QUEEN AMID ASHES
Christopher Ruocchio
For hundreds of years, the crusade against the alien Cielcin has gone on unending. The invaders have left devastation in their wake, razing entire planets, kidnapping billions. Unto this, Hadrian Marlowe, the man destined to end it all, the man they say cannot be killed. Newly made a knight of the Empire, his first true battle won, Hadrian is about to learn again that nothing is simple, and that the battle for justice and truth is a long and hideous thing....
CHAPTER 1
THE SUN IS HIGH . . .
The red light of battle still raked the sky as the wreck of inhuman ships turned to cinders upon the upper airs. Each streak of light—like the mark of a claw—left its smoldering wound upon the heavens as vessels burned and fell. They had never seen us coming. Ten years the Cielcin had besieged Thagura. Ten years they had hounded its millions, hunted them for sport, gathered them into camps, into ships for transport to the fleet that hung in orbit like a school of vampires and sucked the blood of the world.
We had traveled as fast as we could, but the space between stars is vast, and even the fastest dromonds of our fleet are not fast enough to bridge such distances. The locals had put up a fight, the ruins said that much. We had reports of survivors in the hinterlands, of towns gone underground, retreating into tunnels and caves Thagura’s first settlers had dwelt in before mankind brought air to that desert world. But of the capital? Of the city of Pseldona—Pseldona of the Hundred Gates, Pseldona of the Many Towers, Pseldona of the Rock?
Only the Rock remained. The Rock, and the broken bones of a few towers torn down and torched from orbit.
“’Tis an evil place, Hadrian,” Valka said, coming to my side. The winged shadows of our fliers cut the rusted soil like knives, made darker by the great burning of the fleet in orbit.
Unrolled like a carpet beneath us, the ruined city yawned: a black stain on that red world, its tumbled towers and white streets charred with plasma fire, the silicates fused to glass. The settlers had built her high upon knees of the Rock, terrace upon terrace, so that once her silver fountains and white halls rose above the desert sands. Brightly painted she once had been—the queen of the cities of Thagura—her houses blue and gold and white, her banners snapping in the desert air, and everywhere brimming green with date palms and olive groves.
No more.
I shook my head. “No,” I said, “evil has been done here.”
Would that I might have seen her in her flower, before the enemy came.
“Where’s our man?” asked Pallino, who had volunteered to captain my guard for this journey to the surface. Unlike Valka and myself, he had donned his helmet, the faceless ivory casque of an Imperial legionnaire, and carried his energy-lance in the crook of his right arm, its bladed head swaying as he moved, leaving the double column of our escort behind him. “Shouldn’t he be here?”
Again I shook my head. “They’ll have seen us descend,” I said, and pointed up the ruined path toward the Rock itself, to where the remains of the baroness’s palace moldered like the worn teeth of a fallen jaw. “Malyan’s people said they would make contact near the crag.”
“’Tis a miracle there’s anyone left alive at all,” said Valka, sweeping golden eyes over what remained of Pseldona.
It was her first time seeing anything of the terrors the enemy left in their wake. She had not come to the surface with me on Rustam, had not seen the black scar of the old city stretched for miles across the face of that far world, nor seen the squalor of the ship-city the survivors had built for themselves.
“But there are,” I said, as bracingly as I could manage. “You heard the transmission! The baroness is alive, and saved some of her people.” I hooked a thumb through my shield-belt, reassured myself that the hilt of my sword hung proper in its clasp. It would not do to dwell on what was lost. We were victorious! Our fleet—and our new flagship, the Tamerlane—had broken theirs in less than a day. Thagura was free, and though there was pain and loss and tears of grief, there would soon be tears of joy, and song, and hope as man rebuilded. And a new city would rise from the ashes of the old, and in time all that would remain of this destruction would be the tale of man’s endurance.
Clapping Pallino on the shoulder, I said, “Let’s move!” And raising my voice, I addressed the men of my guard. “Eyes forward, lads! Let’s make a proper show for the baroness!”
As one, my guard shifted their lances, the ceramic bayonets flashing in the red light of Thagura’s star. Gone were the red ceramics of the old uniform, the black tunics and blocky, foreign style. My Red Company had been transformed. What had begun as a mercenary outfit half my life before had been transmuted into an Imperial force. The brand with which the Emperor had anointed me his knight still seemed to rest upon my shoulder, its touch upon my brow like that of one of the seraphim of old—all flame.
I was a knight of the Empire, no longer a rebel, no longer just a boy. Nearly half my life I had quested for Vorgossos and peace. I had found Vorgossos only.
The Rock loomed above us. A great red dome of the living stone that towered thousands of feet above the sands of the Tagurine Erg. The Rock and the palace that crowned it had served House Malyan for generations, and though the palace was gone, the Rock remained, and the faces carved upon it. Thagura had been settled thousands of years before, and the nobiles who ruled over it had carved their likenesses a thousand feet high into the face the Rock itself. The relief images of Baron Aram Malyan and his son, Vahan, stood holding up the rim of the acropolis, their muscled bodies supporting the palace their family called home.
I had seen them as our fliers circled to land, but the sight of them still had not quite sunk in.
I had already traveled far in my forty years, had plumbed the depths of Vorgossos and knelt before Caesar himself in the Georgian Chapel of the Peronine Palace on Forum, but there is no shortage of wonders in creation, and the twin colossi carved into the face of the Rock were mighty indeed. How many hands had labored there, and for how many decades?
Still they had not fallen, though the palace above them was dust.
“Oro, sound the horn!” I called to the herald as we mounted the steps to the plaza that stretched beneath the feet of the colossi. Shattered masonry lay all around, and the lesser statues in the dry fountain lay broken. Old blood stained the tiles, and everywhere the signs of old violence glowed white hot for those with eyes to read.
The herald sounded his clarion, and the bright noise of that trumpet echoed and died on the breeze. There was nothing. No one.
“Black planet!” Pallino cursed, “It’s quiet.”
“There’s nothing left,” Valka agreed, and drew close beside me. “There aren’t even birds, do you see?”
She was right. We might have stood upon the surface of an airless, desert moon. A tall banner—a hundred feet high—swayed from one iron pillar at the corner of the square. White with three blue lions, the banner of House Malyan. All the world was still.
“Oro, again,” I said.
Again the trumpet sounded.
Bang!
A bolt of violet light struck the tiles of the square not a dozen feet from where I stood, and the trumpet blast died at once, choked off. My men reacted at once, swinging their lances from their parade holds to readiness as they crouched and searched for targets. I stepped forward, one hand slipping to the hilt of my unkindled sword, and shifted to place myself between Valka and the enemy.
“Hold your fire!” I shouted, and raised a hand.
It was the bolt of an energy-lance that had struck the tiles. The Cielcin did not use such lances, preferring to fight with scimitar and claw and the flying snakes that chewed men’s flesh and slavered blood as they flew from target to target.
“Show yourselves!” I called. “We are men like you!”
“If your herald blasts his horn again we’ll shoot him dead!” came a rough voice from the roof of the crumbled building that lined the far side of the square. “There may still be Pale about!”
Both hands raised then and visible, I stepped forward, black cloak snapping about my armored shoulders. “Look above you, friend! The battle is done!” I gestured—not unlike the colossi graven above us all—until I felt as though I held the burning heavens above me. “I am Lord Hadrian Marlowe, Knight-Victorian of the Empire. We have a gift for the baroness.”
“A gift?” the man repeated.
“I come to give her back her world!” I shouted. “Were you not told? The siege is lifted! I say again: the battle is done!”
In the silence that followed, Pallino muttered, “Bit slow, aren’t they?”
A man stepped out from the shadow of a second-story arch. He wore a dun greatcoat over his scratched white armor, but his bald head was bare, and though he wore a plasma rifle on a strap over one shoulder, he raised his hands to mirror mine. “Her ladyship said...but I did not dare believe!” The relief in his tone had an almost physical weight. “Ten years...Is it really over?”
“I have orders from the Emperor and Lord Hauptmann to bring the baroness to Marinus!” I said. “She must give her account to the Strategos, that we may determine what may be done to restore your world.”
The man shook his head, though whether in negation or disbelief I could not say. He rested one hand on the wall beside him, sagged as a man who has relieved himself of a terrible weight. Presently he shook himself. “Stand down, you men!” he said. From the ruined buildings all around, I felt more than heard the shifting of boots and swish of cloaks as men relaxed. My own men did likewise, settling back to rest.
A moment later, the bald captain emerged from the shadows of the building, tails of his coat flapping on the wind. Half a dozen men filtered out behind him, sans order, each man’s expression more hollow-eyed and hangdog than the last. The captain saluted, fist to breast as he bowed slightly. “I can’t believe it.”
“Were you not sent to greet us?”
“We were, aye, but still . . .” His eyes flickered to Valka at my side, and I knew how out of place she must look, a Tavrosi witch, golden-eyed and tattooed, the shoulders of her red jacket black-feathered and strange. “Ten years, lordship. You’re sure they’ve gone?”
I was growing tired of the man’s disbelief. “What’s your name, soldier?”
Coming back to himself, the fellow saluted again, fixed his eyes on a point over my shoulder. “Maro, sir. Vahan Maro. Captain of the lady’s guard . . .” At this he glanced around, taking in the haggard collection at his back. “What’s left of it.”
Vahan, I thought, glancing up at the colossus on the left, like the old baron.
I extended my hand. Maro looked at me a moment, surprised to find a lord of the Imperium so offering his hand like a common soldier. He took it only apprehensively. “Good to meet you, Captain,” I said, and nodded in a way that said we should proceed. “I am Hadrian Marlowe, as I say. This is my...” I stumbled, about to say the word paramour as I turned to gesture at Valka, and while it was so, I was not sure how she would take the label, and so said, “...companion. Valka Onderra of the Tavrosi.”
The man’s eyes widened. “A witch?”
“A doctor,” she said icily, using the Tavrosi word. Vechsrei.
I translated for the perplexed captain, and waved him forward. “Lead the way, Maro.”
They kept looking at the sky. I have never forgotten that. Stopping every dozen steps to glance at the clouds and the heavens where the enemy’s ruined fleet fell burning like so many prayer lanterns lit and let fly. Maro and his men led us toward the foot of the Aram’s colossus, where I spied the ruin of the huge lifts that ran up behind the statues to the top of the Rock. We did not climb up, but instead circled the inselberg and descended down a paved street where the barracks of the city guard stood carved into the foundations of the Rock on our left. The invaders had carved the round symbols of their speech in the stones with claws and the points of knives. Windows stood smashed, doors staved in.
“Lower city’s worse,” Maro said. “They didn’t burn up here by the Rock. They firebombed the whole city once it was clear they’d got all they were getting from it.”
“What of the rest of the planet?” Valka asked, hurrying along beside me.
Maro shook his head, but did not break stride. “We know they hit the other cities. Aramsa, Tagur, Port Reach, but we lost contact early on. The Cielcin tore down the satellite grid, and the hardlines were all cut in the bombing. We had the QET—that’s how we got to you—but we couldn’t raise anyone else on the planet. We could be all there is.”
Pallino cursed.
Raising a hand for quiet, I said, “There were forty million people on Thagura by the last census. They can’t all be gone.”
The captain shrugged. Up ahead on the left, the squarish shapes of the barracks buildings retreated farther into the overhang of red stone above, creating narrow streets that pierced the rock and led up and down narrow steps to hidden chambers within the lonely mountain. The heavy metal door of some hangar or motor pool stood shut and scarred, and farther along the path, I saw the thin shape of spears hammered into the earth at irregular intervals. Green banners—tattered and faded—flapped there tall and thin. I could not read the alien signs painted on them, but I knew the skulls that decorated their points were those of men.
The tired captain stopped before one narrow opening and turned back. “I know, lordship—and by Earth, I pray you’re right. But ten years is a long time. It may be some of the miners and the desert folk got away, or some of the lesser lords survived in other bunkers, but the cities?” He shook his head, then gestured down the passage. “It’s this way.”
The great lords of the Imperium had been digging tunnels since the days of the God Emperor. The dangers of inter-house warfare were never zero, and shielded or no, the great palaces and estates of the various barons, counts, dukes, and marquises were ever targets for orbital bombardment, whatever the Great Charter and the formal rules of war may say. There was hardly a palace beneath any of the Sollan Empire’s half a billion suns that did not possess something like the bunkers in which Gadar Malyan and her court found themselves. Some planets and castles possessed only the most rudimentary of boltholes—sufficient to sustain a lesser lord, his family, and a scarce dozen or more retainers—while others boasted a complex warren of tunnels from which a planet’s resistance might be directed. Still others were the palaces themselves, whole halls and galleries themselves all resided in darkness below the earth.
They were relics of an older time, when man battled man for honor and for gain. How prescient that need had been, and how fortunate. In preparing to battle ourselves, we had prepared for the invaders, for the Cielcin to sweep in from galactic north and lay waste to our many worlds.
Valka and I turned down the narrow way. Three of Maro’s men hurried on ahead, head-lamps illuminating the path as they reached the top of a winding stair that angled down. At the bottom, a pair of men in tan cloaks like Maro’s greeted us with curt nods, and from the way they saluted Maro I guessed they’d been left to hold the garret. The room itself was dark, and from what little I saw I guessed it had been an intake chamber of the sort one finds in the offices of urban prefects under every sun. It was not hard to imagine criminals dragged off the streets of Pseldona, hauled in to explain themselves to a prefect before being dragged down to lockup. I spied reinforced glass on the inner doors, and empty lockers—the doors twisted and strewn about the place—where once the effects of detainees were kept.
“The entrance to the bunker is through the dungeons?” I asked, somewhat surprised.
“No,” Maro answered. “Through the castellan’s offices. Through here.” He gestured, then turned back to his men. “Tilcho, Garan, you two stay here until my signal. It’s quiet out there, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been followed.”
“Aye, sir.”
Once we passed through the intake chamber, we followed Maro’s men along the ruined hall. It seemed there was nowhere the xenobites had not gotten, for here too were signs of looting and more rude graffiti.
When we hurried down another three levels by a spiral flight of stairs, Maro asked, “Is it true, lordship? What they say of you?”
I had passed Maro then, and flinched as though the man had rammed a dagger between my shoulder blades. Had the story reached even here?
Is it true you can’t be killed?
Valka’s golden eyes—artificial as they were, confections of metal and glass—glowed at me in the dimness, her face opened in concern. She had been there, had seen me die, had screamed as the inhuman Prince Aranata’s blade struck off my head. As had Pallino and a number of my guard. The story had begun to get out, of how I had simply appeared again, alive. Of how I had saved Valka and my people from the prince at the last moment.
Had the story reached so far already? Whispered from soldier to soldier as the legions traveled between the stars? No blade can cut the Devil down.
But Maro did not ask the dreadful question, instead he said, “Did you really kill one of their princes in single combat? The Cielcin, I mean.”
I felt my shoulders relax, and smiled. Valka smiled too and turned away. “Don’t believe everything you hear, Captain,” I said, smiling after her and glancing to Pallino, who had fought by my side. “I had help.”
“But you did kill one?”
“Aranata Otiolo,” I said, thoughts running back to that monstrous prince. Nearly eight feet tall and thin as Death, but broad-shouldered, with arms that reached its knees and horns long as daggers above its broad, white face. “Yes.”
The men about us whispered in surprise and admiration. In all the centuries of war between our two kinds, I was the first—the very first—to kill one of their princes face-to-face. Titus Hauptmann, Cassian Powers—the great heroes of the early Crusade—these had killed princes by the dozen, whole blood-clans, but they had done so with the fire of their guns, with atomics and armadas to outgun the sun itself for firepower. I alone had met such a lord of demons sword for sword.
I had lost.
And lived only because they had brought me back. The Quiet. The ancient beings whose ghosts I first encountered in the ruins on Emesh. They had handed me back my life, and I didn’t even know why.
“My lord?” Maro’s voice brought me back to the moment. “Through here.”
The castellan’s desk had been overturned, lay broken on the moldering carpet. A portrait of His Imperial Radiance, the Emperor William XXIII, hung slashed on one wall. Still I recognized the green eyes and fiery red hair of the man who had knighted me. The same portrait hung in duplicate in ten billion offices on a hundred million worlds. Torn books littered the ground, and smashed bits of quartz that had once held all manner of data.
One of Maro’s men circled the perimeter of the room, admiring the destruction. He made a warding gesture with both hands, first and last fingers extended to ward off evil. “Black planet, they got close.”
“But they didn’t find the door,” Maro said, unslinging his rifle. He pounded the butt of the weapon on the floor once, twice, three times. “Ciprian! Open the gate!”
A deep click resounded through the low, stone room, and an instant later the floor began to shake, and a terrible grinding filled the air and set my teeth on edge. A slit opened in the floor beneath where the desk had been, and two of Maro’s men hurried to fold back the rug to keep it from sagging into the fresh opening. Yellow sconces flickered to life, and a dirt-faced boy in ill-fitting white armor peered up at us from the bottom of the stairs.
“Is he the knight?” the boy asked, eyes wide as he looked at me.
“He is,” I said.
“You’ve come to save us!” he exclaimed. I guessed he must be Ciprian. “And the lady?”
I nodded, and looked to Maro.
The captain extended a hand. “After you.”
CHAPTER 2
THE BARONESS
Thus I bring you, Reader, through that hidden gate. Many times I would enter the underworld in our long war, and many times come to some catacomb, some deep-delved place dark and dank and stinking of desperation and unwashed men.
Many times.
But Thagura was the first. Though I had fought before—on Vorgossos, on Emesh—I had never come to so formal a theater of war. Our fight against Aranata beyond Vorgossos had not been planned; and on Emesh the enemy had surprised us, falling like fire from the sky. The Emperor had anointed me, created me as a knight, and though I chafed in my new station, I wore it proudly as I could. Thagura would anoint me again, a second baptism greater than the first. How many times would I stand in so dark a tunnel in the decades to come? On how many worlds?
I can name them all now, though as I followed the unwashed Ciprian I still believed I might count my battles on my fingers. I still hoped for peace, though I no longer knew how to achieve it. The boy who dreamed of peace on Delos long ago was dead, indeed, and though I bore his name and blood alike, I was not him. With every threshold we cross we become someone new, for every place is new, and every hour, and with every moment we are changed.
We may not step in the same river twice, nor with the same feet.
And I had stepped into the last redoubt of House Malyan upon Thagura, and doing so became a hero. The gallant rescuer, though it had been Captain Otavia Corvo and my officers who broke the siege in orbit, and not Lord Hadrian Marlowe. Gone was the boy—I say again—and in his place there strode a knight, young and tall and clad in black: Black of hair and cloak, his knife-edged face so pale it seemed to glow in the dimness, his witch-companion at his side.
“They’re here!” I heard a hoarse whisper, and saw a haggard face peer out from a side passage.
“Is it really over?” an old woman in the pale smock of a nurse appeared in another passage.
More faces flowered from doors left and right. Dark shadows showed beneath every eye, and nearly all had a gray pallor that spoke of want of sun. To judge young Ciprian by his age, I wondered if he had ever known the sun—or if he had, I wondered if he remembered it.
“Everybody stand clear!” Captain Maro proclaimed, joining me at the bottom of the steps. “He’s for the baroness!” Then he turned aside and spoke from the corner of his mouth. “Just the servants, lordship. My lady awaits in her chambers. This way!”
But before I could go another three paces, a young woman broke from one of the side passages and fell to her knees before Valka and me. She seized my ankle and kissed my polished boot. “Lord!” she said, looking up with shining eyes. “Earth bless and keep you, lord! Is it done? Are we free at last?”
At a sign from Maro, two of the Malyan soldiers seized the woman roughly and spurred her back whence she had come. “Get back!” said one.
“Hadrian!” Valka’s hand settled on my arm.
“Stand down, you men!” I exclaimed. “Leave her!”
The soldiers let her stumble against the wall, where she slid once more to her knees.
Maro moved to my side. “They were ordered not to speak to you, lordship.”
Taking him to mean this order was intended as a courtesy for me, I raised a hand. “It’s all right.” The woman peered up at me, one dark eye luminous through curtains of unwashed yellow hair.
“Lordship,” Maro said, “the baroness is waiting!”
Valka’s shadow moved on the wall as she shifted at my side, not speaking. Ignoring the captain, I went to the woman and dropped to one knee beside her. “Are you all right?”
She nodded. I tried to smile, knowing the expression was cold comfort when played across my satyr’s face. Brushing my black hair back, I said, “It’s almost over. The enemy is gone.” I touched her shoulder, and standing one more raised my voice so the gathered servants might all hear me, I said, “We have the driven the Pale back into the Dark! Their worldships have retreated, and their lesser vessels are burning now all across your skies!”
It was as if some dam broke, as if some taut, invisible cord were cut and loosed the breath from so many tortured lungs. The woman broke down and buried her face in her hands, her shoulders heaving.
“Lordship!” Something in Maro’s voice cracked as he took half a step toward me. I should have marked it then, and wondered, or felt the tension in his men, the way they bristled as the crowd clapped and cried aloud in joy and disbelief, but it was lost in the moment, as I turned from the serving girl and ducked my head.
“Lead on.”
There was a guard posted at the door to the baroness’s chambers: four men in the colors of House Malyan, their faces hid behind plates of blue ceramic. They stood aside as Maro approached, and the door behind them rolled aside, disappearing into a slot in the wall, rolling on huge gear teeth to admit us.
“Your men will wait here,” said Maro, gesturing to a side chamber.
“They will not,” Pallino said, stepping forward.
Addressing Pallino directly, Captain Maro said, “The baroness has ordered that this will be a private audience.” Pallino did not move. He might have been a statue, a suit of armor on display. Captain Maro blinked. “But you may accompany your master.”
Amusement flickered at the corner of Valka’s eyes.
Gone at once were the drab walls of painted stone, the floors of plain concrete. Gone were the ducts and stripes of wire mold bracketed to the arched ceiling. Gone were the open metal doors and unwashed faces. Tavrosi carpets lay thick on the floors before us, and the walls were minutely tiled. A dozen mosaicists had labored many months to decorate the walls with mandala designs in shades of blue and white and violet, with here and there a spark of red glass bright as gems.
A flight of stairs as ornately tiled descended beneath an oiled balustrade to a level below, and the reflected light of glowspheres dancing on water flowed up to meet us, catching on the tiles. So beautiful it was—and such a contrast—that my breath caught.
Hand steadying his weapon on its sling, Maro hurried down the stairs. I followed him, boots ringing as we descended into the central chamber, where a long, narrow pool of clear water stretched beneath marble caryatids whose crowns upheld the rock above.
“What the hell is this doing here?” Valka asked from my side, hissing the words in her native Panthai so as not to be understood.
I could only shake my head. What compulsion had so seized the lords of House Malyan that they had felt the need to place a thing in their underground shelter? Gold and porphyry gleamed at the base of the caryatids that supported the vaulted ceiling, and more mosaics—these showing the great Heroes of our Imperial past—decorated the vaults. I recognized an image of Prince Cyrus the Golden with his great sword and gilded mail, and one of Simeon clothed in red and seated on a stone.
Maro led us around the right of the great pool and up a short flight of steps to a balcony overlooking the water.
“This is him?” a rich voice wafted from a divan to greet us. “Enough, Ravi! Our hero is here!”
That the woman who rose from her cushioned seat was of the highest Imperial blood no man could deny. The porphyrogeneticists of the High College who had sculpted her for her parents from conception had lavished all their art upon her, for she was perfect as any of the statues that upheld the roof of that grotto—and almost as naked. Her eyes were twin chips of black jade, and her hair was like a cascade of fresh ink—dark even as my own. She sat up, arranging the translucent silks that draped her like faint shadows of evening, hardly concealing the creamy flesh beneath.
Perched then on the edge of her divan, the baroness extended one glittering hand. Lapis enamel coated each taloned nail, and the diamonds on each finger I felt must weigh on her. I stood a moment, stunned by the display and our circumstances. Of all the ways she might have greeted us...this?
Remembering himself a fraction too late, the woman’s cupbearer—a nobile boy of perhaps sixteen standard years—cleared his throat and said, “You stand before Her Excellency, the Lady Gadar Berhane Amtarra-Vaha Malyan VII, Baroness of Thagura, Archon of Pseldona Prefecture, and Lady of the Rock.”
I swept my gaze over the cupbearer. He was bare chested, and wore only a white cloth bound about his waist. Unable to keep a faint frown from my lips, I went to one knee. Taking the offered hand, I knelt and kissed the baroness’s signet ring. “Lady Malyan, I’ve come to give you back your world.”
Gadar Malyan withdrew her glittering appendage. She smelled of salt, and I guessed that she had been swimming in anticipation of our arrival. Standing, I drew back to a level with Valka and Pallino.
The baroness smiled lazily, staring up at me. “Hadrian Marlowe. I expected you would be taller!” Her tongue curled as she grinned. “It is an honor to meet you! We are gratified to learn the Emperor has sent his best at last!”
“The honor is mine, my lady,” I said, and fixed my eyes—as was the military custom—on a point over the lady’s shoulder. “The Emperor will be relieved to know that you survived.”
“Certainly he will,” she said, her grin freezing on that marble sculpture of a face, eyes gone hard as glass. “That no doubt is why he has left us to languish under the alien boot for so long. The sun is high, and the Emperor is far away, they say. But I thought Thagura counted for more in the Imperial books than this.”
I frowned at her. It was an old Mandari proverb she quoted at me, from an age when that people had emperors of their own, but she used it wrongly.
“I beg my lady’s pardon,” I said, and bowed my head, letting my confusion go. “We came as swiftly as we were able. We were at Monmara when we received our orders from the Solar Throne.”
“The Throne itself?” She brightened. “The Emperor himself ordered you to come?”
“Yes, my lady,” I said, eyes flickering to her face and away. A bead of water—or was it sweat?—was tracing its line down her white neck, and where it ran I glanced dutifully away from. The order had in truth come from from the Imperial Council, from the War Minister, Lord Bourbon, and the Director of Legion Intelligence. But let her believe as she liked. If believing the order had come direct from Caesar softened her disposition, that was just as well. “I have orders to bring you to Marinus to meet with Lord Hauptmann and the Viceroy. They wish a full report of what has transpired here.”
Gadar Malyan’s perfect lips twisted, but settled on a smile. “I will be able to tell my tale in person? To plead for my people?” She almost rose from the divan. “Are we to go now?”
“Not at once,” I said. “The Cielcin have been driven from orbit, but it may not yet be perfectly safe to move you. I wanted to ensure that you were safe and to put my men at your disposal. I have brought half a hundred of my men to help keep you safe until we are certain the system is secure.”
“And yourself?” she asked. “You are staying?”
Hooking my thumbs through my belt, I answered her. “I would hear what happened.”
“Yes, yes you must!” she said, her lazy smile returning. “Send your servants away, my lord. We haven’t much, but we shall make you as comfortable as we may. Will you not sit? Ravi! The wine!” She waved one bangled arm at a chair beside her divan.
I moved to accept her invitation, swept my cloak aside, but seeing there was no other chair near at hand for Valka, I asked if one might be brought.
Malyan’s face turned downward. “Are you not going to dismiss your servants?”
“I’m not his servant,” Valka snapped, angling her chin.
Eager to head off any incident, I raised my hands. “Lady Malyan, may I introduce Valka Onderra Vhad Edda. My companion.”
“Your companion?” Malyan’s eyes flickered from Valka’s face to mine. “Your concubine?”
“His paramour,” Valka corrected, using the very word I’d avoided with Captain Maro. I caught myself blinking at Valka in surprise. She had spent much of the years since Vorgossos in cryonic fugue, and though I had aged five years since she first had kissed me aboard the ship of Kharn Sagara, she had scarcely counted one, and so her admission surprised me, so cautious had she been to give our entanglements a name.
“Paramour, really?” Gadar Malyan reclined against the rest of the divan, breasts heaving beneath the gauzy shadow she wore as she accepted a goblet from her serving boy. Speaking round the rim of the glass, she inquired, “There’s a wife, then? I had not heard.”
Why were we talking about me? I looked from Valka to the baroness, back to Valka as she replied, finding her tongue before I could: “I am all.”
“I’m sure you are, dear,” Malyan said, black eyes taking Valka in. “I’m sure you are.”
Before Valka could conjure a reply, the boy Ravi approached with a chair from farther down the way and set it beside my own, so that Valka and I faced the lady as she reclined, raising her goblet for the boy to charge. He did so dutifully, and it was only as he did so that I marked the hollow quality and glassiness beneath the charcoal that rimmed his eyes. Like everyone in the vaults beneath the Malyans’ Rock—everyone except the baroness, it seemed—the boy was exhausted body and spirit. When he had finished with his mistress’s cup, he poured for Valka and myself before drawing back, his shoulders hunched.
“He is such a good boy,” the baroness said wistfully, gazing at her servant. “The last of his house, I daresay. His father, Lord Vyasa, was my archon down in Aramsa.”
Turning to look at the boy, I found his eyes were on me, hard as glass. “I am sorry,” I said, and to the baroness too I added, “We’d have come sooner if we could.”
“I know,” she said, and lifted the goblet to her lips. “But it is over, yes?”
“Yes,” I agreed, and tasted the wine. It was Kandarene, and red as arterial blood. No wine of Earth was ever so bright and violent a color. “Will you tell us what happened?”
The baroness set her goblet aside. “What is there to tell?” she said, adjusting the drape of her garment. “They overwhelmed us. They were in orbit before our deep system satellites flagged them. My captains told me the surveillance grid was ill-maintained.”
“Your man Maro said as much,” Valka said, eliciting a terse expression on the lady’s face.
“Did he?” Malyan asked, chewing her tongue. “Maro is very good. Very thorough.” She drummed her fingers against the bowl of her goblet. “But my fleet never stood a chance. The Cielcin outnumbered us five to one, I’m told—ship-for-ship—and their flagship! You can scarce imagine! There are moons about our outer planets that were smaller. We were fortunate Thagura does not have much by way of seas! We might have drowned, you know?”
Lady Gadar Malyan shifted where she sat, leaned forward to place her glass on the table between us in such a way that her shift fell open. She caught my eye in the fraction of a second my attention slipped, and smiled. Her own eyes flitted to Valka as she covered herself and sat up. “They besieged Pseldona that same day. Dropped...half a hundred landing towers on my city. Mother Earth alone knows how many of my people they made off with. My men were overmatched.”
“Is that when they burned the city?” I asked.
“Oh no! That . . .” She caught herself. “They burned it later. Their prince—Muzugara, I think his name was—sent a herald to order my surrender. I refused, of course. I can’t imagine my capture would have done much to dissuade his men from sacking my world.”
My fingers tightened on the goblet they held. Our swords shall play the orator for us.
When I had gone into the tunnels beneath Emesh to first confront our enemy, I had done so in the hope that I might reconcile our two kinds. As a boy on Delos, I had dreamed of traveling the stars, of seeing man’s dominion, and of meeting the xenobites that dwelt beyond and beneath us. Not just the Cielcin, but the Irchtani, the Cavaraad, the Umandh, and all the rest. I imagined that the war that plagued mankind and the Cielcin both was all a misunderstanding, that surely we could be made to coexist. That it was only human greed and human cruelty that kept us apart.
I was half right.
We are no angels, we men. But the Cielcin?
Too well I remembered the screams as Aranata and its men tore our captured crewmates limb from limb and feasted. When I closed my eyes to blot out Gadar Malyan’s failed and obvious attempt at seduction, I saw instead white, inhuman faces raised to watch me, red and smeared with gore.
Five years since Vorgossos. Five years and the nightmares had never quite stopped.
Aranata’s blade flashed at my neck.
Darkness.
“You’re quite right,” I told the lady. “There is no reasoning with them.”
When I opened my eyes, I found the baroness watching me with one eyebrow arched. “My fleet was lost. Every ship in orbit—nigh on every ship I had—was destroyed within the first month. Archon Vyasa and the lesser lords launched what resistance they could. Perhaps the exsul houses on the edge of the system came to our assistance, I don’t rightly know.”
“Perhaps they fled,” Valka said.
The baroness dismissed this with a gesture, neither denying nor allowing this. “We lost our satellites after the first sack of the city. Muzugara’s ships used them for target practice. For a time we communicated via the old hardlines, but those went out in the second year. We had the telegraph, only none of the in-system numbers answered. Not Vyasa, not Acre, not the exsuls. What could we do but wait?”
“Waiting seems to have suited you quite well.” Valka’s tongue cut the air like a razor, like highmatter.
I flashed a glare at her, but she didn’t seem to notice. Her eyes were on the baroness, who leaned back in surprise. “Perhaps you should consider a wife, my lord,” she said to me, ignoring Valka as one might a barking dog. I felt my own blood boil. “Your woman speaks above her station.”
If Gadar Malyan expected me to apologize for Valka, she was fated for disappointment. “She’s Tavrosi,” I said, an explanation—not an excuse.
“She is most uncouth,” Malyan said. “Though perhaps such wild blood has its merits.”
“That is quite enough, Baroness,” I said. The woman was palatine, and of higher rank than I, but I was a knight of the Royal Victorian Order, one of the Emperor’s own, and her liberator. “So the Cielcin firebombed the city?”
Malyan blinked, fetched her goblet, for a moment uncomprehending. “I...yes. In the second year. They took out the bastille sooner, and the palace, of course. A few other targets, but they spent their time harvesting the population. I gave orders to evacuate to the countryside as soon as they arrived, but I don’t know what good it did.”
“To the countryside?” I echoed. “To the desert, you mean?”
Malyan shrugged. “That is what countryside we have on Thagura.”
I clenched my jaw. Too many of the great lords of the Empire I have known have thought too little for the men and women in their charge. Only Caesar himself ever seemed to care, and perhaps a few, precious others. I never understood them, these men and women—like my own father—who viewed mankind not as man, as men and women, but as ants, as numbers on a balance sheet.
Pallino spared me the trouble of responding, for he hurried back up the steps whither he’d departed, boots ringing off the vaults above and the bare forms of the caryatids supporting them. “Had!” he said, forgetting formality in his haste. “Word from Corvo! They’ve pacified high orbit, but there’s evidence the Pale dug in near the pole! Corvo says there’s camps. Miles of camps!”
“Prisoner of war camps?” Valka asked, rising to her feet.
I felt my blood run cold despite the heat and the damp beside the pool. I had seen holographs taken at Cielcin war camps before, but only still images. The longhouses—tents, really—and the ill, starved people crowded into pens. The bodies and human refuse piling about the ankles of the living. Pestilence, famine, and death. I did not want to go, and knew I must.
My chiliarch nodded behind his faceless mask. “Most like. She’s launched an attack group to take the camps. They’ll be there in three hours.”
“Can we join them?” I asked, rising as well. “Is there time?”
“I thought you were staying!” the baroness objected. “Am I not to go with you?”
It was the boy who once had dreamed of peace that moved me. If my men took Cielcin prisoners, I might speak with them. If I could speak with them, I might find a way at peace, might repeat what I had done on Emesh—might use our prisoners to barter with Muzugara, somehow. If I could turn even one of their clans to our cause, it would be progress and proof that things could change, that the Crusade which had for four centuries racked the galaxy might end at last.
Drawing my cloak about my shoulders, I said, “Plans have changed, my lady. The enemy is still on your world. Pseldona may be safe, but I would not risk your safety. You must stay here until the security of your planet may be guaranteed.” To the room at large I said, “I will leave my guard with you, my lady. For your protection. Valka, Pallino.” I gestured, and without waiting to be dismissed, hurried to the steps.
“You’re not thinking of leaving me here, are you?” Pallino asked when we had returned to the hall. Maro had remained behind a moment in the wake of my sudden departure, no doubt consoling his lady for the rudeness of her rescuer.
Fearing we might be overheard, I took Pallino by the arm and leaned in. “There’s something amiss here, Pallino. The baroness is far too cavalier for a woman who lost her entire world.”
“Ten years ago,” Pallino said. “And being trapped down here so long’s enough to drive anyone a bit mad.”
“She was trying to seduce you,” Valka said, appearing between us. “You saw how she reacted to me.”
“Is she that desperate?” I could hear the wry grin in Pallino’s voice, and flashed him a look. It was not the time.
I could only shake my head. “Possibly she thinks her family is done for. With Thagura ruined, maybe she thinks throwing herself at me will save her. I don’t know. She could just be putting on a brave face, but circumstances have been so dire here for so long...I want you and the men to hold here and keep order. There’s bound to be a bit of unrest now these people know the end has come.”
“I don’t like it, Had. Sending you alone.” Pallino placed an arm on my shoulder.
“I’ll take the shuttle and link up with Corvo’s attack group. Did her message say who had the command? Crim?”
“Aye.”
CHAPTER 3
THE SATANIC MILL
Fires were already burning by the time our shuttle landed on the ice beyond the perimeter of the camps. So far to the north, the sun would not rise for years—so long were Thagura’s seasons—and the angry red of the broken Cielcin towers like a forest of malformed trees set the glaciers to gleaming like molten glass.
I had donned my helmet, and so could not smell the burning as the ramp lowered and I hurried down flanked by the two guards I’d allowed Pallino to send with Valka and myself from Pseldona. The unseen energy-curtain of my shield muffled sounds, but still the roar of engines overhead and the blast of weapons shamed any natural thunder I had ever heard.
Our frigate lay ahead, parked on the snows like some quiescent beetle beneath shields of its own. A small fleet of troop landers nestled about it, their holds emptied, snow trampled flat or melted away where our legions had passed. Through the smoke and swirling snow, I could make out the shapes of the rear guard dug in about the ramps with artillery gleaming at the ready.
“By damn, ’tis cold!” Valka swore. “We couldn’t have docked with the frigate direct?” She alone of the four of us was not armored, and the cloak she’d taken from the shuttle was hardly enough to keep out the cold.
“Not landed, ma’am,” said Oro, the senior of the two guards and the man who’d served as herald on our arrival. “She’s a Roc, that one. The holds are all along the ventral hull.”
“It isn’t far!” I said, wrapping an arm and my own cloak about her.
The four of us hurried across the snow. I had to resist the temptation to duck as lightercraft winged overhead. It would have done for the men to see the Halfmortal crouching like some backbench logothete afraid of fire. As we drew near the Roc, a trio of men hurried forward from an auxiliary ramp to greet us. Two were legionnaires in red and white, their faces hid. The other was a lieutenant in the blacks of a naval officer, one of the new men the Emperor had assigned me when he’d elevated me to the station of knighthood. She wore a white, fur-lined cloak over her greatcoat and held her matching red beret to her head to keep it from being blown off by the wind.
“It’s Bressia, isn’t it?” I said, relying on my suit’s amplification to boost my voice over the wind. I did not shout.
“Yes, my lord!” the lieutenant replied. “Lieutenant Commander Garone asked me to bring you to him! This way!”
No sooner had the words escaped her lips than a flash of violet light split the polar knight like a wedge, and overhead a line of our Sparrowhawk fliers tore toward the camp. One of the Cielcin siege towers—standing like the rockets of uttermost antiquity—had been trying to rise. The roaring we had all been shouting over was the distant fury of ignition as its great engines blazed. The Sparrowhawks’ beam weapon had found their mark, and for an instant I stood transfixed upon the snows as that dark tower fell back to ground amidst a nimbus of golden fire fretted red about the edges.
Bressia escorted us up the ramp and through the hold to the bridge, where Karim Garone had taken up command of the assault. Like most of my high officers, Crim had been a mercenary before casting his lot in with my Red Company. A Norman of Jaddian descent, he had spurned the blacks and silvers of the Imperial naval uniform and retained the braided dolman and bright tunic and trousers that were his custom. Even on the bridge of the Roc, he wore his shield-belt with its white ceramic saber and a bandoleer that glittered with knives.
His dark face brightened as Valka and I appeared, and he looked up through a holograph map of the field of battle.
“You made it, boss,” he said, straightening. “We’ve crippled what fleet they had. Bombed the landing field.”
I returned the commander’s lazy salute, ignored the momentary stiffness and quietude of the lesser officers in the command post. Many of them had never seen me before. Thagura was our first mission under the Imperial banner, and while the senior staff was composed of my people, the Normans who had fought for me at Vorgossos, the bulk of our personnel were Imperial levies, men and women assigned me by the Emperor when he gifted me the Tamerlane. Almost I felt their eyes crawling over me, examining every line of my face and of the black lorica and sculpted black armor that had been another gift from the Emperor.
“I saw your work,” I said.
Crim smiled. “Small good escape would have done them. Those siege towers aren’t warp-capable. If they’d gotten to orbit, they’d have had nowhere to go.”
Still I felt eyes on me, and glanced round at the junior men at their duty stations. In the brief silence I heard one whisper, “Halfmortal.”
I flashed a glare in his direction, and he turned hurriedly back to his work. Approaching Crim by the central podium where the map gleamed, I said, “What of the camps?”
“Petros took his chiliad around to the east,” Crim said, and pointed, highlighting where the Cielcin had erected a palisade of overlapping plates. Guard towers—more landed rockets, I deemed—stood at intervals along the wall. “Sword Flight’s hammering the towers.”
“When did you engage?” Valka asked, coming to my side.
Crim answered, “Three minutes past two, ship time.” I checked my wrist-terminal. That was nearly half an hour before.
“Gravitometers are showing huge pits bored into the ice beneath several of the buildings.” The commander gestured at a number of red-highlighted cylinders thrust deep into the glacier.
I heard Valka’s frown in her voice. “Geothermal sinks?”
“Maybe?” Crim replied. “If they are, they’re not lighting up on thermal imaging. Might be shielded.”
“Or something else entirely,” I said darkly, glancing from the projection to the thin stripe of window that ran along the forward wall of the bridge. Smoke rose in a mighty wave from the burning camp, and the firelight flooded through that horizontal slash of a window like blood from an open wound. “Are there captives?”
Crim followed my gaze. “I’m not sure. That’s why Sword Flight’s sticking to the towers. Dascalu and Ulpio took their chiliads straight forward, toward the south wall. Here.” Again he pointed, highlighting the alien palisade directly between the landed fleet and the camp proper. “They’re to keep the Pale from breaking through and taking a run at us. Petros is there—on the east as I said. One of the groups will get through. If there’s anyone still alive, we’ll find them.” He met my eye, and his face hardened until it seemed as stone as Aram’s colossus. “How was the city?”
“Gone,” I said. “The Pale blasted it from orbit. Atomics, maybe. Plasma. I’m not sure.”
“Noyn jitat.” Crim exhaled. “Earth rot their bones.”
Valka gripped the rail of the console podium. “Perhaps there are survivors.”
“We can hope!” Crim said, and wheeled round to stride up the central aisle toward the window and the spot where the helmsman’s and navigator’s stations stood, one hand on the hilt of his sword. “M. Irber! What of those towers?”
A dark-haired ensign at one of the tactical displays raised his voice in reply. “Just need a little more pressure and time, sir. There are seven on the eastern perimeter still firing. Sword Flight’s swinging round.”
Drumming his fingers against the hilt of his sword, Crim said, “Righteous.”
“Fifth Chiliad’s pinned down on the ice, though,” Irber continued. “Towers Twelve and Thirteen have clear lines of fire on their approach.”
“Raise First Sword,” Crim said, turning to join Irber by his console. “Order his wing to concentrate fire on those towers. I want Petros to have a clear line against those walls.”
Valka leaned toward me and asked, “First Sword?”
“The aquilarii,” I said, meaning the fliers. When we were but mercenaries in the Norman Expanse, we had had no air force of our own, no lighters. Though Valka had been a ship’s captain in her youth, that had been for the Tavros Orbital Guard, and their ways were not our own. “Their wing leader.”
While Irber relayed his orders to the wing commander, I brushed past the holograph podium and stalked toward the window. Another flash of violet light cracked the sky and bled its color on all creation.
My first real battle.
Not my first brush with violence. That had come in the streets of Meidua when I was young. Nor was it my first encounter with Death. She had visited my father’s house when I was just a boy, had taken my grandmother from me. For an instant, my eyes reflected in the smoky alumglass seemed to become her eyes, preserved forever in the blue fluid of the canopic jar I’d carried to our necropolis in her funeral train. And I had known war, had ventured beneath Emesh and into the bowels of Vorgossos—and into the howling Dark that awaits us all.
But I was a knight then, and at forty finally a man, though by rights my ephebeia ought to have happened half my life before. Before I had led of necessity, led because I alone possessed the pothos, the vision: my dream of peace. But that was—quite literally—another life. That dream had died with Aranata’s prisoners of war, and with me. On Thagura and after, I led because I needed to. I had a duty, and a purpose, and a mystery to solve.
Understanding why the Quiet had restored my life required that I serve the Emperor, for I knew the Emperor possessed knowledge of that ancient race, and that he alone might command his magi to illuminate me.
And I fought because it was right, or so I told myself, consoling myself while the screams of Aranata’s prisoners resounded in the vaults of my mind.
“Are you all right?”
Valka had come up beside me, was peering up into my face with her luminous yellow eyes. How strange it was—even then—to see softness on a face so long hardened and sharp as glass. We had not begun our acquaintance well. She had thought me simple, a barbarian, and despised me for it, as she had despised the Empire I called home. After so many years of coldness and disdain, seeing concern on her hard but lovely face was like returning for the first time to a place in spring that one has only ever known in winter.
“I’m fine,” I said, responding in her own tongue so we might not be overheard. “I’ve never really commanded an army before.”
“’Tis not so!” she said, smoothing the cloak over my shoulders. “You led the charge from the Schiavona. You saved all those people.”
I took her cold hand in my gloved one. “That was different.”
“’Twas not.”
“I didn’t have a choice, then. I didn’t have time to think about it.”
One corner of her mouth lifted in wry bemusement. “And now you have the time for thinking you are not so sure?”
A short laugh escaped me, and I looked round to see what eyes were on us. There were none. The helmsman’s station and the navigator’s were both empty with the ship grounded as it was. Another flash of violet cut the night, and the distant thunder boiled as the earth shook and Irber shouted, “That’s Tower Twelve!”
When I did not reply, she turned me fully to face her and leaned against the console. “These people’s lives are in my hands, Valka,” I said. “This planet is in my hands.”
“’Tis what you wanted, is it not?” she arched an eyebrow. “A purpose?”
What man is a man who wants less?
Or more.
She glared up at me, eyes truly glass, bright as crystal. Reaching out, I took her hand. “I wanted peace.”
“And if you can’t have it?”
I found I could no longer look her in the eye. I could not say what I was thinking. The words would not gel. Perhaps I had no words at all then. I have them now. There will always be peace. It is only a question of when. War is energy, and energy runs down. The universe returns to rest, and whether that rest comes without any conflict or after it is another matter entirely.
“We will have peace,” I said, and stooped to kiss her. She did not shy away.
I did not say, One way or another.
Smoke rose from the field like a swarm of locusts, like a shoal of black fish writhing before the diver. Crim and Valka had both objected when I announced my intentions to join our chiliads in the camp: Crim because his commandant should not risk his life in what still an active war zone, and Valka because I ordered her to stay behind.
“We have no armor for you!” I told her, though armor might perhaps be found aboard the frigate. In truth I could not risk her. Valka had been a soldier once—of a sort. But she had been a ship’s officer, and known only one battle—and that had been brief. What was more, but for our ill-fated adventure on Vorgossos, she had never known personal combat, never fought an enemy she could see. She had no experience leading men and fighting tooth and claw, blade-to-blade with the enemies of man.
The camp towers were like guttering torches staked about the camp. To our left—where the snowdrifts piled high against the palisade—one had fallen entirely, and the blue lightning of ruined circuitry spat in the frozen air.
Our shadows danced tall and shapeless on the red snows ahead as we hurried forward, cast by the great lamps on our landers. Crim had ordered thirty hoplites for my escort, and not far ahead a full century—mixed light and shielded infantry—hurried toward the shattered gates. The violet crash of hydrogen plasma and silent flash of beam weapons resounded ahead with the mingled cries of human and inhuman voices. The men around me might have been living statues, faceless and precise in their movement, communicating on direct bands or my brisk signs. Above us, the knife-shapes of Sparrowhawk fliers with their single, solitary wings circled slowly now, floodlights shaming the great burning all around.
I might have been alone in all that movement—the only true person on Thagura—were it not for the screaming, for the occasional noise on the comm line.
“Up ahead! On the right!”
“—get a clear line on the target!”
“Form up, men! Form up!”
“Th—think the bastards fired on some of their own ships!”
“You seeing this?”
“The walls! Earth and Emperor! The walls!”
This last came from one of the men in my guard. We’d come to just within a stone’s throw of the palisade then, the heads of our shadows just tickling the base of the metal wall. The alien structure had been erected without any intention of permanence, though it might have stood for years. It was fashioned of great interlinked sheaves of metal-like leaves—like the scales of some unholy terror—each crowned with a row of spikes perhaps a cubit high.
What I had taken at first for misshapen deposits of snow at the base of each snapped then into focus.
“They’re heads!” cried one man behind me.
“Mother deliver us,” another said.
I have seen men beheaded. Hanged. Whipped. Put up in stocks before the halls of justice on a dozen Imperial worlds. I have seen the corpses of rebels hanged, seen criminals branded. I know man is no angel. But the faces leering down at us had been savaged. Cheeks flapped, torn open to the ear, eyes were missing or else hung by slender cords. Scalps were torn or torn away entirely, and every face bore the mark of teeth and talon.
It was the contrast, I decided much later. It was the contrast that was the thing. The will that had set so many heads upon that wall and raised that wall in the first place was like our own. It had taken intelligence to build the camp and the rockets that encircled it, an understanding of nature’s laws. But it was an animal’s savagery that had done the rest, and worse...for the blood was frozen and dried.
They had not done this thing to frighten us, had not intended any statement, any warning. They had done this for themselves, and only for themselves.
This black thought hounded me as we reached the level of the ruined gate and passed beneath the watchless gaze of that broken humanity. One of the Sparrowhawks slewed overhead, drifting on its repulsors, its gunner picking targets from the camp ahead with admirable precision.
“Dead ahead!” cried the decurion on point before me. “Fire! Fire!”
I saw what he had seen an instant later. One of the longhouses stood dead ahead, and indeed five of them converged on a yard just within the gate like the spokes of a wheel. The doors of the foremost longhouse stood open, and lit by the fires that blazed within, a dozen warriors stood tall and thin and terrible as Death herself. Taller than any man they were, but narrower in the shoulder and longer of limb, like shadows themselves stretched by the light of dying sun. In the red light of war, they gray-slick armor might have been green, but their pale faces—white as chalk, as bone—shone terribly even at this distance. Even as we drew near, one among leaped toward our men who’d gone before and laid into them with its scimitar tall as a man. The milk blade flashed, crashed through the shields of two hoplites—left, right—for there is no shield which man has made sensitive enough to turn back the meager energies of a sword blow.
Two men fell dying, and the beast that slew them fell an instant later as a dozen plasma rounds struck its face and chest. My own chest tightened as the memories of war came flooding back, but I clamped down on my fast-galloping heart, clenched my unkindled blade in my fist.
Where that first warrior fell, two more leaped into place, each wielding not the milky blades of their kind, but whips like braided cords of silver, which they uncoiled and—whirling above their heads—let fly.
“Snakes!” cried one of the men about me in warning.
The silver whips writhed through the air between our party and theirs fast as any arrow, rolling on repulsors. I squeezed the twin triggers of my blade and raised the weapon in reflexive guard as they slithered in among us, swimming through the air chest-high. The blade shone blue-white as distant stars amidst the angry reds of all that burning, and the exotic material rippled as the liquid metal blade shaped and reshaped itself with every motion.
“Hadrian!” Valka’s voice sounded in my ear from where I’d left her on the Roc’s bridge. “Hadrian, what’s happening?”
“Nahute!” I said, drawing my blade high. They were machines, the weapon of a Cielcin berserker, flying snakes whose steel and diamond maws clamped, lamprey-like, to their prey and drilled into them, seeking the heat of a man’s body and center mass. How many men have I seen chewed and hollowed out by such weapons? How many thousand?
Our shields would buy us time, and indeed I saw the first drone strike straight for one hoplite’s face and rebound as his energy-curtain repelled the shot, but they would snake among us, would worm their way in slowly, through the shield, and do their lethal harm. Fast as they were and slim, they were tricky targets for any man with lance or plasma burner, and they were then among us.
My men were too close. I could not strike at the drones without carving through them, and nothing save adamant and highmatter itself could stop that highmatter blade. One man screamed as one of the nahute pierced his shield and found a gap in his armor. Red blood smoked in the freezing air as his suit’s integrity failed.
“Spread out!” I shouted, waving my sword above my head. “Spread out and fire on the Cielcin! Fire on the Cielcin!”
The men all moved to obey me, and the xenobites pouring from the longhouse ahead began falling, but not before many threw nahute of their own. The drones flashed among us, and leaping aside I struck one in half with my blade while above, the torch-beam of one of the Sparrowhawks passed overhead, so that the snows of the yard—trampled gray by so much traffic—shone hard-edged in every detail. Shots rained down from above as the belly-gunner picked his targets.
Beside me, another man fell screaming, wrestling with one of the serpent-drones as it bored into his side. I ran to him, seized the tail of the horror as it wriggled in deeper. The dying man looked up at me, and from the angle of his blank visor I knew he was staring straight into my eyes. Though I pulled, I knew I could not get the snake free, and the poor bastard went limp an instant later.
When he was gone, the drone slid out easily, but before its spiral maw could turn to strike at me, I slashed it clean in half.
The skirmish had ended without my notice. The bodies of men and xenobites littered the yard or else lay piled by the doors of the burning longhouse. Shaking the blood from my hydrophobic cape, I straightened beside the body of the dead man and—blade still burning cold in my fist—stumped to that open portal.
Safe in my suit, I had no fear for air, and on account of the fires there was sufficient light to see what lay within.
The bodies to which I guessed the heads belonged hung skinned and bound by their ankles, their blood left to drain through a kind of grate laid upon the floor. There must have been hundreds of them in that longhouse alone, each hanging like some hideous fruit. Many had their arms missing, and so little resembled men or women at all, but those who did hung down from on high, trailing like a forest of kelp from the floor of some grasping sea.
I turned away as quickly as I could, and was glad of my mask and helmet to hide the sickness and horror in my face. Still sensing that something was amiss with me, one of my decurions came and put a hand on my shoulder. Voice amplified by the speakers in his suit, he asked, “My lord? Are you all right?”
I wanted to vomit, but found the words instead. “This isn’t a camp,” I said, choking. I had known intellectually, had known all my life, that the Cielcin devoured the flesh of men, had seen the frenzy fall on Aranata’s prisoners aboard the Demiurge. But to see so many lives ended, so many human persons treated with such systematic industry...it was a horror unlike anything I had faced, more terrible even than the Brethren who dwelt beneath the waters of Vorgossos.
“This isn’t a camp,” I said again, more strongly. “It’s a slaughterhouse.”
CHAPTER 4
DEATH BY WATER
As much as my instincts demanded that I let the fires burn, I could not do so. An examination would need to be made of the camp, holographs and phototypes recorded, samples collected for study. Despite four hundred years of war, there was much—too much—of the enemy we did not understand. Though I speak their tongue and though I’d set out to understand them and make peace, there was too much I did not understand.
Such horrors as that camp there are in human history, but they are only shadows. Imitations of the deeper horrors and depredations of the Pale. The Cielcin have no compassion. I know that now, though I then hoped it might prove otherwise. If they extend mercy, it is because they require something still of those shown mercy. If they surrender, it is ever with the thought of revenge. Often I have wondered if they may truly be called evil, for a tiger—as I have said—is only hungry when it hunts and slaughters man.
When I doubt, I return to that camp.
The heads on the walls had been placed facing inward, peering down at the survivors laboring in that living hell. The lips of many had been cut away, or torn by inhuman fangs, so that they smiled on the men and women below. The whole palisade was a cruel mockery, a vicious jape and reminder that those within its bounds were never going home. And when I think of this, my doubts within vanish like mist before the sun.
Evil is.
The tiger is not cruel, nor the tidal wave. The meteor is blind and the solar flare heedless as it burns. Men are cruel—and beasts sometimes, yes—but they are men. And the Cielcin are Cielcin. What peace is there to brook between predator and prey?
“My lord?” inquired a rough voice over the comms. I recognized the voice of Dascalu, one of my new chiliarchs. An instant later his name and ident code flickered in one corner of my suit’s entoptics.
I was standing in the middle of the yard just inside the ruined gate, snow and smoke roiling all about me. Above, a trio of our Ibis shuttles circled, repulsors gleaming blue against the polar dark. Fire retardant fell like rain from nozzles in their underside, and slowly the conflagration began to ebb.
“My lord?” Dascalu’s voice intruded again. “My lord, you should see this!”
Shaken from some dissociated reverie, I at first mistook Dascalu for one of the men around me, and said in reply, “No one should see this.”
There were still intermittent sounds of fighting in the middle distance as our troops encountered a new knot of the enemy barricaded in some outbuilding or in the tunnels we were just starting to find beneath the ice. A staccato burst of gunfire sounded just then, as if to punctuate my reply.
“What’s that, my lord?” asked the decurion next to me.
Realizing my mistake, I shook my head, keyed the comm response. “What is it, chiliarch?”
Dascalu’s response came after the barest hesitation. “We’re in the southmost of those domes along the western wall of the complex. We’ve found...well, I don’t know what we’ve found. Some kind of monument?”
“Monument?” I echoed the word. “What do you mean?”
“That’s what it looks like. Petros said I should call it in.”
An image appeared in one corner of my display. I studied it a move, stomach turning over. “I’ll be right there,” I said. “Forward your images to Dr. Onderra at the command post.” Turning to the men of my guard, I gestured that they should follow and began crossing the yard. The men had piled the bodies of the enemy in a great mound in the center of the yard formed by the five slaughterhouses, and the few dozen of our dead had been laid in neat rows along one side. Moving toward the domes—which were visible just over the flat roofs of the longhouses—I switched comm channels, broadcasting to all battle groups. “What news of survivors?”
“Negative, my lord,” came Petros’s reply.
“Nothing yet,” said Dascalu.
“No sign,” replied Ulpio.
We passed between two of the slaughterhouses and turned right, following a path of compacted snow past what I guessed was the intake for the longhouse in question. My mind sketched the images of men and women in rags herded barefoot and bloody through the shutters then closed.
“Holy Mother Earth, have you ever seen such an awful place?” one of the men at my back muttered, voice flattened by his suit.
I could only shake my head.
The camp was not large, covered perhaps a dozen hectares, perhaps two. The palisade with its row of ruined heads encircled the thing entire, buttressed by the then blasted or fallen shapes of the siege towers. The gate by which we’d entered—the gate nearest the slaughterhouses—had been nearest the broader landing field, whence more of the alien landing craft now smoldered, the first casualty of our assault. Later reports would funnel in of similar camps, all of them clustered in the north polar region where the sun then little shone, for the Cielcin were creatures of the subterrane, reared in caverns beneath the skin of their homeworld, and their eyes little loved the light.
Beyond the far end of the longhouses, a series of squat towers marched. These were the lower segments of siege rockets, I realized, pods dropped by the xenobites to serve as housing units for the xenobites themselves, for the slaves and slave-soldiers of Prince Muzugara whose job it was to tend the prisoners and administer the camp itself.
“Why couldn’t they build somewhere warmer?” one of the men muttered, trying not to be overheard by me. “Thagura’s half desert, ain’t it?”
“Cold’s got to be hell on the prisoners,” another man agreed.
“They aren’t prisoners,” I said. “They’re food. Did you not see the bodies?”
The men went deadly quiet behind me. My brother Crispin’s voice resounded in my ears, his old question. Is it true the Cielcin are cannibals?
Cannibals they were, and worse. Anthropophagi.
“Enough talk,” I said, voice dark and flat through my suit speakers. I turned to face the men, who—deadly quiet—went deathly still. “This is not a camp. Do you understand? It is a ranch. This camp is meant to dress provisions for the Cielcin fleet. When I said it is a slaughterhouse, I meant it is an abbatoir. The Thaguran population was brought here, processed, and shipped to the Cielcin fleet. That is why they have been here for these ten years.” I shook my head. “We will not find many survivors. Hundreds, perhaps thousands on all this world.”
The men made no reply, but shifted awkwardly where they stood. One ducked his head.
I turned away.
Half a dozen domes, each some five hundred feet in diameter, stood along the western wall of the camp complex. Snow covered each of them, but here and there that shroud lay cracked, broken by the ridges in the dark material beneath it. I felt certain that these were built of the same interleaving plates as the outer palisade, a light and quick construction designed to provide rapid protection from the snow and wind. Thagura was warmer than Earth of old had been, but still the ceaseless winters of that frozen north froze deep enough to kill in hours.
More inhuman bodies littered the approach to the low slit of an entrance, and more of our men stood armed and vigilant along the path. The snow there was trampled black by so much foot traffic, and a broad, shallow sort of gully ran down to the rim of the dome, where a sort of tunnel led beneath the dome itself and inside.
What doors there might have been were gone, blasted to shrapnel by the breaching charges my men had used to get inside. Picking my way over the tangled limbs that clogged the descent, I passed under the shadow of the arch. The walls to either side were carved from the polar ice and studded with bits of alien electronica whose functions I could only guess at. Ribbed cables ran along the walls and across the floor. The tunnel turned sharply right, following the curvature of the dome overhead. The few lights that yet functioned were red and dim as dying suns, and my suit’s entoptics boosted the image projected on my eyes to compensate, contrast sharpening until the hall seemed a simulacrum of itself; unreal.
Seeing how cramped the confines were, I turned to my men. “Decurion, you and your men with me. The others will wait here and guard the entrance.” I did not wait for his reply.
Catching sight of me in my black mask and armor, one of the legionnaires in the hall thumped his compatriot, and the two stood straighter. A third hurried forward. “Lord Marlowe, the chiliarch sent me to retrieve you.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Just inside,” the man said, saluting a little late. “This way.”
Turning, he led us past more stationed men and over more bodies, following the icy corridor along its gentle curve. The hall slanted steadily down, deeper into the ice, and I felt certain the air must be bitter cold. Half a dozen men waited at an inner door below, and stepped aside at my approach.
The image I had seen briefly on my mask’s display greeted me at the bottom of the stairs. We had come out beneath the black metal of the dome, and from beneath its structure it revealed itself like the petals of some venomous flower, black and razor-edged. The apex must have been two hundred feet above our heads, and all about us the native ice rose twice the height of a man to where the spiked foundation posts of the dome rested in the planet’s surface.
The Cielcin had melted a space for themselves beneath the dome and I spied a number of side passages that led to further tunnels, doubtless connecting to the other domes that lined the western edge of the camp. About the walls were stacked barrels wrought of some gray cousin of plastic and heavy crates marked with alien runes. Dead ahead, in the center of the room, a steep-sided pit—like a well—opened in the icy floor; great chains, hung from cranes bracketed to the dome above, descended into the shaft. I might have wondered at their purpose had I not been distracted by the horror erected along the wall opposite.
“Holy Mother Earth, deliver us,” hissed I, who did not pray.
Skulls lined the wall opposite, set in a broad arc that must have circled a full third of the circumference of that chamber beneath the dome. Each was polished clean of flesh and shone in the low light. Inhuman hands had set them there, and stacked them high and neatly, rank upon rank, their hollow eyes staring down at me, asking, accusing.
What took you so long?
Each had been nailed to the ice wall of the chamber, pinned through the back of the head. The sculpture—for sculpture it surely was—rose two dozen heads high in the center, where a central column, undulating, rose from the ranks massed about the base. These rose like a wave of skulls above the tide, like a serpent standing, ready to strike.
For the second time that day, I thought I might wretch, and shut fast my eyes against the sheer number of them. There must have been thousands.
“My lord!” A familiar voice startled me from my horror, and opening my eyes I found the chiliarch, Dascalu, hurrying toward me. “We called as soon as we were sure the dome was secure.” He gestured at the wall of bones. “What is it?”
I could only shake my head.
I had never seen anything like it before, not on Emesh, not on Vorgossos. Ice crunched under my feet as I circled the pit toward the effigy. Beneath my mask, my mouth hung open. I felt increasingly sure that I was looking at some crude impression of a snake. The Cielcin had placed each skull with care, with reverence, with malefic intent. Curling tendrils snaked from the central column like arms, coiled across the surface of the ice, each wrought from femurs and tibias and the long bones of arms.
For what felt then the hundredth time that day, I thought I might be sick.
“I don’t know,” I said at last, when Dascalu asked again.
How little I knew of the enemy then. A knight I might have been, and cloaked in Imperial favor, but I was a boy of forty little years, and for all my reputation, I was ignorant as all children are. When I had left Delos, I imagined peace. I had not imagined places like that camp, or horrors like that grim effigy. I would see such sculptures many times, on many worlds.
They never got easier to see.
“They piled what looks like spoils from the people here,” the chiliarch said, gesturing to a pile of rags and various oddments high as a man that lay mounded between the arms of the macabre display. “But that isn’t all.” He pointed—as I knew he must—at the pit. Dascalu shook his head. “My lord, I . . .”
I raised a hand to quiet him. I didn’t need to hear.
Black water waited at the bottom of the pit, its surface disturbed by the movement of something unseen within it. The Cielcin had melted a shaft down into the glacier—it must have been twenty feet to the dark surface.
“Is there a light?” I asked.
“Torch!” Dascalu shouted, casting about.
One of the men at hand produced a glowsphere about the size of a grapefruit and passed it to the chiliarch, who handed it with deference to me. Without comment, I pulled the tab. The thing vibrated and flared in my hand, and a cold, white light fierce and several times brighter than the alien lamps filled the domed chamber. Not engaging the lamp’s repulsor, I let it fall. The light vanished down the shaft, hit the surface with a distant splash.
The waters churned as things pale and eel-like swam away from the light. The glowsphere sank like a fallen star, illuminating the waters.
Those waters were not black at all, but red.
“Those things aren’t native, are they?” Dascalu asked.
“I’m not sure,” I told him, studying the monsters. Each was about as long as a man’s arm, and milk-white. “Valka?”
Her voice sounded in my ear. “I’ll look.”
But I didn’t need her answer. I knew. They were Cielcin creatures, some species of fishlike organism brought from the circle of some dark star.
“What are they for?” the chiliarch asked.
The glowsphere had reached the bottom of the shaft then, had settled on the bottom. Its white light had colored pink from the waters below. How deep those waters were was hard to say. It might have been half a hundred feet. That redness was clue enough, but I knew what I would find at the bottom, and sure enough, there they were.
More bones lay mounded at the base of that shaft, stripped as clean as the ones mounted to the wall.
I drew back, overtook by a vision of men and women crowded into this place and forced into the waters a dozen at a time. Had they been living when their Cielcin captors fed them to their worms? Or were these the castoffs? The men and women not fit for the slaughterhouses or for a life in chains aboard Muzugara’s ships?
“We’ll need to get a science team in here,” I said. “Radio Captain Corvo and the rest as soon as you’re sure the compound is secure. Ask for Varro and his best.”
I heard Dascalu salute, but did not turn to look at him.
“Would that we’d come sooner,” I said to no one in particular.
“’Twas no way we could have done,” Valka said into my ear. “We came as swiftly as we were able.”
I bit my lip. “I know,” I said, and wrapped my fingers around one of the frosted chains that ran down into the horrid pit.
Dascalu had not left my side, and I found him peering down with me. Presently he ventured a question. “How many do you think there are down there?”
“We have no idea how deep it goes,” I said, eyes moving back to the serpentine icon wrought of human bones. “And all these must have been down there, once.” A terrible thought occurred to me, and I asked, “Is it the same with the other domes?”
Dascalu’s silence confirmed my deepest fears.
“But why?” I asked, shaking my head. “Have you ever heard of anything like this?”
“No, my lord,” the man replied, glad to have a less weighty question to answer.
I thought I knew them. The thought kept rebounding in my head. I thought I knew them. Since I had been a boy, learning their inhuman tongue at Tor Gibson’s knee, I had dreamed of traveling among the xenobites, among the pale Cielcin who wander the stars in ships like homeless moons. I had read everything in our limited collection there was to read on their culture, their biology. What little we men knew we knew from war. From the hulks that littered our star systems or broke upon our shores when their raids had come and gone. Though our two kinds had warred for centuries, there was much—so much—we had yet to learn. But for a few symbols, their written language was still a mystery, and though we knew their weapons and their warships, understood their tactics, much of their culture, their literature, their art, remained obscure. I might have been one of our Empire’s foremost authorities on the enemy, but I knew too little.
We all did, in those days.
“Look out!” A shout shocked me back into my body, and turning I saw a hulking, black shape leap into the central chamber from a side passage, its white sword flashing in the misty air. Two men fell before it, weapons discharging, punching holes in the surrounding ice. One shot grazed a conduit, and power sparked and died, plunging all the low, red lamps the xenobites had fixed to the walls into stygian black. Only the distant shine of the glowsphere at the bottom of the pit lit the chamber, and by its glow I saw another trio of Cielcin cut their way into the room. One tackled an armored centurion to the ground, pinning his arms like an aggressive lover as it lowered its fangy jaws to tear out the man’s throat.
Conscious of the pit at my back, I darted to one side, circling right to hit the intruders from the side. I ignored Valka’s questions ringing in my ears and snapped my sword from its magnetic hasp. Dascalu had moved to follow me, and the few of my guard who had stayed with me scrambled to adjust their bearings.
One of the Cielcin hurled its nahute toward us, and my men fired at it before the chiliarch roared. “Bayonets! Bayonets, hold your fire!” That stray shot had, after all, destroyed the dome’s lights. A second nahute flew at us, and its owner chased after it, sword drawn to strike at the men before me. My guardsman raised his energy-lance to parry the alien scimitar, and he twisted, struck the monster with the butt of that lance.
The Cielcin staggered against the wall, huge black eyes glaring. With its sword it battered the man’s lance aside and slashed at his neck even as the nahute drone impacted the man’s shield, disorienting him. The soldier fell like a toppled tower, head striking the ice wall. Not realizing he was already fallen, the nahute found a chink in his armor and burrowed its way in.
The xenobite’s eyes found mine and, blade dripping, it advanced on me. “Tuka yukajjimn!” it barked in its rough tongue. “Tuka eja-ayan!”
You are vermin! It said. You are nothing!
“Nothing?” I echoed, repeating the word. “Eja-ayan? You have lost! Surrender!”
In answer, the tall xenobite bounded toward me, raising its sword. I raised my own, fingers squeezing the triggers to kindle the liquid metal blade. The highmatter fountained from the hilt, pentaquark nuclei locking into place. The Cielcin blade descended, met mine without resistance. The alien blade sheared clean in half, and the part that should have struck my head clattered against my shoulder. For an instant, the xenobite stood clutching its stump of a sword, black eyes confused. I guessed it had never seen highmatter before, did not know it was dead.
My own blade rose and fell, bit into the monster’s shoulder and slid clean through from collarbone to the opposite hip. The creature fell in two pieces, and I stepped into the space it had occupied a moment before, bloodless weapon gleaming in my fist. The two behind it stumbled back, adjusting to this new development. One launched its nahute at me, while the other uncoiled its drone and cracked it like the whip it so resembled.
Reflex made me draw back, recoiling even as Dascalu and the hoplite at my side moved forward, lances aimed at the small knot of survivors who had burst into the room. I held the right flank by the wall, with Dascalu at my left and more of the men hemming them in. There was shouting and a tight burst of plasma fire—despite the chiliarch’s orders—as the men at my left slew the nahute the enemy had let fly.
“Where did they come from?” the decurion asked.
“I don’t know!” Dascalu answered. “We swept the dome! I swear it!”
Our men had encircled the remaining Cielcin then. They had nowhere to go but back along the side passage whence they’d come. Thus cornered, trapped on Thagura, their ships burned, their fleet fled to the outer Dark, they had nothing but to give up their lives.
“No matter!” I shouted.
There were seven of them left. Seven against the sons of man. Seven against Earth.
The fighting stilled then, if only for a moment as either side measured the other. The Cielcin were all taller than us, slim and crowned with horn. The tallest among them—an officer of some kind—must have been eight feet high. The lesser berserkers wore versions of the gray-green armor the warriors above had worn. If the cold bothered them, they gave no sign, each crouching, adjusting their posture, daring us to attack.
The fighting would be over in instants if we could be sure of our aim, but I understood Dascalu’s caution. We outnumbered the Pale at least three-to-one in the chamber, and more men were not far. We had only to summon reinforcements.
“Take them alive if you can!” I said, surprising the men about me.
“Sir?”
“You heard me!” I said, then barked a word to the xenobites. “Svassaa!”
Surrender!
“Surrender?” the officer echoed. “There is no surrender!”
“You will die here!” I replied, wary of the discomfort the inhuman words coming from my lips placed in the hearts of the men about me, but I had studied their tongue since I was a boy, and though no man may speak it properly, I spoke it as well then as any man could.
The officer held its nahute limp in one hand. “We are dead already! Our prince is gone!”
“He abandoned you!” I agreed, adjusting my guard. “But surrender and I will permit you to die honorably. You may take your own lives, so that you did not die at the hands of us yukajjimn.”
The thought seemed to tempt the xenobite for a moment. The officer hesitated, hands slackening on its weapons. Its round, black eyes searched for some evidence of my eyes in the black sculpted mask that hid them. It did not find them. “Those are not our orders.”
“Damn your orders!” I said, and said again, “Svassaa!”
The officer flinched—a curiously human motion. “We are Cielcin,” it said. “Cielcin obey.”
“Your prince does not!” I replied. “He commands! And he is gone.”
Still the officer hesitated, and only then did I mark the wound on one temple above the narrow hole that served it for an ear. Ichor dark as ink ran down the far side of its face. Sensing that I had knocked it back a step, I continued, “You have the command of these.” I gestured with my sword at the others. “Are you not now their prince? Do you not now command?”
“Dunyasu!” one of the others roared. “The worm speaks blasphemy! Mutiny against our master!”
“I have a shot!” interjected one of Dascalu’s lancers.
“Dunyasu!” another of the lesser warriors agreed. “Don’t listen to it, Emasu! It lies like all its kind!”
“I have a shot!” the lancer shouted again.
The underlings chose for us. The two who had cried out dunyasu—abomination—leaped forward like gargoyles from the buttresses of a chantry. I jumped aside as one bowled into Dascalu, knocking the chiliarch from his feet. The violet flash of an energy beam felled one of the others, and in the next instant I saw the officer, Emasu, fall as invisible light scorched its shoulder.
I cursed, and ran my sword through a swung nahute as one of the warriors whirled the serpent-drone over its head. Another cut stole the legs from under the demon, and it fell, blood smoking where it met the ice. My own bootheels crunched, and I slipped as a third stroke took the head from the downed creature. My knee struck the ground, and I groaned as Valka hissed a sympathetic word in my ear.
The fighting was done as I stood, reduced to a blurring of slow movement on the ground as the dying died. Dascalu had emerged victorious, clutched a bloody knife in his off hand as he staggered back to his feet.
“Give that to me!” I ordered him, and the chiliarch did not argue. I snatched the bodkin from him, held it reversed, with the blade flat against my arm.
Unkindling my sword, I went to the wounded officer, and seizing it by its horn forced it to look into my masked face.
“You are dying,” I said flatly, voice amplified by my suit. “You may yet die well. Answer me: What is this place? What is it for?”
Emasu blinked up at me, nictitating membranes flicking vertically across its eyes. Confusion? Surprise? “Paqami wo,” it said. We must eat.
The thought of men hanging skinned and headless in neat rows flared whitely in my chest, and straightening I released the demon’s horn and pressed the heel of my boot against its wounded shoulder. Emasu winced, and before it could move I pointed the emitter end of my unkindled blade in its face. “The pit!” I said, leaning my weight onto my foot. “The statue! Explain!”
Emasu’s eyes went to the sculpture of bones, the many-armed serpent rising along the interior of the dome, almost to the metal leaves that formed the roof over our heads. “Miudanar!” it said. “The Dreamer!”
“Your god?” I asked. I had never seen any of the Cielcin gods rendered in art before. Had never seen any art from them save the round glyphs—like clusters of bubbles—that passed for calligraphy among their kind.
In answer, the officer groaned. “His is the time before time, and the time after it.”
Emasu hissed as my heel dug into its wound. “You killed my people to make an idol?”
“Veih!” the officer said. “No! These were the scraps. The leavings, and those who could not work, or would not serve to nurse our young.”
Behind my mask, I blinked. “Your young?” But I shook my head. It didn’t matter. I held Dascalu’s knife up for the officer to see. My meaning clear, I pressed, “Are there survivors? More of my kind?”
Emasu eyed the blade with emotions I could not name. Longing, perhaps? Disgust? Relief? “We could not kill you all. Belowground. There are pens.” It jerked its head back the way it had come, down the side passage that had been sealed before the assault. “We waste nothing. Even your kind has its purpose!”
I pressed harder, and the officer cried out in pain. I didn’t care. The hollow eyes of so many thousands glared down at me—I hoped—in gratitude and belated triumph. “You wasted plenty when you torched the city. How many millions died that day?”
“We didn’t burn the city! That was you!” Emasu tried to sit up, and snarling I stomped it back into its place, making the men about me fumble anxiously with their lances. “We would have sucked it dry if we could. Taken our fill and fled! But our fleet was starving! We could not leave without our fill, and your kind breeds but slowly! We could not replace what you took from us that day!”
Emasu’s words rattled me to the bone, and I did stagger back then, reeling as I turned my back. “They didn’t burn the city,” I said numbly, speaking so the other men would understand. The full horror of what it was saying—that they had forced the human captives to breed more food, that they required us to help nurse their young—was lost for me in that moment beneath the weight of this other revelation. “They didn’t burn the city,” I said again.
Malyan did.
I thought of the devastation we’d seen in Pseldona, the ruins of the city stretching for miles across the shelf above the desert, blackened, sand burned to glass. If what the monster said was true, it was not the xenobites who had wrought that devastation, but the very woman whose duty and sacred charge it had been to defend that city with her life.
“My lord, look out!” Dascalu exclaimed, raising his lance to fire.
Whirling, I found Emasu half-risen to its feet, claws extending from its six-fingered hands like so many knives, teeth bared and black with blood. It never found its footing. Before it could stand, a dozen men discharged energy beams into its body, sending up faint coils of white smoke in the dim air. Dead, the officer teetered a moment and fell back where it had lain a moment before. Disgusted, I raised Dascalu’s knife and hurled it into the body. To my surprise, the blade stuck in the xenobite’s throat.
A sudden need for air overcame me, and I clawed at my helmet. The casque broke apart and folded away into the neck flange of my armor, and tugging at the elastic coif that bound my hair I sank to my knees before the pit, gasping at the frigid, stinking air. It was worse—far worse—than the sterile closeness of the helmet had been. When Dascalu approached and put a hand on my shoulder to check if I was all right, I seized it and glared into his visored face. “It said there were survivors down below,” I said. “Find them, and bring them to the ships.”
“Yes, my lord.” Dascalu turned to go.
I did not release his arm. “Dascalu.”
“Yes, my lord?”
“Do not let the survivors see...any of this.”
“Yes, my lord.”
CHAPTER 5
THE SURVIVORS
“I wish you’d have let me go with you,” Valka said.
We were alone for the moment in the command frigate’s ready room, a spartan chamber in the usual Imperial gloss-black, brass accents worked into the walls and about the imitation window that showed the smoldering ruins of the camp. I could just make out the domes, snow-frosted, in the distance, black against the blacker sky.
Seated in the high-backed chair at the head of the ellipsoid table, I glanced at her. “I know. But you weren’t kitted for it. It’s cold out there.”
“’Twould have been time for me to find a suit if you’d but waited,” she countered. “’Twas no need for you to rush into the heat of things.”
“It wouldn’t have been right for me to sit here safe on the ship while the men seized the fortress,” I said in reply.
Valka held my gaze a moment, silence stony.
“I have a duty to my men,” I said, spreading my hands defensively.
“You have a duty to lead your men,” she riposted. “Do your knights not lead from ships such as this?”
Her golden eyes had started boring holes in my face, and I turned to look back at the ember-lit camp through the false window. “I am not those men,” I said. “I don’t have the head for strategy. That’s for Crim. And it isn’t right that they should risk their lives while I stay safe on the bridge.”
The smile in Valka’s voice shone through. “Hadrian, you really were born ten thousand years too late.”
“Twenty thousand,” I countered, taking her point.
Before she could respond, the door opened, and the chiliarchs, Dascalu and Petros, entered the chamber. Both men had removed their helmets, and their red-and-ivory armor still bore the grime and damage of battle. Both saluted in unison, raising gauntleted hands, but it was Petros who spoke. “My lord, we’ve brought our wounded and those of the survivors most in need of care to the ships, but it’ll be another ten hours before the Tamerlane is in position to drop shuttles enough to carry the survivors all out of here.”
“Ten hours,” I chewed the figure like something sour. “How many are there?”
“More than ten thousand for certain, possibly so many as fifteen.”
“Fifteen . . .” I rubbed my eyes. It was a staggering figure, perhaps more than we could transport south in a single journey, perhaps more than we could adequately provision and care for if Thagura was truly as devastated as it seemed to be. But to be all that remained—if they were all that remained—of forty million? “So few . . .” My tongue felt swollen in my mouth. “Do we have the provisions we need to bring them south?” Pseldona was gone completely, but there was a chance that one of the lesser cities had enough infrastructure in place to help sustain so many.
Petros shook his head. “That’s a question for the captain. We can bring them south, but all the bromos protein on the Tamerlane won’t feed so many for more than a year or two. They’ll have to get to planting.”
Half-turning to Valka, whose perfect memory would ensure the task did not go undone, I said, “We’ll need to telegraph Nessus. Tell them to send a seed ship. These poor people won’t survive without offworld aid.” The sick feeling that had not left me since the doors of the slaughterhouse opened only intensified. There would be more death on Thagura in the years to come as the survivors worked to decide just what life after the invasion would mean. “And I’ll want the aquilarii to scout the countryside. All wings. I want the message broadcast to every corner of the planet, I want to know where any and survivors might be. If there’s so much as a fishing village intact that can take refugees, they must.”
Petros nodded, turned his dark gaze on his associate. “We think we found the people you were looking for. Survivors from the city. Took a measure of doing. Once it got out we were looking for those who survived the sack all manner of folk lined up.”
“But you think you found people who were really there?” I asked.
“Not many, and they aren’t well,” Dascalu put in. “Pseldona was rocked in the first weeks of the invasion. The poor bastards have been in the camps all this time. Pale used them for workers.”
A shadow passed over Petros’s face at the words, and I had to remind myself that the chiliarch’s own home had been devastated by a Cielcin horde. He knew what it was like to live under alien occupation, to see people taken and used, to see others turn against their fellow man for an extra few months of life. “Collaborators, most like,” he said. “Take what they say with caution, my lord.”
I held the chiliarch’s eye for a solitary moment. It was a trick I’d learned from my father. Say nothing, let the other man chastise himself. Prudent as his advice was, he should not have offered it without my asking.
Realizing his error, Petros looked down. “We can bring them to you at your convenience.”
“Please,” I said. “Send them in.”
There were nineteen. Nineteen men who had survived the ten years since Pseldona burned. Most of the other survivors had come not from the primary cities, from Aramsa, Tagur, Port Reach, and the rest, but from the lesser cities and townships that dotted the planet in the wetter, temperate zones above the ergs that dominated the equatorial regions.
They were all men, not a woman among them. My men had forced them to scrub in the sonic showers aboard the command ship, and each had been given a standard-issue single-suit of unmarked black to wear. Many were missing ears or fingers from so long in the polar night, and though nearly all were darker skinned from generations in the deserts that girdled the world, there was a sallowness in their complexion that spoke to years without light. Thagura’s seasons were long, its orbit slow, and so in all the years the Cielcin had spent sucking the blood and life from the planet, the long nights and short days so far north had not even begun to reverse.
They shuffled through the door, each emaciated and skull-faced, pale eyes bulging at the sight of Valka and myself and at the faceless men of my guard. Several sat at the table without being ordered to do so, and I did not reprimand them for it. These men had lived in hell, and needed no more from me. I could then scarce imagine the horrors they had known, and that failure of imagination held my tongue for several long instants while the poor men waited for me to speak.
I do not have to imagine now, for I have lived as they lived, and for longer.
Had I then known, I would have spoken sooner, for the sound of any kind word would have been like drops of rain in a desert. “Gentlemen,” I said after another long moment passed, “I am sorry.”
No one spoke, and how could they? What were my words measured against the breadth of their suffering? Had I the panacea of the ancient alchemists to hand, it would not have served them. The marks of talon and lash—and those of teeth—could be seen upon their hands and faces, but I sensed the deeper wounds lay in their souls. There was a hollowness in every face, a cadaverous light in their eyes, as those the lamps of the chamber illuminated nothing within.
My words were nothing.
And yet I knew I must speak, and so opened my mouth. “My men tell me you come from Pseldona. Is that so?”
A couple nods, but mostly vacant stares greeted me.
“I am sorry,” I said again, and found my own eyes sliding to the polished black glass of the table between us. “That is a very long time.”
“My family!” one of the men burst out, dark eyes meeting mine. “My lord, do you know them? Lorna and Emin? Are they alive?”
There was a desperate hope in his eyes, one I’d no choice but to snuff out. “No, no I don’t know.”
The man crumpled into his seat, and the instant he did so every other man began in the same vein, shouting one over the other for news of his family, his children, his parents, his wife or lover. They shouted until the hard walls rang with the rough sorrow of their voices. I felt the tears rise in me, and shut my eyes to stem their flow.
I raised a hand, and only steadily did quiet fall back into place. Confusion, hope, despair...all hung in the air like incense. “We only just freed the camp,” I said. “It will take time to learn who all we have. My men tell me there are thousands. It may be that some of your people have survived, but I don’t know. I don’t know yet.”
The new silence deepened, and almost I could see the dark cloud settling on every heart. But I had to know, had to ask, and so proceeded. “There is something I want to know, something I was hoping you all might be able to confirm for me.” Not a one of them would meet my eye, their hopes all crushed or forwarded as they dreamed of hurrying through the other survivors themselves, scrambling for any sign or symbol of those they’d lost. “During our attack on the camp, I interrogated one of the enemy. An officer, I think it was.”
“You spoke to them?” one of the men asked, shaken from his torpor. His pale eyes shimmered as he looked at me, horror plain in his face. “With those demons?”
Valka placed a hand on my shoulder, quiet support. The man sketched the sign of the sun before extending his first and final fingers in the ancient warding gesture against evil. Others did the same. I was well used to my familiarity with the xenobites’ tongue frightening people, nobiles and plebes alike, but in that room it was something different. The mere admission that I could treat with the enemy placed their stamp on me, like a burning brand on my forehead, and the knowledge of that brand terrified, as though the captives had not escaped at all, as though I were half-Cielcin myself.
But I would not lie, for lying has never ordered the world, or made it better. “I did,” I said, and felt the temperature drop about me. “And it told me something I think only you gentlemen can confirm. It told me that they were not behind the bombing of Pseldona. It told me that our forces—the Lady Malyan’s forces, that is—were the ones who destroyed the city.”
I could still hardly get the words out. The mere thought was more sickening than the camp itself. Why would Gadar Malyan do such a thing? I thought back to my meeting with the baroness. She had planned to seduce me, that much was clear. Had she hoped to distract me? To play the ingenue, to place the blame on Vahan Maro—or on some other officer now dead? Or was she really that simple? Really the vapid and sensual debutante she’d presented? I couldn’t be sure, but there was a sour taste in my mouth, edging more bitter with each instant I reflected on our meeting.
“It ain’t true!” said an earless man by the door. “Her ladyship would never do such a thing. She’s ruled us since my grand-da’s day, and her family’s kept Thagura since the beginning! Four thousand years!”
“Aye!” said another man, his left eye and the whole side of his face wound in fresh bandages. “The lady would never. Seen her, I have! Like Mother Earth herself. It was her engineers what brought the water down from the north and saved my village.”
“Your village?” Valka interjected. “Are you not from the city?”
The man stammered, looked down, as if shamed by her question. “That was when I was a lad, ’fore I come to Pseldona.”
We were all quiet then. For my part, I could not quite tell if the man was lying or no, but I supposed it didn’t really matter. Surely one of the nineteen was from the city itself. I would punish the men for lying. In retrospect, I should not have offered a boon to anyone with information. I knew that generosity was likely to bring forth liars, and I should not have been surprised to find one or two had slipped by Petros and Dascalu’s net.
The vehemence with which these men defended their lord surprised me, though. My father had never encouraged such loyalty from his people, but then my father had been a different sort of ruler, inspiring fear, not love.
Hadrian, name for me the Eight Forms of Obedience. Gibson’s words floated back to me.
Obedience out of love for the person of the hierarch, I thought, imagining these peasants seeing the statuesque Malyan from afar. Genetically perfected by the magi of the High College, she was a goddess to them. How could they not love her?
I ran a hand back over my hair, pushing the dark fall from my face. How long had it been since the medtechs had taken me out of fugue? I glanced at my wrist-terminal. Not quite three days. Ye gods, I was tired. Had I slept? There would be too little sleep in the days ahead. I would need what I could get on the flight back to the city.
“There weren’t no raid sirens,” a voice interjected.
Looking up, I could not at once identify which of the men had spoken, but after a second or two those around him gave way, carving out an empty space between them and the speaker. Thinking back to Petros, to his contempt for these survivors, I wondered if just that behavior had been a part of how these men had survived for so long, and felt a shred of my chiliarch’s contempt.
The man who had spoken was old, though perhaps it was only his torment that so aged him. The tip of his nose was gone, and one ear, and claw marks marred the side of his neck.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“There weren’t no raid sirens, my lord,” he said, taking my question for anger at his failure to use the proper honorific. A felt a pang of guilt. “Remember it plain as, I do. I worked down in the greenhouses. Out on the edge of the erg. Lord Aram—the first baron, I mean—he had raid sirens built all through the city. All up in the rocks, like, so as folks would know to shelter if Extras or some other house come raiding in from the Dark.”
“It sounded!” another man interjected.
“When the attack first came,” the old man said, “aye. And the second time. When the Pale come and raid the city proper, by Blue Square and all. But they didn’t sound that next day.”
The man who’d interjected, a flat-nosed fellow bald as an egg, interjected again, “You’ve gone and lost it, man!”
“I have not, Lodi! It’s you who don’t remember!” The old man looked around at me. “I’d not lie to a nobile, my lord. Not for anything. On my honor!” Obviously nervous, he scratched at the ruin of his nose.
Eager to head off any interruptions from the man called Lodi, I asked. “What’s your name, sir?”
“Siva, my lord. If it please you.” If the man had had a hat he might have wrung it in his hands.
“Tell us what you were going to say,” Valka said, and something softened in the freedmen, as though it were a relief in itself to hear a woman’s voice. I wondered again that there were no women among them.
The man Siva let his hand fall from his frostbitten nose. “We were sheltering, sheltering in place as ordered. There weren’t no proper bunkers down on the sands, but there was the old bio station out by Sharkey’s Point. That’s where we were when the bombs dropped. Lucian—he were in the Legions once—said they weren’t no atomics, but I don’t know the difference. Bright as twenty suns they was. Blinded a couple of us. Didn’t stand a chance when they came circling back. Figured it was them what done it, but there was no sirens, I’d swear by Earth’s bones, my lord, begging your pardon.”
“I think he’s right,” said a younger man from the back. Scarred as he was, the man’s accent betrayed a greater polish than that of the others. “I was in the city. In one of the public shelters. I don’t remember sirens that day. And they didn’t come until later. Months later. We had to open the vault when the water went bad. That’s when they found us.”
I glanced up at Valka.
“They said the sensor grid was decimated in the first attack,” she said, speaking Panthai so as not to be understood.
I nodded, remembering, and replied in kind, “It doesn’t take a satellite grid to know a fleet’s incoming. Warning might have come later, but not at all?”
Our use of the Tavrosi language seemed to perplex all but the man with the urbane accent, and I returned my attention to them. “There is a very real possibility that your lady ordered the bombing of Pseldona,” I said, as measured as I could manage. To my surprise, the men did not burst out in objections this time. “What her motivations might have been, I cannot say. Perhaps she had bad intelligence in her bunker. Perhaps she thought destroying the city would discourage the Cielcin from raiding in it. I don’t know . . .” I tapped one of the magnetic hasps that held my white Imperial cloak in place over my armor. “I am a servant of the Emperor, and no other man. If she has done this thing, I must know of it. His Radiance must know of it. And I will find out.”
“Shouldn’t you be worried about them?” asked a man from the rear, hard-eyed and obviously half-blind. “Not pointing fingers at her ladyship?”
“She brought water to our village!” the man who was not from the city blurted out again. “When I was a lad. Folks were dying they were, and she saved us!”
A third man cried out, “The Pale are still out there!”
His words set the other men to shouting: “They took my Ari, they did! Killed her in front of me. Put her head on the wall!”
“And my Lorna! And my boy, my poor boy . . .”
“It’s them you ought to deal with!”
Eyes shut again, I forced the words out sharp as I could make them, though my voice shook. “The Cielcin have been driven from your system. Their fleet is gone.”
The man called Lodi shook his head. “They’ll be back, then. The minute you’re gone, they’ll be back. They’ll not leave so easily. They know we’re here.”
Unable to keep quiet any longer, Valka exclaimed, “The Cielcin have done all the harm they can to Thagura! They’ll move on to some fresh target. ’Twas only desperation that kept them here. They were underprovisioned for another journey.”
“It may be they’ll have to eat one another before they reach wherever they’re going,” I said, thinking back to my conversation with Aranata Otiolo—before it killed me. That prince’s people were starving too, suffering from so long a time in space, with so little food, so little protection from the radiation that bathed the Dark between the stars. I had pitied the Cielcin at the time, but my capacity to pity them had worn through. Like old shoes I’d walked too many miles in.
My words seemed to perversely comfort the men. Looking around, I said, “The Cielcin will not return here. Not in your lifetimes . . .” Nineteen pairs of eyes—mostly pairs—looked back at me with bruised hope. “You will all be taken south as soon as possible. We are scouting for a place to move you and the other survivors. My men will see to it that each of you receives a wine ration before you return to your tents. Tell the others their suffering is at an end.” I waved a hand to indicate they were dismissed.
The men shifted where they stood; some turned, others rose unsteadily from their chairs.
One coughed, and the younger man with the scars and the city accent asked, “What is your name, my lord?”
I glanced up at Valka, hesitating in the knowledge that these men would return to the refugee tents we’d ordered erected on the ice. They would share the news of this meeting with the others as they shared or hoarded the wine rations we gave them—each according to his nature. It felt strange to take credit for their freedom. I had not won the battle in orbit, though I had briefly confronted Muzugara over the holograph. That victory belonged to Otavia Corvo, to Bastien Durand and the other ship’s officers. I had been only an accessory, a part of the audience. Nor had I smashed the camp and freed the prisoners, though I had done my best to stand in the thick of it alongside my men. That victory belonged to Crim, to Dascalu, Petros, and Ulpio and the other chiliarchs, to the wing commander of the aquilarii.
Valka spoke first, addressing the men. “This is Lord Hadrian Marlowe.”
Looking back, that moment stands out to me, not because it was the first such moment, though in a sense it was—the men whom I’d saved at Vorgossos were my own, and knew me—but because it was in another sense the last. There was no recognition of that name in the faces of the men, no opening of eyes and mouth, no reverent whisper of the Halfmortal. I was only a man to them, as I had not been to my own people aboard the Demiurge. I would not be a man much longer.
I had just become a name, and names are seeds whence heroes grow.
The city man bowed deeply. “Lord Marlowe. I am called Antin. Thank you. I...Thank you.”
Several of the others bowed, or bowed their heads.
“Thank you, Antin,” I said, awkwardly, felt Valka’s hand once more upon my shoulder. The old man who had first spoken of the raid sirens had reached the door, and I said, “M. Siva, would you please stay?”
The old greenhouse laborer froze. Head bobbing, he turned back, frostbitten hands over his heart. “Yes, lordship.”
Antin was the last to go. He lingered on the threshold a moment, looked back at me one last time, and I knew that he would be the one to take his tale to the others, the thousands who waited in the tents. His story—not mine—would be told to the survivors of Thagura and spread like a virus. In a generation, there would be songs and tales of how Hadrian Marlowe alone stole into the camp and freed uncounted thousands. How with his own hands he tore the gates asunder and stormed in while his men set fire to the alien ships. I might have smiled if the thought were not so discomforting.
I did not want to be a hero. That was not my dream.
“M. Siva,” I said when the door hissed shut at last. “I’m sorry to keep you, but I must know. Were you holding anything back for fear of the others?”
The old man shook his head, but did not raise his eyes.
“M. Siva, I must know.” Still the old man did not speak. “I will not bribe you,” I said, “but if you know something, I must know it.” Valka moved and seated herself at my right hand, placed a hand on the table near to the old fellow, comforting as best she could. “Was it the baroness’s forces that bombed the city?”
Siva screwed shut his eyes, and I realized in the next instant that he was shaking. Valka reached out and took his wrist. “’Tis all right,” she said. “No one will know you told us.”
The laborer bit his lip, shook his head furiously, but he said, “It wasn’t them.” He sucked in a deep, rattling breath. “There were no warning. No sirens. No bells. It were the third day. The third day, didn’t even give us a week to fight back. I’d gone out with the basket to raid the greenhouses—they hadn’t smashed them yet, hadn’t bothered with the outskirts. The others as could had taken all the skiffs, the groundcars...emptied the bloody motor pool. We was trapped. Couldn’t run if we wanted to, and anyway, Pseldona was home. I thought it was them when I first see ’em flying in. They came out of the sky, down from orbit. But the Pale landed those towers. They wanted people. Wanted them alive. Breeding stock, I reckon. Those as can. They ranch us, you know?”
I nodded barely as Siva cracked his watering eyes. “I do.”
The old man shuddered, snot bubbling from his ruined nose. I had no kerchief to offer him, and looking round I spied no box in the conference room. Siva continued, “And the things they do to the others...the ones that ain’t fit to eat. The ones they can’t breed . . .”
“What about the bombing, M. Siva?” Valka asked, gently as she could. “What about the towers?”
“They weren’t no towers,” the old man said. “My Uncle Raji, he was in the ODF, used to fix jump ships. Lighters. Used to take me with him. I know my ships, lordship, I do.” The tears had come again, and again Siva shook his head, moved his hands to shield his eyes.
“You’re sure?” I asked, feeling dread like cold iron clamp round my heart and twist my guts in its fist. “You’re sure they were human ships.”
“They were old Manta-IIIs, I’d bet my life on it. All these years...I still don’t know why. Why would they do it? Why would they rain fire on us?” He let his hands fall, eyes shining. “They were supposed to keep us safe.”
“They were,” I agreed, and placed my own hands on the table. “Thank you, M. Siva.” I looked round again, hoping to find some junior officer or adjutant, but we three were all alone. “Valka, can you go find one of Crim’s lieutenants? Any of them will do. I want M. Siva taken to the Tamerlane and treated.”
She stood, understanding my intentions without having to ask. Siva had been very brave to speak. After all he’d been through, I had just asked him to speak against the landed ruler of his world. He would not be safe on it anymore. The others would know he had spoken to me, and if the baroness were indeed guilty of the mass murder Siva had accused her of, then those loyal and devoted to the baroness would never forgive him, nor would the baroness herself. He would never find peace on Thagura, not anywhere. He would have to come with us.
“I’ll wait with him,” I said, and did my best to smile, hollow though the expression was.
CHAPTER 6
OF FLIES AND SPIDERS
Pseldona again.
The blackened city stretched away beneath us, a desolation of twisted metal and pale ash. When first we’d swept over that ruin, I’d felt myself sick at heart, thinking of the horrors of the Cielcin, the horrors of our too-long war. That second time, I saw it with new eyes. I spied the greenhouses as we approached, shattered but still standing on the sands below the inselberg crowned by the ruined palace. Peering back, I saw the shapes of the other ships of escort, each carrying half a hundred men. Crim and Bressia and the high officers had remained behind to coordinate relief and mop up any remaining Cielcin at the polar camp. Varro’s science team would want to perform forensic work as much as possible, and when that was done, I’d left orders for the site to be annihilated with antimatter charges. Wiped from the map.
No part of it should remain.
“She has to pay,” Valka said from the seat across from me in our private language, peering down at Malyan’s devastation.
“If she truly is guilty,” I agree.
“Truly?” she glared at me with hard eyes. “Do you doubt it?”
I shook my head. “She must answer for what she’s done,” I said, casting about the chamber, counting the helmeted heads of my guard. Not a one of them understood Tavrosi Panthai, but I still wished we had no audience for this. It would not do for my men to see us argue, and so I kept my tone as neutral as I could. “If she’s guilty, she must go to Marinus. She may face the strategos and Imperial justice.”
“Imperial justice?” Valka echoed me again. “Please. She is one of your palatines. She will be ferreted to some prison planet. She won’t even have to live her sentence. Your Emperor will put her on ice for a century. Two. Only to have her thawed out again and sold to some Perseid count for her genome. She won’t suffer a day in her life.”
The venom in her tone shocked me. We had been so long apart—her in fugue while I mingled with the Imperial court—that I had forgotten the intensity of her hatred for our way of life, and of our nobility in particular. She carved some exception for me in her heart, and I supposed that I had thought it a sign that she had tempered in time. Evidently I was wrong, who could not say that she was.
“You may be right,” I said at last.
“I am right,” she said, crossing her arms over her crash harness. She peered back out the window between us. “How many people do you think were in the city?”
I didn’t answer her at once. It was a question we could have answered. I knew there had been forty million on the planet itself, making Thagura far and away one of the largest fiefdoms in the Norman Expanse. But in the city itself? It could have been as many as ten million, or as little as two. Much of the planet’s population was spread across the temperate zones, where the planet’s rare water was more common.
How many of them yet remained was hard to say. It would not be until Malyan’s people—or whoever replaced them—were able to import relief forces and conduct a new census that we would be able to fully appreciate the cost of the invasion...and of the baroness’s reply. I know the answer now. That census was done, years after I departed, conducted by Sir Albert Trask, the man made Imperial proconsul on Thagura after the invasion.
Two hundred and twenty three million people remained on the planet, barely more than half...and there were eight million people in the city when it burned. Eight million people gone in a day. In an instant.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said at last. It didn’t really. “Too many.”
“The woman should die for this,” Valka said.
Her words tore my attention away from the city beneath us. We had passed back into the shadow of the great Rock, and Vahan’s colossus peered in at us. “If she’s guilty,” I agreed—or thought I did.
“She is guilty,” Valka asserted.
Resting my head in my hands, I pressed the heels of my thumbs into my eyes. I had barely slept on the flight down from the pole, and it had taken medication to get me there. The sight I’d seen through the doors of the abbatoir would not leave me, nor the mute accusation in the eyes of the heads on the wall. I almost yearned for cryonic fugue again, to sleep between the stars. Half-dead, at least, I’d sleep.
“It hardly matters who wins this damned war,” Valka muttered, her bitterness like acid on her tongue. “We’re as bad as they are.”
“We’re not,” I said, reflexively.
Golden eyes found mine. “How can you say that, even now?”
Perhaps you ask yourself that very question, Reader. Perhaps you sit there and whisper to your pages, asking if I am not the Sun Eater? Asking if it was not I who burned the fleet at Gododdin, and set fire to that whole world? It was. In the annals of history’s greatest killers, Gadar Malyan merits but a chapter, a heading.
I have written several books. I take no joy in it. What I did, I did for all mankind. What Malyan did, she did only for herself. Judge me if you will, but read on, and know that I have asked these questions too, and asked them of myself—and not only myself.
How many years have we added to our wars? How much higher have we piled the corpses, how much deeper are the rivers of blood because of us? Because of our failings? At every turn, with every step, I have found the horrors of the enemy met with horrors of our own. It was us who shot first at Vorgossos, breaking the fragile—and indeed, impossible—dream of peace. It was us who tortured our prisoners on Emesh, was us who fired first at Cressgard and started the war, whatever the official records may say.
We are no angels—nor am I—but neither are we the Cielcin.
“We don’t eat them,” I said in answer.
When at last we landed and returned along the path Maro led us down to the dungeon and the office of the castellan, it was with another hundred men. The other soldiers—a full chiliad—waited in their ships in a line above the descent to the lower levels and the hidden gate. A new sun was rising over lost Pseldona as we went down, and the dorsal fins of our shuttles rose like black sails against the blushing sky, a solitary line like a row of funeral monuments. Much of the people in Malyan’s bunker were only servants—courtiers like the cupbearer, Ravi Vyasa, not soldiers. We must have outnumbered the baroness’s guards ten-to-one.
Valka had not liked being left behind a second time, but when I had explained my plan to her, she relented. It would not be easy to extract the woman from her hole without bloodshed, and indeed I half-expected to find the baroness locked in her paradise, and had ordered a plasma bore and breaching team be deployed from the Tamerlane at the earliest opportunity.
So much nearer the equator, the wreck of the battle still smoldered in the skies, its traces visible in the tongues and streaks of acrid black staining the heavens. But where before the effect was strangely beautiful, I could then only think of the smoke of thuribles in Chantry, the scents of frankincense, benzoin, and myrrh.
But Maro’s guards did not resist us when we returned. Quite the contrary. We were ushered back down the hidden stair and along the corridors below to the inner door, where Pallino and the men of my guard I’d left behind remained with Maro’s men. Between them they had swept the path clean of onlookers.
My lictor greeted me as I rounded the last corner, my helmet again firmly in place. He and my men saluted—Maro’s, too—and waited for me to speak. “Is the baroness still inside?” I asked.
Pallino must have blinked, judging by the pause and the faint shift of his head. “Yes, my lord. Her and her captain. Some others. They had word of your return.”
I had not ordered word be sent, but I supposed they had yet some access to the surface, some lookouts in bolt-holes throughout the ruined city, and some way of running messages through other doors and tunnels. I paused for only a moment, wondering if I should have sent word, if my silence implied cause for alarm on the baroness’s part. Had I erred?
If I had, it was too late to change. For the plan to work, I needed Malyan to trust me. To come willingly. I had no wish to fight with Captain Maro or his men, or to make a charnel house of the bunker to rival the polar camp. If she was innocent, no harm would be done, and if she was not innocent, then it was better to win the battle before it even began.
“Survivors?” Pallino asked.
“Yes,” I answered him. “Not so many as I hoped. But the planet is ours. I spoke with Corvo on the flight back. She’s telegraphed the news to Marinus.” Conscious of the native audience, I added, “It is a pity the worldship got away. We might have had another of their princes.”
Pallino drew aside, fell into step as I approached the door to the paradise. “We may yet, lad,” he said, a bit of the old myrmidon friendliness creeping through. “They might not have gone far. If we wounded their ship, maybe they wash up in local space.”
I clapped the fellow on the shoulder, indicating by that gesture that it was time to move on. He was right: If Prince Muzugara’s worldship had been damaged, there was always the chance we might hunt it down, but that was a problem for another day.
The baroness awaited.
Discreetly as I could, I tapped the chiliarch twice on the shoulder with my fist before pointing at my eyes, making the gesture casual as could be. Pallino and I had been myrmidons in the coliseum together when I was outcaste, before I had regained my station. It was an old signal, one of many, one not used by the legions standard, but the sort of thing we relied on in the ring, fighting shoulder to shoulder in ranks, most unlike the shielded hoplites and dragoons of the Imperial service.
Pallino caught the signal plain enough and drew back. Be ready for action. There was no time to explain, and always the chance that any subvocal suit communication might be intercepted and overheard. Like as not, the baroness had neither the means nor the personnel for such intelligence work, certainly not there below ground, but it never hurt to be cautious. I had a hundred and fifty men in the bunker. The baroness had perhaps a hundred, but they knew the territory, they had the door controls. We were in her net, and in her power, if she would but use it.
Apparently unawares, the guards opened the gates to the paradise and ushered us inside.
Captain Maro was halfway up the grand staircase from the pool in the grotto below when we stepped over the threshold, and it took every ounce of my scholiast-trained control not to flinch for my shield catch.
But he raised a hand in greeting. “Lord Marlowe! What news from the north?”
Hooking my thumbs through my belt, I stopped with feet apart, white cape hanging from my elbows. “The camp is liberated, Captain Maro. We’ve saved several thousand of your people. My people are as we speak preparing to relocate them south. There is a settlement near Iudha Oasis apparently unspoiled. My comms officer was in contact with the archon. They are able to take refugees.”
Maro touched his brow, heart, and lips, raised his fingers in the sign of the sun. “Mother Earth and God Emperor bless us,” he said. “The archon, did you say? The archon of Iudha? Lady Sirvar?”
The name sounded familiar, and I allowed a short nod.
A smile bright and terribly joyous broke across the bald man’s rough face. “O Mother!” The captain put a hand to his brow. “Sirvar Donauri! So the country survived? Thagura is not lost after all!”
It is lost to the dead, I thought, but did not say. Gesturing to my guards, I said, “I am here for your mistress, Captain. We were interrupted before, but Thagura is hers again for true, and needs must that she accompany me to Marinus.”
That much had not changed. I thought of Valka’s words on the flight down, and wondered what I must say to Titus Hauptmann and the Imperial Viceroy if I failed to bring the baroness to them. I was a knight of the Royal Victorian Order, one of the Emperor’s own, and my victory of Aranata Otiolo had won me a great deal of latitude, but to execute a baroness of the Blood Palatine without trial, without Inquisition, without anything but my own judgment would be an overreach. I would suffer for it, and yet Valka was right. Gadar Malyan would find no justice on Marinus, and what she did find would be no justice for her victims.
If they are her victims, whispered a little voice within me.
“To Marinus?” Maro repeated, evidently having forgotten that those had always been my orders. “Is that...really necessary? My Lord Marlowe, Thagura has suffered. My lady wishes to remain here. To see to the reconstruction, the future of her people!”
“She did not wish so when I spoke to her before,” I said. Gadar Malyan had all but thrown herself at the possibility of travel offworld.
Vahan Maro nodded, but did not step aside. “My lady has been long in thought. It is nine years to Marinus. Even if we were to go and return at once, that would be nearly two decades she would be away from her world, from her people. She must not go! She is needed here! If she must give her report to the viceroy, let it be by telegraph.”
“There will be time for this discussion before we depart,” I said, taking one measured step down the stair. “We would not set sail today at any rate. Stand aside, Captain. I would discuss these matters with your lady.”
Maro hesitated only a second before stepping aside with a muttered, “Yes, of course.” He and the two fusiliers who’d hurried up behind him fell into step just before Pallino and myself. We left the bulk of my guard at the base of those stairs—Maro had been too late to keep two dozen men from descending with me—and proceeded as we had done before around the pool.
The baroness was not where we had last seen her, on the garden terrace overlooking the pool. Maro led us along the marble walkway beneath the nude caryatids, past a pair of round doors in that terrace to a broader door at the far end. The chamber within featured a dining table of pink petrified wood and carpets two inches deep. So lush were the appointments and so deep the silence there that I felt an absurd need for quiet myself, as though I were a rude child again in my father’s house. But I caught my reflection in the smoky mirror glass opposite. Where had that rude child gone? In his place a black devil stood armored in Roman fashion, his sculpted armor and serene face mask drinking the light, his white cloak seeming to shimmer in the jewel-light of crystal lamps.
Maro led us through the chamber to a narrow hall that ran along the back wall of the dining chamber and teed off it in the center. We turned down this branch to an armored door at the end—I marked the garret to the right where half a dozen Malyan troopers languored, on-duty but bored. They peered out at me as I passed, curious to see the newcomer.
The captain pressed the door panel, and said, “It’s Maro, ma’am. I’ve brought him.”
The panel glowed blue and chimed as the door slid open.
Gadar Malyan sat in a tufted, high-backed chair beside a dormant holograph well, her young companion Ravi not far off. Like any good palatine nobile, she had not seated herself with her back to the door—even a door she controlled. Her hand was on the wood-faced panel built into the chair that had opened the door. She had abandoned her diaphanous robe in favor of a form-fitting gown of Malyan azure. She had pinned up her inky cascade of hair, and the pins that held it glittered silver in the low light.
With a pang and thrill of horror, I realized who she reminded me of. The paracoita Kharn Sagara had sent to me on Vorgossos, the one who had forced herself on me. It was her coloring, the dark hair and pale skin, and the full feminine excess of her figure, nearly spilling from her too-tight dress. She arched an eyebrow, and I reminded myself that the threat here was the same. “Lord Marlowe!” She placed her cigarette and its long-stemmed holder on a stand above a crystal ash tray at her elbow. “I feared you would not return!”
“There was never any chance of that, ladyship,” I said, putting a hand to my heart in soft salute. “The matter at the pole has been seen to. Thagura is truly yours once again.”
Gadar Malyan mirrored my gesture, one hand flitting to her heart. “For this you have my gratitude. Will you not remove your helmet, my lord? Ravi, the wine!”
I felt a strong urge to refuse, to order her to come with me at once. But I had to play matters carefully. I had to make her feel secure enough to leave her crypt. And so I raised a hand and keyed the release that opened my helmet like a flower. The segments of the casque broke apart and tucked themselves into the collar. I tapped to loosen the elastic hood and pulled it down, doing my best to smile. “We mustn’t stay long,” I said, and explained that we had found survivors in the polar camp and meant to relocate them to Iudha in the south. “Your people here should be brought south as well. Pseldona is a ruin. If Thagura is to be rebuilt, it will not be from here.”
“Not until relief may be brought from offworld,” the baroness said, brightening as Ravi returned with the wine service. “Will relief be brought from offworld?”
“Eventually,” I said, moving to examine a painting on one darkly paneled wall. It showed a team of farmers toiling at their crop, dressed in the homespuns of Sollan peasants. One man wielded a great hand-scythe, blade raised against the sky, while in the distance the huge gray towers of a drydock glimmered about the half-build shape of a starship. There were no such fields on Thagura, and I wondered from whence that canvas came. Upon it, the great contradiction of Imperial society glowed in greens and browns and silver: the plebeians at their primitive toil—or so Valka would have it—while we nobiles and soldiers sailed the stars in apparent glory.
What I would not have given then to trade places with the man wielding the scythe. Scion of the Empire I might have been, but as a boy I’d shared Valka’s sympathies, her fury at our castes, our hierarchy. Her sense of the injustice of it all. But even in those early days, even in my youth, I had long worn the chains of duty. Of station. That painting was a celebration of our way of life, of the peasant farmer and of the spacefarers who protected him. For it was for them, and for mankind itself that the Empire was ordered. For what is mankind if not the lowest? If not the ordinary women whom we knights and nobiles are born to serve and to defend?
Beneath my white Imperial cloak, I clenched my fists, thinking of the spider in her chair.
“Lord Marlowe?” Gadar Malyan asked. “Will you not sit a while?”
“I . . .” I turned, eyeing Pallino where he and Maro waiting by the door. The chiliarch adjusted his posture, stood a fraction straighter. “Yes, sorry. I was admiring your painting.”
Malyan smiled very prettily. “Ah! Do you like it? It’s one of Duri’s pastorals. My grandmother was a bit of a collector. She furnished most of this place. We had a genuine Rudas in the palace, but I suppose it is gone now, lost with everything else.” She accepted a goblet from her page, and gestured at the lesser armchair positioned at an angle from her own. “It is a pity, my lord, that we could not have met under better circumstances. I feel we have very much in common.”
The boy, Ravi, put a glass into my hands as I sat—pausing only so long as it took to brush my cape to one side. “Is that so?”
“Do you not see it?” she asked, putting a hand to her coiffure. “We favor, you and I. A matched set.”
I did not point out that where her eyes were black as jet, mine were violet. It would not do to antagonize her. “As you say.”
Gadar Malyan lifted the wine to her lips. It was a different vintage from the one we’d shared days earlier, black as her eyes. “I observe,” she began with careful grace, “that your paramour is not with you on this occasion. Does that mean you have reconsidered my offer?”
I blinked at her. “You made no offer.”
“But I did! You are such a man, my lord. Oblivious, the lot of you!” She laughed, directed its music toward Ravi, who smiled stiffly. “My marriage offer, Lord Marlowe!”
Again, I blinked at her. Not in surprise, not precisely, but in shock at her plain boldness. I had suspected—and Valka had smelt it light-years away—that the baroness had intended to seduce me. I should have guessed that seduction would go so far as marriage, but I was still unused to my restored place among the palatinate. I had spent more than fifteen years—my entire adult life—outcaste and stripped of rank and inheritance by my father. I had spent those fifteen years as nobody, devoid of status and social worth, and did not expect to find a palatine baroness throw herself on me. On Emesh, Count Balian Mataro had attempted to secure me as a breeding stud for his family line, for he was a distant cousin of the Emperor, but Malyan had no way of knowing that.
“Don’t go all silent on me!” she said, brows contracting. “It is only natural, after all! Thagura must rebuild. I am unwed. You are a knight with no holdings, and my hero! What a story it would be.”
Something of my hesitation must have shown in my face, for she reached out and gripped my wrist. “You needn’t say yes at once. You are a Royal Knight, and have your duties, I know. But think on it.” A long-nailed finger traced the full curve of one breast. “You needn’t dismiss your girl, either. I am unworried about competition.”
That sent a charge through me, and it took all my composure not to jerk my hand away, to smile my crooked smile and say, “My girl might feel differently.”
“Does it matter?” she asked, innocent as anything. “She is a tribesman of the Tavrosi clans. You are I are the descendants of kings.” She angled her chin as she leaned back, releasing my wrist to take another sip of the black wine. “Perhaps we may discuss arrangements aboard your ship. We have...time before you must go, do we not?”
That gave me the foothold I needed to reply. “Before we must go, my lady. Have you forgotten? I am ordered to bring you to Marinus to keep you safe. Thagura will not be stable for some time, and the viceroy and first strategos both wish to learn what happened here, and to provide you with an opportunity to coordinate relief efforts with them.”
“But I cannot go!” she argued. “I cannot abandon my people, now most of all!”
Rage is blindness, said the part of me that spoke in my old tutor’s voice. A muscle twitched in my jaw. Was she serious? Or only afraid of the consequences of putting herself in my power? She meant to manipulate me, that much was clear. Her offering of herself—now and later—could be nothing else. I hid my irritation behind a sip of the black wine, and it was only after I’d swallowed some that I feared for poison. Too late. But nothing happened, and I broke the brittle silence, saying, “You can do more good for them on Marinus. The Wong-Hopper Consortium has offices on Marinus. You’ll need to procure construction crews, housing, agricultural equipment. This you cannot do here. Your satellite is gone. You have no connection to the wider galaxy. The datanet. Nothing.”
This seemed to sway her, and her proud shoulders slumped. “I have a planet,” she said. “If Iudha is unspoiled, as you say, we have have what we need to rebuild.”
“You do not,” I said. “You have no military power, no officers. Nearly all your administration was lost in the battle here.” Her head began to droop as she listened to me, and she cradled her goblet in jeweled talons. “Has it occurred to you you may need to reconquer this planet, my lady?”
Her head jolted up, and she narrowed her eyes at me, head moving side to side. “What?”
“You misunderstand your situation,” I said pointedly, and leaning forward set the wine cup—barely touched—on the table between us. I took a deep breath.“The Thagura you knew is gone. Your power is gone. If I were to leave you here, what is to stop anyone, anyone from removing you from what remains of your office? Your captain here?”
I heard rather than saw Maro advance on reflex, but he said nothing.
“You will die here, ladyship,” I said, flatly as I was able. “Your cause is not hopeless, but it is hopeless here. Now.” I stood, and extended a hand for her to take. “You must have connections. Relatives offworld.”
She looked up at me, and for the first time I saw through the veil of coquettish denial she had woven about herself. Her full lips compressed, and there was a glassiness in her eyes I had not seen before. Almost I pitied her, for even if she was guilty of the horrors the Cielcin and survivors alike accused her of committing, she was too a victim. She had lost her world, her home, and everything.
But a bit of Valka’s cruelty—and the old Marlowe family fire—flashed in me, and I said, “And you may wish to reserve your generosity. Save it for a man with more.”
She had no words for that, but understanding her position at last, rose and took my hand.
CHAPTER 7
JUSTICE
The crushing silence greeted us with the sunlight. No birds in the skies of Thagura, nor any grass to stir. The very air was still in the alley and on the street that circled the Rock.
“Do you have her?” Valka asked, words conveyed through the conduction patch behind my ear.
“We do,” I answered shortly, looking back over my shoulder. The baroness looked utterly out of place in her azure gown and intricately styled hair, as if she were from some other world and not the desert ruin about us—which in a sense she was. Vahan Maro stayed dutifully by her side, face grim. I sensed that he had been behind her sudden desire to remain on the planet, and he was not happy about the way things were developing. Had he pointed out that she was putting herself entirely at our mercy? Had he conspired with her in the bombing? Had it even been his idea?
But I smiled, and pointed around the bend to the stairs and up the wall to where the black line of our shuttles waited. Another of our Roc-class landing frigates had arrived from orbit while we were underground, and crouched on the stone above us. “We’ve not far to go! The frigate will take you and your retinue direct to the Tamerlane. She’s in low orbit now, straight up! Do you see?” I moved my hand, gesturing to the fuzzy, black knife-shape where it scudded across the pale sky. At more than a dozen miles long, the ship appeared the size of an arrowhead at its height of several hundred miles, and its ion engines gleamed dully in the daylight like a fogbound star.
Gadar Malyan advanced, Ravi at her side with a sunshade held over the both of them. The baroness squinted through small, dark glasses, shrinking from the light. “I see!” she said, casting about nervously like her men. I had to remind myself that she had lived ten years underground, lived in fear of the sky and of the creatures dwelling in it. That experience had surely activated some primitive part of her biology that remembered being small and scurrying in fear of birds. “When will the others be able to make the move to Iudha?”
Falling into step beside her while Pallino led the way, I answered, “Within the week. We will remain in-system long enough to ensure the survivors at the camp and here relocate safely. My people have been in contact with Archon Donauri there. She will join us aboard the Tamerlane before long. We will take counsel before we return to Marinus.” I winced inwardly at the words leaving my mouth. They were half-lies. Lady Sirvar Donauri was expected to join us aboard the Tamerlane, but there would be no counsel. Not with the baroness.
Sensing a shadow at my back, I turned, found Captain Maro close behind, ever watchful. His dragoons stayed about us, a line to either side of the baroness and myself, and behind there marched a ragged assortment of the baroness’s surviving court, those retainers she deemed too important to be separated from her person. She believed they would accompany her to Marinus—and they might yet. They were to be, in truth, witnesses against her. I could not decide if the baroness were canny enough to surround herself with know-nothings, or foolish enough to keep any confidants close.
We would know soon enough.
We hadn’t far to go. My men waited above, ready to surround our column at my mark.
I performed a quick head count. Baroness Malyan had perhaps half a hundred dragoons in her personal guard, and less than half that number in her train. My own men outnumbered her two-to-one, but that was still close enough that a desperate man like Vahan Maro might risk shielded combat if the chips came down.
“What manner of ship is she, Lord Marlowe?” inquired one of the courtiers, a portly man with an absurdly painted face. “Your vessel?”
“She’s one of the Eriels,” I said in answer, turning to face forward again and resume my pace beside Lady Malyan.
The courtier whistled appreciatively. “Red Star didn’t make very many of those, did they!”
“Seventeen,” I said. “My lord is quite correct.” Taking Gadar by the arm, I leaned beneath the damasked sunshade. “Too expensive, you understand. She was a gift from the Emperor from my services.”
The baroness put her arm in mine. “How many crewmen?”
“Crewmen? About five thousand, full out. But there are ninety thousand men aboard, mostly legionnaires on ice.” We had reached the stair by then, the once smooth and polished stone chipped and scarred by the fighting that had come so near the palace. Above and left we would find the square where we first met Captain Maro and the survivors, and beyond that the crumbled road down from the Rock to the shelf where Pseldona lay in ashes.
Not far.
Gadar Malyan’s fingers tightened, and leaning in she said, “Then could you not be my army?”
“I have my duties, ladyship,” I said, “Even were I to take up on your generous offer.”
“Please,” she hissed, and leaning close breathed. “Help me take back my world. You can have me tonight if you would but do this thing.”
I did not turn to look at her, but neither did I drop her arm—though every thought of Valka screamed for me to do so. Let her think that I pondered her words as we climbed. We were nearly to the top. “My lady, you dishonor yourself. And me.”
She flinched, and drew her arm away.
“We will sail for Marinus,” I said.
She did not speak again as we crossed the ruined plaza and exited by the arch to the slope leading back down toward the city. There the pavement cracked and the withered stumps of olive trees rose blackened and gnarled to either side of what had once been a mighty avenue. Our frigate and the line of shuttles waited just below, and I felt my heart beat faster in my chest. We were nearly there. The Tamerlane had passed almost to the horizon, its dark shape hurrying about its low orbit. We’d have a few hours before it circumnavigated the globe and was ready for rendezvous.
Time enough, and none at all.
At a sign, my herald sounded his clarion, signaling to the watch below that we had come back. I saw a sentinel on the ramp of the frigate vanish inside, saw Pallino put a hand to his earpiece. He was far enough ahead now that he would not be overheard as Valka or the lieutenant in command of the frigate explained what must be done.
“Are we for the frigate?” asked Captain Maro.
“Yes,” I said, “she’ll take the lot of you.” We passed the nearest of the personnel shuttles, and I marked the shuttered ramps, knew that behind each fifty men waited, ready to encircle us.
“So many ships!” remarked the fat lord who has asked after the Tamerlane. “You do travel in style, Lord Marlowe!”
“Indeed, Master Pardo!” I said, remembering the fellow’s name in a flash. He’d introduced himself as we were preparing to leave the bunkers. He’d been a senior logothete working for the Malyan treasury before the war. “The baroness’s security and yours are of the utmost importance!”
A woman beside Pardo chimed in. “Sweet Mother Earth! I forgot what wind feels like!”
A breeze had chosen that moment to blow up and rake the escarpment, carrying with it the bitter alkalines of the desert and ash. I felt its dry fingers in my hair, and stopped a moment, transfixed by something that should not have been there. There, at the base of one of the ruined olives, stood a solitary spot of green. A lonely blade of grass, its seed blown there and deposited by just such a wind as blew through our company, bent toward us.
Life had not ended. Not here, not anywhere.
The men manning the shuttle controls chose that moment to drop the ramps. The baroness had gone on ahead of me, ushered along by her court and Pallino’s men, and had reached the base of the frigate’s ramp. Men in the ivory plate and red tunics of the Imperial Legions came spilling out, lances flaming and ready as they rushed to encircle the Malyan loyalists. The dragoons scrambled to alertness, hoisting plasma rifles beneath their dun cloaks, drawing in around the baroness and her people.
It was a miracle no one fired, though many swore and I heard Maro’s voice lifted in an oath to blacken the clouds. But it was the fat man, Pardo, who found his wits first. “What is the meaning of this?” he bellowed, looking all round for me. “Lord Marlowe, what is going on?”
My men all stood still as chess pieces, bayonets aimed, muzzles threatening. I had to push through their ranks to reach the front, where a small no-man’s-land separated the Malyan island from the sea of red and white about it, clicking my shield into place as I went. The static charge of it prickled my brow, and the small hairs of my neck stood on end. More troopers awaited in the hold of the landed Roc, and a junior officer in blacks with the red beret and long coat stood among them, his sidearm drawn.
Baroness Malyan said nothing. Her eyes were utterly unreadable behind her dark glasses. But she did not act confused. She stood poised as any of my men, not uncomprehending—or so it seemed to me. When I examine my memories of my short time on Thagura, it is to that moment I turn first. I knew then and there that she was guilty. An innocent woman would have shown fear, would have acted lost, overwhelmed. But then and there—for just an instant—I saw the iron in her spine. A moment of defiance and resignation known to many a cornered king throughout the long and bloody march of mankind across the centuries and countless worlds.
“Gadar Malyan, Baroness of Thagura, you are charged with high treason and genocide against the people of Thagura. Surrender, and order your men to stand down, and no harm need come to you or anyone.”
She did not, but stood there like a woman weighing her chances. Presently she removed her glasses, eyes shining and narrowed against the light of the sun. “Genocide!” she echoed, forcing incredulity into every syllable. “You cannot think I did this! You saw them, did you not? You broke their fleet!” She pointed at the sky. “You said you found survivors at their camp! Their camp! You think I did this?”
The various courtiers were starting to raise their hands, bunching together to put as much distance between them and the long knives. Maro’s men—shielded to the last—kept their rifles level at their shoulders. The captain himself glared at me with eyes like blue fire.
“We are the victims, Lord Marlowe! I am the victim!” Gadar beat her chest. “I am Thagura, and Thagura burned!”
“Order your men to put down their arms!” I said again, not negotiating.
“Rogue!” she hissed, cheeks flaring as she spat the word. “You...you cannot do this! I am Baroness of Thagura. This is my world! My world!” She jabbed a finger at the ground. “Maro! Kill this man!”
The captain’s eyes scanned the crowd, taking in the ranks of Red Company legionnaires encircling his charges and his dragoons. He did not fire, but neither did he lower his weapon. “Maro! Anyone!” the baroness shrilled.
I raised a hand, reminding my people of the need for calm. On the ramp to the frigate, Valka appeared beside the black-clad officer. She caught my eye, but did not speak. Gadar Malyan was the chaotic eye in the center of a storm of utter stillness. “Are you mad?” she asked, jabbing a finger at me. “Arresting a palatine lord on her own world! There’ll be hell to pay when we reach Marinus, Marlowe, mark my words! You dare talk of treason! This is treason!”
“Order your men to lay down their arms, Lady Malyan. Thagura has seen enough of violence.”
“Put your guns down, all of you!” cried a senior man near Pardo.
Maro and his troopers did not move. Neither did mine.
Stalemate.
“For Earth’s sake, ladyship!” exclaimed one of the other women, dropping to her knees.
Malyan’s eyes were wide and black as hell, twin spots of ink in broad whiteness. Her nostrils flared, and again she ran the tally, gaze sweeping over her men and mine. One strand of coiling dark hair had come loose from its place and flowed, disheveled, down the side of her perfect face.
“Please,” I said, hands spread on the air before me, as a man placates a wild thing. “Stand your men down.”
Her lips trembled, and shook—though whether it was from rage or fear or grief none but she could say. Her shoulders drooped until she seemed some rag-stuffed effigy propped on a staff. “Lower your weapons,” she breathed, voice barely more than a whisper.
Maro and the nearest of her dragoons complied, rifles dropping. One tossed his to the ground, put his hands on his head. When the others did not move as quickly, the baroness shrilled, “I said lower your weapons, you damn fools!”
Relief played in me, and played out on the faces of the courtiers encircled and on that of Valka and the junior officer. My men did not lower their own lances, but advanced to collect the weapons from the dragoons as they followed the lead of the first man, placing hands on heads and dropping to their knees.
The lieutenant descended the ramp, black coat flapping like wings, and said, “Bind the soldiers and take their weapons.”
Pallino relayed the order more loudly, “Double quick, you dogs!”
I crossed the no-man’s-land to face Gadar Malyan, who looked up to face me. “I know you ordered your own city burned,” I said, and as she opened her mouth, added, “Don’t deny it.”
She shut her mouth. Was she defeated? Or only afraid?
My gaze flickered to where Valka waited in the Roc’s hold. I hoped what we were doing was right. It felt like justice, but what is justice? Only a statue in Chantry, her eyes blinded, a balance in her hands. Thus the cynics would have it. But I am no cynic. That what is right and just is often difficult to see and more difficult to know does not mean there is nothing just or right in creation, only that we are ourselves inadequate in its pursuit.
“You could have been baron,” Malyan said, black eyes filling with tears. It was almost a confession, and I think she realized it, for she continued. “This insult will not stand, my lord. The viceroy will hear of your treachery.”
“The viceroy?” I said, and shook my head. “My lady, I serve the Emperor himself, and like the viceroy, the Emperor is far away.”
That snatch of the old Mandari proverb struck her as I intended. Her eyes widened, and she realized the folly in her words. The viceroy was on Marinus, and she would not come to Marinus except through me. I was the reigning power on Thagura, not her. I advanced until I was within the reach of her arms. She was almost so tall as me, tall as all palatines were tall, but her posture broke again, and she shrank back. “You and your court will be detained aboard the Tamerlane until we have reached our decision.” Turning my head, I regarded Captain Maro where he stood not far from his mistress’s side. “Your men will be placed in our brig under guard. No harm shall befall any of your people. By the Blood Imperial, I swear it.”
She spat at my feet. “What good are your words?”
“Take her away,” I said, and stepped back, gesturing that my men might approach and bind her. I brushed past to mount the ramp to the hold.
Then several things happened at once. A bluish light bathed the ramp before me, accompanied by a humming drone. The men behind me cursed. One of the courtiers—a woman—screamed, and Valka shouted, “Hadrian! Look out!”
I knew that blue, the color of watered moonlight, and knew as well that constant humming. I twisted aside, pivoting around my right foot like a hinge before leaping back to avoid the slash of Vahan Maro’s highmatter blade. The weapon sang through the air, exotic matter rippling like the surface of a pool. The tip whistled past mere microns from my chest. The blow would have severed me clean in half, the blade cutting without resistance.
Time slowed around us, and the fire in Maro’s eyes shone cold as distant stars. His jaw was set, and the iron in his heart and hand was a thing terrible to behold. He was a dead man, and he knew it. He only hoped to make me join him in death, in the mad hope that my absence might spare his lady her fate. Wasting no time, Vahan Maro lunged, thrusting out with the blade none of us had known he had. Twisting aside, I snapped my own sword free of its hasp and squeezed the triggers. Liquid metal flowed to its proper state, the blade crystallizing in a flash to parry Maro’s thrust. The captain recovered speedily, drawing back his sword to aim a cut at my head.
I let him throw it, stepped in with my own parry to stop the captain’s blow from carving me in twain. For a moment, we met each other strength for strength, met each other eye to eye. I held my sword in both hands, the blade nearly perpendicular to Maro’s own. We stayed there only an instant, each of us mapping the manifold possibilities of the next instant, each anticipating each.
One instant ended, another began.
I arrived in it half a step ahead of my opponent. Before he could move, I brushed his blade down and to one side, and before he could respond I slid in and punched him square in the nose with both hands still on my hilt to stagger him, to stop any remise that might have claimed my life or limb. Maro stumbled back, tried to recover.
Too late.
The highmatter encountered no obstacle as it bit into Maro’s shoulder, nor any as the blade passed through heart and lung and liver before exiting the other side.
Stunned silence filled the air above the ashen city. No birds sang, and all the men and women seemed not to breathe. The whole thing had happened in less time than it takes to write about it. In seconds. Maro knew he was dead before he fell. You could see it in his eyes, in the soft oh his lips made, hardly to be heard. Then his head and right shoulder and the arm with it slid along the fault line and fell. His body fell a moment later, and the stones ran red at my feet.
Gadar Malyan cursed and turned away, shading her eyes. Several of the court women screamed, and Pardo belted an oath. I unkindled my blade and stepped back. Still no one moved. My own troops stood around shocked, realizing each in his time how close I had come to death, and realizing—too—that they had been no use in the critical moment.
Stowing the hilt of my sword back in its hasp, I said, “Take the body away and bury it. Make a cairn if you must.” Two of the men nodded. Knowing I must, I stepped over Vahan Maro, taking my cape in one fist to keep it from falling in his blood, and returned to Gadar Malyan, who turned red-eyed to face me. “Those were your orders he died on,” I said. “Tell your men I’ll tolerate no more heroics from them.”
She shook as she glared at me, and so I took her place, shouting, “Every last one of you, on your knees!”
One by one at first, then five by five, they knelt at last. Two hoplites approached with manacles for the lady then, but I raised a hand to stay them. “That won’t be necessary anymore, soldier. She’s done all the harm she can.” The men both stopped, and seeing the pain and fury in Malyan’s eyes, I said, “A courtesy for the lady.”
CHAPTER 8
THE HANGED MAN
It was cold aboard the Tamerlane, as it is almost always cold in space. Two days had passed since Lady Malyan’s arrest, and still I had hardly slept. The thought of this interview filled me with a sickness and numb dread that forbade sleep. I had meant to speak to the baroness the day before, but could not bring myself to do it, and so she had waited in the unused cabin I had ordered should serve for her cell.
Two legionnaires in masks and full armor stood guard by the door, each armed only with ceramic blades, for lances and plasma burners were not permitted on ship except at high alert. “Has she given you any trouble?” I asked them, facing the trapezoidal door.
“No, my lord,” said the senior of the two men. “Quiet as a lamb. Nothing on camera either, or so Lieutenant Bressia says. She’s had watch.”
I nodded. “Well, let me in, soldier.”
“Aye, sir,” the fellow answered, tilting his head. “Shall one of us go in with you? She isn’t chained, per your orders.”
“That won’t be necessary,” I said. “She is no danger to me.”
“Very good, sir.” The man saluted and turned to key the door.
It slid smoothly upward, revealing a small and comfortable cabin of the sort usually set aside for the senior lieutenants, perhaps a dozen feet deep and a little narrower, with the bed built in along the far wall and a notch to the left to fit the sonic shower pod and small commode. There was no decoration, nothing to soften to spartan nature of the polished black metal. The room had been unoccupied before, untouched since the Tamerlane was put into my charge. There weren’t even scuff marks and the usual signs of human occupation. It was pristine.
The baroness lay on the bed, and turned to look at me as I entered, peering out from her hair. That once magnificent style snarled about her lovely face, a disordered chaos, and from the drawn look in her face and the redness in her eyes I knew she had been crying, knew she had hardly slept.
The door slid shut behind me. Not wishing to give her the first word and the opportunity to direct our conversation, I said, “There were survivors from Pseldona at the camp.”
She sat up then, lips pressed together, but said nothing.
“They must have been taken in that first assault, or so I told myself. Ten years they endured in Cielcin hands. Mother Earth knows what they saw, what they had to do to survive . . .” I let my words trail off, let them hang like smoke upon the air.
Still Malyan said nothing. I hooked my thumbs through my belt. I was not armored, wore only the belted black tunic, dark flared trousers, and polished high boots that were my custom, militaristic but not military. My sword hung from my shield-belt, a comforting weight. I chewed my tongue. “Can you imagine? Of course you can’t. You haven’t seen what they are. The Cielcin, I mean.” I hung my head, studied the polished black metal of the floor between our feet. They had given Malyan a soldier’s burgundy fatigues to wear, but no shoes, and her painted feet stuck out from the rough leggings like that blade of grass from Thagura’s desolation. “I used to think they were like us. Monsters, yes, but monsters such as we. Monsters I could understand—thought I could understand. After all these years, I’m not sure I understand them any better, but I’m sure I understand us less.” I held her gaze. When still she said nothing, I continued. “There were millions in your city, my lady.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Her silence broke like glass, but I marked the delay, the second’s hesitation, the second’s contemplation. Calculation.
She was guarding her words.
“These survivors!” I spoke as if she had not, raising my voice to override her. “Told an interesting tale. Perhaps you know it.” Then I found I could hold her gaze no more, and turned to one side, paced to the nearby wall and back to the other. At that second wall I stopped, turned my head away. “You see, I was wrong. They were not captured in the initial sack—before the burning. At least, not all of them were. They were taken later, after the city was destroyed.” I paused to study the baroness’s face. Her red eyes were utterly unreadable, her face a study of exhaustion and grief. “Do you know what they told me?”
Still nothing.
“They told me that it was human ships that bombed the city. Your city.” I pointed right between her eyes. “Your ships.”
“My ships?” the baroness said, again pausing to find her words. “I...don’t understand.”
“Don’t you?” I asked. “That wasn’t all they said. They told me the raid sirens did not sound. That they had no warning. There had been warnings of the earlier raids. But none that day. I asked myself how that could be?”
The baroness sniffed, snarled, “You killed the only man who could still have answered that question days ago.”
“Do not hide behind your captain, ladyship,” I said. “You were the one holding his leash. It was your words that caused his death. Your orders.” Sensing that I’d pushed too hard on a raw nerve, I drew back a step to put more distance between us, straightened. “You are Thagura, you told me. Or are you telling me your own military went rogue?”
She blinked up at me. It was her only defense. She must have known that. I fancied I could see the gears turning in her head. But she knew as I that had that been her move, the time to make it was days ago, on our first meeting.
Still, she had to try. Looking at some spot on the wall beside my elbow, she said, “I know nothing of war. That was the province of my captains.”
“You have played the damsel well, and tried to conceal much by pretending that you are only a woman,” I said. “But I do not believe it. Of you, or any woman.” I returned to the center of the room and faced her square on. “Eight million people, Gadar Malyan. How many of them died by your word?”
“They took so many!” she said, gripping the edge of her bed until the mattress squeaked in the confined space. “So many in the first days!”
“That may be so,” I said. “But that is not an answer an innocent woman would give.”
She seemed to deflate then, to collapse entire, like a fleet of sails tangled on the solar winds. She knew I was right, knew there was no sense in deception. She stayed that way a long time, and I left her alone with her secret thoughts, not speaking. Her black hair hid her face, and seated on the edge of the bed, she appeared shriveled, shrunken by the weight of her life.
“How long did you wait?” I asked at last. “A week? Two?”
Nothing. Again.
“Why did you do it?” I asked. “Why give the order?”
She shook her head, knowing she had already betrayed herself.
“Tell me, Lady Malyan,” I said, putting my hands behind my back. I tried to sound kind.
One reddened black eye glowered up at me through hair dark as my own. “We lost our fleet. We had nothing. No defenses. And the Emperor was far away.” She started shaking, clenched her fists upon her knees. “I had to act.”
“And so you massacred your own people?”
“You would rather they end up enslaved to the Cielcin?” She looked me fully in the face then. There was no light in those jet chips she called eyes, none but the reflection of fires only she could see. “We were alone! Defenseless! Without any starships to reply!”
I had to walk away, turned to face the wall, ears pricking for any movement from the baroness, but there was none. “The sun is high, and the Emperor is far away,” I parroted, shading my eyes. “You said that before. It’s an old Mandari proverb, but it doesn’t mean what you think. It doesn’t grant you latitude and a long leash. It’s a lament. A lament that the Emperor is not nearer his subjects, and better able to defend them from the likes of you.” For has it not been the case in every age that the greatest ally of the common man has ever been the emperor? The king and his laws against the nobility who ever believes itself above them?
Malyan scoffed. “You think you’re the only lettered man in the galaxy?” She tossed her raven hair. “I have done nothing that others have not done before me, that you would not have done in my place. You know well as I that when the barbarians come calling, you burn your fields to deprive them of food and pray they pass on.”
My mouth hung open an instant, and for one of the vanishingly few times in my life, I—the son of a poet and student of the scholiasts’ tradition—was truly speechless. Valka’s words whispered at my shoulder. We’re as bad as they are. Every cell and synapse wanted to argue with her, but I could never argue with her. Not to her satisfaction.
We’re as bad as they are.
At length I found my tongue. “Men,” I managed, “are not wheat.”
She held my gaze and did not look away. After another silence, she said, “You’re wrong.” I opened my mouth both in stunned amazement and to shout, but she plowed ahead, saying, “I have seen what they are. The Cielcin. I know what they’re capable of.” From the way her voice shook—the audible pathos of it—I knew this, at least, was truth. “They came to my world to feast, Lord Marlowe. To carry off my people! Even the children!” Again her shoulders shook, and those red-black eyes fixed on some indeterminate point on the wall behind me. “So do not talk to me of them. I did what I had to to try and stop them.”
“You thought . . .”
But she was not finished, and the fire in her flared hot as any corona. “I thought to deprive them of...of fodder.”
“You fool,” I said, quietly as I could. “You did not deprive them of a feast, you deprived your people of hope. The Cielcin travel between the stars for centuries. They don’t freeze themselves as we do. They eat what they can raise on their ships; or their slaves; or each other, if they have to. And they would have had to. They were starving when they arrived.” For a third time, I turned my back. “The ironic thing is, if you had done nothing, they might have had their fill and left sooner. You gave them no choice. Pseldona was their best option; a fifth of the planet lived in that city.”
“And I ask you again,” she said, “ought I to have let them be eaten?”
“So you committed genocide from an abundance of mercy, is that it?” I snarled, unable to bite back my retort a third time. “Spare me, Lady Malyan! You were afraid! You’re still afraid! It’s written on your face, plain as anything. You thought that if you burned the city, they might spare you. You and your little court underground.” My hand moved to my sword hilt, fingers squeaking on the wine Jaddian leather. “Do you deny it?”
She must have seen the gesture, for she fell silent as a stone. I took my hand away, turned once more to face her.
Baroness Gadar Malyan had drawn her knees to her chin like a child, and hugged herself, unblinking. In a voice pressed flat and dry as flowers between the pages of a folio, she whispered, “What is to become of me, then? On Marinus?”
I shook my head. Valka was right. On Marinus, the viceroy and Lord Hauptmann might find her guilty, but like as not they would sentence her a term on some prison colony, to Belusha or Pagus Minor. It wasn’t right, nor could it be made right. Once, I might have balked at the thought of doing what I knew I must, but those who balk at justice and shudder at its retributive nature are fools—as all young men are. Justice, by its very nature, must be retributive. Punishment must follow crime, and cannot precede it. Criminals cannot be brought to justice before their crimes, because before their crimes they are not criminals. Man becomes monstrous by his actions, though the monster dwells in all our hearts, as it dwells in mine.
None of us is born evil.
“You cannot go to Marinus,” I said shortly, knowing what must be done. “We will return to Thagura . . .” I tarried then, tarried because I did not want to say what I must, but I ought to have gone on. For hope, bright and terrible hope, blossomed in the condemned woman, and her eyes cleared for an instant. For just an instant. I shut my own. “You shall die on your own world.”
Silence then. Total and absolute.
“I see,” she said, and to my astonishment, she did not argue. She did not grovel. She did not beg. She let her knees fall, feet back on the cold, metal floor, and sat square and still. She did not even blink. “I see,” she said again, and nodded. Tears shone in her eyes but did not fall. “How?”
“You are palatine,” I said in answer. “You’ll be beheaded, in the old way.”
That answer made the reality more real, and her stunned expression shattered. Her eyes found me then in all the emptiness she perceived, and sharpened to twin points of black. “Who are you to judge me? You are no magister! No praetor of the Chantry!”
I studied her face once more, seeing not the eugenic beauty there, but the stains beneath her eyes, the hollowness in her unpainted cheeks, the pain and horror and care. Earlier I spoke of the plebes, of the survivors from the camp, of all they must have suffered and had to do to survive. Survival makes animals of us all, as it had made one of her.
Animals.
Monsters.
“I am Thagura,” I said at last, not really thinking. And a servant of the Emperor, I thought. She inhaled sharply, as if slapped, and I amended, “I am all Thagura has.”
“Mother Earth rot your bones, Lord Marlowe,” she hissed, and spat again between us. “You’ll sit here one day. Right here. For just such a sin as mine.” She slapped the bed beside her. “I pray you lose everything, too. Your world, your people, that little witch who’s wrapped you round her finger. Everything. And I pray you have as self-righteous a judge.”
I might have struck her then, and it would have felt like righteousness. But I knew that it was not. She was beaten, and having no venom left to sting, still bit. Having no reply or comfort for her, I could only smile. But it was the broken, crooked smile of House Marlowe, and no comfort at all.
My fist was raised to bang upon the door by the time she called out, “Lord Marlowe!”
I froze. “What?”
“How did you know? Know that the Cielcin were starving?”
So simple a question at the end of so much talk. I struggled not to laugh, and pounded on the bulkhead all the same. The door slid smoothly up and open an instant later, and the two guards peered in through blank masks. “I asked them,” I said shortly. “They told me.”
Gadar Malyan almost snorted. “And you believed them?”
There was nothing left to say.
CHAPTER 9
. . . AND THE EMPEROR IS FAR AWAY
Dry as Thagura was, there were but few clouds in her sky. Perhaps a week had passed since my meeting with the baroness in her cell, during which time I had met with Lady Donauri, the archon of Iudha who had survived the siege. It had taken much to convince her of the truth: even the baroness’s confession to me seemed not to convince her, and there had been such love for Gadar Malyan before. But Thagura was not the same world it had been—would never be the same again, though new life would grow and rebuild.
You can never step in the same river twice, nor upon the same planet. Time, Ever-Fleeting—as I have often reflected—flows in but one direction, and it is not back.
At length, Donauri agreed to rule on Thagura in our absence, pending the arrival of Imperial troops from Marinus or elsewhere. Unto her would be given the survivors of Malyan’s court, and unto her would fall the decision of what to do with them. Let her sift the lambs from the goats, let her determine who else was guilty, and how. I had a different destiny, would have to answer to Imperial command on Marinus in my time. Standing in the ruined square, I told myself that would not matter, that what I had done was just...
...and that what I must do there—that day, in that square—must be just, too.
My own men filled the plaza, formed ranks about its perimeter, lances or rifles held at rest. Faceless as they were, I felt myself almost alone in the universe. Two dozen of my officers stood in a line at my left, black-clad in their bridge coats, red berets bent over the left. Crim stood chief among them, wearing his black coat like a cape over his bright Jaddian dolman with its belt of throwing knives. Seeing me watching him, he gave a tight nod.
Valka stood to one side of the crowd, protected by my men. She did not see me looking, but looked herself back to where the shuttle carrying the baroness circled in its final descent. Seeing it, the gathered Thagurans—survivors from the camp, Siva among them; men and women up from Iudha; and some of the courtiers who had endured in Malyan’s bunker. These seemed even more remote to me than the faceless soldiery, almost members of another species.
My men had toiled the previous night to erect something like a scaffold. Thagura had little wood, and so they’d lashed a number of supply crates together to make a kind of stage in the center of the plaza. Their black faces gleamed dully in the colorless light, and I could feel the faint heat of them through my boots. The day was warm, was likely to grow warmer, and dressed in my tunic and trousers—without my armor’s cooling suite—I experienced Thagura as never before. Dry and hot, the air leeched the moisture from my face, and the wind snapped at my hair.
“Not long now,” Pallino said, speaking from my shoulder. “Bressia says they’ve landed.”
I raised a hand for quiet. I did not trust myself to speak.
I had killed before, in battle and in duels, but I had never once performed an execution. Though I had spent the night contemplating the possibility of my own death in the morning, I had never been made to pause and ruminate upon the death of another. Almost I wished to trade places with the baroness. She at least would not have to live with the consequences of what she had done.
The old systems of democracy and parliament only allowed the cowards to hide. My father’s words floated at me from childhood, from another world. Those old systems had killed bloodlessly, painlessly, by bureaucracy, as the kings of the Golden Age killed by the servants. I knew I could not, and touched the hilt of sword where it waited, to reassure myself that it was still there.
At the entrance to the square, Oro sounded his trumpet, a deceptively bright and airy sound. Three long notes he sounded. Three to mark the arrival of the baroness and her escort.
Oro fell silent as my guards brought her forth. They had shackled her for the occasion, and she wore still the burgundy fatigues—without emblem or device—of a common soldier. But her hair was clean again and brushed over one shoulder, running like spilled ink, and her eyes—as dark—were fixed on some point beyond human seeing, somewhere on the Rock above, where the graven images of her ancestors looked down and shouldered the shattered legacy of their house.
We have to show the people we are people, not some abstraction. It was like Father stood beside me, a hand on my shoulder. How I’d hated him then. How I understand him now, as I had tried to teach the baroness.
It is by the sword we rule.
It was by the sword I ruled Thagura then, if only for one more day, would be by the sword that Sirvar Donauri must rule the survivors in Iudha and retake her world, as I had taken it from the Cielcin. It would be a long campaign, but there was order at the end, order and life again. And peace, if not the peace I’d sought as a boy.
Which ancient god was it who said he brought not peace, but the sword?
Is it not oft true that peace comes only after the sword is drawn and bloodied?
So it has been for me.
An eerie silence played over the square as bright-haired Lieutenant Bressia led Gadar Malyan to the platform on which Pallino and stood. No true silence, for a murmur of dry words floated on the air, carried by the stiff breeze. Though my men all were silent, the Thagurans shifted and whispered, elbowing one another, jostling that each might get a better look at his lord.
“My lady!” one cried aloud, and turning I saw a hand up-raised. “Lady Malyan!”
“Lady Malyan!” another shouted, drawing her gaze, too.
“Is it true?” A woman’s voice rose up. “Is it true what they say?”
The baroness did not answer, but turned her face away.
At a sign from one of the officers, Oro sounded his horn once more, a brief flurry of notes calling for the attention of all gathered. Fresh silence fell, and turning from the baroness, I raised my voice to be sure all gathered might hear. “In the name of His Imperial Radiance, William XXIII of the Aventine House, Firstborn Son of Earth, I, Hadrian of the House Marlowe-Victorian, a Royal Knight and Servant of our Honorable Caesar, have declared that for the high crimes of genocide and of treason against sacred humanity, the Lady Gadar Malyan VII, Baroness of Thagura and Archon of Pseldona Prefecture, shall die this day by the sword.”
The words belonged to some other man, were spoken in some other voice. A voice that sounded so very like my father’s. If I try, I can almost hear it now, can remember the flat echoes rebounding from the crumbling facades of the buildings all around, can feel the uneasy shifting of the crowd.
As in antiquity, the firing squad and the noose were common ways to die and so tradition demanded that all palatines die by beheading. That same tradition—codified in the Chantry’s Index of law—specified that the sword should be not highmatter, but polished zircon, a white ceramic blade lighter than water and sharp almost as highmatter itself. I met a student of the law once who told me that the Chantry Synod had decreed it so because highmatter required no skill to cut, and the death of any great lord should be a ritual undertaken with the utmost care. The carnifex should have been a cathar of the Chantry, a man trained in the arts of death.
But there were no such students in the throng.
“Is it true?” a new voice called out, and I could not find the speaker.
“It isn’t right!” another shouted. “You are a knight, and she a lady! By what right do you judge her?”
“By this!” I called in answer, snapping the hilt of my sword free from my belt. I raised the Jaddian weapon high for all to see. “And by her own words! She has confessed her crimes! It was by her command that this city and its millions burned! She sought to save herself, in the hope that by burning Pseldona, she might encourage the enemy to move on! It did not work, and even if it had, it would not have worked for the millions dead here.”
The strength of my words seemed to still their objections a moment, and so I pressed on. I did not anticipate a riot, but I needed to keep control of the crowd, and so I moved to the edge of the makeshift platform, sword unkindled in my hand. The wind tousled my hair and my cape and pulled at the red aiguillettes pinned at my shoulder. “The Cielcin are gone. I pray they will not return. But Thagura is yours, is ours, is man’s once more! You must rebuild your world, but you cannot do so under the command of this!” I pointed at the silent Baroness. “Eight million people lived in this city. Four million people, and she killed them.”
So many. So few when measured against the billions my own actions would one day claim.
So very few.
“The sun is high,” I almost murmured, and turned to look at Gadar Malyan, “and the Emperor is far away. But I am his servant, and in his name I will not leave this world in the hands of its greatest criminal. My Red Company sails tomorrow, and your world will pass into the stewardship of Lady Donauri, who has safeguarded many among you for so long already.” I gestured to the archon—an older woman with hair like spun steel and a face like old porcelain—who stood impassively. I had shown her Malyan’s confession, and she had believed. “We will not return, but the Emperor’s justice—which I do here today—has returned.”
“Is it true, my lady?” a familiar voice cried out then, breaking the stiff silence that followed my pronouncement. “Say it is not true!”
Gadar Malyan bowed her head and did not speak, though we had not gagged her. Turning, I signaled that she should be brought forward to the emptied munitions box my men had erected to form a block. I faced her then, the baroness bracketed by her two guards. Those black eyes found my face and iced over.
“We have no chanter on our ship,” I said, “no priest. But I will have my men light the prayer lanterns for you, ladyship.”
Her lips curled. “You pretend to care about my soul? Another courtesy for a lady?”
“Yes,” I said. I did not then and do not now believe the Chantry’s teachings, but I was not without succor for her in those final moments. “It does not end here, you know?”
“What?”
“There is...more. After.”
Malyan only blinked at me. Those were early days, and the story of Hadrian the Halfmortal had not yet spread across the galaxy. She did not know it, did not know that I had died and come again. “What are you talking about?”
“Death is not the end, my lady,” I said, and found as I spoke the words that I could not explain them. It was as though my tongue would not obey. And so I swallowed, recalling for myself the Howling Dark beyond death, the warmth and light I’d felt as I journeyed down toward the hidden light at the end. I could not share it with her. It was not mine to share. At length I found my rebel tongue again, and gesturing to the block, I said, “Kneel.”
She did not, not at once, but raised her chin, defiant.
I circled round to the side of the makeshift block, giving the nod that brought one of my guardsmen’s lances into the back of her knee. She fell gracelessly to the platform. I caught her wince as her knees took the impact, and the lashed crates beneath us shook. She raised her head, faced her people behind the lines of my men. “What I did,” she cried aloud, “I did for Thagura!”
“What you did, you did for yourself,” I said flatly, and kindled my sword.
The blade shone pale and very fine in the colorless light of that foreign star, too beautiful to be what she was. I raised her then, gesturing with the weapon. “Bow your head.”
The baroness turned to look up at me, eyes hard and wild. “You’ll lose everything, too,” she said. “One day. You’ll have to choose as I did, and when you do, you’ll see.” She nodded and turned her head away, eyes sliding shut. “I did what I thought was right. You’ll do the same, and then you’ll be right here with me.” She squared her shoulders.
Often I have found that god puts truth in the mouths of our enemies, for their words are the only ones we ever truly heed.
“It will be cleaner,” I said, not rising to the bait, “if you bow your head.”
“Earth and Emperor damn you,” she said, and bent her neck.
I stood over her, my shadow falling across her and the block as the crossing of a moon blackens the sun. I can say at least I did not hesitate with the eyes of so many on me. I raised my sword and—doing so—blackened her sky forever.