SOMETHING DWELT IN THE waters below. It churned from time to time, disturbing the black surface, a surface close enough that if I reached down—up—with my free arm I might almost touch it.

Almost.

And what a blessing that would be. If my torment on the wall was worsened by the occasional reprieve, my torment in the pit was made worse by the lack of one. Without food, without water, they had bound my legs and one arm tight to my chest and hanged me by my ankles. I had started above the level of the pit, but inch by grievous inch I had descended half a hundred feet toward the water below. I should have lost consciousness long before, would have done so but for the careful incision they made along the hairline by my right temple. Thus the blood—which might have pooled in my head and so flooded my consciousness—dripped out instead.

It must have taken days to reach the bottom.

I hardly knew anymore.

It was the third time. Or was it the fourth?

They’d left the one arm free that I might signal my captors to haul me up, to signal that I was ready to surrender. To speak. I had signaled the first time, but when they had given me water, I spat in their faces and found myself on the chain again. I wasn’t sure why they pulled me out the next time. Perhaps I was very nearly dead. Vague memories of a firm mat and the beep of medical machinery persist.

“. . . lost too much blood,” said a feminine voice. Severine?

“Why are palatines always AB positive?” a man asked.

The woman answered. “Old superstition. One of the corps that helped set up the old bloodlines was Nipponese.”

“You were right about his neurological scans.” Another woman. “Never seen anything like them. The Empire’s still ahead of us in some ways.”

“It’s not Imperial work,” the man said. It wasn’t Urbaine.

“Could be random mutation?” the second woman suggested.

Severine replied. “Not likely.”

The next time they lowered me into that dreadful hole, it was with one needle in my arm and another in my thigh, one to hydrate me and the other to constantly replenish my blood supply. I could not sleep. I could not die. At irregular intervals, one of the Cielcin would come to the lip of the pit above and rattle my chain.

“Sikarra!” the inhuman gaoler would cry. Confess!

When I did not, it would tug the chain so that I slammed into the wall and disturbed the thing that lived in the water. I would shut my eyes and feel the blood dripping from my wounded scalp, matting my overlong hair . . . and when I opened them, I would be somewhere else.

So much of my memory of Dharan-Tun is fragmented like this. Snatches remembered through delirium and pain. Periods of lucidity punctuating shiftless horror until eventually they dragged me back to my cave to heal before I would again confront the Shiomu, the Prophet.

I remember its face hanging in the dark above me where I lay on the floor of my cave, eyes narrow. “I weary of this game,” it said. “Tell me where your Emperor is.”

Candle smoke and the resinous scent of myrrh wafted from my dreams, the familiar, funereal smell of the Chantry. The Emperor knelt in prayer, alone and clad in white, his arms thrown wide. Above him on the dais the altar stood empty beneath the statue of the God Emperor and the dome frescoed with its image of Earth. Beyond the high, narrow windows, the city of Sananne rose.

Nessus.

“Tell me where your Emperor is.”

The words floated unvoiced across the surface of my tongue. Nessus. Gododdin. Vastauna. Siraganon. Perfugium. I did not dare speak them.

I hung above black water, my heart beating in my head. Witch-lights sparked and shone in the depths below. I think now that some cousin to the fish that dwelt in the Prophet’s grottoes must have lurked there, drinking the blood that dripped from my brow.

When I did not speak, they hurt me, hauled me from the pit and lashed me to a pole. They stripped me, whipped me until the blood ran hot down my back, or peeled a strip of skin from my thigh and left the raw meat exposed to dry and crack and scream.

“Tell me where your Emperor is.”

The pain vanished, blotted out like a dream on waking. I felt . . . nothing, not even the cold. My mind went clear for the first time in . . . in I did not know how long. Syriani Dorayaica stood at the edge of the pit above which I hung, dressed once more in armorial black. It was not alone. Behind it stood Urbaine in a violet suit, his hands tucked into his sleeves, flaps folded down from his Mandari cap to cover his flat ears. Three more Cielcin stood to one side with the winch that operated the chain, and another MINOS operative in medical white stood at hand. Behind and above them, the red-streaked ice walls gleamed like crystal, and I remembered just how high up this new prison was. Great reservoirs of drinking water—whole oceans of them—lay above the great caverns and warrens of Dharan-Tun, trapped beneath layers of ice that shielded the Cielcin and their human slaves from the predatory energies of space. My pit opened on one such reservoir, high above before the waters filtered down through desalinating plants to be fed into the hellish city below. I could remember seeing gangs of men and of Cielcin, too, laboring to maintain the pipes and locks and the great lifts that carried ships and cargo up huge and airless shafts toward the surface.

There could be nothing on the surface. Dharan-Tun was the size of a planet, and nothing so large could possibly have the protection of shields—even if Syriani had pillaged the technology of radiation shielding from captured human vessels, as I guessed it might have. Anything unshielded on the surface not trapped beneath the ice would be subject to the fierce ion storms as particles got caught in the planet-sized vessel’s warp envelope. I was so close to the sky in my pit, closer than I had been in what must have been years . . . but it had never been farther away.

“Where is your Emperor going?” the Prophet inquired. Syriani Dorayaica had never before made an appearance at the pit. “Tell me, and this ends now.”

Blood dripped from my forehead with each passing heartbeat.

“I know you can hear me, kinsman,” Syriani said. I had rotated on my chain so that I looked out across the cavern yard to where a dozen other pits waited with gallows and winches at the ready. “Names. Catalog numbers. Coordinates.”

“I don’t know them,” I said.

The pain returned, switched on like a light. I felt the numb shock of the cold, the bone-deep ache from my hanging, the blood drumming in my head. I felt the hot line where my temple had been incised again and again with each subsequent hanging, and the raw, scabrous stripes where skin had been peeled from each thigh. I felt too the leathered tightness of the whip scars that had become my back.

“It’s on,” Urbaine said.

The collar.

I had almost forgotten about it. I’d worn it so long it had become a part of me, had chafed my neck until it bled. Evidently it didn’t just cause pain. Urbaine had taken control of my spinal nerve and sensory cortex entirely.

“You are unusually resilient for one of your kind,” Syriani said, circling into view. “But this has gone on too long. I will have my answer. And do not lie again. Urbaine will know.” I had vague memories of having once given false planets to end my time in the pit. It had worked for a day. I guessed Syriani must have access to captured Imperial star charts or to MINOS’s own database. “Where is your Emperor going?”

Perhaps you think I have undertaken this account in order to lionize my virtues, to paint a picture of Hadrian Marlowe, Hero of Mankind; or to illustrate my campaign and my victories against the enemy. That much perhaps is true, but I should say that when I started this account it was with the intention of telling the truth, a thing I have striven to do unflinchingly, though I have perhaps failed at times in this charge. But in setting my pen to this page and in spilling the scholiasts’ vermilion ink I knew these moments must come.

I do not relish my memories of Dharan-Tun, of Syriani Dorayaica and its Iedyr. There is much I have not said. I have not stopped to tell you about the stacked human legs I saw in a barrow like cordwood, or dwelt upon the headless corpses that hung outside cave mouths, or on the gutters thick with red blood where those corpses had drained.

But I know this moment must be told, though it shames me.

“Perfugium!” I said, “Vanaheim! Balanrot! I don’t know them all!” I cannot be sure which names I spoke, or if I spoke them all. Though I sat in on many a conference with the Emperor and the Magnarch discussing the details of His Radiance’s tour of the Centaurine provinces, that had been years ago. I had spent seven years between Nessus and Gododdin before entering the freeze for the long haul to Padmurak. The names were all I had left.

But I am certain Perfugium was one.

“Perfugium!” I said again, and shut my eyes—and shut my mouth with shame.

The pain vanished, and at once I felt sick instead.

Urbaine was smiling his diseased smile, but Syriani was impassive. “Su tutai wo,” it said. “Very good.” At this it made a sign, and the Cielcin at the winch lowered me back into my pit. The pain did not return; Urbaine kept the collar inhibiting sensation, so that I hung there, bound and bleeding, and could think about what I had done.

It was no mercy.