OF ALL THE PLACES I have lived, Maddalo House was among the most perfect. Had it been on Colchis and not Nessus, it might have been the very best. The Cid Arthurians who’d built it millennia before had done so on the edge of the bluffs that overlooked the riverlands and hedged pastures that rolled over hills and ran between them toward the capital on the horizon. The exterior was all of lime-washed stone, and the peaked rooftops were each supported by wooden beams intricately sculpted in the geometric style so closely associated with that chivalric cult.

It was not the grand palace of any great lord of the Imperium, but beautiful in a way balancing humility and pride. The two wings of the former abbey enclosed a courtyard and a rock garden that once had encircled the customary anvil and sword of the Arthur-Buddha. The Chantry had had that cult icon removed and melted down when Nessus was conquered by the Imperium, and here and there the villa showed the signs of the Inquisition: a rough patch in the wood where a lotus or a grail had been chiseled off, a petrified stump where the sacred fig tree had been cut down. There were places on the walls where traditional artwork had been removed and replaced with artifacts that clearly did not belong: a stuffed bull’s head, the nude portrait of palatine woman reclining on a leather couch, and a sculpture that seemed to me no more than a gnarled mass of bronze, shapeless and ugly.

I’d had the bull’s head and the ugly sculpture removed, replaced with a bat-winged angel in the style of those gargoyles who’d protected my childhood home of Devil’s Rest. Valka—not surprising me—had insisted on keeping the painting. It made me uncomfortable, and she found that amusing.

The place was filled with the signs of our long occupation. Twin battle standards of the Red Company stood on pennon-staffs bracketed to either side of the grand staircase. Each bore the pitchfork and pentacle of my branch of House Marlowe bordered by the twisting labyrinth pattern that recalled my mother’s family’s Greek heritage. The library—a square tower on the southwest corner—contained nearly all the books that had traveled with me for so long on the Tamerlane. There too were housed the dozens of journals—white-paged and black—that I’d filled with sketches and snatches of poetry and favorite quotations over the long centuries.

Valka had claimed one of the upper halls for a study, and there filled the place with phototypes and print-outs of maps and scans of the various Quiet sites she’d visited in her life. The revelation that the circular anaglyphs that covered the Quiet’s ruins were no glyphs at all, but the fingerprints in three-dimensional space of the higher-order dimensional mechanisms the Quiet had left behind, had broken her for years. But she was a xenologist, and language or no she would unravel the mystery she’d set out to solve.

I’d been given a small staff along with the place, of whom only old Anju remained after seventy years. She’d started as a scullery maid when Valka and I first took up residence at Maddalo House. Now she was the cook, and had been for nearly thirty years. She was terribly ancient for a plebeian, but was first to awaken every morning to prepare breakfast for myself and for the rest of the villa’s small staff: the groundskeeper and two housekeepers. Often I would eat with them before taking my exercise in the vaulted gymnasium in the east wing. Once, the place had rung to the sound of steel as the Cid Arthurians sparred with one another.

The fencing gimbals with their target dummies and the holograph well were the only vestige of the monks that had not been scratched or painted over in some capacity. As I so often had in the morning those long decades—while Valka slept after a quiet night’s labor—I stood in the center of the fencing round, targets dancing about me on the end of articulated metal arms. Holograph projectors painted the images of men over those targets. The Cid Arthurians had designed and programmed the images of medieval knights in Gothic plate, their visors down, tunics bright and richly patterned.

I felt shabby by comparison, barefoot, bare-chested, clad only in close-fitting trousers, the sword in my hand a weighted fiberglass rod. There were four of them, circling with blade or mace in hand, holographs mapping neatly over the armatures at the end of each of the gimbal arms, so that each knight appeared connected to the circular device on the ceiling above us by an umbilical of elbowed steel. How the device could pass Chantry inspection I was not sure, nor could I guess at how the machine’s iron will operated without recourse to artificial intelligence, yet operate it did, never once repeating itself. I had toyed with the thought of removing it—its jointed arms too much recalled the limbs of the Exalted and of the chimeric half-machine soldiers that formed the core of the Prophet’s armies—but I never did. The Chantry had done enough harm to the old place when it tore out the old religious icons—I would do it no more harm. Moreover, I confess a certain attachment to the machine. The holographs recalled the images my own mother would paint in her holograph operas, and so—standing against those ancient knights in their metal armor—I felt I stood in one of her stories.

The first knight lunged, red plume dipping as it thrust out the point of its sword. I parried the blade, slid the point of my sword inside and up under the knight’s visor. The holograph faded, and the padded automaton withdrew, dummy blade drooping as the gimbal retreated, pulling it into the air. One down. I leaped aside in time to dodge a blow from the next knight, whose false image wore a surcoat of blue and gold with what looked like the fleur-de-lis of House Bourbon stitched upon it. The others came on, one in black and gold with a huge mace and the other in lobstered steel with a helmet like a barrel and bristles beneath the eye slits in imitation of a mustache. I parried a blow from the black knight and swung wide to put it between me and the other two. I had to control them, to try to isolate one opponent at a time.

My bare feet slid on the glassy floor as I backpedaled, retreating before the ferocious onslaught of the black knight. The blue one darted round toward my left, hoping to pincer me. I charged the black knight, batting its mace aside and striking it a blow that rang its armet like a bell. The knight staggered, metal umbilical whining as it went to one knee, according me the time I needed to turn and parry an overhead cut from the knight in blue. The mustachioed knight raised its great sword like an executioner.

I lunged, kept the point of my weapon forward through a careful parry that pushed my enemy’s blade aside. It struck the floor as I extended, the tip of my training sword passing through the illusion of plate to strike the target at center mass. The knight vanished, dummy skeleton lifting back into the air, circling round even as the first dummy deployed again, holograph painting the image of an ancient Nipponese samurai in lieu of the knight with the plume.

By then, the black knight had recovered its feet, and both it and the blue moved together, working as a unit. Their ghostly feet made no noise where they trod over the laser-smooth stone, nor did their armor rattle. They struck together, and though I struck the black in the head, the blue one’s holographed sword walloped me across the back, leaving an angry welt.

Snarling, I blocked the blue knight’s sword arm with my left, felt little pain as my false bones bore the brunt of the impact. I whirled, blade whistling round to strike my mock opponent in the side of the head. It fell and faded, beaten. Knocking out three in such rapid succession had earned me a reprieve from respawning opponents, and I stood facing the samurai, sword raised in the forward line that had been my preferred guard since my days in the fighting pits of Emesh. The antique knight had a demonic mask that hid its face beneath the sloping kabuto. It advanced, blade flashing. I parried, side-stepping in a way that forced my point nearer the samurai’s eyes. The simulacrum retreated, changing its guard. The curved blade came up, slashed down. I slackened my grip, allowed my sword to dip and flow out of the way as my opponent overcommitted, momentarily offering me its shoulder.

As a boy, I had so often hesitated to strike when Sir Felix pitted me against my brother.

I struck.

The fourth drone’s holograph faded, and all four of the gimbal arms rotated above me, dangling their combat dummies like evil fruit. I slowly rotated in the midst of them, watching as the automata touched down on the stone about me, brandishing padded batons that turned into the steel swords of ancient knights as the holographs flared back over their metal skeletons.

I gritted my teeth, swept my attention round in a circle to assess my situation. I had a moment, crooked Marlowe smile reflected in the mirrored breastplate of the knight before me, knife-edged face a determined mask. I was great, then, great as I had ever been. Great—perhaps—as I would ever be.

The lead knight tapped its blade against its open palm, image producing no sound. Its fellows fanned out, circling about me like sharks in bloody water. Surrounded, no man could fight four at once. No ordinary man. I turned on the spot, knowing I could not keep all four in my sight—within the scope of my vision. Four became eight. Became sixteen. Thirty-two. Sixty-four. Hundreds. Thousands.

They struck, and vanished as they struck, their possibilities snuffed out by time’s relentless flood. One blade whistled by as I turned my shoulder, and I turned another aside as I pivoted, bringing my own weapon around to chop into one golem’s shoulder. I did not stay still, but hurried back, escaping the center of the knot my enemies had made, blade held between myself and them.

How many times had that hall rung to the clashing of our blades? How clearly I remember the color of the sunlight through the wrought-iron grates in the windows, how clearly I recall the smooth chill of the glassy floor beneath my horned feet. So many thousand such mornings lay behind me, so few were yet to come. Silence was coming to Maddalo House. Silence, and a shadow called Hadrian Marlowe who would one day face smiling Sir Hector on that very glass and struggle even to hold his sword.

The silver knight thrust its weapon at my eyes.

“Pause simulation.”

With a dopplered whine the servos in the gimbals and in the metal puppets ground to a halt, the silver knight’s holograph sword inches from my face. I relaxed, turning to see Valka standing in the circular arch of the door, dressed in a loose, sleeveless shirt and flared jodhpurs. Tribune Lin stood beside her, leaning on his cane and studiously looking anywhere but at the hideous, deep scars that striped my left hand and arm, relic of the highmatter sword that had nearly killed me in the Grand Colosseum on Forum.

Still surrounded by the holograph knights, I said, “Lin! I’d not realized the time.”

The tribune wore undress blacks beneath his greatcoat, and carried his white tribune’s beret beneath the arm opposite his cane. “I’d not realized you kept that,” he said, using his cane to point at the yellow flag that hung on the far wall of the gymnasium. It showed a black, eight-winged angel with a skull for a face. It had belonged to Marius Whent, the self-styled Admiral whose dictatorship we’d toppled on our quest for Vorgossos.

Looking up at it, I said, “It’s the one that flew above the state building. Jinan . . . Lieutenant Azhar cut it down during the celebration.” Jinan and I had climbed the spire ourselves.

“I still have his sword,” Lin said, and patted the weapon through his coat. Though not an Imperial knight, Lin had carried the weapon ever since the Pharos affair. I was surprised no one had ever challenged him over it. “Are those from the arena?”

“What?” I turned distractedly, midway through the motion of handing my training sword to one of the automata. The antique knights flickered, and the drones withdrew, pulled up toward the arched ceiling like puppets exiting the stage. He meant my scars. Ordinarily, I wore a black leather glove buckled to the elbow to hide the worst of it. “Yes. Relic of the time before the last time the Chantry tried to kill me. They’re bound to succeed if they keep going on like this.”

“Don’t say that!” Valka said.

I shrugged. Thanks to Valka’s demarchist implants, we were quite certain the house was not bugged. Part of the reason I’d selected Maddalo House for my own was its antiquity; its one-time status as an abbey meant the old place’s connection to the planet’s datasphere was thin at best. There were no electronic locks on doors and windows, no security cameras, no integrated comm systems. If anything in the vicinity had been transmitting, Valka would have sensed it with her neural lace.

“How do you find Nessus, Lin?” I asked, toweling myself off. “Enjoying your meetings with the Magnarch?” I’d sat in on several of Lord Venantian’s advisory sessions with the Emperor, discussing the logistics of His Radiance’s tour of the outer provinces. Frightfully dreary work.

Lin shrugged. “It’s not so bad. You seem to be quite comfortable.”

“The house?” I looked round at the gymnasium, at the tall, narrow windows that overlooked the grounds and the English garden, safe within its high hedge walls. “The house is the only part of my cage here that’s any good—except my cellmate.”

Valka rolled her eyes.

“Still,” Lin said, stumping over to the windows to get a better view of the garden, “you could do worse. I was surprised to get the invitation, truth be told.”

“We mentioned it when you arrived,” Valka interjected.

“Yes, but . . .” He did not turn to face us, but squared his shoulders as he surveyed the world below, drummed his fingers on the head of his cane precisely as old Raine Smythe had done, “we have not always seen eye to eye.” As he spoke, it occurred to me those drumming fingers belonged to the hand I’d once cut off. After an uneasy silence, Lin added, “It has been a long campaign . . .” His voice sounded drawn, tired—every note of it betraying the tribune’s several hundred years. I had to remind myself that he was patrician, that though we were close in age, his less nobile blood was wearing on him more than mine. Lin was not a young man. “I am grateful that we are on the same side, Marlowe.”

Where was all this coming from?

“As am I, Lin,” I said, not sure what else to say.

“I never thanked you for getting me off that field on Berenike.”

“You don’t have to,” I said, draping the towel about my shoulders.

The tribune turned on his heel, inhaled sharply. “I do.”

Receiving Bassander Lin’s gratitude was not the most comfortable experience of my life, so I stepped around it. “Berenike was hard.”

“Whatever happened to those Irchtani soldiers of yours?”

Nearly two-thirds of them had died in the final assaults against Bahudde and the drill the Cielcin had sent against our fortress. “Reassigned,” I replied. “Their commander, Barda, went to a Legion fort on . . . Zigana, I think it was. Took his men with him.” I shifted posture, folded my arms almost defensively. “They’re training more of their kind to fight for us.” At the funeral for Udax and the hundreds of dead Irchtani, I had promised Barda my loyalty to his people. It was a promise I’d done little to keep. Shaking myself from such guilty reflections, I said, “Please, let me dress. I’ll be back shortly.”

I withdrew to the safety of the bedchamber then, and quickly washed and clothed myself: a white tunic with loose sleeves belted above my customary black trousers and high boots. I lingered a moment to fuss over the silver fasteners of the leather gauntlet I wore to conceal the scars on my left arm, violet eyes studying their own reflection in the mirror. An antique laving basin stood on the vanity before the mirror. It had belonged to Jinan, who had used every morning and evening to perform the ablutions her Jaddian fire god asked of his faithful. She had left it with me when I left her. I had used it to hold certain valuables ever since. My rings lay in it: one of ivory, one of rhodium, one of yellow gold. Nestled amongst them was the piece of white shell the Quiet had given me and whose radiance had guided me out along the rivers of time from the Howling Dark, and the silver half-moon of the genetic phylactery Valka had made for me. There too was the silver cylinder that housed the inert pentaquark reservoir of the highmatter blade that Augustin Bourbon had given to his picked assassin for that day in the Colosseum. I’d removed it before sending the empty hilt back to its owner so that he knew who it was that had encompassed his fate. I’d kept the core ever since.

A reminder of what I was and what I should not become.

This reminder I tried to square with the vision of me Bassander Lin had, his gratitude, his holy terror. The last buckle tightened on the cuff of my gauntlet, and I shook the white sleeve down over the glove. As I stepped away, the light reflected on the silver solder that held the smashed basin together. I had broken it moving into my quarters aboard the Tamerlane when the Emperor gifted me the old battleship, and its scars shone bright as my own did, without a glove to hide them.

I thought of Lin, his bones smashed and stitched back together with worn-out tools, and of Valka, her mind burned by MINOS’s virus. The war had left its marks on each of us, as all Time’s servants must.

I found Lin and Valka in the main hall, and coming down the grand staircase between the Marlowe banners, I led Lin on a tour of the house and grounds, the three of us talking of little things, old memories. We spoke of Raine Smythe, of Vorgossos and of the time before Vorgossos. We spoke of Emesh and of Sir Olorin, and of Otavia Corvo and the others who slumbered in icy crypts in the Tamerlane above.

“I’ve not seen any of them properly since before Thermon,” I said. “Pallino and Crim were with me on Eikana, and I spoke to Lorian and Corvo on comm after, but I’ve been cut off a long time.”

“We both have,” Valka said, reclining in her seat. The three of us had absconded to a table the housekeepers had brought out into the garden for the evening meal. “Wine?” She proffered the bottle of Carcassoni blue.

Lin refused the vintage as he had refused it at the start of the meal. “Just water.” He refilled his amethyst glass from a matching pitcher to underscore his refusal. “I imagine it’s not been easy, cut off from your people.”

“And the Magnarch is not my greatest admirer,” I said, cutting through what remained of my quail.

Seeing Lin’s raised eyebrows, Valka put in, “He is very . . . devout.”

“So am I,” Lin said coolly.

“She means that Lord Venantian considers me guilty of heresy and witchcraft and . . . everything else the Inquisition brought against me at Thermon.” I swallowed my bite of quail and watched Lin closely for a reaction.

The Mandari officer betrayed little feeling in his face, but shook his head furiously. “Impossible. I saw what you did on Berenike, and on that ship . . . if you were machine or some experiment, the Inquisitors would have found out. They’d not have needed an assassin.”

I felt a frown slice across my face. Lin’s point was one I’d made to myself many times in the dead of night when the dreams came swift and silent. If I were anything but human, the Chantry would have found it. I was myself alone, and whatever the Quiet had done to me, they had not changed me as Kharn Sagara had changed, trading his body for another.

A wind tousled the pencil cypresses and walnut trees beneath whose boughs there came the spark of fireflies in the fresh gloom of evening. “That’s the problem,” I said at last. “It would almost have been better if I was guilty. They would at least have known what to do with me in that case. I’d not be trapped here.” I gestured at the garden, at Maddalo House, at all of Nessus unrolled beneath the darkling sky.

“There are worse fates.”

“Maybe,” I agreed, and sipped my wine.

“You said the Emperor was here for us?” Valka interjected, one hand settling on my arm. “On the tarmac. You said you overheard Sir Gray Rinehart and your legate talking?”

Despite having told us so much already, Bassander Lin looked uncomfortable. The man was Legion to his aching bones, and for him to engage in hearsay like a newly minted academy cadet was more than passing strange.

Bassander set his amethyst drinking goblet on the table, eyes darting back beyond the garden and across the lawn to where his flier cut a knife shadow against the sunset, as if afraid it might hear him.

“Sir Gray believes the Emperor means to name you an auctor of the realm.”

I was glad I’d set my wine glass back on the table, for surely I would have dropped.

“Auctor? Me?”

“What’s an auctor?” Valka asked, gold eyes darting from the tribune to me.

Bassander answered for me. “It’s an old office, one which hasn’t been invoked since the Jaddian Wars.”

“Since the Aurigan Wars,” I corrected. I’d read Impatian’s histories of the Empire a dozen times over the centuries. Turning to face Valka, I put a hand on her knee. “You can’t be serious.” But Bassander was never unserious. In decades of knowing him, I’d hardly known him to smile.

“If you two don’t answer my question . . .” Valka put her own glass down and hid her left hand in her lap. I recognized the tension in her shoulder as she masked one of the occasional tremors.

I raised a conciliatory hand, but it was Bassander who spoke. “The auctors were Imperial proxies, co-Emperors in all but name. They speak with the Emperor’s own voice, issue commands, draw up laws, command the Legions.”

“They were surrogates,” I added. “The old Emperors used to appoint them and send them out in their stead to carry out their will. Hand-picked men, trusted. They’d exercise the Emperor’s office until their mission ended and then be done. After the Aurigan Wars, the Emperor—I want to say it was one of the Tituses—created the system of Magnarchs and Viceroys instead. That was a little more stable, a bit less centralized.”

Valka was nodding along, right hand massaging the left. “You really think he’d resurrect this old office?”

Lin shrugged. “Like I said, he diverted the fleet five years off schedule to make this extra stop. Why do that if not for something like this?” The tribune leaned over the ruins of his meal. “Making you auctor would set you above the Chantry. They’d not dare move against you. You’d be safe. Safe to leave this place.”

My eyes narrowed reflexively. “What makes you so sure the Emperor wants me to leave this place?”

“To hear Rinehart tell it, the Emperor didn’t want you sent here in the first place, said you were wasted here.” Lin lifted his amethyst cup and drank.

I dwelt on this. Sir Gray Rinehart was Director of Legion Intelligence and by extension a man mere footsteps from the Imperial Council. Hearsay this auctor business might have been, but hearsay from the Imperial spymaster was something much closer to fact than lesser rumor.

For the first time in a long time, I felt an absurd twinge of hope, and suppressed the lopsided smile, concealed its spread by looking down at my plate. “Auctor,” I said, “auctor.” It made sense. There were few things that would drive the Sollan Emperor to divert his escort—to divert an entire battle fleet—over a hundred light-years out of its way, adding years to the time His Radiance was away from Forum. The appointment of an Imperial auctor was one. The first auctor in over nine thousand years.

Valka laughed suddenly, a bright sound in the twilit air. “Oh, your friend the Magnarch won’t like this at all!”