We are the gods now.
Behind our men and the Martians came the train: parade floats hovering or pulled by tanks, or else striding on machine legs of their own, driven by hidden operators. The cart ahead of us was pulled by two white lions, four times the size of any lion I had seen, and upon the platform rode crucified five living Cielcin officers, and at their feet lay mounded a hoard of weapons taken from the ship we conquered in the night. Behind followed three thousand captured Cielcin, chained wrist and ankle, their horned crowns carved away. To what fate they marched I did not know, nor ever asked.
And last of all I came, riding with my officers upon a floating barge that seemed driven or pulled by no device save the banners of the Imperial sun, which blew about us like sails. I stood upon the highest level before an empty throne. On this one occasion I wore no black and was arrayed instead in Imperial argent, that brightest white which is reserved only for members of the Blood Imperial, for I was a cousin of that blood and they claimed me in my triumph, so that I seemed to gleam like a white star in my formal armor before that empty throne. No slave stood at my ear, no homunculus to whisper that I, too, was mortal. That I, too, would die. For I was immortal in that moment, and immortalized. About me stood all my faithful friends. Arrayed on steps beneath me were Pallino and Crim, Elara and Siran—and there were Captain Corvo and Commander Durand, and young Aristedes with Koskinen and Pherrine, with Ilex and the other bridge officers. And Alexander was there, arrayed like me in argent, as though he too were some kind of conqueror. And there too were Udax and Barda and others of the Irchtani auxilia who had aided us. Even our ghosts rode with us, for the memories of Cade and Ghen—of Switch—stirred in my mind.
And Valka was there. Against her wishes and better judgment, she stood a step below me and somewhat removed, hands clasped, eyes sweeping the crowd. She wore a gown of simple black, unadorned, as if to protest all that Imperial white. Despite that, she glowed to me more brightly than all the rest.
And behind us all, not crucified but mounted on a post like a witch for the burning, came the body of Iubalu.
What remained of it.
The flesh parts had been cleaned away and replaced with a plastic facsimile, though the snarling fangs were fierce as the originals had been. I glanced back at it, looming like an angel of death above us, white as we. At a signal the cornicens sounded their horns, and turning I raised my sword to pass beneath the Arch of Peace at the center of the Campus. And as we passed beneath its curve and shadow and the statues of Justice and Mercy both, I lowered the sword in my left hand and hoisted high the spear we had recovered from Iubalu’s ship: the heraldic staff topped with its broken circle and dangling silver chimes.
Iubalu’s staff.
It is that moment which shines out of Vianello’s painting, which rises from the triumphal arch on Nemavand. That Devil Marlowe standing with sword in hand and the spear of his enemy raised in triumph.
The crowd roared. The horns sounded. The trumpets blew. The very skies of Forum answered them, for a great wind rose and carried the noise of our exultation from that mighty field to the highest towers and the lowest spire of that gilt and holy city—and thence by holograph to every world.
I scarce recall the faces of that crowd: palatine and patrician, the highest and noblest in our Empire. I can see them only as a mingling of bright colors, of silks and velvets and burnished gold beneath the rows of Imperial suns embroidered red on white, snapping on tall banners like sails in that unceasing wind. In time we came to the Last Stair: a thousand steps and eighty so wide a hundred men might mount their gilded marble and climb abreast. Imperial banners marked the edges and hung between the white pillars above. Beyond them rose the domes and Georgian rotundas of the Sun King’s Palace, its towers a hundred stories high. In its golden shadow we stopped, and at another horn blast I descended from my place, still clutching my sword in my hand and carrying Iubalu’s heraldic spear. Valka fell into step behind me, and Corvo and the other officers followed.
Above us and along the steps were arrayed the great princes of the realm, them whose blood was old as Earth and older than the Empire. There was the red lion of House Habsburg, and the black eagle of Hohenzollern. There flew the red and blue shields of Bourbon beside the banner of House Bernadotte. There too were the banners of the Houses Mahidol, Singh, and Rothschild, and there was the crysanthemum of Yamato, whose chief still called himself the Mikado no Nihonjin, the Emperor of the Nipponese. They were not alone. These princely houses stood among those of the magnarchs and viceroys whose time it was to live with the Emperor in his holy city. Was that the eagle of Kephalos I saw? Or was it only my imagination?
Each dipped their banners as we climbed the stairs, each bowed as I passed with Prince Alexander beside me, and cries of “Halfmortal! Halfmortal!” dogged my ascent, and as I had been instructed to do I lifted the Cielcin spear to each in salute. How strange it was, and how marvelous, that these great princes and chevaliers of the Imperium should bow to me and to my company, composed as it was of foreigners, of plebeians, with an intus, a homunculus, and a pack of inmane savages. The world had changed—and I had changed it.
But bow they did, if not all of them.
Augustin Bourbon did not bow, nor his cousin, Prince Charles—the son of the previous Prince Charles whom Augustin had betrayed his own father to support. Neither did Marius Hohenzollern nor his wife, Wilhelmina. It did not matter. At last we came to the receiving platform at the top of that mighty stair where the Emperor awaited us, seated on a throne grander and more beautiful by far than the empty seat on the barge I’d left below. There I—to whom all the great lords of the Empire had bowed that day—bowed myself, and knelt, and laid at the royal feet the staff of the enemy I had beaten.
One of the mirrored Excubitors approached. As he did so I unkindled my sword and proffered it—head bowed—with both hands. The knight received my blade and gave it into the hands of His Imperial Radiance, William XXIII, who grasped my weapon as though it were the very scepter of rule and said, “Well done, my good and faithful servant. We are glad to receive you here in this, your moment of triumph.” Without standing, the Imperial person raised my sword hilt in one velvet-gloved fist. From my place on the ground, I glanced up. Behind His Radiance there was a sea of white robes and redheaded faces. The Empress stood behind the throne, and dozens of their children behind prudence shields powered by reactors large as mountains hid deep in the bowels of the City far below. “Hadrian Marlowe, for your service to Earth and Emperor, you have our gratitude.” He lowered my sword hilt, which was the sign for a page homunculus to approach on its knees, head bowed, bearing aloft a red silk pillow. Moving with the gravity of the weightiest stars, the Emperor rose, snowy garments fluttering about him in the breeze. In gloved and many-ringed hands he took the item from the pillow and raised it for all the crowd to see.
I felt my breath catch.
In the Imperial hands was a wreath, a crown of living gold.
The Grass Crown.
“For your bravery on the field of battle, by our own hand, we set upon your head the Grass Crown! The highest honor we may bestow.” He approached and set the wreath upon my head. It was far heavier than I expected, and when I would remove it later I discovered that it was—in truth—wrought of living gold. The leaves and wood of it were laced with metal. How such a thing can be I do not know, and yet I tell you it is so. “You rode at the head of your army against the Pale, saving not only your men from destruction but redeeming those legions we thought lost forever, defying our wildest hopes.” He raised both hands, by that gesture encompassing the Last Stair and the whole of the Campus Raphael—encompassing most of all the gilded barge-palanquin on which I had entered, on which still stood, hanging from its post, the demonic corpse of the Vayadan-General Iubalu. “With your own hands you slew the captain of the enemy, and brought us news of an alliance between the Cielcin and those barbarians who have ev
er been a threat to our realm and dominion.”
Turning, His Radiance plucked my sword back from the arm of his throne and offered it to me. A powerful symbol, that. To put into my hands a weapon that at that range no power in the universe could have stopped me from using against him. I took the sword in my left hand and accepted the Emperor’s right. White gauntlet in red glove, the Emperor himself pulled me to my feet and wheeled me to face the crowd. I held my sword aloft just as the Emperor had done—an Emperor myself, if for only an instant, draped as I was in the cloth of that office.
I looked down upon the high lords of the Imperium, down on Habsburg and Hohenzollern, on Bourbon and Bernadotte. I looked down on Mahidol and Singh and Rothschild, down on Yamato, and felt them looking up at me. Bourbon turned his back. And Hohenzollern. And Mahidol. And when all the banners dipped, theirs did not, and despite the cheering and the bright music of horn and trumpet and the rose petals falling from the high hall as once they’d fallen on Crispin in Colosso, I felt a cold dread seep into my heart, though it melted in the warmth of that instant, for there too were the faces of Corvo and Durand, of Aristedes and Koskinen and Pherrine. Crim and Ilex knelt there side by side, and beside them were Udax and Barda and the Irchtani who were that day heroes to the lords of men. And there were my friends Pallino, Elara, and Siran, who had come with me from the bottom of Emesh. And there was Valka—who did not kneel but stood apart in her black dress, a witch in seeming if not in truth. Criminals and slaves, homunculi and inti, foreigners and xenobites and witches, too.
My people.
My friends.
A moment later, a port opened beneath the post from which Iubalu hung. A containment field was activated, flashing as it englobed the palanquin. Then a violet flame issued forth, hot as the hottest stars and twice as bright, though the field polarized the worst of it. Iubalu was consumed then, the titanium and plastic all melted away. Not even the adamant of its armor would remain through heat hot enough to dissolve molecular bonds. I shut my eyes, and shutting them saw once more my vision . . . twice received.
I saw a black ship plunge into a star, and saw the Cielcin swallowed all by light, and heard once more the shrieking voice of the oracle, Jari.
Light! he screamed, demon-possessed and dead inside. Light! Light! Light!
And the Emperor’s voice rose above the masses, louder than the voice of God. “As it is here for this one—so shall it be for all the rest,” he cried. “Death to the enemy!”
“Death to the enemy!” the crowd echoed back.
“Glory for Mankind!” the Emperor decreed.
“Glory for Mankind!”
“Long live the Children of Earth!”
“Long live the Children of Earth!”
CHAPTER 29
FAR BEYOND THE SUN
THE DAYS OF FORUM are long as weeks, and as the sun was setting on the day of our triumph, a ball was held in our name in the Peronine Palace itself. I had slept since the triumph, and traded the argent clothes and mirrored armor and the golden laurels of the Grass Crown for suits of common white, with my customary red stripes on the trousers and a collared half-cape over the left shoulder, white above and black beneath. I felt silly in the white leather riding boots, in all that glowing silk and soft velvet.
“I swear, you’re less nervous before a fight,” Valka said, coming up beside me.
I smiled, equal parts fondness and mirth, for she looked entirely unlike herself. Gone were the untidy hair, the tight vest and jodhpurs. Gone too were the scuffed boots and the rolled-back sleeves, the stylus tucked behind one ear or else pinned in her hair. Her pale face was powdered paler still, and painted shadows clung to her eyelids. And her lips were red. Her gown was a floating collection of shadows, black as black, and edged with a subtle crimson like her hair. There were black gems shining at her throat, and a net of them covered her shoulders and high breasts. A gauzy sleeve covered her right arm, but the left was bare, revealing the fractal tattoo pattern there, whorls and spirals and geometric tangles blossoming from the backs of her fingers to where they vanished at the shoulder. A silver pin like a knife secured her so-oft untidy hair, which fell in curling waves across her face to hide one golden eye.
“What?” she asked when I said nothing. I must have been staring.
“You look . . . impossible,” I said, and smiled my broken smile.
She leaned close, pulling in her wake the scent of sandalwood and something smoky. I thought she meant to kiss me, and when I stooped to kiss her back she pulled away. “I know,” she said.
Crim snorted.
I eyed the fellow in his glossy black suit, his red silk shirt open Jaddian fashion almost to the navel. I raised an eyebrow. Crim looked away, grinning toothily. “Try to behave,” I said, smoothing my jacket. “You’re not on holiday. Don’t forget.”
The security man straightened. “Wouldn’t dream of it, sir.”
But I saw the smile he flashed Ilex, and I softened. We had won a great victory, and they were not wrong to celebrate. “Just . . . behave yourselves,” I said, and rested a hand on the ornamental saber I wore at one hip. Its blade was only aluminum and blunt as a butter knife. Real weapons were not permitted into the Imperial presence, but as a knight I was entitled to wear something.
“Is your party all here, my lord?” asked one of the bald, round-faced eunuchs who waited by the doors.
I looked round at those gathered behind Valka and myself. Pallino had freshly trimmed his blackish hair and wore a cravat of all things, looking oddly solemn with Elara on his arm in a stately bronze dress. Captain Corvo was a mercenary and no legionnaire, and so had not been permitted her uniform, nor had any of my Norman colleagues. She looked entirely out of place in a gown and nearly as uncomfortable as I was in my white court finery.
A trace of wry laughter touching my face, I answered, “Yes.”
“Are they going to say our names?” Elara asked, “Like in the holos?”
“They’ll say his name,” Pallino answered, “maybe the doctor’s. We’ll just be ‘and escort,’ you’ll see.”
We followed the servant along mirrored halls with Martians standing at attention. We came at last to a glowing colonnade that overlooked the Cloud Gardens and the Galath tree, its bough glowing with milky light in the golden blush of twilight’s last embers.
The bright and heady sounds of music rose to meet us, washing down the hall like fine rain. Not the martial music of horn and trumpet, but the sweet notes of violin, of flute, and harp. And here a woman’s lofty voice lifted in wordless song as the double doors were opened—not by inhuman mechanism—but by four footmen in red palace uniforms.
“They could have made the walk shorter,” Lorian grumbled.
The light that spilled forth shone the color of honey, and brought with it the heady aromas of wine and smoky food and the mingled scents of a thousand different perfumes, all blended together in an orchestra as sonorous and deep as the music and twice as intoxicating. Such was its power that even Lorian Aristedes fell silent.
An androgyn nuncius raised a crystal clarion to its lips and blew as we entered, the high clear note riding smoothly over the uninterrupted orchestra. That done, it lifted up its high and musical voice to sing out: “Sir Hadrian, Lord of the House Marlowe Victorian, Commandant of His Radiance’s Red Company, and escort!”
“Told you,” Pallino grumbled.
I raised my cane for quiet and offered Valka my arm, which she took as we crossed the threshold, linking hers in mine.
“I hate this place already,” she muttered in her native Panthai.
Answering her in that same language, I said, “You have no art in you, dear lady.”
The ballroom was a marvel, a confection of baroque architecture, arched ceilings and painted vaults with ribs set with carnelian and carved white marble, every surface frescoed with images of the children of Earth encircling
their mother. The Earth herself stood triumphant in the center: a nude woman in full flower standing upon the emerald-and-sapphire globe of the planet itself, her golden hair streaming beneath a crown of twelve stars. Recalling it, I cannot help but recall my friend, Edouard, who called that icon blasphemous. I cannot remember why.
“Hadrian!” a voice cried out, shaking me from my contemplation of that incredible sight. Alexander strode across the floor to greet us, dressed in white as I was, his flaming hair oiled and perfectly coiffed. He embraced me as though we had not seen one another in years, though he had stood beside me on the palanquin in the triumph that overlong day. He released me, but held me at arm’s length, as though I were a child and he the proud parent. “Welcome! Welcome!”
Painted faces—men and women alike—watched us from around the rims of wine cups or over the arcs of silk or paper fans. I wondered what our closeness looked like to those fine lords and ladies, and remembered sharply Lorian’s half-baked suggestion that I should wed the prince and so solidify my position. I took a measured step back, certain that among those watchful faces must be a lord or two who had turned their back to see a minor lord like me—no matter my high lineage—advanced to so honored a place so quickly. “You’re wearing a sword!” I exclaimed, noting the metal saber at the prince’s side. “Your father didn’t knight you, did he?”
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