Once before Danlo had been invited into this place of history and great moment. With its circular walls of polished white granite and the great clary dome high above, it was a dazzlingly bright room but also draughty and always cold. He remembered how he had once knelt on the cold black floor stones before some of these very men and women. (One of whom had been Demothi Bede.) But now, since he and Demothi were no longer of the Old Order, they were not bidden to kneel on a Fravashi carpet according to tradition, but rather provided chairs on which to sit before the watchful eyes of a hundred and twenty lords. These tense men and women waited at their little crescent tables arrayed in a half-circle around four chairs in the centre of the room. Danlo, who had always hated sitting in chairs, took his seat with great disquiet, and he wondered at the two empty chairs next to him. As before, he smelled jewood polished with lemon oil and the reek of many old people’s fear. The greatest lords sat directly across from him at the two centre tables. Danlo knew many of them quite well, especially Kolenya Mor, the Lord Eschatologist, who played with the silken folds of her new golden robe. Kolenya was plump, moon-faced, intelligent and kind – and utterly beguiled by this new religion called Ringism. She was a bold women and also the first lord to trade in her traditional robe for a new one of gold. Also at her table were Jonath Parsons, Rodrigo Diaz, Mahavira Netis and Burgos Harsha with his plain brown robe and glass-pocked face. At the other centre table sat lan Kutikoff, the Lord Semanticist, and Eva Zarifa in a purple robe displaying not one but two golden armbands. Next to her, old Vishnu Suso shifted about in his chair, all the while staring at Danlo and fingering his armband as if he suddenly found it too tight. He seemed uncomfortable sharing so close a physical space with the other lord at the end of the table, Audric Pall, the Lord of the Order himself. And no wonder, for Danlo had never seen a more horrible human being in all his life. It almost hurt him even to look at Lord Pall, with his pink, albino’s eyes and skin as white as bleached bone. This rare genetic deformity was accentuated by his black teeth, revealed whenever he spoke or smiled, which was not often. Lord Pall liked to communicate only by using his hands and fingers, making the little cetic signs which the journeyman cetic sitting by his side like a parratock bird translated into spoken language. He was as silent as a cetic, as the saying goes, and also cynical, subtle and wholly corrupt in his spirit.
Eli los shaida, Danlo thought. Shaida eth shaida.
Lord Pall lifted his finger slightly, and the cetic sitting at his side – a handsome young man with the blond hair and ferocious blue eyes of a Thorskaller – spoke in his place: ‘Have you fallen well, Lord Demothi Bede? Danlo wi Soli Ringess? We wish you well. We accept you as the legitimate ambassadors of the Fellowship of Free Worlds, though you should know that we do not accept the legitimacy of the Fellowship itself.’
‘Perhaps in time that will change,’ Demothi said.
‘Perhaps,’ Lord Pall said through his mouthpiece. But his little pink eyes betrayed no sign that he thought this might be possible. ‘Time is strange, isn’t it? We have so little of it. At this moment, the wavefront from the supernova is falling towards us at the speed of light. And perhaps the fleet of your Fellowship approaches even more quickly. And these aren’t even the most immediate dangers that we face.’
‘Of what dangers do you speak, my lord?’ Demothi asked.
‘That you will soon know,’ Lord Pall replied. He turned to look at a journeyman horologe standing by the doors to a second anteroom across the chamber. The horologe bowed his head, then drew the laser that he wore in a holster at his hip. He very warily opened the anteroom’s doors. Two men were waiting for him there, and, with a wave of his laser, he escorted them into the chamber towards Danlo and Demothi Bede and the two empty chairs.
‘No!’ Danlo suddenly said, forgetting all restraint. Then, realizing that he had spoken out of place, he held his head as still as a thallow as he locked eyes on these two men whom he knew too well.
‘I see that you’re acquainted,’ Lord Pall said. ‘But allow me to present our guests to the rest of the College: Malaclypse Redring of Qallar, and Bertram Jaspari of Tannahill.’
At the saying of this name, a hundred lords gasped as if sharing a single breath. From lost Tannahill, thirty thousand light years across the stars, Bertram Jaspari had come to Neverness even as Danlo had come. With his pointed, bald head and skin discoloured blue from the mehalis disease common to Tannahill, he was an ugly man – perhaps the ugliest whom Danlo had ever known. His mouth was as small and puckered as a dried bloodfruit and his eyes cold and dead-grey like rotting seal flesh. His whole face seemed set with a permanent sneer. And all these eye-catching physical features bespoke only the work of his surface self; his true ugliness went much deeper. Danlo knew him to be devious, vain, stingy, cruel and utterly lacking in grace. And worse, he had no care for any human being other than himself, and worse still, he liked using others in his lust to grab power. And perhaps worst of all, he was small in his spirit, small and twisted like a plant deformed by lack of water and sunlight. If he had competed with Lord Pall to see which one of them could best embody pure shaida, it would have been hard to judge the winner.
‘You are a liar and a murderer,’ Danlo whispered as Bertram Jaspari let himself down into the chair next to him. ‘A murderer of a planet and a whole people.’
Bertram Jaspari pretended that he hadn’t heard these soft yet fierce words of Danlo. He seemed afraid to meet Danlo’s blazing blue eyes. He just sat in his jewood chair, adjusting the folds of his kimono, the traditional garment of the Architects of the Infinite Intelligence of the Cybernetic Universal Church. Scarcely a year earlier, in the War of Terror which he had inflicted upon Tannahill, he had dyed his kimono a bright red as a sign of his willingness to shed blood. (Though as far as Danlo knew, he had shed only the blood of his fellow Architects and never his own.) All of the fanatical sect called the Iviomils now wore these same ugly kimonos. Somewhere in space, perhaps hiding behind a nearby star, Bertram’s fleet of Iviomils would be waiting to shed more blood or to accomplish a much more shaida purpose.
Next to him, above the remaining empty chair, stood a man who seemed his opposite. He wore a dazzling, rainbow-coloured robe and a single red ring on the little finger of either hand. Like all warrior-poets, Malaclypse Redring was physically beautiful. His skin was like burnished copper; his hair was black and shiny as a sable’s fur. Everything about him rippled with an intense aliveness, especially his eyes, all violet and deep and quick. He, at least, dared to meet Danlo face to face. While the eyes of every lord in the chamber nervously regarded him and wondered why he remained standing, he turned his head to look at Danlo and seek out his fierce gaze. As they had twice before, they locked eyes and stared at each other for a long time. The light streaming deep in Danlo’s eyes seemed to draw him like a fritillary to a star, and yet something he saw there must have unnerved him, too, for without warning he suddenly looked away. No one, it is said, can stare down a warrior-poet, especially only the second one in history to wear two red rings, and the hundred and twenty lords sitting safely behind their tables looked back and forth between Danlo and Malaclypse, afraid to believe the truth of what they had just seen. Malaclypse Redring, too, was afraid, though he had no qualms about letting his fear be known. Once more he looked at Danlo, and told him, ‘You’ve changed, Pilot. Again. Every time I see you, you grow closer to who you really are. And what is that? I don’t know. It’s