“HOW LONG ’TIL RENDEZVOUS, pilot?” I asked, wasting no time as I came through the portal to the bridge of the Ascalon. The Challis-class interceptor hummed beneath my feet as I took in the narrow bridge and the three men crewing it. The Ascalon could run with as few as one man at the controls. It had been designed to transport small numbers at great speed and in great secrecy. I’d added it to my list of assets before the Battle of Senuessa, some years before Thermon, when the need to travel between the relatively close-knit worlds at the edge of the Veil had been great and the Tamerlane’s speed was insufficient.

“Ten minutes, my lord,” said the chief pilot officer, a reddish woman with a shock of white hair.

Her navigator spoke up. “Should be able to see the old girl in about three though, sir. She’s coming round the day side.”

Valka entered as he was saying this, and said, “Be sure to put it on screen, please. I’d like to watch our approach.”

“Aye, ladyship.”

I felt Valka bristle at the honorific, but she did not rebuke the man. Centuries spent among us Sollan barbarians had worn down her defenses, and at any rate, our sojourn among her people had not more endeared her to the demarchists’ way of life.

A moment passed in professional silence as the three officers went about their work. The helmsman sat forward-most of all, strapped into a chair thrust out into the midst of an alumglass geodesic blister, glass above and below and to all sides. It was the only true window on the bridge, used mostly to allow the helmsman to communicate by body language with ground crew whenever the ship was in dock. In space it was . . . less useful, though it eased the claustrophobic bottling effect common on so many starcraft, especially the smaller ones. The other seats—those of the chief officer and the navigator—stood farther back beneath the low, sloping roof. It was between these I stood, ungloved hand resting on the back of the navigator’s seat at my right, the Emperor’s gold ring shining on my finger. I’d half-expected him to demand its return, but before I’d left Nessus I’d seen His Radiance the Emperor one more time. He’d insisted I keep it as a sign so the Grand Conclave on Padmurak knew I represented him personally.

“ ’Twill be good to see Otavia and the others again,” Valka said. “It has been so long . . .”

That was an understatement, but after so many decades any statement would be.

“She said they’d all be waiting for us,” I said. I’d spoken to the old mercenary captain earlier that very same day to coordinate our pickup. The Ascalon had landed in the meadow outside Maddalo House, and old Anju had overseen the house staff work to carry the crates Valka and I had earmarked for transport to the Tamerlane.

“Don’t suppose I’ll be seeing you again, master,” the cook said, peering up at me with eyes half-veiled with age. She’d been but a girl when she’d started, all elbows, those eyes sparkling with laughter. I’d watched three generations of her family come and go. Her great-grandson had just passed his examinations and entered the civil service, working for the Magnarch’s office. Anju said he aspired to patrician uplift, and I’d promised to put in a good word. How strange the passage of time is. Generations for the old chef, a lifetime.

And my hair had yet to gray.

Stranger still, as for Otavia Corvo and the others aboard the Tamerlane, it had been no time at all. Sixty-eight years had passed them by in less than a dream, and the familiar faces we rode to meet, whom we longed to see again after so lengthy a separation—had seen us merely yesterday.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice,” I murmured, quoting. “Everything flows.”

“My lord?” the chief pilot officer looked round. I had spoken in Classical English, and that dead language was alien to the young man.

I caught Valka looking at me, one brow raised. She’d understood me perfectly. “Nothing,” I said, and shut my eyes, thinking of the shimmering rivers of time, of whose strange waters and stranger shores I dreamed each night.

The navigator cleared his throat. “We have line of sight, lordship. On the overhead.”

A false window blinked on the canted ceiling above the three officers, showing a contrast-boosted and greatly magnified view ahead.

I had not seen her at Eikana, had not seen her in so many years.

The Tamerlane crested above the cloud-streaked green and white face of Nessus like a city sailing. She flew inverted to us, her armored dorsal hull facing the planet we orbited so that the spires and geometric holds and the organic swell of engine clusters that hung beneath that armored top layer seemed the black towers and bastion of a dark castle wrought of steel. My castle. The five great cones of her fusion engines were dark, and only the faint points of ion drives shone like stars across her stern. She was flying away from us, and we were overtaking her, our own ion drives sparking, pushing us to higher and higher orbits.

More than a dozen miles she stretched from pointed forecastle to the arrowhead of her stern. Between the naval crew and officers, the infantry who slept frozen in her holds, and the aquilarii who manned her lightercraft, more than ninety thousand men called her home—none more than me.

Not speaking—not needing to—Valka wrapped an arm about my waist.

I smiled.

We were home.

In time the hangar doors were opened and we passed through the static field into the launch bay. On approach, the pilot officer inverted the Ascalon, flipped it head over heels so that we slid into the launch bay backward, relying on the ion drives and on common repulsors to bleed the momentum from our burn. Magnetic clamps embraced us, and the great bay doors slid closed.

Valka and I were aware of this only as a distant clangor, for we waited by the hatch. She squeezed my hand and kissed me, hooked an arm around my neck to draw me down and close. The seventy years of our exile melted then and dripped away—and more than those years. The odorless, recycled air and the brisk chill of the starship brought back the sense of ages past, and the Valka who kissed me was not the dark lady of Nessus, but the young xenologist I’d met on Emesh when I’d been little more than a boy.

“Back on the road again,” she breathed, forehead pressed to mine.

I matched her grin and kissed her in turn.

The hatch opened, pale light streaming in.

“Good to see some things haven’t changed,” came a familiar voice. “Hasn’t it been like a hundred years for you two?”

Otavia Corvo stood at the end of the gangway, seven feet of corded muscle in her captain’s blacks, floating coils of bleached hair twisting about her dark face. She uncrossed her arms and grinned.

Valka and I sprang apart as First Officer Bastien Durand said, “Welcome back to the Tamerlane, Lord Marlowe. Doctor Onderra.” He bowed, adjusted his arcane spectacles, tried his best to hide the wry amusement he shared with his commander.

“Seventy years,” I said in answer, striding forward to clasp Otavia by the arm.

She grinned wolfishly. “You haven’t aged a day.”

“Otavia!” Valka pushed past and embraced the taller woman.

“Valka!” The captain returned the embrace, surprised by the fierceness of it. There is a part, I think, in those of us with augmented lifespans, which has never adjusted to them. It is as if our memory and our cells expect only to live the three score and ten of our mythic past, and so seeing Corvo and Durand again after so long a separation was meeting again a friend from childhood in the twilight of deep age and finding them unchanged.

When Valka and the captain had come apart, Corvo said, “White and Koskinen are prepared to take us out-system as soon as we get clearance. The Commonwealth? Really?”

“Have you ever been?” I asked.

Corvo shook her head. “Heard stories.”

“I sailed with a woman who came out of there before Pharos,” Durand said, his old composure restored. The First Officer had been distant and chilly before Annica and Berenike, but after he’d been almost remote as the stars. If my experiences with the Quiet and my magic—to borrow the Emperor’s term—had converted Bassander Lin from adversary to friend, they had alienated Durand. I had forced the officer to shoot me and watched the blood drain from his face when he saw the bullet had done me no harm. I am not sure he had so much as looked at me since. “She was strange. Laconic. Sort of spoke around what she wanted.”

“The Lothrians don’t have ways of referring to individual people,” I said. “No names or titles. No identity, no property.”

“Sounds like hell!” Pallino said, appearing from round the corner at the end of the gangway tunnel, Elara in tow.

“Pal!” I clapped the man on the shoulder. I’d seen him far more recently than the others, but it was still too long. Elara I embraced. They were—besides Valka, and I supposed Bassander Lin—the last link I had to what I considered the true beginning of my life on Emesh. “How long have you two been out of freeze?”

“Only since yesterday,” Elara said. “We’d have called, but the captain here said you were busy with the Emperor.” She smiled in an almost motherly way. Elara had fallen into the role of quartermaster when we’d stolen the Mistral and left Bassander and Jinan above Rustam. She and Pallino had never married. They’d both been older when I’d met them in the fighting pits on Emesh, and though both of them had entered a second youth when I’d named them my armsmen and members of my house, I suppose neither of them felt the need to formalize their entanglement, as Valka and I had never done.

Valka and I moved out of the gangway umbilical and into the hall overlooking the launch bay. Through high, narrow windows I could see the black and silver knife-shape of the Ascalon clamped into its moorings. As I watched, the three nacelles and the wing on the near side folded against the hull of the ship.

“The Emperor?” asked a small, pale-eyed man with long hair so blond it was nearly white. “What’s this, then?”

“Good to see you, too, Aristedes.”

Commander Lorian Aristedes returned my acknowledging nod, toyed with one silvered brace that kept his too-long fingers in their proper places. “Is the Emperor here?”

Valka interjected. “He’s on tour, visiting worlds across the front.”

“He’s who ordered this mission to the Commonwealth,” I said.

Lorian’s skeletal face composed itself into a frown. “Straight from the top, eh?” I could hear the gears in his head starting to turn. “Are they trying to push you out of the action again?”

“It does certainly seem that way,” I agreed. The little man had an unnerving habit of cutting straight to the heart of things. Turning to Corvo and Durand, I said, “Will you have someone take our things to our quarters?”

Durand tapped his chest in salute and moved off, pressing past the others to find the stevedores. When he had gone, I asked Corvo, “How long will it take us to reach Padmurak?”

The captain chewed the inside of her cheek. “A little over forty-three years standard.”

“Is Halford out of freeze?” I asked, referring to the night captain, the man whose job it was to tend the Tamerlane while she sailed between the stars with her primary crew in fugue.

Corvo shook her head. “I figure the ship’s been offline so long we ought to take the first leg to shake her down. It’s seven years to Gododdin at top speed. We’ll refuel there and cross the rest of the way to the Sagittarius before we turn core-ward and make our way up the arm.”

“Good,” I said. Seven years. “I’ll stay awake as well; that way I’ll be around if anything arises that requires my attention. Besides, it will be nice to have some time with everyone. We’ll wake Halford and the rest at Gododdin; he can take us on to Padmurak.” The thought occurred to me that traveling up the Sagittarius Arm would mean passing near Colchis. Even if it were not possible to set into port there, I made a note to leave a message by inter-system relay for Siran and Gibson—assuming they were still alive.

“This will probably be Roderick’s last voyage,” Corvo said, meaning Commander Halford. “He’s over two hundred years active time now. Three hundred by the time we make it back from the Commonwealth.”

Half his palatine life . . . I thought. I seldom thought of the night captain. Despite all the years he’d put into our company, I had spent but little time getting to know the man who had saved us all from pirates off the coast of Nagapur. “I can hardly believe it’s been so long.”

“I know!” Pallino exclaimed. “Seems like just yesterday we were dealing with that stick old Lin kept up his Mandari ass.”

“Tribune Lin sends his regards, by the way,” I said to Corvo, who accepted this news with a nod. Everyone was quiet a moment, and I said, “On the bright side, this is a diplomatic mission. We’re moving away from the fighting for once. I don’t expect there’ll be much call for shore leave in the Commonwealth, but see we spring for the good stuff when we resupply in Gododdin. You’ve all been under the ice a long time. Do you good to live a little.”

“All they’ve got on Gododdin’s bromos,” Pallino groaned. “I’ve eaten enough hyper-oats for a hundred lifetimes.”

Valka laughed. “ ’Twill do you good.”

“Believe me, Valka, I’ve had enough good done me by that shite to last ’til Earth comes.”

I caught myself grinning, looking round at all the others. My friends. “I have missed you all.”

“Wish I could say the same, lad!” Pallino barked. “But they keep us nobodies froze up, so I saw your ugly mug day before last.”

“Good!” I snapped back, and for an instant I was not Hadrian but Had the myrmidon again. “That way you won’t forget it. Old man like you needs reminding.”

Pallino pointed a finger in my direction. “Think that’s funny, do you? I’ll teach you to respect your elders, lad.”

“You’re not my elder anymore, Pal,” I said, and felt my grin die a little as Durand returned with the porters to take mine and Valka’s effects to our cabin. I found new life for it again and continued, “Maybe it’s you who needs teaching.”

The old soldier beat his chest. “Try that in the ring, son.”

“It’s a deal!” I said, laughing along with the others. “What’s ship time?”

“Fourteen hundred hours,” Lorian answered.

I took this information in with a curt nod. “Good. Corvo, would you walk with us? I want to see everything gets set up in the cabin proper and we’ll all reconvene for dinner, yes?” I paused, realizing only then that we were short. “Where are Crim and Ilex?”

“Still in medica,” Durand answered. “Started the thaw later than the rest of us. Okoyo says they’ll be clear by end of day.”

“Let’s push dinner, then!” I said, brushing past Lorian with a gentle hand on the short intus’s shoulder. “I’d rather see everyone together!”

The air felt dry and lifeless as the doors cycled and the ventilators kicked quietly on. The lights bloomed from dark to orange to golden. All was as we had left it. The wall was bare where Whent’s flag had been removed, and the bookshelves on the curved gallery on the level above yawned their emptiness. The books had all been taken to Maddalo House, and in Maddalo House they remained. Valka had gone with Corvo to the bridge and left me to oversee the reordering of our lives.

I drifted toward the couches and the low table that made up the central sitting area in the center of the room, taking in the old dining table beside the wine cabinet and refrigeration unit and the pocket-door that led to the dumbwaiter that descended to the officers’ mess. There, too, were the old coat hooks above the sideboard where once I’d kept Jinan’s laving basin.

Something on the floor caught my eye, and I crossed to the sideboard, crouched beside it.

Shards of glass littered the floor, shone in the soft overhead light.

It took me a moment to realize what they were from.

It was the remains of the glass bubble I’d ordered made to preserve my Galath blossom from the predations of time. When I’d left the Tamerlane at the start of my exile, it had seemed wrong somehow to take the flower with me. Perhaps it was because it was a symbol of the Empire, and the Empire had spurned me. Or perhaps it was only that it had come to mean little to me, like the Nipponese woodcuts that hung on one wall.

The globe must have fallen with the motion of the ship, or perhaps one of the porters who had helped empty the chamber had shattered it by accident as we sealed the rooms. I’d no way of knowing, for surely security logs so old were purged from the ship’s database. I poked through the smashed glass and found what I was looking for.

The white flower had withered at last, its silver-edged petals wrinkled and gray. I lifted it by its desiccated stem, twirled it in my fingers, a frown coming unbidden to my face. My reflection glowered at me from out of the glass front of the sideboard. I might have been the same young man who’d first taken ownership of the Tamerlane. The pointed nose and high cheekbones were the same, as were the violet eyes and curtains of ink-dark hair. My age betrayed itself only in the deepened permanence of the creases at eyes and mouth, and in the tiredness of the spirit that clung to me.

In the quiet of the chamber, and unwatched, I reached for that second sight. I saw the flower across infinite variations. Dead. Dead. And dead. Here a petal was missing, here the stem snapped. There I found it flattened, and in too many places . . . found it not at all. I reached further and further, casting my eyes toward the very edges of the cone of light that described the boundaries of my sight—the boundaries of the possible. In not one of them were the flower and the glass made whole. They had broken long ago, and it was only the present I could change—and the future with it.

Only the past is written.

“Lord Marlowe?”

I crushed the flower in my fist, looked round to find the stevedores had arrived with the first of mine and Valka’s luggage on a float pallet.

“Yes?” I stood, let the dust of the flower fall. “What is it?”

“I . . . where would you like this, sir?”

“By the stairs.” I pointed with my gloved hand. “Unless it’s earmarked for our personal quarters. Carry that through.”

“Yes, my lord.” The men shunted their float pallet over the Tavrosi carpets and set about their work.

“And someone clean this up!” I said, indicating the shattered glass as I swept from the room to join Valka and Corvo on the bridge, my original task forgotten.