NIGHT AGAIN, AND DREAMS.

Dreams of drowning and deep water. Pale hands trailing in the dark, caressing, dragging me down. I was dead, or nearly so, sealed inside my armor. Time ran backward, and I fell, fell upward toward red light and sound and the chaos of battle. I stood upon a bridge of crumbling stone outside a city of gray towers. Groundcars burned about me, and ragged men held guns.

If, as some believe, time is without end, then in time all things are made true. I believe there must be a final end, as there are endings for so many lesser things: empires, planets, men. But even the centuries of a man’s life are time enough to make truth of mistruth. I had told Lorian once that I did not dream the future. I had not known I could.

The guns fired, muzzles flashed.

I woke.

Dawn had come to Padmurak, and the pale yellow sun shone sickly through the horizontal slits of window glass in one wall, showing cross sections of the brutal, cyclopean city. From our penthouse atop the sky-spire that housed the Imperial embassy, I could make out the shapes of the other domes in the distance. Somewhere miles off lay the shuttleport. Beyond that lay the freight starport: twice the night before I’d seen rockets flare across the sky. Beyond that was only tundra. Tundra, and the endless factories and barracks and labor camps that made up the foundation of Lothrian society.

I let Valka sleep, and washed in the waterless shower, scraped myself beneath the sonic jets and watched as the shower pod flash-incinerated whatever material remained within the stall. I donned my diplomatic best: white shirt and the trousers with their double blood-red stripe along the seam. Over this I belted a tunic jacket in paisley black-on-black brocade lined with crimson. I took my time fitting the leather gauntlet over the sleeve, clicking the fasteners into place. I screwed the Emperor’s sovereign ring onto the first finger of my right hand, and tucked the pendant with the white shard of the Quiet’s shell onto its chain. The boots fitted themselves, tightening about my calves. The sword clicked into place.

The Grand Conclave awaited.

Varro, Valka, and I crossed the antechamber’s black-and-white-checked floor, bracketed by our guards and led by new representatives of the Commonwealth government. Each day we saw new ones, and never again the old faces. We were led round the reflecting pool and up an angled stair to a gallery that ran left and right along the width of the palace ziggurat and overlooked the antechamber and the lower halls or out upon the palace grounds. Ministers and functionaries in identical gray with the black star of government service above their hearts milled about. These were the pitrasnuks, the partisans who ruled the Lothrian Commonwealth in the name of their zuk People.

The inner wall of the gallery was all one mighty frieze depicting the People in triumph. Straight ahead of the main gates stood a square arch. Through this we marched past security, past more gray murals and down a narrow hall whose ceiling was so high above it was lost to darkness. No side passage appeared, and I sensed that we approached the very heart of the ziggurat. The place reminded me of the unforgiving concrete fastnesses of the Chantry bastille on Thermon, or the cell blocks in Borosevo on Emesh. I wondered if the Commonwealth had taken their inspiration from the Chantry so many thousand years before, had stolen their cold architecture for the terror it evoked.

The hall opened on a round chamber, and looking up I found that we had walked out upon the pit of an amphitheater. A coliseum. Sheer walls encircled us, ten feet high, and above that lip, behind an iron rail before us were seated the thirty-five Chairs of the Lothrian Grand Conclave, forming an arc before us. The central chair stood empty, but the others—seventeen to either side—held the assembled gray-faced and gray-robed lords and ladies, each black-haired or white. Lesser functionaries sat behind and above them and all around above that central floor, faces half-veiled in the dingy shadows of that hall of power.

“The Conclave recognizes the delegation from the Sollan Empire,” said an elderly man seated to the right of the central seat, whom I took for their speaker. “On behalf of the Conclave, it is hoped that the delegation’s presence marks the beginning of a new era of cooperation between the Empire and the Commonwealth. The good of all is the good of each.”

He spoke these words with the weight of a priest at his ceremony, and indeed no sooner had he finished speaking than the other Chairs and the congregation of lesser functionaries all intoned, “The good of all is the good of each.” After each pronouncement, a device embedded in the wall beneath the vacant chair in the center of the Bench above repeated their words in awkward, stilted Galstani—presumably for my benefit.

In the dim air, I detected the shimmer of a prudence shield between us and the upper level, and without having to ask I understood how it was we’d been admitted with our guards. No hand weapon we might bring to bear could penetrate that energy curtain.

Sensing my cue, I stepped forward and bowed, one hand over my heart, the other thrown wide in the courtly manner expected for planetary rulers. “Honorable Chairs,” I began, straightening. “I am Sir Hadrian Marlowe, knight of the Royal Victorian Order. I am sent by my Imperial Master, William XXIII of the House Avent, to request aid in our war against the Cielcin xenobites who have ravaged our worlds and the human universe for so long.” I paused, allowed the lords’ earpieces time to translate my words, allowed time too for a response, but the Chairs of the Grand Conclave all watched me with impassive eyes.

I took a step forward. “Our Empire has borne the brunt of this offensive for more than a thousand years.” Again I paused. I’d known in my heart that the war had raged so long, but to speak the words aloud was something else entirely. Inhaling, I pressed on. “For more than a thousand years we have fought and bled—and died—to keep the enemy at bay. For more than a thousand years we have held the line. It is the blood of our people that has bought safety for your own. But the Cielcin have crossed the Expanse in force. Their navies burn planets along the Centaurine frontier. We are attacked on more fronts—in more systems—than we can defend. We need ships. We need more men.” This pronouncement met with stony silence from the men and women on the bench above. With a sidelong glance to Varro, I said, “My Imperial master asks that you join us in defending mankind from this unprecedented threat.”

Still the Chairs made no sign. The elderly man at the right hand of the empty seat glanced about at his compatriots, looking for some sign from them. Presently, the man in the Ninth Chair shifted forward in his seat. So young he seemed by comparison to the other, his short black hair oiled and neatly combed, gray eyes flinty above hollow cheeks. “Who names others master or slave cannot know a man as comrade. Ask how equality may be practiced by one who knows it not.”

I said nothing, turned this response over in my mind. I understood the Lothrian perfectly, but the machine-translated Galstani repeated his words as I stood there. It was not a direct answer, but then I had not expected one. Was the Ninth Chair asking a question of me? Or admonishing against the Conclave for granting this audience? I marveled at his age, and wondered how so young a man might rise to such a height in the Commonwealth. Perhaps mastery of the Lothriad was a greater asset than experience in the eyes of the Grand Conclave? Perhaps the young man was a scholar of some kind, a theologian of their godless faith.

A moment passed, and I decided the Ninth Chair must have meant his statement for his fellows on the Bench, for another—the woman in the Thirteenth Chair—raised her nasal voice. “A yearning for equality lies in the heart of all.” Was she encouraging dialogue? I looked again at Varro. The scholiast’s dark features were as ever entirely void of emotion, evincing none of the frustration I felt.

“They don’t trust us,” Varro said, leaning close to whisper into my ear. “The gentleman on the left does not expect us to deal fairly. I believe he thinks we mean to capitalize on the situation. The woman disagrees.”

Nodding, I surveyed the Chairs of the Grand Conclave, each minister overshadowed by the high, square back of his or her seat. A camera drone tracked through the air, sketching a circle about the rail that hemmed us in on the lower floor. I watched it go, staring down its lens. “I am empowered to make concessions to the Commonwealth in the Empire’s name, starting with this.” I drew a crystal storage chit from a pocket on my belt, a card perhaps an inch wide and twice as long. I held the device aloft for the Bench to see.

At a gesture from the elderly man in First Chair—that to the right of the empty seat in the middle—a plinth rose from the floor at the focus of the arc of seated chairmen, and I laid the crystal atop the glass surface. An instant later a projection flowered in a cone of light cast by a holography suite lost in the darkness above and behind the seated lords.

Embedded beneath a layer of fractal security stamps that confirmed the holograph’s validity as an Imperial document marched line upon line of legal text. “As you can see,” I began, one hand behind my back, the other raised as if offering something up on my palm, “we’re prepared to offer an immediate end to our embargo on the sale of refined uranium and antimatter. We will even allow certain corporations operating under Imperial charters to deal with your colonies. There is no reason an arrangement between our peoples cannot be mutually beneficial.”

A murmur went down the line, and above and about the main Bench where sat the group of thirty-four, the various lesser functionaries muttered and stirred. Presently, the woman in the Sixth Chair raised her hand. “A man requests the Voice!” she said.

Once more, I looked to Varro, eyes inquiring. The scholiast’s pinched brows rose, and he shook his head. Slowly—very slowly—the various chairs turned to watch each other, variously leaning in or peering one to the next. Sixth Chair kept her hand raised. At length, another joined hers, that of the square-jawed man in Seventeenth Chair—him at the leftmost extreme of the Bench above us, the furthest at the right hand of the center. The ice thusly broken, more hands rose. Ninth Chair folded his arms, and seeing this a number of the others did likewise. The old man in First Chair went up and down the line, counting. “Twenty-one!” he exclaimed. “To thirteen. The Voice is granted.”

I wondered what they did in the case of a tie.

The Sixth Chair stood, one hand steadying the drape of her gray robe. “Why now? The Empire has been an enemy of the People for thousands of years. The Empire has blocked trade. The Empire has blocked the establishment of colonies. The Empire now begs the People for aid. Why?” The translator repeated her words in the same flat, sexless voice as it had the others.

Thirty-four gray faces looked down on me. Sixth Chair did not seat herself, but waited. I stared up at her, astonished.

A man requests the Voice, she’d said. She had requested the right to speak her mind, to speak off-book—and the others had voted on it. Would she have spoken had they voted against her? I guessed not, for who in all the Commonwealth would be watched more closely than this group of thirty-four?

I glanced at Ninth Chair before responding to Sixth. “Worlds are burning across the Centaurine,” I said. “Hundreds of worlds. The Cielcin are moving now in numbers unlike any they’ve sent against us before. The front is too long—in too many systems—for even our forces to adequately defend. The regional governors and feudal lords are overrun.” I spared a glance to Valka, who offered me the smallest smile of encouragement as I plowed ahead. “The Centaurine has acted as a bulwark against the enemy for centuries. If it is overrun, the Cielcin will be at your door. Our people have been a shield for yours since the war began. Even should we maintain control of the region, it is entirely possible the Pale will burn channels through our territory to yours. I tell you: the war has changed.”

Sixth Chair seemed to mull this over a moment before answering. “If the Rugyeh come here, it will be costly. The Rugyeh fleets will be overextended. Weak.” This remark elicited nods from several of the other Chairs on the Conclave’s Bench, including both the Ninth and Seventeenth Chairs.

Rugyeh was Others in Lothrian. It was their word for the Cielcin.

“The Cielcin will be fat on plunder, their numbers replenished by so many years spent in transit,” I said. The various studies Legion Intelligence had conducted on the few Cielcin ships we’d taken intact over the years had revealed no fugue creches, and the many dissections and gene sequencings performed by scholiasts and their lay technicians on the bodies of the Pale had hinted at monstrously long lives. The Prince Aranata Otiolo had once hinted to me that it was over a thousand years old—though how long a Cielcin year might be relative to our own was a mystery I’d yet to solve. The Cielcin were not idle as their migratory fleet clusters plied the Dark between the stars. Generations were born, lives lived, so that the armies of the enemy were bred anew and stronger with each flight between worlds. Between battles. It was thanks in no small part to this fact that the army Bahudde had led when it razed Marinus had been so strong when it flew to assail Berenike. For humanity, a long flight across the stars meant stasis, meant sleep—but for the Pale? For the Cielcin it spelled flourishing and strength.

“You do not understand them as I do, Honorable Chair.” I locked eyes with her, willing her to understand. “The Commonwealth is not prepared. And should it come to fighting in Lothrian space, my Empire will not be in a position to fly to your aid.”

“A threat!” shouted one of the other Chairs, a reedy man far up the left side of the Bench, speaking out of turn. “The delegation threatens the People!” The mechanical translator piped his words into the ensuing silence without translating his tone. His objection played out dead and spiritless on the air.

First Chair’s quavering voice intervened, saying, “A man who speaks without correct speech elevates individual will above the will of the People.” The elder placed a hand on something in the vast empty seat in the center of the Bench. “On behalf of the Conclave, the Twenty-Fifth Chair is to be censured.”

The Twenty-Fifth Chair blanched and regarded the hands twisting in his lap. He had spoken out of turn. In a small voice, the fellow said, “A man requests the Voice.” To my surprise, he did not raise his own hand, though Sixth Chair—still standing—raised hers. As before, Ninth Chair crossed his arms, his lackeys with him, and again as before First Chair counted hands.

“Seven!” the First Chair proclaimed. “To twenty-seven. The Voice is withheld.”

Twenty-Fifth Chair frowned but said no more.

The Sixth resumed her line of questioning. “The delegate says the Commonwealth is not prepared, but the delegate asks for the assistance of the Commonwealth. This is confusing.”

Unable to help myself, I said, “The good of each is the good of all.” This evinced a rumble from the Chairs and a muttering from the robed and suited congregation in the stands about and above us. “What is good for my people is—in this case—good for yours. Or are we not people in your opinion?” When the Sixth Chair had no response to this, I took a rhetorical step forward, underscored by a literal one. “I assure you, the Cielcin will make no distinction between yours and mine. Their dietary preferences are quite apolitical.”

To my surprise, Sixth Chair had no reply for this, but sank back to her seat. That broke the spell—or rekindled it—for she said, “The good of all men is greater than the good of any one.”

Varro spoke for the first time. “Does that mean you agree to our terms?”

I hadn’t dared to think it would be so easy. Were the Lothrians so hungry for want of resources? I understood that—like my father—they worked their zuk serfs to the bone, though unlike my father they paid them only in bread and protein base.

Seventeenth Chair interjected, “The actions of the Commonwealth shall never be decided by one.” He studied his compatriots thoughtfully, resting his chin on one fist, appearing almost bored. “On behalf of the Conclave . . .” He paused, waited for a nod from two or three of the others before proceeding. For the first time, I realized that phrase was a kind of marker—like the request for the Voice—an indication that what followed adhered to no line of their beloved book. I supposed there must be unique statements required for such groundbreaking proceedings as ours. Indeed, this whole audience stretched the endurance of Lothrian correctness; we were on the borders of politically approved truth. Hence the requests for Voice, hence the censure of the Chair who’d spoken out of turn. “On behalf of the Conclave, this will not be decided at once. The Conclave must review the delegation’s proposal.” As he spoke, his fellows nodded along. Abruptly, Seventeenth Chair cleared his throat. “A man requests the Voice.” He raised his own hand. Again the hands went up; again Ninth Chair and his coterie crossed their arms, the only ones not to raise their hands.

Again First Chair tallied. “Twenty-nine,” he said. “To five. The Voice is granted.”

Seventeenth Chair smiled thinly before proceeding, standing as the Sixth had done. It struck me that the fellow was very tall, and wore his judge’s robes with the air of a king, lordly and imperial. He did not seem the representative avatar of an equal People at all. “The Sixth Chair raises a fine point. The Empire’s sudden clemency speaks of desperation. The delegation claims the power to make concessions. Further considerations beyond those drafted in this proposal from the Sollan Empire must be considered. Amendments must be made.”

“Amendments?” I asked, relieved to once again be speaking to a man and not a mouthpiece.

“Such as?” Varro put in.

Valka remained quiet between us. She was no representative of the Imperium and had no right to plead on its behalf. She was my eyes, for the machine eyes her Tavrosi clansmen had given her so long ago missed nothing, and the nematodes that ordered the gray matter of her brain forgot nothing, just as Varro—with his centuries of mnemonic schooling—forgot nothing. As witnesses, they were indispensable.

“Settlement rights in the Upper Perseus,” he said, smiling as the auto-translator played out its message in the only tongue they knew I understood. That the Seventeenth Chair did not hesitate for an instant told me that this had been planned from the start.

I cast my eyes downward. Had I been sent to the Commonwealth to fail? Had the Imperial Council expected the Grand Conclave of the Commonwealth to make a request I could not grant? A request they would never grant?

Had the Emperor given me another impossible task? Surely the Imperial Council and their advisers would have known this possibility would arise. We had blocked Lothrian expansion into the Perseus Arm of the galaxy for millennia. Our last war with them had been fought to decide that state.

“Settlement rights . . .” I shook my head. “I will have to telegraph my Imperial masters.” Had I indeed been made auctor, I might have granted it on the spot. “It will take time to communicate properly. In the meantime we may discuss the details of an arrangement.”

“On a purely hypothetical basis,” Tor Varro added, ever the champion of precision.

Another voice sounded in that dark hall. “A man requests the Voice.”

All heads turned to the speaker.

The Ninth Chair raised his hand, a single finger extended. Having thrice voted against his compatriots’ right to original speech, it shocked me to see him raise a hand so. Several hands rose at once—those of his coterie—and the hands of the others.

All the others.

I was ignorant of the inner workings of Conclave politics, and so dared not guess at what this might mean.

“Thirty-four,” First Chair rasped. “To zero. The Voice is granted.”

The man called Ninth Chair did not stand. Like an Emperor himself—lordly as the still-standing Seventeenth Chair—Ninth Chair sat back against the smooth granite of his seat, the high back like a grave monument. “Why does the Sollan Emperor send this man? Hadrian Marlowe is known. The delegate is a warrior. Why does the Red Emperor send a warrior to Padmurak?”

“Because each man must serve the good of the People in fullness of ability,” I said tartly, speaking for the first time in perfect Lothrian.

The Ninth Chair clapped. “Very good! And quite correct,” he said. “But the question remains unanswered: why this delegate?”

The Lothrian habit of indirectness—of the erosion of all identity save role or function—was starting to grate on me. The Lothriad may have liberated the serfs from their masters, but in the Empire even the meanest slave had the dignity of a name. I had had a belly full of Lothrian collectivism, but I clenched my jaw, let the frustration ebb away as I exhaled through my nose and reflected on one of Gibson’s stoic aphorisms. I sensed a great many things hung upon my answer, though why I was not sure. I held Ninth Chair’s gaze for several seconds before examining the others: the elderly First Chair, the noble Seventeenth. The multitudes of near-faceless men rising in higher orbits behind the Grand Conclave’s bench, microphones and holographs on the tables before them, all of them clad in gray like a college of sorcerers.

“I know the Cielcin,” I said, and for effect repeated myself in the tongue of the Commonwealth, working around the awkward, impersonal nature of their language. “Din konraad vedajim Rugyeh.”

A man knows the Others.

“There is no one in the Imperium better acquainted with the enemy,” I said. “I have killed two of their princes myself—a claim no other man may make. I have fought three fingers of the White Hand who serve the Scourge of Earth. It was I who negotiated the first surrender of the enemy at Emesh. The Emperor has sent me that I might advise your admirals in the tactics and nature of the enemy. Of our enemy.” Addressing my next words to the Twenty-Fifth Chair, I said, “My presence is not a threat, sir, nor are my words. They are a warning. The Cielcin are coming, and should we fall, they will come for you. They will crack the domes of your Great City and use your People for meat. Aid us, and we will aid you.”

Ninth Chair smiled through my words, but when I had finished speaking, he said nothing, only leaned back in his seat, his piece apparently said and done.

The First Chair spoke instead. “The Conclave will review the delegation’s proposal. This audience is at an end.” When he’d finished this declaration, the First Chair reached down into the empty throne beside him and slammed something. Craning my neck, I could just make out the black leather cover of a book, a volume perhaps a foot wide and a cubit tall, a little larger than one of my own folios. Standing, he lifted it above his head, showcasing the black star embossed upon the cover. I knew then that I was looking at a copy of the Lothriad itself.

I had never seen one printed. I’d read it as a boy, of course—every child of every great lord does, if only to understand the evils of it—but like so many of the texts I’d been given as part of my education on Delos, I’d only interacted with holos. Seeing it somehow in its proper place it struck me as an object of horror.

A black book.

The only book permitted in the Commonwealth.

A fitting emblem that, a fitting contradiction. They were a people who called slavery freedom, a nation that called narrative truth, a culture that glorified its People by destroying the very concept of personhood.

How could they be anything but a nation of book burners founded on a book?