CHAPTER 55
BLACK PLANET
I fancied myself entombed. The walls of the iron carapace about me seemed the insides of a sarcophagus inscribed with signs and symbols strange to me. The Interfaced had disabled all access to the thing’s controls. I was a passenger only. A prisoner, in a sense, at the mercy of my wing companions—men and women I could neither see nor hear.
Safe in my armor, entoptics projected images of the world outside directly onto my retinas. Though I could not move, I could see, see the distant stars like torches in the night spiraling as we soared toward the darkly gleaming planet below.
Well I recognized those icy climes, that witch-lit surface, green as poison beneath her snows.
We had found Vorgossos, just where Calen Harendotes had said it would be.
When first I had journeyed to that profane world, I thought it must lie well beyond the borders of human space, far from the light of any Imperial sun—and yet originally Vorgossos must have been within a mere handful of light-years of Earth herself, for if the stories were true, she had been inhabited since before the founding of the Empire.
But Sagara had built massive engines into the planet’s pole in imitation of the mighty star-drives of the Cielcin, forever paranoid, forever planning against the day his world would be discovered. Thanks to Bassander Lin—and to Switch, who had betrayed me—that day had come, and when the Empire returned with fire and sword to conquer Vorgossos in the wake of my previous visit, they had found only the desolation of space.
Space, and the planet’s undead star.
Kharn Sagara—the other one, the woman—had anchored her world about another brown dwarf star. When all our leaders had met in council, Absalom Black had revealed the world relied upon the gravity of such a star to keep its core active and molten. Without it, Vorgossos would be stripped of the protection of its magnetic field, exposing the Undying and residents of her profane city to the effects of cosmic radiation. And worse, without it, Vorgossos would grow deathly cold and the great subterranean oceans would go to ice.
About me, the AMP whined, engines at my back and shoulders flaring. The surface of the rogue world scrolled below me. Sensors in the inner hull tracked my face and eye movement, altered the display I was seeing. Above and behind me, I could see the shapes of the other cephalophores against the night, betrayed by the faint running lights—red and white—that twinkled on their hulls. Above them, the black shapes of our fleet—dominated by the hulking Sojourners of Eidhin, Archambault, and Zelaz—had appeared only as patches of brighter darkness against the eternal night. Beside them, the knife shapes of our Imperial battle cruisers had seemed as daggers beside great swords.
A flash of light filled the darkness. Lightning without thunder.
A shot.
“What was that?” I asked, broadcasting on comms.
I knew to wait the requisite seconds for a reply, was surprised when one came almost instantly.
“ANTIMATTER WEAPON DISCHARGE DETECTED,” it said. “BEARING X TWO-AUGHT-NINE POINT ONE-SEVEN BY Y NINETY-SEVEN POINT EIGHT-THREE.”
A reticle appeared where the light had faded, indicating that I should look over my shoulder and to my left. I did, though through the fading light I saw nothing. The matter of the voice took precedence. “Who’s there? 2Maeve?”
The voice had been flatly feminine, but on reflection I did not think that it had been the Interfaced commander. 2Maeve was out there. Calen Harendotes had chosen the Mistwalker to lead the incursion onto the planet’s surface, and Lorian had chosen the Interfaced for the assault.
There was no answer.
“Speaker, identify yourself.”
“It’s the AMP, Marlowe,” came the voice of one of the Interfaced on the comm. “You’re not networked, so it has to talk to you.”
“The AMP?” I echoed.
“The fleet’s taking fire!” said another voice—I thought it the voice of 5Eamon, 2Maeve’s optio.
“From where?” I asked.
Again, there was no answer. The Interfaced had little time for me. I was scarcely more than dead weight, little more than cargo. A payload they were set to deliver to the surface.
Our mission was simple: make the surface, secure a landing zone for the troop carriers.
“We cannot take the city by storm,” Lorian had said, poring over the schematics Harendotes had revealed to us in council. “The domes are under more than a mile of glacier, and the only way in is through these flumes.” He indicated shafts like the one we had ridden down into the city. Only one cable ran from the ground to the orbital station, but there were other shafts, other tunnels that linked to structures built nearer the surface. “Not even the Chantry’s bombs can penetrate to that kind of depth.”
The holograph slid out, showed the planet entire in miniature. “We have to fly in through the tunnels. The whole planet’s riddled with them. Old mine shafts, mostly.” He traced a line with his cane. “The network runs all the way from the city here—under the seabed—to the engine installation at the pole.”
That was our target.
The cephalophore whined as it accelerated, dropping me nearer the planet’s surface. We would have to fly low, to come under the reach of the guns Kharn had built in ancient days to guard his world.
“ANTIMATTER WEAPON DISCHARGE DETECTED,” came the cephalophore’s flatly feminine voice again. It recited the bearing. I looked, saw nothing. Even the ships of our own fleet were lost in the black.
“Arthur Flight, this is Mistwalker,” came the old, familiar voice on the comm. “Arthur Flight, do you read?”
Not being Interfaced himself, Lorian had no choice but to communicate in the old-fashioned way.
“Read you, Mistwalker,” came 2Maeve’s reply. “This is Art-1. Orbital insertion complete. Prepared for hard drop on your mark.”
“Message received, Art-1,” came Lorian’s reply. “T-minus twenty-three minutes to mark. Hold your course.”
We had but to orbit the planet, wait for the opportune moment to descend and cut for the gun emplacements that encircled the worldship’s mighty engines. Our target was a drum tower overlooking a small landing field just beneath the curtain wall of the crater that formed the heart of the engine complex.
Calen’s plan called for us to fly our shuttles—with cephalophore escort—along those tunnels, soaring along thousands of miles of pipeline and accessway to the gates of the hidden city.
“Lorian, what’s happening up there?” I asked.
The Mistwalker was at the fore of a battle group that had inserted itself into a high, polar orbit about Vorgossos. The bulk of the fleet was much higher, had come out of warp first to draw the Vorgossene fleet into orbit higher and farther from the planet itself, allowing us to slide in later arriving from mere light-hours away and under the extended fleet.
“Douro and the free captains have engaged Sagara’s fleet. They’re taking heavy fire,” came the Commandant General’s reply.
“And you?”
“Safe for the moment,” Lorian said. “Maybe they haven’t spotted us yet—and they definitely won’t have seen your lot. It’s whatever Sagara’s got on the surface that worries me.”
“What about the Demiurge?”
“No sign,” came Lorian’s reply. “Maybe it’s not here.”
“Maybe,” I said, not believing it.
The thought that Kharn Sagara’s dread vessel might simply appear at any moment and unleash any of the Mericanii Archontic weapons chilled my very blood.
“Elffire and your Captain Ghoshal are ready to deploy ground troops the moment you clear the landing zone,” Lorian said. “Guard yourself, Marlowe.”
“And you,” I said.
Cassandra was on the ground team, along with Albé and a thousand HAPSIS men, Ramanthanu’s five and the Irchtani among them, supported by another ten thousand of Lorian’s own soldiery. Camillus Elffire—the former Legion man who was captain of the Mistwalker’s infantry—was to lead the ground incursion. Their task was to disable the worldship’s mighty engines.
“I’ve got people for that,” Lorian said. “This will be a glorious day for the new world. Sagara has long been a thorn in our side.”
I could say nothing. I was sure that even then, a particle of Kharn’s Protean awareness was bent upon us, hanging on our every word. The Monarch himself was safe aboard his flagship, but I did not doubt that his eyes and ears were everywhere.
Another flash resounded in the deep above our heads, bright for a moment as any sun.
The battle was—to me—only the shine of those distant lights. The rosettes of missile fire, the bright lines of particle beams, the flaring spat of laser, the inky fire of dying ships. At my distance, it was only an abstraction. Blue lightning, red fire, the white flash of annihilation.
From the inside, I knew it was different.
Well I could picture Lorian gripping the rim of his holography table, knuckles white, shoulders bunched as those of a strongman prepared to lift, every man and woman alongside him the same.
When first I had come to Vorgossos, the place had seemed remote, obscure. The city below the surface had been crowded, yes, but the palace of Kharn Sagara and his mighty vessel had been lonely desolations, and so it had seemed that—while his power there was absolute—he had ruled very little. His chief servant was a machine, his troopers SOM puppets. Calvert alone of all his retinue had seemed his own man, though he was yet his master’s creature. Whence then had come this Vorgossene fleet?
A red star blazed high above us, then the clean white of annihilation.
“What was that?” I asked.
Lorian did not reply. Instead, my cephalophore answered in its inhuman woman’s voice. “ISV CARDENIO DESTROYED.”
The Cardenio had been one of Douro’s ships, one of the Imperial fleet.
The Vorgossene fleet must have overwhelmed the ship’s shields.
We had suffered our first major casualty.
“Arthur Flight, this is Sentinel Commander Kedron,” came a deep voice over the comm. “We’ve reached the eastern wall of the engine crater. Commencing bombing run.”
I could not shake the sensation that I was being watched, looked for in the night.
Did Kharn Sagara—the other Kharn Sagara, the woman whose host was arrayed against us—know that I had come? Did Brethren? The daimon possessed some power to project its will. It had sent me visions to guide me to itself on my last visit. Might it not be seeking for me, even then?
Or was I afraid?
“TAKING EVASIVE ACTION.” The cephalophore’s cold voice announced even as it cut hard to starboard and plunged me down so fast my vision went gray. Even as we did, I saw a lance of emerald green slice the air not a hundred feet from me, and not five hundred feet away, another of our cephalophores erupted in scarlet flame as a second beam swept across it.
“ENGAGING SHIELDS.”
Another emerald beam clove the dark above Vorgossos, shot past so near I thought for sure I heard the void sizzling as it passed, as though the very quantum foam of reality were boiling. My teeth rattled as afterburners engaged, and I rocketed toward the planet’s surface. The AMP returned fire of itself, launching a fusillade of tiny missiles from a reserve in the left shoulder—though at what it fired I had no idea.
“2Maeve!” I bellowed into the comm. “What’s going on?”
The woman did not at once reply.
“2Maeve!”
The cephalophore plunged sharply, the main drive in the center of my back thrusting me down, down toward the craggy peaks and icy valleys of Vorgossos.
“2Maeve!”
“Drones!” came the wretched woman’s answer. “We’ve been made!”
Another ray of emerald fire sliced the sky before me, moving like a sword blade. I marked its origin on the surface just as a trio of fireballs bloomed in the dark. The particle beam had cloven three of our fliers in twain, and their pieces fell like heavy rain to the snowbound surface miles below.
“We’re going in!” 2Maeve said, and a moment later, I was falling, rocketing toward the planet. Turning my neck, I saw perhaps a dozen others converging, falling toward the source of that emerald sword. 2Maeve meant to rush the guns. I prayed the weapon needed time to charge before refire. As close together as we were, a well-aimed shot might claim us all. No Royse barrier could endure sustained fire from a beam weapon for more than a couple seconds, not unless it drew power from a ship’s antimatter reactor.
A hail of missile fire rained from my shoulders and from the shoulders of the others as we fell toward the surface, and a moment later I watched the sunfire of innumerable small-scale explosives carpet the target area below.
“Art-1 to Mistwalker,” said 2Maeve. “We had to drop early. Ran afoul of a gun emplacement on the surface. It’s been neutralized.”
Instead of Lorian’s high, aristocratic voice, the voice that answered was the basso profundo of Lorian’s first officer, the Exalted Amatorre. “Very good, Arthur-1. Proceed to target.”
Rockets flared, and at once we were flying, skating lower and lower over the icy terrain. The peaks of the nearest mountains were by then above our heads, whole castles of ice where perhaps no human foot had ever trod. The pale-green light that characterized the planet seemed to rise through the ice below, filling the night with a low, phosphorescent gleam.
I wondered what its source was? Some part of that world’s extensive tunnel network? Some fell engine of Sagara’s? When last I’d come to Vorgossos, I had believed them the light of cities, but they were too dim, too diffuse for that. They made me think of the phasma vigrandi of Luin, whose lights lead men and animals to their deaths, and of the marsh fires in ancient legend.
Dim Vorgossos.
A shot lanced through the dark above, fired from one of the mountains. Taking evasive action, my cephalophore dove into a chasm that had only just opened beneath my feet. The green light of Vorgossos streamed from its depths, bright almost as day around me. Only then did I understand its source. The whole chasm ran straight as an arrow, its walls quarried smooth and buttressed by great pylons of dark metal, a broad trench that ran for as far as I could see. Great floodlights embedded in the trench’s walls and base shone upward, illuminating the massive construction.
Though I knew it not then, I was flying over the outermost part of the engine complex, components of that machine—vast as continents—designed to push the world. I had seen such places before, on the hulls of Cielcin vessels.
Something moved on the wall above me, and looking up I saw the arm of a crane immeasurably long swing round as its cab rolled along tracks built into the side of the trench.
“They’re still building,” I said out loud. Indeed, the construction must never stop. Anything so large and complicated as the planet’s drive system must require constant maintenance and upkeep.
“T-MINUS FIVE MINUTES TO TARGET,” the cephalophore’s daimon informed me. My skin crawled at the sound of its falsely female voice. I grasped the control yokes with armored hands—they would not move—and clenched my teeth as the machine that enclosed me ducked beneath a bridge that spanned the trench ahead, looping to fly inverted as it dodged another barrage. Missiles launched from my shoulder tore the gun emplacements high and to my right to pieces.
Another trench diverged to our left, and the cephalophore turned to race along it. I felt the blood rush and puddle in my face as the platform decelerated, tipping back until I was almost vertical. The machine’s six bladelike wings—useless in that airless place save for the attitudinal repulsors arrayed to the underside of each—scooped and slowed me to where we could then divert by another passage.
2Maeve spoke. “The tower is dead ahead now! Marlowe, prepare for drop.”
“I am ready,” I said, and pressed the command to close my suit’s helmet inside the cockpit of the cephalophore. The helmets of the Latarran dragoons were made to interface with the AMP’s systems, but my own Imperial armor was not, and so to don my helmet was to insulate me from the entoptics that projected their vision of the outside world.
To isolate me in that iron coffin completely.
How long had it been since I had worn that armor in battle? I had worn it once or twice for formal occasions on Jadd, and to show it to Cassandra. Well I remembered her—a girl hardly more than ten—donning the helmet and leaping from the bed in my chambers in the villa beneath Volcano House.
“T-MINUS THREE MINUTES TO TARGET.”
“It’s too heavy, Abba!” she had said, trying to lift it from her shoulders.
“T-MINUS TWO MINUTES TO TARGET.”
Blind within the iron maiden, I felt the AMP decelerate, felt my heart and my stomach lurch as we rose, heard the voice of the daimon through my helm. The cephalophore shook as missiles rained from shoulder and chest. My inner ear told me we had come almost to a complete stop. The blood—pressed by the haste of our flight—flowed freely through me once more, carrying the adrenaline to every fiber of my being.
“T-MINUS ONE MINUTE TO TARGET.”
I tapped the shield generator at my belt, checked that the repulsor harness fitted over my breastplate was secure. A shot rattled the whole of the AMP about me, and I bit my tongue.
“T-MINUS THIRTY SECONDS.”
There was a switch on the armature meant for my left hand that would open the platform’s iron ribs and allow me to leap free. I disengaged the safety, readied my thumb on the catch.
“Marlowe, you’re over the landing zone!” 2Maeve’s voice filled my ears.
“T-MINUS TEN SECONDS.”
I thumbed the release.
“VENTRAL HATCH OPENING. EQUALIZING CABIN PRESSURE.”
With an almighty hiss, the coffin-sized cabin in the heart of the cephalophore was emptied of its air. I was relying then upon the reserves compressed in the slim tank concealed in the back of my suit, and upon the rebreather system in the helmet. A searing flash of light greeted me, and I saw the top of the ramparts awaiting me thirty feet below. The tower loomed dead ahead, a finger of bright metal rising above an arc of curtain wall like a dam. Below that wall to my left, an expanse of bare, black tarmac—half-blanketed in dry snow—stretched for what seemed a mile at least against the barren snowfields. Across that snowfield, I saw the lights of other towers, and beyond them the green glow of the trenches, and the tops of the great engines that patrolled the rails that ran along the tops of that ravine.
2Maeve’s voice resounded in my ear. “Go! Go! Go!”
I didn’t hesitate. I leaped from my harness, repulsors buoying me as I fell.
The gravity of that world was somewhat less than one standard, but still that fall would have broken my ankles without the repulsors to buoy me. My cephalophore had targeted and destroyed the guns atop the nearest tower. Lightning sparked amid their ruins, and a chilly vapor like smoke arose.
Dead ahead, the doors at the base of the tower dilated, and disgorged the foot soldiers of Vorgossos. By their glass dome-helmets and the hoses that ran from reservoirs to the iron collars about their necks, I knew they were men—or had been men. They raised long guns and fired on me, rushing forward to take cover behind angled fortifications.
But Gibson’s sword was in my hand, the simurgh-headed sword of Jadd, its star-white blade a light in the black of that place.
This was not the abstract battle in high orbit, not the clash of ship against ship at distances my mind could never encompass. Not Lorian’s lethal game of cat and mouse.
This was mettle against mettle, man against man. Toe-to-toe. Hand-to-hand. Face-to-face.
This I understood.
My cephalophore still hung in the air above the wall, its black arms extended, guns still firing. I saw the flicker of my attackers’ shields as they came on, moving from cover to cover, returning fire over my head to the iron knight standing in the air above me. The first of Lorian’s dragoons had leaped out after me, firing rifles as they descended, the round eyes of their hod helmets like hurasams on the eyes of the dead.
I reached the first of the enemy defenses, and hewed through them with my sword. The metal screen gave way, and the man behind it fell back, firing. I slashed at him, severing the stock of his plasma rifle and the hose that supplied his air. I saw his eyes grow wide as he understood what had happened to him, and seeing that, I knew that here was no SOM, no mindless puppet of the enemy.
The Queen, Kharn Sagara, had posted living men on her gates.
A shot took me in the back, and staggering, I whirled, found another wave of men advancing from the shorter tower. My cephalophore pivoted, guns sweeping the ramparts. As I watched more of Lorian’s dragoons rappelled from the unhinging shells of their cephalophores, so that it seemed the iron maidens gave birth to living men.
One of the defenders had a heavy lance, and its particle beam tore one of the hovering platforms to pieces, cutting through its shield. The ruined hulk fell to earth, crashing upon the ramparts and the field far below.
“They have us surrounded!” shouted one of the Interfaced.
Assuming he meant the words for me, I said, “We have to win the tower! Push! Push now!” I waved my sword like a standard. “Man!” I cried, finding I could no more shout Earth! Or Empire! “Man! For Mankind!”
Cries of “Latarra!” and “For the Monarch!” answered me.
Still, the man was right. We were surrounded. Another shot from the heavy lance claimed a second cephalophore, and the flash of its destruction flooded the endless night. Far away, greater lights raged against the belly of the sky, and I knew that somewhere, Sentinel Commander Kedron’s ships were dropping their bombs, hoping to cripple the planet-vessel’s mighty stardrive. Higher still, one still could see the flicker and the minute lines of beam weapons traced between the vessels of the fleet light-seconds away.
“Lorian!” I shouted into the comm, hurling myself behind cover to guard against the heat of the enemy’s lances. “Lorian, we made planetfall! We’re advancing to the tower now.”
No reply.
“Lorian!”
The response came after a second’s delay. “Good for you!” he said. “We’re a bit busy up here.”
I fell silent myself, and lurched from hiding to rush the next enemy position. My sword blazed in my fist—bright almost as the burning brand of Ragama, if colder. I hewed at the enemy, striking the legs out from under one defender, catching another in the chest with a thrust that smote his heart.
At my back, still more of the Interfaced were landing, while their cephalophores—piloted now either by those still airborne or by their own daimons—swept the ramparts from the air. I felt the urge to duck each time one of the machines flew overhead, but kept my head up, my eyes forward as I advanced.
A short stair ran from the top of the wall ahead to the door that opened into the tower. As I reached its base, those gates rose up, and a horror stirred within.
The creature was like a spider, a giant of fiber and steel many times greater than a man. Seeing it, I lost a step, mind numb with the terror of it. Before I could move, it struck at me with one of its innumerable limbs. I raised my blade to parry, but its forelimb was adamant, and the force of that blow nearly knocked me from my feet. I ducked a wild slash from a limb that was no limb at all, but a sword ten feet long. Only as the beast turned and crawled down the steps into the light did I realize what it was.
Not a spider at all.
It was a man.
Had been a man. Once.
Here was one of the Exalted, one of those demoniacs who had sold his very flesh for power, and with it, his soul. One could still see the shape of man through the grafting of all those limbs, though the torso had been made larger, the shoulders and hips widened to accommodate so many arms and legs. More like a scarab was he than a son of Earth, and scuttled toward me, his face—a mere ornament—smiling without helmet or visor to protect it from the airless cold. A dozen iron arms hung beneath his bulk like the jaw legs of some crustacean. The beast barreled toward me, moving lightly down the steps despite its bulk. It raised that long sword, and lo! Its edges blazed with pale fire!
The weapon thrust toward me, and I spun my sword to parry and step inside. The white-edged blade caught my own, and too late I recognized the shine of highmatter about that core of common steel. The giant blade whistled round, and it was all I could do to lift my own weapon in a two-handed parry that saved me being riven in two. So great was the strength of that blow that any other man would have broken. But as I had endured the onslaught of the vayadan-general Bahudde, I endured, directing time to that place where I did not falter.
I think that my endurance shocked the chimera, for it froze a moment, its undead face—moved by subcutaneous wires that recalled Lorian’s own implants—scowling in the airless void. The huge highmatter sword fell again, and again I caught it, turned it back, thrust at the creature. My blade penetrated the monster’s eye, but it showed no pain, only shrunk back and redoubled its assault. No blood ran from that wounded face, no fluid boiled in vacuum. Another of the beast’s countless arms lashed out at my eyes, and I caught that iron fist in my left hand—my new hand of flesh. I felt the report of that impact resound in all my bones, but not a one of them broke.
I hammered my blade against the joint in the beast’s long arm, felt the substrate tear. The appendage went limp—I must have severed the glass wires that carried messages to the hand from the creature’s jarred brain.
I had not expected the power to come so easily, to flow through me like clear water, and yet it did.
But it was not enough.
One of the creature’s hooked forelimbs caught me by the ankle and pulled my feet out from under me. I hewed at one of its many wrists and the jointed fingers reached for me, scrabbling backward over the ground, feeling the grind of my armored back against the stone of the wall. The mangled hand hung—half-shorn—from the wrist, but two more seized my shoulders, and the giant highmatter sword drew back as the Exalted thing made to drive the point in beneath the lip of my breastplate.
That might have been the end of Hadrian Marlowe, and an ignominious end, had not a huge shape fallen out of the night and caught the wrist that held that sword. It was one of the cephalophores, its wings blazing with light, its engines smoldering with blue fire. It shifted its weight and pulled the Exalted spiderling into the air like a wrestler hurling his opponent to the mat.
My iron rescuer turned and fired upon the chimeric beast with the plasma launcher strapped to one arm. The Exalted was shielded, threw up arms to further shield its core. For a moment, it was pinned in place. I rocked to my feet, sword still in my hand. The cephalophore that had saved me alighted not half a dozen paces to my left, and I advanced in the shadow of its guns.
My savior’s suppressive fire had cut the monster’s shields to ribbons, and the Exalted’s breastplate gleamed red with heat. Even if the adamant stood proof against plasma, the components within—man and machine—were surely boiled as a lobster in its shell. Still the mighty sword flashed, ten feet of blazing highmatter, blue as lightning. Again I raised my sword to parry, felt the crushing weight of servos whining. The eyes of that dead, still-human face went wide in vacuum as I stepped in to plunge my blade into the monster’s glowing heart.
The Exalted had been that door’s last defender—perhaps the captain of the gate. The men about me were laying down their arms! They knelt, hands on heads.
We had won the gate.
The men behind us on the wall were retreating, falling back to the lesser tower.
The cephalophore whose pilot had saved me from the gate captain knelt itself, its chassis clamshelling open. I moved to greet my savior, expecting 2Maeve, or if not 2Maeve, one of her lieutenants. 5Eamon or 8Gael.
But the man who leapt from the AMP’s saddle was arrayed in glittering gold. Of gold were his gauntlets, and gold his shimmering greaves. The helm he wore upon his head shone in the tower’s lamps. Whatever artisans had crafted it—whether on Latarra or in the deeps of time—had fashioned it in the image of a terrible bird, so that the visor seemed the hooked beak of a falcon, and the eyes were set with diamonds black as coals, so that the man within looked out through optic threads inlaid in the helmet itself. Black was his tabard, and blacker still the cloak that hung from his broad shoulders, and the collar of his office shone about his neck and shoulders like a fragment of the very sun.
It was Calen Harendotes.
The Monarch himself had come, and the sight of him sent a thrill through his people, and a shiver of terror through the defenders kneeling and frightened about the tower gate.
Kharn Sagara had returned to Vorgossos.
One of him, at least.
“It is well I was here, Marlowe!” he said, his words conveyed to me over a private channel. “That chimera nearly had you.”
“Lord Sagara,” I said, as privately. “I did not expect to find you in the van.”
“Vorgossos is my home,” he said in answer, cocking his head in a way accentuated by the avian nature of his helmet. There were jeweled bangles affixed to either side of his head, beaded strands that wavered as he moved. They looked almost like earrings. “You think I would entrust its recapture to anyone else? To you?”
I unkindled my blade, looked round at the kneeling men, at our dragoons as they hurried to collect their arms under the watchful eyes and aim of the still-floating cephalophores. I said nothing, and turned away, moving for the stair. There was yet work to be done. The guns needed to be powered down, the gates to the tunnels opened.
“You should be dead,” he said to my retreating back.
I did not need to remain near at hand to continue this conversation, but I halted at the top of the stairs.
“That chimera’s attack should have crushed you.”
“Yes,” I said. “It should have.”