The Thrones of Kronos (91 page)

Brandon had decided to leave the blank plaques as reminders
of the limitations of his power. There was nothing he could do to restore the
items that had been destroyed.

Then there were the gifts that could not be bought back: the
Stone of Prometheus, which Vi’ya had carried safely to the heart of the Rift
and back, and the Tetradrachm, which Ivard had borne with him through all his
strange journeys to the last and strangest, never to be known. Brandon touched
the worn circle on the last plaque, where the coin had sat so long, and hoped
Ivard was still alive.
Where is he, and
what has he become?

Then he turned to face the Ivory Chamber.

It was still not really safe, but he must make this
pilgrimage or be haunted forever by the ghosts of those who had died here
expecting to witness his Oath of Service.

The doors opened freely, and he looked around. No longer
littered with the smashed and burned remnants of the formal gathering
Dol’jhar’s bomb had destroyed, the hall was empty. The windows had been
restored, temporarily plain dyplast, admitting the dim moonlight from without.
All traces of the tapestries, that last he’d seen ruined and tattered, had been
removed. The walls were utterly bare. Before him stretched a vast space. On the
seared doors to the Throne Room beyond, he saw a complex pattern, barely
discernible in the darkness, all that remained of the inlaid glory of the
Prophetae Gennady’s Ars Irruptus.

A fierce whoosh of cold air buffeted his face. The tianqi
had activated—and were sending in air straight from outside.

That was the only warning he had.

As he reached the center of the room, a man’s silhouette
manifested from the gathered shadows, of medium height and spare of build.
Brandon knew this immediately as a holograph of Jaspar Arkad. But the image’s
eyes met his in a gaze of recognition that no holograph could ever fake.

Brandon drew in a breath: though he knew about Jaspar’s
manifestations both on Arthelion and at the Suneater, the Ban was so ingrained
that the back of his neck gripped in atavistic fear, though his rational mind
knew he was in no danger: The House computer, taken over by Jaspar Arkad in
establishing the Panarchy of the Thousand Suns, repository of the diaries and
memories of all his descendants—including Brandon himself—had somehow become
sentient. That reflexive rejection of this transgression of the Ban warred with
an almost vertiginous sense of awe.

“You have come full circle, greatson Brandon, from
abdication to acceptance. You will find the Testamentary where you, and only
you, can access it. You must arrange for its transmission to those who follow.”

“And then?” Brandon asked.

The image smiled, and made a slight bow. “That is up to you.
I cannot promise my unmaking, no more than you could yours. Perhaps you will
find it needful to unmake the Ban.”

“That would take centuries, even if it were agreed upon,”
Brandon replied. “Which is unlikely.”

“Perhaps. Events may overtake you.” The image held up its
hand, forestalling his next question. “No, I will not speak of what I saw on
the Suneater at the end. One good reason for the Ban is to force human beings
to think for themselves, lest they become slaves to their machines. But the
data will be here, should you need it.”

“And you?”

“I will be here also. Even the destruction of every node on
Arthelion could not unmake me now, and you could not afford that, anyway.”

A threat?

“In any case,” continued the holo, “infanticide is not a
feature of the Panarchy, and I am your child. Had it not been for your
meddling, years ago and more recently, I might not have been. Accept your responsibility,
and exercise it.”

Brandon nodded slowly. “That is much the same advice my
father gave me.”

The image smiled. “Of course! How could it be otherwise? You
will do well to follow it.”

And then it faded away, and through the melting mist,
Brandon saw Vi’ya. She walked forward and stood before him without speaking,
her eyes as dark as the eternity of space. He kept silence, and let his eyes,
and his heart, offer their own promise.

But then she spoke, and in a moment all meaning, all joy,
whipped away into nothingness:

“I must go.”

And now he who moments before had conversed with his
ancestor’s shade, shaping the destinies of trillions, could not think at all.
He could only act.

Dropping to one knee, he held out his hands, palms up, in
the ancient gesture of supplication, petitioner to sovereign.

And for the very first time, she also knelt, slowly and
deliberately. Then she touched his hands, palm to palm, and with her greater
strength, turned them both vertically, fingers pointed toward the stars, in the
age-old modality used in marriage.

He listened without speaking as she told him, at first
quickly, then in words that came halting, what he had to know.

And they rose at last and left, hand in hand, the center of
a whirlwind of protective fresh air.

Holder of oaths, in
loyalty sworn, the circle of fealty, a weight to be borne.

On the morrow, he would give himself over wholly to service
of those trillions, making an oath that would only end with his death, but
tonight was his.

o0o

“Fifty thousand kilometers,” Lokri said. He leaned back
and lazily cracked his knuckles.

“Make orbit,” Vi’ya responded. She watched Lokri program the
course into the nav console.

For a time the only sound was the whisper of the tianqi
until Vi’ya heard Montrose’s tread in the hatchway behind her. He stopped
behind her pod and leaned against a bulkhead to look up at the big viewscreen.

At comm, Tat worked quickly, sorting through the spectrum of
novosti newsfeeds. Presently she said, “Here’s Cormoran—”

The viewscreen flickered and they looked directly into the
Throne Room from above the assembled crowd of Douloi, a restless sea of rich
garments and glittering jewels. High above them an exultation of banners and
blazons hung in celebration of the long history of the Panarchy, echoed in the
bright tones of music sounding softly behind the susurration of the assembled
throng. Below the imager a wide aisle ran to the Emerald Throne; beyond it, in
shadowed distance washed by the enigmatic colors from the tall windows all
around, the Gate of Aleph-Null loomed, and Vi’ya realized that their coign of
vantage was above the Phoenix Gate.

But a hint of dissonance distracted her as she scanned the
vast room so faithfully reproduced on the big screen, and she puzzled at it
until, with a cold bite of shock, she recognized that not one of the hundreds
of people in the room was wearing black—unlike the last time the chamber had
been used.

Like billions of others in the Thousand Suns, Vi’ya had
watched that anti-coronation—had it happened only months ago?—from this same
vantage point. The grim legends of Dol’jhar briefly overlaid the scene,
bringing with them a sense of the others in attendance there today, the ghosts
of the Douloi slaughtered before the Lord of Vengeance for their loyalty to a deposed
Panarch.

She shook her head, dispelling the image of the memory of
the blood lapping at the foot of the Throne. There was no hint of that today:
color, light, music, the grace of Douloi movement in the dance of preference
and deference that she could see but never imitate—all these washed away the
bitter past in a glory of bright celebration.

We are the Phoenix.
Vannis
had played back that speech for her, but only now did she finally understand
that symbol of rebirth, so foreign to her home world of ash and rock.
Math the Lictor would have understood it.

“Knew Nik’d get the best position,” Lokri chortled.

On-screen, the crowd quieted, and the music changed, beginning
with the
Manya Cadena
, evocative of
the time that sundered them all from Lost Earth. From under the imager the
Laergon of the College of Archetype and Ritual strode forth, bearing the
reconstructed Mace of Karelais. He was followed by the ritual Polloi in her
stark uniform of black and white, bearing the golden manacles of Service on an
ebon tau-shaped staff with a silver snake entwined around it. And behind them,
a slim figure all in white, all alone.

“. . . would have been playing at the
interrupted Enkainion,” she heard Nik say as the last notes of the Maya Cadena
died away.

Then Cormoran fell silent as the Laergon stopped before the
Throne and turned around. Raising the Mace overhead in both hands, he bent
gracefully from side to side, bringing its ends down on the floor, evoking the
strange harmonics, like sea and starlight.

The light in the vast hall changed subtly and the high
ceiling seemed to vanish, opening to the stars. Below, with dizzying swiftness
the perspective changed, though nothing moved, and now the viridian glory of
the Throne was the clear focus and axis of all within the hall.

“That’s not a throne,” Tat said, her eyes round. “It’s a
tree.”

As if Nik, or the unknown ajna artist, had read her mind,
the perspective on the Throne slowly changed, growing to fill the entire
screen. Vi’ya’s eyes were led upward to where the branches reached, gnarled
into a complex lacework, for the stars. She had a brief image of a great Tree
growing past the Palace roof, up through the atmosphere to space, the branches
enfolding the
Telvarna
and binding it
round with leaves.

And she wished, for a painful heartbeat, that they were
caught fast, protected by this symbolic construct of a thousand years of power,
and wisdom, and will.

No
.

She had learned to acknowledge the best that the Panarchy
had to offer: the wisdom, and the will, and certainly the power. But protection
was illusory; her fate was in her own hands, to make or to mar as she willed.

Her gaze returned to the lone figure standing before the
Throne. All sound in the great room ceased as he began to speak. Emotion thrummed
through every nerve as Brandon’s voice rose and fell in the cadences as
familiar now as her own breathing. She did not hear the words, but it didn’t
matter. It was a political speech, one moreover she had helped him to fashion,
for he wanted to speak words that would adjure to unity not just his
war-shocked citizenry but the Rifter over-culture.

“There’s the gnostor,” Montrose interrupted, as on the
screen Sebastian Omilov brought forward a book, symbolic of secular wisdom.
“Looks like he just discovered a fortune under his bed. Brandon piling on the
awards?”

“He’s going home,” Sedry murmured from her place at the
weapons console. “Didn’t you know? He’d had some kind of falling-out with his
own family, during Gelasaar’s reign, but that’s been made right. He’s retiring
and going home to his birthplace.”

Sebastian Omilov stepped back, and his son moved forward,
bearing a sword; then Vannis Scefi-Cartano, with a silken sash; and then,
finally, the High Phanist, with the Arkadic signet, reforged from the mold
interred with Jaspar Arkad nearly a thousand years before.

As the High Phanist stepped back, last of the Semiotes of
the ancient ritual, bearers of ancient regalia symbolic of the Panarch’s source
of authority, Vi’ya turned her attention to Vannis.
Poised and beautiful, she looked like a polished jewel.
Does this
bring us full circle? Vannis had asked that only yesterday, though it seemed
longer ago than that.

There is no circle
,
Vi’ya thought as Brandon stepped up to the Throne, turned, and faced the room.
A circle implied a blending of beginning and end into one, a cycle that made
its rounds without change. And in greater sense that might be true, but within
the perspective of their lives the circle was actually a spiral, winding round
and upward, much like the tree branches reaching toward the stars. Her own life
had changed forever, bound to theirs; she thought of Jaim, sitting silent and
alone in the engine room, watching Vannis on his screen. Was Vannis thinking of
him as well?

Was Anaris watching?

No. For of course he would never betray the slightest
interest in any of this to his own people, and yet he had not come away from
his years on Arthelion unmarked: she knew that much about him. But Vi’ya suspected
he would watch this sooner rather than later, making comments meant only for
the hearing of Morrighon.

Next came the words of the Panarch’s oath, clearly spoken,
and this time her crew did not interrupt. It did not take long. After all the
hours of ceremonial, the actual oath was short, and simple, and unchanged from
when Jasper Arkad first penned it.

Brandon finished, then took a step backward. She could see
his face now, and read in the uplifted gaze and the curve of his mouth the
profound triumph he felt as he sank down onto the Throne of his ancestors.

Sebastian and Osri, Vannis and the High Phanist, made a low
obeisance, and behind them all the others in the great hall, as Brandon’s eyes
looked out over them. Vi’ya had a visceral sense that he saw past them, past
the Palace—that he was looking for her. And then she saw his right hand move
slightly in a gesture of promise.

She knew it was for her; he knew she was there, watching.

Her hand moved, a twin gesture to his, and then she tabbed
the screen off. The crew looked up expectantly at her, their expressions
characteristic, from Lokri’s smiling challenge to Sedry’s steady regard.

“Let’s go,” she said.

Ehyana Bengiat opened her eyes and thought herself still
dreaming, for above her stood a naked young man of supernal beauty, and next to
him a large beige-striped cat, its slitted eyes gleaming.

She looked down her body—she, too, was naked, yet she felt
no shyness, for the young man looked at her in a way that made her feel he
really saw her, not the beauty that everyone else never looked beyond.