It offered a pale hand, long-fingered, with pointed nails red as its painted lips. Finding my voice, I looked it in the face and said, “And you’re The Painted Man, I assume?” I moved to take the frightful white hand, noting the tattooed eyes peering out from its wide sleeve.
It snatched its hand away, holding it above its head, bracelets rattling as it wagged its finger at me. “I am no one, boy. Remember it.” It leered at me, settling back in its chair. “Samir, darling. Fetch us tea.” It waved that hand in dismissal, and the fat plagiarius went back out past the screens. All was quiet for a moment, the five of us alone with the demon. Over its shoulder, I could see the strange and sprawling city unrolled beneath us. A towering rocket stood not far off, blinking with holographic advertisements and the ever-present scaffolding that endeavored to turn the peculiar architecture of Arslan into something enduring.
“Messer,” I said, taking the careful point against using the homunculi’s name, “I am Hadrian Marlowe, Lord Commandant of the Meidua Red Company. I assume Samir has spoken to you of our needs?”
The Painted Man rubbed its arms under the sleeves, the images of lidless eyes and leering mouths painted on its skin blinking from beneath the violet silks. “There’s only one thing people, uh, come to me for.” Its nails snicked on the tabletop, and it turned its head from each of us to the other. I could not track its eyes—there were no whites in them—and it seemed to look everywhere at once. I read once that our ancestors had evolved whites in their eyes for precisely that reason: that the rest of us might know where the other looked. It was no wonder those humanish creatures with the lying eyes had been stamped out. I could not trust it. “Sit, sit, sit!” It waved me to the opposite chair, then, realizing there was only the one, shrugged and said, “Your little . . . friends here. They will have to stand, I’m afraid.”
As I seated myself, I could feel Switch move closer behind me, taking up a position at my shoulder. I knew it was him without having to turn. I took in a deep breath, trying to quiet my grated nerves from the shock of seeing The Painted Man’s face. I had a plan, and I meant to stick to it. I had to shock the creature—no small task—and hoped the brain behind that horrid face was still human enough to understand. “I’m here for information.”
A muscle spasmed in the homunculi’s cheek, and its brows contracted. Hit. “Information, you say?” It stroked the hollow of one cheek. “Samir said you were in the market for atomics?” It almost pouted with those bloody lips, the painted shadows around its eyes stretching down the inmane’s face. Tugging on the silver hoop in one ear it said, “Do not test my patience, little boy.”
I told myself I had faced worse creatures than this, whatever its monstrous appearance. I had faced truly inhuman monsters before, I had faced an Ichakta-captain of the Cielcin and lived to speak of it. I had burned Emil Bordelon out of the sky. I had fought in Colosso and sat at table with my own father, the Butcher of Linon, more times than I could count. I had nearly been killed in the streets of Meidua, and faced the other boys that dark night in Borosevo. What was this—what was it—next to all that? The poets say that one’s fears grow less with trial, that we become men without fear if tried enough. I have not found it to be so. Rather, on each occasion we are tested, we become stronger than our fears. It is all we can do. Must do. Lest we perish for our failings.
And so I spoke. “You are an Extrasolarian. I wish to deal with the Extrasolarians. With your masters, whoever they may be. I want a way to contact them.”
“My . . .” The creature mulled over the words. “. . . masters.” It looked at me—or so I thought—with those eyes like drops of ink. It smiled again, smiled with its whole face. “You don’t know what we are, do you? You ask after masters, but we are not the bloody, fucking Empire. There are no masters. You deal with me.”
“I meant no offense.” I splayed one hand on the tabletop, narrowed my eyes. “Weapons are the smallest part of what I want,” I said, playing the mercenary captain. “Things that can’t be had under the Imperial Sun. Do you follow me?”
The homunculi’s demeanor changed at once. It sat back, and the too-wide smile—momentarily banished—returned with astonishing speed. It laughed, a high, grating sound like air escaping an old instrument. “Is that how it is, then?” It leaned forward, black eyes turning blacker as it grinned, attention flitting from one of us to the next. “Oh, but this is amusing.” It pointed squarely at me. “Civilization’s on the wane, you know? They say the Imperial Sun is red because it’s grown supergiant. And supergiants burn out. The xenobites burn cities, take millions . . . and here’s a nobleman of the blood of old King William himself, asking after daimons. What a time to be alive.”
Samir chose that moment to return with a metal tea service, which he placed on the table between us. I took a moment to compose myself, rattled by The Painted Man’s remark about old King William. It meant the Emperor, of course, the first Emperor. How had the homunculus known that I was a part of the Peerage? Of the blood Imperial itself? Or did it only mean that I was palatine?
“You misunderstand me,” I said, taking the tea service before the creature across from me could. Bassander’s discomfort with the idea of even pretending to have truck with daimons floated up in my mind. But I’d had a better idea. One closer to the truth. “I’d been given to understand the Extrasolarians were the very best to go to for . . . unnatural requests.” Emboldened, I added, “You’re living proof that must be true.”
Reclining against the back of its seat, The Painted Man smiled. “You don’t know the half of it, little boy.” Then it smiled, and the red paint about its lips stretched, flowing as if from under its skin until the points of its smile stretched horribly from ear to ear. “You still don’t seem to understand, though. There are no Extrasolarians. Not the way there’s an Empire. We don’t organize. That’s why I don’t have any masters. No gods or emperors. No hierarchy.”
I snorted, glancing at Samir where he cowered as invisibly as an obese man could. “No hierachy, eh?” With difficulty, I pulled my attention back to the pallid face with its horrid too-wide smile. “The fact you don’t pay taxes doesn’t mean you’re free, or that there’s not someone out there who can squash you.”
“Why would they? I’m a businessman. I provide a service, and for a modest price,” The Painted Man said, combing its too-red hair back from its too-white face.
“What service is that, exactly?”
“If you didn’t know that, you beautiful idiot, you would not be here.” It turned its head to Samir. “My lovely friend explained, did he not?” He had. The Painted Man salvaged nuclear ordnance from abandoned Imperial and Norman bases throughout the Veil, or else raided house stores on the borders. It did other things: trafficked in smaller arms and less caustic technologies. Things like starships, terraforming hardware, even the dreaded daimons of artificial intelligence. “So what is it you’re really after, if not the atomics?” The red pigment twisted into evil spirals across its cheeks. They vanished almost as fast, leaving me contemplating the nightmare before me.
“I do want the atomics,” I said, taking only the smallest sip of the tea. I had to suppress a grimace. “But not only.” The situation called for delicacy. I did not know what it was I needed to ask for. I could hardly say that I wanted Vorgossos because I was an Imperial agent, could I? “The Chantry forbids the trade of xenobitic artifacts between worlds within the Imperium.”
The Painted Man put down its teacup suddenly and held a hand to its mouth, as if in surprise. One of its tattoos floated up its wrist and filled the back of its hand. A grinning mouth, twin to the one on its face. It widened, revealing a tongue red as its lips. Then it was gone, and The Painted Man asked, “Xenobites? The Cielcin, do you mean?”
“I’m a collector, you see,” I said, spreading my hands. “And I had word from a Durantine trader on Pharos that there was a place where the Extrasolarians—where people, I should say�
��where they traded with the Cielcin.” It was all a lie, of course. There had been no Durantine merchanter at Pharos.
I realized only then that The Painted Man’s stunt with the tattooed mouth had been a distraction, meant to hide its genuine response. I had surprised it, for it said, “I have heard . . . stories.”
“Vorgossos,” I said, preferring again to speak shortly and sharp. “I had always believed it was a myth, but . . . this merchanter . . . he said he’d been there.” Had it been my imagination, or had the homunculi’s inhuman eyes darkened at the name Vorgossos? Samir had flinched as he had in the drug den when I spoke of The Painted Man. Switch had caught on as well, for his fingers tightened on the top of my chair, just behind my shoulder.
“Vorgossos? Now that is interesting,” The Painted Man said with another of its frightful bouts of laughter. “It must have something to do with the way they breed you nobiles. You’re all so baroque.” It glanced up at the others behind me and spoke in a stage whisper. “Is it sexual, your interest? Because there is trade in that, you know? You wouldn’t even have to go to the Undying. March Station would be far enough. The Exalted would be all too happy to drug one of the Pale long enough for you to get your play—I hear you don’t want them awake—they bite more than I do.” At this it gnashed its teeth and chortled. “Aah, humans are so interesting. But then, you’re as human as I am.”
A series of emotions flashed through me: disgust, contempt, anger, disgust again. I slammed my eyes shut, trying to gather my scattered thoughts. Deciding not to rise to the bait, I said, “What’s the Undying?”
The homunculus threw an arm across its face in exasperation and turned away. The eyes tattooed on its pale flesh shut themselves and vanished entirely. “You ask for Vorgossos but do not know its lord?”
“I thought you said there was no hierarchy among the Extras?”
It laughed again, then without warning slammed both its hands flat against the table, half-standing. Switch and Ilex each took a half-step forward behind me, but the homunculus rocked back in its seat, laughing. “The look on your face!” It pointed again, its red smile spreading across its face without the lips moving at all. Scowling through its grin, it said, “Shall we stop dancing, Lord Marlowe? I thought you’d be more amusing than this . . . with your reputation. What you did to dear sweet Admiral Whent’s men . . .” It sucked in a breath, as if about to cry. “Hilarious.” It grinned, and the red pigment in its lips faded away.
Glancing up at Switch and Greenlaw to my right, I said, “Very well. I want the location of Vorgossos in addition to the supply of atomics my man discussed with yours.” At this I jerked my head in Crim’s direction. “If this is agreeable to you, I—”
The Painted Man raised a hand. Its long red nails snicked against one another. “I can’t give you Vorgossos. It can only be found by those its master allows to find it.”
“And why is that exactly?” I asked. I was running out of patience. I had traveled too far and for too long to give up so easily. I hoped Ghen was close with his troops. Ilex would still be in communication with them, ready to move on my signal.
“Because it is a planet without a sun, and those are not easy to find. Enough of this.” It drank again, and turning to its toady said, “Samir, dear. You promised me a mercenary company, not a nobleman on holiday.”
The fat man bowed so rapidly I thought he’d fallen. “Forgive me, master. They seemed serious.”
I stood then. That was a grave mistake. “I am serious.”
The Painted Man raised a hand, and at once the two thugs on the other side of the screens came through. How they had known when their master signaled I couldn’t guess.
Switch spoke up for the first time. “Hadrian, we should go.” He put a hand on my arm.
I brushed him off angrily, only to find the hands of the two thugs on me. “I came to trade, homunculus.”
“No, you didn’t!” the homunculus said, stepping lightly up onto the table, robe flapping in a sudden wind from over the railing. “This whole thing is a joke, Lord Marlowe. And while you are very funny, I’ve had enough. I know exactly what you are.” It looked straight down at me and grinned, its impossible smile widening beyond all human imitation. With a jerk of its chin, it dismissed the two thugs, who hauled me backward, despite Switch’s politic objections. No one went for their weapons, for which I was privately grateful—my shield wasn’t on. We passed out onto the crowded portico.
No one looked at us. The conversation didn’t even stumble. On the street in Borosevo we used to say someone could beat you down in the street and no one would stop to help. Many times I’d watch another urchin like me turned to pulp by the prefects or less legitimate thugs in full view of other people. Rousseau was wrong.
“I need to get to Vorgossos!” I shouted. Still no one looked our way. My four compatriots stood, assessing—Ilex, I hoped, was signaling Ghen. We’d have to move fast to take The Painted Man. I prayed the big myrmidon was in place.
“I may be a great many things, boy,” The Painted Man said, and it jumped down off the table, pressing past Crim with as little regard as you or I might give a cockroach, “but I don’t trade with Imperial spies.”
I had nothing to say to that. It had me right. It smiled entirely too close to my face—its tattoos were flushing up its neck like a fever. A cloud of little black eyes opening. At that precise moment a shot rang out. Not the cough and roar of plasma fire, nor the simple pop of a laser as it flash-boiled its living target. This was the concussive blast of a simple firearm. A sniper. One of the thugs holding me fell away and a fine spray of blood washed over my face, my coat. I thought I spied the flash of a targeting laser from the scaffolding about the rocket that was becoming a tower opposite us. At that precise moment a half dozen soldiers in heavy gray cloaks sprang over the railing at the edge of the porch, led by Ghen.
It was the strangest thing, not because the ordinary world—a tea house—had plunged off a cliff into the ocean of chaos that roils beneath all things, but because it hadn’t. The diners kept eating. Drinking. Talking. They kept laughing. They hadn’t missed a beat. I couldn’t afford to, either; couldn’t afford to dwell on it. I drew Olorin’s sword with my free hand and whirling planted the mouth of the hilt against the fellow’s chest and squeezed the activator. The blade sprang into being. She gleamed in my hand, faintly phosphorescent highmatter glowing blue-white as moonlight. I tugged up and away, slipping a finger through the finger-loop to shore up my grip even as I opened the man from sternum to clavicle. He fell away and turning I faced The Painted Man, blade held en garde. She sang naked and bloodless in my grasp, the exotic metal in her blade rippling like seawater over itself. “I didn’t want to have to do it this way. You’re outnumbered. Come quietly.”
Without smiling, the red pigment in The Painted Man’s inhuman face spread in cruel mockery of a smile, rising almost to its equally scarlet hairline. Something hit me in the back, and I staggered, my sword slicing through one of the paper screens and a part of the metal railing as if it weren’t there. The Painted Man moved quickly, leaping into the crowd—which as a unit found its feet. Each and every man, woman, and child in the group—who moments before had been laughing and dining and living their lives—went silent as the tomb. Only the wind spoke, and Ghen, who swore.
“I told you,” the homunculus said, tapping its head with one red-tipped finger. “You don’t know what we are.”
CHAPTER 5
EYES LIKE STARS
HAVE YOU EVER SEEN a corpse? You’d be surprised how many people have not. I remember the first I saw: my grandmother, the Lady Fuchsia Bellgrove-Marlowe, when I was just a boy. Something happens to their eyes . . . It’s indescribable. It’s as if some fluid pressure slackens—whether in the eyelids or in the orbs themselves I cannot rightly say—and they cease to be eyes at all. I say this because the light in each eye of every living child of Earth tells us something of
the mind behind it. It’s a subtle thing, hard to quantify or even to describe. I met a strojeva once, a Durantine android serving as quartermaster on one of their ships. She had eyes that looked human—and indeed might have been grown from human stock. But I knew, knew with the metaphysical certainty of the devoutest priest, that her eyes were dead, and had always been. There was no light in them.
The eyes of that crowd on that porch above the tea house were like the eyes of that strojeva. Hollow. Glassy. Dead. And yet the faces . . . they were the faces of men. Women. Life and care had etched lines on their faces, weathered their skin. There were even a couple of children mixed among them to sell to me the lie that they were still living human beings. What they were in truth I did not then know.
I thumbed the trigger on my shield-belt and pivoted as the energy curtain collapsed around me. Olorin’s sword thrummed in my hand, the strange matter rippling as it moved, the blade’s cutting edge shifting with its direction of motion. Switch fell in behind me, and Ilex; each activated their own shields. “What are they?” I asked The Painted Man, who stood smiling—truly smiling now—amidst his thralls. “Your puppets? What have you done to them?”
The creature didn’t answer. Another shot rang out, making me flinch. One of the diners fell smoking with a fist-sized hole in its chest, and everything changed at once. Still utterly silent, the mob threw itself at us. There must have been fifty of them. Throwing her hood back, Ilex stepped past, drawing a heavy phase disruptor. She fired, the hiss of lightning fuzzing the air.
“Stop that ugly one!” Ghen’s voice was raised above the crowd. “Oh-two, three! With me!” I saw his huge mass gesturing over the heads of the crowd, saw the violet shout of plasma, felt the heat of it even through my shield.
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