THE WORLD BENEATH US shone gray and white as a holograph plate tuned to a dead signal. What air Padmurak had was stale and lifeless, and Vedatharad, the Great City, sprawled across snow-streaked tundra that had never known the touch of life. Each of the Great City’s districts stood sealed beneath mighty domes of common steel and alumglass, reminding me of nothing so much as the demon-haunted city of Vorgossos.

Even from the air, the effect of the Commonwealth’s capital was one of crumbling utilitarian efficiency, of brutal concrete blocks and right angles beneath mighty domes of glass. Soulless monuments to a godless scripture that made cogs of men and claimed to set them free not by breaking their chains, but by labeling those who forged the chains and held them as fellow workers. The Commonwealth claimed its wealth in common, and claimed there was no class, no hierarchy, no division between one man and the next. Its people had no names—so it was said—no stations. They dwelt in empty cells in the great hive towers that rose like the stacks of Satanic mills about the perimeter of each of the vast city’s domed arcologies.

“Hell of a place,” Crim said, peering through the slit window in the side of the shuttle as we prepared to disembark. “This is their capital? They couldn’t put it on a world people can breathe on?”

“It is rather telling, isn’t it?” I asked, peering out beside him.

The sky above was gray as the planet, white clouds matching white snow. One of the outlying domes filled the sky before us, the lines of its black skeleton carving its order against the heavens. So unlike the Eternal City it was, fencing out the sky.

“Helmets on!” Pallino ordered, taking charge of our little procession. I thumbed the trigger that deployed my helmet from its hiding place in the neck flange of my armor. The whole thing unfurled and clicked into place above my face with jewel-like precision while the others lowered their helmets into place. I heard the whine of pressure seals and hiss of air systems as the suit’s air began to flow. Tor Varro wore his scholiast’s greens over the black environment suit, his face hidden behind a mask of featureless black glass. Valka’s helmet was similar, black alumglass and jointed steel above the padded matte underlayment, but the rest more resembled my own: the breastplate she wore over her blood-red tunic was sculpted to evoke the female torso, the pitchfork-and-pentacle embossed over the sternum—just as mine. She was no soldier, and so wore no pteruges at shoulder and waist, nor any armor upon arms or legs. But the polymer of her left arm bore the fractal pattern of her saylash, her clan tattoo—exact to the minutest detail—black against black.

I hadn’t seen her wear it in decades, and smiled beneath my mask. She carried her old Tavrosi service repeater strapped to one hip, partially concealed by the heavy brocade of her short cape—cousin to my own.

What a pair we made.

“Helmets secure?” Pallino went up the line. His inspections complete, he rounded on the pilot officer and said, “Go to equalize cabin pressure.”

A louder hiss accompanied the venting of the shuttle’s air to balance the less wholesome air without, and an instant later the shuttle hatch opened on the ramp. The first of our guard went out, dressed in armor of Imperial ivory, their lances tall and keen, shaming the shabby guards of the Commonwealth in their drab grays. Varro followed, then Crim and Pallino ahead of Valka and myself, leading the knot of more heavily armored hoplites who made up the core of our guard.

We’d been instructed simply to march straight ahead across the field and toward the low, wide slit of the receiving bay that stood open across half a hundred yards of open tarmac. Why we had not been directed or permitted to taxi directly into the bay was a mystery to me. Perhaps the Commonwealth intended a subtle insult in the way they forced us to march.

The Lothrian soldiery lifted their lances in salute on either side. There must have been two hundred of them, armor hung with medals and dripping with braided cords.

“Looks like they sent their best, eh?” Pallino asked, whispering despite the private comms channel.

A thin wind cast about us, so insubstantial it barely lifted the heavy brocade of mine and Valka’s capes.

Varro answered him. “It is an unusually high concentration of decorated men.”

“They’re trying to impress us,” I said. As if the soldiery could compensate for the decaying urbanity of the starport.

Above the rectangular lintel of the hangar mouth was carved a stylized relief of the Lothrian people working arm in arm, two columns marching toward one another to meet in the middle beneath the graven image of a book. Their postures were rigid, artless, and mechanical—and their faces were carved with empty expressions aping joy and determination both, an unnatural mixture that I can’t recall having ever seen on the faces of living men.

Nodding at the graven book, Valka asked, “ ’Tis the Lothriad?”

I returned her nod. “Yes. I’m told we’ll see it everywhere.”

The Lothriad formed the foundation of the Commonwealth. More than a code of laws, more than holy scripture, it contained the list of approved statements, the phrases and ideas which were permitted by the Grand Conclave for use by the people. Once, the peoples of the Commonwealth had spoken freely, it was said. But as the partisans tightened their grip, they revised their dictionaries shorter and shorter, pruning out dangerous and unnecessary words. In the end, they outlawed even names and other words by which one man was identified from the next—for it was said that to recognize distinctions was to foster inequity. If the clansmen of Tavros feared to prejudice one partner over another in questions of love and marriage—the men of the Commonwealth feared prejudice itself.

In time, they published no dictionaries. In their place was printed not a list of approved words, but of approved thoughts. There would be only one way to express hunger, or pain. Only one way to request assistance, or address a comrade. Where once had been a language, there was to be set of ideologically approved sentences, like hieroglyphs. Unchanging.

Or so it was said, so we were asked to believe.

We passed beneath that graven lintel, and steel doors ground behind us, shutting out the pale and jaundiced sun. The light that shone from the flat ceiling overhead was utterly without color. Indicators in the periphery of my vision told me that air was being pumped into the cavernous hangar, and on the receiving platform ahead I saw a portal open and admit a man in a gray suit without emblem or device, bookended by men in armor of unassuming black.

As we drew nearer the platform, the gray-suited man raised a hand. “Dilijatja vatajema,” he said, speaking the guttural Lothrian tongue. The delegation is welcome. “On behalf of the Conclave, a representative bids the delegation from the Sollan Empire welcome to Padmurak and the People’s City.” I marked the earpiece the man wore, and guessed that a panel of advisors—if not the machine itself—was feeding the man his lines, ensuring he stayed on-book.

I returned his bow. Curious, I tested the air and spoke in Galstani. “Thank you for your warm welcome, representative. I am Lord Hadrian Marlowe of the House Marlowe-Victorian, apostol from His Radiance, Emperor William XXIII. I am sent to treat with your masters, the Chairs of the Great Conclave, that we might respond to the Cielcin threat in a way mutually beneficial to our two peoples.”

As I expected, the man paused a long moment before answering, waiting for his machine or the puppet masters behind it to censor and translate my meaning. I might have spoken Lothrian, but I sensed that to do so was a risk. I knew the language, but not the list of stock phrases approved by the Conclave and its various ministries, and sensed that to try was to stagger blind and drunk into a minefield.

“That which is for the good of all men is good for each,” the minister replied, this more clearly a quotation. He offered a weak smile. I wondered at the enormous complexity required to converse with an offworlder not bound by Lothrian speech codes. I did not envy the fellow his task, for surely the firing squad or the guillotine awaited failure.

“Let us hope so,” I said, and realizing my helmet was still on, reached up and removed it with a button press, the whole apparatus folding away like some Nipponese paper sculpture. “Are you one of the Conclave?”

The man shook his head. “Each man must serve the good of the People in fullness of ability. Even the smallest contribution to the good of the People is a benefit to all.” I took that to mean that no, he was not one of the Chairs—though I did not doubt he was some manner of logothete or secretary high in their service. The Lothrians could pretend to have no hierarchy, but that did not mean one did not exist. The man bowed, ushering us forward. Still speaking his native tongue, the man said, “Cars have been brought for the delegation.”

We passed through the drab streets of Eleventh Dome and along gray boulevards unrelieved by the green of trees or grass. Nothing seemed to grow in that dreary city, and great stacks vented steam into the air, where it condensed and dripped from the glass overhead like sad rain. I had the distinct impression—peering out through rain-streaked glass from the rear of the representative’s motorcar—that we were being taken down streets cleaned especially for our visit, for we saw few people, and the brutal stone and concrete facades of buildings shone where hydraulic cleaners had scrubbed away so many years of grime. Bronze reliefs that showcased the virtue and exploits of the People were everywhere in evidence, and everywhere shining without patina or rust.

“Where are all the people?” Valka asked, watching two men and a woman in identical gray suits hurrying along the street beside us.

The representative peered out the window of the car, blinking. He seemed to be looking for the very people Valka asked after, but he was only waiting for his prescribed reply. It came after but a second. “Let each toil for the good of all.”

I could feel Pallino longing to say something, and directed a glare at the captain of my guard. The patrician fellow looked pointedly out the other window, watching the other cars of our motorcade following on behind.

At length, we passed out of Eleventh Dome and along an underground highway that ran beneath the blasted tundra toward another of the domes. This journey only reaffirmed my suspicion that the city had been emptied ahead of our arrival, for six lanes stood open for our motorcade, and I guessed on any other day the traffic would be fierce. I found I had little desire to question our host, who had nothing of his own to say.

Lights pulsed by, orange and sickly.

They gave way to the pale yellow sunlight of another dome, this one mightier than the first. We’d come out under the heavy arch of steel gates that might be shut to isolate the dome should necessity arise and onto a high bridge that ran across a churning reservoir. A mighty dam rose to one side, its sluices open to let forth the flood in thunderous cataracts.

Across that long bridge rose the crowded geometry at the heart of Vedatharad. Pile upon pile of cyclopean stone rose into the yellowed day. The air about seemed thick with some haze—as of the steam that wafted from the stacks in the outer dome—and through the glass curtain of the dome itself I saw the windowless hulks of the blockhouses rising like factories. There were the people of the Commonwealth, I knew: sealed in their hovels.

There were more people as we approached the core of the city, men and women in the same dull gray uniforms hurrying about beneath First Dome’s bottled sky, some alone, some huddled together beneath umbrellas to shield against the drip of water from the glass above. Still more wore medical masks over their faces, and everywhere there were guards. I was not unused to seeing military police—we had prefects on every Imperial world—but the sheer number of them! A black-armored man stood on every street corner, reminding me once more not of any Imperial city, but of the city above the palace of Kharn Sagara on Vorgossos.

And like Vorgossos, there was a darkness underneath.

The People’s Palace stood behind an encircling wall of concrete and steel half a hundred feet thick and three times as high. Within its bounds, the central ziggurat rose in great steps like the pyramid of some false, forgotten god. Outbuildings, windowless and unadorned as tombstones, stood about the perimeter wall: barracks and arsenals and the offices of the secret police. Water played from abstract fountains or jetted in arcs above the main road, leaping from one pile to the next. Soldiers in the matte black of the Conclave Guard or in the highly decorated gray and red of the formal service stood at mechanical attention before doors and fountains, or looked out from the steps of the ziggurat that rose a thousand feet toward the apex of the dome above.

The cars circled around the last fountain and came to a halt before the great stair. A red carpet flowed down those steps like magma, like the incarnadine rug Klytaemnestra unrolled beneath the feet of Agamemnon the Great when Earth was young. Two armored guards opened the clamshell doors, and the representative made a gesture to indicate that I should lead the way out. Pallino went first—Crim was in the car ahead of us—and offered me a hand up. I returned the gesture to Valka, who took my arm.

“It reminds me of home,” she said in Panthai.

I hadn’t wanted to say it. Where she had come from, beauty was subjective—and the world was subjective. At home among her people, Valka had seen what she wanted to see, what her implants painted over her world, illusions in her mind’s eye cast like shadows on the real. She had seen rich gardens where I had seen bare stone, imagined rich wooden floors and hand-carved furniture in place of laminate tile and nylon upholstery. The demarchists imagined riches and papered over ugliness, but the Commonwealth embraced that ugliness and imposed it on all they possessed.

“Are you all right?” I asked her, leaning in. It seemed unlikely that any of the Lothrians about us should speak Valka’s relatively obscure language, but there was always a chance.

She smiled bravely. “Fine. ’Tis nothing.”

A trio of camera drones took holos of us as we mounted the stairs. Security, perhaps, or perhaps the organs of some state propaganda broadcast eager to spin some yarn about our visit. I flashed one a crooked smile, acknowledging the salutes of the pikemen on the stair. Ahead, Crim marched with the signifer who carried the diplomatic staff aloft with its red banner, white-striped where the red Imperial sun shone bright. As we mounted the steps and passed beneath gargantuan square pillars toward false doors forever open and carved like the open pages of a book, I saw ranks of shadowy figures standing to receive us: gray-suited men and women, pale-faced and dark of hair.

I expected us to be stopped and welcomed at the doors, but we were marched instead through security, scanners glowing. They would know about my sword and shield projector, and about the sidearms strapped to one thigh. They’d know too about my parrying dagger, and about the loadout of each and every one of the forty men in my guard down to the smallest of Crim’s knives. Even the adamantine bones of my left arm were laid bare to them.

Only Valka’s implants might escape their notice, that and the monofilament coil Crim kept hidden among his dark hair.

Our representative waved a stiff salute to two others—a man and a woman—who hastened across the atrium to greet us. Each was so like the first that I thought they must be brothers, gray-skinned, black-haired, and hollow-eyed. The three of them each seemed propped up by stimulants, though whether it was verrox or amphetamines or simple caffeine I could not say. Both wore earpieces identical to that worn by the first.

“The delegation is welcome,” they said in unison, waving their short salute. It was the precise phrasing the first man had used to welcome us in the hangar.

“We are honored,” I replied, allowing them time for a translation to be heard and read to them. “When will the Grand Conclave hear us? I am eager to meet with your masters.”

The woman bowed slightly, hands clasped before. “There are neither kings nor masters in the Commonwealth.” She spoke with the chiding edge of a schoolmaster, of a scholiast correcting a slow learner. “The Conclave is not in session this day. The delegation will be summoned when the Chairs arrive.”

A frown threatened to storm across my face, and I looked from Valka to Tor Varro. “Is there to be no reception? I had hoped to begin at once.”

The two men and the woman exchanged glances, each waiting for words to be put into their mouths by the correct authority. Already I felt my patience wearing. Silence I could endure, but this empty-headed passivity that passed for civic virtue was more than I could bear.

“I come on a mission of special significance from the Sollan Emperor himself. Am I not to be received?”

The woman—clearly the senior of the trio, though doubtless that observation would be met with the paean about each man serving the good in fullness of ability—fixed me with a stare and taut smile. “Let each toil for the good of all. Let there be bread, and board, and good order for all who toil.”

“Busy, eh?” I hooked my thumbs through my belt and surveyed the cavernous blank space we had entered. Here the floor was not plain concrete or laminate, but marble tile, a white and black grid. Ahead, a low pool gleamed, lit from beneath, its surface perfectly smooth above dark stone. A black mirror. I felt the child’s impulse to disturb that stillness, to shatter the illusion of perfect order all around.

I knew what was happening.

They were posturing, pretending as all lords must that such great matters were of little moment to them. Pretending that the arrival of an apostol from the Sollan Empire was not a sign of the end of their world.

War had come to Padmurak, whether its dark lords willed or no.