Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “You should sleep, Gibson.”

  “Now that I know you’re all right.” And with that the scholiast took my water away, setting it back on the side table with my effects and the medical instruments. “As soon as you can, speak to your father.”

  “Gibson . . .” I reached out with my good hand and seized his loose sleeve by the cuff, belts straining, fingers thick and weak and numb. “He’s giving it to Crispin.”

  The aged scholiast looked down on me, his eyes gone flat as mossy stones. “Giving what to Crispin?”

  Not caring about the cameras, the microphones, whatever else lurked in my room, I shrugged and flapped my good arm, wincing. “Everything.”

  He tapped his cane against the tiles, pensive. “He hasn’t declared an heir.”

  “But he did make some sort of announcement, didn’t he? After the Colosso?” I felt certain that I was right and would have closed my hands into fists had one of them not been imprisoned in the gauntlet.

  “Nothing as such.” Gibson tapped his cane on the ground again. “Between your assault and your brother’s turn in the Colosso—which was a frightful piece of work, as I understand—he’s not had time to say much else. The plebeians are in a furor over your brother. I hear Crispin was quite the . . . the gallant.”

  “Gallant?” I almost laughed, feeling the sudden urge to spit on the floor. “Black Earth, Crispin’s a maniac, Gibson! Unstrap my left hand so I can drink myself, damn it!” He did, passing me the cup. The feeling was ebbing back into my hands, and I squeezed my left around the clear, heavy plastic. The capering Marlowe devil hanging on my wall almost looked to be laughing at me, and I clenched the cup so tight the plastic creaked. “He has to know! He heard what Father said.”

  Gibson tipped his head at an angle. “What did your father say?”

  I told him everything: my failure with the Guild factionarius, the council session, everything. After a moment I shut my eyes, letting my head fall back against the feather pillow for what seemed the hundredth time. Then I asked the question I feared above all others, deciding it was better than letting it fester in me. “What is to be done with me, then?”

  For so weighty a question, Gibson answered it with surprising swiftness and control, and I had to remind myself that the man was a scholiast, trained to hold logic above all other things. “That has not been announced. Your father never declared you his heir, so if what you say is true, there’s no legal difficulty, not truly. And the commons are rather taken with Crispin, as I say. For the moment at any rate.”

  “We’ll see how long that lasts.”

  Gibson laid one spotted hand on my shoulder, light as paper. “Your father has always thought you too kind, Hadrian. Too soft to rule.”

  “It’s the Mining Guild factionarius . . .” I reached up to set the cup on the windowsill by the bedside, turning on my side as best I could while Gibson regained his seat.

  “It isn’t just about the Guild factionarius.” Gibson leaned against the back of his chair, his eyes slipping again from my face to the view of the sea through the high window. “Your father is a carnivore, Hadrian—a true predator. He believes all lords must be thus.”

  I did sit up then and winced at the pain in my side, pressing a hand to the medical seal. “There are people dying in those mines, Gibson. The radiation . . .”

  My tutor acted like he had not heard me and continued to speak, his voice never rising above a muted whisper like the rasp of wind through weathered stones. “He believes dominion must be hard, your father.” His voice changed suddenly, crackling with a pedagogue’s intensity. “Hadrian, name for me the Eight Forms of Obedience.”

  I did. “Obedience out of fear of pain. Obedience out of fear of the other. Obedience out of love for the person of the hierarch. Obedience out of loyalty to the office of the hierarch. Obedience out of respect for the laws of men and of heaven. Obedience out of piety. Obedience out of compassion. Obedience out of devotion.”

  “Which is basest?”

  I blinked, having expected some question more daunting than this. “Obedience out of fear of pain.” He only wanted to make me say it, to make me feel the weight of those words.

  Gibson smiled. “The law of the fishes. Quite right. Your father commands thusly, and Crispin will be more of the same. That is why he believes in your brother and not in you. Do you see? It is a compliment he pays you, though he does not mean to.”

  Lacking an answer, I let the empty cup drop from my hand and turned away in disgust. The whole business was sour. Wrong. “That is no way to command a people.”

  “All your father wants is to squeeze. To earn enough from his mines to buy a barony off the Imperial Office and elevate your bloodline among the houses of the peerage.”

  “But why?” I murmured, feeling the pain in my side more sharply then, though it was yet a dull and warming ache. “More dirt and serfs to dig in it. More of the same . . .”

  Gibson’s voice shifted, sounding suddenly far away. “Once the lords of men all thought as your father does, counting all resources as fuel for progress. It destroyed them and cost the Earth her life. In your father, this callousness is excusable only because there are other worlds he might move to when this one is spent.”

  As he spoke, my vision started to darken about the edges, and it was all I could do to reply, “That’s not an excuse.”

  The scholiast patted my shoulder. “And there’s the difference between you.”

  If I had a response to that, it never came. The darkness at the edges of my vision crowded in, falling like sand.

  * * *

  In my dreams I was alone, passing under the narrow arch that led from the necropolis to the mausoleum where my family’s ashes lay interred. How many times have I walked that way in dreams, who in life stood there only once? That had been for the funeral of my father’s mother, Lady Fuchsia, when I was yet a boy. I had not known her well, but hers was the first body I had ever seen. My first encounter with Death. The stink of it and the memory have never left me. It haunted me, and often when I witnessed Death again I recalled the cloying smell of myrrh, the smoke of the incense tapers, and the drone of the chanters and of old Eusebia as she led the funeral march down the echoing steps to our necropolis. To my young mind it was less that my grandmother had died and more that Death had visited us, so that each death that followed hers recalled that procession, those steps, that walk into the underworld.

  In the dream, Father went first behind the prior, carrying Grandmother’s ashes, while we, her family, followed with the canopic jars. I had her eyes, suspended in cerulean fluid; mother had her heart; my uncle Lucian—dead now seven years himself, killed in a flier crash—carried the brain. A shroud of some hue darker than black concealed the statue of my grandmother erected on the rough floor amongst the stalactites. I could hear the water dripping from the stone ceiling, dropping into pools flat as mirrors. In my dream, when I tore that pall away, it was my father’s statue beneath and not Grandmother’s at all. And it lived, watching me with eyes like dying stars. And I dropped the jar of eyes I carried, which smashed upon the cavern floor.

  His stone hands seized me, lifting me bodily from the limestone. The cavern melted around us, turning to smoke and darkness until only the red eyes of my father’s ghost remained. I fell away from them, back out and through some unseen portal ringed by the funeral masks of thirty-one Lords Marlowe, white and fading in that endless shadow. I felt as one swimming in crushing depths, frigid and smothered, bereft of direction. A gripping terror held me in her talons, and I seemed to wake, finding myself whole and healed. Gibson was still there, standing straight and tall as he had never stood in memory, his crooked spine straightened, his hair neatly ordered, his eyes sharp as scalpel blades.

  All this I easily discounted, distracted by the slit nostril marking my mentor as a criminal. Sometimes I think my memory has failed me, lost somewhere a
cross the long centuries since my youth. From time to time I wonder if I my later memories rushed backward and clouded that childhood nightmare. Yet if I were again threatened with beheading, still I think I would swear that it was so: that I saw Gibson’s injury before it was inflicted upon him.

  I was old and young again before I understood.

  CHAPTER 9

  BREAD AND CIRCUSES

  A WEEK PASSED BEFORE the corrective brace came off my ribs, and though my hand was still trapped in its own device, I had an order to obey, so I dragged my fragile self from my bed. Shoes proved too difficult with only the one working hand, and not wishing to order a maidservant to put them on for me, I went without and took the lift-tram from my suites down to ground level of the Great Keep. I had been fussed over enough, and besides, I wanted Father to see the state of me. I descended into a series of underground tramways and up again into the offices of the prefecture capitol, a deltoid building near the castle barbican crowned by a central dome and three square towers styled like the bell towers of ancient cathedrals. Barefoot and attracting stares and whispers from the gray-uniformed logothetes of the various ministries, I crossed the great Marlowe seal on the floor beneath the rotunda and moved toward the highest of the three corner towers.

  Father’s office was at the pinnacle, accessed by a circular metal door guarded by Sir Roban Milosh and a decade of lance-toting hoplites, faceless men and women in liquid-black ceramic armor and red capes. The knight-lictor grinned. “Young master! It’s good to see you on your feet.” He stepped forward. “Here to see your father?”

  I bobbed my head, numb, exhausted, and conscious of the awkward weight of the medical corrective clamped to and laced through my flesh. I hid the grizzly thing behind my back, suppressing a wince as the exoskeleton bumped against my backside. “I understand I’ve you to thank for my life, sir.”

  Roban waved that off with his usual ill grace. “Doing my job, sire.”

  Not one to be rebuffed, I set my good hand on Roban’s armored shoulder—as much to steady myself as to thank him—and rasped, “All the same, sir. You saved my life.” I bowed my head. “Thank you.”

  “Your father has been expecting you, my lord,” was all Roban said in answer, perhaps not knowing how to take such gratitude from one of his palatine masters. Or else the sight of the corrective on my hand offended him. The man was patrician himself and of decent birth, if not an exalted one. His genetic enhancements were coarser, after-market things, applied upon his ascension to knighthood. A mutant, as were many of his caste. “He’s inside.”

  I took my hand away, sighed. “Well then.” I straightened my back. “Morituri te salutamus, eh?” I looked round at the decade of armed hoplites with their energy lances glittering. We who are about to die salute you.

  “Sire?”

  “Latin, Roban,” I said, limping forward, my heavy callouses scratching against the mosaic work on the antechamber floor. I did not give him the translation. “Can you get the door? I . . . well . . .” I lifted my injured hand, noting again the little dots of dried blood crusted where the hair-fine needles pierced my warmed flesh.

  “Aye, young master.” He reached forward, the articulated armor plates of his suit opening to bare his palm, which he pressed against a translucent hemisphere in the center of the door. The device scanned the veins within the knight’s hand, and heavy bolts slammed. That done, the door rolled sideways into a slot in the wall, and Roban called within, “Hadrian is here to see you, my lord.”

  My father’s basso voice came from within. “Send him in.” Curious that he did not address me, though I was well within hearing. But then, he did not look up either or at all bestir himself from the constellation of holographic diagnostics that englobed him at his monolith of a desk. I crossed from the mosaic onto Tavrosi carpets an inch thick. Father’s high-backed seat was framed by a massive round window that looked out over Meidua and the arcing seaport. The sky across the southern country was streaked by the contrails of rockets carrying payloads into orbit and beyond. The two side walls were packed with bookshelves. But where the shelves in Gibson’s study were stuffed, described by the chaos of long use and loving attention, my father’s were ordered and—I suspected—only free of dust because of the fleet of house servants who tidied the place.

  I stopped almost in the precise center of the square room, just on the edge of the high-angled sunlight, kneading my toes into the carpet. Like a penitent before the altar of a jealous god, I waited, head bowed.

  At long last he noticed me, setting his tungsten stylus on the black glass desktop and dismissing the holographs with a wave of his hand. With the light behind him, he sat in shadow. He did not speak at first but contemplated me in silence. After what felt like eons, he only said, “Take a seat.”

  I stood for a moment, a beat, no longer than a couple of seconds. Father just watched me, unmoving, unspeaking. So I relented, falling into a low, round-backed chair opposite my father in his grand old confection of red leather and brass. Silence filled a single, acid moment between us, stretching time in its unfeeling fingers. I waited him out. Patience is a common trait amongst the peerage—and indeed amongst any of the nobile castes—but whereas I had the whole day open to my recovery, Father had doubtless allotted only a small amount of time for our appointment. I had the luxury of patience where he did not.

  Presently he spoke. “Why were you in the city?”

  “What?” I felt my shoulders tighten as if expecting a blow. “No, ‘How are you feeling, Hadrian? Are you all right?’”

  “Of course you’re all right, boy.” The gray hairs at Sir Alistair’s temples and forelocks glinted silver in the high sunlight. “That’s why I’ve put off this conversation. No point in having it until you were all right.”

  “You could have visited.”

  My father sniffed. “You have not answered my question.”

  “I was walking home.” Mid-answer, Lord Alistair’s eyes drifted from my face to the fine enameled globe of the planet at the extreme corner of his desk. It was of the sort made for wealthy collectors, lighting itself in real time with the rotation of the world and Delos’s twenty-six-hour day, weather systems and cloud banks rendered in exquisite holography.

  “Walking. Home.” Somehow each word was a manifesto, a condemnation. In my drug-addled state I struggled not to shrink from him. He did not raise his voice. He almost never raised his voice. That was one thing that made him so terrifying. “Do you know what you’ve cost us with this little misadventure of yours?”

  “Misadventure?” My voice cracked as I slid forward in my seat, robe belling open at the chest as I repeated, “Misadventure? I was attacked, sir.”

  The Lord of Devil’s Rest drummed his fingers on his desktop, upsetting a few loose sheets of formal vellum. Contracts, I supposed, if not writs of fealty. The truly important documents were all still done by hand. “The offenders have been apprehended and given to the Chantry for punishment.”

  I held up my left hand for his examination, the signet ring screwed back onto the thumb. “So I’d guessed. Did you cut it off the poor bastard’s finger, I wonder?”

  Father smiled. “The minute a peasant can harm one of our own is the minute our house ceases to be feared. This isn’t like the ancient days, son. We rule, ourselves. Not as a body politic, not in the name of or with the consent of the governed. Our power is ours—do you understand? And that power is ours only so long as we can hold it.”

  “Obedience out of fear of pain,” I spat, remembering Gibson.

  “That is the only way a man can govern a dog, boy.” He leaned back against his seat, the red leather crinkling. Taking a leaf from his book, I glanced past him to watch the distant ground traffic in the city below our acropolis and the tilt of white sails in the harbor.

  A sick feeling formed in the pit of my stomach as I asked, “What have you done?” I strained, half expecting to see a b
urning city block or a blackened glass crater where the offending suburb had been.

  “Placed a curfew on the district and shot anyone in violation of it.”

  “You can’t do that!” I objected, shaking my head. “It will only make things worse.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question.” Lord Alistair briefly fixed his attention on my face again. Before I could articulate a clarifying question, he said, “Why did you leave the Colosso?”

  Half talking over him, I rolled my eyes and spat, “The bloodshed disagreed with me, Father.”

  “Disagreed with you?” His lordship visibly sneered, lips pulling down and away from his lower teeth. “Disagreed with you? And you wonder why there is a question as to whether you or Crispin will succeed me?” He stopped his globe spinning with a slap of his hand.

  “Because I don’t want to sit through Colosso?”

  “Because people saw that you didn’t sit through Colosso. That box isn’t opaque, you idiot child.” I was about to speak, but Father held up a hand for silence. “While you were busy trying to leave, your brother was standing his ground with the best of my gladiators, standing for his people.” He banged a hand on the desktop. “And do you have any idea what your departure says to them? Do you know what message that sends? And then to be wounded by churls!” He shook his head, lips curled as if the last word had put a foul taste in his mouth. “They won’t fear you after this!”

  “And they fear Crispin?”

  “And they fear Crispin,” Lord Alistair repeated, drumming his fingers on the tabletop again. “It should have been you in that coliseum, boy. Felix tells me you’re the better fighter.” I tried to contain my surprise at this statement. It was true, but I’d never expected to hear Sir Alistair say it. In the voice of a grim magistrate, he asked, “Do you understand what you’ve done?”