NEGOTIATIONS WERE LONG.

I shall not rest on the weeks of hearings and conversations, nor mire you in the details and double-think and the quagmire that was negotiating with the Lothrians. Whole days were spent waiting for the quantum telegraph drip to transmit documents to the Imperial Council—data flitting one bit at a time across the thousands of light-years between Padmurak and Forum. Days more passed while the Council communicated with the Emperor, who had long since left Nessus on his tour of the frontier. I gathered he had stopped on Vanaheim and would remain there for some months.

The Council and Emperor both were unwilling to cede unsettled territory in the Upper Perseus. The Commonwealth had spread across the upper reaches of the Sagittarius, forming a bulwark that kept our own settlers from lighting out across the galactic west. It was their presence in the first place that had forced Imperial settlements to cross the Second Gulf by way of worlds like Gododdin into the Centaurine in the first place. Access to the Perseus would not only open up new expanses for settlement by the Commonwealth and give them access to the Outer Arm and the galaxy’s edge, but would bring the Lothrian frontier dangerously close to the Durantine Republic and the Principalities of Jadd, a development that would not endear us to the Durantines or our Jaddian allies.

The Cielcin were the greatest threat humanity had known since Columbia and her daughters, but no threat justified such a betrayal of our allies.

At the same time, we could not refuse. We needed Lothrian support, and I could not afford to return to Nessus and Caesar in anything but triumph. And so I too circled the subject of our arrangement with Lothrian imprecision. Other concessions were made, the possibility of Lothrian settlements in a reconquered Norman Expanse were floated as a possibility, and new borders were drawn across the Rasan Belt, the no-man’s-land between Empire and Commonwealth across the Sagittarius.

It was dry work, and the details of it bear little on this accounting.

Valka grew tired of the whole business in a matter of days, and I could not blame her. She had insisted on coming down to the city with me—she would not be left behind. I had long ago learned my lesson. Since Berenike, she and I were seldom parted, and then only because some other agency mandated it—such as had happened with Eikana—or because we agreed to go our own ways. She ceased to sit in on my talks with the various Chairs after the first few days, preferring to remain in the lavish apartments in the palace complex our hosts had set aside for us. We spent many an evening dining with the various members of the Imperial consulate’s staff.

The chiefest of these was Lord Damon Argyris, Chief Consul to Padmurak. Argyris had spent the better part of the last fifty years in Vedatharad—nearly all of it within the walls of the embassy tower. “They don’t hold with foreigners in their cities, these Lothrians,” he said. “It’s gotten worse. In my predecessor’s day, there was a foreign market past Eleventh Dome where offworld merchants were allowed to trade. Not ours, of course. Not since the Persean Wars. But offworlders all the same.” The consul rested his head against the minutely tiled wall of the sauna, dabbed at his forehead with a corner of the towel he wore draped about his muscled frame like a toga. “Truth be told, I’m almost surprised the Grand Conclave had any interest in the Emperor’s material concessions. The fuel, maybe—you never can have enough—but I almost expected them to refuse the offers of trade. Perhaps things are different in the other Commonwealth systems, but Padmurak had become nearly so inaccessible as the Earth itself.”

“I suppose we should be grateful,” I said, admiring the high-resolution mosaic that dominated the wall behind the consul. It depicted the God Emperor as a hero of classic antiquity—muscled and nude—crushing an iron serpent beneath his heel. One hand clutched the mechanical demon about the throat, the other raised a flaming sword. So small were the individual tesserae, each as small or smaller than a grain of rice—that the mosaic appeared no mosaic at all, but a painted image that glistened with the steam of the baths.

From the way Argyris’s eyes had wandered, I knew he was admiring the other bathers. When the consul remained silent, I added, “Since the Emperor will never allow Lothrian settlement of the Perseus, we should take what we can get.”

Still Argyris said nothing. I cleared my throat. “No indeed!” he said, smoothing his mustache with one hand. “To do so would be to undo the work of centuries.” His black eyes focused on me again, wrenched from the sight of so much nude flesh at great personal cost. “I’m not comfortable with the potential re-drawing of the borders in the Rasan Belt, either.” The Belt had formed a neutral zone between the Commonwealth and the Empire since the Persean Wars, a hundred-light-year-wide space that both powers agreed to leave unsettled. The new arrangement—if agreed upon—would close that space by half entirely on the Commonwealth’s side, allowing them to settle and prospect rank thousands of new solar systems. It was not access to the Perseus and the Jaddian border, but it was something—a clear loss and concession on the part of the Empire.

“Nor am I,” I said, falling silent. I gripped the edges of the stone bench on which I sat as Argyris gestured for his serving girl to lave more water on the hot rocks between us. Her gold collar marked her for a slave, and I reminded myself that for my moral outrage at the strictures of the Lothriad, the Empire committed its own sins. Steam flowered between the consul and myself, and as the girl leaned forward to collect more water, Argyris reached up to touch one bare breast. The girl said nothing, but flinched when the consul pinched her nipple.

“Enough!” I snapped.

Argyris glowered at me, but let her go.

“Give me the ladle, miss,” I said to her, extending my left hand. Unintended, the hideous, deep scars on my arm stood out silver-white in the yellow light from the lamps floating overhead. I saw her eyes go to the old injuries, felt the consul’s gaze too. Impatient now, eager to get her gone and away from Argyris—if only for a time—I snapped my fingers at her. Wordless, she passed the instrument over. “You may go.”

“Hold on just one moment!” Argyris said, glowering at me. “You can’t just!”

The girl was caught between her master and myself, and stood, visibly torn, barefoot and wearing nothing but a silken breechclout and the gold costume jewelry the consul had dressed her in. “Lord Argyris, we are having a serious conversation,” I said dryly, brandishing the ladle like a schoolmaster’s baton. “Do try and focus.” Both of us being palatine, I had no way to know Damon Argyris’s age, or even if he were my junior or senior. After the first hundred years of living, I’ve found diminishing returns on maturity to be the rule, not the exception. Whether he was two hundred or five, Argyris was a creature of habit as surely as I was; it was only that I found his appetites grotesque. As a boy, I had nearly pressed one of my own servants to service me before realizing what it was I was doing. I had thought it possible that she might love me. I’d hoped she would. But there exists a gulf between master and servant—even more so between master and slave—that is wider than the Rasan Belt, wider than the Gulfs where no stars shine, and the only avenue across it is coercion.

And love does not coerce.

I had realized my mistake in time. Had I not, I supposed it might have been me harassing slave girls in the consulary bathhouse. Reflecting on this, I ladled more water over the rocks. Amid the steam I said only, “Let her go, Argyris.”

Remembering that I was the Emperor’s apostol and a knight of the Royal Victorian Order—and the Halfmortal besides, as my scars too obviously attested—Argyris swallowed and waved the girl away. Swaying, she hurried off, and in her wake, the consul shrugged. “Have it your way, then.”

Smiling my crooked smile, I circled back. “You said things have changed here?”

“Oh yes,” the consul grimaced. “Like I say, they shut down the foreign market before my time here, but even when I was new it was possible to walk down the street without a Lothrian escort . . . now . . .” He stretched luxuriantly, craning his neck to continue his observation of the room. “Now Padmurak is a world of tunnels. Shuttle to motorcar to building to tram to next building, chaperones all the way.”

“I assume they don’t want us to see their way of life?”

“They don’t want us to see how dirt poor they are,” he said, dismissive. “For all their talk about the good of the People, their perfect order is good for very few.” Argyris wiped his face again with his towel. “You can see it driving around if you look. They do their best to paper over the parts we get to see. But every now and then an accident on the highways will put you through the next block and you’ll see it: crumbling roads, broken windows, shuttered hives.”

“Hives?”

“Those blockhouses the zuk workers live in around the perimeter of each dome. Call them vuli, hives.”

I could not help but stare at this. “Like . . . bees?”

“Aye, like bees.” The consul chewed his lip, “Damn it, Marlowe. You sent my girl away and the steam’s going.” Obliging the fellow, I poured water over the black stones between us. “That’s better,” he said. “City’s not crowded like it used to be. I’ve heard talk of the Conclave redistributing the population. They’re always worried about a mob here—the domes, you know. Very susceptible to sabotage. And there’s the revolutionaries to mind.”

That caught my attention. “I’ve never heard about Lothrian revolutionaries.”

“That’s how they like it,” Argyris said coolly. “But there are liberalist revolutionaries, if the Commonwealth broadcasts are to be believed.”

“Liberalists?” I raised one eyebrow. “Republicans?”

“Not sure if they’ve thought so far ahead.” The consul groaned as another wave of steam rose about us. “Not sure they exist, to be honest. Our intelligence boffins think they might be a party bogeyman. Pure propaganda.”

I felt myself getting confused and again set the ladle down. “I thought you said they feared the mob.”

“Of course they do. There are—best guess—one point three billion people on Padmurak. Maybe twenty . . . twenty-five million in Vedatharad? But fewer than a million of those are proper pitrasnuks. The Chairs and their ilk are outnumbered, and that makes them hostages to their own people.” That at least was not so different from how things were in the Empire. A lord ruled only by consent of the governed, even if that consent was not enshrined in law. The threat of popular revolt was an eternal problem, one only solved by just rule. Lords who ruled harshly, as my father did, had no choice but to rule more harshly day by day to keep their people in line. Machiavelli had it wrong. Far better to be loved than feared—and better still to be both loved and feared.

But of the obligation of kings I’d seen little in the Commonwealth. Beneath its veneer of fresh paint and buildings sprayed clean of grime, the city—and perhaps the entire Commonwealth—was crumbling with neglect.

“You should hear their broadcasts,” Argyris continued. “Pure poison. If it’s not their liberalists blamed for stealing rations or blowing the air supply, it’s us for blockading trade routes.”

“Bread and circuses,” I said knowingly, arms crossed.

“Mostly circuses. The bread goes to the partisans,” Argyris assented with a sigh. “Of course, they’re the ones who closed the trade routes in the first place, we just won’t reopen them. Always accuse the enemy of what you’re doing.”

Into that pregnant silence I laved another cup of water, struck by the cosmic irony of our circumstances: two nobiles of the Imperium—rich men by all accounts—enjoying the consul’s lavish appointments while the city outside the embassy tower fell into neglect and disrepair. I mollified myself with thoughts of Anju and the staff at Maddalo House, and of the pension I’d left for them. A small thing measured against the grinding poverty of the Commonwealth, but something.

A young logothete emerged from a nearby pool and collected his towel from a stone bench, bare feet slapping on the tile floor. Argyris watched him go with something like approval. I waited him out, and when at last the object of his interest had gone from sight, I said, “The Eleventh Chair invited Doctor Onderra and myself to witness the ice harvest down south end of the week—and we’re to visit the city farms tomorrow. Will you be joining us?”

“No, my lord,” Argyris said. “Ghastly business, those ice mines, but it will give you a sense—I think—for what this place is really like. Likewise the farms. Built like a fortress! I will be with you for the First Ballet, however.” That was three days before the polar expedition. “I’m told they’ll be performing Ademar’s Earth Afire in our honor.”

“I can’t say I expected theater from the Lothrians,” I said.

“Void as they are of color?” the consul asked, a knowing edge in his deep voice. “No, they’ll still find ways to surprise you. Don’t tell anyone on Forum I said it, but the Lothrian First Ballet are the best I’ve ever seen. Better than anything the Emperor puts on.”

Circling back to the more immediate subject, I said, “I’m surprised the Lothrians don’t have a better source of water. Don’t they recycle what they bring in from the ice?”

This return to less aesthetic pursuits clearly dimmed the light in Damon Argyris’s eyes. “Yes . . . well, they do, Sir Hadrian. You saw the dam and the sluice gates on your way in?”

I told him I had.

“The domes are not the original city—or so my predecessor said. The Lothrians have been on Padmurak a long time. They dug tunnels first, whole networks below the surface. It’s where they got the notion of hives, I’ll warrant. After the domes went up, the tunnels were converted to infrastructure. Highways, ventilation, waterworks. But it’s not enough. Even with the City shrinking—as I say—they still use more than they can take in. Padmurak lacks for water, aye, but what she really lacks . . .” he gestured round at the baths, “is air.”