THEY HAD TO DRAG me to my next audience. I tried to walk, but the muscles of my legs cramped before I had climbed twenty paces. They were not gentle, and my feet were bloody by the time we reached our destination.

Pale light illuminated the grotto not the customary low red, but bright enough it hurt my eyes. The rough stone walls had been carefully sculpted, depicting the circular anaglyphs of the Cielcin language: some symbols small as robin’s eggs, some large as dinner plates. I recognized a symbol here and there, but their grammar remained mysterious to me. There were no sentences, no linear thoughts. The Cielcin looked at the runes and saw images, forming relationships and semantic meaning by the relative position and size of one symbol to the next, so that a cluster of marks might suggest several meanings at once. I knew enough to know that one cluster spoke of virtues and princes, another of masters and slaves, but the relationships between one and the next were blurred to me.

The guards dropped me on the uneven floor, and I remained there, chest heaving, knees bruised by the fall.

“Ennallaa kounsur,” ordered the familiar voice. Leave us.

The Cielcin did not argue with their lord. I was hardly in any condition to stand, much less fight—and my hands again were bound.

Syriani Dorayaica stood not ten paces away, its silver-crowned form framed in a round portal. Gone was the striated armor. In its place, the Prophet of the Cielcin wore sleeveless robes of irinyr, the heavy, glossy material that passed for silk. Its arms were sheathed in silver rings hung with fine chains that dripped with sapphires and lapis lazuli, and black filigree—carefully applied—decorated the flat, white face. It looked less the warrior and more the sybarite, its white hair carefully braided and musked with something smoky and unpleasant.

Aware that I was on my knees, I struggled to stand. I felt grubby before the Great One, dressed in nothing but rags cinched about my waist.

“Beautiful,” the Prophet said in Galstani, huge black eyes studying me the way a gourmand studies his food. “There is a purity to suffering, do you not think?” Standing, I gave no answer, but leaned against the wall. “Your own philosophers and priests acknowledge this. It is no betrayal to agree.” It drew nearer a step. “Your own quietude will not bring you closer to Utannash, kinsman. Speak.”

It was only with great effort that I found my voice. I had not used it in a long time, and the sound was more alien to me than the voice of the Prophet. “The nobility is in how we bear suffering. Not in the pain itself.”

Syriani’s lower lip stretched, and it advanced toward me. “Think you that it is so?” It continued its study of me, eyes picking over the whip-scars that stood out white on my shoulders and flanks. “Pain purifies. It reminds us of the division between the ouluu, what you call the atman, the soul—and this.” Reaching down, it pinched the soft flesh at the crease between arm and chest. “Ujazayu. The substance.” One talon snicked, sliced into the flesh. I did not wince, but shut my eyes as a rivulet of blood ran down my side and stained the rags about my waist. “Better to accept the pain, to escape through it. To bear it only is to accept the Lie.”

“The Lie?” I said. “Utannash.”

The Prophet hissed. “It is the author of the Lie. We are not this.” It pointed first at its chest, then my own. “Not things. None of this . . .” It pointed at the cave, at Dharan-Tun and the universe beyond. “None of this is real. It is the work of Utannash, who is false. Whose work is false. Pain brings us closer to them, closer to the truth.”

“To your gods?” I asked. “To the Watchers?”

Syriani made the breathy yes sound. “You begin to see.”

“So I’m being . . . purified?” I asked.

“Purity is the greatest sacrifice,” Syriani intoned. “I wish for you to understand before you die.” It drew back a pace, half-turning to contemplate the carvings on the walls. “The gods seek to free us from this prison. To destroy this world and set us free. Free to join them in Iazyr Kulah, the true world.”

“Paradise,” I said.

“Just so,” the Prince of Princes said, affecting a human-seeming nod. “Your Utannash built this world to punish us. We must destroy it, and so we must destroy it.” Syriani paused and turned away, wandering a few paces up the hall toward the portal whence it had entered. “How do you survive so confusing a language?”

I said nothing for a long moment, stared at my host in confusion and disbelief. “You want to . . . destroy the universe?” I almost laughed. The thought was ludicrous on its very face. It simply wasn’t possible. “You’re insane.”

Syriani Dorayaica turned and looked down at me. “With all you know, kinsman, you say this thing?” It made a negating gesture, tossing its head. It gestured at the portal and said, “Wegga ush ti-koun.”

Walk with me.

Moving gingerly on raw feet, I limped to join the Prophet, all too aware of the rough scrape of callus and stick of raw flesh on the cold, damp stone. Shallow pools lined the path, sunk into the dark rock. There tiny, luminescent fish swam, their blue-white radiance illuminating the phosphorescent glyph carvings in the walls. Syriani did not speak for a moment, but picked its meditative way between the pools and over stepping stones nearly flush with the surface of the still, clear water.

“You surprised me at Berenike,” it said at last, stopping beneath an arched and sloping wall thick with carved signs that glowed silver in the fish-light. “Clearly, you are more resourceful than I anticipated. You should have died.”

“You were overconfident,” I said, keeping my distance.

“I was not certain I would have such a chance again.” Syriani had its back to me, its braided queue on full display where it sprouted from the base and back of its skull behind the flange of the epoccipital crest. “I acted hastily. A mistake I will not replicate.” It looked back over its shoulder and amended. “Have not replicated.”

I narrowed my eyes. “A chance to kill me?”

“To destroy a servant of Utannash, yes.”

“I thought you wanted me for your Aetavanni.”

“I was prepared to compromise,” the Prophet answered, and shut its eyes. “But the gods reward their servants. Now I do not have to.”

It turned back and continued walking along what I was starting to realize was a kind of garden path. Pale and glowing fungi grew from the walls and contributed to the tableau, and thin streams of water cascaded over rocks and into pools clear and black as space. I limped after the Prophet, whose bare feet clicked on the stonework. Evidently I had been summoned to accompany the Scourge of Earth on its walk through something like its palace gardens. I expected to see servants or collared slaves—human and Cielcin alike—but we were utterly alone.

At length, I asked, “Why do you call it that?” When Syriani did not answer, I added, “Utannash?”

“It is its name,” Syriani answered, one clawed hand caressing the edge of a fan-like mushroom as it stopped to admire it. “Utannash is That-Which-Lies, or the Deceiver—you would say. That is the word?”

Unseen, I nodded, but said, “Iugannan is liar in Cielcin, is it not?”

“In Cielcin?” Syriani made a low clicking noise I took for disapproval. “Think you we have but one language?” It looked at me, nictitating membranes blinking across the surface of eyes large as eggs. “You understand less of us than I thought . . . I thought we were alike. I have read and studied so much of your history. Your art. Your philosophy. I sense you have not reciprocated as much as I had thought—though you speak well.” There was a note of almost human sorrow in the xenobite’s voice.

“As do you.” Indeed, it spoke the standard better than most men I have known.

Dorayaica dismissed these words with a gesture. “Utannash is the Lie and the Liar both. It is an old word. An old word for an old enemy in a tongue little remembered by my people in these benighted times.” Glass teeth—the very teeth that had maimed my right hand—flashed at me. “Do you not know that we too are a sunken race? Far fallen from our former glories?” The Prince of Princes crossed the surface of one black pool and stood before a glowing mural of interlocking circular runes. “Were Elu in my place . . . already our dominion would encompass this galaxy, and not a one of your kind would breathe free. Alas, I am not Elu, and the clans are not as they were in Eue after Se Vattayu.”

“But why Lie?”

The Prophet’s eyes drifted shut. “Because its world veils the truth of the Caihanarin.”

“The Watchers?”

Again, Syriani made the sharp, breathy sound that meant yes. “They gave us everything. They made us. They taught us to fly, brought us out of Se Vattayu and gave us the stars, that we might cast down their enemies. Utannash would destroy them and make itself the only god, it would impose its lie—this universe—on all that is. It is alatayu. Nemesis, Destroyer . . . Devil, you would say.”

I snorted. “So am I.”

The joke evidently was not amusing to the Great One. Syriani Dorayaica gestured at the walls. “It took my baetayan several hundred of your years to create these gardens. To carve these udaritani. Can you read them?”

“Only a little,” I admitted.

This seemed to impress the Cielcin lord. “They are a far subtler art than your primitive systems.” It waved its hand at the arc of wall across the pool. “This is our story.”

I imagined baetayan like Tanaran laboring for several times the life-age of a plebeian to complete the mural carvings. It must have taken a small army of them to complete the work, if the sheer scale and number of the tunnels was any indication.

“I thought the baetayan were oral historians of a kind.”

“They are,” Syriani said, “but stories should not live only on the tongue. Would you not agree?” It traced the perimeter of one gleaming mark with a clawed finger. “The udaritanu is not like your alphabet. They are a pictoral style. Like one of your blasphemous paintings.”

I blinked. “Blasphemous?”

The Prophet acted as though it had not heard me, but marked a series of small circles with three triangles inscribed within each. “Here are our ships leaving Se Vattayu. And here the planet itself.” It indicated a huge and convoluted glyph at the center of the image. Seeing it suddenly as an image and not a strange and unlinear sentence shifted my sense of it, and looking straight up along the curve of the wall I spied another equally convoluted glyph bound to the sign that represented the Cielcin homeworld by an almost helical chain of smaller signs. Clearly here was their destination, the world of their exile.

“But . . . blasphemous?”

Syriani turned its huge, horned head to peer down at me as though I were an unruly child. “You make images. Icons you would call them. Idols. To depict material things as they appear, as a part of Utannash and its Lie, is to deepen the Lie. It is an affront to the gods.”

“But you have statues in your hall,” I said. “Those . . . monsters.”

“Monsters?” Syriani hissed again. “They are the gods, kinsman, and the gods alone are real.”

I understood. Countless were the old traditions of men who turned against art and beauty. Who burned it, broke it, tore it down in the name of some transcendent principle. Their belief was that such images wrought by hands obscured or usurped the things they represented: that a flawed human icon of Beauty—failing to be beautiful—destroyed Beauty. Perverted it. Or that a great icon replaced Beauty—or Truth, or whichever virtue or ideal you cared to name—and became the thing itself. It is not so. Art, great art, serves as a reminder of invisible things and of their manifestation in things visible. The image, say, of our Radiant Emperor stamped upon the obverse of every hurasam serves not only to remind us who is Emperor, but of the virtues that make him Emperor. The sense of strength and dignity, the serene command.

“What then of your White Hand?” I asked.

Clasps fashioned in the shape of that hand secured the Prophet’s robes. It fingered one before it replied. “I told you,” it said. “I shall become a god.”

“By conquering us?”

Syriani made the breathy yes sound again. “I shall make a sacrifice—not only of you, but of all your people. As Elu ascended, so shall I.”

“Ascended?”

Glass teeth flashed. “You name your Emperors gods, do you not?”

“Only the first,” I said tartly.

Syriani moved out beneath the great mural, one six-fingered hand spread as if to grasp the whole thing in its fingers. “Elu was the first. The gods spoke to him, taught him to build the ships that carried us from our dying world. It was Elu and his Twelve Aeta who left Se Vattayu, who made us more than the animals we were.” Its outstretched hand traced the helical line from Se Vattayu to the next world. “As ants to wanton boys are we to the gods . . .”

“They kill us at their sport,” I said, finishing the quotation.

“Ah, there is the Marlowe I expected.”

“Shakespeare.” I raised my chin.

“Just so,” the Prophet said. “But my gods made us strong instead—though they might have smothered us in our infancy. Elu led those who would listen to a new world.”

“Eue?” I asked, recalling the earlier name. I had heard it before. It was a part of one of the Prophet’s titles . . . the Prince of the Princes of Eue.

The tall Cielcin bowed its head in what was for its kind a threatening gesture—it was a human nod. “It means the gift.” Syriani turned away again and walked a few paces along the mural, raising its hand again to a cluster of udaritanu marks that spread out from the sign of the planet Eue. “It was on Eue we became Cielcin, became godsborne.” When it saw the look of confusion on my face, Syriani added, “It is another old word.”

“Urbaine seems to think humanity can become Cielcin,” I said, and realizing my meaning might be vague, I added, “Become godsborne, that is.”

Syriani’s teeth flashed again. “Urbaine is a naked little climber, isn’t he? He thinks putting on a body more like our own will win him some favor . . . and it may.” The Prophet made a negatory gesture. “Urbaine believes humanity may be made to see the Truth, that in time your kind might serve the Caihanarin and aid in bringing about the end. I am not so sure. There is too much of the Lie about you. And you are weak.”

“Weak?” I stood straight as I could, no easy task with my crabbed muscles and ruined shoulder. “We’ve held you off for centuries.”

The expression on the Prophet’s face might have been pitying. Even after so many years of familiarity with their kind, Cielcin faces were hard for me to read. “Is that what you’ve done?” Syriani Dorayaica began to move again, circling me as it had in our first meeting. “The stage is hardly even set, and already your Commonwealth is ours.”

“They’re not my Commonwealth.”

“And yet your presence there suggests you need them, suggests that your Emperor is desperate.”

I short aah escaped me, and I cast my gaze down at my bare and bloody feet. I understood then why I had been treated to this lecture on history and this walk through the Prince’s grottoes. Screwing my eyes shut, I said, “It is customary to ask these questions while you torture a man, great Prince.” My whole body ached with the memory of the pain I’d already suffered, and every sore and still-healing wound cried out at my obstinacy. “Not after.”

The high wail of the inhuman laughter rebounded off the cave walls. “You are a brave one, my lord.” It drew nearer as it spoke, hands clasped neatly before it. “But you will tell me what I want to know. I know your Emperor has left his home. I want to know where he is.”

“Then you have the wrong man,” I said simply. “I don’t even know what year it is.”

The Prince’s White Hand rose up and slapped me full across the face with such force that I crashed sideways into a shallow pool. Glowing fish scattered, darting away from me where I lay. It took an effort simply to prop myself up on an elbow, and the binders on my wrist slowed me still more. “Think you that I am simple?” the Prince asked. It towered over me, clawed feet gripping the uneven stone. “Do not lie to me. I know you know his itinerary. I want the list of planets your Emperor intends to visit. Names and catalog numbers. Coordinates.” I managed to find my knees, and hunched over, eyes shut through the dull pain, my long and tangled hair hiding my face from the terrible thing before me. Syriani’s cold, high voice filled my universe. “I will hurt you again, kinsman. Tell me what I want to know.”

“I don’t have it,” I said. It wasn’t strictly true. I was passingly familiar with the coordinates and star catalog numbers for the Nessus system, for Gododdin, and Aulos—perhaps some of the others. But there had been at least thirty names on the Imperial itinerary, and I was no navigator. It had been so long since we left Nessus, and so much had happened. I remembered a handful of names in the moment. Nessus. Vanaheim. Siraganon. Balanrot. Perfugium. “I don’t know.”

The Prophet crouched to bring itself nearer my level. “As I said, there is too much of the Lie about you. I want those names, Utannashi, and I will have them.”

“Utannashi . . .” I translated. “Liar.”

“Do you deny it?” Syriani asked, and the incredible stench of its breath filled my nostrils.

I managed a defensive little laugh. “Aranata Otiolo called me Oimn Belu.”

“The Dark One,” Syriani hissed. “I did not know Otiolo had such poetry in him.” Reaching out, Syriani seized me by the hair and hauled me to my feet, forcing my face to look up into its own. “I had hoped your chastisement sufficient to purge the Lie from you. I was wrong. We have more work to do.” It released its grip, and I slumped, scalp stinging where the skin had nearly torn.

Syriani turned away, jewelry rattling from arms and horns. It raised a hand in signal, two fingers outstretched. Some unseen eye or camera must have been on us, for in seconds a half dozen scahari warriors in armor and painted battle-masks appeared around a bend in the rocks. I felt myself tense reflexively as they drew near, their curved, white scimitars tucked in the crooks of their arms. What new devilry they portended I dared not guess, but stood stock-still as they laid hands on me.

“Qattaa!” Syriani barked an order, and the warriors all froze.

Switching back to the standard, Syriani said, “There is one other thing, kinsman.” It paused, as if expecting me to ask some clarifying question or interrupt. “How did you survive on Berenike?”

The guards held me fast, and though I averted my gaze, one of the scahari seized me again by the hair and forced me to look, to bare my throat. When I did not speak at once, another slapped me with the flat of its sword, leaving a bright weal across my bare stomach and a thin line where the razor edge still cut. “You don’t know?” I gasped.

Syriani Dorayaica studied me with inhuman focus, transparent membranes narrowing beneath hooded lids. “Your people say you do magic. That you perform miracles.”

I did my best to shrug. “Perhaps Utannash’s power is not so false as you claim.”

The Prophet drew near again and placed clawed hands on my shoulders. It smiled down at me, teeth bared. “You can see the power of my gods all around us.” With its eyes, it encompassed the whole of the grotto. “We are proof of their power. This world, this Dharan-Tun, is proof of their power. All you have are tricks.”

“I turned your victory into a defeat,” I said. “Not a bad trick.”

Without any change in expression, the Prince of Princes dug its talons into my shoulders, blood welling up as the glassy claws dug into my flesh. I sensed the change in emotion behind the Prophet’s eyes, sensed what I felt sure was anger. Frustration. I sensed that nothing would have made this enemy happier than tearing me apart then and there. Then—without warning—it released me. “Still you bluster!” it hissed, and turning crouched to cleanse its bloodied fingers in the water of the nearest pool. To my horror the little fish swam up and crowded about Syriani’s hands and the water ran clearer. My guards did not move. Syriani had not dismissed them. “It brings me no pleasure to destroy you,” it said, lowering its hands further into the water with exquisite slowness. “You are, I think, the only other creature in this iugannan—this universe, you would say—who can understand me.” It lifted its cupped hands from the water, a single glowing fish in its grasp. Steadily, Syriani allowed the water to run out until it held the hungry little creature on its palm. It wriggled uselessly, gasping for air. Without preamble, Syriani crushed the helpless thing in its fist, water and some fluorescent liquid spilling back into the pool to the frenzied delight of the others, who swarmed to filter the water of their former compatriot’s blood. “Certainly you are the only one of your kind who can. This war has often felt a contest between we two. After Berenike, I was certain.” It dipped its gore-streaked hand into the water and allowed the little fish to feast. A moment later its eyes found mine again. “You’re seen it, haven’t you? My armies marching across the stars, burning your worlds? You’ve seen your death. You know I am the one who kills you—that you die at Akterumu. And you know that when you are gone, humanity falls. You know your people will be our slaves for a time, and when that time is done, they will be nothing.”

It stood.

“I’ve seen it, too,” the Prophet said.

“The rivers of time?” I found I could hardly speak.

I had held on to the possibility that Syriani was no prophet at all, that its visions were not the visions of a seer, but those of a visionary—that the future it predicted for its people was only a dream it had had. I had dared to hope the Prophet’s visions were false.

But Syriani nodded.

“The Watchers see all,” Syriani said, “and I have seen with their eyes. As you have seen with the eyes of Utannash.” It half-turned, raising one hand in the same two-fingered gesture it had used to summon the guards. Halted. “And I have seen that you will tell me what I want to know. So I will give you one last chance to confess: tell me where you Emperor is.”

“Don’t you already know?” I ventured, suddenly not so sure.

Syriani made a slashing gesture with the hand not holding two fingers aloft, and again one of the scahari walloped me in the stomach with the flat of its blade. “Do you think this is a game we play?” it asked.

I took that for a no.

“Velenammaa jatti wo!” Syriani barked, lowering its two fingers.

Take it away!