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CHAPTER 9

GNOMON


Two days gone we left the circles of Jadd’s sun, but it was not until the third day that the summons from Oberlin came at last. A logothete in the gray suit of a civil servant called at the Ascalon’s airlock, and I accompanied him up the lift all the way to B-Deck, where we walked the full length of the Troglita and came at last to a pair of heavy doors.

“You may leave your terminal with me, Lord Marlowe,” the logothete said, extending one hand, palm up.

Surprised, I reached for the strap securing my wrist-terminal before I could give it much thought. Presently I halted, asked, “For what reason?”

“The Director is concerned about security.”

“Security?” I repeated, incredulous. “We’re at warp, boy. There’s nothing coming on or off this ship.”

The logothete appeared entirely unruffled. He had not dropped his hand. Not for the first time since Albé came striding across my lawn on the Islis di Albulkam, I experienced the sense of shadowy figures moving just out of sight, as though some sinister fellow in a cloak and hood stood just around the nearest bend in the hall. As I had many times before, I imagined the social world as a limitless chessboard extending in all directions.

White tiles. Black tiles. Red.

Holding up the terminal for the man’s inspection, I powered it off and slid it into the inner pocket of my coat. “That will have to serve, sirrah.”

The man’s mouth worked like a bellows, and he took a mincing forward step. “It will not serve, lordship.”

I took a full step in his direction. The man was only patrician, and I had perhaps a head on him, and the rumor of me added perhaps half a hundred heads. He stepped back, bowing slightly. “What is your name, sirrah?” I asked.

“Angbor, lord.”

“Angbor,” I said, “You know who I am?”

“Of course, lord.”

“And still you wish to delay me?”

Angbor bowed and withdrew another step. “I am only following my orders, lord.”

“And if your orders were to hurl yourself out the airlock, Angbor, would you do it?”

The man almost had to think about it. “No, lord.” He straightened, and the blood had left his face. “These are matters of Imperial security. The very highest!”

I pounded on the door with one fist, not taking my eyes from the logothete.

It opened an instant later, and two legionnaires in full plate stood within.

Angbor straightened his jacket, smoothed it with both hands, and said, “I’ve brought Lord Marlowe to see the Director.”

The first legionnaire nodded his blank-visored face. “Very good,” he said, and waved us through the security check.

The bulkhead doors opened on what must have served the vessel as a secondary bridge. The primary was far aft on A-Deck, and from the broad slash of window that stretched the full width of the chamber ahead, I could tell this room was as far forward as forward got. Beyond the window I could see the bowsprit and the forward gun emplacements on the dorsal hull. Most of the consoles were dark, but Lord Oberlin sat in one bucket seat to the left of the central holography well, young Lascaris at his side. Tor Rassam stood perhaps a quarter turn around the holography well. Behind them, the violet fractals of warp shimmered beyond the Troglita’s prow, rippling where the ions caught in the ship’s gravitic envelope mingled with the distorted starlight blue-shifted by the violence of our speed.

Angbor stormed ahead. “My lord, he would not surrender his terminal.”

Oberlin turned from Lascaris, his sad eyes reminding me acutely of some aged bloodhound. When he spoke, it was to me, and not to his subordinate. “Do you trust us so little, Lord Marlowe?”

Check.

“Do you blame me?” I asked, stepping fully into the room. Four more legionnaires in faceless plate stood within. One stood with his hand casually on the butt of his holstered stunner.

“I am not your enemy,” Oberlin said. “If I were, I would not have permitted you the run of the ship. You’ve been in our power for three days.”

I acknowledged the truth of this with a simple, open-handed gesture. “I could well ask the same of you, Lord Oberlin. We are underway already, and I still know next to nothing of your cause.”

The old man nodded, smiling almost to himself. “That is not true,” he said. “You read the packet A2 delivered.”

“I did,” I said. “Did you?”

The seal had been unbroken, but such seals could be imitated.

“No,” he said, tone inscrutable. “But I spoke with Caesar before we left Forum. Indeed, I championed the notion that we should sail to Jadd to recruit you.”

I felt my eyes narrow involuntarily, and said, “I’ve you to thank, then?”

“I was not your only advocate,” Oberlin said, “Sir Gray Rinehart argued for your inclusion, as did Lord Nicephorus.”

“Nicephorus?” That surprised me. The Emperor’s chamberlain—his closest confidant and perhaps his only true friend—despised me, though I do not think it believed me false as did the priests and priestesses of the Chantry.

“I am told even Her Radiant Majesty, the Empress spoke in your defense.”

That gave me pause, and a thrill like a blade of ice laid against the side of my throat ran through me. “The Empress tried to kill me,” I said, “as you’ll recall.”

Oberlin’s expression was unreadable, the studiously bland, blank face of the career bureaucrat. “Perhaps she only hopes that by dragging you back onto the board you’ll meet some untimely end.”

Those words struck me as completely honest, and in their perverse way put me at ease. Still, I said, “Or perhaps she means to use you to destroy me.”

Oberlin was nodding along with every word, and when I finished replied, quite coolly, “I will not waste what little breath remains to me trying to convince you. As proof of my good faith I can only offer you your continued freedom and the truth.” He raised a hand in the direction of the door. “You are free to leave at any time, my lord. Command it, and I will order Captain Clavan to drop anchor and permit your ship to depart.”

I did not challenge him. We both knew it was a lie. My continued freedom was a thing contingent now upon my continued role in the great game.

We were pretending, all of us, that I had been given a choice. But Jadd had been forced to permit Albé in to see me, and would have been forced in time to extradite me, or to turn a blind eye to kidnapping. It was not Jaddian strength that had guaranteed my freedom-in-exile all these years, but Imperial forbearance. The Emperor never meant to kill me, only to lock me on Belusha until I could be decanted from fugue like some special vintage. And Jadd had been as good as Belusha. Better, because I had not wanted to escape it.

Even if I could take Oberlin at his word, even if Cassandra and I were free to depart, I knew we would not be free for long. We would meet with some terrible tragedy at the Chantry’s hands, or at the hands of some other Imperial assassin. In ten years. In fifty.

Poison.

A flier crash.

A well-timed charge.

Knives in the dark.

Have I not said that freedom is like the sea? That a man may swim in any direction he chooses, but all he will do in that sea is drown.

“Speak, then,” I said, planting my feet a shoulder’s width apart.

Oberlin nodded in his tired way, ran a hand across his balding scalp. Lifting his chin, he said, “Sargis, you and your men will wait outside.” The leader of these men—a centurion with several gold phalerae decorating his breastplate—saluted and moved for the door. As was the way with our legionnaires, he must have subvocalized commands to his subordinates, for the others moved silently off. Sargis himself lingered by me. Seeing this, Oberlin said, “I have nothing to fear from Lord Marlowe, Sargis. A2 is here.”

I had not seen him until that moment, but a quick look round revealed young Albé seated in a remote corner, legs and arms crossed. The light of warp shone across his lenses, making his eyes seem to glow. I wondered what threat the young agent might pose that so assured Lord Oberlin.

The heavy doors hissed shut a moment later, leaving me alone with Oberlin, Lascaris, Tor Rassam, and the distant Albé.

“As you are already acquainted with the purpose of our enterprise,” Oberlin began but slowly, “I will not waste time. Priscian.”

The gaunt secretary removed a holograph wafer from a breast pocket and placed it on the rim of the holography well that stood beside him and the seated Oberlin. The black glass rim glowed where he’d placed it down, scanning the laser-fine flaws cut into the quartz disc. Lascaris punched a key on the well’s control console, and a moment later an image appeared above the recessed hemisphere of the projector in the center of the well. It depicted what appeared to be a dented cylinder—wider in the center and tapering at either end, with slotted depressions at those ends where it might have fitted onto a spindle. It reminded me of a scroll, though it seemed to be fashioned from a single piece of gold.

I recognized at once the writing that spiraled around its surface. A single, continuous line of script, with letters made by fine, wedge-shaped indentations that rose from the center line like the rise and fall of a sine wave.

It was Vaiartu script. The language of those the Cielcin had called the Enar.

“This,” Rassam began, a schoolmasterish edge to his tone, “is K-887. It is a cylinder of Vaiartu manufacture, taken from a Cielcin horde captured at the Battle of Asara. As you can see, it is of solid gold, massing some seventeen kilograms.” The image revolved as he spoke, showcasing new facets of the Vaiartu inscription that wound about its surface. “Uranium-thorium-helium dating puts the cylinder between nine hundred thousand and one-point-one million years old, placing it rather late in the development of the Vaiartu Kingdom. This estimate is corroborated by the sineoform writing, which is of a style commensurate with the period.”

As he spoke, I moved to the rail surrounding the holography well, the better to study the Vaiartu artifact. The one side was badly dented, as if the soft, yellow metal had been crushed in the teeth of some mighty gear. Along the other, a well-worn ring of anaglyphs ran. Not the scratchy writing of the Enar. The circular writing of the Firstborn, of the Quiet. It was—in its way—akin to the tablet I had seen Ugin Attavaisa gift Syriani Dorayaica, and the one I recalled from my memories of the visit to Echidna that had never happened.

“It’s an atlas,” I said.

Rassam turned to look at me, briefly revealing his surprise. “How did you know that?”

“I’ve seen its like before,” I said. “Twice. Only those were tablets. The shape of this is different. And the material.”

“Gold does not corrode,” Oberlin said, “making it the ideal medium for the preservation of such information as this.”

“The tablets I saw were of stone,” I said.

“We believe the cylinder part of a royal collection,” Rassam said, “how the Cielcin found it we can only guess.”

The projection changed, displaying the sineoform writing broken into segments, with various of the angular, clawlike characters highlighted in scarlet where they floated in the air.

“The Prophet has had its forces searching the galaxy for a very long time,” I said, wishing I understood the inhuman letters. The moment held a certain surreality for me. When I learned of the Enar at Dorayaica’s elbow, I had believed I was the first human being in all history to learn of them.

How wrong I’d been.

Oberlin had said that Tor Rassam was the galaxy’s preeminent expert on the Vaiartu Kingdom. It seemed strange to me that such an expert should exist at all. I had so many questions.

One such question escaped me, filling the air before Oberlin or Rassam could continue. “How long have we known about them?” I asked. “The Vaiartu?”

Rassam looked to Oberlin for approval. The old patrician inclined his head. “The first Vaiartu artifacts were found on Pherkad in the fifth millennium.”

“The fifth millennium?” I repeated the words, incredulous. “That was twelve thousand years ago!”

Eager to bring the volume down, Oberlin said, “It was a long time before we realized they belonged to a starfaring civilization, and longer before the scientific community managed to differentiate Stonebuilders from Firstborn.”

“You called them all the Quiet in those days.”

“We called them nothing,” Oberlin said. “A minor point: HAPSIS did not yet exist. But you’re right. It took centuries for scholars to realize certain of the sites and artifacts they’d uncovered belonged to the same cultures. The datanet did not exist in those days, ships were slower, fugue less reliable, and for word to travel across the early Imperium took decades.”

“And you managed to keep this all a secret?”

To my surprise, it was Lascaris who answered, “Much of the truth has ever been believed myth by most people, and much myth truth.”

I accepted this. It is a truism among those who study history that much of what common people believe is false. The belief in popular power is one such falsehood, when the truth is that the populace is ever directed by an elite will, ever wielded by a Caesar or a Lenin as a murmillo might wield a blazing sword. The belief in progress is another. There are more specific examples: The belief in the God Emperor’s divinity masked a deeper truth. The belief that the Mericanii were a race of machines who waged war on mankind is believed by every child, almost none of whom has ever heard of Felsenburgh. In the face of so much falsity and confusion, it was no wonder the truth was not more widely known. A vate might preach the unvarnished truth from his column in the city square, and be ignored even by the wise—or worse—be hanged upon a tree for a rebel.

“Secrets are not kept,” said Oberlin. “They are managed. Like flowers, if you like. Or like weeds. There was a time when every sailor in the cosmos talked of the Ancients. The Quiet Ones. The old gods. There were operas and serials made about the story.”

“The Annuna,” I said. “Yes, I’ve read them.”

“I’d forgotten those ones,” Oberlin chuckled. “Pulp adventure nonsense. Science fiction. But it is better that the truth wears fiction’s mask in the popular eye. The people police themselves, and will dismiss as mad any man who speaks the truth.”

“May I continue, lord?” Rassam asked.

“Of course, of course!” Oberlin waved a hand. “Forgive me. I am an old man, and prone to digression.”

A faint smile creased the blond scholiast’s face before Stricture smoothed it away.

“The coordinates on the Asara Cylinder index nineteen worlds, nearly all of them concentrated in the lower regions of Perseus and Sagittarius. Of these, eleven were known to us already. One—you may be interested to know—was the planet Emesh.”

That did not surprise me. Emesh had appeared on other Enari tablets, and indeed Uvanari’s doomed expedition had used one to come to Emesh in the first place, and—discovering it already inhabited by humanity—had been destroyed there.

“And Sabratha was one of the other eight?” I asked.

“On the contrary. You will recall it was already settled,” Rassam said, and paused to ask Lascaris to advance his display. The holograph shifted, revealing the wire-frame globe of a world revolving slowly. The display showed off a composite of orbital images, a world of ocher sands, white salt pans, white ice caps, with here and there the milk-blue of small salt seas. “This is Sabratha,” Rassam said. “Settled ISD 16997.”

“Almost exactly four hundred years ago,” Oberlin chimed in.

“And you recovered the Asara Cylinder when?”

“Forty-eight years ago,” said Tor Rassam. “Prior to our doing so, we were unaware of the Vaiartu presence on Sabratha. The planet is sparsely populated.”

Fewer than fifty thousand people on the whole planet, Oberlin had said.

“The salt deposits you see in the equatorial zones here and here,” he pointed, “and here, about the north polar region, are the remnants of great, shallow seas. At one point as much as ninety-six percent of the planet’s surface was once underwater. Now it is less than seven percent. All of this, coupled with the planet’s naught-point-seven standard gravities is suggestive of a planet with little-to-no magnetosphere, but this is not so. Sabratha’s magnetic field is quite robust. Radio communication is difficult, and the necessity of laying fiber-optic hardlines has limited colonization of the surface, so it should come as no surprise that the Vaiartu ruins went undetected until we knew to look for them.”

“This is all well and good,” I said, studying Sabratha where it floated like a confection of caramel spun sugar. “But I did not leave Jadd for a lecture in geophysics. Did you find one of them?”

Rassam did his best to hide his vexation, but I had known too many scholiasts to miss the signs: the minutely narrowed eyes, the compression of the lips, the faint tension in cheek and jowl. He glanced to Oberlin, then said, “The governor-general’s office performed a survey of the deep desert. They found a Vaiartu site at forty degrees south latitude. Here.” Again he pointed, and the image of Sabratha ceased its rotation. “This region would have been undersea at the height of the Vaiartu Kingdom.”

“They were amphibious?” I asked.

“Indeed,” said Rassam. “The governor-general hired a local team to begin the excavations.”

“Against our recommendation,” said Lascaris, a touch stuffily.

Coming to stand just beside Rassam, I squinted at the map. The region he’d highlighted with his finger showed a black mass rising from a sea of rippling ivory and gold. Text in vermillion and jet black written alongside it read Cetorum Mensa and Mount Sark. The desert surrounding it—level plains that stretched for thousands of miles in every direction—were labelled Mare Silentii and Victorialand.

“They’ve been digging?” I asked. “What did they find?”

Rassam looked to Oberlin again.

When no one spoke, I said, “Well? Did you find one of the Watchers, or didn’t you?”

Sabratha began to revolve once more above the well. I saw Oberlin through it, his head bowed, his wispy hair swaying in the breeze of some unseen ventilator above our heads. Almost forgotten in his corner, Edouard Albé stirred.

“Priscian, show him the rest.”

The image of Sabratha vanished, replaced by a series of images, still phototypes and holographs taken of the site itself. Images of what seemed to be a mountain dominated, black against the eggshell blue of the sky. Great trenches dug in the sand, reinforced by corrugated metal walls or held back by static compactors. There were images of Wheeler grids, great square pits dug into the earth in a grid. The ribs of some long-dead sea-beast rising like bent pillars from brown sands. Green walls, cracked and crumbling. Square pillars and trapezoidal windows—the hallmarks of Enari architecture. Of the Vaiartu.

These passed away at another click of the remote, erased faster than I could absorb them. Still more images replaced them, and I recoiled almost at once. Lying on an examination table under stark lights was the most horrific corpse I had ever seen. The chest appeared crushed, as though the man—if man it was—had been caught in the grip of some monstrous vise. Dried blood soaked the tattered ruins of his bone-white uniform, and his every limb—all six of them—were bent and mangled. But it was the face that most horrified me.

The faces.

He had two faces, had nearly two heads. Each seemed to grow out of the other, so that the left eye of one fell within microns of the right eye of the other. The flesh seemed to flow between them, and I felt that their bones and indeed their brains must be conjoined. Somehow, that was not the worst of it. The noses of both faces were broken, indeed were broken in the same way, each leaving the same smear and trail of blood across the corresponding lips. It was as if—in the grip of some strong drink—my own vision had doubled and swam, so that one man appeared almost two. He had four arms, and despite the mangling of the torso—torsos, for there were two sets of crushed ribs that interlaced with one another, that grew together and seemed fused, nearer together as they neared the pelvis, so that from the navel down he seemed almost one man again.

Light flickered off young Albé’s spectacles as he averted his gaze.

“Who was he?” I asked, studying the ruined face. It was . . . nearly the most horrible thing I’d ever seen.

“One of the governor-general’s dig team,” Rassam replied. “His office dispatched some three hundred Legion engineers to the site shortly after it was discovered. They excavated a large portion of the city—as you saw—but . . . ”

“But the team immediately began reporting problems,” said Oberlin, apparently eager to move the long-winded scholiast along. “They ran into trouble with their comms—as you might imagine, given the planet’s magnetosphere. Equipment kept failing—native equipment hardened against Sabratha’s unique conditions. Then one of the cooks killed himself. The diggers started reporting nightmares. One man killed another—some fight over a local boy, ostensibly. Then this.”

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“There’s more,” Oberlin said, and raised a hand for Lascaris.

The secretary clicked his remote, and the cluster of images disappeared, was replaced by a single, broader image. It showed the same stark white of the medical pod, the same body lying on a slab under glass. There were two other bodies alongside it. The camera through whose lens we peered was in the ceiling, doubtless part of a suite of sensors there. The two-headed form lay on the central table. The one to its left lay with torso crushed and face bloodied, its legs broken in what seemed a fashion identical to those of the twinned corpse. The body on the right table was small—small as that of an infant, but well-proportioned as a full-grown man. It had been crushed the same way.

All wore the padded white jumpsuits of a Legion engineer, though the clothing of the twinned man and the child fit their bodies perfectly. Stranger still, I realized at once that the pattern of the bloodstains on each was identical. Perfectly identical, down the last drop.

“The body . . . bodies . . . were brought in at oh-five-hundred hours this morning,” the recorded voice of some physician played from the well’s speakers. “Friede and Jansen found them. Think he went to take something from the supply cache stored there. A torch, most like. The lads are always nicking supplies, and Mann kept a still behind the diggers’ barracks. No telling what he was after . . . black planet.”

The physician hove into view, dressed in a heavy, rubberized suit. “I’ve ordered Friede and Jansen quarantined, and will remain so myself. It’s unclear if some pathogen is to blame, or . . . if it’s something else. Things haven’t been right here since old Arty shot himself. Now this . . . ” The man grunted, keyed the lid that opened the cover on the nearest pod. It hinged open, and the doctor leaned over the most ordinary of the bodies. “I took blood samples from all three half an hour ago,” he said. “They’re all Mann. All three. All three the same, perfect matches for the genome we have on file. There’s no sign of infection, and at any rate infection wouldn’t explain the clothes.”

While he spoke, the physician raised gloved hands to manipulate the arm of the body on the slab before him. He lifted the arm before him. The right arm.

The arms of all three bodies—all four arms—rose in perfect tandem, as though unseen strings bound them one to the other like a line of marionettes.

“Stop playback,” Oberlin’s voice slashed across the moment like a blade.

Silence rang in the disused bridge. The light of warp through the forward windows rippled across the polished floor and darkened consoles. Words seemed to me distant as the unfixed stars and as alien: cold and remote. Still, I sensed that Rassam and Oberlin, Lascaris and even young Albé were all watching me, waiting.

“What say you?” asked the Director of HAPSIS.

I could only shake my head. Though I dwelt for years in the dungeons of Dharan-Tun and heard the words of the Watcher Miudanar loud in my ears, I had never seen such a thing, not in all my six hundred and more years. I knew that here was the question Oberlin and Albé had crossed kilolights to ask.

“I have never seen its like,” said a voice that must have been my own. The image of the dead engineer and his three bodies still hung frozen on the air, right arms all raised. “They’re all the same man?”

“They are all the same matter,” said Rassam, tucking his hands deep inside his flowing sleeves. I could only blink at him. “What is done to one happens to the others.”

When I did not respond, Lascaris skipped forward, and I watched in mingled horror and fascination as the suited physician traced an incision along the right forearm with a glass scalpel. The flesh parted smoothly, and though the congealed blood within did not run, I saw the mark of the knife trace itself along the splayed-out arms of the other bodies: the twinned man and the dwarf.

“Entanglement?” I asked, referring to that property of the minutest quanta wherein exciting one half of a bonded pair excites the other in an instant, regardless of the intervening space.

“It is not entanglement,” Rassam said. “It is something else.”

“What?”

I thought I could hear the eyes of Rassam and Oberlin narrow in the noisy quietude.

“You don’t know?” Oberlin clasped his hands across his pigeon’s chest.

“Know what?”

As if to himself, the Lord Director whispered, “Caesar said you were the one. He said you would know.”

“Know what?” I asked again, more forcefully.

“What they are.” Oberlin looked at me with slitted eyes. A great ring with a carnelian set in its bezel flashed upon his finger.

“And what are they?” I asked.

Oberlin hesitated. I recalled the note he had slipped me when I survived the Chantry’s interrogations, the pitchfork he had scratched through the watermarked Imperial sunburst at the bottom of the official stationery. The young Friedrich had been a believer, one of the many in the Imperial service who gave voice and credence to the whispers that I was the God Emperor come again.

Did he believe still?

I felt he must not, felt that Time, Ever-Fleeting, must have cooled his ardor—as it cools all things. My ignorance could not have strengthened his belief, and yet there was caution in those narrowed eyes, and not contempt.

“Higher beings,” he said at last.

I glared at him. They were the words the Irchtani used to describe us humans—specifically those of us of the palatine caste. They were also the words I had used to describe the Watchers to Cassandra. By using them, the aged spymaster intimated that he had overheard our conversation aboard the Ascalon. They had surveilled the dear old ship, then.

I let my smile freeze to show I understood his veiled meaning.

“They are creatures that exist beyond what we ordinarily think of as spacetime. They are abstract creatures, composed of pure energy.”

I could only stare at him for a moment then. It was the most . . . incredible thing I think I’d ever heard. “Impossible,” I said aloud. “I saw one’s body.”

“You saw only a fragment,” Oberlin said.

“A fragment?” I echoed the words, incredulous.

“Suppose you were to dip your hand in a pail of water,” the spymaster said, raising one arm by the elbow so that the fingers pointed down. “Suppose ordinary space were only a sheet of oil spread upon that water. The Monumentals are like the hand. The body you saw was like a fingerprint. A husk left behind.”

I felt as though I’d been plunged in oily water myself, as if Oberlin had knocked the legs out from under me. Oberlin continued, letting his hand fall, “Matter, of course, is but another form of energy. In nuclear reactions, we free the energy imprisoned in matter and so on. The body you saw on Eue was only the condensates formed when the Monumental forced its energies down from its reality into our own.”

“But it had a brain,” I protested. “A skull. An eye socket! Nerve channels!”

The Director could only shrug.

“The creature on Eue spoke to me,” I continued.

The old campaigner’s face darkened. “That was not in your report.”

“No,” I said sharply. “It wasn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I did not think I would be believed,” I said. “I didn’t even know HAPSIS existed at the time.”

The old man leaned forward, eyes alight. “What did it say?”

“It showed me a Cielcin victory,” I said. “And it showed me the Vaiartu. Their conquests and fall. That and . . . a thousand other things . . . ” I fell silent. “Pure energy . . . ” The words sounded at once comical and terrifying, and I longed to seat myself in one of the empty chairs about the center console, but I did not. It was better to stand, better to maintain the appearance of control. “How do you know all this? Nairi? The Atropos Expedition? They found a Watcher dead there.”

“Did Caesar tell you what happened to the men of the Atropos Expedition?”

“He told me they killed themselves.”

Again Friedrich Oberlin studied me as though I were a cell culture under the glass of some vile magus, or like an enemy duelist awaiting the telltale twitch that precedes the mortal draw. “Many did,” he said. “Some vanished. Others were torn apart. We have footage of men lifted bodily into the air, and of others . . . ” He rapped the rim of the holography well with the knuckles of one hand.

“Like this?”

He didn’t have to answer. I understood then why they were so certain Sabratha was the place, and why they had come for me.

“What happened to him?” I asked, though I thought I could guess the answer.

Oberlin confirmed my suspicion.

“The Monumental,” he said when a fresh silence had stretched on long enough. “His Radiance told me what you did on Perfugium, How you killed the Cielcin commander.”

Almost embarrassed, I turned away. I had looked across time to a place where the windows of Attavaisa’s command ship shattered, and so tore the air from the Cielcin general’s lungs. We had watched as Attavaisa and all its officers were pulled through those open portals into the silent black of space. Though many of the memories of that earlier Hadrian have faded, that one remains forever undimmed. Too well I recall the glass of the bulbs in our own command center falling down on us like rain, the hiss and crackle of electronics fried by some overspill of my choosing. I had never controlled the power well, had hardly used it since that black day.

“I was there that day in the Grand Colosseum, too,” Oberlin said. “When you stopped that highmatter sword with your bare hand.”

“That was no miracle,” I said, seeing the old light of belief flicker in Oberlin’s somber gray eyes.

He dismissed my words with a gesture. “I saw the recordings from Berenike, too. I’d wager Aptucca was something similar. Was it?” Aptucca had been more like the Colosseum. Duplicity and a plan had won the day in my battle with the Cielcin Prince Ulurani, and not the Quiet’s power. When I failed to answer him, Oberlin asked the question I felt sure he’d wanted to ask me since our first meeting when he was a young man. “Did you really come back from death?”

Wordlessly, I nodded.

In the corner, the light off Albé’s lenses flashed as he turned his head away.

“You are closer to them than we are,” Oberlin said, and pointing at the holograph and the bodies of the poor engineer, he continued, “The things you can do are like this.”

“They’re not,” I said.

“They are!” Oberlin said. “You must see it!” He leaned fully over the holograph then, and the light of the projector lit his time-softened jowls from below, giving his wizened face a skull quality.

Remembering what I had said to Cassandra the day we set sail, I said, “You think that I can fight them?”

“No,” Oberlin said, surprising me. He seemed to think about his answer then. The wrinkles on his brow collapsed, forming a deep crevasse between his eyes. “I don’t know. But we don’t need you to. We have the means to kill it. We need your help to find it.”

I stared at him, uncomprehending. “You have the means to kill it?”

“Priscian,” Oberlin turned to his secretary. “The Perseus files, if you would.”

The gaunt secretary removed a second quartz wafer from a brass case he produced from his breast pocket and handed it to the Lord Director. Oberlin held it as though it were a bar of depleted uranium, weighed the thing in his hands. “You will review this alongside the reports from Sabratha tonight. We will meet again tomorrow.” I held out a hand for the wafer, but Oberlin did not give it to me. “We have been planning this for a long time,” he said. “Longer than you know.”

“Since Atropos?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “We’ve spent every one of the last nearly three thousand years preparing for this expedition. After Atropos, HAPSIS quarantined Nairi. We studied the Monumental there for centuries. Lost countless lives. How do you think we learned what they are?”

My hand was still out to receive the wafer, but my mind was far away. In my mind’s eye, I saw a flotilla of watchful ships, forever orbiting verdant Nairi. I pictured an Imperial fortress in the jungle, overlooking the cyclopean ruins of the Vaiartu royal outpost, imagined the brave men who had volunteered to go and learn, knowing they might face a monster that defied what little we knew of natural law.

“They are composed of pure force, as I told you. They are a pattern of force. Like a signal. Radiating down from those . . . higher dimensions. That signal can be disrupted with a sustained electromagnetic pulse, provided the beast can be brought within range.”

“You killed the one on Nairi?” I asked.

“Yes,” Oberlin said. “Centuries ago. Well before the war. But we . . . suspected there were others. That’s why we prepared for Operation Gnomon, we wanted to be ready in the event another—”

I raised the hand I’d been holding out for silence. “You’ve had a weapon designed to kill the Watchers since before the Cielcin invasion?” I almost shouted the words.

“History did not begin with Hadrian Marlowe,” Oberlin replied, voice cool and low.

“Then why do you need me?” I bellowed, glaring from Oberlin to Lascaris. I thrust a pointing finger in the direction of young Albé, who had stood sharply. “Leave off, A2!” I raised both my hands to show I meant no violence. “I’m bait,” I said, eyes flickering to Tor Rassam before returning to the Director’s face. “You’re using me as bait.”

“You’re our foxhound, old boy.” Oberlin bent forward to collect the quartz wafer from the well display. The images of the poor engineer winked out at last, and he slid the two wafers between his fingers as though they were a pair of silver kaspums. “Caesar believes your . . . faculties will make you uniquely attuned to the beast. You have senses we lack.”

“I’m bait,” I said again.

“If you like.” The old man shrugged. “You begin to understand, at any rate, why we were so willing to risk an international incident to force the Jaddians to hand you over. It is good you came willingly, in the end.” He grew quiet then, and I was struck once more by his extreme age. A slouching, round-shouldered little old man with thinning hair.

He did not look like a god-killer.

My thoughts ran to Cassandra. I should have left her on Jadd—whatever her wishes. I had half a mind to ask Oberlin to save her, to spirit her away to some far-flung province when she went under the ice . . . and yet I knew I could not do so. To send her away would be a betrayal, but more than that I knew I could not risk allowing her to slip into Imperial custody. I might never see her again.

Oberlin held up the two quartz wafers between thumb and forefinger.

Two coins.

In ancient days, the fathers of men laid two coins upon the eyes of the dead—a pair of bronze obols that the deceased might offer the ferryman of souls to speed their way to Hades. Often we believe the myths of those ancients mere fancy, amusements for the delectation of children—or those men who are like children, never learning conviction. They are not. Those stories echo in eternity—are indeed perhaps reflections of it, cast from some higher world—such that their shrapnel are to be found everywhere. In everything.

Have I said that we live in stories?

We do, and so those two coins Oberlin offered me were the very toll price of hell.

But which of us was the ferryman? And which the corpse?


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Framed