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CHAPTER 37

DISSOLUTION


The day before I was at last to meet with His Radiance—a meeting that would never occur—the Emperor himself failed to appear in Council. An apparition of Prince Alexander appeared instead, alone below the throne upon the dais, a portent of things to come.

I stared at the empty throne over Alexander’s shoulder, the round, red cushion of the headboard an empty halo amidst all that filigree of golden sun beams.

He can’t have much longer, Edouard had said. Edouard, who was leaving, who had been summoned away. By my allies, as he suspected? To insulate what it was he knew? Or by my enemies?

If they meant to block my meeting with the Emperor, they were not moving Edouard fast enough. They would have to act quickly. But how? Edouard’s note had talked of violence, of a plot to frame me for treason. He said they had the Gadelica, had found Ramanthanu and the others. They would arrest me, snatch me from Martian hands and produce the xenobites as evidence, ask why it was that the Emperor’s pet sorcerer kept demons bottled on his ship.

A show trial . . . then what? An execution?

All these thoughts and more danced like the fire reflected in my eyes, played there while I sat in council on the highest row, and listened as Lorian argued with Lord Rand and Sattha Kull. The Tavrosi Grand Admiral did not believe the science of Lorian’s machine, and the Exalted captains that had accompanied the little Commandant General had shouted him down.

Kull remained convinced it was a sham. Director General Wong Xu shared that skepticism in more measured terms, a skepticism echoed by King Paeon of the dryads and by the Durantine Doxe. In return, Captain Archambault presented detailed footage of an attack his Two Dreams of Spring had carried out against a worldship that had stopped to refuel in a desolate system about a red dwarf star.

“The Cielcin siphon material off gas giants,” the Exalted captain proclaimed. “Separate the hydrogen and helium, use the helium in their fusion reactors, run the hydrogen through their accelerators to create the antihydrogen required to achieve warp.”

That had long been speculated, as Lord Rand indicated at once. The first great plasma siphons had been uncovered in the wreck of Typhon, the second worldship ever captured.

“But they make stops between battles to refuel,” Archambault explained. “Often for years at a time—as long as it takes for them to replenish their fuel reservoirs.”

“You cannot imagine how much fuel is required to move a worldship,” said Captain Zelaz, floating above the proceedings like an evil spirit.

“While the Cielcin park to refuel, they are vulnerable,” Archambault explained. “That was when we struck. We tracked them to this system, VA-87:13 DS-114. They were not prepared for attack: The statistical probability of a random encounter in an unsettled system is so close to zero, after all.”

“There were no survivors,” Lorian said.

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The session broke with the fifth hour after noon. With its elongated days, Forum kept to Earth standard time, ignoring its own solar cycle entirely. Day and night were on Forum treated more as weather than time. That day was sunlight as I recall, though the sun of Forum was far past its noon. It would be dark in several days, and remain dark for nearly the next standard month.

I felt it should be dark already, placing my dark glasses—the dark glasses I had stolen from a man on Emesh when I was just a boy—on my nose. My Martian escort had rejoined me in the hall outside the council chamber, followed me like bloody shadows out into the colonnade. The Campus Raphael stretched before us, down a flight of marble steps.

It was an ordinary day, the breeze perhaps a little cool, the air stabilized by the planet’s watchful weather satellites and by the great sail wall that cut the Coriolis winds.

“Lord Marlowe!”

I knew that throaty voice, knew its owner before I turned.

The Cantor, Samek, hurried down the steps beside me, one hand hiking up her flowing robes. She looked precisely as she had the day Lorian arrived, in black clerical robes with the white skullcap and epitrachelion of her office. A pair of cathars stood behind her, eyes concealed by the traditional blindfolds in the manner of Justice herself.

Was it to be so simple? Had they come to arrest me then and there, on the steps of the Sun King’s Hall, in the sight of all the worlds? I wore no sword, but my shield was active—as was customary among the high lords of the Imperium at court. I eyed my Martian escort. If I struck the one to my left with a rising elbow to the chin, I could surely steal his lance, kill the second and Samek both before the cathars closed. If I rushed the stairs, I might make the gates before security took me, and so find myself in Aurelian’s custody and as close to friends as may be.

The words of Edouard’s letter burned like fire in the blackest pits of my heart.

May attempt violence. All I know.

I took my hands from the pockets of my coat, but I made no other move—either to strike my escort or to run. “Cantor Samek!” I said loudly, turning fully to face her.

“May I walk with you?” she asked. “I’d like a word.”

“Speak your piece,” I said, defiant.

“It would be best if we had this conversation more privately,” she said.

I had anticipated that she intended to make a spectacle of me, but now that she seemed desirous of privacy, I intended to deny it to her. The leviathan advanced on me, swept down the stairs, her hands folded before her.

“Would it indeed?” I did not move.

Her mouth pursed, and she said, “You entertained Lorian Aristedes at your apartments the evening before last.”

I felt a strange relief that she had not asked about Edouard.

“My apartments are surveilled,” I said. “I assume you’ve heard every word.”

“Yes, indeed,” she said.

“Then you know there’s nothing,” I said.

She was standing at the bottom of the stairs by then, a few paces from me. “That’s not why I’m here,” she said. “We really must talk privately.”

I eyed the Martian Guards posted at the base of the stairs, watched a trio of logothetes processing up and to the right.

“You believe he is still your friend, don’t you?” Samek said. “You have seen what he has become. You cannot trust him. None of us can. His master seeks to humiliate the Emperor, to rob us of the Norman provinces.”

“We have lost them already.”

“By handing them over without contest, we alienate our allies in the Expanse. There will be general rebellion. Chaos.” She was standing very close then, fidgeting with her ring in a manner redolent of Selene. Her furrowed brows wrinkled the Phoenician sāmek tattooed between them. “Do you find his stories about the telegraph detector credible?”

I blinked at her. This was not the conversation I had expected to have.

“I . . . I am no magus, priest,” I said.

“The theory laid out by Aristedes and his demoniac compatriots is nonsense,” she said. “Perturbations in the quantum foam . . . instantly detectable at a distance of several thousand light-years, sensitive enough to make sense of coded messages?” She shook her head. I could smell the verrox stimulant on her breath, bitter and alkaline. “Your friend is lying.”

“You’re saying Grand Admiral Kull is correct,” I said.

“Kull is abomination, as surely as Aristedes,” she said in hushed tones, “but yes. This device of theirs cannot work. They would sell us false goods for an arm of the galaxy.”

“And their support in the war,” I said. “Lorian is to command their armada against the Cielcin.”

Samek sniffed, looked over her shoulder. “And now he requests we supply his armada with neutron-class enhanced radiation weapons. Why?”

“Atomics?” I asked, feeling suddenly that Samek had been right, that we should be having this conversation under cover. A pair of women in silk dresses passed us, one tittering to the other from behind a patterned fan. “You’re lying.”

“I do that often, my lord,” she said, eyes wide and glassy, “but not now.”

“What would Lorian want with a cache of atomics?”

“That is what you must find out, my lord,” she said, stepping forward. I felt the dark waters swirl around us, felt the leviathan draw near. “We cannot trust these barbarians. You know this. Calen Harendotes has long allied with these sorcerers, this . . . MINOS.”

Every fiber in me screamed to step away. Samek was a creature of power and cold malice, the avatar of the organization that had for so many centuries sought my destruction. It had been they who directed the assassin, Irshan; they who had falsified the charges that bought me twelve years in captivity on Thermon; they who had tried to kill me when their sham trial turned against them. They had paid Udax and his kinsmen to attack me on Gododdin, had possibly even been the force that galvanized the Empress against me.

But I held my ground.

“He was your friend, I know,” Samek said, once more twisting her ring. “But you cannot trust him, lord. If you are true—as you say, a servant of the Empire—you must find out what his master is planning.”

“Must I?” I asked, and turned to go.

Her ringed hand lanced out and caught me by the wrist. Furious, I looked into Samek’s face. “For the good of the realm,” she said, and there was an edge to her words, a conviction that had not been there an instant before.

A triumph.

The realm. Tugging my hand free, I averted my gaze, looking first at the ground between our feet and then around at the Campus Raphael. We were in the heart of that realm that very moment, dancing on the head of the pin that was the axis about which our every world turned. “Are you really so desperate?” I asked, rubbing my wrist to rid it of the memory of her touch. “You dare speak to me, to me, of the good of the realm? Who in all the Empire has given more? You come here, seeking to turn me against one of the last friends I have in all the galaxy . . . and with what? Rumor? Lorian Aristedes is my friend, Cantor. I would sooner distrust myself.”

Had I not distrusted him not two days earlier? Had I not found him changed?

The Lorian I had known was gone, or buried. The good commander lost beneath the Commandant General. I was old, and tired, and touched by the demoness Ushara. Another demon had taken Lorian, the daimon called machine. He had said his implants were only prosthetic nerves, replacements to his stretched ligaments and fraying tendons. But what if he had lied? Might not some iron serpent lie coiled about his brainstem, altering his thoughts, or carrying trojan thoughts planted by his royal master? Might he not be possessed?

And yet he had almost wept to see Cassandra standing in the inner arch of our apartment.

“When you stand before Mother Earth in judgement, lord,” Samek said, eyes still shining, “you will have to account for your actions. Your soul is in your hands.”

Still massaging my wrist, I glared long and hard at Samek. Her tone had shifted, softened, darkened. She had not pressed the issue with Lorian, had seemingly abandoned it as quickly as she had taken it up.

Your soul is in your hands. Had not Gibson himself said precisely that so long ago?

I snarled at her, saying, “I have seen the Howling Dark that awaits us all hereafter, priest. Your goddess was not there.”

Samek recoiled as if stunned, bright eyes hardening to points of furious light. “You do not deny it? These stories they tell of you?”

I was deep in black water, felt the serpent coiling in the dark all around me.

“You have seen Berenike,” I said, referring to the recordings of my miracle. “Perfugium. Still you doubt me?”

Her face had grown pale as milk, as death, and the triumph and conviction that had but recently lighted her eyes was blown out. “Why did you come back?”

I did not answer her.

“Why are you here?”

“You still don’t know?” I almost laughed.

“Tell me!” Samek hissed, drawing near. “We know of your demons.”

Edouard’s letter, I thought.

They know about the Cielcin on Gadelica.

She seized my wrist once more, hard eyes locked on mine. What a sight we must have been, there on the steps of the palace! The devil and the priestess of Earth, both in suits of black. Knight and hierophant—matched pieces.

When had the day grown cold?

“You say the Emperor summoned you,” she said, referring to our earlier conversation. “Why? Speak now, and you may yet save your life and that of your bastard.”

She was so close, so close that I might strike her with my forehead and break that powdered nose. The scent of verrox filled my nostrils.

“My bastard . . . ” I snarled. “If you so much as touch her—”

“Why did you come back?”

A black mood was on me. This woman had threatened my life, threatened Cassandra’s life and Lorian’s—sought to turn me against him. “To kill a god,” I said, and tugged my hand free. “To kill a god, priestess. Does that frighten you?”

Let her think I meant her own.

Her eyes went wide, then narrowed to mere slits. “Impiety harms only the impious, lordship,” she said, drawing herself up to her full height, and I saw for the first time that she was slightly taller than I was myself, a true palatine. “I see now you are beyond salvation. I will pray for your soul.”

With that she gathered her robes in one fist and drew back, dark waters buffeting me as she turned tail and made for the stairs, her cathars close behind. Her eyes were slow to leave my face then. I have never forgotten them, nor the thin smile that should not have been on those pursed, carmine lips. Three steps up, she halted, looked back over her shoulder. “Think on your sins, my lord.”

I watched the leviathan depart, feeling the pull of its dread weight, little knowing I was dead already, and that it would soon have me in its jaws.

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The pale towers and green parks of the Eternal City passing beneath my shuttle seemed things frozen in time, as though the aureate light that fell from the distant sun were a kind of amber. But for the fliers that darted like bees from one flying platform to the next, the whole thing seemed still as stone, a sculptor’s miniature or artist’s copy, a display crafted for my benefit and mine alone.

Unreal city . . . 

It was an illusion, all of it. A funeral mask of marble and gold filigree upon a face long gone to rot. Harendotes’s demands and the revelation of his machine had cracked that mask, and the galaxy was peering in now, glimpsing the decay. The Empire was weak—though before the war began, it had never been greater. Its very size had been its undoing, having created for itself a territory too great for any human mind and armada to defend.

I shivered, drawing my coat about myself, watching the towers pass.

Even if we could destroy the Cielcin, the rot would likely prove fatal. The mere act of renouncing all claim to the Norman stars would shatter the mask and the illusion of Imperial supremacy.

All across the galaxy, the Imperial sun was setting. In its place would come an age—not of darkness—but of countless lesser lights. Where the Imperial sun had gone, the stars beyond counting would shine out the clearer. Our Empire—its order—would pass away, and in the Age of Night, the Age of the Stars that was to come there would be chaos. War. War not only with the Lothrians, whom brave men are fighting even as I write this page, but with the Normans, with the Extras, with what remains of the Grand Army of Latarra . . . and of Lorian’s dream.

And with whatever lies beyond . . . 

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“Lord Marlowe?” One of my Martian escorts caught me as I stumbled in the flier’s door.

“I’m all right, Larok,” I said, steadying myself.

My encounter with Samek had left me shaken, and my short flight from the palace to the Martian citadel had provided me with silent reflection sufficient for regret to flower like a weed. I had denounced the faith, threatened a high cleric—an agent of the Choir, no less—and spoken of my own death and return, and of the wonders I had worked at Berenike and at Perfugium.

It was foolish.

The door to the inside lay open ahead, but I tarried on the gangway, drawing my coat ever tighter about myself. The day had taken chill, as if the very sun were robbed of fire. I permitted the Martians to lead me inside and along the hall to the lift that would carry me to the level of the guest houses high above. I leaned on the support rail, overcome by the day’s events.

When we reached the end of the hall, I faltered.

“Where are the guards?” I asked Larok.

There ought to have been two men posted at the door outside.

“Unclear, sir,” came the reply. “I’ll radio Sir Canton.”

“You do that,” I said.

The door showed no signs of being forced. Its control panel remained intact, and appeared for all the world not to have been interfered with. It accepted my code and cycled, moving gently to one side. The bell chimed, and Neema emerged from the servant’s quarters, bustling directly toward me, his brows knitting with some urgent complaint. “Domi!” he said, speaking Jaddian. “She wouldn’t stay outside. Insisted I let her in.”

“Neema.” I raised my hands to stop the fellow in his tracks. “The guards on the door. Where have they gone?”

“Sent them away! That’s what I’m telling you!” the Nemrutti servant explained. “She’s in your chambers, sir, most improper—I told her so myself! But she would not listen.”

“Who’s in my chambers?” I asked, relieved to find the man in one of his usual moods. “Where’s Cassandra?”

“Gone to the gymnasium,” Neema said, answering the second question and forgetting the first. He paused, marked Larok and the other Martian standing just inside. “The guards have returned!”

Laying a hand on the man’s shoulder, I said, “No, they came with me. Who’s here?”

Neema’s blunt face fell, and his voice softened. “My lord, are you unwell? You’re sweating!”

“What?” I touched the nape of my neck, and found it damp. “Is it warm in here? It was quite cold outside.” I left my servant standing in the foyer to fetch my sword from its hiding place in my second coat. It was still there, safe in an inner pocket.

I permitted Neema to skin me out of my coat—found as he did so that I had indeed been sweating, and marveled at it. I had hardly noticed. The butler let fly a stream of complaints as I crossed the common room, moving toward the inner arch and the short hall to my chambers, shield-belt still on, sword hilt concealed in my trouser pocket, my right hand primed on the safety catch.

“Just barged right in like she owned the place, master!” he said, having entirely failed to answer my question.

I raised a hand for silence, placed a hand on the knob.

Neema shut his mouth as I turned the latch, and the woman seated on the divan between the room’s narrow slits of window stood sharply, turning to face me. She wore a black mantle, head to toe, with a deep hood that hid her face. Still, I knew she was a woman at once from the way she rose, standing all at once and freezing in place.

“Identify yourself,” I said, angling my left side to face her.

She raised her hands and threw back her hood.

“Selene?” The tension in my every limb vanished at once. “What are you doing here?” She looked wrong dressed so in black.

“I came to warn you,” she said, crossing the carpet to my side. “The Chantry plan to move against you. They say they raided your ship, the one that brought you from offworld. They said there were Cielcin frozen on it, that you intended some treason with them . . . ”

“I know,” I said, relaxing.

The princess blinked at me. “You know?”

“You shouldn’t be here,” I said, gesturing at the ceiling. “This place is watched.”

Furiously she shook her head. “They wouldn’t dare. Besides, I sent my people to stop the recording.”

“You what?” I asked. “Why?”

She drew nearer, eyes downcast, until she was standing just before me. She was nearly so tall as I, taller than Valka, and yet when she peered up at me she seemed as one who peers across a great distance. She raised a hand. Her arm tinkled with countless jeweled bangles. “I told them I was here for you. They will protect my privacy, if not yours.”

I swayed, contemplated moving away. The floral notes of her perfumed hair were filling my nostrils. Jasmine. Iris. Rose.

“Besides.” Her breath was on my face, words like warm smoke. “It is not wholly untrue.”

She kissed me then, clumsy but intent, kissed me in a way that made me certain that she had never kissed anyone before. Had I seen that moment before? In that skein of prophetic images and other memory? In that vision of other lives? Had I not seen lives lived with her, seen us together—myself enthroned with Selene at my feet?

Did that future lie somehow ahead of me?

But no . . . I had been young in those visions.

“Princess, I . . . ”

“Call me Selene,” she said. She kissed me again, undoing the clasp that secured her mantle.

Valka’s shade seemed to hover on the air. Sandalwood in the perfume, perhaps, not as strongly. I drew back. “Princess,” I said again, “we cannot.”

The dress she wore beneath the fallen mantle was white as any bride’s, but translucent, revealing all of form and of the snowy lace beneath. She had armored herself for battle, in her way, after the fashion of women.

“I have wanted this,” she said, “since Father told me we were to be wed. Now we may never be, and I . . . they say you are guilty of consortation. With the Cielcin and the Extras both. Demons and daimons.”

Ushara stirred behind my face, laughing at the word demon.

“Hadrian, you’re scaring me,” she said, and I realized I was smiling, and more than smiling. I shuddered, raised a hand to my face. It came away damp. I needed a shower. It was so hot in the close air of that bedchamber. Had I altered the temperature settings?

“There are Cielcin on my ship,” I said. “Prisoners I took at Sabratha. They came over to our side.”

“Came over?” Selene rested her hands on my chest. “Is that even possible?”

“I don’t know,” I told her, not moving—not daring to move away. She was a princess of the Imperium. I could not refuse her. If I did, she might easily say—embarrassed, hurt—that I had tried to force myself on her. My protestations of innocence would never be believed. If I did not refuse her, my life would still be forfeit. One could not simply despoil a princess of the Aventine and live.

“I don’t know,” I said once more, “but I have to try. If there is a path to peace . . . if the war could end . . . ”

Her eyes were shining. “Aurelian says you have a secret mission, a mission known only to Father and himself, that you were never a traitor . . . ” She bit her lip, almost trembled. Not knowing what to do, I laid a hand on her shoulder. She felt so cold to my touch. “He said you struck Father over me . . . because he offered you my hand but days after your lady doctor was killed.” She did tremble then, and averted her eyes like emeralds. “I am sorry. She was a good woman—though I did not know her well. I have no desire to replace her. But I would make you a prince of the realm. That is some protection . . . and I would be . . . would be good to you.” She smiled nervously.

“You don’t . . . ” I nearly choked. “You don’t have to do this.”

“I told you,” she said, “I want to. Why do you think I was put on ice all these years?”

There was the answer to one mystery, at least. Why she—alone, it seemed, among her siblings—had been preserved against the ravages of time. Had the Emperor been saving her? Hoping for my return? I felt a sudden swell of pity for her.

“Hadrian . . . ” Her voice sounded suddenly very far away. “You’re bleeding.”

“I . . . what?” I swayed, touched my forehead, found the wetness still there, but the fingers came away red.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “Did something happen?”

There was a mirror in the private bath. I had only to round a corner to see into it.

“The carpet!” Selene’s voice was hushed.

Looking down, I saw dark spots on the green and gold of the carpet. As I looked, blood dripped from the fingers of my left hand. I lifted the palm to look at it, brushed the bloody skin to find the wound. The skin sloughed away, peeling from palm and fingertip alike. I hissed with the sudden pain of it. “Get Neema,” I said.

She did not move.

“Lights!” I shouted, commanding the lamps in the bath.

They swelled to life as ordered, revealed the gilt-framed mirror and my reflection both. Blood was leaking from my scalp, from the marks of Syriani’s talons that decorated my left cheek. I was sweating blood. Weeping it. Bleeding from both my hands.

“Samek!” I said, and knew. The leviathan had bitten me. “She poisoned me!”

“Samek?” Selene wasn’t following.

“The Chantry!” I said, unable to take my eyes from my reflection. “You’re too late.”

For the good of the realm, she’d said.

No wonder her tone had changed. She had killed me already.

“She grabbed my wrist,” I said. There must have been a needle in that ring of hers. “Dispholide.”

Selene’s face—concealed beneath white powder—went whiter still.

I knew what must come, knew how little time remained. I had watched Irshan die by the priest’s poison in the Grand Colosseum. He had disintegrated in seconds, the slime of him soaking my clothes.

“Go, Selene!” I said. “Don’t look!”

“But!”

“Look away!”

The skin of my face had already started to sag, eyelids drooping. It was so hot, and I knew that heat for the final fever that it was. The dose Samek had given me must have been smaller than the one Irshan had taken, or else delayed that I might make it to my apartment before it took me. I coughed, and spattered blood across the mirror and the marble vanity. Selene screamed. I saw her standing there, unmoved in the door to the bath chamber. I gripped the edge of the vanity, fell against it, and felt something in my shoulder snap. I gasped, but gasping only brought forth more blood.

I could hardly breathe, heard the rasping of it, felt the burbling of fluid rapidly filling my lungs. “Neema!”

Selene screamed for me, and dimly I felt something strike the floor at my feet. I looked down. My left arm had fallen away. Melting flesh—red blood, yellow pus—ran from the ridged black adamant of the false bones Kharn Sagara had given me.

I fell a moment later.

Neema had appeared beside Selene in the doorway, olive face utterly without blood. “Domi! Master Hadrian!”

I reached for him with my right hand, saw the two fingers Doctor Elkan had made for me had fallen away. Blood soaked through my dripping shirt. Every inch of me was red.

“Neema!” I gasped, coughing. It was so hot! And the pain! It was worse than anything I could remember, worse than any of the torments of Dharan-Tun, worse than the phantom pains Urbaine had designed and administered through his collar, worse than any injury taken in battle, worse than the moment of shock as Aranata’s sword struck off my head. I felt as though my every nerve were stripped and wound through gears of raw iron. My every atom was laid bare, but I could not even scream.

I was going to die. Samek had killed me.

Dispholide.

The Priest’s Poison. The Mermaid’s Kiss . . . 

There would be nothing of me left, nothing but my false bones and blood and slime.

“Cassandra!” I croaked, and again, Cassandra.

I could not hear my voice the second time. My vision was going dark. Selene and Neema both seemed to float above me, fear and horror on their faces.

Cassandra! I prayed the words were getting out. Lorian! Lorian . . . Albé . . . find . . . Albé . . . trust . . . Lorian . . . 

They had to act quickly, before the curtains fell and the knives came out. Samek had killed me . . . would kill them next . . . 

The pain was fading, dulling to a gray ache—my vision likewise gray. The last thing I saw were Selene’s eyes—green as malachite, as Cassandra’s eyes. I felt hands on me—though I had no skin to feel. Still, they carried me, dragged me away, lifted me higher, deeper into the dark that, howling, awaited me.

Those green eyes watched me, and I felt their pity, their pain, and a love immense as planets poured out at my suffering, though their owner would not move to stop my pain.

And I knew . . . knew that I was dead.

My last thought as my brain dissolved at last and ran out upon the floor, was that Cassandra was alone. They had killed me. They would kill her.

And there was nothing I could do.

Nothing . . . nothing . . . nothing . . . 

Then I was nothing at all.


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