by Tom Toner
She looked Bidens up and down as he jumped from the ladder, deciding he could do the cutting while she had herself an evening tipple on the balcony.
“You dropped it,” Jatropha whispered beside her, appearing as if from nowhere.
“How particularly observant of you,” she said, rounding on him. Bidens lowered his eyes, gingerly pushing the plank straight with his foot.
Pentas came around the Corbita’s wheel, carrying Arabis and pursued along the branches by a dozen fascinated black Monkmen. They stopped to look down upon the stricken vehicle and its owners, chewing handfuls of nuts. Eranthis noticed a few sitting on the Wheelhouse’s roof, some stolen wine bulbs tucked into their paws.
“If we don’t get going soon they’ll have all our supplies.”
Jatropha looked at them, eyebrows raised, and they immediately scampered off, leaping back into their branches.
Eranthis took one end of the plank again with Bidens and leaned it against the wheel. The rattling thump of what was clearly another Wheelhouse grew in volume along the Artery and they turned to watch it approach. It appeared from behind the trees, slightly smaller than the Corbita and painted in peeling shades of blue. Potted shrubs crowded the decks, and in the shadow of the tiller cabin, two occupants sat darkly concealed, sparing them no more than a glance as they passed. The contraption rumbled on, pelting the edges of the field with a spray of pebbles, and was gone. Eranthis wondered how long it would be before the landowner heard about the mess they’d made of the field, hoping they could get the repairs finished before anyone came.
Almost a Quarter later, as night descended and they ate on the balcony, a shabby, emaciated figure arrived riding a push-gig and stopped to examine them as the Demian had. It approached the lantern light, growing in clarity, and Eranthis saw it was an Awger. Its long, morose face smiled as it bowed, its large body hidden beneath a ragged Shamecoat. Eranthis thought it must be half-hound, looking canine in some way, though it wasn’t furred like their last visitor. Beside it, one handle clasped in its hand, the push-gig leaned, draped with baskets and nets and dangling cages that appeared to contain sleeping birds under coverings. This thing was some kind of wandering peddler, perhaps. Or a catcher of messenger birds. Eranthis glanced at Jatropha, who seemed to be paying the Awger little attention as he read from one of his books in the weak light.
“Don’t feed him anything,” the Amaranthine muttered, not looking up. “There’s food enough on the road.”
Eranthis suddenly understood why these creatures were outcast. One imagined the processes involved in their conception: a bored Melius traveller, a Cursed Person sleeping rough on a town’s wooded edge. She looked at the Awger with a new sympathy, taking a plate of food and descending the ladder to meet it.
“Here,” she said, offering the plate of Bulberries and drippers, knowing it was nothing special.
The Awger slinked back from her light, gently taking the plate from her. She hadn’t asked it to join them, but was nonetheless surprised when it poured the food into a bag hanging from the push-gig’s handle and pocketed the plate as well, raising a hand as it climbed back on and wobbled off back onto the Artery.
“That’s coming out of your pocket money,” Jatropha said, going inside as the squeaks of the push-gig diminished into the darkness.
DAY-DARK PALACE
Lycaste fastened his grip under the Amaranthine’s arm, dragging him up and out of the surf. The pitted rocks were sharp as blades where he scrabbled for a hold, slashing his hand across from palm to thumb. He swore and looked for Huerepo, noticing the Vulgar climbing to safety some way along the outcrops.
“Help me with him!” Lycaste bellowed over the boom of the waves, flapping his bloodied hand and dragging Maneker up by the shoulders. The Immortal moaned, his fingers going to his eyes.
“Here,” Huerepo panted, arriving to stand over them on the lip of a jagged shard of rock. Rising above the shoreline where the Vulgar had come from, Lycaste could just see the top of a creamy, wind-eroded tower in the early-morning light, the spires of some darker, taller edifice rising behind. The rest of the world rolled above like a hallucinogenic nightmare. The two of them stared down at Maneker lying against the sharp outcrop, his legs still lapped by arriving waves.
The Melius who had attacked them had been clumsy in their work, slashing randomly into the man’s head. While the right eye was entirely missing, only a portion of Maneker’s left had been removed. The remainder dangled among the scrapes and scratches, a pink ribbon held together by nerves or vessels, sticking limply to the Amaranthine’s cheekbone. Lycaste could only imagine the pain the man was in, hammered and scoured by salt waves since their jump from the ship, and yet Maneker hardly made a sound.
Lycaste bent, lifting the Amaranthine and draping him over his shoulder. He glanced at the tower as he stepped up onto some flattened rocks. It appeared to match Maneker’s description, its stone pocked and speckled with holes, the mortar scooped away by the sea winds of millennia. When he came to the lip of the rocks, he released the Amaranthine, laying him as gently as he could at Huerepo’s feet. Maneker began to mumble, his hands opening and closing into fists, the skin of his knuckles whitening. He opened them and suddenly started beating his palms on the rocks, cutting them and flinging blood.
“Stop!” Lycaste pleaded, standing awkwardly at his side.
“Why?” the Amaranthine hissed.
Lycaste was lost for words. He sat down on a lump of rock and looked out to sea.
Maneker broke into a shuddering sigh, raising his bloodied hands to his missing eyes once more.
“The prisoner might be able to help him,” the Vulgar said, tipping water from his spring pistol and glancing around impatiently. “Don’t you think? We shouldn’t wait.”
Lycaste glared at Huerepo. “You’re welcome to carry him for a while, you know.”
The Vulgar crossed his little arms about himself, his tunic dark and dripping. His shiny white face looked especially pale with the gloom of the early evening spanning a continent behind him, on the world’s opposite side.
“All right!” Lycaste got to his knees, his heart still thudding from the climb and a night spent struggling through dark, choppy waters, a person clinging to either arm. He reached out to grab the Amaranthine.
“I can walk,” Maneker said suddenly, his voice soft. “Just . . . guide me.”
Lycaste hesitated, glancing at Huerepo. “Are we in the right place? This is the tower?”
Maneker nodded, feeling the rocks for a place he could lean on to stand. “I know this shore. This is it.”
Together they shuffled up the rocks, the Amaranthine holding tightly onto Lycaste’s wrist. He couldn’t help but find Maneker’s clammy, broken-fingered grip unpleasant. Huerepo had chosen to climb inside the damp knapsack, though the added weight hardly slowed their grandfatherly pace.
The dawn sea winds softened as they came inland, cresting some stiff dunes of milky, blown weed and sinking into the gardens surrounding the tower, what Lycaste remembered Maneker calling the Oratory. Other blackened towers clustered nearby, their tiled peaks grey and desolate against the glowering white sky. Maneker had said that these had all been built by the hand of one person, and had taken many centuries to erect. Now they looked to be falling down, with a heaped litter of corroded masonry marring the overgrown paths between them. Lycaste’s gaze traversed the gargoyle faces in the walls—hollow-eyed Amaranthine heads worn smooth by rain—and down to the path before them. Worn limestone walls double Lycaste’s height led off into the depths of the overgrown gardens.
“Can you see the walls?” Maneker asked through teeth gritted with pain.
“Yes,” Lycaste said, gazing up at the black windows of the place.
“Five right turns, commencing after the second left.”
They went in, Lycaste understanding immediately that the Amaranthine maze had not been functional for some time. The walls Maneker expected to be there had mostly worn to nothing
but foundation blocks, others laid siege to by gloomy stands of overgrown holly laden with orange berries.
“The walls are all eroded,” he said, guiding Maneker’s hand so the man could feel the head-sized holes that punctured the stone near him.
“It doesn’t matter,” the Amaranthine said. “Go the way I told you.”
With Huerepo counting the branching passageways over Lycaste’s head, they made their shuffling way through the second left, turning right immediately where the worn chunks of stone suggested a corner. The holly had almost entirely obscured any direct route to the Oratory with a forest of spiked, deep green leaves.
“What if we just pushed through the trees?” Huerepo asked from the top of the knapsack. “From up here I could guide us.”
“You think so little of Amaranthine design,” Maneker said tersely, the pain perhaps worsening. “We’d be lost almost immediately. I suppose I’d get out after a few centuries of trial and error, but that wouldn’t help you two.”
Lycaste, who was enjoying the sensation of not being the cause of Maneker’s irritation for once, looked into the dark holly groves with new fear, beginning to worry that they might have miscounted the turns.
“Shouldn’t be long now,” Maneker said. “Keep counting.”
They turned the last corner, a more robustly built section of the maze leading to the grand steps of the Oratory across a misted acre of gravelled garden. Lycaste put out a hand to stop Maneker, feeling Huerepo tense on his shoulders.
At the end of the maze something stirred, its slender head rising from the remains of a long-decayed corpse. Lycaste met its eyes through the stiffened, matted fur of its muzzle, hearing the deep rumble of its snarl.
“Fuine,” Maneker said softly at the sound. “They should’ve starved by now.”
The beast’s lips peeled back, its jaws slathered from the body’s rotten innards, teeth brown as mahogany. It tensed on its haunches and moved a blooded paw to cover its meal.
“Let it eat,” Huerepo said as they inched closer. The Fuine observed their approach with unblinking intensity, flattening its ears as a Melius might. Its yellow-white pelt was stretched tight over its bones, balding in places like a worn stuffed toy. It patted the ground with its tail, thumping out a tattoo of unease. They slipped past the Fuine with their backs to the wall, stepping slowly and deliberately. Huerepo shivered inside the knapsack and pulled the cover down.
They passed a few feet from the corpse. The Fuine trembled, a ripple shivering through its wasted muscles, and clawed the body, teeth bared. Lycaste hardly breathed, gently pushing Maneker ahead of him. The Fuine’s eyes moved restlessly from Maneker’s to Lycaste’s. It began to drag the body backwards with shuffling movements until Lycaste saw it come up against the opposite wall. Startled, it glanced away from them.
He quickened his step.
The Fuine swung its head around, snarling, and sprang.
Lycaste turned, shielding his eyes, feeling the weight of it strike and almost knock him to the ground. Claws tore painlessly into the meat of his back, hooking between his shoulder blades. He threw himself against the eroded wall, pinning the creature until one of the claws slipped, then grabbed at the skinny paw and sank his teeth into it. The Fuine yowled, working its other claw loose and grappling his leg. They spun and dropped, spraying gravel. The Fuine mewled and snapped at him, the charnel stench thick from its jaws, snaring his free arm in its teeth. Lycaste pulled his wrist back, peeling the skin away with a spray of blood, and bellowed, clamping his teeth into the Fuine’s furred neck. They stayed locked that way in a wrestlers’ embrace, muscles straining, until Lycaste dug his slipping foot back into the gravel and summoned all his weight forward. The Fuine howled as Lycaste bit harder and dug deeper. Blood began to jet as he worked his jaws from side to side, tearing and pulling and yanking at the Fuine’s flesh until he knew he was coated with the thing’s blood. He wrenched and tugged, feeling something give way inside the animal’s neck. Its struggling slowed to nothing and it slumped beneath him. He pulled his teeth out, jaw muscles aching, and spat blood.
One look into its eyes told him the Fuine was dead. He tried to stand but couldn’t, seeing his own blood caking his thigh where the creature’s barbed claws had locked into his muscle.
“Bloody hell,” Huerepo muttered from inside the dropped knapsack, poking his head out. He was apparently more interested in the state of Lycaste’s back. “Wait, wait. Stop squirming.”
Lycaste kept still as the Vulgar climbed out, half-expecting the Fuine to rise up with a second wind and swallow Huerepo whole. The little man glanced fearfully at the creature’s glassy eyes as he worked first on the claws embedded in Lycaste’s leg, yanking them out one by one and drawing fresh blood.
Lycaste looked down at the Fuine lying in a heap before them, then at Maneker.
The Amaranthine nodded and kept moving. “Not so useless after all,” he said, extending his hand behind him. Lycaste exchanged wary glances with Huerepo and offered Maneker his scratched, bloodied wrist.
They dealt with another emaciated Fuine closer to the doors by tossing it food from Lycaste’s knapsack. Lycaste looked back a few times to watch it eat, worrying as he limped to the Oratory that it might still be there, waiting, upon their return.
They approached the doors, two carved oaken slabs stained a dark cherry by centuries of fierce weather. A few bones, pitted and pale as marble, decorated the steps. Lycaste guided Maneker’s hand to the great tarnished silver handle, running the man’s fingers along the relief carvings in the surface of the door.
“They won’t be locked,” he said, taking his hand away. Lycaste leaned his shoulder against the heavy panel and shoved, heaving the doors open.
Within, the Oratory was still and frigid, their breath pluming before them. In the light of the open door, Lycaste could see the spiral stair that led to the upper chambers. He stepped further in, offloading Huerepo as the Amaranthine let go of his wrist and went about locking the doors. Darkness slipped into the room again, returning comfortably to a space it had occupied for hundreds of years without interruption.
“Just a minute,” Maneker said, whispering something to himself.
Lycaste waited, feeling goosebumps rise on his ripped skin. His mind couldn’t make sense of the things he’d glimpsed during the few seconds of light. He faced the room in the blackness, nothing but their shallow breathing, Maneker’s whispers and the muffled wind outside for stimulus.
A creamy glow kindled into existence above them, emanating from a small, white point.
“What are those?” he asked, of nobody in particular, walking slowly to the centre of the chamber. Before him, pale in the yellowish light, stood maybe a hundred jumbled figures, slim and white as bodies left to soak. Lycaste put out his hand to touch one. Each was a faceless mannequin made from stitched canvas, the stuffing poking out from holes in some of them to expose a hard wooden skeleton within. Most had toppled sideways in one direction, and thrown over them were ancient, musty clothes, the musk of which filled the chamber with a fine dust of dissolving thread. Lycaste took a handful of the ancient cloth, tweezing the fibres between his fingers, alarmed to watch it come apart in his hand. The stone floor under the mannequins’ angled feet was littered with precious gems, which had presumably fallen from the clothing as stitching had given way over the centuries. He crouched and picked one up, a flawed garnet carved with a thousand façades, and tossed it to Huerepo, returning to the pile of blank effigies to sift their bodies for intact clothing that would cover his stinging scratches. The blood had stopped flowing, but still great tracts of red, swollen muscle showed through where the skin had peeled away from his arm and leg.
Lycaste selected a gown and tore the sleeves off, handing the unwanted fabric to Huerepo so that the Vulgar could bandage the Ama-ranthine’s ruined eyes. He tied what he could around his own wounds, winding the fold of fabric over his forearm and strapping more to his thigh with tight knots he’d learned during Impat
iens’ fishing lessons. Satisfied that he could do little with his back, he cast his eye around the jumbled pile of mannequins again, spotting something glimmering in the lantern light. He made his clumsy way through, pushing the figures out of the way and stacking them to one side like cords of wood. In the centre of the heap, a group of twenty or so mannequins had fallen to pieces, weighed down by exquisite metal clothing. He pulled a hauberk of glittering gold rondels from the dusty remains of a smashed figure, framing it against himself to see if it would fit. Draping it over his arm, he resumed the search, finding yet more dazzling pieces of clothing that might be of some use to them on the return trip, understanding how much easier his encounter with the Fuine might have been had he worn some of this Amaranthine armour. Lycaste waded out of the debris again to where Huerepo had almost finished applying the trimmed cloth to Maneker’s eyes. The Amaranthine sat still, his head tilted up to the spark as if he could discern its light. Sometimes his lips moved soundlessly. Lycaste smiled, watching Huerepo move across the room to inspect the trove, mouth open in wonder.
After he’d loaded his pack with clothing, Lycaste picked up some delicate blue gloves trimmed with fur, untucking the finely spun fingers. They looked almost large enough to fit his own hands, being twice the size of any Amaranthine’s and possessing more than the standard five digits each. He slid his fingers in, waggling his knuckles and looking around for anything that might go with them. As he did so, something sharp and fine pricked his middle finger and he pulled his hand out with a gasp. A spider, dark and quite repulsively hairy, slid writhing from the glove to plop onto the floor. Lycaste stepped back as it scurried to the door, inspecting the tiny beads of blood on his fingertip.
“Watch out,” he called to Huerepo, who was still digging around among the mannequins. “There are bitey things in the clothes.”