THE DOCUMENT TUBE BESIDE the rolled-up parchments was stamped with the Imperial mark, not the old Windsor crest or the Mericanii eagle or star. It bore no other mark except a name stenciled in Classical English text.

Aramini of Colchis, it said.

“The architect?” Alexander asked. “That was his name, right?”

“ ’Twas.” Valka was grinning. She’d carefully unrolled the ancient schematics. The blueprints had been printed on crystal paper—like so much else in the archive. The ultra-thin quartz was proof against rot, water, and decay, but even still it was delicate, made fragile by all that time. The document showed complete schematics not only for Gabriel’s Archive, but for the entirety of Nov Belgaer Athenaeum, and moreso—for the superstructure atop which it had been built. “Do you see?” Valka asked, crossing her arms. “Do you see it?”

The structure was as I have told you, a drum tower half a mile in diameter built atop a chasm just as wide and twice as deep. Not imposing by any means—so much wider was it than it was tall—its exterior fronted in gray stone and complicated by level upon level of Roman arches above narrow slitted windows rising to a flat roof governed by gardens. Gabriel’s Archive spread out from its lowest level like roots from the trunk of a tree, forming a ring around the exterior of the lowest level of the mighty silo.

“No . . .” I lifted the schematic, peeling one translucent layer back to reveal the page beneath.

Not the lowest level of the silo at all.

“What is it?” Alexander asked. Gibson hadn’t seen it either, though perhaps the poor illumination was to blame.

“ ’Tis round, this archive,” Valka pointed. “It forms a ring about the base of the central shaft here, but not quite.”

I leaned in over the table where Valka had spread Tor Aramini’s schemata. “The inner wall of the archive is in line with all the levels above it, but there’s this big empty space here. We came down stairs to enter this archive.” I indicated the space encircled by Gabriel’s Archive. “You’re saying there’s another chamber beneath the main shaft of the library? But the plans say it’s solid rock.”

“What if ’tis not solid?” Valka was beaming again. “I can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner!” She was practically shrill. “But do you see what it looks like?”

Almost in unison, the scholiast, the prince, and I all cocked our heads and studied the architect’s antique plans. I could feel Valka burning to tell us, and glancing up saw her biting her tattooed fist.

“What is it?” I asked, eager to put her out of her misery.

In answer, my doctor only peeled back a second and third layer of crystal paper, removing the balconies and bookshelves, the stairs and ventilation ducts, removing the tower itself.

And then it was obvious.

“It’s a blast pit,” the prince said.

“Yes!” Valka exclaimed, and pointed approving at Alexander.

I returned to studying the blueprints. “A blast pit . . .” I mused, turning my head further to one side. I supposed I could see it, the landing well for some ancient rocket hollowed out beneath the Library. Tor Aramini and his builders had dug a huge crater in the center of the mesa and cut the reservoir into place to drown . . . what? A chamber full of paintings and crystal paper? “You think there’s a ship here?”

Gibson was shaking his head, but he said, “Why else build a blast pit?”

I imagined some ancient rocket descending, laid down like a mummy in its crypt and sealed inside, the curse tablets and iron bars set in their proper places.

Alexander’s palatine face had gone the color of a Cielcin. “A Mericanii ship?” The fact that he was standing in a room spangled with Mericanii artifacts did not seem to impress the boy, but a ship was something else entirely.

“ ’Twould not go to so much trouble for all this!” Valka spread her hands. “Those locks! The water! The bombs!”

I smiled crookedly at her. “I think you owe us barbarians an apology,” I said. “They were worried about something getting out.”

Valka shot me a withering gaze, but the smile would not leave her face. “Yes, yes, you’re all very smart.”

“A ship . . .” Gibson said, and stroked his chin. “That would explain the floor at the bottom of the main shaft.” Inclining his head, he indicated the way back to the stair and the massive gearwork doors.

“The floor?” Alexander asked.

“Fused silicate,” Gibson answered. “I thought they’d had to laser-cut the lowest levels out of the bedrock, but . . .”

Valka took over, still grinning, “But! They weren’t cutting stone out, they were pouring it in. ’Tis a false bottom!”

Accepting that Valka was right without protest or question, I asked, “But where’s the entrance?”

The brass nib of a cane cracked on tile. “More importantly,” Gibson asked, “why seal the chamber in—ship or no—when it’s already locked in a secret archive beneath the Imperial Library?” The question gave us pause, and—though nearly blind—Gibson pointed a detail the rest of us had missed. Reaching out, he folded down the transparent crystal pages, highlighting one sheet in particular with a gnarled finger. “Do you see?”

I peered over his shoulder. Assuming I was reading the thing correctly, Tor Aramini’s design had caused a copper mesh to be laid into the mortar of the Library walls, packed into the joint between the masonry and the natural stone of the central shaft to form . . .

“A Faraday shield,” Valka said. “ ’Twould explain a lot.”

“Explain what?”

“I thought we were just too far underground,” she said, gesturing at her own head and the machines inside it, “like on Vorgossos, but . . . I haven’t been able to reach the Tamerlane in here.”

My brows furrowed on their own. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“ ’Twas not important ’til now!” she said, shrugging.

Prince Alexander cut in. “What’s a Faraday shield?”

“A metal screen,” Valka answered him. “Think chain link fence. ’Twill block most electromagnetic signals. Radio, terminal comms, and so forth. Anything not a quantum telegraph.”

While she spoke, Gibson had retreated from the high table and seated himself on an antique chest bearing the Windsor stamp. He looked like a man who’d seen his own father’s shade. Not even in the throes of torture had I seen old Gibson so pale, his apatheia gone. “It is sometimes called a Faraday Cage.”

The word cage conjured images of prisons, of the bottles demons and djinn were captured in in ancient stories. Unbidden, one of the door-murals I had seen in the house of Kharn Sagara floated in my mind, the child Kharn enthroned, clutching Brethren in a flask upon his lap.

A cage.

“Why build a cage?” Alexander asked.

The boy was so slow. “Because something inside is still operational,” I said. Had Kharn Sagara known? Had Brethren? Had some ancient signal escaped Tor Aramini’s cage—or had some signal older still been transmitted before whatever lay beneath the Library was locked away? I imagined white hands on arms ten thousand light-years long reaching cross the stars to grasp long fingers together, like reaching for like. Elated as Valka was, I only felt a pit in my stomach open and yawn. “But where’s the door?” I asked again. “Because I’m sure us cutting our way in is precisely the kind of thing Aramini had in mind when he planted those bombs beneath the reservoir.” Valka was still smiling. “What?”

The smile widened. “ ’Tis the fun part,” she said. “I have no idea.”

---

To the chance observer, it must have seemed that we had lost our minds. Or it would have done, had there been any observers so deep in the bowels of Gabriel’s Archive. As it was, there were none to see the way Valka, the prince, and I scrambled over the shelves and alcoves and pulled tapestries out of arrases and examined the bare stone beneath.

There had been no sign of Valka’s secret chamber in Tor Aramini’s blueprints, only signs that pointed to its absence. We spent several days looking, and after the initial excitement wore down on the first day, we had Pallino, Siran, and our few remaining guards help us.

“ ’Twould have to be something mechanical,” Valka was saying, feeling along the edges of one alcove with her hands. “I would love to get a set of gravitometers down here. ’Twould have the matter settled in hours.”

“You’d never get them past the day gate,” Gibson said, sitting with Alexander beneath the portrait of Lord Washington.

The prince—who had lost almost all interest in searching once the soldiers joined us—asked, “Why would it be mechanical?”

Valka’s reply came strained as she felt her way along the back of one bank of consoles. “Because it can’t be something the machine could open from the inside.” She came away from the wall, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I thought ’twas going to be easier than this.”

“Well, we’ve been here for seven fucking years already,” Pallino said, coming round the bend. “Why would it be easy?” Doran appeared at his back, dark circles beneath his eyes. Pallino wasn’t looking much better. The chiliarch’s dark hair stood on end, and to judge by the way he gasped as he lowered himself against the wall, his feet hurt him nearly so bad as mine did me. Inspired by the chiliarch, I slid down the wall opposite and crossed my legs, half-contemplated removing my boots to massage the aching flesh beneath. Washington’s painting stood between columns half-sunk into the wall, beneath a rounded Roman arch like those on the exterior of the Library. The arches and columns marched on along the inner wall of the Archive, each holding the portrait of a different Mericanii lord. The ancient plaster had cracked in places, chips fallen away with the passing of so many thousand years. Hairline fractures ran behind Washington’s gold-leaf frame, marks of time as sure as the wrinkles on Gibson’s seamed face.

Seams . . .

“They might have just plastered over it . . .” I said, liking the idea more by the instant. Seven pairs of eyes turned toward me. I pointed at the wall beside Washington’s portrait. “These recesses are all plaster between the columns. See? Around the pictures.” I pointed. “Outer wall’s all masonry. They could have just covered up the door. There’d be no way any sensor equipment would get past the day gate, so it would be safe enough.”

Gibson was nodding along in his seat. “And no scholiast would take a mattock to the wall and destroy a precious site like this.”

“But they could get in if they wanted,” I said, and—feeling something like the ruin-lust that so often stirred Valka’s blood—I lurched to my feet. “May I borrow your cane?” I asked Gibson.

My tutor raised the stick flat in both hands like a knight offering his sword to the Emperor. I placed my hand between his and took the cane, realizing as I did so that I had never held it before. It was heavier than I expected, the ash wood petrified and hard as stone, the head and tip not plated but solid brass.

“What are you going to do?” Valka asked, unsteady strides closing half the distance between us. “Hadrian, don’t you dare!”

But I was hurrying on ahead of her, passing down the line of Mericanii lords until the paintings changed to photographs. I’d counted them all before. There were seventy-seven. Seventy-seven lords of the Mericanii from Washington to Felsenburgh. Nearly five hundred years they’d reigned, lords of the greatest empire Old Earth had ever seen, greater than Qin, or storied Egypt; greater than Spain or ancient Rome. It was the Mericanii who first left Earth’s lonely shores and set foot among the stars, they who sent the first colonist beyond the circles of the Sun and raised new cities by the light of strange stars.

JEFFERSON, GRANT, HOOVER, NIXON, HAWLEY . . .

I stopped again before Julian Felsenburgh’s saintly image. Plain black suit and white hair.

Me being me, I held the cane straight up in salute to the ancient dictator. Felsenburgh the Liberator. And like a fencer on his line, I lunged, thrusting the tip of Gibson’s cane through the inch or so of thick plaster just beneath the antique picture frame.

And struck . . . stone.

I felt the rock resist me, and the solid vibration that told me what I’d struck was solid as the hill above our heads.

“What the hell are you doing?” Valka grabbed my arm. “This place is priceless, you barbarian!”

Pallino undercut the moment’s tension, saying, “I thought for sure you were right, Had. I thought you had it.”

“I just have the wrong one!” I said, shaking free of Valka’s talons.

“You are not putting a hole in the wall underneath every one of these paintings, Hadrian!” she said.

Pushing past her, I replied, “You know the story about the bird who wore the diamond mountain down?”

“I said stop!”

Alexander chimed in, “Shouldn’t we talk to the primate? Tell him what we’re doing?”

“I am tired of waiting!” I said, and punched through the plaster beneath Felsenburgh’s neighbor, a grim-faced woman whose name I have since forgotten. Stone again. “We’ve come too far and taken too long to leave now empty-handed!”

Crunch.

Stone again. I jogged ahead of Valka, pausing just long enough to strike two more of the panels, crushing a thumb-sized hole in the plaster beneath each portrait.

Crunch. Crunch.

“You don’t know what you’re doing!” Valka protested. “Hadrian, the bombs!”

Crunch. I’d gone through ten of them already. Fifteen.

“We don’t even know what we’re looking for!”

“It’s only plaster!” I said. “It’s not the paintings!”

“You can’t just vandalize a fifth millennium library on a hunch!”

I raised the cane again and thrust at the wall.

Ping!

The brass tip struck metal and rang like a bell. I turned and looked at Valka.

“I hate you,” she said flatly.

Drawing Gibson’s cane back, I thrust it into the wall again. It pinged loudly, confirming the hollow sound of before was no random happenstance. “No, you don’t.”

I peered up at the image of the man in the painting. Black-suited like the others, round-faced, gray hair short and smile unassuming. He was as plebeian-looking as the rest, hair receding, dark eyes hid behind spectacles. A white dome stood behind him where he sat in a plain wooden seat in lieu of a throne beneath a tawny sky.

“Truman,” I said, reading the name on the placard. Speaking to the painting, I asked, “Why you?” But it didn’t matter. I shook myself and—returning my attention to the doctor—said, “With your permission?”

---

In retrospect, we ought to have mentioned our discovery to the primate before we stripped the plaster from the walls. The stuff crumbled easily and fell almost to dust. Under Valka’s close eye, Pallino, Siran, and the soldiers removed Lord Truman’s image and set to work. It only took the better part of twenty minutes, and in time they revealed a simple hatch concealed behind a metal plate that folded outward when Siran pulled.

It had no key, no lock, only a wheel-lock handle, such as the bulkhead doors of a starship. A door requiring human hands to open.

“Why is there always another door?” I asked no one in particular.

No one answered.

Valka moved forward with me, and together we forced that ancient wheel to turn. Metal groaned and at last gave way so that Valka fell against me as the door opened. If the air in Gabriel’s Archive had been dry and stale as an old tomb, the air in that final chamber was worse still. It stank of spent gunpowder and smoke, as if the fumes of whatever burning had sealed the rock in place yet lingered there.

“We need light!” I said.

Siran answered, “Where are those glowspheres?” Two of the men began moving.

The men returned with torches, and despite my objections, Pallino went first, casting the beam of his torch ahead. I followed soon on, clutching Valka’s hand in mine. The floor beneath us rattled, and looking down I saw abyssal dark looming through latticed steel. The path ran on ahead and vanished, lost in shadow.

“Can you see?” I asked Valka.

“Probably only a little farther than you,” she said. “What is that smell?”

“Sulfur,” Siran added. “Ozone, maybe?”

“Smells like shit you bring in from space. Like when you’re skinning out of a suit in the airlock.” Pallino stopped. “This goes on a way. Looks like there’s a gate ahead.”

I wished I’d brought my sword. On Vorgossos at least I’d been armed.

Valka spoke from just behind me. “This metal lattice is a Faraday shield. Aramini wasn’t taking any chances.” She hissed, “What I wouldn’t give for a better light.”

The gate, too, was a metal lattice, though like the hatch outside it had neither lock nor key, only another wheel requiring human hands to turn it. This we did, and advancing, saw a sign with letters painted in English and in Galstani alike.

WARNING: CLOSE OUTER DOOR BEFORE PROCEEDING

“Siran,” I said, “close the door, please.”

“But if we need to get out fast . . .”

“Do it,” I said, and moved forward, following Pallino.

Another gate stood ahead, twin to the last. This we opened and closed behind us, seeing an identical sign. There were no lights. No switches. No hardware of any kind. There were sconces bracketed to the lattice walls of the cage-like catwalk along which we moved, but we had no torches save the little glowspheres, and so moved on.

“I see something!” Valka said, her machine eyes seeing what ours could not.

I saw a moment later.

A pale gleam shone at the end of the gangway—for gangway it was. A hatch, white-tiled and black-trimmed, with a tiny porthole in its center.

As we drew nearer, I could make out the name stenciled on the surface there, and read aloud. “U.S.S. Horizon,” I said, coming to a halt beside Pallino.

“It is a ship, then?” Alexander’s voice came from the rear of the line, bracketed between two of our guardsmen. “A Mericanii ship?”

“ ’Twould seem so,” Valka answered, peering out the side of the gangway. “ ’Tis a long way down yet. No telling how far. I’d guess we’re dead center.”

Moving to stand by Pallino, I held my glowsphere high enough to shine pale light across the door and the stenciled name. “Can we open it?” Gibson asked. The old man had come with us, but hung near the rear with the prince.

I ran a hand over the smooth surface, almost as if I could sense the impossible span of years that lay beneath it. Like the relics in the hall, the portraits, the banners, and the documents, the vessel was more ancient than my merely human mind could grasp, had been old even when Kharn Sagara was young.

But the latch gave when I forced it, and the door folded out with a groan.