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CHAPTER 44

THE MISTWALKER


The hand lay on the table before me, and the long bones of the arm, half swaddled in white cloth, seemed almost to resonate in my mind as I stared at them. They were of adamant, black as the bones of Ushara herself. They were hollow, but I had always thought them ridged. Instead, they were a lattice of irregular geometric shapes, of nanocarbon tubules spiderwebbed together to form the shapes of humerus, ulna, radius, metacarpals, phalanges, and the rest—all held together by ligaments of nanocarbon wire.

I had never seen them, though they had traveled with me for so long.

They reminded me of the bones of Ushara, so darkly glistening.

I gripped my new left hand—the hand of flesh—with the new right. Try as I might, I cannot articulate the feeling, the sense of displacement, of unreality imposed upon me by those bones. Just what had possessed Neema to fetch them up with my necklace and terminal when my old body had turned to slime I cannot say. But he had, and cleaned away the blood and dissolved meat, and wrapped the bones in white silk.

I wonder what has now become of them—what will become of them. Does Cassandra have them now? Or did Lorian retain them? Has Edouard carried them to some remoter clime? Have they found their way to Jadd—there to be installed in a casket of alumglass and jeweled gold? Or has Bassander Lin retained them? That hand would be a holy relic to him, and to his followers.

An idol. An icon.

A divinity.

The Black Hand of the Sun Eater.

“So we left Sabratha, then,” I said at last, having concluded my recitation, “and sailed for Forum. I had hoped to find the Emperor there, but as you know, he remains in the provinces.”

“Marshalling the Empire’s defenses, yes,” said Lorian Aristedes, surveying me across the black glass table. A pot of some violently green tea sat to one side, and as he spoke Lorian poured a dram of the viridian over a glass of iced milk, refreshing his cup. He offered me the same, but I declined with a gesture, having not touched my cup in the first place. “So they say.”

“You doubt the story?” I asked.

“I doubt everything,” Lorian said. “That’s why I’m still alive.”

I remained silent, watching Lorian stir his tea with a platinum spoon. Behind him, a window opened on the cylinder city that filled the Mistwalker’s interior. We were high in the forward section, peering out through the wall that made up one end of the great tube, high enough that the gravity was perhaps half what it was at the ship’s circumference. The Mistwalker was a spinship, one that relied on rotation about its central axis to simulate gravity, and so the closer one drew to that false, fluorescent sun, the lighter gravity became. It had no suppression field, and the bridge section beyond the conference room had no gravity at all.

For all its marvels, the whole place felt claustrophobic. The whole city was enclosed, without reference to the space outside. An entire world trapped in a bottle. Despite all that air, and the trees growing on gray terraces and seeming to hang from the gardens in the sky portion of the city, it felt difficult to breathe.

“This . . . Watcher thing. Why didn’t you tell me?” Those colorless eyes held mine as if weighing me.

“Would you have believed me?” I asked. Lorian had doubted the rest of my story, had doubted my very presence, had shot me rather than believe.

The little man grunted in negation. “You know,” he said, “I always did wonder about that place . . . on that Cielcin world. It really was a skull, then? I assumed it was artificial, that the Pale or these . . . Vaiartu chaps had built it. Nothing that big should exist.”

“I know,” I said, “it violates much of what we think we know.”

“It violates basic physics, Hadrian,” Lorian said, eyes narrowing, “not that you’re one to talk.” He drank his tea, propped his elbow on the edge of the table, his chin on his fist. “What can it do? The Watcher, I mean. What will the Cielcin do with it?”

“That is the wrong question,” I said. “You have it the wrong way round. The question is: What is it going to do with the Cielcin?”

Lorian dismissed this with a wave. “I mean what is it capable of? Widespread destruction, to be sure. But of what kind? How does it work? And how do we kill it?”

“There’s the Perseus weapon.”

“But we don’t have the specs,” Lorian said.

“Albé might,” I said.

The other man allowed this with a gesture. I could sense his irritation, his excitement. I had not answered his initial question. “I don’t know all it’s capable of,” I said. “Lorian, it tore whole lighters out of the sky, pulled men to pieces by the score. And it was weak, starved . . . at full strength?”

I could only shake my head.

“This is why I need to go to Vorgossos.”

The Commandant General frowned, still leaning on his fist. “Yes . . . to find Kharn Sagara. What makes you think he has a weapon meant to slay these things?”

Do what must be.

The Quiet’s words rang in my ears. “I’ve seen it,” I said at length, and took up my own cup to cover the sudden fragility of my claim.

The little man laughed, and I set my cup down with force sufficient to slosh the bitter draught over the brim and onto the saucer. “You asked,” I said, at once conscious of the new length of my hair, of the untrimmed nails digging into the palm of my left hand. “But you misunderstand me, Lorian. I have been there before. You know that. I have seen these weapons. With my eyes.” I pointed at my own face to underscore the point. “They were not designed for this purpose, but they will serve.” I told him then about the weapons Columbia and her children had made, engines of mass destruction, of terror and power to alter the world and further violate the laws of nature. There were weapons that produced cold, weapons to shatter planets, to damage stars. Weapons that could destroy matter and energy entirely, breaking that most fundamental of conventional laws.

Lorian was nodding by the time I finished, and raised a hand. “I understand you. But how do you plan to get there, and if you do get there . . . how do you propose to make this Kharn Sagara cooperate?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed after a long silence. “I hoped your Monarch might prove himself useful in that regard. We are going to Latarra, are we not?”

“We are,” Lorian twisted his milk tea on its saucer, sunk into a contemplative silence. “My Monarch . . . ” Behind him, the light of the great beam that served the Mistwalker for a sun carved gray shadows between the tower spokes that held it in its place. I watched one of the crew shuttles take off from the surface below us, rise—and then fall—to the city on the opposite side. “Do you not appreciate the position you’ve put me in?” His voice was suddenly brittle. “That Council was the first time in human history that a delegation of the Extrasolarians was received at Forum. Do you hear me? The first time.”

I leaned back in surprise. “That can’t be true.”

“At least the first in living memory,” Lorian riposted, temporizing, though his was quite the concession. “Do you remember another time? Have you ever found anything in your books?”

I confessed that I hadn’t.

“You realize what you’ve done?” Lorian asked, somewhat unfairly. “By saving your daughter and that servant of yours—to say nothing of kidnapping the princess—I have made us the aggressor in an all-new theater of war! They are black tidings I carry back to my Monarch. Black tidings, and failure—”

“—and me,” I said. The Commandant General was beginning to work himself into a lather, as I knew all too well. I had to head him off.

“And you!” Lorian almost sneered, and thrust one long and crooked finger in my direction. “But I am not your servant anymore, Hadrian. I did my time, and went to hell!”

“Then why did you save Cassandra?” I asked.

“Because I am your friend and you asked!” Lorian snapped, voice rising to a full shout. “And because you would have done the same!”

His words touched something in me, and I looked away. After a long and swirling silence, I managed to choke back my emotions and suggest, “You should contact the Emperor directly, if you can. Prince Chancellor Aurelian, if you cannot.”

“Why?”

“The Chantry acted alone,” I said. “You know what they’re like. Since your arrival, they were hounding me, convinced that you and I were in league.”

“Which we of course confirmed,” Lorian said.

“But they think I’m dead,” I said. “If you let me contact the Emperor—me, and Selene—we can reopen negotiations. You still have the telegraph device. Your tracer. The Empire will want to deal.”

Lorian’s face twitched, formed the faint shadow of a smile. Only the shifting of the black false nerves about his lips betrayed him. “You may be right.”

“They have every reason to,” I said. “It is the Chantry who wishes these negotiations to fail. The Empire itself cannot afford to let them.”

The Commandant General thought about this a long moment, turning his tea on its saucer as though he were a technician unscrewing the cap of a particularly delicate explosive. “And in return for your help reopening a dialogue,” he began.

“I want Vorgossos,” I said. “Or the road to it. Your Captain Eidhin took me there the first time, aboard his Enigma of Hours.”

Lorian started. “I didn’t know that.”

“There must be someone among your elite who knows the way,” I said, at once intent. “I must have those weapons.”

The other man nodded, and without a word lifted his tea to his lips.

We sat there for a long while, Lorian sipping at his tea. I watched the city turning behind him. Though we were turning with it, I seemed somehow more aware of the nature of the city-ship from our vantage. Perhaps it was only that the false sun and gridlocked sky were so near at hand.

“How many men have you under your command?” I asked, looking out at the buildings.

“I’m not going with you,” Lorian said. “You were working yourself up to ask.”

I said nothing.

Lorian leaned back in his chair. His long, very white hair hung over one shoulder in a single loose plait. Abruptly, I recalled Sir Hector Oliva, the young worthy who had spirited me from Colchis to Nessus, and thence to Carteia. He had worn his hair thus in xenophilic imitation of the Cielcin. So strange that it had become the style.

I felt very old all at once.

Had I been intending to ask Lorian to recommit himself to my cause? He said that he was no longer my servant, and that was true—he was so much more. That he remained my bonded armsman had become for him a technicality, and one easily overlooked.

“My place is with the Monarch,” he said, not taking his eyes from my face.

“He must be a great man to so inspire your confidence,” I said.

Calen Harendotes. The self-styled Monarch had been a rumor for much of my long life, like a giant looming at the margins of a map. In the Empire, it was said that he was the scion of some renegade house, a once-mighty lord of the Imperium lost among the barbarians. Some said he was an intus, a grotesquery—variously a giant or a dwarf. Some said he had four arms, others that he possessed no limbs at all. Still others said he was a woman, or an androgyn in the style of the Lothrian new-men.

They were none of them true. I had seen holograph images of the man taken some centuries before. They had shown a tall, handsome man—black haired and pale complected, his eyes concealed behind gold-mirrored spectacles. An assassin the Emperor had sent to slay the Monarch had said the man was a chimera, that nearly all his mortal flesh had been cut away and replaced by fine machinery.

That assassin had failed in his mission, and the Monarch had returned him to the Imperium—not without his head, but as only a head. The poor man’s still-living crown had been sent to Forum wired to some hideous machine. Bellows had forced air across the fellow’s vocal chords, and he had told all that he had seen, and brought with him a warning: that the Empire should not interfere with him or his domain. He knew full well that the Imperium—faced with the Cielcin on one hand, and the Lothrians on the other—could not risk opening a third theater of war.

The Empire had ceased all its activities in the Norman Expanse, and no second attempt had been made on the life of the Monarch himself.

“He is . . . ” Lorian raised a hand, gestured as if grasping at smoke. “ . . . like you, I think. There’s no one quite like him, if you understand me. You have that in common.” Realizing this seeming contradiction, Lorian shrugged, let his hand fall. “He is building a new world on Latarra, Hadrian. A new order. A better one. There is no palatine or plebeian—neither Extrasolarian nor Empire-man. Each is free to rise according to his ability, on his merit. Had I remained in the Legions, somehow, I would never have risen any further than I already had. I told you once: I would have been chained to Beller’s desk until my dying day if not for you. There was no place for me there. On Latarra, I made my place. My own!” He tapped his chest, where the Latarran falcon glittered in cloth of gold against the black gabardine. “Commandant General! Me. If only my lord father could see me now . . . ”

This sounded most unlike the man I’d known, and I said as much. “I never took you for a man who chafed at his station, Aristedes.”

“I did my duty,” he said, “but I can do so much more now. You have not seen it, Hadrian! The white sun shining on the Citadel of the Monarch in the morning! The Printed City! The pillars of steam rising all across the Maze! Extras and common men, dryads, chimeras, homunculi—all brothers and free!”

“You make it sound a paradise,” I said, reaching out to touch the printed fingers of my former hand.

“It will be,” he said. “You’ll soon see.”

I studied Lorian then a long moment. There was a light in Lorian’s eyes, a fire and fervor I thought I had never seen in him. He was a man alive, a man awake and burning with the promises of tomorrow, of a tomorrow he would build.

“You could have a place there,” Lorian said, marking my quietude. “When all is done. I will have an estate, and be a lord in my own right. You could come to live there, you and the girl.”

“We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” I said, but thought privately of my home on the Islis du Albulkam, of black Mount Hephaistos and the Jaddian seas shining at night. I thought, too, of Selene, and of the kiss she should never have given me.

I saw myself once more seated on the Solar Throne, young again and strong. My own reflection in the black glass of the table was staring up at me. I knew what future lay ahead of me.

Fire at will.

“Do you really think the Empire will come back to the table?” Lorian asked.

“What choice do they have?” I countered. “You’ve exposed a massive security breach. No telegraph is secure. They know that now, and if for no other reason . . . they’ll deal.”

Lorian frowned, swirled his milk tea in its glass. “They might simply attack. They’ve tried to kill the Monarch before.”

“He was trading with MINOS, Lorian,” I said.

That seemed to catch the little general off his guard. His eyes widened.

“You didn’t know?” I said. “Latarra provided them with the test subjects for the Ganelon station.”

“The plague?” Lorian frowned. “You never told me that.”

“It wasn’t relevant to the mission,” I said, and when Lorian did not reply, added, “Perhaps your Monarch is not all he claims to be.”

The Commandant General stood suddenly, turned his back to stand at the window, his narrow shoulders framed against the ring of city outside. “It’s war, Hadrian,” he said finally, standing straight. “Each of us pretends to be fighting for right, or Earth or gods . . . but in truth, we’re each only fighting for ourselves. The Cielcin are no different. They need to eat. All that matters, ultimately, is that we win. How we won will be decided later, that it may be said we fought with honor.”

“You don’t really believe that,” I said.

“Of course I do,” he said. “And so do you. Because it’s true.”

“The Cielcin are monsters, Lorian,” I said. “We’re not the same. You know that.”

“And yet you keep five of them in your train,” he said, speaking to his own reflection in the window. “How do you explain that?”

He’d caught me flat-footed with that one, though I should have expected it. Still seated, I bowed my head. “I still hope they can be changed.”

“You cannot wash away a tiger’s stripes, Marlowe,” Lorian said. “You can only be eaten by it, or ride.”

“You don’t ride tigers,” I said.

“That’s what you’re trying to do,” Lorian said, “keeping those Cielcin alive. And so long as you do, you’re in no position to judge anyone. Not me, not Harendotes, not anyone. Have you forgotten what they are?”

It was my turn to stand. “I forget nothing,” I said, voice icy. “You were not there, Aristedes. You did not see what happened.”

“Because you sent me away!” he almost shouted, shoulders hunched. One black-veined fist hammered the alumglass pane. It was an old wound we had reopened, for both of us. “They were my people, too.”

“I know that,” I said. “But someone had to warn the Imperium. You were the right man.”

Lorian did not turn. “Mark my words,” he said. “They will betray you.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but I have to try.”

“Why?” Lorian turned at last, and I was reminded just how small he was. He came barely to my ribs. He was shouting by then, his high voice an unsteady roar. “Why bother? Why give them this chance?”

“This is what you wanted to talk about?” I asked, incredulous. “This?”

Almost I expected to find Captain 2Maeve and the rest of Lorian’s security detail surging through the door at the sound of Lorian’s voice. “Why?” he shouted again. “Damn you! Tell me why!”

“Because they were not made for evil!” I shouted in return, and such was the force of my voice that Lorian flinched, and in the unsteady quiet that came after, I said, “I would save them if I could. It is the Watchers who are evil. It is the Watchers who are our enemy, our real enemy. If Ramanthanu and its brothers will serve in their defeat, then I welcome them gladly.”

Lorian was chewing his tongue as though it disgusted him. “You trust them?” he said, and almost laughed. “But you do not trust me?”

“What?” I could hardly believe what I was hearing.

“You think I am a fool,” Lorian said. “To follow the Monarch.”

“You’re acting the fool!” I said. “Neither the Emperor nor your Monarch is righteous, neither’s hands are clean. I was making a version of your point, albeit one that does not dispense with all concept of right and wrong.”

The little man seemed to deflate all at once.

Seizing the chance to quieten things, I resumed my seat. “Why does your master need Imperial atomics?” I asked. Lorian gripped the back of his chair with both hands, did not look up. “Aristedes?”

“I can’t tell you that,” he said. “It’s classified.”

He might have denied it, but he had not.

“I know what the Empire is, Lorian,” I said. “We have to trust each other, if we are to work together. The Chantry woman—the one who murdered me—she told me you had requested a stock of Imperial neutron-class atomics. I need to know why.”

Still Lorian did not move, but remained hunched over his seat, his city behind him.

“Whatever the reason,” I pressed on, “it was important enough that you made it a condition of your deal. If I am to help reopen a dialogue between your master and the Emperor, I need to know what those atomics are for.”

The little man was nodding along, and looked sharply up as I finished.

“We want a worldship,” he said. “Or more than one, if we can take them.”

“A worldship?” I could hardly believe it. “Why?”

“What do you mean why?” Lorian asked. “Do you know how long it takes to build something on that scale?”

“Your master wants to inherit the Cielcin war machine,” I said, and might have whistled in appreciation of the Monarch’s sheer ambition.

“Yes.”

I saw the brilliance of it almost at once. By acquiring Cielcin worldships, Calen Harendotes would not only put himself in command of truly titanic naval assets . . . he was salvaging his escape plan. Should things not go his way and the whole human universe turn against him, he would have ships vast as worlds onto which he might pour his refugee population.

They might quit the galaxy entirely.

During my long stay in Maddalo House, I had read several papers speculating as to the effective range and functionality of the Cielcin oscianduru, their worldships. Scholiasts and lay magi from both Legion Intelligence and the Imperial Office alike had speculated that the largest Cielcin vessels were capable of making the journey at least so far as the Clouds of Magellan.

“I see,” I said. It was not for me to pass judgement, and in a certain sense, it did not matter. Whatever came of the war with the Cielcin—of my war against the Watchers—the next engagement of man’s eternal civil war would come, and was not my charge. I had my task. “Very well.”

“Do you think the Empire will accept?” Lorian asked.

“Why can’t the Latarrans simply produce their own?”

Lorian resumed his seat, his passions quelled. Draining his cup, he recharged it, pouring first the milk, then the tea over it. I watched the green sink into the white, forming shapes neither poet nor magus could accurately describe. “We are talking about bombing something the size of a moon,” Lorian said, “we can’t produce the necessary volume at speed. You and I both know the Empire maintains stockpiles all across the galaxy.”

That much was true. Conventional wisdom and military fact maintained that there were millions of cached atomic weapons hidden away across the galaxy, maintained by the houses—greater and lesser—for their own private defense, and by the Imperial Office itself. These were ferreted away on remote moons, on airless satellites and in freighters hid deep in asteroid fields.

“I’ll help you,” I said. “But you have to help me. I reopen communications between Latarra and Forum, and you help me find the way to Vorgossos.” I raised a hand to forestall Lorian’s interruption. “You can’t go with me. I understand. But I have to go. Get me an audience with your master, that’s all I ask.”

“That’s all?” Lorian laughed. At once more serious, he set his glass down. “Hadrian, I can’t promise he’ll let you go.”

I felt those words more than heard them, hanging above my head. I had been afraid of something like that. Severine of MINOS had tried to turn me to her cause, had offered me a false life, a half life as a soulless construct like herself. The Jaddians had spent decades studying me in my exile among them. The Empire and the Chantry both doubtless wanted to take their turns with me. Why should the Monarch of Latarra be any different?

“I understand,” I told Lorian, “but I must go, and I will go.”

Lorian smiled. “I guess you’ve seen that, too?”

I matched his smile, and drank. The fear I’d felt a moment earlier was gone. Whichever way it was to happen, I would sail to Vorgossos. Nothing I had done had stopped the vision coming true. Not even time. I had believed myself too old, believed that the deaths of my friends upon the black sands of Eue had taken me beyond the confines of the vision, believed that I had failed, that what the Quiet had told me must be could never be.

Yet there I was, on the path.


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