THOSE FIRST DAYS OF our journey to Colchis passed in a gray haze. Until that point, Valka had been content to leave me be, and I had sat—swaddled in my blanket—upon the empty bridge or in the cargo hold, listening to the drives or watching the stars twist and stretch across infinity. I had been as one dead, as though I were not aboard the Ascalon at all, but Charon’s ferry, slouching not to Colchis, but to the afterlife.

But Valka was right, we were not dead, and at her patient insistence throughout the days that followed, I dragged myself after her, forced myself to dress and to set about helping her to repair our critical systems.

We hardly spoke in all that time. Despite all our years apart, there was nothing to say, and each of us had been so long in isolation that neither knew how to speak to the other. But we did not need to. There are older, deeper languages than language, and love has little need of words. It was enough that she was there, and would not let me be alone.

With the algae vats purged and running properly and most of the rotten plant matter and dead fish gone from the aquaculture systems, it was only a matter of time to rewater and replant the beds, and it was not long after that the foul smell of the air abated. Through it all, Valka moved with a quiet, diligent efficiency. It had been easy, for so long, to forget that she had been a sailor once. So easy to forget that she had fled her home on Edda not once, but twice: once when they tried to cure her of Urbaine’s virus, and once so long ago, when she had used the credit she accrued from her military service to buy passage from the Demarchy to see the galaxy and the ruins she so loved.

Old natures, it seemed, died hard.

“You know we can’t both go under the ice,” Valka said, putting her foot within striking distance of the issue coiled between us. “The ship won’t fly itself—and even if it could, hydroponics would be right back to where we started, and worse.”

I said nothing. I had known this conversation was coming—had been coming for days . . . or was it weeks? But I hadn’t wanted to face it. There was only one reasonable outcome, and I was not yet ready to be alone.

Irked by my silence, Valka’s voice sharpened, and she said, “We could put in somewhere nearer. Resupply. Once we cross the Rasan Belt, there must be some outpost where we could—”

“No!” I said, turning from the crate row of squash seedlings beneath their heat lamps, surprising myself with the vehemence in my voice. “Valka, the minute we’re flagged on Imperial systems, they’ll impound us. We can’t hit a fuel depot, or put into port to take on a couple spacers—and we couldn’t pay them, anyway. We’ll never get to Colchis.”

Valka looked up from the test kit she’d been using to check the minerality of the water beds, brows knitting. She held the testing rod frozen in two fingers, as if she’d forgotten her arm. “Why do you want to go to Colchis so badly?” she asked. “Hadrian, Siran is dead. Gibson is dead. You know that.”

“I know that,” I agreed, unable to mask the bitterness in my voice. “It’s just . . .” My mouth had gone dry, and I had to screw my eyes shut to find the words again. “We have to get back to Nessus eventually. Or to Forum. But we can’t go there directly. They’re too far away. We have to go somewhere, and that may as well be Colchis.” I wiped my hands on the gray rag I’d hung over the lip of the bed, pushed myself back on my rolling seat, and listened to the misting armatures hiss for a minute. “If we put in at the nearest outpost—wherever that is—there’s no telling who’ll come for us: it might be the Emperor’s men, if we’re lucky. And whatever happens, Legion Intelligence will want its way with us. But it might be the Inquisition.”

Valka let her hand fall. “I didn’t think of that.”

“If we go to Colchis, we can control how we make contact. We can use the athenaeum, make it official. That way the Chantry can’t make us . . . disappear.” I smiled to keep the memory of the Chantry’s assassin on Thermon from my mind. “And the Ascalon can bypass orbital defense and find . . . whatever’s left of Siran.”

“Her grave, you mean?”

“Of course I mean her grave!” I said. “Do you have to make me say it?” I bit my tongue to stop the bitterness from catching. In a voice crushed to smallness, I carried on. “But she’s the only one who has one. The only one I can visit. I have to do that first. Then we’ll go to the athenaeum and hand ourselves over to the Imperium.”

I hung my head and said no more. Perhaps Valka was right to worry about me. Maybe I had gone mad, but some part of me felt that I would find her there, and Gibson. Nearly five hundred years had passed since we left Colchis on our fateful voyage to Annica, but Colchis was another world, and it seemed to me that I should have left it standing still when I departed. After all, I had found Gibson there once centuries after I thought he must have died. My father’s vindictive nature alone had ensured that meeting. He had shipped Gibson to Colchis among the freight, on the slowest ship he could find. Thus it is in the nature of things that ugliness and evil bend to good in time. Gibson had arrived on Colchis a mere handful of years before I, and so we had been allowed our reunion. We would not be allowed another.

I knew that.

I had left a letter for him when we journeyed past Colchis on our way to Padmurak. There had been no reply, would be no reply. And yet I knew that to stand in the grottoes beneath the Great Library and to walk those halls once more would do me good. Simply to walk where Gibson had walked, and to return and tarry once again upon the sands of Thessa, was in a sense to return to that earlier time. How I longed to swim in those waters where once—however briefly—I had been happy and free. Still some part of me knew that what I really longed for was to hear once more the shouts and laughter of my men, and to feel that sense of family that is what we truly call home.

And I knew also that I would never feel it. Not ever again.

“You should be the one to sleep,” Valka said, meaning fugue. “Your injuries . . . you need to recover.”

I shook my head violently, rebelling against the pity in her tone. “We both know I can’t do that on ice. I need time to . . . to take care of myself.” My left hand gripped my ruined shoulder. No amount of exercise would set the joint to rights. I needed a doctor. We both knew it.

“You need to rest,” Valka said, putting her tools down, the better to survey me across the water bed between us. “When we get to Colchis, they can do something for your poor hand and the . . . the rest of it.”

Suddenly self-conscious, I turned my slashed face away, all too aware of the corrective tape she had laid over the marks of Syriani’s talons. I could half-see them in the polished white of the hydroponics room: black seams on pale flesh, like the solder in Jinan’s shattered water basin.

“You should be the one to go under,” I said. “Nothing is going to happen to us. We’re safe at warp. I can watch the ship.”

“Can you?” There was no venom in Valka’s voice—only doubt—and that was the far more terrible thing.

I cursed myself in that moment. My weakness. A shadow had crawled up from the pits of Dharan-Tun, a shadow and worm that wore my name. I had spent those first weeks of our voyage shattered and worthless. Forgivable? Perhaps. Understandable? Certainly. But misery was a thing we could ill afford. I sucked in a deep breath, nodding all the while, and felt as I felt the holograph image of a crumbling statue must feel when played in reverse, my every part and particle struggling to force itself back together. “I don’t like the thought of leaving you alone,” I said. It took every ounce of self-control I had not to glance at her left hand, remembering the way it had squeezed her throat under the sway of Urbaine’s worm. I could not leave her to watch the ship alone, and besides . . . Valka was a clansman of Tavros. She did not have twenty-eight years to waste.

I was palatine—am palatine.

I had twenty-eight years to give. For her.

“I can do it,” I said.

“You’re not a sailor, Hadrian,” she said, looking at me with sorrow in her sharp and lovely face.

“And you don’t have the time,” I said. “Twenty-eight years is a long time.”

“ ’Tis too long for anyone to spend alone,” she replied. “You can’t seriously be proposing that I leave you here by yourself.” She gestured round at the Ascalon. “I’m not so old as that yet. We Tavrosi don’t live so long as you palatines, but I have time. We have the supplies for a few years, at least.”

I seized the damp, gray towel to have something to do with my hands, squeezed it in my fists until my hands ached, and chewed my tongue. “A few years, fine. No one has to go under the ice yet. But when someone does, you and I both know it should be you.”

For once, she did not argue. “We need to get the ship back in full working order,” she said after another long pause, all business. But in a soft voice—more to herself than to me—she whispered, “We can do this. We can do this.”

Thus the first years of our journey passed by. With the ship at warp, we busied ourselves repairing hydroponics and seeing to the growth of the vegetables meant to supplement our steady diet of porridge made from rehydrated bromos bouillon. I knew next to nothing of aquaculture, and so relied on Valka—whose mind, naturally, contained volumes on the subject encoded in her neural lace. But I learned steadily, and she learned, too—for the knowledge she held was no more a part of her than a book at my disposal was a part of me. Often she’d described it to me like a library, a psychic palace of near infinite, interlocking rooms through which she moved—knowing always the contents of each chamber as she entered.

The scholiasts employed a similar technique—without the use of machines such as those Valka employed—to ensure that they forgot nothing. It was said that a master scholiast could perform as well as such machines, but it took a man a lifetime to master such techniques. Valka been born with such mastery. It had been built into her. And though even after all our years her powers frightened me, I thanked whatever gods there are—the Quiet, I guessed—for them. And for her.

It was months before the first harvest was ready, and we feasted such as we could: on squash and onions, potatoes, tomatoes, and beans to complement the omnipresent porridge. There were even herbs in seed storage: rosemary, sage, and thyme, and so it seemed a feast indeed, despite the lack of meat. In truth, I did not long for it, who had so often eaten raw fish in the lake of my cell and whatever foul, stinking flesh—I dared not guess what kind—that my guards had fed me when the ration bars ran out.

I am ashamed to say I wept at the first bite, though in my heart I dreamed of bread and cheese and wine. Still, it was a return to civilization, to the human world.

But we had not yet come to civilization. Valka and I were alone, and many were the days—gray and numberless—that I dreamed of music, of crowded streets, and the wind through the trees of the English Garden at Maddalo House. How much less a prison it seemed than that cold and quiet ship.

And yet it was not so bad as that, for though Valka and I were alone—we were alone together. I have said before that in love the universe contracts, its horizons shrinking until you and the other fill the universe entire. For Valka and me, then, it was almost literally true. As we had come together in the dungeons of Vorgossos, shivering in the dark and cold, so we faced the long night of that voyage together.

Years passed, and as they passed the memory of Akterumu and Dharan-Tun retreated a pace. The scars on my face and body dulled from red fire to dull embers to white ash, and though still my shoulder pained me and my missing fingers woke me burning in the night, I found I lived each day better than the last. I never would be like I was—even if we reached the Imperium, even if they mended my shoulder and regenerated my hand—I knew a part of me would forever lie on black sands beneath the Dreamer’s hollow eye.

There are endings, Reader, for all things.

And before long, one such ending came.

“I don’t like this,” Valka said for what seemed the thousandth time.

It was not yet cold in the cubiculum. Not a one of the ship’s forty fugue creches was active—that was the worst part. Each one belonged to a man we might have saved. Corvo might have slept in the one to Valka’s left, Pallino and Crim further down. Ilex and Elara and young Leon might have joined us—and the men whose names I did not know who had survived Aulamn’s attack and made it to the Tamerlane.

Each stood empty, instead.

“I know,” I said. “I’ll be all right. I promise.”

Valka did not answer, but turned away, bent to examine the connections that fitted her creche to the coolant supply and circulation system, a job that—properly—should have been the role of a fugue technician, but we had none. It was no great matter. Of all the systems on board a starship, the ones that ran the fugue creches were the most automated, the most insulated from error.

Presently, she straightened, turned to look me in the face. “I still think we could take it in shifts. The TX-9 supply is low, but there should be enough to run a fresh creche once or twice.”

“I know that, too,” I said, using an old scholiast technique to clamp down on my breathing. “Let’s get you ready.”

“We can wait another day,” Valka said, not moving to undress herself.

“We’ve been saying that for weeks.” I tucked my chin, crossed my arms, studied the polished floor between us and the pointed toes of Valka’s boots. “It’s time.”

She sniffed, and though I did not look up I knew she nodded. “All right.” Risking a glance, I caught her staring up at the ceiling, at the lamp crawling along its track at the vertex of the arched ceiling. We were on the Ascalon’s highest level, right below the dorsal hull, and the weight of all the emptiness and of the whorling stars beyond oppressed my mind. She didn’t move, and in her stillness I recognized the hollow ache of a woman fighting tears.

“I can’t help but feel like you won’t . . . won’t be here when I wake up,” she said at last, and sniffed again, pressing her eyes shut.

I went to her, crushed her to me, and gritted my teeth as my torn shoulder wailed. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be right here.”

Her hands came up, held me with the delicateness of disbelief. “Promise me,” she murmured, breath on my neck, “promise me you’ll wake me. When you have to.”

“If I have to.”

“I know what I said.”

Letting her go, I stepped back, did my best to smile. “I will,” I said, knowing I would not. As Valka had said, our supply of cryonic fluid was low. Corvo had not kept the Ascalon supplied during the voyage to Padmurak. There had been no cause for it, and what little maintenance the Tamerlane’s crew had performed on the lesser vessel, it had been just that: maintenance.

Valka let out a ragged sigh, clenched her jaw as she pulled her shirt up over her head. She was naked beneath, and I caught myself remembering the first time I’d undressed for the freeze aboard Demetri’s Eurynasir. How cold it had been, and how unforgiving the universe. We had been six years sailing from Eue by then. There were twenty-two to go.

“I’ll take the clothes,” I said, watching Valka lean against the console to tug her boots free. She didn’t answer except to toss the boots onto the floor with her striped shirt.

Before long she wore nothing at all. Nothing save the tarnished half-moon pendant that hung about her neck on its fine silver chain. The black lines of her clan saylash drank the light, so black was it against her skin, the dense fractal lines spiraling up her arm and down her flank to one swelling hip. She looked so small in the stark light of the cubiculum—but then, I guessed we all did in our turn. She raised her left hand to the medallion and tugged it free, then proffered it to me, holding it by the chain.

“Watch this for me,” she said, letting it drop into my palm.

An absurd thrill of shame washed through me then. My own phylactery—the one containing Valka’s cells—remained in Maddalo House where I had left it. I closed my fingers round the metal before putting the thing safely into a pocket of my tunic.

“I’ll keep it safe,” I said, doing my best to smile. “And you.”

Hands behind her back, she crossed the short space between us, raised herself on her toes to kiss me on the cheek. “I mean it,” she said. “You wake me when ’tis time.” She drew back a step, squinted up at me. “I don’t want you playing the hero anymore.”

“No more playing,” I said, and to this day I cannot tell you how I meant it.

She kissed me properly then, and when we were done, she drew back and turned to step into the creche. I watched her a long moment, then stepped in to help her with the blood line and the cuffs to keep her in place. Urbaine’s worm would not threaten her in the deep dream beneath the ice, and that—at least—was a comfort. I’m sure some other word or honest nothing passed between us, some idle phrase mouthed a million times in darkness or in day. But when all was done I drew back and pressed the controls to drop the lid. Metal and glass shut like a blossom at the end of day, and I hit the switch on the console to start the process.

She was asleep before the cryonic fluid filled the tank.

And I was as alone as I had ever been.

Wake me. When you have to.

In the end, I never did. Not after five years, nor ten, nor twenty—though I needed her back at once. I escaped the kingdoms of death and returned to that great empire of silence, and in silence lived for years. Routine made me sane again—at first. Then solitude drove me mad. We are not meant to live alone, and many were the days I spent in the dark cold of the cubiculum, regarding Valka’s sleeping face through the glass of her creche, like the prince in those oldest tales, finding his princess in death.

How peaceful she seemed to me, so nearly dead. She had come so far, through so much.

For me.

Not for the first time—nor for the last—I endeavored to put my life to paper. Lacking parchment and pen, I wrote volumes on my terminal, and wrote as well on other subjects. I wrote of Pallino, of Corvo and the others we had lost, and of the torments I suffered in Dharan-Tun. In writing I dissolved my madness and my sorrow both, for it is the peculiar nature of words to trap feelings larger than themselves, and so reduce those forces and passions which might overthrow us to objects we can handle and name.

Sorrow. Grief. Fear. Pain.

I called them each by name.

There in the silence of the ship, for silent years, I set myself in order once again. Not whole, not healed, and though I think I spent years in a state close to dreaming or to coma, lying on my bed, in time I rose and began to live again, and to speak with myself. I began as well to try to strengthen my body once again—so much as my tortured limbs and aching shoulder would allow. I hoped that when we returned to civilization there might be help or healing to be found. New fingers, as Pallino once had won a new eye. That was something remarkable: I hoped. So, hoping, I counted the days until reversion.

Until Valka woke from sleep.