by Tom Toner
Ghaldezuel had read the monthly news at the bank, one of the few places where the papers could actually be read by anyone, and noticed amid the bills of trade and anti-Lacaille sentiment the recent spate of mutilations, rare even in a city in which thousands were murdered or robbed each day.
The figure saw him, turning minutely in his direction, and he made his way along the bridge, feeling a little self-conscious. One day, one day the person would come to him, though Ghaldezuel had little illusion that such a day would fall any time soon. The first sign of acknowledgement had taken a year; the first word two.
They stood alongside one another. A hunchbacked Wulm bustled past them, the high stink of its body drifting with it. The multicoloured river boiled beneath, turgid with rubbish: old broken-up furniture; a crumpled, mossy boat that was now the floating home of a few dozen Oxel; a handful of bloated bodies sweeping face-down in the current. Those would be caught by a Ringum fishing gang further along and inspected for valuables, their spotters on all the bridges making sure nobody else got to the corpses first.
A three-fingered hand came to rest on the railing beside him. Ghaldezuel looked at it only for a moment, taking in the crescent nails, ivory-coloured and bitten right down to the cuticle. They cannibalised even themselves, they were so hungry.
He fished inside the pockets of his suit and brought out a little paper parcel, good Lacaille jewellery from Pruth-Zalnir, and turned to the hooded figure.
“For her to wear on top,” Ghaldezuel said, placing a hand on his chest to illustrate, “when she comes here. There is a note inside—you just open the clasp.”
Tzolz looked down at him through the shadows of the hood, taking the parcel in his blunt fingers and examining it. When he spoke, it was in a deep, melodious Lacaille.
“She will be glad to have this.”
Ghaldezuel blinked a nod. “Tell your dear aunt from me that the Vulgar will soon be kicked back to where they belong. They can’t harry her if they’re retreating from my people, and we’ll keep the wretched creatures running.”
They strolled back to the riverbank. The attack on Nilmuth tomorrow could not be planned in any more detail. But there was more to say. He reached out a hand, touching the Bult lightly on the arm.
“I might have another task for you, when you and your team are rested. Something to find.”
THRONG
“Bult!” Lycaste roared, flailing his arms and jumping up and down, the structure bouncing under his boots. The Prism making their way towards him hesitated.
Slightly less stagey, if you could.
“Bult!” he raged, trying to inject some genuine fear into the word. The spell appeared to be working, however; his would-be assailants were clapping their hands and stamping their feet, glancing nervously in all directions.
A thumping of iron-shod feet announced the arrival of something large. It pushed through the crowd and sent them scampering on their way without a second glance at Lycaste. More came up behind, making their way down the steps.
“What about these?”
Ah, all’s well. Maneker briefed me for this.
He put away his weapon, still alive with nerves and annoyed that Perception hadn’t thought to warn him to expect them. The new arrivals clanked down to him, four muscular forms barely a head shorter than him and encased in brilliant suits of coloured plate. Fur-lined capes trailed behind them, billowing in the cold wind. Lycaste’s first thought was that he’d never seen this particular breed before, until some nagging memory told him that he had. Just before he’d fallen, before Maneker had brought them all to Proximo. This breed had been there in Vilnius Second, too. They stopped before him and clapped their hands together as one. They were not like most of the small, bat-faced things he was so used to. In fact, they were quite the most handsomely dressed Prism Lycaste had ever encountered. Tidy, chestnut-brown beards sprouted from their long faces, faces that were home to small, ice-blue eyes. There was something crocodilian about the way their jaws interlocked; each possessed a ramshackle set of hooked teeth, almost like a Jalan’s, that protruded among their whiskers.
“Letters,” the greyest of the specimens commanded in First, snapping his bare fingers.
Give them to him.
The Prism snatched the package from Lycaste’s hand, squinting at the script on each letter, then turned and left without ceremony, stamping back the way they’d come.
“We should hurry,” another said to Lycaste. He had a soft, smoky voice and appeared to speak First better than Lycaste did. “A Perennial Amaranthine was here today, watching the comings and goings for people like you.” He looked Lycaste up and down appreciatively. At first, Lycaste assumed it was only his beauty, as usual, that had caught the Prism’s attention, realising a moment later that it was more likely the fine Voidsuit he wore.
“Gamnin,” the mercenary said, indicating himself. He gestured at the other two. “Olonan and Narvott.”
Lycaste followed them up and through the enormous gatehouse, the mercenaries paying his entry fee for him. His surly, would-be robbers observed them from the shadows.
“Never mind them,” Narvott said.
Lycaste felt suddenly as if he were simply being passed from thug to thug. Percy, a comfortable—if likely imagined—weight around his shoulder said nothing.
“The same Perennial tried to hire us earlier this year,” Narvott said, pushing past a host of small creatures on the stairs to their level and holding the door open for Lycaste. “Amaranthine do not ask twice.” The high outpost rocked under the force of the wind, the mercenaries’ hair blowing and flattening. “After yourself.”
Lycaste went through into a small, altogether cleaner wooden chamber. The three mercenaries took their seats at the single table, conferring in low voices. Between them lay the remnants of a luxuriant dinner: a fat, gutted blue fish on a wooden platter. Plastic jugs and pots and cups stood empty on every spare surface, as if the mercenaries had been kept waiting for some time. A tower of smaller creatures standing on one another’s shoulders looked in, salivating, through the single glass window.
Maneker has not spared his expenses here, I think.
Lycaste seated himself by the small fire, his feet aching, moisture steaming from his suit and hair. The mercenaries took a few last sips of their drinks while Gamnin tipped the remains of the fish out of the window and slammed it closed. Lycaste dragged his stool closer to the fire to let Olonan reach his sack of equipment.
He sent you because you are distinctive. It would have been in those letters he posted, back on Rubante. “Look for a beautiful Old World Melius,” or words to that effect.
“But he said I could leave, if I wanted—even then—” Lycaste hesitated when the mercenaries glared at him, forgetting he’d spoken aloud.
An illusion, all of it. Like the freedom they offered me, once.
Lycaste remained silent, nursing his hands by the fire.
Forget it all now, the Spirit whispered. Be confident. Impress Maneker. With my help, you may use him one day.
The mercenaries had finished collecting up their things—huge gunnysacks of weaponry that each looked heavier than an Amaran-thine—and stood ready. Under their arms they carried long-beaked helmets beaded with jewels.
“All right then,” Gamnin said, taking a final drink and nodding to a little doorway behind a curtain. “Revenge for dessert, eh?”
Perception crept at floor level, snaking between the mercenaries’ boots, periodically checking on Lycaste at the back. It sensed others approaching them from the balconies, skipping to join the procession: tall things, short things, things that hobbled and howled, things with hooked noses and stooped backs. They wore whatever they’d made themselves, or traded and fixed up, and Perception felt that same kinship with the Prism it had developed long ago. Each creature was being paid a Tuppence for their service, a sliver of Maneker’s wealth so small that one might spend it merely by holding a silver Ducat under an abrasive stream of sand, but it was more
than some of them would see in a decade. Perception felt their quickly beating little hearts like a march to war, and with them a quickening in itself.
Together they streamed along the walkways, following the winding one-way route back down to the shipyards. It fell in step alongside the leading Prism, listening to their payment clinking in their pockets, understanding that these soldiers came at a higher price. These were the Long-Life’s pariahs, the Prism he hired to invade the Vaulted Land all those years ago and create a schism between the Investiture and the Firmament. They were the bait to necessitate his rise: the Jurlumticular.
Perception felt a certain satisfaction as it looked at them. They had discovered at last how they’d been used, and as such Maneker had managed to secure their services for a significant discount. The remaining funds could be spent on a hundred more Prism companies around the Investiture, on ships, matériel and heavy guns, on gleeful things of spectacular destruction. It felt an imaginary shiver, an echo of its father’s testosterone, and contemplated all the good that could be done with just the right amount of carnage, precisely applied.
Micro-mines were nothing but nuts and bolts, scrap metal and jetsam, really. Perception had expected a fuse of sorts, but, like all things Prismic, it was delighted to see the truth was much simpler. Hurl your rubbish fast enough and it could cut through objects like a blade. Sometimes—in the poorest of vessels—even frozen ship waste would do. How very like the Prism to pelt their enemies with their own sewage in a bid to escape.
It watched as Poltor dumped another box of the stuff, ticking off a mental inventory. The crews of all the modified ships would need particularly fine thrombosis suits to survive this added speed, but luckily Huerepo was on the trail of some. The Vulgar looked up into the mists at the Hasziom’s tail fin. “All right?”
Perfect.
Perception had seen in an instant how wasteful the spatial dynamics of superluminal engines were, the filaments coiled and folded willy-nilly into spaces that could take much more. With ten miles of extra filament—simple copper, preferably post-growth—and a superior folding algorithm, the Spirit thought it could push the velocity of the Epsilon, the Hasziom and their two hundred mercenary ships a thousand fold, faster than any Amaranthine vessel of antiquity.
But that was just the beginning. Even now, as it oversaw Poltor and the Oxel tipping out the supplies and rummaging through them, Perception fancied it could imagine ways of reviving the lost Firmamental art of perpetual motion, or eliminating the need for engines and hulls entirely.
Bilocation, it mused, producing the unseen equivalent of a thoughtful stroke of the chin. There appeared to be no law demanding that such a talent remain the sole preserve of the biological. Why couldn’t ships do it, given sufficient tailoring? Or ghosts?
Lycaste climbed back aboard, leaving the babbling influx of hired mercenaries outside and heaving a sigh of released tension as the welcome stink of the Epsilon replaced that of the Bunk Barge. He had a look around, noting how homely the small place felt all of a sudden: he must have lived in the thing for over a month before transferring to the Hasziom, a ghost ship by comparison. Lycaste snorted at the choice of phrase, reaching the door of his old cupboard. He pushed his way inside, dumping his gauntlets and removing his cuirass and pistol as he lit the lantern.
What little floor space there had been before was now taken up with an assortment of packages. Lycaste stared at the boxes, thinking at first that they’d evicted him while he was away and taken the room for storage, only understanding as he read a paper note pinned to the nearest package. It was scrawled phonetically in barely literate First:
FUR OUR DEAR LICAST,
ON HIS BIRFDAY.
MUCH LUV,
THE EPSILON INDIA.
Felicitations, Perception said in his ear.
Lycaste stood and gazed at the pile, tears welling in his eyes.
ASH
Maril awoke to a throat clogged with phlegm and wetness in his eyes. He blinked, thinking he must be aboard the Wilemo. Something had gone wrong. The gyroscopes had broken. He knew the absence of gravity when he felt it. He pushed his hands out experimentally, feeling for his blanket. But it wasn’t there. His fingers went straight for the weapon that should have hung on his hip, but that was missing, too. He tasted blood, equating it to the soreness in his throat. He might even be upside down, for all he knew. Maril moved his head tentatively; it felt as if someone had tried very hard to break his neck. One of his wrists felt bent and his feet as if they’d been slashed with knives. Time and direction were halted in a black purgatory. Sniffs and snorts came from all around, mutterings and the occasional hacking cough. A blob of smelly liquid squirmed across his cheek.
The background rumble that had pervaded everything with a constant, numbing vibration had come to a stop. They were falling now, he sensed it—that must have woken him up. With only the gentlest tugs, at first, his body began to feel weighted again, his head brushing the wall behind him as it sank. He twisted carefully, hands outstretched to catch himself. Clanks and bangs as things settled and fell around him, the hateful squeal of scraping metal. Maril felt his way to the floor, a finger lodging in something warm.
“Wha- Shit, what’s—what’s in my ear?” a little voice spluttered.
“Furto?” Maril asked, withdrawing his finger. It came to him. The island. A song. Lopos. A chain around his neck.
“Are we landing?” A new voice. Jospor, to his left.
“Landing?” someone else asked.
Maril nodded in the darkness, only remembering after a moment that the gesture couldn’t be seen.
“Hold on to something.”
“Can’t see a—”
The outside roar of re-entry grew around them. Maril felt his skin bead with sweat as the heat in the cell increased, all weight now returning, his flabby muscles pinning him to the metal floor until he could struggle into a sitting position. Things slid and rattled in the dark, their agitation increasing in fury until Maril feared the chamber would shake itself apart.
With a slam, all objects in the black space shot upwards, bouncing and ringing like a room full of struck bells. Maril and the others flew towards the ceiling, weightless again for a moment, before piling back onto the floor. He rolled, groaning, his hand pinned beneath him, one knee smarting where it had clunked against the bulkhead. Furto whimpered beside him, his hand finding the top of Maril’s head in the dark.
They rode out another bang, their spines and muscles tense, and waited. Maril sensed they might have landed. Sounds stirred from outside, while the heat had ebbed from the air.
The lights flicked on with a snap, blaring through Maril’s outflung hands. For an instant, he’d caught sight of the place they were in and all its contents.
He winced, peering into the cavern of light, realising it was pouring through an open hatch in one wall. Daylight. Sunlight. The muted colours of another place, misted with a smoky swirl of warm, ashscented air. He opened his eyes wider and looked around.
Stacked sections of ship fuselage surrounded him, most of them tied down, some smaller pieces of loose salvage scattered and broken by the violent landing. A row of barred compartments, one of which he and Furto were locked within, lined the inside walls, their occupants stirring in the light. Maril noticed the insignia—three painted red finger shapes—upon one of the bits of tin sheeting just as his eyes slipped to the prisoner in the neighbouring compartment, rousing itself and staring back at him.
Their eyes met, not five feet apart.
“Bult!” Furto wailed, joined by squeals from the rest of the crew. Maril froze as the predator Prism stretched and looked him over. Across the floor, another two Bult had risen to squat at their cage bars, examining the Vulgar they’d been imprisoned alongside all through the night. Maril thought of everything the crew night have said within earshot, totally unaware.
He froze, hands balled into fists, his whole body tense and shivering, willing himself not to show weakness, no
t to back into the farthest corner of his cage like a chick shying from the cook’s probing hand.
He’d never been anywhere near this close to one before, never even seen what they really looked like. Once, almost fifteen years ago, he’d flown over a ruined desert town and spotted a dark shape running for its shadows, uncertain even as his men cried out at the sight. Now he had his chance, and Maril could hardly blink.
The Bult was tall, perhaps the size of an Immortal, judging by the bony brown knees jutting up against the bars, one calf almost entirely ripped away and recently healed. Its arms were long and wasted, pointy at the elbows, a couple of lean biceps lending them an unpleasantly wiry strength. Those three hideous fingers, as famous a symbol of imminent death as any in the Investiture, weren’t tipped with claws, as the drinking songs claimed, but rather fleshy pads and crescent nails. Its naked skin was unwrinkled except for some smooth lines around the wide mouth and a crease or two that traced the pair of large black eyes and their sparse, almost pretty clusters of lashes. Some scarred pinkness marred the skin of its bald, elongated head—perhaps a recent burn. The eyes fixed on his: intrigued, hungry. Maril stared fearfully back.
Figures had appeared, framed blearily in the light of the world outside. Something nebulous darkened the opening, carrying with it a sharp vinegar whiff that stung the back of Maril’s damaged throat. He sensed his eyelids flutter and drop, panicking briefly as he lost sight of the Bult once more before drifting away to nothingness.
They walked behind their Zelioceti captors, chained by their necks to one another, the four Bult striding alongside, similarly shackled. Maril’s crew cried out and clapped their hands, the more superstitious among them pounding their chests and stamping their boots, attempting desperately to ward off the demons they’d tried all their lives to avoid. Maril studied their awful faces as he walked, and their eyes slid hungrily between the trudging Vulgar in turn, hawkishly observing each misplaced footfall and stumble, each nervous shudder. Again and again, Maril caught the eye of the one that had been placed beside him for the voyage, understanding that it was trying to ascertain who among the tattered force was their captain. Maril looked ahead, sensing out of the corner of his eye the Bult’s renewed attention, realising the creature had made its choice. He kept his eyes to the front, feeling its gaze slide all over him, taking in his torn, chalk-smeared shirt and britches, his silver-capped boots, his striped-hide holster. It was seeing what it must have thought was its adversary, the captain responsible for shooting down the pursuing Nomad over the seas of Coriopil. Maril clenched his mouth shut, concentrating on putting one foot before the other, the iron chain grinding into his bruised neck, his head swimming with the fragrant, burned air of the place.