THE CAVERNOUS HALL THAT the Prophet had selected for its meeting echoed with the sounds of inhuman feet. How many thousand steps had we climbed to reach that dark and secret place? And how many times had I fallen, my muscles cramping from disuse before at last Dorayaica forced its men to carry me?

The great prince had not remained with the others, whose camps filled the lowest levels of the ringed city, or else flooded the sands about the gate. Too well now I remember the stink of peat fires in the low halls and the noise of evil laughter; the carnival excitement of it all. Dorayaica told me it had been generations since all the clans gathered in one place. I could scarce imagine. It must have been as though all the children of Earth were called home to haunt her wasted hills and dry riverbeds and reveled in the ashes of man. Well I recall the tables laden with bones in the open doors we passed and the wailing of inhuman voices raised in prayer and in song.

But Dorayaica had not joined its lesser brethren, had instead brought us higher—level by torturous level—until only the wind whispered in the halls of the Enar city. There I lay, half-forgotten, upon the dais to one side of the seat the servants had erected, shackled to it by a heavy iron chain.

I think that several days had passed since our arrival at Akterumu. I cannot be sure. The great prince had condescended to allow Severine to treat my wounded brow and cheek, but had forbidden her to bind the wounds, and so the dry air burned my raw flesh and my head throbbed. Time itself passed in a haze, lucidity coming only fitfully, when terror forced my mind to focus, as it focused on the sound of clawed feet on stone.

A party of Cielcin had appeared in the high, trapezoidal arch, led by a herald in priestly white. Blearily, I sat up, chains rattling dully in the still air, and felt Dorayaica’s eyes on me.

The herald approached with mincing steps, leading six lesser priests—baetayan in wraparounds white as that of their leader—who carried a metal chest on poles between them. Two of Dorayaica’s scaharimn stepped forward to meet them with hands outstretched, their hooked scimitars tucked neatly against the crooks of their right arms.

Taking the hint, the herald knelt before the guards and the Prophet’s chair. A green banner hung from the herald’s staff, embroidered with Cielcin calligraphy in black. It gathered this in its fingers, gripping the stave as it sank to its knees and raised its high, atonal voice. “Anamnato qiaqara o-Aeta ba-Aetane,” it said in formal greeting, head raised to bare its throat in submission. “On behalf of my master, Aeta Gurima Peledanu, Lord of the Fiftieth Branching of the Line of Imnun, I—a slave—offer homage.” It raised its clawed, free hand, gesturing to the lesser priests with their metal box.

Almost lazily, the Prophet raised an allowing hand.

The lesser baetayan approached and lowered the chest to the floor, swinging it to face the Prophet. It was large as a coffin, and indeed I took it for one at first, bleary as I was. Two of the servants lifted the lid, and the herald stood to present the contents to the Prince of Princes. “Weapons, Great Lord!” it said, lifting one for Dorayaica to see. “Swords taken from the yukajjimn! Six twelves by twelve and seven, each won in battle!”

The herald’s fingers squeezed, and I felt my stomach lurch as understanding struck me like a wave. The highmatter blade flowered in the green gloom of the hall, casting its harsh, white radiance on relief carvings that showed the Enar—four-legged and six-legged, eight-legged and more—marching across the stars.

Six twelves by twelve and seven.

Wordlessly, I converted the figure best I could. It was nearly a thousand. My cheek ached as my jaw fell in shock, but it was not the staggering wealth such a number represented—the price of a world and more—but the tragedy of it. Each had belonged to a knight of the Sollan Empire, and for every knight that fell, I knew a legion fell with him.

“This is a worthy gift,” Dorayaica said after a moment, and the herald let out a gasp of relief. “Put down that weapon, slave!” When it had done as the Prophet ordered, Dorayaica said, “Where is your master?”

“I am here, Dorayaica!” came a shout from the gate, and through it—flanked by scahari warriors of its own—came a Cielcin armored and robed in green to match the herald’s banner. Silver caps sheathed its crown of horn, and silver chains draped its high forehead as though it were some courtesan of Jadd. Bits of jade pierced its brows and studded the sharp cheekbones, and jade rings flashed upon its fingers. “You called, and I came!”

Dorayaica rose as the lesser prince advanced toward us. Seeing this, Peledanu sank to its knees before the Prophet. “Your oracle!” it said, baring its throat. “The message you sent! Is it truly time?”

“Raka,” Dorayaica said. “It is.”

Peledanu shut its eyes, whispered something I could not hear.

The Prophet advanced until it stood upon the lip of the dais, its back toward me. It towered over Peledanu on the floor below. “Are you constant to the old ways?”

The lesser Aeta looked up at Dorayaica. It did not speak at once. “I am your slave,” it said at last. “I have ever been your slave. But the others! They do not believe as I do. There have been talks! Before you arrived, I heard Iamndaina and the others! Vanahita!”

Dorayaica hissed, one hand snatching the trailing hem of the Imperial toga it wore over its fasciated armor. “Speak not to me of the others. They are shadows, Peledanu. Creatures of the Lie. Are you constant to the old ways?”

“Eka iyadar ba-osun,” it said again. “Always! I have been! Ever since you drove the Eta Vananari from this place! By the Dreamer, I swear it: you are Elu come again!”

I pressed my forehead against the side of the Prophet’s throne to stop my head swimming. “Eta Vananari?” I mumbled the words. They were more of Dorayaica’s old words, of that I was certain, for I could not divine their meaning.

Peledanu had spoken of an oracle, a message Dorayaica had sent. On Dharan-Tun, the Prophet itself had said it had called this Aetavanni, this meeting of the clans. What had it said? What word, what message could summon so many disparate clans? Did Dorayaica have the power to compel their obedience? Might it have threatened to hound them each across the stars? I did not think so, though its horde was vast and pitiless as the sun.

“Caiharu ba-okun,” Dorayaica began. “Your faith redeems you. You were wise to come in peace.” At the word peace, Peledanu bent and pressed its face to the rough green stone. A thrill went through me at that word. Qilete. Peace. It was the same word Aranata Otiolo had used in our failed negotiations so very long ago, and hearing it then in that place I understood its meaning more sharply than ever before.

You were wise to submit.

Taloned feet clicking on the stone of the steps, Syriani Dorayaica descended, one hand holding its toga neatly in place. Peledanu did not rise, nor did any of its servants. As though it had all been rehearsed, the Prophet lifted one foot and stepped on the lesser prince’s shoulder, and I winced as an indrawn breath rasped my wounded cheek, chains rattling as I drew a hand to my face. Unbidden I remembered another hall, another ceremony: myself kneeling before the Emperor, the ancient iron sword laid upon my shoulder. But where my ascension to knighthood had ended with the Emperor ordering me to rise, presenting me as a knight to his court, uplifting me and dignifying me, there was none of that here. Just as the Cielcin udaritanu characters were perversions of the language of the gods, so too this ceremony was a demonic mockery of the very thing I had experienced myself.

I am a soldier of the Empire.

By the same token, Peledanu had become a soldier of something else. Often I had imagined the great game of empire played like labyrinth chess across the stars: white king, black king, red. Here then I watched some lesser piece—a centurion, perhaps, or a pawn—wander into the heart of the labyrinth and win itself a crown, albeit a crown of chains.

“You are mine,” Dorayaica hissed, and at length withdrew its foot.

Peledanu did not rise as I had risen, but crawled backward, snuffling as it did, not lifting its face from the earth. How easy it was to see in the lesser the burrowing creatures the Cielcin must have been before Bloody-Handed Evolution granted them their minds.

“Eka ba-osun,” Peledanu answered.

“Stand aside,” Dorayaica ordered. “There will be others.”

Still the lesser prince did not raise its eyes, but crawled backward a long way before returning to its knees. Dorayaica’s own men advanced and took up the chest Peledanu’s men had brought and carried it aside. I did not envy the soldiers whose task it would be to carry the weighty thing back down the thousands of steps to the ground and the shuttle.

I had just witnessed a Cielcin negotiation, if negotiation it could be called. There had been no negotiation, no terms. Peledanu’s surrender had been unconditional, its humiliation total. The whole conversation couldn’t have lasted more than a couple minutes, though my hazy mind stretched time almost to breaking.

As Dorayaica turned to resume its seat, it looked down at me, teeth bared. “See you now that faith is power?” it asked.

I said nothing, but moved away from the throne as it sat back down, dragging my chain with me. The Prophet had chosen for its audience a short, broad arcade that opened off an inner hall. Deep, slanting shafts in the wall behind opened on the sky, and the gray light of Eue’s sun fell in at angles, illuminating patches of the rough relief carvings that seemed to cover every flat inch of the city’s surface. They showed the strange Enar embattled, fighting a race of tentacled beings in a city of square towers.

Lines of Enar script accompanied the reliefs, scratched into the stone as with claws. The characters all stemmed from a central groove, rising or falling from it like the perturbations of a sound wave. I had never seen its like.

“Valka . . .” I murmured. What would Valka have thought of this place? Images—imagined or remembered from some undiscovered time—played like shadows across the interior of my skull. Somewhere in the other memory of my vision, had we come here together? Found the place abandoned, empty of foes?

But Valka was dead, had to be dead. Adric’s severed head peered back out of my memory with hollow sockets from the Prophet’s table. Valka could not have escaped from Padmurak. With the Tamerlane lost, there would have been nowhere for her to go.

I shut my eyes against the gloom of the high hall, but it did not stop me remembering. The great gates of Vedatharad slammed closed, their iron clangor shaking my very soul. Why had I gone after the chariots? Could I have not stayed in the transport with Valka and the others? We might at least have died together, and I might have been spared those hideous years on Dharan-Tun.

It didn’t matter. It would be over soon.

“Onnanna!” The Prophet’s voice cut across me as surely as its claws had done, and I realized I’d been crying. “Enough!” it said. I could not see its face, saw only the ringed white hand tighten on the armrest of its throne.

I’d not realized what I was doing, and realizing stopped, holding my breath to keep myself from sobbing.

All dead. The words kept replaying themselves, ever circling in my heart.

All dead. They’re all dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.

Grief is deep water. Gibson’s words drifted back, but I had drowned long before—should have drowned myself in the waters of my cell. But if I had—if everything Dorayaica had told me was true—then that would still have served its purposes. On Annica, the Quiet had showed me something of the part I was to play, had showed me the futures and the pasts that never were. I had seen myself burn the Cielcin from the sky, and seen myself sacrificed on an altar beneath a black dome above a sea of pillars in a desert of black sand.

I knew but one would come to pass, if not as I had seen it.

In the vision, I had not been alone.

Alone.

We were not alone. Others came one by one to offer gifts and debase themselves before the Prophet. One by one Dorayaica accepted them, and one by one it stepped on them, in doing so taking the lesser princes into its service or reaffirming some service already taken. At length I pushed myself so far from the throne as my chains would allow, scrabbling on my heels until I sat with my back to the roughly hewn stone of the outer wall. Through it all, the beam of gray sunlight through the shaft above my head tracked across the far wall, illuminating portions of the Enar carvings. In the inconstant light, the crab-like horrors seemed to move, their graven limbs flickering, as if the carvers had hoped to simulate motion by the passing of Eue’s pale sun. Perhaps the images had once been painted or enameled, but the color had long since gone.

The princes who came lay gifts of spices and perfumed oils before the Prince of Princes, or else gems and precious metals. One presented an idol wrought of human bones, and another a basin of white stone carved with Cielcin runes. More than a dozen came, and in their turns took up their places alongside Peledanu to either side. Among them was Muzugara, whose fleet we had burned at Thagura when I was young. Time and again, I would catch black eyes staring at me, doubtless wondering who the human rat was, chained to their master’s seat. Did any of them know? Did any of them guess?

“Twice twelve and one,” said the general Vati Inamna, who stood at the Prophet’s left hand, unmoving as a statue. “So few.”

“It is more than Elu had,” Dorayaica replied, raising a hand to quiet its protector.

“Dorayaica!”

The shout came from the heavy stone arch at the end of the hall and plunged the chamber into silence. All eyes turned to the door, where something huge and hulking lumbered into sight. How I had not heard it sooner I dared not guess, for it was easily the mass of a small groundcar. At first I took it for a chimera of the sort MINOS had wrought for the Prophet, but as it advanced—lurching forward on a dozen four-clawed metal feet—I recognized it for what it was.

It was a chair.

The Cielcin who rode upon it wore heavy armor enameled with cobalt blue as anything I’d seen. Its face was squarer than Dorayaica’s, a block of white bone beneath a crown of shorter horns. Its braid was likewise short, falling just barely past its left shoulder, but there was fierce savagery in its bearing, which burned cold and lethally in its dead, black eyes. Without being told, I knew that here was one greater than the others, greater than any in the room save Dorayaica itself.

No herald went before it to announce its coming, nor any gift.

“Attavaisa!” the Prophet exclaimed, not rising from its seat. “I did not think to see you!”

The prince in blue drove its chair lurching forward, its many legs clicking scarab-like in the still air. In its wake, a dozen warriors with cloaks to match the prince’s armor moved like blue shadows.

“I have found it, tanyr!” Attavaisa said, bringing its chair to a halt ten paces from the lowest step of the dais. “Many times twelve worlds I searched, but I found it!” As it spoke, it lifted a cloth-wrapped bundle from its lap and stood.

I had to suppress a moment of shock. I had thought the creature lame, its armor all for show, but it moved swiftly, dropping to one knee—not two—at the base of the stair to proffer the bundle like a platter with both hands.

Syriani Dorayaica did not speak at once. “It cannot be . . .” it said at last. “You found one? After all this time?” The Prophet stood and descended the stairs before its throne. Beside it, Vati advanced, ready to leap to its master’s protection at the slightest provocation, the chimera’s electronic reflexes faster than any mere mortal—human or Cielcin. Watched by all the others, Dorayaica tugged the cloth covering Attavaisa’s burden away.

I craned my neck, the better to see. My face throbbed with the effort.

It was a tablet of gray stone, not so unlike the stone of Akterumu itself. Indeed, I thought Attavaisa might have taken a piece of the city itself, chiseled the tablet from the wall.

Dorayaica seized the tablet with both hands, held it up to better see. I could just make out the tracery of fine circles clustered like bubbles, just like the Cielcin udaritanu. Just like the anaglyphs that were a part of the Quiet’s strange machines. But written around it in tight, scratched lines, were the marks of the strange Enari script, spiked and angular.

These Enar had been aware then of the Quiet, too.

“Have you checked this against the others?” the Prophet asked.

Attavaisa tilted its head to the right—a Cielcin nod. “There are new worlds. Perhaps some were known to Utaiharo. We will never know all Otiolo took or destroyed, and many here are known to us already, but there are some. Six, perhaps seven, that I have found on no other record.”

At the name of Otiolo, Dorayaica hissed, and several of the others joined it, hissing. I remembered what Dorayaica had said of Otiolo, calling the dead prince Betrayer and Deceiver, and began to wonder if I had done the enemy a favor. It seemed small wonder, then, that Otiolo had been interested in any sort of alliance with us.

It had been desperate. Friendless. Alone.

Dorayaica and Utaiharo had shared some common purpose, that much was plain. The tablet in Dorayaica’s hands was some kind of atlas, a map of sorts leading . . . where? To Enar colonies? To Quiet ruins? To some remnant of the Watchers themselves? Or to all three?

Suddenly I understood why Uvanari and Tanaran had brought their doomed ship to Emesh all those years ago. Their master, Otiolo, had found Emesh on just such a tablet. Tamnikano, that was what they’d called it. It had a Cielcin sound, but it was no Cielcin word at all, but a rendering in the Cielcin tongue of some older word. The Enar name for the planet. Had the Enar been on Emesh once? Had the Watchers?

The Quiet’s city on Annica was rushing backward across time, defying entropy—growing, not crumbling—rushing across some dimension higher than human sense. Some piece of the vision I’d been granted clicked into place, and I understood. The Quiet was building its cities—his cities, his kingdom—upon the bones of these Enar, just as any conqueror might found his palace upon the site of his triumph.

On Annica, I had been granted a glimpse of the great struggle, dark against light, Watchers against Quiet, many against One. I knew my part in that struggle, knew also that I had failed. But I glimpsed in the dimness of that hall something of the other side, tasted the desperation of Dorayaica’s cause. It was scrambling in the dark, scouring the black of space for pieces of its gods’ dead dominion before all was washed away.

“After all is done here,” Dorayaica said, “we must search these worlds.” The Prophet stood there a long moment, staring at the tablet, holding it as though it were a newborn child. “Perhaps the gods are not all dead.”

Those words washed away the clarity I’d felt a moment before, replaced it with a cold terror like a blade of ice between my shoulder blades, colder than the bloody pits of Dharan-Tun. I was holding my breath, I realized, and heard again the words I’d heard in my mind when we’d arrived.

Ammarka.

Perhaps the gods are not all dead.

Ana mahriya teche.

It was not just ruins the Prophet sought, not just pieces of its gods’ dominion, but its gods themselves. I tried to wrap my arms about myself, but the manacles prevented me. Miudanar’s skull waited in the desert outside, its presence like a black shadow on my mind.

Teche.

Was it a memory of the words I heard again in that moment? Or the words themselves? Dead the Dreamer might have been, but it did not rest quiet.

“Vati-kih, yelnna,” the Prophet said, summoning the general to its side. The white knight went and accepted the Enar tablet with machine carefulness. “See that this is delivered to Dharan-Tun with all care. Do it yourself.” It whispered the words so that the lesser princes gathered below the seat could not hear, but I did. Then Dorayaica turned back to face Prince Attavaisa, and in a louder voice said, “Are you constant to the old ways?”