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CHAPTER 49

THE PRINTED CITY


Seen from above, the city was like a blanket of whitest snow, a shroud cast upon the hills. It had not been there when Caesar and Sir Gray had showed me images of the place before the assault on Ganelon, and so I guess that all of it—every tower and paved street, every bridge and storefront and apartment insula—had been erected in the short centuries since.

The Latarra I had seen—had expected to see—had been a place like Rustam, a city of sunken ships, a city hastily amalgamated by those disparate peoples flocking to the protection of the planet’s Monarch. It had become a city of pristine order, a city not unlike Meidua, with its white stone buildings and cobbled streets. But where Meidua had been a place of common stone, its palaces marble fronted, chased with gold, the buildings of that alien city were of machine-manufactured stone. Great bricks of limestone and pure dolomite fitted together like puzzle blocks about skeletons of adamant and steel, their edges so straight and smooth no moss or blade of grass might spring between them.

Still, the vestiges of the old city remained, with here and there a mighty freighter rising like the black bones of a mountain from beneath that city of white snow. Still more grounded starships ringed the white city’s perimeter, not yet broken down and recycled—their adamantine hulls harvested for their carbon and transformed into the limestone that made up the city’s new growth. Those outer districts, that warren of sunken ships, that was the Maze of which Lorian had spoken, the first city upon which the Monarch’s new one was built.

And then there was the Citadel. The images Caesar and Sir Gray had showed me all those years ago had depicted an ancient, castellated pile upon a rise at the center of the Maze warrens, a low, many-towered palace—complete with glass gardens and turrets and checker-tiled piazzas.

That palace was gone. In its place, a great construction was going up. Cranes and crawlers, conveyors and loaders and drilling machines in incandescent red clustered about their charge. Where once that old palace had stood, a new one was rising: Terrace upon terrace, step upon step, it rose, a vast ziggurat of adamant and steel.

I thought of the vast fortress beneath Castle Borosevo, the armored ziggurat—the topless pyramid—upon whose summit had been perched the home of Count Balian Mataro.

This pyramid-ziggurat was much the same, of a style not uncommon across the Norman reaches. When the lords of a world did not delve for their protection—as had been done on Berenike and Perfugium alike—they built such fastnesses.

That hall of Calen Harendotes was not yet done.

Calen Harendotes.

I was to meet him soon, that figure of modern legend, that King of the Outer Worlds.

Calen, son of Ausar of the House Harendotes. Monarch of Latarra. Conqueror of Ashklam. Prince of Monmara. He who had gathered uncounted nations to himself. He had been one of the marginalia nearly all my life, little more than a dragon coiled about the compass in one corner of the map.

He was about to become astonishingly real.

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The martial shout of trumpets rang out their greeting, pronouncing a melody I must have heard when Lorian landed on Forum. The opening of the ramp of Lorian’s egg-shaped landing craft admitted a gust of cool air. It was winter in the city, but at that lowly latitude, the day was only cool. My unbound hair guttered across my face, and at my side, Selene shivered, and clutched my arm.

“It’s all right,” I said, glancing sidelong at her. At her request, Lorian’s people had found a white gown somewhere in the Mistwalker’s city-hold. Her hair was still the short bob it had been after she had slashed her hair in grief.

Self-conscious, she reached up to flatten that crimson auriole, glacing sidelong at the ranks of Interfaced standing at attention between us and the ramp. “I’m all right,” she said, attention flickering to Ramanthanu, to Annaz and the other xenobites who made up our own train.

“You’re sure we can trust these people?” Cassandra asked, eying the first wind of that new world with suspicion.

“My people, do you mean?” Lorian asked, appearing as if from nowhere from between the ranks of his men. His diminutive stature had granted him the element of surprise yet again. “Trust me only so far as you can throw me, girl.” He donned his short-billed cap with a flourish. “Mind you, I’m lighter than I look.” With a wink, he turned and descended the ramp, which was still lowering as he took his first steps, so that almost he had to leap to reach the landing pad outside.

Aristedes was totally at his ease, the conquering hero come home. That—I thought—was passing strange, as it was partly in defeat he had returned.

But I had forgotten much of Lorian in the years since the parting of our ways. He was a strategist to his core, and politics was only another theater of war. I watched him go, his rope of silver hair dancing behind him, watched him move with all the energy of a Eudoran mummer in a farce—which in a sense he was.

“Commandant General Aristedes!” said the leader of the receiving party, a tall, thin creature in robes of Latarran armorial black. At first I took it for one of the Exalted, so tall was it and thin—so thin—that I knew no human skeleton remained beneath the neck. In that he recalled First Officer Amatorre, but where Amatorre’s face remained the face of a gaunt and aquiline man, the face of Oneiros was lost behind a mask of mirrored black.

“Majordomo Oneiros!” Lorian said, his cane tucked into the crook of his left arm. He saluted sharply. “I have brought two gifts for His Majesty!”

Apparently undaunted, the towering Oneiros replied, “We understand that you have failed to secure the treaty you were selected to arrange.” Behind the Majordomo, a block of men in the gold-eyed masks and hod helmets and flanged armor of Latarran dragoons stood holding blazing lances or the short stocks of plasma rifles. There must have been a hundred of them at least. Had they come to honor Lorian? Or to arrest him?

“I have done far better!” Lorian said, directing his attention to the gaggle of more gaily dressed courtiers assembled to Oneiros’s right hand. “I have brought Selene, Princess of the House Avent, daughter of His Radiance, the Emperor. And more! I have brought the Demon in White himself, the Halfmortal! Lord Hadrian Marlowe, Royal Knight and one-time Commandant of the Imperial Red Company.”

That sent a thrill of surprise through the congregation. Word of Selene’s apparent kidnapping must have reached them, but news of my coming would have been a surprise. Lorian had been wise to conceal my presence. In doing so, he had reserved his strongest card in his hand, and wrongfooted any opposition to his failure as a diplomat.

He had changed the game. You could sense it in the manner of the crowd, the way they whispered, tittered to one another.

“Are they all human?” Selene whispered in my ear, gripping my arm more tightly. She inclined her head to the gathered worthies of the Monarch’s court.

A woman sat in a float-chair like an egg slashed across a diagonal, four limbs arranged so that her four long-fingered hands gripped the rim with jeweled fingers. She had no legs, only a pair of arms where her lower legs should be. I had seen such a creature in the Minoan fortress on Ganelon, and wondered if they were kin—some artificial race like the dryads. Beside her, a man taller and more muscled than even Otavia had been stood in robes of carmine and cloth of gold. About them were gathered a curious assemblage. There were men and women clad Imperial fashion, and still more in the drabber styles of the Normans, and one or two Exalted chimeras, alongside up-jumped homunculi and stranger sorts come to see the Commandant General and his shame.

But that shame had turned to triumph.

The Majordomo, Oneiros, glided toward us, robes rasping over the ground. It did not seem to walk as it approached us—there was no motion of knee or hip—only to translate across the white stone. Beside me, Selene flinched, and Cassandra grew tense.

The towering creature stopped several paces in front of Selene and myself, studying us both with its featureless black face. I thought I detected a light beneath that blackness, a witch-gleam of pale blue where the left eye might be. “Princess Selene, Lord Marlowe,”—it bowed, arching in a way no human back could—“be welcome to the White City and to Latarra. I am Oneiros, Majordomo to His Majesty, the Monarch.”

Selene offered one bejeweled hand for the faceless man to kiss. A hand of jointed steel slithered from the black robes, took her white hand in its fingers and raised it to its faceplate.

“We are honored by your hospitality, Majordomo,” Selene said, her voice admirably calm.

“On the contrary,” Oneiros said, “we are honored by your presence. You are the first of your nobile bloodline to grace our world.” The creature turned to me. “And . . . Lord Marlowe. This is unexpected.”

“Is your master present?” I asked, surveying the throng behind Oneiros, the armored dragoons, the courtiers. We had landed on a pad atop a square turret that projected from one of the ziggurat’s lower terraces, high above ground, but beneath the tops of the nearest towers of the Printed City. Just as Lorian had described, I could see pillars of steam—taller still—floating up from the Maze beyond the new city where fusion reactors burned hot as tiny stars. At this altitude, one could see the construction happening everywhere, that whole, great Babylonian edifice rising from the earth. The whole thing had sprung up from nothing in mere decades, in another few dozen years it would be complete.

A triumph of engineering and the human will.

“My master is always present,” Oneiros said, swiveling that faceless face to look at me once more. “Why have you come?”

“To treat with your master,” I said. “Not his servant.”

Oneiros went stock still a moment. Presently, the Majordomo twisted to regard Lorian. “Commandant General Aristedes, you were tasked to make peace with the Imperials. You failed. This is a grievous disappointment.”

Lorian interjected, “There was a change of plans. I must meet with His Majesty as soon as possible. Much has happened, much has changed.”

“You were directed to arrange an accord with the Imperials,” Oneiros said again.

“An accord for which we are happy to negotiate,” said Selene, insinuating herself into the conversation.

Oneiros swiveled to regard her. “You are here on your Imperial Father’s will?”

She hesitated, looked to me.

I did not speak at once, either. The truth of our circumstances could not be long concealed—too many had been present at the council on Forum to conceal anything. Word would have traveled so far as the Monarch’s court, if only as fleeter rumor.

Turning, I looked to Edouard, who had followed us down the ramp with Captain Ghoshal—who had insisted on accompanying us. To keep a watch on her highness, he’d said. The HAPSIS man nodded silent concurrence.

“Our situation is more complicated,” I said.

“Our situation has been complicated, you mean,” said the four-armed woman from her seat. She was pale as the city itself, possessing a sailor’s pallor, and her hair was just as white, lending her an illusion of age far greater than she possessed. “Marlowe and Aristedes are friends of old. I think it no coincidence that he appears here just as our carefully laid plans fall to pieces.”

Beside her, the big man spoke in a voice like the cracking stones in the bowels of the world. “We had heard that you were dead.”

While my resurrection had been witnessed only by those aboard Lorian’s ship, my death had doubtless been galactic news. Word would have propagated across the datanet, relayed by quantum telegraphy to the remotest corners of the human universe.

“That is false, sir,” I said, opening my arms, “as you see.”

“Rumors of your demise are forever exaggerated,” said the four-handed woman, crossing her arms like legs.

“Indeed, madam,” I replied, “were it not for my friend of old, they would not be rumors at all.”

Oneiros pivoted to regard Lorian. “What is the meaning of this?”

“Imperial factionalism,” came Lorian’s answer. “Lord Marlowe and the princess have agreed to negotiate with the Solar Throne for our interests as the price for my saving their lives. I must speak with His Majesty, the Monarch, at once. You have spoken to him already?”

How Oneiros could have spoken to Harendotes already puzzled me only for a moment. We were among the Extrasolarians. Surely their king and this creature of his possessed the means to communicate with another silently and at once. Likely, I thought, Calen Harendotes had been aware of Lorian’s surprise from the moment Selene and I had emerged from the landing craft.

“You speak of factionalism,” said the four-handed woman, floating to join Oneiros. “Explain yourself, Commandant General.”

Lorian bowed, still performing. “My dear Master Jamina, Lord Marlowe was targeted for assassination by agents of the Holy Terran Chantry, who are—it surely does not have to be said—hostile to the idea of an alliance between our New Order and the Solar Throne. That assassination attempt endangered the life of the princess here.”

Majordomo Oneiros spoke, its toneless voice airy and void of all inflection. “We have it from Imperial channels that you assaulted the fleet of the Martian Guard and absconded with this princess. You have declared war upon the very people with whom you were tasked to make peace. You are in no position to demand an audience.”

“And yet here I am,” Lorian said, “demanding.”

“This is most irregular,” Oneiros said, playing the role of the Monarch’s Neema. “Why were we not informed you had captured Lord Marlowe?”

“Captured?” I asked, stepping forward, a hand going to the winged lion-headed hilt of Gibson’s sword.

Lorian barred my path with his cane. “Peace, brother,” he said. “Lord Marlowe is our guest, Majordomo.”

The towering machine-man slithered toward Lorian, stooping like a vampire in its black robes. “That remains to be seen, Commandant General,” it said.

Cassandra strode forward to join me, her own hands going for her swords. Selene drew closer, and about us, the Irchtani closed ranks. Ramanthanu hissed, and its fellow Cielcin bared their fangs.

Oneiros had frozen, gone stock still. When it moved again, its demeanor changed. It cocked its head to one side, and said, “You travel in strange company, I see,” and turning to the guard it shouted, “Bring them!”

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“Abba,” Cassandra asked, when we had been escorted to a waiting room within the Monarch’s palace. “That Majordomo was going to hold us prisoner? Why the sudden change?”

“I should like to know that as well,” said Edouard, who was seated at a side table of graven, dark wood. “I thought they’d have us in tower cells.”

Instead, we had been brought—with all our guard and effects in hand—to a sitting room with high slit windows in the slanting outer wall of the ziggurat. Latarran banners depicting the golden eagle crowned by the disc of the sun hung blackly from the walls, and what furniture there was—baroque in its styling, intricately fashioned—stood in stark contrast to all that pale, printed limestone as a rose in the desert.

The Cielcin had clustered in one corner, and crouched there, fingering their knives. Annaz and the Irchtani of our guard hopped about, shifting from foot to foot. Ghoshal sat at the table opposite Edouard, looking haggard as ever, while Selene had claimed one of the room’s tapestried couches for her own, with Ghoshal’s men to guard her. Lorian and his people had gone elsewhere, to debrief the giant and the four-handed minister.

My mother’s son, I was standing at the window, looking out over the construction and the White City near at hand. Ships were moving across the sky in the middle distance. Latarra’s sun was pale, and the light of it caught in the stone, but such was the refraction index of the artificial material that it did not flash and cause blindness as one might think. Rather the stones of the city glowed with a warm light, pristine, serene. It would be beautiful.

It was beautiful even then.

I understood then, sharply and all too well, what Lorian felt for the place. Calen Harendotes had wrought an earthly copy, an homage and loving imitation to the Emperor’s Eternal City in the clouds. But the city of the Monarch was founded on stone. It was a place mortal men might tread. Common men. A place where even a misborn intus like Lorian Aristedes might make a lord.

“What do you think happened to Lorian?” Cassandra asked.

“He’ll be speaking with his people,” I said. “Possibly with his king. They’ll be deciding what to do with me.”

“With you?” Selene had overheard us. “With us, surely?”

“Your fate is simple,” I said. “They need you to make this peace of theirs. Besides, they knew to expect you. I was the surprise.”

I had not turned to look at her, and reaching up laid an arm along the edge of the window at my right hand, still watching the construction. I heard Selene shift in her seat. “Will they let us see him? The Monarch?”

“They will,” I said, “eventually.”

“I don’t like it,” Ghoshal said, “begging your pardon, highness. I don’t like this place one bit. That . . . horrible creature. The Majordomo. And that woman—the one with the hands!”

To my surprise, it was Edouard who spoke. “She is a tetrand, captain, unless I miss my guess,” he said. “Her people were bred by the Empire long ago, to work as slaves in null gravity. Their production was banned alongside the dryads. I thought they were extinct.”

“I met one before. Briefly,” I said, peering back over my shoulder at the room. “There was one among the masters of MINOS.”

Ghoshal grumbled. “Gives me conniptions is all.”

“We made them, captain,” Edouard said. “Be kind.”

“I don’t have to like it, sir,” Ghoshal said, “or this place. It’s too clean. Too new. Everything feels . . . ”

The doors opened at that precise moment, great constructions of paneled ebony carved with reliefs depicting formless ripples. I turned, expecting Oneiros, or Lorian, or the tetrand minister, Lady Jamina.

Instead, we were presented with a quartet of liveried men carrying a small, square table between them. The Cielcin stood as they entered, cocking their heads to watch through nictitating membranes as the servants brought the table and set it on its single leg to one side of the empty couch opposite where Selene sat.

“What’s this then?” I asked, stepping forward.

The seniormost of the four servants bowed low.

I saw what it was before he answered.

“His Majesty, the Monarch, asked that we deliver this to the chamber, my lord,” he said, withdrawing an appropriate step. “He said you’d a fondness for the game, that you might enjoy it while you wait.”

I looked down at the table, at the hexagon pattern wrought in jet, carnelian, and mother of pearl.

It was a druaja board.

Not knowing what else to say, I thanked the servants. “Have you any indication how long we must wait?” I asked.

The man bowed hastily and withdrew.

“ . . . fake,” Ghoshal finished lamely. “Everything feels fake.”

Selene craned her neck to study the table. “What a strange gesture . . . ” she said. “A chess board?”

I had drifted toward it, opened one of the corner drawers to reveal the pieces: the legionnaires, emperor, and hierophant, cataphracts and centurions and castellans all nestled in red velvet, each of white jade. “Curious,” I said. I had a passing fondness for the game, one tempered by my time with old Aldia on Jadd, but it was far from the sort of thing that men spoke of when they spoke of me.

I drew what I guessed to be one of the cataphracts from its place. This particular set had depicted the traditionally mounted man as a walking tank, a six-legged colossus not unlike those in the Mistwalker’s mighty holds.

“Do you play?” Selene asked.

“Only a little,” I said.

The princess shook her head. “I never learned how.”

“Why send a chessboard?” Ghoshal asked, peering at it across the side table he shared with Edouard. “Is it bugged? Are they listening to us?”

I looked at him for several seconds without speaking. “My dear captain,” I said, “we are in their house already. They’ve heard every word we’ve said.”

Ghoshal snapped, “What then?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I had the sense that the game table was some joke, some private jape at my expense comprehensible only to the sender. “We may be here for some time. Hours. Perhaps longer.”

“Surely they won’t leave us here overnight,” Selene said.

“They may,” I said. “I suggest we all get comfortable.”

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We did not have to wait overnight, as it happened, though the pale Latarran sun had sunk and turned gold as the banners of its king by the time the great doors opened again. The Majordomo, Oneiros, stood in the door, flanked by masked and helmeted dragoons in the fearsome gear of the Latarran Grand Army.

“Lord Marlowe,” the Exalted creature said, “His Majesty has agreed to see you.”

I rose from my place on one of the more distant couches. “Selene.” I touched the princess’s shoulder to wake her. “Selene, it’s time.”

The princess rose unsteadily. “What time is it?”

“Not quite sundown,” I said.

Oneiros slid into the room. Voice impassive and smooth as polished glass, it said, “You must come alone, my lord.”

Selene and I exchanged glances. I looked to Cassandra, whose face was grave, and to Edouard, who seemed at once pensive and puzzled.

I offered Oneiros a short bow. “As you wish.”

I looked back as unseen mechanisms shut the whorled ebon doors, struck by the tableau of my people—all of them standing or sitting, seeming frozen, unmoving as chessmen on an abandoned board. The Majordomo led me along the white stone hall, past armored guardsmen with eyes like little suns and time-blackened paintings of seemingly incredible age. One or two of them, I felt sure, had been brought out of Old Earth when men were young. One showed a nude woman—the goddess Venus, I realized—standing on a shell while the Hours rushed to clothe her. I halted before its majesty, only to be summoned by a word from Oneiros.

The Monarch awaited.

I followed Oneiros down the hall to a lift of wrought iron and silver glass which conveyed us slanting upward into the palace. The lift opened on an atrium, a high-ceilinged space whose walls converged as they approached the ceiling, not quite forming a triangle. “We are near the top of the current construction,” Oneiros said, answering a question I had not asked. “Alas, the palace will not be complete for some years. You are seeing it in its infancy, I fear.”

“Your master has accomplished marvels in a short time.”

“Our people are vital,” Oneiros said. “They share their Monarch’s dream of a New Order. It is that dream which propels the construction. They build because they believe, because they love Latarra. Because they love their lord.”

I smiled at the back of the monster’s hooded head. “Such love is a powerful thing,” I said.

Oneiros did not turn back. “My master has asked that you join him in the imitarium. Just through here.” One hand of jointed steel indicated the black iron doors before us. Oneiros halted, turned to face me. “I am commanded, however, to relieve you of your sword.” That hand extended, palm up. The panels that comprised the surface of that hand were intricately styled, inlaid with twining knots of gold filigree, very fine. When I hesitated, the Majordomo said, “My master is not a cautious man, but he is no fool. Your Red Emperor once sent an assassin against him, with a sword concealed in the man’s crutch. We sent that man’s head still living to the Eternal City. We would prefer not to have to send yours.”

“I doubt that you could,” I said, placing the ivory hilt into the iron hand.

The Majordomo examined the hilt. “It will be returned to you,” it said, voice flat and toneless as ever. The hilt vanished into the creature’s flowing sleeve, and the heavy doors opened onto a short flight of steps that vanished into the dark above. Oneiros bowed, gesturing that I should proceed ahead. I passed it on the threshold, mounted the first step.

The Exalted had called this place an imitarium, and though I thought I could guess the meaning of the name, I was not prepared for the full reality. For an instant, all was dark. Then the doors at the top of the stairs opened, and I felt a rush of air, and pale sunlight streamed down from the room above. It was the light of midday—pale silver on that world—though I knew it was almost sundown, and that at that very moment, golden rays streamed through the windows in the chamber where Cassandra and Selene sat waiting.

Among the Tavrosi, genuine physical possessions are rare. Limited is perhaps a better word. Much of what they possess exists only virtually, as data stored in the network formed by their collective neural laces. The hospital where they had tried to purge Urbaine’s worm from Valka’s mind had seemed to me a drab and sterile hell, a place of dull gray and white-washed concrete, though Valka had spoken of dark wood and flowers, and of soft music I could not hear. No two Tavrosi needed to agree on the reality they perceived, so that the same chamber might appear blue in the mind of one observer, green to another. Always they were asserting their will and private preferences on the world around them, each living halfway in a dream like the dreams of the Mericanii—dreams I alone on Edda could not see.

The imitarium of Calen Harendotes was like those dreams, and like also the holograph operas of my mother.

Reaching the top of the stairs, I found myself on a balcony overlooking the White City of the Monarch. The sun was high, almost directly overhead. The day was fair and bright, and the wind was in the west, blowing in across green hills that I had never seen.

The Maze was gone, the columns of steam from the grounded ships that served the White City as power generators were gone, and the grounded ships all with them. The great city rolled across the hills and beneath the massive palace, a sea of white stone.

The construction all was finished. In the distance, the pale spire of a hightower grounding station rose above all, limestone foundations giving way to a skeletal structure of shining steel from whose summit the lift cable rose, a black streak that vanished into the sky. As I watched, the pale lozenge of a cargo lifter ascended that cable, beginning its slow climb to heaven.

Oneiros had vanished.

I approached the rail, at once recalling windy nights on the terraces of the ziggurat beneath Castle Borosevo, Valka’s perfume on the night air. The cap on the rail was of brass bright as hammered gold, and turning back from the city, I looked up upon the heights of the palace behind.

It was a pyramid, gold capped and polished smooth, its crown nearly a mile—at my guess—from the plaza that lay below, where tall fountains played and men went to and fro.

Tentatively, I touched the rail, felt cold metal beneath my fingers.

I withdrew my hand, as if burned. I had been so certain it was a holograph. So certain the image of the city was counterfeit, the wind and noise of distant fliers a clever simulacrum.

“Magnificent, is it not?” asked a voice deep and curiously accented.

Turning, I found that I was not alone. A man had appeared as if from nowhere.

I knew him at once, had seen his likeness projected in the air of the Emperor’s study.

Tall was he, a king of men, a giant of history and in fact. No crown or coronet was there upon his head, and his hair—black as my own—was oiled and neatly combed back from his broad forehead, curling smoothly behind his ears. In lieu of any crown, he wore a golden collar, a gorget that hid his neck entire, extending over his chest and shoulders. The Latarran falcon shone on that collar above his breastbone, the sun disc above its head a single black diamond two inches in diameter. He held himself with the poise and bearing of an Emperor, tall and straight, his hands clasped behind his back. But where our Caesar dressed himself in white, Calen Harendotes was cloaked in darkness. Indeed, so dark were the knee-length tunic and the cloak flowing from beneath that golden collar that they seemed to drink the sunlight, to rob the whiteness from the glowing pale stone about him.

But beneath that darkness, he was dressed in armor of shimmering gold. Golden were the greaves that sheathed his legs, and gold his sabatons. Of gold, too, were the vambraces and gauntlets that hid his mighty arms, and gold the belt about his narrow waist, all of it scored with markings in a language I could not read.

And his face!

Here was a man who radiated power. Power and menace, with canted brows and a sharp nose. Shadows guttered in the hollows of his cheeks, and the eyes were as twins to the diamond at his throat, black as hell. At first, I took him for Mandari, but he might have been Nipponese. He was certainly no palatine, for all the nobility of his bearing.

And he was smiling, a look of demonic bemusement on his face, one eyebrow raised.

“Magnificent,” I said, turning fully to face him, “it will be. One day. None of this is real.”

“What is real?” the Monarch of Latarra asked, resting one golden hand on the cap of the rail at his left. “Only that which we believe to be real, or are made to believe, or can make others. I am Monarch, King of Latarra. What is a king but a man who asserts his belief in his own kingship on others? What is a kingdom but his dream?” He looked out over the vision of his city complete. “What you see is real, Marlowe, because I will make it real. Am making it real.”

I smiled. “You’re trying to impress me.”

“To impress upon you the reality of your situation,” said Calen Harendotes. “Your world is what I make it now. You are my guest, my prisoner—if I should wish it.” As he spoke, I thought I detected a blue gleam in the darkness of one eye. “Why have you come here? To gloat at me in my exile?”

I blinked at him. “Your exile?”

Calen Harendotes smiled, and from his robes withdrew a slim, white object.

It was my sword. The Conqueror of Ashklam turned the weapon over in his gilded fingers, examining the graven ivory, the iridium fittings and controls. “This is not the weapon I remember,” he said, voice far away. One finger traced the carving on the pommel, the lion’s head whose mane and wings made up the grip. “But it is still of Jaddian make. This is a simurgh.” He meant the winged lion. Harendotes squeezed the trigger, and the blade sprang forth. All the whiteness of the city about us made the blade seem blue as Earth’s lost sky. The Monarch frowned. “The blade is Imperial, however. Forged on Phaia, I think?” He peered at me for confirmation.

“It is,” I said, but did not share its history.

“Have we met before?” I asked, knowing the answer.

The pyramid, the chessboard, this talk of perception and of swords. All had fallen into place, and I felt a thrill of terror and of hope, for I saw my chance plain. Saw what I must do.

Rather than answer, Calen Harendotes brandished my weapon, aimed the point squarely at my heart. “Tell me,” he said, “if I strike you down where you stand, what will happen? Will you die again?”

The Monarch had come at me at an angle, positioned himself between me and the door, with the rail at my back. The wind gusted suddenly, flapping the broad lapels of my greatcoat and pulling at my hair. Sharply was I aware of the titanic drop behind me, the fall and the terrible long slide down the face of the palace pyramid to the city perhaps a mile below. I had to remind myself it wasn’t real, that I was in a chamber of that same pyramid, and that it was unfinished.

Alone in all that false reality, I knew that I was real. The rail at my back, the pyramid, the Printed City in the fullness of its glory, its green hills and hightower, its pale sky and white sun . . . all of it was false. For all I knew, the Monarch himself and the sword he held were phantoms. But why?

“If you can kill me,” I said, “I will surely die.”

“You think you could stop me?” asked Calen Harendotes.

“My belief against yours,” I said. “I like my chances.”

Calen smiled, and the sight of that smile was a terrible thing. “My man, Aristedes, told me you died escaping from Forum,” he said, circling to stand squarely between myself and the door.

His man, Aristedes. The bite of those words was sharper than the sword leveled at my chest. His man, indeed.

“That is twice now that you have died. How many know that, I wonder?” he asked. “What are you, Hadrian Marlowe?”

“Only myself,” I answered him, hands raised, “which is more than you can say, Ren.”

“That is not my name,” he said, smiling a crooked smile. The sword nearly touched the gabardine of my tunic.

“It was, once,” I said, “before your father crawled inside your head. How much of the boy remains, I wonder?”

Calen Harendotes snarled, and something happened then I did not expect.

The railing at my back vanished. I should have fallen, plunged over the side of the pyramid and tumbled down to the plaza thousands of feet below. I struck the hard floor instead.

Calen Harendotes stood over me, armor glittering, black cape and tunic drinking the false sun like blood. All the world began to dissolve. The gold-capped pyramid, the White City with its walls and hightower complete. Even the sky was lost, replaced by an echoing gloom. Great pillars of monolithic stone stood all around us, retreating into the dark distance. Propping myself on elbows, I half rose, recognizing the dark chamber, the throne at my right hand with its miles of snaking cables.

It was the throne room of Vorgossos in replica, precisely as I had seen it in life.

“You cost me my home, boy,” said Calen Harendotes, who was Ren.

Who was Kharn Sagara.


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Framed