BLACK WINGS CUT THE gloaming air, and a gust of wind slashed the terrace before the dome of the skull. The Cielcin king had wasted no time sending forth its messenger. I wondered at that. Even after all my education—all my experience—the ways of the Cielcin were strange to me. Had it but waited, Dorayaica might have sent the Emperor my head. Yet it seemed other demands and concerns governed the great king’s attentions. Perhaps it feared chaos in the city as the various factions, the generals and servants, ministers and vayadayan that served the murdered princes scrambled in the aftermath of the Elusha’s regicide. Perhaps Lorian had some part to play in the next phase of its plans, a part that would not wait.

Or perhaps it only wanted me to watch as the shuttle vanished into the darkening sky.

Again, I pressed my forehead to the lip of the altar, staring down at my hands while Syriani spoke, addressing its own people once again. A light blinked on my wrist-terminal, a power indicator, I guessed, some sensor warning of damage to my suit. The cut water lines, perhaps. “Cielucin ba-koun!” it said, “My people! Behold my victory! The yukajjimn on their knees.” I looked up in time to see the Elusha raise its bleeding hand once more. “Fight for me, and we shall bend their every world!” Behind me, the chimeras began distributing the bodies of the dead princes yet again, tossing the corpses unceremoniously from the terrace to the Cielcin below. “Ti-koun!” the Prophet proclaimed. “In me the Blood of Elu—the Blood of the Gods—flows anew!”

Hand still raised, blade outstretched, Syriani turned and faced the skull of the dead giant, looming over me from across the altar. “Miudanar! Dreamer! Watcher! God! I am your servant, as Elu was before me!”

Again the doom-drums began to sound, low and deep to shake the bones and rattle the teeth of all who gathered in that hideous place. I tried to meet Syriani’s eyes, but the sinking sun had fallen almost to where its bloated orange disc shone through its horned crown, transmuting the Pale King to a dark silhouette. “I have brought you one who serves Utannash, the Deceiver! A Champion of the Lie! May his life sever the chains that bind you in Death! With this sacrifice I strike against the Lie itself! I am your instrument! I am the Truth of God!”

A roar went up from the chimeras and from the army of the great king. Scimitars and banners flashed and fluttered above the vast ocean of alien bodies.

Stowing my blade, Syriani wheeled about. Still in its own tongue, it said, “Here Avarra offered its life that Elu might prove his devotion! As Elu made sacrifice, so I offer this creature to the gods—and offer these!” And here the Prophet spread its arms, highlighting the kneeling humans on the plains before the stair. “To you, my people!”

I knew what must come next, had seen it—as I had seen so much of that terrible day—a thousand times in my dreams.

But I was not dreaming.

A thousand times I’d seen the Prophet raise those glittering hands. A thousand times I’d heard their dry slap, the sound reverberating throughout my visions and backward across time.

It clapped its hands, and said that single, terrible word—that final, horrible command: “Paqqaa.”

Eat.

The chimeras who had held back the crowd put up their arms, and like black water the Cielcin rushed in, leaping on the kneeling and defenseless Red Company from either side. Ninety thousand men and women howled and scrambled to their feet in terror as hundreds of thousands of the Pale pressed in. One lunged at Pherrine in the front line, but Koskinen leaped in front of her, striking the monster across its face with his elbow. The Cielcin staggered back, and the palatine helmsman leaped atop it, knocking it to the ground. I had a brief image of the junior officer hammering the xenobite with his fists before two more Cielcin seized him by the arms and—planting a clawed foot on his chest—tore his arms from him.

I never heard Koskinen’s cry of pain.

My scream drowned my universe, and I slammed my forehead against the altar and tried to stand, to pull the iron chain from its ring beneath the altar and free myself. The little light kept sparking on my gauntlet, warning me of the failure in my suit.

Not like this.

Screwing up my eyes, I clamped down on my breathing. The only noise then—louder than the distant shrieks and shouts of terror—was the thunderous tympani of my heart. Syriani turned to me, and said—voice even and smooth as glass, “You see? Your legend is a lie. Your god cannot save you.”

I ignored it. Focusing on my chains. Surely the old iron loop must break. I tried to focus, to find the quiet place within me. Grief is deep water, I told myself. Rage is blindness. But every stoic aphorism, every lecture of Gibson’s, every scrap of philosophy or poetry I had ever learned fell flat and hollow in that windless hell. It all meant nothing before that horror. Behind it all the Tamerlane smoked, her ruin blackening the sky. And above all, a shadow slashed the bottom of the sun, and the very air turned gray with false twilight. Looking up, I understood.

Dharan-Tun had moved to occult the sun. Syriani had ordered its captain and its sailors to darken the sky just as they had at Berenike. It was a crude bit of theater, of melodrama, and melodrama was the lowest form of art. But had I not learned that the lowest things are closest to the ground and truth?

I pressed my forehead to the altar stone, willing the chain to break as I strained with all my sinews, boots planted on the Enari marble, knees and back bent. My wrists ached where the manacles chewed into them despite the gauntlets I wore.

“No,” I hissed. “No!”

Rough hands seized me, slammed my face into the stone. Dazed, I permitted those hands to turn my vision upward. “Watch!” Syriani hissed in my ear. “I want you to see. I want you to know your god deceived you, deserted you. I want you to know Truth.”

Somehow, Ilex and Elara both had wrested scimitars from the scaharimn, and behind them other knots of men had drawn together. Ninety thousand was no small number. They would be a long time dying.

“See how they struggle?” the Prophet asked. “We have not had a festival such as this since before the Scattering.” Claws dug into my scalp, blood welling from new wounds where the great king held me. I winced, sagged back against the altar, knees striking stone.

“Why don’t you just kill me?” I mumbled.

The Elusha released my bleeding head, and I slumped back against the altar. I could do nothing while my people died. Nothing.

The gray air grew darker, and the sounds of feasting and wicked laughter rose from the sands below. And screaming. And tears.

“Your time is not yet done,” Syriani said, gesturing at the sun and the false moon eclipsing it. “Utannash has forsaken you. Admit it.”

Hot blood ran down my face. I blinked it back, bent my face away, pressed my forehead back against the altar. I could not look anymore, could not stand to see the suffering I had failed to prevent. The suffering I caused. I could not stop hearing, however—could not stop listening to the sounds of tearing flesh and terror.

“Admit that what you did at Berenike was a lie,” Dorayaica said, standing over me. Beneath that black sun, it cast no shadow, for its shadow fell on all the world. “You have no power. You never did. You are as false as your false master. You cheated me.”

I glanced up at the great king in its black armor and robes, at its Imperial-styled toga, at the silver jewelry that decorated hands and horns. I shook with rage, with grief, with remembered pain.

I turned my face away.

“You are alone,” the great king said. “Your people are alone. They have lived like kings. But they will die like rats. I will step over your body and onto every one of your worlds. Your people I will root out. Enslave. Work to the last man. And when you are gone, your future will never be. Utannash will die, and the gods will be free at last. Free from this false universe. Free to build a better one.”

True darkness fell.

Light.

Blue-white and clear as moonlight.

A Jaddian blade. My blade.

“Die now and forever,” Syriani said, and lifted that blade.

The world went silent and still as stone, as if Time herself faltered. Severine had said she thought that I could perceive time differently than ordinary men, that my brain processed it in higher resolution, in smaller increments. Small enough to perceive the quantum branchings of possibility, small enough that instants seemed like hours.

I listened, heard nothing.

I saw.

I might have wept, if weeping were possible in such a state and space of time. My vision had returned, and I turned with eyes unclouded to look upon myself arrayed across the infinite now. Countless Hadrians knelt in chains, or crouched, or stood defiant, each representing a line of possibility that had not happened. Reading this, you imagine that there were—that there are—an infinity of other worlds. You think that what we do does not matter, because we have done everything once somewhere. Somewhen.

It is not so.

Only what does happen has happened. But the universe remembers what does not. The alternate pasts are not lost. Nothing is lost. Not matter. Not energy. Nor possibility either. I turned my eye to see those other selves, to peer into that abyss of uncounted possibilities, events so remote and so unlikely they could never have occurred at all.

The other Hadrians stared back, and met my vision eye to eye.

In the Alcaz du Badr, the great palace of the Princes of Jadd, there is a hall of mirrors. In its center lies a silver fountain and a pool whose fish—so the porphyrogeneticists say—can never die. Beneath the light of that fountain’s crystal lamps, the hall appears reflected, refracted, in infinite variation in the polished walls. Sitting on the marble rail, the prince in meditation might feel himself the center of the universe, and look out upon himself and his undying fountain echoing forever in those perfect mirrors.

So it was with me.

I blinked, and in the space of that eyeblink my vision changed. No longer was I a line stretched across the potential present, but the focus of a kaleidoscopic vision whose every facet reflected another version of me.

Something had changed in me, brought on by the crisis. I was awake as though for the first time, and clear. Not without pain or grief, but past both. Past everything. My torment and the final horror of that place had pushed me to some windswept place in my soul where not even my own passions could reach. I was clean, and clean I saw everything.

Though still aware I slumped with my head upon the altar—I could feel the cold, dry stone against my face—I saw with a kind of double vision the abyssal Dark beyond death.

Find us, a familiar, polished voice resounded in my ears. Find us in you.

Hadrian Marlowe stood over me, just as I had seen him in the dungeons of the Conclave. His matted hair—striped and shocked with white—fell to his waist. His ribs showed through skin translucent as ivory. His eyes shone sunken deep in their holes. Huge scars covered his arms and bare thighs, and his face bore the marks of tooth and claw.

Was I dead already?

When I had died aboard the Demiurge, my own image had greeted me—garbed in finery of deepest black. I had changed so much. Suffered so much. Lost . . . so much. I looked up at myself, ragged and torn. He lifted a hand, offered me the thing he held in three fingers.

With three fingers, I took it.

For a moment, we locked eyes, that other Hadrian and me.

“Avenge us,” he said, as I had said to Lorian.

I nodded, and understood. He was one of the might-have-beens, a Hadrian that never was. A Hadrian that failed, a Hadrian who—in his final moments—had reached out across time from his time. A time that never happened. A past that never happened, a time now lost to time. He had failed, that I . . . and we, might not.

“I will.”

Beneath the altar, a weight came into my hands. Bound in chains, I gripped the object, feeling the smooth play of leather beneath my gloved fingers. The vision faded, and I tightened my grip, feeling the familiar shape of the emitter and the rain guard. I pointed it down, shut my eyes, and taking the hilt in both hands, I squeezed the trigger and drew the blade with the press of twin buttons. Highmatter flowered above those desert sands, and with a single stroke I severed the chain that bound me and sheared through the altar to catch the blade falling toward my neck. When the blow struck, I felt my blade bend, and feared for a moment that my own sword might take my life.

But I heard a grunt, a gasp of pain, and—freed from my bonds—I rolled with my back to the altar to face my enemy.

Silver blood spilled from a wound in the great king’s side, and it pressed its slashed palm to the spot, staggered back. As it faded back I stood, using my left hand to steady myself against the cracked altar, sword held out before me with my ruined right. The Elusha glared at me, eyes wide. With fear? With fury?

“How?” it asked.

I was quiet.

For a solitary instant, the world was still, though the slaughter churned below us. We stared at one another, two matched chess pieces squared off at the center of the board, each holding an identical sword.

The same sword.

Holding an unsteady guard with my maimed hand, I fumbled with my shield-belt, found the long-unused catch that triggered the energy curtain. I half-expected it to fail. After so long a period of neglect, it should have failed, but the graphene battery in the belt pack had held its charge since Padmurak. The fractal curtain sprang up and closed about me, air shimmering a moment before it faded to invisibility. Thus shielded, I put both hands back on my sword and pressed forward, hoping to catch the great king on the defensive. On the steps above, Vati leaped to its master’s defense, but the Prophet threw up a hand to halt its servant in its tracks. The general froze, one hand on the ceramic blade sheathed at its hip.

As we stood facing one another, I heard a distant cry boil from the plain at the foot of the stairs. “Halfmortal!” that fragile human voice rang out. “Halfmortal!”

They had seen me, and soon the cry rose up from a thousand different throats. “Halfmortal!” they shouted, and rallied to their last defense. “Halfmortal!” I lunged, sweeping my blade up to catch the king of the monsters on its hip.

Still clutching its side, the Elusha parried with my own blade, forcing my weapon down. Even injured, the Cielcin lord loomed over me like a breaking wave, its glassy teeth a snarling tangle. “You will not take . . . my victory from me,” it hissed, and slammed its forehead down into my face.

I managed to tuck my chin in the last instant so that the king’s bony brows struck the top of my head and not my nose. The force of it still flattened me, knees buckling like old timbers. I bit my tongue as I struck tile.

I was not the man I was. However resolute, however righteous in my fury, I was not strong enough. My time in the dungeon of Dharan-Tun, on the walls and in the pits and under the knife, had taken so much from me. I could stand, but it was nearly all I could do to stand.

“Another trick!” the Prophet hissed, eyeing my weapon. “Concealed in your suit somehow?” It raised its sword to strike, grunting as the movement stretched the wound in its flank. That instant’s hesitation bought me all the time I needed. I rolled sideways, passing under Elu’s altar, and stumbled back to my feet. The light was still blinking on my gauntlet as I brought the sword back to guard, mindful of the Cielcin grappling with my men at the base of the stair. If I could slay Dorayaica, it might be enough to turn the tide, to break its newly welded-together Cielcin empire back into seventeen hundred little factions. Without a clear leader, they would tear one another apart in their desperation to get at us.

“Hadrian!” Elara yelled. “The Tamerlane! We have to get to the Tamerlane!”

I ignored her. The Tamerlane was no good. Anyone with eyes to see knew that. She would never fly again, could never fly again. That final fall had broken her, and the black smoke heralded huge internal fires. Soon they would spill forth and drink deep of Eue’s airs.

The ship was lost.

The Elusha moved around the altar, bleeding hand pressed to its wounded side. It swept its blade at me. I raised my sword just in time so that wild blow bounced off, skipping like a stone across the surface of still water. The blade circled round, and Syriani slashed downward with all the finality of an executioner.

My left arm saved me, as it had in Colosso so long ago. Kharn Sagara’s printed adamantine bones held fast, and the highmatter caught against my elbow, shearing through suit and skin alike. The force of that blow still staggered me, and I collapsed against the altar. In a blind panic, I seized Syriani by the wrist, stopping its sword’s descent with my good left hand. Before I could slash at it with my own blade, the Elusha’s bloody hand shot down and pinned my arm to the altar beside me. Its teeth flashed.

“Why prolong your struggle?” the monster snarled, voice thick with strain. “You will die!” The Elusha’s blade inched nearer and nearer my face, its rippling edge gleaming like moonlight. Sharp as highmatter was, it would take no force to press through skin and bone and brain. Micron by micron it drew nearer. I tried to free my sword arm, but the monster’s talons clamped down the harder. “You must . . . die.”

I was trapped. I could not even raise my sword again to get it between Syriani’s weapon and my face. The blade was caught pointed down, and my opponent leaned all its terrible weight on my wrist, trapping the weapon beside me, my arm at full spread. The other hand barely held the highmatter from my face then. Saliva dripped from the vampire’s fangs, so near my face I half-expected the creature’s jaws to unhinge and snap forward. I could smell its fetid breath, and the stench of raw meat and corruption mingled with the metallic tang of the blood smeared across its face washed over me.

My tormented shoulder screamed white fire, and I knew I would not last long. The Prophet’s slit nostils flared, and as I turned my face away, I saw it: a faint stirring below. My eyes flickered down to the monster’s wounded side. Blood like mercury dribbled down its flank, staining the beast’s stygian robes. I had struck it a mighty blow, but my weapon had not bitten near deep enough to kill. Still, the injury should have put down any ordinary foe.

I hung there a moment, straining against the Prophet’s inhuman strength, transfixed by the sight of its open side. Had I imagined it? My eyes went back to Syriani’s face, to its teeth bared in a snarl of triumph. Triumph, and comprehension. It knew what I had seen.

Again I looked down, and saw what I could not have seen.

Something pale and wicked slithered beneath the Prophet’s skin, like a fish just beneath the surface of a clouded pool. I felt my eyes stretch wide, remembering the nightmare of my vision in my cell, the pale fingers stretching from the Prophet’s severed neck. Miudanar’s skull loomed over the Prophet’s shoulder, its single, evil eye dead and empty and full of deathless malice.

“What are you?” asked Hadrian Marlowe, voice so terribly small.

“I told you,” the Prophet answered. “I shall become a god!”

It leaned against me with all its weight. My shoulder screamed. I was going to die after all. Even my miracle had been for nothing. The highmatter would pierce my flesh without force, without resistance.

Without resistance.

I had forgotten the very thing Crispin had forgotten so much when we were boys together.

I had forgotten that highmatter was not steel.

The edge needed no force to cut, needed no room to accelerate.

Inches were enough.

Inches were all I had.

And so I stopped trying to free my wrist, stopped trying to raise my sword. I dragged it in instead, angling the point so that I struck the demon king’s leg behind the ankle. Limited though my range of movement was, the weapon notched black armor and severed cloth, bit perhaps halfway through the bone.

Syriani hissed and fell on top of me, its sword falling wide. I slid free, drawing up my sword to make the final strike, to end the Prophet there upon its own altar.

Something huge and solid as stone struck me then, and I went flying through the air, over the heads of the guards battling at the foot of the stairs and into the crowd of men and bodies below. I struggled to sit up, blood clinging to the irinyr cape from the bodies beneath my hands, but it was no good.

The vayadan-general Vati stood atop the steps, its white cloak abandoned, its skeletal form standing tall between its master and me. The beast had flashed toward me with all the speed its augmented body could muster. My shield had insulated me, but the mass of it and the sheer kinetic force of that impact had been enough to hurl me almost a hundred feet from the altar platform.

Something soft had broken my fall, and for an instant I lay there, dazed. The sounds of chaos churned about me, and the world spun and would not still. I turned my head, experienced the sensation of falling. Then my vision cleared, and I found myself staring into what once had been a woman’s face. I could not recognize her. Both eyes were gone, and the flesh of one cheek hung down from her jaw, baring bloodied teeth. I yelled and tied to stand, but the softness beneath me shifted, and I staggered, found I lay on damp red sand amid a carpet of ruined bodies. Fatigues torn apart like parchment paper, strips of skin and meat, offal spilled and stinking clung to my armor.

With a terrible effort, I forced myself to sit up among the carnage.

Men and women warred about me, many of them armed with stolen spears or scimitars. As I looked round, Teyanu squashed one fleeing man beneath its feet, and one of the chimeras lifted a woman above its head and—seizing her by the ankles and under the arms—tore her in two pieces, hurling the pieces over its shoulder to the hungry crowd. The sounds of laughter and fey hooting and of the evil drums filled the circle of Akterumu.

Above me, Vati helped its lord to stand. Syriani still held my sword—my original sword—and glared down at me with narrowed eyes. It favored its right leg, and the left bled furiously before the altar of sacrifice, mingling with the dregs of Bastien’s. To look at it, I had half-severed the royal foot, and knew that ever after the dark lord would walk with a limp.

But it was impossible to take satisfaction in that small victory. The memory of my vision and of the pale thing moving beneath the alien flesh turned my already emptied stomach.

It was all I could do not to fall back and join the dead.

Rough hands seized me. Human hands, I realized, and looking round saw Elara and Ilex and one of the lesser chiliarchs. Petros, that was his name. “On your feet!” Ilex said, trying to lift me. “We have to move!”

“Biqqaa!” Syriani was shouting, pointing with my stolen sword. “Biqqaa totajun wo!”

But the Prophet’s words were lost. Drowned out in the instant that followed.

The light came first, white and angry as the sun until the day shone brighter beneath the Prophet’s eclipse than any day had ever on Eue. The explosion followed a moment after, as air boiled and alien flesh, and before my hearing returned, I felt—rather than heard—the deep concussive booming of guns.

“Impossible.” I felt the word in my bones, and turning looked back.

The Tamerlane had opened fire. Though she lay broken and flightless, doomed as a stranded whale, her every bank and battery glowed red and smoked with fury. Standing among my final friends in all the universe, I raised my sword and laughed.

“Earth!” I shouted, and hurled the word at the Shiomu Elusha, at Syriani Dorayaica and its court of devils. “Earth! Earth and Emperor!” And though my throat was ragged and my ears rang, I heard the words arise in the throats of the defenders gathered nearest me.

“Earth! Earth and Emperor!” they sang, and “Halfmortal! Halfmortal!”

In the shadow of its dead and deathless god, the Prophet staggered, frozen in shock and confusion. I looked round, sharing the beast’s astonishment. My first thought was that it was Lorian, that the little man had overpowered Severine and her guard and done . . . something. But it wasn’t possible. I raised a hand to shade my eyes—for surely that flash had been one of the Tamerlane’s terawatt lasers—and froze.

I was looking at the light on my gauntlet, the light I’d kept seeing on my wrist-terminal throughout my botched execution. It wasn’t a failed sensor or fuel indicator.

It was the comms.

How had I not realized?

Numb, I checked the conduction patch in the collar of my suit just below my ear with my left hand. It was still there. Stupidly, I prodded at the terminal switch on the gauntlet, blade still bright in my hands.

I almost dropped it.

“ ’Tis about time!” came the bright, familiar voice. “I thought I was going to have to come out there and drag you here myself.”

My heart caught in my throat. “Val . . . Valka?”

“Of course ’tis me, anaryan!” her own voice broke, and I choked to hear it. “Get to the Tamerlane!”

“But!” I could hardly think. I looked back up at the Elusha and its generals. We would never again have such a chance.

“ ’Tis no time! You have to run! Get Elara and everyone you can!”

My hands went to my side, and I turned, looking from the temple steps to the ruined battleship, torn in two. About me lay strewn the bodies of dead men and Cielcin, red blood and black thickening the sands.

“Run, damn you! Run!”