I finally hold up my hands, relieved to find they are not visibly shaking.
"Then I wish to negotiate." I say it in Vetusian too, though mine isn't as smooth or elegant.
The notion still ludicrous as it leaves my mouth, but we're here now.
"I believe we may be able to help each other." I itch to move, to do anything to feel less vulnerable.
But I have to trust Eidhin will find a good position to act, should things turn violent.
"An interesting proposition, from the man who has ruined so much." The shadow shifts. "How do you believe we can do this, Carnifex?"
"You need a replacement for Princeps Exesius, and an end to this war." I say it as if it is not a guess.
I peer at him, then, reluctantly, let my metal mask and arm melt away.
"My name is Quintus Vis Telimus Catenicus, and I can give you both. I have the legitimacy and the popularity to bind these pretenders beneath me. But to do that, I need something that will force them to the table, regardless of their legions." I close my eyes.
Gods help me. "Something that will make them fear me enough to temper their ambitions."
Another long silence. A complete lack of motion from the shadowed figure.
"You decided upon this course only hours ago," he says eventually.
I frown. "I have been thinking about it all week, but … I suppose."
"Why?"
"Because my options were limited."
"Yet you evidently knew I was already looking for you. Intending to kill you, given the chance. Just as, I assume, whoever so clumsily dangled you intended to kill me."
I swallow. Thrown by the strange and unsettling veer in conversation. "They were really limited options."
"Undoubtedly." Still an absence of emotion, but I imagine dry amusement in the response, this time.
"Even so. When a man is Synchronous, sometimes things bleed through. Small things. Inexplicable impressions, instincts you may not normally have. A whisper of the memory of knowledge. And I think, perhaps—unless the coincidence is extraordinary—this is why we are speaking now." Another pause.
Face still shadowed. "Do you know my purpose, Catenicus?"
"To cause another Cataclysm." No point in pretending.
"No. That is means, not purpose." The dark shape shifts.
"More than nine in every ten dead, in this world. It is a horror and heartbreak that cannot be explained in numbers or words. But that sacrifice is to save the one in ten. It is to prevent the obliteration of two worlds, and the enslavement of whichever remains." A pause.
"And as of a few hours ago, you are now the only man alive who can fulfil that purpose."
He steps forward out of the shadows, and the flickering light of the distant fires reveals a man in his thirties, haggard and unkempt, with shoulder-length black hair.
A crooked nose. Dirty and unremarkable. "I will help you. I will give you what you need. This iunctus will guide you—and your friend lurking in the shadows, if he wishes—to where you need to go, while I prepare. All I ask in return is that you truly hear what I have told you. A choice of many lives, or all of them, Catenicus. That will be your burden, now."
There's a scream from a few streets over. Echoing and hollow and haunting as it drifts through the hush and then cuts off abruptly. To my right, Eidhin slowly emerges from the darkness.
I feel light-headed. Nauseous. Another deception? I can't see its purpose. It's not something I am going to believe without proof, and a lot of it.
But I have not been asked for anything except my attention. Not yet.
And he has that, now.
"I'm listening," I eventually say quietly.
THE FIRST brIGHT RAYS OF DAWN KISS THE UPPERMOST tombs of Agerus as Eidhin and I trudge wearily behind the iunctus, the Necropolis and its thousands upon thousands of graves stretching away across fields divided by the flickering orange of the Eternal Flames.
Beautiful, and utterly desolate. No sign of the Military personnel who would normally be here.
It took almost an hour for the iunctus to guide us to the docks through the burning and blood of Caten's fracturing.
Ka seemed to relinquish his control of the dead man before we could ask anything more; since Alta Semita our guide has been completely unresponsive to both conversation and command, calm and mechanical as he steered us unerringly around blockades and patrols and, finally, onto an empty bireme that immediately began gliding into the darkness of Caten's harbour.
It was hours before our ship angled toward the shore again.
Despite my weak protests, Eidhin spent much of the start of the journey checking my wounds and then applying fresh makeshift bandages, padding everything so that the discomfort of my crutches would not be so bad when I did have to walk again.
He brushed off my gratitude with a familiar, dismissive grunt before finally tending to himself.
After that, I dozed fitfully, carefully prone, metal bracing rearranged to best ensure the shape of my legs.
Too exhausted to fully stay awake. Too angry, and anxious, and heartbroken, and in pain, to sleep for long.
I would slumber and then wake with a jolt to the gentle motion of the boat, and remember Aequa, and all of the helpless injustice would come thundering back, and I would lie there and stare at the night sky and let the rage that pounded my heart lend me more of its determination, second by second.
Eidhin, I think, did not even try to sleep.
I often stirred to find him nearby at the bow, leaning against the railing and watching as the inky waves of the Sea of Quus broke silver against our passage.
In my waking times, we talked occasionally.
About what Ka said, whether it could possibly be true.
About what might come next. But mostly we gazed in silence.
Captives of our own thoughts and worries and grieving furies.
The sharing of heavy burdens in each other's company, even if neither of us said them aloud.
And now as we trail the dead man past graves and mausoleums, I know where we are headed. Only confirmed as we turn down the almost invisible path into the mountain and pass beneath the archway, its writing barely visible in the early dim.
Death is the door to life.
"This is where Emissa took me, when we came to see the prisoner," I tell Eidhin grimly.
He glances at the iunctus uneasily. "Why would the Concurrence have brought us here?"
"The Concurrence have not brought you here." We both flinch and curse at the statement of the dead man in front, abrupt in the hollowness of the thin chasm.
He turns to us, and I can suddenly see an awareness in his gaze that hasn't been there since Caten.
"They are the enemy. Humanity's enemy, which I have fought my entire life.
Do not conflate us." Delivered emotionlessly again, but he pauses, staring at each of us as if to ensure we understand, before moving on.
Eidhin and I exchange shaken looks, and follow. It does, I suppose, suggest an answer to the main question we debated on our way here. If the Cataclysms are really to stop something worse, what could be the cause of the latter?
It seems we have our answer.
My mind reels, and I can see Eidhin silently trying to make sense of it too.
Was Veridius working with the Concurrence, then?
No. Surely no advantage to him in deliberately obfuscating like that—and he even admitted that he had drawn his own conclusions about the ancient enemy described in the ruins, and their role in the Cataclysms.
Still. The revelation unbalances me more than it should, challenging a truth I was somehow certain of. I feel sick. Oddly horrified. As if it were important to me that my original understanding was true.
"Who are the Concurrence, then?" I say it into the hush as the iunctus lights a lantern, and we forge into the darkness of the tunnel.
The iunctus moves steadily ahead of us. "Not a who.' A what.' A self-contained latticework of iunctii. The remnants of a rogue system which once controlled the lives of hundreds of millions of people across the world. Across the world, before the Rending."
I exchange a look with Eidhin, who shakes his head slightly. Equally baffled. "A system?"
"A great, independent machine made up of the dead. Interlinked, each one carefully purposed. More vast and complex and impossible to fight than you can imagine." We've taken a different path to the one Emissa led me along, and a dead end suddenly looms in the form of a massive obsidian slab, divided into three distinct panels.
The gilded symbol of the Hierarchy slices down the one in the centre.
The iunctus gestures me forward before I can probe the bizarre statement further. "There is Will imbued in the outer two sections. You need to move it to the centre. But once this door is opened, we have a matter of hours, if that, before your Military arrive to stop us. So we must move fast."
I nod. Take a deep breath, and do as he instructs.
The polished black surface shudders, and slides into the ground.
Eidhin and I stand there as the iunctus strides through.
"Vek." I breathe it.
"Vek," agrees Eidhin softly.
We're on the lowest level of a space hundreds of feet deep and at least as high, painted in eerie green light.
Ahead and behind, the floor slopes upward into multiple levels, accessible via carved stairs.
To our left and right, the space stretches away in both directions as far as I can see. An enormous, semi-cylindrical tunnel.
Filling it—not just along the pathways of our level but on the tiered ones above—are bodies.