by Tom Toner
PART II
SCOUNDREL FLOWER
A drifting flower caught on the pommel of his saddle as the mount tramped through the near-deserted streets of Sarine City. Sotiris bent and took it between his fingers, inspecting the yellow and purple snapdragon before tossing it away.
Elatine ambigua, the Scoundrel’s Flower. The air in the street still reeked of perfumed smoke; the tiny flower had been burned on pyres in celebration throughout the city and the greater Province. Citadels as far as Gmina and Zielon Second—both trampled by the Jalan advance—had supposedly rejoiced all week in their liberation and return to the Lyono-thamnine fold.
Sotiris watched the town houses for signs of life now as he rode, looking through darkened windows into courtyards and parlours. Flags and banners of the First, long and vibrant green where they lay against white stone, trailed from every topmost window.
A young Firstling girl, already nearly Sotiris’s height, came wandering out from a flowered alley. Sotiris felt his mouth dry up.
“Iro?” he whispered incredulously, almost falling from his mount. She glanced in the direction of the zeltabra, perhaps hearing the clop of hooves, but saw nothing. Sotiris looked again as he steadied himself, unsure, and wove past the child still shrouded in his glamours.
No, that couldn’t be right, that couldn’t be her. His sister was aboard a graceful sailing ship somewhere out at sea. He was going now to meet her. The Amaranthine’s mouth moved as he thought things over, nodding finally to himself and patting the zeltabra’s neck. Yes, he was going now to bring her back.
Sotiris could see no other signs of life as he made his way along the streets, occasionally touching a glass bottle of water to his mouth and taking a swig. This late in the year the days were dry in the First, with little water to nourish the great fields of bloodfruit and Bulber-ries that grew around the outskirts of Sarine City. The undercultivated trees of the sunny Southern Provinces did not experience such difficulties, drawing all their water from the soil and rocks instead, blossoming where almost no rain fell. Over a slanting roof, Sotiris could see the deep gold of the plantations at the city’s base. Famine was not unheard of here, but only the very oldest would remember it.
He tapped his boot against the zeltabra’s rump and trotted it over the cobbles towards an inner gatehouse. Above, the palace loomed in the winter sun, wheeling messenger birds decorating its turrets as they came in to land. Sotiris looked to the high specks of windows, sure that he was being observed by more than just Amaranthine. He allowed his head to drop in a minute nod, an acknowledgment only trained eyes would detect.
Sotiris glanced inside the gatehouse, taking in the single huge bed upon which various scabbarded swords and blades almost the length of him were laid, oiled and gleaming.
“Who’s that?” came the challenge in First. An old Melius face peered from the darkness of an upper window, looking straight at the Amaranthine. Sotiris knew instinctively that the fellow was blind. The gatekeeper’s golden-white hand held the rope of a huge bell located somewhere in the rafters.
“Amaranthine,” Sotiris said in the Highest First, a tongue only gatekeepers and librarians kept handy. “To see those within.”
“Immortal,” the guard muttered, putting a hand to his cheek. He let go of the bell rope and stumbled away from the window into darkness. Sotiris waited, tapping his finger on the pommel. The zeltabra flicked its ears, bobbing its head once to loose a persistent fly from its lashes. He looked back up to the closest parapets of the fortress, noticing a strand of silk snagged on a flagpole. The boy-king—in his childish wisdom—had tossed money down to the people of the city (themselves wealthy enough to treat such diversions as a game). Apparently nobody had noticed this last piece.
Sotiris glanced at the blind gatekeeper as the Melius approached, his hand outstretched.
“If you are truly Amaranthine, then let me touch you,” the Firstling said in the same High tongue.
Sotiris assented, dismounting and presenting his face for the Melius’s wandering fingers. The huge nails scuffled over his cheeks for a second, careful not to touch Sotiris’s eyes, and were withdrawn.
“Lord and Master,” the gatekeeper mumbled, nodding vigorously. He stepped up to the tall gates of the Fourth Entry and deftly inserted the key. “Sire Amaranthine.”
“My thanks,” Sotiris replied. He looked at the zeltabra a moment as it stared dolefully back, unsure whom it belonged to and where it might have come from. He frowned and climbed into the saddle, sure the animal wouldn’t be missed.
“I believe there’s a sixteenth of magenta up there on the tile,” he said to the gatekeeper once his boots were in the stirrups. “You might have it before it’s noticed.”
The gatekeeper frowned, his sightless and clouded eyes instinctively turning to the parapet. “Oh,” he said in plain First. “I thank you, Amaranthine.”
“Farewell,” Sotiris said, the crisp sound of the beast’s hooves already echoing in the narrower street as the gates closed behind him.
Here the richest in the city lived, clustered like parasites around their diminutive sovereign. The houses to either side were made from pitted white growth-stone, much like those in the outer Provinces; here, conversely, it was regarded as a luxury. Thirdling and Secondling servants dawdled on the steps leading up to some of the buildings, their heads turning at the sound of hooves. Sotiris saw that some were scarred, baited by their masters. He passed them by.
“Amaranthine Gianakos.” Filago bowed as best he could with his great wooden crutches.
Sotiris eyed the Melius, noticing the new jewels of office set into his ceremonial cuirass. The Lord Protector of the First had not long awoken from his injuries. He looked gaunt and hollow-eyed.
“They await you,” the Melius continued, motioning to the cloisters that led to the upper halls before leading the way.
Sotiris followed behind, sweeping back his emerald cloak. More of the Elatine flowers lay strewn between the pillars, unswept since the revelry of Elatine’s defeat.
They came to a set of thirty-foot-high doors, the grand objective of the failed Jalan invasion. Filago leaned and pushed with a wheeze of effort. Sotiris didn’t attempt to help him. The doors juddered open with the groan of rusted, pre-growth hinges and he stepped past the Melius into the chapel.
Across the bronze floor, four Perennials sat enthroned, still as statues, only the clashing colours of their robes giving them away in the distance. Sotiris strode forward, uninterested in the space he had arrived in; like all well-travelled Amaranthine he had seen the painted chapel plenty of times, the novelty somewhat lost on him by now.
He reached the thrones and stopped, surveying the Perennials. He waited, fixing each of their gazes. Anton Vyazemsky was the first to kneel, followed soon after by Christophe De Rivarol. Florian Von Schiller—heir apparent by the ancient laws—bowed his head and took to his knee more flamboyantly, leaving only Trang Hui Neng still seated.
“Sotiris—” Hui Neng began slowly, his hands coming together.
“You are my subject?” Sotiris asked coldly, his sepulchral voice slicing through the stillness of the chapel. “Subjects kneel.” The cathedra Hui Neng sat upon made a loud cracking sound, shattering suddenly beneath the Amaranthine’s weight and tumbling him to the floor. The other Perennials stiffened in their supplicant poses, not looking up.
Sotiris nodded, his cool gaze taking them in, and made for the far doors, his stride faltering as soon as he was out of their sight.
The boy-king’s bedchamber was darkened with huge curtains of silk drawn across the high windows. Sotiris let his eyes adjust for a moment before stepping forward into the gloom. He grimaced as the smell of a monkey house in high summer met his nostrils.
A flash of light from the doors caught a reflection at the far end of the room, a piece of cutlery being moved.
Sotiris hesitated, peering. “Here I am,” he said, closing the door fully behind him.
The sound of its raspi
ng breath became slowly apparent. Sotiris could just make out a laid table with a figure perched behind it. Glass or crystal tinkled as the beast sipped something.
“I’ve caught you at a bad time?” Sotiris asked, stepping closer. The chamber was very large, though filled with so many furnishings that it felt quite cosy. The king’s possessions were still stacked on tall, laddered shelves that reached up to the ceiling.
“Closer,” came the voice, small and dry and empty. It had trouble breathing here, apparently, in such new, oxygen-poor air.
Sotiris lingered where he was. “May I not see you first? It would be polite, don’t you think, after all this time?”
The shadow appeared to consider his question, eventually stirring and reaching for the edge of a curtain. It flapped aside.
Sotiris stared, walking forward on feet seemingly possessed.
The being slouched behind the table, the flicker of reflected light within the eyeholes of the shroud it wore suggesting a gaze that followed his movements. Bottles and dishes and forks were heaped on the cloth before it, a Dutch master’s vision of gluttony. A taloned hand clutched the stem of a twinkling goblet, twirling it thoughtfully before raising it.
Sotiris watched it drink, tucking the rim of the glass beneath its misshapen white hood. When it had finished, it wiped at its mouth, licking its lips with a black tongue before the material fell back. They’d told him the body was sensitive to the slightest rays of light after so much time entombed in darkness. Sotiris even recognised the embroidered material: it had once contained the remains of the Firmament’s single Empress. Sotiris couldn’t help but speculate on what the Long-Life might have done with the rest of her.
“Your Firmamental Majesty,” Aaron said in a muffled voice, pushing away the goblet. “Come closer, so that I may touch you at last.”
Sotiris glanced at the empty dishes as he approached. “You are sated now?
The hooded creature nodded. “You can imagine my curiosity.” It appeared to regard the mess before it thoughtfully. Sotiris saw from the detritus on the plates that it had eaten meats of some kind, remembering that the body Aaron inhabited had been of mixed parentage; more than a little full-blooded carnivore lurked in that veiled gaze, considering him.
Sotiris stepped to the edge of the table, inspecting the pale skin of the beast’s ungloved claws. “You won’t fall ill?”
Aaron tapped thoughtfully on the nearest plate, finally offering his hand. Sotiris took it. The touch, slick and warm and almost feverish, was not what he’d expected. “I have been inoculated, Sotiris,” the Long-Life said, indicating the table. “Nothing can harm me here.”
Sotiris nodded, thoughtful, withdrawing his hand. “Besides the living, of course.”
He watched the eyes, unblinking, shining from behind the holes in the cloth.
“As if you know what living is,” Aaron sneered, tucking away his clawed hand.
The blankness returned. Sotiris wanted to reach out, to pull the hood away and see what it was underneath all that fabric. Then he recalled, his dreams coming back to him in a rush of sensation.
Burned, strong coffee and salt on the wind, the sucking slap of waves rolling into port.
A soul, bound to the world and now free.
An offer, a reward, and then all would be well.
DUSK
He’d fallen asleep stretched back in the deckchair, his arms dangling stiffly over the sides. Lycaste sat up groggily and glanced around at the cool, pink light. The Vaulted Land’s lazy Quarter had run on towards night, shrouding the plantations in deep shadow. He blinked, noting the abundance of moths fluttering in the evening air, tiny blurred shapes that spiralled and hovered around the balcony. Lycaste frowned. There were hundreds of them now, as if they’d been released from their nets for the evening. He wondered absently how the pickers collected them each morning as he peered back into the dark recesses of the rooms behind him.
But there were no pickers, not any more. The fields, their silver pathways gleaming dully in the last of the light, were empty. Lycaste sat up in his deckchair to look over the balustrade, leaning his elbows on the stone. It was just bright enough to see that some of the nets had been torn open, accounting for the profusion of moths clouding the sky. A few settled on the stone balcony, wandering clumsily across his hands, but he hardly noticed.
Something had happened.
Lycaste stood and brushed away the moths, new fear mixing with his bafflement, and collected his bag. Returning to the ballroom, he saw that the plasterer had gone. Slivers of glass glittered on the tiles that Lycaste spotted too late to step over properly, performing an awkward half-leap and cutting his foot in the process. He gripped his sliced heel, hobbling along until he could lean and remove the thin shard embedded in the skin. After one or two spots of blood oozed out, the wound closed and he could walk on, at first leaving large red crescents like inverted hoofprints across the floor behind him.
The pantry remained untouched, though from some of the other, more distant rooms Lycaste thought he might be able to hear the rumble of conversation. The feeling that something had happened returned, stronger this time, as he left his bloodied footprints across the tiles. He moved hesitantly towards the sounds, now erupting with peals of laughter to a backing of song, his pistol at the ready.
In an anteroom to one side of the pantry were libraries of sorts, a row of identical chambers decked with the same dusky rosewood shelves. Lycaste stood unnoticed in the doorway of the last, watching the fifty or so pickers who had congregated in the room. The light was almost gone in the chamber, but the glow of pipe bowls and a smoky fire in the hearth lent the place and the dancing people in it a sinister tinge, as if they were not quite there. Someone just inside the door passed him a bottle, tipping the neck amiably at him. He took a sip automatically, the instinct to blend in and hide that had kept him distant from people all his life taking over. The liquor burned his throat but he smiled as best he could. An arm curled around his neck as he passed the bottle back, a girl’s nose brushing his before he knew what was happening. When the kiss was done, she looked up at him and grinned, taking a gulp from her own fluted bottle that wetted her wide, pretty lips to glisten in the firelight. He dipped and kissed her again, inciting a stamping bellow of approval from the surrounding half-lit figures, and accepted another offered bottle.
The jangle of broken glass and a shower of spirit made them both glance up. A Melius in ripped clothes was perched atop one of the shelves, his hands raised. “Proximo!” he roared, throwing down another broken bottle as the room cheered back.
“Proximo!” the girl yelled in Lycaste’s ear, stamping her feet and taking his face in her hands to bite his lip. She pulled away and pushed the bottle to his mouth, tipping it up until he was forced to lean back to catch it all. At last, when he thought he would gag, she relented, taking the bottle back and grabbing his hand.
They stole out into the hallway, the roaring of song following them into the darkness. She led him along, her fingers around his thumb in a curiously childish gesture that made him wonder at her age, apparently uninterested in the scenes of pillage they were passing: people wrapping things in curtains and hefting them out of the windows, precious metals being chiselled, yanked and torn from the walls. His throat—still dry despite the drink—ached, and he was conscious for a moment that he might well have slept for much longer than he’d thought, like some slumbering princess of legend, years passed in dreamless oblivion. Maneker and Huerepo could be long gone by now, having tried in vain to find him. The panic he’d so successfully tamped down finally broke through.
Lycaste returned his attention to the girl, his heart thrashing. She was untying her skirts one-handed while she ran, unslipping buttons with practised ease. At a flight of broad stairs, she discarded the last of her underwear and bounded on ahead, leaving him to puff slowly after her like some aged, impotent husband.
The darkness of the upper floors was almost total, though somewhere he could
hear her calling to him. Passing by a broken window, Lycaste stopped for breath, looking out by chance onto the inner courtyard where they’d first met the Satrap. Light from the lower windows came to rest in stripes among the trees and fountains of the formal garden, the shadows of dancing Melius writhing in the grass like elongated black spirits. The garden appeared empty, though something pale and patterned had caught on the edge of the fountain, stirring in the night wind. Lycaste stared down at it, slowly realising that he’d seen the material before: the Satrap’s nightgown.
The silver cobbles of the road thrummed with the beat of hooves. Lycaste pushed into a still-netted enclosure, batting at the sudden swarm of soft wings, and dropped to his knees. In the dimness, he saw and heard three riders bolt past against the bluish outline of the hills, their mounts’ reins jangling. He shivered, one large finger wedged into the chiselled trigger guard of his pistol.
The port Maneker had mentioned, Astirion-Salay—it couldn’t be far. Lycaste stopped to listen to the whoops and song floating from the palace windows. Another set of hooves thundered up the road, the skittish beast stopping and starting. Lycaste turned in the undergrowth, ears rising.
The charcoal outline of a ferdie and its two small riders bucked along the path leading from the gardens, pursued closely by two more. Lycaste ducked again as the crack and spark of a weapon lit the plantation for a second.
“I’m here!” he screamed, rising and tangling himself in the nets. A surge of moths swirled from the leaves. “Over here!”
The leading ferdie galloped past, the dwarfish person at the back twisting and firing something that fizzed and sparked at the chasing riders.
Lycaste pushed his fingers through the loops of the net and tore it open, struggling free. He shook himself and sprinted parallel with the road, ducking as the second rider reined to a juddering stop and aimed a blackly silhouetted weapon at the departing ferdie.