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CHAPTER 40

THE JUDICATOR


I tore away from that warm and seeming-human hand. “You’re one of them!” I shouted, backpedaling. My heel caught on one of the floor’s snaking cables, and I fell.

A dark blur stood over me then, glowing with a light all its own. The thing I had called Rag spoke, speaking then with one voice and not two, saying, “I am what they were meant to be. What they were before.”

“Before what?” I asked.

No answer.

“What were they meant to be?” I asked. I screwed my smarting eyes shut, willing them to see. “What are you?”

“One who has kept his oath,” Ragama said, and I thought I could detect the hint of a wry smile in his tone. “Unlike yourself.”

That made me open my eyes. Blearily at first I saw the Judicator standing over me. Where before he had seemed a child large as a man, now he was a man in truth, the man the boy called Rag might become, given time: strong of jaw and hard of eye, as much the image of statuesque perfection as Ushara herself, as masculine as she had been feminine. His black hair curled about his face, recalling the profile of many a Grecian hero, though he dressed in that patched, gray robe and tattered mantle.

“What oath?” I asked, transfixed by the transfiguration that had come over the boy, the man, the creature towering over me.

“To do what must be done,” said he, and offered me his hand, “for the good of all creation.”

For just a moment, I was aware of countless hands extended toward me—toward the countless mes that stretched across the infinite breadth of time. I asked, “Are you the Quiet?”

The Judicator did not move, did not lower his offered hand. He only smiled. “The Quiet . . . ”


Ollori, doshae i Britagge?

What is the Quiet, Child?


Almost it seemed I was a child again, and it was Gibson’s voice that asked the question. So plain a question, so simple, so direct. I could only shake my head.

Ragama possessed the patience of a stone, still bent to offer me his hand.

I spoke only with great difficulty, sensing that all I was—my very soul—hung upon my answer. “I don’t know,” I said at last, then again more precisely. “I’m not sure.”

At first, I had thought the Quiet a people, an extinct race of spacefarers far antedating man. On Annica, the Quiet had revealed itself—revealed himself—to be a singular intellect, his we the we of Emperors.

He was an entity, a being, a personage, and not a race at all.

The other Hadrian I had seen in my cell beneath Vedatharad had echoed that revelation. Though he slay me, that other self had said, speaking through lips cracked and bloodied, I will trust in him.

Above me, the Judicator still waited, still offered his hand.

“Is he here?” I asked, looking to the cradle. In my dreams, my visions of that alien place, I had heard the wailing of an unseen infant. All was silent then.

“Your mistake,” the Judicator said, “consists in believing that he is somewhere, like you or I. He is nowhere, and so is everywhere at once.”

“Enough riddles!” I snapped. I tried to stand, bare feet catching on the cables again. I caught myself on the end of one rotting pew, one knee striking the hard floor with a force that set my teeth together. The cable had had no give to it. It was hard and solid as stone.

Ragama’s hand was still there, just within reach. I glared at it, and at him. “Will you not speak plainly?” I almost spat the question.

The Judicator crooked his fingers, indicating I should take his hand.

Grunting, I took it, permitting my antagonist to haul me to my feet.

When he offered no further word, I said, “I’ve been here before.” I made to step toward the cradle. “I’ve seen the egg. He showed it to me. All my life, I carried a piece of it around my neck.” I touched my throat with a hand. There was nothing there.

Ragama’s arm checked my progress toward the cradle, held me in place. “You have not answered my question.”

“Your question?”


Dashan i Tia?

Who is He?


I turned to meet the creature’s eyes. They were clear and black as ice, shining with a light of their own. Seeing those eyes, I knew, knew that the man before me—that hero in poor cloth—was himself only a garment, a cloak draped but loosely over . . . something else.

I found I could not lie. Not there. Not to him.

And so I could say nothing.

For much of my life, I had believed that the Cielcin worshipped the Quiet, believing the Watchers and the Makers simply their names for the vanished builders of the black halls on Emesh and Annica, on a hundred other worlds. But the Cielcin did not worship the Quiet. To them, he was a wicked god, the architect of our broken universe, a universe that should never have been.

But he was a god to them still, the devil of their black pantheon.

Utannash, they called him.

The Deceiver.

“He is a god.” The words hung on the air a long moment before I understood that I had said them.

Ragama’s hand was still flat against my chest, barring my path. His fingers were like fire burning there.

“And what is a god?” he asked.

Had I not asked the same question of Valka, once?

A creature in a fairy story, she had said.

Only this story is true.

I had never answered the question for myself.

“Shūturum.” The word tore from my lips, formed by no thought of mine. And the voice that whispered it was not my own. I knew that I was smiling, grinning with inhuman delight. I felt my teeth grinding over one another, heard their creaking in my bones. “Absolute.”

It was Ushara’s word. Ushara’s answer. And Ushara’s voice that gave it.

The Judicator’s eyes narrowed to mere slits.

“You did not come alone,” he said. “There is another with you, riding in your heart. I see him in your face.” Without warning, Ragama’s hand lanced upward, clamped over my grinning mouth. With a strength hardly to be believed, he held me, and the touch of his hand upon my face was sunfire. I tried to scream, or rather—Ushara did—but we succeeded only in releasing a low, animal sound. A growl. A moan. A whimper. “I would have the man’s answer, Brother,” Ragama said, “not your own.”

I dared not meet the creature’s eyes, knowing that to do so would bring pain unlike anything in my experience. An oily shame was on me, a black despair that I had allowed myself to be touched by one of them, to be polluted, touched by evil.

“Look at me!”

I could not, knowing then that Ragama would surely kill me, that I had failed his test.

“Look at me!” Ragama ordered, and equally I dared not disobey.

I raised my eyes to meet his own, and found that they had changed. Where before they had been black as the void, they were now blue and bright as stars—almost colorless. I could not look away. I could not look away.

“Name yourself!” Ragama said, syllables rebounding off the crumbling vaults like the thunder.

“No . . . ” The word escaped my lips, though it issued from her will. “No . . . no . . . ”

Those eyes! I could not escape those pale eyes! Though I thrashed and turned my head, always I found them peering into me, into the very heart of me. There was nowhere to turn, no escape to be had. No escape . . . 

“Tell me your name.”

I felt the sensation of countless eyes crawling over me and through me, taking in my every atom. I felt the fingers of the will behind those eyes touch my mind, and at once I was peering down at the piteous creature the sons of Earth called Hadrian Marlowe. So small was he, withered and broken by time and torment, his body scarred, the black of his hair shocked and streaked by pain. I kept one of my hands over his lying mouth.

He did not need it.

A shadow lay on him and in him, a shadow plain to see.

But it was not his shadow.

It moved of itself.

I seized that shadow with countless hands, and dragged it into the light, shouting—all the while shouting—that it give itself a name. It showed me then, he showed me. We were falling, hurled together from some higher place. The stars fell past us, and I hated them, hated them as I hated the hand clamped over the mouth of the little creature I had claimed. I felt that hatred contort that mouth, that face, but held on the tighter. In that moment, Hadrian Marlowe touched and so glimpsed not one, but two of the terrible creatures at once.

Ushara and Ragama at once shared his mind and heart, and he knew them—and saw that they were kin indeed, but that though they were kin, they were bitterest foes.

“You were to shepherd the stars, Brother,” Ragama said. Those eyes—bright as sunlit snow—peered into me and through me, but it was not me he locked eyes with, but her. “To command them!”

“Brother?” I asked, and for an instant, the pain of that hand grew less.

“Hush, Child,” the Judicator said. “It will be over soon.” Those burning fingers tightened, blazed until I felt certain that the skin of my face must blister, must smoke and peel away. I tried to scream, but could no longer find my mouth. “You betrayed your purpose, Brother!” Ragama roared. “And for what?”

The lips that I had lost moved of their own, words like grave worms slipping out between Ragama’s fingers. “To . . . choose . . . for myself.”

“Tell me your name!”

Smoke coiled from my face in truth, black and terrible. Still I felt my cracking lips move, felt blood run and boil down my chin. I was dead, and knew that I was dead. Knew I could no longer refuse the question.

I spoke, but the answer came from over my shoulder, from a place unseen by mortal eye.


Ushara.


It said.


Ushara zirdol.

I men Ushara.

I am Ushara.


As she answered, I understood. Ragama had said that she had been made to shepherd the stars. Her task had been their maintenance and command, and she had forsaken it so that she might rule the Vaiartu as a queen. As a god. In doing so, she had rebelled against her master, her maker, against the Quiet himself.

A light streamed from Ragama’s face, his hand, his every pore. It burned me, burned her, burned the creature that clung to the little man whose father—who was no true father—had named Hadrian.

I could feel her slipping away . . . 

 . . . and found at once I did not want her to go.

I had learned so much from her, seen so much in my visions . . . had understood so little. Did I not still need her? Surely that fragment of the Watcher in my mind had its uses? Could it not be of service in the fight against the Cielcin? Against Ushara herself?

Was that a hand I felt in mine? Cold, white knuckled, six fingered?

I turned to see her face, those black eyes, those ruby lips, that hair like the fall of evening.

I saw nothing, could see nothing but the light streaming from Ragama’s face.

I heard a voice. Two voices. The twinned voice of Ragama speaking:


Trian am taba ol anozam tia?

Will you let me kill him?


A choice.

Ragama had offered me a choice.

Was this the test, then? Had I not yet failed, after all?

It would be so easy to refuse, now it came down to it. So easy to remain with her. To die with her. A shadow passed between the Judicator and myself, and I perceived it was the shadow of her hair. Ushara stood between Ragama and myself, her arms wound about me—those heavy, white limbs—her breasts pressed against my chest, so that her breath came cool upon my neck.

We were falling, falling together—entangled as atoms in a telegraph.

She was shielding me, I saw that plain, protecting me from the Judicator’s light.

How could I let her die?

The twinned voice spoke again, asked the same question.


Trian am taba ol anozam tia?

Will you let me kill him?


“Yes.”

A moment of weakness. A moment of strength? Lips moved, cracked, burned, splitting with blood and pain.

The shadow vanished. Her shadow.

In a single instant she was gone, and the light with her.

And the pain.

I was lying on my back amid the cables that snaked along the floor, staring up through the cracked and crumbling vaults of that pagan temple at the palely amaranthine sky. The stars were dying, Ragama had said.

Of course they were dying.

They had lost their shepherd. One of their shepherds, at least.

I was surely dying myself. The pain had stopped, though its memory lingered.

Ushara was gone. Her shadow, her imprint, her memory. The part of her that had fallen on my mind, settled in it after the battle on Sabratha . . . the part of her that had haunted me in all the years since was gone. I smiled, but it was the crooked smile of my youth, and try as I might, I could not disfigure my face as she had, could not replicate her toothy, demonic grin.

She was gone.

I could move my hands again, though I feared to touch the ruins of my face.

Still, I did do, and felt the scars Dorayaica’s talons had made.

There was no hurt—no new hurt—upon the old, remembered flesh.

“Impossible . . . ” I said, and shut my eyes.

A pale light shone through the lids, and opening them once more, I beheld the figure of a woman standing over me. Her gown shone like pale fire, and the cord wound about her slim waist was of braided silver, and of silver, too, was her coiling hair. But no sign of age was there in the smooth porcelain of her face. And her eyes . . . 

“Ragama?”

She laughed sweetly, and bending at the knees offered me her hand. “I am myself alone, Child of Earth.”

“You’ve changed,” I said, not taking the offered hand.

“I have not,” said she. “I am more than you can ever see. You are like a creature floating upon the surface of a pool. Before, I but dipped one finger into your waters. Now, I dip another.”

Her hand was still there, waiting for me. Her smile was like the sun.

I sat up on my own, hair settling about my face. “What are you?”

“I told you,” she said. “I am one who has kept his oath.”

“What oath?” I asked.

“The same as yours,” she said.

“But earlier, you said I haven’t kept mine,” I said. Rejecting her hand, I stood, remembering the fire of her touch.

“You left your work unfinished,” she said, smoothing the front of her pale gown.

A flash of the old Marlowe fury blossomed in me, and I advanced on her a step. “I was murdered!” I exclaimed, hands balling into fists. “I’d be dead, but for you!”

Utterly unmoved, the white woman said, “You had abandoned the path already. Two hundred years you wasted in sloth. How many more might have been saved had you not faltered?”

“I had lost everything!” I roared.

“Not everything!” came Ragama’s riposte. “You have not lost everything, even now.”

“Even now?” I asked, stepping forward yet again. “Are you saying . . . that I can go back? To my people? To my time?”

“Should you pass the test,” Ragama answered.

My heart lurched. “What is the test?”

“You still haven’t answered my question,” she said.

“What question?”

“Who is he?” Ragama smiled. “I would have your answer, not my brother’s.”

“Your brother . . . ” I left the fact that Ushara was a woman aside, along with the fact that Ragama herself wore the shape of one. “You said you weren’t one of them.”

A smile broke on Ragama’s face like the dawn, and laughing, she tossed her head. “I am not!” she said, the sound of her laughter a sweet music. “My brother was one of us, once, and not the other way round.”

“But you are of the same race?” I asked. “The same people?”

“Were you not told?” Ragama asked, peering intently at me. “I see the memory in you.” She rested a hand upon the end of one rotting pew, and as she did, I felt the familiar pain behind my eyes, the pain of mind touching mind . . . the sensation of eyes crawling over me, across my skin, through my memories.

I drew back.

“Don’t be afraid,” the Judicator said, and offered me a hand. “We are not a race, Child. Each of us is an island unto himself, and no river . . . neither growing, nor fading, nor furthering his kind. The Unmade made us to serve.”

“The Unmade?” I asked. “The Absolute, do you mean?”

“Your Quiet, yes,” Ragama said, turning to look at the bassinet beyond the altar rail. “He is not like us, Child of Earth. He is something else. Something more.

I could only shake my head, casting about for an answer.

Had I not asked the Quiet himself?

We are, had been his answer.

“He is,” I said at last.

“You remember!” Ragama laughed, and the music of that laughter was like a spring wind in that place of time’s last autumn. “He is that which has always existed, that which will always exist. Before the Cataclysm that birthed your cosmos, he was there! It was at his command that the first photons were kindled, by his word the first quarks condensed, the first atoms formed. He ordered the formation of the first suns, and set my brothers to keep and watch over them. To watch over everything. Nothing would be without him.”

I had gone very still, my bare feet freezing on the cracked stone of the temple floor. The wind that blew through the crumbling roof and shattered windows pulled at my trailing robe, blew clean through my soul. “It’s true then?” I asked, voice small as I approached the bassinet. “All true? He created the universe?”

Dorayaica was right.

Shifting, Ragama placed herself between me and the rocking cradle that held her slumbering lord. “Yes,” she said. “Every universe.”

Every universe. I mouthed the words, reached up and hugged myself, eyes going to the frescoed ceiling. Directly above, the icon of a long-dead king shone, white haired and beardless, his face like burnished copper. He was arrayed as a warrior, dressed in black scale edged with gold. Of sable, too, was his cloak, and the crown upon his head was wrought all of raw iron. But that was not his only crown, for about his head, a ring of fire like the sun shone in powdered gold. I could not read the alien inscription beneath him, but knew that here was one of the Last Kings of Men of whom the boy Rag had spoken.

“You mean there’s more than one?” I asked. “More than one universe?”

“This is not the first,” Ragama answered. “Nor will it be the last.” She turned as she spoke, moved among the smashed pews and broken statuary, picking her way among the flowing cables to where she might look straight up into the pale, pink sky.

The enormity of this revelation washed over me like the tide, and I was drowning in it. How many mystes and magi, how many sorcerers and scientists and charlatans all had spent their lives in pursuit of that question whose answer the Judicator had simply handed to me in that moment?

Other universes . . . and all of them made.

Ragama’s voice had become like music playing in a distant room. “It was not meant to end, this cosmos . . . but it is very nearly over. Soon the last stars will die, and the last life thereafter. A hardy few will survive, for a time, in darkness and in cold, but nothing lasts forever . . . ” Her words turned melancholy. “It was not meant to be so, would not be so but for them. They abandoned their posts, upset the balance.”

“The Watchers?”

The Judicator’s smile faltered. “We were made—each of us—with a purpose. A function. A role. My brother was made to tend certain of the stars. Without him, they will burn out in time. Those of us still true cannot uphold creation alone.”

“What is your purpose, then?” I asked.

The smile returned. “Vengeance,” Ragama said, turning once more to regard the rocking cradle. “And to wait.”

It was madness, all madness. If what the Judicator told me then was truth, then the laws of nature were not immutable, not intrinsic to nature itself, but upheld and held in place by intelligences vast and strange and in service to an intelligence far greater still. The universe was cosmos indeed, was order—supremely planned.

I shuddered, said, “You really are gods.”

“I am only a servant,” she said, and taking a step, vanished—reappeared in the same instant at the foot of one six-handed idol on the far side of the temple. Recalling the creature’s analogy, I imagined fingers tapping the surface of still water.

“How many of you are there?” I asked.


We are without number.

Ge im corfa chisga.


Her answer darkened the air like thunder, issuing not from her lips at first, though she finished, saying, “As are they.”

I felt my blood run cold. I remembered Ushara turning in the skies above Sabratha, her countless eyes peering down from dimensions no mortal eye perceived. I imagined Watchers then, without number, a legion and horde of formless beasts roiling from the unpastured Dark, taking forms huge and hideous and terrible in majesty—disquiet gods of night, demons without number.

“If what you say is true . . . ” I hardly dared to breathe. “Then we have already lost.”

Ragama vanished again, appeared in an eyeblink right before my eyes. Incongruously, she laughed again. “Do not despair, Child of Earth. His victory is certain.”

“You’re mistaken,” I said. “I’ve seen the future. Nothing is certain.” I made to approach the chancel, stepping over one braided cord. A hand closed upon my wrist to stop me, but turning, I saw that Ragama had not moved, had not reached out to touch me.

“One thing is certain,” Ragama said. “This creation will end. All life in this cosmos will die.”

“You call that victory?” I snarled, trying to shake my arm free of that unseen hand.

“Our ways are not your ways,” Ragama said, neither moving nor unhanding me. “Long will the night be, between the setting of these last suns and the kindling of the next. Trillions of years will pass before the collapse of all matter. Only once that collapse occurs, when the universe yawns and stretches with age, only then will the conditions of the end resemble those of the beginning. A formless void. Then he will shape the new world from the old clay, as he has uncounted times.”

“So it’s fate, then?” I asked, tasting bitter bile. I nearly spat. “All of it?”

“Fate?” Ragama shook her head. “No.”

“You’re telling me that nothing I do matters,” I said. “That it’s all some silly game.”

“It matters to you,” Ragama countered. “To your kind. You think that what is inevitable robs you of agency, but it does not. Were you not told long ago that your soul is in your hands? The fate of your universe is certain death—that has been true almost since the beginning, since my brothers abandoned their charge—but your own death is not certain, nor that of any of your kind.”

I was silent then, and hung my head.

“Oh, I see,” Ragama said, “you believe the whole of creation hangs in your balance, that if you fail . . . he will never have been.”

“Because that is what I was told!” I said, anger flaring star-bright.

“You have been as one who studies a great mural by the light of just one candle.” Here she raised a finger. “You have seen more than any of your race—save a few—but you will never understand the all of things. You cannot. You were not made to.”

I could only stare at the creature then, the Watcher who was not a Watcher.

He does not need any of us,” Ragama said. “He is Absolute, and the Absolute is perfection. It is we who need him.”

“To remake the universe?” I asked. “A universe without the Watchers?”

“To exist,” Ragama said, echoing the words of the Quiet himself. “It is not his reality that is in doubt, but yours, ours. What is at stake is not creation—there will always be another—but your place in it. Yours, and every one of your kind.”

I was shaking my head. “You’re lying,” I said.

Ragama seemed to grow in size then, just as Ushara had done. Towering over me, she said, “I cannot lie.” Neither could the daimons of the Mericanii, though they bent truth as the darkest stars bend light.

Thinking of the daimons, I balled my hands into fists. It had not been my sword that availed in my contest with Ushara, but my will, and that at least remained to me. “I’ve seen the egg, seen it hatched. I know he’s in it. I know you’re waiting for him to be born, to complete the circuit. He creates us. We create him. Break that circuit, and everything ends.”

“That is their hope, and their dream,” Ragama said, looking down on me with eyes like chips of ice. “To unmake the Unmade. Usurp his place. Build their own creation. They tried once before—and paid for it. But they will never succeed. Everything that has a beginning has an end, Child, and so he can never be destroyed—for he was never made.”

“But you yourself said the Watchers would be victorious!” I roared, no longer caring if I used the cursed name. “You’re one of them! He is one of them! You used me!”

I braced myself, expecting a blow.

Abruptly I recalled a thing Lord Nicephorus had said to me on Carteia, the day Caesar himself had shared the Empire’s knowledge of the Watchers with me. I could see the androgyn’s face—as clear as the face of Ragama herself—and hear its cutting words.

You are not touched by the divine, Lord Marlowe. He had said, You are in league with alien powers.

It had been a trick all along, it had to be. I had been a pawn in their game, a tool used to break the Empire and the will of man. And I had broken it. The worlds of the Centaurine were broken, and the Norman frontier destroyed. The Emperor was in hiding, desperately reinforcing the front. The stars were thick with plague.

The Cielcin were winning.

The Watchers were winning.

There was no Quiet, had never been. The writing! The writing of the Watchers in the pantheon at Phanamhara—the Watcher writing copied by the Vaiartu on countless tablets—that writing and the anaglyphs of the Quiet were the same. I had believed the Watchers and the Quiet one and the same for much of my young life. Only my revelation at Annica had changed that belief. And that revelation was a lie.

They were one and the same after all!


No!

Ag!


Ragama reached out with one white limb—so like Ushara’s—to grasp my arm.

I caught her wrist instead, my hand sliding across the infinite breadth of time to ensure I did not miss. I felt flesh cold and hard as diamond beneath my grip, felt fingers I could not see seize upon me in turn. With my other hand I caught her other arm and held it, knowing she could have as many hands as she desired, while I had only two. Still, I strove with her, whatever her size, whatever her power.

“Fool!” the monster said. Was that strain in the music of her voice? “Why would I . . . cast my brother from you . . . if I were . . . in league with . . . them?”

I did not dare answer.

I felt my knees buckle, felt them strike the hard stone floor. I bent beneath her. Trying to resist the strength of her arms was like trying to hold back the tide, so great was the strength of her will. Still, I tried, knowing that to fail was to die a true death, a final death.

An unseen hand struck me, and I fell flat upon my back, the cables of the bassinet under me.

Ragama stood over me, and from her figure a terrible light blazed, not white but pale gold and bright as the brightest sun. For the briefest instant, I saw every statue, every stained-glass window, every fresco and smashed wood pew with a sharpness that has never left my memory.

Then I was blinded, and shut my eyes against the light, and cast a hand over my face.


Dorphae dae ol!


The deep voice of the Watcher intoned.

Its lyrical twin spoke with it, half a syllable out of phase.


Look at me!


But I could not. The light was too bright, and even if could see through it, I knew that to look was to look upon the Watcher, Ragama, in the fullness of his horror and his majesty. I knew my feeble human intellect could not have seen what there was to see and remained whole.


Look at me!


The Watcher’s voices both fell like rain.


Dorphae dae ol!


I could not look, and yet I dared not refuse. Against all reason and sanity . . . I opened my eyes, and though I was certain I was looking at the floor between my splayed hands . . . I saw.

I saw the pitiful man-shape kneeling before me, kneeling now, his hands half-raised to cover his violet eyes. I saw through him, as though his skin and every fiber were blown of the clearest glass, saw him with the eyes of the Watchers, as though he were a sketch unrolled upon a page, his every nook and hidden depth revealed.

His thoughts. His memories. His pain.

I saw the snaking avenue of his life, his every second stretched behind him. I saw his deaths: his flesh dissolved in bloody foam, skin peeling away like white foil; his head struck off, plunged into still water. And I saw his life, heard his anguished cry at a blackened window, felt his knuckles smash the nose of a red king. I watched as he raised cairn after cairn with bleeding hands on a shelf above the sea, heard the noise of men screaming as a vessel moved to block the sun.

“No.” His lips moved, hands straining to cover his eyes. “Not again . . . ”

He had suffered so much. Lost so much.

I saw battles, and battles. Death and death.

Pain. So much pain.

So much love.

I felt his love for the daughter he had not truly fathered, for the woman he had not truly wed. I watched as the Jaddian sorcerers handed him a girl child wrapped in a towel white as snow, heard his weeping, felt his joy and sorrow mingling as he held the babe in his arms. I felt his heart break as he faced his woman’s killer, and knew it had been his love that wrenched the power from his broken spirit.

And peering back across his years I saw a mountain, heard a voice . . . 

 . . . and hearing it, released him, turned my face from him in wonder.

The light faded all at once, and I, Hadrian, sagged against the nearest bench, looking up at the creature that had been the pale woman a moment before.

“His voice,” the creature said, and turned its face from me. Its own voice shook in wonder. “His voice!”

Gone was the white-haired woman, the towering woman so like Ushara. In her place a giant stood. The hair that had been pale as starlight was now all of coiled gold, and of gold were the vambraces on its wrists, and golden its breastplate above the white tunic and beneath the white cloak. For just a moment, I thought I saw the Grecian hero’s face peering at me from under that cap of gleaming hair. Then it was gone, replaced by a face neither man’s nor woman’s.

Were those tears on the alien face?

“You’ve never heard it before . . . ?” I asked, clambering to my feet. For just a moment, I’d forgotten my fear, forgotten my horror, my rage. There were tears on the creature’s cheeks. Its mouth hung open in wonderment, one white hand rising to obscure it.

Ushara had wept, but hers had been tears of pain. Ragama shed tears of joy.

“None of us has,” the Judicator said, and it was a woman’s voice that issued from the giant’s lips. “Even the greatest of my brothers has not caught the barest glimpse of his face. You call him Quiet, but he has said more to you in your brief eyeblink of a life than he has to any of us since the beginning. You are truly blessed!”

At the thunder of the giant’s word, I drew back, hands rising to guard my face like a pugilist in Colosso. They were the only defense I had. For an instant, I had forgotten where I was, and what it was I faced.

“I am not your enemy, Child,” Ragama said, stalking round me where I stood. “He is not your enemy, whatever you believe. Even now he fights to save your kind, to salvage what may be salvaged from this dying universe, that it might endure into the next.” As it spoke, the Judicator drew nearer, armor shimmering like the sun, gaze neither blank nor pitiless, tears still evident on its superhuman face. “All this time, you thought you were rushing to his rescue, when in truth he was rushing to yours.”

“I still don’t understand,” I said, drawing back at the giant’s approach. “If he is so powerful, why does he not destroy the Watchers himself, and the Cielcin with them? Why did he permit the Vaiartu to burn the galaxy of old, or let my own people murder one another like animals? Why wait for the end of time? Why allow . . . any of this at all?”

Ragama’s smile did not falter, though it turned melancholy and brittle as glass. “Would you have him be a tyrant? Deny you the freedom to choose?”

“To choose what?” I snarled, clenching my fists once more. “What have I ever chosen? If what you say is true, I’ve only ever been a pawn in his game.”

“There is only one choice, Child of Earth, for you and for all your kind,” Ragama said, circling me, wending through the wrecked pews until the way to the altar and the cradle was clear. Ragama gestured for me to approach, saying, “Glory or decay.”

“Glory or decay?” I did not move. I did not dare, sensing some trap, some trick.

“Will you stand now with your maker against those who would tear down his world—as you have thus far? Or will you pass into darkness, and all your people after you?”

“You said my people worship the Watchers even now,” I said, nodded to the half-open doors.

“Not all,” came the Judicator’s reply. “Each must answer for himself.” The giant pointed toward the altar rail.

Understanding the Judicator’s intent, I turned and faced the chancel, began the long walk along the nave, stepping carefully over cables and braided metal hoses. A canopy of carven stone descended upon the spot where the bassinet stood, like a stalactite, as though it were the finger of some almighty hand thrust down to touch the cradle.

Mounting the steps to the dais, I found I had ceased to breathe. The cracked faces of the Watchers—many eyed and many handed, moth winged, bat winged, tentacle bearded—glared blasphemously down at me, at the miniscule creature I was.

I hardly saw them. I had eyes only for the cradle.

It did not belong in that place of crumbling stone. The bassinet itself was fashioned all of plain, cold steel, and of steel were the various cords and cables that ran up to its base, or into the banked consoles that formed a cordon about it. These shimmered with lights red and blue and golden, all winking in the gloom like so many candles. Display panels and holographs showed writing in the fiery characters the Watchers and the Quiet shared.

At last I stood there, where I had stood in dream, and peered down into the cradle—the incubator, I realized, feeling the heat rising from it. Where in my visions I had seen gray cloth and the broken fragments of shell, a whole egg nestled, large as the largest melon. Various sensors there were taped to its surface, or attached to probes inserted with great care through the hard shell, connecting to those machines whose functions I could only guess at.

It was all a dream. That had to be it. I had not died, was simply lying delirious on the floor of my bath in the Arx Caelestis. I would wake soon, and find Cassandra and Selene looking down on me.

It could not be real.

“He’s really . . . in there?” I asked, voice hushed.

“It is as I said,” Ragama spoke, advancing along the central aisle after me. “The king returns.” As the giant advanced, it seemed to glide over the floor between us, the hem of its robe trailing on the tangled cables entirely without disturbance, as though it passed clean through them.

“When?” I asked, cognizant of the tears then shining in my own eyes.


Cocan tiam i uls cocan.


The alien reply rattled the very window panes, issuing as it did from every corner of the old ruin.


His time is the end of time.


As it drew nearer, the giant contracted, shrinking until it stood little taller than I myself. I fell to my knees, overcome at last. My hands caught the lip of the bassinet, kept me from falling flat. My whole being shook, body and soul, and I pressed my forehead to the cradle, hiding my face.

God or monster, it did not matter.

Here was the king of infinite space, bounded in his nutshell.

What could I say? Or do?

Ragama’s hand lay on my shoulder. Its warmth—which had burned Ushara, hot as sunfire—seemed to me then merely the warmth of dark stone in summer. “All your life, you have fought for the preservation of your race. That remains your fight now, but you must fight not for their survival, but for his cause.”

“Or else what?” I asked, turning to look at the gleaming giant. “He’ll destroy us?”

Ragama lifted its burning hand from my shoulder, leaving no hurt. “He destroys nothing,” the Judicator said. “You destroy yourselves, just as my brothers did.”

I was shaking my head. “He said he needed me to fight for him. He needed me to save him!”

A warm hand touched my cheek, turned my face to look back up into that of the Judicator, and once more its face was the face of a woman, though her eyes shone like the sun and not like distant stars. “It is not his existence he desires—that is eternal. It is your existence and that of all the worlds that he has made.” Drawing back, she turned her gleaming face from me. In a faint and distant voice, she continued, “Once, there was a magus among your people who believed that if he might learn the location and velocity of every atom in creation, he might know the whole of the future. He was wrong, for the Unmade—in his wisdom—made such knowledge impossible. One may not know the place and motion of every drop in the smallest cup of water. But there will come a day, when all is cold and still, in which such a magus might learn all of the past. Then, when all is ended, he will judge all that he has made. What is sweet, he will retain. What is sour, he will discard.”

“Speak plain sense, damn you!” I muttered, turning on my knees.

“You believe you fight to reduce the evil in what is,” Ragama peered back at me through coiling golden hair. Gone was its woman’s countenance. In its place, the unsexed face of an androgyn watched me, like man and yet unlike him, familiar and alien at once. “You fight to increase the good. Every person you save, every world left untrammeled by evil serves to increase the good in that final accounting. You asked why he does not end all that he has made: because the story is not yet finished, even now, and he will not end it until every bead of light has had its day.

“This universe is dying, but Death was never meant to be. It is an invasive weed, the result of my brothers’ treason. They wounded the stars, poisoned the very foam of space, and turned you children to their worship and cause.”

“The Cielcin,” I said. “The Vaiartu.”

“And your own people.” Ragama thrust an accusing finger at me. “Or did you think that you were good?”

“No,” I said, and turning tried to hide my face, but I found the Judicator standing wherever I turned, even when I looked up. It was staring down at me, its sandaled feet planted on the side of one of the temple’s great pillars, standing at right angles to the ground.

Am I a good man?

“No,” I said in answer. “I know what I am.”

The Ragama nearest me smiled forlornly, a sorrow black as the starless sky in its almost-human face. A device there was, hammered into its breastplate: three interlocking triangles inscribed within a circle. Where had I seen it before?

“This need not come to pass,” the Judicator said, restoring its hand to my shoulder. “This is your future. But it need not be so.”

I looked up through shining eyes. “What?”

“He has not yet returned, nor sent his Oracle to you. Those events lie ahead of us. You can prevent the message being sent, reject the call. Poor Saltus and his people need never come here. You need never go to Emesh. You may live the life you wanted, in relative peace.”

“What?”

“Break the egg,” the Judicator said. “Kill him.”

For a moment, I did not dare speak. “You said his victory was inevitable.”

“It is,” Ragama said. “You but destroy his incarnation. You have died twice, should he not?”

Again, I could only manage a single word. “What?”

“He will return. If not by this egg, then by some other road,” the Judicator said. “You cannot stop him, but you can free yourself. Yours was the shortest road, but he will find another. Reject him, and he will.”

“You’re serious,” I said.

“There is no fate but the fate of the all,” Ragama said. “You are free to choose your own ending, as you have always been.”

I looked into the bassinet, at the egg of the unborn god, its surface the purest white I had ever seen. A knob of broken stone lay on the floor beside me, set there as though precisely for my use. I had only to seize it, to shatter the egg and kill the very author of our world.

“This is the test,” I said, grasping the stone with shaking fingers. I looked up to where Ragama stood. “You will stop me the moment I raise—”

But Ragama was gone.

I was alone in that decrepit temple, surrounded by those fell idols, those statues of the demons the gargoyles had failed to keep out. Nothing moved, and for a moment, the only sound was the roll of distant thunder somewhere out over the black city of Llesu. In that moment, I was certain of everything, certain I could kill the Quiet, that doing so would free me of the prison that had been my terribly long life.

I could save the others. Save Pallino and Elara, Ilex and Crim, Corvo, Durand, Crossflane, Smythe, Ghen and Switch and Lorian . . . the entire Red Company.

I could save Valka.

Start again.

I had only to bring down my hand.

Who was to say the Quiet’s next champion would not be a better man than I? Was it not then humility to lay down my burden? Who was I to shoulder so heavy a burden? Only an old man, tired and broken.

Break the egg.

Ragama’s voice seemed to echo in my ears.

Glory or decay.

I had only to choose.

Valka would live again, Valka, and all the others. They would never meet sad Hadrian Marlowe, murderous, Pale killing, twice fated to die. Some other champion would stand for Utannash, and cause mankind no end of grief, cost mankind uncounted thousand souls, drag those souls to the Halls of Dust on Mother Earth and leave their bodies for the feasting xenobites.

“Ragama?” I stood, clutching the hunk of black stone in aching fingers. “Ragama?”

It had to be a trick.

A trick.

I turned and faced the egg. If it was deception, if Ragama was truly one of them, then I had been brought to that place to achieve their victory, that the thing that made our world might be slain by his own creation, the sculptor slain by statuary as it fell.

Would that be so terrible?

No good, but no evil, either. Everything that is vanishing in an instant, the universe snuffed out—brief candle.

No pain, no suffering.

Peace at last.

Quiet.

All was quiet then. Ragama had not reappeared, had left me to my task.

My decision.

My blasphemy.

Six hundred years of pain lit my every thew, filled my lungs. A scream red as the sundering of our universe filled that forgotten temple, and wheeling I turned to face the cradle, stone in hand. I had had enough of gods, enough of monsters.

Enough of everything!

Valka!

I had been a pawn long enough. I would make myself a king, and damn the rules of the game! Let it start again, let some other Hadrian walk away with my life. Let him live free, in happy ignorance, and never find his fate!

Or let it end.

Let it all end.

I splayed the fingers of my left hand against the egg to steady it—the false hand Kharn Sagara had given me—I raised the stone for the kill . . . 

 . . . and felt the creature stir within, pulse against my hand.

I faltered.

The stone fell from nerveless fingers, clattered to the floor. I sagged against the bassinet, my body wracked with dry, heaving sobs. Moving like a man with two broken legs, I turned my back against the pedestal that held the embryonic god. I cannot say how long I sat there, or how long were the days on that dim and dying world. It felt as though the rest of eternity ran out, though the last sun was still shining through the broken roof.

I could not do it. I would not do it.

“Why?” I asked, muttering in my solitude. “Why did you bring me here?”

I had not expected an answer, but I received one.


Your work is not yet done.


Ragama’s voice had come from everywhere at once, shook every atom of air in the old temple until dust snaked down from the vaults above. This new voice disturbed nothing, issuing as it did from nowhere at all. Indeed at first, I thought it only my own self that answered, for it spoke in my heart’s own voice. Some force drew my vision skyward, and I peered out through the hole in the roof at the pale and bloody sky.


This must be.


With a jolt I stood, turned to face the cradle, hand moving for a sword that was not there. I’d half expected to find Gibson’s shade standing where Ragama had stood. Or Cat’s. Or my father’s. But there was no one. My eyes went to the egg, “It’s you, isn’t it?”

The soundless voice answered.


I am.


Hesitant, I returned to god’s bedside, gripped the rail of the bassinet with one hand. With the other—the very hand that had wielded the stone—I reached down and caressed the pale, hard shell. It was warm as some friendly, familiar hand, and smooth as glass, as polished stone. “Please,” I said, voice thin and dry and close almost to breaking. “Please, let me go.” Sinking to my knees, I pressed my forehead to the rim of the bassinet, both hands gripping the cold, metal rail. “Find another if you have to. Just let me go . . . ”


Whom shall I send, if not you?


“I don’t care!” I said, shouting into the steel.


You would send another in your place?

To bear as you have borne?

Name him.


“Do it yourself!” I snarled.

The soundless voice answered. Three simple words.


I already have.


“What?” I scrabbled to my feet, staggered back a step.


If you need my life, Child, take it.

It is yours.


My life, the Quiet had said, not ours.

I have touched the minds of beings far greater than my own. The daimon, Brethren; Ushara; Ragama . . . I thought I knew what it meant, thought I had communed with the Quiet upon that mountain on distant Annica, but in that instant, I knew that I had seen nothing, knew nothing, understood nothing of the majesty that was—that ever was, that ever would be.

I felt . . . I felt as a child feels when, taken out beneath the night sky, he is first told that each of those little lights is its own sun, with its own worlds, its own life and history. Vast as our cosmos may be and infinite in depth, next to him it is as nothing, as the meanest puddle is nothing when measured against all the seas of Earth. In all that vastness I was less than nothing, less than a mote of dust, and yet like a mote of dust I was drawn upward, not crushed by the enormity of what I saw so that I—who might have pressed my face to the very stone in awe and reverence—felt that I should leap into the air and sing.

So great was the joy that filled my heart then that I forgot my anger, my hatred, my fear. My suspicion melted like the dew, and my sorrow vanished like shadows under noon’s bright star. I saw how he had made our creation, ordering it by his will. I watched as he set his servants, the Watchers, to guide and guard his great project, felt his grief as they betrayed their purpose, betrayed him.

I felt his sorrow, deeper than human feeling and yet not strange, like a familiar color somehow darker than the human eye could perceive. Always we were turning from the path, turning against him. He felt our every pain, witnessed our every torment, experienced every injury as though it were his own. Still, he would not stop us, for to stop us would be to destroy the very thing that made us what we are. And feeling that pain, I understood the why at last. He suffered to see our suffering, and so our suffering made us more like him, who knew our every hurt.

And I was ashamed, ashamed that I had thought him only another monster—had nearly destroyed him with my own gray hand.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and knew that I was weeping. “I’m sorry, I . . . I didn’t know.” I hung my head, ran my loose sleeve across my staring eyes. “What must I do?”


Have you forgotten?


I saw once more the black ship, its every deck brimming with iron statuary, its hull a Gothic pile of writhing human forms, great faces staring out between buttresses and from beneath the peaks of pointed archways.

The Demiurge.

Seeing it, I passed within and in its hold beheld the ancient weapons housed in cradles of iron, stopped before one smaller than the rest: a black deltoid like the head of an arrow long as the Ascalon, with engines gleaming along its stern. As I watched, it fell from an open hold, its flat surface opening to reveal the seed of the dark star imprisoned within.

Then it was gone, and a light brighter than any sun flowed across creation, a light that killed everything it touched, destroying ships and moons and planets all, disordering even the living light of the Watchers’ incorporeal forms. I felt the pain of that light, searingly bright. I felt the death in it, death uncounted.

For the last time, then, I heard that voice, that voice which was no voice at all, for no sound formed its words.

I have never heard it again.


Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?


I drew my hand away, found myself standing before the altar stone, before the cradle and the egg.

There were footsteps on the stone behind me.

I turned.

A man stood there. Of gold was his gleaming breastplate, and gold the bracers and greaves that sheathed his well-formed limbs. His cloth was fine, his tunic and cloak of steaming argent, brighter than white.

“Ragama?” I asked.

Ragama’s hair had been golden. White. Black.

Now it was red, red as flame, and streamed from his shoulders, billowing like living fire. In his face, I saw the shadow of the boy called Rag, the boy who had pulled me from the Well. Here, I knew, was Ragama complete, a Ragama who had thrust as much of his being into our narrow plane as could be contained by our meager three dimensions.

“You pass the test,” the Judicator said, voice deeper than the thunder.

From my place on the dais, I was nearly so tall as the burning creature. Smoke coiled on the air between us, spewed by little flames that coiled and danced and died in the air about that man who was no man at all.

“You would have stopped me.”

Ragama’s face was very grave. “That is not why I was made.”

I faltered, not sure that I believed him. I turned once more to regard the egg of the unborn god. “You . . . would have let me do it?” I asked, striped hair floating on the heated air. “Could I really have killed him?”

“Only the part of him that can die,” Ragama said. “And then only for a time. Did I not tell you? His coming is inevitable. Nothing can stop it, not them, not you.” One of the flames swirling in the air about the Judicator seemed to peer at me. I felt that crawling sensation of eyes, and longed to hide, to turn my face from him. It was as though my mortal brain and eye knew that I was looking upon things not meant for common men. “Why didn’t you do it?” the creature asked, eyes like garnets blazing. “I thought you would.”

All my life, I had carried a piece of the shell about my neck. That alone was not enough to tell me if it must hatch . . . or shatter. In that final moment, I had remembered how that piece had come back to me on Eue, when I had thought I must die and all I loved with me. But that had not been the thought that stayed my hand.

“Because this is the world where my daughter lives,” I said, looking round. “How could I destroy it?”

Ragama’s face split in a bright grin. “Your kind is more like him than ours,” he said, and I have pondered those words ever since. “You understand, then, why he will not unmake what he has made.”

“I do,” I said, and once more my eyes were shining with tears.

Cassandra . . . 

I would have destroyed her, too, and for what? To ease my pain?

We are beasts of burden, we men. We struggle, and by that struggle are filled.

Gibson’s shade had said those words to me.

The Quiet had said those words to me.

“You understand what you must do?”

Seek hardship.

“Vorgossos,” I said, “on Vorgossos . . . there is a weapon, one made by the machines of old. One that can destroy the others.”

Ragama drew nearer. “Your road will not be easy, nor your burden light.”

“That does not matter,” I said. “It must be.”

“Will you then renew your oath?” The giant stopped at the foot of the dais, standing so that our eyes were level. “And see to its end this course you have begun?”

“I will.”


Umal naqodra!


The giant said.


Then kneel!


No unseen hand forced me to my knees, nor any great wind. I knelt of my own will. Above me, the giant tossed back his cloak, and lo! Its lining was of pale fire! Flames spun in the air, kindled and blew out—were kindled anew. A light like the aurora settled on Ragama, seemed to spread from his back like wings. Tipping back his head, he convulsed, and from his lips there sprang a spike of twisted metal.

With a gasp, I realized what it was.

It was a hilt.

I sat there, transfixed, unable to move as the Judicator closed one fist about the hilt and drew it forth from himself.

No smith on ten thousand worlds would have called what the Judicator drew forth a sword. It was a spike of crude iron, twisted and gnarling. And it blazed, as though the creature had a furnace in his belly. Its edges gleamed like a thing new forged, and he raised it above his head.

When I was invested an Imperial knight, the oaths I swore were legion. I knelt before the Emperor for several minutes before His Radiance lay the sword of office upon my shoulders. Caesar had asked what seemed then a hundred questions.

I had sworn so many vows—nigh all of them broken.

Ragama asked no questions, extracted no further oaths.

I expected him to speak, to begin some rite or benediction, or to lay that blazing sword upon my shoulder. My brow.

Instead he drew back his arm, and a thousand hands—unseen—held me in place as he plunged that burning brand into my heart.


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Framed