The Weight of the World

by Tom Toner

  Thousands of Prism shipping lanes had been drawn onto its blue and gold surface—the globe being the representation, Perception understood, of a volume just over eleven light-years across from pole to pole—accompanied by minute numbers denoting the various seasonal turbulences one could expect in certain parts of the Void. The captain had labelled every Lacaille lane, a surprisingly scarce number, in painstaking detail. It imagined him sitting here, night after night, the wood-stove ticking, a bottle of something clutched in his small white hand, scribbling away. The numbers and dimensions of the lanes would have to be redrawn every month or so, Perception assumed, the Firmament and Investiture constituting an ever-changing landscape like the desert dunes from one of his old books. The Spirit memorized them anyway, along with all the faint rubbings-out beneath, thinking it could probably evolve the numbers through various probability algorithms to save the need for redrafting. It now had the perfect map, assuming all was accurate, to accompany its mental sun charts. And here was another piece, pushed back on the shelf. A crown-shaped girdle of iron moons and stars and planets designed to be fitted around the globe’s waist, a representation of the Prism Investiture made by a more inexperienced hand. Perception looked at all the little metal balls, interested to see the seams of the casting process, its thoughts wandering to other things that might be forged and cast, in time.

  Port Woen, Voliria Minor, Eriemouth. It read inwards, following the curve of the circlet. Threads of red and blue and black Old World silk tied between the globes appeared to denote the shipping lanes on this map, but where they weren’t snapped they were frayed and fluffy: ancient, useless information. The Spirit studied a particularly large, dented globe: Port Cys. The word black had been inscribed on the tiny metal bearing of its moon, Obviado. The Spirit peered at some even bigger worlds, those large enough to have the lines of their continents etched onto them and to which the most silken traffic appeared to be directed. Filgurbirund and its moon, Drolgins: the jewels of the Vulgar Empire.

  This is it? the Spirit wondered. Surely Hominidae had explored further than this. All that time, all that opportunity, and this is what they made? The Investiture, something it had always envisaged as a near-endless opportunity, was nothing but a thrifty collection of fifty-five planets—only one under the full ownership of a Prism race—and their clustered moons. There must be lands lying out beyond these worlds, habitable places, like the rest of them. It considered the idea for a moment until it found the lockets, and then forgot itself, delighted.

  Yuck! The captain had three wives, or sweethearts, each possessed of their own locket, a drawing concealed inside. And what an assortment. Perception formed the impression that they didn’t know about each other.

  It went to recline on the bed of sacks, seeping this way and that, hearing the faint clatter and bang of repairs being made higher in the body of the Voidship, realising what was missing: there weren’t any Rubante honey boxes on board. The Hasziom had never set down, or, if it had, it had been repelled before it could load anything. The Lacaille crew had literally been starving as they made their attack on the Epsilon India.

  Perception reached a tendril of itself into the chest, sorting through the documents and sacks of tin coins. E-O-Z-I-E-L the Eleventh, the Spirit spelled out, attempting to gauge the worth of it all, then settled back into the late captain’s bed to read his letters.

  So, it finished after a few moments, looking into the dark iron mouth of the woodburner as if the miserable thing had known the Hasziom’s secrets all along.

  This vessel had never been engaged directly in the war with the Vulgar. Indeed, it looked as if the Man-o’-War operated without any special loyalty to the Lacaille admiralty or their king. Instead, its deep, long course had been plotted out of Harp-Zalnir to circle the Investiture before diving back into the Firmament and down to its very core. The Spirit read the passages on the folded posters again, searching for any more meaning.

  Whatever in the world a Bult was, there were Great Companies, the Hasziom previously included, that would very much like to have one.

  Perception had a thought and returned to the Firmamental globe, where specially annotated volumes of the shipping lanes had briefly caught its attention to begin with: the suspected haunts of these Bult, perhaps. A green and gold disc painted with stylised clouds and half-surrounded by a skeletal, world-sized shield sat at the globe’s southern pole. A flurry of little notes had been scribbled around its circumference. They’d been headed for the Old World.

  It returned to the letters. These Bult sounded deliciously nasty, whatever they were, commanding a bounty of ten thousand Truppins brought in alive, and the Spirit was suddenly extremely keen to meet one. There were supposedly a few breeds of the creatures that moved in indecipherable migrations around the Firmament, though they were evidently as rare as the tigers of Perception’s books. It was reported that two years ago they’d eaten the population of a whole Vulgar township, prompting Filgurbirund to send battalions to harass them to the edge of the Investiture. The fleet had partially succeeded, only the outbreak of war with the Lacaille forcing the Vulgar to divert their attentions.

  The Spirit left the chamber, consulting its mental maps of the Satrapies along with all the memorized rubbings-out. It saw patterns where nobody else would, understanding that after being pursued by the Vulgar in ineffectual circles, the crafty Bult were now, wonderfully, evenly placed throughout the entire Firmament. Grand Companies like the Hasziom’s were darting everywhere in an effort to pick up the bounties, but from the letters the captain had received, it appeared that not a single individual had been caught or killed. How the hell the Lacaille ship had hoped to catch one after being beaten off by a handful of diabetic Pifoon was anyone’s guess.

  But there was someone who could commune with them; a Lacaille no less, the bounties said. A knight of sorts, if the Spirit understood the definition. Perception thought the fellow must have a fine secret indeed, something better than just a nice cut of meat hidden in his pocket, and wondered what in the world it could be.

  PART IV

  THRASM

  Port Maelstrom hung tethered to the huge Vaulted Land of Epsilon Eridani: an unhollowed little moon of ruddy deserts and frost-tipped mountains, trapped in a swirl of smoky blue atmosphere like a polished stone in a vast, jewelled carcanet.

  Ghaldezuel and De Rivarol appeared at the southern pole, a tundra of wind-flattened umber grasses hundreds of miles from anywhere, their ears and fingers tingling, fists clenched. Ghaldezuel could almost laugh; he’d survived his first Bilocation—one of the few Prism ever to do it, he suspected—complete and undamaged. A wave of nausea swept over him and he bent to stare at his boots.

  About half a mile across the grasses—waist-high to Ghaldezuel— they could see the weak sun twinkling from a garrison of parked Vulgar tanks, their armoured bodies festooned with flags that swayed in the wind. De Rivarol scanned the land around them quickly, his long face set grimly against the swarms of biting flies that had quickly descended upon them. Ghaldezuel pulled on his net cloak, keenly aware of the various diseases the insects were known to carry in Port Maelstrom, and together they set out.

  The tanks had been sitting there for some years, abandoned to the elements. Their gun barrels, once presumably sheathed in cloth covers, had nearly rusted away, and when Ghaldezuel inspected the tracks, he saw that only two would still be capable of covering the distance to the airstrip twenty miles north. He pointed out the best of the vehicles to De Rivarol and they climbed aboard. Ghaldezuel settled himself at the front with his lumen rifle resting on his knees, the netting blown tight against his face as they pushed through the tundra, a belching trail of smog from the exhausts clearing most of the flies.

  About a fifth of the moon was scoured almost completely bald, a relic from a geological period long past, before hominids of any kind had set foot on the world. The cool desert of this southerly continent was home to a prison from the Age of Decadence famed throughout the F
irmament and Investiture: the Thrasm. The Amaranthine who’d built it had taken its name from the Lacaille word for terminal illness, since sentences in the Thrasm were invariably for a period of no less than five hundred years. No incarcerated Prism had ever survived it, most not even living past their first year inside. Within, it was said, there was no running water or plumbing of any kind. Prisoners ate where they shat, grubbing in pits of filth: closed ecosystems of waste and illness and speedy death. Any Firmamental Melius unfortunate enough to find themselves locked in there were usually slain and eaten on sight, owing to the mistaken belief among Prism that Melius meat was sterile. Others with hardier immune systems often faced the same fate unless they could defend themselves, and so it was that only the fiercest and most brutal of Prism now inhabited the ancient Thrasm, whittled and honed by conflict and disease.

  The airstrip came into view, a cracked expanse of bonestone scattered with crimson-rusted engine parts and a few whole Voidjets still covered with fluttering canvas. De Rivarol drove the tank onto the strip, jarring to a halt among the spare parts. Ghaldezuel climbed stiffly down, checking his rifle and peeling wriggling flies from his netting, wishing he’d driven. From his pocket, he took a paper-wrapped cake of oat-rolled meat called a Zharle bun, stuffing the whole thing into his mouth while he examined the skinny shapes of the Voidjets beneath their coverings.

  “We fly high,” De Rivarol said in Unified as he crossed the strip, inspecting some of the jets’ wheels. “They’ve been loose for some time now. I don’t want to risk anti-air measures.”

  Ghaldezuel nodded. He untied the canvas that covered the nearest Voidjet and pulled it free, checking the various flaps, fins and air intakes of the skeletal blue vehicle as it was revealed. It contained no ejector mechanisms of any kind barring a moth-eaten parachute bundled and tied to the sickle-shaped tail fin—useless, even dangerous during flight. Ghaldezuel cut it free with his knife, smiling at De Rivarol’s look of profound unease.

  The Amaranthine went to work, clapping his hands and shooing the flock of bony storks that were strolling across the strip. “Now, now! Now, now!”they screeched, flapping their wings in agitation.

  Ghaldezuel ignored them, tipping Canolis oil into the tank from a can he’d found under another tarp and climbing the chassis to deposit himself in the pilot’s seat.

  “Be off with you, ridiculous birds!” the Immortal raved at the storks, flickering sparks across the stone concourse. Ghaldezuel watched him, considering in earnest putting an end to his life right there and then. His gloved hand hovered over the untested weapons triggers for a moment and then lay still. At length, De Rivarol turned back to the jet, a look in his eyes telling Ghaldezuel that he’d realised his danger, and stormed back to the aircraft.

  “Cut them down,” he said, pulling himself up and into the tiny passenger seat.

  “It will damage the runway.” Ghaldezuel sighed, checking the various gauges.

  “I don’t care.”

  “You should,” he said, peering at the inboard ailerons as they flicked up and down on the wings before starting the motor. “We might burst a wheel and be stranded.”

  The Amaranthine fell silent as the engine groaned, whirring into life. The jet was a basic Vulgar rush-job, simple as a spring rifle and manufacturable in huge quantities, like the tank they’d driven there. From its nose and wings sprouted soldered-on lumen cannon a century old and connected with simple wiring to the cockpit. Ghaldezuel didn’t see the point in flying high—the jet might not even get off the ground, let alone make it the seven hundred miles to the Thrasm.

  He leaned back. “Belted in, Sire?”

  De Rivarol muttered something, fiddling with the clasps on the passenger seat’s leather strap. Ghaldezuel smiled again and slid closed the plastic cockpit, latching it shut. If they did encounter difficulties, De Rivarol need only shut his eyes and Bilocate, still being close enough to the pole to do it successfully, and yet the Immortal appeared to think they both had as much to lose.

  They taxied off, a blast of air from the jets panicking even the most obstinate of the birds, before finally screaming with a juddering heave into the grey air. The grassland and its teeming clouds of gnats rushed by beneath, the strip sliding away behind to reveal grey-brown vastness and the hints of uplands further north. In the white sky, the gunmetal blob of Epsilon Eridani, luxuriant Vaulted Land though it might be, floated like a circle of dirty ink on the horizon. The days here were long; they would reach the Thrasm a while before sundown, if all went well.

  “Don’t let the desert and strong sun fool you. This is no sixty-degree Province of the Nostrum. It gets cold here, very cold,” De Rivarol explained behind him, having to shout above the shuddering scream of the engine. “There used to be arrival procedures. Amaranthine could land at a palazzo to pass the night before being taken to the gaol by a mounted caravan of Elepins.” He looked off listlessly to the landscape, apparently lost in thought. “This is an ancient place.”

  Ghaldezuel knew some of the moon’s history. Prism prisoners, even though it was against the edicts of the Most Venerable, were most often executed nowadays. It was simply too labour-intensive to ship criminals to Port Maelstrom while the Firmament receded into its deathly sleep. He thought about it, considering whether he’d choose death rather than come here, and couldn’t decide. Escape was technically possible, as with all things, and therefore a chance of life beyond here—but even if you could get to a port over the mountains it was all still Firmamental land, far from the edge of the Investiture and months from any degree of real freedom.

  The tundra below began to wither and disappear, balding to dusty tracks and watercourses and finally to real, ochre desert topped here and there with a scum of darker soil like charcoal. They flew over antique Decadence shipyards and mills, the carcasses of ancient vessels lodged in the dust like opalescent ammonites, their milky blue and green bodies eroded by millennia of scouring winds. Tiny Prism shanties, technically illegal but largely ignored, had sprung up in the shade of the mill apparatus like growths of multicoloured fungus. De Rivarol pointed and Ghaldezuel looked, tipping the jet as best he could until its mechanisms protested. The remains of the workforce here, most likely, rather than prisoners. It had only been twenty days since the Thrasm’s dissolution, hardly long enough for anyone to make it out this far. A bare road wound like a creek bed through the shanties and on into the desert, stretching off towards the murk of hills and the wavering suggestion of mountains beyond. Ghaldezuel stopped trying to read the jet’s basic map and slung it in the back next to De Rivarol, banking and following the tiny thread of the road. On either side of the causeway, pinkish stands of scrubby trees fought the dryness of the continent, bent against the wind that screamed in off the plains. At the rumble of the jet, distant Prism appeared from the brush like hopping fleas, firing in tiny flashes from the ground.

  De Rivarol struggled in his seat to get a better look.

  “We’re going too fast,” Ghaldezuel said. “They can’t hit us.”

  The scrub disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, making way for the foothills and the beginnings of the great, inhospitable Gerdis Range of mountains beyond. Ghaldezuel took in the high peaks, their brilliant snowfields gaining clarity in the haze, sharp and intimidating as crumbled stone thorns. He peered. There—a far-off brown network like a cancerous blemish on the baked rock of the hills: the power stations that surrounded the Thrasm.

  They struck the runway, bucking with the increasing wind, the four rubber wheels extending and popping with a bang when they met the broken stone. De Rivarol cursed as Ghaldezuel fought with the jet, swerving it across to the edge of the strip. They came to a wobbling stop in the long black shadow of the conning tower, a small Vulgar alarm in the cockpit whining furiously and then falling silent.

  Ghaldezuel looked out at the tower, busying himself with the latch on the cockpit and pushing it open. Huge rusted guns lined the strip, gazing up into the sky. The mountains brooded over them
, murky grey glaciers distantly visible in the vast crags.

  They climbed out. It was another few miles from the empty airstrip to the prison. A network of subterranean passages lay beneath the simple coal-fired power stations in the foothills, feeding electricity down to the ancient structures beneath. Any number of traps could have been set in such tunnels; Ghaldezuel had resolved to go over, not under. He tilted his head and listened to the barren winds coming down from the mountains. The jet’s approach would almost certainly have been noticed in the echoing passes.

  He went at once to the rear of the jet and popped open the fuel cap, siphoning out what was left in the tank and collecting it in the small can he’d found it in. De Rivarol watched him closely as he jammed a lid onto the container and wiped his hands with a rag.

  “Give me that,” the Amaranthine said, gesturing for the can. “It’ll be safer with me.”

  Ghaldezuel met his gaze coolly and handed it over.

  They turned together and regarded the end of the strip, where a few pieces of broken equipment surrounded one of the great desolate holes drilled into the foothills, the ramshackle chimneys of the power stations rising above like thin, deformed fingers. The five-thousand-year-old installations that powered the prison and its deeper secrets had been built with slaved Prism hands, as had the Thrasm itself, and had now fallen into disrepair, a symbol of the Amaranthines’ lack of interest. Chunks of glittering coal from the great stores had blown in the wind and collected in loose clusters across the stone concourse. Ghaldezuel ground one under his boot, listening to the wind, then unshouldered his lumen rifle to inspect it, pleased once more with the powerful, modern-calibre they’d given him. They started out.

  A vast flight of steps, built around the three subterranean access holes, led up and into the hills towards the first power station. They took them, pausing every now and then and checking the mountain slopes around for movement. Ghaldezuel knew from the prison manifest that there were only eighty-three inmates at the time of dissolution: twenty Vulgar, forty-six Lacaille, fourteen Wulm, two Firmamentals and one Old World Melius. A peculiar collection. Most were likely dead now, victims of the chaos when the cells had opened, and perhaps more had been eaten in the ensuing twenty days. Those left had been honed by one last test and were probably now the most dangerous Prism in the entire Firmament. Ghaldezuel touched his glove to the locations of the various knives and pistols stuffed inside his armour, pressing forward.