The Promise of the Child (55 page)

The cannon began firing before he reached the forward battery, the privateer still weaving and banking. Popped shell casings like barrels sprang and bounced from the rear of the guns, flipping into piles that rolled with the motion of the ship. Maril jumped over a spinning casing and ducked against the roaring heat, swinging quickly into the cockpit beneath the battery chamber. Nobody turned to him as he fell into his seat, their eyes fixed on the blazing image ahead of them.

Pieces of wreckage illuminated by popping blasts of light tumbled and whipped past almost too fast to catch, the afterglow staining Maril's eyes a muddy, streaked blend of colours. Ahead of them the Nomad traded fire, veering and twisting and spinning, as the haunting, glorious bulk of Zeliolopos—the largest of Tau Ceti's gas giants—swelled rapidly before them.

Amid the bolts of light, Maril could see that the schooner had been modified, with large-calibre guns now ruining the sleek lines of its exterior. Its pristine outer paintwork had been similarly despoiled with a bold new insignia that was hard to miss.

He mouthed the word before he said it, knowing how ill the crew would take it despite those who sat with him in the cockpit knowing full well by now who their pursuers were. The insignia blazed across the Nomad's sides was of three pan-Prism fingers stencilled in red. A famous warning, known and feared all across the Investiture.
The Bult.

Maril and his crew were being hunted by cannibals.

The privateer's cannon reloaded and fired into the curve of the Nomad's hull before it could release countermeasures, smashing away a flurry of protective plating. The schooner swerved, discharging a round of glittering, explosive-tipped needle rounds that the
Wilemo Maril
twisted to avoid, the sudden force jamming Maril's bones into the side of his suit and squeezing his face up against the inside of his helmet. The schooner was trying to slow, flaring retro engines as a snowstorm of shattered plating spattered the privateer. Maril saw his chance, tearing open his visor plate.

“Full battery!” he screamed into the forward compartment above them, unclipping his belt to lean back as far as he could. Twelve guns situated in a halo around the bulge of the cockpit bellowed into life, shredding the rear of the Nomad with a flash that blinded them all for the best part of a minute. When their eyes had adjusted, they saw that the schooner had managed to deflect only one shell, the material of its hull sloughing away like shed skin, white-hot and sparkling.

“Make full speed, Ribio,” Maril said, unclipping the jaw of his helmet to feel his bruised chin through the beard. He peeled a chart from the wall, turning it this way and that and ripping it in the process. “Anti-Zelio-Coriopil,” he said, tracing the concentric red lines with his shaking finger and tapping a red dot the size of a full stop.

The privateer swung beneath the sleet of debris and outdistanced the Nomad once more, sailing like a broken leaf in a hurricane towards Zeliolopos.

The giant planet was nine times the size of Jupiter, banded with fourteen hundred atmospheric belts of turbulence; all but one subtly different shades of green and gold, the last like a blood-red paper cut across its lower middle, speckled with lighter storm systems. The
Wilemo Maril
plunged on towards the swirling current of the storm until the details of its flowing clouds became visible, coiled and wound around a central gaping eye. To Maril it looked like a filthy, deep wound on the verge of turning septic, a rancid, infected crimson gash on such a vast, violently beautiful wall of colour. The privateer angled slightly while the tempest grew before them and eventually lost its form altogether, the miniature blotches of surrounding storms taking on their own sublime intricacies. Maril knew that each of the hundreds of weather systems that rolled around the giant eye were themselves bigger than the Old World, wider even than any of the moons that circled the planet. He looked into their dirty red sockets while he listened for the return of the stricken Nomad, his thin body still trembling every now and then inside the suit, and thought of all the ships and souls that had lost their way inside those storms over the centuries. He would not make the same mistake.

As if in confirmation of his cunning, a speck rose to port, doubling in size with every heartbeat. The cockpit crew strained their damaged eyes, the pilots leaning forward. Maril sat back at last, listening to the ragged coughing of the master-at-arms and the similarly ill-sounding grumble emanating from somewhere in the superluminal compartments.

The dot was as large as his outstretched thumb now, a hot, salty glob of viridian suspended like a teardrop against Zeliolopos's tawny golds, greens and reds. The moon, Anti Zelio-Coriopil, was almost entirely ocean but for a chain of islands circling its equator—it was to them that he and his crew would fall. Maril knew little of what lay there besides information gathered from drinking songs, notably the
Songs of Lopos
, many of which he knew by heart. He did not sing—of course—but he deigned to sit and listen while his crew relaxed in whatever port they found themselves in, tapping a finger to their carousing if the drink got the better of him. He knew the soldiers called his finger-taps “the Marillion waltz,” and smiled secretly at the thought.

The green globe's faint string of islands became minutely visible and his smile stiffened, the feeling returning to his bruised face and battered limbs, still reeking with the film of sewage that had leaked from the pipes. The privateer began to judder as it hit the moon's thick atmosphere, soft as smoke where the shadow formed its crescent.

Maril flicked a switch, broadcasting through the only remaining internal channel.

“Men: scuttling drill. Secure yourselves where necessary.” The pilots busied themselves in the front seats. Jospor turned to him, thrice buckled. His helmet stayed on, so that all Maril saw was a faded reflection of his own worn face peeping from its layers of Voidsuit.

“Wilemo, you are sure of this? We might still have some strength—the damage crews are not done reporting in. There may be a chance of reaching Anti Zelio-Slaathis.”

“I am sure,” he said, hinging up the jaw of his helmet. The internal workings looked reinvigorated, if still weak, as glowing, stolen Amaranthine automation lit up to either side of the faceplate. The moon became red in his helmet display, criss-crossed with symbols and representations of weather fronts. Jospor's suited body flashed X-ray through the chair, his bones jumping out before the wavelengths of the helmet's vision settled. “Descend,” Maril's voice said clearly into the other helmets in the cockpit, their mumbled assent reaching his ears as if they were sitting beside him, and the ship began to fall.

The green moon grew, its face wriggling across the windows as the privateer fought to remain level. Rivets rattled in their sockets, the plastic of the portholes to Maril's side whitening with the smashing strain. He watched with dismay as his beloved Voidship took steadily increasing injury, the cockpit itself feeling loose in its housing beneath the forward battery. The tip of the nose, just visible beyond the hazing windows, was glowing and loosing sparks that splattered the view.

The whole ship kicked upwards suddenly, jarring their bones, and the Nomad roared beneath. It fell in a scream from the radars, which had failed to anticipate its approach, spinning sideways for a moment before them and breaking in half above the clouds in a ruptured burst of flying pieces. The pilots of the
Wilemo Maril
shrieked, grappling with the turbulence of the enemy ship's descent, and bounced through the flying white-hot debris and smoke trails. Maril saw the piece of shredded hull gliding towards them in his suit vision, its probable trajectory calculated and drawn across the view. Warnings flashed at the bottom of his sight, displayed with a multitude of arrows and excited Unified exclamation marks. The debris darkened the window, blocking the view of the entire moon. The helmet screamed in a tinny, synthesised voice, strobing the oncoming piece of hull in case he hadn't noticed.

“Battery!” he shouted again, spittle dampening his bristly beard, just as the white trails of a dozen shells slammed from around the cockpit.

The piece of hull detonated into a thousand glowing shards, the splinters whickering past the cockpit in a blooming star of grey smoke tails. The
Wilemo Maril
dived through, the window hazing in one corner where wreckage had struck it. More thunks and bangs signalled their descent through the comet trail of debris from the Nomad, a ragged hole appearing in the nose where something had shot through it. Maril watched his Voidship begin to unravel, the rivets popping at last from the tip of the nose and pinging away, plates of metal loosening and flapping and tearing in the gust of their fall. The green sea, hot and smooth like a worked slab of sun-baked jade, tipped to meet them.

“Cut them,” he said to the pilots. The nose disintegrated, battering the forward windows as it spun away. The growling superluminal engines screamed once and were silent, only the shriek of a foreign wind coursing past and catching on the angles of the ship, all flaps and wings now extended to increase drag. Maril crossed his padded arms over his chest, hearing the moaning ship losing its momentum. Pieces of the enemy Nomad still rained through the haze of lemon-yellow sky in spears of black smoke, dashing white into the hot sea, the main bulk having already scuttled somewhere behind them.

Jospor flicked off the last of the electrics, turning in his seat. He clapped a salute, followed by the pilots. “Captain.”

Maril nodded back, his eyes drawn once more to the wall of emerald green rushing towards them.

Trial

“Wake up, Lycaste.” The words were spoken just before the water hit his hot, dry skin.

“He doesn't look too good.”

“Better than dead. Cassiope made a grave mistake.”

“He'll live out the festival?”

“One hopes.”

“Then that's all that matters.”

*

He'd been dreaming of Jasione. But it hadn't been a normal dream, more like the one he'd had in the field of purple plants that day, terrifying and surreal. Lycaste opened his eyes; the pain in his stomach had spread, throbbing, to his back and sides, and there was a bitter taste in his mouth as if he'd vomited nothing but bile while he slept.

In the dream he'd rescued her and they'd gone back to Kipris Isle together, starting a family and growing old. It had felt real enough, but not as happy as he'd have wished. Silene had been there, begrudgingly accepting her mother's choice and tormenting her new siblings. Lycaste had to pay her to keep silent, eventually granting her a yearly stipend until he died. The silken money he gave her always came from a hole in his stomach, caked with drying blood.

The children were the only happy part of the dream: two, no, three girls. He was glad they weren't been boys. They were beautiful.

Lycaste tried to touch his stomach, flinching at the tenderness along his entire torso. At some point the cut had burst again, a slug-trail of blood marking his fevered progress across the floor while he slept. He felt weak, light-headed: the only part that wasn't entirely unpleasant.

A reception had begun outside the door to his prison chamber, its rising volume and music not unlike what he'd heard on the far island. Perhaps a hundred voices conversed and laughed in High Second beyond the wall, broken by clinks of metal or glass, occasional shouts and intervals of raucous hilarity.

The door opened carefully to avoid prying eyes and Xanthostemon slipped in, closing it gently behind him. He came to Callistemon's repositioned plinth and stared at it thoughtfully, obviously unsure how it had moved, and pushed it over to the wall.

“Can you walk?” he asked, gazing into the cage.

Lycaste cleared his dry throat and tried to sit up. “I'm not sure.”

Xanthostemon opened the door of the cage, putting a hand delicately to his nose. He squatted beside Lycaste and peered at his midriff. “You're swollen. Here.” He took Lycaste's arm and hauled him to his feet. It took a while; despite his emaciation, Lycaste was still over a foot taller than the Secondling.

“Thank you,” Lycaste said through the pain. The smallest kindnesses felt magnified these days.

“You've nothing to thank me for,” Xanthostemon said plainly, without looking at him. “We'll see you pay, but not before the trial. Our sister would have caused us great shame had she succeeded.” He glanced up at Lycaste. “So give no thanks.”

“All right.”

Xanthostemon remained looking at him. “I … I can begin to understand how it may have been, why he died. But do not count on mercy you shall not receive.” He handed Lycaste a small crystal glass that he'd brought in with him. Lycaste took it and peered at the rapidly dissolving little pearl sinking to the bottom.

“Drink. It will keep you awake if the pain gets too much.”

He drank, gagging. After he'd finished, Xanthostemon led him through another door Lycaste hadn't known was there, a recessed alcove behind the line of busts. It took them to a narrow hallway inlaid with more of the coloured stripes.

He was made to wait in a circular stone room, unadorned except for an ornate trapeze dangling in the centre from a hook in the ceiling. A ghostly white chameleon hung by three of its limbs from the jewelled perch. Its ruby-red eyes were mounted in sockets that swivelled at him inquisitively before moving on, as if dull guests infringing on its valuable time were an all too regular occurrence. Lycaste limped to the wall to investigate the coloured stripes to see what they were, confirming his suspicion. It was money, of all the highest denominations, implanted in shining lengths along the walls. He was impressed, despite everything, and smoothed his finger over a piece to find it was buried some way beneath the surface, entombed in the resin-like depths of a superior form of translucent growthstone. The lizard strained and clasped the perch with another limb, hanging feebly upside down while it decided what to do next. A long tongue slithered from between its lips and travelled wetly across one eye.