CHAPTER 68
THE DEVIL, THE DRAGON, AND THE DEMIURGE
Darkness.
Silence.
Night.
We had slipped the bonds of Vorgossos at last, and returned to the stillness and desolation of the void. The profane city lay behind us, burning, flooded, dark and growing cold. We had not lingered, abandoning Elffire to his devil’s work. It had been one of the hardest decisions I ever made, and no decision at all. Vorgossos had to be destroyed. The scions of Kharn Sagara had to be contained, and the wreck of the daimon, Brethren, annihilated lest even its least component fall into the hands of men. What the Extras might have done with the machine core of a Mericanii intelligence more or less intact beggared imagination.
And I could not have afforded to stay.
Every minute we lingered was a minute the Demiurge hung there, defenseless.
Kharn Sagara had said his scions had already stolen it for themselves, but that proved a lie. A lie, or a desperate hope.
The black ship hung quiescent in the sky above Vorgossos, its orbit slowly falling away from that dead and dying world. We streaked toward it, a cluster of tiny fliers, shuttles running dark. We broadcast no message, gave no sign. Not to Lord Douro, nor to Sentinel Commander Kedron, nor to any Commandant General or free captain of the Grand Army of Latarra.
Not even to Lorian.
The body of Valka’s replica lay shrouded in its torn banner on the floor of the rear compartment, the bodies of Calen Harendotes and of Kharn Sagara beside it. I had not thought of how I might tell Cassandra the truth, or how I might break the news to Lorian. His woman was dead, had died terribly, murdered by his own king—who was Kharn Sagara in exile, in disguise. 2Maeve had died a pawn engaged in a battle between two of the same man, the same monster.
Would Lorian believe me?
In my heart, I knew we had been too long escaping Kharn’s palace and the profane city to save Cassandra’s arm. Medics under Edouard’s temporary command had bandaged the stump of her arm and packed her severed limb on ice, but I knew we were too late.
Still I sat beside her, both my hands clutching the one that yet remained to her.
I felt the sensation of eyes on me, and shook myself. I had fallen into the dreaming, so tired was I. But there was no one. Turning to my right, I found Ramanthanu dozing in its chair, eyes closed, four nostrils flaring with every deep and even breath. I had never seen one of the Pale asleep before. Not in all my six hundred years and more. Something of the monster in it seemed to have fled, banished by that brother of Death, that son of Night called Sleep. I watched it for a long moment.
Was I really meant to destroy its kind?
Ragama had said as much, had made that clear. The Absolute had made his judgement, and I was to be his sword.
Here I am, I had said. I had accepted the role, but still I prayed it might be otherwise, if only for the sake of my own soul.
“Abba?”
Cassandra was awake. Blood had soaked through her bandage. Her hurt was fresh and grievous, and her voice slurred from the laudanum Edouard’s men had given her.
“Quiet, dear girl,” I said, and squeezed her one strong hand. “You’re going to be all right.”
“Know that,” she said, eyelids fluttering, head lolling as she looked at me. “Want to say . . . want to say . . . don’t want . . . ” She blinked several times. “If they can’t save my . . . my arm, don’t want one of those machines.”
“Anaryan . . . ” It was not the time to be making hard decisions.
“I don’t want one!” She glared at me, as forcefully as anything. “You understand?”
“They can grow you a new arm,” I said. “Like they regrew my fingers. Lorian’s people can see to it.” If I could escape the web of Vorgossos with Lorian still my friend.
But Cassandra was shaking her head. “Won’t be me . . . ” she said with force.
I didn’t argue with her, but pressed my lips to the top of her head, urging her to rest. “Just sleep,” I said. “We’ll be there soon.”
“Don’t . . . want . . . ” she murmured, words slurring to incomprehensibility.
I knew the pain she felt.
Pain.
Our fear of pain is the foundation of all morality. It is that fear that shapes our world, orders civilization. We pass laws, build walls and fortresses, fight wars and forge empires all to minimize our people’s pain. That is why it is the lowest form of obedience, not because it is basest—as I once answered when asked by Tor Gibson—but because it is foundational. Our experiences of pain teach us the nature of suffering, and so we are moved to minimize that suffering in others. Pain grounds our reality, is the cornerstone of our interactions with the objective world.
Pain makes us human, teaches us to be human.
That I knew Cassandra’s pain made it all the easier to love her, and to love as she needed me to love her there and then: to be a silent presence, solid and unmoving and totally there.
When I think of the Battle of Vorgossos, it is not of the horrors of the city or the magicians, not of Elffire’s massacre or the rape of the Interfaced, not of Calen Harendotes or Kharn Sagara or Valka’s twisted image. It is not of Brethren, of Orphan, of Cheyenne and little Daniel—nor of any of the visions I received. It is of that moment, that short flight from the planet to rendezvous with the Gadelica. It is of my daughter, and of my sitting by her side.
We docked with the limping Gadelica and offloaded our cargo. Ghoshal himself greeted us in the shuttle bay, and received the bodies of Harendotes and Sagara and Valka’s clone with care. Other ships sped on to seize the Demiurge, but I stayed to ensure Cassandra reached the medica myself, remaining aboard only long enough to wash away the grime and blood. My filthy armor I left for poor Neema, and I dressed myself in my customary blacks, in tunic and breeches and high leather boots. My long hair I bound with a silver ring at the left shoulder, and so arrayed returned to await the call.
* * *
It was not long before the call came, and I returned to my shuttle, Edouard and the Cielcin in tow. Orphan had remained aboard the shuttle with the cargo, bound and fettered, for only thus would my men permit the beast to travel. I’d had to put myself between the giant and Edouard’s men when they brought us to the shuttle, and only my insistence had prevented the beast’s destruction at their hands.
We had only a short distance to go between the Gadelica and the Demiurge.
“Has the fleet noticed our presence?” I asked the pilot officer, once we were well on our way.
The pilot, a young man with a dark face and the shaved head of an enlisted man, said, “I don’t think so. The main fleet’s about a light-minute out from the planet now. The Latarrans drove the bulk of the defenders back out-system. That big, black ship was the only thing left holding orbit.”
“What about the Mistwalker?”
“Driven off,” the pilot said. “We only came back when you signaled.”
“Lorian’s sure to have seen us,” said young Albé.
“All the better to go now,” I said. “Hard burn, ensign. I’ll feel better once we have control of the ship.”
“Aye, my lord.” The pilot officer prepared us for launch.
I felt raw, like an open wound. Though I had escaped Vorgossos with nary a scratch, my soul had been afflicted mightily. I kept seeing Valka’s face—its lines transformed to something like a parody of the woman I’d loved. The horror and the pain in those eyes—those emerald eyes, my daughter’s eyes—as Kharn forced her to kneel in front of me. I knew what the Undying bastard had intended, and almost I wept anew. Wept for Valka, for the woman who was not Valka. Wept for 2Maeve, and for Lorian, and his dream. Wept for Cassandra, and her grievous hurt. For Orphan, forced full formed and deformed into our world. For the boy called Daniel.
But I shut my eyes instead, and seated myself in the back of the cockpit.
The great hatch of the Gadelica’s shuttle bay opened, and we unclamped from our moorings, passing through the suppression-field curtain that held the atmosphere in the hold.
When I opened my eyes again, I was looking out at blackness. Above us, Vorgossos gleamed a pale green in the night, its trenches and furnaces lit from within, lending its icy surface a dull, milky shine. Seeing it, I thought of the eyes of the woman Kharn Sagara, sightless and obscene. The planet itself was an eye peering down at us, watching us draw near the Demiurge.
The ship itself I could not see, black as it was against that blackness, and lit by no light of sun or beam. We seemed to be sailing for nothing, sailing to nowhere. Falling into the black. I thought of my escape from the Tempest, when Lorian and Bassander Lin had conspired with the Jaddians to save me from the Emperor—and from myself. That too, had been a descent into darkness.
“It’s a miracle they haven’t seen us,” Edouard said.
I said nothing.
To fly in space is to be exposed. There is nothing between you and any observer but distance, but space itself. There is nowhere to hide, and nothing to guard you from the enemy. To fly in space is to be naked before the whole, uncaring universe.
It was a miracle the fleet had not yet seen us.
But something had.
Once more I felt it: that sensation of eyes on me, that certainty that I was being watched. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, and I sat a little straighter.
The forward viewport was alumglass, a true window, and no false screen. Through it, I saw the void itself, the vastness of that quantum foam we call space.
And it saw me.
Across the infinite black of space, boundless and barren, I felt a presence, a will and weight of malice and delight. My own vision seized upon it, and in an instant I felt myself dragged across the light-years. The blackness rushed by me like a wind, and I beheld it!
Fortress of iron. Palace of bone. Castle of ice and torment.
Dharan-Tun.
Its icy wastes were like the wastes of Vorgossos, but where the face of Vorgossos was cracked with leprous green, the face of Dharan-Tun was pocked with craters, with blast pits filled with ships crewed and maintained by the Prophet-King’s slaves. Great as nations its engines glowed, deep pits in which blue fires guttered.
A skull world. A dread world.
Flagship of the Cielcin fleet.
Capital of their empire.
And seeing it, I knew what it was that had summoned me, what it was that had watched me, sought for me across the light-years, bending its fell will to find me.
Inexorably my vision fell, was pulled downward as a flier skewered by a harpoon. I struck the worldship’s icy surface and passed beneath it, through warrens and tunnels and pits of ice and iron and naked stone. Once more I beheld the infernal city, and the iron fastness of the Dhar-Iagon, and passing through its gates I came upon the hall of the gods, where the Watchers—carved of black stone—peered down from between mighty pillars.
Miudanar and Iaqaram.
Pthamaru and Shamazha.
Shetebo and Nazhtenah and a dozen more at least.
And I passed through the corridors and cavernous feasting halls, past tableaus of decadence and decay. Two Cielcin devoured another, cutting the child from its womb. A writhing mass of the creatures sweated in a bed large as a stage, locked horns in ecstasy and agony as claws tore and teeth snapped, black blood on white flesh. Baetayan such as Tanaran had carved their histories on the palace walls, and warriors in robes of black drilled relentlessly in grottoes of gray stone, composing poems to their scimitars.
I came at last to the deep hall, where courtiers and inhuman priests, their faces painted with crude shapes in blue and green, all milled about the precipice and the narrow way before the Pale King’s throne.
That throne was hid within a hemisphere of white stone, a great dome of rock whose narrow door only one might pass.
But I passed it then, and came to that holy place, summoned by the lord of all that bleakest hell.
Within the dome there was but one chair, a simple block of stone. There was but one door: the narrow crack behind me. And though there was no light, I saw plainly.
The Prince of Princes, Prophet and King of the Cielcin, Blessed Bride of Miudanar, sat its throne alone, its hands upon its knees. Rings of silver bound its horns, dripping with bangles and fine chains. Sapphires shone among those chains, studded those rings and glinted at its throat, and on its fingers. Black was its raiment, black as the void, and black the armor beneath it.
Black, too, its eyes watched me—had never left my face.
“You have changed, kinsman.”
Its high, cold voice filled all my senses like a kind of mist.
“So have you,” I said, drawing nearer. I was conscious of my body, felt the straps on my chair aboard the shuttle cutting my shoulders, sensed the hard, cold stone of the chamber beneath my feet.
With excruciating slowness, Syriani Dorayaica raised its head. The motion was accompanied by a cracking sound, a grinding as of stones in the bowels of the world. It was as if two tectonic plates were moving one against the other.
“I am becoming. I am almost here.”
I stopped my advance. “You are not Dorayaica.”
The lord of the Cielcin smiled, lips peeling back from glass-splinter teeth. “Dorayaica is here.”
I froze, hand hovering over the pommel of my sword.
Uls aman i aaiam.
“Ushara?”
Dorayaica’s lips did not move, but its voice sounded in my ears. No.
Od uls tiam.
Miudanar.
The Dreamer had awakened, was awakening before my eyes. It had been its will—not the will of Dorayaica—that had summoned me across the light-years. I felt the straps strain against my shoulders as I leaned forward, circled the great king to its left.
“Is this a vision?” I asked.
The head turned to follow me, face catching what seemed a kind of light. Once more I halted. A scar ran along the left side of its face, a scratch that ran from jaw and cheek past the round, black eye and across the forehead to the great primary horn . . .
. . . and did not stop, but flowed from flesh to bone without ceasing.
It was not a scar, I realized.
It was a crack.
“What is a vision but the truth of the higher world brought down?” That voice. That manner. That was Dorayaica.
“So you are still alive,” I said. “This will kill you, kinsman. It is killing you now.”
“I will be a god!”
“You will be a corpse!” I countered. “But I can save you.”
The truth was I was not certain that I could. Ragama had cast Ushara’s shadow from my mind, but that had been a shadow only, an image; and Ragama was one of them, and Judicator of the Absolute’s High Justice.
I was only a man, if a man all-realized.
It did not matter.
“It is you who needs saving!” Dorayaica raised its right hand, pointed at me with its second finger. The first was gone, its stump ragged and uneven. “Your worlds are thick with plague, your people fat with cancer. Your Emperor hides from me like a child!” The hand fell, struck the creature’s knee with a solid clack. “Your days are done.”
The monster’s breath came in labored gasps, and its head drooped.
“This is why you have summoned me across the light-years?” I asked. “To gloat?”
“You have killed the Wemunyu-u-Deni,” Dorayaica said. “Kharn Sagara was a fool. He built my Empire, and for what? An engine.”
It was talking about the telegraphs. I had almost forgotten them, forgotten that Calen Harendotes had lied. He had bought an alliance and the Normans with false coin. Half-false. He had said his technology laid bare every telegraph in the galaxy, when in truth it was only the Cielcin ships he could find.
Sagara had been many things, but he had been no fool. He had given the Cielcin the cornerstone of their galactic civilization, united the clans in faster-than-light communication for the first time in their history.
And he had a charge beneath that stone.
“You can see everything?”
Dorayaica never lied. “Only so far as my sight allows. I searched for you, when I sensed you in the Dark, my kinsman. I almost caught you before, but you went behind the curtain.”
Behind the curtain. I thought. “The magnetic field.”
On Sabratha, Ushara had been trapped by the planet’s vast magnetic field. Vorgossos had a field all its own—a consequence of its molten core. I had felt that pressure of eyes on our descent, but it had vanished when we reached the planet’s surface.
“What do you want from me?” I asked.
The beast looked sidelong at me, that fell smile returning. “You are his,” it said.
I became at once aware of another presence.
That other had not entered by the door. The door had been in my sight the whole time. I felt a wind behind me, a breath upon my neck. My hand was on my sword, but I did not move. I knew that to move was to risk violence, and that if I was right—if I was both in my seat in the shuttle and beneath the dome of that white throne—violence might well prove fatal.
To myself. To Edouard. To everyone on my shuttle.
The woman slunk into view. Jeweled ankles rattling with every step.
Tall as any queen was she, tall and cold and terrible. Her heavy white limbs swayed as she circled Dorayaica and myself, and her hair—a curtain of black more a shade than a cloak of fine wires, a shadow that hid and yet did not conceal her nakedness—floated on the air behind her, moved by a wind that was not there. Gold were the bands upon her wrists, and gold upon her biceps. Fine gold chains netted her nightshade hair, and golden chains fell upon and between her swelling breasts.
She said nothing as she came to rest behind Dorayaica, and bending wrapped her arms about the Prophet, as though they two were lovers.
I understood then why I was there, why I had been summoned.
All was as I had feared.
Ushara had found her way.
This was a declaration of war. Not against the Empire, nor against mankind—but against the Quiet, the Absolute himself.
I had drawn too near, lulled into a false sense of security by the Prophet’s stony state.
One inhuman hand—the hand missing its first finger—lanced out and seized me. Only the thumb and the final three fingers closed. The others were hard as stone.
Acting on reflex, I slammed my hand down upon the xenobite’s, aiming to break its grip.
I broke its hand instead, and the stiff fingers both cracked clean off, revealing nothing but pale stone inside—if stone indeed it could be called. Pain lanced up my arm as the Prophet’s taloned thumb sliced through my sleeve and cut me. With a hiss and a shout I drew my hand back—
—and found myself seated in the rear of the shuttle’s cockpit, Edouard looking back at me, horror and confusion on his face. “Lord Marlowe?”
“It’s nothing,” I said, unwilling to explain.
But it was not nothing.
There was blood on the palm of my right hand.
My forearm and sleeve were cut, and the red blood flowing.
“It was real,” I whispered, staring at the wound in horror. “It was real?”
“What was real?” Edouard asked. The pilot officer was looking at us.
“A vision,” I said, not caring if the junior man knew. “Dorayaica’s transformation is nearly complete. It’s nearly one of them.”
Edouard half came out of his seat, the light glinting off his ivory spectacles. “A Watcher?”
“Yes,” I said. “It has Ushara with it, the one we failed to kill on Sabratha. It knows we have the Demiurge. It knows we killed Kharn Sagara.”
“How?” the younger man asked.
“It can see things, Edouard,” I said, eyes wide and glaring. I was afraid, truly afraid, for the first time since Ragama had restored me to life and my own time. “It can see across the universe. It pulled me to where it was. I was on Dharan-Tun, just now.”
The younger man pushed back, saying, “You never left your seat.”
“I was on Dharan-Tun and here, don’t you see?” I said, and showed him my arm. “It cut me with its own hand. Do you see?”
Whatever the other man said, I did not hear it. I had looked down at my feet.
Lying on the metal floor of the cockpit, right between my boots, was a crooked piece of stone. A sculpted finger, four-knuckled and taloned. A Cielcin finger.
Dorayaica’s finger.
* * *
The ramp opened on the mirror-black hold, a door in the distance set in the mouth of a vast human face.
I’d rolled back the sleeve of my tunic to stop it flapping, and held Dorayaica’s finger in my fist. It felt solid and cold as marble, smooth as glass. In the few short minutes it had been in my possession, it had become a talisman of sorts, a reminder that the nightmare I’d seen was real.
“Lord Marlowe!” One of the men of our vanguard hurried toward me, masked and armored. “There are larger holds, we think one may hold the Gadelica entire.”
“Very good, lieutenant,” I said. “See if you can open the doors, and signal Captain Ghoshal if you can. Have you located the bridge?”
“Not yet, my lord,” the fellow said. “The ship is vast—”
A harsh voice cut over the poor lieutenant, saying, “Vast!”
And another, “Vast, yes—and there are many winding ways.”
“Many winding ways,” agreed the first voice. “But I know them all! I do!”
“I do!” the second voice agreed.
“We do, we mean!” said the first.
The other shuttles had set down beside my own, and the clink of chains resounded from the ramp, shook and rattled as their owner shambled into view.
At my command, Orphan had been washed clean of the mud and afterbirth that caked its pale, almost bluish hide and matted its black-and-white hair. The short, white hair on its one head formed a kind of aureole, a halo of silver curls, while the long black hair of the other face had been combed back. Thus clean, I saw its faces plain for the first time. The face upon its left hand—the white-haired face, was sickly and pale and deformed, its cranium irregular and swollen beneath that cap of thistledown. Its eyes were palest blue, its nose bent and ugly, as though it were the face of some ancient angel battered in the ring. The other face wore a circlet on its brow. This it had taken—along with the cloak that draped its mighty and misshapen shoulders—from the treasure horde of Kharn Sagara when we had returned to her pyramid to fetch her body and to take it and that of Valka’s replica back to the shuttles. That second face had a profile that might have decorated many an ancient solidus, so regal was its construction, with an aquiline nose, strong brow, and square chin.
“Orphan will show you the way!” it said, revealing its shackled wrists—all three of them.
“If you will but free us!”
The men set to guard the creature eyed it and me with suspicion.
Orphan wore one enormous mantle over its too-broad shoulders. The garment had been designed for Kharn Sagara, and bore his colors. All black brocade it was, as fine a cloth as I had ever seen, embroidered with the serpent dragons so beloved of the Undying in cloth of gold.
The ouroboros.
Symbol of immortality.
The sight of that symbol, of the serpent devouring, twined about the weeping eye of the Undying, filled me with unquiet dread. Kharn’s scions still were on Vorgossos. Hundreds of them. Elffire and his men—still bent upon their Monarch’s final order—might kill a dozen, or a hundred, but if we did not act quickly, a hundred might escape. Even one was enough, for who could say what wickedness, what horrors even one might carry from Vorgossos in a single ship, or in his evil heart?
We had too little time. The ship was ours, but there was as yet still the defenders to consider. And the Latarrans. And the Empire.
They would wait.
Vorgossos came first.
“Free the homunculus, lieutenant,” I said, gesturing with my bleeding arm.
The man stammered, shocked. “My lord?”
“Was I unclear, lieutenant? Free the homunculus. Now.” I slid Dorayaica’s finger into a pocket of my tunic, its weight upon my soul. At least the fire of its eyes was gone. Perhaps the ship’s shield was some insulation, or perhaps the Watchers both had made their point. “Orphan has sworn an oath to me. It will not harm you.”
Orphan rattled its chains. “I do harm now by omission,” said its black-haired head.
“The slothful harm only themselves,” the white-haired head agreed.
The giant was nearly naked beneath its robe. It had wound another of Kharn’s capes about its nakedness, but its torso and legs were bare, for no suit of clothes was there to fit its twisted body, nor could any clothing long conceal its twistedness.
“You heard our friend here,” I said. “We waste time.”
“But . . . ” The man still hesitated. “Who . . . what is he?”
I hesitated myself, if only for a moment. “He’s our pilot.”
* * *
There are endings, Reader, and this is one. Some endings are beginnings—as I have said. Such was that day—that day which surely was three days long at least. It had seen already the end of the Mericanii, the death of their last machine. It had seen the death of Latarra, of the New Order, the new galaxy of which good Lorian dreamed. It would see the end of Vorgossos in but a short hour’s time.
But it was a beginning, as well. Would be a beginning.
That day had given me the Demiurge, and with it the means to become what the Absolute demanded I become.
That day was—would be—the beginning of the Sun Eater.
If what I have done disturbs you, Reader, I do not blame you. If you would read no further, I understand. You have the luxury of foresight. You know where this ends.
I shall go on alone.