I FELT LIKE A man balancing on a wire. The smallest failure in any direction but forward was set to plunge me down Bassander’s path: back to the war and some squalid end I could not see. I knew this: it would not be to retirement and a quiet life with Jinan on Ubar, and even if the captain kept his word and kept me from a kept life on Emesh, it would be to some poorer purpose than I envisioned for myself.

Was it greed then that motivated me? Pride? To be accounted a great hero of man, to be feted and honored by the Emperor as he who brought peace to the galaxy? Or was it—as I then claimed—a thing done out of compassion? Compassion not only for human life, but for all? I cannot say. In part because it has been so long—almost fifteen hundred years of Earth since I stood in my cabin aboard the Pharaoh and weighed my chances—but because also there were parts of me that were alien to my waking mind. Ancient parts, parts we humans hold in common with the ape and the whale and lobster, which are older than our words. Than all words. I knew them not and so cannot speculate as to the depth of my motivations, or their source.

Suffice it to say I felt a tragic need to do something, and to define that doing for myself. I had a talent: I could speak with the enemy. And I had a chance to use that talent. And I had legitimized that chance—if tenuously—in speaking with Raine.

Politics is a dangerous game, and I played it once before to my great peril and benefit. On Emesh, with Valka’s help, I had escaped an arranged marriage and trouble with the Chantry and won my way offworld. I attribute this less to any particular genius on my part and more to a blind and scrambling pragmatism. House Mataro, the Jaddians, the Chantry, the Cielcin, the Legions. I had threaded a tight and winding way between them and emerged only somewhat burned.

As I sat on the edge of my bed in that starkly lit little room, I ran long fingers over the sparse pockmarked scars that stippled my left arm. Uvanari tried to kill me in the end, after its torment. Drops of molten lead had struck me from one of the torture implements the Chantry cathars had left to hand for use against their alien prisoner. The scars shone like slick craters in my pale skin. Like stars.

The price I’d paid for my cleverness.

With what would I pay this second time? Was it worth the price?

I had spoken to Raine Smythe, exchanged texts via telegraph from the Mistral, where Bassander was least likely to intercept. She’d offered me a paper shield. No comfort in extremis. She could not gainsay Bassander, whose orders came from Titus Hauptmann, himself her superior, but she might order me to disobedience all the same.

I ordered you to find Vorgossos, her message said. If I order you to ignore Hauptmann’s recall and obey me, it’s me they’ll court martial.

But I’ll have followed criminal orders, I replied.

That won’t matter if you succeed.

“Hadrian,” Gibson’s voice echoed out of time. “Name for me the Eight Forms of Obedience.”

As I had done years ago, again I recited, speaking to myself in the dark of my cabin. “Obedience out of fear of pain. Obedience out of fear of the other. Obedience out of love for the person of the hierarch. Obedience out of loyalty to the office of the hierarch. Obedience out of respect for the laws of men and of heaven. Obedience out of piety. Obedience out of compassion. Obedience out of devotion.” I said them over and over.

Which is highest? His rough voice turned within me. Which do you obey?

Obey, I thought, and thought in my father’s voice, and the word was like the howling of air from a shattered castle on a broken moon. My father, Lord Alistair Marlowe, the Butcher of Linon. There are two sorts of men. One hears an order from his better and obeys. The other sees order in himself and obeys that. All men obey something, even if it is only themselves.

I was not sure he was right, but I knew one thing: Bassander was only that first sort. He was a soldier, not a lord.

What motivated Bassander? Compassion? There was not a compassionate bone in the Mandari soldier’s body. Piety? Perhaps, though what passes for religion in our Imperium is—I have learned—a small and specious thing. In any case, I did not then believe that Bassander was pious, taking him for the sort of wind-up man preferred by the admiralty in their officers. It was loyalty, of course. Loyalty not to the person of his commanders, but to their ranks. Bassander required order more deeply than I knew. He depended on it to hold back the chaos in his own spirit, for there were demons there, as dwell within us all. In the Legion there was structure, order, law. His loyalty was a function of this dependence, this need. He obeyed the office of the hierarch, the structure of his legion. His captain, his tribune, the First Strategos.

To whom did I answer? What did I obey?