CHAPTER 42
DOUBT
She did not come to me, but retreated half a step. “What are you?” she asked, one hand moving to the hilt of one sword. Her eyes were hard as glass.
“Cassandra!” I stood. I touched my face with that hand that was not my hand, that new left hand of flesh restored. “I know. I know I am not the man I was . . . ” Echoing Ragama, I said, “I am the man I should have been. But I am me, Anaryan, I promise you that. Upon your mother’s blood, I promise it.”
I knew that I was naked, but I felt no shame, and the desire to cover myself came more for concern for the others than for myself. Cassandra was not alone. The two men from the hold had filtered after her, each holding his stunner limply at his side. There came a beating of great wings upon the air, and the Irchtani chiliarch, Annaz, alighted beside her, head cocked so that it peered at me with one glass bead of an eye.
“They said you were dead, bashanda,” he said.
“I was,” I said.
“What do you mean,” Cassandra began, hand still on the hilt of her sword, “that you’re the man you should have been?”
More had come to the Gadelica’s ramp, men and women in ship’s fatigues. I recognized Captain Henric Ghoshal, a broad-shouldered, mustachioed man with the black hair and bronze complexion common among the old palatine families. “He’s on his way,” he said.
“Someone get the man some clothes!” cried another voice. “Call his servant!”
“Where is Neema?” I asked, and looking round at the city coiled about that linear sun, I asked, “Where are we?”
Cassandra seemed not to have heard me. “Who are you, really?”
Edouard appeared over her shoulder, his usually oiled hair unkempt, his eyes hollow.
“Who am I?” I said, advancing a step toward my daughter. “Cassandra, I am myself.”
“Neema said you died,” she said. “And the princess. They said you . . . they said it was the priest’s poison. That you melted.”
Edouard stepped forward, laying a hand on Cassandra’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t let her see, lord,” he said. “Is it really you?”
“It’s really me.”
“Your scars,” he said. “Your face.”
I raised a hand to hide my once-scarred cheek. “Gone.”
“How?” he said.
“The Quiet,” I said, and let my hand fall, for there was nothing for it to conceal. “He has sent me back. I still have work to do.”
The younger man’s mouth hung half-open. He teetered on the precipice of speech.
“Dorayaica must be destroyed,” I said. “It is infested by one of the Watchers, and soon it will have gathered enough strength to act of itself. It will be like it was on Sabratha, only it will not be constrained as Ushara was. Already, Dorayaica has gathered her to itself. I have seen it. They rule together. On Dharan-Tun.”
Edouard set this all aside with a gesture. “You were dead,” he said, and shook his head in disbelief. “I saw the body. The blood. Her highness said it was the Mermaid’s Kiss.”
“Dispholide,” I said. “It was. One of their Cantors poisoned me. You tried to warn me.”
“I failed,” Edouard said, and dropping to one knee before me, he took my hand. “My lord, I failed you.”
Tugging on his hand to make him rise, I said, “They failed, Edouard. I am here. Stand!”
He did so, and drew back.
One of the junior men had retrieved the foil blanket where it tumbled cross the stone yard and offered it to me. I accepted it gratefully, and bound it about my waist, fashioning a kind of skirt. The man who offered the cloth to me had jerked away as I reached for him, and I looked round at the others with equal parts confusion and joy. Cassandra had not moved at all, still stood with her hand on her sword.
“Anaryan,” I said to her. “Don’t be afraid. It is only me.”
“This is some trick,” she said. “Some Extrasolarian devilry. You are a clone. A copy they have sent to torment us.” She turned her head to speak to Ghoshal and Annaz and the others. “We should never have trusted them!”
Tears brimmed in my new-made eyes, and I moved to take her by the shoulders in the instant her attention turned away. Before she could react, I embraced her, felt her every fiber tense. She did not move for the space of several heartbeats. “Cassandra,” I said softly, speaking into her braided hair. “It really is me.”
For a moment, I thought that she might return the embrace, might soften, might weep as I was weeping.
“I thought I’d never see you again,” I said.
She lurched away. “You can’t be real,” she said, and her eyes were shining with unfallen tears.
“How long has it been?” I asked, looking from her to Edouard.
“Two days,” came the younger man’s reply. “We left Forum at once, took the Ascalon from the Porta Leonora, commandeered the Gadelica with the Commandant General’s help.”
I felt my eyes widen. “Lorian?” I looked round at the Sojourner. “Of course . . . ”
“This is his ship,” Edouard said.
Henric Ghoshal advanced to join Cassandra, Annaz, and Edouard. He moved cautiously, as if afraid I might shatter or combust. “I sent for him, my lord!” he said. “He is coming now.”
“He helped you?” I asked, turning from one face to the next.
My last words.
Find Albé, I had said, clutching Selene’s arm as my own rotted away. Find Albé. Trust Lorian.
Evidently they had. I shut my eyes, murmured thanks to he I knew was always listening.
Something in the quality of the silence changed, and I opened my eyes, saw Ghoshal’s men part on the ramp of the troop carrier, drawing back to admit the knot of figures emerging from the hold.
The Cielcin emerged into the false day of the drum city, shielding their too-sensitive eyes with long-fingered hands. I could feel the tension in the humans gathered about them, marked the tendency of hands to drift toward weapons.
But Ramanthanu and its people made no move, unless it was to walk toward me. Seeing me standing there in plain light, the lop-horned captain fell to its knees, pressed its flat face to the pavement. The others followed suit.
“Ba-Aeta-doh!” it said, voice loud despite its kneeling. “My lord! They said that you had fallen—but I did not believe!”
I answered it, “I was told our people had found you. I feared that you were lost.”
“Muddanyutata o-tajarin’ta,” said Albé, stepping forward. I had not known until that moment that he spoke the Cielcin tongue. It made sense, he was—had been—of HAPSIS, after all. “I woke them and the Irchtani. And Captain Ghoshal. We needed men to take the ship from drydock. Aristedes and the Extrasolarians staged a distraction so we could escape.”
I tried to picture the battle. Edouard, Neema, and Cassandra stealing aboard the Ascalon in the Porta Leonora, battling the Martians to win free. The attack on the orbital dockyard, the theft of the Gadelica. The complicity of Lorian and his fleet.
“Does this mean the deal with the Extrasolarians fell apart?” I asked.
None answered.
“Ba-Aeta-doh!” said Ramanthanu, making the honorific a single word. It had not raised its face from the pavement. “Ba-Aeta-doh! I knew you were not dead. If the false god of my fathers could not destroy you . . . I knew no weapon of the yukajjimn could!”
I looked down at the kneeling creatures, spared a glance for Cassandra. She had relaxed somewhat, had at least taken her hand from the sword. But suspicion remained in her emerald eyes, and there was a tension in her every fiber, as though she were a bowstring held taut by an experienced archer. By contrast, there was nothing of suspicion in the kneeling Cielcin.
If anything, the Cielcin was groveling, was rushing to reassert its subservience, as though in terror of the lash. Knowing what was expected of me by the traditions of its kind. I advanced and placed my bare foot upon the soft, exposed back of the creature’s head, where the coarse, white hair sprouted from behind the horned epoccipital crest. Seeing this done, the others pressed themselves flatter to the stony ground, but said nothing.
Something turned in my stomach as I performed the action. It was wrong, and yet the alternative was violence. The Cielcin would either submit or conquer.
Or die.
Removing my foot from the captain’s head, I said, “Lenna, Ramanthanu-kih.”
I hadn’t forgotten what this creature was, what it had done to the prisoners on Sabratha—what it had ordered done. And yet it was a link. The first step in the chain I’d hoped to find and pull as a boy. The visions the Quiet had shown me time and again were of extinction, of the death of our kind . . . or of theirs.
Do what must be, that silent god had said.
Still, I hoped I might effect a compromise. A synthesis. A marriage of heaven and hell.
A peace between man and Cielcin.
The only alternative was genocide.
The captain stood and drew back, Otomno and Egazimn, Bikashi and Atiamnu with it.
“Where are we, then?” I asked, addressing Edouard and Ghoshal.
The mustachioed captain answered. “Perhaps it is better if we wait for the Commandant General.”
“You do not trust me, Captain?” I asked.
“I am not certain you are who you say you are, sir,” the man said. “The Hadrian Marlowe I met on Sabratha was old. Gray haired. Horrid great scars on his face and hands. Whatever you are, you aren’t the same man.”
How I longed for Valka, then! For Pallino! For Bassander Lin!
Not a one of the people in that landing field had been present aboard the Demiurge. Not a one of them had seen my return, had seen me defeat Aranata Otiolo after the loss of my own head.
But Lorian was coming.
Lorian had seen the recording Pallino’s suit had made. And Lorian had been at Berenike, and at Perfugium, and at a dozen other battles beside.
Lorian would understand.
“I think we’d all feel more comfortable if you came back onto the ship, sir,” Ghoshal said.
As he was speaking, I realized that many of Ghoshal’s men had drawn their sidearms, and as their captain spoke, they trained the blue slits of their stunners on me.
I raised my hands. “There’s no need for this,” I said. I smiled. “Your weapons will do you no good, sir. They are no threat to me.”
Could they not see that I was myself?
“Keep your hands where we can see them, sir,” Ghoshal said, voice unusually mild. “Please.”
I had frightened them. I saw the unease in their faces. One man’s stunner shook.
“Captain Ghoshal!” exclaimed Annaz, hopping to face the palatine commander. “This is unnecessary. Tell your men to lower their weapons! Whether this is Bashanda Marlowe or not, this is no threat to us.”
“You really think it’s him, bird man?” Ghoshal asked, right hand ready by the holster of his own sidearm. His eyes darted to Annaz.
The Irchtani and Cielcin, both . . . I thought. Strange that they, who were remoter from me, saw what those closest had not.
“You will come peaceably?” Ghoshal asked.
I had not lowered my hands. “Of course.” I directed my words to Cassandra, whose beliefs alone of those gathered there mattered to me. “It really is me. I have been remade, don’t you see? My body was destroyed by the Chantry’s poison. The Quiet has fashioned me a new one.”
Had Cassandra’s doubt broken, just for a moment? Something in her face had flickered.
“I will come peaceably, Captain Ghoshal. I intend no violence toward you or your men. I will have need of every one of you if we are to reach Vorgossos.”
“Vorgossos?” Edouard interposed himself between myself and Ghoshal’s stunners, his arms outstretched. He stared intently at me. “Why Vorgossos?”
“Kharn Sagara has a weapon,” I said, “a ship. It has weapons designed by the Mericanii, weapons capable of destroying the Watchers.”
Edouard squinted up at me. “You’re certain.”
“I’ve seen the weapons myself,” I said.
The HAPSIS man hung his head. For a moment, the only sound was the crinkling of the foil lashed about my waist.
“Edouard,” I said, using the man’s right name. “We can finish what we started on Sabratha. Operation Gnomon is not done yet.”
The Museum Catholic glanced at Ghoshal. “My lord, we are fugitives. I feared they would kill your daughter after what they did to you. We had to kill men to escape Forum, to say nothing of the diplomatic cost. And that is not all . . . ”
I did not give him the chance to finish, saying, “Our duty has not changed.”
“If we are captured . . . ” He did not have to say it. He gripped my arm, stood near so that I felt his words upon my face. “They will execute all of us.”
I could only nod.
“We are hardly more than three thousand,” Edouard said. “Less than half the strength we took to Sabratha. The Gadelica is troop transport. Ancient. We have nothing save the hardware in our hold.”
I heard hardly any of this. I looked him in the face, held his gaze through those ivory-rimmed lenses until he faltered. “You believe me,” I said.
“What?”
“You believe I am me,” I said, clarifying.
Edouard looked away, almost embarrassed. “I’ve read your file,” he said, “saw the footage from Perfugium and Berenike. I’d be a fool to doubt, besides . . . ” He broke off, face downcast. “I believe in miracles.”
I looked at him, hard-eyed. “Your god did not do this.”
Edouard smiled, just for a moment. “My god is the only one who can do this.”
What could I do but smile at him?
“Step away from him, Albé,” Ghoshal said. “Lord Marlowe . . . if you are Lord Marlowe. Will you come quietly?”
I laid a hand on Edouard’s shoulder, stepped past him, back into the line of fire. “If you so wish, Captain. I will go to the brig.” I looked down at my makeshift clothing. “I don’t suppose you might send for my clothes?”
“We’ll find something for you,” Ghoshal said.
Cassandra had not moved in a long while. As I drew level with her, I said, “Will you come visit me?”
She looked away. “I . . . si.”
“This way!” Ghoshal’s aristocratic tones cut across us both.
Passing my Cielcin and the Irchtani, leaving my daughter and Edouard behind, I permitted myself to be escorted back across the stone yard toward the open vessel. I had to hike my foil skirt up at the knee to keep from stepping on it as I mounted the ramp, the wind of the coiled city-ship tugging at my overlong hair.
“Let me through!” a contralto voice exclaimed.
I halted, and my escort—four men with stunners drawn—halted with me.
“Let me see him!” The voice had gone shrill. “Let me through, I say! That is an order, sirs!”
The men before me parted, permitting a woman with short, red hair to pass. I did not at first recognize her. She wore an officer’s dress blacks, but they ill fit her, having clearly been cut for one broader of beam than she. She staggered into the open space at the top of the ramp, looked down at me, face white as that of a phantom.
“Hadrian?”
Her voice revealed her.
“Selene?”
She had cut her hair, slashed it off about the line of her jaw as with a sword. I did not think I had ever seen her face unpainted before. Still her rank betrayed itself: in the touch of gold at her throat, in the rings and bangles on those slender hands where they emerged from the officer’s tunic.
There could be no denying who she was, or what she was.
She raised one hand to her mouth, eyes wide. She had seen me die, and more than die—she had seen me brutalized. Well I recalled the horror I had felt seeing Irshan decompose so rapidly beneath me on the floor of the Grand Colosseum. Too well I recalled my own demise, my own reflection melting in the mirror, blood streaming from my eyes like tears.
“You’re alive . . . ” she said, not lowering her hand. Some emotion touched her eyes. Joy perhaps? She shook. “How can you . . . be . . . ? Is it you?”
Smiling, I said, “Don’t cry for me, Selene.”
Her shoulders shook, and she clamped her hand over her mouth, staggered down the ramp toward me. I raised an arm to catch her, still clutching at the blanket wrapped about my nudity. She fell against me, sobbing the while. I held her close, let her cry.
I had forgotten until that moment that she had kissed me, and stood at once more stiffly. Still, I held her fast, let her cry. She had seen a terrible thing, and what the days since had meant for her, I thought I could guess.
“You brought her with you?” I asked, projecting so that my words carried over the crowd. I turned her about with me, so that I might see the others—Edouard and Cassandra, Ghoshal and the xenobites. “You kidnapped an Imperial princess?”
“She insisted,” Edouard said.
“She insisted?” I echoed. “So that’s all right then. If she insisted!”
I could hardly believe my ears. Not only had they been forced to blast their way out of Forum, absconding with two Imperial military vessels; not only had they jeopardized nascent relations with the Latarran Monarchy; but they had kidnapped one of the Emperor’s own children. It was no wonder tensions aboard the vessel seemed so high.
“She seemed to think it would prevent the Martians from simply destroying our ships,” Edouard said. “I agreed.”
I looked down at the woman sobbing against my bare chest. “They would have . . . killed the others,” she managed through her tears. “I . . . couldn’t have that.” One green eye peered up at me through those ragged strands of violently red hair.
My jaw grew tight. By enabling their escape, she had put the lives of every man and woman on the Gadelica in still greater jeopardy. The lives of Albé and Ghoshal—the ranking officers and apparent ringleaders of the plot—were certainly forfeit. The Cielcin would be executed out of hand, and the Irchtani likely along with them. The junior men might survive, they were only following orders, after all—but they might not, or might merit their own voyages to Belusha.
“You cut your hair,” I said lamely.
Selene choked. “I . . . yours is different, too.” She held one curling strand in near unfeeling fingers. Only by degrees did she raise her face to my own. Her eyes were raw with tears, red rimmed and wide, so wide I thought I might drown in them. Once, perhaps, I would have. Then I felt only pity for her. And concern. “You’re all different.” She blinked. “You really can’t be killed, can you?”
“Not today,” I said, and smiled down at her.
She raised a hand to gingerly touch my face, but pulled the white fingers away. “You . . . your face has changed.”
“I know,” I said.
“Step away from the princess, Marlowe!” came a high, familiar voice.
Turning from Selene, I saw the man I’d hoped to see striding from the gate at the end of the stone yard, one of his hod-helmeted officers in tow. Lorian walked with a deliberate haste I had never seen in him before. He had left his cane behind, and the short-billed officer’s cap he wore was pulled down almost to his eyes, which were alight with focus.
“Lorian!” I moved to meet him.
Without breaking stride, the little Commandant General drew his sidearm—a wolfram needler of exquisite make—and fired the weapon straight at my chest.
The needler fired a slim bolt of polished tungsten—long as the end of a man’s thumb and no wider than the tine of dinner fork—at many times the speed of sound. I knew its type. The bolt was vaguely pill shaped, narrower at either end and rounded so that it might tumble on the air, slewing round so that it might tear through whatever it struck with a sound like a thunderclap.
It did not strike me, though it passed clean through my bare chest.
Lorian did not stop.
The needler was only semiautomatic, and so he had to depress the trigger with his finger each time he discharged the weapon. I counted seventeen rounds before the good commander was within a dozen paces of me. Never once did he blink. He stopped perhaps ten feet from me, and taking aim at my face prepared to fire a final time.
I raised a hand.
Time parted, and the bolt struck the ramp at my back with a shower of sparks.
The officer at Lorian’s right hand—a tall, thin woman with hair nearly so white as Lorian’s own and a black, metallic implant at her right temple and along the cheekbone beneath one bright eye—looked on in horror.
“Are you done?” I said, irritated.
The others were still and silent.
Lorian fired again.
The wolfram bolt passed clean through my chest and struck the ramp at my back without leaving a mark.
“Now I’m done,” the little man said, grinning wolfishly.
“Mère de Dieu!” Edouard swore, rushing to come between us. “What the devil was all that?”
“Should you meet the Arthur-Buddha,” Lorian said, holstering his needler, “kill him.”
“I don’t think this is what the old masters precisely had in mind,” I said.
“You’re really you,” Lorian said, grin widening.
“I’m really me.”
The little man spread his arms. “You son of a bitch!”
“You shot me, Aristedes!”
“I had to be sure, didn’t I?” he said, and embraced me. “They said you were dead!”
“They say a lot of things,” I said, thumping the man on the back.
I sensed a strength in Lorian’s limbs that had not been there before. All his life, the man had been a scarecrow, a thing of paper and straw and twigs. He seemed a man of raw iron now, and perhaps he was.
“It wasn’t just the nerve implants, was it?” I asked.
“I told you, I’ve had some work done.” Lorian drew back, punched me in the arm. “You should talk. What the hell happened?”
“The Quiet,” I said.
“Again?” Lorian looked to his companion, exasperation coloring his face. “You know, most people die when they’re killed, Hadrian!”
I grinned to match his own. “One of these days I’ll get it right.” I looked up at the city overhead, Ghoshal and his fears forgotten. “This is your ship?”
“The Mistwalker,” Lorian said. “We took her fighting the Exalted at Abziri. We have some thirty of her class in the Grand Army, plus the free captains. There are thousands of smaller ships.”
“What is it all for?” I asked, watching men and women walking across the roof on the far side of the long sun. “Harendotes didn’t raise this army only to aid the Empire against the Cielcin.”
The woman at Lorian’s right spoke up. “Not only.”
I looked at her, marked for the first time the black threads radiating from her implant beneath her pale skin, so like Lorian’s own.
Lorian raised a hand for peace. “Hadrian, this is my Chief Security Officer, Captain 2Maeve Gamma A27 of the Interfaced.”
“Two . . . Maeve?” I repeated the odd name, turning to the strange, demoniac woman. “Interfaced?”
“You would call us barbarians, I believe,” the woman said icily.
“Perhaps I would,” I said. “Lorian?”
The Commandant General had returned. “That’s enough, 2Maeve.” He looked up at me, one hand resting on the needler at his waist. “You heard our terms in council. Control of the Norman stars. That’s why we’ve raised our army.”
I was nodding. I returned my attention to Lorian’s face. “Where are we going?”
Lorian’s colorless eyes held mine a long moment. At last he blinked. “Latarra.”
“Latarra?” Somehow, the thought had not occurred to me, not even once.
“I was supposed to return from Forum with a treaty,” Lorian said.
A treaty, I thought, thinking of what Samek had said when she had poisoned me, and atomics.
“Instead, I have you.” Lorian fixed me with a stare sharp as the bite of his needler. “And the princess.” He glanced at Selene, and doffed his hat, restoring it to his head at a jaunty angle. “We’ll have to make do, but you . . . ” He jabbed me with this finger, entirely unperturbed by my appearance and return. “You will have to tell me everything.”