I SAW PALE KINGS and princes, too. Pale warriors—death-pale were they all.

So the poet wrote, and so I write, standing in memory within a shadow of the great arch that marked the opening of one of the two towers at the threshold of that inner desert and the sea of pillars about the shrine of Miudanar’s skull. Severine and Urbaine stood near at hand in MINOS grays fringed with white. Rank upon rank of the demons of Arae stood opposite them, ten feet tall and armored in snowy white.

All stood with me watching the others march by. Pale blue banners went past, painted with runes in darkest jet. “Hasurumn,” said my Cielcin escort, the creature whom Dorayaica had sent to accompany me.

The Aeta Elantani Hasurumn itself appeared behind its banner-bearers, riding a gray, eight-legged beast that shambled like a bear but had the scaled hide of a serpent. It held its horned crown high, chin tucked in the royal way, its armor not black but bronze, its surcoat and cape the same eggshell blue as its banners. Behind it followed an honor guard of two dozen bronze-clad scahari berserkers.

“Raka oyumn Aeta Ugin Attavaisa,” said my escort, indicating the next chieftain in the parade. Prince Ugin Attavaisa rode no beast, but sat upon its iron throne that marched on a dozen mechanical legs. Of cobalt were its banners, and cobalt too the enamel of its flanged armor. Its face was squarer than the last, and its short braid hung just barely over its shoulder as it sat back and gripped the black orbs that capped the arms of its rough seat. Another two dozen soldiers followed it, armed with what appeared to be contraband Imperial energy-lances. To my astonishment, I marked a human woman marching with Attavaisa’s heralds beneath the cobalt banners, a gilded collar about her neck.

Still more princes rode by: Iamndaina and Eluginore, Peledanu and Koleritan, Onasira and Muzugara—whom I battled at Thagura long ago. Some rode upon long-necked beasts with slick and blistered hide, while others rode gray chariots or upon walking thrones like the seat of Attavaisa.

“How many are there?” I asked, hoping for a better answer than the one Vati and the Prophet had given me on our descent.

My Cielcin escort blinked. “Some twelve and five hundreds at last count. Maybe more.”

Seventeen hundred princes.

Seventeen hundred blood-clans.

I looked down at my feet, at the Enar marble green and dark between them. Half a minute passed before I realized I was holding my breath.

The day had come at last. The last day. Glancing sideways, I watched the thin line of the princes where they emerged from the tower opposite. One by one the princes and their escorts emerged from the far tower and marched to the central avenue before turning inward toward the temple of the skull. Only the Prophet’s clan, only the Itani Dorayaica waited in the shadow of the other stair. Syriani’s place was to be last of all. A place of honor and of fear. The wail of inhuman voices filled the distance, and what little I could see of the parade route was lined with masked and armed Cielcin waving the banners of their tribes.

I could not see the temple or the pillars that encircled it, but I knew what awaited me.

I had walked that way before.

A sharp, cold voice sounded at my rear, and my attendant drew back, folding itself neatly to the floor. The four guards that secured me snapped to rigid attention, rattling the heavy chains that bound me waist and wrists. A familiar metallic tread sounded on the steps behind me, and I turned my head in time to see the slim, armored shoulders and tall, white crest of the vayadan-general Vati heave into view.

“Raka uelacyr jujia,” it said, speaking to the chimeric soldiers that stood to one side, ordering them to readiness. “Yelnun.”

He comes.

The general pivoted its turret of a head, surveying the demons, the scahari, the MINOS personnel. “We move after Netanebo!” it said, doubtless the name of yet another clan chief.

“Aya!” the soldiers replied, and stamped their booted feet.

The great prince was to come up last of all, to arrive at the Temple of Elu after all the others were in place, after all were present and ordered. Syriani wanted to be seen, wanted the gathered forces of the blood-clans to see it arrayed in all its majesty alongside its warriors and its witches.

The general made no speech, but turned to face me. It had no face, but I sensed the ghost of a smile in its words as it cycled from Cielcin to the standard. “You are to have a place of high honor, Oimn Belu.”

“The roast always has a place of high honor at table,” I said stiffly, looking past the giant to where the gray sunlight fell. “But the lamb would rather be at pasture, I think.”

Under the general’s shoulder, I saw Urbaine’s teeth flash.

Vati cocked its head. “You are to be the last aeta to make pilgrimage before the Great One.” It twitched its heavy white cape aside, revealing the azure beneath. With one claw-like hand it reached up and seized a packet tied beneath one arm and drew it out. “A gift from the Great One. Sha ti-Aeta, ti-Aeta.”

From one Aeta to another.

The general put the packet into my hands.

It was light, and wrapped in black silk. For a mad instant, I thought the Prophet had given me back my sword. But there was nothing in it, I could feel it in my hands. The packet was empty, was only cloth. “What is it?”

The general gestured for me to unravel it, and I opened it in my shackled hands.

It was a cloak woven of irinyr, the finest Cielcin silk, a heavy weave black as midnight. It unrolled in my hands, flowing on the air and over the green marble slab at my feet. Its lining shone red in the pale light as arterial blood.

My colors. I looked up and into Vati’s false and glowing eyes. The Cielcin could not see red. I glanced at Urbaine and Severine and the other magi. This was their doing.

Raising its voice so the Cielcin of the great prince’s escort could hear, it proclaimed in their tongue, “A cloak for a king!” The noise of inhuman laughter filled those alien vaults, and I could almost feel the blood freezing in my heart.

Seizing the garment from me, Vati draped the royal cloak about my shoulders and pinned it in place. It was precisely such a mantle as Syriani wore itself, with a stiff, short collar standing at the neck and fitted to the shoulder. I shuddered, remembering: I had worn a Cielcin cloak when I walked that final road in my dream in the dungeons of the Grand Conclave.

The Cielcin gathered round rattled their scimitars and wailed their frigid amusement, hooting like demonic apes.

“Aeta!” one of them declared.

“Aeta ba-Yukajjimn!” another joined in.

The king of vermin, I translated.

“A king!” the mocking chorus came. “A king! A king!”

My vision and reality marched side by side, the future reaching back to meet me like the great cities of the Quiet. I hadn’t long to wait. In just a few moments I would be ushered out to join the pilgrimage across that vast expanse of desert . . .

 . . . to meet my vision.

“Where is your master, slave?” I asked the general.

Vati’s metal arm flashed, one razored fingertip slicing just above the level of my eyes. A line of red pain flowered an instant after, and hot blood dripped into my eyes. The creature’s machine-augmented brain had calculated the distance between us to the micron, had calibrated its strike with transhuman precision. A half inch nearer and it would have perforated my skull with that talon, half a foot nearer and it would have smashed my skull to pulp.

I hadn’t even seen it coming. The speed of it had blurred the limb to invisibility, faster than my optic nerve could track. Still, I did not cower. I did not draw back. There had been no time for fear, and if it came now it would come too late. I had no desire to give the beast its satisfaction, and so—fresh blood on my forehead to match the dried blood on my cheek—I stepped forward. “Is it not time?”

“Soon,” Vati answered. “The Great One will follow last of all. Once the others are in place.” The chimera reached out and touched my bloody forehead with the back of its hand. The ceramic was cold as ice, as death itself. “You little understand the importance of this day. This place. This meeting.”

“Your master means to make itself a king,” I said, not flinching away at Vati’s touch. “It isn’t hard to understand.”

The vayadan-general made a low, coughing noise that might have been a laugh. Vati turned its back—my blood red and bright on its hand. “He will become greater than any since Elu this day.” It seemed to peer through the vaulted roof and the dark above, through the relief images of the Enar trampling their foes. Speaking the standard so that only I and the magi might understand, it said, “Perhaps greater than Elu.”

“Is that not blasphemy?” I asked, thinking of Aulamn’s violent reaction to Prince Aranata’s impieties.

“It is Truth!” Vati countered. “He shall be set among the gods!”

My nightmare flashed before my eyes. The Prophet’s head tumbling at my feet, the silver blood sheeting down its front, the terrible fingers digging their way out from within the prince’s severed throat.

Beyond the open arch and the walls of the tower, the gathered Cielcin roared, pulling me back from my tumble into waking terror. The sun—gray and dim as it was—was still shining. I was not dreaming, I knew. I knew the difference, knew the pain in my forehead was real—and the aching in my bones.

“It is time, vayadan-doh,” said one of the white-clad courtiers, crawling toward Vati where it stood in the center of the entrance hall. “The yukajji must go.”

By way of acknowledgment, the vayadan-general spurned the creature with its toe, flipped it onto its back and pinned it with a foot. The courtier lay quiescent. Vati gestured to the chimeras nearest the door, but if it gave an order it did so via the praxis that bonded its mind to the metal it wore in place of discarded flesh.

Watching the creature move, I wondered if it viewed its alteration as a blessing, a casting off of the mortal and lying flesh it believed Utannash and the iugannan had given to it. Did it believe the less flesh remained to it, the more pure it was? Or was its state a sacrifice offered in service to its lord, as Avarra had sacrificed all for Elu?

My guards pulled at my chains, dragging me forward across the entrance hall. My sabatons rang on the tile as I staggered out after them, dragged hands-first. Urbaine leered at me as I passed. “You’ve never been prettier, my lord!” he jeered. “The blood suits you.”

Beside him, Severine bowed her head and said nothing.

I spat at his feet. “I’d wear yours better.”

Urbaine arched his brows as I went past and gestured at his companions. “We are immortals! You are only half!”

“Then why did your woman here want me so badly?” I countered, and nodded at Severine.

If my remark stung the magus, he did not rise to the bait. “You’ll be with your people soon,” he said, and smiled. The bloodless lips peeled back too far from his pointed teeth, a servant’s imitation of his master’s inhuman grin.

“I’ve no doubt,” I said coolly. “I know what comes after, sorcerer. You have no idea.”

“I think you’ll find it is you who knows nothing of what comes next, my lord,” Urbaine said, smile undimmed. “But you will.”

My escort had found my place in the formation and was nearly ready to go. I was to follow a block of the chimeric soldiers led by the hulking behemoth Teyanu, who waited beyond the outer arch. Four dozen still-organic scahari fighters surrounded me, their scimitars drawn and crooked in the traditional way. After me would come another block of chimeras led by Hushansa in three separate bodies, then another four dozen of the Prophet’s personal guard in black and silver, and the heralds with their tall, slim banners showing the image of the White Hand. Last of all would come the great prince itself, flanked by Aulamn and Vati.

But first came the slaves. Some thousand human slaves waited beyond the gates, not chained but hemmed in by guards just as the prisoners had been hemmed in by the douleters in my father’s Colosso. At a sign, these minders drove the slaves before them like cattle, chivying them along the parade line toward the central avenue. Shrill horns filled the air with screaming.

My guards began to move, pulling me by my hands, chains and armor ringing like silver bells. I moved forward into the light and turned right toward the temple of the king. A wave of sound rushed over me, dampened and dimmed by all that Enari stonework just a moment before. The Cielcin who held my reins tugged me forward again, steering me right across the level sands toward the avenue. They laughed as I half-tumbled, half-jogged to keep from falling.

When I looked up, I saw the crowd for the first time.

All along the great road, held back by guards in the prophet’s black and silver, were great throngs of the enemy. They lined the avenue six and seven deep, the ones in the rear craning their necks or else pressing forward and through to the line of the guards. They ran thus all the way to the dome, where even so far away I could see their ranks swelled to encircle Elu’s Temple.

Twelve miles away.

Far gone were the days when captains and generals marched their armies upcountry by the thousand, or crossed the Granicus into Persia. I had no knowledge just how long it took to march an army on foot over so long a distance. I was not even sure I could make it so far as I was then.

I knew it would take hours.

Ahead, the line of march stretched all the way to the shrine itself, princes and their retinues shining in the flat and colorless sun. Their armor and their banners were the only color in that gray and green-black world. The huge vayadan-general Teyanu—hunched in its six-legged tank of a body like an inflated parody of the Enar—moved only slowly. A huge gap had opened in the line between it and the retinue ahead. A quarter mile, perhaps. Into this gap the Cielcin douleters drove their thousand human slaves, their spears spitting lightning that sparked and flashed in still air. The sound of their laughter and their cruel voices was an echo of the hells that ground beneath Dharan-Tun.

Unlike in my dream, where wind scoured the empty space in the circle of that stone city, the air was dead and still, the gray sun cold and very small in the cloudless sky. My Cielcin cloak fluttered about my shoulders as I walked, my too-long and matted hair a curtain that hid my eyes.

There was no denying who held the power here. Seventeen hundred princes there might have been, and seventeen hundred blood-clans, too. But each of the princes I had seen had brought a scant two or four dozen scahari with it for the great moot, the Aetavanni which was to be held within the shrine of Miudanar’s skull. The Prophet had brought thousands, and by its fleet ensured the others complied. Oh, they had brought their worthies by the thousand to bear witness on the black sands beneath the topless pillars. Nor did I doubt that from every window and turret, every arcade and balcony in the ringed city encircling us tens of thousands more waited and watched. But they were unarmed, or carried scimitars only, and were held at bay by the legions of the Prophet and its demonic corps.

No other prince of the Cielcin wielded creatures such as those Syriani had in its train. The demons that MINOS had designed towered over the ordinary horn-crowned xenobites, and moved with a pantherish grace and threat of violence. As they and the titanic Teyanu marched past, I could feel the surrounding throng go still and hush.

There could be no question who ruled on Eue. The Princes of Princes was nominally but the first among equals, but only nominally. The gathered Cielcin bared their throats as the Shiomu’s forces passed—until they saw me.

“Yukajji!” they cried. “Aeta ba-Yukajjimn!” And “Aeta! Aeta!” And “Oimn Belu!”

Their mocking tones and frigid laughter pulled at me with iron hooks, peeling chunks of my soul away on unseen chains as the twin iron leads pulled me forward. They had fastened my leash to brackets in Teyanu’s rear, and from time to time I had to jog to keep from falling as the Exalted Cielcin strode on. Once or twice I looked back and saw the crowned trio of Hushansa’s bodies marching behind, black cloaks flowing from their shoulders, single red eyes scanning the crowds. Such curious glances cost me my footing and twice I fell, prompting hideous laughter from the crowd. The scahari who walked with me seized me roughly beneath my arms and hauled me to my feet, spurring me forward with their lances.

Ahead, the dome of the temple rose black as space, its strangely crystalline substance almost sparkling in the light. Each time I met the gaze of the dead god’s sightless eye, I felt the weight of the Dreamer’s ghostly presence like a pressure on my mind. The unquiet whispers sounded again, rushing beneath the booming of the crowd, and time and again I had to shake myself to be rid of them.

How long had it been since I had walked so far? Not since my last voyage aboard the Tamerlane, when oft as not I would take my morning exercise with Commander Halford, running segments of the battleship’s promenade above the lighters chambered atop their mag tubes.

“Aeta! Aeta! Aeta ba-Yukajjimn!”

“Aeta eza dunyasu!”

“Dunyasu! Raka dunyasu ne!”

Something wet and stinking struck my face. It stuck a moment before its own weight peeled it free to splatter on the ground. It was a strip of rotting meat. Human meat. A strip of rotting flesh hurled by one of the onlookers. The dam broken, a rain of flesh and white and grayish filth spattered the green stones. A glass bottle shattered, prompting the guards warding the line to push the riotous crowd back. Whitish slime burst on the stones at my feet, splashing across the tops of my boots. The foul stench wrinkled my nose, and I knew without needing to be told that it was Cielcin filth.

I kept walking, kept my eyes fixed ahead, fixed on Teyanu’s mighty piston-limbs as it advanced along the aisle. The rotten sun beat down, thickening the still air. My tongue felt thick and fuzzy, and I fumbled with my shackled hands for the water tube concealed in a pocket along the inside of the neck flange of my breastplate. It took a measure of doing to fish it out and work it up between my teeth, and when I pulled on it, it came up dry. Dorayaica may have ordered my armor cleaned and restored, but someone had cut the catch-tube.

Letting it swing free, I cursed. A gobbet of alien waste struck my side, marring the fine irinyr cloak with its mucus.

Perhaps two hours of the forced march had passed, and more than half the distance. My feet dragged, and my head pounded from heat and want of water. The shouting. The mockery. The jeers never ceased. Pale shit and rotting meat spattered the stones before my feet, clung to my cloak and trailing hair. My shoulders ached from where the chains kept pulling me, and the shackles chafed my wrists each time the general Teyanu took a step, its huge peds shaking the earth.

“Aeta! Aeta! Aeta!”

There was blood on the green stones.

Red blood. Human blood. Great pools of it and smears stretching left and right.

I missed a step, surprised to see it there—to see something so familiar and so horrible in so alien a clime. Teyanu did not stop, but—silent—took another lurching step. I stumbled forward, fell, struck my knee. It took all I had scrape back to my feet and hurry forward. I had not heard a change in the screams beneath the wail of alien horns and the exultation of the crowd. But one scream rose above the rest and pulled me back through my haze of exhaustion and pain.

It was a child’s voice, high and clean and very much alone.

“No!” it said. A boy? A girl? I could not be sure. I could be sure of nothing save that word. That single, final, necessary word.

No.

The child’s scream was cut off sharp as any electrical current. There should have been silence after such a note. But there was only more screaming. The inhuman douleters had driven the thousand or so slaves forward along the avenue, so far—so far that the crowd to either side stood now thirty ranks deep, white faces staring and hooting and slavering to either side. They had driven the captive humans far enough, it seemed, and their grim inclusion in the Prophet’s march was explained at last.

They were party favors.

Peering round Teyanu’s hideous bulk, I watched as four Cielcin fell upon a woman who had fallen in her haste to stay ahead of the great prince’s train. With no hesitation their leader seized the woman by her hair and raked its scimitar across her throat. Dying—but not dead—they shoved her to one side . . . toward the crowd. White hands reached out to take her, and in an instant she was gone, dragged into the crush of inhuman bodies. I did not have to see her fate to know it, remembered the fate of Raine Smythe and poor Sir William Crossflane. Dismembered. Devoured. Torn apart.

With each dozen or so steps the douleters would seize upon another victim and slay him or her, alternating left and right.

We have to show that we are not abstractions, my father told me once. That we are tangible powers. I fancied almost that old Lord Alistair walked beside me, that it was his shadow and not the shadow of the scahari fighter at my shoulder that fell across me as I plodded on after the hulking general. If you are to rule, you must show your people why you rule. You must give them a reason to obey.

“Gifts,” I mumbled, looking round, almost expecting to see the old archon striding along in his robes of red and black velvet. “Bribes.”

Law. Justice. Order. These people do not understand. These men do not value. But food? Shelter? Safety? These have value men cannot deny. These men will accept in place of justice, because they are greater than justice.

“I don’t believe that,” I said, still searching for my father’s face in the ranks to either side. “They are baser than justice. Not greater.”

Men are base creatures, my father countered. What is justice compared to hunger? Compared to fear? Nothing.

“I do not believe that,” I said again, more forcibly.

Then you die a fool.

“Men are not beasts!”

The guard at my right hand kicked me in the back of my knee, dropping me to the pavement. On reflex, I seized the chains that held my wrists to take the pressure off, clenched my teeth as Teyanu’s steady, ceaseless motion hauled me two yards across the blood-soaked flagstones. In the brief space before the titan’s next step, I found my feet again, hurried ahead to put slack back into the leads that bound me to the vayadan-general.

Men were not beasts, I knew. But the Pale were. I gave up trying to find my father—he was only a memory—but I saw one of the Cielcin standing behind the line of guards that manned the parade rout. Red blood smeared its face, and it held a man’s forearm in its fingers, the flesh torn near the elbow.

By such donations, Syriani showed the gathered masses who was greatest among the shattered clans of Eue. There could be no doubt who ruled.

And if there was, Syriani itself dispelled it.

We came at last within the shadow of the great skull, its jet and crystalline surface drinking the colorless light and radiating gloom upon the crowd gathered round. Teyanu drew aside, and the scaharimn that had dogged me all the way from the outer gates shunted me along after it to stand in the empty space that had been cordoned off amidst the crowd. An ocean of inhuman faces stretched out all around. Those who had lined the grand avenue had followed us as the parade drew to an end, so that thousands of Cielcin encircled the Temple of Elu—Miudanar’s skull. The entourage of each prince stood at intervals around the stepped concentric rings of megalithic Enar stone that formed the foundation that propped up the dead Watcher’s remains, banners oddly still in the dead air beneath the pylons that supported the skull. Beyond them, the first ring of pillars rose, taller even than the black dome itself, their faces adorned with Enari writing and more of the omnipresent reliefs of ancient violence.

And beyond those pillars the sea of alien faces stretched. Thousands gathered close about the temple and across the black sands. Tens of thousands. As a mass they stamped their feet and rattled sabers, their cries never fading, never dying down. Of the human slaves the Pale had driven before them there was no sign, and I knew that each man and woman and every child of their number lay distributed amongst that crowd of thousands, bodies broken like bread.

Last of all came Syriani itself, flanked by Vati in its white cloak and tall, plumed crown and by winged Aulamn. The Prince of Princes did not ride the scaled sulan or drive a walking platform. Nor was it carried—as our Emperor so often is—upon a gestatory throne. Syriani Dorayaica had made the pilgrimage from the outer gates upon its own two feet, just as Elu had done. In so doing, it showed its resolve, its strength of character, and its piety. It was a profound statement of power, that after its generous gift of human cattle and display of martial force—after its white-plated demons, after Teyanu and Hushansa, after Vati and Aulamn and the captive demon-prince Hadrian himself—that the prince who had summoned the entire Cielcin people home to roost arrayed itself not as an aeta, not as a prince, but as a conqueror. In place of the servants who carried the flabella before the Imperial person, there marched four heralds, coteliho carrying their heraldic spears topped with the image of the Hand and the broken circle.

The broken circle of Akterumu, I realized—the meaning of that symbol locking into place. The heralds rattled their spears as the Prophet approached, their high, cold voices raised in proclamation. “Raka attantar Aeta ba-ajun, Ikurshu ba-Elu!” they declared with one voice, chimes ringing on the still air with each declamation.

Blessed be our Clan-Chief, Bloodshoot of Elu!

“Raka attantar Aeta ba-ajun, ijanameu deni ve ti-iedyya ta-tajun ba-scianda eza ba-itani!”

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

“Raka attantar Aeta ba-ajun! Ute Iedyrin Yemani Iugannan-Biqarin!”

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

“Raka attantar Ute Aeta ba-Aetane ba-Eue!”

Blessed be the Prince of the Princes of Eue!

“Blessed be he in the sight of Miudanar!” the heralds cried out. “Blessed be his name in the ears of Iaqaram! Blessed be his life in the hands of the gods!”

“Yaiya toh! Yaiya toh! Yaiya toh!”

Syriani reached the end of the avenue and drew up to where I stood beside Teyanu. It looked down at me. It might have looked down its nose at me if it had one. The Prophet reached out with one silver-bangled hand, and two warriors came forward and detached my chains from the vayadan-general in accordance with some prearranged plan. They put my leash into their prince’s hands and bowed as they drew away.

“I told you once that we are a sunken race. Do you remember?” I did not answer, but swayed on the spot, exhausted from the hours-long walk and the sun and the still air. Casually, the prince struck me with the back of its hand. It was not a hard blow, but it was still sufficient to stagger me, to turn my head and reopen the wounds its claws had placed the previous day. “I asked if you remembered, kinsman.”

Face stinging, I smiled up at the demon, my destroyer. “I do.”

Syriani Dorayaica’s lips flexed in amusement. It paused a moment, as if weighing its words, and wound my chain about its one hand. “Today we rise.” It brushed past me, jerking the lead so that I stumbled after it as it moved toward the stairs and the platform where Elu had burned Avarra’s body millennia ago.