DAYS PASSED BEFORE THEY came for me. How many I cannot say for certain, for they had taken my terminal with my armor. I had only the coming and going of my gaoler to mark the time. The scrawny zuk, hook-nosed, hairless, and black-eyed, never said a word. He never undid the manacles that bound my wrists together, but neither did he chain me back to the wall. Twice daily he entered my cell to deposit a fresh meal tray and to clear away the ruin of the old. He never lingered long nor entertained any of my questions, and no wonder: the fish-eye lens of a camera eye watched from high in one corner, and it never blinked.

The food was foul: every day a brick of white and putrid-seeming protein paste alongside some greenish mush and a heel of stale bread. They had not taken the underlayment of my suit, and its waste processing and water reclamation still worked. Thus I had more water and cleaner than I could get from the greasy tap that thrust from the far wall.

I counted sixty-seven meals before the Guard came for me. Thirty-four days, assuming the meals had come at regular intervals, as they almost certainly had not. Once, I had dined with a junior commandant of the Imperial prison world of Pagus Minor, who told me it was common practice in his profession to stagger a prisoner’s meal times, serving meals too close together, and then too far apart. Deprived also of the light of the sun and all other external indicators of the passage of time, the client becomes uncoupled from the basic rhythms that provide his body and mind with the structure upon which his comfort and his sanity depend. This increases his anxiety, triggers a depression response, and robs him of sleep—to say nothing of the disregulation of the bowels and discomfort of the stomach caused by irregular eating and poor fare. These are subtle tortures—and subtler indignities—compounded by the fact that for those thirty-four days, the manacles remained a part of me.

“A man will stand,” the Guardsman decreed, his arrival trumpeted by the blast of the alarm. He tapped his truncheon against his thigh.

Standing was an agony in itself. Cramped muscles spasmed from malnutrition, from my beating, and from my month of sleeping on the bare stone floor. They beat me again, more cursorily this time, and took great pains to avoid my head. When they were done, they half-marched, half-dragged me through a maze of corridors so starkly lit I fancied I could hear the buzzing of the lights in their fixtures.

The lift buzzed more loudly still, and rattled to a halt. The heavy door rolled open, and still more of the Guard pulled back the iron grill that blocked the opening. We emerged into a security checkpoint teeming with the black-clad Conclave Guard, and exited behind a bank of security scanners into a marble-tiled hall whose walls bore cement friezes of the Lothrian People marching arm in arm.

I knew where I was.

It was the tunnel that pierced the heart of the palace ziggurat, that ran from the lobby and the fountains to the floor of the Conclave’s arena. I was being taken to the very heart of Lothrian power. As we drew near the great doors, I did my best to get my bare feet under me again. I was not going to be dragged before the Conclave a broken man, bruised and freshly bloodied. So I dressed myself in the vestments of Empire—invisible to all—and raised my chin to come in chains before the gathered lords of the Commonwealth.

The lights within were dim, tuned to their lowest, reddest setting. My bare feet slapped against the tile, and the noise of my tread and of the boots of my escort clattered against the vaults and the empty stands that rose in circles all around. Ahead, the tall backs of the thirty-four chairs that stood to either side of the Lothriad on its great throne rose like funeral markers, their occupants watching my approach in ringing silence. I caught the eye of the First Chair, white-haired and solemn, but what he saw in me must have unsettled him, for he looked away. The Third Chair watched me, too, she who had led Valka and me on our tour of the Party’s farms. There sat the Sixth, who first of all the Grand Conclave had questioned me under the power of Voice. Of the Ninth Chair there was no sign, but there sat the Twenty-Fifth, who’d been censured by the Conclave the day I’d arrived on Padmurak.

And there was Lorth Talleg, watching from his place to the far left, smiling to see me brought so low.

But for a few lesser functionaries seated immediately behind the great Bench about the square entryway by which the Conclave entered and the guards posted on the perimeter doors, the great space stood empty. The army of clerks and secretaries and logothete-partisans who had filled the chamber like spectators at Colosso were nowhere to be seen. I was, evidently, to be tried with as few witnesses as possible.

When I’d approached within earshot of the Bench, my guards shoved me, and I fell to my knees at the focus of the arc along which the Chairs were seated, and just under half their seats stood empty.

Few witnesses indeed.

“The Conclave recognizes the delegate from the Sollan Empire,” the First Chair said, keeping to the proscribed forms, speaking in his native tongue, his voice soft and quavering. “Ushdim.”

Rise.

I did not move.

“Ushdim!”

At the sound of my guards approaching, I raised my manacled hands and stood. Still, the two guards seized me roughly and held me fast.

First Chair’s hushed tones rose again and filled that echoing space. “On behalf of the Conclave, the delegate stands accused of fomenting war with the People of the Commonwealth, of conspiring with revolutionary agencies against the People of the Commonwealth, of traveling and treating under false pretenses with the People of the Commonwealth, of the murder of a foreign diplomat on Commonwealth soil, of the murder of a commissar of the People of the Commonwealth, of the murder of officers in the service of the Commonwealth, of doing violence against the People of the Commonwealth, of destroying the property of the People of the Commonwealth, of stealing the property of the People of the Commonwealth, and of failure to comply with officers acting in the defense of the Commonwealth. Dya vinatva?”

These last words were strange to me, though I had studied Lothrian as a boy. Focusing through the pain, I tried to make sense of them.

“Dya vinatva?” the First Chair asked again.

Vinatva . . . Vinat was fault. Error. Guilt? Vinatva, then, was faulty. Guilty. But dya?

“Dya vinatva?” the First Chair asked again, and added, “Panacca!”

Confess.

The last piece clicked into place, and I understood. Dya was you. The Lothrians had—publicly—abolished names, abolished I and we, he and she, us and them. They clumsily addressed people by their functions, the delegate or a worker, or in general terms, a man. But they had retained, as an archaism or artifact of legal formality, this solitary word. This singular way to separate the lamb from their flock of goats. You. I felt certain I understood correctly.

“Are you guilty?” the First Chair asked. And then the order. “Confess.”

They had abolished every identity save guilt. The word you remained, atrophied but still potent, as an organ for singling out the enemy for punishment.

I raised my chin, a lord still despite my almost-nakedness. “Let us speak plainly, my lords,” I said, and I was pleased to find my voice neither broken nor strained. I spoke in Galstani, in the language of men whose minds at least were their own. The translator did not speak for me. The great room’s recording suite was not engaged. There would be no record of my trial, only of my death. I had died upon the bridge, died a terrorist attempting to start a war. “You have done this, not I. Those were your men who attacked us as we returned from our tour of your polar camps. Argyris was your man, and it was on your orders that he detained my party in our embassy. You might have let us leave peaceably, but you did not. Your agencies ensured there would be violence. Your orders.”

The First Chair slapped his hand against the arm of his throne. “Dya panacca?”

“No!” I shouted. “I do not confess!”

A blow caught me in the back of one knee, and I fell with a crash.

“Panacca!” the First Chair commanded.

Steadily, I found my feet once more, half-turning to see the guard who had struck me. He held his truncheon ready at his side. “The question is why!” I raised my hands to forestall the guardsman’s blow. “Why bother with this charade? If it is war with the Imperium you desire, you might have done so before I ever came here. Why force this . . . pretext?” I turned then and took two steps toward the Seventeenth Chair. “Lorth Talleg!” The use of the man’s right name sent a murmur along the Bench and forestalled any retribution. “Tell me why.”

Lorth Talleg of the Seventeenth Chair peered down at me. Slowly, he leaned forward in his seat until he peered over the rail like a sentry from between the merlons of his castle wall. He looked out with the air of a man watching the throes of an especially close contest.

“Confess!” the First Chair’s dusty voice implored, overriding any response from Talleg.

Another blow caught me in the lower back, and I struck the stone wall beneath the Conclave’s Bench. I was permitted once more to stand, though I had to use the wall to lever myself back to bare and callused feet. I understood the game well enough. They did not mean to kill me, as any lord of the Empire might have done. They wanted me to relent, wanted to break me, wanted me to say what they told me to say. By such small surrenders they would secure my compliance, and they meant to secure it by the oldest methods imaginable.

Obedience through fear of pain.

They would send Hadrian Marlowe back to the Imperium not as himself, not as a man, but as their man, a dancer trained as surely as those who performed Giallo’s ballet for us upon the stage. They wanted the Halfmortal remade in their image, rebuilt as a Lothrian creature.

“But you did kill our men, did you not, my lord?” Lorth Talleg inquired, confirming my suspicions. Small truths. They would ask me to agree to small truths first, make me speak their words one step at a time. Had Talleg given me his name only to play my friend now?

“I defended myself!” I said, and glowered at the guard that had followed me to the end of the bench. He didn’t move. “Hit me, coward. Or do you only strike a man when his back is turned?” Still he made no sign, so I addressed myself to Talleg and the others. “I will not play your games. Kill me or release me. You waste my time and yours with this dumb show.”

“But you did kill them, did you not?” Talleg inquired mildly, speaking my own language. “And you did kill poor Argyris, did you not?”

Talleg had not stirred from his place on the rail.

“What I did, I did for the good of my people.” I froze, ready for the guard to charge and strike me. “Where are my people, Talleg?”

“The Sollan embassy has been liquidated,” came the response in Lothrian, and turning my head I beheld the speaker standing on the level above the level of the Bench, his hands clasped neatly behind his back, gray suit neatly ordered, gray eyes flashing with triumphant delight. It was the Ninth Chair, his slight figure framed against the blackness of the hall by which he’d entered the congressional arena. “All dead.”

He allowed these words to hang in the air like gun smoke while behind him the other absent Chairs filtered in, hovering about the Ninth Chair like satellites to his Jove. What was it about the little man that commanded such terror and obedience in the other Chairmen?

I had but little time to contemplate that question, for the little man’s words hung over me. “Dead?” I repeated, thinking of the guards we’d abandoned in the carport, of the hundreds of personnel who lived and worked in the embassy complex, of Argyris’s poor slaves.

Of Pallino, of Corvo and the rest.

Of Valka.

When the Ninth Chair did not reply nor any other intervene, I said, “You cannot win. Kill me if you wish. Destroy my people if you can. You will not win the war. My Empire will tear your planets from the sky.”

“You should not threaten,” the First Chair said, speaking in Galstani for the first time. “Any man who comes to Padmurak begging aid has come in no position to threaten.”

The Ninth Chair overrode him, raising one hand. “The delegate’s threats are empty. The survival of the Commonwealth has already been assured.” He surveyed the floor of the arena, where I stood, barely standing with four guards close about me. He seemed to take notice of my state for the first time, and a flicker of rage moved beneath the gray-paper skin of his face. The Ninth Chair let out an exasperated sigh, and all the wind went out of him. “The Conclave was asked to keep the prisoner in good health.”

“The delegate must be punished!” cried one of the seated chairmen.

“The Conclave renders to the enemies of the People what is due the enemies of the People!” declared another, sparking a riot of noise from the seated members of the Grand Conclave. First Chair struck the arm of his throne, but the councilmen did not cease.

Third Chair shouted at the Eighth, and the Eighth at Twenty-Fourth. All the while Talleg leaned forward upon the rail, looking not down on me but up toward the Ninth Chair, who stood above it all as Julian Felsenburgh must once have stood above the mobs of Earth, untouched by the tableau beneath him.

The Ninth Chair raised a hand, and silence fell.

In a soft voice, the occupant of the Ninth Chair said, “I am sorry to have kept you all waiting. Evidently you cannot be left alone with my prisoner even for a day.” To my shock, he spoke the words in Galstani, his voice theatrically hushed in the sudden stillness.

“Your prisoner, Iovan?” the Sixth Chair exclaimed in standard, turning in her seat.

“My prisoner, yes,” the Ninth Chair replied. “Was it not I who arranged for his capture? Was it not I who arranged for the capture of his ship?”

“What?” I staggered forward. “You lie!”

The little man looked down on me, but did not answer me. It could not be true. The Tamerlane could not be lost. I confess my mind went blank, went white with shock and rage. What had happened to Valka? To Corvo and the others? Had they made it to the ship? Had they lingered to stage some escape? Some abortive rescue? I screwed shut my eyes to block the tears.

No. No no no.

“My master will not appreciate you playing with his new pet,” the Ninth Chair said.

“Tell them he is not our master!” the Sixth Chair replied. “We have a deal, Iovan.”

“Tell them yourself!” said Iovan of the Ninth Chair.

The Sixth Chair nearly fell against the rail. “Lord . . . Lord Vati is coming here?”

“Indeed I am,” came a new voice, deep and sepulchral, as though it issued from the ground. I had heard such a voice only once before—on Berenike—and the black music of it tore the heart from me.

I heard the demon before it appeared, its armor clinking, servos whining in the dark of the tunnel. Everything came crashing together then. Every little piece found its place. The Lothrians had no desire to make me one of their puppets. They had designs on Imperial territory and desires for war, but I was not to be their scapegoat, their casus belli. They had bent all their will to capture me to make me a gift . . . to the Cielcin.

That was why the chamber was empty but for the great lords who knew the Commonwealth’s most terrible secret. That was why the lights in the Conclave’s arena were turned down low and red.

The creature that appeared in the black arch above the level of the Conclave was decidedly inhuman. It had to stoop to enter the high hall, for the crest of its iron skull stood fully ten feet from the ground. I knew it at once for one of the Iedyr, for its armor and its iron skeleton were of a kind with Iubalu, with Bahudde and Hushansa. The same flanged plating, the same graceful, organic lines. No scrap of the alien flesh was visible, as though it were one of the medieval knights in Maddalo House’s combat holos. Featureless and smooth was its opalescent mask, with a braided queue of false hair bound at the nape of its neck to evoke the Cielcin style. Where the others had been fashioned into shapes different from the bodies they’d been born to, this Vati’s shape was little different from that of any Cielcin, save that it was taller. Its style recalled that of the Nipponese knights I have seen, with banded pauldrons and two stylized horns above the place where the eyes should be. And on its chest in faded silver was the print of a Pale hand.

Behind it came a dozen scahari warriors in traditional Cielcin black and blue, the cloaks above the fleshy contours of their armor embroidered with interlocking circular runes, their white scimitars drawn and held at the ready—as in my vision—in the crooks of their right arms. They dwarfed Ninth Chair Iovan and his coterie, appearing as men among children.

Words fled me.

When Valka and I had eaten with Lorth Talleg, I had accused the Commonwealth of reducing mankind to Eloi, to sheep. How right I’d been! Here then were the Morlocks, the dwellers in darkness, the creatures the shepherds were fattening their sheep to feed.

The Cielcin.

At once Argyris’s somber ode to the decline of the Great City and Carry and Magda’s tales of patrols rounding up men for deportment offworld took on a sinister cast. Fifty years, Argyris had said. Fifty years. How many men had this Conclave sold to its inhuman masters? How many women and children? My bare feet felt fused to the ground, and I watched in wide-eyed horror as the Pale knight descended on cloven feet from the platform to the level of the Bench.

“At last,” it said, regarding me with its faceless face. I felt the presence of a million tiny, faceted eyes on me, and took a step backward, skin crawling. “I should slay you for what you have done to my sister-brothers, but my master has forbidden it.” The creature’s artificial voice seemed to shake the dust from the red lights above, so deep was its resonance. “Do you know who I am?”

Raising my chin, I answered, “You’re one of the White Hand.”

“I am Vati Inamna, First Slave of the Prophet.” Implants the sorcerers of MINOS had installed in the creature’s brain translated its native tongue to standard. The general stalked round the circumference of the stands about me, moving toward one of the narrow stairs by which men might reach the floor. “I hoped I would be the one to catch you. The gods have heard my prayers.”

Up close, the giant towered over me, its head cocked at an angle. Its heavy black cloak fluttered from pointed shoulders as it raised an arm. I had had occasion to examine the bodies of Iubalu and Bahudde both, and marked the same stamp of handicraft in the design of that arm and hand. The artificers who had designed the metal body had given it the look of an anatomical sketch; the corded texture of the adamantine plate evoked sheets of muscle, the fibrous polymers beneath tendons shifting over metal bones. The segmented and six-fingered metal hand gave the impression of a flayed man.

Vati touched my face, hard fingers closing over my mouth as it turned my head like a buyer examining the teeth of some Norman slave boy on the auction block. The blank white face peered down at me. The sensation of crawling eyes grew stronger. I recoiled, but the fingers only tightened until I thought my jaw might crack.

“He has waited for this,” Vati said, “for such a long time.” The creature released me and traced the line of my nose with one blunt ceramic fingertip. “They say you are chosen by your god.”

“The Quiet,” I said.

The giant twitched its iron hand. I barely saw it. The blow caught me beneath the chin and sent me flying through the air to crash against the wall beneath the Lothrian Bench. My head rang, and I had to shut my eyes to keep the world from spinning.

“Only a man,” Vati said, dismissing me. The Pale knight’s shadow fell across me. “There are no gods but ours.”

For once in my life, I did not argue.

Vati had called itself Dorayaica’s First Slave. The vayadayan were slaves, as all Cielcin who were not Aeta were slaves. Here then was the Grand Vayadan, the First Finger of Syriani Dorayaica’s White Hand, Chief of the Iedyr Yemani, captain of its armies, master of its hosts. Before it, in chains, I was only a man. A rat. Yukajji. The pain in me kept my vision cloudy, and even if I could have stood before that metal monster, I could not stand against the Commonwealth, who had placed all their hideous strength at the service of mankind’s greatest enemy.

“Talleg!” I shouted. “How can you allow this?”

“The good of all is the good of each, my lord,” Talleg replied. “Their sacrifice . . . for the security of the Commonwealth.”

Somehow, I’d found the strength to stand. “Your people are your Commonwealth, you fool!” I shouted. “A nation is its people, and you sold yours for meat.”

The Grand Vayadan threw back its head and let out a sound like tearing metal. It was an inhuman laugh. Vati turned to its escort, and in its own tongue barked, “Gorre! Take our guest to the ship and prepare him for his journey.” High above, a Cielcin I assumed was Gorre leaped to obey. The Ninth Chair hurried to join it. Why the little minister should accompany the xenobites I’d no idea, but three of the Ninth Chair’s coterie and fully half a dozen of the Cielcin descended to join their master on the arena’s floor.

“The desert is nothing, Lord Talleg!” I cried, recalling our dinner conversation. “Nothing!” I had to make him see, to make someone in this republic of monsters understand. The world they sold their souls and their people to build would never be. Like every Faustian pretender, they had not realized the very act of purchasing their desire had put that desire forever out of reach. Their pound of flesh might buy a place in the sun from their new masters, but the Lothrians would be only tenants there. The Conclave was selling its own people for food, just as they had accused the Sollan palatines of capturing Lothrian peasants and devouring them to extend their lives.

What was it Argyris had said?

Always accuse the enemy of what you are doing.