CARRY MADE GOOD ON his threat about the water valve. After he poled us down the channel for some time, he took us up another, slower waterway—relying on an outboard motor for thrust and his long staff for steering. There we stopped long enough for the big man to douse me in the jet from a fresh water main, to spray my armor and tunic clean of filth. I remember falling as the jet hit me. I do not remember being hauled back to Carry’s boat. In my damaged state, I drifted, addled mind confusing the dark sewer pipes for the rivers of light and Time.

There was another jet, another series of pipes. Water draining. An ocean draining. A lake. I lay on the ground at Carry’s feet, feeling the torrent wash over me. I felt bones crunch beneath my feet, remembered hurrying down a slope as the tide retreated before me, heard the awful screaming of some monstrous creature of the deep. Its bloated mass loomed before me, tendrils flailing as it died. Innumerable bleary eyes focused on me, and a trembling hand reached out, imploring. I reached out to take that hand, and knew the monster in that moment.

I blinked, gasped as Looker turned the wheel to stop the flood and the vision-memory alike. Carry hauled me to my feet. It was his hand I’d taken, and no monster’s.

I was on Padmurak.

Padmurak.

I had to tell Valka and the consul, had to warn them. Had to save them.

The Conclave was trying to kill us. They wanted to start a war.

Would they be safe in the embassy? Would the Commonwealth risk so flagrant an assault?

“Is not far now,” Looker said, crouching near me by the gunwale. “Not far.”

Dimly I was aware of the boat, of Looker watching me and Carry looking down as he guided us down another channel. Twice we passed other zuks working on the pipes, or else plying their own way in the dark and doubtless foul-smelling waters. Jinan glared at me from across the small boat, eyes white with fury, the azure ribbon in her hair. I sat upright, tangled in the sheets of my bed aboard the Tamerlane, the smashed myrmidon’s helmet watching me from the bedside table. The woman beside me moved, and looking down I saw the bronze length of Otavia Corvo tangled at my side, naked as I was.

She blinked blearily up at me. “Can’t sleep?” She rested one warm, strong hand on my thigh. Corvo rose and kissed me. So startled was I that I sat there, paralyzed, her tongue in my mouth, her floating hair all about my face.

I awoke again, this time blearily, my vision thick and fuzzy as my thoughts.

Other memories. Other lives.

Dazed as I was and damaged, my mind flickered from memory to memory. Things that never happened and never would. I feared I would never find myself again, would wander lost in the memory of those other lives, other Hadrians, and never come back to that little boat.

I needn’t have feared.

“Help take this mask off,” came a gentle, feminine voice. I felt my helmet hiss open, felt warm, wet air on my face. A bright light tracked left, right across my eyes. “Concussion,” the voice said. “Carry says you are . . . offworlder?”

She was speaking Galstani.

“I am,” I said. “I am an emissary from the Sollan Empire. We were attacked by . . . by liberalists.”

“There are no liberalists,” the voice answered.

“I know that now.”

A woman’s face—smiling and matronly—emerged from the harsh, pale light. She had a round face beneath a cap of short, graying black hair—not shaved like the other zuks I had seen. But she was a zuk. She had the familiar Lothrian black eyes, the same gray pallor. She wore the same gray coveralls. “You must rest.”

“I must get back and warn the others. Valka . . . the consulate . . .”

She pushed me down with firm hands. “You must rest, by God.” She kept a hand on my chest. “It will take days before you’re fit to go anywhere.”

“I don’t have days!” I said. “Valka doesn’t have days!”

“If you go, Carry and Looker will be fishing you out of the drains again before sunrise.” She turned away and busied herself spraying down a series of tiny, exquisitely sculpted fruit trees that stood in stepped rows beneath lamps. Despite their diminutive size, the fruit borne by a few of the trees was ordinary. Two apples ripened on one, and three oranges on another. A third held a single pomegranate. “Not that there is a sunrise down here.”

The room—blurred though my vision was—was not much larger than a city tram car. A line of cots, each little more than a foam roll and a plank atop a metal frame, marched down one side. All but mine were empty. The side opposite was given over to the trees, which glowed beneath their pointed lamps. The walls were concrete buried beneath layers of overlapping metal pipe and rubberized conduits. There were doors at either end. The place gave the impression not of a hospital ward, but of a power station or steam tunnel.

“What is this place?”

She looked at me, all Lothrian terseness. “Clinic.”

“You’re . . . Magda,” I said. She did not deny it, nor had she really answered my question. Words slow and stumbling, I tried again. “Why this place?”

The Lothrian woman cradled her spray bottle. “Why down here, you mean?”

It hurt to nod.

“The Guard don’t come here,” she said. “Too deep. Too old. They don’t know the ways.” As she spoke, she busied herself with a black plastic crate that had lain beneath the next cot. “People come down. Nowhere else to go on Padmurak. They all drain down here. Some of them washouts like you . . . some of them outcasts like your friends. Some of them just . . . run away.”

“Which were you?”

“I was called,” she said, and stopped fiddling with the crate to touch something through the front of her gray tunic. From the look of things, she had altered the Lothrian fatigues common to all the zuks I’d seen into a long tunic or loose dress that hung on her stick frame like burlap to a scarecrow. She reached into the box and drew out a white pill bottle. Magda opened it and shook three small pills into her hand. “Take these.”

Olorin’s sword was still in my hand. “What are they?”

“Painkillers,” she said. “They’ll help.” I held her gaze so long as I could, but had to shut my eyes. I extended my free hand, and palmed the pills dry the moment she gave them to me. “You’re . . . palatine, yes?”

My eyes opened to mere slits, cautious. I decided a moment later that it was too late for caution—I had taken the woman’s medicine, after all. “I am. My name is Hadrian.”

“Palatines heal fast. Two days. Maybe three. You’ll be right as rain.”

Unable to help myself, I echoed, “Right as rain?” It was an old idiom, one that had survived to our time from the days of Classical English. It had no place on this world that had never known English or rain. “Are you Lothrian?” She had the look. The Lothrians were so distinctive, so monolithic an ethnic group with their black hair and ashen skin, that I knew the answer before she said it.

“Yes.”

“Where did you learn Galstani?” I asked. The Grand Conclave could not possibly want many of its people learning languages not censored and pruned by their ministries.

Magda glanced toward the door in the back of the little ward. “Father Dias,” she said. “God rest his soul.”

Twice now she had mentioned God, a word I’d never thought to hear from a Lothrian, and certainly not a word I ever thought to hear on Padmurak, not least so deep in the warrens of the Great City. “Your father?” I asked.

“No.” She reached down the front of her dress and drew out a pendant on a thin chain. It was a cross made from two nails crudely welded together. “He was a priest. Came here to . . . to help us. To help me help us.”

“A priest?” I asked, uncomprehending. Why would a Chantry priest come to Padmurak? And what had he to do with a cross? I thought perhaps her Galstani was not so good. I remembered only slowly, recognizing the antique symbol for what it was: the emblem of an ancient cult, one of the adorator faiths protected in the Empire by ancient law. “You’re . . . a Museum Catholic.” There were Museum Catholics back home on Delos, but I had never seen them, never encountered their symbols in the flesh. I knew a little of their faith, had read the Books of Dante and Milton on Gibson’s orders as a boy, and though I knew enough to recognize the cross for what it was, I knew little of their ways then.

Magda shook her head. “I try to be. Father Dias was.”

Here was truly a marvel, that twenty-five thousand light-years from Earth and twenty thousand years hence should be found beneath the domes of Vedatharad a single, solitary devotee of a god who had been old when the God Emperor was young. By ancient decree, made to dwell on reserves like that which stood in the mountains above Meidua. The Empire had long tolerated—long segregated—such pagan mystagogues as the Catholics, the Vaishnavites, and the Theravada. The accords which protected them in the Empire ran back to the Great Charter, millennia before the formation of the Holy Terran Chantry, though why the Chantry had not moved to abolish these adorators, I dare not speculate.

But we were not in the Empire.

“He’s dead, then?” I asked, too abruptly in my addled state.

Magda nodded. “He built this place. Saved me. Baptized me. Gave me my name.” She indicated the clinic all around. “So I carry on. Help the poor rats Carry and his like drag in. Helped Carry, too. Him and his . . . child.” Her reticence as good as confirmed my guess that Looker was one of the Lothrian new men.

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll be . . . found out?” I asked.

Magda fixed me with a flinty gaze, all iron. “I’ll not be the first to die in His Name.”

I could only assume she meant her old god.

“Like your priest?”

“Father Dias was baptizing us. Giving us names. Teaching us to speak the standard. Conclave didn’t like that. Caught him when he went above to treat the sick.” She glanced down at the crate beside me. “They rounded him up. Sent him away with the others.”

“To the camps?” I asked, thinking of Everfrost Station. “He was a physician?”

Magda chewed her lip. “He was. And I guess. People disappear all the time. Families. Entire hives. Could be the camps.” She studied my face carefully, as if gauging me for my reaction. “Could be they sell them to your Empire. They say you palatines drink blood, that that is how you live so long.”

“What?” I almost burst out laughing.

“They say the blood of children keeps you young.”

“It doesn’t!” I did laugh then, and regretted it instantly as pain flowered in my skull. “Genetic engineering does that.” But Magda was smiling. “Were you having me for a laugh?”

She bared crooked teeth, her smile lighting up her aging features. “There are those who think the Conclave sell us offworld.”

“They do take people, then?” I asked, thinking of how empty Vedatharad had seemed.

“All the time,” she said. “More and more. But it is only to settle new worlds. If he was not killed, Father Dias was sent to a lahe offworld. A camp colony.” She laughed softly. “I do not think you a blood drinker.”

I winced, touched my exposed face with my gloved hand.

“You should let me take that armor off,” Magda said, rising from the next cot to lean over me, her hands seeking my suit seals. “Let me have a look at you.”

Acting almost without thought, I seized her wrist—it took me two attempts to succeed—and pointed the emitter of the highmatter sword at her. “No.”

Magda only blinked at me. There was little fear in her eyes. “You may have other injuries.”

“No,” I said, voice flat, final. “I’m fine.” I’d have known by then if I had broken any bones, would certainly have known if I was bleeding into my suit. There would have been alarms, notifications on my helmet’s display and on my wrist-terminal. There were none. I would have seen them when I tried to signal the others.

“Let me help you.”

“I’m fine, damn you!” The strain of half-sitting up set the blood to pounding in my head. My vision blurred and I fell backward, felt the sword tumble from fingers suddenly nerveless.

I whited out.

Lost in white darkness, I could sense nothing. Even the pain was gone, muted—the effect of Magda’s painkillers, I don’t doubt. I existed as little more than one of Descartes’s sad solipsists, aware of nothing but myself. It was like being dead, like nothing so much as my experience of the howling Dark through which my soul had wandered before the Quiet sent me back. How long I lay like that in Magda’s clinic I dared not guess. Hours? Days? Time meant little through that pale haze. Once or twice I woke and found the Lothrian doctor watching me from the next cot, or else tending to her little fruit trees.

Once or twice I heard her sing, though she thought me dead to the waking world.

From all that terror teaches,

from lies of tongue and pen;

From all the easy speeches

that comfort cruel men;

From sale and profanation

of honour and the sword;

From sleep and from damnation,

Deliver us, good Lord.

The words were in English—that was the strangest thing. “Did he teach you that?” I think I asked her. “Your priest?”

He must have done, though I cannot remember her reply. It seemed an appropriate song for the Lothriad. A prayer for a world that knew too much of lies and terror. Too much . . .

I awoke screaming, clutching my side. Blood soaked my fingers where I’d torn crude stitches open, sheeted down my side. When had I been wounded? When had I been stabbed? Magda emerged from the back room, already rolling her sleeves back.

“Lie flat!” she shouted, slipping into her native Lothrian with panic as she scrambled for the plastic medical kit beneath the next bed. “A man will die if not.”

It took an act of will to prize my hand away from the wound in my side, the wound I had been sure was not there a moment before. I pressed my head back against the pillows, jaw clenched, the fibers in my neck straining.

Magda paused as she approached. “What did you do?” She peered at the wound.

“Nothing!” I said, honestly. I had no memory of her removing my armor, but I felt certain I’d have remembered so deep a wound in my side.

“This wasn’t here before!” she exclaimed, applying pressure.

I yelled.

“You tried to close this yourself?” she said, examining the sutures. She looked around, face drained of color.

“What have you done to me?” I asked. Remembering her story about the palatines drinking blood, I rasped, “What did you take?” The pagan adorator meant to harvest my organs, that much was plain. Looker and Carry had not brought me to Magda to save me, but to kill me instead.

Magda stepped back, hands bare. “Nothing! I was in the back. I heard you scream.”

My sword lay on the bedside table, just at the edge of my reach. Why hadn’t she taken it? I reached out to seize it, causing an ecstatic flash of pain to spasm through me as torn muscle pulled apart. Magda’s hands seized me, tried to steady me, but it was too late.

“Mother of God . . .” I heard her swear.

But I was already fading.

When I awoke next, Magda was nowhere in sight. Carry sat against the wall beneath the ranks of little trees, arms crossed, head tucked against his chest. He was snoring. Fresh bandages wound about my chest from sternum to navel, so tight it hurt to breathe.

I must have made a sound, for Carry cracked an eye. “A man wakes,” he said. “Magda says a man cut himself.”

“A man did no such thing,” I managed to grunt out, looking round. My sword still lay on the bedside table. Why hadn’t they taken it away? If they meant to hurt me—as I thought—surely they would have taken away my arms as they had my armor.

But there was my armor on the next bed. Catching me looking at it, Carry said, “Carry had Looker clean a man’s armor.”

Forgetting my Lothrian, I nodded weakly. “Thank you.”

That, too, was not the action of an enemy. What was going on? Stiffly, I moved a hand to my wounded side, felt for the injury. What had happened?

“Magda says a man must stay longer. A man is unfit to travel.”

I took my hand away from my side and stared at it as though I’d never seen it before. “What?” I hadn’t properly heard the man. His words caught up to me a moment after. “No. No, I can’t stay.”

I’d been speaking Galstani again, and Carry hadn’t understood me. He shook his head, ran a hand over his prickly scalp. “Magda brings food. A man has slept now for three days.”

“Three days?” I managed to prop myself on my elbows, and was surprised when I felt no pain. Anything could have happened in three days. Had Crim and Pallino made it safely to the embassy? Was Valka safe with Damon Argyris? Was the Tamerlane safe in orbit?

Carry moved swiftly to my bedside and helped me to sit up. I waved him away. “I’m all right,” I said, and switched to Lothrian. “A man must bring a man to the surface. To First Dome.”

“Not until Magda says,” Carry said.

I seized him by the front of his gray fatigues, all bleariness and pain forgotten. “Please. A man’s people will die.”

The big zuk peeled my fingers off his clothing with steady hands. “A man must wait.” He stumped away, vanishing through the outer door with a shout. “Looker! Come and watch the drowned man!”

Alone a moment, I felt my dressings again, fingertips parting the pale linen. I expected to find the black tape of a medical corrective beneath, or sutures such as I’d found when last I’d woken up, but I was mistaken.

There was no wound on the umblemished flesh.

There was nothing at all.