He smiled at her, the first smile of recent memory, and sat. “It’s been a long journey, hasn’t it?”
“You think it’ll be over soon?” she asked, leaning with her back to the window ledge, suddenly hoping he hadn’t thought it a silly question.
“I do, actually.”
She looked at him, surprised, beginning to see through his Westerling guise a little, observing snatches of his real face beneath the glamours. “You’re going to show them who you are?”
He shrugged. “These people don’t know much about the Amaranthine. It was the First that was favoured, the First that was told of the Firmament and its workings. I’d be surprised if they understood what was happening.”
“They’ll think you’re some kind of demon.”
He smiled, without much warmth. “It wouldn’t hurt.”
“Is there no other way to bargain?” she asked, nervous at the prospect. Scaring folk made for a dangerous hobby, especially if they were the wrong sort.
Jatropha shook his head. “There isn’t time, Eranthis. Your niece will remember this ordeal, in some form or other. We must get her back as soon as we can.”
She nodded slowly, trying to see past the idea he’d projected in all their minds, trying to picture the Amaranthine’s old self. She wished she could have seen him as a young man.
“Do you ever think about your parents?” she asked him suddenly. “I can’t stop thinking of mine these days.”
He looked up at her from where he sat on the bed, eyes searching her face and moving to the floor, as if he’d just woken up from a dream. “Yes. All the time.”
She hesitated. “Do you remember their faces?”
Jatropha was already shaking his head, looking past her into the twilight. “No.”
She moved from the window and sat beside him, elbows cradled in the palms of her hands. “Are there others you miss, from your life before all of this?”
He seemed to think, and her heart ached at all the lonely years he must have lived.
“You know,” he said, his eyes clear and focused on her for the first time since the baby was taken, “I don’t think there are. I mourned, of course—I mourned the friends I lost. But soon it was as if they’d never existed.”
“You learned to forget, I suppose,” she said, studying him.
“Yes. To live this long without forgetting . . . I’d be as mad as all those Immortals in the Firmament.”
She saw his s
mall hand lying close to her own, their difference startling, and imagined a time when she, too, would be gone. “I hope you remember us.”
He looked sadly at her, drawing in a long breath. Eranthis knew then that he would not.
“And now I must go and persuade Xanthostemon to eat,” he said. “He needs his six meals a day, like the rest of you.”
He stood, swaying a little on his feet as if the blood had rushed from his head, and wandered from the room. Eranthis glanced at the small indentation his hand had left on the sheets, smelling him in the air still, and felt tears sting her eyes.
She sat up late, too anxious for what tomorrow would hold, his smell lingering in the room. In her hands she held a length of dark blue silk, the highest denomination in her purse. Eranthis had found a tear in it this morning, on the road, and widened it until it had made the shape of a Melius letter J. It had not escaped her that to propose marriage, one must select silk of the highest value, cutting into it the name of the beloved so that it became worthless. She thought of snipping off the ruined part now, saving what was left, then decided that perhaps, for tonight, it ought to stay.
Eranthis hovered at her door, listening, sure that neither her sister nor Xanthostemon would be asleep. But it wasn’t them she was going to see.
She unlatched the door, staring out into the dark wooden world of the guesthouse landing. It was a pokey place, built for smaller Westerling people, the low ceiling slanting in just as drunken a manner as the castle above. Eranthis wandered to the end of the hall, feet padding on wooden boards, the fluttering of her heart tickling the tips of her fingers.
She tapped on his door, hearing the grunt of someone not expecting visitors, and waiting a moment until footsteps announced she was about to be let in, butterflies dancing in her stomach.
“Can’t sleep?” Jatropha asked, returning to his desk. Eranthis closed the door softly behind her and shook her head. She sat comfortably on the end of his bed, observing him as she had so many times before in the Corbita’s cabin. He was writing letters, a neat stack already done and sealed beside him. She watched his beautiful handwriting glide over the paper: a perfect script, as impeccable as print, clearly honed over lifetimes. Following the curl of Jatropha’s pen was so hypnotic that it wasn’t until he’d finished the letter and begun the next that she realised neither of them had said another word. In the gloom, she felt her heart swell beneath her ribs. To be so comfortable in one another’s presence, so wordlessly at home.
