“This is my home, sir assassin,” Luseferous told the man. “This is my place, my refuge, this, which you… invaded, despoiled, dishonoured with your… your plot. Your attempt.” His voice quaked as he said, “I invited you into my house, invited you to my table as… as hosts have guests for ten thousand human years and you… all you wanted to do was hurt me, kill me. Here, in my home, where I should feel safer than anywhere.” The Archimandrite shook his head in sorrow at such ingratitude. The failed assassin had nothing but a dirty rag to cover his nakedness. Luseferous pulled it away and the fellow flinched again. Luseferous stared. ‘They did make a bit of a mess of you, didn’t they?” He watched the failed assassin’s thighs quiver and twitch. He let the loincloth fall to the ground; a servant would replace it tomorrow.

“I like my home,” he told the fellow quietly. “I do, really. Everything I’ve had to do I’ve done just to make things safer, to make home safer, to make everybody safer.” He waved the trunk-leech towards what was left of the man’s genitalia, but the leech seemed listless and the man already exhausted. Even the Archimandrite felt like some of the fun had gone out of the situation. He turned smartly and strode to the pot on the broad rail over the tank, dumping the leech inside and peeling the thick elbow glove off.

“And now I have to leave home, mister assassin,” Luseferous said, and sighed. He gazed down at the long coiled shape of the once-again-still Recondite Splicer. It had changed colour from brown to yellow-green now, adopting the colours of the mosses it lay upon. All that was left of the trunk-leeches were some dark spots and smears on the walls, and a faint, tangy smell the Archimandrite had come to recognise as that of yet another species’s blood. He turned back to look at the assassin. “Yes, I have to go away, and for a very long time, and it would seem I have no choice.” He started to walk slowly towards the man. “Because you can’t delegate everything, because ultimately, especially when it comes to the most important things, you can’t really trust anybody else. Because sometimes, especially when you’re going far away and communications take so long, there’s no substitute for being there. What do you think of that? Eh? There’s a fine thing. Don’t you think? Me working all these years to make this place safe and now I have to leave it, still trying to make it even safer, even more powerful, even better.” He stepped up to the man again, tapping one of the curved fangs boring through the fellow’s skull. “And all because of people like you, who hate me, who won’t listen, who won’t do as they’re told, who don’t know what’s good for them.” He gripped the fang and pulled hard at it. The man mewed down his nose with pain.

“Well, not really,” Luseferous said, shrugging, letting go. “It’s debatable whether this will really make us safer or not. I’m going to this… this Ulubis… system or whatever it is because there might be something valuable there, because my advisers advise so and my intelligence people have intelligence to this effect. Of course nobody’s certain, nobody ever is. But they do seem uncommonly excited about this.” The Archimandrite sighed again, more deeply. “And impressionable old me, I’m going to do as they suggest. Do you think I’m doing the right thing?” He paused, as though expecting an answer. “Do you? I mean, I realise you might not be entirely honest with me if you did have an opinion, but, all the same… No? You sure?” He traced the line of a scar along the side of the man’s abdomen, wondering idly if it was one of those that his own inquisitors had inflicted. Looked a bit crude and deep to be their work. The failed assassin was breathing quickly and shallowly but giving no sign that he was even listening. Behind his sealed mouth, his jaws seemed to be working.

“You see, for once I’m not absolutely sure myself, and I could use some advice. Might not make us all safer at all, what we’re planning to do. But it has to be done. The way some things just have to. Eh?” He slapped the man’s face, not hard. The man flinched all the same. “Don’t worry, though. You can come too. Big invasion fleet. Plenty of room.” He looked around the chamber. “Anyway, I feel you spend too much time stuck in here; you could do with getting out more.” The Archimandrite Luseferous smiled, though still there was nobody to smile at. “After all this trouble I’d hate to miss watching you die. Yes, you come with me, why don’t you? To Ulubis, to Nasqueron.”

“Eh? Oh, yes.” Uncle Slovius raised a flipper-like hand and waved it vaguely. “Please do.”

“Thank you.”

Fassin Taak hitched up his walking britches, gathered in his wide shirt sleeves and folded himself decorously into a sitting position at the side of the large circular pool of gently steaming and luminously blue liquid that his uncle floated within. Uncle Slovius had some years ago assumed the shape of a walrus. A beige-pink, relatively slim walrus, with tusks barely longer than the middle finger of a man’s hand, but a walrus nevertheless. The hands Uncle Slovius had once possessed were no more — they were flippers now, on the end of two thin, rather odd and ineffectual-looking arms. His fingers were little more than stubs; a scalloped pattern fringing the ends of his flippers. He opened his mouth to speak, but then one of the household servants, a black-uniformed human male, approached him, kneeling at the side of the pool to whisper something into his ear. The servant held his long pigtail out of the water with one many-ringed hand. The dark clothes, long hair and rings all indicated that he was one of the most senior functionaries. Fassin felt he ought to know his name, but couldn’t think of it immediately.

He looked round the room. The chamber of Provisional Forgetting was one of the rarely used parts of the house, only called into action — if you could call it that — on such occasions, when a senior family member was approaching their end. The pool took up most of the floor space of a large roughly hemispherical room whose walls were translucently thin agate inlaid with veins of time-dulled silver. This dome formed part of one bubble-wing of the family’s Autumn House, situated on the continent Twelve on the rocky planet-moon ’glantine, which orbited the gaudy, swirlingly clouded mass of the gas-giant Nasqueron like a pepper grain around a football. A tiny portion of the massive planet’s surface was visible through the transparent centre section of the dome’s roof, directly above Fassin and his uncle.

The part of Nasqueron that Fassin could see was presently in daylight, displaying a chaotic cloudscape coloured crimson, orange and rust-brown, the summed shades producing a deep red light which fell through the violet skies of ’glantine’s thinly breathable atmosphere and the dome’s glazed summit and helped illuminate the chamber and the pool below, where the black-clad servant was supporting Uncle Slovius while he supped on a beaker of what might have been either refreshment or medicine. Some dribbles of the clear liquid escaped Uncle Slovius’s mouth, trickling down his grizzled chin to the folds of his neck and dripping into the blue pool, where tall waves slopped to and fro in the half-standard gravity. Uncle Slovius made quiet grunting noises, his eyes closed.

Fassin looked away. Another servant approached him, offering a tray of drinks and sweetmeats, but he smiled and raised one hand in a gesture of rejection and the servant bowed and retreated. Fassin fixed his gaze politely on the dome’s roof and the view of the gas-giant, while watching from the corner of his eye as the servant attending his uncle dabbed at the old man’s lips with a neatly folded cloth.

Magisterial, oblivious, moving almost imperceptibly with a kind of tumultuous serenity, Nasqueron turned above them like some vast glowing coal hanging in the sky.

The gas-giant was the largest planet in the Ulubis system, which lay within a remote strand of Stream Quaternary, one of the Southern Tendril Reefs on the galactic outskirts, fifty-five thousand years from the galaxy’s nominal centre and about as remote as it was possible to get while still being part of the great lens.