YOU HAVE JOURNEYED FAR with me, Reader, and so will have an inkling of what it is like for me to be struck speechless. I stood, half-turned, half-facing Kharn, half-facing Bassander, and waited for those higher parts of me—where dwells Reason in that place just behind my eyes—to catch up with the rest of me. I struggled to compose myself, to pull some witticism from the depths of my soul and cut the young officer down where he stood, to compose a line so cutting that even Bastien would sit back at his writing desk and clap himself on the back and marvel at his own cleverness.

But every quip, every curse, every stoic aphorism of Imore’s or clever jibe of Gibson’s fled me, and I conjured up the most articulate statement I could muster. “You!”

Valka, at least, was as surprised as I was, and so for once I was spared her editorial.

Bassander Lin’s spartan face permitted itself only the barest shade of humor as he said, “Yes, me.” In Lin, that ghostly smile seemed indecent mirth, and I scowled. “You look like hell, Marlowe.”

“How appropriate!” I snapped, my wit returning. “How’s your hand?” Bassander did not reply, but I saw a muscle ripple in his jaw and knew I had scored a point. Seeing my advantage, I pressed, asking: “How is this possible? This isn’t possible.” I pivoted back to the figure of Kharn Sagara seated on his life-sustaining throne. “Did you call them here?”

One of the Undying’s eyes drifted down from on high, its single, beady gaze fixed on me. I recalled the way my tunic had smoked in the ruins far below, and felt myself flinch away from the machine, afraid it might fire on me. I felt an urge to seize it, to snatch it out of the air and smash its delicate instrumentation against the Doric column to my left.

“And invite you destroyers to my hall? To my city?” Kharn Sagara’s omnipresent voice was like the crash of thunder. “I know your kind, Marlowe. You plunder, you slaughter, you steal. You call this Empire. You make a desert and call it peace!” I wondered at Valka beside me, wondered if she did not agree, even in that hellish place.

Ignoring Bassander and his honor guard, I rounded on the King with Ten Thousand Eyes. “Now it is you who forgets his sources, my lord! Tacitus was Roman himself, quoting the king of some barbarian tribe too dismissive of his civilization.”

The flock of Kharn’s eyes all descended, with one for each of us—orbiting uncomfortably close to our faces. The king’s voice rang out, “I have an Imperial interceptor in orbit above my world. Above my world. Fifteen thousand years I’ve ruled this planet and never—never—have your thugs knocked down my door.”

“An interceptor?” Valka asked, turning to Bassander. “You regrouped with the fleet at Coritani?”

Bassander’s minuscule smile might as well have been a leer. “Titus Hauptmann sends his regards, traitor.”

“And Raine Smythe?” I asked, and smiled inwardly as I asked. The tribune had expressly ordered me to seek Vorgossos, and in doing so she had taken responsibility for my actions on herself. Not that Bassander had any way of knowing that, of course.

“The Obdurate is on course to rendezvous with us here,” Bassander said.

“Along with your entire miserable fleet, I don’t doubt,” Sagara intoned.

Bassander shook his head. “No. Per our arrangement, my Lord of Vorgossos, the fleet will not come to this . . .” The precise young officer took in the artful chaos about Kharn’s throne and the heavy cables snaking across the floor.

Valka—ever the more technically inclined—strode past me, the folds of my coat drawn about her like the vestments of empire, like a royal cloak, and asked, “How did you find this place? You can’t have followed us to March Station, not and made it to Coritani and back.” She did not at all look like a woman lately imprisoned. Despite the grime on her face and in her hair, she showed no concern. I could see a hint of the starship captain she had been move in her, in the stiff lines of her posture and the crack of her voice. How had I not known them for what they were before?

A thought bubbled up without warning. Brethren again, their warning: He is coming. We have allowed word to be sent. Allowed word to be sent. Allowed. An awful thought swam on the wake of that first, and I said, “Who sent you the coordinates?”

Bassander Lin stopped merely hinting at a smile, but he advanced past me—abandoning his men between the last columns on the long approach to the dais. He approached Kharn’s throne, coming closer even than I was myself. “We have an accord?”

“You have not given me a choice.”

There was a part of me that rubbed its hands and chuckled to see the King with Ten Thousand Eyes brought so low. Long-lived as he was, Kharn had seen the crumbling of empires. If his own legend was true, he had seen the Mericanii’s afterlings destroyed. He had watched the Jaddians revolt, seen the Aurigan rebellions put down . . . he knew what it felt like to see the walls of Constantinople smashed from neutral ground.

Now he knew what it was to be the emperor.

How long would it be before our Legions descended upon this place and hollowed it out? How long before the Chantry followed and burned Kharn Sagara and his pet daimon and all his undead soldiers to dust and his unholy experiments with him?

Not long. For all I knew the fleet to which Bassander referred was just such a force. Fire and sword for this dark lord.

And yet Kharn Sagara—old Saturn himself—sat quiet and unmoved as stone. There was no fear in that ageless face. It did not trouble me at the time, though it should have done.

“What accord?” I asked, knowing Bassander was enjoying every instant of this.

The Legion captain looked back over his shoulder. “What do you think?”

My heart stopped. “The Cielcin?”

“You found them?” Valka asked.

Kharn’s voice seemed to circle round us like a starving panther. “The captain strikes a hard bargain, you see.”

I saw, and glanced at Valka. I had felt her eyes on me not a moment before, and sensed that she thought what I was thinking: that Brethren’s words had been true again. I had not had to lift a finger. The Cielcin were coming. “They’re coming here?” I asked.

“That’s enough from you,” Bassander said, and made a gesture to his men. Two legionnaires broke ranks at once and came forward, one carrying two pair of electromagnetic manacles in his hands.

Speaking from what I suspected was no more than petty revenge, Kharn Sagara said, “No. We shall take my ship and rendezvous with your Imperial flagship.” The Obdurate, I decided he meant.

“What about Otavia?” I asked—implored, really. When Bassander did not answer me, when he only stood there like a holograph recording left paused and flickering, I shouted, “What about Captain Corvo and the Mistral? Switch? Pallino?” The legionnaires seized me by the arms, and I recalled—though I thought until that moment I had forgotten it—the way Father’s men held me as I watched Gibson whipped those last days at Devil’s Rest. “Don’t ignore me, Lin. Don’t you dare ignore me!”

“Hadrian!” Valka interjected. “Calm down!”

Kharn Sagara’s laughter filled all the world, and though I strained against the legionnaires who held me, I could not break free. Valka—ever the more sensible—offered her wrists without resistance or complaint. A third legionnaire had to hurry forward to assist the two holding me, and though I broke free a moment and drove my elbow up into the softer place beneath the armored jaw of one man, I was subdued in short order. The twin bracelets of the manacles slammed together when the legionary triaster—denoted by the red paint on the left side of the blank white mask of his helm—pressed a button on his gauntlet.

The Undying spoke in his voice like the voice of God, saying, “You have your fugitives, Captain Lin. Now for the matter of payment.”

How Bassander shrugged off the preternatural strangeness of Vorgossos I cannot say. I have seen men for whom art has no virtue, men to whom the grand works of genius are little more than furniture. Such men might behold even a relic of Earth’s vaunted Renaissance and shrug, and ask why anyone would pay a steel bit for a scrap of oiled canvas. Bassander was just such a man, and perhaps it is the province and advantage of such men to be deaf to the spirits that fill just such places as that hall.

He gave the throne room a perfunctory looking-over and said, “We agreed payment was to come when you secured our introduction with the Pale, lordship.”

I could not imagine that Kharn Sagara was a man much used to being denied, and yet he sat there with his usual chthonic immobility, watching Bassander with a hundred eyes. I knew full well that Sagara might have killed Bassander Lin then and there, might have killed us all and so spared himself the difficulty, were it not for the fact of his and his world’s exposure. Bassander had him over a barrel—or so we all believed, not then knowing the Undying’s inhuman motivations.

Before Bassander could move to have Valka and myself escorted away, Kharn Sagara spoke. “A moment.”

At a hand from their captain, the triaster and the legionnaire who held me halted, turned me about. Sagara watched me with one of his inescapably long pauses, black eyes searching for something in my face. When he spoke, it was in his own voice, chest implants whining to lend breath to his words. “I do not know what my pet said to you, Lord Marlowe, but know this: they are never wrong.”

He meant it to unsettle me, believing I had received some prophecy of doom—as indeed I had—and yet I stood amidst the unfolding of a piece of that prophecy, and despite the binders at my wrists and the implacable chill emanating from our Captain Lin and his faceless entourage, I felt again that sense that I was in the proper place, on the proper path. Bassander had come, just as Brethren had said someone would, and he was bringing the Empire in his wake.

So I stood a little straighter, as if there were no manacles on my wrists at all, and said, “Good.”