“NOT FAR,” I SAID, not speaking to any of the others in particular as we hurried along the busted tramway. Stumbling, I leaned against the tunnel wall, gloves leaving bloody handprints on the raw metal. “Not far.”

Most of the others had hurried on as I had ordered, had gone to retrieve Corvo from the bridge, or else gone on ahead directly to the Ascalon where it waited in one of the rear holds. I coughed again, both from the residual effects of the MINOS toxin and from the thin layer of smoke that filled the tunnel. Blood pounded in my ears with the strain of running, and thirst thickened my tongue.

“Forget the horse . . .” I murmured, doubtless sounding mad to the few men who’d remained—the ensign, Leon, among them. My kingdom for a drink.

Otavia’s voice sounded in my ear, relayed through the patch in my suit’s collar. “They’ve landed those shuttles on the dorsal hull. The ship is breached.”

“Is the Ascalon still clear?” I asked, and spurred myself to motion.

“For now.”

“I sent a few of the men to get you.” My bootheels rang on the metal decking, accompanied by the dry snap of the others’ bare feet. The whole hall sloped upward toward the stern, so that by every step we climbed higher. Everything was askew, canted, lending a sense of imbalance to the world.

And the world was off its axis.

Pallino was dead. And Ilex. And Crim. Elara, Durand, Koskinen, Pherrine, Halford . . . the whole Red Company. Dead. Gone. “What about the main force?” I asked, climbing past the opening of a cross tunnel, a juncture where the Tamerlane’s defunct tram network branched, traveling across the ship rather than longitudinally. Somewhere up ahead there was a guard station, one of the reinforced holdouts ship’s security used. There’d be weapons there, and a new charge pack for my shield.

Corvo’s words stumbled over the line. “They’re . . . almost finished outside.”

Almost finished. The words had an ominous ring, cover that they were on the truth: that what the Cielcin were almost finished with was the wholesale slaughter of ninety thousand human souls. Unable to help myself, I pounded my fist on the bulkhead, sending a spasm of pain lancing up my right arm. Before long, the halls of the Tamerlane would be lousy with Cielcin warriors, and our mad dash would become a wild hunt.

“Lord Marlowe!” Leon’s voice rang back from two dozen paces ahead. “It’s here!”

The guard station door was dead, and required three men to prise it open. I’d tried my sword, but the Jaddian blade only smoked and hissed, spitting sparks. Closer inspection confirmed my worst fears: the reservoir that held the blade’s pentaquark highmatter had cracked in Aulamn’s grasp, allowing the exotic matter to escape confinement.

The old thing was dead.

But there was no time to grieve over the loss of the weapon, just as there was no time to grieve over so much loss of life. Leon and the other survivors found phase disruptors in a wall safe and shield belts on a rack. They kitted up with shaky efficiency—two were limping badly from foot or leg injuries, and all wore a grave mask to hide the horror in their souls. I struggled to remind myself that I was not alone anymore, not alone in my suffering.

It was hard.

“Here, sir.” Leon extended his arm. I looked at the phase disruptor in my left hand—I could hold it with the right, but not well—and checked the new power pack on my shield belt.

“Phase disruptor won’t stop Cielcin on a single shot,” I told him, and told them all. The myelin-like substance that insulated the xenobites’ nerves was thicker than our own, more resistant to the disruptor’s energies. “You see one, you fire until it drops.” Leon and the others nodded and made curt, affirmative sounds. “All systems blue?” I asked, sweeping my eyes over the others, battered and dead-eyed. A scant dozen, maybe less.

One woman—a shaved-pate conscript with the Red Company sigil tattooed on her neck—checked her weapon and said, “Sir.”

“Let’s move.”

We left the guard station and the tramway platform, hurried instead into an ordinary hall lit only by the red glow of emergency lighting. That light evoked memories of the dungeons of Dharan-Tun, and I felt my chest constrict. Fear is a poison, I told myself, but the aphorism did little to admonish my tortured nerves. Fear is a poison.

The smoke grew thicker as we climbed. Not far ahead, a bank of lift tubes ran the height of the great ship. Those lifts were sure to be dead. While the weapons systems still operated under emergency power, it was all but certain the fall had damaged the lift tubes and bent them beyond all hope of repair or function. We would have to climb down the access stairs, relying on maintenance corridors to reach the launch bay that housed the Ascalon.

Without warning, the deck beneath our feet gave way, buckled and dropped half a cubit before juddering to a halt. “Earth and Emperor!” one of the men shouted, leaping toward the wall.

“Keep moving!” I said, and led the way in stepping up onto the next segment of the hall. The whole ship was crumbling, collapsing under its own weight like some delicate sea creature cast upon the land. The metal corridor had sheared, split along a weld line, the metal tearing like paper. The low screeching of tortured alloy chased us up the hall.

Again Corvo sounded in my ear, “They’re in the ship. I’ve locked down all the emergency doors I could, but they’ll get in.”

We hadn’t far to go, another half mile up the corridor to the lift lobby, and then down the stairs several flights to the launch bays. “Are the others there for you yet?”

“Not yet,” she answered.

“Damn them, then,” I said. “You get out of there. We’re nearly to the lifts.”

Valka’s voice chimed in, bright but tense as piano wire. “Where are you?”

“G-Level, about half a mile forward of the lifts.”

“G-Level?” the dismay in Valka’s voice was an almost solid thing. A thing with mass, with volume. “You’re eighty-four levels up.”

That news only gave me a moment’s pause, and I watched Leon and the bald woman hurry past me, disruptors at the ready. I’d known it was something like that. “At least we’re going down,” I said, and added, “This whole place is falling apart.”

“She was never meant to land,” Valka replied. Then, in a quieter voice, as if to herself, she continued. “The Cielcin purged the main fuel tanks, but they missed the Ascalon.”

Corvo chimed in, “They must have thought it was a shuttle. Didn’t look too close.”

“Corvo, you need to move. You’re farther from the launch bay than we are.”

“I’m also faster than you,” came the captain’s retort. “You need to hurry. They found that hatch you cut open. How many are with you?”

I counted. “Eleven.”

“Eleven?” I could almost picture Corvo’s horrified face. Then she asked the next, terrible question. “Crim? Pallino?”

My eyes slid closed, but I kept moving, the motion of my screaming legs made mechanical by sheer and desperate necessity. “They didn’t make it.”

Both women’s silence deafened me, and so I barely heard the first shots fired by the men ahead of me. But their oaths grabbed my attention.

“Earth and Emperor!”

“How’d they get ahead of us?”

“Back!” one yelled, and I recognized the voice of the bald woman. “Back!”

Their bare feet slapped on the metal flooring, and their eyes were wide as they barreled back down the hall toward me, slowing only so long as it took to half-turn and fire back up the hall. Pale faces emerged from the dark behind, white-horned Cielcin faces with eyes like the black of space, teeth flashing, black and glossy in the dim red glow of the emergency sconces. They must have cut their way through another of the hatches on the dorsal hull and found the stairs.

Now they stood between us and the Ascalon. Between Valka and me.

“Back!” I called along with the others, then seeing a branching ahead, said, “Left! Back to the tramway!” My breath burned in my lungs, but I ran anyway, raw flames where my legs should have been. I felt half a corpse running, and half-lost my footing rounding that corner. Hexagonal portals stood shut to either side, the doors to what once had been the cabins of junior officers. We were running toward the Tamerlane’s port side through the dormitory grid. Not far ahead would be a tram line that ran along the battleship’s central spin, connecting the officers’ quarters with the main bridge, which lay at the vessel’s extreme front end. The tram line itself was almost certainly broken, snapped when the ship had crashed. But the surrounding tunnel was still intact enough—we had traveled up it to reach the guard station.

The ship’s trams had not only traveled the length of the vessel, but moved vertically as well, or along sloping shafts that connected to lower decks and connected several of the Tamerlane’s more critical zones. If the stairs were barred to us, we might take the tramway down several layers—even without a car—and so find our way to one of the other lift carousels and another stair.

We hadn’t far to go.

At the end of the side hall, I turned right. Several of the others had outpaced me, though Leon stayed ever just two or three paces ahead. A rectangular opening in the left wall led out onto another tram platform, and the foremost of our company had reached the platform’s striped black and yellow edge. There he waited, disruptor raised to fire. At his back one of the cars waited, its running lights all dead.

“Onto the track!” I shouted, waving for the man to leap ahead.

He fired instead, and I heard an alien groan and—looking back over my shoulder—saw a Cielcin stagger and catch itself on the door. It couldn’t have been more than thirty feet behind.

“I’ll cover you,” he said, then said to one of the others, “Garan, the door!” He fired again, caught the Cielcin in the face. The second shot felled the creature, and it fell to the ground, scimitar clattering.

One of the others followed the gunman’s finger to the control panel that ran the great sliding door to the hall. “No!” I shouted, knowing the panel was dead. “No time!” I shoved the gunman toward the track. But the man on the door did not stop, and slammed the emergency switch. As I expected, the door did not move. It was dead, just as I’d suspected. “Go!” I slid down the steep metal slope to the electromagnetic rail, boots clattering on the corrugated flooring. Leon and the bald woman skidded down just ahead of me, along with a handful of the others. The one called Garan and the gunman were still above, and an instant later I heard the electric hiss of disruptor fire and more Cielcin shouting.

Not far . . . I told myself. Not far.

More shouting from the deck above, then a human cry, and the gunman shouting, “Garan!”

A Cielcin voice rose above the din behind. “Bayarraa o-totajun! Bayarraa o-totajun!”

Cut them off.

“Corvo!” I shouted, pressing fingers to my collar. “Get to the Ascalon! There isn’t any time to waste!”

“I can still keep the main force from boarding,” came the captain’s firm reply.

“Otavia, run!” Valka said.

The whole ship shook under us, and distantly I heard the screech of tortured metal. The ground shook, and gouts of black smoke billowed in from a side passage up ahead, red-lit from beneath.

“This whole place is falling apart!” Leon said at my side.

Rather than reply, I said, “There should be a down shaft up ahead! Maintenance stair on the right.”

“Are you sure?”

“Just move!”

All my years of solitude and slow wandering aboard the sleeping Tamerlane had paid for themselves. I knew I was right. The tram shaft did not penetrate all the way down to the level of the bays. We would have to find our way by a different road, but it would free us from our pursuers.

Not far . . .

The hall sloped upward, and ahead the red lights shone brighter. Perhaps two hundred paces from us, the tramway widened. The shaft! My boots clattered on the metal floor, multiplying the sound of our flight to the noise of a platoon. The dry clatter of Cielcin talons shook the hall behind.

“Kiannaa!” their fell voices cried. “Kiannaa, yukajjimn-kih! Kiannaa eza ujarraa!”

Run! Run!

Their shrill and hooting laughter spurred us on like whips, and I fired blindly over my shoulder . . . and stopped, frozen with dismay.

Black shapes appeared on the slope above us, white scimitars gleaming redly in their hands. The Cielcin formed a wall, filling the tunnel ahead.

Cut them off, they’d said.

They had.

“We have you!” their captain called. “Svassaa!”

“Hadrian?” Valka’s voice sounded in my ear. “Hadrian, what’s happening?”

I did not answer her.

It was over. All of it. All . . . over. I had lost. We had lost. Humanity had lost. I had dared to hope, had produced a miracle. But my sword was broken, and my hopes had proved in vain.

Lies.

The deck shook beneath us, and I turned back, saw the pursuers hurrying up the ramps to fill in behind. There was no side passage. No way out.

“Svassaa!” the Cielcin captain called. Surrender.

“Wemayu udim!” I shouted. A black spirit lay on me, and I spread my hands, throwing back my irinyr cape. “Death first!” I would not be taken alive, would not return to slavery and torment in the bowels of Dharan-Tun. I would follow Pallino, as Pallino had followed Elara. And Valka would follow me.

Valka . . .

I would never see Valka again, I knew. And she was so close. After so long, after seven years in the dungeons of the Prophet, I was minutes from her side.

It may as well have been millennia.

The captain cocked its head, and behind its white and featureless mask, I guessed it must have smiled. “Death?” it said. “You are dead already! You are ours! You are his!”

About me, Leon and the others shuddered and drew close, disruptors raised and primed, their slit muzzles glowing more red than the emergency lights.

“Hadrian!” Valka chimed in my ear.

“It’s over,” I said to her.

“What’s going on?”

“I love you.”

She didn’t answer. I knew what she must say.

Well, you’re not wrong.

I said nothing to the Pale. I would not give them a choice. I raised the disruptor, leveled its maw at the captain. It wore no pilfered shield, no spoil stolen from human victims.

I fired.

The bolt struck the captain full in the face. It went to one knee, cursing. Futile though I knew resistance was, I would not die a coward. Broken though I was, I would not die in pieces. I shot again, pulled the trigger a third time. The captain fell dead, smoking from where the disruptor had at last fried its hardened nerves. Training the gun on the next target, I ran forward, firing, meant to run straight into their line. I had no sword, and would be hacked to pieces.

But the deck beneath my feet buckled, black smoke rising all about. All froze where they stood, and about us metal screamed and bent, and the whole shaft buckled like rotting wood. I yelled, and heard Valka scream in my ear. The whole horrible iron labyrinth collapsed around me, blue sparks flying where wires tore. The world tumbled about me, and I caught confused snatches of men and of monsters falling all around, and of flames rushing past.

“Hadrian!” I heard Valka scream again.

I was falling, falling through open air. Pain flared as I struck the deck below with my bad shoulder, and I tumbled farther still. My last impression was of dark metal rushing up to meet me, then darkness fell like a hammer blow.

“Hadrian!” a familiar voice kept calling, bright and sharp as glass. “Hadrian Anaxander Marlowe, you bastard! Wake up!”

Anaxander, I remembered thinking. What sort of name is Anaxander?

Greek.

It was Greek.

“Damn your purple fucking eyes, are you there?”

“Valka?”

Valka let out a relieved breath. I could almost see her eyes close, chest empty of tension and of air. “I thought you were dead.”

I felt dead. My head rang, and every muscle ached as though tenderized with a wooden mallet. I was lying on the floor atop a heap of ruined metal, broken struts and torn wires and bent slabs of floor. “Where am I?”

I was alone, and reminded myself that Valka was aboard the Ascalon. I had to find the Ascalon. My arms shook as I heaved myself to my feet. Only chance had kept me from being buried. When I’d landed in this new hall, I must have rolled forward of the greater part of the crash, for looking round I saw the snarled mass of the cave in at my back, ruined metal and bodies tangled, filling up the space behind. Those few steps I’d taken toward the Cielcin army, my suicidal final charge, had—by perverse act of providence—saved my life.

“Leon?” I said, casting about for any sign of life from the others. “Leon?”

“Who’s Leon?” Valka asked.

I did not answer her. It took all my concentration and every ounce of strength just to stand, just to contemplate the need to carry on. My arms trembled as I heaved myself to a kneeling position. “How long have I been out?”

“Ten minutes,” she said. “Otavia said there was a cave-in.”

I nodded, said nothing. Ten minutes. Not long, but long enough to know that I was reasonably safe. Were there still Cielcin about, they would have been on me long before then. I’d been lucky, in a perverse sort of way. The dense black smoke of electrical fires dotted the hill of ruined metal at my back, lit from beneath by oily red flame. The scent of burnt plastic and burning hair filled the corridor, and I choked. I took a step. My ankle lit up with pain. I tested it. It was not broken. Still, it flared with every odd step.

“They’re all dead,” I said, and a broken laugh escaped me then. “Every one.”

“We’re running out of time, Hadrian!” Valka said. “They must be all over the ship by now!”

Leaning against a damaged bulkhead, I pressed begrimed gauntlets to my eyes, hoping the pressure would relieve some of the pain splitting my head apart. Somehow, it made me cough instead, and I doubled over, tried to spit. So dehydrated was I—I had had no water since before the great march and pilgrimage of the Cielcin. Had that really only been that morning? How long were the days on that accursed planet?

“I know . . .” I managed at last. “I’m coming . . .”

A pair of dead Cielcin lay not far ahead, one crushed by a heavy beam, the other half-buried where the corridor wall buckled along the right side. From the way the soft part of the monster’s skull behind and beneath the crest had caved in, I guessed the beast had died in the fall, and was glad of my recharged shield, which I felt certain had saved my life. The hilt of the inhuman warrior’s scimitar stuck out from beneath it.

I had no weapon. I’d lost the phase disruptor in the fall.

Stooping, I tugged the hooked and milky blade from beneath the dead creature. Point to pommel, the blade came nearly to my chin, making it longer than any rapier or longsword, and so heavy—next to highmatter—that I knew I would need two hands to wield it. That was just as well; my right was as good as useless on its own. I used the blade as a cane instead, rested my weight against the zirconium point. The shaft should still have been just ahead, up the slope of the ruined corridor and under the snapped cross-beam where the roof above had buckled, nearly blocking the passage. The only way forward lay through a narrow wedge of space against the left side—a slit just wide enough for a man to pass.

I made a step toward it, leaning gingerly on my twisted ankle.

Something made me pause, and I looked back down at the body of the Cielcin I’d despoiled. There was something out of place. My vision and sense of balance still hazy, I sank to one knee beside the corpse—pausing long enough to prod the body with the sword to ensure it was truly dead. My eyes settled on the thing that had bothered me after just a moment. There was a fine silver chain strung about its neck. That was not remarkable in itself—the Cielcin were always wearing silver—but the chain was clearly of human make, its links fashioned of fine, interlinking squares in a style wholly alien to the xenobites.

A style I knew all too well.

“No . . .” I said, raising shaking fingers to tug the chain out from beneath the fallen warrior. It wasn’t possible. It simply wasn’t possible. And yet . . .

Numb fingers found the pendant a moment after, and I held it in my fingers, astonishment washing over me like a wave.

White as white and whiter still the Quiet’s shell shone, set neatly within its silver ring and held in place by delicate pins. I looked at it for what felt like lifetimes, stunned by the mere fact of its presence. Looking at it, I felt a deep and overriding sense of weight, of purpose, as though that chain held not a necklace, but the world. I closed my fingers about the medallion, reassuring myself that it was real.

It was.

What improbable journey had it undertaken to return to me from the hands of the slave who had taken it? Had this Cielcin taken it from the poor, aglossal bastard who had robbed me when I hung from the walls of the Dhar-Iagon? Or had it come by some road longer and stranger still?

I opened my fingers, and stared down at the shard of shell as though it were a holy relic—which I suppose it was. Syriani claimed that Utannash, the Quiet, had created our world—our entire universe. Was it not then a god, if not one begotten of its own creation? It was a relic, as was I, and looking at it then—in that place, that hell, of all places—I believed. The Quiet had placed it there that I might find it. It, he, had placed the sword that I might be drawn to it. He had saved me when all the others had fallen, preserved me as he had delivered me from death beneath Aranata’s sword.

Clutching the relic tight, I stood, and—leaning on my pilfered sword for support—I moved on.

The shaft was where I had hoped to find it, and the stair. My boots rang on the powdered metal, and I tried not to look down. The shaft plunged some sixty levels down, and only a steel grill separated the maintenance stair from the tram shaft, and a fear of falling gripped me. It was a miracle the stair was still intact, but I was growing not to question such things. Smoke rose from side passages, vented up the shaft toward the dorsal hull.

I knew where I was. From the bottom of the shaft, I had only to follow the tramway along the spine of the ship for perhaps a quarter of a mile. There would be another platform, another security station, and beyond that a simple corridor to the original stair alongside the lift tubes with access to the launch bays, the Ascalon, and Valka.

The stair sawtoothed back and forth. Down a dozen steps, turn, down a dozen more. Turn. Down. Turn. Down. Again. Again. Again.

“Is Otavia with you yet?” I asked Valka.

The captain answered herself. “I’m still on the bridge. I managed to divert emergency power to the dorsal gun, cleaned up some of those landing shuttles.”

“Don’t be a hero!” I said. “They’re already in the ship, Corvo! Get to the . . .” I paused to catch my breath, leaned against the rail. “Get to the launch bay, now!”

Corvo hesitated. “That mob from outside is already into some of the lower holds. I can do some damage. Thin them out.”

“Everyone else is dead!” I almost shouted, heard my words rebound off the walls of the tram shaft. Dead. Dead. Dead. Afraid I’d call the Cielcin down on myself, I hissed, “I won’t lose you, too. Move, damn you!”

I could practically see Corvo shaking her head. “No good. If they get out of those holds, they’ll be right between you and the ship.”

“They’ll be right between you and the ship, Corvo, if you don’t move now.” I slammed a fist against the grille separating me from the main shaft. Some twenty levels left to go.

Silence on the line. I kept moving, nearly tripping over myself in my exhaustion as I scrambled down the stairs, wielding my borrowed scimitar like a cane in my left hand. The bit of the Quiet’s shell I’d shoved into a pouch at my belt for safekeeping, leaving my maimed right hand free to steady me on the rail.

“Corvo!”

I felt her jump at the harshness in my tone, even over the comm. “I’m going.”

My eyes flickered shut with relief. “Good. I’ll see you soon.”

“Where are you?” Valka asked. I could hear the tension in her voice, edging toward panic.

“Nearly at the bottom of one of the tram down-shafts,” I said. “Almost there.”

I was a dead man walking, but a dead man walking across the bottom of the shaft, along the ruined tram line that ran the length of the Tamerlane’s spine. Somewhere behind me, Otavia Corvo was moving along just such a tunnel. The bridge lay on G-level, sixty floors above and all the way at the rear of the ship, perhaps ten miles back. At my very best, it had taken me a little over an hour to run from one end of the ship to the other. Corvo could do it faster, though how much faster was any man’s guess. As I stumped along the tunnel, practically dragging the zircon sword, I was remembering the fight in the Imperial Embassy, the way Corvo had torn through the Conclave Guard with her bare hands. I willed her to move faster.

The platform was right where I expected to find it. I threw my sword up over the edge and succeeded in climbing the short ladder to retrieve it. The emergency lights flickered here, and white-hot sparks flashed from torn panels on the wall. The air stank of corruption, and old stains colored the walls. Blood, I guessed. Relics of the battle to take the Tamerlane at Padmurak. I saw no bodies, and could guess where they had gone.

Plasma burns marred the walls, and here and there a patch of metal or warped plastic showed where the fighting had been thickest. Huge scratches ran along the floor, and I guessed that these were the markings left by the demons of Arae, the chimeras in their haste.

“Corvo, where are you?” I asked. “I’m nearly there.”

No answer.

“Corvo?”

“I’m moving as fast as I can,” she said after another silence. “Keep going!”

Something in the way the old ship groaned as its struts stretched and decks collapsed reminded me of whale song. How often had I heard that baleful music in the night at Devil’s Rest, carried on the winds from the great bay and the Apollan Ocean below our acropolis? I limped as quickly as my wounds would allow, the tip of my scimitar pinging off the deck beneath my feet. Elara’s dead eyes kept flashing before my own, and the way Crim’s head had sloughed off in Aulamn’s fingers. The tears flowed freely, but I did not slow. I could not. Pallino’s words kept pushing me, and my own words to Lorian.

You give them hell now.

Avenge us.

“Avenge us,” I muttered. “I will. I will.”

I dried my eyes upon my cape, trying not the think of the refuse smeared on it. The lift carousel lay dead ahead, and I could see the red-painted door that accessed the stair. The sight of it bled energy back into my flagging limbs, and I trotted toward it. The handle turned, and the bolts thudded out of alignment.

“Iukatta!”

I turned my head.

A solitary Cielcin stood at the end of a corridor perpendicular to the one I’d come up. Not one of Syriani’s, this one wore a rubberized suit of slick gray-green, reminding me more of the primitive suits Otiolo’s servants had worn on the Emesh expedition. We stared at one another for a long moment—I wasn’t sure it recognized me, though it knew that I was human. The xenobite’s nictitating membranes flicked once over its flat and soulless eyes. If only I’d not lost my phase disruptor. I could have shot it, simple as.

Instead, the Cielcin turned its head and shouted, “Yukajjimn! Shuga o-yukajjimn!”

The door banged as I shoved it fully open and tore down the stairs. These were broader, flatter, and spiraled gently where the others had zagged back and forth. I almost fell down them.

“I’ve been seen!” I said into the comm. “Corvo, where are you? I’ve been seen!”

“Just hurry!” came Valka’s reply. “The reactor’s primed. We can leave any time!”

The door banged open above me once again, and I heard the clatter of taloned feet on the stairs behind. I almost fell down the stairs then, caught myself on the rail with my bad hand. Cursing the pain in my ankle, I staggered on, trying desperately to keep ahead and out of sight of my pursuers. There must have been half a dozen of them, to judge by the clamor they made. Once, perhaps, I could engage six scahari berserkers. Shielded and armed with highmatter, they would not have proven a great challenge, but as I was? Those six were as good as the half a million who had gathered about the black temple outside. At least they had no nahute, or if they did, they did not use them.

The decks below G-level were numbered, not lettered, in Mandari numerals stenciled red against the gray metal, with the conventional numbers just beneath. 70. Eighty-four.

The lever squealed as I leaned my weight upon it, and I banged my shin as I pulled the door inward. My sculpted greave saved me, and I leaped over the threshold, ungraceful as I cursed my damned limbs. As I left the stair, I fancied I caught a blur of motion on the stairs behind.

“Uimmaa o-tajun!” an inhuman voice called out. “Kisurraa! Qita! Qita! Qita!”

The door swung shut behind, momentarily cutting off their voices. The corridor ran left and right, the opposite wall slanting up and away from the floor, studded with trapezoidal windows.

Was it right or left?

I went left, watched the sloped windows on my right, seeing the vast armatures that housed the magnetic clamps that held the ship in its hold.

They were empty.

“Shit!”

I turned around, hurried back in the opposite direction. The door to the stairs opened, and the first of the Cielcin rushed out. I screamed, raised the scimitar in both hands and swung. No art behind that blow, not an instant of all my centuries of training. But the blade struck true, cleaved into the joint at the base of the monster’s neck, and stuck there. Ichor black as ink spilled out, and the Cielcin buckled like wet clay.

The other Cielcin spilled into the corridor a moment after, but by then I was a hundred feet down the hall. I could see the Ascalon through the portals at my left, its knife-like body safely nestled in the clamp armatures. The last orange light of day filtered in from the open doors of the launch bay. I dared not even begin to guess how Valka had opened them under emergency power, but my heart soared to see them, and my limbs felt lighter as I skidded round that final corner and galloped toward the gangway.

“Valka!”

She stood in the circular mouth of the airlock, jaw set, golden eyes narrowed with resolve. My heart swelled at the sight of her, and I thought I would stumble from shock and the sheer weight of feeling that rushed to fill the hollows of my soul. Tears flooded my eyes, but for the first time that day they were tears of joy.

Valka wore no armor save a shield-belt, was dressed simply in the skintight underlayment every legionnaire wore beneath his kit. Her hair was long—longer than I had ever seen it—and hung at her shoulder in a thick braid.

“Look out!” I cried, looking back to see the Cielcin filling the gangway behind.

Without a word, Valka raised her Tavrosi service repeater and sighted along it, one eye drifting closed. I ducked. She fired. A wedge of violet flame split the air of the gangway with a noise like lightning. Valka fired again, and a strangled cry issued from one of my pursuers as it hit the deck. A buzzing, grinding sound filled the air then. I recognized the sound of nahute and hurled myself forward, keeping low as Valka fired a third time.

“Get in!” she shouted, firing again. Throwing myself against the right wall of the umbilical, I threw myself the last few feet, turned so that I hit the deck inside the Ascalon’s forward airlock on my left side. Valka fired thrice more, felling the last of my pursuers. Three nahute winged toward her, lamprey mouths spinning like sawblades. Valka raised a hand as if to catch one in her fist, and an instant later the drones fell dead and clattered to the gangway.

“Are you all right?” Valka asked, punching the button that sealed the outer door on the ruined Tamerlane. She only glanced at me, but for Valka that glance told all.

I lay upon the floor, gasping. “I’ll live.” Valka was already moving, boots clomping on the deck plates as she hurried toward the bridge. I watched her go upside-down, my chest heaving, and rolled to follow, exhausted and absurdly conscious of the blood and filth that covered me. I was shaking badly by then, muscles cramped and sore, but I found my knees and called after her. “Where’s Corvo?” I looked around, half-expecting to see the tall, bronze captain standing in a doorway or to emerge from one of the supply crates and throw back a hood.

But understanding hit me an instant before Valka said, “She isn’t coming.”

“What?” I lurched back to my feet, chased Valka toward the bridge. “No! No, where is she?”

Valka was already clambering into the pilot’s chair. “The minute I fire the main reactor, they’ll know we’re here,” she said, keying the controls that slid the pilot’s chair out on tracks in the glass geodesic that fronted the Ascalon. “All those little ships will be shooting at us. Otavia volunteered to stay and cover our retreat.”

“She can’t!” I said. Corvo had lied to me. Valka had lied to me.

“ ’Twas always the plan.” Valka did not stop to look at me, but threw a series of switches and seized the yoke in both hands. Far behind, a faint, humming roar rose up, filling the ship and shaking the very ground on which I stood. “Strap yourself in, or find something to hang onto.” There was an edge to Valka’s tone, sharper even than highmatter. I identified it at once: she was holding herself together by a spider’s thread of brittle rage.

Growling, I turned my back on the cockpit, pressed fingers to my collar. “Corvo, explain yourself.”

Unlike before, the captain answered at once. “Easy choice to make,” she said simply. “Especially when I thought I was trading my life for as many as could fit on the Ascalon.”

“You’re not!” I hissed. “It’s just Valka and me.”

“It’s still an easy choice.” She sounded almost calm. “I know what you are.”

“That makes one of us.” I half fell against the rounded arch of the door.

Corvo laughed. “If anyone can kill these bastards, it’s you.” I wanted to tell her she was wrong, but I couldn’t do it. Pallino and Elara, Ilex and Crim, and all the others had given their lives in that same belief. Ninety thousand men had died in that light, for that reason. In my mind’s eye, I saw the great captain leaning over the holography well, hair floating about her head like a halo, shoulders bunched like Atlas holding up the world. Clear as day in my mind, I saw her raise her eyes and say, “It was a privilege fighting for you, Hadrian.”

I punched the bulkhead, punched it until my hand went numb and I thought the knuckles must break. Screwing my eyes shut, I tipped my head back, stared through eyelids at the ceiling. “The privilege was mine.”

Was.

“I’ll fight on,” she said. “Take a few thousand of them with me. Go!”

“Hadrian, strap in!” Valka exclaimed. “We’re going!”

Silent, shaking, I sank into the navigator’s chair and tugged the restraints into place. Valka was just as silent. I could sense the whiteness of her knuckles beneath her gloves. The Ascalon thrummed beneath us, shaking dust from the rafters of the Tamerlane’s great hold. A series of heavy metal thuds resounded as the clamp armatures disengaged, and we were floating on repulsors.

“They heard that!” Corvo’s voice played over the ship’s loudspeakers. “Their air support’s coming round.”

“Understood,” Valka said, every atom the old Tavrosi guard captain then. “We’re off.”

That said, Valka punched the engines. Not the slow-burn ion drives. The primary fusion torch. A torrent of red and violet flame burst from the back of the ship and engulfed us, filling the hold with fire. The Ascalon kicked, and even with the suppression field engaged I was slammed back into my seat as we lanced forward and up. An instant later, we’d cleared the flame and were rising, sailing above the black sand between the Tamerlane and the outer wall. I saw the ring and the twin towers of the gates of Akterumu rising ahead. A Cielcin gunship—a lance of blackened steel, or so it seemed—flew toward us.

From below, the Tamerlane answered, all guns blazing. Unshielded, the Cielcin vessel blew apart, fragments showering on the sands.

“We’ll never make it out past their fleet!” I said, catching sight of the gleaming false moons that filled the sky beyond the ringed city.

Valka did not blink. “We will.”

One of the terawatt lasers flashed, its radiance polarized by the window glass. Still I turned my head away at the glow, watched two ships fall to pieces. Valka pulled the yoke back, tipping the interceptor almost straight up like one of the rockets of yore.

“Otavia,” she said, “we’re clear to jump.”

“Clear to jump?” I said, aghast. “Inside the atmosphere?” Ordinarily, making the jump to warp inside a planet’s atmosphere was extraordinarily dangerous. The process of warping space to form the spatial envelope that surrounded the vessel itself was hugely destructive to whatever was caught in its manifold. The curvature of space and gravity are—so the scholiasts teach us—one and the same. To bend space is to increase local gravity. Thus to make the jump to warp speed was to expose the surrounding space to extraordinary tidal stresses. For this reason, ships always accelerated beyond a planet’s gravity well before the jump to warp. It was safer for those left behind.

On Eue, that hardly mattered.

Corvo’s answer overrode my objection. She cleared her throat. “See it done,” she said.

Valka pushed the lever forward.

The sky stretched, towers and moons alike retreating as if someone were playing a trick with the focal length of my eyes. The Tamerlane’s guns tore through another trio of on-rushing shuttles. They burst in glowing nimbuses, like fireworks at a triumph. I sank back into my chair, and an instant later the towers of Akterumu and the moons of the Cielcin fleet vanished, and the bruised orange sky melted away to total darkness and silence.

Neither of us moved.

We were free.