The pylon is fucked up in ways both subtle and obvious.

The obvious bits are why nobody’s activated it. The glow is all wrong—well, subtly wrong, but it’s not like Zidanya can’t recognize that like I can recognize a sequence of primes—and there’s a weird vibe to it, something that I can’t put into words and which, unusually, I can’t isolate with the Visor.

The subtle bits are more interesting; the magic doesn’t flow right.

I don’t actually understand how the pylons are put together, how they’re supposed to work. The way their runes fit together made absolutely no sense to me until I figured out that all I can see of them is four spatial dimensions out of seven, and the fourth one has to be kludged into a sprawling expanse of data representations. I can infer things about the others from various places, but that’s not important; what’s important is, I don’t understand the pylons, but there’s supposed to be a flow to the magic in them, and this one has snarls.

It takes me about a kilosecond of indirect analysis and both Sara’s and Zidanya’s assistance to figure out that there isn’t a trap there, that the snarls aren’t some form of esoteric attack or enchantment. From there it takes me about fifteen seconds to figure out that the pylon’s functionality is almost completely blocked.

Figuring out what the snarls actually are turns out to be even faster, because once I activate the pylon, most of them flare and die. Messages, it turns out, aren’t attacks or enchantments; and what’s left is somewhere between a tripwire and a tracer, something that exists only to fire if fucked with. I’m pissed at myself; if I’d known that it was two separate layers of functionality rather than one, if I’d thought to check, I might have puzzled it out.

He’d probably have stopped me, though. He’d certainly have noticed, what with the whole “standing just outside the exit, watching us” thing.

I have no idea how long he’s been there, and when I instinctively go to check, my Visor doesn’t come up.

“Amber.” I don’t look over my shoulder. “You okay?”

“I am… pressured. My lord.”

I frown at that. “Need to sit this out?” Politer than are you compromised, and besides, that wasn’t an ironic title she just dropped, so I know the answer to that question.

“I am,” Amber grinds out, “more than that one thing. My place is at your side.”

“Well.” I grab my stuff off the table, fiddling with the nigh-useless twinned triangles, and start walking towards the exit. “For now, stay behind me. Zidanya, Sara. Don’t get—”

“Do not finish that sentence.”

“For shame, Magelord.”

“... right.” I breathe deeply, setting my shoulders against the pressure. My face flushes in embarrassment and joy at their responses, and I wouldn’t have it in me to argue with them even if we had time for it. “Right.”

The room isn’t that large, and I hadn’t so much as looked at the exit until now. That’s deeply weird; I’ve been in here for a long, long time, and there’s sunlight visible out that wavering film of power, and I should by all rights have been drawn to it in fascination. Something wholly new, clearly magical, and representative of the departure from here I’d been working on so hard?

But the figure, that squared-off figure with the broad shoulders and beautiful proportions standing with that obnoxiously perfect posture, makes it all make sense.

“I observe that you stand uninvited.” I pitch my voice to carry, walking slowly and steadily across the dungeonstone floor. My mana probably dips, dips again; I can’t tell anymore, without the Visor. “Still, I suspect you can hear me, even through whatever that barrier represents.”

“It is so.”

I had expected… I don’t know what I’d expected. Any of a clear, rich medium tenor, a rumbling bass, or a light baritone—or all at the same time—would not have surprised me. A colorless, affectless voice, neither high nor low, drained of all emotion? That surprises me.

“And?”

“You stand,” Seidr says in that flat, carrying voice, that voice which stubbornly refuses to echo, “in the presence of a god. The appropriate courtesy is to kneel, and be bidden to rise and approach.”

“Is that so. Well, way I figure, there’s a bunch of you, and one of me. So how about this?” I keep walking, and my voice goes hard, in that political way I learned so tediously. “You stand before a Navigator who has flown through nothingness and chaos to true stars. You may bow.”

There’s a frozen moment of time. I can palpably feel, somehow, Amber’s mixture of shock, horror, and pride, but I can’t read anything from the avatar standing in front of me. The seconds tick by as I stop two paces away from the Temple’s exit-barrier, mirroring the barrier-distance, and I cock my head to the side just the slightest amount.

“Your deeds are recognized.” Seidr’s head inclines fractionally, noticeably, and a certain tension in the air both eases and increases.

“Cool.” I straighten my posture, trying to erase the slightest kink or bend in my spine. “Coming inside? By bread and salt, under the eye of the Void, I’d welcome you to sit among us and talk.”

“Magelord.” I’ve gotten to him at least a little bit; there’s intonation in that voice now. No way of knowing if it’s the precursory pre-invocation or if it’s me. “I do not often repeat myself.”

“Generally a good strategy, if you’ve got the speech training to get your cadence right.” There’s a hiss of… something from Amber, something that sounds vaguely like when I asked Yevgeniy to write down for me exactly why he thought we should skip the failover test on the secondary backups. I’d been dating… Soshi, maybe, who’d worked in his department, and she’d been in the room. Memories, I think to myself, and try to focus up; it’s only been a beat, but it was a beat I hadn’t intended to take. “People usually hear you the first time; better to ask for a readback, if you want to make sure there’s no ambiguity. If someone asks for a repeat, maybe you’re talking too fast, but probably it’s a power play or they’re not paying attention. I’ll ask again: will you join us at the table, and speak under the bonds of hospitality?”

“There is an order to these things, Magelord James. An order which I will not lightly brook your violation of.”

“The line was and was I speaking too quickly, by the way.” I should be stopping, probably need to be stopping. My mind is soaring and my body is full of a thrumming energy, and I tuck my hands into my pockets to stop them from shaking. “Which you were not; this is a power play. And you keep using the wrong title, which shows you don’t understand what’s going on. Am I a Magelord? Sure, I’ve fallen in love with the woman whose creation I was unwillingly party to, whose glory belies the matter of her origins. But I’m an Outsider, Seidr. A Voidnav of the Fleet of the Old Faith.”

“It may be that in your world of origin, your social order ranked you highest.” Seidr is pissed, I think; he’s doing some sort of two-toned thing with his voice that is threatening to turn my insides into jelly. “You will do well to remember that in this world, there are gods, and this one’s patience is not without limit. Kneel.”

“And said Raviv Mizri, who was in his time Speaker of his Worldship: hear, all those who may; the Lord who is our God is One.” I clasp my hands behind my back, forcing myself to smile, even if faintly. I’d listened to the recording; I’d listened to the recording seven times, from the challenge to his reply to the launch warnings to the deep-penetrators that had wiped the entire infrastructure of a solar system’s governance out.

Thirty-seven million civilians had died along with them, when the tally was done; thirty-seven million people, on a planet whose name is written on a candle and set alight to float with dozens of others once per liturgical cycle, on every ship of the Fleet.

Raviv Mizri would resign, after the launch and its aftermath, to pen the central tenets of the Heresy of the Void.

The almost ten million on his ship flew on, unhindered, unbowed.

“There is no God,” I say into a silence that’s like a wire drawn taut. “I know full well what the truth of divinity is. But even if I weren’t a congregant of the Voidfaith, I am still Fleetborn, a follower of the Old Faith, one of the People of the Endless Sky. Our answer to any demand for our submission has been unchanged since we tasted true freedom, and mortal as I am, I am an inheritor of that reply. Take the offer, Seidr; this third time I offer it is the last. Bread and salt, the bonds of hospitality. Because the alternative, well.

“You want me to kneel to you?” I can feel the edges of my lips curling; I’ve lost the fight against my facial expressions, and the snarl is showing. “Try to make me. See where it gets you.”