The Tropic of Eternity

by Tom Toner

  “Yes, the hole,” he said thoughtfully. “You and Ghaldezuel will come out with me tomorrow.”

  The witch turned her helmet minutely in Ghaldezuel’s direction.

  “Which reminds me,” Cunctus said, wrenching himself laboriously into a stoop. He stared at Ghaldezuel and motioned for him to do the same. A slow, deathly silence descended on the banquet, a hundred bloodshot eyes swivelling.

  Cunctus looked at the massed Prism faces, clearing his throat. “I have sent a messenger to Paryam, the absent king of Drolgins, inviting him to capitulate. Tomorrow, with the help of our allies the Lacaille, I will formally ask the three remaining kings of Filgurbirund to decide their allegiance.” He pointed along the table. “I hereby name Ghaldezuel here grand-marshal of my New Investiture. He is free to choose his underlings as he sees fit.”

  Ghaldezuel bowed, to a polite clatter of applause. Mumpher’s gaze bored into him, the jealousy palpable through the thick air.

  Cunctus took a swig from his cup, his beard dribbling, and extended his hand to the Vulgar bureaucrats. “For now, I have decreed the city of Napp the new centre of the Investiture. It shall enjoy all the prosperities of a capital until Hauberth is mine. How do you like the sound of that?”

  They nervously clapped their approval.

  “An offering for fortune, Cunctus?” the witch said softly at his side.

  A look of sudden delight crossed Cunctus’s features. “Yes!” He singled out the Vulgar who had spoken. “You, come here.”

  Ghaldezuel watched as terror filled the Vulgar’s eyes. He glanced at Cunctus, leering at the little person from across the table, and wondered that the Melius had any informants left.

  “Come on,” Cunctus said, waiting until the official had climbed awkwardly down from his seat and shuffled behind everyone’s chairs, a dark patch spreading in his britches as he approached his new king.

  Cunctus reached down and hoisted the Vulgar into the air for all to see. “I like knowledge,” he said to the room, bouncing the little person like a baby. “I like to make friends. This fellow here—” He frowned and turned to the whimpering Vulgar. “What’s your name?”

  “T-Timo,” he stuttered.

  “Timo! Excellent! Let Timo here be an example, for he has made me very happy.” Cunctus’s hand wandered into his beard, untangling one of the briolette-cut rubies, which had been tied so tightly into his matted hair that it might have stayed there for years. “Here,” he said, holding it out to Timo. “It’s yours.”

  The Vulgar took it gingerly and was released, returning to his seat with the vacant look of a person in shock.

  Cunctus sat back down, digging heartily into his dinner once more. “So Timo, my friend,” he said brightly, looking up between mouthfuls, “Andolp the glutton kept a fine table, eh? Did he eat like this every day?”

  Timo, still unrecovered and staring at the precious stone in his fingers, glanced hazily at the banquet. “Today was his birthday, Majesty.”

  Cunctus stopped chewing, his massive brows creased, eyes lost in shadow. He swallowed and glared at the Vulgar. “His . . . today? His birthday was today?”

  Timo nodded and hurriedly stowed the ruby, clearly worried he’d said too much.

  Ghaldezuel was entranced to see something like sadness appear in Cunctus’s eyes, remembering that a lot of Melius folk attached particular sentimentality to birthdays. Cunctus stared mournfully at his plate, his mouth hanging open to reveal a ramshackle row of yellow, serrated bottom teeth. “A fellow must always enjoy his birthday,” he muttered. His gaze met Ghaldezuel’s. “We must eat up, clear our plates.” He took a sip of his steaming wine. “This feast must be enjoyed. And you know I hate waste.”

  *

  The clouds were racing in dark streaks over the city. Ghaldezuel pulled the collar of his cloak up and stepped out into the twilight, following the path of the walls. Down in the square, Andolp’s body still lay, a black smear, untouched; Cunctus had publicly forbidden anyone from disturbing the remains.

  The stench of the place wasn’t so bad up here, whipped skywards and carried away by the racing wind. Hovels grew like fungus around the mismatched crenellations of the walls; simple dwellings like spun wasps’ nests made from mud and filth and chewed paper. These were dark, having been cleared after they’d taken the city, but further out across the great amphitheatre of tatty buildings, Ghaldezuel could see lights kindling in the blue. He looked off towards the lagoon, dark now, perceiving a faint light on its far shore—the place Cunctus had mentioned, the Lunatic’s castle. He sniffed the wind. The twilight felt weighted with something, as if the souls of every Prism that had died here hung heavily the air.

  Corphuso, never far from his thoughts these days, appeared once more in his mind’s eye. Corphuso, who had run screaming into the Long-Life’s robes and disappeared, never to be seen again. Somewhere, like all the souls in this shitpot city, the inventor still lingered. Ghaldezuel gazed across the distance for a while, thinking on the witch’s prediction.

  She was wrong about him, he was sure. Spirits or no Spirits, Ghaldezuel was certain that his role here was done. Soon all of Drolgins would belong to Cunctus, Filgurbirund would go to the Lacaille, and the Vulgar, barred from the New Investiture, would dwindle into obscurity. He’d played his small move, a culmination of obscurely arranged pieces, and all would be well at last in the grand, wide world.

  “I’ll see you soon,” he whispered into the falling night, his thoughts turning elsewhere, planting a kiss in the palm of his hand and blowing it to the turgid wind. “And then we’ll get as far away as we can, just you and me.”

  He straightened, an old wariness tingling the fingers nearest his holster. Someone, a deeper shadow on the wall, had followed him out and waited for him near the keep.

  Ghaldezuel trudged back up towards the shadow, his lumen pistol heavy on his hip. He’d met plenty of the Investiture’s finest deadbeats in his time and they were a deluded bunch, arrogant with a sense of their own importance. To ignore them only increased their unpredictability; instead, one had to ease towards them, relax them into thinking they had power, and the trap was sprung.

  He came upon the shadow, slowing until it revealed itself to be the unmistakably squat, ugly figure of Mumpher. Ghaldezuel should have guessed from the pipe smoke that wreathed the wall. As he approached, Mumpher stuck out a foot to trip him up and Ghaldezuel stopped.

  They stood in silence, the wind toying with their hair, looking at one another. Ghaldezuel could see by the Wulm’s drunken, churlish expression that he wanted a fight. Ghaldezuel had expected as much, knowing that Mumpher needed a way to win back Cunctus’s sympathies. The Wulm had fought his way up through the gang’s ranks, his extreme violence and unwavering loyalty endearing him to Cunctus over the years. And now, Ghaldezuel knew, he had taken the role that Mumpher thought was rightfully his.

  He walked on, Mumpher falling into step behind him.

  “I know about your darling coming to stay,” he said quietly.

  Ghaldezuel turned with the speed of a striking snake, snaring the Wulm’s ear in his grasp. He tugged Mumpher swiftly to the edge of the wall and pinned his arm behind him. Cunctus would be livid if he could see them now, but Ghaldezuel didn’t want to let go just yet. He could feel the muscular Wulm tensing beneath him, a dangerous creature in a box; the longer you imprisoned it, the angrier it got.

  “Mention her again,” Ghaldezuel whispered, pressing Mumpher hard against the wall. “Please. You’ve had a lot to drink. Cunctus will think you slipped and fell.”

  The Wulm grunted but kept his mouth shut. Ghaldezuel released his grip and shoved him hard to the ground, striding back towards the keep.

  OUTPOST

  The Humaling star: a beautiful, terrible beacon. Its planets were hot, Harald read; porous worlds of sandstone caves and black subterranean jungle, places where Prism life had all but stood still. The first travellers there were tail-end Hiomans, the last to look much like the Amaranthine and t
he first to get lost, vanishing from the theatre of history nine thousand years ago. Over time, Humaling was discovered again, and with it came tales of something terrible there, something that might once have looked like men.

  Harald woke in what felt like the dead of night, fumbling for his plastic candle, moving softly through narrow wooden hallways and casting his gaze up into the darkness, where enterprising little Prism folk had built a network of bunks among the linen closets. The grumbling of a hundred little snores filtered down from the makeshift beds. Harald continued on, dodging a trickle of piss aimed at a pot some way to his left, following the scent of greasy frying.

  The lonely outpost Lorena, Fortress of the Small Hours, had been built hundreds of years ago at the bottom of the great Lorena Well—a weathered sinkhole too deep for anything but a single broad shaft of sunlight to reach—to accommodate the moon Wherla’s few travellers. It was a squat, windowless wooden tower surrounded by a moat, trenches and a straggly underground forest of anaemic pines, accessible only through a hatch in the roof. Harald had come here on the recommendation of a lonely few he’d met on another Humaling moon, Pearn, in search of the ultimate sensation.

  It was known as Uyua in the Wulmese fourth dialect, and as far as Harald could tell, there was no direct translation into Amaranthine or any other Prism tongue. Cosiness came close, he thought as he wandered the warm, dark corridors, or possibly snug. But what really separated the quality of Uyua from these Unified words was that to achieve it, one had to experience a little shiver of fright, a frisson of danger. He knew the sensation well—watch the rain come down from the window of a warm, cosy house and you were a little of the way there; watch it come down with the window open, feeling the chill of the night wind, and you were closer still. Now suppose a lion circled the house, its breath misting in the downpour, gazing up at you. That was Uyua. And that was why Harald, on holiday now for the first time in decades, had come.

  For the danger was very real here. Audible through the thick walls of the place were sounds, sounds that at first might be mistaken for a moaning night breeze. Harald paused and pressed his ear to the wood panelling, closing his eyes against the candlelight. The walls themselves were hollow, packed with wool and sawdust and ruined rubber Voidsuits. The braver visitors (either desirous of the full experience or simply because the house was too full) slept in these insulated hollows, stringing up their hammocks among a forest of bent old nails. He listened now, trying to block out the grumbling snorts.

  There it was. He tried to imagine them as he pressed his ear to the wood, but found he couldn’t. Harald subdued a shiver, concentrating, savouring. The stink of fried fat enveloped him in the warm darkness, the wonderous dichotomy of Uyua soaking him from head to toe. They saw the bodies of lost Prism sometimes, when they shone their lamps out into the night. Harald heard they were always found daintily peeled, missing every single bone. Your soul lived in your bones, some Prism thought.

  He detached himself from the wall and made his way deeper into the tower, stepping over wads of bedding and slumbering little people. Following his nose through the ever-increasing pall of hanging smoke and charred meat brought him eventually into the pantry, where Old Mutte and his daughter fixed the meals.

  Harald stood in the shadows, black-skinned and almost invisible, glad to have made it here. In the light of twin crackling fires sat the Lorena’s resident insomniacs; Investiture folk up playing games and strumming instruments, a bearded Oxel on its second bottle, head nodding. None paid him much attention—he wasn’t the first Immortal to come calling at the Fort of the Small Hours. Some Amaranthine brought gifts, thinking they could buy their friends out here. Harald never bothered. Respect was a universal thing, he found; what didn’t work in the schoolyard wouldn’t work in the Investiture. What he did bring was news: Prism people hoarded news like gold and traded openly once they got something they liked.

  He nodded to those at the table—a great slab of woodwormy door set on trestles—and sat down, accepting a plastic jug of boiling water from Old Mutte and wrapping his gloved hands around it. Some hairy, rather colourful Ringums eyed him with curiosity—perhaps the Amaranthine usually kept to themselves here, listening and shivering from the comfort of their private rooms—while the pupils of a pair of unseen eyes, reflective chrome in the firelight, watched him from the dark. Harald took a sip of his plastic-flavoured water and tried to follow the game of Topple going on to his right. They looked to be playing for almost anything: cubes of fried meat, a rusted tuning knob, even a cracked Old World pendant with some Melius’s faded portrait gurning from the locket. Harald peered at it surreptitiously—there was Threheng script stamped around its setting. What in the world was it doing all the way out here?

  He brought out a little book he’d been struggling with, eavesdropping on the several languages being spoken around the table. He knew them all to greater and lesser degrees but would only speak the house language, Vulgar, if anyone engaged him. People didn’t like to know you’d been listening.

  The New Investiture, as usual, dominated the conversation. Harald pored over his book, hardly reading a thing, noting the hush that descended around the table as others stopped to listen in.

  “I’ve got fat in here. Good food.”

  “You were always fat.”

  “It’s the fear of Uyua. Makes you eat.”

  “Whatever you say.” A pause as another object—a broken comb, missing all but one tooth—was added to the pile.

  “Lacaille agents on Filgurbirund now, I hear. Won’t be long.”

  “Mmm.”

  “The Vulgar’ll never accept their terms. Too proud.”

  “Hmm.”

  “So stuffy, so full of themselves.”

  Harald almost nodded, before checking himself. The Vulgar thought themselves eminently superior to their cousins the Lacaille, though in truth few others saw it that way. Scarcity had bred a new creativity into the Lacaille people, and their moons were not only safer but also more enlightened than those of their relatives from Filgurbirund.

  There were dozens of theories as to why the Lacaille had risen so suddenly from obscurity, almost sacking the powerful, Firmament-favoured Vulgar Empire in the space of a month, killing one of its four kings and taking another hostage. The prevailing talk was that it could only have been a lull in Amaranthine surveillance—the Immortals’ power play had already created some kind of schism, culminating in the destruction of Virginis—but other suggestions abounded, the most outlandish of them claiming that creatures from beyond the Never-Never (things truly unrelated to hominin life) had chosen this moment to influence things in the mammalian domain, building up the Lacaille for their own nefarious ends. A fascination with the notion of truly alien life had endured in the Firmament and Investiture, despite—or indeed as a result of—thousands of years of disappointed searching. Another theory Harald had heard was that some Lacaille—Eoziel himself, perhaps—had been gifted with Immortality and joined the Firmament, thereby inducting his empire into, and merging with, that of the Amaranthine. It would further explain Cunctus’s involvement, but not why the Pifoon held sway there now. Others (mostly the Lacaille he had met) blamed it on the Vulgar themselves, saying they had grown too greedy, like the Amaranthine of old, and that the Immortals, seeing their old mistakes being repeated in their progeny, had struck them down before they could proliferate further. Another (this one propagated by the Vulgar themselves) was that the Vulgar must have discovered some Amaranthine conspiracy and been purged for it, leading to wild speculation over what that secret could possibly be.

  Harald knew that the answers, when they came, were often quite simple. It could be something as small as a family connection, a disgruntled person in some persuasive position, the movement of money— perhaps taking advantage of the Amaranthines’ apparent indifference regarding taxation during the change of regime—driving a swell of unforeseen action before it, and another in its wake.

  “And Andolp of Drolgins
is dead, I suppose you heard. Cunctus the Apostate killed him then and there, throttled him with his bare hands.”

  Harald’s eyes froze on the words.

  “I heard he was pushed from a window.”

  “Well, whatever. Cunctus’ll set his sights on Filgurbirund next, and all hell will break loose.”

  “If he can ally himself with the Lacaille.”

  “Of course he will. They’d be fools to ignore him now. It’ll all be over by Firmamental summer.”

  “Good! Let ’em shake the place up if they want. The Vulgar were sore winners anyway. The Firmament spoiled them, just like the Pifoon.”

  Harald could feel eyes on him as they spoke. He concentrated hard on his book.

  “I think this one here reads the same page twice, no?”

  “You think he listens in?”

  The show-off in him took the bait and Harald glanced up from his book at last, meeting their many eyes. “I’ve been reading the same page all year, actually.” He brandished the little jewelled book. “Always a mistake, packing the classics.”

  They stared at him. A few Ringum Lacaille banned from enlistment, those strange, colourful specimens and the drunk little Oxel. Even leprous Old Mutte had paused by his pan, observing the situation warily.

  “It’s not nice to eavesdrop,” said one of the Lacaille finally, this time in house Vulgar. He turned back to his companion and their game of odds and ends.

  Silence, but for the snores that percolated through the dark, the popping of water pipes expanding, wind and hail clattering against the treated walls. The unknown eyes that regarded Harald from the shadows had a smile in them now. They came forward, revealing that they were set into the head of a fat, long-nosed half-Zelio. Harald must have looked surprised—the Zelioceti were one of the last breeds he’d expected to be sharing a guesthouse with—and the fellow broke into a wide grin.

  “Come now, Jaczlam,” the Zelio said, addressing the surly Lacaille, “it’s not every day you get to chat with an Amaranthine. Let us be polite—his people are down on their luck.”