The Tropic of Eternity

by Tom Toner

  “What’s he doing here?” asked Holtby with barely concealed disgust. “Trang Hui Neng was one of them! He cannot be trusted. You should not have confided in him.” He paused, retreating to safety behind Jotroffe, and all eyes turned curiously on Percy.

  “It is a long tale to tell,” said Maneker. “Suffice it to say that this is not Hui Neng, only his corporeal form. I shall introduce you all properly soon.”

  Holtby was about to interject when a limping Firstling joined Pentas. She looked at him sharply, and Lycaste had the sudden premonition that the man had not been supposed to come. “And this is my husband,” Pentas said, softly. “Filago.”

  Lycaste nodded, catching Percy’s eye.

  “And Eranthis?” he asked. Pentas shook her head.

  “She left, some time ago. The last letter we had, she was in the Threheng Counties, out east, wandering.” Pentas looked sadly at Filago. “She is happy, though.”

  “Now then, where is Sotiris?” Maneker asked, suddenly businesslike, raising his voice above the introductions. “If he sleeps”—he ventured a nervous look at Percy—“perhaps we can wake him?”

  “I’ll try,” said Percy, following on the heels of a nervous-looking Holtby. They came into a long, gilded hallway, the floors worn down into soft valleys by hundreds of years of Melius feet. More paintings gambolled across the ceilings, details of the formation of the First.

  “That room,” Holtby said, pointing to a tall blue door, “cannot be opened by any tool or blade. Some Incantation protects the material of every stone in the walls.”

  Lycaste darted a look at Percy, who was already moving towards it, arm outstretched. The Spirit, taking sanctuary in the Amaranthine’s body, could apparently now recall some of the deepest secrets of the Firmament, including the fabled spells of antiquity, like the one that had set it free.

  Percy touched the varnished wood of the door with his palm, eyes rolled upwards into his skull, apparently accessing the memories of his borrowed corpse. His lips began to move.

  “Aedile . . . thirty-one blackbirds baked in a pie . . . No, that’s not it.” He frowned and looked critically at the door, something dawning in his eyes. “It is like the seal that locked me away. Abigail’s Incantation. Not the same, but similar.”

  Maneker was wringing his hands. “Can you . . . can he remember?”

  Percy raised his eyebrows. “Just a minute, have patience. The motes here are lightly distributed, but they will answer my call.” He closed his eyes, muttering under his breath, then opened them with surprise. “This was chosen specially, by Aaron.”

  He placed his hand upon the door.

  “Long, long have I bewailed the severance of our loves,

  With tears that from my lids streamed down like burning rain,

  And vowed that, if the days deign reunite us two,

  My lips should never speak of severance again.

  Joy hath o’erwhelmed me, so that for the very stress

  Of that which gladdens me to weeping I am fain.

  Tears are become to you a habit, O my eyes,

  So that ye weep as well for gladness as for pain.”

  His voice died away.

  Nothing outward happened. Percy indicated to Maneker that he should try, and the Immortal pushed at the door.

  It swung slowly open with the groan of old hinges, and there, crumpled and dangling half-out of the bed, his head bloodied against the tiles, lay Sotiris.

  Maneker darted forward, kneeling and cradling his old friend’s head in his hands. From the look of the dust, which lay thickly all around, even on the man’s head and shoulders, he had lain like that for some time. The blood on the tiles, though light, was brown and old.

  Maneker began to weep, a tearless heaving of breath that they all felt unable to turn away from.

  “I knew in the dream,” he sobbed, “I knew I’d lose you. Damn him—damn him!”

  Percy watched from the wings as Lycaste went and knelt at Maneker’s side, helping him lift the body of their friend back into the bed. He had never seen this man, Sotiris, before.

  “You know,” he said, clearing his throat, “he is not gone for ever. You can still find him.”

  Maneker looked balefully up from the bed, Lycaste standing red-eyed beside him. The whole royal court seemed packed into the corridor behind them.

  “He’s out there, somewhere,” Percy said, noticing and licking a dab of jamfruit from his index finger. “And I suspect I know where.” Lycaste stood. “You mean that?”

  “Of course. It would have been much easier if I hadn’t lost the Collection, but—”

  “The Collection?” asked Holtby, looking between them. “The pieces of Perception?”

  “That’s right,” Percy said guardedly.

  Holtby shrugged. “There’s a second set down in the vaults, I forgot to mention it. Perception’s twin. Would that be of any use?” Lycaste and Percy looked at each other.

  JOURNEYS

  Jatropha, Maneker and Percy sat around the bed, looking at the still form of Sotiris, now propped up against the cushions, a peaceful expression on his tanned, sombre face. Arabis came to join them, bringing a chair with her, followed by the Amaranthine Percy had noticed sitting at the back of the chapel, Harald-something.

  Percy spotted that Arabis held in her hands a pale cloth cap. Maneker took it reverently from her and presented it to Percy.

  “The office of Firmamental Emperor is somewhat redundant these days,” he said. “But, as the true and worthy inheritor of everything we see around us, Perception here ought to take it.”

  Percy looked at the cap, understanding that it was a very simple crown, and glanced among the others present. Jatropha and Arabis, who already knew what he was, were nodding and smiling. He took the crown gingerly, feeling in its weight many thousands of years of use, questioning how it had managed not to fall apart over the years.

  Arabis gestured for its return. “May I?”

  He handed her the crown, and she stood, placing it slowly atop his head. “There. Crowned by a Melius queen. Not very official, but it should do, yes?”

  Jatropha patted her on the head. “It will do.”

  “I will take Sotiris back to Gliese,” Maneker said to them all, looking sadly upon the late Emperor with his single glass eye. “Cancri, his home, is not safe any more.”

  Percy nodded, attempting to look regal, knowing the decision had nothing to do with him. The Pifoon Satrap Berzelius had managed to close the seas of Cancri manually, no doubt having found and begun to test the weapons within. Thankfully the Parliaments of Gliese, in Maneker’s perplexing absence, had formed their own standing armies, protecting the tiny corner of the Firmament they had left.

  “And I’ll go east,” Jatropha said, “to the countries of the Oyal Threheng, to shore up our relations with the Jalan.”

  Percy clasped his hands together, wondering earnestly what a Jalan was, but said nothing.

  “While I shall make my way out to the Investiture,” Harald said, his eyes meeting Jatropha’s. “We have been in contact for some time with its de facto Lacaille king, Ghaldezuel the First, who wishes us to know that he respects our right to the Old World, knows we have a common enemy in Berzelius and would like to meet.”

  Percy looked at Harald, liking him immediately. “I’ll go with you, if I may.”

  Harald beamed. “The more the merrier.”

  “Doesn’t a queen have any say in the matter?” asked Arabis.

  Percy turned to her. “The choice is yours,” he said with a smile, seeing from the corner of his eye as Jatropha began to protest. “With whom will you travel?”

  “I want to go with the Spirit Emperor,” she said, reaching out to hold his hand, “to meet this Ghaldezuel.”

  Percy shrugged. “You heard him—the more the merrier.”

  OYAL-THREHENG

  Commodore Palustris’s galleon rounded the crimson coast, battling its way up the Gulf of Ezrom and on into the wide, perpetually s
torm-whipped waters of the Indris Sea. The squalls of the east, a band of enigmatic storms that raged and blew from the southernmost Provinces all the way to the Jalan capitals of Karakol and Jalandhar, could not be traversed by land, the reason often cited for the failure of the First to retaliate after Elatine’s scuppered invasion. Instead the seas allowed a moderately calmer passage, but this being the Old World, they were infested with the writhing shadows of giant octopuses and the burbling song of monsters in the deep, songs that vibrated through the hulls of ships and woke tired travellers in the night.

  Jatropha took to the deck, savouring the rolling, chalk-pale waves that swept up against the railings and dashed themselves across the masts. Within a minute of ascending he was soaked through, cackling into the wind. Poor Holtby, a nervous sort at the best of times, had chosen wisely to stay below.

  The tall, red-painted Jalan barque, on first inspection appearing a little top-heavy for these frisky waters, bobbed like a cork, perfectly suited to the voyage home. Jatropha observed the great triangular sail above him snapping in the gale, its protestations loud amid the shriek of wind, and reflected on what a strange year it had been. 14,659 AD, the princess growing into her third year of absolute rule, and who should return but the missing souls of Lycaste and Hugo Maneker, their machine Spirit at their side. He shook his head in wonder, delighted, and gazed back out at the sea. Across the heaving water, a storm of dark, sweeping rain lay heavy over the ocean, and beneath the waves, dark things—whether weed or creatures, he didn’t know—stewed. Jatropha looked into the depths, trying to make them out, ruminating on how the world beneath the seas was more densely packed with life than any rainforest of the land, a living soup that so often appeared barren. Life and death, he considered, two realms separated by nothing but a change of state, the light passing beautiful and distorted between them.

  They landed at the westernmost port of Janar-Savajh, the barque blowing sideways in the gale and thumping up against a huge semicircle of wool-packed bollards, catching neatly in their grasp. Across the storm-hazed port, Jatropha counted half a dozen more of the tall Jalan ships, their rounded hulls allowing them to bob almost horizontally in the squall without capsizing.

  They lugged their bags ashore, wobbling down a thrumming gangplank and reeling in the wet gusts that charged across the bay. The Commodore, a gigantic Jalan who never left his ship, waved a huge hand from the stern.

  Jatropha waved back, seeing him lumber below deck, and looked into the windswept forests that lined the cove. The air was so loud it drowned out Holtby’s words, thundering across the woods of Jamnagh before being muffled by the sea. Jatropha pointed into the darkness of the forest, a country of woodland unbroken for at least a thousand miles, and they clasped their hats and cloaks to themselves before wading in.

  The forest was made up of squat, hard-wearing baobabs so ancient and densely packed that many had grown together into thick, near-impenetrable coppices. Jatropha had come this way once before and knew, though there was no path, to walk into the wind.

  The gale softened as they entered the ancient woods, and within a few strides they felt nothing but the stirrings of a breeze against their cloaks, though looking up they could see the tops of the trees bent double with its force. Holtby unpacked his flask of Decadence brandy and offered some to Jatropha, the two stumbling over the man-thick roots of the baobabs, following the breeze. Occasionally, through the trees, they spied lumbering Jalan shepherds guiding their flocks down towards the port, the scream of their whistles breaking through the din.

  The day grew dark quickly, the thundering sky packed with cloud, and they stopped in a propitious tangle of baobab sheltered from even the smallest of breezes to light their fire. But the sly wind had siphoned through the roots and flowed just a little above ground level, blowing out their fire each time they tried to light it, and so they had to lie content in the company of the Greenmoon, visible every now and then among the racing clouds.

  Jatropha gazed up at it, deciding he’d sleep better floating just a little off the hard earth.

  “That’s a fine talent,” Holtby said over the distant roar of the gale, recovering from his shock. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do that.”

  Jatropha, deep in thought, hardly heard him. He was thinking of Eranthis’s most recent letter to her sister, describing her adventures in the Threheng Counties. The waxy piece of paper had been stamped with the green crescent moon of the Jalan Potentates and the word “Surath,” the name of a citadel further down the coast.

  She’d been gone six years, almost to the day. After that night in the guesthouse on the mount she hadn’t hinted at her feelings again, and Jatropha heard sometime later that she and Xanthostemon had even been—briefly—married.

  He had never told her how unlike other Amaranthine he was, that love had featured in his life, off and on, and that the pain of loss had tried, and failed, to inoculate him against all feeling. She thought that life had filed him smooth, but that was not quite true. Now that she was gone, he felt her absence more keenly than any other. He missed her every day.

  When the time had come, at Queen Arabis’s behest, to journey into the East, he hadn’t needed to think twice.

  Jatropha blinked away the suggestion of a tear, noticing that Holtby had fallen soundly asleep, his cloak pulled snugly over his head. He was a good man, loyal to the Devout only on principle (they’d helped him, once, and he had felt obliged to them), soon seeing the errors of his ways.

  When Jatropha glanced back at the moon, it had broken, glowing, through the racing cloud once more. He hesitated. Something had moved incrementally in the green-tinged light.

  He remained still, watchful, his eyes tracing the lines of the baobabs. He’d met a lot of strange things in his time, but there were still some out there that had eluded him.

  His gaze rose, picking out the curve of bony knees pressed tightly together; a gently rising ribcage; a snub-nosed face, narrow as a branch. The creature’s gimlet eyes, heavily lidded to avoid the glint of the moon, were locked on Holtby’s sleeping form. In the time since they’d made camp, it had crept close enough to touch him.

  Jatropha marvelled. A Glauk; legendary flesh-eating beast of the Threheng forest, said to stand so still and straight that its prey simply walked into its grasp.

  He looked at it through narrowed eyes, pretending to be asleep. The Glauk was about Melius height, but it was no relation. Jatropha thought it had more in common with the Marmomen of the South—fuzzy, twitchy creatures more closely related to the tiny monkeys of antiquity.

  The Glauk lifted its spindly leg a step off the ground, pausing at the zenith of the move like a chameleon, apparently undecided on what to do next, and placed its foot down a little closer to the sleeping Holtby. Jatropha could see the avidity in its eyes, a suggestion of a flicker, visible only by the light of the moon. The Glauk’s fingers uncurled and Jatropha realised with a start that it was beginning the slow process of reaching; he’d better get a move on.

  “Hello there,” he said softly. The Glauk recoiled, turning its bright, moon-filled eyes on him. He saw how swiftly it could move, all that conserved energy springing into life, and wasn’t surprised when the thing rushed at him. He stopped its breathing almost instantly, the creature’s long, bamboo-like legs suddenly unable to move.

  Jatropha got to his feet and wandered over, inspecting the thing as it stood before him. It was using all its will to force air into its lungs, and as he stepped up to it, the Glauk’s panicked eyes met his.

  “I’m going to leave you here for a day, Sir Glauk,” he said in Low Twentieth, the language of these forests, whispering so as not to wake Holtby. “You won’t try to follow, will you?” The thing managed a no, a sharp flick of its eyes. “Please,” said Jatropha, indicating the ground. “Sit.”

  It collapsed to its knees, still struggling for breath, and manoeuvred itself until it was cross-legged. He left it there, not far from Holtby, and went back to his place in th
e moonlit spot, musing on how even murderous things crave comfort and will change their ways to get it. Jatropha had known enough unpleasant sorts in his time, people with no scruples about killing, and had seen in them the same love of warm food, soft beds, laughter and love, the same fears of heartbreak, embarrassment and loss. Nothing, and nobody, was beyond change. He thought of Eranthis for the thousandth time. Not even himself.

  It was best to let poor Holtby sleep, unaware of the death that sat, shivering and gulping for air, only a few strides away. These were arduous forests and the fellow would need his strength for the long walk ahead.

  THE EAST

  Eranthis finished making the bed, folding the fine sheets and stowing them in a row of wooden cubbyholes with all the others. When she was done, she stood back, hands planted on her hips, surveying the neatness of her cell. It was a good, small place, possessed of an incongruously large Jalan bed, desk and chair, free on the condition that she sang with the children at last Quarter every evening. Its single round, glassless window looked out across the lime-green fields, their rows of brilliantly twinkling waterways blazing sunlight back into her eyes.

  She unfolded and donned her Shameclothes: a black children’s-size gown and hat, long around the legs for modesty. Only the child size would fit her; another gift from the moneyless country she found herself in, given out free upon arrival.

  Eranthis had been here, in the Bhorish Singing Academy, for almost half a year, sweltering indolently in the heat until sundown, when she walked to the acoustic fields to sing with the children. Singing was the one thing she had always been able to do better than her sister—how she had envied Pentas’s ability to paint and draw, furious at her wastefulness of the talent—and it pleased her now to use her own abilities as a way of living. The Jalan of these parts, a varied bunch of half-giants and ogres, appeared to care little for her quality just so long as their children practised, for it was apparently a great and admired skill further east, where things mattered.

  She sat on the stoop for a while, ring book in hand, awaiting the breakfast bell. The pyramidal edifice of the school rose above her, a light structure of wooden verandas hung with curtains of patterned cloth. Some stooped Jalan greeted her on their way down to the fields. She enjoyed their company well enough, though there were one or two that still refused to speak to a Melius of the Provinces, some even making the sign of evil behind her back. Those she did speak to conversed with her in First, the language remaining useful enough to get along by even this far east. She’d tried her hand occasionally at Twenty-Second, but never got far before they reverted helpfully to the language they assumed was her mother tongue.