THE CABIN DOOR HISSED shut behind me, and briefly I heard the whine of air systems.

I was alone at last.

I left Hadrian Marlowe the Halfmortal’s coat in a compartment by the door and hung the Devil of Meidua’s belt on a peg. Stooping, I unfastened Sir Hadrian, Knight Victorian’s boots and left them in a bolt-hole underneath the coat. Unshod and unbelted, whatever was left of me crossed the vestibule. The inner doors were only wood, and opened at my touch.

Home.

My suites aboard the Tamerlane were large by the standard of such things. The lounge was an open, high-ceilinged chamber complete with a small dining area to the right and a concealed lift that allowed servants to carry our meals up from the officer’s mess four decks down. Doors in the left-hand wall led through a sort of airlock to our sleeping quarters and the private bath, while a short stair ascended to a loft that ringed the entire lounge with shelves stuffed with books, microfilm reels, and storage crystals. There were no windows, though the massive holograph plate that dominated one wall showed an image of the gas giant below the Tamerlane turning slowly against the night. Its planetshine fell pink and golden on the dark furniture and richly patterned carpets. A dinted myrmidon’s helmet sat atop a mannequin’s head on a side table. High on the wall to my right a golden banner hung, displaying the eight-winged angel that once had been the battle standard of Admiral Marius Whent, the erstwhile dictator of Pharos I had destroyed. A macabre trophy. A memento mori made all the more appropriate by the black skull the angel had in lieu of a face.

A hundred other relics there were of the life I’d lived and Valka with me. There was a ceramic laving basin that Jinan had given me, cracked and repaired with silver solder. Beside it on the sideboard table stood a holograph depicting Valka and myself standing above the cleft at Calagah. Sir Elomas Redgrave had taken that holograph. That had been more than almost four hundred years ago. Sir Elomas was probably dead. The table itself concealed the controls for the room’s holography suite, disguised to look like ordinary wood. Carved flowers acted as dials for volume and lighting control, while pressing a whorl here or a leaf there would conjure control plates or activate the table’s recorder. Often I would dictate to it, recording drafts and pieces of what has become this book.

All of it vanished in an instant when she spoke from the armchair at one corner of the antique rug. “How did it go with the prince?”

Valka Onderra Vhad Edda set aside the tablet she’d been reading and rose. To judge from the tangled mess of papers on the drinking table at her elbow and the half-concealed holograph, she had been up to her elbows translating an inscription from the ruins at Calagah on Emesh. In the long decades we had spent together, she had identified several patterns in the alien inscriptions, but even with the computer laced through her brain, she could not read them.

“He’s fine. Whined a bit when I told him he was rooming with the junior officers.”

The doctor smiled and, reaching up, brushed my hair back with delicate fingers. “You used to whine a bit, too.” She leaned in and kissed me. When at last we separated, she asked, “Are you all right?”

I let my hand fall, and turning, crossed the carpet to a sideboard where a wine collection waited behind glass. I drew out of bottle of Kandarene red and poured it into the decanter. Priorities thusly ordered, I looked back at her. “I’m just tired. I don’t like being on stage so much.”

She snorted. “ ’Tis a lie!”

In spite of my tiredness, I smiled. “Maybe. Not for these people, anyway.”

“Anaryoch,” Valka swore in her native Panthai. Barbarians.

“The Emperor isn’t so bad, it’s the bloody ministers,” I said, “Breathnach and Bourbon.” I pulled Aranata’s ring from my thumb. I placed it and the ivory ring I wore about my third finger in lieu of a wedding band in Jinan’s basin by the door to our sleeping quarters. Remembering suddenly, I drew the Galath blossom from my pocket and lay it in the bowl as well.

Valka and I had been together longer now than most plebeians could live, but she had refused my offers of marriage. She was Tavrosi, and they had abandoned such institutions. I told myself it did not matter, that I was palatine and palatines did not marry for love. That a palatine’s true relationships were had outside marriage. I told myself that this was better, or at least good enough.

We lie to ourselves all the time, but there remains a piece of us near our heart that whispers, You don’t believe that. That part often spoke to me when I thought of Valka and of the bond between us, but she had a way of silencing it with her presence. I stood there a while, cradling my now-naked hand with the other, feeling the false bones Kharn had given me. Valka hardly looked a day older than when we’d first met: pale-skinned and sharp-featured, her red-black hair pulled messily up from high cheekbones. She wore only a long gray shirt that left a length of ghostly thigh exposed beneath prominent hips, the sharp points of her clan intaglio chasing down her arm in fractal patterns. Valka had slept in fugue far more than I had since we left Vorgossos, and the gap between our ages had closed. No longer was she the worldly stranger, the fey sorceress of far-flung Tavros, but a living woman. My woman.

Pretense had dropped between us.

“What?” She smiled at me. She never used to smile.

“Nothing,” I said, and it was true. “I love you.”

“You’re not wrong,” she said, and her smile returned my words to me. “But are you all right? Really?”

I returned to the decanter and—unwilling to wait any longer—poured myself a glass. I gestured at Valka with the crystal bottle, but she shook her head. “I’m fine,” I said, “really, I . . . the Empress asked about you.” Valka said nothing. She had enough experience dealing with me to know I would speak my piece in time, that I was only working myself up to say what it was that was bothering me. “She called you a witch.”

“ ’Tis nothing out of the ordinary, then,” Valka said, trying to reassure me.

Speaking to my own reflection in the bloody wine, I said, “But it was the Empress. I . . . they know what you are.” Knew she carried a forbidden computer laced throughout the gray matter of her brain. I stifled my fear behind a swig of wine. It tasted of smoke and pepper.

I swallowed.

Valka raised narrow shoulders. “They know I’m Tavrosi. You barbarians assume we’re all full of machines. They won’t do anything, besides . . .” Here she seated herself on the arm of the couch that wrapped around the holograph projection bit. “We’re leaving Forum now.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t come back.”

“You don’t mean that.”

I took another sip of wine. I knew I was drinking it too fast for how fine a vintage it was, but I needed the drink desperately. I needed to sleep—to dream, perhaps—and for a long time. Perhaps I would go into fugue for the first leg of our journey, allow myself that escape and respite: to cease to be for a time and return. It was tempting, and one often heard stories of certain palatine lords—aged and world-weary—placing themselves in cryonic fugue for years and decades at a time to prolong their tragically long lives. Common wisdom taught that such people did so only to extend their lives, the rich and the powerful clinging like drowning men to their wealth and power, but I know better. Such men are not afraid of dying. They are afraid to live, and so live only days at a time.

“You’re right,” I said. “It’s only . . . coming from the Empress . . . I worry about you.”

“You worry about me?” Valka’s winged eyebrows shot up. “Hadrian, if your Imperial friends ever learn these things you can do are real, they’ll forget all about me.” Valka had seen me die, had seen my head struck off by Prince Aranata with my own sword. And she had seen me return, sent back by the Quiet for reasons I did not understand. I had told her everything, about the howling Dark beyond death and the rivers of light that flowed across time and separated what was from what might be.

I seated myself on the arm of the couch beside her. “I can’t do anything. It was the Quiet.”

She put a hand on my knee and leaned warm against me. I offered her my wine cup and this time she accepted, vanishing half the remaining contents in one shot. She turned her hand palm up for me to take it, and I did, closing my artificial fingers about her true ones, flesh against flesh. After a moment of companionate silence, she asked, “Did you get access to the archives?”

“No,” I growled, accepting the wine back. “The Emperor’s holding it for ransom, I think. I don’t know why. Said it was for him to decide what I do with my time or something like that. He played like he didn’t know I’d requested access, said we would discuss it when we returned from this fool’s errand.” I made a gesture as if to throw something away. “I’m sorry.”

Her fingers tightened against mine. “Hey.” She lifted my hand in hers, kissed it. “ ’Tis not your fault.” I crossed back toward the bar to recharge the empty glass. “We’ll figure it out after this.”

“We’re not meant to figure it out, Valka. We’re meant to fail so the Emperor has an excuse for removing the people’s favorite new hero from the limelight. Or if not the Emperor, one of the old dogs like Bourbon.” I glanced back over my shoulder.

“Bourbon . . .” Valka wrinkled her nose. “He’s the fat one, isn’t he?”

“That fat man is a descendant of the ancient kings of France who went into exile when the Mericanii took Old Earth.”

I could hear Valka’s frown as I poured a second glass of wine for myself. “Why are you defending him?”

“I’m not defending him,” I said. “He’s a descendant of a family line that goes straight back to the Golden Age. I think that’s worth something.”

Her response played in my head before she could voice it, and with my back turned to her, I mouthed the word as she asked, “Why?”

Smiling, I turned and raised the glass to my lips. “You’re the historian,” I said, “you don’t think history is valuable?”

Valka made a rude gesture. “Not when history is an ass.” My smile did not waver. Valka had never met War Minister Bourbon, knew nothing of the man save what I had said of him. Her dislike of the man was for my sake, and I loved her for it. “You really think they mean for you to fail?” The way she looked at me, as though I were spun from glass . . . no one else looked at me like that. Not since I became a knight. Maybe not ever.

“Yes,” I said, feeling like glass myself as she wrapped her arms around me, pressing her face against my chest.

“Well then,” she said, “ ’tis well that whether we fail or not is up to us.”