The Weight of the World

by Tom Toner

  This was living.

  NOURISHMENT

  At first, all Corphuso had found were the man’s footprints in the dew, dragged trenches like shining slug trails leading down to the woods. But then the Amaranthine’s freshness had withered, the lustre fading, and his form had begun to solidify; a far-off wanderer who cast a dim shadow. He would become a fixture of this place soon, like they all were.

  Corphuso understood on some level that the Amaranthine had been put here for a reason. And now, in another place, in another time, he was dying.

  He had his cloak wrapped around him today; the weather appeared to be turning cold, percolating up his sleeves and down through the damp hole in the toe of his boot. The Long-Life, as if in distaste of the weather, was nowhere to be seen.

  But that wasn’t quite true, and he knew it. The beasts in their cages up the hill, all those starving souls dribbling in eternal purgatory: someone fed them with those buckets and sticks. He’d waited, day after day, to see who it was, until finally that person came.

  It was the Long-Life himself, doing the rounds like a good jailor, sometimes talking to his old friends while they whimpered back. Corphuso hadn’t understood until he’d climbed the hill and looked south, spending the day trying to count the hundreds of stone edifices that disappeared into the distance.

  The souls nourished him. That was how Aaron had preserved his vigour these millions of years. Even Corphuso, absorbed by accident like a parasite in the gut, was doing his part in keeping the Long-Life strong.

  This place, this page of the book, was part of the Long-Life’s memory. It existed, it appeared, within him as well as without. It was a place to store old souls, a place where they might live on, even at a reduced and purely functional level, so that he could feed from them.

  Corphuso arranged his bed for the night, a passable lattice of sticks stuffed with smaller twigs and leaves. He’d been eating the first hatchlings of the season, and now he picked up some crushed little animals and ate them whole, looking out through the trees at the brushed hint of a grey-blue land beyond. The forest was a metaphorical barrier, he sensed, as well as a real one. Where the land sunk away, the realm grew deeper, leading down and down into a place even farther removed from the clarity at the crest of the hill where Sotiris had woken. Moving beyond the forest’s reaches would change something in both of them, Corphuso thought. But it had to be done.

  He cuddled into his twig nest, his blurry thoughts recalling his beloved invention. He remembered there were things he hadn’t told them, things he’d discovered. But they’d find that out for themselves, sooner or later.

  TREASURE

  Tzolz gazed up at the damaged walls of the hermitage; rough grey stone spattered with flecks of dried gull shit, black, sooty towers on the verge of collapse. There had been no great prosperity here, but also few raiders in hundreds of years. Fire held no fascination for him—when he looked into it, he saw nothing—and so this place would stay standing a while longer yet. The Bult did not burn what they had desecrated; they ate and took what they needed, seldom sparing their victories a backward glance. One had to care to burn, and the Bult simply didn’t.

  The bodies of the Quetterel lay where they’d fallen: crumpled, splayed, half-sitting and leaning, some at tables and chairs, an old abbess in her bunk. Barely eaten for the most part, besides a particularly juicy youngster Tzolz had fallen upon without bothering to silence it. Now he was growing sated, finding some rhythm, some contentment in his chews to replace the barely contained ferocity he’d begun with. He swallowed, pulling the Quetterel boy’s femur wetly apart to get at the marrow and scooping at it with his lower teeth. Licking the bone almost meditatively, his gaze travelled up to the ramparts where one of his pack, Esos, stood naked. They would eat, but only when he’d had his turn. The other, Izar, came hobbling to the wall with his arms full of weaponry, dumping the various spring pistols and rifles at defendable points and then standing like a stooped gargoyle at the battlement with the other. They watched nothing, waiting.

  When Tzolz was full and fit to burst, the first tugs of a stitch paining his brown, rib-stacked belly, he stood and threw down the knob of bone he’d been sucking on. Eat, then, if you like.

  Without ceremony, the other two began their ritual, hauling and dropping their chosen bodies to the base of the walls and disappearing at the steps to climb down. Tzolz heard ribs and knees smash inside the thick black robes as the corpses hit the ground, saw a hairy head burst open. Fur, he thought distantly. It was fur the Quetterel were covered with, not hair. Like the Leemuremen of Port Obscura.

  He staggered over to the edge of the road, pawing at the thin coating of ash that covered his hands, and squatted to gaze off into the hills. Coriopil floated unnoticed above them, a spot of deep green against the lime and gold tiger belts of Zeliolopos. The train-thing had rumbled off back down the road at the first sign of traded fire, and he didn’t think they’d see it again any time soon.

  He took a deep, ash-scented breath and watched his two Bult eat. The rich, iron-musty slime of eyeballs and testicles and fatty kidneys lined his lips, mingling not unpleasantly with the ash. It was a fact few knew that the Bult ate only flesh. Tzolz had looked at other Prism foods— black breads, white rice seeds—and seen only stuffs, fodders, padding like the fur that warmed some Voidsuits and the wool that lined old ships. It did not interest him why others ate the way they did.

  He had meant to taste the Vulgar captain, once the day’s labours were complete. For a long time, he’d stood at the busted-open cells, thinking quiet, ever-turning thoughts and smelling the air. A new coat of ash had covered the road since the Vulgars’ departure, but there was no hurry. They could only have retraced the journey south, back to the treasure ship that had brought them all here. The hermitage was a dead thing now. Plenty had escaped—he’d seen them with his own eyes running off into the woods—but it didn’t really matter. Cave systems in the hills held an even stricter order of Quetterel that did not speak to their ash-coated brothers; it would be days before anyone disturbed this place.

  Tzolz’s eyes followed Esos as the pale Bult made his way along the road to the edge of the orchard, dragging his chosen, split-headed corpse by the ankle. Esos liked to have his way with all the dead, eating into them first so that he might make himself more holes.

  Something clicked beneath the Bult’s foot as he dragged his trophy corpse, dimpling the ash into a tiny crater. Tzolz brought his head up, the familiarity of the sound registering somewhere in his mind, as Esos erupted into a blast of finely misted blood and ash, chunks flying high and raining down onto the track. Pieces of the wooden fence running parallel were blasted into the orchard in a spray of dust and splinters. Tzolz climbed to his feet, ignoring the stitch in his side. He observed Izar come limping warily to a window ledge and stare down at the grey and scarlet mess on the road.

  They contemplated the blasted ground, stepping around the body parts. Tzolz came back around to the obliterated fence and looked wordlessly off into the orchard, deciding after a moment to follow the spots of blood and flesh into the long yellow grass.

  There, plain as painted footprints in the grass, the tracks of seven Vulgar and a dozen of their wild creatures led off further into the startled silence of the orchard. Tzolz barely needed to look down to follow the trail as he wound between the trees, smelling the air as he went and glancing up into the branches to see the occasional piece of Esos dangling there like Old World bloodfruit.

  Eventually, at the orchard’s far edge, he realised he’d lost the track and stopped to look out at the semicultivated trees that led deeper into the volcanic hills. He walked the length of the fence, finding no more tracks on its other side, and turned back, his hackles raised. They were still here, still here somewhere.

  Tzolz crept into the shade again, eyes alert and reflective, his breathing slowing, listening, scenting. Their sweat was everywhere, daubing the trees like rank animal piss, but there was no sign of them. He c
ame to the last point at which he could make out clear impressions of their boots. The lead prints, smaller than some, were those of the captain. He squatted, looking around, then up, scanning the branches with quick flicks of his head.

  No more tracks. Gone. Tzolz opened and closed the three fingers on each of his hands as he thought, uneasy for one of the few times in his adult life. The sensation was far from outright fear, but to something as impassive as a Bult it might as well have been the same thing.

  A memory of his employer’s last few words to him came unbidden into Tzolz’s mind, his thoughts turning to the place he had once been looking for, the whole reason for their lightning visit to the planets of Tau Ceti.

  You’ve no hope of finding this thing on your own—so look out for anything unusual, anything peculiar.

  The Quetterel had built their hermitage here. Why?

  He put his hand out to the dark, ornamented iron railings that surrounded the tree closest to the tracks in the grass. The metal was old and pitted, but the tree seemed well looked after. The grass around its trunk had even been chopped fairly recently.

  “Tsuuuls,” came the wheezing voice through the trees. Izar appeared as if from nowhere from behind the body of an enormous yellow fruit. They stared at each other, motionless.

  EPILOGUE

  Every muscle trembled as he grappled with the final step, a shiny wet block of bluish stone jutting out over the circular sea. He lay there for some time in the dampness and spray, dozing fitfully, too weak to roll himself.

  For a dozen days he’d climbed, first down, past rolling tumbles of salty water into darkness, and then up into the light, some level in his head spinning and realigning. Within the enormous tunnel of water, he’d seen others descending, small shapes in the dark, passing like motes in the huge slants of thick sunlight.

  He imagined in his delirious state that he might have lost half his body weight in the descent and subsequent climb; Melius were perfectly at home drinking salty water, but a person Elatine’s size needed more.

  “Hoo!”

  He barely registered the echoing cry, bathing in the coolness of the sea air.

  “Hoo, ean!”

  A blade stuck into the flesh of his back. Elatine growled between his teeth, still unable to move. Another found his neck, forcing him to sit up.

  They were dark little blurs at the fringes of his vision; too small to possibly worry about, even though they might carry weapons. Elatine breathed deeply, eyelids drooping, a word, a name, on the tip of his tongue. He ought to have known the word; it was all that had sustained him on the long climb through the crust of the world.

  “Melyus! Hoo!”

  He lolled his tongue and yawned. Gazing up, he could see that he had indeed come to the outside layer of the great hollow world: the deep black-blue sky arched from horizon to horizon, its withering sunlight steaming his drenched skin.

  “Aele ma Amarantien!” the little voice squawked, and he found the name.

  “Maneker,” he said out loud, startling the blurry little people into silence. “Hugo Maneker.”

  CHELSEA: 1649

  He’d told Esther in the middle of the night, sitting up suddenly in bed. In the morning he couldn’t quite recall what had made him do it—a dream, perhaps. Now she knew, and now she was gone.

  Forty-one. The number of people Daniell had killed. Twenty-five in service to his Lordship. Not every face came distinctly to him, as some people said. Sometimes the act itself was almost gone from his memory, as if he’d rolled back his eyes, sharklike, until the deed was done. What he did remember, clearly and clinically, was the place and time of every death. He’d come close himself once or twice—shot in the foot with a musket ball and clubbed around the ear—but it was more than just a roll of the dice; he was good at what he did, better than any he’d been sent after.

  Daniell listened to the birds from his eggshell-blue parlour, working his way through a cold steak and kidney pie. He thought about those days with the detachment of a man making the most of his meal, sawing at the thick pastry like a doctor sawing bone.

  He’d awoken with a start, sticky inside the hot tent, his ears at once trained to the distant cries. Outside the field was empty, a sump of litter and gently smoking ash from fires kicked out. Flies and gnats churned thickly over the fields in the golden morning air.

  Daniell pulled on his boots and stumbled out of the tent, understanding immediately that he’d been put to sleep. Days could have passed, though investigating the fires lower down the hill he thought not. A crispy curl of blackened bacon lay pressed into the ash, still baking in the warmth.

  More cries carrying over the rise, a blue-black haze of summer smoke. Langport was aflame already.

  He sheathed his sword, loading two pistols with seasoned ease and making his way carefully into town. Bodies lined the road, their red coats browned with dry mud. A girl of no more than five was checking one dead soldier for valuables as Daniell sprinted on over the rise and down the next mile of hill to the flaming town.

  He came to the hanging chapel, stopping to look out over Bow Street, the main causeway to the river, realising that his horses had gone.

  Down by the river, red-coated men fired desperately at an advancing mob of clubmen; townspeople mobilised in their hatred of Aaron Goring and his army. Pops and puffs of grey smoke from their rifles rose to mingle with the dusty haze of flaming buildings. He saw no sign of the Parliamentarians, realising finally that they must have left the beleaguered army to the fate of Langport’s townsfolk and moved on.

  The bridge out of town was the only way back to Royalist-held land. Men crouched behind its stone walls, firing over the parapet while others reloaded. He might be able to cross further down, where the rushes and sedge thickened, knowing if he couldn’t that there would be miles of farmers’ fields to backtrack across, miles of unknowable slogging through rutted dirt and crops.

  He stood for a long while, looking out at the burning town houses, watching the remnants of his army thinning and trying to run, only to be shot down as they made it over the bridge. Soldiers took clubs to the head and fell twitching, set upon by smaller boys with scythes and hoes; others threw down their unloaded muskets and shrieked surrender, but to no avail. Daniell knew he couldn’t get out that way.

  He drew his sword and vaulted the chapel wall, slogging back down the hill and across flat farmland to the far curve of the river, the sun bearing down across his shoulders, something in his heart breaking.

  Four months ago, the procession had led King Charles to the scaffold. Daniell hadn’t gone to watch, though it wasn’t all that far, even if he could have got a ticket for the beheading. Perhaps for the best—one never knew who might’ve been there, too, watching silently from the stalls.

  He sat back, his pie accomplished, gazing out at the bright May sun glowing through the pink magnolia tree in his garden. He’d bought his own retirement—the one Aaron had promised him—happy in the knowledge that he owed his old lord nothing. At night, he slept soundly and without fear of finding some assassin at the foot of his bed, for after the battle he’d changed his name to Bellfield, growing out a luxuriant beard and gaining as much good healthy yeoman weight as his poor wife would allow.

  He pushed the plate aside, the sheen of grease catching the sun like all the rutted mud tracks of the war. Aaron was out there, somewhere. Perhaps he lurked in the city still, spinning lies and promises among the new parliament. Maybe he’d taken passage to the Americas—a thought that comforted Daniell no end—establishing himself amid the Quakers and plantation owners there. One thing he knew for certain: in a thousand years, when Utopia had come and people crossed the skies with wings of flaming gold, his old Lordship would still be around, stalking the halls of cities that floated beneath great balloons, or sailing the lush, newly conquered seas of Venus or Mars. Daniell wondered if Aaron would remember him in that distant, heady future. Sometimes he imagined, slightly saddened, all the mischief the Oracle would make,
knowing he’d never see it.

  And to what end? he wondered, the pink glow of the leaves bobbing with the breeze.

  He stood, sated, and walked out to his brick-walled garden, breathing in the fragrance of the trees. Daniell was no fool, having understood that night as he heard the Oracle’s stories that he was hearing something biographical, tales plucked from the past and retold with a careful detachment.

  He sincerely hoped Aaron found his Sarsappus one day, and that his old lord got what he was owed—be it good, or be it bad.

  GLOSSARY

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Aaron the Long-Life Spectral machine soul, now inhabiting the corpse of a long-dead Epir pilot

  Alba, Gentleson of Flacht Melius, corrupt High Plenipotentiary (deceased)

  Arabis Melius, daughter of Pentas and Callistemon

  Arns Vulgar, crewmember of the Wilemo Maril

  Bidens of Mostar Melius, son of the mayor of Mostar

  Briol Unborn daughter of Wilemo Maril (deceased)

  Caleb Holtby Pre-Perennial Amaranthine; junior honorific of the Devout

  Callistemon Melius, Secondling Plenipotentiary and father of Arabis (deceased)

  Captain Wilemo Maril Vulgar, privateer captain

  Carzle Lacaille, prisoner aboard the Epsilon India

  Christophe De Rivarol Perennial Amaranthine

  Convolvulus Melius, ancient ruler of the First, ancestor of the Berenzargols (deceased)

  Corphuso Trohilat Vulgar, inventor of the Shell

  Count Andolp Vulgar, landlord, owner of the Shell

  Cunctus/the Apostate Daniell Bulstrode Gang leader infamous throughout the Firmament and InvestitureAncient human, equerry to Aaron, Lord Goring (deceased)

  Drazlo Lacaille, crewmember of the Wilemo Maril

  Elatine Jalan Melius, commander of the Eastern legions

  Elise Perennial Amaranthine, Satrap of Port Elsbet