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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

In Which a Crown of Empire Is Retrieved

Looking over Bruno and the sleeping Dolceti, a newly awakened Radmer feels—if grimly—the same vindication he did upon setting his boots on the beaches of Varna, after a fifty-hour tumble through cold vacuum. Crazy idea, yes, but here they are. Ten bodies poorer than they began, but still operational.

And there, in the distance, nestled among dunes as high as ten semaphore towers, lie the ruins of Manassa. He sees stone and brick walls jutting up, gray and black and ocher against the sand. More important, he sees the mirror-black sheen of inactive wellstone, alive with glints of green and purple and tarnished silver. It’s been a long time since he’s seen so much in one place, and it’s a good sign indeed; this deadly journey has not been in vain.

The dunes themselves are light brown in color, with patches of gray-black and khaki, and long, strange smudges of darker brown. They look like nothing so much as a pair of desert camouflage trousers out of some Old Modern war drama. The top of the dune field makes a clean line against the sky, not sinusoidal but irregular, ripply, dotted with shallow crests and peaks. It divides the world in two: brown underneath and achingly blue above.

By contrast, the first ridgeline of the Blood Mountains is jagged and chaotic with trees, with rocks, with a variety of grays and browns, dark greens and light greens. Behind that sits the eyewall, which reaches away to the north and south, wrapping around the Shanru Basin. A weak tornado, fifteen kilometers wide.

To the west, the ragged line of the Johnny Wang Uplift is lost in blue-white haze, with the eyewall behind it and evil-looking clouds boiling over the top, racing hard to the north. The ground between here and the Uplift is incredibly flat, broken only by the dune field itself.

Ah, my precious Lune, Radmer frets. He hasn’t seen this place since the Shattering, when the ground fell two hundred meters and the city burst like a melon. Almost no one got out alive. It looks now like a cork jammed too deep in its bottle and then left too long on the shelf, so that the resulting hollow has filled with dust. Disrupting the clean lines of his planette, his would-be masterpiece. If he’d had more time to track down and melt out seismic hotspots, that terrible day might never have come. He’d never had it in him to save the Queendom, but the Iridium Days, at least, might still be going strong if he’d managed the last years of Luna with greater finesse. Tamra had forbidden him from completing the crustal stabilization, yes, but that simply told him he should have begun it earlier. Somehow. He should have paid more attention to the news; he should have anticipated the need.

Or, alternatively, he could have mustered the resources of the post-Queendom era. With sufficient digging—and he knew where to dig—the worst of the pressure could still have been relieved, gradually and intentionally. Not all in one shot. The Shattering was his fault if it was anyone’s. Still, his punishment is fitting: to dwell forever in the ruins. Such is the fate of an immorbid people, as Rodenbeck had warned.

But Radmer learned long ago not to mope. It doesn’t help anything. He turns his mind instead to practical concerns: a fire, upon which a decent breakfast might finally be cooked. He begins gathering up bits of desert driftwood, strangely light and hard in his hands.

At the edges of the dune field, there are dead and dying trees. Also a few living ones that look recently half-buried, and some dead-and-mostly-buried ones looking as though the sand moved forward and swallowed them a long time ago. Here and there, thick roots and branches jut out of the sand like bones, with a solid, shiny feel that suggests they’re already partially fossilized. How long would it take to petrify wood in sands like these?

But the stuff burns well enough when he lays it in a pit, so he unfolds the little titanium grate he’s been carrying all these days, and places some hard biscuits and olives and fatbeans in a tray of water to soften them up for grilling.

Soon the smells of food are waking up the others, who rub their eyes, make faces at the scum and grit in their mouths.

“Am I dead?” the young Dolceti, Zuq, asks hopefully. He looks like a man badly hung over and ready to swear off the grape forever. His skin has gone purple-white, but that at least is a reaction to the brightness here; his body is attempting to reflect unwanted heat and UV.

“Not yet, I’m afraid. But with one of my breakfasts, you may be in luck. How’s your condition?”

“Not good,” Zuq answers, showing off a broken wrist.

And he’s not alone; of the ten Dolceti who’ve made it this far, nine are sporting some sort of major sprain or fracture. Splinting these becomes the first task of this day, which is already into late afternoon and will see the sun set in another twelve hours.

“Remember the war,” Radmer tells them solemnly, as Bruno de Towaji stirs, shakes the sand out of his hair, and finally rises. “Injured or not, you’re here to fight. You’re here to protect this man, Ako’i, while he rummages through yonder ruins.”

“We know our jobs,” Bordi answers solemnly. “We don’t need you to tell us.”

“Fair enough. But you do need breakfast.”

He dishes it hot into their waiting bowls, and for those who’ve lost their bowls along the way he plops it, steaming, into their bare hands. If it burns them, they don’t acknowledge it, but rather wolf it down, barely pausing to chew.


“I’ve been here before,” Bruno says while the others eat. His eyes are on the distant wellstone jutting up from the sand.

“In the Iridium Days?” Zuq asks, sounding, as always, like he just barely believes it.

Bruno snorts. “They weren’t called that until they were nearly over, lad. We had no name for that bitter time, when the Earth lay dying, chewed outward from its core by fragments of the murdered Nescog. Still, ‘iridium’ is a clever pun; someone back then had an acid sense of humor.”

“Because it sounds like Eridani?” Radmer asks.

Bruno coughs out a bitter laugh. “Not at all, lad. Think back to your chemistry lessons; think of a periodic table. Iridium is a member of the precious metals group, one step down from platinum and two down from gold. But it’s less shiny than either, and was never a favorite in coins or jewelry. In a value-of-metal sense, the phrase ‘Iridium Days’ falls somewhere between ‘Golden Age’ and ‘Iron Age.’ It’s a dark subtle irony for an era of decline.”

“Well,” says Zuq, “at least they kept a sense of humor.”

Bruno smiles down at the boy, who still looks to his eyes like an overgrown toddler. Not only is he short, but like all the “humans” he’s got that oversized coconut, those big questioning eyes. “You mightn’t say that if you were there.

“You did a lot of fighting?”

“Indeed, though not against an enemy you’d recognize. Oh, there were shooting wars here and there, but for the most part we had shamed ourselves into a kind of sorry truce. Even Doxar Bagelwipe was appalled at the scale of destruction. ‘So fragile after all,’ he said on his deathbed. The nerve!”

“So what did you fight?”

Bruno waves a hand. “Oh, you know. Gravity. Entropy. I spent a decade as a common laborer in the Bag Corps, trying to rescue as much mass as possible for the neutronium presses. Trying to turn the Earth into a constellation of planettes, so her people might have somewhere to flee to, even if they lacked the means. But they did lack the means, and so did we. Only two planettes were built down there in the gravity well, before the Earth collapsed into rainbows. I have no idea what’s become of them since. Uninhabited, presumably, or your people would know of them. Have you heard of a world called Ramadan? Or another called Open Hand?”

“I haven’t,” admits Zuq. Other voices mutter their agreement.

Bruno sighs. “No, I thought not. Alas. Before that I was involved in a project to revive select portions of the Nescog. Right here in Manassa, for almost a year. Someone had found an old fax machine, complete with network gates, and we snatched it from the hospital system and were trying to contact the last few nodes, before they went down. With that, you see, we could yank people right off the dying planets! But the tide was against us, all efforts in vain. Were there people who considered the situation normal? Even glorious? I never met them. For those who remembered the Queendom, its aftermath was a time of great sadness.”


“It got better later,” Radmer tells them both, as if apologizing. But Bruno is mostly right; the Iridium Days were never as roaring as the legends that adhered to them afterward. But neither, in his opinion, was the Queendom itself. He’d fought against it, been exiled from it, crawled back to it in defeat, and finally, toward the end, joined its upper echelons—a rich man with heady connections. He knew it better than Bruno did; knew it from up and down, from inside and out. And the simple fact was, the Tara and Toji of Luner mythology, with their Sphere Palace and their Great Bronze Navy and their “only as strong as the weakest among us,” were creatures out of fairy tale. He’d long ago stopped trying to reconcile them to any literal history.

But Bruno surprises him by saying, “Nothing lasts forever, my friend. Not even the bad.”

And what can Radmer say to that, who has seen his share of bad, and even a goodly slice of forever?

After breakfast, he leads Bruno up into the dune field for a closer look, taking Deceant Natan—the only uninjured Dolceti—along as bodyguard. Radmer doesn’t expect trouble, but he’s always prepared for it.

At the base of the hills, the dirt looks almost exactly like beach sand: a mix of white and brown and black grains, very small, interspersed with sharp bits of unweathered gravel that can’t have been here very long. And like an undisturbed beach or riverbed, the ground is covered with a ripply pattern of footprint-sized dunes. When he steps in the trough of one, he finds it squashing underfoot like a sponge. When he steps on the crest, it supports his weight for a moment and then slowly undergoes a kind of staged collapse. Squish squish crunch. It’s like this at every step, and it will take a lot of steps to carry them up to those ruins.

With a terraformer’s eye, he takes in the view ahead, admiring the way the sweep of the mountains has conspired with the swirl of the storm to gather so much dust in this quiet comer. The dune field is larger than the city it swallowed. In fact, Radmer can see now that the city must extend beyond the eastern side of the eyewall, into even greater ruin.

Still, surprisingly, the northeast faces of many dunes are lined with grass and other plants, particularly at the base, or the seam between dunes, and it strikes him suddenly that this is not so much a desert as a battleground, between the forces that build and move the dunes, and the forces that seek to smother them with plant life. It’s the terraforming drama itself, writ small.

Nor is this place particularly dry. Indeed, emerging from the base of a high dune, a little stream flows in bursts, with minor flash floods of water surging every twenty seconds or so. Gloo-OOP! Gloo-OOP! like a kind of geological clock, ticking away the empty millennia. Bruno pauses here, admiring.

“I should like to study this regularity,” he says, sounding wistful. “How do deep sand and shallow water conspire in this way? Tick, tock!”

But Radmer doesn’t have to remind him there’s a war on, with millions of lives hanging in the balance. Bruno watches four complete cycles, and then he’s off toward Manassa again, without prompting. It’s not an easy walk; after a while, the crumbly yielding softness of the sand fatigues the calf muscles, the ankles, the tendons along the top of the foot. Maybe a camel would feel at home on a surface like this, but few other creatures are adapted for it; Radmer is keenly aware that he’s a primate of seashore and savannah and forest. He can climb a rock or a tree without difficulty, but his evolution doesn’t know this place.

Still, they find their way. The crests of the dunes are almost like roads, extending for winding kilometers. On either side the dunes drop away into hollows a hundred meters deep. On the face of a dune, the undisturbed ground is a tiger-stripe pattern of brown and black, or beige and dark gray. The lighter sand seems to accumulate in the hollows, with the darker sand following along the ridgelines.

“Something to do with grain sizes?” he asks Bruno.

But the older man just shrugs. “A natural sorting mechanism, clearly. Weight, temperature, the stickiness of the grains . . . You’re the planet builder, I’m afraid. I can only guess.”

Anyway, for whatever reason, the vegetation and the lighter sand seem to occur mainly in the same places—streaks of white and green among the brown. Even though it’s technically winter, the long day has heated up the dark sand, which shimmers with mirages. Radmer is already thirsty again, and from the road-crest of a dune those cool colors beckon. And the roads don’t lead the right direction anyway; from here, straight on is straight down! But walking down the steep hillside is almost impossible; it invites one to run. Soon the three men are descending in great walloping giant’s steps, with the sand squeaking and groaning wherever their feet touch down. It’s hilarious and a little bit frightening, because the dune collapses with every step, and it seems to Radmer that the whole thing could easily bury them without a hiccup if they stumble. So they don’t.

The pale sand at the bottom of the ditch is very firm when his foot comes down straight on top of it. A sideways kick loosens it, though, revealing softer sand beneath. It appears, actually, to be a semisolid crust of larger particles sitting on top of a fluid of smaller ones. The trough is full of dried, dead vegetation, with mounds of light brown sand surrounding it.

He’s got to retract his thoughts about the lifelessness here, though, for on closer inspection he sees that the dunes are crisscrossed with little tracks. The shapes and even sizes of the footprints have been lost—blurred out by the shifting sand—and there’s no other clue to their identity. Ironically, the plants here in the trough look edible and even succulent: desert species of pea and rice and pepper, perfectly adapted to sucking moisture out of this environment.

He hasn’t seen a termite mound anywhere, but here in the trough he does see a few individual blue-on-clear specimens, carrying not only seeds and wood fragments but also the body of some larger insect he’s not sure he recognizes. Or perhaps it’s a little machine, not truly organic at all, and the termites will go hungry tonight. In any case it’s balanced along three blue-and-clear backs, and moving steadily toward whatever home the termites have here.

“Industrious and hungry,” says Bruno, looking down at the marching line, and Radmer can see how strange these engineered creatures must seem to him, who grew up on an Earth still mostly natural.

“Food for something else,” he counters, for ultimately that’s the only purpose any animal serves in this ecology. Or any ecology.

One set of animal tracks, clearly left by a kangaroo rat, consists of paired footprints, very small, with a linear drag mark between, as from a little tail. The footprints terminate in a fist-sized mound of undisturbed sand, and Conrad supposes the thing has buried itself there to wait out the day’s rising heat. In summer this place must be an oven! But Radmer can see, again with his terraformer’s eye—how a big, hungry creature like himself could make his living out here. Reaching an arm into the sand to pull out mice and lizards, garnishing them with desert rice and desert peas and cooking them over half-fossilized driftwood, with the woody, nutty taste of termites for dessert . . . The eye of the Stormlands would be hard-pressed to support a large population—as the empty city of Manassa can attest!—but there’s enough energy here to sustain a small band of frugal hermits.

Would it make them hard? Vicious?

“Keep your eyes open,” he suggests to Natan, quite unnecessarily since the Dolceti have no other job. “This place isn’t exactly lifeless.”

“If there’s boogeymen,” Natan agrees cheerfully, “I’ll hold ’em off.”

Radmer isn’t kidding, but neither is Natan, so he lets it go.

“There’s good clean air here,” Natan adds approvingly. “Nice for my allergies. Don’t worry yourself, General.”

Surprisingly, an hour later they’re only about halfway to the area Radmer has identified as the “top” of the dune field. If there are more and higher peaks behind those, he doesn’t want to know about it! But it seems they have arrived at the outskirts of Manassa; a corner of wellstone juts up half a meter from the sand.

“Declarant,” Radmer says to Bruno, pointing out the anomaly.

“Ah,” says the former king, rubbing his hands together. “Well, well. What have we here?” He kneels next to the object and brushes some of the sand away from it. “It’s dead, for starters, but so are a lot of things. Wake up, you!” And when that doesn’t work, he taps it forcefully, several times. “Hello? Activate!” This, at least, produces a brief flicker of color.

Bruno looks back at Radmer. “You used to know these things, Architect. Have you any ideas? It’s getting plenty of sunlight, so it should—”

This piece is getting plenty of sunlight,” Radmer says, and for a moment he sounds like Conrad Mursk, even to himself.

“Ah!” Bruno agrees, liking that answer quite a lot. “This piece is getting plenty of sunlight, but we have no way of knowing how far down the structure extends. It’s browning out! This little sliver may be attempting to power an entire building, yes? Or else it really is dead, but let’s start with what we know. Natan, will you break off a piece for me? This way, if you please, not that way.”

But it proves more difficult than he’d expected; against even dead wellstone, mere human strength is rather slight. But with swords and feet and a great deal of grunting and heaving, the three men manage to break off a shard that fits neatly into Bruno’s hand, with edges dull enough that Radmer doesn’t fear he’ll cut himself.

But still, the fragment refuses to respond with anything more than flickers of green and a faint, faint crackling noise. Finally, in exasperation Bruno says, “Listen, you, this is a Royal Override. Shut down all resident programs and boot up in command line mode.”

Strangely enough, that works. Yellow letters and numerals appear on the flat surface, and in another moment Bruno is tapping the shard with three fingers in rapid sequence, keying in a set of basic configuration commands. The thing, already shiny rainbow-black in his hands, turns the color of a solar tree: superabsorber black. Then it begins to change in more sophisticated ways; colors shoot along its length as it reconfigures itself, layer by nanoscopic layer.

“God’s eyes!” Natan curses, watching the fragment flicker and change. “I never quite believed in sorcerers!”

Bruno looks up in annoyance. “Eh? Is it sorcery to spill ink on a page? To rot an apple? To stand in the sun and turn your ‘human’ skin as white as milk? No? Then I’m no sorcerer, Deceant. This object is a tool, like a special sort of window glass. Nothing more.”

“So you say,” Natari mutters, looking as though he’d prefer to take a step or two backward. But this Older is his responsibility, through death or worse. He stands his ground. “But in the stories, it’s only Tara and Toji who can command the stones. ‘Roylovride,’ yeah, that’s the magic word.”

Bruno turns away in weary disappointment. “Believe what you like. I don’t suppose it matters.” To the fragment in his hand he says, “Run standard sensor package. Run any sensor package. Run sensor diagnostic.” Then, when these fail to work, he casts an annoyed look at Radmer and says, “Do you know anything about sensor design?”

And although Conrad Mursk did time in two different navies, in deep-space and deep-solar atmospheres—places where wellstone sensors were the difference between life and death—it never really rubbed off on him. He was remarkably bad at a remarkable number of things, which in the end is why he’s ended up here, why the world is the way it is.

“No,” says Radmer. “I wish I did.”

“Hmm. Well.” Bruno plops his ass down in the sand and peers at the fragment for several long minutes. “There’s information buried inside you,” he mutters to it at one point. “Libraries of it. You know things; you just don’t know you know them.”

He sits there, fumbling and muttering, for what seems like a long time. Then, finally, perhaps an hour after sitting down, he rises again and brushes the dust off himself.

“Have you got it working?” Radmer asks, trying not to sound weary or ungrateful.

“Not properly, no,” Bruno answers with obvious irritation. “I’m trying to map the city by composition, and it’s just not working. But I’ve located something that might make the job easier.”

“Yes? What’s that?”

“A working fax machine,” Bruno says, as though it isn’t good news at all.


As it turns out, the fax is located a kilometer and a half deeper into the dune field, where the free flow of sand is restricted by the presence of wellstone walls, running deep. And even to Radmer himself, it really does begin to seem that Bruno is a kind of sorcerer, for though he’s complained about the crude sketchplate in his hands—it isn’t working properly, it isn’t suitable, its library has been corrupted—he’s able to use it, somehow, to communicate with the dead wellstone all around him. Conrad Mursk had been an expert programmer in his day, and his particular specialty was in speaking to buildings, or pieces of buildings. But Conrad had merely been determined and lucky, which was not at all the same thing as being brilliant.

Now, Bruno walks out ahead of Radmer and Natan, and the dead wellstone in his wake turns to silver and gold, to impervium and marble and mother-of-pearl. There’s no real rhyme or reason to it, no master plan, no memory of how the city once looked. The King of Sol is just fooling around, putting the stuff through its paces, like a musician picking up a long-forgotten instrument. In truth the effect is kind of gaudy, kind of ugly. But it makes a world of difference in the appearance of the desert: no longer a ruin, no longer a dead city filled with sand, but a sleeping one, carefully preserved for later use.

The first problem comes when the fax machine turns out to be buried deep in the sand. When the men arrive at the designated spot, there isn’t even a building. There are wall fragments and even a bit of intact rooftop nearby, but the magic spot itself is just a basin of sand, featureless and apparently empty.

“Blast,” Bruno says, surveying the scene unhappily. But he isn’t daunted for long; within another minute he’s calling out instructions to the surrounding wellstone, forging connections between the intact pieces of building and the intact pieces of street far below. Soon the fragments are coming alive with circuit traces, white and gold and silver on black, and he’s murmuring to them, gesturing, and finally raising his beseeching arms into the air, more like a prophet or a druid than any conventional sort of scientist.

And the sand responds.

At first there’s just a hissing sound, and then a slight rumble underfoot, barely noticeable. Then Conrad’s hairs suddenly stand on end, his pistol and blitterstick rattle in their holsters, and there is a tangible jerk in the ground beneath his feet. Against the sides of the wellstone ruins, the sand begins flowing like water. Out, away, unburying this place. And in another few seconds these trickles are entraining more sand around them, becoming rivulets, streams, rapids. Radmer exchanges a glance with Natan, and the two of them step back, and back, and back some more. If Bruno needs protection in this place, it’s not a sort that they can provide. Soon, the dust is flying in geysers and there’s an excavation happening in real time, right before their eyes. The hole is rectangular, at least to the extent that the collapsing sand permits, and it’s three meters deep, then five, then ten. Radmer and Natan retreat farther. Then the hole widens, and they have to retreat some more. Within minutes, the top of a building is exposed. Then the whole top story, with the sand flowing away in rivers, crawling to higher ground and spilling down out of sight, into hollows somewhere, burying mice and lizards and desert peas.

Then, all at once, the sound and the movement stop. The sand neither rises nor falls. It doesn’t trickle back into the hole, and Radmer’s hair does not lie flat against his scalp. There is some sorcery at work here, still.

“It’s down there,” Bruno says, pointing quite unnecessarily into the pit. As if they could miss what happened there. As if they could be looking at anything else. The building fades from mirror-black to bronze, and Bruno says to it, in a somewhat louder voice, “Glass ceiling. Glass windows. Door.”

A double line of round portholes appears in the bronze, one of them surrounded by a rectangular seam, which parts from the material around it and swings inward on imaginary hinges. Bruno climbs down into the hole on sure, steady feet, as though he does this all the time. He follows the carpet of rigid sand right into the doorway itself, pausing at the threshold to look over his shoulder at Natan and Radmer. “Are you coming?” It’s very nearly a command.

Natan is looking frankly scared by all this, and Radmer can hardly blame him. He hasn’t seen a sight like this in thousands of years, or maybe ever. But he murmurs, “It’s all right. We’re in good hands.”

And Natan replies, “I’d fling myself into the great beyond for this man, too, in a sphere of brass or not. Suddenly I feel sorry for the Glimmer King. Isn’t that a funny thing?”

“Aye,” Radmer can only agree. And with that, they follow the ancient scarecrow of a man inside the ancient building.

The interior is surprisingly well lit. It’s an office of some sort, and the surfaces are immaculate—walls and floors and countertops, tables, the arms and seats and backs of wellstone chairs, supported by spindly structures that look, even to Conrad’s eye, as though they should have collapsed at the first puff of wind. The fax machine—a sight Radmer hasn’t seen since the Shattering, or nearly, stands against a far wall. Bruno walks right up to it as though he owns the place.

“Buffer status.”

And then, when that doesn’t work, “Royal Override. Reset all functions to factory nominal. Report the status of mass buffers. Report the status of memory buffers. Perform a full diagnostic, and stand by.”

The foggy, fractal surface of the print plate flickers for a moment, and then the walls around it come alive with diagrams, with scrolling lists of words and numbers, with a holographic table of the elements, annotated with a bar graph showing how much of each element is present in the machine at this particular time. It isn’t much.

“Fax,” Bruno says to it, “how are you feeling?”

“Very well, Your Majesty. It’s good to be functional again, for the first time in nineteen years.”

“Nineteen? Not two thousand?”

“I’m not sure why I said that, Sire. A glitch, I’m sure. Did I wake briefly, under the soil? Did some ray of invisible warmth find me for a moment? Long enough to reset my counters? If so, I’m honored to be reactivated now for more meaningful service, especially by one so eminent. Is there anything I can help you with?”

“Yes. Much.” Bruno runs his admiring fingers over the surface of the print plate, looking wistful and perhaps a bit sad. “I see from your diagnostic you have two human beings in your buffer. Optimized humans, bearing the unmistakable imprint of Queendom-era pattern filtration. I don’t recognize the names, but then again I wouldn’t expect to. There used to be so many people.”

“Shall I reinstantiate these two for you?” the fax machine asks, with no particular emotional emphasis. It doesn’t care one way or the other; it will simply obey the man it perceives as its king.

But Bruno shakes his head. “No, let them sleep. It’s more humane. But preserve them in your memory, fax machine. Let no misfortune befall them, if it’s within your power to prevent it. You are about to see some heavy use, and I’d prefer those patterns not be erased in the process. Is your library intact?”

“Alas, Sire, it is sorely degraded.”

“Have you any battle armor?”

“No.”

“Hmm. Have you ordinary spacesuits?”

“No, Sire. But I do have some police uniforms.”

“Ah. Well, that’s a starting point. I’m going to feed you material samples and provide some detailed specifications. We’re going to improvise.”

“It will be a pleasure, Sire.”

But Natan is striding forward now, the look on his face almost angry. “I’m remembering something from my classical literature, all of a sudden. That word, ‘ako’i.’ It isn’t a name at all. It’s an old term meaning, like, ‘professor’ or something.”

Bruno turns, looks over his shoulder. “You surprise me, Deceant. And you’re absolutely correct; Ako’i is not my name.”

Radmer is not accustomed to feeling like a spectator, but the two men have locked eyes, locked step in some ephemeral way, and he’s on the outside. He has nothing to say, nothing to add, no tasks to perform. He simply wants to see what these men will say next, what they’ll do. A sense of terrible importance hangs over the moment.

“Your name is Toji,” Natan accuses.

And Bruno smiles sadly. “No, that’s not it, either. But you’re very close.” He murmurs something to the fax machine, and a perfect diamond crown tumbles out into his waiting hand.


Bruno had never asked to be a king, and in many ways he’d felt himself wildly unsuited to the role. But he had learned how to play it, and more than that, to feel it. Because people could tell the difference between a leader who spoke from his heart, and one who was just going through the motions. He was an inventor, yes. A scientist and lover, yes. A father and a hermit and a failure, yes. But he was once a king as well, and he consequently understands the power of myth, to rally the spirits of men when cold reality’s at its grimmest. He has left Natan and Radmer behind, instructing them to gather raw material to feed the fax. He himself has other business.

And he’s young again! Immorbid! His black hair flowing almost to his shoulders, his black beard bristling, his veins coursing with élan vital! A medical-grade fax machine was a rarity indeed in the Iridium Days; this one may have been the last in all the world, in all the universe. Perhaps the very one he’d once employed himself, to seek the final remnants of the shattered Nescog. And he remembers with perfect clarity: by the end there had been no working collapsiters. He and Eustace Faxborn—newly widowed in some accident or other—had broadcast Royal Overrides in every band of the spectrum, had scoured the heavens for even the lowliest maintenance ping in response. But they had gathered only silence, and eventually the project had been shut down. So why are there packet acknowledgments—recent ones!—in the fax machine’s history file today? Why indeed?

His mind feels fresh. His scars and wounds have fallen away like hosed-off grime. He has designed himself a suit of Fall-era battle armor, and it fits him more perfectly then he could ever have dreamed or remembered. And with its impregnable power all around him, he feels like a king indeed, or more than a king, for the people of this world have never seen anything like him. He bounds across the dunes at a speed no mere human could sustain. He leaps and twirls, firing weapons into the ground for the sheer bleeding hell of it.

In no time at all he comes upon the wounded Dolceti, eight men and a woman huddled miserably in their hollow in the sand, and he alights among them, striking a pose that feels appropriate for the moment.

“We are successful, my friends,” he says to them through his suit’s loudspeakers. He’s tried the radio, too, but the Dolceti don’t have receivers, and anyway all the police channels seem to be drowning in interference, or in voices at such high volume that Bruno hears them only as noise. Why? From where? Is it some communication channel of the robot army? Is it something else entirely? He doesn’t know, and for the moment he doesn’t much care.

“Succor awaits,” he says to the Dolceti. “Walk into the dunes, into the ruins. Along the walls, there are flickering lights that will show you the way. Enter the top of the bronze tower, and speak with Radmer and Natan. There you’ll be healed. There you will be equipped with such armor and weapons as you’ve only heard of in stories. For the journey out of this place, and for all that follows afterward.”

But Bordi says to him, “The hair and skin look nice, sir. Truly, it’s a miracle. But you forget yourself, yes? You’re not in command here.”

“Are you sure?” says Bruno. “Then I’ll ask you, as a friend, to follow this recommendation. Time is short, and we have much to do.”

From his sprawled position on the ground, Zuq looks up at Bruno with a smirk. “God’s eyes, Ako’i, in that costume, with that hair and those eyebrows, you look like the King of Sol.”

And Bruno, sensing his moment, places the diamond crown atop the Gothic dome of his helmet, and says, “Your mother didn’t raise any fools, lad. That’s good. Now go, do as I say, and I’ll be with you shortly. I must tarry here awhile, to contemplate matters strategic.”

In fact, he needs to tarry here for a good bit of brooding—perhaps even tears—because all this has reminded him too much of his beloved Tamra, for whose smile he would gladly trade this world and all its people. Fortunately, no one is offering him that trade. No one ever will. The past is gone.

Unless perhaps some device could be constructed to interfere with it—an arc de commencer, so to speak. Bruno has never really wondered how such a device might be built, how it might operate, but perhaps now, with his mind restored to youthful vigor, is the time to give it some thought. Might he right the wrongs of his past, wiping this world’s very existence from the stage of history?

But the Dolceti—unaware of the apocalypse he so idly contemplates for them—are rising to their feet, appraising him with new eyes, weighing his stance and his words, murmuring quietly among themselves. It’s Bordi who breaks the moment, bowing his head and saying, “I always thought there was something funny about you. Now, at last, I understand. And what of the Queen?”

Bruno shakes his head. “If she were here . . . if she were here none of this would be happening. We used to say she had Royal Overrides for the human soul. But not the Eridanian one, alas.”

“Hmm. We owe you no fealty; you know that. You’re not our king. Or perhaps you are and always were, and your authority supersedes that of the Furies, or any other worldly power. It hardly matters, in this hour of doom. Can you save us from the armies of Astaroth? If not, then who could? I know a good bet when I see one, Sire. My sword is yours to command.”

To which Bruno answers, “Having seen your sword in action, Captain, I know full well the value you offer. Now look me in the eye and tell me you’ll fight bravely, for your world and your people.”

“You know I will.”

“Indeed. Now go.”

And they do, hauling their bodies up and limping off into the dune field, while Bruno sits his ass down to commence the aforementioned mope. He will not, he realizes now, tamper with the flow of time. Even if he could, even if he would, his very presence here in the ruins of Lune is evidence that he shan’t. Do people possess nerve endings which extend, in some ephemeral way, into the future? For even in this state of unnatural vigor, Bruno senses nothing ahead of him. He is immorbid, yes, but not immortal. He cannot imagine any future beyond the next few days.

Indeed, the hour is later than he’s thought, and the situation more dire, for as the disc of the sun slips behind the Stormlands’ eyewall to the west, over the vanishing silhouettes of the Dolceti, a bird calls out from the east, from somewhere among the scraggly trees clinging to the hills there.

ThooRAT!

ThooRAT!

Should omens be believed in this place? Bruno doesn’t know, but before another minute has passed he spies a trio of tattered figures approaching him from out of those same stony hills, from the teeth of the storm itself. There’s dust and worse raining down all around them.

Bruno calls up a sensory magnifier in the clear dome of his helmet, and scans these approaching figures in every spectrum he can think of. He’s expecting Dolceti stragglers, but in fact the newcomers are Olders. Familiar ones: Sidney Lyman and his lieutenants, Brian Romset and Nick Valdi. They look exhausted, battered, barely conscious after fighting their way through the eyewall and the raging storm beyond it. But they’re moving quickly and purposefully across the sand, because . . .

They’re being chased by two dozen gleaming robots.


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Framed