“About you what?” I ceased pacing in an arc up and down the landing field conference chamber. Distracted momentarily by the convoy of personnel on chariots streaking across the tarmac from one of the outer hangar domes back toward the line of colossi at the wall. “Ah.” I had forgotten. “I told Bartosz the commander would be joining him to coordinate our part of the ground defense. If he or Hauptmann gives you trouble, fall back on your rank and do your duty.” Demons above and below, I thought. If Hauptmann had thought me insubordinate, I shuddered to think what he would think of Aristedes—and him an intus, no less. “They won’t stop you doing your job, and any fool with eyes to see knows you’re good at it.”
A low quarking sound came from the Irchtani corner, and Kithuun-Barda said, “What of us, Devil Man?”
The Irchtani were fresh from the ice, and seeing the xenobites standing there in their vest-like uniform jackets, talons curled against their breasts, threw into sharp relief just how much time had passed since last I’d seen them. I had been in Gabriel’s Archive when their time—alone and as a people—to roost on Thessa had come. I had seen neither Udax nor Kithuun-Barda since Forum; since before Selene; before the knife-missile; before Breathnach and Bourbon; before Philip, Ricard, and Irshan; before Colchis, Gibson, and Horizon. Before Annica and the Quiet. The Irchtani seemed to belong to another world, another Hadrian.
I shook myself. “The First Strategos has installed anti-air artillery along the inner wall overlooking the city.” I paused, unsure how best to articulate what needed saying. “The fighting is bound to be thick there, kithuun, but those missile emplacements and the guns around them are a crucial line of defense. Your men will make a great difference there, but the Cielcin will come for them.”
“Let them try, bashanda,” Udax said, punching his open palm with one scaled fist. “We are the fighting Irchtani! We defeated their metal monster, you and me! We will do it again.”
I hoped the xenobite was right. Whatever else was true, we would be in the thick of the fighting. “Most of Hauptmann’s legionaries are keeping to space,” I said. Hauptmann planned to take the fight to the Cielcin in orbit, to capture or destroy their ships, for which he needed all the men he could get. A less experienced commander might have been offended at being relegated to groundwork, but I knew better. We were not the rearguard, but a critical element of the defense. Perhaps the critical element. “Let him win the glory, if that’s what he wants. Let him add another standard to his collection. Our duty is to protect the people.”
Valka was smiling as I spoke and caught my gaze. I returned the expression. “We’ll play this close and defensively. Kithuun-Barda, as I say, I want you and your people manning the inner wall. I’ll want cohorts three, four, and five in the industrial quarter defending the approaches to the Storm Wall with the ODF ground troops. Bartosz is taking the landing field.”
“If they attack at all like the rest of Pale,” Lorian said, shifting in his seat to draw the attention of those around him, “they’ll hit us hard and fast. Hard drop troops from orbit, get them into the city past our guns. They won’t know to hit the Storm Wall yet, they’ll go for the city.”
“What are you saying?” I asked, and ceased pacing to look at the little man with his ghost-pale eyes.
Commander Aristedes’s smile was all teeth. “Hold the guns until after they land in the valley. Then close the lid.”
“Fire on the city, you mean?” Durand sounded aghast. He had not been at the meeting with Hauptmann and Bancroft.
“It’s empty!” Lorian snapped back. “Why not? Why not do to them what that Iubalu creature did to us? Draw them in. Let them overextend themselves.” He clambered to his feet and toward the holograph table that stood between me and the others. “Keep the Irchtani on the inner wall, but put our men in the city in the approach tunnels to the bunkers where they’ll be safe. Here and here . . . and here.” He pointed with those ghoulish fingers of his. The Cielcin will hit the city and start hunting—only they won’t find anyone. Draw them in,” he said once more, “then close the lid.”
I was nodding along quite before I realized it. “Very good,” I said. “Then we’ll be prepared to fall back through the bunkers to the Storm Wall if we lose the city, and re-seal the gates behind us.” I glanced at Corvo and Durand. “Can you speak to Bancroft? We need to make sure the tunnels are cleared from the lower gates up through to the fortress proper. I want her refugees out of the way.”
“We’ll want to mine the lower gates,” Pallino said, raising his chin and his voice from the back. “Last thing we need’s the Pale fucking us in the ass if we have to retreat.”
I nodded. We had the beginnings of a plan.
CHAPTER 74
PHYLACTERIES
LIGHTNING CHEWED AT THE horizon, illuminating the distant nuclear plants beneath their pillars of white steam. I was made acutely aware of the volume of the air, the height of the clouds above and about me, their weight and charge. I surveyed the land below with new eyes, saw the landing field unfold in countless variations, witnessed countless permutations of the lightning falter across infinite permutations of cloud, watched by infinite versions of me, each so alike that not even I fully understood the differences.
“I thought you’d be up here.”
I hadn’t seen Valka’s approach, but whatever vision I have is limited to those things my senses are aware of, and though I could—if I concentrated—perceive the infinite possible now, it was only the little infinity bounded by my senses. On the mountain I had seen with the eyes of the Quiet, seen everything, seen beyond the boundaries of my mortal self, beyond the walls of reason and of sleep to realms and narratives so improbable that they were little different than dreams. And perhaps they were.
“I didn’t hear you come up,” I said, turning.
She looked as she always did, wry smile in place beneath golden eyes and wild, red-black hair. To fight the gusting winds so high atop the Storm Wall, she’d donned her customary short leather jacket, its wine red complimenting the charcoal shirt with its pattern of skulls and the Tavrosi script that confirmed I’d been right. Annica was the name of those musicians she liked so much.
“I didn’t want you to!” She almost laughed. “Are you all right?”
“Calm before the storm!” I called back—for she was perhaps twenty paces from me. Inclining my head to the lighting, I added, “Literally, in this case.” We had weathered our fair share of storms since coming to Deira, though from the city itself they were no great spectacle. Atop the Storm Wall, winds might reach an excess of six hundred miles per hour, spurred to great speeds by all that open space—and that was without the updrafts from where the winds crashed against the pale ramparts of that mighty edifice of metal and stone.
“ ’Tis,” she agreed, coming to stand beside me. “ ’Tis so still.”
“It always is before a battle,” I said, “as if the whole world were holding its breath.” Off on the horizon, the lightning flashed again, though again the thunder was too remote to be heard. My vision faded away, and I was once more a man wholly present. I drew my cape tight around myself. “Otavia’s returned to orbit.”
Valka leaned against the parapet, peering down at the colossi four thousand feet below. From our height, the enormous machines appeared almost like ordinary beetles. Above, red lights flared against the higher levels of cloud as ships in orbit fired their engines. “I saw her off,” she said. “Will it work?”
I looked round at her, baffled by the question. “I don’t know,” I said, leaning on the rail. “I really can’t see the future, Valka.” I’d tried to explain it to her half a hundred times since Annica, before and after the freeze.
“But you did,” she said. “You said you saw the Pale attack this place.”
“On the mountain,” I said. “But I wasn’t alone then.” I took her hands in mine, glad that here the wind and open air would wash my word
s away. I looked over her shoulder. In the distance, I saw soldiers hurrying about, busying themselves with gun emplacements set upon the wall. Technicians swarmed over the massive shield projector turrets that studded the wall every quarter mile, silvered domes shimmering. I spied also my own guards, faceless Red Company men armed and armored who maintained their quiet distance.
I was never really alone.
“But they are coming?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Another battle.” Valka shook her head.
“Perhaps the final battle,” I said, recalling my visions. There were so many futures, so many places in time. Had I seen valleys in the great landscape of possibility where the war ended at Berenike? Or were those possibilities only dreams? I knew I must avoid the futures I had seen, that was enough. “We can stop Dorayaica here,” I said. “It’s the biggest threat. With it gone, the other clans might surrender or . . . run back into the Dark whence they came.” No sooner had I opened my mouth than the memory of what lurked in that darkness flashed like the lightnings in my mind. The hideous wings; the writhing, shapeless masses.
“What is it?” Valka asked.
“Nothing,” I said, and held one hand to her face. I tried to smile, though I fear the expression was strained. “Ask me again sometime.” She pressed against my hand, stepped closer in an uncharacteristically warm public display. I put my other arm around her, mindful—though she was not—of the people all around us.
Valka did not move for a long time, but after a moment she said, “I feel like I’ve been slipping into your shadow, Hadrian.” I did not let her go. I let her talk. “I’ve studied the Quiet for years. Decades. And I was wrong. Wrong about . . . about everything. ’Twere not an ancient people, ’twere not a people at all, even their philukun language was no language at all! And here you are . . . an Imperial fucking palatine . . .” Her voice trailed off in frustration, lost in the folds of my cape. “I failed at everything I ever set out to do. After the guard . . . I wanted to be a scientist. But I couldn’t even do that right.”
I held her tightly and did not speak.
“Decades,” she said. “Blood of my fathers, decades, Hadrian! Decades I worked on those inscriptions. For nothing.”
“Not for nothing!” I said, unable to keep silent any longer. “We figured it out.”
She thumped me in the shoulder with an open hand. “You figured it out.” I could feel her gaze on me and looked down. There were tears in the false eyes. “I should hate you for that. I worked for so long . . . so long. And you . . . it wasn’t even a language . . .”
“You had no way of knowing that,” I said.
“I told you about Sadal Suud, did I not?” Her words were barely above a whisper. “This was long before I met you. There was this Chantry priest there who kept one of the Cavaraad in chains. I was on the caravan, going to see the Marching Towers. I waited until dark and freed it. I thought ’twould run free, but . . . but it attacked the workers. I guess it wanted revenge . . . I just . . . wanted it to stop hurting.” She was shaking by then, and I held her firm in my arms, my own expression grim. I had never seen her come apart like this, unravel like one of the famed carpets of her home. “Why can’t I do anything right?” I held her tighter, unsure what to say. Through my embrace she managed to say, “It killed a child. The drover’s boy. Stomped him to death. Because of me. Because I’m so . . . nago.”
“You’re not stupid,” I said.
“Yes I am,” she said, fallen back into her mother tongue. “All that work wasted.”
“It’s not finished!” I said, one hand in her hair. “We’re not finished, you and I! There’s so much we don’t understand.” I turned her face back up to mine. I would not brush away her tears. “I need you, Valka. I can’t do this alone.”
Her expression was unreadable despite the tears. Fury mingled there with loathing—not of me, but of herself—and pity danced between them, but there was more. A tightness and . . . was that fear? I could not say. Was she afraid? Of what? Of me?
“Why did you come up here?” I asked at last, and suddenly I was afraid. Not to leave me, surely? Not there and then! Not like this! A lump formed in my stomach, hard and poisonous. I choked it down. Not like this. Where would she go? Where could she? The planet was under martial law.
“I . . .” She stepped away, inhaling sharply through her nose to clear it. “’Tis unimportant. It can wait.”
“Valka . . .” I took a step back toward her, but she held up a hand.
“Don’t Valka me.” She shook her head and looked away again. “I want to do one thing right.” I realized then what the expression on her face was. Not fear. Nerves. My stomach almost fell out of me there on the wall-walk. Lightning flashed again, followed by the dry, sucking rattle of wind as the storm approached, still tens of miles distant. “I know I’m not what you . . . what you expected,” she said, hands in the pockets of her coat. “I’m not Lady Marlowe. I never will be.”
The ivory ring on my gloved hand branded me a liar, and for the first time since that fateful day in the Colosso I was glad of the glove. “You don’t have to be. If I’d wanted a wife, I’d have had one. Anaïs or Selene . . .” There had been others. I had been so long a knight and the Emperor’s favorite—and so long at court. Had I been more susceptible to the charms of women—which is to say had I been the sort of man willing to take advantage of women—I might have had whichever I’d wanted.
I wanted her.
More than a hundred years together by then, and it wasn’t enough. I still wanted her. Always her. Only her.
But she was shaking her head. “I know ’tis what you want, but I can’t. ’Tis not me. We don’t . . . don’t marry in Tavros. I just . . . can’t. I’m not your Lady Marlowe.”
“I don’t want you to be,” I said again, still terrified at the thought of where this conversation was going and glad the nearest technicians were dozens of yards away. It would not do for Hadrian Halfmortal to come apart where men could see. I confess I tried reaching for my newfound sight, but in my distressed state my mind would not focus the mechanism of my new sense.
But Valka stayed firm. “Yes, you do,” she said. “And I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too,” I said. I did not mean to pressure her, to lay any burden on her she would not bear. We’d had all of marriage a palatine could ask, and more—for we loved one another. Only family—perhaps the greatest part of marriage—remained barred to us, locked behind doors neither Valka nor the High College would open. But what we had? “Valka, I would not trade any of our time together. You don’t have to apologize to me.”
Turning back to the rail, I looked out for miles across the landing field below. White vapors rose from one of the distant blasting pits like the exhalations of an ancient dragon. Another supply rocket destined for the fleet above. Lightning flashed again, and the fire of distant rocketry in the airless vaults beyond the roof of the world cast its angry shadows on the clouds.
“I’m sorry about the Quiet,” I said. My revelation on the mountain had taken her struggle from her, reduced her as my death aboard the Demiurge had reduced Bassander. Would she become another worshiper? Another of my shadows? I could scarce imagine anything more horrible, unless it was that she should leave me. “I still don’t understand everything that’s happened to me—or why it’s happening to me.” My hands curled into fists against the rail. “The Quiet said I was the shortest way between now and its future, but it is trillions of years to its future. All of this . . .” I waved a hand at the field beneath us. “All of it’s just a little piece of something so much bigger. Something I don’t understand. I need your help.”
Once more I felt the weight of my visions crushing me. All of time and space, of times that never were or never could be. The Watchers and the Quiet and the war between them, carried out across time and space from the first spasm to the final gasp. How s
mall I felt, how meager my actions seemed, and how inconsequential. How tiny were all the actions of man against that blank and uncaring universe?
How could any of it matter? How could any of us?
I know better now. The universe has no center, they say . . . and yet the universe is infinite. Is not then every point the center of the universe, surrounded on all sides by infinite space? Copernicus was as wrong as he was right. The Earth of old was as much the center of the universe as the sun she circled. So too were Mars, and Jupiter beyond. So too Delos and Emesh, Vorgossos and Annica.
Berenike and Gododdin.
Every place is the center of the universe. Everything matters.
Every one of our actions, every decision, every sacrifice.
Nothing is without meaning, because nothing is without consequence.
And that was so much worse, so much heavier a burden to bear, though I carry it as I carried Valka’s instrument up the mountain.
“Hadrian?” Valka’s voice broke on me, and I shook myself. “Are you all right?”
“I can’t do this alone,” I said. “Please don’t go.”
She started, eyes narrowing as she looked up at me. “What?”
“I thought . . .” I could not get the words out.
“You thought I wanted to leave?” She looked almost wounded. “Where would I go?” The floor seemed to have disappeared beneath me, and I was plunging through the Storm Wall’s many hundred levels toward the planet’s core. But she caught me, reaching up to brush dark hair from my face. “You’re the only mystery I have left.”
She kissed me then, not long or deeply, but enough.
Valka rummaged in the pocket of her coat. “I wanted to give you something, seeing as we might not be long for this world. Again.”
She held her palm up for my inspection. Nestled in it was a disc of some bright metal—platinum, perhaps, or rhodium—a little larger than a silver kaspum and slightly convex, with a crease along the center. The nervous tension returned to Valka’s face, and for a second I feared she might jerk her hand away.
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