CHAPTER 64
SMOKE AND SANDALWOOD
“Valka?” I turned to face her, heedless of my danger, of the threat posed by Kharn’s three new eyes.
“Hadrian?” The low sound of her voice broke something in me, something I had not known until that moment had remained whole.
It was Valka.
I knew it could not be, and yet it was. There had been recognition in her voice, her tone, her inflection. She knew me, and I knew her—though my reason screamed from its prison just behind my eyes.
Still I went to her, heedless of the blood trickling along the hoses at my feet into Kharn’s near-lifeless form, of the three drones orbiting. Sword unkindling in my hand, I crushed Valka to myself, whole body shaking as I pressed my cheek against hers. Her flesh was warm and real in my arms, and no cold impression.
She did not reciprocate. Her arms rose, but shock held them away from me. I saw one raised above my right shoulder, its owner momentarily stunned.
“How long was I in fugue?” she asked, her breath a warm air on my neck. She tried to extricate herself from my grip. “Hadrian, what’s wrong? You’re hurting me.”
I could not answer her, or bring myself to obey. I only sobbed into her shoulder, not letting go.
At last my breath ran out, and my lungs drank the air of her, and it was that air that gave me pause. An unfamiliar floral scent filled my chest. No sandalwood. No smoke.
Oleander. I placed the scent. Oleander and . . . and something else.
Musk rose.
It was wrong, and the wrongness of it knocked me back a step.
I heard her indrawn breath. “Your face!” Slow fingers reached up and touched my cheek. Almost at once she pulled away, as if she felt she’d crossed some line. “What happened to you?” When I did not answer—I could not speak—she spoke more quickly, a tumbling panic to her words, as though she feared she would not have the opportunity to speak. “That chimera took you away. You’ve been gone for . . . for days. I thought . . . ” She did not tell me what she had thought. “What did they do to you?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing!”
“You see what I have to offer you?” the iron voice of the Undying fell about us both like rain.
The question brought me back into myself. I looked at Valka. Really looked.
Her left arm was bare, her clan saylash wiped clean. The tattoo should have covered her from the base of her fingers to her shoulder, and from her shoulder down her flank to the point of the left hip, its black geometries a tangle of fractal whorls, lines, and crosshatching, a language only the daimons of Tavros could read. Instead her skin was unmarked, palest gold unblemished by needle or by time.
And her eyes . . .
Her eyes were green, not the golden I remembered.
Seeing them there, in her face, broke my heart anew.
They were Cassandra’s eyes.
For so long as I had known her, my Valka had golden eyes, the false eyes her people had made for her. I had not once seen the eyes that nature had given her, had only ever speculated as to their hue. Most believe it a simple matter to reproduce the traits of the parent in the child. Nature, of course, does so unasked, and so often. But it is no easy thing to isolate the genes that code for many particular traits, unless one’s family has been indexed and designed for generations. When the Jaddian magi sequenced Cassandra from the cells of my body and Valka’s blood, I asked only that they not give my child her father’s eyes. I’d no desire to see the eyes of Lord Alistair Marlowe peering at me out of my daughter’s face.
Our daughter’s face.
I had always wondered if chance had given the girl her mother’s eyes, or if else she had inherited the eyes of some other ancestor.
I wondered no more, and wondered at the caprice of nature, and of he who governs nature.
“What you have to offer . . . ?” I echoed, not turning to face the ghoul enthroned.
Something moved behind me, shifted just a little. Still I did not turn, could not take my eyes from the face of the creature standing there in front of me. The face of the woman I loved, arrayed as for a tryst, or for some pagan sacrament of sex and sacrifice.
I longed to hold her again, knew I should not.
She was not Valka, could not be Valka. Could never be.
And yet . . .
“I accept,” came a dry and rattling voice, “I accept your . . . offer.”
The voice had not come from Kharn’s machines, but from her plastinated husk.
“What offer?” Valka asked, stepping nearer me. I drew back. “Hadrian, what offer?”
There was blood on the black lace of Valka’s balconette, on her belly from where I had embraced her. My sword had found its way back into its hasp, and I brushed my cheek with the back of that hand, smearing away my tears.
Kharn was still speaking. “I will . . . take up my bro-brother’s place. I will take your . . . your victory, and your peace. If you . . . will order . . . your men to . . . to stand down.”
I hardly heard the demon queen. I could look nowhere but at her.
The longer I looked, the less she resembled the woman in my memory. Valka’s lips had never been so red, so pouting; nor her breasts so round and full. It was as if she had been crafted to entice me.
And yet . . .
“Hadrian!” She stepped forward again, angrier now. “Avan al noroka . . . what is going on? Where is Kharn Sagara? Who is she?” She pointed over my shoulder at Kharn Sagara, the woman in the chair.
I thought I understood.
“You took her memories,” I said, speaking to Kharn and not to the Valka who was not Valka. “You took both our memories.”
The cloned Hadrian Marlowe that had accosted us in the high hall had possessed something of my memories, my attitudes, my manner.
They’re my memories! My other self had shouted, then muttered I know what’s real, he had said. I know what’s real.
“You will not . . . remember it,” said the Undying. “But yes. Father Calvert had you scanned, for his . . . own amusement. He was . . . given—given to violent delights.”
Was given. The black magus was dead, then. That was well. I prayed he had died swiftly.
Maybe I’ll keep one of you as a pet . . . a drooling little doll. Would you like that?
“His amusements had a way of paying for themselves,” said Kharn, relying on her machines once more. “I will give her to you, if you will but tell me how you do it. How you cheat death.”
My eyes met Valka’s eyes—Cassandra’s eyes—saw the hesitation there. The confusion.
The fear.
“You’re not her,” I said, though it tore the heart from me. “You’re not my Valka.”
“Your Valka?” the replica repeated, breathless.
Of course. If Calvert and Kharn Sagara had taken our memories, it must have been when we were his prisoners. It had been there, in the dungeons of Vorgossos, that Valka and I had grown together at last. I remembered us huddled in the cold, curled on the hard stone floor of the old power station above the reservoir, when I had scratched at the walls with a nail, making images of home, of Gibson, of Valka herself for her own amusement. I remembered the way she’d pressed her body against mine, and the way her perfume had clung to her clothes and hair as the days rolled on.
Smoke and sandalwood.
Oleander and musk rose.
“We were married,” I said, seeing the shock in the replica’s face, the anger, the . . . bemusement? She smiled as though it were some jape I told. “As good as married. We have a daughter. She’s here, now, with me.” I drew nearer this replica as I spoke, drunk on the image of her. She had Valka’s face: her high cheekbones, her pointed chin. That single strand of half-coiling hair that fell from forelock to navel was the dusky red-black I remembered, like the shadow of some forgotten sun. “Look at your arm, Valka. Your saylash . . . it’s not there.”
The woman’s green eyes were shining, wide with fear.
“My what?”
“She does not know what you mean,” Kharn said, her blackly metallic voice filling the dim hall.
At my back, there was a rustling of heavy fabrics, a scraping of metal on stone.
I turned.
Kharn Sagara had found her feet at last. Where before there had been a mannequin of skin and bone, her flesh dry and waxen, there stood a starving woman, weighed down by black samite and cloth of gold. “We made her not to recognize our changes. It is better for her.”
“Better for me?” The other Valka stepped forward, apparently unaware of her state. I had no cape to grant her modesty.
“Be silent!” This time Kharn spoke from her own papery lips.
The second Valka’s tongue clove at once to the roof of her mouth. Her eyes bulged, and she touched her too-full lips with long fingers. Her nails were enameled a deep, brilliant red. That hand went to her throat, and I recalled the way that hand—that hand’s cousin—had gone to her throat at the behest of Urbaine’s worm.
“That’s better,” the Lady of Vorgossos said. As she spoke, she reached up into her sleeve and—seizing the head of one of the linkages that ran up that sleeve—pulled on it. A moment later, she withdrew a needle perhaps four inches in length, dropped it and the tube that fed it on the ground. “Let us talk of peace, Lord Marlowe,” Kharn said, and it was Suzuha’s voice, growing stronger by the moment, “of peace, and eternal life.”
Step by agonizing step, the Undying descended from her throne, detaching cable after cable, electrode after electrode from her arms and chest. Her robes parted, revealing the skeletal body beneath, the ribs visible, the breasts shriveled. There were sockets—black holes, metal rimmed—just below her ribs, ports from which she detached cables whose functions were mysterious to me.
“You call this eternal life?” I asked, looking to the second Valka, who seemed at once unable to move. Only her eyes darted in her terrified face. She did not understand what was happening. What she was. What had been done to her.
“We must go down to see the Brethren,” Kharn said. “They can still communicate with the Demiurge. I can stand my armada down.”
“What of your brother’s body?”
“It is in hand,” said Kharn. “Reconstruction will take some time, but there are means by which he might be imitated.”
Valka’s hand still clutched her throat. She was shaking.
“Let her go,” I said. Valka or no, I would not see her suffer.
Kharn ignored me. “Marvelous, isn’t she?” The lady who was Death drew up beside me, surrounded by her drones. “We made some . . . modifications to the original. All part of an effort to draw what we could out of the samples we took from you . . . ” She lay a hand on my shoulder, light as dead wood.
“I said let her go, Sagara.”
At once Valka fell to hands and knees, gasping. I knelt by her side. “Are you all right?”
The replica shook her head, but did not speak.
She was not Valka. But Valka’s ghost was in her, and no one—woman or man—should suffer so. Hands on her shoulders, I looked up at the specter who stood above us both. “How many of me did you make?”
“Oh . . . ” the woman began.
The machine finished. “Dozens.”
The woman again. “All failures.”
“You spoke of the Quiet,” the machine said. “How is it done?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” I said. It was . . . indescribably sweet to hold her again. To pretend to. “I have no power in myself.”
“I shot you!” Kharn almost—almost—shouted. “You should have died! Would you deny it to my face?” So she had attacked me to force my hand, to place me beyond all hope of denying what was real. “Do you think Vorgossos blind? Deaf? Do you think I have not seen and heard what tales pass in the wider universe since you left me here, torn in two? I have heard the stories, seen the holographs: Aptucca, Berenike, Perfugium. I know the Jaddians have struggled as I have struggled, and our friends of MINOS. And from the memories of my brother-self’s poor soldiers I know that you have died a second time—don’t deny it!” Her voice had reached its full strength by then. “You are more like me than you admit! You are not the same man I gave a new arm all those years ago.”
I was still kneeling, my arms around the other Valka. The gems in her hairnet glittered. Black opals that blazed like her. Her curling forelock trailed on the stone between her hands. Whispering gently, I helped her to stand, faced Kharn Sagara squarely.
“I am he,” I said.
“Do not lie to me,” said Kharn Sagara, her three eye-drones blazing about her narrow shoulders.
Lacking a cloak, I put an arm around Valka’s shoulders. It was all I could do for her. She still would not speak.
“It is no lie,” I said to her. “I am the man my father ordered from the tanks. Only reborn. Remade, and by the hand of the only one who truly can.”
“Impossible!” the Undying said. “You are some clone, some trick of the Imperium.”
“I am a servant of the Quiet,” the Halfmortal answered her, “and the Quiet alone.”
“The Quiet!” There was a brittle quality in the daimoniac’s voice. Was it fear?
“You asked me how I do it, this gift of mine. He gave it to me, Sagara. He made me what I am, I can do nothing that he does not permit. You see but three dimensions. I see more. I can see time.”
Kharn Sagara’s eyes narrowed to mere slits. “You expect me to believe you have some power over time itself?”
“Only the power to move through it,” said I. “Not merely forward, but across it.”
Beside me, Valka choked.
My fury flashed white as lightning. “Whatever you’ve done to her, stop it!”
Kharn’s eyes were chips of flint. “You have spoken to her enough! If you want her, you will tell me what I want to know. Where did you acquire this gift?”
Annica.
She wanted the location of Annica. Could I give it to her? Would it do her any good? After all, it was not on Annica that I had received the Quiet’s imprimatur, but on another Annica. An Annica that was not and would never be.
And yet I found I could not tell her, sensing that to do so was a betrayal.
“I can’t tell you that,” I said.
“Be reasonable, Marlowe,” Sagara said, drawing nearer to the Valka replica and to me.
“You have already agreed to my peace,” I said. “The Demiurge for Vorgossos.”
“For Vorgossos, and Latarra, both,” she corrected.
“For Vorgossos and Latarra, both,” I agreed. “You said we must go down to see the Brethren . . . ” The great intelligence had said we would meet again, one last time.
Sagara’s anger flared hot as lightning. “I’m not sure who you think you are! You bring a treasure into my house and insult me by not even pretending to haggle over the price! I offer you the one thing no other can: your woman, reborn! The chance to start again!”
As though some spell had been lifted, Valka gasped, green eyes fixed on me. “Your woman?” Her breasts heaved as she spoke, her words like broken glass. “Your woman? You said we were . . . ”
“Married,” I said. “As good as.” The tears welled up afresh. “You died,” I said to the woman who was not my own. “More than two hundred years ago. It’s been more than a thousand years since we first came to Vorgossos, Valk—”
I could not say her name, could not call this woman by it.
Still, I would save her if I could.
The other Valka shook her head, that one curling tress swaying. “A thousand years?” she said, withdrawing half a step. “No, no, ’tis not possible. ’Tis a lie.”
“No,” I said. “We have a daughter, Cassandra. You’d love her—the real you, I mean. I—”
Once more, Kharn Sagara placed a weightless hand upon my shoulder. It was a thing of paper and dried wood. “Do not be a fool,” the demon whispered in my ear. “You could make her fall in love with you again, my lord! You can leave here together—and all I ask is a little answer.”
Knowledge then, her predecessor’s words echoed in eternity, not life.
But the two were now the same, the two trees conjoined as by some fungal infection, their roots entangled, so that they were one organism, inedible.
“Do you like her?” Kharn’s second hand was on my chest, so that she embraced me.
Rage stopped my tongue. And shock. And horror.
And love. That, too—and fear. Fear for her sake. This woman who did not understand, who had been built for evil purpose, and evil use.
“She is as she was when you left my care,” Kharn said, ringed hand scraping over the bloody ceramic of my sculpted breastplate, sliding back and forth. “Her memories are the same, her personality.” I could hear the smile in that thin and papery voice. “A perfect copy, and more than perfect. We have made certain . . . enhancements, as you see.”
I feared to pull away, feared the three drones that yet circled the three of us, feared to threaten our tenuous peace. We had no time to waste. Every moment passed spelled more death and destruction: in orbit, in the city, in the palace itself.
It had to end.
And things do end, you know?
“You’ll find her more . . . pliant than the original.”
The replica found Valka’s courage at last. “More pliant!” She stepped forward, nostrils flaring. “More pliant, is it? ’Tis—”
“On your knees!” Kharn snapped.
Valka fell at once, not so much kneeling as hurling herself at the ground, knees first.
“That’s much better, isn’t it?” Kharn said.
Not like this, I thought, mind half-blank with denial. How many times had I imagined seeing her again?
Not like this.
“Valka . . . ” Her name escaped me unbidden, torn from my lips.
She looked up at me, eyes wide. “I couldn’t stop myself,” she said, “couldn’t—”
“Quiet, girl!” Kharn said, and the poor replica fell silent at once. Lips mere inches from my ear, Kharn said, “She can be yours, Lord Marlowe. All yours! And all you have to do is tell me how you do it.” Her voice shook with desire, with a hunger and a fear more animal than human, yet cold. “How do you cheat death?”
I was silent.
“Perhaps a demonstration,” Kharn said, still holding her hand to my chest, nails clicking. “Give her an order. See for yourself. More than perfect, I told you.”
Valka’s hands tightened on my tunic as she tried once more to speak. But she could not. Kharn’s second order had stopped her tongue as surely as the first had brought her to her knees. Still she was enough herself—enough Valka—to look at me with fury and defiance and terror mingled. Perhaps she believed that Sagara had done something to her implants, to the neural lace that webbed the gray matter of her brain.
“She has your eyes,” I said at last, not knowing what to do with the terror in her face. The terror of me as much as anything, for here was a Valka that hardly knew me, that did not trust me as Valka had herself. “Cassandra,” I said, explaining in my halting way, speaking to the shade of the woman who was dead. “I asked them to give her your eyes.” Against my judgement, unable to help myself, I touched her face with one hand. She flinched, but could not flee. “I never knew they were green.”
Green.
Green eyes.
“You were with me all along,” I said. To her. To him. “Always there, and I couldn’t see it.”
What was it Catherine had said of the God Emperor? Of the Hidden One who had sent him dreams of tomorrow?
. . . it was as though some friend who had always been there, ever by his side, had taken him by both his shoulders and—as if after a hundred years of silence—had finally started to speak.
After more than two hundred years—after more than six—I understood.
I had never been alone. Not there, in Vorgossos, nor in the black pits of Dharan-Tun, or the pandaemonium of Eue. Not for an instant.
Help had always come, had always been with me. And so I knew that help would come, that I would find a way out of the labyrinth once again—and for good and all.
I understood.
I do not remember raising my hands, do not remember turning. Kharn Sagara had taken a step back, permitting me a little space with her gift. My fist collided with the undead woman’s jaw. I felt her teeth splinter like old wood.
“Valka,” I said, drawing my sword and kindling it. I gave her an order, just as I had been told. “Run.”
One of Kharn’s drones fired on me. I blinked, saw a place in time where I stood three paces to my left. The shot sizzled through the air, impacted one of the chamber’s square pillars. I heard the sound of stone splintering, slashed at the bundle of cables that ran along the floor nearest me.
Valka’s replica was running for the doors, the train of her sarong streaming behind her. The doors were shut. Would they open? Could she open them?
Kharn sprawled on the floor at my feet, dazed. I was counting on that disorientation, on the infirmity of that aged incarnation to be my salvation—and her doom.
I’d had a bellyful of these Extrasolarians, these demoniacs and machine men, enough of all their empty promises, their vile hatred of human life. The creature running for the door was not Valka, but she was someone. I would kill Kharn Sagara, destroy her—him—utterly if I could. Let Vorgossos burn. Let Latarra crumble. I gave no thought to the Demiurge in that moment, no thought to my mission.
It did not matter.
Kharn Sagara was evil. I say it plain. And we should not suffer evil to endure.
Nor would I treat with it. Not anymore.
A second stroke from one of Kharn’s drones slashed the air. I let it pass through me, dragging my sword across the ground, tearing through cables and hoses alike. There were many still bound to the creature at my feet, socketed to ports in the wasted flesh of rib and thigh. Beneath the robe, the Lady of Vorgossos wore naught but a linen breechclout, long rotted by time. I spurned her with my toe, turning her to lie on her back.
“More than perfect?” I echoed, not expecting an answer.
I had made a ruin of her face. Blood—strangely black and glutinous—spattered her cheek where my mailed fist had torn her flesh, and her jaw was smashed to pulp.
There was no debate, could be no debate between us.
She had to die.
He had to die.
There was no escape. She could not broadcast her image offworld, and if she escaped into another body on Vorgossos itself, we would find her. I would tear that planet apart if I had to.
I raised my sword.
As I did, one of Kharn’s drones hove into view, its eye flaring. Time parted, and the beam cut through the place I had been. I was beside the thing now, blade still raised. It fell, and the drone fell in the following instant, its chassis in two pieces.
Doom had come to Vorgossos.
I stood over Kharn Sagara then, a withered husk with a broken face. The last of her line.
Whatever Calen Harendotes had become—and all his afterlings—they were a new creature. Once more I raised my sword. The sorcerers of MINOS had two transmitters in their bodies. One in the brain, one in the chest. I brought my sword screaming down, blade parting the crown of Kharn’s skull in the middle, carving without resistance through face and shoulder to the heart. In that final instant, there came another flash of blazing blue. I hadn’t seen the drone that fired, nor felt that lightning sting.
“She was perfect,” I said to Sagara’s corpse, forcing myself to look at the cloven head. “And she’s gone.”
Remembering that a piece of her was not, I turned toward the door, hoping to see that iron portal opened, and the replica gone.
But the doors had never opened.
That last flash of blue had found its mark.
Kharn Sagara had performed one final act of cruelty. With her final shot, she had struck not at me—her enemy—but at the replica, that she might wound me more deeply.
“Valka!” I knew not what else to call her.
Unkindling my blade, I hurried to her side.
The shot had taken her in her back, burned right through her spinal cord, a hole no larger than a man’s thumb, right between her shoulder blades. Light shone through it. Through her. There was but little blood.
“Valka!”
She did not answer. The shot had surely pierced a lung, if it had not found her heart. Gently I turned her over. “Not again,” I heard a crushed little voice saying. “Not her. Not again . . . not . . . no . . . ” I was looking up, looking round for someone, anyone.
But we were alone.
She was not Valka. She had Valka’s memories—leastways as far as our first sojourn on that black planet—but a man is not the sum of his memories, but much more.
A man is a story, a thread winding back through time from death to conception, an unbroken line—save where the powers of our universe intervene. A man is neither body nor soul, but a soul incarnate. The body I gathered to myself then in that moment had not been born on Edda to the father I had never met, the father murdered by the Chantry. The soul that had but lately departed that too-ample flesh had not been the spirit my spirit loved for all those long centuries. The creature Kharn Sagara had made to tempt me and for torment—as part of his . . . her scheme to unlock the secrets of Hadrian Halfmortal—had been an echo only.
A mayfly, living for a day and dying.
“Not like this,” I was saying, had said I think a hundred times. “Not again . . . ”
What had I imagined? That I might have saved her? Freed her of whatever poison Sagara had poured into her ears? Had I thought that I might love her, as I had loved Valka herself? No, no . . . The thought of her kneeling at my feet, eyes wide with terror, filled me with nausea. Kharn’s little necromancy was a perversion, an act of evil. He had made this Valka only to be a slave. My slave, or any other man’s.
How many had he made?
I cradled her head, held her to myself, and for a moment it was not the replica I held, but the woman herself, the woman whose body I had never seen—could never bury. Her death had been an abstraction to me, remote as distant thunder. There was no abstraction there, amid the tangled cords and square columns that encircled that Satanic throne.
No thunder.
Was that a breath upon my cheek?
I straightened, still supporting her lolling head.
“Valka?”
A tremor, and her blackened eyelids flickered, revealing slits of palest jade. “ . . . Hadrian?”
Her voice rattled, trembled with the word, and I knew Kharn’s last shot had indeed pierced her lung. I saw the hole above one breast, black edged. Her breathing was very shallow.
“Couldn’t . . . ” She wheezed between words. “ . . . open door . . . ”
“Don’t talk now,” I said. “We’re going to get you out of here.”
It was possible to save her. If we could get her on ice—into fugue—it would be possible to prevent the effects of hypoxia. Brain damage. But to get her into fugue, we would need an emergency field crèche, and the nearest we had were in the shuttles, in the tunnels beyond the city’s shattered gates.
Could we get her there in time?
The replica’s eyes bulged, mouth gasping.
I realized what I’d said. “You can talk if you want,” I said. “Only it’s better if you don’t.” The oily sense of nausea returned. Sagara had set a worm in the poor creature’s brain, as bad as the one Urbaine had planted in Valka herself. “I’m sorry.”
“You . . . came back,” she said, and said again, “came back for . . . for me.”
“Of course,” I said, lying to her.
“Your face . . . ” she said. “You look . . . different. Good.”
I smiled through fresh tears. Almost laughed.
Every breath brought pain, as though it was I who had been shot, not the poor woman in my arms.
“I’m not . . . her, am I?” asked the replica. “You said I’m . . . not.”
“Not my Valka,” I said, placing a hand over her wound, as though I might heal it by simple pressure. “But that doesn’t matter. Just hold on.”
Would that Ragama had taken away my grief with my need for sleep! Instead, it seemed my every emotion shone through more sharply, my every hurt more deeply.
I knew I could not save her.
“Cassandra!” I screamed her name, begging for her—for any of the others—to hear me through the doors.
I did not even know if she was alive.
“Our . . . daughter?” Valka said. “A thousand years . . . ”
“I love you,” I said, unable to help myself. To say it one last time—even to an echo . . .
I had no choice.
“Love?” Valka’s eyes widened, and I recalled that here was a Valka I had never loved, with the memories of a Valka I had not yet loved. She repeated herself, her voice—like her eyes—gone very far away. “ . . . Love?”
Her eyes—already distant—moved infinitely far away.
She was gone.
Scars I had long thought healed split and tore in my breast, my heart, my soul, and I clutched her body to myself, though I knew her spirit slept within the howling Dark, awaiting the new creation—as Ragama had said.
Still I wept, for the pain of our parting . . . and because our reunion was almost infinitely far away.