by Tom Toner
“For a long, long time.” She hesitated, tipping her head to glance at him, her smile growing sharp and unkind. “You’d like me to dress?”
He had no idea what the correct answer might be. “The men,” he said after a moment, “it would be best for them.” Maril looked at the sleeping bundles on the beach, most congregated around the fires.
The lady Amaranthine shook her head dismissively, smiling and uncrossing her legs slowly. “Only you can see me, Wilemo. I can be as naked as you wish.”
He looked sharply away from her opening legs. “This is heatstroke. The poison fish.”
“Look at me,” her throaty voice lulled again. “I’ve let you see past my glamours. Don’t be ungrateful.”
He looked, allowing his eyes to travel over her. She slid on her buttock to face him, arching her spine like a cat as she stretched. Maril thought of all the men now long dead who must have fallen for her charms, forcing himself to concentrate on what she really was, one of the Immortals. Beneath it all she was a rotted log, a cold, withered mind denuded to madness by such an incomprehensible span of time. He held the thought and fixed her eye.
“We sought sanctuary here, as you must know. We’ve no way off this place.”
She opened her lips slightly, running her tongue over straight, white teeth before speaking. “Come and find me, Wilemo.”
He darted a glance at his sleeping men, in case any had woken. When he looked back she was gone.
“You were saying their names.”
He didn’t look at Jospor. “I was delirious.”
“Do you think they’re here, watching over you?” the master-at-arms asked. He was shaving in the bright reflection of his Wulmese helmet, squinting where the sun bounced back into his eyes.
Maril tossed his half-finished skewer to a passing Bie. It swerved and cried out, delighted, raising a shower of stones. “No.”
The master-at-arms raised his chin, pursing his lips as he brought his knife along the curve of his throat. Maril scowled. Across the beach he could see the orange smudge of his suit dangling from its poles. He wondered briefly about the collar, apparently still attached, until Jospor’s sharp curse after nicking himself with the blade tore him from his thoughts. More of the shimmering green and silver fish lay ready to fry on the rocks, caught in the hundreds with the Bie’s rods. He looked at their beaked heads, sincerely glad that the men he was responsible for wouldn’t starve, at least. On the pebbles across from the fire, the crew played games with their hosts, and he watched them for a while as they threw sticks for the long-tailed animals. The creatures ran and caught whatever was thrown, competing against each other to return them to special marked areas the fastest.
Gramps gazed on solemnly from the shade of a tangle of dead trees, his deep eyes set in shadow. Maril watched him for a while; the old Bie didn’t really look that much like the others. His head was stouter and less toothy, and his body smaller overall. The scales that covered his back and flanks were wider and of a markedly lighter shade. Gramps appeared to register Maril’s new interest and shifted a little further out of the sun.
Maril glanced away self-consciously, returning his attention to his crew. Their clothes were already ragged after less than a week. Furto, the youngest, ran shirtless, while Drazlo appeared to have discarded his underclothes entirely. Maril didn’t like it. Clothing was a tenuous link to civility in the Investiture as it stood; he would make a point of ordering them to clean themselves up.
His thoughts turned stubbornly from clothing to a lack of it—to the Amaranthine, and her invitation.
The island was the peak of an ancient volcano, dead and dry, its caldera having crumbled into a gouged slope many miles long that dropped to form a swirled spit on the westward side. Its chalky crust reared up in places like the ripped bark of a tree, with huge spiked monoliths of white stone ten feet high growing from the hills. It was through a forest of these that Maril wandered as he dwelt on what she had said. His excitement betrayed him, filling him as he climbed. He told himself it was the excitement of hope, that she represented a way off this place, but he knew it was also something more.
He’d told Jospor and the engineers that he’d needed to think, leaving after breakfast with enough water for the day and promising to fire his pistol should he encounter any trouble. Before setting out, he’d gone to see his old Voidsuit, still being used as a tatty awning, and cut out the metal helmet collar. It felt comfortable slung over his neck, a weighted talisman of simple, rusting iron.
The crew had not explored the island with any great enthusiasm, keeping to the beaches below the outcrops and roaming the coast in search of more fresh water. They had little idea of the size or shape of the place beyond what some had glimpsed on the descent, and the Bie were no use at all in the matter. It was clear that the beasts went somewhere every night; he’d have been better off simply following them as it grew dark. But he couldn’t wait.
The chalky hill steepened, the rocks sliding away as he scrambled, clattering along a course of gravel and shale that wound down the shaded side of the hill. Maril stopped to drink from his canteen, unsure exactly what he was looking for; perhaps a small tumbledown house made of driftwood or a flattened plateau of rock on the mountainside. As he drank, he looked down at the journey he’d made through the sharp outcrops, seeing wisps of smoke rising from their sheltered beach beneath the cliff. The whiteness of the island stung his eyes, a baking, dry heat rising from it. This was what all Amaranthine wanted, he reflected, snapping the cap back on his flask: for lowly folk such as himself to climb through heat and danger to pay them homage. For a moment, he registered the salt on his lips as fresh sweat dripped from his whiskers, unable to stop himself from imagining her taste.
He resumed his climb, fingers stained white as they scrabbled for a grip in the chalk, feeling his resolution ebbing. At a flattened slab of rock he rested again, looking up and around at the sheer side of the mountain. There was no further route up from this side; he would have to inch his way around the rock and into the heat of the sun-facing north side of the slope. He rummaged in his pack, taking a rolled-up shirt to wrap around his head as Jospor had done and wondering about the effect of the slightly lower gravity of the place if he had the bad luck to fall.
Looking down and tracing the route such a fall might take, he suddenly noticed the fissure in the hillside below him, hidden from the lower slopes by the angle of its cut. He’d missed it entirely, lost in thought and bent on reaching the top. He stood and stared down into its darkness, spotting some small footholds cut into the side.
It was a good example of how the Amaranthine really did hide themselves, Maril reflected as he climbed carefully down into the narrow crack between the rocks. Their concealment came not from any actual disappearance—for they weren’t beings of magic, however much they might wish to be—but the careful manipulation of the minds of others through subtle powers of suggestion. He’d only spotted this place by accident. Perhaps that was the only way he would see her now, in her lair.
It grew dark quickly, the air in the narrow space still and cool. It occurred to Maril as he stepped carefully forward that he might have misread the signs, that perhaps no Immortal lived here at all and he was actually unwittingly walking into the den of some creature that had never seen or tasted Vulgar before. It was only when he saw the first glow of pinkish light that he knew he’d found the right place. He holstered his pistol, knowing how ridiculous he would look to her, and made his way further in, stopping as the passage widened.
The light shone from beneath the surface of a huge pool larger than their camp. Stalactites dripped down to brush the water’s surface, making the pool’s true size hard to guess at beneath the arches of rock.
She must have heard him make his clumsy way in and was sitting submerged on the bottom, watching. Maril froze, looking down to her. They locked diffracted eyes.
She rose through the pink light, feet kicking gently, and broke the surface at the pool’
s far edge without taking a breath. His gaze travelled over her foreshortened form as it climbed, lengthening, out of the water. “Clever Wilemo,” the Amaranthine whispered, the hiss of her voice echoing to him as she began to dress, buttocks glimmering in the reflections. Something, perhaps the source of the light, moved beneath the water, but Maril couldn’t drag his gaze away until she had dressed fully, shrugging on a thin gown and buttoning it twice at the waist. He looked down reluctantly to see a small spark of pink light rising from the depths and joining her at the far end of the cave, momentarily glowing through her gown. Behind her, the light revealed what he took to be the Immortal’s meagre possessions, a heaped stack of chests and lanterns balanced on a three-legged table. The spark drifted into one of the lanterns and remained there, illuminating the entire cave.
The Amaranthine picked up the lantern—the glow once again passing through her dress in a tantalizing silhouette—and slinked deeper into the cavern, leaving Maril in growing darkness until he had no choice but to follow. He edged his way around the pool, seeing only the thin, syrupy reflections of the retreating light, and followed the spark.
“These caverns were hollowed millions of years ago,” her distant voice announced. “If you look closely you will make out the tool marks.”
Maril didn’t slow his pace, worrying that the light would disappear entirely and he’d be lost there, stumbling and blind. What she’d said didn’t make any sense, but as he hurried along, he spared the edge of an arch of rock a quick glance, noticing that there did appear to be carved, chiselled marks in its dim surface. He lengthened his stride, slowly catching up to the light.
“I knew that I would find this place, eventually,” the Amaranthine continued. “My proof.”
The light grew. She’d stopped, standing among a towering system of stalagmites that reached up into the blackness. The coloured light gave the place an almost festive feel, Maril thought as he joined her, staring up with her at the rock walls.
“These are natural,” she said, gesturing to the dripping stalagmites. “Formed over the epochs by running water—a centimetre a century.”
Maril nodded absently, his eyes darting every now and then to her damp gown and the curves beneath.
“But these structures,” she continued, looking at him, “are not.” She raised the lantern, revealing a scintillating glimpse of breast, and shone the light across the gnarled section of the cave before them. Maril tore his gaze away from her and looked.
Pillars and branches of tapering stone disappeared into the gloom beyond the reach of the lantern, like the ossified remains of a huge web. Maril shivered, half-expecting a fat, man-sized spider to come rearing out of its stone lair, but stepped closer anyway, mindful of the Amaranthine beside him. He touched one of the stone branches hesitantly, running his palm along it. Swirling patterns traced the rock, shallow as the grooves of a fingerprint. He forgot himself, stepping further inside the web to touch another branch. The gentle indentations were everywhere, most of them impregnated with a hair-fine filigree of glinting metal; fossilised optics, perhaps, exposed by the soft scouring of unknown years.
“This part of the crust has risen up over time,” she said, reaching past him to touch the rock. “The whole moon must have been woven with these branches, deep down.”
“Who made these?” Maril asked.
The Amaranthine glanced down at him. “Did you never wonder why the worlds of the Firmament, and even the Investiture, were all possessed of naturally breathable air?”
The question had occurred to Maril, as a younger man, but he’d presumed that was simply how most planets—like the Old World, the sacred origin of all species—had formed. He looked at her curiously, filling his canteen from the shallow pool beside where they had sat down. The darkness all around was comforting for once, cool and quiet and timeless.
“Terraforming,” she said, sweeping a delicate finger through the air. “All of the rocky planets discovered after the Second Era were habitable but swamped with oxygen, much more so than the Old World. Breathable, but heady, corrosive. New beings like us had never tasted such atmospheres and weren’t used to them.” She looked up and around, her drying hair still clinging to her cheekbones. “The flavour of this air is eighty million years old.”
Maril took a drink, offering the flask to the Amaranthine. He still did not know her name. She took it without hesitation, swigging lightly and swishing the liquid around her mouth. When she was done, she spat back into the pool.
“I would wager the wealth of the Firmament that there are undiscovered planets and moons out there, beyond the limits of the Investiture in every direction for many light-years more, that harbour the same atmospheres and yet remain as completely lifeless as all the worlds before them.” She looked at him, passing back the canteen. “Their empire was far greater than even the Amaranthine could dream of.”
Maril knew of course of the ancient, mummified monsters on display in the Sea Hall of Gliese, that they were from another time, before anything like he or the Amaranthine had come into existence, but his knowledge beyond that was vague to say the least. Despite a certain interest in history, Maril spared little time for such diversions as natural sciences, preferring the epic lore of the Firmament and Prism, the battles, the conquests. He took another drink from his flask, tasting her at last, wondering if the invitation still stood.
“And the Bie?”
She was silent a moment. “A branch of them, certainly, evolved beyond all recognition.” She reached out and grasped the flask without asking, taking another sip. “I came here many hundreds of years ago, knowing that any search of the planets of Tau Ceti would be slow and difficult and dangerous. It was only by accident that I found this island. Besides a skeleton on the west beach—some old Wulm Voidfarer with a bullet through its skull—I gathered the place to be virgin, unexplored. You and your men, Wilemo, are my first visitors.”
He chose the moment to ask. “And will you help us?”
The Immortal regarded him, all trace of her good humour abruptly gone. “There is great sadness in you, Wilemo. I see it, and I see the faces of those you loved. Why not stay here? Stay with me and study the Bie-Yem, learn their language, as I have.”
He flinched from her look, forming his answer carefully. “I can’t, no matter how much I might like to, Amaranthine. You must understand I do what I must for my men, for my crew.”
The coldness lingered in her eyes as she looked at him, a sharp, fearsome indifference that lurked just behind her smile. “I have no plans to leave here during your lifetime.”
They stared at one another, the silence of the cavern surrounding them.
Slowly her fingers went to her buttons, undoing the light gown. Maril let himself see her nakedness as it unfurled, nothing hidden from him now as she drew one slender leg up and draped it across his lap, leaning back. She was almost certainly a Perennial of her kind, more dangerous than a vacuum legion of elite Lacaille, and still he wanted her like he’d wanted nobody else in his life.
“Let me go and discuss things with the men,” he said thickly, feeling his whole head flush to the tips of his ears. She smirked as he squirmed out from beneath her, gesturing to the lantern.
Maril hefted it, peering back once more before stumbling off through the cavern. Behind him he could hear her singing something eerily beautiful, only realising as darkness swallowed her that it was a verse from the songs of Lopos, subtly changed, a version many hundreds of years old.
At the cut, he deposited the lantern, taking one last look at the floating spark inside, and climbed the small notches to the lip. Late-evening sunlight struck him, warm and gold. Zeliolopos raged silently above.
Maril crouched on the scree of the slope, breathing deeply. The nausea returned, and he realised that lust had driven all thought of food from his mind. He stood shakily, looking at the canteen on its leather strap and pulling the cap off. He studied the rim, then upended it and tipped all the water away, wiping the spout ca
refully with the tail of his shirt.
That was it, then. Their fate was sealed. He put a knuckle to his dry mouth, his body shivering with the expended adrenaline, and stumbled up the slope, hoping perhaps to get a better view of the island before the sun went down.
Maril rounded the edge of the slope where he’d first noticed the cave, carefully negotiating the treacherous rock as it crumbled away beneath him and whitening his fingers and knees all over again. More of the island came into view below, a vast slope of the dead, bleached-white tree trunks like the stubble on a huge and grotesque face, crowned with a brilliant white beach that swirled off westwards where the equatorial winds shaped it—the place the Amaranthine said she’d found the skeleton. The waves beat calmly at the sand, apple-green and likely still hot from the day. His gaze followed the shoreline, looking past it to the sea.
A long, orange tanker studded with a clutch of spiked towers lay offshore, eighty feet from the beach, partially hidden by the outcrop of the bay and surrounded by the tall white stacks of a crumbled cliff. Maril almost slipped and fell, grabbing a chunk of rock and steadying himself just in time. He squinted, his eyes not what they used to be, and searched the rusted patterns on the vessel’s hull. Zelioceti. He ducked a little behind the rock. It was a sea ship, not fitted for the Void, antique and rusted to within an inch of its life. Smoke issued from funnels and chimneys on its towers, venting from crew compartments deep within the hull. Its dented, sickle-shaped prow, muzzled with a great coil of chains, wasn’t all that dissimilar from the protruding nose of a real Zelioceti. Docked on the vessel’s humped deck was a bladed grey missile shape that might have been superluminal.
Maril’s gaze moved down to the curl of beach. A party of tiny specks were creeping through the shallows, almost invisible if it hadn’t been for their shadows, cast long in the last of the light.
MERSIN
