CHAPTER 45
DREAMING WIDE AWAKE
The whine of our shuttle’s repulsors died, and the little craft jolted as the landing peds took our weight. All about me, Lorian’s troopers—black armored and hod helmeted, their luminous eyes like golden suns—shifted as the hatch fell down to become our ramp. A cool breeze entered from the great hold beyond, and the last light of the stretched sun with it.
“Remember what I said,” came a cold voice from over my shoulder, and turning aside, I found Captain 2Maeve standing just there. A light blinked dull red in the implant beneath her right eye.
He stuck his neck out for your brat and that red-crested bitch, she’d said, coming within mere inches of my face. You had better deliver on your promise to fix this. If he suffers even a shred of embarrassment when we reach Latarra, I will kill you again.
I had said nothing. There had been nothing to say, and I had ridden in the shuttle in silence, watching the great hold and the city pass by below.
I smiled at her, felt the new, symmetrical pull of the muscles—an alien sensation. “You love him, don’t you?” I asked, studying her sidelong. I wondered how much of her had been given over to her machines. Her mind, certainly. The black lines of nerve implants shone on her right cheek. I did not doubt that similar nematodes threaded her bones and sinews, perhaps reinforced her muscles. Still the shape of the flesh beneath that black tunic and jodhpurs—slim and tough as leather cord—was yet the shape of woman.
She was no Exalted, though she was Extrasolarian to her core.
2Maeve’s blue-gray eyes narrowed. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“He’s a good man,” I said. “Perhaps the best man I know.”
2Maeve raised one gauntleted fist. I did not flinch.
“I see I’m near the mark,” I said.
“You know nothing, fleshling,” she sneered, and let her fist fall.
Only then did I mark that the eyes of all the others were on us, every man and woman of the guard tense as coiled snakes. I could sense their hostility, a hostility that had—a moment before—been present only in 2Maeve.
The Interfaced.
Whence they came from the nameless dark I cannot guess, but wherever it was—rogue planet or airless moon or dark site station far from light of sun—it was a place where the men and women threaded the tissues of their brains as they did among the Tavrosi. Only where the Tavrosi guarded their hearts, allowing access between one neural lace and the next only in the rarest circumstances, the Interfaced allowed it at all times, distributing their thoughts, their feelings, their experiences and impulses between one another, so that—for an instant—2Maeve’s anger had fixed the eyes of all her companions upon me.
Though they remained individuals, they shared between them, and could coordinate their actions, conjoining their will to a single purpose.
They were fearsome warriors, and even more fearsome friends.
The captain stepped in front of me. Full in my face, she said, “Now move.”
Outside, the sky was growing dark, and the bright bar of the sun had shrunk to a slim gold beam, fine and blazing as one of Ragama’s hairs. Soon it would be gone, and in its place, the pale lights of streetlamps gleamed, those on the far side of the spinship appeared almost to form a grid of stars.
“Hold!”
Captain Henric Ghoshal was waiting on the tarmac, two dozen legionnaires in faceless white about him, the heads of their lances fretted with blue fire.
I halted, feeling the night wind in my flowing hair and in the tails of the officer’s greatcoat I’d taken from the ship.
“Captain Ghoshal,” I drew to a halt. “What is the meaning of this?”
“That’s far enough, sir. My lord.” Ghoshal hesitated, but his voice did not shake. “Will you come peaceably?”
I looked over my shoulder to 2Maeve. She shook her head. I surveyed the small Imperial contingent, saw no sign of Selene—2Maeve’s red-crested bitch—or of Edouard. Likewise the Irchtani and Cielcin both were absent. I prayed they were unharmed. A hundred thoughts ran through my head at once. Ghoshal could not have been planning to do anything. He was in no position. The Gadelica—and the Ascalon within its hold—were both as good as impounded, and the Gadelica certainly could not hope to shoot its way out of the Mistwalker. It was a troop carrier.
“Lord Marlowe—if you are Lord Marlowe,” said the mustachioed country officer. “You must surrender, sir. Until we can verify that you are who and what you claim, you cannot be allowed the run of the ship.”
“Where is Special Agent Albé?” I asked. “And the Princess Selene?”
“I thought it best not to trouble her highness,” Ghoshal said. “She has had a trying day.”
“What more proof do you require?” I asked, spreading my hands. Had I not bent time upon that very spot when Lorian opened fire on me?
The foremost of Ghoshal’s men flinched, leveling their lanceheads at my chest.
“There will be no violence in the hold!” 2Maeve stepped forward. A quartet of masked and helmeted men advanced with her, stunners drawn. “Stand down, Imperial!”
One of 2Maeve’s lieutenants—a man called 5Eamon—said, “Tell your men to lower their lances, captain!”
“Peace!” I said, raising my open hands to the level of my face. “Peace, all of you!” I fixed my eyes on Captain Ghoshal. “I will come peaceably, Henric, but tell me: May I at least be confined to my ship?”
“To the Ascalon?” The man seemed to contemplate this a moment, one hand upon the catch of his shield-belt. “To your rooms, aye. Lord Marlowe’s rooms, I mean.”
“I am Lord Marlowe,” I said.
“That remains to be seen, sir,” the fellow said.
“It’s sir still, is it?” I asked.
Ghoshal straightened, realizing his contradiction. Rather than answer for it, he said, “Manas, Holden, his effects.”
Two of the Sabrathan lancers advanced slowly, keeping the heads of their lances high, tucked against the crooks of their arms to steady them and free their off hands. One had drawn his stunner, held it at the ready as his companion advanced to disarm me.
Neema must have told them he’d given me back my sword. I could feel the men tense as I twitched my coat aside and snapped the hilt free of its magnetic hasp.
I presented the hilt to the man called Holden, pommel first.
“See it comes to no harm,” I said, holding the man’s gaze through his featureless visor. “The hilt was fashioned on Jadd, but its heart was forged on Phaia, for a man who was like a father to me. Its value is beyond price.”
The man Holden took it gingerly and drew back. Spreading my hands once more, I said, “Is that sufficient, Henric? Or would you shackle me as well?”
The mustachioed officer shook his head. “Is it necessary?”
“If it comforts you,” I said and proffered my wrists.
Ghoshal made a negatory gesture. “If you are Hadrian Marlowe, then we have nothing to fear.”
I confess I smiled. I had on multiple occasions given my own Imperial people cause for fear. When I had stolen Tanaran from Bassander Lin. When I had set Lorian to seize Lieutenant Casdon from the Chantry’s inquisitors. When Mads and his fellow Dragonslayers had spirited me from the Tempest’s brig. Ghoshal himself had assisted in my latest burst of counter-Imperial action, when Selene and Edouard had spearheaded the escape from Forum.
Still, he was not wrong. He and his men had nothing to fear.
“I am disappointed, Henric,” I said. “You’ve come this far. Why the change of heart? Perhaps you should have handed my daughter and the princess over to the Martian Guard.”
The captain’s face appeared almost bloodless in the pale light of the landing field. “Perhaps I should have, sir,” he said stiffly. “I did what I thought was my duty at the time. I had my orders from Agent Albé and the princess.”
“Neither of whom are here now,” I said.
“No, sir,” Ghoshal said, tone almost apologetic. “I’ve my men to think of, sir. You understand.”
I had no response, but allowed his men to form a block around me. One laid a hand upon my upper arm. “This way, my lord,” he said.
“Nothing will be decided tonight,” Ghoshal said. “If I am mistaken, you will forgive me.”
Will I? I thought, and might have said at an earlier point in my life. Instead I asked, “What are you afraid of, Henric?”
The eyes of the Gadelica’s captain flickered from my face to the Latarran dragoons at my back. I turned to look at them, at 2Maeve and 5Eamon and the others. The lamplike eyes of the Latarran helms shone brightly—gold circles cutting the night. I understood a moment before Ghoshal gave his answer.
“If you are not Lord Marlowe,” he said, “then you are some contrivance of our hosts.”
“What?” 2Maeve barked a laugh. “How would he profit us?”
“I’ve not worked that out, madam,” Ghoshal said.
“Commandant General Aristedes shot me, captain,” I said.
“Aye.” Ghoshal’s fingers drummed against his shield catch. “Might be you’re the real Marlowe. Might be you’re some kind of homunculus. A changeling. It’s said there are magi among the Extras who shed bodies like snakeskin.”
I let my hands fall.
Behind me, 2Maeve spat. I would later learn that there were those—even among the Extrasolarians—who found the practices of the sorcerers of MINOS and of Kharn Sagara distasteful. Still more distasteful, I think, was the implication that I might be one of them. The woman had called me fleshling, had spoken the word with a venom not at all unlike the venom of a Chantry priest denouncing abomination.
There was a sword that cut two ways, it seemed!
“He is not one of us,” she sneered. “I have returned him as my commandant ordered. I am done here. Do with him as you will, Imperial, but see that he comes to no harm. We have need of him.”
“You all do,” I said.
Without a word or outward sign, the Latarra dragoons withdrew, mounting the ramp to their shuttle—a smaller white egg not unlike the greater craft that had descended upon the Eternal City. Ghoshal and I stood and watched it go, watched it lift up into the onrushing simulation of night that hung above. Its passage evinced only the barest breeze, its shape barely disturbing the airs of the vast hold.
When it was gone, the hand upon my arm tightened, and the man to whom it belonged said, “This way, Lord Marlowe.”
I permitted myself to be led away then, up the ramp and into the Gadelica’s rear hold. In the process, I stepped over the scratches Lorian’s needler had left in the gunmetal. The captain led the way through the hold and up into one of the perimeter halls that encircled the hold that housed the Ascalon, thence into the Ascalon itself. I caught a glimpse of the old Challis interceptor seen through the windows of the docking vestibule. The Gadelica’s hold was dark, leaving the smaller ship almost invisible within, illuminated only by the light of the room in which we stood. Time and radiation had peeled the painted star from her tailfin, but the memory of it stirred images of the visions Ushara had offered me, of my empire and that star spread across the heavens.
Still, I expected the memory of her to stir in my mind, to carve her mark across my grinning face. It never did.
Ushara was gone, and I was free.
Free of her, at least.
I had expected them to leave me at the access umbilical. Instead, Captain Ghoshal and Manas and Holden and the others marched me along the extended gangway and through the airlock in the smaller vessel’s starboard side. The doors to the bridge stood open to our right just within, the consoles quiescent. We proceeded down the hall to aft and down the stairs to the level of the cabins.
I was to be confined to my quarters, not merely to my ship.
A breath escaped me, and I felt my nostrils flare.
Though I understood their fear, I could not help but be irritated. It should not have surprised me, and yet it did. The occasion of my first death had not been met with such suspicion. Quite the contrary, it had transmuted Bassander Lin from antagonist to ally, and more than that. He had come to believe in me, as though I were some prophet or holy man, and it had been that belief that had caused him to aid Lorian and Prince Kaim in their plot to spare me my place on Belusha.
This second time was different.
But why?
The door to their left slid open. The door to Cassandra’s room. I brightened, stood a little straighter to see my daughter standing in that open portal—my daughter, who I had thought for a time I would never see again.
“Cassandra!” I hurried forward a step, but the man on my arm tightened his grip.
Abba! I thought she would say, and smile, and come to me, and all would be well.
Instead, her face darkened, and she retreated into her room, door hissing closed behind her.
That, more than Ghoshal’s stubbornness, or 2Maeve’s crass hostility, more even than Lorian’s shifting allegiances—cut me to my core.
“Cassandra!” I halted at her door. “Anaryan!” I knocked—perhaps too forcefully, as two of the legionnaires were pulling at me to move.
“Enough!” came Ghoshal’s interjection. “Lord Marlowe, please!”
I turned to glare at the country officer. I might have torn those drooping mustachios from his square and self-important face.
Rage is blindness.
I confined my response to a hard-edged glare.
To my great astonishment, the simple officer did not retreat, so near was he to his goal.
“Alex and Nira will have the first watch,” he said. “If you require anything, you may ask them for it. Have you eaten?”
“No,” I said.
“I will have something sent down for you,” Ghoshal said.
“Where is Neema?”
“I think it best if my people see to your needs for the time being.” Ghoshal did his best to smile. “I’ll have the doctor sent up to take samples and perform the exam.”
I told him he had better do just that. I was curious myself to learn what they might find.
Ghoshal nodded, turned to his men as they opened the doors to my quarters. “Nira, radio GenSec if there’s any trouble. I’ll keep a garrison off the gangway.”
“Aye, sir,” said the man called Nira, a decurion with the familiar stripes on his masked face.
Ghoshal surveyed his people. “Very good.” His dark eyes returned to me. “This is only a precaution, lordship.”
“I know,” I said. “I understand.”
I crossed the threshold, and did not look back as the portal hissed shut behind me, leaving me alone.
I no longer sleep.
I discovered this that first night, after Ghoshal’s men brought the evening meal and I was left alone. I lay there a long time, immobile, watching the blinking of dim lights against the brushed metal of the ceiling, waiting for sleep to come. At the time, I thought the fact it had eluded me that night a fluke of my special circumstances, that my new body was adjusting to the rhythms of the world.
But I have never slept through the night again.
Instead I pass perhaps an hour—and perhaps less—in a state like unto dreaming, though I am conscious always of my surroundings, and may fall into it even on my feet.
I find I do not miss it.
I did not dream that first night, but lay awake and troubled, and from time to time arose to pace the bounds of the cage Ghoshal had made for me. I did not then guess the change that had been wrought in me, as I say, and believed it was only mania that kept me wide awake. Once, in the middle of the night, I opened the doors to find the quartet of men who had remained scrambling to their feet. I smiled at their surprise, but only handed them out the emptied tray of food.
Cassandra’s door was shut. Was she awake? The thought that she might be, alone and perhaps in pain, distressed, pulled upon my aching heart. I longed to go to her, but knew that to do so—if Ghoshal’s men would have permitted it—was to risk making matters worse. The poor girl would have to come to terms with what had happened on her own.
I saw clearly then that though it was I who had been murdered, I had in a sense suffered the least. I understood what had happened to me, and why it had happened—and at any rate, I had survived a similar episode once before. Cassandra had lost her father, her only family. She had not expected to have him returned, and like poor Captain Ghoshal, she was not certain that the man who had returned was the same as the man who had dissolved upon the tiled floor.
And so I sat there, alone, my back against the wall of my cabin, thinking of the girl she had been, of her charging through the old house, the children of the masters and young Prince Arman du Karaj following in her wake. Well I remember her—no more than five standard years old—sitting at the wooden table in the kitchen, at the trestle table where Neema and the other servants took their meals, her tongue between her teeth as she scratched at parchment with wax pastels, trying to draw as I did.
I am not ashamed to say that I wept that night. Wept . . . not for grief, but from a new and sharp awareness of how much I loved the dear girl—and of how much I had loved her mother. Something had changed in me, had happened in my mind. How shall I make you understand? It was not merely my body the Absolute had made anew, but my mind. Things that once had been obscure to me were clear as polished glass. Sharp and clean and painfully I saw the man that I had been: Hadrian Marlowe, Son of the Devil of Meidua, Royal Knight Victorian, Lord Commandant of the Imperial Red Company. Halfmortal. Palekiller. Hero of the Empire.
A mask, a veneer of gold leaf over hammered lead.
Brave, but foolish. Learned, but unwise. Noble, but proud. So proud.
And the grief! How much grief there was in his beating heart! An ocean of it! And for what? Had he not known—or had he simply forgotten—what he had told so many for so long?
That death was not the end.
Why had he mourned for Valka, when he knew he would see her once more and forever when the universe was changed? When the stars that then were young all cooled to ash and were rekindled? The machines of Felsenburgh had failed to cure Death, but that did not mean Death would have the final victory. As I had been stirred to new life in the Well beneath Llesu, I knew that all the dead might live again one day. I had felt them, had I not? Within the Howling Dark of sleep?
Realizing this at last, I set aside his grief—if not his loneliness, or his pain—and steeled myself for my task. I would see Valka again, if I did not fail in my task, and took heart in that, though I knew not then how many years must yet come between our parting and our reunion.
The Absolute had boiled all the lead in me, had transmuted it all to gold. I was, as I have said, the man I should have been, and that man wanted nothing more than to see his child and to tell her he had returned.
But I could not, and should not, and so had nothing to do but wait for the dawn, the false dawn of that strange vessel . . . and whatever new tidings it would bring.