CHAPTER 50
HORUS, OR ZEUS
“I saved your life,” I said, not standing. “If you can call it that.”
The throne at my right stood empty, the fittings of its various hoses and cables waiting in slots to receive their lord.
“You did,” said Kharn Sagara. “And you destroyed it.”
Abruptly, I recalled what the sorcerer, Gaizka, had said to Takeshi and Urbaine at Ganelon. “You lost Vorgossos to your other self.”
“My sweet sister,” Kharn sneered, not taking the point of my sword from my chest, “tried to destroy me. Only one of us could rule, she said. If our duplication was to be allowed to persist, we would diverge too greatly ever to be reconciled. I was not interested in being reconciled. The circumstances of our new incarnation accorded us much occasion for novelty. There was much we could learn from our situation, much we could achieve as two that we could not do as one. But she would have none of it.” The sword in Kharn’s hand drooped, ceased to threaten me a moment. “You called me Ren a moment ago, but I am not. The host you remember is no more. My sister killed it. Me. And drove my thoughtform from Vorgossos. If I had not anticipated her treachery and prepared a relay to evacuate my consciousness, I would be dead.”
This was new information. The man before me—if indeed man he was, was not the little boy I had saved aboard the Demiurge a lifetime before, but a new incarnation entire. The phantom that had crawled inside little Ren when Bassander killed the Undying had been forced into the outer dark. There it had clung, demon-like, to some secret satellite, where bit by bit it had transferred to some far-flung outpost, some hidden bastion of Kharn’s secret empire. There the phantom had gathered strength, had built for itself a new body.
A new life.
A new kingdom on Latarra.
Calen Harendotes.
All at once, the legends of the man ran clear. I thought I understood how he had emerged as a power on the galactic stage so swiftly and suddenly. He had acquired his resources so swiftly because Kharn Sagara had spent more than fifteen thousand years acquiring them. And not just resources. Allies. Contacts. The two Kharns each had scrambled to seize what they could of the whole of their once-shared dominion, had divided that dominion against itself. The woman had Vorgossos. Thus she had the Brethren in her thrall. But what of the Demiurge, and the weapons I had been sent to find? Might they even now be hiding in some dark and frozen orbit about Latarra’s own sun?
“You are dead,” I said, responding to the Monarch’s story.
My sword flashed microns from my eyes, and I started.
“Do you ever tire of your contrary nature, Lord Marlowe, I wonder?” he said, and nearly holding the blade to my chin, asked, “Or do you wear it as a mark of pride?”
“Ask anyone who knows me,” I said.
Kharn’s smile could draw blood. “Was I not clear?” he said. “Your beliefs matter only so long as you can assert them on others. What point is there in your beliefs if they cannot change what is? You say Kharn Sagara is dead, but I am he.”
“Even a perfect copy is not the original,” I said, “and you are not a perfect copy, I’ll warrant. The woman certainly is not.”
Seeing the way the man snarled at the mention of his sister-self, I pressed my advantage, scrambling back across the concrete and awkwardly to my feet. “We came here seeking aid. An alliance between Latarra and the Empire.”
“An alliance you destroyed when you impelled my Commandant General to declare war on the Imperium,” he said. “And for what?”
“Lorian told you.” We were standing perhaps five paces apart by then. Somewhere in the distance, I discerned the drip-drip-drip of water.
“He told me you died,” Kharn said, circling to my left, sword still blazing in his fist. “Again.”
This new incarnation, this Calen Harendotes, seemed entirely more vital, more present than the ancient sorcerer I had known on Vorgossos of old. That Kharn had been a specter, a ghost with one foot in the netherworld, a creature of moonlight and shadow. This Kharn Sagara was like the sun, his fury and menace hot as fire. His black-as-black raiments—far from being things of night—were rather like the bruises that dance upon the surface of the suns, concealing light beneath. Not light in themselves, but rather darkness visible.
“He told me he intervened because he believes your . . . abilities might prove useful to our cause.”
I blinked at him. Had Lorian lied to his Monarch? Suggested that it had been my miraculous return—not simple compassion for Cassandra as mine and Valka’s daughter—that had prompted him to abandon his duty and shoot his way out of Forum with the Gadelica in tow?
“Does he know?”
“Who I am?” Sagara asked. “No.”
“Then why are you telling me?”
“Because you are my prisoner,” Harendotes said, pointing my sword at my face. “And because we are the same.”
I felt the instinct to rebut his words rise in me, but I did not take the bait.
“You say that I am not Kharn Sagara, that I am a new man. Or a ghost. But neither are you the man you were when last we stood in this place.” He raised his empty hand to encompass that dim hall. His gold-clad fingers shimmered in the gloom.
We were not on Vorgossos, I had to fight to remember that, so complete was that simulation, so total that illusion.
We were on Latarra. This was only a waking dream.
“Your face is different,” said Kharn Sagara. Said Calen Harendotes. “But your spirit, your condescension is the same. What happened to you?”
I could wrestle the sword from him, break the waves of time as I had in my skirmish with Cassandra, but I did not move. I needed this man, needed his ship, his weapons.
I had come to Latarra hoping to find the road to Vorgossos once more, but I had found Vorgossos himself. Its king in exile.
“I was sent back,” I said, “restored to life by the author of our creation.”
That fey smile lit the face of the Monarch once again, that smile that failed to reach his eyes, though a light—pale blue as lightning—guttered in his pupils. Those eyes were surely false, mechanisms not unlike Valka’s own.
“The author of creation?” Sagara laughed. Had I ever heard him laugh before?
“You think me mad,” I said, “but you know better. When last we met, you spoke to me of the powers that are out there in the universe. Creatures stranger than anything I could imagine.”
Lions, leopards, and wolves . . .
“I know about the Watchers, Sagara,” I said. “The things the Empire calls Monumentals.”
Calen Harendotes’s smile froze in place. Was there fear in those false eyes?
Had he encountered one of the Watchers before? The Lord of Vorgossos had ruled for long millennia. Who could say—save he alone—what horrors he had faced?
Before he could speak, I said, “The Cielcin have awakened one. Soon they will have two. If we do not act swiftly, they will crash across this galaxy like a wave. No one will be safe. Not the Empire. Not Vorgossos. Not your kingdom here. That’s why I’ve come. We must put aside our differences. I have brought a princess of the Imperium; with her aid, we can repair the damage that has been done to our negotiations by our enemies.”
“Our enemies?” Harendotes arched his brows.
“I assume Aristedes told you,” I said. “I was murdered by the Terran Chantry. They desire that there should be no peace between your people and mine. They would declare war with you even were the Cielcin knocking at their doors.”
The Monarch of Latarra, the King of Vorgossos smiled his black smile once again. “And you would not?”
“You’re a lesser evil,” I said simply. “I do not believe it is the destruction of mankind you desire, Kharn Sagara.”
Again, the man laughed, and this time there was, I think, real amusement in that deep voice. “No,” he said, “no, I don’t desire it. I don’t even desire the destruction of your Empire.” Drawing back, he unkindled my blade, turned the pommel once more in his hands. One gilt finger traced the twin garnets set there to serve as the simurgh’s eyes. “An appropriate emblem for you. The simurgh has a habit of surviving death.”
The lion-headed bird was a cousin of the phoenix. Forever destroyed. Forever remade.
Was that to be my fate? Surely it had been my life.
Harendotes tightened his fist about the hilt, twin flames guttering in the black pits of his eyes. “I would have your secret, Lord Marlowe.”
“My secret, Sagara? I told you.” What was it Lord Nicephorus had said that snowy day on Carteia? “My secret is that I am in league with a being from beyond our cosmos, a being who has bent time and space to keep me on-mission. That mission has brought me here, to you—though I did not think to find you here.”
At my final words, he looked up sharply from his contemplation of the graven simurgh. “You did not? I thought you—of all people—would surely have seen through my façade. Harendotes is Horus,” he said, touching one cheek with a finger, “god of the eye. Horus, who protects his father’s throne. Horus, who avenges his father’s name. I thought you a student of mythology, Lord Marlowe. I confess, I am disappointed.”
How strange it is, to be called a disappointment by a figure out of one’s childhood storybooks. Almost it was as if Arthur or one of his many knights had found me wanting.
“You know,” I said, “I admired you, when I was a boy. Your legend. You’re a hero in the Empire. We tell stories about you. How you battled with the Exalted, conquered Vorgossos. How you defeated the last Daughter of the Revolution . . . ”
The man jerked at the mention of that name. “If you did not come here for me,” he said, “why then have you come?”
“I came to seek Vorgossos,” I said. “I need the weapons the Mericanii built.”
Harendotes—I admit I found it difficult to think of him as Kharn Sagara, so different did he seem—was silent then a long while. Water fell into unseen pools about us, recalling not only the throne room that illusion resembled, but the grottoes of the palace of Syriani Dorayaica. He still was studying the simurgh carved into the hilt of my sword, seeming almost to have frozen to the spot. His eyes—whose black depths flickered with blue flame—seemed no longer to see the Jaddian weapon in his golden hands.
“The Archontics,” he said. “You want the Demiurge.” The Monarch peered up at me, and spoke the words I’d known must come. “I don’t have it.”
“Your sister-self?”
Slowly, the great king nodded. “She took everything from me. My home. My ship. My familiar.”
“Brethren, you mean?”
“I had it from a seed,” he said, and held up thumb and forefinger perhaps an inch apart. He spoke as if I were no longer there, spoke to shadows and memory, and so speaking I saw the shadow of his earlier incarnation, of the Kharn Sagara whom Bassander Lin had killed. “A pearl of great price. It was I who fed it, made it grow, I who dammed the waters and made it a home.” He looked at me, almost embarrassed, and closed his upraised fist. “I will have it all again.”
Realization dawned on me. “The bombs,” I said. “The atomics you sent Lorian to ask for. They’re not for the Cielcin fleet. You intend to besiege Vorgossos and retake her.” I could not help but add, “And Lorian doesn’t know.”
No answer.
“Was it all for this?” I asked, gesturing at the chamber about us—the imitarium—and the pyramid beyond. “All of this . . . just so you can retake Vorgossos?” Was it possible?
“To retake Vorgossos?” the Monarch asked the question as though the thought had not occurred to him. “Yes. And to kill my sister. Atomic bombardment will destroy any chance she has of broadcasting her thoughtform offworld. She will be trapped, you understand. Vulnerable as she has never been vulnerable, and only your Chantry and the Emperor himself possess such weapons in the quantity required for such a task . . . ”
“The radiation . . . ” I said. A cloud of nuclear radiation would disrupt any signal leaving the planet, killing any chance the other Kharn had of escape.
Calen Harendotes had remastered himself, smoothed his square-edged smile away. “My sister was right,” he said. “We cannot coexist.” He smiled. “I have not been so close to death since your Empire was young.”
“You’re as close to death as any man,” I said.
“Not closer than you,” said he.
“There is none closer to death than me,” said I.
I expected him to laugh once more, to mock my sense of melodrama, but he did not. “There is not,” he said, eyes alight with malice and dark amusement both. “You said that the Cielcin had found one of their Watchers, their . . . their gods.”
“Two,” I said. “They found two. Dorayaica is becoming one.”
“Becoming?” That caught the Monarch by surprise, and that new incarnation of the Undying turned his back on me—black cape swirling in the gloom of the false room. He stopped halfway to his throne. Over his shoulder, he said, “You know what they are? The Watchers? What they’re capable of?”
“They’re beings of pure energy,” I said.
“No,” Kharn said, mounting the steps to his throne. “Matter and energy are but different forms of the same mundane substance. They have no substance at all.” He seated himself, flung one leg over the arm of his seat of rude metal, revealing rune-scored greaves, poleyns, and cuisses. His legs might have been all metal. “You don’t understand?”
I shook my head.
“This room,” he said, and gripped the arm of his chair with one hand. “This seat . . . are all false. Patterns of light projected, given substance by the careful calibration of prudence fields. But they create a world, the illusion of one—you would say. Suppose this room were to stand for our cosmos: an image made by mechanisms outside it.”
“The Watchers are those mechanisms,” I said.
“No,” Kharn said again, tapping the side of his seat with my unkindled sword. “They are ideas. Programs, if you like. Scripts fashioned to maintain our cosmos just as the daimons in my machines maintain the image of this room.”
“Only they have abandoned their posts,” I said, and thinking of Ragama, amended, “some of them.”
Calen Harendotes only looked at me, and in him I saw the shadow of his former life, the old man—his heart and lungs replaced by some vile mechanism, concealed by leaves of plastic fashioned to appear as flesh and sinew. The dead Osiris to this man’s gleaming Horus, the Saturn to Calen’s Jove.
After a long silence, he stirred, and raising my sword, said, “If I were to give you this weapon and command you to kill the daimons painting this illusion . . . could you do it?”
“I could try,” I said, “the machines are somewhere in your palace.”
The hand that held my sword extended one finger. “What if you could not leave this room? What then?”
“The projectors—”
“—are so high above your head that you will never reach them,” the Monarch said. “Even if I were to give you a firearm, you could shoot at the ceiling until the gun burned out and never strike even one. And there are dozens, Marlowe.” He let his hand fall. “Even if—by some miracle—you succeeded, you would have destroyed only the interface by which the daimons interact with the imitarium. Not the daimon itself.”
I found myself recalling Ushara’s eyes peering in at Sabratha from the night sky, pictured the Watchers as eyes peering down at the globe of infinite space that was our cosmos. Observing it, but not a part of it, as though she had opened some tear in the very curtain of night.
“You see?” he said. “It is impossible. You cannot even try. Like your Quiet, they are outside the curve of our spacetime. What you have seen—what I have seen—are only manifestations. We cannot defeat them. It is folly even to try.”
It was my turn then for long silence. Above me, Calen Harendotes watched, a gleam in his eyes sharper and harder than the dull light of his father’s gaze—which was his own.
“Programs . . . ” I said at last. I had not been able to get past the word programs. “It’s true, then? The First Truth?”
“You’ve been speaking with Prytanis, I see.”
“Speaking about him,” I said, though I had spoken to the Preceptor briefly on the voyage from Forum.
Calen Harendotes was smiling. “Who can say what the Seekers saw in the cosmic background? They have never shared it with those of us in the secular world. They believe we are programs ourselves, all part of some great game played by beings beyond. What the nature of that beyond is, none can say . . . ” Here he laid his trap. “None, perhaps, save you.”
I stood a little straighter.
“You spoke of a darkness last we met,” he said. He turned his head, looked away at something hid in the gloom only he could see.
Memory.
The past.
“Darkness,” I said, “and light beneath.”
“You told me—both of me—that you were not alone, that you felt other people with you. People you could not see.”
“I told you then everything I knew of what happened to me,” I said.
“But you have died twice now,” he said. “Surely there is more you know.”
“You’re asking if I went beyond,” I said. “I didn’t. The dead dream, you know? The patterns of their lives remain accessible to those with the right tools. They sleep even now, their memories locked in the quantum foam, waiting to be recalled! I have seen the future, Sagara. I have been there! I have seen what I must do! I need your ship—your weapons—if I am to do this thing!”
The man on the throne looked at me, confounded. “Locked in the quantum foam . . . ” he muttered. “You’re saying the past exists now. That a record of it is writ in the very present—” He broke off. His lips moved, and I thought that I could guess their meaning.
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future . . .
“And time future contained in time past, yes,” I finished the quotation.
“Shakespeare,” Sagara said.
“Eliot!” I snapped, and when he recoiled, pressed, “Now who’s the disappointing one?”
The king in yellow sat his throne, unmoving. After a moment, he brought his leg down from the arm of his high seat and sat properly, facing me like Zeus at Olympia. He did not respond, but gripped the arms of his throne until I thought the metal would warp beneath his golden fingers.
“Do you know why I . . . became what I am? Why I chose this . . . existence?” he asked, peering down at me. “Do they tell that story in your Empire?”
I froze, and locked eyes with that figure of fable, that man of myth. “It does not take a great mind to guess.”
Harendotes’s smile returned, and returning once more failed to touch those luminous blue-in-black eyes. His pupils were like twin lasers gleaming in black irises. “You think it was fear. Fear of death. I do not deny it. I fear it still. But I do not fear as lesser men, from ignorance! From terror of the unknown! I fear death because I know, Lord Marlowe. I know that death is not the end.” His words were cold and distant as the stars shining in his eyes, gripped by a bone-deep fear, cold as ice. “I know what your Emperors awakened on Nairi, long ago, and what happened there. I can guess what you have seen—but you have not seen what I have seen.”
“What?” I asked.
That lonely smile did not waver. The Monarch’s face might have been shaped of plastic. “Hell,” he said at last.
Hell.
It was so ancient a word—little changed from the days of Aryas. Hell. Hades. Hellia. Halja. Still, it seemed strange to speak of it in that place, or with such gravity. The Chantry teaches that hell is only an abstraction, a state of punishment that might arise anywhere—on any world—as punishment for man’s sins. Earth herself became a hell in the ember days of the Golden Age, before the coming of the machines. Still other worlds had fallen into hell. To my people—and to me—Vorgossos had itself been a hell, a place of misery and of man-made horrors unspeakable in the light of Imperial civilization.
But Kharn spoke of something else. Something older, direr. Fell.
“What?”
“Do you know what Vorgossos is?” he said. “What it was? Before it was mine?”
I thought about the question for a moment, remembered. “It was an outpost of the Mericanii Dominion.”
“Do you know what it was for?”
I thought I could guess, but held my silence.
“They knew of them, Marlowe,” he said. “The Mericanii knew of your Watchers. As they grew more sophisticated, Felsenburgh’s machines grew sophisticated enough to detect their presence. They realized what they were, what our universe is.”
“And what is it?” I asked, knowing Kharn’s answer.
“Only a dream,” said he, “a holograph. A story.” His fell smile returned—it would come to be the defining feature of this incarnation, that smile. There was no warmth in it, only a coldness that seemed to drink the light. “You mock me, say I am a dead man, that I am only a ghost, a program, an imitation of the Kharn Sagara that was. Only I know we are all imitations, all programs. Ghosts.”
I, who had been beyond and touched the heart of the Absolute—if only for a moment—could only shake my head, “Not the way you think.” There was no machine, only the mind of the Quiet himself.
“Deny it all you like,” Kharn said. “You know I speak the truth. Our universe is an illusion, one shared by all of us, yes, but an illusion all the same. Only our experience matters, because to each of us, only our experience is real. You say I am not Kharn Sagara, but what is Kharn Sagara save that which believes itself to be Kharn Sagara?”
“You are afraid,” I said, drawing nearer the throne. “Afraid you’re wrong.”
The eyes of Calen Harendotes flashed like lightning.
“Am I? Wrong?” he asked, and barked short laughter. “I think not.” He brandished the hilt of my sword as a prelate might his baculus. “As above, so below. The Mericanii’s machines saw in the Watchers creatures like themselves. Programs designed to run our universe. They made contact with them. Captured one. Studied it on Vorgossos just as your men studied theirs on Nairi . . . they hoped to use it in the fight against your Empire. Selarnim, they called it.”
“Selarnim?” I said, feeling the shape of the word, searching for recognition in some memory, for some fragment of Ushara’s shade in me. But she was gone, and with her all the memories she had carried. “They wanted to use it against the Empire?”
“They wanted to rebuild their own,” Kharn said. His voice had grown deadly soft by then, the murmur of an aged and terrible sorcerer. “I told you once . . . that I had never seen a miracle,” he said. “I lied. The Mericanii used Selarnim to raise the dead, just as you were raised. Without machines. I saw it with my own eyes! I spoke with them myself! I know what awaits us hereafter! The darkness! The torment!”
“You . . . ” I spoke over him. “Were one of the Mericanii?”
A blackness fell on the face of the Monarch then, a sick anger and a sorrow I had never thought to see writ there, “No!” he said. “I was their slave.” Into the new-made silence, he continued, “Your Empire was not built in a day, boy, nor did the Mericanii fall all in one. They endured for many lives of kings. It was the last of them that ruled Vorgossos . . . before I came.”
I looked up upon the deathless king in wonder. “I always believed the machines died with the Earth.”
“Did your Chantry tell you that?” Kharn’s smile was like the drip of poison into my heart. “Many of the Mericanii survived your Advent. The loss of Earth defanged them, and only one of their great machines remains, but the children of their optimates, their rulers, lived to inherit the stars. Or who did you think the Exalted were?”
“The Exalted?” I swallowed.
“Are the direct descendants of the Mericanii,” he said. “At least in . . . certain cases.” Again he laughed. “You Imperials . . . you believe yourselves the masters of our stars, but you have forgotten so much of what you once knew. Supremacy has clouded your wits. Now your strength is failing, which has brought you to me . . . ”
“What happened to it?” I asked, returning to the matter at hand. “To the Watcher, Selarnim?”
“Destroyed,” he said. “Along with its captors.”
“You destroyed it?” I asked. “So it can be done.”
“I destroyed one solitary Watcher,” he said.
“You said it couldn’t be done.”
“I said we could not defeat them,” Kharn corrected. “They are legion, boy. It is mere chance the others did not find us sooner. Humanity has grown so large, so fat and stupid, broadcasting its civilization into the darkness. Why do you think I hid myself on Vorgossos for all these long millennia? You may triumph in battle once. Twice. A hundred times—it does not matter! You cannot defeat them all!”
I knew as much. I had seen deep time, the end of time, had seen the black city of the servants of evil—the last men crouched about the last star like a campfire in the jungle while lions circled in the Dark outside.
And leopards. And wolves.
Still, I said, “I don’t have to. It is my task to defeat these two, to stop Dorayaica and the Cielcin. I need only triumph once. This once.” When Kharn Sagara said nothing, I advanced again. “We can help each other! You need our support to retake Vorgossos. I need your ship. Will you help me?”
Sagara’s black eyes had fallen to his lap, to the hilt of ivory and iridium with its pommel like a winged lion. He had become his predecessor then—his predecessor’s predecessor—and sat in silence, hardly moving at all.
“Vorgossos,” he said at last, when I thought he might never speak again, “is all that matters. My sister is all that matters . . . ” He looked at me with eyes like the remotest stars. “She has taken my life from me, Marlowe. My eternal life.”
“You can have it back, my lord.”
“I had thought to kill you, when I heard that Aristedes was bringing you to me,” he said, and lifted my hilt in one golden hand. “To see if you would return. But it may be that you are worth more to me alive.” The Undying extended the sword for me to take.
I advanced to receive it, as I had from the Emperor, and from old Aldia when he had restored Gibson’s shattered sword.
But Kharn Sagara pulled it back. “If you speak of any of this to your people, if you tell my Commandant General Aristedes who I am . . . I will not kill you . . . or the Princess Selene. I will kill the other woman. The one who looks so like your Doctor Onderra.”
My heart went cold and hard as iron, and the hand I’d reached out with to accept my proffered sword balled into a fist and fell.
“Your daughter, I believe?” One eyebrow rose.
“Yes.”
That malefic smile returned, square teeth pressed together as the Undying cast my sword at my feet. Not the offering of a weapon from liege to vassal, but the casting of a bone to a dog. I did not bend or kneel to retrieve it, but crouched and took it up.