The Tropic of Eternity

by Tom Toner

  But fortune, who until then had looked kindly upon the king, turned her back, and Dracunctus’s rule had ended suddenly one night when a shape blotted the stars outside his window, the prelude to a company of Skylings appearing and dragging him away. The bandits—Cunctus had found out later they were nothing but opportunistic Zelios that had made camp on the Greenmoon—had assumed the Amaranthine would stump up for the king’s release, keeping him chained but in good condition for some time while they waited for negotiations to begin. But the Amaranthine weren’t interested. The Firmament had just crowned a new Emperor: why couldn’t the First (still spooked by the loss of their own) follow their example and do the same?

  When the Zelioceti realised what was happening, Dracunctus was taken to the Lacaille moon of Harp-Zalnir and interned with hundreds of other wasted but still potentially useful prisoners, before being moved to the Grand-Mirl, a rusted Lacaille Colossus rented out to lesser breeds.

  Ghaldezuel listened in the darkness, imagining the romance of the scene, wondering whether to believe him.

  Gradually, Dracunctus had fallen in with the Firmamental Melius there, learning pidgin Unified and rising within their ranks. For ten years he all but ran the prison battleship, and when the time was right, every imprisoned creature there joined together under his rule and stormed the guard house. Wearing the chief jailor’s head on a chain around his neck, Cunctus and his new followers made at once for the fortress of Diezra, on the nearby moon of Nirlume, capturing it in one fell swoop and setting up home there.

  A happy age of plundering the nearby ports and moons followed, staving off the attentions of the rapidly weakening Lacaille navy with bribes and outright aggression, and Cunctus came to understand that a return in force to the Old World might now be possible. His family had done nothing for him while he languished in Zelio prisons, and he already possessed more martial power than every Old World ruler combined. But the Amaranthines’ interest in it as their holy centrepiece to the Firmament meant that it would forever remain a point of contention, whereas in the Investiture, forsaken and largely left to its own devices by the Immortals, he could rule absolute. So Cunctus elected to stay.

  For forty more years, he and his swelling city-state harassed their corner of the Investiture, spurring mass migrations of panicked Prism inwards to Firmament’s End and outwards to the Never-Never. By then, the Cunctites were powerful enough to consider taking a Vaulted Land and turned their slavering sights on the richest, closest of the baubles: Cancri, lying at the edge of the Firmament and all but undefended, akin to leaving the bulk of your life savings on your doorstep, guarded only by a frowny-faced scarecrow. Cunctus knew that with a few feints and traps (to absorb and annihilate the standing Pifoon armies stationed on the nearby Vaulted Lands) he could take the whole place, crust and innards all, close the orifice seas and batten down for the outrage.

  “What could they have done?” he asked Ghaldezuel, not looking at him. “Harangued me, surrounded the place, perhaps. But there is no winter in the Void; a Vaulted Land cannot be starved into submission by sieges.”

  Ghaldezuel rubbed his face, nodding, understanding that if it hadn’t been for Cunctus’s arrest after one sloppy job, the Melius might indeed have tried it. It could be done, and—perhaps next year, Cunctus had reasoned—it would be. Aaron the Long-Life had known this, too. It was why, out of all the sixty-eight Firmamental prisons left abandoned by the Amaranthine, he had chosen the Thrasm to be liberated. Had Ghaldezuel kept to his word, the Cunctites and their leader would now be speeding towards the Vaulted Land of Gliese, racing at the bidding of their new spectral master. Instead they went off course, their fleet of marvellous ships curving beneath the Firmament and rising somewhere altogether less glamorous: the weakest spot in the Investiture, ripe to fall. The seat of the Vulgar Empire.

  Drolgins hung weightless, a milky marble above the hazed curve of Filgurbirund, its thick wrapping of clouds shimmering like a snowfield. Ghaldezuel’s eyes narrowed, sliding across its surface to the impression of a hollow in the land: there, where the clouds broke into mottled spots of white and blue—the deepest place in the Vulgar kingdom. It was sometimes called the Lair of the Cethegrandes, the Gulp, the Speaking Hole. He knew it as the Bottomless Lagoon of Impio.

  “How did you hear of this?” he asked as they floated side by side in the ship’s surreal viewing chamber. “Did your witch tell you?”

  Cunctus cleared his throat, having found the Lacaille language taxing over time. It used too much phlegm. “Her Spirits, yes.”

  “But how could they know?”

  “They follow the trajectories, Ghaldezuel—the motions.” Cunctus turned his watery eyes in Ghaldezuel’s direction. “They follow the movements of every little tiny thing.”

  The Vulgar citadel of Napp was owned by Count Murim Andolp, one of the wealthiest Prism in the Investiture. It was a weathered ring of spires and tenements surrounded by wild, thorny forest, its battery of newly emplaced lumen turrets looking out across the valleys of Milkland to the whitish haze of the Hangsea and its dark blotch of lagoon. Unlike the dark, shit-streaked aspect of most Vulgar cities, Napp’s walls were ringed with colour, a darker circlet containing a reddish, newer layer of wall within. The brighter shade was a second city wall, built swiftly with fresh new brick, and rising above the new wall’s turrets and gatehouses was a three-quarter dome that almost blotted out all light in the city. The dome’s bricks contained inside them a chain of precise hollows, checked and rechecked during construction to ensure they never deviated more than a third of an inch from their original design, and polished smooth by ten thousand pairs of little hands.

  The city of Napp was a gigantic replica of the Shell.

  Count Andolp had ordered its miraculous new architecture built in one short year, and under such a veil of secrecy that not even the Amaranthine—now suitably distracted by the revolts in their own lands—had any idea of its existence. Every one of the enslaved workmen responsible had been sewn into bags and dumped into the lagoon, and Andolp had made sure to burn all trace of the designs afterwards, barring a set of measurements he’d had engraved onto a bracelet he wore on one pudgy wrist. Thankfully for him, even the Shell’s illustrious inventor Corphuso Trohilat had gone missing, and so it finally appeared that Murim Andolp, and only Murim Andolp, possessed the secret of Immortality.

  Napp was recently known among other names as the Silent City, for one of the many strange abilities of the Shell was its capacity for trapping sound. A person standing just outside the walls would hear nothing but the wind wailing in off the lagoon, their ears only unclogging as they passed inside. Coupled with the strange absorption of sound, the gigantic hollows also served to trap light (in the same manner as the first incarnation of the Shell, built two decades before). Many that heard rumours of the city half-expected upon arrival to find it invisible, but of course that was not the case. The Shell acted as a Light-Trap, it was true, but only in small quantities. Napp itself couldn’t stop light leaving its walls, but it could make the stuff move very, very slowly. That same indecisive person, standing on the parapet of the old walls and peering in, would see a shambolic ring of thousands of shanties, their occupants all moving at the half-speed of running treacle. To the city’s Vulgar inhabitants, life itself felt slowed down, though their reaction speeds remained unchanged. Wealthy Prism went to stay there for a few days at a time so that they could experience the life-extending effects of slow-motion existence. They ate and drank and fornicated their way through days twice as long as they were supposed to be, secure in the knowledge that within Napp’s walls their souls could never be harmed, and returned unsteadily to life like they’d been asleep a hundred years.

  The city’s inhabitants witnessed Cunctus’s arrival in that same painful slow motion, watching a ship the likes of which Napp had never seen before come burning through the clouds above them.

  Napp’s lumen turrets erupted into life, filling the sky with puffs of black smoke. The Wilh
elmina, glossily nautiloid like the atavistic Chrachen of humanity’s nightmares, dropped smoothly through their defences, jamming and silencing them all at once. The bellows of their last detonations rolled over the valleys, replaced with silence.

  By the time Cunctus had breached the walls, hundreds of Andolp’s mercenaries had worked out whom they were shooting at and begun to stand down en masse, Napp’s central turrets falling silent, the news moving slowly before his advance.

  Ghaldezuel, encased in gleaming silver armour, strode as if submerged in treacle through the smashed postern gate surrounded by a battalion of long-eared Wulmese mercenaries. His forces had stopped firing some time ago—only a last few desultory bolts still sailed from upper windows—and the remaining hand-to-hand fights were clumsy. People occupied a space they did not appear to and died while they were still standing. A turret bolt left the inner keep in a languid arc, stuttering into a whizz beyond the walls, and silence poured over them.

  Ghaldezuel crunched through broken glass, staggering a little as he got used to the sensation of living externally in slow motion while his every sense remained unchanged, then turned and watched for Cunctus. The Melius was at the gate still, talking with his lieutenant, Mumpher. A bright green jet screamed through the air, and when they looked up it was still overhead, twisting as it flew and beginning to bank back over the city.

  Sounds, locked within the place and unable to leave, operated here a fraction faster than the light. Ghaldezuel felt everything before he heard it, and heard everything before he saw it. A gasp came from his right, accompanied by the wet patter of blood sprayed across his chin. He twisted painfully slowly, ducking needlessly as he did so. The dead Wulm beside him grinned and hoisted his rifle. A glinting bullet was working its slow way towards him, still about a foot from its target. It drove relentlessly into the flesh beneath the Wulm’s collarbone, peeling away slivers of plate armour, and out through his back, polished a bright, electric red by its passage. Ghaldezuel strode on, head ducked, eyes vigilant. To be stabbed in a place like this would be the cruellest punishment, he imagined—having to watch the blade slip inside you, inch by inch.

  Cunctus lumbered alongside, grinning, the rubies still knotted into his yellow beard. Together they followed their mercenaries up some vast white steps crowded with hovels, rising until they could see Andolp’s keep, flame licking from its windows. Bolts, claw bullets and sparkers from the higher reaches still rained down on them like colourful fireworks and ricocheted beautifully across the stone. As far as Ghaldezuel knew, he was still alive, but there was no way of telling who among the invaders were. Cunctus staggered on, glancing away from his destination only when they passed above the walls and came level with the bedraggled spires of the highest tenements. Bodies lay everywhere, crowded around blasted gun emplacements and scattered down the steps. Ghaldezuel looked at their faces as he passed, marvelling once more that their souls were surely still here, ensnared in the hollow chambers of the city walls. His thoughts turned to poor Corphuso, the Shell’s inventor; how fascinated he would have been by this place.

  They paused and Cunctus spat, savouring the view from the top of the city. As his slow spit hit the ground, they heard a commotion and glanced towards the keep.

  There were scurrying figures up ahead, trapped by the fire blazing in the keep, unable to flee up or down.

  Cunctus narrowed his eyes. “Bring them here!”

  They watched the little people being rounded up, the squeals reaching them across the distance.

  “Quite clever, this place,” Cunctus muttered, a dangling line of drool fluttering from his chin. “Not sure I could stomach living here, though.”

  The mercenaries came down the steps, clutching their captives by the ankles; the Vulgar of Drolgins were an inch or two taller than their Filgurbirund relatives, owing to the lighter gravity out here. Cunctus squatted and surveyed them, angling his head so that he could see them upside down. They snivelled and whimpered under his gaze, an assortment of shabbily dressed things clearly disguised with whatever they could find in the hope of escape.

  Even Ghaldezuel, who had never seen the count before, spotted the better-fed specimen at the end of the line, his jowls flushed with the inversion of gravity.

  Cunctus smiled, signalling for his mercenaries to drop them. “Murim Andolp, as I live and breathe!” he cried. “You are bad at hiding, sir.”

  Andolp grunted and climbed to his feet, turning to dash back up the steps.

  Cunctus lumbered after him in slow motion. “Have you forgotten me, sir?” he snarled, and grasped the Vulgar by the scruff of the neck. Andolp went limp in the giant’s grip, breathing hard, his roving, wild eyes meeting Ghaldezuel’s before moving on. A golden diadem slipped out of his rags and rolled across the step.

  Cunctus winked at Ghaldezuel and, without looking at Andolp again, hurled him over the parapet.

  It took a full two minutes for Andolp to fall the seventy feet to the cobbled square. Ghaldezuel, his mouth dry, heard every scream. When at last he struck—a while after the faint, sore-throated shrieks had stopped abruptly—it was with the force of a cannon, spurting blood across the square and decorating the gatehouse.

  “What a bleeder!” Cunctus remarked cheerily, peering over the edge. “Come on,” he said, tossing Ghaldezuel the diadem and lumbering up the steps. “Dinner awaits.”

  Ghaldezuel glanced back at the remainder of the party, a ragtag assortment of Wulm and Drolgins mercenaries, their plate harness twinkling in the sun. The Threen witch Nazithra, sunburned and helmeted against the light, kept her head bowed as she climbed, the sounds of sobs escaping from her faceplate. As she passed, Ghaldezuel caught her wrist.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  The helmet turned his way, dark slits observing him. “Homesick,” she said stuffily, voice muffled by metal. “Missing my friends.”

  “Friends?” Ghaldezuel asked. “You mean your Spirits?”

  Nazithra turned back to the steps.

  “Aren’t there Spirits here you can talk to?” he asked, trying a lopsided smile.

  Her helmet swung back to look at him. “He will send us out to the lagoon tomorrow. Come with me and I’ll introduce you.”

  Ghaldezuel stared after her as she climbed on, wishing he’d never asked.

  BANQUET

  Ghaldezuel found himself at the head table, only half-listening to a dozen slurred conversations in the smoke-thickened air around him. Cunctus ate with the gluttonous abandon befitting a giant, spraying huge mouthfuls of chewed meat as he spoke, his head hunched beneath the low ceiling, knees lifting the table from its trestles. The Wulm Mumpher, to his right, puffed a pipe and drank, studiously ignoring Ghaldezuel, the lethargic smoke wrapping them both in elegant, serpentine coils. The Wulm’s clothes had been shot through that day with at least five bullet holes, each miraculously missing his body. A sign of fortune for things to come, Cunctus had proclaimed, apparently forgetting the morning’s thirty casualties.

  Ghaldezuel’s eyes slid to the occupants of the other tables. All of them were running and glistening with sweat; the ancient Amaranthine wines they’d brought from the Sepulchre had been heated, for some reason, and everything they ate (in infuriating slow motion) was flavoured with strong local spices. Ghaldezuel spied fried Monkbat stuffed with boiled fish and sluppocks, and plates of glistening white eels from the lagoon. A live thorn leopard—declawed, shaved and specially fattened for Andolp’s table—was tethered beneath the chairs, mouthing toothlessly at some of the mercenaries’ feet, unaware it was living out its final moments. A handful of Vulgar dignitaries spared the same fate as Andolp ate quietly with them, trembling little fingers betraying their anxiety.

  As per Cunctus’s initial orders, the telegraph wires out of the city had all been cut without damaging the walls. Napp was now on its own, unreachable by road and uncontactable by the other citadels in the great, wide country of Vrachtmunt. These Vulgar—and the city’s largely indifferent inhabitant
s—would have no choice but to bed down here in the Immortal city until Cunctus began his push to take more of Drolgins’ countries, opening up his supply routes.

  Ghaldezuel looked at the Vulgar people as they talked softly among themselves, their eyes downcast, but he hardly saw them. He was thinking, his mind spinning. Suppose they rebuilt Napp’s Shell-structure around the whole moon? Would there be room for every soul in the world? Would time itself stand still? He was becoming Corphuso, he realised with a snort: an insensate, unhealthy navel-gazer. He turned his attention back to the others, taking a sip from his Cethegrande pearl cup and watching as the leopard was led away for slaughter.

  “So tell me, bureaucrats,” Cunctus grunted, leaning forward and jabbing a fork in the direction of the trembling little Vulgar, “what news from the lagoon?”

  They glanced at one another, appearing to nominate their most confident speaker.

  “Lots of Cethegrande activity, my Lord King Cunctus,” said the Vulgar, “ships sucked down daily. And a champion eaten”—he paused to lick the grease from his fingers—“by a beasty wrapped in chains.”

  “Chains?” remarked Cunctus, fingering a lump of meat caught in his beard. He turned his large pink eyes on Ghaldezuel as he spoke. “Where did this happen?”

  The Vulgar pointed a trembling finger roughly south-west. “Down by the Lunatic’s castle, at Gulpmouth.”

  Cunctus slapped the table, a great languid slam of his open palm that they heard and felt before it came down. Everything on the table wobbled for a considerable amount of time, rolling and spinning.

  “You hear that, Ghaldezuel? I told you! That could be my Scallywag!” Cunctus licked his lips, his slithering tongue encountering the piece of trapped meat. “It’s almost as if he knew I was coming.”

  “The lagoon, Cunctus,” the witch supplied, posting a chunk of hairy bat flesh through her open faceplate. “It is deep.”