CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

The Lake of Mirrors

They sat docked at Crossover Station, taking in their last consignment of human-made goods and foods, as well as five casks of Bass Ale, enough for the long haul to Chapal and back. Beyond Crossover Station lay the mysterious reaches of Chapalii space.

"And while it's true," Branwen was explaining over a supper of what Benjamin, the quartermaster, called "stir-fry," "that all known space is Chapalii space, or at least controlled by their empire, still we mark the boundaries of League space because it's familiar space, it's our space, human space."

Just as, Anatoly thought, the plains would always be the true home of the jaran no matter how far their empire extended.

"Past Crossover," she added, "as the old joke goes, you're skating on pretty thin ice." Anatoly shook his head, not understanding the analogy. "I guess that wouldn't make any sense to you," she said with a smile, thoughtfully, without the self-satisfied air of superiority so many people in the League used when explaining things to Anatoly. "We League humans have been sunk in the same cultural milieu for such a long time now, over a century, that we forget what it's like to have people come in who don't have the same markers. In the old days, even the tribe just over the hill might be wholly alien. Maybe we've lost a little of our ability to adapt to that."

"But surely you must adapt to the alien, if there are so many zayinu—so many aliens—in the universe."

"Not as many as you might expect."

"Or more than you'd expect," interposed Summer Hennessy, the big pilot. "If you take into account the probability of a solar system forming around a star, and a planet falling into an orbit that is within the zone of life, and life itself arising, and intelligent life—"

"Define intelligence," snapped Rachelle, the other pilot, the testy one.

"—and all of that coincidentally happening within the same time frame as human life developed,"

finished Summer, ignoring Rachelle's comment. "It's more likely civilizations, alien, intelligent, or otherwise, would be separated by gulfs of time as well as space."

"Begging your pardon," said Anatoly politely, not wanting to seem as if he was interrupting the other woman, "Captain, but then do I understand you to mean that within League space you have a variety of routes on which you can travel, but once beyond this station, you must follow the old trade routes laid out by the Chapalii?"

"Exactly. I don't know how much you know about how we actually travel in space, and how we navigate. . . ?" Branwen kindly trailed off to leave room for him to stop her.

He just shook his head. He had traveled with the Gray Raven and its crew for seven days now, and he had quickly felt comfortable with being ignorant. Especially after the third day, when they had had a free-for-all fencing match in the passageways and he had not only won handily but been feted with great good nature afterward by the others. He had actually gotten rather drunk. The crew of the Gray Raven were good people to get drunk with, like his old comrades back in the army; he had never felt comfortable getting drunk with the actors.

"Stop me if I start lecturing," said Branwen with a grin.

"Yes, do please stop her," said Rachelle, but she always said things like that, and Anatoly was learning not to take her comments seriously.

"But I'll try to make this short. I'm not sure what's going to happen to you, Anatoly, but I've always preferred to, ah, scout out my ground in advance, so to speak." She half turned in her seat to face the one wall in the galley that was not wood-paneled. "Screen, pull out a hologram. Display standard singularity simulation. If you take a stream of photons, the particles which make up light, they'll move through space at the speed of light and continue in the same direction unless some force causes them to change direction. Before we met the Chapalii, we traveled in ships that could approach but never attain the speed of light, so obviously travel time between the stars was glacial and feasible only in the time frame of years and generations. But the Chapalii gave us relay stations."

In the three-dimensional image that seemed to extend from the wall, a stream of particles which Anatoly supposed represented a stream of photons struck a round object and shot away at a different angle.

"These relay stations create 'windows' which are singularities in the time-space continuum. The navigator—that's me—in concert with coordinates given out by the relay station, describes a velocity and an angle at which the ship enters the singularity. That's our vector; that's why it's called a vector drive. It's like entering a gravity well, which throws us to a second singularity, which has been determined by the vector at which we entered the first one. So you could enter the first window and come out in two different places depending on your vector."

"Or you could enter a window with an innocent vector and end up never coming out," added Rachelle cheerfully.

"So you must scout out these routes ..." Anatoly hesitated. "How can you scout them, if you must know beforehand where you are going? It isn't like trying a path up into the mountains and turning back if it ends in the heights, or riding out into a desert until half your water flasks are empty, and then returning to the last oasis to try a new route."

"The truth is, we're dependent on the Chapalii for that. Or at least outside of League space. Inside League space we believe we have recorded most of the routes through space, and there do seem to be a limited number, not an infinite one. Obviously, if you have a finite number of relay stations, and not all link each to the other, there would be a finite number of routes between them. But in Chapalii space proper, we have to accept the route that is chosen for us by whatever passes for their navigational staff. For instance, the run to Paladia Minor and Major and thus to Chapal: We call it the Mirror Road because on the second jump we pass through a system where there's a mirror array in orbit, reflecting the binary star. Of course we don't know what it's for, but it's a brilliant landmark.

Only this ship and two others have ever been allowed to run all the way in to the Paladias, and that is the only route we're allowed to take. We know there must be other ways to get there, since we have records from Sojourner King Bakundi and her husband, who are on the Keinaba merchant flagship, but she's got no access to navigation. She can only look out the viewports, and there aren't many of those on Chapalii ships apparently. There are a few other humans apprenticed on Keinaba ships, but only the flagship seems to go in to the Paladias."

She paused. Benjamin was still eating, spearing broccoli with neat stabs, and Florien was on comm duty on the bridge. Moshe sat with chin propped on hands staring dreamily at the opposite wall, as if he could read a secret message in the swirling wood grain.

"I don't truly understand what this means, a singularity. Is this something that exists already? Or is it created?"

"In the early days of expansion, after humans met the Chapalii and before the Chapalii coopted the League into their Empire, there was a great deal of debate on that very point. As soon as the League was subsumed in the empire, though, the Protocol Office put an end to public debate."

"They said it was 'unseemly,' " said Rachelle sarcastically.

"Which means the debate goes on in private," added Branwen. "Which means there's no consensus yet. Do the relay stations create the singularities? Can technology do something that massive?"

"It can't only if we suppose that technology is limited to what we understand of it," interposed Summer.

"Or are the relay stations just set up to take advantage of singularities that already exist, that have been mapped? If that's the case, are there singularities out there that the Chapalii might not have mapped which we can use, to get around them? Because they control the shipping routes, with the proverbial iron hand. Well, it's not something that any of us but Florien sit up nights worrying about."

"Oh, I do," said Benjamin, a forkful of sauteed onions poised just beyond his lips. "If I could figure it out, I'd be rich."

Rachelle snorted.

"So have you scouted no other routes in Chapalii space?" Anatoly asked.

"We can't" replied Branwen. "We'd certainly like to. I don't know how much you know of the history of the League and the Chapalii, but until the elevation of Charles Soerensen to the dukedom, no humans had been allowed to pass beyond the boundaries of League space at all. He was the first human to set foot on Chapal, when he went to be invested before the emperor."

"Actually everyone thought he was being taken there to be executed, after he led the failed rebellion against the Empire," said Rachelle. "Imagine the surprise when he returned as a duke."

Anatoly tried to imagine this, but could not. In fact, a wise ruler knows that it is not enough just to conquer and kill; those conquered—the right ones, chosen carefully—must be given a stake in the Empire so that it becomes in their interest to help maintain the peace. That had been part of Bakhtiian's strategy all along.

Florien's voice leapt out of the console embedded in the center of the table. "We have clearance to cross over. Window at oh nine forty."

"Shit!" swore Rachelle. "That's in only thirty minutes and I wanted to take a shower." She jumped up and raced out of the room.

"She'll take one anyway," groused Benjamin. "We can't be leaving already. There's a consignment of flower rubies I've been bargaining for down at Viery Market. They'll be gone by the time we get back."

Branwen had already stood and was efficiently clearing her utensils and plate away, stowing them in the sonic cleaner. "Summer, get the hatch cleared. Benjamin, you're going to have to do a quick run around the ship and make sure everything is batted down. Moshe—"

"We never got this short a notice before," said the boy, coming out of his reverie.

"Help Summer with the hatches. Anatoly, uh, probably if you'll clean up here and then come up to the bridge, that would be the best place for you."

He nodded and began stacking plates. It was not, truly, a man's job, but he had long since discovered that the khaja of League space did not have as strict a sense of order as the jaran did, knowing which duties belonged to which people, which was no doubt why the Chapalii Empire had been able to absorb them so easily. Finishing, he sealed all the cabinets closed and secured the chairs to the table, and then pulled himself up two flights of ladder to the bridge. Here, at about half gravity, all his movements felt awkward, although he had seen Branwen and Rachelle take leaps and bounds and spins when the yacht was in its brief periods of freefall that left him breathless or nauseated. The other two men, like him, seemed more bound to gravity.

Six crash seats ringed the bronze access tube that ran the length of the ship, from the prow all the way down to the engines. He strapped into the seat that faced the courtesy screen, as Rachelle called it: a big screen that gave the appearance of being a window onto the outside, although of course it was merely a projection. Rachelle, hair bound back in a complicated braid, was there before him. She sealed herself into her pilot's chair, a contraption that covered her hands, and an oversized visor curled out to cover her eyes. Branwen sat in the captain's chair, her fingers flying over a numerical keypad, mouth lifted in a half smile that Anatoly recognized as intent concentration. Other than the faint clacking of her fingers on the pad and the hollow thrum rising up the access tube like a distant heartbeat, the bridge was silent. Florien turned, saw Anatoly, and flipped the comm onto the open speakers, another courtesy which Anatoly appreciated.

"Hatches secured," said Summer over the comm. As if in response the station controller said, "You are clear to detach."

"All hands secure," said Branwen without looking away from the keypad and whatever the screen embedded in her chair's arm told her.

One by one, all hands reported in: Rachelle (sounding preoccupied), Florien, Summer, Benjamin (sounding irritated about his lost deal), and Moshe. Last, with a start, Anatoly remembered that he had to report in as well.

"Secure," he said, a little embarrassed. Branwen glanced up at him and flashed him a swift, sweet smile, reassuring, before she went back to her calculations.

"Detach commenced. Accomplished."

"Heading mark two seven eight," said Branwen. From the depths of her chair Rachelle responded with a word that sounded more like a click, or else a word in a very strange language. They continued to trade numbers as the yacht backed away from Crossover Station, banked, and headed out to the point where they would rendezvous with the window—with the singularity, Anatoly corrected himself. It was the one element of travel across the oceans of space that he had yet to get used to: For that instant, which was not an instant, going through the window, he had a notion that he ceased to exist or that he was somehow thrown into a different time. Sometimes he would see brief visions, a memory from his childhood or from a battle, or catch a remembered scent, the stench of a spoiled water hole or the perfume of grass, or he would feel the touch of a spear biting into his thigh or the touch of his wife brushing a finger down his chest. As he considered this mystery, the Gray Raven passed imperceptibly into the singularity.

Genji walks toward him down a corridor filled with light. Her robes fill the passageway with a sound like the laughter of wind through dense leaves.

He was back on the bridge, straining against the straps, broken out in a sweat. She had been watching him. He would swear to it. Only, how could she? It was impossible, of course. It was only a vision induced by the singularity. Wiping his brow, he glanced around the bridge, but neither Branwen nor Florien paid him any mind, and Rachelle, of course, was enveloped by her chair.

A rush of alien words spilled out over the comm. On the screen, Anatoly saw a distant blue-white sun and the graceful red curve of a planet and, closer, winking lights floating in a geometric pattern, marking some kind of station.

"Damn," said Florien. "The translation program hit the standard loop again. Has Benjamin been playing around with it?"

"I'll go real-time," said Branwen. "Signal me when you've got it running." She began to speak in standard Chapalii. Her pronunciation was rough, but the phrases slipped off her tongue easily enough, standard phrases that any human could learn. "This is Hao Branwen Emrys, of the Gray Raven, daiga class ship under the protection of the Tai-en Charles Soerensen. Request coordinates for the next vector."

The station remained silent for some time. By the time the alien controller replied, Florien had the translator fixed. The voice came out in a tinny monotone.

"Your registration notice is in order. No protocol request has been filed in advance."

"We are bound for Chapal, under the protection of the Tai-en Charles Soerensen, this journey authorized by the voice of the Tai-en Naroshi Toraokii. Sending clearance code now."

After another pause, the voice returned. "What road do you request permission to enter?"

"The Mirror Road, bound for Paladia Minor."

"No," said Anatoly suddenly. "We want the swiftest road for Chapal."

Branwen and Florien swiveled around to stare at him. Rachelle, of course, could not, but he heard her mutter something under her breath, and her neck—all that was visible of her—tensed.

"Who countermands the authority of the Tai-en Naroshi Toraokii?"

"I am Anatoly Sakhalin, prince of the Sakhalin tribe. I countermand this order. I am on my way to see the emperor, and I wish to reach him quickly."

"Merde!" said Florien. "I'm getting a flood of coordinates."

Branwen hunched down over her screen. "I've never seen any of these before. These are nothing like our usual coordinates."

"We're being given priority to go through." Florien's voice shook.

"Rachelle, are you on it?"

"I'm ready."

They traded numbers back and forth and the ship moved on, leaving the geometric pattern of lights behind as it arced around the gilded line, as round as a cupped hand, that marked the planet against the heavens.

They broke past the singularity. Anatoly smelled smoke, sharp on a winter's wind, and then it was gone.

"Fucking bloody hells," said Rachelle, her voice muffled through the visor. "I've never seen this place before."

"New stream of coordinates coming in," said Florien. "They didn't even ask for identification."

"And he does dishes, too," said Rachelle.

"All hands," announced Branwen, keying into the shipboard link, "we've got clearance to go forward. We'll take this next window, but then we're breaking to check for stress on the hull."

They took the next window and at once the Chapalii station control fed them a new set of vector coordinates. No one had the slightest idea of where they were, but Branwen set the modeller onto a search program and by the time they'd checked the ship twice and all had a sleepshift and a shower and a meal, she had found three probable locations.

"Based on the maps we have," she said to the crew, who were gathered in the galley over a breakfast of aebleskiver and fresh raspberry jam, "we're either way the hell beyond Imperial space or else sitting pretty more than halfway to Chapal."

"Ship's chart says it takes about forty Earth days to reach Paladia Minor," said Anatoly. "By the standard route."

They all looked at him. "It does," said Branwen finally. "If there are no delays, which means, where we stand in the queue and how heavy the traffic is that week, and if no other more important ship gets priority."

"Only now," said Rachelle, "we're the ones cutting to the front of the line."

"Anyway," added Branwen, giving him that look again, the one they were all giving him, as if he had suddenly turned zayinu in front of their eyes when they thought he had been human all along, "this is clearly not the standard route. No bets now on how long it's going to take."

"Twenty days," said Benjamin. "Bet it cuts the journey in half." There were no takers.

They reached Chapal three days later. Not the Paladias, which were, according to Branwen and to the navigation charts, the access routes into Chapal. The only access routes, according to what humans knew, their best intelligence gathered by Soerensen's people and the Gray Raven itself.

They just winked into the system within long range scanning range of Chapal, climbing at a steep rate so that their velocity altered perceptibly as they passed through into the ecliptic. Alarms went off all over the yacht. The steepness of the climb pressed Anatoly deep into the cushion of his crash seat and then, shifting hard, flung him against the straps. Bile rose in his throat, but he kept it down. The others on the bridge—that meant all of them, except for Florien down in the damping bay to keep a close watch on the engine fields—took it in stride, but they were experienced spacers.

Rachelle swore colorfully under her visor. "Cutting it close, aren't they? What is this—?"

She broke off.

No one spoke.

"Holy Tits," said Summer. "That's Chapal. No other planet's got that porcelain gleam."

"Lock these files," said Branwen in a low voice, "and save them with access only to the crew, and to Soerensen." She glanced back at Anatoly. "And Sakhalin," she added, as if on an afterthought. She looked wan.

"Do you know how much this information is worth?" said Benjamin on a rising arc.

"Your life," snapped Branwen. "It shouldn't be possible to get here that fast."

Hard on her comment, the comm snapped to life. Chapalii poured out, a stream of words gushing into the sudden silence on the bridge.

"Translation program isn't picking this up," said Summer. "It keeps bleeping unreadable."

"Oh, damn, it must be formal court Chapalii or something," muttered Branwen. "We're not allowed to translate that into our primitive tongue. It isn't seemly."

The words kept coming, a flood, rising.

"This is Anatoly Sakhalin," said Anatoly into the air. "Speak Anglais, which is the language I understand."

The words ceased.

Then, awkwardly, a voice—not filtered through a translation program—spoke in Anglais, vowels clipped and consonants rounded in an alien fashion.

"Prince of the Sakhalin, a transport is sent for you, most honorable."

"I've got incoming," said Summer at the tracking console. "On screen."

The ship that flowered into view was no bigger than the Gray Raven, according to the stats that scrolled underneath the screen: estimated volume, mass, length. She was atmosphereworthy, Anatoly was fairly sure, because of her sleek line and trim curves. Otherwise she was fairly ordinary. He unstrapped and rose, somewhat unsteadily, to his feet, but luckily no one was looking. They were all staring at the ship.

"How will I get across to her?" he asked. Three heads snapped around to look at him. Moshe continued to stare at the screen, and Rachelle was still concealed in her chair.

Branwen jumped to her feet. "I'll take you down. Summer, you've got the helm."

"Gotcha." Summer shifted to take Branwen's seat.

They left the bridge.

"I think the best bet would be to have Rachelle accompany you," said the captain. "She has the broadest experience of the world. There isn't much she hasn't seen, and despite first impressions she can keep her mouth shut at all the best times. You'll need supplies. It took Charles Soerensen days, waiting in various anterooms, to get in to see the emperor."

"He will see me at once," said Anatoly, surprised that she would say such a thing. "I will go alone. I don't want to argue over this."

Branwen stopped dead in the passageway and looked him over rather like a young woman examines a prospective lover. "Huh. You are an arrogant bastard, aren't you?" But she said it kindly, not as an insult. "Okay. I won't argue, but we only have six months' worth of supplies, so we can't wait for you forever. I assume you have the full text of xenology's precis of Chapalii customs and so on and so forth, so you don't commit any faux pas—uh, any mistakes, any bad manners."

"I was brought up under Grandmother Sakhalin's own tutelage. I trust she has taught me how to behave properly. Begging your pardon, Captain." Then he thought better of simply ignoring her advice. Like any etsana, she had experience that it behooved him to heed. "But of course it is only wise to take a few supplies, and the demimodeller with the xenology files, in my saddlebags, against necessity."

She brushed a few stray curls of hair out of her eyes. Laugh lines crinkled up around her eyes when she smiled, and he smiled back, liking her very much. "All right." She seemed about to say something else, but did not.

At his cabin, she remained discreetly outside while he collected his saddlebags, his saddle, and his saber, and she protested by not one word when he emerged from the cabin carrying them. Diana would have, of course. She was always embarrassed by these vestiges of his former life. They collected supplies and went down to the aft air lock. A dull, shuddering thud shook through the hull as the transport made contact. Anatoly hoisted the saddle onto his shoulder, made a polite farewell, and cycled through the air lock.

A thin tube snaked out on the other side, translucent, so that he almost felt that he was walking on the heavens themselves as he crossed over into the other ship. Stewards waited for him. They took his saddlebags and his saddle and led him to a suite of rooms that were notable mostly for the unsightly orange and pink frieze that circled the antechamber. He took refuge from its splendor in a tiny lounge whose walls were covered with a restful pale gold matting and fitted at one end with an observation bubble. They brought him three liquids in spun crystal cups, all of which were undrinkable, and finally he chased them out and told them to leave him alone until they reached the emperor's palace.

He watched their descent through the bubble, which was, alas, sealed over once they hit the atmosphere. But he had seen the great porcelain skin that covered fully half of the planet's surface: The fabled city of the emperor, as large as the great Earth continent of Eurasia. Bored and curious, he set his modeller on his knees and asked it for information on the Imperial city. It knew little enough: Theoretically the civilization of the Chapalii had risen out of the murk of Chapal and eventually learned how to sail the interstellar seas. They had, it was supposed, made a kind of shrine out of the holy ground of their birth, and their home planet had become their emperor's residence, his palace and his parks, that he alone controlled access to.

The transport set down so gently that Anatoly did not know they had landed until the stewards came to fetch him. He allowed them to carry his saddlebags and saddle because he guessed that they might think less of him for trying to spare them that burden, even if he wanted it for himself. But he refused to let any of them touch his saber, and he tucked the demimodeller into the pouch on his belt, sparing it from prying hands and words.

The ship stood on a riverbank, landing feet splayed out on the sandy bank. A delicate skiff bobbed on the waters, tied up to a pier constructed of spears of ashen wood so slight that he could not believe they could hold his weight. But he knew better than to hesitate. A transparent tube extruded from the ship, leading down the ramp and out to the skiff, where it bubbled out in the stern, a safe, malleable chamber molded to the shape of the boat. He walked out onto the pier, and a steward in silver livery helped him to a seat on the skiff, in the stern. Belatedly, he recalled that silver livery was the mark of the emperor. He kept his expression impassive as the transport's stewards swung his saddle and saddlebags onto the boat and the tube pinched closed around him, sealing him into an oval bubble.

Another silver-clad Chapalii poled them away from the pier and they were off, caught at once in a swift current, pulled downstream.

On the horizon he saw towers, and beyond them, the pale glow of the city, bright even against the bright light of the Chapaliian sun. He reached out and touched the skin of the mobile chamber. It gave beneath his touch, cool, not sticky, molding around his fingers as he pushed outward, stretching with his thrust and shrinking back in as he withdrew his hand. It felt as innocuous as skin and as strong as silk, as tough as boiled leather.

He sat in silence for a long while. No one steered the skiff, which plunged along, barely rocking in the waters, down a deep channel. The boat seemed poured out of one mold of a translucent pink material shot through with a substrate pattern of hexagrams and five-pointed stars, light shifting through them as the vessel skimmed over the ever-changing waters. Finally, because neither of the two stewards attending him spoke, he did.

"How soon will I reach the emperor?"

Both stewards stood and bowed, a remarkable feat of balance on the moving skiff. "Most honorable and most high, this vessel approaches the Yaochalii's seat of honor. To the unmoving throne at the center of the universe you are being conveyed."

"You are the Yaochalii's attendants?"

The steward on the right flushed a deep red, which meant, Anatoly recalled, that he was pleased or flattered. "I am Cha Kato-ra, Chamberlain of Swift-Current Boats, and this is my cousin, Cha Tona-ra, Chamberlain of the Linked Circles of Breath. We are only attendants to the great park at whose center lies the lake of mirrors where sits the unmoving throne. You honor us by your notice, most high."

Cha Tona bowed in his turn. "Most honorable and most high, it is the craftsmen of my house who have been granted the privilege of crafting this—" The slightest hesitation. Cha Tona flushed blue up the line of his jaw, and then recovered himself. "—this membrane, whose substance will allow you to enter the presence of the emperor."

Anatoly laid a palm flat against the bubble. A sudden, uncomfortable tingling invaded his hand, as if the skin of the bubble was trying to sink into his skin. He jerked his hand back, startled. "Please explain this process to me," he said, wondering if the bubble somehow protected the emperor from him, like a shield covering potential enemies.

"Your anatomical construction does not allow you, most honorable Yao-en, to breathe the air on our planet. This membrane permeates your molecular structure and creates a barrier which then synthesizes from those elements you draw in the proper intake of oxygen and outflow of carbon dioxide and waste products which suffice daiga in their primitive breathing mechanisms."

"If I do not accept this, ah, membrane?"

Mortified, both lords—for in fact they were by grant of title lords and not stewards—flushed violet.

"Most munificent and generous Yao-en, without this kukiwa you cannot appear before the emperor."

"Did the Tai-en Charles Soerensen accept one of these membranes?"

The question produced silence. Cha Tona placed one pale hand carefully on the side of the skiff, as if he was communicating with it. Off to the right, a massive mountain of obsidian breached the ivory shell to the city, its jet bulk wreathed with carnelian and jade towers, as slender as wands.

"Yao-en." Cha Tona crossed both hands on his chest and inclined his body in a one-quarter bow.

"The Tai-en Charles Soerensen did not appear before the emperor."

"Yes, he did."

"I beg a thousand pardons for disputing your words, most honorable, most exalted. The Emperor appeared before the Tai-en Charles Soerensen in the Hall of Dukes, as is the Yaochalii's custom, but it is not his exalted flesh which appears there, but only his form."

Anatoly digested this news in silence as they skimmed onward. Waves spilled once over the prow as they took a sharp dip through a flurry of rapids, and were then sucked away through the boat to vanish, leaving not one drop of water behind. Charles Soerensen thought he had seen the emperor, and he had, in a way, but only an image of him, like a nesh image, Anatoly supposed. But not even Charles Soerensen had met the emperor in the flesh, as the actors always liked to say.

"I accept the membrane," said Anatoly.

No sooner had the words left his mouth than the bubble shrank around him, shrank until it hugged him and shrank further, dissolving through his clothes until he felt it like fire along his skin and stretching in through his lips and nostrils and ears and eyes to invade his whole body.

At that instant he realized he had fallen into a trap. He took in a breath, to lunge, to draw his saber and at least take them with him, but he could not breathe nor could he move, as if the dissolution of the membrane into his skin had paralyzed him. Why had he trusted them so blithely? Why had he believed that the name of Sakhalin would protect him wherever he went? What an arrogant, stupid fool.

He sagged forward, caught himself with his hands on his knees, and pushed up to sit, panting.

Water flashed under the light of twin suns; he hadn't noticed the other one before. The bubble had shadowed it. One of the suns was a great, glaring thing, angry and red; the other was small, hot, and bright, with the blue trembling of flame inside it. He sat in the open air, the breeze on his face and the bitter tang of alien water on his lips, spray from the river. The two lords sat in pale splendor, each with his hands in his lap, fingers folded together in complicated patterns that reminded Anatoly all at once of the complicated braid in Rachelle's hair, made beautiful because of its suggestion of layers and sweep.

And he knew that he was the first human ever to sit and breathe unaided—except not unaided—in the air of Chapal, with the great palace defining the horizon on his right and an endless park of pink and white flowers to his left.

The river dipped, sinking beneath them, only it wasn't sinking, it was rolling on along the level ground. The skiff was sinking on an impossible strip of water that seemed to be tunneling into the river itself, as if they were contained in another, invisible bubble. The river rose around them on all sides and they raced into it, underneath it, swallowed in a darkness that roared with the tumult of waters. He felt that slight touch, like the delicate brush of a hand, that usually signaled the passage into a window.

Farther back along the tunnel, receding endlessly into the distance, stands Genji, observing him still.

The blackness sluiced away like water pouring off a duck's back and they came out of the tunnel into an eerie grotto. Anatoly pinched himself to see if he was awake. They could not have gone through a window, not on a planet. He was obviously hallucinating. Perhaps it was an aftereffect of his intermingling with the membrane. Only an idiot would think that such a procedure could occur without strange side effects coming after it.

The grotto lightened. They passed out under a glowing arch strung with glittering orreries onto a sunlit lake strewn with petals of gold. The light was blinding, like a thousand mirrors turned to reflect the suns.

Anatoly shaded his eyes, which helped enough that he soon discerned that the lake was vast and probably square. The shoreline rode like a thin boundary of white on the still expanse of shimmering gold. In the center rose an island, and toward this island the skiff flew, skimming over the surface of the lake without touching the surface of the water or the curling leaves of the golden petals. It's this lake, he thought, craning around to look behind himself, that Naroshi's garden was set out to imitate.

The island rose, and rose, as they neared, a shore of gleaming white pebbles bounded by an ebony wall. Enclosed by the wall stood a marble ziggurat, squares piled upon squares, receding toward a distant peak, the even line of the ascending ziggurat severed by a wide staircase as bright as diamond.

The skiff slowed and coasted to a halt where a staircase that seemed to be carved out of a single piece of ivory marched into the water, receding into the depths until, farther out, its descent was shaded by petals. Anatoly wondered, wildly and at random, if there was a second ziggurat mirroring the first, thrusting down deep into the earth.

Two Chapalii in silver livery came down the steps. Lord Kato and Lord Tona stood at once and bowed to them, but the two new lords bowed in their turn to Anatoly, by which he deduced they must be dukes in the service of the emperor. To his surprise, they took his saddlebags and saddle, and when he jumped out of the skiff and began to climb the stairs, they flanked him, one on each side, bearing his worldly goods on their shoulders.

It was a long climb.

Anatoly paced himself, taking it slowly and allowing himself a pause every one hundred steps to take in the changing view. But the higher he went the more winded he got, so he mostly got the impression of a vast blinding lake surrounded by a luminous gray mist, like fog creeping in. Yet even as high as he climbed, knowing that each successive platform was smaller, when he reached the top he halted on the edge of a broad square field. Glancing back, he saw the dukes standing about one hundred steps down, waiting. Below them, a wispy strip of cloud draped the ziggurat. He did not remember climbing through it.

"Come forward," said a voice in Chapalii. Unlike all other Chapalii voices, except perhaps that of Genji, it hinted at emotion, curiosity, perhaps, or something unfathomable, inhuman.

Obediently, he walked forward. This field, perhaps one hundred meters square, was as black as the void of space except for the glowing lines that crossed back and forth in a giant grid. It reminded him of a huge khot board. In the center sat a slab of jet-black stone, like an outgrowth of vacuum, only it was not a standing stone but a throne. He kept to one of the glowing lines, feeling superstitious, and as he walked he passed near a three-dimensional model of a hydrogen atom, hovering about a meter above an intersection of lines. It shimmered as he passed, spitting sparks at him. He walked on, turned a right angle, and a second, and came to a halt.

It took him a long moment to find his voice.

"Yaochalii," he said at last in his mangled accent, but he knew enough formal Chapalii, he hoped, to get by. He bowed, slightly, inclining his body at the waist just enough to show that he respected the person who sat on the throne but not that he considered himself in any meaningful way lower than him.

Lifting his head, he stared.

The emperor was old. Unlike Genji, whose skin had a pearlescent hue, the emperor's skin seemed so pale, so thin, that Anatoly almost thought he could read the shape and flow of his internal organs as through a fine parchment gleaming with the faint oils of a scribe's fingers. Elaborate carvings decorated the throne, towers and orreries and molecular structures entwined by an endless looping, spiraling vine. Carved out of the ebony substance of the throne itself, they stood in relief as distinctly as if they been painted white in contrast. The air around them was as still as glass: If it moved at all, he could not perceive it.

"Welcome to the game of princes," said the emperor, and extended a hand, closed in a fist. "Here is your token. Take it, and you have entered the game."

Anatoly had learned many things from his grandmother. One was never to move in haste. "What is the object of the game?"

"To take the throne."

"Who are the other players?"

"Is it not called, the game of princes?"

"What are the rules?"

The emperor seemed amused. "That is the disadvantage of entering the game late. The first rule is that each player must learn the rules."

"What happens to you, Yaochalii, when the throne is taken?"

Now the emperor chuckled, not a human chuckle, but a rolling swell of amusement. "I am nothing.

I cannot be taken. But the princes bide their time and maneuver for position, and when it is proper the Yaochalii passes through and a new Yaochalii takes his place."

"Ah. Then with what resources do I play?"

The emperor lifted his other hand. It was so pale that Anatoly thought that he glimpsed, for an instant, a shifting line of carvings through it as it carved an arc in the air, rising to touch the emperor's own mouth, fingertips brushing across his nostril slits.

"What resources do you bring with you?"

"I am a prince of the Sakhalin tribe, a captain in the jaran army led by Ilyakora Bakhtiian, a husband to the Singer Diana Brooke-Holt, a brother and a father and a grandson. That is all."

The emperor considered. Anatoly noticed for the first time that filaments grew out of his back and into the throne, as if he was somehow in symbiosis with it.

"Because you are daiga, all daiga holdings accrue to you. I have spoken. It becomes as I decree."

He said the words softly enough, but they rang like hammers in Anatoly's ears. All daiga holdings.

"Because you are so young as to be more like a first breath of mist born of the morning than a true, solid form, I grant you this courtesy: That any of my servants you have met and will meet this day shall enter your service, they and their houses, to the end of time. I trust this will be sufficient."

Like a flower opening to the sun, the emperor's hand opened. In his palm sat a miniature tower, forged like a castle keep, the last refuge, the stronghold. Anatoly smiled wryly, recognizing the symbol for what it was: possession of a piece of ground, meaningless to him but so utterly important to khaja of all kinds, even zayinu.

"When you take possession of this token, you will enter the game. You will continue to travel as you will, and as you must. But you will leave behind on my board a splinter of yourself, a shard, by which I may monitor your movements and amuse myself with watching your progress in relationship to the others." He waited for Anatoly to come forward.

"How am I to know the other princes, Yaochalii?"

The emperor's gaze swept the plateau. Out there, on the lines, placed on intersections just as khot stones were placed in the grid, stood a handful of images, like that model of the hydrogen atom he had passed on the other side of the throne. Images, like badges, like banners, like nesh images, each one representing one of the princely houses: a streamlined and archaic-looking rocketship, a teardrop, a blade, four strands of colored rope knotted together, an inverted tetrahedron. The other four were out of sight behind the throne.

It was time to act.

Anatoly stepped forward and lifted the tower from the emperor's hand. It was as solid as stone and as slippery as water. It throbbed in his hand, as if it linked him to the pulsing web of light on which he stood. And it did link him.

Even as he stood, breathing hard through his mouth while he felt the glare of two suns on his back and the oppressive stillness of the air on his skin, an image formed around him, a glimmering that slowly faded into being. It grew and shaded from mist to gray to the false solidity of a nesh image, superimposed over him. Startled, he stepped back, out of it, and stared at the piece that now took its place on the board.

It was a jaran rider, his saber riding on his belt and the butt of his spear tucked into the curve of his boot. He wore his hair long, in the traditional style of a soldier, three braids, and Anatoly saw there his own profile, sharpened in nesh to a brittle perfection. The mare was the image of Sosha.

Like Anatoly, the rider remained still. But of course, he could not move unless Anatoly moved. He was, of himself, nothing, nonexistent, and yet he was also, as the emperor had said, a shard of the true Anatoly. The token, the tower, remained as solid as a stone in Anatoly's hand, his passage into the game, his first playing piece, perhaps, or a reminder that what appeared as a game on this high and isolated board, here in the center of the emperor's great palace, weighed heavily on the worlds below.

A cloud drifted by, breaking up on one corner of the ziggurat and reforming into a new shape over the golden lake.

It was time to move. The emperor waited, one hand open, the other hand closed.

"Yaochalii, may I ask one more question?"

"You may."

"Do you have any favorites, in the game of princes?"

"I have none."

That seemed fair enough, assuming he was telling the truth. But at that moment Anatoly did not truly care if the emperor was telling the truth; how could any human hope to know, in any case? All daiga holdings. That meant that not just Earth but Rhui was his, that he was their suzerain, their governor. And that meant Bakhtiian had, in one brief stroke, in the unfolding of a single hand, won his war.

All khaja lands now belonged to the jaran.