THE CHAIR’S WHEELS CREAKED as the slave pushed me along the ribbed and grotesque hall. It was the only sound save the padding of her bare feet on the naked rock. Clad in a new colorless tunic, I hung my head and stared at my mutilated hands: at the missing fingers and the ugly, red-white weals of cryoburn where my rings had peeled flesh from bone; at the regenerated fingernails and the older, fainter scars, relic of Irshan’s sword. My body had become a mural, a temple whose reliefs spoke of pain.

I was not the only such monument.

There were always bodies in the city. I saw them when they carried me on a litter up the winding way from the prison in the deeps of that unholy place. Men, headless, hung on hooks above gutters thick with blood. No murmurous haunt of flies in that alien city, only the stink of corruption, of meat rotting for the Cielcin palate. They hung outside cave mouths like trophies, skinned and opened, the offal scooped out.

And then . . . there was the palace.

Each time when my torments had reached their end and I was brought before the Prophet to confess, I traveled through the corridors of the Dhar-Iagon, through the grottoes and high halls where inhuman soldiers stood sentinel and white-faced courtiers gnawed thighbones and gristle. More than once I saw the remains of human slaves lying on the stone floor, or saw only dark stains. Twice our guard halted to drag the bodies aside.

Before long, the slave girl pushed me through a pointed arch and into a narrow corridor. Many hands had ground the stone floor smooth, but the walls retained the unhewn roughness of the wandering planet’s native rock, and the chair creaked only slightly as the slave pushed it forward, upsetting the saline bag on its staff beside my head. I craned my neck to see around the bend ahead, but was stopped by the heavy straps that held me above the knee and about the chest. I had not left the chair for days while Severine’s correctives worked their subtle art of repair. I could sense the vastness of the chamber beyond only by the open quality of the air, the gentle breeze that wafted about the dark stone. It spoke of volumes, of emptiness.

We entered onto a kind of shelf, an open space several hundred feet long bounded by a sheer drop into abyssal dark ahead and on the left side. To the right, the raw stone rose to the cavern roof, from which huge glass lanterns hung, their round faces cutting the glare to a somber, demonic red. Somewhere in a corner, the hollow piping of a flute played, wailing and atonal, and before me—seated at the head of what seemed a kind of feasting table—sat the Prophet in its robes of imperial black.

Syriani Dorayaica stood as we approached and raised its arms as if to embrace me from the far end of that table. “Here he is!” it said in the standard. “Shiabbaa o-tajun, cielucin ba-koun! Shiabbaa cahyr ute Aeta ba-Yukajjimn! Behold my kinsman, my fellow clan-chief. Will you not all kneel?” It glanced sidelong about the chamber, moving its head snake-like from the wall to my right to the precipitous drop at my left. It was only then that I—who had had eyes but for my enemy—realized we were not alone. In the rusted shadows beneath the lanterns stood a congregation of inhuman persons. Soldiers dressed in glistening black, white-masked and white-crested. White-robed counselors and courtiers dressed in elaborate robes of blue or gray. Painted concubines clad in silver jewelry, naked and androgynous beside collared human slaves.

And all of them silent save the lonely minstrel whose flute suddenly stopped.

“Gasvaa!” the Prophet ordered, and stretched its iron claws.

As a single organism, the crowd sank to its knees about me, even the human slave girl who had pushed my chair. Above it all, the Prophet settled back in its high seat and smiled its alien smile, its glass teeth bared. Speaking once more in my own tongue, it said, “Are you well, kinsman?” It raised a hand to indicate my state.

I glanced down at the thick straps that bound my legs and chest and at the medical correctives taped over my flayed thighs, and once more at the ruin of my hands. All at once I was acutely aware of the medical bags hanging from the staff beside my head, and of the waste hoses socketed into my flesh beneath the long, drab garment I wore.

I was on display. Like so many captured lords of antiquity, I had been trotted out as a symbol. There were so few emotions that stood congruent in the hearts of our two species, so few rituals held in common. But humiliation was one. And shame. These we had between us, man and Cielcin. These we shared. Ute Aeta ba-Yukajjimn, Syriani had called me. The True King of Man. I was not the Emperor, but I had slain two princes of the tribes of Eue. I was a prince in their eyes, elutanura ve ti-ikurrar, to use the Cielcin phrase. Crowned in blood. Yet I was no king, and no true Aeta—for I was not Cielcin. I was a living blasphemy in the eyes of the xenobites, and so I had been brought forth to be mocked.

“Your courtesies leave much to be desired,” I said, and gesturing at my state, at the wheelchair and the corrective taped to my hands and thighs, asked, “Why am I being treated?”

The great prince leaned forward in its rough stone seat, claws splayed on the corners of the long dining table between us. “You must walk where we are going,” it said, still in the standard, still for my ears alone. It rose to its feet in a stirring of black and silver chains, the udaritanu embroidered on its robes glittering like the constellations. Lifting its hands again it addressed the gathered throng, high, harsh voice raised. “Raka Oranganyr ba-Utannash! The Champion of the Lie! He is Ute Dunyasu, the Great Affront, and Oimn Belu! The Dark One!” As it spoke Syriani tossed its head from side to side, hurling its words like thunderbolts. It stepped to the corner of the table, one hand trailing along the surface. “It was his hand that slew Aranata Otiolo, his hand that cut down Venatimn Ulurani. He took my Iubalu, my Bahudde from me. He is the greatest of their warriors! The greatest enemy of all whose eyes are fixed upon Iazyr Kulah!”

As it spoke it proceeded along perhaps a third the length of the table, dragging its claws on the polished stone. It was the strangest table I had ever seen, not flat like the tables of men, but deeply furrowed, so that a trench perhaps a cubit deep and three cubits wide ran down the length, its walls slanted steeply from the wide lip.

And there were grates in the bottom.

The whole thing had the look of some vile feeding trough.

Syriani had not finished, and flashing shark’s teeth at the still-kneeling congregants, it said, “But he is broken now. He has been purified. He has confessed! He has given us the location of the Uganatai, their false king! Their Emperor.” It spoke this last word in the standard, pronouncing it with carefully measured tones.

I hung my head, the memory of my shame washing over me like a tide. How long had I endured the question? Endured my purification, my mortification at the hands of the enemy? Not long enough. I should have died before betraying the Emperor as I had. Others would have done so. I clenched my hands in my lap, feeling the absent fingers ache as the stumps moved. I had never been a great patriot, no true lover of Empire. As a boy, I had very nearly hated her: had I not marveled at her cruelty and reviled her for it? Had I not reviled my own father? Was he not avatar of the Imperium in my eyes?

And yet I loved her then—and love her now, who has wounded her more deeply than any man living or dead.

I loved the Empire not for the breadth of her dominion, nor admired her for the strength of her arms. I loved only that which she defended: mankind itself, palatine and patrician, plutocrat and plebe. I loved the Sollan Empire for the shield she was, the bulwark she built up against the darkness beyond the light of her suns.

And I had failed her, and failed the Emperor, and in so doing, failed every man, woman, and child the Emperor held in his charge.

My distress must have made itself plain on my face—and I sensed that Syriani had a better measure of human feeling than I had of Cielcin—for it addressed its court, saying, “Our journey is almost done. In twice twelve and nine watches we will reach Akterumu. There we will meet our brethren, and there take what is rightfully ours! Then we will burn the yukajjimn from our skies. We will find their Uganatai and I will drink his blood myself.”

“Teke teke tekeli!” cried a white-robed Cielcin near the fore of the table, still kneeling on the stone.

“Yaiya toh!” the others replied, and one by one hurled themselves to the floor.

All fell about their lord and were still.

In the fresh silence, Syriani lifted its voice again and proclaimed, “Too long we have kept to the darkness. Have we forgotten that Elu bid us step into the light? That it was he who answered Miudanar’s call and led us to the sky? Have we forgotten that the gods taught us to fly? That we are a chosen people? That we alone may join them in the next world when this iugannan is washed away and the Deceiver is cast down?”

It turned back, returned with loping strides to take its place before the high seat. “I am the prince whom Elu promised. I am the one to unite our people once again, to gather the thirteen tribes of Eue under one banner—to hold them in my Hand.” It pointed at me where I sat bound and crippled at the opposite end of the table. “And it is my Hand that gives you this great gift, this great enemy. His capture is proof! The gods fight with us!”

“Adiqasur Caihanarin ush ti-ajun wo! Adiqasur Caihanarin!” the Cielcin echoed, many of them raising their faces. “The gods fight with us!”

“I am the prince who will wash away the Lie! I will give you the stars! I will lead you all to paradise!” And here the great prince clapped its ringed and taloned hands, bangles clattering like chains. “Take this as a token of what is to come.”

Thereupon a door opened in the stone wall to my right, and a double line of human slaves emerged, chained to one another by the ankles and carrying heavy trays of black glass on bars between them. These they carried forward and lay across the table-trough.

But I could smell the meat before I saw it, and cursed as the slaves withdrew.

The Cielcin do not cook their meat. There had been little fuel in the tunnels and cave warrens of their native world. They would eat burned meat—I had seen charred bodies in the ruins of ships and of cities with strips of flesh removed—but it was not their preference. Aging passed for cookery among the Pale.

Rotting.

Still, I recognized the bare ribs, the stacked limbs, and there was no mistaking the heads that—eyeless—stared from the center of skinned and artfully arranged thighs. The nearest stared up at me, empty eyes black as pits, as coals. Black as the eyes of the enemy. The Pale had peeled the skin from the dead man’s face and applied some greenish paste to the browned and marbled flesh of cheek and jowl. But it was not the face that most stirred my horror, nor the whorl of nestled limbs of which it formed the centerpiece. Nor was it the tray of mounded organs—fresher than the meat. It was the red cloth that lined the tray. No alien silk was this, but the dyed wool of a humble legionary tunic. The huge trays were lined with them, each requiring perhaps half a dozen to cover their black glass surfaces, each arranged so that the short sleeves draped over the sides and the epaulets of rank were on full display.

These were blank-plated legionnaires, or triasters with their single bar, and here and there I marked the double bar of a decurion. Ordinary men. Common soldiers. Once. But it was not even the tunics and the badges of rank that drew my eye. It was the insignia beneath the rank identifier, above the little embossed sunburst that was the mark of the Sollan Empire.

A pitchfork and a pentacle.

My pitchfork and pentacle.

My vision blurred, if only for a moment. Fury boiled my tears away. “These were my men!” I shouted, and there was a strength in my voice I had not heard there for a very long time. About me, the other Cielcin had begun to find their feet, were rising like a gray and deathly chorus from the stone floor all around. I strained against the bonds that held me, but they would not yield. “My men!”

Syriani did not smile, but settled itself in its stone chair with almost pharaonic serenity to contrast the anguish and the rage coming off me in waves.

“How?” I demanded, shaking in my seat. “When?”

The Prince of Princes gave no answer, though its eyes—like sockets themselves—never left my face. “Cielucin ba-koun!” it said, voice still filling that high-vaulted place of rough stone. “My people! I give you a piece of this abomination’s army! These yukajjimn would have burned these halls. They would have slaughtered you. Us! They would have destroyed our dreams of paradise. I have destroyed them.” It raised a hand, three fingers extended like a vate offering benediction from atop his pillar. “This is but a foretaste of what is to come.”

“Where are the others?” I demanded, speaking standard to avoid a scene. “Syriani, where are the others?”

The Cielcin to either side edged closer, communicating not with words but with the careful, teasing steps of the pack approaching its chief, chins raised, throats bared, lips parted, testing the great prince.

But the prince had eyes only for me. Leaning forward so that the fine chains that decorated its horned crown swayed and sparkled in the red lamplight, its gripped the corners of the table. “Where they have been all this time,” it answered in perfect Galstani. “In my keeping.”

One of the white-robed courtiers drew too near the table, and the Prophet snapped its attentions from me. It hissed, jaw distending to extend the black gums and glassy fangs forward from its otherwise flat face. The lesser creature recoiled and dropped to its knees.

For a moment, I felt as if I had come out of my seat—out of my body. “In your keeping?” I repeated, shaking my head. “Severine said the ship was lost with all hands.” I never quite believed her, and yet . . .

“She is yukajjimn,” the Prophet said. “Yukajjimn lie . . .” It trailed off then, turning to regard the kneeling creature. A furrow formed between the xenobite’s hairless brows. “But her lie has served the Truth, because it has served me.” All around us, the other Cielcin were shifting in hungry agitation. I could practically hear the saliva dripping from their fangs. They but waited for the bell, for their master’s signal. “I wanted you to think you were alone. Because you are alone. Your people did not escape Padmurak. They will not escape their fate, as you will not escape yours.” I shut my eyes to stop a fresh flood of tears. The Great One kept talking, voice smooth and sharp as glass. “No one knows you are here. No one is coming to save you.”

“It won’t matter,” I said, and raised my voice then to stop it breaking. “My death won’t matter. The Imperial fleet outnumbers yours ten thousand to one. You cannot hope to match their strength.”

“Strength . . .” the Prophet said. “Vandate . . . Do you even know what strength is? What it is to have strength?” Opening my eyes again, I marked the Cielcin standing all about me, held from their feast by deference to the Prophet on its throne. Syriani was still speaking the standard, speaking for my ears only, and I had to remind myself that I, too, was Aeta, and that when Aetamn spoke, the Cielcin deferred, no matter their hunger. “You think it is wallati? Power? Numbers? Think you it is weapons?”

The great prince turned its attention on the prostrate member of its court. “Okun-kih,” it said, and the creature lifted its face. The Prince of Princes raised its hand and pointed. “Iagga,” it said. Go. The Cielcin stood, inky eyes following its master’s taloned finger to the edge of the shelf on which we all stood. I followed that finger, too. The blackest abyss yawned below us. How deep it stretched or how wide it was defied my ability to know. There was only the dark—like the Dark of night, of space—except that here there were no stars, no light but the red glow of lanterns.

The doomed Cielcin jerked its head to one side, a nervous tic I had to remind myself was the Cielcin affirmative. It did not question, did not splutter or plead. The white-robed courtier shuffled back on padded feet, eyes wide, unblinking. It looked over its shoulder, and—finding itself mere paces from the edge—turned and faced oblivion. It hesitated only an instant before stepping out into open air.

It vanished in a silent rush of silk and hair.

Vanished. And was gone.

None of the others stirred or gave a cry. Some shuffled awkward from side to side, still more bared their throats in submission to their demon king. None challenged its actions, none questioned its supremacy. I said nothing, but waited for the great prince to speak. Syriani looked round at its gathered courtiers, translucent fangs bared in a snarling, inhuman smile. “Vandate . . . strength is not strength, kinsman,” it said, speaking the standard still for my benefit. “Think you if all these wished me dead that I might defy them by my strength?” Syriani shook its head—the human gesture out of place and strangely obscene. “Know you what your Empire is?”

The question came at me seemingly from nowhere, and I could not help but ask, “What?”

“Imperium,” the prince said, “means command. Order. It is a belief, a compulsion. Faith. A liar’s faith, yes. But faith.” And here it extended a clawed hand toward the abyss and the creature who had thrown itself into its maw. “There you see true faith. The faith of one who acts in the name of Truth. My new empire is a command, too, a command given me by Miudanar, great among the gods! My command, my faith, is truth. Truth is power. The gods’ Truth. It was our faith, our caiharu, that broke your fleet at Berenike, or have you forgotten?”

I had not. How well I remembered the sky fires burning, the light of the annihilation cascade filling the sky like ten thousand setting suns. At Bahudde’s command, the Cielcin fleet had penetrated the shield curtain of our own defensive fleet before destroying their own AM fuel stores. Titus Hauptmann had grouped the fleet too close together, and the resulting wave of destruction tore our cordon apart. Our men had stood no chance, had died because the Cielcin berserkers cared nothing for their lives. How many Cielcin had died to make that sacrifice? How many hundreds? How many thousands?

We never knew. Their remains had all been blown to atoms.

“You’re right,” I said. “Truth is power. So let me tell you a little truth.” I leaned forward so far as my restraints would allow, the stench of corruption masked by exotic and sweet-smelling spices filling my nose. “You think you’ve already won, but . . .” I looked down at the rotting feast spread above the trench-table before me. The empty eye sockets of my men stared up at me, their gaze inescapable. “But this is not a victory. Do you know how many of us there are? How many trillions? And you think you can wipe us out? You think they won’t fight you when I’m gone? Hunt you? Hound you to the last? You think the blood of Earth so thin that my destruction will be enough to break them? Do you really think we are a sunken race? We did not need your gods to pull us from the muck. We are not savages or thralls as you. You may triumph in battle after battle, but you will not win the war.”

The Prophet’s jaw snapped forward, every one of its more than a hundred pointed teeth exposed. It hissed, and I did not need to have studied the expressions of its kind for so many centuries to know that here was anger. For the first time since coming to Dharan-Tun, for the first time since my miracle on Berenike, I had rattled the old demon. Syriani’s nictitating membranes flicked shut and open over those black pits it called eyes, and it raised two taloned fingers like a priest in benediction. Letting the hand fall, it said, “Paqqaa.”

Eat.

The Cielcin to either side of the table rushed forward, no ceremony, no decorum. The creatures only wore the dress of courtiers and aristocrats. They were beasts, and all pretense at civilization was in that instant stripped away. Ministers clambered over concubines to tear soft strips of meat from artfully arranged bones. One Cielcin in the white costume of a minister lashed out at another, talons tearing the creature’s face. Paying the wounded Cielcin no mind, the minister stooped, flanged jaws extending, and tore at one of the platters. Not far off, I saw two of the concubines in brightly patterned silks seize one of the human slaves who’d carried in the meal. The boy cried out as one of the concubines bit down on his throat and tore.

I shut my eyes, but still I could see the Prophet’s smile shining in the blackness. Still I could hear the noise of feasting. I might have vomited had I anything to lose.

“Not a victory, you say?” came Syriani’s cold and glassy voice. The great prince leaned forward in its high-backed seat, pausing to survey its feasting, bestial courtiers. “But you forget: I need not kill each one of you yukajjimn to achieve dominion. I do not wish to.” It spread its hands, indicating the rotting feast. “Your kind have their place at my table.”

“You can’t win,” I said. “Kill me, and you’ll give my people a hero. I’m as dangerous to you dead as alive.”

“And your Emperor?” the great prince countered, and reaching out peeled a strip of flesh from the platter before it and—lifting it as some ancient pharaoh might a bunch of grapes—slid the morsel between opened jaws. “Will he be dangerous when he is dead?”

I had no response to that. The demon king’s eyes went wide, and its leering smile returned. “I thought not,” it said, and chewed savagely, dark juice running down its chin. At a gesture the nearest Cielcin courtier approached its master, throat bared. Syriani seized a strip of the concubine’s fabric and dabbed at its chin before lashing the creature with one hand. The concubine went to its knees, clutching the stained fabric to its breast as it crawled away. The prince’s eyes found mine again, and held my gaze until I broke and looked back down at my hands.

“Perfugium,” it said at last, voice tinged with something like relish. “Vanaheim. Balanrot.” They were the names of the planets on the Emperor’s itinerary. The names I had betrayed. I looked up, sick with horror and self-loathing. But the Great One was not finished. “Carteia,” it said, “Aulos. Nessus. Ostrannas. Siraganon. Ibarnis. Thielbad. Kebren . . .” It rattled off an ever-growing number of worlds in precise sequence. Deliberate sequence. A dozen. Two. More than thirty planets distributed across the Centaurine provinces. Only slowly did I recognize them for what they were: the Emperor’s complete itinerary.

“How did . . . ?” I felt as though a pit had opened beneath my feet. “I didn’t . . .” I hadn’t given Syriani everything. I hadn’t remembered every name. I wasn’t even sure I’d known them all.

“You really think you were the only one we questioned?” asked Syriani Doryaica. The great prince reached out one pale, six-fingered hand and seized an object from the heart of the platter nearest it. “It took some time to ascertain which of your people had the knowledge we sought . . . but what is that charming human expression? He sang.” The Great One lifted the object—the head—by its neat dark hair.

Despite the days of corruption and the gray-green spice paste plastered to the dead man’s features, still I knew that nobile face: the proud palatine nose and hard jaw, the prominent brows and jutting chin. In life, Adric White had been the Tamerlane’s navigator, one of the officers who had joined us upon the occasion of my investiture, when His Radiance the Emperor named me to his Royal Victorian Knights. I had never grown to know Adric well, but he was—had been—a good officer. Quiet, efficient, competent to the last. Yet we were never friends, and so I hope you will forgive me when I report my initial response was not grief, but horror.

Adric had been aboard the Tamerlane, not on Padmurak at all.

It was true. All of it. The Tamerlane had been captured. The Red Company imprisoned. Somehow I’d dared to hope, even with my men skinned and separated on the banquet table and torn apart in feasting, that it was all some elaborate sham. So terrible was that banquet and so terrible the truth of it that my very mind rebelled, and I had sat there bound in my seat not with hope, but with denial. For until that moment, I felt that none of it was real. Syriani had tormented me, tortured me to separate me from my body—to prove the truth of its philosophy. To prove that this world—the world—was a lie.

The Lie.

I had not believed it, had not believed that all was lost, that all my people were taken prisoner, that Valka and Corvo, Pallino and Crim and the few survivors of the battle in Vedatharad could not have survived. I had denied reality ever since I’d awoken in the fugue creche in Severine’s arms. I had believed, without knowing I believed, exactly what Syriani wanted. That the truth was lies.

Recognizing this, I stopped. I had to shut my eyes and clenched my fists against the grief that came then. The desolation. I had been tortured to no purpose but my own disgrace. “You knew,” I managed to say. “The whole time. You knew the planets. Catalog numbers. Coordinates.”

“Your ship’s records were all we needed, that and your . . . friend’s? Testimony.” I opened my eyes in time to see Syriani toss poor Adric’s head aside. Three of the courtiers chased after it, eager to eat a morsel discarded by their Aeta. My vision blurred with tears. “You begin to understand. All I did, I did to get that little truth from you. I wanted to see if it was possible.” And here the Great One stood, leaned over the banquet table like a white and spreading shadow. “You will never be Cielcin, Lord Marlowe. You will never serve Truth.” It raised its eyes to the red lamps hanging high above and ceased to move, the frozen center of that tableau of animalistic feasting, the fixed center of a roiling social order. “And you will die. You. Your Empire. Your god. Everything.”

I was being dismissed.

Tears fell on my bandaged hands. Tears for Adric, whom I hardly knew. Tears for Koskinen and Pherrine. Tears for Ilex and Elara, for Lorian Aristedes. Tears for Durand and Halford and all the brave soldiers of my Red Company. Tears for Pallino. For Crim and Corvo. Tears for Valka, for Valka most of all. And tears for Hadrian Marlowe, whose end was coming fast.

Akterumu awaited.