by Tom Toner
Lycaste kept very still, crouched in the shadows behind the arm of an ornate chair. The Jalan remained in the doorway, bent-backed and slobbering, his ears pricked like a hound’s. Lycaste could see the whites of his great eyes as he peered into the room, gaze alighting every so often and moving on. Those eyes reached the chair Lycaste hid behind and halted, uncertain.
Lycaste let out his breath in tiny increments, his heart squirming, his skin darkening to black.
One thumping footstep, then another two. The Jalan walked towards the far curtains and flung them open, turning in the mist of dust.
Lycaste jumped from his hiding place and slid, diving beneath a vast claw-legged table and scrabbling as far as he could into its shadows. A huge hand darted after him, catching his toe. Its claws dug in, wrenching the toe out of its socket. Lycaste pawed the dust, choking, and was slowly dragged back from beneath the table and into the paler gloom of the open room, a polished trail following him through the grey. He trembled but kept still, as if somehow playing dead would help.
The gnarled face of the Jalan peered down at him, his great nose and brow casting huge shadows. Lycaste’s toe throbbed.
“You’re no Firstling,” the giant rumbled while he tapped a finger against his battered cuirass, a carapace of angular metal as large as Lycaste’s old boat. He considered the dim chamber for a moment, and, yanking Lycaste by the leg and dragging him to the window, hauled open another set of curtains. Warm light flashed into the chamber, illuminating a dozen Amaranthine seated at the table Lycaste had just crawled under. All were missing their heads.
The Jalan paid little heed to the death in the chamber. He was looking, rapt, out into the sky beyond the grand window, a ribbon of drool trembling from his lips as the wind sighed in.
“You!” he cried suddenly, dropping Lycaste and leaning out. He swung back, slavering and breathing hard, thumping around to the edge of the table and hurling it to one side. The bodies tumbled from their chairs. Lycaste covered his head, fully expecting to be next, but the giant was already storming out of the room and back to the stairs.
Lycaste waited until he heard the Jalan making his way through the halls above, then inspected his toe and hobbled to the window.
The Amaranthine, Hugo Maneker, was out there, dangling from a distant rampart by the tips of his fingers.
“Meddling turd!” the great voice bellowed. The giant had made it to Maneker’s ledge, his tongue lolling, the shadow of his fourteen-foot-tall frame looming as he knelt to take the Amaranthine’s fingers. “I ought to cast you to your death,” the giant sneered in First, that strange, slightly-too-high-pitched voice stilled to a grumble. “It’s finished, all of it. Everything.” He bent, and slowly prised one of the Amaranthine’s fingers away from the ledge, looking into Maneker’s eyes, daring him to respond. “It’s not so hard at all, really, is it? To kill one of you.”
“Get it over with,” Maneker said, his voice clear and composed as he dangled. He raised his voice. “Do it, Elatine! ”
“You think I won’t?” Elatine cried, gripping another of the Ama-ranthine’s tiny fingers in his claws and bending it back with a snap. Lycaste watched Maneker’s face, noting how nothing appeared to alter in his disgusted expression. He wondered why the man didn’t use his abilities to try and free himself.
“Do it!” the Immortal raged, a sudden thermal whipping at his clothes. Elatine’s lank hair stirred and stood on end, parting where sweat had stuck it into clumps. He lifted Maneker upwards like a stringed puppet, peeling back his lips to reveal his huge mouth of jagged teeth.
“Stop that!” a familiar voice cried in a helium-squeak almost too thin to be heard.
Lycaste glanced to the end of the ledge, remembering the Vulgar, Huerepo. The little person heaved himself over the edge and stood watching Elatine cautiously.
“Look what you’re doing!” Huerepo continued in First, his tiny body squaring up against Elatine’s brooding shadow. “To an Amaranthine!”
Elatine glowered at the bite-size Vulgar and flattened his ears, his predatory eyes set deep in caves of shadow. Butterflies flooded Lycaste’s stomach at the sight, but the Jalan stood where he was, apparently about to say something, finally choosing to remain silent. He dropped Maneker back onto the ledge, regarding Huerepo solemnly.
“It’s over, anyway,” Elatine said, turning to address the landscape. He flicked his eyes to the sun, noticing perhaps for the first time how it stood supported by four stone columns many miles thick. At length, he looked down at Maneker as if considering whether to help the man after all.
“Write to me when you’re mad, Amaranthine. It would cheer me no end.”
He strode off, a limp forcibly and self-consciously corrected, picking his way across the roof.
Huerepo watched him leave, scuttling to the Amaranthine’s aid when he was sure Elatine had gone. Lycaste wondered how the little man was planning to haul someone twice his weight over the edge.
The Vulgar glanced across to Lycaste’s window and waved his rifle. “Hello! I need a hand here.”
Lycaste stared for a moment then nodded, making his way to the stairs while trying not to look at any of the fallen corpses in the room. Conscious that Elatine was still at large somewhere in the place, he kept his footfalls light.
This is not death, he realised, passing slanting bars of light churning with motes. It was something else, something his little mind just couldn’t comprehend.
He arrived at a tall, broken window that offered a better view of the lands outside, observing how a sinuous tree grew from the stones of the black walls down below. The meadows stretched unbroken beyond where Lycaste thought the natural horizon should have been, the umber plain only breaking up into islands when it met the pale body of a circular sea.
Continuing on, he found a way out onto the peaked roofs and negotiated a careful exit through another smashed window—this one conceivably the victim of Elatine’s rampage—watching his footing and trying to ignore the huge drop into the palm-lined courtyard below. He picked his way to the Vulgar’s side and together they looked down at the Amaranthine. Maneker glared sullenly at the dark stone in front of him.
“Does that finger hurt?” Lycaste asked tentatively in First, crouching. Elatine’s nails had cut into the flesh like blunt, wide-edged knives.
“No,” Maneker replied in Tenth.
“Well . . .” He glanced at Huerepo and back to the Amaranthine, finally extending a hand. “Here.”
At first, it didn’t look as if the Immortal was going to accept. Finally, he glanced up at Lycaste’s hand and grabbed it, allowing himself to be hoisted quickly and easily onto the parapet ledge. He brushed at his rags, examining the finger for a second before stuffing his hand into a pocket.
“Will he come back, do you think?” the Vulgar asked.
“Not if he knows what’s good for him,” Maneker snapped, glaring at the lines of ornate windows. At length, he turned away, nostrils flaring. Lycaste glanced between them; the Vulgar Huerepo had sat down against the inner wall, not appearing to notice a milky, pale pink gem-stone the size of an egg lodged in the dark marble beside him. Dozens more had been planted by some haphazard design everywhere Lycaste looked. The Vulgar smoothed his hair down, his helmet having apparently fallen off in the fall, and wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of a hand.
Lycaste took in the soldier’s long, white ears with their dangling lobes, the foreign elongation of his skull. The man’s small nose was curiously feminine, pointed daintily at the end much like the tips of his ears, and endowed with two rather prominent nostrils. A wiry sprouting of moustache hairs decorated the corners of his lips, ginger where the sun caught them, and Lycaste couldn’t help but think of the golden Monk-men he’d seen begging at garden walls or wandering the shores of Kipris Isle, bashing away inquisitively at shells and digging for worms as the tide fell back. Huerepo’s fur-lined pinstripe tunic, wrinkled and darkened with sweat, poked from the neck of his tarnished armo
ur—what Lycaste remembered from his schooling might have been called a plackart—a size or two too big for him as if it were nothing but a family hand-me-down. Someone, perhaps his father, had described to him how the furred Monkmen fitted into the lineage to which Lycaste himself also somehow belonged, and to which, by some vague extension, these Vulgar people must also belong. They were all of them related: fourth and fifth cousins once, twice, thrice removed. Their eyes met briefly as Lycaste studied him, unable to look away despite the vastness of the world around them. Huerepo stared back, as if noticing the difference between the two of them for the first time himself, then pulled his simple pistol from its holster to inspect it, tipping a handful of bullets into his palm. Lycaste had seen Old World bullets—Impatiens had kept a store of them in his home for shooting bottles—but they were mostly spherical, not particularly dangerous unless you caught one in the eye. He got the impression that the sharp things Huerepo was counting would have stopped Elatine without much trouble, feeling a little safer at the thought.
He glanced at Maneker, who stood with his back to them, gazing out at the view. The Amaranthine’s corpse-borrowed clothes were stained with watermarks of yellowed grime, ripped here and there by the fall to reveal patches of tanned skin beneath. Lycaste went to the wall’s edge, keeping his distance from the Immortal. After a while, Maneker glanced at him askance, his rage apparently abated at last.
“And what do they call you? Something floral, I suppose?”
Lycaste looked down at him, almost afraid to reply. “Lycaste Cruenta, Tenthling.”
Maneker nodded, taking in Lycaste’s nine foot height. “A red Tenthling Melius. And a friend of Sotiris Gianakos, no less. You have come up in the world, haven’t you?”
Lycaste coloured self-consciously, glancing around at Huerepo, who had stopped fiddling with his gun to watch them. “I did as he asked—I found you.”
“You did. And now here we are.”
Lycaste followed his gaze. “Where . . . ?” he began carefully, hearing the stupidity in his own voice.
“Proximo Carolus,” the Vulgar said from behind them. “The Second Solar Satrapy.”
Lycaste took a breath, realising how terrified he’d been that his first fears—that they were all of them dead and turned to spirits—might be confirmed. Maneker turned, surprised.
“I recognise the land bridge from maps, Amaranthine.”
The Immortal nodded approvingly. “Then you know we haven’t come far. Four light-years or so. Your name?”
“Huerepo, Sire,” the Vulgar said, performing an extravagant little bow.
“How,” Lycaste began, unable for a moment to phrase his question, “how did we get . . . inside?”
Maneker gestured to Huerepo for the answer. “Vulgar?”
Huerepo glanced at Lycaste sheepishly. “Bilocation. Amaranthine can telegraph themselves, disappear and reappear at will. The iron particles in their blood align into patterns over time. It is a magnetic effect.”
Lycaste nodded slowly as if he understood, a technique he’d perfected over the years to avoid follow-up questions. Maneker looked shrewdly at him, then at Huerepo.
“You speak well for a Prism, Vulgar.”
“Thank you, Sire,” Huerepo said courteously, dipping his head. “And you saved our lives.”
Lycaste grunted in agreement. His head still spun at each glimpse of the view from the parapet. Four light-years, Maneker had said. The words meant nothing, of course, but carried with them the suggestion of enormity. It was clear, he thought, as he placed a hand on the smooth, warm marble of the wall, that any dangers he had faced before were long gone now, dissolved as they’d fallen into the night.
The Vulgar got to his feet and Lycaste watched with mild alarm as the little man hoisted himself over the steep pitch of the roof and disappeared. The Amaranthine, having gone through the pockets of his stolen rags and placed an assortment of trinkets on the wall, now appeared to be thinking, and Lycaste wasn’t inclined to disturb him. The breeze moaned around them, hot and flower-scented, the plaintive cries of an altogether foreign bird lilting on the air, making him feel even further from home. Far beyond, rivers poured like slippery silver into green deltas, hazed by gargantuan distance. He felt himself retch, swallowing, but nothing came up. It felt like a long time since he’d last eaten.
A wild commotion drew Lycaste’s attention abruptly back to the roof, the hair rising on his arms. Huerepo stumbled into view, tripping, cursing and waving his pistol. Two creatures followed, both brandishing black metal staves like pokers. At the sight of them, Lycaste stood, squaring his shoulders instinctively. They were smaller and even uglier than the Vulgar, both dressed in fine, shimmering waistcoats of red fabric. Lycaste realised with a start that the material was silk.
The two Prism noticed him and paused, their tirade of abuse halted for a moment, before thrusting the staves in Huerepo’s direction again. Both the Vulgar and the other creatures raged at each other in a language Lycaste had never heard before, though he found it relatively easy to detect the percussive expletives, repeated over and over again by both sides. Huerepo stamped his little foot and aimed his weapon theatrically at the nearest one, screaming at the top of his voice, but the creature appeared undeterred.
Maneker watched the altercation with a cool eye. He stepped past the three quarrelling Prism, apparently unconcerned as Huerepo pulled the trigger in his attacker’s face. The pistol misfired with a puff of white smoke, a golden shell pinging away across the roof.
“Bilocation ruins weaponry,” Maneker said tersely, stepping between the Prism and forcing them apart. “Away,” he cursed, slapping at one of the angry creatures. It howled and dropped its poker with a clang, scuttling behind its fellow. Huerepo turned the pistol over in his hands, confused.
Lycaste sat down warily, listening to the way Maneker spoke to the creatures in that same, clipped language and covertly examining Huere-po’s pistol. It looked fairly simple, even to him: a coil of rusted spring encased in a soldered stock, slid back and forth by a bolt. Some slight artistry had been engraved into to the weapon’s golden barrel, which Lycaste guessed had originally come from another firearm.
After what felt like a very long time, in which Huerepo managed to completely dismantle the gun and put it back together again, the Amaranthine turned back to them, snapping his fingers.
“These Pifoon say the port of Astirion-Salay—a few days from here—still operates, but they won’t take me there. Bands of disloyal acolytes are roaming the Satrapy lands, on the lookout for Amaranthine.” Maneker assessed them with his shrewd gaze, “I can’t have anyone slowing me down.” He licked his lips, glancing out into the expanse. “I have places to be, as I’m sure you both understand.”
Lycaste cradled his elbows, dismayed. “But . . . what—”
Maneker shot him a glare. “Do as you wish, sir. Stay here or walk to the far pole, I really don’t care—but if I find you on my trail it won’t be pleasant.” He took a longer look at Huerepo, then drew his rags about him and marched away across the roof, the two jowly Pifoon shooting them malevolent glances before following. After a few feet the Amaranthine hesitated, turning back. “But be warned. This place is not safe— not for any of us. Tread lightly, wherever you go.” He considered them, the wind tousling his hair. “I wish you both luck.”
When Maneker had gone, Lycaste crept to Huerepo’s side and the safety of the pistol, which the soldier was hastily reloading. “That’s it?” he asked, feeling the first stirrings of panic. “He’s leaving us here?”
“Evidently.”
“I thought this was an Amaranthine land? It isn’t safe?”
Huerepo slid the last bullet into its chamber and wound the mechanism closed, pulling back an oiled spring and cocking a latch at the side. “He was imprisoned by them,” the Vulgar said, “an enemy of the Firmamental Throne.” He glanced at Lycaste, shrugging. “As, I suppose, are we, as accomplices.”
“Nonsense,” Lycaste said,
shaking his head. “I know an Amaran-thine—Sotiris. He’s a kind man.”
Huerepo snorted. “Kind men are not welcome these days.” He stood with a groan, holstering the pistol. “Come on.”
“But he told us not to follow him,” Lycaste said.
The Vulgar stared at him. “You’re a simple soul, aren’t you?”
There was no further sign of Elatine in the castle’s dust-choked interiors. A wide spiral stairway led down into the tower, each surface carved from smooth marble. Larger jewels embedded in the pinkish stone shone dully as they passed, perhaps polished smooth by the inquisitive touch of thousands of years’ worth of guests. Lycaste stopped and listened, peering down the steps to the next floor where a jumbled pile of broken porcelain lay at the centre of a swirling white floor mosaic.
Huerepo checked his rifle as he went, perhaps refusing to believe that it had also been damaged by the Bilocation. Lycaste paused at the pile of smashed crockery, watching the Vulgar fiddling with the weapon.
“What do you think? Will it work?”
“I can’t tell,” the Vulgar said. He sighted it on an unbroken marble urn the size of a bathtub and pulled the trigger as Lycaste covered his ears. It clicked, the spring snapping forward like an animal trap, but didn’t fire. They looked at each other.
