by Tom Toner
Others came in, their faces stained with filth and gore, their pinkish eyes haunted. They were hauling something that scraped along the flagstones. It was too low for Lycaste to see.
“Clear some space!” an authoritative voice shouted and the soldiers fanned out, exposing an armoured Firstling body being lifted onto the pushed-together tables. The body’s cuirass had been bent and hammered by some huge impact, and Lycaste saw that pieces of it were embedded in the Firstling’s torn-looking face.
Huerepo muttered something, struggling, and Lycaste reluctantly removed his hand.
“Filago,” the Vulgar whispered.
Lycaste didn’t know the name, but he kept his mouth shut, watching a Thirdling fleshdoctor bending over the man and fiddling with shaky hands at the clasp of his case. The Firstling soldiers in the room paced and muttered, some glaring at the doctor. The Secondlings looked too numb and shocked to care. One turned to the larder, his yellow face expressionless, and began to try to open the door.
“Staunch!” the fleshdoctor announced as a spurt of blood splashed him in the face. “I need linen!”
The Secondling turned back and went to the table, blocking the bloody scene from view.
“We can’t stay in here,” hissed Lycaste.
“Why not?” whispered Huerepo. “There’s no way out.”
“There must be!” He looked around in the darkness of the larder.
A tall Secondling soldier clad in a huge banner cape, muddy and bloodstained around the hem, rattled into the doorway. He raised the visor of his plumed helm and stared in horror at the scene on the table.
A general who had been pacing up and down stopped to regard him. “Goniolimon?”
Lycaste pushed his eye to the gap again to see the man, his heart thumping. Goniolimon Berenzargol, Callistemon’s father.
The Secondling came to his senses and looked round at the general. “Skylings, First Lord, in the grounds.”
The Melius on the table moaned as the fleshdoctor extracted another shard from his face, dropping it into a mixing bowl with a clink. The Firstling general glanced grimly at the high windows, taking Gonio-limon by the arm and leading him over to the larder door.
“Listen carefully,” he said in a whisper. “Take Protector Filago to the roof. There was a Vulgar galleon stationed up there—with any luck it may be there still.”
“What do I tell—”
“Here.” There came the rasp of metal on metal. Lycaste peered through the gap.
“It contains two hundred length of silk,” said the general, lifting a chain over his head and passing it to Goniolimon. At the end of the chain dangled an intricately wrought pendant. The Firstling checked over his shoulder and opened the complicated clasp for the Secondling to see.
“The Vulgar won’t refuse you.”
“I won’t flatter you by saying I’m disappointed, Reginald,” said Stone, looking up from his wine.
Bonneville stared into his eyes, his body very still. He could do nothing but picture how he looked to the Perennial. An eroded, antique memory of the little priest’s house in Colwyn Bay flittered through his mind, rain battering the roof tiles. This is what happens to boys who steal.
“You think you’re the only one who tried to assist the Jalan?” Stone’s eyes narrowed for a moment. “Elatine will bow to us even when he reaches the First.” He glanced at Elumo. “We did not imagine he would have such eager help, however.”
Elumo rose from his seat, not looking at Bonneville. He put the drink down. “You come to us with lies, Sire Bonneville, financing our enemies behind our backs.”
“I never lied, not to you!” Bonneville blurted. Stone’s eyes widened in fury.
Elumo looked at him at last. “The Lacaille schooner you spoke of, the Nomad Class? A figment of your imagination, I think. Because of you, thousands of my men died above Mars-Gaol, and the Lacaille now hold the Satrapy.”
“Enough of this, Elumo,” Stone said, shaking his head. “This one roasts tonight—there’s no point trying to make him see sense.”
Bonneville could feel himself shaking as they looked at him, no longer trying to quell it. “It was the truth,” he implored, looking into Elumo’s eyes. “The delivery of the Soul Engine was—”
“I will not hear any more!” Stone roared, thumping his fist on the table. The air filled with static, snapping from the silken fibres of Bonneville’s cloak. Elumo stepped back, a fearfully expectant look suddenly crossing his face.
Stone hesitated, his eyes suddenly flicking to the darkening window. Elumo turned, too, the helmet clutched in his hand.
The guns on the lawns were firing into life, making their glasses jump from the tables as if animate. Each throaty boom shook through Bonneville’s innards, and he was gratified to see Elumo flinch. Stone went to the window cautiously, peering out into the twilight, while Elumo made to leave. Bonneville saw his chance.
“Here!” he hissed, opening his palms and extending his will into the chamber. A scorching blast of air engulfed the space, invisible but for the shimmer. The walls peeled as Stone’s body withered and crumpled, loosing ash as the window blew out. Elumo, slightly further from the source of Bonneville’s rage, was blasted to his knees, the skin of his face melting and separating. Bonneville let him scream, watching with a trembling excitement as the eyes in his unsightly Vulgar head burst, the sockets fuming, before delivering another blast of heat that blew open the door and set the corridor aflame.
He crunched over to Elumo’s burning body and stamped his heel onto one of the ringed hands, putting out the flames. He bent quickly and tore three of the rings from the denuded fingers—one was pliable to the touch, on the verge of melting—and stuffed them in a pocket. He stopped to inspect some crisped Vulgar skin that had come off in his hand before wiping it carefully on the ruined wall. Just one more thing they’d never suspected—that he might have lied, oh so slightly, about his age.
He left the remains of the inner dining chamber, where moaning Vulgar guards still rolled about the smoking floors, and scuttled through the still-undamaged grand hall, noticing that some Secondlings were already engaged in ripping down the precious, fabulously intricate tapestries. Bonneville stopped in the candlelit chamber, eyeing them warily. They noticed him and paused in their work.
“The roof,” he said, as loudly and resonantly as he could, “is that Voidship still there?”
“I believe so, Amaranthine,” said one in faltering Unified, bowing fearfully. “Follow me, if it pleases.”
The soldier took him along the passageways of the grand house, pausing at some service doors and directing him through. Bonnev-ille could hear the fighting spreading within the house, and several Thirdlings brandishing fire-tongs and curtain rails ran nervously past.
“Up here?” he asked, pointing to a spiral stair rising at the end of the linen chambers.
The Secondling hesitated for a moment, directing his eyes at the floor. “Take me with you, Amaranthine.” He raised his head. “Please! I would be loyal and true, the finest servant there ever was!”
Bonneville stared at him, snorting a laugh, and jogged for the stairs. The Secondling followed. “Please, Amaranthine!” He reached out a hand to grab Bonneville’s cloak.
Bonneville turned and lashed out, his fingers missing the Melius but the force of his rage igniting the man’s hair. The Secondling yelped and beat at his head. Bonneville ran on, not looking back.
He took the polished growthstone steps three at a time, sure he had missed his chance. With every pounding heartbeat his certainty that it was all for nothing increased. At the top of the stairs he paused for breath, leaning against the cold stone. The passage was built for a species of person much taller than he was and the wide steps had been especially tiring to negotiate. He looked up. A locked wooden trapdoor was all that led to the roof from here. Bonneville grabbed it, melting through the metal in a few seconds, and thrust it open.
The evening air ripped through his hair, almost
blowing him back against the trapdoor. There among the spires of the house was the Vulgar ship, its engines thrumming through the metal tiles of the roof. Across the spires, Vulgar and Lacaille fought, the tiny goblin men swearing and grappling, some slipping on the tiles and falling. Bonneville recoiled as a white Lacaille crashed to the roof in front of him, a flaming hole puncturing its chest. More were firing on the Voidship’s open hatch and the Vulgar just inside, hammering the metal hull until it had begun to glow and deform. The ship, trying in vain to pick them off with its light nose falconets, flared its superluminal engines like an animal in danger, bursting liquid green flame across the rooftop and deafening all closest to it.
Bonneville ducked back into the trapdoor, his hands at his ears, and leaned against the stone.
He rocked his body, eyes compressed shut, understanding finally what the Long-Life had achieved. With the Treaty of Silp sabotaged and the Vulgar and Lacaille at each other’s throats again, Aaron had ensured that no two Prism empires could be used against him. Perhaps he’d even known of Bonneville’s plot all along, waiting until the moment the Shell was being transported—and at its most vulnerable—to seize it. There were no deals now, no loyalty. The Lacaille, just like their sworn enemy the Vulgar, had been thrown against each other, their forces employed to the hilt in a war created just to distract. Anything to keep the Long-Life’s enemies at arm’s length for the small amount of time he needed.
The door rattled as something tried to pull it open. Bonneville flinched, his gaze darting back down the stairway.
He ran, steadying himself against the wall with the tips of his fingers as he heard them come through. Sounds of clattering boots followed him. He missed a step.
Bonneville felt the slip before it had fully happened, his feet swinging out from under him, arms pinwheeling to find a banister that wasn’t there. His last full realisation before his skull burst on a stone step ten feet below was that he’d just done a small, wet and totally miraculous fart in his underclothes.
Lycaste and Huerepo emerged from the larder into the dim kitchen. The logs on the hearths had burned down a little, filling the chamber with a haze of smoke that mixed with the scents of sweat and blood.
Filago had been moved into the upper chambers on the pretence that he needed rest to recover, while the others had filed out to guard the entrance to the lower hall. Only Lycaste and Huerepo knew where the Lord Protector of the First was really being taken.
“That galleon on the roof,” he said to Huerepo, peeking around the corner of the arch and into the staff antechambers. The sounds of fighting outside were explosive, yet the corner of the house they were in still felt relatively quiet. “Do you think you could … fly it? Make it fly?”
Huerepo shook his head, dumping the contents of his many pockets so that he could fill them with fruit and cheeses from the larder. Lycaste saw that the Vulgar had been carrying a few books on him, but they were all printed in some angular, foreign text. “I’ve never flown anything before, you might as well ask a Melius—” His expression became suddenly sheepish. “Apologies, a Vulgar saying.” He looked wistfully at one of the books he’d discarded and then back at Lycaste’s nakedness. “No pockets,” he muttered grumpily and threw it into one of the fires.
“What was that?” Lycaste asked, checking again through the archway.
“Just an adventure book,” Huerepo replied, a touch defensively.
He considered the soldier a moment. “So what did you do? Before today?”
“Pump operator. I lived on a tanker in the Sea of Winth until I was drafted.”
“You speak our languages well enough.”
Huerepo performed a little bow. “First shares some similarities with Vulgar, but thank you, all the same.”
Lycaste nodded, motioning the Vulgar to the doorway. “I don’t think it’s going to get any quieter than this. Let’s go.”
They made their way across the linked chambers and into the under-hall, pausing behind pillars and curtains whenever troops—usually increasingly ragged-looking and skinny Secondlings and Thirdlings—ran past. Lycaste noticed that some had empty sacks with them, perhaps heading for the kitchen larders. When the group of Melius were almost at the kitchens, the sound of smashing glass stopped them in their tracks. The first of them screamed and fled in the other direction, followed shortly after by a small, thin creature quite a lot like Huerepo, except its face was a slightly less angelic shape and its eyes smaller. It snarled and produced an unpleasant-looking pistol, firing into the crowd of running Melius.
“What’s that?” hissed Lycaste.
“Op-Ful-Lacaille,” the Vulgar said. “Infantry. Those cannon in the garden must have been taken care of.”
Ten more Lacaille joined the first, those at the end of the procession emerging from the kitchen unpacking themselves from bulky rubber suits with ropes and strings attached. They threw the padded orange inflatables down on the ground and continued on, sniffing the air around them with curiosity and gabbling together in a foreign tongue.
“Can you understand them?” he asked Huerepo.
“Yes. They’re looking for a Vulgar prince who is here.”
“A prince?”
“Princeling Elumo. I’ve heard of him. They’ll try and ransom him when they find him, I imagine—probably something just for themselves, not on anyone’s order.”
They followed behind the yammering Lacaille, ducking once as a firefight broke out with some better-equipped Secondling soldiers. Shots and bolts of light slammed around the under-hall, smashing chunks out of the stonework and setting fire to one of the huge wooden beams that arched into the ceiling. Lycaste was not surprised when the last of the Secondlings tried to run. The Lacaille brought him down, laughing as he screamed.
“The Amaranthine told you where to find this man?” asked Huerepo when they were sure the Lacaille had moved on.
“Upstairs somewhere, in one of the prison chambers.”
“One of them? How many are there?”
“Just help me, will you?” Lycaste sighed, spotting a passage that appeared to lead upwards. “He’ll come and find us when it’s all over, I’m sure of it.”
Transformation
Ghaldezuel had hung back as the foolish Vulgar started to run his mouth, partly in the spirit of self-preservation—finely attuned, he liked to think—but also out of simple curiosity.
He had, of course, been aware of his cargo’s preserved contents—one of the two beasts left over from another age, some millions of years old and surely inestimably valuable—but only recently learned of their significance. They were Old World history, nothing he usually concerned himself with. People–early Hiomens—found the creatures long before his race had even come into existence in the Firmament, and as such their importance had faded over the millennia to little more than an archaeological footnote relating to a forlorn and forgotten planet, a place where horrors still roamed. He had considered holding on to the precious corpse should the deal turn sour, knowing it would be worth a fortune to the right Amaranthine buyer, but this Aaron the Long-Life struck him as being a dangerous, unpredictable sort of Immortal.
So he had waited, and listened to what Corphuso had to say to the Lord of the Amaranthine, his long ears straining to hear the import of the babbling Vulgar’s sudden revelations. Something about machines and ghosts, monsters and mistakes. Ghaldezuel knew enough about the fabled prospect of machine intelligence to state happily that such a thing did not exist—or if it ever had, it was made and destroyed swiftly by a more powerful lost generation of Amaranthine, the Decadents, people the Immortals never spoke of. What all this had to do with a stinking, mummified cadaver more than seventy million years old was beyond him.
He watched Corphuso disgrace himself until he could take no more, sure it would somehow impact on the Lacaille and their handling of the precious goods. That was when he tried to stop the Vulgar inventor himself.
But he was too late.
The gun had
melted into a sparkle of liquid drops before Corphuso had time to pull the trigger and splashed across the bronze floor of the chapel like a thrown jug of water. A spell cast by one of the Perennials, eager to demonstrate his loyalty—and perhaps his powers—to the master. Ghaldezuel watched Corphuso stare slackly at the mess of molten metal in his hand, no doubt unable in his shock to feel it burning into his skin, and then rush recklessly at the Long-Life, screaming incoherently. He disappeared within the shadowy folds of the man’s robe as if he had run through a waterfall, the material parting around him momentarily and flowing back into place.
Everyone in the chapel held their breath.
Aaron looked down at himself calmly, stepping to one side. Corphuso was nowhere to be seen. The Lacaille soldiers glanced at each other but held fast, and Ghaldezuel, his own shock notwithstanding, was proud of them. Even the Perennials were glancing surreptitiously around the chapel, unsure quite how the trick had been accomplished. Ghaldezuel watched their faces for any sign that this freakish show was for his benefit, but the Amaranthine looked genuinely mystified. It was as if the man was nothing but a projection, some trick of the light.
“Now, to business,” Aaron concluded smartly, sweeping his robes around him and stepping towards the circle of Amaranthine. “Would you?”
Two of the Perennials, one immensely fat and bejewelled, the other sallow and lean like a caricature, approached the corpse in its glistening vat. The fat one had upon his hands a pair of fine damask gloves. He stooped over the chest, eyes going to the petrified monster’s face before delicately gripping it behind the neck and around the legs, as one might carry a bride. Ghaldezuel, of course, would never have a bride, but he had seen the process at Lacaille wedding ceremonies as a child. Awful, deceitful affairs. A waste of precious years.
The thin Perennial lifted the ancient Voidsuit—apparently as light as air—from the second compartment and passed it to another. The Amaranthine who took it regarded it with fastidious reverence, holding it at arm’s length and gazing up at the painted ceiling.
