by Tom Toner
The white ground had begun to rise beneath their feet. A few feet more and Ghaldezuel knew they were at the low stone ramp beneath the Thrasm itself. He squinted into the whiteness, reflexively drawing his pistol. There were footprints leading away beneath the prison.
He hushed De Rivarol, fully expecting the blasted Immortal to pipe up, uncomprehending. The prints doubled back on themselves, the freshest running behind him. He turned, sweating, and aimed into the snow. De Rivarol appeared in the white, glaring at Ghaldezuel’s drawn pistol. The flurry strengthened for a moment. He looked down. There were more prints everywhere.
“What is this?” Ghaldezuel muttered, swivelling, knowing as he looked into the snow that he’d lost his sense of direction. He wiped moisture from his eyes.
The crack rebounded around the blank valley. Ghaldezuel tensed, bending his knees. De Rivarol froze. Another shot sliced through the whiteness, along with the whizz of the bolt.
“Up the ramp,” he hissed, throwing himself to one side and fumbling for his rifle. A third shot slammed into the snow where he’d just been standing and he aimed in the general direction of the hills, firing a volley of silent blasts of light, as many as he could until the muzzle reddened, glowing white at its end. He dunked it to sizzle in the snow, counted to ten and then fired another fifteen, ducking back immediately to continue his run. Across the valley he heard the muffled thunder of his second volley detonating in the hillside.
He couldn’t be sure, but he thought the snow might be clearing. He could already see the lowest hills as the squall turned into dashing sleet. The Thrasm’s mighty shadow glowered to his left, a great, dark smear in the rushing weather. His eyes went to the foothills beyond the Thrasm, on the other side of the valley, and he threw himself into the snow. Flashes lit up from their ridges, the snapping concussions following almost reluctantly through the storm. They’d been waiting for him on both sides of the valley, as he’d thought they might.
De Rivarol jogged up beside him and crouched, his eyes bright with what looked like excitement. Bolts fizzed through the air. “Time?”
Ghaldezuel nodded, aiming the rifle again. He heard the Amaran-thine’s mumbled words, his eyes going to the shadow of the Thrasm.
It took a moment, a moment during which more flashes popped along the hillsides and he thought the command must have failed. Then, with a rush of snow like a vast inhalation of breath, the entire prison disappeared. A tapering cone of clear air punched through the sleet like a beam of light quickly filled in with dashing flakes, and then it was as if the place had simply never been there.
The incoming fire ceased abruptly. Ghaldezuel took a few slow breaths. He slung his rifle over his shoulder and stood to his full height, edging out into the middle of the valley with his hands held clear of his body to either side. The wind strengthened to drum in his ears.
Gradually the sleet subsided to a lull, a pause for breath before another low bank of cloud swept curling in over the mountains. Ghald-ezuel felt his plate armour dribbling. It had been given a good clean, at least. He remained with his arms apart, his rifle and pistol flung to the ground, the chill air biting his fingertips through the steel-tipped gloves. He’d pulled his lumen-reflecting rubber helmet on during the barrage but didn’t want to make any hand gesture now to remove it. Consequently he saw the hills, and the descending skeletal figures, through a film of dim, polarised plastic. They stopped a fair distance off, taking in what the Amaranthine had done.
A perfect tube had been bored into the rock from where the Thrasm had once hung. He stepped back a little, glancing first at the people at the edge of the hills and then at the tunnel, a circular hole cut out of the snowy ground leading down into the rock. The Sepulchre, Ghaldezuel thought, his plum-sized heart pounding inside his chest. The hole was a full sixty feet across, bored by a weapon of extraordinary power. There must have been a superluminal weapon from the Age of Decadence down there, lying, listening, waiting for just the right words.
De Rivarol came to stand beside him, not bothering to raise his own arms.
The assortment of stick men reached the hole, gaining clarity through the last of the snow that carried on the wind. Ghaldezuel studied them, though they appeared to pay him no mind. The smallest of them, a squat little figure shrouded in a blue and gold Firmamental flag, appeared fascinated by the hole, bending down to touch its rim.
“So there he is,” De Rivarol muttered.
The flag-shrouded person looked up at last, locating them both and strolling over.
They observed the small person’s escort of taller shadows following on behind as they crossed the valley. One was enormous and could only be some sort of Melius. There weren’t many of them, leading Ghal-dezuel to suspect that quite a few had been left in the hills, their weapons trained.
“I’d be grateful if you’d let me speak,” Ghaldezuel said.
“Talk away,” the Amaranthine said dismissively. “I know Lacaille and all the rest of them, but I suppose you have the manners.”
The group was almost upon them, visible against the snow as an emaciated, spectacularly ugly Melius and four small Prism people, probably Wulm beneath their peaked hoods. As they approached Ghaldezuel, he saw that they were a stone’s throw from death, all but the Melius thick with crusted sores where their flesh showed through ripped clothes stained umber from the shit of the Thrasm. The giant himself was naked like an Old Worlder, coated in places with coarse white woolly hair and possessed of a great yellow beard. He rubbed his huge hands together and glared at Ghaldezuel with a feral, drooling intensity.
The flag-shrouded person marched forward, its fingers engaged in lighting a bent cheroot.
“Well then,” a red-lipped mouth said from the shadow of the hood, revealing serrated yellow teeth. “You’ve bought yourselves a bit of time. What can you do for us?”
So Cunctus was a Wulm, as the Satraps thought. Ghaldezuel was a little disappointed. He’d been hoping for a rogue Amaranthine, or perhaps a particularly bright Oxel, just to make things interesting.
He bowed his head, cautiously pulling off his rubber helmet, then glanced among them, taking a cold breath.
“We are emissaries of the one hundred and eighteenth Firma-mental Emperor,” he said in Wulmese. “His Most Venerable Highness Sotiris Gianakos has commanded that we set you free, to be pardoned unconditionally, so that he might be assisted in his great cause.”
The Wulm nodded thoughtfully, sucking the cheroot until it caught and puffing a little cloud of smoke into the cold air. He shot Ghaldezuel a glance, a glitter of unseen eyes in the shadow of the hood. “Been preparing that, have you?”
“I was instructed not to deviate,” Ghaldezuel said.
“Are we speaking with Cunctus himself?” De Rivarol demanded in Unified, stepping forward. Ghaldezuel winced.
The Wulm snorted, looking among his followers, then threw back his hood.
“Who?” asked the remains of a bald red face, smoke curling from the corners of its wide, spike-toothed mouth. The other Prism chuckled, parroting him. Who? Who?
Ghaldezuel had heard about the scars. A bottle of acid, some said, in retribution for any number of crimes. When the hood had fallen, he could only assume it had been something much, much worse.
“Watch yourselves,” the Amaranthine said, his voice silky-smooth.
The Wulm turned his bright, hideously alive yellow eyes on De Rivarol, passing the cheroot back to the Melius. “This one—” he pointed to Ghaldezuel “—comes with an offer. What do you have?”
De Rivarol smiled icily. “Firmamental right.”
Ghaldezuel shook his head, opening his mouth to try and rectify the situation.
“Superluminal,” whispered the Melius in a cracked voice, gazing at the hole. The cheroot dangled from his huge mouth, the smoking stub wobbling as he smiled. “Hidden beneath us all this while. What word was it, Amaranthine? What word did we almost say a thousand times, unknowing of the—” he made a grasping motion with his
hand “—the weapon, listening?”
De Rivarol sneered. “Your Melius ought to learn some manners, Cunctus. Muzzle it, and let’s talk somewhere privately.”
Ghaldezuel put a tired hand to his brow. He’d noticed how the Wulm had only smoked the cheroot to get it going, at first thinking nothing of it. All the stories, all the confusion; a new scapegoat with each arrest.
The Melius turned a suddenly unamused eye on De Rivarol, and Ghaldezuel could see then that the Amaranthine understood.
De Rivarol recovered admirably, squaring his shoulders and speaking in First this time. “Well then, whichever of you is in command here, please accept this—” he pointed to the hole “—this gift from His Most Venerable Majesty. That which has been long buried in the depths of the mountain: the treasure hoard of Port Maelstrom.”
“Like my friend here said,” the yellow-bearded Melius croaked, patting his Wulm and looking directly at Ghaldezuel, “sell us your wares.”
Ghaldezuel glanced piteously at the Amaranthine, slipping the weighted black hood from his pocket.
“Now listen to me,” De Rivarol screeched. “Only I can broker this with you. The Lacaille—he’s nothing.”
Ghaldezuel wasted no time aiming a kick into the crook of De Rivarol’s knee. The air around the Amaranthine snapped and tingled as he staggered. Cunctus and the Wulm stepped back. Ghaldezuel bundled the hood over the Immortal’s head, breathing heavily, feeling the heat through the material as he tied its cords around De Rivarol’s neck. He pulled out his blade before the Immortal could finish his yell and sawed first one, then the other of De Rivarol’s hands off, shoving the Amaranthine into the snow and passing Cunctus the hands. The Melius nodded, accepting the hands, small inside his own great paws, and examining the rings on their fingers.
“My offering to you and yours,” Ghaldezuel said, panting, then nodded to the hole. “Plus all that lies within.”
The Melius looked at the writhing De Rivarol, hooded like a falcon. “That is a powerful thing there. Very good of you to bring it.” He twiddled his beard thoughtfully. “But I don’t need one. Push it in.”
Ghaldezuel nodded, stooping and dragging De Rivarol by the boots, deaf to his pleading and cursing. For twelve thousand five hundred and five years, this man had traded the deaths of countless others for his own. Ghaldezuel was that death, come now after all this time in the form of a half-man of another age. And it was a good trade, he thought, dropping the wriggling Amaranthine’s boots on the lip of the hole. His death would save so many.
Ghaldezuel gave the Amaranthine one last shove, rolling him over into the gulf. He turned and walked away, ignoring the others who ran to see De Rivarol fall.
“That one came with the Emperor’s wishes,” he said to Cunctus. “But I do not.” He threw down his blood-slick blade, removing the eight other deadly items about his person and flinging them one after another into the snow. “I come to ask you to join me, to take what’s left of our Investiture from those Firmament-loving Vulgar and rekindle the greatness we were promised.”
Cunctus studied Ghaldezuel, light snow catching in his beard. “Folk have made better displays than that and not meant it. You’ll have to go out to the old guard tower, so that we can know you better.”
Ghaldezuel looked uncertainly across the valley to the dark hollow of the crumbled tower, noticing a thin strand of smoke blowing sideways from its smashed upper chamber. A beanpole body the colour of clotted cream stood in the gloom of the ruins.
“Go on.”
The snow was driving back in as he trudged to the remains of the guard tower, his head bent against the wind coming down from the peaks. The sun shone as a pocket of light in the cloud, dipping and glowing. With every step, Ghaldezuel expected the Melius to change his mind, feeling upon his shoulders the possibly imagined eyes of marksmen in the hills. It was what he’d have done, were he in command of this place. He knew, too, that he wouldn’t accept intruders with such ease. There would have to be torture. It was the only method of absolute trust. But he’d prepared himself already, taking a powder beforehand that should dull any pain.
But they were curious. He’d not still be alive if they weren’t.
At the gloomy, rubble-strewn mouth of the guard tower, he saw more of the footprints: those dainty, frenzied marks that had surrounded him on the approach to the Thrasm. Ghaldezuel bent and looked in.
A thin hand lunged out and grabbed his collar, hauling him into the dark.
FILGURBIRUND: MIDSUMMER 14,647
ONE DAY BEFORE THE ATTACK ON NILMUTH
He opened his eyes, blinking at the pale morning and checking instinctively for the papers in his pocket. Ghaldezuel stretched and sat up, glancing at his clock and through the narrow plastic strip at the landscape below. The rolling hostel must have made its way across three country borders in the five hours since he’d boarded, loosing and picking up fresh travellers like fleas. He could hear them outside, in the halls, clamouring and laughing. Ghaldezuel was distantly amazed that he’d slept.
Outside, the thick forests were seeping to bright orange, swathes of rust already touched by the first snowfalls of the season. Those deep belts of land, some hundreds of miles wide, were home to innumerable horrors: nocturnal beasts more terrifying than many a creature of the Old World, roaming gangs of scalpers and slavers, private inbred armies commanded by Vulgar warlocks. Only his wits kept him safe here, in what was considered by nearly everyone to be the most civilized world in the Prism Investiture, the richest kingdom of the Vulgar, its name translating roughly as the safest, warmest of burrows. Filgurbirund.
The vast, cubic mass of the hostel pulled into a station, its great wheeled legs splaying and locking firm to thwart any bandits who might fancy stealing one whole—it had happened before—and juddering to a stop at the concourse, a flat expanse of warped wooden boards at the edge of the town. Ghaldezuel looked at the spires of the teetering buildings, their poles dangling with flags and sigils that stirred in the cold early breeze, before reading the peeling letters on the sign: Wiehlish. Not far now. His eyes went to the Vulgar issuing from the station, huddled little caped creatures, bundles of grey and brown, their heads bent to the increasing wind. Many carried bottles in their hands. They handed over their tickets, ragged strips of paper that fluttered dangerously in the wind. His eyes followed one that had escaped its owner’s grip to dash into the edges of the woods. The tiny Vulgar, still at the rear of the queue, dumped his pack and hobbled in panic after it. Returning his attention immediately to the line of waiting Prism, Ghaldezuel saw the bag being rifled through eagerly, until almost everyone in the queue had taken something for themselves.
After a few minutes more, the rolling hostel blew its horn and made ready to leave, the drawbridge at the edge of the boards pulling back. There was no sign of the fellow who had disappeared into the edges of the forest. Vulgar without inside tickets climbed the steel ladders at the sides of the vehicle to find places on the top where they could set up for the coming journey, the threat of snow meaning nothing to the drivers in their heated compartment.
Ghaldezuel leaned back in his bunk, relishing the locked space he had bought, the most expensive compartment in the hostel. In the corridor, people were already stirring, cursing the influx of new travellers aboard what was already a dangerously overcrowded vehicle. As fists hammered on his door, Ghaldezuel knew the place would only get worse—and more filthy—as the rolling hostel stopped to pick up even more people as it neared the city, still two hundred miles away. From what he’d heard outside during the night, it was clear that the single toilet on this floor had failed, with the whiff that crept beneath his door informing him that angry Vulgar had begun a dirty protest at the opulence of Ghaldezuel’s situation. He didn’t care. Let them soil their own sleeping place—it would only bother him for a moment, during the minute or two it would take to alight. He looked outside again, watching Wiehlish pass out of sight and the depths of the forest resume. Trees slid and slapped at
the window, the gaps in their scarlet leaves revealing haunting glimpses of the black woods beyond, and he wondered that the roads hadn’t completely disappeared during northern Filgurbirund’s long summer.
Ghaldezuel fished in his travel cloak and brought out a small metal-bound book on a chain, suddenly finding he hadn’t the energy to leaf through it. He would see the six-hundred-year-old city himself in a few hours, so what use were reproductions? Hauberth Under Shiel, the northern capital he was making for, did not hold with foreign vehicles or trade caravans—anyone arriving from outside the Vulgar Empire needed to carry his Silp Treaty papers on his person at all times and pay passage with a reputable Vulgar transport. As per the laws, Ghal-dezuel had arrived three countries away to apply for entry, waiting a day and a half in the Voidport at Phittsh and then catching the quickest hostel to the capital for his appointment with the bank.
He slept a little more, trusting his internal clock to wake him when it was time to leave but winding his real one anyway. At a juddering stop, a platoon of Gurlish Vulgar soldiers boarded, fat from a long summer of stalemate in the sporadic war against Dool, a country to the west. He studied their shoddy armour and pot-bellies as they crossed the drawbridge over a racing black stream. They must have been stationed in the northern forest in case of a surprise attack on the capital and were only now making their way in for leave. His eyes touched on their weapons, a mixture of old and new; family hand-me-down spring rifles and Gurl-issued lumen pistols with bent sights. Useless in these times of peace; the Treaty of Silp had accomplished much, not least the gradual soothing of simmering tensions among the Vulgar, and nearly all of Filgurbirund’s wars appeared to be at an end. Ghaldezuel watched the last of the soldiers amble aboard waving his dirty ticket and returned his attention to the book of architectural drawings until it was time to disembark.