‘Most of it. I have people looking to me. I was never a leader, Ari. Always happier just doing my own thing. I only took Said and Wahir with me because they couldn’t go back. Said especially, but Wahir needed to come along or he’d talk and talk and talk, and I was afraid someone would overhear. Then Alessandra, because I wanted her on my side rather than selling information about me.’

‘Does it matter what they were? They’re your brothers and sister now. I’ve seen the way they act even when you’re not there: they follow you because they want to, not because you make them.’ Ariadne paused. ‘You have a princess too.’

‘Yes, yes I do. And the half-mad monk she travels with. Now there’s a relationship I don’t pretend to understand. He stopped her from harming the emperor and nearly killed her in the process.’

‘Va was indeed mad when we met him. However, speaking with him has been instructive. He believes himself to be nothing but a tool of his god, to be used as he sees fit. I was able to turn this to our advantage and convince him that our appearance was fore-ordained. He no longer poses a threat to us.’

‘I can sense a but coming.’

‘But what if I’m right? What if I’ve discovered a fundamental truth: that we are pawns in his game, rather than he in ours? I need to think on these matters further.’

Benzamir could almost feel the ship’s systems slow as Ariadne concentrated on the metaphysical problem. ‘Well, if we’ve failed, then it is the most glorious failure. We’ve been to Earth, Ari. Where it all began for us. The seeds of your birth are there too. What we’ve seen, the things we’ve heard, the people we’ve met. Those who’ve fought by our side. But we can’t honestly count this as failure because it would cheapen everything else – every kindness shown, every smile, every laugh, every bead of sweat and drop of blood. You’re right: we can’t take anything back, and I wouldn’t want to. So let’s be content with what we have without worrying about what might have been.’

‘What will happen to Persephone?’ she asked in a small voice, sounding more like a little child than a ship that could leap between stars.

‘I don’t know,’ said Benzamir. ‘If it comes to it, will you fight her?’

‘This time I will.’

‘Then we’ve said everything that needs to be said. Show me the world again.’

He watched the landscape slip away underneath him as Antarctic mountaintops hung onto the last vestiges of day, burning orange peaks against the shadows all around.

‘Benzamir?’

He heard hesitant footsteps behind him. ‘Hello, Alessandra.’

‘What is this I’m looking at?’

‘It’s where you live. There are things like telescopes on the outside of Ariadne, and the view is brought in here by machines.’

‘It’s so’ – her voice caught in her throat – ‘beautiful.’

‘And it belongs to you, to all of you.’

‘We—’ She stopped, and started again, noticing that he’d ditched his palace finery for a grey quilted pilot’s coverall. To her, it seemed different, almost alien. ‘I didn’t know where you’d gone.’

Benzamir sighed, slid from his chair and walked into the middle of the display, which swallowed his legs and left his upper body troubled only by clouds. ‘I just wanted a moment to see it for what it is. You can see the scars of cities from up here, the places where roads once joined them up, strange patterns made by long-dead peoples. On top of those there are new buildings, new trade routes crossed by horses and camels, new states ruled over by new leaders, even if they do take old titles and style themselves after barely remembered legends.’

Alessandra walked forward to stand close to him, marvelling at the way the map of the world passed under her, through her. A continent she had seen only in ancient maps slid by, a spine of snow and a plain of grassland. Pin-sharp rivers and puffy crowns of forests revealed their riches.

They crossed the flooded valleys of the coast and moved out into the wave-flecked ocean. Benzamir shifted uncomfortably. ‘I’m sorry. I’m being a bad host. I need to go and wake the princess, and then I can explain everything to all of you. I’d rather I only had to do it once.’

He made to leave, and she noticed his limp.

‘You’re hurt.’

‘I know. It’ll fix itself eventually.’

‘I don’t want to fuss.’ She caught his sleeve and held him still for a moment. Then she let her grip fall and said: ‘You don’t need me to look at your leg, do you? You have machines to do that too.’

‘Both inside and out. I’m not—’ And he thought about the problems he’d had telling Said and Wahir where he had come from and how he had got here. ‘I’m only mostly human. I’ve some extra bits and pieces that help me do my job.’

She looked him up and down. ‘You look normal to me. What are you saying?’

Benzamir sighed, and tried to turn her round with a hand on her elbow. She shook him off.

‘Really. What are you trying to tell me? How much of you isn’t a man?’

‘All the magic is done by machines. Some of the machines are inside me; the controls for the rest are also inside. My eyes aren’t real. I’ve a personal shield grown under my skin. Things like that.’ He studied her for her reaction. Her face registered a creeping realization; it was a start. ‘I thought you ought to know. I don’t want to hide what I am any more.’

Alessandra stared, not exactly at him, but through him. ‘Is this a test?’

Benzamir nodded. ‘Yes, that’s precisely what it is.’ He sidestepped round her to the door and hesitated. He thought for a moment that she might say something, do something, even follow him. She didn’t.

CHAPTER 38

BENZAMIR WALKED SLOWLY over to the surgeon’s table, where Elenya lay sleeping. He hardly dared look at her, though eventually he did.

‘Alessandra is right: when Princess Elenya has regained consciousness, I should do some remedial work on you,’ said Ariadne.

‘We don’t have time. They know we’re here. They know how many of us there are and what resources we have.’

‘You mean they’ve worked out it’s just me and you. But they haven’t launched against us. They’ve stayed stealthed.’ She paused. ‘I think they’re frightened of us.’

‘I thwarted their coup. They’re more likely to be furious than frightened.’ He picked up the metal tray in which lay the serrated disc the surgeon had extracted from Elenya’s guts. Blood and flesh clung to its blades. ‘I wish I knew what they were waiting for.’

Ariadne showed him Elenya’s vital signs. They looked well within tolerances for an unmodified human; figures that had had to be dredged out of the archives. Benzamir took the cloth off Elenya’s wound. It had been sealed shut with canned skin, but the bruising was working its way out as an elliptical target in yellow and black.

He put the tray down and did what he could not risk doing if Elenya had been awake. A strand of her hair had stuck to her cheek; he brushed it free with the tip of his finger.

‘Such beauty, such passion,’ he whispered. ‘You could turn a man to good or evil with one smile.’

Her eyes opened, and he stepped hastily back.

‘What were you saying?’

To his relief, he realized she couldn’t understand a word of Nu. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, too quickly. ‘How are you? Any pain?’

‘No. None. I don’t know what you did to me.’ Elenya looked down and found her dress cut, torn, stained with gore, but no visible wound. ‘Where did it go?’

He fetched her the disc. ‘It made a mess going in, and a bit more coming out again. We think we connected everything back together again the right way. Just don’t do any heavy lifting for a while.’

‘We?’ she asked.

‘Me. Ariadne. I’m sorry about your clothes.’

She tried to sit up and winced as the bruise compressed.