CHAPTER 7
THE DEICIDES
It is not for nothing that Two-Faced Time derives his two-headed visage from half-remembered Janus—god of doors. They are symbols—as indeed all the material world is a symbol, a simulation in crude matter of that world higher and closer to the one in which he resides, which is himself. To step over the threshold of any door is to undergo a transformation, if only in that geometric sense by which we are transported from one chamber to another. When the next Emperor passes beneath the Arch of Titus at his coronation, he is transformed from a mere prince to the person of the monarch. When the seeker enters into the cloister of the athenaeum he becomes a novice of the scholiasts—though he may have yet to endure even a single lecture. So too when the ashes of my father were sealed forever in their vault in our necropolis, he became a part of history, departing the world of active concerns.
All doors symbolize change.
When the doors of the docking umbilical opened onto the Troglita’s receiving bay, it was to change me back into something like the man I had been. The great chamber revealed by those hissing gates was a thing of black metal and polished brass—as were the doors themselves. The officers in black and silver with their red or white caps, the legionnaires clad in ivory and crimson, even the very air—sterile and odorless—recalled my long centuries of service. The martial clarion ringing against the ribbed ceiling seemed an echo of that same trumpet I had heard at every parade and every muster since I departed Forum for Thagura aboard the Tamerlane on our first voyage together.
Albé had gone on ahead of me, with Janashia and Browning bracketing him at either side. The dozen or so men who had waited in the hold of the Ascalon followed close behind—an honor guard of sorts. I had buttoned my jacket as we waited in the umbilical. Almost I wished I had my Order of Merit or my Grass Crown to wear, to awe the soldiery and remind these men of HAPSIS who I was and had been.
But the Order of Merit and the Grass Crown had died with Nessus—or had they died with the Tamerlane? The legionnaires to either side beat their breasts in salute as we passed, approaching half a dozen figures waiting at the end of the receiving hall. The silver-haired woman with the copper skin and white beret was clearly the captain, and the two officers to her right—both men—were almost certainly her first and second. At once I thought of Corvo. Indeed, but for the height this woman might have been cast from the same mold, with her bright hair and burnt complexion. To her left there stood an aging man who leaned upon the arm of the younger man beside him, and beside them there stood a scholiast robed in green.
When the last of the trumpet’s music faded, Albé came to a halt and saluted. “Lord Director, Captain Clavan: I have brought Lord Marlowe as directed.”
The old man—a patrician of so advanced an age that what little hair remained to him was white as snow and circled his crown as clouds might some craggy mountain peak—acknowledged the young man’s words with three nodding gestures that shook him all the way to his waist. “Very good, A2.” Then he turned his attention to me, a tired smile forming beneath his somber eyes. “Lord Marlowe, it has been . . . a very long time. Almost I feared I would die on this ship waiting for you, but you’re here now. Do you remember me?”
I did. The shadow of the unassuming young logothete I had known on Forum remained in the antique visage, hardly to be seen.
“Sir Friedrich?” I said, still struggling to see the young minister I had known beneath the slow corrosion of years.
“It is Lord Friedrich now,” he said. “A technicality of my office.” He patted his attendant on the arm, and the young fellow—a slender man with steely gray eyes and the sallow complexion of a life-long sailor—walked the old lord forward a pair of steps. I advanced, passing Albé, and bowed as the old man bent awkwardly himself. “As you have no doubt guessed, I am Lord Director of Contact Division, under the Imperial Office.”
“HAPSIS,” I said.
“HAPSIS,” Oberlin agreed. “Indeed, you might have had my job. Did you know?”
I blinked at him.
“There was a time you were slated to replace my predecessor, Lord Powers.”
“Cassian Powers?” I looked to the man’s attendant for confirmation. “Cassian Powers was the Director of HAPSIS?”
Oberlin’s tired smile returned. “He was enfolded by this old Carnival shortly after Second Cressgard, when he broke Echidna.” He looked round, marking the officers and the soldiery standing at attention to either side. “There will be time to discuss old history after we are underway. Time is short, as I’m sure our A2 here told you.” His eyes went to young Albé.
“A2?” I looked at the man. Pointedly I asked, “Not a lieutenant, then?”
Edouard Albé offered crisp salute. “Edouard Albé. Special Agent 2, Imperial Office, Contact Division.”
“Special, indeed,” I said icily, and felt my eyes narrow.
“Lord Marlowe!” The tanned, silver-haired woman in the white beret advanced, her flinty eyes fixed on a point just above my shoulder as she saluted herself. “I am Captain Marika Clavan, ISV Troglita. These are First Officer Morrow and Second Officer Vedi.” She gestured to the two men at her right—my left. “On behalf of my crew, welcome aboard.”
Already tired of saluting, I made the gesture anyhow. “You’re very kind, Captain. You have a beautiful ship.” I had seen it on our approach, the classic black Imperial knife blade, with the blocky towers and pyramids of its castle rising to aft like the fins of some immense shark. “How many aboard?”
Captain Clavan replied at once. “Eight thousand, two hundred on board, counting the sleepers. We’ve a full legion—a small one, six thousand men—one thousand auxiliaries, and the engineering corps.”
“Engineering corps?” I asked, turning back to Lord Oberlin.
“To excavate the ruins on Sabratha,” he said. It was the first time I’d heard the name of our destination. “There will be time to go over the particulars in private, my lord. We have much to discuss. Will you not introduce us to your companions?”
“Of course!” I said, inhaling sharply. “The Jaddian is my manservant, Neema, one of the Nemrutti. And this!” I laid a hand on Cassandra’s back to present her to the Director. “Is my daughter, Cassandra Otavia.”
Cassandra bowed in the courtly fashion, right hand to her breast, the left thrown wide as she bent, right leg forward. “My lord,” she said.
“Your daughter?” Surprise widened the old patrician’s eyes. Sotto voce, he asked, “She’s not an intus, surely?”
I felt my eyes flash. It was an extremely untoward question, made all the sharper by the fact that—to the Imperial mind—it was true. Cassandra had not been born of a union approved by the Solar Throne, had been born without the imprimatur of the High College.
“She’s my daughter,” I said again, icily.
“Lovely to meet you,” Oberlin said. He patted the arm of the young man at his side. “Priscian, introduce yourself.”
The attendant straightened, bowed his head. “Priscian Lascaris, lordship. I have the honor of serving as the Director’s secretary.”
“My life-support system, in truth!” Oberlin said. “Genetics is an unjust god. I am old, as you see, and will only get older, Earth bless and keep me. Priscian keeps me on my feet and on schedule. Don’t you, Priscian?”
The sallow man smiled and diverted his eyes, evidently uncomfortable to be so near the center of attention. “I do my best, Lord Director.”
“And your best is very good, lad. Very good, indeed. But I am forgetting Rassam! Rassam here will be leading the excavation. He’s been with the Carnival now for—goodness, longer than I have!”
The scholiast—a golden-haired, blue-eyed palatine—bowed with his hands folded before him in his flowing sleeves. “An honor, lordship.”
“Rassam?” The name sounded familiar. “Were you involved with the Echidna dig?” I must have seen his name in the piles of documents Valka and I had studied together at Maddalo House.
“I was indeed,” Rassam said.
“Rassam is an expert on the Stonebuilder civilization,” Oberlin said. “Perhaps the expert, truth be told.”
“A small pool,” Tor Rassam murmured.
Though I had cautioned Cassandra to speak little, she said, “You mentioned an excavation. Are we excavating something?”
Oberlin and I exchanged a long glance, and much, I think, came clear for me in that unvoiced exchange. Long ago, the Emperor had spoken to me of the Atropos Expedition, an ill-fated Imperial adventure to the planet Nairi. On Nairi, the Emperor’s men had discovered the ruins of an Enar city, and the bones of a Watcher—still undead. It had destroyed them, or so William had told me.
They must have uncovered another city of the Enar. But had they found the corpse of a Watcher? Or something else? Surely they would not have needed me simply to dispose of some old bones. There was something more, something Oberlin did not want discussed in front of the men.
“Yes, my dear!” Oberlin said at length. “We are sailing for Sabratha! Do you know it?”
Cassandra shook her head.
I did not know it, either, and told the man as much.
“A dismal place, by all accounts,” Oberlin said. “Arid. Very arid.”
“Where is it?” I asked.
Marika Clavan answered. “Far into the Lower Perseus, about fifteen kilolights east of Tiryns. Right on the edge of the Imperium.”
The Lower Perseus.
I had never been so far toward the outer rim. The Demarchy of Tavros lay far to the galactic east and above the ecliptic, but it lay within the embrace of the Arm of Perseus, above the gulf that separated it from Orion. Sabratha lay so far along the Arm of Perseus that it was nearly on the frontier, where Imperial space verged upon the wild stars. The Emperor’s letter said that they had gotten the planet’s coordinates from the Cielcin. How long ago had that been?
“It’s unsettled?”
Oberlin gestured that we should walk along beside him, and I did so. There was a set of doors at the end of the receiving hall. We proceeded toward them, moving slow on account of Oberlin’s advanced age. “Not entirely, no. We’ve a minor outpost there. Williamtown. The colony was formally incorporated about . . . four hundred years ago?”
“Still sparsely populated, then?” I asked.
“Fewer than fifty thousand people on the whole planet, yes . . . ” Oberlin said. “There’s too little water.”
Cassandra brightened. “A desert world?” She had never seen a desert before.
“Very nearly,” Oberlin told her. “There are a handful of shallow seas in the temperate zones—large lakes, you might call them. Each far too saline to service native life. They used to be bigger, you know. The planet lost its magnetosphere for a time, and the solar winds stripped much of the air and water away before the core melted and got the magnetic fields flowing again.”
“But is there air?” Cassandra asked. “We won’t have to wear helmets the entire time, will we?”
“There’s air, young miss,” Oberlin said. “The Colonial Office has been working to refine the atmosphere for our use. There’s a great deal of carbon trapped in the planet’s crust. They’ll make a paradise of it in time.” Changing the subject, he said, “You’re welcome to stay aboard your own ship, Lord Marlowe, but we’ve doubtless more spacious quarters earmarked for your use. It’s just the three of you?”
I told him I did not have a retinue, and he nodded. We had passed through the doors by then, and entered into a fresh section of hallway where trapezoidal windows looked down on our right upon one of the Troglita’s mighty holds. Below, a labyrinth of crates and digging equipment lay strapped to the hold floor, attended to by perhaps two dozen men in the bone-white fatigues of the Legion Engineering Corps. I recognized the shapes of excavators, of trenching tools and tunneling equipment.
A deep sadness settled on me. Valka and I had planned to travel the galaxy together, to embark on just such a dig as this, leastways in as far as we could, being only two. The monstrous cost of this expedition occurred to me then, and I think my haggard reflection in the window glass grew paler. I had never given much thought to how we might pay our way had we escaped Imperial clutches after Ganelon. Had I managed to beg my leave of the Emperor, that would have been a different story. I might have been feted across the Empire as a retired hero, even with the war on. But had we simply run? I might have offered my services as a mercenary, as a captain of mercenaries, under my own name or any other. But in doing so, would I not re-create in miniature the very conditions from which Valka and I had fled?
And there I was . . . in the great game again. The Carnival, old Oberlin had called it—using the pet name men of that most secret service used to refer to their trade. I had tried for so long to escape my role and fate, but as Valka herself once lamented, the galaxy is itself a circle, and anyone who traveled far enough and fast enough would find himself . . . right back where he started.
Thus it had been with me.
“Lord Marlowe?” I looked round. Oberlin and Lascaris had moved ahead, and I guessed from the Director’s tone that he had been talking. I hadn’t heard a word.
“He does this, sometimes,” Cassandra said, somehow apologetic and laughing at once.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was woolgathering.” I gestured at the windows to the hold. “It looks like it will be quite the dig.”
Lascaris helped Oberlin to the window. After a long moment, the old man said, “You and the girl should settle in first. We’ll have much to discuss.”
“We will stay on the Ascalon,” I said at once, surprising even myself with my sharpness. It had been my intention all along, would have been my intention even were it not for the Emperor’s warning.
“Very good,” he said. “Still, the captain will want to give a tour of the ship. We will speak later. Yes?”
“I want to know everything, Friedrich,” I said. “If I am not satisfied, my daughter and I will leave. Is that clear?”
I felt Lascaris bristle. I looked at him, and saw the anger in his hard, gray eyes.
But Oberlin nodded tiredly, and dabbed at a bead of sweat on his spotted brow with a shaking finger. “Of course, Hadrian. We will be breaking orbit within a couple of hours. Go with the captain and see us off. You will have the run of the ship, of course. The officer’s gymnasium is on C-Deck, should you find yourself in need. You’ll find the quartermaster’s office there as well, on the starboard side.” Turning to his secretary, he said, “I need to lie down, Priscian. Take me to my quarters, there’s a good lad.”
Then they were gone, leaving us in the company of Captain Clavan, Tor Rassam, and the ship’s first and second officers. Them, and young Albé. A2, I should say. From the receiving hall behind, I heard the barked orders of the centurion who had overseen our welcome guard. The lot were breaking up, returning to their ordinary security duties. In the hold below, the engineers were still at their labor checking and securing the equipment for the coming transorbital burn.
“Shall we go to the bridge, Lord Marlowe?” Clavan asked.
“Yes,” I said, “Yes, I’d like that.”
“It’s this way,” she said, gesturing toward the door at the far end of this new section of hall. “Afterwards, I’ve prepared certain of our troops for inspection, and the legate and our chief of engineers both wished to meet you, but Lord Friedrich thought we could keep the welcome party here on the small side.”
I hardly heard her. My eyes went to the back of Edouard’s head. I had hoped for the answers to start crystallizing from the moment we decamped from the umbilical, but I had received only hints. Hints, and the promise of those answers I had been promised already.
The Emperor had warned me to trust no one. It seemed I was not the only one. I marveled that Lord Oberlin should say so little before even his own men.
But how could he do otherwise?
His was the maddest and most dangerous quest in human history.
He aimed to hunt and kill a god.
And I—my own god help me—aimed to help him do it.