SEVERINE WASHED ME AND taped correctives to my wounded hands and chest. The bruises and bruised bones from my beatings on Padmurak had not healed in fugue. She taped these as well—her ministrations watched by Cielcin guards in a medica that seemed tailored for human use, its instruments out of place in a chamber that appeared little more than a cave melted out of solid rock. I was fed as well, bland porridge made from bromos and a heel of brown bread. Better fare—somehow—than the Lothrians had offered me in their prison.

Though that was not to last.

These ministrations accomplished, the MINOS witch handed me over to the Pale, who beat me and held me down as the smallest among them fixed a metal collar about my neck. Something in the collar whined as it clamped shut, and a faint red light gleamed.

Dumb as I was and fugue-sick, I little remember the winding stairs and twisted corridors, the lifts and rattling chains of that horrid bastion. I am not Valka, and never was. My memory fails. Fades. Forgets.

For that, more than anything, I am grateful.

But I will not forget the smell, the stench of Dharan-Tun. Iron and sulfur. Blood and fire. Rot and death. For all the pandemonic glamour of the Prince of Princes, its dominion was a horror of iron and raw stone. It was a kingdom in exile, a kingdom on the move, rough-hewn and hideous in the hollows of a wandering moon. How vast it was I could never be sure, vaster than the moons of Emesh, vaster than some planets. Dharan-Tun was an entire world, a planet driven by engines huge as the empires of Old Earth and powerful as suns, and though its surface was dark and cold and rimed with frost, beneath its icy cap—in tunnels and in halls fit to outdo mythic Nidavellir in their scope—teemed millions, perhaps billions of the Cielcin and their thralls.

But where there were tunnels and halls there were caverns, too. Dungeons . . . and pits.

The door hissed and sealed shut behind me, its lock panel glowing a faint, ugly red. I had stopped shivering by then, but still I crossed my arms. Severine had given me a loose garment, a colorless kind of cassock, tight-sleeved but loose in the body so that it flapped about my ankles. Still barefoot, I stepped into the darkness of my new home, squinting to see by the light of the door panel.

The dark stared back.

Slowly, advancing on bare and callused feet, I pressed forward into the gloom, testing the ground with my toes. The air felt warmer here than in the cubiculum where Severine had awakened me, warmer than the medica where she had bound my wounds. The air smelled of moist decay, fungal and earthy and strangely sweet.

Something splashed in the darkness.

“Who’s there?” I called out, feeling my way along the wall with one bandaged hand. The stone felt glassy beneath my fingers, as if shaped with plasma or a cutting beam. After only a few steps I had to stop. Injured as I was, starving and fugue-sick, my head swam. Severine had kept me in medica—a drab stone room that beeped with instruments—for what felt like more than a day. I couldn’t be sure. The lesser gravity, the darkness, and the sense of dislocation all mingled with the weight of the one thing I’d struggled with since the moment I crashed my chariot on the bridge.

Grief.

Another splash.

Shutting my eyes a moment and screwing grief to the back my mind, I shuffled forward. “Hello?” Absurdly, I almost expected to hear Brethren’s chorus of voices rising from the darkness, almost expected to see its bloated arms waving through the gloom ahead. But there was nothing. Looking back, I saw the red glow of the door lock. Faint and far away as a star it seemed, though the short hall could not have been more than ten feet long. Ahead, the chamber opened to either side, its dimensions shrouded in dark. “Show yourself!”

Quiet.

The quiet stretched.

Another splash.

I’d made it perhaps a dozen paces from the end of the hall when my foot found water. A puddle? A pool . . . Hiking up my loose garment, I waded up to my knees, gritting my teeth against the cold. I was suddenly conscious of the throbbing of my injured hands and stopped, careful to keep the robe out of the water. Something brushed against my leg. I lurched backward, splashing back toward the shore. Whatever manner of sightless creature dwelt in those alien waters, I did not desire to meet it. I sank onto the shelf, my back against the rough wall just inside the hall. It was just a fish, I told myself. “Just a fish . . .”

Alone in the dark, I drew my damp legs close.

Alone at last.

At last the darkness closed in around me. The darkness and the reality of my imprisonment, the reality that the Tamerlane was lost, that Valka was dead. That everyone I knew and loved was gone. My Red Company. My people.

Hot tears fell, and I clenched my screaming fists, heedless of the pain that blossomed from beneath the black corrective tape. I wanted the pain, needed it . . . deserved it. I clenched my fists until the pain of those flayed fingers was enough to fill that pitch-dark cave with my ragged screams. Iovan’s smile seemed to split the darkness, his evil, gray-skinned face leering at me, false eyes flashing. I understood a piece then of how Valka must feel, haunted as she was by Urbaine’s specter. A sob escaped me, and its passage was like the falling of the first chips of stone that herald the breaking of a dam.

What was the last thing I’d said to her? I’d leaned in to kiss her before mounting the ladder to the roof of that evil van. Leaned in and said I’ll be back. But I would never be back, could never go back. I had lied to her in the end—in a way. Valka was dead, had to be dead.

You don’t know that.

Her voice, that bright Tavrosi voice, sounded so clear in the darkness of my cave that she might have been sitting across from me, sharing my cell as we had shared a cell in the dungeons of Kharn Sagara.

You don’t know that.

They had been her last words to me, a reminder that I was not always right. I almost laughed—what better epitaph might there be for Valka Onderra Vhad Edda, once of Tavros? The memory pulled on another, and Iovan’s smiling eyes seemed to shine at me from the shadows.

Your Tavrosi concubine, he’d said. Her implants do pose a problem, one that . . .

One that what?

I sat a little straighter. Iovan had not spoken of Valka as one dead. She’d been alive when I’d boarded the shuttle that brought me to this place. How long ago had that been? How long had I been frozen on my journey from Padmurak to Dharan-Tun? Hope and fury in me both, I stood and scraped my cheeks with the heels of my hands. I hurried back down the little hall away from the pool and pounded on the door, crying out for Severine, for Syriani—but no one came. I must have beaten on that portal for an hour before I staggered back against the wall, robe flapping about my heels. Focusing my vision, I peered across the vast infinitude of possibility, peering for a world where I opened the door and escaped.

There were none.

Reading this account, you might think my vision boundless, but it is hemmed in by what I know. In relying on my technician to power down the antimatter foundries on Eikana, I relied on his skills, only shepherding us along currents of time opened by his ability. I had no understanding of the mechanisms governing that Cielcin door, no knowledge whether the lock was electrical or mechanical, or where the controls might be. From my limited perspective, the door was as good as wall, and try as I might, the door as it presented itself to the limited prism of my consciousness would not open. I was Pandora’s cat—neither living nor dead—and powerless to escape my prison.

Powerless to escape my collar, too. I dug my fingers beneath the lip of the collar and pulled, straining the hear the scrape of locking mechanisms. It wouldn’t budge, not in mine or any universe. I could not see my way to choices I did not understand.

At length, I returned to the shelf by the black pool and listened to the trickle of water flowing over distant stone. How long I lay awake no man can say, for time itself dissolved in that darkness.

Days, I think, passed without event. By the end of the first day the inward gnawing of my stomach became difficult to ignore, and the desire for water drove me to drink from the pool. I had no way of knowing if the water was safe enough to drink, but the taste at least was not so evil. Bitter, yes, but not poisonous. I would know soon enough. If I had made some error, it would not be long before some waterborne animalcule turned my bowels to water and twisted my guts. I thought of Cat dying in her gutter. What an end it would be if Hadrian Halfmortal, whom men said could not be killed, who caught highmatter in his hand, who had stood unburnt beneath the lance on Berenike, were struck down by some alien dysentery in a dungeon and the Dark.

But I would die of thirst elsewise.

The door opened, admitted a bloody flow of light.

“You look comfortable,” came a drawling human voice. Two shadows stood in the arched portal. After what I guessed were days in darkness, even the dying-embers glow of Cielcin lighting was blinding. From the sneer I guessed that these were no thralls of Syriani’s, no collared slaves, and as they drew nearer one kindled a lamp in the form of a slaved glowsphere that hung close to her shoulder.

That white light—harsher than the red by far—blinded me for true. But as my tortured eyes adjusted, I recognized the face of Doctor Severine, her gray eyes—the same as Iovan’s—twinkling down at me. But it was her companion who had spoken. His voice and face were unfamiliar, though something of the ensemble spoke to me of old acquaintance. Milk-pale and hairless he was, tall and thin as if in imitation of his Cielcin masters, his eyes the familiar machine gray. He wore a knee-length brocade jacket cut Mandari fashion with high collar and knotted closures, so deep a purple it was almost charcoal with slippers to match, his legs sheathed in white hose.

Eyes aching from disuse, I cast my gaze around the chamber. Stalactites hung from above, spires of milky stone shot through with dark veins so like the stone of our necropolis beneath Devil’s Rest on Delos far away. The rough floor of the shelf carved a crescent shape against the shore of the pool, which stretched perhaps two hundred feet to the far wall where the limestone rose in tumbled steps above the surface of the water. A narrow trough—perhaps six inches wide—ran along the far wall to a culvert of raw iron caked with grime. Water from the pool spilled down into it in a miserable trickle. A primitive latrine.

There were no other amenities, unless it were the iron rings hammered into the walls at intervals. Noting my interest in the rough toilet, the man said, “Oh, gave you one of the better cells, did they?” He glanced at Severine, who said nothing.

“What do you want?” I asked, voice hoarse. In the presence of other people, I was suddenly aware of how grimy I felt, of the oil on my face and hands. I felt an overwhelming urge to climb into that pool and scrub myself clean. But even my meager movements had set my stomach groaning.

The man exhaled. “To feed you. What else? The Prince asked us to keep his guest comfortable.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“I am glad to find your experience with Iovan has not taken the temper out of your Imperial spine,” the man said, coming from the hall onto the shelf proper. “That will make watching your time with the Prince all the more gratifying. He is an artist, you know.” As he spoke, a crate floated in from the hall, carried by a gleaming drone held up on humming repulsors. It deposited the box and flew away, back out the open door. For a fleeting instant, I wondered if I might overpower the two sorcerers and make a dash for it.

I knew I could not.

The bald man sighed, massaged his neck. “It is a pity your bird men are not with you. One owes me a head.”

My stomach turned over and knotted with old fury. “You’re . . . Urbaine!”

“The very same.” The MINOS sorcerer who crawled inside Valka’s mind and crippled her bowed a mocking bow.

“I’d hoped you were dead,” I said, though what a thin and feeble hope it proved.

Urbaine gave a thin-lipped smile. “You are not the only man in the galaxy to whom Death does not come easy.” He looked me up and down. “I would love to test the limits of your legend, my lord. I understand some in the Empire believe you are some kind of god. Even the Prince—bless him—thinks you sent by one. But there are no gods. There is no magic, only mysteries we have not yet solved.” As he spoke, he opened the lid of the crate and drew out a foil-wrapped packet. He tossed it at me with the air of a man tossing scraps at a dog. It slid across the floor.

It was a legion-style ration bar.

I did not move to take it. I would give neither Urbaine nor Severine the satisfaction of seeing me desperate. I would not beg or scramble for scraps as they so clearly hoped.

Severine spoke. “There should be enough to last you . . . about a standard year? Assuming you pace yourself.” Her smile could have drawn blood. I matched it.

“How did you survive?” I asked Urbaine.

The sorcerer gestured to his heart with two fingers. “You missed my secondary transceiver. Broadcast an image of my daimon here while you were busy with poor Bahudde.”

“I thought you needed a larger transmitter.”

“Like the one on Arae?” He smiled and seated himself on the rations crate. “You missed us by minutes that time. No. On Arae we had to transmit several dozen daimon images about half a light-year, and we had to do it quickly. On Berenike there was only me . . . and I only needed to get to orbit.” Urbaine’s face grew sardonic. “You don’t . . . know much about machines, do you?”

I shrugged and—using the rough wall for a handhold—pushed myself to my feet, my already grimy robe clinging about me. “Enough to know what you are.”

Severine’s smile had not faltered. “And what are we, Lord Marlowe?”

“Ghosts,” I said. “You died with your original bodies.”

The woman snorted, and laughing Urbaine said, “Primitive nonsense.”

“It’s not,” I said, knowing too well the depth of the intrinsic linkage between consciousness and flesh. “You’re just an image—to use your word—a shadow of . . . whoever you once were.”

“We were shadows once,” Severine said, cryptically. “We are more than human now.”

I studied their faces. Severine appeared human enough, a Mandari woman, as I’ve said, but Urbaine had clearly left pieces of his humanity behind. His nose was flat and broad, not quite the slits of his Cielcin masters, and his ears—were they fused to the sides of his skull? “I met someone once who believed as you do. He was so abstracted from his humanity I think he could no longer even understand what he’d lost.”

“Nonsense.” Urbaine dismissed this with a hand.

“It’s not,” I said again. If it were nonsense, I felt sure I would have met one posthuman chimera not given to moral insanity. “You cannot become more than human by making yourself less human in the first place.”

Urbaine stood smoothly. “There is no such thing as human. We are data. Genes. Thoughts. The form is irrelevant.”

“The form creates the function,” I said. “Change the body. Change the mind.”

“We did not come here to debate philosophy!”

“No,” I agreed. “You came to gloat.” I spread my hands, fingers flexing without pain. The correctives had been hard at work while I languished in the dark, evidence that at least several days had passed. “Get on with it.”

I had gained some semblance of solid footing despite my collar and my cage. Urbaine seemed to have noticed, for he snarled, “You’re the one locked in here, Marlowe! You’ve lost!”

“I am,” I said. “I have.” I turned away, peered down into the water at my feet. In a distant voice—not really meaning to speak—I continued, “Your friend Iovan said you meant to destroy the Empire.”

“To set humanity free,” Urbaine replied, spreading pale, long-fingered hands.

“By enslaving them to the Cielcin?” I countered.

The sorcerers looked at one another. It was the woman who answered. “New paradigms,” she said, “new growth. The Cielcin offer opportunities not . . . previously available.”

I snapped my gaze back onto the two sorcerers. “Such as the dissolution of the Empire?”

“Such as,” Severine said. “Humanity has grown fat in your Empire’s care. When was the last great invention? The last industrial revolution? The last new idea? Your lords are perfectly willing to playact medieval darkness as though the Golden Age never ended.”

I turned my back on the wizards and paced toward the shore of my pool. There were fish in it, whole shoals of little silver leapers no longer than my hand. “The Cielcin want to wipe us out.”

“They want to wipe out the yukajjimn,” Urbaine agreed. “We are not yukajjimn. You would not be yukajjimn if you but knelt.”

My reflection stared back at me. “It’s a caste?” I said, unable to scrub the shock from my voice. Long ago, when I’d met with Prince Aranata Otiolo, it had spoken of the human yukajjimn in such a way that seemed to refer exclusively to the Sollan Empire. Kharn Sagara had been exempt. I had not thought much of it at the time—there had been so much more to consider—but the distinction and the importance of it crystallized. Sagara had subordinated himself to that Prince in order to maintain a kind of peace and to trade with it. In doing so, he had signed himself onto the lowest rung of a ladder on whose highest stood the Prince itself. And no wonder—oaths were meaningless to the dark lord of Vorgossos, who served only himself. The Cielcin did not want to eradicate all of humanity . . . they wanted to eradicate every man who would not kneel to them.

“You are Aeta yourself,” Urbaine said. “A human Aeta.”

“A yukajjimn Aeta,” Severine added.

“It’s a caste . . .” I said again, dumbly, still looking out at the waters. “So you will force mankind to kneel to her conquerors?”

“We will force change,” Urbaine replied. “Progress.”

“Those are not the same thing.”

“They are!” Urbaine countered, and I saw his shadow flickering on the wall across the water. “Under the Prophet’s Hand, humanity will spread across the galaxy, across galaxies. We will fight in his armies, build his cities. We will ascend. We will evolve. Humanity will become more. We must.”

I turned to look at the wizard, at the clear imitation of his alien masters styled on his flesh. Examining his inhuman face, I understood him. He craved power. All his talk of uplifting mankind he directed at himself. He would sell trillions into bondage and the abattoir if it brought him prestige. At minimum, he meant to serve as the vizier of a new and inhuman emperor. But it was more than that. Urbaine was a believer, whatever his protestations.

“You are a man of science, sorcerer,” I said, sparing a glance for the other, who had gone strangely silent. “You say there are no gods. I say that religion and science are each journeys of faith. Each quests for something—the same something, in my experience.”

Urbaine snorted. “You’re a fool. We are building a better world.”

“Paradise,” I said to him. “Enlightenment? Call it what you will.” The slap of that riposte wrongfooted the two sorcerers, and I pressed on. “Speaking only in terms of science: most change is evil. All change increases entropy, and all entropy is loss.” As I spoke, I thought of my final, apocalyptic vision of the darkness at the end of time, of the last stars winking out like candles as dark energy sundered light from light. “The only good comes in preserving those things—peoples, institutions, whatever—which are good themselves.”

Severine sniffed. “And who defines good? You?”

“There are trillions of people in the Empire. Trillions who will die defending it.” I turned at last and glowered at Urbaine and Severine. “How many are you?” I felt the sting take hold.

Like the revolutionaries who penned the Lothriad, the magi of MINOS were doubtless few in number. Revolutionaries are always few, always forcing their vision on the disinterested masses, caring little for how those masses suffered in the execution of their dreams.

“Oh, we have people everywhere,” Severine sneered.

“Not trillions, then?” I managed a derisive sniff of my own.

Urbaine’s face had gone grave as stone. “I would not be so proud, if I were you,” he said. “You think it is only the Commonwealth we’ve suborned? Our fingers are everywhere. In everything. The Principalities. The Republic. The Small Kingdoms. What’s left of the Freeholds . . .”

“And the Empire itself, I don’t doubt.” I no longer had the energy to be surprised. “I should have killed you when I had the chance.” I had no guarantee that carving the heart out of the wizard would have destroyed him for good. There was always the chance some backup of Urbaine’s image, his daimon, remained on some faraway world. But it would not be the same daimon, not the same man.

How could one vanquish an enemy for whom Death meant so little?

Urbaine’s smile revealed a set of entirely canine teeth. “And now you never will.” He drew a step nearer. “It is a pity your woman was lost. I would have liked to have her as well. The things we might have done with those implants of hers.” He cackled then, and licked his lips.

My vision went white, and I hurled myself at the sorcerer, aiming to knock those pointed teeth from his face. Weak though I was, my overhand still caught the magus on the side of his jaw, and he folded like paper, like a bundle of dry twigs. For an instant, I stood over the man whose worm had chewed through Valka’s brain, the man who had crippled her for a time, had nearly killed her. For a moment, I stood triumphant, fist raised for the second blow.

Pain flooded my sensorium, as if lightning had struck every nerve ending and every synapse at once. It was as if I’d been encased in white-hot metal, as if my bones had been packed with glowing coals. I felt my skin blister and peel away, my cords snap and curl. If I screamed—and I must have screamed—I could not hear it over the pure liquid agony my universe had become. No acid, no poison, no virus—not even the vile dispholide of the Chantry priests—could burn with such heat.

And then it was done, switched off as smartly as a lamp.

When I recovered, I found I had fallen on my back, my rags and hair soaked by the water’s edge. The pain had gone entirely, but its memory remained like a boot print on my heart. Severine and Urbaine were staring down at me. The latter was grinning his imitation Cielcin smile.

His teeth were red.

I pointed up at him. “Got you.”

The pain flared again, brief and bright. When it passed, my throat was raw from screaming. I coughed, choked—would have retched if I had eaten the rations Urbaine had tossed my way. I only heaved instead.

“You think this is one of your stories,” the sorcerer said. “You think yourself some kind of hero. You think you are fighting evil.” He shook his head. “Your Empire has kept you simple. There are no heroes. There is no good or evil. Stories are for children . . . and children have to be made to grow up.”

I understood what had happened then. “The collar . . .” I could still hardly speak without coughing. One of the sorcerers had activated the device by way of their implants. I couldn’t have fought back if I tried.

“Nerve induction,” Urbaine explained, touching the back of his own neck. “Applied directly to your spinal cord. Not pleasant, is it? I wrote the configuration myself. I’ve sampled every sensation the human brain is capable of feeling. . . . Believe me when I say it can get worse.” He turned to go, and paused to kick the ration packet toward me with a pointed gesture. “Eat, Lord Marlowe. You will need your strength.”

Severine followed in his wake, her hard shoes clacking after his Mandari slippers. The last thing I heard before the door squealed shut was her voice saying, “We’ll leave the light.”