SINCE THE DAY I died aboard the Demiurge, my dreams have haunted me, even in fugue. Since Annica, since those days upon the mountaintop of that other world, I dreamed of what I’d seen. The Quiet had revealed all of time to me, poured past and present and possible futures into my head. Universes of events so unlikely they were indistinguishable from dream. I had supped of those waters like a man who drank the ocean—and though I’d swallowed it all I could not hold it, and spat it back again.

Pieces of that total vision came back to me, sounds and images, sensations remembered by the unconscious mechanisms of my all-too-human brain. Chains bound me wrist and ankle, forced me to hobble like an old man. The Cielcin surrounded me, watching with unmasked faces, their black glass fangs glimmering as the guards at my back spurred me on with their spears. Ahead, a black dome rose like half an enormous egg, and upon its steps awaited a figure in black and azure, silver-crowned.

“You knew it would come to this, kinsman,” said Syriani Dorayaica, black eyes on me. It raised one clawed hand and pointed at the sky. “Time runs down.”

I followed the gesture skyward—and cried out.

“Hadrian!”

Darkness.

Light.

A hand on my cheek, cool and dry. The scent of smoke and sandalwood.

“Valka . . .”

We were in bed. She’d turned on the lamp, a baroque piece of stained glass, and propped herself on one elbow. It took me a moment to remember where I was. My eyes wandered among the richly carved beams and plastered ceiling, soaked in the wood paneling and Jaddian carpets and the high, narrow windows that overlooked the balcony and the gardens.

Maddalo House. Sananne. Nessus.

The old villa had begun its life as an abbey for Cid Arthurian monks in the years before the Empire came to Nessus. It perched on a bluff overlooking the villages that surrounded the great city of Sananne. By night, the sky-spires and the cyclopean outlines of the mile-high drydocks glowed with artificial light, and the air was thick with the song of cicadas. Gentle winds blew the pencil cypresses that fringed the bucolic grounds, reminding me of home.

Home.

It had been my prison for seventy years, and though it was a gilded cage, a cage it remained. For twelve years the Chantry tried me for treason and for heresy, and for twelve years they’d proved nothing. Recordings they’d collected and suppressed on the galactic datanet of my miracle on Berenike could not be proved undoctored, and the scholiasts who had served in my defense fought the Inquisition tooth and nail. In the end, in desperation, the Chantry tried to kill me, just as Augustin Bourbon and the Empress had tried on Forum. They failed, and botched their trial in the process. For their pains—and because I’d caused the Emperor too much pain—I’d been sent to Nessus, capital of the Magnarchate of Centaurus. With the Veil of Marinus lost, Centaurus had become the center of our war with the Cielcin, and so it was to Nessus I’d been sent. The Tamerlane sat in orbit, its crew on ice save for Valka, who’d been allowed to live with me in my comfortable prison for the past several decades.

The Emperor had shuffled me off here to keep me out of trouble, to keep me away from Forum and out of the public eye. It might have been a good life, were I not bounded in a nutshell.

Were it not that I had bad dreams.

“Are you all right?” Valka asked, stroking my cheek with tattooed fingers. When I didn’t answer, she added, “The dreams again?”

I nodded and sat up, swung out of bed and, naked, crossed the thickly carpeted floor to the basin to fill a glass with clear water.

When still I didn’t speak, Valka asked, “ ’Tis not Eikana, is it?”

“No,” I rasped. It had been three weeks since we’d returned from Eikana aboard the Ascalon. I’d finished my reports to the Magnarch’s people and to the Legion Intelligence Office, and was enjoying a brief furlough on the villa’s estates. “Eikana was nothing.”

I did not have to turn to know Valka was shaking her head. “What was it?”

“Nothing new,” I said, and thought, Time runs down. I’d had the dream a thousand times over the years, seen myself marched toward the black dome in chains, seen the Cielcin Prince of Princes standing there.

The scholiasts say that memory exists to impart lessons that protect us from injury. The memory of burning our hands teaches us not to play with fire. What then can be said of my memories of the future? If that was what they were?

“You’ve hardly slept since you got back,” she said.

“You can take responsibility for some of that,” I said, turning, the crooked old Marlowe smile firmly in place.

She matched that crooked smile with an asymmetric curling of her lips. It was not her old smile. The worm Urbaine had loosed upon her mind had done its damage, and though Valka had recovered from her ordeal, she had never fully healed. Here and there the scars of what the magus had done showed in the asymmetric stillness of some muscle or the faint tremor of a hand.

“Something is bothering you,” she insisted, pushing untidy red-black hair from her face.

“It’s been so long,” I said at last.

“Since you fought?”

“Since I had the dream,” I said, and conceded, “but that, too.” I had slept for the nine-month return journey from Eikana, and for once my dreams had not followed me into cryonic fugue. “And I keep thinking about something that . . . general said. ‘We’ll have you in time.’ ”

A crease formed between Valka’s winged eyebrows. “Dorayaica’s been after you since before Berenike. ’Tis not news, Hadrian.”

I looked down at the water glass cradled in my hands, at my ghostly reflection in it—then to Valka. Time had been kind to her—if Urbaine’s worm had not been. The long decades had made but few marks upon her face and body. Yet she was Tavrosi and no palatine. Faint creases marked the corners of her eyes, and the lines that marked the perimeter of her smile were set more deeply. But there was no frost in the dark fire of her hair, and when she smiled—and this time it was the full smile, not the uneven one—it was with the old electric spark that lit my own face.

“You’re right,” I said, eyes wandering the length of her. “Of course you are.” I drained my glass to disguise the moment necessary to gather my wits. “But I can’t shake these . . . visions.”

Valka arched one eyebrow. “Perhaps they are only dreams now.” My smile flickered. She was right about that, too. If I was right—if the Quiet had showed me all of time when I stood upon that mountaintop—then much of it would never be. Much of what haunted me might be as good as fiction. I dreamed myself seated on the Solar Throne with Princess Selene at my feet, or toiling in a field in chains alongside a girl who looked very much like Siran. Sometimes, I saw myself standing naked on the auction block while men bid on me for the fighting pits, sold by that pirate, Demetri. Other times, I dreamed my first encounter with Uvanari, only we were standing amidst the green sea of a plantation and not in the tunnels of Calagah. A boy named Switch died in my arms beneath Emeshi skies, but he was not the Switch I knew. And I died beneath Gilliam’s blade. Beneath Uvanari’s.

Things that had never happened—that could never happen. I saw them all.

“Hadrian.” Valka’s voice reached me where I sat at the bottom of my thoughts. “Come back to bed.”

I did not answer her at once, but turned over all these thoughts and un-memories one after another. Valka was right, too many of the dreams were impossible. They would never be.

Why then did I wake sweating in the night to this particular nightmare?

My eyes flickered to the antique clock that glowed above the cold hearth. It was nearly dawn. “I think I’ll stay up,” I said. “I have to meet the Magnarch later this morning.”

Karol Venantian was far from the picture of the Sollan Magnarch one imagines. Not the barrel-chested former officer or stuffed-shirt politico. The Supreme Lord of every system in the Centaurus Arm of the galaxy, one of three men in all the human universe to hold the office of Magnarch and speak with the Emperor’s own voice, had the bearing of a scribe. Rapier-thin and stooped somewhat by his nearly six centuries, old Lord Venantian would not have looked out of place in the green robes of a scholiast. He wore the violent purple of his rank instead, a half-toga that left both arms free pinned at the left shoulder of his long white-and-gold jacket.

“The Consortium delivered the uranium for Ramannu Province on schedule,” he said, surveying the landing field out the window of our flier. “Once the fuel barges arrive from Eikana, the whole caravan will be ready to launch. Commandant Lynch tells me our Nipponese friends were quite pleased to find their refinery more or less intact.”

Talk of the Wong-Hopper Consortium and uranium put me in mind of home. Had some of that latest uranium shipment been mined on Delos or in its system? I supposed I could ask the Magnarch, but it was better not to know, better to imagine.

“Yamato estimates it’ll be about eight months before the Eikana Fuelworks are operable again, but that’s much better than the timeline we were looking at before.”

Through the porthole at my right, I could see the gray-white face of the nearest Sananne shipyard building rising more than a mile into the sky. The tallest towers of the city seemed meager things beneath it. Pale as it was, it reminded me of an old painting in the Peronine Palace of the city of London burning in the shadow of the colossal pyramids of the Mericanii. Discomforted by the comparison, I turned to the Magnarch. “There’s always the possibility the Cielcin will return. We beat them, but their general escaped and doubtless will have carried word of its defeat back to its master.”

“Yes, quite.” The Magnarch stroked his pointed chin. “The Yamato are doubling their in-system security, but we will dispatch a legion to support them.”

“You’d best dispatch a legion to every refinery in Centaurus,” I said.

The Magnarch’s brows contracted. “Has your time offworld made you forget your place so quickly, Lord Marlowe?” Lord Venantian’s tone betrayed the iron in the man, and for a moment he seemed no scribe at all. “You’re quite correct, of course. There’s no telling what intelligence the Pale might have collected when they ascertained the location of the Eikana Fuelworks. Possibly our entire refueling infrastructure is compromised.”

“Possibly,” I agreed.

“You heard the news about the Jaddians, yes?” Venantian asked.

“What news about the Jaddians?”

“Prince Aldia has promised us an army.”

“Again?” The Jaddians had been promising support since I was a boy. A dozen times it seemed the Principalities were on the verge of sending an armada—thousands of ships and millions of soldiers—but every time the princes had seemed on the verge of launching their fleets, they’d pulled back, preferring instead to send a token force, a fact-finding expedition such as the one the Satrap governor Kalima di Sayyiph had led to Emesh so long ago.

From the look on his seamed face, I could tell the old Magnarch was thinking the same thing. “So it would seem,” he said, a touch of acid in his tone. “I had word from Forum that our Jaddian friends have launched a fleet of some twenty thousand warships under the command of Prince Aldia’s grandson, Prince Kaim.”

“Kaim du Otranto?” I said, arching my eyebrows. “Al Badroscuro?”

Venantian snorted. “Darkmoon,” he said. “What a truly ridiculous nickname.”

“He is not a ridiculous man,” I said. I had never met the young Prince of Jadd, nor seen a proper holograph of him. The men of the eali al’aqran, the Jaddian palatines, wore masks for all their public appearances, painted porcelain prostheses that moved with their expressions. They were meant to separate the man from his station, to symbolize the divide between personal and political—though whether they succeeded in this was a question for men other than me. The result of this was that though men like Aldia du Otranto and his warrior grandson were known across the galaxy, their faces were not, whereas the face of our holy Emperor and his predecessors peered at us from official portraits and from the observe of every golden hurasam.

The Magnarch seemed to chew something a moment, said, “No indeed. The War Office says he’s bringing an army of two hundred million mamluk clones.”

I felt surely that I was wearing one of those Jaddians masks then, and that the jaw had fallen off. “Two hundred . . . million?” I repeated the figure, throat at once very dry. It was a staggering figure, nearly the equal of all the Imperial legions and the armies of the greater and lesser houses in the Centaurine provinces.

It was easy to forget why cloning—duplication—was one of the Chantry’s most grievous sins. The illegal construction of clone armies had allowed the Jaddians their independence in the first place, and before the Cielcin Wars, it had been their militant maintaining of those same clone armies that had kept the eighty-one Principalities of Jadd free of Imperial control. But if the Jaddians were willing to commit their not-inconsiderable resources to the war effort for true—their clone mamluk slaves could be precisely the weapon we needed to turn the tide on the xenobites for good and all.

“They ought to have the demons quaking in their boots!” Venantian said. “Though they’ll not arrive in these parts for decades yet.”

Still reeling, I nodded. Jadd lay on the outermost edge of the galaxy, on the far side of the Sollan Empire, tens of thousands of light-years from Nessus and the front. “Are you sure we can trust them?” I asked. I of all people had no reason to mistrust the Jaddians—Sir Olorin Milta and his satrap master had been instrumental in ensuring the launch of my ill-fated expedition to find Vorgossos—but the mere mention of such staggering numbers was enough to chill the blood.

“Prince Aldia and His Radiance have been friends for centuries,” the Magnarch said, leaning back in his seat as our flier slowed over the landing pad high on the exterior of the shipyard dry docks. “I do not think we’ve anything to fear. We’ve increased levies across the outer provinces. It is the Emperor’s wish we match that number by the end of the century, and that’s to say nothing of the new of naval personnel we’ll need to train up for all these ships we’re building.”

Our shuttle landed the moment after, and presently Lord Venantian rose. I was to join him in surveying the progress our shipwrights were making on the construction of components for the new dreadnought. When it was completed, the Huntsman would be among the largest battleships in the Imperial service, a hundred-mile rival even to Kharn Sagara’s Demiurge and the Sojourners of the Exalted. The ship’s superstructure was being assembled in orbit above one of Nessus’s five moons, but many of the mighty vessel’s component parts were being assembled on the ground where gravity was more boon to the construction worker than bane to the construction process. In time, the components would be lifted into space on impossibly long cables for final installation.

The Magnarch’s aides—silent for the duration of our flight—scurried down the open ramp ahead of us, gray-suited logothetes and scholiasts alike. I followed on behind, keeping to the great lord’s side.

“How did you find your reprieve, Lord Marlowe?” the Magnarch asked, pausing at the base of the ramp.

“Your Grace?” I stopped beside him. The day stood fair, the wind quiet even so high above the ground. My black hair floated in the air between us, and I combed it back behind my ear.

“Eikana,” he said. “You’re been with us, what? Seventy years?”

“Sixty-eight, before Eikana,” I replied. Old though he was, white-haired and wizened, the Magnarch of Centaurus yet looked down his nose at me. I have always been short for a palatine, if tall by the standards of common men. I raised my chin, certain that our entire meeting that morning existed so the Magnarch—my jailer—could ask this one question. I squeezed the hem of my black cape in my left hand until ordinary bones would have ached from the strain. “I have served the Empire all my life,” I said. “I will continue to be of service.”

The Magnarch smoothed his porphyry-colored toga with one ringed hand. “There are those on my council who expected you to run.”

Despite the warmth of the white sun, I felt a chill creep into my bones, freeze my blood and soul. A flicker of the old Marlowe anger passed through me, and I said, “I am sorry to have disappointed them.”

“I’d not have relished siccing my dogs on you.”

That was as much a lie as it was not a figure of speech. On his rare off days, the Magnarch was famous for taking his wolfhounds into the highland forests north of Sananne to hunt foxes and the ten-legged fur salamanders who called the planet home.

“I’d have given them a merry chase, I’m sure,” I said coolly, allowing a small smile to hint that I only meant it as humor. It was only desperation that had prompted Lord Venantian to send me to Eikana in the first place. Mine had been the only company with the force necessary to liberate the refinery within rapid-response distance, the only one with ships fast enough and soldiers waiting.

“I’m sure!” the Magnarch agreed with equal coolness.

I could have hit him. The bastard had insisted Valka remain at Maddalo House when I left precisely because he knew it prevented the very scenario he was describing. To suggest I would have fled without her was an insult I’d gladly break teeth to set right.

“I remain the Emperor’s faithful servant,” I said, effecting a short, punctilious bow my dancing master had taught me long, long ago.

“Good!” Lord Venantian said. “He will be delighted to hear that when he arrives.”