“YOU MUST FORGIVE BROTHER Van,” said Primate Arrian—master of all Nov Belgaer Athenaeum and the Imperial Library. “The boy was doing his duty. He is young. I apologize, Lord, for leaving you to stand in the rain.”

“It’s no trouble,” I said, accepting the straight-backed wooden seat the Primate offered me. Valka sat beside me. Varro stood behind. The Primate’s quarters were low-ceilinged and close, with a warm fire crackling merrily in the fireplace, burning what appeared to be moss. Another novice, a young woman clearly of palatine birth, sat on a stool with a clipboard on her knees. Ink stained her hands and the front of her green robes, as she struggled with the old-fashioned pen and writing tablet.

Arrian took his seat behind the large desk. The furniture was plain, but well made, carefully polished and maintained. Everything from the worn bookshelves, to the scrolls in their honeycombed niches, to the weathered stone walls themselves ached with age.

“What brings you to Colchis, Lord?” Tor Arrian asked. He was an older man, but by the red of his hair—going gray in places—I guessed that he was a cousin of the Imperial line.

I glanced at Valka, having decided to not quite tell the truth as I had before the Emperor.

“The Mericanii, Primate,” I answered after a pregnant moment.

Whatever Tor Arrian had expected, this was not it, for despite his scholiast’s training I saw his eyelids flicker. The girl’s pen scratched to one side. “The Mericanii?” the Primate said. “Why? I will admit our knowledge of current events is sparse in athenaeum, but I know you, Lord Marlowe. You are focused on the Cielcin, are you not? Why turn to—of all things—the Foundation War?” My eyes turned to the scribe. Even in the offices of a scholiast primate behind the walls of an athenaeum, there were ears. No cameras or microphones, but there were recording devices of a kind. “Ekaterin is my daughter,” Tor Arrian said. “You need not worry.”

His daughter? That caught me by surprise. Scholiasts do not have children. A bastard, then? An intus? She looked healthy enough. Perhaps she was one of the lucky ones.

Smiling at the primate, I continued my lie. “On my travels, I discovered evidence of contact between the Mericanii daimons and certain . . . extraterranic agencies.”

“Xenobites?” The scholiast lord almost, almost arched his eyebrows.

“Possibly.”

“We have no such information here,” Arrian said. “Wherever did you learn such a thing?”

Eyes shifting to Valka, I hesitated. She answered for me. “Vorgossos.”

The scholiast’s composure cracked, and he nearly laughed, echoing, “Vorgossos . . . you’re not serious.”

But Valka and Varro alike had come to Vorgossos. Both had spoken with Kharn Sagara. The Chalcenterite answered, speaking from over my shoulder. “It is true, father. The planet exists. You will forgive me, but it seems the reports from Legion Intelligence have not yet reached you here.”

“Vorgossos . . .” The primate repeated the name. “Next you will me that Ys is real! Camelot?”

Valka crossed her arms. “If your acolytes had not taken my terminal, I might have shown you.”

“Shown me?” the primate said. “You have holographs?”

“I have memories,” she said, putting one finger to her temple. She offered no further explanation. The intaglio on her arm spoke to her Tavrosi ancestry, and that was enough.

Tor Arrian looked away.

“I met a man on Vorgossos who said the Mericanii conducted probing missions deep into the galactic volume. That some of their missions produced interesting results.” I did not say what Brethren had said, that its fellow eldritch machines had perceived the Quiet across the stars and the centuries. “It is possible some of these incidents were early contact between the Mericanii and the Cielcin—long before our own people reached the Veil of Marinus.”

But the primate was shaking his head. “Lord Marlowe, how much do you know of astrophysics?”

I raised one eyebrow, sensing the trap but not the shape of it. “Enough as any sailor not tasked with piloting a ship.”

“Little and less, then,” Arrian said, eyes finding the ceiling. “The Mericanii never developed the warp drive. Any probes they might have sent would not have gotten far before our ancestors caught up with them, certainly before they penetrated as far as the Veil.” He was right; the Mericanii had ruled Earth for nearly two thousand years before the Advent and the Foundation War, but that limited them to a sphere of influence with a radius of two thousand light-years around Earth. The Veil of Marinus was more than twenty thousand light-years from Earth, near the heart of the galaxy. If by some chance our ancestors had missed one of the machines’ ancient probes, it would still be on its way, tracking toward the core and galactic north at nearly the speed of light, time dilated and distorted in its wake.

Undaunted, Valka leaped to my defense. “But the Cielcin are a nomadic people. ’Tis possible, if unlikely, that one of these incidents described by this man on Vorgossos might have been early contact with the Cielcin. Prior human contact might explain Cielcin belligerence when they attacked Cressgard centuries ago.”

Arrian’s handsome palatine face composed itself into a frown—a most un-scholiast expression. “That would require a cultural memory reaching back more than fifteen thousand years on the part of the Cielcin. And I thought all evidence suggested they only became a spacefaring culture in the past few thousand years.”

“They are longer lived than we are,” I said.

“And ’tis possible we misunderstand their origins,” Valka agreed.

The primate shook his head again. “This is a fool’s errand.”

“With respect, primate,” I said, and bowed my head, “it is my errand.” I placed my ungloved fist on the tabletop, displaying Sir George’s ring. The Emperor’s ring. “I am of His Radiance’s Knights Victorian, here at his special command. You are bound, and I command. I request and require your cooperation.”

Tor Arrian’s frown deepened, and in that frown I recognized the face of the Emperor. Who had Arrian been in his former life? A brother? A cousin to the throne? Had he known William XXIII as a boy? Had they played together in the gardens of the Peronine Palace? His green eyes stared at the ring. Surely he knew it.

Both hands flat on the tabletop, he answered, “You must understand how irregular this is. The Strictures are most explicit with regard to what we can and cannot do. We are bound, you say. This is true. All men are. The information you request and require is in Gabriel’s Archive, sealed since it was transported here at the founding of this institution. Sealed by order of Emperor Gabriel II after the Pretender’s defeat. Sealed because even my order was not to be trusted with Mericanii artifacts. It will take more than a ring to open those doors, my lord. You have come all this way for nothing. I am sorry.” He stood, and bowed low over the table, his hands tucked into his flowing brocade sleeves. “But I answer to higher authorities than you.”

“Higher than the Emperor?”

“To tradition. If William wishes to break with tradition, he must tell me himself,” he said. “You have the freedom of this institute and the library—save the monastery on the crag, of course—unless you wish to join our order.”

“Not today,” I said icily, standing myself. “I am grateful for your hospitality, primate. But.” If Tor Arrian insisted on playing the game to the letter, so be it. I would cross every T and mark every vowel if that was what it took, even if it took months to clear.

“But?” Arrian raised an eyebrow.

“But,” I said coolly, “I will be transmitting directly to His Radiance on Forum. You will open those doors for me, primate. Depend on it.” And with that I turned and strode from the room in a flowing of black coattails.

---

“ ’Tis only a minor setback,” Valka said, gripping my arm as we strode down a pillared gallery from the primate’s offices.

Varro cut in, following softly behind. “I will return to the city and see the request is wired through.”

“You have the Emperor’s codes?” I said.

“I do,” he said.

“Very good. Take Doran and two men with you,” I said. “Now that we know the situation on the ground here, please send to the Tamerlane. I want Prince Alexander brought down. If we’re to be dug in here for months, he might as well get an education out of all this.” We swept down a flight of stairs as I spoke, guards marching in lockstep behind.

Varro assented, and added, “If might make a suggestion?”

“Certainly.”

“If we are to be at anchor here for some time, it might do to let the men ashore. Many of them have not had proper shore leave in decades—a number of them have not even left the Tamerlane except to fight. This isn’t Forum. They’re not like to get into any political trouble.”

“Political trouble,” I said, thinking of Lieutenant Casdon. “Very good, counselor. Make the arrangements with the governor-general. I’ve no wish to flood her city with lonely sailors all at once. Perhaps there are some remoter locations the men might visit in smaller groups. Less chance for mayhem.”

Varro bowed and withdrew, hurrying along one leg of the quadrangle we’d descended into with Doran and his guards.

“What’s the point of a library if they won’t let you read anything?” Pallino said when the scholiast had gone.

I could only sigh. It was a tiresome delay, but for once in my life, time was not of the essence, and so I did not complain.

---

The athenaeum citadel was, as I have said, bounded by a high, circular stone wall. But I feel this presents too simple a picture of the place in which I now sit. For a start, this picture leaves off the monastery on the crag overlooking the main athenaeum. On that high crag, old men retreated to contemplate the stars and to study the soul, muttering of philosophy in dusty halls, writing books that descended their winding stairs and vanished into the cavernous halls of the Imperial Library, perhaps to be read one day by some novice destined to tutor some great lord, perhaps not.

The Library itself stood at the center of the compound, a massive drum tower perhaps half a mile in diameter, the only structure in the place not built of common stone, but of steel, with high, narrow windows rising for fifty stories above the low stone buildings and spires of the lecture halls and refectories, observatories, conservatories, and greenhouses. Part of the mountain it seemed, an admonishing finger or defiant fist upthrust from the body of the highlands and Colchis itself.

It was but the tip of the iceberg, for beneath its mighty spire there were deep halls and chambers and winding labyrinths, walls packed and lined with books, and more than books: with scrolls and pamphlets, with ancient storage drives, microfilm, and quartz storage crystals—though the scholiasts possessed no praxis to read such things within their walls. How many billion texts molder yet within its walls? How many trillion?

The Library and athenaeum institute of Nov Belgaer that surrounded it was a labyrinth and a microcosm unto itself, replete with aqueducts and gardens, amphitheaters and classrooms—all the essentials necessary for maintaining a community of thousands and facilitating their lives of consecrated research.

Quarters had been found for us in a quiet dormitory near the outer walls, and while we waited for Varro and Doran to return from Aea with Alexander, Valka and I ate in the refectory alongside green-robed brothers and sisters of the Order and were permitted to explore those parts of the compound nearest the main gate, where dwelt the novices and those full scholiasts whose vocation it was to interact with the world outside. Pallino was never far behind, dogging us with his men.

Valka’s nails bit into my arm the instant we crossed the threshold, heavy doors swinging shut on temple-hushed quiet.

“You’ve finally done it,” she whispered, strangely breathless. “You’ve finally brought me somewhere nice.”

Dust hung thick on the air with the smell of centuries, danced in sunbeams cast through high and narrow windows on a quiet undisturbed in nigh as long. Delicate mosaics showing geometric designs tiled the floor, and richly carved counters ahead and to either side of the double doors stood tall, their attendants stooped over ledgers behind iron grillwork fashioned in the image of thorned vines. The doors themselves stood shut beneath an arch carved with an inscription.

“ ’Tis Classical English, yes?” Valka asked. “What does it say?”

I squinted up at the old, squarish letters. “Great is Truth,” I read aloud, “and mighty above all things.”

“Can we . . . just go in?” she asked me, looking round as if for some sentinel or sign.

One of the attendants raised her head from her book and said, “You may. But kindly keep quiet.”

Keep Quiet, I thought, capitalizing the word. Bowing my head, I advanced and held the door open for Valka, standing to one side so that I caught the look on her face as she passed me and beheld the Library itself for the first time. Sharp though my memory may be, I do not share Valka’s perfect clarity of recall. Things fade for me, dim, and distort. Memories are lost.

Though not the memory of her face.

Her eyes glowed as they widened, but her smile and look of wonder stretched wider still, until the joy in her and the awe yawned large enough to swallow the Imperial Library and drink its every word. I could not help but smile. After decades, after nigh on a century of waking years and more than a century asleep, after years of patient waiting and delay and time spent poring over Imperial military reports and scans from captured Cielcin ships—Valka’s faith had been rewarded.

She moved forward in a kind of dream, left me hanging on the door. I watched her go, filtering in behind her, not daring to speak and interrupt her religious moment. Stacks of books surrounded her, aisle upon aisle of circular shelves marching, bending away to encircle the massive library. Ladders ran on brass tracks in the tile alongside inlaid strips of carpet to deaden the tramp of feet. Valka spun as she advanced, taking in the sights, obvious tourism earning her a dismissive glare from a novice clearly not yet trained in the management of her outward emotions.

“There must be a million books on this floor alone!” said Valka, sotto voce. She almost laughed. She turned to the nearest aisle—marked in brass on its end cap with a sign reading Encyclopdias, Extraterranic Biologies, Na-Ne. Selecting a tome at random, she drew out one volume of a 20-volume set detailing the native pseudoflora of some planet I had never heard of. She turned the pages, flipping through so quickly I knew she could not possibly be reading the text. I had to remind myself that she did not have to. Merely seeing the pages was enough. Valka could recall each idly-glanced-at page with the clarity of digital recall.

She closed the book with a thump.

“Simply marvelous!” she exclaimed, a manic gleam alight in her eyes. “And these are just encyclopedias, dictionaries, compendiums . . . oh! And indexes, look!” She was grinning like a fiend as she turned the huge slim index volume around to show me. “Attention: This index is imperfect,” she said, displaying a card inside the front cover, written in both Classical English and Galstani. “Hadrian, they don’t even know where all their books are!”

“How could they?” I said. “Students must move them all the time. And I’ll bet each time the curators try to reorganize things some new curators come along with new ideas and change everything over.”

Valka was shaking her head. “You anaryoch. A collection like this should be properly sorted, backed up, scanned. What if this place burned? What would happen to all this?”

“They’ll never have a machine in here,” I said. “The scholiasts in particular are forbidden. It was scholiasts—well, scholars—that built the machines in the first place. Your people have forgotten what the Mericanii were like. What they did.”

“ ’Twas so long ago!” Valka objected, hugging the index to herself. “So much has changed!”

“You remember Brethren,” I said softly, confident that here in all the universe there were no cameras listening in.

Her face fell, and she placed the volume back on its shelf. “Maybe you’re right,” she said.

But Valka was not one to let my being right ruin her time in the Library. She brushed past me and returned to the central aisle, marching along its spine toward the central desks and the main stair. The archives rose above us for several levels, each railed with old iron, and connected by a spiraling iron stair. Scholiasts in viridian sat on straight-backed chairs at tables or wall-in reading desks, keeping rapt silence or else softly murmuring to one another.

Following Valka’s lead, we climbed the stairs and ran along the narrow span that led from the central spiral to the second floor of the archives. We continued in this vein for hours—for the entirety of the afternoon, in fact. We climbed to floor after floor, and after a dozen or so floors passed through the roof of the lobby to where the iron stair became stone and the round aisles became straight. Here Valka stopped her climb and we descended instead by a sweeping outer stair that spiraled about the outside of the central archives, passing wall-niches where stood the busts of great thinkers, magi, and poets long dead. Switchback stairs broke off from ours at regular intervals, ascending and descending straight up and down as may be.

After a while I realized what Valka was doing: she was building a map. When we each arrive in a new place, we must inhabit it for a time before it becomes real, before its passages and turnings become to us as familiar as the lines inside our hands. Valka needed but one showing to become accustomed. I marked how her eyes—still wide with wonder—marked each brass placard and aisle marker, knowing that with each idle glance she etched an indelible memory of what each aisle held and where it was. In watching her, I conceded that she, too, was right. With Valka’s memory alone, the Library might be properly indexed in a palatine lifetime.

On the third level or the second we exited the stair, passing out into an annex attached to the archives’ drum tower. There we found washrooms alongside a dispensary offering cool water and the scholiasts’ only true vice: coffee. Here we lingered a moment, sitting in a corner among quietly chattering students, and talked of little things.

Exploring the annex further, we passed beneath an arch with its brass signed marked SCRIPTORIA. Here a curving hallway tiled black and white processed beneath arched vaults with arched doors to either side. Through these—some open, some closed, some occupied—stood small chambers with writing desks and papers, vellum, and inks alongside charcoal and rubber and jars of sand, all the tools of the scribe’s trade. Names on movable type showed in sliders on the doors, marking each cell for its occupant: Tor Hunt, Tor Saad, Tor Vermeule, and so on. At one of these we stopped.

Number 113.

Here I pause, for it is in this very chamber I sit at my work, writing this very page. And turning to look at the wooden door, I look back across centuries at my younger self, standing beside Valka in the door. How young I was! How young and how untested. We stepped into the room, my room, and looked round. The cell was and is not large, just more than four yards deep and three across, with a canted writing desk beneath the veined glass window with its view of the towers of the athenaeum compound and the sea beyond. If I crane my neck I can see a sea mount looming on the horizon, brushing the limb of the gas giant Atlas where it skirts the heavens above. As in the hall without, the ceiling was vaulted, and as in the outer stair of the tower, there stood niches filled with the porphyry busts of sages. The traditional bust of Imore was there. The first scholiast stared impassive from his niche above a cubby where the room’s occupant might theoretically leave his or her manuscript. I ran a gloved finger over the ledge, scraped a thick caul of dust from the dark wood.

“Gibson,” Valka said, voice strangely hushed by some quirk of the air.

“What?” I looked over my shoulder, found Valka pointing at the dark bust of a man above the central niche in the left side. Moving to join her, I squinted up at the statue in its enclosure. It was not my Gibson, not at all. The image was of a handsome man with the strong jaw and cheekbones of some patrician line. Sharp nose, high forehead, eyebrows steeply slanted. He was no scholiast, if the wry smile he wore was any indication. I read the inscription. “Christopher-Marcus Gibson,” I said. “Golden Age ethical philosopher. Fairly obscure.”

“How do you know this?”

“It’s who my Gibson named himself after,” I said. “When the scholiasts are embraced by the Order—when they become scholiasts, that is—they take a new name as a sign that they’ve cast aside their old lives and the attachments of family and so on, which is important. Especially because most of them are palatine.” I gestured at Gibson’s bust. “Gibson—my Gibson—always said he was the finest philosopher of the late Golden Age.”

She cocked her head to one side. “Looks a bit like you.”

“Maybe a little.”

“The jaw,” she said, pointing. Valka frowned. “Why did he take his name?”

“He never told me,” I said, turning from that first Gibson’s statue to look at Valka more fully. “I don’t know much about him.”

“About your Gibson or this?”

“Either, I suppose,” I said. Christopher-Marcus Gibson was of an age remote almost as Alexander, as the last pharaohs and the first Caesars. The Golden Age of Earth, before mankind was made subject to her machines. Who could say with certainty what sort of man was he, who might have broken bread with Churchill or locked horns with Bonaparte? Who might his friends have been? Heroes and prophets of that antediluvian time? Not even Kharn Sagara would know, for Sagara—immortal and eldest as he was of all the Children of Earth—was a child of our latter days, a child of the Exodus, of the Peregrinations that carried mankind from Earth. None now live who can answer these questions.

My own Gibson was as much a mystery.

The scholiasts burn their dead and scatter the ashes to the winds. They keep no records, no biographies. They are servants, stewards. The only memory they leave behind is the work they did in life.

So it is with the rest of us, in truth.

“You know, I don’t even know his name?” I said. “My Gibson, that is. Who he was before, you know? He was palatine, so he was someone.” I felt her glaring at me and raised my gloved hand in apology. “You know what I mean.”

Valka wrapped an arm around me and stood there in companionate silence, looking up at the elder Gibson’s likeness. “Does it matter who he was?” she asked.

I looked down at her, astonished to hear her ask such a question. As long as I had known her, Valka had obsessed about identity. I suppose I did as well, if differently. Where I had concerned myself with the proprieties of antique class, Valka’s prejudices had run against the Imperium as a whole.

Against me and everything that I was.

As a young man, Valka’s pretenses at egalitarianism had irritated me, not because her compassion for creatures like the Umandh on Emesh and the Irchtani—even our own homunculi—was misplaced; it wasn’t. But because her compassion ended there and excluded me. Excluded Gibson, too. But Gibson was dead, and whoever he was, I knew that I would never see him again.

“No, I guess it doesn’t,” I said. “We should head back. Varro’s bound to be back soon with the prince.”

Valka nodded and permitted me to chivvy her toward the door.

I lingered for but a moment on the threshold and—though I did not then know it—looked back upon the very chair and desk at which I now spend my exile. Turning round, I can look even now upon that elder Gibson’s bust. His statue is why I chose to return to this scriptorium of the three hundred that line this hall. Sitting in its shadow, I feel almost as if the eyes of my Gibson were on me.

I left the cell then, not knowing I would ever return.