ONE ENCOUNTER WITH BASSANDER the next day drove me from the Pharaoh again—this time in possession of the black leather pencil kit and folio I’d left in my room, along with a few others of my possessions. I shuttled over to the Balmung, intended to spend the rest of my time there before the jump to warp and my inevitable return to fugue. It was easy to pretend—as the days went by—that Jinan’s siding with Bassander had not rattled me. I knew she was only doing her duty, and I was grateful we were holding position instead of returning to the Imperial fleet.

Superluminal communication takes time. Only a single pair of slaved particles is shared between our telegraph and the other; data dripped across the uncounted light-years one bit at a time. Short messages, text, were quick enough. But images, video, complex files . . . these took time to compile, and longer for the fleet to reply to. If our little meeting had been a nightmare, it was nothing next to whatever Raine Smythe and the high officers endured. Secure as we were in our position, we might hold out for days.

And we did.

“I don’t know how you deal with it,” Elara said, setting the serving board on the center of a glass dining table. “That Lin gives me the creeps, him always watching those security feeds.”

I glanced at Jinan and smiled despite myself. “Well, mostly I try not to sleep there.” Jinan squeezed my knee under the table. “I like it here better. It’s all his people over on the Pharaoh.”

Pallino came through the arched bulkhead from the small kitchen that serviced the Balmung’s executive dining room. With his paramour and Switch in tow he finished setting the table. I was grateful for Elara’s statement; it had broken the tense silence with Jinan and myself and whatever it was between Jinan and Valka.

“Well, we’re all much better looking,” Switch said, taking the seat opposite me with a huge serving bowl filled with a pasta tossed with onion, pepper, and mushroom pulled from the hydroponics section. “But that’s mostly me.” Valka snorted, and Elara hit him in the back of the head with a spoon. Switch yelped.

“Lin’s a right peacock. Parents were Legion, probably their parents were Legion and that’s how he got his commission. Got his baton shoved up his ass more than in his hand, you take my meaning,” Pallino said, settling in between Switch and Elara at the round table. Over their shoulders, a holograph plate projected a vision of the Pharaoh and the smaller Mistral ahead of us in orbit above weeping, umber Rustam. “You get his like all the time. Competent, but he lets his . . . his principles run him into bad decisions. The sort of officer who thinks using his dead mates for sandbags is glorious.”

At my left hand, Valka took the water pitcher from Switch and poured for herself. “’Tis nothing glorious in that.”

“In using your mates for sandbags? Nah,” Pallino said, working a finger under the strap of his eyepatch and adjusting it against his stiff white hair. “The glory’s in being the sandbag, in saving your brother’s life.”

“We’ve hit a dead end. Don’t be too hard on him,” Jinan said in her Captain Azhar voice, a little more stiffly than the woman I knew. “Bassander is acting on the intelligence he has.”

Valka passed me the water pitcher, saying, “Indeed, but therein lies your problem, captain.” She held her hands like the pans of a scale. “Military intelligence can make up for the other kind, and vice versa, but Lin’s short on both.”

“That is not true,” Jinan said. “He’s overworked. You know he spent the whole flight from Sanora awake, yes? Coordinating with the fleet? He’s exhausted. Anyone would be.”

“Then he should put himself in fugue for a while,” I suggested. “It’s not an excuse for running back with his tail between his legs.”

My Jaddian captain did not look at me as she said, “We still have no idea what intelligence is on The Painted Man’s terminal. Once we know that, we can make an informed decision.”

I bit back the retort that came to mind, stared down at my empty plate. Thinking better of saying anything further, I busied myself serving Jinan and then myself. Ordinarily, my captain would have slapped my hand away and served herself. That she did no such thing struck me as a bad sign.

“You made all this yourself?” Valka asked Switch, lifting the serving dish to spoon the short noodles from their golden ceramic bowl and onto her plate.

The lictor grinned ruefully. “No, it was mostly Pallino. I was just the fetch and carry.”

“The kid doesn’t give himself enough credit!” said one-eyed Pallino. “He did the roast this time, and the sauce for the pasta. I mostly glared at him and chopped things.” Valka grinned, passed the bowl to Jinan with a polite smile, and shook her head. Seeing this, Pallino asked, “What?”

“You never cease to astonish, you saichdattr,” she said, meaning those of us who came from the coliseum. “’Tis not a chef one envisions when one pictures an Imperial fighting man.” She raised her glass in salute.

“Meaning no disrespect, doctor, you’re not what one pictures when he thinks of a Tavrosi sorcerer.” Pallino mirrored the salute. “Besides, grow up with a grandmother like mine and see how far you get without learning to cook. Woman would die of shame if any nipote of hers couldn’t make a proper meal.”

“Nipote?” Jinan repeated. “Was she Jaddian, you grandmother?”

Pallino frowned, taking the serving bowl from Jinan. “No, I don’t think so. My family lived on Trieste, well . . . since the beginning. I was the first of my village to go to the Legions in over five hundred years. They knew they would never see me again, but my old nona was so proud. Her boy out there fighting for the Emperor. She were right pious, that one.”

“It is a Jaddian word,” Jinan said. “Perhaps we are cousins somewhere far back.”

The one-eyed old soldier shrugged, ladling the pasta to his plate without ceremony. “Might do, aye. Might be there was something of what went on to be your people as settled on Trieste on their way out from the old-old Empire. Might do . . . might do.” He set the serving bowl on the table. “Ask His Radiance, here. Had’s got the head for this sort of thing.”

I flinched and almost dropped my fork. The His Radiance hit me too close to where I lived. Ghen had called me that, and it was catching. It seemed almost a sacrilege that it could still be said, now that Ghen was gone. I did set my fork down with great care. “It’s possible. It’s not easy to track migration patterns anymore, and I don’t know so much about your homeworld, Pallino, but . . . sure.” I looked at my plate the entire time, at the dripping slice of imitation beef beside the pasta in its red sauce. Becoming aware of this, I inhaled sharply and sat a little straighter. “Sorry. I . . .” I took up my cup—water, not wine—turned it in my hands. “I wanted to say something.” All eyes turned to me as they had in council, though here the effect was of warmth, not coldness.

My friends, such as I had found and had found me. Switch, transformed from boy to man, victim to victor. Pallino, who had been like a father to us both, or at least a gruff old uncle. Elara was there beside him, younger and quieter than Pallino and with an easy smile and a laugh the years have not obscured from me. And there were Jinan and Valka, who mattered to me and would matter more than all the gold in Avalon—though I paid more dearly than any Emperor. My friends. My family. Made and not begotten. Only Siran was missing, who was stationed on the Mistral and had not joined us.

And Ghen, who was dead.

“I wasn’t sure what to say,” I began, voice tripping over itself in a way that sounded very much not like the Hadrian Marlowe I knew. “And to be honest I still have no idea. But we’ve an empty chair at our table, and we’ll always have that empty chair.” At once I found I could not look the others in the eye, and focused instead on my reflection in the gleaming dark of the wall between Switch and Pallino’s shoulders. “He died brave as he lived. Pulled two of those monsters apart with his bare hands, I think. But I sent him down those stairs to try and find us a way out. He didn’t question me—and Earth knows the bastard had questions in him. But he went.” I was lying. Trickery had killed Ghen. Trickery and cowardice. He’d been shot in the back by The Painted Man while the vile creature wore the face of a friend and Ghen had grappled with those SOM demons. And so I turned my lie into blame. “I should have been faster . . . If I’d gone with him.”

“Now hold on, Had,” Switch said, who alone of the company had shared the last horrible adventure with me, “That wasn’t your fault. That homunculus would have killed Ghen anyway when it took you. There wasn’t anything you could do.”

That drew a sad smile from me, but I suppressed the urge to say that yes, it was my fault. Instead, I shook my head and said, “Ghen was a good man. Hard to learn to like but easy to keep liking.” His face flickered before me, laughing in the coliseum, then again in the dark of The Painted Man’s office. My knuckles whitened on the cup. “He gave his life for us, same as the others, but was our friend. He was my friend.” I found the strength to look at Pallino, at Elara. Switch. The cup, when I raised it, weighed some amount I could not gauge. Too heavy, as if it held all the blood in a man’s body and not the little water there was in truth. “Ghen. We will never see his like again.”

“Ghen!” all said.

It is hard, Reader, to find words for the dead when one has no religion. One cannot say the deceased is in a better place, or that they are better off—though perhaps it is so that not to exist is better sometimes than to suffer in the world. One cannot offer prayers, though one may light the votive lamps and send them drifting to the sky. It would be a long while before I lit a proper lamp for Ghen, as it would be a long while before I found myself in a shrine, and when that time came his was but one of several lamps released unto the sky. I think it was Orodes who said the first act of civilization—the moment culture was born—was when those ancient pygmies, our forefathers, held the first funeral. The bright line, he writes, between man and what was before man is drawn by that dignity with which we honor the dead. Man does not leave her dead to rot, but burns or buries or builds, protecting the body and the memory of the fallen. There is civilization: its cornerstone a grave.

“Don’t seem right,” Switch said, having drained his own cup. A rueful smile pulled across his chiseled face. “If it were one of us, that big bastard’d be running down the whole list of dumb shit we did. He wouldn’t have gone all solemn.” He rubbed his sleeve over his eyes; a weak and soundless laugh escaped him. Pallino and I joined in. “If you told me he’d be the one to go first . . . before me . . .” He shook his head, and Pallino clapped him on the shoulder.

“You can’t let that get to you,” Elara said. “It’s just like fighting in the pits, lad. There ain’t no reason he died instead of you or Had or that Greenlaw woman. Like you just said to Had, it ain’t your fault.”

Switch nodded, shut his eyes. When they opened they no longer shimmered with unfallen tears. “No, I . . . I know.”

Of all people, it was Valka who cut in. “He’s still a part of us.” Her strange Tavrosi accent gave a weight to her words. “Every memory we have is still here. I did not know him well as you, but I think you’re right: he would not want us all solemn. Come!” And she told a story about how Ghen had gotten into a fight with one of Jinan’s aljanhi commanders after Ghen made fun of the man’s hat. The man had sent Ghen a matching hat, hoping to shame the Emeshi myrmidon. But Ghen had no shame, and had worn the thing in a heartbeat, and the Jaddian commander had backed down at once. “’Twas the ugliest thing I’d ever seen,” Valka said. “It had these green feathers all over. Where the aljanhi got another I’ve no idea. But Ghen wore the bloody thing for a week.”

“I missed that!” Elara proclaimed, laughing.

So it went on for the better part of an hour, each of us swapping stories about Ghen. Switch recounted a story of how Ghen had kept leaving him fake love notes back in the coliseum at Emesh. “I knew it was him at once. Bastard could hardly spell, but I let on I thought it was this chappie up from Tolbaran I’d had eyes for—this was before you’d come along, Had. He kept it up for weeks.”

“And you just let him?”

Switch grinned. “Yeah! I think he was mocking me for . . . well, you know what he was like, but I kept letting on how much I liked them. He didn’t know what to do with that!”

Pallino had another story, about how Ghen had stepped in at a bar on Ardistama, not so long after we’d left Emesh. “To teach these local boys some manners, he said. To impress the girls, I said. Ghen tossed those blighters round like they were sacks of flour. I ain’t never seen grown men run so fast.”

By the end we were all laughing, and what tears fell were not all of grief. Even I, who among those gathered was perhaps the most somber—having shouldered the blame for Ghen’s death—even I was moved more to laughter than to sorrow or shame. We have little control over our ends, and none over what passes beyond them. But if we live well and truly, those who follow on may remember us for our lives and not our deaths.

Perhaps it was for that reason I blurred the circumstances of Ghen’s death. It was not that I lied, but that I valorized those final moments because the truth is so much larger than those material facts of the world. Better to recall his rough laugh than imagine whatever horrid sounds he’d made with damaged lungs in those final moments in the tea house.

Better the reassuring fable than the clinical truth. Fables are more real than reality. Such are your stories about me—many of which I began, knowing the power of stories as I do. I could not have made peace at the Battle of Aptucca years later if my legend were not more true than myself. By this fact of human nature and belief, we are made larger than ourselves: some better, some worse, some only more complicated. Thus two and two is made five, and so we grow beyond ourselves.