The Promise of the Child

by Tom Toner

  He waited, holding up a gnarled finger. Crude microphones on his breastplate tasted the silence, hearing the distant explorations of his five other teams as they swarmed through the fortress, the grumble of detonations and the groaning of the structure all around them adding to the distant moan of the wind through the chasm at their backs. No conversation between his units was permitted, and so at last he heard them, whispering in their little high-pitched voices. Tzolz allowed himself ten more seconds, finger still raised, understanding Vulgar more than adequately. He pointed slowly at the leftmost opening of the many-branched corridor ahead of them and his three mercenaries converged on it, their thin shadows looming like skeletons across the wall. At the edge of the doorway he turned off his lights and listened to the darkness, the voices—inaudible to a normal Prism ear—louder in his helmet now. He knew exactly where they were.

  He unclipped a bomblet from a canister on the belt of his suit, pulling the firing pin and counting, then stooped and rolled it swiftly down the spiral ramp. A few seconds later, one of the voices hesitated, obviously turning as its volume fluctuated, and Tzolz muffled his auditory channel. The blast shook the spiral passageway, shrapnel spinning and clattering from the entrance. Tzolz flicked on his lights and dashed through the curling smoke, leaping the last of the passage and landing among the disoriented Vulgar platoon, the small figures illuminated harshly in his strobing gaze. He rammed his rifle’s bayonet into the closest Vulgar, spinning and knocking an armoured elbow into another’s head. Their screams filled his muffled earpiece, the little creatures realising at last what he was, and he snarled inside his helmet, pulling the bayonet free and scything it through another. They were poorly equipped and shoddily dressed despite being caught at home, and Tzolz began to wonder if he might be able to reach his quarry long before the fleet caught up to his small force. He aimed quickly and put a bullet through one more, his troops crouching at the foot of the ramp and firing into the flickering blackness. When the screams had stopped, he leaned against the wall, breathing quickly, his lights taking in the heaped bodies at their feet. His squad began searching the defenders’ elaborate but ill-armoured clothes, long, dark fingers investigating pockets and flaps, taking what valuables and compatible ammunition they could find.

  Tzolz bent to examine one of the Vulgar, his lights blazing across the pale elfin face. It coughed, retching once, and then tried to turn its head away from the light. He caught its chin with one hand, squeezing its jowls together, and turned it back to him, sliding up his reinforced faceplate. The small Vulgar’s eyes widened as they focused on him, pupils shrunk to pinpoints in the glare. Tzolz looked into the creature’s eyes as its broken body attempted to struggle, then back to his team, who were ready to continue. He slid the palm of his three-fingered hand over its face, forced his thumb into one of its eyes and pushed, watching the white flesh depress until it gouted blood. With a wet crack, the Vulgar’s skull crumpled in his hand and its movements ceased.

  Venturing further into the fortress, the tunnels below became more lived-in, with tapestries cloaking the walls and dividing living spaces, the homely smells of sour ale and poorly maintained plumbing adding to the sense of warmth in the dim light. Tzolz removed his helmet, tossing it onto a loaded dining table in some servants’ quarters, and loosened his chest-plating. Like many of his team, his genitals were partially exposed, and the removal of his armour only served to make him look more gangly and naked. Such things mattered not to his breed, one of the wilder, more basic Prism races that dared to delve into the Firmament, and the added bulk would only slow him down from here on in. A small timepiece set into his shoulder-plating told him they had less than an hour before battleships stationed in the inland sea would be within range of the fortress and his means of escape. He looked around the large dining hall once more as he pulled on his gauntlets, taking in the dimly glowing logs in the hearth, some scattered to smoke on the tiles by the force of his arrival, and the shelves stacked with bottles and jars, small squealing animals in cages and stinking yeasty cheeses. The Oxel scouts were already raiding the larders, gorging themselves on the hanging lengths of dried, salted meats, but his squad stood around the room still as statues, their thin faces watching him intently in the firelight. There was only one thing his mercenaries really liked to eat, and they would soon have it.

  *

  At the shaft, Tzolz stopped, the blackness complete around them. They had travelled in darkness from the abandoned servants’ quarters down and down until his ears popped. Only the sound of running water had told him they were finally upon it, the great spine of the citadel. He switched his suit lights back on as his feet met soft mounds on the floor, and he looked down to see that they were walking once again on casualties, pieces of all the Vulgar that had fallen from the higher levels during the attack. Most had tumbled straight down the shaft, but some had hit the sides and bounced, ending up lodged like detritus in the corkscrew corridors that made up the shaft’s sides. Two levels below them, the drilling team were waiting in silence, their hungry, reflective eyes visible in the suit’s weak light. Further below them, the bricks and stones turned to solid rock, cold granite slabs that glittered with running water. At his signal they began their work, dragging heavy drills to the sides of the shaft and pulling chains to start them.

  The noise of grinding filtered up along with the drifting cloud of pulverised stone, turning the air around Tzolz’s group into a milky soup wherever he shone his suit lights. The team stood, waiting, their faces haggard and obscene in the mist like sunken corpses in a moonlit pool, the portable generators within each soldier’s armour issuing their own small whisps of coiling smoke. Running among their feet the Oxel played, one tripping and falling into the chasm before its fellows could stop it. Tzolz watched the body tumble, screaming, until it was lost in the darkness.

  The drilling team shut down their machines, the mist swirling in the updraught from the shaft and dissipating. Tzolz’s crew bent to look, some grabbing their spring rifles and training them on the hole that had suddenly been revealed in the chasm wall, a weak light pouring from it. Tzolz waited, sighting his own weapon on the caved-in portion of wall below. The edges of the hole crumbled further until a portion of the wall suddenly sloughed away completely, dropping into the shaft in a cloud of dust and stone and unveiling a cross section of tunnels and levels swarming with shrieking Vulgar soldiers. They squealed to each other and fired into the drilling team, Tzolz’s men dropping as many as they could before bolts and sparkers started raining into the level on which they were crouched. The Vulgar squad was mostly composed of trained Loyalists, but the motley armour indicated hired help as well, with not a few Zelioceti and even Wulm mercenaries among their number. Tzolz lifted his rifle to cover his head and made his way down the open passage in the side of the shaft, shots chipping the stone around him. They were surely too far away for any great accuracy, but still he made a last dash for the safety of a stalled drill lying canted on its side. Fizzing sparkers whined and bounced from its casing as he dropped behind it, brushing at a smoking dent in his shoulder-plating. Glancing up at his squad, he could see that two were dead, the third taking a bolt through the eye as he watched. The remains of the drilling team had pushed into the hole and were climbing the ladders in what appeared to be sleeping quarters. Tzolz followed their progress along the flimsy-looking wooden bunks and up into the next chamber, some leaning from the level they were on to shoot up into the mass of screaming Prism scampering this way and that along their bunks. He checked his clock, knowing before he did so that there was no more time for fighting. He clawed at the drill, bringing it up to his chest with a wheeze, and held it there like a shield as he made his way to the hole.

  A Wulm dropped into his path just as he reached the ladders, shoved from its level by the panicked Vulgar loyalists. It shook itself and stood, squealing as Tzolz threw the drill aside and slammed his rifle into its small head. The long-eared Prism’s face crumpled in a froth of blood and
it rolled, tumbling into the chasm. He looked up at the drillers clambering above, some taking bolts and falling, then back along the open tunnel he was in. There were bodies piled against the rustic wooden door at the far end, its edge burned away by some sort of incendiary explosion. He kicked it open in a storm of splinters, bringing the rifle up and felling a Vulgar as it ran for the next chamber, then made his way to an apparently undefended lower passage. As he jogged, Tzolz realised he was limping and glanced down to see that the meat of one calf had been mostly torn away by a clawed bullet. He ground his teeth and ran on.

  Corphuso watched the Amaranthine as she touched the machine’s edges, running a finger almost tenderly along the coils that made up its outer lobes. She hesitated, her ancient mind lost for a minute in some distant reverie, and tapped the structure with her finger, as if trying to gauge the exact blend of the fine amalgam of alloys from which it was made. The tap of her finger produced no sound, the architect noticed, and was pleased.

  The flotilla would be underway, he knew, sailing up the fjord and into the canals that led to the fortress’s surf lands. From what they could hear, deep in the base of the under-chasm, the attack had lost momentum, perhaps—Corphuso dared to hope—already totally intercepted at the serving levels. The mighty citadel of Nilmuth hadn’t been breached in five hundred and seventy years, despite centuries of sporadic civil war across Drolgins. Now a free Vulgar mercenary army from Untmouth protected the fortress at all times, stationed in the vastness of its broad foundations, and a fleet of destroyers—a gift from their secretive allies the Zelioceti—kept watch over the port. Only brute force had gained the Lacaille access today, but they hadn’t enough time to reach the treasure they were digging for. Corphuso smiled nervously as he watched the Immortal examining the Shell, wondering again just what he had made, and how it would change things forever.

  “Are you pleased with it, Amaranthine?” he asked, observing how little she appeared to notice the distant rumbles of conflict in the levels above them.

  Voss looked up at him, her hand remaining on the structure it had taken him twenty-four years to build. She was dressed in the exquisite finery the Immortals always wore whenever he saw them, priceless jewels dripping from every cuff and piccadill. “I think it is a marvel, Corphuso. A blessing, but also a curse.”

  He looked at the glimmering machine. “I expect, as ever, the blessing shall be yours, the curse ours.”

  She smiled, the expression so rare on her pretty face that he couldn’t help but instantly smile back. “You shall be a Prince of the Firmament now, Corphuso—you can leave the cursed behind at last.”

  The architect sat down, glancing briefly at the Vulgar soldiers standing to either side of the doors. They were wizened, ill-looking things, their skin shiny and liver-spotted in the glow of the fire. If they had heard what she said, they made no sign. It was true—he wanted to leave the Investiture, but he had never told a soul. The Prism worlds were places of pestilence and fear, where the short-lived suffered and scavenged and fought. His successes had left him far wealthier than most, his large family married into the courts of Moonkings and Princelings across the Prism Investiture, but he was now bound to the counts of Nilmuth as they fought over his invention themselves, and all but a prisoner in the fortress. His dearest and yet most secret wish had always been to leave all this filth and terror behind with enough money and influence to be granted a place among the Immortals in their Firmament, and perhaps—were there any hope of such a thing—to become an Amaranthine himself.

  “I am bound by duty to my kingdom, and by its loyalty to the Firmament, Amaranthine,” he said carefully, glancing again at the soldiers. “It is not for me to decide my fate, nor would I wish to.”

  The Amaranthine looked into his eyes, the smile lingering at the edges of her mouth. He wondered how many liars she had known over her long, long life, and how many she had seen shamed.

  “Quite so, Corphuso,” she replied at last.

  He took up a heavy book awkwardly, leafing through the dense Vulgar print to the engraved pictures, noticing from the corner of his eye how she still looked at him. He was waist-high to the Amaranthine, nothing but a dwarf in her eyes, but some deep Vulgar sense of pride always allowed him to forget his small stature. Gradually he became aware that the sounds in the fortress had changed, almost disappeared, while at the same time deep, resonating grumbles were seeping through the thick walls from the lands outside. The soldiers looked at each other, then at the architect.

  “It’s the flotilla, Architect,” one said excitedly. “It must be!”

  He stood, putting down the book to listen. The Amaranthine had returned her gaze to his machine, apparently uninterested in their good fortune. Detonations, distant and yet obviously enormous, popped and thudded high above the fortress. The Lacaille invasion force was fighting back, apparently. They must want what he had very badly to risk returning fire on an armada of sixty-one Lumen-Class Zelioceti destroyers. For what felt like the millionth time, Corphuso deeply regretted forging the thing the Amaranthine was stroking, wishing he could take it all back. Supposedly a machine of life, it had become an inevitable tool of death.

  Some other noise returned his attention and that of the soldiers to the thick doors of the under-chasm library where they were sheltering. Someone or something had run the last of the steps and was now outside the door. The Amaranthine looked up suddenly, taking her hand at last from the Shell.

  A weighty oaken slat cracked and sizzled as the door was fired upon from outside, two more shots blowing the double doors in. The two soldiers fell under the flying debris as someone opened fire into the chamber, rolling in the mist to find cover. Corphuso crouched and knocked the table, scattering the stack of books he’d been absently looking through during the siege, pieces of the chair he had been sitting upon a moment earlier raining down around him.

  Looking across the floor from under the table, he caught a glimpse of his attacker ducking behind a column. He felt hot sweat prickle down his neck and chest, staying very still. So, the Lacaille were now employing the very breed they feared the most. He hoped they suffered for it in the end. He saw the bony, elongated Prism male, genitals exposed, hideous face partially hidden in shadow, slide the bolt on its rifle and peer around the column.

  As it did so, the air turned to fire.

  Corphuso rolled and covered his face, waistcoat and cloak shrouding him like blankets as the library was engulfed. For what felt like a small lifetime roaring heat pelted the table, flowing around his small hiding place and sucking away all the air, then suddenly it was over as quickly as it had started, the fire dissolving into sooty smoke.

  He peered out from under his smouldering clothes to where the Amaranthine stood, the charred flagstones describing a perfect semicircle of blackness around her feet. Corphuso glanced back to the column, the shelf of books behind it still aflame, but could see no sign of their attacker.

  Voss, the Immortal, patted the unharmed machine at her side, the spiral of hollows in its shell gleaming iridescently in the smoke-thick air like polished opal. “I suspect it’s time to take your treasure elsewhere, Corphuso.” She smiled again. “Come. You need no longer worry about appearances—the Firmament expects us.”

  PART I

  Cove

  Lycaste watched as the fish darted about his ankles, standing as still as he could. Garishly painted and about the length of his smallest finger, he had seen this kind many times but couldn’t remember their names. He crouched slowly for a better look, reflections darkening the water. One of the fish had something, a worm or parasite like a long white thread, dangling from its eye. Where the thing was attached, a milky cataract had formed.

  He reached in, startling them away, and took a cupped handful of water to splash on his neck and forehead. He liked the salt on his face, the sting of it on his cheeks when he looked at the sun. Today, of all days, he needed time, silence. Silence to think, perhaps, silence to hide away. But that wouldn’t
be possible. Lycaste shook his head and started back, gazing at the outcrops of the bay beyond and feeling the water dry on his hot, rust-coloured skin.

  Even in the sheltered bay he wouldn’t swim, his overactive imagination seeing shadows move, staining the perfect turquoise around the far-off crags. His friends swam nearly every day, but they’d long since stopped asking him to join them. Huge migratory sharks had been spotted out there, coasting silently between the baking rocks. Fat, pearl-coloured monsters five times the length of him; what they ate or where they came from he couldn’t say.

  It was later than it seemed, time to go in. He wandered up the stony beach, his feet skipping on hot pebbles as he looked for patches of cooler sand to walk on. Lycaste’s estate included the small cove, his orchards taking a weak hold at the edge of the beach, a thin strip of mottled eggshell between rich swathes of sultry green. Further down towards the next bay the water became a light, chalky blue as it washed against the suddenly white pebbles of a separate beach. He preferred his land, his colours.