The Promise of the Child (2 page)

“He is yours, Aaron. Bring him back to me when he is great.”

Aaron smiled broadly, his eyes suddenly kind. “The
greatest
, or not at all.”

Chapel

A white chapel guarded the tiny crescent port, looking north-west to the strait between the islands and into the deep blue waterway where the fishing boats came in. Sotiris only remembered the building from the front, never from any approaching angle. Shallow stone steps led downwards from its locked door to the urchin-caked rock beneath, sinking into the darkness of the sea. He had never seen inside; the single square window was always too grubby and the Ionian light too bright, even at sunset. Only smudges of colour revealed themselves if he looked away across the water, back to the port. Pale blobs of yachts or catamarans bobbed, becoming clear only for an instant before memories of their form were muddied by all the intervening time, and houses on the harbour-side were little more than far-off parcels of yellow and white and pistachio green.

The chapel was one of the places his mind took him on walks, guiding him along the grassy hillside that fizzed with twilight cicadas and down to the locked door. When he tried to look up at the side of the building, gaps in the recollection pulled him quietly to its front. Memory was crude, cubist, unyielding.

The chapel and its island had become a sort of stage, a setting upon which things he sometimes read and heard could play out in his mind. He didn't know if other people thought like this and it had never occurred to him to ask.

Sotiris's remembered walks to the chapel were almost certainly more fiction than anything else. The memories were pickled, viewed through the oily layer of whatever preserved them, altering their colour, texture, even their form. But they had fared well, considering. He counted again, briefly. Those memories of the chapel were almost twelve and a half thousand years old.

A tourist boat with an outboard motor glides into view. He should have heard the raw-throated engine—he knows the boat well, even if its shape and colour are vague—but it is strangely silent, as if much further away. The boat passes only a few yards below him in the strait, headed for port. There are people standing on board and he recognises all of them but one: the man at the centre of the group, a glass in his hand.

Sotiris knew perfectly well that he was dreaming, that his sleep had found the well-thumbed scene at the front of his thoughts that night and offered it up once more, but still he was frightened.

He places his hands on the wall, the chapel at his back, and peers over as the vessel passes beneath. The figure is in shade, then obscured by a bunch of yellow parasols they must have found for their guest's arrival. Raising his eyes and staring back to the little coloured blocks of houses beyond the yachts, he keeps thinking,
Why doesn't the boat make any sound?
It's as if it doesn't want to be noticed, perhaps trying to reach the port without any fanfare. But the people at the colourful harbour-side already know it's coming—they're there, they're waiting.

Then the tour boat passes the chapel and leaves the shade, sun warming the parasols and colouring the motor smoke. The depths it's heading into are almost green. He sees the guest again, mingling, charming, carried onwards to Sotiris's island. He glances over his shoulder, the chapel twisting, and wonders if he can run back in time along the hill path to Vathi. It was possible, just about; but the people waiting at the harbour by the rusted bollards and benches and nets would shoo him away like the local leper. They didn't know. Sotiris straightened in his dream, turning from the harbour and trying to wake. The truth was that he really didn't want to be there when the boat came in; he didn't want to see their guest close-up.

It wasn't a man, the image that mingled and charmed on the top deck of the boat; that's what those people waiting couldn't understand. It was a mirage, a skilled deception, a glamour. It hadn't come to help them.

Fortress

Through a fog of roving hail the machines dropped, at first nothing but far-off grey specks revealed now and then in the blustery white sky. By the time the colossal brick-red fortress at Nilmuth had noticed their approach, the specks were already angling their descent, the scream of their fall reaching the watchers below. The hundred and five craft fell in a diamond shape, the outermost machines slowing as they reached their target and elongating the formation to a narrow spear. From miles around the descent and attack would look slow, like a flock of ravens mobbing a dying beast, and their speed was only given away by the popping bursts of supersonic detonations impacting through the fleet as they met the highest spires of the fortress.

The first machines, selected for their bulk, detonated as they hit the spires, rupturing stone and metal. The second wave followed a moment later, their beak-like forms burrowing through the next layer of towers and into the depths of the fortress. Bodies and masonry thundered past the third wave of machines, a gulch of flame blackening their already dark hulls as they hit gas tanks and piping. They fell deeper, rigged to explode at a certain depth to allow the passage of the next, more vital wave, eventually blowing apart the inner foundations of the great central spire. The machines that came after were self-powered, bellowing their exhausts through the smoke to slow their descent and extending skinny arms to claw for purchase on the citadel's rock flanks. They lodged in the ruins of the spire, rubble and stone still falling like rain around them, and popped hatches in their undersides to disgorge dozens of tiny figures.

Tzolz glanced up through the dripping sleet at the war machines circling the gaping breach in the fortress, lumps of wet rock the size of horses still falling among his team and denting the reinforced hulls of the landing craft. He checked his spring rifle again, looking around to the assembling mercenaries still funnelling from the hatches, and moved wordlessly through the debris to a ruined corridor, his armour-plated feet crunching over the dismembered bodies of the Vulgar who had lived at this level. Teeth and fleshy shards of bone littered the rubble like seeds, some sticking to the polished metal of his boots.

His squad took point, crowding past him to the edges of the doorway to hurl tiny Oxel scouts. The fairylike Prism species whistled to each other and scampered in, their bulky flight-suits clinking with dangling bomblets. As he waited, Tzolz looked back through the dripping chasm at the vacuum-suited Lacaille knight still sitting in the open hatch of the furthest craft, the heavy helmet making any expression unreadable. Rusted pipes and chunks of material still dropped like snow into the breach and Tzolz backed further into the doorway.

A series of detonations signalled the depths of the Oxel's explorations and he turned quickly, shaking the moisture from the weapon and hoisting it to his shoulder. Ahead, the dark and smoky corridor had been widened, doorways to adjoining chambers blown in by the tiny scouts, and he diverted two teams in either direction with swift hand movements, taking the central passage himself with three more. Their spies had indicated that the Shell was frequently moved for its security, resting at irregular intervals in an iridium-lined chamber in the guts of the structure. If the agents valued their skins they'd have made their way out of the country to the harbour at Untmouth by now, knowing full well what awaited those who remained in the fortress and the fallow lands surrounding it. Tzolz flicked his lights on, illuminating the rest of the corridor with a caustic white glare that sent shadows bouncing across bare stone walls and elaborate hanging braziers. At the end of the section of corridor there began a succession of spiral ramps once necessary for vehicular access, one of which would take them down into the lower levels. After three ramps they would hit a shaft, the spine of the fortress, where a drilling team was to meet them.

He waited, holding up a gnarled finger. Crude microphones on his breastplate tasted the silence, hearing the distant explorations of his five other teams as they swarmed through the fortress, the grumble of detonations and the groaning of the structure all around them adding to the distant moan of the wind through the chasm at their backs. No conversation between his units was permitted, and so at last he heard them, whispering in their little high-pitched voices. Tzolz allowed himself ten more seconds, finger still raised, understanding Vulgar more than adequately. He pointed slowly at the leftmost opening of the many-branched corridor ahead of them and his three mercenaries converged on it, their thin shadows looming like skeletons across the wall. At the edge of the doorway he turned off his lights and listened to the darkness, the voices—inaudible to a normal Prism ear—louder in his helmet now. He knew exactly where they were.

He unclipped a bomblet from a canister on the belt of his suit, pulling the firing pin and counting, then stooped and rolled it swiftly down the spiral ramp. A few seconds later, one of the voices hesitated, obviously turning as its volume fluctuated, and Tzolz muffled his auditory channel. The blast shook the spiral passageway, shrapnel spinning and clattering from the entrance. Tzolz flicked on his lights and dashed through the curling smoke, leaping the last of the passage and landing among the disoriented Vulgar platoon, the small figures illuminated harshly in his strobing gaze. He rammed his rifle's bayonet into the closest Vulgar, spinning and knocking an armoured elbow into another's head. Their screams filled his muffled earpiece, the little creatures realising at last what he was, and he snarled inside his helmet, pulling the bayonet free and scything it through another. They were poorly equipped and shoddily dressed despite being caught at home, and Tzolz began to wonder if he might be able to reach his quarry long before the fleet caught up to his small force. He aimed quickly and put a bullet through one more, his troops crouching at the foot of the ramp and firing into the flickering blackness. When the screams had stopped, he leaned against the wall, breathing quickly, his lights taking in the heaped bodies at their feet. His squad began searching the defenders' elaborate but ill-armoured clothes, long, dark fingers investigating pockets and flaps, taking what valuables and compatible ammunition they could find.

Tzolz bent to examine one of the Vulgar, his lights blazing across the pale elfin face. It coughed, retching once, and then tried to turn its head away from the light. He caught its chin with one hand, squeezing its jowls together, and turned it back to him, sliding up his reinforced faceplate. The small Vulgar's eyes widened as they focused on him, pupils shrunk to pinpoints in the glare. Tzolz looked into the creature's eyes as its broken body attempted to struggle, then back to his team, who were ready to continue. He slid the palm of his three-fingered hand over its face, forced his thumb into one of its eyes and pushed, watching the white flesh depress until it gouted blood. With a wet crack, the Vulgar's skull crumpled in his hand and its movements ceased.

Venturing further into the fortress, the tunnels below became more lived-in, with tapestries cloaking the walls and dividing living spaces, the homely smells of sour ale and poorly maintained plumbing adding to the sense of warmth in the dim light. Tzolz removed his helmet, tossing it onto a loaded dining table in some servants' quarters, and loosened his chest-plating. Like many of his team, his genitals were partially exposed, and the removal of his armour only served to make him look more gangly and naked. Such things mattered not to his breed, one of the wilder, more basic Prism races that dared to delve into the Firmament, and the added bulk would only slow him down from here on in. A small timepiece set into his shoulder-plating told him they had less than an hour before battleships stationed in the inland sea would be within range of the fortress and his means of escape. He looked around the large dining hall once more as he pulled on his gauntlets, taking in the dimly glowing logs in the hearth, some scattered to smoke on the tiles by the force of his arrival, and the shelves stacked with bottles and jars, small squealing animals in cages and stinking yeasty cheeses. The Oxel scouts were already raiding the larders, gorging themselves on the hanging lengths of dried, salted meats, but his squad stood around the room still as statues, their thin faces watching him intently in the firelight. There was only one thing his mercenaries really liked to eat, and they would soon have it.

*

At the shaft, Tzolz stopped, the blackness complete around them. They had travelled in darkness from the abandoned servants' quarters down and down until his ears popped. Only the sound of running water had told him they were finally upon it, the great spine of the citadel. He switched his suit lights back on as his feet met soft mounds on the floor, and he looked down to see that they were walking once again on casualties, pieces of all the Vulgar that had fallen from the higher levels during the attack. Most had tumbled straight down the shaft, but some had hit the sides and bounced, ending up lodged like detritus in the corkscrew corridors that made up the shaft's sides. Two levels below them, the drilling team were waiting in silence, their hungry, reflective eyes visible in the suit's weak light. Further below them, the bricks and stones turned to solid rock, cold granite slabs that glittered with running water. At his signal they began their work, dragging heavy drills to the sides of the shaft and pulling chains to start them.

The noise of grinding filtered up along with the drifting cloud of pulverised stone, turning the air around Tzolz's group into a milky soup wherever he shone his suit lights. The team stood, waiting, their faces haggard and obscene in the mist like sunken corpses in a moonlit pool, the portable generators within each soldier's armour issuing their own small whisps of coiling smoke. Running among their feet the Oxel played, one tripping and falling into the chasm before its fellows could stop it. Tzolz watched the body tumble, screaming, until it was lost in the darkness.

The drilling team shut down their machines, the mist swirling in the updraught from the shaft and dissipating. Tzolz's crew bent to look, some grabbing their spring rifles and training them on the hole that had suddenly been revealed in the chasm wall, a weak light pouring from it. Tzolz waited, sighting his own weapon on the caved-in portion of wall below. The edges of the hole crumbled further until a portion of the wall suddenly sloughed away completely, dropping into the shaft in a cloud of dust and stone and unveiling a cross section of tunnels and levels swarming with shrieking Vulgar soldiers. They squealed to each other and fired into the drilling team, Tzolz's men dropping as many as they could before bolts and sparkers started raining into the level on which they were crouched. The Vulgar squad was mostly composed of trained Loyalists, but the motley armour indicated hired help as well, with not a few Zelioceti and even Wulm mercenaries among their number. Tzolz lifted his rifle to cover his head and made his way down the open passage in the side of the shaft, shots chipping the stone around him. They were surely too far away for any great accuracy, but still he made a last dash for the safety of a stalled drill lying canted on its side. Fizzing sparkers whined and bounced from its casing as he dropped behind it, brushing at a smoking dent in his shoulder-plating. Glancing up at his squad, he could see that two were dead, the third taking a bolt through the eye as he watched. The remains of the drilling team had pushed into the hole and were climbing the ladders in what appeared to be sleeping quarters. Tzolz followed their progress along the flimsy-looking wooden bunks and up into the next chamber, some leaning from the level they were on to shoot up into the mass of screaming Prism scampering this way and that along their bunks. He checked his clock, knowing before he did so that there was no more time for fighting. He clawed at the drill, bringing it up to his chest with a wheeze, and held it there like a shield as he made his way to the hole.