The Promise of the Child Read online

  THE PROMISE OF THE CHILD

  VOLUME ONE OF THE AMARANTHINE SPECTRUM

  TOM TONER

  Night Shade Books

  an imprint of Start Publishing LLC

  Jersey City, New Jersey

  Copyright © 2015 by Tom Toner.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Publishing LLC, 101 Hudson Street, 37th Floor, Suite 3705, Jersey City, NJ 07302.

  Night Shade Books is an imprint of Start Publishing LLC.

  Visit our website at

  www.start-publishing.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Toner, Thomas.

  The promise of the child / Thomas Toner.

  pages cm – (Amaranthine spectrum; volume 1)

  ISBN 978-1-59780-845-3 (hardback)

  I. Title.

  PR6120.O445P86 2015

  823’.92–dc23

  2015013632

  Illustrations by Patrick Knowles

  Cover design by Claudia Noble

  eISBN: 978-1-59780-590-2

  Printed in the United States of America

  “Smiles form the channels of a future tear.”

  Byron

  “It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one’s face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.”

  Oscar Wilde

  PROLOGUE

  Praha: 1319

  Eliška watched the rain outside while she waited, the windowpanes already misted with the steam from her sodden furs. The chestnut leaves brushing the glass were a rich emerald green against the dark sky, fat and luscious from a fourth summer of unceasing rain. Somewhere in the square a peddler was shouting, his calls softened by the downpour.

  She let her eyes wander to the desk before her, carved from light wood and heaped with papers. Thick black and red seals of office dangled from some like dried scabs, snapped where the knife had slit them. If she stood from her chair she might perhaps see some of what was written, but she knew better than to think of disturbing anything on that wide table, instead looking to the shelves, her eyes settling on the fireplace. The dank day made it feel much later than it was, but the flagstones in the hearth were clean and swept, the andirons resting on them still unused. There would be no fire tonight in this fine, high-ceilinged room, not even if its master worked at his desk until morning.

  On her walk across the mostly deserted Judith Bridge, she had seen a woman leaning against the parapet, vomiting into the swollen river. Two stray hounds on the far side had stopped in the driving rain to watch her with ears pricked, their eyes bright. Eliška had hurried on, her escort clapping his hands to shoo the animals. The dog packs had a taste for children, but it couldn’t be long before they started after larger prey in this starving city. People blamed the rotten meat thrown into the shambles for encouraging the packs, and perhaps soon they’d need to be hunted in the narrow streets like boar in a woodland.

  Hearing the muffled bells of St Vitus sounding across the Mesto, she looked back to the window, watching the scrape of damp leaves against the glass.

  “Princess.”

  The voice in her ear was pleasant, conversational, but she gasped nonetheless.

  “Do not stand,” the man pleaded, holding out a ringed hand and smiling down at her look of alarm. He glanced over her furs and tutted. “You are wet.”

  “Bonjour à vous, Aaron,” said Eliška softly, composing herself and running a hand over the fur at her throat. She knew it pleased him when she practised. “I walked.”

  Her husband’s principal exchequer, acting ruler of Bohemia in all but name, nodded and smiled brightly, glancing out at the square. “I would have sent someone if you’d written ahead.” He went to his desk and papers, sparing them a cursory glance before moving to the window. Eliška knew the glance was contrived to be casual, but those eyes took in everything; they’d have spotted a single moved or shuffled document, any item out of place. Not for the first time, she wondered if it might be a test, leaving his private correspondence for all to see while they waited in his office, and whether the sheaves of paper were even important at all.

  At the window, the man stopped, taking in the view between the trees. “Praha looks splendid even in this rain, don’t you think?” He turned to her, that face always somehow difficult to recall, kind and avuncular, just beginning to run to fat from years of sitting behind great tables.

  “As lovely as Paris?” she asked him, trying her best to smile.

  He laughed lightly, a breath from his nostrils. “Very nearly.”

  Her eyes lowered to the newest chains of office around his shoulders, globular garnets winking from their links. John had rewarded his advisor well for his years of service, as had his father before him. The town house he kept on Seminárská was no indication of Aaron’s true wealth—the man could have had a palace carved from blue Carrara marble or splendid quarters in the castle on the hill if he so chose—but this modest building had served as the advisor’s sole residence since her husband’s coronation in 1310, before the years of famine and damp had scoured the city.

  “They say the rain will continue all summer,” she said, sitting back in her chair and watching his reflection in the glass as their eyes met. “But Gascony and Aragon will be spared this year.”

  Aaron’s reflection continued to watch her, a spirit peering in at her from the window. He shook his head.

  “Not England. I have a letter from King Edward; he writes that there was no bread for him with his supper when he stopped at one of his towns in June. No bread for their own king. Bohemia is not yet that desperate.”

  Bohemia. Perhaps when it is, you shall take your leave.

  Eliška glanced to the thickly embroidered rug covering most of the pale floorboards beneath her chair, as if in contemplation. There might be letters from more illustrious men than Edward on that table, had she the courage to look earlier. A certain Pierre, a friend of Aaron’s and a fellow Frenchman, wrote to him often. Pierre went also by the name of Pope Clement, when it pleased him.

  “Have you been there? To England?” she asked, gesturing with a nod to the table and its clutter.

  Aaron’s eyes followed hers to the table. “Not for years and years, Princess—though I would venture to say it was a finer place when I did, under the rule of his father.” He raised a hand above his head briefly. “Tall men are often more adept at governance, for some reason, and the Scot Hammer was exceedingly tall.”

  Eliška had travelled abroad just the once, to meet her new husband at Luxembourg when she was barely fourteen; Aaron himself—fresh from assisting the Emperor in the wars against Florence—had arranged the union, and she remembered at first quite enjoying his company in a foreign court of strangers so far from home. He had made her feel safe, always sparing her the time to talk in confidence, no matter what the hour, and sometimes even making her laugh at a point in her life when she had thought she could not. Indeed, as she looked around the chamber, it occurred to her that there might be nowhere in the land safer than where she sat now, in this rain-battered town house. Thieves and rapists roamed the outlying districts of the city and her days finished well before the sun had set. Even her lonely rooms in the castle might not be nearly so impregnable as this dark chamber with its lingering stink of wax and varnish. Anyone at court could tell you who really ruled the city, but those who valued their noses
kept their mouths shut and their eyes closed. They said Aaron the Jew kept no lovers, that he never slept; some claimed he seldom ate a morsel, the whispers among the diplomats he entertained monthly suggesting that he did not even deign to touch things. Eliška’s eyes still went to the man’s hands—pale and long and veined with blue—whenever they met, despite her best efforts. The more she thought about it, the more ridiculous such whispers sounded, as if her husband’s court were filled with children. Of course she had seen him eat, and drink. He had touched her shoulder just then, had he not? She couldn’t remember.

  Whatever the prejudices against the king’s secretive atheling, his statesmanship and vision were legendary, and under his guidance Praha was promising to rival Rome one day as a seat of enlightenment. Heaps of silver Groschens stamped with the collared lion of Bohemia tumbled in daily from principalities as far-flung as Berlin and Frankfurt as the city vied to become, against the designs of countless kings and princes, capital of the whole empire. The princess might even admit—privately, of course—that her husband’s absence barely obstructed Aar-on’s designs at all. Unlike John, the softly spoken chancellor seemed to live for his adopted city, and as far as Eliška knew, Aaron hadn’t left it since her father-in-law the Emperor’s death in Buonconvento a few years before.

  But she was not so naïve as people thought, this princess, with her round, mole-speckled face and sleepy eyes. If Aaron came and went at leisure, or kept many wives, or visited all the brothels in the Holy Roman Empire, nobody would ever know. As with the affairs of state, he managed his own business behind bolted doors and heavy tapestries, in cold chambers where no fire blazed in the hearth.

  He was watching her again when she looked back to the window.

  “And so you are here to discuss Václav, Princess.” He looked at her properly at last. “Begin.”

  Eliška felt a blush rise to her ears. She had tried to keep something from this man and he had embarrassed her—albeit momentarily—for it.

  “Yes,” she admitted. “My son is unwell.”

  Aaron nodded as if it were old, familiar news, his eyes going to the floorboards at his feet. “As I said, you ought to have written in advance—I am busy today.”

  “You could come tomorrow.” She heard the young girl in her voice as she spoke but no longer cared. “Can you?” She kept her gaze on her hands, feeling his stare running the length of her body.

  “Yes, perhaps.” He sighed. “In the afternoon. Don’t let any physicians touch him until I am there.”

  She glanced at him, relief fading the blush. Whether good magic or bad, she was glad of the chance of it. “Your … payment this time, Aaron?”

  The man turned his head briefly to think, a few strands of iron grey, thinning hair catching the day-dark light. There were no moles on his chalky skin or blemishes of any kind save the creases around his eyes. “He’s to come here a year earlier than we agreed. When he is seven. I may choose to take the prince travelling with me.” Aaron looked sharply back at her. “Are we agreed?”

  A year earlier was small coin. Eliška knew her reputation as a methodical, industrious girl, and knew she had no choice. She would lose her son either way.

  “He is yours, Aaron. Bring him back to me when he is great.”

  Aaron smiled broadly, his eyes suddenly kind. “The greatest, or not at all.”

  Chapel

  A white chapel guarded the tiny crescent port, looking north-west to the strait between the islands and into the deep blue waterway where the fishing boats came in. Sotiris only remembered the building from the front, never from any approaching angle. Shallow stone steps led downwards from its locked door to the urchin-caked rock beneath, sinking into the darkness of the sea. He had never seen inside; the single square window was always too grubby and the Ionian light too bright, even at sunset. Only smudges of colour revealed themselves if he looked away across the water, back to the port. Pale blobs of yachts or catamarans bobbed, becoming clear only for an instant before memories of their form were muddied by all the intervening time, and houses on the harbour-side were little more than far-off parcels of yellow and white and pistachio green.

  The chapel was one of the places his mind took him on walks, guiding him along the grassy hillside that fizzed with twilight cicadas and down to the locked door. When he tried to look up at the side of the building, gaps in the recollection pulled him quietly to its front. Memory was crude, cubist, unyielding.

  The chapel and its island had become a sort of stage, a setting upon which things he sometimes read and heard could play out in his mind. He didn’t know if other people thought like this and it had never occurred to him to ask.

  Sotiris’s remembered walks to the chapel were almost certainly more fiction than anything else. The memories were pickled, viewed through the oily layer of whatever preserved them, altering their colour, texture, even their form. But they had fared well, considering. He counted again, briefly. Those memories of the chapel were almost twelve and a half thousand years old.

  A tourist boat with an outboard motor glides into view. He should have heard the raw-throated engine—he knows the boat well, even if its shape and colour are vague—but it is strangely silent, as if much further away. The boat passes only a few yards below him in the strait, headed for port. There are people standing on board and he recognises all of them but one: the man at the centre of the group, a glass in his hand.

  Sotiris knew perfectly well that he was dreaming, that his sleep had found the well-thumbed scene at the front of his thoughts that night and offered it up once more, but still he was frightened.

  He places his hands on the wall, the chapel at his back, and peers over as the vessel passes beneath. The figure is in shade, then obscured by a bunch of yellow parasols they must have found for their guest’s arrival. Raising his eyes and staring back to the little coloured blocks of houses beyond the yachts, he keeps thinking, Why doesn’t the boat make any sound? It’s as if it doesn’t want to be noticed, perhaps trying to reach the port without any fanfare. But the people at the colourful harbour-side already know it’s coming—they’re there, they’re waiting.

  Then the tour boat passes the chapel and leaves the shade, sun warming the parasols and colouring the motor smoke. The depths it’s heading into are almost green. He sees the guest again, mingling, charming, carried onwards to Sotiris’s island. He glances over his shoulder, the chapel twisting, and wonders if he can run back in time along the hill path to Vathi. It was possible, just about; but the people waiting at the harbour by the rusted bollards and benches and nets would shoo him away like the local leper. They didn’t know. Sotiris straightened in his dream, turning from the harbour and trying to wake. The truth was that he really didn’t want to be there when the boat came in; he didn’t want to see their guest close-up.

  It wasn’t a man, the image that mingled and charmed on the top deck of the boat; that’s what those people waiting couldn’t understand. It was a mirage, a skilled deception, a glamour. It hadn’t come to help them.

  Fortress

  Through a fog of roving hail the machines dropped, at first nothing but far-off grey specks revealed now and then in the blustery white sky. By the time the colossal brick-red fortress at Nilmuth had noticed their approach, the specks were already angling their descent, the scream of their fall reaching the watchers below. The hundred and five craft fell in a diamond shape, the outermost machines slowing as they reached their target and elongating the formation to a narrow spear. From miles around the descent and attack would look slow, like a flock of ravens mobbing a dying beast, and their speed was only given away by the popping bursts of supersonic detonations impacting through the fleet as they met the highest spires of the fortress.

  The first machines, selected for their bulk, detonated as they hit the spires, rupturing stone and metal. The second wave followed a moment later, their beak-like forms burrowing through the next layer of towers and into the depths of the fortress. Bodies and masonry
thundered past the third wave of machines, a gulch of flame blackening their already dark hulls as they hit gas tanks and piping. They fell deeper, rigged to explode at a certain depth to allow the passage of the next, more vital wave, eventually blowing apart the inner foundations of the great central spire. The machines that came after were self-powered, bellowing their exhausts through the smoke to slow their descent and extending skinny arms to claw for purchase on the citadel’s rock flanks. They lodged in the ruins of the spire, rubble and stone still falling like rain around them, and popped hatches in their undersides to disgorge dozens of tiny figures.

  Tzolz glanced up through the dripping sleet at the war machines circling the gaping breach in the fortress, lumps of wet rock the size of horses still falling among his team and denting the reinforced hulls of the landing craft. He checked his spring rifle again, looking around to the assembling mercenaries still funnelling from the hatches, and moved wordlessly through the debris to a ruined corridor, his armour-plated feet crunching over the dismembered bodies of the Vulgar who had lived at this level. Teeth and fleshy shards of bone littered the rubble like seeds, some sticking to the polished metal of his boots.

  His squad took point, crowding past him to the edges of the doorway to hurl tiny Oxel scouts. The fairylike Prism species whistled to each other and scampered in, their bulky flight-suits clinking with dangling bomblets. As he waited, Tzolz looked back through the dripping chasm at the vacuum-suited Lacaille knight still sitting in the open hatch of the furthest craft, the heavy helmet making any expression unreadable. Rusted pipes and chunks of material still dropped like snow into the breach and Tzolz backed further into the doorway.

  A series of detonations signalled the depths of the Oxel’s explorations and he turned quickly, shaking the moisture from the weapon and hoisting it to his shoulder. Ahead, the dark and smoky corridor had been widened, doorways to adjoining chambers blown in by the tiny scouts, and he diverted two teams in either direction with swift hand movements, taking the central passage himself with three more. Their spies had indicated that the Shell was frequently moved for its security, resting at irregular intervals in an iridium-lined chamber in the guts of the structure. If the agents valued their skins they’d have made their way out of the country to the harbour at Untmouth by now, knowing full well what awaited those who remained in the fortress and the fallow lands surrounding it. Tzolz flicked his lights on, illuminating the rest of the corridor with a caustic white glare that sent shadows bouncing across bare stone walls and elaborate hanging braziers. At the end of the section of corridor there began a succession of spiral ramps once necessary for vehicular access, one of which would take them down into the lower levels. After three ramps they would hit a shaft, the spine of the fortress, where a drilling team was to meet them.