CHAPTER 1
THE HIGHEST PLACE
LIGHT.
There was no light in that dark place, save that which rolled like fog down the sloping tunnel to the domed cavern. No light, unless it was the false light of the lamp drone, the enslaved glowsphere I had set to circling that chamber like a star. It had been Valka’s, that lamp, had accompanied her on I knew not how many expeditions, followed her into the countless darkened halls and tombs built by that powerful but unrecorded race, the unravelling of whose mystery had been her life’s work.
It was fitting, then, that it should accompany me in that high hall.
That it should accompany us.
“Listen,” I said, for what seemed the thousandth time.
“I am listening,” said the woman seated cross-legged on the stone before me.
“Kwatz!” It was Gibson’s reproach—the one the scholiasts had taken from the ancient Zen Buddhists. “You are speaking just now, Anaryan. Speaking is not listening.”
Mollified, my daughter bowed her head, face concealed by the blank mask of her armored suit. I studied her in silence then a long moment. My eyes lingered on the sleeve of her swordmaster’s mandyas, the red and gold samite hanging limp from the left shoulder. Realizing I was staring, I turned, resumed my orbit of the chamber, moving against the circuit of the lamp.
For a moment, the only sound in that airless place was that of my own breathing, my suit’s rebreather whining faintly in the vents beneath my jaw. “We were not made to live as beasts,” I said, “not made to live as we are. We were made with a higher purpose. For a better world.”
Cassandra was silent. Valka’s drone passed me by, circling in the other direction, illuminating the glassy black walls until my own reflection peered out at me.
Light.
The light moved off, plunging me into shadow once again.
Darkness.
“Can you hear it?” I asked. I had brought her to that place, hoping that in that place she might hear it more plainly—she who had never heard it before, would never hear it at all.
“Hear what?” she asked.
“Quiet,” I said to her. A command, and the answer. “Listen.”
Silence.
“There is nothing, Abba.”
“We were made to hear, Anaryan,” I said. “Every man was meant to see as I see, to hear as I hear. What I have been given, you must ask for yourself.”
The dark about me was like the black of space between days.
Night.
“Can’t you just . . . tell me how?”
“There is no how,” I said. “I can do nothing that he does not first permit. He made me what I am, remade what I was. You must ask for the same.”
“But how do I ask?”
“The same way you learned to ask that question,” said I, still circling. “By listening.”
The light came nearer, circling round
to pass me again, and its coming was like the rising sun in that dim and many-shadowed hall.
Day.
“The magi who named him Quiet—little knowing what he was—named him truly. But he can be heard.” I waited, expecting the girl to interrupt. When she did not, I exhaled, nodding my approval. “When you were a child, you learned your words listening to mine. You must listen to his word now. Only once you have listened will you be able to speak.”
“You didn’t learn to listen,” Cassandra said. “He just . . . appeared to you.”
“He revealed himself to me,” I said, “so that I might show others the way. Now listen, Anaryan. Can you hear it?”
She was silent this time, having at last—at least for the moment—learned that much.
I could hear it, even if she could not.
Song.
I discerned it for the first time after the battle above Vorgossos, after I deployed the Archontic weapons against the Imperial fleet and fled—in the silence of the long dark between the stars—though I realized I had been hearing it since I awoke upon the Mistwalker after my death at the hands of the Cantor, Samek.
A high, tremulous music.
It strained at the edges of my hearing.
The very voice of God.
“I can’t hear anything,” Cassandra said. “Aren’t you supposed to be teaching me?”
I had stopped walking then, and Valka’s lamp
circled between us. “I am teaching you.”
“I can’t do it,” Cassandra said. “We’ve tried this a hundred times, Abba. It’s impossible!”
“It’s not impossible,” I said.
“Your gift—whatever it is—I didn’t inherit it.”
“Of course you didn’t,” I said. “You can’t inherit it. Don’t you understand? MINOS, Kharn Sagara, the Empire, the Chantry, the Jaddians . . . they’ve all tried to understand what I am. Every one of them has failed. What I’ve been given is not in my blood.”
Cassandra only looked at me.
“We are more than flesh and blood. It is the heart that must change, the spirit, the mind.” As I spoke, my own mind raced to the scholiasts, who sought to dampen emotion to make themselves more like the machines they were meant to replace. What we were attempting was little different. “The universe roars at us, deafening the spirit so that we might not hear his voice. That’s why we’re here.”
I had wanted to come down to the planet—that day of all days—one last time. I might never have another chance, and I longed to once more speak to the will and being that had twice saved me from death.
Though I could hear his music, he had not turned his face to me, nor uttered any word, not even there, upon the mountain.
“Abba,” Cassandra said. “It is impossible.”
“Kwatz!” I exclaimed, saw her startlement. “You have only just begun.”
“But there is nothing!” she said. “I don’t know what you can hear, but I can’t. I’m not like you, I’m not . . .” She gestured up at me with her one remaining hand.
“. . . changed?” I finished for her.
“Different!” She shook her head. “You were dead, Abba—I mourned you. Selene said she saw you die, said you were nothing but a puddle on the floor! But you’re here, and—”
“You still doubt that I am myself?”
“No!” Cassandra turned her masked face from me. “No, but . . . you are different. Changed is one word, I suppose . . .” She devolved into her native Jaddian, cursing under her breath. “But you said yourself, you couldn’t hear this . . . whatever I’m listening for . . . until after you came back. And you’re not the same, you’re . . .”
I smiled mildly. “Young again?”
“Well, yes,” said she. “Maybe I need to be like you before I can do it.”
“No,” I said. “My . . . experience . . . has only
only made the hearing easier. What you see”—I gestured at my body, the new body the Absolute had given me—“is the fruit, not the germ.”
Cassandra was silent then a long moment. “Then . . . do you think I can be . . . changed, too? Like you?”
It was my turn to hesitate. I felt the answer in me, tidied away in some undusted chamber in my mind. I had not put it there, but there were then—and are—so many things in me granted by revelation. “Yes,” I said, and grew silent. “Everything must change, girl. And will. But the change must not come from the blood, or by the praxis of the magi. They change the body to transform the spirit. We change the spirit.”
“And so change the body?” Cassandra asked.
The lamp passed between us, illuminating the anaglyphs carved on the walls, those letters that were not merely letters.
“As you see,” I said, and I shut my eyes.
The celestial music was still there, like the hum of distant engines, half unheard. Quiet indeed, it suffused the universe, sustained it, gave it meaning.
“There’s a story, an old story . . .” I began. “Sometimes it is about the God Emperor. Other times it is the Old Queen, Victoria. Else it is Arthur, or the Great Alexander . . . say it is Alexander. Desiring the knowledge of all things, he arrived at the gates of Eden, and, finding them barred by angels with wings like the lightning, he knocked on the gates, demanding as lord of the world that he be permitted to enter paradise. But the angels refused him. Three times they refused him, and
when they had refused a third time, he demanded that instead he be given a gift from within. And so the doors opened a sliver, and a hand appeared and offered him the very thing he sought: a fig from the Tree of Knowledge. Sensing that here was a test, the great king did not eat of it, but at the direction of Orodes the sorcerer, he instead cut the fruit in two, setting aside one half. The remaining half he cut in two, setting aside one of the new-made quarters. And so on he went, cutting and cutting with that sword—the very sword with which he cut the knot at Gordium—until at last he held one single atom. At the sorcerer’s behest, this he split as well, down to a proton. Splitting the proton to its quarks, he brought down his blade a final time, and cleaved the quark in two, and at its splitting he felt the rush of strong winds, and heard a cry—as it were the word of some foreign tongue.” I paused then. “Do you know what he found inside that quark?”
Cassandra shook her head.
“Nothing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“When the ancients peered into our cells and found the helix, they discovered that each of us is a word, one writ in a language only our magi understand. There it was: the language of the human animal laid bare. Four letters. They thought this the answer to the mystery of life, little seeing how it raised further questions. When Alexander at last split the smallest particle, he found it empty. Believing he had his answer, he went away laughing. But the particle was not empty . . .”
“The word.” Cassandra saw where I was driving.
“Yes,” I said. “The magi think mathematics are the language of reality, but mathematics are only our attempt to translate the true language—this language . . .” I gestured at the anaglyphs inscribed on the walls “. . . into a language we can understand. But we can understand it already, we have the means—we have only forgotten.”
“That’s what you can hear?” How clearly I could see her face! Sense her incredulity! Even through the mask.
“The music,” I said, “the whole universe is singing. Now listen!”
I did not dare move, did not dare disturb her. Only the steady procession of the lantern disturbed that airless place. A call light flickered on the terminal I wore on my left wrist. Seeing it, my heart sank.
The time had come, as I knew it must. The time to leave that place and face the universe.
with a gesture.
Looking down at her, I studied my daughter with the fullness of my vision, seeing her not as the three-dimensional object another man might see, but the manifold event she was. No mere body in space, but a wave crashing across the universe, rippling where she struck the present moment again and again, collapsing into one certain past from the infinite, uncertain futures.
In no thread of potential that I could see did she succeed. I could not force her, not with all my ascended strength. No man may carry another over the threshold. Each must take the first step and the final one himself.
I could only show her the gate.
My terminal flashed again, indicator chiming in the patch behind my right ear. Covering the light, knowing she could not hear me on the private band, I said, “Marlowe.”
“Lord Marlowe.” The man who spoke was Holden, one of Captain Ghoshal’s men, and the first of those who had accompanied us on our little pilgrimage to the planet’s surface. “We’ve just had word from Special Agent Albé. The Jaddians have arrived.”
I shut my eyes against the fateful words.
Orphan had guessed the Jaddians’ arrival to within three hours of the fact. “Very good, Centurion,” I said. “We will not be much longer.”
With that, Holden withdrew. I could almost see him turn to relay my words to his companions in the shuttle outside.
“Did something happen?” Cassandra’s voice flickered in my ear.
I froze. She had seen the indicator, knew I had received a comm. The small light had stood out the brighter in that dark place. I shook my head. Everything about the human universe . . . our technology, our obligations, our very bodies, sought to obscure the Quiet’s word from us.
“The Jaddians have arrived.”
“Non posho pharo, Abba,” she said.
I can’t do it.
Willing her to feel the smile in my words, I said, “You will, Anaryan.”
She never did.
“Should we go?” she asked, uncrossing her legs to half rise from the black stone floor.
“We must,” I said, looking round at the domed hall. “I had hoped coming here would make this easier . . .”
Cassandra had found her feet by then. “It’s all right.” She joined me in my observation of the dome. “I just can’t do it.”
I did not argue with her, even to reassure her. I would not myself have wanted reassurance in that moment. I knew how she must feel. Defective. Insufficient. Had I not felt that way myself, many times? I only placed an arm on her shoulder. “I have never been a good teacher,” I said, remembering another Alexander.
“Maybe it can’t be taught,” she said.
I shook my head. “I know it can be.”
“I’m sorry, Abba.”
“We never thought it would be easy.” I let my hand fall and, sketching a circle in the air, summoned Valka’s lamp. The little false star scudded through the air to take up its place at my left shoulder, and together we turned and made our way up the sloping tunnel.
So deep underground, the lamp overpowered the planet’s weak daylight. It would be a match for the sun even on the surface. But that dim star would burn a trillion years yet, cold and sedate as it was. Valka’s lantern could not so long endure. The cost of its burning brighter was a shorter life.
What did that—does that say—
about me, I wonder?
“Prince Kaim has come himself?”
“We can only hope,” I said. The truth was, I could not be certain what we would find when we reached the rendezvous point. Would it be my friend, the Prince of Jadd? Alone as I had begged him?
“Lord Douro didn’t give you any other choice.”
“He did not,” I said in agreement, thinking of that ill-starred lord of the Imperium, the Baron of Anarias, and of the knife he had plunged into my back.
Wolves . . . leopards . . .
“Lions . . .” I muttered, making the word a curse. “There may be an armada waiting for us at the end of our next jump.”
“Then we’ll fight them,” Cassandra said, taking my arm in hers.
The light that filtered from the opening ahead was a pale but bloody red. No air was there on all that world, and so my cloak and the empty sleeve of Cassandra’s mandyas both hung limp in the void, disturbed only by our motion.
It wasn’t right.
There should be wind on such a promontory, at such a height.
There had been, once, if only once, when I had come there with Valka so long before.
The white lozenges of the camp we had constructed at the foot of the mountain so many miles below could still be seen, untouched by dust or rain. I had walked among them when first we came back to that sere and airless world, and read the stenciled words painted on each black hatchway.
PROPERTY OF THE IMPERIAL SERVICE VESSEL
TAMERLANE | SDN-04391
RED STAR FOUNDRIES, LASAIA
ISD 15387.11.12
All was as we had left it on Annica.
Ahead of us on the promontory, the fat-bellied shape of an Ibis-class lander waited, its forward ramp down, rear compartment void of air. Holden was waiting for us, his men seated or milling about. They leapt to attention at the sight of us emerging from the cavern, one snapping shut the twin plates of a pocket holograph projector, the silhouette of a dancing odalisque winking out of existence.
“My lord!” Holden saluted. “You are finished?”
“I hope not, Centurion!” I said, doing my best to let the smile show in my voice. “But we shall soon see, won’t we?”
The centurion looked over his shoulder to his men. “I thought these Jaddians could be trusted.”
“The Prince of the Jaddians can be trusted, if he has come alone.”
A shadow fell across the sun then, as though that bleary red eye had gone behind a cloud. Turning my visored face to heaven, I saw it, moving like a dagger against the sun, blacker than the space it moved through, edges catching the light where it sailed beyond the tops of Annica’s thin day.
The Demiurge.
The mighty ship was like a spike of adamant, of obsidian edged in red fire, its terraces and buttressed nacelles gleaming in the light. Impossibly huge it was, a hundred miles and more from stem to stern, vaster by far than even my Tamerlane had been.
The ultimate power in man’s universe . . . and it was mine, though I held it with a mere token force.
The building of it had been the work of long millennia, its design the work of the daimon, Brethren, and Kharn Sagara’s diseased mind. Huge sculptures of men and gods dominated its exterior, their mighty thews upholding towers, hands buttresses, and pylons, as if holding the whole thing together—a Babel built on air, one no god might make low.
“I wish Lorian were here,” I said, words only for Cassandra. Even then, I recalled the look in his colorless eyes as just before he turned his back on me, the holograph going dark, leaving me with no choice.
Whatever was coming, whether it was the Imperial fleet entire, or Olorin alone, I would have to face it. My message had been simple, mere text. I’d had no choice but to fire on Ohannes Douro and the ships of the Chantry. I had secured Demiurge and the caches of Mericanii weapons. The Latarran fleet was broken, the Vorgossene fleet destroyed. Kharn Sagara was dead. And dead. And dead. And dead. I was alone. Outlawed. Friendless . . . unless Olorin was yet my friend. I had begged him to come alone, my last friend then in all the galaxy, my only ally.
And he had come.
I had given him a set of coordinates, a patch of unpastured space several light-years from the Annica system. The journey had taken the prince decades from his course, caused him to quit the field of battle
completely, and to vanish from human affairs.
I had needed to pray, to commune with the being that made me what I was, that had moved me like a pawn to the center of the board, and so made me its cataphract, that I might move in all directions.
“I know,” Cassandra said, addressing my lament for Lorian. “But we may meet the little man again.”
“Yes,” I said. “But as allies? Or enemies?” I lay a hand on Cassandra’s shoulder as she brushed past. “How quickly can we be in the air, Centurion?”
Holden stiffened. “I took the liberty of starting launch preparations the moment Agent Albé holographed. We can leave in minutes.”
“Very good,” I said, looking up at Demiurge where it transited the disc of the sun. My suit’s entoptics cut the solar glare down to something manageable, and so I watched the ship as it seemed to cut the star in two.
It was an omen.
I was not ready to go.
We had been long years in exile, more than a dozen years circling Annica and Annica’s nigh-immortal star. Too long.
Not long enough.
To return to the ocean of stars was to embrace the end. The end had come at last, as I knew it must—and yet I was not certain I could do it. I had been commanded, upon that very world, that very mountain, to slay the Cielcin, to visit the Quiet’s judgement upon them for the crime of turning to his enemies, for the crime of serving the Watchers and the cause of abolition.
They would destroy the universe if they could. They would fail, but not without causing untold harm. This the Quiet had allowed, in the hope that the Cielcin might abandon their way, but after untold generations, they had not done so, and so the hammer must fall.
And I was the man to bring it down.
But was I right? Was it right?
The Cielcin were surely monsters, but they were not always thus. The Watchers had only made them so, twisted them from the path they might have walked alongside man . . . or ahead of him.
And yet, had I the right to do as I had been commanded? Did the Quiet have the right to command as he had commanded?
Did it matter? For surely if I failed, mankind would suffer.
I had seen that end, too.
Is this really what you want? I asked in the silence of my heart, listening for a reply in that ultimate music.
But there was nothing. The straining as of silver harp strings was impossibly far away.
No answer.
officer, only the missing arm and crimson half-robe to denote her from some captain of the corps. She hung onto one of the handles mounted just inside the open door. “Flight officer says we’re ready!”
“I’ll be just a moment!” I said.
Demiurge had completed its transit of the sun.
To mount that ramp was to leave my fragile peace for the final time.
I felt every moment of my age then—six hundred years and more—and both deaths.
I had my answer then.
A wind scoured the rocks, blown down off the pinnacle of the peak above, blowing toward me and across me, so that my black cloak was thrown back. So great was the force of that gust that almost I staggered back toward the ramp.
I had my answer, my word from that higher world, and so turned—but unlike Alexander at the doors of Eden, I did not go away laughing. ...
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