CHAPTER 59
HADRIAN AGAIN
We have him. That was what 2Maeve had said.
Him.
Was it possible that the other Sagara had reincarnated himself, resumed masculine form? Calen Harendotes had not challenged this revelation, but then to do so would have been to reveal that he knew more than he ought. And yet I could not escape the sense that something was amiss. It did not seem right or possible that Kharn Sagara should be captured so easily, and so without a fight.
We saw little sign of servants or soldiery as we crossed the burnt threshold into the house of the Undying. Calen Harendotes had insisted he go to meet the captured king, and I went with him.
There was something else, something the dragoons would not tell me. They kept turning back to look at me, round eyes like lamps in their black-masked faces, saying nothing. My Cielcin close behind me, and the men of HAPSIS and their Irchtani accompanying the Monarch’s Interfaced guard, we passed along familiar square corridors of cracked, poured stone, following a red stripe painted onto one side of the floor. Old conduits flowed along the walls overhead, and sconce lights that had perhaps been kindled by the Mericanii themselves flickered and buzzed as we passed.
“It’s not like any palace I’ve ever seen,” Cassandra said in Jaddian. “It feels . . . dingy.” As she spoke, we passed an open doorway, a square arch through which could be seen an antique sitting room. Couches of wood, intricately carved and tapestried, surrounded a holography table above which the spectral image of a woman danced. Two men lay dead in the open doorway.
A guardroom. Had I seen guards on my first visit? Or only the faceless SOMs?
“It’s old,” I said. “Older than any place you’ve been. These halls were built before the God Emperor’s day.”
“They were built before the Foundation War,” said Calen Harendotes, not a dozen paces before us. “After the last Great War of the Golden Age. The last war on Earth, when the Mericanii conquered the realms of Europe, and drove the Mandari to the stars. When the old kings fled to Avalon, and the great Exodus began.”
Those words brought even me to stillness. So little remained of those final days of Earth. In those days, it was said the ancient kept their records almost entirely upon their primitive datasphere, abandoning the page and the canvas entirely. That datasphere had not survived the Advent, the cataclysmic final battle between old William Rex and the machines.
So much of our history was lost.
“Was this Felsenburgh’s war?” I asked.
“This was before Felsenburgh, if only just,” the Monarch said. “It was men that built Vorgossos—or so the legends say. The machines came later. Fort Grissom it was in those days, before the consonant shift . . . ”
“Fort Grissom?” I could hear the shadow of Vorgossos in the old English words. Many of the English F sounds had been vocalized as the language evolved, and the terminal T sounds dropped—an influence from the French exiles at William’s court. Thus fort had become vor, though how Grissom became Gossos is harder for me to explain. Despite my facility for languages, I am no great student of my own, and the slow transition of the King’s English, called Classical in our latter days, to the Galstani, the Standard of the Imperium, is a field many thousands have dedicated their careers to unraveling: the renewed Francophonic influence, the intrusion of Hindi, Bengali, and Urdu—among others, the standardization of the alphasyllabary by Artemon.
“Grissom was one of their archaenauts, the first sailors,” Harendotes said.
I had never heard of him, though I knew the names of Armstrong and of Shepard.
Our destination was a great hall at what seemed the far end of the palace’s main level, a long, round chamber whose high ceiling was lost in the gloom above us, though mighty lamps clung to square pilasters projecting at intervals from the outer wall, shedding their luminance on that bare stone chamber.
The place had the air of a throne room—though there was neither chair nor dais—of a high lord’s receiving hall. Massive doors dominated the wall opposite where we had entered, and though I did not yet know it, behind them there was a mighty lift, a huge cargo platform that descended on tracks at an angle all the way down to the laboratories and the Garden. It felt as though we stood at the bottom of a rocket’s blast pit—and indeed perhaps we did. Too well I could picture great cranes lowering cargo from the planet’s icy surface to this distant floor, and imagine Mericanii footmen with gleaming batons and bright uniforms signaling one another.
What I had told Cassandra resonated with me.
That here was the oldest place—the oldest human place—that I had ever been.
A scout in Latarran combat armor advanced from the far door, leaving his squadmates to scramble to attention. He saluted after the Latarran fashion—reminding me of Elffire and the slaughter outside—and said, “12Ashling’s team has him, my Monarch. They’re bringing him up the lifts.”
“He surrendered without a fight?” asked Calen Harendotes.
“So it seems, my Monarch,” the man said. “He had an android with him. A servant, I think.”
“No woman?” the Monarch asked.
“A woman?” the man echoed. He was not Interfaced himself, I guessed. “No, my Monarch. Not that anyone said.”
We hadn’t long to wait. No sooner had the scout spoken than the great lift doors hissed. They might have opened a full quarter of the round room’s circumference, but the metal shutters opened only the barest crack—just wide enough that three might walk abreast. Two Latarran dragoons appeared—their eyes first of all, followed by perhaps half a dozen others. Between them, they held a man in cloth of gold, his loose robes cut Nipponese fashion, their broad, square sleeves embroidered with dragons whose eyes were chips of jet. He wore loose black trousers cinched at the ankles, and slippers to match the robe. His chest was bare beneath it, and where the Kharn I’d known had possessed a mechanism in place of his chest and ribcage, the chest of this incarnation was entirely human. Indeed, I thought him all human at first glance, until I saw the gilded fingers of the left hand—so like Calen’s own. His hair was black and hung curtain-like across a face pale as death.
The dragoons forced him to his knees before the Monarch, and two dozen Latarran lances pointed at him where he sagged. The soldiers that had come up behind him cast a body on the floor at his right.
It was the golem, Yume, without a doubt. A shot had shattered its ceramic faceplate, blasted a hole clean through its head. The circuitry still sparked, and here and there one part of the jeweled mechanism—visible through the translucent skullcap—still whirred.
I felt certain it was not all dead, and yet it did not move.
“We found him cowering in an apartment attached to the labs below,” said a woman whom I guessed to be 12Ashling. “He claims he was trying to escape. I’ve left a team to look for hidden passages. If there is some way out, we’ll find it.”
There was at least one other route from the palace, via the lifts that descended to the power station and the strand by Brethren’s waters.
The kneeling Sagara did not look up. The men that held him kept hands on wrists and shoulders, his arms outstretched. A third stood just behind, his lance trained at the back of Sagara’s head.
Kharn Sagara advanced upon Kharn Sagara, Calen Harendotes towering over the kneeling prisoner. So near to one another, it was impossible not to notice the similarity of their dress: the black and gold of Vorgossos had become the black and gold of Latarra, the weeping eye replaced by the solar-crowned falcon.
“What have you done?” The question escaped Harendotes in hardly more than a whisper.
The kneeling Sagara did not answer.
“This is not Kharn Sagara,” said Calen Harendotes, stiffening. Seeing that change in his posture, I knew that he had probed the mind of the kneeling man, questing after his implants, testing his praxic defenses.
12Ashling stiffened. “My Monarch?”
Calen Harendotes did not take his eyes from the kneeling subject in black and gold. “Did it work?” he asked, a tone present in his voice that I had never heard there. “Have you done it?”
Fear?
Loathing?
Excitement.
For an instant, I thought the Monarch might kneel himself and embrace the other like a brother—though he had denied him a moment before. “The Angelus Series was a failure . . . ” The Monarch’s words spilled from him in whispers, without suit amplification. “There was nothing. Nothing to explain what happened.”
“Angelus Series?” I asked. “Harendotes, what is going on?”
At the sound of my voice, the man on the ground stiffened, jerked violently in the arms of his captors. The two dragoons lurched to strengthen their hold. The pale face—concealed behind curtains of lank, black hair—peered up at me a moment, and what I saw rocked me back a step.
Returning his gaze to the ground, the man in the golden robes began to shake, limbs straining beneath the weight of his oppressors.
No.
No, I realized.
He was shaking with laughter.
“Lord Marlowe,” said Calen Harendotes, not tearing his gaze away from the laughing man.
I stepped forward, but a broken voice stopped me dead.
“Mar . . . lowe?” it said, low and deep and polished. “Marlowe?”
The laughing man had stopped laughing, and looked up at Calen Harendotes, and at myself. “Is this some joke, Sagara? Another test?”
“Abba!” Cassandra recoiled.
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
The kneeling man looked up at me and smiled. It was a broken smile. A crooked smile. One lopsided and asymmetrical.
It was the smile I had seen in the mirror for more than six hundred years of life.
The face that looked up at me was pale, handsome, but sharp, jagged, and austere. It was the face of the son of some ancient house—great in dignity, but bereft of real authority. The nose was straight and sharply pointed, the brows pitched with grave intensity, the eyes violet as the flower that bears that name.
It was my own face. The face of the man who had died gasping on the floor of the Arx Caelestis.
My old face.
“You?” I did not know what to say. “You’re . . . ”
All my life, rumor that I was some Extrasolarian copy had followed me like a shadow. Ever it had been the stalking horse of the Chantry, of the Empress, of the Old Lions about the Solar Throne. I knew it was a lie, a falsity preached by my enemies. All Kharn Sagara had given me were hollow bones. The Inquisition had itself reviewed my body and brain scans, my blood—and declared me human. It was the Quiet, the Absolute himself who had redeemed me from death’s dream kingdom. Even if Kharn Sagara had somehow been responsible for my restoration aboard the Demiurge—and he had been dead when I died, caught between incarnations—he could not have been the cause of the second.
I knew I was Hadrian Marlowe, knew I was myself.
And still I doubted in that moment.
Doubted everything. Doubted the life I’d led since leaving Vorgossos. Valka and Selene. Dorayaica and Urbaine. The Empire and the Commonwealth and Jadd. Doubted Cassandra herself, though she stood by my side that very instant.
I found the controls behind my right ear to open my helmet. The mask and helm broke apart, folded themselves neatly into the collar of my suit. With rough hands, I pulled the coif from my head and shook out my long, black hair.
The kneeling Hadrian’s eyes widened. “You’re not me,” he said, and looking at Harendotes, asked, “What is this?”
“I have the same question,” I said to that other self.
Calen Harendotes ignored us both.
“Calvert,” I said suddenly, rounding on Harendotes. “Calvert took my blood. You cloned me.”
This was why he’d brought me, why he’d kept me close throughout the battle. Not because I was the only weapon his other self could not replicate, but because I was the one weapon he was sure she had.
The Angelus Series . . .
Series.
How many of me had Kharn raised in the bowels of Vorgossos?
“You have my memories,” I said.
“They’re my memories!” the other Hadrian said. “I know what’s real!” And again to himself, more softly. “I know what’s real . . . ”
On Jadd, Aldia’s people had taken my blood, had taken cell cultures, brain scans, everything they could. It was the price I’d paid for Cassandra’s life—and for my own. But Aldia would not have gone so far as this.
Remote synaptic kinesis, Sagara called it. The transcription of thought and persona. When had he scanned me? And how? In my long imprisonment, perhaps? When Valka and I had shuddered in the cold of the power station below the palace?
And all to isolate, to replicate the gift the Quiet had given me.
My second life.
And more.
Harendotes had feared that his sister-self had unlocked the Quiet’s vision, that an army of Hadrian Marlowes awaited us in the bowels of Vorgossos, each one capable of fracturing time as I. I had not had the vision when I first came to that wretched place, but had some seed of the ability been in me—even then?
Had the other Sagara found it?
“If you’re going to kill me, kill me,” said my replica. “Kill me like you killed the others.”
“Others?” I asked.
“You’re one of them,” the other Hadrian said. “You’re not me.”
“Let him go!” I said to the dragoons, to Harendotes. “Damn you all, let him go!” No one moved, and going to one knee before my other self, I seized him by the shoulders. “Have you seen it?” I asked. “The darkness after death? The black city?”
My replica looked at me, violet eyes narrowing. “You’re mad,” he said.
“Do you know the Quiet?” I asked.
“The Quiet?” The other Hadrian blinked. “Is this some kind of test? What do the Quiet have to do with anything? They haven’t saved me.”
They . . . He didn’t know. I hadn’t known when I left Vorgossos, hadn’t known the truth.
Hadn’t known him.
I looked round at all the others, up at Calen Harendotes, looming like a mountain over us both. The dragoons jostled their captive clone, while the one behind kept his lance trained at the back of the clone’s head. Cassandra stood frozen beside Ramanthanu, who understood enough of human emotion to shift the scimitar in its grip. Surrounded by his guards, Harendotes had not moved, but stood there—shoulders hunched—like the icon of some golden god.
“How many others are there?” I asked my other self.
The homunculus shook his head.
“How many?”
2Maeve shifted beside her lord, animated by some revelation. “He called you Sagara,” she said, mind catching up to the moment as she addressed her liege. “Sire, what did he mean?”
But Harendotes had not heard her, his mind was far away, flashing across the datasphere in pursuit of his other self.
“How many of me are there?” I asked the replica once more.
“Sire?”
“How many?”
“What did he mean?”
People conceive of war and battle as mere events, happening for discrete periods of time in a specific place. But war is a place unto itself. A new universe, one with its own laws of time and space. Seconds which might have passed one after another in ordinary time pass all at once in war—so that hours vanish in instants—or not at all. In war, often a single second contains lifetimes.
So it was with that next instant.
It seemed a hundred things transpired at once.
But it began with the replica screaming.
The other Hadrian convulsed, letting out a high, piercing wail. He might have fallen, but the dragoons held him fast. He arched his back, head thrown back, eyes lolling, mouth stretched wide with incipient madness. I stood, lurching to my feet in my haste to get away. The air about the clone and his matched bookends crackled with pale lightning, and all three men spasmed as a current burned through them. The golden robe smoldered, burst into flame. The dragoon standing close behind the replica fired his lance, but the shot seemingly had no effect. Again the replica screamed as the dragoons fell atop it. Dead perhaps, or stunned. My clone’s golden hand had closed about the one dragoon’s wrist, and closing—separated from the gilded arm.
Calen Harendotes drew a golden sword. Highmatter blazed pale blue in the dim light of the palace hall, and I drew my own weapon, little understanding what was happening. The self-severed hand of gold was changing, sprouting wires like the waving cilia of the Umandh. These twined themselves about the fallen Latarran dragoon, wormed their way between the plates in his armor.
But the clone was standing, and bellowed with a voice then hardly human.
He stood, swaying in his smoking robe. His own long hair was smoldering too, and he raised his golden arm, the arm Kharn Sagara had given him. He aimed the wrist at Calen Harendotes . . . and fired.
A bolt of blue-red plasma clove the darkling air, impacted the Monarch’s shields. The clone’s robe and hair were all ablaze by then, but he did not seem to even notice. I saw his eyes for half a moment. They were flat and dead as the eyes of a corpse.
Jagged, black lines there were then seared into his face, lines that wept blood.
I understood.
The convulsion that had stunned the two dragoons had killed my unhappy replica.
He was a SOM.
Somewhere to my right and behind me, a woman screamed.
“Abba!” Cassandra had drawn her swords. “The Interfaced!”
I had no time to see what it was she meant. My clone turned his hand cannon on me and fired, and I turned my head as hot plasma washed over me. Despite my shield, despite the adamant and ceramic of my armor, despite the suit’s thermal sublayer, I felt the heat even still.
“Defend his lordship!” shouted one of the HAPSIS men.
A shot rang past me, and I felt the buffet and rush of wings.
One of the Irchtani had hurled itself at the replica, talons outstretched to seize it.
The SOM fired, blue light punching holes through the leaping bird-man.
I cursed, and threw myself toward the beast that had been myself.
A hatch opened in the clone’s metal shoulder, and a cylinder of glowing metal spat out and bounced across the floor. It was the plasma cannon’s heat sink, and it was already spent. Face expressionless, the draugr hurled itself toward me. I slashed at it, highmatter fountaining in my hand. The SOM raised its metal arm to parry, caught the highmatter on its vambrace. I knew then that limb was only gilded, the substance underneath was adamant. We locked eyes a moment, violet and violet.
An instant later, a spike of rippling blue-white burst from the creature’s self-severed wrist. Where the muzzle of the plasma cannon had been a moment earlier, there was a blade of highmatter long as my own sword. The replica chopped down at me, moving roughly. How had the Monarch’s security not thought to check the arm for weapons? I parried the creature’s blow, recoiled as still it stepped toward me, heedless for its own life.
Then a blade white as sunlight slashed through the monster’s torso from neck to opposing ribs, and another slashed across its waist.
My other self fell in three pieces.
Cassandra stood in its place, still masked and helmeted, sparing me the sight of her doubtless anguished face. My own eyes were wild and shining, I knew.
But it was not over.
Something huge and stinking collided with me, and I hit the ground so hard the breath was driven from me. Twisting, I saw a cold, white face microns from my own, its eyes black as pits, its teeth bared, its breath a fetid reek. Instinct brought my sword hand up even as shots cut the air where I’d been standing an instant before. Belatedly, I recognized Ramanthanu, and understood that the xenobite captain had saved me. “Ba-Aeta-doh!” it hissed. “Caicu!”
The others.
“What others?” I tried to say.
From my place beneath the lop-horned captain, I strained to look.
Three dragoons in Latarran livery had taken aim at me. Their lances blazed.
I found my voice at last, and rasped. “2Maeve! 2Maeve! Stand down!”
The dragoons did not fire. Neither did they drop their lances.
I spotted the Interfaced commander standing amid her people, marked her by the shape of her body and the gold falcon on her helm. She had raised her own weapon, had it trained on one of my men.
“Harendotes!” I roared. “What is the meaning of this?”
Cassandra was standing over us, swords raised and shining, shield active.
There was a tension in the Monarch’s sepulchral tones that had not been there moments before. “I wish I knew,” he said. “Commander, explain yourself.”
2Maeve did not reply.
Still, no one had fired since those initial shots at me, and a tension had settled on the hall, as if the chess game were near its end, and any false move might spell shahmat. HAPSIS men and my Irchtani brandished guns at the Latarran soldiery, and 2Maeve’s dragoons picked targets all their own, pivoting smoothly from one to the next.
“Ichakta-doh!” One of the other Cielcin—Otomno, I think—offered its hand to Ramanthanu, who stood unsteadily, using its scimitar for a lever. It hauled me up after it.
“We are betrayed,” the lop-horned captain said, shifting one six-fingered hand to the nahute coiled at its waist. As it spoke, it interposed itself between the nearest knot of Interfaced and myself. Its kinsmen drew around it, forming a knot about Cassandra and me. “Ubalannaa o-aeta wo!” it said to its subordinates.
Guard the prince.
There were some Latarran soldiers—one perhaps in five—that looked about in terror, their guns tracking from my Sollan legionnaires to 2Maeve’s dragoons.
Cassandra made the connection an instant before I did, saying, “It’s the Interfaced.”
“Impossible!” said Calen Harendotes, turning on the spot, his sword still shining in his hand. “The Interfaced would never betray me. I made them what they are!”
I filed this little revelation away for another time.
“‘Pride goeth before destruction,’” came a deep, black voice—a voice from nowhere, from everywhere at once, “‘and a haughty spirit before a fall.’ And you will fall, brother of mine.”
“Sister!” Calen said. “What have you done?”
“What is yours is mine.”
It was the voice of Kharn Sagara, the deep, chthonic voice of the machine that spoke for him. It was issuing from the suits of each of the Interfaced. Each and every one.
“The hand,” Cassandra whispered.
She had seen it first. The hand that had separated from the arm of my clone. It had attached itself to one of the Interfaced.
“They’re possessed,” I said. “He’s taken their minds.” I meant the other Kharn.
“How?” Cassandra asked.
My mind went to Valka. To Urbaine. To the worm that had chewed its way from her neural lace and through the white matter of her brain.
“2Maeve!” I called. “I know you can still hear me! You have to cast him out!”
“She cannot hear you.” Calen Harendotes said through his mask. “None of them can.” The Monarch of Latarra, the King of Vorgossos-in-Exile, took ringing steps toward me. He thrust his sword in the direction of the nearest dragoon. “They are already dead.”
My heart broke for Lorian then. “You’re wrong,” I said.
Harendotes did not argue.
“We are outnumbered,” Ramanthanu said in its own tongue.
It was so. The Interfaced had us two-to-one at least, and perhaps three-to-one. They had made up the bulk of the Latarran vanguard, and my own troopers numbered fewer than a hundred in that hall. The bulk of my Imperials had remained at the gates of the palace, securing the place against any attack from the city.
With great reluctance, I placed myself shoulder-to-shoulder with the Monarch, my sword raised beside his own. “If we have to fight them . . . ” I said, voice failing.
“We have to find my sister,” Calen said. “We have to kill her, and soon.”