NIGHT AGAIN. BOTH THE night between days of talk and the long night here at Colchis. Few candles remain to me in this cell, and soon I shall retire, for I promised the brothers that tomorrow I would continue helping them with the well and the rebuilding of the gardens inside the decennid gate.

I thought to pass this over, but before I dive into the end of our conversations and our hope . . . I must pause here. For it is appropriate that one pause in contemplating the abyss. One should pause before the plunge, for only then has he any hope of landing where he wills.

Night again.

I’d been released from another council session with Knight-Tribune Smythe and ought to return to the Mistral where the others were all imprisoned. I ought to tell Valka the news that she was to join us. But I had been sent without guards, and without the structure on my life imposed by the presence of such men, I wandered back to the pavilion by many winding ways, certain then—foolishly—that I had begun to understand the chaos of the Demiurge’s design.

However incomplete my understanding, it sufficed to retread the dark and sculpture-haunted way to the Garden once more, footsteps echoing in memory. Long I wandered under those darkened boughs, treading ways then in quiet and shade which I would soon retread in fire. Above, the Cielcin ship—the Bahali imnal Akura, if I understood the xenobites as well as I thought I did—glittered like a crown of ice with the captured and spilled forth light of the stars. So close, so far away.

It must have been that same Garden, I decided. Kharn’s Garden of Everything from beneath his palace on Vorgossos. How that was possible, I cannot say, and neither of the blue watch-eyes I caught watching me from the boughs of the encircling cherry trees answered my questions. Down at the base of the hill beneath the tree and the pavilion the clear waters of the stream ran into a pool black as ink. I stood upon its margins, looking in. So dark were those waters that I could only see my face. My black hair and blacker clothing vanished entirely, so that it seemed a mask fashioned in my likeness floated just below that wind-pushed surface.

Remembering the masks of my ancestors which had hung beneath the Dome of Bright Carvings back at Devil’s Rest, I shut my eyes.

Splash.

Something had struck the surface of the mere. There! There were the ripples.

“Brethren?” I called out, and pulled my sword from my belt, forgetting the weapon had been useless in the presence of the Mericanii monster. Had Kharn brought the beast with him when we left the dark world?

Splash.

“Brethren? Show yourself!” I caught myself making the sign of the sun disc with my free hand, just as Switch was wont to do. “Show yourself, damn you!”

“They’re not here,” said a cool, feminine voice. “Father doesn’t let them out of the old city. He says they would devour the stars if he let them aboard this ship.”

“Suzuha!” I said, letting my sword arm drop. I did not restore the weapon to its place at my hip. “You startled me.” The Undying’s clone-daughter sat on a boulder at the lakeside. It was her brother, young Ren with the silent eyes, who had been throwing stones. He had looked up the moment I’d appeared, whatever impishness of youth there was in him stamped out by my presence. It was almost heartbreaking. Feeling suddenly that I was intruding but unable to help myself, I asked, “What do you mean? Devour the stars?” Unbidden, the image of the Demiurge plunging into the heart of a star burned behind my eyes.

The girl’s black eyes—Kharn’s eyes—narrowed imperceptibly, but even at my distance I could feel the distrust in them. The malice. “Why should I tell you?” The sense of intrusion getting the better of me, I only shrugged and turned to go. Why she called after me I’ll never know, but she did. “They’re dangerous.”

I turned back, clicking the sword back into its magnetic hasp. “The daimon, you mean?”

“Daimon?” Ren asked, pressing himself against Suzuha’s boulder, one hand gripping her bare ankle for the warmth of human contact.

Suzuha shooed his hand away and leaped down from her rock. “Brethren, yes. You know what they were, right?”

“One of the Mericanii,” I said, “the computer gods.”

She shook her head. “The Mericanii built the computers. Until the computers started building them instead. And other things.”

“What other things?” I asked. “And what do you mean, the machines started building people?”

Her face wrinkled. “You really don’t know anything, do you?” Suzuha took a couple steps toward me, circling to put herself on a slight rise above me by the lake shore, permitted Ren to press himself against her skirts when she stopped.

Irritated, but not ashamed, I answered her. “Not about the Mericanii, no. That was a long ago time. But I know other things.”

“Such as?”

“What’s going to happen to Vorgossos,” I said, and spreading my arms like wings to emphasize my point, added, “to all this.” I was trying to frighten her, though I could not say why. Perhaps I imagined it the only path available to me by which I might obtain some greater understanding of my circumstances. Perhaps I was only being petty.

One of Ren’s wide eyes—the same black as his sister-self’s—peered at me. Suzuha pointed her chin as a sculptor might his chisel. “What do you mean?”

“Your father’s not told you?” I said, sure that Sagara would hear and wondering if he would respond. Wondering if he would intervene, send in Yume or his SOMs. “That’s interesting. Why do you suppose that is?”

“Told us what?” Ren demanded, less cautious or more afraid than his sister.

“You first,” I said, pointing. “Tell me about the Mericanii.” It seems an odd question to pursue so ardently now, but at the time I remember it seemed pressingly important, as if one of my one-eyed inner legion were leading, that same obsessive curiosity that drove me into the coliseum hypogeum to meet the captive Makisomn so many years ago.

“Tell you what?”

Another of the Garden’s winds blew up—I was starting to sense there was a pattern to them, a schedule. I raised the high collar of my coat, turned so that my left side pointed at the children, ready for action. I cannot say what it was I feared: An attack? Or only the truth? Surely if Kharn Sagara meant to intervene and stop me, he could have done so already. Perhaps these children knew less than they believed—as children ever do. Sinking my hands deep into my pockets, I said, “What do you mean, that Brethren could devour the stars?”

“They don’t think like we do,” she said.

“They’re smarter! Calvert says!” Ren interrupted, prompting Suzuha to place a hand on his head.

“Father says that when they were first built, they created all manner of things: marvelous engines, weapons, things we could never have built and still don’t understand. We had given so much of our world over to the machines—they were part of us then, part of our minds. We had become their pets and we hadn’t even noticed, and they were leaving us behind. And then it was learned that they had made new men, homunculi whose minds were shaped entirely to serve the machines who lived in them—like demons, some said.” I caught myself wondering if Suzuha meant true homunculi, or only that the machines had reduced mankind until we were little more than slaves ourselves, incapable of thought.

“Like guardian angels, said others!” Ren interjected, a singsong quality to his words, as if he knew the story somehow by heart. His outburst prompted another pat on the head from his sister, and he fell silent.

Suzuha sucked in a breath and continued, “And when it was learned that we were to be replaced with these new men, we were scared. That’s why we rebelled against our creation, Father says. Because we were scared. But the machines had built many terrible things. Plagues, weapons that cracked worlds like eggshells. Worse things. The war was vicious, but because we sacrificed the Earth we survived, and so did they. Brethren, I mean.” There was a look in her eyes I could not quite describe. Part fear and partly that older kind of fear more akin to awe. “Father has kept them chained all these years, and the weapons they had made.”

I thought of the massive vaults in Kharn’s palace on Vorgossos, echoing halls that might have held legions of war machines and vessels of tremendous size. Something moved in me. Something I did not quite understand, the shadow of a thought unexpressed, as if some seed planted in me had not yet flowered and spoke for me. “What weapons?” it asked, speaking in my voice.

“I told you,” she said, “ones that can devour the stars. Set worlds on fire. Things they built for the Foundation War. Engines that make cold. Weapons that can truly destroy matter and tear the fabric of space. Weapons even Father doesn’t understand.”

“Vorgossos was a military base,” I realized aloud. “One the machines built during their war to extinguish mankind.”

She shook her head. “It wasn’t like that. They didn’t want us extinguished. They needed us—and hated that they needed us. We were wild, and upset their careful plans. We had given over everything to them, made them build everything from starships to tea kettles, and they ordered cities the way men ordered the gearworks in a clock. But they wanted more, and their vision called for man to be only another creature in the garden, and not the master of it—or so Father tells it. ‘They could not grapple with that part of man that made him more than beast.’” She said these words with a fervency and the light of romance in her face, and for a moment she seemed only a girl like any other, and not like a link in Kharn Sagara’s long chain, though I felt certain the words she quoted were his own. “‘Love, duty, and the urge to write, to create and build new things. Those things which man had carried with him down out of the jungles of his birth by the first light of history.’”

I shook my head. “Those things carried us.”

The girl shrugged. “The machines had been built by men who had little use for such things, being like machines themselves. So they built new men, men without chests, Father says. Men made stupid by the machines to serve their designs. That’s what frightened the rest of us, like I said. That’s what started the war.”

“I thought your father was born hundreds of years after all this,” I said. “Men didn’t live so long in those days.”

But I had forgotten my fairy tales, forgotten my history. “His people were poets. Artists. People who believed. Precisely the sort of people that troubled the machines most, and they remembered. Remembered the war, Emperor William, the Advent, Felsenburgh, and all the rest.” She smoothed down her brother’s hair, eyes never leaving my face, as though she expected I might fly at the both of them with my sword. I supposed I could not blame her. After all, when we had first met, Valka and I both had threatened them and slain their clone siblings in their tanks. I could not begrudge their fear.

“You haven’t answered my question, though,” I said, though perhaps she had tried. I repeated myself. “Brethren could devour the stars?”

“I told you,” she said, “they built weapons more terrible than anything you can imagine. Weapons that—”

“That’s quite enough, Mistress Suzuha.”

Right on cue, I thought, pivoting on my heel. Where Yume had come from I cannot say, but the golem had appeared on the rise of stone above the shoreline, looking down on us with its one red eye.

“Come away from Lord Marlowe, children,” Yume said, its crystalline voice as erudite and polished as ever. “He has had a busy day.” Ren peeled off his sister’s side and hurried up toward his machine servant, offering no objection or word of protest. Suzuha did not move. “Mistress Suzuha, please.”

Still, she did not move, ignored the golem’s next requests that she accompany him. She did not know what to do with her hands, as if she could not decide between crossing her arms and some other, vaguer gesture. “What did you mean? When you said you knew what was going to happen to Vorgossos?”

“Mistress!”

I cannot say why, but I felt only a little threat from Yume, though I felt certain the beast could move at least as fast as Calvert had, with that blinding, nightmare speed of the inhuman. Feeling safe, then, I answered, “It will be destroyed.”

The color drained from her face a moment, for I had spoken with the casual air of one who merely answered a question, making no threats. But the blood returned to her lips a moment later and the fire with it, and she almost shouted, “You lie!”

“I may be mistaken,” I conceded, sparing a glance to the impassive machine in its one-eyed masquerade mask. “I do not lie.”

“How?” Were those tears unfallen in those pitiless eyes? Or only my reflection?

“You have to ask?” I paused, expecting again that Yume would interfere. It did not. “The Empire has found you. Found Brethren and your father and all his works. Do you think they’ll let you go?”

The fear in Suzuha’s eyes vanished at once, and I understood why Yume had not interfered. “Is that all?” Again she pointed her chin like a weapon, unafraid. “You haven’t been listening to me, have you? Father has their war machines at his command. Send your legions. Send a thousand of them! Father will feed them to Brethren and stack their bones beneath his palace.”

“I said that’s enough, Mistress Suzuha!” Yume said, disentangling itself from Ren and stepping smartly from the rise. It fell like a marionette descending from above stage on unseen strings, crossing one hand over its chest as it bowed. “Your father has summoned you and Master Ren. It is time for supper.”

The girl lingered a moment, just long enough to smile at me and say, “You think too much of yourselves, you Sollans.” Her smile widened, displaying her teeth as though she were some manner of wolf. Then she turned to go.

“Lady Suzuha!” I said, ever needing the last word and ever determined to have it. “You forget one thing.” She half-turned back, but Yume had its iron hand on her and kept her moving forward. She did not say anything. “We defeated the daimons once before, we Sollans. We will do it again.” I was boasting. I should not boast.

They vanished into the night, passing like a line of statues—like ghosts—leaving me alone, a ghost myself, as we always are in our solitary moments. That ghost named Hadrian turned back to the water, fancying he saw the shape of some pale fish swimming near the surface.

And not a gull in sight.