Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  The man’s blow went wide, and he turned his bike into a skid, laughing as he wheeled about to face me again. I should have run, but I stood my ground instead and drew my main gauche. The knife was only about as long as my forearm, its ceramic blade milk-white in the red of twilight. “Who sent you?” I demanded, adopting a defensive crouch. Absurdly my mind went to the azhdarch-baiting I had witnessed earlier that afternoon, but I realized quickly how little that situation had in common with my own. The flying xenobite had outmatched the slave gladiators with ease. This was more like the bullfights of old, which were still practiced when the Colosso lacked for more colorful monsters.

  And I was a poor matador without even a proper sword.

  “Who sent you?” I repeated, now more challenge than question. The other two men flew at me on their own vehicles, one brandishing a prefect’s blackjack, the other an aluminum bat such as children played ball with. I threw myself forward, counting on the fencer’s strategy of closing distance to save myself from the assault. It only worked in small part, and before long I found myself flat on my backside. Clotheslined—that was the word. Surrounded, I rolled onto my knees and recovered my ground, tapped the panic button on my terminal again. Roban must have gotten the alarm, along with Kyra and the other guards. I tried to imagine peltasts piling into Kyra’s shuttle, imagined energy-lances opening like jewel boxes into attack mode.

  “Take his rings, Zeb!” said the man with the pipe. “You see them things?”

  No, I realized with a start. Not a man. A boy. My assailants were all children. Ephebes no older than Crispin, their faces patched with sad little twisted hairs and pockmarked by acne. Common street rats. A gang. But where had they gotten the bikes? Such things could not come cheap, surely, even though they weren’t regulated by the Chantry.

  The Chantry . . . the sanctum’s infernal bells were ringing all over the city now, and above in Devil’s Rest Eusebia would be preparing for that evening’s Elegy. People were praying, or else worshipping the bloodshed at the Colosso. I imagined Crispin standing in the dusty ring of the coliseum as rose petals showered down upon him and his vanquished foes. Somewhere Sir Roban would be homing in on my location, but around my little knot of chaos, the world went on unchanged.

  I held my knife out. “Fight me fairly!” I called, foolish and naïve. This was no duel, no refereed, back-and-forth, man-to-man fight with matched weapons, the tide of combat dependent solely upon skill.

  “Thought you yielded!” said one of the other boys—Zeb, maybe. I never learned which was which. The two behind me circled closer, bikes idling. “Fucker probably lives in one of them spire palaces up in Hightown, and he talks about ‘fairly.’” The boy spat. “Knock him down again, Jem. This ain’t his turf.”

  “This is my—” I was about to say city when the big lad with the pipe drove straight at me. I lunged sideways, aiming to bring my knife around—too slow. The pipe caught me in the arm just above the wrist, and I dropped my knife. Howling, I went to one knee, knowing my wrist was shattered. The two other boys whooped and jumped off their bikes. Clutching my broken arm to my chest, I scrabbled across the concrete, chasing my dropped knife.

  “No you don’t, pat!” Someone seized me by the back of the coat. I twisted, cracked the serf in the chin with my good hand. I heard him cry out and bared my teeth in satisfaction, nostrils stretched, chest heaving. The other boy snarled and pounced. Thinking of Crispin—how he would fight almost the same way—I snapped out with a kick, taking the peasant between his legs. He winced and stumbled back, according me enough time to get back to the knife. I recovered it just as the boy with the pipe joined the fray.

  I knew I couldn’t win. Maybe with both hands I could have bested three hoodlums in the streets of Meidua. Maybe. If I were armed properly with a sword? Certainly. But as I was? Broken and ambushed and with only my knife? All I could do was play for time. I was lucky, and the boys got in one another’s way more than, say, three legionnaires of the Imperial forces would have done. So I stood, abandoning all my breeding and education like the troglodytes who abandon civilization and live as beasts.

  The one with the pipe—Jem, I think—came at me first, and I slipped backward even as one of his friends circled round behind me. I slashed at him, but I was too clumsy and slow with my off hand. I was many things, but left-handed was not one of them. Something clubbed me in the back—the blackjack or the stickball bat—and knocked the wind out of me. I staggered and fell, and a boot slammed hard into my ribs. What little air was left to me fled, and I gasped, tried to rise. Another foot slammed down on my good wrist—not hard enough to break it, but enough that I dropped the knife. I lost consciousness for a moment. They must have kicked my head. Something hit my back again, but only with the immediacy of distant cannon fire. I think my spirit tried to rise even as my body ran itself to ground and darkness. Dimly I washed back to faint awareness, heard one voice hiss, “Ought to teach you to come down here like you own us!”

  “Take his rings, Zeb!”

  “He’s got a terminal, too! Snag it!”

  Hands tugged my signet ring from my left thumb and started on my terminal’s magnetic clasp. Then I heard it: “Guys, we’re fucked. Look.” I smiled, though my face was in the pavement. I knew he was showing them the ring. “He’s a fucking Marlowe. We’re fucked.” I wanted to smile, but my lips would not respond. A palatine’s ring is everything. It holds his identity; his genetic history, both of his family and his constellation; his titles; and the deeds to his personal holdings. If they took it and tried to use it anywhere on Delos, Father’s men or Grandmother’s would find them.

  Fools.

  I don’t remember anything else except darkness and the absolute certainty that I was dead. Crispin would rule. No question about it now. Let him have his throne, his place in the Imperium. Let Father grow to lament his choice. I didn’t care.

  Certain scholiasts teach that each experience is only the sum of its parts. That our lives may be reduced to a set of equations, that they may be factored, weighed, balanced, and understood. They believe the universe is one of objects and that we are only objects among objects. That even our emotions are no more than electrochemical processes carried out in our brains, accessories to the pressures of Bloody-Handed Evolution. This is why they struggle for apatheia, the freedom from emotion. This is their great failing. Human beings do not inhabit a world of objects, nor did our consciousness evolve to live in such a place.

  We live in stories, and in stories, we are subject to phenomena beyond the mechanisms of space and time. Fear and love, death and wrath and wisdom—these are as much parts of our universe as light and gravity. The ancients called them gods, for we are their creatures, shaped by their winds. Sift the sands of every world and sort the dust of space between them, and you will find not one atom of fear, nor gram of love nor dram of hatred. Yet they are there, unseen and uncertain as the smallest quanta and just as real. And like the smallest quanta, they are governed by principles beyond our control.

  And what is our response to this chaos?

  We build an Empire greater than any in the known universe. We order that universe, shaping outward nature in accordance with inward law. We name our Emperor a god that he might keep us safe and command the chaos of nature. Civilization is a kind of prayer: that by right action we might bring to pass the peace and quiet that is the ardent desire of every decent heart. But nature resists, for even in the heart of so great a city as Meidua, on so civilized a world as Delos, a young man might simply take a wrong turn and be set upon by brigands. No prayer is perfect, nor any city.

  It was suddenly very, very cold.

  CHAPTER 8

  GIBSON

  IF I HAD DIED in that alley more than a thousand years ago, things would be a good deal different. There would still be a sun in the skies above Gododdin; there would still be a Gododdin. The Cielcin would not be forced to live as our thralls, in our a
lienages. But then, there would still have been a Crusade. I know what it is they say of me. What they call me in your history books. The Sun Eater. The Halfmortal. Demon-tongued, regicidal, genocidal. I have heard it all. And as I have said, we are none of us one thing. As in the riddle the sphinx asked of poor, doomed Oedipus: we change.

  If you seek my baptism, look to that moment when I lay dying on a lonely street in Meidua, my hand and ribs shattered, my skull cracked, my spine fractured. Seek the time when I was cut down while Crispin ascended to glory and the adulation of the crowd. I would watch the holos later, recovering in my rooms in Devil’s Rest, and see how flowers and banners were hurled at Crispin on the coliseum floor, how the people laughed and cheered for the gallant son of their archon and his stupid cape.

  * * *

  I awoke to painted constellations. Ebony rails embedded in cream plaster, the stars’ names shining in brass inlay. Sadal Suud, Helvetios—the constellation Arma, the shield. And just beyond it, Astranavis, the starship. My room, the curved vaults of the ceiling done up in homage to the Delian skies. My room. That was wrong. I was dead. How could I be in my room? I tried to move, but I couldn’t. Shifting produced only a dull ache in my bones. I could move my head, though, and I looked round. A slouched figure in green sat by my bedside, head bowed as if in prayer. Or sleep. Beyond him were only the familiar bookshelves, the gaming station, holograph plate, and the painting of the broken starships in white paints on black canvas. An original Rudas, that one.

  “Gibson,” I tried to say, but could only groan with my dry throat. My eyes widened, seeing the device clamped to my hand. It was like a gauntlet or a skeleton’s hand, a loose assortment of metal plates like the petals of an orchid—or of some medieval device of torture.

  “Gibson . . .” This time I produced an infant’s approximation of a word. There were needles, hair-fine and flexile, pressing down from the gauntlet rigged to my ruined hand. A similar device, more closely fitting, prisoned my ribs, and both sites almost glowed with warmth. Someone had strapped my good arm and legs to the bed frame to protect my injured parts. I imagined those flexile needles curving through my bones, branching as roots branch so that the accelerated healing process could take place.

  The old man stirred, moving with the exaggerated slowness of the exhausted returning to consciousness and a groan like the creaking of trees. His cane slipped, the brass head striking the tiles. He ignored it, leaning forward in what a non-scholiast would call excitement. “You’re up.”

  I tried to shrug, but this tugged against the hellish contraption about my chest and forearm, and I bit back a ragged gasp. “Yeah.”

  “What in Earth’s name were you doing in the city alone?” He didn’t sound angry. He never sounded angry. A scholiast’s first training was in the suppression of emotion, the elevation of stoic reason above the winds of mere humanity. And yet . . . and yet there was concern in those gray and misty eyes and in the way his papery lips turned down at their wrinkled corners. How long had he been sitting there, slumped in his chair?

  I took in a rattling breath and instead of answering, I mumbled, “How long?”

  Inarticulate, that. Vague. The leonine old man at last stooped, grunting, to recover his fallen cane. “Almost five days now. You were nearly dead when they brought you in. You spent the first day in suspension while Tor Alma worked to rebuild your damaged brain tissue.”

  I felt my brows contract involuntarily. “Damaged?”

  Gibson almost, almost, cracked a smile. “No one could tell the difference anyway.”

  “Was that a joke?”

  The old man only stared at me. “You’re to make a full recovery, Alma says. She knows her business.”

  I waved my good hand, tugging on the strap. My head felt as if some perverse surgeon had packed it with cotton and cleaning alcohol, so light was it, and my eyes throbbed. “Think I’d rather be dead.” I let my head fall back against the pillows, grunting.

  The scholiast’s eyes tracked over my face, one beetling brow cocked. “You shouldn’t talk like that.” He glanced past me and out the narrow windows to the sea.

  “You know I don’t mean it.”

  He sniffed, wrapped his long, gnarled fingers over the head of his cane. “I know.” I tried to move again, and Gibson reached out to set a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t move, young master.” I didn’t listen, tried to sit up. Pain flared white behind my eyes, and I fell back again, unconscious.

  When I woke, Gibson was still sitting beside me, eyes closed, humming softly to himself. There must have been some change in my breathing, for the old man cracked one eye open like the owl he so resembled. “I told you not to move, didn’t I?”

  “Was I out long?”

  “Only a couple of hours. Your mother will be glad to know you’re back with the living.”

  Feeling more cogent than I had on my last waking and somehow more brave, I said, “Will she, now?” I glanced round the room, moving only my eyes this time for fear I’d repeat my earlier mistake. “Is there water?” With surgical care, the scholiast stood, leaving his cane propped against the chair he’d vacated, and tottered across the room to a sideboard where a silver beverage service dispensed a cup of cool water. Gibson found a straw and moved to my bedside, proffering the drinking cup. “Tell me, Gibson: If mother cares so much, where is she?” I drank, the water tasting finer than Father’s best wine. I knew the answer already, but I plowed on. “I don’t see her.”

  Gibson’s face fashioned itself into a thin mask over pain. “Lady Liliana is still at the summer palace in Haspida.”

  I made a small “Oh” sound, more an outrush of air than a proper word, akin to the Cielcin word for yes. Haspida, with its orchards and clear pools. I thought of Mother’s suites there with her servants and her girls.

  “I wish she were here, too.” Gibson rubbed at his eyes. There was a deep tiredness in him, as if he had been sitting up for days. Five days, I told myself. Too long. “For your sake, she should be here.”

  My brows contracted. It was not his place to say what my mother should be doing. But this was Gibson, so I let it stand. “How bad is it?”

  “You completely shattered your right hand, broke five ribs, and did considerable damage to your liver, pancreas, and one kidney.” Gibson’s face flickered with disgust, and he smoothed the front of his robes. “And that’s to say nothing of the head trauma. I’d take it slowly, or you’ll tear things again.”

  Nodding weakly, I allowed myself to sink back against the pillows, eyes drifting closed. “What happened?”

  “You don’t remember?” The scholiast frowned. “You were attacked. Some lowlifes by the warehouse district. We pulled the surveillance footage and found them.” He inclined his head toward the side table. “Ardian led the prefects. They found your ring.” I followed his gaze, and there it was—my signet ring with the Marlowe devil laser-etched on the bezel sat there amongst odd medical instruments, my terminal beside it.

  “I see,” I murmured, tipping my head to drink from the water again. Strange that when you’ve no need of water, it tastes like air. You never notice the taste, the glorious taste, until you’re parched for it. “They’re dead, then? The three of them?”

  Gibson only nodded. “Sir Roban found you just in time. He brought you back. He and that lieutenant of yours.”

  “Kyra?” Against caution I tried to sit up straight again, regretted it as the pain turned eloquent within me.

  Gibson grew quiet, and I thought for a moment that he had passed out standing up like a narcoleptic, overcome by the soul-deep tiredness that pervaded him. But as I settled back into place and the pain faded, I saw that his eyes were open, watching me.

  “What is it?” I asked, wincing as I turned, tugging at the place on my stomach where Tor Alma had fixed the corrective.

  The old scholiast drew in a deep breath, fussing with the cuff of one volumin
ous sleeve. “You father wants to see you whenever you’re well enough.”

  “Tell him to come see me,” I spat reflexively. It hurt. Neither of my parents was here, nor was Crispin. Only Gibson, my tutor. My teacher. My friend.

  A small, nearly warm smile stuttered into place on Gibson’s seamed face, and he patted me on the shoulder with one spotted hand. “Your father is a very busy man, Hadrian. You know that.”

  “Someone tried to kill me!” I gestured against my bonds at the patch below my ribs. “You’d think he could take the time to check in on me. Did he come at all? Even once? Did Mother?”

  “Lady Liliana has not bestirred herself, no.” Gibson sucked in another breath. “She left instructions that she was to be notified in the event that your condition worsened. As for your father . . . well . . .”

  That was all I needed to hear. “He is a very busy man.” There was a hollow, brittle quality to my words, like a pane of safety glass cracked by a bullet, its pieces held together only because the shards had fallen against one another, ready to topple at the slightest disturbance.

  “Your father . . . asks that you consider how your injuries might reflect on the dignity of your house.” I will always remember how Gibson would not look at me as he said those words, almost as much as I remember the sting of them.

  I shattered, shut my eyes to hold back the tears I sensed were coming. It was one thing to know intellectually that one did not have the affection of one’s own parents, but it was quite another to feel it. “He told you to say that.”

  There was no response, and that confirmed it. Looking again, it struck me just how tired Gibson was. There were dark circles beneath the old man’s gray eyes and a fine stippling of beard between the fierce side-whiskers. I reminded myself that this man had been sitting in that chair for almost five days, for the entire duration of my recovery. I had a father of a sort, but his face would never hang beneath the Dome of Bright Carvings.