I AWOKE TO THE sound of voices.

Not rough voices, not the braying threats or coarse humor of prisoners; nor the cold, businesslike patter of the Inquisition, clinical at its work. Quiet voices. Polite. Fighting stun-fatigue and the leaden numbness that is ever its companion, I struggled to sit up. Young as I was then, already I had grown accustomed to waking up in strange places and to dungeon cells. I had made quite a habit of frequenting such places during the brief period wherein I called myself a mercenary. And yet, as I fell back against the cushions, it was only with the glum certainty that this time Jinan was not coming to save me. Jinan was far away, with Bassander and the Centaurine Legions at Coritani, regrouping in their defense of the Veil.

Cushions . . .

My second thought was that no prison should have cushions, nor so fine a couch as the one I reclined upon, upholstered in rich and patterned velvets of red and gold. It had the feel of an antique. The gold leaf upon its woodwork peeled in places, and its fabric faded, marking the splendor of some other age. The ceiling above could not have been more different. Pale concrete it was, cracked in places, and in others exposing naked steelwork gone to rust. The walls were the same, but hung with paintings and with tapestries fine as any lord’s.

“You’re awake!” said a quiet, measured voice, polished as old wood. “The guards brought you in some hours ago. They stunned you, yes?”

My new acquaintance was an elderly man, liver-spotted and with thick white hair and a pointed chin-beard. High-cheekboned and with a touch of epicanthic folding about the eyes. Nipponese? He wore a pale suit with a high collar and gold-fringed red toga, and his long fingers were heavy with rings. I knew at once he was palatine, and from that guessed that he was very, very old. There were liver spots on his hands as well, which struck me as a sure sign that he was near the end of his long life. Of all the people I had met, only Gibson seemed older to me.

“They did,” I said, nodding best I could while lying down. “My companions?”

The old man shook his head. “You were brought in alone. We all were.” He waved a hand, taking in the room at large. Several dozen others sat or stood or milled about in the hall behind him. Men and women, all haggard-looking but finely dressed, all with the tall, too-symmetrical look of palatines—or of the similarly well-endowed—about them. The man pressed a hand to his chest. His nails were very long. “I am Kim Hae Song, Baron . . . I was Baron . . . of Munshin.” Not Nipponese, then. Mandari, perhaps?

I mirrored his gesture, astonished to find a planeted nobile tending to me in my unconsciousness. “Hadrian Marlowe. My father is an Archon on Delos.”

“Delos!” The man’s eyes went wide. “You’re an Orionid lord! What constellation?”

I saw no reason to lie. “Victoria.”

The man’s face paled, and he stood quick as his old bones were able. “You’re one of the Peerage?” He bowed. “Lord, I . . . I did not know.”

“I am the very least of the Peerage, Baron Song,” I said. “Indeed, I would bow if I could move.”

“Nonsense, nonsense!” The old man regained his seat on the ottoman. “A cousin of the Star Victoria and His Radiance ought not to bow to me. My great-grandfather was a starship manufacturer.” He pressed a hand to his chest, to the ruby pin securing his frilled ascot. “But you’re so young! So young to be . . . here?” He made an inquiry of that statement, casting eyes about.

Following his gaze, I saw naught but gray heads around me, and realized with a start that every other person in the chamber was old, though most were yet tall and lordly. “What is this place?” I managed at last, not able to think of a better question. “What sort of prison is this?”

“Prison?” Lord Song repeated, “Prison? No-no-no, dear boy, no. There are no prisons on Vorgossos. Should one offend the Undying, I hear he offers them a choice: to be turned into one of his soldiers or, ah, exile.”

“Who chooses the former?” I said seriously.

“The, ah . . . the ones who don’t want to freeze on the surface.” He flapped his hands, a gesture which only intensified when I began to stand. “You must not! The stun fatigue, Lord Marlowe, you’ll fall.”

I did stagger, banged my hip against the couch. My oath drew the attention of several of those well-bred personages nearest me, and a thick silence fell about me.

“Is he all right, Kim?” asked one nobile lady, her face wrinkled as sand-etched teak.

Lord Song held up an acknowledging hand, but moved to put his shoulder under my arm. I swayed there, steadied by the old man’s weight against me. “Where are the guards?” I asked.

“Guards?” Song said, uselessly.

“I need to know what happened to my friends,” I said. “I had five companions. Three men and two women. They must have been taken with me.”

Kim Hae Song patted my shoulder in what I assume was meant to be a fatherly way. “They’ll have been quartered appropriately. They’re fine. You could probably have a message carried to them. They have to wait separately.”

“Wait?” I snapped.

“Well . . .” The old man blinked. “Yes!”

“Wait for what?” I began stumping toward the door, conscious of the plush give of the fine carpets beneath my feet.

Song tried to dig his heels in, but I brushed him off, stumbling only a little before I fell against the wall. There I remained. It was all I could do not to slump over, and I struggled to stop my knees from shaking. “Surely you’re here for the same reason we all are? To petition the Undying? This is where to meet him.”

“Not a prison?” I asked.

“You’re free to leave, boy!” shouted another, older man. “Looks to me you’ve more time than the rest of us, and the golem doesn’t take us in any sort of civilized order. I’ve been waiting two weeks for an audience.”

A silver-haired woman in a white evening gown spoke up. “Two weeks, Archibald? I lost count of how long I’ve been here at six weeks. That was weeks ago!”

“And I’ve been here the better part of a year,” called another whose face I could not see.

Baron Song leaned toward me. “We’ve all been waiting a long time. The Undying sends his golem for us when it pleases him.” The old Mandari wrung his hands. “It pleases him for us to wait.”

“I am the Marquise of Sarmatia!” the woman in the white dress announced, banging her cane undramatically against the thick carpets. “It’s an affront, I tell you! An affront!”

A hulking man, reduced only somewhat by age, said, “And I am the Grand Duke of Milinda, Marquise. What of it?”

“We are all lords here,” said Baron Song diplomatically.

“I am only a spice merchant!” said another man whose gray-faced complexion reminded me of the old vilicus on Emesh. “And Pardos here is an artist!”

“Who are you, newcomer?” asked the Marquise of Sarmatia.

Trusting my knees at last to stop shaking, I stepped forward—only then becoming aware that my sword was missing—and said, “Hadrian.” I was patting down my coat pockets reflexively, searching for the lost weapon. The guards must have taken it. Remembering myself and bolstered by the effect the information had had on the old Mandari Baron, I said, “I am Hadrian Anaxander Marlowe, of Delos and the Star Victoria.”

“Nonsense!” said one of the lords. “And what’s a stripling like you doing in a place like this?”

“It’s not nonsense, Frederick,” said the dark-skinned woman. “The Viceroys of Delos are Star Victoria, the Auriga branch . . . some Princess Imperial married one of the Delian Viceroys millennia ago. If House Marlowe was a local house, married to the Viceroyalty, it could be the boy’s of the Peerage.”

“He has the look . . .” said the Grand Duke of Milinda, adjusting his saffron cape.

I clenched my jaw, not terribly thrilled to have my family history debated before my eyes. Only it seemed very trivial to me after so many years a mercenary, though I knew it was not. Of old, perhaps, it was so. In ancient days a king was only a man who believed himself king and made others believe by the strength of it until the people took that strength on faith even after it was gone. It is said that no less than Alexander, considered by many the forefather of our Empire, once asked the scholiast Diogenes why it was he searched through a pile of bones. Diogenes rebuked the young Emperor, and sent him away saying that he sought the bones of Alexander’s father, but that they looked no different from those of a slave.

It is not so any longer.

We believe our civilization the product of our struggles, when in truth we are its products. We are its children, raised behind its walls. When the first magi of the High College altered the genetic makeup of the first palatines, it was in the spirit of Imperial civilization: to answer the demands of their age and to reward the heroes who conquered the Mericanii. When it came time for those new palatines to conceive children of their own, it was in that same spirit they acted, until that tradition was as ossified as natural law. Until it was natural law. Humanity parted ways with our cousins, the late, lamented chimpanzees, because the differences in our behaviors—our cultures—drove us apart.

How long, I wondered, before we palatines are similarly sundered from native man? Forget Diogenes. How long before even blind Homer could tell the bones of our Emperor from those of a slave? Not long. There are many amongst the old houses of the Imperium—dowagers, mostly—who make a study of the genetic markers that define our constellations. These old women can identify a nobile’s family from the smallest detail of body or face. In my youth, I’d believed it a kind of game. I am wiser now. Nothing old women do is a game, and it is a profound mistake to believe that one must care about a thing to be subject to it.

“He does look Imperial,” said the Marquise of Sarmatia. “A bit on the severe side, but he reminds me of Prince Faustinus—did you ever meet him, Sendhil?”

The Grand Duke of Milinda shook his head. “What’s he, then? The Emperor’s eighty-third son or the eighty-fourth?”

“Seventy-eighth.”

“Well, excuse me!” The Grand Duke threw up his hands. “How am I supposed to keep track of a brood like that? Ye gods, Marietta, who has the time?”

It was like they’d forgotten I was there.

In time, food was brought to us, and what strange food it was. No proper meal, no feast. Two homunculi: one with skin like milk and hair like onyx—the other reversed—escorted a train of several carts through the chamber. Briefly I saw four guards without. Dun-uniformed SOMs with their blurry faces. They held the massive doors for the serving girls, but otherwise were unmoved. The homunculi went about with trays bedecked with canapes and airy vols-au-vent. Coffee was to be had in abundance, and tea, but no wine. No water. I watched as the others all took fulsomely from the trays—none speaking to the girls who carried them.

“Take what you can,” Song advised, plucking a round dozen of the things onto a small plate. “There’s never enough . . . Tea please, there’s a good girl.” The homunculus with skin whiter even than mine curtsied and returned with a ceramic cup.

“Do you know where my companions are?” I asked her.

She watched me with eyes amber as her thin robes, but said nothing.

“They would have been brought in with me.”

“Don’t waste your time, Lord Marlowe, they don’t speak,” said Baron Song. “Let’s resume our game, shall we?”

I teetered a moment, keeping eye contact with the pale homunculus, who after a moment bowed demurely and moved away. Given no choice then, I returned to the couch and the table beside it. Druaja—labyrinth chess—is a very old game, played as much with the board as the pieces on it. I’d never mastered it, having not the patience or the puzzle-solving mind for such things. But Song had invited me, and I’d seen no other choice.

“Your move, I believe,” said the old baron, popping a piece of salmon pastry into his mouth.

In Druaja, one races one’s opponent to the center of the labyrinth, all the while trying to capture your opponent’s emperor. The labyrinth shifts—or can be made to shift—depending on varying arcane rules. I moved one of my centurion pieces round a corner, blocking one of Song’s cataphracts from advancing further toward the center. Myself eating a roll stuffed with onions and some fine cheese, I asked, “How long have you been here, Lord Song?”

“I don’t rightly know,” he said. “My terminal died a long time ago, and those delightful serving girls don’t come to any schedule I’ve noticed, so I can’t use them to keep time.” With a ringed hand, he captured one of my legionnaires and—having taken a piece—used it to depress a switch on the edge of the board. This altered the shape of the ridges running between the board’s hexagonal tiles. My centurion was cut off, freeing his cataphract. “But I should think several months now.”

“Several months?” I repeated. “Sitting in this room?”

“Where else can I go?” he shrugged.

“Earlier . . . one of the others mentioned a golem?” I said, studying the board.

The Mandari looked at me a long time. “His servant. Yume.”

“Yume?”

“It’s a daimon. An android,” Song said, responding to my next move with a quickness that made me feel inferior. “The Undying keeps an android majordomo. When it is our time for an audience, he sends it for us.”

“But . . . months?” I said, confounded, forgetting the Druaja board for a time. “I don’t have that kind of time.”

The Baron looked at me seriously, folding his hands across his chest as he leaned back. “What’s this, then? Are you ill?” His face darkened. “Are you an intus? Is that it? You don’t look like an intus . . . unless it’s your mind that’s afflicted. That’s something only the Undying could cure?” He made this last a question, though it seemed to me not to be so.

Chewing on another of the canapes, I was able to bite back a harsh retort. Doctor Cento had asked me the very same question, and I found it grating. The Baron, too, should have known that back home such an insinuation would have been grounds for a duel.

But I checked myself. “I’m not an intus,” I replied, moving my hierophant to capture one of the Baron’s knights. I held the captured piece in my hand, feeling the weight of it. The fine details of the knight’s medieval shield were worn down, and his face was a dull, featureless oval. It was old. Very old. I wondered just how old it was, and for how long it had moldered in this hall, a part of the furniture.

“Why are you here then?” the man asked.

Kindly or no, I was not about to tell the old Baron about my mission, about Tanaran and the battle at Calagah, about Raine Smythe and Bassander Lin. I smiled my thinnest smile, but said nothing. I slammed the knight down on one of the buttons, shifting the labyrinth’s shape again, trapping three of the Baron’s pieces.

The Baron swore, changed his plans, his question momentarily forgotten.

Eager to push the conversation away from myself, I asked, “You really think it’s true, then? That they have a cure for dying here?”

Song’s eyes lit up like those of a fanatic. “Oh, yes. Without a doubt.”

This shocked me, and I fear that I recoiled slightly at the vehemence in Song’s words. I had heard the stories, of course. Dim Vorgossos, where dark sacraments are performed to twist the blood. Lost Vorgossos, where of old Kharn Sagara revenged himself upon those who’d murdered his family. That bit of the story seemed true, if what I’d learned could be believed, and yet . . . and yet the rest of it still seemed to me a black fable.

“If immortality were possible, surely the Emperor would possess it,” I said. “It was my understanding that we were pushing the limits of the possible anyway. Something about the brain.”

Song rocked back in his chair, our Druaja game forgotten. He took a drink of his tea, smacked his lips. “Memory.” He smiled. “The brain struggles with memory as it ages—among other things. In we palatines this is stretched to the very limit, but we cannot go much beyond seven or eight hundred years, even if the heart and other organs can be kept young.” He smoothed his velvet jacket, darkening the green fabric.

I saw where he was driving, and frowned. “What’s the solution? A new brain?”

“A new brain! A new body! That is what the Undying offers. A new you.” He leaned forward again, leaping his hierophant over one of the walls to threaten my emperor. This done, he raised his eyebrows at me. “This is why the others are so confused to see you, young as you are, ah . . .” He looked me up and down. “How young are you, exactly?”

“Thirty-five,” I said evenly. “I was born in ’117.” That was more than a hundred years ago, I realized with a start. I’d spent more than two-thirds of my time alive frozen in cryonic fugue. This moved me to silence, and I looked down at my plate, selected another of the dainties on offer and ate it, hoping the food would drive away this existential crisis.

Song was still speaking. “Thirty-five! Why, you are only a child!” He smiled. His teeth were very white. “No wonder you are such a poor hand at labyrinth chess!”

The serving girl chose that moment to return, offering me a selection of small fruit tarts. Recalling Song’s advice that I should take what I wanted while I had the chance, I selected a pair of raspberry ones with chocolate and thanked the homunculus. She departed in a swirling of bronze silks.

“Thirty-five . . .” the Baron said again, shaking his silver head. “You know, when I was thirty-five, there were no Cielcin? No Crusade!” He made an expansive gesture, nearly upsetting his tea. “It was different in those days . . . ah, but where were we? Your move?”

Days later, I had very much improved at labyrinth chess.