Iron Gold

by Pierce Brown

  “Julian?” he murmurs.

  I hestitate. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, it’s Julian. Stay with me, brother. Stay with me.”

  He blinks up at me, clarity coming to him. “Lysander.” I smile, happy to be seen. “Lysander, what have you done?” Tears leak out of his eyes. “What have you done?”

  The accusation puts me on my heels. Robotically, I turn to Dido. “He needs a surgeon.”

  “And he’ll have one when I’m satisfied.”

  “No, he’ll have one now. His life for the safe.”

  “Already making demands? Perhaps you really are a Lune after all.”

  Seraphina kneels to feel his pulse. “Mother.”

  “Very well.” The woman motions her attendants to collect the man, but Diomedes steps in their way.

  “The Olympic Order will take custody of him.”

  “Do you not trust me?” Dido asks.

  He ignores her. Seeing the worry in my eyes, he says, “Our surgeons will do what they can. If he dies, it will not be by their hand.” I nod in thanks. The stoic man motions two Olympic Knights to carry Cassius out. They hoist him up and pass unmolested through the crowd to disappear through one of the stone doorways.

  He will survive. He has to.

  Lost in thought, I flinch as the safe slams to the ground in the center of the blood-soaked marble. Dido’s men back away from it. “Your turn, young Lune,” Dido says. “Prove who you are.” I pass Seraphina without looking at her on my way to the safe, conscious of the hundreds of eyes that watch and judge not just me, but the worth of my blood.

  I bend before the safe and numbly turn the dial through the combination. My hands are shaking so severely I have to try twice until the tumbler thumps inside the safe. The lock unlatches, then the secondary lock, and the door swings open. I back away, Cassius’s words echoing. What have you done?

  I’ve made a choice. The right choice.

  I move so Seraphina can replace me in front of the safe. She carefully sets my ivory box and Cassius’s oak vessel atop the safe. The sigils of our houses stand out in the dim light on the wood and ivory. “It’s in my box,” I say.

  Seraphina reverently opens the lid. Inside she finds my grandmother’s House Lune ring. She shows it to her mother before moving aside my mother’s book of poetry. Her fingers glide over the worn green leather edges of the poem book as though she can feel what’s inside before lifting up Karnus’s razor. She produces a small tool, unfastens the screws smoothly on the bottom of the hilt, and pops open the mechanism. The holodrop is stuck to the chemical impulse unit like a lone drop of morning dew. She deposits it in the receiver plate of the holoprojector Dido’s men have brought into the room and steps aside to make room for her mother. Something makes her look back at the box and the crescent moon there.

  I hate her eyes lingering on it. It feels somehow shameful that my family’s last relics are held in so small a box, bare now for the world to see.

  “I did not want this path to be taken,” Dido says to the Moon Lords in a grand, sweeping voice. The sort great statesmen and tyrants all seem to possess. “This violence. This coup against my own husband…” She shakes her head wearily. “It is a travesty.” There are whispers of agreement there. “You all know I have labored for years to convince Romulus that the Pax Ilium was made under false pretenses. I have been ridiculed. Mocked that this obsession is a madness born of my foreign birth. Perhaps the hot blood of Venus is not gone from my veins entirely. But I am a child of the Dust now. I know I am not above the law.” The Golds frown down at her. “The actions taken by me and my men are not above the law. In fact, they were enacted to ensure that the law is followed. Which is why, when I have finished speaking, I will set myself at your mercy. Like my husband, I will set myself before an Olympic Trial and you may judge if I am mad, if you like. And if my actions are found treasonous, I will meet the dust. But until then, I ask you for your ears….”

  Greeted by silence, and a nod from Helios, ArchKnight of the Olympics, she continues.

  “Ten years ago, the Dockyards of Ganymede were destroyed. A hundred thousand died on the station. Ten million Ganymedi died when the rubble fell upon New Troy. It was a calamity not seen in the Rim since the coming of the Ash Lord. We blamed Roque au Fabii and his Sovereign.” She looks at me. “But what if I told you there was a hidden truth? Another man responsible for the newest in the long list of crimes against our people?”

  She paces along the floor.

  “Four months ago, I received word from a broker in the Core, who claimed to have information that would be of interest to me. The broker, a White of the Ophion Guild, represented an unknown seller who wished to exchange the data for information in our archives. The information was purported to be sensitive; they could not risk transmitting it for fear of Repubic interception. Knowing my husband was required to uphold the Pax Ilium, and would do so regardless of the information, I acted of my own accord and sent my most trusted agent, my daughter, Seraphina, into the Interior. This is what she returned with.”

  She activates the holoprojector.

  The audio comes first. The sound of metal dragged upon metal. Whimpering. Metal on flesh. Then the video appears in the air in the center of the room over our heads with ghostly radiance. It shows the bloodied deck of a starship, a grand one judging by the size of the bridge. The mutilated body of a dead Gold woman is being dragged by her hair by a pair of huge pale hands covered with tribal runes. They could only belong to an Obsidian woman. The hands pry open the Gold’s mouth, pinning her teeth open with a curved wedge of ceremonial bone. Fingers jam roughly into the Gold’s mouth and pull her tongue forward with a pair of iron prongs. Then, with a hooked knife, the hands saw at the base of the tongue till it comes free with a grisly sucking sound. The hands pierce the tongue with an iron barb and push it along to join the dozen others already hanging there on the Obsidian’s belt. Racial indignation rises in me. The Peerless at our sides watch without flinching.

  This is the true face of the world. The darkness beneath civilization that my grandmother warned me about. I have known it, felt it, and, in absence of her guidance, watched it leak through her fallen empire.

  The Obsidian leaves the corpse behind and walks past the body of a second fallen Gold. At her feet, the epaulets of an ArchPraetor are flecked with blood but the body is seemingly unmolested. The face of Roque au Fabii is pale and bloodless. The Obsidian joins a coterie of battle-scarred women in spoilt armor who form a crescent around the forward viewport of the bridge. White hair stained with blood and soot hangs down their backs. In front of them kneels the dread woman Sefi, the powerful sister of Ragnar Volarus. She clutches a battle-axe and gazes out the viewport as the ship slides across space toward a mottled blue and green moon. Two armored Golds stand beside her along with a stocky Asiatic Gray looking out at the pride of Ilium—the Dockyards of Ganymede. Two hundred eleven kilometers of metal, bolts, dry docks, engineers, refineries, assembly lines, ingenuity, and dreams and labor. One of the two great dockyards of humanity, before the Republic’s fledgling shipyards over Phobos. All suspended above the pale splendor of Ganymede’s equatorial seas and at the mercy of her enemies. Not of Fabii and his Sovereign as the worlds have believed for more than a decade, but of the Rising. Of the despised Slave King.

  “Men built this?” Sefi asks in awkward Common.

  “It took two hundred fifty years…it’s how old the first dock there is,” says the Gold woman at her side, the traitor, Julii. The Gray comes forward to whisper something to the second Gold, a man. He stands with his back to us, but I would know him by his shadow or even the faint whisper of his hoarse voice.

  His helmet is off. His armor was once white, but now it is scored with pulseblasts, razor marks, and viscera. He’s slouched, his weight leaning on the rigid slingBlade at his side. He seems an old man, but the side profile of his face is scarcely older than mine is now. How could he do all this before his twenty-third year? Even Alexander of Macedon would mar
vel at the Slave King of Mars, a creature as grand as the empire he broke. His image glitters in the eyes of the hundred Moon Lords.

  The Reaper turns to look back with stony eyes at someone in the bridge pits, but the Julii sets a hand on his shoulder. “Share the load, darling,” she says. “This one’s on me.” She raises her voice. “Helmsman, open fire with all port batteries. Launch tubes twenty-one through fifty at their center line.”

  The Peerless around the Bleeding Place stand in silence, their faces illuminated by the pale fire that tears into their lost dockyards.

  The docks were never meant for war. Her ships were to defend her. What horror that her greatest child, the Colossus, would return upon the brink of independence to destroy her.

  Tungsten iron rounds shear through metal bulkheads like hail careening into wet bread. The dockyards die in silence. Oxygen vents. Spheres of fire gasp and drown in space. And dead metal drifts off, pulled inexorably to Ganymede’s bosom.

  As the destruction rains, the Reaper turns from the viewport, his face a death mask of grief and pain, and I feel as if I hear his heart beat across the years, across the space, and know how far he’s come from the man he wanted to be.

  He reminds me of my godfather.

  While the room disintegrates into fury, I marvel at the boldness of Darrow’s charade, even at the shrewdness of his cruelty. In the last moment of his victory, he saw an opportunity to win a war against the Rim that had not even begun, and he took it with as bold a maneuver as I’ve ever seen. But it is certainty I feel, not respect or horror. This is the man I once idolized. An unpredictable gambler of savage intellect with a limitless capacity for violence. I respect his capabilities, but I do not respect the man. And here, in the wake of his destruction, I understand beyond a shadow of a doubt that to protect mankind, the Reaper must die.

  Dido, it seems, was not mad after all.

  “The Slave King betrayed us,” Dido says, lifting her razor high till the bitter blade trembles in the air through the projection of the dying docks, the metal shiny and opalescent, like a strand of tears frozen in time. “The Pax Ilium is broken! When his tattooed, mechanized horde is finished with the Core, they will come for us. Your families. Your homes. You see it! You know it. So now, my noble friends, I call for war.”

  The Moon Lords look to old Helios, who sits with Diomedes. The old man stands slowly to his dignified height, the picture of dignity and cold resolve. He pulls his razor from his hip and extends it into the air. “War!” cries their Truth Knight.

  “War!” thunder the eleven others, unsheathing their blades. While they thrust them into the air, Diomedes barely lifts his hand.

  With the Olympics having spoken, a fever spreads through the assembled Moon Lords. A host of razors unfurl and shine in the dim light, the teeth of so many dragons. Seraphina looks at me. Finally she has what she’s sought. With a look of religious satisfaction, she unravels her razor and, like her mother, like her brother and generations of kin, she lifts it into the air.

  “War,” she says softly, as if declaring it only against me.

  IN THE BEDLAM THAT FOLLOWS, I’m spirited away by Diomedes and a coterie of his men. They take me back to my room and push me inside.

  “Diomedes,” I say before the door closes. The knight turns. “Cassius, I want to see him. I need to know if he’s alive.”

  “It is not safe for you in the halls.”

  “I helped you.”

  “You are still a Lune. Whether he lives or dies is up to him.”

  “And your surgeons.”

  Realization dawns. “Do you think we would not care for him? He showed his honor. I will stand vigil myself and send word when I know his fate.”

  “Thank you.”

  He hesitates. “He betrayed your grandmother, yet you travel with him….”

  “He saved my life from the Rising. I am bound to him.”

  “I understand.” He nods, his first sign of respect to me. “But if he dies, you will be free of him. Then to what will you be bound, Lune?” He leaves me with that and shuts the door. It locks from the other side. I pace the cold stone, unable to think of anything but Cassius on the floor asking me what I’ve done. I feel the walls closing in.

  I retreat inward. Forcing myself into the Willow Way, imagining my breath as the breeze that moves the branches and sways the grass and kisses the water. A second movement of breath now comes, which moves the lavender and pushes the bees and tinkles the wind chimes of summer at Lake Silene. A third movement is that of fall. The fourth breath that moves the curtains and twists the flames in the braziers and brings the snow of Hyperion in through an open window and makes Cassius’s cape dance in the wind is that of Luna’s winter.

  Deep in that distant pool of memory, I see him again for the first time.

  The young Bellona stands with his back to me, looking out at the Citadel grounds beyond the balcony. Sun glints off the gold tip of the Legion Pyramid headquarters in the distance. His hair is coiled and shines with scented oil. Snow melts there. His coat is dark blue with feathered silver epaulets and a silver fringed collar. He wears a silver razor on his hip and silver buckles on his boots. He looks like a storybook knight, and it makes me distrust him.

  Though capable, he is a petty, spoiled creature who lured my favorite House Mars student onto the bank of a river and there betrayed him. Why? Because he could not absorb what Grandmother extols as the highest lessons of the Institute—the bearing of loss. If the loss of a single brother in the Passage broke him, what good would he be under the grind of war?

  “So you are the favorite son of Tiberius,” I say in the memory. He turns around to appraise me. In a white cashmere jacket with pearl buttons, holding a book of mathematics in my hands, I stand no higher than his waist. A condescending smile spreads across his lips. “Salve, my goodman,” I say.

  “Lysander, isn’t it?” Cassius asks without attention to protocol.

  “It is.” He waits for me to say something more. I do not.

  “Well, you’re an eerie little creature, aren’t you?” He leans closer, his lively eyes narrowing. “Jove, you look eighty and eight all at the same time.”

  “My grandmother is wroth with you,” I say.

  His eyebrow arcs. “Is she now? Have I done much to be wroth about?”

  “You have killed eleven men in the Bleeding Place since summer. And your villa has been a constant source of debauchery and media fodder. If you were attempting to encourage the stereotype of Martians as warmakers, you succeeded most admirably.”

  “Well…” He flashes a smile. “I do like causing a stir.”

  “Why? Does it make you feel important? Alis aquilae. The words of your house. ‘On eagle’s wings.’ I suppose an air of self-satisfaction is natural amongst the apex predator of the sky. Who would contradict them?”

  His face darkens. “Careful, little moon boy. You may wag that tongue all you like on this hill. But on Mars, that’s how men meet their end.”

  I blink up at him, knowing I have nothing to fear. “Does truth disconcert you so?”

  “Call me a pedant for manners.”

  “Manners. Well, if it’s manners you wish to discuss, I can call Aja in and you can debate the particulars with her. They are different on Luna.”

  He wags a finger at me. “Using the claws of others is not brave, nor is it the same as having claws. I would have thought you of all people would know that.”

  I’m not sure what he means, me of all people, so I fight the instinct to shrug, knowing it a foul habit, and incline my head to dismiss his puzzling insult. “One day I will have claws and I will learn to use them, my goodman. Until then, I do believe the claws of others will suffice.”

  “Goryhell, you’re a terror.” He watches me a moment. “I’ve decided to like you, little moon boy.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “But do not be offended if I withhold similar sentiment. I told Grandmother the other Martian would be better.”

  His mood
swings to darkness once again. A feeble trait to be so protean. “Which other Martian?”

  “The orphan,” I smile. “Andromedus.”

  “Darrow…”

  “Yes. He was ArchPrimus. Was he not? He stormed Olympus. Unheard-of quality, despite his parents being of such…humble acclaim. The Andromeduses were Martian, bannermen of House Aquillus before they tried their hand in the Belt. Your bannermen. Did you know them?”

  “House Aquillus?” He smirks. “Haven’t even heard of it.”

  “It is in eastern Cimmeria. But of course he takes nothing after them in features either. He’s inordinately…durable and clever. Most importantly, he inspired loyalty. You, despite your natural gifts, did not.”

  “I won’t be lectured by an unscarred brat, no matter his last name. You’re not even supposed to know about the Institute yet. Little cheat.”

  “You prove my point. You have no humility. Andromedus would be better.”

  “Better for what?”

  “Now, Cassius, didn’t Lady Bellona teach you patience is the utmost virtue?” A young woman wearing my house colors but speaking with an Agean brogue leans at the doorway to my grandmother’s office, smiling nastily at Cassius.

  “Virginia,” he says with a strange, Pinkish smile.

  “Hello, handsome.” She smiles sweetly at me. “Lysander, did you write any poems for me today?”

  I blush and suddenly wish I were as tall as Cassius. “None of worth, I fear.”

  “That’s not what Atalantia told me.”

  “She’s much too…forgiving.”

  “Well, I’ll be the final judge of their quality. Shall you read them to me after supper?”

  “Aja was going to take me to see the falcons at Gosamere,” I say.

  “May I come?”

  I nod despite knowing Aja will be annoyed.

  “Wonderful, I do love falcons.”