MY CIELCIN CAPTORS MARCHED me through the palace halls, their clawed hands clamped tight above my elbows, claws pressing against the armorweave of my skin-suit. We moved in stages, the Conclave Guard clearing zones ahead of us, securing doors to preserve their secret alliance with that arch-nemesis of mankind. Iovan of the Ninth Chair marched on ahead of me, accompanied by one of his coterie—a woman. Had she been the Fourteenth Chair? The Thirteenth. My head still swam, and my whole body ached from the blow Lord Vati had delivered me.

“It won’t work,” I said, lifting manacled hands to test the bruise blossoming on my jaw. “When your people find out what you . . . what you’ve done . . . they won’t accept it.”

Iovan halted, turned to my alien escort. “Dajaggaa o-tajun ne!” he snapped, ordering the xenobites in their own tongue. Gag him. “I’ll have no more of his prattle.” To my astonishment, the Cielcin obeyed. One produced a length of silken cord and wound it between my teeth. That accomplished, Iovan lay a hand on my shoulder in mock affection. He smiled, gray eyes alight. “Don’t want you causing a scene now, do we?”

A short lift ride later we found ourselves exiting onto a loading dock. Members of the Conclave Guard stood at entrances and at vantage points all round, ensuring the place was secure. An armored van of the kind we’d stolen from the embassy awaited us, and it was into its rear compartment the xenobites loaded me, securing my manacles to a length of chain attached to an iron ring in the floor. My inhuman guards seated themselves to either side, neither saying a word. Outside, Iovan shouted orders in Lothrian to the driver and the guards before climbing in himself, the Thirteenth Chair on his heels. I was not surprised when he hove into the seat opposite mine as his men shut the doors.

He was smiling ear to ear, but said nothing as the van groaned to life and began to move.

I could not speak, and so contented myself with a narrowing of the eyes.

We stayed that way for what felt like minutes, the car bouncing and rolling beneath us. Black-robed, armored, and white-masked, the Cielcin officer, Gorre, watched over us from its place by the door, its sword still unsheathed in the crook of its arm. When it seemed the silence might stretch no more without breaking, Iovan said, “You wouldn’t believe how difficult I found it giving the order to bring you in.” He spoke Galstani, studying my face as though I were some specimen on a slide. “When you escaped us on the bridge, I thought we’d lost you. I almost let you go after that. To lose an adversary like yourself after all these years . . .”

“. . . It’s a tragedy,” the woman finished for him.

Iovan nodded soberly. I kept staring. He spoke as one who knew me, and I was certain I did not know him. Iovan was Lothrian through and through. He had the Lothrian gray pallor, the black Lothrian hair, the blunt features and black eyes . . . but no. Iovan’s eyes were gray, and seemed to glow in the dim light of the cabin in the same glassy, reflective way Valka’s eyes did in the right light. They weren’t real. Seeing confusion writ on my face, Iovan said teasingly, “You don’t remember? I’m hurt.”

“We’ve met before,” the woman put in, and her eyes were the same flashing gray.

“On Arae,” said the man. “Your dog shot me.”

Arae. I felt my eyes grow wide as the pieces all ticked into place.

Arae. It was on Arae that we had first encountered signs of any alliance between mankind and the Cielcin. It was on Arae that the sorcerers of MINOS had forged the first Cielcin-machine hybrids. It was on Arae—likely—that the Iedyr Yemani themselves had been designed, their iron limbs manufactured. The sorcerers themselves had all committed suicide rather than be taken alive, each transmitting an image of his or her mind across the Dark to a ship that had slumbered undetected in deep orbit. Siran and I had chased one of their number to a foundry deep beneath the earth, and there battled her and her pet monster, a lesser demon, a prototype of the hybrids that had led the Shiomu’s armies ever since. Siran had shot the witch, but she had been a woman.

What had her name been?

“You really don’t remember?” Iovan asked.

The woman smacked her forehead. “Aah! But that was Severine’s memory! It is we who are confused.”

Severine, that was her name. The name of the witch on Arae. Urbaine himself had used that name on Berenike as well, in the crawler.

“Oh, but this is no fun!” the woman said, and reaching out tugged the silken cords from between my teeth.

I worked my lips and tongue, tasted blood where the Cielcin bonds had torn flesh. After a long moment, I gasped. “It was you.” The two sorcerers surveyed me with sparks in those dead mechanical eyes. “Valka said she sensed another . . .” I spat pink. “Another neural lace. She thought it was a flashback, but it was you.”

“Ah, your Tavrosi concubine.” Iovan nodded primly. “Her implants do pose a problem, one that . . .”

The woman overrode him. “Urbaine fucked her good, didn’t he? I’ll bet there are days she still can’t walk straight!”

Snarling, I made it halfway out of my seat before the Cielcin restrained me. Even chained, I might have made it across the van and shattered the woman’s toothy smile.

“Adajjaa!” the Cielcin commander barked. Restrain him!

For a moment, I struggled against the xenobites who held me back, but malnourished and beaten as I was, I was not up to the challenge. I collapsed back into my seat, chest heaving. The Thirteenth Chair tittered, and Iovan exclaimed, “Still fight in you! Good. I was worried they’d broken you.” Here he reached out and tapped me on the nose with a forefinger. Iovan smiled. “Our employer will be pleased.”

“The Cielcin don’t have employees,” I said. “They have slaves.”

“Know them so well, do you?” both sorcerers said in unison.

I blinked. The words, the rhythm, and the inflection had all been identical. My mind went back to Arae, to the circle of corpses we’d found tethered into the transmitter that had broadcast their images across space. Those sorcerers had shed their bodies as a snake sheds its skin. They were not men at all, but ghosts, thoughtform programs that infested and possessed one shell and then another, not so unlike Kharn Sagara himself. I looked from one to the next and wondered if they were sharing thoughts between one another, or if Iovan were both the man and the woman.

Realizing I’d been silent longer than the question really demanded, I answered. “I do.” I glanced toward the inhuman commander, Gorre. Unsure if it understood our tongue, I said, “The Cielcin are using you. They will keep you around so long as you are useful.” Gorre gave no sign our human babble meant anything, and why should it? Humans were slaves. Vermin. Food.

Iovan leaned toward me and raised his eyebrows. “It is well we are of much use.”

The Thirteenth shook her head, and watching her do so it struck me how detached, how singular was every gesture, as though each of the two’s expressions were the result of careful consideration, as though the mind that animated the puppet flesh were far removed. “It won’t matter,” I said. “The Lothrian people won’t stand for this once they discover what you’re doing.”

“The Lothrian people are well in hand,” Iovan replied. “The Conclave were all too willing to sell their precious proles out from under them if it kept them off the menu. It wasn’t even hard. Three generations I’ve been here—they die so fast! Three generations to subvert the Conclave to our aims.” He sat back, a smug expression coloring his gray face as he affected the attitude and severity of the Ninth Chair. “And the will of the Conclave is the will of the People.” His solemn mask slipped again. “Like it or not, Hadrian—may I call you Hadrian?—the Commonwealth is suzerained to the Cielcin Prince. You’ve lost.” He lay a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “And I was the one who beat you.”

The woman’s smile flickered into place mere instants behind the man’s. “The hour is far later than you know,” she said. “Your Empire is doomed.”

I blinked at her. “You’re doing this . . . to destroy the Empire?”

Iovan pulled a face. “Well . . . yes. Your Empire has crushed humanity. The galaxy has changed, but we have not. Or you have not. Your Chantry has kept us in a dark age for thousands of years. Thousands of years wasted kneeling to your Red Emperor and his golden throne. No more! It is time for change, do you see?” He shifted eager in his seat, one hand to his breast. With the other, he seized my hands, gray eyes fixed on mine. “The things I’ve seen . . . you cannot begin to imagine.”

“I can imagine more than you think,” I said quietly.

Both Iovan and the woman laughed. “Vati did not exaggerate,” Iovan said. “Their gods are real. Beings you couldn’t begin to comprehend . . .”

“Caihanarin,” I said, using the Cielcin word. “The Watchers.”

If I had expected this word to ruffle the two sorcerers, I was disappointed. “You know a word and you think you know them? You know nothing, Hadrian, nothing of what is out there.” Iovan pointed through the roof of the van. “We shall be like gods ourselves. Like them.”

“The Empire will vanish, and mankind will be free,” the woman said. “Free to evolve again, to transcend.”

“Like you?” I said, inclining my head to indicate the machines that filled their heads.

“We,” both the Ninth and Thirteenth Chairs intoned, “are only the beginning.”

“Nettan suja wo!” Gorre barked, ordering us to silence. It was unsettled—I guessed—to hear the name of its gods on my tongue. Iovan and his counterpart each fell silent then, peering up at the hulking commander where it stooped just inside the rear of the van.

Noting their meek obedience, I held the man’s gray gaze a moment and mouthed a single word:

Slaves.

Still in chains, they dragged me from the van and into the pale light of a hangar cousin to the one in which we’d been greeted when we first landed on Padmurak. Naked steel arched above us, and the bones of catwalks and gantries hung overhead, lending the place an oppressive, industrial weight. The shuttle that awaited us could not have been more out of place in that place of right angles and hard lines, its long fuselage crooked like the head of an old man’s cane, its surface striated and ribbed as some anatomical sketch, raw and organic as the design of Vati’s body had been.

It had no ramp, but a lift platform lowered into place as we approached.

The commander, Gorre, shouted orders to the two xenobites who manned that lift. It spoke quickly, and with a thick accent that blurred my understanding of the alien tongue. But I caught the word wananna. Prepare. In response, I saw one of the Cielcin mount a ladder and climb one of the struts on which the lift had descended and vanish back into the ship above. My escort forced me onto the platform, pausing only to hiss at the lift operator.

“Psannaa!” Iovan called, ordering my guards to halt.

The Cielcin forced me into position on the lift platform and turned me round. Iovan and his nameless companion, his fellow sorcerer, stood arm in arm, each wearing identical plastic smiles. “It is a pity I can’t go the whole way with you,” the woman said, twining her fingers through the man’s. “I want to see what the Prince will do to you. He has such interesting ideas . . .”

“We shall have to wait until we can synchronize with the others,” the man said, and kissed the woman’s hand, his smile hardly faltering. “Say hello to them when you see them.” He disentangled himself from the woman and approached, mounting the lip of the lift platform. He made a show of smoothing the already taut shoulders of my skin-suit like a concerned parent adjusting the uniform of a son they meant to send to war. “I meant what I said: it really was difficult ordering your capture. I don’t want the game to end. But I am glad—so, so glad—that I was the one who beat you.”

“You haven’t beaten me,” I said.

“No?” Iovan leaned forward and—inexplicably—kissed me on the forehead.

I slammed my face down into the little man’s nose, felt the satisfying crunch of cartilage. Iovan staggered back, tumbled off the lift platform to the hangar floor, laughing all the while. I wondered if the sorcerer’s fleshly puppet felt pain. Urbaine had not, nor had Urbaine died when Udax had taken his head. The Cielcin held me more tightly, their talons straining to pierce the skin-suit’s weave.

Hooting, Iovan found his feet, one hand clutching his dripping nose. “Save some of that spirit for the Prince. You’ll need it on Dharan-Tun.”

It was the first time I’d heard the name spoken aloud, the dark world and black fortress of the enemy, citadel of the Scourge of Earth. It was a petty victory I’d scored on Iovan. He was right. He had won. He had beaten me, and if what he said was true . . . he had beaten us. If what he’d said was true, if the Tamerlane itself had fallen, then all was lost.

But despair is the deepest sin, and the final failure.

I gritted my teeth and glared down at the little sorcerer.

“Salu’ayan ne?” Gorre shouted to the others. I heard the breathy sound that passed for yes among the xenobites. “Eija!”

The lift rattled as it ascended and pulled me into the stinking darkness above.