The Weight of the World

by Tom Toner

  She hated to think what might have happened had they managed to run away in Mostar, conscious now that there must have been thieves on their tail for who knew how many days. There were surely more out there, awaiting any messenger birds that were able to get away. Finally, she returned her attention to the Amaranthine. She’d been wrong about him, and once again he had saved their lives.

  “All right,” Eranthis muttered, blowing on her tea and glancing at Pentas. “Forward we go, then.”

  “Good,” Jatropha said, finally pouring a cup for himself.

  They’d rolled on through the night, keeping their lanterns dimmed. Up ahead, a crude dam of branches and rocks had been hastily dumped in their path, and the Wheelhouse needed to leave the beach to get around it, making its hesitant way through a dark woodland illuminated only by green-tinged moonlight.

  Eranthis thought of the furious chronicler, Geum, the man they’d escaped at Acropolo. He could have spread word into the west by now. There might be a Jalan bounty on their heads, for all she knew. Jatropha said he had friends who could track the chronicler down, but that they must be patient; there were likely others out there with more to gain from the stolen Berenzargol child, and they, too, would have caught wind of the stories of a Wheelhouse making its way into the West with a valuable cargo.

  “So,” Eranthis said. “Fortifications.”

  The Wheelhouse was not a rare form of transport; they’d already sighted dozens of the ramshackle, multicoloured things on the road from Acropolo, so there was little point in selling it for something less conspicuous. She’d seen in Jatropha’s face how much he loved the thing and would’ve been sad to force him to sell. As a compromise, they’d all agreed on fortifying the vehicle against attack without slowing it down too much.

  “I know just the people,” Jatropha said, hawking his tea noisily out of the window and clearing his throat. “Let’s get going.”

  Pentas huffed, looking at the beach. “Must you spit like that?”

  Jatropha glanced back at her, a sudden intensity in his gaze, and Eranthis was reminded that he was a living thing, just like them. “I must,” he said. “Always.”

  Zadar was another port, an escarpment of growth-stone three miles long rising from weed-black rocks out of a dark blue sea. Across the water to the west, the far lands of Tail brooded, unseen, connected to the Thirdling city by daily convoys of merchant cogs. The westerly breeze whipped the surf along the coast into twinkling white trails, like the snow-capped peaks of a range of deep blue mountains, enraged as if by a blizzard.

  Pentas observed a cluster of three ships bobbing in the waves as her eyes wandered up to the city’s great keep. It rose at the end of the escarpment to angle out above the sea, a growth of dripping stone the colour of old bones, as if the material had gone wild at the ocean’s edge and spread out of control. Her eyes lingered on the swathe of wild mineral trees leaning over the sea; the deep forest they’d be sleeping in that night.

  Pentas narrowed her eyes against the sea wind, bobbing Arabis at her hip. The child had a Firmamental Ducat in her pudgy hand and was working away at its carved edge with her gums. “I don’t see why we’re stopping, why we can’t just get as far away from here as possible.”

  Jatropha looked into the baby’s large, pale eyes and smiled. “Oh, you think we’re being chased?” The condescension in his tone was unlike anything Eranthis had ever heard. “They’re ahead of us as well. When word gets out that the future queen of all the Provinces is trundling around in a wheelhouse, I assure you there’ll be nowhere to run.”

  Eranthis had been rummaging for the old telescope she’d stashed in her bags. She brought it out and returned to the deck, sighting the fortress. Pentas gestured for it but she shrugged her away. “What do you suggest, then?”

  “Gifts arrive in the strangest guises,” he said, absurdly beginning to chuckle. A black messenger raven with eyes like red marbles swept past the balcony, calling out in a language the girls had never heard. Jatropha’s smile broadened as he watched it wheel away, feathers ruffling in the wind. “Did I ever tell you,” he began, very much in the way he started every pointless, inconsequential story, “that I used to be a thief, once upon a time?”

  TANKER

  The crump and rattle of exchanged fire drifted across the island as Maril scampered down the hillside, his boots slipping on crumbling shale. He threw out a hand to steady his slide as a larger, deeper detonation rumbled from the direction of the bay.

  He sprinted between the chalky outcrops, momentarily lost until he saw the sea. Reaching the beach and unclipping his pistol, he stopped to listen, the boom of the evening waves obscuring anything that might be going on in the northerly coves. He stood a little longer, waiting, undecided, seeing none of his men or any of the Bie along the stretch of beach, then ran for the bent tree, spotting its angled trunk some way along the rocks at the water’s edge.

  He saw the shovel lying to one side as he came upon where Jospor had hidden the last of the weapons, knowing before he got there that they’d be gone. The hole was freshly, hurriedly dug out. He could make out more shots coming from around the headland; the fierce detonations of a firefight mingled with hoarse shouting.

  At the outcrops, Maril crept, head low, until he could just see the rusted Zelioceti tanker where it lay offshore among the towering sea stacks. He scanned the beach, noticing assorted scattered debris, still aflame. Further along, someone lay face down; a body clothed in bloodied rags, the rubber of its boot on fire. One of his men—Maril recognised the rings he wore. Dilmon. He ducked back, tapping the stock of his spring pistol against the rock while he thought. It was still dry and loaded with fifty-five lethal poison-tipped rounds: each was an assured one-shot kill— just loading them while the privateer bucked under fire could have been his last act in this life.

  This is an opportunity, he reminded himself on a continual loop. This is not a disaster.

  Edging out behind the rock again and running his eyes along the coast, he saw them at last—a train of shackled Vulgar guided by taller Zelioceti through the shallows to the tanker’s pitted hull. Maril’s eyes went to the decks, seeing the Bie milling on a winch platform, watched over by a Zelioceti leaning against the prow. In its hand it clutched a long driftwood staff that it pounded on the deck, a regular clanking beat. Maril cursed the damn creatures, furious at how calm they looked, how easily they’d been shepherded aboard. Glancing back to the captives in the shallows, he could see they were being taken to a ladder on the side of the hull. As the first of the Vulgar began to climb, Maril ducked behind cover again and turned his eyes skywards. The glow of the sun was almost gone, tingeing the sea a dark, foreboding green. He would wait.

  The stars, mostly washed out in the glow of Zeliolopos, had begun their night’s watch when Maril made his careful way along the beach and into the shallows. Once waist deep in the sea, he paused to observe the bob of lanterns further up the beach. He’d been watching the sweeps of the Zelioceti as the darkness grew. They must have taken a tally of the prisoners, questioning some in various unpleasant ways, and knew now that they were still short a valuable captain.

  Keeping his pistol out of the water, he waded deeper in, his clothing growing heavy, boots stumbling on patches of dead coral among the pebbles. As he neared the hull he glanced back, his nerves calmed by the sight of the fruitless search still going on along the beach. Judging by the lights, there were at least a dozen out there, the furthest scouts already almost a mile away and nearing the outcrops at the foot of the mountain.

  Clenching his pistol between his teeth, he stretched out into a doggy paddle, swimming the short distance beyond the stern to one of the sea stacks, ghostly pale in the gas giant’s light. Its limestone girth had been worn down where the sea brushed it, creating an almost insurmountable overhang that Maril would have to climb before he could make his way further up it to the top.

  He’d spent the waning day selecting which of the stacks to climb. They surrounde
d the Zelioceti ship like a white forest of tapering spires, ancient columns eroded at their base. At least four stood higher than the tanker by a few feet; a short jump down and he’d be on the deck.

  Close to the base of the chosen stack, Maril saw some rough edges he might grasp if only he could reach them over the smooth, dissolved undercut of the column. He clung on with one hand and pulled his knife free with the other, jamming it into the rock above and kicking the heel of his boot against the softened stone at the base of the stack. His waterlogged clothes dribbled into the sea like a gurgling piss stream. Maril froze, alarmed at the volume, and shook himself, dispersing the water.

  Climbing from the undercut was less difficult than he’d anticipated. Luckily the majority of the column hid him from the tanker and the beach—they glowed white in the planet-light, brilliant and obvious in their contrast. He crested the stack, arms and thighs burning from the exertion, and crawled along its angled top to stare down at the tanker.

  Fire drums on deck sent sparks floating up towards him in eddies of smoke, the stink of oil and tar and effluent climbing with them through a mesh of chains that ran the length of the tanker. He could just make out the ship’s cargo: dismantled Voidship components tightly packed and tied beneath pitch-coated canvas coverings, the majority hidden by a colossal heap of bundled copper wire and the first two ramshackle conning towers rising at the prow. Lengths of peeled tin, holey where the rivets had been removed, lay in cords just beneath him. A few charred superluminal cylinder heads sat massively off to one side, their circumferences striped with shrapnel scars. Maril looked at the debris beneath him, fantasising how long it would take for a crew to cobble together something that might get him and his men off Coriopil, well aware they could do no such thing. The Vulgar had no great talent for engineering. They purchased from the Pifoon and tinkered, or commandeered Lacaille ships. Even the late Wilemo Maril, before he’d taken a spanner to it, had been fifty years in the hands of a Lacaille Great Company then stolen from a yard of reprimanded ships. It was a well-known and embarrassing fact that most Prism Voidships had actually started life in Amaranthine Foundries more than four thousand years ago, remnants of the wars that had ended the Age of Decadence. Others, belonging mostly to the Pifoon, were even more ancient: six-thousand-year-old Amaranthine vessels able to snap across the entire Firmament in a handful of days, useless to the Immortals once they’d realised their own late-arriving powers. Only bits of those ships’ engines survived, usually, though one or two of the most expensive he’d seen had sported a few segments of rainbow-coloured carapace more wondrous than Old World jewels. The Pifoon did their best to copy their masters, fashioning the housing of their borrowed motors into the forms of beasts, but when you’d seen the originals, as Maril had, even highly prized Prism work looked laughably, staggeringly crude.

  From his vantage point on the stack, he could no longer see the grey Voidship, if that was what it really was. He guessed from what he had seen that it was not Zelioceti manufactured. Whether it would be any use or not was another matter; it was no easy feat to fly a ship you were even partially familiar with.

  Maril took a breath and jumped down, trying to land on his feet but tripping and skidding, spraining his wrist where it shot out to take his weight. His knife flew across the deck, spinning on the metal with a sound like a rolling coin. He dashed after it, clutching his bent wrist, ducking behind a heap of cargo at the last second as the shadow of a Zelioceti loomed over the deck. The knife spun to a stop. Maril leaned back in the shadows. The dragon jaw of a Pifoon cockpit, its internals stripped, gaped out at him. After a few breaths, he crept around to watch as the Zelioceti stooped, inspecting the knife thoughtfully before picking it up. The Zelioceti’s glinting eyes swivelled to survey the deck while it mumbled to itself, the sound of the sea and the rumble of the ship drowning whatever wandering thoughts it was trying to express.

  Maril pulled off his boots and set them to one side, sidling around the wreckage pile. He took a breath and inched into the light, ducking back the moment he saw that the Zelioceti had continued on along the deck, the knife in its hand. He swore, grabbing his boots and working his way parallel with the Zelioceti until he’d overtaken it and dashed into the shade of another superluminal component. There was no time. The Zelioceti had a long stride. Maril took a deep breath and swung out with a kick, snapping the creature’s gangly knee and dragging it squirming into the shadows. He brought his boot down across its long neck, silencing it before it could scream. The knife clattered free and he took it back, ears pricking as silence returned to the deck.

  He tied his boots to his belt, stepping barefoot through the webs of taut, thick chains that held down the assorted cargo. The rusted iron of the deck was still warm from the day, sticky with salt and rough where strips of corroded metal caught his feet. Maril knew of a paralysis called Clostrid that could enter the blood through metal—he’d seen Vulgar die from it—but there was no time to inspect the soles of his feet. Vaccinations did not exist in the Investiture and infections alone killed billions every year. If he found himself bleeding he’d need to cut and cauterize the skin, as he’d done with other wounds.

  He was nearing the centre of the tanker, a great slab-sided bulge of rusted deck crowned with another small conning tower. It worried him slightly that he couldn’t see the Bie or their guard anywhere about, but he had to go on.

  The docked two-man Voidship came into view. It was rocket-shaped at the nose and gnarled with weaponry. Its plump body—built to carry freight, he thought—was covered with a patchwork of vulcanised rubber grouted with solder and hundreds of iron fins that stuck out at every angle. The characters painted across its bladed exterior, now that he was close enough to see them, were undoubtedly Pifoon. He stopped, keeping in the shadow of a leaning collection of beaten tin panels, and read the angular foreign letters slowly. Tarmon Barbinel. Maril knew the name; it was part of a Fortune Company, a wealthy assortment of Ringum treasure hunters too expensive for anyone but the Pifoon to hire. Maril scratched his ear-tip with the hilt of the knife. The Zelioceti, when they stole, painted out any other marks of ownership, so this ship had been gifted by the Pifoon: essentially a present from the Amaranthine Firmament in all but name.

  Near the base of the Voidship’s docked tail, where an eruption of petal-shaped blades and fins enclosed an exhaust, one last stamped insignia caught his attention: the self-portrait of the Quetterel, once a stick-figure drawing, now simplified and stylized to a symbol of hard, branching lines printed boldly on everything they owned. So, they played a part in this, too.

  Maril’s hopes grew. The Quetterel hardly flew, but they scrubbed and polished everything they owned with an obsessive rigour that bordered on the religious. Maril had heard them also called Compulsives in his time; Prism infected with an unquenchable need to purge. Barring the possibility that it had been totally stripped of foreign, undesirable parts, the ship should be in perfect condition. The ancient Amaranthine engine inside the thing would be meaty, powerful enough to outstrip his dearly departed privateer in a heartbeat and thunder beyond the reach of the Tau Ceti system in a matter of minutes. It was an offer too good to ignore.

  Keeping beneath the shadow of a knotted tangle of chains, Maril spotted the guard that had been keeping watch over the Bie. The adolescent Zelioceti had left its driftwood staff leaning against the railings and was sitting silently on another superluminal component, playing with the loose end of a chain, its links as thick as fingers. The Zelioceti’s deep-set eyes were lost in shadow, the darkness of its drooping red proboscis resembling an elongated goatee, some timeless caricature. Maril wondered how the mysterious things entertained themselves; most could not read or write—a trait shared with more than ninety-nine per cent of the Investiture—but where other Prism enjoyed the company of their fellows, the Zelioceti appeared not to. They had no games of luck or skill that Maril knew of, and a disarmingly simple tongue composed mostly of words pilfered from other kingdoms. A few
wealthy familial lines, assisted by the Pifoon, led their manufacturing prowess, but he was fairly certain these on the tanker were just LopoCeti—unpaid orphans local to the moons of the giant planets. This one, malnourished and bandy-legged, bore the body-length scars of a hard childhood.

  The Zelioceti unfolded, waddling a little way from the huge engine bolt it had been sitting on and squatting until a look of deeper blankness settled over its shadowed face. It swallowed, stomach muscles straining, and began to squeeze a coil of black stool onto the deck, its fingers fidgeting around its rear and coming away stained. The smell of the fishy defecation reached Maril quickly on the warm night breeze. The shepherd shifted, eyes narrowing as it tried to pass something more solid than the last, and Maril took his chance, slinking from the darkness with his knife raised, not realising until it was too late that his shadow stretched long before him.

  It spun faster than he’d have expected, leaping up and throwing out its filthy hand. Maril reacted as best he could, swinging the blade as he ducked, chopping through its fingers in a whirl and sending them flying in different directions. Before the Zelioceti’s wounds were noticed, it had gripped Maril’s wrist and twirled him, flinging him around. Maril felt the knife loosen in his grip, slinging free as his bare foot sank into the fresh turd and slipped out from beneath him, peels of rust driving into his heel. His back hit the deck with a concussive hollow bang.

  The creature’s shadow darkened his blurred vision, and then a hand closed around his face, slathering his mouth in shit and iron wetness. The Zelioceti twisted Maril’s neck back until he was sure it would break, the bones crackling and popping, the din of their protestations not quite blocking the thumping percussion of something being trailed along the metal. The loose chain. He pushed against the Zelioceti’s scrawny strength, bucking and kicking, unable to move. The shepherd wheezed a pained laugh, and then Maril felt the cold weight of the chain as it wound around his throat, not quite closing his windpipe. A rasp of metal on metal reminded him of the suit collar he still wore, a hoop of life-preserving iron preventing the chain from squeezing tight. The Zelioceti grunted, waggling its mauled hand, and strained at the chain, pressing the bolts of Maril’s collar into his neck. Ghostly Zeliolopos light dimmed above him, the scent of iron blood and iron chains stronger than anything he’d ever smelled, and the memory of the Amaranthine sliding her long leg across his lap came unbidden into his mind, breathing in as the life drifted away.