MY TOUR OF THE water-harvesting facility in the south polar regions had been unremarkable. Valka had remained in our suite in the Sollan Embassy under the watchful eyes of Damon Argyris and the consular staff; her seizure had been one of the worst in recent years. She’d recovered, but the thought of traveling from the Great City and across the wastes by train to a place the Lothrians called Lahe Uenalochta, Everfrost Station, was more than she could bear. The journey had taken nearly two days by train, packed into spartan accommodations with Pallino and Crim and twenty guards for company.

Of the camp itself I shall say little. But I saw a zuk, a woman, forced to stand naked on the ice beneath the station’s dome for some crime—they would not tell me what it was, or let me approach. She had no hair, and little flesh on her bones. Her feet were turning blue.

But I could not have seen it.

There are no women on Padmurak, I was told. And no men either.

I am no prophet. The visions of all our futures that the Quiet poured into my head are unsorted, and I lack the wit to sift wheat from chaff. I know only what can happen, what may happen—and only a little of that. So I shall not prophesy. But I know the Commonwealth will fall. Whether by sword or by beast, by famine or thirst, I know not, but I know it will. What Gods there may be—mine or any other—cannot long tolerate such crimes. So too our Empire will fall. It is falling already. I have knocked its pillars down, torn out its heart with the heart of my star. The world is changing, and as Valka said: time does not run backward, nor entropy turn back.

We remained at Lahe Uenalochta for but two days. I dined with the Commandant, who was indistinguishable from every partisan and military person of the Commonwealth I had met. I cannot even recall his face, though I recall every line of the woman’s. It was her face I drew in the little sketchbook I secreted in a pocket of the heavy coat I wore.

The train put in near Thirteenth Dome, near the southernmost tip of Vedatharad. Our representative escort chivvied us from the train into a fleet of black motorcars that seated five men each. With traffic cleared along the route ahead, we were expected to pass along the underground highway through Eighth Dome on our return to the Imperial Embassy. Our drivers were Lothrians; only their partisans were allowed to drive vehicles in the Great City. It simply would not do to give outsiders much latitude in exploring the capital in all its ruined splendor. Besides, only those raised in Vedatharad stood a chance of navigating the circuitry-dense streets that honeycombed the bedrock beneath the domed arcologies of the city.

“You heard from her?” Pallino asked, eyeing me with his customary paternal concern.

“No signal yet,” I said in answer, realizing as I spoke why the Lothrians had decided on a metal skeleton for their great domes. Each bubble was a Faraday Shield, an iron net that blocked standard radio and tight-beam transmissions. The denizens of each of the city’s domes were cut off from the next, unable to communicate, unable to coordinate.

Pallino chewed his lip and looked for all the worlds like he meant to spit in the Lothrian vehicle. “Thought she was getting better.”

“She was,” I said, sparing a moment’s notice for our Lothrian representative and the three other hoplites of my guard who’d joined us. I did not wish to discuss Valka’s condition in front of any Commonwealth partisan, or to give any details about her implants, for such things were frowned upon even in that far country. Nor did I wish to discuss her reference to the other neural lace she’d sensed in the theater—assuming it was not only Urbaine’s shadow. “But it’s not the sort of thing that ever really heals.”

Beyond the window, gray towers rose almost to the level of the dome three thousand feet above. Vaguely I recalled this stretch of highway from our journey out to Everfrost Station. Our track skirted the perimeter of the dome past bridge after bridge that turned inward and ran across the lower district and the dense network of canals and waterways that shot through it toward the towers in the dome’s heart. We had only to follow the perimeter and this road would dip back and braid itself into another of the underground thoroughfares that would carry us direct to First Dome and the embassy.

“Only wish her people’d done more to actually help instead of tried to fry her head,” Pallino said.

“She’s all right,” I said, unwilling to agree. To say that Valka was damaged was to betray her victories. My mind went to my old basin, its shards held together by silver solder. Was I too not scarred? Valka had never spurned my wounds—not even my death—how could I not return what she had given me?

Over the rail to our left, the road fell off quickly, plunged a thousand feet or more to streets and water channels where fresh floods newly arrived from places like Everfrost burst from sluices below us into the city.

“I’m surprised there’s any open water here,” I said.

“Let there be provision for all the People,” our representative intoned, responding to the translation of my remarks through his earpiece. “Let there be water and food and rest for all that labor.”

Pallino leaned across to me. “The hell’d he say?”

Our Lothrian escort had of course spoken in his own native tongue. “Nothing,” I told Pallino, and that was true. Pallino sat a little straighter then. He was seated facing forward and so had a view of the road ahead. He leaned against the window, trying to get a better view of something. “What is it?”

Gone was the fellow’s casual air, and from the way his lips moved I could tell he was subvocalizing with his lieutenants in the other vehicles. I craned my neck to look, but whatever Pallino saw I could not see.

“Military police in the road. Flares.” Pallino looked round at our Lothrian escort, who sat blinking at the sudden change in my lictor’s demeanor. “The hell is this?”

I felt certain then that our Lothrian friend understood Galstani perfectly, for he looked round like a man in pursuit of an answer even as his earpiece murmured its translation. “The enemies of the People are everywhere,” he recited.

“Details, man!” Pallino hissed when I’d rendered this translation. “How do these braindead fuckers get anything done?”

“When our backs are turned,” I said dryly, not caring what our host might think, and made the thumb-and-pointed-forefinger gesture that meant stay alert.

No sooner had I said this did our car begin to slow. Through the heavy doors and armored windows I heard shouting in Lothrian, though the specific words and quotations used were lost.

“They’re directing us over the bridge,” Pallino said. “Road must be out.” He glowered at the Lothrian sitting beside me. “Hey. Grayface. Why is the road out?”

The Lothrian only blinked at him.

Pallino leaned across the compartment, blue eyes flashing. “I asked you a question. Why is the road blocked?”

Laying a hand on Pallino’s arm, I repeated the question in the Lothrian’s own language.

The Lothrian representative tilted his head, listening to some message from the powers that held his strings. “On behalf of the Conclave,” he said, marking his next words for an actual response, “there has been a disturbance along the N4 connecting to First Dome. A collision has blocked traffic in the tunnel. The delegation and escort must reroute to the C7.”

Pallino turned to me for translation. “Traffic accident in the tunnel,” I said. “They’re sending us another way.”

Peering out the window, I watched the black beetle shapes of the Lothrian motorcars marching along behind us as we began to roll again. Despite the inconvenience and the faint thrill of concern—after so many years a soldier and so strange a life, any deviation from the plan was an occasion for worry—I could not help but feel a spike of curiosity at the prospect of turning off the carpet which the Lothrian government had unrolled for our arrival. I half-expected the windows to turn opaque, but they never did. Not as we turned across the bridge over the lower district toward the gray towers at the heart of the dome, nor when we reached the far side.

Like the other kupa, the other domes we’d passed through, Eighth Dome’s most developed urban spaces lay in the center, where the steel-and-glass false sky was highest. In First Dome, the central buildings were all Party government buildings, with the ziggurat of the People’s Palace standing above all. There was no comparable central structure here, only tower after square tower rising dark and nearly windowless into the gray and misty air.

“Seen better days, eh?” Pallino asked, watching broken glass facades and crowds of men in tatty gray overcoats clustered about oil drum fires. I saw more men, more zuks here than in the parts of Vedatharad we’d been meant to see, but the impression was still of emptiness. “If this is their capital, I’d hate to see what the colonies must be like.”

Thinking of the woman I had seen standing barefoot on the ice, I said, “More like Everfrost Station, I imagine.”

“Reckon they blame us blocking trade,” Pallino said, speaking as though our Lothrian tagalong were not present. “Figured they’d be happier with your terms. Dunno why it’s taking so long.”

Our talks had not been going well. Like the Cielcin, the Lothrians were limited by their language. They struggled to express or incorporate novelty into a system so frozen by the need for correct thought, and the process for approving new thoughts outside the limited context of the use of Voice was a slow and arduous one.

“No one ever said it would be easy,” I said, spotting a line of men and women standing in line outside the busted front of a dispensary marked with a black star and the word Paishka—Rations—marked in phosphorescent letters.

We came through the inner district, past the rusted hulks of long-abandoned groundcars. Down one street, a black-armored personnel carrier slowly rolled, blue klaxons flashing but silent. In silence then we skirted the perimeter of the inner district, traveling counter-clockwise toward another bridge that would carry us over the watercourses and canals and squat buildings of the outer ring. Turning to peer out the window, I had a clear vision of its gray span where it rose on concrete pilings, the tallest of which rose nearly a thousand feet above the canals and the rooftops below.

Our line of cars slowed as we approached, for the Conclave’s careful scrubbing of the streets had come too late, and the traffic ahead of us thickened with the trucks and groundcars of the Great City’s everyday life.

“On behalf of the Conclave, this route will add some eighty minutes to our travel time.”

“Great . . .” Pallino said. “More of this.”

In time we pulled out onto the bridge and into six lanes of traffic.

“They’re clearing the way ahead, Crim says,” Pallino said, two fingers to the comm patch behind his ear. Crim was riding in the foremost car, with the rest of us strung out between the other five vehicles. “Pushing the cars to each side.”

Still our progress was slow. A klaxon blared from the foremost vehicle, and an amplified voice rang out in flattened Lothrian. “Clear the way,” it said. “Clear the way.”

We ground to a halt.

Pallino swore under his breath.

Uncomfortable silence filled the cab like water, my hoplites shifting in their seats. The Lothrian man sat there unmoving as a stone, eyes fixed on a point out the far window, mind lost somewhere in the curling mist above the low district hundreds of feet below us. I watched with him, looking back at the gray towers like headstones beneath the center of Eighth Dome.

It looked strangely familiar to me, as though I’d been there before. Was it Vorgossos again? The memory of Kharn’s ancient city has never left me, so powerful was its first dark impression.

We’d sat there unmoving for the better part of ten minutes before the shouting began.

“What’s that?” I turned to see.

Pallino’s craggy, revitalized face turned down in an expression of grave alertness. Turning to our escort, he barked, “What’s going on?”

The representative shook his head and did not answer.

Pallino seized the man by the front of his drab, gray tunic.

“Let him go!” I hissed. When Pallino did not, I reached out and laid a hand on his wrist once more. “I won’t have you starting an international incident over a traffic jam, Pallino. Stand—”

Down.

But the last word caught in my throat, canceled by a soft and distant popping.

The crack of gunfire.

Pallino’s grip tightened on the representative’s lapels. “What the hell is going on?”

Seeming to understand his meaning if not his words, the representative replied, “The . . .” He froze, clamped his jaw shut.

“The liberalists,” I said, stringing two and two together. I turned to the representative and repeated the statement. “Bodanukni. Paustanni?” Rebels?

Before he could think about an answer and self-censor, the representative nodded.

“Tell Crim and the others to get sharp,” I said, and worked the elastic coif free of my suit’s collar baffle. I pulled it over my head and tucked my long hair in and away from my face before I keyed the command to don my helmet. The segmented casque unfolded and closed about my head. The entoptics flicked on a moment later. All the while I heard distant gunshots. Screams.

Crim’s voice came over the line then, “. . . won’t be getting far in these cars. Anyone have eyes on the enemy?”

“None behind,” said one.

“Not yet,” said another.

The Norman-Jaddian commander replied. “Eyes forward. Watch the cars on either side. I don’t want us outflanked.”

“Tohn! Tohn!” came a distant cry. That was quickly in Lothrian.

Another gunshot. Not the crackling discharge of phase disruptors, nor the blaze of plasma.

“Is that a shotgun?” Pallino asked.

I could only nod. Rounding on the Lothrian representative I said, “Summon your prefects. Where are the Conclave Guard?”

The man’s frown deepened, and he said, “On behalf of the Conclave, the delegate is requested to stay in the vehicle. Help is on the way.”

“Bah!” I pressed the comm patch behind my own ear. “I want men posted on either rail. We need to outflank them, Commander.”

Crim’s reply was terse. “Aye, lord.”

He relayed the orders down-chain, tagging two men from each vehicle, ordering one right and one left. The two in ours moved to open the door, and the representative shouted, “The delegate is requested to stay in the vehicle. Help is on the way!”

The second hoplite out the door made a rude gesture. A shot rang out the moment his boots hit the pavement, and his shield flashed, making him stagger. He slammed the door, dropped into a half crouch as he snapped his short-stock plasma burner to attention, and moved for the cover of the stopped cars. What the gray-faced Lothrian peasantry must have thought to see Sollan Legionnaires in ivory plate and red tabards spilling from their Party’s groundcars was any man’s guess. The men moved with quiet efficiency, signaling for the zuks to abandon their vehicles and run. Many did, spilling back along the bridge for the inner portions of the district.

I remember being remarkably calm.

“Can we get word to the embassy?” I asked.

“Not through the fucking dome,” Pallino said.

More shouting. A gunshot shattered the window of the car opposite us.

“Help is on the way,” the Lothrian stooge repeated. “Stay in the vehicle.”

Something whistled on the air, and a moment later the whole car shook and lifted into the air, flipped clean over. Relatively safe in my armor, I threw an arm across the Lothrian to help pin him in place as the armored vehicle skidded upside down along the road.

“Rocket!” Pallino swore, escaping his restraints and falling to the ceiling beneath us. He kicked the door open.

“You have to stay!” the Lothrian man exclaimed, speaking Galstani as I dropped to follow my guards.

I was not shocked to find he spoke our language—I guessed every man the Conclave set to watch us must. “You stay,” I said, and slammed the door behind.

Mist and smoke mingled, and orange flames lit the gray day from places where cars were burning. Men and women in the dull gray coveralls of the zuk class ran past. Two cursed at me as they went by, still more went wide-eyed with fear.

“Ne bahovni, ne panovni!” one shouted and spat. No gods, no masters!

Still more shouted, “Zara! Zara!” That was king. Caesar. On their lips, it had the weight of a slur.

“They blame us for this,” I said, and flinched as a bullet broke against my shield.

“Fuck them! Earth rot their bones!” Pallino hissed, and raised his disruptor to fire.

One of the liberalist guerrillas had appeared from behind one of the cars. She fell in a tangle of limbs and gray fabric, her allegiance to some other order betrayed only by a red and white armband. I stared at her body a moment, wondering what lies or desperation had led her mutinous hand to turn on me.

I had no time to dwell on it.

“Where’s that grenadier?” I asked.

“No sign,” came Crim’s reply. “Pallino, get His Lordship under cover.” The swordsman tugged one of his throwing knives from its bandoleer and drew his ceramic sword. It shone white as milk as he turned. I drew my own sword, but did not kindle it. A hail of bullets fell about us, pockmarked the face of the upturned car. More men in gray with armbands or headbands striped red and white appeared, not charging but advancing slowly, methodically between the cars ahead. They did not move like revolutionaries, like anarchists or liberalists or whatever they called themselves, but like professional soldiers.

One of my guards fired, and his disruptor bolt caught—not on a shield—but on some insulating garment worn beneath the gray coveralls. The man flinched and turned under cover. Crim caught another as he emerged from the sidelines, having evidently dispatched one of our men by the rail. The white Norman sword flashed as Crim shoved the man’s rifle up and out of the way. The off-hand knife flashed. Blood flowered. Crim spun away, hurled his knife in a tumbling arc that caught another man behind the eyes. He fell like a Nipponese marionette, his shotgun discharging with a noise to shame the thunder.

The others opened fire, bullets tearing the air between us. Car windows shattered, and the fleeing people cried out and fell bleeding. We returned fire, hoplites crouched behind the government motorcars for added protection.

“We need to find whoever was behind that rocket!” I said to Pallino, gripping the old soldier by the upper arm.

Pallino nodded once, relayed my order over broad-band comm to the rest of my guard.

Where were the Lothrian prefects? Surely they had fliers inside the dome for rapid response. They should have been there already, filling the air to either side. Pallino fired around the rear of the car and hooted as he felled one of the enemy.

A bullet pinged the glass between our heads, and looking up I saw nearly half a dozen of the liberalists closing in from the other end of the bridge, each with a pistol leveled at our heads. Grateful for my shield, I almost laughed. It seemed innocent bystanders had not been the only people streaming past us.

“Well done . . .” I muttered under my breath.

Not waiting to allow Pallino the chance to gainsay me, I leaped away from the vehicle and pounded down the road toward them, crossing the empty space between the rear of our motorcade and these new assailants. The liberalists were picking their shots carefully, mindful of their fellows on the other side. A shot pinged off my shield, bullet dashed to flinders. I kindled my blade, highmatter flowing like mercury as I reached the nearest man. He’d stood bravely through it all, hoping my body shield might fail with each successive shot.

The fellow’s eyes were wide by the time I reached him, conviction shading to panic. He must have had little experience with Royse fields, had hoped to break my guard with so small an effort. An energy lance might, might have depleted the barrier in time, but common bullets?

He fell in two pieces.

Five men swiveled and fired on me, the shrapnel of their rounds filling the air around. I threw a hand over my face and dove sideways behind a parked van, still venting steam from its fuel cell. I felt the crunch of sheet metal and crack of glass as bullets riddled the hulk. The civilian vehicle lacked the armor of the government motorcade, and I feared a stray shot—or an expert one—might breach that fuel cell. I could not stay still.

One of the gunmen came round the side of the van, a shotgun in his hands. He wasn’t of the five—those all had held small arms. He must have come down the side by the rail. He thrust the muzzle forward like a bayonet, hoping to get the aperture inside the energy curtain of my shield before I could react. I slammed his head into the car beside us. Dazed, the fellow pulled the trigger by reflex, shots flashing off my shield and peppering the street beside us.

The man staggered back, bleeding from his head. Another shot pinged off my shield above my head, and I turned, distracted. Another of the liberalists had taken cover behind a low-slung car, had fired over the hood. Seeing his chance, the shotgunner darted forward with a yell.

Too slow.

The highmatter sword flashed once through a rising arc that cut the stock of the weapon in two and severed both the man’s arms. He fell back as a shot from one of my hoplites claimed the man who had shot me. I saw another target among the vehicles by the rail and ran toward him, heedless of the shots falling all around, the way they smote the concrete about my feet. At my back, Crim held the bulk of the liberalists at bay, knives flying and blade flashing.

I plunged toward the rail, blade hewing through a lamppost that toppled and fell with a splash into the waterway a thousand feet below. Another mighty explosion shook the bridge, and a nimbus of red flame flared where the fuel cell of one van stood burning. Scarlet light cast all the world in bloody colors, and I turned back to see black figures framed against the flames. Once more their precision struck me. Not a ragtag collection of desperate freedom fighters. No. These were soldiers trained and outfitted. I remembered what Damon Argyris had said.

Our intelligence boffins think the rebels are a Party bogeyman, a scapegoat . . .

A scapegoat. Or a puppet . . .

As I stood there at the rail, I saw Pallino and his men make short work of the last of the liberalist rear guard. They turned to join Crim. We were winning. I thrust my sword up and raised my voice to rally the men for the final effort. “Earth and Empire!” I shouted, not for piety or patriotism, but as a pronouncement of identity in that hideous place.

And then I understood.

I remembered.

Remembered why the bridge looked so familiar.

The gray towers that rose from the heart of Eighth Dome seen from that spot on the bridge were precisely those I’d seen—those I’d remembered from a future that had not happened—in my dream the night before I first met the Grand Conclave.

A future that had not happened, yet.

If memories exist to instruct us on past failings, my memories of the future are signposts to warn me off future errors. As a familiar scent or sound triggers memories, so my arrival in Vedatharad for the first time had triggered nightmares of things which might happen there, things my body and brain remembered from that day upon the mountain when the Quiet poured all of Time through my head.

I remembered falling a second too late.

The third rocket struck the car nearest me. I had no time to focus my sight, no time to cry out. If Pallino swore and Crim shouted, I did not hear them. I flew back and struck the rail with enough force to drive the air from my lungs. The last thing I remember was the headlong rush of air and darkness that came before the crash.