Mar Kellen was an old soldier and gate police comrade, about Olmy’s age. He had been born during the later Jart Wars, the biggest push against the Way’s invaders before the Sundering, when the Jarts had been repelled beyond two ex nine—two billion kilometers down the Way. Those wars had lasted forty years and had scoured hundreds of thousands of kilometers of the Way. The territory gained had been fortified and gates had been opened to uninhabited worlds ripe for mining. These worlds had supplied the raw materials for the early Axis City, and then had supplied the atmosphere and soil which covered much of the Way’s surface.

Those years had been horrible and glorious, years of death and annealing; the Hexamon had emerged from them stronger, ready to command the paths between gates, attracting patrons and partners from inhabited worlds accessed through those same gates. In some instances, the Hexamon had assumed trade abandoned by the Jarts; in this way it had established strong mercantile bonds with the enigmatic Talsit. It was the Talsit who had told them the name of their enemies, as closely as it could be translated into human speech.

The Jarts had not been defeated, of course; merely pushed far down the Way, and kept there by a series of powerful fortresses.

Mar Kellen had survived the last twenty years of the wars, and had then served in the fortresses beyond 1.9 ex nine. Even those frontier outposts had not challenged him enough. He had joined the gate police, and there had met Olmy.

They hadn’t seen each other for centuries. Olmy was surprised to learn Mar Kellen was on Thistledown; he would have thought him the type to join the Geshels in their push down the Way.

Clandestine arrangements irritated him; he had long since ceased to enjoy intrigue, especially when it was unavoidable…. But Mar Kellen had suggested he had something Olmy could not ignore; and whatever his old friend’s peculiarities, he had never been deceitful.

The fifth was Thistledown’s gloomiest chamber, a kind of vast cellar. Many train lines passed through on their way to the sixth and (at one time) seventh chambers, but only one still stopped there, and that infrequently, by special request. There were few restrictions on travel to the only unoccupied chamber in the Thistledown, and each month a few hardy mountain climbers and river rafters visited the grim, cloud-shrouded landscape of raw asteroid mineral, sculpted by centuries of mining into fantastic gray and black and orange peaks and abysses. The excess waters of Thistledown ran red there, thick with rust and other dissolved minerals, not recommended for drinking without having chelation implants to handle the metal content.