THE IMPERIAL SHUTTLE CROUCHED in the landing bay before us as I watched unspeaking from between the six guards Bassander had left to watch me. I kept my silence as I had been ordered to do, face fixed dead ahead, hands blessedly unshackled at my sides. The vessel had the look of of some armored beetle, its body bloated, coated in adamant plates the color of space. Two great wings retracted, folding down and against the hull as gouts of white mist blew into the air. I glanced sidelong to where Bassander Lin stood with Lieutenant Greenlaw, stiff as stone among his guards.

Kharn Sagara was nowhere to be seen, but I knew he wasn’t far, knew he watched through unseen eyes and through the antique monitor screens high on the hangar walls. They glowed dull gray in that black hall, watchless and all-seeing as the eyes of blind old men. I suppressed a shudder, watched as the shuttle’s formal ramp descended and a cornicen emerged in full regalia: open-faced helm with its crest of red feathers, a clarion in his hands. He did not—Earth be praised—wind the thing, but drew aside as two lines of guardsmen descended. Like the cornicen, they were arrayed in full battle dress. They had expected to be performing for Kharn, as Bassander had done in the throne room with his little parade. Without him present, I wondered if they felt like actors bursting triumphant onto the stage of an empty theater.

This sense of anticlimax was compounded by the appearance of the knight-tribune herself. Flanked by her first officer, Sir William Crossflane, Dame Raine Smythe was a thoroughly uninspiring figure. Short, broad, blunt-featured, she bore all the hallmarks of her plebeian birth and the surgical meddling that had elevated her from it, and next to her patrician subordinate she seemed a weathered sculpture of a woman: dishwater hair simply cut and cut short above uneven brows, a flat nose, a face . . . utterly forgettable. Though she was not old, she leaned upon a cane, and I wondered if some new injury had befallen her since we parted ways at Emesh, or else if this was some affectation, as though she meant to draw attention to the lowliness of her status. I imagined thus had many men of higher birth and better breeding underestimated that iron lady.

“Captain Lin!” she called when she was yet at a distance, apparently untroubled by the strangeness of that awful ship and its sculpts of staring faces. “Well met.” She too had dressed in full finery: long red tunic beneath the sculpted armor breastplate—a man’s breastplate, I noted; high polished greaves and long gauntlets visible beneath a variant of the very greatcoat I wore, blacker than black but with wide sleeves to accommodate the gauntlets. A strange paradox, that: that she should project at once an almost feeble vulnerability and all the strength of Sol.

Bassander stepped forward, beat his chest, and then raised his hand in salute. “Ma’am.”

Her eyes found me—those dull brown orbs as sharp as lasers—and she said, “And Lord Marlowe, too. Good, good.” The knight-tribune craned her neck. “Is this Lord Sagara not joining us, then?”

“Oh, he’s here,” I said darkly, ignoring a look from Bassander that was darker still. “You can depend on that.”

Smythe seemed to consider this a moment before she said, “Very well, then. We shall withdraw to the Schiavona, then, and get our business together. I trust the Cielcin have not yet arrived?”

“No ma’am,” Bassander said, then took a moment to shout orders that the knight-tribune’s effects were to be brought from the shuttle and taken to the ship. “And we’re not certain when it is they’re due. Sagara has been tight with the details.”

“But you trust he will deliver?”

The younger officer glanced at the nearest monitor screen before saying, “With all due respect to our host, I did not give him much choice.”

The knight-tribune tapped her cane against the metal decking. “Good.” Her eyes searched out the Gothic wreck of the hall. “Ghastly place . . .” She gave a signal and her escort—who had stood aside in two lines to flank the landing ramp—came together. Presently two more decades of legionnaires appeared, descending the ramp from the shuttle.

“How many are with you?” Bassander asked.

“Four decades and five, including myself and these.” She gestured to Crossflane, to the cornicen, and to two men emerging at the rear, a centurion—to judge by the medallions fastened to his breastplate—and an optio with his double stripe.

“And five hundred aboard the Schiavona,” Bassander confirmed, though surely the number was known to all present. The Cielcin, I understood, were to be held to a complement of similar size, both parties under the careful and apparently neutral eye of the Undying.

Crossflane scratched at his fierce side-whiskers with one hand and, addressing his question more to me than to any other, asked, “What’s the disposition of the prisoners aboard the Mistral?”

I glanced at Bassander only briefly. “Mostly in fugue, sir. Captain Corvo—she’s our mercenary captain—put most of the crew into stasis when Doctor Onderra and I did not return from the planet.”

Lin leaned in. “She’s only a couple dozen personnel active at this time, sir.”

Those words at last brought Smythe level with me, and at a gesture my . . . my honor guard stepped aside. Her face was wholly unreadable. After an interminable period, she said, “What am I to do with you, Lord Marlowe?”

“Ma’am?”

“I told you when you left Emesh that Bassander was meant to keep you on a tight leash, but here we are . . .”

That made me blink. “I was only following your orders, ma’am.”

“And a fine spot you put me in, too.” Her expression softened, and she cast her eyes up and around the chamber. “But perhaps it may all turn out to our advantage in the end.”

Averting my eyes, I asked, “What’s to be done with me, then?”

“For the moment? You’re to help us out of this mess. I’ve brought a translator on Hauptmann’s orders—he doesn’t trust you—but you know these Cielcin at least, and for the moment I’ve convinced him you’re useful.” She made to move past me, but as she did, she stopped and placed one gauntleted hand on my shoulder. I felt her eyes on me and turned. “See to it that you are. Useful.” And then she was gone. Crossflane glowered at me and followed in her wake, leaving only Bassander left to smile his little smile.

The mapping holograph glowed ahead of our party where I followed just behind the cornicen in his high-crested helm. I had come direct from the Mistral, and so was not entirely certain of the way, but when we came to a place where the hallways turned sharply upward, where the gravity sheared at right angles with the turning of the ship’s internal suppression fields, I became convinced that we were not simply going to the Schiavona, not that there was anyone who could say with certainty where we were and where we were going within the belly of Kharn’s awful ship.

The floor simply arced smoothly upward, and as though we were walking along the interior curve of wheel we rose, and rising I looked back and saw our escort in the hall behind, and it seemed they marched down a wall to meet us. Vertigo took me and I shut my eyes. Twice more did we encounter such turnings, once sharply right and again—most terrifying of all—the hallway bent straight down, so that to advance we had to step as if into an abyss. I was acutely conscious all the while of the artificiality of it all. That Kharn Sagara might at any moment alter any one of these fields and turn his hall into a shaft and so murder us. I took it as small consolation that the Obdurate lurked somewhere out in space, not far, that its guns perhaps protected us.

It was a smaller comfort but a more compelling one to realize that Kharn would not kill us because we were being led to his door.

A round door opened, rolling away into a pocket in the wall, and entered into a low hall lit—it seemed—by hundreds of blue flames. Like unto the flame which burned outside Kharn’s palace on Vorgossos they were, and it seemed almost they cast no light, but that what light there was came from no source I could ascertain.

“Here we are!” Kharn said, voice ringing out from his throat.

He sat behind a table, his children to one side. Ren and Suzuha both looked curiously at the Imperial contingent, and the girl’s face darkened when she saw mine.

The golem Yume stood primly to one side, its hands clasped, head bowed as though in prayer or sleep. “Welcome aboard, Knight-Tribune Smythe. I trust your journey was agreeable.” He had spoken at once, not forced Raine to wait upon his patience.

“Quite.”

“Not too far from Coritani now?” the King of Vorgossos asked, and there was a silver malice in his voice. We had come much farther, of course. The mighty Demiurge had moved through kilolights as though they were miles.

The knight-tribune leaned heavily on her cane. “No indeed.”

There followed one of Kharn’s customary long silences, the children fidgeting in their chairs, anxious to be away. Someone must have briefed Smythe on this peculiar disregard for time, for the tribune did not move, nor Sir William beside her. For a while, the only sound was the faint whirring of the implants in Kharn’s wasted chest that breathed for him. He shut his eyes. “Did you bring what was promised?”

“Of course. In the hold of my ship. We can ferry your cargo to you at your convenience.”

“See that it is so, Knight-Tribune. See that it is so.”

I caught myself wondering just how many of Kharn’s blue eyes lay hid among those gas-flame candles, and remembering the way they had burned my clothes I felt a sudden, horrible nakedness. Everything about this meeting struck me as an opportunity for Kharn to impress upon his Imperial guest the degree to which we were in his power. Power. It was all they believed in, Kharn and the soldiers alike. As if it were only the threat of power that held the world to order . . . as if there were not better ways and truer. But a darker thought took me—though a less pressing one. What payment had the Empire offered Kharn Sagara? And what coin would he accept? The disquiet I felt was echoed in the stiffness of Crossflane’s shoulders and the stiff way Smythe leaned on her cane.

The Undying was still speaking. “I will have one of the primary bays prepared to receive the cargo then. You will wave your people and tell them to begin the necessary preparations for the transfer.” Smythe acceded to this request without hesitation, and Kharn asked, “How many freighters will be arriving?”

“Five,” Sir William said, a brittle quality to his tone.

“Five . . .” Kharn mused. “Very good. The crews of those freighters will depart aboard the shuttle on which they arrived and withdraw to your ship. I am generous, but the number of Imperial personnel aboard my ship is already stretching the borders of my tolerance, are we clear?”

Five ships, I thought. Five. Something about that figure turned cold in me. Very cold. Not money, then. Materiel? Fuel? Possibly, though I imagined somewhere in the snows of Vorgossos lay the accelerator farms from which Kharn might draw all the antilithium he would ever need for his ships. I thought of the uranium tankers my house would send careering into space, packed in the holds of Consortium freighters and shipped . . . everywhere. No, no, I thought. This is something else.

“Perfectly clear,” Smythe replied. “And the Cielcin?”

“When the Otiolo scianda arrives, their party will be quartered in a bay far from yours, and both of you”—he opened his eyes to mere slits, and yet the shine of them was evident even by the corpse light of that fey chamber—“will be kept from one another, but that is the price we pay for hosting two armies under our roof.” Ren seized his father’s sleeve, for security more than attention, but Kharn Sagara did not bestir himself. He did not look like a man concerned about the presence of more than five hundred Imperial legionnaires on his ship, nor one unsettled by the prospect of sharing a space with as many Cielcin. And why should he be? How many bodies did he have aboard? How many thousand corpse-soldiers lurked behind the sealed doors in every hall? “And while you are here, I must ask you remain aboard your ship. I must prepare to receive our Pale emissaries, and must guarantee them the same security I guarantee you, and would prefer that your fine soldiers stay out of my way.”

Knight-Tribune Raine Smythe took a step forward, wringing her cane in both hands. “That sounds perfectly equitable. You may rest assured you will have no trouble from us.” Hearing her, I knew she meant it, whatever came later. “I confess this audience came sooner than expected. May I adjourn to consult with my people aboard our ship and to send orders that your cargo is to be brought across?”

The Master’s eyes were fully open then, and he raised a hand—the left—and gestured toward a door to the side of that spectral hall. As though answering his summons, it opened, and he said, “Please. Go and rest. I will summon you again when the Cielcin arrive.”

“Sooner, I hope,” Raine Smythe replied. I sensed the move an instant before she made it. “I should like to discuss the disposition of Vorgossos.”

For the first time since I had known him, Kharn Sagara looked . . . surprised. The emotion came and went as the pharaonic mask reasserted itself. Smythe flourished her cane and turned, giving a signal that the cornicen should wind his horn. He did, and the clear and sunny sound of that instrument in that dim and sallow hall was like a rainbow in the dark. The double column of men behind me straightened to attention, shifted their lances from one arm to the other, and followed Smythe as she followed the gleaming holograph thread from the room.

“Tribune.” The word came with the force of thunder, not from Kharn’s human lips, but from the very air about us. “Do not threaten me.”

Smythe half-turned. “I do not threaten, Lord Sagara. I only express my enthusiasm for cultivating a close working relationship between yourself and my Imperial master for the duration of these negotiations. Good day.” She did not wait for Kharn to reply, and before he could speak, signaled that the cornicen should play once more, and the sound of trumpets echoed in that low and arch-lined space, one throat joined by echoes until it seemed an entire band marched there. I was swept along with them and might have smiled, were it not that I understood one thing—I think—more sharply than the rest.

It was not before any lord that Raine’s troops performed, no petty king of the Outer Perseus or Norman warlord. No barbarian chieftain was he: one who counts himself one of the powerful because his planet had for so long stood apart from the Imperium—no fool in a crown of bells who thinks ten ships an armada. No. Kharn was something else, something stranger by far and more dangerous. Once, militaries marched to get from place to place, but in our more enlightened age they do so only to perform: for their masters, for their people, for themselves. Their esprit de corps. Here we marched for a foreign lord, yes, but only for him. All the knight-tribune’s efforts, her iron will and the splendor of her guards, was aimed upon the eye and will of that one man who was no man at all.

Whatever he was, Kharn Sagara had seen prouder hosts and more numerous. And more fearsome ones as well. We imagined—Bassander, Crossflane, and Smythe—that we had outfoxed the Master of Vorgossos, that we were Jupiter feeding Saturn a painted stone instead of his children. But Kharn was older now than the entire civilization that had worshipped Saturn. We were not the first to contend with him.

We will not be the last.