Lord Balian Mataro reached into a drawer beneath his desk and drew out a sheet of crystal paper. He turned it on the glossy surface and pushed the document toward me. Ordinarily such writs were done on vellum, signed by hand. But this was a copy, clearly sent to Emesh across the vast and echoing quiet of space by quantum telegraph. I felt my blood temperature drop when I saw the seal printed beneath the holographed fractals beside the signatures: the crimson devil capering with its trident raised above its head against a field of darkest black above the words “The Sword, Our Orator.” It matched the bezel of my ring exactly, had indeed been made with an identical ring hundreds of light-years away. And the names beside it: Alistair Diomedes Friedrich Marlowe and Elmira Gwendolyn Kephalos. My father and my grandmother, the vicereine.
It was another terrible minute before I realized the nature of the thing they’d signed. So long, in fact, that the count’s deep voice asked, “Do you know what this is?”
“A writ of disavowal,” I said, eyes going to the graphic of the Imperial sunburst at the top of the long sheet of white crystal paper. I read: We resolve beneath the mark of His Imperial Radiance, our Emperor, William the Twenty-Third of the House Avent, Firstborn Son of the Earth, etc., to dissolve all ties legal and familiar with the renegade Hadrian of the House Marlowe, formerly of Meidua Prefecture, Duchy of Delos, Auriga Province. In concert with the examinations of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, his conduct . . .
“. . . his conduct has been found wanting of the standards and grace expected of his station. He has betrayed his house and his lord father and brought shame upon his family name and upon the viceroyalty of Delos,” the count recited—or perhaps read upside-down. “Grievous charges.” I took it as a mercy that he did not keep reading.
I did not answer. There were tears in my eyes and something like tears in my throat. I could not speak. My ring was a lead weight on my thumb, dead and pointless. It was just a lump of metal. I had nothing, then. Truly nothing. Before, when I was destitute in the streets of Borosevo, I’d had the private dignity of my hidden station and what holdings were tied, however tenuously, to my name and rank. But now I was truly destitute, with nothing but the genes in my bones. Mataro was right. I was a stud, and in the most unflattering sense, like a famous racehorse lamed in the slip. I tried not to think about Switch, about Pallino and Elara and the ship I’d meant to buy with the ghost assets on my ring and a song.
No longer. I would almost have to prostitute myself to Anaïs and House Mataro to survive.
“I’m sorry to tell you this.”
“No, you’re not,” I said in a voice like grave soil. I had just seen the date on the writ and knew what had been done to me and by whom. “You sent to him. To my father. You telegraphed him right after I arrived.” The day I’d arrived, if I’d read the date right. He’d been planning this since we met, since I sat unconscious in his chair upstairs. That was why he’d been willing to keep me in his house, why he’d tolerated my antics in the coliseum hypogeum and at dinner with the prior. The bastard didn’t even have the decency to deny it. His face did not so much as twitch. He knew he had me. “For all I know, you urged him to do this. Made some deal to keep me. What was it? Thirty pieces of silver?”
The man’s face went blank. “What?” He didn’t understand me. “You should be honored. You’re to be my son.”
“I’m to be a whore.” I almost choked, took a moment to crush the sob in my throat before it could escape. Grief is emptiness. So chastised, I filed my grief, turned to practical matters. “What are you going to do with me, then?” There would be time to dwell on the day’s horrors later—would be time to drown them, if necessary.
“You brought this on yourself, boy.” The count tugged the writ back toward himself. “Now, to present matters. Once you’re married, Ligeia won’t be able to move against you without moving against my house, which she will not do.” He stood with a swirl of orange silks and paced anxiously to the curved arc of windows—view screens, in truth, which projected an image of Borosevo in all its rusty, low glory, the canals green-choked by algae. “The problem is those three years between now and then. You’ve made yourself a powerful enemy, you know.” He paused to peel another verrox leaf off the bale, hand vibrating visibly. “I’ve a mind to send you to Tivan Melluan, up on Binah, to get you out of harm’s way.”
I did not respond; I was staring at my hands again. They too were shaking, though not from verrox toxemia. My long hair fell over my face, curtaining me off from the count. Tears milled across the surface of my eyes, unfallen. Too much—it was all too much.
At length I looked up from my hands, resigned, and said, “My lord, a question, if I may.”
It was worth asking. It was all I could do.
CHAPTER 62
THE GILDED CAGE
THE EMPTY WINE BOTTLE bounced against the floor tiles, rolling away under the table. I let it go. I had half a mind to call Switch on my terminal. I shouldn’t have been alone in that moment, and yet I knew I could not stand to be with anyone. It wasn’t even dark out; that day—that interminable day—refused to end. The orange sunlight fell darkly through the narrow windows, casting my spartan apartments into relief. My wine depleted, I dragged my journal from the small table beside my short couch and keyed a control in the tabletop to polarize the light from the windows, dimming the world.
I sat sharpening my pencil, twice breaking the thing in my unsteady fingers. Gilliam’s face kept asserting itself. “Don’t trust,” he had said, “don’t trust . . .” Perhaps the Chantry gods were real, I thought. Perhaps they hated me; perhaps I was to atone. Lord Consort of Emesh . . . I ground my teeth. The bird cares not that his cage is gilded. A great honor, even if it was a kind of prison. A kind of poison. I would be a lord in title as well as blood, and a greater one than my father.
I scooped up the empty glass, raised it in a dramatic toast. I had to suppress an urge to dash the glass against the wall, but I settled for slamming it back onto the side table with a scowl. Slumped against the arm of the chair, I raised a hand to no one in particular—to the cameras in my suite, perhaps—and made a rude gesture. I forgot in my drunkenness that they were not the cameras of Devil’s Rest.
The door cycled open. I’d locked it, wanting to be alone. Half panicking, expecting to see a cathar or Chantry assassin, I raised the scalpel I used to sharpen my pencils, pointing it like a plasma burner. In my haste my knee slammed into the arm of the couch, and I staggered and fell back into my seat, knocking my glass to the floor. “Damn it . . .” A sob shook me, blessedly quiet. Unable to look at Valka, I looked down at the shattered glass instead, at the wine puddling on the hardwood.
“If you’re trying to drown yourself,” she said with affected coldness, “there are larger bodies of water on Emesh.”
I glared up at her from my place on the floor, then down at the scalpel in my hand. Contemptuously I threw the thing aside, watched it clatter over to the small table by the kitchenette. “Wasn’t water.”
“’Tis the problem, I think.” She filled a glass of water from the sink and passed it to me, helped me to regain my place on the couch. “Drink.” Her hand touched mine briefly, and even through my haze I felt and remember the warmth of it. There was care in the motion and a tenderness I did not deserve that day of all days.
I drank, rested my head against the back of the couch. She moved off to recover the scalpel. She turned, caught me staring, and arched one winged eyebrow. I had seen uglier statues of Venus in old archives, though surely here was Pallas. That thought forced a laugh through my nose. It collapsed into silence, and after the better part of a minute had passed—during which time the xenologist seated herself in a narrow armchair by the windows—I managed to mumble, “I’m sorry.” Then again, more strongly, “I’m sorry.” I pressed my eyes closed, pinched the bridge of my nose. “There’s more wine . . . somewhere. Sir Elomas had a case sent up. Thank him for me?”
“I should think you’ve had enough.” She gave me a look that diminished me, made me feel a part of the couch I half lay upon. Those golden eyes took in the bottle that had rolled onto the floor, the pencil shavings, my rumpled clothes, and the tangled blankets that lay scattered on the floor between the sofa and the open door to my bedchamber. She crossed her arms. “I was going to come knock some sense into you, but I think the damage is done.” She kept watching me.
“Sorry . . .” My tongue was thick and fat in my mouth, slow to follow the scant lead my brain had on it. “Valka, I was only going to wound him, but he cut me.” I held up my bandaged arm for inspection. “The bastard cut me. Faster than I expected.” I shuddered, shut my eyes. I couldn’t look at her, not in my current state. Maybe if I closed my eyes she would go away. She shouldn’t have been able to get inside in the first place. “Stupid . . . I . . .”
“You are an idiot,” she said, but she smiled, if only barely. “But you’re not a liar.”
“What?” I looked blearily up from my journal. It had fallen open to an image of Devil’s Rest, the castle in undetailed black as seen from the streets of Meidua—seen indeed from that very street where I had almost died a lifetime ago. Had it really only been three years? Or thirty-five?
Valka’s eyes narrowed to slits, glowing in the dim umber light of afternoon, but her smile didn’t waver. “You’d never killed anyone before.”
“I’m not . . . I . . . No.” I wanted to cry, but more than that I wanted to be all right, or at least to present as all right in front of this strange and exquisite foreigner. She was a colossus, tall and calm and remote as the stars.
After a pregnant moment, she said, “It’s not easy, is it?”
She was being subtle. I was too drunk for subtlety at the moment. It was a struggle to keep my words cogent, to stop them from running like a man’s makeup in the rain. “What?”
“Killing.”
I cocked my head at her, numb fingers working to close my journal. “Yeah.” Her voice had not been that of an academic but was drawn with painful experience. I did not press her. Valka sucked on the inside of one cheek, kept her attentions fixed on my face, lost in thought. Blearily I gathered up what wits remained me and asked, “What?”
She shook her head, pressed a fall of red-black hair behind her ear with a determined gesture. “What will you do now?”
I shrugged, moved as if to grab a bottle from my side table, only to remember too late that it was empty and on the floor. I mumbled something about the marriage, then told her everything. About Gilliam, about Anaïs, about my father and the Chantry. “The count wants to send me up to Binah. To keep me away from Vas.” I paused, cleared my throat. “But I asked him to let me go with you.”
“What?” Valka’s head snapped up. “Why?”
“I don’t want—I don’t mean to invite myself, it’s just . . . I think you’re right. I don’t think the Empire’s good for me.” I stifled another sob, slammed my head back against the sofa. Once. Twice.
If ever there were a moment, a point at which Valka warmed to me, it was then. I could almost feel it the way one feels the sound of ice cracking when water is poured into a glass. Her cold and brittle smile softened. Instead of answering, she rose and tugged my empty cup from my hands, went to refill it. I was left in silence for the better part of a minute, watching the bob and dart of tiny ships against the distant celadon sea. In the evening sunlight the green waters turned the color of mud, and all the world was cheap as a bad painting. The ugliness, I thought. This was what Gibson meant about the ugliness of the world. But perhaps the world was perfect and it was myself who was hideous.
The woman returned, this time settling herself onto the low coffee table before the couch. She pressed the water on me. “Why Calagah?”
I lied, “For the aliens. The history.” For you. To escape. “If you’ll have me. I don’t want to be a . . . a burden.”
“The count will allow it?” Valka looked nervous. The expression did not suit her.
“I can’t stay here, not after”—I waved an incoherent hand—“today.” Nodding, I slumped sideways onto the arm of the couch. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Came here to yell at me,” I mumbled. “Right thing. Now you’re being all nice.”
She pursed her lips, eyes darting out the window to the painted, putrid city. “I’ll yell at you later.” Then, “Your father disinherited you?”
I shook my head, regretted the gesture at once as the room started to spin. So I shut my eyes. “Disowned me. My grandmother did, too.” A laugh escaped me, mad and thready and broken. “I’m not really Hadrian Marlowe anymore. I’m Hadrian nobody.” I pulled the signet ring from my thumb—the damn thing had gotten me into all this mess in the first place. With little effort I flung it across the room. Let the cleaning drones have it; let them sweep it into a bin and bear it to the incinerators. It was worthless anyhow, disinherited as I was. My holdings would have been canceled the moment it had happened. The land I held on Delos had defaulted to Meidua prefecture and to House Marlowe.
House Marlowe.
I’d believed I was House Marlowe, but I was only an extension of it. An appendage. I’d always thought my house composed of individuals, but even on that strange world I had depended on my name and on the ring that symbolized it to mean something. We think ourselves the masters of such symbols, but they are our masters. Devils. Sphinxes. Suns. I had clung to the bloody thing like a talisman, hoping it would protect me, save me. It had damned me instead, had made my idiotic behavior catastrophic. “The Sword, Our Orator!” I hissed, saying my family’s words. I made of them a curse. “Would that it weren’t so.”
The lights dimmed in one of the castle’s too-familiar power fluctuations.
Valka struck me hard across the face without preamble or warning. The sound of it startled me more than the force of it, and I pressed a hand to my cheek, stunned. “Stop it,” she said, brows knitting as she leaned in. “’Tis well you’re having second thoughts, but ’tis too late. You have no one to blame but yourself. You understand? This isn’t happening to you, ’tis happening because of you.”
The fool believes the iniquities of the world are the fault of other men. Gibson’s voice, dry as old manuscript pages, had never been more clear. The truly wise try to change themselves, which is the more difficult and less grand task. What need had I then for House Marlowe? For the worthless ring?
My face ached where Valka had stuck me, but the pain was far away. I didn’t argue. She was right. “His eyes, Valka. His eyes. Gilliam’s. I . . . I saw them . . . hollow. One minute he was there, and the next . . .” I had seen dead men before, had seen their eyes—like distant suns and with just as little heat—but never once had I seen the moment of passage. Even Cat, who had died in my arms, had crossed over with her eyes shut. “It was horrible. Horrible . . .” I fancied I saw his pale blue eye shining at me now, filmed over in death. The eye of a vulture.
The Tavrosi woman made a hushing sound, ushering in a long and agreeable silence. I teetered on the brink of sleep, that soft and temporary oblivion. Teetered but did not fall. At length I said, “Can I go with you? To Calagah? I don’t want . . .” I pawed the air in the direction of my ring. “I don’t want any of this.”
Her lips curled, and she said, “What about Anaïs?”
I sniffed. “What about her?”
“You’re betrothed.” She gestured at the room around me and by extension at the castle beyond. “You have to come back here.”
“I know.” I drew my legs almost to my chin, blew my hair from my eyes. “But I don’t have to stay here.”
Valka smiled again—the warm smile she had shown me earlier, not the cold one that was her custom—and rested her tattooed hand on my cheek. She spoke words I could not hear, or perhaps she did not speak at all. The moment is a warm haze, a
smear across my memory as darkness and the trials of that day washed me away.
CHAPTER 63
CALAGAH
IN BOROSEVO I’D FORGOTTEN what it was like to be anything but hot. The sprawling capital sat a mere ten degrees north of Emesh’s equator, squatting across the island-shoals that dominated that vast and shallow sea, far from the planet’s remote and lonely continent in the south. There the forensic remains of long-quieted volcanism showed in the time-eaten upthrust of igneous rock, black and flinty. Thence the long-conquered Norman settlers had maintained their planetary freehold, centered on the captured city of Tolbaran, now the seat of Lord Perun Veisi.
During a brief sojourn to Veisi’s castle in Springdeep, I learned much of Emesh’s pre-Imperial history: about the fishing culture and the network of island towns that dominated the planet from cap to shrunken polar cap; about the settlement and the first contacts with the Umandh; about the guerilla fighting and the peasant fishing junks wrecked at sea, dragged under by the coloni natives. I learned about the annexation, the decade of struggle between the freeholders and the three massed Imperial Legions under the direction of the first Count Mataro, Lord Armand, for whom the smaller moon was named.
And I learned about Calagah itself.
Valka was a good teacher, and where her information was lacking—which was rare—Sir Elomas Redgrave filled the gaps with neat concision. That I was to wed Anaïs Mataro when she came of age became something of an open secret, and indeed something of a joke to my two close companions. They called me “my lord” to my face, echoing Ghen’s mocking tendency to refer to me with the Imperial style.
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