by Tom Toner
He sat on a window ledge. The candlelights were flickering into life above the mountains, and soon a miniature galaxy of artificial stars, little tapering flames that coiled smoke at their tips, were burning in the sky, obscuring the lands above.
This was not the old Satrap’s palace he occupied now. Berzelius had considered very carefully whether to install himself there once the Pifoon had risen up and the deed was done, but had honestly found the thought of living somewhere he’d worked for almost forty years appalling: remembering the Satrap’s voice at every turn, seeing her in the shadows of the pre-dawn light. His betrayal was too fresh.
As a front, he’d taken the new Emperor’s palace instead, proclaiming it more fitting. The Emperor Sotiris did not live as grandly as the Satrap of Cancri had, having left his estate before he ever knew he’d be elected, but it was nevertheless a sumptuous place of fifty thousand acres curled around the great green lake of Cancrous. Upon arrival, Berzelius had taken the liberty of rummaging through all of the Immortal’s drawers and chests, read his correspondence, stood and gazed at all the ancient family paintings encased in resin, a few of which had been defaced by the first Pifoon to break in, and wandered the vaults whispering to the sparks. It was a fine, shimmering place of peeling gold; he could rule the New Firmament well from here.
Berzelius had only met Sotiris once, in his last month of butlership to the Satrap. He’d quite liked him, for what it was worth, seeing the easy manners and friendly openness that had clearly attracted the rest of the Amaranthine to his duplicitous cause, but had found the Immortal a trifle dull. Of course, many of Sotiris’s stories Berzelius had only walked in on—lighting the sparks, pouring the water, serving dishes of sweets for them to suck while the night drifted by—but Berzelius lived for stories; he was a connoisseur of them, hearing the best from all around the Firmament as Immortal visitors came and went, and tended to think of his own life up until now as nothing but a glorious tale of advancement against the odds. Other Amaranthine—that Von Schiller, most notably— had offered up far better entertainment for their room and board, but by the end of it, Berzelius could see that the Satrap herself was rather sweet on Old Sotiris and couldn’t be persuaded to part with him. He’d felt jealous then, seeing her attraction to him, and had wanted Sotiris gone. Not long after, they released the Pifoon butler for his well-earned retirement, and he’d made the journey up to the outer shell to live in splendour, all the while waiting for the Firmament’s cracks to show.
The stories they sent him now did not please him. It was barely a day and half since the coup that had offered up the throne of Cancri, and yet news had come of the taking of Drolgins. News had come of Cunctus. News had come of some Lacaille deal and an Op-Zlan marshal of the New Empire. News had come of the Bult. The Bult, now somehow inexplicably taking a central role in the New Investiture. Not only was it personally terrifying for Berzelius, it also demoralised those who might have been persuaded to come to his aid. Thankfully the Bilocating Amaranthine delivering the gossip was cuffed and hooded as soon as he arrived, unable to leave and share what he’d discovered here. Berzelius supposed news would move even more slowly with the disappearance of the Immortals, forced to stutter along the shipping lanes until it reached the right ears. He didn’t care.
He came to the huge bedchamber, pushing open the doors and creeping in. The windows looked out not to the lake but to a hidden garden behind the palace courtyard. The vast bed, impeccably made the morning of Sotiris’s departure, had been soiled by some of his guards. He looked at the mess—a row of smudged turds like filthy great leeches on the fine bedspread—and shook his head, flinging down the bottle.
“I can’t have this!” he screeched, staggering back through to the golden reception rooms. The drinkers there stiffened, watching him warily.
“Every one of them will come back here before tonight and clean this up,” he spluttered, seizing another bottle from the smallest Pifoon and plugging it to his lips. That the Satrap, someone to whom he was close for four decades, had just been crushed with weights was not enough; now he had nowhere to sleep off the inevitable hangover.
Berzelius looked at Ingo, who had followed him through, and tried to breathe deeply. “Any news of the Whisperer?”
“They’re bringing her, Satrap.”
Berzelius nodded, soothed, and went back to his window ledge to sip at his wine and wait. The millions of candles bobbed in the great breezes of the world, twinkling over the lake, and Berzelius let his eyes close as he rested. Such a long two days of sleepless activity. A Vaulted Land had never been successfully occupied in the history of the Amaranthine; it had taken nothing short of a viper’s precision and speed to strike when the Satrap’s armies—not to mention the Lacaille fleets stationed nearby—were at their busiest elsewhere. Astonishingly, impossibly, it had just about worked.
Now that all Amaranthine who could have Bilocated away and spread the news had been intercepted, all he needed to do was to close the orifice seas—for they were still alarmingly open, allowing anyone the opportunity to come and go—and seal himself away for the inevitable storm. You could hardly call the prospect a harsh siege; inside their world was a closed and luxuriant ecosystem, hollowed and cultured to sustain trillions when in fact its population now numbered in only the tens of thousands. At first, Berzelius hadn’t seen the need to reopen the seas at all—why not keep them closed and rule this single world until he and his successors had turned to dust? He would be presiding over an entire planet half as big again as the Old World; untrammelled power and riches were his now, untold treasure bequeathed by the defeated Amaranthine.
But then the news had come of Drolgins’ fall, and Berzelius knew he hadn’t the time to luxuriate. The Investiture, once it had coagulated beneath Cunctus’s barbaric rule, would set its sights on the New Firmament, and Berzelius would have to be ready. The Pifoon on the neighbouring Vaulted Land, Ectries, would need to follow his lead as swiftly as they could, for the near-victorious Lacaille were already making their presence known in the Firmament and eyeing up territory for themselves. The local Tethered moons and planets, at present still the battlegrounds of the Vulgar and Lacaille, would have to be taken, too, before their safety mechanisms snapped shut. This fight, Berzelius felt, would almost certainly cost him his life, but he was more put out and exhausted than anything else.
He felt the breeze strengthen, bringing with it scents of waterweed. There would be a frost tonight. The Pifoon in the chamber cackled, the sound of someone hurling more wood onto the roaring fire. All Berzelius felt now was the low after the high: Sotiris’s fortune—reputedly in the region of one hundred million Firmamental Ducats (the equivalent of billions of gold Pifoon Stamps) and searched for in vain by the first Pifoon to arrive at the palace unchallenged—must have been kept in the vaults at Gliese, or perhaps already requisitioned by the Lacaille that had paid the place a flying visit during the battle. Berzelius didn’t care much either way; he had the wealth of the whole Vaulted Land at his disposal now, not to mention the private treasures of the Satrap herself; sufficient riches to finance the building of a fortress world the size of a Satrapy, or to launch dozens of Firmamental wars. A part of him that used to scrimp and save occasionally remembered that a thousandth of a Firmamental Ducat was enough to build a good Pifoon home, and considered digging beneath the palace for the treasure anyway, just in case it was buried there. Berzelius had just paid himself a sizeable salary from the Satrap’s estate, in keeping with his new title, and distributed other great treasures among his family and generals. He was now perhaps the wealthiest Prism person who had ever lived, his fortune eclipsing that of the Lacaille king Eoziel or the richest of the Vulgar kings, Paryam. It was only fitting, he supposed, as Satrap.
He did the sums now as he sat there, the gentle spinning of the room amplifying some kind of clarity in his mind. About five thousand lives had paid for his new position. It was an expensive throne, yes, but it could have been a lot dearer, too.
The doors were pulled open to reveal the Whisperer, her hands and feet bound, being carried by a group of Pifoon. The Amaranthine’s head, from which the sounds of soft whispers percolated, was draped in a black woollen hood.
Berzelius took another swig and jumped down from the ledge. The “safety mechanisms” he had just been thinking of were in the hands of this woman, this Whisperer. And she’d almost got away.
“Now then, Calvine,” Berzelius said, wandering over to her. He could hear his words as they slurred around his mouth. “You can stop your whispering, it won’t do you any good. If you won’t co-oprer . . . if you won’t play along, we’ll have to dump you in the lake like your mistress.”
The figure lay still on the floor, an unnatural heat rising from her.
“And I don’t want to do that,” he continued, pitching his voice louder. “But believe you me, I do what’s necessary for our cause, in case you haven’t noticed what’s been happening in these lands the last few days.”
Still nothing. Berzelius suddenly wondered whether she might have fallen asleep. He shook her.
“I was a friend to the Satrap Ilieva, I cared for her. I didn’t want to do this.”
“Yes,” the hooded figure said finally, muffled. “I saw your self-control.”
“It was the natural Law of Succession!” he raged, slopping the wine. “I was in her service for forty years, I deserved more than a retirement!”
“And now you’re the new Satrap?” the hooded Amaranthine asked. “Her replacement? You lower creatures will tear the galaxy apart.”
Berzelius hurled the bottle at her. It shattered over her head, splashing wine across the floor. He stood back a little and checked his bare feet for glass, breathing harder when he noticed the darker currents of blood swirling from beneath the hood and mingling with the wine.
“Calvine?”
The hooded body lay inert and silent.
“Calvine?”
Berzelius staggered back, looking around the stunned group of Pifoon.
“What have I done?”
Ingo stared at him, his yellow eyes very round.
“What have I done, Ingo?”
His division general wiped his mouth, stunned. The Amaranthine’s blood was seeping across the floor now like a swirling dark stream. “She was our only chance to close the seas.”
When they’d checked her non-existent pulse, Berzelius stumbled off towards the bedchamber, moving through the gilded rooms, hot-faced and swaying. When he came at last to the soiled bed, he threw aside the sheets and dumped himself down.
The room spun, whirling.
He thought of Cunctus, that faceless, formless stirrer of chaos, and sat up in bed, suddenly sure he was about to be sick. The seas cannot be closed.
He sat for a moment on the edge of the bed, cupping his balls in one hand—something he’d done since infancy when the nausea came on—and thought about his unprotected world.
“I’ll go down into . . . into the crust tomorrow,” he slurred to himself, burping. “Find the Alamaranthine weapons they left for me.” Berzelius smiled, lips stained purple by the wine. “And then we’ll see what can be done.”
FIREWORKS
Warm night had descended over the nexus by the time Sotiris’s sedan chair, hauled by puffing Epir, arrived at the top of the promontory. Sotiris leaned his elbow out of the window and gazed into the starlight. The gate reared above them, an arch of soaring towers. He leaned further out, staring upwards. The star, so bright from a distance, looked muted now that night had fallen, and impossibly distant. It was as if the light that found them down here had to pass through the depths of an ocean, weakening as it drifted deeper into the abyss. Sotiris’s heart sank.
He recalled the Epir ships he’d noticed on the way up—surely if they worked, everyone would have used them to escape already. They must know something he didn’t.
The sedan slowed to a stop, its wonky door rattling, one of the Epir in front craning his head around to peer at Sotiris.
“Thank you,” he said quietly, stepping out with his bags. He hadn’t gone more than a few paces when they dumped the sedan and wandered off to a nearby well bar. Sotiris hardly noticed; he was staring into the gaping mouth of the gate, watching the crowd of shuffling figures moving beneath the lamplight. It must have spanned a quarter of a mile across. Its crimson walls, purplish in the darkness, were spiked with towers, their summits crowned with silver crescent moons and the busts of once-prominent Epir. Sotiris wondered whether Aaron had really seen this place at some point, or whether it had been built entirely by the inhabitants.
As he peered into the causeway beneath the arch, he thought he could see many types of Epir—crossbreeds and thoroughbreds, old and young—and marvelled at how many Aaron had trapped. Hanging from the gates were all the city’s thousands of mummified dead—those who had travelled deeper—displayed for all to see, with their names written beneath their outstretched claws, as if waiting for their souls to come back and claim them. As Sotiris walked closer, he noticed the elongated, emaciated form of a human corpse. He read by the silver light of the star. Daniell something, it said in Leperi. Bustrad . . . Bulstrode. He couldn’t make it out. Someone the Long-Life must have known.
He spent a little longer surveying the bodies, a sense of trepidation forcing him to dawdle at the gate, before joining the crowd and moving slowly under the starlit shadow of the arch. Beneath Sotiris’s feet, the bone-like substance of the bridge had been worn into ruts, the aeons of clawed and shod feet grinding it away. Hundreds of Epir were passing back and forth beneath the gate, their eyes glimmering when they looked at him. Sotiris saw that many of the leaving Epir clasped food and drink, and his spirits lifted. Something was going on inside.
He stopped for a moment at a food stand, buying a cup of sharp Clorandal. Through the arches to one side he could make out the starlit meadowlands rising all around, and just the simple act of looking reminded him that his boat was down there still, unprotected, his crew dispersed. There was no turning back now.
He followed the surge of the crowd, learning from his basic grasp of Leperi that the queen of this land had almost come to the end of a season’s gifting. The Epir with him now had arrived late and were hoping there might still be treats in her basket. Sotiris wandered behind them, puzzled. Presumably she threw them to the crowds.
For the first time, he heard a name tossed around, a name he hadn’t picked up on before—a word made of phlegm and clicking tongues. Was that the name of Aaron’s queen? He concentrated, treading on the feet of the Epir in front. It turned and glared at him, crimson pupils contracting.
“Sorry,” he muttered, and was rewarded with a grumble. They turned the corner into a huge square, adorned all around with the sharp spikes of towers, the light of the world’s lonely, stationary star shining down upon them. Sotiris gazed above the heads of the Epir, wondering at their total indifference to artificial light, spying three figures seated on a scaffold at one end of the square. His eyes widened.
The central figure, the one doing all the gift-throwing, stood more than ten feet tall, a giant worm of a serpent replete with four twig-like arms. The queen, he thought, gazing at her, registering that her body was entirely two-dimensional: when she turned to one side, she nearly disappeared.
To her left sat a hunched, crimson machine form, the pyramid of its head catching the moonlight. And to her right—
Sotiris pushed forward, oblivious to the hisses and curses of the crowd.
Iro sat there, her face bored and neutral, as easily readable in the starlight as it had ever been.
“Iro!” he cried, his voice raw. “Iro, it’s me!”
But yet again his voice seemed to lose all potency before it reached her, as if a thick wall of glass stood between them. He was moving swiftly through the crowd now, the Epir pa
rting at the sound of his shouts. His sister could not have been more than forty feet away, but still she couldn’t hear him. Even the two-dimensional queen appeared oblivious to his presence.
Sotiris pulled his bag from his shoulder, taking out the Osserine fireworks he’d brought with him and lighting one with a flick of his thumb and forefinger. This high up, a little of his power had returned to him and sparks sprayed across his feet, lighting up the square. He held the tube, waving it around. At first, the Epir didn’t seem to know what to make of the sputtering thing, their haggard faces lit by the glow. They were looking at the firework, but not at him. Sometimes they can see me, he understood with dismay, but sometimes they can’t.
But one person could. A figure he might have recognised from some other life. It was a small, bat-eared humanoid with alabaster skin. It was rushing towards him through the crowd. As the person drew nearer, Sotiris could see that in his hand he held a gun.
The crowd peeled apart around the small white person, their eyes still drawn to the sputtering red sparks of Sotiris’s firework. Sotiris turned and pushed his way out of the square, shoving rudely through the crowd of oblivious Epir and tossing the firework away. The strange little person dogged his every move, scuttling between the legs and tails of the crowd, gaining on Sotiris with every heartbeat. A moment more and there was nothing between them. The person aimed and fired.
The bullet missed, sailing off into the air above the bridge. Sotiris glanced behind him, then back to the drop and the meadows, their canals glowing in the starlight. He took a running leap.
For a moment, he was weightless and falling, arms pinwheeling, legs kicking, until a jutting tower came up to meet him and he landed with a winded crash upon its steepled roof, scrabbling for a grip and dangling over the meadow.
At that moment, something changed. He wheezed and almost fell, not remembering ever having felt so much pain before. The white person—he recalled suddenly that it was a Vulgar—came skidding to a stop above him, staring down, aiming once more.
