“NEVER SEEN A MAN heal so quickly,” Magda said, finding me already in my suit and sitting up when she returned. Like its father, Looker had dozed off while it kept watch, snoring softly beneath the fruit trees. It had been time enough for me to don my suit’s black underlayment, the garment tightening into place as I activated its seals, smart material contracting until it formed a second skin.

Thus the healer found me when she returned with four cups of egg noodles in some brown and subtly fungal broth. These I ate gustily, discovering I was starving—and small wonder! I had not eaten since the morning of the battle on the bridge, and not eaten well since we left the embassy for Everfrost Station more than a week before.

“Like I said,” I said around an eager mouthful, “we palatines are genetically engineered to be . . .” I almost said superior, but stopped myself. “Well, to heal quickly.”

“I wish you’d let me look at it,” she said, pointing at my side with her plastic fork.

“I’ll survive,” I said, mindful of the uncertainty in the woman’s black eyes. She’d been watchful ever since I’d awoken her screaming with a fresh wound in my side. I knew she believed I’d harmed myself, as I had at first suspected some foul play on her part. When pressed, she’d produced a medical scanner, proved my kidneys and liver, my spleen and all the rest were where they ought to be. Ever after, she acted as though I’d struck her, as though her fears were ludicrous and cause for offense. I’d apologized so much as I could, but maintained a careful distance.

I could not let her examine my wound. I could not let her know it was gone, vanished as readily and as without warning as it had appeared. I would have thought it only another product of my damaged brain and fevered dreams—like my vision of myself with Otavia—were it not for the bandages and the dried blood on my sheets. Unthinking, I felt my side with my hand. My right hand. The hand I’d lost and regained. Had something similar happened? Had my consciousness, my will, reached out across the parallel bands of time and seized another? Had I shut my eyes on one universe and opened them on the next? I imagined consciousness like the beam of a torchlight swept back and forth along a bookshelf, stopping to select one title, one narrative—and then the next.

It was how the Quiet had saved me aboard the Demiurge, trading the dead Hadrian for the living one; the man who had lost right arm and head for the man who had lost the left. My memories remained constant. I remembered my death not because the past had changed—the past cannot be changed—but because the present had been. The Quiet had conjured up a state of Hadrian lost to entropy and cast it back into the world, produced it from behind the stage, from a potential state the universe would never have seen otherwise. The Quiet had only nudged probability, altered the wave function about me until what had been lost in potential replaced what was. I had lived again. So too had I traded the concussed Hadrian for the wounded one, called out in my delirium, and found my wounded self.

I’d made a mistake. That was how I knew I was responsible. The Quiet did not make mistakes. When it left me without my left arm, it had known I would need bones of adamant there to survive my duel with Irshan. It had showed me all of time, but my human mind could not encompass it. But it had left me with a measure of its power and a fraction of its sight, however limited I was by my body.

Seeing the gesture, Carry asked, “A man is all right?”

I took my hand away from my side. How had I done it? Was it some feature of the medicine I’d taken? Or had my trauma brought it on?

“I . . .” I realized I was speaking the standard and switched to Lothrian. “Da.”

Let them think it was my palatine biology that had saved me. It was so much easier that way. There was too much I did not understand, and more they would not. Turning to Magda, I spoke again in Galstani. “Long ago, another woman helped me as you have. I had nothing to give her. I have nothing to give you now. But I am grateful.” I set the empty box of noodles down. How had this woman obtained them? Extra rations could not be easy to obtain, and despite the opulence of the greenhouses Third Chair had shown me, I found it difficult to believe all those beneath the Conclave’s Bench ate well. “Thank you.”

“It was the right thing to do,” Magda said.

I stood suddenly, head clear. There was no pain. Whatever I had done in my delirium, I had escaped concussion and injury both—though I was not sure I could do it again. My suit gauntlets lay on the little metal table, and I clicked them into place.

“God sent you to me,” Magda said, and touched her cross, “as He has sent all the others.” My tunic was a total loss, but my armor was clean again. I looked smaller reflected in the glass front of a medicine cabinet without tunic or cape, with only my armor and the form-fitting combat skin beneath it. But I looked like myself at least. Magda was not finished. “You say you are a great lord of the Empire. Perhaps you are why He called me here to serve. To save you.”

“I do not believe in your god,” I said, too harshly.

But Magda did not balk or so much as blink. “He does not need you to.”

“Magda.” I looked down on the pagan woman with a sad smile. “I have not come to destroy your Conclave. I am here to save my own people, to stop the Rugyeh.”

“The what?” she cocked her head.

In spite of myself, I laughed. A weak, hollow sound in that place of metal and stone. She had not even heard of the Rugyeh, of the war that raged across nearly a third of the settled universe. And why should she? The Conclave would not wish the People to know what passed beyond their borders, for to them there was nothing beyond their borders, could be nothing. The Lothriad was all, and though they knew of the Sollan Empire, of Jadd and the Durantines, they understood these places only as fictions written by their pitrasnuk masters. How could I begin to explain?

I decided not to even try.

“I must go,” I said, and taking her hands in mine stooped and kissed them. “You saved my life. I will not forget you.”

She accepted this without despair, and as I turned to follow Carry out the side door, she said, “Lord Hadrian?”

I froze and turned to look back. I said no word.

“He has a plan for you, I think. My God.”

Why should those words haunt me so?

There were bodies in the water. The slow current moved them toward us as Carry’s little boat carried us upstream. Once or twice, the big zuk lifted his pole and shunted one aside as it drew near. Some were men, others women, others too far gone to say. One wore a black skin-suit beneath torn gray fatigues. There was a band tied about his arm, white and red. I fancied that here was one of my attackers from the bridge, but he could have easily been from some other altercation in the city above.

“Conclave Guard,” Carry said, jerking his chin at the man. “Secret police. Often such men are wearing the colors of liberators.”

“Why?”

“Panovni. Rebels shoot people. Party protects. People love Party.” He shrugged.

We sailed on quietly for some time after that, the only sound the faint whine of the boat’s engine. Looker trailed a length of pipe in the water, watching its little wake. Once we passed a pair of men wading across a broad waterway on stilts and carrying large nets on the end of poles. Carry saluted with his staff, and they returned the gesture, but no words were exchanged.

Mean though their existence was, there was hope in it, in people like Magda and in her faith to her old god. Hope that all that mighty edifice of cement and brutal steel might one day come crashing down. For all their ingenuity, the architects of the Commonwealth and authors of the Lothriad had not broken the human spirit. Their boot might tramp on men’s faces for a day, a year, or an age—but in the end it would be the foot that broke.

“How many live down here?” I asked the ferryman.

Carry thought about this a long while. “No man knows,” he said. “Thousands. More. Many.” He shrugged again, his usual gesture when frustrated by the limitations of his crippled tongue. “Less than when Carry was young. Patrols come through main tunnels, clear men out. Take men away.”

“Magda said the patrols take people to the work camps.”

“More and more,” came the reply. “Patrols used to take one man, two. For reeducation. For offworld.” Shrug. “Now patrols take ten. Twenty. Take men from above, too.”

I nodded, ran a hand over my eyes. Little could I remember being so tired or so sick with worry. I prayed—to Mother Earth or Magda’s god or to some other power I could not say—prayed that Valka and the others were safe. Pallino and Crim might have won the battle on the bridge, might have driven the convoy back to the embassy themselves.

They might be dead, said another, softer voice.

It was all too easy to picture the embassy tower afire, all too easy to imagine the telegraph broadcast by a fleeing Tamerlane:

Lord M missing, presumed dead. Embassy destroyed. Consul dead or captured.

War.

War.

“War,” I muttered. A truly ancient word, unchanged from the Golden Age of Classical English, and hardly changed since the Hyperborean times when man was young and dragons ruled the Earth.

“Stoh?” Looker asked, turning to look at me.

“Voyn,” I said in answer. “If the Conclave has attacked the Sollan embassy, it is war.” I reflected that despite my words to Magda, my visit might spell the beginning of the end of the Commonwealth. Another accidental prophecy.

The child frowned at me and asked in broken standard, “Your . . . people. Kill Conclave?”

I looked at the hermaphrodite in surprise. It was the first time either Looker or Carry had shown any signs of speaking Galstani. Perhaps Magda had shared a word or two. I studied Looker’s face for a moment. The child still trailed its length of pipe in the water, but was not looking at it. Looker’s Lothrian black eyes blazed with a light I had not seen there before, the fires of revolution and of hope.

“Maybe,” I answered.

“Maybe not,” Carry grunted, having evidently understood enough of the standard. His voice was thick with the pessimistic realism of age, in stark contrast to that of his child. He pointed then over our heads up the dark tunnel before us. Slipping back into his native Lothrian, he said, “First Dome is not far.” Ahead a low, broad arch opened on a broader watercourse, and the darkness seemed more gray than black. Wall sconces flickered dull and orange, and the slime of eons shone wet and black on the walls and on the curved ceiling above.

“A man must watch for patrols,” Looker said, shifting to look back at me. “On the surface, eyes will be everywhere.”

It would be no easy feat finding the embassy once I was in the city proper. The Lothrians had done all in their power to obscure the plan of their city from foreign visitors. I envied Valka her perfect memory, and wished terribly that she were with me. I dared not try to contact her, for any transmission I might send was sure to be overheard by the Lothrian police—and if what Carry and Magda said were true, if it was the Lothrian government itself and not their liberalist bogeymen who had attacked my party on the bridge—I could not afford to be overheard. I would have to move quickly.

I knew the look of the embassy tower—it was one of the tallest buildings in First Dome, and close to the People’s Palace in the center of the district—but the nature of the streets was strange to me, and I had no way of knowing if I were climbing up right beneath it or on the dome’s far side. Almost I thought I should abandon my armor, travel in the grays of a common zuk. But to pass for one of the low-caste workers I would need also to shave my head, and I’d no way of doing that then and there.

As Carry poled us closer to a rickety metal strand on the far side of the arch, I tugged my suit’s coif up over my grease-matted hair. It cinched tight.

The bigger zuk killed his boat’s motor, and he poled us the rest of the way to the dock. Rope in hand, Looker leaped onto the dock and tied the boat in place. I clambered over after the child, less steady on my feet. My boots clanked on the metal decking, and I looked round. Not far beyond our little dock the water came rushing down the gentle incline of a spillway through an opening far above that might have been a hundred feet wide where the waters of the artificial lakes of First Dome drained below.

For a moment I stood there, looking to neither Looker nor Carry. I was remembering another waterway, another city.

Another life.

Tell me a story, would you? One last time.

Wet cement. Lichen. Rot. Refuse.

The smell was the same, the same as that awful culvert in Borosevo where Cat had died. For the moment I stood there, the stench drew a bright, straight line from Padmurak to Emesh, and I was a boy again, and Cat was dying in my arms.

“Hadrian-man!” Carry’s voice intruded, and looking round I saw him pointing along the narrow path that chased the wall of that vast culvert to the base of the spillway. “There is a door. The stairs will take a man to the city.”

“Thank you!” I replied in Galstani, certain then the man knew that much at least.

The big fellow raised a hand. “Peace be with you.”

Those words were English, and were certainly words he’d learned from Magda, or from her priest. I had not stopped to consider the man and his half-homunculus child were members of the doctor’s ancient faith.

I suppose they must have been.

Not knowing what to say—knowing there was little peace on my road—I only echoed him, saying, “Peace be with you.”

Then, alone again, I turned away and made my way back to the world above.

My own story was not yet done.