The Weight of the World

by Tom Toner

  At the plateaued lip of the brick road, beggars from the Praz-tatl township waited in a camp of strewn rubbish. Ghaldezuel had scarcely hauled his bag over the edge before they came for him, pleading, gabbling. He growled, sending all but the bravest scampering. The remainder tittered and skipped before returning, asking again in glottal creole dialects for anything he might have to spare. Some of the naked Ringum here had tails, he saw; long bony whips with tufted, beaded ends.

  “Op-Zlan,” the closest said, apparently still convinced of Ghaldezuel’s inner generosity, “lend us something.”

  “Lend?” Ghaldezuel spat, noticing as the creature reached into its hair and vigorously scratched free a shower of dandruff.

  “It shall be returned!” the beggar yelped, delight crossing its face as it scratched. “Upon my word! Mine for but a moment!”

  “Let me through,” Ghaldezuel grumbled, shoving past and brushing at his bag where some of the Ringum’s dandruff had settled on the leather. Ahead, the pits of the tin mines swarmed with workers, their lanterns kindling as evening fell. He watched them trundling their barrows across the slanted grey-white slab-sides of the mountain and down cut steps, the wind picking up, then glanced along the vertical road to the lights of Atholcualan twinkling in the grey twilight.

  He turned back to the beggar. “I could lend you something, for a service.”

  The beggar stopped scratching and eyed him hungrily, its huge black pupils dilating.

  “Take a message to the pit-master,” Ghaldezuel said. “Tell Suar-tho the Vulgar that Ghaldezuel is here, at the causeway.”

  “Galdessuel,” the beggar repeated uncertainly, coiling its tail around its nakedness in the growing cold. “A Truppin to tell.”

  He nodded, dropping the coin into the Ringum’s hand. “Ghald-ezuel. Remember the name.”

  The beggar rubbed the coin between its fingers, lifting it to its flat, wide-nostrilled nose and sniffing the metal. This trade was clearly for keeps. “Galdessuel—the Vulgar will know you are here.”

  The corsair waited, brooding, at the bottom of a steep ravine of shorn rock, illuminating the blackness like a gnarled, glowing jewel. Stretching into the darkness above, the cloistered ceilings of the mine glittered, their precious seams catching and twisting that distant light. The ship, though bulky for a Lacaille vessel and prodigiously armed, was barely superluminal. Only a tenth of its bulbous white body housed motors, the rest given up to seventeen long-gun battery chambers and a shell of dense plating more than fifteen feet thick. Nestled at its core was a private cell, a stateroom; for this corsair Ghaldezuel knew well—it belonged to King Eoziel XI himself, ruler of every Lacaille moon for six trillion miles, arch-enemy of the four Vulgar kings and their allies. It was purportedly escorted at all times by a battleship—the Grand-Tile—which Ghaldezuel assumed was now waiting in high orbit for the corsair’s return, the services of which had been promised him by the Melius, Pauncefoot.

  He turned to Suartho, the Vulgar pit-master, ready to go down.

  The old foreigner grinned, exposing a graveyard of wet, brown teeth as he surveyed the view. “A powerful beast, for sure. You’ll be safe aboard that, wherever you’re going.” When Ghaldezuel didn’t comment, he pointed towards the glowing furnaces at the far end of the monstrous chasm, so distant that they looked more like campfires. “And replated with my tin, from my refineries. It is only the under-plating that comes from Zuo—they have a foundry there. I offered to supply the rubber—I used to make the best in Zalnir—but they didn’t want it.” He gave Ghaldezuel an appraising look. “Check to see if it’s perished when you go inside, would you? Nothing gets past Suartho. Nothing.”

  Ghaldezuel wasn’t listening. His eye followed the Oxel crews as they worked on the corsair’s hull, their equipment roaring distantly as tiny sparks flew. “What are they doing?”

  “Refits,” the Vulgar said vaguely, as if he didn’t really know either, the spoiled musk of his breath accompanying each word. “You are early, Ghaldezuel.”

  “I know,” he replied coldly. “The climb isn’t so hard, not with clean lungs and a healthy heart.”

  “Your heart is healthy?” Suartho chuckled. “That’s not what I heard.”

  The slope of shale and crumbling soot was steeper than Ghaldezuel had imagined. It had taken an hour of picking his way down the black rock face among wraith-like waste sifters to arrive in the lit bowl of the corsair’s makeshift hangar.

  He stood and looked up at it, totally absorbed, the bag dropped at his side. The magisterial Voidship’s name was the Ignioz, after a hero of the Investiture Wars. The enormous whitewashed vessel was helmed with a figurehead of tarnished silver plate, a statue of the tittu-lar admiral himself leaping from the prow between the falconet cannons, one muscular leg outstretched. In his glove, he flourished a lumen pistol of relatively modern design—directly after the war, the Firmament had forced the smelting of all Lacaille weaponry, apparently foiling the sculptor’s wish for accuracy—his other hand thrust forward, thick index finger pointing, in the throes of a battle charge. Ignioz was said to have slain Amaranthine in the wild Threen moons; Ghaldezuel could believe it. Perennials, when they came to discussing those messy, expensive campaigns, reportedly refused to mention Ignioz’s name in the hope that the hero might one day fade from Firmamental history altogether. He took in the glittering, romantically sculpted prow once more, glad to see first-hand such a fitting monument to the Immortals’ failure.

  And yet, he thought, hoisting his bag again to his shoulder, here he was now, in thrall to the Amaranthine Firmament just as Paunce-foot had smugly predicted.

  Ghaldezuel shaded his eyes from the glare of the portholes, spotting the gaping entranceway to the service hold of the Ignioz further along its lumpen hull. Oxel crawled over the pitted blisters of the broadside turrets, whistling to one another in their absurd outer-Investiture speech. Barely the length of his forearm, they were chosen for their nimble fingers and enthusiasm for jobs no other species would willingly accept. Sociability kept them in line—imprison one alone and it swiftly died or went insane, but with fellows around them they flourished. Huge populations of Oxel travelled the Prism Investiture in mysterious migrations, with generations—for an individual lived scarcely twenty years—sometimes surviving in secret colonies aboard battleships and tankers before being discovered and put to work or sold to the markets.

  Now as he came upon the Oxel, he was reminded of how scrawny and bat-like they looked, their naked bodies glistening with sweat in the dimness, many hanging upside-down with their long, moist fingers gripping the rivets of the fuselage. As Ghaldezuel approached, he saw that one had a white tattoo inked into the grime of its little forehead. He stopped to read it as the Oxel looked down at him.

  “Op-Zlan, Knight of the Stars! My congratulations!”

  He turned to his addressor, the Oxel whistling and halting their work at the new arrival.

  His contact, a two-hundred-year-old Lacaille male with bent ear-tips and a fine yellowed beard, hobbled out from the shadows of the hull. He brushed crumbs from his rubber Voidsuit into the darkness at his feet. “I honestly did not think I would see you. Here.” He fished in his pockets and handed Ghaldezuel a package of already opened messages. Ghaldezuel held them to the light to see one of the postmarks: Woenmouth, in the outer Investiture. A place known on some charts as the Whoop, being so very far away from anything else.

  “The team are restless,” the old Lacaille said, his crinkled, baggy eyes hidden in shadow. “They’ve developed a taste for these reprisal missions.”

  “I know, Vibor,” Ghaldezuel replied, listening to the Oxel as they began to sing, their work resumed. He tucked the parcel of letters away. The Bult did not write, not even to sign a name, but they could dictate. “They’ll enjoy this one especially, I think.”

  Vibor moved further into the light. “The timing is right?”

  “The timing is more than right.” He shrugged, looking up at the ship’s hull. �
��There has never been a more perfect moment. Something is happening.”

  The old Lacaille winked at him. “People feel it. Someone, some Immortal, wants us to advance and the Vulgar to fall, even if it is to the detriment of the Firmament itself.”

  Ghaldezuel shook his head, picking up his bags. “But this thing they want, Andolp’s Light-Trap—it won’t help them.”

  “Not our fault. Not our business. Help them in any way you can, I say—help them spend their money and they’ll grant your conditions.”

  Ghaldezuel cleared his throat by way of assent. He pointed up to the vessel’s vast flank, rusted chains dripping down and securing it to bollards embedded in the rock. “Why does that Oxel have the word ‘sorry’ written on its forehead?”

  Vibor turned and blinked into the darkness, though the Oxel in question was gone. “That one grew ill with a fever of violence. When it knew what would become of it, that it would lose its mind, it thought to apologise in advance to all it might harm.”

  At the cabin door, Ghaldezuel felt the corsair’s engine compartments grumbling, stirring from their sleep. He was shown inside by a vacuum-suited Lacaille soldier with a face deformed by hundreds of tiny shrapnel scars. Ex-royal escort, most likely, battle-hardened and xenophobic. The soldier would not speak Vulgar or Pifoon, or any of the more sophisticated languages of power. Taking off his cloak and hanging it above the simple bed, Ghaldezuel moved to the porthole to look out, waiting for the soldier to leave. Through the thick, warped plastic he could make out the glowing furnaces in the distance, their thumping operations muted now within his sealed fortress. He cupped his hands against the light of the cabin but could see little else, eventually pulling down the metal shutter and sliding the bolt, locking it in place. He had messages to write, but the climb from Atholcualan’s thin air into even higher lands had tired him out. In a day, the Ignioz would dock at the Grand-Tile, fastening inside the colossal battleship’s hangar for its onward journey to Port Halstrom, in the Inner Investiture, a passage that would take more than a week. There would be ample time to draft messages, some of which would never reach their intended recipients anyway as they passed through kingdoms, country borders and small wars, thieves’ pockets and cargo holds.

  He pulled off his underclothes, the musk of the day’s exercise reaching his nostrils, and draped them over the bottom of the plastic fold-out bed. He turned off the light, bolted the door and slid between the rough sheets into a pocket of utter blackness.

  Ghaldezuel listened to the throb of the blood in his ears, smelling the vague odour of rancid butter from the ship’s inner lining. He fancied he could hear something else, something possibly emanating from outside. Finally he sat up, the darkness thick and heavy, and pulled up the shutter again. Pressing his nose against the plastic, he could see the great bowl of the mine’s chamber once more, its chiselled rock walls twinkling in the sparse light of the forges and what glow still filtered from the Ignioz’s open hangar below. He watched an Oxel crawl four-legged to a tiny trolley on the ground, select a piece of equipment and scamper back to the corsair, its shadow long and grotesque.

  As he looked out, Ghaldezuel realised he could see reflective eyes shining in the gloaming beyond the cloisters of rock. Slaves at rest, perhaps. Or possibly the mammalian inhabitants of the mine. Suar-tho had warned him that there were creatures here, things that had climbed in centuries ago and never left, things that dined on workers when they strayed from their details. Nonsense, of course, stories designed to keep work crews together and discourage flight. He pressed his face against the window, trying to see, feeling exposed and yet deliciously safe at the same time, a little boy hiding beneath blankets. The eyes stared, unblinking, then extinguished, pair by pair. Once again the mines were dark but for the glow of the furnaces, the only sounds, other than the distant rumble of the ship, coming from Ghal-dezuel’s own body. He glanced back into the blackness of his cabin, afraid for a moment, and lay down again. As his eyelids slipped closed, he thought of the woman from the station, her light dress billowing in the breeze, their eyes meeting, and pushed her at last from his mind.

  PART I

  PROXIMO

  The air thickened, the cold boiling away and drying Lycaste’s fluttering hair as he fell. His guts heaved under a new weightlessness, the slung dot of sun twirling as the world rolled. He scrunched his eyes closed, the last few breaths of cold Vilnius air squeezed from his lungs, unable to scream.

  Abruptly, his feet met a surface. He was inside a dark, dust-coated space illuminated only by the streaming light of a small window. Lycaste swayed and trembled, wrapping his arms around himself.

  Then he was standing in open meadow, the sun beating down across his back, staring at his long shadow through the flowers. A tawny black castle with enormous blue and gold flags drooping from its towers lay some distance off, hazed by distance. A glinting wasp settled on his hand and jabbed at him, breaking the spell. He flinched and grabbed it.

  And he was up to his knees in still, warm water, wrapped in the heady scents of moss and damp.

  Lycaste didn’t want to move. He shuddered in the water, hearing an echo of Sotiris’s words.

  Stay with him. Do as he says. It’ll be all right.

  Darkness enveloped him.

  Pins and needles shivered through him in pulses, finishing at his fingertips and leaping from each of them with the crackle of static. Lycaste cradled himself, grimacing, until the fear drifted away to form something new. He pushed a hand out into the dark, towards a crack of colour just beyond his reach. The smell was that of age and neglect, wood and cloth almost petrified beneath a fat, grey layer of dust. Lycaste coughed. He was in a cupboard. Another damn cupboard. He levered himself onto his knees in the dark, pushing through a rustling forest of hanging things. Garments, perhaps.

  It’ll be all right.

  The light grew closer. He pressed an eye to it, pushing the door gently ajar.

  He’d left things to grow mouldy in the back of his larder sometimes, always too frightened and revolted to go near them, and as he gazed out of the cupboard his skin crawled. It was as if the room he’d found himself within had been left to rot.

  Dust so thick that it had sprouted wiry, branching hairs grew from every surface, its textures stippled with colours. What must once have been heavy curtains lined the walls, pulled closed so that only string-thin rays of sharply delineated sun slanted through the various holes in the fabric. The bright little beams of light were solid with still motes, only beginning to churn as the first of his breaths reached them. He made out a few items of ornate, dark furniture in the distance, his ears attuned to the falling rhythm of his slowing heart. He looked up into the grimy, mirrored ceiling, noticing how he could see into parts of other, darkened rooms. His head swam, and he felt for a moment as if he’d fallen into a dim, neglected kaleidoscope.

  Lycaste stared along the ceiling at an opulent, inverted landscape of jumbled furniture until he convulsed suddenly with hacking coughs. His nose was filled with dust, caught in the thick, wiry hairs inside his nostrils. He wiped it with the back of his dusty hand, realising as he did so that he was still clutching something. Scrunched up in his fist: a clinking silver thing like a little stone. The wasp. It had been wearing a jewelled suit.

  He staggered to his feet and went to the nearest curtain, dragging it open to a blaze of flying dust and squeezing his eyes shut against the glare.

  The suggestion of a courtyard filled with fat palms down below. Lycaste recognised the flags flying from the rooftops: beautifully intricate golden stars stitched onto deep-blue silk.

  He looked up then, all memory of his arrival melting away.

  “Oh,” he said.

  He had died. He must have. His spirit had fallen through the world and out of the other side.

  Every colour Lycaste had ever seen poured across the skies like wax, dripping and hardening to the curve of the land below. Seas glimmered like damask where the light burned twinkling across them
; lands shone dully in claret veins lined with gold and green, the colours of their mountain peaks scraped away to white blades that pointed dagger-like to the centre, where a silently boiling disc of light glowed upon four huge stone buttresses rising from each compass point. He leaned out of the window a little, clutching the rotten frame. Dry brown meadows stippled with electric-blue flowers marched off into the distance, the tops of luscious palms swaying in the breeze. Lycaste felt the hot wind of the unspeakable place buffet him, drumming his ears, then craned his neck around to look directly up, past the sun, wondering if—were his eyesight good enough to see that many hundreds upon hundreds of miles—he would spot himself staring back.

  Death was a mirror, it appeared, curved and unending.

  A thunderous howl of rage brought him out of his reverie with a sweat. There was someone else here.

  He moved away from the window, scooping dust with his feet, listening. Motes swirled as something thumped around the upper floors. Lycaste swallowed a tickle in his chest and tiptoed to the doorway, his heart racing.

  Stillness. The tickle grew more insistent. Lycaste fought it down, feeling as well as hearing the padding of something huge walking away up above. He remembered: the Jalan they’d fallen with.

  The rasping cough exploded out of him, raising dust. He staggered, swallowing.

  The footsteps faltered and swung around, drumming in great vibrating thumps to where Lycaste could see the beginnings of an enormous flight of marble stairs. He turned and ran, raising a sweeping tide of dust.

  The whole room rattled as the Jalan came for him, still unseen but for flashes of motion gaining on him in the dark reflections up above. Lycaste’s heart thundered in his chest, as if it, too, were shaking and raising dust. He sprinted for the doorway of an adjoining chamber, his feet slipping. Another flight of marble stairs greeted him and he pounded up them, grabbing at golden railings to haul himself along, feet slapping the stone. The giant had arrived at his cupboard, great breaths reverberating up the stairway, and Lycaste knew he didn’t have much longer. He followed the stairs around to the next level, everything rattling with the thump of his pursuer. As he passed a window, Lycaste caught sight of the little Vulgar soldier making his way across one of the ramparts, his armour twinkling, but didn’t stop. At the edge of his vision, a dark claw reached out and he ducked, feeling its breeze as it passed. Lycaste whimpered and leapt the last few steps up to the next floor, swinging the door at the top shut behind him only for it to be slammed back open. The huge silhouette, black against the light of the grand stairway, shouldered its way in.