15 Rising Withering, 1886 CE

The force of the still-accelerating drop-pod shoved Dorsin back, deep into the leafy seat. A few hours' travel, at most, to drop anywhere at within half a continent--the Thunderhammer cannon and its dense biofuel, taken together, were extraordinary advances in Tellurian technologies.

Yet Dorsin barely thought about that. They were tools, nothing more. If they could not help him rescue his wife, then they were worthless.

But he would save Oralie. He would bring her back with him. Back from this folly of hers.

He needed his wife. Acerbia needed her; all of the Nethress holdings needed her. Whatever the High had done to lock her away, he would break the chains and bring her out, healthy and whole.

Wife on the one hand, daughter on the other. Hopefully Cornartis would keep his end of the bargain.

For now, unable to move for the force of acceleration and unable to hear because he'd vacuum-sealed his ears against the screaming of the wind outside the pod, Dorsin ran through the contents of his skinsuit.

Calorie packs. Weapons, not all of which were conventional. Some thaler bills; a few carats' worth of diamonds. And of course, his own flesh, his own DNA.

He needed little else. He didn't intend to stay in the Nameless City long.

The acceleration stopped, and gravity took over. Leaves tore away from the drop pod as it began to fail, its predefined lifespan having been reached.

As the drop pod disintegrated around him, Dorsin extended gliding wings. He flew into late afternoon sunlight like a starburst out of a cloud of dust.

The horizon stretched beneath him like a carpet of green moss, rolling toward an orange-blue haze to the west, toward the sea, and climbing the side of the mountain range toward Vallus to the east. The Nameless City nestled in the floor of a break in the mountains, surrounded by steaming jungles.

Dorsin aimed for the curling double-helix towers of blue and red at the pass to Vallus at the edge of the city, the gate that held the Chimerical hordes of Vallus at bay.

The Palace of Ascension.

Surprise was a soldier's best weapon. Dorsin would give the Sodality no time to plan.

As Dorsin descended, he called on his SOPHIOS to enhance his eyesight. Just in case of hostilities, he would do well to study the disposition of guards around the tower. He--

What was that moving in the jungle of Vallus beyond the city? Dorsin swept his attention in that direction, scanning the thick vegetation.

There it was again. Across a wide swath, jungle plants bent and waved as if in a breeze, but they bowed far too deeply for any normal wind. Some of them, smaller saplings, didn't even bounce back to their original positions afterward.

Through gaps in the trees, he could see rocks and stagnant pools and game trails. And Dorsin saw flesh on those open areas as well.

That was no breeze. Chimeras were on the move.

And not merely near the city. Now that he looked, Dorsin saw patches of similar movement up and down Vallus's wide expanse.

It was no use worrying about it now. Dorsin would set his inquirers to studying changes in Chimerical behavior after he saved his wife.

Balconies dotted the sides of the spiraling towers of the Palace of Ascension. Dorsin caught sight of a few dozen guardsmen across those balconies. Dozens more stood sentry on the plaza grounds below. A lone barracks nestled among the control buildings for the airfield. A pair of Defenders of the Pass sat at a table just outside the barracks, playing cards.

Lazy. But then, they didn't expect to be attacked, did they? Even if these guards were not Magi--and they almost certainly were--still nobody would be foolish enough to charge in and make an enemy of the Sodality. Nobody but Dorsin, that was.

Four skywhales waited on the sprawling landing pads. One of them bore the wolf's head, once the insignia of Dorsin's family line, now of the whole of Gens Nethress.

Oralie's vessel. Dorsin squinted against the screaming wind and ducked into a dive, aiming for the plaza just outside the towers.

Time to make an unforgettable entrance.

He landed in a roll, taking it at a sideways angle; his shortsword was in its sheath across his back within his skinsuit, and it wouldn't do to snap the blade. Dorsin came to his feet, steaming in the jungle heat, just outside the doors to the scarlet tower.

A quartet of Defenders blinked at him. He dusted himself off once for show, then raised his chin. "Magus Princeps Dorsin Generosus Ortus Nethress demands an audience with the High."

To their credit, the guards recovered quickly. Two of them put hands on their weapons, nasty looking rifles; they kept them lowered, but it was obvious they would be ready to react at a moment's notice. A third stepped back and whispered something into his shortsphere. The bulky backpack-sized device surely would have crushed him if he was not either Stigmatized with additional muscle fibers or a Magus using a strength STIGMOS.

Some day soon, every Gens would use radio, and the massive shortsphere devices could be retired. For now, Dorsin would be glad that the advantages of radio belonged to Nethress.

The fourth guard, a tanned, muscled man with yellow eyes and short hair of the same color, stepped toward Dorsin and spoke. "We received no word of your arrival."

"I gave none." Dorsin peered at each of the men in turn. "As the Sodality gave me no word that they had taken my wife."

The guard looked confused. "Please wait, Erus." The man who'd been speaking into the shortsphere stepped up and whispered something into the other's ear. Nodding, Dorsin's interlocutor added, "An embassy is being prepared to receive you."

"Good. I will wait." Dorsin drew himself into parade rest.

The guards looked at him evenly. He stared back.

Neither side seemed inclined to give way.

The guard with the shortsphere put a hand to the segment of the device encapsulating his ear, then frowned. Dorsin enhanced his hearing and listened in.

"...at forty percent. Still awaiting the other rangers. According to those who have reported in, Chimerical activity is unusually high and displays atypical organization. Invoking Condition Saffron. Officers are commanded to double personnel on-duty until stand-down order is given."

"Is something wrong, son?" Dorsin asked.

The man shot him a hostile look. Apparently, using the Symbiont to spy on the Sodality while you were in their territory was uncouth.

Well, so was holding a man's wife hostage.

One of the other guards shook his head. "Just some unusual behavior from the Chimeras is all." He waved past the towers toward Vallus beyond. "It happens on occasion."

"Not like this," the man with the shortsphere muttered.

Dorsin nodded. "You are the gateway to West Vallus," he observed. Even if the towers only had a few hundred visible guards, those men would be Magi--as would many of the other inhabitants--and its Tool-managed defenses would be formidable. Plus, four additional military installations were spread throughout the Nameless City. The Sodality would be able to call up thousands of soldiers to fight off any Chimerical incursion.

Or any incursion by a rage-driven Princeps.

Somehow, the thought didn't give Dorsin pause.

He stood aside politely to allow a quintet of novices--two women and three men--into the tower. They didn't cover themselves up as the novices of Acerbia did, probably both because the Nameless City was a Sodality holding and because of the heat. They looked so young, almost certainly in truth and not simply because of the Symbiont; few who wore the Sodality's lowliest robes were Magi. Young enough to be wed off, or perhaps to be casually bred to strengthen the bloodlines.

It was not the way of Gens Nethress to engage in that behavior. Especially when it came to sex, self-control separated man from beast.

The Sodality should have been grateful for that General Principle of Nethress. Self-control was all that was keeping Dorsin from slaying his way into the tower right now.

A pair of men hurried out of the lobby. One was dark and tall and bare-chested; he looked like a servant of sorts. The other was shorter, with wrinkles beginning to make themselves known at the corner of his eyes and a light dusting of white in his black hair.

How many centuries old must that man have been to show such age? Three? Four?

They bowed to Dorsin. He returned the gesture, though he didn't bow quite so low to them as they did to him.

"May your ascension be swift, Princeps Dorsin," said the older man gravely. "I am Magus Dominus Magnus Vertnell Sodalitatis, and my second is Magus Servus Muoro Sodalitatis. The Sodality welcomes you to the Palace of Ascension."

"I very much doubt that," Dorsin replied. "I've come for my wife."

Vertnell and Muoro shared a glance. "We had no advance notice of your arrival."

"I have learned that when dealing with kidnappers, it's best not to give them forewarning of your presence."

"Kidnappers?" Vertnell looked hurt. Blood, but he was a good actor. "There is no need for such aspersions. Come inside. Take refreshment with us, and let us discuss your needs. The wisdom of the Sodality is open to all of the Ascending."

"I need no refreshment. All I need is my wife. Give her back to me, and I will be on my way."

"You speak of Uxor Principis Maga Oralie Generosus Nethress Ortus La Table d'Or?" Vertnell asked, slightly emphasizing the word "Maga." A ploy to remind Dorsin who had granted Oralie the Symbiont in the first place.

It wouldn't work. Dorsin had paid for Oralie's suppression treatments with carats and promised favors both. He was not a supplicant receiving favors; he was a customer granting custom. "I do."

"Your wife is not in these towers, Princeps. You have my most solemn word." Vertnell placed a hand on his heart and inclined his head.

Was he lying? "Her skywhale is on the landing pad."

"I give you my word," Vertnell repeated. "I have not laid eyes on your wife."

A liar? Or merely ignorant? A thought occurred to Dorsin; he was both glad and ashamed that he had been focused on his wife and had not considered it earlier. "And Ambassatrix Rosabella Sodalitatis?"

"She is here," Muoro said immediately. "I have been seeing to her needs."

A flare of jealousy burst in Dorsin's heart. "I want to see her."

"She is in seclusion," Muoro said firmly.

"Bring me to Rosabella."

Vertnell stepped forward and put out an arm to bar the door. It was a symbolic act--Dorsin had made no move towards the entryway. "You have no power to make demands of the Sodality, in the Sodality's palace, regarding the Sodality's property. If your wife were in the towers, I would bring you to her, but she is not. Ambassatrix Rosabella, however, is not within your purview. She belongs to the Sodality."

Vertnell's face softened, and he let his arm drop. "But my invitation remains. Join us for refreshment, and let us discuss your wife."

If Dorsin took Vertnell up on the offer, that would get him inside the doors, at least. With more control than he felt, Dorsin said, "Very well. Lead the way."

The lobby was cool and beautifully lit from all sides. Vines swayed from upper balconies and groups of Sodalitatis murmured here and there or lounged on chaises.

Muoro called down the lift, then came to ramrod-straight attention. As the lift doors slid open, he swept a hand inside, gesturing for the other two men to enter.

"The third floor tea-rooms have an excellent view of Vallus," Vertnell said as Muoro stepped in and the lift doors closed.

Third floor...

Oralie had said, The High laid a trap for me beneath the Palace of Ascension, my love.

Beneath the Palace of Ascension. Oralie wasn't in the towers.

She was below the earth.

Vertnell hadn't lied. He'd told nothing but the truth, and kept back the most important bit.

"Tell me," Dorsin said, "does the elevator go down as well as up?"

Muoro paused, his finger halfway to the cyst-button for the third floor.

"And tell me, you who kept silent," Dorsin added in a bare whisper. "Have you laid eyes on my wife?"

Dorsin was on Muoro before the man could think twice. Dorsin swept away Muoro's arm with one hand, and with the other he punched Muoro in the chest.

Not the most effective attack, unless one had a sub-skinsuit syringe waiting to inject Symbiont-slaying phages into the other man.

Dorsin did.

Muoro shouted in surprise as Dorsin whirled, swept around Vertnell, and put him in a headlock, shifting the thin syringe around so that Dorsin would be able to inject Vertnell with the slightest of movements.

"Fool," Vertnell grunted as Muoro staggered back to a fighting position. The skin on Muoro's arms tore open as sharp ridges of forgebone protruded through. It was a common STIGMOS for bodyguards, allowing a Magus both to block effectively and to throw forearm strikes that would lacerate an opponent. "You enter our house and attack--"

"Watch," Dorsin ordered.

Vertnell's hair started to writhe. Whatever STIGMOS he was calling on, it wouldn't help him.

Dorsin called on his Symbiont to build quick-twitch muscles into his fingers. "Dead man's switch," he breathed into Vertnell's ear. "Make a move to stop me, and what's happening to your man will happen to you. Watch."

Vertnell paused. Muoro took an unsteady step forward, then screamed and fell to one knee. The STIGMOS he'd just actuated failed; the forgebone bracers he'd constructed cracked and melted back into his body.

"I know how to kill the Symbiont," Dorsin whispered.

"Abomination." Vertnell sounded horrified.

"Not half so abominable as taking a man's wife. Now take me down into the depths. I require an audience with the High."

***

A double-bulbed lumin above provided the only light in the dim and ominous room. Dorsin stepped to the center of the chamber and stood on the speckled black floor, looking up at seven platforms and seven thrones.

"Give me back my wife," he demanded.

Masked figures occupied the thrones. Each pair of masks and thrones was marked by a symbol: a broken triangle with concave sides, a circle swirling inward toward its center like a whirlpool, a star whose sides were double helices, a Mobius loop. The figures on the thrones twitched and murmured, but they made no effort to respond to Dorsin's demand.

He frowned. They clearly weren't asleep, but they didn't seem to be awake, either. What, then? He put a hand to the back of his waist, near the spot in his skinsuit where he'd concealed his pistol.

Just in case.

Finally the figure marked by the concave triangle lunged forward out of the throne. Dorsin stepped back to gain more certain footing in the case of a confrontation, but the man, or perhaps woman, didn't descend from his platform.

Come to think of it, Dorsin saw no way down from the thrones.

The broken-triangle High looked down on Dorsin, who imagined he could feel the hostility behind that mask.

"We felt you," said broken-triangle as the people on the other thrones came alive.

"Give me back my wife," Dorsin repeated as the others stood one by one.

"You come shod. You tread on respect for the Half-father." broken-triangle pointed to the ground. "Kneel. Beg forgiveness for what you have done to Muoro."

How did they know? "I will not."

The High marked with the Mobius strip loosed a low, ecstatic wail. "Genesis of glories in their germlines," she said, swaying on her feet. "Speech without space, senses so soft..." She sensuously dragged the fingers of one hand against the other palm.

Her words sparked understanding within Dorsin. "Are you using my wife for Synapsis?"

The High remained silent.

"Why?" Dorsin asked. "You have everything you could wish for! I have only her. Give her back to me, and I'll leave this place."

"The Maiden of Ascension shows faith in the Most High," intoned a low-voiced High marked by a point within a square. "She returns the Half-father's other half to us. Now, at last, Apotheosis is within mankind's grasp."

"We will not return the Maiden to you," said broken-triangle. "Her presence paves the way for the hour of twin suns. She is a... harbinger. A..." The man twitched, as if his words were not entirely his, and when he spoke, he sounded different, ancient. "A voice in the desert, crying out, 'Prepare ye the way of the Most High.'"

Dorsin was not easily intimidated, but the words made him shudder. Nor was he a believer in Adonist fairy tales, stories of benevolent gods living in the heavens, or in Sodality dogma about the holiness of the Symbiont. Even so, broken-triangle's words, which Dorsin had never heard before, bore the taint of a sacred saying rendered profane.

Broken-triangle had accused Dorsin of trampling the holy underfoot, but the High seemed barely human. If this was the result of apotheosis, then it led not to a mythical heaven but to an all-too-real perdition. Dorsin was not a denier of the sacred; they were.

"Most High's Mate, Maiden, Mother to mankind," warbled Mobius loop.

"Your wife is yours no longer," said broken-triangle. "In her, we are whole, and when the Hour of the Suns comes, you and yours will be as well. Rejoice."

"Rejoice!" echoed the other High.

"You cannot have her," Dorsin said, planting his feet. His gun would almost certainly be faster than a STIGMOS. How quickly could he place bullets in seven heads?

"We already do. You will leave here without her," said concave triangle. "Only decide whether you will do it alive--"

Dorsin's skinsuit split as he drew his pistol, bringing it about to aim at broken-triangle--

Tendons shot down from the ceiling, wrapping about his arms, his legs, his neck. His shot went wide, clanging off the wall.

Dorsin struggled for breath as the trap lifted him off the ground.

"--or dead," broken-triangle said.

Alternative esophagus! Dorsin's Symbiont hissed its agreement in his mind, shifting the organs in his abdomen and forming a breathing apparatus through his belly button.

The darkness at the edge of his vision receded just in time for Dorsin to make out an impaling spike of bone at the end of glistening red musculature. It wove like a snake, tracking Dorsin's eye.

"Alive or dead?" asked broken-triangle.

There was a way out of this. But there would be no return. Not for Dorsin, not for Nethress, and perhaps not for humanity.

The bone spike twitched. "Alive or dead?" repeated broken-triangle.

Puzzle-pieces converged, became a decision: If this was the cost of the Symbiont, better not to have it at all. Not with the Sodality in charge.

Dorsin memorized the location of a door at the end of the chamber, deactuated his excess lungs, vacuum-sealed himself, and expelled a grenade from his skinsuit onto the floor of the chamber.

The moment it hit, the grenade's fronds unfurled, blasting a white aerosol into the room.

The High screamed. The muscles holding Dorsin spasmed as the Symbiont-killer infected them. They released Dorsin and retracted into the ceiling.

Dorsin hit the ground, scrambled up, and charged blindly for the open door whose location he'd memorized. He unsealed himself and glanced back into the poisoned chamber as he passed through the door. The platforms were now bare. Where were the High?

Had they escaped? How?

Dorsin ran down an esophagus of damp air into a well-lit domed room of bone and forgebone. Dorsin realized to his shock that the light was coming from a glowing circular pool in the center of the room.

A pool with a naked head lolling at the far side. The luminous liquid made the skin of the creature appear pale and sickly.

Something broke the surface of the pool, then drifted back down, but not before a seaweed sargasso of blonde hair kissed the surface.

"Oralie!" Dorsin slid to a stop beside the pool. Her face was a rictus of pain, twitching endlessly, and she drifted naked above the floor of the pool.

A floor, Dorsin realized, that was a body: flattened, devoid of organs, stretched out along the curving floor, holding the water as if the distended flesh were a cup.

Oralie floated up, and Dorsin grabbed for her head. His fingers closed on her hair. Gently, he tried to pull her out of the glowing water.

Resistance. The skin of the man, the Tool, had wrapped around her ankles, binding her to him. To it.

It would not let her go.

"Oralie," Dorsin said. "Oralie!" The glowing water remained still as a mountain pool.

Dorsin knew that glow. It had streaked the leaves of the plant-cocoon in which he'd gained his Symbiont. It flowed even now through his veins.

It was the Symbiont, concentrated and unfettered, and it sang to him.

He sang back to it, a wordless song half-remembered from days spent wrestling in his Chrysalis.

When he was six notes in, Oralie burst upward. Her face broke the water, and she gasped. "Dorsin!" she cried, though her eyes didn't open.

The world fell away.

"Is Rosabella right?" Oralie asked. "This is where the Symbiont comes from?"

"Xenovallus Symbiosus," broken-triangle responded. "The blessing from heaven, the Wisdom that guides our hands. Behold its father. The half-father of all of us. All except for you."

The Synapsis snapped away, and the world returned.

Dorsin had seen Oralie's memory.

Dorsin had been willing to sacrifice access to the Symbiont by destroying the High to save his wife. But was he willing to sacrifice the Symbiont itself?

To sacrifice the moaning, mumbling Tool that held his wife hostage?

The world needed the Symbiont.

But Dorsin needed Oralie.

And this whole corrupt institution--an institution which a mere hour ago Dorsin wouldn't have given a moment's thought to, but which had stolen his wife and drowned her in a lake of alien thoughts--needed to die.

Dorsin extruded the Symbiont-killer syringe from his palm and plunged it into the flesh of the Half-father of them all.