by Tom Toner
He closed his eyes for a while, letting the green glare of afterimage fade in the blackness, and reopened them slowly. The night was dark again around them. Nearly all the Loyalists appeared to be asleep, accompanied by Huerepo’s delicate, grumbling snores at his side. Lycaste looked past the fire and saw Maneker still sitting, his head tilted to the black sun.
In his mind, Lycaste found he could almost picture the Satrap they were travelling to meet: a kindly old man with a long white beard who would welcome them warmly into his home—a home much like the model palace Lycaste had built for himself back in the Tenth. He knew of course that the man would look like Maneker or Sotiris, but was unable to come up with a squashed, pinhead Amaranthine face that would serve his daydreams, picturing instead that of a Melius man with high, rounded cheekbones, the drooping nose so often associated with gentlemanly wisdom. He hoped very much that this Satrap, this Vincenti, might have known Sotiris in some way, just so that perhaps together they might talk of him some more. Lycaste realised as he closed his eyes that he missed the man who had saved his life more than anything else; more than his estate on the beach, likely sold by now, he supposed. More than Impatiens, who in his gruffness had tried, though Lycaste had never realised it, to nurture him, to prepare him for the world. More than Pentas—that half-forgotten name and cause of all the misery he knew. More than Jasione, even, the first woman, he was sure, who had ever loved him. He missed his friend. Sotiris was safety; Sotiris was home.
CORIOPIL
They were a wilderness, these moons. Glowing discs of colour like lights seen through drizzle, the filaments of lanternfish in the deepest sinkholes of the world. He had chosen one, fallen to it the way something darts, impelled, to that glimmer in the black. Now he was trapped forever, his soul ensnared. Celia. No, Zelio. Rhythmically beautiful words for death. He hears a dry voice, a feminine voice, asking him what in the world he’s doing, all the way down here.
The wild sun arced and sank into the sea, a circle of faded, foreign colour. Maril knew as he squinted at the light that it wasn’t the star he’d been born under, even if his other thoughts were muddied and diluted, stretched to a blur. Heat and green seas rocked the bed while he recounted the tiny details of his old life. A shadow sometimes moved beside him, dampening his face with something as warm as the water, but most of the time he was alone with his past, reliving it over and over again.
Maril remembered his unborn children. He’d have called the boys Wilemo and Osgol, had they lived. The girls—though only officially named upon their wedding day by their husbands—were to be Imsi, Briol and Fanesho. His dead progeny sat beside him while he slept, natives of this hot, green place.
Once the blanket came away and he stirred, trying to grasp it and tug it back, his eyes fluttering open to see the curving wall of colour above, churning like the slow currents of the sea. He grasped for the blanket and the hot blackness returned.
“That the last of it?” Maril asked as he sat on the bleached white stones of the beach.
Jospor passed him the dented metal flask of wine. “We’re stuck with water from the pool from now on.”
Maril touched the rim of the flask to his lips, trying to savour the sweetness, but the wine tasted old, vinegary. After a few small sips, he passed it back. The master-at-arms hesitated, accepting with a nod.
“So.” Maril sighed, picking up a stone from the beach and rolling it between his thumb and forefinger. “Four days adrift.” The pebble was chalky and pocked with holes, like the labyrinth of white, spear-like outcrops the capsized hull had negotiated before reaching the island. “None of which I can remember.” He forced an ugly smile, taking back the flask when he was offered it. “Not much use, was I?”
Jospor shrugged. He’d draped his head with rags; only his greenish eyes and the white skin of their lids were visible between the folds.
Maril glanced along the beach at what was left of his Vulgar crew. They were trying to fish, the looming globe of Zeliolopos—a handful of its other moons floating bold against the backdrop of its grandeur— filling most of the lemony sky behind them. His gaze lingered. Sitting among the crew and occasionally laughing at their attempts was one of the bizarre indigenous creatures, the Bie, as they called themselves. Maril studied the scaly thing for a moment then looked back at the rock in his hand. He tossed it as far as he could into the green surf.
He’d woken about an hour ago, slick with sweat and weak from hunger, the flapping orange rags of his old Voidsuit stretched across some driftwood poles for shade, along with some of the more complete suits as blankets. The master-at-arms had taken turns with the rest of Maril’s crew to nurse him as best they could, but there was little the volcanic island could provide besides water and peculiar, pungent-tasting fish.
The island was a towering fortress of pitted and bleached stone, the sinuous white trunks of dead trees taking hold only near the beach, where they stood in haunting, desolate groves. Jospor had taken Maril on a stumbling tour of the beach, down to where the remains of the privateer’s escape clipper—the explosively detached snout of the ship— tilted as a makeshift, capsized outpost, beached on the sandbar. The clipper’s plated scales, dented and partially pulverised by the attacking Nomad-class ship and subsequent fall through Coriopil’s clouds, had buckled enough in places to provide shade for most of the crew during their drift towards the equatorial islands, with a rota allotting time inside the cockpit and under-battery.
As evening burned the yellow sky raw, Maril made his way towards one of the campfires on the beach, his legs still weak beneath him. Upon seeing them lit, he’d worried at first, but a glimpse at the darkening ocean for the hundredth time had assured him that there was nobody to see. They were alone here on this drop of water, the bodies of the Bult that had followed them likely sunk to the bottom of the limitless green sea.
The captain took a deep lungful of the ocean air, clean and tinged with salt, the first of the twilight’s calm coolness carrying the musty charred scent of fish from the fires up the beach. The voices of his few remaining men carried on the wind. He turned from the pink sky to look at them—all he had left in this world. Of the hundred and sixteen Vulgar he’d hired on Filgurbirund, more than two-thirds had perished, lost to the Void and the fields of Steerilden’s Land. And now the survivors would die here, in this lonely place. He glanced around him once more, treading the pebbles up the beach to the fires, comforted by the thought that there were probably worse places to tether one’s soul.
The men at the closest fire stood to attention, clapping the salute in recognition of his recovery. Maril felt his eyes prick with tears and gestured for them to sit. He found his place next to Jospor, now free of his sun rags, and pulled a piece of fish from a twig-spit.
“The Bie have been showing us how to fish properly,” Jospor said. “Those foul-tasting ones were poisonous. We had no idea—I thought the headaches were heatstroke.”
Maril tore a bite and nodded, looking past him to the native creatures as they ambled between the fires, begging amiably for scraps. From what he could gather, the reptilian-looking things were not brainless— especially since they’d made the very poles with which his men now fished—but possessed instead a particularly robust sense of humour and a friendliness he had seldom seen in even the most loyal of pets. Their language was a mixture of complicated noises, yawning yelps and snorts of easy laughter. Though not without his suspicions, Maril had to admit that they charmed him just as they did his men, and he found himself glad to be sharing the place with them. There appeared to be at least forty in their colony on the island, all apparently of the same age barring three or four youngsters and a particularly old and grizzled individual—the group’s patriarch, perhaps—who seemed uninterested in the new arrivals on the beach. Jospor had nicknamed him Gramps. Whatever they were, in all his travels, Maril had never heard of anything like them. He stared at them a little longer, meeting Gramps’s eye.
One of the Bie slunk over, its pointed
snout pushed in Maril’s direction, black eyes wide and round. The furred bronze scales that covered its back were rough and patchy from a day’s contented scratching on the rocks, an activity Maril took to be the equivalent of the season’s first moulting.
“Ooeiihh eh?” it said, snuffling and licking its lips. Its breath stank of fish. Maril hesitated then threw it a piece of his dinner, watching the Bie scamper off into the twilight.
“How do we know that’s what they call themselves?” he asked Jospor, finishing what he had left before the creature came back for more.
“It’s all they would say when we first came ashore,” the master-at-arms said.
“You don’t think it means something else—beware, for instance?”
“I think we’d know by now if they didn’t want us here.”
Maril looked to the dark shore for a moment, hearing rocks tumbling in the surf, and lowered his voice. “What weapons did you salvage?”
Jospor shook his head, taking another fish. “Almost nothing. The armoury took a hit.” He stuffed the fish in his mouth and performed a little clap before counting off on his fingers. “We’ve got a barb shot, a foot mine, some bomblets that might have got too wet, seven spring pistols and a sparker buried beneath the leaning tree. I’ll show you when we’re done.” He remembered something, tapping his side. “And your pistol.”
Maril took the weapon and examined it, pleased to see it was still loaded with poison-tipped rounds. “None of the Bie saw you hide them?”
“No.”
He nodded, glad. It was comforting not to be entirely at the mercy of the creatures, despite their pleasant manners.
A wild, scrawny youth with twiggy arms and tufted ears named Furto wandered close to drag more wood to the fire. Maril and Jospor watched him building the blaze, the captain suddenly conscious of how much wood they might have remaining on the island before they were reduced to eating fish raw and sleeping by the light of Zeliolopos alone. As his thoughts turned to supplies, Ribio the pilot began to sing, slowly at first, his hand drumming on the stones beside him, something that must have been a ring picking out a sharp plink on the pebbles.
Droppin’ a’through the
Muerto Gulf,
You a’see some dist-far lights,
Them twinkling dots, thems look like jewels,
And they’ll pullen you in them sights.
Another crewmember, Veril, started up, his higher voice mixing with Ribio’s.
But don’t go near them lights, them sounds,
Them’s lights that drag you in,
Them’s them sixty moons of Lopos, boy,
Them’s teeth in death’s wide grin.
Jospor chimed in weakly, accompanied after a moment by Furto.
They say it’s Zelios that eat you up,
Or a’things in the Slaathis trees,
Or Catchtails, Hoopies, Murms—all teeths,
Them things you’ll never see.
All but Maril were singing now: a choir of thin, uneven voices drowning out the surf.
But stop yer clappin’, you’ll do no good,
What gets yer, it’s all smiles.
I know, I was there, I gots away,
It’s them sirens of the isles.
Maril blinked back a quick tear as the song continued, oblivious to its verses. He saw clearly the faces of people who had never been born, wondering how such a thing was possible. They’d sat beside him, he was sure of it, clear and solid as Jospor was now. He stared at his master-at-arms, suddenly immensely tired.
An early-morning chill shivers him into something like wakefulness.
His five children stand over him, wearing some of the Voidsuits left out that night, and gaze at him with bored eyes. He glances through their legs for his sleeping crew, but they aren’t there. The beach beyond looks nothing like the one he went to sleep on. His children have moved him in the night.
Maril clambers to his feet, retreating out of the circle. They follow him as if attached by threads, never more than an arm’s reach away. He stumbles, backing into the rocks at the shore’s edge, and Imsi grabs his collar before he can fall.
He recovers his composure, unable to think of a thing to say. They look so very much like him, never mind that none ever made it alive from the womb. The boys even have a little of their mother around the eyes, but none of their faces are kind. He senses, though they’ve come to visit him in the night, that it isn’t their job here to look after him.
They start walking, almost as one, and the invisible thread compels Maril to follow, trudging with them up into the high stone gullies until they come to a place with a view of the other coves. There they stand, arms interlinked, supporting him. His hands touch Briol’s and Osgol’s backs, their muscles smooth through the Voidsuit fabric, and he feels a sense of pride.
Osgol turns to him, shrugging away Maril’s touch. The wind grows suddenly cold.
They aren’t his children any more.
Looking back at him are five haggard things with beaked snouts and birdlike eyes, their skin painted vibrant silver. Their Voidsuits, now home to emaciated bodies, sag and bulge in all the wrong places.
I am not their father, he realises, startled almost to wakefulness.
Together they pick their way along the line of the gulley, walking for what feels like hours. Maril studies the backs of their plumed heads, spying delicate little orifices that must be ears. He tries to speak to them, but the air seems too thin to transmit his words.
With a grunt, he manages to break from the grip of the thread. The sensation is that of snapping a strip of rubber. He stumbles, nearly thrown back, waiting for any response. When he gets none, he turns and hurriedly retraces their steps, hearing the spirits’ footfalls diminishing up the gully. He’s made it—he’s free.
The ground steepens, white stone cliffs rearing on either side and obscuring the sinking sun. Maril fancies that when the sun sets here it might rise for him on the other side; he need only keep walking, walking until he can wake.
This is an upside-down place, he thinks absently, bracing a hand on the chalky rock to rest. A mirror world, in which spirits live.
Sounds from up ahead: the hollow clatter of falling pebbles. Maril halts, his boots dug into the slope. The sun has almost set.
Something pokes him between the shoulder blades and Maril jumps and spins, crying out.
The suggestion of a shadow, scampering back up the slope.
He shudders.
“It!” screeches a voice extremely close to his ear, this time on the other side.
He flails, swinging a punch, but the silver-skinned beast has already skipped away, grinning. It cackles and dashes back up the slope.
“Catch me!” the creature cries, halfway along the track.
Maril stands, breathing heavily. They are playing.
Time rolls to a stop. Their laughter, like rough birdcalls, is infectious. Together they cover the island, Maril finding places to hide when he’s been tagged, rooting out the creatures when it’s his turn, enjoying himself more than he has in years.
They sit together and look out to sea, their faces not so strange to him now, and he feels at peace with the island for the first time as the sun dissolves into the water.
They begin to confer in deep, unintelligible voices, and offer him something. It’s a circular ring of stained metal, still dangling plastic latches and scruffs of ripped cloth. The neck from his suit collar.
Maril takes it, and at their prompting he drapes it over his head. He can see in their eyes that the gesture means a great deal to them.
The creature that used to be Briol rests its claws on his shoulders, pressing against the edges of the collar, and after a moment he understands. They want me to keep this on. When I wake, I’m to find this and wear it.
He opened his eyes, rolling on hard pebbles and sitting up to look out at the early-morning light. The pressure of invisible hands remained on his shoulders, drifting away with every heartbeat until
it was gone, and Maril let his gaze wander up as he remembered where he was. Zelio-lopos, thunderously resplendent in the blaze of unrisen sun, crowned the horizon from east to west. He watched the green and gold belts of clouds travelling almost too slowly to register their rolling currents, the single red wound—a deep storm thousands of miles wide—glowing from within. The vertigo was sudden and enormous, uncontrollable despite his many years spent in the Void, all sense of up and down dissolving.
“The captain, I take it?”
Maril drew his pistol in a heartbeat, rolling on the pebbles and aiming at the sound of the voice.
A woman sat on a piece of driftwood beside the dead fire, her hands clutched in her lap, legs crossed. He breathed through the nausea, noticing from her features and size that she could only be Amaranthine.
Her slanted eyes settled on him. Maril took in the lithe curve of her sunburned thigh and small, bare breasts, understanding distantly that she was entirely naked, like an Old World Melius. He studied her face, realising that she was also exceptionally, unnaturally beautiful. The thought shamed him as he turned away to stow his weapon. He was Vulgar, of a different species; such thoughts were near heretical. She would know his mind, too, just by looking into his eyes.
“Look at me.” Her words—spoken in Unified—were dry and deep, their timbre far older than her face. Maril knew that none of her kind existed now who weren’t ludicrously ancient, but she appeared to be no more than twenty, perhaps twenty-five. He glanced back guiltily, unsure how to arrange himself and finally standing.
“Captain Wilemo Osgol Maril,” he said in the Amaranthine tongue. “At your service.”
“Vulgar? Lacaille?”
Maril shook his head, faintly astounded that she had to ask. “Vulgar.”
“I’ve been away a while. You all look alike to me.”
He nodded, only half-believing that the insult was not intended, and gestured around him. “You live here, Amaranthine? All alone?” A slight hope tickled at him. He and his men were perhaps not so stranded as they thought.