A WEEK PASSED. NOTHING happened. No one came, nor word, nor invitation. And so Otavia got her wish: I did not leave the Tamerlane, and when I was not at Valka’s bedside I watched Forum from orbit, and saw the white towers and the gold lights of the Eternal City glittering by day and night like an empire of fireflies. Like a thousand points of laser light pointed at our ship.

I consoled myself that whichever hand had grasped that handleless knife, the Emperor at least was my ally. Why go to the trouble of arranging a private audience with me? Why put me through all the tedious trouble of courtship and betrothal only to dispose of me?

No, the Emperor was my ally. That was the problem.

Who was watching me out of that watchful planet? The great lords and Lions of the old families? Legion Intelligence? Princess Selene, perhaps resenting the prospect of marriage to a lowly outcaste? Prince Alexander himself? I prayed it was not Alexander—though I feared it was. Still, Valka’s fears that it was Princess Selene behind the knife made sense, better sense than any of the old Lions, who for all their bluster objected to me only in principle.

Men are slower to act from principle than self-interest, and far slower to act on principle than jealousy or revenge. If I were a betting man, I should place my chips on the Lords Hohenzollern, Mahidol, and Bourbon last, on Alexander first, with Selene somewhere in between.

Unless there were a conspiracy. Unless there was some other hand I had not counted on.

---

The stalemate broke at last. A summons to appear before the Imperial Council arrived by telegraph on the morning of the tenth day since Valka’s attack. Not from the Emperor, but from Prince Hector Avent, the Chancellor of the Council. The damage to Valka’s lung had healed—accelerated by Okoyo’s ministrations—and though she remained as yet in bed to give the new membrane in her lung time to strengthen, she was breathing on her own, and she’d been taken off her painkillers.

I had Otavia send our reply:

To the Lord High Chancellor of the Imperial Council . . .

Per communication dated 16561.05.16 and submitted to the Imperial Office, a plot against Lord M’s life was detected and stopped same day. Agency behind this plot unknown. Possibly unsafe for Lord M to travel. Request meeting by holograph. Reply requested.

—Otavia Corvo, CPT-FOED, Red Company, ISV Tamerlane

Otavia’s caution won out in the end over my need to appear unruffled, not out of concern for my life, as described to Prince Hector and the Council—though that was theoretically a concern, as there was a proud tradition of shuttle crashes in the Eternal City—but because I wanted to see what they would do. A number of the Lions held seats on the Emperor’s Council, and though I personally counted them the least likely of my enemies, it would not do to blunder in facing them.

The Imperial court demanded precision, and so our communique revealed almost nothing.

The Council appeared on the holograph as the captains had before our fight with Iubalu: like a parliament of ghosts. The Emperor was not in attendance, but his throne—a lesser cousin to the mighty confection that stood in the Sun King’s Hall—stood empty on a dais above and behind a U-shaped table. Prince Hector Avent, however, was a man so like his brother they might have been clones. I did not know the man well—as a Knight Victorian, I did not report to him—but he was, in a sense, the second most powerful man in the galaxy, unless one counted the Prince of Jadd.

About him were seated the great logothetes of the various ministries: Lady Leda Ascania of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment, Lord Allander Peake of the Ministry of Justice, Lord Haren Bulsara of the Colonial Office and the Special Adviser on the Cielcin Question, and Lord Cassian Powers, the man they called the Avenger of Cressgard. It was Powers who had led the punitive expedition to Cressgard to attack the occupying Cielcin after first contact. The Minister of Welfare was there as well—a weasel-faced woman with solemn eyes, and the Minister of Revenue, Lord Cordwainer. There was Vergilian, Synarch of the Chantry in his black and white robes and the tall white cap that recalled the pharaohs of Egypt. And there was Augustin Bourbon, of course, the Minister of War. And behind them, on risers ascending to the left and right of the throne—were the various lesser logothetes, scholiasts, and scribes whose role it was to support the efforts, claims, and cases of the high councillors who bent the ear of the Emperor and his High Chancellor.

Too many names. Too many faces. Too many enemies.

“My lords and ladies,” I said, kneeling on the projector plate, “I apologize for the nature of this meeting. As my captain communicated, there was an attempt on my life. We are still attempting to ascertain the motive behind it, and as such my advisors have deemed it unsafe for me to travel at this time.”

From his low seat at the center of the U beneath the throne, Prince Hector surveyed me a moment where I waited on one knee, head bowed like the loyal knight I was. I watched him through my eyebrows and long dark hair, waiting.

“There have been various reports,” he said, in a voice higher pitched but resonant and musical as the Emperor’s. “You are unhurt?”

“I was not present at the time,” I said, honestly. Crim’s sudden appearance before Selene and her girls at the Royal Forest attested to that fact plain enough, and I would not deny it.

“That is well!” said Lord Allander Peake, the Minister of Justice. “There were rumors you’d been killed, sir.”

The Minister of War snorted. “Don’t you know he can’t be killed, Allander?” Augustin Bourbon leaned in over the table, watching me with tiny, piercing eyes. “I trust you apprehended this assassin, Lord Marlowe? He is in your custody?”

I held Lord Bourbon’s stare a moment, studying him. Did he know the answer to his own question? I searched for some sign, some symptom of murderous intent in that fat-enfolded face, but whatever thoughts were written there, I could not read.

“There was no assassin, my lord.”

A flurry of confused and angry questions flew past me like arrows, prompting the sergeant-at-arms—a lonely Martian praetorian in a white-plumed helm—to bang his fasces against a steel plate in the floor behind Prince Hector’s seat. The metallic clangor stilled the nobiles and quieted the whispers and the rustling of pages and crystal tablets. The unsteady quiet that followed split in two beneath the Chancellor’s flat command: “Explain.”

The outburst from the Council seemed strange to me, but I supposed that all those important persons were so used to responding at will that they must rush over one another all the time. Pausing a moment to see if further interruption was coming, I proceeded. “There was a knife-missile.”

I watched Lord Bourbon as I made this pronouncement, looking for some sign of guilt, of surprise or triumph, of anything. But the Minister of War’s face was inscrutable as the stone face of a gargoyle long left in rain.

“Why was this not brought to our attention sooner?” exclaimed Synarch Vergilian, a craggy, gray-faced old lord with a basso voice. “Certain knife-missiles flout holy writ! The weapon must be handed over to the Inquisition immediately, Lord Marlowe. Immediately!”

I turned my attention on the flickering ghost of the Synarch in his white pharaonic crown. Hands innocently spread before me, I offered a short bow. “Holy Wisdom, forgive me, but I cannot. My soldiers had the weapon incinerated when it was discovered. I can have scans and surveillance records handed over to an Inquisitor with our report, should His Wisdom desire.”

Vergilian’s face darkened, even in ghostly projection. “That is most irregular, Lord Marlowe. All suspicious artifacts are to be handed over to us without question or hesitation. Such is the law.”

If the weapon was, as Tor Varro described, an Akateko-model Nipponese knife-missile, it certainly flirted with artificial intelligence. The daimons which governed its function were simple things, but its decision-making potential and the logic trees it obeyed in choosing its targets—while not intelligent like you or I—walked the line enough to cast suspicion on anyone who came in contact with the machine.

Suddenly, I doubted the Chantry’s hand in this attack. Hypocrites the Chantry’s priests may be, but to employ something so nearly intelligent? It was a bridge too far.

Unless, whispered that piece of me that yet thought in Tor Gibson’s voice. Who better to choose the most effective weapon of this kind than a Chantry Inquisitor? An Inquisitor would know precisely which weapon would appear possessed of daimonic intelligence without truly being so, and so select an instrument of assassination designed to implicate anyone but themselves. For none would believe the Chantry would employ a knife-missile, where its usual weapons were poison. Poison, surprise, and fear.

The Chantry would not send a knife-missile! they would say. Not when they might strike Lord Marlowe with a wasting illness that revealed he had been an intus pretender all along, a charlatan and no cousin of the Star Victoria at all.

“I beg your indulgence, Holy Wisdom. Many of my officers are of Norman extraction and are not defenders of the faith. They are ignorant of our ways.” Only then did I straighten again, and looking the high priest in the eyes, added silently, And if it was you, you’ll never know how close you came. We’d been lucky. The slow grind of the Imperial engine had allowed Valka time to get out of medica and back to our rooms. The corrective tape had come off and left only the faintest scars. Scars no one would question or wonder at on a foreigner, or on one who had seen action, as Valka had. Only a deep tissue scan would reveal the signs of her punctured lung, and none would think to look—unless they had knowledge of the incident they ought not to have. Of far greater concern were the medica records themselves. Data, like matter, is never truly destroyed, and though I’d ordered Okoyo to purge her records of Valka’s surgery and ordered Crim to delete all security footage and replace it with recordings copied from seventy years earlier, an Inquisitor might find these things.

No cover-up could be perfect in the face of such security technologies, or of such holy scrutiny.

“Defenders of the faith . . .” Vergilian echoed, pale eyes narrow in his bloodless face. “Are you such a one, Lord Marlowe?”

I had been answering such questions for decades, if seldom from the Synarch himself. The truth was that I believe almost every palatine to be agnostic on the question of Earth and the God Emperor’s divinity. The only true believers were the plebeians who accepted the Chantry’s teachings for the beautiful dream they were. I could not say this before Vergilian, or before the Council, though many of them doubtless shared this opinion with me.

“I have been defending the Holy Mother’s children all my life, Wisdom,” I answered, side-stepping the question with the grace of the matador I have sometimes been. “I pray the Council will forgive me, but there is no one here, with the exception of Lord Powers, who has bled more for the realm and the Children of Earth than I have.” I caught the retired soldier’s eyes as I said this, and a flicker of something—understanding?—passed between us both. Lord Powers was the oldest remaining officer in the Sollan Empire to have stood in battle against the Cielcin and lived to tell about it. Who could understand my meaning, if not him? Baiting the Council was a dangerous game, but I had to remind those who did not number themselves my enemies just what I was and had done for them. I had to keep them defensive.

Prince Hector replied, overriding any pious rejoinder from the high priest. “No one questions your valor, Sir Hadrian. Only the circumspect manner by which you have responded to this incident. We ought to have been alerted to the details.”

“You say there was no assassin, sir,” asked Lady Ascania of Public Enlightenment. “But the weapon must have arrived aboard your ship somehow. How was it intercepted?”

How fitting that the Minister of Public Enlightenment—the greatest propagandist and liar in the galaxy—should ask me that question. For my answer was a lie. “It was packed into a crate of supplies intended for the officers’ quarters. It never got the chance to deploy.” Most important to me was keeping the assassins in the dark. They must not know their plan had nearly succeeded, lest their second attempt win through.

The truth was, neither Crim nor Aristedes had been successful as yet in determining how the weapon had gotten aboard our ship. The weapon might have arrived through a shipping crate, but it could not have made it into my apartments without help. The batmen and cleaning personnel were the primary suspects, but Crim had investigated all of them, including the late, lamented M. Martin, and found no evidence of complicity. It was possible, if unlikely, that the blade had traveled through ventilation or some other system—such would almost certainly require artificial intelligence, for subsequent analysis had proved Varro correct: the knife had no receiver, and so no pilot crouched nearby, hiding in some forgotten hold or among the sleepers in the cubicula.

“This should be handed over to the Martian Guard for investigation, Lord High Chancellor,” said Allander Peake, stroking his pointed black beard. “All crimes carried out within Forum orbit are under their jurisdiction.”

Vergilian cut in, “The potential presence of daimons is a grave matter, Lord Minister of Justice. Lord Marlowe’s ship should be impounded and subject to thorough analysis under the auspices of the Holy Office. If the weapon employed was possessed of artificial intelligence, it is possible some other system aboard has been compromised as well. I recommend all communications with the Tamerlane and all transport to and from it be sealed immediately until such time as potential threat is ruled out.”

The Chancellor shook his head with a coolness reminiscent of his brother, the Emperor. Turning in his throne-like seat, Prince Hector Avent turned to a gray-clad logothete on the bench to his right. The young woman sat managing the holograph controls and the transmitter. “M. Sylva, you are monitoring our datasphere’s ice walls?” he asked, referring to the defensive layers that protected the palace’s datasphere network.

“Yes, Your Excellency,” she said at once.

“And we are secure?”

“Yes, Your Excellency.”

Prince Hector rotated to regard the high priest yet again. “We are perfectly safe, Holy Wisdom.”

“I agree with the Synarch, Lord High Chancellor,” said Augustin Bourbon dryly. “We cannot risk contamination. If what Lord Marlowe says is true about the nature of this attack, and given his history, we must be prepared for the possibility of Extrasolarian involvement. An investigation should be sent to the Tamerlane to verify they are clear of infestation.”

A terrible thought crept its way down my neck. Had I just played directly into their hands? Perhaps the knife was never meant to succeed? Perhaps the weapon was only a distraction, and I was meant to be caught red-handed in possession of forbidden machine intelligence and executed?

Iron fingers clamped over my heart and I held my breath to stop it pounding. If that was Bourbon’s play—assuming that he and Vergilian were each my enemy—it was brilliant. And in my destroying the knife to protect the fact that the assassins had nearly succeeded, they would find enough rope to hang me. The false bones of my arm, the machinery in my lover’s brain, and maybe—just maybe—Pallino’s recording of my demise.

“I’m not sure that’s necessary, Lord Minister of War,” Prince Hector said. “If what Lord Marlowe says is true, the weapon has been destroyed. He can simply hand his records over to the Martian Guard and the investigation may continue apace.”

But Lord Bourbon had an answer ready-made, a simple statement, breathtaking in its casual sound. “Only as a precaution. We cannot be too careful.”

“No indeed!” the Synarch agreed.

Valka’s words came back to me, her reminder.

He said he thought the person who promised to pay him was a Chantry priest.