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CHAPTER 51

THE MONARCH AND THE PRINCESS


“What happened, Abba?” Cassandra asked when the doors of the Monarch’s waiting room were shut behind me. “What did he say?”

Selene had stood as well, turned on the spot, twisting her hands before her, graceful fingers pulling at her rings.

I hesitated only for a moment, Kharn’s threats resounding in my ears.

“He will deal with us,” I said.

A smile bright as the sun broke across Selene’s lovely face, and she sagged with relief. “Mother Earth!” she said, “But this is good news! I should have gone with you.”

“He wished to meet me privately,” I said, and smiled a thin, false smile. “Meaning no disrespect, Highness, he knows I lead our party. And I think he wished to meet the Halfmortal on his own terms.”

Henric Ghoshal straightened in his seat. “Lead? You?”

“Peace, sir,” Edouard said. “What is he like, this Harendotes?”

I held the HAPSIS man’s gaze a moment. I willed him to read my mind, to see my thoughts writ like tattoos across my face. I had to tell him, to tell Selene.

To tell Lorian . . . 

Lorian.

I thought of Lorian, so long in the service of that undead king. He could not know, and yet . . . would knowledge of his Monarch’s true self change at all Lorian’s sense of devotion to him? Sagara had donned Harendotes’s golden mask. But was it a mask at all? It was his deeds that had won him Lorian’s obedience.

Obedience out of devotion.

Love.

“He is not palatine, unless I miss my guess,” I said, looking to the others for their reactions. Edouard’s dark eyes narrowed behind their lenses. Ghoshal glowered. The xenobites—Irchtani and Cielcin alike—simply listened. “I think him of Extrasolarian stock. He may even be one of their Exalted. Much of him is machine, I deem.”

“But we can trust him?” Selene asked.

Not one word.

I sank onto the nearest couch, exhausted from my experience in the imitarium. Not since my resurrection could I recall feeling so weary. Until that moment, I had not been sure that I could feel weary. For all its strangeness, it seemed my new flesh was still human.

“We can trust him to serve his interests,” I said, “which for the moment . . . serve ours. He wants everything. Your father to cede all claim to the Norman territories. The atomics. Everything.”

Cassandra stood over me, rested her hand on my shoulder. I took it in my own, held her hand tight against my collarbone and smiled, but did not look up at her. “Nothing more?” Selene asked. I knew what she feared. That Harendotes would ask for her in marriage.

But what need had Kharn Sagara for wives and heirs?

Calen Harendotes’s heir would be Calen Harendotes.

If anyone succeeded to his throne at all.

Latarra—its Monarchy, its City, its New Order—were each but levers. Props designed to a single purpose. To restore Kharn Sagara to his throne. His proper throne.

On Vorgossos.

“So it would seem,” I said, still holding Cassandra’s hand. She seemed the one solid thing in all creation, an anchor to that reality which seemed increasingly unreal.

“When can I meet with him?” the princess asked.

“On the morrow, I think,” I said. “He had met with Lorian already, as we thought. We have only to discuss how we can move forward.”

Selene perched on the edge of the black couch across from me. I studied her in silence, marking the tension in her posture. I had to remind myself that here was one who had never strayed beyond the walls of the garden paradise of her life. Like her brother, Alexander; like the Arthur-Buddha; like a certain boy from Delos . . . she had never voyaged past the confines of palace life, and while the Eternal City held its dangers and its monsters both, they were hidden things, things ever beneath the surface of gaily painted civilization.

Here the monsters walked in the bright sun, and stood straight and tall as men . . . and the secrets hid behind their gilded faces were darker and more foul than anything she had known.

And yet I had misread her, for she leaned forward and laid a hand upon my knee. I released Cassandra’s hand, feeling somehow that to complete a circuit between the three of us was to betray Valka’s ghost. “Are you all right?” the princess asked.

She meant to comfort me, despite the depth of her own fear.

I smiled, and laid a hand on hers, taking it from my knee.

There was a strength in those smooth, white fingers, though they seemed delicate as glass, and she clenched my hand in hers. “You seem . . . shaken.”

Not one word. Kharn’s warning resounded.

I threw a glance up at the ceiling, at the lights on their tracks peering down like eyes. I had no way of knowing where precisely Sagara’s eyes were hiding, anymore than I might have smashed one of his projectors from inside the total illusion of his imitarium.

There is no door.

“I’m all right, Selene,” I said, not meaning to use her name. “I am only tired.”

I would have to tell them . . . somehow.

* * *

A small legion of identical women in black dresses fringed with white lace appeared not long after I was returned to the antechamber. These directed us by many corridors and stairs to the pyramid palace’s diplomatic apartments, where we were to be quartered for the night. Their face—for they were all of them identical—was familiar to me, but it was not until one conveyed Cassandra and myself to our quarters that I placed the visage, long forgotten, long suppressed.

It was the face of the homunculus woman, Naia.

The poor woman’s cells—her image—had been made immortal as her master. Not even death would release her from her life of bondage. Indeed, so much of the court of Vorgossos had been rebuilt—was being rebuilt—in negative upon the surface of Latarra. There the pyramid stood upright, striving for heaven, not hanging toward hell. There was the cloned slave woman, and the city outside, white as snow, but vaster, not hid but brazen as a whore undressed in the window of her brothel, advertising her virtues—turned to vice—to all who looked upon her.

And then there was Oneiros. The Majordomo was clearly a machine. A copy in new countenance—new hardware—of the very Yume who had served the king on his old world.

Seeing the city beyond our windows, I saw it then for what it was: Sagara’s new dream. Not the pandemonic subterrane of his old capital, but a second kind of Babel, reaching for the stars. Here was his challenge not only to our Empire, not only to the Cielcin and the black gods they served, but to the sister-clone that had taken from him his home, his security, his immortal life.

“We trust that everything is to your liking?” asked the woman who was Naia, and was not. “If you require anything, you need only ring the bell. There is a panel by each of the doors and a rope at your bedside. Is there anything I can do for you, now?”

She spoke like one of Kharn’s machines, eyes glazed, vision fixed on something that was not there.

“No,” I said, “leave us.”

Cassandra had gone into one of the suite’s two bedchambers.

“I am watching,” the woman said, tone hollow, remote.

I looked at her, saw a light glimmer in an implant beneath the skin at the side of her neck, saw a flicker like stars in the hollow blackness of her eyes. “Sagara,” I said, facing the woman and daimon-man possessing her. “You again?”

The clone Naia’s face split into a grin redolent of Ushara herself. “Shall I stay awhile?”

I turned my back on her. On him.

In dealing with demons, Edouard would later tell me, the best thing is not to hear.

“One word to your people,” he said, “and I start killing them.”

“You would do well not to threaten me,” I said, moving to the window and the sun setting over the Printed City. “You need me, Kharn. So much as I need you.”

“Somewhat less, I think,” said the king in the woman’s voice.

“Did you come here just to threaten me?” I asked, and turned to face the girl.

“Sir?” the girl who was not Naia blinked at me, confusion and faint terror on her face. She was not precisely the same as the odalisque I had met. That Naia had been trapped in a permanent state of arousal, her mind doctored until she had no regard for anything but the flesh—not even her life. “Threaten you? I would never!”

“Abba, who are you talking to?” Cassandra had returned, having removed her sword belt so that her mandyas fluttered from her left shoulder like one wing.

Kharn Sagara had fled.

“No one,” I said, and offered the slave girl a gentle smile. “You may go, child.”

* * *

The new day came in its turn, and dragoons in Latarran livery came to take me to meet with Harendotes and his court. We met the Princess Selene in the hall, and I permitted her to take my arm and so we were led—sans guard—up into the pyramid and along a series of passageways to a door like a deep shaft that ran out through the structure’s sloping outer wall and onto a terrace high on the pyramid’s eastern face. Like the balcony in the imitarium where I had first met the Monarch the day before it was, but greater, a broad shelf that extended for perhaps a hundred feet from the gentle slope of the palace clad in white stone. Looking up, one almost felt that he might climb the great structure, might scramble hand over hand and so reach the unfinished peak crowned with the vast engines of construction, the exposed superstructure like the bones of some iron giant scoured clean by the upper airs.

But the terrace itself was all complete, and planted with dark trees. The sun of Latarra was pale, and hung low in the eastern sky, and so the leaves of those trees and the grass that blanketed the terrace garden were nearly black.

Beside me, Selene gasped. “The city goes on forever,” she said.

She had been raised in the Eternal City, which by all objective measure was greater and more splendorous by far, but there was something undeniably impressive about the way the city rolled over the low hills to where the grounded vessels of the Maze still stood like the bones of dragons in the sun.

A servant in white and black, one of the Kharn’s Naiads, bowed as we approached along the garden path, and led us with a gesture over white flagstones to where a carven oak table stood arrayed upon the grass. It had clearly been brought out for the purposes of this meeting. Its legs were like the claws of birds, intricately carved, and the faces of falcons stared from each of the thing’s four corners. A golden tea service sat upon it, and about it were seated five figures—two in float-chairs, all of whom were familiar to me.

Calen Harendotes stood, his long black hair flowing in the wind. He had removed his ebon cape, but he still wore the dark-as-night tunic and the broad, Egyptian collar of his rank and station.

“Princess Selene of the Aventine,” he said, and bowed more shallowly than he ought, “be welcome to Latarra. I am Calen, Son of Ausar of the House Harendotes, Monarch of this, Our Kingdom of Latarra.”

Disentangling herself from my arm, Selene bowed. “I am grateful to you for your hospitality, Monarch, and regret the circumstances that bring me to your fair city. I hope that we might work toward a solution that is mutually beneficial to my Empire and your Kingdom.”

Harendotes had fixed his eyes on me for the entirety of this exchange, and smiling, said to Selene, “I hope for that as well.” He extended a hand, gesturing to the four others seated about him. “Allow me to introduce certain of my High Court. I believe you know Captain Zelaz.”

“We’ve been acquainted,” I said, eying the hairless dwarf in his float chair.

The Exalted captain grinned at me, revealing needle teeth. “We have indeed!”

“Zelaz here is first-among-equals of the Exalted captains loyal to me.”

Selene smiled at the monster. “You were one of the delegates to my city, were you not, sir?”

The dwarf’s whole chair bobbed where it floated, doubtless impelled by some errant thought in the creature’s brain. “I had that honor, princess.”

Harendotes continued. “Beside him is the Lady Jamina Ardahael, my Master of War.” The Lady Jamina raised both of her right hands in solemn greeting, but kept her razored tongue behind her teeth. Indicating the man on his right, the giant who had accompanied Lady Jamina to our reception the day before, he said, “My Chancellor, Lord Absalom Black, the seventh of that name.” The giant bowed his head. “And Lord Qiu Zhihao, formerly of the Wong-Hopper Consortium, Master of Finance.”

Lord Qiu made no move whatever.

Harendotes lay his hands on the edges of the table. “You have placed us in a very difficult position. Lorian Aristedes has placed us in a very difficult position. Our relations with your Empire are in their infancy, and it is my preference that the infant . . . survive.” Watching him, I recalled the way his previous incarnation had presided over the peace talks between Aranata Otiolo and Raine Smythe. That had been in a garden, as well—the very garden where I had first lost my life.

What was it that Valka always said? That even the universe was curved?

“Commandant General Aristedes claims that he intervened only to save you, Lord Marlowe, your family, and the princess here from agencies within your Empire hostile to our alliance and to you personally. I, of course, have only his word and yours that this is so.”

“And mine!” Zelaz said.

Harendotes—who was Sagara—glared at the floating dwarf before continuing. He touched a sheet of quartz paper lying on the dark wood of the table. “The Empire has accused us of declaring war against them, of the murder of their troopers, the destruction of their property, and of your kidnapping, Your Highness.”

Selene shook her head. “Your people are blameless. Commandant General Aristedes acted at my request.”

“Your request?” asked the tetrand, Lady Jamina Ardahael. “Not Lord Marlowe’s?”

Selene hesitated, looked round at me, her eyes wide. I nodded, and saw Harendotes’s fey and unfeeling smile out the corner of my eye. “Lord Marlowe was . . . incapacitated at the time,” she said at last. “I had to make a choice. Your Commandant General saved my life.”

“I told you we cannot depend upon his loyalty, sire,” said Lady Jamina softly.

Lorian had not acted on my wisdom, acted to deliver me alongside Cassandra and the princess to his master. He had acted for me, in my name and memory, to save my child—my only daughter—from those factions in the Imperium who, having destroyed me, would not have hesitated to destroy her.

“Hush, Jamina,” said Calen Harendotes. “Aristedes has his uses. Even his blunders turn lead to gold, it seems.” He drummed the table with his fingers, and eying Lord Black, said, “This may be his magnum opus.”

The giant smiled. “We have lost nothing, and gained the Halfmortal.”

“Incapacitated,” Harendotes said, studying my transfigured face. “Incapacitated, indeed.”

How I feared for Lorian. Whether he had lied outright or merely omitted the truth, Selene had already wounded his standing with his liege—all unknowing.

“We must have peace with the Imperium,” Harendotes said, resuming his seat at the head of the table. “Sit, please! The both of you!” Golden hands gestured to the two empty seats opposite him. “Tea?”

“Please,” Selene said.

One of Kharn’s Naiads approached, appearing almost from nowhere—I wondered if some trick of holography had concealed her standing to one side.

“No, thank you,” I said, and laid a hand on the table before Selene to halt the servant in her stride.

Calen Harendotes smiled once again. “You have eaten my food and tasted my water already, Lord Marlowe.”

In fact, I had not—though it was well possible Selene had done so. I had not been in any position to watch her or the others during my audience or after the Monarch’s servants had taken us to our rooms.

“It is not poisoned,” said Absalom Black, voice low as the grinding of tectonic plates.

“It is not poison principally that concerns me,” I said.

Harendotes arched an eyebrow. “You are well in my power, Lord Marlowe,” he said, “but I have no desire to do either of you harm. As Her Highness says, I wish to put the ugliness of recent events behind us, that we may better reach an equitable peace.” That said, he gestured for his serving girl to advance and collect the gilt tea service. The Naia clone poured for the princess, and for myself.

“How do you propose to ameliorate present tensions with the Imperium?” asked Jamina Ardahael.

“I had planned simply to talk to them,” Selene said. “If you will permit me the use of your telegraph, I have only to speak with my brother—Prince Chancellor Aurelian, I mean. He will listen to me.”

“It is Prince Aurelian’s seal that underwrites this threat of war,” said Harendotes, fingering the crystal paper on the table before him.

Steam coiled from the gilt-rimmed black ceramic cup before me, smelling of flowers and bitter herbs. It spiraled in the air, caught by the breeze that tousled the dark-leafed trees.

The Naiad had vanished.

“Yesterday, Commandant General Aristedes spoke of factionalism within the Imperial court . . . ” said Lord Black.

“I am certain he explained it,” I said, turning my gaze from each occupant of the table to the next. “You debriefed him yesterday, did you not? I must say, I am surprised to find him not here.”

Jamina interjected. “My generals do not sit on the High Court, Lord Marlowe. I do.”

“I see,” I said, turning my own hollow smile on the tetrand woman.

She was Lorian’s master. Of course. Lorian had said he might one day make a lord, but he was not one, not yet . . . and not—I sensed—if Jamina Ardahael had anything to say about it. How strange that she, by all accounts stranger and more alien than Lorian, should rule over him after the fashion of our lords. Stranger still that here, on Latarra, the shape of the Empire had asserted itself in distorted reflection. I thought of Kharn’s inverted pyramid beneath the surface of Vorgossos, and what it signified.

“We should like to hear your accounting,” said Lord Black.

To my surprise, Selene answered faster than I, setting her teacup on its black-and-gold saucer. “Lord Marlowe has ever been a polarizing figure in the Imperium. He is”—she hesitated— “well loved. Popular. Popularity engenders jealousy . . . and fear. There are those who say he is the Earth’s Chosen.”

At that, Zelaz laughed, and Jamina hid her mouth behind two of her four hands. Calen Harendotes himself made no effort to hide his smile. Somewhat abashed, Selene hung her head, the tip of one ear cresting from the waves of red hair slashed short.

“This popularity has made him many enemies. The same enemies who would oppose any amity between our Empire and your Kingdom. The Chantry, chief above all. Certain of the Old Lions, House Bourbon, for example, and the Martian Guard . . . ”

That the Martian Guard were not enamored of me came as little surprise, but still my blood ran cold to hear it. I was—had been—too close to the Emperor for their comfort. From their perspective, I must have seemed a malign influence, a dark star exerting its gravity on all-beloved Mars.

Selene continued, “It is these enemies which moved against us, they . . . ”

Realizing she had overextended herself, said almost too much, she stopped.

Lorian would have been unable to conceal what had happened to me from his masters—would most likely not even have wished to conceal it. He was Latarra’s man, now, and not my own. He had made that much abundantly clear.

And Sagara knew at any rate.

“They murdered me,” I said flatly, staring not at Harendotes—not at Sagara—but at his court.

What did they believe?

Lord Qiu was impassive, face unreadable as the faceless helms of our soldiery. Black frowned. Ardahael narrowed her sharp eyes.

Zelaz tittered. “Did a poor job of it, didn’t they?”

“He is one of us, then?” Black asked, turning to his master. “One of yours?”

“No.” Calen Harendotes flashed a look at his subordinate that might have curdled new milk. “He is no chimera, Absalom.”

I could feel Selene’s confusion coming off her in waves, and laid a hand on her arm to still her. From his tone, I guessed that Lord Black was one of Kharn Sagara’s clients, and had been for many lives of men. Sagara offered immortality, or as near to it as any man could. Lords of the Imperium, directors of the Consortium, Jaddians and Durantines and doubtless Lothrians, too, had all sought Vorgossos for thousands of years that they might be born anew.

Remote synaptic kinesis, Sagara called it. The process of transferring the thoughts and memories from one body to the next. Harendotes had introduced Lord Black as the seventh of that name. I suspected he was truly the first, and that like Sagara himself, the elder Black had become the younger each in turn.

“How was it done?” asked the vast immortal. He was near to revealing his master’s nature.

“We have more pressing concerns,” Harendotes said, closing one gilded hand about the giant’s wrist.

That cowed Black, and I myself was silent then a long moment. Theirs had not been the reaction I’d anticipated, but then . . . I supposed to wights like Sagara and Black, that a man might live again was no great mystery.

A great part of me was relieved to hear Kharn Sagara deny so effusively that I was one of his creations. That rumor and doubt had followed me much of my life, always in the mouths of others.

“When I recovered,” I said, “we were en route here.” Lorian, forgive me. I prayed he would not suffer too much for having concealed that he had attacked the Martians and fled Forum system without me aboard.

“You mean to say that the Commandant General left Forum with your corpse and the princess?” asked Lady Jamina. “He believed this worth the chaos it has sown?”

I almost smiled. Lorian might escape the tetrand woman’s wrath after all. Let her think he intended to bring my body to them for study, or that he had anticipated my resurrection. I pictured string threading a needle. “You must understand,” I said. “The Terran Chantry believed that Lorian Aristedes and I were part of a conspiracy orchestrated by this court to achieve your ends. They believed this from the moment he stepped out of his shuttle in the Eternal City.” I held Jamina’s gaze. “Doubtless he was chosen as envoy for his Imperial pedigree, but his association with me in the minds of the Imperial elite led them to believe Latarra was involved in a plot against the Imperium.”

“My lord,” said Lord Qiu Zhihao, speaking for the first time, voice thick with the accents of the Mandari plutocrats. “If what Lord Marlowe says is true, then perhaps the prudent move is to return him to Forum? Give him to the Chantry as a show of faith?”

Calen Harendotes dashed my belief that he was all machine below the neck by drinking from his own steaming cup of grassy tea.

Qiu continued. “It would put to rest all talk that we have anything to do with him.”

“That would be a mistake,” I said, though I saw the shrewd wisdom in the man’s words.

“Grovel for the crows?” Black snarled. “You must be mad, Qiu!”

Unfazed, Lord Qiu replied, “We might do better to barter with the Imperials.”

To my surprise, Lady Jamina spoke in my defense, saying, “I would not deal with the black priests unless I had no other choice.”

Harendotes gestured for silence, making a curious, horizontal gesture, as if sealing a bag. Silence fell, and into it, the Monarch spoke, addressing me directly. “Why is it a mistake?”

“Because,” I said, “the Emperor is in my camp.”

“Cào nǐ mā!” said Qiu, swearing violently in his native Mandari.

“Do you think us fools?” Jamina asked. “Word of your disgrace has reached us, even here. I do not think there is a world under heaven that has not heard how you attacked your Emperor.”

Again, Zelaz tittered. “Broke the Imperial nose!”

Once more, Selene came to my aid. “My father pardoned Lord Hadrian many years ago.”

“Did he now?” Zelaz asked. “Big of him. Didn’t even slit his lordship’s nose in recompense, I see. How good! How uncommonly kind!”

“Enough, captain,” said Calen Harendotes. The Monarch and I studied one another a moment. I was uncertain whether or not Kharn Sagara had shared the existence of the Watchers with his Court. “Whatever else he may be, the Red Emperor is no fool. He is not the sort to waste a man of Lord Marlowe’s talents.”

That sidestepped the issue.

Sagara regarded me from behind Harendotes’s black eyes, the lamps in those pupils guttering. As I withheld the full truth from my people—even from Cassandra—he had not told his people everything.

Eager to bring the matter back round to its point, Selene spoke up. “I am prepared to explain the situation to my father and brother. Commandant General Aristedes acted in my defense. He deserves a medal. I will see he gets it.”

That had been a nice touch. Once more, I saw the empress Selene might become. At a stroke, she had reversed Lorian’s position on the board from liability to asset.

“Latarra need not play the role of villain in the Emperor’s eyes. Your man’s intervention helped thwart a plot against one of the Emperor’s own royal knights, and saved the life of one of his children. That is the song I will sing to my father. I can untie this knot with a word.”

Lady Jamina was incredulous, and flicked her long, gray hair from her brow with one jeweled hand. “You expect us to believe the Terran Chantry would murder a princess of the Aventine House? One of the children of their living god?”

“My father is not a god, whatever you believe,” Selene countered.

“It is not us as believes this thing,” said the tetrand woman. “It is your people who are mad.”

Selene appeared to chew on this a moment—or only on her tongue. At length she said, “I was but one of two witnesses to Lord Marlowe’s . . . to Lord Marlowe’s . . . ”

“Death,” said Calen Harendotes.

“Murder,” Selene amended. “Had Aristedes and Agent Albé not intervened, I would have found myself hurled from the battlements before long.”

“Who was the other witness?” asked Captain Zelaz.

“My servant,” I interjected. “He remains in orbit with the rest of my people.”

The giant Lord Absalom Black loomed over the table. “You cannot offer this resolution at no price,” he said. “What would you have in return?”

“Only what was promised,” Selene said. “The telegraph-tracking technology.”

“And Vorgossos,” I said, envisioning a hand directing the hierophant clean across the board to check the enemy emperor.

“Vorgossos?” Black looked at Harendotes, then at myself. “What?”

From his reaction and that of the others, I felt certain that Zelaz at least—and possibly Lady Ardahael and Lord Qiu as well—knew the true identity of their master.

“I seek passage to Vorgossos,” I said.

The exile Kharn’s eyes gleamed.

Not one word.

“I found the planet long ago, but it has moved. I know it is a worldship of design not dissimilar to the design of Cielcin vessels, and I know there are those among the Extrasolarians”—here I directed my words most especially to Captain Zelaz—“who know how to find it.”

The Monarch and his High Court were silent, each watching each. Lord Qiu might have shuffled his papers if he’d had any. Zelaz emitted an almost nervous laugh.

As it must, it fell to the Monarch to speak. “Lord Marlowe knows already that we are at war with Vorgossos,” he said. “It is for this reason I sent Lorian Aristedes to treat for a portion of the Empire’s atomics stockpile.”

This was news to Selene, who was taken aback. “At war?” She looked to me.

“Vorgossos would not join our cause,” said Calen Harendotes simply, “and so, they must be made to. The planet is a warship in itself, a deterrent against the Cielcin fleet. One we require.”

Absalom Black spoke up. “What do you want from Vorgossos?”

I hesitated, studying the face of the man who would be king, who had been king.

Not one word.

My answer required the utmost delicacy then. Selene’s life hung in the balance. Hers, and Cassandra’s, and Edouard’s—and those of every man and woman and xenobite under my tenuous command. “There are certain weapons in the Vorgossene arsenal,” I began, watching for Harendotes’s response. Above the golden pharaonic collar, the face was as impassive as stone. He had no need of further threats. “I had hoped to negotiate with Kharn Sagara”—I lingered for half a beat—“to enter the war on our side. Doing so would, I see, preclude our alliance—as you are at war.”

“The solution is simple,” Selene said, suddenly bright. “We commit to back your assault on Vorgossos. In return, you grant us the weapons Lord Marlowe has spoken of. You keep the planet.”

Harendotes and Black exchanged looks. “Would the Emperor agree to that?”

“It is possible,” Selene said. “The armada is spread thin across the outer provinces, but there may be a fleet available.”

“An Imperial fleet . . . ” mused the Lady Jamina. “In addition to the bombs we require?”

“If it is in my power to grant,” Selene said.

“It seems you may have your wish after all, Lord Marlowe,” said Calen Harendotes. “Perhaps we will seek Vorgossos together.”


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