The Tropic of Eternity

by Tom Toner

  Eranthis turned to the scullery window. Pentas’s shape sat there, diffuse behind the glass, day in and day out, the warmth of the hob her only company.

  The Old Torinn, the first real Westerling city on the road out of Tail, was most travellers’ introduction to the harsh realities of Western life. Every newcomer passing through its gates arrived within a labyrinth of wooden corridors, walking divested of their luggage and means of transport to an open square surrounded by spyholes. Like much in the West, a land of covered eyes and darkened houses, to look was to judge: conversations with strangers were held with downcast eyes or from behind sheets of cloth, and portraits of any kind were forbidden in the city. Even personal questions, innocent though they might be as a way of getting to know someone, were permitted only after a second meeting.

  Pentas followed her sister and the Amaranthine, the old codger disguised this time as another handsome local specimen, through the maze and out into the cool square filled with wooden cubicles. The sound of murmuring conversations packed the acoustic space like the drone of bees, while up in the walls hundreds of painted spyholes flapped open and clacked shut, examining them covertly. They followed a chalk line on the stone to their own cubicle, taking a seat.

  “Don’t say anything,” Jatropha muttered, hunched at the table.

  Eranthis glanced at her sister, sitting mute and lost in her own world. Not much danger of that. Pentas and Jatropha hadn’t spoken a word to each other for the ten whole days since the child’s abduction— quite a feat in the Wheelhouse’s cramped cabins. She looked at them both for a moment, realising that this was the closest they’d come physically, too, forced together like this at the Westerly border.

  Eranthis yawned and scanned the holes in the walls, watching their little wooden doors slamming open and shut, scrawny Western hands hanging on the hinges. A spyhole on the wall behind them remained open for an uncomfortable amount of time, she noticed, only clacking closed when she twisted to look directly at it. In the cubicle beside them she could see a pair of large, red feet with a rope of bells around one ankle. Her eyes wandered to the table in front of them. It had been scratched into over the years, names and dates and little pictograms drawn and written in the styles of every Province. She spotted Jalan script: boxy letters chiselled hard into the wood.

  “Oh, come on.” She sighed, rocking back and forth on her stool. Pentas begin to carve her own patterns into the table with a stylus provided on a string, Jatropha watching dispassionately. After a moment, he grabbed her hand. Eranthis stared at them, turning her eyes to the table.

  Ara

  She’d begun to carve her daughter’s name.

  As if on cue, a slot in the panel opened up, exposing a delicate Westerly mouth.

  “Can I look, please?” the mouth asked, showing the blue-stained teeth of a compulsive sweet-eater.

  “You may,” Jatropha replied at once, having clearly been through the process before. The uppermost slot was shoved aside, and eyes—still disconnected from the mouth by a gap between the slots—peered in at them.

  “You are a resident,” the disjointed face said to Jatropha. It wasn’t a question.

  “I live on the Ogrile Hill,” he replied. “These are my nieces.”

  The eyes took no interest in Eranthis or Pentas. “Yes, family is fine. You should not have been sent here if you’re local. This is the wrong box.”

  “Ah, but I have meetings,” Jatropha said. “I need a night token.”

  The mouth issued a sigh, pausing while some fingers came into view to massage the brow. “I can give you one. But you’re in the wrong box.”

  “One’s enough, thank you.” Jatropha took the token as it came through the mouth hole and stood to leave. “Won’t happen again.”

  “It most certainly won’t. I’ll be making a note of this.”

  “Thank you, please do,” he replied over his shoulder. He glanced at Eranthis. “Come on.”

  “Why were we in there, if we didn’t need to be?” asked Eranthis, running to catch up.

  “So that Callistemon’s brother knows where to meet me tonight.”

  The bonestone gates were innocuous, set into a high, slogan-stained wall peeling with bills and boards. Weeds had sprung up in the hinges and danced to the light wind. Jatropha gave the place little more than a cursory glance as he ascended the steps and let them in.

  Eranthis followed behind, closing the gate after herself and Pentas.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, after the moment had passed.

  “It’s home.” Jatropha smiled, looking at her. “Now and again.”

  The house was of the Nostrum conical style; a bell-shaped tower of faded blue. The gardens, groves of shady olives that looked recently tended, extended right up to the door.

  “When did you last come here?” she asked, taking in the small, weed-free pools.

  “The year before last, for a night or two.”

  The house itself was unlocked, the front doors opening onto a grand hallway. Jatropha threw his sunhat onto a chair and stalked off, slamming a door behind him. Eranthis and Pentas looked at one another, taking in the cool, high-ceilinged hallway, the walls decorated with framed pictures.

  Nearly every other door in the place was locked. Eranthis couldn’t help but wonder whether it was just the symptom of a neglected house, or because the Immortal had something to hide. Those few left unlocked opened onto small, bare chambers stacked with boxes or piles of framed pictures thick with dust. Occasionally she glimpsed a troop of Butler Birds going about their business making the house habitable, and assumed they lived here all year round.

  She sat in one of the bare chambers, listening to the birds’ mutterings, the clang of pans and dishes. There must have been thousands of years’ worth of history in this house, hidden behind its graffitied, street-facing walls. Memories from a time when her and Jatropha’s families might have been related, perhaps even one and the same. Eranthis heard a grumbling sound and noticed a plastic box, about the size of a person’s head, near her shin. It had white slabs like feet sticking out beneath it. She nudged it with her toe and it abruptly woke up, staggering around the room. Twin spots of colour appeared on its forward-facing side and it swiftly located the door, stumbling out of the chamber and reeling along the hall. Eranthis went to the door and watched it bumping off the walls until it finally disappeared around a corner.

  The land to either side of The Old Torinn’s swampy river had been turned into a lush garden that ran through the middle of the city, thick with date palms and papyrus. This dense, forested valley was the clandestine site of the city’s merchant courts, and as a result of the Westerly attitude to introductions, business could only be conducted there in the dark. Unsurprisingly, the practice tended to attract some of the more nefarious Westerlings, those come to take advantage of the rich pickings afforded by blind midnight transactions. Merchants who went there tended to huddle in groups around large bonfires, quite aware of the dangers, until commanded by law to venture away from the fires and out into the blackness just so that money could change hands. To stay visible to each other in the gloom, they coloured themselves white, and it was amid a spectral woodland of white forms that Jatropha discovered the fire he was looking for.

  He walked into the light, the eyes of the people there rolling to avoid seeing him even as they said their hellos. Jatropha did the same, studying their feet.

  Three to his left: a set of yellowish, notably Secondling toes.

  He looked up, meeting the man’s gaze.

  Xanthostemon Berenzargol, SecondPrince, was considerably older and broader than his brother Callistemon had been, but the similarity was still striking. He looked at Jatropha expectantly for a moment, before gesturing to the darkness of the palm grove behind the fire. They stepped together into the gloom.

  “They think there might be a Skyling on the prowl,” Xanthostemon said, glancing away from the fire and into the rustling palms. He spoke fine Modan, the lilting High S
econd hardly showing. “People are being found in bad ways.”

  “Well, we won’t be long out here,” Jatropha said. “The Awger?”

  Xanthostemon looked at him hard in the firelight, as if trying to see past his disguise. “It didn’t come this way, but Awgers have no special loyalty to one another. I’ll find it.”

  Jatropha nodded, conscious that they’d broken about three city laws already during their brief discussion. “Do you have time to come back to the house?”

  Xanthostemon looked off to the city’s lights, broken up by dark palm fronds. “We’re leaving first Quarter. She’s with you, then? The girl?”

  Pentas was examining a series of framed Melius portraits when the sounds of the Butler Birds caught her attention. She peered around a corner, watching them as they busily lit fires in the house’s main reception room; something they hadn’t bothered to do for her or Eranthis, she noted. She felt her heart squirm in her chest: Jatropha was coming. And he was bringing someone.

  She waited, sweat prickling her skin, hardly noticing as the birds dusted their twiggy fingers and made to leave, bustling past her. The fires crackled, the scent of hot dust clogging the hall.

  Footsteps, just outside the door. Muffled conversation and a pause. That first click clack of a door being fiddled with, the sound that stops a heart.

  The Amaranthine entered, always startling her when she saw him in disguise, as he was now.

  She waited, a lump rising in her throat.

  Out of the darkness came a man that could have been Callistemon, half a year dead. He was heavier, more careworn, as if the corpse had sagged and pruned in its salty seaside grave. The twisted effigy of her lost love shot her a glance, a look that took her back as easily as a remembered scent.

  “Pentas,” Jatropha supplied, studying them from beside the fire, and she felt her legs weaken.

  The man’s expression stayed fixed as he advanced upon her, and Pentas let her shoulders drop, their eyes locked. His left fist was balled slightly, the tendons prominent, his breath coming out in a shudder. He loomed over her. Jatropha would stand and watch, she knew.

  But then Xanthostemon was dropping to one knee.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said quietly, eyes creasing shut.

  Pentas felt something crack open inside her, the tears already streaming down her face.

  The Butler Birds looked aggrieved to have to prepare dinner so late, until one stern word from Jatropha sent them scurrying to the kitchen. Eranthis watched him interact with them, annoyed to discover that she quite admired the way he handled his servants. There were jobs to do and no time for nonsense. She stood between doorways, watching Xanthostemon and Pentas talking quietly together in the adjoining room, switching her attention back to Jatropha as he harangued the birds. They were the same breed Lycaste had once owned, she supposed, though they looked a little plumper around the middle from all the years spent living idle in the company of Jatropha’s excellent food and wine.

  “Those lazy creatures,” he said, pushing past her to the dining room. “They’re lucky to have work at all.”

  Eranthis frowned, smiling, watching him fussing messily at the table. “Can I help? I feel a little useless just standing here.”

  He looked up at her, distracted, a colander in his hand. “No. Save your strength. Pentas will need you, later.”

  It came time to sit, the lanterns awakening, the fires puttering warmly in the grates, and Eranthis felt a growing tension at the table. Xanthostemon was tired, hardly eating, and it seemed clear that he’d rather be gone. Eranthis watched him, imagining with every mouthful the little Arabis spirited further and further away. There wasn’t time for this.

  “Its name is Billyup,” Xanthostemon said after a silence. “Though it goes by Brimhup, sometimes Yardlie.” His eyes moved to Pentas and then back to his plate before he spoke next. “It’s wanted for . . . a lot of things.”

  “Your cousin in Pan,” Eranthis said, “he’s on the trail, though?”

  Xanthostemon nodded. “He is. But it’s not just a case of tracking the beast, you understand. There are others after it, too. We have to be careful.”

  Jatropha swilled his wine in its cup, setting it aside without taking a sip. “How long?”

  Xanthostemon ate quietly for a while before he looked up. “It had a week’s head start. There are a lot of places to search.”

  They fell silent save for the quiet scrape of cutlery. It took Eranthis a while to notice that Xanthostemon was looking at her.

  “My brother mentioned you in his letters, too, Eranthis.”

  She glanced away from him, feeling a crawl of revulsion, remembering the way Callistemon had once looked at her. “Oh yes?”

  “He wrote fondly of you all, actually,” Xanthostemon said softly, sitting back.

  Eranthis thought for a while before she spoke, aware of Pentas’s charged presence beside her. “All the while knowing what he was going to do, you mean?”

  They stared at each other, before Pentas suddenly broke the spell.

  “He changed his mind,” she whispered.

  Xanthostemon looked back down at his plate. “Yes, at the last. He didn’t deserve his fate, despite his flaws.”

  Eranthis made no reply at first, picturing the man’s slow death from that interminable disease. “The illness was quick,” she lied, putting down her knife, not wanting to look him, or anyone else, in the eye as she spoke.

  For a long time, Xanthostemon didn’t respond. She felt his eyes on her, questioning, as if daring her to admit it wasn’t so. She steeled herself and looked up.

  “What illness would that be?” he asked. He sat very still, his fork laid aside.

  She glanced between Pentas and Jatropha, realising that Xanthostemon mustn’t have known. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought Jatropha, in his letter . . .”

  Xanthostemon glared at Jatropha for a moment. “They caught his murderer. The man came to our house. Don’t try to tell me that—”

  “What?” Pentas breathed, looking suddenly unwell.

  “Callistemon was ill,” Eranthis said. “He died from it. We saw it happen.” She glared furiously at Jatropha, understanding that some poor soul had paid for the Amaranthine’s thoughtlessness. “We buried him.”

  Xanthostemon was staring at the table, his mouth working gently. “But . . . the man, the man-boy, the Tenthling . . . He was with us, he—” He looked up. “Lycaste. Do you know that name?”

  “What?” Eranthis gasped.

  “It was Lycaste. They said he murdered my brother.”

  Pentas went pale.

  Jatropha leaned forward. “What are you saying, Xanthostemon?”

  “He stood trial,” Xanthostemon said, glancing between them. “But then the First, they came and took him.”

  The table fell silent but for their breath, the soft ticking of a clock somewhere growing suddenly, insistently loud.

  GATHERING

  The firelight was green, emanating from a wooded hillock in the marshes about half a Crule away. Billyup watched it intently for a while, unblinking, then continued his slog through the dark water, the Babbo bound up again in case of noise.

  For a week he’d waded the flat brown paddy fields, ears alert, fishing with a line in the evenings and plucking lollyseed from the banks of the ditches. He’d seen nobody except messenger birds stopping to rest in the holes in the marshes, managing to catch a few as they preened, reading their letters while he crunched them whole. Provincial news; the movements of small militias, the motions of money. A lady named Maluse wrote to her husband complaining of his absence, while sending another to her lover instructing him to come as fast as he could. To the Babbo he gave the feathers, and was amused to see how she loved the pink and blue and green little things. He’d taken some and sewn them into his cloak, hoping she might warm to living on his back.

  Billyup came level with the hillock. Voices drifted across the water to him.

  He waded closer, his ste
ps slow beneath the water so that he slid unheard to the hillock’s muddy edge. The flames of the fire rose high and slim, like a poplar tree made of light, and around them sat the lively, unmistakable silhouettes of Demian folk.

  He watched. There were six of the little mammalish people. Maybe a seventh relieving himself in the trees. They were drinking zest: Billyup could smell it. He shifted in the water, the mud having set a little around his feet.

  The Babbo began to grumble. He lifted a hand and bopped her on the head, realising too late that he oughtn’t to have done it. The thing cried out beneath her layers; a sharp squeal that penetrated the cloth like a blade, catching the attention of those at the fire. Billyup stumbled and almost fell, planting a hand in the mud to steady himself and whacking the Babbo again with the other.

  Now they were all observing him, furred black outlines.

  “Who’s this?” said one of the little people, staggering to the hillock’s edge and peering down at him. “An Awger, is it?”

  Billyup was acutely aware that his features were perfectly visible in the firelight. He pulled down his hood.

  “What’s it doing out here?” asked a soft, feminine voice. Billyup peered through his hood at her, shying from the light. They spoke in Modan, the dialect of the Outer West, but he could understand it well enough, being similar in form to Low Second.

  “You hungry? Will you sit?”

  Billyup wavered, trembling in the water, and scented again the bright smell of the zest. He’d sit with them, take some of that spirit, see what they were like, what they had.

  “Would it please you to see my tricks?”

  The Demian lady, Garew, had pretty eyes. He gazed at her furred face, then down at the beads in her hands.

  “See,” she said, running her little fingers along the beads. “Twenty balls of glass.”