This was the Iron Crown of Lombardy, a band of gold and emerald segments jointed with hinges and set with precious stones in the form of crosses and flowers. Within the band was a narrow circle of iron, if legend spoke true, beaten out of one of the nails taken from the True Cross. It was the most ancient insigne of royalty surviving Christendom, and held its most precious relict, and had been kept, until late, in the Cathedral of Monza in Milan. A delta of scar tissue running upward from the corner of his right eye to beneath his cowl was a memento of an assassination attempt, and surely made the wearing of that crown painful in his brow, even under the elfin gravity of the moon. Painful or no, he did not set the crown aside.

Within the triangle of the mouth of his hood, the glint of his white teeth between dark mustachios and goatee could be glimpsed, the drops of cold fire caught in the diamonds of his iron crown, and the strange light from no-longer-human eyes.

2. The Hermeticists

He raised a hand gloved in what seemed black silk. Although there seemed to be none within the chamber to see that signal, nonetheless, upon that gesture, five of his fellow Hermeticists rose from three circular iris-hatches in the floor, drifting upward with the eerie grace only lunar gravity allowed.

The men did not quite land, nor quite walk, but moved toes against the dark deck with ballet smoothness. Their black garments rippled like silk, and silvery antiradiation mantles fluttered like capes as they passed.

All men in the wide chamber wore similar bodies. The Hermeticists in their lunar-adaptive forms were tall and emaciated, lacking in water weight, with dry cracks at lips and nostrils. Even the heaviest of them had a sunken, skull-like cast to his face, a strange leaden highlight to his skin, a side effect of the special nanomachinery lining their bones and filling their bone marrow to prevent microgravity decay. Their eyes were as mirror-shining as the eyes of a cat, or filmy as the eyes of a sea beast, for growing additional microorganisms meant to shield their eyes from accidental radiation exposure turned out, unexpectedly, to be less cumbersome than polarized faceplates or dark goggles.

Their shipsuits were built along lines opposite to those of the bulky atmospheric armor of the First Age of Space: an only mildly biomodified human skin, when mummified by skintight garb, was discovered to have sufficient tenacity to resist vacuum. A second cushion of very light material was used to hold a layer of partial atmosphere next to the skinsuit, in order to help with pressure differentials the free motion of human joints necessitated. This outer silk was like a living layer of air pockets that expanded and contracted with each movement, granting the Hermeticists an eerie shimmering to play over them, like ripples seen on the scales of restless sharks.

There were silver fittings at waist and shoulders, and the heavy ring of a collar at the neck. All the men were bald as a monks, with skull-tight cowls that covered ears and cheeks and buckled beneath the jaw. Each wore his hood drawn up, but not sealed nor inflated. Goggles and mask hung below the throat like a second face.

There were only minor variations to the uniforms.

Melchor de Ulloa was a very handsome man, even in his lunar form. He was always wreathed in smiles of bewildered good cheer and in the scent of lavender. At his throat was an ornament like chicken’s claw within a circle, representing peace, a symbol called Nero’s Cross. He was the ship’s political officer.

Narcís D’Aragó, the cold-eyed master-at-arms, dangled a powered rapier from his baldric and an Aurum pistol in his thigh holster. This weapon fired a nanotechnological smart package designed, upon impact, to disassemble nonliving material such as armor or clothing, and nonimportant material such as flesh and bone into a puddle, and next to form electroneural connections to any nerve cells it encountered floating in that puddle, such as disembodied eyeballs, brain or spinal tissue, linking those cells to the nearest signal nexus for download.

Sarmento i Illa d’Or was a man of muscular bulk, broad shouldered as a bullock, light of step even under Earthly gravity, and in his gauntleted hand an emission wand called a soul goad, used to control thralls, parolees, or courtesans modified with skull implants via shocks of pleasure or agony that left no marks. Aboard ship he had been the quartermaster, and during the time of the World Concordat, the master of the feasts.

Jaume Coronimas, who had been an engineer’s mate aboard ship, and the broadcast power master during the Concordat, wore a cowl pieced by two small holes, and through these rose from his scalp two tendrils like whip-antennae made of yellow bioprosthetic metal, and these gold tendrils swayed softly toward the signal sources in the room, peering forth from the mouth of his hood like two inquisitive snakes. His face would have been thin and gray even had his skin not been adapted toward lunar conditions.

One man was not like the others. Father Reyes y Pastor, the expedition chaplain, was in red, and wore ermine and scarlet cardinal’s robes atop his black silk. Hanging down his back was a broad-brimmed red hat with elaborate tassels upon tassels, the galero. The hat was not on his head, for he wore the black hood of a scholar, proud of his academic achievements above his ecclesiastical station.

The coppery eyes of the Hermeticists glinted under their hoods like red coals in the mouths of dark, triangular furnaces.

The five drifted in soundless grace to their places at the round table. Places, not seats, for no chairs were needed, nor did human legs grow weary in a world of one-sixth weight.

There were more than six score empty places to each side of them. Each empty place was covered over with long, triangular silken lengths. These were the hoods removed from the shipsuits of the departed. Their tassels hung mournfully to the deck, swaying ghostlike in the ventilation of their own internal circuits.

The Hermeticists were alone. No servant had ever set foot in this upper sanctum, not a chambermaid to sweep, not a butler to present a bulb of wine, not a technician to set to rights the thousand intricate circuits of the information systems. No unmodified human could withstand the radiation that time to time poured invisibly from naked outer space a few feet overhead, detected by the dry clicking of counters. Nor was it in the present purposes of the Hermetic Order to acquaint mankind with the full spectrum of biotechnological modifications they employed for their own uses.

Del Azarchel spoke: “Faithful and beloved friends, equal partners in my reign, partners now in my downfall, the entire living world, the Mother Earth so fair and green, is lost to us, with neither a drop from her endless seas nor a wisp of her abundant airs and winds allowed to us here.

“This Luna, this hueless world of lifelessness, through turmoil and fire we achieved with the daring theft in her orbital shipyard of the great ship Emancipation. Her sails, as nothing else could do, turned aside the deadly force of the mirrors of the Giants, those same orbital mirrors which burned the civilization whose glory we represent. That power became propulsion for us, for we turned death to life by that same alchemy of knowledge which assures us our supreme authority above mankind.

“As if sailing hither on a sea of fire, this dead world our new world we made, and found this ancient base, long forgotten from the First Age of Space Travel, on the far side of the moon, and far from the orbital mirrors of the Giants, and with diligent work, and not without the sacrifice of loyal servant’s lives now mourned, our genius restored it from death to life.

“Here allow me to restore our hopes. History is merely one more language the Monument Builders decoded, and only we, only we anointed few, can speak this language to issue decrees and cast spells in it.”