To see.
Durand was still standing with his mouth open.
“Do you believe me now?” I asked again.
Mute, he nodded.
“Good,” I said, and looked round at the others. “That’s settled then. We sail for Berenike at once.” Still leaning on my cane, I brushed past Durand and stumped toward the forward holograph viewer where it dominated the wall, playing at being a window. It showed Annica’s red-umber disc beneath us. I could just make out the lonely mountain on the horizon, brown and scabrous. The other mountains were nowhere to be seen. “Dorayaica knows about Berenike. It attacked Monmara to shock us into retreat, knowing we would mass there. It but waits for the fruit to ripen. By ordering the retreat to Berenike, Oberlin and the Legions have played right into its hands.”
“How do you know all this, lord?” Koskinen asked.
Not taking my eyes from the mountain, I answered him. “I saw it.”
A murmur went through the junior officers. I heard the word Halfmortal whispered there, and recalled Carax and Sir Friedrich and the image of my trident inscribed over the Imperial sun. Another future flashed before me, where I sat upon the Solar Throne with a white stone upon my brow—the very eggshell shard I wore about my neck even then. I could just see its faint reflection in the wall behind the holograph.
So many potential futures.
So much doubt.
CHAPTER 72
BETWEEN THE HAMMER AND THE ANVIL
THE SKY ABOVE DEIRA city sparked with the flame of sub-light engines. As I often had in the two years since we’d arrived on Berenike, I found myself looking up, past the gray glass towers of the canyon city and the grim stone walls that rose so high to either side, past the terraces on the western crag and the smooth steel expanse of the Storm Wall to the east, and watched our fleet at their maneuvers.
It was like watching constellations come alive. So high were they that even the mightiest dreadnought was reduced until it appeared as one of the common stars fixed above the city or else tacking planet-like across the skies.
“I never get tired of watching it,” Pallino said at my shoulder.
I looked round at the old chiliarch—one of the last pair of myrmidons who remained with me from Emesh. My other guards had maintained a respectful distance when I’d tarried by the rail, their faces peering determinedly ahead.
“Back in basic, on Zigana, the sky was always full of ships. Couldn’t even see the stars—course, you never missed them. What’s the difference?”
Leaning on the gentleman’s cane I’d not abandoned since Annica, I said, “You know the ancients used to believe that night was a curtain? That the stars were pinholes you could see the day through?”
“Don’t think I did, Had,” he said. An uneasy silence settled between us. He wanted me to get moving. We could not afford to be late. “Damn big curtain,” he added, squinting up at the night with his two blue eyes. “There sure is an awful lot of Dark.”
“It’s the light that matters,” I said coolly. “That’s where our guns are.”
Inhaling sharply and gathering my wits, I turned and strode along the path from our apartments in the lower city—where the gubernatorial palaces stood above the great canal amidst the tower penthouses of the wealthy—to the industrial and mercantile quarters above that sheltered in the shadow of the Storm Wall.
Berenike had begun as a mining colony long ago, when human settlement in the Norman Expanse was young. Despite nearly three thousand years of settlement, the planet had never flowered as Marinus or Monmara had. Mining efforts still dominated its lower latitudes in those few places where the surface was not given over to briny, algae-soaked seas, and it was of note on the galactic stage only as a Legion supply post, having once been the Imperial beachhead in the sector in those times before the conquest of Marinus. Aside from the Legion personnel on station in orbit, fewer than ten million people called Berenike home, and every one of them—absent the few hundred intrepid miners in the windswept colonies—huddled in Deira beneath and behind the Storm Wall.
We had a commanding view of the city from the express lift, slim towers retreating into the chasm depths beneath us. The great city had been built in the shelter of the Valles Merguli, the Valley of the Diver, a chasm five miles deep in places and several hundred long.
“People will build fucking anywhere, won’t they?” Pallino said.
“It’s the storms,” I said. So much of Berenike’s surface was flat that the coriolis winds—spurred on by moist, tropical airs out of the equatorial regions—could whip themselves into gales ten times more horrific than anything our ancestors had known on Earth. Hightower orbital lifts were out of the question—too much risk of a line snapping or a tower being knocked down. All ground-to-orbit traffic came and went through the massive landing field that covered the plains above the windward edge of the Valles: tens of miles of paved prairie stretching almost to the horizon.
We could not see it from our lift, for Deira city was fashioned on many levels. The lower wards ran along terraces that lined either side of the great valley, connected by many bridges and shadowed by many towers. Above these on the windward side, a short, inner wall rose, separating the terraces of the valley from the flat, poor neighborhoods that huddled in the shadow of the Storm Wall, which protected these upper quarters and the valley alike from Berenike’s scouring winds.
The Storm Wall.
It was a bulwark against the heavens themselves, a barrier built almost a mile high and perhaps a third as broad. Whole segments had been engineered in orbital facilities out-system and flown across the galaxy at monstrous cost on behalf of the Wong-Hopper Consortium, who had founded the original joint-stock colony on the planet.
By rights, it should have been the hundredth marvel of the universe, but there it was, mouldering above a city on a planet that amounted to a caravansary and refueling depot on the road to the Norman frontier. When we had first descended from the Tamerlane, I had thought it a feature of the landscape and not a work of human hands, so mighty was it. Tall and broad it was, and ran for hundreds of miles along the canyon edge. The space on the far side of the Valles Merguli was hardly worth mentioning: an impassable morass of broken stones and sinkholes given over to swampland and the native scrubby plant life.
“I know it’s the storms,” Pallino said, ignoring propriety and the decade of guards at our backs. “But we could have picked another planet.”
I shrugged, drummed my fingers against the silver head of the cane. “The air was good. That’s rare.”
The Legion headquarters were in the barbican of the Storm Wall, a many-leveled adjunct to the main structure thrust out on the starport side of the wall itself. Through horizontal, inhuman windows I could look out on the flat plane outside the city, the airstrips and steel-reinforced concrete mounds of hangars between and above the shielded blasting pits where rockets waited for clearance to launch.
“They won’t be far behind us,” came the familiar gruff voice from over my shoulder. “We lost one of our outriders on the way in. I can only hope our boys managed to destroy the ship’s computer before the Cielcin got hold of it, else they’ll know our strength.”
“They already know,” I said, turning from the window to regard the man at the head of the conference table.
Titus Hauptmann looked more or less precisely as I’d remembered him: leonine, gray-haired with mighty sideburns, curling mustache, and bushy eyebrows, positively carnivorous in his black uniform draped with chains and silver braid. Like the Emperor amidst his retainers, Hauptmann was seated at the far end of a ring-shaped conference table, surrounded by his captains and attachés. The First Strategos raised an eyebrow. “Take a seat, Lord Marlowe.”
Rapping my cane against the floor, I said, “Dorayaica planned this. It’s been watching our troop movements for years. Analyzing our logistics, dissecting our supply trains, ma
king use of captured technology: shields and so on. It knew we would fall back here. It chased you.”
“Do you mean to be insubordinate, Marlowe? I said sit down.”
“No sir,” I said, and paused just long enough to be ambiguous. Moving to take my seat opposite the First Strategos, I said, “It’s just my manner.”
“Your manner . . .” Hauptmann snorted. “Your manner does not exempt you from observing the proper forms, sir knight.”
“I’m quite certain you’re right, sir,” I said. The Duke of Andernach had long ago ceased to terrify me, but I took my seat, lips pressed primly together as I glanced sidelong at Otavia Corvo, who had not stirred from her seat at my right hand.
Hauptmann shifted in his seat, swept his eyes over the half a hundred officers and officers’ holographs that sat in council about the table. “We have at best a few weeks to marshal our defenses. Regardless of whether or not we are to believe Lord Marlowe’s doomsaying, it is certainly the case that the fleet which assailed Marinus has followed us rather than linger to sack the planet.”
“That alone suggests Lord Marlowe speaks the truth,” said another familiar voice from the First Strategos’s right. Unlike Hauptmann, Bassander Lin seemed to have aged a thousand years since we’d parted after the Vorgossos affair, though he carried none of it on his face. Rather there was something in his posture, something subtle and hard to pin down, a great weight that bent his spirit even as his back was straight. I almost pitied him. He looked more or less like I remembered, high-cheekboned copper face stony beneath woodsmoke hair, dark eyes narrowed. There was perhaps a touch of silver in the dark mane, but he was every ounce still the young officer I recalled—if not young anymore. “It is uncharacteristic of the Cielcin not to linger. If they come so hard on your heels, Lord Strategos, the enemy must have remained at Marinus just long enough to . . .” his voice faltered with the implication of his words, “. . . to reprovision for the journey here. Smash and grab.”
As he spoke, Lin’s eyes wandered to me, and he set his jaw. The captain had been with us on the Demiurge, had been with me when I died. The experience had changed him—at least changed his attitude toward me. Gone was the antagonism, the posturing and constant tension, the rivalry between us. Holy fear had taken its place, sunk roots like talons into the man, and drained blood and fire away. He had not spoken to me since he arrived on Berenike, had not communicated at all, unless it was to watch me as though I were some manner of ghost.
“They are the hammer,” I said darkly. “We are glowing iron.”
“Excuse me?” asked one of the captains, a gray-faced woman with short, dark hair who might have been cast from the same mold as the late Raine Smythe.
I did not explain the ancient and primitive art of hammer forging to the assembly, but pressed on. “There is another fleet coming. Possibly it is already here . . . or near here. Waiting. The pursuers are meant to attack us, to divert our attention. Marinus was only the bait, my lords. I suspect you are the prize.”
“Explain,” Hauptmann said.
Extending a hand palm up, I said, “Lord Hauptmann, you have menaced the Cielcin in these regions for decades. If Dorayaica has been studying us, it certainly knows you. I would be prepared to bet this entire performance has been put on for your benefit.”
Hauptmann’s face was ash and stone. “What makes you so certain?”
I could hardly tell him I had seen it in a vision. At best, they would think me a charlatan, at worst a pretender to the throne. Carax’s medallion seemed to flip, coin-like, before my eyes. It struck the table with the scarred face down. I shook myself, and the vision faded.
“He dreamed it, most like,” said the gray-faced woman, evincing small smiles and nervous laughter from a few of those present. I was surprised and vaguely unsettled to find that only half of the officers—give or take—joined in. Evidently the footage and legend of my duel with Irshan had spread even as far as the front in the years since I left Forum.
“Marinus is not a random prize,” I said, unruffled. “It was our capital in the Veil. Its selection was intentional. Deliberate. We are dealing with the same scianda that attacked Hermonassa. These are calculated moves. Not the traditional raids we have dealt with across the Veil for centuries. Hermonassa was in the heart of the Empire, thousands of light-years from the front.”
Hermonassa had not been the first core world attacked. There had been random raids carried out throughout the crusade. Cai Shen had been such a one, and I wonder now if that, too, had not been the work of Syriani Dorayaica. An early effort. Cai Shen had been a key uranium source for the Legions and Consortium alike. Had it been targeted? Had Dorayaica—or a Cielcin very like the Shiomu—found record of the planet in the navigational computer of some captured Imperial vessel?
“They chose Marinus to put us on alert,” I said. “They knew—somehow they knew—that you would retreat here. The fleet that attacked Marinus is coming, and then the jaws will close.”
Another officer—a legate in black and silver with his white beret on the tabletop before him and a face like an old fox—was nodding along. I was a moment recognizing the emblem with two crossed swords on his lapel. It was the badge of the 437th Centaurine Legion. Raine Smythe’s Legion. “I can’t speak on the subject of Sir Hadrian’s visions, but he speaks sense. Why leave Marinus to recover?”
Titus Hauptmann crossed his arms, displaying the ornately sculpted vambraces he wore. “You weren’t there, Leonid. Marinus will not recover. The place was damn near devastated. The Pale left because there was nothing left.”
A scholiast several places down the table cleared her throat. “But it is most unlike the Cielcin to waste resources, Lord Strategos. The first siege at Cressgard took years. The Cielcin were still chasing people out of caves in the mountains when Cassian Powers arrived five years in.”
“There is nothing left of Marinus to waste, counselor!” Hauptmann said. “You saw the footage.” Memories of blasted cities and of plains turned to glass impressed upon my mind. I remembered the black crater burned into the face of the planet Rustam so long ago, like a black eye. Doubtless Marinus was worse.
“How long is the average Cielcin invasion, exactly?” asked Captain Corvo.
The scholiast shut her eyes, mind ticking through a series of mnemonics to find her answer. “In cases where we have been unable to mount an effective defense? Between three and eight years.”
Legate Leonid Bartosz interjected. “The assault on Marinus lasted three days.”
The scholiast spread her hands, bronze badges on her green legionary uniform glittering. “With respect, strategos, it is highly unlikely the Cielcin could strip a planet as settled as Marinus of all resources in a mere three days.”
“And they withdrew first?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
Titus Hauptmann’s face grew dark, confirming what I already knew. It was all but impossible to trace a ship through warp. All it took was a stop and a change of trajectory to ensure the subtle distortion and the infinitesimal heat of the ship’s drive glow would be lost to even the most watchful eyes. The attackers had not fled Marinus at all, only staged a strategic retreat to mark the humans’ own flight to rendezvous with the rest of the fleet on Berenike. They’d lit a fire on Marinus, and like moths we’d come rushing to meet it.
“If you’re right,” the gray-faced woman said, “we ought to have detected their approach by now.”
Corvo pursed her lips. “That would depend on how far out they are and how long they’ve been there.” She was right, but her words conjured images of spiders lurking in their webs, and I imagined Cielcin vessels lying in cold ambush for eons, the Pale xenobites gnawing bones in their dark tunnels, awaiting their coming feast.
“You’re proposing that this second fleet of yours has been lying in wait for years—for more than a decade—somewhere beyond the Berenike heliopause?”
&n
bsp; “Out beyond your sensor net,” Corvo said. “They wouldn’t look like any more than a cluster of asteroids unless you got too close.”
Taking Corvo’s words like a baton in a race, Hauptmann turned to me and asked, “I don’t suppose these visions of yours have given you any useful intelligence, Lord Marlowe? The location of this secret fleet, perhaps? How well equipped are they? What are their numbers?”
So dry was the First Strategos’s delivery that I could not quite tell if he was being insincere. Feeling the eyes of the gathered captains on me once more, I replied in kind. “Forgive me,” I answered him, “I do not have visions. I only guess at strategy.”
“Strategy.” Hauptmann frowned beneath his thick mustache, disappointment evident in his leonine face. He reminded me of the late Sir William Crossflane. “Forgive me, I am not in the habit of acting on guesswork.”
“Nevertheless,” I said, “that is what I offer.” Had I spoken truly, spoken of Annica and the Quiet, I would have been even less believed. For a moment, I considered giving the captains a sign, performing for them some miracle as I had for doubting Durand. But to do so here would be to expose myself to the Imperium, to open myself up to investigation and perhaps to study. I did not think the Inquisition would be gentle with me. Not a second time.
“My lord, if I may?” asked Bassander Lin, resting one vambraced arm against the black glass tabletop. Hauptmann signaled for the junior man to speak, and Lin pressed on, “Guesswork or not, what Lord Marlowe suggests strikes me as credible. We should call for reinforcements. Whatever else is true, this Dorayaica’s grasp of strategy has proved a world apart from the other Cielcin clans. It was his badge we saw on Marinus.”
I watched Bassander with quiet surprise. It had been one thing to find his antagonism washed away, but to win outright support? That was something else entirely.
Another of the legionary captains cleared his throat. “Have there been any disappearances among ships leaving the system in the past several years? Mining convoys? ODF patrols?”
Demon in White Page 72