CHAPTER 63
HELA AND DIS
Our escort made no sound as we were led from the lab. They drifted along about us, forever circling, swarming like a shoal of silver-black fish. We were taken up another sloping lift and along a service corridor most unlike the halls of the palace. Those were square cut, finished in poured stone whose surfaces were daubed with primary colors, outlining paths that led to one location or the next. This was hexagonal in cross section, more in the style of the chambers in the laboratory, and I guessed that it had been built by Sagara himself, as the palace had been part of the original Mericanii construction, along with the subterranean domes of the city.
A wet wind greeted us when the door cycled open, and we stepped out into a black space, a cavern of inestimable size. All about us, the naked rock of Vorgossos loomed, gray and black veined with white. Pale lamps with iron posts illumined a metal platform that thrust out into darkness. There the lonely car of a tram waited, its magnetic track hanging from the roof of the cavern above.
“There is water here,” Ramanthanu said. “I can smell it.”
“Raka junnana suh,” I said, pointing down and out into the blackness. “It is far below. We’re above the city’s reservoir. The tunnels where we entered run right below it.” I repeated this information in Galstani for the others.
“Where are they taking us?” asked one of the legionnaires.
“To the heart of Vorgossos,” I said, reaching the tram platform. “To the house of Kharn Sagara.”
“His house . . . ?” Cassandra echoed.
I mounted the steps to the tram, found it exactly as I remembered. Desolate of any console, a thing of rude metal with benches running along the center of the car. I did not sit, but went to the rail, Cassandra beside me.
“You’ve been here before?” Cassandra asked, though it was not really a question.
“With your mother,” I said, though Valka had not taken that first trip across the sunless sea to where the true palace lay. I had gone to face Kharn Sagara alone then, escorted by the android, Yume. “Long ago.”
Cassandra hung her head. After a moment, she tapped the controls at wrist and neck to open her helm. The thing unfolded like the carapace of some ivory beetle, segments falling to reveal her shining face. Her eyes were red, and distant as the quasars. I laid a hand on her shoulder. After a moment, she said, “Those others . . . were they all . . . were they all really him?”
“So it seems,” I said, and squeezed her shoulder tight. Switching to Jaddian so as not to be understood by Daaxam and the legionnaires at least, I said, “You listen to me: We are going to get out of this, you and I.”
She turned shining eyes on me, reached up to tug the coif from her hair. She had wound her hair about her crown Jaddian fashion.
“Dora tutti lantahi?” she asked, sparing a glance for the xenobites as they crowded in behind us.
Where does it all end?
With light, I thought, and recalled that killing radiance I had seen filling all the universe, burning ships and moon and planets to something less than ash. With light and fire. Light and fire . . . and the destruction of the Cielcin.
All of this ran across the ridges and along the ravines of my mind, but I said only, “I wish I knew.”
“Don’t you?” she asked. “Know? Can’t you see the future?”
The tram had begun moving, gliding smooth and silently out over the waters, out into the night. I had seen the future. I had been there, and walked the streets of that dead and lonely city at the end of time. And yet it was not a certain thing, not a thing cast in stone. Even in Ragama’s day, nothing was certain.
“There is no future,” I said, unsettling the girl. “No one future. We are not prisoners of fate, Anaryan. I cannot say how this will end. But it will end. My story will end, and when it does, another will begin.” I touched her face, held her cheek in my gloved hand. “Your story. You will live your life in peace, in a galaxy made safe—if only for a time—from the Cielcin, from the Watchers, from people like this.” I looked round at the gondola, at the shoal of black-and-silver fishes swimming through the air alongside us. “This I promise you.”
“Ti-saem-gi wo!” cried one of the Cielcin. “There are lights ahead!”
Ours had not been a long journey. I turned from Cassandra’s face to peer out into the gloom. The scahari’s inhuman eyes saw more sharply in the black, had seen the lamps before I could.
But there they were, standing to either side of the overhead rail, gleaming from inverse towers of white stone. We passed between them, and I saw it at last, gleaming like a mirage in the light of those pale lamps: the great pyramid hanging from the roof of the cavern, its gate open like a vast mouth.
The rippling glow of light reflecting off unstill pools danced as we came to a halt within the antechamber. Black hangings I did not remember hung down from above, embroidered with the angular, undulating dragons of the style that so often decorated the Undying’s robes, and the single, weeping eye that was the emblem of Vorgossos.
A figure stood at the top of a short flight of steps, its slim silhouette framed in the monolithic square arch of the door. It was again the creature, Yume. One of it, at any rate. Its body was all of black metal and golden filigree, with here and there a panel of clear glass revealing the orichalcum machinery, the delicate gearworks and springs that clicked and turned to animate the daimon’s form. Its face was a masquerade mask of snowy white, with only the left eye cut out and surrounded in tracery of delicate gold.
“Lord Marlowe,” it said, “you are expected.”
I took the first step up toward the inhuman creature.
When Cassandra and the others made to follow, the golem said, “The others will remain here. My mistress will see you alone.”
I hesitated, looked back at my haggard companions. Cassandra shook her head.
The teardrop drones were even then circling above our heads, lenses pointed down, their threat made plain.
“If you hurt them—”
Yume spoke over me. “My mistress instructs me to tell you that you are in no position to make demands.”
“She can tell me herself,” I said, snarling at the machine. “I know you can hear me, Sagara!”
Totally unfazed, Yume said, “You will surrender your weapons.”
I turned to stare at the creature. “Why?”
“It is protocol.”
“Protocol . . . ” I rested a hand on the hilt of my sword, hesitating. Steadily I drew it from its hasp, held the ivory hilt on my palm for the machine to take. “Your master is afraid.”
The machine said nothing, but reached out with enameled hands to receive the scrimshawed hilt. A compartment opened in the golem’s chest, and it thrust the weapon inside.
“For safekeeping,” the creature said. “It will be returned.”
I said nothing, but turned and mounted the steps.
Fear is a poison.
I felt that poison in my veins, as cold as the dispholide had been burning.
I followed the golem from the platform in the antechamber up into the vestibule, along a columned hall and down the sloping stair toward the throne. All the while, a pair of Sagara’s drones swam after me, flanking me like captured asteroids.
The great wrought-iron doors slid open, their relief carvings of men and machines seeming to dance in the inconstant light. Thus I came at last to the throne of the Undying, and found it unchanged.
It was precisely as it had been when last I’d seen it. Precisely as it had been in the imitarium on Latarra. Dark and drear, its unseen roof supported by square columns of pale stone, its floor threaded and tangled with a mess of wires and cables, all flowing like bundled nerves toward the chair ahead. I had to pick my way through that tangle to reach the dais, where a slim figure slumped against the left arm.
“Strange, isn’t it?” asked the voice of the machine, speaking from the twin drones that bracketed me. “That fifteen thousand years should pass—almost without incident—but that in the last thousand, destruction should twice befall my house.”
The figure in the chair did not move. I was not sure she could.
Where Calen Harendotes had been a shining figure, an image of the solar masculine in all its shining glory—the figure on the throne was lunar, cold as the dark side of a moon. The body beneath her heavy robes of samite and cloth of gold was an insubstantial thing: a thing of skin and cord and bone. Her face was the face of a skeleton, her black eyes deep sunken, and more: They had gone blind.
I could not have guessed the age of the host, or why Kharn Sagara had not yet abandoned her. She might have been a girl of twenty, or a crone of twice twenty-times-twenty. The face, half-hid by curtains of tenebrous hair, was utterly ageless.
But it was undoubtedly the woman who had been called Suzuha.
She seemed little more now than a doll, a hollow-bodied mannequin whose strings were cut long ago. I half expected to find dust on those fine robes, were I to stroke them with a finger.
I had said nothing.
The woman spoke again in that false, inhuman voice, “Stranger still that on both occasions, you should be at the heart of things.” The black eyes of the doll on the throne shifted to look at me, narrowed only a fraction. “Do you not see now wherefore your coming is to us as the footsteps of doom?”
She said this last in Classical English, and I recognized the phrase.
“Tolkien,” I said.
Was that a smile on the corpse’s lips?
“You remain a man of letters, I see,” said she. “Have you come to kill me, Moros?”
I shook my head. Moros was the god of doom, brother to the Fates, son of Night herself to the old Achaeans. “It is not your doom that concerns me, Sagara,” I said. “But the doom of all mankind. The Cielcin have woken the Watchers. I have come for the Demiurge, as you knew I would.”
Harendotes had known, had spoken with Brethren before his exile. It stood to reason that this woman-self would know my mission as clearly as the man, and more, for the daimon, Brethren, remained in her power.
“You cannot defeat them,” said the lifeless body in the chair. “They are a part of reality itself. You would do as well to battle gravity.”
“Men have battled gravity for as long as we’ve been men,” I said. “But I am compelled to come here. I will not leave without the Demiurge. Without the Mericanii Archontics. I have my orders.”
“From your Emperor?” asked the Undying, still using the mechanical voice.
“From the Absolute,” I said, curious to see if Sagara recognized the name. She gave no sign, “from the Quiet. The . . . will that restored me to life.” Still somehow, I could not make myself say god.
A single beringed finger twitched. The machines spoke for their mistress. “You would deprive me of my best defense?”
“Give it to me,” I said, “and you will not need defense at all.”
The golem, Yume, had assumed an attentive post beside its mistress’s throne, hands tightly clasped before its sternum. The two drones that circled me had fallen into step beside one another, so that they made a pair of eyes in the air. All was calm a moment, and I heard the distant sound of fountains I could not see. I wondered if they existed at all, if the sound was not simply there to mask the silence of that echoing hall.
“You expect me to trust you, who has twice brought destruction down upon me?”
“What choice do you have?”
“You are unarmed. Defenseless. Your life is in my hands.”
“If you can take it.”
“And your daughter’s life?” The eyes narrowed yet again. “Can I take that, too?”
She had heard our conversation, of course, and deduced the nature of our relationship simply enough.
But I had expected the threat. “Kill me if you like—and all my companions with me. You will not leave here alive.” I did not panic, nor rage as the corpse-woman perhaps expected. “You are as mortal as you have ever been. You cannot broadcast your spirit offworld, and your brother has taken all your scions from you.”
“Has he?” Another finger twitched. “All of them?”
“It will not matter,” I said. “Kill me, and the fleet will burn this world to ash. Not a one of you will escape. Not you. Not your brother’s spawn. You will die here, Kharn Sagara, now and forever, unless you make peace.”
My left hand went to my belt, to Edouard’s pocket telegraph. Was it time for the final push?
“The Demiurge,” Sagara said, slumped against the arm of her chair. “My fleet will hold. The ship can defend itself. I have only to wait.”
She might at that. Even without direction from the Undying on Vorgossos, the vast ship was certain to be able to act on its own. It had daimons—it had, after all, been able to support itself somewhat after the death of the first Kharn Sagara I had known.
“And if you’re wrong?”
“You ask me to hand my one defense over to you,” she said, voice filling the air about me, “while an armada of Chantry Sentinels sits in wait above my planet! Do you take me for a fool?”
I said nothing to that, studying the still body of the woman in the chair. The skin on her hands and face looked almost plastinated, her whole body preserved by some arcane chemical process, supported by the hoses that snaked up under the hem of her robes.
“What have you done to yourself?” I asked.
She had pushed this incarnation to its limits, further even than had her predecessor. More than a thousand years of real time separated us from our last meeting, and she had clung to her mortal shell as any rat clings to flotsam, unwilling to let go.
“It is hard to die,” came the machine’s answer. “You’d think I’d have the trick of it by now.”
“This is no life,” I said. The woman was almost a living mummy, a phantom trapped in its own body, hardly able to move. That she had chosen such an existence for herself—when she might have easily adopted one of her scions’ flesh—baffled and fascinated me.
“On the contrary,” Kharn said. “I am more alive than you. I am in many places at once. In many bodies. In the drones speaking to you now, in the ones that remain with your daughter. I am in my servants, can go anywhere I please. Even now, I am hunting my brother’s by-blows in the palace above. I have killed seventeen since they fled my laboratory.”
“You’re afraid,” I said, ignoring her little speech. “Afraid of death.”
She had made herself a body nigh immune to time, left it in the heart of her dominion, casting her will, her image across the whole of her domain. Her earlier incarnation had possessed that ability at least, but he had not taken the preservation of his own flesh to this same unholy degree.
Only the black eyes moved. Sightless, still they found my face, directed by the machines that saw for her.
“You’re afraid of what comes after,” I said. “I know what you saw here. What the Mericanii found.” Those eyes grew wider, their milky blacks surrounded by white sclera. “And I know they killed it. Your brother-self would not say it plain, but they must have destroyed it. The Watcher they found. I know it can be done.”
One of Sagara’s customary silences began then, and I turned, hoping to find some artifact or piece of artwork on display for the deathless lord’s examination. There was nothing, nothing but bare pillars of pale stone receding toward those iron doors, the floors carpeted in cables and conduits. Yume was silent, immobile beside its lord.
“The Chantry will not destroy Vorgossos,” I said at length.
“So certain of that, are you?”
“Vorgossos was to go to the Latarrans after the victory,” I said, thinking of the battle still raging in orbit—the battle I could know nothing of. Was Lorian alive? Were Douro and Kedron? And the free captains? “To your brother.”
Nothing.
“He and the Emperor have an accord,” I said. “The Emperor has given him the lordship of all Norma. In return, your brother pledged his fleet to the war, and the means to track the Cielcin across the stars. The Chantry will not dare jeopardize that.”
A low, staccato sound reverberated from the drones in orbit around me, and presently I turned back, looked up at the woman in her high seat.
It was laughter, that dark sound like thunder. Again, that single finger moved.
“Track the Cielcin?” the Undying asked, echoing my words. “Is that what he told you?”
It was my turn for silence.
“Let me guess: He has developed a means for detecting telegraph transmissions—any telegraph transmission—in real time, at any distance? As proof, he offers the location of the various Cielcin hordes scattered across the galaxy. He promises to share this impossible invention with you, if you will but accede to his demands, all the while holding over your heads the implicit threat that all your communications are now laid bare . . . am I near the mark?”
When I did not reply, she laughed again: a noise like the shifting of great stones in the bowels of the earth. “Have you never wondered how it was that I could summon the Cielcin prince to our last meeting?”
The thought had occurred to me, but I’d had but little need to reflect upon it at the time.
“You gave it to them,” I said. “The means to communicate faster than light.”
“I have not always confined myself to Vorgossos,” said the Undying. “On one of my many adventures, I encountered a certain prince of the Cielcin . . . ”
“Dorayaica.”
“No,” said the black voice, simply. “Ours was the first meeting of our kinds. This was . . . a thousand years before Cressgard, before Echidna and your then-young Baron of Ashbless.” She meant Lord Cassian Powers. “Perhaps more than a thousand years. The centuries do run together, don’t they?”
“You built the Cielcin comms network?” I asked, incredulous.
“They were a scattered people. Divided. Aimless. I gave them the means to become great.”
The stone beneath my feet had become quicksand, and I was drowning.
Kharn Sagara made the Cielcin.
The thought echoed in my mind. He had found them: a few nomadic tribes, focusless and leaderless. He had given them technology, the means to link those increasingly disparate bands across the infinite night; given them the means to come together for the first time since Araxaika the Great and the last Aetavanni—perhaps since the reign of Elu. He had made the Cielcin an empire, a force to challenge ours.
“How is this possible?” I asked. “In a thousand years of fighting, we have never found a single telegraph. Not one.”
“The Cielcin are savages,” Kharn said. “They could not operate the machines themselves. I made them very simple, no larger than a coffin, each with its own enclosed power supply: a small antimatter reactor core. I told them that if one was to fall into the hands of the yukajjimn, that they would be able to use it to find the others . . . ”
“They destroyed them,” I said. But they could not have destroyed them all. Perhaps we had found one in the intervening years . . . found one and believed it the product of MINOS manufacture. “You installed a second telegraph in each one, one that connected to you here.”
“Yes,” Kharn said. “You do not seriously think I would offer such a thing without benefit to myself. I ensured that I would know where every one of their fleets was at all times. For my own safety.”
“And in return,” I said, “they built your engines. Dorayaica built them.”
“So my brother told you that much, at least,” she said.
“You tricked them,” I said. “You sold them the means to build an empire, but what you were really building was for yourself.”
“I have received their every transmission. Every message. Every threat. Everything they have said to one another on my machines since the beginning. I received the summons Dorayaica sent to all the princes. I heard him declare himself king, and sent my congratulations. He believes me one of his servants, a fiction I have allowed to persist.” More laughter. The milky, black eyes grew wide. “Sleep with the Devil, and then you must pay . . . ”
I could not believe it. “You could have given us this at any time,” I said. “We might have ended this war a thousand years ago, before it had a chance to truly begin. How many lives were lost because of your silence? Your caprice? How many billion lives?”
“I told you,” Kharn said, “when last you darkened my door: Mankind is nothing to me. The Cielcin are nothing. I have other concerns.”
“Your own immortal life.”
“I am as old as your civilization,” she said. “I was born in Omelah, on New Ithaca—a planet that no longer exists. I slew the last of the Mericanii, the true Mericanii, here on Vorgossos. I have warred with three of your Emperors across the ages—though that is forgotten. It was I who made first contact with the Cielcin. I am history, Marlowe. Should I be destroyed?”
Almost it seemed the cords winding about my feet were snakes, tendrils, tentacles under the command of the creature in the throne. “I should kill you,” I said, turning to look back over my shoulder. “How many billions?” I asked again. “Answer me that!”
“What are they measured against my one?” she asked.
I felt my blood begin to boil in my furnace heart, the old Marlowe rage, not destroyed by the Absolute’s transfiguration, but clarified. Where before it had been an all-consuming fire, it was then a beam of searing light, carving its way through my soul as sharply as the eyes of Calen Harendotes, a rod of light like Ragama’s blazing sword. I firmly grasped that rage, held it tight. At once, it seemed there was no air in the confines of my helm, and I pawed at the controls, freeing myself to breathe the cold, dry air of the hall.
Seeing that I was so overcome, the black laughter sounded once again, colder than anything I had heard pass the lips of the Monarch of Latarra.
“You have yourself come for the means to eradicate the Cielcin race,” the iron voice rang out, its demonic laughter continuing from devices other than the ones that spoke—a jangling discord, point and counterpoint. “You and I are the same.”
“We’re not the same,” I said, clutching my rage. Was I really going to let this creature live?
I advanced one lurching step toward the woman enthroned. Her twin drones scudded away from me, lenses flaring.
“Your face . . . ”
One of the two drones drifted from the other, breaking formation. It swam through the air toward me. I could hear it humming. Its glass eye peered into my face, aperture focusing.
“You are not Hadrian Marlowe,” said the mechanical voice. “Your face is different.”
The other Sagara had said the same thing. Precisely the same thing.
“I have come a long way to return to your hall,” I said, combing my hair free of my coif. It fell lank about my shoulders, still in the still air. “I will not leave until my task is done.”
“You cannot kill me!” she said in answer. “You have said as much yourself. You want my ship.”
“And you want to live,” I said, sparing a glance for the golem, Yume, whose hollow heart held my sword. “You said I had nothing to offer you but death. You are mistaken. There is a way out of this for you, if you will but take it.”
The finger twitched. Eyes narrowed. Irritation? Permission?
“Your brother is dead, but his people do not yet know. Take his body. Take his place. Declare victory. You can set his army against the others, trap them here, on Vorgossos.”
“Take his body?” the woman asked. The words came out small, crushed by surprise—as though the thought delighted and had not occurred to her.
“Who better to play the part of Kharn Sagara than Kharn Sagara?” I asked. “Claim Latarra for yourself. Keep Vorgossos. Give me the Demiurge.”
The drones resumed their formation, became a pair of eyes in an otherwise unseen and insubstantial face. I ignored them, held instead the watchless gaze of the undead woman’s clouded eyes.
“No.” The word fell like the White Sword. Again that black laughter sounded in the hall. “No, I want more.”
More? I took another step nearer the throne.
“You died,” she said. “Without synaptic kinesis. Without a neural lace, or a clone, or any praxis at all. I want that power. Eternal life.”
“I do not have that power,” I said.
I had been expecting the shot, saw the left drone’s eye gleam just as the eyes of mad Harendotes had gleamed. I knew my time had come. I had but a short instant to act.
On Dharan-Tun, Severine had said my brain processed time differently than those of other men, that I could perceive it with an acuity sharp enough at need to see the quantum perturbations of each instant. That was how I could collapse reality—change reality. You perhaps believe that there are many worlds, many Hadrians, many of you who read this page. There is only one, though that one may occupy a myriad of states. My vision was bounded—remains bounded—by my senses. I cannot affect what I do not see, or hear, or apprehend. A shot might take me by surprise, or assailant catch me unawares. A poison might have felled me once, or a virus cut me down. I cannot open locks whose mechanisms are concealed to me, or turn back time.
But I could still do the impossible.
It was a small matter to part the beam, as I had in the laboratory. I felt it burn past me, knowing my shields were already spent. The drone was right in front of me, a yard from my face.
My hand went to my sword.
On Akterumu, I’d seen a vision of my other selves, my other states—the Hadrians that never were. One had placed a sword into my hands. Now, I called one to me. Yume had taken my sword from me, concealed it in its chest. I had no way, no means of knowing it was there save memory.
Save faith.
I did not look down, did not check my holster to see if the ivory simurgh was there. I knew it would be. So long as I did not look, it would be there.
It was.
The blade kindled to a pale fire. Rose. Fell.
Both the Undying’s drones died in an instant, clattering lifeless to the floor. Yume lurched to get between me and its lord, but I hewed at the android, and its priceless body of gilding and glass and brass gears fell in ruins. I mounted the steps of Kharn’s dais, sword bright in my hands.
“Enough of your games!” I said, holding my blade mere inches from the lifeless woman’s face. “I know what you did with the blood you took from me. I know you failed. Your fellow sorcerers tried and failed. The men of Jadd tried and failed. Whatever I am is not written in my blood!” The woman in the chair hardly moved.
I reached down to my belt, and drew out Edouard’s telegraph. I held it before her milk-dark eyes, knowing my time had come at last. “See this,” I said, placing my thumb half an inch from the button that would transmit the lethal signal. “My men have placed sapping charges along the tunnel outside the Seventh Deep, beneath your reservoir.”
If my words left any impression on the half-dead creature before me, she gave no sign. In destroying the drones, had I robbed Kharn of her ears along with her eyes?
“I have but to press this button, and they will detonate, and drain the water from your lake. What will happen to your precious daimon, then?”
Those dead eyes turned but slowly, slowly peered into my face. A muscle—long disused—pulled in one stiff cheek. Lips parted, dry mouth forming a word hardly to be heard.
“No . . . ”
“Yes,” I said.
“No . . . ”
I was standing over her by then, the edge of my blade almost against her throat. As such, I could see the hoses running up under the hem of her robes, up her sleeves. Many were cables of braided glass, others sheathed in black. But as I looked down, I saw one—translucent—running red. Blood was being piped into the undead queen.
With terrible slowness, she turned her face to look up at me. “You . . . cannot . . . do . . . ”
“I will,” I said, “unless you surrender.”
But Kharn Sagara had one gambit left to play, one piece to bring out upon the board.
“Hadrian!” a voice—the voice—broke upon my universe once more.
For a moment, I had not recognized it: So familiar was it, and so impossible, that my mind had simply denied the possibility. Not taking my sword from the Undying’s throat, I looked up through eyes that were welling with tears before I understood why.
Unheard by me, the great iron doors had opened to admit a solitary figure. A woman. A woman flanked by three more of Kharn’s drones. Seeing her, I froze, hardly daring to move, fearing that to move would be to awaken from the dream I had not known I was experiencing.
For surely it was but in dream that we would meet again.
Kharn Sagara had dressed her in gauzy black, arrayed her like one of the Naiads. She wore nothing but a loincloth and a balconette to bind her breasts. Narrow strips of fabric hung from her waist both front and back, forming a kind of sarong that fell almost to her unshod feet, leaving the swell of her broad hips exposed. Her hair was long, and bound by a net of pearl and crystal, save where a single, lengthy tress ran curling from forelock along the right side of her face to her bared navel.
There exists no word for the color of that hair: so deep a red it appeared black in all but the brightest light. Dark charcoal painted the lids of her eyes. Her lips were red, and her face . . . any aesthete of the Imperium might have enumerated her imperfections, saying she was too much of too many things.
But not to me.
To me, she was everything—had been everything.
Vision blurred by grief and joy and terror all, I let my sword fall from Kharn’s throat—as she no doubt intended.
“You . . . ” I tried to speak, took one halting step down the dais toward her. “I . . . how?”
It was Valka.