I had lost Gibson’s letter.
The letter of introduction he had drafted to the scholiasts at Nov Senber. The letter of introduction without which I would never gain admittance at the athenaeum. I’d be turned away at the gate. I tried to tell myself that a scholiast would not cry. But I was not a scholiast, would never be a scholiast. I slammed my fist into the mattress. Once. Twice. I hit my thigh, wordless sounds leaking out from between my teeth, anguished and accursed. Maybe it was only a dream. It had to be. It all had to be a dream, some awful nightmare. Maybe you did dream in fugue. Maybe I was dreaming then. Maybe I would wake up in a minute to Demetri’s irrepressible grin. On Teukros.
I never did.
The thought of my family consumed me. Of orders shunted by QET wave between the stars. I could imagine my father demanding the local prefects hold me until I could be retrieved. I wondered where he would deliver me. To Vesperad? Back to Delos? Or simply out an airlock? I had shirked my duties, abandoned my role as a son. By the Great Charters, by all the laws of the Empire, I was his to command. Hadrian, name for me the Eight Forms of Obedience. I wouldn’t. Somewhere in the nameless city, the bell towers of a Chantry sanctum began to chime. I wondered if I had dozed again, drifted off toward the deathlike state I had occupied for uncounted years until that day. For a mad instant I thought they were the bells of the Chantry sanctum in Meidua and that I was home again, that my father might come striding up that ward, through air stinking of rotting fish and old mold.
And I knew. Knew I could not let anyone scan my blood. The moment my genomic fingerprint hit the system on this world, I would be flagged, and there was nothing in the universe I could do to stop that information from reaching all the way back to Meidua. The instant my genes turned up on some census, the moment I tried to pull funds from my out-system accounts, they would know in Devil’s Rest. Interplanetary extradition was such between Imperial worlds that whoever it was who ruled this sweat-soaked rock the old surgeon had called Emesh would have no choice but to jail me and pack me off on a return journey to Delos.
So I had to disappear.
* * *
Night fell with astonishing speed, and soon the bleary red-gold light through the open windows was replaced with the inconstant yellow sputtering of the ward’s lamps. The men at the end of the hall moaned incessantly, their trauma the only sound apart from the rumble of groundcars outside. I slept fitfully, my whole body feeling like someone had struck me with a meat tenderizer. When I woke, it was to that awful smell and the sight of the ugly crone and her willowy assistant walking up or down the aisle of that desolate place. During one of those waking cycles it struck me at last that I had seen no sign of proper medical equipment: no drip-bags, no monitor equipment, no scanners. Thankfully I saw no corrective braces. I felt as if I had wandered out of the world I’d known and into some meaner universe such as the fantasies in Mother’s holograph operas, places where the printing press was magic and healing meant draining the blood from a man. I half expected those guttering light fixtures to be gas lamps.
“Is he really a lord, ma’am?” The girl looked back over her shoulder from under flaxen hair, her voice hushed and breathy. I closed my eyes to the merest slits, pretending as only the truly tired can to be asleep.
I heard a tinny rattling, then the sound of those bony jaws crunching something. The old woman’s verrox leaves, I didn’t doubt. “I think he is, Maris. Yes.”
“He’s very tall,” the girl said, voice even lower than before. “Do you think he’s a prince?”
The old woman shook her head, limp hair flipping about her face. “Princes all have fiery hair. Everybody says so. We’ll find out who he is when the money comes in, girl. Leave the poor boy alone.”
Something oily twisted its fingers in my guts, and I turned my head away, unwilling to continue looking at the two women who had helped save my life. I might have thrown up again if I’d had anything left in me worth losing. The fishy soup they’d fed me was little more than broth, and it had stayed down. But I couldn’t stay.
I couldn’t pay them.
In the near silence, I thought I heard the dripping of the water in the mausoleum of my forebears, the march of soldiers in Marlowe livery. I could not go back. I had beaten my own brother nearly to death and fled in the night. For that alone, my father . . . I do not like to think what my father might have done to me. But it was more than that. If I feared Lord Alistair’s fury so much, I would never have left home. No, it was for my mother that I feared. What might happen to her if Father knew what part she had played? I hoped my grandmother would protect her.
* * *
Night came, as night must. True night, so that even the street without grew hushed, and I—who had slept most of that day and for untold years before—pulled myself naked from beneath my sheets. My muscles felt slack, weak, heavy as lead weights, and I slumped against the aluminum bedstead as I stood. I was grateful that I was alone in my nakedness, remembering how the mutant Saltus had mocked me. Where had they gone? What had happened while I’d slept frozen? What had changed? The crone who ran this clinic—I never learned her name—swore that this was typical of Free Trade vessels, that passengers were tossed aside like so much chaff. I couldn’t quite make myself believe that it was so.
Fearing the poor girl would choose that moment to enter the hall, I dragged my sticky sheet off the bed and made a toga of it, holding it shut with my hands, grateful for the thick callouses on my feet from years of training. My bandaged thumb ached, my head swam, and I swayed against one peeling plaster wall. I had to find clothes. I couldn’t go out into the city in naught but my skin. Leaning against the corner of the landing at the midpoint of a narrow flight of stairs, I thought back. The woman had said she would find clothes for me in the back. The back. A storeroom? A closet? Surely there was something lying about.
There was, as it happened, behind a dinted green metal door on the first floor, past a supply closet and a pair of drinking fountains. The room smelled of fungus and rot, as if it had been underwater more than once and never properly aired. Never cleaned. I didn’t want to waste time, fearing that Maris or the crone would find my bed empty and come looking. I found a shirt, a gray pullover with a black star inked on the chest. After several attempts, I found a pair of trousers that fit well enough at the waist. They were baggy, their dun legs covered in mismatched pockets, variously stained. Of shoes, socks, or undergarments there was no sign. But nearly fifteen years of fencing barefoot and of running the walls at Devil’s Rest and Haspida unshod, had turned my soles to horn. Those hardened soles slapped the grimy floor as I left the medica, moving toward the double doors. A ceiling lamp flickered, highlights glittering over the white-and-black-checked tiles. A rat scampered across the space, causing me to start. I watched it go; so like myself it was, stealing into the night.
I squeezed my fist around my bandaged thumb, pain lancing up my arm to my teeth. With a grunt, I set my jaw. Whatever had happened, the bastards had taken my ring along with all the data it held. All the proof I was who I said I was, of my titles and holdings. There were people for whom the mere sight of a palatine seal opened doors, greased palms. That ring might have helped without putting me on high society’s damned genetic map, might have kept me off Chantry and state registries.
The doors moaned as I threw them open, pressing against the wet night air. It hit me like a wall, like a wave. I had thought it hot and humid inside the musty clinic, but I was mistaken. Breathing the heavy air was like sucking in a lungful of water, and I felt my stolen clothes start to stick to me.
Something smashed against the floor behind me, glass and metal and the clatter of wood. I turned and caught Maris staring at me from down the hall, the remains of someone’s meal—mine?—shattered and spilled on the checked tiles. She looked ready to scream, to cry. She bit her lip, hands twitching before her, and I knew then that she knew I was running, stealing the help they had gi
ven me, leaving them with nothing. I thought of the rat again and ran. She did scream then, but the word was lost in a sudden gust of night air.
I ran then, ran for blocks, splashing through filmy puddles in the warped and sagging tarmac, past the neon windows of storefronts and under the overhangs of the upper stories of short buildings that looked rust-colored in the light of orange street lamps. Rain fell soft and warm on my downturned face, and though I knew it was wrong, I ran anyway, chest heaving, head pounding as my blood, long still, became reacquainted with the necessities of living. At long last I stopped, slumped against a rubbish bin outside a bakery, a lone figure in stolen clothes, crouched against the night. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide.
And I realized that it was not rain on my face, but tears.
CHAPTER 23
RESURRECTION IN DEATH
I SPENT THE REST of that night hiding in a loading dock behind a warehouse, huddled among a set of unmarked steel drums. Sleep never came, but how could it? The very air felt as if it would choke me, so thick it stuck in my lungs. Some artifact of antique terraforming, perhaps? Or of natural ecology? I knew nothing of my new world, this Emesh. The gravity was undoubtedly stronger, which explained the leaden weight in my limbs. I’d heard a story once about a man, a magus who advised the Emperor, who could gauge a planet’s gravity by the rate at which a pocket bandalore fell and returned to his hand. I had never learned the trick of it, but at a guess I was pulling more than thirty percent what I had on Delos.
When day came at last, the sun was wrong. Delos’s sun was a tiny point, half the size of a silver kaspum, no bigger round than the cross-section of my smallest finger. Emesh’s sun, by contrast, was an angry, weeping red eye the size of my fist. It baked the streets, turning the low brick structures of my new home into the walls of an open-air oven, rippling the air with whorls of heat visible to the eye. My stolen clothes stuck fast to my frame, and I felt the water being burned out of me beneath a sky dappled orange and ocher and pink, streaked with high and inconstant clouds.
The city itself was a curiosity, a low sprawl of unknown scope. Its buildings—most no more than three or four stories high—stretched like netting over an equally low landscape. What little earth I saw between the concrete was sandy and pale. Once or twice I caught sight of the sea between the buildings, peering at me from down crooked streets and over the heads of the growing crowd. Only it too was wrong. The waters shone a sickly green, patched here and there with blue and no silver at all.
Emesh, I later learned, was tectonically dead, and its air and water had more in common with Earth’s sister Mars than with the Homeworld herself. But for one continent, her rare landmasses—little more than islands by the standards of any planet worth the name—were low sedimentary accretions built upon the backs of shoals and coral reefs or else dredged and mounded up from the bed of Emesh’s shallow world ocean. The city itself, Borosevo, was built on steel pilings rammed deep into the earth, and over the long years this obtuse architectural fact revealed its folly in spiderwebs of cracks in walls and pilings. You could see the count’s palace, though, standing above the low mass of the coliseum and the nine minarets of the Chantry sanctum with its copper dome and grim bastille. The palace sat upon a concrete ziggurat gray as the ocean of my home, a fat, topless pyramid a thousand feet high that dominated the low, tin-roofed sprawl of Borosevo. Its spires were glass and sandstone, its roof red-tiled and bright beneath the bloody gaze of the sun.
Using that massive building as a landmark, I worked my way around the city’s edge, reasoning that the starport must be close. The kindness of strangers is one of humanity’s proudest miracles, but it has limits, limits that told me whoever had found me would not have brought me far from whatever alley I’d washed out in and that the alley likely would not have been far from the ships. My jaw tightened with rage at the thought even as my stomach tied itself tight into knots of hunger. Yet it was the thirst that really started to get to me, and when at last I found the starport near noon, I was dry as an unused sponge and flagging badly.
A pair of ornithons took flight as I approached, the six winged snakes rolling their way up and through the air to join the steaming contrails of distant shuttlecraft. I watched the creatures go. My dry mouth hung open, for I had never before seen such things. Here was something more tangible, more real than the gravity and the soupy air. Strange creatures, strange climes.
The cold air of the starport terminal—kept in by a static field—hit me like a breaking wave, and I became a fish gasping at the thinner, drier air, doubled over, hand on my knees just inside the entry. What a sight I must have been: bare and muddy-footed; the legs of my baggy trousers already torn and stained from my midnight run; my long, coal-dark hair plastered down my face almost to the chin. A pair of women in purple business suits skirted me as widely as they could, collapsing matching umbrellas that held the sun at bay. I was unsure how to proceed. My whole life, shuttles had been arranged for me and people had cleared out of my way. I’d never had to come at this sort of situation from outside. From below.
“Messer?” came a polite voice, intruding on my confusion and indecision. “Messer, you can’t be in here.” Looking round, I found a young man in a sort of uniform kaftan, his hands clasped in front of him, peering up at me from a respectful distance from beneath the brim of a flat cap. “You’re upsetting the clientele.”
I stared at him, mind gone entirely blank. “Upsetting?” I repeated, looking round at the moon-blank faces of the people around me, at the way they tried not to stare. Understanding broke over me, and I said, “Sirrah, I . . . forgive me. I was on a ship, the Eurynasir. Perhaps there was some mistake. I awoke in the city, in a clinic . . .”
The honorific surprised the man in the kaftan, and he glanced uncertainly at the two khaki-wearing security officers who bookended him as lictors might a great lord of the Empire. He repeated the word softly to himself: “Sirrah?” Then he said it again more strongly, a tight smile stealing over his effete, fine-featured face. “On a ship, you say?” Something in his manner, in the cold exactitude of that smile, told me that even if he understood, even if he believed me, it didn’t matter.
I drew myself up to my full height. Such as it was, I had a few inches on the little plebeian in his flat cap and flowing robe. “Yes,” I said, planting hands on hips. “The Eurynasir. Sailing out of . . . out of . . .” I racked my memory, trying to dredge up the names of the planets Demetri had mentioned, but at last I surrendered. “Out of Delos. Check your flight logs. The captain was a Jaddian. Demetri Arello.”
Something in my voice, in my face—perhaps even in my use of the subordinating honorific—gave the man pause. He shook back his sleeve, glanced sidelong at the square-jawed woman in khaki to his left, and called up a holograph display from his wrist-terminal. He frowned, cycling through panel after panel. Still bent over it, he said, “I’m not seeing a ship by that name.” His small smile sharpened until it could’ve cut glass. “You’re sure you have it right?”
“Eurynasir,” I repeated, spelling it out for him, a shade breathless. I paused, composed myself. “It has to be here.” I lowered my voice, took a half step closer to the man. When his two guards tensed, raising telescoping batons, I froze, held my hands innocently visible. “Look, I was dumped in an alley, sirrah.” I glanced around, trying to make absolutely certain no one could hear me, and for a moment the coolness of the air distracted me, breaking my train of thought, and the words that escaped me came out breathless. “I’m trying to figure out what happened.” The man made a gesture, and his two guards bulled forward, each seizing me above the elbow. “You have to listen to me!” I snarled, trying to free myself, but the woman with the lantern jaw struck me in the gut.
“Get him out of here,” the man in the kaftan said, waving a dismissive hand and turning to go.
Weak as I was, I snapped my arm free and lunged forward. “It has to be here.”
The
man in the kaftan froze and made a slashing gesture with one hand. “Maybe they scrapped the junker.” Then the lantern-jawed woman struck me again, full in the belly. I doubled over and stayed there. The man smiled that glass-cutting smile. “Don’t come back here, you understand?” The smile was a thing of beauty, its condescension so flanged, so precise. I said nothing, permitting myself to be dragged away down a white-tiled hall, past high windows rattled by the distant takeoffs of lifter rockets from blast pits that dimpled the concrete mass beyond the terminal, orange beneath the blighted sunlight. The tinny music piped over the terminal speakers jangled meaningless in my ears. They hurled me out a back door onto a loading dock much like the one where I’d spent the previous night. Only after the door had locked behind them did I rise and limp back into the city.
I’m not seeing a ship by that name. The words resounded in me, and I bit my lip, thinking, nursing the bruise I was sure was forming on my belly. My stomach turned, gnawing on itself. I hadn’t eaten since the thin broth they’d given me in the clinic, and before then I had had neither food nor drink since the wine I’d had with Demetri in Karch. Not seeing a ship by that name. What did that mean? Did that mean the Eurynasir had not put down in the starport? I lowered myself onto a low concrete wall in the shade of a leafy palm tree, listening to the steady thunder of a distant fusion rocket as it burned its torch for heaven. Did this city have a second starport? It didn’t seem likely, given the distance needed to isolate the city folk from the crushing sound of those rocket engines cracking at the sky.
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