I COULDN’T REMEMBER FALLING, but I was on the ground. I scrabbled hands and knees, tried to kneel, to stand, to breathe. Coughed instead, spat gobbets of pink fluid on the stone beneath me. Struck my head. The blood rushed and pounded in my ears like the approach of a stampede, and it was all I could do to weather clenching muscles as every fiber heaved to vomit up the bile in stomach and lungs.

They were supposed to drain you before they pulled you out of fugue.

I could hardly remember ever feeling so cold.

Trying once more to stand, my foot slipped in the amniotic fluid, and I cracked my skull on the earth.

“There, there,” a softly musical voice said, “there there, gentle lord. There there.”

Those were hands on my face, cradling my head. My chest felt fit to burst or tear from the pain of coughing. Spitting. I couldn’t see, couldn’t speak. The sound of my coughing and retching was all I knew, all I knew but that angelic, feminine voice.

“Valka?”

The woman hushed me even as my coughing began to subside.

“No, no . . .” the woman crooned. “It’s just us. Hush now. Breathe.”

It could not be Magda. They could not have got her, too. Was I still on Padmurak? No . . . no. I remembered, remembered Gorre stripping me of my skin-suit, forcing me into the pod. They had taken my shackles, strapped me into the creche. “Valka!” I managed to scream that time, and lurched to my knees. One faltering step set me falling once again, hard. “Where?”

“Dead, I fear,” came the reply.

“No,” I said, voice hollow and weak. “No . . .”

“Your ship was taken. Destroyed with all hands.” I heard the soft slap of feet in puddles, felt again the cool hands. “You are what is left, my lord.” Those same hands half rolled me over, and I sensed rather than saw a woman crouch beside me and pillow my head on her thighs. For an absurd moment, I thought it was my mother, and then I remembered my mother was dead, a victim of those long years I’d spent frozen between the stars. Still, I thought I heard her voice.

You are my son.

Another voice—higher and colder than that of the woman—intruded on my blindness and my still-galloping heart. “What is the matter with him?”

When the woman spoke, I could hear her smile. “I awoke him without draining his lungs.”

“He will recover?” the cold voice asked. Something familiar in that voice, something I could not quite remember.

“It will pass,” she answered, stroking my face. The woman crooned and made gentle hushing noises. “It is more amusing this way.”

The sound of hard soles on metal. “I want him alive, doctor.”

“I . . .” Another fit of coughing seized me, and the woman pushed me upright. Blue-green sputum spattered my lap, a blur against my pale nakedness. “I can’t see . . .” It was not strictly true. The world revealed itself to me as a smear of light and shadow, the only color the bluish-green of the slime that covered me and the floor about.

“It will pass,” the woman said again. “Those jitaten prophanoi who did your freezing made rather a mess of you, I fear.” Something cold pressed against my back, and I heard the faint whine and beep of some medical instrument. “Still some fluid in the lungs. That will take time.” A white light shone in my left eye, tracked to my right. I winced. “I hoped Iovan would have put you in fugue himself.”

More footsteps sounded on the metal, circling us. I turned my head, tried to point my ears to track the source of that noise. “I asked for Hadrian Marlowe, doctor. Not his corpse.”

“He’s alive!” the woman replied, and I thought I could hear terror beneath the motherly sound of her voice. “Core temperature is rising. EEG is . . .”

“Is what?” the frozen voice demanded.

“It’s . . . strange.”

“If your colleague’s inattention has caused my kinsman permanent damage, Doctor Severine, I shall be most disappointed.”

“Yes, Great One,” the woman demurred. “It’s not that. His action potential rates are off the charts.”

I caught her hand, adrenaline tightening my chest. “Severine?” I squeezed her hand until I thought the bones might break, felt ridges there on the printed bone so like the false bones of my own left hand. Images flickered: A white metal hand punching the armored glass of a tank. The hulking shape of our colossus marching bow-legged across salt pans toward a looming mountain. Men dead and wired to a transmitter. Siran. A shot in the dark. “You’re one of them!”

Again I tried to stand, shoving the witch Severine away from myself. Again I slipped. Again I fell, rolling onto my back in the slime of my rebirth. The darkness swam about me, lights orbiting overhead. Slowly, I became aware of the way the fluid plastered my hair to my face, and of the aching pain in my fingers and at my throat.

My rings. They had not taken my rings, had not removed them when they strapped me into their Extrasolarian-built fugue creche. The skin beneath had frozen to the metal and ivory and burned away. As my body warmed, the pain seeped in, and blood dripped from my fingers and ran from similar wounds where the chain and the piece of the Quiet’s shell had burned my neck and chest. I could just barely make out my hands, palms and blood-streaked fingers resolving from smears to mere blurs. Shakily, I worked Prince Aranata Otiolo’s old ring from my left thumb, biting back a cry as the flesh beneath peeled back, baring meat and cord.

“Your poor hands . . .” Severine said, taking my hands in hers. “We’ll have to fix that.” For the first time, I realized she was wearing gloves and a medic’s shapeless, glossy coveralls. The face behind the transparent visor was not the one I remembered from Arae long ago. She had spoken Jaddian, but the face that looked down on me was Mandari, narrow-eyed and high-cheekboned. She had not been Mandari on Arae, had she?

I snatched my hand away, wincing as the freezing air whistled against the exposed flesh. Not taking my eyes off Severine, I held the injured limb close, red rings seeping blood from thumb and third finger and the first finger of my right hand. They would scar something fierce. I’d had such a cryoburn scar on my left thumb—my original left thumb. That realization sent a laugh—small and fragile—past my teeth. I clamped it back. That I should have lived so long and traveled so far to gain the same injury again was an irony more bitter than any I could then imagine. The absurdity and the horror of my situation impressed itself on me: sitting naked and cross-legged on the floor before my empty fugue creche, covered in blood and bluish fluid.

“I remember you,” I said, though as I say the face she wore was not the same as the one I remembered, but she was the same witch of MINOS I’d encountered on Arae so long ago. “Thought Siran killed you at first.”

Severine smiled thinly. “Had she aimed for the head, she might have succeeded.” She extended her hand. “Hand it over.” She meant Aranata’s ring. I looked down at the bloody thing. The red stone leered at me like an evil eye from rhodium molded—like so much Cielcin art—to evoke naked muscle. Taking advantage of my fugue-sick state, she plucked it from my fingers.

“Let me see that,” the other voice said.

The woman stood, left me on the floor and turned, crossing the puddles of slime I’d made falling from my creche, and knelt. I tried to turn my head, but could not see past the kneeling woman. My creche stood in the center of a pool of pale light amidst greater darkness. Faint illumination—red as hell—shone on walls of webbed stone whose organic arches put me in mind of the intestines of some petrified giant.

“So it is true,” the voice said. “It really was you who liberated vile Otiolo. I had heard the story, but stories are lies.” The tap of feet on metal resumed, and a figure in ribbed, enameled armor and black robes emerged from the darkness, pausing to rest a possessive hand on Doctor Severine’s head. I felt my breath catch, and cursed my cold-addled brain for not realizing—not recognizing—sooner.

Prince Syriani Dorayaica stepped carefully onto the wet floor, one jeweled and taloned hand clutching the hem of its robes to keep it from the clinging slime. Tall and terrible it was, tall almost as its iron servant, Vati, though in the planes of its face and the lines of its body there was no sign of the machine. Here was a lord of the Cielcin such as had been bred in the dark chasms of their birth, its limbs clean and unaltered by MINOS’s electric sorcery. As it moved, silver threads in the black robes shimmered, highlighting the shape of runes that glittered like stars reflected in waters black as space. A silver pin fashioned in the shape of a grasping hand secured the folds of that imperial garment at the left shoulder—in imitation, I realized with growing horror, of the togas of our own Caesars. Its armor was decorated with a motif of twining arms, ornate as any emperor’s. Its face was a screaming horror, smooth as glass, white as marble, with eyes darker even than its robes and large as eggs beneath its crown of horn. Delicate silver chains hung across its brow, decorated with the deep blue of tiny sapphires, the greatest of which shone in the midst of its forehead like a third, unseeing eye. The horns themselves—swept back from that royal brow—were chased in silver.

It did not squint as it stepped into the light as did so many of its kind, but looked down on me in my nakedness like the avatar of some stygian god. “At last, you have come, honored kinsman.” It spoke the standard perfectly, and stooping presented Prince Aranata’s bloody ring on its palm. “Welcome to this . . . my home, my Dharan-Tun. I have been waiting for you for such a long time.”

I found I could not speak. I could hardly think. It was as though my mind could not accept the reality of my situation. It was as if I’d awoken not merely on another world, but in another world, as if the universe I’d known—that of the Sollan Empire, of the Red Company, of Padmurak and Nessus, Forum and Vorgossos and Emesh—was gone. Severine had said the Tamerlane was destroyed, that all my people—all my friends—were dead. I could not accept that, could not even take it in. The thought that everyone I knew, everyone I loved, everyone I’d fought beside for so long . . . the thought that they were dead. Durand and Ilex; Koskinen and White; Elara, who had come up with me out of the pits of Emesh; and Lorian Aristedes—the whole Red Company. And Corvo and Crim. And Pallino . . . and Valka.

Valka . . .

Valka could not be dead. It simply wasn’t possible. I would know.

“I would speak with you,” the Prophet said, tilting its huge, horned head. Still offering Aranata’s ring, it added, “Take it. Speak.”

Quaking still from cold, I reached out and took the ring from Syriani’s white hand. Not taking my eyes from its face, I fumbled the ring onto my right thumb, leaving the left to weep blood. “And say what?” I managed, swaying where I sat.

Syriani straightened, regained its full height. “You have taken two of my servants,” it said. “Iubalu and Bahudde were dear to me. And you destroyed them.” The Prince of Princes turned, robes fluttering in the slight gravity, and stalked to the edge of the pool of light. “What is more, kinsman, you have broken my armies, stymied my conquests, interfered in my efforts in your Commonwealth, murdered our kinsmen—though for this I should honor you, though it is not namnaran, not our way. What is more, your very existence is a blasphemy. You are dunyasu, accursed, and attantar, blessed. And you are its creature.” The giant xenobite—slender as a saber—flexed narrow shoulders. Releasing the hem of its robe it turned. “Think you your trick on Berenike has unfanged me? Think you your god can prevail?” It tilted its head right—the Cielcin answer to a shake of the head. “Veih. No. Utannash is fickle. False. It will betray you. Abandon you.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “What is Utannash?”

The Prophet spoke as if it had not heard me. “When you call for it, it will be Quiet.”

“What do you want from me?” I asked, the question of every prisoner in every age.

Raising its white hand—still smeared with the blood from my ring—it pointed at me. “Twelve and four times twelve generations of my clan have passed since the days of Elu. Twelve and four times twelve generations of suffering. Of squalor.” The hand dropped. “No more.”

I looked on in silence, aching hands curling into fists. The other two rings—still on their cryoburned fingers—bit and tore the flesh. Hissing, I summoned all my strength . . . and stood. My head spun, but I am proud to say I did not fall. Feet apart for balance, I said, “That is nothing to do with us.”

“You are in the way,” Syriani Dorayaica said. “You. Your god. You must be swept aside. My empire shall stretch from star to farthest star, so that they might see me.”

I took two steps forward, finding my strength at last. “Then kill me,” I spat. A nahute hung strapped to the Prince’s belt, a coil of bright silver. Dorayaica would have only to unspool it to end my life.

It did no such thing.

The Prince only smiled, its lipless mouth peeling back to reveal glassy teeth in black gums. I was struck by just how much there was redolent of the grave in the Cielcin species, as if Evolution in her caprice had crafted a species out of human nightmare and sent them against us. The Cielcin smile was a kind of snarl, not a smile at all.

“It is not enough that you should die, kinsman,” the prince said. “You should die well.”

That said, it turned and—gathering up its robes once more—swept from the pool of light. Its braided queue vanished last of all, a white serpent slithering into the night. “Clean him up, doctor, and find a place for him. And fit him with a collar. We have a long way to travel.”

And then it was gone. Somewhere in the dim distance, a door hissed. Severine plodded forward, rubber boots squelching in the slime and blood. “Come, Lord Marlowe!” she said, gesturing. “Let us see to your poor hands.”

I slapped her hand away, staggered, swore as the pain in my fingers worsened. The very air hurt. “Where are you taking me?”

She blinked at me through her mask. “To medica.”

“Where is it taking me?” I snarled.

Severine only smiled.