Mass Effect. Chapter 36. (Patreon)

Aellarin

Silvana sent me the draft of her victory address while fighting was still going on on Suen. There was a blank space left in the text for the date. I lingered on that empty line, then went back to the beginning and read the whole thing through without letting the incoming reports distract me.

She thanked our allies, remembered the dead, and spoke about returning to peacetime. The Dominion was given exactly as much space in the speech as befitted one member of the coalition. No promises to dictate what would happen to the liberated territories, no attempt to present the end of the war as our personal achievement.

Silvana knew how to speak on behalf of a state; she did not need my help choosing the words.

About a hundred years had passed since the first joint operation between the Dominion and Citadel Space. Back then, it could have seemed that the hardest threshold had already been crossed: we had learned to fight together, the enemy was being pushed back, and liberated systems had finally stopped being rare exceptions. Then it became clear just how much space still lay behind the rachni lines. On the common map, the front had been retreating toward Suen. Inside every system we liberated, planets still had to be taken one by one and supply routes secured.

Rachni factories continued to operate beneath surfaces shattered from orbit.

The krogan carried out the ground assaults. They entered the tunnels, seized production sites, fought their way toward the queens, and verified whether a hive had truly ceased to exist.

Krogan endurance suited the allied command very well. Where their own infantry would have required different preparation and suffered unacceptable losses, krogan could simply be sent forward; if the sector remained in rachni hands, more would follow. A high body count by itself was not considered a reason to stop.

By the time the coalition reached Suen, it had centuries of accumulated experience behind it. Links between sectors were cut, exits were sealed, and active production facilities were captured whenever possible before the final purge. Dropping a unit into an unprepared passage for the sake of an impressive deadline was no longer always considered a good idea. A lost detachment had to be replaced, and a failed assault delayed the units behind it and disrupted supply.

That did not make krogan lives especially valuable in the eyes of their allies. It simply meant that unnecessary losses might fail to achieve anything. When command considered the casualties justified, the krogan were ordered into the hive. And some clan leaders demanded the most visible sectors for their warriors themselves: there was no honor in taking the last great rachni capital while sitting in reserve.

Suen was one of the enemy's last worlds, but far from the only place where fighting remained. Its fall was meant to mark the end of organized resistance on this scale. For politicians, that was enough. No one wanted to postpone the victory address for years while one expedition after another inspected one cavity after another beneath one nameless mountain range after another.

The ships gathered at Suen came from all across the galaxy. Alongside the asari and salarians came batarians, quarians, elcor, and even the hanar and volus found a way to take part. Our own pennants were there as well. The Dominion operated on secondary axes, deliberately avoiding any role without which the offensive itself would have stalled.

As the end of the war drew closer, it became increasingly important to be counted among those who had helped bring it about. Even a small detachment gave its government grounds to speak of its contribution, and its diplomats something to remind others of during future negotiations.

But fighting together did not make the price paid by different species equal. One species' ship could carry out an operation on the edge of a system and return home almost untouched, while the krogan would still have to go underground.

They had acquired a dreadnought of their own as well: the Lug. It was the only ship of its class transferred to the clans before final victory. By then, the krogan contribution to the common offensive had become difficult to dispute, and the clans finally received a capital ship under their own command. No second ship of the design was built.

The Lug was laid down in salarian shipyards, with salarian, quarian, and our own engineers working on the project. The clans decided what they wanted from a heavy flagship in battle. The result was a machine built to break fortified lines, destroy capital ships, and coordinate large-scale assaults, with powerful defenses, enormous structural reserves, and a high degree of combat autonomy.

Behind those requirements one could feel the experience of those who had often been forced to keep fighting in damaged equipment and wait for help longer than promised. The Lug gave the clans a genuine tool, not merely an impressive symbol. But possessing a fleet flagship still did not give the krogan the right to decide for themselves what would happen after victory. Questions of territory were settled at other tables.

I had no intention of lying to myself about our own role. Vect and I had deliberately taken advantage of the war's length and done things that helped it continue. While our neighbors spent their strength, the Dominion consolidated its position, acquired technologies, and learned to operate inside a foreign political system. At some point, our security became noticeably less dependent on the next failure at the front. The other members of the coalition did not all gain that margin at the same time we did.

Now it was pleasant to see the result of that calculation. And unpleasant to realize how easy it was to grow accustomed to it. Other people's losses had long since become a routine part of the information on which I based decisions.

I did not need an endless war. A weakened galactic community was more convenient than a strong one, but a completely ruined one would stop providing much of what we had opened ourselves to obtain. Markets, scientific schools, industry, and the future allies themselves all had to remain alive. Victory was coming late enough for the Dominion to have made use of the war. I had no desire to demand another century from it.

There was also what the victory speech had no place for.

About fifty years before the current offensive, rachni behavior had begun to change. Too much of it looked as though they had suddenly awakened in the middle of their own catastrophe. Attempts at diplomatic contact appeared. From the information that reached me, the queens were looking for a way to stop the extermination, but the coalition no longer wanted to listen.

I was not surprised by that refusal. Those who had lost their worlds heard the enemy's appeals as a request to preserve its own. For the asari, the memory of dead loved ones could remain personal even a century later; the salarians inherited institutions that had grown out of the war, along with their missions and conclusions. The krogan saw the rachni only from firing distance. Every side had reasons to continue, and diplomatic attempts often provoked even greater fury.

What interested me was something else: why had the change happened at all? The shift in the situation at the front explained much, but not necessarily everything. I remembered the words about the Great Mother and returned to them whenever new reports fit poorly with the queens' earlier behavior. There was not enough evidence to connect those things conclusively. But neither was there any reason to discard the question.

Even rachni caches began to look different. The rachni had hidden eggs before, but now clutches were increasingly found in places from which the offspring could hardly have emerged in time to affect the ongoing war. It seemed the queens were already thinking about the time after their own deaths.

Underground hives offered more than enough opportunities for that. A chamber behind several layers of rock, a side branch sealed before the others, a clutch far from known lines of communication - any of those could survive both the assault and the inspection that followed. Caches were found underground beyond the hives themselves, in oceans, even on asteroids. We had to assume that what we found represented only part of what had been left behind.

Scientists estimated that an egg might survive for five hundred years in a space environment. Under suitable conditions on a living world, it might last even longer. We did not have five centuries of observations for every type of clutch to treat that estimate as a guarantee, but it was more than enough for quarantine services.

That was why the fall of a hive did not close the story of a planet. Drilling came next, inspections of surviving tunnels, searches for old plans, and years of monitoring. Oceans were checked down to the deep trenches, along with polar ice caps and caves beyond the known hives; quarantine could last for decades. No one had invented a device capable of reliably finding every egg beneath kilometers of rock. By signing a permit, an inspector confirmed that the area had been examined by the available methods. They could not guarantee the absence of clutches.

And the surface itself was often no longer suitable for colonists. The rachni reshaped biospheres around their own food and living conditions; afterward, coalition fleets passed over their worlds. Roughly a quarter of the surveyed former rachni worlds were declared unsuitable for normal colonization for the foreseeable future. Life remained there. That did not make restoring the old ecosystem, or settling sapients for whom the local environment would not be poisonous, any easier.

I imagined what the first postwar offers to settlers would look like. A system name, promises of work, a picture of an attractive stretch of coastline, and a long appendix of restrictions. Many such worlds would have to be exploited for a very long time without ordinary settlements. The war had taught us not to treat a mark on a map as sufficient proof that a territory could actually be used.

I thought separately about the few rachni who had survived with us. Almost all had been killed; the remaining ones were very far away, loyal to the Dominion and to me, and almost no one knew they existed. Neither the public victory nor the future arguments over quarantine could be allowed to draw foreign attention closer to their refuge. I had no intention of tying their fate to declarations about the enemy's complete extermination.

I set the address aside. Our industries were already filling foreign orders, and Aiterri who had settled abroad were tying their own futures to those places. The war had helped us take our place among our neighbors, but trade and travel had long since outgrown military necessity. To understand what victory would change, it was worth remembering where we had started and how far we had moved beyond our original calculations.

When we opened the borders, what I wanted above all was access to foreign knowledge and industry. I wanted what our neighbors did better, wanted to learn how they did it, and wanted to keep them from using that access to subordinate us in return. Vect had spent several decades preparing that rapprochement, and even with all his careful planning, we could not have imagined in advance what the agreements would become once billions of Aiterri began using them.

The Dominion already ranked fourth in population, behind the salarians, batarians, and asari, while leaving the quarians behind.

It had become difficult to treat us as an insignificant neighbor. But the size of a state alone was not enough to make foreign markets welcome it. A supplier could possess an enormous fleet and still lose a contract to someone whose products were easier to repair and whose failures were easier to make claims over. What mattered to new partners was what exactly they would receive from the Dominion and who would guarantee that the agreement was honored.

I could see the result of Vect's work in the behavior of the partners themselves. Our companies used shared rules with growing confidence, while foreign firms found enough benefit in cooperation to defend it without having to be asked. Those interests remained even when diplomats changed.

The Citadel already had common patent law, trade regulations, and institutions powerful enough to make others take them seriously. The war had increased the need for all of them. Cargo moved through several jurisdictions, medicines were supplied to multiple species. Carriers depended on foreign ports and access rules. It was more profitable for those involved in trade to settle matters within recognized procedures than to begin each dispute from nothing.

The Councilors gained more influence as those procedures became part of everyday necessity. They did not need to strip the republics of sovereignty for a decision on whether to approve a medicine to affect hospitals across several states at once. Companies turned to the Citadel for patent protection and dispute resolution; passengers grew accustomed to relying on its transportation rules. More and more matters that had once been handled inside individual states became common concerns. The Council's dependence on the asari and salarians had not disappeared, but its room to act within that dependence was growing.

Trade had worked the way we expected. Many of our developments complemented asari and salarian products, reduced costs, or allowed others to preserve what had previously been lost. The Dominion did not have to displace every existing supplier.

The war had also given us access to new sources of raw materials. Systems retaken during the century after the joint operation had been declared common territory of the galactic community.

Extraction rights could be obtained on acceptable terms. Dangerous territories required investments that governments were slow to make, and the conditions determining whether a place was suitable for mining were very different from those determining whether one could raise children there. An automated mine could work on a poisoned surface. A few hundred specialists maintained the equipment from an orbital station and traveled only to limited areas that had passed inspection.

Only resource-extraction companies were allowed to operate in the former rachni territories opened for use. Risk was simply built into the cost of security, inspections, and downtime.

The Dominion received concessions for a hundred, two hundred, sometimes three hundred years. Within the first few decades, an enterprise had time to build supply, repair, and permanent sales networks around itself. Ore went to Hivencor and our other industrial worlds, contracts flowed back to our carriers, and it was easier to develop new sites when your equipment was already operating nearby.

Mining on worlds unsuitable for ordinary life created demand for orbital settlements. Against that background, the asari developed a concept for a spherical garden ship capable of producing food. There was something appealing about the idea: your own greenery, living space, the ability not to depend on a devastated surface. I liked the very desire to build such a vessel.

My enthusiasm diminished noticeably when the estimates appeared. An enormous ship required expensive construction and extensive research, while no convincing military application could be found for it. In government circles, the concept more often served as the subject of jokes. Even so, several states began research: among the asari there were enough people who could fund an interesting idea for a very long time without demanding that it justify itself by the next meeting.

Our proposal was simpler. Large standardized blocks from which a space station could be assembled could be mass-produced and transported aboard specially adapted ships. The station could not move as a whole to another star. It had to be dismantled, loaded in sections, delivered, and reassembled, but even with all that work the solution was often cheaper than a unique ship.

Housing blocks and warehouses were followed by hospitals, generator modules, and facilities for growing food. A customer could order exactly what its enterprise required and expand the station later. The manufacturer did not have to redesign the entire structure for every new mine. The more orders there were, the cheaper each production run became and the more readily customers bought it.

Competitors appeared, of course. Patents protected specific designs. Rivals had to find other solutions, make their own blocks work together, and at the same time try to match our price. Small production runs lost both on cost and on how thoroughly the designs had been tested, although some companies still managed to find their own buyers.

The approach had limits as well. Civilian security modules sold well alongside the stations, but assembling a full military base the same way was not economical. Requirements for protection and operation under fire quickly consumed the savings.

After victory, the market was expected to change even more. For centuries, shipyards had built warships, chemical plants had produced explosives and fuel, medics had worked for the front, and transport companies had supplied armies. Those capacities would not vanish with the final victory announcement. They would need work, and cheap surplus equipment would compete with new production.

Military transports would be converted into freighters, old escort ships into patrol and rescue vessels. All of that would take decades, require modifications, and demand inspections of remaining service life. But the Dominion, already experienced in modular production and maintenance, was entering that transition in a strong position.

That did not make us the best at everything. We never broke into the mass supply of weapons to krogan armies; medical deliveries remained a separate success. Military procurement had long since been divided up, and standardized weapons had to fit existing stocks, training, and repair networks. An expensive suit that outperformed a foreign model did not automatically become a suitable order for an entire army.

On the private market, however, the Great Houses found buyers. Inside the Dominion, the sale of many combat suits they had developed was prohibited; Citadel Space had no such ban. The designs had to be reworked for the anatomy, movement, and habits of different species.

In that niche, our models noticeably surpassed asari and quarian offerings. The asari tried to be present in almost every attractive market, and quarian cybernetics were considered among the best, but the Houses produced the better complete combat package.

Wealthy krogan readily ordered custom versions. Clan leaders, the few major merchants, and successful private mercenaries could afford equipment unavailable to an ordinary shock trooper. They especially liked the heavy weapons that our Blessed carried: Mortals lacked the strength for such armament. Self-guided missiles using element zero, heavy projectile systems, reinforced actuators - all of it sold without much persuasion.

Handheld mass weapons became a separate success. Export versions of the Eternals' close-combat weapons were fitted with built-in power cells, removing the need for the user to be a skilled biotic. The cell required recharging and maintenance, but a krogan could use the weapon without the Gift.

Those weapons required ammunition, new protective components, replacement cells and actuators, and software updates. Service contracts were signed for decades. Representatives of the Houses began appearing with major clans because it was profitable for them to keep technicians close to their customers, and profitable for the krogan not to send expensive equipment halfway across known space.

Buyers did not always think about that at the time of purchase; later, changing suppliers became a separate expense. I was pleased that our Houses were creating this dependence, but I had lived among them long enough to understand that once a House had a customer, it would try to profit from that customer's difficulties as well. Competition was no less necessary here than in foreign markets.

The clans had money. They were paid well for every recruit sent against the rachni. But in my estimation, compensation proportionate to saving the galaxy should have been orders of magnitude higher. The funds were not distributed evenly, and one leader's expensive armor said nothing about the wealth of all his warriors. Besides, payments were no substitute for the planets the krogan expected to receive.

Opening foreign markets also brought consequences that were far less convenient. Reports from the Shadows on batarian trade repeatedly mentioned the sale of Aiterri Mortals. Some Houses began relationships with influential local owners through gifts dressed up in respectable contractual language. The wording did not change the substance: members of our own species were being handed over into slavery.

Middle Houses on remote Dominion colonies distinguished themselves especially often. And while a new species was still regarded as a rarity, there was good money to be made from it.

Then supply increased, prices fell, and Aruns and Lizards began appearing in the same schemes. I read such reports without pleasure, but no longer with surprise. We had used dependence inside our own society for too long to expect every House to stop at the boundary of what was permitted out of simple kinship. Beyond the state's borders, the temptation to test that boundary became even stronger.

The government condemned the slave trade, and several openly piratical stations were subjected to punitive expeditions. Houses whose guilt was exposed were destroyed harshly and publicly. Their commercial positions were taken over by others that had not stained themselves by selling their own citizens.

The offices and useful connections remained. Only the owners changed.

This did not turn into a war against the batarian system of slavery. The Dominion continued to trade, and citizens saw that the criminals had been punished. I did not confuse punishing a few guilty parties with eliminating the market itself. But neither did I want to abandon our presence in foreign space and surrender everything to competitors.

Abroad, meanwhile, our reputation remained excellent. Most buyers encountered medi-gel, reliable equipment, new stations, or competent specialists rather than the crimes of individual Houses. In ordinary conversations about galactic neighbors, the Aiterri were associated with greedy trade or slavery far less often than the volus and batarians. Their bad reputation helped our good one, though neither explained the behavior of every individual partner.

Far harder to predict was how the Aiterri themselves would use their freedom. Young Blessed were already choosing where to work, whom to live with, and what contracts to sign without feeling much gratitude toward those who had once fought to make such choices possible for them. I considered that right, though their carelessness sometimes irritated me.

They acquired acquaintances abroad, foreign professional habits, and tastes considered strange at home. Some returned after their first failures. Others settled in so thoroughly that the Dominion remained their homeland but ceased to be the only imaginable place for their future.

Foreigners quickly realized how formidable a trained Blessed could be in combat. To defeat a heavily armed krogan, one did not have to be among the strongest; skilled use of biotics was an advantage in itself. In a specialized combat suit, a Blessed became an opponent who usually required vastly superior forces to stop. Those who had no intention of ever entering a tunnel still wanted that kind of capability beside them.

Stories about the Eternals increased the interest. Blessed explained the difference by comparing their own strength to that of a Mortal. I would not have turned that into an exact ratio for military calculations, but such an explanation was usually enough for the listener. The natural question followed: if Aiterri available to a private employer were already that dangerous, what could a state inhabited by Eternals do?

Contracts offered to Blessed became more and more lucrative. Asari matrons hired bodyguards, volus expanded elite security details, and batarians signed agreements with independent mercenaries. Batarian clients understood that an expensive specialist would leave if treated badly, and that holding one by force would not be easy. Blessed were paid for strength, reliability, and a willingness to remain nearby at unpleasant moments.

Banning all of this would have turned permitted life abroad into a fiction very quickly. We chose to make use of the connections that were forming.

About one percent of those mercenaries worked directly for our intelligence services, and another one percent belonged to deep-cover operations. Half of the rest knew that even after betraying an employer, they could find refuge in the Dominion and would not be extradited.

The promise of asylum alone did not make them agents. Many formed entirely sincere relationships with their employers; a bodyguard could protect one family for years and come to regard it as their own. We did not demand that such a person become disillusioned with that family simply because doing so would make the intelligence possibilities easier to interpret.

We encouraged honest fulfillment of contracts as long as the service did not harm the Dominion. A reputation for reliable mercenaries opened doors for those who came after them, including those with other assignments.

The war had meanwhile changed the way biotics themselves were viewed. The coalition had seen them used in practice for long enough that interest was no longer limited to a handful of exceptional fighters. Krogan biotics, asari experience, and the abilities of the Blessed all pushed researchers to look for ways to increase the number of gifted individuals and use their abilities more effectively. Research programs were already expanding, and after the war they might receive some of the funds that had previously gone toward replacing losses.

Foreigners were especially interested in Saelina's Neitron complex. It proved toxic to other species, and researchers began attacking different aspects of the problem.

Export of Neitron from the Dominion was banned completely, including research samples. Our partners could study Aiterri biology, compare publicly available information, and propose their own hypotheses without it, but access to the development itself remained closed: we had no intention of sharing our scientific heritage.

A black market followed. Some hoped to alter the composition, some to find the right dosage, and some simply sold counterfeits to buyers who had no way to verify the contents. Sellers promised to grant power to an adult buyer even though the real drug increased the probability that a gifted child would be born and was toxic to other species. They explained the ban by claiming that the Aiterri were hiding a safe method of use. Even a failed experiment could be blamed on the wrong drug, the wrong dosage, or interference by a competitor. There was always another buyer for the next attempt.

Aiterri and asari entered romances during travel, study, or long periods of work abroad. Ordinary sex between our species was possible, and the physical differences often attracted rather than discouraged.

They could not have children together. For many Aiterri, that shaped the relationship from the beginning as a romance after which they would return to familiar life and a family of their own species. But an intention to spend only a few months together did not guarantee that parting would remain easy.

I remembered Malena and Decian's case from the first diplomatic contact between Citadel Space and the Dominion far too well to calmly accept attempts to present biological incompatibility as a beautiful obstacle overcome by the power of love. Cinema, naturally, had already done exactly that.

In one famous story, an Aiterri and an asari fell in love aboard a ship caught in a rachni ambush. When there was no longer any hope of rescue, they chose to meld so that they could feel each other's love one last time. The asari died; her lover, shedding the appropriately manly tears, drove the ship into a rachni dreadnought and saved the rest of the fleet.

The fashion for our culture began among wealthy asari who were fascinated by a new civilization, and the rest of the Citadel elite soon followed. They bought music, films, clothing, commissioned architectural designs, and tried our cuisine. The Dominion looked like an ancient, wealthy civilization that had remained closed for a very long time. Some of that former inaccessibility could still be sold even after the borders opened.

The Great Houses learned that market quickly. An individual object could be made more valuable by selling along with it an idea of how Aiterri lived: home interiors, the habits of the owners, suitable music and food. The result was recognizable, even if far from every inhabitant of the Dominion would have recognized their own daily life in the package. An asari customer bought what she wanted to imagine; it was more profitable for the manufacturer to sustain that interest than to explain how many less elegant apartments existed in the Dominion.

Foreign tastes also influenced our artists who found buyers abroad. I did not always like the result. But any attempt to permit only useful borrowing would quickly run into the question of who exactly was supposed to distinguish useful from useless in someone else's private life.

Education produced a slower exchange. A humanities university organized according to asari standards appeared beside the large Museum of Modern Species. Study lasted no less than twenty-five years. That was a serious period even for a Blessed, but it allowed another culture to be studied more deeply than successful trade required. Blessed, asari, and roughly a dozen krogan admitted under diplomatic agreements with the clans studied there.

I liked the thought that a future krogan counterpart might acquire experience that did not reduce everything to war. Someone was already being offered years among books and foreign ways of understanding the world instead of yet another contract at the front.

The Museum of Extinct Civilizations affected me differently. Copies of Prothean beacons provided by the Citadel stood beside other evidence of the past. More than fifteen exhibits came from civilizations destroyed by the rachni. Sometimes all that remained to us from an entire history was a single object whose purpose still had to be determined.

The ancient ship that had once spurred many of our own developments was displayed there as well. Its stealth panels had been removed: we still could not reproduce their design. Visitors were shown a vessel belonging to a species believed to have existed at roughly the same time as the Protheans. Behind that cautious phrasing lay ignorance that had survived a very long period of study.

Museum copies were sent to deep-storage archives, and gradually the program ceased to be limited to collections. Languages, scientific databases, plant genomes, art, history, technical instructions - down to the information needed to begin rebuilding an industrial civilization - were preserved. Dozens of repositories on different worlds meant that everything did not depend on one fortunate location.

Other states laughed at first, then began creating archives of their own. The asari focused on memory and cultural heritage, the salarians on practical technologies, and the quarians on creating as many independent copies as possible. I did not expect our caches to survive every conceivable catastrophe. But the possibility of leaving at least something for whoever came after us was worth the expense.

The Rachni War itself was accumulating monuments as well. Memorials to battles already existed, sites where fleets had died were preserved, and tours were organized to former enemy systems that had been checked many times over. For some, it was family memory; for others, the history of their species' arrival on the galactic stage. And there were souvenir hunters willing to secretly carry away a fragment of a hive or even an egg without thinking about what quarantine was for.

By evening, new lights had come on along the neighboring roof. I was about to close the window when a message arrived over a secure channel. The text, relayed through several communication nodes, already contained confirmation from allied command: the primary objectives on Suen had been taken by krogan units, large-scale organized resistance had been broken. The operation was being declared a victory.

I read the message again. The qualifications remained thoroughly military: clearing operations continuing, isolated pockets, the need to hold captured sectors. There was apparently still gunfire on Suen. But what we had been waiting for roughly two hundred and fifty years had finally happened.

For several moments I sat with one hand on the edge of the desk. Then I realized I was pressing my fingers too hard into the wood and pulled my hand away. I wanted to tell someone immediately - although Silvana had probably received confirmation before I had, and everyone else would hear it publicly soon enough. I started to compose a reply, but could not think of anything to add to the confirmation.

We had won.

***

The next day, I left my airspeeder not far from the Council Palace and crossed the square on foot. Eldarin was still celebrating. Passersby stopped beneath decorated facades, called to one another across the street, and congratulated acquaintances they would normally have acknowledged with nothing more than a nod. Several times I had to step aside for children racing between adults and showing absolutely no interest in whose solemn portrait happened to be displayed on the nearest wall.

Near Heroes' Square, the movement became calmer. There were visitors here as well, but people lingered longer beside the monuments. Some read the inscriptions; others explained to their companions what the Aiterri immortalized in stone or metal had been famous for. I passed several groups and stopped in front of the monument to Emberlis Vale.

The sculptor had chosen a composed, severe expression for her. It was recognizable, though in life I had more often seen that face under circumstances no inscription on a pedestal would ever mention. The sculpted Emberlis looked out over the square.

I read the name, then the short inscription beneath it. The inquisitor's public life was over. Her achievements could be listed in the past tense, controversial decisions explained by the circumstances of the era, and her biography studied as a complete whole. The convenience of a finished story was especially noticeable when you knew how much of it had never been told.

One of the visitors studied the monument for a long time, then led her companion toward the next one. I waited until they had moved away. An Aiterri woman who had been standing to one side approached me and raised her gaze as well.

"Have you been here long?" she asked quietly without turning.

"Just arrived."

Emberlis - because it was her - shifted her gaze to the inscription. I recognized her by the attention she paid to my voice and the carefully controlled restraint of her movements.

"I look too stern here," she said after a short silence.

We moved a little farther aside, where passersby could not overhear a quiet conversation. From there, a branch hid the upper part of the statue while the name remained visible. Emberlis turned toward me and folded her hands in front of herself.

"Handing over my duties is harder than I expected," she said. "Something always turns up that I would rather finish myself."

"Will that pass soon?"

"I don't know, my lord. If I wait until every matter is finished, I will never leave."

She spoke about leaving with the same matter-of-fact precision with which she used to explain the progress of trials to me. I would gladly have asked what remained unfinished and spent another half hour on that conversation.

I remembered the incident with Maddock and smiled despite myself. I was still the only person who knew that Emberlis was an Eternal. But her loyalty had never protected me from surprises.

"This time you did come to see me before leaving," I said.

Emberlis lowered her eyes, and I thought she understood exactly what I had remembered.

"I wasn't planning to hide this idea from you."

"I know. I meant something else. You've already decided to go."

I looked at the monument again. She would no longer need the old legend. Usually it was I who disappeared from the lives of those close to me for a time; now Emberlis was leaving, and the wait might last longer than several of my lives. Even when I managed to return, some reunions were already impossible. Asmund was gone, and no new body could change that.

Vale stood beside me, alive, looking at me. I could ask her to stay. She would listen - and that was exactly why I hesitated to ask.

"We may not see each other again in this millennium, Emberlis," I said. "Are you sure about this plan? I could use you here."

She did not answer at once. Somewhere on the square, someone called to a companion who had fallen behind; I followed a passing group with my eyes almost automatically. Emberlis waited until they were gone, then turned back to me.

"Yes, my lord. I am sure. After what you told me about the future, I cannot let this opportunity pass."

The words were calm, without any promise that she would necessarily return successful. I knew she was capable of acknowledging risks when a concrete course of action was involved.

"And yet it still seems to me that you agreed to this too easily," I said.

"I can refuse, if you order me to."

There was no challenge in her voice. That was what made it difficult. She truly would abandon everything if I demanded it, and she would find the explanation herself: I could see what she could not yet see. With trust like that, it was very easy to abuse one's position and call every personal desire a necessity.

"I don't want to keep you here by ordering you to stay." I shook my head.

Emberlis unfolded her hands, then placed one palm over the other again.

"It isn't easy, my lord. I had to leave behind many things I wanted to do. And I would like to keep working beside you." She looked directly at me. "But I was the one who proposed this path."

"I would prefer it if you stayed a little longer," I said at last. "Not because the others cannot manage. I would simply like to know that you are here."

"I would like that too, my lord," she replied quietly.

I nodded. We stood in silence for a while, and I no longer wanted to search for one more argument that might persuade her to remain.

"Take care of yourself, Emberlis."

"I'll try, my lord." She looked into my face. "And you as well."

I reached out and briefly squeezed her hand.