CHAPTER 29
THE JOURNEY HOME
I spent the next week abed in the Lord Hood Grand Medica in Williamtown. It transpired that I had been exposed to elevated levels of the arsine gas, and it took time to reverse the damage and clean the poison from my body. Though she had been exposed herself, Cassandra had fared a good deal better, and the same doctors only administered a course of oral medicaments that bound the poison in her blood and banished it from her system. She sat with me through it all, and Neema, too.
On the second day, a Chantry prior came to shrive me, to offer the forgiveness of Mother Earth. He would not leave when I refused him, not even when I shouted. He remained until Neema and Cassandra escorted him from the room. He was not a bad man, I think—he seemed more confused by my behavior than anything.
The governor-general himself appeared on the fifth day, responding at last to my summons. It was a ghost that came into the recovery suite, bracketed by soldiers in ivory plate. The Genseric Hulle I’d known had been a bland, unremarkable bureaucrat—provincial and untested.
The creature that seated itself at my bedside might well have been a walking shadow. Much of Williamtown had been destroyed. I had seen the wreck of siege towers when I’d been brought from the starport to the Grand Medica, the burned-out remains of once-proud colonial buildings. Fire teams and the urban prefects had been scrambling to maintain order, and the word was that many thousand Sabrathans had been carried off to Rugubur.
Meat. Slaves. Meat. Slaves. Sport.
When I told Hulle my belief that the whole of Phanamhara should be annihilated, his face grew dark.
He assented, though he had not seen what I had seen, saying that the site had brought nothing but horror to his little world. I prayed he would not suffer for his conviction, and promised to take full responsibility for his actions when I made my report to the Emperor. I would recommend Sabratha be abandoned, I told him, and he did weep then, for the desert world had been his home—and more than that, his project—for more than a hundred count of years.
I cannot say for certain if the place stands empty now, if the ruined streets of Williamtown are void of life, save for the tataxi and the invasive cats and rats that are man’s constant companions.
A second Phanamhara.
Word of Sabratha is scarce in the wider universe, and not without reason.
It was nowhere, and nothing to the Imperial universe.
A dot on the edge of the map.
None shall ever guess at its importance, save you, dear Reader. You, who know.
It was at Sabratha that the fate of mankind—and of the Cielcin, of the Cielcin most of all—was sealed. Ushara had sealed it, though I did not then know or understand that it was sealed, or how it would be decided.
When I left Sabratha—three weeks after the battle at Phanamhara—it was never to return, nor did any word follow me back across the wide Dark of space of whatever passed there.
The Ascalon was fast, but she could never carry all the massed survivors of Operation Gnomon, and so Lord Genseric Hulle commended one of the bulk cruisers of his Defense Force into my service. The ISV Gadelica was a broad, square-nosed troop carrier with a rear castle like a stepped pyramid, composed entirely of the black-clad adamant typical of most vessels of Imperial manufacture. Into her vast holds were loaded all our surviving personnel, and a berth was found for the Ascalon herself, tidied away in the great hold that ran along the belly of the ship.
Of the eight thousand, two hundred men that had sailed from Jadd to Sabratha aboard the Troglita, only three and a half thousands returned. Nearly three thousand had died aboard the Troglita in the battle above the planet, or else had died in an abortive boarding effort, trying to land on the worldship Rugubur. The remaining dead had lost their lives fighting on the surface.
The Irchtani had fared somewhat better. Of the chiliad that had sailed with us, eight hundred remained. All of these were loaded aboard the Gadelica and interred for the long journey ahead, and at my urging, special pods were found capable of fitting and freezing Ramanthanu and its four companions. Egazimn and Atiamnu both resisted the notion of fugue, and Ramanthanu had to beat them into submission while the others watched. The pods used were of the sort built to transport livestock, and the Cielcin were made to lie down in them, curled like infants as the pods were filled.
“This will not kill us?” the captain had asked me.
“I transported one of your kind thus,” I told it. “Long ago.”
I needed to see the Emperor, but the Emperor was in hiding—so Prince Aldia had said—and I’d no way of communicating directly with His Radiance. The telegraph that had one half of the entangled pair that had allowed Oberlin to communicate with Caesar in his hidden fortress had been lost with the Troglita, and I could not risk sharing information about Gnomon via more public government channels. I would attempt to contact the Emperor during our stop off in Tiryns system, but had arranged for a short, cryptic message to be relayed by official channels before we departed the governor-general’s palace in Williamtown.
To His Imperial Radiance, William XXIII of the House Avent, Firstborn Son of the Earth, Guardian of the Solar System, etc . . .
I received and begged your pardon.
My mission was incomplete.
I sail for Forum at once.
I sent the missive myself, marked with the governor-general’s security seal and the highest urgency. It would reach the Emperor, who would know it came from me. I received and begged your pardon—the order reversed, effect following cause.
There was much I might have put into a letter. Word of Oberlin’s death, of Gnomon’s failure, of the destruction of the vayadan-general Muzugara and of Ushara’s escape. But I could not speak of those things, not without allowing for the possibility that the letter would be read by eyes other than those of Caesar.
I was sailing for Forum, where it is said the wind blows in all directions at once.
Forum, where there is no solid ground.
“I do wish Captain Ghoshal had engaged me for assistance with this last meal,” Neema was saying, following in my wake. “I could do a good deal better than that fool chef of his.”
Not breaking stride, I rounded the final bend in the hall that would take us to the overlook gallery and the access umbilical, saying, “You’re not the one eating it, Neema.”
The Nemrut School serving man tutted officiously, “It is unbecoming, domi. A man of station should eat like one.”
“You fuss like an old woman, you know that?” I said, keying the door. It rolled aside into a pocket in the wall. Beyond lay the cramped overlook gallery, a receiving room with slanting windows running along the left side, looking down on the ventral hold.
The Ascalon herself nestled clamped in her berth just beyond the windows, close against the glass. So close, her scratched and pitted enamel could be scrutinized. Two years sitting in the desert had left its mark. Grime streaked the gently curving dorsal hull, and the red pentangle painted on her tailfin was all but scoured away.
“Where’s Cassandra?” I asked.
“I don’t rightly know, domi,” came Neema’s reply. “The captain expects us in the officers’ dining room in twenty minutes.”
“He’ll wait,” I said.
It felt wrong to be attending dinners, to be moving about the ship on ordinary business. It felt wrong that the world had not stopped on Sabratha, that all had not been suspended in pursuit of Ushara.
“Cassandra should join us,” I said at last, studying my ship through the glass and my ghostly reflection in it.
“She wasn’t invited,” the serving man replied.
“You haven’t seen her?”
“No, domi,” Neema replied. “She was out and about. Wanted to see more of the ship, I think, before tomorrow’s freeze. Young Albé will be in attendance, I think.”
Nine days at warp already. The thought floated over the gray matter of my mind. Twenty years to go. The Gadelica was not fast, not nearly so fast as the Troglita. Ghoshal had told me she maxed out around 700C. 700C, and twenty years to Tiryns.
Ignoring Neema’s mention of Edouard, I said, “I should have gone ahead on the Ascalon. We might have gotten there sooner.”
“I thought you said you didn’t want to lose sight of the others,” came Neema’s reply. “You didn’t want the men talking or getting disappeared by the state apparatus.”
Those were nearly my precise words, and to hear myself parroted back to me with such precision might have discomforted me, had I not spent half an eternity with Valka by my side.
“Quite right,” I said. “I just wish there were something more I could do.”
“You are sure this . . . Watcher creature escaped?”
The face reflected in the polished window dared a rictus grin, and I smoothed it away with an effort and a muttered phrase.
“Quite sure,” I told him.
“Well, if it is so, domi, surely we have time,” Neema said, adjusting one of his silk cuffs. “The Cielcin must travel, too. Perhaps they must travel farther than us.”
He was right, and I admitted as much, laid one hand on his shoulder before turning to key the airlock. The metal grating that ran along the floor of the umbilical rattled as we went, and the Ascalon’s doors hissed as we passed through the forward airlock by the bridge. As before, I had declined rooms aboard the greater vessel, preferring to keep my old room aboard the Ascalon. I had just returned from a meeting with one of the junior medical officers, who had informed me that both the Irchtani and Cielcin were sleeping comfortably—vital signs normal. There was some concern, he told me, about the blood supply.
The blood of sleepers is, as a rule, mixed with certain pharmacons and frozen, stored—like the sleepers themselves—at something approaching absolute zero. The blood may be retained almost indefinitely, requiring only that it be separated from the cocktail of preservative chemicals that prevent hemolysis in long-term storage. A simple centrifuge suffices to separate the blood from its protective pharmacons, and the proportion of blood lost per freezing is reduced to something less than one part per thousand.
Additionally, synthetic blood substitutes are often kept in reserve should the immediate blood supply run short. On no fewer than three occasions was I awakened with such false blood. It takes the body months to recover in such circumstances. Even a palatine needs several weeks to replace the imitation blood with his own, and the effects of false blood are fatigue and muscle weakness.
In the case of human passengers, great ships like the Gadelica always carried more than was strictly necessary—even the Ascalon retained a few spare gallons in near-perfect cold. But we had only small reserves of Irchtani and Cielcin blood—donated by the living xenobites in the lead-up to our departure from Sabratha.
It would have to be sufficient, and I’d told the medical officer as much.
Banishing thoughts of blood from my head, I descended the stairs from the level of the bridge to my cabin.
Clack. Clack!
I froze on the landing, peering into the sconce-lit hall where once I had battled Alexander’s assassin, listening.
Clack! Clack-clack!
A cry sounded from below.
Silence.
Clack!
I shook Neema off and descended, turning through the open doors of the little ship’s main hold.
“Hard at work?” I asked.
Cassandra stepped away from the training mannequin as if it were a lover, and I’d caught them both in states of undress. The girl had abandoned her mandyas and her Jaddian tunic and trousers, wore only a pair of close-fitting pants that terminated just above the knee and a loose shirt that hung scarecrow-like on her thin frame.
“I just . . . ” She seemed almost embarrassed. “I wasn’t much good on Sabratha, was I?”
“Anaryan . . . ”
She raised the training sword she held as if it were some stolen treasure. “I need to train more. To be stronger. To . . . ”
I’d crossed the little space between us and taken her in my arms. One hand on the back of her head, holding her ear to mine, I said, “There was nothing more you could have done.”
“How can you stand it?” Her words were wind over my shoulder.
“I can’t,” I said. “Why do you think I was on Jadd?”
She was silent then a long while, one arm crooked about the back of my neck. I felt her shake, silent tears falling. Captain Ghoshal’s dinner no longer seemed important. Not to me.
“I should not have brought you,” I said at last. “I should have let you stay on Jadd.”
Her arm tightened, and I felt her shake her head. “Don’t.”
A single word to encompass volumes.
“I left my work undone,” I told her then. “I’ve wasted the last two hundred years.”
“Don’t talk that way, Abba.”
“If I had not come to Jadd . . . ” I said, “this might be done already.”
“If you had not come to Jadd, I would not exist, Abba,” Cassandra said, pulling away from me, her empty hand on my shoulder.
I lay a hand upon her face. “I did not mean . . . ”
“I know,” she said, and smiled, eyes wet now with tears. She wiped them away. “I didn’t want you to find me here. I thought you’d gone to meet with the medical officer.”
I turned, found Neema standing just inside the door to the hold, doing his best to appear a part of the furniture. “I have dinner with Captain Ghoshal in half an hour.”
“In fifteen minutes, domi,” Neema interjected, ever the lord of time.
“In fifteen minutes,” I said. We both smiled, shared a private laugh at poor Neema’s expense. The Nemrutti manservant had come through the battle better than all of us. He had escaped the Cielcin entire, escaped Ushara and all but the distant noise of violence. “May some things never change, eh?” I tapped my daughter under the chin.
We drew apart.
“You don’t need to hide,” I told her, “or be ashamed of anything. You survived, dear girl. That is what matters.” I seized the hand still on my shoulder. “Will you come to dinner?”
Neema interjected again. “Domi, there is little time!”
“I know, Neema!” I said. “Ghoshal will wait.”
But Cassandra shook her head. “I’d rather stay here.”
Nodding, I let her go, and turning made to join Neema at the door.
“You sent me away!” The words struck me like a plasma bolt between the shoulder blades.
I did not turn.
“You didn’t even say farewell!”
“I said farewell in the camp.”
“I thought you were on the ship, Abba!” I heard her feet on the deck behind me. “You could have died!”
I turned, a whirling of Imperial blacks. “And you could have died, Cassandra!” She retreated half a step. “And it is better that I should die than you.”
“Not to me!” she said lamely.
“Anaryan . . . ” I tucked my chin, tried to conjure the proper words for myself. “I am sorry. But you know now what it is we fight, and why. You saw the Cielcin, and their god. I would spare you that battle, if I can.”
“But you can’t!”
“If I can,” I said again, more strongly. “Girl, I want you to live in the world that follows after all this. A better world.” I half turned away. “I do not want any of this for you.”
Cassandra retook that step toward me, saying, “That is not for you to decide, Abba.”
“But it is!” I said, and tried to smile. She made it easier. “We cannot decide the world we live in ourselves, but we can change the world for those who follow after.”
“I am not following after, Abba. I’m here now.”
Then I am a ghost before my time, I thought, my smile frozen. “Your mother and I had this same argument, you know? She was always furious with me . . . rushing into battle . . . leaving her behind.”
“But you let her fight with you!” Cassandra said.
“Yes.” At once I found I could no longer look at her. “And she died.”
Cassandra seemed to fold in on herself.
Unsettled by the silence and the cloud that had settled over us both, I pressed on. “She should still be here, you know? She should have met you, grown old on Jadd. I should have protected her better.” I reflected on how unnatural it was that my child had never once seen her mother, not even at her birth. It was . . . wrong.
“How did it happen?” Cassandra looked sharply up at me. She had asked before, and always I had eluded her, said only that she died in the fighting.
I held her gaze then a long time, knowing I must say something.
I spoke at last. “Her ship was shot down. We were separated in the battle. She had to evacuate on a different transport. We were on comms when she died . . . ” I shut my eyes, saw only that patch of darkness, that window onto night.
Never, never, never . . .
“I shouldn’t have outlived her,” I said finally, not daring to move. “I should be dead a hundred times.” The shame I had felt on Sabratha—when I had survived my battle with Ushara—returned, and I averted my gaze. “It’s embarrassing, in a way. I fought so long to keep her safe, but she’s gone . . . and I’m still here.”
Cassandra’s lips compressed to a thin line, almost invisible. “You’re always saying I should let go of the things I can’t control,” she said. “Grief is deep water.”
A rough laugh burst from me, and I half turned again away. “I’m a very bad stoic, daughter.” I passed a hand over my eyes. I still felt weak from my experience on Sabratha.
“Is it true you died?” The question slashed across the moment, dividing time present from time past.
I looked sharply up at her—too sharply to deny it.
I nodded. It was time she knew.
“They said you lost your head,” she said, speaking as one who could hardly believe the words escaping her lips.
I spared a glance for Neema, who still stood in the doorway.
Slowly, I nodded.
Cassandra did not move. For a moment I thought she’d turn away, or laugh, or berate me for a fool. But she had seen Ushara, had seen me work miracles that black night in the desert. Slowly—very slowly—she nodded instead.
It was her turn then not to speak, and yet I could not either.
My mouth was dry . . . I had tried all her life not to tell her, and now she knew the rest of it. What profit was there in silence?
“I . . . ” Again I looked to Neema, wishing he were Gibson, were Valka, were Pallino, were anyone better suited to help me in that moment. “I . . . it was Aranata Otiolo. A Cielcin prince. I was very young. Younger than you.”
“He killed you?”
“It,” I said, surprised at the venom in the word. “It killed me. The Quiet sent me back.”
“The Quiet?” Cassandra echoed. “What’s that, then?”
We had come to it at last. The conversation, the only one that mattered. The Truth.
“The Quiet is . . . ” What? A people? An intelligence? A god? Ushara’s memories flared in me. The memory of falling, of being cast down into this universe all unwilling, thrown by the hand of him who made us. Made them. “ . . . Shūturum.”
Cassandra stared at me, and it was a moment before I realized what I’d said, and I translated, “Absolute.” When that did not seem to answer the girl’s question, I tried again. “The Quiet is an . . . entity. A person. Like the Watchers, maybe, but more. He . . . wants to help us against the Cielcin, against the Watchers.”
“Why does he need you?” she asked.
“Because . . . ” How could I compress the titanic visions I had seen into a simple answer? “Because I have a part to play. The right man—in the right place, at the right time—can tip the balance. I have a part to play ending all this. Stopping the Cielcin. The Watchers.” I smiled, an immense relief washing over me. I had spent decades in fear of this discussion, and it had come at last—and Cassandra had not fled. “There is so much to tell you, mia qal.”
“Then tell me!” she said, and I saw the Tavrosi iron in her, and might have wept.
“Master Marlowe,” Neema took a mincing step nearer me, slippered feet rasping on the metal floor. “The captain is waiting.”
“Damn the captain, Neema!” I raised a hand to quiet him.
Unruffled, my servant said, “Perhaps . . . you might resume this line of inquiry after dinner.”
I looked round, gaze torn between the man and my daughter, feeling that pressure of time that haunts us all more sharply as time passes. My obligation to the captain, to my daughter.
My sense of my own great age.
“Perhaps . . . ” I said, echoing the manservant and agreeing with him. “Perhaps we should talk later. There is much you . . . should know. I think the time has come to tell you everything.”
“I’d like that,” Cassandra said, “ . . . and Abba!” She took a sharp step forward, fixed me with those emerald eyes.
“Yes, Anaryan?”
“Don’t send me away again,” she said, making of the words a command. “I’m ready. I’ll be ready.”
Perhaps she will be at that . . . I thought, holding her gaze, seeing the Swordmaster of Jadd—for just a moment. And yet she was my daughter. The future . . . and the last vestige of my past.
“I would spare you all of this,” I said, throwing up my hands to encompass the whole of the ship.
“But you haven’t!” She countered, “You can’t!”
“I’ll try,” I said, and when her face fell, I added, “But I won’t send you away again.”
She brightened almost at once, and ran to embrace me, dropping the training sword on the deck. I gathered her to myself, heedless of Neema’s presence, of the captain, of Ushara, of Dorayaica itself.
Of everything I had ever known—found or claimed or made—she was the only thing I’d made for myself. Not for the Imperium, nor for the Emperor. Not for the Red Company that was no more. Not even for Valka—not really—nor for her memory.
Cassandra was the only thing that mattered anymore.
She was all.
And still I did not know I lied to her in that moment, though the shadow of the future stretched over us, cast by the light that was to come.
Yet it was a lie, even still.
How often do we speak deceit without our knowledge of it!
How often do we fail to act out the Truth!