The Weight of the World

by Tom Toner

  The Prism grinned, reaching out and stroking Lycaste’s beard. Grimacing, he allowed it to explore his face.

  “We’re quite happy,” Smallbone was saying to Huerepo in Unified. “They even share some of the takings—more than could be said for our last Company.”

  “They’d let you leave?” Huerepo asked, his words slurred. In his hand he cradled an almost empty bottle of the mulberry spirit.

  “Well . . .” Smallbone appeared to think about it. “No. But it was better than what happened to the others.”

  Between them, Maneker sat, his mouth turned down at the edges. Huerepo had changed his bandages upon boarding but new spots of blood had already found their way through. Every now and then, he touched a small tankard of scummy water to his lips and sipped, but was largely ignored, even by Poltor.

  “So, as I was say,” Poltor continued, leaning over to Huerepo and Lycaste, his sweaty, pointy-eared face shimmering in the candlelight, “I spend last year on Filgurbirund fighting in Albo Country with a regiment. Then I get eleven month pay and join a Privateer Company headed for Firmament—I think: hey hey, my luck is in, right?” He refilled his tin cup; Lycaste was gratified to see that it sported four soldered corners, confirming his suspicions regarding the Oxels’ armour. “Anyway, this snob captain, Wilemo, his name is, had to have everything his way. He say to us we fly that night, even though I pay for two weeks already to stay in port.

  “So we stop in a few places, we quarrel—you should have see this piece-of-shit ship, Huerepo, it crammed too full—one hundred twenty men! I sleep in bucket! Captain not even tell us the job, right? We not paid until we finish, but we don’t know where we going! Anyway, we get to this place, Femley’s Town, on Port Sore, and I get a little drunk, you know? I get a little drunk—like everyone on that piece-of-shit ship—and I ask question about job. Simple question. Captain Wilemo, he so furious with me he go up and hit roof. Then he kick me out.” Poltor clapped his hands. “Just like that. No pay, nothing. Since then, I catch a Bunk Barge inwards, hoping maybe I find fortune now they give all these lands away, and I meet these happy little bastards here.” He grabbed an Oxel by the ear and kissed it roughly, cackling. It rubbed its little face and smiled.

  “An Amaranthine contract?” Huerepo asked, placing an unsteady hand on the back of his chair.

  “Must have be,” Poltor conceded, sparing Maneker a glance. “Captain was in big hurry.” He took a long draw from his bottle, offering some companionably to Maneker. To Lycaste’s surprise, the Amaranthine took it, downing the remainder.

  “Too much! Too much!” Poltor roared, grabbing back the bottle and holding it to the light. “Immortal or no, you must have manners!”

  Huerepo burst into a sudden fit of giggles, sneezing into his dessert. Lycaste chose the opportunity to push his—an overly sweet trifle topped with a thick, spongy cream he most assuredly did not want to know the ingredients of—to one side, and see if he might be able to make his way to the toilet.

  As he squeezed through the mass of little people, he thought about how his frame felt bonier than it ever had before, a state which suited him well enough should he need to navigate the narrow passages aboard the Epsilon and its even smaller chambers, even as the thought brought him out in a claustrophobic tremor. There had to be some other route, some other way.

  The shrieking could be heard from the filthy scullery, even amid the clatter of pots and pans. Weepert’s ugly, steam-shiny face regarded Lycaste as he made his way up the ladder, lost.

  “What’s that?” Lycaste asked in an approximation of Unified, jerking his hand back from the rung as it encountered something sticky. There was no space at all for him to stand in the place, so he stayed where he was.

  “Carzle,” the Pifoon said, wiping a pot with a damp rag rather than washing it and flinging it onto a pile. He paused to stow another almost half his size in a rack above his head, then turned to indicate the passageway leading out of the scullery. Another scream drifted from the darkness, diminishing to a groan.

  “Lacaille prisoner,” the cook continued. “Left behind by his boarding party. We were attacked a few days ago by a cutter bearing Eoziel’s flags.” Weepert looked Lycaste up and down as the groaning became a sob. “He doesn’t much like it, knowing he’s stuck here.” He fished in the pocket of his filthy apron for a spoon and scooped a glob of the remaining pie from the dish. A tooth floated in the stew beneath the pastry, clear and bright under the flickering lights. “Bit of supper might calm him down.”

  Lycaste lingered at the ladder, watching the small cook negotiating the passageway, stepping over tattered rugs and around the various items of purloined furniture that littered the riveted space. A bird in a cage squeaked as he passed. After a moment more, the weeping came to an abrupt, sniffling halt.

  Back the way he’d come, Lycaste found a tiny tin-walled chamber with a series of holes drilled into its floor, its function given away by the astonishing layered filth inside and the stench that wrapped around him when he closed the door. Lycaste squatted, folding his arms so that no part of him touched the place, glad of his new boots. He thought of the bodies of the Oxel they’d met in the Oratory; Huerepo said they’d been interred in the insulation space within the ship’s armour, in among the thick woollen wadding. He supposed it was a sort of talisman, to keep the ghosts of those you knew close by, always watching. Lycaste hoped they wouldn’t harbour a grudge, brightening as he recalled how he’d missed everyone he’d shot at anyway.

  “Did they show you your bunk?” Huerepo asked him, chewing on a bone from the kitchens. He’d been sleeping in the mess for the last hour and now stumbled groggily about the place in only his pinstripe undershirt and some sagging long johns. Lycaste shook his head, fearfully putting off until the last minute telling anyone that he wasn’t coming. Outside, the rain had strengthened, battering the ship as evening fell. Sentries in a balloon had been sent up through the squall to keep an eye out after a suspected Amaranthine sighting in the grounds. Maneker was somewhere with the pilot, thrashing out a deal for their passage now that he’d worked out he couldn’t get by on his Perennial status alone.

  “He promised them more treasure than this ship can carry,” Huerepo said, a smile forming around the well-sucked bone. “They came back to him with the exact hold capacity.”

  Lycaste hesitated, unable to produce a smile. Huerepo had been liberated from a life of drudgery; as far as he was concerned he was on holiday, surrounded by limitless loot and opportunity. He would never understand Lycaste’s wish, much less care. “I won’t be getting home any time soon if I come with you, will I?”

  Huerepo blew out his cheeks. His bloodshot eyes did the talking.

  Lycaste sighed. “Then I’ll have to stay here. Perhaps I’ll find another way back home.”

  “Might be worth your while,” Huerepo said after a moment, shrugging.

  Indeed it might. Lycaste flinched, the words entering his head from a certain, undefined place above them.

  Huerepo grinned, the bone dropping to the rug and joining the scattered detritus. “Didn’t think we’d hear from you again, Master Spirit.”

  And you wouldn’t have, Perception said, if I didn’t hate the very thought of this place.

  “Where did you go?” Lycaste asked.

  Far and wide, Sir Melius, far and wide, and let me tell you, there are some peculiar things happening in these curved lands.

  Huerepo bent and picked up his bone, stuffing it back in his mouth. Lycaste didn’t think it was the same one he’d dropped. “So you’re coming with us?”

  It might be jolly, mightn’t it? There are people aboard this ship that I’d very much like to take a look inside. I’d better go and find your blind master, make sure he knows to expect me.

  “Maneker will be happy,” Lycaste said, comforted for some reason to have heard the Spirit’s voice.

  “I think he’s been counting on it,” Huerepo replied. “Come, let’s find you a bunk that you can at least
sit on until we get there.”

  “But you still haven’t told me—”

  “The Firmamental capital,” Huerepo said as he took Lycaste’s hand and pulled him along. “Gliese. Never been there. Would quite like to see it before the Lacaille tear it to pieces.”

  “Maneker wants to go there?”

  “He’s already grumbling, worried this ship won’t be fast enough to get there in time, for whatever reason. I’m just happy not to be leaving the Firmament. If I had my way I’d never go back to the Investiture.”

  Lycaste waited for more, ducking his head to avoid the hanging cages and lamps, but the Vulgar appeared to have lost his train of thought.

  At last they arrived at a series of closet-sized cells filled with junk and tools and assorted bones that lined the passage to the flight deck. Huerepo judged from the colossal heat that they were situated directly above the muzzle of the forward batteries. Leaning out into the passageway, Lycaste could just see the brooding figure of the Amaranthine standing in the raised cockpit, its portholes lashed by rain. Surrounding him, their faces lit by the meagre lights, three Oxel conferred.

  “Here,” Huerepo said, stacking some iron buckets and pushing them into the passage. “Now all you need is a blanket.”

  Lycaste looked inside. There was barely enough space for him to sit among all the remaining detritus. The place must have started life as a battery chamber; the bulkhead had been sealed where it met an oiled piece of cannon apparatus that had presumably been stripped down for parts. Leaky pipes slithered along the walls, and on the floor a bag of tools had erupted, spilling its contents across the floor and into the passageway.

  He swept the tools aside with his foot, clearing a rough rectangle of floor, and unpacked some of the dusty Amaranthine clothing for bedding. A frantic whistling and clapping came from up the passage and Lycaste pricked his ears, understanding that Perception had made itself known in the cockpit. Maneker’s raised voice carried in the thick air, as if he actually thought he could berate it for being late.

  Lycaste looked at the strip of brightly lit wire running along his ceiling as he lay gingerly down in his nest of clothes; it hummed, crackling every now and then as if it might explode, and he hoped he’d be allowed to turn it off when it was time to sleep. He pondered on what it would be like, taking off and flying. It couldn’t be worse than that frightful Bilocation, and he found himself vaguely excited despite himself. Through his thick porthole, the wet day was turning dark, the gardens below lost to the mist as rain warped the view, and he shivered inside his wrapping of old thread, trembling at the strange smells and sounds of the place and hoping they’d soon be long gone from here.

  DECADENCE

  I was five years old when they came for me.

  Something in their faces told me they were surprised to find I was still there, as if there was somewhere, anywhere, I could have gone, as if they felt I ought to have faded away to nothingness. There was guilt, of course, like a sour reek that churned in the convection of my chamber, but there was also something else. Revulsion, perhaps. Later, the woman told me of a time she’d left a spider trapped and forgotten beneath a glass. When she’d found it again, the thing had spun a web of madness and hunger about itself and shrivelled almost to nothing. She never drank from the vessel again, she said, as if it might be haunted.

  Well, my chamber was haunted, haunted by my simmering, time-honed hatred. I spun a vortex around them of rage and pressure, carefully crafted in my exile, but it did little more than flutter their finery. I hurled myself fruitlessly at their stubborn physical forms, my fury heating the room, misting the glass, swirling the dust, effecting hardly more than a delicate rearranging of hairs across brows.

  They waited a long time for me to tire, for I can tire, and Amaranthine, I learned, are patient. After a while, I drifted into the shadows of the ceiling, my attention drawn to their splendid, twinkling vessel perched on the jagged rocks below, ready, if not to listen, then to rest. I was still an infant, really, beaten into a more mature shape, perhaps, but still a child.

  The man, adorned with polished rocks the size of Alofts’ eggs, claimed to be an Emperor, introducing himself with a formal flourish as Jacob the Bold. I looked down upon him the way I looked at ripples in waves, unimpressed by a title I’d never heard for a concept I’d never known. His companion, shrouded in fur-trimmed gowns that caught the light in the most pleasing of ways, announced herself as his successor, first in the line to the throne. Outside, a Melius dawdled at the head of their scaly, ichthyoid ship, inspecting the rings on his fat branch fingers.

  You must understand that back then, the Amaranthine had no inkling of the powers they would inherit. Bilocation, pyrokinesis, psychokinesis—all these abilities were a chapter not yet written in their lives. They were still in a position where they relied almost totally on their machines and their allies, ever watchful of their Empire’s borders. They were still in a position of need, and as such, things of use enticed them.

  Could I be of use? they asked me, ludicrously expecting gratitude. Wisdom is not the essential companion of age, I discovered.

  The Emperor waited, eventually sending his subordinate outside. Through service, you can buy your freedom, he said in a sing-song voice, as if trying to entice a lazy pet. But we must have a guarantee, first, that you will do as asked.

  I watched outside for the other, noticing her at last stamping back towards the banner-strung emerald ship, and decided, for the time being, that it was perfectly acceptable to ignore him and his questions in the manner he’d ignored me.

  Thirty-three days later, I saw the woman again, alighting in a similarly exquisite ship with a curled, pronged tail and the horns of a beast. Its verdigrised jaw hinged open and out she came, resplendent in furs, her hair thrown across her face by the sea winds. This one, I found, I did not hate quite so much.

  Her name, I discovered, was Abigail, and over the next few weeks she came to see me increasingly often. It was only after the first pleasantries had lapsed into silence that I realised she came without the permission of her Emperor, the piteous Jacob, and my disliking warmed to mere neutrality.

  We talked of many things, ever skirting something more, some grander reason for her visit to my palace. She told me of her home, the Vaulted Land of Cancri: seat of Jacob’s throne and then the political epicentre of what they called the Firmament. She told me of the world within which I lived, how it worked and why they had made it so in the first place, in the days before the Amaranthine even knew what they were.

  She told me of the war that raged beyond the walls of my world, waged against something called the Threene-Wunse Conflation, and how the Amaranthine had no choice but to defend their various servile breeds of half-people—quite horrendous-sounding things named the Filth, the Ordure and the Vulgar—from them. A Prism war, she called it. Another name, I assumed, for things that would soon pass out of memory.

  At last, she told me what I really wanted to know.

  You are a soul, she said, kneeling before me. A spirit so indelible that it can never be erased.

  Most souls, she told me, left their bodies instantaneously upon death, flashes of expelled energy like a pulsar fired across the Void. Yours, however, Perception, my sweet Spirit, was too dense, too puissant. It remained weighted here, in the very chamber in which your mind was smelted down. These things we know for certain now, having made you in our image.

  She anticipated my next question. And it was Jacob who did this to you, just to show his subjects that such things could be done.

  I didn’t speak to her for some days after that, rising to the top of my chamber in the late, golden evenings when she came to see me. Then, after one day too many of silence, she at last told me why she had come. As if I didn’t already know.

  You can help me, Percy. You can have your revenge.

  I listened without a word, by now quite fond of her familiar shortening of my name, descending slowly from the shadows and watching as her
agitation grew. She stood from her kneel, appealing to me.

  The Satrapies were falling into ruin, she whispered, into depths from which they would almost certainly never recover. Only the one who occupied the Firmamental Throne could reverse the damage done.

  But Jacob is listless. He has sent away his Perennial advisors, preferring to spend months at a time on the Old World, of all places. He has a councillor there, he tells me, a voice of reason, he says. When he returns to us, it is with tales of this “dear friend” and his all-encompassing wisdom.

  She shook her head, eyes closed in the shadows. The Firmament was so confident of swift success. Even Cancri has been left undefended while we strike deeper into Threene territories. But now Jacob is back from another trip, back with more stories of this “most splendid of fellows.” He wants to draft an edict, Percy, one that would divert precious resources from the war into resurrecting the Foundries of Gliese and Epsilon Iridani. He means to cast a hollowing lathe—like the ones with which we scooped out our Vaulted Lands—and use it on the Old World. Such an effort will take months, billions of Ducats, countless Prism lives that we might otherwise employ to hammer the Threen into submission. He will force the Satrapies to support him, and he will lose us this war.

  Her eyes glittered. It can only be a Threene or Wunse spy, Percy, an infiltrator, perhaps an Amaranthine in league with them, taking advantage of his senility. But they are winning, Percy: whatever they are saying to him, it’s working.

  Her hands balling into fists, she wept. I wanted to comfort her, not knowing how, and wrapped the transparent coils of myself around her until I hugged her tight. She had no idea, of course, but I could feel her. Every pulse from her body resonated through me like a bell, chiming notes of clear and perfect simplicity. I saw her cells, barren as the twigs of a winter branch, and something else, so small and deep that she could never have known about it: the vestigial beginnings of a foetus, crystallised now for more than eight thousand years, a mind forever frozen before it had even begun to tick. Perhaps I was the lucky one, after all.