THESSA ROSE FROM THE waves like the worn-down fang of a giant. That thought put me in mind of Miudanar’s massive skull, and of the vision I had seen of the red-crowned creatures standing by as a colossus erupted from the waves, and despite the warmth of the Colchean sun, I shivered and hugged myself, letting the spray scour my face. Turning, I saw Valka standing at the rear of the boat, talking with one of Imrah’s cousins—another of Siran’s descendants—a man called Ginoh. Imrah herself sat in the control cabin with her brother, Alvar, who manned the controls.

Our prow broke one of the waves, and a fine mist blew across the deck and sparkled in the noonday sun. Turning my face to the water, I shut my eyes and let the rime wash over me. Opening them again, I thought I could see the low, white shapes of the old prefabricated modules we’d brought down to the island to house the Red Company for our shore leave during our previous stay on Colchis, like lime-washed sepulchers. A deep, hollow melancholy filled me at the sight, and I gripped the rail with my maimed hand, the remaining knuckles turning white.

“Are you all right?”

Imrah had come out of the cabin, leaving Alvar at the controls. She wore a hydrophobic cape of dun homespun embroidered with the angular red serpent designs so beloved of the natives.

I looked down at her—she was more than a head shorter than I—and did my best to smile. It must have looked something frightful, for Imrah drew back a step. Turning my face up to the clear, gray sky, I said, “I was just wishing for rain.”

“For rain?” the Keeper echoed.

“I haven’t seen rain in more than forty years,” I told her, and realized only as I spoke the words that they were true. Forty years since Severine awakened me from the creche. A lifetime. Looking up, I imagined the gray sky was the gray of clouds, and that a rain might come and wash me clean. I could still feel the dull ache in my shoulder, and knew then I would never find a water pure enough to make me clean again.

The young woman squinted at the sky, marked a couple distant clouds scudding over the horizon. “Won’t be any rain today, I think,” she said. “But you stay long enough, you’re sure to find some.”

Remembering the look my previous smile had put on Imrah’s face, I kept my own face still and said, “I am sorry. I’ve been alone a long time. I did not mean to frighten you.”

The Keeper drew her cape about herself and moved to look out from the rail beside me. Thessa was drawing ever closer, and the white shapes of the barracks modules shone brightly in the sun. Even at this distance, I could see where the locals had run lines between them laden with banners, and that stone foundations had been packed in beneath the landing peds.

“Your doctor said you spent the passage alone.”

I held her gaze then. Not wanting to talk about my voyage, I moved my head in the direction of the shore. “Are people living in the camp now?”

“Oh no,” Imrah said, clearly glad of the easier line of conversation. “Grandmother’s mother had those foundations put in. Them and those dikes along the shoreline. There.” She pointed.

Someone had built a pier as well, a narrow stone strand atop cement piles, thick with barnacles and a reddish, coraline growth that I guessed was native to the watery moon. As we drew nearer, Imrah’s cousin Ginoh leaped ashore and tied us off. As I mounted the steps onto the pier, the man stuck out his hand. I shook it on reflex, acutely aware of my phantom fingers as the stout fisherman’s hand gripped mine.

“Just wanted to say I’d done it, sir,” he said, and stepped back to give me space. Valka grinned wryly up at me, clearly amused as she clambered onto the pier. Imrah came last of all, cape fluttering about her slim shoulders.

“I’ll mind the boat, Imrah!” Alvar said, cracking open an icebox and drawing out a dark bottle.

“Mind you do!” she shot back. “Don’t get too deep in that chest now!”

Her brother grinned and raised the drink in salute.

All was as I had seen it from the boat: Imrah and her family had put stone foundations under the old barracks pods and laid huge paving stones on the beach. Painted flags flew from lines hung overhead, filling the air with a sound like soft wings. Ginoh went on ahead, Imrah not far behind. I flagged, stared up past the protected beach to where the dark stone of the cliffs rose, tall trees swaying in the sea wind. The whole of the world was hushed, as if in Chantry, and the waves crashed gentle at our backs.

Pointing to a barren patch of sand, I said, “That’s where the lads were boxing, do you remember?”

“Yes,” Valka said simply. I remembered a step too late that she forgot nothing, that for her memory was sharp as sight. Her hand found mine, and she pointed up at the promontory overlooking the bay. “And there’s our spot. Remember when Otavia found us that first day?”

“I do!” I said, squeezing her fingers with my good left hand.

An oily melancholy hung on me, and with each halting step I thought I heard a man’s shout or a woman’s laughter. Thought I saw young Aristedes sneak off toward the officers’ quarters, a local girl leading him by the hand. Fancied I heard Pallino’s rough voice raised above all. “Right, so there I was!”

If I had come to build a marker, to raise a monument to our honored dead, I had found one ready made and tended by the Keepers of Racha. Siran’s kin. A place had been made ready long before.

“Lord Marlowe!” Imrah called from the path ahead, waving. “This way!”

I shook myself from the grasp of memory and climbed the path after Imrah and her cousin. Beyond the last row of low, white lozenge buildings the rocky shelf of the island rose steeply, and we followed a path Valka and I knew well up the cliff toward the promontory.

“Siran had the hospital pod set up on the ridge to keep it clear of the storms!” the Keeper exclaimed, throwing her words back over her shoulder as she led us on our hike.

We turned left at the top of the path, turning our backs on the spur of stone that looked out over the bay that Valka and I had enjoyed so long ago. Ahead, the path curved left, following the crescent shape of the island, and rose slightly to a kind of plateau overlooking the sea, the center of which was dominated by a solitary dome of scuffed white tile, like some strange, scaled fungus. Once, the structure had stood upon three huge landing peds, mighty columns bent like the legs of dogs. As with the housing pods in our ancient camp below, Imrah’s family—Siran’s family—had shored up the foundation with rough masonry. The dome itself had a distinct Consortium look to it, belied by the Mandari writing stenciled to the right of the door in faded indigo. Like the pods below, the dome clearly had been lowered from space, and I fancied still I could see the black marks of burnt stone where fusion flame had left its mark when the pod came in to land.

Seeing all this, I did not see the cairns at once, and so it fell to Imrah to point to the row of stone mounds. They ran along the right side of the path; hunched, rounded things with man-high pillars at the end facing the roads. Cords of some imperishable fiber wove through the tight-packed stones, red and white, their lengths hung with charms. Prayer cards, I realized.

“The other Keepers,” Imrah said proudly, and placed her hands on her hips. Bowing slightly to the nearest, she said, “This is my father’s. He was shipwrecked about ten years back. He’s the only one not buried here.”

Valka spoke for us both. “I’m sorry.”

Imrah smiled and adjusted one of the fine plastic placards that hung from the knotted cord. BAGOS, it read. The man’s name. “It’s all right,” Imrah said. “He is with me still. The soul lives on in the heart. In the memory. No one is ever truly dead.”

No one is ever truly dead.

She looked up at me, still smiling sweetly, and asked, “If I may, lord: they say you died.” She did not ask the question.

I did not answer her at once, but turned to look beyond the funeral markers to the gray-tossed sea below. A salt wind rushed over us, pulling my hair and setting the prayer cards bound to the cairns to rattling. Looking round, I envisioned an army of lesser monuments laid out across the bluffs, rank and file hung with cards or carved with half-forgotten names.

Ninety thousand names.

“It’s true,” I said at length, not saying more.

“Then surely, you know better than any of us.” She looked round at Valka, who yet stood beside me, and for Ginoh, who had moved toward the hatch that opened the domed structure ahead. “Are not the dead still with us?”

Corvo and Durand.

My eyes slipped from the girl’s face to the path behind her. I had not spoken of the Howling Dark to any save Valka in any detail, though many had asked. I shook my head, tried to find the words to capture that experience. I had not seen any but myself in the Dark, and yet. . . . “It was Dark,” I said roughly, simply, spreading my free hand. “I was worn to tatters, thin as smoke, and crawled. Dark as it was, I knew there was light beneath and ahead. I never saw a face or heard a word in all that silence, but I wasn’t alone.”

How had I forgotten?

Like fish in dark water I had thought them, those other presences, each of us moving forward and ever down toward the light beneath that divine darkness, crawling as a serf must crawl to reach the throne. Not alone.

Ilex and Crim.

I inhaled sharply to stay the tears. “Not alone.”

Imrah brightened. “I knew it. It is said we will meet again on Earth.”

“On the Earth,” I echoed, doubting. “Or elsewhere.”

Imrah indicated the next cairn. “This is my grandmother’s. She was Keeper for more than a hundred fifty years.” Briefly, she touched the placard hung from this cairn’s braided cord. I read the name AMARTA. Imrah touched the name plate of the third cairn too. “And her mother.”

ELARA.

The familiar name caught in me like a spark, and I jerked my head away. I knew without Imrah’s saying a word whose name was on that last monument.

She spoke anyway. “Here she is.”

SIRAN.

My knees went out from under me, and I released Valka’s hand. Turning my face up to take in the gravestone, I found rain in that cloudless sky. Water fell upon my face—fell from my face. “She thought I would stop her staying,” I said at last, the fingers of my ruined hand scrabbling in the stony earth at my side. “She was right. I wanted to. I wanted to.”

Valka’s hand settled on my shoulder. I pawed at it, held it fast.

“If I’d . . . stopped her . . . stopped her leaving, I mean, she’d be dead, too.” Of course, she was dead anyway. But dead with honor, buried with love. Better Thessa than Akterumu, better Colchis than Eue. I did not shake or sob, but neither could I stop the flow of tears from reddening eyes. “How many of the others would be in places like this if not for me?”

Valka’s hand trembled, then clenched my shoulder with sublime force. “None.”

None?

I looked up at her, and for a moment Imrah and Ginoh—the whole of the great plateau and the ancient hospital pod—were only shadows. “She would be ashes in the coliseum incinerator were it not for you. You brought her here.”

“And brought the rest to Akterumu,” I groaned, thinking of the coliseum.

Pallino and Elara.

Pallino and Elara should have been here at least, buried next to Siran.

Valka traced her thumb along my collarbone, back and forth. “Siran chose to leave. They chose to follow. You did not know where our path would lead. You’re not Fate, Hadrian—or Death herself.”

“I should be dead,” I said. “They should each have a place like this.” Taking up a pebble from the soil, I tossed it at Siran’s cairn, resolving then—in that moment—to raise monuments for the others, for as many of the others as I could name.

Valka’s fingers tightened. “They died for you. So that you could keep fighting. Because they believed in you.”

“And what did their faith earn them?” I asked. “They should have stayed home.” I found another flat piece of rock and placed in on the cairn. “My father was right. I should have listened. Gone to Vesperad. Become a torturer—I would have done less harm.”

“And less good,” Valka said, and kissed the top of my head. “How many millions have you saved? At Berenike? Senuessa? Mettina? Arae? Aptucca? How many?” When I did not move at once, she shook me, held my gaze as though pinning me to a board. “Your father is here, remember? Let’s go to him.”

Gibson, I reminded myself, and blew out a long breath. Gibson is alive.

Cold air greeted us once we passed the airlock and entered the cubiculum. The whole dome was not large, and but for the airlock itself comprised only a single chamber half a hundred feet in diameter. Every surface was the same white plastic and ceramic tile as the exterior, with consoles and counters surfaced in black glass. A dozen fugue creches lay flat at waist height, radiating from the center console like the spokes of a wheel. Their glass lids all stood open, raised like the petals of a flower.

All but one.

“How’ve you kept it powered?” Valka asked, chafing her arms.

“There’s a small reactor underwater on the far side of the island,” Ginoh said, tapping a console to turn up the cold, white lights. “Breaks the water down for fuel.”

Advancing on the pod whose lid was shut, Imrah added, “It doesn’t draw much power with just the one pod running.”

“Siran couldn’t possibly afford all this,” I said, turning on the spot. The cold air stung my damp cheeks, and I rubbed my face in my hands. She’d left the Red Company with nothing but the clothes on her back, and the men of Racha were not likely ever to afford such a thing. It must have cost half a million marks at least. Perhaps more. There was a stamp of fine craftsmanship about every component in the chamber, not the cheap and fragile plastic work one commonly associated with Wong-Hopper materials.

Imrah stopped beside the casket and looked up, face clearly puzzled, “She didn’t. He did.” When I only blinked at her and turned to Valka, she continued, “You are lords, are you not?”

I was speechless. Gibson was a scholiast. He had nothing. Owned nothing. The scholiasts renounced all worldly possessions save their robes, the better to give their lives to their service and their pursuits. He had nothing, no assets, no holdings, no money to speak of.

It wasn’t possible. It didn’t make sense.

And yet . . . there he was. I drew level with Imrah beside the sealed creche, looked down through frosted glass and violet fluid at the beloved face. Gibson looked—if anything—younger in the freeze, not dead, not corpse-like at all. The thinning mane and leonine whiskers were right where they had ever been, and the notch that marred his left nostril where Sir Felix’s knife had cut was unchanged.

“It’s really him,” I said, voice barely more than a whisper. “What is he doing here? How can this be?” The reality of what I was seeing, of Gibson’s presence, was only just sinking in. Some part of me had felt as though I were dreaming ever since we clattered down the ramp onto the beach. Seldom had my interplanetary wanderings come at such a cost. So many of my friends and companions, so many of the fixtures of the Imperium—the Magnarch, the various officers, the Imperial Council, and the Emperor himself—either traveled with me or were palatine, and so long-lived they had not vanished to be replaced by their grandchildren.

In the Golden Age, men told tales of sailors adrift in time, sailors who—traveling so near the speed of light—outstripped the flow of Time itself and sailed fast into the future. Such men returned to Earth in distant ages to find only smoking ruins, or an empire of apes, or machines. Warp travel bypasses the relativistic flow of Time, but the distances between stars are so vast—and in fugue the processes of life are so suspended—that the effect is not so different. Though I fought to save the Empire, no more was it the Empire I’d begun my fight to save. That Empire was in the past, and would never be again. And its people were in the past, and in the ground.

But not all of them.

“What are you doing here?” I breathed, laying my hand on the glass surface of the casket, smiling in disbelief at the beloved face within. Lifting my eyes to the Keeper, I said, “Can you wake him up?”

Imrah’s dark eyes widened. She glanced at Ginoh, and said in hushed tones, “I . . . we’ve never done it before.”

“No matter. ’Tis simple,” Valka said. “I’ll do it.” Without further ceremony, my Tavrosi witch brushed the young Keeper aside and tapped a couple of the controls, nails drumming the glass surface as she waited on some unseen mechanism. Using the blade of my hand, I wiped away at the frost coating the lid of Gibson’s creche. Beneath the glass, he looked like the graven image of a king laid down upon his tomb.

The faint whir of a centrifuge spun up within the center console, and a temperature gauge began to climb. 77 Kelvin. 78. While in fugue, a constant flow of TX-9 is supplied to the sleeper’s bloodstream, always in motion to keep the tissues from freezing solid and developing cryoburn. The first phase of resurrection required the temperature of that intravenous flow be increased, warming the body from the core outward in preparation for the reintroduction of blood and the purgation of the remaining cryonic fluids. Only then would the tank be drained and current applied through the electrodes fixed to the chest to restart the latent heart and brain.

Done properly, the window in which the sleeper is susceptible to brain damage is less than a minute long.

“Core temperature’s rising,” Valka noted. I checked the gauge. 137 K.

“What can we do?” Imrah asked.

I gestured toward the lockers surrounding the low dome. “Are there blankets?” Both Imrah and Ginoh paused, wheels in their minds turning. Presently the man leaped into action, moving off toward a bank of compartments lining a far stretch of wall. Leaning in beside Valka, I asked, “Is he all right?”

She nodded. “You know so well as I the process mostly drives itself.” As if to give the lie to this statement, Valka reached down and tapped an indicator. “Ninety seconds to saline flush.”

I moved back to stand beside the sarcophagus. There was no reason to fear—extracting a sleeper from fugue was as routine as anything—and yet I could not stop my hands from sweating.

219 K.

At 300 the TX-9 would be exchanged for the saline solution, and the process would enter its final phase. Ginoh came hurrying back with a heavy white blanket in his arms. I stayed him with a raised hand. Beneath the fingers of the other, the frost on Gibson’s casket began to drip and run onto the rubberized floor.

“Thirty seconds.” Valka’s eyes met mine across the console, and she smiled. For the first time since I leaped from the chariot in Vedatharad, I felt a warmth well up in my chest. I returned her smile. “Mark.”

The instant the saline flush started, the tank began to drain, violet fluid retreating through openings in the base of the creche to be boiled and returned to the tank. A pneumatic hiss followed an instant later, and I drew back as the clamshell lid began to rise. Gibson lay naked on a padded white slab, his arms—spotted and time-eaten—at his sides. A hose ran from his mouth to siphon the fluid from his lungs, and a braided cable ran into his arm. As I watched, hot blood flowed red as dull fire up the line and into Gibson’s veins.

“Stay clear!” Valka said, hand reaching for the switch to arm the electrodes.

My eyes found the heart rate monitor, its line flat and dead.

A bright note sounded, strangely cheerful, and Gibson convulsed on the slab, hair soaked and flesh damp from the creche. I marked a thin scar on his chest, as from a sword. I had never seen it before—had never had occasion to see it before, and wondered at it. On the monitor, the line jumped. Jumped again. His heart was beating. Brain activity showed on panels of black glass, but even after decades of familiarity with the readings, I little understood them.

“Blanket!” I said to Ginoh. The native man handed the cloth to me, and I draped it over Gibson to hide his grubby nakedness. It was not right that I had seen him so. Still, I gripped his hand in mine. The old man wheezed, coughed gently, and his thin fingers tightened reflexively on my own. Looking to Valka, I asked, “Should I pull the tube?”

She made a gesture in the affirmative.

With smooth but firm motion, I reached up and tugged the siphon free. Gibson coughed again, rolled blindly to his side and retched. A thin stream of purplish fluid ran out. Cryonic rebirth—for all its high art and science—was just as undignified as birth itself. Releasing Gibson’s hand, I held his shoulders, kept the blanket in place. At once, I found myself remembering another bedside. Another world. Another life.

What in Earth’s name were you doing in the city alone?

“What in Earth’s name are you doing here?” I asked, unable to keep from grinning.

The old scholiast’s gray eyes raked over my face, unseeing. That was no surprise. Fugue blindness was so common it was nearly inevitable. “Livy?” he croaked, turning his head in an effort to find the source of my voice. “Livy? Is that you?”

Livy? There was an ancient historian named Livy. A Greek? A Roman? Was this Livy then a scholiast? “No, Gibson,” I said, bringing my face closer to his ear. He had been deafening as long as I’d known him. “No. No, it’s Hadrian.”

A warm smile split the scholiast’s face. “Hadrian!” He raised a hand, upsetting the weighted blanket. Fresh from fugue, Gibson’s scholiast rigor had yet to assert itself, and his emotions ran free and wild across the seamed face. “Hadrian!” The bony fingers found my face, and the sightless eyes turned toward me. “You found my . . . letter.”

“What letter?” I didn’t understand. Scholiasts didn’t send letters, not from athenaeum. The colleges were meant to be a retreat from the wider world, places of isolated contemplation and study, places nearer the abstract realm of form and theory. But of course, Gibson was not at athenaeum. Had some letter come to Nessus and been blocked by Venantian’s people? “What letter?” I asked again, shaking my head.

“Doesn’t matter,” he murmured, voice barely more than a whisper. “You’re here.”

It didn’t matter. Unable to restrain myself, I stooped and took the old man in my arms, embracing him as a son should embrace his father.

“I am.”