IT DIDN’T LOOK LIKE a clinic, leastways not any more than the flophouse had where I’d first awakened on Emesh so long ago. The words Cento’s Biotechnic spat in neon frames above the corner door, the letters red in Galstani and blue-green in Lothrian. There were no windows, as there had been no windows on most of the street-level buildings in that dark city, and piping and heavy ductwork crowded about the entryway and along its walls. The place hadn’t been hard to find, was only the fourth or fifth such establishment we’d entered that day. The bonecutters were everywhere, peddling tonics to change the color of skin or eyes or hair, to enhance hearing and sight beyond the normal range, or to implant terminals or praxis stranger still. One peddler advertised the regrowth of fingers—or the growth of additional ones. Still more focused only on genitals, complete with dancing holograph displays of the improvements on offer, and advertised their ability to change one’s sex completely, rebuilding the body from new cells.

The whole show disgusted me, filled me with the same contempt I’d felt for Crispin and for my own mother with the way they used their concubines. Indeed, I’d felt a similar distaste for Valka, who for all her talk of equality and of the dignity of life had used the body servants on offer at Borosevo Castle. The commodification of the flesh. To reduce to transaction and whim one’s own life and body seemed to me a violation sure as any slaver’s whip. And worse, for it was one’s own hand that held the lash. You are a body, all of it screamed. Nothing more, and it is not enough.

From the perversion of the flesh, O Mother deliver us.

But we are not bodies. We have bodies. And though who we are is rooted in that animal matter we rise higher, growing like a tree toward heaven. I can think of no greater evil than the insistence that we are only meat. How many lives have been demeaned—destroyed—by that insistence? How many millions? That city, what it offered, suggested that we were nothing more, and so the men who traded in flesh—offering surgery, therapy, and replacement—offered people a vision of their best selves. As if identity were fluid. As if who we are is only granted to us by others and is by others taken away. As if no part of us is our own. I saw signs selling memories and offering dreams, selling experiences and emotions wholesale. Those buying such services imagined they improved themselves, when in truth it was their selves they destroyed. Their souls. Traded piece by piece for pieces unrecognizable, until, like the ship of the legendary Theseus—who replaced his vessel part by part until all of it was changed—they had replaced all of themselves, and who they were born was dead.

As a man who suffers a stroke is forever changed by the event, so too the addition of arms or of a new kind of sight or the complete transfiguration of the body was not the actualization or purification of self, but a kind of death. Not the caterpillar becoming the butterfly, but the spider devoured by her own children. No mind could undergo such changes to the body and remain itself, any more than an uprooted tree can make its home in hostile soil.

Yet it was to one of these flesh peddlers, these surgeons of the human soul, that I had turned. For the road to Vorgossos, it seemed, was paved with such depredations. I combed back my wet hair, shook the spare droplets from my clothes. Crim and the others filed in behind me.

The room shone a polished white, starkly lit in contrast to the urban gloom without, the age of the place belied only by the deep scrapes and scuff marks etched into walls and floor. For all that, a pleasant music softly played, and under it the sound of water falling, though there was no fountain to be seen. It had every appearance of a grubby place trying to be pleasant, and so disarmed my trepidations after the casual inhumanity of the street.

There was no one there to greet us.

“Are they not open?” Switch asked, visibly tense.

“I don’t know . . .” Crim said, drying his hair on a kerchief produced from a pocket in his quilted kaftan.

“Welcome!” a bright voice interjected, speaking in perfect Galstani. “Here at Cento Biotechnic, the number one leader in genetic recombination therapy and organic implant technology, we pride ourselves on—”

“Hello?” I said, speaking over the artificial voice, which dropped its volume in response to my voice—though the message kept playing. “Hello, is anyone here?” Crim had been acting as my herald, but the lack of any human person wrong-footed me, and I’d spoken out.

“Someone will be with you shortly,” the voice replied, not changing its cheery tone. “If you do not have an appointment, or are here for one of our free consultations, kindly seat yourself by the dispensary. Someone will be with you shortly.”

Looking round, I caught sight of the beverage dispensary. We’d not made it halfway to our seats before another, rougher voice called out, “Dobra! Dobra dovarishka! And welcome!”

The speaker was a small, rat-faced little man with a pigeon chest and round shoulders. Not a visage to inspire confidence in a genetic surgeon, though I supposed the strange man had his reasons. He wore a device like a jeweler’s glass over one eye, though whether it was only a device or part of him I could not say, and when he smiled—which was constantly—it was to reveal teeth the color of gunmetal. Seeing me, he stopped. “Solnech?” he asked aloud. “This is Imperial, yes? No mistaking it. The height of this!” He raised a hand above his head to indicate how tall I was. “Patrician? No no. Palatine!” His one visible eye widened. “What is bringing palatine to Cento?”

I flashed Crim a look. No use trying to hide what I was from a geneticist, after all.

“You’re Doctor Cento?”

“Yevgeni Cento, geneticist.” He thrust out a hand, and it was only after I’d taken it that I realized the skin there was smoother and more pink than the weathered dun of his face. Younger. “What is it the palatine wants?” He was clearly Lothrian, or had been, and had that disconcerting Lothrian habit of eliding pronouns from his speech. “And is the palatine having a name?”

“Gibson,” I said at once. “Just Gibson.”

Cento’s eye narrowed, but his expression did not falter. “An honor! An honor, sir. Few palatines come so far from home.” He leaned forward, a conspiratorial hush overtaking him. “But what can Cento give man who has everything Empire can give?”

“I was told”—I did not say by whom—“that you might be the man to help me.” I took a step closer to the short little man, tipping my head so that I spoke to him from the corner of my mouth. “There are things the Empire cannot cure.”

“Eh?” Cento looked at me more closely, and I saw the lens in his monocle focus as his brows furrowed. “The palatine is not intus, yes? This can be cured, but . . . is costly. Intus . . .” He waved a hand. “Complicated.”

Trying not to think about Gilliam Vas and his mismatched eyes, hunched shoulders, and twisted back, I suppressed a shudder. “No, no I’m not.” The inti were palatine bastards, born without the intervention of the Emperor’s High College, damned to a life of disease and mutation by engineered genes so complex the fetus required constant medical intervention to ensure proper development. Development I had received—as all trueborn palatines must—by medical technicians while I grew in my father’s tanks.

“Then . . . is children?” He paused a long moment, pointed at me. I could almost see his brain seizing on the difficult word: “You. This woman?” He pointed at Siran. “High College makes children difficult for palatines, yes? Makes intus?”

“What?” I practically blurted the words out, glanced in horror at Siran. “No!” My myrmidon friend smiled wryly, making me feel a little safer. “It’s nothing like that.”

Cento frowned. “Nothing like that . . .” His voice died off into vague mumbling. “Cento sees. Yes. What is thing Cento can do for the palatine?” Here he affected a mocking bow. “Assuming the palatine can pay, this is.” His human eye and the monocular swept over my scant escort, as if to criticize them for not being a proper guard. I wondered how often—if ever—a lord of the Imperium had been in his grungy little shop. We’d had similar experiences in the other clinics we’d entered, and on the docks before that. It was disarming, being doubted. Here, it seemed, blood meant nothing at all, and it was only my coin that mattered. It was almost refreshing, being treated as a man among men and not a lord at all. In the Empire, my credit had been assumed good on principle—it was how I’d nearly bought a spaceship with no income by merely flashing my ring.

My ring. Thinking of it drew my hand to my left thumb, to the wheal of burn scar that wrapped its way around it. I’d thrown the old thing away after my father stripped me of my title and holdings. I had gone into exile with it on my finger, into cryonic fugue. The metal had burned my skin in suspension, and the thick scar shone waxen in the harsh light of the clinic. Cento saw the gesture and darted forward. “Cryoburn,” he noted, taking my hand. Something in the shift of the light revealed the faint spots of other scars on the back of my hand, relics of my battle with the Cielcin captain, Uvanari, after it escaped on Emesh. “More burns.” His human eye darted up, inquiring, even as the machine stayed focused on my hand. “Cosmetic, then? Cento can grow new skin—entire new skin! Twenty thousand marks!”

“No!” I said, tugging my hand away. I cannot say if it was a fighter’s sentimentality or the same disgust I’d felt of the street outside, but the thought made my skin crawl, as if the skin itself feared to be replaced. Summoning then a portion of my lordly hauteur I said, “Instead of pawing at me and guessing, doctor, you might allow me to answer your original question.”

Cento stepped back, smiling to reveal his gray metal teeth.

Tired by my failures with the other clinics and by all that strange day and place, I said, “It’s life I’m after, doctor.” I felt suddenly foolish, standing there.

“Life?” Cento frowned. “The palatine is young, yes? Cento can lengthen telomeres, regenerate organs, remove plaque from brain, but so soon? We . . .” He paused again, pointing from himself to me and back again. “We can take look, yes?” He made an expansive gesture, indicating that I should follow him down the hall. “Guards wait here. Clinic very safe. No one bother Cento . . .” His words devolved into a patter of indistinct Lothrian, thick and guttural.

Switch pulled a face that seemed to say he’d rather leave me alone with a foaming azdarch than with the chiromancer, but I waved him back. “Watch the door,” I said, allowing myself my crookedest smile as I patted the hilt of my sword through the coat, reminding both Switch and myself that it was there.

Cento led me into an exam room. A doctor’s bench stood against one wall, and a round platform stood in another corner, an array of sensory apparatus hanging from the ceiling like the legs of some waiting, pregnant spider. A console stood at the far end of the room, screens a quiescent black, indicator lights blinking a pleasant blue-green.

“Palatines already have life. Much life,” Cento said, gesturing that I seat myself on the bench. I leaned against it instead, not removing my coat. If the gesture annoyed the doctor, he made no sign. “Sometimes Cento can do much, sometimes little. Human genes only stretch so far. May be the client need seek abstraction.”

“Abstraction?”

“Machine!” Cento said, tapping his monocular implant. “Kidney fails, say. Can replace this. But as get older, humans begin fail systematically. On cellular level. Cancer happens. Palatines age less. Less plaque on brain, in blood. Less organ failure. More cancer. Die quickly at end. Machines . . . no cancer. Other problem, maybe. But no cancer.”

I shook my head. “No machines.”

“No machines!” Cento repeated in exasperation. “Of course. Solnechni. Already breaking law coming to Cento but not break this law.” He snorted. Approached me with a needle. On instinct, I backed away, pressing myself against the bench. “Is only sample. Cento must see what is working with, know how can help.”

Old stories returned to me, tales of how fools and desperate men seeking life or knowledge had traded for it with a cupped handful of their own blood. I had to remind myself that however like an ordinary medica this place seemed, I was among the Extrasolarians, and the Extrasolarians were little better than demons. I was too well-educated to believe that giving Cento a vial of my blood gave him power over me, the way one might overpower a demon with his name, but I could imagine other things. A virus designed to kill only me; clones of myself made and sold into slavery, sold as soldiers or catamites; pieces of my genome cut up and turned into products—those Marlowe eyes shining out of other faces, that Marlowe smile grinning with other delight.

The commodification of the flesh.

Suppressing an instinct to smash the man and flee, I said, “You misunderstand me.” And here I reached out a hand to stay the doctor’s own. “It is not more life that I seek. It’s another life. I am a foederatus, doctor. A mercenary. Mine is dangerous work. I might die any number of ways. I have heard among the Extrasolarians that there are ways to cheat death. That even if my ship were lost I might survive.”

Cento frowned, stopped. “This Cento cannot do.”

“Who can?”

“On March Station? No one.” Cento closed his hand around the needle and drew away. Only then did I release his hand. “This thing cannot be done. Not by Cento. And if Gibson not pay Cento, Cento not work for Gibson.”

I reached into my coat, hand gliding over the sword hilt there for the zippered pouch in the lining. My fingers found the universal card and waited there. “I’d be willing to pay for a referral. I understand if there is no one here, but I hear that on Vorgossos—”

“Chern zashich nme!” Cento swore in his native Lothrian. “Say no more!”

“You’re the fifth clinic I’ve been to today,” I said coolly, expecting this reply and no longer impressed by it. “None of the others could help me.” I drew out the black universal card with the three golden helms of the Rothsbank glittering on its surface. “I am willing to pay for information, doctor.”

The doctor put his syringe into a pocket of his gray smock and stood silent a long moment. He seemed to deflate, to sag to the polished white floor. “You do not know what it is you ask.” His accent, which before had been thick almost to the point of opacity, slipped. After the spirited performance of minutes before, the man seemed almost undressed. He used Galstani pronouns without hesitation. Understand, it was not that he was not one of the Lothriad, but that some exaggerated performance of his slipped away. Seeming at once very tired, he reached up and unscrewed his monocular. The lens housing came away, revealing a naked socket that sank deep into his face. Dark metal glinted there, and a red light pulsed far back in the recessed hole. Cento drew a dirty kerchief from another pocket, polished the lens before screwing it back into his face. “Vorgossos . . . no one gets to Vorgossos except through his Exalted.”

“His Exalted?”

“The Undying who rules Vorgossos,” Cento said, pressing his lips together. “This is the story you hear, yes? The Undying who shares his gift to those who pay for it. A cure for death. This is why you seek Vorgossos?”

A cure for death. That was true, in a sense. Only it was not my death that concerned me, for I was young and not then afraid of my fortified mortality. Unbidden, the black scar on Rustam’s surface filled my vision, that aching ruin of a city. I heard again Uvanari screaming under the cathar’s knives, and saw men writhe in the dark as Cielcin stooped over them, blood on their faces like vampires.

A cure for death.

“Yes,” I said, swallowing. “I was told you Extrasolarians had such a thing.”

“Extrasolarians . . .” Cento almost laughed. “We are not a people, Gibson. We are people. There are Extrasolarians and Extrasolarians. I am only a doctor. The Exalted . . . you have heard stories.”

I had. My mother was fond of them. The Exalted had appeared as villains in some bad Eudoran masques, in so many great operas. It was against them that the legendary Kharn Sagara had fought after they destroyed his home. They were beyond humanity, it was said, creatures who had given so much of themselves to their machine daimons that almost there was nothing left. The very word conjured impressions of bloody fangs in metal jaws, of eyes dead as old metal, and vague shapes lurching about the dark corridors of the mind.

“The Exalted serve Vorgossos?”

“Some of them do,” Cento said. “They are not an order; they are not a people. Some of their captains answer to the Undying, but not all. Only they know where the world is.”

“How is that possible?” I said. “It’s a planet, isn’t it? How does one hide a planet for . . . centuries?”

Cento’s human eye wrinkled in amusement. “No one knows, and yet no one will tell you where it is.”

“You know, then?” I took a step forward, emphasizing as I did so my height advantage. I towered head and shoulder over the little Lothrian, and the gravity on March Station was not so strong as on Emesh. I might have lifted him with one hand if I wished it.

“No! No!” Cento raised his hands. “You need to ask right people. Vorgossos has contacts. Traders. Men who know right ships. Cento is not one of them. Cento does not know. You have to go to the traders. To the docks. Not ships captains. Shipping companies. The Exalted have people on March Station. Some are Vorgossos. Some not.”

I brandished the universal card again. “A name, Cento. I need a name.”