The Promise of the Child (33 page)

“I want you to be away as soon as I leave, Maril, so stop your men tinkering.”

“Yes, Amaranthine,” the captain said in a helium voice, tapping his helmet and speaking into it. Vulgar with huge plastic water barrels were making their way down to the river and filling them, passing a group just returned from the garden's maze towing a protesting hedgehog in a net.

“They can't do that on the viscount's land!” grumbled a Melius in Bonneville's retinue. “Amaranthine, please, send these goblins on their way!”

Bonneville sighed and put a hand to his eyes. “Maril, we're going now. It's time you did, too.”

More of the Prism passed with a saw, some cords of wood and piles of salvaged metal hacked from the sculpted foil trees. They heaped it all on the back of a tank and drove it into the belly of the ship, leaving one of their member behind to pick up pieces that had fallen off. He strayed too close. The Melius closest snarled and jumped from his heavy mount, lashing out to grab the little man and shaking him. The Vulgar squealed, helmeted head swinging and clattering against his armoured collar. Captain Maril turned, reaching for his pistol but not unclipping it from its holster.

Bonneville had begun to climb down from the zeltabra when the Melius ripped the struggling Prism in half, roaring and hurling both pieces in opposite directions. The small men in the garden stopped, their weapons raised. The giant looked apologetically back at Bonneville, ears flattening.

“I'm sorry, Sire—” he began, a rifle crack from the balloon severing his head from his shoulders before he could finish his sentence. Bonneville watched the bloodied body slump, its head rolling away across the lawn. The other Melius struggled to control their whinnying mounts, some bolting with a thunder of hooves back down the path.

Bonneville watched them go, finally dismounting from the zeltabra and walking up to the Vulgar captain, wondering if his missing Melius servant would be his undoing. Perhaps he would have to dispose of the others, too, when they got him back.

“Bring your sniper down,” he commanded.

Maril spoke into his headset uncertainly and they waited for the balloon to descend. The small sharpshooter, armoured in a coat of painted mail, came trudging to meet them, not looking at the dead Melius. He began to remove his helmet until Bonneville held up a hand for him to stop. He stared at the armoured soldier, everyone in the garden watching.

At first, nothing happened. The Vulgar stood looking at him, bowing delicately. Then smoke began to rise from the sniper's cuirass, coiling and wafting across the grass. Bonneville continued to stare, casual as a man reading a newspaper. The sniper hopped from foot to foot, staggering into the captain. He tried desperately to get his helmet off but the metal had fused, and black smoke was now pouring from the binocular eyeholes. The smell of overcooked flesh filled the garden and the sniper crunched to his knees, gauntlets at his helmet, red-hot metal hissing and popping. Captain Maril withdrew slightly, shielding his little face as the armour around his sniper melted, crumpling inwards into a small, screaming ball. The jagged metal sphere became white-hot, burning the neatly cropped lawn around it, then was still.

The captain and his men watched wide-eyed as Bonneville walked to the glowing ball and picked it up.

“Remember your loyalty, Maril, as shall I.” The Amaranthine turned and threw the sphere into the stream, where it splashed with an angry cloud of steam. “Now get out of here.”

Wilemo Maril

The Vulgar privateer
Wilemo Maril
departed the Old World after two days spent submerged deep within a jungle of the Thirteenth Province, its pumps recirculating fresh water from a gushing river while much-needed repairs were carried out for the long voyage ahead. Large, strange-looking fish were caught, gutted, chopped and frozen, small mammals skinned and salted. On the second day it tested its motors, expelling a burp of thick, noxious smoke over the running waters, and heaved into the sky, exhausts roaring like a monstrous animal in pain. As it climbed through driving rain, it tested its communications and radar, listening hard for enemy traffic and finding none within the three-hundred-mile range of its terrestrial antennas. The rain grew softer; the Old World's horizon became curved, indistinct, blotched with geography and the haze of encircling atmosphere. Portholes froze over, the foot-thick plastic useless as it escaped the fog of particles and headed for the void in which it belonged.

After a couple of minutes, the Greenmoon—a place the Amaranthine masters of the Old Satrapy still called
Yanenko's Land
—passed by below to starboard, a coloured, far-off dot sweeping below the demisted portholes. The privateer's course was plotted in the red-lit tunnels deep inside the Voidship, tiny Vulgar bent over sheaves of thick, unrolled maps. Their route would take them—as usual—on a trajectory that avoided most of the Solar Satrapies, minimising contact with both Amaranthine influence and the interest of other, less civilised peoples.

The superluminal filaments were running at just over two thousand miles a second as Mars-Gaol, a blasted, orange speck of no-man's-land, passed by high and far to port, the routine of the privateer settling into its long journey, finally switching on its wave antennas to listen for anything within a twenty-seven-thousand-mile volume around it. The tiny Voidship whizzed far from Jupiter's Amaranthine-inhabited moons and flicked under Saturn-Regis, correcting its course through the hail of asteroids that flew past in the crackle of its radar. They were burning at just over seven million, five hundred thousand miles an hour when they passed Neptune—the electromagnetic vibrations of its rings tinkling like a bell—climbing up to the edges of interstellar space until they were outside the heliosheath of the sun altogether and bolting at one hundred and eighty million miles a day towards the next Solar Satrapy in the Firmament, the starlight beginning to blend together into a silver glow that sparkled through the portholes. Had the septuplet engines not increased rapidly in efficiency with almost every mile, the journey just to the fringes of the Solar Satrapy would have taken them over sixty days, and they could not reasonably have expected to enter the next for another three hundred and eighty years. But as it stood they were due to pass Proximo, the nearest Satrapy to that of the Old World's star Sol, in just under fifteen days' time.

The ship arced, curving away from the Satrapy of Proximo—its Vaulted Lands heavily occupied and guarded by great shoals of Prism Voidcraft loyal to the Amaranthine—and roaring through the empty gulf in the direction of the Fourth Solar Satrapy of Port Elsbet, once named Barnard's Star.

Maril studied the thick pile of maps in the dim emergency light, the continual cries of radar operators verifying accurate distance and wave-signal checks piped into the small operations capsule. Port Els-bet was a chain of five planets, only one of them Vaulted, modestly populated. Their unusual route dictated that they would have to stop there before resuming their journey out of the Firmament, despite the increased Prism activity of late. Any of the dozen other hominid breeds could obstruct his mission, even supposed allies of the Vulgar, and all were to be avoided. The Prism usually lurked around the borders of the Firmament, feeding on the scraps from the Amaranthines' table, squabbling, warring, creeping into the light only to steal, but sometimes they swam closer in, just to see what there was to be seen.

He wondered exactly what might be happening—certainly something unprecedented in his thirty-six years as a privateer captain. The usually sedate Amaranthine were now Bilocating between their realms more often, their trailing gaggle of subservient Prism droning behind, transporting them where necessary. With Virginis scoured and dead, any Prism who weren't so loyal (the majority, Maril found) had seen in the Immortals' appalled silence how the Firmament might be wrested from its owners' hands, how the Ancients might be overwhelmed. Losing his sniper to that greedy Immortal had been the tip of some kind of unspeakable iceberg on the Old World, he knew it. There was something in the Old Satrapy, something terrible, and from its mouth blew the first chill winds of a new age.

Utopia

Lycaste suspected the broken finger hadn't healed properly. He flexed it, watching the many-jointed knuckles slide around beneath his skin, but it wouldn't stretch any more. There was no pain, but the realisation was enough to distract him from what the tiny bird had said. He looked up and scratched his wiry beard, trying to concentrate on the creature as it perched on the branch of a slim, red-skinned sapling.

“Did you wish to attend?” it squeaked. “The speech is at midday.”

Lycaste tried to recall what they had been talking about. The drowning of the Immortal.

“Ah, yes. Yes, I'd like to come,” he said in careful Third. It was the only language spoken in the Amaranthine Utopia that he could understand perfectly, being the closest to his own.

“It's very sad. Some of us knew her for a long time,” sang the bird, no bigger than the final joint of his thumb. It was a wonder, he thought, that the animal could think and speak at all, its brain must have been the size of a peppercorn. Its body was a feathered white ball surrounded by iridescent red fronds. Twig-like legs poked from beneath to grasp the tree, and a set of beady black eyes studied him as it warbled. The bird's tongue flicked to lick the end of its stubby beak after each word, leaving thoughtful pauses.

“How old was she?” he asked it.

“Old enough to qualify as Perennial, I think. My Great Mothers knew her well, but she would've been here long before that, of course.” The bird cocked its head suddenly and whistled shrilly as another flitted and landed in a nearby tree. “Excuse me,” it gasped, springing nimbly into the air. Lycaste watched it go. “Midday on the lake,” it called back, surprisingly loudly.

Lycaste sat cross-legged on the red grass and gazed out through the coppices of cultured trees at the perfectly circular lakes beyond. In the haze of blue and pink he could barely see the furthest ones, their muddy beaches crammed with a multicoloured, babbling throng of socialising birdlife.

There were dozens of lakes—how would he know which to go to? He'd have to ask, though he wouldn't get a decent answer out of any of the Amaranthine. He bet that not one of them knew, or cared.

From the cycles of the Greenmoon, Lycaste worked out that tonight would be his eleventh night in the Utopia—one of three great gardens that encircled the Black Sea—and many more since he had last seen Melilotis disappearing into the darkness. He hadn't counted the days at first, only deciding he ought to once they began to slip by unnoticed. He could imagine only too well how easy it could be to forget the passing of time while living among Immortals. He might drop dead like a dayfly while they went about their demented business, and only then would they give him more than a moment's thought, probably forgetting he'd ever existed within the Quarter. This sacred Utopia, or
Paradise
as the Glorious Bird referred to it, was like that: a sump for the forgotten, ruled over by a power higher than he'd ever known existed.

The gardens were, he thought, a bit like a carnivorous plant he'd once kept in his bedchamber on Kipris: a long, tubular throat of a thing that preyed on any flies unlucky enough to fall into the pond of corrosive juices that filled its gullet. One day he'd looked in uninterestedly to find the insides of the plant crawling with beetles, their hooked feet clamped to the sides of the tube while they fed on the dead flies, happily munching away and unaware of any danger below. The Amaranthine were those beetles, cheerfully inhabiting a world where others must appear to perish in an instant and disappear from sight, day trippers they needn't bother to get to know.

He stood, pins and needles fizzing in one leg, and hobbled across the flat lawns to the closest pillar. It towered eighty feet above him, its black, shining bulk inlaid with seams of gold. Hundreds more stretched roofless into the shrieking distance, their excrement-streaked columns studded with woven nests. At the top of each column a naked statue crouched, its outstretched arms obviously designed to hold whatever the pillars once supported. No two figures were alike—he'd spent days with an aching neck looking at them all. Some were quite explicit, their legs stuck at glistening angles into the bird-flecked sky. Others frowned sulkily at whoever walked beneath. Across the lawn, another set of mirroring pillars ran, their figures peering down at him. Hundreds of the columns near the shores of the Utopia were pocked with holes and gashes and cracks that Lycaste often ran his fingers along, scars from a violent life nobody remembered.

He strolled up to an enclosed nest, a pocket of flowers and stems with a small hole for an entrance that hung from one of the pillars, and tapped on its side. There didn't appear to be anyone home so he went to the next one, a larger, more complicated structure with single petals sewn into its walls like scales.

“Hello?” the minuscule voice inside asked sleepily.

“Er, hello—do you know anything about a eulogy? Where it might be held?” Lycaste leaned his face into the musky depths of the hole. He flinched as a long magenta beak jutted out like a dagger.

“How should I know?” The creature cawed. “Ask him.”

Lycaste glanced around to see one of the Amaranthine mincing by, eyeing them with a jolly smile. The short man's pale skin was lividly sunburned, but he didn't appear to be in any pain. He wore a cape of bright feathers around his shoulders that trailed along the grass, picking up debris and the occasional squeaking baby bird that had fallen from a nest. Lycaste didn't like trying to talk to them; it was akin to conversing with someone who didn't wholly believe you existed, or that if you did you would soon cease to. They were such a strange disappointment to Lycaste, despite the fact that up until the last few days he'd had no idea of their existence. The person in front of him had lived for at least eleven thousand years—probably more—before falling victim to the madness that had seen him sent here. Lycaste looked down at him, unable to understand how such a thing could live for so long. Snot hung limply from the man's nostrils as he tittered, waving his short, burned fingers in greeting. Within a minute of meeting one he'd noticed the resemblance to old Jotroffe: five fingers on each hand, small puffy face and tiny glinting eyes. It was beyond doubt that an Amaranthine had been living among them in the Tenth, but by choice rather than being consigned there.