The Promise of the Child

Chapter 2 & 3 (updated daily)

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.