The Weight of the World

by Tom Toner

  “How is’t, Bulstrode?” asked the sentry at the rise, his matchlock propped like a walking stick, barrel-up. “You’re needed.”

  He took the diagonal route, hobbling where the field had been trampled into dry divots by his Lordship’s cavalry the day before, and reached the crest in time to see the last of the pink fade from the few clouds. Only a deep, sooty orange lined the far hills of Burrowbridge, staining to blue above.

  His Lordship’s tent was dark, empty as always. It comforted Daniell to think that a charlatan would have objects: talismans, jars of animal parts, perhaps a fat grimoire of spells sitting ostentatiously on a shelf. But his Lordship didn’t appear to own a thing that he didn’t carry on his person—not a candlestick, chair or chamber pot. Daniell, in his unspecified role of retainer, had gradually risen over the few years of his service to handle nearly all of his master’s needs—from writing letters and saddling horses all the way down to far dirtier work, work that his Lordship assigned only to him. After those sorts of jobs were done, he was invariably given a holiday, perhaps a few days’ leave for a man, a week at an inn for a family; the precise rates of exchange for a life seemingly already weighed and worked out. Only just this once had someone got away, by nothing but a hair. But his Lordship needn’t concern himself with that—Daniell had the matter in hand.

  As he came upon the hill camp, he saw that the huge fire-pit among the tents was piled with kindling and rolled pamphlets from town. He paused, looking into it, trying to make out what some of them said in the fading light.

  The devil appeared to Joan Hodgkin in the form of a dog, he read, without needing to mouth the words. Daniell crouched and pulled out the paper to read more by the light of the faded sky. She sold her soul and was possessed. He scanned the text, examining the crude drawing of the old wife and understanding before he’d come to the bottom of the pamphlet that she’d already paid for her crimes. The West Country was a superstitious hollow, a place where mists still clung to the land long after dawn. Another written piece caught his eye, tiny among the cluttered drawings of parliamentarians in their broad hats.

  Henry Purcell of the Privy Council has today laid grievous charges at the door of the king’s lieutenant general of the horse, Lord Aaron Goring, accusing his Lordship of sending villeins to his lodgings in the most lewd and violent of manners.

  Daniell felt the sweat on his brow chill as he read the words, the sky darkening around him. At least his Lordship wasn’t here.

  But he was here, of course he was. Daniell straightened and looked into the black silhouettes of the trees around the tent.

  “Shall I light the fire?” he asked, bustling to the accompanying tent to find his things.

  The trees appeared to draw breath. They said nothing for a handful of moments, then from the wood the delicate voice spoke.

  “Where were you?”

  He stopped in the darkness. “Game of cribbage and all-fours, Lordship.”His hand found the tinder-pistol in the sack by the entrance and he brought it out, returning to sit by the pit. The fragrant grass beneath him had been cropped almost to stubble by horses now moved. As he looked for his master in the dark, the fire sprang abruptly to life, billowing sideways in a breath of heat. Every piece of kindling and paper burned equally, as if the flames had not started in any one place. His Lord materialised from the depths, his kind, fatherly face set in blankness, and stepped into the light to sit. Daniell realised he was still clutching the pamphlet. He tossed it into the fire.

  Aaron, Lord Goring, did not look at his servant, his eyes only interested in the fire. He lit it in this way sometimes, when they found themselves rushed. The magic, though wearing thin on Daniell, hadn’t quite lost its novelty. Where his Lordship glanced, the flames sank back like a dog afraid, blowing hard with a grumble against the base of the pit when they could flee no further. Daniell looked for shapes again, his gaze darting about the spaces between the flames, but could see nothing this time. At length, he spoke.

  “You had all but two of the culverin cannon removed this evening, I heard.”

  Goring finished his fire-play, rolling his eyes up to the evening sky and the first blush of stars. “Then so would every able spy for five miles. Two cannon for appearances, or the king would send relief.”

  Daniell looked at him, impressed for the hundredth time by his master’s methods. All was ready, then. Their army waited for its own annihilation.

  The Lord Goring gazed back, eyebrows raised playfully. Those bland, somehow colourless eyes had sent the Earl of Monmouth mad with a glance, and yet increasingly they looked on Daniell with something like love. He felt a swell of pride and warmth at the sight, a real smile forming at last. He’d known some who’d chosen their allegiance in this war by consulting astrologers; this was how Daniell had chosen his.

  “I have our horses ready beneath the hanging chapel, top of Bow Street,” Daniell said. “You know the one.”

  “I know all the chapels,” the Lord said, stretching out his hands above the spitting fire. Their shadows slinked over the flames, wholly impossible, like pieces of cut black cloth.

  Daniell looked up, waiting for more, but his master’s thoughts on the subject appeared to be at an end. “The wood,” Goring said, withdrawing his hands and looking off to the darkness of the crowded fields.

  Daniell placed the first few logs in the flames and sat down to cover himself with his jackets. Goring, as usual, wore the colours of King Charles, the faded red coat of the travelling cavalier topped by an oddly useless iron gorget around his collar. Without full armour there was no need for it, especially deep into the western edge of the camp. Daniell supposed it displayed the Lord’s bunched medallions in a pleasing way, reflecting after a moment that there wasn’t any point protecting what no man could harm.

  He was not, and had never been, a man of God. A sturdy disbelief in the consequences of sin had long suited Daniell Bulstrode in every line of work he chose, especially under his current Lordship, with whom he had journeyed the past three years. Despite everything his plain mind told him, however, Daniell knew perfectly well that the being sitting before him was nothing like a man, however impeccably it dressed itself.

  Unspoken, the understanding between them persisted. Only Daniell knew of his Lord’s true nature, and only he would benefit from it. He might have wondered in his bed some nights whether he could indeed be consorting with the fallen angel himself, but with daylight such fears felt childish, absurd. Like a boyhood memory of trying to identify creatures half-glimpsed in a rock pool, Daniell knew he couldn’t possibly have come to the correct conclusion—and so it shouldn’t matter. Names meant nothing now. Perhaps his Lordship had never even been given one, back in the great where and when of his birth. He was an Oracle, nonetheless, destined to supplant the stuttering, nincompoop king who had led them all to war. One day, when the man-shape at the fire and he were as brothers, Daniell would ask his questions. But, until then, he saved up for other favours.

  “How does the town hate me?” Goring asked abruptly, raising his eyes again as the stars clarified. “As passionately as Leicester?”

  Daniell snorted. “More, much more.”

  His Lordship allowed his army to do as they pleased wherever they marched. The west had become a place of fear, ripe to rebel even as the losing side cheered their lieutenant general for his apparently blind eye, running riot wherever they found themselves garrisoned. No soldier Bulstrode knew had turned down what looting there was to be had. Not even Daniell, who fancied an early retirement once he could afford to take his ease.

  “Fine,” Goring breathed, still studying the stars. “We raze the town tomorrow as we retreat. Burn it from east to west.”

  Daniell took a moment to think on the order, working out who to wake in the early hours and who to let sleep. His master had so far rarely destroyed utterly, preferring to sow the seeds in more subtle ways. But it was late, Naseby was lost and the king’s army already crippled. The west could be squandered e
fficiently with one final act of sabotage, and this small bend in the river might just be it.

  “And the prisoners? I’ll turn them out again? I could send them off Somerton way this time.”

  The Lord gave the impression of thought, though Daniell had never seen him think long on anything. “Not this time. Take them into town at dawn and chain them in the market square.”

  Daniell sucked his lips. “As you say.”

  Minutes passed in silence as they stared into the fire. Just as Daniell was wondering whether he should take his leave and find some supper in the field, he began to see the shapes again, wriggling forms between the tongues of flame.

  “I told you once the tale of the spy,” Goring said abruptly, studying the rings on his fingers: fat signet seals for pressing into wax, never once used, as far as Daniell knew.

  “Yes, Lordship,” he replied, remembering the pagan story. “The emperor betrayed by a prince, his brother.”He recalled the town, one of many on a long road, and the manor they had sat the night in, waiting for a courier.

  “Remind me—what was the name of the person who took these lands from him?” his Lordship asked, feigning forgetfulness.

  Daniell thought for a moment. It had been a tale not fit for anyone older than a certain age, and yet by its simplicity alone had contained a certain allure. He’d been tired as he listened that night, only the light of a fire two rooms away colouring his Lordship’s face as he told it, and Daniell suddenly found himself afraid that he might have fallen asleep—that this was a test, a punishment. But he did remember. He remembered the whole thing.

  “Sarsappus.”

  A story of when the world was held suspended in a glass bubble, its lands divided into two halves. A story of three great kings and three vast, star-shaped realms, their borders and names lost to antiquity, the stones of cities sunk lower into the earth than the foundations of Camelot.

  “So you were listening.”

  “I wouldn’t be much use to you if I didn’t, Lordship,” Daniell said, his confidence returning, picturing the ancient king as he had then, while the tale was being told: a frail old horror, the wiry hair of his beard picked out in the myriad colours of stained glass. Where God had been during the spinning of this tale, he had no idea.

  “And would you listen if I told you more?”

  Daniell hesitated, suddenly tired beyond belief.

  His Lordship held up a hand, its shadow staining the flames. “Rest. Perhaps I’ll tell it while you sleep.”

  Daniell had slept, propped against a log like a summer labourer on a country road. Stirring, he found the fire had grown, smearing one side of him with a sheen of sweat and parching the hot skin of his face. His beer mug had rolled on the grass, spilling what little was left. He shuffled upright, his mouth dry, needing desperately to piss.

  His master caressed the fire, apparently oblivious as Daniell stirred. It comforted and alarmed him in equal measure to know he’d slept beneath that benevolent gaze, at the mercy of this being, this maker of light.

  He buttoned his jacket, creeping a way down the hill. The fires of the encamped army were strung like a necklace of candles across the hill and down to the river, its dark waters invisible. Shapes of men passed before them, scintillating the distant firelight like stars watched on a hot night. Daniell stood, thinking, his eyes drawn back to the flames of his Lordship’s own fire.

  The spindly, warped outline of a man who was not quite a man shone through, standing now. Daniell held himself in the darkness, understanding clearly that Goring remained on the far side, that the shadow bled through the flames whichever way you looked.

  Those shadows. They’d never been quite right.

  The black skeleton raised its arm, thin as a winter twig. The chill returned.

  Daniell raised a hand tentatively and waved back.

  ATHOLCUALAN: WINTER 14,646

  SEVEN MONTHS BEFORE THE BATTLE OF NILMUTH, AND THE ATTEMPTED THEFT OF THE SHELL

  Spiderwebs of mist draped the city of Atholcualan, hanging milkily in the stillness between the patchwork of domed favelas and tenements that rose up the mountainside. Ghaldezuel took deep, slow breaths as the wind whipped at his grey clothes, his eyes narrowing to follow the line cut into the mountainside. The rambling city before him had been built high in these mountains to serve the old industrial frontier; for centuries, Lacaille folk down on their luck or on the run had come here, climbing through sickening altitude to find what scraps of work there were to be had. The frontier was long gone now, the city visited these days by a single train, the Atholcualan Star, a ramshackle locomotive that wound its leisurely way through the Cractitule Range from Zuo every thirty-two hours: what amounted to daily here on the Lacaille-owned moon of Pruth-Zalnir.

  Ghaldezuel took another laboured breath, his skull aching. He’d been awoken in the night by the screams of a botched robbery below his chamber window. A stabbing, he’d surmised blearily, listening to the pitch alter, growing more hysterical until he wondered if it might burst the thin glass, only to fall suddenly silent. He’d turned over and rucked the blanket over his head, knowing the sound of death, welcoming sleep.

  Below him, at the bottom of a flight of crumbled bonestone steps, the stationmaster had exited his tower. Ghaldezuel had considered leaving word with the master rather than wait—the Atholcualan Star was a notoriously unreliable piece of machinery, frequently derailing on a pass not far from the city—but something about the message had forced him to reconsider. He stood and watched the distant hills, a little sun breaking through the cloud at last and bathing his flat white face.

  There—a shimmer of movement. The hills baked, for all their altitude, and he had to squint now at the swaying mirage. Bells and horns began to clamour with the hour throughout the shambolic, almost vertical city. Perfectly on time. Ghaldezuel wondered again whether such precision might have been laid on specially, for today the Star carried a peculiar and esteemed passenger. He looked down at the waiting Prism, mostly Ringum half-breeds or travellers, noticing that the huddling crowd hadn’t yet spotted the arriving train. Perhaps ninety per cent of the city’s inhabitants had never taken this train nor ever would, not even into the next township; they simply couldn’t afford to. Those who arrived after each long day here were invariably wealthier merchants or slaved Oxel machinists, come to work the mines beneath Praztatl, the range’s highest peak. There would be some well-off Vulgar on that train, as usual, mostly travelling under protective documents issued under the new Peace Treaty of Silp. Nearly all would be robbed during their stay, perhaps a dozen murdered—as was the case each season—but with little chance of retribution. The Vulgar kingdoms had no influence here on Pruth-Zalnir. They might reprint their passports with an extra page of warnings, but that would be all. Peace was too fragile for a scant few lives to interrupt.

  Ghaldezuel lifted a hand to shade his eyes, conspicuously aware of the paler bands on his fingers where once there had been rings. The train grew larger on the mountainside, its fortified iron turrets streaked with scarlet rust and white smears of guano. Hired mercenaries, posted in the crow’s nests to keep watch for thieves, were climbing down now as the train approached, specks working their way across the sun-bright metal. A relatively recent fixture, their numbers had swelled in response to last year’s attack on the train by the Investiture-renowned Cunctites, who’d failed at the last minute when a Voidjet had come swooping in to chase them off.

  Carriages swayed behind the engine and Ghaldezuel was finally able to spot the little white faces poking from the windows, their hair blown back. He noticed the last compartment, its windows dark, the shutters pulled tight, and made his way down the steps and along the platform, sliding past the waiting Prism and strolling to the very end of the riveted steel slab where pale weeds and flowers took hold among the pitted metal.

  He kicked his boots, scuffing at the weeds while the train pulled alongside. Doors opened before the engine had fully come to a halt, the tiny occupants hopp
ing out excitedly and gabbling in Vulgar on the platform as they were passed cases, crates and sacks. A few staggered and swayed as the altitude caught up with them, holding gloved hands to their mouths. Ghaldezuel felt no sympathy for them. He watched a Vulgar child, tiny and squealing, being handed from an open window to its long-eared mother. The lady’s vibrant blue gown billowed suddenly in the mountain breeze as she took the toddler, her round jade eyes meeting Ghaldezuel’s along the platform. He studied her briefly before turning away, noting her perfume as it carried on the otherwise foul wind.

  The stationmaster eyed Ghaldezuel’s shabby clothes as he strutted past to wait at the carriage door. Ghaldezuel returned the master’s stare before handing him a thick white-gold crescent coin stamped with an almost impossibly intricate pattern. The stationmaster straightened, his expression momentarily dubious, taking the Firmamental Half-Ducat with some reverence and slipping it into his top pocket. He nodded to Ghaldezuel and made his way back to the master’s tower, hurrying the milling visitors as they squabbled over their bags.

  The door of the last compartment opened, locks within turning. The carriage rocked as something huge transferred its weight to the inside step and Ghaldezuel retreated a little, making room on the platform.

  The gigantic Firmamental Melius shouldered its way into the sunlight, glancing up to take in the vibrant city. Assorted jewels and charms dangled from the sagging, sweat-shiny skin of its neck, held high above any curious Lacaille hands. Ghaldezuel watched for signs that the beast’s vast lungs—the size of industrial bellows—might be suffering in the thin air, but was disappointed. The Melius looked down at the Lacaille as the churning colours of its skin settled to a deep crimson, planting a bare foot onto the platform and rising to its full height.

  “Ghaldezuel Es-Mejor?” the giant enquired with remarkably acceptable Lacaille pronunciation. Ghaldezuel could feel the glottal rumble of the Melius’s voice through his bones as the creature spoke.