ALL THAT WHITE STONE recalled for me the great caverns of our necropolis. As I followed the golem Yume through that labyrinth of drab corridors, almost I thought I could hear the faint drip of water falling from stalactites into the black pools about the sarcophagi of my ancestors.

There had been outrage when I was taken. Song and his fellow Titans had snarled that I was only a child, that they should be taken instead. Yume had ignored them, and so cowed were they by their unholy desire and their lust for what the Undying alone could give that none raised a hand against the automaton.

I never saw them again, nor learned if they received their inhuman sacrament.

I did not want to learn.

I had found my Virgil, and quiet followed it down windowless halls of blank stone, past sealed metal doors and square columns supporting ceilings lost to clinging shadow. The machine responded to none of my queries, and I soon stopped asking questions. We saw no servants, no guards, no cameras on our descent, not along colonnades or winding stairs, not in empty galleries or the vacuous dining hall through which we passed, its brushed metal tables bare and bolted to the floor. We descended by many hundred steps, round many dozen corners, through uncounted levels. I could not have found my way out if I’d wanted to.

A great metal door barred our path. Three times the height of a man it was, and three times across, being round, and sunken slightly so that the hall floor might pass unbroken through it. Some nameless artist in the deeps of time had taken a plasma torch to its thick surface, and fashioned there in flowing metal the bas-relief image of a boy enthroned atop the shattered ruins of monsters. Machines, I took them to be, the Exalted, and so guessed the seated boy was Kharn Sagara. He clutched something in his hands. A bottle, perhaps?

“It’s true . . .” I breathed, stopping. “He really is Kharn Sagara.”

Yume’s head swiveled full round, though it kept walking forward. “You did not believe?”

“No.”

“None ever do.”

The door rose up and admitted us onto a raised platform where an open monorail cart waited hanging by a rail above our heads. The tram was accessed only by a single stony strand reaching out into absolute blackness like a warning finger. Glowspheres hovering above its length did little and less to illuminate that blackness, and beyond their light I sensed an abyss infinite almost as the black of space.

But here there were no stars.

The tram rattled as it advanced, and the gentle wind of its passage carried the briny stink of salt and alien planktons. “What’s that smell?” I asked.

“We are beneath the original installation,” Yume said, mounting the stairs to the tram car. “The builders placed their city above the underground sea, whose surface is more than five miles below.”

Ahead through the gloom I discerned a shape, hanging from the cavern above like the stalactites in my memory. Only as we approached did I see it more clearly, not a stalactite at all. A pyramid. A great, square pyramid done all in white stone. Two sentry towers decorated with golden cartouches hung to either side of the track. Their glowing faces showed sculptures in the same style as those on the massive door. What they depicted, I could not say.

The tram ground to a halt, and Yume led the way down from the tram onto a white marble platform. Light shone from hidden sconces high above, illuminating a vault decorated with an image of the heavens. We descended a steep stair, Yume careful to check its pace that I did not stumble or fall. I sensed we must be approaching the base of that terrible structure, though how I knew that I could not say. The air grew colder. Dry. At the base of the stair was a short hallway, perhaps ten yards long. I could almost taste the silence.

Yume seized the great bronze ring in the doors and knocked. Once. Twice. Three times. They creaked as they swung inward, though there was none to open them. I pressed on, aware only after I had done so that I was alone. That Yume had left me.

And the doors were closed.

No stir of air was there, and but for the sound of water the place was quiet as a temple. As a tomb. Not speaking, not knowing what to say, I stepped forward. The place was all in shadow, and dimly I was aware of great pillars of pale stone rising like ghosts about me and of the statues that filled the space between.

One such pillar rose ahead of me, greater than the rest. At its base—upon a dais of many steps in the very middle of the chamber—stood a massive chair. A great tangle of cables flowed toward it, gathered from every dark corner and falling from the ceiling above like garlands. A great horror was on me, and a sense of awe and of terror unlike any I had known. The fear of the shepherd before Pharaoh, of the merchant before Caesar. Of man before god. Still not speaking, I approached to within five paces of the lowest step, turning my face upward to look upon the man seated there.

The Undying’s face was ageless, neither old nor young, though his dark and wild hair was touched with gray at temple and forelock. A heavy cloth-of-gold robe lay upon his shoulders, tiny dragons picked out in black against that shimmering garment. It stood open, and beneath he was bare-chested, and I could see the hoses and sensor tape wired to sockets in his flesh. What trousers he wore seemed to me part of a spacesuit’s underlayment, black and padded. His feet were bare, calloused almost as much as my own.

He did not speak, and for a time I honored his silence, standing placid at the foot of that mighty seat. His eyes—black as coals—were far away, nor did they seem to see me.

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale

Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,

Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,

Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone.

Thus he seems to me in memory: King of the Titans in all his ruinous glory, couched in numb contemplation of the Dark. How long he’d been seated in that awful chair I could not imagine, nor imagine the well and depth of years in his experience.

“Lord,” I said when minutes had passed, “I am Hadrian Marlowe, grandson of the Vicereine of Delos and a cousin of His Radiance, the Emperor William XXIII. I am come on a mission of special significance, to the Imperium and to all Mankind.”

Nothing.

Not even the eyes moved. My words died in darkness, and the silence which followed was total and absolute.

“Lord,” I said again, “I come at the behest of an Ichakta of the Cielcin Itani Otiolo, and on behalf of a baetan of the same.”

Nothing.

He did not seem to breathe, and I would have thought him dead but for his reputation. All that chamber was still, the fixed center of an unfixed universe, dead as the dead sun about which that frigid world turned.

“Lord,” I said a third time, “you brought me here in your own time, of your own will. I’ve been waiting the better part of a month.”

Again, nothing.

Frustrated, I turned, looking round, half-expecting Yume to appear behind me and take me away. From my vantage near the throne I saw the statues were not alone in decorating that dim chamber. There were paintings. Some ancient and others less so, paintings of the sort my father or any great lord of the Imperium might slaughter to keep. Some, I think, were artifacts from Old Earth, so faded were they and time-stained. I approached the nearest statue where it stood on a plinth at the base of another column, aware of how the ceiling seemed not to exist above me. It was of a woman in a great cloak, and beneath that cloak she opened on hinges to shelter and reveal a bearded man who himself comforted a broken figure. The statue’s hinged doors opened to form a kind of triptych, and on the left the same woman cradled an infant, and on the right the broken man stood renewed, as if whatever torment was in the central frame was undone and forgotten.

“Beautiful, is it not?” asked a voice deep as the darkness.

I had been just about to touch the sculpture, and so turned sharply out of guilt.

Kharn Sagara—if that was who he truly was—had not stirred. A tiny drone, leaf-shaped and smaller than my fist, sped back and away from me, its one blue eye gleaming. “It is,” I said, unsure whether I should address the little drone or the man in his chair. Between Brevon and Jari I felt I had grown accustomed to speaking to strange creatures in strange rooms. And yet this was different. Brevon, for all his mechanical abstraction, had been a man, and Jari had been a monster inside and out, hardly human at all. This was different. I felt . . . I felt as I imagined some ancient Achaean might have felt, standing in the shadows of the temple at Olympia before the gilded statue of Zeus. Waiting for the god to speak.

“She is a tree of life to them that lay hold on her: and he that shall retain her is blessed.”

“What?”

“That is why they come here. Your . . . ilk.” The voice was all around me, emanating in chorus not from the mouth of the man in the chair, but from a swarm of little, blue-eyed drones descending in formation like comets from the dark above. “They wish to live again. Anew.” His words were halting, fractured, as if each was painstakingly selected and not without cost or pain. “Not you.”

“You clone them,” I said, accusing—knowing I should not accuse. “You clone them and . . .” And what? “You destroy the clones so the original might live.”

Nothing.

I walked around so that I stood in front of Kharn, looking up into his hooded eyes. He might have been Mandari, or perhaps Nipponese, though he was pale almost as I. He had the eyes. He did not speak again for minutes, and when at last I could bear it no longer, I said, “I wish to make contact with the Cielcin Prince Aranata Otiolo. I am told you’ve had dealings with its kind.”

Kharn’s eyes—his human eyes, which were black and not blue at all—swiveled to regard me. The light in them was very far away. Remote as the faintest stars. His voice coming like the grinding of stones beneath the earth, he said, “Knowledge, then. Not life.” Then in a voice barely more than a whisper, a voice which came only from his human lips, he added, “But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat. Did no one tell you?”

He was quoting, I realized. Quoting from an antique religious text, one with which I was not at the time very familiar. But Gibson had been a thorough teacher, and I’d a fair grounding in the literary canon of Earth’s Golden Age, and so replied, “The day thou eatest thereof, my sole command Transgressed, inevitably thou shalt die . . .”

“Milton.” One of the drones orbited smooth and silent about my head, a mere hand’s span from my face. “I see you are a man of culture.” I angled my chin, determined not to shrink or scrape in the face of this dark lord. Kharn sat up straight, hands gripping the arms of his chair. “But what else are you? An emissary? An apostol of the Empire? Speak your words, ambassador.”

“The war has gone on long enough,” I said shortly, holding my hands out in formal entreaty. “Nearly four hundred years of conflict now. Dozens of worlds lost, billions of lives. It has to end.” I paused, expecting the other man to interrupt, but he never did. The black drones moved in slow spirals, all watching. The King with Ten Thousand Eyes. I wondered what perverse God there was to have chosen that book of all the books Gibson owned to give to me. “A Cielcin captain surrendered to me at Emesh. I have hostages, among them a priest-historian of their kind. I am trying to arrange contact with their leadership. To make peace.”

That xanthous king surveyed me with eyes like coals. He reached inside his robe and adjusted the drape of one of his many hoses. I’d had my next series of remarks prepared, but they fled me. What I had taken for flesh beneath Kharn’s yellow robe was paneled, segmented like a carapace, so that his ribs were separated from the flesh beneath. The hose he’d rearranged ran up under his ribs, toward whatever organ there passed for a heart.

Still he did not speak.

“The Cielcin captain itself informed me that you have had dealings with its kind in the past, that you might be able to arrange a meeting with them.”

“An interesting design, this,” Kharn said, lifting an item that had lain unseen in his lap. “Jaddian, I believe.” It was my sword. Olorin’s sword. I’d lost it when I was taken, brought to the waiting room with Song and his fellow Titans. Her silver fittings and emitter shone brightly in the dim air.

I stood a little straighter, braver now I was growing used to that strange room and the man before me. “It is. It was a gift from a Maeskolos of Jadd.”

“Ah,” Kharn said haltingly, “only a Maeskolos?” He triggered the blade, turned the weapon in the air before him. It shone its familiar lunar blue, star-bright in the gloom. The highmatter surface rippled, flowing like quicksilver. “I have always admired their order. The Maeskoloi understand the art of violence because they understand that violence is art. It is a lovely weapon. I don’t suppose you would part with it?”

The question caught me by surprise, and almost I stumbled. “I’m sorry?”

“I’ve a collection of Jaddian weaponry; yours would make a fine addition,” Kharn said. “I would pay you, of course.”

“It’s not for sale,” I said, a touch too sharply, I think, for the Undying raised an eyebrow. Backpedaling, I said, “The Maeskoloi do not sell their arms.”

“Si fueris Romae . . .”

“Do as the Romans do.”

“He speaks Latin as well!”

“Modo paulo,” I said. Only a little.

The Undying’s flock of eyes all orbited me by then, disregarding the chamber and the art around. When Kharn spoke again, it was from everywhere, as if all the air of that immeasurable hall trembled by his word. “You have come by a long road to find this place. Why?”

“I’ve already told you,” I said. “To make peace.”

We stood thus a long while, like two pieces on Song’s Druaja board, though how close we were to the center of the labyrinth I could not say, nor could I guess what sort of piece I was. Kings and pawns, I thought. Kings and fools.

After what seemed a very long time, Kharn said, “But why?”

The reasons were so self-evident that I could not articulate them. I tried to remember, to recall what it was I had said to Sir Olorin and Bassander that night by the wreck of Uvanari’s ship. I could not quite recall, and so said, “To end the war. To save lives. To make a better world . . . and because there is room enough in the galaxy for both the Pale and us.”

“Is there?” Kharn smiled, his human eyes still fixed on the blue glow of my sword. “A tiger might prowl over miles and within her bounds, and no lamb is safe, though their flock asks only for one pasture.”

“How many worlds should burn?” I demanded. “How many billion lives? We could end this war.”

“War,” Kharn repeated, and leveled my blade at me like some medieval judge. “There is always war. As well struggle against it as against gravity. You will fail.”

“Wars end,” I said coldly.

“Wars end,” Kharn agreed, more coldly still. “War does not. And I am not much troubled what form our wars take. For over fifteen thousand years now your Empire has warred across the galaxy. I have watched your sun rise over half a billion worlds. And before that, before me, it was the same, only it was smaller.” He lowered the weapon, and lowered his eyes. I would have thought them closed, but Kharn Sagara never seemed to blink, only to stare sightless and all-seeing and at all times. “What is it to me who sits on your Solar Throne, or how long is its sway?” With a click, the King of Vorgossos deactivated my sword and turned the hilt over in his long-fingered hands. The nails were long, neglected, claw-like.

I took a step forward, forcing his eyes to widen their orbit. “What is it to you if the Cielcin come here? What if they decide they’ve dealt with you enough? What if they decide to deal with you instead?” The ageless face only smiled. And with painstaking care he lay my weapon on the arm of his chair. He did not blink, nor turn his eyes away. “The war is spreading, lord. How long until you are yourself affected?” Somewhere between the start of this sentence and its ending, Kharn’s black eyes glassed over, as if the man had vanished from whatever room the soul occupied behind those eyes. “The war affects us all.”

Distantly, a fountain burbled.

The Undying did not move, and again he did not seem even to breathe. The man had the patience of a statue. And why should he not? Every statue in our necropolis underneath Devil’s Rest was younger than the man before me. Small wonder Song and the others were left to wait so long in that chamber far above.

To Kharn, it wasn’t long at all.

“Once,” Kharn said at last, speaking only with his own lips. His chest rose and fell. “Once it was so. Once mankind had but the one neck and war the hands to squeeze. No more. The Cielcin may pillage as they please and not destroy mankind. This storm shall pass like all the others.”

Recalling his earlier quotation, I marshaled myself and—speaking, it seemed, to Dis himself—said, “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain neutrality in a crisis.”

“And if you had truly read Dante, Marlowe,” Kharn said, voice issuing once more from the drones around me. “You would know the deepest pit of hell is cold.” He lifted his chin, staring up into the darkness at things I could not see. I wondered then what else he saw, and through what eyes. I thought of his SOMs, of the light shining through their dead and sagging faces. I felt certain then that there was no place on that dreadful world where Kharn Sagara could not look. From the highest dome through caves of ice and down to that sunless sea, every square inch and stray atom passed beneath Kharn’s lidless gaze. How his mind endured the strain I cannot say, but I had not then seen the ceramic shine of implants beneath his ear and that wild fall of hair.

“So you will not help?”

“Five hundred standard years I’ve traded with the Cielcin. With Otiolo, Hasurumn, and Dorayaica,” Kharn said. “I see no reason to jeopardize these arrangements in the name of your Emperor.”

I blinked. “Five hundred years is . . . before first contact.” I meant the Battle of Cressgard in ISD 15792, when the Cielcin attacked our colonial fort settlement on the edge of the Marinus Veil. The loss of that colony had sent its horrible message careering across the Imperium, the temple fires burning on every world and the priests beside them crying out those fateful words: We are not alone. I had come too far to give up so lightly, and stepped forward, placing one boot on the lowest step of Kharn’s white dais. “Do so many deaths mean so little to you?”

“Yes,” Kharn said, speaking for the first time without hesitation. “When you’ve seen as many lives as I have, you learn how little they are worth.”

“Then why do you cling to yours so tightly?” I demanded. “Or is it only other lives that are meaningless?”

Kharn’s lips twisted into some septic impersonation of a smile. “When you have seen enough of other people, you will learn that it is they who believe their lives are meaningless. Why should I value them, who do not value themselves?” I had no answer to that, only a vague sense of righteous indignation. “Flesh is the cheapest resource in the human universe, Lord Marlowe. It spends more easily than gold.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Because you are a child,” said the Undying. “Thirty-five, was it? Thirty-five . . .” He meant my age. He had heard my conversation with Song, of course. “I have lived more than four hundred of your lifetimes, boy. Your belief means almost nothing.” He lifted my sword from the arm of his chair and—leaning forward—presented it to me pommel first. “Take your Jaddian weapon.”

I had to climb the dais to accept it, and so came close enough to really see the man. The myth. He stank of unwashed flesh and hair, of machine lubricant and something . . . sweet. Myrrh? Blue lights pulsed beneath his left ear in time with some unheard signal. It was the chest, I decided, and his ribs that were prosthetic. The flesh there was not flesh at all. Veins stood blackly out on his neck, and again he did not seem to breathe. Some mechanism, buried perhaps beneath the flange of his ribs, breathed for him.

“Thank you,” I said, taking the sword. I was eager to be away. Sagara frightened me, I am not ashamed to admit. Halfway down the nine steps—sword yet in hand—I turned. “This is not like other wars, lord. Unless we can communicate, our two sides will tear one another apart.”

Kharn did not look at me, but folded his hands in his lap as he contemplated the dark above. “You may have the hospitality of the palace, naturally. It wouldn’t do to turn so august an ambassador away at the door when he has only just arrived. Yume will find rooms for you. Yume!”

“Here, Master.” The golem appeared from the shadows—the red light in its black eye leading. I would have sworn the door had not opened. It padded forward, silent on metal feet. Without being given instruction, the android placed a hand on my shoulder and prepared to lead me away.

I turned to go, sick with the weight of my failure. But I did not protest, I did not grovel. So august an ambassador . . . He was mocking me, and I had no choice but to be mocked. I’d not come in a strong position, had nothing to trade. I had counted on the humanity of the least human man I have ever met, a man whose consciousness perhaps resembled my own even less than those of the Cielcin.

“A moment.” Kharn’s voice was like flint. The golem stopped beside me, and shrugging free of its iron hand I turned. “Approach.”

I did, aware that—surely—I was a pawn in some dominance display but not caring. If this man, this creature, wished to humiliate me, I could not stop him. Nor would. I had need of him and his connections, and though I’d already thought them closed to me, I was not about to make matters worse by arguing. So I stopped at the base of the dais, mindful of the automaton at my back. It was my turn not to speak, and so I waited.

“Your Cielcin prisoner. You said it was one of the baetan?”

“Yes.”

“Bring it to me. We will hear its case.” Kharn’s flock of eyes dispersed, each vanished up and into the darkness, and lonely Saturn’s head drooped. He must have sent some silent communication to the android behind me, for now I heard its quiet advance. In the scant seconds before it took me by the shoulder, I found myself moved again by that same awe and fear I’d felt on entering. Not even the halls of our Sollan Emperor would later fill me with such disquiet. I felt again that sense of time, and the sense that here was the oldest man in existence—perhaps the oldest ever to exist. The silence that fell and folded about his throne comprised millennia. There thickly lay the frozen years, so that the very air seemed a kind of amber, and I the prisoned fly.