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December 16, 2022 - January 5, 2023
But I reached out and laid my hand—my three-fingered, right hand—upon the top stone of Gibson’s cairn. No words came to me, no final speech, no promise. What could I say to him that I had not already said? That he did not already know? Nothing.
It was a new day on Colchis, and for Hadrian Marlowe, and as fair as any he had seen. The ugliness of the world does not fade, nor are fear and grief made less by time, nor is any suffering forgotten. We are only made stronger by its blows.
I like this idea of pain not fading in time, only our relative strength is increasing.
On our first visit to Colchis, the governor-general had been a tall, icy woman with white-gold hair and pale eyes. I do not remember her name. But she was gone—dead, I felt sure, another casualty of Ever-Fleeting Time. In her place sat a broad-shouldered, yellow-bearded man dressed in the white suit and red sash of his rank, rings on his fingers like a petty impersonation of the Emperor himself.
Concise writing
How small they must have felt, huddled on the uppermost lip of that precipice, looking down through miles of catwalks and ladders to the base below our captured ship. How vast and dark is our universe, how arrayed against us—not indifferent as the ancient magi would have it—but hostile and cruel. And yet above them—above it all—unrolled like a carpet of diamonds black as ink, the silent stars whirled. Each placed there, if Dorayaica spoke truth, by the Quiet’s hand, to light our way in the Dark. Each had been painted with deliberate care, that each ray of light might fall as a sparrow, in
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Nicely put
Again I went to stand, and again she thrust a hand out to keep me away. For so long she had kept silent, but I knew her pain was there. I’d see it time to time, etched just beneath her face, betrayed by some set of her jaw, by some flicker in her eye. Betrayed by some fragment of Urbaine’s worm. She had suffered—not as I had suffered—but in her own way, and suffering is not quantified or measured. It only is.
Suffering is not quantified or measured. It only is.
Colchis.
This was the Empire I loved, though I had scarcely lived in it. The Empire of ordinary men and women living ordinary lives. I smiled to see them, though I felt again the sharp division I had felt—as between species—wandering the streets of Meidua as a boy. With the glass of the armored window between them and me, I might have been at a menagerie, though I dared not guess which of us was the audience, and which the caged beast.
Again he laughed—he laughed too easily.
We have need of heroes, however broken, however terrible, however insufficient they may be. And we have need of more than one hero, for heroes do break, you know.
I asked her a question. A very old question. “Valka,” I said, and cleared my throat. “Am I a good man?” She turned then—hands on the door frame—and surveyed me a long time. What did she see with those inhuman eyes? Those eyes that saw everything without exception, without distortion? A smile split her face. A true smile, brighter even than her pity had been bright. “You’re still asking that question?” she managed to say, laughter cracking her words. “After all this time?” I could only blink at her. “Do you not have your answer a hundred times over?” A brief tremor shook her arm, but she hid it
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“You’d have guessed higher?” I asked, knowing how I looked, my face battered, body torn, black hair shocked with white.
“I’m a sailor, Marlowe. I couldn’t settle down if I wanted to. A man in my profession takes what he can get—which is all the girls want to offer anyhow.” “Maybe,” I allowed, pushing off the control console to stand straight again. “Maybe you’re right. But there are women and women, commander. Some ask nothing of us, and so we are nothing to them. But there are those women who ask all of us. Those are the ones worth giving all for.”
A ferocious sneeze resounded through the entrance hall, and turning as if at a gunshot, I saw Sir Hector Oliva standing on the threshold, his face in his sleeve. He wore a black leather case on a strap over one shoulder. It held his lute, a mandora of exquisite make. He’d played it many times—at all hours—aboard the Ascalon as we sailed for Nessus, and played it well as his own legends say. In his other hand, he clutched another, flatter case, more than half so long as he was tall.
One cannot step in the same river twice,
The man you were yesterday died yesterday, and is only a piece of the man of today, as you will be tomorrow.
jasons ship
It must have slid from the chain it shared with the Quiet’s shell by chance and so been left behind when Anju and the other servants had packed our effects for the journey to Padmurak.
perhaps he used the qiets powers subconsciously and selected this possibility
If a god were only something greater than the seeker, more developed than man, then the Quiet was a god beyond all doubt. But by that token, we men were gods to the Umandh, to the Cavaraad, and the other lesser races that dwelt among the stars. And what gods! Zeus and his debauched cabal of bloody-minded psychopaths could hardly be more degenerate. We were just as mortal as the others . . . only flesh and blood. But the Quiet? What is a god?
“Without beginning,” I muttered, “or end. Sounds like a god to me.”
“I heard raised voices,” he added by way of damage control. Valka and I had been communicating in almost hushed tones. Legion intelligence, indeed.
He stooped and collected his medical kit for the last time, then bowed. “Please do take good care of yourself. It will take time to fully heal.” The black knight’s mace caught me full on the chin, snapped my head to one side. I went to one knee, head ringing like a bell as I snorted air out through my nose.
I wish that I could say I saw it in him then: the seed of the man he would become, the seed of greatness. Though I have seen the many futures and swum the waters of time, I do not know their currents. Who can see the tree written in the seed, or know its fruit? Only the Quiet one, whose hand did the writing, and whose eye sees all the universe as you or I apprehend the words on a page.
It felt so strange to be back, as though all of Padmurak and Dharan-Tun had a been a dream, and yet it felt as I still were dreaming, and it was instead that pavilion and the well-dressed and powdered that were unreal—and I myself was unreal. How could I be at the Imperial court again? On Carteia or anywhere? How could any of it still exist when so much had changed? When I had endured so much?
The tribune grunted. “Someone can,” he said. “It might not always be us. But life has its way of rolling back the tide. Who was it said you could move planets with a big enough lever? Shakespeare?” “Archimedes,” I said, leaning against the rail. “You always know,” Lin said, a small laugh escaping him. “How is it you always know?” “I read,” I said, and shrugged. “People always accuse me of wasting my time, but they don’t complain when I have their answers.” Lin made a small, affirmative sound. “Suppose I’ve never seen much point is all. The world’s so not like what it was when those books of
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King of Akkad. King of Sumer.
“God!” Nicephorus could take it no longer. “You ask us to believe that God speaks to you?” To my surprise, the Emperor hissed, “We believe it of William, Nic. What cause have we to think revelation ended with God’s Emperor?” God’s Emperor. I stood a little straighter, ears pricking. Not God Emperor.
Mag Mell
“I can’t do this,” I whispered, coming to a standstill before the crate—like a coffin—that housed my restored armor. Why should your burden be light? Prince Philippe’s voice—Gibson’s voice—floated back to me out of a half-remembered dream. I shut my eyes, leaned against the metal pod, gripped its hard, defined edge. We struggle, and by that struggle we are filled. “Seek hardship,” I murmured, remembering Brethren’s words. I had found hardship indeed.
A hollow laugh escaped my throat, and to my shock I found that I was nodding along in agreement.
“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”
Even so, no sooner had the Nipponese man’s words died than a flat, feminine tone filled the air, piped through hidden speakers on every level, confirming my guess. “Imperial forces have entered the system,” it said, then repeated itself in Mandari, “Repeat: Imperial forces have entered the system.” I shut my eyes. Hope was not lost. Though hope was a cloud, I prayed silently then that Lin and Lorian and the lesser captains would prove a thunderhead indeed.
“Are you sure?” Bassander asked, composing his blunt face and blunter manner into something like a conciliatory mask. “We thought that twice before.”
How does he do this? He somehow manages to stay so far away from common phrases that it sometimes feels like he learned a different english from me
“If Dorayaica captures His Radiance, his pet magi will broadcast whatever humiliation it has planned to every human world in the galaxy. When we have all seen Caesar tortured, raped, used for a footstool—his belly slit open and his innards tossed to its servants . . . no one will want the Solar Throne. No one will believe in it. The Empire is a belief! A commandment! What is Caesar if not a man who can command that he is Caesar? Who can prove it by the sword?
Our only route out was through.
I laid my hands flat on the table, unconsciously mirroring Lin’s posture from my seat. Unheard by the others, I muttered, “Lorian isn’t going to like this.” CHAPTER 33 THE CITY OF BLACK SEPULCHERS “I DON’T LIKE THIS,” Lorian said.
I did not kindle her blade, but bowed my head. “I will,” I said, and turned to go, reaching up to tear my cape away. Torn already, it would be more a hindrance than anything in the catacombs of the colonial store. I cast the garment—the white cape of the Imperial service—over the back of an empty chair by Lorian’s side and hurried to join the prince. “Where’s Sharp?” I said.
I told you once that the universe has no center, and thus every point is its center, and it is so. If I have strained you, reader, by my repeated insistence that every action matters, that every moment of every life is the moment, the axis about which all things turn, understand that I say these things because they are true. Every step, every turn, every refusal to step. Everything matters. The cosmos is not cold or indifferent because we are not indifferent, and we are a part of that cosmos, of that grand order which has dropped from the hand of He who created it. Every decision creates its
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Profusely scattered throughout this series about empire, suffering, and courage are gems like this. Good fantasy and scifi is philosophy applied to unbound imagination, packaged neatly in story.
I do not know what made her call out then, her voice strained by the force of her acceleration. Turning from the display of the aerial battle, turning my back on the Emperor, I returned to Lorian’s side. To Valka. Finger pressed behind my ear, I asked, “What is it?” She never answered. I gripped the back of my seat, glanced away an instant to Lorian. The intus was looking up, bereft as I was of any task. Valka shifted in her seat. Her ship shook around her. Sir Tristan’s medal gleamed. Her lips parted, shaping the unheard word. “I—” The holograph went dead.
I looked up. The Emperor was looking down at me, his eyes very wide. I tried to read his face, but I saw too many emotions, each standing in the place of the other, each vying to come forth. I knew what I had done, and knew also what I had to do—what was expected of me. The eyes of the court were on me, of the Martians and of Jadd. The eyes of the Emperor were on me, also. I was already on my knees. I had only to bow and submit myself to the will and rule of the Emperor, to reassure His Radiance and all that the natural order of the world would be upheld. I was already kneeling . . . But I
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AMONG THE EXTRASOLARIANS, THEY say, there are men who take memories, who siphon them away in crystal phials and stopper them like djinni. But I could not seek their services, not and remain myself. I said once that a man is the sum of memories, and it is so. Thus, to discard those memories—however terrible—is to discard a part of ourselves. A part of me had died and so remained on Perfugium with Valka, will remain there until its sun swells and swallows that miserable world, but the scars left where she once dwelt are a part of me, too, and worth the price and privilege of knowing her. Of our
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No words can enclose that silence, or capture the blackness on the holograph where she had been. I can write of that day only as a terrible emptiness, a void blacker than space. Mere words are insufficient, are too small to capture the chasm that had opened beneath my feet.
“Don’t talk like that!” I said, still staring at the tap. “If you were any different, you wouldn’t be what you are.” But could I fault him in his thinking? Had I not thought much the same of myself, a hundred hundred times? Do we not all think this way sometimes—whatever our condition—and in a sense is it not true? Evil occurs because we are insufficient to challenge it. Too weak to stop it at the gates, too blind to see it bubbling within. Were we all angels in our virtue and heroes in our capacity, we might hold all chaos at bay, might stop even the unkindling of the stars.
