The Promise of the Child (63 page)

As soon as they had confirmed the cargo, the Perennials walked forward in unison, each grabbing a Lacaille by the arm and pulling him back. Only the Long-Life and Von Schiller remained standing near the chest.

“There you are, withered thing,” the Long-Life said to the object in the left compartment, his head tilted down to it, apparently lost in reverie. As he did so, the whiff of the chest's contents reached Corphuso's nostrils and he flinched. Ghaldezuel grimaced and put a hand to his nose.

The indistinct man turned to Von Schiller, who bowed.

“Do not be offended, Florian, that I did not choose your body as my new vessel.” He gestured at the objects in the case, still seeping vapour. “These were my old masters. My mind, everything I was, was built to their own templates. Why tailor a fresh suit when you have one already?” His expression became slack and vacant as he regarded the case. “Now you shall see, Florian, how it is done.” He looked over, an afterthought. “
Vulgarii
—you must come and watch.”

Corphuso was pushed to the front, to Ghaldezuel's considerable amazement, by one of the Perennials. He found himself standing next to the Long-Life and looking down into the second case, the sharp stink wreathing his body.

At first he couldn't understand why they had come so far, endured so much, to bring nothing but the skinned carcass of some kind of animal with them. He bent closer, suddenly forgetting the presences around him as his eyes unravelled the form. A lonely paragraph from his expensively erratic education made itself known at the back of his mind.

The mist cleared around the twisted form, revealing gangly, taloned arms scattered with wiry blue plumage. Its chest was bony, concave where the ribcage met the stomach, svelte as a racing hound. The hips were distended, the scarred legs and gristly feet quite obviously reconstructed by some surgical procedure. Between them curled a gaudily plumed tail, forked at the end. He looked to the head.

It was almost alive, the eyes—their pupils horizontal red slits decorated with a corona of marbled white iris—bright with shock and pain. But he knew it was dead. He knew it was dead, because he knew what it was.

It was a dinosaur.

The snout, crooked and sharp like a patrician nose, could not conceal the cruel snaggle-teeth that poked at angles between its fleshy lips. The nostrils were huge and flared. Around its scrawny neck was a mane of iridescent feathering that tapered to the collarbones. He staggered back, at last beginning to understand. In the next compartment of the case was a Voidsuit, or something that appeared to be for the same purpose, but a fantastically advanced and beautiful example of one. An elegant bulge of cream material, it was tufted here and there with protrusions and wisps like the feelers of a moth. It had hinged open in places to display an interior like a sound-proofed chamber, all spears of soft red foam. Running along the surface of the spikes were veins of white machinery as fine and delicate as the membranes of a leaf. He opened his mouth slightly, astonished that such beauty could have swaddled such ugliness, trying to grasp how and why he should be seeing what he was seeing.

Corphuso noticed Ghaldezuel looking at him as he moved back. The Lacaille had known, but didn't fully understand. He turned to the Long-Life and gazed up at him in wonder, the man's vague face framed by the whirls of painted figures on the distant ceiling.

“You said they built your mind after their own.” His lips trem-ored as he spoke. The Long-Life regarded him silently, his predatory eyes merging in and out of focus. Corphuso composed himself and continued, “They
made
you. But you are not one of these things. You were—you
were once
—” He stopped himself mid-stammer, quite sure for a moment that he was about to embarrass himself with his foolish assumptions, but he had to know. “You were a machine, weren't you? You belonged to these creatures.”

Von Schiller moved to take Corphuso's arm but he resisted, staring into the apparition's eyes. “You're a ghost. A machine soul. Like Perception, the device made by the Amaranthine.” His eyes widened. “This is why you need my Shell. What happened—how did you die? Were you destroyed, too? Is this all that's left of you?”

Another Perennial grabbed him by the wrist but he struggled out of the grip. “What are you planning to do? Why become mortal again?”

“Corphuso!” Ghaldezuel hissed, trying in vain to step forward. “Calm yourself!”

But Corphuso could see now the culmination of his mistakes as it lay there on the floor of the chapel. He had caused all of this.
His
invention had awoken this ancient power from its aeons of slumber. He looked across at his precious, glittering Shell.

He moved as swiftly as he could, reaching for and grasping the closest Lacaille's pistol. He ducked, steadying himself as Von Schiller grabbed him, and aimed at the Soul Engine.

Vilnius

Sotiris wrenched the zeltabra around with some difficulty. It panted, striped flanks coated with yellow pollen and blue sap, wild eyes straining to turn and glimpse the towering city at Sotiris's back. The Amaranthine pulled at the reins again, his face suddenly an image of fury, searching out Lycaste as he followed behind.

“Faster!” he shouted, his voice deep and instantly commanding. Lycaste slapped the harsant's rump as hard as he could, finally joining the Immortal at the field's edge.

Sotiris patted the zeltabra and turned to face Lycaste. His ancient eyes were bright in his grimy face as he extended a gleaming, metalencased arm and pointed.

Where the forest of bloodfruit ended, the hill dropped towards a river valley wreathed in smoke. The light, fading quickly in the humid afternoon, could only just pick out the rusted bodies of war machines and their riding passengers as they swarmed in the forested valley. A great bridge spanned the river at the valley's bottom, stretching beneath a colossal gateway set into huge curtain walls already beginning to crumble under the siege. As Lycaste watched, a shell struck a section of the wall, erupting in a huge bulging mushroom of smoke that rose to drift on the wind, the echoing crump of its impact only just reaching his ears. A cheer, glottal and full-throated, rose from among the screams and roars in the dim trees of the valley.

Lycaste looked up, following the turreted ramparts and streets of the city as they wound to the crest of the canted hill it had been built upon. Clouds glowered over the topmost buildings, appearing to touch the spires.

“The city of Vilnius,” Sotiris said. “Last outpost of the Second Province.” Lycaste thought he looked worn, a man accepting defeat. He studied the dirty Amaranthine as Sotiris sat astride his mount, even the dainty Firstling armour dangling from him like a boy in adult's clothing. Lycaste did not want to end up like this: twelve thousand years on and still tired and filthy and scared, leading some idiot descendant around behind him. He looked back to the fury of tiny specks crowding the bridge—Secondlings defending their land—thinking on how many chances the Immortal were given to suffer anew.

“Ready?” Sotiris asked, taking up his reins.

“Bilocation, Elumo, is one of those phenomena that is quite impossible to describe to those who've yet to achieve it,” Stone said, sitting back in the chair with a satisfied smile and listening to the rumble down below. “It is the product of a gradual settling of the iron particles within the brain, a process that takes many thousands of years.”

“Until they are aligned into a certain pattern,” supplied the Princeling Elumo, somewhat doubtfully. His glass rattled on the table and he put out a stubby little hand to steady it.

Bonneville looked at the rings on the Vulgar's fingers: thick wedges of precious metal spotted with stones. Since his youth, the thrill of stealing had been like a drug to him; he would take those rings for himself one day, when the Princeling was no longer useful to him.

“Exactly, Elumo. The alignment is transitory, we are sure, possibly shifting to another pattern within a few millennia that will be of no practical use—certainly not for faster-than-light travel. It may be that we require our ancient fleet again before too long, and the further support of our dependable allies, the Vulgar.”

“How do you know when you are able to do it?” Elumo asked, waving away the pleasantry. His other hand remained at the ready in case the drink shook again.

“It always accompanies other physical, and often detrimental, changes—the inability to keep time, a lack of awareness of one's surroundings, but also a swelling of the innate powers of the mind.”

“Are you not afraid of these changes?”

Stone looked at Bonneville for the first time. “Ask Reginald here, he is yet to experience them.”

Bonneville smiled, performing a little shrug for the benefit of the Vulgar. “It is our curse.” He took another sip of his wine and washed it around inside his mouth.

The three were drinking Vulgar alcohol as a courtesy to the Princeling, who apparently refused to drink anything else. It was impossible for an Amaranthine of any age to get drunk, but Bonneville could already feel the strong mixture burning his gums slightly.

The Princeling took out his helmet briefly to check the time. He had changed from his shimmering gown into a beautifully made Void-suit in preparation for leaving. Bonneville glanced at the inside of the helmet as it was returned to the chair.

That was supposed to be the signal.

Elumo remained seated, staring at his hands, a smile forming on his small white mouth.

Bonneville looked to the door, waiting for it to burst in. He had taken no chances; beneath his waistcoats he wore a plate of treated iridium, plundered from the tomb of an ancient Amaranthine.

The door opened slowly, a couple of silent Vulgar soldiers entering to stand behind the Princeling, the tips of their pointed helmets only just reaching the arms of his high chair. Stone's eyes remained fixed on the table, his hand cradling the cup of Vulgar wine.

The realisation that he had been betrayed came to Bonneville slowly. He felt the smile dying on his face.

Lycaste swore again and again beneath his breath, his hands squeezing the reins. He kicked and the beast galloped on, swerving through a plume of smoking wreckage as a shell landed nearby.

Sotiris waited, circling the screaming zeltabra, his hand outstretched as if to shield his eyes as he stood in the stirrups. When the harsant was alongside, he put out his hand to catch Lycaste's reins and swung one leg over the broad upholstered saddle.

Lycaste shifted, the Amaranthine's metal toe plates scuffing his shin, and they cantered on. The terrified zeltabra skittered away across the bridge through the flames.

“Now!” Sotiris screamed, kicking his metal spur. The beast charged sideways along a crater in the stone, their teeth rattling with the impacts of shells slamming into the bridge. High above, the city of Vilnius Second burned.

Lycaste—even among the encompassing, deafening bombardment of cannon-fire and hand-to-hand battle on the bridge—could hardly take his eyes from the metal monsters that ripped and wheeled across the skies. The
Voidships
, as Sotiris had called them. He closed his eyes at last, gripping the harsant's neck, and let Sotiris do the steering.

They flashed through the heat of a flaming tank, Lycaste's eyebrows and beard singeing, and landed among a legion of thirty or more Jalanbulon directly engaging the small Firstling cavalry units with pikes and sabres. Amid the throng, an armoured Asiatic had hold of a Zeltabra's hind leg. He roared and swung, unseating the Firstling soldier and snapping the animal's limb, the beast's scream made silent by the huge, reverberating noise all around.

A Jalanbulon turned as they approached, raising his rifle. Sotiris leaned past Lycaste and stretched out his hand, engulfing the giant in an instantaneous blast of white flame that poured soot from its blazing tips. Three nearby Jalanbulon began thrashing and roasting in the heat given out by their burning comrade, whose armour pooled and bubbled amid the rubble. A shell followed through the smoke, bursting from a gun emplacement on the parapet, and once again the Amaranthine opened his palm, dissolving it into a molten bloom of falling sparks that showered the bridge ahead. Lycaste ducked his head through the coiling, rolling heat of another fallen war machine, the harsant bouncing madly as it galloped. It knocked a Firstling down, crushing him with a sickening crunch of bones, and slammed a Jalanbulon furiously to one side, the Asiatic rolling and clattering where his metal armour bit at the stone.

A single, concerted bombardment suddenly lit up the edge of the bridge nearest to the city walls, shattering one side into the river below and dumping the chaotic crowd of hundreds of fighting Melius a hundred feet into the water. The harsant adjusted, swerving away from the shattered stone edges where troops still crawled and dangled, maimed and mauled by the bombardment, leaping a regiment of standard-bearing Firstlings and thumping to the ground amid a shattered tangle of spiked wire. It howled, stamping the wire down, but was snagged. They twisted, turning the beast as best they could while Melius thrust pikes and spears at them through the coils of wire. A sharp edge nicked Soti-ris's chin, flinging blood across Lycaste's arm, and then they were free, the burned skin on his legs ripping away. Lycaste stared at the Immortal blood, astonished for a moment as they cantered on. Sotiris extended his hand while they shook off the last of the wire, sweeping a host of charging Firstlings into nothing but a slanted column of sparks and ash. Blood streaming from cuts across the harsant's own flanks flicked into their faces with each bouncing gallop.

Lycaste looked up as a formation of the metal ships thundered overhead. They loosed rounds of erratic projectiles and angled away, the pale evening sun catching their coloured fins and strakes like glittering fish. He followed the trailing smoke of the flying mines until they encountered the walls, some blooming away in falling fragments of light before they could impact, others detonating and hurling stone far into the sky. Lumps of wall began raining down upon the throng of troops, smashing into the bridge. Legions and battalions stared upwards to watch the fleeing Voidships being overtaken by others of a different, even more threadbare design. Lycaste gaped in wonder, watching them tangle in mid-air. Tiny black specks—the strange men who made the Voidships—were slinging hooked ropes to leap between the craft as they rolled and twisted, many falling to their deaths. One of the vessels, the largest of the initial squadron, was suddenly blown in half in a lightning burst of flame and hurled detritus, screaming downwards to strike the bridge in an erupting fireball. The blast swept upwards from orange to black, engulfing the city gates and the hundreds of troops defending it.