THE LEGIONS HAVE A code regarding the treatment of prisoners. They are to be fed twice daily and to a schedule. They are to be provided a place to sleep—even if it is only a blanket and a patch of floor—and they are to be provided some semblance of day and night. There are other rules, but it was upon these I meditated in that concrete vault of a chamber. As I have said, the twin serving girls appeared at random intervals. I timed them. Sometimes they would appear within hours of one another, sometimes almost a standard day would pass without their arrival. And each time they did appear, the crowd of old men and women would stand and turn in expectation of something other than the food carts . . . of this golem Yume who served the lord.

Through all this, the yellow light in the chamber went on unchanged. And, but for the varnished paintings so dark as to be almost opaque and the dusty velvet hangings, there was nothing to look upon, no change in the environment. It was enough to drive one mad, to be so deprived of darkness. I could handle the irregular eating schedule. The darkness was harder, but I made do, using my coat as a kind of tent.

No one bothered me. Not even the Grand Duke of Milinda.

On the ninth day or the tenth of my soft captivity, the doors opened. The palatines all stood and flocked to the doors like cats at the arrival of their master. Even I stood—canceling the holograph I’d been reading off my terminal, a bit of Impatian’s History of the Jaddian Wars. I meant to try again to implore the serving girls to have a message sent to Valka and the others, as, contrary to Baron’s Song’s assertions, I had not been allowed to send a message to my companions.

But the food carts did not appear, nor the twin girls in their translucent gowns. No one appeared for a good five seconds, prompting a wave of excited muttering from our herd of cats. The palatines all muttered, equal parts nervousness and expectation, and moved toward the door.

The figure that entered did so with a quiet whirring. There should have been hissing, clanking, the grinding of awful gears.

Far from the nightmares I had seen on the Enigma of Hours, the creature that entered the waiting room was elegant in its design and execution. Perfectly human in its mechanics, of androgynous design: narrow-hipped and narrow-chested. It wore no clothing, having no flesh or shame to cover. Much of its form was dull gray, with here and there a band of bright electrum reflecting the light around it. Crystal panels in hip and shoulder exposed glittering brass clockwork.

“Yume . . .” Baron Song whispered, shuffling up beside me.

The golem turned its head back and forth—pistons and chords in its neck stretching. The face was a convex arc the color of bone. It had only one eye: black and painted on the surface where the left eye ought to be, gold filigree playing about its edges. It would have looked hardly out of place at a masquerade ball on Renaissance.

Smoothly—moving with the grace and poise of a member of the Avalon ballet—the machine raised an arm. “Would the Lady Catherine Domitia Harfleur, the Baroness Varadeto, please step forward? The Master will see you now.”

A pulse went through the crowd, murmurs intensifying. The elderly black-skinned woman stepped forward as the group stepped back until she stood in a sort of no-man’s land between the crowd and the android. She looked very small, stooped as she was by age in her soiled finery, glittering though it was with jewels. Yet despite the silver cane on which she leaned, she hurried, and despite the native trepidation I felt at the sight of the golem and its one black eye, she seemed unafraid.

The android pivoted smoothly on one heel, offering the nobile lady its arm. Being less affected by a Sollan fear of machines than she was an eagerness to be getting on, she took it without complaint.

“Sir,” I said, stepping forward. I didn’t know what else to call the thing. “A moment.” Servos whirred as the android Yume turned its head—a little too far, I thought—to look at me. It did not speak. Only then did I realize that the filigree rimming that mask’s one eye described a stylized tear running golden down the robot’s blank cheek. “I was . . .” I would not say arrested. “I was brought here with five companions. Three men, two women—one of them a dryad. I have been here for more than a week. I do not know what’s become of them. I do not know how they fare. The others here say they are permitted to send messages to their entourages. Might I not send one of my own?”

A dim red light, like a cinder, burned in that black eye. In its polished court accent, the android replied, “You are not permitted.” It swiveled its head away.

“Why not?”

The machine very gently released the Lady Catherine Domitia’s arm and turned to face me. Its head pivoted first, one hundred eighty degrees. Its body followed. “I can assure you that your companions are quite well.”

“May I see them?”

“You are not permitted,” it said again, speaking with the precise tone and cadence it had employed mere moments before. I wondered if it was truly intelligent, or if it was only a puppet, force-fed a list of prescribed responses. It clasped its hands before itself like a cantor preparing to sing and added, “You will have your time with the Master.”

“When?”

“When you are sent for,” the machine said. “There are others here whose needs are far more pressing than yours. You will be attended to in time, Lord Marlowe. Do be patient . . . although . . . if you cannot wait, you are welcome to leave.” And with that, it turned, offering its arm again to the Lady Catherine Domitia.

Baron Song whispered, “You shouldn’t have done that. You’ll wait longer now.”

Another week passed. I read all four volumes of Impatian’s History of the Jaddian Wars and half the collected works of the playwright Bastien. Incisive as the old comedian was, I found his old-style comedy too much like farce, and gave it up. There was no datasphere to access, and so I found myself limited to the contents of my terminal. No small library, to be sure, but much of it was review. Not being a trained sailor, there’d been little for me to do on the Mistral, or on the Pharaoh or Balmung before it. I’d read a lot. I reviewed Valka’s notes and holographs on the Quiet ruins at Calagah on Emesh, on Ozymandias, on Sadal Suud.

I caught myself thinking about my vision again. And about the Jari and his words.

I wished I could speak to Valka, wished I could make her believe me. For that matter, I wished I could make myself stop thinking about it at all. I had larger concerns: the Cielcin, the war, my treason, Ghen’s death, the deaths of the three aquilarii I’d left on the Balmung. And that place: that whited city, its haunted guards, the Undying’s pet machine, and the Undying himself.

Kharn Sagara.

It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be. He was a myth, a fairy story as surely as were Apollo and the Moon, as Genghis Khan and the Cid Arthur. I knew his story, had told it to Cat a hundred times in Borosevo. If any of it were true, he would be old almost as the Empire. It could not be. And yet the Quiet, too, had been a fairy story—whispers of ancient aliens told by serfs and spacers alike, none too well believed. I had not believed, not until Valka showed me better.

Perhaps that was why I dwelt upon Jari and my vision. The rational foundations of my universe were blown out from under me, and I twisted in a fell wind. As when I’d first learned of the Quiet, this revelation about Vorgossos and its ruler had shaken me, left me without a box with which to frame my universe. And so my mind, frantic, had revisited those older, unincorporated parts of my experience, trying to build a new whole from the pieces.

Light! the seer had said when I’d asked after my future.

I have never forgotten my vision: the image of that black ship descending, plunging dagger-like into a whiteness that drowned the stars. Nor have I forgotten the host of the Cielcin, glittering where they stood arrayed like some great leviathan.

Light . . . How had Jari known? I knew little of his Deeps, but the oracle had said that he—or the things that had consumed him—were not the Quiet. Leopards, he had said, using my own words. Words I had not yet chosen. Leopards, lions, and wolves. The light had been in his vision and mine. A harmony. Did that make it true? There is no future, the seer had said. Everything already is. They have only to choose.

To choose what?

“It is well to see a young person like yourself reading.”

“What?” I looked round, found an elderly woman—the Countess of Somewhere I did not doubt—smiling at me. She was dressed in crushed and ruined velvet, soiled by her long stay here, but her face was kind. She proffered a plastic plate at me. There was a single fruit tart on it. The serving girls had not been for ages. She’d been saving it. Crushing my terminal’s floating holograph to close it, I sat up properly, declining the dish without comment.

“Reading,” the grandmotherly woman repeated. “Most oft these days you only see young people reading printed books. Antiques, you know? Or counterfeit ones. They like to be seen reading more than they like to read. What are you reading?”

Self-conscious, I pulled my sleeve back down over the short terminal gauntlet. “Travelers’ tales.” It had been an account of the first excavations of the tombs on Ozymandias, written by an aide to the scholiast who had led the excavation. How Valka had come by the text I’d no idea. It was the sort of thing the Inquisition would kill one for having, full of references to other xenobite sites on other worlds.

The Countess of Somewhere set her plate aside, leaned forward. “Really? I used to love such things. What’s it about?”

I was in Vorgossos. I saw no reason to lie about the Quiet. “The colonization of Ozymandias in the Thirteenth Millennium. In particular the excavations beneath the Great Arches at Panormo south of the capital at Merenhor.”

“The Arch-Builders, do you mean?”

“The very same.” I returned her smile. “The author has this notion that the Arch-Builders did no such thing, that they were only inhabiting the constructions of an older, far more advanced civilization.” When she said nothing, I added, “The same has been said of the Judeccan Irchtani, and of the Cavaraad on Sadal Suud.”

The Countess made a face. “Are you talking about the Anunna stories? I haven’t heard those since I was a girl!” I must have made a face, for she pressed on. “I suppose you are a bit . . . young for them. There were a bunch of operas about them. Ancient xenobites out among the stars, greater than us.”

“The Chantry didn’t repress that?”

“They weren’t so stodgy in those days, you know? Weren’t so concerned with propriety or the dreck artists cook up, you know? They were different times.” Her eyes—blue eyes—seemed far away after that peculiar fashion unique to the very aged. “But I suppose the war’s changed things. Stories about fearsome xenobites must have fallen from fashion once we had the real thing.”

With nothing to say to that, I studied my hands, nodded primly.

“You’re not like the rest of us,” the Countess noted. She was only the dozenth since Song to make that determination, and I felt my smile calcify.

Brittle as my smile, I said, “I suppose I’m not.”

“You can’t be here for the same reasons as we.”

“And why not?”

She shifted forward in her seat. “You’re too young to be thinking of dying. Especially for one of the Peerage. Baron Song said you were one of the Star Victoria? The Emperor’s own? You must have . . . centuries. Centuries before you would think of coming to a place like this.”

“That’s why you’re all here, then?” I asked. “Life extension?”

“Life extension!” She showed her teeth. A couple of them were missing. “We have nothing left to extend. The Undying offers us a second life.”

Baron Song had said much the same thing. A new brain. A new body. “But how?”

“He grows them. Raises them. Until they’re ready.”

“Raises them?” I looked her squarely in the face. “You’re talking about children.”

The Countess of Somewhere’s face might have been a graven mask. Whatever else she was, she was Sollan nobile, and had learned long and long ago to control herself. “I am talking of another me.”

“Cloning?” I said, disgusted. Cloning was one of the Chantry’s Twelve Abominations, the most mortal of sins. It was added to the list later on, if memory serves, after clones had been used too often to cheat in matters of succession.

The Countess didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.

“The young man bothering you, Countess?” said Baron Song jovially, appearing at my elbow. She was a Countess, after all. Ordinarily, this synchronicity might have amused me, but there was a sucking hole where my stomach ought to be. Gone was the kindly old Mandari with his frilled necktie and pointed beard. Gone too the elderly woman with her grandmotherly smile. The faintly funereal texture of the room with its trace geriatric musk and the smell of old upholstery and oil varnish took on an aspect of brimstone and salt smoke. Static and charge.

There is a chamber in the Peronine Palace on Forum where are kept a great many paintings and artifacts recovered from Old Earth. Among them, kept in a windowless room lighted by glass candles, were nine of a series of fourteen murals. The Pinturas Negras, painted at the end of Earth’s Golden Age by an artist called Goya. The other paintings—and the rest of Goya’s work—are lost. Victims of the Advent that claimed our homeworld, or else lost in the Peregrinations that followed.

The Emperor himself showed me the paintings, and but for three of his Knights Excubitor and a detachment of his own Martian Guard at the door—we were alone. He was shielded . . . the Emperor is always shielded, and the Royse field flickered in the light of the glass candles.

“Saturn Devouring His Son,” the Emperor said, gesturing with one beringed hand.

It was an ugly painting, but unforgettable. It showed a naked man with tangled hair and beard, a giant clutching the mutilated corpse of a headless man, his teeth tearing an arm off at the joint. There was self-aware horror in the eyes of the mad Titan. He knew what he was doing was wrong, and yet would not stop himself, so hungry was he for life.

So old was that ancient canvas—rotted through in places—that the bright crimson of the blood covering Saturn’s hapless son had gone to clotted brown. Seeing it, I remembered the eyes of those people in that grim hall. Lord Song and the Countess of Somewhere. The Grand Duke of Milinda and that Norman spice merchant. They knew. They knew what they were.

The very foolish might look upon such creatures and, sneering, say their wealth had corrupted them. It is easy for those without wealth to pretend at morality, as if they would not themselves make depraved choices given the means. There is no morality in poverty. It is only that wealth gives the immoral greater opportunity for abuse. Given the means, how many souls would make pilgrimage to Vorgossos? How many trillions?

“He’s not bothering me at all, Kim!” the Countess said. “Quite the opposite! I’ve interrupted his reading.”

“Not at all!” I said, scrambling to maintain a mask of politeness to quash the screaming in my head. “We were just discussing the, um . . . the procedure.”

Baron Song seated himself in the chair opposite my couch, so that he surveyed me across the empty Druaja board. “I do hope I’ll be taken below soon,” he said idly. “I’ve been here ever so long.” He opened a drawer on the side of the table and began pulling out the worn marble pieces. “Fancy another game, Lord Marlowe?”