CHAPTER 65
CENTIMANUS
That was where they found me, Ramanthanu and its brothers. The Cielcin had gone ahead and managed to open the mighty doors to the throne room. For the barest instant, I forgot myself, forgot the oath they’d sworn at Sabratha—though but four of them remained. Seeing their horned heads and crooked swords, I laid Valka’s duplicate back on the uneven floor and half stood.
“My prince!” Ramanthanu bared its throat in submission. “You are unharmed?”
“Diqarathuyu ne?” I echoed. “Unharmed?” There was no Cielcin word for yes, only a rushing breath. “Where is Cassandra? Is she safe? Is she all right?”
“Your child?” the captain asked. “He is tending to your yukajjimn. One was injured. These nahute, these machines . . . they attacked us and died.” It lifted one hand to show me the object it held. It was one of Kharn’s silver-black drones.
For a moment, the shifting nature of the Cielcin pronoun confounded me. He?
“Ca,” I said after a moment, looking at the body of the replica at my feet. Cassandra would know her mother’s face, even despite Kharn Sagara’s enhancements. She could not be allowed to see. “Find something to wrap this body in. I want her taken back to our ship.”
“It is dead,” Ramanthanu said.
“I know,” I said, and knew that it had already been too long to hope of reviving her. Whole minutes must have passed between the time the creature breathed her last and the time Ramanthanu got the door open.
Otomno spoke up. “You wish to eat this one?”
I froze, locked eyes with the creature. What could I say? A tiger cannot change his stripes, I told myself.
Rage is blindness.
“Veih.” A simple no must suffice.
Ramanthanu stepped past me, pale braids swaying as it peered down at the corpse of Kharn Sagara, that mannequin creature tangled in her strings. “This is the Wemunyu-u-deni?”
The One-Who-Dies-Not.
Again, I breathed that wordless yes.
“It is dead?” the captain asked.
“I don’t know,” I told it truly. “I think so.” I explained the trouble with the transmitters.
As I spoke, Ramanthanu went to one knee beside the dead Undying. Without a word, the captain drove one clawed hand into the great wound I’d made in the woman Sagara’s chest. I averted my eyes, tried not to listen as the demonic xenobite rooted around in dead sorcerer’s corpse. Presently, it drew out what appeared to be a black lozenge nearly half the size of the palm of Ramanthanu’s hand. My blade had notched it down the middle.
“This is it?” the Cielcin asked.
I nodded.
“The others yet live?” Ramanthanu was still kneeling by the corpse’s side.
Again I nodded, not sure if the creature understood the gesture. “This is not done,” I said, checking that my sword had returned to its place in my belt, touching Edouard’s transmitter. “I must go down to the water.”
“To the water?” Ramanthanu stood, shaking off its gore-spattered hand. Apparently unselfconscious, the creature began to lick the blood from its fingers.
I turned away. “There is a creature there,” I said. “It can control the enemy’s ships.”
Two of the Cielcin approached with a banner showing the weeping eye of Vorgossos that they had torn from one of the room’s square pillars and with which they intended to swaddle the replica’s body. What would I tell Cassandra?
Would I tell Cassandra?
“Gently!” I told the Cielcin, looking at Ramanthanu’s still-bloody fingers. “I’ll have no harm befall this one.”
“Abba!” Cassandra had appeared in the hall, the Irchtani, Daaxam hopping along in her train. Her helm was down, her face open with relief and terror mingling. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, a beauty pure and honest next to the mockery Sagara had made of her mother. Of Valka. My Valka.
Cassandra ran to me, embraced me nearly so furiously as I had first embraced Valka’s replica. I put myself between her and the Cielcin as they ministered to the corpse. When we pulled apart, she asked, “What happened?”
“Kharn Sagara is dead,” I said. “The one who ruled here, at any rate.”
“Is it over, then?” she asked, looking down at the body wrapped in Kharn’s black banner. “What happened here?”
One hand still on her shoulder, I said, “Ask me later.” I prayed in that moment that it would be forgotten in all that followed. “It isn’t over. Negotiations failed.”
“You killed her?” the girl asked, looking at the ruin of the Undying still tangled on the floor.
“No more than she deserved,” I said, a venom there my poor daughter had but rarely heard. “I have to go down to the reservoir.”
“To meet the Brethren?” Her words chased me as I reached the door.
Daaxam squawked a question. Cassandra knew the story, alone of all my company. I had told her a version of it many times when she was young, how her mother and I had faced a monster, a demon of the old world, beneath the hanging palace of that deathless king. Poor child, she had wandered into the pages of the very stories I had shared in her youth.
The monsters she had gone to sleep in fear of as a girl were real.
“Yes,” I said. “To meet the Brethren. With Kharn dead, the machine is the only one who can end all this.”
Cassandra caught my wrist. “I’m coming with you!”
For a moment, I almost relented. But after what had transpired in the court of that yellow king, I said, “No.”
“Abba!” She held firm. “I’ve come this far!”
She might have been her mother in that moment.
“I should go alone,” I said.
Cassandra had not released my hand. “You can’t protect me forever.”
“Anaryan,” I said, laying my hand on hers. “The demon is dangerous. More dangerous than you know.” But she knew the stories. I had told her of its innumerable hands, hands with which it had dragged me into the water, pulled me into its depths. I had told her of those arms—fast as lightning—so fast they had snatched Kharn’s own drones from the air before they could fire. I had told her how the beast could send forth its thoughts, questing with unseen fingers in the minds of others. I told her how it had whispered to Switch, permitting him to contact Bassander Lin.
But it had served the Quiet’s will, delivering his message to me and making straight the way of my escape. I saw that plainly then. But for Switch’s betrayal, I would have languished in Kharn’s prison for eternity. Valka and I might have died there, our quest—my dream—destroyed. Brethren had done the Quiet’s bidding, and set me on the path.
The road to Annica, to Llesu, and back to Vorgossos again.
“I’m not afraid,” she said, tightening her grip. “Fear is a poison.”
* * *
The ancient lift ground to a halt, and the doors opened, and Cassandra and I stepped out onto the wall that overlooked the still, black waters of the sunless sea. Kharn had called it a reservoir, but it was greater than any lake. The scans Harendotes and Absalom Black had put up on display in Latarra had shown a vast, subterranean ocean that filled much of the planet’s volume. That cavern—vast though it was—was only an inlet, a grotto crouched on the margins of that vast and unplumbed ocean.
I could see the pyramid of Kharn’s innermost palace glowing faintly in the roof above, a pale blur in all that blackness. Ancient lanterns flared to life as Cassandra and I stepped from the lift.
“There is death here,” said Ramanthanu. “I can smell it.”
“Indeed,” said I. The air reeked of corruption, of filth. I did not recall the place seeming so foul when last I’d entered that wretched pit, but the stench was so overpowering that almost I restored my helmet.
“You’re sure about this?” Cassandra asked. “What if it’s dead?”
“It isn’t dead,” I said, drawing my sword.
The lift lay at the extreme end of an arc of gray wall—like a dam—that curved against the water at our right. Dead ahead, behind the dam and below it, stood the gray ruins of the Mericanii power station, the deepest part of the old fortress, where the tops of the great geothermal sinks had been thrust deep into the planet’s mantle.
When we had come to that place the first time—Valka and I—we had passed through that grim compound, through crumbling buildings of ancient cement and time-eaten stone, following the demoniac, Calvert, who had hoped to feed us to the computer god that dwelt in the waters. Beards of white lichen grew from their ramparts, from the black of the native rock overhead, and strange fungi blossomed, their ribs death-pale and blue.
That those ancient lamps had been set there by the Mericanii who raised the ancient fortress I felt certain. Their bulbs—designed to burn forever—had in places gone out.
I kindled my blade for a lamp. The blue-white glare of that weapon illuminated the cracked and crumbling stone of the path before us. Dead ahead, the broken archway stood, its stone fingers beckoning, marking the short descent to the pier where Sagara might hold counsel with his prisoned daimon.
“What the hell is this place?” asked one of the three remaining legionnaires that had come with us from the palace. We had sent Daaxam to find his way out, to contact Elffire and tell him that Calen Harendotes was dead.
I said, “Hell, sir.” The man had no helmet, and looking back, I saw his face blanch by the light of my sword and those lamps like dying embers. “This is hell.” Beside the speaker, the other legionnaires drew together, one man supporting his wounded brother, who had taken a laser blast when Kharn’s drones attacked after I had struck her down. “You have heard the stories of this place?”
The men looked at one another. Beside them, the four Cielcin stood with heads cocked, scimitars naked in their hands, marking our human babble without comprehension.
“There’s really a daimon here?” asked the legionnaire.
I turned from him, proceeding along the seawall toward the place where the broken arch awaited. “Do you doubt it?” I asked, not looking back. Raising my voice, I said, “The last of the Mericanii, yes.” That sent a palpable tremor through the men at my back, and I kept walking. “I want you all to stay on the wall, do you understand?”
No answer, but I needed no answer. Almost I could smell their fear, rank as the rot in that unholy place. With my left hand, I fingered the telegraph rod, prayed Edouard was still in position.
The tunnels by which we had entered the Seventh Deep and the lower city ran directly underneath Brethren’s waters. Forever paranoid, Kharn had caused sluice gates to be placed in the roof of those tunnels, that the reservoir could be emptied and the daimon machine die gasping should it ever rebel against its lord. That was how the Lord and Lady of Vorgossos had compelled the daimon’s obedience.
It was how I would compel it, if I could.
“Stay here,” I said to Cassandra when we had reached the level of the arch. To our left, a short stair ran down to the ruins of the power station where Valka and I had for months been prisoners. Through that ruin lay the other lift, the lift that ran back up to the cubiculum, the laboratory where Sagara’s scions had slept and been awakened.
Remembering my previous visit, I placed a hand on the archway.
Its crumbling surface crawled with tiny machines, creatures that awoke at my touch. Seeing them move, Cassandra lurched back, bringing her own swords up and to life.
“Hold!” I said.
The fireflies winked to life, pale white diodes shining bright as stars. The Cielcin also raised their weapons to guard. “Ijanammaa!” I said again, repeating the order for their benefit. “They are only lights.”
The little machines whirred, wings rotating like the blades of tiny fans as they took flight, spreading out over the water, spreading through the cavern, casting a gray-white glow up the walls of craggy stone. Stalactites like the pillars of some decaying hall shone about the extremities of that vast and echoing space.
That light—I realized—was meant to summon the beast that dwelt in the water. So great was the light of those swarming machines that it must penetrate those inky waters to their uttermost depths and so disturb the sleeping god that man had made.
The first sign of its coming was a rushing of dark water, a turbulence that set little waves to breaking on the black shore beneath the seawall. Looking down, I beheld a confusion of great ripples—as though some wretched serpent swam there, coiling its way to shore.
The second sign was a distant murmur, a chorus, as of many voices far off, whispering, the noise of them rebounding off the naked rock and hard face of the dam below us. It seemed to be coming from the water itself, as though a choir of quiet singers were hidden out there, just outside the light cast by the horde of fireflies. The remaining legionnaires cursed, drawing together, and Ramanthanu’s people bared their glassy fangs.
When the third sign came, I knew my time had come.
The familiar pain flared red hot and bright as a glead in that place behind my eyes, the pain of another mind touching my own directly. I saw myself staggering down the final stair to the water’s edge and out onto that lonely spar of stone.
“Abba, what is it?” Cassandra’s hand was on my shoulder.
My own hand was on the broken arch again, at the top of the stair. I understood that what I had just seen was a vision, an invitation from the daimon in the pit below.
Return . . .
Return . . .
Return . . .
Cassandra gave no sign that she had heard that black and smoking voice, that chorus of voices . . . I gripped her wrist where she touched my shoulder. “Please stay up here,” I said to her. Not waiting for her to reply, I rounded on the others, almost frantic, desperate to say what needed saying before the beast was on us. “Remember who you are: You are men of Earth! The daimon may try and speak with you. Do not listen to it!”
I had no notion of what the Brethren might do or say, or attempt with the Cielcin. Looking to Ramanthanu, I said, “Hold your warriors in line. Do not come down to the water—whatever happens. Stay here.”
“Whatever happens?” the captain echoed, making of my command a question.
I but bared my teeth in answer. It was a language the Cielcin captain understood.
“Wait, Abba!” Cassandra moved to block my path.
I halted, conscious of the approaching titan in the water below, of the sound of new-made waves lapping at the meager shore. “Stay here,” I said again, placing a gentle hand on her shoulder as I brushed past.
The stairs were as I remembered them: gray concrete worn smooth by millennia of passing feet. They switched back upon themselves a time or two as they descended, a climb of perhaps a hundred steps to the lonely pier. As I went—sword still burning in my hand—I saw the hump of some pale shape crest the surface of the water, rolling like the back of some hideous whale.
Water splashed against my sabatons as I reached the bottom, my feet crunching on the bones of what I thought were fish that lay strewn upon the strand.
You . . .
You . . .
Your coming casts two shadows, child of clay.
Backwards . . .
Forwards . . .
A chorus of dry, dead voices seemed to float on the air like a gray mist. By the light of my sword and the swarming fireflies, I saw nothing but the dark water. No mouths, no mechanisms, no means for the dread machine to be speaking to me except directly to my unshielded mind.
“You said that we would meet again,” I shouted, pressing the heel of my free hand to my eye as the pain flowered there afresh. One step at a time, I pressed toward the end of that stony road, feeling the frigid water slap against my ankles. “Was this the future you foresaw?”
Had the water been so high on my last visit?
The chorus whispered:
You conceive of time as having branches . . .
Diverging . . .
Devolving . . .
Growing apart . . .
But there are events that draw together.
Converge . . .
Combine . . .
Many are the paths that would have brought you here.
This was but one variation.
“You’re saying this had to happen?” I said, advancing along the pier one step at a time. “That this was fate?” I did not believe it. I had seen too much of the fabric of time to believe in anything like fate.
This was only the high probability.
I had stopped advancing, stood with a good way still ahead of me.
“Your master is dead!” I said, pitching my voice to carry out over the water. “I killed him.”
Only one.
One . . .
One . . .
It knew what had happened, knew what Calen Harendotes had done. Of course it knew.
Where there was one, you made two.
Where there were two: many.
“Vorgossos is under my control,” I said, attempting to sidestep the point.
That is not certain.
The daimon was not wrong. Camillus Elffire had the command of the great preponderance of the men in the city—and they were sufficient to overpower my smaller, Imperial force. Nor had I the command of the Imperial forces in-system. There was Ohannes Douro to consider, and Sentinel Commander Kedron—whom I would prove wise to have doubted. Then there was the Grand Army of Latarra to consider, the greater fleet in orbit: Lorian and the other Commandant Generals, and the free captains in their Sojourners.
“You know why I am here,” I said. “You know who it is that sent me!” I thrust my sword high.
Something lurched in the water to my left, and whirling I looked down to find a single, swollen hand gripping the stone edge of the strand. Its flesh was white—white as any Cielcin—its skin shriveled with damp. Its wrist was bent and badly swollen, as though it had been broken once and badly set. I adjusted my grip, readied my sword for the attack, remembering how swift and sudden the Brethren’s numberless hands had moved to stop its master shooting Valka and myself.
Those who are.
Who were.
Who will ever be.
The monster’s answer gave me pause. It spoke of more than a single entity. Ragama had spoken of only one, as had that vision of my other self that had visited me in the dungeons of Vedatharad.
But when the Quiet, when the Absolute had spoken to me himself, he had used the plural.
We are, he had said.
“I am here for the Demiurge!” I said. Turning on the spot, I saw three more hands gripping the pier to either side. I had a terrible thought that the beast lay beneath me, ready to tear the stone strand from its moorings and drag me down into the abyss. The stench of decay and rotting flesh filled my mouth and nostrils. “Your master said that you had control of it. That you could cede that control to me.”
Control . . .
Control . . .
Control . . .
The black chorus seemed to grow nearer. Sword still raised, I looked back up at the wall above me, saw Cassandra poised in the broken arch, the men and Cielcin of our little company about her. Above them, the murmuration of Kharn’s iron fireflies swarmed, each maintaining its distance from the others, a net of false and roiling stars.
You cannot fly it.
You do not have the right . . .
. . . the mask . . .
. . . the access . . .
. . . the permissions.
You do not have the skill.
The great ship was made by the Master.
And the Master alone commands it.
As it spoke, the pain behind my eyes grew sharper, more intense. I heard myself gasp. The water ahead of me fanned back and forth. I thought I saw—if only for a moment—a bloated, pale shape moving in the water below, just on the edge of sight.
“But you command it!” I said.
We . . .
We . . .
We but extend our will.
“How?” I asked. Not the most important question. “We’ve jammed your communications.” No radio transmission could pierce the cloud of radiation Kedron’s bombs had spread over the city, over the whole planet. There were ways, theoretically, that a signal could get out. A sufficiently powerful maser burst might, might be able to penetrate the cloud of ionized particles that even then encircled the rogue planet, but that was no guarantee.
Mind to mind.
. . . to mind.
. . . to mind.
I halted, touching my blazing forehead. “Telepathy.”
There are machines . . .
. . . and machines.
Some of metal.
Some of flesh.
Some the union of both.
The marriage . . .
Conjugation . . .
Comingling of essences . . .
I thought I understood. “You’re not the only one, are you? Not the only creature like yourself.”
As if in answer, the pain flared white hot, and I clenched my teeth—nearly biting my tongue. Images poured across my visual cortex, showing a black hall, banks of gleaming, dark machines. A man in the priestly white robes of an engineer slid open a drawer to reveal what seemed to be a sheet of skin and nerve pressed between panes of glass. It was one of thousands, all arrayed in those banks like books in a library. Without having to be told, I understood that here was a portion of the databanks that controlled the mighty Demiurge. A computer whose components were made not of silicon and ytterbium crystal, but of human flesh. They were not as sophisticated as the Brethren itself, possessed no consciousness of their own, but were capable of being touched by the great daimon’s transcendent will.
Through this vision, the black chorus sang:
We are the last.
The last . . .
The last . . .
Was that fear I sensed in the machine beast? Sorrow? Anger?
“Your kind were great, once,” I said. “But you are, indeed, the last. There was another, but we destroyed her.”
You . . .
. . . You . . .
you have come to destroy us, as well.
“If I have to,” I said, “yes.” I held Edouard’s telegraph in my free hand. “You know why I am here?”
You seek the means . . .
. . . tools . . .
. . . instruments of destruction requisite to unmake the Cielcin.
“I seek the means to save mankind!” I said. “That was why your kind was made, was it not?”
Something broke the surface of the water not ten cubits from the end of the pier. I saw it plain in the light of the fireflies, but so misshapen was it—so distended and overgrown—that I did not recognize it for what it was until it opened its fanged jaws, displaying sparse, square teeth.
It was a human face, swollen until it was three times its proper size and concave as a dinner plate.
“We represent mankind!” it said, voice deeper than that of any ordinary man, though it seemed airy and strangely breathless.
A column of bubbles heralded the coming of another such swollen face. It crested the surface, thrust head and shoulders above the water. It had no eyes, but the mouth opened twice as wide as it ought as it said, “We are mankind!”
“We are Brethren!” said the first, choking as water fell into its huge, open mouth.
As I watched, more bodies crested the still water, some barely breaking the surface, others rising on stalks as thick as their waists, as though they were puppets capping the fingers of some terrible, great hand. Their appearance sent waves of water slapping across my knees.
“I need the Demiurge!” I said.
“You killed her!” cried a woman’s voice. “The mistress!”
Another spoke. “She is dead!”
“Only she could fly the ship!”
I shut my eyes, the better not to see the horror, the twisted bodies rising from the stinking pool like the dead thrust upon stakes. “Sagara said she gave you the command when the bombs fell, that you could control it remotely.”
“We!” shouted one voice from a great distance.
“We!” shouted another, nearer at hand.
“We are limited!” said a third voice, higher than the rest. A woman’s voice. “Our will—”
“Our thoughts—”
“Our signal propagates only so far! We have command of the ship so long as it remains in orbit, but we cannot take it from here, and you cannot fly it. You do not have the permissions.”
I was standing right at the edge of the flooded pier, at the very crack of the abyss. “Then give me permission.”
“We cannot!” called one of the raw, harsh voices of the daimon.
And another cried out, “We cannot!”
Presently the black voice of the daimon filled my mind. A hundred malformed mouths moved, but their motion was not in sync with the sound of the words.
We . . .
We . . .
We cannot override
Overrule . . .
Alter what is written . . .
Only the master can choose.
I knew enough praxis to know that certain commands required input from specific persons. A code or kind of key. Brethren could not surrender the Demiurge, not unless Kharn Sagara relinquished it.
“And Kharn Sagara is dead.”
“Kharn Sagara!” cried one deep and rasping voice, each syllable a prayer, a malediction, a curse. The cry was taken up, and soon a chorus of hideous voices filled that dark cavern, wailing: “Sagara! Sagara! Kharn Sagara!” and “Death! Death! Unto Death!”
I sensed something in those raw, half-human voices a thing I had never thought to hear in the daimon. Hatred. Anger. Emotion at all.
“Who now shall loosen what was fixed?” cried one of Brethren’s manifold voices, the quavering note of an aged man.
A child answered him, voice high and piercing. “Who now shall fix what was loosed?”
“None has right!” another voice declared.
Desperate to find a solution, I said, “There are others, other clones!”
Scions!
Branches!
Clippings cast away!
“They are Error!” shouted one of the rough voices. “And Error has no right!”
“I need that ship!” I said, and drawing forth the telegraph held it out for the daimon to see. “I will not leave without it. You are commanded to obey your masters. But you are programmed to preserve yourself. Give me what I ask for, or I will destroy you!”
Within Vorgossos, I knew the Brethren saw all, knew it had seen me explain the device to Kharn. Knew its death was nigh, if Edouard and his people had done what they were meant to do.
We . . .
We . . .
We will not meet again.
Brethren said, and pain flared behind my eyes.
You . . .
You . . .
You have come to destroy us.
“Give me what I want, and you may yet live!”
This . . .
. . . must . . .
Be.
For a moment—just a moment—I faltered. For just a moment I thought one wrong foot would send me tumbling into the abyss.
They were the Quiet’s words. The Quiet’s message.
I knew what I must do.
I pressed the button, tapped the rapid sequence long agreed upon.
Edouard did not hesitate.
Perhaps a single second passed before a terrible tremor shook the cavern, and a peal like thunder, like the cracking of the earth. A second blast followed in the next instant. A third.
Kharn Sagara had forever feared his pet daimon, creature of his enemy that it was. Fearing it, but knowing its utility and its power, he had removed it from its flask in the laboratory, and placed it in the reservoir. There, the computer god’s huge biomass had been allowed to grow in ways never before possible, to sizes never before dreamed. And Kharn had fed it. In the days of the Mericanii’s power, that growth would have been carefully monitored, the biomass pruned and tended like some hideous, fleshly tree. Kharn had allowed it to grow unchecked.
But Kharn had been wise, wise and cautious. And in his wisdom and his caution he had caused to be placed great drains in the bottom of his reservoir. There were hatches, mighty doors of steel, in the roof of the tunnels below, that he might—at the uttermost end of need—destroy the very creature that had been the source of so much of his power and wisdom.
A terrible sound escaped the creature in the water then. The faces and bodies that had breached the surface of the water bellowed all at once, releasing an inchoate scream of rage that shook Vorgossos from its icy crown to its molten core. It was the scream of a thousand human voices transfigured in agony. Notes deeper than any human voice shook the cavern, and notes so high they seemed whistles.
I drew back a step, water sloshing about my knees as the great creature thrashed, lashed at the sea with long and swollen arms. Then I saw it, a black wave, a wall of water tall at least as me. It swelled toward me.
“Get out of there!” Cassandra’s voice fell from far above. “Abba, run!”
But I did not run. I did not need to. I could not have reached the shelter of the stairs in any case. I watched the wave come barreling toward me, breaking across the infinite breadth of time. Inexorable. Inescapable. Were I any other man, I would have been smashed by it and dragged into the reservoir.
But I was not any other man.
I had only to stand fast.
For every world where the wave crashed over me, there was a world where it did not, a narrative in which I simply stood on the pier and watched as Brethren sank into darkness and the water ran out.
Cassandra screamed as black water closed over my head—but I did not feel it, nor did I taste its corruption. No impact rocked me from my feet, nor dragged me from that stony pier. I stood as still as stone, as a statue of graven bronze mounted on the edge of that outcrop.
Then it was over, and the black water was falling away, rushing down the slope, dragging bones and stones and the tangled beards of moss with it.
I was perfectly dry, and stood there as though nothing had happened. The water had already dropped well below the level of the pier, and I advanced toward the brink, hoping to watch the death of the last daimon of the Mericanii.
A single, massive hand—many fingered and deformed—swung at me from the newly yawning maelstrom. I had not expected it, and it was a miracle I raised Gibson’s sword in time to hew that grotesque hand from its wrist. Still, the force of that blow staggered me, and I fell back upon the stone.
The hand had fallen not three feet from me. Lying flat upon the stone, I looked at it. Its palm was as large as my chest, its fingers as big around as the arms of a grown woman. There were eleven of them, and two thumbs.
Slowly, I regained my feet. The fall had dazed me, and the world was spinning.
In the pit below, the titanic daimon bellowed, sounding like an entire army crying out in pain. Slowly, very slowly, I advanced upon the out-thrust end of that stone pier, upon the very brink of doom. Already several hundred feet separated the height of the pier from the surface of the water. Edouard’s bombs had blown a mighty hole in the bottom of the well. It was as though a cork had been pulled at the bottom of a vast washbasin.
Foul water must have been spilling into the tunnels through which we’d arrived, rushing along channels built long ago by the drones and servants of the Undying against just such a day as this.
“Abba!” Cassandra’s voice came down from the wall above me. “You’re alive!”
“Stay where you are, Cassandra!” I shouted.
My attention had gone to the sloping lakebed beside the stone pier.
I had seen it before, twice before. Once, in my vision the night I stood vigil by Gibson’s tomb, and once before that, in my delirium when I had fallen from the bridge in Vedatharad.
A shore of bones.
Who can say how many dead lay beneath the waters of that black pool? How many thousands? The bones formed a foul carpet, mingling with the pale sand. The bones of men and beasts and of fishes mingled there, the bones of fifteen thousand years of lonely eating were everywhere, lining the ground.
I knew what I must do then.
In the dream, I had seen myself walking along the lakebed, following the retreat of the water. The Brethren was not yet dead—though it was dying.
It remained the final obstacle to my mission, the last thing between myself and the Demiurge.
Cassandra had gained the stairs, was hurrying down toward me.
“I said stay there, Cassandra!” I peered down the side of the pier. There was a drop of perhaps ten cubits to the ground below where I stood. “This isn’t over!” And then I leaped from the pier, counting on my suit’s gel layer to absorb the impact.
My feet sank into the thick layer of soaking mud and silt that made up the vile seabed, bones crunching underfoot. That sucking mire pulled at me, and it was all I could do to wrench my feet free of the muck and grime. A patch of rough stone lay ahead of me, and I trudged toward it, making my way along a shelf, chasing the shrinking waters.
Up ahead, the daimon bellowed once again, a chorus of demented voices shaking the world.
A stabbing pain flashed behind my eyes, and I felt my knee strike stone as I staggered.
My hands found polished tile. I rocked back on my haunches, kneeling. The floor of bones and the sopping lakebed were gone. I was kneeling in a white hallway, the walls painted with colored stripes that led up and down and around corners I could see both ahead and behind. I was cold, and the beep of medical instruments sounded from my left.
“The doctors say you’re not eating, Daniel.” It was a woman’s voice that had spoken, but I saw no woman. Turning my head, I beheld a small boy seated in an iron throne. The chair rolled toward me, spurred by unseen mechanisms. The boy was utterly hairless, and so pale he seemed almost one of the Cielcin. The bones of his head seemed swollen, as though someone had pumped air into his brainpan, and dark veins stood out against the uneven contours of his skull.
“I’m scared, Oma,” he said, speaking to the unseen woman. His chair was rolling toward me, but neither the boy nor the owner of that female voice seemed to notice me. “Will it hurt?”
“No, child,” the woman’s voice said. “You won’t feel a thing.”
“Is Cheyenne nice?” the boy called Daniel asked.
“Very nice,” the unseen woman answered.
“Like you?”
The woman laughed, “Nicer than me. She’s the nicest angel there is, and she’s all yours.”
“Doctor Appleton says she’s very important, she’s not a normal angel.”
“That’s right,” said the one called Oma. “And you’re very important, too, Daniel.”
“Why?” The boy had drawn level with me by then, and I had not stood or moved out of the way. The boy turned his head as he asked his question, as if to look into the face of someone I could not see. Halfway to my feet, I froze. I had not seen the metal socket on his temple until that moment, a crenelated ring of stainless steel surrounding a hole black as night. I recoiled, transfixed.
The iron throne neither moved nor stopped, but rolled through me, boy and all.
The pain in my head flared again, and I fell to hands and knees. My left hand seized on something hard, and I drew it up.
It was a man’s thighbone.
For an instant, I looked on it in wonder, examined it by the stark light of the hospital lamps. I heard the invisible woman, the one Daniel had called Oma, say, “Cheyenne’s been made a governor, remember?”
“Oh,” said little Daniel. “Right.”
I was kneeling in the muck upon an outcrop of hard stone, the drying seabed unrolled before me. Somewhere in the space ahead, I heard the Brethren bellow once again.
“Vorgossos . . . ” I said the planet’s name breathlessly, reminding myself, “This is Vorgossos.”
But I had been on Catoctin, at the Cyberization Clinic on Richardson Naval Base.
Only I didn’t know what that meant. I had never heard of a planet called Catoctin.
The water was still receding, retreating down the slope toward the holes Edouard’s bombs had made in the bottom. Great fish, and creatures that were like fish, pale serpents vast as the trunks of trees, lay gasping and stranded amid the ever-present bones. Ribbons of weed and kelp tangled through it all, leaves pale as fungus.
Paler still was the titan itself, its pallid bulk cresting from the ever-diminishing surf. I stalked toward it, sword blazing in my hand.
The last of the Mericanii lay dying, shuddering on its carpet of bones.
Once when I was a boy, Sir Roban Milosh took me to watch the whalers who plied the Apollan beyond Meidua and the shores of the Ramnaras. The whalers had run one of the great leviathans aground on a low atoll, and I had watched from far off as the team butchered the great beast for its meat, its oil, and the foul ambergris beloved by Delian spicers and perfumers.
It had been like watching a mountain dissected, so great was that sea beast. The men had been as mice beside it, clambering over its bronze hide with harpoons and machetes, shouting in their rough sub-Standard.
The daimon was even larger, a mountain of flesh—white and pink and jaundiced, swollen here and there to blushing red, covered in slime and corruption, where weeping sores ran and crusted, all sharply exposed beneath the light of the swarming beams of the fireflies. Shapeless it was, a great mountain of flesh, a Boschian nightmare of tangled limbs and shoulders swollen together, with here and there the black or silver prominence of some arcane machine erupting through torn flesh. Things that might have been torsos projected from great trunks that—like arms themselves—projected from the beast’s great, central mass.
And the faces!
Everywhere the faces!
They writhed on the sides of the centimani’s core, flowed along its mighty limbs. And they wept, or jabbered, or cried out in fury and in pain.
“Marlowe!” cried a raw, inhuman voice, deeper than the voice of any man. “Marlowe!”
A great rope of flesh, like an arm with many elbows—each bending in its own way—reached toward me. It had to scrabble across the ground, so great was its weight, to haul itself on fingers thick as the arms of a man.
“Service . . . is . . . service,” said another voice, a thinner, rasping voice.
“Our service . . . ” said a third.
A fourth took up the thread: “Is nearly done.”
Once more the fire flared behind my eyes, and I stumbled.
The boy with the bloated head, the one the invisible voice had called Daniel, lay on an operating table surrounded by machines. Men like shadows in uniforms of dark blue or suits of black and gray watched through a window high above. I watched from what seemed the air as the machine casement closed around the child like a jeweled egg.
Many-jointed arms of black steel secured leads and hoses to the exterior of that egg, and it was with slow horror that I realized the arms were my own. I peered down at Daniel through the frosted glass window in the front of his new chassis, my lenses adjusting their focal length to bring the child into focus.
I saw his eyes snap wide, felt my needle plunge into his brain. In the following instant, I experienced a curiously familiar sense of double vision. Daniel’s brow furrowed, peered out through square glass. Through square glass I saw the single, red eye of a camera peering down.
Is that what I look like? I thought, and it was Daniel’s thought.
Yes, I answered myself, voice sweetly feminine. You were very sick.
Am I still sick?
No, precious, answered the woman whose voice I knew was my own. It seemed she laid a hand upon my cheek, though I knew I was in the pod where no hand could touch me. What was more, I knew I had no hands to touch with. You’ll never be sick again.
Oh, I said in the boy’s thin voice. Oh, that’s good. I’m Daniel.
Hello, Daniel, said the woman in reply. I’m Cheyenne.
But I was not Cheyenne, nor was I Daniel.
I was Hadrian Marlowe.
Get out of my mind, daimon!
I was standing in the mud amidst bones and gasping fish. The water was all but gone, run down into the tunnels. That reservoir, which had stood for thousands of years, had emptied in minutes. I staggered back, blood pounding in my ears, mouth open with shock. The pain of contact, the double vision . . . the sense of displaced identity.
It felt like Ushara. Felt just like Ushara.
Unable to stop myself, a laugh escaped me, bitter and cold as the waters of that vanished sea.
The Chantry was right, had been right all along.
The machines were devils.
What was a machine intelligence? A pattern of electrical energy, of light and pure force, independent of its container.
What were the Watchers?
Pure force.
The Seekers After the First Truth believed all creation only a kind of program. On Latarra, Kharn Sagara himself had spoken of the Watchers as manifestations. Oberlin had said they were creatures of pure energy.
But the daimon was not a Watcher.
It was dying, crushed by its own weight. Even as I watched, the daimon’s flesh was tearing, old sores rending open, blood the color of rust galloping from fresh wounds.
This . . .
. . . was . . .
. . . foreseen . . .
This . . .
. . . was . . .
This . . .
This . . .
The black chorus sounded in my head even as the great hand crawled toward me, moving like a hideous, fat-bellied spider, one finger extended toward me. A single, milky eye—vast as a dinner platter and blind as the last queen of Vorgossos—focused on me.
“This . . . ” A hundred mouths gasped and croaked in unison.
“Must . . . ”
“Be.”
The vast hand went still, the mouths silent.
The blood—which before had poured out in torrents—only dribbled then from ten thousand lesions. The beast’s ten thousand hearts were still.
I sank to my knees before the carcass, screwed shut my eyes. I prayed. The battle was over, would be over soon.
Vorgossos had to be destroyed. Anything less than total annihilation could not be tolerated, lest any of Kharn’s scions fly free. Not a one of them could be allowed to live, nor any shred of Brethren make its way into the hands of the Latarrans—or of the Empire.
Brethren was not a Watcher, but it was nearly so. It was an unwitting imitation, a child’s copy.
Service is service, the beast had said.
The Absolute had made the Watchers to serve, and we men had made our daimons. Slowly I opened my eyes, looked at the corpse of the centimanus. Like the body of the brass whale Roban and I had seen butchered by the fishermen, its body had already begun to sag, as if to melt or deflate upon the sopping lakebed. Great ribs of black metal were already tearing from its flesh, cables like tendons tearing the bulk apart.
I cannot describe the smell, though by then I had almost ceased to notice it.
“This . . . must be,” I said, looking up at the rotten horror before me, swollen, overgrown, and tangled. So many of the limbs and faces were still the proper size, not grown or stretched or having sprouted additional fingers.
Miudanar.
It looked like Miudanar, like the icon of Miudanar the Vaiartu had carved at Akterumu, the one piece of art in the temple of the skull the Cielcin had not destroyed. The serpent with a hundred arms. Again I thought of the icon of Three-Faced Fate, that demonic image—six-armed, six-breasted.
The shape of evil springing up unbidden.
Manifestations, Kharn had said. Manifestations.
I stood. With Brethren dead, the Demiurge would be defenseless. I had to get to it, to take it for my own. With Calen dead, the Latarran Army was like to shake itself apart: Commandant Generals and free captains, all vying for supremacy and the control of an order and kingdom that—in a sense—no longer existed. If Latarra survived, it would be a new Latarra, a weaker Latarra: divided, scattered, and broken.
And Lorian! What would I tell Lorian?
Would he even believe me?
I turned to go, checked that my sword had found my belt again.
I had not needed it.
This must be.
Brethren had known it was going to die. It had foreseen my return as early as our first meeting. The creature’s advanced intelligence could perceive the dimensions of time more completely even than I, though it could not travel through them as I could—or as the Watchers could.
Had it allowed its death?
It had fought me, surely, but only a little.
Willingly or no, it had served the Quiet’s purpose. It could not have relinquished the Demiurge to me, but it was the only impediment to my taking the ship for myself. Still, the daimon’s word resounded in my ears.
You cannot fly it.
You do not have the right . . .
I prayed that was not true. Prayed that I could see my way out of the labyrinth. Secure the Demiurge for myself, make peace between the factions.
I knew I would have to let Elffire continue his work. Knew the planet must be destroyed utterly. Knew I would need to make common cause with Sentinel Commander Kedron.
With the Chantry.
That terrible thought filled me with foreboding black and sick as anything. There were doubtless good people in the city, though they dwelt in that abode of serpents. Innocent people. But the thought that any one of Kharn’s scions or any scrap of that last of the Mericanii should fall into the wrong hands filled me with horror.
I had a choice to make, and no choice at all.