The Promise of the Child

by Tom Toner

  Lycaste leaned, eyes trained on the back of the brother’s head as he handed his father the money and turned to the people sitting in the road. Melilotis.

  “Did you ever see such a wealthy Cherry?” exclaimed Hamamelis, holding up a fistful of ribbons. He waved the jaunty tassels in Eremurus’s face. “Stolen!”

  “That’s his money,” said Eremurus tiredly, his eyes on the path.

  “It’s not his money!” screamed Hamamelis in a sudden, shaking rage, striking the man. “That monster killed my Leonotis and you sheltered him, you looked after him! What did he promise you, Eremurus? Tell me that much—what did he promise you to hide him here?”

  “We didn’t know he was the one!” sobbed Jasione. “We believed him.”

  Hamamelis turned to the house and scanned the walls and gardens.

  “What are you going to do with us?” asked Jasione.

  Hamamelis stretched his arm behind his back, like a swimmer before a race. “I think you both know.”

  Tell Me

  Lycaste flexed his finger again in demonstration, still tender from that day at Koyulhizar, but Sotiris didn’t see. He was staring into the woodland where hanging lanterns glowed, as if he’d managed to fall asleep with his eyes open.

  Lycaste took a breath, continuing uncertainly. “I climbed back in and waited until the evening, just before they closed the gates. When the brothers returned I managed to slip away, risking the north road forest.”

  He waited for the man to give some sign that he’d heard even one word of the tale.

  Sotiris stirred, his shoulders rising. Lycaste could not see his eyes in the soft night lights. “Do you feel better?”

  He thought about it. “A little.”

  The Amaranthine began tapping a finger at his mouth. “There is one part of your tale I would know more about.”

  “Yes?”

  “This old man from the Tenth. Jotroffe. Tell me about him.”

  Nomad

  The Nomad was a famous class of schooner, known throughout the Investiture as the pride of the Lacaille fleet, and yet Ghaldezuel had told him they possessed only three—the other two presently sitting in a hangar somewhere, too old and dangerous to take to the skies. Cor-phuso was granted chaperoned visits to the engine compartments to look at the tetraluminal filaments, the calibre of which he freely admitted his own empire did not possess, at least to his knowledge. The filaments, looming darkly in their housings like gigantic bundles of wound copper wire, were of course Amaranthine-made and fabulously old, a present from the Age of Decadence before the Immortal’s relationship with the Lacaille had soured. They were cared for night and day by a separate crew, the Lacaille High Commission fully aware of their value. Corphuso understood well enough how to build a filament of his own, but also that achieving any speeds greater than the basic minimum was a feat the Amaranthine had taken with them into senility. Being given the chance to see such treasures firsthand was a rare honour, and he thanked them for it.

  The encounter with the Vulgar privateer on Steerilden’s Land had resulted in substantial losses, the captain of that ship—whoever he was—proving capable enough to evade and roast one of the legions that had escorted them from the battleship over the Threen moon of Port Obviado. The damage to the Nomad itself had proved debilitating enough to require an extra day’s work, during which Corphuso had been permitted time to stretch his legs in the wild pink poppy fields. There was nowhere he could run to, and so he had apparently not been watched as he walked, exploring the small green islet’s forests in wonder.

  Dutifully returning to find the schooner in good health again, Ghaldezuel had announced to Corphuso that they would be increasing their speed towards Firmament centre. The Lacaille knight had handed him a heavy thrombosis suit made from capsules of a reeking yellow gel and watched as he put it on. The few suits aboard were given only to the highest-ranking Lacaille, and many unprotected troops died on high-speed journeys. Corphuso mumbled his gratitude, wondering briefly who might be going without so that he could be given such protection.

  They sat together, upon finishing a large evening meal of Steerilden hare, in the aft hangar of the Nomad, its progress from the Satrapy of Port Elsbet measured in Lacaille code beeped via the intercom. Around them the vessel growled, the speed of their descent through the Firmament expanding the tin, steel and rubber fabric of the hull. Beyond them, the Shell, still encased in the giant metal chest, sat like a gunmetal block under the hangar’s fluorescents.

  Corphuso had ceased speaking Vulgar with Ghaldezuel, choosing instead to practise his Lacaille. It appeared from all angles as if his future now lay with the rival empire and their new, if inexplicable, loyalty to certain factions within the Amaranthine. It occurred to him that little had really changed—he was being transported in relative comfort and ease to the Vaulted Lands, and much faster than he might have been had his party of Vulgar not been betrayed. Honours and privileges could still await among the Amaranthine, and a chance to leave the Prism Investiture forever. He’d decided on his walk through the poppies that he should also begin his new life by brushing up on Unified, the Immortal language. It was a difficult tongue, filled with short, clipped words that shared a frustrating number of meanings, but it would stand him in good stead when the Nomad eventually reached its final—and as yet still undisclosed—destination.

  He could see from the buckles on the huge metal case that the Shell had been inspected during his absence, perhaps even tested, but decided not to ask Ghaldezuel directly about such things. He knew that it worked perfectly, that they would not be disappointed should they find some poor fellow to test it on, but still the possibility of somehow failing them, after all they had done to secure him and his machine, unnerved him. The Soul Engine was unlike anything ever conceived of before, of that he was sure; it would be the start of a new age of daunting, unfathomable possibilities, perhaps even, he feared, levelling the power of the Firmament—a power held so long and so tightly—once and for all. Corphuso also knew, though, that whatever eventual peace it brought, whatever equality it ripped from the Immortals’ indolent hands, his machine would still be an engine of death for generations to come, a plague against which there would be no defence. But change, he reflected, always began that way, destroying what was already there to make room for the new. He would do his best to warn those who finally took charge of the Shell, though he knew somewhere deep down that even they would not listen.

  “We are at fourteen million miles per hour,” said Ghaldezuel, taking a sip of water as he listened to the code from the intercom. He drank no ales or wines on principle and allowed Corphuso none, either. “I advise you not to do anything strenuous for the remainder of the journey as we increase velocity.”

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” replied Corphuso in Lacaille, the stink of the thrombosis gel reaching his nostrils again. He knew he would have to get used to it and was trying to breathe in as much as possible.

  Ghaldezuel nodded, his Voidsuit replaced by a lighter though still preciously inlaid variant with superior inbuilt shock-absorption. “Your Lacaille improves already with practice. What other Prism-speak do you know?”

  He shrugged. “I am fluent in Pifoon, and my Low Oxel is fairly good. I can speak limited but conversational Threen, Zelioceti One and Two, Wulmese Fifth Dialect and some rusty Unified, as well as a smattering of Quetterel.” He thought for a moment. “I suppose I could also get by in First, should we crash-land in the Old Satrapy.”

  Ghaldezuel did not look at him as he wiped his mouth. “An excellent education.”

  Corphuso knew well the resentment in Ghaldezuel’s voice. “My family traded with the Vaulted Land of Epsilon Eridani. It was profitable.”

  “I am sure,” replied Ghaldezuel, looking off towards the stacked columns of rusted white half-tracks at the other end of the hangar. “Shall we take a look at your machine? I am eager to gain an appraisal of its abilities.”

  Corphuso glanced at the huge case. “You d
oubt the cargo?”

  Ghaldezuel’s sky-blue eyes looked into his. “Perhaps I doubt the inventor.”

  Sulthumo Leorgin had been a free Vulgar boot polisher working in the court of Count Andolp of Filgurbirund, a wealthy landowner and occasional financier of clever inventions. When Leorgin died after a short bout of breathworm—known by the Amaranthine as tuberculosis, and at that time a very common cause of death among the Vulgar scrape classes—he was inspected perfunctorily by one of the count’s physicians and taken to be interred in the Serf Ponds.

  What happened next astounded the various undertakers who carried his corpse, and would go on to capture the imagination of the whole Investiture. At first it appeared, after the body began violently shaking and wheezing, that Sulthumo was not dead at all and might begin to make a recovery. Only after he died a second time—being officially pronounced expired in the arms of the undertakers once more—did they resume moving him to the ponds to join his family plot. When Leorgin woke for a third time, his carriers decided they had little more patience for a body that could not make its mind up whether to live or die and called the physicians once more.

  Leorgin died and came back to life again thirty-one times before they decided to shoot him, after which he apparently expired for good. As far as Corphuso could tell, the boot polisher was dead still, but developments would later make him question even that assumption.

  Opening him up, Count Andolp’s personal physician discovered that Sulthumo Leorgin’s body contained certain abnormalities in Vulgar anatomy never before recorded; in his notes, carefully studied during the intervening years, the doctor wrote of channels in the brain and neck that were oddly formed, opening here and there into hollows where the spinal column should have grown vertebrae. It was a stroke of luck for the unfortunate Leorgin that he had never broken his feeble spine, although later discussion of the matter concluded that he would likely have returned to life even if he had. The channels and loops and caves of space, equivalent perhaps in size to a Vulgar digestive system, may have accounted for the “reflux of life,” as the physician put it, that resulted in poor Sulthumo waking repeatedly after his own death, and casts were made of his exceptional interior in order to study it further.

  Almost a year later, a young medical student discovered, through the accidental shining of an electric torch into the cast, that light behaved unusually within its confines, and apparently remained within its structure to glow long after the torch had been shut off. The news of such magic drew philosophers and alchemists from around the kingdom, and Count Andolp grew rich from the display of his ex-polisher’s astounding innards. Before long, the news percolated beyond the Vulgar borders, attracting Prism travellers and magicians from all over the Investiture, and, eventually, Amaranthine.

  Corphuso Trohilat, then a young architect engaged through family connections in designing a mausoleum for the prince of Drolgins, visited the Count’s museum of oddities to view the casts, paying handsomely to see the exhibit alone. He understood, after taking careful measurements, that there might be further applications for the curiosity, known by now as Andolp’s Astounding Light-Trap.

  He appealed to his family and within a year had secured the funds to buy the Light-Trap from the count, who parted with it on the condition that he retained rights to a high percentage of all future profits made. Corphuso accepted willingly, knowing that such profits would be enough to buy Filgurbirund itself one day, and perhaps a good deal more.

  Despite probable sabotage in which the original casts were destroyed, Corphuso’s timely measurements assured he was able to build a larger-than-life-sized replica of the hollows and tubes, situating them within a surrounding case and experimenting over the years with different materials in the construction. It appeared that the geometry of the shapes had to be reproduced exactly—to within a fraction of an inch of the original measurements—for anything unusual to happen, such as light and even sound somehow remaining stuck for a time within the hollows, and Corphuso began to speculate at the incredible odds of finding such a freak of nature at all. When all was ready, he excitedly began the first phase of his experiments, purchasing Lacaille prisoners from jails and labour camps across Filgurbirund with the promise that, should the experiment succeed, they would be pardoned to a man for their crimes against the Vulgar and released.

  One thousand and seventeen Lacaille prisoners climbed, one at a time, into the massive machine Corphuso had built, thin extension tubes connecting them to the coils and hollows within. Once inside, the hatch was sealed, suffocating them in a matter of minutes.

  The same one thousand and seventeen Lacaille returned to their cells over the course of the trial, alive and fully functional, delighted with the prospect of their pardon.

  The Soul Engine was a success. The year was 14,636 AD, Amaranthine Standard, and death had finally been conquered.

  Corphuso studied the scratched metal surface of the table, glowing under the hangar lights, and the dead remains of the hare on its platter. Its buck-teeth were still visible, poking slightly from its splayed lips. The meat around its cheeks and eyes had been cut away. No one within the Prism Investiture, not least the Vulgar, appeared to be concerned by the implications of such a revelation. All they saw was a functional solution to a problem that plagued far too many in the kingdoms of the Investiture, as well as another way of gaining influence within the Amaranthine and punishing their Lacaille enemies further. Corphuso shook his head gently. His machine had found the soul, ensconced in its hiding place since the evolution of the ancient mammal phyla that had birthed the lines that would make the Amaranthine, Melius and Prism alike. His findings spoke not just of immortality—perhaps an even more perfect immortality than the sadistic decadents of the Firmament had ever dreamed of—but also the possibility that there was indeed something that came after, some world just beyond glimpsing. He had found the evidence of life after death. And it didn’t even stop there. Corphuso’s first fully formed emotion after realising his device worked was one of profound fear. It raised the implications that there might, after all, be a God.

  He looked back at the hare, stretched and cold, its yellowish fur tinged with the blush of the vast Steerilden poppy fields, wondering where its animal soul had travelled to, and where it might reside now.

  The Lacaille prisoners’ pardons were later rescinded by the Vulgar kingdom, the high courts of Filgurbirund never really believing that such a thing would be possible and deeming the release of over a thousand prisoners an almost treasonously stupid act, and all were put to death again, this time without the help of the Shell.

  By then, news of the life-conjuring engine was deliberately being hushed-up by Filgurbirund, the princes and dukelings deeming it a vital asset in the three-hundred-year Lacaille-Vulgar hostilities. Corphuso was arrested and forced to sign away his invention to the Principality of the moon of Drolgins, with all profits to be handed over immediately, and relocated to the fortress of Nilmuth to resume his work. There he remained a virtual prisoner, confined to his libraries and workshops with a force of technicians, most of whom had now either died in the siege or on Port Obviado, up until the day the Amaranthine had arrived.

  “So,” said Ghaldezuel, watching as the chest was unbuckled, “you were working to make it smaller.”

  Corphuso shrugged as the two Lacaille vacuum troopers swung open the chest at last and pulled away the gold-thread cloth, revealing the gleaming expanse of the machine. “It was hoped that we could make a wearable piece for each soldier, so that death would become nothing more than a minor irritation on the battlefield.”

  Ghaldezuel looked at him shrewdly. “But the device only succeeds if no part of the body is permanently damaged—I understand nothing messier than asphyxiation is viable.”

  Corphuso stepped up to the Shell, checking to make sure that it had not been damaged, beginning to feel possessive of it all over again. “A team of surgeons would accompany the armies—at least, that was the plan—to stitch them ba
ck together as quickly as possible. With the contraption on rapid circulation it would ensure continual healing and prevent brain death, even if our soldiers were shot through with bullets.” He glanced at Ghaldezuel, who was standing with him at the edge of the machine. “In practical situations, I don’t believe it was as simple as that. I was charged with ironing out the problems.”

  The Lacaille knight remained silent for a while, examining the shifting colours on the Shell’s surface. “How far did you progress?” he asked at last, turning back to Corphuso.

  The architect hesitated, having known for some time that this question would be put to him at some point. His only remaining power lay in what he had yet to publish to the Principality before his capture, information still locked away in his head. “I achieved little more than the early trials,” he said, looking directly at the Lacaille. “The Soul Engine is not a machine for rejuvenation—that grail is still yet to be found, or”—he added thoughtfully—“remains in the possession of the Amaranthine alone. This device does one thing only, but does it well: it restores life energy to a corpse, capturing and, with my modifications, returning what we can only call its immortal soul. The state of the body within which this aura then finds itself is not a fault of the Soul Engine, but rather a fault of those who performed the killing.”

  Ghaldezuel sat again, taking up his plastic glass of recycled water. “Defensively put.” He drained the water. “The Amaranthine will find its true potential now.”

  Corphuso went and sat at the table, too, the troops closing the case and returning to their positions at the huge doors of the hangar. A beep on the tannoy told them the Nomad was increasing its speed again, though it would be a couple more days before it passed the nearest Satrapy.

  “Something has troubled me,” he said to Ghaldezuel, maintaining eye contact. “Why would the Amaranthine begin the process of moving the Engine, the Shell, only to suddenly hire the Lacaille to do it, thereby sabotaging all they had just achieved? I mean no offence when I say that the Lacaille were never the trusted allies to them that the Vulgar have been.”