Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “It was the summer of ’987!”

  The announcer’s voice filled the coliseum, rebounding off the cheering masses with their banners and hand-painted signs, screams and shouts of “Devils! Devils! Devils!” nearly drowning out the artificially amplified tones. It was enough to wrench at even my attention. I knew the date, knew what it was we were about to see.

  “The last men of the 617th were stranded on Bellos, their ship crashed, their brothers and sisters slain! No one was coming to save them!”

  On cue, the lift at the far end of the platform was raised, spilling thirty men and women out onto the field. Slaves, all. They were felons to a man, it being the practice on Delos—as in much of the Empire—for felons to be forced into such a life. Their nostrils were slit to mark their crimes and their foreheads tattooed with their offenses. Some lacked a hand, others an eye or both ears. All had been shaved bald, their bodies painted white to make them look more like Cielcin. Though it was impossible to tell in their black jumpsuits, I knew the male slaves had all been castrated and that the breasts of the female slaves had been removed to make them more like the Cielcin—neither woman nor man—and to demoralize them. They were meant to die there on that day. Meant to fit the narrative in which the survivors of the 617th Centaurine Legion repelled a Cielcin horde that had ravaged Bellos colony.

  The seven men of the Meidua Devils wore body shields and armor; the slaves had none. The Devils carried plasma rifles and lances, set low so as to cause only superficial burns. The slaves had crude steel blades and cudgels—the Cielcin abjured firearms. It was not a fair contest. But then, it was not meant to be.

  This was the Colosso, the great sporting event of the Empire, and it was a bloody thing. First the baiting with the azhdarch; then this melee, a chance for the conquering heroes to get their blood up; then the smaller bouts, champion against champion. And first among those battles would be Crispin, the young and dashing son of their lord, resplendent in his finest armor, gallant with his bright sword and stylish hair. The whole thing struck me as perverse in that moment. Perhaps the ancients were right. Perhaps Valka was. Perhaps we are barbarians. I wanted away, wanted my rooms back in Devil’s Rest.

  “See our noble heroes surrounded by the Pale beasts!” the announcer continued. With their stun rods, red-uniformed douleters prodded the slaves into a ring about the seven Meidua Devils. “See our noble heroes, the only thing standing between the poor people of Bellos and their fate as food for the monstrous Cielcin! See them make their heroic stand!”

  A gong sounded, filling the arena: sonorous, doleful, oddly serene. The ringing of that gong echoes within me still, shadowing my own future. The crowd shrieked with ecstasy. I turned away, flipping to a new page in my book and sharpening my broken pencil on the little scalpel I carried in my kit.

  The first shouts as the plasma fire cut into the attacking slaves burned me. They could not do anything but fight. The douleters around the perimeter had glowing lances that would drop them in an instant, force them to fight another day or kill them where they fell.

  I shivered.

  Beside me Crispin was entirely out of his seat, brandishing his unsheathed sword, the ceramic blade gleaming razor-sharp above the heads of the groundlings below our box. He shouted incoherently with the crowd, spurred on by the violence. I thought of Sir Felix then, of the boxing round the ears he would’ve given Crispin for drawing his sword so needlessly. I’d worn no weapon myself save a long knife, telling Roban I needed no defense other than his presence. That had gladdened the knight, but I felt foolish and terribly small, underdressed beside my brother, armed and armored as he was.

  One of the Meidua Devils brought his foot down on the face of a slave, breaking the man’s nose. Red blood ran down his cheeks and chin, carrying flakes of white paint where it went. He brought his foot down again, and the crowd gasped, then cheered. The boot rose, stamped again on the slave’s face. The slave didn’t move. He was dead—had been dead. This was showmanship: gratuitous, meaningless. It was not for me. It was for creatures like my brother, like the hollering serfs and plebeians in the stands with their kebabs and spun sugar delicacies, their sweetened drinks and cheap beer.

  “Young master Crispin.” A harsh, masculine voice sounded from the back of the box. I looked around the side of my chair and was surprised to see that it was a woman who had spoken: squat and with sharp brown eyes, her hair a tangled, sandy whorl cut just above her ears. Her ugly, windburned face twisted into a grotesque smile. I reached up and grabbed Crispin by his absurd half cape.

  He sloshed blue drink onto the floor as he turned, leering at the sight of the ugly woman. “Is it time?”

  “Yes, young master.”

  Crispin practically wet himself with excitement, abandoning the drink on the table and almost running to where the fat douleter stood just inside the open door to the hall. The sounds of the crowd wafted in through that open portal, clearer, sharper without the muddying effect of the box’s shields to help block the noise.

  “Are you coming, Master Hadrian?” Sir Roban took a step forward.

  “No, Roban.” I turned away, rubbing at the smear of charcoal on the blade of my hand and succeeding only in dirtying my left thumb in the process. I fixed my attentions on the page before me and not on the bloody work on the killing floor. The truth was that I would gladly have gone with Roban if the lictor were bound for any place other than the gladiators’ annex at the entrance to the field.

  “Shall I stay here, then?”

  “No, no. Crispin will need you more than I. The box locks.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Alone in the lord’s box, I sat in the chair meant for my father while below seven men kitted out as Imperial legionnaires butchered thirty prisoner-slaves with plasma burners and energy lances. The smell of burned flesh and singed fabric began to rise from the killing floor, mingling with the smells of kebabs and popcorn rising from the stands. It was an unsettling, disgusting aroma. I flipped through the pages of my sketchbook: images of people and places around the castle.

  I had loved drawing ever since I was a child. As I grew up, however, I realized there was something singular about the process. A photograph might capture the facts of an object’s appearance, colors and details rendered perfectly at a higher resolution than any human eye could appreciate. By the same token, a recording or RNA memory injection might convey a subject with perfect clarity. But in the same way that close reading allows the reader to absorb, to synthesize the truth of what he reads, drawing allows the artist to capture the soul of a thing.

  The artist sees things not in terms of what is or might be, but in terms of what must be. Of what our world must become. This is why a portrait will—to the human observer—always defeat the photograph. It is why we turn to religion even when science objects and why the least scholiast might outperform a machine. The photograph captures Creation as it is; it captures fact. Facts bore me in my old age. It is the truth that interests me, and the truth is in charcoal—or in the vermilion by whose properties I record this account. Not in data or laser light. Truth lies not in rote but in the small and subtle imperfections, the mistakes that define art and humanity both.

  Beauty, the poet wrote, is truth. Truth, beauty.

  He was wrong. They are not the same.

  There was no beauty in that arena, but there was a truth. There, while men shouted and died on the killing floor, executed for the diversion of seventy thousand spectators, I saw it. Or heard it, rather—heard it behind the screams and cheers and laughter of the adoring public as Crispin stepped onto the field amidst smoke, as the douleters and servitors dragged the bodies of the dead slaves toward the lift. A silence. A profound, echoing quiet. Not a quiet in the ears but in the mind. The crowd—for it was a singular being—was shouting to drown out the loud silence in their souls.

  I heard it, but I did not understand what it was. What it meant
.

  Buttoning my jacket, I turned, crossed to the door, and left the box. I needed air. All at once I found I could stand to watch the tableau no longer. It was not my world, not a thing I wished to inherit along with the rest. The peasants cheered as I left the box, cheered for Crispin.

  He was welcome to it.

  CHAPTER 7

  MEIDUA

  THE AIR WAS COOLER outside, and the sounds of tumult from the Colosso were muted and far away. Afternoon was settling toward evening, and the hulking, pale sun reddened on her haunches above the low towers of Meidua. In the distance our acropolis and the black castle of my home loomed like a thunderhead. And I was alone. The men and women ambling along the street outside the arena and the circus grounds might have been members of another species, so distant did they seem.

  Perhaps my father was right to doubt me. If I could not endure the violence of the Colosso, how could I be expected to rule a prefecture as he did? How could I be expected to make the hard and bloody choices that are the soul of ruling? As I hurried from the coliseum, past the hippodrome and the grand bazaar, my mind turned to House Orin, to the shattered halls on Linon half a system away. I told myself I could not have done such a thing, that I was not so strong or so cruel. I thought of the dead slaves, of the gladiator’s boot smashing the whitened flesh until the head crunched beneath it. I walked faster, wishing I could walk fast enough to leave the world entirely.

  Immediately beyond the circus grounds, the city rose to loftier heights, its street lamps already lighted as the towers carved their shadows on narrow streets. A shuttle winged its way overhead, and in the far distance I could just make out the fusion contrail of a lifter rocket streaking heavenward. I wished I were aboard it, bound for somewhere—anywhere—else. I knew I should be heading back—to my own shuttle at least, if not to the box and the games—but the thought of returning to the coliseum, of seeing Crispin at his bloody game, filled me with disquiet. I stopped a moment in the shadow of a triumphal arch, watching groundcars move past as they wove slowly through the heavy foot traffic this near to the coliseum. A stiff wind blew up from around the bend in the road, carrying with it the scents of salt and sea and the cawing of distant birds. The fading day was fair with a faint chill hinting at the end of summer, and I shrugged my jacket a little closer about me. I would walk home, I decided, and damn Father and what he’d have to say about it. It was not too far to the castle: a few miles west and north up the winding streets, hooking around a bend in the limestone bluffs toward the stairs and the Horned Gate.

  So I set off along the esplanade, moving parallel to the Redtine and up toward the falls with their great locks. Beside me the river thrummed with little fishing junks and heavy barges carrying trade goods from upriver. The sound of men’s voices carried far over the water, raucous and rough. I lingered there a moment, watching an old-fashioned galleus crewed by serfs go by, pressing against the slow current of the great river on its way back toward the distant mountains. Faintly over the waters I heard the cry of their oarmaster and the banging of the drum. “Row on for home, my lads,” he cried, words in time with the drumbeat. “Row on for home.”

  I stopped for a moment, watching the old-style ship until a freight tanker painted with the Marlowe devil blocked it from sight. The serfs didn’t stand a chance. They were forbidden the technologies allowed to our guild workers, and so they made do with the sweat of their brows and the strength of their arms.

  I had half a mind then to turn back, to make for the wharfs and the fish market I’d often toured in my youth. There was a Nipponese man there who rolled fish with rice in a corner store, and in Lowtown there were performers who pitted animals against one other. But I was mindful of my danger, a palatine nobleman walking openly down the street dressed in the finery befitting his station. I twisted the signet ring on my thumb self-consciously and fiddled with the slim bracelet of my terminal. Instinct told me to call for backup, to at least alert Kyra that I was not going to meet her at the shuttle.

  But I was protective of my privacy, as are all young men faced with difficult periods in their lives. Turning away from the riverside, I waited until the groundcars stopped rolling and crossed the front street, following a winding avenue upslope past blinking storefronts and stands selling produce and Chantry icona of printed plastic and false marble. I politely declined one woman’s offer to braid my hair, then ignored her angry shouts that someone with my long hair must be a catamite. It was fashionable in those days for men to wear their hair short, as Crispin or Roban did, but I—and perhaps this was an emblem of my failures as an heir—preferred to ignore the populace. I wanted to point out to the woman that her archon wore his hair long, too, but I restrained myself and left her screaming on the corner.

  As I said, I felt almost a part of another species. Because of my family’s long history of genetic modification, I was—despite my short stature—taller than most of the plebeians I passed, my hair darker, my skin paler. Though I was still but a child, barely twenty years standard, I felt ancient beside those prematurely aged merchants and laborers, not because I was ancient but because I knew those wrinkled faces and leathered hands were scarcely older than my own. Their bodies had already betrayed them. Perhaps it was the barbarity of the Colosso, or perhaps my feelings have been clouded by what followed that walk, but thinking back to that moment I remember the faces of the Meiduans as little more than caricatures. Each seemed but a child’s sketch or primitive carving done by one who had only the barest inkling of what a human was meant to be. Their heavy brows and large pores, oily skin mottled and sun-leathered as mine would never be. I did not then stop to ask myself which of us was truly human. Was it me, with my College-tailored genes and regal bearing? Or were they more human than I could ever be, their state the state of nature? I believed at the time that it was me, but as in the parable of the sea captain who repairs his ship plank by plank until it is new again, I cannot now help but wonder how many lines one can rewrite in the blood before a man is no longer a man, or human at all.

  The next street I found wound up and to the right, its limestone-and-glass facades curving around and artfully grown over with grape vines, though it was the wrong time of year for them to bear fruit. I passed the offices of several goods importers and a place where the commoners could pay to have someone replace their rotten teeth. Theirs did not grow back indefinitely and did so imperfectly, I’d been told. I had always found that strange, but then I thought of Madame Director Feng and her stainless steel implants. Why had she opted for such when white ones were available? This thought utterly absorbed me, and so I did not take the gunning of the bike engine for what it was or suspect the coming blow until it took me in the back.

  My breath was knocked from my body, and I struck the paving stones with a grunt, my long knife under me. My back ached, and it was all I could do to get my arms under me and rise to my knees. Too-black hair fell into my face, and suddenly I understood the utility of Crispin’s shorter style. That almost made me laugh, but too much of my mind was absorbed in what was happening. Where had everybody gone? And where was the vine-fronted street I had so admired moments ago? I must have wandered, entering a broad alleyway that angled steeply upward toward the face of the bluffs and our acropolis. High above, the towers of Devil’s Rest still looked like the uplifted palace of some turbulent god.

  Distantly I heard the bells in the city Chantry begin to chime the sunset, and the chanters’ voices, amplified by massive speakers both in the temples and on tent poles across Meidua, began to pipe the call to prayer.

  “Get him, Jem!” a voice called. Something heavy and metallic smacked stone, and I turned just in time to see a big man on a powered cycle gun his throttle, the primitive petroleum engine belching poison into the air. Where he had gotten the thing—from some guild motor pool or back-alley deal—I never knew. He clutched a length of pipe in one hand, and from his posture I knew he had just struck the ground with it. The pipe
also must have been what had struck me down. But it was the man’s face that caught my attention. The left nostril had been clipped, sliced up to the bone so that the thing gaped awfully in the light of the burning streetlamps. And on his forehead, text proclaimed the man’s crime in angry black letters: ASSAULT.

  “Get him!” the other boy cried out.

  I snapped my attention sideways to where two other men on bikes waited at the end of the lane ahead, egging on the man with the pipe. I held a hand up, staggered to my feet. “I yield!” I said, remembering my lessons about situations such as these, then discreetly thumbed the panic button on my wrist terminal. “I yield.” Dimly I recalled instructions from my childhood, a reminder to surrender when unarmed or outmatched and to hope for ransom. Any palatine house would honor such a request as part of the rules of poine.

  But these were no palatines.

  “Fuck that!” said one of the two men behind me. “Fuck yielding.”

  The other said, “You’re a pat, ain’t you? Fine clothes like that?” He ran his tongue over his crooked teeth. “All kinds of money on you, I’d bet.”

  No answer I could have given would have satisfied that greed. I had only a second to take in my surroundings. The man with the pipe opened up the throttle of his bike, rear wheel spinning in place, kicking up dust and stone chips loose on the road. Then he rocketed toward me, pulling his arm back for another swing. Almost all my years of combat training fled me then, and I lurched sideways up onto the sidewalk, hoping the small bit of curb there would slow my attacker. During the scramble I thumbed the activation box on my shield-belt, felt the dry hum of the energy curtain coalesce around me. The sounds around me all went muddy, but it occurred to me that even on his bike my attacker would be too slow for the shield to do any good. The threshold of a Royse field’s usefulness was faster than any human could move. It would protect me if one of the bastards had a gun, but from that length of pipe? No.