THE FIRST BREATH OF air that wafted up the Ascalon’s ramp carried with it sunlight and the smell of salt, heralding the nearby sea. Valka and I blinked, and I confess my eyes brimmed with tears. I’d spent most of the twenty-eight year journey aboard the Ascalon alone, tending Valka’s creche and the vegetables in the water gardens, and though Valka had been awake again for nearly a year and though her presence had restored a piece of my humanity and my soul, I wept to see and to experience anything beyond the confines of that wretched ship and to feel the proper weight of a world pulling at my feet.

Colchis.

I nearly went to my knees at the base of the ramp, would have gladly squeezed the sandy earth in my fingers. I felt almost numb with longing, so overwhelmed was I, as a condemned man laughs at the sunlight on his walk to the scaffold after so long in his cell. I turned about, eyes drinking in the vista: the Ascalon perched upon a rocky shelf above the blue-green sea, the waters filling the bowl of the world unto the horizon. The pale sky shone, the orange eye of the gas giant Atlas glimmered in the sun, and the distant cry of terranic gulls dragged my soul all the way to childhood and the beach beneath our acropolis. I laughed then, and leaving Valka and the ramp ran along the hillside toward the shore: a man alive again.

I had not seen the villagers approaching, shouting and pointing, laughing themselves in wonder at the approach of a ship from the sea beyond the skies. We had been to Racha, to the island village, only once before, on a fishing trip with the natives when we enjoyed our time at Thessa. Not much had changed in the decades we’d been away. The wooden houses still stood on stone pilings on the ridge above the shore, pitched roofs and narrow chimneys small and quaint against the alien sky. Here and there a white banner flew, the red Imperial sun shining bright, a prideful declaration that the peasants here claimed no lord save the Emperor himself, who—on account of the Great Library in Aea far across the sea—claimed Colchis as one of his many demesnes.

Valka called after me, and turning I saw her standing in the shadow of the Ascalon’s tall rear fin, shading her eyes. “No pursuers,” she said, and tapped her temple. “Nothing on the general comm. I think we slipped customs and patrol.”

“Good!” I looked round, still smiling like a fool, and took in the salt air. I was alive. We were alive. The words had a different sound beside the water, under the pale sky. If we had managed to evade detection, we would have the time we wanted, time to find Siran—or her grave. Time to tell her what had happened. Though so much time had passed for me, the solitude had kept the wounds fresh, and though I could walk and act like a man, I felt more ghost than living. Hadrian’s Marlowe’s shade—not Hadrian Marlowe himself.

“Ho there!” a voice called, drawing both Valka’s and my attention from one another. The villagers had drawn near then, a group of twenty-some, young and old, each dressed in clothing of dun homespun with spiral patterns blue and red embroidered on. The speaker was an older woman, pale-faced, sun-spotted, and smiling. “What brings you to Racha, sailor-man? Are you traders?”

I shook my head, raised my whole left hand in greeting—ashamed of the right. “No, madam! We are travelers. I seek Siran of Emesh, who wedded Lem, your eolderman.”

The woman’s hand fell at once, and her eyes narrowed. “None here by that name, sailor!”

I felt my heart sink, and Valka said, “ ’Twould have been long ago!”

“Then surely she’s dead!” the peasant woman said.

“Lem were eolderman in my granda’s day!” said a man. “And he was patrician! Lived to be three hundred, he did!”

“We know!” Valka answered him. “We seek her tomb—her children, if she had any. Or their children.”

The crowd muttered amongst itself then, and a woman in a plaid apron had to rein in a straying child. While they deliberated, chewing over this piece of information, I returned up the gentle slope to join Valka. I had found one of my long coats during the long voyage from Eue, and its tails snapped about my calves. My roughly shorn hair—never recovered from my torments and still shocked with white—blew across my face. An old man peered at me from the back of the throng, eyes an almost colorless blue that reminded me of Lorian, and he said, “Who are you, lad?”

Did I dare tell them? I looked to Valka, but her face was unreadable. I doubted word would leave the island with any speed. Like most Imperial subjects, the Rachan villagers lived simple lives. They would have but little technology: ice chests, electric lighting, climate control for the houses, the odd holograph projector or two, maybe a groundcar—though Racha had few roads suitable for such—or a skiff. They would have radios and datasphere uplinks to receive the planetary broadcast service and to communicate with Aea and the rest of Colchis’s settlements, but I did not think it likely word would get out that we were present. Racha was very isolated, a little village on an archipelago whose remoteness was its greatest claim to fame.

But I was spared by the decision by an even older man who said, “You’re Hadrian Marlowe, ain’t you?” When I did not at once answer, the fellow stepped forward, removing his salt-stained felt cap. “I thought it was you. Only the white in your hair spoiled my guess. But your voice, lordship. No mistaking it. Silver as the Emperor’s own tongue, if you’ll pardon my saying so.” He bobbed his head. “An’ I recog your woman, lord. ’Member her markings, sure as sunrise. Meaning no disrespect.” When still I did not speak, he came forward and bowed stiffly, if as low as he could go. “You won’t remember me, but I was prentice to old Lem, sire. Name of Ejaz. That was centuries ago. Did my time as a sailor an’ come home, but I recog you.”

“Ejaz?” I said, studying the old fellow’s face. I thought I recalled a lad of that name who had fished with Siran’s Lem. At once I felt foolish. We should never have come to Colchis. Siran was dead, and Gibson was certainly dead. Five hundred years was enough to turn even most palatines to dust, and neither Siran nor Gibson had been young when we left them. I told myself that Colchis had been on our way.

“I remember you, Ejaz,” I said, though it was not quite true, and shut my eyes. “I did not expect to find anyone still living from those days.”

Ejaz’s jowls quivered, and he said, “It is you, then?”

“It is,” I said, and raising my voice so all could better hear, I said, “I am Hadrian Marlowe. I come seeking the grave of my friend, Siran, who lived among you.”

Old Ejaz bowed more deeply still. “Knew it was you, lord.”

“Marlowe!” the woman who’d first addressed us exclaimed. “You’re the Halfmortal?”

“So they say, madam,” I said. “Please, tell me where my friend is buried.”

The old woman shook her head, but the blue-eyed man said, “We should take them to see Imrah!”

“Imrah!” Ejaz said.

“She’s Keeper, ain’t she?” the old woman said. “She’ll know what’s best.”

Taking a step forward, I drew level with Ejaz and—stooping so that I met the old woman at eye level—I asked, “Keeper?” It was not a title I recognized. “Keeper of what?”

“Of the tombs, lord!” the woman answered. “Of the isle of the dead!”

I looked around at Valka, who shrugged and smoothed the collar of her shirt.

I cannot say why, but I had expected Imrah to be another crone. Perhaps it was because the villagers who had met and spoken with us on the strand were all older themselves. But the Keeper was a young woman, comely and well-built, with oiled black hair neatly combed and painstakingly twisted into a knot secured by crossed wooden pins.

“You really are Hadrian and Valka?” she asked, looking from my face to Valka and back again. She smiled. “Grandmother always told me stories . . .”

A gentle wind blew in through the open shutters, tousled a wooden chime that hung just outside. Imrah glanced toward it, and I followed her gaze to where I could see the Ascalon’s fin rising above the low rooftops, and to the sea beyond. One of the squat gray shapes on the horizon, I knew, was Thessa, the island where the Red Company once had stayed. I was not sure which it was.

“Siran was your grandmother?” I asked.

“What?” Imrah shook her head. “No, no. She was Grandmother’s grandmother. I never knew her.” The Keeper of Thessa poured cups of something green and steaming from a ceramic pot, turned the service tray on its spindle so that cups faced Valka and myself. Valka drank at once, but I studied Imrah’s face. I thought I could detect traces of Siran there. In the slightly darker tint of her skin, yes, in the almond shape of the eyes, in the way her jaw worked as she spoke. How strange it was, the passage of Time. Ever-Fleeting, indeed. “I suppose I’ve you to thank for my patrician standing.”

I shook my head. “You have her to thank,” I said with feeling. “Siran was . . . a good friend. A good fighter. She saved my life many times.”

“She always thought you’d come back.” Imrah set her cup down on the table, cradled it in her hands. “But I never thought it would happen in my time. Never thought I’d be the one.”

“The one to what?”

Imrah blinked. “You don’t know?” She looked from me to Valka again, eyes narrowing. “Then why are you here?”

Without thinking, I said, “They’re all dead.”

Valka laid a hand on mine where it lay on the tabletop. “We lost people. We did not know where else to go.” I sat silently by then as Valka recounted—in the broadest possible terms—the capture and destruction of the Red Company. I stared fixedly into my cup of greenish broth, not quite meeting my reflection’s eye. The chimes sounded again beyond the open window, and I glanced out to sea, counted the sea stacks where they rose gray against the horizon.

“I’m sorry,” Imrah said, horror plain on her face. “For your loss. So you came seeking . . . refuge?”

“Quiet,” I said. An answer, not a command.

“Peace,” Valka translated, and there was a brokenness in her voice that I had but seldom heard, and reminded myself that she had spent more than a decade holed up on a freighter beneath the snows of Dharan-Tun with Corvo, Crim, and Pallino. That she had suffered—if suffered differently than I had done.

I cleared my throat, set my cup back down untouched. “We have nowhere else to go.”

Imrah accepted this with arched eyebrows. “Why not go back to where you came from?” She cast about for the name. “Nessus?”

“Because everyone is dead! Don’t you understand?” I half-rose from the seat, hands shaking. I clenched them into fists. “Don’t you know what they’ll do on Nessus? What they’ll ask?”

I could not relive what had happened, could not so much as bear the thought of enduring a debrief or writing a report. I have stopped many, many times in recording this account. Lingered over no more than a sentence in a day, limped through Dharan-Tun and the ruins of Akterumu. Even after so long . . . there is no true healing. There are only scars, wounds not even my writing and my art could heal.

“I can’t do it,” I heard myself whisper, “I can’t . . .”

I had been so long alone, and it was too much—far too much—just to sit there with Valka and this woman, this echo of the friend whom I had lost. I had thought my time alone aboard the Ascalon had been curative, but I sensed then that it had only hollowed me out. While we had fought across the stars and suffered, time had flowed by. Why had we come to that place? What had I hoped to find? Siran alive? Surely not. And though this girl was Siran’s blood, she was not Siran. There was no family, no belonging here.

Valka stood and steadied me with gentle hands. “Forgive us.”

Imrah shook her head. “There’s nothing to forgive.” I looked away as soon as she finished speaking. I could not bear the pity in her eyes. After a moment’s silence, she carried on. “So then . . . you don’t know about the island?”

I was as yet in no fit state to reply, and so it was left to Valka to ask, “The island of the dead?” Valka still held my shoulders, but kept her attention squarely on the young lady across the table. Outside, the wooden chimes sparkled on the air. “What is it?”

Again the Keeper shook her head. “I always thought you would know. Grandmother always thought you would know.”

“Know what?”

“Your father,” Imrah said, inclining her head at me. “Your father is there.”

I blinked, sneered, “My father is an old man on Delos, woman.” Brushing Valka’s hands away, I fell back into my seat, leaned over the table. “Do not play games with me.”

Siran’s twice-great-granddaughter blanched and leaned back. “He said you would return here one day, and that he wanted to be here when you did. He ordered a fugue pod sent to Thessa.”

I hid my hands beneath the tabletop, shut my eyes. “My father is the Lord Archon of Devil’s Rest!”

“Siran helped him!” Imrah said.

“Liar!”

Imrah’s voice came out choked, and I realized I’d been shouting. “My family has maintained the pod for nearly five hundred years!” Valka’s hands settled on my shoulders, held me in place as I snarled and rose to leave.

We should never have come.

“Siran first, then her daughter, Elara. Then my grandmother, my father, now me.” She was speaking very fast by then, clearly frightened of me. I didn’t care. I did not even feel the blow of discovering Siran had named a child after Elara, did not stop to remember her namesake’s final fall from the shuttle hatch. “Ever since he left the college! I swear, lord—I do not lie!”

Whatever rage I had felt a moment earlier dissolved like dewfall in the sun. “The college?” I said, aghast, and let my hands unclench. “You mean . . . the athenaeum?” I glanced at Valka, eyes suddenly wide. The Keeper spoke not of my father at all, but of . . .

“Gibson,” Valka said. “Tor Gibson?”

“He was a scholiast, yes?” Imrah asked.

“Was?” I turned from Valka to the Keeper, blinking back emotions I cannot rightly describe. “What do you mean?” One could not simply cease to be a scholiast. One might be disbarred or anathematized, his research collected and buried or destroyed, but a vow to embrace Stricture was for life.

The young lady looked at Valka and me, confused. “You really don’t know anything about it?”

My anger flared again, and I said, “We don’t, damn your eyes.”

Imrah pressed her lips together. “He’s not your father, then?”

“He’s as good as,” interjected Valka. “You’re saying Tor Gibson is on Thessa? In cryonic fugue?”

I sat stunned, trying to take in this revelation. Gibson . . . alive? Again I shut my eyes and held my face in my hands. Imrah shifted in her seat, the wood creaking. “My great-great-grandmother, she helped set him up. Promised to watch over him. For you.” She paused, and the distant cries of the gulls rushed in through the open window.

Pawns again, I thought, and touched the Quiet’s shell through my shirt. Always forward.

My regrets and anger at having come to that backwater place vanished in a trice. “How did he get out of the athenaeum?”

Imrah blinked at the question. “I . . . don’t know?”

I rubbed my face, willed myself to be human again. “I’m sorry,” I said, and did my best to smile at the young woman seated across from me. I saw again the echoes of Siran in her face, the traces of my old friend. I felt suddenly very old. Old and lonely. She was so young, perhaps not even thirty! I was more than ten times her age, had spent nearly so long as she’d been alive locked aboard the Ascalon, alone. Nearly a thousand years of human history had passed since the High College spun my genome on the breeding looms and Tor Ada had pulled me from the vats. Could this woman, this girl, even conceive of such a span of years? I was not sure I could, who had lived so much and so awfully. “You cannot know what this means,” I said at last. “Can you take us to him?”

The Keeper brightened then, and laid her hand on the table. “Of course.”