THE WORLD PASSED BY through a cottony blanket. Someone had removed my helm, and the blood pounded like distant tympani in my ears. Only the vaguest sense of my surroundings was left to me. I remember falling, and muffled shouts in Lothrian. Semi-conscious, I sank in and out of that quagmire which lies beneath sleep, here and there rising long enough to catch a glimpse of a black-armored Guardsman or the inside of a van.

Darkness.

Two men dragged me, my arms over their shoulders, feet trailing like those of a puppet. One cursed, and I fell again, knees striking stone. Eyes unfocused, I stared at the ground between my hands. Greenish stone. Pale dust. Something rattled, and abruptly a chain I had not known was fixed to a collar about my neck pulled taut and I lurched gasping to my feet. The creature holding my chain bared glass fangs in a vicious smile.

The Cielcin said nothing, and its brothers at my shoulders pushed me on, their white swords held flat against their shoulders in the crooks of their right arms. I stopped, feeling the wind rip at my hair and snap at the black cape of alien silk they had fixed about my shoulders.

I was not on Padmurak at all.

Padmurak had no wind—not in the domes—and the black pillars that rose like topless trees all around me into the gray, dead sky were like nothing I had seen in the Commonwealth.

Was I dreaming? Had I not seen those pillars before?

“Aeta!” barked an alien voice. “Aeta! Aeta!”

A king! A king!

Looking round I saw my danger. A sea of Cielcin stood all around, stretching away to either side, filling what seemed to me a valley between the arms of a mountain, blurry and angular at the margins of my sight. Each of the Pale wore a mask whose slitted eyes blocked the wan sunlight. Many carried staves, spears from which flew the silken banners of a hundred hundred clans. “Aeta! Aeta! Aeta ba-Yukajjimn!”

The King of Vermin! The King of Rats! they cried, their voices like the harsh music of crows.

They were pointing at me, I realized. Laughing at me.

I staggered forward, half-dragged by my keeper with its chain.

I knew where I was. Knew what waited in the great black dome ahead. I fixed my eyes forward, deaf to the cries of Aeta!

“Oimn Belu!” still others cried. Dark One. It was a name Aranata Otiolo had called me, once.

Ahead, I saw the cruel lances and crooked scimitars of the enemy flashing in the sun, and I realized I was being led in triumph as I had led the smashed ruin of General Iubalu through the cloud-crowned streets of the Eternal City. I spied the white armor of the Demons of Arae, the hybrid Cielcin-machines wrought by the traitorous posthuman sorcerers of MINOS, and thought I spied a trio of slender figures crowned and escorting a floating white eye.

Hushansa.

And those other figures—the winged one and the colossus and the warrior with the white crest—those were the other generals, his other generals, the other fingers of his White Hand. The Iedyr Yemani, the holy slaves and guardians of the Prince of Princes, Syriani Dorayaica itself.

I knew where I was. Knew that beneath the arch of the black dome my chain would be threaded through an iron loop as the Scourge of Earth clapped its clawed hands. How many times had I dreamed this dream? How many times had I seen what was coming? Heard the screams?

I screamed.

One of the guards at my side dropped me—struck me, or so it seemed. But he was only human. That grim plain with its black pillars set in spirals about the dome vanished, and the Cielcin with it. I was in a cell. There were no Cielcin. There was no black dome, no sea of pillars. Another vision. A waking dream.

The Lothrians had taken not only my helmet but my armor, stripped me down to my underlayment. Before I could rise, a plated knee rose and cracked me in the side of the head. I skidded across the floor and struck the wall, spitting blood and the broken fragments of a tooth. The next blow caught me in the stomach, and it was only grace that kept me from vomiting. Through the next flurry of blows, I slowly managed to get my hands up to shield my head.

It wasn’t enough.

My hands ached.

I tried to move them, but I could not. Blearily, I became aware of the fact that they were fixed above my head. I tried to lower them and winced at the pain that coruscated down my arms and shoulders. Chains rattled.

I was manacled, my hands in cuffs attached to a length of chain bolted high in the wall. The rest of me was free so that I might stand and so relieve my arms, but I could not sit or sleep without raising them again and so tormenting myself.

“What a terrible fate,” a hoarse voice said. It took me minutes to realize the words my new acquaintance had spoken were Galstani, which would have been unremarkable except that I was sure I was still on Padmurak—had never left Padmurak—sure that this at least was no dream.

It took a force of will to raise my head. I was in the same low-ceilinged cell, the only illumination a single red sconce gleaming in the crumbling mortar by the square steel door. My wrists chafed from my bonds, and even the faintest motion made the thews and fibers of my arms shriek with pain. My body ached, and beneath the underlayment I guessed my flesh was a welter of bruises. I could not blame the Lothrian guards. I had killed so many of their fellows on the bridge alone. I probed the spot where my tooth used to be with my tongue and spat, and only then found my cellmate.

An old man sat in the corner, his bony hands in his lap, unchained. He wore nothing save a ragged breechclout, and his skin was pale and faintly jaundiced, his body covered with scars. His hair fell almost to his waist in oily curtains that shadowed his face, the matted black streaked liberally with white. He had no beard, and I could count each rib and trace each vein through the papery skin. Starvation had withered his muscles, and his nails were like claws.

“This must be,” he said. “This must be. Remember?”

“What did you say?”

“Thought we could escape . . . thought . . . we were too old already.”

His accent was . . . strangely familiar. Beneath the brittle qualities of starvation and pain yet remained the polish of class and old breeding. It was an Imperial accent, the accent of the scion of some antique Imperial house. What such a man was doing moldering in a Lothrian dungeon I felt sure might fill several books. “Do I know you?” I asked.

“Though he slay me, I will trust in him,” the stranger replied, and lifted violet eyes to mine. “And he has slain us before.”

I recoiled. Deep sunken were those violet eyes, and far away their stare, yet I knew them still, and knew intimately then the scars that marred the flesh of the other man’s arm. I knew every scar. Remembered the mark beneath his left eye where our father’s ring had torn my cheek. Recalled the bright spots on my right arm from the brace I’d worn as a boy, and the marks of war and crime and Colosso. But there were fresh wounds on his left cheek—the mark of talons red and terrible. And he was thin. So thin! And so bruised I thought his skin must burst in places.

“Do you know of whom I speak?” the other Hadrian asked.

I was going mad, or else here was another vision.

“The Quiet?”

Hadrian nodded. “We are on the shortest path now. We must be,” he said, and screwed shut his eyes to make of his words a prayer. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry . . .”

“Sorry for what?”

He had no answer, though the look in his eyes was enough.

“Find us in you,” he said, and pointed a finger at me.

“I don’t understand!” I tried to get my feet under me, tried to stand, to approach my other self if I could. What horrors had wrought that other Hadrian in such an image? I thought I could guess. I had walked that path not long before, bound in chains.

A king! A king!

“One way!” said Hadrian Marlowe, raising a hand for emphasis, one finger extended. I recoiled. The last two fingers of that hand were gone. Only scarred and ragged stumps remained. “There is but one way through the needle!” It was one of Gibson’s old aphorisms, and the memory of it and of Gibson in that wretched place were like the memory of sunlight on a world without a star. “Always forward, always down. Never left or right.” Hadrian said again, “Find us!”

“I said I don’t understand!”

The red light beside the door went out, and with a buzzing loud as raid sirens it cycled blue, and the door hissed open. My attention flickered from my counterpart to the scrawny gaoler who entered with a plastic dinner tray. “A man must eat,” he said, setting the tray on the floor before removing the control wand to uncouple my wrists from their chain. Still manacled, my hands fell to my lap.

The other Hadrian was gone.