Her Majesty set her cup back on its saucer. “All the same. He is a prince of the Empire. A child of the Sun, and my son, and you will look after him.”
“I will,” I agreed, and smiled despite the visions of torture and torment in the dungeons that I felt certain must lurk beneath this holy city in the sky. Nervous, I spared a glance for the androgyn servant standing now beside an antique-looking red figure vase on a stone table. It was trying its best to appear a part of the furniture, bright eyes fixed on the ground. The palace servants were all identical, or nearly so. Intelligent but not creative, they were perfectly loyal and obedient, rapier-thin and long-faced. They frightened me, but I pitied them. They had not chosen to be born as they were.
The Empress’s tea table stood beneath the apex of a glass dome overlooking part of the Cloud Gardens. Leaves so green they were almost black brushed against the glass and the ironwork.
“I cannot remember the last time a mere knight drew such a following,” she began, and I sensed she was working toward some pronouncement or point. “To have fallen so far . . . to be outcaste and to rise again . . . I mean, you’re practically patrician.” She said this last word in a tone that suggested patricians were little better than goats. I held my face still in a rare moment of near-scholiast blankness. The Empress was the product of the finest genetic tailoring in the universe: a living icon. Had I shown her image to some Achaean shepherd, he would have fallen to his knees in worship, mistaking her for Demeter. Small wonder she held those of lesser blood in contempt! What else could a goddess feel for a goat? “Nevertheless,” she continued, “you’ve found yourself quite the following. You’re a true hero.”
Was she mocking me? Like her Imperial husband she had too fine a control of her face, and nothing of her emotions that she did not expressly allow showed in her expression.
“Mother!”
The voice came from behind me, so I had to set the tea down again and turn to see the young man standing in the door of the solarium.
He looked precisely as I imagined. A boy of perhaps thirty standard years. Red-haired like his parents and green-eyed, with high cheekbones and a strong jaw. I’d expected more of the Imperial white, but the only white he wore was a collared half-cape over his left shoulder. His tunic and trousers were black as my own.
“Alexander! Come in!” The Empress rose in a swishing of skirts. “Come meet Lord Marlowe! He’s been waiting for you!”
“Not very long, I hope,” the prince said, stepping into the room, and it was only when he did so that I saw he was not alone. A woman followed him, and so like was she in form and color to the Empress that I knew she must be one of the woman’s own daughters.
I was not certain whether or not I’d seen the prince before. The Imperial princes and princesses were all of so strong an archetype that I could not have told one from another without careful study. I did not kneel, which ordinarily would have been appropriate, my being only a knight and a petty lord without holdings before two of the Imperial children. But I was also, by Imperial decree, the knight appointed to train this young prince, and so I confined my salutation to a simple nod, shifting my posture to stand at attention. I fixed my eyes on a spot on the wall and said, “Sir Hadrian Anaxander Marlowe, at your service.”
The prince smiled nervously, teeth flashing. “Yes, you are!” And to my astonishment, he bowed. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Sir Hadrian, sir.”
“Your father has requested and required that I train you,” I said formally. “With your royal mother’s permission, we plan to leave Forum at fifteen hundred standard.” Directing my question at the servant standing behind the prince, I asked, “I trust the prince’s effects are already aboard my ship?”
“The Tamerlane?” Alexander asked. “Father said we’re going to Gododdin. I’ve never been offworld. Have you? Been to Gododdin, I mean.” He looked down at his boots and seemed to chew his tongue.
I shook my head. “I’ve come in along the old core routes more often than not, returning from the Veil. This’ll be a new adventure for both of us.”
To my surprise then, the young prince took a step forward, jaw gravely set. Solemn-faced, he did something I have never seen a member of the Imperium do before. He thrust out his hand for me to shake in the peasant fashion. So surprised was I that I took it unthinking. In a voice grave as his expression, Prince Alexander said, “I have heard stories about you since I was a boy.”
What could I say to something like that? In its way, it was almost as incredible a line of conversation as my encounter with Carax in the great hall. Unable to help myself, I felt the crooked Marlowe smile bleed across my face as I said, “I hope you did not believe all of them.”
Alexander gave a short, hollow laugh and released my hand. “Oh! I should introduce you!” He stepped aside. “Sir Hadrian, this is my sister, Selene.”
The princess offered me a hand, and as she wore no ring upon her slim, white fingers, I kissed my thumb instead as I took those fingers in mine. “Highness,” I said, looking up at her. I found I had no other words.
For I had seen Selene Avent once before. In a vision given to me by the daimon Brethren in the dark waters below Vorgossos. The vision the Quiet had left with them for me to find. A vision of my future, or one of many futures. In that vision I sat on the Solar Throne with a circlet on my brow, and this princess sat at my feet in a gown of living flowers. Other visions I had seen of a life we two might share, and though we had not met, I remembered the perfume of her hair and the taste of her lips and the way she moved beneath me. Struggling with all this, I kept my eyes downcast in what I hoped was a respectful manner. I could still feel where her hand had touched mine, and thinking of Valka, I made a fist at my side. I did not like to think about that future, or any future without Valka in it.
“My brother speaks most highly of you, sir knight,” the princess said, and the sound of her voice was like a half-remembered melody playing in a distant room. “We are fortunate to have men like yourself defending us.” Her smile was like the first blast of sunlight around the limn of a planet from orbit, and again I averted my eyes.
Haltingly, I answered, “That is kind of you to say, Highness.”
“Will we be leaving now, Sir Hadrian?” Alexander asked. “Directly, I mean?”
“That is my intention.”
“Good, good.” He looked round at the solarium as if he’d never really seen it before. I knew the look well. It was a look more closely kin to fear than people really believe. A fear born of the fact that though we may come back to a place at the end of our journeys, we never really return, for we are not the same person who departed.
Watching this, I could not blame the prince, I who have survived several such transformations myself. So I smiled instead. “We’ll spend a year or two awake on the journey. See what you know, what you can do. See to your training.” The prince brightened visibly at the news, though I sensed the shadow of distaste from the Empress at my brusque tone.
“Please take care of my brother, sir,” Selene said, and clasped her hands before herself.
“I will, Highness,” I said, and I did bow then. “You may depend on it.”
“Should we go now?” the prince asked, eyes still wandering around the old solarium.
I told him we didn’t have much time to linger, and stepped aside as young Alexander said his goodbyes. He knelt before his mother and took her hand in both of his and swore he would return. I remember smiling at this gallant display, thinking that in that moment he seemed everything a prince of the Sollan Empire should be. How little I perceived the weight hanging on his shoulders, or the desire to prove himself. He was one of the latter-born, the one-hundred-seventh child of the Emperor’s impossible brood. A living spare, destined to live out his days in the Peronine Palace, studying statecraft and diplomacy to sit a throne that would be never his, that would go to Crown Prince Aurelian or to Pri
ncess Irene, the second-born. He would be denied marriage and children by the High College and his own father to keep the Imperial clan from swelling to too unmanageable a size. The Kin Wars had taught their bloody lesson and left their mark burning across a million worlds so long ago, when the days of the palatine were counted in years and not in centuries.
Alexander needed desperately to become something. To become someone. To matter. Thus it is for all men. We are nothing until we have accomplished something. Even for the young prince it was so, though his rank gave some identity. Recalling the Hadrian ignored and belittled by his lordly father, I felt a pang of sympathy for the boy.
A thought occurred to me, and I asked, “You’re traveling alone? You’re not bringing servants or guardians?”
“Is your sword not guard enough, Sir Hadrian?” the Empress asked, arching one perfect eyebrow. I felt an echo of Bourbon’s tone in her question. Surely the great Devil of Meidua can keep one little boy safe?
I matched the ice in the Empress’s eyes with flint. “You may depend on it, Majesty.”
“We will,” she said tartly, and I noted the royal style of that reply.
What was said as we departed I do not now recall. I remember the princess’s nervous smile and the Empress’s hard-eyed gaze. So similar were they in appearance and dress. So different in substance. And the boy beside me? The man? There was little of the warrior in his step, little of the commander in his bearing.
How little I guessed of what he would become.
* * *
Our shadows raced ahead of us as we descended the steps of the palace, my coat and his cape fluttering in the wind. The Martians saluted as the prince descended, and I turned my collar up to shield my face. As we passed the fountain, he stopped, and I went on for three paces alone before turning back.
The prince leaned against the rim of the fountain, one hand flat against the marble.
“Sir Hadrian, I know my father did not offer you a choice in taking me, but . . . I am grateful.” The boy would not look me in the face. “I won’t fail you.”
I crossed my arms. “Good.”
What did he see when he looked at me? The Hero of Aptucca? The man who had slain not one but two princes of the Cielcin? The man who they said could not be killed? To the boy I was like a character from a storybook—not a man at all. He looked at me as I might have looked at a dragon had one crawled off the page and curled itself around the Galath Tree.
“I want to be a knight. Like you.”
“This isn’t a field trip, you know.” I did not wait for a reply, but turned and continued onward, moving back toward the strand where my shuttle waited to carry us to orbit and the Tamerlane. I did not hear footsteps on the path behind, and after a moment I stopped, turning back. Prince Alexander still stood there, hands balled at his sides. How small he seemed! How narrow those shoulders bred to wear the mantle of empire. Strange to think of him as that young man again, after all these years, after Gododdin.
After he ordered my execution.
“Are you coming?” I called.
The prince stirred. “I . . . yes!”
“Right then,” I turned away, “let’s be off.” But I stopped short, for something just off the path had caught my eye, white as snow on the mossy stones. I knelt. It was a Galath blossom, so bright it glowed. The wind must have tugged it free of those sacred branches, for it was said that the flowers of the Galath tree never fell. I am not a superstitious man, but the sight of that pale blossom in my fingers sent a chill stealing over me, as though it were the Empire that had fallen.
Or a star.
CHAPTER 5
TAMERLANE
FORUM SHONE BENEATH US, rosy and golden and so vast it filled half the universe. Through the porthole at my ear, I watched the ocean of clouds roil below. Already the Eternal City was lost to sight, its high towers and shining domes swallowed by the empyrean. Ahead, the lonely flames of stardrives flickered like candles against the Dark. When they imagine the black of space, the storytellers imagine starships crowded close enough for men to shout at one another from the rigging.
It isn’t so.
In the Eternal City it was often said that ten Martian legions orbited the gas giant, ever vigilant, boasting enough firepower to unmake a planet ten thousand times over. I never saw them. Once or twice I spied the glow of ion drives or the flash of a fusion rocket, but the red-gold orb of Forum hung quiet and proud in the night amid its archipelago of moons.
“There it is!” I pressed closer to the window and pointed out into the black to where a lonely arrowhead gleamed. At this distance, it was no bigger than my thumbnail, but it was growing fast.
Alexander craned his neck to look past me and asked, “The Tamerlane?”
“Home,” I said. The young man squinted, then reached across me and pressed his fingertips against the glass, made a spreading motion as if to magnify the image. Nothing happened, and laughing, I said, “Just alumglass. It’s a real window. No need for tactical displays in a passenger shuttle.” I leaned back against the slick upholstery, the better to allow the boy to see the ship that had been my home for many decades.
The Tamerlane.
The Eriel-class battleship had been a gift from the Emperor, granted to me in lieu of a planetary fief when he named me a knight and re-legitimized me as a lord of the blood palatine. From engines to bow-cluster she stood more than twelve miles long, pointed and flared like a knife blade from her prow to the convex arc of ion engines above the three huge fusion cones. The heavy armor on her dorsal side gleamed glossy and black in the sunlight, weapons clusters concealed beneath hatches outlined in gold, and beneath that armor the bays and fuel tanks and crew decks hung like an inverse city of towers or forest of trees swept back in a gale. More than fifteen thousand men lived aboard, and nearly seventy-five thousand slept the long and icy sleep of the soldier in great holds high above beneath the dorsal hull.
I could not hear the pilot officer through the bulkhead, though I guessed she must already be in communication with the deckmaster to clear our landing. Speaking to the two hoplites sitting across from us in their Red Company uniforms, I said, “I’m sorry to take you both away from the City so quickly.”
One of the men tugged on his restraints as he leaned in. “Truth be told, lordship, I’m happy to be away.” Only belatedly did he remember he was speaking in front of a prince of the Imperium. I could practically hear the fellow blush through his black visor. “Meaning no disrespect to the young master.”
“I’m your prince!” Alexander said sharply, taking the hoplite aback.
“I didn’t mean any disrespect, my prince.”
Sensing that this could get out of hand and quickly, I put a hand between Alexander and the soldier. “It’s Baro, isn’t it?”
The man puffed out his chest. “Aye, sir.” I’d recognized the peeling decal of the naked woman on his armor’s left thigh. It wasn’t regulation, but I’d encouraged my centurions to ignore such things unless it was for dress uniforms. She had a snake wrapped round one rounded thigh.
“Baro here has never met one of the Imperial House, Alexander. You must forgive him! He’s a good man.” I let my hand fall. “You made decurion recently, didn’t you? I thought I saw a notice . . .”
“After Aptucca. Thank you, sir.” He tapped the single red stripe running down the outside of his right arm to mark his rank. “I’m honored you remembered.”
Keeping my attention fixed on Alexander’s face, I said, “You’ve earned it.”
Outside the Tamerlane grew closer, black hull bright in the yellow sunlight. A fueling station still drifted to one side, connected to the ship’s reservoirs by an umbilical. Preparations for departure were still underway, it seemed. That was well. As we drew nearer our shuttle slid upward, accelerating to rise and catch up to the Tamerlane’s higher orbit.
“Is it always like t
his?” Alexander asked. His eyes were screwed shut, and he’d tucked his chin against his chest. It looked like he might be sick. I had grown so used to the zero-gravity environment aboard such shuttlecraft that I’d not even noticed it.
“You get used to it.”
We landed not long after, sliding into a smaller hold fore and high up, nearly at the level of the dorsal plate. I felt myself sink into my seat as the Tamerlane’s suppression field kicked in, artificial gravity pressing down on me like a damp blanket.
“It’s heavy,” the prince remarked.
“One-and-a-half standard gees,” I said in answer. “We run heavy. It keeps you strong, prevents loss of bone mass.” When Alexander did not look reassured, I summoned up what pity I could muster and said, “You get used to that, too.”
The Eternal City flew above the sea of liquid metal at the heart of the gas giant at an altitude where the atmosphere was at tolerable pressures and where the planet’s gravity was as close to Earth standard as could be found. The prince had lived his entire life in an environment tailored for human habitation, made as much like our lost and ruined homeworld as any place could be. He was in for a rude awakening.
A moment later, the docking booms magnetized and clamped onto the exterior of the shuttle, pulling us into a dock. I heard the hiss of pneumatics and the whine of atmospheric seals depressuring, and the door folded out and downward, becoming a ramp. Standing, I offered Alexander a hand. “Welcome aboard, Your Highness.”
* * *
The crew that waited to greet the prince on the gangway was as motley a collection of Imperial officers and mercenaries, of palatines and plebeians, of homunculi and other misfits as could be contrived this side of Jadd. Captain Otavia Corvo, a Norman mercenary herself, stood at the fore in her black deck uniform. Despite her low birth, Otavia was a giantess. Nearly seven feet tall, musclebound, broad-shouldered, and coffee-skinned, her curling blond hair floated about her head like a halo.
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