VALKA DID NOT RETURN from her ventures in the stacks until long after I had fallen asleep. Something about her implants allowed her to sleep only a little when she had a mind. An hour or two was enough to sustain her, despite her languorous schedule of sleeping late and working in her undergarments in our apartments aboard the Tamerlane. When the fire was in her, she hardly slept at all.

“I found the xenology section!” she told me. “ ’Tis up on the thirty-seventh floor. Thirty-seventh! And no lift! You can’t imagine how my legs feel just now. They have Carter’s original journals from the Rubicon digs in the fourth millennium! The originals! ’Twould not let me read them—I had to look up the phototypes in one of the slide catalogs.”

“Gibson’s here,” I said, cutting across Valka’s mania for old things.

“What?” Valka froze. “You mean . . . alive?”

I told her everything.

---

It took some doing to find my way back down through the bowels of the Library’s main silo, but in time I found the hall with its coral pillars and scrolls and paintings under glass. Valka stopped me only once to admire an ancient sketch, red on yellowed vellum, of a bearded old man.

“Da Vinci!” she said. “Hadrian, this is from Earth!” Many of the things in the archives were, and ordinarily I would like nothing better than to spend an hour or a day with Valka exploring the storied past.

But Gibson was waiting, impossible though I still found it to believe.

He wasn’t in the Archivists’ Grotto when he arrived, and our progress was delayed by Valka’s awe of the caverns themselves. At length I asked an older scholiast—a flat-faced man in over-washed green—where I might find my old tutor. He directed us back along a winding passage to a solitary door embedded in the rock. I knocked. When no one answered, I tried the handle. It opened, and I stepped through into a small apartment. The Archivists were accorded better lodging than the novices were in their barracks on the surface. Glass globes full of the white-glowing algae hung on the walls, casting rippling lines on the rough stone walls like sunlight on the surface of the water.

It was nothing extravagant. An old couch flattened by decades of service, a coffee table before it, a writing desk in one corner beneath hollows in the rock into which metal shelves had been placed. Books lay about everywhere—evidence that Gibson, too, had not changed in our long separation. His chambers were still cluttered, the chaos of his living space a necessary sacrifice to build the order of his mind.

Smiling, I called out, “Gibson?” I paused a beat to take a step into the chamber, pitching my voice toward the arch that opened in the back of the room. “Gibson, it’s Hadrian.”

“Perhaps he’s working,” Valka said.

“Hadrian?” The familiar voice rose from the back room. “Just a moment!”

All at once, a strange uneasiness gripped me, as though I were a plebeian day laborer bringing some farm girl home to meet his parents. A giddiness and an odd fear mingled in my chest, wrestling with one another.

I needn’t have feared.

The old scholiast appeared a moment later, still barefoot, robe belted about his waist, brass badges gleaming on his sash. He stopped short when he saw I was not alone. “Oh!” he said.

Two chapters of my life—two very different lives—stood represented in those two people: the woman I loved, and the man who had raised me. Seeing each of them at once I felt at once the boy of nineteen and the man of six score and three.

“You must be Valka,” Gibson said, coming forward, his scholiast training keeping the old face flat. Despite the cane he held, he took Valka’s hand in both his own. I could tell he was smiling beneath his mask of composure. “I am so pleased to meet you. Hadrian’s told me so much.”

“Only the good parts, I hope,” she said, smiling up at the old man who, stooped as he was, still had an inch or two on her.

Gibson patted her clasped hands with his free one. “There was only good. Please sit! Please!” He gestured toward the flattened sofa with his cane—and it was the same cane he’d used on Devil’s Rest, preserved after all these years. “I don’t keep much here by way of refreshment—we all eat in the refectory—but I can put tea on, if you would like. But Hadrian doesn’t take tea, of course.”

“I do!” Valka said. “Let me help you.”

The scholiast denied needing help, but Valka insisted, and at once the two busied themselves with the process of steeping the evil beverage. I sat bemusedly by, toying with the glove on my left hand.

“You know,” Valka said when the kettle was filled and boiling, “I never thought I’d meet you.” Gibson turned to look at her, smiling politely. There was something of the owl in the way he turned blinking to regard the lady, and I was reminded of old Lord Powers. “Hadrian said it’s only been four years for you.” Gibson bobbed his head, but did not interrupt. “ ’Tis been a lot longer for us, but he’s never stopped talking about you. I’ve always wanted to see where he came from. ’Twas not sure what to expect.”

Gibson held two teacups in his hands while they waited for the kettle to boil. “Only an old man. No great mystery—certainly not after everything you both have seen.”

“He told me you didn’t believe him,” Valka said, looking down. “I didn’t believe him, either.”

They were talking about me as if I weren’t there, and I felt suddenly that I’d intruded on a conversation not meant for my ears. That I did not belong.

The old man glanced at me a moment before responding—and I wasn’t sure if that heightened my sense of intrusion or dispelled it. “I told him I did believe him. I only don’t understand.”

“He told you why we’re here?”

“Delving into the secrets of the universe, was it?”

Valka laughed suddenly and looked at me. “You come by your sense of drama honestly, then!”

Was it my imagination, or did Gibson actually flush to hear that?

I chuckled. “You should meet my mother.”

Scholiast composure reasserted itself, and he said, “You’re waiting for access to Gabriel’s Archive. You hope to find some record of contact between the Mericanii and these . . . Quiet. You say the Mericanii artificial intelligences could perceive time and communicate across it. I am not a physicist, but I do not see how that is possible. One can move forward in time at varying rates; the ancients demonstrated that quite soundly. Einstein, Royse, Rosier, and so forth. But backward? Impossible.”

“But if what Brethren told me is true,” I said, “it would explain my visions. The Quiet are showing me things that have happened in its past, or that might happen.”

“Your visions don’t sound like visions to me,” Gibson said. “They sound abstract. More like dreams than a holograph recording.” The scholiast shook his head, and though his face remained impassive, I sensed the tiredness, the deep sadness in him. “You have grown beyond me.” Valka took the cups from him and poured the tea. “Why do you suppose the creatures take my appearance?”

He had not turned to look at me, but I knew Gibson addressed his question to me. I could sense the familiar whip-crack quality of his questioning.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Because I thought you were dead?” No sooner had the words escaped my mouth than I realized I had only assumed Gibson was dead because the Quiet had worn his face. “I’ve read too many ghost stories,” I said darkly, and shook my head.

Valka set her tea on the table while it cooled, crossed her arms. “Perhaps they wanted to communicate in a way you would understand?”

“Or because you trust me,” Gibson said, lowering himself into his seat. “Who can say? The Chantry regulates knowledge of these ruins of yours outside these walls.” He waved his stick round at the walls of the little apartment. “But even in here I never studied them.” Gibson’s eyes lingered on Valka’s face a moment before jumping to mine. “I could never have imagined . . . this.”

“No one could have,” Valka said. “There are days I don’t believe it myself. But ’tis true. I saw him die, M. Gibson.”

“Tor,” I corrected her, made uncomfortable by the talk and reminder of my death. I massaged my neck, remembering the painless bite of the blade as it struck off my head. The very blade that even then lay in a lockbox in the complex’s barbican.

The scholiast took up his tea, face dark and strangely sad. “Just Gibson will do. Hadrian is the nearest thing to a son I have left, which I suppose . . . makes you family?” He twisted the last few words, making them a question. Gray and misty eyes flitted from each of us to the next in polite turn.

Valka understood before I did. “We’re not married. I’m Tavrosi.”

“Ah!” Gibson put a hand to his forehead. “I had forgotten, apologies.” But Gibson was a scholiast, and scholiasts do not forget. “I am getting old . . . more than six hundred now. Please forgive me.”

“We’re as good as,” Valka said, and smiled at me. “ ’Tis been almost . . . seventy years for me? Not all at once! I’ve been in fugue more than he has.”

My old tutor looked into the depths of his tea, as though he were some primeval sorcerer hoping to learn some secret from the leaves. “Then you know him far better than I,” he said somberly. Not looking up, he continued, “I can’t begin to tell you how many times these four years I’ve asked myself if what I did was right: helping you escape your father. I’m still not sure. But I am glad that some good has come of it.” His eyes moved to Valka. “He was so lonely as a boy, you know? That castle was no place for a child. Much less two.” Valka said nothing, and Gibson turned his eyes on me. “You have a sister, you know?”

“I what?” I was glad I’d no teacup of my own, for surely I’d have dropped it on the rough stone floor. A sister?

“Alcuin sent word here by telegraph pending my arrival, telling me all sorts of news from home. Your parents commissioned her from the High College shortly after you left. A replacement.”

“Replacement?” I echoed lamely. I’d had no idea.

“Sabine Doryssa Marlowe,” Gibson said, pronouncing the name with grave formality.

“Sabine,” I said. My great-great-grandmother had been a Sabine. It was a good name, ancient, old as Earth herself. “I had no idea.” How in nearly a century of service on Forum had I failed to learn that Alistair Marlowe had petitioned for and been granted the right to birth another child? A sister. I had a sister. “Alcuin told you?” I had not thought about Tor Alcuin in decades. My father’s chief counselor and I had never been terribly close.

Tor Gibson recharged his tea from the pot and restored both cup and teapot to the table. I still could not believe it was really him, really alive and in the same room with me. “Only once. The telegraph arrived shortly before I did . . . as a courtesy, one scholiast to another. Just to let me know what had happened while I was asleep. I knew you’d fled, but there was little other reference to you in the letter. Alcuin said you were fighting the Cielcin—but I didn’t think that could be true. It didn’t sound like you at all.”

“A lot’s changed.”

“I know.”

A question occurred to me. “Does my father still rule?”

“Yes,” Gibson answered. “He did some time offworld, it seems. Traveled to the Consortium offices at Arcturus and suchlike. He’s not quite an old man.”

“And Crispin?” I asked. “My mother?”

“Alive,” Gibson said. “Crispin married one of Lord Albans’s daughters—they have children. Your mother has all but quit Devil’s Rest for Haspida. She’s quite old. Word is your sister will inherit your father’s seat.”

I could not help myself. I laughed, the sound of it catching on the stone walls and hurled back as something hollow and tinny. After all my father’s hard lessons, after the way I’d been pitted against Crispin every day of my life until I fled Delos—after my flight and our final combat in the guest suite of the Summer Palace—none of it mattered. Lord Alistair Marlowe was giving his lands and castle away to a sibling I had not even known I had. It was too rich. Still laughing, I said, “Of course she will.”

Imperial lords were under no obligation to pass their title on to their eldest child. As Father had passed me over as unqualified in favor of Crispin, so it seemed Crispin had been discarded, though for what reason I could hardly guess.

“Alcuin says your sister is every inch her father’s daughter,” Gibson said. Was that sympathy in the old fellow’s eyes?

“Of course she is.”

Sensing my irritation, Valka chimed in. “On the other hand, Doryssa makes Anaxander seem almost tolerable.”

I snorted.

But Gibson cut through it all. “Sabine has spent a good deal of time offworld—not so much as you, of course—but she’s much younger than Crispin is now. And Alcuin believes she’ll do well on the throne. Says she’s the right temperament for it.”

“A cold, evil bitch, is she?” I asked, bitterness rank in my voice.

“Kwatz!” Gibson exclaimed, and raised a hand to mime striking me. “That is not worthy. Of you or her.”

Chastened, I bowed my head. “You’re right.” We sat, the three of us, in unsteady silence for some time, the light from the strange wall sconces shimmering across stone. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m never going back.” For all they had done in shaping me, Delos, Meidua, Devil’s Rest, and my family were as good to me then as the figures of a fairy story or half-remembered dream. In truth, figures from fairy stories, figures like Simeon the Red, like Kasia Soulier, like the Cid Arthur and even old Cassian Powers . . . like Kharn Sagara most of all . . . seemed somehow more real by the light of that gleaming algae than did my own flesh and blood.

“I am sorry to tell you like this,” Gibson said, and a wry, very unscholiast smile crept across his aged face. “Seem to be doing a lot of apologizing, don’t I?”

“You’ve nothing to apologize for,” I said.

The old man wrung his hands again. “I didn’t ask last night: how long do you intend to stay here? Not that it’s really my business.”

“ ’Tis!” Valka said. “And we’re not sure.”

“The Emperor more or less ordered me to stay out of the public eye indefinitely,” I said. “After Breathnach, Bourbon, and the rest.”

“And the Colosseum,” Valka added, as if I could forget.

“And the Colosseum.”

Gibson leaned forward and put a hand on my arm. His scholiast’s control had reasserted itself, and his face was grave and empty. “Then we should count ourselves fortunate. I have missed you, my boy.” He turned on Valka. “And you are someone I am very interested to meet. Hadrian tells me you’re a lay scholar?”

Valka beamed. “A doctor. I studied xenology and archaeology at Isana University on Edda, my home.”

“That’s in the Demarchy?” Gibson asked. “Wonderful. And you study these things? The Quiet?”

“The best I can,” she said, “as I’m sure Hadrian’s told you—the fossil record is . . . sparse.”

Gibson drank his tea. Leaning toward me, he said, “Hadrian, I don’t think you could have found someone more qualified to help answer your questions than this.”

“Don’t I know it?” I said, and smiled at Valka.

She smiled back. “For the past several decades, I’ve mostly studied the Cielcin, of course. They seem to worship the Quiet, did Hadrian say?”

“He did,” Gibson replied. “The Watchers, was it?”

“Yes,” I said, “but it may be the Quiet are only one god or set of gods among many to the Cielcin.”

“The Makers, do you mean?” Valka asked. “We know so little. Practically speaking, most of what I’ve done since I met this one is translate text and analyze artifacts collected from the battlefield. For Legion Intelligence.” She smiled, and I detected a trace of the old glass-cutting sharpness in that smile. Sharpness and the bitter taste of mockery—but whether mockery of me or of herself I could not say. “ ’Twas not how I expected to spend my life.”

The old man was nodding along in understanding quietude. “It never is,” he said. “If you had told me when I was a boy that I would be a scholiast and tutor the sons of a minor house for two generations . . . and that one of them would go on and be a Knight Victorian and battle xenobites, I would have laughed at you.” He held the clay teacup between his twisted, bony hands. I did not dare interrupt him. I could count on one hand the number of times Tor Gibson had made reference to his earlier life. “I told you once, Hadrian: we are all pawns.”

“Even the knights,” I said, and laughed.

“Even the Emperor,” Gibson cut in, “as I’m sure you noticed.”

I thought of William XXIII, a prisoner of his rituals and his court, subject to the will of his counselors and the winds of political necessity. Such a wind had made him send me away.

“A Servant of the Servants of Earth,” I said, reciting that last and seeming least of the Imperial titles. What had I told Alexander? “Noblesse oblige.”

“You’ve learned much since I left you,” Gibson said, nodding approvingly. “You’d have made a good lord.”

“Now I never will,” I said.

Gibson raised a finger. “The lessons I taught you are as salient for a knight as they are for a lord. You’ve not wasted anything.”

“It’s not that,” I said, looking to Valka. “It’s . . . when I left home, I wanted to be like you. I wanted to be a scholiast. I wanted to see the galaxy and learn and teach, maybe do good. I thought I could make peace with the Cielcin, but I failed.”

“With two princes,” Gibson said. “How many are there?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it won’t matter. They don’t want peace.”

“We don’t know that,” Valka said. “ ’Tis much we don’t know.”

I could only shake my head. “I’m not so sure.”

But Gibson was smiling. “Whatever happens, Hadrian my boy, I have faith in you. Beneath all this finery and those scars you are still the young man I knew. You will find a way. And you will find the answers you are looking for.” He stood suddenly, moving with a swiftness I’d not guessed was in him—forgetting as I often did that he was palatine beneath those wrinkles and that weight of years. “And I’m going to help you.”

“You are?” Valka sounded delighted.

“Yes, dear lady,” Gibson said, taking up his cane. “Four years is hardly time to familiarize myself with the Library—but I am an Archivist all the same. And I’ll not have my star pupil stumbling through these shelves alone. The minute Arrian approves this extraneous paperwork of his, I’ll help you with Gabriel’s Archive. I’ll have a word with the primate.”

I stood too, in part from surprised joy, in part concerned for the old scholiast, afraid he might fall over. “You must come meet the prince,” I said. “I was hoping to get him some instruction while he’s here.”

Owlish eyes blinked at me. “I’ll speak to Arrian first and be along.”

“May I have a word with you, sir? Gibson?” Valka asked, standing herself. “Before we climb up?”

Gibson swiveled to regard her. “Of course.”

I threw Valka a curious look, but she waved me down. “I’ll wait outside.”

---

They joined me beneath Imore’s statue, and we went together back along the scroll hall and up through the silo to the main building. Gibson took his leave of us outside, tottering off toward the hierarchs’ offices toward the north wall.

I watched him go, bent but still tall, leaning on his cane all the while.

“I still can’t believe it’s really him,” I said.

Valka’s hand squeezed mine. “I like him. I can see where you get those old-fashioned manners of yours.”

“Courtesy is timeless,” I said, and for once Valka neither argued nor laughed.

“Are you all right?” she asked me.

“I’m happy,” I said, and truly meant it. “What did you ask him about?”

She disentangled her hand from mine and wrapped the arm about my waist. “I didn’t ask him anything,” she said, looking up at me, bright eyes wide in her pale and lovely face. How had I ever thought her severe and unpleasant? She reached up and kissed my cheek. “I just wanted to thank him.”

“For what?”

“For you.”