I stare up at the sun and wait for it to darken.
Then a shadow eclipses it.
No.
No.
No.
Half the monster’s face is melted to the bone, baring his bottom teeth. His nose is gone. The iron crown melted to ruin and steaming, fused with his hairless skull. He looks into my eyes, and I see the abyss in his as he laughs at the pain. I moan something in fear. There’s a lurch. A sudden pressure in my chest. He pulls away, his hand holding something red as he mouths a word dead to my ears.
“Worthy.”
Then he takes a bite of my heart.
The world is a maze without a center. Become it, or be forever lost.
—SILENIUS AU LUNE,
SILENIUS’S MEDITATIONS, 25 PCE
IT IS TIME.
After days of waiting for others to enact my will, the hour fast approaches for my own flesh to enter the fray. Glirastes has informed me that Darrow’s departure is imminent, as is Atalantia’s attack. Somewhere out beyond the mountains, her bombers fuel to deliver their payloads.
It is now or doomsday.
“The dinner is prepared, dominus,” Exeter says to me as I close the book of Shelley’s poems and rise from the orchard bench. It is late afternoon and the songbirds have begun to croon for night. Rising guards patrol the fringes of the estate, looking at the sky, not knowing that the attack will come from within.
I smile at a mismatched pair of guards as I fall in step with Exeter along the gravel path back to the house’s southern portico. The pale man gives no sign of his week’s labor. He has been busy on my behalf.
While it would have been easier to negotiate the compliance of Glirastes’s wary loyalists in person instead of through a proxy, it would have exposed us to dangerous levels of scrutiny. I dare not tempt fate by playing more games than necessary with Darrow.
Soon, I’ll be rid of the spike. Until then, the perfect libertine I have remained.
The dining table is set for two. Glirastes and I make idle banter of the predictable sort, but it is peculiar seeing him smiling across from me when inside I know he is churning with fear and doubt.
Neither my friend nor I have much appetite. So it is a relief when the servants take away the barely touched remains of our dinner. Glirastes stands. “I must return to the spaceport. Be a good boy and see me off.”
At the boarding stairs to his shuttle, I smile at the old man. “You know what they say about you?” I ask.
“My boy, you should know I haven’t the faintest care.”
“You found Heliopolis a city for men, and made it a city for gods.”
He snorts. “If there are gods, they are in brighter worlds than these.”
He has little appetite for banter. He knows the dangers of the path I have chosen to walk, and he doubts me because the old do not remember the necessities of youth. They see only the years on our horizon to which they think we are entitled. But we are entitled only to the moment, and owe nothing to the future except that we follow our convictions.
I am finally following mine.
The desert taught me that the only path is forward.
“I left you a gift in your room,” Glirastes says. “Something for the occasion.” He lingers on the shuttle steps, unwilling to say farewell.
He nods, sets a hand on my shoulder, contemplates a parting word, and then enters the shuttle.
Night comes not soon enough.