OF ALL THE PLACES I have lived, Maddalo House was among the most perfect.  Had it been on Colchis and not Nessus, it might have been the very best.  The Cid Arthurians who'd built it millennia before had done so on the edge of the bluffs that overlooked the riyerlands and hedged pastures that rolled over hills and ran between them toward the capital on the horizon.  The exterior was all of lime-washed stone, and the peaked rooftops were each supported by wooden beams intricately sculpted in the geometric style so closely associated with that chivalric cult.

It was not the grand palace of any great lord of the Imperium, but beautiful in a way balancing humility and pride.  The two wings of the former abbey enclosed a courtyard and a rock garden that once had encircled the customary anvil and sword of the Arthur-Buddha.  The Chantry had had that cult icon removed and melted down when Nessus was conquered by the Imperium, and here and there the villa showed the signs of the Inquisition: a rough patch in the wood where a lotus or a grail had been chiseled off, a petrified stump where the sacred fig tree had been cut down.  There were places on the walls where traditional artwork had been removed and replaced with artifacts that dearly did not belong: a stuffed bull's head, the nude portrait of palatine woman reclining on a leather couch, and a sculpture that seemed to me no more than a gnarled mass of bronze, shapeless and ugly.

I'd had the bull's head and the ugly sculpture removed, replaced with a bat-winged angel in the style of those gargoyles who'd protected my childhood home of Devil's Rest.  Valka - not surprising me - had insisted on keeping the painting.  It made me uncomfortable, and she found that amusing.

The place was filled with the signs of our long occupation.  Twin battle standards of the Red Company stood on pennon-staffs bracketed to either side of the grand staircase.  Each bore the pitchfork and pentacle pf my branch of House Marlowe bordered by the twisting labyrinth pattern that recalled my mother's family's Greek heritage.  The library - a square tower on the southwest corner - contained nearly all the books that had traveled with me for so long on the Tamerlane.  There too were housed the dozens of journals - white-paged and black - that I'd filled with sketches and snatches of poetry and favorite quotations over the long centuries.

Valka had claimed one of the upper halls for a study, and there filled the place with phototypes and print-outs of maps and scans of the various Quiet sites she'd visited in her life.  The revelation that the circular anaglyphs that covered the Quiet's ruins were no glyphs at all, but the finger prints in three-dimensional space of the higher-order dimensional mechanisms the Quiet had left behind, had broken her for years.  But she was a xenologist, and language or no she would unravel the mystery she'd set out to solve.

I'd been given a small staff along with the place, of whom only old Anju remained after seventy years.  She started as a scullery maid when Valka and I first took up residence at Maddalo House.  Now she was the cook, and had been for nearly thirty years.  She was terribly ancient for a plebeian, but was first to awaken every morning to prepare breakfast for myself and for the rest of the villa's small staff: the groundskeeper and two housekeepers.  Often I would eat with them before taking my exercise in the vaulted gymnasium in the east wing.  Once, the place had rung to the sound of steel as the Cid Arthurians sparred with one another.

The fencing gimbals with their target dummies and the holograph well were the only vestige of the monks that had not been scratched or painted over in some capacity.  As I so often had in the morning those long decades - while Valka slept after a quiet night's labor - I stood in the center of the fencing round, targets dancing about me on the end of articulated metal arms.  Holograph projectors painted the images of men over those targets.  The Cid Arthurians had designed and programmed the images of medieval knights in Gothic plate, their visors down, tunics bright and richly patterned.