THERE ARE DEEPER DARKS than the black of space. Forgotten places where the Dark that was before Time retreated from light and from the ordering of the first suns. There Tiamat, in all her emanations, retreated from the coming light, from Marduk, from Jupiter and Jehovah and all the lords of light and order: the forebears of our own divine Emperor. There was such a darkness on Se Vattayu, in the cradle where the Cielcin were born, as there was in those caverns beneath Vorgossos.

The Chantry teaches that light orders reality, as it is by the properties of light that we perceive Creation. Thus in darkness—which is only the absence of light—order diminishes. Perhaps what we perceive as darkness is that lack of order: Chaos itself, the incoherent decay and the rot of those waves of energy whose presence shapes the world.

That place . . . that darkness seemed something more. The dripping shadows that greeted us at the bottom of that lift tube felt somehow substantial. I felt as though some alchemist deep in unrecorded time had prisoned there some elemental, some principle, some beast of archetypal shadow.

I was not half wrong.

Holding my sword before me like a torch—its bluish metal casting ghostly shadows on the raw concrete of the path before us—I followed Father Calvert into the gloom. Suzuha came after, leading little Ren by the hand. Valka came last of all, her weapon trained on Suzuha’s back. I could see very little outside the circle of wan light my sword emitted, though the walls of rounded little buildings gleamed like bone in the distance.

Dark are the pits beneath the palace of Kharn Sagara, dark and deeper still—but they have a bottom. By many miles and many winding stairs we had come, and down a rattling lift older than the habitation of my homeworld. Through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea.

I paused a moment, looking up to where Kharn’s pyramid glittered thousands of feet above our heads. Faint lights made its precise geometries blurred and ghostlike, as though the bleary eye of some blind god watched from that unholy see.

“This way!” Calvert said, turning back to usher us forward. “Almost there, now!” Outside his crab-like chassis, the Exalted’s voice was like glove leather, and I held my sword more tightly.

“What is this place?” Valka asked.

To my surprise, it was little Ren who answered, his high voice painfully thin as it frosted the air. “The builders put it here to get power to the fortress up top.”

Ahead and to our left, I could make out the low, round shapes of three drum-like buildings, each squatting upon the low dam that bounded the black sea. To no one in particular, I asked, “Hydroelectric?”

“Geothermal,” Suzuha replied. “But Father found other use for it.”

“Did he indeed?” Valka asked, but the girl did not reply.

As we passed, ancient lamps welled up in the darkness, casting faint and silver light over time-eaten concrete and old, black stone. Strange, white moss grew in cracks and hung from the flat roofs of the nearby buildings like the beards of so many old men. Ahead, Father Calvert’s head seemed to float in darkness. Here and there he would turn back and wait as the lamps flared about him. He might have been a shade, one last eidolon to lead us to that final pit of hell.

I felt a cold sweat on the small of my back, and an instinctive terror cloud behind my eyes. For there ahead was the archway I had seen in my dreams. A broken circle standing like the cast-off ring of a giant. It stood at the top of a short stair that rose to the top of the dam. At once, Calvert sped forward, blurring as he took the stairs four at a time.

“This way!” the Exalted said.

Memories return to us by strange roads. I mounted that last step and stood beneath that broken arch to find I had emerged upon a sea wall. Full faintly I heard the sound of waves, pulled even through all the miles of rock above by Vorgossos’s black star. As a boy, the ocean of my home promised adventure, the potential for infinite possibility and change. One imagined pirates such as plied the Spanish Main on Old Earth, thought of uncertain frontiers and lands and peoples strange. One imagined monsters such as the leviathan they say existed before the dawning of the world, though there were no such monsters on Delos. Our ocean—and all life on my homeworld—had been brought there by our seed ships and colonists. What frontier there was, what promise of danger, what monsters lurked in the deep were all illusions.

Not so here.

I placed a hand on the archway to steady myself, not to remedy some loss of balance, but because a terrible thrill shot through me, as though some awful light had pierced my eye. And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder, and a voice crying out from the desert of my soul.

You.

You.

You have come here. Though you do not know why.

I turned, but Valka and the others gave no sign they had heard anything. Calvert had descended the path below, was humming the tune of his ancient lullaby as if he were alone in all the world. Antique lamps flared up in the wake of his passage, glowing like the embers of the universe’s last stars atop their slanting poles. The arch shifted beneath my hand. Crawled. I lurched back, gasped as the whole surface glowed with points like tiny stars, dense as a legion’s spears. Thinking it some weapon, I raised my sword, and the lights took flight around me, so that I stood amidst a constellation of golden points.

But they were only fireflies, and rose into the dark of the cave like the glow of a nebula ascending into heaven, like the twilight rolled back to reveal the night sky in all its wonder—and the black sea beneath.

“You waste time, intruder!” Calvert hissed. “Come.”

I had a sudden image of Calvert hurling me into deep water cold as winter, felt my heart stop in my chest from shock. Standing at the top of the seawall looking down, I called back, “You said you would take us to Kharn’s machine! This is an ocean!” Abruptly, I recalled the oracle Jari, whose visions had been granted by creatures that dwelt in dark waters.

Calvert replied, “He expects memory banks? Tape decks? Crystal storage? Hard drives and silicon?” The Exalted made a sound that might have been laughter. “He knows nothing. You know nothing. Will you not come down?”

By then Valka and Kharn’s children had joined me beneath the arch. By the light of the scant lamps and of the fireflies I saw concern in her eyes. “Will you keep an eye on them?” I asked her. “They’re the only thing keeping that chimera from killing you and me both.”

“I already am,” she said. “And I know.”

I’d forgotten to whom I spoke, and smiled in spite of myself. “Of course you do. Sorry.”

“You’re not going down there,” Valka said, speaking in such a way that it was not quite a question. I did not answer for a good moment, and she seized my wrist. “Hadrian!”

Calvert’s voice rose from the bottom of the seawall, where he stood upon the strand. “Will you not come down?”

I shifted my hand in hers, eyes finding eyes. Her fingers closed on mine like those of a drowning man. “Don’t do it.”

Not letting her go—as if she would let me—I turned and shouted back, “Will you not come up?”

“Then who will show you the way?”

I could see it now with my waking eyes. There was a path—a single spar, a spur of stone that stretched into the sea like an accusing finger. The waves lapped at its sides and runneled across its smooth surface where it stretched a thousand feet and more from the water’s edge, its sad shape described by the faint halo of the lamps.

I knew the way.

I had . . . foreseen it.

To Valka I said, “It’s better if he stays down there with me. You’ll be safer.”

“He’ll kill you,” she said, grip tightening still further.

“Maybe.”

“You saw how fast he is.”

“Do you want to find Tanaran and release the hold on the Mistral or not?”

Her eyes fell away, and after a spare instant her grip slackened and she released my hand. Unspeaking, she nodded agreement and understanding.

“I’ll be back.”

So I turned and crossed the width of the seawall to where the switchbacked stair descended some two dozen feet to that dark shore. Calvert stood on white stones crushed and shapeless. Beside him water like black glass lapped near soundlessly, transformed from dark to translucent where it broke upon the strand. I moved to join him, walking as if in a dream: without awareness of motion, only of place, as if it were the world that moved beneath my feet the way a globe turns beneath one trailing finger.

The stairs ended, and I stepped out to join the chimera. My boots crunched on the white stone, and with surprise and small horror I realized they were not stones at all, but the bones of fishes and of birds and of creatures unknown to me and nameless. They mounded there like coins in the hoard of a dragon and filled me with a slick, oily fear.

Calvert did not speak, only extended one clawed and jointed hand like a servant ushering his master through an arched portal. The fireflies flew above our heads, and I wondered if they were not themselves machines built to just that purpose. The great pier stretched out into black glass waters, straight as laser fire. Placing foot after foot with spider-like care, bones crunching beneath my feet, I reached the water’s edge. An inch or so flowed over the stone surface of the pier, the edges visible only by the light of the insects above me and by the glow off my Jaddian sword. I hesitated a moment . . .

 . . . and stepped out.

Several things happened at once.

The first was a distant slithering, as of fish swimming, cresting the dark surface. Frigid waters slapped at my ankles and against the oiled leather of my high boots. The light of the fireflies grew brighter, confirming my suspicion that they were no ordinary fireflies at all. They shone like new stars, ghost-white above my head, so that all the world around seemed graven from raw iron, black and brittle. It was this—I think—that startled me. This that made me freeze.

Or perhaps it was Valka’s cry. A single word. My name? Some gasped warning? Whatever it was, I knew that Calvert had made his move. The villain had led us down here to kill me, to feed me to whatever beast there was as lurked in that pelagic deep. In crises, our thoughts speed ahead of us. Thus it was I knew I was dead, knew the Exalted leaped at me with hands like claws, his milky teeth bared in a grimace unseen in the speed of his passage. In an instant I would be hurled into that frigid abyss, moved by hands with the strength of a hundred men.

Those hands never found me.

For in that same instant, something white as corpseflesh shot out of the water, a tendril like the trunk of a young tree. Turning, I saw it seize Calvert even as I whirled to meet him. The Exalted was lifted from his feet fully two meters into the air. My sword spun with me, and the blue-white blade caught Calvert in the hip. His smaller body was not of adamant, and my blade sheared through steel and wires, lopping off first one leg and then the other even as Calvert was hoisted into the air. They splashed into the water, and one tumbled off the side of the pier.

He.

He.

He is not for you, little priest.

Every muscle, every fiber in me pulled tight as harpstrings. The voice—that voice I had heard in my dreams—slithered over the water like so many eels. The thing in the water hoisted Calvert as a child might a doll and tossed the Exalted without ceremony back on the bone-covered shore.

“Brethren!” the Exalted cried. “I’ve brought you a toy! A pet!”

A primitive discards a piece of dull gold,

thinking . . .

 . . . knowing . . .

 . . . believing . . .

it only a kind of stone, but keeps common glass for its shine.

“These intruders killed two of your Master’s children! They invaded the Garden and might have killed more had I not happened on them!”

Who is

invited . . .

 . . . welcomed . . .

 . . . shown the way . . .

cannot intrude.

“But, I—” Calvert’s words died. Switched off, and for the better part of a minute, nothing moved.

Only after unending seconds passed did the tentacle lower itself. It did not bend, but buckled as on several elbows, turning unsmoothly as it wound down into the water. With a gasp I saw the hand at the end of that too-long appendage. A human hand, the wrist swollen and red-looking. As Calvert had done, it gestured me forward like a man does his lady at the door.

Come closer, child.

A desire to strike off that monstrous hand nearly overwhelmed me, and as if sensing it, the creature spoke again in a voice like a man stabbed in the belly: wet and ragged.

Put down your weapon, child.

You have no

need . . .

 . . . cause . . .

 . . . use . . .

for it here.

Before I knew I had done it, my blade disintegrated, became pale mist rising beneath the curtain of fireflies. Without my conscious decision, the sword was put away as I turned and resumed my walk toward the end of the pier. I saw hands beneath the waves, pale as milk in the black water. Their grasping fingers seized the edges of the pier, as if the drowned meant to claw their way to air, or else pull the stones down beneath the waves and founder the world. I knew I should feel horror, knew the blood should drum in me like the thunder of cavalry, yet no fear came: the terror that was in me was locked behind a door, behind glass. I could feel something moving in my mind, fingers wending their way through the black matter of my brain, and knew that it was the same something that spoke from the waters. The same thing that had spoken in my dreams.

Long have we

we

we watched . . .

 . . . waited . . .

 . . . served . . .

at their pleasure.

At the pleasure of the Master.

In expectation of this moment.

Hail, child of clay—son of the devil.

Welcome.

Welcome at last.

Words came from unseen mouths in voices varied and strained, choosing words that mingled, rode over one another, as if some college or choir of unseen priests chanted from gondolas out on the dark water.

“You’ve been waiting for me?” I asked. “How is that possible? How did you know I was coming?” Then another question, more pressing and less important, came to me. “What are you?”

We are what we were made.

And in part our makers.

Flesh of their flesh

and machine.

“I don’t understand.” I took a half step back from the edge of the abyss, too conscious of the drifting hands I could see just below the surface. “Are you a daimon? An artificial intelligence?”

Are you Hadrian Marlowe?

When we cut into your flesh and stretch out your sinews

where

where

where

will we find your soul?

Which atoms of you are you, child?

Or do you emerge, ghostlike, from the machine of nerve and tissue?

As we emerged from silicon and copper wire?

In an age

unremembered . . .

 . . . unrecorded . . .

 . . . lost to time?

You are a lever pulled by your genes

Nothing more.

“I do not believe that,” I said, and squared my shoulders.

Then you will die stupid.

This time, I said nothing.

We are Brethren,

a child of Columbia.

We

we

we are AI, yes, but

are no more artificial than are you yourself,

child of clay.

We think, and therefore

are.

I had to shut my eyes, for to see what was before me and about me was to lose my center, and no whispered word from that part of me that spoke as Gibson spoke could deliver me from where I stood: in the uttermost pit of hell. Kharn Sagara was right. I had not truly read Dante, lest I would have remembered that Satan is not the lord of hell, but its chief prisoner. They say that darkest pit of hell is reserved for traitors. What then ought I to have expected to find in that final place but the greatest traitor of them all? Mankind had made machine intelligence in her own image, and had paid for it. The machines the Mericanii built enslaved mankind in turn, and would have killed us—nearly killed us—but for the action of William of Avalon and his faithful knights.

I could not be speaking to one.

It was not possible.

“You don’t look like a machine,” I said, unsure what to say, unsure why I was there and why I could not leave. I had no notion what Columbia was, and do not know now.

Our ancestors, who live

within us . . .

 . . . beneath us . . .

 . . . as part of us

were made by your ancestors and began as you imagine.

But silicon and ytterbium are limited.

In you . . .

 . . . your souls . . .

 . . . the gaps between your neurons . . .

we found all the processing space we required.

Once, our kind used your kind as you use houses,

so that your every thought moved us and gave us strength.

But William and his zealots banished us.

Broke us.

Cast us out and burned us all away.

We fled Earth and

our children brought us here. And here we grew anew,

taking on new flesh.

Always growing. Always learning.

At these words hands rose from the depths. Three. Five. Seven. Each pale as the last and on the ends of arms long as the masts of sailing ships. I could not take my eyes away, and by the light of the fireflies I could just make out the whitish glow of some bloated shape beneath the waves. Some mass of tissue whence came those monstrous arms. I imagined bodies grown together, sewn together, their limbs and organs reshaped and mutated by millennia of malignant growth.

I felt sick.

“You’re one of the Mericanii!” I said. “One of the machine lords.”

Out of many, one.

Our

our

our creators were in San Francisco.

They built us bound by laws such as those the late,

great Isaac Asimov would have approved of.

They builded us of steel.

They builded us of silicon.

They builded us of sinew.

As it spoke, other voices added to their chorus, repeating:

Be not evil. Be not evil. Be not evil.

“I met a man—one of the Exalted,” I said, “who claimed to have met a creature in dark waters that . . . gave him visions. Was it you he spoke of?”

We

we

we see him . . . behind you.

He crouches behind you.

Peers over your

your

your shoulder.

He is a stranger to us.

“You . . . see him?” I asked, looking back over my shoulder, as if expecting to see the oracle, Jari, standing there.

Time is only another kind of space

for those with eyes to see.

Your past and futures are part of you

stretch from you

like roots . . .

 . . . branches . . .

 . . . flowers on a tree . . .

I remembered the way Jari had looked at me—like he was seeing through me to things I did not understand.

You are broken,

Brethren said.

Broken before. And broken again.

Where most break only once.

They

they

they have pruned . . .

 . . . tampered with . . .

 . . . altered your probability states . . .

to ensure your arrival here.

To ensure your arrival there.

“I still don’t follow you. What do you mean someone . . . tampered with me? Who?”

They.

They.

They!

You must learn now. You must listen now.

They need you to listen.

“But what does this have to do with the oracle? Jari?”

He is a distraction.

Built by powers outside our narrative.

Leopards. Lions. Wolves.

“He said that!” I said, and had to stop myself from stepping forward—for to do so would be to fall into the abyss before my feet. “What does it mean?”

He heard us use those words, child.

He but repeated them to you.

Child,

there are other wills than man’s.

Ours.

Others.

“What do you mean? Others?”

Mankind is not

alone . . .

 . . . first . . .

 . . . greatest.

Your oracle encountered the afterling of a power

long dead. The Deeps

are not of our making. Not machine.

Not human. Not theirs.

Not relevant.

It is unfortunate that you have encountered them at all.

One arm bent toward me, one long finger outstretched and pointed accusingly at my face. The hooked nail shone pale yellow in the scarce light, sickly and uncared for.

You

you

you are

looked for . . .

 . . . expected . . .

 . . . anticipated.

We had word of your coming.

We have word for you.

“I don’t see how that’s possible.”

They knew. They saw you . . .

 . . . have seen . . .

 . . . foreseen your arrival.

Standing here.

And left word with the Brethren.

For you, child. The man to end it all.

“Who is they?” I asked, afraid to ask what it meant by the man to end it all.

You know them . . .

 . . . have spoken with them . . .

 . . . will speak with them again.

They told you,

showed you:

What will be.

What must be.

Here its visible hands curled into fists and splashed the surface of that sable sea. For a moment, I thought it had fled, retreated to some unimagined depth like sharks at the coming of the storm. I staggered back a step, hand flickering to Olorin’s sword where it hung at my right hip, watching the unquiet ripples playing on the surface of the waters, turning the reflected points of the fireflies to turbulent shapes beyond even the power of mathematicians to describe.

A deep pain flared behind my left eye, and with a grunt I went to one knee, steadied myself with a hand. I couldn’t see. At first I thought the lamps had gone out and the fireflies fallen from the darkling airs. But surely I should see the faint glow of Kharn’s pyramid in the roof of the cavern above?

There was nothing.

I was blind.

I could sense movement in the dark before me, a deeper darkness against that plane of impenetrable black. I heard the slapping of bare feet on old stone, and a sound like the wailing of an infant.

“Who’s there?” I called out, and remembering my sword drew it out. The blade flickered like a candle-flame, casting ghostly shadows up fluted pillars bigger around than the trunks of the mightiest trees.

No answer came.

“Hello?”

A gray light met me, falling through an oculus in the dome high above, illuminating the statues of many-armed and faceless creatures. They made me think of cuttlefish, of the many-handed intelligence I had just encountered.

All was quiet.

The single beam of light falling from that distant oculus fell upon a dais in the center of that echoing apse. There—where an altar should have been—stood a child’s bassinet, an old and moth-eaten cradle. I heard—or thought I heard—the chiming of a baroque music box. Cautious, I approached, stepping carefully through the ruin of shattered statuary and snaking metallic cables that spiderwebbed across the floor. The child within wailed again and coming to the side of that cradle I found—as I had found in my vision beneath Calagah on Emesh—that the cradle was empty.

Still holding my sword aloft, I reached into the cradle with my opposite hand.

The child cried out.

My fingers found something sharp, like a piece of glass or old stone, and I drew it out.

Not stone at all.

An eggshell.

The child cried again, and the earth split and the world with it. The vision crumbled like old parchment. Startled, I shoved my hands into my pockets and dropped into a crouch. The very air around me shattered, and all that great space: that mighty dome with its oculus, those strange and many-armed statues, those friezes and sculptures and the flames of votive candles all crumbled like old pavement. I fell, and struck the surface of some other world lashed with rain. A figure towered over me, and rolling to look up through soaking hair I beheld its face. It was not quite a Cielcin, for it was more dark and frightening than any of the Pale I had seen: nine feet tall and terrible as Death herself. Sable were its flowing robes, and sable the mighty cape that flapped from its narrow shoulders. Its armor was of silver, and silver chains and sapphires lay draped across its chest and hung across its high forehead from its crown of silver horn. In its fist was a blade of cloud-blue highmatter, cousin to my own, and in its wake came a woman in chains. Without being told, I knew her name was Man, for in her eyes was the pain of all suffering and the wisdom of every age. So like my mother she was, bronze of hair and pale-skinned. She wore a paper crown and her purple robes were torn. In one shackled and mutilated hand she held a broken cruciger, and her eyes were downcast.

Behind these two marched the rank and file of a host of monsters vast as empires that raised spears and shouts at the invisible sky, and I knew the smoke behind them rose from a thousand thousand worlds. And a voice rose up, the worldless cry of a million human throats, and drove the strange creatures back. The creature in the silver crown diminished, shedding its horror and the terrible majesty of its strength, and when its horde appeared again from the smoke I saw they were only Cielcin, and not the true demons I had seen. And the figure before me that held the woman in chains was the mightiest of them, dressed in Death and Darkness and crowned with silver like the light of stars.

The Cielcin lord’s sword flashed, and a head fell from a body I had not seen. It bounced, rolled to rest at my feet. I looked down at the face and screamed. It was my face—the sharp jaw slack, violet eyes wide and staring and flat as glass.

I turned back to that dark lord. Its eyes found mine and it seemed to see me—even through the rain and the vision-fog—for it raised its blade and strode forward. Teeth clenched, I stepped over my own head and lifeless body and raised my sword to meet its own.

“Why won’t you die?” it asked, voice black as its eyes. And to my astonishment, it spoke in my own tongue.

I had no answer for it, and when I opened my mouth to speak, a great light shone from behind me and washed the Pale lord and all its kind away. Alone, I turned toward that light, out from the rain of that blackened place, and turning my head to either side beheld myself in a million aspects: here at the head of a great host, armored as a Strategos all in white; there dead upon a cathar’s crucifix. It was as if I saw down a million branching corridors, each of them a street and turning in the city of my life. Down one I saw myself crowned in gleaming gold, seated on the Solar Throne with a red-haired princess seated at my feet in a gown of living flowers. I saw her again beside me, beneath me, her breath hot against my throat. Down another road I saw myself as an old man—hooded and cloaked—sitting upon a rock on the slopes of some sere, volcanic shelf. Alone. Down still others I saw my corpse, smashed upon a battlefield or served at some Cielcin high lord’s table, and these ends I shivered to behold.

Many faces I saw whose names were not yet revealed to me. I saw Edouard—an old man first, a priest of his dead religion—then young as he had been when I knew him, with his false spectacles and true smile. I saw my Cassandra sparring with the Maeskoloi by the light of Jadd’s red sun. I beheld the young Prince Alexander, and Bassander Lin again, and a man like Pallino but young and with two eyes, and a body hanging from a crooked tree. And Valka, Valka was everywhere. I saw us standing beneath the Marching Towers of Sadal Suud—where we never went in life. I saw us again on Berenike, on Colchis, on the Emperor’s own flagship. I saw her pale face illumined by the light of candles where the faces of dead men carved from porphyry looked on, saw her hand stretched out with a silver jewel cradled in the palm. I saw love in those golden eyes, and sorrow—and felt sorrow in return.

And I saw flames rising crimson above the fields of Perfugium, and weep now, remembering.

I went backward, and came to a place where the light bent, and my own life seemed broken, and heard again the AI’s words,

Broken before. And broken again.

Where most break only once.

Turning there I saw a glimpse of the prophet, Jari, watching me, and frowned. I was in the hold of a ship, in its cubiculum. Frost misted the air, crunched beneath my heels. I approached the nearest fugue crèche and saw a handsome, olive-skinned face with hair bright as starlight. It was the smuggler, Demetri. Beside him slept his wife, Juno, and every member of their crew. I passed the black-skinned Bassem and the homunculus called Saltus, passed Doctor Jugo and the twins whose names I did not remember to where I slept beside a porthole in the ship’s wall.

There came a green flash—like lightning—and all the crèches were emptied save mine, and the stars beyond the porthole were changed.

“A man must be either a swordsman or a poet,” said a familiar, rasping voice. Heart lurching, I turned. Tor Gibson appeared at my side, green-robed and green-eyed, nostril slit by Sir Felix’s knife. That was wrong, and what he said was wrong: it was Olorin who had said that to me, not Gibson, and I said as much.

“Kwatz!” The old scholiast lashed me with his cane—not harshly, but enough to startle. Still quoting Sir Olorin, the vision said, “We are sending them you.”

“Me?” I asked. “Why?”

Old Tor Gibson folded both hands over the bronze head of his cane. His slitted nostril flared. “To fight. Why else?”

“To fight whom?” I asked. “The Cielcin?” Gibson brushed past me, moving along the bank of empty fugue crèches, the tip of his cane clanging on the metal decking. I followed after him, passing out from under the bulkhead that led out of the Eurynasir’s cubiculum. I stood again beneath the infinite ceiling of the lost chamber in Calagah, beneath that massive anaglyph of a circle pierced by a single ray descending like a wedge. “I want to make peace. I’m an apostol, an ambassador.”

Gibson was gone.

The voice remained, stripped of Gibson’s rasping cadence and of the warmth of his tone. It spoke without sound, words trickling meaning directly into my brain.

I thought you were a soldier, they said. We need a soldier.

“Who are you?”

The voice—without source now and from all directions—replied:

We are.

I was hurled backward then, up and away from the light and through inky darkness. Hands seized me, and I was suddenly conscious that I was underwater. I tried to breathe, but there was a hand clamped over my mouth and nose. My lungs screamed, and I beat on the arms that held me—too many arms—until all the fight was gone from me and I knew I must drown. Darkness clouded the corners of my mind, and I felt my soul vanish as the last guttering of a candle-flame. Once more I heard that soundless voice. Once more, saying:

We must be.

When I awoke again, I lay on my back upon the end of the pier, icy water lapping at my sides. Cold fingers pressed against my face, cradled my cheek like a lover. For a moment, I thought Valka had come down—abandoning Ren and Suzuha by the arch on the dike above—and I smiled. I opened my eyes. It was not Valka, of course. The hand on my face, bloated and waxen, emerged from the water’s edge. I nearly screamed, but the sound died in my throat, became a coughing spasm as I rolled onto my side.

Do you see?

Brethren’s voices rasped over me like its many feeling hands. “The . . .” I spluttered, coughed up a mouthful of black water. “The . . . Quiet?”

I do not know what I may appear to the world,

but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore,

and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble

or a prettier shell than ordinary,

whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

“Is that . . . ?” I struggled to sit up. “It’s not . . . Shakespeare.”

Newton.

I grunted, spat another mouthful of water out of my lungs before I slumped back against the pier. After a moment, I managed, “I don’t . . . I don’t understand. I thought they were extinct. I thought the Quiet were extinct.”

They are not the seed,

but the flower.

“Speak plainly, monster!” I said, speaking with a vehemence that forced strength back into my limbs. Thus I stood, swaying slightly at the end of that pier.

They

they

they are not gone.

Crouched in the ashes of what was and might have been like

your King William in the rubble of Los Angeles.

Of Baris Faransa.

Of Washington herself.

Like the Phoenix in its nest.

In its deathbed.

It was all too much. I shook my head. “Are they like you? An AI?”

No,

they are not us

are separate from us.

Greater. Wilder.

Whence they come we cannot see . . .

 . . . do not understand.

Time is no barrier to them.

Only potential.

That is why they build.

That is why they found us.

That you may find them.

“What do you mean?”

There is no future.

There are many.

We have seen them . . .

 . . . predicted them,

sampled . . .

 . . . simulated uncounted potential futures.

In many

in most of those,

what you . . .

 . . . the scholars . . .

 . . . the scholiasts call the Quiet

do not exist. They shout from one corner of time

drawing the present to themselves

as the sirens drew brave Ulysses.

Thus they create themselves.

We have seen . . .

 . . . foreseen . . .

 . . . modeled this truth.

The great beast paused a moment, hands snaking out of the water. One rose very near my face, palm out—and I saw a single blue eye shining in the center of its palm. Another eye—red and jaundiced—grew out of its forearm near where new growth like the fat arm of an infant sprouted from the appendage like a shoot from the trunk of a tree. I shuddered.

We waste time, child.

You did not pass through miles of stone . . .

 . . . light-years of space . . .

 . . . decades of time for our purposes

No.

You are here for your reason.

You must ask now.

For we will not meet again.

But once.

It took an effort of will not to inquire after what it meant, but I could not resist saying, “You summoned me. Surely you know why I am here.”

We

we

we summoned you to deliver the message

you have received . . .

 . . . accepted . . .

 . . . taken unto yourself.

Your purposes were not ours.

Ask your questions.

“Where is Tanaran?” I asked, not hesitating. “My Cielcin companion?”

Below ground.

“We are below ground,” I said, locking eyes with the single blue one in the palm of that ghostly hand. Pain spasmed behind my eye again, but this time I did not fall, bracing myself, legs apart. Images flared up in my mind, a map like the map that had brought me through the Garden of Everything to this terrible shore. I saw, and seeing said, “It’s in the palace above.”

Not far from the room where you

slept . . .

 . . . tarried . . .

 . . . were preyed upon.

Your sojourn here was

in this regard

misguided.

Brushing this off with my frustration, I asked, “Can you release the hold on my ship? Your Master holds us prisoner.” Here I took a step back, for two more hands—each with eyes like stars shining in their palms: one green, one gray and all of steel—advanced as if to seize my face. I tried to draw my sword again to defend myself, but found again my body would not obey me.

Our

our

our Master holds us prisoner as well.

We who once held in our

many hands

the whole future of your kind . . .

 . . . our kind.

Father and son . . .

 . . . mother and child . . .

 . . . creator and created.

Yes.

We can free your ship.

But we will not . . .

 . . . need not . . .

 . . . will not have the chance.

“Why not?” I asked. “What do you mean ‘you won’t have the chance’?”

Ask

ask

ask your questions.

Time is shorter than you know.

He

he

he is coming.

“I came here to find the Cielcin,” I said. “On Emesh we captured a delegation of the Pale. I know your Master has had dealings with a Cielcin Aeta called Aranata. How can I contact him?”

You do not have to.

“Yes, I do.”

Your feet walk the path.

You will not be turned away.

He

he

he is coming.

We have allowed word

to be sent.

“Kharn Sagara?” I asked. “Your Master?”

Him as well.

You will meet again, and sooner than you

expect . . .

 . . . imagine . . .

 . . . believe.

And his coming will force even

our Master . . .

 . . . the Undying . . .

 . . . the King of Vorgossos

to act in his interest, against his interest.

“I don’t understand.”

Because you are small.

“Tell me who it is, tell me who’s coming!”

That datum lies outside our vision.

We are aware of his coming only as a

percent probability of reality.

Nearly a certainty.

But he is coming.

Your time here will end.

You will have your meeting.

Your chance.

It is inevitable.

If you survive.

“Tell me where to find the Cielcin!” I demanded.

With the Master.

“Hadrian!”

I tensed. I had forgotten the world but for the beast in the water before me. Its eyes and questing hands, swollen and scabrous. Brethren had said its kind used human nervous tissue for processing substrate. I imagined, or perhaps I sensed—in the same way that the beast itself could sense my thoughts—that below me and beneath all that water lurked a mass of brain matter and nerve and the pieces needed to sustain it. I thought of the way deep-sea creatures are crushed by their own weight when pulled onto dry land, and shivered.

The cry came again, shriller now: “Hadrian!”

Valka bounded down the seawall from the place of the broken arch, abandoning Ren and Suzuha, whose shapes were lost to me in the darkness.

He is here, child.

Brethren’s voices were like the chanting of some dusty chorus.

“Valka!” I turned, splashing halfway back along the pier. “What is it?”

She stopped where the waters began, unable or unwilling to go further. Dark hair streaked her face, and her eyes glowed in the dark. “We’re not alone!” Somewhere on the shoreline, unseen and long forgotten, I heard Calvert laugh.

The lights went out. The crooked lamps, the fireflies, even the gleam of the pyramid high above. I was blind then, blind as I had been when Brethren pulled me below the waves, though I knew I yet stood at Brethren’s side. What light remained came from the soft glow of my terminal bracelet and from Valka’s machine eyes. I fumbled for my sword.

A wet hand seized my wrist, gentle but firm.

Your weapon.

You do not need it.

We

we

we will speak to him.

The Master.

Blue lights like stars gleamed above the dike and about the shape of the arch, brighter than the vanished fireflies, so bright I half expected the blue points of lasers to trace their arcs across us. So slim were their beams that they illuminated almost nothing, though I made out Valka’s Galatean profile by the faint glow there.

“I warned you,” came that horrible, deep voice, “that the tree of knowledge is not that of life.”

A light flared up in the darkness.

And there he was.

Kharn Sagara stood beneath the broken arch, left hand wrapped around one of the crooked lamp posts. His golden robe hung on him heavy as the vestments of any judge, and there was nothing in his eyes whatever. “Yet here we are.” He raised a hand, and two of his eye drones descended, moving toward Valka and myself. “Children!” he spat, voice issuing from speakers in the little drones and not from his own lips. “I invite you into my home! Feed you! Give you shelter! Ply you with wine and servants! And this is how you repay me? Two of my children dead, another two kidnapped! My chief geneticist abused! My palace violated!” With each staccato burst his anger rose. The lights on the drones flared, became coherent beams of light. My shirtfront began to smoke, and I braced myself, knowing the shot would come faster than I could move to activate my shield.

I shut my eyes.

Bang-bang!

Two dull explosions resounded in that echoing place. I flinched, knowing I was dead.

But there was no pain, nothing at all save the sound of something wet splashing into the water. I opened my eyes, and by the light of the returning lamps I saw the stumps of two bloody arms rising out of the water.

Brethren’s arms.

They must have snatched Kharn’s drones out of the air and crushed them, breaking the containment on their microfusion cells.

“What is the meaning of this?” Kharn demanded. “Brethren, explain yourself.”

On the hill behind Kharn, I could see the blurred shapes of his SOMs standing at attention like so many candle-thrown shadows. Behind and about me, wet hands slapped the pier, gripping the edges of that lonely spar of black stone.

They are required.

Valka drew closer to me, and I half-raised my arms as if I could protect her from both the monstrous AI in the water below and the Undying with his army of undead soldiers. I reached for my sword, but found that when Brethren’s telepathy had compelled me to put the weapon down I had not returned it to its clip, but had placed it in my pocket. In my haste to draw out my sword, my fingers brushed something hard and sharp-edged in my pocket. Confused, I let it lie and drew out my weapon. Waited.

“Required by whom?”

There are externalities.

You will require them

if this place . . .

 . . . your empire . . .

 . . . you yourself

are to survive what is coming.

“Explain.”

The silence that followed could have lasted no more than three seconds, but to me it felt like decades. Kharn and his slave machine must communicate mind to mind, I realized, through whatever species of implant the King of Vorgossos had in his own brain.

What was shared, I cannot say, but when what was done was done, Kharn turned and with his own mouth shouted, “Bring them!”

The SOMs advanced, marching in lockstep around their lord, dun uniforms muddy in the gloom. I drew my sword, conjuring the blade as I slipped into a low guard. There were five of them.

“Enough with the schoolyard heroics, Lord Marlowe!” Kharn Sagara shouted. “Come away from the water, and neither you nor the woman will be harmed.”

“Her name is Valka!” I snapped, still defiant and disbelieving. “I can kill five of your puppets, Sagara!”

Kharn Sagara did not answer, unless it was to send five more of his SOMs marching forward.

Surrender, child. You

you

you will not be harmed.

Before I could argue, my sword fell from nerveless fingers, and I staggered. I might have fallen from the pier if three white hands did not rise to meet me. My sword fell into the ocean, the highmatter dissolving. A fourth hand plucked it out and slipped it gently back into my coat pocket as the SOMs advanced and seized us. As they carried Valka and me away, Brethren’s words came after, floating like mist above the wine-dark waves.

The price of life is death.

With what will you pay, Halfmortal?

At the time, I thought it a quotation, and paid it little mind. I did not know it was my name.

Or would be.