by Tom Toner
He thought quickly, jumping up and shoving the pursuing ferdie as hard as he could. It fell with a scream, spilling its rider onto the road. Lycaste ran on in a leaping sprint, catching up with the foremost riders and passing them, coming to a halt and facing them with his arms outstretched. The tiny figure swung around, finding him in its sights.
“Stop! Maneker!” He put out the flats of his hands as the ferdie galloped past, then turned and slowed.
“There you are!” the Vulgar wailed, his face a grey smudge in the twilight.
“Get another and follow,” Maneker growled, nothing but a lump of rags at the ferdie’s neck. He dug his boots into the beast’s flanks and Lycaste watched them canter off, clenching his pistol in the darkness, waiting for the sound of the next ferdie. From the darkness the last rider emerged, slapping his whip and spitting oaths. Lycaste steadied himself in the centre of the road, his legs braced apart, aiming as best as he could at the top of the rider’s head. He fired, shutting his eyes before he’d squeezed the trigger.
After a few moments went by, he blinked them open and stared along the dim road through a drifting swirl of moths, the silence intensified. In place of a bang, the pistol appeared to have cancelled out all sounds, as if sapping them from the air. The man’s shouted curses had ceased the instant Lycaste pulled the trigger, and now only a cantering ferdie appeared through the moths, its rider nowhere to be seen.
Lycaste reached out a hand and caught the animal’s reins to slow it as it trotted alongside him. Mounting unsteadily, he looked out into the bluish night for the others, inspecting the pistol with a baffled frown and sliding it back into his bandolier.
CORBITA
Her eyes stung. The pink wooden chamber was only just beginning to feel like home after their three-day passage. Pentas blinked and rubbed her face, hoisting the lantern and pushing herself out of bed, furious all over again with the old man for forcing them on this absurd trip.
She checked quickly on Arabis and saw to the two small chairs herself. The table she would leave unless someone else came for it; it wasn’t her job. It outraged her that Jatropha had turned down the offer of hiring a Butler Bird for the voyage. Other people across the galley had them; she saw them in the mornings airing beds and guessed such a luxury would’ve cost only a fraction of a length more. They had an arduous journey ahead, or so everyone kept telling her.
Up on deck the morning was porcelain pink, almost mirroring their chamber, with one or two faint stars still lingering in the west. A roped gangplank had been lowered to the harbourside and Pentas could see the ship had been unloaded, the rest of the passengers already on their way. They’d let her sleep in. A stirring of gratitude was soon replaced by indignation that the old man and her sister still treated her like an invalid, some sorry moping lump of a girl who needed all the help she could get just to survive. She marched ahead with the chairs, dumping them by the rock wall of the harbour while Jatropha inspected the removal of their cargo from the hold. The sea cog’s animal figurehead, carved to resemble a giant Southern Howling Owl, gazed over her. She stared into its vacant eyes, remembering the days when she’d been interested in sculpture herself, and judged it a poor likeness.
Two Tenthling boys caught her attention at the entrance to the hold—she thought she knew them distantly; they’d once been in Impa-tiens’s employ. The first stepped back into the dim morning light, motioning with his hands. At his signal, a great parcel of tied canvas rolled out, the thing Jatropha had guaranteed would get them to the Second Province unharmed.
The twenty-seven-foot-high Wheelhouse rolled chaotically backwards out of its covering and down the stone ramp, sloshing through the surf and coming smoothly to a stop in the sand. Pentas looked to the ramshackle wooden balcony that framed the vast spoked wheel, spotting Jatropha sitting happily in the cabin among the jumbled terrace of apartments, the peeling paint of their red and blue window frames bright in the morning sun. Eranthis followed along the beach, the baby clutched to her, and signalled for Pentas to climb in.
The two boys had joined her sister, both apparently eager to see the baby. For a moment, Pentas felt seething resentment that someone, even the child’s aunt, would allow anyone near Arabis without her express consent. She stormed onto the beach and snatched the child away, then climbed the ladder. On the balcony, she set the child down in a too-large chair, smoothing its sparse hair in an attempt to calm its bawling, and began to explore the rectangle of tiny rooms that made up the living quarters, scullery and crude necessarium, the sound of the waves sighing through the open windows. Eranthis arrived on the balcony, her arms laden with more goods—gifts from the cog’s captain— and they glared at each other through the scullery window.
“Welcome aboard the Corbita!” the Amaranthine’s cheery voice called from the prow. Eranthis said nothing, arranging her baggage and slapping the wheel’s huge wooden spoke in response. Pentas took Ara-bis, claiming a bedroom and unfurling some blankets. She kicked her bags through the door and slammed it shut.
The great house began to move, wobbling uncertainly along the sand and up into the orchards of Artemida. Soon spear-shaped cypress trees screaming with cicadas brushed the windows, blocking the last glimpse of the coast, and Pentas knew glumly that there was no turning back; they’d set out at last upon the Western Artery, their route unbroken now but for Provincial borders all the way to the home of her lost love.
The twenty miles of road to Acropolo were fairly straight and scattered with travellers of varying shapes and colours, their luggage piled in neat towers over their backs or hefted by servants carrying litters. The majority gave way to the Wheelhouse, stopping at the sides of the road to wave as it rumbled past, kicking up a storm of pebbles and dust in its wake. For those disinclined to move out of the way, Jatropha honked an inflatable horn, eventually scattering them. Pentas moved to the window to watch some recalcitrants ambling to the roadside: two Fourth-lings, perhaps homeless from the war, and a Tenthling guide. Over his back, the Tenthling lugged an open basket of writhing black snakes. The travellers looked sourly at the Wheelhouse as it wobbled by, the Fourth-lings eventually spotting her in her small window and meeting her eye. She collected Arabis and moved to the other side of the cabin, stepping through the slowly moving spokes to reach the scullery. From there she could get a better view of the wild groves of ancient poplar, cypress and olive, unsullied by glowering travellers jealous of her comfort. Pentas wondered why Jatropha kept so stubbornly to his secret identities; they’d move if they knew who he was. She watched the twisted olive trees sweep by, some apparently thousands of years old, suddenly aware that none of the travellers on the Artery would likely even know of the Amaranthine’s existence.
Pentas rocked the sleeping bundle in her lap for a while, her thoughts sliding back into the past, to a time of seemingly unending grief and pain. Lycaste’s handsome face, once so fresh in her mind, was hardly visible now, just a suggestion, like one of her faster sketches. The second face that came to mind she knew would never dull. It was visible every time she looked down, as she did now, into the bundle of soft linen in her lap, and would be there reflected back at her as she looked into the faces of his family once their trip was done.
Through a blur of tears she saw she had a visitor; a small red messenger bird with a curved beak and round black eyes had landed on the windowsill of the scullery and cocked its head at her, observing Arabis in her lap as if she were the most fascinating thing it had ever seen. Pentas stared at it, noticing the clutch of rolled letters wedged into a painted wooden collar around its neck. She sniffed, waving an arm to shoo it away.
At a bend in the road, the orchards rose sharply. They crested the rise, the Wheelhouse climbing with a sluggish squeal, and began to drop again, picking up speed. Pots and hanging jugs tinkled and swayed, pans clattering musically. Across a hot swathe of olive orchards the land rose again to a hilly plateau, a glaring-white town of growth-stone towers clinging to the hillsides. Crowning the plateau were the stumps of
old stones, the ruins Jatropha had told them of where they would make their first stop.
“Iced treats,” said the fat Ninthling in the concave place, “perfect on a day like this.” He gestured to the curving, patterned walls at the hundreds of pigeonholes. “I have Green Excelsa, Valline and Syrup.”
Pentas dawdled, not wanting to leave the fabulously cool chamber. She’d never tried an iced treat, though of course she’d heard of them. The conical chill chambers dotted the rubble fields of Acropolo, their smooth cone sides scrawled with written advertisements. Pentas had been allowed to wander first, leaving Eranthis and the Cryling back in the wheelhouse and taking her time wandering among the exceedingly dull ruins.
She touched a hand to the purse around her neck, feeling the coiled silk given to her by Jatropha for daily expenses, and pulled out a length of green. She presented it to the treat seller to be snipped and he touched her palm in the customary sealing of the deal, taking up his scissors and holding them open half an inch from the ribbon’s end. Pentas nodded, confirming the transaction by the age-old agreement of the eye, and the Ninthling closed his shears. Stowing the snippet of money, he turned to the pigeonholes and removed the pot of Valline she’d pointed at.
She strolled among the shells of worn columns, keeping the Wheel-house in view. Up ahead were the low remains of the place Jatropha had called the Erechtheum, already busy with morning tourists. Pentas wandered closer, spooning the rapidly melting treat from the pot, not entirely sure whether she liked it or not.
Jatropha had hinted that he’d be gone the whole day, about some business or other that they wouldn’t understand. He’d left them here, at the top of this blasted hill, in some attempt to instil cultural sensibilities into the girls; an effort Pentas considered wholly wasted, like the awful jokes the Amaranthine told. Her sister would no doubt appreciate the ruins, remnants of a time before even Jatropha claimed to have existed, but all Pentas saw were lumps of weathered rock, smoothed by rain and wind to nothing more than denuded shapes almost indistinguishable from nature.
The old man, just like her tutors before him, didn’t appear to understand how bludgeoning someone with facts caused them to hate their subjects. Pentas, force-fed knowledge all her life, despised almost everything but painting, where her natural talents had shone through and freed her from rigid instruction. It was her greatest love still, though in the past weeks and months she hadn’t thought it possible that her mind would ever turn again to paints and board and the tranquillity they could bring.
At the eroded foundations of the Erechtheum she put down her pot, sitting in the morning light to watch the travellers as they pored over the remains. She observed a huge, bent-backed Jalan tramp wearing linen rags and sashes—some soldier recently released from his commission, perhaps—gazing attentively at the worn entrance columns and extending a hand to rub the stone in wonder. She watched the giant without expression as he licked his ramshackle teeth with a long tongue, taking out a chisel and glancing surreptitiously around. Pentas looked away to the other ruins, pretending to be lost in thought, waiting a few breaths to glance back. The Jalan had begun working at a piece of the stone, scraping away until a chunk came free. He pocketed it with a jagged smile and ambled inside the remains.
Pentas strolled behind him at a safe distance, her eyes following the hunched shape as it looked from side to side. She passed through the entrance of the ruin and into shadow, pausing to see why the Jalan might have been interested in that particular part of the pillar, but the stone surrounding the gouge was as plain as any other.
Within the ruins, traders had set up shacks and awnings that spidered out and up to the missing roof. Pentas saw the Jalan lurch towards a food stall and begin the haggle, cradling his purse with almost infantile vulnerability. Her eyes wandered to the scenes beyond; a zeltabra auction was in the process of setting up, the iron railings of an enclosure being hammered down amid various chairs and milling people. She took one last look around and left, reentering the sunlight more bored than ever.
At a pile of stone slabs, a cluster of spherical cages stood uncovered, whatever was in them left to bake in the sun. Pentas wandered a little closer, suddenly hopeful that they were Monkmen. She bent and peered inside until a face stirred and looked up at her.
“What are you, then?” she asked it, squatting to look inside the other cages. They were tiny pale monsters, heat-shrunken apparitions like a Melius washed and left out to dry. They blinked, opening their mouths and revealing rows of needle-sharp teeth. Inside the second cage, one had died and been partially feasted upon. Pentas knew better than to try to reach in, imagining a gruesome scene where she came away minus a finger, but she lingered all the same, whispering to them as they stared keenly up at her.
“Hello, little darlings,” she said, looking into their eyes and seeing the faintest comprehension in them. “What are your names?” She saw their pointed ears stir, knowing then that they could understand the gist of what she was saying. “How about something to eat?”
Clear drool seeped from their open mouths, a look of slack anticipation on their faces. Pentas smiled and reached into her purse, rummaging her hand theatrically past the silk rolls.
“Now what have we here?” Their mouths opened wider, exposing long, desiccated tongues. She began to remove her hand slowly, watching their beautiful blue and green eyes dilate.
“Oh.” Her hand came out empty.
Their faces crumpled in confusion. Pentas covered her laughter with a hand.
“Taunting the Starlings, eh?” someone said behind her. She looked to see that the voice belonged to an elderly Eighthling wearing a neatly pointed black beard. “You’re courting bad luck, you know. Only the children make sport with them, so they do.”
Pentas shrugged and looked back into the cage. The Starlings had begun to mumble to one another rapidly in a tongue she couldn’t help but find vaguely threatening.
“Still, you’re a clever girl for not trying to pass them your finger,” the man continued, still standing a few paces away from her.
“Of course,” she replied. A semi-amused look had emerged in his lined, twinkling eyes. It was an expression she was familiar with, suspecting easily enough what he might want from her. The man’s skin had churned golden-pink in the delicate shade of jolly good humour. His pointed beard looked too perfectly trimmed. Vain, Pentas thought, glancing back at the disgruntled creatures in the cage. As she did so, an arc of stinking yellow water jetted out at her, splashing her feet.
“Little monsters!” she screamed, shielding her eyes. The Eighth-ling roared mean laughter. Pentas looked down at her wet toes, hands in the air, beginning to laugh despite herself. The Starlings echoed the laughter like a flock of squealing parrots.
“Here,” the man said, untying a handkerchief from his pack.
She took it, wiping herself down.
“I warned you, so I did,” the Eighthling said, taking back his handkerchief. He dribbled water from his flask over it and shook the linen rag onto the stones. Pentas grimaced, imagining him using it to blow his nose further down the road, and decided now would be a good time to return to the Wheelhouse. The necessarium on board, whilst old and leaky, would serve her better than a strange traveller’s handkerchief. She nodded and began to make her way back along the stones.
“Might I escort you among the sights, miss?” the Eighthling called after her, falling in step alongside. He bowed and gestured at the cloth-bound ring book in his hand, which he must have been holding the entire time. “I’m something of a chronicler in these parts. I give tours of the place for a small fee.” He ran a hand through his beard, staring critically at her. “But great beauty is silk in itself. I’ve watched you wander this place, so I have, and you looked more than a little bored—let me render my services for free.”
Pentas glanced at him askance, not replying. She saw the Wheel-house between some worn pillars across the field of boulders and was suddenly glad.
“Or perh
aps just sit with me a while,” the man added quickly, stashing his book with trembling fingers and moving to block her way.
“No, thank you,” Pentas said, pushing past him.
The chronicler hissed under his breath, putting out his wiry hand to stop her. “Maybe the young miss is hungry? Let me take you into the town for something.”
“The young miss wants you to leave her be.”
“Of course, of course,” he simpered, still walking beside her. With a spark of alarm, Pentas noticed him glancing furtively around, checking for anyone nearby. She thought of the things Jatropha had shown them, the ways of shirking troublesome attention and unwanted suitors, but couldn’t remember any of the Amaranthine’s tricks.
“I like that,” the chronicler said, twiddling the tip of his beard. “Playing mean. I like that, so I do.”
The Wheelhouse came into view again, close enough to run to. Pentas saw Eranthis waiting on deck.
“My, my,” the Eighthling leered, his voice taking on a deeper, coarser tinge all of a sudden. “Aunty? Sister? Girlyfriend?”
“We’re with our husbands, actually,” she replied, fixing his beady eye. “They’ll be back soon.”
The chronicler smirked. “Oh, if I had a fifth of green for every time a girly said that to me.” In an instant he had her wrists in his grasp. “But pretty girlies lie for a living, so they do.”
“Piss off!” Pentas yelled, shoving him to one side. The weight of the man’s pack sent him toppling with a yelp before he could find his footing. She grinned, running on.
“Bitch!” he screamed after her from the rubble. “I’ll be coming for you! I know what you have up there!”
“Get us out of here!” Pentas half-giggled up to Eranthis as she reached the shadow of the Corbita and climbed the ladder to the deck. She threw the hatch closed over the rungs and locked it shut. Together they hid in the scullery, watching from the corner of the open window as the chronicler arrived, prowling around the base of the wheel.