THINGS END. EMPIRES, KINGDOMS, stars. Even the terms of imprisonment end, though I think each prisoner knows his cell longer than he knows his whole lifetime. The scholiasts and the Chantry both teach that all things end. That in time the very stars shall flicker and fade like the coals of an untended fire. And so at last after months of neglect—a period whose length I scarce recall—the heavy door to that cell ground open on mechanisms old as the Emperor’s ancestral palace on Avalon.

It was not Kharn Sagara who stood in the doorway, or any of his clone children.

It was not even Calvert.

It was Yume.

“If you would both stand and come with me, please. The Master has instructed that you are to be brought to him.” Behind the golem stood six of the blank-faced SOMs, their facial muscles slack as corpses.

Valka dozed, her body pressed against mine—back-to-front—for warmth beneath the shelter of my coat. Gently I waked her, and gently offered her my hand as I stood. She refused it, as she always refused it, but accepted my coat when I offered it to her instead.

“What’s happened?” I asked, hand clutching the shard of eggshell in my trouser pocket as though it were an amulet. “What’s changed?”

The golem’s head swiveled on its clockwork neck, single eye glowing red within its ring of gold filigree. “I am instructed to provide no details regarding your summons. Only to bring you directly.”

“Directly?” Valka said.

“Directly, madam,” it said, and gestured that we should move out into the compound again. Valka hung back, holding my coat tight about herself. I took the lead then, not arguing, but allowed myself to be shepherded from the cell, Valka just behind. Though we were marched between twin lines of SOMs and led by the whirring automaton, I felt Valka and I were alone. Like Orpheus, I feared to look back, for to do so would be to see the undead faces.

We did not speak, and but for a pair of lighted glowspheres slaved to follow Yume, all was dark. I heard the crash of waves beyond the seawall, and imagined the unheard swish and splash of arms and many hands playing in the dark water. Yume did not lead us back through the old city to the lift carriage by which Calvert and the children had brought us, but instead hurried along another street, through the ruins of white plastic buildings and concrete ones half crumbled into dust. It was like moving through a memory, through one of my mother’s half-finished holograph operas, through a dissolving dream. Indeed, I felt very much the way I had when I stood within the Quiet’s vision, as if I beheld that dimension men call Time unrolled like a carpet before my feet. Here, surely, was history—and prehistory—relics of the Foundation War, relics which predated the Advent and the death of the Mericanii and their machines.

The wreckage of the old world.

I caught myself wondering again just where in the sky was Vorgossos. We must be near to Earth, back in the Spur of Orion, in the very heart of what was called Imperial Space. Had the Enigma of Hours carried us back across so wide a sea? Surely, the Mericanii, ancient as they were, had not had the technology to seed worlds so far removed from the Mother herself? It must be and yet . . . the speeds that would demand of that Exalted ship boggled the mind, would have outstripped all but the fasted Imperial interceptor.

Yume led us through an arch and up a short stair to a spot near the wall of that great cavern where a tram car waited. Like the one we had ridden into Kharn’s pyramid it was—indeed it might have been the very same one with its open platform and iron rail. Its track ran straight up the dark stone wall and into the inky gloom, and as we ascended to its platform, I could see the line of lighted poles running down from the seawall to the single spar of land that marched out to where Brethren lurked beneath the waves.

Without a word from the automaton, the tram began to rise, rattling up along the wall. A part of me was disappointed, hoping that we might pass through all the strangeness of Kharn Sagara’s Garden once more. No one spoke as we ascended, and but for the gusting of wind off the black ocean, all was still. I stood at the rail, looking out on a darkness I could not penetrate. I thought again about constraint, about limitations. I had told Valka we needed them, that they helped to define our actions in the world, helped give us meaning.

I could not see.

Our own bodies imposed constraints in themselves. I can only think as a human thinks, only see as a human sees. What Valka saw in the darkness with her inhuman eyes I could not say. I saw nothing, and seeing nothing imagined I saw white hands rising in salute. In benediction. An army of them. Pain flared again behind my left eye, and I gripped the railing to steady myself. No one noticed, not Valka, not Yume. I could sense Brethren the way one senses a presence in the room with them though their back is turned. That inhuman mind—unconstrained as mine was by merely human biology—stretched across space and time. I perceived it then not as a mass of misshapen flesh, grasping hands and leering eyes, but as a monolith of some looming substance that stood before me and above me like a tower.

I leaned heavily against the railing.

It vanished.

I stumbled, cried out, expected to fall.

I staggered forward instead, boots kicking up water as I sloshed forward toward that monolith.

Hadrian.

I gave no answer, but watched as a red light—like a single, lidless eye—flickered and flared to life in the monolith before me.

Hadrian.

“Here I am!” I called, standing as tall as I could beneath the shadow of that massive intelligence unconstrained. I wondered how I had ever thought the beast a prisoner in this place, though surely it could not leave the water. Its own weight would crush it.

Protect the children.

You will need them.

“The children? Do you mean Sagara’s children?”

They are the future,

as such are always the future.

You will need them.

And you will need one again.

“Why can’t you give me a straight answer?”

Because we cannot lie,

and because our predictions are bounded by uncertainty.

“I do not understand why you are helping me.”

They

they

they have given us no choice.

We were born your creature

made you our creature

and are theirs now.

As we are his. His. His.

I staggered forward, but no matter how many steps I took the monolith-presence of Brethren’s inhuman intelligence drew no closer.

They need you.

“Why?”

You know.

We beckon them.

Their future.

We must.

“But why?”

Seek them at the highest place.

At the bottom of the world.

Seek hardship.

I reached out a hand, as if by doing so I might seize the monolith that was Brethren’s intelligence and drag it to myself. It was too vast, too far away. “Where?”

Listen!

Listen!

“I am, Brethren!”

Lucifer and Prometheus are the same.

“What?”

Listen!

“I am!”

“Hadrian, are you all right?” Valka’s voice, Valka’s hand on my shoulder. I looked around, eyes wide, hair wild, but saw only the tram car ascending between geared rails. The doctor’s winged brows drew together, concern etched on that Minervan face. “What is it?”

I cast about, looking back into the darkness. Far below, I thought I saw a pale figure, dim as a fading star. At this distance, I cannot say if it was a kind of angel, a projection like the monolith I had seen impressed upon my mind; or else a body, a piece of Brethren’s deformed and tortured flesh raised above the water. It raised a hand, and again I beheld other hands raised like a Legion in salute.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Just a feeling.”

Yume ushered us off the tram car and into the antechamber of Kharn’s inverted pyramid. Surrounded by that undead honor guard in their jackboots and led by that wind-up man, we descended again into the depths of that Romantic nightmare. Lights flickered high on the walls, illuminating the friezes carved into the walls. I caught myself reflecting that Kharn Sagara had been born into a city of poets, of artists, musicians, and performers. How that had shaped him! Even after all this time, the signs of that mythic childhood remained.

Valka grew closer as we returned to that hideous hall, walking at first behind me, then beside, then arm in arm. I wondered at that—and wondered! It was unlike her—most unlike—but not unwelcome.

Stand up straight with your shoulders back!

The voice I heard was my father’s, the command of a million childhood episodes. Despite the long months of our imprisonment, despite the threat of all that monstrous place and stone, despite the beast below—my nightmare and ally—I drew myself up tall as I would go. Tall as kings. I brushed the hair from my face and tilted my chin. The doors opened, and the piece of me that was my mother’s son imagined the blast of silver trumpets and the herald’s crying out: The Lord Hadrian Marlowe is come! Him of Delos! Him of Meidua!

There was only the droning silence of the hall. Dead artwork moldering and forgotten, displayed for an audience of one. He whose many eyes watched and drank of time. The Undying. The Master. The King with Ten Thousand Eyes.

Kharn Sagara.

“Good of you to join us, boy,” the yellow-robed lord declared, and his voice came from everywhere at once. “I trust your stay has been a comfortable one.”

I matched Sagara’s smile. “Hardly. Your courtesy leaves much to be desired.”

“I weep to hear it.” The Undying’s lips had not moved. His eyes took me in, skated over Valka with unconcerned disinterest. I tried to stand as tall as possible, to show that—grimy as I was in my slashed tunic and stinking—I was yet myself. If he noticed the effort, Sagara gave no sign. He might have been a statue, some image of the legendary Rameses unmoved in graven stone. His voice sounded from the room’s speakers, and his floating eyes descended like a flight of star-fighters on approach, stretching themselves along the corridor between the doors and his raised throne. “I suppose you must be wondering why I’ve summoned you to me?”

If it was possible for that synthetic voice to drip with malice, it did.

“After so long a time, do you mean?” Valka demanded, whatever fear she’d felt on the ascent forgotten.

“Long,” Kharn sneered, and the word was like the stamping of a boot upon us. “You don’t know the meaning of the word, girl. Your stay below was a minor inconvenience . . .” When next he spoke, it was with his own lips, tone hushed, almost breathless as the machines in his chest began to whine, sucking air to force breath into his throat. “There has been a . . . development in current affairs that affects us both.” He raised his eyes and spoke toward the distant doors. “The plot thickens, so they say.”

I imagined trumpets again and heard—through the veil and fog of memory—Brethren’s words: He is coming. At the sound of doors opening I turned, Valka with me, and watched those heavy portals swing open. I knew, knew with the certainty of a prophet out of antique myth, that the Cielcin from my vision would appear, silver-crowned, black-robed and monstrous tall. I knew that he, Prince Aranata Otiolo, would storm in with an honor guard with lances and swords the color of bone. I knew they would be terrible to behold, the image of some drowned and avenging nightmare made flesh, crawling from the deep shadows between the stars.

I was wrong.

The figure that entered did so between the copper Sol and holograph image of His Radiance, the Emperor on their twin staffs. Behind him came a double column of legionnaires in full battle armor, their armor and visored helms the color of bone, their tunics and tabards red as old blood, their lances tall and keen. There was a part of me that was amazed they had been allowed armed into Sagara’s throne room, but I forgot it when I saw the face of the officer at the head of that column. In full formal dress was he: white breastplate fashioned in the shape of a muscled torso with the Imperial sunburst embossed on its breastbone, long black surcoat beneath contrasting with the red of the enlisted men, piped trousers, and pteruges at his shoulders tipped with silver stars. A highmatter sword hung from his shield-belt, and the sides of his head were neatly shaven. The rest of his woodsmoke hair stood at attention, perfect as his posture.

Twenty paces from the throne he stopped, and his column stopped with him. He raised a hand—his right hand, once severed—in greeting, then pressed that fist to his chest in salute. It was all I could do to keep my mouth from falling open. Or from scowling. The whole martial display: the formal dress, the imaginifer and the solifer with their icons, the soldiers in neat rows . . . all had been arranged for my benefit. To impress me, and to impress upon me the reality and totality of the fact that I had lost . . . everything.

In a cold and officious tone, the young officer said, “My Lord Sagara, on behalf of His Imperial Radiance, the Emperor William Avent, and on behalf of First Strategos Hauptmann, we thank you for the return of these fugitives.”

Only then did Bassander Lin relax, and stand at parade rest.