CHAPTER 57
THE SACK OF EDEN
Smoke yet filled the air about that shattered gate, and great fingers of tortured metal curled in all directions. The very stone of the floor had cracked and blackened beneath the impact of Calen’s antimatter bomb, and all around, the bodies of SOMs lay broken and bloody.
For all the clamor about us, the noise of gunfire and shouting men, a curious calm stretched about that gate. The shots I heard were not the frantic sounds of battle, but the surgical precision of executions as Elffire’s men and my own dispatched the enemy’s wounded. The whine of engines I heard was not the sound of our attack, but was only the second wave coming in for a landing.
The cephalophores had streamed ahead, passing the ruined gate into the city beyond. They were bound for the palace gates, for the house of Kharn Sagara. Whither we, too, were bound, though it fell to us to trudge through the streets and over the terraces of Kharn’s vile city.
We had come upon the mouth of the Seventh Deep, the deepest—and thereby the newest—level of the great subterrane. I could see the pale buildings within, and recognized in their design the same machined white stone, the same towers and domes and monolithic architecture that made up the Printed City on Latarra. Peering through that blasted gate, I felt as I had once as a boy when Crispin and I had overturned one of the broad flagstones in the topiary garden at Devil’s Rest and upset a colony of swarming insects.
Vorgossos.
I had not wanted to return.
“Are you all right?” asked a familiar voice.
Looking round, I found Cassandra had picked her way over the bodies to my side. There was blood spattered on the white faceplate of her helm, but it was not her own.
“I’m fine,” I said. “The Demiurge has attacked the fleet. Lorian tried to get through while we were attacking the gate . . . ” Realizing we were alone, I asked, “Is your comm down?”
“Si, Abba,” she said.
“Good.” I looked sidelong at the nearest Latarran soldiers. They were far enough away that I might take the necessary risk. “Is Edouard in position?”
“If he’s not yet, he soon will be,” she said.
“Very good,” I said, and cast my eyes at the roof of the tunnel high above our heads, where steel reinforcement mingled with rude, naked stone. Recalling Lord Black’s briefings on the invasion from our time on Latarra and from our meeting at Merope before this final assault, I said, “We’re directly below the reservoir here.”
Despite her suit, Cassandra shivered. “I don’t like the thought of all that water overhead. It reminds me of Phanamhara. Only there’s more.”
“Much more,” I said.
The oldest parts of the great city were far above us, in the dome that the Mericanii had built. That was near the surface—had been on the surface when it was constructed, before the ice had encroached and buried it forever. Sagara’s palace lay beneath it, a tangled warren of tunnels and caverns, chambers and silos and great iced-over hangar bays. Below that lay the Garden—the research park and complex where the servants of the Undying practiced their black necromancy. Below that further still lay the sunless sea, the black waters where dwelt the daimon, Brethren, and where the Mericanii of old had built their power station to suck of the heat of Vorgossos itself.
But there was much more besides, much more than I had seen in my previous visit. The city had grown beside the old palace, spreading like the mycelia of a fungus immeasurably vast. Rather than assault Vorgossos as its master long imagined—coming down from above, through the hightower’s oculus as I had when I’d come as a visitor in my youth—we had assaulted the profane city from below. That shattered gate opened on the deepest level, a level below the palace, below the Garden, below even the sunless sea. The tunnels that bound the city to the engine complex ran below the waters of Brethren’s home straight to that lowest level.
“Keep your helmet on,” I said to her, watching Ramanthanu and its kind approaching through the carnage toward us. “My terminal says the radiation hasn’t penetrated to this depth, but be mindful.”
“I thought they bombed the engines.”
“And the airfields, yes,” I said. “But Kedron’s men bombed the city as well. There were surface defenses.”
Ramanthanu drew level with us, its kinsmen close behind. Two of them—Egazimn and Bikashi, I think they were—had removed their masks, and red blood was running down their chins.
“These yukajjimn are not good fighters,” said one.
“But they are good eating,” said another.
I glared at it, but said nothing. What could I say? I had brought them with me. And why? I knew what they were, what they were capable of. We had fed them printed meat throughout our journey, but it should not have surprised me that they leaped at the chance for proper fare. They had pledged themselves to me through their captain, but that had not changed what they were—what they would ever be.
You cannot wash away a tiger’s stripes, Lorian had said. You can only be eaten by it, or ride.
I had chosen to ride.
The lop-horned captain raised a hand for quiet. “We have taken the gate,” it said to me.
I emitted the wordless noise that was the Cielcin yes. “But we must take the palace,” I said.
The Cielcin called Otomno moved to stand beside its captain. Peering into the city, it said, “It is almost like home.”
At that precise moment, a clarion call went up—the noise of trumpets and of drums filling the cavern like water—and looking I saw a column of men coming up the ramp from the tunnel below. They were all in Latarran livery, their round eyes shining like searchlights in the dark below the short bills of their hod helmets.
“The Monarch!” cried a herald. “The Monarch of Latarra is come!”
And there he was, riding a little behind the head of his column, the chest of his cephalophore unhinged to reveal the man himself arrayed in black and gold. Seeing me, he commanded the iron maiden to kneel, and leaped from his harness to the mounting peg that projected from the inside of the platform’s knee.
“Lord Marlowe!” he said. “The city is ours.”
“If we can hold it,” I said in return. “I spoke with Aristedes during the attack on the gate. The Demiurge has joined the fighting.”
Calen Harendotes’s jeweled gaze swept over the ruin of the gates. “I know,” he said, apparently unconcerned. “I am in constant communication with my generals. We hold to the plan.”
“Can the fleet hold?” I asked.
“Long enough” was his answer. “But we must be swift. If we can capture Sagara, the Demiurge will cease to be a problem.”
Cassandra interjected. “Why is that?”
The officer at the Monarch’s right—Camillus Elffire, the captain of the Mistwalker’s infantry—snarled, “Mind your tone! You are addressing his Majesty, the Monarch!”
Calen Harendotes neither affirmed his subordinate, nor ordered him to stand down. “Only Sagara may wield the Demiurge, and he will not do so from its bridge. Ending the battle here will end the fight in orbit.”
Not for the first time, I was struck by the difference between this incarnation of the man and the earlier one I had known. The elder Sagara had been a creature of infinite time. Of infinite patience. This younger one was by contrast a dynamo, a man of vision, of pitch and moment. Perhaps it was only that the tissues of this newer body were so much younger, so much more vital than his predecessor. Or perhaps it was that he was mortal, so much closer to death.
When had Kharn Sagara ever been so close to death?
A single shot might end his life, break the chain of experience that stretched back to the elder days, when man was young and newcome to the demon-haunted stars. All that knowledge, all that life could end as easily as any other for the first time, perhaps, in more than fifteen thousand years.
“You’re certain he’s here?” I asked, daring.
“He would not abandon Vorgossos unless he had no other choice,” said Harendotes.
“You seem to know a lot about him,” said Cassandra.
Calen Harendotes turned his beaked and jewel-encrusted mask on me, and for a moment I feared. After a moment, he said, “Your people have disabled their comms.”
Had he been trying to speak to me? To renew his threat? Behind my mask, my eyes flickered from the Monarch’s face to the tunnel. I could see some of Ghoshal’s men in Imperial white hurrying from our landers to join us. The Irchtani were among them. Somewhere out there in the darkness, Edouard was at work, carrying out his secret task—the task I had given him in the darkness of the Ascalon on the journey from Latarra, when I had told him and Cassandra everything, when we had laid our plan and trap for those who had trapped us.
“It seemed prudent to isolate them from any praxic assault,” I said. “I almost lost . . . a friend to an attack from one of MINOS’s sorcerers.”
“Your Tavrosi woman,” Harendotes said.
Cassandra stiffened, almost imperceptibly.
“Yes.”
One could feel the tension between us, coiling like a viper ready to strike. He did not trust me—was right not to trust me. I was glad I yet wore my mask, so little did I trust my own face not to betray me in that moment.
The moment passed, and Calen Harendotes turned his jeweled bird’s head to address his subordinate. “Commander,” he said at last.
Camillus Elffire snapped to attention, saluted his liege. “My Monarch.” He did not know that he was about to be issued the foulest order of his career. How well I remember his face in that moment! He had the look of almost any Imperial soldier. His face was square and pale as any sailor’s, with a strong, wide jaw concealed under a thicket of graying beard. His scalp was hairless, making him seem more an enlisted man than an officer.
There was nothing of the demonic about him, no hint of the machine, nor of evils subtler and more perverse. He seemed to me an ordinary man, and no butcher.
Calen Harendotes was still as stone, as the golden effigy he resembled. His words issued from speakers built into the breastplate of his armor—which may, for all I knew, have been his breast itself. “Take your men through every level of the city. Kill all you find.”
To his credit, Elffire hesitated. “My . . . my Monarch?”
“None of the natives may be permitted to leave this place,” he said. “Not one. Am I clear?”
“You cannot be serious!” I said, rounding on the Monarch.
The dragoons nearest their ruler leveled guns at me, and I halted, recalling that Cassandra was just at my side. Still, Ramanthanu and the others tensed, raised their scimitars.
I raised a hand, shouted a command to the xenobites for stillness.
“You think me amusing?” he asked. “You think this is play, what we do here?”
“You cannot kill them all!” I said. “There are thousands in this city! Thousands!”
“Hundreds of thousands,” the Monarch corrected, and turned to his servant. “Commander, tear the city apart. Leave none alive.”
Camillus Elffire swallowed. “Every one of them?”
“Was I unclear?” the Monarch inquired. “Every one. Man, machine, homunculus. Leave none alive.”
I took another step. “That wasn’t the deal, Sa—” I caught myself on the verge of saying his name. “That wasn’t the deal!”
I would not be party to a massacre.
“We do not have a deal, Lord Marlowe,” said Calen Harendotes, “you are here at my sufferance, and because you may yet prove useful. It is with your Empire that I’ve an accord. Not you. Now be silent!” The dragoons with their long guns tensed, but did not fire. Eyes still on Elffire, the Monarch said, “The New Order requires the destruction of the old world, commander. Are you unequal to the task?”
Whatever will there was in Elffire broke then. The light in his eyes went dim. “No, my Monarch.”
“Very good,” Harendotes said. “Commander 2Maeve and I will lead the assault on the palace. Lord Marlowe’s people will accompany me. You have your orders, commander. Give them no quarter. Leave none alive.”
Stiffly, the man saluted. “Yes, my Monarch.” Turning, he placed his helm back upon his head, and the mask flipped up from his gorget and hissed as it clicked into place. He hurried to broadcast his dreadful order, leaving Cassandra, the Cielcin, and myself with the knot of Interfaced dragoons that made up the Monarch’s personal guard.
“Lord Marlowe,” the Monarch said. “Activate your suit’s comm. We will speak privately, you and I.”
Slowly—very slowly—I reached for the controls on my wrist-terminal.
The black jewels that were the Monarch’s false eyes fixed on me, and a moment later his voice filled my ears—unheard by any other. “Need I remind you of my promise?”
Not one word.
“You need not,” I said.
“You overestimate your value,” he said coldly. “We have obtained Vorgossos. Soon, we will have obtained my sister. I do not need your support. Rather, it is you who needs mine, as I recall.”
Though she could not hear us, I felt Cassandra tense at my side. She was Maeskolon, of the order of swordmasters. This Kharn Sagara stood mere feet from her, and from myself. She might slay him before he could give the order that killed us both. My eyes went to the empty cephalophore the Monarch had leaped out of, at its shoulder guns and the arm cannons limp at its sides.
We would never be fast enough.
I could not reliably predict whence an attack might come, and so choose to be spared its thunder.
“If you believe that,” I said slowly, “then you should kill me now.”
Silence.
“You need me,” I said into that silence. “At least you think you do. I’m the one weapon in your arsenal your sister cannot match.”
The smallest hmm of laughter escaped the Monarch then. For a moment, I thought he would say something, would reveal something of his secret hand. He had no intention of handing me control of the Demiurge, I knew as much, or even of handing me the Archontic weapons. He would betray me, but not until he was certain that I was no longer necessary.
But I meant to betray him, and would have to strike first.
“You are always so certain,” he said. “So righteous. Tell me: Do you have doubts?”
“And you?” I asked, ignoring the question. “Are you certain? Certain your sister is even here?”
The Monarch’s voice seemed far away, barely more than a whisper. “She is here,” he said. “I can sense her . . . prowling at the edges of my mind. She thinks she can destroy me, as she destroyed my previous incarnation. The one you call Ren.”
“And can she?”
Calen Harendotes—Kharn Sagara—turned to watch Elffire’s column move into the city to begin their monstrous work. His silence said everything, and again I was forced to contemplate what it must be like to be the Undying, and to be so close to death for the first time in half of an eternity. On Latarra, he had hinted that he had encountered the Watchers before, and that he had glimpsed something of what lay beyond death.
Hell, he had said.
What would a man do to avoid hell?
Almost anything, I was certain. But this?
Sharply I could hear the shock of guns in the distance. Had I been right—in part—as a boy? To think that man was as vile as the Cielcin? Or vile in his own way? I would walk those streets in moments, and see the carnage and the horror I could not have stopped for anything. As I write, I remember the body of a young boy lying in the street—his head blown to pieces, the rest of him strangely untouched. He had been the victim of an energy-lance. The beam had boiled all the fluid in his head.
He could not have been older than five.
His body recalled another I had seen. On Senuessa, long before. The girl had been strung up by her wrists, suspended by wires that cut. The Cielcin had taken her head, painted rude symbols on chest and arms, and left her for the planet’s desperate crows. Were we really so different?
I had never before thought of Vorgossos as a place, a city where men lived, where women and children went about their lives. On my first visit, we had spoken to only one of the citizenry before Sagara’s faceless men had come to collect us, and I had not seen the city for what it was: a human place, though it was filled with human ugliness.
“These are your own people,” I said, thinking of the slaughter, the brutality the Latarrans had brought to bear upon the natives.
Homo homini lupus.
“They are nothing,” Harendotes said. “Only my sister matters. Only Vorgossos itself.”
I became aware then of a voice chanting, softly singing, filling the air about me—not piped in through the speakers in my helm.
Now if we could win to the Eden Tree
where the four great rivers flow,
And the wreath of Eve is red on the turf
as she left it long ago,
And if we could come when the sentry slept,
and softly scurry through,
By the favor of God we might know as much—
as our father Adam knew.
And I marveled—not at the quotation, or the Classical English—but to hear Kharn Sagara singing. There was something wrong about that simple fact. It was as though I were back in the pantheon of Phanamhara, hearing the voice of Ushara.
He should not sing.
“That’s Kipling,” I said.
“It is,” said he. “You have been learning your poetry since our first meeting, I see.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “We are storming Eden,” he said. “My Eden, so it is fitting that I have brought the devil with me.”
Before us, the city was burning, and the crack of guns resounded louder than before—nearer at hand. As I watched, one of the cephalophores streaked round a tower that rose halfway to the domed ceiling. A rocket struck that tower like lightning, and it fell.
Screams.
Fire.
Gunshots.
Eden indeed.
“We can’t just stand here and do nothing,” Cassandra’s whisper hissed over my comm. “Abba . . . ”
“You think me cruel,” said the Monarch, voice crackling in my ear. “But you forget: Any one of them might be designed to house my sister’s ghost. They must die, lest she escape.”
I turned to face the king in yellow gold. “And that justifies the slaughter of innocents?”
Well I remember the Monarch’s words—chilling and clear—and the way he turned his eyes on me. Black, dead diamonds glimmering. “There are no innocents,” he said. “Have you heard it written? There is none righteous.”
I hated the Extrasolarians—hated and feared them. Feared what they were capable of, hated what they had done to Valka, and to the galaxy. It was their sorcerers who crafted the lethovirus, whose actions caused the deaths of billions.
Yet I could not wish them dead.
Not like that.
Not at the point of Sagara’s sword. Not to secure his immortality.
His peace.
Doubtless you think me a hypocrite, I, who have slain billions myself. I will not argue with you, Reader, except to say that what I did I did for the galaxy, for all mankind.
What Kharn did that black day, he did only for himself.
I knew then that I would have to kill him. Not there, before the gates of the Seventh Deep, surrounded by his men, but soon. I held Cassandra’s hand the tighter. Why had I not sent her into the tunnels with Edouard? Had I been alone, I might have acted then and there. Let the Quiet bring me back once more, if I was so vital to his cause.
And Lorian. Would he understand?
Would he even believe me?