LONG WERE THE HOURS of our descent, and little of them shall be writ here, for there is little to say. We sat on couches, or stood in numb anticipation, watching the witch-lights shine from the depths. Pale green they were, or white, or sulfurous yellow. We were alone in our descent, climbing down our cable with all the patience of a spider at her web, unaccompanied by the lights of other lift carriages. Switch sat sweating, sick at his guns, staring at his hands more than out the windows. Ilex and Valka exchanged quiet words with Crim. Pallino stood by the window, said, “In all my years in the Legions, I ain’t never seen a place so desolate as this,” and was silent.

I must have dozed a while, and dozing dreamed. I was lost in dark waters, with no inkling where light or the surface might be. All was dark as space, as our approach to that lightless world had been, without even the unfixed stars to ameliorate. I did not know which way was up, and so fancied that perhaps I was in space after all. I could not breathe but . . . did not need to. For a moment, I thought I saw the funeral masks of my forebears shining like swamp gas.

Hadrian . . .

They seemed to speak in voices dry as desert sand.

Hadrian . . .

Those white faces . . . each in turn opened like the lid of some horrid eye. Vanishing . . . vanishing until none remained, leaving me alone. Only then did I realize I could not breathe, and realizing—panicked. I tried to swim, to fly, to cry out. No words came. Then the hands came, emerging from the inky dark beneath me on arms long as lift cables. Fingers hard as iron seized me, closing over my mouth, around my wrists and ankles.

Hadrian . . .

I awoke with a start, glad none of my companions had seen. I could still hear the awful voice ringing in my head.

Hadrian . . .

It spoke again.

Listen!

I shook myself and ground my teeth.

How fast we descended I couldn’t say. There was no wind, no atmosphere to slow our descent, and so we fell like a meteoroid, buoyed by the protective curtain of suppression fields. Most hightowers, I knew, took days to make their climbs. Ours took hours. In all that time we couldn’t get a communication through to the Mistral, no matter what we tried. As we sank lower, the ghost-lights revealed themselves as markers on the doors of sealed blast pits, half-concealed by snow so that the ice itself glowed ethereal in the deep and endless night.

I don’t know what I expected. A city perhaps, sprawling and strangled, with buttressed walls and high towers. A piece of me, I think, suspected the place out of the vision I had seen in Calagah: that ancient city, Gothic in its ruinous splendor, limitless in scope, its halls echoing to the sound of that terrible infant I had heard in the dream. But on the surface there was nothing, nothing but the trackless snows and a single obelisk of white stone—more than a mile high—through whose open summit was threaded our lift cable and all the others. All was dark within, lit by faint service lights that recalled for me the crimson lamp in Jari’s forehead.

We stopped.

“Are we down?” Switch said, voice high. He sounded almost the boy of seventeen I’d met in the Colosso.

Ilex shook her head. “Airlock.”

Sure enough, the whole lift carriage rocked on its cable a moment after, and the sound of rushing wind overwhelmed us. Then we resumed our descent, more slowly now. Down into darkness.

Boom.

A deep sound reverberated up the shaft around us. Light—soft and with the faint gray of rainy sunrise—rose from below us.

Thus we entered the unholy City: through an oculus near the side of a massive concrete dome. I tried to imagine the building of such a structure—whose mad hands had hollowed such a space beneath the surface of a world. It must have stretched for miles, and from our great height I could see the arched mouths of great tunnels leading away to what I guessed were other domes, other chambers. It must have been two miles from the apex of the dome to the ground. A river ran through a sluice gate high in the dome wall and through streets and plazas of white stone. Crumbling tenements of gray concrete stood in grim file along one wall, dwarfed by the great turrets and pyramids that looked almost childlike next to the massive scale of the ancient dome.

“Well,” Pallino said, crossing his arms, “there’s a thing you don’t see every day.”

Even I was speechless, watching as a pair of albatross dove past us through cloud—cloud—toward the tops of towers below.

“It must have taken centuries to build all this,” Crim said, pressing himself against the glass. “The dig alone . . .”

Ilex stepped up to join him. “They could have built the dome over a crater. Ice might have stacked up over the years.”

The Norman nodded. “Fair point.”

“I see people!” Valka interjected, pointing.

She was right. Far below, the insect shapes of men and women moved along streets and about fountains, or else stood in the shadow of a street corner or leaned against a column. The relief I felt at the sight of them! To know this was a true city and not some grim necropolis of pale white . . . I felt tension ebb from my shoulders that I had not known I had.

“Stay sharp, everyone,” I said, watching the tops of the towers sink past our eye level. “And stay close.”

The air smelled damp and mossy, and everywhere was heard the cry of birds. A deep-throated warbling greeted us as we left the lift carriage, stepping out onto a marble plaza not unlike that in the station above. Here the tiles were cracked, or worn by the passage of uncounted feet, and the bronze statues were green with time. Every building was of the same white stone, or fronted by it, and the very air seemed faintly to glow with reflected light.

Our passage across the square disturbed a flock of pigeons, and it was they who led our procession down a short flight of stairs to what I took for the main street, which rose smoothly up an incline and across an arched bridge toward a massive gate in the wall of the dome. A great many people hurried along the street, many of them only human, still others homunculi or chimeras. Almost instantly I felt the old hair-prickling sensation steal over me, as though my every inch was begrimed by a thousand grasping hands.

We were being watched.

“Do we have any idea where we’re going?” Valka asked, stopping beside me at the base of the stair. She had insisted she be allowed on this expedition, who had missed March Station and Rustam before it. Otavia had refused, but I’d supported her. Valka had never been a ground soldier, never a legionnaire, but she carried a plasma pistol all the same. Not an arc burner, but an actual, cartridge-fed repeater. I’d never seen the weapon before.

“I don’t even know what we’re looking for,” I said. “The Painted Man said the ruler of Vorgossos calls himself the Undying. I’ve no idea if that’s to be taken literally or if it’s warlord pretension.”

“It could be literal,” Ilex said, “if he’s Exalted. Earth knows how long they live.”

“People who speak of this place speak in terms of needing something,” Crim said, hooking his thumbs into his shield-belt. “Gene tonics. Abstraction. Cloning. Xenobite genetic augmentation. The sorts of things they won’t do even among the Extras.” Pointing with his chin, he took in the buildings around us. All were laser-cut of the same pale rock, quarried—I did not doubt—from the excavation of that massive dome. “This look like any Extra city you’ve ever seen?”

He wasn’t wrong. Whatever horror I had felt on our approach and descent was fading behind the voices of the crowd. On the Enigma, on March Station, even on Rustam—where Imperial law was faltering—the streets had been littered with holographs, massive advertisements selling everything from cigarettes and sim games to body modification. They’d even sold religion, or the religions had sold themselves. There was a debasement there, as I have already recorded, but there was a freedom, too. And perhaps it was better to buy debased things if that meant one was free to choose. Perhaps having that very choice—that freedom—is what debases the things we choose. The Cid Arthur teaches that life is suffering and called that a noble truth, and the Christ of old says that nobility comes in bearing that suffering as he did, out of conscious choice. Perhaps that was why the advertisements on March Station had so offended me.

All that choosing rendered a noble choice impossible.

But here there were no advertisements. No holographs of women or of smiling cartoons. No vendors hollering from street corners. The City beneath Vorgossos was somber as a sepulcher. What people there were—and there were a great many people—moved quietly about their business and did not look up.

“It reminds me of home,” I said suddenly, only realizing as I spoke that it was true.

Switch looked at me, aghast, and even Pallino raised an eyebrow. “What sort of place did you grow up, exactly?”

Father had forbidden the installation of advertisements—even printed ones. The streets of Meidua had been kept clean, and if a banner or device was shown it was only the sable banner of my house with its capering devil cackling in crimson thread, or the red sun of the Empire. The buildings there had been of white stone, too, and the great thrust of our acropolis whence rose the black tower and citadel of my birth.

“We kept it clean,” I said.

“’Tis unnatural,” Valka put in, and there was a species of despair in her voice. “It takes force to keep a place like this.” She was not wrong; by Father’s word vandals caught writing on the walls or putting up posters were given to the Chantry for torment.

No one accosted us as we moved deeper into the City, or paid us any mind. Those persons we passed averted their eyes or went on as if we were not there. Only the rare dram of attention stuck to us—on Ilex more than on any other member of our company. At any moment I expected some sinister figure to come lurching around a street corner or from the shadow of a door. But neither the likes of Jacopo the gene sculptor or Marko the Exalted spoke to us. None did.

“’Tis like being in one of your cities,” Valka said to me, unable or unwilling to hide her sneer. “Like everyone’s afraid.” I let this dig at my home and empire pass by, having already admitted that I was reminded of Meidua and Devil’s Rest. When the doctor noticed she’d failed to get a rise from me, she added, “Did you notice the guards?”

I had. I could see two of them standing in the shadows of a fat concrete stair that corkscrewed up along the outside of a cuboid building, holding shock-sticks tonfa-fashion. Even at a distance, they seemed curiously faceless, their features blurred and indistinct.

“They’re SOMs,” Ilex interjected.

Switch swore. “You’re sure?”

“She’s right!” Valka agreed. “They’re standing too still.”

The guards wore a sort of khaki uniform that recalled for me the jumpsuits worn by the Umandh slave douleters on Emesh, more akin to the uniforms of an urban prefecture than the armor of house hoplites or peltasts, with high boots and long gloves done in brown leather. Without being certain, I could sense that Ilex and Valka were right. They might have been graven from stone. Oft I have witnessed such decorum, in my father’s soldiers—in the Emperor’s own Martian Guard—but these creatures seemed not even to breathe.

“You!” a soft voice said. “You are visitors!” Turning, I found a woman in a dull blue suit near at hand. She had the soiled look of one who lived without the comfort of bed or shower. It was a look I knew all too well, having worn it for years. And like the beggar I had been—once—she reached out a hand, palm up. “What you here for? Ol’ Shara knows the way. Knows all the best magi, she does. Knows where to find them. Is it slaves you come for? Soldiers? Weapons?” She screwed up her face, cringing. It took me a moment to realize that this woman, this brave woman, expected that I would strike her. I wondered at the sorts of people who often came down those lifts. I did not have to guess. She had come to me of any of the six of us. The only palatine.

I waved Switch back, not needing a bodyguard against an old woman. “Shara,” I said, using her name. “Have you ever seen one of the Cielcin? The Pale?” I raised a hand above my head, indicating the height of the creatures I meant. “Here?”

“What?” She shuddered, not looking at me. Sparing a glance round I saw others like her, dirty men and women in once-fine clothes. There were many of them, coming toward the main street and the lifts like penitents to an altar. “Not here,” she said, “not here.”

“I have come a long way to speak with them,” I said, fumbling in my coat. “I am told the master of this place has business with them. That he speaks with them.”

The woman had twisted herself as far from me as she could without running away, but still she kept that one hand extended, palm up. Sighing, I placed a single coin in the palm of her hand. It was golden. A single Imperial hurasam stamped with the profile of Emperor William XXIII, the living Emperor. Her fingers closed about it, and she looked at it, looked at me, eyes wider than the coin. It was not a small price. For such as she, it was a fortune. In all my time as a beggar in Borosevo, none had given me so much. Not once.

“The Master?” she breathed. “The Undying?”

Stooping so that I looked her in the eye, I said, “Where can I find him?”

“He’s all around us, lord.” She raised a hand. How it trembled! “He sees all around us! He knows why you are here. It is why you are here. It is why we are all here. He leaves Shara to mind the gate . . . poor Shara. Her and the others.” That rocked me back on my heels. This was a performance, of a kind. An Attic chorus dressed in rags. Did they greet all visitors in this way? Perhaps so.

“What the hell does she mean?” Switch asked, and without turning I knew he had a hand on his plasma burner.

I raised a hand to stay him, thinking of the ghostly way our ship had been piloted from the Mistral. On Emesh, Valka’s neural lace had allowed her to see through the eyes of the castle’s security system. She had controlled the lights and the power grid and helped me . . . helped me to deliver Uvanari from its suffering. But she had seen. I did not understand much about datasphere communication networks, but I knew enough, for the hair-prickling sensation I had felt took on a special sharpness. Turning, I beheld the two officers I had seen standing in the shadow of that spiral stair. Their blurred faces had turned and were looking at me. Was it my imagination? Or was there a light shining through them?

“I’m not here for slaves or soldiers,” I said. “I need to speak with him.”

“Hadrian . . .” Pallino cautioned.

Again I raised my hand, a fist this time, for silence.

“Lords come to him, wanting to be young again, wanting things no one else can give.”

I’d heard the stories, had told pieces of them in my quest for this place, but I’d never really believed it. Everyone knew immortality was impossible. If it were not, then surely the Emperors would be immortal. The human mind could only endure so long, could only shoulder the weight of so much memory.

“He’s really immortal?” I asked, taking a step closer.

“He does not die,” she said. “He raised these stones. Built them on what was before. Drove the demons out.”

A piece of me froze a little, and I said, “You’re not serious.”

The woman looked at me, affronted, and backed away.

“You’re talking about Kharn Sagara,” I said, remembering the story. “The King with Ten Thousand Eyes?”

Shara’s face went white. “Say not his name!” She staggered back.

“That’s impossible,” I said, following her.

“Hadrian!” Crim interjected, more sharply than Pallino.

“He would be ten . . .” I trailed off, trying to remember. “Fifteen thousand years old!”

“Hadrian!” Valka this time. Her voice—the bright urgency of it—stopped me cold, shook me from my myopia.

I had been so focused that I did not hear—that I did not see—the guards emerging all around us. Dressed all in dun they were, jackbooted and gauntleted, with peaked helmets and indistinct faces. Shara staggered away, and the other beggars with her, one Attic chorus fleeing the advance of another, leaving us six alone in a ring of faceless men.

Faceless.

They had faces. Once. If you have seen a corpse—as all of us do eventually—you have seen the guardians of Vorgossos. The dead do not have faces, not truly. They have objects that used to be faces, but whose cheeks and jowls are animated by no will, and so hang like old meat from hooks in an abbatoir. And a light shone through them, gold and faintly green, so that the dim contours of the skull showed beneath the servile flesh. Ilex was right. SOMs indeed, and far more unsettling than the ones The Painted Man had wielded against us in Arslan.

“I see them!” I said, reaching beneath my coat to draw my sword.

The guards made no threatening sign, only tightened their cordon around us.

There were nearly thirty of them. We were surrounded. I did not activate my sword, but kept my thumb on the trigger as the other hand drifted for my shield-belt. Glancing over my shoulder I saw the others. Switch had drawn his weapon already, and Ilex. Pallino stood on guard, Valka beside him. Crim looked unconcerned. I envied him that. “Steady on!” I said, taking a half-step forward, settling into a proper guard. “No one move!”

One of the guardians moved forward, head tilted to one side. It stopped five paces from me, watched me with that unholy light glowing its flesh. It had been a man once, pale-skinned and hard-boned, with a subcutaneous growth of beard that colored his jaw blue. Something moved behind those dead, unfocused eyes. The pupils tightened, and a moment later the slack and atrophied muscles of that rubberized face pulled tight, until almost one could believe the thing a man. I imagined unseen strings tugging at the creature, as though it were some ghastly marionette.

“Put down your weapons, and you will not be harmed.” Its voice was flat and dead. Lifeless, as though it were a statue that spoke. A golem. A machine.

Taking my hand off my shield catch, I said, “I am Hadrian Anaxander Marlowe of Delos, a cousin of the Emperor. I am come on a diplomatic mission on behalf of His Radiance and of First Strategos Titus Hauptmann.”

“Put down your weapons, and you will not be harmed,” the SOM said again.

“’Tis not listening, Hadrian,” Valka said. “There’s no one home.”

I couldn’t afford to listen. “I bring with me a baetan of the Cielcin Itani Otiolo. I am told the Undying has had dealings with the Aeta of that clan in the past.” The SOMs began to advance. Suppressing a howl of frustration with a mental effort and one of Gibson’s platitudes, I clipped my sword back to my belt and stepped forward. “I must speak with . . . with Kharn Sagara—if that is your master.”

The SOM’s head twitched, and almost I believed there was something in its hollow eyes.

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams.

But it was a dream, and what recognition I’d thought was there vanished a moment after.

“Put down your weapons, and you will not be harmed.”

The creature raised its stun baton . . . and struck.