The Promise of the Child (32 page)

The man scratched his cheek with difficulty on the bony edge of his shoulder. “Maybe.” He gestured at Lycaste's lap with his nose. “Give me some of that food there first.”

Lycaste didn't see the point. He threw him something—a last meal—nonetheless, surprised when Melilotis snapped it up expertly, like a hound tossed a piece of meat. “Tell me something, Good Man,” he said, slavering.

“What?”

“Tell me something I'll like, to make this all less boring. I look at you, that face of yours—you must get a lot of butterfly, eh?”

“Butterfly?”

“
Women.
I can see it—man like you, they love that, eh?”

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps? Only perhaps? Come on, tell me. What do you do with them?”

“What's this here?” Lycaste pointed to a common symbol he didn't understand.

“No no no. You tell me first. You tell me about all your tasty butterflies.”

“We're going to talk about the map.” He frowned and scrutinised some broken islands, mouthing the name of their sea under his breath.
Aegeanite.

“Like that, is it? Don't be so boring, Good Man.”

Lycaste was beginning to tire of his new name. He looked up. “There's not much to tell.”

Melilotis laughed suddenly. “Maybe the butterflies don't like you. They can see how boring you are. Have you ever even been with one?”

“I have.”

“No you haven't. I can see it in your face. Look, you're blushing! It makes you prettier, you know.” Melilotis giggled again. “That's it! You don't like the butterflies at all, do you?” He sat up. “You like good
men
, don't you Good Man?”

“I like butterf—I like women. Good women. And I have been with one.”

“I don't believe you, Pretty Man. That's what I'm going to call you from now on. Pretty Man.”

“I don't care what you call me.”

“Yeah, I bet you'd like being called Pretty Man, eh?” he sat back, smiling. “You wanted my advice, well, I've got some for you: don't go north—they don't like pretty men there.”

“I wasn't planning on it.”

“No? Where are you going?”

“None of your business.”

“I don't think you know,” said Melilotis casually. “You don't know where you are and you don't know where you're going. You need someone like me, Pretty Man.”

Lycaste ignored him, tapping the metal plates. “The sooner you tell me what I need to know, the sooner you can go.”

Melilotis looked back at the map. Extending further in all directions than anything Lycaste had seen before, the never-ending continent filled the plate. He traced his own journey, a pitiful afternoon stroll across gentle slopes. After a long silence his captive resumed.

Melilotis began to build a picture of the land beyond the plantation's gate. He suggested that the Artery branched in tributaries like a broken vein, although when Lycaste pressed for detail the man was less certain, citing a poor memory, and under scrutiny the ships became vague apparitions. Lycaste's new charts themselves, while displaying interesting topographical detail—as well as listing the names of landowners, his Uncle Trollius included—and frequent engravings of plants that varied by region, still only gave a hint of what might lurk in each new Province. At the main map's northern edge they found the Second Province, described in islands and fjords that became less detailed the further out they went. To the west, a new continent began in the shape of a dangling, deformed leg with a clawed heel. It didn't look right to Lycaste, like something made-up. He asked what it was, but Melilotis, despite trying to answer the question as if he himself had been there, quite clearly had no idea. He was repeating himself more and more, burning away his stock of answers until Lycaste found he could predict the man's responses in order. The places and settlements Melilotis claimed to know well were glossed over with the dismissive wave of a hand; names were thrown around with little explanation, people who'd wronged his family, liars, thieves, men who were once great and had dwindled to obscurity. The places he didn't know were systematically denounced as dangerous, not to be visited. Often the monologue would arc back to Melilotis himself, his prospects, his future as the eldest son of a fine family. Lycaste rubbed his eyes in the late night, dropping the black he'd forgotten he was wearing, thinking he'd go and look for the money one last time before he tried to get some sort of sleep.

Melilotis's thin face beheld his red nakedness for a while without expression, then he chuckled, as if at an old joke. “Hey, Pretty Man, you're looking sleepy.”

“I'm going to look around some more. Maybe you should try to get some sleep yourself.”

“Oh no, I don't need to sleep.”

He glanced at Melilotis's bonds once more and walked through to the weighing chamber, wiping a finger along the oily surfaces of the metal scales. Where would he have hidden the money himself? Lycaste liked hiding things but couldn't think of anywhere he hadn't already looked. He stooped, the headache from his plant hangover flaring again lightly, and looked under each of the scales. The rinsing chamber was much the same, the water in the vats relatively clear, no good for concealing anything. He reached a hand into the cold water anyway, probing the sludge of leaves in the bottom.

“I don't think we'll find this money, you know—” Lycaste began as he arrived at the sitting room once more. He stopped, glancing about and snapping the rings back onto his index and second fingers. The cords that had tied Melilotis lay ripped and cut, the door to the sitting room swinging. Lycaste dashed through the corridor and up the steps, retracing his path more cautiously until he reached the entrance to the underground chambers they'd been searching. Melilotis was trying to wedge the door shut. Lycaste fired at it, shattering the hinge in a spray of splinters, and climbed the stairs after Melilotis, reaching the garden in time to see the man's slim form scuttle into a grove of swaying purple. By the glow of the bloated moon he saw Melilotis scaling the gate, his head swivelling to glance back at Lycaste as he reached the top, then dropping over.

The ring's spokes sighed and whined upon his fingers, little flashes arcing between them. He slid the weapon off and gripped it in his fist while he looked into the night. Briefly turning back to the house, Lycaste glimpsed strange black shapes in the green light of the moon. Against the north-facing wall, from the highest windows on the first floor, hung three small figures. He stared. The children were arranged by height with a tiny body, a baby, dangling at the end.

Contract

Bonneville instructed the Melius closest to him to light their lamps as his striped zeltabra trotted to the stream's edge. He remained in the saddle, his cloaks warm around him in the northern dawn light, waiting for an answering glow somewhere in the cloud. He had ridden five miles from the Sarine Palace along a road that wound through vast sculpted gardens and coloured topiary alive with strange creatures, the pleasure lands of sympathetic noble families. Bonneville had made sure to outbid any possible reward for their treachery, but remained on edge. He was required at Psalms to the Long-Life back in the painted vaults beneath the chapel in two hours; they'd better be on time.

A dim glow surrounded a bank of grey cloud to the south, solidifying as the vapour parted. He whispered to his Melius servant and the giant placed his hand across the lantern three times in quick succession. The light in the clouds responded in kind, lowering slowly towards them.

So the clipper relay had worked, taking his message beyond the Old World without anyone noticing. Or so he hoped. He remained seated on the skittish zeltabra, watching as the grey mists bulged and parted around the ichthyoid silhouette of the Vulgar ship—the privateer
Wilemo Maril
—its yellow-and-blue-plated hull screaming and shuddering like an injured sow as it fought the strain of gravity. The last of the cloud strands hugging its body burned away as it fired growling bursts of pale green flame from its aft superluminal exhausts, a crackle of thunder adding to the noise as it fell. The appalling wailing of the Voidship's descent began to frighten the mount, and as Bonneville fought to regain control of it he worried that even out here they might be discovered. He yanked on the leather reins and leaned back in the gale of leaves to observe the chaotic landing.

The privateer dropped, issuing gusts of superheated air and steam from orifices set into its great rusted belly, yellow sodium lights flickering to life along its flanks. Its militarised design reminded Bonneville vaguely of an enlarged Threene-Wunse bomber, the kind that had laid siege to the outlying worlds of the Firmament during the Wars of Decadence, but adapted now for the absurd speeds and hardships of space—what the Prism called Voidfaring. Such adjustments were not so difficult for the Prism as they seemed: along with the discovery of superluminal travel was the revelation that, mechanically at least, the construction of an engine that could exceed the speed of light was an exceptionally simple endeavour. Indeed, a child in possession of no more than a bucketful of inexpensive equipment could make one in less than an hour. The Prism—lawless, greedy beyond words and now foolishly awarded such knowledge, travelled where they wished, pilfering and slaughtering to their hearts' content.

He watched as a tile of hull plating sheared off and spun into the grass. The ship had likely passed through the hands of many Prism races since its construction, each owner adding and subtracting at their leisure. Its scraped and dented nose, buried among a bristling collection of forward cannon of various lengths like whiskered jowls, appeared to house the flight deck and was decorated with painted black symbols of conquest: Bonneville could just make out Quetterel and Lacaille ship names and numbers in the tally, with crude paintings of the species' skulls daubed beneath. The hull, stretching streamlined behind the dozen heavy guns, had been replated in hundreds of places with coloured strips of salvaged metal like an ancient trawler, producing a patchwork-blanket effect of tropical yellows and blues stained crimson where rust had spread between the welding.

Bonneville glanced along to the broadside guns as the privateer completed its descent, taking in the three fins that angled up from its flattened body. A fourth had apparently graced the stern until not long ago, its remains patched over with bright silver plating like the smooth stump of an amputee. He saw the Voidship turn as he gripped the reins, feeling more than a little dismayed knowing that he had entrusted his contract, and a trip of many trillions of miles, to this contraption and its crew.

Blistered gun turrets on the fins swivelled with a groan to settle on him, while a second pair in the nose angled outwards to scan for any danger from above while it landed. As he watched, a section of the craft's curved belly opened above the neat lawns to disgorge a stepped rectangular platform bathed in yellow light, some rogue piping falling from the hull. Inside he could see a glowing hangar strung with fluorescent tubing. A few tiny silhouettes came to the edge of the platform, waving it down until the scarred metal ripped into a rectangular hedge with a shudder, then stepped aside to let three bullsized tanks and a convoy of troops trundle onto the grass through the steam.

A whining alert switched off, as did most of the lights, and a large hatch in the rump of the vessel hinged open. All of the little figures glanced upwards, waiting. A hot-air balloon attached to a chain rose out of the hatch, ascending quickly on a burst of flame and dragging the chain with it. Bonneville could just see a figure with a long scoped rifle leaning from the basket and looking out over the labyrinthine garden, the early-morning wind tugging at the flame. He smiled, enjoying the Vulgars' pompous sense of security, and waited for the captain to approach. The small tanks bellowed into life, their engines idling, while more Vulgar and equipment issued from the settling hull of the ship, some climbing into turrets on the sides of the tanks. Two soldiers went to the amputated back fin and busied themselves with unscrewing a heavy metal cap. They stepped aside as the hole spluttered and began to pour out waste and sewage onto the lawns.

The Vulgar captain stamped up to Bonneville's zeltabra, escort at his side, and stood waiting for the Amaranthine to dismount. Instead, Bonneville covered his nose delicately and remained in his saddle, making sure the tiny people knew their place.

“You have my contract, Captain Maril?”

The waist-high gnome nodded briskly, taking a rolled paper from his belt. He looked cautiously up at the Melius, almost three times his size, and handed it to Bonneville with a grunt. The Amaranthine unrolled the paper, delighted to notice the elaborate wax seal dangling from its end that completely failed to serve a purpose. He began reading, very slowly.

The Melius growled at the Vulgar captain until he stepped briskly away from the zeltabra's side, which looked down dubiously at him before finding some grass to crop. Maril was of no importance within the jumbled ranks of the Vulgar, just another opportunist privateer captain, the first to have a ship ready when word of a large commission reached the ports of Drolgins. His pinched face was that of an elf from a fairy tale, white as the skin on Bonneville's scalp. The orange Voidsuit he wore was patched and resewn, in just as much disrepair as his ship. The pointed helmet in his hand squeaked to him and he replaced it to listen carefully. The radar operator was no doubt informing him of the location of enemy privateer ships over the hemispheres of the Old World, though Bonneville didn't expect any this close to the Amaranthine-protected First.

Bonneville finished reading, noting that the contract was in fact a warrant for his own death, should he betray the Vulgar. He took a pen and scratched his full name at the bottom, then smiled at the captain and handed it over, noticing work was being done to the privateer as the light improved.