by Tom Toner
Without waiting for them to reach him, he ran for the house, hot stones skittering from under his feet and stubbing his toes, skinning his ankles. He felt her hand on his, the warm salt tears between their fingers, remembered how she’d said they were alone out here, totally alone.
Lycaste staggered into the closest tower, sweeping cutlery from the long table with both of his arms and the last of his breath. He stood panting for a second in the shaded quiet of the afternoon, the haunting chant of the flowers making him tremble, his manic heart adding a moist, fearful beat to the chorus. A final bowl finished its clattering roll on the floor as he spun hopelessly, nothing in his wasted twenty-five-year education having prepared him for such things.
As he left the bedroom, where Drimys lay tucked safely and securely in a thick wad of blankets, Lycaste noticed with exhausted resignation the faint but hysterical red footprints scattered across the floors. His dull mind tried to sort them by size, to see which belonged to whom. Behind some lay trails of tiny droplets. Blood was a rare sight, their bodies hardly produced it; today he had seen more than he could bear, and he knelt with a clean cloth to wipe it up, meaning to follow the trail back. It came away easily, still wet. As he bent, another bright spot dripped from his broken nose and he realised. Drimys’s wounds had clotted and sealed back on the boat. This thinner stuff was all his own.
Postcards
Sotiris looks around him. He is on the steps that thread down from Penelope Street to the harbour-side. Dates lie scattered on the stone, fallen from the palms that grow along the wall, and pink flowers brush his face. His feet are hot so he trots quickly to the Plateia, where he knows a little café that overlooks the water. He passes a restaurant where a couple are eating calamari, the girl laying her fork down to check something, perhaps a phone. He glances again to see what the device looks like, but when he turns back it is gone, along with the couple. He rounds a corner while he thinks about this, walking under closed, peeling blue shutters and into a bar of shade. The burble of a few dozen people in the café interrupts the cry of swallows overhead, Sotiris noticing as he walks that Iro and her visitor are in the postcard shop across the street.
He watches the man who is with his sister as he approaches. Aaron, that is his name. His surname is something English and uncomplicated, eminently forgettable.
“Here he is,” she says to her guest, smiling at Sotiris with just a hint of apprehension. He looks into her eyes as he takes her hand and then turns his gaze on the man. Aaron has selected a few postcards from the rack, so extends his other hand. Something about his expression tells Sotiris that the man doesn’t want to be touched and nods a greeting instead, smiling as best he can. Perhaps he’s a germ freak—all too common after a century of international pandemics and biotic-resistant illnesses. His face is benignly kind and slightly chubby, pale as if he’s wearing rather too much sunscreen. He looks like every Englishman Sotiris has ever seen.
“I believe we’ve met before,” says Sotiris in his best English, “back in London?”
“We have,” Aaron replies in a soft voice, “just for a moment. You were leaving the house.”
Sotiris glances again at the postcards in the man’s hand, noticing the photographs on their glossy faces. “Yes, I remember now.” He remembers nothing but a blurred face at the gate, a brief hello, his sister’s eyes wet with tears that night when he returned.
They walk across the street to the café for a late lunch, the blue harbour water slopping against painted plastic buoys and rusted chains. Her guest is tall, but not too tall, and dressed in a pale cotton shirt just a size too large, dark trousers and polished brown brogues that must be sweltering in the heat. It is as if almost everything about him is contrived to look ordinary, unremarkable.
Aaron settles in the chair across from him and glances at the menu, leafing through it quickly.
“How was Venice?” Sotiris asks to break the silence, seeing the man come to the end of the menu and close it.
“Venice?” Aaron thinks for a moment. “More beautiful than I remembered.”
They settle on olives, bread and tzatziki to begin with, followed by plates of souvlaki, grilled sardines and pastitsio to share.
He watches Aaron eat, fascinated. The man uses his cutlery carefully at first, as if he’s only seen it done by others and wishes to copy the action as faithfully as he can. Wrapped in a paper bag by his plate are the three postcards from the shop, all of them displaying the same view of the island. Sotiris watches Aaron’s eyes as they flick to Iro while she talks, realising with unease that he cannot quite work out what colour they are.
Iro is asking him about the overnight ferry, and Aaron lays down his knife and fork to explain, pushing the plate away. The food on it is merely rearranged, hardly eaten. It reminds Sotiris of something he might do, in another life far away from here. The thought makes him pause, wondering why he would think such a thing.
“And Sotiris,” asks Aaron, turning his queerly colourless gaze on him, “I hear you’re an up-and-coming politician? Iro says you are running for Custodien of Athens.”
“It’s between me and one other,” he says, trying to remember the name of the other candidate.
“Come now.” Aaron leans back, indistinct eyes flashing. “I don’t expect you’ll have a problem beating Callinicos.”
He stares, surprised. “You’ve been following the race in England?”
“Oh yes, there’s very little interesting politics left over there. It’s all too stable, too …” He smiles widely. “Too predictable.”
Sotiris notices that, besides the lines around his eyes, Aaron doesn’t have a single blemish. The man is surely fifty—he must spend no time in the sun or have access to the best treatments money can buy. Far too old for Iro, he decides again.
“Well, let’s hope you’re right. It would be a disaster for the country if that old conservative won.”
Aaron puts down the glass, playing with the straw in his fingers. His hands are long and slim, as white as his face. “Greece will choose the right man.”
His sister appears to take that as a cue to excuse herself and grabs her handbag. He wonders if she’s going to put on make-up. They stand and watch her leave.
“I can see I am going to enjoy talking to you, Sotiris,” Aaron says, sitting back down.
He nods absently, tracing a circle of spilled salt with his finger on the table. “Just what are your intentions regarding my sister, Aaron?” He looks up at him. “I won’t see her hurt again.”
Aaron laughs long and hard, juddering the plates and cutlery on the table. Sotiris waits for him to finish, insulted. Finally the man composes himself and stares at him. “I’m afraid she’s not the one I’m interested in, Sotiris.”
Once again the wind moans, a hollow sound that keens through the harbour, harried from a far-away place across deep, cold seas. With a jolt of fresh new pain the memory forms. He looks to the table, but there are only two chairs, two plates. She was never there.
Ghaldezuel
Corphuso’s eyes followed the greenish haze of Port Obviado’s horizon all the way to where the Light Line ended, the view distorted through the thick plastic of the porthole and his own stretchy suit helmet, clouded and milky from use. Made from a reinforced rubber, it was an almost perfect fit but smelled sour inside, like someone had vomited in it not all that long ago. He tried to breathe through his mouth and focus on the view, the hard acceleration of the Lacaille capsule sinking his stomach to his knees. The blackness above the horizon was empty, starless in contrast to the crisp brightness of the moon’s edge, and a hard point of light high above was undoubtedly the Lacaille Colossus battleship they were heading for. He tilted his head in the helmet to look down, back into the darkness he had come from, remembering the Vulgar people who had died that day, and the Amaranthine.
The Threen had taken him through the foothills for another hour, speaking freely in the darkness. From what he had gathered, still tied and blind, they were
delivering him—and his precious cargo—to someone named Ghaldezuel.
Ghaldezuel. Corphuso recognised the poetry of a Lacaille name when he heard one. The Threen had betrayed the Amaranthine and her Vulgar charges, as Voss had no doubt feared they would. He was sorry she had died, after all they had been through together. Though he knew the Amaranthine had never warmed to him or any of the Vulgar she had been sent to protect, Corphuso hoped it had been quick.
Ghaldezuel himself had met them at the walls of a submerged keep, materialising from the darkness in the wan light of a candle lantern. His brilliant white vacuum suit, pure as snow on a mountain top, had reflected the lantern light around the cowering Threen as he introduced himself in Vulgar. Helmet hinged back, he did indeed look very similar to Corphuso: pale porcelain skin, pointed ears with rounded lobes dangling almost to his chin. His skull was a little longer than would have been considered attractive in a Vulgar person and his eyes perhaps a little smaller, but it was clear that the two Prism races had come from a similar mould. Corphuso had seen no point in behaving poorly to the Lacaille and had shaken his hand in the Amaranthine manner, glad just to be heading away from the darkness of Port Obviado at last. Whatever they had planned for him and his Shell, it would surely be more pleasant than any future he might expect should he resist. He thought of his family, dowried off here and there across the Investiture, and decided they would not miss him for the time being.
Now, as they ascended to join the safety of the enemy fleet that hung in the moon’s mesosphere, he glanced over at the Lacaille sitting quietly beside him in the capsule. His suit was not entirely of one material, Corphuso noted, watching reflections of the moon’s bright side slip across its polished faceplate, but lined with gnarled seams of silver and beads of gold that framed the small eyeholes. The gold was lustrous enough to be pure Old World metal, and Corphuso wondered with a small smile whether he might be sitting next to an Op-Zlan-Lacaille: one of the Lacaille Knights of the Stars.
Ghaldezuel sensed Corphuso watching him and looked over. Their eyes met through the haze of smoke drifting weightlessly from their suit generators.
“The Soul Engine is larger than I thought it would be,” the Lacaille said, companionably enough, in his accented voice.
Corphuso glanced back to the Shell in its case. It filled the entire storage space of the capsule behind them, massive and looming like a block of granite. Some part of him was at least gratified to hear the Lacaille employing the machine’s official title. Orange canvas straps hooked to the capsule’s metal walls kept it stowed in place, while a single thick, padlocked leash secured the Shell’s harness to the hardened breastplate of Corphuso’s Voidsuit. The arrangement, though certainly dangerous, comforted Corphuso slightly.
“May I ask something, Ghaldezuel?” Corphuso asked, his squeaky voice amplified comically in the small space.
“Ask away,” the Lacaille replied.
“Why kill the Amaranthine? She was not Perennial, she had few of the powers their elders have.” He shrugged with difficulty inside his thick, rubbery suit. “Why waste a fine ransom?”
Ghaldezuel stared silently at him for a moment, his blue eyes moving to the Shell secured in its canvas straps. “One less Amaranthine in the Investiture, no bad thing. You would have preferred that she lived?”
Corphuso looked out of the porthole, then back at the Lacaille. “You risked more than you needed to. The Immortals do not forget.”
Ghaldezuel chuckled, a sound like porridge being poured from a bowl. “They forget their own names, given time.”
Corphuso turned again to the window as he thought of a retort, the small capsule juddering as it hit a pocket of turbulence in the high atmosphere. He watched as they passed through a bank of dark cloud, wondering at how high it lay. The Voidcraft they sailed in was almost at the emptiness—there should be no clouds up where they were.
A glittering red object suddenly passed beneath them through the black cloud and into darkness, soon followed by a few more, the light winking from them just long enough to leave an afterglow in Corphuso’s vision.
“What was that?” He turned to Ghaldezuel, seeing as he did so that the Lacaille was busily unbuckling his harness. Without a word he reached over and disengaged Corphuso’s. The Vulgar stared down at his belt floating free, feeling himself rising from his seat in the weak gravity. As he clutched the armrests, Ghaldezuel waved his hands away from them irritably.
“Zelioceti,” the Lacaille said, reaching under his seat and producing an antique lumen pistol, also white, and slotting it into a holster at his hip. Ghaldezuel stood, forced to crouch in the tiny capsule, and pushed himself off towards the cockpit, a separate detachable module arranged above them like a periscope. Corphuso watched Ghaldezuel rap his knuckles on the back of the pilot’s seat and mutter something to him in Lacaille.
Looking back out of the window, he saw that they had passed through the cloud—a fog, he suspected now, not cloud at all—and were much closer to the battleship, perhaps three miles or so from one of the gaping hangars they would dock at. Corphuso couldn’t help but be impressed; its functional asymmetry bristled with rusted white turrets and towers, a small city held high in orbit. Belches of dark smoke poured from beneath its exhausts into the green atmosphere like ink dropped into water, curling down inside their own massive weather systems. Flocks of tiny black shapes curved and raced about it, the standing squadrons of Lacaille Voidjets, some breaking off and pursuing even tinier vehicles that caught the sun in brilliant flashes. The capsule passed through another pool of darkness, Corphuso now understanding it was the smoke from a ruined vessel, and into sunlight again.
He stood, thinking of trying to unbuckle himself from the great metal case, when a roar of rushing air pinned him back into the seat. The capsule banked, the view curving, loose equipment rising and bouncing off the ceiling and into his suit. Ghaldezuel, swimming back down towards the end of the capsule, grabbed Corphuso by the arms and hoisted him up, the leash attaching him to the Shell’s chest pulling taut. The Lacaille clipped himself to the Vulgar’s cuirass, their helmets butting and cracking together in the rattling capsule’s ascent. Corphuso glanced once more out of the porthole to see something strafe the capsule just as the window blew out and the riveted walls peeled away, air rushing around him in a roaring flurry.
He and the case were thrown up and out, spinning with a rush of twinkling pieces of the capsule, Ghaldezuel disappearing somewhere behind or below on the stretched leash. The view spun, tipping from the darkness of the moon to the green horizon and back to blackness again. Jagged shrapnel whirled like a blizzard between him and the tumbling remains of the capsule, which suddenly broke apart and scattered in a blinding flash.
He was falling now, thrown back towards the moon’s topmost clouds, his breathing loud and hectic in the claustrophobic suit helmet. Somewhere the Lacaille knight was shouting into his helmet, but the voice was too quiet and riddled with static to hear. The battleship became briefly visible and then disappeared again in the spin as Corphuso tried desperately to think of what he could do. He threw up into his faceplate, misting the thick plastic, his tumbling descent slopping most of it back into his face until he vomited again, squeezing his eyes shut against the acid stench.
When he opened them again, he could see Ghaldezuel falling parallel and struggling with the line that was still clipped to the hook on Corphuso’s cuirass. The Lacaille was trying to stabilise their fall with rocket attachments on his suit, which flared repeatedly, bouncing Ghaldezuel’s small body up and away from the line, straining until the weight of Corphuso and the Shell yanked him down again.
A seven-winged, lividly red Zelioceti aircraft screamed past like a meteor, climbing and turning to pursue them as they fell. Ghaldezuel controlled his struggling rockets just long enough to aim and fire at the vehicle, missing as the leash wrapped around him once more and pulled him down towards Corphuso. Together they fell, swinging madly in a circle like spokes in a wheel. Th
e aircraft skimmed past again in a red flash, this time close enough for Corphuso to see a blurred impression of one of the pilots clambering onto the outside of the vehicle, then the jet banked and hove towards them, the sound of the wind whipping around the suit’s external speakers, obscuring its roar until it came close. As he spun, Corphuso caught a glimpse of the Zelioceti climbing along the wing, a thick harness and crampons keeping it attached and upright, the rushing wind billowing its fur cape. The lumpen armour it wore underneath was a bright red like the aircraft, spattered here and there with silver insignia. It wore no helmet, just goggles and a pointed, fur-lined cowl, and Corphuso spotted the long proboscis snout bobbing as it traversed the fuselage.
Ghaldezuel flared his rockets as he took aim again, the aircraft unexpectedly tipping a wing in their direction and scooping him out of the way. The line snapped, wrapping around the wing, and both Corphuso and the chest spiralled into the hot, thrumming side of the plane, lodging between two of the pectoral wings with a bang. The line attaching him to the Shell caught fast on a panel of raised rivets, fortunately bearing a weight that would have easily ripped Corphuso in half. The Zelioceti glanced down at him, unsteadied by the jet’s sudden movement and throwing its arms out like a tightrope walker. The feral, unpleasant race were the Threen’s allies on this world, but for some reason they, too, had been betrayed by the nocturnal beasts. There was nothing Corphuso could do but watch as the Prism uncoupled another set of leashes, advancing towards him through the rushing wind. He could hear its wheedling, slippery speech filtering into his local sound-feed, piped into the helmet through a transmitter inside the jet. The architect’s rusty grasp of Zeliospeak was enough to understand that the thing was communicating not with him but with the jet pilot, explaining how he was going to snare the huge chest now dangling from the plane’s wing. Corphuso realised as he listened that he was ancillary to the Zelioceti’s plan and was going to be cut free once the creature was done. He swung his head, looking for Ghaldezuel, appalled that he should be in such a position and wishing desperately that his enemy would come to vanquish his supposed ally.
