I felt my own smile grow to match, felt the quiet laughter of a moment ago threaten to return. “Who did you think I was?” She didn’t have to say it. I knew.
Valka looked at me a long time, those golden eyes bright in the gloom with a light all their own. “You can guess, I’m sure.”
I could. She thought I was Crispin. Thought I was a butcher, a thug. She thought I enjoyed the violence of our world, a wolf among wolves, and though the Empire was a wilderness of wolves, I did not think that I was one of them. There must have been something of that thought on my face, for she said, “You’re not, though. You wear your Imperial mantle like it chafes you.”
“It does.”
“Why?” she asked. “Why are you unhappy? This place . . . They want to give you everything. You have everything. You’re a palatine, and they want to make you consort to a girl who rules a planet. Do you know how insane that is? Anaïs Mataro ruling a planet? Or anyone, for that matter.”
We both laughed a little, her at the Imperium, me at Anaïs. When that was done I looked away, fiddling again with the chips of stone in the sand beside me. “What makes you think that what I have here is so worthwhile?”
“Your privilege, you mean? Would you rather you were one of your peasants?”
“I was a peasant for years,” I said harshly, glaring at her. “I lived in storm drains, Valka. I lost my . . . my friend to the bloody Gray Rot. I almost died in Colosso more times than I can count. I’ve been through things you can’t imagine. Don’t preach to me about privilege. I know what I am. I didn’t choose it, but don’t think I haven’t suffered for it. And staying here would be no privilege.” I couldn’t keep looking at her, not just then. Not with what I was about to say. “But Gilliam . . . Gilliam was my fault. I will atone for that and beg your forgiveness. I acted wrongly. But if you think that a forced marriage to Anaïs Mataro isn’t a prison for me just because she is gorgeous—your word, not mine—then you don’t know what a prison is.”
To my everlasting surprise, she said nothing, covered her silence with a drink of wine.
An expression so very like pain pulled on the muscles beneath her pale skin. After a moment I said lamely, “I wanted to be a pilot too. Switch and I and some of the others—the myrmidons, I mean—we were going to buy a ship, maybe start merchanting. Maybe mercenary work, traveling from Colosso to Colosso.” I picked up one of the stone chips and hurled it at the sea. It didn’t quite make it there. “I was going to be like Simeon the Red. Travel the stars, meet xenobites . . . rescue princesses, I don’t know.”
“You have a very romantic view of the universe,” she said. She meant it as an insult, but I refused to take it as such.
“I would like to,” I said. “I’m just sorry the universe doesn’t share that aspiration.”
I could feel those unnatural eyes on the side of my skull, but I didn’t look her way. “Are you always this dramatic?”
“Ask anyone who knows me.”
Valka snorted and passed the nearly empty wine bottle back to me. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry too.”
* * *
Another problem with Augustine’s common-sense vision of time: it assumes a sort of causal relationship between past and present, between present and future. True, perhaps, in the physical sense, but in the narrative? No. Stories are not subject to Time, Ever-Fleeting. They transcend time. They are eternal. In Classical English, the word “present” means both “now” and “gift.” How the ancients survived such confusion I will never know, but there is beauty in such vagaries. Each moment, as it passes, is precious and so is separate from the moments that follow or precede it.
The truth? The truth is that I cannot remember if we shared that bottle on the last night at Calagah or if there was some other conversation our final night that I can no longer remember. It does not matter. In memory we rose from the shore and made the walk back to the cleft just as the sky turned to flame and thunder.
A great flash filled the heavens, red and white, channeling deep shadows across the craggy landscape. Smaller flashes followed, blue as daylight. I stood transfixed, staring up at the fading light as fire streaked the heavens. Something cast its flame against the clouds, turning the night to a mummer’s parody of sunset, the colors all wrong even for Emesh’s bloody giant sun. There was pink in that light, and blue—the colors of plasma—falling like lightning across the sky.
I had no time to remember elementary physics. Indeed I had forgotten sense in my shock and awe.
Sound followed shortly after the light, and the shock of it knocked me from my feet. It was like being one of those prophets from antique mythology, brought to my knees—to my face—by the bellowing voice of God. Like thunder, but more than thunder. Like someone had broken the sky. I clapped my hands over my ears, felt myself groan, but I did not hear it, for nothing could be heard beneath the awful crashing. The light was fading, and the sound with it, leaving a tinnitic ringing in my ears undercut by a dull, chthonic rumble, as if another planet were grating itself against the skin of the world.
“Get up!” someone shouted. Something tugged at my arm and shoulders, helped me rise. Valka. It was Valka. Technicians came pelting from their plastic homes, some panicking, others milling, staring uncomprehending at the sky.
Near at hand, someone shouted, “A meteor?”
“Impossible!” another voice declared.
“A ship!” screamed a third. “One of ours?”
“Cielcin!” I lost track of the speakers, of the faceless members of this Attic chorus crying that the army was at the gates. “It’s the Cielcin!” Fear is a strange thing, irrational, but incredible in the way it achieves truth faster than reason.
My ears still rang, and my eyes ached from the fireball. The sky above was scored with streaks of light, the stars lost in the confusion, finer points shimmering in the vaulted airs of heaven, white against the Dark. From the ground it was beautiful, well and truly beautiful, an angry red tower of flame and smoke falling as a sword upon the world. Without needing to be told, I knew our chorus was correct, knew that a ship was falling, smitten by ships more distant still. I knew those fine points of light in heaven were the drive-glows of lighter wings, tiny ships holding no more than two men each deployed to cover and blockade Emeshi airspace.
And I knew. Knew with the bitter certainty of fear.
The Cielcin had come.
The words came easily to me then. “Bel!” I shouted at the nearest technician. “Run to Elomas and tell him to wave Springdeep—we’re going to need fliers. Soldiers.” So small a thing, and yet when I recall that day I remember that as a proud and vital moment, the moment when I could have caved and fallen to the ground but stood fast and straight and acted.
The technician, a feminine man with high cheekbones and a pale offworld complexion, stammered and looked confused. “What?”
Beneath our feet all the world shook, punctuated by a crash of unholy thunder loud as the dying of suns. Valka staggered against me, but I caught her, steadied us on the uneven ground. “The hell . . .” I looked west to where the column of flame had descended, a slash in the sky that now touched the horizon. Streaks of orange light yet fell from the heavens, tongues of flame tracing where the fiery remains of the ship had just fallen from the sky and crashed into the stonelands. “Bel, go! Find the old man!” I turned to Valka. “We need to round everyone up, get them onto the beach, away from here.”
“Away?”
“You can spot the camp from miles off—it’s a target!” The sky in the west choked on smoke, lit from beneath by still-burning flame. Remembering the crash, I was bothered by the blue bursts of light cutting through the chaos. Attitude jets? Yes, they must have been. Ye Gods, they had steered this way. Of course they had. They’d aimed for the one continent on all Emesh. They were banking on walking out of here. I tried to remember details, but the chaos had burned them all a
way. “It could be one of our ships. Shot down.”
Valka stood off to one side. She hadn’t moved for a good ten seconds. “Shot down, maybe, but ’twas not human.” How she could tell through the smoke and noise I could not say. “I think you’re right. We need to get everyone out of here.”
CHAPTER 68
HELP
WE WERE ALL HUDDLED in a shallow spot in the seaside cliffs when the shuttles came, arcing overland and out along the coastline to come back toward Calagah from the sea. Their lights gleamed blue and white, their tread nearly silent on the air, buoyed by Royse repulsors. They came in like the longships of old, kicking up the surf with their engines, outboard attitude jets adjusting their drift. Still more shot past, drives carving blue lines in after-image across the sky, angling toward the spot in the west where the ship had crashed. They looked different in the dimness, oddly fishlike, glinting like brass as they streaked away.
The dozen that set down on the beach were squat lozenges, taller than they were wide. Their slanted front faces hinged open, turning to ramps. A moment later soldiers in rust-colored combat armor tramped out, the Veisi serpent twined across their chests and down their left arms. Their leader—a centurion, by the transverse crest on her helm—passed her lance to an adjutant and unsealed that helmet, which she tucked under her arm. She moved forward, advancing on Elomas and young Karthik where they sat on a low shelf of stone. “Sir Elomas!” She was nearly bald, copper-skinned and severe with a sheet of burn scar above one bright eye. I recalled her from Spingdeep: a good officer, resolute.
“Vriell!” Karthik rose and dashed to the woman, who stopped to embrace the shorter boy. “Are you here to take us away?”
“Aye, little lord!” She tousled the fifteen-year-old’s hair, then stood and spoke to the old knight. “Sir, if you would, I’ve orders to return you to Springdeep directly.”
Elomas had not stirred from his place on the low shelf of stone, boots dug into the beach, jacket thrown down beside him, shirt open to the breastbone as he chewed on one of his chocolate bars. He looked drawn, pressed thin as paper, and yet he smiled at the severe-looking centurion. “What’s going on, Vriell?”
“I’m not at liberty to say, sir.”
“Not even to me?”
“Not to anyone,” she countered, standing at attention, her hand on the hilt of her ceramic short sword—mere soldiers were not permitted true highmatter swords in those days. “Not my place, sir. Orders come straight from the top.”
“From Father?” Karthik asked, meaning Archon Veisi. He peered up at the centurion. “Or the count?”
“From the knight-tribune,” Vriell replied, then realized she’d said too much and set her jaw. “Please, sir. Let’s get everyone aboard the shuttles now.” She stepped aside, gesturing with one arm to indicate that Elomas should take the lead. “This way.”
The knight-tribune. I studied the centurion’s face from my place against the basalt cliff, glanced at Valka and Ada where they sat huddled among the few packs the technicians had liberated from the site. Knight-Tribune Raine Smythe? I summoned up a memory of the woman from the banquet, from Dorian’s Ephebeia and the triumph. Square-jawed and plain, face traced by patrician scars, her unremarkable brown hair cropped short. She had seized power on Emesh, citing some emergency protocol in the wake of what we all knew, officially confirmed or otherwise, was a Cielcin attack. Count Balian would have ceded authority to her as the ranking Legion officer, allowing her temporary command of his personal forces. That explained the Mataro green mixed in among the red and white of His Radiance’s Legions.
Lights still flickered in the sky, bursting and sparking as lighters and other starships tracked and dragged to high and lower orbits, bisecting the night sky with streaks of flame. Every now and again, a point silently blossomed into a rosette of pink-red flame: the death of some spacecraft. The poets romanticize space combat; holograph operas depict them as things of sound and fury. Even from within a battle it is not so, but from the outside they are only light and silence, save when the heavens come crashing down. I rose from my place, craning my neck to look back along the shoreline to where the smoke of the distant crash muddied the air, lit from beneath by plasma fires and burning metal.
“How far off are they?” I demanded. “The Cielcin?”
The centurion looked at me, recognition in her bright eyes. Her eyebrows—or rather, her eyebrow and the patch of burn scar—rose in surprise. “Lord Marlowe.”
“Centurion,” I said. Valka and Tor Ada moved steadily toward the fliers, pushing through the milling few dozen technicians and archaeologists. “We know it’s the Pale.”
The patch of burn scar above Vriell’s eye whitened. “Then you understand the need for haste.”
“Who’s on the other fliers?” I pointed up at the sky.
“Jaddians,” she answered, unsure how much my rank demanded that she share with me, “and the Legion.”
I glanced at Valka, then to Elomas. “Sir, you have to let me go with them.”
“What?” Elomas’s eyes widened, green even in the predawn light. “Why?”
“Out of the question, lordship!” the centurion said, taking a step forward to lay a hand on my arm above the elbow. “The count would never forgive me or Lord Veisi if you were to come to harm.”
I brushed her gauntleted hand off, but she reasserted her grip. What did I care if Archon Veisi lost favor in the eyes of the count at Borosevo? He was only a regional governor. A flicker of my father’s aristocratic ice slipped into the edges of my voice, and I hissed, “Get your hands off me.” Vriell quailed visibly, reminded for a moment that I was palatine. She released me. That I was to be the consort of her count’s future heir was a secret, was irrelevant, but my own breeding was enough to engender pause. “You’re going to back them up once the dig team’s secure?” She didn’t respond, just set her heavy jaw, chin thrust out. I took it for affirmation and clapped my hands. “Good. I’m coming with you.”
“Lordship . . . I . . .”
“I’m coming with you.” I brushed past her, making for another of the drop-ships, one the dig team was not pouring into.
Valka’s voice rose above the hum of repulsors and the lapping of waves. “Hadrian!”
I turned back, planted by chance on a slight rise in the craggy beach. My words were for the centurion, though I spoke as my father might, to the whole group. “If any of the Pale survived, I can talk to them. I can get them to surrender.” Whatever Valka had been about to say, she grew quiet. “I can help! Centurion, you know I can help.”
The truth was that I did not know what made me say it, what drove me. Curiosity, perhaps? Or pride? Even now, after all the centuries, all the bloodshed, after the death of a sun and the death of a species, after all the good and evil done by me and in my name and in the name of mankind, it is that instant that rings true. If you seek a moment—the moment—on which to hang my life, it is there. Upon that stony shore at the margin of the world, on a night when fire reigned and fell from heaven, I found a purpose. I was Hadrian Marlowe again. I was like a man possessed, and I stood fidgeting with the wheal of cryoburn scar on my left thumb. I had lost my ring, thrown it away in Borosevo. I’d looked for it the next morning, but it had vanished. Stolen, I had guessed, by one of the servants, or else tidied away by some unthinking cleaning machine. I had not pressed my claim at the time. It was next to worthless now that my titles and holdings had been revoked by my father, and I’d had other things to worry over.
“It’s not safe.” The centurion shook her head and advanced on me again. “You have to go back to Springdeep.”
“Then you’ll have to stun me, Centurion, and then you can explain to Anaïs Mataro why it is you stunned her fiancé.” That struck true, and the color drained from the centurion’s face. Seeing my opportunity, I forged ahead. “Let me go where I can help.” Vriell looked from me to Sir Elomas, but the old
man only shrugged, wind pushing his mop of white hair over his face, obscuring it. “If I can talk to them, maybe I can stop further bloodshed. You don’t want to lose any of your people, surely.” Makisomn’s head rolled behind my eyes, and I sucked in a breath, eyes screwed shut for a moment as I marshaled myself and forced words out. “Three hundred years of fighting, Centurion, and in all that time we’ve never, never seen the Cielcin surrender. We can change that.”
CHAPTER 69
OF MONSTERS
EVEN AS I HURRIED down the ramp, a shield-belt heavy at my waist, I could not believe it had worked. Vriell had gone with Elomas and the others—even Valka had not objected to the retreat back to Springdeep—leaving me in the care of her adjutant and second-in-command, a coal-skinned optio whom I did not know. The man led me and the decade of troopers in our flier across the primordial countryside of wort and moss to the place where the Cielcin ship lay smoldering like a finger fallen from a burning corpse, broken at the end of a great furrow in the landscape turned up by the grinding halt of its impact. I slowed as we approached, overcome by the realization that I had never before seen so great and terrible a vessel. Unbroken, it might have been half a kilometer from end to end. Now it was a smoldering ruin of heat-blackened metal and what looked incredibly like stone. Not a castle of ice at all—what ice would survive a brush with Emesh’s atmosphere?
The flames still burned. Figures stood illuminated by the few Jaddian fliers still turning in the air, black against the night. Juddering repulsors shone blue above us. A curious mix of Jaddian mamluks in blue and orange and Imperial legionnaires in ivory armor and red tabards crawled over the scene, supported by the odd Mataro staffer in green and gold. Dead ahead, a man in form-fitting leathers stood, flowing robe and empty voluminous sleeve billowing in the wind.
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