The search does not take long.
“This has to be it,” Sevro says outside a set of double doors gilded with gold.
“There will be Stained inside,” I say. “We should wait for Apollonius.”
“You need him to wipe your ass too?” Sevro asks. He kicks open the doors. “Time for your bill, Ass Lord.”
The room is quiet.
Despite the decadent floral moldings and whitewashed walls, the room is cavernous and sparse but for a large four-post bed that looks out an open balcony window to the sea. A pulseShield ripples faintly outside the windowsill. Around the bed squat a legion of hulking, polymelian forms. At first I think they are knights, but as a column of light from the outer suite illuminates the gray metal, I realize that they are not men at all, but medical machines. Small displays glow with life readings.
An old Pink in a nightgown and two Brown servants holding fire pokers guard the foot of the bed, shielding its inhabitant from us. The Browns charge, screaming at the top of their lungs. We take them down, trying not to kill them with our metal-covered fists. The Pink at the bed is wailing. “No,” she screams. “Stay away from him!”
I pull her from in front of the bed as Sevro approaches it warily. She slashes at me with her nails, breaking them against my armor. “Monsters!” Her spit sprays my face. “You monsters.” Sevro punches her in the back of the head. I catch her as she drops to the floor.
A deathly stench fills the room. Sevro stands at the base of the bed, his hand pulling back the silk curtains. His face is pale. “Darrow…” He jerks the silk curtains off the frame so I can see.
On the bed, lying in a nest of blankets, are the remnants of a giant. When I met the Ash Lord as a lancer to Augustus, he stood over seven feet in height and weighed as much as a Telemanus. At that time he was edging past a hundred. But he was still stately and spry despite his girth. That vigor he retained throughout our many bouts in the early stages of the war. And though his face has spoken on Core broadcasts over the last years, I see now that it was a ruse, and why he hides here in his seaswept citadel.
Barely a third of the man remains.
What does is emaciated and skeletal. His arms have shrunken in on themselves, the muscle withered away. The skin, once dark as onyx, is now loose and scabrous with yellow flakes, oozing pus into white bandages. His once-bright eyes are sunken into his head, which is bald, the skin tight and dry like a thin layer of scale over his titanic skull. Wires and fluid lines connect to the machines that guard his bed, cycling his blood and removing his waste. It’s as if he has been devoured from inside.
“I wondered who knocked,” he murmurs. His eyes—stained with a rotten yellow infection—watch me without malice. A hologram floats beside his bedside, showing us the battle outside. “I thought it the Saud, finally come to reclaim their planet. But now I see it ends as it should, with wolves.” The simple words brook no anger. The voice alone remembers the man. It is drum-deep, defiant and proud, even trapped as it is in his wasted body, like summer thunder captured in a tattered paper lantern.
For ten years we’ve been adversaries. Have danced across the worlds in a never-ending duel. Each move countered by the other, then re-countered in one giant game on many boards—first the metal jungle of Luna, the plains and seas of Earth and Mars, then the Core orbits, till finally the sand belt of Mercury, where I took the planet and he broke my army. Now all those vast theaters and the millions of men shrink down to this moment, to this small room on this far-flung isle, and none of it makes any bloodydamn sense.
“Am I not as you expected?” he asks with a smile.
“Let’s just cut his head off,” Sevro says.
“Not yet.”
“What are we waiting for? This piece of shit needs to meet the worms.”
“Not yet!” I snap. Sevro paces around the bed in agitation.
“You are precisely what I expected,” the Ash Lord says. “The destroyer of a civilization too often resembles its founders.” He wets his mouth from a water feeding tube and follows that up with a grotesque clearing of his throat. “I must apologize, Darrow. For not seeing you sooner—when you were just a boy who broke his Institute. Had I opened my eyes and noticed you, what a world we would still have. But I see you now. Yes. And you are immense.”
It’s admiration in his voice. It’s familiarity. How few people left breathing could understand this man? How many men know what it is like to give a command that kills millions? I swallow, my hatred for him quieted by the wretched thing he’s become, and my fear at heading down the same broken road.
This is not how I pictured our final confrontation.
“What happened to you?” I ask. “How long have you been like this?”
The Ash Lord ignores the question and searches my face. “I see you kept our scar. And our eyes. Then what of the Red remains?”
“Enough.”
“Ah,” he says quietly. “I suppose that is what every man must tell himself in war.” His voice rasps and he sucks again on the water tube. “That there will be an end, and when it is done, enough of himself will remain. Enough to be a father. A brother. A lover. But we know it isn’t true. Don’t we, Darrow? War eats the victors last.”
His words make a heaviness settle on me. I wish I could say I was different than him. That I will survive this war. But I know day by day the boy inside is dying. The spirit that ran through the halls of Lykos, that curled with Eo in bed, he began to die the day he watched his father dangle from a noose and did not cry.
“It’s a price I’m willing to pay to be done with you,” I say.
“That is part of your Red genetic character. Your yearning, your need to sacrifice. Brave pioneer. Toil, dig, die for the good of humanity. To make Mars green. We designed you to be the perfect slave. And that’s what you are, Darrow. A slave with many masters. Change your eyes. Take our scar. Break our reign. It won’t change what you are at your core. A slave.”
Bombs rumble outside. Sevro spits at the corner, nearing the end of his patience.
“Lorn once said you were his greatest friend,” I say. “That you were once a man to be admired. Before Rhea. Before you crowned yourself with ash.”
“Rhea was a rational transaction. Sixty million lives to keep order for eighteen billion.” His shrunken lips curl. “What do you think Lorn would have done if he saw what you were? Do you really think he would have spared you?”
“No, I think he would have cut my heart out,” I say. He could walk away from his Society, but he would never let it fall. I hear a sound at the door. Apollonius enters, alone. The Ash Lord’s eyes darken with hate. But in seeing the state of his nemesis, Apollonius does not look as dismayed as he should.