by Tom Toner
Ghaldezuel sat back a little, worried the table might break. The giant’s bearded head filled his view, almost forbidding him to look elsewhere.
“They confirmed that I shall sit at your side when you are king of the Investiture, that together we shall bring about the Amaranthines’ extinction.”
“Yes. But what did they say about you?”
“Very little. I saw an old love sitting beside me. It was . . . unexpected.”
“That old trick! They tried that on me the first few times. It’s nothing, a reflection of your mind.”
“I guessed as much.” He remembered the twin swirls of light revolving in the Threen’s eyes. “What are they? The spirits?”
Cunctus sipped his tea, eyeing him. “You must have guessed, being at one time in league with a member of their kind yourself. They’re the ghosts of the old masters’ machines, put to death here when the ancient regime fell.”
Ghaldezuel fell silent. He noticed the giant had made extraordinarily elaborate knots in his beard. They almost looked like faces.
“Hand me the paper,” Cunctus instructed, gesturing for a cloth-wrapped roll that lay on the steps. What he unfurled was the most beautiful map of the Investiture Ghaldezuel had ever seen. Cunctus selected some charcoal and wet it with his tongue, then began adding shakily to the roll. Ghaldezuel saw his was the same hand that had made the beautiful drawings on the map. While he worked, his flabby pink tongue stuck out of his mouth, the way some children drew.
“Here,” he said, pointing to a perfectly inscribed circular map among the hordes of others. Lines scrawled with the arrows of solar currents bulged around it. “This is where the Machine King—your Aaron, or whatever he calls himself—will go, once he’s got the last thing he needs.”
Ghaldezuel hesitated, suspecting a trap, then peered surreptitiously at the drawing. AntiZelio-Glumatis.
“He and I share similar unhappy fates, you see,” Cunctus said with a sly smile. “My own flesh and blood left me to rot, too, so that they could take my place on the Sarine throne.”
Ghaldezuel frowned, uncomprehending.
“Your one-time friend, the Long-Life—he who is busily ripping down the Firmament?”
Ghaldezuel nodded cautiously.
“I expect he’s after his brother.”
Ghaldezuel peered through the fresh specks of snow, surprised to see that there was still power down there: a hint of light glowing in the base of the pit. He clung on to the finely trimmed lip of rock a little longer, wearing his old Voidsuit again but divested of his weapons.
He shifted, almost losing his grip, and transferred his weight to the frayed rope.
He dropped past other lines and ropes and cloth ties that the Wulm had let down, his flickering suit lights picking out the last of the climbers as he shuffled into the darkness.
Gradually the light increased, a warm glow strong enough to make out the glassy smoothness of the superluminally pulverised rock sides of the tunnel. Something that looked like a tiny flicker of floating light passed his face, an Amaranthine household spark. So that was what they had down here, patiently waiting the millennia for their masters to return. Ghaldezuel glanced down at last, contemplating how far he had to go, and realised with a start that he was almost there.
The speared nose of some massive, glimmering weapon rose to meet his dangling feet. Beyond it, vast in the gloom, the body of the greater vessel spilled out in all directions, a truly massive Decadence ship locked away for more than five thousand years. Ghaldezuel pulled in his feet and angled his body so that he could drop onto the side of the smooth nose. His boots met the hard metal of the ship’s snarling animal face, catching on its plated scales, and he half-slid, half-stumbled his way down until he could climb the last fifty feet to the floor of the cavern.
Hundreds of sparks swarmed around the assembled Wulm, rising and dipping like Zuo fairy flies. Ghaldezuel’s metal boots touched the stone with a clink and he let go of the rope, swivelling to look up at the looming, vertical body of the Amaranthine ship.
A handful of sparks hovered around the craft’s conical snout, as if inspecting the enormous nose-mounted superluminal cannon that had obliterated the Thrasm. Ghaldezuel remembered a strange glossiness to the metal as he’d made his way down: the remains of De Rivarol. The sparks were trained to hover above any Amaranthine until commanded to desist and might stay there all night. More drifted to gather in knots of muted light over the vessel’s gaping jaws, carving shadows into the hollows of its eyes and the voids between its teeth, illuminating the soap-bubble colours of the hull plating.
The great rearing ship had been built in the image of a Crachen of old, a nautiloid beast seven stories high, a coil of bronze tentacles enclosing spears of blade-sharp weaponry around its skirts, as if the creature had dropped to settle on the spires of a city. Ghaldezuel fumbled at his suit lights, turning them off, then took in the rest of the dim place.
The Sepulchre. It was vast, like a mile-wide bubble blown in volcanic stone and left to cool. Off in the darkness, more sparks were glowing into life, casting blue and orange light against the walls and ceiling. Heaped Amaranthine treasure glittered in piles twenty feet high, all looking as if they’d been dumped in a hurry before the great cavern was sealed. The bubble, he understood, had been hollowed using a more advanced process than that which created a Vaulted Land. Those great places had their insides scooped out roughly nine thousand years ago, when the precursors of the Amaranthine had realised—numbering as they apparently did in their trillions—that doubling the living space on an already-conquered planet was a much easier task than finding and settling a new place. All one required was a vast scooping machine—the ancient Hollowing Lathes, some of which still lay where they had been abandoned, rust-holed and lived-in, on several moons in the Investiture—and the ability to kindle stable artificial suns.
It was only during the magical Age of Decadence—at which point the last of the true Hiomen Empires had fallen and the Amaranthine had established their hallowed Firmament—that superluminal tools capable of dissolving matter with greater than surgical precision began to find their uses. And so it was that places were cored superluminally, and by that means the last two great planets of the Firmament, Cancri and Tau Mandrano, gained their interiors.
Along with, apparently, this old place, the Sepulchre.
Ghaldezuel began his wander, keeping one eye open for Cunctus and his witch. Out of reach of the light, he could hear the busy rush of water, most likely the redirected flow of the poisoned river. He looked down, scooping up a handful of bright silver Ducats and Halves: the disc and crescent shapes bore the intricate portrait of Jacob the Bold, a lost Firmamental Emperor. They were said to be hard as diamond, useful as a weapon in a pinch, though anyone lucky enough to have one to hand could afford all the protection they needed. He took one of the crescents, dropping the rest, and rubbed the point of its tip thoughtfully.
Gleaming jewels scattered the gentle light of the place like a Wiro’s fairy-tale dungeon, and among them other, more darkly indecipherable things lurked half-buried; machines and bejewelled Statuary Tombs, engine parts and suits of armour. Another of the Amaranthine sparks had fallen and lodged, buzzing and spitting, between some stacked, gem-encrusted swords the length of a Melius’s arm. Ghaldezuel looked around, conscious of an expectant stillness to the place. The cavern was a sump of potential energy, hundreds of lifetimes’ worth of treasures. This was all Cunctus and his gang would need to recruit the best—and worst—of the Investiture to their cause.
Beyond, like cadavers thrown hastily into a mass grave, a legion of rotten paper robots with rusted spines lay half-submerged in a landslide of gold and silver trinkets. He trudged up a hill of Ducats for a better view, half-expecting to find the Collection itself dumped among their number, knowing deep down that he wouldn’t. The paper men, from what he could see from his vantage, were quite dead, completely unusable. Ghaldezuel had heard tales of the Stickmen, as they had bee
n called during the wars of Decadence, but never seen one; it was said a rogue Amaranthine had gifted the Jalan warlord of the Oyal-Threheng reams of the same indestructible paper—the cannibalised skin of their antique, defective army—to build his Firmament-famed origami keep.
He walked in sliding steps down the hill again, passing a suit of monstrous clothing that appeared to be made of dull red glass. It must have been built for something other than an Amaranthine, something endowed with hundreds of arms or wings. He stopped to tap its belly with his boot and it fell abruptly to pieces, shattering the silence of the vast place with a torrent of tinkling echoes. The lights bobbed once, falling still again. The sunken spark spluttered and hummed.
As he came upon the Firmamental robots, Ghaldezuel stopped short. In the edges of the spark-light, a gleaming curve of reflection slipped off some dark material, catching his attention. He switched on his helmet torch again, the generator behind his head whirring and burping a puff of smoke.
There above the paper Stickmen, wedged at an indifferent angle into the heaped treasure like a sword in a stone, lay the ship of the ancients: the Dilasaur vessel discovered in the rings of Saturn-Regis thousands upon thousands of years ago.
Ghaldezuel crunched forward across the mounds of coins and treasures, transfixed. It was impossible at first to tell whether the dark, spinning-top-shaped mass, picked out here and there by his light as he moved his head, was the correct way up or not. As he moved closer, he noticed that the out-thrust spindle of its nose was crumpled and shredded, and that great dents in its fuselage had been made by a huge and deadly impact.
He arrived at its burnished surface, putting out his gloved hand to touch it and glancing up at the nose. All along the curve of its side were scratched names and dates: Dylanis Mors 3276, one read in the Latin shapes of the pre-Unified languages. He looked at the others: O.B. & T.I., Rubrich Pappen, The Brothers Lumetri, 3901. One message in particular caught his eye, dragged in spidery writing almost two feet tall: The Devil’s Sailboat.
Ghaldezuel stood back a little. The pristine craft they kept entombed in clear resin in the Sea Hall of Gliese must have been a facsimile. He could understand their shame—this object certainly hadn’t been well looked after in the first years of the Interstellar histories. He supposed it had been passed from empire to empire, continually gifted or bargained with, a unique treasure left to families and states, seized by every revolution. It was a wonder the ship and its fabled occupants had survived at all.
And here he was now, a Lacaille knight at the end of an epoch, standing before it as millions of others must have done, thinking the same thoughts, wondering at the very same wonders. Who or what else would stand and read these words in years to come? Would they even understand these scribbles?
He shone his suit lights up at the nose, trying to see if there was a rip in the fabric of the ship large enough for him to climb through.
In the flicker of his helmet torch, he saw there was rodent shit everywhere. Uncountable generations of them must have lived here, dwelling inside the mechanisms of a thing they could never understand. He dithered for a moment and sealed his helmet’s faceplate, knowing the fumes from the droppings could be dangerous. The silence intensified as he switched on his sound feed. Disturbed dust floated across the beams of his lights like passing wraiths.
He looked around the snug cockpit, a nested series of shells like a layered, egg-shaped throne set into the nose, buckled and warped by the ancient impact. He saw where they must have sat, doubled over like hunchbacks as they stared at their equipment, a collection of nodes and hollows in the pale, smooth material that presumably shone optical information of some kind directly into their eyes. The whole place appeared to have been moulded or poured, grown like Old World bone-stone. He shone his lights across the curved ceiling of the cockpit, seeing yet more channels and nodes that must have projected information or sound, without spotting a single seam or rivet. Even the Amaranthine had built with seams, once upon a time.
And what blasphemy has been done to you now? he thought, gazing at where they’d sat. The souls of those things, if he’d understood Corphuso’s sermons on the subject correctly, were lost to the Void, coalesced perhaps in the craters and crags of Saturn-Regis’s rings, sunk wherever gravity would hold them.
Ghaldezuel tried to imagine how he’d feel if someone told him that a demon would one day occupy his remains. Would he feel violated? Slandered in some way? He stood very still, falling dust glowing as it passed through the beam, a galaxy of stars. He’d want revenge, he supposed.
Well, they would get that, at least, in one form or another.
Ghaldezuel widened the beam of his torch and crept further into the cockpit. It was their own fault, really, building such a being without a thought for the consequences. It was just a pity so many others had to pay for their mistakes.
Ghaldezuel stirred from his thoughts, peering out through the vessel’s shattered nose. They were calling out for him across the landscape of treasure. He looked at the finger of his glove, realising he’d been tracing patterns in the rat shit on one of the consoles. He took a last glance in the rear of the vessel, but the walls there had buckled and crumpled as the ship had dived side on into the rock, sealing what could have been storage or living quarters away from prying eyes.
He began to climb through the tear in the nose, hesitating as he hoisted his leg and staring back into the darkness of the cockpit. Ghaldezuel returned to it, taking the crescent Half-Ducat he’d found and scraping hesitantly into the surface of the optical projection equipment at the base of the throne.
G & J
When he’d finished, he took off his glove, laying his finger against the Lacaille letters, pressing it there as if stamping a wax seal. Shavings of whatever the vessel was made from drifted dustily to the floor, exposed after millions of years hidden. He looked at the crude scratches of his handwriting for a moment, then used the Half-Ducat again to scrape one final addendum beneath.
FOR EVER
Ghaldezuel left, not looking back. He knew he would never in his life return to this forlorn cockpit, and was glad.
“There you are,” Cunctus cried across the expanse of treasures. “Look what we’ve found.”
Ghaldezuel trudged over, his thoughts far away. The Melius was holding something long and translucent, like a thick, stubby snakeskin. He nodded to the acid-burned Wulm and they pulled the skin in different directions, expanding it. Ghaldezuel took a step back, watching the thing unfurl. After twenty feet they were still going, the material of the substance unravelling like one of those fancy hump sheathes you could buy in Filgurbirund to keep the babies away. The sheath terminated in the Melius’s hands at a bulbous helm section, also apparently expandable and lustrously oil-coloured where the light of the sparks slid across its surface. Ghaldezuel came closer to inspect its rainbow shimmer for a while as the other Wulm pored over it, their mistrust of him momentarily forgotten. Unlike the others, he didn’t want to touch it; there was something about the thin, multicoloured fabric—apparently repellent to rat faeces, unlike everything else—that disturbed him. He resisted the urge to look into the darkness of the cavern for the beast that had shed it, comprehending as he examined it that the skin was some kind of ancient suit, much like the glass carapace he’d inadvertently shattered. Another relic of a lost age, he thought, making brief eye contact with Cunctus. Something discovered but not understood, at least by anyone living.
“Might come in handy, Mumpher,” Cunctus said to the Wulm, rolling up the skin.
“Who is she?” the witch asked at his side, helmless and leering.
He started, swallowing and glancing guiltily back to the ancient ship in which he’d carved the initials. “Nobody.”
“Not nobody, Ghaldezuel. You put her name in eternity.”
He watched them finish rolling up the skin, saying nothing more. Mumpher the scarred Wulm took it from Cunctus’s trembling hands and went to oversee the other discoveries be
ing made in the cavern. Rats were already being cooked around a few of the fires the gang had lit, and someone was dragging what looked suspiciously like the Amaranthines’ fabled mirror—a polished piece of silver capable of capturing and re-showing ancient light, it was said—across the pile to use as a sledge. Cunctus watched, too, turning to grin at them both. He’d knotted some huge rubies into his beard.
“Oh,” the witch said, catching his wrist. “Oh, that’s it.”
Ghaldezuel glared at her and walked away.
Hauberth’s din floated to his ears as he stepped above ground, the humidity settling in his hair, running down his cheeks. At the quay, the atmosphere above the place was a yellow smudge that ran to green where it met the ship-flecked sky.
Filgurbirund was a big planet, heavy and thick-aired, the atmosphere varnished over like an old and discoloured painting. The gravity of the place, along with widow-making malnutrition, explained perhaps why the Vulgar here were such a small race, as easily aggrieved as any trembling little breed of dog quick to bare its teeth. They’d owned this place as long as anyone but the Amaranthine could remember. Its histories were as rich and dense as the smoggy planet itself, home to thirty billion souls at the last old, ineffectual census, and now, he assumed, considerably more.
Across the water, Ghaldezuel spotted him. A tallish figure cloaked and hooded in a luxuriant ultramarine cape, standing straight and motionless at the parapet of the next bridge. Ghaldezuel took in the sight, wondering for a moment what others—what the fifty million Vulgar of the city—would see. Merchants with their little houses strapped to their backs peeled around the apparition, uninterested in what appeared to be a tramp with a good new cloak staring catatonically at the waters. The homeless (a good portion of the city) seemed wary of going anywhere near the figure; the bridge was almost deserted of them—a rare occurrence. Perhaps they thought the cloaked shape must be a lawman, standing still and watchful beneath the deep shade of his hood. They had no idea, as ever, what walked freely among them.