THE WIND ROARED IN answer, scouring the mountaintop with such force that—helmeted as I was—I raised an arm to shield my eyes.

Hadrian.

“You called!” I exclaimed, wheeling about as if I might track the gale with my eyes. “I came!”

Take off your mask.

My hands were moving before I was fully aware of it, and I stopped their progress. I could see the indicators in the bottom left of my suit’s entoptics. There was still no air outside my suit’s protective shell.

There was nothing. And it was very, very cold.

“If I do that,” I said, “I’ll die.”

Silence.

I had come so far. Too far, in truth, for I was not sure I could survive the journey back. I had bent all my efforts for so many years, fought and killed and served the Empire, all to stand on that mountaintop. Looking round, I saw the faces on the stone mountains encircling us. My eyes searched for the lonely flower, but it was gone. Torn out in the wind? Or had I only imagined it?

Was I going mad?

“What is this place?” I asked.

Silence.

“What do you want from me?” I asked to no avail. “Tell me!”

The silence was deafening. I wheeled on the spot, taking in the crumbling splendor all around me. I swore. There was nothing for it.

I gripped my wrist-terminal with my opposite hand. “Fear is a poison,” I told myself, and tried to master the panic in my heart.

Fingers keyed the orders into my terminal, sending warning alarms blaring inside my suit so loud they nearly deafened me. Grinding my teeth, I found the hardswitch behind one ear, exhaling as my helmet seals broke and the mask and helm unfolded like the petals of an iron flower, exposing my face as the material collapsed into my collar.

Nothingness hit me like a freight tram, driving what little air remained from my lungs. I tried to breathe, but there was nothing there. Adrenaline’s cold fingers closed about my heart and squeezed. I felt the slap of cold and the steady drum of blood running through my veins. Panic seized me, and I fell, vision going dark.

I must have been centuries falling. Eyes veiled in gray mist, I lost sight of the mountaintop, my only sense of place the double impact of my knees striking stone, chest heaving.

Air.

There was air.

I stayed on hands and knees a long while, staring at the ground. Ages passed before I could see it, and I did not move. When at last I could breathe more easily, I rasped, “Was that . . . some kind of test?” I looked up, and my next words died on my tongue, for the sky had changed. Gone was the black of night and the subtle shimmer of starlight. The same red sun hung miniscule in the sky, but it shone somehow brighter and more warmly, its radiance spread through a pale, white daylight that veiled the face of the stars. “Where are we?”

Behind the stage.

I had almost expected to get no answer. The voice—coming as it seemed from a spot just above my shoulder—startled me, and I scrambled to my feet.

“I don’t understand!” I said. “I have so many questions! I’ve come so far!” Still searching for the source of that soundless voice, I spun round, one hand flitting to my sword. “The mountains! The bridge, the flower! I—” My words died on my tongue.

Standing on the edge of the mountain’s top—right where I had ascended and right where the flower had grown—stood a massive finger of stone. Half a hundred feet tall it stood, and perhaps ten across. The marker was black as the stone of the ruins below and covered in the same circular marks, some small as coins, some large as dinner plates. It had not been there before.

Silence ruled the mountaintop once more. No word came, nor shout of wind. I moved toward the marker, hand still on my sword. As I did, the light changed, revealing the massive glyph carved at the top: a single circle bisected by a vertical line. The same symbol I had seen in the hidden chamber of Calagah. Remembering that encounter, I approached with caution and stretched out one gauntleted hand to touch my reflection in the mirror-dark stone.

Nothing happened.

Memory of pain and deep cold moved in me, kindling an idea. I fumbled with my glove’s seal and cast the first gauntlet aside. “Take off your mask,” I muttered, peeling the second from my other hand. I reached out with my bare hands and touched the surface of the monolith.

Again, nothing happened.

Scowling, I stepped back and turned away. I was so sure I’d been right. Resisting an urge to kick one of the gauntlets aside, I strode to the far edge of the mountains. “I don’t know what you want from me.” I turned back to glare at the monolith . . . and froze.

My reflection had not stirred. It remained standing square in the face of the black stone, one hand flat against the surface just where I had left it.

I did draw my sword then, but left the blade unkindled.

Green eyes met violet.

“What do you want from me?” I asked, drawing nearer with careful steps. No second reflection appeared behind the green-eyed one. “Why did you bring me back?”

The other Hadrian raised his chin in a gesture I knew all too well. His lips did not move as he answered me.

You are the shortest way.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Silence.

My reflection watched with flat, green eyes, its hand pressed flat against the surface of the stone.

I understood, and held my hand to its.

Pelagic cold poured through the contact, so deep my bones ached. I gasped, sagged against the wall and slid to my knees once more. But my hand would not be moved. I felt as though stone fingers had closed on mine. Referred pain lanced up my arm and kindled in my brain, setting alight that spot behind my left eye and whiting out my vision.

And all at once I was not on the mountain at all.

I was looking down on it instead, soaring as a bird might above the stone giants and crumbling terraces of the city. My vision began to shimmer, to flicker like the shapes in a child’s shadow theater as it spun about the lamp. I beheld other mountaintops, retreating in undulating procession east and west into eternity. I saw myself kneeling at the monolith, or standing, or not there at all. The further away I looked, the more different the mountaintops became, until the monolith was gone and the stone faces and the mountain with it. I saw our Sparrowhawks circling in a distant sky, and the white shapes of our camp pitched on red sands at the edges of infinity.

The pain flared white with the flash of revelation, for I understood.

The breadth of time unrolled beneath me. All the places that might have been or might be breaking like waves against the ever-moving present. I saw possibilities rise to crash upon the now and fall away as time slipped ever on. Infinite possibilities—but only one was real. Only one occurred; the rest fell into darkness in corners of time that never happened. I knelt in such a corner that very moment, upon that strange mountaintop towering above an Annica that would never be, lost to unrealized potential, to entropy. Suddenly I understood what the voice had meant when it spoke of our being behind the stage.

The stone giants, the city, the mountain on which I stood existed in another present. One that had not happened—that could not happen—because the past that informed its reality had not. I had come to a time unreal and unrealized.

Beneath the gaze of my vision naked time rolled like a carpet, like a thin sheet of oil atop an ocean of what might be. Time’s wave broke, and infinite nows shattered and sank into darkness save that one which we would say occurred. The waters of potential receded, running down toward the future—if future it could be called—only to be thrown back upon the present in new form.

I looked back—upward, or so it seemed to me—and watched our galaxy play out in innumerable forms. Focusing, I found I could pick out the threads, the rivers of time tangled in that ocean. I saw our Empire—and nations like our Empire, and others totally strange—spread across its face. I saw a mighty dominion of the machines set their hellish order over the stars in a time that never was, and saw strange flags planted on worlds I might have known by other names. I saw the green hills of Earth and witnessed the white pyramids of the Mericanii fall and rise above the cities of our birth. I saw Felsenburgh’s peace and the war he’d built it upon. I saw the Earth burning and the white chariot of Apollo that first carried us to the stars. All the empires of man’s birth flickered and died small deaths. Rome and Egypt, China and Britain all passed in instants until the Earth quaked beneath the dominion of dragons in the deeps of time.

And I saw myself. My own life ran like a silver thread from Delos to Emesh, from Emesh to the Demiurge, from the Demiurge to the very mountain on which I stood. Broken, Jari had said, and broken again. At last I understood his meaning, seeing clean fractures where my thread passed from Delos and the Quiet had intervened to force me onto Emesh and where Aranata had taken my head. Jari had spoken of roads, but I saw rivers. Perhaps the truth of what I saw is more than any human mind can comprehend, and these visions are only the animal mind’s interpretation of the eldritch truth. Perhaps we humans can perceive that truth only by analogy. Even Jari’s posthuman mind had failed.

So I looked forward to see what had driven Jari mad when he saw me.

The Cielcin roared and raged across the galaxy. Planets burned and fell. Billions of lives ended. Blood flowed like water and soaked the stars. I felt the heat and saw the sun-flash of nuclear fire as ships and cities died. I saw men and women corralled and chivvied into shuttles to be taken back to victorious Cielcin warships. I saw the white cities of Forum plunge burning from the sky. All that art and history, all the glory of our age and Empire fell in ashes like snow. Red-haired princes hung on hooks like sides of meat, and I recognized faces I knew. Crude Philip and Ricard. Proud Aurelian. There too were Titania and Vivienne and the Empress who hated me.

And there were Selene and Alexander. Each mounted on hooks beneath their ribs, paraded on tall staffs like banners.

I saw the oceans of Delos boiled away and lightning strike the towers of Devil’s Rest. A girl with black hair and violet eyes stood upon the highest walks of the Great Keep and watched the black ships descending, unfurling their banners across the sky as cannons rained fire.

The sister I’d never met, perhaps.

I never learned. For some force drew my eye, pulled it forward—downward—along the trough of time’s wave, chasing that bright and silver line toward the manifold unfurling futures. Another world. Another star. I knew the black ship well by then. I had died there, after all. Like a ghost I floated amongst its legion of statues, their metal forms pockmarked and scarred. I passed through its hull and down its aimless corridors, through the garden where I’d lost my life and up an empty shaft along one castellated tower to a place I had not been before. The Demiurge’s bridge was a dark place. Red holographs gleamed above console banks, and the holograph plates in the foreground showed the system unrolled beneath us: two fleets converging above a green world, its yellow sun shining out clear across the void. I did not then recognize the sun, nor the planet in its orbit. Never had I seen two fleets of such size. Such mass and charge. They swarmed across the tactical holograph displays like a constellation of fireflies, filling the skies above the planet. How many of our legions were there arrayed? I could not count them.

I know the number now. They recited it to me at my trial.

One hundred twenty-seven legions.

Three million, one hundred seventy-five thousand men. And that was without counting the various logothetes, the courtiers and nobiles who had sailed with our Radiant Emperor to witness his last and final victory over the barbarian xenobites.

That was without counting the more than two billion people on the planet below.

Without counting the Cielcin.

I felt the deck plates cold beneath my feet for the barest instant, and heard a strange, familiar voice. “Are we ready?” A figure stirred in the captain’s chair and leaned into the light. Hadrian Marlowe stood, black cloak settling about his frame. It may seem strange to say, but I had not known myself at first glance. Something about me had changed. Something in the shape of the face, perhaps? In the slant of brow and slope of nose? In the way the pointed jaw set as I moved toward the window.

“Aye sir,” said a voice I did not know. I could not see its owner. “But . . . are you certain?”

My other self stopped midway between the chair and the forward holograph display. He turned, locking eyes perhaps with the lieutenant who had questioned him. He almost faced me, and I saw him plain. His hair fell almost to his shoulders, and there was something in his face wholly unfamiliar to me.

These thoughts were driven from my mind a moment after, for that other Hadrian’s eyes met mine. Coincidence? One corner of his mouth twisted up in that familiar half-smile. “Do what must be done,” he said—I said—and turned his back on me. “Fire at will.”

The vision broadened, blurred, and skipped ahead. I saw the sun split open like a bloated whale and spew its fire forth. Fleets burned and the planet with it . . . and all those lives.

“No!” I screamed. “No!”

The pain flared once more behind my eyes, and all went white as that murdered sun. Pain lanced also down my arm, but I pulled it away, severing contact with the black stone. I fell back upon the rough stone and clutched my frozen hand to my chest. I half-expected to see my own bloody fingertips still glued to the face of the monument, but the flesh was whole and wholly without blemish.

“I won’t do it,” I said. “I won’t!”

The unheard voice descended on me once again. This must be.

“Why?” I lay back against the ground, and when I spoke it was in a smaller, weaker voice than before. “In Earth’s name, why?”

We must be.

“You?” I scrabbled back, moving farther away from the monument and the dark vision it had offered me. Both Brethren and Horizon had said the Quiet lived in the future—in a possible future—that they interfered to direct the flow of history unto themselves. “The Cielcin have to die so you might live . . .” I massaged my still-aching hand, flexed the fingers. There was no trauma on the flesh. Only the memory of pain. Only the agony. I was shaking my head. “I won’t do it. I won’t. I won’t be your tool.” I tried to stand, but my body remembered its exhaustion, its hunger, and I could not stand. “I will not butcher them.”

You have before.

The memory of Nobuta’s death washed over me, and I felt the creature’s body go limp. Uvanari died again beneath my knife. And Iubalu, and the demon on Arae, followed by the nuclear flash as Ulurani’s ship exploded in the skies above Aptucca, a little nova to herald the coming death of Gododdin’s sun.

I shook my head more furiously, and drove back the visions.

“Those were different,” I said. “Those were all different.”

The words played again in my ears, my own voice—my own face—alien to me. Fire at will. Do what must be done.

What must be.

This must be. The Quiet insisted.

“Why?” I almost shouted, managing this time to lurch all the way to my knees. “Tell me!”

Listen, came the entity’s response, a single word no louder than the rustle of wind through autumn leaves. It faded from my hearing and was gone.

---

I could not leave the mountain, though I tried. Finding my feet I staggered to the edge of the escarpment. The slope descended so steeply and treacherously that in my exhausted state I knew to attempt the descent was to kill me. I’d staggered back and recovered my gloves, still meaning to try. My helmet seals hissed back into place, and the antiseptic blankness of suit oxygen replaced the gunpowder and iron smell of the Annican air.

I made it perhaps ten feet before I fell. One foot went out from under me, and I slipped off the narrow shelf and fell perhaps thirty yards, coat shredding itself along the near-vertical rock face. Only the suit’s gel layer saved me, flash-hardening with the impacts to insulate my joints. Landing on an outcrop below, I struck my head and knew no more.

---

Bleary eyes opened on the Annican sky, still that burned cream color and not the black of night. The same day? Or another day? I drank from my suit’s recycler tube, stomach cramping for want of bread. I coughed, spitting water along the inside of the suit mask—a bad situation, that. Still coughing and without thinking about it, I undid my mask’s seals. No alarm sounded this time. And I wiped my face on the torn sleeve of the coat I wore over the environment suit.

It was a long time before I sat up, and longer still before I realized where I was.

The monument loomed like a black finger over me, slightly tilted where it stood on the edge of the mountain peak. I was back on the summit. I had no memory of climbing, but in my state that was no guarantee. I fell back in the dirt.

“On your feet, Your Radiance,” came an old, rough voice. “This all you got?”

I shut my eyes. I did not want to see Ghen again.

“I forgive you, you know,” said another voice. “I’d probably have done the same thing.”

I did not want to see Switch either.

“Fall asleep there, and the birds’ll get you, Had.”

I did open my eyes then, knowing full well what I’d see.

Cat sat on one low rock, legs crossed beneath her patched, filthy dress. Her thick, matted hair stood all on end, but she smiled through the grime. Ghen stood just behind her, hulking in the maroon fatigues of the Red Company, slit nostril flared. Switch sat nearby. Not the man I’d banished, but the boy I’d sheltered in Colosso, befriended, defended, twice failed. He wore the dinted armor of a fighting pit myrmidon, and sat sharpening his steel gladius.

“There are no birds here,” I said.

“Not yet,” Cat answered me. “But they comin’. Give it time.”

I turned my face away, but when I did I found them in similar positions on my other side, such that I could not escape the sight of them. “You’re not real,” I said. “You’re them.”

“We are,” the three said in unison, confirming what I already knew. They were but faces the Quiet wore, as it had for so long worn Gibson’s shape—when I believed him dead. I knew Cat and Ghen were dead, having seen both their bodies. The Gray Rot had taken Cat on Emesh, and The Painted Man had done for Ghen, a victim of devilry and my own bad commanding. Switch was probably dead, unless like Gibson he too had spent the long decades since Vorgossos frozen, but I thought not. Whatever powers govern our universe—and I was starting to have my suspicions—they would not allow two such unlikely coincidences to happen within one human lifetime. No, Switch was dead, burned or buried on some rock—I know not where.

“What does that mean?” I asked. Resigning myself to the Quiet’s little torment, I sat up and faced the shades of my dead companions.

“We are without beginning,” Switch answered, momentarily setting aside his whetstone.

“Without end,” Ghen added.

Cat took up the chorus, saying, “We create ourselves.”

We are.

“I won’t do it,” I said, pulling one aching leg in beneath myself.

“You will.” Cat smiled at me sweetly.

“You must,” Ghen said.

Still holding his sword against his shoulder, Switch said, “To create is to choose.”

Frustrated, I surged to my feet. “Speak plainly!” I roared.

But the phantoms were gone, and I stood alone once more upon the mountaintop, wind blowing through my hair.

Listen!

The Quiet’s command rang out like thunder, like the lightning itself.

“I am!” I shouted, and beat my breast with a fist.

But no answer came.

I seated myself on one of the low stones, glaring at the monolith. My reflection did not appear. After several minutes passed, I rose and—tearing the gauntlets once more from my hands—placed my palms flat against the cold monolith.

No visions came, no voice spoke to me.

I howled and sat at the base of the monument like Cid Arthur before the Merlin Tree, my back to the stone. Perhaps I slept, or wandered in that country like sleep which is nearer Death than dreaming. Nothing moved, for there was nothing on all that world save the stone of mountains and graven images. Not even the haunted winds blew.

So absolute a silence I have never known.

We fear silence. I said once that darkness is chaos itself, that in darkness any and all things might arise unseen like the cat from Pandora’s evil box. Silence is like that, but more profound. There was darkness before the dawn of time, and silence, too, but silence was the deeper thing, the canvas against which all thought is measured. You have heard stories of men driven mad in quiet rooms by the rushing of their own blood. It is not true. It is not the sound that does it, it is themselves. In silence, they are confronted with their own natures—and with nature itself—and cannot look it in the face. As darkness brings forth the creatures of the night, so silence brings forth the things within our hearts . . . if we will but listen to it.

Night came. And day again after. I emptied my suit’s water supply again and knew it could not last forever. Hunger gnawed at me and blurred my vision, and I half-expected another shade to appear with offers of food. None did. I had confronted Ghen, and Cat, and Switch, and though they had not recriminated me, the memory of their faces haunted my delirium. I was not the man I could be, should be. I had failed them, and failed the bars I’d set for myself. I had punished Switch for caring, and sent Ghen to his death. I could have saved Cat—maybe—if I’d but torn the ring from its chain on my neck and ordered the Borosevo hospitals to treat her.

I hadn’t.

Three times I’d failed.

My vision flickered, pulling at the corners where I could not really look. If you have ever seen a creature stir in the corner of your eye, or seen a figure standing there and, turning, found only an empty door . . . you will know how I felt.

Listen.

I had no strength to argue with that supernatural voice anymore. The flickering did not stop. Shades danced there, and I knew that I had only to turn and face them, face Ghen and Switch, Cat and all the rest.

Was I dying again? My first death had come so suddenly that I’d not experienced the end as such. This death—if death it was—came slower.

Listen.

I turned—not my head, not my eyes—but my sight. Turned and saw the things shimmering there, shimmering as the visions the monolith had presented me. I saw again the crest of the wave of time, the mountaintop repeated over and over to infinity in uncounted iterations. I was dying, I saw, and would die in innumerable variations that stretched out to my left, expiring at the foot of that monument, dead upon a mountaintop in a universe that never truly occured. To my right . . . I saw myself stand, and saw the path toward standing, dependent on factors so small and improbable they would almost certainly never occur at all. The faint flicker and burn of chemical energy in my body, the constitution of will, the breaths taken just deeply enough to find the air I needed. I had only to choose the path.

I chose.

I stood, and my vision of the choice blended with the reality.

It was not the future I saw—though I tried—it was the now, the infinite possible nows. With each passing moment I moved to open Pandora’s box and knew before I did whether her cat was alive or dead.

To create is to choose, the voice repeated, echoing the words of Switch’s shade.

Teetering, I leaned against the monument.

“What is happening?” My voice was barely more than a whisper.

You are beginning to see.

White pain flared again behind my eye, and I slumped back against the black pillar.

I was on my hands and knees on a gray stone floor, tangled hoses and cords beneath me. My exhaustion strangely absent, I rose and looked round. The familiar vaults of the alien cathedral rose above my head, pillars graven in the images of inhuman things winged and webbed, supporting Gothic arches in their tentacled grasp. The music box chimed, doleful and serene in that quiet place. I saw the bassinet a moment after, placed in the chancel where an altar ought to be. Careful not to crush the delicate hoses, I moved toward it as I had twice before, one hand on my sword.

No infant cried on this occasion, nor was there any sound but my feet. On reaching the cradle, I saw why. The egg was intact. Larger than any melon it was, a sphere of unblemished white. Braided cables and hoses ran through sockets in its shell, and machines I had not marked before in the rim of the bassinet chimed softly in time with the music as the embryonic god dreamed.

Reaching out one hand, I caressed the shell between its hoses, certain that I stood beside the cradle of the Quiet itself. Not a people, as Valka imagined, but a singular thing. Its we was the we of emperors, the style of a being that spoke for multitudes.

Something roared in the distance, and I looked up. The doors of the great cathedral banged open, but what entered then I never saw, for the vision blurred and stretched, flowing beneath my feet like light smeared across the event horizon of a black hole. Though my feet did not move, I sped straight out of that ancient temple along a ribbon of silver light across uncounted billions of years until I approached the murdered sun from the back side and heard once more my own strange voice whisper those three awful words.

“Fire at will.”

My vision turned upward, and I beheld the silver line I’d followed, straight as laser light from one to the other. Other lines ran beside it, winding, broken or bent—each longer than the thread I’d taken from the cradle to that dying star.

And I understood.

You are the shortest way.

For the Quiet to be born, the Cielcin had to die.

“But why?” I asked the darkness, sensing the light beneath.

The Quiet’s voice was silent, but I understood why. Our words were too small for it. For it to answer in words was like pouring an ocean into a wine cup.

I tried again. “Why kill the Cielcin?” I hoped the narrower question would help. “They worship you!”

No.

The vision changed.

The hundreds of thousands of worlds of mankind’s dominion lay beneath my feet, unrolled like the finest Tavrosi carpet. I saw them each, and saw how small we were against the vastness of the galaxy, smaller still against the vastness of time. I witnessed other empires—and nations which were not empires at all—stretched across the heavens in man’s name. In some, machines stood by us shoulder to shoulder, or served us as the ancients dreamed. With my own eyes I saw our extinction play out in a million ways across a thousand epochs. I saw the Earth destroyed ten thousand times before we learned to fly. I saw the Cielcin consume us until nothing remained. I watched us swallowed by the Mericanii in times that never were, beheld the final defeat of the God Emperor at Avalon and stood witness as even he was strapped to a table in a pyramid raised above the ruins of Caliburn House, his followers given cancers to multiply their cells and stave off death forever while they dreamed infinite dreams and marked their descent into senile dotage, unable even to die.

Small as we were, we were not alone. Looking out across the stars, I perceived the beginnings of countless peoples beneath alien skies. There were cities, towers, tumbled ruins on a thousand thousand worlds across our galaxy and beyond. Places where no human had walked, places where perhaps no human would ever walk: across the Clouds of Magellan, to distant Andromeda, to Triangulum and beyond. There were empires in the far-off Coma Wall that spread across galaxies as we spread across star systems, ruled by peoples terrible and altogether strange.

And I beheld darker things. Older things. Greater ones.

Beings vast and incomprehensible as mountains moved beneath the outer suns, their antique wills slow and slouching as they bent their power on the stars. I saw hideous peoples on their knees in worship, and I knew. Knew it was not the Quiet the Cielcin praised.

Their horrid shapes moved about the fringes of my vision, dark against dark. I caught only glimpses: eyes huge and faceted as gems, wings malformed and time-eaten, pale limbs and claws yellow and cracked with age. Try as I did to look upon their faces, my mind rebelled, recoiled, and would go no farther. Memories of Brethren stirred in me, its many arms, its bloated form, its massive size so great that to escape its confinement in the waters beneath Kharn’s palace was to risk death, crushed by its own titanic weight. Large as it had been, I sensed these things were larger still and swam between the stars like cuttlefish. They knew us not, so small were we, and so small the affairs of a single galaxy to them.

But their servants had noticed us.

The Cielcin had.

Pale priests offered sacrifices at their altars of bone. I watched as one slashed its hand and allowed black droplets to fall upon a mound of corpses before a black and open portal. Something pallid and boneless slithered out of the dark, tendrils reaching out like snakes, like the fingers of some unseen hand. A dozen of them reached out and embraced the sacrifice, dragging it wetly back across rough stone.

“The Cielcin think you’re one of them,” I said. “What are they?”

They were.

It was not a helpful answer. “What do you mean, were?”

They came before.

“Before what?” There was no answer. “Are you one of them?” I asked.

They are not a kind.

I pondered the implications of this. Each one unique, a species unto itself.

“Why are you showing me this?”

So that you will understand.

“Understand what?”

The music box chimed faintly in the darkness, and turning toward the faint flowering of light, I saw once more the unholy temple of the egg. This time, I recognized the cyclopean forms of the colossi that decorated the pillars. Time unrolled again, branching futures flickering, exposed by the Quiet’s hand to my merely human eyes.

There were only two futures running from the egg. Like the contents of Pandora’s box, the thing inside the Quiet’s egg—the Quiet itself—was either living or dead. Down one passage there was only darkness, such a darkness as had been before creation: the darkness of a universe dead and cold, where all energy was lost. There the Watchers ruled in eternal night and plotted their conquest of every corner of time, until everything that ever was or might have been was lost. Down the other, the egg hatched, and beyond its birth I saw the stars reborn. A new universe. A new kingdom. A second life.

The Cielcin were only another battle in the long war. The only war. Not life against life, man against xenobite, and certainly not the petty wars of man against man—whatever their horrors. Theirs was the final war: light against darkness. Good and evil. Heaven and hell.

“Why me?” I asked the darkness once again.

The vision faded, and a voice I heard from behind me said, “Because we have to show them we are not abstractions. Not ghosts.”

I knew that voice, though I had not heard it since I was a boy.

Turning, I saw my father’s shade standing amidst the tumbled stones of the mountaintop. He looked just as I remembered: the same jet hair and grim expression, the same pale skin and violet eyes to match my own. His long mane was going gray at the temples, and he wore official robes of red-on-black brocade. A silver ring sat upon each of his fingers, and in his hands was strength. He had said those words to me so long ago, after my near murder on the streets of Meidua.

A ghost then? Or only a memory?

“Get up,” he said, and the memory of that once-hated voice moved like poison in me.

It was still agony to stand, but I could still see the breadth of time stretching to either side, could still choose my moment, as they had chosen for me when they delivered me from my death on the Demiurge, selecting another Hadrian—a potential Hadrian—from one of those failed narratives. They had traded the Hadrian who died for another Hadrian. For one still living. For one identical to the man who’d died in all but one respect: I had lost the other arm.

For me.

I laughed. Had they foreseen my battle with Irshan in the arena? Had they arranged that moment, too?

“Lorian was right,” I said. I was not the same Hadrian at all, not the man who had died by his own blade beside that lake, though his memories were in me. The Quiet had interfered from above the stage like the gods of ancient Greek theater. They needed a miracle, and so they’d made one. “That bastard.”

Lord Alistair raised one eyebrow. Once, that expression would have held fear for me, but that was long ago.

“I’m not a monster,” I said, and made a gesture as if to throw something away. “All this . . . I can’t pretend to understand it all . . . but I cannot do what you ask.”

“You must.”

“There has to be another way,” I said.

No. My father’s lips did not move. Snarling, I turned from him, crossing toward the monument, somehow sure I would see for myself. I pressed both hands against the black surface, willing the cold to come. Nothing did.

“Show me,” I whispered.

My vision still shimmered at the edges. The strange second sight I’d been granted was still there, and I turned my sight to look in that direction. The Quiet had changed something in me—or perhaps that power had always been there, lurking just out of sight.

A black dome rose above gray plains, surrounded by spiraling columns. A mighty host stood near at hand, and far above the moon-like shape of a worldship blotted out the sun. Beneath that dark star I saw their black banners snapping in the wind, and recognized the sign of the white hand in among the more traditional banners marked with Cielcin calligraphy.

“Yaiya-toh! Yaiyah-toh! Yaiyah-toh!” came the Cielcin chant, and the beating of their spears against the earth was like the sound of thunder. A hundred princes of the Cielcin stood there and awaited the coming of one mightier than the rest. Dorayaica came, crowned in horn and silver and leading me on a chain. I looked older than I had in the last vision, gray-templed like my father, haggard and gaunt. Old though I was, I recognized the face more readily than I had aboard the Demiurge.

The vision blurred, and I heard a piercing voice cry out, “Akterumu! Akterumu!”

Then we were aboard a Cielcin vessel—the same vessel that had eclipsed the sun, I knew. The Prince of Princes stood upon a platform above a throng of its people, clawed hand spread out. I knelt upon the platform beside it, still chained wrist and throat and ankle. Beneath me marched a sea of human faces, goaded forward by Cielcin wielding spears. I saw Otavia’s floating hair among them, and heard Pallino cry out. “Give them hell!” he said.

I was powerless to save them.

The Prophet clapped its hands.

Screaming filled my universe, and it was not until my lungs gave out and choked that I realized the screaming was my own. The vision faded again, flickering gone until I observed only the world around me. That vision was the price I paid for failure, I decided, a future I must not allow to come to pass.

“You have to let me go,” I said. “Dorayaica is sailing for Berenike, I saw it! You have to let me go!” Where in all that roil I had seen Berenike I could not say. There was too much, and I struggled to hold it all as though I cupped precious wine in my two hands.

Lord Alistair’s shade was still standing there, unmoved by the tears streaming down my face.

“I can save them!” I almost screamed the words, and without my newfound vision guiding me I barely kept my feet. “I have to go back.”

There is much you do not know, the unheard voice told me. If you go now, you will go where we cannot reach you.

“You have done it before,” I said.

Time changes, the Quiet said. Soon your time will go beyond our sight.

I pictured the wave of time, and thought I understood. “You can only interact with my . . .” I reached for the right word, “. . . my narrative when your future lies within the realm of possibility. But we’re outside that now, and the rules are different.”

I took their loud silence for a yes, and shook my head. “I have to go to Berenike. If we can stop Dorayaica there . . . I can save them. I can save your future, too. There is a way. There has to be a way!”

The Quiet’s voice did not respond, but my father spoke. “Do you swear to see to its end any course begun?”

Confused, I turned to look at him, for it was not the elder Devil of Meidua’s voice, but the Emperor’s. It was a piece of the oath I’d sworn when I became a knight. How little the words had meant to me so long ago—how much they mattered then.

“I will,” I said, rejecting prophecy and fate.

Father’s shade raised one hand, pointing at the monument. “Then go.”

Then go.

Approaching the black stone, I rested a hand against it, face inches from the glyphs on its surface.

With my new vision, I perceived that they were not glyphs at all. Perceived that all of Valka’s efforts over so many decades—all the efforts of her predecessors across centuries to decipher the alien marks—were for nothing. They were not the symbols of an alien language, but the parts of some vast and incomprehensible machine. The monument, the corridors and arches, all the great halls and byways of the ruined city and the ruins on every world the Quiet had touched were parts of a mechanism that reached upward and down into dimensions that we pawns—who move but forward—cannot see. That was how the tunnels moved, how they were propelled backward in time. That was how I came to this place, this other Annica, this universe that time forgot. The Quiet’s tunnels were a machine—or something like a machine—that bridged time, that extended north and south, east and west, upward and down across the infinite realms of possibility.

The round symbols began to turn, winding like gears in the face of the dark stone, and retreated from me. My hand fell through the surface, and I watched in dumb amazement as the glyphs wound backward, climbing inward and down step by gradual step, until I was looking not upon a monument, but upon an arch opening on a step that ran down.

Mouth open, I peered around the monument, careful with my new and limited sight to choose only the steps that kept me from falling. The monolith couldn’t have been more than a foot thick and stood upon the edge of the mountain, but the path that opened in its face ran straight, out and down into empty air.

I knew what I had to do.

I crossed the threshold, following the stairs down, the glyphs turning all around me, building a corridor for me from the dark matter of the walls. I was dimly aware of my progress, but the way was straight and narrow, and I braced myself against the glassy stone to either side. I did not see the hallway, for all was dark, and in time the light of the mountaintop faded away, leaving me in shadow.

Light appeared in time, shining ahead. A mote at first. Then a spot the size of a steel bit. The hall widened to either side, narrow walls belling outward until I walked beneath rounded archways. The light ahead was daylight, and I saw a glowsphere go floating past above my head.

It was one of ours.

I realized then just where I stood. I was in the entrance hall to the ruined city, a suspicion I confirmed a moment later, reaching the level of the outer gate. The way ran straight and clear before me, running downhill clean to where the white buildings of the camp awaited me. I was back in the living world.

I knew the air was gone, but I lifted my face to the sun, feeling the thin sunlight on my bare skin. The second sight remained to me, faint and far away at the edge of my perceptions, but it was enough, enough to choose to stand, enough to hold the effects of the vacuum at bay, if only for a little while. The future was lost to me, and the past was veiled. I was weaker without the Quiet to hand, but it had vanished, its time remote from ours, lost in the ever-changing wilderness of times yet unreal.

But it was enough, enough to carry my exhausted body downslope toward the camp.

And the army and the shuttles that waited there.