TWICE TWELVE AND NINE watches passed, or must have done. Severine and a pair of human medical technicians in drab gray visited me in my cell repeatedly, and it was after the third or fourth of these visits that I began to realize they were coming daily, and coming the same time every day. How I knew this I cannot say. Perhaps after so long adrift in unmarked time some antique and well-trained part of me recognized the ticking of a clock in their actions. Perhaps that was their intention, to reassert something like the regular ebb and flow of events, to prepare me and return me to sanity for what was yet to come. At length I was removed from my chair, my waste hoses and saline drip lines extracted, my medical correctives removed.

I was whole again—or whole as I could be.

My torn fingernails had fully regenerated, and where the Pale had flayed me there remained only flat, white scars. They did not restore my fingers—though they might have done—and the right shoulder still ached with old torment. They might have done more to heal me, but they had done what little was necessary. As Syriani had said, I had been made strong again for but one purpose.

To die.

How many times had I seen it in my dreams? The end? That last, long walk to Akterumu, the place of the rock? It was why I had been hunted since before the Battle of Berenike. Why I had been captured. Why I was still alive.

The door opened, and Severine entered, flanked not only by her customary medical technicians, but by two Cielcin soldiers in ribbed black armor. The xenobites carried a crate between them, a trunk of alien manufacture, which they placed on the ground just inside the tunnel that led from the cell door.

I stood—because I could stand—and faced them, chin raised in defiance. Remembering the gesture signaled submission to the inhumans, I ducked my head instead, stepped back as Severine bowed. “Gentle lord,” she said, no trace of mockery in her tone.

“We’ve arrived,” I said, sensing the pregnant quality of the air. “At Akterumu.”

The doctor signaled her technicians, a white light pulsing at one corner of her jaw. She fixed those gray, metallic eyes on me, and not for the first time I shuddered at the absence of spark or humanity in those too-bright globes. The revenant woman gestured at the crate flanked by its Cielcin stevedores. “Your presence is required aboard the Great One’s landing barge. I have been ordered to see that you dress yourself.” And at her sign one of the Cielcin kicked the catch that secured the lid of the crate, revealing the contents within.

The old familiar sigil shone up at me, the pitchfork and pentacle embossed amidst its pattern of raven wings, black on black. I stared down at it, disbelieving, at the black tunic with its crimson-fringed labyrinth embroidery, at the leather-wrapped ceramic of the breastplate, the sculpted bracers and greaves, the pteruges decorated with images of faces and of stars.

I did not reach for it.

“Put it on,” the MINOS witch said.

I could see the black armorweave of the skin-suit rolled in one corner, but did not move. I had thought never to see my armor again, had thought it abandoned on Padmurak, or else carried off as a trophy for the prince or by one of the sorcerers of MINOS. Instead, it looked as if it had been cleaned and impeccably repaired. No sign of the filth of Vedatharad remained, and the damage it had sustained in my flight and final stand upon the bridge had been mended by some careful artisan. It looked new as the day it was printed.

Tears in my eyes, I asked, “What’s to be done with me?”

Severine’s gray eyes narrowed. “You are to be presented to the Aetavanni in the city below. The other clan chiefs are arriving.”

“The city?” I asked. The Cielcin did not build cities. Not on planets.

“Akterumu,” she said.

“I thought Akterumu was the planet.”

“Akterumu is the city,” she said, half-turned to watch her inhuman guards. “Eue is the planet.”

“Eue?” I froze. Hearing the sacred name in my verminous mouth, one of the Cielcin guards lunged and struck me in the jaw. Weak as I was, I folded like a paper house. “We’re going to Eue?”

Eue.

The very name evoked a primitive darkness from beyond the borders of infinity. For all my contact with the Pale, it remained a black shape at the edge of comprehension, a myth to rival lost Atlantis or vanished Sarnath. It was to Eue that the Cielcin King Elu led the survivors of the doom that befell their homeworld. It was on Eue that the Cielcin ceased to be mere barbarians and learned to sail the stars. It was from Eue that the first Aeta launched their fleets into those same stars when Elu at last was gone.

It was the holiest site in all the Cielcin universe, as central to them as Earth was to us. I had never imagined—not in my deepest nightmares—that the place was still out there, still real.

“Iukatta, qisabar-kih!” Severine exclaimed, ordering the guard back. “Biqunna o-tajun wo! Eza shuza netotebe ti-Shiomu!” She crouched over me, dry fingers on my face. “Are you hurt?” I had no illusions. It was her own skin she cared for, not mine. It would be she who suffered if I came to harm. The Cielcin guards both retreated a step. Human Severine might have been, but she was not yukajjimn. She was Exalted, a posthuman servant of their dark master.

“We must not keep the Great One waiting,” Severine said coolly. “Come now.” With gentle hands, the witch-woman helped me to my feet and pulled the loose gown up over my head. Naked but beyond shame, I stood there as the two medtechs advanced and sprayed me with some antiseptic agent that foamed and boiled in the cool air, lifting the grime and sweat from my scarred and leathered flesh. At length, they helped me don the skin-suit and tighten the seals. The garment cinched tight about my starved frame, and for the first time I was acutely aware of the wastage of muscle and sinew. My shadow dancing on the floor looked half-Cielcin, so thin and skeletal the limbs, so hollow the belly.

I permitted the technicians to pull my tunic over my head. One held my waist-length hair while Severine assisted the other in fitting my breastplate.

“It won’t go,” the junior man said, indicating the fit about my neck. “We have to take the collar.”

A light at Severine’s jaw pulsed. Communicating with Urbaine, I guessed, or with some Cielcin authority. She nodded, and speaking neither to me or to the technician, said, “He won’t be any trouble.” She paused, listening perhaps. Dry fingers brushed my neck, and the witch’s dead eyes stared into mine. “Isn’t that right, gentle lord?” I did not answer her, and after another attentive pause, Severine said, “Understood.”

The collar clicked open in her slim fingers, and she lifted the thing away. How long had I worn it? My neck felt thin and fragile without it, and the skin beneath was raw. It burned as they adjusted the skin-suit’s neckline and attached the molded breastplate. Old servos whined as the armor tightened itself, and before long greaves and gauntlets went on.

“That’s better,” Severine said, and combed my lank and over-long hair back with her fingers. “You look almost yourself again.” She held my tresses in her hand, as if weighing them. The once black hair was shot with white like veins in black marble. “Though you are old before your time.” She smiled up at me, almost coy. A temptress’s smile. “It is not too late to accept my offer.”

Looking down on her, I smiled in spite of everything. “It was always too late for that, witch.”

Severine let her hand fall, her unassuming face dark. “Witch!” she sneered. “You’re a fool. And you’ll die a fool.”

I raised my wrists for her to cuff them. In the gauntlets, it was almost impossible to tell my two fingers were gone. “I’ll die a man,” I said.

Her smile—which had faltered at my refusal—flickered back into place, but there was a sadness in it now, a finality, and a strange kind of victory. “You’ll die.”

A green light suffused the access tube that led from the tunnels to the great prince’s landing barge. I could see little of the vessel ahead, but I guessed it was of the broken-circle shape preferred by the xenobites for their smaller craft. Through the glassed walls of the tube glittered the icy surface of Dharan-Tun. The great shipyards and iron docks of the Prophet’s legions had been carved into the walls of some crater or sinkhole to shelter them from the surface so that workers might move about even while the great worldship was at warp. Gantries and the mechanical arms of fuel injectors hung above and below, and in the green-lit distance I could make out the crescent shapes of other vessels, shuttles or lightercraft doubtless meant to escort the Prophet’s barge.

My Cielcin escort held my arms with taloned hands and set the pace with their long strides, so that I half-jogged and was half-dragged along, chains rattling the while.

“Do you see it?” Severine called from behind me.

I did not have to ask what she meant.

The world above filled half the sky, its marshy face lit by a pale sun I could not see. Its watery greens and rust browns streaked with grayish cloud, sickly and putrefied, Eue stared down at us from the heavens from amid its parliament of moons. It loomed over the lip of the crater above like the face of some idiot god. I felt its presence like a vast and lidless eye, as though the planet itself were watching me.

And why not? If the legends were to be believed, it was to Eue that the Watchers had brought their inhuman thralls. Looking up, I felt almost as though it were they who watched me, and thinking of the awful statues in the halls of the Dhar-Iagon, I shuddered. But I had stopped too long, and stumbled as my guides urged me forward and jerked the chains that bound me.

Like a puppet on its strings, I followed.

Scahari warriors in suits of enameled black marked with the mirrored imprint of the six-fingered White Hand stood guard just inside, flanking squat pillars that bristled with cylindrical protrusions like blunt spines. More of the low, red lanterns hung in the spaces between them: glass spheres in which a radiant gas gleamed. The atrium might have been another room of the palace, so unlike a ship it seemed, worked all of metal and graven stone. Murals done in the udaritanu letters covered recesses in the walls, and ahead an iron door rose like the portcullis of some medieval castle to admit us.

My escort half-carried me up stairs higher and shallower than any human step. I heard Severine and her companions laboring behind. A herald in robes of snowy white and azure slammed the butt of its ceremonial spear against a metal plate in the floor as I entered and announced, “Aeta Hadrian Marlowe wo! Ute Aeta ba-Yukajjimn! Beletaru ba-Uatanyr Thunsavadedim ba-Zahaka. Anabiqan ba-Otiolo. Ba-Ulurani. Elutanura tajun ve ti-Ikurrar!”

Hearing my name and titles rendered in the Cielcin tongue turned my stomach to water, and I was glad of my armor. Absurdly, some ancient part of me—the part that had thrilled to meet with Uvanari and with Makisomn in the pits of Emesh—wondered if the Cielcin had always employed heralds and titles like our own, or if Syriani Dorayaica had changed the traditional practices to better resemble the style of our Imperial court, as had been the practice of human barbarians since Sargon came to Uruk.

The high hall resembled the greater one in the Dhar-Iagon, with knurled pillars and ribbed arches that made me think of flesh. Green light from the holy planet’s hideous face streamed through the arched glass of the roof above and the wall behind the dais that rose before me. Looking up, I was struck by what a display of opulence and strength that glass roof was. No human vessel I had ever seen boasted so large a window. Most had no windows at all, preferring imitation windows, screens that often as not depicted false images of planets and of stars. Windows were weaknesses, places where hull integrity might fail. To build so large a window on so important a craft—the great prince’s personal landing barge—was to project power to awe all who bore witness to its terrible splendor. Here, it said, is a prince without fear, a prince mightier than fear, a prince who has conquered fear.

And beneath that mighty roof, framed before a wall of glass almost as mighty and looking out upon its shipyards, stood the great prince itself. Syriani Dorayaica did not turn as I approached, but surveyed its dominion with hands clasped behind its back, flanked by its generals, Vati and the winged Aulamn. Of Hushansa and Teyanu there was no sign.

“Yelnna, tanyr-do,” the Prophet said, and gestured to a place at its side. “Join us. We ascend presently. I wished for you to see, scholar that you are.” My guards marched me up the royal steps to stand with the Prophet. There was no throne, nor any semblance of one. The dais was bare but for a tracery of glyphs etched onto the floor. I could not read them. One hand raised to dismiss the guards, Syriani said, “Ennallaa o-ajun.”

The guards dropped to their knees and crawled back down the stairs, leaving me with the Prophet and its two holy slaves. Syriani Dorayaica spoke into the renewed quiet. “Do you know where we are?”

“Eue,” I said.

Syriani hissed, and the two chimeras made low thrumming noises, more machine than organic. “I see . . .” It glanced to Severine, who along with her two associates knelt at once. “Do you know its meaning?”

“Its meaning?” I echoed, confused. Chained though I was, my armor made me man again, and I did not shrink from the Great One as I had in our previous meetings. “It’s the planet Elu brought your ancestors to when Se Vattayu was lost.”

“Tuka qisaban!” the winged general, Aulamn, snapped, red eyes flaring.

Syriani raised one ringed and taloned hand to silence its slave. “Elu did not bring our people out of Se Vattayu. We are Cielcin. Kielukishunna in the old tongue. ‘Those carried by the Gods.’ Godsborne, you might say.”

I blinked, understanding for the first time. “They brought you offworld? The Watchers?”

The Great One bared its teeth. “It was Miudanar, the Dreamer, who taught Elu the art of shipbuilding. He taught him to fashion the hull and split the atom. He showed Elu how to cross the darkness, and led our people here.” With that said, the prince reached up with one white hand as if to scratch the face of the green world above us.

Eue. The gift.

Had I not often wondered how so vicious and primitive a people had won their way to the stars? A metallic clangor shook the vessel beneath us, and Vati turned its head away, as if listening. I found my vision pulled skyward yet again, and I traced the contours of the rusted mountains and mossy pools across the surface of the planet above. I saw no shape of canals or sign of cities, no great mark of industry or civilization. It was the day side that faced us, and so if there were any lights to see, they were invisible. About it moved its countless tiny moons in stately procession like a flock of logothetes about their lord.

“Your gods . . . the Watchers taught you everything?” I said, not taking my face away.

“Cara,” Syriani amended. Much. “Some things we found at Akterumu.”

I felt my brows contract, and I brought my attention back to my demonic host. “Akterumu . . .” I said, and glanced back down the steps to where Severine stood among the pillars and the guards. “Doctor Severine said it was a city.”

“It is a city, you would say,” the Great One said. “The oldest city.”

“How old?” I asked. I realized I did not know how old Cielcin civilization was. It was one of the great mysteries that surrounded their kind. On Forum and later, on Nessus, I had reviewed studies done by scholiasts and lay academics who’d pored over artifacts recovered from the various worldships captured in the fighting. Valka and I had assisted in some—Valka ever eager in those days to understand the connection between the Cielcin and the Quiet. Some of the smaller vessels we’d seized or destroyed had superstructures dating back five or six thousand years, but there had been certain artifacts—drinking vessels or stone monuments, tablets carved with udaritani—that experts guessed were nearer four or five times that number, dating back to before the Golden Age of Earth.

The Prophet turned at last from its contemplation of the holy world in the sky above us and looked down at me, transparent membranes clicking over the ink-dark surfaces of its eyes. Silver chains swayed across its bony forehead as it angled its crown in an almost didactic pose, as though it were the scholiast and I the ignorant student. “It was old in Elu’s day,” it said.

Again, I blinked uncomprehending. “Old in . . . what?”

The vayadan-general Vati interrupted then, its high, cold voice scratching at the windowpanes. “All is made ready, Aeta-Shiomu,” it said, using the Cielcin title meaning Lord Prophet.

Syriani Dorayaica inclined its head and waved a royal gesture. “Tutai wo. Velenamma o-ajun junne, vayadan-kih.” It returned its attention to the green planet in the sky. Take us down. The Prophet’s nose-slits dilated as it exhaled. “The baetayan sing that there is no time on Eue. That nothing passes. Nothing changes. I do not know if it is truly so, but it is an ancient world, and most ancient is Akterumu, whose towers were old when the stars were young.” Sparing a glance for my confused silence, the Prophet said, “We did not build it. Elu did not build it.”

“The Watchers?” I asked. “This . . . Miudanar?”

Placing a hand on its breast, Syriani answered, “We are slime. Filth. Creatures of the Lie—as are you. But we do not have to be. In submission to the gods, we receive our ouluu, our soul. Our spark. It is a pearl that connects us to the gods, a gift. Like Eue!” Another clangor resounded through the structure of the barge about us, and above and below alike there roared to life a flat and ceaseless hum as the engines flared to life. Through the windows before us, I marked several smaller crescent-shaped craft flaring up in the berths that studded the crater walls. Grand as the spectacle was, it was as nothing next to the Prince’s next words. “We are not the only ones the gods bore up,” it said.

We began to rise, though my stomach stayed where I had left it, and my heart sank.

“You mean . . .” I could not speak. Snatches of the visions I had seen atop the mountain rose from the tangle of memory, creatures defying description arrayed across the stars, nameless and numberless. The universe teemed with life, had teemed with life before our time—would teem with life when we were gone. “You’re saying there were others? Other . . . Cielcin? Other species that worshiped your gods?”

Aulamn laughed, and the noise of it made me start. “Usayu u!” it said.

Only one.

We were rising above the lip of the crater then, first in a grand and stately procession of black crescents. Through the windows to either side I could see the curving horns of the great prince’s barge reaching out like arms to embrace the planet above.

“We are the Second. They are the Enar,” Syriani said. “The First.”

The implications of this revelation rocked me where I stood, and for a moment I forgot my torment, forgot that I was riding to my death, forgot even the two lethal chimeras that stood so near at hand. An ancient people, a civilization older than anything we had known, older than the oldest sites left by the Quiet.

“The Enar?” I repeated the strange word slowly, taking my time with each syllable. It was another ancient word. First was udim in the Cielcin tongue I knew, but like so many of the words the Prophet had taught me, I suspected Enar came from a language old as Elu, or older still.

“Utannash perverted all things, trapped them in these hideous forms—as we are trapped,” Syriani said, and with a gesture indicated first its body, then my own. “The Enar sought escape, sought to free themselves from this world.”

“They went extinct, you mean.”

The prince’s jaws snapped forward, jutting out past thin lips, fangs dripping as it snarled. “Do not jape with me,” it hissed. “They failed. They could not destroy the Lie, though they burned a billion worlds.”

Having lost too much to be cowed any longer, I asked, “What happened to them then?”

“They are gone.” Syriani waved this question aside as though it were no more to it than a buzzing fly. “Destroyed perhaps by Utannash and his champions before they could complete their work. But what they left behind! Akterumu the Great! Akterumu of the Pillars! Akterumu of the Hundred Hundred Gates! This is their legacy! And our inheritance! Our Eue, our gift! Do you see?”

Even as it asked that question, we rose above the lip of the crater at last on slow repulsors. The Prophet’s barge began to advance, drifting slowly up and forward. For the first time then I beheld the surface of its dark world. Like Vorgossos, Dharan-Tun lay sheathed in ice. Unlike Vorgossos, which had seemed lifeless and snowbound, Dharan-Tun’s surface was a riddle of iron and of pits. Still more crater bays marched in file unto the shrinking horizon, where in the distance icy mountains stood crowned with the ugly stacks of industry and belched smoke into the airless sky. The greenish glow of Eue blotted out all but the brightest stars, and all was silent in that kingdom of death.

“Do you see?” Syriani asked again, and from its shift in tone I guessed it asked a new question. “For your kind . . . there can be no victory.”

What could I say? Nothing.

So I said nothing.

It had been one thing to walk the tunnels below and to witness the demonic city in the deeps, but to see the surface of Dharan-Tun, to behold that vast and pitiless war machine unrolled beneath my feet was something else entirely. Vast though the resources of our Empire were and great our armies, I could not help but feel they were overmatched by the totalizing purity of the Cielcin effort. Everything on Dharan-Tun, everything, was bent to but one terrible purpose.

To the war.

To the annihilation of man.

What could we men do in the face of such resolve? Such caiharu? Such faith?

Beside me, Syriani Dorayaica lifted its face to the verdurous gloom, peering up with narrowed eyes through the glass roof toward Eue and the stars. “So many are here already!” Its translucent teeth flashed.

It took me a moment to understand what the Prince of Princes was seeing, and when I did I felt the last ounce of warmth in my blood run cold. It was not a parliament of moons that orbited the profane capital. Eue’s attendants were not moons at all. The nearest of them shone in the skies above Dharan-Tun, large and bright as a silver kaspum, its left edge gutted and hollow, revealing the cyclopean engineering beneath: the halls and bays, the towers and silos and the great mechanism of the engines that propelled the worldship between the stars.

With spreading horror I comprehended the mass and charge, the cosmic scope of the fleet arrayed about the planet Eue. Each moon was a ship, and each ship was the core of its own fleet of lesser vessels. A thousand moons filled the sky about the planet, each the capital and flagship of a Cielcin clan. Some great, some small—but none greater than the Prophet’s. Mighty though the fortresses of those other clan-chiefs seemed, none seemed to me so great or so terrible as the world I left behind.

Syriani had said the Aetavanni met at its command, and I believed it, for surely the clan Dorayaica might crush any one of these others at a whim as our Emperor might annihilate a petty lord.

Who could dare refuse such a summons?

“How long has it been since so many were gathered here?” Vati asked its lord and master.

“Twelve and seven generations,” the prince answered its slave. “Not since Araxaika ended the Kinslaying.” Turning to me and switching from its native tongue to mine, the Prophet said, “That was perhaps twenty of your chiliads ago.”

“Millennia?” I asked.

Twenty thousand years. Nineteen generations. Not for the first time, I wondered just how long the Cielcin might live—and how old Syriani was. Twenty thousand years . . . as a boy, I would never have imagined the Cielcin heirs to a tradition and a history so long as our own. They seemed so primitive, so unsophisticated by comparison. Yet it made some sense. Long-lived as they were, they were perhaps slower to innovate, slower to discover or to change. And if what Syriani had told me was literally true, their greatest innovations had been given them by powers, creatures they believed were gods. What reason had they to innovate? To discover?

The Prophet and its creatures looked on, an emotion I could not name filling the air about them like smoke. In hushed tones, Syriani said, “This thing has not happened since antiquity.” To my astonishment, the prince reached out and seized Vati by the wrist, as if to find comfort or give affection. That brush—that grasping hand—has haunted me more than any of the hollow-eyed slaves I had seen in the halls of Dharan-Tun, haunted me nearly so much as the corpses arrayed on their platters in the hall of that Pale King.

I do not know why.