“WHAT ARE WE GOING to do?” asked one of the helmed and visored soldiers, as if to no one. “We can’t just sit here while they try and blow their way on board.” A murmur of voices welled up to greet this question, as if they stood behind it, sheltered by and supporting its sentiment. Bassander had not answered it, as if he meant for us to endure the siege without a response, without action.

And Bassander was gone.

A muffled shout came up through the sealed ramp, and the ship rocked again. From the remoteness of the shouting, I imagined the Cielcin standing back, all afraid to come too near the ship, for fear that we might fire upon them, perhaps, or because they thought that we—like Ulysses and his brave Achaeans—might spill forth with fire and sword.

In the uneasy, thunder-rocked calm of that moment, my eyes went to the captives. Ren and Suzuha both lay limp now, not yet escorted to the medica as Bassander had ordered. They might have been asleep, were it not for the awkward way their limbs lay tangled and their eyelids fluttered. I crouched beside Tor Varro where he knelt at their side. “Any change?”

He shook his head. “They’re both alive, but I don’t know what’s been done to them. They could be brain-dead for all I know. There’s no telling how their implants work.” Here he rolled Suzuha’s head gently to one side, revealing a cap of bright metal—roughly triangular in shape, with the corners rounded and smooth—set on the spur of bone behind her ear. A blue indicator light blinked there, flickering very fast. “Maybe whatever’s been done to them isn’t complete.”

“I wish we could have brought the golem,” I said. “It would know what to do.”

“’Twould be surprising,” Valka said, appearing at my side, “if there were anything we needed to do for them at all.” She placed a hand on my shoulder, her shadow falling across the prone forms of the children. I took her hand on reflex. Her fingers were very cold in mine. “You saw the way Sagara kept them close? Like insurance?”

The same blue light flickered behind Ren’s ear. “What’s taking so long?”

“Remote synaptic kinesis,” Valka said.

The scholiast squinted one-eyed up at her. “Nonsense.”

Valka only shrugged. “Have you a better theory, counselor?”

“Transferring the mind remotely?” He touched a hand to his mouth. “By radio? Tight beam?”

Valka extricated her hand from mine and went to one knee beside me to get a better look at the implant node behind Suzuha’s ear. “Quantum telegraph. Radio would have an effective range.”

“Why aren’t they awake?” I asked, an astonishingly illiterate question.

The doctor’s fingers traced the contours of the girl’s implants, lips parted. When she spoke, it was perfunctory, as if she’d barely heard me. “I don’t know what the architecture of these implants is like, but I’m sure the mind needs time to install itself in the new hardware. To compile. My guess? Sagara transfers his consciousness from his old body to the implants in the new, that he runs off the machine core and grows into the new brain tissue. There might even be personality differences that emerge as a consequence of the new bodies.” She bit her lip, eyes alight with an unholy delight. “Fascinating.”

“Differences?” I asked.

“Well, take this one,” she said, speaking of Suzuha as though she were a sample on a slide. “Different sex. Different hormone culture. That would change Sagara’s thinking—I bet he does this on purpose, grows different bodies, I mean. For the novelty.”

I couldn’t help but remember the flesh market on March Station, the way memories and personality were sold like cloves and onions: bodies resculpted, sex and intelligence alterable at low and competitive prices. All that freedom, all that chaos. How could anyone not but drown?

The only thing Theseus could not replace was Theseus himself.

Well, Kharn Sagara was not Theseus, and had done even that.

Whatever awoke in Ren and Suzuha would call itself Kharn Sagara, but would no more be the silent king whom Bassander had murdered than I am my children. Rather a different creature would walk away from this, bearing his name, his memories, perhaps the core and kernel of his personality, but they would grow differently, and when they in turn were old and machine-riddled, sitting on their thrones at the end of their lives . . . they would have diverged further from where they were, lost in the currents of their own bloated humanity.

Valka was still speaking. “He must have had a backup implanted somewhere in his body, a parallel transmitter mirroring his brain in real time . . . Bassander’s shot would have fried anything in his head . . .”

“But why two?” Varro asked. “Why both of them?”

“Double his chances of getting out alive?” I suggested. “Or maybe something went wrong when Bassander stunned the boy?”

The scholiast opened his mouth to reply, but at that precise moment our third prisoner began to stir, as if prompted by some unseen choregus from off-stage. “Eka . . . ?” Nobuta asked. “Eka ti-perem gi ne?”

“You’re on our ship,” I said, folding my legs under me so that I could sit properly and make myself as non-threatening as I could. Switching back to Galstani, I said to Varro, “We really ought to get these two to medica.” The scholiast agreed and began calling for a medtech.

Nobuta was trying to form words. “Aba . . . Abassa . . .”

“Rakayu abassa ba-okarin ti-saem gi,” I said, leaning in. Your father isn’t here. Or was it mother? I didn’t know anymore. Someone had bound the Cielcin child wrist and ankle. That upset me, but I understood the wisdom there. Young as it was, the Cielcin juvenile was larger than any of us. I massaged my eyes with the heel of my hand. Around us, Lieutenant Cartier and Tor Varro worked to get Ren and Suzuha carried out, and those soldiers who had not left with Bassander Lin milled about, listless, listening to the sound of thunder through the ship’s hull.

“What are you going to do with me?” Nobuta asked.

A comforting smile tried and failed to come to my face. I felt sure I looked only pained. I didn’t have an answer, only vague, half-formed ghosts. Another blast rocked the ship, and as if from a great distance I heard the lieutenant say into her terminal, “Commander, we should get the third and fourth centuries down here. I don’t like the sound of whatever it is they’re doing out there.”

When she’d finished speaking, I scrambled to my feet, leaving Valka and Nobuta on the floor, and hurried to follow her. “Lieutenant, are internal comms still working?”

“Comms are still online period, my lord. It’s only that we can’t get a signal through whatever this big ship’s made of.”

“So do we have a way to communicate with the outside?”

“Well. No.” Cartier blinked—the expression of a plebeian trying to find a politic way to tell a palatine she thought he was being stupid. “As I say, my lord, we can’t communicate with the Mistral or the fleet.”

Smiling a razor’s smile—knowing exactly the mocking thoughts running through her head—I said, “I hear you. I mean, can we communicate outside?” I made a gesture with my hands like I was holding a small box between them. “With the Pale?”

“Oh!” The lieutenant brightened. “There’s the public address system.”

The projection booth was large enough for myself, Valka, and the two legionnaires holding Nobuta between them. I remember all of it. Every detail. The round walls padded with black foam, the bright recording instruments gleaming in the ceiling, the projection equipment in the wall sketching its own image of outside in an arc before us. The way the air smelled close and much-used. The oppressive quiet. The way every made sound fell away at once, vanishing forever from the world. And the dark, the dark most of all. So dark that our Cielcin captive could stop its squinting.

So dark that when the holograph image of the outside appeared it seemed solid as any material thing, as if the hangar outside the Schiavona had been brought inside. The illusion, I remember, was almost total, so much that my mind deceived me, and brought in the heat of flames and the smell of men burning. That my mind needed no help in conjuring that smell sickens me to this day.

“Raka Aeta Aranata ti-perem gi ne?” I demanded, stepping alone into the painted circle that marked the target area for the holograph pick-up. The Cielcin all jumped, and I suppressed a thrill at their surprise, knowing I must have appeared from nowhere like a bolt of lightning, words rebounding like thunder in the echoing vastness of the hall without. Where is Prince Aranata?

The xenobites ceased their milling about and drew back far enough to have a clear image of me. Some stood with swords drawn beneath, still others fingered nahute at their belts and snarled while yet more gathered the bodies of our slain and dragged them back toward the blasted sculpture of the hangar door. I asked again, “Where is Aranata?” and was greeted by a chorus of hissing.

Snakes in the Garden, I thought, though this had only begun in the Garden—that it would end there, too, I had as yet no idea.

“Here, yukajji!” And there he was. She was. It was. Prince Aranata Otiolo emerged from the parting ranks of its soldiery. Darker. Taller. Mightier and more terrible than the rest it stood, crowned with horn and silver, and the way its men folded back and shied away was like the bending of light about the greatest stars. “Belnna uvattaya ba-kousun ti-koarin!” Give me back my child.

“Give me back our dead!” I countered.

“Abassa-do!” Nobuta cried out from behind me, words caught up by the booth’s microphones.

“Nobuta!” Aranata took a half-step forward, as if it might leap through the holograph it saw outside and save its young. I felt pity tug in me, recognizing this sign of parenthood for what it was: one of those precious few things our two species shared. Red-Handed Evolution had crafted us both to the same purpose: to survive. To be fruitful and multiply. And whatever our differences in behavior, in feeling, morality, or cause, we were the same in this, both K-selection creatures dedicated to their children. Because we must be.

“It’s unharmed,” I said. “One of our men stunned it while you were chasing us through the Demiurge, but no other damage has been done—which is more than you can say of Raine Smythe.”

Behind the figure of Aranata Otiolo, I saw the smaller form of Tanaran appear, dressed in its customary wraparound of dark green and black, almost as though it were some fiendish mockery of the scholiasts who stand at the shoulders of great lords. “Show Nobuta to me!” the Aeta demanded, claws flexing from its fingertips like so many black-enameled nails.

“In a moment,” I said, trying to hold my calm, to remind myself that the image before me was only an image, that the xenobite chieftain could not tear me limb from limb as it so clearly longed to do. “First things first: have you taken any of our people alive?” Aranata didn’t answer. If it had taken no prisoners, there would be reason to deny it, so I said, “You did. How many?”

“Sim lumare,” it said. Not many.

“More than six?” I asked. “More than twelve?” In a human being I might have hoped to catch a facial tic, some minute tremor or shiver in the eyes. Some small self-betrayal. There was nothing clear in those alien eyes, no light that men might read by. “I want them back, Aeta. I want them all back. We still have other hostages. Tanaran’s companions. If you want them and your child, you will return everyone you’ve taken and the bodies of our dead. Then you will take your screamers and go.” I pointed for emphasis, the other hand going involuntarily to my sword. My thoughts ran at once to Bassander, to Jinan, and their little band. Had they made it to the Mistral yet? Had they been found and captured?

“Show me my child!” Aranata said, not debating.

“I’ll show you yours if you show me mine,” I said.

The Aeta did not move. Neither did I, unless it was to finger the pommel of my sword at my right hip, eyes narrowed to slits. The prince was used to getting her way, used to the authority and the power of her station atop the predatory hierarchy of her kind. The Cielcin knew nothing of reciprocity, of responsibility, of competence—only of power and the dominion of force, like an idiot’s mockery or a child’s copy of man. How they had climbed their fumbling way up from the mud of their birth I cannot say. Perhaps they were right, and the Quiet aided them. Perhaps they were lucky, or perhaps it was only that instinct for subordination and obedience ran in them as strongly as the impulse to dominate. Perhaps they lacked free will, or like the pagan emperors of old believed free will the province only of those great ones—like Alexander—they named gods on Earth. Who now can say? There are so few of them left.

So few who survived me.

Many times I have wrestled with ideas I cannot understand. Each of us does, for even the brightest scholar has limits on his competency. I saw a version of that struggle playing on the Aeta’s inhuman face. It could not understand that I refused it, so used was it to command. I have seen similar struggles writ in the faces of autocrats—in a certain prince, most notably—but there always was it tempered by frustration, with annoyance that we the underlings would not know our place. Here there was only blindness and deep confusion.

But I had not stuttered, not blurred my words, and at last the Aeta blinked, nictitating membranes and lids flicking closed and open again in sequence. “Bring them here, Tanaran.”

The baetan lowered its head, hands out before it. “At once, my master.”

It was not long before it returned, leading a line of its kind and their prisoners—perhaps a dozen, perhaps so many as twenty. Their number has blurred with time, obscured by the moment that followed, for bringing up the rear, battered and bleeding from his head, was Sir William Crossflane, and there—on a bier beside him, whether dead or only unconscious I cannot say—was the charred form of Raine Smythe.

I stopped myself from crying out, fingers tightening on the hilt of my sword, as if I meant to draw it and leap forward through the holograph to save them as though I were some Maeskolos or hero of legend and not a foolish boy gone so, so far beyond his depth.

“Your masters, I believe,” Aranata said, stressing the term beletarin, masters. I wondered if it believed that I was under some compulsion cousin to that which Tanaran had felt to do whatever was necessary to return to its master. To serve them. Perhaps I should have been, or perhaps it was providence that Bassander had gone and they were left with me. “Now, show me my son.”

With a gesture to the legionnaires holding the young Cielcin, they advanced, holding Nobuta between them by its bound wrists. One—more vindictive than the other or perhaps driven by the sight of his captured tribune and her first officer—shoved Nobuta to the ground at my feet. I heard an angry rush of air escape the Aeta, saw Tanaran take a half-step as if to help its young lord back to its feet. I knelt instead, and speaking in my softest tones said, “On your feet, Nobuta, there’s a good lad. Your abassa is watching. Be brave.” It didn’t respond, and I looked up—not at the holograph of the Aeta and its people standing above our kneeling prisoners, but at Valka. I’d felt the press of her eyes on me, different than the press of any other eyes: the cold concern, the discomfort, the disgust for the situation moved so very close to fear. For me? For all of us? Or because of something she feared I might do?

I wonder now if Valka were not touched by some form of prescience—a witch in truth as well as accusation—for the fear I saw in those eyes and remember there seem in memory more appropriate a response to what came after than had happened before. But I smiled at her, not knowing my own future and so unafraid, and helped Nobuta regain its feet.

“Raka ti-saem gi!” I said. Here it is.

“Nobuta!” Aranata advanced, looking for all the world as if it might leap out of the projection into the suite in front of us, hands outstretched. “Are you all right? Have they hurt you?”

The younger Cielcin did not move, only hunched its shoulders. “Veih,” it said. No.

Prince Aranata’s black eyes narrowed. “Marlowe, if you’ve hurt my child, I swear by all my ancestors I will use you as a replacement for that slave you cost me.”

I fancied I could hear the slow crunch of ice in my veins, as though boots trod the surface of some frozen lake within me. Another voice was lifted up, rougher and more strained. “Marlowe?” She had only caught the first word of what Aranata had said. “Marlowe, is that you?”

It was Smythe. I could see her lift her burned face from the bier. Sir William turned, shuffling on his knees to her side. His Cielcin guards made to stop him, but Tanaran permitted it with a gesture.

“Yes!” I said, voice breaking. “It’s a relief to hear your voice, ma’am.” My own voice choked, strangled by shame. I had not gone to check on her after the blast. I could have saved her. I could have brought her back with me. She was alive, by Earth! And I had abandoned her.

Nobuta yelped as my fingernails bit into its arm, and Aranata hissed. “What are you doing?”

I released the Cielcin, and it shied away from me, shrinking down so that almost I was taller than it was. “Marlowe, if that’s you,” Smythe said, and I felt sure that she hadn’t properly heard me. I saw Sir William lean in to whisper something to her, and her words grew more insistent. “Marlowe! Don’t give in! Listen!” One of her guards kicked the stretcher on which she lay such that she tumbled into Sir William’s arms. The older first officer moved to restore her to her place, whispering softly.

I looked round to the others, but the soldiers’ faces were all hid by their helmet masks, and Valka only shook her head.

Eager to remind me of her presence, the Prince Aranata Otiolo raised her voice. “Return Nobuta to me and your masters will yet live!”

My eyes ran up and down the line of prisoners arrayed before me. “That’s everyone?” I asked. A mere dozen, maybe two—of the more than a hundred we had lost on the long chase from Kharn’s Garden to the Schiavona. At least Bassander was not among them. I risked a glance at my terminal, knowing that of all the Cielcin perhaps only Tanaran would understand the gesture or the purpose of the device. It had been a little less than half one standard hour since Bassander and Jinan had left through the service umbilical. Surely they had made it to the Mistral by now, surely Captain Corvo was mustering her troops and preparing to return with what little of the Red Company remained.

I don’t need to negotiate, I told myself. I only need to play for time. But how much time?

“You expected more to survive us?” the prince boasted, and beat its chest. “Your kind build cleverly, yukajji-do, but you are small and break easily.”

I pushed this jibe aside, recalling the ease with which I’d killed Oalicomn. “If you want your child, you will withdraw your men to your ship and leave only enough to guard your prisoners. I can come down and meet you.”

“And leave me defenseless with your army near at hand? Never!” the prince barked.

“We must have assurances that the violence is at an end,” I said. “If I returned to the Garden, what promise could you give to me and my people of safe conduct?”

The Prince of the Itani Otiolo bared its fangs like shards of ice. “It is not my people who broke their word, Lord Marlowe. It is you, your kind, you who are faithless.”

Damn Bassander to the Outer Dark, I thought, looking round. He had taken any hope of the moral high ground from me with his little act of martial piety. But of course he was only acting on Hauptmann’s orders. On Hauptmann’s orders? How many commanders in how many ages had claimed just such an excuse? How many criminal actions and actions of criminal stupidity had been glossed over by that sheen of mere and muscle-minded obedience? Sir Olorin’s words came back to me out of the remotest past: In Jadd we say a man must be either a swordsman or a poet. I looked round at the soldiers, thought of Bassander, of Jinan, of Corvo and my friends: Pallino, Siran, Elara. Of Ghen, who was dead—and Switch, whom I could not forgive. My companions.

Swordsmen all.

How many of these others would have done precisely as Bassander had when ordered to do it? How many would have killed Kharn Sagara and crippled the Demiurge just as the strategos emerged from warp and set fire to the Cielcin fleet? Even Valka, who had become a sort of poet in this second life of hers . . . even she had fired upon the Prachar terrorists when she had been a ship’s captain defending her native Edda. A swordsman herself, for all her bluster. They had ordered and she had obeyed.

“I am not Bassander Lin,” I said, as much to myself as to the Aeta, for all the good it did. “But I will not open my ship or my people to attack for the sake of a few prisoners.”

The Aeta snarled. “Not even your masters?”

Rather than argue and say that Smythe was not my master, I only shrugged. “Mnado ni ti-tajarin’ta wo!” Not even for them.

The prince snarled at me through the holograph, snatched something from its belt. Highmatter blue as starlight flared there, rippling in the beast’s alien fist. A sword. Smythe’s sword, I realized, recognizing the brass pommel—so like the head of her cane. The blade looked almost comical in the Cielcin’s hand. By proportion too short to be a true sword and too narrow.

It didn’t matter.

Prince Aranata turned and brought the sword down hard—harder than it needed—onto the shoulder of the nearest of our legionnaires. The man didn’t even have time to cry out. Exotic matter cleaved through the segmented plate at his shoulder, through his shoulder, his sternum—came out the other side. His torso fell sideways, tumbling in two pieces to the deck at Aranata’s feet.

Blood everywhere, the red of it so much worse than the black of the Cielcin. I could almost smell it, even through the holography booth. Behind me, Valka swore and Nobuta shivered where I held it close. Fangs glittering, Aranata Otiolo rounded on me, eyes narrowed to crescents. “Yukajji! Belnna uvattaya ba-kousun ti-koarin!” Give me back my child.

I shut my eyes for the space of a heartbeat. Two. Enough to marshal myself, my resolve. Fear is death to reason, I told myself, words tinged with Gibson’s leathery timbre. Rage is blindness. In the space of my silence, Aranata had seized another soldier, a triaster, still helmeted and in full kit, held him by the crest of his helm as though it were a handlebar. The man strained, but for all his galvanically boosted muscles could not pry free the xenobite’s hand.

“Give me back my child,” Aranata repeated, and lifted the soldier bodily from the ground by his helmet as easily as a little girl might raise her doll by the hair. “Or I will kill every one of your people left to me.”

My eyes drifted shut once more, and I felt another, colder voice speak through mine. “Do that,” it said—I said, “and you’ll find yourself with nothing to bargain with at all.” I realized then that all the soldiers behind me had gone still as stone. Even Valka seemed not to breathe. “So spare the trouble. Order your soldiers back to your ship, and we will make the exchange. Our captives for yours. But if you so much as—”

Smythe’s sword moved in a flat arc through the body of the hanging man, cutting him in half just above the waist. The prince continued to hold him for a moment, just long enough for his entrails to wetly spill from beneath his tabard and splatter with his fallen legs to the ground. I clenched my teeth, one hand squeezing Nobuta’s arm so tight the creature yelped. Aranata, fangs bared in the xenobite’s most vicious smile, tossed the torso back over his shoulder as easily as it were a cherry stone, making the other prisoners flinch and shy away. Three of its subordinates hurried forward, making as if to crouch by the dead man’s side.

“Veih!” Aranata barked, whirling toward them. “No!” It snarled, recalling some memory I had almost forgotten. What was it?

The way a starving dog growled at its pack, defending its claim to food.

I suppressed a shudder. “Stop this!” I said. “Stop this now!”

“Belnna uvattaya ba-kousun ti-koarin!” Aranata howled, repeating its refrain, and as it rounded once more to face my image projected outside the ship, I saw its jaw hinge forward, teeth angling forward, protruding past Aranata’s lips like the fangs of some terrible sea monster. In spite of myself I recoiled, taking a half-step back and dragging Nobuta with me. I hadn’t known the Cielcin could do that.

“I don’t think you understand,” I said, and once more I spoke in that cold, unfeeling voice. “You may have our soldiers, even our commander, but I have your son.” I emphasized the word uvattaya. Son. “Make your threats, Aeta. Kill. It won’t change that. I’ve given you my terms. Withdraw. Your. Men.”

The Aeta gnashed its protruding fangs and turned, hand going for another soldier.

“Stop right there!” Sir William Crossflane said, scrambling to his feet. “Stop, I say!” He waved his arms, trying to draw the Cielcin chief’s attentions to himself. He’d been slow to rise, to unfold himself from where he’d knelt by Smythe’s bier. For a moment, the knight-tribune lifted her face, and I saw the bloody burns there, the burned-off hair, and the single white and sightless eye. I shivered. But for another thirty feet or so that might have been me.

Crossflane appeared so very small before the prince, despite his nobile standing. Aranata Otiolo stood almost half again as tall as the old man, who nevertheless staggered forward, saying, “I’ll not stand by while you butcher my men in front of me.” He thumped his chest with one fist—as though he meant to start a salute. “Take me instead.”

I found my voice at once. “Sir William, I—”

Prince Aranata didn’t hesitate, didn’t pause to honor the knight’s sacrifice. Nor did she raise her—his?—sword. Instead, the Cielcin seized Sir William by the hair, yanked his head back like an assassin, like a lover in the throes of some violent romance. I cried out, took two steps forward before I remembered that it was only a holograph I saw before me.

Too late.

The Aeta fastened its massive jaws about Sir William’s throat. Like a lover, I thought again, perversely. Like a vampire. But it bit harder, and even in the hissing holograph I saw the blood well up about its fangs and the way Sir William’s eyes bulged in their sockets—the way his hands beat on Aranata’s arms and shoulders. Twitched. Went still. The prince tore its jaws away and the throat with it. The knight fell backward and—to the side, almost unseen—I saw Smythe’s hand go out from the edge of her bier, straining toward the body of the man who had served her so faithfully and for so long.

Blood ran down Aranata’s chin as the prince turned to regard me, startlingly red against that flesh like chalk, that snow-white hair. As it leered at me, the Aeta’s teeth retracted, collapsing once more into a semblance of something like a flat, human face. And then, worst of all, it swallowed. Glass teeth dyed red. Black eyes shining beneath a crown of silver horns. It made a gesture with one hand, and three of its minions advanced, half-stooped already, and dragged Sir William’s body—I tried not to think his carcass—away.

For a moment, all I saw was the thick and angry line of red smeared on the black floor.

Red and black.

My colors.

“Give me back my child, Marlowe!” Aranata said, and stood over the dying shape of Raine Smythe where she lay, nothing in those horrible dark eyes at all.

“Master!” Tanaran hurried forward, hurling itself to the ground. “Do not kill this one! The others are worthless to the yukajjimn!” It pressed its face to the tile beside the red stripe of Sir William’s blood, hands clawing toward its master’s ankles.

Aranata kicked at its servant’s hands. “Iagga, Tanaran-kih! Iagga!”

I’d had enough. The quiet piece of me—the part with that cold and unflinching voice—moved forward, kicked Nobuta in the back of the knees. The prince’s child fell, unbalanced by the way its hands were bound behind it. I caught it, steadied it by the thick braid that sprouted from the base of its skull.

“Hadrian, no!” Valka said, coming forward.

But the sword was already in my hand, its blade quiet and stowed. Still, I pressed the emitter against the xenobite child’s breastbone at the base of its neck. Angled the way a Colosso myrmidon might make the killing blow. Aimed that it might descend past bone and sinew to pierce the heart and lung. “March your men back to your ship, Aranata,” I said, abandoning title or pretense. “Now.”

The Cielcin prince bared its teeth again. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“I would dare all.”

“Marlowe wouldn’t!” Tanaran said, coming to its knees, hands pawing at its master’s robes. “He is weak, master. A coward. He would not allow the other yukajjimn to harm us on Tamnikano. He will not harm Nobuta. He does not have the spine for it.”

The word spine made me stand up the straighter, and I ground the emitter’s rain guard into Nobuta’s shoulder. The child cried out, “Abassa! Please!” I tightened my grip on its braid, mindful that Valka stood mere microns from the edge of the projector’s pickup, microns from where the Cielcin could see her.

Nobuta began to cry.

A coward, I thought, and the word echoed like a chorus in me, like Brethren’s voice.

Coward

coward

coward.

Cowards and faint-hearted runaways look for orations when the foe is near, I thought, quoting that first Marlowe, that ancient poet whose name and devil sign my ancestors had taken for their own. Cowards negotiate when the fighting is thickest. They retreat into terror and call it principle. Once, I might have done the same, and clung until the bitter end, hoping for peace. The boy I’d been in Meidua, on Delos . . . he might have tried forever. So too the young man who had charmed Cat with stories above the canals in Borosevo. He might have tried.

But Raine Smythe’s words—her last words—sounded in me again, clear as if she’d spoken in my ear. Don’t give in!

I saw Smythe’s ruined face again, lost in the clutter of the projection, her fire-blinded stare unseeing, its lens to glass. Dead then. Dead for true. I had no way to be sure, and yet knew it must be. How she’d survived the blast in the hangar to begin with I’d no idea.

She’s dead, I thought, and knew that this time it was so. Smythe’s dead.

I bared my teeth.

I made a choice.

The breath left Nobuta with a wet sound. Every muscle tensed, and blue light shone where the point of my sword sprouted from the creature’s opposite side. I deactivated the weapon an instant later, moved as much by regret as by the recognition that what was done was done—as if by stowing the sword I might undo its striking.

Aranata screamed, a deep-throated, wordless bellow I heard through the hull of the ship as much as through the holograph pit’s sound system. A cry of anguish. Of pain that could be understood by man and xenobite alike.

Pain.

The idea that pain is evil is the basis for all morality. Ours. Theirs. Everything’s.

But was I evil, then? Or had I only done evil?

No matter. I had done what needed doing. Always forward, always down, and never left nor right. I let Nobuta fall, let its face strike the floor of the holography booth. How long did I stand there, gathering the darkness of that chamber to myself like a cloak that I might cast over the body at my feet? I cannot say. I’d lost my coat in the hangar bay, lost it to the blast that killed Smythe. I had no shroud for Nobuta, nor words to say. No orations. No negotiation.

Aranata shouted something—words I cannot recall, did not understand. It pointed at the other prisoners, at Smythe’s body. The Cielcin behind tore off their own masks and fell upon the prisoner, upon Smythe on her bier. Claws out, teeth extended.

Blood. And the sounds of feasting. One of the Cielcin seized Smythe’s arm and straining tore it from its socket, raised it dripping above its head like a trophy, then pressed the morsel to its face and tore. The sound of it was a horror, and more than I could bear. Amid it all I saw Aranata turn on Tanaran, on its own kind, and cut it cleanly in two. I think I understand now: Tanaran had advised that I would not harm Nobuta. Tanaran had been wrong.

Valka swore behind me in her native tongue.

I switched the booth off, banishing Prince Aranata and its kind. And to myself—to no one—I said, “The Sword, our Orator!”

My family’s words. I remembered my family’s colors—the red blood smeared on the black floor. Later—when all was said and done—I would see it again, see the bodies of our dead and theirs mutilated all over that ship. Red and black. Black and red.

As it was for so many soldiers on so many battlefields from that black ship back to the first sunrise over Uruk at the dawn of time, as it was when Techelles spoke to Tamburlaine in that dead, first Marlowe’s words, those words we took for our own when we took the name:

Our swords shall play the orators for us.