CHAPTER 60
DARK DESCENT
“The lift!” Harendotes was shouting. “Get to the lift!”
The doors through which the Interfaced had brought my clone were still open, a narrow slit in the silo’s iron walls.
Chaos blossomed all about us, and the air was thick with fire. I had lost sight of 2Maeve in the maelstrom, but her kinsmen fired on us with plasma burners and lances alike. I threw an arm across my face as a shot took me, glad of my shield curtain. One of my own troopers—near at hand—fell smoking as his own shield was overwhelmed by an energy beam. One of Ramanthanu’s scaharimn fell upon one of the attacking dragoons, and smashed its forehead against the man’s armored face, seizing the bare instant the man was stunned to slam up into the soft place beneath the chin.
“Pull back!” the Monarch was shouting.
“We can’t get out!” Cassandra said, just behind me. “There’s too many of them between us and the doors.”
I had been right to tell our troopers to disable their comms. The other Sagara would not have been able to seize their minds, as she had with the Interfaced, but she might have locked the impact layer of every soldier’s suit, immobilized them, left them to await the coming of their destroyers.
“Back!” Harendotes was still shouting, still trying to move forward.
One of the Interfaced swung at me with the haft of his lance, ceramic bayonet descending like a halberd. The simurgh blade rose to meet it, severed bayonet and haft both without resistance.
But I could not kill the man. As the boy I’d been had so often pulled his winning strike in battle against Crispin, so too I withheld my blade. The memory of my own face disfigured by Sagara’s machines—of my own voice and thoughts embedded in that false flesh—haunted my every breath.
Seeing my hesitation, the Interfaced man cast down his ruined lance and drew his sidearm. The plasma burner coughed as he fired at me, advancing in the mad hope of seizing my sword wrist and pressing the muzzle of his pistol against my exposed face.
I did not want to kill him.
Still, my blade descended, and the poor bastard—a prisoner and a slave in his own mind, and perhaps a corpse—fell in two.
An oath black as hell escaped me.
No man should have the power to master another in his own heart, to carve out his soul and function with a word. In my mind’s eye, my replica’s golden hand crawled like a spider up the arm of the dragoon that had held the wrist. I saw its cilia waving, worming their way into the flesh of the dying soldier.
The hand!
“The hand!” I exclaimed, casting about in the madness, certain that if only I could destroy the hand that I might save 2Maeve and her people.
There was the ruin of my replica, lying in bloody pieces, smoldering. One of the living charged at me, but Ramanthanu hurled itself between the Interfaced and me, scimitar flashing, while about us both three of the Irchtani flapped into the air, drawing fire and filling the air with shrill cries and the buffeting of wind. Cassandra flashed past me, twin blades striking at our foe.
All the while, Calen Harendotes was shouting to fall back to the lift. I saw the sense in that: With its narrow gate, the way could be defended, the swarming enemy bottlenecked. But if I could stop it—if I could sever the link that bound that other Kharn to his . . . to her new slaves—if I could save them all, could save even only 2Maeve . . .
There he was, the dead dragoon—still smoking from the electric shock that had claimed his life. I saw the golden hand still clamped to his wrist.
One of the Interfaced turned to bar my path, lance sweeping round. I leaped back, colliding with Otomno in my haste to win clear. A shot flashed past my shoulder, and I recognized the stripes of a lieutenant on the man’s shoulder.
It was 5Eamon, or 8Gael.
“You know me!” I said as the lieutenant rushed me, bayonet chopping at my shoulder. Time bent to my will, and the blade connected with my shoulder but did not bite, did not even knock me down. I sensed the will behind the false eyes in the lieutenant’s mask evaluate what had occurred, the daimonic presence considering.
I slashed the stock of the energy-lance, but once again did not move in for the kill.
Seizing that opportunity, 5Eamon—for so I thought of him—cartwheeled away. His heel clipped my chin, and I staggered back, rattled. The dead dragoon was on the ground between us. Before 5Eamon could redouble, I fell upon it, slashing with my sword. The thing’s shell was adamant under gold, and would not break.
“Cassandra!” I said, calling for her aid.
The girl leaped between us, blade pointed at 5Eamon’s chest. The half-dead lieutenant cocked his head, evaluating. Two of his fellows—near at hand—broke off their assaults and rounded on her. I had a brief image of my daughter surrounded, her swords held at rising angles like the wings of a butterfly, right hand forward.
I went to one knee beside the gilded hand, and wielding Gibson’s blade like a paring knife I snicked at the wires that bound it to the dead dragoon. Calen was still calling for retreat. The Monarch had gathered a knot of men about himself—mostly the non-Interfaced Latarrans, though a few of my own people had shored up the space around him.
I had expected the Interfaced to go limp when I cut the first wire, but they showed no change. Increasingly desperate, I cut at the writhing filaments until not one bound Kharn’s golden hand to the dead man’s wrist, and pulled the thing away. It was heavy as three hands should have been, and dead as the hand of a statue.
“It should have worked,” said a voice that sounded like my own.
The Interfaced were still unfree, still slaved to the will of Kharn Sagara. 5Eamon had drawn his pistol, fired it at Cassandra. The others about her were keeping their distance, forcing her back. Her shields were holding, would not hold forever.
I had a choice to make, and no choice at all.
I found my feet and launched myself at the nearest attacker, plunged my sword through his breastplate of common ceramic all the way to the hilt, pulling so that the slim hole became a gash, and the man burbled in his mask as he fell, blood sheeting from the wound to stain the damasked carpet. That carpet was burning in places, and the antique wall hangings were afire. The air was filling with smoke, and my eyes were smarting.
Harendotes had found the door, had fallen back through it.
If we were to join him, needs must that it be soon. Surely the sound of fighting would draw reinforcements—or the nonresponse of the Interfaced on Latarran comm.
Ramanthanu and its ilk leaped after me, driving back those assailants menacing Cassandra.
“5Eamon!” I said, thrusting my sword out in my classic Spanish line. “Surrender!”
The shell that had been the man called 5Eamon only shot at me. The bolt passed clean through me as I strode toward him and—shutting my eyes—raised my sword for the killing stroke.
“Door!” I shouted, waving my blade in the direction of our only possible exit. “Retreat! Follow the Monarch!”
I spurred one of the Cielcin on ahead of me, lingered to drive my legionnaires before me. “Cassandra! Go!”
“Not without you!”
“Go!” I turned but slowly, conscious of Ramanthanu close by. The huge Cielcin captain slashed one of 2Maeve’s dragoons across the belly with its scimitar, lashed at the man with the nahute still held in its other hand.
A scraping metallic sound filled the high hall then, and looking, I saw the great shutters beginning to grind closed. “They will shut us out!” said Ramanthanu. “We must go.”
I could still not find 2Maeve in the chaos. I shouted for her in vain, knowing even as I did so that she would not answer, even if she heard. Ramanthanu seized my wrist with one six-fingered hand.
“Iagami ni,” it said.
We ran, then, each pressing the other toward the door. Harendotes was already through, and must have found the controls to open it. I saw Cassandra pass through the grinding portal, memories of Vedatharad flickering like lightning in my skull. The doors had opened only a little, were barely wide enough then to admit a single man.
I was not the last to make it through, but I was nearly so.
The great shutters slammed together not five seconds after I squeezed through, joining Cassandra, the Monarch, and the few other survivors on the lift platform within.
Many, many more had remained in the hall behind.
We could hear the sounds of shouting and of weapons discharge through the heavy metal of the doors behind. There were perhaps forty of us remaining in the tube, of the perhaps three hundred that had followed the Monarch into the depths of the palace.
The huge lift lurched, was already moving beneath us. The shaft was cut deep into the planet’s crust at a shallow angle, so that it proceeded not straight downward but diagonally along tracks in the sloping wall. Only a hollow steel rail—painted yellow and black—separated the occupants of the platform from a long tumble to the floor of the shaft.
Seeing the target of my fury, I pushed my way across the platform to where Calen Harendotes stood over the controls, his back to me. Two of his remaining human dragoons tried to bar my passage, but the sight of my face drove them apart, and the Monarch turned as I seized him roughly by the throat and bent him backward over the rail. “What were you thinking?” I bellowed. “Bringing the Interfaced here? Of all your soldiers?”
My hand tightened on the Monarch’s throat, found it unyielding as stone, as steel.
Harendotes’s answer issued from the speakers in his suit. “I could not have anticipated that she would bypass their defenses and attempt root-level access.”
“And why not?” I demanded, raising my other hand, the hand with my unkindled sword. “She is you!”
Something cold and hard pressed against my flank, and glancing down I found Harendotes had pressed the mouth of his own unkindled blade against my side.
“Not one more word,” he said darkly.
“Or what, Sagara?” I spat in his face. “You’ll kill me? You need me. You’re afraid. Afraid your other self has made an army of my clones, every one of them capable of what I can do.”
Harendotes’s throat did not move beneath my grip. He did not seem to breathe. “The one dead in the room above has not returned.”
“But you can’t be sure,” I said, “and you haven’t been counting. My people have yours here three-to-one. Kill me, and you’ll die. Right here.”
The falcon helm opened at some unheard command, and so sharp and sudden was the movement of its metal hinges that I jerked my hand away, permitting Sagara to stand. Beneath the helm, his eyes were blazing, a blue light in their black depths. Those eyes swept the platform, marked the door now a hundred feet up-slope above us. About us both, the few Latarran soldiers shifted, eying one another and my own men, who had grown stiff with anticipation. I had Irchtani, and Cielcin with me, and Cassandra—a Maeskolos—besides.
“It won’t be enough,” the Undying said, eyes still shining with their own light.
“Then do it,” I said, stepping back.
Instead, the Monarch did nothing, and for a time the only sound was the slow grind of the cargo lift.
“That’s enough!” A woman’s voice slashed the air between Sagara and myself. “We can’t afford to fight one another right now. We’re cut off.”
Slowly, I turned from the Monarch to face the woman who had spoken.
It was Cassandra, of course.
My daughter had removed her helm and peeled the coif from her braided hair, the better to glare at me, hard-eyed. When I did not respond or challenge her, she addressed Calen Harendotes, “Is there another way back up?”
“Yes,” I said, thinking of the stepped garden path Valka and I had taken down to the Garden so long ago.
“We cannot go back,” said Calen Harendotes. “Not when Kharn Sagara remains.”
“Kharn Sagara . . . ” one of the Latarran soldiers spoke up. “My Monarch, the Halfmortal . . . said that you were Kharn Sagara. What did he mean?”
Harendotes glared at the man. The noise of gunfire from the chamber above had stopped.
Abandoning all caution, I rounded on the common man, resolved to speak the truth at last. “Your Monarch is a clone,” I said, addressing the crowded lift, “a replica of the very Kharn Sagara we’ve come to kill.”
The poor soldier said nothing, looked from Harendotes to his companions. If I had expected the Monarch to act in that moment, to make good on the threat he’d made in his imitarium, I was disappointed. He simply stood there, silent and unmoved, sword quiescent in one golden hand.
“You’ve been had, all of you,” I told the dragoons. “Your New Order. Your Monarchy. Latarra itself. All of it was a masque, a farce designed to restore your master to his proper place. He does not care about you. About any of you! He will take back his home and abandon you to the Empire and Cielcin alike!” As I spoke, I turned to address my words to Sagara himself: to Calen Harendotes. “Isn’t that right?”
Pale fire still flickered in the hollow depths of the Monarch’s inhuman eyes, casting their faint glow upon his high cheekbones. He longed to kill me, so cold and venomous was his hate. But he did not dare. Not then, not there upon the lift. Not with matters degrading so rapidly about him. Powerful as he was, we were his best chance of surviving, of reclaiming his throne and place.
And he knew it.
“My Monarch?” asked one of the surviving dragoons—not the one who had asked first. He took a mincing step nearer his liege, head bowed. “Are you . . . are you really Kharn Sagara?”
Calen Harendotes did not take his eyes from me. “I am who you say I am,” he said at last, drawing whispers from the others—from his own dragoons and from the men of the Empire.
“They have stopped fighting, Ichakta-doh,” said the Cielcin Egazimn.
Ramanthanu hissed at its subordinate for silence.
Another of the Latarrans stepped forward. He was a young man, by his slimness, barely more than a boy, but braver in that moment than many a great king of men, though perhaps he knew it not. In a high, clear voice—a voice that trembled as he challenged his Monarch—he asked, “Is it true? What the Halfmortal said?”
Calen Harendotes stared at the young man, and so great was the power in his visage and the force of his cold gravity that I felt certain the boy would break beneath his gaze. But he did not.
“Was it all a lie?” the boy asked, speaking in that moment for Lorian, for 2Maeve, for every Interfaced and Exalted, every Extrasolarian, every Norman refugee and abandoned marcher lord who had looked to Latarra for leadership. For protection. For hope. “All of it?”
The pale light in the Monarch’s eyes went out, and—incredibly—he smiled. “What’s your name, son?”
The dragoon must have blinked inside his helmet. “Pavo, my Monarch.”
“Pavo,” Harendotes said. “Are you afraid of death, Pavo?”
Thinking this a test from his liege lord, the boy answered, “No, sire.”
“You should be,” said Calen Harendotes, sparing a glance for me. “I am.”
“My Monarch?”
“Here on Vorgossos, there is the power to turn back death. To live forever, even to restore the dead to life. You know the legends they tell of Kharn Sagara? Of this place?” The boy nodded. “They are true. Once, I had that power. I want that power back. Marlowe says that I have used you. What king does not use his subjects? He says I will abandon you. I would have our dream live forever, Pavo. Think of it: A kingdom that never fades, that never withers, that never falls into the hands of lesser men. I shall be no mere monarch, but Monarch Eternal. And you shall live forever at my side. That is the promise of Vorgossos. That is why we are here.”
Though I did not believe him, I listened then in amazement. Gone was cold, dead Saturn; gone bright and thundering Zeus. In their place, there stood an Alexander—a god-become-man. The light that was in his face as he spoke to those few soldiers was a thing bright and warm as summer skies. Here was a man I might have followed, if I then sought to follow any man. I saw then who Kharn Sagara might have been—and might once have been of old—lordly, gracious, kindly and all wise. His every word seemed sense, even to me—if only for a moment, and the men that heard him were warmed by his voice, and chafed their hands by the fire of his vision. His dream.
Not even I was immune. Such was the warm music of his voice and the fire of his dream that for a moment even I forgot that it was Kharn Sagara speaking. Kharn Sagara, who destroyed the minds of his own cloned children to cling to his falsely eternal life. Kharn Sagara, who had imprisoned both Valka and myself, who—in the body of his Naiad—had tried to force himself on me, who had cloned my flesh and memory I knew not how many times . . . Kharn Sagara, who had ordered Elffire to slay every man, woman, and child in the city outside.
The promise of Vorgossos . . .
“But a promise built upon a lie,” came a voice rough and atonal by comparison. “You cannot offer these people eternal life. Only a trick to cheat death. And even then, you cannot offer it to everyone.”
It was my own voice that had spoken.
Harendotes smiled at me. “Of course I cannot give it to everyone,” said he. “But to you?” He swept his gaze over the still-descending lift. “You will live forever at my side, if you will but help me in my task.”
Pavo glanced at his compatriots—the few Latarran soldiers that had survived the chaos in the hall above. “Forever?” He almost breathed the word. “You can really do that?”
“I am Kharn Sagara, who took this world from the Americans,” he answered, using the old name. “I have walked this galaxy for a thousand generations, and if you serve me, so will you.”
That seemed to satisfy Pavo, who looked to his companions for support, being the junior man.
“What must we do?” asked one of the others.
“We must kill my other self, the Kharn Sagara who rules this place, and stop her regenerating.” Sagara directed his words at me. “You see now why I needed you?”
The urge to strangle the man returned to me. “You took my blood,” I said, “my memories.”
Sagara did not so much as blink. “You died,” he said. “You came back. You did it without praxis. Without machines. Any man would want that for himself.”
“How many?” I asked, jaw tight, eyes more on Cassandra’s face than on Kharn’s, fearing her reaction. She had killed my replica, a creature—a man—who seemingly shared my memories, the memories I’d had until we parted ways.
Her own father.
“I had to know,” Kharn said, voice hard and brittle as ice, “I had to know how—”
“How many?” I shouted, voice resounding off the hard, stone walls. “Angelus Series, you said! How many, Kharn Sagara? How many of me have you killed?”
Fled was that music in the Monarch’s voice. His answer was small, grubby . . . terrible to learn. “Before she killed me?” he asked, and shrugged, shaking his head. “Dozens. Dozens.”
Dozens.
I clenched my hand about the ivory simurgh the Jaddians had given me. They had intended it as a symbol of the sword itself, that sword which had been destroyed and was remade. I had been made anew myself, restored by the hand of the Absolute.
I had been destroyed more times than I had ever known.
“Marlowe,” said Kharn Sagara. “Fight for me.”
“Fight for you?” I almost laughed. The sheer audacity of that man, that king of daimons. “Fight for you! I should kill you where you stand.”
Undeterred, Kharn Sagara said again, “Fight for me, and I’ll give you what you want.”
I looked at him then, long and hard: the god-in-exile, his lank hair falling in his face, his dark eyes bright with intent, his golden armor glimmering.
“The Demiurge?” I asked.
He nodded.
Had the Quiet brought us to this pass? Worn the Monarch down in desperation? Bent him to his purpose? To my quest?
I had no time to reflect on such lofty matters.
Not there. Not then.
For in that moment, a terrible screeching filled the shaft about us, and looking round, I realized with a start that someone had arrested our descent. We were caught on the middle of that sloping passage, a thousand feet from the top, and at least as many from the bottom.
“What’s happening?” one of the men asked.
“Sagara?” I glared at the Monarch.
But I had my answer in the next instant. From high above us, there came the hiss of hydraulics, the rattle of steel.
The great shutters were opening. For an instant, I saw only a single pair of luminous eyes—the helmet lights of a Latarran dragoon standing on the lip of the lift shaft high above us.
Then they were not alone. There were four eyes. Eight. A dozen.
“They opened the door!” Cassandra said, dismay coloring her voice.
Calen Harendotes had kept his head, and his fell voice rang out. “Open fire!”
The crack of lances and cough of plasma arms filled the lift shaft then, and I knew a moment of almost serene terror as I watched the Interfaced leap from the precipice toward us. Some fell but slowly, relying on repulsor harnesses still fixed over their black and gold-filigreed armor. Others hit the sloping floor of the shaft with a force to rattle teeth and slid toward us, aiming their lances careful as may be to pick wild shots at us where we stood trapped and exposed upon the platform.
And they were not alone. Behind them came men in Vorgossene khaki, and wild with abandon as the captured Latarran pawns. Heedless of their own danger they hurtled toward us, a once human tide to wash us all away.
Cassandra rushed to the rear of the platform, planted one foot on the sloping floor. It was too steep to climb, too steep to rush and meet them, but her twin swords blossomed in the sparse light, and she stood ready, our men and Calen’s all about her. Ramanthanu and I moved to join her, my own blade springing to life in my hands.
“Fire at will!” Harendotes was roaring, and blue plasma and light unseen flashed about my head as I joined my daughter on the front line. A shot caromed off my shield, and high on the slope above I saw one of the dragoons go down, slain by a careful bolt from one of the HAPSIS men about me. The few Irchtani among us leaped up the passage, wings spread in that narrow space. New-made bodies tumbled down the slope toward the platform, struck the lift about our feet.
The first of the living reached us then, lance pulled back to strike.
I slew him where he stood.
The lift platform was perhaps five cubits from the sloping floor to the rail where Sagara made his stand. There was hardly room for our party, to say nothing of our attackers. “Get us moving!” I shouted, tugging the coif back over my head.
A pair of Vorgossene SOMs tumbled to the platform at my feet.
They had no weapons, no shields that I could see, nor any visible sign of implant or augmentation. One had been shot already in the shoulder, the other in the thigh. Neither seemed to feel it, though the latter staggered as it moved.
They were simply chattel.
Chaff.
Ramanthanu tore into the first of them, and seizing him by the throat the captain hurled him over the rail at our left hand. The SOM vanished over the side, scrabbling into the abyss below. A dozen others had already made the platform, and the fighting about me was thick and desperate. I saw Cassandra strike the head from one of the converted Interfaced—was it 2Maeve? No, the helm had no crest.
Lorian, I remember thinking. Lorian, forgive me.
Something collided with me, knocking me to the deck. My head struck the metal floor, set my teeth to ringing. I had not restored my helmet, and pounded the emergency control. My mask unfolded, clicking into place as I regained my feet. I thought it must have been one of our men who had been knocked to the floor.
Where was Cassandra?
She had been not two paces to my right, standing at the foot of the sloping wall.
She was gone.
“Cassandra?” I called out. There was no sign of her on the ground about me, though the platform was strewn with bodies. “Cassandra!”
Calen Harendotes had drawn his sword, stood with Pavo and the other Latarrans close about him. One of Ramanthanu’s kinsmen lay dead at my feet, black blood streaming from its mouth. Ramanthanu itself was grappling with two unarmed SOMs.
There was only one place she could have gone.
I slashed at one of the dragoons standing in my way, crossed the broad shelf of platform to the rail and peered down. “Cassandra!” She had fallen, must have fallen when my back was turned, fallen and slid down into the abyss at the bottom of the lift shaft. Wild-eyed, I rounded on the Monarch. “Sagara!” I screamed. “Take us down!”
The gilded king turned to look at me through the chaos. “She’s locked the controls!”
I hissed, cast my gaze down over the rail. She’d been armored, but had removed her helmet while we talked on the lift. It was possible she was alive, had slid safely down the incline to the floor below. But the ground was lost in darkness, lit only by low, orange panels to either side.
The sound of iron-shod feet on the deck behind me brought me back to myself, and turning I saw three dragoons in Latarran body armor strike the platform, raise their lances to fire. Perhaps a dozen SOMs fell hard behind, and more were coming. The lift platform shook beneath the combined mass of so much humanity, until I felt certain it must give way, yet it held.
I saw it then, a falcon-crested helm blazing red-gold in the light of the lamps. 2Maeve of the Interfaced cut down one of my Irchtani with a blazing lance, and swept the haft into the side of one legionnaire’s head.
A gray resolve settled on me, and I advanced a step. If indeed I could not save her, I would deliver her from her slavery myself. I could do that for Lorian, if nothing else. Then I would force Sagara to find a way to get the lift moving, if I had to hold his face to the console.
But I never reached 2Maeve.
I hardly took another step. One dun-clad SOM leaped from the sloping wall above and slammed into me with enough force to knock me bodily from my feet. My fingers tightened on my sword as my back hit the rail at the rear of the platform. The whole world turned upside down as I fell over it, fell headfirst into the sloping lift shaft below. The mindless SOM clawed at me, and I hurled it from myself as I struck the sloping floor with my shoulders. My suit absorbed the shock, and I tumbled head over heels, sword a searing beam of death in my hand. It was a miracle it did not kill me then, a miracle I did not drop it. I was skidding down, and scrabbled with my free hand, trying to right myself, to put my feet between myself and the final impact that was to come.
I was not falling alone. I saw men in Imperial white and crimson, in Latarran black and gold, and looking up, I saw one of Ramanthanu’s kinsmen skidding along the wall above, falling in a way that suggested the Cielcin had leaped deliberately. And there was Kharn Sagara himself, sliding feetfirst along the rough stone slope.
The ground was coming up fast. There was an iron-walled pit where the platform was meant to rest, hardly deeper than a man was tall. I had righted myself by then, and struck the earth with a force that turned my suit’s gel layer momentarily solid as it took the impact. Dazed, I found my feet, swayed away from the base of the slope to the wall of that shallow pit. My SOM attacker lay at my feet, its neck broken. There were rungs cut into the side of the pit to allow workmen to clamber in or out. I unkindled my blade and mounted them.
A hand shot down and caught my wrist, and looking up I saw a trooper in Imperial white looking down at me.
“Are you all right?”
It was Cassandra. Her mandyas hung in tatters from her left shoulder. I permitted her to help me up. She had not donned her helmet, and a dark bruise was spreading on her forehead above the left eye.
“Fine,” I said, “are you—”
“I’m fine,” said she. “Two of them dragged me off the platform. I hit my head on the way down, but—”
One of the SOMs crashed into the pit at the bottom of the shaft, his legs breaking with the impact, with no armor to soften his fall. A pair of our own troopers followed, landing hard on their sides. One fired a random shot, discharging by accident. One of the Cielcin—Egazimn, I think—leaped the pit entire, alighting not three paces from where we stood. There were bodies everywhere at the bottom of that shaft. Sollans, Latarrans, Vorgossene slaves.
A handful of troopers in Imperial white stood near at hand, clutching their lances and picking shots at our foes as they rolled like a tide toward us.
Calen Harendotes tumbled to the floor, Pavo and the other surviving Latarrans hard behind. Our troopers went to help them out before the tide of once-humanity came in.
Too late.
A sea of dun-clad SOMs fell atop Calen Harendotes, wave capped with Latarran black until the pit was filled with bodies living and dead. Those that came after clambered over the ones that had fallen first, hurled themselves at us. Once more I kindled my blade, and Cassandra hard beside me, and one by one we cut them down. Together, we were driven back, forced down the hall at the lift’s end toward the sealed lower gates to Sagara’s labs.
“We can’t stay here,” my daughter shouted, leaning against me as we retreated.
There was Ramanthanu, leaping clear of the carnage.
And there was 2Maeve, wielding her lance, its bayonet red with the blood of my people. The falcon bright upon her helm flashed as she turned to face me, the eyes of her mask twin suns blazing like the headlamps of some barreling vehicle. She saw me. Kharn Sagara saw me through her eyes.
“Destroyer! Why have you returned?” Kharn Sagara’s artificial voice issued from the suits of all the stolen Interfaced—living and dead. “Are you not content to have broken me?”
“Broken you?” I asked. “I saved your life! Both your lives!”
“Half-lives!” the daimon king replied, puppeting 2Maeve into taking aim. “You see what it has cost me!”
“It is not my fault if you have gone to war with your own self!” I said.
“Why have you come?”
“I want your ship!” I said. “The Mericanii weapons! The Cielcin have freed a Watcher from its prison! I seek the means to destroy it!”
For the barest instant, none of Sagara’s puppets moved.
“What?”
“Brethren said I would return one day!” I said. “Sagara! Give me the Demiurge, and I will end this madness!”
The daimon behind the hollow men did not answer. I imagined the deathless woman seated on her throne in the inverse pyramid, a creature of metal and bone, considering, chin propped on one skeletal hand.
No answer came, for in that next instant, a hand thrust from the pit behind and seized 2Maeve by the ankle. The former commander of the dragoons fell flat on her face, and another hand grasped the rim of the pit.
A golden hand.
Up came Calen then. Seeing him, it was as though I saw a great beast rising from the depths of the sea, a worm or leviathan cresting that lake of dead men. Blood soaked his face and black hair, and gleamed darkly against the gold plate of his armor.
I saw him then as he truly was: neither Saturn nor Dis, neither Horus nor Zeus, but Mammon—clad in gold—and blood-soaked Moloch, too. He towered over the fallen 2Maeve as behind him, the boy Pavo clawed his way free of the pile of dead and dying men.
“Sister!” roared the Monarch. He had lost his sword, and stooping grabbed 2Maeve by the pauldrons, hauling her to her feet. The undead woman clawed at Calen’s face, but he bared teeth alarmingly white in his bloody face, and seemed not to feel it. “You cannot run from me,” he said, shifting his grip, so that he held 2Maeve’s face between his hands, and so great was the strength in those golden hands that her helmet sparked and flared.
And then something happened that I have never forgotten.
Those black eyes of his blazed with fire electric, blue as the hottest suns. Calen’s face was perhaps a cubit from the face of 2Maeve—from the face of his sister-self’s new garment. He looked almost about to kiss her. Instead, twin rays of light burst from his glaring eyes, beams of coherent energy powered by some fusion furnace in his secret heart.
2Maeve’s head burst asunder, and I cried out for Lorian, and for the woman who was already dead. But Calen Harendotes was not done, and turning his head, he swept his gaze back up the shaft, the light of his inhuman eyes a ghastly beam of death. He killed without discrimination then, without care. The limbs and severed torsos that tumbled down the shaft were of Vorgossene soldiers, and Latarran—and my own men.
That instant seemed to last eternity, with Calen Harendotes’s raw-throated yell filling that dark, deep place. Then the beams stopped, and all was silent, unless it was the rasping of the Monarch’s voice. “I will kill her,” he said to Pavo and to me. And to the bodies of the dead and dying—and to her—he said, “I will kill you.”