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CHAPTER 56

THE DRAGON’S BELLY


My own masked face watched me from the window glass, thin and translucent as a ghost. That mask had never seemed mine to me, not truly. Ever it had been a costume, an artifice put on by the boy Hadrian in an effort to become Lord Marlowe. The Halfmortal. The Hero of Aptucca. The Devil of Meidua. Now it seemed more real—more familiar—than my own face.

I had never felt more powerful—more in tune with the power that the Absolute had given me. I clenched my fists at my sides, felt the creak of nanocarbon-backed rubber in my gloves, the subtle click of the plates that guarded fingers and the backs of both my hands as they slid against one another.

I eyed Sagara’s gleaming reflection in the window, studied him at his work. The Monarch of Latarra had busied himself overseeing the capture and conversion of the command post. The tower and the barbican that stood athwart the tunnel gate and the landing field was to become our beachhead, cornerstone of our assault on the palace of the Undying and the profane city above its gates. It occurred to me then—watching his aureate reflection in the glass—that he had chosen his new title with care. He was not an emperor, not a king, but the Monarch of Latarra.

The only ruler.

The only one.

His whole identity—his very name—had become a repudiation of his sister-self. He, who had at first pushed for change, had learned his lesson at the point of that other’s sword. There could be but one lord of Vorgossos.

Would be but one.

The last of the gate tower’s human defenders—those who had not surrendered—had made a final, desperate stand in that very chamber. I myself had cut the door, permitting 2Maeve and her dragoons to seize the chamber and slay the last of the defenders. Their bodies lay—still smoking—upon the floor, or else slumped in the seats that were to be their conveyance to eternity.

“They got a signal off, my Monarch,” said 2Maeve darkly. “Sagara knows of our presence here.”

“No matter,” said Calen Harendotes, seated amid the smoke and wreckage of that bright chamber. “Elffire and the Imperials are all accounted for?”

“And Commandant General Jansen’s men,” said the dragoon commander. “We have the gates open, we’ll be ready to move out within the hour.”

For a long moment then, Calen Harendotes did not respond. In that moment, he recalled the shadow of his grandfather incarnation, the elder Sagara who sat for eons unmoving, lost in memory and the careful analysis of his art. “Our going will be slow,” he said. “The tunnels will admit all but the largest of our ships, but we will have to rely upon repulsors only. There will be times when we must maneuver most carefully. Your men, commander, will lead the van. Your AMPs will be invaluable below.”

My vision and my attention wandered to the world beyond the window glass, to the frigid field and the fleet of troop carriers alighting upon it. Cassandra was with that force, and Edouard, and my Irchtani, and Ramanthanu and its four kinsmen. I longed to go to them.

In taking the tower, Harendotes had disabled the airfield’s automated defense grid. Outside, the guns that before had blazed with unrighteous thunder were silent as the dead. It struck me, then, how inferior such a system was to an army of well-trained men. The woman Sagara’s mercenaries had given up the fight the minute their dread captain fell, but the daimons that governed the artillery? Those had been annihilated by a single keystroke.

I turned my back on the window, studied the room: the flashing consoles, readouts and holographs I but little understood shimmering above black glass; the still-smoking bodies of the dead; 2Maeve and her dragoons in Latarran black and gold, fearsome as the damned.

The commander and the Monarch both had removed their helmets in the safe climate of the control room, but I had no desire to smell the dead burning, and resolved to keep mine in its place. Thus relatively safe from pricking ears, I keyed Lorian’s frequency, waited for him to confirm receipt.

“Did you know?” I asked, surprising myself with the force of my words.

No response.

“Lorian, did you know?”

The Mistwalker’s immediate danger had been overcome more than an hour previously, but the ship had circled round to the far side of the world. A signal delay was to be expected, but not so great a one. I pictured the little man chewing his tongue, weighing his words with care.

For all that deliberation, the best he could manage was, “Did I know what?” His tone was strangely brittle.

“You didn’t tell me that he was leading the ground assault,” I said.

The Commandant General answered in Lorian’s voice. “He ordered me not to.”

“And that didn’t strike you as strange?”

“The Monarch’s security is of paramount importance,” came the man’s late reply.

“Black planet, Lorian!” I turned my head from the crowded room. My eyes went to the body of one of Kharn’s defenders, a dryad man in a gray-and-white uniform that seemed strangely familiar. I hissed, “Don’t sell me that line.”

“I had my orders,” he said.

“You should have told me.”

“I did tell you,” Lorian said, “I’m not your man anymore. I did my duty, and my time. I am Latarran, now.”

I chewed on my tongue then, studying the face of the dead dryad. “So you are,” I said. “How fares the fleet?”

“Kedron’s bombing was a success,” Lorian said. “The planet’s engines are down. The ground force Sagara kept clustered about the pole are mostly dead. The main body of our fleet is holding.”

“No sign of the Demiurge?” I asked.

“Not yet.”

That was both blessing and curse. I did not like the thought of the mighty vessel armed and dangerous overhead. Mighty though our fleet was, I could only begin to guess at the destructive power of the Mericanii Archontic weapons, and knew that our odds of a victory—both in orbit and on the planet’s surface—were better with the vessel strangely absent.

Still, I wanted that ship, had been sent to retrieve it. Turning, I looked at Calen Harendotes, at the Monarch seated amid the ruin of the control room. He had brought me as a trump, as a powerful new piece in the game he played against his sister-self, one she did not possess. He would suffer me only so long as I served his purpose. But what precisely was that purpose? Why had he allowed—insisted—that I lead the van?

And why had he come himself?

“You don’t think . . . ” Lorian’s voice intruded on my reflection. “You don’t think Kharn Sagara has fled, do you?”

Thinking of the titanic effort Harendotes had undertaken to reclaim what was lost to him, I said, “I can’t see Sagara abandoning Vorgossos under any circumstance.”

“He has to know we were coming,” Lorian said. “He must have spies on Latarra.”

“If . . . he knew,” I said, careful not to say she and reveal I knew more than he, and so imperil us both, “then why did he not take the planet away from here?”

Lorian’s response was several seconds delayed. “You think it’s a trap?”

There was something going on I did not understand, some part of the contest between Sagara and Sagara. Something to do with their cycle of reincarnation, perhaps? Or was it only that the woman was so confident of victory that she had waited here for us?

“He’s holding the Demiurge back,” I said. “He’ll wait until the fleet’s spent. Scattered. Then he’ll strike.”

“It’s what I would do,” Lorian said.

“Tell Douro, Gadkari, Kedron . . . the others,” I said. “Tell them to be ready.”

“We have the numbers,” Lorian said. “Even with the Demiurge, we outnumber the Vorgossene fleet ten to one.”

“I only hope it’s enough.”

* * *

Cassandra had been given a suit of common legionnaire’s armor, over which she had donned her Jaddian mandyas. Albé came on beside her, dressed in a suit of unassuming black with the hand-and-sun symbol of HAPSIS enameled small above the heart. His ancestor’s rifle hung over one shoulder, and I would not have known him but for it—as I would not have known Cassandra were it not for mandyas, for the faces of both were hidden by the visors of their helms.

Ramanthanu and the other Cielcin followed in their wake, and even the Latarrans cut them a wide berth.

We met on the fused silicate of the landing field, beneath a sky still filled now and again with the shine of distant weapons fire.

“We don’t have long,” Edouard said, clapping me on the shoulder. “Ghoshal says they’ve launched lighters from a base on the surface about a thousand miles off. We need to get into the tunnels.”

“It’s a long way to the city, isn’t it?” Cassandra asked. “Through the tunnels?”

“Several thousand miles,” said 2Maeve, appearing at my left hand. The Interfaced commander had donned her helmet again and its lamplike eyes glared at us from beneath the lip of her helmet. “It’ll take us the better part of a day to reach the city underground. My people will take point, cover the troop carriers . . . now move it.”

“Where’s our ship?” I asked Cassandra.

“Just back this way,” she said.

2Maeve seized me by the forearm, halting my progress. I felt Cassandra tense, but turned to face the Interfaced woman. “How did you do it?” she asked. Her grip was like a vise. “What you did on the wall. Against that Exalted?”

I pulled my arm free, turned to go.

“You really are everything they say you are, aren’t you?” 2Maeve asked. “Everything he says you are.” That stopped me, and I turned to look at her, at the woman who had tamed Lorian Aristedes. When I did not speak, she said, “When you showed up aboard the Mistwalker, I thought it was some trick. But you went toe-to-toe with that chimera. I saw it.”

Steadily, I nodded. “And don’t you forget it, commander.”

“Why are you here?” she asked, moving to block my progress. “You Imperials should have been relegated to the battle in orbit, instead he puts you on the front line. Why?”

With delicate care, I laid a hand on 2Maeve’s shoulder, some part of me daring her to make some move. To challenge me. “I am beginning to wonder that myself,” I said.

“He told us not to tell you of his presence until he revealed himself,” she said, meaning Calen Harendotes. “He doesn’t trust you. I don’t trust you.”

I let her talk, waited for her to fall silent before saying. “You trust Lorian.”

That found her heart, and I felt her flinch beneath my fingers. Almost then I expected her to seize my wrist and try whatever assault she was imagining. She drew back instead. “You’ve no right to invoke his name,” she said. “You hear me? None.”

2Maeve froze suddenly, cocked her head, as if listening. She held that posture for less than a fraction of a second, but in that smallest space of time, I guessed an entire conversation had elapsed. “We’re not finished,” she said—though we were, and would forever be. She had received orders, and hurried off to carry them out.

“You have a real talent for making friends,” Edouard observed.

“I hit you,” I said flatly.

The intelligence man sniffed. “I remember.”

Ramanthanu lurched toward us. I had forgotten how tall the xenobites were. It had been some time since I stood so near to one. “Raka yumna Vorugosa ne?” it asked.

Vorugosa was the Cielcin name for the planet.

I grunted the wordless Cielcin affirmative, said, “It is.”

The Cielcin warrior’s face was concealed behind the mask that supplied it air, and I marveled at the way its long hair floated off its shoulders in vacuum, at the creature’s lack of need for a pressure suit.

Ramanthanu turned and looked out over the empty ice. “It is like one of our worlds,” it said, voice flattened by the compression of the signal transmitted from the mask. “I saw the engines on our approach. My people built them for this Sagara.”

“Cadanagumn raka’ta ne?” I echoed, incredulous. “They built the engines?”

Of course. Who else? The Cielcin had the technical know-how, the experience. And Kharn Sagara had known of them well before the Empire had.

“Which prince?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

Ramanthanu swiveled its head to look at me, the wide, black eyes on its mask making it seem almost some skeletal owl. “Dorayaica,” it said.

“What did he say?” Cassandra asked. “What about Dorayaica?”

“Dorayaica built the planet’s engines for Kharn Sagara,” I said, and marveled, thinking of the great crater away to the south. “A long time ago.”

It was then that Edouard asked the question I should have asked, and in so doing linked together certain of the pieces that had always floated unconjoined in the back of my mind. “Was it Sagara who first gave Dorayaica access to human technology, do you think?”

“I assumed it was MINOS,” I said. And yet Kharn Sagara had told me of dealings he had had with the xenobites in the past. Had Dorayaica been among the names of the princes he had given me? “Or else Dorayaica simply looted what it found.”

“It must have made a deal with Sagara,” Edouard said. “Shields, weapons, chimerization . . . all for the engines. But why?”

“Sagara fears death,” I said. “And so much of her life is wrapped up in this place . . . ”

“Her life?” Cassandra was looking at me, her face hid behind the faceless visor.

“His life,” I said, at once aware that some agent of the Undying was sure to be observing this conversation, lurking in the shadows of our suits’ communication systems. “One of the forms of Sagara I knew was a woman.”

Cassandra made a disgusted face.

“If Sagara was Dorayaica’s first point of contact with mankind,” Edouard was saying, “he might have introduced the Prophet to MINOS later on.”

“It’s possible,” I allowed, looking to Ramanthanu. Would that I had known to interrogate the creature on this matter sooner. Ramanthanu had been a captain in Muzugara’s service, had perhaps even fought opposite the Tamerlane at Thagura, and had not served Dorayaica. Still, it was possible that rumor of the then Aeta ba-Aetane’s actions had passed among the clans. Perhaps it had even been the news that Syriani Dorayaica had received mighty weapons from a race of inferior beings that had sent the first sciandane fleets roaring out of the north. Had it been rumor of the wealth and riches of humankind carried by the Prophet’s servants that had brought their first ships to Cressgard?

Had Kharn Sagara caused the war?

Had I followed these lines of thought through to their conclusion, I might have understood the full scope and shape of our danger, and of how we’d been deceived. But the lines would not converge, the gears would not turn.

Not yet.

“There is more here we do not understand,” I said, attempting to bring my focus back round to the task at hand. Speaking first in Galstani and then in the Cielcin tongue, I said, “We must be very careful. I want you all to stay by me.”

* * *

Dark are the pits beneath the palace of Kharn Sagara, dark and deeper still—but they have a bottom. By many miles and many winding passages we went, men jostling one another in the close air of our fliers. The cephalophores had gone in first, led by 2Maeve and her dragoons. The great tunnels had been dug by Sagara and his machines to supply fuel and coolant to the engines, as well as to allow for the massive particle colliders that produced the antimatter fuel necessary to run the almighty stardrive. These had been built in the Cielcin fashion, in stacked loops hundreds of miles in diameter, either underground or within the sheltering walls of the craters high above.

The smallest of these were hardly large enough to admit a single man, but the grandest were vast as the trenches that veined the planet’s surface, thoroughfares and highways designed for the transport of cargo trams and such ships as ours. For there were vast storehouses in the remoter parts of that world, and fastnesses empty and desolate, redoubts built for the retreat of that planet’s deathless lord.

More than once, the forces of the Undying were set against us. More than once turrets and guns on tracks opened fire. I rode in the train, hunkering on a bench in the back of one flier beside Cassandra, one hand clenching her arm as the ship shook. Oft as not, she dozed, evidently at her ease. How could she sleep in such a place?

I touched her face, as I had when she was small. Glad that she was with me—if dreading that she was there. Her mother had come to Vorgossos with me, and faced the horrors of the palace and the garden that lay beneath it. I had not wished to place the girl in danger, but her mother would have cursed me had I tried to hold her daughter back.

“Abba?” she stirred, and caught me watching her. “What is it?”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “I was thinking of the last time I was here.”

Cassandra straightened, shifted to look at me. “They told me how you fought that monster at the gate,” she said. “Can you teach me? How you do it?”

I blinked down at her, mindful that Edouard was seated across from us, strapped into his chair. I did not distrust the Museum Catholic, but he was HAPSIS still, and I was wary that what passed between us might find its way to Caesar—not only to Kharn Sagara, who doubtless still was listening.

I looked at her a long time, so long I thought myself frozen—turned all to black marble. Presently, I smiled. “I’m not sure I can,” I said. The thought that the Quiet’s gift might be something I might transmit had never once occurred to me. The Jaddians had pinched and prodded me for decades before they spun Cassandra on their looms. Severine and Urbaine had taken blood and brain scans—though if MINOS had gained any insight into what I was, they had not turned it to the service of the Prophet-King of Dharan-Tun.

“Will you try?” she asked in her native Jaddian. Her hand was on mine, and squeezed it tightly. “I want to try.”

I returned the pressure of her hand. “All right,” I said. “When this is over.”

In time, she dozed once more, and I—who has not slept since Samek’s poison took me—wandered in memory behind my eyes, thoughts questing in the dark beyond the narrow windows of our shuttle.

Certain of our soldiery had remained on the surface to reify our hold upon the beachhead, and to establish communication relays that would keep us in contact with the fleet. They were to be reinforced by the Chantry’s Sentinels under Kedron’s command, while Lorian’s fleet held the lower orbits against reprisal from elsewhere on the surface. Higher and deeper into the dark, Lord Douro and the bulk of the vast Latarran fleet still engaged the enemy. I occupied myself trying to comprehend the scale, the scope of it: vessels engaged across light-seconds of time, their rack and ruin spread across thousands of miles of blank eternity.

The light of that battle would stream out across eternity, and perhaps be seen by astrologers in ages hence, some poor magus prophesying doom—little knowing or realizing that the doom that light portended had come ten thousand years before . . . and to other men.

Our own doom was nearer at hand, as again our shuttle shook, jostled Cassandra from my shoulder.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

Edouard had already found his feet. “We’re hit!” he said, and tapped the comms patch behind his ear. “Shields are holding.”

I keyed the commander’s channel. “2Maeve, what’s going on out there?”

The Interfaced woman’s reply was a moment coming. “Railguns,” she said flatly. “Mounted on tracks along the tunnel. His Majesty says this section is heavily fortified.”

Standing myself, fingers to that place behind my ear, I said, “He seems to know an awful lot about this place’s defenses.” I was playing with fire, I knew, testing the Monarch’s waters.

But if I was letting on my knowledge of things hidden, the commander did not seem to know—or notice. “We’ve good intelligence,” she said. “Lord Black was a fixture at Sagara’s court for thousands of years. He helped to build this place.”

Is that so? I thought, thinking of the giant who had sat at the Monarch’s right hand.

An explosion sounded from outside, its ruddy luminance streaming in from the starboard windows, casting bloody light upon the white-armored men inside. Something huge and fast as fire flashed past us in the gloom—one of 2Maeve’s cephalophores. A moment later, another explosion rocked the under-dark, and we were sailing forward, rushing on repulsors pushed suddenly hard. Inertia nearly toppled me—did topple Cassandra—and she fell against a row of seated men. I caught one of the hand loops in the ceiling above, and hurled myself forward, keeping my feet by sheer force of will.

“Strap in!” came the flight officer’s warning on the comm—too late. I reached the fore of the compartment, pushed past the hatchway to stand behind the twin pilot seats.

“What’s going on?”

“Enemy had turrets, sir,” said the man to my left. “Big ones. Extras lit them up.”

Through the forward canopy, I had a clear view of the great tunnel. Its cross section was circular, a massive tube in the bowels of the planet, its sides complicated by the presence of lesser pipelines and ductwork, and by cables bracketed to the walls. I saw what must have been the tracks the guns had been mounted to: twin rails to left and right, such as a tram might use. Now and again, a junction would flash by us, side passages opening left and right, above and below. Always the tram rails would rotate, spiraling to bypass the junction, so that the rail that started at our left hand ran to the floor rather than across an opening.

As I watched, a car hurtled onto that track, accelerating on superconducting magnets to match our speed. I saw the turret atop it swivel to fire on the ship before us, saw the flash of shields. My pilot eased back, putting distance between us and the ship in front. There was room to maneuver in that great shaft, but always the chance that the loss of the ship ahead might spell our own destruction. I was dimly aware of the other lightercraft in our train, narrow-bodied Shrike boarding craft, fat-bellied Ibises and the Latarran equivalent—each containing perhaps half a hundred troopers.

One of the Interfaced AMP units flashed past, fell upon the turret tram and grappled it, using pincers like mighty thews to tear the cannon from its moorings. Explosions rocked the tram cart as the cephalophore leaped away, six wings blazing with repulsor light as two of its brothers winged past, streaking ahead of us up the tunnel.

As I stood there, we came forward into a junction the size of a coliseum and just as round. Perhaps a dozen passages converged there, radiating like the spokes of a wheel. Our flier shook as a shot caromed off our shields.

“They’re above us!” said the copilot from the seat to my right.

We had flown directly into a kill box. Turrets on rails ran all about the perimeter of the chamber, above and below the entryways to the side passages, and gun emplacements covered every entrance.

“We’re close to the city!” came the voice of one of the Interfaced. I thought it might be 8Gael.

Seamlessly, the voice of one of the others put in. “Fifth passage on our left, the Monarch says! Move!”

The ships ahead of us in the train were already moving, threading the flash of the guns in their desperate attempt to win free.

“Shields holding,” said the copilot. “Power reserves at seventy-three percent.”

Just ahead, another of our lighters erupted in a fountain of red flame. My heart—which moments before had risen high in my throat—sank almost to my knees. There had been half a hundred men on that ship.

All of them, gone.

Another of the cephalophores let loose a salvo of missile darts that flared toward the guns high on the walls above, and as I watched three of the turrets fell in heaps of burning slag.

Another of our fliers burst into flames.

A moment later, a call from some other vessel sounded on comm. “Taking heavy fire!”

“They’re everywhere!”

“We should have held back and let the Extras handle it,” I said.

Calen Harendotes must have known what we were flying into. He had built these tunnels, in past lives. Grinding my teeth, I gripped the backs of both the pilot’s and copilot’s seats. The mouth of the proper tunnel was straight ahead, its guns turning to focus fire on us. What had the Monarch been thinking, driving our train into that awful place?

I understood a moment later, as the first salvo tore across our bow.

He had meant the train to serve as bait. As targets.

The fliers were much larger the cephalophore units, slower and less nimble, and better able to shield themselves from concentrated fire. The daimons that governed those turrets’ offenses had prioritized our fliers over his hussars. The flying cavalry fell upon those guns, and there! I saw one at the fore of all the others, black armored and terrible, its wings spread in the dark of that hideous maze, and in its pincered hand was the sword of the captain of the gate, that massive spike of highmatter-edged steel. It sliced the nearest turret to ribbons, rocketed to the next, carving a ruin of sparking fume and torn steel in its wake.

Without having to be told, I knew that here was Calen Harendotes himself, the Monarch-Conqueror at the head of his host, and he was a fury to behold.

“The way is clear!” came the royal voice, the voice of the Undying Lord of Vorgossos-in-Exile. “Forward, Latarrans! Forward to victory!”

I had expected Sagara to lead from the rear, to safeguard his momentarily delicate mortality. But he fought like a whirlwind, the edge and very point of the sword that was his army. But then, he was precisely where he had to be. Who knew the warrens and secret places of Vorgossos better than he, who built them? Still, so great was the valor of his assault that I forgot for a moment the cold calculation he had made, and the deaths of so many of my own men.

But only for a moment.

“Follow the Extras!” I said, thumping the pilot’s seat. “Follow the Extras!”

We surged forward, and once more I was forced to hold on for all that my life was worth. Our flier rushed through the gate and out of the great junction, sailing along miles of conduit-lined tunnel.

“We’re nearly to the inner gate,” 2Maeve said on comm. “Your men should make ready to deploy!”

“What about the guns?” I asked, lurching back against the bulkhead by the door separating the cockpit from the rest of the flier.

“Leave them to us!”

I returned to the rear compartment, shouting for the men to make ready. Cassandra was on her feet, was pulling her coif up over her coiled hair, and Edouard was already masked. “Albé!” I gestured for him to join me.

The HAPSIS man pushed through the soldiers to my side. Placing one hand on his shoulder, I bellowed so that the whole compartment might hear. “This is Vorgossos!” I said, pleased by the weight and carriage of my new voice. “Trust nothing that you see! I want every one of you to power down your comms. Stay by one another, rely on hand signals!”

“Sir?” One of the men cocked his head, confused.

The ship banked beneath us, and I caught the loop in the ceiling above my head to steady myself. We were sweeping in for a landing. “There are daimons here, soldier! Thinking machines! You must guard yourselves and your suits! Comms down! Do you understand?”

The soldiers roared their affirmative.

I did not say that I did not trust our Latarran allies, that I did not trust Harendotes himself. But if our soldiers were silenced, severed from the comms, we might escape even his scrutiny.

We would be free to act as we would. As we needed.

“Pass the order along to every unit you encounter!” Albé said, taking up the role of my second. “Marlowe’s orders—and mine!”

“The Extras should have the gate open by the time we make land!” I said. “Make straight for the gates! Don’t linger in the open. We’ll be—”

An explosion slammed into the port side of our flier, knocking me from my feet and into the starboard wall. Men hurled upon one another by the blast fell like tumbled cordwood, and the whole world began to spin. We were going down, spiraling. I guessed that whatever had struck us must have burst just outside the curtain of our shield, for I saw no debris, no blast of fire as I reeled. Rather the concussive force of that blast had knocked us from our course, must have damaged one of our repulsors out on the flier’s portside wing where the shield was at its thinnest.

“Brace for impact!” someone roared. Edouard? The pilot officer?

I hurled myself at Cassandra, wrapping both arms around her as the flier struck metal with a sound like the breaking of worlds.

Silence then, punctuated only by the sound of fighting outside like distant thunder.

“Cassandra?”

“Yes?”

“You’re all right?”

“Yes, Abba,” she said.

She had fallen beneath me, and still more of the others had fallen on top.

“Blow the hatch!” came a voice, far off. It sounded strange. Muffled. Amplified. Looking back over my shoulder toward the rear, I saw a knot of men standing or crouching near the exit. We had fallen at an angle, nose down, so that the floor heaved up and to the right as one approached the door.

As I watched, the explosive bolts on the hatch blew—emergency lights flashing red and soundlessly. The door vanished into darkness, admitting the night that was beneath the black planet’s crust.

Albé had found his feet. His family’s rifle was slung over one shoulder. Legs apart, he bent to offer us a hand. “We’re down,” he said, unhelpfully.

“I noticed,” I said, and—taking his offered hand—stood and stooped to help Cassandra to her feet. Belatedly, I tugged my coif up over my hair, punched the command to close my helmet. Cassandra did the same.

It took my suit’s entoptics a moment to flicker on, to render for me a vision of the crashed shuttle and the darkness without void of the smoke and fume of that hideous place.

“Where exactly are we?” Cassandra asked, leaping from the rear of the shuttle to the uneven ground outside.

Ramanthanu was waiting for us, its kinsmen at its back. They were looking up into the darkness, round eyes wide open.

“Dein raka ne?” I asked them.

“There are yukajjimn on the walls,” Ramanthanu said, pointing with its scimitar. I could not see them. “They do not attack.”

All about us, our other ships were landing, seeking level ground amid the huge conduits and catwalks that ran along the tunnel’s floor. Ahead, a broad slope of poured stone rose to a flat expanse of shelf, and beyond that, the great inner gates of the profane city stood closed. Above and about them, level upon level, switchback ramps rose to either side, running back along the tunnel.

“They don’t need to,” I said.

High above us, one of the great turrets blazed, underscoring my point.

A trio of our hussars streaked overhead, wings crackling with blue fire. One fell smoking from the heavens, crashed into the floor not five hundred feet from where we stood. Our own soldiers were spilling from their landers. Some were picking shots at the turrets, at the enemy soldiers Ramanthanu had seen waiting for us.

Then Calen Harendotes made his move.

Heavy were the mighty doors of Vorgossos, and thick. Many lives of men they had endured, though not once had any enemy been set against them—for no enemy had come down the dark road from the planet’s frozen surface. But though they had stood since the Empire was young, they fell in an instant—fell so quickly I hardly understood what had been done.

I saw a searing flash of light, heard the sound of engines roaring. An eruption of argent fire filled the gloom, so bright my suit cut the light. For a moment, I saw the dun-clad soldiery standing on the tiered ramps above us, left and right, and knew them for what they were.

Then the thunder spoke, and for a second time I moved to shield Cassandra. But bright as the blast was, it was contained.

I knew that color, that radiance, white as white.

Calen Harendotes had used antimatter against the gates of his own kingdom. A tactical charge. A single grain of antimatter whose shaped charge had funneled the full bore of that most volatile substance directly at the mighty gates. Pale light streamed through the new-made opening, strangely wholesome in the horrid gloom.

“Forward, men of Sol!” roared Edouard Albé, brandishing his rifle.

Our legionnaires streamed forward, ranks bolstered by the landed men of Elffire’s division, supported by the cephalophores in the air. The Vorgossene soldiers to either side of the gate leaped from the lower balconies onto the shelf before the opened way, a pale light in their empty faces.

They were SOMs, soulless mannequins in the Undying’s service, brainless creatures that had once been men. 2Maeve’s cephalophores landed about us and to either side, forming a corridor along which we could travel and reach the ramp of poured stone and the broad shelf before the gates. More fliers were coming in for a landing, building a cordon around us to block the onrushing SOMs.

We had reached the shelf by then, met the soldiers streaming from the second landing wave, the one nearer the gates. The SOMs would fight to the last, but though their numbers were great, our ordnance was greater, and the guns of the Interfaced dragoons held back their mindless tide.

Then my comms crackled.

I had not silenced my own communicator, as I had told the others to do. There had not been time, and the crash had shaken the thought wholly from me.

Mistwalker to Marlowe, repeat. —walker . . . Marlowe.”

The signal was poor so far underground. It was a miracle it had come through at all.

But it was Lorian’s voice.

“Lorian!” I shouted, holding a hand to my ear in vain effort to better hear the man. “We’ve reached the inner gate!”

Whatever he meant to say was garbled, broken by so many miles of air and rock and metal. Still, I discerned four words.

“Attacked—”

“ . . . fleet scattered . . . ”

“—Demiurge!”

My blood ran cold.

The Demiurge had come.

I almost saw it, in the gray matter of my mind, near at hand and terrible, as terrible as Dharan-Tun itself—and somehow more alien.

The Demiurge.

Like a great, black tower she was, a tower projecting sideways across the void. How well I recalled her buttressed nacelles, her terraced ramparts carved with statues of goddesses and devils, her forecastle like a maw of cathedral spires.

“Lorian!” I shouted into the band.

There was no reply.

“Lorian!”

There was nothing at all.


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Framed