Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  She wadded up the tape and threw it out into the rain and looked at me with a sudden intensity I found almost frightening, and I shied away despite the pain in my chest and arms. “You talk funny, Hadr-Hadrian.” She stumbled on my unfamiliar name. “Where you from?”

  “Delos,” I said, as if the name could mean anything to her.

  You talk funny. That thought stopped me short of saying anything further. It was so obvious now that I’d had it pointed out to me. Whatever I looked like, I still spoke like a Delian nobile, like a palatine of the Imperium. I should have noticed that—no wonder the others among the city’s poor mistrusted me. I stood out like a broken finger.

  “Where’s that?”

  Only a few of the unfixed stars peered through the storm, watchful and timeless. Around one of those lights was home. I could not say which, for though I knew the names of the stars, their positions were strange here. It could be any of them or none, my home lost under cloud or in the Dark. But the truth is poor poetry, and my mother had taught me better. I bit my lip—in part to subdue another wave of pain from my burning side—and pointed. “See that star, there?” I coughed. She nodded. “You can’t see it, but there’s another star behind it. Much, much farther away. That’s where I come from.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “My turn for a question!” I interjected, trying to sit up. No good. As is so often true in cases of exhaustion or hurt, rest was the best and worst thing for me. I couldn’t make myself move. “You don’t have any painkillers, do you? Nothing heavy. No narcotics.”

  She shied away, face darkening. “I don’t . . .” I wasn’t sure if she was answering me or not. Her voice broke. Was it fear? Why? I couldn’t understand. “I don’t know these words.”

  “Drugs,” I said. “Medicine?”

  “What exactly happened, anyway?”

  That brought a grimace to my face. “Tried to steal off the back of a lift-palette from some bastards with white armbands.” I gestured to my left biceps.

  “Rells?” Her dark face went pale. “Shit, rus, you are crazy.”

  “Seemed like a good idea at the time.” I laughed weakly, trying to undercut my own foolishness. I waggled my toes. “I wanted . . .” My voice trailed off, broken by exhaustion, by pain, by the interminably long night.

  . . . shoes.

  * * *

  I must have passed out. When I awoke, the Emeshi night stood deep upon the world. The clouds had rolled on, and the fierce squall had diminished to gentle rain. I was alone, unmoved from my spot beneath the solar panel. Cat was nowhere to be seen, and I lay aching and soaking and cold on the hard rooftop. Whatever comfort I’d felt in the place before going to sleep was gone, replaced by a bone-deep stiffness and a dull throbbing at the base of my skull. I lay a long time before Cat came back, watching the underside of the solar panel and the swirl of clouds along the horizon. The storm passed away north, lightning now only distantly visible, thunder reduced to the dullest drumbeat.

  “You’re not dead,” she said, small mouth going up at the corners.

  “I wasn’t that badly off.”

  She placed a plastic shopping bag on the roof beside me and opened it, one of the heavy sort sailors and housewives insisted on never throwing away. “Any of this help?”

  I had to grab one of the solar panel’s support spars to haul myself into a sitting position. The bag was full of half-emptied medicine bottles, the labels torn or blurred or written in foreign scripts. I began sifting through them. “Where’d you get all this?”

  “Trash,” Cat said simply. “Might still work okay.”

  I was in no position to be choosy. I set five bottles of vitamins aside as well as three with labels written in a form of Mandari strange to me—no sense playing dice. At last I found a bottle written in the distinct blocky Lothrian alphabet. Naproxen. I shook it before unscrewing it. There weren’t many left. “You sure I can have some?”

  She made a throwing away gesture and went out into the still drizzling rain. I took three of the pills, ignoring the bottle’s recommended dosage, and left the bag beneath the solar panel. It took a great effort to make myself stand again and more to peel off my soaked shirt, which I left hanging from a bar beneath the panel. I paused a moment, taking my ring off the cord round my neck. I stuffed it into a pocket of my soaking pants instead. A moment later I sagged onto the ledge overlooking the city. The water had risen nearly a foot and a half in the alley below, and I averted my eyes. Tired as I had been, I might not have awakened until it was too late.

  Cat and I sat there a long while, unseen by the world, seeing all of it. At last I asked, “Why did you help me?”

  “Told you,” she said, making the throwing away gesture again. “Ain’t gonna let anyone drown in their sleep like that.” I held her gaze for a good long while, and something in my face must have spoken to her, for she added, “And you was crying. I know what that’s like. Being alone.”

  “You said something about your mother,” I put in, curiosity overcoming tact.

  Cat’s face crumpled, the pretty, common lines drooping. I felt something in me break for having caused that sadness as she said, “She’s dead. Sick. The Rot, you know . . .” She tossed something over the side of the building—a chip of the concrete ledge, perhaps. “You got a family?”

  I shook my head, resisted touching my ring where it lurked in my pocket. “No.”

  CHAPTER 27

  FORSAKEN

  “SHE HAS FORSAKEN US!” the vate shrieked, reaching gnarled fingers up to the sky in the raised square before the massive dome of the Borosevo Chantry in the White District. The holy madman stood on a scaffold ten feet above the paving stones, crying out to all who would listen. Most days the people hurried past such as he, scurried out from the canals or up from the sealed parking lot for those few citizens wealthy and vapid enough to purchase groundcars in a place like Borosevo, where the roads were few. But it was Friday, and the weekly Litany was being celebrated by the system’s grand prior, an aged priestess called Ligeia Vas who put me in mind of withered old Eusebia. Because of this, the plaza was flooded with worshipers who could not fit into the Chantry sanctum and who would instead watch the prior from screens hung between pillars depicting the Four Cardinals.

  Beggars crowded the entrances to the plaza and clustered about the pillars that stood before the double doors, young and old alike. Many were bandaged, sores weeping from Gray Rot. Yet more bore the marks of the Chantry’s justice: missing fingers, thumbs, eyes, tongues. You could see their crimes tattooed in black lettering on their foreheads: ASSAULT, THEFT, ASSAULT, HERESY, HERESY, THEFT, RAPE, THEFT, ASSAULT. The more naked among them showed the signs of whip scars on their backs or ugly wheals and burn scars bright as new metal. A disproportionate number of them were men, though the Rot showed no such prejudice. Some among the standing congregation wore masks over their faces or else wore gloves despite the heat of the day.

  The crowds also meant conditions were right for begging. With an icon of Charity carved above the doors of the sanctum, even the most hardhearted of the faithful thought twice before spurning us with a toe. Whether they gave us any spare steel bits or quarter-kaspums was something else entirely, but I bobbed my head in placid gratitude all the same, kneeling like a penitent alongside Cat near a street corner leading into the plaza. The vate still screamed from his pulpit, naked and stinking. “Our Mother, the Earth Who Was and Will Be Again, has turned Her face from us. These Pale devils are Her punishment for the vanity of our ways! Mark me, brothers and sisters, children of Earth and Sun! Mark me, for the punishment is coming! A cleansing fire that will wash away all our sins! Repent! Repent! And be clean again!”

  A man dropped a coin into Cat’s begging bowl; she looked small and terribly forlorn beneath one of the city surveillance cameras. “God and Emperor bless you, messer,” she said, bowing her face over the bowl. I couldn’t help bu
t notice that she had nearly three times the coin I had. I grimaced. At least my ribs had healed.

  “You’re sharing some of that with me, aren’t you?” I asked, smiling. I kept my voice down but was wholly incapable of keeping the playfulness from it.

  “Gods no,” Cat spat back. “Get your own!” She swatted at me, smiling so that the light caught her crooked teeth. I chuckled softly. It felt good to laugh again, to be given a reason to laugh. Her hand lingered a moment on my knee, fingers warm and damp with sweat through my trousers. The day was hot, the air thick and steaming. We stayed there all morning, as we did each morning on the day of the High Litany. A woman in a violet suit walking beneath a bright paper parasol placed a whole silver kaspum into Cat’s bowl with a smile. The girl nearly cried and stood to bow in thanks.

  I looked down at my own bowl, at the paltry collection of steel bits and the crumpled twelfth-kaspum note there. The smile on that woman’s face has never left me, though she never said a word. When I think of kindness, it is to the shape of that mouth with its cheap red lipstick that I turn.

  “We have rejected nature!” the vate cried. “We bend the knee and the neck to lords made less than human!” And here the naked madman clutched his own member with a gnarled hand, beard blowing in the wind atop his scaffold. “The Mother knows! Knows the nobiles have forgotten Her, have worked Her from their blood!” The part of me that had been an archon’s son twitched, half expecting to see the prefects—or even soldiers in the green-and-white of the count’s service—march in to take the sun-crazed old preacher away. None came, for it is said the mad are close to Earth.

  CHAPTER 28

  WRONG

  ALREADY NUMB FROM A stunner graze and clutching my useless left arm, I slalomed round a street corner and up onto a set of crates, using them to springboard over the parked float-palette that blocked the road. The gray concrete glowed with heat, but my scarred and grimy soles could not feel it. I cannot say which day it was or how many months or years of my life had washed into those canals like so much garbage.

  I heard shouts behind me and shrugged the straps of the stolen purse into the crook of my still-working arm. Gasping, I darted up a set of stairs and into an alley so narrow my broad shoulders almost scraped the sides. The buildings hung close above my head, piping and ductwork exposed and bracketed to metal walls. My shirt snagged on a bolt and tore, doubtless gashing my unfeeling arm in the process. The electric crackle of stunner fire and shouts of, “Stop! Thief!” followed me like the hounds in one of my late uncle’s foxhunts. My chapped lips pulled into a mean grimace, hair blowing in my face. I turned, shouldered past a pair of women carrying shopping baskets on their heads and onto a high street running along the saline bend of a canal.

  Though my instinct was to run, though years of bruises and broken bones badly set by backstreet hacks screamed at me to keep going, I knew that would only make me stand out. Many’s the time I watched a crowd turn against a fellow thief, the brightly dressed throng transmuted into a wall of solid flesh as the prefects brought him down. Instead I slipped around an iron railing and settled at an empty glass table at the edge of a cafe’s sitting area. Holographs for ordering flickered on the glass surface, and I made a show of riffling through my purse—no mean feat with one of my arms stunned and useless. I did not doubt that there was a camera somewhere on me, but I didn’t think that information would make it to the prefects before they slipped by me. I ignored the universal card in the purse and the identification forms, both belonging to the powdered man in the low-slung sarong I’d stolen it from. I found a pair of slightly ovoid glasses—silver-rimmed with lenses of ruby glass—that I shoved onto my nose. I took a moment to gather back my long hair and bind it with an elastic band, also courtesy of the bag. What’s more, I found a full half-kaspum note and nearly another kaspum in steel change. These I stuffed into my pocket with a small smile before setting the purse down beside my chair.

  Behind me, I heard the drumming of boot heels on the pavement, but I did not turn. I bowed my head and pretended to look over the menu embedded in the table.

  “Don’t worry,” a rough voice said. “I won’t say a thing.”

  I looked up to find an older man smiling at me from the next table over. He raised his eyebrows and smiled over the rim of his drink. We were the only clients for three tables. An old book sat closed beside one fist, and he wore an indigo jacket cut in Nipponese fashion, square sleeves patterned with gold and black diamonds about the cuffs. His graying hair was pulled back into a greasy topknot, frayed and bristling like a calligrapher’s long-abused brush.

  I decided to play dumb. “I’m sorry?” My voice came out ragged, masking somewhat the effect of my clipped Delian accent.

  “Your arm’s gone stun-lame and you’re breathing like the Duchess Antonelli’s prize racehorse. Don’t take a scholiast to figure you’ve done a runner.” He wasn’t Nipponese either, judging by the craggy lines of his face or the tenor of his words. Indeed, I couldn’t place his accent. Durantine, maybe? Or one of the Norman freeholders, though he didn’t have their coloring. I stood sharply, turned to go. “Don’t be that way. Old Crow ain’t going to say a word. Why don’t you sit awhile?” He kicked a chair out with a sandaled heel. When I didn’t answer or move, he sighed, slipping a loose lock of graying hair behind his ear. “How long’s it been?”

  “How long has what been?”

  “Since you was stranded, boy! You got the stink of space all over you, and anyone with eyes can see you’re no Emeshi.”

  I let my numb arm fall and swallowed the impulse to object to being called boy, but I didn’t take his offer of a seat. “I don’t know,” I said. “Couple of years.”

  Old Crow frowned. “Couple of years . . .” He shook his head, topknot wavering. “That’s hard.”

  I risked a glance over my shoulder to where the prefects—four of them—were working their way through the crowd. Suddenly nervous, I slunk into the chair opposite the other man.

  From his complexion and the strangeness of his dress and accent, it was clear he was as Emeshi as I was, so I asked, “Where are you from, messer?” I could have kicked myself. The messer made me sound more than half-educated, not the common thief I seemed.

  Crow smiled as if he understood, waving a hand around noncommittally. “Oh, lots of different places.” He peered over my shoulder, watched the prefects press on down the high street toward one of the many bridges that arched over the canal. “But I’m bound for Ascia, in the Commonwealth. You?”

  I chewed my lip, looked down at the table. I didn’t want to answer. I regretted sitting down. At last I said, “I’m from . . .”

  He slapped the table. “Not that. Where are you going?”

  Slowly I raised my eyes to his, confused. “Nowhere. What do you care? I shouldn’t even be talking to you. Whatever you’re selling—”

  “Not selling a damn thing,” Crow said, scratching behind one ear. “Just seeing a man in need’s all, only I ain’t got nothing to give, neither.” He groaned, leaning in over the table. “Bones don’t thaw like they used to. Damn fugue creches.” Despite his complaints, he looked to be on the near side of middle-aged. I couldn’t guess his caste, or even if he had one. He splayed a hand on the tabletop, and only then did I realize the man was at least a little drunk. “A man’s got to be going somewhere. That’s why Old Crow here . . .” He gestured at the sky, trailed off. “Anyway . . .”

  I rose to leave, checking my pockets for the coins I’d taken from the stolen purse. They were still there, and I crumpled the half-kaspum note in my fingers. The prefects had vanished around a bend, and I peered out through the lenses of my pilfered red glasses, seeking them. The sailor made no objection to my leaving but said, “This planet’s a shithole, you know? How’s a man supposed to breathe? Even the whiskey’s wrong.” He made a face at his mug.

  Wrong.

  It was precisely the word I’d
thought of a hundred times since my rude awakening on this world. It was all wrong. The sunlight, the two moons, even the air. I could not have imagined my current state from the comforts of Devil’s Rest nor wished them on even the lowliest peasant. At once the stolen coins seemed a terrible weight in my pocket, a yoke upon my shoulders.

  The drunken sailor was still talking, though less to me and more to the world in general, it seemed. “Listen to Old Crow here. A man’s got to have a fire under him.”

  “How’d you become a sailor?” I asked without thinking. There was a better life, one I might aspire to in my meanness. Thoughts of Simeon the Red—of traveling the unending night—filled me. Even if I would never be a scholiast or part of the Expeditionary Corps, the adventure and mysteries I sought and the prestige of exploration need not be barred from me.

  Crow cocked his head at me, scratching at his ear again, a look on his face like I’d asked him a hard question. “I was born one. So many are.” He pointed a finger at me, jerked his thumb like the hammer in an antique firearm. He winked, then squinted at me. “You ain’t thinking of signing on, are you?”

  My heart leaped into my throat. The thought of again being on a cold ship, clean and fed, positively swelled within me. I darted a glance over the cafe rail to the street, keeping an eye out for the khaki uniforms of the urban prefects. Interpreting my quietude for an affirmative, Crow said, “That’s a hard life, brother. You’d be better off getting a job in the hothouse farms than sailing. Black Earth! Be a fisherman. Fishermen make an honest living without all the damn freezing.” He rubbed at the back of his neck, grimacing. “Say, you thought about the pit fights? Strapping lad like you . . . They got no shortage of need over in the Colosso. Someone’s got to fill in for the dead boys.”

  “Are you a recruiter?” I asked.