It was my turn to narrow my eyes. “Only what they say I am, my lord,” I answered. “The Emperor’s demon. His servant.” Standing, I drew the white cape around me, glad I had chosen to wear it for my audience with Caesar.
I locked eyes with the War Minister and did not let go, did not permit myself even to blink. To the man’s credit, he held my gaze for two seconds, but only two.
“I . . .” He knew I knew, and the touch of inhuman hand had frightened him. There was nothing he could do. The Inquisition had already studied my hand and passed me for it. “Good day, Lord Marlowe.” He turned to go.
I caught Lord Powers watching me, a sad smile on his owlish face. Noticing me looking, he gave a short salute, and said, “I’m sorry, my boy.” Without another word he turned with Lord Haren and departed.
Sorry for what?
I watched the congregation go.
They made it to the distant arch before I called out, “Lord Augustin!”
The fat minister froze and turned with terrific slowness to meet my gaze. I wanted to frighten him, wanted the memory of my eyes to haunt him to his dying day. I stared at him, still unblinking, eyes wide and cold. I caught myself remembering the cold glare my father would give me when I was a boy, violet eyes frozen but blazing as the bluest suns. Beneath my cloak, I extended the first and final fingers of my hand toward the minister. A primitive kind of magic, and an ancient curse.
I was a demon, after all.
Remember me, I thought, as if he could ever forget.
The color drained from Bourbon’s face to see me glowering at him like some predatory hawk, and blanching he looked away and fled.
* * *
The gardens were as I remembered: white pillars with painted capitals arranged in concentric squares around a marble pool thick with the white and pink of lotus blossoms and the azure eyes of nenuphars. Mosaics covered the floors and stood in arches beneath painted vaults along the outer walls of the quadrangle. Presiding over all was a frescoed Icon of Beauty: a nude woman with golden hair enthroned on a crimson shell.
Advancing with my Excubitor escort, I bowed low as I would go, left hand re-gloved at my heart, right hand thrown wide before His Radiant Majesty.
“Rise, Lord Marlowe,” our Caesar said. “Are you well?”
William XXIII sat on his Savonarola chair, green eyes studying me intently.
“I am healed, Honorable Caesar,” I said in answer.
The Emperor’s eyes continued their study of me. I felt like a sample, like a bit of slime beneath some magi’s microscope. “It seems you invite catastrophe wherever you go.” I opened my mouth to object, but Caesar raised one velvet-gloved hand and continued, “I am aware the fault for this particular incident lies in no small part with my dear wife and idiot child, but the fact remains that you are a problem which politics do not permit us to easily solve.” He leaned upon his fist.
I dared not speak. To speak was to implicate the Empress, to accuse the Chantry, to attack the Emperor’s own Minister of War. Such accusations—true or otherwise—could mean death in that place, and I did not want to die. Worse, I could not risk being wrong.
Fortunately, the Emperor was not finished. “We are not certain who put the sword in that Maeskolos’s hand, or who ordered Colosseum security to stand down. Augustin and our Martians assure us they will find the culprit, but we have decided to bow to the advice of our Council and dismiss you.”
“Dismiss me?” I repeated, astounded.
“Not from our service,” the Emperor said. “Our Victorian you will remain, but this trouble in the arena. Do you understand what you’ve done?”
Unable to stop myself, I answered him, “Survived, Radiant Majesty.”
The Emperor’s voice cracked like thunder. “Do not be flippant with me, Marlowe. I have indulged you shamefully for decades because you produce results.” The royal we had vanished when his anger came. “But those results have made you a lightning rod for trouble. Have you considered the possibility that the Chantry itself wants you dead?”
“Yes, Radiance.” I bowed my head.
“Do you understand the position that puts me in, defending you?” he asked.
“I do, Radiance.”
William stood. “Do you?” He remained standing before his throne, deep voice close to shouting. “Our civilization stands upon two legs. I am one, the Chantry the other. Do you know what it means for one foot to trip the other?”
The answer was obvious. We fall.
I only bowed deeper, choosing safety over further flippancy.
“You are useful to me, Marlowe, but you are making it where I cannot defend you from those people who consider themselves our friends and servants without challenging the delicate arrangement between Synod and Throne.” He wheeled—a rustling of white and crimson—to face Beauty on her shell. “My wife has suggested I banish you. Pack you off to Belusha or put you on ice for a few hundred years until this following of yours fades from memory. Tell the people their White Demon is fighting still on the fronts in Norma. Who would know the difference?”
Horror blossomed in my chest. There was a simple elegance in such a plan. With a single move I would be transformed from man to myth and legend. Dimly, a part of me wondered how many ancient heroes of antiquity had been disappeared at the apex of their triumph, destroyed lest—like Boniface Grael—they become Pretenders to threaten the throne and the God Emperor’s sacred dynasty?
“But as I said before, Marlowe . . . I am a practical man. And so I will ask you a question, and understand your fate hangs upon your answer, so speak truly.” With his back to me, I stood straight again, fists clenched in their gauntlets until the right one ached. I held my tongue. What else could I do? I’d survived trial after trial, plot after plot, but everything had collapsed to this single instant anyway.
A trial, of sorts.
The Emperor clasped his hands behind his back, ten rings glittering. “When last we met in this spot you reminded me of your standing request for access to the Imperial Library on Colchis, do you remember?”
“I . . . what?” I almost gasped. I had not known what I expected from the Emperor, but it wasn’t this.
“The Imperial Library,” William XXIII said once more, repeating the place’s name as though I were one who’d never heard of it before. “Nov Belgaer Athenaeum in Aea on Colchis. You have renewed a request for access every time your ship returns to Forum. Why?”
I paused for the space of three breaths before answering. “I told you, Honorable Caesar. I wished to find records of potential brushes with the Cielcin in the Norman colonies predating the Rape of Cressgard. “
“And I told you not to lie to me, Hadrian Marlowe.” The Emperor rounded on me and took two steps off his dais. Reacting in time with their master, the Excubitors—who had retreated to the shadows beneath the mighty pillars—advanced with swords still raised. But Caesar raised one finger. “I will give you another chance. Tell me why.”
What had I to lose in speaking the truth? If I answered wrongly, the Emperor would dissolve my company—or worse—imprison them, disperse them with me to Belusha and Pagus Minor and a dozen other prison colonies or punishment posts with the Legions.
I had to choose.
The only way out was through.
Always forward, I thought to myself.
But I was nearly out of rope.
The Emperor would know anyway, how could he not? The truth was one of the galaxy’s best-kept secrets, but here was Lord of that secret’s keepers.
“Radiant Majesty, what do you know of the Quiet?” I asked, voice soft as if whispering might hide my words from the cameras that doubtless fixed electric eyes on me.
Caesar’s eyes narrowed to the barest slits. “You know?”
“I was on Emesh,” I said.
“You know?” the Emperor repeated. Then somet
hing astonishing happened. William XXIII of the House Avent collapsed into his folding throne. “How do you know?”
I took one startled step forward. Remembering myself and recalling that I addressed the Emperor—and not knowing how else to react to him in such a state—I went to one knee. “Radiant Majesty, I was on Emesh. There are ruins there. Tunnels on the southern continent, at a site called Calagah.”
“Emesh . . .” the Emperor repeated, looking down at his lap. “I don’t know that one.”
“Valka—my Tavrosi companion—took me there when I was a guest of House Mataro. She studies them.”
One leather boot emerged from beneath the snowy robes, red as his gloves. The Emperor’s eyes had drifted far away, seemed lost in the shadows of the pillared galleries that surrounded the pool at my back. Presently he glanced up at the white towers of the Peronine Palace behind me. “The Tavrosi, of course. I had forgotten about her.” He drummed his fingers on the arms of his chair. “You told me once that you do not have visions,” he said, still not looking at me. “Was that a lie?”
Bowing my head, I answered, “Yes, Radiant Majesty.” Face lowered, I was able to conceal my surprise. He asked after visions! What more did he know?
“You told me the daimon on Vorgossos showed you the future, showed you Syriani Dorayaica—the Cielcin conquering the stars.”
Eyes locked on the mosaic pattern of birds and fishes that decorated the floor at my feet, I repeated, “Yes, Radiant Majesty.”
“But that was not all?”
“No.”
“You may speak freely, Marlowe,” Caesar said. “If it is our Excubitors you fear, you need not.”
Still on my knee, I clenched my left hand, felt the black leather groan. “The cameras, Radiance.”
Caesar snapped his fingers, and looking up I saw him lean forward in his seat. “Speak freely, I say.”
Had he shut them off? I supposed it didn’t matter. The Emperor had given me an order. How could I refuse? “The daimon . . . received the vision from the Quiet and gave it to me.” I paused, expecting the Emperor to interrupt, but William did not stir. I explained what Brethren had told me, that the Quiet dwelt in the future—not the past—that Brethren’s superhuman intelligence had perceived the Quiet across time, and that they had forced the daimon to carry a vision for me, prepared it for when I came. I told him about my earlier vision in Calagah, and my experience in the chamber that had never appeared again. I did not tell him about the Howling Dark, about my death, about the other Hadrian I had met in the darkness.
“The Cielcin vayadan I killed. The chimera. The one from my triumph . . . it said that Syriani Dorayaica has received visions as well.”
The Emperor shook his head, surprise mingling with confusion on his antiquely handsome face. “That can’t be!”
“I believe the Cielcin call the Quiet the Watchers, sometimes the Makers. Caihanarin, or Genanarin. Possibly they are but one set of gods among many. But the Cielcin worship them, I don’t know why.” I broke off a moment, shifting to take the pressure of kneeling off my knee a moment. “Radiance, when I was on Vorgossos Kharn Sagara told me the God Emperor had visions. That it was his visions which delivered us from the machines.” It was blasphemy, I knew, and expected the Emperor to stand and shout for his guards, but he only sat there, patient as the Undying himself, eyes still glazed and confused. “He said angels came to the God Emperor in his dreams.”
“Oracles . . .” the Emperor muttered.
To my great surprise, I interrupted His Radiance. “Radiant Majesty, Kharn Sagara is nearly so old as our Empire, and twisted as he is, he is more learned than any man alive. If what he told me is true, I hoped there might be records on Colchis.” I could feel myself working up into one of my moods. “If the daimon I met on Vorgossos could perceive time, then surely the other artificial intelligences the Mericanii constructed in the Golden Age must have known of the Quiet as well. Surely you must have something in the Library, or in Caliburn House or . . . somewhere? I need to find them. To understand them. To understand what is happening to me and what all this has to do with the Cielcin. Please. Please, Radiance, I am no use to you on the Council, I am no use to you as a prince-consort trapped in this palace, and I am no use to you locked in fugue or rotting in a tower cell on Belusha.”
“Use,” the Emperor echoed, eyes focusing on my face for the first time in minutes. “Use . . .” He chuckled to himself. “I asked you once—in this very garden, as I recall—if you were my servant. You told me that you were. My counselors seem to think otherwise.” The Emperor drummed his ringed fingers against the arm of his seat. “Still, I wonder if they are not mistaken. So I ask you again: whom do you serve?”
Aware I trod on thin ice, I knelt and pondered my answer. The time for lies and careful half-answers was passed. The truth was my only solution, my only salvation. But I did not know the truth. Whom did I serve? Where did my loyalties lie?
I did not know until I answered. “The truth, Radiant Majesty? I think . . . I think I serve them.”
“The Quiet?”
“You say you know of them. They are not merely a vanished people gone from our universe. They live—or they will live, if what the Brethren told me is true. What they are I don’t understand, but they called me. Showed me a vision of the future. The destruction of mankind, commanded me to stop it. How could I refuse that call? I fight to prevent that future, to defend humanity itself.” I broke off, aware that I had said too much. “Perhaps I serve humanity, then, as you do.”
The Emperor was nodding along, eyes narrowed. “A Servant of the Servants of Earth, are you? But what of the Empire? What of me?”
“If you speak of these rumors that I desire your throne . . . I deny them. I do not want it.” I bowed over my knee. “I have served Your Radiance for more than seventy waking years. I will continue in that service, if you will keep me.” I turned my face up to look upon William, child of the God Emperor’s blood by line unbroken. “Let me go to Colchis. Let me learn what I can. Let me fight and serve.”
His Radiance said nothing, only surveyed me stone-faced and somber for so long I thought Kharn Sagara himself might feel his patience wear thin. As if to himself, he said, “. . . and only a cousin.” He shook himself and sat straighter in his chair. “You cannot remain on Forum. Regardless of who is behind these attacks on your life, it is clear to me and my counselors that you are a lightning rod for catastrophe. That stunt of yours in the Colosseum has transformed you from a mere legend into something far more substantial. It is one thing, it seems, to do great deeds far away—but to stop highmatter with your bare hands in my own city . . .” He shook his own from the consuming folds of his robes and gestured that I should approach. “Show me.”
My knee sang with relief as I stood and once more undid the clasps on my leather gauntlet. I pulled the glove off and presented my bare arm to His Radiance, palm up to reveal the deep white scars that had so frightened Augustin Bourbon.
The Emperor took my hand in both of his and examined the scars, turning the hand over to see the top of my forearm where more white stripes stood out silver against my pale skin. “Strange ring,” the Emperor noted, indicating the one I’d taken from Prince Aranata so long ago. His grip tightened, feeling the faint ridges in my false bones. “I saw the Inquisition’s report. Adamant bones. All the way to the shoulder?”
“Yes, Radiance.”
“Fascinating.” He took his hands away. “And not a circuit to be found. Sagara was generous. It is a pity matters ended poorly with him. He might have been a powerful ally against the Pale.”
Holding my glove in my fingers, I said, “He would not aid us.”
His Radiance nodded tiredly, and fidgeting with his rings drew one from his finger. He held it up. “I have decided to retain your services, sir,” he said. A moment passed before I realized the Emperor intended me to take his ring.
> I did.
All of yellow gold it was, with no gem of any kind. On its round face shone the relief image of a knight on horseback striking a dragon with his lance.
“Sir George,” he said, “the Dragonslayer.” The Emperor leaned back in his seat. “Present the ring at the Library. The scholiasts will admit you.”
I held Sir George’s ring in my scarred palm, sensing somehow that to don the Emperor’s ring would be inappropriate, especially in his presence. “You honor me, Radiant Majesty.”
“We do,” the Emperor agreed, returning to his formal style. “See you do not disappoint us, Lord Marlowe.”
I bowed deeply once again. “As you command.”
“And speak of this to no one. You will report directly to me. I will have one of my secretaries arrange that you receive my personal telegraph codes,” William Avent said, rising from his seat. He approached me. I held my bow. His now four-ringed hand touched my shoulder. “Let us take their given name as a command: the Quiet.”
I told him I understood. Telegraphs were analog, relying on entangled particles to transmit data instantaneously across interstellar distances. Assuming they were not connected to the datasphere network in any way, they were perfectly secure.
“Then go at once. Take your ship and your people, and do not return to Forum until I order it so.”
Standing straight once more, I drew back three paces, bowed again as deeply. “As Your Radiance commands.” It was a kind of exile. Not to prison on Belusha, not to icy sleep, but to my quest—to a quest renewed by right authority, the Emperor’s ring in my hand. But an exile all the same. Half-turned away, I halted, and asked the question that had leaped full-formed into my mind. “What of Selene?”
The Emperor arched an eyebrow. “What of her?”
“Are we still to be married?”
“You were never officially betrothed,” the Emperor replied. He had regained some measure of his Imperial composure, though I sensed still that our conversation had troubled his heart. I bowed again, and he said, “Though that may change, depending on the nature of your return.”
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