The Promise of the Child

by Tom Toner

  Lycaste took a dainty bite of his unripe fruit, smelling her musk on it. “They bring a lot of prisoners like me this way?”

  “Prisoners, slaves, soldiers. Not on His Excellence’s private ship, though; and never at this Quarter.” She gave him an appraising look, taking another peach out. “You must be someone special.”

  He took the new piece she offered him. “Not really.”

  The Melius put aside her book, The Fabulous Escapades of Dorielziath and Scundry, and looked him full in the face. He guessed she was thin for an Asiatic—not that he’d seen many Jalan barring the odd huge sailor stopping off at Kipris when he was a boy—with a wiry mane of curled white hair that framed her chin like a beard.

  “I wouldn’t say you’re my type, so don’t go getting ideas, but you’re handsome for a Southerner. Don’t be all bashful, you know you are. Is that what they’re doing now, kidnapping pretty boys for the amusement of noble ladies?” She shook her head. “I can’t pretend to like Twolings, no matter how much I may love my naughty little charge.”

  “You’re her nanny?”

  “Clever, too, this one. Throw in some wit and I’ll let you wed my daughter.”

  “Oh, I don’t have much of that.”

  Her large foreign eyes looked into his. They were kind, creased with care or laughter. “Never mind. My son was one of those funny boys. Not a looker, not like you, so he had to make up for it elsewhere. The fool got himself noticed, though, and they deported him. No idea where he is now. Slaved, perhaps, or sent to the Westerly Provinces.” She sniffed and looked out at the twilight, the mountains almost invisible now. “Wouldn’t wish that on anyone, even those doing the treating.”

  Lycaste shuffled closer under the weak light of the lantern, cold stars beginning to twinkle above them. Sounds of dinner and song continued from the top deck, the musical scrape of cutlery, crystal clinking.

  “What will you do when you’re free? If the war ends?” he asked her.

  The giant shrugged, pulling her blanket closer. “Depends on how it ends.” She hesitated, looked down at him. “Aren’t you cold?”

  “Not really. My skin changes.”

  “I forgot. All you lot with your special skin.”

  Lycaste tucked his knees under his chin, listening to the invisible water churn past. “I’m not like these people.”

  They docked at a shape in the darkness among the slap of waves striking an unseen jetty. Looking up, Lycaste saw faintly lit sections of wall, and across the water another distant island burning tiny wobbling reflections into the black fjord.

  They led him without restraints across the broad wooden jetty to a recessed gate in the bulk of the massive wall. The Intermediary knocked gently but urgently on the woven metal of the gate, suddenly illuminated by a kindling light above their heads. Lycaste could hear music coming from the far shore of the other island, drifting vocals accompanied by instruments. The two weren’t supposed to blend—even Lycaste, from his brief study of music, knew that—but the combined sound was beautiful and sad nonetheless, suddenly reaffirming why he had been taken all this way. He stepped back a little from the gate, attracting vague attention from the Secondling.

  The door opened with the rasp of a multitude of locks and they proceeded through into an unlit, low-ceilinged chamber. Once inside, the music vanished. The person who had opened the door for them remained at the front, apparently unconcerned with Lycaste’s presence.

  The floor changed from boards to stone as they arrived at a glowing antechamber. Lycaste ran his hand along the delicately patterned wall, granulated and pocked like the substance of egg-shells, reminding himself that it was still just a house, and these were just men. Smaller, more refined, perhaps, but men like he was.

  In the long room their guide stopped the procession to examine whatever it was he had let into his home. Lycaste was pushed to the front. Their escort was a boy, not yet twenty, but he was unmistakably Callistemon’s brother. Lycaste met his eye long enough to see the familiarities. The boy nodded, announced something swiftly to the men in High Second and then led them deeper into the labyrinth of chambers. Now that there was light, Lycaste could see the ornamentation of the place: painted statues and busts, sweeping murals that outshone Pentas’s best efforts, even the walls here were carved-relief stories running from left to right like writing. Inlaid in the stone were shimmering lines of pinstripe colour. He reached out to touch them but was swiftly rebuked by the Intermediary. They crossed a hall that opened into the night, revealing the first few feet of a sculpted garden. Two bright stars, very close together, shone above the hedges. Cuprum and Stannum, the elements most common in the Menyanthes jungle.

  At the next doorway, Callistemon’s brother stopped and waited for them, a tall door standing open. The guide looked at Lycaste one more time, taking in his thin, hairy extremities on the way up to contemplate his face, and gestured for him to enter. The door closed behind him, a snicking latch sealing any hope outside.

  Lycaste patrolled his new quarters with the unease of someone expecting a long-overdue practical joke. Was that it? They were going to leave him alone? He reminded himself it was the middle of the night, so the rest of the household was most likely asleep. He’d have until morning to settle in.

  At the far end of the room stood a bell-shaped, man-sized cage with its hatch ajar. Lined up against both walls were more busts, though as he made his way past them, Lycaste noted the similarity in their dainty features. Callistemon’s family. On a plinth at the entrance to the cage stood one last disembodied head, painted black. He had to climb into the cage to see the face. It was his victim, immortalised in stone. Lycaste noted the angle, the position. He was supposed to contemplate the deceased while he rotted in his cell, perhaps weep for mercy as Callistemon looked on. He looked around, considering moving the plinth back against the wall, his mind weighing the possible consequences. He decided to leave it, sitting next to the wall and staring at the back of the statue’s head.

  If Sotiris had not abandoned him after all, if the Immortal had some plan to find him, then he had best do it soon. Lycaste had no idea how it might be done, or why Sotiris would want to go out of his way to do it at all. There was no favour he could offer in return, no reward he could give that was likely to interest a man who’d lived for twelve and a half thousand years.

  Then there was Jasione. If he didn’t escape he would never see her again. He expected, though, after a moment’s solemn consideration while he looked at a fat bust of what he presumed was Callistemon’s mother, that he would see all three of them here, at whatever trial he was being prepared for, forced to give their accounts as he had his. What nonsense would Silene invent to save herself? Lycaste shook his head, wondering if Jasione was here right now, in Callistemon’s old home.

  Moving his gaze to the next statue, Lycaste fancied he heard sobbing. It was a small, lonely sound coming from somewhere deep in the labyrinth of hallways beyond his room. He stood and went to the panelled door, pressing his ear against it. He was thinking of trying to find a drinking glass somewhere to see if it would amplify the sound when the door opened.

  Another Callistemon look-alike entered, though he was much older than the last. Perhaps the elder brother the Plenipotentiary had once mentioned.

  “I am Xanthostemon,” said the broad man in accented Tenth, presumably because he thought Lycaste wouldn’t understand anything else. He pointed casually at a bust Lycaste hadn’t come to yet, his own. The man’s skin was very yellow, with a whitish tinge around his palms and lips. He looked like he might be reaching his century. Xanthostemon walked over to the cage and checked inside.

  “Penstemon said you were fair, handsome.” He looked over his shoulder, eyebrows raised. “Penstemon—the one who brought you here, my younger brother.”

  Lycaste waited to see what the man would do while he stood awkwardly by the closed door.

  “We read your … note,” Xanthostemon said, opening the cage aperture a little wider an
d leaning on it. “It would be best—and for your own safety—if you got used to your new home.” He pointed at the cage. Lycaste stared stupidly at him, looking for the trap. “There’s water inside for you,” the man said, waiting.

  He shuffled forwards and climbed in.

  Xanthostemon swung the cage shut and left the chamber, the distant weeping drifting through the momentarily open door again. Lycaste sat cross-legged and looked at Callistemon’s face. It was a perfect likeness, if a little idealised. The man’s curls had been scruffier, even when he’d made an effort before dinner, and his neck had perhaps not been so heroically muscular as that. He stretched to see the thing better, observing the chipped paint around the nose and chin where it must have been dropped or thrown. Perhaps it was rage rather than sadness he was hearing through the carved shell-layers of the walls.

  The trial required him to be alive, he remembered Rubus telling him that, alive enough to answer the flow of simple and perhaps predictable questions that the Intermediary had assured him would be posed. His head might necessarily have to be left in a reasonable condition, but little else. He examined the bucket in the middle of the floor, stirring its water with a shaking fingertip. No gold flecks. He smirked even as he trembled, thinking he ought to complain and tell them he was used to finer stuff.

  Everything but his head, and maybe his heart, was surplus to understanding and response. He took stock of his arms as if seeing them for the first time, his long skinny legs, bony knees sticking out like bolts. His eyes drifted between his thighs, absently cupping himself as he visualised some of the depraved things his vengeful gaolers might wish to try on him.

  A key turned in the lock. Lycaste removed his hand guiltily from his groin and hid it behind his back. One by one, a pallid collection of people entered the chamber. Penstemon and Xanthostemon pushed past and directed them to a perpendicular bench with carved animal feet that Lycaste had assumed was ornamental in its ridiculousness, and the three women sat to examine him. The elderly lady dabbing at her eyes with a shining piece of silk was clearly the matriarch, Callistemon’s mother. Her body was mercifully mostly folds, making her look more like some rotund weeping slug. The overpowering smell of cinnamon that had accompanied them into the room was most likely coming from her hair, which was powdered and piled into what must have been the latest fashion. Wedged on either side of her were two daughters, one of them monkeyish and sickly looking, as if she hadn’t seen sun all year, the other rather attractive, if only by comparison. Lycaste studied them in return through the bars since he had nowhere to hide, a caged and wary animal. He could see Callistemon in all of them, five sets of his victim’s eyes staring at him.

  “What a poor, bedraggled creature,” declared the mother softly in Plain Second, her voice hoarse. “I see no beauty in it, I don’t care what everyone’s saying.”

  The fairer daughter was looking intently at him. She stood from the ottoman, stepping closer to the cage.

  “Cassiope,” murmured Xanthostemon.

  She glanced back at her brother, who was standing by the doorway. “I just want to see him properly.”

  Lycaste watched the sway of her hips and the lines of her body as she came to the bars, meeting her small eyes as she looked up at him. Her hair, bunned and curled like her mother’s, was an unpowdered burnished gold.

  Cassiope ran her gaze over his face and neck, casually dropping it to his lower half and up again. “I don’t think they exaggerated, Mother,” she said, angling her head slightly back towards the bench. “You must admit, he’s very … unusual.”

  Lycaste let his eyes drift across her, taking in the small, pale nipples and blonde down that wandered south of her navel, hair so scantly suggested that it might not be there at all.

  “They say you killed my brother for a woman, Cherry,” she said quietly, so nobody else could hear. “That’s what they say. You must have loved her with all your heart.”

  Her hand slipped something small and slim and white out of her bunned hair. Lycaste only noticed after a moment that it wasn’t white, but reflective.

  “That was the trouble with Callistemon—he always got what he wanted.”

  She snarled and thrust the blade between the bars at Lycaste’s midriff, stabbing as far as she could before he could react. Xanthostemon’s arms appeared swiftly around Cassiope’s to drag her away from the cage. She struggled and swore, twisting to spit at Lycaste. Her brother swung her off her feet and carried her out in screams of fury. The other daughter scampered to follow, panic-stricken, leaving Penstemon and his mother in the chamber.

  Lycaste put his hands to his stomach, watching the blood well between his fingers. It was deep, the wound stinging somewhere far inside him. Already he could feel the pain beginning to take root at the end of the cut, though the bleeding had stopped. His knees gave way as the mother approached, dabbing her dry eyes occasionally with the silk, her son following closely behind, a small smile stretching the unlined skin around his mouth. With Penstemon’s help she manoeuvred the black bust of Callistemon until it was against the centre of the cage’s door, looking in at him. Lycaste rolled to watch them, clutching his wet stomach, the burning agony doubling with each heartbeat, as if the knife had been dipped in something caustic. Perhaps it had.

  When she had finished, the fat lady looked at him once more, then dropped her handkerchief through the bars. She shook her head and took her son’s arm to leave.

  Lycaste tried to roll himself towards the bucket, but something inside him was snipped, broken. It felt as if a giant pair of garden shears were cutting him in half every time he twisted his torso, so he stopped, lying and listening to the waves of pain pulse through him.

  “Sotiris,” he whispered to himself, eyes squeezed shut.

  A convulsion caused him to press too hard on the wound, reopening it. Lycaste cried out, clamping his teeth together and groping for the silk handkerchief, jamming it into the hole in his belly. Darkness settled around the edge of his vision, mischievously darting this way and that. Gradually it won more ground until it grew bored of the game, and the lights went out.

  Elatine

  The small, sturdy bridge across the water looked like the best option, the booming detonations still coming from farther down where the lake broadened. The crossing was undefended save for a cannon some distance off, the walled city of Yuvileiene still standing guard between the bridge across the narrowest point and Elatine’s attacking regiments. Sotiris strolled along, trying to enjoy the autumnal chill, watching the dark blue waters course alongside the banks. He had swapped his Utopian feather cloak for one of the lighter, verdigris-weathered Dongral coats of armour, actually pleasantly cool where the holed plates allowed air to circulate.

  He crossed the bridge, noticing a company of Dongral—the legion dedicated to defending the borders of the Second—walking briskly towards him, probably with the intention of manning the heavy gun on the bank he’d just left. Sotiris passed to one side, letting the tall Melius breeze past. He sat for a little while on the stone wall of the bridge as one of them stopped to look back, the blind spots in the Melius’s mind hiding Sotiris with room to spare. The Amaranthine hadn’t been seen, merely felt, like something glimpsed out of the corner of your eye. The Melius stood for a while, unconvinced, and then sheepishly hurried after his companions.

  He remembered, as he sat, the bridge he had crossed in his dream. He felt the rough growthstone between his fingers, his shoulders tense. What he had done to Lycaste was beyond reprehensible, perhaps one of the cruellest things he had ever done to another person—even if they were of a different, arguably lesser species. But it was all he could do, all he could think of doing, that might save the Firmament from what he saw when he slept. No Amaranthine had ever before gained the ability to infiltrate another’s dreams; it was unheard of, unknown. But Sotiris’s instincts had told him enough already—that Aaron was no Amaranthine. Wherever the Long-Life now resided, almost certainly west of here in the grand capital o
f the First, he wore the appearance of a kindly, middle-aged and anonymous fellow, betrayed only by eyes that could not decide on a colour when the light touched them. Sotiris had no idea what Aaron’s true self—whatever lurked beneath that bland and accommodating façade—might really be, but he was determined to find out. And poor Lycaste was to be his bait.

  He gazed over the plantations towards the city, hearing the thud of heavy guns as he removed his helmet. He’d have to remind himself to put it back on once he’d crossed the battlefield, for random shells remained considerably less susceptible to trickery than the Melius who fired them.

  The battle, though still in its infancy, was spectacular, in its own way. The gleaming city, pinkish against the miles of plantations from which it rose, was only being struck lightly so far, the cannon on the far hill more interested in the massed troops dug in among the palms. There, across the fields, huge fanned bursts of smoke smudged the whitish sky, brown clouds drifting with the brisk wind before the crack and thunder followed across the air. He could actually see the shells, incredibly fast, arcing and slamming into the fields, and wondered how many were hitting their targets.

  Sotiris scanned the fretting city, seeing twinkling guns and troops crowding the ramparts, looking for a way around that wouldn’t involve wading through the shallow trenches of the plantation. In an hour or so, the regiments camped in their temporary paper city on the far line of hills—themselves just a thicker line in the smoky distance—would be moving forward to engage the foot-soldiers as their guns targeted Yuvileiene itself. Sotiris wasn’t sure how effective the soldiery of this strategy was, but Elatine’s luck wasn’t failing yet. He’d fought across vast tracts of eastern jungle to get this far, the fingers of his legions finding the last soft spot into the rural fringes of the Second here at Yuvileiene. Sotiris got the sense that many of the outlying Provinces had held out only long enough to convince the First of their loyalty, great swathes exhaling in relief at last as Elatine’s legions marched through, triumphant in the conquest of their new territories. Of course he’d heard of the atrocities, but Sotiris had chosen to believe they were greatly exaggerated. He needed this army; turning a blind eye here and there was all that would secure it for him. For the hundredth time his thoughts returned to Aaron’s offer at the café, the promise he had made. It was in those subjective dream-moments that Sotiris had begun to fear his own weaknesses, and to strengthen his resolve.