I hadn’t.
Three times I’d failed.
My vision flickered, pulling at the corners where I could not really look. If you have ever seen a creature stir in the corner of your eye, or seen a figure standing there and, turning, found only an empty door . . . you will know how I felt.
Listen.
I had no strength to argue with that supernatural voice anymore. The flickering did not stop. Shades danced there, and I knew that I had only to turn and face them, face Ghen and Switch, Cat and all the rest.
Was I dying again? My first death had come so suddenly that I’d not experienced the end as such. This death—if death it was—came slower.
Listen.
I turned—not my head, not my eyes—but my sight. Turned and saw the things shimmering there, shimmering as the visions the monolith had presented me. I saw again the crest of the wave of time, the mountaintop repeated over and over to infinity in uncounted iterations. I was dying, I saw, and would die in innumerable variations that stretched out to my left, expiring at the foot of that monument, dead upon a mountaintop in a universe that never truly occured. To my right . . . I saw myself stand, and saw the path toward standing, dependent on factors so small and improbable they would almost certainly never occur at all. The faint flicker and burn of chemical energy in my body, the constitution of will, the breaths taken just deeply enough to find the air I needed. I had only to choose the path.
I chose.
I stood, and my vision of the choice blended with the reality.
It was not the future I saw—though I tried—it was the now, the infinite possible nows. With each passing moment I moved to open Pandora’s box and knew before I did whether her cat was alive or dead.
To create is to choose, the voice repeated, echoing the words of Switch’s shade.
Teetering, I leaned against the monument.
“What is happening?” My voice was barely more than a whisper.
You are beginning to see.
White pain flared again behind my eye, and I slumped back against the black pillar.
I was on my hands and knees on a gray stone floor, tangled hoses and cords beneath me. My exhaustion strangely absent, I rose and looked round. The familiar vaults of the alien cathedral rose above my head, pillars graven in the images of inhuman things winged and webbed, supporting Gothic arches in their tentacled grasp. The music box chimed, doleful and serene in that quiet place. I saw the bassinet a moment after, placed in the chancel where an altar ought to be. Careful not to crush the delicate hoses, I moved toward it as I had twice before, one hand on my sword.
No infant cried on this occasion, nor was there any sound but my feet. On reaching the cradle, I saw why. The egg was intact. Larger than any melon it was, a sphere of unblemished white. Braided cables and hoses ran through sockets in its shell, and machines I had not marked before in the rim of the bassinet chimed softly in time with the music as the embryonic god dreamed.
Reaching out one hand, I caressed the shell between its hoses, certain that I stood beside the cradle of the Quiet itself. Not a people, as Valka imagined, but a singular thing. Its we was the we of emperors, the style of a being that spoke for multitudes.
Something roared in the distance, and I looked up. The doors of the great cathedral banged open, but what entered then I never saw, for the vision blurred and stretched, flowing beneath my feet like light smeared across the event horizon of a black hole. Though my feet did not move, I sped straight out of that ancient temple along a ribbon of silver light across uncounted billions of years until I approached the murdered sun from the back side and heard once more my own strange voice whisper those three awful words.
“Fire at will.”
My vision turned upward, and I beheld the silver line I’d followed, straight as laser light from one to the other. Other lines ran beside it, winding, broken or bent—each longer than the thread I’d taken from the cradle to that dying star.
And I understood.
You are the shortest way.
For the Quiet to be born, the Cielcin had to die.
“But why?” I asked the darkness, sensing the light beneath.
The Quiet’s voice was silent, but I understood why. Our words were too small for it. For it to answer in words was like pouring an ocean into a wine cup.
I tried again. “Why kill the Cielcin?” I hoped the narrower question would help. “They worship you!”
No.
The vision changed.
The hundreds of thousands of worlds of mankind’s dominion lay beneath my feet, unrolled like the finest Tavrosi carpet. I saw them each, and saw how small we were against the vastness of the galaxy, smaller still against the vastness of time. I witnessed other empires—and nations which were not empires at all—stretched across the heavens in man’s name. In some, machines stood by us shoulder to shoulder, or served us as the ancients dreamed. With my own eyes I saw our extinction play out in a million ways across a thousand epochs. I saw the Earth destroyed ten thousand times before we learned to fly. I saw the Cielcin consume us until nothing remained. I watched us swallowed by the Mericanii in times that never were, beheld the final defeat of the God Emperor at Avalon and stood witness as even he was strapped to a table in a pyramid raised above the ruins of Caliburn House, his followers given cancers to multiply their cells and stave off death forever while they dreamed infinite dreams and marked their descent into senile dotage, unable even to die.
Small as we were, we were not alone. Looking out across the stars, I perceived the beginnings of countless peoples beneath alien skies. There were cities, towers, tumbled ruins on a thousand thousand worlds across our galaxy and beyond. Places where no human had walked, places where perhaps no human would ever walk: across the Clouds of Magellan, to distant Andromeda, to Triangulum and beyond. There were empires in the far-off Coma Wall that spread across galaxies as we spread across star systems, ruled by peoples terrible and altogether strange.
And I beheld darker things. Older things. Greater ones.
Beings vast and incomprehensible as mountains moved beneath the outer suns, their antique wills slow and slouching as they bent their power on the stars. I saw hideous peoples on their knees in worship, and I knew. Knew it was not the Quiet the Cielcin praised.
Their horrid shapes moved about the fringes of my vision, dark against dark. I caught only glimpses: eyes huge and faceted as gems, wings malformed and time-eaten, pale limbs and claws yellow and cracked with age. Try as I did to look upon their faces, my mind rebelled, recoiled, and would go no farther. Memories of Brethren stirred in me, its many arms, its bloated form, its massive size so great that to escape its confinement in the waters beneath Kharn’s palace was to risk death, crushed by its own titanic weight. Large as it had been, I sensed these things were larger still and swam between the stars like cuttlefish. They knew us not, so small were we, and so small the affairs of a single galaxy to them.
But their servants had noticed us.
The Cielcin had.
Pale priests offered sacrifices at their altars of bone. I watched as one slashed its hand and allowed black droplets to fall upon a mound of corpses before a black and open portal. Something pallid and boneless slithered out of the dark, tendrils reaching out like snakes, like the fingers of some unseen hand. A dozen of them reached out and embraced the sacrifice, dragging it wetly back across rough stone.
“The Cielcin think you’re one of them,” I said. “What are they?”
They were.
It was not a helpful answer. “What do you mean, were?”
They came before.
“Before what?” There was no answer. “Are you one of them?” I asked.
They are not a kind.
I pondered the implications of this. Each one unique, a species unto itself.
“Why are you showing me this?”
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br /> So that you will understand.
“Understand what?”
The music box chimed faintly in the darkness, and turning toward the faint flowering of light, I saw once more the unholy temple of the egg. This time, I recognized the cyclopean forms of the colossi that decorated the pillars. Time unrolled again, branching futures flickering, exposed by the Quiet’s hand to my merely human eyes.
There were only two futures running from the egg. Like the contents of Pandora’s box, the thing inside the Quiet’s egg—the Quiet itself—was either living or dead. Down one passage there was only darkness, such a darkness as had been before creation: the darkness of a universe dead and cold, where all energy was lost. There the Watchers ruled in eternal night and plotted their conquest of every corner of time, until everything that ever was or might have been was lost. Down the other, the egg hatched, and beyond its birth I saw the stars reborn. A new universe. A new kingdom. A second life.
The Cielcin were only another battle in the long war. The only war. Not life against life, man against xenobite, and certainly not the petty wars of man against man—whatever their horrors. Theirs was the final war: light against darkness. Good and evil. Heaven and hell.
“Why me?” I asked the darkness once again.
The vision faded, and a voice I heard from behind me said, “Because we have to show them we are not abstractions. Not ghosts.”
I knew that voice, though I had not heard it since I was a boy.
Turning, I saw my father’s shade standing amidst the tumbled stones of the mountaintop. He looked just as I remembered: the same jet hair and grim expression, the same pale skin and violet eyes to match my own. His long mane was going gray at the temples, and he wore official robes of red-on-black brocade. A silver ring sat upon each of his fingers, and in his hands was strength. He had said those words to me so long ago, after my near murder on the streets of Meidua.
A ghost then? Or only a memory?
“Get up,” he said, and the memory of that once-hated voice moved like poison in me.
It was still agony to stand, but I could still see the breadth of time stretching to either side, could still choose my moment, as they had chosen for me when they delivered me from my death on the Demiurge, selecting another Hadrian—a potential Hadrian—from one of those failed narratives. They had traded the Hadrian who died for another Hadrian. For one still living. For one identical to the man who’d died in all but one respect: I had lost the other arm.
For me.
I laughed. Had they foreseen my battle with Irshan in the arena? Had they arranged that moment, too?
“Lorian was right,” I said. I was not the same Hadrian at all, not the man who had died by his own blade beside that lake, though his memories were in me. The Quiet had interfered from above the stage like the gods of ancient Greek theater. They needed a miracle, and so they’d made one. “That bastard.”
Lord Alistair raised one eyebrow. Once, that expression would have held fear for me, but that was long ago.
“I’m not a monster,” I said, and made a gesture as if to throw something away. “All this . . . I can’t pretend to understand it all . . . but I cannot do what you ask.”
“You must.”
“There has to be another way,” I said.
No. My father’s lips did not move. Snarling, I turned from him, crossing toward the monument, somehow sure I would see for myself. I pressed both hands against the black surface, willing the cold to come. Nothing did.
“Show me,” I whispered.
My vision still shimmered at the edges. The strange second sight I’d been granted was still there, and I turned my sight to look in that direction. The Quiet had changed something in me—or perhaps that power had always been there, lurking just out of sight.
A black dome rose above gray plains, surrounded by spiraling columns. A mighty host stood near at hand, and far above the moon-like shape of a worldship blotted out the sun. Beneath that dark star I saw their black banners snapping in the wind, and recognized the sign of the white hand in among the more traditional banners marked with Cielcin calligraphy.
“Yaiya-toh! Yaiyah-toh! Yaiyah-toh!” came the Cielcin chant, and the beating of their spears against the earth was like the sound of thunder. A hundred princes of the Cielcin stood there and awaited the coming of one mightier than the rest. Dorayaica came, crowned in horn and silver and leading me on a chain. I looked older than I had in the last vision, gray-templed like my father, haggard and gaunt. Old though I was, I recognized the face more readily than I had aboard the Demiurge.
The vision blurred, and I heard a piercing voice cry out, “Akterumu! Akterumu!”
Then we were aboard a Cielcin vessel—the same vessel that had eclipsed the sun, I knew. The Prince of Princes stood upon a platform above a throng of its people, clawed hand spread out. I knelt upon the platform beside it, still chained wrist and throat and ankle. Beneath me marched a sea of human faces, goaded forward by Cielcin wielding spears. I saw Otavia’s floating hair among them, and heard Pallino cry out. “Give them hell!” he said.
I was powerless to save them.
The Prophet clapped its hands.
Screaming filled my universe, and it was not until my lungs gave out and choked that I realized the screaming was my own. The vision faded again, flickering gone until I observed only the world around me. That vision was the price I paid for failure, I decided, a future I must not allow to come to pass.
“You have to let me go,” I said. “Dorayaica is sailing for Berenike, I saw it! You have to let me go!” Where in all that roil I had seen Berenike I could not say. There was too much, and I struggled to hold it all as though I cupped precious wine in my two hands.
Lord Alistair’s shade was still standing there, unmoved by the tears streaming down my face.
“I can save them!” I almost screamed the words, and without my newfound vision guiding me I barely kept my feet. “I have to go back.”
There is much you do not know, the unheard voice told me. If you go now, you will go where we cannot reach you.
“You have done it before,” I said.
Time changes, the Quiet said. Soon your time will go beyond our sight.
I pictured the wave of time, and thought I understood. “You can only interact with my . . .” I reached for the right word, “. . . my narrative when your future lies within the realm of possibility. But we’re outside that now, and the rules are different.”
I took their loud silence for a yes, and shook my head. “I have to go to Berenike. If we can stop Dorayaica there . . . I can save them. I can save your future, too. There is a way. There has to be a way!”
The Quiet’s voice did not respond, but my father spoke. “Do you swear to see to its end any course begun?”
Confused, I turned to look at him, for it was not the elder Devil of Meidua’s voice, but the Emperor’s. It was a piece of the oath I’d sworn when I became a knight. How little the words had meant to me so long ago—how much they mattered then.
“I will,” I said, rejecting prophecy and fate.
Father’s shade raised one hand, pointing at the monument. “Then go.”
Then go.
Approaching the black stone, I rested a hand against it, face inches from the glyphs on its surface.
With my new vision, I perceived that they were not glyphs at all. Perceived that all of Valka’s efforts over so many decades—all the efforts of her predecessors across centuries to decipher the alien marks—were for nothing. They were not the symbols of an alien language, but the parts of some vast and incomprehensible machine. The monument, the corridors and arches, all the great halls and byways of the ruined city and the ruins on every world the Quiet had touched were parts of a mechanism that reached upward and down into dimensions that we pawns—who move but forward—cannot see. That was how the tunnels moved
, how they were propelled backward in time. That was how I came to this place, this other Annica, this universe that time forgot. The Quiet’s tunnels were a machine—or something like a machine—that bridged time, that extended north and south, east and west, upward and down across the infinite realms of possibility.
The round symbols began to turn, winding like gears in the face of the dark stone, and retreated from me. My hand fell through the surface, and I watched in dumb amazement as the glyphs wound backward, climbing inward and down step by gradual step, until I was looking not upon a monument, but upon an arch opening on a step that ran down.
Mouth open, I peered around the monument, careful with my new and limited sight to choose only the steps that kept me from falling. The monolith couldn’t have been more than a foot thick and stood upon the edge of the mountain, but the path that opened in its face ran straight, out and down into empty air.
I knew what I had to do.
I crossed the threshold, following the stairs down, the glyphs turning all around me, building a corridor for me from the dark matter of the walls. I was dimly aware of my progress, but the way was straight and narrow, and I braced myself against the glassy stone to either side. I did not see the hallway, for all was dark, and in time the light of the mountaintop faded away, leaving me in shadow.
Light appeared in time, shining ahead. A mote at first. Then a spot the size of a steel bit. The hall widened to either side, narrow walls belling outward until I walked beneath rounded archways. The light ahead was daylight, and I saw a glowsphere go floating past above my head.
It was one of ours.
I realized then just where I stood. I was in the entrance hall to the ruined city, a suspicion I confirmed a moment later, reaching the level of the outer gate. The way ran straight and clear before me, running downhill clean to where the white buildings of the camp awaited me. I was back in the living world.
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