CHAPTER 36
THRESHOLDS
The Council proceeded thus for many weeks. I was not permitted to speak with Lorian outside the Council. My Martians saw to that, chivvying me from the council hall upon the conclusion of each session, only to spirit me back to my place in the Arx Caelestis. Likewise my meeting with the Emperor was delayed. His Radiance was consumed by matters of state, so the men in Aurelian’s office said when I called to inquire, which was almost daily.
The Emperor would hear me, Aurelian’s office said, when the Emperor was ready. Why the Emperor was not ready sooner I could not say. He must have known how dire was my errand, must have received the telegraph I’d sent ahead.
I received and beg your pardon. My mission was incomplete. I sail for Forum at once.
He knew Ushara was still alive, that Operation Gnomon—the mission to find and slay the Watcher on Sabratha—had failed. I was a prisoner of Imperial protocol, and Cassandra along with me. Four years I’d been made to wait. Four years under careful watch in the citadel of the Martian Guard. Many were the sleepless nights I whiled away, peering through the polarized windows at the ceaseless day, or through clear glass at the as-interminable nights.
Cassandra fared—if anything—worse than I. She, who had grown with the freedom of the isle and the gleaming waters of Jadd, who had ventured with me across the endless sands of Sabratha, felt the walls of our apartments more strongly. Only Neema was at peace. The Jaddian servitor busied himself ordering our little world, keeping house and serving at table. More than once he got into arguments with the Martians who watched our door, demanding items for the larder or to know why our laundry had not been returned or handled properly.
Selene had not made good on her promise to take Cassandra and me riding in the Royal Wood. Aurelian must have denied her.
Still, I was not without guests. A man from the Chantry came the day after Lorian’s arrival—the day Lorian had revealed the existence of the Latarran telegraph sensor. He repeated many of Samek’s accusations. That Lorian and I were working in concert, that we were acting on the orders of some parallel Imperial agency—Special Security, or HAPSIS, or the Imperial Office proper—that we were conspiring against the Imperium. Lorian’s revelation about the Monarch’s new method for tapping into telegraph transmissions did not help my case. Had I known about it? Was I familiar with its function? I told the man I was not, that I was as surprised by the news as he.
He left frustrated, promising to return.
Edouard appeared for the first time in several months. He had been involved in official matters in the HAPSIS office. With Oberlin dead and the Emperor offworld, the whole department had been thrown into chaos, and Aurelian had been forced to step in to name an interim director while a proper successor for the late Lord Friedrich could be found. Word of Lascaris’s replacement had set the department—and indeed the entire intelligence apparatus—into disarray. The Inquisition had been called for, and conducted thorough investigations of all personnel in an effort to turn up other infiltrators.
Edouard himself looked drawn and pale, as tired as ever I’d seen him.
“I’m being reassigned,” he said, seating himself on the edge of the chair in the lavish sitting room. The wall behind him showed a relief sculpture of the planet Mars, its curve filling the bottom third, its pale cap inset with mother of pearl, its twin moons rising above its arc. The Earth filled the sky above it, with the sun—its surface enameled with gold leaf—shining at the apex, so that the viewer’s eyes were drawn inevitably toward it, from Mars, past Earth. Almost the sun’s golden rays made a halo all around the young agent’s head. “I’m not sure where. I think Aurelian wants me offworld.”
I took the news in silence.
Besides Cassandra, Neema, and myself, Edouard alone on Forum knew what had transpired on Sabratha. There could not be many, even in the HAPSIS offices, who knew of Gnomon, of Project Perseus and of what had transpired on Nairi. With the Chantry and its Choir sniffing around and the general chaos brought on by the presence of so many offworlders—not least the Extrasolarians themselves—Aurelian was sure to want to keep Gnomon and all knowledge of the Watchers concealed. I was under control, and my people with me. Edouard represented the only loose end.
“When do you leave?” I asked.
“At the end of the week,” he said, voice stiff. “That’s why I’m here now. I wanted to say goodbye.”
Neither one of us spoke for a moment. I had developed a distant fondness for the young fellow in the years we’d worked together, and the news that he would soon depart Forum—and my story—had taken me by surprise.
“You really don’t know where you’re going?” I asked.
Edouard held my gaze for the space of several heartbeats, long enough to convey that whatever he might say, he knew. “With the Sabratha matter concluded, there are other projects I must turn my attention to.”
“The Sabratha matter is not concluded,” I said.
“You know we should not discuss such things,” Albé said, and—changing tack—leaned in, “Have you any proof of that?”
I felt Ushara’s shadow play across my face, and turned away, lest the younger man see it and fail to understand. “Only a feeling.”
Edouard said, “Legion Intelligence captured a Cielcin worldship fighting in Lynga. Mayhap I’ll be sent there. There will doubtless be Vaiartu artifacts requiring examination and oversight.”
That he had proposed such a course of action for himself was proof enough that he was doing anything but. I nodded, accepting the fiction, but conveying by my smile that I understood. What young Albé’s fate was to be I could not guess, but it was certainly not the oversight of a dig out in Lynga Cluster.
“In which case I wish you well,” I said.
“Have you had a chance to speak to His Radiance as yet?” Edouard asked, his face intent.
Neema emerged from the rear hall and circled the chamber, heading from the apartments’ kitchens, through which lay the servants’ quarters that were his private abode. I watched him pass. I was well used to being watched, though I felt I had never been watched more closely in all my long life. Aurelian alone knew all that I knew, and Aurelian was not the only audience for whatever surveillance equipment was doubtless listening to our every word. There was the Chantry to consider, and the Lions. Agents of Prince Alexander, of Legion Intelligence, of Mother Earth only knew who else.
“Not until the day after tomorrow,” I said. “I’ve had a devil of a time getting an audience. Twice now Aurelian’s office has scheduled a meeting, but they’ve had to move it.”
A shadow passed over Edouard’s face. “Trouble with that . . . super telegraph of theirs?”
“Maybe.” I idly reached for the glass of dark wine at the table beside me. “Have you been in the Council? I haven’t seen you.”
The younger man shook his head.
“The Emperor has aged so much,” I said. “He colors his hair, I think. It looks . . . it looks wrong. The centuries since I last saw him have not been kind.” Catching sight of my own reflection in the chocolate-dark of the Kandarene in my glass, I added, “To any of us.”
“How old do you think he is?” Edouard asked. “In years actual?”
“He was crowned in . . . ” I had to remember. “Fifteen eight twenty-six?” Every child in the Imperium was made to memorize the year, palatine or peasant. “That was sixteen hundred years ago. I’d wager he’s perhaps half that.”
“He can’t have much longer, then.”
“Have a care,” I said. It was not proper to speak of the Emperor’s impending death, however innocently. “But no.”
Edouard had denied himself a cup of my wine, but I drank anyway. The Kandarene was rich and faintly sweet. It lingered on the palette like blood, tasting of relentless time. “I am six hundred twenty-two myself, though I was born more than a thousand years ago now . . . ” I looked sadly at the mural of Mars and her sister planet—our mother. “Sometimes I think the galaxy I set out to save doesn’t even exist anymore.”
“I know what you mean, Lord Marlowe,” Albé said. “What is that old saying about planting trees though you’ll not live to enjoy the fruit?”
Abruptly I recalled the passage I had quoted to the Seventeenth Chair of the Lothrian Grand Conclave on that black voyage to Padmurak. “I say it is the cruel law of art that all things must die, and that we ourselves must die . . . having exhausted every suffering, so that the grass, not of oblivion but of eternal life, should grow, fertilized by works.”
Edouard blinked at me, “That’s not it, but you take my meaning.”
“I do.”
“What we do . . . we’re not saving the galaxy—the Empire, I should say—for ourselves. Men like us will never know peace, lordship.”
“Men like us?” I said, looking sharply at the young man. “Are we alike, Edouard?”
“Yes, lordship,” he said. “We’ve both looked into the abyss, haven’t we? We both know what’s out there.”
We did at that.
“It falls to us to ensure the rest of the galaxy doesn’t have to know, isn’t that right?” He stood as he spoke, retrieving his black service beret from the arm of the sofa. He pressed it to his head, draped it toward the right ear.
I matched him, setting aside my goblet to find my feet.
“That is what I tell myself,” I said.
“They’re wrong to send you away,” I said. “Our work isn’t done.”
“That’s not for me to decide,” said A2. He placed his left hand into his pocket, seemed to hesitate. Presently he offered his right, in peasant fashion, palm up for me to take. “I hope we meet again.”
I took the offered hand, saying, “As do I.”
I felt the slip of paper creak against my palm, felt too my heart grow numb with dread. My eyes flicked to Edouard’s face. The other man smiled, nodded, withdrew his hand. Drawing back, he pressed that hand to his breast in stiff salute. “It was an honor to meet you, lord. I can’t imagine there are many in the Imperium who can claim to know all the children of old Lord Alistair.”
“Not even I can claim that,” I said, having never met my sister, Sabine.
“Domi?” Neema had emerged from the servant’s door. “There’s someone at the door, Commander Kas’s men just waved to alert me. Shall I have him wait?”
Edouard straightened his tunic, rested one hand on the silver buckle of his belt. “I was just leaving, sirrah,” he said.
“Did the Martians say who it was?”
Neema sniffed. “Two words at a time is the best the brutes can manage.”
Albé’s note was still in my fist. I slid my hands into my pockets, mind already working through the details of just how I would manage to read the blasted thing. I would have to hide the thing in plain sight, open it among my papers, find a way to dispose of it where my monitors would never think to look. Hide it in a wad of toilet tissue, or else secret it in a pocket of my clothes until next I left my chambers—toss it over the side of one platform, to tumble the thousands of miles down to Forum’s metallic seas.
I felt as though I clutched a slug of pure uranium, felt its radiation burning through the lining of my pocket.
“I’ll see Agent Albé out myself, then,” I said, not sure who my mysterious visitor could possibly be. I had been so without guests for so long that to have two visitors in one day was a marvel, or would have been, had not Albé’s note become the heart of a neutron star weighing down my pocket.
I led the man out into the foyer, past the water closet and the coat closet to the cold, metal door. I had control of that door, though there were always Martians posted outside. The imitation of freedom.
“Your family must be proud,” I said.
He touched his cap. “They think me a courier in the diplomatic corps. But they are proud of what they think their son is.”
“They should be,” I said, and thinking of the unanswered question, I appended, “You’re a good man, Albé.”
“None of us is good, lord,” Edouard said, “It for us to do good despite ourselves.”
“Parting wisdom?” I asked, offering my wryest smile.
“Something like that,” the younger man said.
“This is not the end,” I said to him. “We’ll meet again.”
“I hope so,” he said, but his smile said that he thought otherwise.
I keyed the door, turned to greet my guest.
I should have known the day would come, had hoped for it since he had emerged from his massive egg in the Porta Prince Arthur.
Lorian Aristedes was standing in the hall, caught midway through a word with the Martian to my door’s left. He wore the Monarch’s black and gold, and carried his falcon-headed cane in the crook of one arm. When he saw me, he removed his cap and placed it under that same arm.
At once I found I did not know what to say.
“Lorian . . . ”
There were indeed black lines beneath the intus man’s waxen flesh, like mineral veins deposited by water in white marble. They spiderwebbed across his face, faint but plain to see. His long hair hung over the right shoulder, queue secured by three golden rings.
“You’re Commander Aristedes!” Edouard said, bowing his courtly best. “The Tamerlane’s tac officer.”
Lorian’s brows arched. “It’s Commandant General, these days,” he said. “I’m no longer with the Imperium.”
“Yes, of course,” Albé bowed. “I’d heard that, too.”
“How are you?” I asked, words barely more than whispers.
It did not seem real. When Lorian and I had said our farewells aboard the Tempest, both of us had known it was for the final time. And yet it was not—had not been.
“I’m . . . good,” the little man said, and smiled in his lupine way. “As good as I’ve ever been.”
Remembering myself, I said, “This is Special Agent Edouard Albé, Imperial Office. HAPSIS Division.”
“HAPSIS?” Lorian’s eyes slid from my face to Edouard’s and back again. “What are you doing here, Marlowe?”
“I should let you two be alone,” said Edouard. “My Lord Marlowe.”
I smiled, and said, “Until our next meeting.” I touched the outside of my pocket, pressed to feel that the man’s note was still there.
It was.
“I hope there will be one,” he said, and offered crisp salute.
“There will be,” I said.
Then he was gone, nodding to my door wards as he passed. Lorian turned to watch him go, drumming spidery fingers against the head of his cane. “Stiff fellow, isn’t he?” He grinned up at me. “Formal.”
“Not like you,” I said, matching the little man’s grin.
“Not at all!” Lorian said, and eying the Martians standing like statues to either side of my door, he added, “May I come in?”
“Of course,” I stepped aside to permit the fellow to pass me. He speared the floor with his cane as he crossed the threshold, and I cycled the door behind us both, glaring briefly at the Martian to my right as the portal slid closed.
“What in the eight hells are you doing here?” he hissed, shifting his grip on the cane so that he held it like a sword. So swift was the change in his demeanor that I recoiled. “You were supposed to be on Jadd!”
“I was on Jadd!” I said, growling to match the other man’s snarl.
“And I was on Belusha!” he countered. “I went to Belusha for you.”
My gaze fell to a spot on the floor beside Lorian’s boots, bounced up to the ceiling to the black aperture of a camera eye in the ceiling. We were being watched, and recordings of our conversation would find their way to unfriendly eyes and ears in time. But Lorian was the representative of a foreign power now, a Commandant General in the Monarch’s Grand Army. Like Valka on Emesh, he would be accorded a species of diplomatic immunity . . . and I? What could they do to me that they could not do already? Indeed, they must have admitted Lorian precisely to see what would happen, to search for coded signs and mysteries.
I smiled. They would be disappointed.
“You think this is funny?” Lorian stepped toward me, a menace and a tension in his posture I had never known in the man. He seemed—if anything—more vital than ever I had seen him, as though he were spoiling to strike me.
“It’s good to see you,” I said.
That stopped the little man’s rage, set him back a pace. His cane struck the floor between his feet, both hands folded atop it. He pressed his lips together—cap still squeezed beneath his arm. “You too.”
“Do you want wine?”
“You always did keep a good cellar,” the other man said, following me.
“I’ve a Kandarene red open.”
“Sold.” Lorian swept the sitting area, pausing to lay his cap on the sideboard. “I liked your place on Nessus better.” He pointed at the mural of the planets. “Though the decorations are a sight more tasteful here than there.”
Recalling the painting of Lord Maddalo’s paramour, I shook my head. “You did escape, didn’t you?”
“You’re implying I was set loose?” Lorian dropped into a chair at angles to my own.
“I’m not implying anything,” I said, filling the glass Edouard had declined.
Lorian accepted it with uplift. “Your health.” As I returned the gesture, he said, “I imagine how I escaped Belusha is very high on the list of questions our audience wants answered.” He pointed at the ceiling once more, twirled his finger in a circle. “Belusha was . . . you can’t imagine it. There’s the main prison—Downwell, they call it, that’s where the sleepers stay. The rest of it’s mining camps. Petrochemicals, mostly. And the scrapyards. They had me pulling precious metals out of derelicts the better part of four years before I ran.”
“Ran?”
The little man took a long swig from the glass. “Out into the wastes. They don’t really guard the camps—they don’t have to. Belusha’s a whole lot of nothing, but there’s people out there. Others as ran away . . . and their sprouts. The outborn, they’re called. Raid the camps sometimes. Empire doesn’t care. If the prisoners out there die, they die.” Incongruously, he smiled. “There was a girl, Sarala. She saved me.” His voice dropped off, and he went still. “I tried to save her.”
Catching his careful choice of words, I asked, “Tried?”
Lorian smiled sadly.
“If you won’t tell me how you escaped,” I said, “how did you come to . . . ” I gestured at his uniform, at the Monarch’s colors and falcon sigil. “All this?”
“You first,” said Lorian, leaning in. “I thought you were getting out! You were supposed to be on Jadd! Instead you’re here, on Forum, in the Lions’ den! I say again, Marlowe: What in eight hells!”
That was the second reference to the Cid Arthurian afterlife the good commander had made in so many minutes. I studied him a long moment then. He seemed to have aged but little in the two centuries since last I’d seen him. The sallow, skeletal face was—but for the addition of those blackened veins—the same face I had seen that last day aboard the Tempest, those colorless eyes the same laughing windows on a mind of wheels within wheels.
“The Emperor pardoned me,” I said.
“And you came back?” Lorian’s words dripped venom. “I went to Belusha, and you came back?”
“I wasn’t given a choice,” I said. “The Empire subsidizes the Jaddians’ military budget. They threatened to withdraw support if Prince Aldia did not turn me over.”
Lorian swore. “At the same time they’re begging the whole damned galaxy for aid? What could be so serious?” He shook his head. “You’re a good officer, Marlowe, but you’re not worth more than the whole damned Jaddian armada!”
“I wish I could tell you,” I said, touching Edouard’s note through my trouser front.
Lorian’s face darkened, “The ceiling people?”
I held my face immobile. “I’m meant to meet with the Emperor the day after tomorrow,” I said. “There’s something I still have to do. Unfinished business, you understand.”
“Unfinished business?” One hand on the head of his cane, Lorian leaned back against the cushions. “Dorayaica?”
I smiled. I could say nothing.
“Something to do with that HAPSIS fellow? Contact?”
I only kept smiling.
“Damn it, Marlowe! You have to give me something!”
“No,” I said, surprising myself, “I don’t.” Eager to change the subject, I set my glass aside and sitting forward said, “Lorian—the Extrasolarians? Are you insane?”
“Where was I supposed to go?” Lorian said, setting his glass aside. “A fugitive like me?”
“Not to the Extras!” I said, and gesturing to his face, asked, “What have they done to you?”
One of Lorian’s hands flitted to his face, and I saw the same blackness webbing the back of that hand. “They cured me,” he said, snarling. “Nerve implants. They replaced most of my tendons and major ligaments, too. See?” He held up both hands, waggled his fingers. “No braces.” Seeing my face darken, he said, “I know what you’re thinking. There’s no daimon. Nothing half so smart as your terminal. They wanted to. Wanted to give me a new body—said they’d even make me tall, but I wanted to stay me.” He let his hands fall. “It’s not so different from your arm.”
“I’m glad you’re well,” I said.
“You haven’t seen him, Marlowe,” Lorian said, eyes suddenly aglow. “Calen Harendotes. He’s like . . . he’s like you, I guess. He has vision. He’s building a better world.”
“A better world?” I echoed. Had I not used the same words myself, and more times than I could count? Was it not for a better world that I had toiled for so long—and so fruitlessly?
“A world without blood. The Empire would never have given me my own command,” Lorian said. “I was only a commander because you pulled me off that desk in Beller’s office. Everything the Monarch’s given me, I earned. Look at me, Marlowe. Commandant General! I led our fleet at Eragassa, at Nida—half a dozen other places. Where else would that have been allowed?”
“With me,” I said shortly, stopping his furor.
“It was over, Marlowe!” Lorian almost yelled, almost stood. “The Red Company was gone! You were gone!” Realizing he was near shouting, Lorian checked himself, and lowering his voice, said, “You should have stayed on Jadd. Drowned yourself in harem girls and the prince’s best wine!”
“I told you,” I said. “That wasn’t an option.”
“Then maybe you’ve lived too long!” Lorian snapped, voice rising again.
I glared at him, shocked, hurt, surprised.
“Abba?” A voice intruded from the inner hall, and looking up I saw Cassandra, standing in the arch that led to the back rooms, dressed in a knee-length Jaddian tunic and loose trousers. “I heard voices.”
Lorian stood, mouth half-open. His eyes flickered from Cassandra’s face to my own, and he touched his rope of bound hair. Turning to me, he said, “Valka’s?”
I nodded.
“How?”
By way of answer, I fished the phylactery out from under my shirt by its chain, held it hooked on one thumb. “Her blood,” I said. “The Jaddians made her for me.”
“Abba?” Cassandra’s face darkened with suspicion. “Qi es aphto?”
“Cassandra,” I said, letting the phylactery fall and gesturing to my guest, “this is Lorian Aristedes.”
Her eyes widened. “Your friend?”
Lorian’s eyes were shining, and he shut them as he smiled, raised one hand to shield his face. “Yes, my lady,” he said. “I have that honor.” He turned to me, brows knitting. “Not a clone?”
“Our daughter,” I said.
Lorian’s face split. “Your daughter?” He turned and bowed.
“It’s an honor to meet you, messer,” Cassandra said, and curtsied. “Abba has told me so much! Have you come for dinner?”
Crossing the room, I put an arm around her, and before Lorian could object, I said, “Please.”
* * *
In the end, he stayed for the remainder of the evening. Neema fussed about the addition of a surprise dinner guest, but Lorian was uncharacteristically gracious after Cassandra’s appearance, and I sensed that as I had hardened in my old age, Lorian had softened.
Though he had at first seemed a man utterly transformed, the good commander asserted himself throughout the evening, emerging from the cracks in the Commandant General’s face. He was Lorian still, but a Lorian filled with a new drive and purpose, a dream that he had seized with his own hands, in his own way. He was Lorian still, Commandant General of the Latarran Grand Army and my friend both.
But things had changed, were always changing—were not and would never be the same.
When he was gone, I retired to my chambers at the rear of our apartments, spoke the word of command to lower the shades. My folios lay stacked upon a corner of the rose-quartz-topped desk in a niche to the right-hand side, facing the four-poster bed with its pillars like feathered serpents. In full sight of the cameras I knew were hidden in the molding, in the headboard, in the stained-glass panel in the door to my private bath, I seated myself in the tufted desk chair, opened my folio to a half-finished sketch of Mt. Hephaistos drawn from memory. It looked wrong to me then, as it had for months—but always I had hesitated to remove it. There were loose leaves of paper on the desk at my right hand. Rough sketches of human faces. Gibson, Pallino, Corvo and Valka together. These mingled with printouts, bound copies of the minutes from the previous week’s council meetings. Reports from the War Office.
I tore the sketch free, crumpled it, set the ruin atop the loose pages. I set Edouard’s note down with it, made a show of opening the crumpled image, of looking at it with regret. It permitted me the chance to open Edouard’s own note, to disguise the action of doing so as only a part of my artistic consideration.
I could see the words of Edouard’s message plain, half-hid beneath that rumpled sketch.
Chantry intends to block your meeting with Emperor.
They know about the Cielcin on Gadelica.
Will attempt to frame for treason.
May attempt violence. All I know.
In haste,
E