“THE GOVERNOR-GENERAL SAID SHE can’t allow thousands of soldiers loose in her city,” Varro said from across the bare stone room the scholiasts had set aside for Valka and myself.

Seated on the edge of one of two narrow cots, I looked up at the scholiast, checking the frown that wanted purchase of my face. “Understandable, I suppose,” I said. Aea was a small city, and the addition of several thousand fighting men—however well trained and civilized, as I liked to imagine mine were—would not be good for the locals. Drunk and disorderly conduct, fights, theft . . . all the collateral damage of men swaggering and high on their status as Imperial soldiers. And more than Imperial soldiers. They were members of the Halfmortal’s own Red Company. I was certain the last thing the locals wanted was several hundred star-born bastards kicking about without fathers. “But she did make provision for us?”

“The Sevrast Islands,” Varro replied. “They’re an archipelago to the north, just on the far side of the equator. There are a few towns there, fishing settlements—but the greater part of the islands is still wilderness. The governor-general proposed our men might take to the beaches. It’s warm this time of year.”

I caught myself nodding along. “Camping trip, is it?”

“It’s an insult,” Alexander interjected. The young prince stood in the arched window looking out over the quadrangle two stories below and the novices strolling beneath the ancient ash tree at its center. “A Prince of the Imperium and a Royal Victorian Knight relegated to a literal backwater.” He turned, looking for all the world just like his father for a moment. “Of course this whole place is a backwater.”

I raised my gloved hand. “It will be fine,” I said tersely. “You’ll find there’s more to the world than cities, Alexander. You’ll like it.”

“The beaches?” He sounded incredulous. “I don’t like sand.”

“Enough,” I said, not lowering the hand, but turning it palm up in a gesture of peace. Directing my attentions to Varro, I asked, “How soon will we have men on the ground?”

“Corvo is having them decanted now,” my scholiast answered me. “But it might be three days before the first group is fit to make planetfall.”

That made sense. The rapid thaw and reorientation we put soldiers through in emergencies was less than medically optimal. Now that we had the time and the opportunity for respite, it was better to take things slowly, to run medical exams on all our troops—human and Irchtani alike. “I’m not sure how long it will be before Tor Arrian gets his paperwork all right and proper so Valka and I may begin, and Earth knows how long we’ll be at our research,” I said, speaking past Varro and Alexander, addressing the room at large as my father might have done. “It could be years, so I’ll want to make sure everyone has a good long time on the ground. But I don’t want everyone down at once ruining the place, and I don’t want trouble with the locals. Let the officers know they’ll be on duty so long as their men are on the ground. Their time will come at the end.”

The scholiast bowed. “I will send a man to the day gate to wave the Tamerlane.”

“Very good,” I said, and waving a hand dismissed the scholiast from my presence.

“Where’s the doctor?” Alexander asked. The prince had returned to studying the world beyond my low window.

Smiling, I lay back along the end of the bed, resting my tired muscles. Pallino and I had spent the morning sparring, and my body ached with memory of it. The patrician treatments had made the man stronger than he’d ever been, and Pallino had the wiry strength of a legionnaire, even when he’d been an old man. Young again, he was a terror, though without any of Crim’s finesse or my polish. “Where do you think?” I asked, watching the prince with one eye, hands behind my head.

“Still reading?” He sounded shocked.

“She doesn’t read,” I said, rolling my ankles as slowly as I was able, relaxing taut cords. “She’s scanning.” Alexander knew full well that Valka was Tavrosi, and he had some inkling of her abilities, but I saw one hand form itself into the familiar warding gesture all the same: first and last fingers extended, the others curled. “She found the xenology section last night. She’s been turning over every leaf as fast as she can.” Knowing it would frighten my young squire, I said, “She’ll have absorbed half the books in the section by now.”

The truth was, I envied Valka her abilities. As I have grown older, I have found it increasingly difficult to sit down and read, preferring to listen to my terminal read to me as I go about other business or sit drawing with my charcoals and my folio. It took me hours to absorb what took Valka instants.

Bowing his head and—for a change—not arguing, the prince answered, “I suppose it has its uses.”

Never one to simply agree out of hand, I grunted and said, “Plato objected to writing, you know. Said it would spoil man’s ability to remember. He was right. Imore worked for decades rebuilding mankind’s lost capacity for memory. Valka can absorb an enormous amount of information without learning it.”

“But she can recall any line or bit of information from it,” Alexander said.

“Yes,” I agreed, “but she hasn’t developed any kind of theory about her new knowledge. She can’t sort it. Or hasn’t sorted it.”

The prince was getting it, I could tell by the way he was steadily nodding his head. “So she doesn’t have any ideas about the information.”

Reader, have I already said that there is a difference between knowing a fact and owning it? “It takes Valka as long as you or I to think about what she knows.”

“Surely not as long,” he said. “She doesn’t have to waste time learning and relearning information.”

“True,” I said. “But she also doesn’t feel the same pressure to learn. Much of the data Valka has taken in in her day just sits in there, waiting to be useful. She hasn’t thought about it, hasn’t accessed it, and because those parts of her mind are machine, the thoughts only sit there until she needs them. She told me once things don’t float in her mind the way they do in yours or mine.”

Alexander turned sharply then, curiosity plain on his impossibly sculpted face. “Does she dream?”

She didn’t, but I did not feel that it was my place to say. Whatever the nature of Valka’s implants, they’d fundamentally altered her brain’s chemistry and mechanics. Not only did she not dream, she did not struggle to sleep. She could switch off her waking mind as easily as you or I might turn a light switch.

“Why do you ask?”

“I only wondered,” the prince said. “I can’t imagine what it must be like, being like that.”

“Neither can I,” I said. The prince was silent a long moment. He’d turned back to fully face the room, eyes intently studying his own shoes. I could tell he wanted to ask something, and so said, “Out with it. What’s on your mind?”

Alexander twitched as if I’d shocked him. “I don’t understand why we’re here.”

I hadn’t told him. I’d explained everything to Pallino, to Siran and Elara, to Crim, Otavia, and Ilex—everyone who’d been with me on the Demiurge. I’d even explained it to Lorian, who believed though he had not seen. “Were you not told?” I asked, toying with one silver clasp on my glove’s long gauntlet. “I’ve long had evidence—rumor, really—of earlier battles with the Cielcin in our history. On Vorgossos, Kharn Sagara told me the Mericanii . . . encountered xenobites.”

“Kharn Sagara?” Alexander repeated, eyes gone wide. “Not the Kharn Sagara.” I only looked at him. “You didn’t tell me.”

“You didn’t ask.”

“How is he alive?”

“He clones himself,” I said, still lying there, “and takes the new bodies.”

The prince made the warding gesture again. “But he must be . . . ten thousand years old!”

“More than fifteen thousand,” I said soberly. “Almost old enough to remember the Mericanii, and old enough to remember things from that time we have long forgotten.”

“Like the Mericanii fighting the Cielcin?”

“Possibly the Cielcin,” I said, so what I said became something less than a lie.

“But then . . .”

A knock sounded at the door, cutting off the prince’s question. “Enter!” I called.

The novice at the door bowed. “I apologize for the interruption, my lords,” she said, still bowing.

I sat up on the bed, swinging round to face the young lady. She wore the simple green pullover of a new-made scholiast, tied at the waist with a white cord, no sash or bronze badges to be seen. “Stand,” I said. She did. Hope springing in my chest, I said, “Did Arrian send for me?” Had the formal approval cleared the telegraph from Forum already? It seemed unlikely. It had only been three days since we had arrived.

“The primate?” She wrung her hands—definitely a novice then, and would be until she learned to control such nervous expressions. “No, my lord. I work for the curators. One of the archivists sent me for you.”

“One of the archivists?” I found my feet. “Why?”

“I don’t know, lord,” the girl said, bowing her head again. I guessed she was patrician by birth; no palatine so young would be deferential to me. “He said, ‘Carina, fetch Lord Marlowe for me.’ I am sworn to obedience, lord. I did not question him. I am sorry, lord.” She bowed again, and I sensed a glimmer of fear in the movement. Fear of me?

Smiling sweetly as I could, I offered the girl my most courtly bow. “It’s all right, Sister Carina,” I said. “Let me get my boots on.”

---

I left Alexander in the suite and followed Carina back out into the sea air. She did not speak much, but hurried on ahead of me, replying to my questions and my attempts at conversation with timid staccato replies. After a minute or two, I gave up. No sense wringing blood from a stone.

Sister Carina led me back toward the Library tower, but not the way I’d entered it with Valka on our first day. Rather, we entered through the scriptorium annex, past the winding halls and Room 113, past the coffee dispensary and back through the main archives, where to my surprise we turned down and followed the stair past the ground level into a cavernous silo of a space ringed round by ironwork balconies. Here the book stacks continued, descending it seemed for half as many levels as they climbed above. We passed dozens of brothers and sisters of the Order as we went, rattling down old metal stairs. I half-expected to catch Valka in among them—she was in there somewhere, lost among the stacks—but she did not appear.

At length Carina brought me to a hall where scrolls—actual scrolls—stood in niches like honeycomb to either side. These were blueprints, schematics, and other diagrams kept in vacuum behind filter glass to preserve them. Maps and paintings were stored in similar glass slides, protected for all eternity. It was a collection to rival and drown even the Undying’s Garden of Everything.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

Finally stringing together a coherent answer, the girl said, “The archivists’ quarters are down here. I wanted to spare him the climb.”

The arch ahead was not like the classical arches above, but circular, the door round as a pressure hatch—indeed I think it was such a hatch, or had been. Bioluminescent lamps hung on the walls, and pillars of some strange, pink stone stood in ranks beyond.

“Coral?” I asked.

“It traps moisture,” Carina said, stepping aside to allow three of her brothers to pass. “Protects the books.”

“Protects the books from what?”

I had my answer a moment later. Ahead the hall gave way to living rock, its face precisely carved by careful hands over many long centuries. Stalactites hung from the ceilings, flowed into graven pillars that supported natural vaults. Metal doors showed in the rock around, opening on deeper grottoes. A statue of Imore sat upon a pillar of stone in the center above a still, black pool. No blade of grass was there, nor flower, nor even moss. The Archivists’ Grotto. It ought to be one of the Ninety-Nine Wonders of the Galaxy all on its own, a work of art and beauty. Like the dark delvings of the Cielcin it should have been, or the gloomy haunts of our necropolis beneath Devil’s Rest, but it was like neither of those things. Great veins of gleaming algae clung to the vaults above, shedding their white light on the groves and aisles of stone, teased by decades and centuries of cultivation into fractal patterns as Buddhist monks arrange rocks in a garden.

Here I have made my home these past three years and labored at this account. Here I have lived and labored alongside the brothers and sisters of the Order, though I am not one of them. Here I have hidden from an ungrateful universe, and lived not as Hadrian Marlowe, but as a guest of Arrian’s successor three times removed. They never asked my name—though the primate knows me. They call me the Poet, and that is enough. A private joke that you, Reader, will no doubt understand.

But of all the beauty of that Grotto, of the arched cavern roof and the pillars flowing from it, of the still pool like a black mirror beneath Imore’s unsmiling face, of the hanging stalactites like the fangs of some forgotten dragon, I shall say no more—for my attention was given to none of them. My eyes went instead to the bench beside that pool, and my vision blurred with tears.

Vast is the galaxy, and vaster still the cosmos. But vaster—greater—even than that is the cosmos, the great enemy of chaos, the order that stands above it all. Four hundred billion suns in our galaxy, trillions of worlds—half a billion of them settled by Man.

So small.

Small enough for chance.

For miracles unlooked-for.

As I drew nearer I stopped, tears flowing freely by then. Upon the bench—waiting for me, it seemed—sat an elderly man, his body stooped with care, his viridian robes hanging loose on him as old rags upon a scarecrow. As I approached he looked up, smiling in a most un-scholiast way beneath his wild mane of thick white hair, gray eyes sparkling. His craggy face caught the light of the algae growth above, deep shadows carving there, throwing the mutilated nostril into sharp relief.

“Hello, Hadrian!” said Tor Gibson.