CHAPTER 47
THE WOMAN AND THE GIRL
I passed the next several days as I had the first. It was then I truly discovered the extent of the change in me, as I did not sleep that second night, or the third—or any night since. You doubtless think such an experience a torment, unable even to sleep, but somehow it was not.
The only torment was the thought that Cassandra had not come to visit me. It was possible that Ghoshal had simply not permitted her to visit me, but I could not shake the sense that she had not even tried to.
The sense that I was alone.
Or nearly so.
Following the incident with the sword, Neema was not permitted in to see me, but he had been allowed to prepare my meals for me, and brought them to the door. I saw him briefly on those occasions—thrice a day—and spoke with him. By the evening of the third day since my return, he brought the news that Cassandra had vacated the chamber beside my own for a disused cabin on the Gadelica.
“I think she just needed time to think,” Neema said. “You know what she’s like . . . doesn’t know something until she’s decided it for herself . . . ”
“I do know what she’s like,” I said somberly, and took the tray he’d brought for me.
“I’m sorry it’s not better, domi,” Neema said, nodding at the food. “We’ve had to beg food off the Extras. We left in such a hurry . . . there’s nothing on board but bromos and whatever the hydroponics section can grow.”
I placed it on the sideboard counter. Standing some distance from the door—such that I could no longer see Holden’s men—I said, “I’m sure it’s lovely,” then, “have you rested, Neema?”
“Me?” The manservant smiled. “No need for that, domi. Let me circle round you.” He made a gesture to imply an orbit.
“If you see Cassandra,” I said, staring down at the plate of fish and dressed greens Neema had begged off Lorian’s people without really seeing it, “tell her I’d like to see her.”
For days, he was my only company, and was made to stand in the hall.
On the sixth day, the door opened, and I knew something had changed. My lunch tray lay on the sideboard—but recently finished. Neema ought not to have returned for many hours yet.
I sat up on the bed, banishing the almost-dream that had taken the place of sleep.
I had expected Henric Ghoshal, or Edouard—had expected even Cassandra.
But it was Annaz.
The black-feathered chiliarch saluted in the doorway. “Bashanda,” he said, saluting with one wingtip claw. “I have orders to bring you. We go to big ship.”
I swung my feet over the side of the bed and rose. “Kithuun Annaz!” I said, brightening. “I understand I’ve you to thank in part for my daughter’s escape from Forum.”
“Only in part,” the bird man croaked, bobbing his head. “Ishaan Irchtani played only a little part.”
“You’ve my gratitude all the same.”
Annaz bobbed his head. After a moment’s unsteady silence, he said, “Halfmortal.”
I stiffened. The word had taken on a different character in the mouth of the colonus. Annaz had not seen me die, but anyone who had known me before my death could see the change that death had wrought in me.
“You truly cannot be killed?”
“I honestly don’t know,” I said.
The bird man peered up at the legionnaires posted to either side of my door, hopped across the threshold. He raised one scaly hand and touched me with it. “You defeated death,” he said.
I looked at him, could sense the xenobite wished to say something.
As my father would have done, I waited him out.
Annaz spoke but haltingly. “Among my people—on Immuz—it is said Ugaanwali is at hand.”
“Ugaanwali?” I asked, though I knew enough of the main Irchtani language by then to guess. I recognized the root of the word for struggle.
“Great War,” Annaz said. “They say your war is Great War. War in which even Death will die. They say that winds of Hakaaro will cease, that Hakaaro itself will flower, that Ishaan Irchtani will become like gods. Like you.”
Hakaaro was the Irchtani god of the underworld, and the underworld itself, a dry and frigid place, a realm of frost and dust where the spirits of the dead gnawed bones forever.
“Like me?” I asked.
“You are bashaniya bashanda, higher-than-high!” Annaz said, and I wondered—not for the first time—just what it was said in mine and Udax’s name on Judecca, which the Irchtani called Immuz.
It was . . . not unlike my conversation with Edouard, or with Prince Kaim the day Valka showed him the images of my first death. Each believed I was a part of their own story. That I had been sent . . . by Ahura Mazda, by Edouard’s Christ, by the gods of the Ishaan Irchtani.
Each sought to claim me for their own, to fit me into a pattern they could understand.
But whatever was happening to me, it was something stranger.
“I hope that your people can take their place in the greater Empire,” I said, and recalling the promise I had made the day I burned the bodies of Udax and the other Irchtani who had died upon the field at Berenike, I said, “and I will help you do so, as I can. But we have a higher purpose.”
“To kill Cielcin God-King, yes,” Annaz said.
“Yes,” I said. In my focus on Ushara, in the chaos of my own murder and return, the politics of Empire and Latarra . . . I had almost forgotten Dorayaica. “To kill the Prophet.”
“I take you now,” Annaz said. “We go.”
He took me from the Ascalon and through the umbilical back to the Gadelica. He was my only escort. We had left Holden’s men in the vestibule, and passed men and women in the black fatigues of shipmen or tunics of officers in the halls. The Gadelica had no tram system like the Tamerlane, being much smaller, but we took a lift up nearly to the top level—to the level of the bridge and officers’ quarters.
“Just here,” the chiliarch said, stopping at the door to the captain’s stateroom.
Four men stood at posts outside it.
Ghoshal himself would have no need for guards against his own men.
I knew who had summoned me, who I had been brought to see.
“He clean?” asked one.
“I did not search him,” Annaz said.
The man did, and came away with nothing.
“Let him pass.”
One of his fellows keyed the door.
Ghoshal’s chambers were more spacious than my own, if smaller than the apartments I had once had aboard the Tamerlane. A great, false window dominated the wall opposite the door, its display keyed to show a view of the Mistwalker’s hold piped in from photoreceptors on the ship’s exterior. Outside, the thin beam of the sun shone down on the rolling city. A little vestibule with a mirror and a fitting station where the captain might don his boots and uniform jacket with the help of his batman opened on the sitting area that doubled for an office. Its appointments were fairly standard: the customary tufted black leather furniture, brass fixtures, and glass tabletops of the usual Imperial military style filled the space, with here and there a piece that conveyed the captain’s personal touch—a rug of some spotted fur, white and black; the painting of a hunting scene showcasing men on horses pursuing a feathered, hexapedal creature I could not name; and the desk itself, an antique of hand-carved verawood, green as summer.
Memory of the place came back to me, of the dinners I had had—floating absurdly above the glass dining table—with Ghoshal on the flight from Sabratha.
But it was to the woman seated on the tufted couch that my attention was inexorably drawn.
The Aventine Princess Selene had never looked less herself. She had slashed off most of her hair, as I told you, leaving her with a ragged cap of red-gold little longer than a boy’s. She wore a simple officer’s tunic, without mark or collar tab or badge of rank, though jeweled rings yet glittered on her fingers, diamonds and rubies. She cut a strange figure, so attired. Most unlike herself.
“Lord Hadrian!” She stood at my appearance, practically ran to me, and before I knew what was happening, she had embraced me once again, and covered my face in kisses.
I did not dare move. To reciprocate was to commit a crime far greater than I had done when I struck His Radiance in the face. To deny her was to risk her wrath. I had become Kyra, paralyzed by circumstance.
Sensing my hesitation, the woman drew back and—hiding her embarrassment—let out a breath I’d not realized she’d been holding. “They wouldn’t let me see you,” she said. “The captain and Agent Albé. They said they weren’t sure that you were you, but I knew. I knew from the moment I set eyes on you again . . . ” Her own eyes went to Annaz, who had followed me into the room. “Thank you for bringing him to me, chiliarch.”
The Irchtani bobbed his head, hopped from one foot to the next, bending in a fashion that approximated a courtly bow. “My honor, bashanda-princess.”
“Will you wait outside?” she asked, and smiled sweetly. “I would like to speak to Lord Marlowe alone.”
Again, Annaz performed his little dance and bowed. He left without another word, talons clicking on the black metal of the deck.
When the door had shut, Selene’s face opened like the sky after a storm, her smile radiant as the sun. It was . . . difficult not to love her, who felt such joy at the sight of me.
“I like them,” she said at last, peering after the vanished Annaz. “The Irchtani, I mean. They’re so much smaller than I expected. How tall do you think the chiliarch is?”
I thought about it. Annaz was taller than Lorian, but that was not saying much. “No more than five feet, I should think? They can’t be much taller, else they’d be heavier, and so unable to fly.”
Selene dismissed this with that lack of concern with trivia that is the hallmark of women everywhere. “They are gallant fighters,” she said. “We would not have escaped Forum without them.”
“You should not have come,” I said, and seeing the distress in her face, appended, “it isn’t safe for you here.”
“I know that,” she snapped, “but it wasn’t safe for your daughter anywhere. They killed you!”
“I have not forgotten,” I said.
The princess bridled. “I did what you told me!” she said, drawing herself up to her full height. “I went to Albé and Aristedes, just like you said! I got your daughter and your servant out. I didn’t know who else we could trust.”
“It was the Chantry that killed me,” I said, my own words striking me with that sense of unreality. “There are others at court who were no doubt happy to see me die. Certain of the great houses. Those who think they know the Emperor’s mind better than he does himself. Your mother, of course.”
“My mother?” Selene’s eyes widened.
She hadn’t known. “Your mother was behind previous attempts on my life. The knife-missile. The Colosso. Perhaps others.”
The girl retreated a step, hand feeling for the chair nearest her. She found it, sank onto its padded arm. “My mother . . . ”
“She’s not alone,” I said. “Your brother tried to kill me. At least once.”
“Not Aurelian?”
“Alexander.”
“Alexander!” Selene was aghast. “But . . . Alexander worships you, for Earth’s sake!”
I felt a somber smile creep across my remade face. “Once, perhaps,” I said. “But you have not seen him since he went away, I gather? He is not the same man.” Selene’s only response was to hug herself. “He fears me, like the Chantry fears me. He fears what I am.”
“The Earth’s Chosen?” Selene whispered, committing the same error as Annaz, as Edouard and Prince Kaim.
“No,” I said. “I am not the Earth’s Chosen. I am something else.”
She looked up at me. “I saw you die.”
“You did,” I said. “I showed Alexander a recording of my . . . my first death.” A bitter laugh escaped me. “I was beheaded. In combat with a Cielcin prince. One of my men’s suit cameras caught it all . . . I showed it to him, a long time ago. After I left Forum the last time. And he was with me on Berenike. You know about Berenike?”
She nodded, still hugging herself as I spoke.
“He’s known what I am a long time,” I finished lamely.
Selene fixed me with a gaze that recalled her father. “And what are you, sirrah?”
How could I answer her? How should I? “I am . . . ” I looked out the false window with its simulated view of the coiled city. “I am Hadrian Marlowe.”
“I never doubted that,” she said, and her eyes were shining. “But how did you survive?”
“A god saved me,” I answered her. “Or a being so like a god it makes no difference. He needs me to save mankind from the Cielcin and their . . . their masters.”
“Their masters?” Selene looked at me, brows knitting.
Standing over her, I said, “Ours is a proxy war. Humanity and the Cielcin, we’re only pawns. Pieces in a larger game. Once, I thought your father one of the kings, the emperors in that game, with the Cielcin Elusha opposite him. I was wrong. The whole human race, we’re just one pawn, one piece in a game so vast and so ancient neither you nor I can comprehend its scope.” I took her hands in mine. “We are so small, Selene. The whole human race is so small. But we’re a crucial piece.” When I saw she was not understanding me, I said, “Even a pawn can check an emperor.”
“Why are we so important?” she asked.
“Because the universe was made for us,” I said.
“For mankind?” she said. “That’s what the Chantry teaches.”
It was, but the best lies are half-truths, and so it was with the Cult of Earth.
“For life,” I said, “for all life. But the Cielcin have turned against life, against the universe itself. They would destroy it if they could. If we do not stop them.”
Selene’s eyes narrowed. “You can’t be serious.”
I said nothing at all, only held her gaze.
“You are serious.” I felt her hands tremble.
“The powers the Cielcin serve are very great. Lesser gods, made to oversee reality itself, to herd the very stars. Even if they can’t succeed in destroying everything, they are capable of destruction on a scale you and I can’t even imagine. If they have their way, the whole of the Cielcin Wars will have been only prologue.”
Selene pulled her hands away. “If what you say is true,” she said, “if this . . . god that has sent you is so great, why does he not help us?”
“He is helping us,” I said, gesturing at my own heart with one open hand. “I am the help, Selene. That is why we have to seek Vorgossos.”
“Vorgossos?” The princess stood. “The Extrasolarian kingdom?”
“Kharn Sagara has in his possession a cache of weapons designed by the Mericanii daimons, as well as one of the daimons itself,” I said. “The machines were in contact with these higher beings . . . ” I paused, cognizant of my use of the same phrase the Irchtani used to describe we palatine humans. “They knew about them, Selene. They built weapons capable of fighting them.”
The princess asked, “Why would the machines build weapons to fight these . . . things?”
“They believed they were protecting us,” I said.
“The machines?”
“Yes,” I said. “The story you know is not quite right. The Mericanii. The God Emperor. The Foundation War. Nothing begins as evil, not even the machines. All they did to us, the slavery, the torment, they did because they believed it was to our good. They never wanted us destroyed.”
On Vorgossos, the monster Brethren had spoken of the message it received from the Quiet. The daimon had peered across time, across the higher dimensions of our reality, and received a message from the future, from a time beyond even Ragama’s day. But Brethren had not built the weapons that slumbered aboard the Demiurge. Its progenitors had.
“You really think there’s a weapon on Vorgossos that can . . . destroy the Cielcin?”
“Destroy the Cielcin,” I said, “and the beings they serve.”
Selene sank onto the couch, the low coffee table between us. She kept her glittering hands on her knees. Her nails were red as her hair. “Let’s say I believe you,” she said. “What must we do?”
I did not take either of the chairs facing her. It was better if I stood, better if I remained the old soldier, the good soldier. She looked somehow young again, with her hair so shorn. Gone was the woman, imperious, radiant, regal as any queen. In her place, a frightened girl sat, a child alone. I wondered then if Selene had ever once left Forum before. Perhaps she had gone to Caliburn House, to her family’s estates of Avalon or Shakespeare. Perhaps she had visited Mars, seen the blue dot of Earth shine above Phobos and Deimos.
But it was possible, just possible, that she had never left her home before.
And there she was, sailing to Latarra. Into the lion’s den.
“First, we need to handle our hosts,” I said.
“You said we could trust Lorian Aristedes,” she countered, fear mingling with accusation in her tone.
“And so we can,” I said, “but there is the matter of his master to consider. He is a prisoner of his circumstances, as are we.”
The princess drew one knee to her breast, putting her foot on the couch. Hugging the limb to herself, she said, “You said I shouldn’t have come. Captain Ghoshal believes this Monarch of Latarra will hold me captive.”
“Ghoshal is a fool,” I said, “if an honest one.”
“What will become of me?” she asked.
“If we have our way, nothing,” I said. “You are in danger, princess, I will not lie to you, but you are in—I think—considerably less danger than I.” I read the question plain on her alabaster face. “Do you think the Extrasolarians would hesitate to take this body apart to learn its secrets?”
Selene’s grip upon her leg tightened.
“It will not come to that, if we are careful,” I said. “You, on the other hand, are certainly worth more alive, and worth more to your father and family than you are to the Monarch. It will not prove difficult to remind them of this.”
How small she looked! How lost. How utterly bereft. Both chivalry and its opposite howled at me to go to her, to take her in arms and hold her. Sharply I recalled the visions I had seen, the memories of other lives—of the lives we’d had together. I found I knew every line and curve of her, every secret place, and the knowledge distressed me. It was knowledge I should not have.
I had to remind myself that here was the woman her father had offered me as balm for Valka’s death.
She was only a Tavrosi.
That was no fault of Selene’s, but it tainted her all the same.
Still, I pitied her.
“The Latarrans want their alliance with the Empire,” I said. “Their position must be more desperate than they let on, else they would not come to us with this offer of theirs.”
“The telegraph trace?” Selene’s brows contracted. “Surely that offer cannot stand! The Empire must believe the Extras kidnapped me, that this is some plot of your doing—exactly as the Chantry foretold. In a way, I played into their hands . . . doing what you said.”
She was perceptive. That, at least.
“You saved my daughter,” I said, and eager to solidify the wall between us, added, “mine and Valka’s. I will always be grateful to you, princess. But we can salvage this situation. We must offer to reopen negotiations between Latarra and your family. We can tell your father and brother what transpired and why.”
Selene raised her chin, brittle and strangely defiant—perhaps she was only wounded. “They will not move to defy the Chantry.”
“They do not need to,” I said. “They need only ignore them, which your father has done for as long as I have known him.” William had ever been at odds with his clergy, with the priors and patriarchs of Earth’s Holy Chantry. Imperial civilization stood upon but two great pillars: the Chantry and the Throne. Time and the stress of war had buckled both those pillars. Now they sagged against one another and chafed.
“We can do as much,” I said. “You will escape this net, your highness. I promise you that, but you must do as I say.”
“Selene,” she said, pronouncing each of her name’s three syllables with shaky force. Her eyes were closed, pressed shut. “Please call me Selene.”
I said nothing.
The girl inhaled sharply, let her leg fall. “I’m not a fool, Sir Hadrian.”
“I did not say that you were,” I said.
“You said I shouldn’t have come,” she said, “but if I hadn’t done so, there would have been nothing to stop the Martians blasting your Cassandra and the others out of the sky!”
Selene . . . what became of her, I wonder? After all was said and done? After I slit the belly of Gododdin’s sun and spilled its fire across the Dark? After Orphan and the Astrophage? And that last night on Tenba?
I have heard it said that she is dead. That she—along with many of her siblings—was murdered in the massacre that followed the Emperor’s death, the Night of Knives. I have heard it said that she was sent to Pagus Minor, or to Mars. That she was the concubine of some Martian legate, a gift for his service to our new Imperial sovereign. Others say she was returned to Avalon, where she dwells now and forever in the halls of her fathers, a part of the furniture—so to speak—at Caliburn House. Still others say that she, the Almost-Bride of the Sun Eater, serves now as one of the Cinarians, the Ash Maidens who serve at the Cenotaph of the God Emperor.
I do not know. But I pray that she has found peace . . . wherever she is.
“Won’t you look at me?” her voice intruded on my silence, tugged at my turned face. “You won’t even look at me . . . ”
I looked at her.
Her eyes were shining, but had turned hard and cold as glass. “I have loved you,” she said, “since the day you rode through the Eternal City in triumph—Grass Crown upon your head.” She wrung her hands in her lap. “Father set me aside for you. I have slept for decades at a time . . . watched my brothers and sisters grow old. Watched my Empire crack apart. Waiting for you.” She stood, the charcoal about her eyes beginning to run. “And then you died.”
I did not go to her, feeling that to move in either direction—in any direction—was to confirm my path through time. I saw the Solar Throne before me, its carmine velvet and rays of beaten gold. I had only to go to her, to kiss her as she had kissed me the night I was destroyed. She would be my Empress—and what an Empress she would make. Not cold and terrible as Ushara, but warm and bright as the sun of vanished Earth.
And yet, it was the same future—the same pattern repeated, just as the inhuman form of the Watchers was repeated in the icons in the Great Sanctum in the Eternal City. To go to Selene then was to choose that path. Power and dominion over men. To choose her and the throne was to make once more the choice the God Emperor had made, to forge a new link in the same chain that had bound human affairs for nigh on twenty thousand years. To go to her was to repeat the cycle, was to attempt to hold history in its place, to pin the future to the past and hold it there by will and force of arms.
That was not my charge, or my desire, though I had no wish to cause her pain.
“Will you say nothing?” asked she.
“I died, yes,” I said softly. “I died, but the man you loved was never born. You love the Hero of Aptucca. The Demon in White. That man isn’t me. He never was.”
Selene flared. “Those stories are true!” she said, and the tears that teetered on the precipice of falling fell at last. “You died, Hadrian! You died, and you live again! Don’t you tell me you are not all they say you are and more! Don’t you dare!” She collapsed sobbing into me, her narrow shoulders shaking.
There I let her stay, but spoke no word of comfort, and when she was finished, I brought the conversation back to the matter at hand.
We had years before we reached Latarra, and though I planned to enter my icy sleep, we had time yet to plan our next move. Still now I recall her tears, and shiver.
Wherever she is now, I pray she is not alone.