by Tom Toner
Huerepo cursed, hurling down the weapon and kicking it across the floor. Bullets emptied as it spun, mostly spilling down the next stairwell. Huerepo paused, breathing heavily, both of them listening to the clicking roll of the ordnance as it made its way to the levels below, the echoes of the Vulgar’s rage reverberating down through the chambers of the building.
Lycaste picked up a broken shard of porcelain the length of a dagger, finding a smaller piece among the rubble and handing it to Huerepo. He followed the sound of the rolling bullets, making his way carefully down the small steps, built for daintier feet than his own. “Who do you expect to meet out here, anyway? More of your sort? Those vicious-looking things that were killing Secondlings?”
“These Vaulted Lands are open now, to anyone and anything with an interest in treasure,” Huerepo said. “This will be a hellish place in no time, what with the treaty over and the Amaranthine strung up.” He looked at Lycaste as he stooped to collect another bullet. “The Vulgar, the Lacaille, the Pifoon—they’ll all be fighting tooth and claw for whatever they can get.”
“But don’t the Amaranthine employ you? You would steal from them?”
Huerepo shrugged, frowning as he looked down the darkened stair. “Hounds eat their master when he dies.”
They continued on, passing dark, empty ballrooms and great magenta-veined doors double Elatine’s height, emerging after a while into the antechamber of the marble edifice, the fields of flowers sighing at the end of the pale hall.
“Did you see all the headless people?” Lycaste whispered as they made their faltering way under dappled palm shadows, at the mercy of twinkling, zipping insects.
“Yes,” Huerepo said. “This is a place of arrival, I think. They must have been left here as a warning.”
Gradually the forest swallowed them, hiding the views of the meadows beyond. Lycaste’s guts felt hollow from hunger. Drool ran from the corners of his mouth. He considered the shiny insects, wondering whether the bees were like that—all bejewelled and fancy—simply because they fed on the glittering landscape. He had a sudden image of himself stumbling home one day barnacled with sapphires from head to toe, nothing but skin and bone beneath.
Unseen creatures hooting in the palm canopies brought his attention back to the forest around them. They were following a trodden trail in the moss, glistening where boots had trampled not long before.
“Should we be going this way . . . ?” Lycaste muttered, his words dying off.
A person stood among the trees, glaring sidelong at them. Huerepo wandered on obliviously, still muttering, his pockets clinking with bullets and jewelled insect shells.
More men came, slipping in and out of shade. Huerepo noticed at last and froze, his fingers flying to his holster and remaining there.
They wore patched red and blue velvet, Lycaste saw, rubbed and threadbare around the elbows and knees, with high boots that fitted close around their shins like those he had seen some of the Amaranthine wearing. Thick chains dangling assorted pendants, rings and talismans hung from their necks. Scabbarded swords weighted with gems adorned the belts of many, threatening to drag down their pantaloons. Their bushy, expectant faces studied him, impolitely uncoloured.
More men sitting deeper in the woods saw him and stood, their ears flattening curiously. They were dressed in shining plates of beautiful yet ancient-looking armour. Great dyed beards hung from the chins of the eldest, clearly combed and coiffed with great care. Their mounts, tied in the shade of the palms beyond, were leopard-spotted, stunted relatives of the zeltabras from home.
They were Melius, like him, but of a race he’d never seen before.
“Alsu, son Elt Worlter,” said a sitting man in some gibberish speak. Then: “Lycaste?”
A cold sweat rippled over him.
The Melius looked questioningly at him.
He noticed how the men at the back had long rifles aimed at Huerepo rather than him. “Yes?”
“Lycaste!” two other men exclaimed together. “Lycaste del Elt Worlter!”
Lycaste smiled nervously as they laughed. He shrugged, his embarrassment growing, and they roared with approval. Even Huerepo had begun to smirk, though weapons were still trained on him. Everyone quietened abruptly as Maneker shouldered his way through the company and glared at Lycaste.
“I gave simple instructions,” he said. “Simple instructions. But here you are.” The Amaranthine climbed into the stirrup of the smallest beast and sat astride, waiting. “Get a ferdie.”
Lycaste gaped at him.
“Get a mount, imbecile.”
The only spare was tethered to a palm deeper in the woods. Lycaste checked its bags and gave it a pat. Huerepo followed him, stopping short and pointing.
“What’s that about, then?”
He looked, spotting a body lying crumpled on the forest floor, its feet tied to the saddle of the nearby animal. He appeared to be a bandit, perhaps the sort Maneker had mentioned. He’d been dragged behind the mount and was bloodied from head to foot, his clothes peeled almost completely away. A beautifully iridescent weapon lay in the moss beside him. Lycaste bent, not wanting to touch the body, studying the gun more closely.
“Amaranthine weapon,” Huerepo said, standing back and eyeing the corpse uneasily.
Lycaste moved to retrieve it, holding his breath to avoid the stench of decomposition. He’d thought he might get used to death, having seen and smelled so much of it in such a short space of time, but he found himself quivering once more, his old bravado nothing but a spell that had touched him briefly and left. He picked up the weapon: a pistol, by the looks of it.
It was, fittingly, an item of Amaranthine perfection, carved from what appeared to be a single piece of polished crystal or pearl. Some distant, detached part of his mind found the weapon exceptionally beautiful and wished to collect it, the way he’d once collected wooden people for his palace back home. He gripped the stock, smooth against his palm.
The dead man muttered and flung out a hand, grasping him by the ankle. Lycaste yelped, involuntarily kicking him, and jumped back. The bandit smiled a gap-toothed smile.
“Take it,” he wheezed in First. “Use it.”
Lycaste held it away from the man.
The bandit smirked, his head lolling back. “Use it on them, while they are a-sleeping.”
Lycaste met Huerepo’s eye and stowed the pistol hurriedly in a bandolier dangling from the ferdie’s saddlebags.
“Farewell,” the man said, breathing quickly as if he’d just run a race. “Lycaste, of the Old World.”
They made camp in the seemingly endless meadows that evening, tethering their ferdies to another grove of low, thick-trunked palms. Lycaste saw to his own, having been given it for the remainder of the journey on the provision that he kept up with the convoy as it cantered through the grass, the riders sitting high on their animals’ rumps.
Something had been following them through the mossy forest as they’d left its borders: a shadow peeping between the trees. It could only have been Elatine, jealously watching them go. Lycaste kept trembling watch, understanding that his guides, though they kept their own counsel, had noticed the shadow, too.
He looked at the ferdie’s calm, dark eyes as he tied it, patting its spotty flank. He wouldn’t give it a name, and yet the part of him that was most afraid wanted to, just so he might have a friend.
Over the half-day’s ride from the castle, they’d lost that feeling of pursuit, seeing little but flowers and grass, their ferdies stoically navigating the paths in the meadows, ears flicking at the curiosity of jewelled insects and tiny velvety hummingbirds that hovered to inspect them. Lycaste had tried to talk to the birds, sensing as he did so Huere-po’s amusement behind him, but they only stared beadily for a moment more before flitting to the next rider. The Vulgar, who had chosen to sit atop Lycaste’s shoulders rather than be carried in a Loyalist’s saddlebags, had spent the day antagonising the bees into stinging him while steadily passing down a n
umber of gold and silver barbs. Lycaste kept them for him in a pouch, wondering incredulously what the little man wouldn’t do for treasure.
Those they rode with were mostly silent and hunched, flicking their whips at their ferdies and watching the curved, never-ending horizon rolling away above. The dissident they dragged behind was almost certainly dead by the time they lost sight of the castle. Lycaste noticed when he looked behind that the trail of blood in the flowers—like the mark of a wide, red-dipped paintbrush—had run dry. The Loyalists broke the silence only to speak to Maneker, who rode out ahead, in low, reverential tones. Their speech was that of the Firmament. Sotiris himself had described it to him on their ride through the Second: Unified. He fancied he could catch the gist of their briefest sentences for just a moment, before the foreign sounds sank and dropped beyond understanding.
After a Quarter or so of this, Lycaste asked Huerepo quietly if he might mind translating.
And so Lycaste knew as they made camp that they were heading to the estate of the Satrap of Proximo himself, an Immortal named Vin-centi. The Melius who sat around the fire, still armoured, were mostly the Satrap’s men, sent out to slaughter any dissidents they found, ensuring that there was still one place in the Vaulted Land where the Amaranthine held order.
Lycaste made his way slowly to the fire, unsure of where to sit. Only a vague sense of disgust kept him from all but following the Vulgar Huerepo’s every move, hoping that he wouldn’t have to talk to the other Melius as they sat around their fire to eat. He watched Maneker carefully as the Amaranthine found a place to sit apart from the others with a bottle of something, resolving that the Immortal was the last person he would turn to for companionship.
Out in the darkness, some sparks of light gave away a distant tower they’d seen as they rode that day; great bonfires Huerepo had told him were lit by Prism that had taken the place. He kept his Amaranthine pistol close as he sat among the Loyalists, his eyes drawn to the bubbling skewers that one man had pulled out of the fire. The tiny hummingbirds weren’t more than a mouthful each, but someone at the back of the convoy had apparently been catching them by the hundreds.
“Sje miech son Arom,” said the Loyalist beside him, the Melius with the great red beard. He produced a fretworked locket from around his neck and opened it, showing Lycaste that it was filled with the petals that must have attracted the birds. They gave off a sharp, almost poisonous stink. Lycaste nodded hesitantly, taking a silver plate of roasted birds as they were scraped from the spit. He saw Huerepo sitting further back—unwelcome at the fire—and dropped another couple of birds onto the plate. Then the red-bearded Loyalist unbuttoned his top pocket and produced a short pipe. Lycaste watched him brandishing it, finally shaking his head as he realised what was being offered. The man smirked and took a flaming twig from the fire, touching it to the bowl and puffing until it smouldered. He inhaled deeply, eyes creasing, and turned to look at Lycaste again.
“First?” he asked unexpectedly through a mouthful of coiling smoke. “You speak First?”
“A little,” Lycaste said.
“Lycaste the Old World Melius,” the man said, smiling to himself. He glanced up. “What happened—you come here with this one?” He indicated Maneker with his pipe.
Lycaste nodded uncertainly, finding the man’s accented mumbling difficult to understand through his elaborate moustaches. He looked into the Loyalist’s brown-gold eyes, yellowed around the iris as if he’d been drinking for many days straight.
“There are Prism here,” the man said. “Prism everywhere. One killed Pigtail, my friend, so I skewered him.” He looked at Lycaste suddenly, miming the action with his pipe stem. “You know this word? Skewered?”
Lycaste shrugged, picking at his nails. He glanced off to where Huerepo sat and decided to take him his supper.
The Vulgar looked up from his thoughts, apparently confused at what he was being offered, and then broke into a sharp-toothed, dis-armingly charming smile. “You didn’t want to sit with the others?” he asked as he ate.
“I don’t like them.”
“Why? Because you don’t understand them?”
Lycaste shook his head in the darkness, eyes drawn to the far-off glimmer of the tower, then up to the glowing topside of the Vaulted Land, somehow bright as day and yet leaving them in darkness below. “It’s not that. I think I almost can, some of the time. I just don’t want to talk to them.” He looked off to where he thought the Amaranthine was sitting, on the other side of the fire. “And I certainly don’t want to be anywhere near Maneker.”
Huerepo finished his last bird, crunching the bones and smacking his lips, obviously thinking of more. “Why’s that?”
Lycaste dropped his voice. “He’s . . . he’s not at all like the other Amaranthine I knew. Sotiris was kind.”
Huerepo snorted, licking his fingers. “No such thing as a kind Amaranthine.”
Lycaste shook his head. Sotiris had saved his life. He could only feel love for the man. At the same time, a new worry snagged amid the tangle of others. Sotiris was kind. He’d spoken as if the Amaranthine were a thing of the past, as if he were gone.
Lycaste glanced back at Huerepo. “They were friends—Sotiris said—he and Maneker. But they aren’t at all alike. I thought I’d feel safe now that we’re with him, but I don’t.”
Huerepo shrugged, patting a knapsack he’d taken from Lycaste’s ferdie into a decent pillow shape. “He’s been alive a long time, Lycaste. He knows more of life than you or I ever could. I think I’ll trust the Amaranthine with mine.”
Lycaste’s low voice became a whisper. “What about this Satrap, Vincenti? He might take us in. He might know a way for us to get home.”
“Home?” Huerepo asked incredulously. “The Old World isn’t my home. I was born in a Shantyland on Nirlume. All thirty of my brothers and sisters died. I earned a fifth of a Filguree a day scraping crablings and sluppocks.” He raised his little eyebrows. “Have you ever scraped a sluppock? They don’t come off in one go, and they bite while they’re doing it. I think I’ll stay here.”
Lycaste had an image of something black and slimy attached to a rock, all teeth inside its coils. He blinked the image away, noticing the tangle of thin white scars at the nape of Huerepo’s neck for the first time. “But Maneker doesn’t need us, he doesn’t even want us—he’ll probably leave us with the Satrap anyway.”
Huerepo shrugged, obviously frustrated. “Then I’ll make myself indispensable to this Satrap.”
Lycaste shook his head and looked away to the fire, his eyes alighting on each of the Melius as they talked. Some had begun to stretch out, removing the most uncomfortable items of their armour so they could lie flat in the grass. In the sighing palm-tops above the tethered ferdies, Lycaste could just make out the silhouette of a Melius keeping watch, his Amaranthine rifle leaning against his shoulder.
He couldn’t bring himself to admit that he needed Huerepo to get away from this place, having no idea exactly where they were. After a period of silence, the Vulgar stretched and rolled over, muttering to himself while he shoved the knapsack into a better shape. Lycaste laid his head down beside Huerepo’s, two private, locked boxes impervious to each other’s thoughts, and allowed himself another good long look at the dayside of the world.
Proximo Carolus, he thought, marvelling at the shape of the Amaranthine name on his breath as his gaze traced the lines of continents, the vertigo returning while his mind tried to sort down from up, the homesickness and longing fading before his eyes. Cream swirls of cloud patterned the lands, pink at the edges of the dawn to the east and west, darker and more tightly coiled towards the seas. His eye made out a break in their pattern high beside a perfectly circular blue sea, and for a moment he forgot everything else. There was a fire burning, surely larger than any fire anyone had ever seen, the smoke staining a sweep of land almost all the way up one curled arm of coast. He squinted, making out flea-like grains that swarmed slowly above the landscape, bright again
st the smoke trail where they winked in the light. Lycaste looked to the sentry in the trees to see if the Loyalist had noticed them, but staring too long at the bright side of the world had washed out his eyes, leaving him blind to the darkness. He turned his attention back to the view.
The fleas were curling, surrounding a legion of others, at first so slowly that they appeared to have stilled. Then from the south a scrawl of white streaks tore upwards, penetrating the swirl and scattering them. Lycaste was vaguely aware that, though their motion appeared sluggish, the shapes must have been moving unfathomably quickly to cover so much distance in such a short time. The coil of attackers dissipated, coalescing at a distance and falling in what must have been a charge. The origin of the white streaks revealed itself: two larger flecks that Lycaste could just make out the shapes of if he strained his eyes, surrounded by a swarm of dots only visible in their groupings and swirls. A new blackness drifting upwards from the throng must have been more smoke or soot from the attack. Lycaste found himself remembering the thunder of the war as he’d ridden in the carriage from the Utopia and was grateful not to be anywhere near what was happening over that circular sea. He cast his eyes around the rest of the world, taking his time at every range and lake they came to, but couldn’t make out any other enemy movements. Finally, he looked to the sun, the side facing them a black circle where it lay against the surrounding world, and saw the real battle for Proximo.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands of them were up there, harrying others as they apparently defended the columns that held the sun aloft. Lycaste knew perfectly well that the specks he saw were not individual Prism folk but their wonderful ships, the Voidcraft. Against the night-black of the sun’s disc, he saw his first flashes, popping with an almost-heard sound. The whole dark sphere of the sun could be covered by his outstretched hand, but Lycaste was sure those flashes, detonating by the hundred every few breaths, were colossal in size. He gazed up at the twinkling for a while, considering how beautiful it might have been if he’d not known how many instant deaths each flash represented.
