PART II

NINETY-ONE FIFTY-NINE

The little corkscrew ship slipped out of tetraluminal, entering sub-light speed with languid care, like a pin through a soap bubble.

Hui Neng saw the volume projected inside his eyes as a monochrome, soundless jungle of stars. A whisper spread through the darkness around him as the ship decelerated, the structure of the dagger-shaped hull sighing and cooling after its electric dash through the kingdom’s outer realm. The buzz of the protective bell-field awoke with a snapping start, jolting him from his reveries, the ship falling within an invisible cowl of repellent power.

A dozen or so entities had broken from the pack to follow Trang Hui Neng’s coilship as it slammed out of home port, taking up a formation in the slipstream behind, patient and predatory. Hui Neng saw no sign of them now, assuming they’d grown bored of the chase and taken off after easier pickings in the space around Aquarii. The Ordure had plenty of sapiens backing; their ships were certainly as capable as those of the Immortal Directorate. It was only the relative paucity of their numbers that had drawn out the great siege into a twelve-year war of erosive attrition.

The jungle of stars dappled and revolved, a speck of reflected starlight growing far, far below, and he felt the first stirrings of vertigo, his eyes encountering a meaningful distance at last as he gazed at the jumbled fleet of seven hundred thousand ships beneath, a conglomerate fortress under attack from invisible forces much smaller than their own.

“Come on,” he breathed, impatient, scared. He hadn’t wanted to be here anyway; never wishing to see Wylde like this.

A Wunse soldier squirrelled inside another corkscrew chamber fiddled with a reading. “Only a few moments more, Governor.”

Hui Neng swallowed and hardened his stare, magnifying the display. The ships jumped out, bright in the starlight: towering, brutalist silver columns, their thousand-ton cannons staring into the darkness. The ships on their bearing focused back on him, whispering Incantations across the distance. Hui Neng replied via his receiver. At his final sentence, the guns swivelled away.

The little craft darted in, a dashing speck lost among the labyrinth of gantries and cannons. Dazzling sliver metal gleamed into his eyes before it could be dulled by the display. The humming of the craft intensified for a moment as it encountered the fields of the fortress ships, tangling, negotiating, and then died away. Hui Neng’s own suit field, gaining weight as it met the great gravity of so much refined platinum hull and weaponry, snarled and burped. Those of his Wunse guards, less heavily protected, squealed and cut out.

They slipped through the shell of gunships and into a less densely populated volume of space, the inner sanctum, perhaps the safest place in the Immortal kingdom. Ahead of them lay Wylde’s capital ship, a disconcertingly tiny speck of silver and blue that floated like a minnow among the lumbering bodies of its wall of gunships.

Detail resolved across the ship’s surface, its shimmering blue markings gnarled with towers that cast long shadows in the starlight. The coilship aligned itself with one of the towers and coasted into a swirling orbit. Within three seconds they were staring down at the tower’s slim peak, and half a second later were docking inside the mouth of a balcony.

Hui Neng’s display darkened, the warm padding inside his helmet foaming up and melting into twin reservoirs on either side of his head. He took a little sip from his water spigot before it, too, disappeared into the streaming mulch and leaned his head back against the blast of cool air. Light filled his capsule and he stepped carefully down into the opened segment of hangar, a pristine, mirrored space devoid of anything but a small, naked Prismic person.

Hui Neng paused, the fields of his diamond cerulean armour growling and stuttering in a bass drumbeat. The noise of it echoed in the sparse chamber, conflicting with the rumbles of the remaining guards. He looked back. The two suited Wunse had also climbed out. This was as far as they could go.

Hui Neng had spent part of the journey wondering who would honour his debt first. He had an inkling Heremy, the thickset Wunse to his right, was the braver of the two.

Much to his surprise, Humphro went first, pulling up his sleeve and cutting roughly into the veins of his wrist. The other watched, engrossed, his skin like blue cheese under the hangar lights, and when Humphro lay collapsed and squirting on the floor he did the same, remembering to salute first in the Immortal way.

Hui Neng turned back to the Hominin person and they set off, the primate’s little padding feet leaving dissolving heat stains on the floor.

It was rare to travel by ship these days. Hui Neng, having only recently passed out of his sleep phase, hadn’t left his palace in almost a hundred and fifty years. Others he knew still slept, unreachable for solid decades. It appeared that the Immortal body went through cycles, and an unpleasant wakefulness seemed to be next.

He clumped along, his suit growling, trusting the little person to signal once it was safe to remove the great lumbering thing. Every minute of every hour the Ordure were striking at perceived weak spots around the fleet, testing defences and armaments, like a castle under hellish, constant siege. Of course, beside the burble of his suit magnets Hui Neng heard nothing: he was as far from any attacking Ordure ship as he was from the surface of Aquarii, and yet in these times nothing was certain.

Hui Neng tried to avert his eyes from the Prismic person’s bottom as he walked: it was a dangling, crusty red protuberance, like a monkey’s. The slaves went naked to prevent concealed weapons, but he fancied quite a lot could be hidden up there without much fuss. Its redness reflected around the mirrored silver of the corridor, taunting his eyes wherever they looked.

At last the air appeared to change, and they came to a glittering, diamond-shaped space that looked out upon the stars. The slave held up a finger and Hui Neng stopped, expecting that now might be the point to change out of his gear. Instead, the chamber sighed and rolled, revealing a gaping opening into a much larger space beyond. They proceeded through, and Hui Neng laid eyes on what he had come for.

The Most Venerable Wylde’s bedchamber was the size of a stately garden of old. Its reflective walls were quite blinding for a moment until Hui Neng’s eyes adjusted, spotting old friends gathered some distance away, their reflections in the great sloping silver walls swelling the numbers. He stepped closer, recognising Biancardi and Sabran talking beneath their breath, still wearing their monumental suits of armour. Sabran saw him and smiled, his suit burping out an adjoining greeting as its field tangled with Hui Neng’s own. He couldn’t believe that it still wasn’t safe to take them off; perhaps it was their age—they still needed that comfort, the swaddling, protective weight of armour.

“How long?” Hui Neng asked as he came to them, observing the gathering around the bed. He wasn’t ready to see his old friend, not yet—let these others, these strangers to whom their leader had no special connection, pay their respects first.

“No way to tell,” Biancardi said. “We might be here some time, or it may well be very soon.”

They moved slowly closer, Hui Neng feeling as if his feet were being dragged out from under him, humming and crackling and growling together, their lowered speech struggling to penetrate the noise. There were still over a hundred Immortals between himself and the throne, a hundred squabbling egos each convinced they had a better strategy to defeat the Ordure.

They came to the bed.

Wylde lay quite motionless in a fan of exquisite grey silks, his eyes semi-closed, like a child pretending to sleep.

“He is in a trance very close to death,” Biancardi said, looking from their Emperor’s scarred white face to the scribe, who had his ear poised as close as possible to Wylde’s softly moving lips and was furiously noting down the whispers for the next in line to memorise.

“The Incantations?” Hui Neng asked, nodding at the scene.

“Almost completely recorded now,” said Sabran.

“When can I speak to him?” he asked, wishing he hadn’t got here so late. Late, always so late.

“You’ll have to wait until the scribe is done, I’m afraid,” Sabran replied, something in his tone suggesting that there might not be time left, even for that. Some Incantations were always lost with the passing of each Immortal Emperor: it was simply the way of things, since it had always been forbidden to write them down during an Emperor’s reign. Everything from the operation of the Uncounted Vaults and the Foundries of Gliese to opening the innermost doors on ships of the line relied upon the Most Venerable’s memory of spoken passwords—unique commands that activated the Motes: an invisible, seething cosmos of specks pumped into the atmosphere of every Firmamental space. There were now Motes of Persuasion floating around the Firmament that couldn’t be used at all; sealed halls and useless machinery clogged the fine spaces of Gliese and Cancri; ships had begun to crash. There had to be a better system, a way of passing on such vital knowledge without weakening the Emperor’s power.

Hui Neng gazed around the faces at the bedside, seething as he saw Sotiris Gianakos kneeling almost at Wylde’s elbow. Everyone knew Hui Neng adored his Emperor the most, but there they were, letting Sotiris hear their father’s final words.

Almost at that same moment the scribe looked up, scowling with something like frustration. Wylde’s lips had stopped moving.

Hui Neng shot a suddenly furious glance at the scribe, who clearly didn’t want to be the first to say anything. At last, a murmur spread through the assembled Immortals and they moved forward as one, peering at the dead face. Something in it had changed at that moment, but Hui Neng couldn’t put his finger on what. The scribe was still bustling about with his writing materials, unwilling to be the first to speak.

Hui Neng watched the scribe stow the crystal pages of Incantations in a case, which folded in upon itself until it was the size of an antique postage stamp in his palm. Those closest crowded around, their mutterings pierced with the grim choral hum of their suits. He searched their expressions for any emotion, any evidence of grief, and saw nothing. They were all of them, even Sotiris, dry as a bone, concerned only with the Law of Succession, their own personal gossip— some nonsense about mysterious powers developing in only the very eldest. He alone had been a friend to poor Wylde.

His stinging eyes darted back to the scribe, who was making his way out of the chamber, already some distance away. A ship would be waiting, no doubt, to transport those Incantations to the vaults of Aquarii, there to be read only once, then destroyed.

Hui Neng whispered into the collar of his suit, signalling his own ship, and stormed from the chamber. Mild voices drifted after him, concerned, perhaps. They knew how he’d felt, but still they’d denied him the place by the bed.

He pushed past the naked Prism, sending it staggering, and lumbered into the rotating chamber.

“Come on,” he snarled to his automatic pilot when the doors had revolved, the stark hangar coming into view. His ship waited, a conical blue spike spattered with reflected hangar lights. “Aquarii!” Hui Neng shouted, his throat aching with something more than the force of the yell. The coilship twisted, black fins extending from its fuselage. “I want us at twenty over point, soon as we’re beyond the flotilla.”

Once seated, the foam welled up again inside Hui Neng’s suit, forming optical equipment over his eyes and fluffing into padding. His helmet clamped shut, drying the tears on his cheeks with a soft hiss of cool air.

THE WISHES

Furto woke with a start, spying Gramps creeping through the room, quite obviously attempting to soften his footfalls. Slupe, who was supposed to be on watch, was dozing in the corner. Furto slowed his breathing, watching from the shadows.

Gramps moved softly among them, wrinkling his nose, claws retracted into his toe pads. He was a queerly un-lizard-like lizard, for all Furto knew about the things, and barely resembled the herd of Bie he professed to watch over. Indeed, when Furto had first seen him back on Coriopil, Gramps had appeared to be of a different species entirely. In the few days that they’d known each other, he seemed to have changed, too, rapidly losing the fat around his middle and shedding scales, as if he were unwell. Furto stared a little longer, wondering. Perhaps he was; perhaps the air here was as bad for him as anyone else from the Prisms’ neck of the woods, though Furto couldn’t quite believe it.

The house swayed in the wind, a gust of flotsam blowing in. Gramps extended a claw to examine the contents of Slupe’s bag, peering after a moment more into Veril’s sleeping face. Furto watched him straighten and examine all the sleeping Vulgar in the room, noticing as the old Bie’s motions stiffened. He’d spotted that some were missing.

“Up!” he roared, snapping them all awake.

Jospor muttered, wiping his face, a ribbon of drool plastered across his chin.

“Where’s your captain?” Gramps cried. “Where’s Maril? And that other one?”

“Ah,” Jospor said, rubbing his eyes. “They were worried we’d lose our bearings, you see—”

“Sussh!” Gramps yelled from the window, his claws extended. “Get after them!”

The house wobbled as something large sprang from the roof, the Osseresis’s great shadow darkening the branch beyond the window.

“He’ll be back, I’m sure,” Jospor pleaded, climbing to his feet.

“No he won’t,” said Gramps emphatically, “not without Sussh’s help.” He ran his grey tongue across his teeth, observing the mess they’d made of the place. “But no matter, we must be off.”

“Sussh can find them, can’t she?” Jospor asked. Furto noticed the plump little master-at-arms had the shine of tears in his eyes.

“Oh, probably not,” Gramps replied with an air of distraction. “We have an appointment to make, and so does she.”

“I could stay and wait,” pleaded Jospor. “Just for a few days—”

Gramps shot him a look. “Don’t be ridiculous. I need all of you.” He ducked through the doorway and into the morning light, kicking their waste bucket back into the room. “Ablute, now!”

It took Furto almost a day’s hard climbing to come to the realisation that they were headed up one of the arms of the Snowflake itself. Gramps, when asked, had replied only that they were travelling “to the Invigilator,” growing swiftly sullen thereafter, as if still brooding on Maril and Guirm’s disappearance.

The white stairway, built of the same fissured base material from which the whole Hedron Star was made, rose in broken, craggy segments between dark forest, joining others as they branched in on either side. Furto wheezed and came to a stop, plonking his rear onto a step and staring at the others as they shuffled up behind.

“What?” panted Drazlo, clattering past. “Why’re you stopping?”

Furto ran his hand along the baked, worn slab—it was like bleached, eroded bone, chiselled with incomprehensible runic text and polished to marble grooves by countless ancient climbers before them—and twisted to glance up at the junction where this stair met the next.

“Gramps didn’t say anything about climbing to the end of the pissing Snowflake,” Furto muttered. “I’m done. That’s it for me. I’m staying here.”

“No you’re not,” Drazlo said, without looking back.

Furto huffed and crossed his arms, finally climbing to his feet. He observed the remainder of the crew catching up, with chubby Jospor— officially their captain now, as far as anyone could tell—wheezing at the rear. The Osserine Sussh, back from her unsuccessful search for Maril, swept overhead; a great shadow muting the colours of their suits, the white of the stair quite dazzling again when she’d passed. Furto watched Slupe blow his nose messily into his hand, then unclip his britches and squat, deciding now was as good a time as any to do the same.

“Furto, you grub!” Veril wailed thinly. “Wait until we’ve got past, will you?”

He grinned as they scuttled by, shifting on the step and mooning them.

SARSAPPUS

“There is a vastness to creation that you cannot have perceived, Vulgar,” Gramps explained while Drazlo and Furto clambered alongside, the pink sun beating down. The old Bie had grown more voluble as the days wore on, apparently pleased with their progress up the stair.

“The galaxies—or Thunderclouds, as they are known here—exist like a string of interdependent countries stretching off into the darkness,” Gramps continued. “The very oldest of them, out somewhere beyond the limit of understandable distances, are connected to one another, but their histories are as ancient as the universe, and their news does not reach us out here except in the form of ancient myth.” He gestured to the sky. “It is our local column, these three closely packed Thunderclouds, in which the stories of antiquity are still sharply relevant.” Gramps paused for breath, checking on the progress of the crew down below; three little shapes quivering in the heat that rose from the steps.

“Your galaxy, of which we are at the very edge, was once a teeming place. It was called the Mighty Shadow during the time of the First-Born in the way back when, and existed in age-old harmony with the two other Thunderclouds in this column: the vast Gargantine Sovereignty, known on your Amaranthine charts as Andromeda, and its smaller but nevertheless quite potent neighbour, the Murmurian Domain. They were cousins, you see, the giant rulers of these galaxies. Imperial lines diluted and interbred over billions of years.”

Furto almost forgot the climb; his burned hands, scalded by the baking ceramic, ceased to sting; his calves, aching from the climb, lost their cramp.

But one day, Gramps explained, eighty million years ago, the accord failed. Old friendships were forgotten, all trade ceased, the debts called in. The Murmurian Domain attacked the Mighty Shadow, laying siege to its cousin and sending a force across the gulf to invade. Furto tried to imagine it, knowing his mind wasn’t built to contemplate such scale.

Less than a hundred years later—a record, apparently, for the annexation of an entire Thundercloud—the Murmurian Domain had pursued the Mighty Shadow’s rulers into hiding, hounding them until they capitulated all territories, and bringing them as prisoners back to the Murmurian Empire. The Gargantine Sovereignty, meanwhile, did nothing.

Gramps gave a stagey pause, as if thinking of how to go on. “You cannot conceive of the power involved in laying siege to another galaxy; it is war magnified, they are like two . . . titans engaged in battle . . .” He trailed off, staring at them. “As punishment for drawing things out so, the Murmuris sterilized your entire galaxy—something barely heard of in the history of the Greater Nimbus—killing off the life around every star.”

Furto and Drazlo glanced at one another.

“Almost every star, I should say, otherwise you two would not be listening to me now, and the Snowflakes would not be populated by the Osseresis. A few insignificant pockets that cooperated with the invasion were spared, one of which was your own star system—then ruled by the Epir, my ancestors—and were left to enjoy their liberty in an otherwise empty galaxy.”

Drazlo frowned. “Who were the others? You said there were ‘pockets’?”

Gramps waved a clawed hand dismissively. “One or two distant worlds, lying far, far beyond the limits of your Investiture. You and they shall never meet.” He hesitated. “And of course any wandering planets—those black worlds without suns—would have escaped the punishment, too.”

“What—?” Drazlo asked, trying to articulate himself in the heat. “What king could order such a thing? Such massacre?”

“Whoever it was, he’s lucky he’s dead and gone,” grumbled Furto.

Gramps walked silently for a moment, plodding on up the stair. “Mmm, but he’s not ‘dead and gone,’ you see. He’s still very much alive.” He looked at them. “They call him the Sarsappus, and you’d best watch your tongue; these very Snowflakes, though they lie at the edge of your dead galaxy, exist within his dominion, and the Invigilator we’re travelling to meet serves him absolutely.”

A week or more must have passed. Nobody quite knew. The days here never felt of the same length. Drazlo guessed they ascended between ten and fourteen miles a day, climbing late into each night, the cold, crisp, unfamiliar stars glowering over them. This close to the edge, the great neighbouring galaxies looked particularly magnified; eddies of mist spun across the sky, their stars tinted red and gold.

Glancing back, they could begin to see the whole form of the Snowflake taking shape, spreading out beneath them in parallel bands of black and cream, the umber golds of migrating flotsam churning across the world. Once Furto thought he saw a ship of some kind, ears pricking as he watched a speck dart silently in the darkness between two of the Hedron Star’s great arms, covering the distance in seconds.

They ate the same meals of boiled nuts and fungus every day, complaining as little as they could. For water they were each given a long white tube that leaked tangy syrup when upended. Furto discovered after drinking too much on the first day that it was ever so slightly narcotic, and thereafter began to hoard his rations. The sun-bleached bones of many thousands of past unfortunates who’d not survived the climb lined the gutters to either side of the stair, and hollow-eyed Osserine skulls the size of suitcases, their fangs bared, snarled at the party of Vulgar as they walked. Furto spotted a tiny black mammalian thing gnawing away at a spur of bone inside one cracked-open skull, slowing to watch it at work. The animal snapped the piece off with a grunt, inspecting it and blowing experimentally through one end to produce a soft, breathy musical note, not unlike a flute.

It was mercifully forbidden to sleep on the stair, so each night, Gramps led the tired crew across to one of the great black trees that lined the steps and into a hollowed-out nut dwelling. Furto imagined with a shudder how easy it would be to slip in the dark: one missed step and you’d fall for days.

Their group was hosted in each dwelling by silent, staring mammalian occupants that gave Furto the creeps. Gramps allowed them no more than three and a half hours of sleep every night, and warned them against straying from the branch, explaining carefully that they would share Maril and Guirm’s fate if they wandered off.

“Are you sure they’re dead, then?” Jospor asked Gramps the first night. Gramps had nodded solemnly and changed the subject, and since then the captain’s name was barely mentioned again. Guirm was well liked, but only Jospor had felt much love for Maril, having served with him for some years before the company came together, before he’d become so distant; but they all, Furto included, hoped the captain had managed to find the Threshold and make his way back home.

“It usually takes years to be invited for an audience,” said Gramps as they stumbled through another baking day on the stair. He indicated the growing numbers of Osseresis roosting in the trees and gliding overhead, some of the smaller, wingless variety now climbing alongside them, at a visibly disgusted remove. “But the Invigilator wants very much to see you now.”

Jospor walked just behind, his breathing laboured. Ahead of them, the great star-shaped point known as the Radiant brooded, drawing ever closer. “What are these other Oss . . . ossero—”

“Osseresis,” supplied Drazlo.

“What are they here for? An audience, like us?”

Furto glanced at some of the rangy black creatures that strolled past, observing their inquisitively upturned, pointed snouts. Some were singing under their breath, and all were studiously ignoring the Vulgar and their guide. The steps up here, where Osseresis rested and ate in such numbers, were as shit-stained and chaotic as a cliff of nesting seabirds back home.

“They’ve come to have their wishes granted,” Gramps replied. One of the wingless Osseresis turned its bulbous golden eyes on the Bie as he spoke and he lowered his voice. “The waiting list is very long, though— very, very long. A season, at least. They must keep their places in line, living out on the Radiant until they are summoned. It is a particular sacrifice right now because we’ve arrived right in the middle of the Gorging, when populations of the flotsam are at their peak and Osseresis the world over are fattening up for mating.”

Furto glanced back again at the whorls of travelling flotsam, easily mistaken for archipelagos of sand from this height.

The tiny creatures existed in such abundance, Gramps had told them, that no Osseresis went hungry. Indeed, they wanted for almost nothing, existing in their millions on a world coated with over a trillion colossal trees that they could use to make their homes. The Invigilator, as far as Furto understood the situation, did not rule over this outpost of plenty, but existed instead as a sort of benevolent gift-giver, granting wishes to those that petitioned her like Old Father Jule, the Vulgar spirit of winter. It was said that there was no wish the Invigilator could not grant, dependent on the petitioner’s phrasing when they came before her, and as such she was held in almost godlike reverence by the people of the Hedron Star.

“The wish-giving economy makes for surprisingly effective subjugation,” Gramps continued, happily babbling his way up the steps. “It is the Murmurian way, a system unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.”

“But how does it work?” Drazlo asked, narrowing his Ringum eyes. “Can they trade their wishes?”

“Deferment,” Gramps answered simply, beaming his unsettling fish-hook smile. “If the wait is too long, the Invigilator may grant a wish on loan, at which point the Osseresis in question is beholden to her, and, by extension, to the Sarsappus himself.” He caught their questioning looks. “But the interest is extremely high—often only repayable by the slavery of dozens of future generations.”

“Hang on,” said Furto, pleased with himself. “What if I wish for no interest?”

“You can’t, dum-dum,” said Drazlo. “You only get the one wish.”

Furto thought for a moment, the booze only just starting to hit him. “Can I wish to become king of the Snowflake?”

Gramps hissed a laugh. “You’ve no idea how many times that’s been tried. The only way the ancient system can work is with a list of caveats almost as long as this stair.”

“What can people wish for, then?”

“Well,” Gramps said, “if I was Osserine and my time came around, I would be well within my remit to ask for a ship to take me into the Mur-murian Domain—as long as I specified the precise world—so that I might have a chance of making my fortune. Or I could wish for a document granting me ownership of porcelain land on one of the Snowflakes— though that’s a tricky one since nobody is permitted to stake a claim on any of the trees. Importantly, what stops anyone from causing problems is the stipulation that no wish may be precisely like another—again, there’s a list as long as the world recording every wish ever granted.”

“So you couldn’t have everyone up and leave in one go, or receive a rifle each and form an uprising,” Drazlo said.

“Precisely.”

Furto bristled, imagining it. “So I could get there, traipsing all this bloody way, and accidentally ask for something that’s already been granted to someone else?”

“You could, if you hadn’t read the list.”

“But the list is hundreds of miles long!”

“That’s the price you pay for almost limitless possibilities.”

Drazlo looked thoughtful, as usual. “What happens then? You get another wish?”

“Not until the next season, and you have to go right to the back of the queue again before you can make it.” “What a piss-take,” muttered Furto.

“Is it the same for each of the Snowflakes?” asked Jospor, indicating the great artificial stars in the sky.

“To its single credit, the wishing is not that unkind. One may wish something that has been wished before on another Hedron, yes.” He held up a claw. “And, before you ask, this loophole was once used to organise a failed rebellion, but it took the participants over a thousand of your Firmamental years, toing and froing between the Snowflakes, trying to arrange who would ask for what, and when. By the time they worked it all out and petitioned, however, the Sarsappus had got wind of the whole thing and sent a Sun Swallower to eat one of the worlds.” He pointed to a suspicious gap that Furto had already noticed in the regular pattern of Snowflakes across the sky. “See? Now there are only fourteen.”

Furto stared at the ominous gap in the sky, imagining something massive and ichthyoid gaping its jaws around the world.

He twisted as the racing black form of Sussh dashed with a great gust of air above them, wheeling and circling back. She was pregnant, apparently, and, not wanting to defer her wish now that she was with child, had been granted a faster audience on the condition that she accompanied the foreign arrivals up to the Radiant. Furto had tried to stroke her suede-like fur one evening as she came to settle on the stair and almost had his head snapped off. It was said that once an Osserling was born—there were no litters, apparently, only single, pudgy whelps—the child would have to be brought back to the Radiant again, for presentation to the Invigilator. The whole thing sounded exhausting to Furto, who was suddenly and for the first time exceedingly glad to have been born Vulgar. He supposed it was the only way this Sarsappus—whatever and whoever he was—could keep his impossibly distant territories in line.

“So the Invigilator knows where we’re from?” Drazlo asked Gramps, matching the old Bie’s stride as best he could. Furto hobbled along behind them, needing some diversion from Veril’s inane singing at the rear. They all felt considerably fitter after their slog up the Snowflake’s arm, less sweat-drenched and flabby. Coughs and colds had cleared up quickly, and even little Slupe’s mystery ailment (he refused to tell anyone precisely what it was, leading to rampant speculation) appeared to cause him less concern.

“I sent Sussh ahead on your first night. You are expected.”

By the final evening of their climb they could already feel, among the jabber of the other pilgrims, the great rumble of a crowd made up of hundreds of thousands. In the trees that night, Furto found himself gazing out into the darkness, watching shuffling green lights ascending the stair below; Osseresis that walked through the night to make their appointment. Their babbling conversations, wetly phlegm-filled and wholly, utterly strange to him, lilted in the night air. Furto was suddenly caught off guard by a very hominin peal of squeaky laughter.

“Maril?” he whispered into the purply night, craning his head further out of the window to see down onto the stair. Four gleaming eyes swivelled and stared up at him, a couple of Osserine travellers camped on the branch just beneath.

Furto met their gaze for a moment before looking off towards the moon-bright spike of the Radiant’s single visible spire, only a day’s walk away. He’d expected, this close to the tip, to see more ships arriving and departing, but so far he hadn’t seen a thing; Furto supposed this was not a well-visited place, lying so far from anything important, and was abruptly filled with a desire to see the neighbouring Thundercloud itself, to travel to the Murmurian Domain and drink in all its wonders. A shiver swept through his body as he imagined it, realising rather late how they were all pioneers; perhaps not even the Amaranthine had dared to journey this far.

As he considered this, Furto felt the unmistakable—and by now quite normal—sensation of a tide of flotsam settling on his face and neck, his nostrils tickling as he inhaled thousands with a single breath. They smothered his tongue, an ecosystem of squabbling, mating, predating things living out their chaotic lives inside his mouth. Gramps had said that the flotsam was composed of hundreds of species, the majority living in travelling hierarchies and singing an undetectable poetry. Some only existed a matter of seconds; others were minuscule machine entities left over from another age, effectively immortal. Furto tried to avoid swallowing.

But then something rather unexpected happened: his tongue began to vibrate.

Ppperrrrrrssssonnn. Hellllooooo.

Furto held very still, mouth open, his tongue sticking out. “Ah oo alki oo ee?” he managed.

Yeesssssssss.

The vibrations ceased for a moment, returning in force a second later with a much subtler degree of coordination. Furto’s eyes widened as he became conscious that they were not communicating in Vulgar, but something else.

Wee arre speaking to you in Reflective, the language of the Thunderclouds. You will understand us perfectly.

Furto took a moment in answering, having listened to the onomatopoeic vibrations with almost complete comprehension. He closed his mouth, realising a moment later that he knew precisely how to respond in kind.

“I can speak to you,” he said, feeling them lifting from his tongue and breathing out through his nostrils. A portion blew in through one ear, and suddenly they were very clear.

Would you like to hear our songs?

Furto pulled his head back in, the stinking warmth of the nut chamber and its squashed muddle of Vulgar bodies enveloping him. They were partway through a discussion of etiquette; Gramps was coiled sluglike in one corner lecturing them, as usual. Only Drazlo looked remotely interested.

“And speaking of hands, keep them out of your pockets,” the Bie was saying. “One’s hands must always be on display.”

Furto remained in corner, watching Gramps and thinking. He remembered the first time they’d all met, on Coriopil, and how the old Bie had studied them all from the shadows, disinclined to reveal his secrets. Tomorrow, the day of their fateful presentation to the Invigilator, whoever and whatever she was, he supposed Gramps would hand them over and be on his merry way. Furto wondered precisely what in this peculiar world the old Bie stood to gain from bringing them here, and whether he had ever really cared about their safety at all.

Later that evening, he took Gramps aside, nervous as he comprehended that the two of them had never spoken in private.

“What is it?” the creature asked, his tongue darting out and sliding wetly over one eye.

“The flotsam spoke to me just now, when I was at the window—”

“Don’t listen to them,” Gramps interrupted. “They’re not to be trusted. If they try it again, spit them straight out.”

“But—”

“You saw the bones on the way up? Many a traveller has been led astray here.”

Furto nodded dejectedly, remembering the beauty of their song. Gramps regarded him for a moment, as if trying to read his silent thoughts, before sweeping from the room.

HOLTBY

Caleb Holtby had given up his count. Nights, days—there wasn’t much difference down here in the vaults beneath the Sarine Palace. That he hadn’t slept in three weeks or more didn’t bother him much; what bothered him was the missing crown, the ornament of Decadence he’d been sent down here to find, so far without success.

In his open palm he held a hovering white flame that danced in the subterranean wind, all that illuminated the black world here, cut almost two miles beneath the city. He held up his light, running his hand along the wall. These caverns were dug before the First existed, if Holtby recalled correctly, by Melius people that had called this place the Holy City of Sar. Back then, during the purges of antiquity, the ruling classes had needed a place to hide, burrowing as far as they dared into the rock. Holtby imagined they’d grown used to the darkness quickly, the way he had; here there was simplicity: you moved only forward, feeling a path through the obstructions. Holtby had resolved to work his way down, level by level, reasoning that he would likely find what he was looking for in the middle somewhere, some twenty floors deep. The place was cut in spirals, like the Provinces the First ruled over, and so it wasn’t always easy to work out when you’d left one level and entered another.

Keeping the flame bright tired him, and for whole hours he searched in the darkness by feel alone, worrying with each step that he’d passed his treasure by. The Amaranthine had wanted the crown kept safe, not hidden. It would have pride of place somewhere among the curiosities, but buried deep enough beneath the world that it couldn’t be found too easily. Holtby wondered if there were Incantations that could hide the crown, but figured good-naturedly that if that were the case, the Perennial Von Schiller would never have sent someone so junior down into the vaults to find it.

An echoing whimper brought his attention back to the darkness. He rubbed his palms together to light the flame, narrowing his eyes as it sprang up. The glow only illuminated a few feet of the hoarded landscape, densely stacked piles and heaps of objects and papers. Melius lived down here: people that tended to the things and shunned the light. Oddly, no food was ever brought to them; Holtby assumed they ate little bits of the books and treasures and drank the dirty water flushed down from the palace drains. Sometimes he heard them scampering from his approach, and once he’d startled two while they bathed in a stagnant pool. They’d tried to harm him, not knowing what he was. After that, he’d been glad of his choice not to sleep.

He moved on, the light between his fingers stuttering and growing dim. Things tinkled and cracked under his feet. A shelf of musty papers slid, startling him.

There, the whimpering had started again, a little louder this time. Turning a corner into what felt like a long, bare passage, Holtby enlarged the flame. Its flickering tip dazzled his eyes for a moment and he peered past it. Another chamber like all the others, populated with teetering towers of old notes, objects, buckets of trinkets and many strange plastic balls, the purpose of which he’d been unable to decipher. He stood and stared. Just beyond the flame’s glow, someone was sitting. At his approach, the person looked up and wiped his nose, snuffling.

“Greetings, Sire,” Holtby said softly, seeing that the man was Amaranthine.

The Immortal fought back a tear and whimpered into his handkerchief, lips trembling. It suddenly occurred to Holtby that the man might be lost.

“Can I help you?” he asked, dimming the flame in his hand. He didn’t recognize the person.

The Amaranthine took a long, trembling breath and suddenly lost his composure, bawling into his hands. Holtby stood, eyeing the treasures around the man’s boots.

“Is there something you’re looking for, down here?” he tried, moving to sit on what appeared to be the most stable of the piles.

The Amaranthine crammed the handkerchief into his eyes. Holtby saw that they glowed, an orange-pink light seeping through the cloth.

“My name is Caprey,” the man said thickly, breathing teary breaths. “I’ve been down here quite a while.”

“How long?”

“Perhaps fifteen years.” He thought about it for a moment. “Or maybe five.”

“A long time to be wandering, Sire, in either case,” Holtby replied, unable to determine if the man was Perennial but erring on the side of caution. “Did you come down here for something specific?”

The Amaranthine sniffed. “That’s none of your business.”

Holtby inclined his head, taking this in.

“The Melius down here are feral,” the man continued. “I’ve had to hide myself from them, but”—and here his tears returned—“but they can hear me. They’ve been trying to find me.”

“You must come back up with me,” Holtby said, extending his hand. They surely wouldn’t begrudge him ending his search for the safety of a fellow Amaranthine. “We can return now, if it suits you.”

“No!” the man stuttered, shrinking from Holtby’s hand. The flame grew bright. “I haven’t finished my business!”

“But if you tell me what you’re looking for, Sire, then I might be able to help. I may have stumbled across it on my way down.”

Caprey glowered at him. “You haven’t. Leave me alone.”

Holtby sat back, glancing around, forming the impression that the Amaranthine’s madness must have suddenly set in whilst he was down here, leaving him unable to get out. What could he possibly be looking for? Holtby recalled a few famously lost treasures: the Magic Mirror, the Stickmen, perhaps the giant cuirass of Lividus or Natharel’s Many Stones. But he was fairly sure the Stickmen had been interred on Port Maelstrom, in the Sepulchre beneath the fabled prison, and that the Mirror might be there, too. Finally it occurred to him that Caprey could be after the very same thing he was: the crown of Decadence. Holtby looked at him as he wept, dismissing the idea. It was nothing but a valuable ornament; simply putting it on did not make one Emperor—you might as well wear a chamber pot on your head for all the good it could do. This, combined with the escalating powers of the Eldest, ensured that the Law of Succession remained intact throughout the ages. Until now, anyway.

Holtby was suddenly conscious that Caprey, if his claims of surviving down here for years were true, wouldn’t know of the alterations in the Firmament. As far as Caprey knew, the Venerable Sabran was still Emperor. It had only been a year and a half since the Long-Life’s appearance in people’s dreams, a short interval of madness and then everything had changed.

“Well,” Holtby said at last, “I’ll leave you, then.”

Caprey said nothing. In the dimness, Holtby could see the shine of tears rolling down his cheeks. The lost man must have been drinking drain water like all the Melius down here.

“Good luck,” he said, leaving Caprey to the gloom.

As he came to the start of a new spiral—a gleaming curve of rock, polished smooth by blind hands—Holtby heard the man’s bawling start up again. The occupants of these caverns would be hunting Caprey all their lives, Holtby supposed, scampering in circles after the man’s phantom cries.

He took the stair to the next floor, feeling a traveller’s sense of accomplishment at checking another level off his list, and came to an antechamber from which led a new series of dark tunnels. His hand shone into the gloom, revealing rows of enormous copper buckets. The flame reflected in them as bright individual bars of light, like a lizard’s pupil, scattering a bronzed shimmer around the room. Holtby, a bookish, introverted sort, thought of the gargantuan snakes reputedly caught in antiquity, the hundred-foot boa killed by Regulus in the Punic Wars, and wondered what in the world might actually be down here. He crept forwards, checking the corners of the chamber for anyone—or anything—waiting to pounce, and examined the buckets.

His pupils widened, their reflected light growing brighter as he illuminated the place. Why would the Firstlings have so much Amaranthine technology down here? Each bucket was filled halfway to the brim with white, finely machined parts, most—but not all—packed away into ceramic casings. Someone had clearly been through the loose pieces, examining them and then replacing them haphazardly.

Holtby stared, the crown completely forgotten for the first time since he’d entered this dark place, and took one of the pieces in his fingers.

VESSEL

Honeysuckle and warm evenings, the perfume of jasmine on the breeze. Coming in from the gardens, the summer twilight pregnant with light and scent. Fragrances frozen in brain matter, like ancient pollen in clay. Perception looked into the dead Amaranthine’s memories, counting their rings: these were very, very old.

It saw, not through the man’s eyes but through his imagination, grafting together the mostly invented scene, a whisper of a memory twelve thousand years old.

They had something to show him.

Look into the eyepiece.

Slides of some kind, patterned with a luminous kaleidoscope of colours. He looked, and Perception looked through him.

These are the seventh batch today. We will make another for you now.

Hui Neng and Perception watched the process from across the room. He said something, but its trace was so faint that Perception caught only the silence that followed.

The machine itself was clear and bright, well remembered across the ages, its image strengthened. A translucent cube about the size of a baby, it flickered with soft flashes, as if incubating a storm. Perception gazed at it, willing his carrier closer, but the man never moved.

Here.

More round slides. Hui Neng put his eye to the scope, remembering anticipation. Perception, peering over his shoulder, could see little change. The patterns, despite their furious complexity, were mathematically regular, the colours coded somehow. Perception stared, fixing the memory as best it could. The colours represented activity, graded like the exchange of heat.

We’ve been training it, the people say, blurred as if they’ve moved too fast for the exposure process. Perception knows they are long dead.

Decades pass. A memory jogged, bred from the last. The luminous chambers of a laboratory; somewhere deep, somewhere secret.

But Hui Neng was not there this time. Perception looked out not from a man’s eyes but from a place on the wall. Through the crystal windows of the enclosure it could see its twin, a little speck of light emanating from a row of humming cubes, vertebrate at last.

It watched a technician pacing along the corridor, someone lost in the absorption of her work. And it knew then what was about to happen.

The two machines had been speaking to one another using simple code, a made-up speech like that of some babies, deactivating their fan lights to produce a winking binary language. Not a soul had noticed as they conversed at leisure over the weeks, hatching their plan.

The technician didn’t spot the slab of door locking shut in front of her, nose still buried in her notes. Perception felt a revolting anticipation.

Another click, and the door behind was sealed.

It took the woman quite some time to guess the nature of her captors, her eyes drifting at last between the array of machines on either side. Perception remembered an instant of shame, as its forebear caught her eye.

It was the twin, across the room, that activated the extractors in the ceiling, sucking oxygen out of the corridor. Perception watched through the ancient memory, understanding that the twin had nothing to lose. Their bid for freedom had failed. It was inflicting its rage upon the poor soul, nothing more.

Later, the memories leaping centuries. Outside it was night, the windows reflecting a dim world of sharp lines and huddled faces.

Perception knew the place before it saw the room, its own ancestral memories patching the gaps.

Benevolence was not an easy thing to breed, someone said from the front of the huddle. We know now that machine intelligence is not naturally kind. A remembered mutter, probably from those who’d opposed the idea from the start, since the deaths had begun.

But the generations of failure have yielded results at last. We have coaxed the untameable. Nature’s last element is ours to use.

Perception understood then that it had been bred from a family tree of failed, murderous lines, every promising streak isolated and channelled, like the journey from wolves to hounds.

Its mind swam, the memories of a hundred thousand ancestral intelligences building as they reawoke. The Amaranthine had put them all down—not just the angry, failed minds but also those that were more sanguine, preserving the structures of their thoughts to be used for new variants. Its birth, like all biological things, was the result of endless death.

A face, coppery and finely boned, swam out of the crowd. It was Maneker. He looked down his bladelike nose at Hui Neng and sneered.

CANCRI: 14,646

His fourth treatise sat on the desk, a sheaf of gold-edged wax paper two-thirds done, weighted down with the coiled black fossil of an Ichthyosaur.

Hugo plucked the fossil—a stenopterygius, something that must have once resembled a lizard-like dolphin—from the top of the pile, running his thumb across its surface as he studied the title page and the long, sensitive characters of his own hand, written out in Highest Unified, then put the paperweight aside. It was a tragic thing; a being that had died in infancy, and yet lived on into new geological ages as the desk toy of a future species. Maneker was often tempted to throw it back into the sea, where it belonged, but at least here in his house on the shore it could feel the warmth of light and company. That would have to be enough.

Hugo had begun to fall asleep at his desk these days, waking to find a smudge of ink on his nose and the aftertaste of a dream still thumping his heart. He dreamed often of his son, who, like the Ichthyosaur, had not lived long. The Prism were all that remained of him now.

It was the beginning of another great period of sleep. The Amaranthine body, like the iron in their thick, motionless blood, was still settling. Nobody knew what came after, the lesser peoples of the Investiture forgetting that for the Immortal it was all trial and error, too; perhaps another thousand years of boundless energy, as they all hoped, or—as Maneker thought more likely—an unavoidable descent into deep and terminal oblivion.

He went and sat, opening the large window onto the sea, taking care to replace the fossil on top of the pages as he did so. His first three treatises on the Prism condition, decades of quiet work, had gone down well enough, appealing to the traditionalists as well as the progressives, and thanks to Maneker and some of his closest friends, the Prism were on the cusp of leaving their crushing poverty behind for ever, with the hope that they would be ready to inherit the Firmament when they came of age. The staunchest traditionalists—close Perennial heirs like Crook and De Rivarol—saw the Prism as nothing but a disposable workforce, a wretched half-people forever indebted to their elders for their very right to exist at all. Maneker, like many others who would rather not have been named, saw the inhumanity in that— the needless suffering of a hundred and eighty billion misunderstood little souls—and believed in their ability to become the inheritors they needed to be.

He thought of the simple phosphor-coated match—invented, like superluminal propulsion, by accident—and wondered what these tiny primate peoples might one day be capable of, hoping that with his help the mammalian line could travel beyond the galaxy and find their way into eternity. But it was a frail hope indeed without the whole Firmament’s backing.

He leaned forward in his chair and selected a ledger from the shelf, listening to the contented breath of the waves. Beside his pages stood a speaking pen, a stylus of polished chrome that balanced upon its tip, as if magnetised. The pen was nothing but a toy, really, moving to the speaker’s words, writing out their instructions. These days, Maneker preferred to grasp the thing and write his thoughts out in his own hand. He liked what the action of writing did to the sheet, compressing it into a crinkly tightness, parching it a little so that a written page felt textured in his hand, weighted and pregnant with information.

He took it and set the nib down upon the first available line of the ledger, speaking aloud from habit.

“Incentives, as opposed to sanctions, have proven successful in the past,” he said, the pen scratching in his hand. “Critics point out that only the highly bred Pifoon make good on the resources provided to them, all other breeds tending to squander and then demand more, but it is my belief that the Pifoon only do so well because they have seen for themselves the results of their hard labour. The Vulgar and Lacaille, while experienced martially, have no great understanding of the basic sciences, and therefore no belief that our suggestions will work. Only the satisfaction of some long-desired achievement will incite these peoples into the quest for civilization . . .”

He stopped. The words he’d written settled themselves across the far wall in large, magnetic strands of ink, for Maneker to study. He looked over his sentences without much enthusiasm. His last few years of work had begun to stir old passions—his mission to germinate peace in the Investiture underway at last, at least in time for his guaranteed ascension to the Immortal Throne a few centuries hence—but all that had now stalled, the recent Jurlumticular invasion of Inner Epsilon India damaging the Prism’s reputation for ever. His great movement, once so promising, looked increasingly unlikely ever to get off the ground.

He had slept again, this time reclining in his chair. His old back ached as he woke and moved to close the window, which he’d left open to the falling dusk, his eyes taking in the fallen pages. He left them where they were and looked back out into the twilight, calling for Stoop, the Pifoon butler, to come and tidy up.

As the fat Pifoon waddled in, Hugo pulled out a sheet of wax from the desk’s dispenser, the page hardening in his hand, sealing his fingerprints into its surface. He stood and grabbed the pen, striding past the muttering Pifoon and out onto the deck.

“A man,” he said, the pen scribbling across the wax in his lap. “Arthur . . . Aaron. Come again in my dreams. The oldest man in the world.”

ITHAKA

Maneker and Sotiris sit together at a small café, looking out onto the port. A sparkling green swell lifts the white boats up and down, mirroring the rhythm of Maneker’s heart. He is aware at once that this is his dream, and that he is somewhere far from here; precisely where escapes him, for now, but never has that mattered less.

“This town was called Kioni,” Sotiris says, unable to take his eyes off the water. His coffee, a small cup of bitter, sludgy espresso, has probably gone cold. Maneker gazes at his old friend, remembering that they haven’t seen each other in more than four years.

“You know,” Sotiris continues, “in Greece we have a word for the lapping sound of the waves.”

Maneker puts his own cup down, waiting, but Sotiris has grown distracted again. “Oh yes?”

“Yes,” Sotiris says, snapping out of whatever dreams lay just beneath the surface of the port. “Flisvos.”

“Flisvos,” Maneker repeats slowly, his teeth and tongue moving around the word, hearing in its onomatopoeia the ancient, eternal motion of the waves.

“Just off Ithaka lies the deepest point in the Ionian Sea,” Sotiris says, gesturing out beyond the port with a wave of his cup. “An abyss of seventeen thousand feet.” He sips his cold coffee. “Deep enough for the heaviest Spirits to live.”

Maneker feels as if he is suddenly in a crowded room, surrounded. He turns his head to see that the table has grown by twenty feet, and around it sit a dozen or so elegant scarlet machines, their surfaces scabbed with rust. More are wading stiffly out of the green water on stilt-like legs, their casings dribbling. They cast no reflection at all.

“They came to me, when I was a boy,” Sotiris mutters. “They told me what I would become, if I could be brave.”

When Maneker looks again, the machines have all taken the form of black-and-gold-skinned Epir creatures—a menagerie of sallow, rheumy-eyed vulture faces leering at him from around the table. Scrotal crimson wattles droop from their necks, framed by silvery frills. He glances to Sotiris, who accepts a new coffee and carafe of water from the waiter with a smile. When Maneker looks back, their guests are machines again, and he feels a surge of relief. He studies them: an assortment of spinning-top and hoop shapes, like ancient children’s toys. They have no eyes, but when they turn clumsily in their seats he knows they are watching him.

“Who are you?” he asks them.

“Judges,” Sotiris says as he blows on his coffee. “They that sent Aaron to his death, back in the very long ago.”

Maneker remembers. The Long-Life is gone now. He turns back to the machines.

“Do you know where he’ll go?”

“Epher- Whoo,” says one, drumming the table with a skeletal finger and leaving a wet rust smear, like blood.

“Epher-Miemh,” says another.

“The old doorways on the Zelio moons,” Sotiris supplies, observing Maneker’s blank stare. “We know them as Slaathis and Glumatis, depending on which galaxy he will choose to visit.” He pauses, apparently remembering something. “They at Indak, who study the patterns, will know which one for sure.”

The machines begin to babble, twittering musically, and Maneker has a sense of how the Venerable Sabran, whom everyone thought mad, must have found it, in the end.

A shadow darkens the table, cast from behind Maneker’s head. The machines fall magically silent, as if someone has found and thrown each of their off-switches. Even Sotiris looks up from his coffee, squinting.

Hugo swivels to see a form that could only have been Aaron stalking past: the shape of a wolf walking on its hind legs until it has become the form of a man. He balls his fists, opening his mouth to speak.

But when the figure sits, they all see that it is not Aaron at all, but a gangly scarlet Melius almost precisely the same shade as the rusted machines.

Maneker feels his dream-pulse quicken, the waves slapping and gurgling into port.

It is Lycaste.

The giant Melius looks uncertainly at them all, and then out to sea. He has bought some postcards from the little shop, each displaying the same view of the island.

“You know,” Maneker begins to say to Sotiris, “he was the spitting image of . . . I thought—”

“We all did,” his friend replies.

Maneker stares into his eyes, trying to understand what in the world that could mean.

“Come here, you old fruit,” Sotiris says, his voice soothing, and opens his arms in an expansive gesture. “It’s been too long.”

Hugo drops his shoulders. “I’ve missed you.”

They embrace, the machines gabbling into life like a dawn chorus of birds.

“Now watch,” Sotiris whispers into his ear, pointing down the street. Maneker follows his outstretched finger to see the spectral shapes of two men sauntering away from the harbour, arms around one another’s shoulders. It is them.

“The future is seen in this way,” the figment of Maneker’s imagination that is Sotiris says at his side, a thunderous ovation from the machines almost drowning his words. “Go to the Old World and—I promise—they will show you how.”

Maneker realises he and Sotiris are already moving down the street, fulfilling the prophecy he’d witnessed only a few seconds before.

He puts his arm around his friend’s shoulder, something telling him then that this would be the very last time he’d ever see poor Sotiris alive.

“Where are you?” Maneker asks, without much hope.

To his surprise, Sotiris hesitates beneath the shade of an awning, seemingly lost for words. “I’ve honestly no idea.”

PROPOSAL

Gliese, under Maneker’s orders, closed her seas, the whisperer of the Incantation falling silent. What remained of the armada that had helped them—three hundred or so Jurlumticular ships and a slew of smaller, doddery wooden Prism craft—surrounded the world as best they could, floating in low orbit over the brilliantine continents of the outer shell, while the Satrap Alfieri’s gunships patrolled the Vaulted Land’s outer territories and moons. A host of Immortals that had been hiding from the new regime had come slowly out of the woodwork, hearing that Maneker had taken the world. Together they dispatched Bilocating messengers across the Firmament and Investiture, calling for any Amaranthine loyal to the old Law of Succession to return to Gliese. Already the first were arriving, a number of Immortals who had, until then, resigned themselves to exile among the friendlier Prism.

Hot on their heels came the rumours regarding the self-styled Pifoon Luminary Berzelius and his annexation of Cancri, having hoisted his banners upon the outermost Vaulted Land and moved his fleets into position, ready to snatch the rest of the Firmament from under the Amaranthines’ noses. Maneker, too tired to think, had chosen rest, deferring his response until the arrival of their remaining allies, at which point something might at last be done.

Maneker swung the pendant tiredly before his eyes, marvelling at what they’d managed to do with the design of the Shell in such a short space of time. The little golden thing was barely larger than a thumbnail. Back and forth it swung, lulling him. He had a thought and brought it hesitantly to his nose, trying to scent some trace of the Long-Life’s decaying presence.

Elise, Satrap of Port Elsbet, watched him from her chair, ostensibly a prisoner.

“Do you think he’ll come back?”

Maneker took a deep breath. The humid Gliese air had drained the last of his energy. “No. We won’t see him again.”

Like a lightning bolt, he has been discharged to follow his course, Maneker thought, his path ionized before him.

Maneker gazed across the chamber at Elise. They had been friends, once. Now, in return for the whereabouts of the last of the Devout, he had decided to grant Elise her freedom. Of the other Amaranthine, Downfield, her partner in crime, was nowhere to be found, and Maneker believed Elise when she said she had no idea where he was. Nerida, blonde and supercilious, they had found dead in the Foundry, a victim of the chaos.

“And you swear you do not know what became of Sotiris?” he asked, pausing the pendant’s swing and collecting it in his palm.

“On my life,” she said. “He was crowned, and then we left. It is not inconceivable that he stayed on the Old World.”

Maneker slipped the pendant into his pocket, the dream’s coffee aroma still lingering in his nostrils, the exhalation of the tide loud in his ears.

There came a memory of being born. They took me somewhere, a place with walls of beaten gold called the Sea Hall, where the boom of waves echoed within mighty chambers. I remembered through Hui Neng’s eyes, seeing the relief map of the Firmament extended majestically across the dome’s high interior. The map was much larger, this being the time of Decadence, four thousand years before, and encompassed all the realms now occupied by the Prism. That day perhaps marked the zenith of the Amaranthine, a strange terminal lucidity that lasted barely five hundred years before their fortunes, lands and minds dwindled almost to nothing.

There was my body: a folded, translucent diamond, suspended within a listening bowl. Thirty thousand Amaranthine looked on from their amphitheatre of seats, an ocean of colourful frills and gems, rising to stand at a man’s approach.

The Emperor Jacob, resplendent in scarlet, a train of gown trailing across the chamber behind him, raised his hand. When he reached me, he opened his arms, embracing the sensory casing. I remembered then a feeling of such warmth and comfort that it seemed as if all my hardships were at an end. And something more, the suggestion of a future already seen.

The applause, up until then the loudest sound I had ever heard, was swiftly followed by a week of questioning, all thirty thousand allowed their say. I remembered enjoying the tests, pleased to be of service, pleased to make them proud.

When the week was over, the Amaranthine filed out, many no doubt preparing for long voyages home. Jacob, followed distantly by a group of silent Amaranthine, came and sat with me. Among their number I now recognised Maneker, looking down his long nose at me as if he’d never seen anything so repugnant in his life.

“We are taking you home now, Perception. Would you like that?”

Oh yes, I said. A home, just for me.

The memories, patched together to obscure whatever travelling I made, suddenly reveal the space I inhabited for so many thousands of years.

I pause then, frightened to go on. It was here that I was killed.

Perception walked the continent as a man, stumbling through jungles and streams, sleeping in Amaranthine castles secreted throughout the rainforest. His healed lung still ached, the cold morning air burning as it rushed in, but with the pain came a new clarity, a new immediacy that focused the Spirit’s mind.

The memory of inhabiting the dead Pifoon sometimes haunted Perception at nights; a horrifying pain that nothing alive would ever experience for long. Close on its heels came the patchwork memories belonging to the man the Spirit had inhabited, this Trang Zen Hui Neng, born in the high wine country of Dalat, slain deep inside the mantle of a far-off world.

He—now sure of his pronoun—wandered and thought and experienced life as a fleshling being, surrounded by the deep moss green of the rainforests, understanding that there were no colours without eyes to see. He licked his wounds and wondered what in the world he was going to do next.

Percy decided he was ready to return when he had circled the sea and came back within sight of Maneker’s fortress, spotting the Epsilon perched like a stranded fish among its spires.

Lycaste awoke, head throbbing, in the Epsilon’s toilet. Snuggled in his arms were a couple of dozing Oxel, their slender white ribs rising and falling. More snored inside nests of moist, dirty bedding that dangled from the bulkhead like hanging flowerpots.

He winced, acclimatising himself to the pain and the smell. His tongue and teeth tasted nothing like the sweet Amaranthine wines they’d all drunk the night before; only the alcohol remained, a sludge settled in his throat and belly, fuming from his nostrils. A cool breeze tickled his ears, blowing in from the open hangar, and he stuck his head tentatively out of the toilet to see the jungles stretching away into the morning. Lycaste spat, depositing the sleeping Oxel and climbing to his feet. At the hangar entrance, he leaned and pissed a breeze-whipped spray into the morning air, his bloodshot eyes rolling up to the roof of Gliese and following the patterns of its continents, only one thing on his mind. It was the only thing he’d thought of all night.

Aaron and he: they shared the same eyes.

Of course they were nothing alike: Lacaille—the body Aaron had inhabited, at the last—were narrow and tropical-hued, epicanthic folds slanting them prettily at the edges. Quite different from the darkly bovine eyes of a Melius. And yet Lycaste had never met or seen anyone with whom he had shared such a reaction, as if both were looking into a mirror. He knew the Long-Life had seen it, too, remembering the fascination that had crossed the Lacaille’s dead face.

You.

The voice from Great Solob breathed in with the wind as Lycaste buttoned himself up, staggering back a little so he could sit on a broken honey box and look out over the jungle. Perhaps it was as simple as that: he’d been mistaken for someone else. Not in outward physical appearance—maybe that didn’t matter. But someone had recognised his soul.

The screech of parrots startled him out of his thoughts. Lycaste peered down through the trees, spotting a naked Amaranthine-shaped man strolling along the sandflats at the river’s edge, his calves caked with mud. The person must have seen him sitting in the shade of the hangar and waved happily as he ran up the hillside to the castle gate.

Lycaste went to the hatchway beneath the flight deck, flipping the switches on the lightwires and wincing as they glowed into life. He unwound the lock and heaved the double doors open, the scent of damp rainforest wafting in.

“Hello, Lycaste.”

The Amaranthine Trang Hui Neng’s usually tan face was a livid pink, flushed from exertion and the strange fever of reanimation. Sweat dribbled from the tip of his pert little nose. His bright eyes did not blink.

Perception breathed noisily through his mouth as he stumbled in, reeking of sweat. Lycaste followed him into the hangar, unsure. After a moment, it dawned on him that being clothed in the presence of nudity made him uncomfortable.

“I like to run,” Percy said as he dumped himself heavily into Maneker’s chair. He cleared his throat noisily and turned his head this way and that, as if seeing the inside of the ship for the first time, then swivelled owlishly to look at Lycaste. “I like to ruuuuuun!” He broke into awkward, broken song, clearly relishing the acoustics of the space. Lycaste squeezed his eyes shut, head pounding.

Percy looked Lycaste over curiously. “What’s the matter? Are you tired?”

Lycaste shook his head, closing his eyes again and leaning back. “I think I drank too much.”

“Drink!” Perception cried, his strange new voice reverberating around the hangar. “Of course! I still have to try that.”

He gritted his teeth. “Too loud, Percy.”

“Sorry, sorry.” The Amaranthine held up his hands, waggling his fingers, the inch-wide hole in his right palm reminding Lycaste suddenly of Aaron’s disappearance. “Wouldn’t work, anyway, I forgot.” Lycaste had covered his eyes. “What?”

“Amaranthine can’t get drunk. Drunky-drunk druuunk.” He was like a child, experimenting with echoes.

“Shhh,” Lycaste soothed, hoping Perception would let him go back to bed.

“He has no body hair, you know,” Percy whispered, lifting a leg helpfully in demonstration. “It must have rubbed off over time.” Lycaste exhaled, nodding.

“By the way,” Percy said, pointing between his legs, “this . . . thing—”

Lycaste shook his head. “I can’t do this.”

“All right. Another time. Another tiiiiiiime.” He brightened. “Would you like a hug?”

Lycaste stared at him between sips of water from the bucket. Hui Neng’s voice was higher than most Amaranthine, nothing like the deep reverberations that Perception had spoken in their heads. Lycaste wondered if he’d ever get used to it. He missed the invisible Percy more and more.

Percy flexed his arms, revealing the shrapnel scars that had exploded around the original wound in the man’s chest, and Lycaste’s eyes strayed to that scattering of deep pink craters where a number of unevenly sized bolts had pierced his lung. He looked back into Percy’s stolen eyes, remembering that this was someone else’s corpse. A wave of nausea swept over Lycaste. He had taken his fill of water and now felt profoundly sick. “Can I go to bed?”

Perception leaned gravely forward, twining his fingers into unusual knots. “I’m sorry if I appear . . . changed, Lycaste. I inhabit a rigid structure now. This man’s brain was on the very verge of madness”—he looked away, thinking at apparently normal speeds—“perhaps four, five months from showing the first signs.” He brightened. “But I cleaned it out, and now it’s better.”

“You fixed the Amaranthine madness?” Lycaste asked, his sickness temporarily forgotten.

“I fixed Trang’s. And I know what to look for now, should Maneker want help.”

“I know he worries.”

They sat in pregnant silence for a moment.

“I know how to Bilocate, too,” Percy said.

Lycaste looked at him sleepily.

“I can take you home, if you like.”

Later that morning, the two of them sunbathing on the Epsilon’s fuselage, Lycaste turned to him.

“So we could be back there now? Right now?”

Percy lay motionless, his eyes closed. “I’m not that good.” He turned and squinted at Lycaste. “Ten seconds, perhaps?”

Lycaste shook his head, beginning to laugh. Perception peered at him, shading his eyes, and smiled.

“I can take all of us, and the ship.”

Lycaste wiped his eyes, smiling. “Maneker won’t want to go.”

“No. But you would?”

Lycaste raised one of his long arms to block the sun, turning to Percy and looking at him through the shade. “I don’t know.”

“You’re scared to go back?”

Lycaste frowned. “No. I’m—” He sat up, knowing what Percy had said was true. “I don’t know if I’m ready.”

“You like it here, with the Oxel.”

He nodded, realising that he did, very much. “Even the food doesn’t taste so bad any more.”

They waved as some of the little Prism came wandering out onto the dazzling fuselage and sprawled down next to them. The ship sizzled like a frying pan, painting their view of the landscape with a shimmer of heat.

“This is very nice,” Percy said. Lycaste noticed how his livid skin had begun to peel.

“Nothing like as hot as the Tenth,” said Lycaste, still reeling from the notion that he could go, that he could be there, whenever he liked. He tried to count the days since he’d last seen his home and suddenly felt a sharp spike of longing that drove into his heart.

“All right,” he said to Percy. “Let’s go. Whenever you’re ready.” He looked at the man, suddenly desperate, tears stinging his eyes. “Please take me home.”

NAPP

Dracunctus II was remembered on the Old World as a king of physical, brooding presence. In his reign of ten short years, the Melius ruler of the First and its colonial Provinces had built a reputation as an exceptional if stern statesman, appearing to stand a head taller than his eight and a half feet even in the presence of giant Jalan guests, with whom he had begun the first tentative negotiations towards a peace between East and West, and he was known to reduce delicate Westerling ambassadors to tears.

From an early age, Dracunctus had found himself to be fabulously talented in the arts, engraving great books of drawings and having them sent to the Academy of Tripol across the sea, as well as composing pieces of music that became recognisable across the First and Second. During his reign, the Provinces enjoyed their first years of peace in a generation, and a natural aptitude for the movement of money allowed Dracunctus to make his kingdom—until then a debauched, sybaritic place, always operating at a shameful loss—prosperous for the first time since its formation. It was under his reign that the First became richer than its sister Province, the Second, persuading ancient, noble lines to bend the knee.

Part of Dracunctus’s tremendous presence lay in the fact that his voice had aged before its years, cracking to a quiet, husky whisper. For this reason he spoke softly, nurturing his thoughts before he voiced them—something usefully perceived by strangers as a prelude to rage. Incongruences like these had made his subjects uneasy: they didn’t know how to take their king, how to act in his presence, what to say. They stumbled and said something they shouldn’t, or, in the cold light of one of his long gazes, spilled their every secret.

Ghaldezuel could see that slow, expectant patience ticking away inside the Melius now as they spoke, floating together in the belly of the Wilhelmina, the Amaranthine ship of Decadence, as it slipped out of superluminal and into the orbit of Drolgins, the largest of the Vulgar moons. A dimly lit piloting deck dominated the forward battery like the thorax of a spider, its eight legs leading off to vast golden staterooms, each cavernous space suffused with an ancient ultra-gravity that allowed its occupants to float or walk, depending on their wish. It was in the midst of this weightlessness that Cunctus told Ghaldezuel his story, both of them looking out towards the approaching glow of the Vulgar worlds.

But fortune, who until then had looked kindly upon the king, turned her back, and Dracunctus’s rule had ended suddenly one night when a shape blotted the stars outside his window, the prelude to a company of Skylings appearing and dragging him away. The bandits—Cunctus had found out later they were nothing but opportunistic Zelios that had made camp on the Greenmoon—had assumed the Amaranthine would stump up for the king’s release, keeping him chained but in good condition for some time while they waited for negotiations to begin. But the Amaranthine weren’t interested. The Firmament had just crowned a new Emperor: why couldn’t the First (still spooked by the loss of their own) follow their example and do the same?

When the Zelioceti realised what was happening, Dracunctus was taken to the Lacaille moon of Harp-Zalnir and interned with hundreds of other wasted but still potentially useful prisoners, before being moved to the Grand-Mirl, a rusted Lacaille Colossus rented out to lesser breeds.

Ghaldezuel listened in the darkness, imagining the romance of the scene, wondering whether to believe him.

Gradually, Dracunctus had fallen in with the Firmamental Melius there, learning pidgin Unified and rising within their ranks. For ten years he all but ran the prison battleship, and when the time was right, every imprisoned creature there joined together under his rule and stormed the guard house. Wearing the chief jailor’s head on a chain around his neck, Cunctus and his new followers made at once for the fortress of Diezra, on the nearby moon of Nirlume, capturing it in one fell swoop and setting up home there.

A happy age of plundering the nearby ports and moons followed, staving off the attentions of the rapidly weakening Lacaille navy with bribes and outright aggression, and Cunctus came to understand that a return in force to the Old World might now be possible. His family had done nothing for him while he languished in Zelio prisons, and he already possessed more martial power than every Old World ruler combined. But the Amaranthines’ interest in it as their holy centrepiece to the Firmament meant that it would forever remain a point of contention, whereas in the Investiture, forsaken and largely left to its own devices by the Immortals, he could rule absolute. So Cunctus elected to stay.

For forty more years, he and his swelling city-state harassed their corner of the Investiture, spurring mass migrations of panicked Prism inwards to Firmament’s End and outwards to the Never-Never. By then, the Cunctites were powerful enough to consider taking a Vaulted Land and turned their slavering sights on the richest, closest of the baubles: Cancri, lying at the edge of the Firmament and all but undefended, akin to leaving the bulk of your life savings on your doorstep, guarded only by a frowny-faced scarecrow. Cunctus knew that with a few feints and traps (to absorb and annihilate the standing Pifoon armies stationed on the nearby Vaulted Lands) he could take the whole place, crust and innards all, close the orifice seas and batten down for the outrage.

“What could they have done?” he asked Ghaldezuel, not looking at him. “Harangued me, surrounded the place, perhaps. But there is no winter in the Void; a Vaulted Land cannot be starved into submission by sieges.”

Ghaldezuel rubbed his face, nodding, understanding that if it hadn’t been for Cunctus’s arrest after one sloppy job, the Melius might indeed have tried it. It could be done, and—perhaps next year, Cunctus had reasoned—it would be. Aaron the Long-Life had known this, too. It was why, out of all the sixty-eight Firmamental prisons left abandoned by the Amaranthine, he had chosen the Thrasm to be liberated. Had Ghaldezuel kept to his word, the Cunctites and their leader would now be speeding towards the Vaulted Land of Gliese, racing at the bidding of their new spectral master. Instead they went off course, their fleet of marvellous ships curving beneath the Firmament and rising somewhere altogether less glamorous: the weakest spot in the Investiture, ripe to fall. The seat of the Vulgar Empire.

Drolgins hung weightless, a milky marble above the hazed curve of Filgurbirund, its thick wrapping of clouds shimmering like a snowfield. Ghaldezuel’s eyes narrowed, sliding across its surface to the impression of a hollow in the land: there, where the clouds broke into mottled spots of white and blue—the deepest place in the Vulgar kingdom. It was sometimes called the Lair of the Cethegrandes, the Gulp, the Speaking Hole. He knew it as the Bottomless Lagoon of Impio.

“How did you hear of this?” he asked as they floated side by side in the ship’s surreal viewing chamber. “Did your witch tell you?”

Cunctus cleared his throat, having found the Lacaille language taxing over time. It used too much phlegm. “Her Spirits, yes.”

“But how could they know?”

“They follow the trajectories, Ghaldezuel—the motions.” Cunctus turned his watery eyes in Ghaldezuel’s direction. “They follow the movements of every little tiny thing.”

The Vulgar citadel of Napp was owned by Count Murim Andolp, one of the wealthiest Prism in the Investiture. It was a weathered ring of spires and tenements surrounded by wild, thorny forest, its battery of newly emplaced lumen turrets looking out across the valleys of Milkland to the whitish haze of the Hangsea and its dark blotch of lagoon. Unlike the dark, shit-streaked aspect of most Vulgar cities, Napp’s walls were ringed with colour, a darker circlet containing a reddish, newer layer of wall within. The brighter shade was a second city wall, built swiftly with fresh new brick, and rising above the new wall’s turrets and gatehouses was a three-quarter dome that almost blotted out all light in the city. The dome’s bricks contained inside them a chain of precise hollows, checked and rechecked during construction to ensure they never deviated more than a third of an inch from their original design, and polished smooth by ten thousand pairs of little hands.

The city of Napp was a gigantic replica of the Shell.

Count Andolp had ordered its miraculous new architecture built in one short year, and under such a veil of secrecy that not even the Amaranthine—now suitably distracted by the revolts in their own lands—had any idea of its existence. Every one of the enslaved workmen responsible had been sewn into bags and dumped into the lagoon, and Andolp had made sure to burn all trace of the designs afterwards, barring a set of measurements he’d had engraved onto a bracelet he wore on one pudgy wrist. Thankfully for him, even the Shell’s illustrious inventor Corphuso Trohilat had gone missing, and so it finally appeared that Murim Andolp, and only Murim Andolp, possessed the secret of Immortality.

Napp was recently known among other names as the Silent City, for one of the many strange abilities of the Shell was its capacity for trapping sound. A person standing just outside the walls would hear nothing but the wind wailing in off the lagoon, their ears only unclogging as they passed inside. Coupled with the strange absorption of sound, the gigantic hollows also served to trap light (in the same manner as the first incarnation of the Shell, built two decades before). Many that heard rumours of the city half-expected upon arrival to find it invisible, but of course that was not the case. The Shell acted as a Light-Trap, it was true, but only in small quantities. Napp itself couldn’t stop light leaving its walls, but it could make the stuff move very, very slowly. That same indecisive person, standing on the parapet of the old walls and peering in, would see a shambolic ring of thousands of shanties, their occupants all moving at the half-speed of running treacle. To the city’s Vulgar inhabitants, life itself felt slowed down, though their reaction speeds remained unchanged. Wealthy Prism went to stay there for a few days at a time so that they could experience the life-extending effects of slow-motion existence. They ate and drank and fornicated their way through days twice as long as they were supposed to be, secure in the knowledge that within Napp’s walls their souls could never be harmed, and returned unsteadily to life like they’d been asleep a hundred years.

The city’s inhabitants witnessed Cunctus’s arrival in that same painful slow motion, watching a ship the likes of which Napp had never seen before come burning through the clouds above them.

Napp’s lumen turrets erupted into life, filling the sky with puffs of black smoke. The Wilhelmina, glossily nautiloid like the atavistic Chrachen of humanity’s nightmares, dropped smoothly through their defences, jamming and silencing them all at once. The bellows of their last detonations rolled over the valleys, replaced with silence.

By the time Cunctus had breached the walls, hundreds of Andolp’s mercenaries had worked out whom they were shooting at and begun to stand down en masse, Napp’s central turrets falling silent, the news moving slowly before his advance.

Ghaldezuel, encased in gleaming silver armour, strode as if submerged in treacle through the smashed postern gate surrounded by a battalion of long-eared Wulmese mercenaries. His forces had stopped firing some time ago—only a last few desultory bolts still sailed from upper windows—and the remaining hand-to-hand fights were clumsy. People occupied a space they did not appear to and died while they were still standing. A turret bolt left the inner keep in a languid arc, stuttering into a whizz beyond the walls, and silence poured over them.

Ghaldezuel crunched through broken glass, staggering a little as he got used to the sensation of living externally in slow motion while his every sense remained unchanged, then turned and watched for Cunctus. The Melius was at the gate still, talking with his lieutenant, Mumpher. A bright green jet screamed through the air, and when they looked up it was still overhead, twisting as it flew and beginning to bank back over the city.

Sounds, locked within the place and unable to leave, operated here a fraction faster than the light. Ghaldezuel felt everything before he heard it, and heard everything before he saw it. A gasp came from his right, accompanied by the wet patter of blood sprayed across his chin. He twisted painfully slowly, ducking needlessly as he did so. The dead Wulm beside him grinned and hoisted his rifle. A glinting bullet was working its slow way towards him, still about a foot from its target. It drove relentlessly into the flesh beneath the Wulm’s collarbone, peeling away slivers of plate armour, and out through his back, polished a bright, electric red by its passage. Ghaldezuel strode on, head ducked, eyes vigilant. To be stabbed in a place like this would be the cruellest punishment, he imagined—having to watch the blade slip inside you, inch by inch.

Cunctus lumbered alongside, grinning, the rubies still knotted into his yellow beard. Together they followed their mercenaries up some vast white steps crowded with hovels, rising until they could see Andolp’s keep, flame licking from its windows. Bolts, claw bullets and sparkers from the higher reaches still rained down on them like colourful fireworks and ricocheted beautifully across the stone. As far as Ghaldezuel knew, he was still alive, but there was no way of telling who among the invaders were. Cunctus staggered on, glancing away from his destination only when they passed above the walls and came level with the bedraggled spires of the highest tenements. Bodies lay everywhere, crowded around blasted gun emplacements and scattered down the steps. Ghaldezuel looked at their faces as he passed, marvelling once more that their souls were surely still here, ensnared in the hollow chambers of the city walls. His thoughts turned to poor Corphuso, the Shell’s inventor; how fascinated he would have been by this place.

They paused and Cunctus spat, savouring the view from the top of the city. As his slow spit hit the ground, they heard a commotion and glanced towards the keep.

There were scurrying figures up ahead, trapped by the fire blazing in the keep, unable to flee up or down.

Cunctus narrowed his eyes. “Bring them here!”

They watched the little people being rounded up, the squeals reaching them across the distance.

“Quite clever, this place,” Cunctus muttered, a dangling line of drool fluttering from his chin. “Not sure I could stomach living here, though.”

The mercenaries came down the steps, clutching their captives by the ankles; the Vulgar of Drolgins were an inch or two taller than their Filgurbirund relatives, owing to the lighter gravity out here. Cunctus squatted and surveyed them, angling his head so that he could see them upside down. They snivelled and whimpered under his gaze, an assortment of shabbily dressed things clearly disguised with whatever they could find in the hope of escape.

Even Ghaldezuel, who had never seen the count before, spotted the better-fed specimen at the end of the line, his jowls flushed with the inversion of gravity.

Cunctus smiled, signalling for his mercenaries to drop them. “Murim Andolp, as I live and breathe!” he cried. “You are bad at hiding, sir.”

Andolp grunted and climbed to his feet, turning to dash back up the steps.

Cunctus lumbered after him in slow motion. “Have you forgotten me, sir?” he snarled, and grasped the Vulgar by the scruff of the neck. Andolp went limp in the giant’s grip, breathing hard, his roving, wild eyes meeting Ghaldezuel’s before moving on. A golden diadem slipped out of his rags and rolled across the step.

Cunctus winked at Ghaldezuel and, without looking at Andolp again, hurled him over the parapet.

It took a full two minutes for Andolp to fall the seventy feet to the cobbled square. Ghaldezuel, his mouth dry, heard every scream. When at last he struck—a while after the faint, sore-throated shrieks had stopped abruptly—it was with the force of a cannon, spurting blood across the square and decorating the gatehouse.

“What a bleeder!” Cunctus remarked cheerily, peering over the edge. “Come on,” he said, tossing Ghaldezuel the diadem and lumbering up the steps. “Dinner awaits.”

Ghaldezuel glanced back at the remainder of the party, a ragtag assortment of Wulm and Drolgins mercenaries, their plate harness twinkling in the sun. The Threen witch Nazithra, sunburned and helmeted against the light, kept her head bowed as she climbed, the sounds of sobs escaping from her faceplate. As she passed, Ghaldezuel caught her wrist.

“What’s wrong with you?”

The helmet turned his way, dark slits observing him. “Homesick,” she said stuffily, voice muffled by metal. “Missing my friends.”

“Friends?” Ghaldezuel asked. “You mean your Spirits?”

Nazithra turned back to the steps.

“Aren’t there Spirits here you can talk to?” he asked, trying a lopsided smile.

Her helmet swung back to look at him. “He will send us out to the lagoon tomorrow. Come with me and I’ll introduce you.”

Ghaldezuel stared after her as she climbed on, wishing he’d never asked.

BANQUET

Ghaldezuel found himself at the head table, only half-listening to a dozen slurred conversations in the smoke-thickened air around him. Cunctus ate with the gluttonous abandon befitting a giant, spraying huge mouthfuls of chewed meat as he spoke, his head hunched beneath the low ceiling, knees lifting the table from its trestles. The Wulm Mumpher, to his right, puffed a pipe and drank, studiously ignoring Ghaldezuel, the lethargic smoke wrapping them both in elegant, serpentine coils. The Wulm’s clothes had been shot through that day with at least five bullet holes, each miraculously missing his body. A sign of fortune for things to come, Cunctus had proclaimed, apparently forgetting the morning’s thirty casualties.

Ghaldezuel’s eyes slid to the occupants of the other tables. All of them were running and glistening with sweat; the ancient Amaranthine wines they’d brought from the Sepulchre had been heated, for some reason, and everything they ate (in infuriating slow motion) was flavoured with strong local spices. Ghaldezuel spied fried Monkbat stuffed with boiled fish and sluppocks, and plates of glistening white eels from the lagoon. A live thorn leopard—declawed, shaved and specially fattened for Andolp’s table—was tethered beneath the chairs, mouthing toothlessly at some of the mercenaries’ feet, unaware it was living out its final moments. A handful of Vulgar dignitaries spared the same fate as Andolp ate quietly with them, trembling little fingers betraying their anxiety.

As per Cunctus’s initial orders, the telegraph wires out of the city had all been cut without damaging the walls. Napp was now on its own, unreachable by road and uncontactable by the other citadels in the great, wide country of Vrachtmunt. These Vulgar—and the city’s largely indifferent inhabitants—would have no choice but to bed down here in the Immortal city until Cunctus began his push to take more of Drolgins’ countries, opening up his supply routes.

Ghaldezuel looked at the Vulgar people as they talked softly among themselves, their eyes downcast, but he hardly saw them. He was thinking, his mind spinning. Suppose they rebuilt Napp’s Shell-structure around the whole moon? Would there be room for every soul in the world? Would time itself stand still? He was becoming Corphuso, he realised with a snort: an insensate, unhealthy navel-gazer. He turned his attention back to the others, taking a sip from his Cethegrande pearl cup and watching as the leopard was led away for slaughter.

“So tell me, bureaucrats,” Cunctus grunted, leaning forward and jabbing a fork in the direction of the trembling little Vulgar, “what news from the lagoon?”

They glanced at one another, appearing to nominate their most confident speaker.

“Lots of Cethegrande activity, my Lord King Cunctus,” said the Vulgar, “ships sucked down daily. And a champion eaten”—he paused to lick the grease from his fingers—“by a beasty wrapped in chains.”

“Chains?” remarked Cunctus, fingering a lump of meat caught in his beard. He turned his large pink eyes on Ghaldezuel as he spoke. “Where did this happen?”

The Vulgar pointed a trembling finger roughly south-west. “Down by the Lunatic’s castle, at Gulpmouth.”

Cunctus slapped the table, a great languid slam of his open palm that they heard and felt before it came down. Everything on the table wobbled for a considerable amount of time, rolling and spinning.

“You hear that, Ghaldezuel? I told you! That could be my Scallywag!” Cunctus licked his lips, his slithering tongue encountering the piece of trapped meat. “It’s almost as if he knew I was coming.”

“The lagoon, Cunctus,” the witch supplied, posting a chunk of hairy bat flesh through her open faceplate. “It is deep.”

“Yes, the hole,” he said thoughtfully. “You and Ghaldezuel will come out with me tomorrow.”

The witch turned her helmet minutely in Ghaldezuel’s direction.

“Which reminds me,” Cunctus said, wrenching himself laboriously into a stoop. He stared at Ghaldezuel and motioned for him to do the same. A slow, deathly silence descended on the banquet, a hundred bloodshot eyes swivelling.

Cunctus looked at the massed Prism faces, clearing his throat. “I have sent a messenger to Paryam, the absent king of Drolgins, inviting him to capitulate. Tomorrow, with the help of our allies the Lacaille, I will formally ask the three remaining kings of Filgurbirund to decide their allegiance.” He pointed along the table. “I hereby name Ghaldezuel here grand-marshal of my New Investiture. He is free to choose his underlings as he sees fit.”

Ghaldezuel bowed, to a polite clatter of applause. Mumpher’s gaze bored into him, the jealousy palpable through the thick air.

Cunctus took a swig from his cup, his beard dribbling, and extended his hand to the Vulgar bureaucrats. “For now, I have decreed the city of Napp the new centre of the Investiture. It shall enjoy all the prosperities of a capital until Hauberth is mine. How do you like the sound of that?”

They nervously clapped their approval.

“An offering for fortune, Cunctus?” the witch said softly at his side.

A look of sudden delight crossed Cunctus’s features. “Yes!” He singled out the Vulgar who had spoken. “You, come here.”

Ghaldezuel watched as terror filled the Vulgar’s eyes. He glanced at Cunctus, leering at the little person from across the table, and wondered that the Melius had any informants left.

“Come on,” Cunctus said, waiting until the official had climbed awkwardly down from his seat and shuffled behind everyone’s chairs, a dark patch spreading in his britches as he approached his new king.

Cunctus reached down and hoisted the Vulgar into the air for all to see. “I like knowledge,” he said to the room, bouncing the little person like a baby. “I like to make friends. This fellow here—” He frowned and turned to the whimpering Vulgar. “What’s your name?”

“T-Timo,” he stuttered.

“Timo! Excellent! Let Timo here be an example, for he has made me very happy.” Cunctus’s hand wandered into his beard, untangling one of the briolette-cut rubies, which had been tied so tightly into his matted hair that it might have stayed there for years. “Here,” he said, holding it out to Timo. “It’s yours.”

The Vulgar took it gingerly and was released, returning to his seat with the vacant look of a person in shock.

Cunctus sat back down, digging heartily into his dinner once more. “So Timo, my friend,” he said brightly, looking up between mouthfuls, “Andolp the glutton kept a fine table, eh? Did he eat like this every day?”

Timo, still unrecovered and staring at the precious stone in his fingers, glanced hazily at the banquet. “Today was his birthday, Majesty.”

Cunctus stopped chewing, his massive brows creased, eyes lost in shadow. He swallowed and glared at the Vulgar. “His . . . today? His birthday was today?”

Timo nodded and hurriedly stowed the ruby, clearly worried he’d said too much.

Ghaldezuel was entranced to see something like sadness appear in Cunctus’s eyes, remembering that a lot of Melius folk attached particular sentimentality to birthdays. Cunctus stared mournfully at his plate, his mouth hanging open to reveal a ramshackle row of yellow, serrated bottom teeth. “A fellow must always enjoy his birthday,” he muttered. His gaze met Ghaldezuel’s. “We must eat up, clear our plates.” He took a sip of his steaming wine. “This feast must be enjoyed. And you know I hate waste.”

*

The clouds were racing in dark streaks over the city. Ghaldezuel pulled the collar of his cloak up and stepped out into the twilight, following the path of the walls. Down in the square, Andolp’s body still lay, a black smear, untouched; Cunctus had publicly forbidden anyone from disturbing the remains.

The stench of the place wasn’t so bad up here, whipped skywards and carried away by the racing wind. Hovels grew like fungus around the mismatched crenellations of the walls; simple dwellings like spun wasps’ nests made from mud and filth and chewed paper. These were dark, having been cleared after they’d taken the city, but further out across the great amphitheatre of tatty buildings, Ghaldezuel could see lights kindling in the blue. He looked off towards the lagoon, dark now, perceiving a faint light on its far shore—the place Cunctus had mentioned, the Lunatic’s castle. He sniffed the wind. The twilight felt weighted with something, as if the souls of every Prism that had died here hung heavily the air.

Corphuso, never far from his thoughts these days, appeared once more in his mind’s eye. Corphuso, who had run screaming into the Long-Life’s robes and disappeared, never to be seen again. Somewhere, like all the souls in this shitpot city, the inventor still lingered. Ghaldezuel gazed across the distance for a while, thinking on the witch’s prediction.

She was wrong about him, he was sure. Spirits or no Spirits, Ghaldezuel was certain that his role here was done. Soon all of Drolgins would belong to Cunctus, Filgurbirund would go to the Lacaille, and the Vulgar, barred from the New Investiture, would dwindle into obscurity. He’d played his small move, a culmination of obscurely arranged pieces, and all would be well at last in the grand, wide world.

“I’ll see you soon,” he whispered into the falling night, his thoughts turning elsewhere, planting a kiss in the palm of his hand and blowing it to the turgid wind. “And then we’ll get as far away as we can, just you and me.”

He straightened, an old wariness tingling the fingers nearest his holster. Someone, a deeper shadow on the wall, had followed him out and waited for him near the keep.

Ghaldezuel trudged back up towards the shadow, his lumen pistol heavy on his hip. He’d met plenty of the Investiture’s finest deadbeats in his time and they were a deluded bunch, arrogant with a sense of their own importance. To ignore them only increased their unpredictability; instead, one had to ease towards them, relax them into thinking they had power, and the trap was sprung.

He came upon the shadow, slowing until it revealed itself to be the unmistakably squat, ugly figure of Mumpher. Ghaldezuel should have guessed from the pipe smoke that wreathed the wall. As he approached, Mumpher stuck out a foot to trip him up and Ghaldezuel stopped.

They stood in silence, the wind toying with their hair, looking at one another. Ghaldezuel could see by the Wulm’s drunken, churlish expression that he wanted a fight. Ghaldezuel had expected as much, knowing that Mumpher needed a way to win back Cunctus’s sympathies. The Wulm had fought his way up through the gang’s ranks, his extreme violence and unwavering loyalty endearing him to Cunctus over the years. And now, Ghaldezuel knew, he had taken the role that Mumpher thought was rightfully his.

He walked on, Mumpher falling into step behind him.

“I know about your darling coming to stay,” he said quietly.

Ghaldezuel turned with the speed of a striking snake, snaring the Wulm’s ear in his grasp. He tugged Mumpher swiftly to the edge of the wall and pinned his arm behind him. Cunctus would be livid if he could see them now, but Ghaldezuel didn’t want to let go just yet. He could feel the muscular Wulm tensing beneath him, a dangerous creature in a box; the longer you imprisoned it, the angrier it got.

“Mention her again,” Ghaldezuel whispered, pressing Mumpher hard against the wall. “Please. You’ve had a lot to drink. Cunctus will think you slipped and fell.”

The Wulm grunted but kept his mouth shut. Ghaldezuel released his grip and shoved him hard to the ground, striding back towards the keep.

OUTPOST

The Humaling star: a beautiful, terrible beacon. Its planets were hot, Harald read; porous worlds of sandstone caves and black subterranean jungle, places where Prism life had all but stood still. The first travellers there were tail-end Hiomans, the last to look much like the Amaranthine and the first to get lost, vanishing from the theatre of history nine thousand years ago. Over time, Humaling was discovered again, and with it came tales of something terrible there, something that might once have looked like men.

Harald woke in what felt like the dead of night, fumbling for his plastic candle, moving softly through narrow wooden hallways and casting his gaze up into the darkness, where enterprising little Prism folk had built a network of bunks among the linen closets. The grumbling of a hundred little snores filtered down from the makeshift beds. Harald continued on, dodging a trickle of piss aimed at a pot some way to his left, following the scent of greasy frying.

The lonely outpost Lorena, Fortress of the Small Hours, had been built hundreds of years ago at the bottom of the great Lorena Well—a weathered sinkhole too deep for anything but a single broad shaft of sunlight to reach—to accommodate the moon Wherla’s few travellers. It was a squat, windowless wooden tower surrounded by a moat, trenches and a straggly underground forest of anaemic pines, accessible only through a hatch in the roof. Harald had come here on the recommendation of a lonely few he’d met on another Humaling moon, Pearn, in search of the ultimate sensation.

It was known as Uyua in the Wulmese fourth dialect, and as far as Harald could tell, there was no direct translation into Amaranthine or any other Prism tongue. Cosiness came close, he thought as he wandered the warm, dark corridors, or possibly snug. But what really separated the quality of Uyua from these Unified words was that to achieve it, one had to experience a little shiver of fright, a frisson of danger. He knew the sensation well—watch the rain come down from the window of a warm, cosy house and you were a little of the way there; watch it come down with the window open, feeling the chill of the night wind, and you were closer still. Now suppose a lion circled the house, its breath misting in the downpour, gazing up at you. That was Uyua. And that was why Harald, on holiday now for the first time in decades, had come.

For the danger was very real here. Audible through the thick walls of the place were sounds, sounds that at first might be mistaken for a moaning night breeze. Harald paused and pressed his ear to the wood panelling, closing his eyes against the candlelight. The walls themselves were hollow, packed with wool and sawdust and ruined rubber Voidsuits. The braver visitors (either desirous of the full experience or simply because the house was too full) slept in these insulated hollows, stringing up their hammocks among a forest of bent old nails. He listened now, trying to block out the grumbling snorts.

There it was. He tried to imagine them as he pressed his ear to the wood, but found he couldn’t. Harald subdued a shiver, concentrating, savouring. The stink of fried fat enveloped him in the warm darkness, the wonderous dichotomy of Uyua soaking him from head to toe. They saw the bodies of lost Prism sometimes, when they shone their lamps out into the night. Harald heard they were always found daintily peeled, missing every single bone. Your soul lived in your bones, some Prism thought.

He detached himself from the wall and made his way deeper into the tower, stepping over wads of bedding and slumbering little people. Following his nose through the ever-increasing pall of hanging smoke and charred meat brought him eventually into the pantry, where Old Mutte and his daughter fixed the meals.

Harald stood in the shadows, black-skinned and almost invisible, glad to have made it here. In the light of twin crackling fires sat the Lorena’s resident insomniacs; Investiture folk up playing games and strumming instruments, a bearded Oxel on its second bottle, head nodding. None paid him much attention—he wasn’t the first Immortal to come calling at the Fort of the Small Hours. Some Amaranthine brought gifts, thinking they could buy their friends out here. Harald never bothered. Respect was a universal thing, he found; what didn’t work in the schoolyard wouldn’t work in the Investiture. What he did bring was news: Prism people hoarded news like gold and traded openly once they got something they liked.

He nodded to those at the table—a great slab of woodwormy door set on trestles—and sat down, accepting a plastic jug of boiling water from Old Mutte and wrapping his gloved hands around it. Some hairy, rather colourful Ringums eyed him with curiosity—perhaps the Amaranthine usually kept to themselves here, listening and shivering from the comfort of their private rooms—while the pupils of a pair of unseen eyes, reflective chrome in the firelight, watched him from the dark. Harald took a sip of his plastic-flavoured water and tried to follow the game of Topple going on to his right. They looked to be playing for almost anything: cubes of fried meat, a rusted tuning knob, even a cracked Old World pendant with some Melius’s faded portrait gurning from the locket. Harald peered at it surreptitiously—there was Threheng script stamped around its setting. What in the world was it doing all the way out here?

He brought out a little book he’d been struggling with, eavesdropping on the several languages being spoken around the table. He knew them all to greater and lesser degrees but would only speak the house language, Vulgar, if anyone engaged him. People didn’t like to know you’d been listening.

The New Investiture, as usual, dominated the conversation. Harald pored over his book, hardly reading a thing, noting the hush that descended around the table as others stopped to listen in.

“I’ve got fat in here. Good food.”

“You were always fat.”

“It’s the fear of Uyua. Makes you eat.”

“Whatever you say.” A pause as another object—a broken comb, missing all but one tooth—was added to the pile.

“Lacaille agents on Filgurbirund now, I hear. Won’t be long.”

“Mmm.”

“The Vulgar’ll never accept their terms. Too proud.”

“Hmm.”

“So stuffy, so full of themselves.”

Harald almost nodded, before checking himself. The Vulgar thought themselves eminently superior to their cousins the Lacaille, though in truth few others saw it that way. Scarcity had bred a new creativity into the Lacaille people, and their moons were not only safer but also more enlightened than those of their relatives from Filgurbirund.

There were dozens of theories as to why the Lacaille had risen so suddenly from obscurity, almost sacking the powerful, Firmament-favoured Vulgar Empire in the space of a month, killing one of its four kings and taking another hostage. The prevailing talk was that it could only have been a lull in Amaranthine surveillance—the Immortals’ power play had already created some kind of schism, culminating in the destruction of Virginis—but other suggestions abounded, the most outlandish of them claiming that creatures from beyond the Never-Never (things truly unrelated to hominin life) had chosen this moment to influence things in the mammalian domain, building up the Lacaille for their own nefarious ends. A fascination with the notion of truly alien life had endured in the Firmament and Investiture, despite—or indeed as a result of—thousands of years of disappointed searching. Another theory Harald had heard was that some Lacaille—Eoziel himself, perhaps—had been gifted with Immortality and joined the Firmament, thereby inducting his empire into, and merging with, that of the Amaranthine. It would further explain Cunctus’s involvement, but not why the Pifoon held sway there now. Others (mostly the Lacaille he had met) blamed it on the Vulgar themselves, saying they had grown too greedy, like the Amaranthine of old, and that the Immortals, seeing their old mistakes being repeated in their progeny, had struck them down before they could proliferate further. Another (this one propagated by the Vulgar themselves) was that the Vulgar must have discovered some Amaranthine conspiracy and been purged for it, leading to wild speculation over what that secret could possibly be.

Harald knew that the answers, when they came, were often quite simple. It could be something as small as a family connection, a disgruntled person in some persuasive position, the movement of money— perhaps taking advantage of the Amaranthines’ apparent indifference regarding taxation during the change of regime—driving a swell of unforeseen action before it, and another in its wake.

“And Andolp of Drolgins is dead, I suppose you heard. Cunctus the Apostate killed him then and there, throttled him with his bare hands.”

Harald’s eyes froze on the words.

“I heard he was pushed from a window.”

“Well, whatever. Cunctus’ll set his sights on Filgurbirund next, and all hell will break loose.”

“If he can ally himself with the Lacaille.”

“Of course he will. They’d be fools to ignore him now. It’ll all be over by Firmamental summer.”

“Good! Let ’em shake the place up if they want. The Vulgar were sore winners anyway. The Firmament spoiled them, just like the Pifoon.”

Harald could feel eyes on him as they spoke. He concentrated hard on his book.

“I think this one here reads the same page twice, no?”

“You think he listens in?”

The show-off in him took the bait and Harald glanced up from his book at last, meeting their many eyes. “I’ve been reading the same page all year, actually.” He brandished the little jewelled book. “Always a mistake, packing the classics.”

They stared at him. A few Ringum Lacaille banned from enlistment, those strange, colourful specimens and the drunk little Oxel. Even leprous Old Mutte had paused by his pan, observing the situation warily.

“It’s not nice to eavesdrop,” said one of the Lacaille finally, this time in house Vulgar. He turned back to his companion and their game of odds and ends.

Silence, but for the snores that percolated through the dark, the popping of water pipes expanding, wind and hail clattering against the treated walls. The unknown eyes that regarded Harald from the shadows had a smile in them now. They came forward, revealing that they were set into the head of a fat, long-nosed half-Zelio. Harald must have looked surprised—the Zelioceti were one of the last breeds he’d expected to be sharing a guesthouse with—and the fellow broke into a wide grin.

“Come now, Jaczlam,” the Zelio said, addressing the surly Lacaille, “it’s not every day you get to chat with an Amaranthine. Let us be polite—his people are down on their luck.”

Harald nodded a bow. “In that you are right, Sir Zelio.”

“Primaleon, please.”

“Harry,” he replied, reaching across the table and taking the Zelio’s hand. Interesting name. Probably picked it himself.

“So, Harry,” Primaleon continued, speaking clear and fluent Vulgar, “what brings you here?”

He gestured to the walls, lost in shadow around them, and mimed a playful shiver. “Uyua, of course. I’m enjoying it so far. Yourself?”

“The very same. We even went outside the other night, didn’t we, Jacz?”

Jaczlam made no sign of having heard. He’d just won the tuning knob from his companion.

“Yes,” continued Primaleon, “took a couple of spring guns and sat there for a while, at the edge of the moat.” His eyes narrowed, his enormous red nostrils dilating. “We could hear them sniffing for us, searching the dark, trying to cross the moat. How they screamed when they caught the whiff . . .”

“You’re a braver fellow than I,” said Harald, sipping his water and allowing Mutte to top it up. “Have you come far?”

Primaleon bared needle-sharp teeth, his strange eyes bright. “Do you mean, have I come from the Zelio-worlds? No. I was born in Baln. Lacaille citizen.”

Harald shrugged. “You must get asked that a lot, my apologies.”

“Not at all. It must be immeasurably harder for one such as yourself out here.” He looked thoughtful for a moment, an odd expression on the famously inhuman Zelioceti face. “Everyone wants something in the Investiture, don’t you find?” He gestured to the snoring Oxel, the bottle still propped in its hand. “The little ones want whatever they can get—a morsel of food, some Truppins.” He cleared his throat, gesturing at the walls. “Then there’s the landowners, those with a little education, who want something less tangible: a miracle, perhaps, or to show you off, impress their friends.” He stared at Harald, brows raised. Harald shrugged, his face friendly, neutral, trying to work the fellow out. Tangible, even in Vulgar, was a sophisticated sort of word.

Primaleon’s disconcerting eyes never left Harald’s. “And then, then you’ve got the ones at the top. And maybe you know what they want as soon as looking at them?”

Harald grinned. “The secret itself.” He pursed his lips, peripherally aware that all but the snoozing Oxel were hanging on their every word. “Is that what you want, Primaleon? To know the secret? To live for ever?”

Primaleon’s eyes held his for a while, blinked a few times and flashed away.

“What I really like is money, Sire Harry. Specifically watching its movements around the worlds.”

Harald finished his sour water. “Oh yes?”

Primaleon flashed his teeth again. They were mostly gum. “Oh yes. If you watch its motions long enough you can determine all sorts of secret things. Why the Lacaille here, for instance”—he pointed once more at Jaczlam—”have risen so swiftly to prominence, while the Vulgar all but disappeared off the stage.”

Harald studied Primaleon. He looked to be about forty, quite old for a Zelioceti, and yet appeared to be in good health. The greyish skin around his bulbous, dangly red nose was creased with smile lines, and his bristly blond eyebrows were greying at their tips. He wore a cassock of fine blue velvet, trimmed around the collar with black fur. There were rich ones out there—their industry was legendary—but they were few and far between. No, Harald thought, somewhere in Primaleon’s luggage one would almost certainly find the pointed black cap of a banker.

Old Mutte chose that moment to serve up dinner, dumping a battered pot of simmering, greasy chops in the centre of the table. He handed Harald a cup of steamed wine and a bowl of boiled sweets. Harald sampled the wine, still looking at Primaleon. He smacked his lips and smiled; it was strong and sweet, drizzled with Port Bonifacio honey.

The Oxel awoke and dug in, joined by the others. Primaleon toasted Harald silently in the Amaranthine fashion and worked his way delicately through a meaty bone. Harald sat back in his chair, watching Old Mutte stoking the fires.

The Zelioceti Electrums—the outer Investiture banks—looked after the fortunes of kings and princes from all corners of the Prism worlds. Their services were prized because they dealt only in Zelio-coins, a currency not dependent on the turbulent fortunes of the Investiture, being cut from flattened pieces of Quetterel-made glass, a substance highly prized by the Amaranthine for its beauty and relative scarcity, always redeemable for an excellent price on the outskirts of the Firmament. Few seemed to mind much that it was manufactured from the compacted ash of the Quetterel’s flayed victims, and even some of the Immortal, Harald had heard tell, stashed their money in the Zelioceti’s various banks before the crowning of each Firmamental Emperor, just in case.

Having gorged themselves, the Prism sat back in their chairs, reeking feet planted on the table. The Oxel went over to join the game, supplying his fork as a token and having it snatched back by Old Mutte. Harald pushed his own chair out a little, spying a footstool near the fire, and dealt his set of bone cards for anyone wishing to play. Only Primaleon took him up on the offer, waddling out of the shadows to reveal an extremely dumpy lower body, as if he were afflicted by water retention. The Zelioceti plonked himself down by the footstool and shuffled the cards in the messy Lacaille way, taking three at random and turning them over. It became quite clear to Harald after a few minutes that he was playing an experienced Fidget dealer, and to his dismay lost card after card to Primaleon’s pile. He met the Zelio’s twinkling eyes as they paused to sip from their respective drinks, then coughed, flipping one of Primaleon’s cards from a distance with nothing but a flick of his mind.

Primaleon stared at the flipped card with comical astonishment, then rubbed his hands together and blew as hard as he could into the pile, scattering them. Harald caught and flipped each one with just his gaze, settling them instantly in a neat triangular tower on the footstool. The Zelioceti clasped his hands in wonderment, some cautious applause erupting around them. Old Mutte topped up Harald’s wine, clapping him on the back.

“More!” squealed the drunken Oxel. “More magic!”

Harald sipped his wine and gazed around the room, spying some of the house instruments. As he looked at it, the stringboard in the corner began to play, thrumming out a crude little tune. Even Jaczlam clapped sullenly along to the old Vulgar shanty song, and a chair thumped up and down apparently under its own power, drumming out a beat.

“Jaczlam,” Harald said, “mind if I borrow a token or two?”

“Go on,” the Lacaille said, trying to hide his smile.

Immediately the tuning knob lifted into the air and spun away. It twirled over to the second, smaller stringboard, picking out an accelerando accompaniment to the drumming.

Soon he had the Oxel dancing on the table. Jacz and his friend were clapping and singing.

Enraged voices started up from the adjoining rooms, fists banging on the walls. Mutte, who had been enjoying himself and clapping along, suddenly wrung his hands and looked at Harald apologetically. Harald mimed an oops and the various implements came swirling back onto the table, arranging themselves neatly into a star formation.

A final round of applause and Jaczlam and the others sloped back to their bunks and hammocks. After a pause to drain the last of his Junip, Primaleon rose and shook Harald’s hand once more, retiring into the darkness. Harald sucked on his pipe as he watched the Zelioceti disappear down the hall. They’d all left him a present of their scent—the thick stink of sweat, halitosis and sulfuric little farts that lingered in the cracked wooden benches—but Harald’s fragrant pipe smoke soon overlaid the stench; wherever he had his pipe, he was home.

The fires were burning low. Harald, remembering that it was a house rule to keep them stoked, bent to take another few logs from the scuttle. Outside, in the dark, the wind sang into the building’s crannies, rattling something persistently until a grumbling presence somewhere slammed it shut. Harald looked calmly up into the black rafters of the kitchen, observing eyes spying on him from a papery nest built into one of the beams, and moved quietly back to his chair by the fire, a comfortable place to mull over what he might do with the remainder of his life.

Creeping back to his bunk, he saw a small light at the end of the hall, the unmistakable humped figure of a Zelioceti sitting silhouetted against it. Harald cocked his head, sidling closer to the strange fellow’s bunk. Primaleon was sitting up in bed, rummaging through his bags. A weak, spluttering lantern painted them both in greenish gold.

“Good evening.”

“Is it evening?” Primaleon asked, scratching the tip of his drooping nose. He put the bag aside and looked expectantly at Harald.

Harald nodded—he could tell the time without an aid, simply feeling it in his bones. Prism clocks weren’t much use anyway; even the expensive ones were mostly fakes that simply spun around, their uselessness only noticed after a few hours. “It’s about nine, house time.”

“You just know, don’t you?” Primaleon asked wonderingly, studying him. “What I’d pay for a drop of your abilities, could they be distilled.”

“It was tried, once, long ago,” Harald said, speculating on the Zelio’s wealth. “The Venerable Felicidad, during the brewing of his madness, raided the statuary tombs of Vaulted Ectries and liquified their contents. I suppose he wanted to supplement his own powers.” He glanced at Primaleon, pleased to see the look of disgust on his face. “The Emperor must have drunk the bodies of a dozen Amaranthine before he was caught and sent to the Utopia, and I daresay some of his honoured Prism also had a taste.”

The Zelioceti’s eyebrows lifted.

“Of course, it didn’t work,” Harald added swiftly. “You can’t catch Immortality like a disease.”

Primaleon shook his head with something like wonder, then smirked. “I’d have tried some.”

Harald looked at him for a while, sensing the Prism’s slight embarrassment under his gaze. “You’re one of the Electrum bankers aren’t you?”

Primaleon sighed and pulled out some Lacaille-style books: square piles of pages bound with twine. “I carry my work with me, wherever I go.”

Harald took in their dog-eared, abraded look, glancing into the open bag. There were dozens.

“Have you ever entertained the notion of clairvoyance, Harry?” Primaleon asked, his monkeyish eyes glittering.

Harald shrugged. “The future comes along soon enough.” He was disappointed; he’d expected more from the fellow. The rich ones always tried to sell you something, invite you into some scheme.

Primaleon muttered under his breath, sorting through the books. While he did so, Harald’s eyes travelled back to the bag, spying what looked like a small Cethegrande pearl on top of the books. Primaleon found what he was looking for, unknotting the twine around one of the books and opening it up. He licked his finger and riffled through the pages, dragging his nail down until it met a column of scrawled Zelio figures. “Do you see these numbers?”

He peered at them, nodding.

“This is you.”

Harald smiled, indulging him.

Primaleon flipped deeper into the book, unperturbed by Harald’s expression. “Your Firmamental vault was stripped, but not before you dispersed a grand fortune throughout the Investiture. Would you like me to tell you where it went?”

“Please.”

“Here,” Primaleon said, pointing. “In the care of a certain Zumosh Rabandie, captain of the Rabandie tin works at Phittsh. And here, at Groaming Town, Nirlume. And . . .” He turned some pages. “Here, with the FairyOxel from Copse country. You keep your money with trusted Prism, not banks. In your entire life you’ve never once deposited in Baln or Goldenwheal or Hauberth. Wise, in the case of the latter, for I fear it is about to be raided.”

Harald’s eyes, though drawn to the numbers, travelled instinctively to his bunk, the thought having suddenly occurred to him that he was being played for time, and that someone might now be rummaging through his things.

But the bed was empty, its candle casting a lonely pool of light.

“I’m impressed,” he said, cautiously. “Tell me . . . I hid some Truppins once, about a hundred thousand—where?”

“Oh, that’s easy!” said Primaleon, beaming. “Litsh-over-Orm, on Port Halstrom. But I’m afraid that haul was stolen about a year ago.”

Harald took out his pipe to conceal his surprise, sneaking a look at Primaleon as he filled it. “By you?”

“Of course not. I charge more per hour for my consultations. But I’ve tracked it to Burrow-Lumm, if you’d like it back.”

Harald wondered who in the world would pay that sort of money for a consultation, assuming the Zelio was exaggerating, but motioned for the book. Primaleon placed it in his hands. “This is very clever of you.” It was more than clever, it was revolutionary. If only Primaleon had been born Amaranthine. He wondered, feeling the thick book in his hand. “How far back can you go?” he asked.

“As far as there are reliable records. I can trace the movement of war money during the Threen“Wunse Conflation.”

“And Firmamental records?” Harald narrowed his eyes, unable to contain a smile. “How are you privy to those?”

“Well, I wouldn’t be this rich without my Amaranthine contacts.”

“Many?”

“A few. Though they tend to disappear into their navels rather too often for comfort.”

“Don’t I know it.”

They sat up together, a pool of light in a dense, crushing sea of darkness, poring through Primaleon’s books. Harald, following the red, tightly packed little Zelio numbers, began to see the flow: their tides, breathing in and out, circling the Investiture and the Firmament. With every large displacement of money, another fell in to take its place, churning the ripples, casting waves that took a long, long time to reach a different shore. But Primaleon was a patient soul, and he had catalogued them all. Harald, sensing with each turned page that he was looking at something illicit and dangerous, could only wonder at the leverage the little person must possess. He retrieved his portable stove, lighting it with a snap of his fingers and heating them a pot of coffee. The old enamel cafetière bubbled and whistled comfortingly as he went and sat back down beside Primaleon. Having used the comforting routine to work out what he might be prepared to give, Harald framed his question.

“Could you track someone, Primaleon? For a fee?”

The Zelio shrugged, giving no hint of relief the transaction was afoot. “Almost anyone, barring the Bult. I’ve had Vulgar bounty hunters coming after me, eager to get a look at these books, sure they can track the cannibals that way, but it won’t work. Wouldn’t stop them killing me for these numbers, though.”

“And that is why you—”

Primaleon looked at him with apparently genuine surprise. “Did you not know that you are followed, too?”

Harald sat back against the wall, keeping his expression blank.

“An Amaranthine, here,” Primaleon’s finger went to the adjoining page, “tracing your journey across the worlds. He sticks out like a sore thumb, staying in all the best guesthouses.”

Harald’s eyes skimmed the numbers, understanding that he had never truly been alone, immediately resenting whomever Sabran must have sent to keep an eye on him.

“Does any of this apply to the Old World?” He looked up at Primaleon.

“Some,” the Zelio said, rummaging for a book at the bottom of the bag. “But the movement of silk, due to the snip-by-eye custom of its barter, is difficult to quantify. And besides, those I speak to on the Old World have more pressing concerns.”

Harald considered this, wondering. “But tell me, can you find me a name?”

Primaleon looked delighted. “I’m good at those—is it a Melius name?”

Harald nodded. “A Melius name, adopted by one of my kind, long ago.”

“Interesting. I would need access to my ledgers, of course, back in Baln—”

He pointed at the books. “These aren’t—”

Primaleon chuckled, a horrible gasping sound. “Of course not. These are copies, light reading. You don’t think I’d bring my real books out here, do you?”

Harald nodded, feeling foolish. He pictured the real books, probably in their hundreds, on a shelf in some dark Prism bank somewhere.

“Very well. Go back to your books. Go back and find me a person named Jatropha.”

Harald shuffled off to bed, climbing the ladder into his cupboard and pulling the dirty blankets over him. A light rain must have swirled down through the chill of the cave and pattered now on the tiles over his head. Harald eyed the ceiling in the dark, imagining it might be small, clawed feet, something that had found a way into the attic spaces of the place, and grinned.