“THERE’S NOTHING HERE,” OTAVIA Corvo said, peering from the holograph scan of the planet our light-probes had made.

She wasn’t wrong.

We’d traveled far beyond the edge of the explored galaxy, circled the core at full warp for almost fifty years, striking out where none had gone before. Had settlers come, they might have passed the system by. Even the mining surveys might never have come here, so remote and desolate a system was it: a solitary, ugly world orbiting a red dwarf star. Waterless. Airless. Lifeless and unremarkable. It shone a rusty brown in the holograph, capped at either pole with crowns of frozen air. Carbon dioxide. Methane.

Tor Varro said, “There are signs of water a long time ago, do you see?” He gestured at deep channels that recalled the fabled canals of ancient Mars, canyons and dry riverbeds miles deep and hundreds of miles long. “Of course, who knows how long ago it was.” Such riverbeds were common on lifeless worlds. Water was not the cosmic rarity our ancient ancestors imagined. Only planets that could retain water were. “There just wasn’t enough of an atmosphere to protect whatever ecosystem there might have been.”

“Or will be,” Valka said darkly, recalling what Horizon had told us.

I tried to imagine time running backward, pictured towers and domes rising black as Calagah from the desert sands, wrought of that strange matter that was not matter at all. Not atoms or molecules.

Varro shook his head, disbelieving.

I could not blame him.

“Surface gravity is an estimated 1.0037 gees,” the scholiast continued. “That’s as near to Earth standard as I’ve ever seen. It’s larger than Earth, though. Less dense. Surface temperature at the equator is just about 280 K. Chilly, but not freezing. If it had an atmosphere it might be livable.”

Valka frowned her way through this brief lecture, arms crossed as she surveyed the holograph. “But there’s no sign of any ruins?”

“Not yet,” Corvo said. “But the light-probes did a low-resolution scan on flyby. We’ll scan again now we’re in orbit.” The captain towered over the projection, a deep frown on her face. “Why this place?” she asked.

First Officer Durand appeared at her elbow, polishing his useless spectacles before restoring them to his nose. “I don’t think there’s anything here, Otavia. This is a dead rock. It’s not even on any of the Yamato surveys. If it were of note they would have flagged it.”

“The Yamato surveys never came this far,” said Commander Halford. The so-called night captain had not quite gone back into fugue and stood quietly to one side. Bald-pated and soft-spoken, Halford was a palatine of some lesser house. A seventh son or somesuch foisted on the Legions to save his family the trouble of dealing with another spare heir. “We wrapped round the core to get here, past the Commonwealth. Surveyors haven’t been this way, so it’s no wonder. He held his black service beret crushed in his hands, as if concerned the primary crew believed he’d erred in bringing us here. I could understand his anxiousness. We were very far from home. Farther than the Norman Expanse—if in the opposite direction round the galaxy’s heart. Farther than the Veil of Marinus or the rim of the Outer Perseus, in parts of space no man nor probe had trodden. “I followed the doctor’s instructions to the letter.”

Valka studied the holograph again. “These are the right coordinates,” she said.

“There’s nothing here,” Durand repeated. “Just a load of dust and old rock.”

I had been silent throughout these proceedings, watching from the vacated captain’s chair, my head propped against one fist. The fugue sickness lay thick on me, and I struggled to keep open eyelids that seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. But at the same time, my mind was racing, recovering from the semi-psychotic shock of returning so suddenly from a state so very like Death itself. I watched the bunch of them by the holography well, and looking past them saw the limn of the nameless world turning on the massive viewing monitor that dominated the bridge’s forward wall.

“No.” It took me the better part of half a minute to realize it was I who’d spoken. All eyes were on me—even the eyes of the technicians and junior officers in the pits below and to either side of the captain’s station. “This is the place.”

Even today I am not certain how it is I knew, and knew with a certainty I cannot fully explain. It was like . . . it was like I had been there before. The rusty face of that nameless sphere called to me as had Vorgossos beneath its dead star. This planet’s star was quite different. Such a dwarf star might shine ten trillion years, so slow and coldly did it burn.

Trying to shake the physical exhaustion that lay upon my excited mind, I stood, feet planted wide to steady me as my head swam. “Commander Halford, thank you, you may go.”

The bald man snapped a salute, fist to his chest. I turned to Corvo. “When can we start scanning?”

“At once,” she said. “We’ve settled into stable orbit over the equator. I was going to launch a couple shuttles into polar orbit to cover the parts we can’t see.”

Stealing her line, I said, “See it done, captain.” I leaned against the lip of the projection well and screwed my eyes shut a moment. “And scramble Sphinx Flight. I want aquilarii running flyovers, see if they catch anything the probes missed.”

---

It had been decades since I last rode in the gunner’s seat of a Sparrowhawk, but I felt the familiar thrill surge through me as the magnetic chute lights cycled red to blue. Ahead and above me, the pilot officer’s hands ticked through launch preparations.

He hesitated before the final level. “You ridden one of these before, my lord?”

“How old are you, soldier?” I asked, head back against the headrest, ready.

I could almost hear the fellow blink. “Twenty-eight standard, lord.”

It was all I could do to keep from laughing. “Since before your father was born, lad. Take us out.”

It’s a strange thing. The largest, fastest ships—ships like the Tamerlane, like Titus Hauptmann’s Sieglinde, or the great Sojourners of the Exalted, ships that outpace passing photons a thousand times over—feel slow. So great is their size and so distant any frame of reference that to travel the black seas of space, even at warp, seems more like standing still. But a lightership, a ship such as the little Sparrowhawk in which we rode? Acceleration slammed us back into our seats as the magnetic accelerator threw us into the void faster than any bullet.

And we were falling. Falling through naked blackness toward a world like rusted iron. I felt my hands go tight on the armrests, and for a moment my vision blurred with red. The lighter was too small to carry a suppression field generator, and so we bore the full brunt of the inertial tide, rolling down from the dark heavens to the barren waste.

Below us, the planet stretched dead and desolate far as the eye could see. Brown peaks and escarpments reared from red sand, and what little atmosphere yet remained turned the sky a sickly yellow.

“Reminds me of Arae,” the soldier said. “Bleak place, lord—if you don’t mind my saying.”

Our flight had leveled off several miles above the surface, so high we cast no shadow on the world below. “Can you take us lower?”

“Aye.”

The pilot was right. The place did look a great deal like Arae, though that world had been white with salt where ancient seas had dried and great wind-tossed pans stretched to the horizons. The sky was what did it. The small and too-close sun made the red deserts redder, but that alien sky declared that this was no country for mankind.

I leaned forward in my seat, looking out from beneath the Sparrowhawk’s single long wing as it tacked against the too-thin air, solar cells drinking of the wan light. There silence reigned, for there was no wind to carry the cry of birds or the scream of beasts, nor the lash of thunder or rain. Few places I have been in all the universe were as stark, as desolate, or as beautiful.

Corvo was right, and Durand. There was nothing in the desert.

We did not seek nothing.

“Take us lower, man,” I said, and though he could not see me I pointed out the cockpit glass to where a mighty canyon yawned off our starboard side. “Let’s have a nearer look at that trench.”

At a gesture from the pilot, the Sparrowhawk’s single wing rotated, coming from horizontal out our left side to near vertical. We tipped forward and plunged, angling down through airs so thin they could hardly be called airs at all. I was glad of our repulsors, for surely the Sparrowhawk’s long, lonely wing was useless beneath that airless sky.

Descending, I saw that Varro had been correct. The signs of antique waters showed in the striations of rock walls a mile high to either side, red and white, but the ancient river was long gone. Buttes rose like pillars on gnarled corners of the mighty rift, buttressing the sky.

“Do you see anything?” Valka’s voice sounded through the conduction patch behind my ear.

“No,” I said. “It’s beautiful, though.”

We flew on in silence a while, eyes and instruments scanning. High above, I knew, the Tamerlane and her shuttles spun and searched. If there was anything to find, we’d find it.

“Do you know what we’re looking for, my lord?” the pilot officer asked, glancing back over his shoulder.

I did not answer at once, but sat peering down through the glass blister in which I sat, feet in the holsters of the chair. Cocking my ankles, I swiveled, surveying the lands below. Pedals beneath my feet allowed me to rotate in any direction within the gunner’s sphere, holographs overlaid on the glass surface and in empty air around, according me a hazy but complete picture of the space around me. Looking through these at the fellow, I said, “Not exactly. But I’ll know it when I see it.” I realized this was the characteristic sort of non-answer congruent with my nearly mystical reputation, and I tried again: “There’ll be structures of some kind. Black stone. Always black stone.” I had not seen or been near a Quiet site since Emesh and Calagah, but I remembered plain enough, and remembered also the innumerable holos and phototypes Valka had shown me time after time. The arches, the angled pillars and inhuman geometries, the strange grace and alien beauty of them, fluted and flowing like water. The round marks, the anaglyphs, each hinting at ideas no human hand had deciphered or human mind understood.

As it always did, such thoughts brought me to ancient Egypt, to hieroglyphs forgotten and undeciphered for millennia, to pyramids more ancient than the white megaliths of the Mericanii.

To gods old when man was young.

What gods were on that nameless world were older still, though yet unborn. For if the flow of time is an illusion—a trick of human light—there is no difference between future and past. Thus that which lies in the remotest future is more ancient than the ancient past, for more aeons are there yet to come in cosmic time than have been. So remote, so deep are the epochs which separate my hand and this page from theirs.

“There are no ruins here, lordship,” the man said.

I chewed my tongue and pressed a finger to the contact patch behind my ear to broadcast on all channels. “Sphinx Flight, this is Lord Marlowe with Sphinx Zero-Niner. One hundred hurasams to the man who first catches sight of something down there. Do you copy?”

A string of replies came over the line.

“Copy that, lord!”

“Too bad we couldn’t have come here before that island on Colchis, eh boys?”

“Smart money’s on us!”

“Up yours, Oh-Four!”

Unseen in the gunner’s seat, I smiled. Ordinary men. What a relief humanity is just to be around. Here we were at a desert on the edge of the world, on a planet beyond the edge of human knowledge, and the bastards were joking.

May mankind never change.

I switched back to Valka’s channel, tipping my chair forward so that I hung against the restraints nearly parallel to the ground. “See anything up there?”

“The shuttles are still taxiing into their orbits,” came her reply. “I have a good feeling about this.”

“What makes you say that?” I asked.

Her response crackled slightly—sign of magnetic interference from the planet’s surprisingly strong fields. “No one’s ever been here. Your Chantry won’t have ruined the place.”

“They’re not . . .”

“Not yours, I know.” She cut me off.

I grunted. “We might be too early. If all these ruins are running backward in time, they might not have . . .”

“Risen from the sands?” Valka finished for me. I could see her smiling by the holography well at the captain’s station as clearly as if I were standing across from her.

“Careful, Valka,” I said where only she and the pilot officer could overhear me, “you’re starting to sound like me.”

“Imagine the horror.”

Though our spirits were high as we searched, we saw nothing. Hours went on filled with nothing but spare remarks and the slow scroll of sere lands beneath us.

“Aristedes is on one of the polar shuttles,” Valka reported. “He’s reporting some water ice in the caps with the dry, but nothing else interesting. Varro thinks there might be groundwater or something. Underground seas.”

“Like Vorgossos,” I said. “Can we do a gravimetric scan?”

“Not from orbit,” Valka answered. “Effective range is too short. You think ’tis underground, this thing we’re after?”

I shrugged in the harness, by then hanging nearly upside down. “I don’t know what we’re after.” I craned my neck, taking in several more square miles of barren emptiness. “Wish you could see this place.”

“I am seeing it,” she said. “Believe you me, Marlowe, this is one adventure I’m happy to sit through. I hate lighters.”

“I just hoped what we were looking for would be obvious. Like the other sites,” I said. Calagah had not been easy to miss: a black facade of stairs and arched colonnades fronting the wall of a seaside ravine, shafts opening through the upland miles inland, a network of tunnels and passages such as ancient Minos might have built.

But we had a whole planet to search, and so I knew I should be patient.

I think I dozed in the saddle, our progress gentler now as we swept the horizon. I dreamt of rain on a world that perhaps had never known it. A torrent fell past me through bottomless skies while winds roared and shook trees whose roots I could not see. I fell with the rain, falling until it seemed I traveled not down but forward with the ground rushing beneath me.

I stood upon a gray plain, not rough but paved and smooth. Ahead a black dome rose shallow against the sky, perfectly smooth and surrounded by pillars wider than any tree. A great crowd stood about me—but did not mark me as I passed them by. White hair, white horns, black cloaks, and black armor. Black too their banners snapping in the wind, each painted with the device of a white hand wide upon its face. I saw once more the figure of a creature tall and terrible, silver-crowned, leading a man in chains. Without having to be told I knew that here was the Scourge of Earth. The Prophet. The Aeta Ba-Aetane. The Shiomu. The Pale King. Syriani Dorayaica.

I drew nearer, horror rising in my heart as I beheld the creature it led on its chain.

Violet eyes met my own.

My own eyes.

It was me.

“This is Sphinx Zero-Five, Tamerlane. Think we have something in the mountains at twenty-seven north latitude, eighty-one west.”

The comms chatter woke me, and swallowing bile I banished my dreams.

Cielcin beneath an open sky . . .

I did not hear Corvo’s response as I came back to my senses. Holographs taken from the other lighter appeared on my gunner’s display. A red stone mountain rose from the plains. It was clearly volcanic, for it stood alone, apart from the surrounding mountains at the edge of one of the basins Varro suspected had long ago been seas. It rose for miles above the plain and pierced—I think—the upper limits of that dead world’s thin air and so brushed naked space.

More images appeared, showing the plain before the mountain. Not the plain from my dream, for I’d a sudden and terrible sense that the black dome I’d just seen would appear before my eyes.

But it was not to be.

Great round arches of stone rose from red sand, black and nearly circular, marking out a path that ran up the foothills of the mountain from the bed below. There five tongues of stone rose, curling from a knurl of rock like the fingers of some impossibly huge hand.

“Valka, you seeing this?” I enlarged the image, and thought I beheld an opening in the mountainside where the five pillars came together.

A door.

“The arches are nearly like the ones on Ozymandias,” she said.

“They’re nearly full circles,” I said.

“If they are like the ones on Ozymandias, they are full circles,” she said. “The bases are just buried.”

“Did you see the door?” I asked. “Up on the slope?”

Valka sounded almost transfixed. “I’ll have Otavia put together a landing party—oh, this is marvelous!” We still had some of the prefabricated units we’d bought for our stay on Thessa, enough to build a reasonable base camp. “We’ll need to secure the site. I can’t believe ’tis really here.”

“You doubted it?” I asked.

“Hadrian.” I could tell by her tone that she’d ignored my question.

“Yes, Valka?”

“I hope you know . . . ’twas all worth it.”

I opened my mouth to respond to that, but the comm line buzzed with outside chatter. “That hundred sovereigns on the table still, Lord Marlowe?” came the spotter’s voice over the comm. It was Sphinx Oh-Five.

“And a bottle of Kandarene!” I called back, riding high on the moment of discovery. “Red or white, soldier?”

The aquilarius replied, “More a red man, sire!”

“A man after my own heart!” To my pilot I said, “How fast can we be there?”

“It’s damn near the other side of the planet, my lord. A few hours. Faster, if you don’t mind getting knocked around a bit.”

I gave the order. “Punch it, Ardi.”

The Sparrowhawk’s single wing snapped round until it stood perfectly vertical, long and towering over the snubbed fuselage like the crest of some dramatic bird. The primary drive kicked, fusion reactor burning with a fury that punched me back into my seat. We were streaking heavenward once more, moving into a parabolic arc designed to carry us around the world far faster than any suborbital flight.

We’d arrived.