by Tom Toner
Lycaste, who’d been leaning close to look at the hard blue eyelashes on a woman’s face, backed away a little. “How long have they—?”
Maneker leaned against the one Lycaste was looking at, pain visibly dampening his spirits again. Dabs of blood bloomed behind his bandage. “This place was a mausoleum many thousands of years ago, before anyone thought to lock Perception away here.”
“What is he? Perception?” Huerepo asked, walking unaided now, proud of all his new finery.
Lycaste thought he might know, but when Maneker turned to him he coloured, too afraid to speak.
“There is no he,” Maneker said, his faded rags mirroring the colour of the light. “Only it. And it must never be underestimated.”
“Is it a ghost?” Lycaste asked, gesturing at the hard statues. “The ghost of one of these Amaranthine?”
“No. Not an Immortal,” Maneker replied, running his hand over the faces of the tombs, feeling their features. “Perception was a machine, once. Made for the Firmament during the Age of Decadence, just to show it could be done.”
Lycaste went to a window and looked out over the crags of the shore, imagining a vast, coppery structure of riveted metal, levers and strings. He saw a full-lipped mouth upon its largest face moving as it spoke. Tell me, Tenthling, have you ever loved?
“The great irony was that it came an age too late,” Maneker continued. “By the time we could manufacture such things, we simply didn’t need them any more.”
“How did he—it—die?” Huerepo asked, his eyes twitching to one of the statues as he spoke. Lycaste followed his gaze, his ears finely tuned to the silence of the room.
The question hung in the air while they listened. Maneker appeared not to have heard them. He turned now, too, head tilted.
Lycaste looked back at the far row of statues, his eyes narrowing.
A collection of slender fingers no bigger than a Monkman’s gripped the side of one statue’s neck, their claws latched on to a perfectly preserved fold in the collar. The tomb’s angelic face, turned slightly to one side, seemed to have paused to listen as well.
Huerepo put a finger to his lips, flattening down his palm as Lycaste made to draw his pistol. The Vulgar pointed to the far end of the gallery, where a slant of strengthening sunlight illuminated a doorway, and motioned what he wanted to do.
They approached the statue from either side, a scrawny arm slowly revealing itself as Lycaste moved around to the tomb’s stone shoulder. A pointed ear, its lobe hidden in shadow, twitched as it came into view. The thing’s eyes turned towards him.
“Oxel,” Huerepo hissed. The Prism, the length of Lycaste’s largest finger, sprang at him. Lycaste ducked, turning to see it rolling on the floor and scampering off down the gallery. He shuddered, a deep revulsion forcing him to check himself over for any more of them, then gave chase, swerving too late as the creature shoved an ornamented chair into his path. Lycaste crashed over it, smashing the back of the chair into dusty shrapnel and hobbling himself.
He rounded the corner into the sunlight, limping as he ran, eyes widening and crying out before he could stop. He toppled and slid, his new boots driving into the gaggle of tiny Prism as they raised their weapons and scattering a few across the hall. Lycaste yelped and scrambled to his feet, sprinting back the way he’d come.
“They’re everywhere!” he hollered, dropping as Huerepo marched forward, loading and springing his pistol and firing over Lycaste’s head.
The stillness shattered, crashing and booming and tearing apart, the enormous noise of Huerepo’s pistol vibrating through Lycaste’s cuirass as stone chips leapt and danced across the floor, skipping and ricocheting, pinging from his armoured back while he lay face down and deafened. Before him, two statues erupted into crimson splatters, pulverised by incoming fire. He began to crawl, one hand over his ear, working his scraping way slowly beneath whizzing bolts and bullets until he was behind Maneker at last. The Amaranthine pulled out a Loyalist pistol he’d concealed in his robes, firing apparently at random into the smoke of Huerepo’s destruction. Shapes flitted in the mist of flung stone and flesh, firing flashes of colour that screamed and bounced, detonating windows with eruptions of flame.
“Sparkers!” Huerepo wailed, flinching as a dot of burning light bounced past him and slalomed around the back of the gallery, igniting the door they’d come through with a comet trail of hissing red fire.
Something thudded through Lycaste’s britches and into his knee, knocking him flat on his back. He looked down at a fizzing shard of sparking colour lodged in his flesh and felt like fainting. It burned out, dying to an ember.
Through the smoke he saw them coming, a scrawny host of shadows. Lycaste aimed and fired as Huerepo reloaded, apparently missing. The far wall of the gallery blinked out of existence as if it had never been there, daylight now streaming smokily in behind the slightly befuddled shapes. Maneker, assuming he hadn’t fired at all, pushed Lycaste roughly out of the way and shot without taking aim, felling a twitching shape in the mist. They began to scatter, harried by the snapping concussions of Huerepo’s spring pistol and retreating behind the adjoining wall.
Smoke drifted, curling up to hug the high ceiling and pouring out of the empty space. Spattered, mixed heaps of guts and chipped stone painted the gallery, the ancient Amaranthine casualties mingled with the newly dead.
“They’ve fallen back—why have they fallen back?” Huerepo whispered, slamming the hot, jammed spring in his pistol until it popped free again. Maneker reached out a hand to the Vulgar for more ammunition, catching a fistful of bolts with impressive ease.
“Lycaste,” Huerepo said, hingeing back his faceplate and glancing to the ruined windows, “check outside, will you?”
“What for?” he asked.
“Just look, dammit!”
He crawled to the missing wall, the rain blowing in and dampening his beard, and peeped over the edge, his miraculous pistol at the ready. Where the wall had disappeared, the stone was cut smooth in perfect cross section. The cliffs below boomed with the hurled grey spray of the sea, some of it rising almost to the windows. Inching his eyes northwards across the coast, Lycaste saw a towering, blackened gatehouse rising from more overgrown gardens. On the lawns beneath it, a silvery-red Voidship with the snarling, stylised face of a hound sat steaming in the light rain. Lycaste clocked one of the ship’s broadside guns swivelling on the Oratory just as he was raising his pistol, swearing and pressing himself flat, hearing the shell rip overhead into the sky. The echoing thump of it travelled across the gardens like a drumbeat.
“What in the grand fuckery was—” Huerepo began as Lycaste heaved himself from the floor.
“No time!” he roared, grabbing Maneker’s cloak without permission and receiving a mental slap across his skin. He spun, raging, throwing the blind man to the floor, hauling Huerepo by the boot and carrying him upside-down across the gallery just as a second shell tore a hole in the wall alongside.
Lycaste shook his head, dust and rubble pouring from his hair, waiting for his ears to open. Only the hammering vibrations of the ship gave it away as it whipped past the torn hole to rise above the Oratory’s spire, windows across the higher turrets bursting at its passing.
Maneker stood, whirling around, saying something that Lycaste couldn’t quite make out.
He dug the sparker out of his knee, crumbling it. His ears opened fully with a wet pop as Maneker repeated himself. “Voidship. I heard it.”
Lycaste pointed a finger at the spires. His voice croaked as he tried to speak. “Gone around. Up.”
“What did it look like?”
“Like a beast.”
“Stolen,” Huerepo muttered, hauling himself to his feet. “An Oxel doesn’t know his arse from a hole in the ground. Turncoat Pifoon at the helm, most likely.”
“We need it,” Maneker said, feeling among the debris for his pistol. “Lycaste, get out there and see where it is.”
Lycaste couldn’t believe his e
ars. “Why me? Send Huerep—”
“Quickly!” Maneker snapped, tightening the bandage around his eyes.
Lycaste rose, his fingers encountering a bolt lodged in the dented front of his cuirass and working it free in wonder. The barbed metal lump had burrowed its way more than an inch into the metal.
“I’ve been shot—” Lycaste began incredulously, glaring at Huerepo.
“Oh, boo-hoo,” Huerepo squeaked, “get out there!”
“Estel Vulgar?” came a call from the adjoining chamber, startling them to silence. Huerepo aimed and fired a warning shot into the remains of the adjoining door, blowing what was left to pieces.
“Vulgarish?” the voice enquired a second time, a new note of urgency in its tone.
“What is this?” Huerepo growled, stamping from behind the cover of his holed and leaking tomb. A pool of deep crimson was making its way across the gallery to mingle with the debris. “Of course I bloody am! Show yourselves if you’re going to talk.”
Something closely resembling Huerepo himself poked its head around the corner, throwing down a weapon and raising its arms.
The two Prism stared at each other warily until an incredulous smile broke out upon Huerepo’s face. “Well, I— Poltor?”
“Huerepo!” the other Vulgar cried, waddling into the gallery and dropping his arms. The two little men embraced, clapping their hands together in a noisy, elaborate ritual.
“My cousin!” Huerepo said, turning to them with a broad grin on his face.
He brought the Vulgar forward as they babbled together, introducing Maneker and Lycaste. Poltor clapped his hands with each introduction, the equivalent of a Melius colour change, Lycaste assumed. He chose not to wear a colour himself, considering the fellow and his friends had just shot him in various places.
“I have not shoot at you if I knew—” Poltor began, addressing the Amaranthine in broken Unified. “If Huerepo not call back now, our ship make you . . .” He grimaced, finding the word and motioning expressively with his hands. “Exploding.”
“Tell him we need it, on Firmamental order,” Maneker said to Huerepo, bypassing the pleasantries.
“I take you meet crew,” Poltor said, cracking a gummy smile lined with yellow pointed teeth. His pale face was blotched with dirt and flecks of blood. Lycaste looked him over, still unsure. The Vulgar did indeed resemble Huerepo around the eyes, though Poltor was considerably portlier, with a fat little stomach that strained at the rubber front of his Voidsuit. His small, pudgy hands, their palms stained carbon-black, were criss-crossed with scabbed scars, the nails sharp. Lycaste straightened, wondering what a Vulgar was doing with the likes of the bat-like things they’d fought, not entirely convinced that he wanted to be associated with such a person.
“Come, come,” Poltor beckoned, leading them through the debris to the gaping hole in the gallery. At the breach, Lycaste looked down, seeing half a dozen of the tiny Prism standing in the gardens, waiting. He craned his neck around, looking for the Voidship, and finally saw it climbing, flashing through the clouds and looping back down towards them, a vapour-trailing speck gaining clarity as the weak sun slid across it.
They stepped over the bodies of those that had died in the firefight. Poltor waited patiently until Lycaste had passed before scooping each of the diminutive Prism into his arms. He took their little weapons and dropped them into his various pockets.
“He is their champion,” Huerepo was saying to Maneker. “Their tame giant.” He waved in the direction of the Voidship’s roar. “These Oxel encountered a Grand Company of Pifoon a month ago, taking their ship.” He took in Lycaste’s questioning look. “Grand Company of Adventure. They’re mercenaries, Protection Armies, whatever you like to call them.”
“How many of them?” Maneker asked, looking sightlessly up into the white light, perhaps still expecting Perception’s return.
“He says a dozen Oxel or so, two Pifoon cooks kept on for the galley and a—” he babbled quickly to Poltor “—a Lacaille prisoner in the brig.”
Maneker sneered. “Tell him they must make room for us.”
The Voidship swung low past the obliterated wall, its scaled body glistening with moisture where it had passed through clouds. It banked in the air and disappeared again, reappearing on the other side of the Oratory and sinking towards the gardens. It settled on six extended, sickle-shaped fins, the toothy cockpit face pointing out to sea. Lycaste hadn’t noticed the fins when he’d glimpsed the ship before and saw now how exquisitely sculpted they were, the whole lithe, muscular form of the ship made to look as if a wolf and a fish had interbred. It was Amaranthine work, Maneker told him when asked, given away long ago and ruined by successive generations of Prism.
“Come, come,” Poltor intoned, waving them on down the shorn rubble face of the Oratory’s north side, away from a fire that had sprung up in the ruins. They picked their way carefully to the gardens, Maneker keeping a hand steady by Lycaste’s shoulder but never touching him. Lycaste felt like nudging the man a little, just to remind him of his dependence, but knew he wouldn’t. Huerepo marched before them, all smiles, gabbling merrily with his cousin.
“The Epsilon India!” Poltor exclaimed as they came down from the heaped detritus of smashed stone to the garden, apparently oblivious to the three oozing corpses in his arms. One of the bodies stared malevolently at Lycaste, its mouth agape, the grass showing through a hole in the back of its head. Across the lawns, the ship waited, its guns hissing as rain sizzled on their barrels. White and red flags lifted from holes in the fuselage, rumpling and flying out in the damp wind.
They stood to admire the ship as Poltor disappeared inside. If Lycaste had to pick a particular breed from home that most resembled the great wolf, he’d have chosen a Laire from the Tenth; those that lolled and slept in the silver trees inland. The ship glowed ruddy gold and silver in the tentative sunlight, the bright patchwork armour along its elegant snout and flanks slanting the sun blindingly into Lycaste’s and Huerepo’s eyes. Scribblings of graffiti had been etched all over its scarred, plated body.
After a moment, the glowing lights of a recessed hangar opened out from inside the chest. Huerepo shook his head as he regarded it. “Look at the mess they’ve made of it.”
“Do you think it’s fast?” Lycaste asked.
“Perhaps. There’ll be an old, corroded Amaranthine filament in there somewhere.”
“Unless they’ve sold it already,” Maneker said, turning to Huerepo. The twin spots of blood on his bandage gave the illusion of two beady crimson eyes. “I want you to go and check the engine compartments when we get inside.”
Poltor reappeared at the head of a procession of five Oxel. Lycaste folded his arms self-consciously as he waited for them to approach, studying them.
They weren’t like any Prism he’d seen so far. They pranced across the grass, light as the air, their twig-like limbs naked below the waist. Over their torsos they wore plackarts of tarnished tin, like inverted drinking cups sporting holes for arms and legs; for all Lycaste knew, they really were. Clusters of rubies hammered into their suits winked in the light, and when Lycaste looked closer he could see tiny skulls like birds’ eggs set among them. From the spiked helms of the leading three dangled blue and red pennants decorated with sewn symbols similar to those scrawled all over the belly and flanks of the ship. Tasselled caps of striped cloth covered the heads of the rest, showing more of their shrunken faces.
The leading Oxel glanced between the three of them, beginning to whistle a complex and disarmingly beautiful tune. Poltor listened and nodded, whistling clumsily back when the Prism had finished speaking. It met Lycaste’s eyes as the Vulgar replied, narrowing its oval pupils.
“All right,” Poltor said, mainly addressing Huerepo. “I tell them already: one,” he counted off on his fingers, “that you are my family. Also, that you want go somewhere. Three, you need go now. They want know where, how much, these sorts of things. This is not easy journey-making in present time
s.” Before anyone could reply, he held up one of his dirty fingers. “But, but, but! We make eating first! Time for talk and such later.”
They followed the lead Oxel to the Voidship. Lycaste could smell the vessel long before he reached it: a heavy, bilious stink wreathed in the fume of charred plastics. The smell of the Void, he assumed, taking a long, trembling breath before entering the hangar.
In a chamber no bigger than Lycaste’s larder, all fourteen of the Great Company sat down to eat.
“Weepert’s signature dish,” Poltor said beside him, ladling some of the enormous pie into Lycaste’s bowl. Within the thick red stew he spotted assorted beaks and fins; the mashed remnants of at least five animals in his portion alone. A dark grey pastry, turgid with the blood mixture, capped off the dish. A hundred puttering candles, planted in the pastry in the manner of Kipris birthday sweets, were the only source of light in the cramped space. A host of reflective teeth and eyes caught the flames, all directed at their new guests.
The Epsilon had risen to perch upon one of the Oratory’s lower spires, its muzzle cannon looking out over the Clawed Sea while a hard, pummelling rain swept in across the water. The dozen Oxel squatted upon the table itself, dunking their spoons into the pie dish for seconds as they squabbled and whistled. Poltor had dragged in some chairs for the rest, including Weepert, the Pifoon cook, and his apprentice, Small-bone, but the two Pifoon were hardly off their feet, climbing up and down the ladder to the scullery with extra saucepans, bottles, bowls and cloths. Poltor had furnished the table with his own stash of Lacaille spirits, a turpentine solution to which he’d added stolen sprigs of mulberry from the Satrap’s plantations and a handful of the silk moths to pickle at the bottom of the bottle.
An Oxel with jewel-studded teeth had jumped onto Lycaste’s shoulder and was trying to say something to him, pulling his ear until he turned.
“Yes?” Lycaste asked, glad of a legitimate opportunity to stop eating.