The Promise of the Child

by Tom Toner

“Look at him and remember,” the Intermediary continued, obviously relishing his task, “that sometimes the most alluring things can be the most deadly.”

  He gripped Lycaste’s mouth before he could pull away, spreading his lips in a pink snarl to dramatic gasps from the audience. A girl tried to touch Lycaste’s chest and he shrank away as best he could in the Intermediary’s firm grasp. His eyes searched the square for Sotiris’s owl, but there were only bright figures and white stone, green-peaked towers and the far mountains of the Second—a wall of huge, bleached, encircling teeth.

  Perennials

  Bonneville knew by reputation all of the Perennials sitting in the rough semicircle looking at him. Only about half had ever openly supported the Devout until now; apparently the threat of further violence to the Vaulted Lands had persuaded the remainder to join the cause.

  Florian Von Schiller, newly arrived from Procyon and now in possession of the still-absent Maneker’s position as head of the Devout, had joined them and was questioning each of the younger Amaranthine in turn. Wearing a brocaded gown of gold that dripped with precious black stones at the sleeves, he sat forward in one of the huge Melius-carved chairs arranged in the chapel. Bonneville could feel his pulse quickening, nervous of such a senior Amaranthine in their midst. There had been no mention up until now that the next in line to the Firmamental Throne of Gliese was among their number. He wondered what else might have escaped him.

  Drifting song, a choir of dozens of high-voiced Firstlings, rose from the vaults below as his eyes wandered to the bleached skull perched on the table between them. It was far too small and dainty to belong to a Melius, and too large for any Prism breed Bonneville knew of. It was almost certainly a person’s skull, an Amaranthine skull.

  “Stone informs me that you are not yet eleven,” Von Schiller said, sucking on a long pipe and blowing sweet blue smoke into the space between them. To abbreviate millennia was a Perennial’s privilege, often used among the youngest so they knew their place.

  Bonneville hesitated, about to reply, but Von Schiller continued.

  “What compelled you to travel here to the Old Satrapy? Surely you can’t have had the dream?”

  He’d had his answers prepared for some time, worked and redrafted as the fear of questioning drew nearer. “I was unblessed by the dream, Sire, naturally falling far too short in age to warrant it.”

  Von Schiller nodded approvingly, glancing around the semicircle.

  “But I had heard of its portent,” continued Bonneville, “that there had arisen an Amaranthine who could join with the sleeping mind and summon those who would support his claim. I knew then that this man was truly the Eldest—perhaps the legendary Jatropha himself—and the rightful heir to the throne of Gliese. I felt impelled to offer my assistance to my brothers here in the First … to your honourable cause.”

  “A noble impulse,” agreed Von Schiller with just the hint of a smile. “Tell me, Reginald, do you remember the Long-Life? Did your paths ever cross?”

  Again he was prepared. “No, Sire,” he admitted—for it was the truth. Many of the Perennials, and some much younger, admitted to remembering the man they had now chosen to deify, but he was not among them. Any lie would prove dangerous, and yet the best lies, Bonneville knew, had mixed in with them a grain of truth. “It is possible that our paths have crossed, but I will not confess to knowing our new Most Venerable.” He watched the Perennial’s satisfaction as he said the last, and was pleased with himself.

  “Yes, it is possible,” agreed Von Schiller. “The Long-Life enjoys the pleasure of delayed recollection—he prefers to wait until we have cast about in our memories for his face without taking it upon himself to remind us.” He sucked on the pipe, appearing to think carefully before speaking again. “He was … a colleague of mine. I had presumed him dead, long dead.”

  “And my tutor,” muttered Scarsbrek, an Amaranthine who had just become Perennial and was still basking in his new-found status. “I had almost completely forgotten him.”

  “He was present for my knighthood,” said another, Snow. “Standing by the side of King James the Eighth.”

  They fell silent, each Perennial in the chamber perhaps lost in memory. Bonneville hoped he wouldn’t have to hear all of their stories before his interview could end.

  “You are of a numerical background, are you not?” enquired Christophe De Rivarol suddenly. “What are your duties here?”

  Bonneville glanced at him, then at Von Schiller. De Rivarol—sixteenth in line to the Firmamental Throne—was perfectly familiar with his background. “I trained at the Trieste Mathematical Institute, before the Sixth War. Here, I am master of the treasury, overseeing the vaults during our tenure in the First.”

  “And is it not the case that you have connections within the Prism?” De Rivarol asked, a wicked gleam in his eyes. “Through the Ducal College of Drolgins, if I am not mistaken.”

  Von Schiller blew smoke, suddenly regarding Bonneville with more interest. A number of other Amaranthine who had been talking quietly among themselves stopped to listen.

  “I did once,” admitted Bonneville in a mild state of shock, rapidly feeding a warp of truth into the canvas. “As visiting Firmamental scholar—a purely honorary position. I was replaced by a Vulgar contemporary after the Volirian Conflict.” He smiled at De Rivarol, composed once more. “I do not believe my successor lasted long. These Prism may doll themselves up in neckerchiefs and tails, but one can’t seriously trust them with anything more than tying their own shoes.”

  “Hear, hear,” harrumphed Vyazemsky, a Perennial who had somehow managed to remain considerably fat for thousands of years despite having no functioning digestive system. Some suspected he ate in his sleep. “We must be ever vigilant that the Prism aren’t indulged too much, even in the form of knowledge.” He glanced to Von Schiller, nodding wisely. “It would ruin them, I fear.”

  Von Schiller took the pipe from his mouth, inspecting the glowing bowl. A tangle of smoke fumed from his nostrils. “Though the Pifoon, among others, benefit from our instruction as best they can—I remain hopeful for them.” He looked back at Vyazemsky. “Hugo Maneker, if I might name such a wasted hope, would have seen them stripped of their territories for some invented crime.”

  “And what has become of Maneker?” asked Vyazemsky, looking around at Stone, the silent chairman of the meeting. “I was told he would be here to welcome me.”

  “As was I,” opined the thin, sour-faced Hui Neng, sitting to one side and swilling water from a goblet. “It is most irregular.”

  Zacharia Stone, dressed more magnificently than any of the others in a jewelled gable hood, held up a finger and inclined his head to Bonneville, speaking for the first time. “Very good, Reginald. I think you can ask your friend Holtby in next.”

  Bonneville stood from his massive chair, the seat of which had been made for a rear much larger than his, and collected his cane. Many of the Perennials were already deep in conversation, ignoring him totally. Once again he was being ushered out, too young to be of importance, too old to be allowed to eavesdrop. He hesitated before pointing at the skull, its gristly jaw jutting towards Stone. “Might I ask to whom this belonged, Perennial?”

  Stone snorted. “That is a traitor’s skull, Reginald, something to inspire our younger members. His name was Yanenko.”

  Bonneville stared at it a moment longer. The eye sockets looked charred, as if flame had licked from within them. He smiled and bowed lightly to the indifferent crowd, recalling that Yanenko had not just been some junior Devout but a Satrap, commanding among his estates the Old World’s moon.

  Walking to the doors he glanced briefly to either side, expecting their spectral master to appear all of a sudden, but there was no sign of Aaron this time. He was glad. Great pale Melius faces stared at him from the cloisters, Firstlings come to look upon the Amaranthine, but he paid them no heed.

  Bonneville swung open the heavy metal doors and stalked out, passing Holtby sitting
in another of the huge chairs.

  “Your turn, Caleb.”

  The younger Amaranthine stirred, a look of concern crossing his face. “What sort of questions are they asking? Should I have prepared anything? Is he there?”

  “Never fear,” he said in passing, gathering his gown and descending a broad stairway to the balconies, “I’m sure the Long-Life shall judge your soul to be just and true.”

  Opening another set of massive doors, he found himself alone on a high turret, the thin air numbing his face. He pushed the doors closed behind him and went to the balcony, throwing down his cane and picking a berry from a potted tree. Bonneville rolled the red cube in his fingers, noticing the relief of insignia stamped across its skin, and watched his steaming breath in the cold air.

  The First, like the Utopias to the south, had been cultivated to a degree that made other Provinces of the Old World look shabby and overgrown by comparison. Fruits, berries and individual leaves bore the crest of a flamboyant designer from some lost generation, the mark of an ancient, barely remembered dynasty still stamped upon any produce that left the Province. Where natural shapes had once been, geometry and right angles now prevailed: sculpted acres of gardens were stippled with cuboid trees and star-shaped bodies of water, the various beasts to be found skulking within also appearing slightly geometric in profile.

  He leaned over the balcony and dropped the berry, watching it fall as he looked out over the pointed steeples of Sarine City, glorious capital of the First—some still pale with the morning’s frost—and the sharp white peaks of distant mountains.

  The palace, more than two thousand years old and certainly predating the current, albeit reasonably long-lived monarchy, was another work from the prolific hand that had designed the flora of the First. Its towers and buttresses only appeared smooth and regular from a distance—their surfaces were criss-crossed and indented with almost vertical stairways and grand plazas, such block geometry appearing impossible, almost hallucinogenic if one paused to look too long. On the horizon across the bluish city lay some watery streaks of high cloud, the day already turning frosty again. Bonneville pulled the loose material of his frilled collar up from his undershirts, wondering if it was cold enough for snow. He extended his hand to catch a drop of frigid rain.

  It was Bonneville’s commission as treasurer to the First, which included arranging documentation for Amaranthine and Prism visitors and overseeing their travels under the protection of the Devout, that had alerted him to the new developments, and only just in time. He shuddered a little with a jolt of retrospective panic as he thought of his near-escape, how all had almost been lost.

  Their new master the Long-Life, one pale hand already gripping the throne of Gliese, had during the early days of his glorious arrival among the highest echelons of Amaranthine society apparently taken it upon himself to alter certain shipping lanes in the inner reaches of the Prism Investiture, securing the passage of an inestimably valuable and little-known treasure and ruining the Vulgar-Lacaille Treaty of Silp in the process.

  The treasure, formerly in the possession of the Vulgar at a fortress on the moon of Drolgins, was to be brought here now, to the Old World. What the Long-Life presumably did not know was that the gift he had awarded himself upon his succession had, at the time of its disappearance, already been en route to an estate in the Hollowed Satrapy of Epsilon India. An estate, should anyone be curious enough to check, belonging to one Reginald Bonneville.

  The Vulgar machine had been known as the “Soul Engine” when Bonneville first arrived to see it, a title he rather preferred. His tenure at the Ducal College of Drolgins had permitted him little more than a glance into its shimmering loops and coils, but a few Firmamental Ducats here and there had soon loosened some tongues.

  Immortality. True immortality—not the fermented, degrading joke the Amaranthine had subjected their bodies to—was what the machine promised. He had seen quickly that such a thing of wonder could not remain in the Investiture; it would be fought over and destroyed, an unrepeatable marvel the Firmament would never see the likes of again. And so he had made arrangements with the Vulgar that would see the Shell’s potential preserved.

  It had now, however, become clear to Bonneville that his underling, Voss, tasked with taking the Shell out of Drolgins to Epsilon India, was lost to him. Turned, perhaps, dead most likely, she had been nothing but a courier, a method of deniability once he had secured the Shell and arranged its eventual return to the Vulgar under the condition of joint ownership and a ruling post in the Filgurbirund Protectorates. On Drolgins, in the equatorial city of Moso, the Council of the Three Dukes had been gratefully readying Bonneville’s ascendancy as Defender of the Kingdom and Prince of all the Vulgar; they would never have known that their new Amaranthine lord and master had himself arranged the Shell’s theft, nor that its design had been faithfully copied and reproduced during its time away. Bonneville had almost believed he’d got away with it, too, watching the Vulgar privateer Wilemo Maril groaning into the sky, his terms safely aboard and signed with the flourish of a man contented.

  And then the news had come.

  The Vulgar country of Vrachtmunt in southern Drolgins, land of the ruined fortress that had held the Shell, reported that Voss had left with the machine and its architect, Corphuso Trohilat, for the Threen Principalities some months ago, and that their entire party had not been heard from since. The Vulgar-Lacaille war, now reignited and raging with a fury that few alive in the Investiture had experienced, had prevented Bonneville from learning of his loss until recently, the postal lanes naturally subsumed by whichever ruling empire held their volume.

  He let the raindrops shiver from the tips of his fingers, breaking away in the breeze and falling. Somewhere in the wastes of the Ninth Prism Realm, Voss had simply disappeared. Up until the last few days, Bonneville had been waiting for confirmation that she had reached the outer Firmament with the machine and its designer safely in her retinue, at the same time expecting a Vulgar fast corsair to arrive with the acceptance of his terms. The privateer captain, Maril, was long out of range of any messages now, a goodly sack of Ducats in his possession; the expectant trio of greedy Vulgar Dukes were sure to demand Bonnev-ille’s head upon finding that he had somehow lost their miracle device.

  He smiled. But he had not lost it, not yet.

  The Long-Life was bringing it here, Bonneville had discovered, to this very Province, stolen from under the Vulgars’ noses and now in the belly of a superior Lacaille schooner dashing across the Firmament. He grinned at the thought, not noticing the cold any more. The answer had not taken long to come to him.

  Since recovering from the news of the Shell’s sudden relocation (permitting himself no more than one afternoon of luxuriant fury and despair) Bonneville had started borrowing—lightly to begin with—from the First’s vaults, careful to take only what would not be missed. The Jalan Regiments of the Asiatic Oyal-Threheng Counties, now pushing their battlefront to the ancient cities of the Inner Second, of course had no idea where their new allowance was coming from. Bonneville hoped their vain and dim-witted figurehead Elatine might one day appreciate the humour of the situation, though, perhaps on the day of his coronation. That the First’s own wealth had funded its downfall might yet be absent from history if the warlord did not wish his own skill in warfare and strategy diminished.

  But even that was a secondary concern. None of the Perennials, not even the meddling and vindictive De Rivarol, had any inkling that Bonneville knew of the Shell’s existence, let alone its secrets. To them he was nothing more than a bean-counter, an expendable junior with a head for numbers and a strict devotion to the Firmamental Order of Succession. Before the treasure was even due to arrive, Elatine’s newly supplied legions would already have swept aside the Second’s meagre defences and be lapping at the Sarine Palace walls. The Vulgar, a fresh contract already on its way to Filgurbirund through some of Bonneville’s new friends, knew now to look for a relatively defenceless
Lacaille schooner making its way through the fastest shipping lanes towards the Inner Satrapies. A small fleet coming the other way would have little trouble intercepting the Voidship and boarding it, taking the Shell before it ever had a chance to touch the Old World’s soil, while a separate squadron continued on to assist the Jalanbulon in the occupation of the First. By then, Bonneville fancied he’d be snugly asleep in his own stateroom aboard the Vulgar whip-corsair the Balmund Flechless, untraceable as the Voidship slalomed across the Satrapies and out into the Investiture.

  He leaned carefully over the edge, finding himself looking straight down into a courtyard five hundred feet below. He pulled back, head swimming, hands gripping the wall. A phobia he’d never quite managed to eradicate. As a distraction, he went through the plan again, trying to find weaknesses, wishing there was some liquid state of thought one could fill its mental boundaries with and then just sit back, watching for leaks. But all seemed well.

  The Long-Life was old, perhaps—as he claimed—older than any of them. But that would not save him. There would be little opportunity for any of the Perennials to Bilocate once Elatine came for them—it was almost impossible to jump from one Satrapy to another unless one was near a magnetic pole. Any attempts to do so from the First Province would likely end in failure and instant death; few had survived a failed Bilocation, with even the lucky ones seldom ending up where they had wished to be. Bonneville felt sure he was quite safe from any future retribution; the plot was untraceable, any escape impossible. And soon he would, quite simply, be unable to die.

  He shivered quickly, pulling at his collar, and turned his mind to the possible rewards, something he rarely did out of an embryonic superstition of counting one’s chickens before they’d hatched. But to hell with it, he deserved a treat.

  He smiled again at the view across the city, feeling old, disused emotions flicker into life. The Vulgar Dukes, keen to see Drolgins become the glorious capital it once was, needed Bonneville and his guarantees enough to grant whatever he asked of them. One might indeed ask why an Amaranthine, a member of the most pampered and envied minority in all of human history, would sacrifice so much just to live out among the savages; why, after all, become a king in a desert? The simple answer was that soon there would be no choice. The Firmament was due to fall, and quickly. The Prism had grown too strong and too numerous—not even a change of Emperor would hold them back. Ever since the Jurlumticular Throng had returned, assisting the Long-Life in the ruin of Virginis, the Immortals had been living on borrowed time. Perhaps before the year’s end the Amaranthine would begin to see their precious Vaulted Lands overrun, the Prism gaining confidence as each Satrapy fell, the Firmament filling with bristling warships as the odious creatures squabbled and wrestled over each new territory liberated from their Immortal masters. Never would there be a more perfect method of escape and at such fortuitous timing. Bonneville liked to console himself—on the days when he felt less than pure—that indeed only the most suicidal of them would have chosen otherwise when presented with the same opportunity.