The Tropic of Eternity

by Tom Toner

  Sitting up a little, she read the addressee on the top letter, her spirits falling. It was addressed to Liatris, that wrinkled old authoress from Albina. His pen paused a moment, as if realising what she had seen, and Eranthis felt a quick, blade-keen jealousy.

  She settled back on the bed, her fingers tracing a crack in the wall. Of course she’d had no expectations—only a fool would have. But seeing that name, she felt more certain than ever that she had to tell him; she had to know. There would never be another chance like this night, this room. She knew that as if it were preordained, somehow.

  Jatropha was still busying himself carefully with his letters, nose pressed close to the words. She observed his slouched position in his chair, wondering. There surely wasn’t anything wrong with his eyes—

  And then it struck her. He knew. Of course he did. He knew how she felt. Perhaps he’d always known. And he didn’t want to talk.

  Eranthis got up quickly to go, her cheeks burning, a pen falling from the sheets and clattering to the floor. When she glanced back, he was looking at her.

  Now. Do it now. She must have imagined the start of this conversation a hundred times, refining the image with each rehearsal, whittling it away.

  “I—” she began, mouth moving as it tried to drag the words out of nothing, heart aching at how close she’d come to speaking them aloud. But she saw then how his eyes moved sadly back to his papers, and her lips closed, compressing, trembling with the prospect of tears that she would never let him see. Eranthis moved quickly to the door, letting herself out, and moved as softly as she could back to her room.

  Some of the Pilgrims they recognised the next morning as they made their way back up into Levisticum’s halls, lining up again. The assembled men and women had already given their presents the previous evening, Pentas remembered; the presents they held now were new—something tucked away at breakfast and wrapped on the walk up. She wondered how far some of them had come.

  They waited, the sun warming them through the glass.

  “He’d better be in this time,” Xanthostemon growled, teeth gritted.

  “He is,” Jatropha said, having turned around. They followed his gaze.

  A small Westerling with long, rosy-blond hair was sidling down the line, chatting and smiling with some of the frozen-looking pilgrims, a few almost fainting at his sudden appearance, not having prepared. She watched the king strut, hating him, ready to claw the smug expression off his handsome face.

  Levisticum came to them, his arms full of gifts, and gave them a glowing smile.

  “I know these ones!” he said in a mock stage aside to some people further back in the line, winking like he’d had a stroke. He looked them up and down (Eranthis supposed a king could break his own Province’s rules), his tongue sliding over his lips, and gestured to a distant archway. “Come on, we’ll have a drink.”

  It soon became clear to Eranthis that the young man had something wrong with him. Of course, she’d never met a king before; they could all be like this.

  “What did the one-legged Grumbit say to the Demian Man?” he asked them as they followed on behind, gurning a smile.

  “No idea,” said Xanthostemon.

  “‘You’re standing on my toe!’” Levisticum shook with laughter at his own punchline and opened the doors himself, appearing to have no help at all.

  “What do you call a Brownling with no nose?” he asked next, padding along beneath pink wooden vaults. They didn’t have time to answer. “Handsome!”

  Eranthis met Pentas’s eye.

  The king gave them all a brief look. “What has the First done to your sense of humour? So dry, so boring!” He hurried his step. “You’ll laugh at this one—I’m warning you, you’re going to laugh! Where does Lyonothamnus keep his armies?”

  “In his sleevies,” Jatropha said flatly.

  “Yes!” the king screamed. “Someone gets it!”

  They came to what must have been the king’s sanctum, a poorly appointed room with a simple wooden chair looking out over the water. The nearby table was scattered with cups and glasses, as if a binge was already in session. Beneath the table, a small Ingolland Melius was squatting and eating, presumably whatever the king dropped.

  “Saw you lot arrive,” he said, sitting down and then abruptly standing up again to root in a bowl of steaming cockles. The things were a Western delicacy, said to seep alcoholic blood when boiled. He offered the bowl. “Hot cockle?”

  “No, thank you,” replied Jatropha, cracking his knuckles.

  “Boooring!” cried Levisticum, startling them into silence as he chewed, a smear of blood on his teeth. “Well . . . if it’s that baby you’re after, you’d better speak to my Gheal, Salpiglossis.” He collected a bottle from the table and clapped his hands, slumping into his chair.

  “What in the world—?” Eranthis whispered, before a troop of dwarfish Westerlings came pouring into the room carrying a large, ungainly-looking golden box between them. They set it down in the middle of the floor, forcing Eranthis and the others back, and fanned out into the corners, watching.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Just inside the gilded box, Eranthis thought she could hear the stirring of a child. She put a hand out, taking Pentas’s wrist, feeling the fluttering of her sister’s heart. The curtains at the box’s front parted, some slender fingers flicking them to one side, and a shrewd, narrow-eyed Prismish face peered out at them.

  The Gheal uncurled its pastel-pink form, climbing slowly from the box. It turned its mascara-coated eyes on the visitors, then bowed low to its king. Levisticum slouched in his chair, the bottle clasped in his lap, and smiled back at it.

  “Show them she hasn’t been harmed,” he said to the Gheal, who turned and pulled a bundle from the box. Arabis’s unmistakable orange face peered out at them, sleepy eyes gazing into the room.

  Eranthis locked her muscles, straining to pull Pentas back as Jatropha strode forwards, clearing his throat.

  “Ah, ah! Not yet,” said the king, holding up the bottle. The Gheal placed the baby back in the box and turned its gaze on Jatropha, stepping lithely up to him. Its dazzling patterns were dyed, Eranthis thought, guessing that it must have been creamy white before its time at court. It pushed past the Amaranthine, approaching Eranthis, Xanthostemon and Pentas, its hideously long fingers extended, and brushed their faces. Eranthis recoiled, understanding why the place reeked so strongly: its fingertips were coated with urine.

  It went to Pentas, mouth opening. “You are this child’s mother,” it said in a high, girlish voice, touching her with its clammy fingers. Its breath fumed of rotten meat. Eranthis met its black eyes, remembering the legends of Gheals in the wild. They were capricious things, her parents had said, bestowing luck or misery depending on their mood. If you smelled strong urine, they’d told her, then you had come by accident upon the lair of a Gheal and you should turn back.

  “I learned my jokes from the King in the Woods, you know, when I was a boy,” Levisticum said, still lolling in his chair and finishing the cockles. When he spoke next, the inside of his mouth was bright crimson. “My Gheal certainly likes them. It came here as a gift, I forget from whom, to bring me luck. People come from far and wide now to seek its counsel, or to find some miraculous cure.” He looked at it. “Haven’t you done well, Salpiglossis?”

  The Gheal turned and beamed at him, presenting the baby.

  “Yes, she’s a good child,” Levisticum said, bending to give Arabis a cursory look. “The state of Pan shall look after her here.” He placed the bottle down and stood, staring at them as he wiped his mouth. “No sense of humour,” he muttered sadly, trailing off and stepping out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

  Salpiglossis’s smile withered and disappeared. It went and sat on the throne, taking Arabis with it and bouncing her on its knee. The baby gurgled happily.

  “Well, then,” Jatropha said after a moment, smiling at the Gheal. “I think I can see who’s really in charge here.”

/>   The Gheal fixed him with a narrow, cat-like stare. Its bottom lip drooped, showing off some yellowed, serrated lower teeth.

  Jatropha stepped a little closer, the chamber beginning to heat up. “This doesn’t have to hurt—”

  The Gheal grinned suddenly, dropping the baby in its lap. Arabis bawled and pulleys squealed as a frame of heavy wood and fabric came thrumming down from the ceiling, slamming into the floor and enveloping Jatropha. Xanthostemon leapt to his aid, but the frame had fallen into bolted latches, locking tight. Eranthis threw herself forward, only to be snared by the sentries. “Jatropha!” she cried, stamping her heel onto a Westerling’s toes and earning a slap.

  With efficient speed, the small sentries had Jatropha surrounded and barricaded in. Their staffs had been built to interlock, and within a minute they had put together a steel enclosure, threading their staffs through loops in the grey cloth.

  “I wouldn’t have got very far without knowing about your sort,” Salpiglossis purred, stepping down from the throne and pacing a sensual circle around Jatropha’s enclosure. On its finger it wore a glass ring in which a tiny red octopus swam. It took a staff from a guard and pounded it on the floor, eyeing them all, then swung it at the fabric. They heard a muffled cry as the staff struck. Eranthis felt tears sting her eyes. He was blind in there, powerless.

  “I came from nothing,” the Gheal hissed, striking again. “I had to dance and suck my way through the dregs of this place, until I knew its every secret.” It swung once more, connecting loudly with bone. Jatropha mumbled some pained curse inside the fabric.

  “I kept expecting someone to come looking, you know,” the Gheal said. “When I caught my first Immortal.” It stabbed the poker into the fabric, careful not to pierce it. “But nobody ever does.”

  It looked up, singling out Xanthostemon. “And your . . . brother? Cousin? He was delicious when I took him to my bed.” The Gheal licked its pointed teeth. “Even more so when I cut him up.”

  Xanthostemon raged against the sentry’s grip. Arabis began to wail and Salpiglossis returned to her, panting a little. It tickled her, cooing, until she quietened, then stepped away from the throne and turned back to Jatropha’s cage.

  “I am the ultraviolet, you see; the part of the Spectrum nobody ever knew was there.” It picked up the staff, preparing to swing. Eranthis felt a hideous pain in her chest, willing herself just a little of Jatro-pha’s talents, could he have shared them.

  But the blow never fell.

  Instead, the Gheal hissed a sharp intake of breath, lifting and staring at the weapon in its hand as if it were a snake. It met their gazes for a moment, suspicious, as smoke coiled from the metal pole, wafting the smell of frying meat towards them. Salpiglossis began to mutter, disbelieving. It turned away, shaking its hand violently, attempting to let go of the spear that was now glued to its palm.

  It turned back to them, eyes wide, fingers extended. Eranthis, the closest, was the first to see how they had begun to melt away from the bone, dribbling in smoking runnels to the floor, the ring bursting. The fat deposits in the thing’s belly and breasts melted next, plopping and sizzling. The Gheal screamed like nothing Eranthis had ever heard then, its eyes whitening over suddenly and bursting, spattering them with hot, wet liquid. The meat of its face drooled away, the sockets and nostrils smoking, teeth loosening and dropping out. The pink flesh beneath its fur was liquid now, pooling in a marbled puddle beneath the Gheal’s staggering body. Salpiglossis slipped in its own juices and tumbled to the floor, letting out one final spluttering shriek before its skeletal remains turned to sponge and broke apart, spilling the remaining guts and lungs across the room. The staff rolled, clinking among the fallen teeth.

  They gawped at the remains for a moment, the guards releasing them in astonishment. Pentas ran through the mess to Arabis, scooping her up and falling into the throne.

  Eranthis went quickly to the fabric enclosure, grabbing a staff and ripping it open, her eyes filled with silent tears as she helped Jatropha out. She gulped them down, turning away as he paused to look at what had become of his captor.

  A small, dark-skinned Immortal man was walking slowly across the hall towards them. He gazed for a moment at his own handiwork, shooing away the sentries, then stepped lightly over the mess and offered Jatropha his hand.

  “Harald,” he said by way of introduction. He shook Eranthis’s hand, then Xanthostemon’s. “Delighted to meet you all.” Turning back to the staff and teeth, he began to chuckle. “Looks like I got here just in time. Nasty thing, that.”

  There was no sign of King Levisticum or anyone else as they left the hall, Arabis safely tucked into Pentas’s arms. The Amaranthine, Harald, led the way—he had something for them to see.

  “I haven’t been here long,” he explained, releasing a spark from a case in his shawl as they approached a door. “But I must have come in through the wrong entrance.”

  The bright little point of light accompanied them down a flight of stairs, illuminating a musky-smelling place that appeared hidden between two floors of the Mount. Eranthis and Pentas had to stoop to enter, moving slowly as their eyes adjusted to the gloom.

  “The Gheal would have brought you here next, I imagine,” Harald said to Jatropha, stepping deeper into the mouldy place. “To keep you with its other experiments.”

  They became aware of a soft babbling sound, punctuated with the drip of water, emanating from the blackness ahead. Hundreds of eyes shone at them.

  Eranthis inhaled a sharp breath of stinking air as the spark lit up the rows of peering faces.

  “It must have been capturing Amaranthine for decades,” Harald said, taking a hand as it reached through the bars of its cage and stroking it absently. “They’ve all been tipped over the edge by their imprisonment. I’ll have to send someone to collect them.”

  Jatropha knelt before the cages, gazing among their faces. A woman drooled and smiled at him, giving him the thumbs-up.

  “There’s more,” Harald said, “much more.”

  He led them through another small door carved from the same piss-smeared wood and into a great bowl of a chamber. At its centre, the spark picked out the details of a rusted, conical hulk.

  “Vulgar corsair,” Harald said to Jatropha, walking around it. There were bits and pieces stacked all over the place, as if it were either being taken apart or put back together. Eranthis gazed at the ship for a while, eyes lost in the tangled tubes of its bulky mechanisms, before noticing the dozen or so small creatures wandering towards her.

  “It’s all right,” Harald said as the Skylings came and hugged his waist and arms. “These Prism were prisoners, too. They won’t harm you.”

  She stared at their little red and white faces, taking in the variety of forms, some furred, others bald and lean. Their skin was speckled with scabs. Some had long, pendulous noses, others large ears and eyes. One of them had a tail.

  Harald spoke to them in a rapid, breathless speech. Eranthis, understanding the Amaranthine must have told them their captor was dead, watched as they all began to weep, clinging on to Harald’s shawl and clapping their hands.

  “They were bred down here,” he said, holding a particularly ill-looking specimen in his arms. “They tell me the Gheal would even, um, mate with them itself, resulting in some interesting stillbirths over the years.”

  “This ship,” Jatropha said at last, looking it over. “The Gheal would have fixed it soon. With Arabis also in its power, it might have been in a position to hold the First to ransom.”

  “I believe that was certainly its hope,” Harald replied. “Ambitious creature, I’ll give it that.”

  Jatropha was running his hand along the hulk of the ship. Eranthis could barely look at him, she’d been so worried. “Out of interest, Harald.” He turned to the dark-skinned Immortal. “How did you find me?”

  Harald laughed. “A Spirit’s Oracle, on his holidays.”

  Jatropha gazed at him, smiling.

  One of the Skyl
ings tugged on Harald’s shawl and, when he bent down, whispered into his ear.

  He straightened. “They will take us out of here in the ship, if we wish. Probably a good idea. I can’t imagine Levisticum, so often amused, will see the joke.”

  LUMINARY

  “It’s done, Berzelius. We threw what was left in the lake.”

  The stout Pifoon general hesitated and took the bottle, holding the heavy thing by the neck and swigging from it as he strolled, barefoot. Beyond the opened windows, the sparkling hazel lake slopped noisily against the stones of the jetty, a cold breeze driving in off the forested mountains of Inner Cancri and rattling their golden frames. Berzelius imagined her floating remains drifting up to the jetty, getting caught amid the poles. He turned away.

  “Did she say anything? Try to give a speech?” he asked, dribbling some wine.

  “Nothing much,” Ingo replied. “We, ah . . . didn’t give her the choice. Should we have?”

  He looked at the Pifoon soldier, now his division general, and continued his stroll.

  Truth be told, Berzelius the Honoured of Hafferty, portly and bald from his little monkeyish head to his ratty yellow toenails, had never much liked wine. He pretended he did, of course; a thousand bottles a year were included with his salary when he was butler to the Satrap, and come the second year it was too late to ask for something else. The Lady Ilieva had attributed his ruddy cheeks and broken veins to a drinking habit, no doubt, but in reality his complexion was nothing but hives brought on by the terrible dustiness of the place. He took another gulp, the wine no longer stinging the back of his throat. It was six thousand years old: a wonder the glass bottle didn’t snap into pieces in his hand.