THREE MILLION PEOPLE CROWDED the Campus Raphael, and the eyes of the galaxy were on us. In the weeks to come and the years to follow, the broadcast of that glittering parade would play across public dispatch and on holograph projectors on every planet in the Empire and beyond.

The Triumph of the Devil of Meidua.

There was a painting made—I saw it only once—a massive canvas that hung in the Sun King’s Hall at the top of one of the grand staircases. I was told His Radiance had ordered the legendary court painter, Vianello, be decanted from fugue for the first time in nearly five hundred years to commemorate the event. It was Vianello who had painted the Emperor’s official portrait, and the portraits of the previous fifteen Emperors, remaining among the living for only so long as it took him to finish his work.

I do not know what became of the painting after Gododdin. Taken down, no doubt. Burned, or perhaps stored in the Imperial vaults on Avalon where none would ever see it. I do know that the triumphal arch erected to my victory over Iubalu still stands on Nemavand, though by Imperial decree my head was chiseled from the monument and cast into the desert, where I don’t doubt it remains to this day, resin untouched by the etching sands.

Both arch and painting depicted the same thing, though neither could capture it, for an Imperial triumph is a spectacle more of sound than sight. The music of horns and silver trumpets filled the golden air, and the exhortation of the millions gathered there was like the breaking of some mighty sea against the shore of a city of gods. Ahead of us and behind marched rank upon rank of Imperial Martians in their red armor and white cloaks, and my Red Company marched behind them as we proceeded through the hippodrome and the Grand Colosseum toward the Last Stair and the Sun King’s Hall. How tall their plumes! Red feathers and white horsehair running in the wind! How proud their banners! How bright their spears flashing in the sun! And the thunder of their march in time to the music of horn and tympani was enough to shake old Jupiter from his forgotten sleep on lost Olympos and proclaim our message across the stars.

We are the gods now.

Behind our men and the Martians came the train: parade floats hovering or pulled by tanks, or else striding on machine legs of their own, driven by hidden operators. The cart ahead of us was pulled by two white lions, four times the size of any lion I had seen, and upon the platform rode crucified five living Cielcin officers, and at their feet lay mounded a hoard of weapons taken from the ship we conquered in the night. Behind followed three thousand captured Cielcin, chained wrist and ankle, their horned crowns carved away. To what fate they marched I did not know, nor ever asked.

And last of all I came, riding with my officers upon a floating barge that seemed driven or pulled by no device save the banners of the Imperial sun, which blew about us like sails. I stood upon the highest level before an empty throne. On this one occasion I wore no black and was arrayed instead in Imperial argent, that brightest white which is reserved only for members of the Blood Imperial, for I was a cousin of that blood and they claimed me in my triumph, so that I seemed to gleam like a white star in my formal armor before that empty throne. No slave stood at my ear, no homunculus to whisper that I, too, was mortal. That I, too, would die. For I was immortal in that moment, and immortalized. About me stood all my faithful friends. Arrayed on steps beneath me were Pallino and Crim, Elara and Siran—and there were Captain Corvo and Commander Durand, and young Aristedes with Koskinen and Pherrine, with Ilex and the other bridge officers. And Alexander was there, arrayed like me in argent, as though he too were some kind of conqueror. And there too were Udax and Barda and others of the Irchtani auxilia who had aided us. Even our ghosts rode with us, for the memories of Cade and Ghen—of Switch—stirred in my mind.

And Valka was there. Against her wishes and better judgment, she stood a step below me and somewhat removed, hands clasped, eyes sweeping the crowd. She wore a gown of simple black, unadorned, as if to protest all that Imperial white. Despite that, she glowed to me more brightly than all the rest.

And behind us all, not crucified but mounted on a post like a witch for the burning, came the body of Iubalu.

What remained of it.

The flesh parts had been cleaned away and replaced with a plastic facsimile, though the snarling fangs were fierce as the originals had been. I glanced back at it, looming like an angel of death above us, white as we. At a signal the cornicens sounded their horns, and turning I raised my sword to pass beneath the Arch of Peace at the center of the Campus. And as we passed beneath its curve and shadow and the statues of Justice and Mercy both, I lowered the sword in my left hand and hoisted high the spear we had recovered from Iubalu’s ship: the heraldic staff topped with its broken circle and dangling silver chimes.

Iubalu’s staff.

It is that moment which shines out of Vianello’s painting, which rises from the triumphal arch on Nemavand. That Devil Marlowe standing with sword in hand and the spear of his enemy raised in triumph.

The crowd roared. The horns sounded. The trumpets blew. The very skies of Forum answered them, for a great wind rose and carried the noise of our exultation from that mighty field to the highest towers and the lowest spire of that gilt and holy city—and thence by holograph to every world.

I scarce recall the faces of that crowd: palatine and patrician, the highest and noblest in our Empire. I can see them only as a mingling of bright colors, of silks and velvets and burnished gold beneath the rows of Imperial suns embroidered red on white, snapping on tall banners like sails in that unceasing wind. In time we came to the Last Stair: a thousand steps and eighty so wide a hundred men might mount their gilded marble and climb abreast. Imperial banners marked the edges and hung between the white pillars above. Beyond them rose the domes and Georgian rotundas of the Sun King’s Palace, its towers a hundred stories high. In its golden shadow we stopped, and at another horn blast I descended from my place, still clutching my sword in my hand and carrying Iubalu’s heraldic spear. Valka fell into step behind me, and Corvo and the other officers followed.

Above us and along the steps were arrayed the great princes of the realm, them whose blood was old as Earth and older than the Empire. There was the red lion of House Habsburg, and the black eagle of Hohenzollern. There flew the red and blue shields of Bourbon beside the banner of House Bernadotte. There too were the banners of the Houses Mahidol, Singh, and Rothschild, and there was the crysanthemum of Yamato, whose chief still called himself the Mikado no Nihonjin, the Emperor of the Nipponese. They were not alone. These princely houses stood among those of the magnarchs and viceroys whose time it was to live with the Emperor in his holy city. Was that the eagle of Kephalos I saw? Or was it only my imagination?

Each dipped their banners as we climbed the stairs, each bowed as I passed with Prince Alexander beside me, and cries of “Halfmortal! Halfmortal!” dogged my ascent, and as I had been instructed to do I lifted the Cielcin spear to each in salute. How strange it was, and how marvelous, that these great princes and chevaliers of the Imperium should bow to me and to my company, composed as it was of foreigners, of plebeians, with an intus, a homunculus, and a pack of inmane savages. The world had changed—and I had changed it.

But bow they did, if not all of them.

Augustin Bourbon did not bow, nor his cousin, Prince Charles—the son of the previous Prince Charles whom Augustin had betrayed his own father to support. Neither did Marius Hohenzollern nor his wife, Wilhelmina. It did not matter. At last we came to the receiving platform at the top of that mighty stair where the Emperor awaited us, seated on a throne grander and more beautiful by far than the empty seat on the barge I’d left below. There I—to whom all the great lords of the Empire had bowed that day—bowed myself, and knelt, and laid at the royal feet the staff of the enemy I had beaten.

One of the mirrored Excubitors approached. As he did so I unkindled my sword and proffered it—head bowed—with both hands. The knight received my blade and gave it into the hands of His Imperial Radiance, William XXIII, who grasped my weapon as though it were the very scepter of rule and said, “Well done, my good and faithful servant. We are glad to receive you here in this, your moment of triumph.” Without standing, the Imperial person raised my sword hilt in one velvet-gloved fist. From my place on the ground, I glanced up. Behind His Radiance there was a sea of white robes and redheaded faces. The Empress stood behind the throne, and dozens of their children behind prudence shields powered by reactors large as mountains hid deep in the bowels of the City far below. “Hadrian Marlowe, for your service to Earth and Emperor, you have our gratitude.” He lowered my sword hilt, which was the sign for a page homunculus to approach on its knees, head bowed, bearing aloft a red silk pillow. Moving with the gravity of the weightiest stars, the Emperor rose, snowy garments fluttering about him in the breeze. In gloved and many-ringed hands he took the item from the pillow and raised it for all the crowd to see.

I felt my breath catch.

In the Imperial hands was a wreath, a crown of living gold.

The Grass Crown.

“For your bravery on the field of battle, by our own hand, we set upon your head the Grass Crown! The highest honor we may bestow.” He approached and set the wreath upon my head. It was far heavier than I expected, and when I would remove it later I discovered that it was—in truth—wrought of living gold. The leaves and wood of it were laced with metal. How such a thing can be I do not know, and yet I tell you it is so. “You rode at the head of your army against the Pale, saving not only your men from destruction but redeeming those legions we thought lost forever, defying our wildest hopes.” He raised both hands, by that gesture encompassing the Last Stair and the whole of the Campus Raphael—encompassing most of all the gilded barge-palanquin on which I had entered, on which still stood, hanging from its post, the demonic corpse of the Vayadan-General Iubalu. “With your own hands you slew the captain of the enemy, and brought us news of an alliance between the Cielcin and those barbarians who have ever been a threat to our realm and dominion.”

Turning, His Radiance plucked my sword back from the arm of his throne and offered it to me. A powerful symbol, that. To put into my hands a weapon that at that range no power in the universe could have stopped me from using against him. I took the sword in my left hand and accepted the Emperor’s right. White gauntlet in red glove, the Emperor himself pulled me to my feet and wheeled me to face the crowd. I held my sword aloft just as the Emperor had done—an Emperor myself, if for only an instant, draped as I was in the cloth of that office.

I looked down upon the high lords of the Imperium, down on Habsburg and Hohenzollern, on Bourbon and Bernadotte. I looked down on Mahidol and Singh and Rothschild, down on Yamato, and felt them looking up at me. Bourbon turned his back. And Hohenzollern. And Mahidol. And when all the banners dipped, theirs did not, and despite the cheering and the bright music of horn and trumpet and the rose petals falling from the high hall as once they’d fallen on Crispin in Colosso, I felt a cold dread seep into my heart, though it melted in the warmth of that instant, for there too were the faces of Corvo and Durand, of Aristedes and Koskinen and Pherrine. Crim and Ilex knelt there side by side, and beside them were Udax and Barda and the Irchtani who were that day heroes to the lords of men. And there were my friends Pallino, Elara, and Siran, who had come with me from the bottom of Emesh. And there was Valka—who did not kneel but stood apart in her black dress, a witch in seeming if not in truth. Criminals and slaves, homunculi and inti, foreigners and xenobites and witches, too.

My people.

My friends.

A moment later, a port opened beneath the post from which Iubalu hung. A containment field was activated, flashing as it englobed the palanquin. Then a violet flame issued forth, hot as the hottest stars and twice as bright, though the field polarized the worst of it. Iubalu was consumed then, the titanium and plastic all melted away. Not even the adamant of its armor would remain through heat hot enough to dissolve molecular bonds. I shut my eyes, and shutting them saw once more my vision . . . twice received.

I saw a black ship plunge into a star, and saw the Cielcin swallowed all by light, and heard once more the shrieking voice of the oracle, Jari.

Light! he screamed, demon-possessed and dead inside. Light! Light! Light!

And the Emperor’s voice rose above the masses, louder than the voice of God. “As it is here for this one—so shall it be for all the rest,” he cried. “Death to the enemy!”

“Death to the enemy!” the crowd echoed back.

“Glory for Mankind!” the Emperor decreed.

“Glory for Mankind!”

“Long live the Children of Earth!”

“Long live the Children of Earth!”