I WAS A LONG time recovering my breath. For a while, I could focus only on the feeling of it: the raw, red pain and the gray blurring of my vision. Each breath threatened to cause another fit of spasms and coughing, and once I retched upon the floor. Through my haze I saw Syriani kneeling in the midst of its destruction, arms spread wide before the graven image of its black god. Miudanar looked down on the carnage, its image betraying no sense of approval or condemnation.

“You killed them,” I managed to say at last, and shaking found my feet. I could hardly remember feeling so weak. I was sure I must have in the pits of Dharan-Tun, in the throes of my torment, but time and pain have blunted those memories, and the exhaustion I felt standing beneath that rippled dome was an exhaustion not just of body, but of mind. It was a minor miracle I could stand at all, so thirsty was I, so wrung dry of water and of tears.

“Yes,” Syriani Dorayaica replied. It spoke in standard. There was no Cielcin word for yes.

“All of them,” I said, more slowly still.

“Yes.”

My chain lay strung across the floor, and I gathered it slowly, links slithering across the cracked and immeasurably ancient marble. “It was not your gods’ doing,” I said. I did not ask.

“No.” My head swam, and so I leaned against the nearest pillar. The Pale King did not turn. “Your magi have their uses.”

“How was it done?”

The creature now calling itself Shiomu Elusha turned and stared at me. “What you said. About the Enar and their end. What did you mean?”

“Ah . . .” I had wondered if that would come up again. I looked around at the carnage in the alien sanctum, at the mingled blood and filth and vomit. It did not take much to imagine it was the Enar’s death I saw again about me, their ruined bodies rotting as if on holograph recordings played back at a thousand times the speed. “I saw them. Here. They made their end here, cowering in this chamber. They drank some . . . substance. Some potion or praxis. It dissolved them. Turned them to dust.” I felt a bout of coughing coming and screwed shut my eyes to better clamp down on my breathing. “They weren’t judged by your gods. They didn’t attain your paradise. They’d conquered the galaxy, but it wasn’t enough.” With each word, I felt a little better, a little stronger. “You really think you can destroy everything?”

The Shiomu Elusha’s huge eyes eyes narrowed, but it did not stand. “Do you doubt it?”

“Not your convictions,” I said, “only your power.”

The former prince’s face split into a huge inhuman grin. “You forget . . . or perhaps you do not understand. I do not have to destroy everything. I have to destroy you. Without you . . . your kind will fail. Without your kind, Utannash will never be.”

“I . . .” I had forgotten.

“And if Utannash is never born, this universe will have never been.” It stood slowly, swaying. I sensed the king was as exhausted as I was, and reminded myself that it, too, had made the long walk from the ringed city that morning. “Think you that I have exaggerated in calling your master the author of this . . . ?” It spread its hands as if to encapsulate the cosmos. “Utannash made the world. You would call it god, but it is not. It is beyond time, but it was born within it. Begotten here. Destroying you and your kind will break the cycle, will end this flawed creation and free my masters—the true gods—the gods of the nothing that was before.” It showed me its hand, the silver blood still wet and bright on the palm. “That is why they made me this way.”

Silence stretched between us then, and for the first time I could hear the distant furor of the crowd outside. The Elusha crossed half the distance between us in three strides, began circling me. “We are the same, you know. Each touched by higher powers.”

“Do you dream the future?” I asked, slashing this line of conversation.

The Pale King stopped its orbit, cocked its head. Again the black-rimmed smile broke its smooth face. “There is no future. Soon we will be free.”

The sound of armored feet rang on the stairs, and turning I was surprised to see the vayadan-general Vati emerge from the narrow arch, Attavaisa and Peledanu in pursuit. All three knelt and pressed their faces to the floor. “Elusha ba-koarin,” they said in unison. My King.

Vati raised its head, red eyes taking in the mounded corpses. “It is done, then.”

“It is done,” the Elusha replied. Was that a note of sorrow in the great demon’s voice? “But it is not over. We have conquered . . . now we must rule. Are the others in place?”

Vati rose without breaking its bow—no mean feat that, and one aided by its machine body. “The ship is being brought down as we speak. The crowd has already spotted it. They ask what has our king brought for us?”

“You flatter me, Vati,” the Shiomu Elusha replied. “They do not call me king.”

“They will, ushan belu!” Prince Attavaisa said, still kneeling.

Ushan belu? I looked from Attavaisa to Dorayaica and back. The term meant beloved. It was a name reserved between an aeta and its vayadayan, its slaves and mates. Attavaisa raised its face to its new king, eyes wide and open. I wondered . . . were Attavaisa and Peledanu vayadayan now? Replacements for Iubalu and Bahudde? Concubines and consorts for the new king?

The Shiomu Elusha dismissed this further flattery with a gesture. “Summon the kalupanari. Have them fetch these bodies down and give them to the soldiers. Let them see what becomes of those who challenge my dominion.” Kalupanari meant the chimeras, the demons of Arae.

It had directed these words to Vati, who raised its chin in salute and stood. “Yaiya toh.”

“Ushan belu, what will you tell the people happened?” the former prince, the vayadan Peledanu asked its lover and master. It knelt still and did not rise.

The Shiomu Elusha blinked membranes and lids alike. “Ejaan,” it replied. “Nothing. Let them see what is true. Let them believe.” It raised its silver hand to underscore this response.

“And those who do not believe?” Attavaisa asked. “What of them, Dorayaica?”

The Pale King snarled. “There is no Dorayaica,” it hissed. “No more. I am Shiomu Elusha. Do not forget it, Attavaisa, or you will fast find yourself with these.” It raised its still-dripping hand to encompass the slaughter in the temple.

Attavaisa said nothing, but angled its head where it knelt to signal submission.

“Those who will not believe and submit are Utannashimn and will be destroyed. But they will submit,” it said, eyes turning to me. “I have brought them a mighty gift.” These words hung upon the air then, thick as the poison that had killed the other princes. For a moment, the only noise was my faint coughing and the dim thunder of the crowd outside. Then more metal feet sounded on the stairs to herald the corpse-bearers who would carry the aetane to their final resting place in the stomachs and at the hands of their former subjects.

“We must go down,” the great king said at last. “Raka ute uelacyr.”

It is time.

The bodies of the princes lay stacked like cordwood beneath the stelai in the chamber of the eye. The sun had swollen to a lurid orange and hung low on the horizon, threatening the tops of the distant towers that marked the gate and opening of the ringed city. The chimeras had made short work of ordering the bodies, had readied them for the new-made king’s display.

I could sense the restiveness of the crowd even through the walls of the great skull, could hear them roil and bicker. The princes had been inside a long while, and but for the group that had carried Hasurumn forth and the disappearance of the chimeras inside there had been no sign of an end to the Aetavanni.

But it had ended, and the Cielcin world had been forever changed.

I sat with my back against one of the stelai, staring at nothing. A chimera held my chain, stood inert as a statue to one side.

“It will be over soon,” said a cold but human voice.

Looking up I saw the magus Urbaine standing over me, his crossed arms tucked into flowing gray sleeves. Severine stood beside him, alongside another woman, each in suits to match the more senior sorcerer.

“What are we waiting for?” I asked.

Urbaine only smiled, and the third woman asked, “Are you so eager to die?”

“How long have I been a prisoner?” I asked in response.

Severine and Urbaine exchanged glances. It was Severine who answered. “Since Vati brought you to Dharan-Tun? Seven standard years. Three months. Twenty-seven days.” From the flattened, clinical nature of her response, I guessed she was consulting some feature of her neural implants.

I felt sick. Had I anything left in my stomach to lose, I would have lost it then. How many times had I asked that question since I awoke in slime and in cold? How many hundred times without an answer? “Seven years . . .” I managed at last, and held the gaze of the other MINOS woman. “Seven years . . . and you ask if I am eager to die?” I dropped my gaze, for merely to look at the sorcerers kindled a sick fury that I knew I would never satisfy. “I knew this day was coming. I’ve known it all along. Known there was no escape. But no . . .” I shook my head fiercely, and shook away a fresh fall of tears. “I am not eager to die.”

In truth, I was not sure I could die—not really. That was the most terrible part. Perhaps if I could, death might have been a comfort after all I had endured. But I had died before, and death had been no release. What would happen if Dorayaica—if the Elusha, I corrected myself—sacrificed me, but I endured? Would I then be condemned to live in captivity and die a thousand deaths for the amusement of the Pale King?

“Have you any water?” I asked, without hope.

To my astonishment, Urbaine produced a half-emptied flask concealed beneath his robe. “A final courtesy,” he said.

I drank it greedily, spilled some of it down my chin in my haste to drink it down. It was not urine, as it had so often been at the hands of my Cielcin tormentors. Such a small mercy. “Thank you,” I said, voice breaking just a little.

By the time I finished, alien trumpets began to sound, and a torrent of inhuman voices welled up to greet them. Looking up, I saw Syriani Dorayaica, the Shiomu Elusha, the heir of Elu and High King of the Cielcin, emerge from the upper stair. It did not stop, did not turn its head to either side, but passed the mounds of bodies and the troops gathered in that lower hall, passed its chimeras and human magi, passed the surviving princes who had named themselves its slaves. Passed me and the soldiers who stood guard over me and out beneath the arch of its dead god’s eye and into the light of that setting sun.

“Cielcin ba-kousun!” it cried, voice magnified by some unseen instrument, booming from speakers embedded in the bodies of the chimeric soldiers who stood at the front of the crowd. “My Cielcin!” it decreed. “My people!” Mine. The storming crowd broke and fell to silence, and into that silence the great king exclaimed, “The princes are dead!” The silence grew deeper still; confusion—and not Dorayaica—was king in that instant. About me, the chimeric soldiers began hoisting corpses in their too-long, articulated limbs. I recognized the body of Iamndaina among them, and heard the shouts and indrawn breath as the first soldiers carried those first corpses outside.

“For the first time since the time of Elu, the blood-clans stand united!” the Pale King proclaimed. “I am Elusha! Shiomu Elusha! I have spoken with the very gods! With Miudanar who dreams here in death! I am he whom Elu foretold. I am the one who will lead our people through the darkness to new life. I am the sword that will wipe clean the universe! I am the hand that will make it anew!”

Craning my neck, I could just see the Prophet’s crowned silhouette on the stair that led down to Elu’s altar. At the word iedyr, hand, the Elusha thrust its slashed hand skyward, displaying the Blood for the crowd to see. The Pale King was silent, waiting for the crowd to draw its own conclusions.

The signs were known.

While the Pale King spoke, the chimeric warriors hurled the bodies of the dead aetane into the crowd the way great princes of the Imperium tossed coins to beggars on parade. If I expected the crowd to hesitate out of deference to the dead, I was disappointed. The Cielcin mob seized upon their dead princes like vultures, stripping rings from fingers and fingers from bones. There would be poor soldiers sporting gems in the halls of Akterumu that night, and slaves killed by masters for trinkets and bits of cloth.

“Izhkurrah!” one of the throng cried out, and an instant later the word was taken up by those around it until the whole desert was shouting along with it. “Izhkurrah! Izhkurrah! Elusha ba-Izhkurrah! Elusha ba-Cielcin!”

“King of the Blood,” Urbaine said softly, a wicked smile pulling at his lips.

“King of the Cielcin,” Severine added.

“A new age begins!” The king’s voice shook dust from the stelai and the roof above. “Elu brought us out of Se Vattayu! Brought us here! Miudanar gave us wings! Gave us ships and the will to build them! It was Umna, Elu’s own, who freed Usathlam from his chains beneath the waters of the Baikosi! It was Dumann, and Zahaka, and Inumgalu—the first aetane—who made slaves of the Azh-Hakkai, who are no more! By Elu’s word did they do these things. It was Elu who built our first ships. Elu who built our first kingdom over the stars.” Here it drew its hands down, fists clenched before its eyes like a boxer. As it spoke, it descended the short flight of stairs to approach the green altar. “It is Elusha who will reclaim those stars. It is Elusha who will make slaves of the yukajjimn! It is Elusha who has brought you their great champion. Their aeta!”

Clawed hands spread wide, as if the one-time Prince of Princes might gather all the Pale unto itself. Responding to some silent cue, the chimera that held my chains advanced, prodding me with its free hand.

I stood unsteadily, braced myself against the defaced stele.

Urbaine grinned at me, and reaching up cupped my cheek with one damp hand. “I am so going to enjoy our time together,” it said. Seeing the confusion on my face, he patted me with his hand. “The Great One has promised us your head.”

And with that, I lurched forward—half-pulled like a dog—into the lurid orange light. I froze upon the top step, looking out upon the crowd. Entering the temple, I had not occasion to marvel at its number. Hundreds of thousands of Cielcin clustered on the level sands before the shrine of the skull. A veritable ocean of faces and of blue and violet banners stretched and spread among the pillars. Some Cielcin had even climbed the nearer pillars and clung from their sculpted faces, the better to see above the horned heads of their compatriots. In the distance, more banners from terraces and from the balconies of the distant city of Akterumu, and I guessed that for every creature standing on the sand, half a hundred gathered in the city. The whole Cielcin race—save those clans who had refused the Pale King’s call—was gathered at Akterumu, on Eue, or in the fleet above it.

There must have been billions of them.

“Behold it!” the Shiomu Elusha said. “Behold the Champion of Utannash, who defied me in battle and is brought low!” As the creature spoke, it raised its silver hand again for the throng to see. “Here is the greatest of them! Let it be a sacrifice to mark the kindling of this new age! As Avarra sacrificed itself for Elu, let us sacrifice this great king of our enemy to the Dreamer and the Watchers who are with us even now!” The great prince turned and made a slashing gesture with its good hand.

My guard shoved me, and I tumbled down the steps to land sprawling at the Pale King’s feet. I looked up and saw the Prophet had climbed the dais to stand behind the altar on the spot where its forebear and namesake had burned the body of its mate. “As I offer this creature to Miudanar the Great in Elu’s name, let this be an offering to you—my people—as a promise of all that is to come!”

That said, it took its slashed and bloody hand and reached across its face, smearing the silver blood across cheeks and lips and jaw before raising the hand once more to the heavens, pointing at the sun. The eyes of the congregation followed, and somewhere below us huge drums began to sound.

A shadow fell across the sun, and even as I regained my feet, my heart fell and shattered.

“No!” I said, voice crushed and small. “No!”

Hearing me, the King of the Cielcin turned, black robes snapping about its heels, eyes dead and cold and far away. Over its shoulders, the chimeras tossed another salvo of dead princes to the crowd, who stood waiting, pulsing, jumping with hands outstretched. Silver blood framed the Elusha’s glassy teeth, but still it pointed to the heavens and said the words I knew I would hear. “You knew it would come to this, kinsman,” it said, and from the blackness of its eyes I knew it knew that I had seen this moment, too. “Time runs down.”

Dharan-Tun had not blocked the sun as it had on Berenike, but something had. Her black shape slid above the towers and the great wall of Akterumu, moving like a thunderhead still higher than any cloud. The putrefying sunlight caught on the polished hull and on the huge, alien vessels that buoyed her. Great towers and spires hung from her belly, a city inverted to the alien city that rose from those gray-black sands. The mouths of her guns stood lonely and quiet, and the ports from which lightercraft were fired gleamed silver-bright beneath the glowing line of her equator. She came lower, and almost I felt in my bones the creaking of her superstructure in the grip of Eue’s deadly gravity. She had been built for space, and no ship her size could bear to land and survive. As she cleared walls she turned, the convex arc of her drive cluster cutting a slice out of the sky.

The great spire that hung down near the aft like an inverse castle was gone, blasted or shorn off, but still I knew her—I would have known her anywhere.

The Tamerlane swung low over the battlements of the ringed city, suspended by four huge Cielcin lifters on blue-glowing repulsors. The air groaned and shook with the complaints of twisted metal and a rushing like never-ending thunder. I looked on, frozen, petrified, tears streaming freely down my face.

Never before had the sight of her inspired such grief and such terror.

Dorayaica, the Elusha, meant to land the Tamerlane within the circle of Akterumu. It meant to offer the ship—and the ninety thousand slumbering aboard—as spoils to unite its newly minted army and empire.

“No . . .” I could only say. But it was there. How many times had I borne witness to this moment in my dreams? How many times had my unconscious mind shown me this very moment—like a traumatic memory—and urged me to do all I could to avoid it?

But it had come in its time, in its way.

I had not escaped Fate.

The great horde had already turned its back on the temple to watch the battleship descend. Many in the rear had already spread out, eager to come nearer the ship, but a line of the king’s chimeras turned them back and worked to secure a landing space. The music of the drums and the terrible trumpets played louder, and the war cries of the Cielcin filled the air and challenged the burning of the lifter rockets for supremacy. I caught the words Elusha and Izhkurrah on the wind many times.

When at last the groaning vessel cleared the walls, soldiers on the ground fired primitive flares, trailing columns of green and azure smoke painting columns against the gloomy sky, guiding the vessel to ground. Never before had I seen the Tamerlane so close while standing on my own two feet. The Eriel-class battleship dwarfed us all, dwarfed even the head of the Watcher enshrined in the heart of that dead land. Beneath its dripping shadow, the white-armored chimeras appeared no larger than ants. As I watched, the vessel sank lower still, its battlements and bay doors pitted and scarred from so long in space without care.

It must have lain somewhere on the surface of Dharan-Tun for all the years of my imprisonment, or else in the holds of some lesser worldship of Vati’s ferried all this way from Padmurak. The signs of battle and of looting were evident, even from a mile off: the heavy armor of the dorsal hull showed the deep, geometric cracks where the long-chain molecules in the adamant had shattered under titanic assault. Cielcin boarding craft still studded the lower decks like poisoned arrowheads in the flank of an iron giant.

She hung a thousand feet above the desert then, lower than the tops of the columns of bright smoke. I could make out white-crowned Hushansa directing the troops managing the landing. Five hundred feet. Greenish flares marked her descent, taller, less permanent than the pillars of the Enar. Three hundred feet. Two hundred. The black towers that like stalactites hung from the bottom of the dying vessel brushed the tops of the Enar columns. The great ship swayed as the lifters burned brighter, hotter, bluer in the sunset. A conning spire struck one of the antique pillars. How long had it stood sentinel there? How many millions of years had passed since its vile builders set it in place?

It fell in seconds.

And the Tamerlane fell atop it. A hundred feet from ground, the lifters cut their lines. How many pillars she broke in that final fall I never knew, and the noise of her impact shamed the drums and every clap of thunder on every world, for it was the ending of mine. Huge clouds of gray sand rose into the sky, washing over the chimeric landing team and halting the rioting horde in its tracks.

Silence fell.

I knew what came next.

The Tamerlane’s nearest side—her port—stood a mere mile from the temple steps, and the thunder of her final fall had thrown the Cielcin horde into chaos. Following silent orders relayed over their implants, the chimeras scrambled to assert control over the masses of the Pale. I heard the crack of gunfire as the iron demons fired on the crowd, hurling the bodies of rioters aside as examples to terrify the others into line.

The instinct for obedience ran deep in their race, and in mere minutes the chimeras had corralled the horde and re-established a central aisle along the paved avenue from the temple toward the outer gates to where the Tamerlane lay shattered and broken on the path.

I wanted to protest, to stop the great king, to break my chains. But I knew . . . knew that even if I did, even if I could, I would face the king itself, its White Hand, its sworn aeta, the chimeras, the scahari, and half a million screaming Cielcin.

What could I do but die?

The first human shapes that emerged from the wreck of my world brought me to my knees. My vision blurred with tears to see the red and the black of them, the officers in their undress blacks and the men in their maroon fatigues. Syriani had emptied the Tamerlane’s cubicula, had thawed out what must have been at least half of the mighty vessel’s ninety thousand. Perhaps it had awakened them all.

They came without armor, some of them stumbling and clearly still fugue-sick, clutching one another and shrinking from the fell beasts at either side. The Pale King’s guards did not hurry them, did not snap at their heels and crack the whip as they had done with the poor slaves that started our parade. Syriani had planned the event with masterful precision. One could practically smell the saliva dripping from alien fangs, could almost taste the anticipation mounting as the moment stretched.

I saw Ilex first. Her green skin and mossy hair stood out against all those pale faces and the dark. My heart broke to see her, to see any familiar and friendly face after all my years alone.

“Ilex!” I stood and hurried toward the altar, heedless of my chains, planning to vault the vile stone and hurry down the steps to join my people. As I did, I spied the knot of black-clad officers about her. I could just make out Commander Halford’s bald pate and prominent ears, and that tiny form! That was Lorian!

My chain went taut, choking me. My feet kept going, spun out beneath me, and I struck my head as I fell. “Why?” I hissed to no one. “Why like this?”

A cold, dead voice replied, “Dajaggaa o-tajun junne!” It was not an answer. Was not a reply at all, and so numb was I and confused and overwhelmed with joy and terror and grief at once that I did not understand the words until iron hands seized me and dragged me back to my feet. Before I could breathe—before I could blink—the soldiers holding me slammed my face into the altar and held it there, fingers tight in my hair. Only a chance turn of my head spared my nose. My vision swam. The sound of the crowd blurred, dulled—as though I heard it through water. I was a boy again, alone and friendless in the dark night of Borosevo, and caught.

“Not like this . . .” I groaned, or thought I did.

Through my ringing mind I discerned the rattle of chains. The chain that bound my wrists they pulled down and looped through an iron bracket beneath the slab of the altar on the far side, so that I had no choice but to bend my neck above the altar, where there was a trough—not so unlike the trough that formed the centerpiece of the feasting table in the halls of Dharan-Tun. I knew how it would end, had seen it a thousand times. Syriani Dorayaica, the Scourge of Earth, the Shiomu Elusha, King of the Cielcin, would seize me by the hair and torque back my head. Using its crooked knife, the Elusha would lay open my throat from ear to ear. My blood would spill out into the trough, the only red in all that place.

But it would not do so yet.

My suffering was not yet done.

The other victims had drawn nearer by then, were gathered at the base of the stair. I remember I could not stop looking at them. I could not stop smiling—that was the worst part. After so long in solitude, so long in torment without a succor or friend, I was truly, perversely, overjoyed to see them. My tears flowed freely, and I was glad of the awful curtains of my hair.

The Cielcin guards at the base of the stair checked their march, crossed scimitars to keep them from coming any further forward. In the rear, men were still climbing out of the ruined Tamerlane, goaded on by douleters with scimitars of their own and wicked pikes. The Red Company crowded into an ever-widening space between shoals of Cielcin, held back only by the threat of the chimeras that held the line to either side. My people made a great wedge before me.

Twenty or so men stood shoulder to shoulder at the base of the steps below me, each garbed in an officer’s undress blacks: Ilex still stood out the sharpest, the dryad with her high cheekbones and bare arms, blinking up at me with amber eyes. Beside her, Elara stood—the last of my myrmidons, for surely Pallino was dead. She met my gaze and nodded, but said no word. Her big, brown eyes shimmered with tears. There again was Halford, the night captain, and beside him Koskinen and Pherrine and the junior officers, men I little knew. I did not recognize Tor Varro at first. The scholiast had donned an officer’s blacks. I had never seen him dressed in anything but the green suits of a Chalcenterite scholiast. His bronze face was impassive, empty as ever of feeling—like his own monument. At his right—near the center—stood Lorian Aristedes, barely elbow-high to the scholiast, his too-long white hair crudely tied at one shoulder to keep it from blowing across his face. Without his cane or his silver braces, he looked half a child. Indeed, he might have been a child were it not for the pain in his bloodless face. His colorless, pale eyes found mine, and he nodded.

It was telling of the gravity of the situation that Lorian said nothing at all.

“Had!” Elara called out. I could barely hear her beneath the tumult of the inhuman crowd, but understood her by the shape her lips made. “Where’s Pallino?”

I could only shake my head. I did not know whether to be glad or devastated by the old man’s absence. Pallino was nowhere to be seen. Nor Crim, nor Otavia . . .

 . . . nor Valka.

“Had!” Elara’s motherly face flushed with anger and with fear. “What happened to him?”

Eyes shut, I pressed my forehead to the cold stone. Dead, I wanted to say. Dead and buried.

The Scourge of Earth rounded the altar and stood at the top of the stairs, turning its head slowly as it surveyed the humanity gathered between the twin shoals of its new-made horde.

Not like this . . .

The doom-drums began to beat again, and the Pale King thrust its silver hand skyward, the right thrown wide to admit the torrent of cheers and the raucous chant of Izhkurrah! Izhkurrah! Izhkurrah!

The Elusha dropped its hand, and when the riot fell back a bit it spoke—not to the crowd, but to the humans gathered before it. “Which of you is captain here?” it asked, speaking the standard so that its captives might understand.

The officers stirred, none answering, each turning from side to side, checking to see how the others would answer first. I could only imagine what this world was like for them. For better or worse, I had lived among the Pale for years. For the others, it must have been like awakening in hell, or else like not awakening at all, but rising to a dream and a kind of waking terror from which there was no escape.

When no one answered, the king asked again, “Which of you is captain?” It tilted its head, jeweled chains and bangles swaying with the motion. Its cloak and the Imperial-style toga it wore over its organic-looking armor shifted as it moved, looking in every way the opposite number to our Emperor. Behind it, Vati and Aulamn and the floating sphere that housed Hushansa’s brain looked on with glowing eyes. The giant Teyanu loomed over the officers, flanking the base of the stairs. White-armored chimeras and scahari in black and blue held tall, slim banners of the White Hand waving in their hands . . . and in the distance? The ramparts and ugly towers of Akterumu—of Pandaemonium itself—rose green and gray and encircled the world and ruined Tamerlane.

At a gesture from the king, Aulamn leaped forward, spreading huge, membranous wings. The vayadan leaped down among the officers, seizing one by the shoulders with its clawed feet. The winged monster flapped its wings once, rocketing skyward with a gust of wind. A thousand feet above the desert, it let the man fall. He screamed and struck the sands amidst the Cielcin horde, which closed in over him in a frenzy like sharks in bloody water. Its feat accomplished, Aulamn settled back to roost beside Vati on the upper stairs before the cavernous eye of Miudanar.

“Answer me!” Syriani said, not raising its voice. “Which of you is captain?” It raised its hand, threatening to loose its winged lover and slave again.

“I am!” came a tired, reedy voice.

Looking down, I saw a thin, narrow-shouldered man push his way to the front of the line. “I am!” he said again, throwing up a hand. He wore an officer’s legionary blacks, but his head was shaved like any common soldier. Bastien Durand had always been a quiet, unassuming man, a dour, officious bookkeeper forever lost in Corvo’s Amazonian shadow. I had never liked him, finding him cold and curiously formal for a mercenary, and we had butted heads in the past. I had always thought him a man of little personal courage, if a dutiful enough officer.

Had he been hiding behind the others?

It did not matter. He was not hiding anymore. Stepping forth, the scholarly soldier adjusted his purely cosmetic spectacles and exhaled sharply. “I am captain here,” he said, lifting his chin—a gesture of defiance, not defeat. He approached the guards at the base of the stairs, who checked his advance with crossed swords.

“Ujjaa nevasari,” the great king said, ordering its men to let Bastien by. The scimitars uncrossed, and when Durand hesitated, one of the scahari seized him above the elbow and frogmarched him up the steps. The xenobite forced him to kneel on the green marble before the altar. Before the Elusha.

Ever the student of human customs, the Shiomu Elusha offered a ringed hand for the commander to kiss. Bastien glanced to me, eyes narrowing. But he had hesitated too long. The Cielcin ruler lashed Bastien across the face, tearing a line from his cheek cousin to my own. Still, the blow had not been hard, and to his credit Bastien squared his shoulders. I nodded at him, granting my approval—but I cannot be sure he saw me.

He kissed the ring all the same, shuddering as he grasped the alien hand. When he was done, the Elusha wrapped too-long fingers around the nape of Bastien’s neck, and said, “I want you to confirm for me and for your people that this is Hadrian Marlowe.” It jerked its head in my direction. “I want them to know that what they see is not a Lie. That it is no trick. That they are not dreaming. Will you do this?”

“You want me to . . .”

“Confirm that this,” it pointed at me with two fingers, talons slowly extruding from their sheaths, “is your master.” The Pale King’s gesture softened as it opened its bloody hand, inviting Bastien to approach the altar. Below, the Red Company craned its collective neck to see their captain—their First Officer, in truth—and the Pale King. Even in hell, human curiosity was endless. About them, the Cielcin tide grew higher, swelling like an ocean of blackness, white-capped, to either side.

Bastien Durand nodded and accepted the Pale King’s invitation. Moving with his customary stiffness, the Norman officer approached the altar. “Lord Marlowe, sir?” he asked.

“Bastien,” I replied, looking up as best I could, chained as I was at the edge of the altar.

At the sound of my voice, the younger man snapped to salute, beating his breast before extending his right arm in the Imperial fashion. “My lord.” He glanced up at the skull of the dead god and the chimeric generals on the steps above us. “Hideous place to die, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I agreed.

“Otavia, sir . . .” Bastien’s voice broke. He couldn’t bring himself to ask the terrible question: Is she dead?

I shook my head. “Lost. On Padmurak. Her and . . .” Then it was my turn to be unable to finish my sentence. I could not say the words: . . . and Valka.

Bastien shut his eyes, massaged them with his fingers, upsetting his glasses. It was the most feeling I’d ever seen from the man, and it was gone as quickly as it had appeared.

“You agree this is no deception?” The xenobite’s voice intruded on our grief, cold, brittle, and terrible.

Bastien Durand inhaled sharply, and turning back to face the Shiomu Elusha replied, “It’s him.”

The bleeding silver hand gestured at the humans penned in between the shoals of the enemy. “Tell them.”

Before he did, Durand looked at me one last time, and I marked a solitary tear where it traced a line down his dark face. For me? For Otavia? For himself? Durand’s face darkened. “I thought you were supposed to be the Chosen,” he said, bitterness flooding his tone.

The words fell like blows, and cut deeper than any knife or lash I’d suffered. I lowered my eyes, pressed my forehead to the cool stone of the altar. It was my fault. Had I been more vigilant, I would have sensed the trap on Padmurak before it was too late. Had I not leaped to destroy the charioteers in Vedatharad, I might have been with Valka and Otavia, Pallino and Crim when their doom came. I might have saved them, and we might have saved the Tamerlane. None of this would have happened, and the Empire would know the Commonwealth had betrayed mankind to the Cielcin.

I did not look up as Bastien confirmed for the human onlookers that I really was myself. I felt—more than I heard or saw—the indrawn breath and the cries of despair from my Red Company. My universe consisted of my bound hands shackled beneath the slab of the altar. I tried to focus, to blink back tears and clench my jaw, tried to see a place where those fetters broke and I won free. I pictured myself leaping over the altar and strangling the monarch with my chains there before its army and my own, pictured us winning free in a desperate brawl against the armies of the Cielcin . . .

Fantasies.

I had no illusions left. Even if I could summon my vanished power and free myself, I knew I would not make it over the altar. If the Iedyr and its guards did not stop me, the king itself would. Even at my full strength, the xenobite king was stronger—and I had not been at my full strength in years. And even if I could overpower the Elusha, even if we humans won the day—outnumbered five or six to one though we were—we had nowhere to go. Akterumu was filled with millions more of the Pale, and orbited by billions. The worldships of seventeen hundred blood-clans waited for us.

We were finished.

Screams broke through the walls of my little universe. Shock and raw dismay.

I looked up, and saw a headless man in undress blacks standing where Bastien Durand had been, right at the top of the lower stair. The body swayed a moment and tumbled down the stairs toward the crowd. The king who had been Syriani Dorayaica stood beside it, grasping in its hand a gleaming sword. Not white ceramic, not a scimitar of the kind wielded by the Pale.

The highmatter blade looked small in its hand, like little more than a knife in its long and spidery fingers. It was not the crackling monstrosity Carax had spoken of in his address to the Emperor so long ago, not the weapon I’d seen in my vision of the night before. The blade was bright and smooth as crystal, as moonlight, its rippling length offset by quillions of liquid metal that shielded the hand. Its fittings were of silver, the grip wrapped in wine-colored leather. It was a Jaddian blade. Olorin’s blade. My blade.

All this time I had thought it lost on Padmurak, in Iovan’s possession, perhaps, or a trophy kept by Lorth Talleg. But the Lothrians had given it to Vati, and Vati—ever faithful—had given it to its master.

And Syriani had used it to kill Bastien Durand.

The commander’s head had tumbled to the base of the stairs, lay now in the narrow stripe of empty ground between the guards who held the stair and my officers who stood before them. No one spoke, and almost I thought that not a one of the humans drew breath, so solemn and still were they, cowed by the sight of what had happened, and by what they knew was yet to come.

The Elusha raised its voice again, cold tones artificially magnified as it spoke once more to all my captured men. “On your knees, humanity!” it proclaimed, and thrust my sword out like a statue of Justice challenging the throng. Slowly, steadily, the Red Company—all ninety thousand men—sank to their knees. The monarch let its arm drop, and in hushed tones continued, “I am Cielcin. The Cielcin. I have bested your master, your prince.” It waved its bloody hand in my direction. “Your Hadrian dies today, and your Emperor will follow. Your people shall be a nation of slaves. Of cattle. But take heart! You have fought well. Your deaths will be swift.” My own sword flashed in my direction. Slowly, I raised my eyes, squared my shoulders. The Shiomu Elusha pointed my Jaddian weapon at my eyes, and in a voice not magnified for the crowd, it said, “But first: you must choose.”

I met the Prophet’s eyes, but did not speak. Behind it, the ruined Tamerlane smoked, black tongues rising above the ramparts of Akterumu unto heaven. Above it all, the countless Cielcin moons looked on.

“You must choose one,” Syriani said. “One of your people must go to your Emperor, and tell him you are dead. I shall permit you your choice.”

The officers had all heard, and the first several ranks of men shifted awkwardly where they knelt. Bastien’s body lay between them and me, his blood violently red in that place of gray and green. His head lay on its side not five paces from where Halford and Koskinen knelt. I met Koskinen’s eye a moment, and Halford’s—recalling how the latter had saved the Red Company and the Tamerlane at Nagapur. He had grown into a fine officer. I looked at Elara, but she shook her head and averted her eyes. I understood her well enough.

Don’t you dare.

“I . . .” Was it a final courtesy? A boon offered a worthy adversary? Or was it a curse? A final act of cruelty? Beneath the altar, I pulled my chains tight, stretched my wrists as far apart as they would go. Ilex looked up at me, nearly so blank-faced as Varro. Pherrine was crying quietly, her shoulders slumped. Commander Aristedes knelt beside her, shrunken in defeat, his thin hand on hers, a fleeting, final moment of humanity in that alien waste.

Only one.

I could save only one.

It wasn’t really a choice. A righteous anger burned in me, searing through the pain and the indignities I had endured. Clearing the clot in my throat, I said, “Lorian.” He was the ranking officer, after all, with Bastien and Otavia dead.

The intus cursed foully and stood. “I won’t go!”

“You must!” I said.

“And leave you to die?” he said, advancing to within striking distance of the crossed scimitars. At a sign from the great king, the guards permitted Lorian to pass. He limped in his awkward way up the bloody stairs—skirting poor Bastien’s body. He did not cower as he drew near the Prophet, who stood nearly twice his height, but tucked his chin like a boxer and said nothing.

“What an amusing little creature,” Syriani said, looking to me. “Your lords keep such pets, do they not? What does it do?” Long used to such abuse, Lorian chewed his lip, but to my astonishment said nothing.

Syriani sniffed, four nostrils flaring. “Take him.”

Footsteps sounded on the tile behind, and twisting in my bonds I turned and saw Severine advance with one of the chimeras. The guard seized Lorian by the neck and dragged him along the terrace that encircled Miudanar’s skull. A dull wind blew, and I beheld the gray shape of a shuttle—a man-made shuttle, to judge by its harsh, plain lines—descend.

“Lorian!” I called after the retreating backs. Severine halted, permitted Lorian to look back. I met the junior man’s pale eyes, and only then did I mark the first sign of tears in the man. He blinked them back.

“Avenge us!”