The Promise of the Child

by Tom Toner

  Ovid, that was the poet. Lycaste remembered another line but didn’t speak it aloud, thinking it more significant than anything to do with crowns or victory.

  How little is the promise of the child fulfilled in the man.

  PART III

  Yanenko’s Land

  “He couldn’t simply be detained?”

  “Detained? Imprisoned might be a better choice of word, Amaranthine.”

  The Melius Tussilago shifted the oar from one huge spindly hand to the other, dropping it back into the sluggish water. Droplets arced and spattered the long boat like slow-motion footage, easily intercepted and deflected. The water and sky were mingling grey-pink bands, the lower liquid moving only slightly faster than its vapour twin as they drifted to the castle on the shore.

  Sotiris felt a kind of shame as he looked at the battlements rising in the grey like a damp watercolour stain. He had not been here in decades, and in truth hadn’t considered returning for many more. It was only now Iro was gone that he thought of travelling to her, and the shame returned tenfold.

  Yanenko’s Land was not a place any fashionable Amaranthine spent time on any more. It had become a backward, overgrown landscape of forgotten things, everything half-off the ground in the weak gravity. The only people who ever came here now were travellers destined for the Old World, as he was.

  It began to rain softly and Sotiris raised his face to the slow drops, searching for the crescent through the grey. The enormous man tutted and glanced up, too.

  “Can you see the Old World, usually, when it’s like this?” he asked the Melius.

  Tussilago looked west, his shrewd eyes—big as tea-saucers—narrowing. “The hint of it, low at this time of day, usually. There.” He pointed. Sotiris peered through the rain, but the mist looked all the same to him.

  “Better vision than mine.”

  The giant turned back to his oar. “Paranthropus Melius does mean better man, after all, Amaranthine.”

  Sotiris searched the cloud, thinking at last that he could see the hint of a curve, a sickle of light. The Earth, his old home.

  He returned to the subject. “So he has never been gone this long?”

  “Never. I’ve been a servant since I was sixteen, over two hundred years. Sire Yanenko’s never missed a solstice in all that time.”

  Sotiris had been watching the castle through the man’s long legs. He looked up at Tussilago. “You think the same fate awaits me up there, on the Old World.”

  The Melius shrugged his wide shoulders. The servants here were kept on long leashes; their manners, unlike their perfectly accented Unified, subject to change. Sotiris found it refreshing.

  “What Province did your family come from, Tussilago? I have never asked.”

  “The Eighteenth. Sire Yanenko took me there on one of his visits once, but I had no taste for the place.”

  “You prefer it here, where you were born?”

  “Of course. Families are overrated, I think.” As he spoke, his oar tarried a little in the slow water. “I was sorry to hear of your loss, however, Amaranthine.”

  “Thank you.” Sotiris studied the giant. His baleful face, the face of millions of men for thousands of years, was not at all human, at least not as he understood the term. Tussilago’s enormous topaz eyes, sunk into wide cheekbones, were almost a foot apart. Dividing the man’s face, a long, graceful nose four times the size of Sotiris’s own stretched down to a heavy, pointed jaw. It was a face he would have found horrifying were he not so used to dealing every day with his Melius servants on Cancri or their Firmamental counterparts abroad. Sotiris was quite sure what the Melius saw was equally out of place, a weakling child born without facial features or musculature, an infant claiming to be a God. A God who had little more mastery of his own fate than Tussilago did. The Melius were pets, in a sense, no different from the baser animals that had accompanied humankind through prehistory. In this case, however, the pets were his successors, left to colonise what had once been his home like bacteria in the bottom of a poorly washed glass.

  He looked into the water, black as peat beneath the churning oar. It might be fashionable in the Firmament to treat these creatures with derision—even to their faces—but Sotiris was abruptly aware out here that they were both just flesh and blood, the long timber boat all that protected them from the gloopy sea and whatever horrors it might hold. He watched the castle draw nearer, its shore fringed with thick, dark oak trees that bent heavily over the waters, knowing he might die at any time, a fall or accident increasing in likelihood with every year he lived. It was called playing the trip game by some Amaranthine—the increasing propensity for accidents the longer one lived—the game claiming an ancient life every now and then. It was the way most of them expected to go out, an ignominious crumple to the ground over some forgotten step or stone or wonky chair. Sotiris, who had broken bones recently enough, didn’t care to think about it even now, as his sister lay in state somewhere on that crescent above, her eternally youthful body unable to decompose.

  Tussilago nodded grimly and glanced at the castle, very close now. His long oar crunched into silt as they reached the shallows, the raindrops pattering harder on the oak boards. “End of the road.”

  The bulk of the fortress appeared to grow out of the rocks on the shore, dripping brown stalactites of oxide running down its battlements. A path in the grey sand led away from the boat canted on the beach and under an arch into darkness. Sotiris climbed down, accepting his servant’s hand and thanking him. Tussilago nodded, easily lifting his master down and taking a large lunch from a hamper at the stern. “I’ll see you when you’re back, then. Good luck, Amaranthine. And if you were thinking of visiting the Eighteenth, don’t bother. Fuckin’ awful place.”

  Sotiris laughed for the first time in many days. “All right. See you.”

  He strode under the arch, slow rain collecting on the stalactites and dripping down his neck. He wished he were clothed in thicker things. Sotiris looked up to the grim, rain-slick buttresses, still unsure whether he might have been followed from Gliese.

  The muffled din of animals usually disturbed his thoughts at this point, but today there was nothing but the rustling of rain. Yanenko had taken his pets, too, apparently, or grown tired of them and thrown them to his servants to feast on. Sotiris came to the huge Melius-built door, barnacled with green scabs of copper, and knocked politely on its flaking crust before letting himself in.

  The blackness inside startled him, his hands going for the wall at once, expecting to hear Maneker’s familiar nasal whispering in his ear, discovered at last. They touched cool granite, fingernails scraping along until they found a cage and opened the lock. He spoke the words, the incantation that woke the light, and saw a tiny orange spark kindling inside the hanging metal box. It floated, flickering, out through the cage door and hovered over his head, dimming at his command. Sotiris took in the bare, almost monastic cloakroom, remembering which of the three doors he’d last gone through fifty-one years before and taking it. The cubic chambers became no larger as he passed through them, retaining the look of any number of storage cupboards that might litter an unromantic age such as this. Their shadowy recesses, briefly illuminated by his passing, were packed with artefacts and trinkets from donated collections and Prism conquests, heaped and piled and wedged into corners. As an old arachnophobe, such places had once made Sotiris profoundly nervous, but no spider had ever lasted long on this lonely moon.

  A larger cell indicated the start of living quarters, or what passed for such things in the Firmament. Sotiris’s spark was replaced by others waking in hanging cages and levitating silently to follow his progress, the original returning to its cloakroom. One darted ahead, fairylike, waiting for him to open a door then gliding forward. Sotiris smiled at the phenomenon, yet another example of the inching entropy only the Amaranthine could see—a household spark gone eccentric. Even wishfully thinking, it was a far cry from Perception, the perfect artificial intelligence built
and dismantled in a single day over four thousand years ago just to prove it could be done, but it was nevertheless intriguing to see the equivalent of a vacuum cleaner come to life after many thousands of years of service. Almost every year he met these little oddities, quirks in the laws of the universe that nobody and nothing should have lived to see. It was like growing tall enough to reach the building blocks of reality and discovering they were chipped and shoddily painted, a crude message or drawing scrawled up there for good measure, nothing more.

  One last door brought Sotiris to a long, comparatively well-lit chamber. His sparks, including the rogues, extinguished themselves, and he was left in the blue light from a hexagonal window that looked out over a wooded courtyard folded deep into the centre of the fortress. Viscous water still pounded the ancient glass, warping the light that smeared the room. A person sat before a glowing hearth at the chamber’s end, smoke from the fire rolling luxuriantly through the weightless air to meet him. Sotiris advanced, noting that the silhouette was feminine, too small for a Melius.

  “Late greetings,” he said in the gloom.

  The figure twitched. “Sotiris?”

  He knew that voice. “Honsiger.”

  The woman sounded like she’d been asleep but Sotiris knew better. The Amaranthine liked to pretend they were still the people they were born as, but thirteen millennia could do a lot to alter a person. Honsiger had likely been staring at the hearth, just thinking slow thoughts, for days. Sotiris himself was guilty of similar, they all were. And as more time passed, it became harder to break the habit. Their minds were ossifying, taking on a sedentary sleepiness that prohibited quick thinking. It meant that talking to faster creatures like the Melius became difficult, requiring them to expend mental energy at the same rate as something with a different metabolism—he’d had to work hard to focus on everything Tussilago had said earlier, unable now to remember what exactly they had been talking about.

  “Welcome back.” Honsiger turned, unchanged in the decades since Sotiris had last seen her. She reached out to a small table at his side and pushed a triangle of paper like a folded napkin across its surface to Sotiris.

  “What’s that?”

  “A note from our mutual friend.”

  He looked at Honsiger a little longer. Not quite ten thousand, she was one of the youngest of them. Natural absent-mindedness made the Amaranthine before him appear older, though Sotiris was in fact two thousand years her senior. Most of the Lady Amaranthine went senile before their time, though nobody really understood why. He took the letter. It was handwritten in a careful, apparently flawless calligraphy, the text arranged almost as a poem.

  It has troubled me this past year, ever searching the volumes,

  For the man that pretends to be our rightful king.

  In my anguish I step back, looking for the patterns,

  And there he is, plain for all to see.

  Beware he of one face but many titles.

  Saviour, Pretender, Usurper. All mean nothing, just another name.

  He is a demon made real, no more Amaranthine than the pen in my hand.

  An ink-splash here marred the writing, as if Yanenko had slammed his pen down.

  I do not know what he is. Not yet. But I shall find out.

  History is his board, the lives of men his pieces.

  I have seen it in the volumes. I have found him.

  Do not give in to him, however sweetly he might ask.

  Sotiris read the note once more and slid it back to Honsiger. “This is his writing?”

  Honsiger nodded. “I would know it anywhere.”

  “Where did you find this?”

  “In a storeroom marked Suicide Notes.”

  “Plain for anyone to find?”

  “Not quite, but I was convinced he’d left us something. I read each note—there were thousands—until I came upon this one tucked randomly into the pile.” As she spoke, the castle’s single housekeeper appeared from a minuscule doorway tucked to one side of the hearth, dragging a fresh copper scuttle loaded with wood.

  “That must have taken some time,” Sotiris said, nodding to the housekeeper and pulling out a chair at the long dining table. He looked at the note, uncertain. Yanenko had been incoherent the last time the two had met, repeating himself often, confusing his words. This letter, however, gave the impression of an Amaranthine barely in command of his senses. He wondered how many other random letters might have been hidden about the castle, meant for imaginary eyes.

  “I can’t remember.” Honsiger shrugged. “Probably. I had Grinling here help me.”

  Sotiris looked at the butler, remembering the creature’s grandfather from his last visit. The Pifoon, one of the smallest species of Prism, were unquestionably the Amaranthine’s most loyal servants, having been bred to the task over many hundreds of years. Grinling bowed to Sotiris, his beady yellow eyes taking in the new Immortal guest, and deposited his fresh scuttle by the side of the one already in use.

  “Shall I make up the southern guest chambers, Madam Honsiger?” he enquired, his trained voice clear and crisp. A scrotal-pink wattle, like that of a turkey, dangled around his monkeyish face to his chin.

  “Yes, go and do that,” said Honsiger absently, barely glancing at the housekeeper. The Pifoon nodded solemnly and made his way back to the tiny door, his little furred paws slapping on the flagstones.

  “I believe,” continued Honsiger when the Prism had left, “that being discovered came second to delivering this message, hence the location of the letter. It was quite obviously to be found there but took time to uncover.”

  Sotiris was hardly listening. He was thinking again of the dream. “Perhaps,” he said dubiously, rousing himself. “But what can have become of him?”

  “He has left for the Old World,” Honsiger said, with apparent certainty. “It is his way of telling us.”

  “You think so?”

  “I have visited him here for a thousand years. You have been coming here for almost that long, on your way to visit your sister in the Utopia. Yanenko had long studied the records that have been here since this land was known by other names. I assumed he was collecting volumes for some thesis or other, a paper he might submit before the third renaissance of Gliese, perhaps. But when Maneker announced that his Pretender would try to take the throne of Gliese for himself, Yanenko retired to his work with a fervour I had not seen in him before.”

  “The demon made real,” Sotiris repeated doubtfully, looking at the folded note.

  “He has gone to face it.”

  It. Sotiris looked into the fire, unsure how to counter such certainty.

  “I know Maneker, just as you do,” Honsiger said into the silence. “His will is iron. I admit, I did not think him capable of such cruelty as that which you have just escaped—” She paused, looking at Sotiris. “But Yanenko must have realised that it would take nothing less than a Perennial of considerable power to stop him.” She shook her head. “I should have seen it—as a fellow German, one ought to recognise these things. You remember the last time Maneker was here? Forcing his views on everyone as usual with that out-thrust finger of his. Poked Yanenko until I thought he was going to snap at last. It was a shame he didn’t. And that Melius servant he humiliated because she was ‘too hormonal.’ Doorknobs are too hormonal compared with most of us dried-out old things.” She frowned, considering something. “They think it was the Jurlumticular Throng, did you know that?”

  “What?” Sotiris glanced up from the table.

  “The Prism responsible for bombing Virginis.”

  “Those that also started the Volirian Conflict?”

  “The very same.”

  Sotiris frowned, idly picking up the letter again. The Jurlumticular Throng were supposedly extinct, eradicated in retribution for horrific crimes against the Amaranthine sixty years before. The Volirian Conflict, named after the furthest star in the Prism Investiture around which the resulting swift war was fought, had started after the Jurlumtic
ular Throng had taken it upon themselves—for reasons that remained obscure—to invade the interior of a Vaulted Land at the very centre of the Firmament. Inner Epsilon India, an influential Solar Satrapy only one away from the capital of the entire Firmament, Gliese, was porous, meaning that it contained many holes to the surface, and it was through one of these gigantic orifices that the Jurlumticular had landed their ground troops. In just one day they had secured an entire continent, slaughtering hundreds of Amaranthine—who, out of decadence and total lack of industry, no longer maintained any inter-solar ships, standing armies or even Voidsuits of their own—and imprisoning their Melius acolytes before the rest of the Firmament had even discovered their treachery. Immortals are not easily slain, and many thousands of the Jurlumticular—a tall, slender Prism race more closely related to the giant Old World Melius than any other—had perished during the battles inside Epsilon India. Their forces had, however, prevailed due to the fact that almost their entire military, including privateer forces and militia, had been drafted for the invasion, a total of nearly seventy thousand individuals and a fleet of twenty-five thousand cobbled-together vessels. It had been unclear, upon the arrival of Vulgar and Pifoon squadrons from Gliese and Inner Cygnis, exactly why the Jurlumticular had chosen to invest so much of their population into what appeared to be a pointless and foolishly impossible task. Three days later, after fighting largely to the death, the Jurlumticular were defeated inside Epsilon India and their remainder executed after trials that lasted only a week. The Amaranthine, at the edict of the Most Venerable and every Satrapy Parliament, had decreed that an example must be made of the Jurlumticulars’ entire race, and so the battle was taken to their vastly reduced colonies around the hopelessly distant and remote Volirian star. All found there were slaughtered, with purchased armies of Lacaille fighting alongside their sworn enemies the Vulgar, as well as Pifoon, Wulm and Zelioceti fleets swelling the attacking force to that of an unprecedented armada. Never had the Amaranthine spent so much on a conglomerated Prism army, reducing their speculated wealth by as much as a seventh and awarding their client Prism as yet unheard-of powers and territory. The results of the genocide, however, were supposed to have secured the Amaranthines’ reputation and supremacy for the next thousand years, reminding any Prism that grew too greedy of the consequences of taking what was not theirs by immortal right.