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Rank only formalizes relationships between people, Alexander. It does not create them. One has rank because one deserves it, and if one does not deserve it, he will lose his rank. Or his life. A man would do well to become worthy of his honors, else he will be deposed as a tyrant.”
A hundred faces. A thousand. Any one of them could have paid Udax. Any one of them could want me dead. “Or all of them,” Gibson said, speaking as I moved my lips.
My blood ran cold an instant later, for a terrible wailing—high and thin as a winter wind through dead trees—issued from the dark to either side. I knew a Cielcin war cry when I heard one, and letting my suit speakers carry my voice with all the force and volume I could muster, I answered them, not with a cry, but with a command. “Light!”
I encountered no resistance as I cut them both down with a single stroke. They toppled past me, black blood pilling on my hydrophobic cape, pattering to the ground.
Nearly twice again so tall as a man and armored all in white, its legs bent like a dog’s, its arms—and there were four of them—so long they nearly trailed the ground. And its face! Its face! It wore a horned mask with a hooked visor like the beak of some evil bird, and beneath I saw the silver-glass flash of teeth and knew it had been Cielcin once.
As I approached he looked up, smiling in a most un-scholiast way beneath his wild mane of thick white hair, gray eyes sparkling. His craggy face caught the light of the algae growth above, deep shadows carving there, throwing the mutilated nostril into sharp relief. “Hello, Hadrian!” said Tor Gibson.
Religion and science are old enemies,”
I said he sold humanity’s soul. I wasn’t being dramatic. Creating his machines was a Faustian bargain, one we’re all still paying for. I think he had no notion what his creations might become, which is why he should never have made them.” My tutor grunted in a most unscholarly way. “There is a reason why in Galstani our word for scientist,” he said the Classical English word, “is the same as the word for magus.”
Horizon slumbers still, or perhaps has died. Its power cells could not last forever. There is little that can.
He was quiet a moment, then sucked in a deep breath. “Hadrian, I cannot pretend to understand everything you’re caught up in. But I will say this: I think you’ve finally found a drama big enough for you.” I laughed, but I had to screw my eyes shut against the tears that came. “I suppose I did.”
Without warning, the old man embraced me, and I was astonished to feel the strength that yet remained in those withered limbs. “You are every inch the man I hoped you’d be, my boy,” he said. I’d never heard Gibson’s voice choked with feeling before—not even when we’d met again in the grotto underground. “I am proud of you.”
