HOW VAST WAS THAT terrible ship? And how many secrets did it hold?

Bassander’s escort marched me down the Schiavona’s landing ramp and into the Demiurge’s hold, a hold so massive that I think all my home at Devil’s Rest might have fit within it, save perhaps the uppermost third of the tower of the Great Keep. I half expected to see clouds pooling near the gloomy ceiling when I looked up and felt the drear wind on my face. Behind us, the Schiavona did not look so out of place in that darkened hall. A brass and black-metal arrowhead bristling with guns and sensor blisters. Craning my neck, I could make out the shapes of men and women moving in the bridge-castle that rose from the back of the vessel. All told, she looked like a thinner, meaner Balmung, and should she not? The interceptor had made good time getting to Vorgossos. I tried not to think of the monstrous cost—in antimatter and in Imperial marks—entailed in the operation of so speedy a vessel. There was a reason such interceptors were few and far between.

Gold metal gleamed in the lights from high above, and I confess I lingered, awestruck. Terrible faces looked down on us from the inner wall of the hangar, and the black forms of men and monsters battled in a Gothic frieze like those on the heavy doors in Kharn’s palace had done. But the legionnaires—less impressed than I was, or perhaps it was only that they had not shared in my strange visions—chivied me along with rough hands. It was toward one of these faces we moved, following a ghostly holograph line spun like a string of spider’s silk through the air. As we approached, I saw its mouth was open, forming an obscene O through which we passed, swallowed by Kharn’s monstrous vessel. The holograph line pulsed, leading us through corridor after black corridor, beneath ribbed supports where strange winds blew like ragged breaths, some hot as breathing, yes, and others cold as the night winds which howled through the merlons of the walls of my home.

I felt the oppressive weight of ten thousand eyes upon me, and knew that Kharn Sagara was not far away. My guards felt it, too, for I heard the muffled sound of their voices through their full masks and knew they communicated one to the others. One of the red-faced triasters made a warding gesture and signaled for quiet.

After a long while, we emerged—not into a hold like the one which held the Schiavona, but onto a glassed-in bridge, an umbilical which stretched out from the hull of Kharn’s Sojourner, the Demiurge, toward where the Mistral stood at port. Knowing my escort would not approve if I tarried, I tried my best to crane my neck to see.

Behind us, the ship bristled with uncounted black spires, towers and turrets and buttressed halls rising behind the rank and file of grim statuary. Black hands stretched from the hull behind us, and stood watch above the great boom arm that held our ship in place. The unseeing eyes pressing down with such gravity I thought they must have masked suppression field generators behind those sightless lenses, such a force was in the terror of their gaze. Behind all that black metal and stone, the unfixed stars stretched, each one transmuted to a whorl of light and colored more blue than anything I had seen. To violet.

But the doors at the end were only of common substance, and the light behind them when they opened was warm. I was thrust inside without ceremony, without salute, and I stumbled against the inner door. The airlock cycled, turning from warning red to serene blue, then opened on a familiar hall: round and white-padded.

“There you are!”

Familiar faces, too.

Pallino hurried forward, Crim and Ilex following in his wake. The old soldier embraced me without preamble. “The doctor told us what happened down there,” he said, and drew away, studying me with that single, piercing eye. “What the hell happened to you? Was it Lin?”

“Jinan,” I said, and shook my head.

Crim hissed, “That jitatin bruhir! She beat you?”

“No more than I deserved,” I said darkly, not sure if I really meant it. “Valka made it back to the ship, then?”

Ilex stepped forward, touched my shoulder. “About half an hour ago. She’s resting.” With Pallino stepped aside, the homunculus embraced me. “We were worried about you.”

I held her at arm’s length a moment, clapped her on the shoulder before speaking to all three. “And I about you all. We weren’t sure if you were still up there.”

“Are you kidding?” Pallino asked, brows arching. “Corvo wasn’t going anywhere.”

“It’s not Corvo I was worried about,” I said. “It’s Kharn.”

That quieted the conversation long enough for me to get my bearings. I’d entered by the port airlock, the same airlock the Exalted Nazzareno had used when it came to pilot us into the Enigma of Hours. I felt suddenly very tired, and swayed a little where I stood. Switch was not there, nor Siran, nor Captain Corvo and the others. I wondered if it was ship’s night, or if perhaps the others had some more pressing concern.

“What happens now?” Crim asked, brushing back his hair.

“Are we still to rendezvous with the Pale?” Pallino asked.

And Ilex wondered, “Is it true this Sagara keeps a Mericanii daimon?”

More questions piled on, words stacking one atop the next like water, like sand poured on a prisoner in an oubliette until I thought I might drown in them. Their voices overlapped, stacked atop those inward questions that had haunted me since I’d wakened Tanaran from fugue. I raised a hand for silence, and to my astonishment, silence fell. Doubts rushed into that quiet like water into a breach: about myself, about my situation, about Raine Smythe and Titus Hauptmann, about Switch and Brethren, Kharn and Jinan.

It was all too much.

“I just need rest,” I said. “Our problems will still be here in a few hours.”

My room in the Mistral hardly felt like my room at all. I’d never stayed long on the ship until we’d escaped with Tanaran. Still, Switch had managed—with help from his erstwhile lover—to wrangle together a portion of my possessions, most of which still occupied the three footlockers that lined one wall of the small chamber. Clothing mostly, and a few old books. Despite the fact that I had spent so much time alone in my cell aboard the Schiavona, and so much time before that with Valka in our frigid cell beneath Kharn’s palace, it was good to be alone again.

To be alone on my own terms again was a blessing.

Had I been trained in the scholiasts’ art, I might have seized that time to unpack my emotions, then to pack them each away behind doors of clear glass, to understand but to be safe from the corrosive power of them.

I couldn’t do it.

There were holographs buried in my laundry, little wall-mount sconces meant to cycle old images one to the next in endless procession. I knew what they would show. Images of Jinan and me from happier times, times stolen between periods of conflict and pain. Between Pharos and Vorgossos. I knew I could not bear to see them. Still, I plucked one of the projectors from its box. It was a small thing, if weighty. A silver-metallic button perhaps an inch and a half across—you know the type—magnetized so as to clamp itself to the walls of my cabin. I felt an impulse to hurl it across the room, but squeezed my hand around it instead. The beveled edges bit into my hand.

I had done the right thing.

Had I done the right thing?

I had betrayed the Empire. I had betrayed Jinan. Switch had betrayed me.

Was it worth it?

They were good men, Bassander said again, words inescapable when they came from my own head. My men. And you murdered them.

I must have tripped some switch or pressed some button, for the projector beeped, startling me. I let it fall, and it bounced and rolled across the floor, coming to rest near the sealed door. It loaded almost instantly, revealing an image of Jinan and myself from our brief stay on Nagramma. Mountains behind us—we had hiked from the capital up to the site of a thirteenth-millennium Cid Arthurian temple to take in the air. Jinan had taken the image, holding the terminal away from us with one hand as she pressed her lips to my cheek. I clenched my fists, determined not to cry. The image changed, showing me at a distance, wandering beneath the white-flowered champak trees beneath the mighty statue of the Arthur Buddha. How small I seemed, dwarfed as I was by that mighty carving, the bearded king sitting upon his lotus throne. Just a little mote of deepest black moving against all that white and beatific stone.

I moved, but not before the image changed, showing Jinan—just Jinan—laughing with champak blossoms in her hair, her eyes closed. I snatched a wadded tunic from the top of the nearest footlocker and cast it over the image, as if to obscure the holographs. That was easier than moving to turn off the projector. I could not bear to see one more moment of it, one more memory. I held my breath and slumped onto the end of my bed, and there—for a time—sleep destroyed me.