I MARKED TIME IN meals, starting from the moment Urbaine and Severine left me lying on the margins of the pool. The packet contained a humble ration bar with a pasty, chemical flavor and a texture equal parts rawhide and sand. One bar was not enough to satisfy, though the nutritional content was calculated to keep me alive and healthy on two a day. Urbaine had played a cruel joke giving the box to me. Not only had giving me control of my own eating prevented me gaining any sense of the passage of time a gaoler’s visits might have engendered, it put me in charge of how quickly I ran out of food.

But I would not play their games, and held myself to two a day—or to what felt approximately like a day. With each meal I carved a notch on one wall with a bit of loose stone, crossed it to form an X as each day passed. The foil I carefully placed back into the crate, which was where I also placed my spent correctives when my cryoburn had healed, leaving raw, white scars.

Beneath the light of the solitary glowsphere—which I felt certain must also have been a camera through which MINOS and Syriani alike kept watch on my imprisonment—I explored the confines of my cell. It was by far the largest cell I’d ever been confined to, with the special exception of Maddalo House, but it was the most foul. Even the cell beneath the People’s Palace in Vedatharad had had plumbing. In the dark beneath the surface of Dharan-Tun, I had no water but the bitter water of the pool that trickled down through cracks in the high ceiling, leaving stalactites like Cielcin fingers reaching down. My only company were the strange, extraterranic fish, eyeless and blind—the only sound their occasional splashing and the metronomic drip, drip, drip of water. I explored every crack, every corner, even dove into the icy waters of the pool in an attempt to find any means of escape.

There were none, and even if I could escape that chamber . . . where would I go? I was alone and as good as naked miles beneath the surface of an alien world. And Urbaine’s collar yet hung about my neck. I entertained dreams of overpowering the guards, of using the mouth of a nahute to grind the collar down and make my escape into the bowels of that dark world as I had made my way along the tunnels beneath Vedatharad . . . but they were only dreams.

Guards never came.

A score of X marks marched along the wall. Two score. Three. No one came.

I talked to myself. Told stories, recounted tales of Simeon the Red, of Kasia Soulier and the Cid Arthur. I recited passages from The Romance of Alexander, from Meditations and The Book of the Mind, I sang songs I’d learned from Pallino and Switch in Colosso, even some of Valka’s I’d learned by years of long exposure. Anything to pass the time, to fill the silence.

But the silence came on anyway, and though I could not be idle and paced the confines of my cage like the very tigers whose story I’d shared on Padmurak, I grew quiet in time, muttering to myself. Sleep came less and less, and though my wounds healed I felt a gray sickness settle upon me, mingling with the grief that all my friends were dead or captured and the last, terrible parcel of hope that denied that same grief.

But I would not accept it. I would not choose.

The door opened, its squeal hounding me from some lonely place between waking and dream.

“Uimmaa o-tajun!” came the rough voice of a Cielcin. I stirred slowly, sluggish from lack of sleep. Five of the Prophet’s guards entered, striated black armor gleaming, the badge of the White Hand imprinted over their hearts. “Ijanammaa o-tajun junne wo!”

Hold him down.

The one whose deep blue surcoat marked it for an officer stood by while the others held my face to the stone floor and affixed binders to my wrists. I did not resist, and the soldiers hauled me roughly to my feet, their taloned hands carving shallow scratches into my flesh.

It took a measure of doing to find my tongue after I knew not how many days or weeks of disuse. “Where are you taking me?” I asked. The xenobites blinked at me—one shoved me by the head. I repeated the question in its own tongue.

The officer bared its glassy teeth, but gave no answer.

“You’re sure the Great One said we can’t have our play?” asked one of the guards before me, tilting its horned head.

“Suja wo!” barked the officer, shoving its underling away from me. “This one’s for the Prince! You heard our orders! Unharmed, he said—and you ask about play!” The Cielcin’s nose slits flared. “Can’t you see it’s the wrong kind anyhow? You’d kill it and lose your spawn. And then where’d we be, Gurana? The Great One’d grind us up for meal.” It shoved its subordinate again.

“I’m carrying is all!” said the one called Gurana.

Its commander snarled, “Then you find somewhere else to shove it. This one’s for the Prince!” Even after more than three centuries of life, my grasp of the xenobites’ language was tenuous. Though I was undoubtedly by then one of the Imperium’s premier experts, there was so much of the Cielcin culture we simply did not know. Without cities to plunder and libraries to raid—much of Cielcin tradition was oral, preserved by baetayan like Tanaran—the niceties remained mysterious even to me.

Still . . . I could guess the sort of play Gurana had in mind. Carrying, it had said. Starved and starved for sleep as I was, I looked on my captors with new horror. The Cielcin were hermaphrodites, mono-sexed but with twin roles: the akaranta, active, and ietumna, passive. Early in the war, we believed the Cielcin reproduced as we did, one impregnating the other, but it was not simple. The Cielcin were parthenogenetic, so that any one might conceive a child on its own, a genetic duplicate. Rather than impregnating a partner, the gravid Cielcin might implant its self-made embryo in another of the species, whereupon the genetic makeup of the host would change the developing fetus via something our magi called conjugation, so that the resulting child—which had begun as a genetic duplicate of the first parent—would take on the traits of both. What was more—provided it acted quickly—this second parent might avoid implantation and pass the child to another, so that the embryo was the product not of one parent or two, but three. Perhaps more.

I had never imagined that the host might not need to be a member of their own species.

I felt sick and said nothing as the officer frogmarched me from my cell.

The sound of screaming resonated up the hall as we hurried on, passing a Cielcin in an iron mask who led a column of human slaves chained collar to collar. In the dim, red light, I might have been forgiven for thinking I’d died and gone to hell. My guards were mostly silent as they marched me up a winding stair carved in the living rock, its pale walls gleaming orange in the light of low sconces. Higher and higher we climbed.

The nature of the corridors changed. Gone was the graven rock, the burrows and sealed tunnel-mouths. Reaching the top of another stair, we passed between two sculpted horrors, three-headed Cielcin figures with faces peering across the archway and in either direction, their black-glass eyes concealing cameras that watched all who came and went. Beyond, we stepped out into an echoing hall whose high, ribbed arches stretched above us like black bones. Other Cielcin paused in their business to watch us pass, or else hurried out of our way. Many wore the dark, organic-looking armor I’d grown accustomed to. These marched in units or stood sentinel, their white-masked faces and horned crests proud in the bloody light. Still more wore silken robes or sleeveless suits in whites or grays or blues, with here and there a green or violet. Among them—naked or dressed in rags—moved human slaves, hollow-eyed and underfed. A group of them carried one Cielcin master on a litter, while another—laden with a heavy pack like some bipedal mule—delivered goods from the mouth of one side passage to another.

It was a street.

I was on a Cielcin street.

The boy I’d been wanted to stop in wonder, but my guards would not allow it. They pushed me along, past a pack of staring human slaves. From their pallor, I took many of them for Lothrians, but there was one gray-haired man with clear, green eyes who might have been of the Imperium. I held his gaze a moment, long enough to see him mouth a single word.

Palatine.

I nodded. He averted his eyes.

Gurana and the other guards shoved me past a line of inhuman guards and through a passage that opened onto a truly massive space, vaster than any of the domes of Vedatharad, vaster than the hollow places of Vorgossos. I did stop in wonder then, and earned a beating from Gurana. Ahead of us stretched a narrow bridge across a vast pit, one of many like the spokes of a great wheel that converged on the far side before the gnarled edifice of the Dhar-Iagon, the fortress-palace at the heart of Dharan-Tun, whose tall and pointed gates yawned to admit me, lit by the molten gleam of magma from the exposed mantle far below.

A shrill cry went up as we approached within sight of the gate, and the mighty doors swung outward. Half-carried by the inhuman soldiers who held me, my callused feet scraping the smooth stone, we passed beneath the arch and along a mighty hall dominated left and right by monstrous carvings.

They were not carvings of Cielcin.

My escort raised their faces in gestures of submission—bearing their throats—as we passed beneath their monolithic shadows. I could not help but emulate them, turning my face to stare in horror and in awe. I did not mark the strangeness of the contrast then, that the Cielcin bowed their heads to signal a willingness to do violence, and raised their chins in submission where we men bow in deference and raise our chins to provoke. What was to them a gesture of reverence to the things carved on those mighty plinths was to me a last vain gesture of defiance to those dark gods whom my captors praised.

I caught sight of the shapes of curling tendrils, of membranous wings worked in stone, of faces folded and wrinkled as tonsils, of eyes and arms too numerous and misshapen to count. One had the shape of a mighty serpent, and another a form like a brain with many hands. Another, bat-like thing clung to a graven pillar, while a shapeless horror of rippling stone boiled beneath the next arch.

“Watchers . . .” I breathed, still looking on. But my escort did not speak the tongues of men, and paid me no mind.

Still more guards showed us to a lift, and we ascended to another hall, this one greater than the first and supported by arched and slanting columns. Throngs of the Pale watched from either side as my hosts shunted me along, my bare feet soiling rich carpets.

The scent of incense filled the air, and the crackle of burning. We ascended a shallow stair to a round arch where guards in black and white armed with polished glaives stood sentinel. Coming to the top of that stair, I beheld what I knew must be our final destination. Violet light fell through windows high above, and I recognized the fractal distortions of warp travel, the blurred and stretched stars ahead blueshifted by the speed of our travel. That distortion set ripples to playing on the jet-black floor. The unholy geometries of iron archways and pointed windows were like no human building, the floor ridged and uneven, the surfaces of the walls and pillars knurled like spurs of Cielcin bone.

Like a throne room it seemed to me, but there was no throne. Instead, a hemisphere of white stone dominated the space beneath the high and narrow windows, a round door in its front, its only approach a narrow span of naked stone that jutted out across a pit whose depths none had fathomed and survived.

Boom.

The moment I crossed the threshold into that black chamber, a deep drum sounded.

Boom-doom.

Beyond the arch, about incense braziers burning low and smoky to either side, a crowd of Cielcin retainers in silks of purest white gathered and lay one by one with their faces to the ground.

“Teke!” cried a herald, and the gathered retainers replied, “Teke! Teke! Tekeli!”

It was not a Cielcin word, though to the uninitiated it had the sound of their language. I puzzled over it, turning the sounds in my head as I turned my head from side to side. I had heard it before. On Berenike. But I did not know its meaning.

Boom-doom.

A Cielcin holding the heraldic spear rattled its silver chimes. “Raka attantar Aeta ba-ajun, Ikurshu ba-Elu!” it proclaimed. Blessed be our Clan-Chief, Bloodshoot of Elu!

“Yaiya toh!” came the reply.

“Blessed be our Clan Chief, who holds in his hands our world-fleet and blood-clan!”

“Yaiya toh!”

“Blessed be our Clan Chief! The White-Handed Godkiller!”

“Yaiya toh!”

“Blessed be the Prince of the Princes of Eue!”

“Yaiya toh!”

“Blessed be the Prince Syriani Dorayaica! Our Master! Our Keeper! Our Father! Our Mother!” The herald’s mantra had reached some kind of crescendo, and with each pronouncement the crowd replied with the yaiya toh, each coming faster and faster with the drumbeats. The soldiers beat the butts of their glaives against the stone floor in time with that drumming until the whole of the palace of Dhar-Iagon shook with their thunder.

The black door in the white dome across the narrow bridge opened on a deeper darkness, and the Shiomu appeared. Dorayaica wore the same sculpted black armor it had worn on our first meeting, the same black and silver toga and cape. The same chased silver shone in its crown, and its long cord of braided white hair hung over one shoulder to its waist.

Unbidden, Gibson’s ancient rebuke rose in my mind. Must everything you say sound like it’s straight out of a Eudoran melodrama? Despite the horror of my circumstances, I almost laughed, but it was a nervous laughter, the laughter of the condemned. Syriani Dorayaica placed one foot in front of the other and crossed that narrow way. The bridge could not have been wider than the fingers of my outstretched hand, but the Prophet seemed not to mind. It raised its hands for silence, and silence fell.

“Tekeli!” it said, repeating the strange word, which the prostrate inhuman crowd echoed without raising their eyes. “I am the Shiomu, the Prophet Syriani who has brought you out of the darkness. I am the Prince whom Elu foretold, who will lead our people through that darkness to new life. I am the sword that will wipe clean the universe! I am the hand that will make it anew!”

“Yaiya toh!” the crowd intoned, rising to their knees. “Yaiya toh!”

I stood even straighter before this pronouncement, until the Prophet’s eyes found me. “Cielucin ba-koun!” it proclaimed. “My People! The Fire is kindled! The Clan Chiefs of our Blood-Kin gather. An Aetavanni has been called for. I have called for it.”

Aetavanni?

Vannuri was to meet. Vanni then was a meeting. Aetavanni a meeting of Aeta, of Clan Chiefs, of War Princes.

A kingsmoot.

Not for the first time, my blood ran cold.

Syriani’s huge black eyes had not left my face throughout this entire monologue. I understood then why I was being kept alive. I was to be paraded in triumph before the princes of the Cielcin as I had paraded Iubalu’s chimeric hulk before Caesar and the great houses of the Imperium. Eye for eye. Tooth for tooth. I wondered if the Cielcin had always practiced such public humiliations, or if it were another thing—like the toga it wore—that Syriani had acquired from its study of mankind.

“Nietada Iubalu oyumn ekan ka’iri o-manasie,” I said, raising my voice to challenge the Prophet’s for that silent hall, speaking Cielcin so that those listening would understand. Iubalu said I was to be a sacrifice.

“You dare to speak her name!” a high voice wailed. Among the ribbed columns and kneeling suppliants, red light shone. I knew the voice at once; I had heard it before. On Eikana. The eye descended from the emptiness above, a red spark in a white metal sphere no more than a cubit in diameter. “Okun ne?” Hushansa—the true Hushansa, the mind and inhuman brain that controlled the iron puppets I had battled on Virdi Planum—peered down at me from within its floating chassis. In the rear of the room, statues moved.

Syriani raised a hand. “Quiet, ushan belu. Onnanna.” The Prophet drew near, one hand securing the drape of its garments. Switching from its native tongue to Galstani, Syriani Dorayaica said, “Without you, Marlowe, I could never be.” It stooped over me, its breath a fetid poison in that place of sweet-smelling smoke. With one clawed hand it reached up and combed my knotted hair back behind one ear. “All that I do, I do through you. You are my soil. My bedrock. All I build, I build on you.” It drew back, baring glass fangs. It gestured at the white dome and the black door. “Narrow is the way to rule! Narrower still the path which is ordained for me.”

“Which path?” I asked.

“I shall become a god,” the Prophet answered. “I shall make an offering of your people to the gods who dwell in the darkness beyond the farther suns, and in so doing I will destroy Utannash. I will destroy the Lie.”

“The Quiet?” I frowned in spite of myself, a pit forming in my chest. Syriani had some kind of vision, it seemed, for it seemed to know the Quiet dwelt among our possible futures, a creature whose creation depended on the survival of mankind.

Syriani hissed. “So you call it.” It drew back, moving to within a few bare paces of the precipice. My head swam with fantasies of breaking free of the guards that held me, of making a last, desperate rush at the Prophet and sending us both to our deaths far below. But something of that thought must have written itself on my face, for no sooner had the thought entered my mind than a metallic ring as of spurs sounded and a white-armored figure appeared from behind a pillar. The vayadan-general Vati stood far to one side, but I knew the chimera could move fast as thinking.

I’d never make it, even if I could escape my guards, and an experimental effort to try earned me a sharp knee to my guts. Shackled, I knelt on the floor not a dozen paces from the dark lord. Syriani—perhaps eight feet tall and crowned in silver—said, “Utannash is the Lie, the author of this lying universe, this prison! It is false! Its powers will fail you, and when they do, you will see the Truth.”

As it spoke, a giant shape moved in the shadows to one side. Turning my head, I saw a hulking shape crawling along the aisle beyond the nearest row of pillars behind the kneeling courtiers. Six-legged it was, like one of the walking tanks deployed by our legions. Its head swung like a turret, one-eyed as Hushansa, its white carapace lit red beneath in the gloom by the light of the incense braziers.

“There are no gods but ours,” the Prophet said, raising its voice to the whole chamber.

“There are no gods but ours!” the court echoed, high voices scratching at the ribbed vaults.

Lowering its voice once more, speaking only to me, Syriani Dorayaica said, “I will destroy it, and you. And everything.”

“Then kill me!” I said, and remembering my audience I raised my voice and said it again. “Shuza biqqa o-koun wo!”

The great prince made a gesture, and Gurana or one of the others cuffed me about the ears. I struck the stone floor face-first and lay there. In my weakened state, it was almost too much to contemplate standing. Still in my own language, the clan chief hissed, “You do not give the orders here, kinsman. Think you that I am a fool? Think you that you might goad me to error? No. Your death is appointed. It will occur. But it will occur in its time.”

“At your moot,” I said.

“The Aetavanni.” Syriani made the breathy sound that passed for an affirmative in its native tongue. “I see you understand me perfectly. Your time is running down.”

“It’s not hard to understand,” I countered. “You mean to make a spectacle of me. To impress the other Aeta into kneeling before you.” I was aware suddenly of how still was the congregation about us, the functionaries of Dorayaica’s court all kneeling on the hard floor, unmoving as stone.

A high keening noise escaped the prince’s throat. It was a Cielcin laugh. “Impress them? Yes. Yes, indeed.”

A rush of wind battered the air, and looking up I saw a pale shape alight on a spar that stretched between two pillars. Its body was whip-slender, an articulate metal serpent with two thin legs and shoulders barely broader than a boy’s. Its armored white head bore a horned crown like the ones on Hushansa’s puppet bodies. As I watched, it folded huge, gossamer wings and slid down the column even as the spider-thing advanced on six legs to join Vati and Hushansa about their lord.

Four of them.

There had been six.

Counting them, I knew I beheld the four remaining fingers of the White Hand, the four surviving members of the Iedyr Yemani, the exalted holy slaves who served the Prophet. As I drank in this revelation, the winged creature shrilled, “This yukajji killed Bahudde!” The creature prostrated itself before its lord, wings folding into its back. “It killed Iubalu! We must have blood!”

“Silence, Aulamn!” Syriani said, sweeping its gaze over the throng. “Rakayu uelacyr udantha.”

The time is not right.

We were on stage. The Prophet was performing for its court. I was the centerpiece in a pageant of tribal justice. The vayadayan of the Iedyr Yemani had entered in line with a script. Twice now the Prophet had silenced its Hand, twice it had refused to hear their pleas.

The huge six-legged thing swiveled its turret head, and a voice deep as the pit at Dorayaica’s back said, “Iubalu and Bahudde were our sister-brothers. This creature must be punished. Its life is dunyasu, an affront! Each breath it takes it stole from your most holy slaves.”

For a third time, Syriani Dorayaica said, “Silence!”

Then Vati knelt, and kneeling the chimera was almost as tall as its lord, its horned and feathered crest tipped back as the machine bared its throat in gesture of submission. It alone of the four fingers of the White Hand had not spoken. “Teyanu speaks truth, Great One. The dunyasu Marlowe has profaned the blood-clan! We are dishonored! Only blood may wash out blood.”

“Life for life!” the winged one, Aulamn, exclaimed.

“Uja raka Aeta wo!” the Prophet replied. “It is Aeta, and an Aetavanni has been called. By the laws of Elu, it is protected.”

The huge creature called Teyanu countered, “By the laws of Elu it is forsworn.”

The Prophet and its Iedyr had reached some form of impasse. I thought I understood. By the ancient laws that governed Cielcin society, no prince might kill another under the flag of truce, and the act of calling for this Aetavanni had raised that flag. But those selfsame laws—and perhaps older laws, the laws of the jungle, of the cave tunnels, of the birds and fishes—decreed that any who attacked the itani, the blood-clan, and the scianda, the world-fleet, was forfeit. Honor demanded Dorayaica destroy me, and honor demanded it protect my life.

It was the tension between these two demands that had arranged this pageant, and it was likely the tension between these demands that had caused me to be kept in my cell for so long. The powers in Dorayaica’s clan, its vayadayan and baetayan, its warriors and priests and close counselors must have deliberated over this moment for weeks to confect this performance.

Speaking for the gathered courtiers, its voice raised, the Prince of Princes said, “No Aeta may kill Aeta when the Fire is lit. We sail for Akterumu, where Elu the Great met the whispering gods! Would you have me break our sacred laws?”

“Veih!” the courtiers proclaimed, the Cielcin word for no.

Speaking for the Hand, Vati—still kneeling, still baring its throat—asked, “But this dunyasu has slain two of our sister-brothers! Two of our bond-mates and bed-mates! Should it be spared? Should we then break our sacred laws?”

“Veih!” the throng cried once more.

Speaking in its appointed time, Syriani asked, “What then is to be done?”

“It must be chastised!” answered Aulamn.

“It must be mortified!” replied Hushansa.

And Teyanu added, “It must be punished!”

I hardly heard any of this, for all my attention was given over to a single word.

Akterumu.

Syriani had said we were sailing for Akterumu. It was a word I’d heard but twice before, from Tanaran, the baetan of Prince Aranata Otiolo, who had said that it and the ichakta captain Uvanari had discovered the location of Emesh and its Quiet ruins from Akterumu; and again in my dreams, chanted beneath the shadow of the black dome.

Slowly, I eased myself back to my knees.

Speaking then in a stage whisper, in Galstani so that only I might hear and understand, Syriani said, “It grieves me that it must come to this, kinsman. But my slaves speak truly. You have assaulted my blood-clan, killed two of my mates. This I cannot abide. This I cannot forgive.”

“Mates?” I could not help myself, and looked round at the iron horrors standing or fallen about their lord. Tall Vati, with its pale crest and banded armor. The winged terror, Aulamn, still prostrate before the Prophet. The hulking Teyanu, six-legged and larger than any groundcar. And Hushansa, Hushansa the Many-Handed, whose nucleus orbited the gathering like an evil satellite.

I had wondered how it was the Aeta kept its pet giants in thrall, why the chimeras did not simply slaughter their Prophet and each other in a mad scramble for the top. Could it truly be . . . love? Obedience out of devotion? Could the Cielcin feel such a thing? Stunned to silence, I watched the Aeta with its retainers, and despite everything I felt a glimmer of the hope I’d known as a boy, the hope that conciliation might be possible between their race and ours.

The spark blew out in the next instant.

There would be no conciliation between our two races. I am no conciliator.

At a gesture from the Prophet, my guards clamped clawed hands on my shoulders and held me fast. Syriani drew nearer, its huge face descending as it bowed toward me. “Give me your hands, kinsman.”

I made no move, and Gurana seized me by the hair and tipped my head back, baring my throat in forced submission. I gritted my teeth and clenched my fists as the Prophet seized my right hand with its cold, damp ones, dragging the left along with it in its manacle. Slowly, inexorably, Syriani worked its clawed fingers around my own and forced my right hand to open. “We are Aeta, you and I,” it said, still speaking my own tongue. Holding my right hand in its left, it displayed its right, fingers spread. “But you have taken two fingers from my hand.” And curling one digit down and then another, it said, “Iubalu. Bahudde.”

What it did next I have never forgotten. Syriani did not move quickly, but moved instead with deliberate strength to place the last two fingers of my right hand into its mouth. So stunned was I, so horrified, I forgot to react for an instant. An instant was long enough. The xenobite’s jaw clenched as it clamped down and bit off my two fingers. Howling, I pulled my hand away, trying to rise, to run, to fall away from the monster that had taken half my good hand. I felt my heart beating in those wounded fingers, saw red blood dripping from the ruined stumps and down the Prophet’s chin. For another single, obscene instant, I saw the red ends of my fingers still between Syriani’s teeth. Then it tipped its head back and swallowed them whole.

For one of very few times in my life, I was struck speechless. I clutched the ruined appendage to my chest, blood soaking my robe. The Prophet smiled down at me, teeth red with my own blood. It laughed then, laughed the high wailing laughter of its kind. I felt shame rise in me. It was all a joke, all a hideous joke: fingers for fingers.

“Taguttaa o-tajun wo!” Syriani ordered. Gurana’s hands seized the neck of my robe and rent the garment in two. Then raising its voice for the crowd, Syriani proclaimed, “Shiabbaa! Ute Aeta ba-Yukajjimn!”

Behold, the king of men!

I wanted to say that it was not true, that I was not the Emperor. But to be Aeta was not quite the same thing. The Aeta must be warriors, and our Caesar fought from the rear, commanding others to bloody their hands in his name. Syriani doubtless understood this fact, understood that to human eyes I was only a knight, but I had bested Aranata and Ulurani both. With my men I had bested Iubalu and Bahudde. I was Aeta, the only human to carry that title, and so I was—to the Cielcin—the Prince of the Princes of Men.

It was no wonder the Prophet wanted me for its triumph. Killing me before the Aetavanni in Akterumu would be a coup to end all coups. All that I do, Syriani had said, I do through you. Through me—through my death—it would solidify its claim to be the Aeta ba-Aetane, the Prince of Princes and High King of the Cielcin.

Syriani raised its white hand and gave a sign. I heard the whip snap before I felt it, the red pain burning my back. I felt hot blood well and run as skin tore and split. The whip snapped again, and I choked off my cry and slumped as my handlers propped me up. I would not scream. Gibson had not screamed. The lash fell a third time. A fourth. Blood soaked my torn gown and ran down my thighs, and I screwed my eyes shut.

What is pain? the teacher asked his student.

It is an illusion, the student answered.

The teacher struck his student across the face.

Urbaine had believed the phantom pain he’d administered to be a masterpiece of sadism, and perhaps it was. Perhaps the sensations he’d engineered were exquisite in their intricate cruelty. But nothing is worth the real thing. Pain, I have said, forms the basis of all morality, for no man who suffers pain doubts that it is evil. No one who experiences pain can even question it.

How many times did the lash fall? A dozen? Three?

When it was over, my gaolers released me, and I fell to the bloody floor at Syriani’s feet.

“What I do to this,” Syriani said, and from the shadow that fell across me where I lay I knew it pointed down at me, “I will do to every one of its kind.” It gathered up its robes and pitched its voice to address my escort. “Take it to the wall and hang it!” it decreed. “Let the slaves see their king!”