“THAT WENT ABOUT AS well as could be hoped,” Smythe said when we returned to the Schiavona, eyes downcast.

No one answered for a moment, aware of the shapes than moved in the silence between us like wolves. We were in one of the upper halls, at a place where environment suits hung from hooks on the wall and the dorsal airlock opened in the ceiling above our heads. We’d just watched a workman clamber through it from the service umbilical that attached to a service catwalk that ran above our ship in the Demiurge’s massive hangar. Smythe had dismissed the laborer with a brusque command. We might have met in her office, only we had not made it so far before the knight-tribune turned back fuming.

She was thinking of the deal she’d made. I could see it in her eyes. Her devil’s bargain with Sagara, and the way he’d turned her gift over to the Cielcin. She was seeing the poor, tormented translator again and again in her mind—was wondering what she’d done, was wondering just what fate awaited them and the remaining fifteen thousand she’d granted the Undying Lord of Vorgossos.

“Well?” To my astonishment, it was Bassander Lin who spoke, echoing the thoughts in my own mind. “Knight-Tribune, did you—” He remembered himself at once, stood a little straighter. “Permission to speak candidly, ma’am.” This Smythe granted with a wave of her cane. Bassander Lin still looked uncomfortable, but he fixed his eyes on a point just above his commander’s head and said, “Did you see what they had done to that poor slave girl?”

Crossflane scowled. “It was difficult to overlook, captain.”

“What sort of animal could do that?”

I have since learned that among the Cielcin, it is considered a great honor to depend upon another, for to do no work among a people whose very lives depended upon the upkeep and careful maintenance of their starships was a mark of supreme opulence. More honorable still was to keep such slaves, such living ornaments, such beings without qiati, without utility. And to torment the humans so held the added relish of domination and pride, to have broken mankind—the great enemy—over the Cielcin knee. I have known men who are no different, though I did not say such a thing to Bassander.

“It was horrible,” Jinan said, almost under her breath.

“Nevertheless,” Smythe said, mustering all her soldierly pragmatism, “we have work to do.” She took a moment to gather herself, looking like a child’s figurine all folded in on itself. What must she have felt? At the time I did not—could not—consider it, such was my fury with her and my frustration. But now I think old Smythe, born a serf herself, imagined that when Sagara had demanded payment in the form of twenty thousand human souls that he intended naught but serfdom for the lot of them. Whatever she was, she was an Imperial tribune, and could not image the macabre and inhuman uses to which a demoniac like Sagara might put such poor souls.

She turned her attention to me. “I mean to make a liar of you, Lord Marlowe.”

“Ma’am?”

“You promised the Pale a tête-à-tête with our chief prisoner,” she said. “This cannot be allowed, not least of which because our Cielcin friends may have . . . opinions regarding the events at Emesh other than—shall we say—the official version.”

Jinan cleared her throat. “Forgive me, Knight-Tribune, but how do you intend to keep them from sharing those opinions once these negotiations are finished?”

Not eager to call Jinan’s attention down on me but unable to hold my tongue, I interjected, “I do have a hard time imagining the Aeta would privilege our word over Tanaran’s.” I was being simple, and as is the nature of such simplicity, I was unaware of it.

“Knight-Tribune, if I may?” said Tor Varro, stepping forward. He was dressed strangely for a scholiast. Still in verdant greens, but not in the flowing robes and togas which befitted his station or dignity, but rather in a long, slitted tunic more akin to a knight’s surcoat, this worn over a close-fitting shirt and loose trousers cinched below the knee, where they gave way to hose and the customary soft slippers. The bronze badges that signified his competency were not sewn onto a sash worn crossways like a bandoleer, but pinned to his tunic front like a soldier’s medals. He had a patrician’s bearing—though none of the scars—and the rock-steady confidence that comes from knowing many things. “When we are finished, it is hoped the personal account of our Cielcin prisoners will matter far less to the Aeta than those incentives he gains by his association with the Empire. We have every intention of this being a . . . felicitous relationship between our two peoples.”

“Felicitous . . .” Bassander repeated, unable to hide his scorn. But he held back, not saying the rest of what was on his mind.

Sensing where this might be headed, I asked, “What exactly are we planning to offer them?”

I had directed this question to Smythe, but it was the scholiast who continued at a sign from his commanding officer. “An immediate cessation of hostilities, naturally, contingent on the prospect of further dialogue. Exactly as you described at Emesh.”

“And what else?”

Varro glanced to Smythe, seeking permission. She made a gesture with the hand holding the cane and he said, “What you’d expect, introductions to the Aeta of other Cielcin clans, the opening of trade agreements . . .” As he spoke, I remembered how, long ago, I had spoken of just such things to Director Adaeze Feng and the other representatives of the Wong-Hopper Consortium, imagining a day when it was trade that defined relations between our people and the Pale, not violence. But then . . . hearing it from lips other than mine, hearing it after the sight of that mutilated girl and the visions I had seen . . . it seemed only the naive dream of a child, like morning dew banished by the first rays of the sun.

I doubted, and doubting took little note of what else was said, but nodded along with the directives and specifics of that meeting. I needed time alone, needed time to think, to put the broken pieces of my mind back together again. I needed sleep. Most of all, I needed to be away. I could feel the net—the noose—tightening around me. The Cielcin. The Empire. The Extrasolarians. Kharn Sagara. My Red Company. My duty to my friends and their faith in me. My betrayal of the Empire. My betrayal of Jinan. Switch’s betrayal of me. I had conjured enough rope to hang myself, called down enough wolves to be sure I’d never leave the woods. When I had left Vorgossos, ascended that hightower once more and regained my place on the Mistral, I had thought I’d returned to the ordinary world. But that familiar ship—those familiar faces—everything had changed.

You cannot twice step into the same river, Heraclitus once said. There is no coming home. I had not returned to the Mistral of my memory, had not gone back to my friends unchanged. There is no going back. I have seen the rivers of time, and tread their lucent waters. They flow in but one direction.

Forward.

I had changed. And they had changed. And everything had changed.

I felt . . . upside down. Disquieted. Upset by the thought of the very peace I had myself pursued so ardently. But I resolved to do what I must, and so bowed my head when at long last the knight-tribune said, “That’s enough for today, then. We’ll reconvene tomorrow at oh-seven-hundred. Dismissed.”

But as we turned to go, the scholiast Varro took me by the arm. “Lord Marlowe, a word.” It was not a question, though in any event I saw no reason to deny the man. I hung back until all the others had filtered out of the room, staring absently at the ladder leading to the service hatch in the roof above. When we were alone, Tor Varro said, “I wanted to ask you something.”

“Yes?”

“When we were speaking with the Aeta just now, there was a moment—I was trying to help that poor girl the Cielcin mutilated—when he asked what we wanted out of all this,” he said, and I felt a knife twist in my back, but kept my expression as blank and open as I could manage. “Smythe told you that we wished for the xenobites to stop preying on our colonies, but you . . . you said you wanted—what was it? ‘Oretiri vaa ti-orruu sucoriyuyaya.’”

To see with eyes unclouded.

He quoted me perfectly.

Still I said nothing.

Something flickered in the scholiast’s patrician face. Amusement? Irritation? There ought to have been nothing at all. That disturbed me as much as anything I had seen that strange day, for it impressed upon me the strangeness of my circumstances, when even the scholiasts smiled.

“I have to ask that in future you hold to the tribune’s script and obey instruction.”

“Did she ask you to have this conversation with me?” I said.

Apology. That was the name of the expression he bore. Embarrassment, even. It was subtly done, such that were I any other sort of man I might have missed it and thought Varro as expert in his mastery of emotion as any other of his order I have known. But I—who long have studied human faces and rendered them in ink and charcoal—saw the expression for what it was. “She believed you would be more amenable to one of our order. I understand that once you wished to join us.”

In a voice pressed as dried flowers and without any warmth, I replied, “That was a very long time ago.”

“Yet you are not so old, I think.”

“It’s not the years,” I answered, “it’s the light-years.” Was that a smile on the scholiast’s pointed face? “Does Smythe know?”

“That you said something you shouldn’t have? Yes. But for what it is worth I do not believe your actions endangered our mission in any way.” The scholiast crossed his arms. They were not the arms of an anemic scholar, but shaped by labors I could not guess at, and I wondered at the nature of his order. The Chalcenterites were then unknown to me, an obscure sect of the scholiast tradition, given less to navel-gazing and to the quiet study of the self and stars. Rather they embodied their labors, and moved through the world of living men. All scholiasts must work to maintain their colleges and monasteries. Being forbidden all technology more sophisticated than electric lamp, they are condemned to toil, and yet Varro seemed more akin to the gladiators I have known than to the farmers and masons of the country.

“There is something I don’t understand,” he said.

“What’s that, counselor?”

“Why are you here?” he asked, and there was no confrontation in his tone, though one might easily have heaped scorn upon such words. “You. The son of a lord. You might have had any sort of life you chose. Why this peripatetic existence?”

I was quiet a long moment, chewing the inside of my cheek. The voiceless words I had heard in my dreams sounded in my mind, backing reflected images of the horrors I had been shown.

This must be.

But when I spoke, it was not of visions. I could not have explained Brethren or Calagah to Varro if I had wanted to. And I did not want to. I wanted to tell the truth even less. The truth was only that I had wanted to leave home out of a child’s desire for adventure, because I had heard stories of Simeon the Red, of Kasia Soulier, and Arsham, Prince of Jadd. Of Kharn Sagara. How foolish he seemed—that other Hadrian—to have dreamed such dreams.

“Why are you here?” I asked instead. “You might have sought an appointment anywhere other than the Legions, but here you are.” It was a presumptuous question, but then so was Varro’s.

Varro didn’t hesitate. “I have a duty.”

“To the Empire?”

“To mankind.”

“And you think I’m any different? Why? Because I grew up in a castle. I’ll wager you did as well to judge from the look of you. I’m here because it’s the right thing to do, and because I can do something about it.”

The scholiast held his flinty eyes to mere slits, as though he sought something in me he needed a microscope to see properly. In measured tones, he said, “Smythe was right about you. You’re an idealist.”

“I wouldn’t say that.” I had heard enough. I sensed that Varro had said all that Smythe had tasked him to say, and that the rest of this was . . . what? A pleasantry? An inquiry? A warning?

“Oh?”

I’d turned to go, and so was made to turn back. “I never said I could do it. Bring peace, or . . . whatever it is we’re here to do. I can only speak the truth.”

“The truth, ah . . .” Varro shifted his posture, not quite looking at me anymore. “You need to speak our truth. Stick to the program. Or you’re no use.”

“Your truth?” I echoed, now turned fully back to face the Chalcenterite. “Forgive me, counselor, but I thought you were a scholiast. There is only one Truth.” I could hardly contain my surprise, my distaste. You may think it strange that I—who have lied a thousand thousand times—might take issue with such a perspective. But he was a scholiast. A man of learning, of science, of philosophy natural and unnatural. He should know better than to engage such sophistry.

Varro dismissed this with the wave of a hand. “These are difficult times, Lord Marlowe, and ours is a difficult task. You should understand this. I’ve been over the records from the Emesh affair. I know your regard for Truth.”

The shadow of something like my brother Crispin moved in me, and it was all I could do not to seize the scholiast by the tunic front. I backed off instead. Rage is blindness, I told myself, made to recall Imore’s aphorism by the familiar green of Varro’s clothes. I was a liar. I am a liar. I have no illusions about this. But I am a liar in the service of Truth, or so I tell myself. In service of the Good—which is the same thing. I had told my lies because they ennobled me, whereas lying in service to the Empire, to an Empire that might sell its own people to the Pale . . . such lies diminished me.

I could explain none of this to Tor Varro. At the time, I could not have explained it to myself. I knew only that my affront and instinct for rightness rebelled at his words, and I said, “I do my duty.”

“That is all we ask,” he said, but I was enough the veteran of court on Emesh and on Delos before that to hear the words inside the words spoken. We will not ask again.