Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  “Run, you fools!” he roars at us.

  I push the Gold senators off me, but I’m too far from the door and the mechanized hinges cannot be stopped even by a Telemanus.

  “Go!” I shout at him. “Daxo, go!”

  My heart breaks as Daxo looks at the narrowing sliver of salvation. His face is red from exertion. His lips pull back from his teeth. He could escape, abandon me, but instead a calmness comes over him and he releases his grip on the door. It seals with a loud thump and he turns to me and shrugs.

  With my com I open a master channel to my entire security network. “Black Cathedral,” I say. “Repeat, Black Cathedral—” But the signal goes down. Daxo puts a hand on my shoulder. His eyes are fixed on something behind me. I turn in time to see a concussion detonate outside the East Door. In the plaza beyond, the colorful crowd has disintegrated into a frenzied mob.

  “The shield…” Daxo whispers.

  Smoke billows. A shield pylon teeters sideways. Sparks shiver out from its sides and, with a blue shimmer, the barrier separating us from the mob disappears. Oh no.

  A tide of humanity rolls up the white steps toward the only open door.

  Senators scream and scramble to beat against the other doors for escape. The remnants of the Vox Populi, some thirty of their fringe zealots, huddle around Dancer’s body down in the Senate pit. Publius is amongst them, his face wild with righteous rage as he shouts for the mob and points toward us as if he were some necromantic conjurer hurling his murderous spirits forward.

  “Optimates, to me!” I shout.

  Barely half of them hear me. The rest have broken up amongst the Forum to beat on the doors, to hide behind columns, to raise their hands in supplication to the mob that teems toward the open East Door. Their faces sunburnt and pale, wide and narrow, eyes Red and Brown and Orange, mad with communal rage, their arms carrying bent bits of fences, stakes from propaganda signs, hammers, and even blackmarket scorchers, they roil toward us. A dozen in front, a hundred behind, and thousands pushing them forward.

  I watch a Blue senator tear herself away from her hiding place amongst the columns and stand bravely at the East Door and face down the mob with an outstretched hand. “No violence!” she declares majestically. “No violence!” she repeats just before a Red man caves her head in with an iron Vox pyramid on the end of a wooden pole. The mob swallows them. They disappear and all I can see is the iron pyramid rising and falling above the swarm. A Pink senator falls. Frail bones shatter as he curls inward like a dying spider. They pull Optimate senators from their hiding places and smash their heads open against the marble.

  Senators flee from them, tripping and falling, skinning their knees and prying themselves up to scramble away, their togas white but for the hems that are stained in blood, so that they look like the fluttering wings of red doves in flight.

  The Obsidian senators, all women, all former warriors, join our lines with a solemn nod.

  “Virginia, stand behind me,” Daxo says in a low growl. I step to his side. With a small laugh, he peels the wool of his toga as if it were made of paper. Free of the encumbrance, he stands bare chested, bare limbed, a monster clothed only in undershorts before the mob. His shoulders are broad as a thunderhead. His back muscled like a sunblood stallion’s. The angels on his head glorious and golden and dancing down his spine to his lower back. But his huge hands are bare and empty.

  “Daxo!” I hand him the Dawn Scepter. He spins it, a meter of solid iron with the fourteen-pointed star of our Republic glittering on the end. “Gold and Obsidian, first rank! Gray second.” I shout over the furor as the mob runs around the sides of the Senate pit to reach us. Those soldiers amongst the Optimates, many old and stooped, but sinewy and dogged in the ways of war, rustle forward to stand fifteen abreast in velvet slippers and white togas to defend the cluster of thin-boned senators behind us.

  I pull on the metal tab underneath the left pocket of my jacket. My secondary razor slithers out of the spine of my jacket, to form into a meter and a third of rigid metal. I lean toward Daxo.

  “On my command: terror.”

  The mob does not hit us in a wave. The wild vanguard was prepped. Pupils flaring with stims and intoxicants, they sprint headlong at us with homemade weapons—hammers and knives—a few with blackmarket scorchers. A scorcher flares. White light ripples across the Forum and the Obsidian senator to the left of me screams as her stomach ruptures open. She stumbles away, half her torso boiling.

  “Now,” I tell Daxo.

  “LIONHEART!”

  …and death for four meters.

  He cleaves the Red with the scorcher in half with the edge of the Dawn Scepter’s star. A man swings at him with a knife. Daxo is already past him, but reaches back to shatter his hand and take the knife. He wheels it down on the head of a Brown in a hammer stroke, flattening the head, and then casually flicks the scepter back into and through the face of another man before bringing it about in a wheeling stroke that shatters three more of the rioters. He kicks a Brown woman in the chest. Her sternum collapses and a bulge from his foot pushes out her back. The last, a young Red man with piercings through the bridge of his nose, stabs at Daxo. Daxo catches the blade in his left hand. It sinks into the palm but bends against the reinforced bone as Daxo pushes back till the man’s straightened arm snaps like a twig. Daxo embeds the scepter in the man’s chest and grabs the man’s other hand. He pulls on both arms, lifting the man in the air so that he is eye to eye with Daxo, his feet kicking half a meter from the ground. With a roar, Daxo pulls off both the man’s arms. The body drops to the floor, spitting blood. Daxo rips the scepter out of the man, pulling ribs with it, and beats his own bloody chest with gore-spattered hands. “LIONHEART!!!” He spins the scepter, pointing it at the crowd. “Dogs! Traitors! In the name of your Sovereign, disarm! Disarm!”

  The mob behind the massacred men skids to a halt, terrified of the Gold monstrosity. All their lives they’ve known of Gold power, but war is fast and smoky and small through a screen. They always suspected the myth of our violence overwrought. Now they see what our manners have protected them from. The courage in their numbers withers at the terrible sight of this machine of war unlocked from his civil chains. But the mob is a machine as well, and its engine of courage comes from those at the rear. They push forward, screaming and shouting and firing over the heads of those terrified in the front, and the press breaks forward, dozens amongst them falling to be trampled by the weight of the distant brave.

  The mob hits more like mud than water. Seeping around Daxo, fighting to run away, heels skidding over bloody stone. My razor carves through the outstretched arm of a young man holding a scorcher, through the face of a fat woman with a rock, the neck of a screaming, terrified teenager with a mouth blue from cloud candy. Bodies push me back and I chop madly, blindly at arms. They seep through.

  I fall back to swing again, but I collide with someone behind me and am pushed forward into the bodies of those I’ve maimed, who wail and hold bloody stumps and are trampled by those behind them. I wheel and hack and slash against flailing limbs. A hammer hits my collarbone. Bone holds. Man dies. A knife digs into my cheek and breaks a tooth in half. Spit sprays into my eyes. Blood. Teeth bite my leg and metal digs into my calf. Searing pain. I stomp on someone until I feel something give.

  Not ten meters away, Daxo kills and maims in a tyrannical whirlwind like the kind Darrow and only few others still living have ever seen in person, much less produced.

  I try to cut my way to him, but I don’t have the mass. Bodies obscure me. Hands pull at me. Shoulders of screaming men subvert my balance as they hit my knees. The back of a head breaks my nose. I headbutt someone else and feel the weaker bone crumple. Sharp metal scrapes down my back ribs and stabs repeatedly into my flank. I howl, pinched between bodies. My legs are caught by someone’s arms and I’m wrestled from the side by a big Red man, his whiskers scrap
ing into my neck. I teeter sideways, pulled down by a mass of bodies. A gun goes off against my thigh. I feel pressure. They pin my sword arm to my side and bite and saw at my hand till the razor slips free.

  I crash to the ground under their weight, arms and legs unable to move against their grip as boots stomp on my head and kick my face. Sound goes in and out, my vision stuttering between black and the swarm of feet and legs at the claustrophobic underbelly of the mob. I swallow a tooth and bite the finger off a man.

  “Virginia!” I hear beyond the curses and shouts. “Virginia!”

  The big Red man atop me twitches. The iron points of a bloody star erupt through his forehead. His eyes roll back into his head and blood sluices onto me as Daxo pulls the Dawn Scepter out of his crushed skull. Another man falls between us. Daxo seizes his belt and hurls him through the air like a doll. I glimpse my friend for a moment, his wild eyes set in that thoughtful face. And despite the horror around us, despite the anger in him, I see the panic of love. He will save me. He will protect me, like he did when he pulled me from the tossing surf as a girl.

  And then he is gone, greatness borne down under a human wave that crashes down from all directions.

  A boot connects with my temple. My head lolls sideways. Something stabs through my cheek and takes two teeth. Numbly, I feel them tearing at my hair, my clothes, ripping off my boots, cutting my pants with knives and my razor, the blade scraping my skin. Two men rip off my jacket as a woman kicks at my face, and hands paw at my breasts and claw between my thighs. I black out in the darkness, feel hands lifting me up, punching me, jamming into my body.

  Then I am free of the mob, the press of bodies above me gone. I open swollen eyes and see through a crack in the darkness. Jeering faces swim beneath me, hands pass me above their heads like a trophy. Sharp objects stick into my buttocks, my thighs.

  “Daxo,” I murmur through broken teeth, mouth full of blood and mashed lips. “Daxo…”

  I see him again through the crowd. His huge body is splayed out on the ground, held down by a big Obsidian with gold teeth as four others stand over him guarding a muscular Red woman in a Hyperion sanitation uniform. Tall for a Red, she hacks at Daxo’s neck with a hatchet till his head dislodges. She holds it by its spine.

  Without looking, she flicks Daxo’s head to the mob. He was a man who could have ruled worlds if he had even the smallest ambition for it, who chose to serve the people even though he despised them. He did that for me. And now his head is tossed around like an inflated toy ball. The golden angels dance no more on Daxo’s crown. They are drowned in his blood.

  The woman turns to look at me. Even set in that face, I recognize her eyes through the Red contacts.

  A demon from the past, now undead.

  Lilath. My brother’s dog of war.

  She is alive. She is the Queen of the Syndicate.

  How?

  Lilath begins to laugh at me.

  With a disembodied moan, I tear my eyes away and look up for some escape to the sky. But it is hidden from me behind the painted plaster, where my husband floats golden and glorious, with Sevro at his side, giving his speech to the mob of Phobos, where he heard the heartbeat of humanity and exhorted it to violence, to war, to the taking of lives for liberty.

  All that fills my ears is the roar of the human ocean as it sings the song of my husband’s first wife.

  HELIOPOLIS STEAMS UNDER the early morning sun. Though northern Helios still buckles under Orion’s storms, the monsoon clouds that drenched Heliopolis with torrential rain have slunk back to the Caliban Sea, leaving the city gleaming white. It might be lovely but for the fact that the rain was irradiated from nuclear warheads, and the air is so thick with humidity steaming in off the Bay of Sirens that the simple act of walking is like wading through pudding.

  My wounds are not yet healed. Everything aches. Nausea from anti-rads grips my belly. Sweat trickles down my back as I stand in a thick cluster of my officers to partake in the Fading Dirge. Before us, a sea of Martians sleep upon a bed of lavender. Spread across the tarmac of the spaceport south of Heliopolis, their faces are green and blue, their bodies distended by the sun so that they look like inflated dolls. There is no Triumph, no victory march for the dead. There is only this meager honor.

  Scarcely one hundred thousand of the four million lost to the sea, the sand, and the atomics have been gathered for the Fading Dirge. Ten square kilometers of lavender were cut from the southern latifundia by my corps of engineers to mask the smell of the bodies. It was meant to give some semblance of dignity to the departed as we say farewell to them together.

  There is no dignity here. A southerly wind prevails. As we beat our fists against our hearts, the ceremony disintegrates into farce as the dank stench of rotting eggs and used toilets drifts up from the bodies. The infantry maintain their ranks, but support and naval men and women unaccustomed to the degradations of ground combat waver, many upturning their stomachs onto the baking concrete.

  The bodies are arrayed to be cremated before our remaining ships of war. The battle-scarred Morning Star looms like a mountain, one and a half kilometers tall, nearly eight long. Four torchShips lie in her shadow, and the rickety remains of one destroyer. From atop her hull, welders shade themselves under the guns and pause their labor to watch. How many times has the Morning Star saved us? By the looks of her hull and the wounds she sustained from the storm and the battle, I don’t think she can do it again.

  Some will call the Battle of the Ladon a victory for the Republic. I cannot. With Naran falling the night before, we have lost all the major cities of Helios. Four million of my men are missing or dead. Just over five million survive to huddle beneath the shields of Heliopolis. Supplies dwindle, especially the anti-rads. Most were in Tyche. Barely one-third of my men are fit for duty, even by our elastic standards. Our tank regiments are depleted. RipWings down to two hundred operational craft. Drachenjägers reduced to seven hundred. All that protects us from being bombarded is the shield overhead. All that protects us from being overrun are the storms beyond, and Atalantia’s fear of what new horror I’ll conjure.

  Despite our vulnerability, Atalantia has not opted for another frontal attack on Heliopolis. Instead, with us trapped inside, she extends her grip over the storm-ravaged continent and squeezes with the thoughtful patience of an anaconda. It means no relief fleet is on its way.

  But I must have hurt her badly.

  By our estimates she lost twice as many as we did, most to the storm on the northern coast of Helios. The military camps of Venus can always provide her fresh bodies, but her precious veterans are irreplaceable—XIII Dracones, Ash Guard, Fulminata, Zero Legion, the Iron Leopards. With the Iron Leopards captured or killed, a third of the Ash Guard drowned in Tyche, Fulminata pounded by Thraxa outside Heliopolis, how many more will she sacrifice for us? None, I wager. They are needed for the Republic. She will wait for reinforcements from Venus, and use the raw recruits as a battering ram. There will be nothing we can do to stop them.

  All know it.

  Amongst the engineering officers, Harnassus stands like an old sea captain squinting into salt spray. Even though she suffered grievous burns in the battle, Thraxa’s shoulders loom over the heads of the Gray, Gold, and Red infantry commanders. But amongst the naval officers, there is an absence. For ten years the Blues orbited around Orion with the fidelity of moons to a planet; now the planet is gone, and the moons drift untethered. They will need a new leader.

  But from where? Captain Pelus, a veteran of ten years, might have flown the Morning Star through hell, but he is no leader. All my Imperators, save Harnassus, are gone. Half my Praetors. More than two-thirds of my wing commanders. Atalantia gnaws through officers who cannot be replaced. Officers who earned their bars and then their wings under Orion and me. Where will we find more like them? In the fat, filigreed Home Guard? In the jockeying politicians of Skyhall?
I can only pillage the Ecliptic Guard so far before it is staffed completely by children.

  I turn to my lancers and find no one there. Not Alexandar, not Rhonna, only Screwface. He’s taken weight off my shoulders since his return. Elated to be back with his own, he seems the only one with any energy to spare. I envy him that, and gave him Rat Legion to put his counter-espionage skill set to work clearing the city of dissidents and any spies the Fear Knight snuck in. “Where’s Rhonna?” I ask him.

  “Tunnels again.”

  “Colloway?”

  “He split from the medWard at 0400. Was wings-up by 0430.”

  “He went out again?”

  “With a full squadron. Man won’t rest until he finds Orion. I thought you knew.”

  I look back at the bodies. “I didn’t.”

  If he dies out there, how many heroes will we have left? A murmur goes up amongst the men. I follow the current of hands that rise to shade their eyes. A ripWing smudges smoke across the morning sky. Of the twelve ripWings that went in search of Orion, three stagger back.

  Colloway is not in his right mind. Since we took refuge in the city, he has been on the ground a total of ten hours. The time it takes to eat seven meals, receive two blood transfusions, exchange seven crippled ripWings for fresh ones, and be locked in the medBay under guard. Lazy guard apparently.

  Early morning condensation turns to vapor as Colloway and his wingmen set their battered ripWings on the concrete before the dead. Colloway’s canopy is so mangled with enemy fire it has to be welded off. When he’s free, he bypasses the ladder and slides down his wing before coming around to the belly of the ripWing where a bloated body is clutched in its towing claw.

  Colloway pries the body from the towing claw and tries to carry it. She is too heavy, even in the light gravity. He stumbles, and I find myself moving from the officers to reach him. Dozens of others join, including Screwface and Thraxa, but not Harnassus. He watches stone-faced from his officers, unable to forgive Orion, or me, for the storm and the millions of civilians it killed.