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happen."
                  "For a lot of things to happen." Dibsey said.
                  "And maybe a lot of things not." Said Hulk, towering close at hand.
                  "I'm listening." Sejanus said and put his hands into the pockets of his greatcoat, around the shiv, and looked Hulk over.
                  "Bertraum." Anders said and put the sheen of his eyes in their self-contained darkness on him. "Old guy we have around at mess. Been here longer than any of us; couple lifetimes served, started going upstairs. He told me: that he knew your name."
                  "Said as much to everyone."
                  "He said you're a deserter, too." Hulk said. "He say that much to everybody?"
                  "Let it not go unsaid, brother," Dibsey said. "That beforehand you had murdered your commanding officer. In battle, more's the pity."
                  "I'm wanted in 12 systems." Sejanus said. "Everything from assault and murder to theft and failure to comply. Everyone has a story for how I got the start of it."
                  "Then it isn't true?" Anders said. "You know what it would mean if it was true."
                  "He's a crazy old man. You said so yourself." He said and stepped into the light of the cell and it shined down on him as through an oculus in the audience chambers of the ancient kings of their ancestors. "I did my duty, and fought for my people."
                  Anders nodded at the floor and stood, approached and embraced him in the way that he had only some hours earlier. In the intervening time a man had been required to die, and with that moment at its close he now knew it was under debate on his word whether or not he should join that man. Then he was taken into arms again as a comrade, greeted as a friend, and thus were fanned the vascilations between life and death.
                  "Welcome home then," Anders said into his ear. "Brother."

Day 2
     
                  "A conqueror approaches." A voice called out from across the shorn heads and tables, a man beside the doorway into the mess hall. "Bend to him your ears, and lend to him his glory. All hail Julius Agrifficus Nyar: Orbidux of the Cocytus Penal Legion; Tamer of Rebel Taan and Scourge of the Union at Karkakarum; Master of a Thousand Head and Fief-lord or Tower 7. All hail Julius Agrifficus Nyar."
                  The trays and bowls and utensils had already begun to rattle and slam beneath his words before he had finished and the discord erupted into cheers as a figure filled the doorway. Some stood on the tables and others on the benches, but all stood. He saw hands raise outward toward the man, fist into hand a flat arc from the breast in the Concilium salute, and the great anthem of the Magnartig Hieraccies rolled out deep and triumphal from the thousand mouths around him. Thus the man stepped forth.
                  He made tall and straight for the ranks of his men who filled the hall and with his clear blue eyes focused on none of them, but all of them. He held up his hands in recognition of their resounding love for him and smiled in the way only leaders can. He then clasped them tight at the small of his back and with the rigidity of his steps the slicked black locks of his hair began to fall into his face. He smoothed them back again and entered the sea of hairless scalps before him, unalike but adored.
                  Julius Nyar shook hands with those he passed and bade them strength and honor. As the thunder of a storm now passed echoes hollow through the canyons and gorges it has left behind. He went slow through the crowd that welcomed him and as they might a hero kept too long away by his duty and was thus ferried little by little to where Sejanus stood with his cellmates. Anders waved him down as the rank and file before them and near at hand