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CHAPTER 21

THE ONCE-PRINCE


The Cielcin searched Cassandra and myself, but the painted man had taken everything of note from us already. They bound our hands with lengths of cord and marched us from the Rhea. We were forced to step over the bodies of human defenders and Cielcin alike, and when we reached the hold, I said, “Shut your eyes, Cassandra.”

She did not obey.

The dead lay everywhere around us, bodies chewed on by the actions of nahute and Cielcin. Throats had been variously cut or torn open, and several of the scaharimn had red blood running down their chins, while others wiped their swords on the tunics of our dead, or bent to despoil or defile the fallen.

In a moment, we passed through that microcosm of hell and came out into the cool night air. All was lit by the hell-glow of our burning ships, and here and there the flash of a particle beam or plasma shot flashed in the middle distance. The fight was not over, but seemed to have died on the margins of the landing field nearest the Rhea. In the dark, I could no longer see the Ascalon. Was it still there? Had Edouard reached it?

They forced us to march beyond the edge of the camp, out onto a stretch of level sand that ran for perhaps three miles to where one of the great skeletons of the Cetoscolides stood. The painted man stood a little apart. He seemed smaller to me, and Lascaris’s clothes appeared rumpled. Lascaris himself had been a tall man, of nearly palatine height. The creature seemed of mere plebeian stature then, and I wondered how long it had inhabited Priscian’s form. When had the real man died? It must have been before they came to Jadd.

As I watched, the changeling fastened my belt and Cassandra’s both about its waist, allowed its jacket to cover the pilfered swords. I swore a private vow that I would kill the monster, as I’d killed that other of its kind on Rustam when I was hardly more than a boy.

“Venanaggaa o-tajarin’ta wo!” came a rough, inhuman voice. “Aeta yelnun wo.”

The Prince comes.

I watched as more Cielcin came out of the fire behind, their shadows flickering like demons on the pale sand. They spurred knots of men and women before them—soldiers and worker alike.

The Cielcin who had spoken—the one with the rough voice—moved along the line its subordinates had made, a lieutenant to either side. It surveyed each of the captured prisoners in turn, pausing here and there to assess an injury or examine some other feature. Once it gripped a man by the face, forced open his jaw to check the condition of his teeth. After each brief examination, the captain—for captain it surely was—made its pronouncement.

“Unjasan.”

“Unjasan.”

“Iyadan.”

“Unjasan.”

“Iyadan.”

“Iyadan.”

“Unjasan.”

“What is it saying, Abba?” Cassandra whispered. “What’s happening?”

Meat. Meat. Slave. Meat. Slave. Slave. Meat.

“It’s deciding what to do with the prisoners,” I said at last.

Pausing before one especially broad-shouldered woman, the captain said, “Tagasvate.”

Sport.

At once the three Cielcin nearest her let out a grating cry. One kicked the woman’s knees out from under her and fell atop her, while the others cleared a space.

“Look away!” I tried to shoulder Cassandra aside, to put myself between her and what was about to happen.

But there was no hiding it.

One of my guards struck me, and I went to one knee.

A moment later, the captain reached us. It was taller than either of its lieutenants, but one of the two primary horns that sprouted from its brow had been sawn off, lending it a curiously lopsided appearance.

Seeing it, the painted man bowed. “Ichakta-do,” he said. Captain.

The Cielcin bowed its head—the threatening acknowledgement of a superior to its slave. “Kybalion,” it said, and I guessed this was the changeling’s name. The Cielcin swept its eyes over Cassandra and myself. Speaking its own language, it said, “You are smaller than your reputation, Devil-Man.”

“Ekanyi usha suh,” I said, having regained my feet. So are we all.

“Not our Prophet,” the captain replied. “His is the only truth.”

“His is the only truth,” echoed the two lieutenants.

Not twenty feet from us, the woman stopped screaming.

“So your Prophet told me, many times,” I said. “That did not stop me from ruining its coronation. Tell me: Does Syriani still walk with a limp?”

The captain slammed its fist into my stomach. I doubled over, but did not fall.

“That name is dead!” the captain said. “He is Shiomu-Elusha, as you of all your kind well know.” It bent over me, its breath the very vapors of hell. “Do you know how many of our people died that day? When your ship leaped away?”

“Enough, I hope, to make up for mine,” I said.

The captain punched me again.

I had never given much thought to the cataclysm the Ascalon had caused by making the jump to warp within the circle of Akterumu. The formation of the warp envelope would have been accompanied by intense gravitic stress. The ruined Tamerlane—already broken—would have been torn to pieces. Its various fuel tanks and weapons batteries crushed and breached. The resulting explosion must have been terrific, to say nothing of the rain of fire and twisted metal that must have come thereafter.

I prayed it had been enough to repay our dead, and wondered if that had been the reason it had taken the enemy so many years to emerge after the fact, allowing Valka and me the time we needed to reach Colchis, Nessus, and Carteia.

“Enough, Ramanthanu!” said the changeling, Kybalion. “The vayadan comes.”

The captain grunted, glared down at me from its not inconsiderable height. Eying Cassandra, it addressed the painted man, saying, “This is his spawn?”

“His child,” Kybalion confirmed. “She must not be harmed. She is the only thing keeping the Utannashi’s power in check.”

Ramanthanu jerked its head in that way that meant it understood. “No matter,” it said. “Soon Utannash’s power will be broken. The Liar will be silent at last.”

The captain’s men busied themselves with the division of the prisoners. Steadily I became aware of a drumming in the air, and looking up beheld a black shape against the starlit sky. The Cielcin lander was larger than the standard siege towers, but not of the crooked design I was most accustomed to. It was like a great keep, descending on human-style repulsors rather than the customary lifter rockets.

It settled on the empty sands before us, kicking up clouds of dust.

“Abba,” Cassandra whispered. “What are we going to do?”

I could only shake my head.

A herald carrying the traditional Cielcin battle standard emerged from the lift that opened, followed by ranks of scaharimn that fanned out, forming the van of the one-time prince’s honor guard. Evidently Syriani Dorayaica had allowed Muzugara to retain the style and honors of its former rank. And more. For when the lift had cycled, four chimeric warriors—white-armored creatures of titanium and adamant nine feet tall—emerged and stood very straight.

The former prince itself emerged a moment later, followed by a pair of Cielcin attendants with filed-down horns whose painted limbs were draped in silk and cloth of silver. These adjusted the train of the vayadan’s white robes, and followed closely as it approached.

Inumjazi Muzugara had changed since I’d last seen it on Eue. There, the prince had been one among hundreds, and known to me only by dint of the fact that we had met before. Once. Briefly. But where its arms had been there were now jointed contrivances of metal and of ceramic white as bone. The Prophet’s gift to one of its faithful slaves. Its armor was of the same insect black as that of its men, with the White Hand emblazoned on the breast. But the robe it wore over that armor was white as snow—was white as the Imperial cloth that I myself had worn for much of my career.

Alongside it, taller and slimmer than the general itself, there strode a scarlet-robed figure in a mirrored environment suit. So skinny it was that I might have encircled its waist with my fingers, broadening only slightly at shoulders and hips. Its face was hidden behind a bubble of golden mirrored glass, a perfect sphere beneath the scarlet hood.

I knew him at once. Quentin Sharp had killed him at Ganelon.

It was Elect-Master Gaizka, one of the sorcerers of MINOS.

The Prophet’s vayadan towered over me, its glassy teeth bared in a rictus of triumph. “When you escaped us at Akterumu, I confess . . . I thought it would be our undoing,” it said. “But the gods bend even you to their will.” Muzugara raised one iron hand and clamped it over my jaw. The metal fingers tightened. “I ought to kill you and have done,” it said, “but you are needed. My Shiomu-Elusha—twelve twelves and twelve praises be upon his holy name—says only the gods may kill you. Any mortal would fail, he says . . . and yet . . . ”

“Enough, my general!” interjected Elect-Master Gaizka, evidently the one-time prince’s minder as much as its advisor. “Remember Severine’s warning. We cannot be certain what might happen if you kill him!”

Muzugara hissed, turning its head to bare its fangs at the glass-faced sorcerer.

“The thing must be done properly, my general,” said Gaizka, bowing his head.

With a snarl, Muzugara released me. Its iron shoulders flexed, components clicking in them like the jeweled workings of some vast Durantine clock. Rounding on Kybalion, the Cielcin general said, “You are certain the Caihanaru is here?”

The painted man bowed, pressing thin hands to its breast. “Marlowe has seen it.”

The once-prince’s eyes flashed back in my direction, narrow with Cielcin surprise. “You have seen it?”

“Denam,” I said, knowing that in doing so I would incur another blow.

“Twice!” Muzugara raised a hand to strike me.

Bracing myself, I let my vision fracture. The back of Muzugara’s hand flashed toward my cheek, faster than my human eye could track. But the blow never landed. The general’s arm passed through me, just as the bullet from Bastien Durand’s gun had done. The Cielcin gathered about us—Muzugara and Ramanthanu, Muzugara’s two concubine-attendants, the guards that held Cassandra and myself—all froze or leaped back. Even Gaizka and Kybalion stopped short.

Gaizka spoke first, his deep, resonant voice barely audible over the thunder of distant fighting. “Fascinating . . . ”

The painted man likewise had recovered its bearings. “That’s enough, Marlowe!”

Cassandra gasped, and I turned to see the knife-missile again at her throat.

Unable to raise my hands in surrender, I shrugged my shoulders.

“It’s really here . . . ” Muzugara spoke in hushed tones. “One of the gods?”

“In the lightning, my general,” Kybalion said. “It has been killing the humans here. Feeding upon their vital energies to amplify its signal. But it is still weak enough to transport, I deem.”

Transport? The word caught like a dull knife against my ribs, so concrete in that conversation of religious abstraction. Transport, of course. The Cielcin had come to free one of their gods, or to capture it and bring it to Dorayaica.

Feeding upon their vital energies, Kybalion had said. To amplify its signal.

Oberlin had said the Watchers were creatures of pure energy, that the bodies they evidenced were only the condensates of that energy into crude matter. Surely then they required energy to sustain the pattern of energy that comprised their thoughts? Had that been why the beast confined itself to small actions like the murder of Doctor Mann, and of Alexander of Alba?

Muzugara had mastered itself from the shock—though it rubbed one hand with the other, as if I had contaminated it with some unseen filth.

“The Shiomu-Elusha will make me aeta once more for this,” it said. “One of his chosen. The first of our kind since Elu’s day to witness to one of the very gods!” Muzugara loomed over Kybalion. The painted man had shrunken quite severely from Lascaris’s former height, and seemed almost a gnome before the bone-crowned Cielcin. “You will take me to the Door.”

Kybalion bowed once more. “Of course, my general.”

“Ramanthanu-kih!” the once-prince bellowed for its subordinate.

The ichakta, Ramanthanu, bared its throat in obedience, an alien salute.

“Bring the Utannashi, Marlowe, and its spawn! And fetch the palanquin! The god is waiting!”


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