Disquiet Gods

Book 6: Sun Eater

by Christopher Ruocchio

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

The sixth novel of the galaxy-spanning Sun Eater series merges the best of space opera and epic fantasy, as Hadrian Marlowe continues down a path that can only end in fire.

The end is nigh.

It has been nearly two hundred years since Hadrian Marlowe assaulted the person of the Emperor and walked away from war. From his Empire. His duty. From the will and service of the eldritch being known only as the Quiet. The galaxy lies in the grip of a terrible plague, and worse, the Cielcin have overrun the realms of men.

A messenger has come to Jadd, bearing a summons from the Sollan Emperor for the one-time hero. A summons, a pardon, and a plea. HAPSIS, the Emperor’s secret first-contact intelligence organization, has located one of the dreadful Watchers, the immense, powerful beings worshipped by the Pale Cielcin.

Called out of retirement and exile, the old hero—accompanied by his daughter, Cassandra—must race across the galaxy and against time to accomplish one last, impossible task:

To kill a god.

Release date: April 2, 2024

Publisher: Baen

Print pages: 784

Sample

CHAPTER 1

THE SHADOW OF THE EMPIRE

 

Song.

A solitary voice rose up in song—as it did at the end of every watch of every day—from the parapet of the agiary temple that stood upon a spur of the black mountain at my back. I hardly heard it. After more than two hundred years of exile, the prayers of the fire priests of Jadd seemed to me no stranger than the sunset prayers of our Chantry, though they too rang hollow in my ears. Prince Aldia had told me many times—and my good Neema had echoed him—that their prayers were the source of ours. The worship of Atash, the holy fire, and of Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Wisdom, was older—far older—than the Imperial Cult of Earth.

Our ancestors worshipped the fire and Our Lord when men were children, the great prince told me often, voice quavering in his great-grandfatherly way. Your ancestors did not worship the Earth until they burned her.

I did not argue with him, though I might have pointed out that the manner of those prayers had come to his faith much later, in the clamor out of Earth, when they had needed ritual and song for comfort in the bitter, lightless years that had carried their people to new suns. So it was with all the old religions, though each claimed not to have changed at all.

Yet why should they not change?

If the god of the fire priests was real—and there are gods that are—then surely his part in the universal story is not ended. Surely there are new revelations at hand . . . and to come. That thought returned to me—who had received revelations of my own—time and again. In a younger man, the thought might have caught and kindled a fire of its own in my belly.

But I was old, and the wind that blew the words of the fire-priest’s song back upon the mountain dragged my long and graying hair back with it, and stoked not the embers in my heart. It was midafternoon, the start of Uziran, that watch which ran from midafternoon until evenfall. Looking up, I could see the acolytes in robes of Jaddian white and the neophytes of the Fire School in tunic and trousers of the same moving toward the agiary.

I did not move to join them, but gripped the iron rail. The metal was hot in the afternoon sun—red and huge as an apple in the pale sky—and I leaned my weight against it. I had started just after lunch, having dismissed Demetra for the day, and left my villa upon the sward above the beach of mingled black and white sand. As I always did, I’d set my sights upon Hephaistos, and walked the Scala Aspara, the White Stair, to the Fire School.

The Fire School.

All across the galaxy, songs are sung of its shining towers, its sweeping colonnades and intricately styled oriels. Legends are spun of duelists facing one another upon arched step bridges over steep-walled canals where the lavas of Hephaistos flow down to the sea, of odalisques oiled and clad in golden collars reclining for the delectation of their masters, of knives and whispers in the dark.

The songs are true, and legends mostly so.

The black mountain, which the first cartographers named Hephaistos—and which the Jaddians themselves called Kauf Adar—rose above all, its broken head cloud-crowned in the eggshell sky, its dark shoulders seeming frosted where the white towers and terraces gleamed. I had walked up the Scala Aspara earlier that afternoon, walked beneath the rows of date palms swaying in the wind and alongside the Grand Canal until I came to Il Casa du Burkan, the Volcano House, where the neophytes had their dormitories.

The mountain was always burning, casting up its fires from the belly of the world. The Jaddians had long ago tamed Hephaistos, directing its flows along canals and down cataracts where molten stone ran like water. To the men of Jadd, this was as ordinary as rain. Always I would pass students taking their lunch upon the embankment, or a pair of old men playing at druaja at a table overlooking the rivers

of fire. Great columns of steam were always rising from the sea where fire and water met, and always there were boats dredging the lagoons to keep them from filling in.

For two hundred years and more, the island and the Fire School had been my home.

Adequately rested at last, I pushed myself off the rail and continued my walk, white shirt clinging to sweating flesh. I was feeling my age that afternoon, I well recall, in my knees and in the shoulder old Doctor Elkan had so painstakingly repaired.

A pair of acolytes hurried past me, late for the watch’s prayers. One smiled at me and said, “Buon pogevra, domi!”

“Buon pogevra,” I said in return, touching my forehead. Good afternoon.

As they hurried past, the other acolyte muttered to his companion in Jaddian. “Itan quillo al Neroblis?”

“Si,” the first said. Then they were gone.

Al Neroblis, they called me. The Black Devil. I supposed I still looked the part. I still wore the high black boots of a military man, and the black trousers. My shirt was of plain white cotton, loose fitting, with laces at the neck in the fashion of Jaddian country lords. My hair was still more black than gray, even at six hundred and sixteen years of age, and though the creases at the corners of my eyes and mouth would no longer smooth away, a peasant might have marked me for a man of perhaps fifty standard years.

The Gray Devil might be more apt before long, I thought, almost muttering to myself as I began the walk back down. I had a mind to visit the library, where old Abdecalas maintained a collection nearly so fine

as the Royal Library in Jaharrad, though it was a little thing when measured against the hoard at Colchis. Still, they had books out of Earth, kept in temperature-controlled vaults beneath the stacks. Cassandra would be at her practice, and would remain so until sundown, when the neophytes were released to the evening meal.

I left the terrace rail and went down an arcing stair of white marble onto an esplanade that overlooked the Grand Canal. Lava burbled in the channel below, flowing black and redly down its gentle incline at my left hand thirty feet below the level of the esplanade. A reflecting pool shimmered to my right, surrounded on three sides by a low building fronted by horseshoe-arched colonnades. A heron trilled in the water and took flight, disturbed by my appearance.

The entirety of the Fire School was built along the gentler, lower slopes of Hephaistos, bisected by the Grand Canal, which ran almost due west from the mountain down to the Varkanan Sea. When I’d ascended that afternoon, I’d traveled up the south side, climbing level by switchbacked level from Volcano House up nearly to the level of the Grand Agiary, the Atash Behram Jaddi, which was highest up the mountain. Now I was descending along the north side. There were twenty-five terraces on either side, each mirroring the other. The library stood opposite Volcano House on the lowest, each connected to the other by an arched bridge.

The sound of training swords clacked from a quadrangle to my right, but the duelists were hidden from my sight. There was always a fight somewhere, or a student reciting scripture, or his own verse. My hosts, the swordmasters, had permitted me to recite my own writings, and though they praised it and me, I think they humored me, in truth, and found my writings as unsophisticated as my sword work. Though I matched many of their masters one-to-one, they found my Imperial style clumsy and imprecise. Master Hydarnes had laughed when I first bested him, and called me Al Brutan—the Brute—and the masters had taken to calling me that when they did not call me Al Neroblis.

They rarely called me Hadrian.

As I reached the second terrace from the library, a flock of gulls rose from a gabled rooftop, and it was a minute before I realized what had startled them. I felt the shuttle’s repulsors before I heard them, as a trembling in the air. Looking up, I saw the black shape sliding across the sky, its slim wings spread against the afternoon sun.

That was strange in itself. For all its galactic reputation, the Fire School rarely received visitors. Its students were expected to make pilgrimage by sea, and crossed the Varkanan by ship from the capital in Jaharrad. Occasionally the prince himself or some other dignitary would visit by air, taking one of the cetacean fliers so loved by the Jaddian people, with foil sails and filigreed hulls.

It was an Imperial shuttle, a black knife cutting the sky.

I hadn’t seen one in nearly two hundred years. The Jaddians were jealous of their holy planet, not permitting foreign ships to make anchor. That had made it the perfect place to keep me safe all the long years. I had assaulted the Emperor, had struck him clean across the face for all his court to see . . . and in doing so I had forfeited my life. Only the intervention of Lorian Aristedes and Bassander Lin had saved my life.

Lorian and Bassander . . . and Prince Kaim, who was Olorin.

I squeezed the regrown fingers of my right hand with the hollow-boned fingers of my left, ran a hand along the scarred left forearm to the inside of the elbow, remembering the needles. Once, I had bought passage to Vorgossos with a vial of inhuman blood. I had bought a home on Jadd with a vial of my own. My genome lay now in the treasure vaults of House du Otranto, High Princes of Jadd. In a generation, perhaps, certain of my genes would be introduced to that august line. I imagined violet eyes peering out from the porcelain masks of Jaddian lords, or smiling through the chained veils of their ladies.

They imagined something more.

They had hoped to replicate my gifts. I knew that Aldia and Olorin both dreamed of Jaddian princes with the power to peer across time, to collapse the waves of potential into a chosen now. Olorin and the Emperor both had seen me slay Attavaisa in the bunker on Perfugium, watched me shatter the windows of the Cielcin ship with a thought.

The Jaddians had saved me, from the Emperor . . . and myself, but they had not done so wholly out of charity.

I watched the shuttle circle the Fire School, following the coastline. For a moment, I thought it was not going to land at all. But it circled back, lower this time, and I fancied that the hairs on my arms stood on end, though the ship was by then too far off for me to sense its repulsors. Its wings folded gracefully back and up as it settled on the square outside Il Casa du Burkan, trees bending in the wind.

An overwhelming urge to run kindled in me, and it took all my scholiast-trained composure not to act on it, not to find Cassandra at her lessons and run. They would look for me—if they were looking for me—at the villa.

Fear is a poison, I told myself, that ancient part of me that spoke in Gibson’s voice still speaking after all the long centuries.

I let my hands fall to my side, and hurried down the slope to meet them.

***

“Just one man, sir?” said Neema, coming to stand beside me in the shadow of the villa’s entryway. He offered a prim frown. “From your manner I thought we were expecting a battalion.”

“Never mind that, Neema,” I said. “You have my coat?”

“Yes, sir.” The servant held up the garment, and I slid my arms into it. I had to wave him off as he orbited me and attempted to do up my buttons.

The coat was not quite the bridge coat of a Legion officer, though it hung past my knees. It was of Jaddian make, black gabardine lined with silk of scarlet paisley, high collared and silver buttoned. In it I looked half a soldier again, and half a lord.

“I wish they’d given us more time,” Neema said. “No call ahead? Most irregular, lordship! Most irregular!”

I placed a hand on the Jaddian’s shoulder, and stepped past him, out the tiled arch of the entryway, and stood upon the top step of the short stair that opened on the crushed marble path that led back up the slope toward the Fire School.

The villa which Prince Aldia had set aside for my use when I arrived on Jadd two centuries earlier had been a geological testing station initially, established on the island long before the Fire School itself was built. The geophysicists and planetologists who had tamed the mountain had lived in it long ago, when mankind was new to the holy planet. It had been they who carved the cataracts and the Grand Canal, and ensured the volcano would not erupt again. They had built their base right upon the seashore, and as I had asked the prince for a place on the water, it was perfect for me, though it was less grand than Maddalo House on Nessus and less dear than the pod I shared on Thessa with Gibson and Valka.

Valka . . . 

I could just make out the crouched-bat shape of the shuttle on the landing yard beside Volcano House, but my eyes went to the man who had just reached the base of the stair and had turned to come toward us. A quartet of Jaddians were scurrying after him, one a master by the white half-robe she wore on her left side. I could hear them shouting

over the pleasant crash of the waves. The wind guttered, blowing the steams where the lava flow hit the lagoon across the path between us, so that for a moment the five of them advanced through fog.

One black rook, one white knight, and pawns . . . 

“You were told to wait, sayido!” cried the Maeskolos, chasing after the man in black. “Master Sasan was to send for Lord Marlowe!”

The Imperial emissary shouted back over his shoulder, “No need! It seems he knew to expect me!”

There was something familiar in his voice—though I was sure I had never heard it before. Perhaps it was only the accents of the Imperium, so different from the lilting music of Jadd.

“He’s right,” Neema sniffed from just behind me. “I say again, master: most irregular.”

“Hush, Neema.”

The servant went quiet.

The space immediately before the villa was clear of all but grass, and the man in black had reached the final bend in the path, and I marked him clearly through the parting curtains of mist, his Jaddian satellites dragged along in his wake. He was not palatine. He had neither the height nor the perfect symmetry of features. I guessed he was patrician. Second generation, perhaps, or third. He had no visible scars from the uplift procedures, as dear Pallino had. His black hair was cut short in the best Legion officer fashion, shaved close on the sides, oiled and neatly combed to the right on top. He wore an officer’s black tunic buttoned up the left side, but neither collar tabs nor any badge of rank or office shone at shoulder or throat. His high boots might have been the twins of my own.

He wore a pair of spectacles—that was the strangest thing. No patrician so young should need such implements. They were rimmed in ivory, and flashed in the red sun as he came to a halt on the crushed marble. Beating his breast in salute, he clicked his heels. “Lord Hadrian Marlowe?”

I returned the gesture with cautious automation, unthinking. “Yes?”

Almost at once I wish I’d not saluted. I was not a soldier anymore, not a servant of the Emperor.

“I have been fighting for the last three years to get in to see you, lord,” he said. “I am Lieutenant Edouard Albé, Imperial Intelligence. I am come on a matter of Special Security to the Imperium. May we speak privately?” He glanced at Neema, then back over his shoulder at the approaching Jaddians.

As if on cue, the Maeskolos—a tall, bronze woman with incongruously red hair—shouted, “Ten thousand pardons, domi! This man was told to await your coming in Volcano House! He would not wait!”

“I have waited long enough!” Edouard exclaimed, jostling with the woman and her attendants. “My lord, I must speak with you!”

My words had all deserted me, and I looked round at Neema, as if expecting an answer in the butler’s studiously blank face. I was not certain what I had expected. An arrest? An assassin? I had been a guest of the Prince of Jadd so long that the Sollan Empire—which had been as Olympos to me; a gleaming, beckoning Erewhon—had diminished, become a mere shadow at the fringes of my mind. The shadow cast by the lieutenant’s shuttle had been only a part of that greater shadow.

“Let him go, Anamara,” I said to the swordmaster.

The red-haired woman released him only haltingly. Edouard brushed his tunic with his hands, straightened his belt and baldric. “Thank you,” he said. “May I come in?”

“No,” I said flatly. “Say what you have to say and be done.”

The young lieutenant’s brow furrowed. “My lord,” he began to protest. “Mine are matters of grave security to the Imperium—”

“I am wanted by the Imperium, lieutenant!” I almost shouted, bulling over him.

She was only Tavrosi. The Emperor’s words sounded fresh in my ears, as though it were William standing before me and not this poor lieutenant.

“I bring a pardon, lordship,” said Edouard Albé, reaching into an inner pocket of his tunic.

“A pardon?” I sneered, surprised by my own anger. “Caesar should beg my pardon, sir.”

Lieutenant Albé blinked up at me, and withdrew a packet wrapped in snowy vellum. He let his hands go to his side, not proffering the packet. “This is no joking matter, lord.”

“No joking matter?” I said, and felt my brows arch. “Did he tell you what he did?”

“I have never met His Radiance,” Edouard said.

“My wife was but lately dead, and he offered me another,” I said. “She would have lived had he but listened to me, and left the field when I told him to.” I could sense Neema’s discomfort coming off the man in waves, and Anamara and the other Jaddians, too, seemed wrongfooted by my naked coldness.

She was only Tavrosi.

I left it to the lieutenant to respond, and he stood there a long moment, mouth half-open.

He lifted his free hand, dabbed delicately at an unseen bead of sweat at his hairline. “My lord,” he said at last, advancing to the foot of the stairs between us, “we really should speak privately.”

“You will speak now or not at all, lieutenant!” I said.

Edouard chewed his tongue, clearly frustrated by his long delay and by me. Three years he’d said he’d spent in orbit, waiting to be admitted to the planet of fire. The Jaddians were—as I have said—jealous of their world, and doubly so in those days, when the virus haunted the starways.

The Imperial embassy had learned of my presence some decades after my arrival on Jadd, and had spent many long years attempting to have me extradited to Forum to face the Emperor’s justice. Prince Aldia’s viziers had fought the Emperor’s logothetes to a standstill, and eventually they had surrendered. They had tried to get at me several times, had sent many consuls and apostols to speak with me. Once, an Inquisitor of the Chantry had come and been turned away in the capital.

Why had this man been permitted when all those others were turned away?

Lieutenant Albé thrust the white packet toward me. “Since you will not hear me, I am bidden to tell you to recall Carteia, my lord.”

My fingers—which had extended on reflex to take the man’s letter—went suddenly numb. The packet slipped from my grasp and fell heavily upon the step.

“Carteia?”

A cold wind scoured the surface of my soul, carrying with it the swirl of snow, the stink of mold and ash, and the memory of a dining hall dominated

by the headless statue of the Emperor.

You will receive a call, His Radiance had said. We will find Dorayaica’s god, and when we do . . . we will kill it, you and I.

“They found one?” I asked, and hid my shaking hands behind my back. I did not stoop to take the packet. “One of the Watchers?” I understood then why the lieutenant had been so reluctant to speak in front of the Jaddians, though I myself found I did not care.

The call had come at last.

“You understand now why it is imperative you let me in to speak with you?” asked Lieutenant Albé.

I frowned down at him, still bothered by his voice. There was something in it, something about the man I could not place. It was as if I knew him—as indeed I would. I did not know it then, but Edouard was to become one of my last and dearest friends.

“For all I know you could be an assassin,” I said. “Perhaps you mean to overpower me. I am an old man, lieutenant.” I could feel the hilt of the sword in its thigh holster, its ivory hilt graven in the shape of a winged lion.

And yet, he had spoken of Carteia, of that cold day alone in the ruins of Rothsmoor with the Emperor and his Lord Chamberlain. Surely, he could only know about that meeting if word had come to him from Nicephorus or the Emperor himself? An Imperial assassin might know such things, but would the Emperor hand one of the galaxy’s greatest secrets to a man certain to be captured by the Jaddians should he make his attempt—win or lose?

I thought not.

“I told you,” the lieutenant said, “I’m Legion Intelligence.”

“You’re lying,” I said, but did not say You’re HAPSIS.

HAPSIS was the Emperor’s own contact division. A secret intelligence corps tasked with uncovering the mysteries of the cosmos, of the ancient and long dead empires that—officially—did not exist.

“Lying?” the lieutenant made as if to remove his spectacles, but seemed to think better of it and let his hands fall.

“You’re no lieutenant,” I said, pointing to his shoulders. “You wear no badge.”

For a moment, I thought the young man would speak plainly, but still it seemed the presence of the Jaddians held his tongue. “My lord, we came all this way . . . ”

“We?” My eyes went to the pale heavens, as if I expected to spy his ship beyond the roof of the world.

His eyes went to the Master Anamara. “My lord, I am forbidden to speak with any man but yourself!”

“Then be silent.”

“Can we not speak privately?” the lieutenant’s voice rose in pitch as he stooped to collect his fallen packet.

I studied Edouard then for a long and silent moment. I could not decide what it was about the man’s round, pale face that seemed so familiar to me. His haircut recalled that of Bassander Lin, but they were both

military men. It was something else, something more singular. The spectacles? Bastien Durand had worn spectacles, but Durand had been as dark as this man was pale.

You will receive a call.

The Emperor’s words echoed from the faded recesses of my mind, half-forgotten until that sunny afternoon. Cloudier shapes moved in recesses deeper still. Wings like the wings of bats. Eyes like glittering jewels. Countless hands of jointed bone. On the mountain, the Quiet had shown them to me. The Watchers. The Monumentals. Those vile gods of night.

Do what must be done.

“No,” I said.

I was too old.

Once, I had dreamed of sailing the farther suns. Of visiting far-off worlds, of speaking with strange peoples and seeing strange sights. I had dreamed of seeing the Quiet’s ruins at Athten Var, to the towers of the Menhir Dur. But I had dreamed of seeing them with Valka. And Valka was dead.

My dream had died with her.

In its place, there was only a black window, a square of night opening on nothing.

Between the emotion and the response . . . Falls the Shadow.

Life is very long . . . 

“Wait!” A hand seized me by the wrist, and whirling I found the lieutenant clinging to my arm. Edouard realized his mistake an instant too late. I raised my free hand and struck the young officer sharply across the face.

For a moment, neither of us moved. Nothing moved, unless it was the guttering mists off the lagoon. Anamara took a step forward, but I stopped her with a glare. Edouard slowly raised his head to look at me. My ring had left a thin tear beneath his eye, and his spectacles had clattered to the crushed marble of the path, but he offered no complaint. Still not speaking, he straightened, and did the most remarkable thing I have ever seen a man so reprimanded do in all my life.

He raised his head, defiant, and presented his other cheek.

I almost laughed. Almost. But I shook my head, embarrassment sliding like egg down my face. I turned to go instead.

Before I had gone two paces, he raised his voice—his strangely familiar voice—and said, “My lord! Your father is dead!”

I froze, fearing in that moment that if I moved I would fall.

The galaxy had lost its center, as I had lost mine.

Too old, indeed.

My father is dead.

The words echoed in my skull, my own thought mingling with Edouard’s. Your father is dead. My father is dead.

Lord Alistair was dead.

I had not seen my father since I was a boy, and yet as shadows grow larger as the sun vanishes from the sky, so his absence from my life had made him grow in memory to a vague and slouching titan, his hulking silhouette cast like a pall across my childhood. Some part of me had, perhaps, been anchored to that childhood by the certain knowledge that he was out there, ruling from the black castle of my home—his life extended by so many long voyages offworld, just as the Emperor had extended his own life sailing round his provinces.

Your father is dead.

All these years, I expected to feel nothing. I had not seen the man in centuries, and he had never loved me—but I threw a hand to catch myself upon the delicately tiled arch, and turned to look back at the apostol. The hulking shadow was gone, and in its place . . . night had fallen. I had felt myself an old man before Edouard had spoken, but in that moment I felt truly aged.

I was an orphan at last, and so—in a sense—I was finally a man.

“How long?” The voice that asked the question sounded like my own.

“More than a century ago,” Lieutenant Albé said, once more proffering his packet. “There’s a holograph from your lord brother in here, along with the Emperor’s pardon and the papers I was instructed to deliver. Lord Crispin gave it to me when I left Delos for the academy. He hoped I might find you. Now I have.”

Neema advanced and took the apostol’s envelope and withdrew on slippered feet, his head bowed.

“Delos?” I echoed the old name, and marked at last what it was about the young officer that seemed so familiar. “You’re from Delos?”

His accent.

His voice had the clipped consonants and genteel polish of the Delian high style, an ancient mode. He sounded like the villain in a Eudoran masque.

He sounded like me. Or like I had done, so long ago.

“From Meidua,” he said, and the recognition of a fellow countrymen in that distant country was an ache as sweet as the news of my father’s death was sour. To hear the clean music of home once more intensified the sense of loss the man had piled on me mere moments before.

Of lost time.

“My family has served yours now for five generations, beginning shortly after you left. I’m the second to enter Imperial service.” The man had not yet bent to collect his spectacles. Without them, his round and earnest face seemed almost the face of a child.

“Leave me,” said the old soldier in the arch.

“Lord Marlowe, if you will but read the report. There is a letter from Sir Friedrich Oberlin. We will remain at anchor for some weeks yet while we resupply, we—”

“I said leave!” I practically bellowed the words. “The Lord Marlowe you came to find no longer exists, boy. Go back to your masters. Tell them he’s dead.”

“We need your help, lord!” the lieutenant said, “The Empire needs your help!”

“Damn the Empire!” I said. “What is the Empire to me?”

The man had no reply ready-made to that, and stammered, “Do you care so little for your own people?”

“My people are dead,” I said, and thought Save one, and she is safe here. “Good day, lieutenant.” I turned and reentered the house as Anamara and the neophytes laid hands on the lieutenant and led him—half-broken by the experience, I think—back along the path to Volcano House.

 

CHAPTER 2

THE PRINCE OF THE HOUSE OF THE MOON

 

The prince had made a fatal error.

I surveyed him over the petrified wood table between us, waiting to see if he had seen it. I searched Aldia’s wrinkled visage, as if expecting to find the answer inscribed in the creases on his forehead. He looked like some fabulous sorcerer, his thick, white hair nearly so long as his snowy beard. He leaned upon one fist, studying the board, apparently heedless of his mistake.

Was that a smile on the papery lips? A sparkle in the deep black of his eyes?

“Are you going to make your move, mi sadji?” he asked, not lifting his eyes from the game.

“In a moment, Your Grace,” I said, studying the labyrinth myself.

Druaja was an ancient game, and one I’d come to truly appreciate only late in life. I had learned it on Vorgossos, when I tarried in the halls of the Undying, waiting for an audience. But I had come to enjoy it only in my Jaddian captivity. When Prince Aldia came to visit the Fire School—and on the rarer occasions when I attended the Alcaz du Badr, as on that day—he and I would play and pass a watch in conversation.

He was better than this.

I had moved the walls three turns previous, lowering the white. By so doing I had cleared a path for my third centurion to make his circuit of the board. Aldia had advanced his king such that by simply moving the piece a quarter turn around the hexagonal board, I might place my centurion behind him, leaving him with nowhere to go. It was an elementary mistake—if perhaps not one obvious at a casual glance.

Lifting the sardonyx figure, I traced the quarter turn, placed the centurion on the appropriate onyx hexagon. “Shahmat, Your Grace.”

“Is it?” The old man leaned back, chuckling. “Is it, indeed? Well played, my friend! Do you know, I’d forgotten you dropped the walls on me!” He collected his cobalt teacup with knobby fingers and drained it. “So simple a move! So direct! There is something sublime in such simplicity, do you not think?”

“Indeed, Your Grace,” I said.

Prince Aldia’s eyes narrowed over the rim of his teacup. “You are more somber even than your usual self, my funereal friend,” he said. “Am I to assume your meeting with the Emperor’s emissary left much to be desired?”

“You don’t know?” I asked, looking up from the finished game board.

“My Yahmazi have ears to hear, but whatever their reputation, I am not in the habit of prying into the private matters of my friends.”

The Yahmazi were the Jaddian secret police, and enjoyed a reputation as fearsome as that of Imperial Special Security. More fearsome perhaps, because they were even less talked about.

“My father is dead,” I said flatly.

“Ah,” Prince Aldia grew silent for a moment. “Mis dolorossos, mi sadji.”

I opened my hand in a reflexive gesture of acceptance.

“Your father was an archon, yes?”

“He ruled a continent.”

“Your brother is succeeding him?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I had not opened the lieutenant’s packet. Some tired voice deep in my soul had whispered. Let it lie. Let it lie until the lieutenant and his ship depart.

I had heeded that voice, and so ignored Crispin’s holograph along with the Emperor’s pardon and whatever else lay inside. “I have a sister, as well—one I never met. Possibly she inherited the prefecture. I really don’t know.”

“We tried to keep him from getting in at you,” Aldia said after a long silence. “The consulate applied every legal pressure. We threw everything we

 had at them: quarantine regulations, religious excuses, outright denials that you were even here.”

“They’ve known I’m here for decades,” I said.

“Since that business with the Oannosene, yes.”

Oannos was one of the Small Kingdoms, a dominion of little more than a dozen suns on the fringes of Jaddian space, along the border they shared with the Lothrian Commonwealth. They had sent a delegation to Jadd to treat with the prince. They had tried to assassinate him instead, and might have succeeded were it not for Hadrian Marlowe, who had been masked and was quietly in attendance.

“They knew you were here well before the Oannos affair,” Aldia said. “So it was for your father this messenger came?”

“You know it was not,” I said.

Aldia studied me with his dimming eyes a moment before reaching out to pluck my winning centurion from the board. “You haven’t read the letter.”

“So you do know what it says?”

“I told you I do not,” he said. “But I do know that your lieutenant has fought long and hard to get at you. They’ve been at dock more than three years.”

“You didn’t tell me sooner?”

“We had hoped the problem would resolve itself without the need to trouble your rest.”

“What changed?”

A pained looked flickered across the old man’s wizened face. “The Empire subsidizes our naval construction. In return we police the border with the Commonwealth. The consul threatened to . . . renegotiate our arrangement.” He closed his fist about the chessman. “The Lothrians have attacked our border worlds many times in the last half century. My admirals believe they will launch a full-scale invasion soon. We require Imperial funding to secure our border. I couldn’t jeopardize our security for your peace of mind.”

I told him I understood.

“It’s getting bad out there, isn’t it?”

Aldia weighed the chessman in his glittering hand as though it were his words. “Yes.” He restored the piece to its hex, and reached for his articulated lapis mask. “You know our fleets prevented a number of foreign objects from striking the planet over the last several years.”

“Foreign objects?” I looked sharply up at him. “Plague cannisters?”

“One assumes,” the prince said, fitting his mask in place. “There’s no way to be certain. They were vaporized.” The azure plates of his fersunan, his mask, fitted smoothly over his face. The mask left his mouth and chin uncovered, so that his beard thrust out unencumbered. “Shall we go? You must be returning to the island, soon.”

I nodded, and stood.

I’d heard reports

of such attacks across the galaxy. Of small probes traveling at near light speed. Of how they would strike the upper airs of a world and fall to pieces, spreading their vile poison on the wind. The virus showed itself only slowly, incubated over the course of many days. The sorcerers of MINOS had done their black work well. Men and women might live apparently normal lives for weeks before the first growths showed.

Plagues were always falling out of heaven, carried by some poor unfortunate from some far-off world. They ravaged the plebeians mostly, for they had weaker immune systems than those of more exalted blood, and at any rate had no exposure to the animalcules of other worlds.

Such a monster had claimed poor Cat when I was just a boy.

This was something far worse, a demon hatched in glass cradles by arts black as hell.

LTH-81. Lymphotropic T-cell Human Retrovirus Mark-81.

I’ve heard it called many names. The Red Sleep. The Gasping Death. The Fleshing Plague. To many of the poorest beneath our stars it is simply the Rot. To the nobiles, it is Lethe’s Sickness. To the scholiasts, the lethovirus.

I will call it what it is, what I called it when I discovered it in the Ganelon fortress.

Cancer as plague.

The bodies of the afflicted quickly developed tumorous growths. New organs formed, or half formed, beside the old. New bone—brittle and spongey—sprouted from joints until the human form was twisted half beyond recognition.

In the end, the afflicted was reduced to a mass of indolent flesh, unable even to move. Unable to do anything but shed the virus into the unwitting air. They had designed it to instill terror. And they had designed it perfectly.

It is out there, even now, though it has mutated into lesser form. There were beggars on Sun Street at Summerfair with misshapen faces and eyes swollen shut. There are lazarets in every city of the Empire now, built to house the sick and dying.

Even now, there is no cure. LTH-81 was a retrovirus, and as with all retroviruses, infection remains for life.

“Jadd is safe for now,” Aldia continued. “By Atash, may it remain so.”

His chair floated off the ground and moved toward the wooden lattice screen between the pillars beyond which stood the water garden. Twin servants—mamluks in chrome masks with silver armor flashing beneath their blue and white cloaks—moved like clockwork to roll back the sliding screen.

The prince floated through the arch and out into warm sunlight. Passing out after him, I felt the static cling of an energy field that separated the cool air of the chess room from the garden proper. I walked beside him, bootheels ringing on the mosaic tiled path. A pair of black swans waded in the nearest pool.

“They always remind me of young Olorin, those birds,” the prince said, pointing. Peering up at me sidelong from his chair, he said, “All that black. Of course, you’d know a thing or two about that, would you not?” He flashed white teeth. I returned the smile more thinly. He must have marked the shallowness of my expression, for his own face fell, the plates of his fersunan clicking almost below hearing. “Why have you not read the Emperor’s letter, Dom 

Hadrian?”

“I don’t need his pardon,” I said.

The Prince of Jadd looked up at me, lips compressed to a thin, white line in his whiter beard. Presently he spoke, “They came all this way . . . and waited so long . . . only to issue you a pardon?”

I in turn studied the elderly prince. Clad as he was in cerulean and masked, he looked like some spirit of the clouds. Though I owed him much—and had given more—I had never told him of the Watchers, not in all our years of friendship. It was possible he knew of them already, just as the Emperor had known, and yet I could not bring myself to speak, sensing that to do so was to betray some secret covenant—not between the Emperor and myself, he was no friend of mine, not any longer—but between myself and the man I once had been.

The same embarrassment I had felt when I had struck the young lieutenant across his face returned that moment. Being old then and wise to the workings of my heart, I understood the feeling almost at once. I was not guarding any secret from the old prince. I was simply ashamed. Ashamed because to admit the lieutenant had come to me upon so dire an errand, and that I had sent him away, was to admit that I was faithless.

The call had come at last, and I’d refused it, was hiding from it even then, as Mashya hid in paradise from the eyes of God, who saw all things.

Had I become a coward in old age? Hiding behind my pride and pain?

“They came to ask me to sail with them,” I said, and turned my face to the great red sun, feeling the warmth and the gentle breeze on my face.

“Will you go?” Aldia had not moved.

I looked down at him, unable to hide my shock. “You would let me?”

“You are not a prisoner

,” he said.

“I . . . ” My eyes narrowed. I was not sure his words were precisely truth. Not for the first time since Edouard’s visit, I thought of the blood they had taken when I first arrived, of the months I spent in a Jaddian military clinic, allowing them to test me and scan my brain. “I am an old man, Aldia.”

The prince laughed once more, a sound bright and sunny as the day whence had come his name. “Old! Dolá Deu di Foti, Dom Hadrian! Old indeed! There is yet more black in your hair than white.”

Recalling something I had said to Corvo long ago—or was it Varro?—I answered him. “It’s not the years,” I said. “It’s the light-years.”

Aldia du Otranto dismissed this with a gesture. “My cells have counted nine hundred ninety-one standard years,” he said. “You can still fight, so Master Hydarnes tells me. Al Brutan is the equal of any of us, he says.”

“He exaggerates,” I said. “Master Hydarnes bests me six times in ten.”

“Only six?” Aldia began floating along toward the colonnade. “That is being nearly equal, no?” A short stair of rose marble ascended to the colonnade ahead, flanked by ironwork trellises thick with flowers. As we reached the foot of the stair, the blossoms all opened their faces to us—as if in greeting—and a twittering as of birdsong filled the air about us both. I did my best to hide my discomfort. The flowers were unnatural, and though they were beautiful, they disquieted me.

Flora should not sing as fauna might.

The pleasure gardens of the High Prince of Jadd were everything they say. Twelve thousand acres of land—black-soiled and verdurous—extended in a great fan from the ringed palace of the Alcaz. There were hedge mazes vast as villages and filled with the sculptures of gods and monsters, swards where topiary armies—men and horses and war elephants—were locked in green and endless battles. There were waterfalls and pools and little rivers brimming with bright fish, and hothouses where jeweled snakes and scarabs crawled in glass enclosures. And the birds! Hummingbirds and nightingales, thrushes and herons and peacocks with their bright tails. Parrots and parakeets and the long-billed toucans that were the prince’s favorite.

And every one of them a work of art, wrought not by nature, but by the magi and the natalists of Jadd. The Jaddians—it is said—have never met an organism they could not improve. The singing flowers were only one example. Aldia himself was another. No lord of the Imperium—not even Caesar—would see so many springs.

For all his talk of my relative youth, I was already ancient. When it came, my dotage would come on fast. The genetic artistry of our own High College had stretched my vital years almost to breaking, and the signs of decline were already there. Still, I could expect health and strength at least a while longer, but Time—Ever-Fleeting—which had always seemed remote to me and open as the sea . . . oppressed me each day like a soaking blanket.

“Admiral Serpico telegraphed three months back,” Prince Aldia said as I mounted the top stair. Velkan Serpico was admiral of the fleet that had sailed with Prince Kaim to the succor of the Imperium. “The Cielcin attacked Nessus. They burned the planet.”

I stopped.

“You didn’t know?”

Nessus was lost? I thought of the great city of Sananne, of the Magnarch’s golden palace, and of the Magnarch himself. Miserable old Karol Venantian must surely have died in the intervening centuries, but

I saw him clearly for a moment, in his official toga, standing upon a balcony in the vast shipyards as the horizon turned to flame. Most of all, I thought of Maddalo House. Of the English Garden and the fencing hall; of Valka’s study and the old library; of round windows and round doors.

Burned.

“It is getting bad out there, Dom Hadrian.” Aldia’s float-chair processed along the colonnade beneath the tiled canopy. “Serpico tells me we lost nine hundred ships in the defense. The Cielcin brought thirty-two of their worldships to bear upon the planet. I am told the world was nearly torn apart.”

“Thirty-two?” I shut my eyes, recalling then the tremors as the encircling Cielcin moons shook the planet Perfugium. The Cielcin had used the titanic mass of their vessels as weapons in themselves, tearing at the planet they besieged until the seas surged and the mountains cracked and fell.

At Perfugium, there had been only seven worldships.

“With Nessus gone, much of the telegraph network in your outer provinces is lost,” Aldia said. “The fleets cannot coordinate across the Centaurine volume. Doubtless there have been other attacks—ones we won’t hear of for many years yet.”

I imagined desperate starships fleeing lost and burning systems, each carrying messages of doom. Syriani Dorayaica would have coordinated a number of strategic strikes with the primary assault on Nessus. The Eikana Fuelworks. The Legion troop stores on Verthandi. Food production on Innis, on Gododdin, and Nohr. As Aldia said, the news would come only slowly, trickling in as the stragglers from lost battles got word to the surviving Imperial fleet.

“What of the Emperor?” I asked.

“Perhaps you should read the letter,” the prince said.

I flashed a look down at him, and bit back a retort. Though we were friends, I reminded myself that here was the Prince of Jadd.

Aldia smiled, and after a moment said, “Serpico tells me your Emperor is in hiding, directing the war effort from the provinces. They met . . . some years ago now . . . on Minnagara after the battle there. That was where our Olorin met and wed his princess.”

“The wedding happened?” I blinked at him, astonished. Surely such a thing would have been news on Jadd? I ought to have seen the broadcasts, even in exile at the Fire School.

“Only contractually,” Aldia said, acknowledging the salutes of his guards as he floated past. “The girl is en route to our holdings on Otranto. We’ve secured her bloodline, and she will be safe there, but the official announcement and the proper ceremony will wait until after the victory.”

“The victory?” I halted. For a moment, the only sound was the distant laughter of the children at their play.

Aldia looked round at me, “Our Olorin will not return from the fighting until the fighting is done.”

“But you talk of victory?”

“Is not victory our aim?” the prince inquired.

I had no answer for that. Peace had been my aim, once, a very long time ago. I had

peace . . . on Jadd, and desired to keep it until Death and Time came—hand-in-hand—to carry me away. I turned to the rail, looked down into the tiled pool where the children of the Jaddian nobiles swam and splashed and fought with one another. Cassandra had been one of them, not so long before.

Peace.

As I watched, two boys leaped from the water to drag a third down with them, laughing. An older girl hurried to chastise them. At once I found myself remembering my own childhood, swimming in the pools of the Summer Palace at Haspida with Crispin while Mother’s girls sunned themselves. The son of some lesser archon had been there with us. What had his name been?

“Do you wish you could go back?” I asked. I nodded at the children glad at their sport.

“And be a child again?” Aldia shook his head, ordered his float-chair to come to rest beside me. “No, mi sadji. Far better what I am: an old man, and High Prince of Jadd besides. A Prince of Jadd may stem the tide, if only a little . . . and for a little while. But what could a child do?” He looked up at me, eyes sparkling. “Do not mistake me! I wish I were young and strong, and wish my legs could still carry me . . . but a child? No.”

“I only envy them.” I crossed my arms, tucked my chin against my breast. “They know nothing of what’s out there.”

“And that’s better, is it?” the prince inquired.

A laugh escaped me in the form of a single, solitary puff of air.

“Better that we be old men, Hadrian,” said Prince Aldia, “so that they might remain children awhile longer.” Almost I fancied that he was Tor Gibson, and that the pool we stood above was the ocean beneath the castle of my home. “Better that you be what you are.”

“And what am I, Aldia?” I asked, dropping all titles, all formality.

“I would not presume to tell you,” the great prince said, and gestured at the children in the water with one ringed and withered hand. “But ask any of them, and I do not think they’d hesitate.”

Al Neroblis, they would say. The Black Devil. Or Al Brutan, the brute.

And one, perhaps, might look on me with wide eyes and whisper Metamortali.

Halfmortal.

I could sense Aldia knew the shape of the thoughts flickering behind my eyes, for he smiled and said, “Shahmat, Dom Hadrian.” He adjusted the drape of his azure robes, and keyed an order into the arm of his silvered float-chair. It began to drift along the arcing colonnade, and I made to follow. But the prince was not quite finished with me, and aimed a question over his shoulder like one of the Parthian archers who were his remotest ancestors, and said, “What does your daughter think of all this?”

I drew up, letting him float away.

“Checkmate, indeed,” I muttered. ...