“I SHALL HAVE A meal prepared and brought to you at once, Lord Marlowe,” Yume said when I was returned to the suite my companions had previously occupied. All signs of its previous occupation were gone: the food cart was cleared away, the bedclothes changed, the furniture ordered, the bathroom soaps recharged. “You’ve been waiting a long time.”

“Three weeks,” I said under my breath, suddenly eager for a shower.

Undeterred by my tone, the android replied, “And two days, four hours, and thirty-seven minutes.” It pointed. “There is a sonic cleaning unit for your clothes in with the bath—unless you would prefer that I take them?”

It waited, and realizing that I might be expected to disrobe then and there, I said, “No, thank you. I can see to it myself.”

“As you wish, sir,” Yume said, continuing my tour of the chambers. “You are free to explore the installation and its grounds, so long as you remain within bounds.”

“Will I be able to speak with Lord Sagara?”

The golem stopped midway through a demonstration of the laundry service unit.

“You already have.” If I didn’t know better, I might have said the creature was perplexed. It tilted its head as a dog might, and almost I imagined a frown on that blank curve of metal it called a face. I could see its gears whirring through the crystal windows in its shoulders. I caught myself making a warding gesture with my first and final fingers. How strange that I who did not believe should fall upon religion in the face of that machine.

“I had hoped to speak with him again.”

“The Master will speak with you in his own time,” the golem said.

“When my friends return?”

Yume’s single eye studied me a moment. Talking to it was not like speaking with any human in my experience. There was no presence to it, nothing of the sort that might cause the hair to stand on end, the skin to crawl. It was dead space. Shape without form. Shade without color. In its polished, patrician accent, it said again, “The Master will speak with you in his own time.”

In my own time I washed and laundered my clothes, and so newly ordered I set myself to exploring that strange palace. The installation Yume called it. The word implied a sort of military order, and indeed the heavy blast door and the spartan geometry of hall and stairwell spoke to me of some ancient fortress built beneath the surface of that lightless world. How many hours I lost in those barren corridors I could not say, nor count the number of sealed doors that barred my way.

In my time since that first sojourn on Vorgossos—and before it, on Emesh—I had the privilege of standing amidst the ruins of ancient civilizations. The black-walled tunnels of Calagah with their walls smooth as glass; the Marching Towers on Sadal Suud, broken fingers rising above the fungal forests; even old Simeon’s tomb on Judecca. Old though they were—their histories measured in scores of millennia—none felt so old to me as that blasted labyrinth. There was a humanity in its bones unlike that in those strange structures built by alien hands. Familiarity aged it. I knew concrete, and so marveled at what depth and span of years must pass to crack and weather those walls. It was not—as the pyramid below—the palace of a great king or emperor, but something else.

Installation.

Who had built it in the deeps of time, and to what purpose? Who had quarried out these caverns and raised these halls? Whose hands had placed those chipped, square columns in the vast and empty spaces, hangar-like, that processed down one arm of that seemingly endless complex? One could yet see where the mark of some ancient trowel had smoothed the cement and badly.

And I was alone.

Yume did not reveal itself as I wandered, nor any of Kharn’s ghastly guards, nor the homunculi who had served us in the vestibule. Once or twice I passed one of Kharn’s blue-eyed drones, floating like a small and lonesome fish in the dark airs. I tried to find Lord Song and his companions, but after some time decided that—wherever they were—they’d been left behind a locked door. Once or twice I thought I heard a human voice and ran to meet it, only to find an empty hall. As I walked, at times one of the great bulkheads would open or close of its own volition, and I thought about what Valka had said: that this place had no datasphere. Not one she understood. Then I remembered older stories, ones I’d told to Cat in another lifetime. They said that when Kharn Sagara took Vorgossos from the Exalted and drove them out, he took from them a demon of the ancient world, a daimon such as the Mericanii had made.

Switch was right, the whole place stank of sorcery. On Emesh, Gilliam Vas had called Valka a witch. He’d been right, in a sense, for the implant in Valka’s brain had allowed her to access and control the castle’s datasphere and power grid. But the more I understood what Valka could do, the less I thought it magic.

Not so in dim Vorgossos.

My first journey to Kharn’s pyramid had left me with the impression that all his palace was empty, a desolate warehouse of drab concrete. It was not so, it was only that the halls were barren. Many doors opened to me, and within I found rooms richly appointed as my own quarters, and the vestibule had been that. Sumptuous carpets covered the floor, and the walls were hung with many priceless things: tapestries and paintings, art and arms and artifacts of all descriptions.

I tarried a while among a collection of ancient legionnaire armor, bone-white and red. The earliest suits were bulky things, the armor hid beneath the baggy environment layer, hoses wired in from the air and plasma packs worn on the back. The helms of two centurions bore the transverse horsehair crests still worn in formal parades. One proud example wore the high, plumed chevalier’s helm of an Imperial Martian Guardsman, his great shoulders draped in a red cloak, with pteruges hanging at shoulder and hip to recall the image of vanished Rome. Many of the pieces were scarred, many broken, many bearing the proud sigils of the House Imperial, or the standards of legions or houses of great renown. Other examples there were: the mirrored masks of Jaddian aljanhi, their bright blues and greens and oranges resplendent beside the drab and ugly ironwork of the Lothriad.

There were smaller pieces under glass, epaulets belonging to famed commanders out of history, a roundel showing the Imperial sunburst that had purportedly been part of a suit of armor made for Prince Cyrus the Golden . . . the shattered remnants of the White Sword that had executed the pretender Boniface in the fifth millennium.

I could hardly believe it.

Kharn had not exaggerated when he called himself a man of culture.

Clang.

A metallic sound reverberated down one colonnade, undampened by any carpet or tapestry. I halted, drawing my sword. Torn between curiosity and the terror of the unknown. But Kharn had offered me the hospitality of his palace, and Yume treated me with every courtesy. I recalled my own words from the landing platform high above and murmured, “I am not afraid.”

Fear is a poison, the part of me that thought in Gibson’s voice said.

Buoyed by that thought and the memory of the old scholiast I turned, following a side passage as it curved gently down a kind of horseshoe bend. It emptied me onto a curving hallway, a circle along whose inner wall stood several round doors. Above I heard the roar of a big machine, great turbines turning in the stone above. I’d heard such things in several places about the palace, and reasoned they were part of some great network that powered the installation—though I confess I knew little of such things.

The inner door opened at my touch, and a blast of warm, wet air rose to greet me like a breath. A shout. Light poured in, not cool and bloodless like the lights in the hall, but true and proper light, such as a sun might make. I thought to turn back, thinking that it must be some mistake, that the door should have been locked and wasn’t, but I heard something then that urged me forward.

The sound of birdsong.

Sword in hand but unkindled, I stepped gingerly forward, placing my feet with silent care. The door had opened onto a short hall—and airlock, I realized, though it had not cycled—and I followed it out into golden sunlight. I gasped. I’d emerged onto the uppermost of a series of round terraces that descended—layer by layer—ever downward. Every layer bloomed with flowers and fruit trees and all manner of greenery. Hummingbirds flitted among the branches, and squirrels. And what at first I took for bees I realized with a start were tiny drones.

I stood a long while by the rail, looking out and down upon layer upon layer of greenery. A strange bird—red and blue, with a hooked beak—fluttered down and sidled up to me, watching me with one beady eye. I tried to imagine Kharn Sagara walking in these gardens, trailing hoses and fiber optics from beneath his yellow robe. I almost laughed aloud. It was a strange vision.

It was a strange extravagance. Kharn had seemed to me so like one of the kings of ancient myth, lord of a tyranny of stone and not the sort of man to love gardens. There was a clinicism in the way he studied his art and kept it in that place, the way a scholiast kept organs and little animals in jars of greenish fluid. A single flight of steps descended, spiraling ever down and in ever tighter orbits, for each garden terrace had a smaller diameter than the last. Water fell in irregular streamlets from the roof above, and looking up I was astonished to see not the blank concrete so abundant in that hideous place, but the naked limestone of the living rock itself.

Perhaps it says a thing of me that I tarried here less long than in the museum halls. I do not know what it says of a man that he might linger for hours before a painting of a garden and yet ignore the flowers themselves—but such am I. Perhaps it was only that I expected a serpent to spring from the bushes and strike at my heel, or for one of the infernal SOMs to at last make an appearance. Down nine levels I descended, and so came in time to the very base of the garden, which was shaped like a keyhole: the stairs emptying onto the round center while the single hall stretched on away, cutting under the terraces above.

Orchids clung to branches above my head, and somewhere a lark cried. The imitation sunlight shone from tiny fixtures bracketed to the roof above, and the mosaic on the floor was treacherous with false rain. The air wafted thick with the smell of flowers, of fruits I could not name. I looked back and up past ascending levels of foliage, and then—sure I was alone—returned my sword to its clip.

The hall that stretched away, like the rough ceiling high above, was all of native rock, and the pale stone sweated with the hothouse moisture of that garden. I’d come so far down I thought that surely I was approaching the level of the subterranean sea Yume had spoken of, and half expected the tunnel would lead down to some Plutonian shore.

There was only another door.

Like the door to the pyramid it was: sculpted of floating metal. It depicted a great, spreading tree, and two great snakes descending from that tree. Their bodies twined into a double helix, tails twined around the stem of the tree, fangs sunk deep in the flesh of a man kneeling about the bowl of the tree. The image filled me with a perverse fascination, and I stood a long while, tracing the contours of the image with my fingers. A light at the corner of my eye caught my attention, and turning I saw a key panel gleaming. It was different than the others. No mere mechanical switch, but a holograph plate. Without much hope, I called it up, was met with an authentication request.

Disappointed but unsurprised, I turned back, returning up the hall to the stair.

Yume was waiting for me.

Or, I thought it was Yume. In truth, I cannot say if the Undying kept but one of the golems or several. The dull gray and unsexed body was the same. The brass clockwork identical. The white mask with its one black eye and weeping golden filigree. In those same cool, patrician tones, the android said, “Lord Marlowe, your meal is ready.” That was supper on the day my companions had left to return to the Mistral.

A pretext? Surely it had appeared in time with my discovery of the Well and its gardens. I could not help but feel that I was being herded away like some irritating child. That I had seen enough and too much of Kharn’s palace.

“What is this place?”

Yume did not look round. “The Orchid Stair. The vestibule to the Garden.”

“This is not a garden?” I asked, confused.

“It is not the Garden,” the creature replied, still a statue but for the winking of the light in its black eye. “The Master maintains extensive gardens. For the children, you understand.”

I did not understand, though I had a sinking suspicion in my bowels that was worse than true knowledge. Thinking of the snakes carved into the doorway, their heads facing one another as they devoured the helpless man, I asked, “What children?”

Still the android did not move. “You know what this place is.”

The creature had a disconcerting habit of not answering questions, as if by avoiding answers it might avoid a lie. Could it lie? I wasn’t sure. It is said that the daimons of old were incapable of mistruth, that the ancient laws which bound and governed their kind prevented it. That had never seemed sufficient safeguard to me, for truth is sharper than falsehood, and just as poisonous. Still, Yume’s omissions were louder than its words. The children. I thought about Baron Song, about the Grand Duke of Milinda and the others. I could imagine a pack of their younger selves living sheltered lives in these gardens, feral as troglodytes, as the children of plebeian families so often are. Each unaware of his fate, of her destiny: of the end that awaited them all.

The warm garden felt very cold.

Thus I permitted myself to be led away, back up through the concentric rings of the Orchid Stair, beneath hanging bowers thick with the delicate fragrance of that eponymous flower. When we’d climbed halfway to the top, I asked, “How far down are we?”

“The entrance above is twenty-seven levels below the outer gate.”

“We’re near to the sea, then?” I asked, meaning the subterranean ocean beneath Kharn’s pyramid.

Without breaking stride, Yume pivoted its head fully around to watch me as it ascended the steps. “Oh no, lord. The sea is much farther below.”

Below.

Song and the others had talked of being taken below, as well. Had they meant only some deeper level of the installation above us? Or was there yet some deeper hall? Some darker theater where the medical labors that gave Vorgossos its dire reputation played out in grim burlesque?

I gave up trying to speak to the machine. Its unwillingness or inability to lie made it a difficult interlocutor. But it was comfortable in silence, and I was happy not to speak to it.

By several stairs and empty corridors we returned to my chambers, and Yume left me at the door. I entered, the heavy portal clanging shut behind me. I left my coat on the back of a chair and found the food trolley waiting by the table. Trusting myself to my solitude, I unclipped my terminal from its gauntlet and set the device on the tabletop, calling up the text of Impatian’s The First Emperors, a biography of the first eleven emperors. I’d finished his History of the Jaddian Wars while locked in Sagara’s vestibule. I set the thing to playing and soon a cool, artificial voice began reciting the text aloud. Forgetting myself, I returned to my coat and pulled my small journal from an inside pocket and returned to the table. That done, I lifted the tray off the trolley and carried it to the table. Beneath the steam lid was a species of strange silver fish, fried in oil and delicately spiced beside an arrangement of red-cap mushrooms stuffed with cheese and onions. A soup there was, too, sweet and smoky, and wine.

Wine. How long had it been since I’d had wine? Since before Rustam, at least.

I took a sip. The torpor that had overtaken me during my time among the client lords was gone, and I found it impossible to relax. I doubted even wine could chase my anxieties from me. Still, I meant to try, though I placed my sword on the table as if it were a piece of cutlery.

Eating slowly, I studied the painting on the wall opposite me while I listened to my terminal read Impatian’s histories. It showed a stone cottage beneath a whorling blue sky. Twining trees and yellow fields. Clumsy brushstrokes and heavy lines captured not the image the artist had seen, not his eye, but some piece of the soul of him. I wondered at it a long time, and so failed to absorb much of the reign of Emperor Victor I. The clear voice seemed a kind of curtain, a pall that drowned the world and drowned myself, so that I sat—like Kharn himself—in contemplation of that image of another age.

Cottages at Cordeville. A replica, the original had died with Earth. I opened my little journal casually, thumbed past black ink sketch after sketch. How poor they seemed by comparison, how crude and unpleasant. How . . . forgettable.

Eternity is the chief quality of high art. Depending on no moment, such art belongs to every moment, and so takes us for a time from our time—allowing us to touch eternity for our fleeting instant. I was there, transported by that painting, my reading, my food. Hidden from the world a time, from my cares. From Uvanari and Gilliam. From Bordelon. From Bassander Lin and three aquilarii dead on the Balmung.

From Jinan.

Transported as I was, I did not hear the approach of feet behind me.

Not until soft arms closed about my neck.