The Tropic of Eternity

by Tom Toner

  “Stop!” cried a shambling Epir appearing at the lip of the bridge. It grabbed the Vulgar’s weapon from him and tossed it over the side. More appeared, shuffling forward. Two Epir grasped the Vulgar’s arms, dragging him to one side, while the great two-dimensional form of the queen appeared, dark against the gloom of the bridge’s spires. Iro arrived at her side, eyes searching the darkness. Sotiris levered himself up onto the tiles, still mute and winded from the impact.

  “Sotiris?”

  His eyes widened. What had she just said?

  “Sotiris!”

  He felt the world as he never had before, a soft, slanting rain pattering his face as he looked up at her, tears welling in his eyes.

  “I remember it all,” she said, sitting with him in a room high in the spires. “Every tiny thing.”

  Sotiris glanced along the low corridor to the lurking figure of Aaron’s queen. She coiled, two-dimensional scales glinting, looking out across the ramparts. Iro said she was like that because she was only the recollection of a memory, and not fully real at all.

  “He has found a way to bring her back,” his sister whispered. “But it can only be done with a great and terrible energy.”

  Sotiris returned his attention to Iro, noticing how alive her eyes were. He hadn’t seen them like that in an age. “Energy? What do you mean?”

  “The energy required to break the impermeable barrier that separates dimensions,” the Vulgar, Corphuso, chimed in. He had been allowed to sit in the corner, and now nursed a drink of something on the condition that he settle himself and not attempt any more violence. “So that he may journey across, in the hope of finding his old love still alive and well.” He hesitated, Sotiris detecting a certain lack of conviction. “Or, if she has not yet been born, he will wait.”

  Iro nodded. “He will destroy, so that he can save.”

  “Destroy? Destroy what?”

  “These energies,” Corphuso said, “have long been thought unattainable. But they are possible, for those with the right skills.”

  “A colossal explosion could help him pass between the dimensions,” Iro said, looking at her friend on the ramparts.

  Corphuso nodded. “The destruction of a galaxy, perhaps.”

  Sotiris stared at him. “Ours, you mean?”

  Iro shook her head. “Theirs. That belonging to the Murmuris, who took his love from him in the first place, many millions of years ago.”

  Sotiris clasped his hands together. They were cold and smooth, somehow featureless, and he remembered then that they appeared only as the Long-Life last saw them. “And he is on his way there now? Hasn’t anyone tried to stop him?”

  Corphuso sat up suddenly. “Why would anyone stop him? He must succeed!”

  Iro hushed the Vulgar with a glance, shaking her head as she returned her attention to Sotiris. “Someone did try—do you remember the storm, a while back? The colours on the horizon? We think it was a fight, between Aaron and another soul.” She shrugged, resignation softening her voice. “But it appears he won and is now well on his way.”

  KALEIDOSCOPE

  The Poacher came in fast, tearing high above the Kalinor star towards Indak-Australis, the great mystery of the Prism Investiture.

  Ghaldezuel sat up front with the Lacaille pilots, restless after a two-week journey at uncomfortable speeds. He’d awoken weightless in a floating puddle of reeking gel, having popped a blister on his thrombosis suit by lying on it during one of the many pockets of turbulence. The familiar pain of the Spirits’ presence in his body and the knowledge that they had him right where they wanted him, with Jathime effectively held hostage back in Napp, were wearing on his nerves. They felt packed into his skull and bones, heavy on his back and tight behind his eyes, his every footfall heavier with their accumulated weight. He was surprised he didn’t actually stamp footprints into the floor, but they had lightened themselves somehow so as not to damage their vessel.

  Ahead, the star Indak was a black bubble against the wash of silver. Ghaldezuel had come in specially to watch the deceleration and to forget the pain, and he wasn’t disappointed: at a squeal from the proximity radar, a bank of shiny white trumpets on the flight deck blaring the wail of Indak and its moons, the pilot to Ghaldezuel’s right pulled down on the twin thrusters, the ship thrumming. The view ahead darkened momentarily as the light from all the worlds changed speeds.

  Then Ghaldezuel’s eyes filled with light again, the colours of hundreds of thousands of visible stars—gold and umber and silvery green, rose-pink and icy cyan—pouring into the cockpit as if they were passing through a tumbling waterfall of jewels. Even the seasoned pilots, used to decelerations at slightly lesser speeds, sat back in their seats and ooohed.

  Indak loomed closer as they swept down towards it, a flare of magenta rising to meet them among the cacophony of stars, Voliria Minor burning fat and golden green in the middle distance. Ghalde-zuel knew they were too far away to make out Indak’s ring of planets, let alone the four tropical moons that he had come here to visit, those worlds perpetually at war.

  He sat forward, battling to hide the motion of his involuntarily clenching and unclenching hand, the Drolgins spirits clearly growing restless, too. “Remember, corkscrew.”

  The pilot Bezma nodded, waiting until they could see the first of the planets against the grand colourscape to initiate the roll. The stars spun around them, something whining on the trumpet deck.

  “Ordnance, Majesty,” said the other pilot, Mumore, without glancing at him.

  They continued their roll, the dull grey-green dot of Silakbo resolving ahead, angling their approach until the planet swept by, a dash of extra colour to stern. Ahead, or far below as Ghaldezuel liked to think of it, lay the planet of Pandemonium and its moons. Almost instantly, the flight deck lit up with various warnings, the stolen Amaranthine technology reporting through a series of squealing displays that they were being targeted by three of the four moons, the other being still hidden behind the planet.

  “Firing short-wave lumen pulses,” said Mumore calmly, his gloved finger closing over a trigger on the controls. Ghaldezuel watched a stream of pink light erupting from the Poacher’s nose and into the Void ahead of them, dashes of controlled fire too swift to untangle so that it appeared almost as a beam. Ghaldezuel could hear the thump of feet as gunners climbed to their stations in the battery below the cockpit, a set of cranking vibrations alerting him that the roving gun turrets were now manned and swivelling.

  The Amaranthine warning symbols pulsed, their sounds turned off, until a flash of something silent and bright zipped past the ship, Ghaldezuel turning in his seat to watch through the cockpit’s windows as it dashed away into the Void.

  “Just lumps of pig iron,” said Bezma. “They must have expended all their proper ammunition decades ago.”

  Another one flashed past, skimming close enough to the ship for the upper turret to open fire. A third missile dashed through the lumen stream at the ship’s nose, exploding like a firework. They ploughed through the burst of colour, still spinning, and Ghaldezuel found he could make out two of the moons at last, realising that what he’d taken for dust was in fact a forest of hanging fortress stations positioned in orbit around them.

  “Coming up on Pandemonium’s Daughter, speed three below point,” murmured Mumore, adjusting something. The moons rose to meet them, drawing closer alarmingly quickly. Ghaldezuel realised the pilots were speeding up to avoid the attentions of the orbital fortresses.

  The Poacher tore through a burst of fire, slamming shells and lumens before it, the battery chambers opening up beneath. Ghaldezuel gripped the back of Mumore’s seat, transfixed, feeling the attention of his parasitic souls grow silent, too, enthralled. This was probably the most fun they’d had in millions of years, he reflected, smiling as the first of the fortresses swept by above them.

  They picked up even more speed, blazing unharmed through the shell of orbital stations—thousands of ramshackle white and grey castles rear
ing like a city around the moon—and falling towards Daughter’s mighty emerald crescent.

  “Atmosphere,” said Bezma, sliding back the throttle as the whole ship juddered. Even Ghaldezuel could feel the drag, an invisible heat glowing through the cockpit and making them all sweat in their flight-suits, unfreezing the latent stink of the ship.

  Almost at once, the Spirits inside him began to speak, their voices blending together.

  “One at a time!” he shouted, noticing the pilots glance at one another.

  We will point, said the chief baritone, he whom the witch had said was called Seerapt-Zaor. Ghaldezuel watched his own hand rise under someone else’s power and extend a finger.

  “There,” his voice said, apparently of its own volition, singling out a massive puddle of dark jungle five thousand miles in diameter, ringed by atolls of startling lapis. The Poacher fell towards it. They took possession of his breathing for a moment, Ghaldezuel panicking when he found he could not do it himself, and then let him go, comprehending that they didn’t need that function to speak quickly. He sweated, sitting back, his body under his control again, understanding that he had no choice but to follow their lead.

  Soon they were skimming a few miles above a clear, vibrant coast. Ghaldezuel gazed down, sensing the wonder of his spectral guests, at the leopard-spotted reefs and beaches, seeing how they bled to an intense green country unbroken as far as the eye could see. A burst of ground fire pattered off the ship’s thick plating and Ghaldezuel felt his mouth moving silently. The fire ceased, as if at his command, and the pilots exchanged another glance. Bezma clapped his hands superstitiously and was silenced by an angry look from Mumore.

  Ghaldezuel ignored them both; the quick exchange of foreign speech in his head was suddenly unbearably, skull-splittingly loud.

  Mumore abruptly cried out, staring at his hand. It was trembling on the throttle, as if fighting an invisible force. Without warning, the trembling stopped and the pilot’s hand was snapped at the wrist, the throttle forced down. Bezma held his hands away from the controls in horror, Mumore screaming beside him, and Ghaldezuel watched as the ship angled its nose towards the jungle and fell.

  His legs worked again without his permission, pistoning him out of the seat and marching him awkwardly into the passage behind the cockpit until he reached his chamber, arms extended as the ship steepened its descent. His hammering heart was suddenly grasped and stroked, as if to soothe it.

  The Spirits forced him to wedge his pillow into a corner and climb in after it, pulling the bed’s woollen mattress over himself. The screaming wail of the ship’s descent drilled into his bones, the roar of the engines slowing.

  They hit, a supreme bang of crumpling metal, the ship skimming and rolling. Ghaldezuel felt his stomach rise and his kneecap strike the bulkhead, knowing instinctively that the painless shock of the blow had crushed the bone.

  The Poacher came to a standstill after its interminable spin, groaning and falling silent. The moans of the crew, filtering through the wreck, turned to screams and wailing. Ghaldezuel shoved aside the mattress and fell onto what had been the ceiling. He had to get out of there.

  Again they took his body from him, marching him despite the sudden, furious pain in his knee and neck out through the ruined passage. A hole had been ripped in the side of the hull, the cockpit and forward batteries completely shredded by the impact of the jungle. The Spirits forced him to climb out through the twisted rip, as viciously sharp-edged as a hole in the side of a food can.

  “What about the others?” he croaked, shoved and prodded between the razor edges, fearful of slitting an artery and abruptly glad that he was being guided. Outside, the world was a luminous lemony green, so dense with foliage that he could barely see more than a few feet into the rainforest.

  There came no answer as he climbed over the twisted metal and jumped the last few feet to the jungle floor, finding himself engulfed by heat and motionless Amaranthine-high grass. He limped and pushed his way through, the pain in his knee dulled by a surge of healing warmth, aware at last that he was moving under his own steam again, and turned to look up through the tops of the grass at the ruined hulk of the Poacher.

  It had upended before driving into the jungle and lay now on its back, a spear of white, crumpled metal a hundred feet long, the nose and cockpit obliterated. A desultory flame flickered somewhere in the remains of the battery chamber, a waft of blue-black smoke further aft implying some deeper fire elsewhere. Ghaldezuel looked along the dented outer fuselage to the turrets, spotting his first bodies: the remains of the gunners smeared inside their gunnery stations.

  Through the grasses he heard them coming and swung around, sweating in the overbearing heat, ears twitching. He knew very little about the Prism that waged war on these moons; they were called the Lingatra, Ringum peoples of indistinct heritage bred by two thousand years of unbroken conflict.

  The grass stood in tall, unbroken stands, hairy-bladed and thick as a hand. Ghaldezuel searched its stripes of light and shade, sweat running into his eyes, wondering just what had become of his life, why in the world he accepted so many foolhardy quests. This would be the last time. The last bloody time. At least the pain in his knee was subsiding as his spectral hijackers worked their magic once more.

  The light shifted, and he comprehended that he was not looking at grass. A pale, mould-patterned creature almost twice his height was staring down at him, long arms dangling at its sides. He started, and it grabbed him.

  Oracle, they’d said in Lacaille while they jumped aboard a ten-wheeled wedge-shaped crawler stained electric crimson with rust. Ghaldezuel found himself pushed rudely to the back of a sour-smelling compartment, only the brilliant, finger-thin beams of light from a collection of bullet holes in the armour plating lighting the inside of the crawler. Another of the long-armed specimens eyed him hungrily. Its small eyes were almost entirely white, as if they had rolled back into its head. Only on closer inspection did he see that they possessed a tiny, milky-blue dot at their centre. They had enormous bat-like ears, these war-Prism of the jungles; huge, hairy dish-shaped growths that twitched and spasmed constantly, flicking away settling insects.

  “Oracle,” it said, repeating the words of its fellows on the roof.

  Oracle. So they knew why he was here, and to whom he should be taken.

  They began a wobbling, jolting journey through the thick jungle, foliage slapping and scraping the rusty sides of the crawler. The Lingatra that shared Ghaldezuel’s compartment wore greenish-yellow battle armour, chipped and scraped all over so that the dazzling silver of the tin shone through. Its white fur was speckled with clumps of moss and fungus, which appeared to be growing on its body.

  They must have rocked and juddered through the jungle for two hours or more before the first cries erupted from the roof of the crawler. Ghaldezuel, even in his woozy state, knew then that others must have seen the Poacher come down: a fine state-of-the-art Lacaille ship, carrying who knew what and who knew whom that might be of interest to such a desperate, ravaged bunch.

  It doesn’t matter, said Seerapt.

  “There you are,” he muttered. The Lingatra’s giant ears stirred.

  Let them take you.

  “But—”

  It makes no difference which of the factions brings you—all share the same masters. Us.

  “You—?”

  Shhh. Seerapt chuckled. Better keep this our little secret.

  He flinched, ducking, as bolts slammed into the side of the crawler, a running zigzag of pops that worked their way along its flank, a little under half punching their way through the metal and opening up more slanting beams of light. The Lingatra beside him caught a bolt in the neck and wheezed. Ghaldezuel felt the vehicle crawl to a stop and resisted the urge to search the writhing creature beside him for his divested lumen pistol.

  Let them take you, the Spirits had said, so that was what he’d do.

  The crawler’s top hatch was unscrewed from above. Ghaldezu
el noticed the Lingatra try to raise its weapon, hands slicked with its own blood, and he pulled the gun out of its grip. The Prism choked a chuckling, panicked breath, slouching, neck pumping blood. Everything appeared to be racing after the torpid slowness of Napp.

  “In here!” he said, loud enough for the activity at the hatch to stop. “Oracle!”

  Fingers like anaemic spiders’ legs appeared at the lip of the hatch. Ghaldezuel thought for a moment they were going to drop a bomblet in for good measure, that this would be it, but then an upside-down face appeared, all yellowish fur and glittering red eyes.

  “Oracle,” he repeated, holding out his hands.

  The upside-down face grinned.

  They did not walk, they waded, the yellow jungle so dense that the sunlight reached them, as through the bullet holes, in thin rays. The Prism that had taken him often climbed to get their bearings, opening their long fingers to reveal blood-red webs of skin and sailing back down to the forest floor to rejoin the procession. Ghaldezuel was patted on the back, stroked and groomed, offered stale food and sour water—quite obviously, from their treatment of him, the best they had. He was their guest. He saw from their armour and weaponry that they, too, had exhausted much of their resources, noticing how the bolts in their belts were whittled from chunks of rock and glass, even hard wood. Their tarnished spring guns were ancient, of a sort used in the Threen Wars hundreds of years before. Rings and other assorted studs and piercings hung from their ears, and by the looks of it, the ten toes on each of their massive prehensile feet, unshod at all times, could also grip weapons and equipment with the dexterity of a hand.

  At the end of a day’s march, the land began to drop. A valley, Ghaldezuel assumed, beginning to understand that where there was depth, you found the Spirits, as if they sank naturally to the lowest point of the world. He began to spot wooden forts suspended in the trees, their occupants climbing out to get a better look at him, and soon they were passing through clearings of gun emplacements, their cement and bonestone bases suggesting a system of underground chambers. Ghaldezuel was surprised to see a heinously rusted liftjet sitting idle on one of the parapets, four of its six wheels replaced with dented fuel drums.