IN THE DREAM I fell again, saw again the bridge, the burning. Heard again the guns, the shouting. My head rang like a temple bell. I clenched my teeth, even though that motion brought pain. Arms moved. Legs moved. Nothing was broken. My suit must have saved me, the gel-layer hardening to protect my limbs as I fell. Something sticky and sucking pulled at me.

Mud.

I was lying face-down in mud.

Something jabbed me in the ribs. Not hard. Feeling it, I felt certain I’d been jabbed already once before, that it was that jab which had awakened me.

“Zhivon!” came a hoarse whisper. My brain was as muddy as my suit, my head throbbed. It took me the better part of a minute to remember that zhivon was Lothrian for alive.

Lothrian, I told myself. I am in the Commonwealth.

I was on Padmurak.

“Valka!” I tried to rise, but my hands carved deep furrows in the mud, and I fell back into the mire with a wet smack. How long I lay there was any man’s guess.

That something jabbed me again.

“Zhivon?” This time a question. I tried to turn. Mud caked the optic threads in my suit’s mask, and it was a struggle to smear it away.

A tall, gray-faced man loomed over me, leaning on a long wooden pole. He had the bald pate and hollow cheeks common to nearly every zuk I’d seen, though he wore rubberized boots that went to mid-thigh over his faded coveralls.

“The drowned man breathes, Carry!” said another voice, this one higher, the voice of a woman or young boy.

“Quiet!” the man said, nudging me with his pole. “The drowned man is not drowned.” The big man crouched, both hands still on his pole. “Where is the drowned man from?”

They were not quoting the Lothriad at all, though they spoke the tongue of the Commonwealth. “A man is of the Sollan Empire,” I managed to croak.

The other straightened and staggered back a step. “Solnechni?”

“The drowned man is a knight!” the other voice said.

Again I tried to rise. Again I fell. My head swam and pounded, and at last I settled for rolling over in the muck. I’d lost my cape in my fall . . . and my sword. “My sword!” I felt for the magnetic clasp at my hip. There was nothing.

I had lost Olorin’s sword, and the feeling drove my head deeper into the mire.

Two faces peered down at me. One was a man’s. The other was as indeterminate as the voice that belonged to it, that of either a strong-jawed girl or an effeminate boy. “What should be done?” the second asked, glancing at the taller man. The child could not have been older than fifteen standard. “Living men are not salvage.”

“Quiet, Looker!” the man said, thudding his stick into the mud after each word. “A man thinks.”

“A man visits Padmurak,” I said, my Lothrian halting in my current state. I prayed I did not have a concussion. “A man was attacked by the bahovni.”

“A man fell into the river!” the child called Looker said.

The man, Carry, frowned. “Bahovni?” His frown worsened.

“Are you . . . rebels, too?” I asked, looking from one to the next.

“Rebels?” Looker repeated. “There are no rebels, drowned man. Everybody knows this.”

A small ah escaped me, and I felt myself sink even farther into the mud. That explained the absence of the Lothrian prefects. They’d been called off. Snatches of the battle on the bridge rebounded across the dark interior of my mind, the way the rebels had disguised themselves among the retreating mob, the precise way they’d moved, their disruptor shielding.

They’d been as Lothrian as our escort.

Why would the Lothrian government want me killed? They must know that to kill an Imperial apostol was to court war. They could not seriously want war with the Imperium, and over what? The Rasan Belt? Persean expansion? They could not hope to win. Though the Commonwealth commanded great territory, they surely lacked the hardware and the manpower necessary to stand against our Legions. Nothing in the crumbling brutalism of Vedatharad spoke to a nation that was master of a war machine to shake the stars. The Lothrians were ragged, starving, poor.

Unless that too were a posture carefully cultivated, a moth-eaten cloak to hide tempered steel. With so much of the Empire’s might concentrated in the Centaurine marches, the Conclave surely imagined our defenses in the Outer Perseus and across the Rasan Belt would be diminished, that in dividing the Imperial attention between two fronts, the Commonwealth might stand a chance at victory.

They may have been right.

That they would buy their victory by allowing the Cielcin to grow stronger in the galactic east turned my stomach.

“The drowned man is dead?” the man, Carry, asked.

I realized I had been still and quiet a long time. The child prodded at me with something short and silver, body tense as if to leap away at the slightest moment. Recognizing the weapon, I seized Looker by the wrist and half pulled myself into a seated position.

“Let go!” Looker cried out. “Let go!”

The big man struck me across the head with the butt of his pole, but my suit took the impact. Still, my rattled skull ached from the blow, and I held on tighter, slipping my hand from Looker’s wrist to the hilt of the highmatter sword.

My sword.

My fingers found the twin triggers, and the pentaquark baryons that made up the blade lanced out, blue-white in the gloom. Looker yelped and let go, and it was only a mad backward scramble that kept the Lothrian from falling. Before Carry could strike me again, I pointed the blade up at him. It was a nearly empty threat. I could hardly hope to stand as I was. From the pain in my head and the blurriness of my vision, I guessed I had a concussion. “Stand down,” I said, struggling with Lothrian’s stilted grammar. “A man is not another man’s enemy.”

“Liar!” the child shouted, clutching a bruised wrist.

I unkindled my weapon, but kept the hilt ready in my hand. With the same hand, I thumped my chest. “Hadrian,” I said. There was no way to say My name is . . . I did it again. “Hadrian.”

Apparently my point had gotten through, for the big man pointed at his own face and said, “Carry.” He pointed at his counterpart, who—wild-eyed and tight-fisted—looked now more like an angry boy than a young lady. “Looker.”

“You have names . . .” I said, slipping into Galstani by reflex. It was all I could do not to laugh. What I’d have given to see Lorth Talleg’s face in that moment, to know for all his intellectual utopianism, his dream of a perfected Lothriad, that humanity was like a weed in cement. His ideals and ideal future may have been a boot stamping on human nature and dignity, but man’s roots ran deeper still and would not be ground out.

“Stoh?” Carry asked. “What?”

There was no Lothrian word for name, no word for you or your.

I pointed up at the man with my empty hand. “Carry.” I pointed at myself. “Hadrian.”

“Ha . . . drian?” he repeated.

My head swam badly, and I half-fell back against the earth. I stayed that way a moment, vision clearing, my surroundings swimming themselves into sharper and sharper focus. I lay upon a kind of artificial shore, my feet still trailing in the brown water. There was no sky above, only a rust and lichen-streaked concrete roof bracketed with pipes. What light there was came in the form of antique diode lamps, dull and orange.

“A man’s words are . . . ne lothtara,” I said. Not correct. The relation between the word lothtara, correct, and the word Lothriad were plain to see. I hoped whichever enterprising partisan had rewritten the Lothrian dictionary to form that particular association had been rewarded handsomely. More likely he had met a firing squad and so transmuted his revision to eternal truth.

To my astonishment, Carry spat.

“Lothtara! Lothriad!” he said. “These are for the pitrasnukni.”

“The partisans,” I said. “These men . . .” I gestured to Carry and Looker both, “are zukni? Zuks?”

Carry nodded. Looker padded around to stand beside the bigger worker. “Let no man be idle!” the big man said, a pathos and a bitterness in his tone that astonished me. It was the first line of the Lothriad I’d heard pass his lips. He gestured to a vehicle equal parts boat and sledge—laden with what looked like scrap—that lay half-mired in the slime in which I myself lay caught. “Looker and Carry run salvage in waste-water tunnels.”

Scavengers.

“Waste-water?” I looked round at the muck I lay in, glad then my suit’s integrity had held.

In sterquilinus invenitur. In filth it will be found.

I tried to laugh. The bottom of the world indeed.

“Can the drowned man stand?” Carry asked.

I tried again, and Carry threw out a hand to steady me. He was stronger than he looked, not bulky, but wiry. It was enough to free me from the filth, but my vision blurred again, and I staggered forward up the concrete slope. I collapsed again. Hands and knees. Blood pounding in my ears. I clutched Olorin’s sword tight, mindful of the way the twin shadows of the man and his child loomed over me.

I had to get back to the embassy, had to get back to Valka, to Crim and Pallino. But I couldn’t stand. I could hardly see. “Must warn . . . the others,” I said, struggling to shove my thoughts into Lothrian’s limited vocabulary. How could I explain that my friends were in danger if I could not express our relationship? “People will die.”

“Hadrian will die,” Carry said, crouching next to me. “Hadrian is hurt.”

Looker spoke up then. “Magda could help.”

“Magda?” the big man echoed, almost thoughtfully.

“Who is Magda?” I asked, twisting to look up at my newfound companions. My vision swam. I was certain by then that I had a concussion.

Carry extended a hand. “Doctor.”

Had I been fully conscious, I might have marveled at how the method these zuks had devised for working around the limitations of their language—the elimination of pronouns and direct address, of identity itself—was to give one another names. I would have wondered, too, at Magda. Looker and Carry both were simple names, almost job descriptions. Magda was something else. It had an antique sound to it, not Lothrian at all.

I took the big man’s hand and—leaning on his staff for leverage—he hauled me to my feet. I tottered, forced him to steady me as I nearly swooned again, my right hand desperately clinging to Olorin’s sword.

“Must find water valve and hose drowned man off!” Carry exclaimed, laughing. “The smell is foul.”

Safe inside my helmet, I could not smell it, but I was sure he was right. The slime that caked my armor and clung to me was—I felt certain—equal parts oil and sewage. Strangely, the big zuk seemed not to mind, but then I supposed he and the child spent their time in these tunnels and waterways, poling for scrap.

We were beneath Vedatharad, deep in the tunnels that connected and predated the building of the domes. The ancestors of the ancestors of the Lothrians who had first settled on Padmurak during the great outward expansion of mankind millennia ago had carved these tunnels with explosives and cutting lasers and great machines. They had filled them and smoothed them with cement and steel and packed into them like ants—like the Cielcin in the dark dawn of their existence. Perhaps the very harshness of the tunnels and Padmurak’s airless environment had forced them to turn to so extreme a set of social controls. Reflecting on those tunnels now, I cannot help but think of the vuli, the blockhouses that dominated the cityscape, wherein dwelt the Commonwealth’s uncounted trillions on this and a hundred thousand colony worlds.

Hives, indeed.

Empty now, those tunnels were little more than bones, the fossilized remnants of what the Commonwealth had been in its beginnings, its only inhabitants the grave beetles and vultures like Looker and Carry who fled there to escape the world above. Better to pick the bones of that awful place than live beneath the boot of the Conclave and the Lothriad.

There are no rebels, Carry had said. That was not strictly true. He was one, his child another, though they fought no battles.

“Magda will help,” Carry said, wrapping one of my arms over his shoulder to help me toward his boat-sledge. “Magda will help you.”