CHAPTER 34
LAST APOSTOL AND LEAST
The ship hung above the landing field like the egg sac of some spider immeasurably huge and swollen, mirror-black and shining in Forum’s pale sun. Far larger than any typical landing vessel it was, perhaps ten stories from belly to crown and half at least as broad, an oblate spheroid that both drank and spat up the light.
“I’ve never seen anything like it!” Cassandra said, voice hushed at my side.
Neema shaded his eyes.
We had been permitted—the three of us—to join Aurelian’s welcoming party, to watch from the sidelines as the aging Prince Chancellor greeted the apostol sent by the Extrasolarian Monarch. The prince himself stood at the center of the stage, surrounded by aides and by the men of the Martian Guard. Certain of his siblings sat in stands behind him, Selene among them. We had been placed to one side, been made to stand among the visiting dignitaries and assembled worthies of the Imperial court.
I placed my dark glasses on my nose and looked up into the long-enduring day, and as I watched the great egg extruded three landing legs like buttressed towers from equidistant points about its circumference. Black feet—tripartite themselves—hinged open as the vast cosmic egg sank on thrumming repulsors. Nowhere was there sign of windows, or line or door. Nowhere did I see the bristle of instrumentation or the swell of guns. But for those extruded, buttressed legs, the vessel was smooth and perfect.
Still, one felt its weight as those legs buckled, pneumatics hissing as they took the load.
Off to one side, a martial band—ordinary legionnaires, not Martians—struck up the Imperial anthem, the notes of the guitar and string section carried on the afternoon wind, bringing with it the air of history turning.
The whole Imperial universe was turning that bright and windy day. Changing.
For the better? For the worse?
Never before had an emissary of the Extrasolarians flown to Forum under a flag of truce, nor been accepted with open arms in the full light of day. One might sense the anticipation in that air, an almost static bite, a tension in every jaw. The Extras were monsters, the creatures every mother used to frighten their children.
I found myself thinking of Ganelon, of the laboratory there, of the black tower where the Elect-Masters of MINOS had gathered like witches to decide the doom of man. This Lord Harendotes had treated with them, and if Aurelian was to be believed, Legion Intelligence had tried to have the Monarch assassinated—and yet here they were, come as friends.
It was better, I knew, that they should stand beside us than against, yet still my hand went to my sword, fingers tight on the ivory grip as though it were a cane, a prop to support me, an anchor in a world gone mad. Had things truly grown so desperate?
I knew they had.
Yet every instinct—honed by centuries of experience, of battles at Vorgossos and Arae, at Berenike and Padmurak, at Ganelon and Perfugium—screamed that I should not drop my guard. I could feel a similar tension in the soldiers, knew that the muzzles of turret guns unseen in the splendorous towers about the landing field were trained upon the enemy.
A crack formed an upside-down U along the bottom of the cosmic egg, gleaming with white light. A vast ramp unfolded smoothly, pneumatics hissing as great pistons lowered it to the tarmac. Beside me, Cassandra craned her neck to see.
A cadre of guardsmen in mirror-black advanced, each carrying an energy-lance whose head flashed with blue fire. Their faces were hidden behind helms black as their armor, hod shaped, with a lip above the faceplate and a short flange over the ears. False eyes—twin circles of golden light—gleamed from every faceplate. Gold stripes ran along the arms, and a golden falcon shone on each breastplate.
The emblem of the Monarch.
Behind them came a motley assemblage of the horrors of backspace. A creature that recalled the pilot, Nazarreno—a silver sphere with a single red eye at its center—stalked out on a dozen iron tentacles, followed by a goliath machine that strode on all fours like an ape and the same gimlet-eyed floating infant I had seen at Ganelon. These were Exalted, once-men who had abstracted their shapes, sacrificed the greater part of their flesh and their humanity to achieve some inward desire. Some inward sense of self or beauty, or higher function. Behind these came six men carrying a palanquin upon which was nestled a sphere of clear glass, a tank in whose greenish liquid was suspended a human brain swollen so large no skull could contain it, its surface studded with bits of dark machinery.
Last of all, there came a dozen or so men—and women, too—in black tunics and high black boots. They wore the same hod helmets upon their heads, sans the faceplates with the glowing eyes. Each carried a highmatter sword on his or her right hip, matching hilts of electrum and black leather, the gold falcon of the monarch embroidered above each heart.
And behind them . . . last of all . . .
“Abba?” Cassandra had sensed the shock in me.
“It’s not possible!” I said. Wonder took me then, wonder . . . and great joy.
At the rear of the strange column, dressed in fashion like these other officers but with no helmet upon his white head, came a man smaller than the rest. No taller than a child was he, slim and slight of frame.
Yet he was a giant to me.
The little man carried a cane in the crook of one arm, but he did not lean upon it as he had so often done when I had known him. Indeed, he walked straighter than I had ever seen, with shoulders thrown back and head held high. His white hair—so short when last I’d seen him—had grown long again, and hung in a lank cord at one shoulder. A tall woman marched beside him. She was nearly so pale as he, and carried her helmet under one arm, exposing a short halo of golden hair cut so short it might have been a boy’s.
“It’s not possible,” I breathed once more, watching his guard halt and salute the Prince Chancellor on the receiving platform.
“Abba?”
“How does he do it?”
“Do what, sir?” Neema asked.
I had thought never to see him again.
He should have been on Belusha, had gone to Belusha in my stead.
His guard halted below the stand and saluted the Prince Chancellor and the assembled dignitaries with raised lances and unkindled swords. The woman beside the apostol ordered them to ease, and the white-haired man—like a wizened child—advanced to the fore and did not bow.
“I bring greetings from my royal master, His Majesty, Calen, Son of Ausar of the House Harendotes, by Merit and Will to Power, Supreme Monarch of the Realm and Worlds of Latarra, Conqueror of Ashklam, Prince of Monmara and Prince-Protector of the Norman Stars!”
I could almost feel the Norman delegation bristle at the sound of that clear voice, and looked to the block of clergymen—a sea of black and white—that dominated the left flank of the stand behind Aurelian. I felt I could sense their terror, and their fury at the sight of the two Exalted and of the swollen brain in its tank.
Still, the suspicion I had felt and the sense of foreboding were gone, banished by the appearance of that slight and bloodless-seeming little man.
The apostol spoke clearly, in the formal cadence expected of such an emissary. “I am . . . ”
“Lorian . . . ” I whispered the name.
I felt Cassandra turn sharply to look at me, heard her whispered, “What?”
“I am Lorian Aristedes, Commandant General of the Monarch’s Grand Army.”
A murmur went through the crowd at this pronouncement. His name was known.
“Lorian?” Cassandra hissed at me. “Your Lorian?”
I nodded.
“What is he doing at the head of an Extrasolarian army?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” I said.
Another time . . .
I longed to shove the men before me aside, to hurry onto the tarmac before the receiving stand and make my presence known to the man who was—who had been—my last true friend.
But Lorian was speaking. “I am joined by the Exalted Captains Eidhin, Zelaz, and Archambault,” he gestured at the three chimeras, the ape-man, the floating dwarf, and the many-armed cyclops. “As well as by His Cognizance, Prytanis, Preceptor of the Order of the Seekers After the First Truth.” He indicated the swollen brain and its robed attendants. Lorian leaned upon his gold-headed cane. From my vantage point far to one side, I could see his pointed profile. Black lines like veins webbed his chalk-white face.
Aurelian raised a hand in greeting. “Be welcome to the Eternal City, Commandant General, captains, preceptor. I am Aurelian, Prince Chancellor of the Sollan Empire and son of our lord, His Radiance William of the Aventine. I regret that His Radiance is not here to greet you in person. He is fighting in the provinces.”
“As is my own royal master,” said Lorian, smiling. “It falls to us to make a peace.”
“Yes, indeed!” the Prince Chancellor agreed. The scholiast that stood at his left hand leaned to whisper in his ear. Aurelian listened, nodded. “Forgive me, Commandant General. Are you not the same Lorian Aristedes who was once a companion of Lord Hadrian Marlowe?”
Lorian stood a little straighter, and in a voice much smaller than the one he’d used to make his official pronouncements moments before, he said, “I have that honor.”
A ripple ran through the crowd of onlooking courtiers, and those nearest me turned to look.
“How come you into the Monarch’s service?” Aurelian asked.
Lorian smiled. “I got a better offer.” No reference to Belusha, no greater explanation. Apparently eager to forge ahead, Aristedes said, “My royal master has prepared a gift for you.” He touched a comms patch behind one ear, and on command more of his armored soldiery appeared, great round eyes gleaming in their black-masked faces, leading a float-sledge draped in a black tarpaulin. The mass beneath it was shapeless and irregular, as if it held mere mounded earth.
The Martians on guard about the landing field tensed, lances at the ready. But the Extrasolarians moved carefully, guided the sledge down the ramp until it rested on the open space behind Lorian.
“At Eragassa, the Grand Army won a great battle against the forces of the Pale. We smashed nine of their worldships, and liberated the people of Eragassa itself.”
I wondered if Turan Achlae was yet present, and what the snarling triumvir might have thought at Lorian’s use of the word liberated. For my part, I still could not believe he was there.
How had he escaped Belusha? No one had escaped Belusha, not in all its history.
I should not have underestimated him.
Lorian seized the hem of the black tarpaulin and pulled. The cloth slid smoothly free—two of his soldiers hurried to help him. The rush of one collective indrawn breath joined the winds of Forum. For my part, I pressed forward a step.
The hulk that lay in ruins upon the sledge had been as large as a two-man flier. It had been larger in life, but the Extras had removed the six great legs that had projected from the bloated, white chassis. Its bristling turrets had likewise been removed, excised with the delicate care of a child pinching the legs off a spider one by one. The great, red-eyed forecastle that had been the chimera’s head was dark, hung from the square shoulders, a dead weight.
“This was their commander!” Lorian said, and slapped the hulk with his cane.
It was the vayadan-general Teyanu. It was Teyanu that had led me on the long march from the gates of Akterumu to the shrine of Miudanar’s skull. Several agonizing miles of gray sand and white faces, of blood and death.
“Aeta!” the Cielcin had cried, slinging filth and rotting meat at me as I staggered after the hulking general. “A king! A king!”
Of the six original slave-generals of the Prophet, but two remained.
That black day, when Dorayaica had sent Lorian to tell the Empire of my defeat, I had shouted after him, ordered him to avenge us. At the time, I had thought those would be my last words to the wider universe, the last words written in the record of my life.
Lorian had heeded me.
“A finger!” Lorian exclaimed, brandishing his cane as I had seen him do a thousand times. “A finger from the White Hand!” He held up his own digit for emphasis. “We took him when we broke his fleet.”
Aurelian moved to the edge of the platform, looked down on Lorian and on the wreck of General Teyanu. “This is indeed a princely gift,” he said. “And but a foretaste of what your master and we may do together.” He paused, letting his hands go to his sides. “This is a new day for mankind, the start—I hope—of peace between our Empire and the Extrasolarians.”
“There are no Extrasolarians, my prince,” Lorian said, cutting across the prince’s words so sharply I felt a pang of discomfort, then bemusement. “I speak only for the Monarch, the captains and the preceptor here speak for themselves, though they travel under my protection. They wish peace for their peoples as well.”
“My lord, this cannot be!” said Synarch Heraklonas. “This is too much! Demoniacs in Forum! Have you forgotten Earth?”
“I forget nothing, Holy Wisdom,” Aurelian said.
“What do you mean,” asked Lord Rand of the Council, “that there are no Extrasolarians?”
“Only that we are not a people,” Lorian replied levelly. “We are many peoples. As I say, I cannot speak for all. My royal master seeks that we become good neighbors. That is why he sends me. I was one of you, once. I stand between Empire and Monarchy. I am commanded to build a bridge.”
“We welcome this opportunity to improve relations between our peoples and the Empire,” said Prytanis, its flat, emotionless voice issuing from mechanisms in the casing that housed its swollen brain. “The Order of the Seekers After the First Truth do not desire war. We seek only to persist in contemplation of the Message and the Meaning of all.”
Aurelian looked to Lorian as one looks for a translation.
The Commandant General bowed. “The Seekers are eremites, a religious order. They desire adorator status.”
“And the Exalted?” Aurelian looked at Zelaz, Eidhin, and Archambault.
The massive machine-ape—Archambault, I thought he must be—thumped his armored barrel of a chest. “Trade. We wish trade with the utmien sollani,” he said. “You have much we need: Food. Fuel. There is much we have: Weapons. Fighting men. My ship, Two Dreams of Spring, is at your service. Ten thousand Exalted crewmen have I. Warriors all.”
“And I have twelve,” said the squidlike Eidhin. “My ship, the Enigma of Hours, will serve in the fighting, if you will grant us a writ of trade when the fighting is done.”
The one called Zelaz was silent.
The Enigma of Hours, I thought, studying Eidhin. The many-tentacled machine-man was the captain of the vessel that had spirited me to Vorgossos so many centuries before.
“We shall have terms,” Aurelian said. “We must discuss these matters in Council.”
“We must,” Lorian said. “My master demands you renounce all claim to the Norman stars. The Empire has lost its grip on the region, and is not like to regain it, with the Centaurus likewise devastated.”
Aurelian smiled. “What of the Norman Alliance?”
Lorian gestured, as if to throw something away.
“Can he be trusted?” I pushed my way through the ranks of men in front of me, until I stood just behind the shoulders of the Martians lined up to separate we onlookers from the Latarran embassy. “Your new king?”
Lorian Aristedes looked round, recognition dawning on his sharp and sallow face. Those colorless eyes of his widened with surprise to see me, and for a moment I thought he smiled—but the smile vanished as quickly as it had come. Black lines threaded Lorian’s face and neck, as though it were ink that flowed in his veins and not blood. Had he found treatment for his ills among their kind?
“Hadrian . . . ” The name escaped the little man in barely more than a whisper. “You’re . . . here?”
“Back in line, Lord Marlowe!” Aurelian said, and the Martians turned to lay hands on me.
“Can they truly be trusted?” I asked, more loudly still. “These Extras?”
The Martians shoved me back a pace, but I held my armsman’s gaze, searching that face for some sign, some subtle betrayal. Was he yet my man? My friend? Or were those black marks the outward sign of some inward perversion?
O Mother, deliver us, thought I, who did not believe.
“Hadrian,” Lorian said again, and looked away. Emotions I could not name warred behind his eyes. I saw them reflected in those watery spheres. Cold fires. “Yes. He can. They can be. I swear it.”
* * *
The reception done, the crowd disintegrated. The Martians moved like clockwork, and the Prince Chancellor and his family and the other high lords on the stand had been chivvied tidily to their shuttles, but the great mass of the onlookers and minor courtiers and civil servants dissolved as they returned to the port terminal and the trams that would convey them back to the city proper. We were among them—Cassandra, Neema, and myself—escorted by six of the Martian Guard.
We had reached the terminal complex, were passing under the pillars of a sweeping colonnade toward the iron stairs that led up to the tram platform when Cassandra asked, “What do you think the First Truth is?”
I told her I could not guess, told her truthfully that I had never heard of the Order of Seekers before.
“The commandant said they were eremites,” said Neema, speculatively. “One imagines they must contemplate the nature of reality, or of divinity itself, perhaps.”
“They believe our universe but a simulation generated by some immeasurably advanced race,” came a low, throaty voice.
A black-robed figure stepped from behind the bole of the nearest pillar. My hand went to my sword at once.
The woman that appeared wore the flowing black habit of the Chantry, a white sash about her slim waist, a white skullcap close-fitting her shaven head, cut about her ears to resemble the hairline.
“They believe their prophet discerned a structure in the background radiation of the Cataclysm that followed the First Cause,” she said. “The Seekers believe this is proof of the falsity of creation. They seek escape from it. That is why their high priests dispose of their bodies. They would dispose of their brains if they could, I think.”
“The Cielcin believe something similar,” I said.
“I know. Theirs is a dangerous heresy,” the woman said.
I offered a thin smile. The truth was, I agreed with her.
She had a symbol tattooed in the center of her forehead, a vertical line crossed three times by horizontals. It creased as her brows contracted. “Can you explain how it is that your man, Aristedes, has come to find himself in Extrasolarian employ?” she asked, bright eyes narrow as those of a cat.
“Perhaps you should ask him,” I said.
“He was sentenced to life on Belusha,” she said. “How did he escape?”
“I say again,” I shifted to place myself between Cassandra and this venomous clergywoman, “ask him.”
“Lorian Aristedes is your sworn armsman,” she continued, “it was he who conspired to free you from Imperial custody.”
In truth it had been a conspiracy between Lorian, Bassander Lin, and the Jaddian Prince Kaim, but Lorian had taken the fall. Lin was, as yet, still a commodore in the Imperial Navy, a knight and hero of the realm.
“He was,” I said, not denying it. “He did.”
“And now he appears at the head of the delegation from Latarra.”
I let my arms hang at my sides, studying the mark tattooed on the woman’s brow.
“You expect me to believe this is all coincidence?” she asked, raising one immaculately plucked eyebrow at the word coincidence.
“Woman, just who do you think you are?” Neema threw out his chest, stepped forward. “My master is—”
“The inquisitor knows full well who I am, Neema,” I said, glancing sidelong at my Martian escort. They had ceased to be men, had become statues, a part of the terminal’s furniture. They were studiously not present.
“Inquisitor?” The woman laughed, clasped taloned hands before her. “Inquisitor, indeed!” She cast her vision upward, as if searching for her god in the heavens. “Why have you come here? Why have you returned to Forum after so many decades in exile?”
“I was not given a choice,” I said. That was true enough.
The inquisitor who was not an inquisitor moved a little nearer, eyes questing over my face, taking in my graying hair, my scarred cheek and hands. “And yet no one seems to know why you have come back at all. I have watched you in Council. But for that incident with the Tavrosi grand admiral, you have been silent. One wonders what your purpose is here?”
“What incident with the grand admiral?” Cassandra asked.
“Aurelian has gone to great lengths to isolate you,” the woman continued.
“Not nearly great enough, it seems.” The whole of the terminal was empty. The Porta Prince Arthur was reserved for visiting dignitaries, for diplomats and Mandari corporate lobbyists, and so was not crowded like the other starports. Still, for even this part of it to stand empty . . . it was unthinkable. Dimly I had the sense that I had plunged into waters deep and black as space, and that the limb of some monstrous thing had brushed me in the dark, the barest appendage of some leviathan of unfathomable size. “Who are you?”
She hesitated, holding my gaze with an intensity I had rarely seen. “I am called Samek,” she said at last.
“That’s not a name,” I said in answer, recognizing the symbol on her brow at last. It was a letter. A very old letter. Not Greek. Hebrew? The part of me that spoke in Gibson’s voice shook its head, recalled the answer from ancient memory.
Phoenician.
It was a code, a designation, like A2.
She smiled a smile that transformed her face from a thing terrible and threatening into something almost lovely. The change was startling. “They said you were well lettered.”
“Well lettered, Samek? Is that a pun?”
She almost laughed, raised one taloned hand to cover her mouth after the fashion of Nipponese women. She was palatine, she had to be. All the high clergy were. “Samek, yes. Yes! Very good. I had not thought to like you, Lord Marlowe.”
“I wish I could say the feeling was mutual,” I said, acid in every word.
“You hate us, do you not?” Her laughter vanished as rapidly as it had come, her eyes—green as poison—hard as gemstones. I did not have to answer, and to do so at any rate was likely blasphemy. “Yet we serve a necessary function.”
I inclined my head just slightly. “You safeguard human nature.”
“Against the very beasts your friend, Aristedes, has brought to court.”
“We need the Extrasolarians,” I said. I did not say, I need Vorgossos.
“Perhaps,” she said, stepping well within the reach of my arms. “Whatever you and Commander Aristedes are planning . . . I will uncover it. You may depend on that.”
She wanted me to step away, wanted to intimidate me, to get me to embarrass myself by retreating even half a pace. Though she radiated menace like plutonium, she was smaller than me, and a woman, and so young. It was a man’s gambit, the sort of thing a rogue might do to a young squire in a winesink.
I was far too old for such games.
“When you do,” I said, “please tell me what it is. I honestly do not know.”
“A man may bury the truth, Lord Marlowe,” Samek said, “but he cannot break it.”
“You are trying to get me to admit something I do not know,” I said. “Until today, I believed Lorian Aristedes dead on Belusha.” I smiled the crooked Marlowe smile. “I know what you are, Samek. You’re of the Choir, aren’t you? A cantor?”
Her silence was all the answer I was like to get. Was that fear in the corner of her eyes? Or only the beginning of another smile? The Choir was the Chantry’s research organ, the college whose members researched the very technologies their laws forbade, the makers of the plagues and poisons the Inquisition held over the heads of disobedient lords and governors. The men and women of the Choir did not offer sacrifice in sanctum nor chant from the minarets at sundown. They were bureaucrats of the cloth, more magus than priest, shadowy figures swimming beneath the surface of Imperial consciousness.
I had never met one, had never thought to meet one.
Now I had.
“I always thought you lot never showed yourselves, kept to your ivory towers?” I said, glancing through the window at my right to where the Extrasolarians’ cosmic egg stood at anchor on the landing pad. “Lorian took you by surprise, too, didn’t he?” Still she had not retreated, and I stepped forward—little more than an inch, until almost her breast and mine touched. “Do you know what I think, Samek? I think you’re losing your grip. I think you panicked when Lorian Aristedes emerged from that ship, and I think that’s why you’re here.”
Samek’s smile returned, and to her credit she did not retreat. “You think you are above judgement, Lord Marlowe,” she said. “You think the Emperor’s pardon a shield. But there are those of us who would shield him even from himself. He has always been blind when it comes to you, but our eyes are unclouded.” She did extricate herself then, drawing back a step. “We are watching you, my lord.”
The leviathan turned with her, swimming away into the blind dark. I watched her go, black robes rippling through the gray shadows cast by those white pillars—a forest of palest stone. The fishermen of every world swear by the presence of monsters in the deep, monsters that burst and shrivel without the titanic pressures that accompany great depth, that die if they swim too close to the light.
The leviathan surfaces only as it dies.
And I would die with it.