VALKA IS ALIVE.

I was still reeling. I had lived so long with so little hope that I had all but abandoned the feeling. To experience it again after so long was a torment terrible as the pit, a desperate joy that ached as redly as the lash.

Alive.

Elara was still at my side, and I seized her by the shoulder. “We have to move!”

About us, the carnage crashed like a sea in storm. We had been accorded our brief island of calm only by the breadth of humanity about us and the new terror of the guns. The Cielcin horde had fractured a bit, those farthest from the temple turning and running for the distant walls of Akterumu. They stood little chance of reaching the wedge of humanity that stretched from the Tamerlane to the shrine of Miudanar’s skull, and so had no reason to remain.

“Valka!” I practically screamed into my comm. “Target the temple! Target the temple! Dorayaica is here!”

Even as I spoke, I felt a blast of wind rush over me, and looking up I saw the crescent shapes of Cielcin lighters wing overhead, repulsors shaking the air as they slewed into a sliding orbit about the Watcher’s skull.

Another voice, rough and tense with focus, answered me. “You’re too close! If I point one of the T-watts your way, it’ll take out the whole building.”

“Corvo?” I could hardly believe it, and wondered if the soaring in my chest was what Lin and Pallino and Valka had felt seeing me return from the dead. “You’re alive!”

“Aye, but not for long if you don’t move. I’m on the bridge. The doctor’s firing up the Ascalon. You have to hurry.” The captain bit each word off. Too clearly I could picture her hunched over the holography well on the Tamerlane’s bridge, desperately directing the action.

“The Ascalon!” I almost laughed for joy. I had forgotten the little Challis-class interceptor. Evidently, so had the Cielcin. Hope blossomed for true. There was a way out. Turning about, I began staggering away from the temple, sword flashing in my hand. Elara and Ilex moved beside me, pushing the men before us. But hope is a delicate thing, and rotted through to horror in the next instant. I missed a step, and the chiliarch, Petros, caught me and kept me on my feet. “Otavia,” I said, voice gone ragged, “what about the others? The Ascalon can’t take even a hundred men!”

There wasn’t any answer.

“Otavia!”

When the Norman captain’s reply came, it was tight as monofilament wire. “I know.”

“There are ninety thousand men out here!” I shouted, throat raw.

“I know!” she shouted back. “There’s nothing I can do!”

“The shuttles!” I said, still moving to stay clear of the carnage. “The lighters!”

The captain snapped, “None of those can make the jump to warp, even if we could field them all.” A pit opened in my bowels, devouring all light. They would be destroyed before they could breach the atmosphere, and they could not hide on Eue, not for the years or decades it would take for reinforcements to come. If any of our people escaped the circle of Akterumu, they would be hunted, hounded for sport across the wastes and choking pits of slime that passed for open spaces and seas on that ruin of a world.

A hundred people. Maybe less.

That was all we could save.

I felt the old Imperial iron straighten my spine, felt jaw clench and sinews stiffen. There was nothing to do but run and fight and save however many we could. But I was not going to die in that terrible place. Not anymore. Not when Valka had come back to me and the fortunes of the world had turned. And yet I knew if any should stay and fight it should be me, knew if any should die that day in the fighting, it should be me.

Pushing that choice aside for the time being, I said, “Elara! Ilex! We have to go!” I pointed my sword toward the hulking ruin of the Tamerlane, heart rising from the ashes of my soul. Valka was alive, and Corvo, too. And if they were alive—then surely Pallino and Crim had made it, too.

Elara’s reply was lost beneath the rolling of the guns. Clouds of vapor and black sand burst in the middle distance, and I saw Cielcin bodies hurled skyward, torn limbs twisted, falling like rain. The Cielcin horde was a chaos, with whole parties peeling away and sprinting across the sands, eager to escape Otavia’s cannons.

“Earth!” someone was shouting.

“To the ship!” I roared, trying to rally the men.

Light drowned the world, blinding the eyes and filling all with a terrible silence. A moment after, a thunder shook creation as the terawatt laser tore through the horde, vaporizing a whole swath of the Cielcin’s right flank. Half-blind but still moving forward, I fell—sword punching a hole in the slick Enari road beneath my feet. As my blurred vision began to clear, I saw what it was I’d tripped over: the torn and headless trunk of a man. Shutting my eyes, I crawled free, scrabbling to my feet. Gunfire shook the desert, and about me all was blood and screaming.

“To the ship!” I yelled again, and shoved a poor, young soldier back in the right direction. Wide-eyed, the boy ran on about twenty feet, buffeted by the passage of the other soldiers alongside. I watched him go, his shaved legionnaire’s head bobbing pale in that sea of black and burgundy. Then one of the demons of Arae leaped ape-like from the sidelines, plowing through our route like a combine through wheat, mowing men beneath it. The creature turned its featureless mask of a face in my direction, white armor streaked with gore. It straightened, drawing itself up to its full height, and barred my path.

Beside me, Ilex swore.

Nowhere to run, I raised my sword high, ready for the attack I knew must come. Memories of the battle with Hushansa on Eikana came back to me, the vayadan’s charge, my vision striking true, the chimera falling in two pieces. Even with the impossible sword in my hand, I was not sure I could do that thing again, and I would need every miracle to defeat such a monster as I was.

It bounded at me on all fours, galloping like a tiger preparing to leap upon a deer.

Though my cry was lost in the noise of the Tamerlane’s cannons firing a mile off, I roared and started forward.

The chimera exploded in the next instant, a thousand tiny pieces spattering the sands about me. Its head struck the roadway at my feet, and I checked my advance, looking up in wonder. Had Corvo made that shot?

“I told you waving that sword around won’t do you much good, boss!”

The voice over my comm almost laughed, and a black shape fell out of the clear sky with a roar of engines and a rush of air. Great wings scooped, repulsors firing as the shuttle plunged out of the blackened sky. I threw an arm across my face as waves of grit and dust kicked up all around. The Cielcin nearest the ship drew back as it sank lower, fearing a salvo like the one that had killed the chimera. Through the grayed alumglass of the cockpit, I could see Crim’s toothy grin, a set grimace offset by the glint of determination in his eyes. He raised a hand in salute as he brought the shuttle in to float inches off the ground. I returned the gesture, spurred Elara forward as Crim worked to turn the shuttle gently round.

Realizing their prey had found escape, the nearest Cielcin closed in.

A hail of plasma fire tore from the open hatch in the shuttle’s starboard side, accompanied by a yell louder almost than the Tamerlane’s distant guns. The spray of violet fire cut the Cielcin charge off at its knees, and smoking bodies fell in ruins, their flesh and armor fused or burned to carbon, cinders torn off by the wind. The shuttle completed its half-turn so that the clamshell side door stood open dead ahead, and there, seated on the lip of the hatchway, with one leg dangling off the side, a heavy plasma rifle tucked against his shoulder, was Pallino.

“Move your tight asses! We haven’t got all day!” the old soldier barked, shifting in the gunner’s seat. The chiliarch still wore the black and red Red Company plate he’d worn during that last, final scramble from Vedatharad, more scratched and worn perhaps, as though he’d gone through hell himself to come to that terrible place, and a short, stiff beard—more gray than black—covered his rough face. But the light in his blue eyes was bright and fierce as ever it had been. He grinned savagely, sighted down the barrel, and fired into the horde. “Now!”

“Pallino!” Elara broke away from me and started toward the shuttle, thrusting up her hand. All around, the crush of humanity started in toward the little ship, each desperate man and wide-eyed woman hoping to get aboard.

I slowed down, safe for a moment with so many between me and the enemy. It was an Ibis-class lander. The Ibises were rated for thirty men, maybe forty—once we accounted for the fact that none of the men on the field were armed or armored.

There was a choice to make.

Whoever climbed aboard that shuttle—like as not—would alone escape that terrible plain. Fewer than a hundred men . . . of ninety thousand. Did I have any right to be one of them? If not for me, they would not have been there. In Akterumu. On Eue. Beneath Dharan-Tun.

“Ilex!” Pallino shouted at the green-faced woman. “Get his lordship and come on!”

The dryad seized me by the arm, and I shook her off. “You go,” I said. “I can make it on foot.”

The one-time engineering officer blinked at me. “You can hardly stand.”

“I can do it,” I said. “Take someone else. No one’s dying in my place.”

“We can’t save them all!” Pallino said, standing in the door of the shuttle. To my horror, the old soldier aimed his weapon down at his fellow humans as they drew near. “That’s far enough! We can’t take all of you. You all need to keep moving to the Tamerlane. I’m here for his lordship!”

All eyes turned to me, and before I could object, a dozen hands reached out and seized me, dragging me forward.

“Lord Marlowe,” one man said, clapping my shoulder.

“Let him through!” another man bellowed, clearing the path before me. Hands stretched toward me, not to hinder me, but just to touch my arms, my cloak, my soiled hair.

“What happened to him?”

“Is that really him?”

“What did they do to him?”

“Black planet!”

“Shit!”

There were tears thick in my eyes then, and I hardly walked straight. The desperate crowd parted, and Ilex and I were shunted forward. I kept my sword held high so as not to harm anyone, and after a moment I stowed the blade. Screams broke out behind, and looking back I saw the flashing scimitars of the Pale not two hundred feet behind. A wall of humanity held them back, men armed or else defenseless grappling with xenobites nearly twice their size, a tide of oil striking water.

We hadn’t long.

Somehow, I made it to the shuttle before Elara, and Pallino stooped—one hand on a bracket inside the door—and offered me his hand. I practically fell onto the shuttle floor, and my old friend helped me to my feet. “You look like hell, Had,” he said, and sniffed. “Smell worse.”

“You’ve looked better.”

He grunted, turned back outside. “We can take thirty-five if you pack in! Move, you dogs!”

I leaned against the bulkhead, chest heaving. Finding that moment of stillness, the tunnel vision of battle faded, and looking out past Pallino where he stood helping the first men onto the shuttle, I beheld the churning sea of flesh behind, the crumbling wall of men hemmed in by the horned and hollow-eyed faces.

They came on like the tide, Cielcin clambering over mounds of bodies and broken limbs. Above it all, a black crescent sailed, winging above the carnage toward the clear air beyond the battlements of Akterumu. Seeing it, I knew Syriani was aboard. The wounded king of monsters would live—if indeed it could be killed at all. Blood like mercury stained my right hand where the Elusha had pinned me, half-dried and chalky. I stared down at it, heedless for a moment to the chaos and the carnage. I kept seeing Syriani’s death in my dreams, the pale fingers snaking out from the severed neck, the alien something struggling to be born.

I shall become a god, the Prophet had said.

The limn of Miudanar’s giant skull shone darkly through the open hatch, its bulk concealed by the shuttle. I could not see its eye. Syriani had said the Watcher whispered to it, that it had heard the dark god’s call. Had I not also heard it? Howling from its place beyond death?

I thought I understood the vision then.

The beast longed for resurrection, and Syriani was its instrument. Or—a worse thought occurred to me. Syriani had been changed in some way, rebuilt from its cells up. Perhaps it was changing still, transforming into something more Watcher than Cielcin, or some unholy hybrid of the two, as though it were Miudanar’s byblow. Its child.

It was suddenly very, very cold.

“Ilex, Elara!” Pallino’s shout shocked me back into my body. “Petros, you too—double quick!” The chiliarch waved furiously to the others, and he thrust his rifle up again to bar the crush of men clustered just below the gate. “Back, you lot!”

Something changed then. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. The air thickened, and the strangled noise of distant screams took on a heightened, fevered pitch. Pallino looked at me, a horror mounting in his rejuvenated eyes. Understanding came to him a moment before me—I saw it in his eyes. But the word went up from some poor man on the ground, and if my blood were ice already, those three syllables plunged my heart to absolute zero.

“Nahute!”

The thickened quality of the air took on new dimension, and I understood that what I sensed—what I felt rather than heard—was the buzzing drone of the xenobites’ most vicious weapon. Over the heads of the onrushing hordes they came, thick as locusts, a swarm of iron serpents seeking flesh. Why the Cielcin had not used them sooner was any man’s guess. Until the shuttle’s coming, there had been a hideous, almost carnival atmosphere to the carnage. We were so outnumbered, so outmatched, unarmed and penned in like sheep. Knowing this, the Cielcin wall that encircled the human knot had advanced with casual violence, tearing men apart in taloned hands—breaking them like bread. Red blood smeared their faces, dripped from wagging tongues, and the air was thick with the noise of jeering and hideous laughter. Yet with the shuttle’s appearance, the pitch of the combat changed, and the revelry and black feast of the Pale turned from festival to fury, fury that any of their prey might challenge them and escape.

In the instant before the cloud of nahute struck the group clambering into the shuttle, I had a clear impression of one of the inhuman banner-bearers, a coteliho hoisting its slim flag high on its lance. A human head topped that banner, its open throat pierced by the metal shaft so that blood stained the black silks. Shave-pated as it was, it might have been any of the common soldiery, but I knew it must be young Halford. I thought I recognized the prominent ears, even so far off.

Ilex accepted Pallino’s hand up even as the nahute tore into the desperate men, drill mouths whirring, whining high and sharp in counterpoint to the deep hum of their repulsors. The primitive things tracked heat and motion, their spinning maws chewing flesh and bone to pulp to reach center mass. Men struck by those awful projectiles shrieked, clawed at the flying serpents with desperate fingers as carbon teeth bit deep and pulped their tender flesh. Unshielded, unarmored, the men on the ground never stood a chance.

Roaring, Pallino threaded the air above the panicking men with plasma, and dozens of the evil things fell upon the survivors in smoking, half-molten heaps, but it did no good. For every one the myrmidon felled, three more got through and latched like leeches to the meat of some poor bastard below. Men stumbled and fell, frantic hands trying in vain to tug the slithering iron eels from bellies and from under ribs.

“Elara!” Pallino thrust out his arm.

She’d gotten separated from Ilex and from me in the crush of bodies and the scramble to reach the ship. Indeed, the same crowd which had parted to spur me on had pushed her aside, blocked her approach. Ilex staggered against the bulkhead beside me, banged open the inner hatch to join Crim. I heard the Norman assassin’s voice sharp as killing steel. “Pallino, we have to go!”

But the old myrmidon ignored him, let his rifle drop and swing from its shoulder strap as he reached further out. “Slew to starboard, Crim, you Norman bastard!”

I could almost feel the tension in Crim’s jaw as he torqued the yoke sideways. Repulsors twisted in their fixtures in the Ibis’s short wings, and the whole shuttle plowed right, knocking down men and women like blades of grass. I wanted to turn away—so horrible was that sight—but found I could no longer move. I gripped an overhead bar instead, ignored the eyes of the men nearest me, stared fixedly at Pallino, his hand outstretched.

Thirty feet separated the chiliarch from his woman. Elara raised her own hand in answer, her dark eyes white and wild in her terror among the survivors yet stranded on the ground. Miudanar’s massive skull loomed a thousand feet behind, and looking into its eye I felt again its whispers slithering across my mind.

“Come on!” Pallino yelled.

One man caught the lip of the shuttle hatch, tried to climb in, but it was no good. He slipped, leaving bloody handprints on the metal floor, and struck his chin as he tumbled back. The Cielcin were in among the survivors then—where once had been a wall of ragged defenders, there was running mayhem as the odd survivors darted every which way, desperate to join the greater mass of humanity running toward the Tamerlane a mile off.

Elara’s hand flew above the gathered heads like a banner. Pallino crouched lower, hanging onto the handle just inside the hatchway, face stretched in a desperate grimace. Hand reached for hand.

“I’ve got you!” Pallino grunted, arm shaking as he tried to pull his woman one-handed from the throng below. The shuttle swayed, but Elara rose, feet leaving the ground. Another man leaped and tried to claw his way through the hatch. Those crowded into the Ibis’s compartment crouched and tried to help Elara and the other man into the ship, while those behind them held the men in front, so that all the men in the shuttle compartment were linked together: a single, defiant organism.

“Go, Crim!” Ilex shouted, slapping the bulkhead behind the pilot’s chair.

The Norman mercenary wasted no time, flicked a series of controls. The wings extended, cupping the air, and the humming whine of repulsors intensified. The shuttle began to rise. A red sea spread beneath us, the field strewn with corpses. Some of the bodies still moved, twitching as nahute burrowed through them, darting from man to man. About the fringes, Cielcin stooped, vampire-like, and tore flesh from bone with teeth like knives. Here and there I saw naked men and women pinned—still struggling—each against two or three of the Pale. Seeing the way they moved, I thought of Gurana, and was very nearly sick.

“God of Fire, she’s heavy!” Crim swore.

“Pull me up!” Elara said, strain evident in her voice.

Pallino’s reply was fierce. “I’m trying!”

Two of the men scrambled to help the chiliarch, one holding the other’s belt as he leaned out to seize the myrmidon by the wrist. “Drop your sword, ma’am!” one of the others shouted. Beside her, the other man had half-climbed through the hatch edge.

Elara hesitated only a moment, released the scimitar. It tumbled down into the abbatoir below the shuttle. I was useless, crushed against the bulkhead by the mass of humanity crammed into that narrow compartment. The air stank of iron and musk. The fellow seized Elara’s hand, and between him and Pallino they pulled her high enough that she planted her knees on the lip of the hatchway.

Something struck Elara in the back, slamming her into Pallino’s arms. She opened her mouth to scream, but blood ran out instead. A high, grinding wail resounded through the cabin.

“No!” Pallino’s hands slapped at her back, trying to find the tail of the evil machine that had bored its way into his lover’s back. Elara sagged against him. Pallino closed his fist around the braided metal of the nahute, and with a yell like the breaking of the world—which I supposed it was—he pulled the evil thing from Elara’s back. The nahute’s head still spun, spraying blood and bits of gore across Pallino’s face and the open hatch beside him. The old soldier stared down Elara’s murderer, half in fury, half in disbelief, and smashed its head and carbon teeth against the bulkhead. “No!” he said again, dropping the busted weapon out the open hatch. “No no no no no no no!” He cradled her head in his hands. “Just when I’d found you again.” He kissed her, but her head lolled back.

It was too late. Elara was already dead.

The other man was hoisted to safety a moment later, and Crim turned the shuttle around, fat and sluggish on the air. Though we moved, all were still. A nahute’s wounds were always traumatic, teeth grinding organ and bone, leaving a gaping hole an inch across. Never straight like the wound of knife or sword, but winding through the body like a worm through fruit. Pallino had stopped the drone entering Elara completely, but there was no telling how severe the internal damage had been.

There had never been any saving her.

“You’ve got to let her go, Pal,” Ilex said, voice gentle as could be. “We can’t take her with us.” She was right: packed as we were into the Ibis, there was no room to lay a body down.

Pallino turned to look at her—to look at me. I had never seen the rough old soldier so bereft, face an open of empty, jaw trembling for want of words. “I . . .” Tears filled those piercing blue eyes for the first time I could remember. “I . . . we can put her in a creche.”

He wasn’t wrong. If we could get her to the Tamerlane, to the Ascalon, if we could pack her into fugue fast enough, it might arrest brain death long enough to get her to a surgeon. Damaged organs could be regrown.

“There isn’t time, sir,” said one of the others near the back, a thin woman with the green star of a medical technician on her upper arm. “We’d have to get her prepped inside ten minutes. We don’t have a field kit.” As if to emphasize this point, the Ibis rocked beneath us, and the noise of killing and death wafted through the open hatchway.

“We can’t carry her,” Ilex said. “You can’t. We need you.”

“Pallino,” came a dry, far-off voice, “I’m sorry.” Only when the words were spoken did I realize they were my own.

The chiliarch blinked at me, blue eyes blacker and more hollow than the eyes of any Cielcin. “I . . .” He shut those eyes, nodded, and kept nodding, as if he were trying to persuade himself. “I’m sorry,” he rasped, and let Elara go.

She tipped backward, fell almost gracefully from the lip of the hatch and out into the clear air. Eyes still shut, Pallino pounded the hatch control with his fist and slumped against the bulkhead.

There would be time to mourn Elara later.

“Lord Marlowe?” I looked round, found a round-faced young legionary looking at me, hairless and pale. “What is this place?”

I blinked at him. A plebeian, the lad couldn’t have been older than twenty years standard, nearly so young as I had been when I left Delos. Looking past him, I marked the other faces watching me. Pallino did not look up. A shadow lay on him, obscuring his eyes.

Why, this is hell, I thought, but did not say. Nor are we out of it.

But I said, “It’s their home, soldier. Or as near to one as they have.” The color drained from several faces, and I marked that the other chiliarch, Petros, was not among them. The officer had been left on the ground.

The shuttle shook beneath us, and I turned—clutching my Cielcin cloak about my shoulders—and pressed through the inner hatch to where Ilex leaned over Crim in the pilot’s seat. The Tamerlane lay dead ahead, a veritable mountain of steel.

“Are we hit?” I asked.

Ilex gripped Crim’s shoulder, and the assassin replied, “If you climb out of this shuttle too, boss, I’ll kill you.”

I did not laugh.

“They are firing on us. It’s those damned chimeras,” Crim said. “Shields are holding.” He banked the shuttle, steering right along the broken length of the Tamerlane toward the great vessel’s stern.

Valka’s voice sounded over mine and the shuttle’s comms, broadcasting on all channels. “Crim. Where are you?”

“Above the ship. Port side. About three miles out.”

“You cleared the landing zone?”

“Aye, doctor,” the Norman replied.

“And Hadrian?”

“I’m here!” I shouted over the din of the guns firing away a thousand feet beneath us. Crim had tipped the Ibis into a steep climb that brought us up and over the crumbling hull, clear of the swarming nahute, clear of the chimera’s weapons.

“We lost Elara,” Ilex said, words raw and rough-edged. “And Bastien.”

“We’re losing everyone,” I said, slumped against the hatchway door. Ilex’s words struck me as pitifully inadequate, almost insane. Below us, the entire Red Company was dying. And I should have been dying with them, should almost have died upon the altar.

“Khun!” Valka swore in her native tongue. I pictured her hunched over a console aboard the Ascalon, knuckles white. “I’m almost ready here. Hurry!”

“Fast as we can,” came Crim’s terse reply.

The shuttle sped through a pillar of smoke black as hell, and beyond the walls of Akterumu loomed high as mountains. Really seeing them for the first time, Ilex gasped. “They built all this?” she breathed.

“They didn’t build anything,” I said, drawing looks even from Crim, who arched his eyebrows.

An explosion rocked the Ibis then, and the Norman cursed and banked left, pitching the shuttle into a dive that brought the Tamerlane hurtling up to meet us. Ilex staggered into me, and I caught her, braced as I was in the door. The men behind us shouted and stumbled, rattling like loose coins in a box. Crim tweaked the yoke back, leveling off a mere dozen yards from the black surface. I cannot recall ever having seen the hull from so close before. The adamant was not truly black, but the deep gray of charcoal, ridged with an almost fibrous texture. It slanted up and away to our left, a megalithic plane rising toward the darkened sky. Huge rents showed in its surface where the substance had fractured along the seams between hull segments. Each segment was itself a single molecule, thousands of feet long and hundreds wide and bonded to the battleship’s carbon and titanium frame.

She was collapsing under her own weight.

Red light streamed through the alumglass canopy, and the shuttle rattled as another blast sounded.

“Noyn jitat!” Crim hissed. “That was close!”

“What’s firing on us?”

A horrible noise flooded the air—sounded even over the shuttle’s comms system—a wailing screech so high and so thin I thought it must scratch the very glass above us.

“It’s the Hand,” I said, and I was shocked to hear just how quiet my voice was.

As if to answer the question no one had time to ask, a thin, white shape landed on the canopy of shuttle, gripping the frame with slender hands. Membranous huge wings spread wide, filling our vision and the air. Aulamn’s red eyes pierced the canopy and locked onto my face. It did not speak, but offered that horrid cry again as a short appendage flicked up over its left shoulder like the tail of scorpion. I recognized the energy-lance an instant before it fired, and shoved Ilex roughly to the ground to shield her with my body. The invisible beam struck the canopy, made it glow. It softened where the weapon beam had struck, red as the monster’s eyes.

“Get it off!” I yelled, hearing the confused shouts of men in the compartment behind.

Crim jerked the yoke up and to one side, tipping the shuttle into a spin that carried us over the Tamerlane’s meridian and along her sloping far side, away from the carnage toward the side that faced the greater desert and the gates of Akterumu.

Aulamn braced itself, but held fast. Its eyes never left my face, not for a second. Even as the shuttle spiraled and the horizon flipped behind it, the vayadan-general drew back its hand—bladed finger held flat like a blade—and stabbed at the glass just above the gleaming point the beast’s lance beam had made. Aulamn’s hand bounced off the canopy with a metallic ping. Undeterred, the general punched again, and the ceramic cracked. Crim cut his spin and slammed the air brake, repulsors kicking back to bleed momentum and force the giant off.

It didn’t work.

The vayadan-general hammered again, wielding its fingers like a mattock, forearm spiking with more force than cannon fire. “Do something!” Ilex screamed.

“I’m all ears!”

The alumglass withstood one blow, then a second. A third.

But four was one too many. Four—so the Nipponese say—is Death.

The winged general’s hand smashed the ceramic canopy to flinders, and I threw my cape across Ilex to save her from the spray of shattered glass.

It was a small mercy. It spared her one final sight of Crim.

The Norman did not cry out as white fingers seized him and tore him—straps and all, from his seat. Crim—Karim Garone—did not curse or flail. His hands went to his belt, to the bandoleer that housed his countless knives. His Jaddian kaftan—striped red and white—fluttered like wings of his own as he plunged one of the vibrating blades deep into Aulamn’s eye. He moved fast as any man I’d ever seen, but it wasn’t fast enough. That blow, which would have felled any man or any Cielcin, would not fell the chimera. Knife still in its socket, Aulamn squeezed. Fingers tightening about his throat, Crim groaned.

“Crim! No!” Ilex shouted. It was Pallino and Elara all over again.

I had to hold Ilex down—kept my cloak over her eyes. The shuttle was starting to spin, was held aloft by its repulsors, but drifted without course, spiraling along its trajectory with what scarce remained of its momentum. An alarm beeped violently, shouting over the wind and the whine of the half-machine thing that grasped my dying friend and servant.

I raised my sword and moved forward, but Crim raised a hand and with his last strength shoved me toward the rear compartment. “Get her out of here!” he grunted, and as Aulamn clenched its fingers, Crim raised a hand in defiance, first and final fingers raised to curse his killer.

The devil’s horns.

The vayadan’s fingers tightened, squeezed Crim’s head from his shoulders as though he were a clay mommet in the fist of an angry boy. Flesh pulped and tore, blood ran . . . and it was only after that final moment that I understood the assassin’s gesture.

It was not an alarm I heard beeping.

The charges exploded in the next instant. Three sharp bursts. Staccato. Two on Aulamn’s arm, a third on its chest. When had Crim placed them? The little magnetic mines blew the Iedyr’s arm apart, and the third blasted Aulamn back and out of the compartment. The shuttle jerked wildly, and I guessed it struck a wing on its way out and down.

An alarm did start then for true, and I lurched to the console—trying not to look at the pulped remains of my friend—and seized the yoke. I tried desperately to level off, but the Ibis was beyond help.

“Get in back!” I howled at Ilex, then to the shuttle at large, “Brace yourselves!”

We struck the hull an instant later, metal grinding on adamant with a noise almost so terrible as Aulamn’s battle cry. Valka shouted in my ear, but I ignored her. There wasn’t time. We were down, and I killed power to the repulsors. There was nothing to do. No brakes to be had, and to deploy the landing peds in that moment would have been worse than useless. I’d bitten my tongue on impact, and the taste of iron filled my mouth.

I spat.

“Pallino!” I said. “We need to move!”

Someone opened the side hatches in the rear compartment. I saw gray light streaming in. Dharan-Tun had begun passing away from the face of Eue’s sun, and the air had a dense, chalky quality. Not hesitating to stand on ceremony we could not afford, I tugged Crim’s bloodstained pistol from its holster and handed it to Ilex by the barrel. “I need you with me,” I said, standing as best I could between her and her dead man.

There were tears in the dryad’s amber eyes, but they had yet to fall. “He saved our lives,” I said, hand shaking as I held out the gun and ashamed that she had seen it. “Let’s not waste them.”

Ilex reached out to take the gun. Her own hands were still, and the tears in her eyes held to their place as she said, “You could have saved him.”

“What?” I blinked at her.

“You could have saved him,” she said again, more sharply.

I found I was shaking my head. “I couldn’t have.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Marlowe,” she said, tearing the gun from my trembling fingers. Not Hadrian, I have always remembered that, but Marlowe. “You could have made that thing’s arm break against the window or made it pass right through him . . .” she glared past me to where Crim’s body lay pulped and dripping in the pilot’s seat, “. . . but you didn’t.”

I wanted to tell her there was nothing I could have done, wanted to tell her how weak I was, how tenuous was my grasp of the vision. I wanted to tell her I hadn’t had enough time, that I hadn’t been fast enough—couldn’t have been fast enough. But it didn’t matter. None of it would have mattered. Like Pallino, she was in pain, and nothing I could have said would reach her in that dread kingdom.

So I shook my head instead. The dryad’s pointed face twisted in disgust, and she turned and stormed out of the cockpit.

I lingered only long enough to tug one of Crim’s knives free from his bandoleer. I am not a religious man, and even if I were, Crim was of the Jaddian faith, and I did not know what words might best convey his fravashi spirit to his lord of light. I bowed my head instead, and was quiet.