The Weight of the World

by Tom Toner

  Lycaste glanced up. “What are they?”

  “Hoopies from the wilds, come for their baby toll as soon as they’re out, when they’re juiciest.”

  Lycaste stared at him, horrified.

  “It’s just the price paid.” Huerepo shrugged, grinning. “I can tell you there are much, much worse places to be.”

  Smallbone wandered past, setting down a bottle.

  “Like where?” Lycaste asked.

  Huerepo didn’t have to think for long. “Humaling.”

  “A planet?”

  A star, home to three planets and a dozen moons of the same name.

  “Indeed,” Huerepo said. “I wouldn’t set foot on Humaling Minor for the bloody Immortal crown itself.”

  “What’s there?” Lycaste leaned forward, entranced, hairs bristling on his skin.

  “Caves,” Huerepo replied. “More caves than could ever be explored. Caves where the woods grow deep underground. There are things that came with the first settlers lurking in them all. Things that grab you and drag you down.”

  Or there are the worlds of Indak-Australis, Perception said. I’ve read about them. Places of perpetual war.

  “Yes, the Australis Moons, the Southern Moons. Jungles so thick that you couldn’t push more than ten feet in a day in any direction. They’ve been at war with each other for a few generations now—some are so cut off that even if armistice comes they’ll just keep on fighting. Or there are the night-dark Threen worlds, Obviado and Obscura, of course, but nobody ever goes there anyway.”

  “The Zelio-worlds,” Smallbone muttered, waddling through to collect the dishes. “The Zelioceti there are inbred to the bone, must be mad through and through.”

  Huerepo shook his head, pushing his plate in Smallbone’s direction. “That’s just a toll gap out of the Firmament, a gateway you must pay to use. The Zelios create rumours to make sure everyone passes through.”

  Lycaste sensed Perception gathering its thoughts. He looked up into the darkness, beyond the candles’ flickering reach.

  Anyone ever seen a Bult?

  The table fell silent. Smallbone and Huerepo glanced at one another, each performing a little clap.

  “No, thank you very much, Perception,” Huerepo said.

  The Spirit chuckled. Sorry I spoke.

  “Some folk had a dead one once, when I was little,” Smallbone said, looking troubled. “Paraded it around on a stick for everybody to see. Don’t know what happened to the corpse.”

  Lycaste passed his plate to Smallbone, feeling as if the shadows of the mess were closing in on him.

  But the Void is a calm and beautiful sea, Perception said, his voice very close to Lycaste’s ear. Its little islands need not concern us.

  “Couldn’t agree more, Percy,” Huerepo said, popping the top off the bottle. “It’s a good life out here, when we’re not being attacked.”

  Smallbone settled himself beside them, lighting a few more sputtering candles. Their crew couldn’t dwindle much more without Lycaste himself taking on duties, and nobody wanted that. It was just as well that others would soon be coming; a host of hired swords keen to join what Maneker, in the closest the miserable man ever got to levity, had called the great hunt.

  Lycaste looked around the mess, reflecting nervously that the cluttered place would never be this empty again.

  LOOT

  Night crept in, throwing shadows across the land and wreathing the risen moon in cloud.

  Jatropha looked up at the walls of Zadar, his clothes fluttering in the night wind, and ran a finger over the glossy stones. Their fabric had been polished smooth to prevent people from the wilds—people like him—from climbing. But that wouldn’t be a problem.

  Once inside and wrapped invisibly in warm light, he walked the corkscrew of passages to the dining halls. Firelight threw his shadow long against the wall to mingle with those of the eating Melius, and Jatropha watched his black silhouette as he crept along. He could hide the thing, of course, simply by moving closer to it, but he rarely did. It pranced among the others, the only evidence of his passing, unnoticed by all. He’d given his forty hired ravens a glint of that magic, diminishing each of them within their own personal blind spots. The trick of hiding others as well as himself came easily to him, though he suspected the Amaranthine population as a whole were yet to master it with any skill.

  He stepped over a snoozing shape as he made his way up into the Museum of Curios, a place he’d heard of but never visited. He hoped it hadn’t all been sold off.

  The door stood bolted from top to bottom, dangling with shiny padlocks. Jatropha pressed one hand lightly to the wood and popped every lock, catching each of them in his other hand and placing them on the floor.

  The museum’s contents had once been in the possession of the Second, in a private collection for paying friends of High Plenipotentiary Alba, Gentleson of Flacht. When the First had found him embezzling Provincial taxes, his estates had been raided and the museum’s contents sold off. It was Zadar’s luck that its own mayor had also been sequestering citadel silk and decided to buy the entire lot.

  Jatropha entered, his slowly beating heart barely affecting the lanterns, and surveyed the scene. The Melius idea of a museum was quite different from that of their relatives of old. Where once, Jatropha supposed, items were arranged for ease of viewing, here one had to stoop and rummage, taking things out of boxes or relocating whatever was heaped on top, so that around the room huge teetering piles of ring books and ornaments rose almost to the ceiling. The habit resulted in fascinating things often remaining lost for generations, since nobody really wanted to disturb a dangerous-looking heap that might fall on them at any moment.

  Jatropha moved between them, running through an inventory in his head as he dug in chests and boxes. A slim, twinkling chain had been hung along one wall, and threaded upon it were more than a hundred old ring pistols from the reigns of the early Enlightenment kings. He pulled down one end of the chain and tipped a handful of them into his pocket, for inspection later.

  Jatropha continued his rummaging even as he heard footsteps. A mutter of confusion from a steward who must have come to the door and noticed the busted locks. A head poked wearily in, followed by a lantern. The Amaranthine paid little heed, but spared a thought for the man’s sanity by making his motions more delicate. They passed within a few inches of each other as Jatropha continued his search and before long were at opposite sides of the room. He spotted the black dart of a raven circling the tower, the first of the birds come up to see what he had for them, and he began carefully placing items on the window ledge.

  The steward completed his circuit and was heading back towards Jatropha when he spotted some moved books and stared at them thoughtfully. Jatropha waited until the birds had each fluttered up to grab what he handed them and then gave the steward a quick pat on the head.

  “Who—?” the Melius spluttered.

  Jatropha swung out of the window, pushed himself away from the ledge and dropped.

  He fell past the glimmering wall, arms outstretched, the black shadows of his birds wheeling around him, the wind whipping at his lank hair, chilling his skin. As the silvery darkness of the woods rose up to meet him, he clasped his hands together, body turning, and delicately slowed his descent until he was only a few inches above the treetops.

  He had fallen over a hundred feet. He looked down at his white toes where they floated above the leaves and felt reinvigorated.

  The birds cackled, circling him.

  “Show-off!” one called.

  Jatropha hung there, levitating in the fresh night wind. He glanced up at the far tower where he’d been searching, seeing the winking of the steward’s tiny light.

  Pentas’s eyes slid across the engraved sentences, reading them without comprehension. She stopped and leaned her arm out on the moonlit ledge. Arabis slept peacefully, mouth agape, a victim of the Amaranthine’s soothing lullabies.

  Her thoughts had turned, as they did
every night without fail, to the child’s father. Had he been a good man, after all was said and done? Pentas didn’t know any more.

  She’d loved Callistemon—heavens, she loved him still—but that did nothing to answer the question. You might appeal, momentarily, to a monster’s tenderness, but a monster it remained.

  She found a well-worn memory, her eyes stinging as she recalled Impatiens—sweet Impatiens now almost six months dead—standing there listening with them, listening to Callistemon admitting his treachery.

  How many had he killed? She swept the thought away for the thousandth time. One, twenty—what was the difference? Callistemon had left a wake of death behind him even as he’d entered the cove, its lingering swell dragging poor Lycaste and Impatiens under with it. It had taken the discovery of the dead Players—a happy troupe of professionals seen often on the Province roads as they wandered north and south—to convince her to leave with Jatropha and Eranthis. With the Players gone, too, the Tenth had lost its lustre somehow, not that she’d ever really wanted to go there in the first place.

  She glanced at the sleeping resemblance of her lost love, tinted by the vague colour of the moon. How could she ever tell Arabis the truth? Jatropha had said, in an effort to prepare her, that in the Second they would venerate Callistemon’s name. He’d also told her that, perhaps not immediately but soon enough, the family Berenzargol would wish her gone.

  Pentas looked again at her little prisoner, remembering the guilty relief.

  They will turn the young queen against you as best they can, perhaps not even allowing communication by letter—though I shall see to that if you desire it. It is only their nature. You are a Southerner, an interloper, and their leniency will be hard won. With one hand you bring misery; with the other their great advancement.

  Pentas yawned and tugged at the blankets, hearing the distant tinkling of Eranthis moving about the Corbita’s scullery. Folded away in a box of things by the bed were her newest drawings, scribbled with whatever materials she could buy on the road. She had talent, everyone said so: there should be no need to cling to some maligned role in the Firstling court. She could make her own way in life at last.

  She thought fuzzily of her route as her eyelids drooped. She would go south, perhaps to Tripol or the Scarlet Lands, where there were small academies of painting and literature. Her daughter . . . her daughter—

  Arabis would never know her.

  Pentas lay, eyes open to the green night. They would meet, if they ever did meet again, as strangers.

  Jatropha took a moment to linger in the woods as he landed, watching the lights of the Corbita from afar.

  He remembered.

  He remembered the look of the bent coin they gave him after his first month. It bore the sideways leer of King Tharrhypas. He remembered his last meal before he put such things aside. Ibex—what those on the peak called poor cow—stuffed with sage, eaten with a cob of rye bread and a dirty egg fried on the black pan. Out had slipped a double yolk, before he’d stirred it up. The last of his luck, perhaps. He knew even then that he would save a lifetime’s money by spurning food and drink and was glad at the efficiency of it all. He didn’t suppose he’d miss it.

  He remembered leaving, selling his goats to the exceedingly young wife of a wicked man named Hals, noticing her looks with the vacant eye of a shepherd inspecting for worms. There had been a girl, once, but choosing this life had hurt her. There wouldn’t be any more.

  He left the mountains with a dry mouth and enough rubbed heads of Tharrhypas to get him as far as Stalia, on the coast. From there it wouldn’t be far to Gaul, according to those he met in the hills. Liguria, he said to himself, tasting the name of the range as he left it—his whole world until now.

  At the coast, he found a leaky merchant ship come up from the Mare Nostrum, the Corbita, and changed his plans, saying goodbye to the Alps from the golden beaches. Proving he could keep in rhythm as an oarsman bought him passage west to Nikaia, but the bawdy place unnerved him. Too much noise, too many folk up from Italia, up from Rome. He took a basement room below a tannery that smelled of dog shit by day and dog shit at night. His landlord was brown as varnished oak and leopard-spotted with a constellation of moles like black, weeping stars. He lanced the things in place of rent, but the man died anyway, hiccoughing his way through cups of doctor-prescribed milk.

  Iulius, he was called then, back in the days when the name was common. The name his father had given him. When the name grew antiquated he changed it slightly, remaining simple Julius for as long as he could in memory of his first life. And that was how he survived. Looking back on fifteen thousand and eighty-four years of life, he reflected that he couldn’t have foreseen how out of hand things would become.

  As the first people were achieving their false, upstart immortality, he decided it was time to withdraw further from the affairs of the world. Jatropha’s burgeoning powers were already revealing themselves, thousands of years before the Amaranthine, as they would come to be known, would ever discover their own, and there were rumours dogging his footsteps: rumours of someone who people in their newfound longevity had come to recognise a little too well. He’d hated them for it, then, when their long memories had forced him into hiding. Never mind that his was something more real, something natural, some quirk of birth that, as far as he knew—and he had looked—had never once been repeated, before or since. A child born naturally immortal, into a populace considered old at fifty.

  And so the years passed, thickening to bands of dashing millennia, until the world had warped and twisted. When he took his Melius name, having decided to remain in the Southerly Provinces most of the year round, he knew, as he had known about the girl—and, to some degree, the fried egg—that it would be his last.

  He was tired now, and the world had grown quiet. There was no one to run from any more.

  THE FEEDERS

  Timing. Take a few breaths before the punchline. Wit appears to go wrong so often because people are desperate for it.

  Lycaste grumbled and opened his mouth to try again, not understanding all this need for pauses and slow reveals. He was frustrated and hungry. All they had on board now was Rubante honey, and that was nothing but candied glue, really, food not fit for a Melius.

  Oh, take a break. Perception was sighing before he’d got three words in. That’s enough for now. We’ll try again when you are seven hundred and must pause for breath between each word.

  Lycaste scowled and pressed his nose against the cold plastic, the vibrations of the Lacaille ship tickling his nostrils, watching the colours of the Feeders intensify. “But I did everything you said.”

  I know. You are studious.

  “Studious,” Lycaste repeated, running his fingers through the cropped stubble of his freshly shaved head. Not a word his father had ever used. Lycaste imagined himself returning home, back to Kipris Isle, dumping his bags on the parlour floor and announcing earnestly: Father, I’ve become a studious man. The old fellow would just about die laughing, he supposed.

  He smiled as they looked out together into the Void.

  A purple aurora two miles wide fell past their porthole, dropping out of sight and snaking off into the sliver depths. The exhausts of the Feeders, Maneker had called it, leaping from his room upon hearing the gentle, drifting signature over the trumpets. This was what he’d been looking for, this grand brushstroke of colour.

  When their course had first intersected it, the crew had been able to see the whole wake as it drifted by, a comet tail of coloured particulates as fine as smoke painted across the Void. Now, as they approached side-on, the superluminal current’s edges had blurred, softening to drift and disperse. Your Melius eyes can distinguish more than thirty million colours, you know, Perception said when they’d first gone to the tiny porthole to look. Three times as many as Maneker, before he lost his sight. Remember that, when you forget to see the beauty in things.

  Lycaste was thinking about colour as he looked out at roughly
a hundred thousand miles of contrail beyond the windows. He’d assumed everyone saw things in the same way, and yet apparently they did not, dwelling in greyish worlds by comparison. Colour had always been so important to him but he’d never appreciated it. The Spirit itself said that it could see much further, following the Feeders’ tail back to the last Satrapy they’d come from. The caravanserai of ships were far too small for anyone—including Perception—to see from this distance, and like an algal bloom were visible only by their massed colour, bright against the dappled silver.

  The current was a lucky find, Maneker said, the trajectory of the thousands of ships exactly overlaying their own; heading straight for a hard, black little star: Gliese, its single Vaulted Land christened with the same name. At the contrail’s head, like a white follicle dangling a million-mile-long purple hair, a swiftly moving dot churned its own darker swirls into the colour. Together they looked at it now, their lesson in jokes forgotten.

  A Colossus battleship, Perception said, the largest class of ship in the Investiture.

  Lycaste tried to focus on the minuscule dash of white, hardly visible itself against the silver of space. He could see now that the great current was flecked here and there with plumes of scintillating green, like a Piebird’s tail feather. “How do you know?”

  I’ve read every last chart and record on this ship. That is probably the Grand-Tile or the Balnazo, judging from its vast exhaust patterns. See how it changes the colours in its wake?

  Lycaste nodded, leaning away from the grubby plastic and rubbing his squashed nose. “Aren’t we going to have trouble catching up with it?”

  In our current state, yes, but I have refurbishments in mind. It paused, as if for breath, a moment in which more thoughts than Lycaste would ever have in his life were surely taking place. I can see them all now. Jostling for the lead. What was that? Ooh—fighting.

  The sparkle of light reached Lycaste a moment later, a lonely flash breaking through the seething purple churn of dust-mote specks.