THE CUBICULUM WAS AHEAD, past sealed and unused barrack dorms. There were men there, some of Pallino’s unit. Fifteen men, was it? Two decades? I could not recall, but I couldn’t ask without showing my hand to the beast that followed us—assuming of course that whatever machines it had to augment its senses had not already alerted the vayadan to what lay ahead. Our boots rang on the metal deckplates as we hurried on, chased by the whine and grind of metal as Iubalu worked to open the heavy door behind us.

I stumbled and leaned on the wall to steady myself. I’d unkindled my blade as we ran. “Udax, where are you?” I rasped into my communicator, one hand on Siran’s shoulder to keep her moving. I knew Iubalu could hear me. I didn’t care. It didn’t matter.

The Irchtani’s reply came an instant later, almost shrill. “Busy, human!”

“What’s going on?”

“I do not know!” he said. “There’s a light flashing out there. They broke off the attack on our port side!”

One hand still on the wall for balance, I answered, “Alarm.”

It had to be Cade. The good centurion had made his move in the end.

“Valka,” I said, rounding a bend in the hall, “Valka, is the ship venting?”

She was still there. “I’m not sure, I . . .” Her voice felt farther away than it ever had, as though I heard her from the bottom of some fathomless well. “’Tis!”

I could have sagged against the bulkhead with relief. Cade had succeeded.

May his soul find peace on Earth.

The scream of metal followed us up the hall, followed by the steady tap-tap-tapping of iron claws on the decking. Iubalu was coming, following hard on our heels. “Kianuri mnu ne?” came the alien voice behind. “Running?” Then it said something I did not understand, voice coming as a whisper in my ear through my hacked implants. “Uboretata ioman ti-belu sha ba-aetane.” I expected more from one of your Aeta.

But I had no time to wonder.

At a signal to Siran, I cut my suit comm completely.

The time for words was over.

There! Not twenty yards ahead stood the door to the cubiculum, a circular portal sealed fast. Her comms similarly deactivated, Siran bellowed through her suit speakers, “Open the door!”

Nothing happened, but we did not slow our pace. The drumming of the metal claws behind came faster, and I imagined the vayadan loping ape-like after us, but I did not turn to see, did not stop to activate my suit’s rearview camera.

“Open the door!” Siran cried out again. And again, “Open the doors!”

The third time paid for all. The door opened, and two of our legionnaires stood in it, short lances at the ready. Behind us came a scrabbling, crashing like the panic of the horse knocked off its feet.

“My lord, get down!” one of the soldiers exclaimed.

I lurched sidelong into a control niche at my right hand. Siran hit the deck, rolling so she landed on her shoulder with her own lance aimed back the way we had come.

Iubalu leaped, but its machine frame was too tall and too broad for that narrow space, and its shoulder caught on the wall. It fell short of Siran’s position by several yards, mere feet from me. Siran and the legionnaires all opened fire, energy lances strafing the Cielcin general with their invisible beams. For a moment, I thought I saw the black char of carbon scoring and a thin tongue of smoke.

I saw my chance. As the chimera struggled to right itself I stepped in and lifted my sword. The highmatter blade shone like a ray of moonlight. I struck, pushing the blade through a smooth cut that skated up the creature’s armored shoulder and struck off the shoulder turret. One of Iubalu’s elbows snapped backward, caught me fully in the solar plexus. The armor took the worst of it, but still the breath was driven from my lungs as I was lifted fully from my feet with enough force to strike the low ceiling.

“Hadrian!”

I hit the deck a moment after, my sword carving a hair-fine slash through the wall of the corridor.

The lights went out. I must have severed a conduit with my fall.

I wanted nothing, nothing more than to lie there. I could hardly move, hardly breathe.

But I had to move. Iubalu had nearly found its feet. White hands clamped themselves to runners on the ceiling meant for handholds when the ship was in zero-gee. Like the wreck of some vessel lost at sea hoisted from the depths, Iubalu hauled itself to its feet.

Move! The word screamed through my every nerve channel, every fiber. Move!

Slowly, my limbs moving with the creaking slowness of rusting clockwork, I found my hands and knees. My feet. Hands seized me. Gloved hands—not steel. Siran and one of the legionnaires pulled me after them, pulled me toward the cubiculum.

I was through.

A moment after I heard the muffled bang of a grenade. Then another. Followed by a hiss and howl of . . . was that pain?

“I got him!” the soldier exclaimed.

But the fool had lingered in the archway. White hands emerged from the smoke behind, seized the fellow by both shoulders and yanked him back. He screamed, and the sounds that followed after defied description as limb was rent from limb. I’d found my voice again, and pressing myself against the bulkhead beside the door I shouted, “Open fire!”

There were at least a dozen men in the chamber, and a dozen men fired, plasma rounds and lance beams streaming through the open door, a declaration of fire.

Silence a moment. Silence and the distant noise of battle creaking throughout the Merciless’s much-strained superstructure.

“Did we get him?” one man asked.

Siran hushed him. I readied my sword.

A single iron hand clamped down on the lip of the door. Another. A third.

Iubalu roared. A high, shrieking sound more akin to a predatory bird or some wraith of fantasy than anything. I could not see it, but I could imagine its white helm and impossibly wide smile emerging from the vapors and the smoke.

“Open fire!” Siran cried again.

Plasma flared violet, but Iubalu did not stop. It inched forward, white blades clicking into place, extending from its wrists. I wouldn’t have much time. The vayadan’s implants seemed to give it full range of vision. My vantage point by the door would not avail me for long. I’d have to act fast or not at all.

All thoughts of action vanished the next instant, for there came a faint whining and a mechanical clatter as ports opened in Iubalu’s chest and rockets flared out. Four of our men vanished in an instant, and the end of one of the aisles of fugue creches exploded in a hailstorm of metal and glass. Violet fluid spilled forth, smoking in the chilly air. I needed only for our enemy to take one more step.

Iubalu took it.

Its white armor had charred black in places, and though the adamant had endured I took that for a good sign. Its shields were down, drained by all that weapons fire. But it did not matter. My business was not with the demon’s armor, but with the joints between it, with the segments of jointed titanium beneath the carbon armor.

Common metal was no trouble at all. As I had once long ago on Vorgossos with the Exalted Calvert, I buried the point of my blade in the ball joint where one of Iubalu’s four arms joined its torso. I twisted the point, gouging the arm loose. It fell with a clatter as I leaped away. Too slow. One of Iubalu’s clawed feet lashed out and clipped my flank, turning my leap into a slide that sent me skidding across the floor.

But the damage was done. Before Iubalu could turn its attentions back on me, Siran and her men opened fire. The Cielcin leaped, caught a spar that was part of the overhead transport system for the cryonic pods, and leaped over the heads of our men to perch upon the top of one of the rows. Disruptor fire issued from the palms of its three remaining hands, but we were shielded and the weapons did no good.

Its smile grew steadily wider, and into the air of the hold, it said, “You will pay for that, hurati.”

I had found my feet again, and though my side ached, I did not think my ribs were broken. Bruised, yes, but intact. In answer, I pointed my sword up toward the enemy. “Come down, then! Come and collect!”

In contemptuous answer, Iubalu punched down with one of its sword hands and pierced the casket on which it stood, killing the sleeper within.

“I think I will ask the master for your bones when he is through,” Iubalu declared, speaking as one speaks to a crowd. “Perhaps I will put your skull with the others.”

Not knowing what to say, I said, “I think not!”

Then a dark shape streaked up from below and seized Iubalu by the arm. Another followed, and writhing in the air they torqued the chimera off balance and set it to crash from its high place. It happened so fast it took me an instant to realize that for the second time that day Udax had appeared in the critical instant. He and another of his Irchtani perched atop the fugue caskets where Iubalu had stood a moment earlier. The other hefted his plasma rifle—no, his plasma howitzer—and fired. Not a bolt, but a stream of violet flame spewed forth and poured down upon the xenobite, and for a moment I feared the monstrous heat would crack and melt the delicate cryonics equipment in rows to either side—but it did not matter. The Irchtani kept firing, a steady stream of superheated plasma flowing forth like the breath of some neon dragon, so hot and bright my suit’s entoptics cut the glare to a mere fraction of all available light.

There is always a price to pay for victory. I prayed the caskets nearby had been emptied long ago, and that we avenged men with that attack, not killed them. The plasma would not burn the creature’s armor, but it would heat and damage perhaps those exposed components of common metal and turn any organic matter to ash.

I raised my sword to Udax in salute and hurried forward to see the ruin of our enemy.

But demons die slow deaths.

One white sword lanced out, ejected from Iubalu’s arm with all the force of a javelin. The white spike caught Udax’s compatriot fully in the chest, impaling him. The blade passed clean through, shattering ceramic armor and the Irchtani’s hollow bones. Iubalu stood, the metal components of its skeleton glowing cherry red where the plasma torch had heated and warped them. It moved slowly, joints ill-fitting in their sockets, but it stood all the same: three-armed, claw-footed, with one pale sword left in its grip. It used that sword for a prop, ceramic edge grinding against the metal as it stood and punched one of the caskets in its fury. Cryonic fluid gushed out and hissed where it struck the creature’s glowing titanium body.

Udax shot at it with his rifle, but the shot washed against the ceramic breastplate to little effect. As though the Irchtani were little more than a fly, the vayadan-general pointed one of its remaining arms toward him and fired once. A nahute shot from a compartment in the forearm and flew up toward Udax, who spread his grayish wings and leaped away.

Its faceless gaze settled on me, and I saw its helmet had closed over its gaping smile, sealing what yet remained of the flesh safe within. Presently the cowl opened, and that leering grin returned.

Still leaning on its sword, Iubalu said, “You cannot win. You’re surrounded. Outnumbered. You’ve lost one ship already, and I will feed you to my master when I bring you to him.” A resonant click filled the air, and as I watched, the sword was unmoored from its place inside Iubalu’s arm and slid into the monster’s hand.

“You can hardly stand,” I said, bruised and exhausted as I was myself.

No answer.

Only the smile.

Iubalu pointed its sword at me, then spinning it took it in two hands, raised high like an executioner. The third arm it held across itself. I almost grinned. What a strange contest this would be, where it could not match me sword for sword. It would have to block my attacks—perversely—with its own arm, or with the armored portions of its body.

My targets were small enough: the backs of the knees, the insides of the thighs, the elbows and shoulder joints. And the face: the only part of the creature that still seemed made of flesh. I raised my sword, point aimed up at that evil grin where it loomed above me.

The white sword fell and the third arm punched out at the same moment. The Irchtani’s plasma weapon had done its damage, and both attacks came slowly—which was to say they came fast as any merely human opponent I had faced. Even my palatine eugenic strength and reflexes were barely up to the task, and I leaped aside, dodging the overhead slash of the blade and parrying the arm. Had the Cielcin been human—or even truly Cielcin—the blade would have skinned the arm and sliced clean through ribs and lungs and heart.

As it was, Iubalu whirled its blade around and tried for a flat cut, but the blade was too long for that narrow aisle, and it caught on the bank of fugue caskets at its right hand. I moved well inside the reach of those arms, and it turned to mark my progress. I had to get around it, had to give Siran and her men clear shots at its exposed backside. Had to get it away from our sleeping men.

The vayadan-general took one lurching step. Its left leg was clearly lamed, the joint fused by the Irchtani’s heroic effort. Unable to rely on its sword in such tight quarters, it threw a hook with its free hand. I did not try to block it, but ducked. The iron fist crashed into one of the sleepers’ instrument panels and shattered the delicate screen. Infuriated by its damaged functionality, Iubalu struck the panel again and snarled.

It did not fire one of its rockets at me. I wondered if it still could. But it was the size of a mountain next to me, and like an avalanche it came, driving me back with vicious blows from one hand and another, ever keeping the third hand and the sword upraised like the tail of a scorpion. I did not try to absorb the blows as a boxer might—any one of them might land hard enough to turn my bones to powder. I only tried to turn them, tried to keep my footing.

The sword slammed down. Its ceramic edge struck my shoulder with enough force it might have sliced me clean in half were it not for my armor. I felt the underlayment harden in response to the impact, the gel layer between layers of nanocarbon armorweave briefly turning to something harder than stone. Than steel. I was grateful—and lucky—that the attack hit my left arm. The false bones in my shoulder did not ache, did not injure as my true bones might have done. Still I let out a cry, and the force of the blow was enough that my knees buckled, and I went down.

“Submit!” Iubalu exclaimed, and clamped one iron-fingered hand over my faceplate, bending me backward as if in some dreadful dance. Those black glass fangs drew down and ever nearer, and I recalled the way Prince Aranata’s fangs had extended as he tore out old Sir William’s throat. With its second hand, Iubalu traced a line down my armored face, almost caressing. A vague horror turned over in me, and I tried to get my feet back under me. But the force with which Iubalu held me in place was so great I could not stand. Where were Siran and the others? They should have been right behind! “Submit!” The lips did not move. The words came from speakers somewhere in the chimera’s chest, their sound garbled now from the damage they’d sustained. The face itself was dead, a taxidermied ornament, monument to the creature it had been.

I could not get away.

I could not get away.

But it hadn’t pinned my arm, and my sword was still in my hand. I struck wildly with it, blindly. The highmatter blade battered against Iubalu’s armored flank, but it did not seem to notice. Not at first. Not until the third strike caught the elbow of one of its remaining arms. The pressure on my helmet faded, and I fell. Snarling, Iubalu seized me by the ankle and lifted me bodily from the floor.

Then and only then did Siran and the others open fire. Plasma streaked through the air—one shot coruscated off my shield curtain—and a moment later I was flying, soaring up the aisle toward the far end. I hit the ground just beyond the end of the aisle and skidded across the floor, armor grinding beneath me. I came to rest mere feet from the mound of bones, my sword still in my hand. Iubalu came on, moving like a tower slow in falling. It did not even seem to notice the men firing at its back—did not feel the plasma fire licking at its armor. Its one leg had locked entirely, joints fully fused, but still it came, still dangerous, still more than a match for an ordinary palatine.

The crack and violet flash of a grenade filled the air, knocking Iubalu from its feet and shattering four of the nearest fugue creches. Before Siran’s men could throw another I shouted, “Stop! Stop! The sleepers!” Now I could get the vayadan away from them, I found I was unwilling to risk further life and limb on behalf of our people.

Hearing me, Iubalu punched through one of the creches with its free hand and drew the sleeper out by the neck, tearing hoses and wires free. It squeezed. Metal fingers bit through flesh and crushed bone, pulped the neck and shoulder. It dropped her ruined body at its feet and stamped, smashing ribs and organs to a red-brown paste between its claws. Its smile never faltered. Furious, I fumbled with the hard switch behind my ear, forced my helm to open and fold away. “Here!” I cried out, and tore the coif from my head. The cubiculum air was cold against my face as I pounded on my chest like a drum. “Here!”

I stood then exposed like Beowulf before Grendel, alone on that patch of narrow ground. The monument of bones at my back seemed to push at me, to spur me forward. Avenge us. Avenge us. Avenge us! It was as though I heard their dusty voices urging me, groaning from that howling dark. I did not look back, for I felt that if I did so I would see that divine darkness and feel the shapes of dead men in the night, pointing as my image had pointed the way for me out of that terrible place.

Forward.

Through.

But I did not have to move. Hand dripping gore, Iubalu stumped forward, sword raised and ready. Conscious of my exposed face, I pointed my weapon toward the beast.

Once more the vayadan-general let out its hideous cry, high and keening as metal scraping glass. I bared my teeth in answer, matching the Cielcin smile.

It leaped. I lunged. Iubalu’s gore-smeared fist clipped me just under the arm and I clenched my teeth as the armor bore the brunt of the assault. My blade bounced useless off one armored thigh. Gritting through the pain, I recovered, raised my sword above my head to parry the sword as it fell. Highmatter and ceramic met again, and the ceramic parted with a sigh, blade spinning away. Howling, Iubalu thrust the broken hilt into my chest, knocking me off balance. Staggering back, I spat, saw red in the saliva where it flew. The pain in my ribs was a distant cry, far off as the groaning of the dead in my mind.

White hands reached toward me, each of jointed metal. I could not get away, and so leaped toward them, ducking beneath Iubalu’s grasping talons, my blade vanishing as I leaped. I slammed into the chimera’s body like a wrestler, and though I could not hope to compete with the size and mass of it I placed the emitter of my sword against the still-glowing joint at one hip and squeezed. Highmatter flowered there, slicing clean and cold and straight through the hip, severing Iubalu’s leg entire. Unbalanced, I leaned against the massive chimera with all my weight. It toppled backward, and I leaped away just as the legionnaires dared to approach. The noise of its falling was so great I expected to see cracks in the steel plating of the floor beneath it.

“Lord Marlowe! Stand clear!” one of the men shouted.

A moment later I saw the blinking of a grenade. “Stop!” I shouted. Too late.

The explosive rang out, so near the damaged stump at its hip it blew apart the pelvis and lower abdomen before Iubalu could move. Legless now and with but two of its four arms, the creature flailed, lashed out as my men—human and Irchtani alike—drew about it.

“The arms!” I shouted. “Don’t kill it!”

Unshielded now and struggling to move, it was a small matter to fire at the beast’s underarms, to fuse the shoulder joints with licking tongues of plasma. Joints melting under the assault, Iubalu still managed to pull its arms to itself, curling them like a boxer in defensive pose.

One hand on my aching side, I stood over it, blade pointed at the hollow of interlaced struts and tendons that served for its neck.

“You’re beaten,” I said. “Surrender.”

Iubalu only looked at me with its eyeless gaze. I had not looked at it so close before, and so saw for the first time the badge it wore upon its chest: the faint outline of a grasping hand, six-fingered, white-on-white. That disturbed me more than I can explain. The Cielcin do not depict things in art. They do not illustrate, do not represent. Their only artwork is calligraphy, the circular Udaritanu writing they adapted from the anaglyphs of the Quiet. To see the image of a hand on Iubalu’s chest was like finding a book written by dogs.

“Your fuel supply is compromised. You cannot run.” I pressed the sword in a little. The nanocarbon tendons brushed aside, uncut, but I saw a braided steel cord sigh apart. The still-organic face spasmed like the limbs of the dead exposed to electricity. “Surrender.” And speaking the beast’s own tongue I added, “Ietta.” Submit.

“We have other ships!”

My sword flashed, cutting through one arm at the shoulder. “How much of you do I have to cut away before you surrender?” I shoved the limb away with one foot, wincing as pain shot through my ribs. Sword point back at its throat, I said, “I will you the same offer I made an ichakta of the Itani Otiolo a long time ago: surrender, and I will see that you and your people are returned to your master.”

Uvanari had surrendered at once, seeing a way to preserve its life and duty to its prince and master. Iubalu, it seemed, understood its duty very differently. Or perhaps it knew, perhaps understood that once in human hands its human-manufactured components would be laid bare to our technicians—that whatever secrets lay hid in that mechanism that served it now in place of a brain would be picked over by Chantry scholars, to take its intelligence to war against its master.

The vayadan’s one remaining hand clenched, opened, clenched again. Its elbow would not bend, nor its shoulder, but it pointed at me, and for the first time that day moved its lips. “There is no returning,” it said. “No surrender. He is coming. He will avenge us.”

Fearing some final trick, I pressed my sword close against the edge of Iubalu’s neck. “Order your people to stand down,” I said. “Do it!”

Iubalu played its final trick, then. Somewhere deep in the artificial mechanisms of its body and mind, something died. It ceased even the attempt at motion, and the faint blue lights that glowed in it went out. All was quiet then. Terribly quiet. The ruined limbs, the shattered body, the one remaining arm . . . these all transmuted in an instant. It was not a body I stood over, not the wreck of an alien chimera, but only an inert mass of metal and ceramic. An empty shell.

Nearly empty.

At a stroke, I think, Iubalu had wiped all traces of its memory and personality from the machines it inhabited, but it had not died. For an instant thereafter, the lips moved, murmuring words I could not hear.

I unkindled my blade and lowered myself painfully to one knee, the better to listen. And what I heard froze every drop of blood in me. “He has seen it, hurati. He has seen your death. The sacrifice . . .” It never finished that thought. The ursine smile slackened, and I knew the vayadan-general was dead.

I was still kneeling by Iubalu’s side when Siran joined me. Through her suit speakers, she said, “You need to put your comm back on.”

“What is it?” I asked, but did as she said.

The reports flooded over me. The Mintaka had won free. The Cielcin in the hold were routed, and with Cade’s men gone Corvo and Aristedes had shelled the rear section of the ship entirely, destroying the force that had killed Cade’s century in the engine rooms. Our reinforcements had boarded the Cielcin craft and were driving the enemy back. Defeat had to turned to victory—and for the Cielcin, victory had become disaster.

But I heard almost none of this. My thoughts were with the last thing Iubalu had said.

He has seen your death.

I’d seen it, too. Seen it a thousand thousand times when I tread the lucent waters of the rivers of time. I had seen myself burned and crucified. Beheaded and betrayed. Tortured or hanged or eaten by the Pale. I had seen myself crowned Emperor of Mankind. Seen myself killed by the very silver-crowned demon king Carax had described before the Solar Throne. Had this Shiomu, this Prophet seen it, too? Had the Quiet granted Dorayaica visions as they had granted them to me?

Or was there some other power above the stage? Kharn Sagara had spoken of others, of powers old when the universe was young, of creatures that dwelt in the night. I had given nearly a hundred years by then to understanding the Cielcin, and I felt again all at once that I knew almost nothing, felt that our two races—mankind and the Pale—were only pawns on some larger board whose scope I could not see.

Leopards, lions, and wolves.

Had I been wrong to think the Cielcin worshiped the Quiet? Or wrong in thinking that was all they worshipped?

I permitted Siran to help me to my feet. “Have this one taken away,” I said, spurning Iubalu’s metal corpse with a toe. “The Emperor will want to see it.” I clipped my sword back into its scabbard at my right hip.

If what Iubalu had said was true, if Syriani Dorayaica had been granted visions by the Quiet or some similar power . . . I stared blankly down the aisle of shattered fugue creches, but I did not see it. It was as if I saw through the Merciless and the Cielcin ship that entrapped it, as if I stared across the bottomless black of space and beheld those eyes, blacker still, staring back at me. I saw once more my vision of the Cielcin marching across the stars, only this time a white hand went before them and blotted out the sky.

The strange mood passed, and passing left me with a parting thought: if what Iubalu had said was true, this Prophet and I had all too much in common.