CHAPTER 87
NO SWORD CAN CUT
“MY LORD, THIS IS a mistake.”
“I have to do it,” I said, looking down at the little man before me. Lorian Aristedes hadn’t slept since before the attack began, and the strain of some stimulant was in his eyes. He leaned heavily on his cane, and I wondered just how much more weight those narrow and fragile shoulders could bear. He might have to bear all, I realized, or break trying. I had no right to place the load on him, and he had no right to refuse. “The fleet will make it here in time.”
Lorian’s fevered eyes narrowed. “They might not.”
“You’re mad, Had,” Pallino said. We were alone in the lift, the three of us, descending from the command center back toward the atrium-turned-hospital near the lower gate. The old soldier had returned just after sundown the previous night—the last son of Earth to quit the field. He’d brought up the rear of the line, the arm of a wounded legionnaire wrapped around his shoulders. The girl had taken a shot to the knee and had to hop along with her commanding officer’s help. Seeing her, I thought of Renna. The peasant girl had probably died fighting in the tram tunnels. I hoped she had, for the alternative was that she had been taken alive by Dorayaica’s soldiers and was even now interned in the labor camps of Dharan-Tun.
Cattle, Dorayaica had said of his captives. Yukajjimn.
Rats.
“You’re only learning this now, old man?” I tried to smile. I failed.
“They should have been here already,” Lorian said. Twenty-eight hours had passed since the Prophet made its appearance. We were well into the window Lorian had given me, but the fleet had not appeared.
I placed a hand on the smaller man’s shoulder. “They’ll be here,” I said. “They have to be.”
We descended in silence after that for several levels, the lights of floors strobing by. To my surprise, Pallino reached out and punched the control that stopped the lift descending. We ground to a halt.
I looked at the old man—though he was old no longer. His short, dark hair stuck out at rough angles, and a skein of silver surgical scars shone like wire though the leathery skin of his face. He was not the same man who had climbed out of the fighting pits with me on Emesh, but the eyes were the same. It was only that there were two of them now.
“Let me go with you,” he said.
Unbidden, a smile tore at my lips. Pallino and Elara were all I had left of Had the myrmidon, now that Siran was gone. With Valka—and I supposed Bassander Lin—they were all I had left of Emesh. And so when Pallino spoke it was almost as though I were Had the myrmidon again and not Sir Hadrian, not Halfmortal, not Demon in White. It felt right.
“Had?” he asked. I hadn’t spoken. “You’re not going alone.”
Sparing a glance for Lorian, who hung his head, I said, “You’d go with me to the Cielcin? To the end?”
“If you asked me to,” he said, and held my gaze without blinking. “You bought me this second life. I may as well pay for it.”
Thinking of Udax, I said, “I’ve had enough of people repaying their debts to me. You should live like Siran. If the fleet doesn’t come . . . if they take me, you run.” I looked at Lorian. “Both of you. You’ve fought enough.”
“Fight’s not done,” Pallino said.
“What about Elara?” I asked. “You’d leave her behind?”
The old soldier didn’t blink. “That’s rich coming from you, lad. Doctor Onderra’s on ice.”
“Valka will understand,” I said, but winced inwardly. The old bastard was right.
“No, she won’t,” he retorted. “She’ll kill you.”
At once I found I could look at neither Pallino nor Lorian. “She won’t have to. I’ll be dead.”
“I’d hope so for your sake when she finds out what you’ve done,” Pallino said. Lorian made a face, but kept uncharacteristically silent. He ducked his head, fingers drumming on the shaft of his cane.
“The fleet will make it,” I said. “And you’re not coming with me.”
“You don’t get a bloody say, lad,” Pallino said. “I’m not letting you go alone.” He held my gaze, unblinking.
Unspeaking, I reached out and punched the button that resumed our descent. I did not break eye contact with the other man, but watched for some tic, some tell, some fault line in his convictions. There was none.
The doors hissed open a moment after, and I stepped into the crowded hall. Men languished on cots or on pallets on the ground. This near the gates, the men were all soldiers, survivors of the previous day’s battle and those members of the rearguard who had remained to defend the Wall. Faces turned toward us as we stepped into the hall. Men sat straighter, some stood to salute. A murmuration of voices followed us.
“That’s him?”
“The devil?”
“Marlowe?”
“He’s shorter than I expected.”
“Quiet!”
“Is he going?”
“It can’t be! It’s some kind of trick!”
I let them talk, and stepped carefully between pallets, careful not to put my boot on anything any man called his bed. The path was narrow, and wound down the hall toward the space where the ceiling opened up and the tiled floor of the atrium ran past the customs houses to the outer gates. The whole space was filled with soldiers. Sitting, standing—most of them reclining on the floor, awaiting the alarm blast and the news that battle had come.
“If you go,” Lorian whispered, “they’ll lose hope.”
“If I go,” I said back, “they might not need it.”
“Even if the fleet comes,” Lorian stopped walking and planted his cane between his feet, “the minute you’re in their hands, you’re dead.”
I kept walking, Pallino close behind. I did not look back. “Haven’t you heard? I can’t be killed.” I said the words loud enough that the men about me froze and fell deadly silent. I had said the thing jovially, conjuring up the old gladiatorial bravado. Lorian wasn’t wrong. Whatever I was, whatever I meant to the soldiers, my loss would be a blow. Moving slowly, I passed beneath the arches of the customs gates and past the arches that led down toward the tram platforms that led out to the starport terminals and the tunnels where the spillover refugees had been taken by the enemy. The men ahead were all on their feet, all armored, all armed. They parted ranks as we approached.
“Has it moved?” I asked one of the wardens, an older man whose dark face reminded me so much of the soldier Carax.
“No, lord. It’s just . . . watching.”
The Prophet’s giant apparition had returned not half an hour before and demanded I surrender myself. Ever since, the specter had floated more than a mile high above the city and the Wall, surveying all there was to survey with eyes like pools of ink. It had not spoken again, had not stirred.
“Shall I open the gate, sir?” the warden asked.
Fear is a poison, I told myself, and squared myself to the door. “Do it,” I said.
A chink of sunlight appeared between the mighty doors. The relief-cast bronzes slid apart, admitting the curling wind. The day outside was fair—all hints of the storm promised yesterday were gone. Empty promises. Lacking the white cape, I had donned my old familiar greatcoat over the black armor. I pulled its collar up about my ears. It was now or never.
“Guards.” I raised my chin. “Do not let the chiliarch through those doors.”
“What?” Pallino surged forward, but a half dozen men converged to block his way. I heard Pallino cuff one of them and winced internally.
Pallino growled. “Had, you son of a bitch!”
I looked back. “Give my love to Elara,” I said, and shifting my gaze to Lorian, I added, “If this doesn’t work, you get these people home.” Pallino struck one of the men holding him and nearly broke free, but three more piled on. It took nine men to restrain him prope
rly.
The good commander flashed a salute, and for once in his life there was no air of casual mockery in the gesture.
I started walking, and passed the icons of Time and so exited the city of men.
It took a moment to resolve the ghastly image of Syriani Dorayaica against that pale and sunlit sky, but it was there, if less substantial than the clouds above.
“Any time now, Corvo,” I muttered, looking out on the ruin of the last day’s battle. The crawler stood not far off, still smoking, and Bahudde’s mutilated form beside it. The smoke of the burning fleet and the blasted power plant still tainted the sky, but they were far off, and did not trouble my universe. The noon-high sun cast no shadows on the earth, and so I had no company whatever as I marched out across the wastes of no man’s land.
It was so quiet, so still. It was almost peaceful.
“How small you are,” Dorayaica said. Looking up, I saw the massive holograph smile, and even as it did once more the dark fastness of Dharan-Tun washed across the sun. The Prince of Princes had timed its orbit almost perfectly. The day turned gray around us. Grayer. Then black. A second eclipse, dark as the last but infinitely more lonely. The mountain-high holograph’s smile turned only more intense in the blackness.
I offered no reply. Every silence prolonged affairs, and every prolongation brought Corvo and the whole of the fleet nearer. I decided I had gone far enough, and stopped.
Silence.
I had not slept, and stood there in an exhaustion close to dreaming. With my second sight I saw the rivers of time, the other presents playing about me. We all stood waiting under that darkling sky. Every Hadrian that could be, that could come from that moment.
“Have you nothing to say?” The phantasm’s voice shook the air.
I spread my arms and spoke over the same band as the day before. “Here I am.”
“Alone?” Dorayaica asked.
“That was the agreement!” I said, arms still raised. “Send your shuttle. You have what you want.”
More starkly visible by the light of its eclipse, the giant holograph stooped, crouching as the real Prophet crouched upon the projection plate in its ship. It loomed over me, face large as a city block, eyes deep and fathomless as hell. “I do.” There briefly it flashed its glassy teeth.
Syriani Dorayaica stood.
“And I have your word?” I asked. “You will spare the people of this world? Grant them safe conduct back to our land?”
“My word,” the giant agreed. “Yes. They will be spared. They will deliver my message to your Aeta ba-Aetane ba-Yukajjimn, your Emperor.”
I raised my chin, defied the giant and asked—though I knew the answer— “What message?”
When Dorayaica spoke, it was not to me. It spoke to the Wall, to the millions of people in it and under it. To Lorian Aristedes, to Commandant Bancroft, the governor-general, and every clerk and logothete of the Imperial government on Berenike—to every soldier and peasant, too—and to Alexander, a prince of the realm. “That Hadrian Marlowe has fallen. That I broke him on the field of battle. And that he can—in fact—be killed.”
That—more than anything—reassured me that the creature meant what it said. We had not made a deal at all, had not bargained. The survival of the others was no concession granted me as an equal, for among the Cielcin there are no equals. It was only part of the great prince’s plan. I was to be carried away, dragged to hell above in the sight of millions.
A triumph.
How long had it been watching us? Learning our ways? The Shiomu knew our tongue as if it had been born to it, and knew our minds. I thought of the rage in Pallino’s eyes. The desperation. The fever and exhaustion in Lorian’s. As we had paraded Iubalu through the streets and over the sky-bridges of the Eternal City, so I had been paraded across no man’s land—would be paraded to the alien stars to die some wretched and lonely death. There would be no body to burn in state, no organs for the canopic jars. No symbol to rally about. It would be as if Hadrian Marlowe had never existed at all. I looked along the cresting wave of time, saw that infinity of myself peering back. All of it—all of us—gone.
Only there was no ship. No shuttle. No black tower crashing upon our shores from the ocean of stars above. No chariot of fire.
Only emptiness. Only quiet. Only the stage the enemy had set for its little show.
A vague sense of uneasiness began to creep over me, and I looked up into the face of the giant floating in the firmament above. Dorayaica’s moon of a face grinned down at me, teeth seeming black in the pale blue of the projection. “I expected better of you, kinsman.” It straightened, jewels flashing in its crown and on the bands wrapped about its horns. It laughed low and quiet in its throat. “I am so disappointed. This bested two of my fellow princes? Slew two of my generals? This?” It looked round, and I guessed that just as Syriani Dorayaica performed for the millions behind the Wall at my back, it addressed an audience of its own kind as well. “This is the White Devil? The one they call Halfmortal? I am Syriani, Blood of Elu! Blessed of Miudanar! The one the yukajjimn call the Scourge of Earth! Prince of Princes! Master of the Thirteen Tribes of Eue! And you, you are nothing!”
Light blossomed all around me, red and granular. Too late, I realized my mistake. I had become too fixed upon my vision, upon the dome and the forest of black pillars, upon the image of myself paraded in chains. The Cielcin in the tunnels had said I belonged to the Prophet. Bahudde had promised to bring me before its master. I had imagined that I was to be taken offworld, to be brought to that evil place before the dome. I thought—what had I thought? That Syriani would sacrifice me to its dark gods, to the Watchers, the way I had seen bodies sacrificed in my visions atop the mountain?
But Syriani intended none of these things. If its men had their orders to take me alive, it was only that I might be killed publicly. Violently. In full sight of man and Cielcin alike. I had thought it would send an escort—thought I had time.
I was wrong.
I shut my eyes, turned my face down against the laser flash I knew was coming.
For anyone else, it was the end.
But I had one move left on the board. Only one.
But it was a remarkably good move.
It had, after all, worked astonishingly well on Durand.
The air around stank of ozone, of burning stone. The atmosphere crackled as with the tang that preceded lightning, and I felt as if I stood in the door of a kiln. There had been no sound, no sound at all. Only white heat, red hot. I died—or might have died. I died a thousand times, but for every universe, every narrative where the laser struck me down, there was another where it failed. Strands of possibility indistinguishable from our own. I had but to reach out and choose—and create the world I wanted. And just as Durand’s bullet had passed through me, so too the laser fell by, burning all around . . .
. . . save me.
The tarmac all about me boiled and glowed with molten heat that rose in terrible waves. Undaunted, unburnt, I stepped forward, still clinging to the vision of those other worlds, selecting with each step—as I had on Annica—from those unlikely quantum states that kept me miraculously intact.
Stepping out from the burning circle and the column of white smoke, I raised my arms in defiance of the god-like apparition that recoiled in the air above.
“You should have sent an army!” I said, speaking for all the world to hear. The prince’s trap was almost perfect. Almost.
It had not known what gift the Quiet had given me. For all Syriani knew and might have known of the Quiet and of the dark gods who dream behind the stars, it had not known enough. It should have sent an army. For all its pomp and circumstance, all its carefully staged theatrics and drama, Syriani had chosen the one weapon I knew I could escape.
The giant’s eyes widened with horror. “How?”
“You said it yourself,” I sa
id, unable to help myself. “I’m an abomination.”
Certain the prince would fire again at any moment, I shut my eyes and tried to focus. My awareness of the infinite potential stretch of time widened again, consciousness spanning countless narrative moments, ready to choose.
“Our offer stands, kinsman!” I spat the final word, still holding my eyes shut and focus tight in my hands. “If you want me, come and take me!”
The fleet had not come, after all. Opening my eyes, I turned and began walking back. I had only to walk straight across the lone and level earth, the Prophet’s triumph turning to ashes around me . . . and the Devil victorious.
Right on cue, the targeting laser painted the landscape red around me. I reached, selected the narrative, the probability state.
I shut my eyes and kept walking. White light—brighter than anything I’d known, brighter than all I would know but once—still bled through my eyes. There came the smell of ozone, the stench of burning stone. The air about me once more thrummed with the tang of static lightning.
I did not stop.
And there! A brighter light boiled across the sky, and looking back I saw white light and crimson fill the heavens like the novae of a million dying stars. They flashed across the void like summer lightning and struck the face of that evil moon, and the ghastly phantasm faltered, flickered, and died.
Syriani Dorayaica vanished, its holograph crashing apart like an image upon a broken windowpane. Turning back to watch, I saw a fireball blaze in the night, and knew that somewhere a ship had been destroyed. I smiled, and raised my hand to the heavens even as Dharan-Tun slid once more from the face of our sun.
The fleet had come at last—so late, but not too late to save us. Otavia and the Tamerlane had returned with Corran and the Sieglinde and nine legions of the sun! And not alone. Every ship of the sector followed on, all those who had come late and rallied at Hauptmann’s rendezvous point in the Dark beyond the system’s edge.
We’d won.
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