The Promise of the Child

by Tom Toner

  All of that had remained true, until now.

  Sotiris stared back along the dark length of the room, the rheumy light now subsiding. “How could they have returned?” he asked, running his fingers along the grain of the table. “And how could they have penetrated Virginis with such ease? Aren’t there defences against that sort of thing now?”

  Honsiger nodded, looking into the fire. “There are. It’s a little known fact that the Firmament contains more Prism than Amaranthine. After Volirian, we gave them territories inside our Satrapies for the first time in an effort to quell any surprise attacks. There are Vulgar and Pifoon sentinel colonies on the surface of every Vaulted Land, barring Gliese itself.”

  Sotiris looked at her. Honsiger had been an active parliamentarian during her tenure on Gliese and knew much that was kept largely secret. Sotiris thought of his home Satrapy. “Even Cancri?”

  The Lady Immortal snorted a laugh. “Cancri more than any. It is the wealthiest and most exposed, lying as it does at the edge of the Firmament. We reward the Prism stationed on the Vaulted Lands with almost every comfort we ourselves enjoy. It keeps them radiantly faithful, we have found.”

  Sotiris considered this, surprised and a little upset that this had been generally allowed and known about all this time. Despite his carefully cultivated egalitarianism, he still found himself now mildly revolted that he had lived in such blissful ease with Prism cavorting just above him.

  “So how did it happen?” he asked, after taking enough time to digest what Honsiger had told him. “How did they do this to us?”

  “The Prism were told to,” Honsiger said quietly. “By Maneker, acting on behalf of our would-be Emperor.”

  “But what could he possibly give them in return?”

  Honsiger picked up an ornate iron poker and pushed one of the logs further into the fire. “Gliese, of course.”

  Virginis had not been cleanly destroyed. Its outer form still remained, but the Prism scouts that had first ventured inside after the furnace—which could be seen all the way from Aquarii, the nearest Satrapy—had found nothing but grey, perfectly scoured rock and a uniform inch of ash covering the entire inner surface. Whole mountain ranges had been ground away in an instant, seas boiled to nothing. Every single living thing inside the Vaulted Land had been vaporised, blown to a powdered storm that had thundered around inside the world. The outside, subject to weak gravity but otherwise perfectly habitable and bucolic, remained relatively untouched, with only those living near the orifices of the planet killed by the firestorms that had erupted from them.

  Sotiris hadn’t been able to look at Honsiger much as they discussed what had happened to Virginis. Not through any sense of guilt that he’d lived and others hadn’t, but because truthfully he felt almost nothing and was afraid his eyes would betray him. Hearing the news on the Pifoon cutter as it made its way into the Inner Firmament had left him thoughtlessly numb, almost pleasantly free of emotion. It was a different form of grieving, Sotiris knew that—shock, perhaps, but also a certain lack of imagination. His sister had drowned, and so her body still lay shrouded, guarded, in the Utopia back on the Old World. Those others—Hytner, everyone who’d died instantly—were now just a compacted, footprint-smudged ash of their component atoms. He simply couldn’t grieve, though he had tried, for atoms. It didn’t appear to be in his nature.

  An ugly part of him that had always slightly disliked Hytner spoke up inside him. They’d made their choice, all those who had derided Maneker’s Pretender and wanted to be seen to do it. Virginis had served its purpose; the Firmament and all who lived beyond its limits had been warned.

  The galvanizing effect of such large-scale destruction meant that the Vulgar Loyalists—fully a quarter of all the Vulgar in the Investiture—had now signalled their allegiance to Maneker. In turn, the Lacaille dukedoms closest to the Firmament had requested that sanctions be lifted by the neutral Amaranthine Satrapies in an effort to even out the influence in the region, reigniting the conflict uncomfortably close to the borders and forcing many Immortals still undecided in their loyalty to hurriedly declare for Maneker, his would-be Emperor and the Devout. Three cowardly Solar Satrapies had immediately pledged their support to the Pretender’s cause within a day, and more were now following. On his journey from Gliese, Sotiris had to hire a Pifoon ship of his own to take him to Yanenko’s Land. Everywhere the Firmament was changing, an invisible front eleven light-years long, pressed and defended, bent and reforged by abstract hopes, fear, jealousy and hatred.

  The Pifoon remained, however, in the hands of sensible Amaranthine, still the majority for the time being, and so it was possible to negotiate the eight-day journey without any course adjustments and in the relative luxury an Amaranthine could still expect. The morning Sotiris left for Yanenko’s Land, the odious De Rivarol had formally invited him to head the new Amaranthine Parliament that would form upon the Pretender’s succession. It was not the first offer he had received in his lifetime. New Parliaments were always being formed and disbanded whenever the Most Venerable’s mental faculties were dwindling—there had been one hundred and seventeen rulers since the Amaranthine Firmament officially came into existence—but he had always declined; it was on this basis, once again blamed on his long record of unimpeachable neutrality, that De Rivarol had allowed him to leave for the Old World, making it clear, however, that Maneker would be extremely disappointed if Sotiris did not change his mind.

  “Did you know him?” asked Honsiger, her voice sharp against the falling stillness.

  Sotiris stirred. It was full dark outside and Grinling must have come and awoken the sparks. The chamber was now warmly lit and comfortable, the fire freshly refuelled, with jewelled goblets of water for swilling set upon the table. Above the table the sparks hung like twinkling stars, rising and falling gently in the smoky air. He had been staring into the hearth for a long time, his eyes dry and raw.

  “I’m sorry?”

  Honsiger looked sleepy, but wiped at her face and sat up. “Did you know the Pretender?”

  Sotiris was shocked for a moment, thinking his dreams had somehow been discovered. “What do you mean? Why should I know him?”

  “You haven’t heard? You don’t hear much. It is part of what makes his claim so compelling—and Yanenko’s note so timely.” Honsiger cleared her throat, sitting straighter in her chair. “Many have come forward—sensible Amaranthine, not supporters of Maneker—and remembered that they … recalled, even knew this man in their lives.” She was silent for a minute, as if deciding whether or not to tell Sotiris something. “I knew him, too. Briefly. He lived for a time in the city where I was born.”

  “In Germany?”

  “Yes. Stuttgart. I believed the man was German, but it appears I was wrong.”

  They blinked at each other. “Who was he?” Sotiris asked.

  “A diplomat friend of my father’s. Very influential, I was told. We never spoke, but I remember him visiting the house, and I was expected to be on my best behaviour whenever he came to see my father.” Honsiger paused. “Herr Kaltenbrunner. That was how I knew him and how I was told to address him, though now of course they say he changed names.”

  Grinling came and refreshed their goblets, tipping the used water into a gleaming silver pot. He glanced irritably to the antique clock and left the jug on the table. Evidently it was his bedtime. Honsiger ignored him as he bade them goodnight.

  “Others knew him by many names,” she continued. “He must have circled the Old World ten thousand times or more but has never left it, as far as anyone I have spoken to can discern.” She paused again, taking up her goblet. “There are some who say they remember him from their childhood, like I do. Some of them are almost as old as the Inception itself.”

  Sotiris took a swill, too, but the water suddenly tasted bitter. He knew now he would not tell Honsiger about the dreams, feeling instinctively that it was something he should keep to himself. “Your point?”

  “My point? That
he is not Amaranthine at all, like the letter says. He is something older, someone who might have …” She shrugged, a helpless look in her eyes. “Always been there.”

  Sotiris shook his head, twirling his cup in his hands. “But why reveal himself now?” he asked. “Why wait all this time to stake his claim?”

  Honsiger cleared her throat gently. “I have a private theory.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “He is the Assassin.”

  Sotiris laughed out loud, banging his cup down and wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “The Assassin? The one who haunts those who break the laws?”

  Honsiger folded her arms defensively, shifting in her chair. “Perennials who oppose Maneker have begun to disappear.”

  “Who?”

  “Crook, among others.”

  “Crook is old. They will find him in a Vaulted Land somewhere talking to himself.”

  “They are being reduced, thinned. It is documented. Maybe there was no edict to allow the succession of this Amaranthine—” She held up a finger for Sotiris to let her finish. “What if His Venerable Self knows nothing of this and it is all a ruse. He might even have been killed.”

  Sotiris stood, inspecting the water on his sleeve, and leaned against the hearth, smoke curling into his nostrils. “I have to say I’m a little disappointed in you, Hanne. You must calm yourself. The Assassin is a bedtime story. A joke.” He shook his head, unable to think of more he could say and wondering whether it might be time to take his leave. The Assassin—Jatropha, he was called by the Firmament Melius in their Old World tongue—was the closest the Amaranthine got to extra-religious superstition, a scapegoat for any ills still present in their ancient society. Sotiris had blamed a fart on the poor fellow once, before even that talent had left him for good. Supposedly one of the oldest Perennials, perhaps older than His Venerable Self, the man had allegedly stayed on the Old World, living hundreds of lives under hundreds of guises. The legend of an immortal wizard who exacted his own justice still suffused some parts of Melius culture, if only to scare their ungainly children into housework. Provided his age was consistent with legend, the Assassin would be capable of nearly anything under the laws of their hierarchy. Only the very eldest of them—a rapidly declining number—could claim seniority and possibly remain protected.

  “And if there’s anyone who might be next on the list, it’s you, Sotiris.”

  “I’ve had enough of this,” he said firmly, stepping away from the fireplace and trying to remember where the guest chambers were.

  “That’s the only reason Maneker’s left you alone this long,” continued Honsiger quietly. “Once you arrive—perhaps not immediately, since he’ll want to honour your sister—you shall be asked for. Any delay in answering, no matter how momentary, will be seen as a threat, a sign of schemes being hatched against him.”

  Sotiris scrunched the letter in despair and threw it into the fire. He was remembering Aaron’s words, and his proposition. They watched it curl and float.

  “When I have mourned my sister, I intend to return home to Cancri, nothing more. It is safe there.” He looked at the woman, his anger softening. “You should come with me, Hanne, leave this awful moon for good, hand the castle over to Tussilago.”

  Honsiger shook her head. “You can’t see it. Cancri will fall just like the rest of the Satrapies. It may take longer, but it will happen.” She looked up at Sotiris. “Your private wealth cannot save you, Sotiris. You Cancriites may breathe what air you need through a pomaded bag of emeralds, but that air will run out, and sooner than you think.”

  Sotiris clawed at his face, exasperated. “Florian Von Schiller, who lives in Cancri, is next in line for the throne of Gliese. He would not risk his home and comfort for the mystical ramblings of an impressionable few, most of whom are barely Pre-Perennial, and some megalomaniacal Amaranthine craving glory before his time.”

  “Von Schiller is conspicuously late in declaring his sympathies.”

  “And when he does he shall see sense, even when it has so spectacularly departed the Amaranthine.” Sotiris became aware that he had begun to raise his voice and stopped, his old heart labouring gently into life. Honsiger wasn’t looking at him, but at the floor.

  The woman sighed into her hands, a shallow breath like the flicker of a candle. “You were there—”

  “Yes. And they spared me,” said Sotiris, remembering seeing Hytner walking away across the meadow.

  “But not the others.”

  “No.”

  “And you won’t help us.”

  Later, when Honsiger had chosen to sleep, he dragged some larger logs across the charred flagstones, heaving the wood—too heavy to lift on the Old World—onto the flames and damping some of them to smoke. The younger Amaranthine might sleep a week or more and Sotiris had already decided he wouldn’t wake her before he left. Sotiris had no bodily functions that could disturb his contemplation, and he fed the fire until dawn, stirring it absently with a great rusted sword he’d found leaned up against the hearth. Since the dreams had begun he preferred not to sleep—he could probably go a month or so without it—and by then things might not matter so much any more, if they mattered at all.

  In the morning, after looking in on Honsiger in her grand and dusty bedchamber and finding her still fast asleep, Sotiris went up to the castle battlements. The grey clouds were thinning despite the drizzle that chilled his skin, a dark green forest glimpsed on distant hillsides. Quickened terraforming, poorly done, had made the moon a dank place, but sometimes the weather lifted; the calm fjord behind the castle had already begun to shimmer silver where the light found it. He saw Tussilago in his boat and waved but the distant Melius didn’t notice. Sotiris turned north, to the blue crescent just visible through the soupy cloud, splaying his hands firmly on the damp eroded stone of the parapet. For centuries Amaranthine had come to this spot, on the battlements at the moon’s northern pole, to tap into the magnetism of certain Firmamental currents and travel the two hundred thousand miles to the Old World. The castle had once been a bustling, sociable place, teeming with Immortal and Melius, its emptiness now reflecting the sorry state of the Firmament and the broken Amaranthine worlds.

  He slowed his breathing as he felt for the currents, closing his eyes and crumbling some loose mortar between his fingers. Slowly the colours came, flashing through his mind as his ears popped, then all sound died away. For the briefest moment he inhabited two places in the solar system at once, Bilocated like a saint of old, and then he was gone.

  Bonneville

  Reginald Bonneville, junior honorific of the Devout Amaranthine Under One Satrapy—more commonly known simply as the Devout—watched the Melius go about her work, her enormous hands kneading and soothing his feet with glistening oils. The chapel was so quiet that each gentle slop of the mixture echoed to the far-away ceiling, and her soft breaths, intensifying as she ran her fingers up towards his ankle, were loud as footfalls in the huge hollow space. He sat back a little in the wooden cathedra, his fingers gripping the enormous armrests as her strength shifted his whole leg, his slowing mind trying to concentrate on the extraordinary images above him.

  The woman—or rather female, considering she was of a different species—pushed hard with her massive thumbs at some sensitive spot, finally making him wince for the first time. She smiled encouragingly, at last having found a place that was not yet totally numb to anything but temperature, and Bonneville suddenly felt a fierce urge to lash out at her, to clout that smile off her monstrous face. It subsided almost as soon as it had arrived, and he turned his slow thoughts elsewhere, back towards the far-away ceiling.

  The painted chapel he sat in was a marvel of the Old World, a place of such unique beauty that Amaranthine—and sometimes even the wealthiest of the Honoured Prism—journeyed from all across the Firmament to look upon its grandeur. The fact that the chapel had been built and painted by the hideous giant Melius was often conveniently forgotten as wealthy travellers crept beneath it, mutte
ring their awe in hushed voices. It had even been speculated that the beauty of the chapel almost single-handedly kept the First Province in power; during their pilgrimages, the Immortal were often guests of First aristocracy, bringing with them such quantities of Old money that each visit surely paid for itself hundreds of times over. Bonneville held the figures somewhere locked in his head—he had been appointed temporary treasurer, after all—and they were huge sums indeed. How neat, he thought, how elegant, that a work of art situated at the highest pinnacle of the tallest tower of the greatest city on the Old World should be the very engine of the Province’s continued dominance.

  He closed his eyes dreamily, opening them again quickly to try and perceive an impression of the ceiling as a whole before allowing his eyes to focus on the parts that interested him. The scene far above was that of the hierarchy of the heavens, at least as far as the twisted minds of the people of the First saw it. One might expect a Melius hand to be crude, aboriginal in its simplicity, but the paintings were startling in their realism and power. Only the colour schemes—miraculous to the eye but painful when stared at for too long—betrayed the painter as being a touch unusual, the mind of a species other than his own.

  He tipped his head back. At the north end of the ceiling, almost directly above the throne Bonneville sat in, was the origin of the Melius: Homo sapiens, as the remains of the Amaranthine had once been known, a gilded crown upon his five-metre-wide, expertly painted head. The Immortal was plain and white-skinned, his huge expression one of stony ambivalence. He wore a robe of fantastical colours that draped the entire scene, hanging like curtains across the towers of his realm, the Firmament, its blue skies alive with extraordinary creatures and golden stars. Flocks of metal birds, intricately painted but hopelessly inaccurate, wheeled and soared among the golden points of light; a generous Amaranthine had obviously tried to explain the appearance of Prism Voidships to the clueless painter, who had then let his imagination run wild.