The Promise of the Child (28 page)

“And if there's anyone who might be next on the list, it's you, Sotiris.”

“I've had enough of this,” he said firmly, stepping away from the fireplace and trying to remember where the guest chambers were.

“That's the only reason Maneker's left you alone this long,” continued Honsiger quietly. “Once you arrive—perhaps not immediately, since he'll want to honour your sister—you
shall
be asked for. Any delay in answering, no matter how momentary, will be seen as a threat, a sign of schemes being hatched against him.”

Sotiris scrunched the letter in despair and threw it into the fire. He was remembering Aaron's words, and his proposition. They watched it curl and float.

“When I have mourned my sister, I intend to return home to Cancri, nothing more. It is safe there.” He looked at the woman, his anger softening. “You should come with me, Hanne, leave this awful moon for good, hand the castle over to Tussilago.”

Honsiger shook her head. “You can't see it. Cancri will fall just like the rest of the Satrapies. It may take longer, but it will happen.” She looked up at Sotiris. “Your private wealth cannot save you, Sotiris. You Cancriites may breathe what air you need through a pomaded bag of emeralds, but that air will run out, and sooner than you think.”

Sotiris clawed at his face, exasperated. “Florian Von Schiller, who lives in Cancri, is next in line for the throne of Gliese. He would not risk his home and comfort for the mystical ramblings of an impressionable few, most of whom are barely Pre-Perennial, and some megalomaniacal Amaranthine craving glory before his time.”

“Von Schiller is conspicuously late in declaring his sympathies.”

“And when he does he shall see sense, even when it has so spectacularly departed the Amaranthine.” Sotiris became aware that he had begun to raise his voice and stopped, his old heart labouring gently into life. Honsiger wasn't looking at him, but at the floor.

The woman sighed into her hands, a shallow breath like the flicker of a candle. “You were there—”

“Yes. And they spared me,” said Sotiris, remembering seeing Hytner walking away across the meadow.

“But not the others.”

“No.”

“And you won't help us.”

Later, when Honsiger had chosen to sleep, he dragged some larger logs across the charred flagstones, heaving the wood—too heavy to lift on the Old World—onto the flames and damping some of them to smoke. The younger Amaranthine might sleep a week or more and Sotiris had already decided he wouldn't wake her before he left. Sotiris had no bodily functions that could disturb his contemplation, and he fed the fire until dawn, stirring it absently with a great rusted sword he'd found leaned up against the hearth. Since the dreams had begun he preferred not to sleep—he could probably go a month or so without it—and by then things might not matter so much any more, if they mattered at all.

In the morning, after looking in on Honsiger in her grand and dusty bedchamber and finding her still fast asleep, Sotiris went up to the castle battlements. The grey clouds were thinning despite the drizzle that chilled his skin, a dark green forest glimpsed on distant hillsides. Quickened terraforming, poorly done, had made the moon a dank place, but sometimes the weather lifted; the calm fjord behind the castle had already begun to shimmer silver where the light found it. He saw Tussilago in his boat and waved but the distant Melius didn't notice. Sotiris turned north, to the blue crescent just visible through the soupy cloud, splaying his hands firmly on the damp eroded stone of the parapet. For centuries Amaranthine had come to this spot, on the battlements at the moon's northern pole, to tap into the magnetism of certain Firmamental currents and travel the two hundred thousand miles to the Old World. The castle had once been a bustling, sociable place, teeming with Immortal and Melius, its emptiness now reflecting the sorry state of the Firmament and the broken Amaranthine worlds.

He slowed his breathing as he felt for the currents, closing his eyes and crumbling some loose mortar between his fingers. Slowly the colours came, flashing through his mind as his ears popped, then all sound died away. For the briefest moment he inhabited two places in the solar system at once, Bilocated like a saint of old, and then he was gone.

Bonneville

Reginald Bonneville, junior honorific of the Devout Amaranthine Under One Satrapy—more commonly known simply as the Devout—watched the Melius go about her work, her enormous hands kneading and soothing his feet with glistening oils. The chapel was so quiet that each gentle slop of the mixture echoed to the far-away ceiling, and her soft breaths, intensifying as she ran her fingers up towards his ankle, were loud as footfalls in the huge hollow space. He sat back a little in the wooden cathedra, his fingers gripping the enormous armrests as her strength shifted his whole leg, his slowing mind trying to concentrate on the extraordinary images above him.

The woman—or rather
female
, considering she was of a different species—pushed hard with her massive thumbs at some sensitive spot, finally making him wince for the first time. She smiled encouragingly, at last having found a place that was not yet totally numb to anything but temperature, and Bonneville suddenly felt a fierce urge to lash out at her, to clout that smile off her monstrous face. It subsided almost as soon as it had arrived, and he turned his slow thoughts elsewhere, back towards the far-away ceiling.

The painted chapel he sat in was a marvel of the Old World, a place of such unique beauty that Amaranthine—and sometimes even the wealthiest of the Honoured Prism—journeyed from all across the Firmament to look upon its grandeur. The fact that the chapel had been built and painted by the hideous giant Melius was often conveniently forgotten as wealthy travellers crept beneath it, muttering their awe in hushed voices. It had even been speculated that the beauty of the chapel almost single-handedly kept the First Province in power; during their pilgrimages, the Immortal were often guests of First aristocracy, bringing with them such quantities of Old money that each visit surely paid for itself hundreds of times over. Bonneville held the figures somewhere locked in his head—he had been appointed temporary treasurer, after all—and they were huge sums indeed. How neat, he thought, how elegant, that a work of art situated at the highest pinnacle of the tallest tower of the greatest city on the Old World should be the very engine of the Province's continued dominance.

He closed his eyes dreamily, opening them again quickly to try and perceive an impression of the ceiling as a whole before allowing his eyes to focus on the parts that interested him. The scene far above was that of the hierarchy of the heavens, at least as far as the twisted minds of the people of the First saw it. One might expect a Melius hand to be crude, aboriginal in its simplicity, but the paintings were startling in their realism and power. Only the colour schemes—miraculous to the eye but painful when stared at for too long—betrayed the painter as being a touch unusual, the mind of a species other than his own.

He tipped his head back. At the north end of the ceiling, almost directly above the throne Bonneville sat in, was the origin of the Melius:
Homo sapiens
, as the remains of the Amaranthine had once been known, a gilded crown upon his five-metre-wide, expertly painted head. The Immortal was plain and white-skinned, his huge expression one of stony ambivalence. He wore a robe of fantastical colours that draped the entire scene, hanging like curtains across the towers of his realm, the Firmament, its blue skies alive with extraordinary creatures and golden stars. Flocks of metal birds, intricately painted but hopelessly inaccurate, wheeled and soared among the golden points of light; a generous Amaranthine had obviously tried to explain the appearance of Prism Voidships to the clueless painter, who had then let his imagination run wild.

Bonneville let his eyes travel downwards slowly, soaking in the view of the four-hundred-year-old scene. From beneath the jewelled folds of the robe peered hideous and demonic faces—those of the Prism, as the Melius painter had imagined them. Some had long noses or large ears, bat-like faces and forked tongues. All were naked, like a Melius. They were examples of actual species, Bonneville knew, though simply reimagined by a painter who had never seen them, and they capered and cavorted between the curtains across a triptych of coloured worlds whose atmospheres blazed with fire and warfare. If one looked close enough (most Immortals brought spyglasses and telescopes with them especially for the occasion), the true horrors of the Prism moons could be glimpsed. Bonneville, though he couldn't make it out with his own eyes, had seen reproductions of what was going on upon the surface of the worlds up there; torture, scenes of sodomy and degradation, slaughter of children and animals on a colossal scale. Each of the hundreds of figures in the horrifying triptych was about three feet tall—coincidentally the real height of some Prism races—but the sheer size of the chapel meant they were mere specks teeming above him.

As his eyes wandered further down, the proportions increased again. The undersides of the hellish worlds were silver crescents of light, moons glowing over a magnificent map that dominated the rest of the ceiling: the Old World. Needle-sharp, stylized mountains pointed like peaks of meringue towards the heavens, the continents they grew from arranged in a dodecahedron around the First, with lettered scrolls unfurling wherever a fortress or city sprouted from the mountainsides.

Beneath the mountains, arranged below the tangled bowers of a beautifully painted forest of palms, the Melius held court. Their huge forms were the most realistic of all the painted figures, dominating the ceiling in a vortex of colours. Here the artist had clearly worked from life and some of the figures were breathtakingly painted. Their elephantine heads glared down at the distant floor, massive jaws clenched in that peculiar Melius way, enacting some scene from history the importance of which Bonneville had quite forgotten.

Occasionally, just as the trance of the scene's beauty was wearing thin, he remembered that the chapel's ceiling and perhaps everything it depicted could one day be his.

He stared at the top of the woman's huge head where it almost touched his knees, her hair scraped back into some sort of artful decoration apparently for his pleasure. She had moved to his other foot now and was obviously trying to locate the same sore spot. Bonneville, unlike other Immortals he knew, was glad he no longer felt things as keenly as he once did. He counted the many millions of days of his life so far as a time of trials, all of them building to the moment when he could be released from crude animal lusts and processes. To be older than ten thousand years was to achieve enlightenment, many of the Amaranthine agreed, for it left the mind nothing but time to contemplate the things that really mattered. He looked at his hands as they gripped the throne's huge armrests, trying to clear his mind.

Hugo Maneker, the Devout's great prophet and leader, had disappeared. Those who knew what was good for them did not trouble the loftier Perennials of the order with questions; those who did quickly vanished, too. Zacharia Stone, a taciturn Perennial fanatic, had been awarded stewardship of the Devout upon his return from Gliese. The volatile, boyish-looking Perennial presided over his peers with obvious relish, threatening members with imprisonment or exile from the Old World for any small transgression in decorum. But it wasn't Stone who frightened him. Stone was scared, too, Bonneville knew it. The Perennial expressed nothing but overwhelming adulation whenever Aaron the Long-Life was mentioned, but Bonneville could see it in him, just like all the others.

The man who claimed to be the oldest living Immortal was an enigma, a spectre-like figure somehow able to appear without warning especially when his name was mentioned. It was said among the Devout that Aaron the Long-Life had come from the Westerly Provinces, already known to the Melius there and ruling in all but name as a Provincial king. It was not unusual for Amaranthine to spend time among the peoples of the Old World—the myth of Jatropha, said to be the most powerful of any Amaranthine, was a fine example. There were even postulations from the younger, more overzealous Devout that Aaron himself
was
Jatropha, awoken at last from a slumber of lifetimes to claim his rightful seat on the Firmamental Throne. Whoever Aaron was, the man appeared in the flesh as he did in the dreams that some of the elder Perennials experienced, portly and kindly faced, his feet appearing to make no sound when they brushed the floors of his chapel. Bonneville had so far only seen him from a distance, a slip of grey in a procession of red and white—the colours of the Devout—as the Amaranthine had triumphantly entered the Sarine Palace and the protection of the Melius Lyonothamnine monarchy of the First. He'd tried to keep his head above the crowd to catch another glimpse, but it had been useless in a caparisoned procession of multicoloured giants almost twice his height, and assumed that the time for his presentation to their new master was still to come.

Bonneville had done almost nothing so far but wait, occupied only occasionally in his study—a hastily cleared guest chamber in one of the Sarine's outer spires—with the business of the Devout and their absolute rule over the newest Satrapy of the Firmament, the First Province. In the bleakness of the Old World nights his thoughts slowed to a crawl, gnawing at the possibilities of his actions, the threat of discovery, the glories of success. The business with the Satrapy of Inner Virginis, mercilessly expunging the opposition concentrated in that beautiful Vaulted Land—that was not something one took lightly, even when the perpetrators were on your side. And there would be more to come. Sometimes the impulse to run and never look back was so strong that Bonneville found himself glancing at the door of whatever room he was in, considering his chances. He had never heard any of the other Devout voice doubts, but then he had never expressed any of his own, either. For all he knew, each and every member of the sect had plans to leave and he'd be left all alone at the final hour. There had to be some way of finding out before it was too late, some subtle method of testing the water without Stone discovering his treachery.