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CHAPTER 15

SECOND SONS


The image shook, rocked side to side with every desperate step. Ragged breathing sounded over the speaker system. A faint groan that might have been the word no. Then it was hurtling out into blackness. The distant floor—green and white—became the roof above as gallery after gallery rushed by. A scream—the same ragged scream I’d heard standing down on the dais—filled the cramped cabin. There followed a horrid crunch and a terrible stillness. Then enameled black greaves appeared, and Hadrian Marlowe stared down at the dead man.

“Enough, Priscian,” said Friedrich Oberlin.

The secretary keyed the playback to halt.

“He just . . . ran for it,” I said into the fresh silence. “Was he unwell?”

“Nothing in his last evaluation,” the Director said over his cup of faintly floral tea. “But you knew that.”

Edouard Albé sat beside me, fingering the reports that one of Lascaris’s staff had brought in from the back office. The dossier showed a blunt-featured but honest looking plebeian man, bald as any legionnaire, with a sailor’s pallor and the blue shadows of stubble on cheeks and scalp.

“Alexander of Alba,” Albé said, and recited his serial number. “Passed his civil exams with distinction. Tested into the engineering corps, ninety-sixth percentile . . . ” He continued reading. “There are no psychiatric flags on his record. Unless you count this drunk-and-disorderly.”

“Which you shouldn’t,” Oberlin said. “The rank and file collect those like bottle tops, every time they take shore leave.”

“He’s clean,” Lascaris agreed.

“It was the Watcher,” I said. “It has to be. This man, Alexander, killed himself the moment I touched the hand. It must have been watching us.”

Lascaris spoke haltingly. “You . . . think it impelled the engineer to kill himself? Possessed him? Like a daimon?”

“That’s what happened on Nairi,” I said, looking up at the gaunt secretary. Lascaris looked—if anything—even less like himself than usual, more tired and drawn than ever. The fellow desperately needed sunlight. Exercise. A woman. “If a machine can influence a man’s mind, why not one of the Watchers? The one I encountered on Eue gave me visions.”

“But why make the man kill himself?”

I could only shrug.

“Perhaps it means to frighten us,” Oberlin said, dabbing at his spotted scalp with a cloth.

“Or warn us away,” Edouard interjected. “Perhaps it knows we can harm it. Or mean to.”

“You think we’ve frightened it?” Oberlin asked his agent.

“Think about it, sir,” young Albé said. “Nearly a year we’ve been here, and nothing. But the minute we dig deeper into the city—find that hand—this happens. Surely it’s a reaction.”

I was nodding along with the young agent’s analysis. “It’s me,” I said. “I came too close.”

“Did you see anything while you were down there?” Oberlin asked. “Anything at all?” From the shine he placed on the word see, I knew he referred to my second sight.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’d like to go back down—have a closer look at those bones.”

“You can return to the planet when we’re done here, lord,” Oberlin said, “but I don’t want you going into the pantheon until Valeriev’s men have secured the place. They’re bolting in guardrails. I won’t have another of my men taking a header off the topmost balcony, and I don’t want you going anywhere near the spot until it’s secured. Are we clear?”

The old man seemed for a moment half his age as he glared hard-eyed across the table at me, his sclera almost blue in the reflected light of the holograph.

“Certainly,” I said.

We had taken a shuttle—young Albé and I—and returned to the Troglita almost at once. I’d slept but fitfully. Oberlin had insisted Albé and I receive full physical and chemical exams while the reports were compiled on the incident in what Valeriev was already calling the Phanamhara pantheon. We had both come back clean, as had all but two of the unsuited men who had entered the pantheon with us. They had been sent to the medica in the ground base and put on chelators to remove the arsenic from their blood before much harm could take root.

“We did get in a preliminary analysis of the hand while you were in medica,” Oberlin said. “Spectral analysis confirms the bones are not ordinary matter, consistent with samples recovered at Nairi and Echidna.”

“Echidna?” I furrowed my brow.

“Lord Powers recovered similar bones in a tomb on the Cielcin worldship,” Oberlin said. “After Second Cressgard.”

“You didn’t tell me that,” I said.

Oberlin blinked. “You did not need to know.”

“You’re going to have to start trusting me, Friedrich,” I said.

The Director only smiled. “The substance is a form of highmatter. Tetraquark, we think. Inert, very stable.”

“Highmatter?” I said, incredulous.

“Not the same sort used in sword making,” Oberlin said. “There is highmatter and highmatter after all. Just as lithium is not iron.”

“We’ll know more about it in a day or two.” Lascaris’s terminal beeped, and he rose from his seat, crossed the room to the sideboard where a carafe of water stood fully charged. He filled a pair of cups, and returning handed one to the elderly knight.

Oberlin produced a jeweled pillbox from his coat pocket and swallowed a pair of red gel tablets.

“And there were bones on Nairi as well . . . ” I said, thinking aloud.

Oberlin made an affirmative gesture. Coughed. “Yes,” he spluttered, “a far more complete specimen. The Vaiartu built their cities about them where they could.”

“Makes sense,” I said, “we build our cities about Chantry sanctums.”

“Highmatter . . . ” Albé mused, and swept a hand across the tabletop, banishing the projection. A few short taps on the black glass conjured a series of images taken of the hand from the upper levels. The bones had fallen all against one another, collapsed into a pile of knucklebones. Rings of round anaglyphs encircled them, etched into the marble slab by Vaiartu masons. “Très incroyable!”

“Have you checked the bones against the material used in Firstborn sites like I requested?” I asked, thinking of Calagah.

Oberlin shook his head. “Not yet. You really think it’s the same?”

I only looked at him.

“What would that tell us?” the Director asked.

“That there is a link between the Firstborn and your Monumentals,” I said. Between the Quiet and the Watchers.

“We know that already!” said Edouard, tapping the holographs embedded in the table. “Their writing is the same.”

“We’d know how the Quiet’s ruins were constructed,” I said. “Whatever this . . . highmatter-like substance is, they condensed it down from pure energy, just like the Watchers do when they build a physical form.” I dragged one of the images nearer me through the glass table. “There’s nothing underneath the slab, is there?”

“Nothing according to gravimetrics,” came Oberlin’s reply. “Are you expecting something?”

“I’m not sure,” I said honestly. “When can I get in to see it?”

“In another week, perhaps,” Oberlin replied. “I do not want any more incidents. First that tech of Valeriev’s disappears with one of our engineers, now this . . . ”

The four of us were silent then. Oberlin was referring to the disappearance of one Robyne Kel, a junior archaeologist under Valeriev. She and a HAPSIS legionnaire called Irum had stolen a skiff from the motor pool and vanished in the night with a select number of Vaiartu artifacts. There’d been no report of them in Markov Station, and that was the nearest settlement—more than three thousand miles away.

It did not seem likely—even with a fresh fusion cell—that a skiff could make it all the way to Williamtown, or to one of the mining depots at the equator. Sabratha was too vast and too sparsely populated. I couldn’t fathom what the two of them had been thinking, running away together like that.

Most like they’d not been thinking at all.

“I’ve ordered Valeriev, Rassam, and Carter to remove the hand and bring it to the surface,” Oberlin said.

Edouard and I both spoke at once. “How?” We turned and looked at each other, and I found that—like myself—the young agent had crossed his arms.

I uncrossed mine.

“One of the passages branching off from the pantheon chamber is wide enough and slants upward. It’s caved in—that’s why we never found it, but Valeriev thinks he can clear it.”

“Where does it come out?” Edouard asked.

“In the avenues,” said Lascaris. “If our scans are correct.”

“You’re making a mistake,” I said, laying my hands flat on the table, scars and all. “The Watcher made Alexander of Alba kill himself simply because I touched its hand. What more will it do if your people try to move it?”

Oberlin was silent then, staring at the hazy reflection of the holograph in the black tabletop. “There will be time to make that determination while Valeriev continues with excavation. In the meantime, Carter and Rassam will study the carvings in the pantheon. You will join them, and keep an eye out for our quarry.” He spoke as though he meant to dismiss me, and Lascaris rose from his place.

I did not rise. “Lord Director,” I said. “We should increase security on the ground. If the creature is aware of us, it may attack the camp directly.”

“All to the good,” said Oberlin with surprising savagery, leaning over the table. “Then it will simply be a matter of deploying the NEM.”

“Simply?” I did stand then. “What about this is simple, my lord? You know as well as I what we are up against. A man is dead of almost supernatural causes. We’re dealing with materials beyond human science, a civilization we barely understand!”

Oberlin raised both his hands in surrender. “You’re right!” he said. “I should not be so cavalier.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve given thought to what might happen if the Watcher finds the Perseus weapon and destroys it?”

The Director’s face shuttered, and he looked down. “The weapon is shielded. And we have more NEM weapons aboard the Troglita. We can always bomb the site from orbit, should it come to that.”

“Commit the rest of the Irchtani, at least!” I said, letting this go. “Let them fly patrols.”

“That . . . can be arranged,” Oberlin said, standing himself. “I must meet with Captain Clavan. Thank you, Lord Marlowe, A2. Priscian, see them to the launch bay.”

Lascaris rounded the table, but I raised a hand to forestall his advance. “Will you not come down to the surface, Friedrich? You should see the pantheon for yourself.”

The man’s eyes widened, and he shook his balding head. “Not now. When Valeriev clears the path, perhaps. . . . ”

I could sense the terror in the man. He did not want to come within a hundred miles of the Watcher’s bones, now he was certain they were there. But I did not call him out. “We should deploy the NEM now,” I said. “We waste time with this excavation. We should plant the bomb in the pantheon and have done.”

“No!” Lascaris objected, voice surprisingly sharp.

I turned, blinked at him. “Why not?”

“Destroy the city?” Oberlin asked. “You surprise me, Marlowe.”

“Nothing in the city matters if the beast lives,” said I.

“You know as well as I,” Oberlin replied, “that the Monumental does not dwell in its bones. You cannot destroy the butterfly by destroying the cocoon.”

“Only the caterpillar,” I said, voice sour. “But it was there, Friedrich! It was there! It killed Alexander of Alba. I’d bet my life on it.”

The old man coughed, dabbed at his mouth with his kerchief. “You may have to, old son,” he said at length, sputtering. “You may have to.”

“Only you won’t bet yours,” I said. “You’ll stay here.”

The director thumped his chest, eyed Lascaris for support. “What would you have of me, Lord Marlowe?” he asked.

I clenched my jaw. “Nothing,” I said at last.

Edouard put a hand on my shoulder. “We should go,” he said.

“Take your hands off me, A2,” I said stiffly. To Oberlin I said, “I will return to the hook then, fisherman. Good day.”

I turned to go.

Oberlin’s words followed me, and there was a false and fragile warmth to them. “Good day, Lord Marlowe.”

icon


“You hate us, don’t you?” Albé asked, when he had taken the seat across from me in the shuttle compartment.

“Oberlin’s a coward,” I said. “For all his talk of not wanting to lose another man, he will risk each of us before he risks himself.”

Albé offered a single, curt nod, then leaned back against the gray pads of the headrest. “Try not to think too badly of him,” he said, and removed his glasses, the better to look at me. “He is not a soldier. He’s old, and very ill.”

“He saved my life when we were younger,” I said, and peered out the window to my left. “He wasn’t so craven.”

The HAPSIS agent brightened. “He told me that story! The Chantry had bought one of your lieutenants.”

“They had her plant a knife-missile in my cabin,” I said. “It nearly killed my wife.”

“Valka Onderra?” Albé’s dark brows contracted. “Forgive me, I’d not realized you were wed.”

“We were as good as,” I said, and heard my voice sharpen.

“Forgive me,” Albé said. “I meant no offense.”

I looked at him, felt my eyes grow hard. “What did you mean?”

The junior flight officer appeared in the door from the forward compartment and saluted. “We’re clear for takeoff, sir.”

Edouard answered her before I could. “Very good, ensign. Thank you.”

It was another reminder that I was not in command.

When she had gone, a quiet laugh escaped me, and I raised one scarred hand to massage my chin.

“What is it?” Albé asked.

“I spent so much of my life trying to escape the walls the Emperor built to trammel me,” I said, holding my hands parallel to one another, as if I clutched a box. I shook them on the word trammel. “I thought I had. But even on Jadd he had me on his leash, and here I am.”

The black-haired young agent inclined his head. “We’re all tied to something, my lord.”

“I am not your lord, sirrah,” I said bitingly.

“Forgive me, lordship,” Albé said, falling back to the less familiar title. “My family’s served yours a long time. The instinct is . . . deep.”

Outside, the hold began to slip away, black plating and strapped crates. We passed the curtain of the static field, and at once Sabratha appeared beneath us, the blind eye of a god mottled white and brown, with here and there the saline blue of vestigial seas.

“I grew up in Devil’s Rest, you know,” Edouard said. “My family lived in the Belling Tower. Father was Lord Crispin’s lictor, and Grandfather before him. We used to visit him—my grandfather, that is—in the mountains.”

“You’re from the mountains?” I asked. Suddenly the man’s linguistic idiosyncrasies clicked into place. “You’re an adorator!”

“A Catholic, yes.”

“They let Museum Catholics into the Imperial service?” I asked. Long tradition forbade Cid Arthurians, Orthodox Hindus and Buddhists, even Jaddian Zoroastrians from enlisting in the Legions—and especially from the civil service.

Edouard smiled, his glasses back in place. “They don’t. But Lord Crispin vouched for me, and I got a letter of recommendation from Vicereine Kephalos to enter Mountbatten Academy on Avalon. The ban can be waived in exceptional circumstances, and the Throne has . . . always been well disposed to the Church. It was for us the protections granted the adorator cults were created in the first place.”

“Why?” I asked, genuinely surprised.

“You don’t know the story?” Edouard asked. “I thought you knew everything. That’s your reputation.”

“Reputations are lies of consensus,” said I.

The adorator gripped the shoulder straps of his harness, bowed his head. “Quite,” he said. “It’s said one of our high priests saved the life of an Emperor, long ago. The Throne has sheltered us ever since.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. “So my brother and my aunt, the Vicereine, vouched for you, and you entered the service.”

“I did,” he said. “Civil Intelligence, not the military. From there, I found my way into HAPSIS.”

“How did that happen?”

“My connection with you.”

“We don’t have a connection,” I said.

Albé exhaled, rubbed his eyes beneath the glasses. “Yes, you keep saying,” he said. “My connection with your family, then. I think Oberlin thought it might prove useful persuading you to come peaceably.”

“A foxhound to flush out the foxhound.”

“That’s me in one,” the younger man said.

“You would have taken me by force, then?”

“Legal force,” he said. “The Jaddians were set to give you up.”

Prince Aldia hinted as much, I thought, but did not say.

We flew on in silence then for a long while. Sabratha was visible through the porthole in the sloping roof overhead, her mountain ranges like caramels in the milk of salt deserts. Edouard moved his lips in time to words I could not hear.

“I met one of your co-religionists once,” I said. “On Padmurak. In the Commonwealth.”

Edouard ceased his muttering. “Oh?”

“She saved my life,” I said. “The Commonwealth’s agents tried to assassinate me. She healed my wounds, said she thought your god had a plan for me.”

“He does, I’m certain,” the adorator said. “He has a plan for each of us.”

“He’s not the one who has plans for me,” I said. “I’ve met gods, you know. We’re here to kill one.”

Young Albé gripped the straps of his harness once more. “We’re here to kill something, but however strange these Monumentals are, they are not gods. They are certainly not God.”

“So sure of that, are you?” I asked.

“What happened to that planetologist—Mann.” Edouard shut his eyes. “God does not do that.”

“What does your God do, then?” I asked hotly. “Does he allow men to die by the million in war against the Cielcin? To be carried off for food? To carry their children? Does he set the Fleshing Plague against us? Did he let my people die?” I was almost shouting by the end.

Edouard pointed his chin, a stolid ferocity in him that I had not seen since the day I struck him upon the lawn before my villa. “Yes,” he said. “He allows evil for the greater good, even the Monumentals. But what is evil is not Him.”

“But why?” I asked.

The younger man shrugged. “I can but guess at His Wisdom. None can do more.”

I scoffed and checked the flight clock. Twenty-five minutes remained to atmospheric insertion. I cursed.

“You asked what my God does,” Edouard remised, and smiled thinly. “He raises people from the dead.”

I glared at him. “Cassandra says I should trust you.”

“Your brother did.”

“I am not my brother.”

“That is abundantly clear,” Edouard said.

That stopped me for several seconds. It had never occurred to me to conceive of Crispin as a man who could inspire loyalty. The boy I remembered had been petulant, stupid, and cruel. Had those been but the features of youth?

“Why did you leave Delos?” I asked.

For the first time, it was Edouard’s turn to hesitate. “My brother Germain will be Lord Crispin’s lictor after Father.” He almost laughed, a short puff of air escaping him. “I thought it would be me.”

A similar almost-laugh escaped me, and for the first time I saw myself in the younger man—a thing I’d not expected to find. “Are you the elder brother?” I asked. My own father had passed me over for Crispin, had meant to send me away.

“I am,” he answered, “but Germain is the better sword.”

“Perhaps he’s where he should be, then,” I said.

“Perhaps we both are,” Albé said. “But I am glad I found you, lordship. You Marlowes need minding.”


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