The Promise of the Child (3 page)

A Wulm dropped into his path just as he reached the ladders, shoved from its level by the panicked Vulgar loyalists. It shook itself and stood, squealing as Tzolz threw the drill aside and slammed his rifle into its small head. The long-eared Prism's face crumpled in a froth of blood and it rolled, tumbling into the chasm. He looked up at the drillers clambering above, some taking bolts and falling, then back along the open tunnel he was in. There were bodies piled against the rustic wooden door at the far end, its edge burned away by some sort of incendiary explosion. He kicked it open in a storm of splinters, bringing the rifle up and felling a Vulgar as it ran for the next chamber, then made his way to an apparently undefended lower passage. As he jogged, Tzolz realised he was limping and glanced down to see that the meat of one calf had been mostly torn away by a clawed bullet. He ground his teeth and ran on.

Corphuso watched the Amaranthine as she touched the machine's edges, running a finger almost tenderly along the coils that made up its outer lobes. She hesitated, her ancient mind lost for a minute in some distant reverie, and tapped the structure with her finger, as if trying to gauge the exact blend of the fine amalgam of alloys from which it was made. The tap of her finger produced no sound, the architect noticed, and was pleased.

The flotilla would be underway, he knew, sailing up the fjord and into the canals that led to the fortress's surf lands. From what they could hear, deep in the base of the under-chasm, the attack had lost momentum, perhaps—Corphuso dared to hope—already totally intercepted at the serving levels. The mighty citadel of Nilmuth hadn't been breached in five hundred and seventy years, despite centuries of sporadic civil war across Drolgins. Now a free Vulgar mercenary army from Untmouth protected the fortress at all times, stationed in the vastness of its broad foundations, and a fleet of destroyers—a gift from their secretive allies the Zelioceti—kept watch over the port. Only brute force had gained the Lacaille access today, but they hadn't enough time to reach the treasure they were digging for. Corphuso smiled nervously as he watched the Immortal examining the Shell, wondering again just what he had made, and how it would change things forever.

“Are you pleased with it, Amaranthine?” he asked, observing how little she appeared to notice the distant rumbles of conflict in the levels above them.

Voss looked up at him, her hand remaining on the structure it had taken him twenty-four years to build. She was dressed in the exquisite finery the Immortals always wore whenever he saw them, priceless jewels dripping from every cuff and piccadill. “I think it is a marvel, Corphuso. A blessing, but also a curse.”

He looked at the glimmering machine. “I expect, as ever, the blessing shall be yours, the curse ours.”

She smiled, the expression so rare on her pretty face that he couldn't help but instantly smile back. “You shall be a Prince of the Firmament now, Corphuso—you can leave the cursed behind at last.”

The architect sat down, glancing briefly at the Vulgar soldiers standing to either side of the doors. They were wizened, ill-looking things, their skin shiny and liver-spotted in the glow of the fire. If they had heard what she said, they made no sign. It was true—he wanted to leave the Investiture, but he had never told a soul. The Prism worlds were places of pestilence and fear, where the short-lived suffered and scavenged and fought. His successes had left him far wealthier than most, his large family married into the courts of Moonkings and Princelings across the Prism Investiture, but he was now bound to the counts of Nilmuth as they fought over his invention themselves, and all but a prisoner in the fortress. His dearest and yet most secret wish had always been to leave all this filth and terror behind with enough money and influence to be granted a place among the Immortals in their Firmament, and perhaps—were there any hope of such a thing—to become an Amaranthine himself.

“I am bound by duty to my kingdom, and by its loyalty to the Firmament, Amaranthine,” he said carefully, glancing again at the soldiers. “It is not for me to decide my fate, nor would I wish to.”

The Amaranthine looked into his eyes, the smile lingering at the edges of her mouth. He wondered how many liars she had known over her long, long life, and how many she had seen shamed.

“Quite so, Corphuso,” she replied at last.

He took up a heavy book awkwardly, leafing through the dense Vulgar print to the engraved pictures, noticing from the corner of his eye how she still looked at him. He was waist-high to the Amaranthine, nothing but a dwarf in her eyes, but some deep Vulgar sense of pride always allowed him to forget his small stature. Gradually he became aware that the sounds in the fortress had changed, almost disappeared, while at the same time deep, resonating grumbles were seeping through the thick walls from the lands outside. The soldiers looked at each other, then at the architect.

“It's the flotilla, Architect,” one said excitedly. “It must be!”

He stood, putting down the book to listen. The Amaranthine had returned her gaze to his machine, apparently uninterested in their good fortune. Detonations, distant and yet obviously enormous, popped and thudded high above the fortress. The Lacaille invasion force was fighting back, apparently. They must want what he had very badly to risk returning fire on an armada of sixty-one Lumen-Class Zelioceti destroyers. For what felt like the millionth time, Corphuso deeply regretted forging the thing the Amaranthine was stroking, wishing he could take it all back. Supposedly a machine of life, it had become an inevitable tool of death.

Some other noise returned his attention and that of the soldiers to the thick doors of the under-chasm library where they were sheltering. Someone or something had run the last of the steps and was now outside the door. The Amaranthine looked up suddenly, taking her hand at last from the Shell.

A weighty oaken slat cracked and sizzled as the door was fired upon from outside, two more shots blowing the double doors in. The two soldiers fell under the flying debris as someone opened fire into the chamber, rolling in the mist to find cover. Corphuso crouched and knocked the table, scattering the stack of books he'd been absently looking through during the siege, pieces of the chair he had been sitting upon a moment earlier raining down around him.

Looking across the floor from under the table, he caught a glimpse of his attacker ducking behind a column. He felt hot sweat prickle down his neck and chest, staying very still. So, the Lacaille were now employing the very breed they feared the most. He hoped they suffered for it in the end. He saw the bony, elongated Prism male, genitals exposed, hideous face partially hidden in shadow, slide the bolt on its rifle and peer around the column.

As it did so, the air turned to fire.

Corphuso rolled and covered his face, waistcoat and cloak shrouding him like blankets as the library was engulfed. For what felt like a small lifetime roaring heat pelted the table, flowing around his small hiding place and sucking away all the air, then suddenly it was over as quickly as it had started, the fire dissolving into sooty smoke.

He peered out from under his smouldering clothes to where the Amaranthine stood, the charred flagstones describing a perfect semicircle of blackness around her feet. Corphuso glanced back to the column, the shelf of books behind it still aflame, but could see no sign of their attacker.

Voss, the Immortal, patted the unharmed machine at her side, the spiral of hollows in its shell gleaming iridescently in the smoke-thick air like polished opal. “I suspect it's time to take your treasure elsewhere, Corphuso.” She smiled again. “Come. You need no longer worry about appearances—the Firmament expects us.”

PART I

Cove

Lycaste watched as the fish darted about his ankles, standing as still as he could. Garishly painted and about the length of his smallest finger, he had seen this kind many times but couldn't remember their names. He crouched slowly for a better look, reflections darkening the water. One of the fish had something, a worm or parasite like a long white thread, dangling from its eye. Where the thing was attached, a milky cataract had formed.

He reached in, startling them away, and took a cupped handful of water to splash on his neck and forehead. He liked the salt on his face, the sting of it on his cheeks when he looked at the sun. Today, of all days, he needed time, silence. Silence to think, perhaps, silence to hide away. But that wouldn't be possible. Lycaste shook his head and started back, gazing at the outcrops of the bay beyond and feeling the water dry on his hot, rust-coloured skin.

Even in the sheltered bay he wouldn't swim, his overactive imagination seeing shadows move, staining the perfect turquoise around the far-off crags. His friends swam nearly every day, but they'd long since stopped asking him to join them. Huge migratory sharks had been spotted out there, coasting silently between the baking rocks. Fat, pearl-coloured monsters five times the length of him; what they ate or where they came from he couldn't say.

It was later than it seemed, time to go in. He wandered up the stony beach, his feet skipping on hot pebbles as he looked for patches of cooler sand to walk on. Lycaste's estate included the small cove, his orchards taking a weak hold at the edge of the beach, a thin strip of mottled eggshell between rich swathes of sultry green. Further down towards the next bay the water became a light, chalky blue as it washed against the suddenly white pebbles of a separate beach. He preferred his land, his colours.

He saw Sonerila and the boys sitting beneath a Midsumnal wine tree, chopping bulbs from its silver lower branches and dropping them into a basket. Lycaste crept close, hidden now and then by the sculpted topiary.

“Just the largest ones,” the servant said, taking the scissors from the taller boy, Papaver. “Just enough to fill the basket.”

The boys sorted through the bulbs while she watched.

“That's enough. You can take the smaller fruit home with you.”

“Why does he always eat alone?” asked the younger of the brothers after a moment, sitting and staring out to sea.

“He doesn't always eat alone.”

“Pentas doesn't join him any more.”

Sonerila looked at him, finally placing her scissors into the basket beside the pile of pale silver bulbs. “Take these to the solar—leave them on the table.”

Lycaste watched them carry the bundle into his house while he rubbed at the sand on his long legs.

“Why not just give everything away, Sonerila?” he suggested, walking out from behind the tree.

Her elongated face turned to him without surprise. Sonerila always had a talent for knowing precisely where he was at any particular time; perhaps that was why his mother had chosen her to stay on. “A reward for their help. I get precious little from anyone else around here.”

He moved out of the shadows to examine a manicured tree. “They came for the gossip.”

“And I gave them fruit instead.”

“You should have given them these.” He held out a branch dangling off-white berries. “They're turning.”

Sonerila looked at him, her long head dappled in shadow. “
Is
she coming tonight?”

He sat and stretched out on the grass, arms behind his head in poor imitation of ease, then considered the helper, half his face in bright sunlight that forced him to squint. “I hope she will. I don't know.”

The bird smiled just as a lady might, pretty dimples forming at the corners of her beak. “How could she refuse a face like that?”

Lycaste smiled back, shading his eyes and looking past her. The boys were trotting down the slope from the house towards them, their purloined wine packaged up in waxed paper parcels from the kitchens.

“Hello, Master Lycaste.”

“Catch anything today?” he asked them, always unsure how to talk to children beyond a certain age.

“Three big fish on Lesser Point, for Master Impatiens's table.” The boy and his brother exchanged glances. “Old Jotroffe was there again. Papaver's taller than him now.”

“And how is he?” asked Sonerila.

“Strange, as usual. He swam with us, kept asking about the sharks—if we'd seen any recently.”

Lycaste looked between them. “You swim at the Point?”

“All the time.”

“And have you? Seen any?”

“No, just porpoises. Hey, want to buy anything? We brought the cart.”

Lycaste shook his head. The cart was always full of junk. The quality objects they hauled from estate to estate were nearly always gone by the time they reached the beach, all the best stuff taken. Lycaste was beginning to doubt there was even anything decent in there at the start; the one time he'd found a usable plastic figure for his palace they'd hiked the price. The boys hoped to start work in Impatiens's export business in a year or two, possibly with the prospect of travelling to the next Province every now and then as things progressed. Perhaps then they'd stop ripping him off.