THE PAIN DROWNED EVERYTHING, even itself. Every inch of me was numb, though with each subtle motion of my body the agony flared white hot and new within me. I opened my eyes. The world resolved slowly.

I wished it had not resolved at all.

Beneath and before me lay a cyclopean city of iron and black stone. Cruel towers rose beside rivers of glowing magma, or else hung like stalactites from the metal roof of the world thousands of feet above. Crude metal stacks carried the fumes of industry from evil mills and foundries fed by those same rivers, and the whole place stank of burning and of brimstone. As I watched, I could see the shapes of men in the distance hauling steel beams into place, laboring at the construction of some new tower or monument beneath the watchful eyes of their Pale masters. So vast was that subterranean space that it might have swallowed whole two of the great domes of Vedatharad and yet had room for a third, and from my high vantage I could see the openings of arched passages to other caverns and tunnels equally immense.

Never before had I seen so great and terrible a city of the enemy. Indeed, no greater city of the Cielcin was there in creation—save one, and that they did not build.

Only slowly did I recognize that I was in the same cavernous vaults through which I’d marched on my approach to the Dhar-Iagon and the Prophet’s throne, the black city of Dharan-Tun.

I tried to crane my neck to see, and realized I was falling.

With a shout, I looked down to rough flagstones a hundred feet below, bare feet dangling over nothing. Movement sent a flaring agony up my arm to my throbbing hand, and full understanding came only steadily, as if reality would not fit itself—could not fit itself—into my brain.

I was hanging on a chain, strung up by my right arm, the other arm and both legs free. My sudden movement had set me swinging like the pendulum of an old clock, and I struck the wall, impact sending waves of pain shooting up my arm and across my tortured back. It was only then that I remembered the whipping, and looking down saw dried blood streaking my naked legs. They’d taken my gown from me, and I hung unclothed for all to see, my mutilated right hand permanently raised as a sign and warning to all who saw me.

I had defied the Prince of Princes, and all would see the consequences of that defiance.

How long I hung there I never knew, nor could guess how long I’d been unconscious. Cielcin passed in the plaza below, stopped and pointed. What human thralls there came averted their eyes and hurried past, chains rattling. It would not be until later that I realized precisely where I was, hanging from the wall beyond the arched outer entrance to the gates of the Dhar-Iagon.

When had I last tasted water? Last eaten?

With a titanic effort, I reached up with my free hand and seized the chain above the binder that held my wrist. Pulling upward, I managed to take the tension off my tortured arm, though I shut my eyes to block out the sight of my mangled hand and the memory of my fingers caught between Syriani’s teeth. Blood welled up where the manacle cut flesh and dribbled down my arm. One pain traded for another, as the act of pulling lit up my tortured back even as my arm and shoulder cried with relief. Stunned, I let go of the chain, returning my weight entirely to the tortured limb. The short drop and sudden stop whited out my vision, and when I came to once more, it was to the sound of a winch, of rattling chains, and to the sensation of rough stone scraping my torn back.

Rough hands pulled me over the lip and into a close, low-ceilinged chamber whose open face looked down on the plaza below. Dazed as I was, mind blurred by the numb agony in my tormented arm and shoulder, I was only dimly aware of the foul-tasting rag my inhuman captors had shoved into my mouth. So parched was I that I sucked at the rag’s contents without thinking, and gagged at the taste: foul, salty, and alkaline.

The hollow chamber filled with the harsh sound of alien laughter.

I recognized the taste of urine too late and coughed, spat the rag out on the floor.

“Pitatonyu edediu!” one of the gaolers barked.

“It don’t know what’s good for it!”

Pale hands held me down while they forced the foul rag back between my teeth and squeezed. I choked, tried in vain to fend the Cielcin off, but ultimately . . . I failed. They left me lying on the bare stone, still chained by my wrist. Alone. I fantasized about looping the chain about my neck and leaping from the open face of the chamber, but it took every effort, every ounce of energy left just to roll onto my side and spare my back.

That was how he found me.

The door opened some time later. I did not even try to move, not even when something cool burned my back. I smelled antiseptic. Alcohol.

An old man’s face peered down at me, skin leathered by torment and by time. He had a plebeian’s blunt features: dull eyes, flat nose, jug ears, and his jaw quavered as he went about his ministry, cleaning my wounds with a sponge and a bucket of what I took for antiseptic.

“Why bother?” I managed to grunt.

The old man did not answer, but produced a squeeze bottle and tipped clear water down my throat. I spit it out, expecting another trick. I could still taste the Cielcin urine, and eyed the fellow with suspicion. He shook his head, jowls quavering.

“Who are you?”

In answer, the man pointed to my collar, then to his own.

“You don’t . . . speak standard?” I asked. The man shook his head, opened his mouth to reveal a black hole where tongue and teeth once had been. “I’m sorry.”

He shrugged, then proffered the water again. I took it with my left hand and managed to drink, clenched my teeth as the alcohol burned the marks the lash had made. I lay there in silence, permitting the slave to do what he was ordered to do: to treat my wounds, to see that I survived for another day’s torment.

His work finished on my back, he moved to my wrist and mangled hand. As he did so, I caught sight of the sunburst tattoo on his neck and the faded number opposite it. 111.

“You were a soldier?” I murmured, gesturing weakly at the mark. They were a legionnaire’s tattoos. He had been taken in battle, or else taken in fugue. He would have been a young man when that happened, and so had lived his life in bondage. A knot twisted in my guts at the thought. “What’s to be done with me?”

The man paused in his ministrations to point squarely at his ruined mouth again, eyes narrow. I felt shame and looked away. I felt a hand on mine a moment later and flinched away, but the fellow caught my arm and pressed his sponge to the stumps of my fingers. I almost whited out from the pain and cursed, trying to flinch away, but the soldier held me fast. I tried to pull my hand free, but he held me, and when I found his face again through tears, I found his eyes captured by something he saw on my hand.

It was the Emperor’s ring.

The mute slave’s eyes darted to my face, back to the ring. And as the poor slave in the street had done, the fellow mouthed the word palatine.

“Yes,” I said roughly. “Hadrian. My name is Hadrian.”

The slave nodded, eyes darting to my hand again. He seemed to be thinking about something. He sucked on the inside of his cheek. What that something was I realized too late. He seized the Emperor’s ring and tugged it off my finger, and when I cried out he stood sharply, upsetting the bucket of disinfectant in his haste to be gone. I tried to rise, but my healer struck me with his heel, and I fell back stunned. The little man leaped on me, and before I could resist he seized the chain about my neck—the chain from which hung the Quiet’s shell.

“No!” I hissed, and threw the man off me.

The chain snapped in his fingers, and the pendant rolled across the floor. Injured as I was, I could not stand, and the man found his feet before me. “Guard!” I shouted, and remembering just where I was shouted again, “Shuindu!” I had little hope of the Cielcin coming to save me. Now, the thought almost makes me laugh.

But it might have frightened the slave all the same. The little man scrabbled for the pendant and snatched it up. He glared down at me and made a cursing sign—first and last fingers extended—as he mouthed the word again. Palatine.

I tried to rise. I failed.

The mute slave’s heel cracked out again, and the world went dark.

The Cielcin returned, the noise of their coming a thunder that shattered my fitful sleep. Before I could get a word out or get my bearings, they seized me wrist and ankle and tossed me over the ledge and out into the stinking air. I felt my shoulder pop as the chain went taut and the manacle tore my wrist. The pain was unbearable, and howling darkness like warm, black ink flooded my eyes.

It was the fourth time they’d suspended me from that chain, five counting that first experience. Five days, or what passed for days on Dharan-Tun, and when each day was done, when I could scarcely breathe, they would haul me back into the cell, torment me, and leave me to another mute slave, a woman who salved my wounds and nursed me on clean water and porridge. What had befallen the man who had stolen the Emperor’s ring I never knew, nor learned why he had not taken the others. The woman could not say. Her tongue had also been cut out.

All I suffered I shall not recount, for some things do not bear repeating.

I opened my eyes again, the pain in my shoulder louder than the unheard burning of the stars. The great city of the Cielcin lay before me. It didn’t seem real. It was some nightmare out of Milton or Bosch or Chambers, a painting of hell.

“You’re not going to die here, you know,” a cool voice said. A shadow fell across my sight, and turning I saw my brother Crispin standing on the wall beside me as though it were the floor. He took a bite of an apple and grinned down at me, looking for all the world like he had when I’d left him on the floor at Haspida, a boy of fifteen. “You’re going to die there.”

“Shut up, Crispin,” I groaned, but when I looked back, he was gone. I missed him at once, and felt myself begin to cry, stupidly, for a brother who had hated me and a home I’d never loved.

But he was right. I was not going to die here. I was going to Akterumu to die. This was only hell. Death came later.

“He’s going mad!” the cool voice said. It took an effort of will to realize the voice had never been Crispin’s. Urbaine was standing in the square below me, dressed in his violet Mandari silks, his bald and unnaturally tall crown hidden beneath a dome-shaped cap.

Beside him, Severine nodded. “That did not take long.”

“I must say, I am disappointed, my Lord Marlowe!” Urbaine called out. “They say you are the Earth’s Chosen. Surely the Chosen need not suffer so!” He laughed.

I had tried already. A thousand times I’d reached for my second sight, my vision of the collapsing waveform of potential, and a thousand times I’d failed. The vision would not come. Starved and tormented as I was, I could not reach the rivers of time any more than I could reach up with my left hand and lift myself to save my tortured right. Delirious, I could not summon the focus necessary to free myself.

In the distance, a gang of men dragged stones.

I could not free myself. Or fly. Whatever power I had, it was sundered from me. The Quiet had gone quiet indeed, just as Syriani had said it would.

“Come down, my lord!” Urbaine mocked. “Come down among us mortals. Will you not come down?”

“Come up instead!” I groaned, swaying on my chain and making the cords of my shoulder ache. “You’re missing the view!”

Urbaine’s laughter filled the square below. “I much prefer this one!”

“I will kill you!” I shouted, sending paroxysms racing up my arm. Against my best wishes, I cried out, turning the shriek into a threat. “By Earth, I will kill you!” Blood pounded in my ears, and I fantasized about tearing my own arm from its socket and falling on the black sorcerer.

Urbaine’s pale face never stopped smiling. “I was sorry to miss your meeting with the Great One!” he called, meaning Prince Syriani. “I heard it was quite the performance.” I said nothing. My scream had taken all my strength from me, and I hung there in a gray haze. Urbaine faded beneath me, and Severine with him. A warm wind buffeted my face, and looking up I saw a great bird stooping over me, its dark pinions spread.

“Udax?” I asked, reaching out with my left hand to clap the Irchtani on the shoulder. But Udax was dead, had died fighting Bahudde on the fields of Berenike. It was an eagle I saw, the very bird that Jove had set to torment Prometheus. It watched me with dark, reptilian eyes.

“They are going to kill him like this,” said a woman’s voice, far away. Valka? No, that was Severine. Valka was dead. Was Valka dead? She was not dead, she couldn’t be. That was a lie Iovan and the other sorcerers had told me.

Prometheus had begged Heracles to slay him, and that bastard son of Jove had asked his father—the old titan’s gaoler—to speed his arrow and release Prometheus from torment. But Jove, in his caprice, sent instead the eagle who tormented Prometheus to bear Heracles to the titan’s side. But it was a trick Jove played, for not even Heracles could break the chain the father of the gods had used to bind Prometheus, and Jove laughed at him from the peak of Mount Caucasus. But Heracles was undaunted, and struck not the chain, but struck off the mad titan’s arm and fled with him from the god’s dark mountain. So it was by many trials that Heracles brought the maimed Prometheus to his son, Deucalion, in the days before Jove sent his flood to wash away the world. Jove’s arrogance had been his undoing, for it came to pass that it was Prometheus’s fire in the hands of Deucalion that delivered mankind from the waters Jove sent to unmake them.

But there was no Heracles, nor any eagle. The chain was torment enough in itself.

Like Urbaine had said, my story was no story at all. There was no hero coming to save me, no good to prevail. But there was evil. There is always evil—and the Cielcin were a flood come to wash mankind away.

I blinked.

There was no eagle. Only Urbaine and Severine looking up at me, one grinning, the other stone-faced. “They must cut him down,” Severine was saying.

“Not yet,” Urbaine said to her. “He’s not done yet.”