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CHAPTER 61

THE TREE OF LIFE


We were seventeen.

Of the fewer than half a hundred that had escaped the high hall to the lift, only seventeen remained. There was Calen Harendotes, and young Pavo, along with four other men of the Latarran Grand Army. Besides Cassandra and myself, I had Ramanthanu and its three remaining kinsman: Otomno, Egazimn, and Bikashi. It had been the one called Atiamnu I had seen dead in the lift. That brought the count to twelve. Of the remaining five, all were HAPSIS men. Four were common legionnaires, men in faceless white and red. The last was an Irchtani, one of Annaz’s people. Daaxam was his name, a black-feathered creature with a red-tipped beak. He carried no zitraa, no great, thin sword, only the long-stocked plasma rifle that had been made for his clawed hands and lengthy pinions.

“I cannot get a signal out,” said bloody Harendotes, stomping on ahead of the rest of us. “She is jamming us.”

As he spoke, I fingered the telegraph remote in my belt, a cylinder of black metal, as thick as a cigar and half perhaps as long, with a single button under the cap at the one end. Edouard had given it to me aboard the Ascalon, when we had met in secret on the voyage from Latarra to Merope and laid our careful plan.

I had tried to persuade Lorian to allow me to travel to Douro’s flagship, the Bradamante, but my friend, the Commandant General, had been ordered to prevent just such an occurrence. Stymied, I had been forced into a corner. I could not reveal the truth of our circumstances to my companions without risking discovery, and yet to have them descend blindly into the net of Vorgossos was by then a greater evil by far. We met within the Ascalon, within the Gadelica, within the Mistwalker. Under the guise of routine maintenance, I had ordered the little ship detached from the Gadelica’s electrical grid. I had the ship vented completely, so that any camera dust there might have been would be pulled through the filters and incinerated.

Lorian—it transpired—had not placed any larger bugs aboard my ship.

Thus we met in secret: Edouard, Cassandra, Captain Ghoshal, and myself. There we laid our plan, which Ghoshal would relay to Douro and the broader fleet once the Monarch and our ground forces lost communication with the Latarran Grand Army in orbit above the planet.

“These two make a set,” Edouard had said, opening the metal case that held them both in dark foam, “each contains a simple telegraph. You press the button on one . . . ” He demonstrated, flipping the cap to depress the key on the end of one of the twin rods. The second telegraph—still in its foam, vibrated as a red light shone from the end opposite the button. “And the other goes off.”

“Anywhere in the universe?” I’d asked, taking up the second with delicate care.

“Anywhere in the universe,” the special agent had confirmed.

Watching us from a corner of my cabin, Cassandra had said, “I thought telegraphs were bigger.”

The HAPSIS man smiled, adjusted his ivory-rimmed glasses. “They are, usually. You’d not believe what it took the men down in Blackmoor to get them this small. I’d wager there are fewer than a hundred pairs in the entire galaxy.”

Blackmoor was one of Imperial Intelligence’s headquarters, a famously windowless white cube of a building on the fringes of the Eternal City.

I had taken the other cylinder from its containment then, turned it in my fingers. “This will cut through any countermeasures our Extrasolarian friends might contrive?”

Edouard Albé had smiled at me. “Unless they can disrupt a basic law of quantum mechanics.”

I followed Harendotes through the halls of his palace. We had come out into the laboratory proper, into that complex of corridors and medical exam rooms behind Kharn’s Garden of Everything. It was there that the Lord of Vorgossos and his servants performed their black rituals. They had not changed much in the centuries since last I’d walked their halls. One of the omnipresent hexagonal doors opened, panels sliding in every direction, admitting us into one of the Undying’s laboratories proper.

I knew where it was we were going, what it was Calen Harendotes sought in all that sterile horror.

The Tree of Life.

I knew not if he called it that himself, but Kharn Sagara’s affinity for the dramatic surpassed even my own, and it would not have surprised me to learn that he did so. He sought the facility that housed his future selves, the embryos—fully grown men and women, youths, children—that might come to house his itinerant spirit.

I guessed what he intended then. He had signaled his intent in his orders to Commander Elffire.

Leave none alive.

The chamber we had entered was long and low ceilinged, brightly lit and sterile white. Harendotes himself seemed terribly out of place in it, bloodied as he was in his torn blacks, his gleaming armor soiled. The place called to mind the halls of MINOS on Ganelon. Passing through it, we descended a short flight of steps into a room dominated by an arcing console whose embedded displays and holographs winked blue and red in the light.

Ramanthanu’s slit nostrils flared, and it said, “Kurshanan.”

Poison, the word meant. Corruption. Rot.

Harendotes was unmasked, and I wondered at that. At Ramanthanu’s word, my mind had raced to Ganelon, to the lethovirus and the terrible thought that we had wandered into its jaws. Even if the Cielcin and Daaxam the Irchtani were immune to its predations, surely Harendotes—whose flesh was human—was not.

Relaying the Cielcin’s words to Harendotes—who must have understood it, though I’d forgotten that fact in the moment—I asked, “Are we in danger?”

“Of exposure?” The Monarch turned to look at me. “You’re worried about the Minoan plague.”

“You traded with them,” I said, “you sold them the test subjects they used to develop the virus.”

White shone the Monarch’s teeth in that red face. “Is that all?”

“Isn’t that enough?” I asked in reply.

Calen Harendotes—Kharn Sagara—seemed to teeter on the precipice of some certain step a moment, his grimace faltering. “You know what the lethovirus is? Where it comes from?”

I nodded. “The Mericanii triggered a mutation that allowed their human hosts to grow indefinitely.” What was the phrase the daimon Horizon had used?

We disabled the tumor suppression genes . . . 

“And where do you think the sorcerers found the code for this mutation?” Sagara asked.

A sick feeling like surprise but not surprise filled my stomach. “You sold it to them.”

“In exchange for the location of this world,” he said.

Aghast, Cassandra said, “You designed the plague?”

“You bastard!” One of my legionnaires raised his lance. “I lost my sister to the rot ’fore I shipped out for Zigana.”

Seeing the raised weapon, Pavo raised his sidearm, and the other four Latarran dragoons—drunk with the promise of immortality despite the horror of that day—did the same.

The Monarch only smiled more widely. There was something . . . broken in the man, a madness I had not seen in the elder incarnation, or in either of the children. Clearly, his murder at the hands of his sister had changed him. For the first in I knew not how many thousand years, he had suffered a blow.

“No, child,” he said, half turning to regard my daughter. “I but provided the cornerstone. The Elect-Masters did the rest. It was they who weaponized the virus, and the Mericanii who devised the original mutagens.”

“All to defeat your other self,” Cassandra said, bridling, voice amplified by her suit. “How many have died because of you?”

Kharn Sagara dismissed them all with a gesture.

I felt the rage that had boiled in my legionnaire rise up in me.

Calen Harendotes had gone to MINOS seeking the way back home. Had the likes of Urbaine and Severine known the truth of the Latarran Monarch? I thought not. But had they been in league with the other Sagara, the Sagara who had retained Vorgossos?

Neither Sagara was on any side but his own—her own—but the fact that the Minoans had possessed the knowledge to find Vorgossos when even its exiled master could not suggested that the other Sagara was yet in contact with them. On Ganelon, Gaizka and Urbaine had spoken of the war between the twin Kharns. Might Kharn himself—herself—have been their source? It did not seem likely—the one called Takeshi had spoken of Kharn’s fragmentation with some disgust, and Urbaine had not known which of the twins had proved victorious.

Yet they had known the way to Vorgossos.

MINOS had some connection to the King with Ten Thousand Eyes.

I had always thought MINOS alone the source of the Cielcin king’s adopted human technology. MINOS and plunder. But there was no reason it must be so. Dorayaica, at least, commanded all the powers of the Commonwealth.

Was Dorayaica even still dealing with Vorgossos?

With what had Sagara bought his world engines? The Cielcin did not trade, but Dorayaica would have exacted tribute from its new vassal-slave.

“How many millions?” Cassandra asked again, Valka’s shade moving in her, the anima accusing.

“When you have lived so long as I, girl,” said the immortal king, “the only thing there is to fear is death. Death is the only enemy.” Those killing eyes turned to me. “But I do not think you have anything to fear here.”

“Lower your lance, soldier,” I said to the legionnaire.

“But . . . my lord!”

“I said lower your lance, man,” I seized the haft of the weapon and forced it down.

The legionnaire tried to pull his weapon free of my grasp. “But you heard what he said! He made the plague!”

“He didn’t,” I said sharply, not letting the weapon go, “and even if he did, killing him would not make a cure.”

Calen Harendotes had not raised his hands when the soldier pointed his lance at him. It would have done no good. For him merely to look at a man was to threaten him.

“I did not craft the virus,” he said. “I only provided the seed. The Lodge did the rest.”

Stiffly, the legionnaire relaxed, and only slowly did I release the man’s weapon.

“We waste time,” the Monarch said, gesturing to the console. “I have work to do.”

About him, the five remaining Latarran soldiers shifted their arms, round eyes glaring at my legionnaires, my Cielcin, at Cassandra with her twin swords, and at the lone Irchtani. Calen’s eyes doubtless had slain many of his winged brothers, and I sensed in Daaxam an anger hot and bright as plasma.

Would I lose control of them, in the end?

I still needed the Monarch alive, still needed control of the Demiurge.

I gestured to allow Calen to continue.

It was easy to forget that beneath that armored exterior, beneath the blood and the power and that sense of command, of black majesty, there lay a man of science. His dragoons tight about him, he bent over the console, began keying a series of commands. Once or twice he hissed as he encountered some obstruction.

“What are you doing?” asked the angry legionnaire.

Kharn Sagara did not reply at once, but before the man could ask him again he tensed. “What I must,” he said, pausing at his work for only an instant. “The scions in this facility are always in development—like the tanks your lords are grown in.”

“Not in fugue?”

Harendotes did not falter. “It is necessary that the scions are stimulated, else their brains would not be prepared for synaptic kinesis.” He stopped, peered down through the glass. It was very dark in the room beyond. “They are dreaming.” Presently, the lights came on, revealing a sight I had not thought to see once more: the tree of Kharn Sagara, that iron nightmare, its tanks like jellied fruits, the bodies of men and women in them like seeds.

Dreaming.

“Like the Mericanii of old,” I said.

“Like those fool Americans,” Sagara agreed, using the ancient name. “Felsenburgh promised them perpetual peace, if they would but put themselves into the hands of his machines . . . ” His voice had retreated until it seemed it issued from down a long tunnel.

“They’re dreaming, you said.” Cassandra had come to stand beside me. “What do they dream?”

There was almost a smile in Sagara’s voice as he answered. “Paradise,” he said, and looked at me. “You think me a monster, Marlowe—I know it. But they do not suffer at my hand.”

“You are killing them even now,” I said. “Aren’t you?”

Harendotes did not move.

“Sagara?”

The king of the damned twitched, bridled, rounded on me with those murderous eyes flickering. “Do not presume to preach at me, my lord. Your woman killed four of me when last you were here.” His demeanor—grown for a moment sharp as new steel—softened in a way strange to see in him. “Without me,” he said softly, “they would never have lived at all.”

“They have never lived,” I said. “This is not life.”

“What is life?” he snapped at me. “Nerve impulses. Sensation!”

“You do not truly believe that Cartesian nonsense,” I said.

Kharn’s eyes flashed blue. “You don’t?”

“You and I both know better,” I said, thinking back to our conversation in the imitarium of the pyramid palace on Latarra, when he had spoken of the Watcher he had himself encountered long ago.

When he had spoken of hell.

Kharn’s belief that life was only sensation was simply denial. Nothing more.

“If the Seekers are right about their First Truth,” said he in counter-riposte, “then we but dream ourselves.”

“We are but the dream of our maker,” I said. “It is not the same thing.”

“But it is,” Kharn countered, and gesturing at the bodies that might have become himself, said, “their world is real to them, and so it is real. And it is a better world than ours.” Golden fingers danced across the glass of the display, slid through holographs in the air that followed his touch. He halted. “Still you think me cruel. They do not suffer as we. They have known no pain, no heartbreak. When the time comes for one to be terminated or used, he simply goes to sleep, never to reawaken . . . ” He stopped again and looked at me. “If your Quiet really made our world, then I am a far better god than he.”

I held his gaze then for the space of several heartbeats. “And nothing of your hosts . . . your scions, as you call them . . . nothing of your scions survives?”

“Oh no,” he said. “There is much that endures. That is the joy of it. My memories are the same, my sensibilities, my reason. The implants house the core of who I am, but they must interact with the brain of each new vessel. Each resulting incarnation is a kind of blending. One cannot duplicate a human brain precisely—not in flesh and blood. That was how I began. Trying. My first several scions were genetic duplicates, but each emerged a little different, and in time, I abandoned similitude entirely.” He withdrew a step. “I have been everything you can imagine at one time or another.”

“Including me,” I said.

He looked at me, face utterly unreadable. There was no emotion in that face. “Not yet.”

Something black and oily slithered in my guts, and I turned my masked face from his bloodied one. “What now?”

As if in answer, all the lights in the hall below went out. Every sconce and floodlamp, every instrument panel. Only the emergency tape striping the floor still glowed faintly green in the gloom.

“What’s happening?” asked Cassandra.

A moment later, a dull, red light slammed on, and a woman’s voice sounded in the hall below. “Warning: Primary Power Loss,” she said, “Emergency Power Enabled. Emergency Power Reserves: ninety-nine point nine-nine seven percent. Average estimated time to pod failure: eleven days, seventeen hours, forty-three minutes . . . ”

“What did it say?” asked one of the soldiers. “What’s going on?”

The voice had spoken in Classical English, in an accent I had never heard before.

No, I realized. Not never . . . 

Once.

“He cut the power to the cubiculum,” I said.

Calen Harendotes spoke. “They should all be cut off from the palace network now,” he said.

“They’re not dead?” I asked.

“Not yet,” came the cryptic reply, and Harendotes turned and brushed past his men toward a side door.

“Sagara!” I called after him.

He did not slow down. Pavo and the others hurried after him, clutching their lances.

Cassandra looked at me. “What is he going to do?” she asked. “Is he going to kill them all, too?”

“I’m not sure,” I told her. Why did he not simply kill them—as he had ordered Elffire to kill everyone in the city outside? Why, for that matter, did he not simply leave them where they were? If they were removed from the general datasphere, was it not the case that his sister-self could no longer reach them?

In my secret heart, the sound of Valka’s throaty laughter echoed like bells.

You know nothing of machines, anaryan.

She was not wrong.


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