Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “I brought you soup,” I said, placing the paper cup on the stone beside her sleeping form. The liquid was cool by then. “No carrot, I promise.” I drew the curtains back, wrinkled my nose at the brown-green stains on Cat’s bandages. She stirred but did not wake. “Broadcast says they think the plague’s running its course, burning itself out. I heard one man say he thought the plague was a Cielcin weapon . . .” My voice trailed away down some corridor in my soul, and I sat in silence for a long time. “I wish I knew how to help you better,” I said at last, picking at an innocent scab on my forearm.

  Still Cat didn’t answer. I laid a hand on her forehead, feeling the sickness there, a fire under her skin as if one might expect there to be magma in her, not blood. I knew she didn’t have long. A day or two. A week. No more. It wasn’t fair. I started undoing the bandages on one arm, revealing the chewed, diminished triceps, the way the brown skin had turned gray and blistered green and liquid yellow. I threw the ruined bandage aside, tore open a packet to apply a new medicine-soaked one. Lacking the words I needed, I hummed as I went about my work, binding up the wounds on her arm and thigh and breast.

  She did not wake, and her soup remained uneaten; whatever heat it might have had bled into the tepid, unmoving air. Water in the channel below us ran at a trickle. Here and there condensation on overhead pipes dripped back to ground, its droplets marking out the nonsense seconds of nature’s timeless clock. I thought—as I often still do—of Lady Fuchsia’s burial and Uncle Lucian’s. There would be no funeral procession for Cat, no canopic jars. No one to remove her vital organs or to burn her flesh to carbon. No true burial. No ashes for the Homeworld. No votive lantern released to the skies.

  “Had?” The word was small as angstroms, the voice soft as the turning of a page.

  I squeezed her hand as I had a thousand-thousand times. “Right here.”

  After an infinite second, she rasped, “Why . . . here?”

  My brows furrowed of their own accord, and my words came unbidden: “What do you mean, why am I here?” She nodded weakly, as if in answer. “Where else would I be?” I smiled, tried to laugh. “I don’t like anyone else on this whole planet.”

  Her laughter turned to coughing, and I cradled her head as pink sputum spattered the bandages over her ruined breast. I bit my own tongue to force back the tears, hoping—almost praying—that she would stop. She did after a moment. “Sorry . . .”

  “Don’t apologize,” I said, shaking her gently, reaching up to move the stringy hair away from her sweat-streaked forehead. “Don’t apologize. You’ll be fine soon. You’ll see. I’ll help you.”

  Slowly—so slowly—she reached up, cupping a hand against my face. Cat made a shushing noise. “Don’t have to stay,” she murmured, lips exposing gaps where her teeth had fallen out. “Not got long . . .”

  “Don’t say that.” I tried to smile, but I could tell the expression was only pained. “You’ll get better.” We both knew I was lying. She was half a corpse already, her once-fiery eyes soft with fog. One, I thought, was blinded or else had gone beyond sight. How fast she had changed. Weeks before—mere weeks before—she had been whole and hale and healthy. Who was this ghost?

  “No.” The echo shook its head. “Promise me . . . Promise me one thing.”

  “You are going to be fine!” I insisted, helping to lower her head back against the wadded scraps of cloth that passed for pillows.

  Her hand closed on my leg. “Promise me you won’t let them burn me.” She meant in the huge pyres, I knew. The bodies piled in squares.

  We believe our lives are coherent things. That they have meaning. Direction. Weft. That there is a purpose to us as there is a purpose to a player in a drama. That, I think, is the soul of religion, why so many people I have met—even my own brother—believe the world must be controlled, the universe planned and guarded. How comforting it is to imagine that there is a reason for all things. Millions of theologians and magi, the cult-priests of a thousand dead gods, have taught this lesson. Cat taught me something else, dying in that storm drain for no reason at all. I am wiser now, but know that no matter what I said, I could not help her. I could not even die with her.

  I could only watch her die.

  “Tell me . . .” She lost her words for a moment, and perhaps her wakefulness, and for a moment the only sound beside the dripping and the quiet runnels of water was the ragged, wet breathing in her throat. Before I could move, could grab for water or for the rag I used to clean her face, she continued, “Tell me a story, would you? One last time.”

  My fingers found her weak ones, closed between them. “You shouldn’t talk like that.” She did not reply, turned her thin face away. She was done arguing with me. We sat in silence a long while, hand in hand. I watched the mingled moonlight that leaked into the storm drain, the color of pale jade. My other hand went to a corner of the curtains patterned with hyacinths. Her blankets. Her shroud. I remembered how we’d torn them from the wall in the heat of the moment and how Cat had stolen them when the prefects staved the doors in, answering reports that we’d been squatting there. That week, that perfect week . . . Had it only been two months ago?

  Not even two.

  “All right.” I sucked in a rattling breath, held it so it wouldn’t come out a sob. “I’ll tell you a story.” A year passed, it seemed, or a century before I chose a story for her as I had countless times. It was one she’d heard before and one I knew almost as well as Simeon’s. “Once upon a time, on an island far from Earth, upon the margins of untrammeled space, there stood a city of poets. The Empire was young in those days, and the last of the Mericanii were broken.

  “The city of poets had been built as a haven, as a place for men to hide from the Foundation War and compose their arts in peace. The city had only one law: that none may use force against another. So the city flourished and was made beautiful by all the artists who dwelt behind its walls and prospered by their fellowship.”

  “Except for Kharn.”

  “Kharn had not chosen the city for his home but had been born to it, the child of a great poet. And as the children of great warriors are often not warriors themselves, so he was no poet. He dreamed of being a soldier, a hero like those in the epics his people composed. His people would hear none of it. ‘We have no need for soldiers here, nor the burden of arms,’ the poets said, ‘for we are far from Earth, and the walls of the city are strong.’

  “‘Those who will not live by the sword will die by one,’ Kharn insisted, for so the poems said. But the poets did not believe their own words, believing stories to be dead trifles under their command. Yet truth is neither opinion nor its slave, and the day came when the sky was darkened by sails. The Extrasolarians had arrived. Men like monsters in the Dark, the children of the Mericanii in their black-masted ships. And they burned the city and the poets in it.”

  “Except for Kharn.”

  Here I paused to brush the hair from Cat’s face and to mop her brow. That accomplished, I continued, “Kharn fought them, and the Exalted—who are kings among the Extrasolarians—recognize only strength. So they spared him even as they cut the hearts from his people and set their bodies to crew their vile ships. They spared him. And Kharn lived among them for many years and with them pillaged other cities, other worlds.”

  I do not know how long I spoke or how long I held her hand. I told the whole story. How all the while Kharn Sagara harbored vengeance in his heart. How he turned the Exalted against one another, slaying their captain and taking command of their ship for himself. How he set a course for their home: the frigid Vorgossos and its dead star. I told her how he took their planet for himself, how he made himself king of that dark and frozen world. It was the story from the book Gibson had given me, The King with Ten Thousand Eyes. It was not a happy story, nor was it a short one.

  Somewhere in the middle of it Cat’s fingers went slack, then steadily colder. I did not
weep or stumble in the telling. I had had enough of weeping, and she would not have liked it if I had stopped. Instead I squeezed her fragile hand, kissed it, said, “The end.” Only it wasn’t. Funny thing about endings—until the suns burn down and all is cold, nothing is ended. The players only change.

  Though Cat’s story had ended, the sun was rising, promising another day of Emesh’s eternal summer. I wrapped her body in the flower-dappled curtain. Death had reduced her to skin and bones, and she was light in my arms. I didn’t burn her. I carried her through back alleys and along access tunnels and the semiflooded walkways that ran along some of the side canals right at the water’s level. It wasn’t right that she should be gone so soon, so young. It wasn’t fair. I laid her to rest in the waters, as in the tale of the Phoenician sailor, and weighed her frail body down with stones. I never found the place again, never returned to light a votive lantern and send a prayer for her soul drifting skyward to the vanished Earth.

  Then, truly alone, I turned away and made my way back to the world of the sick and living.

  My own story was not yet done.

  CHAPTER 32

  STAND CLEAR

  THE PREFECTS’ STUNNERS TOOK two of Rells’s minions in the back, dropping them into a deep puddle at the end of the winding street while I watched, crouched in the shadow of a cluster of dishes and antennae on the roof of the corner store we had robbed together. I still clutched the purse: two hurasams, perhaps fifty kaspums, and a fistful of steel bits. A small fortune to the creature I’d become. Not enough to buy my way offworld—not nearly—but it was all mine. I had tripped the store’s alarm while the bastards beat the shop girl. Hypocritical, perhaps, as I had stabbed the manager in the shoulder. I still held the knife, the blood wiped imperfectly from its scarred surface. The older woman would live, or so I hoped. I’d missed the heart and hit bone. It must have hurt.

  Seven prefects, sweating in their khaki uniforms and blue windbreakers, fanned out to corner the two boys and one girl still standing. “Stand down!” called their leader, a tall man with hair almost as dark as my own, his eyes hidden behind bright lenses. He held his stunner square on Tur, the biggest of the three still on his feet. I could see the stunner’s aperture glowing its icy blue, a narrow vertical stripe of light at the end of the dark weapon. “On your knees, all of you!”

  “Kaller’s drowning, you bastards!” cried the girl, cowering behind Tur’s massive shoulders. She pointed to where one of the two stunned thieves had gone down, his face buried in the puddle. The bespectacled prefect-inspector didn’t move, but his partner—a small woman with her dark hair in a bob—moved off to pull Kaller from the mud. I didn’t move. I might have been carved from stone, a gargoyle such as decorated the walls and buttresses of Devil’s Rest.

  The female prefect checked Kaller’s pulse, his breathing. “He’s alive, Gin.”

  The man in the glasses didn’t so much as nod his head. He didn’t seem to care. Behind him, the only other woman in the group of seven prefects moved off to help her counterpart, hauling the other stunned thief from the mud. The crowd waited behind holographed cordons projected from subintelligent projection drones allowed by Chantry religious law, the kind that had human operators back in the prefects’ office in the palace complex above and at the heart of Borosevo. The drones looked like little more than dustbins studded with sensor and projection equipment balanced on single rubberized spheres. They were not rolling now but standing sentry about the active crime scene.

  For a moment I lost track of the conversation below me, could only hear the repeating recorded feminine voice broadcast from each and every one of those cordon drones: “This is the Criminal Response Division of the Borosevo Prefects’ Office. Please stand clear. A crime is underway. Please stand clear. Repeat. This is the Criminal Response Division of . . .” The words retreated beneath hearing, becoming—like the sounds of water and of aircraft—a part of the ambiance of the scene.

  “We should stun them, Gin,” said another of the prefects, a gangly man with thick sideburns, beanpole thin and tall as a palatine. “Bag them and take them in for conditioning.”

  “Bleed that!” Tur growled, spreading his arms to cover his girl companion. “Don’t want you fuckers fucking with my head.” He brandished the hooked length of pipe he always carried. “Stay the hell away, you Earth-bleeding sons of whores!”

  The man with the sideburns shot Tur square in the chest, stunning him. He toppled backward, nearly crushing the poor girl beneath him. She shrieked and cowered against the painted-glass storefront, and the other thief—I forget his name—rushed to her side. “Stay down!” the man with the glasses said, training his stunner on the others. “I don’t want to have to shoot either of you.” Then, to his associate: “Ko, hold your fire.”

  “The guy was rabid, Gin,” the other man said.

  “I said hold your fire,” the prefect-inspector snapped, glancing back at his associate. “Where’s what you took?” he asked the thieves, looking at their empty hands; my own tightened about the stolen purse.

  The girl thrust out her chin. “Gone, lawman.” She grinned. “You bitches are too slow.”

  “This is the Criminal Response Division of . . .”

  The prefect-inspector thumbed some switch on his stunner, and the blue line of the emitter glowing brighter. “On your knees. Surrender.”

  “So you can take us to the bonecutters and get our heads straightened out?” the man responded. “I’m with Tur on this. No thanks.”

  The prefect-inspector took a step forward. “Surrender, and you don’t have to. You can go to the Colosso; they need more walking corpses.” The thief’s bronze skin went white, and he said nothing. Beside him the girl was even paler. Still I didn’t move, hidden as I was among the antennae, hoping my one-time accomplices would not see me. I needn’t have feared. No one ever looks up.

  “. . . Division of the Borosevo Prefects’ Office . . .”

  The girl was shaking her head. “No. No, I’ll take the bonecutters.” I thought of the slaves in our own Colosso in Meidua, the mutilated men and women dressed as Cielcin dying at the hands of professional gladiators. I could not blame her for fearing. Even the peasants who entered the ring voluntarily didn’t usually last long against those professionals. The Colosso was a death sentence, and a humiliating one, to go to one’s end mutilated by the cathars: noses slit, foreheads branded.

  I did not blame Tur and the others for changing their minds.

  The prefects didn’t take chances. At a signal from the prefect-inspector, the man called Ko opened fire, dropping the other two thieves. I thought of the bruised shop girl and the manager I had stabbed, nodded my approval. Rells’s gang was a bunch of vicious thugs, worse than I ever was. What happened to them felt like justice. And when at last the criminals and prefects had left the street, after the holograph cordon and the projector drones had packed up and rolled away, it was not the public address that had repeated so many hundreds of times during the incident that stuck in my head. Instead it was what Prefect-Inspector Gin had said to Tur. You can go to the Colosso.

  They got no shortage of need over in the Colosso. The words came back to me with a strange, lucid insistence. That old sailor, Crow—he had suggested I might fight in the games. It would be a way to earn a living, maybe to earn enough for passage offworld. It would be dangerous, but what other choice was there? At once that chance encounter took on prophetic proportions, and I leaned back against the rooftop antenna cluster.

  Why hadn’t I done it sooner?

  CHAPTER 33

  TO MAKE A MYRMIDON

  THE VOMITORIUM WAS COLD compared to the outdoor swelter, and through the static field that held that temperate, thinner air in, I could see the heat ripples from the baking street outside the arena. During all my years in Borosevo I had avoided this part of town, never having looked the part. But the coin I had stolen—the theft that had put five of Re
lls’s thugs into reeducation at the hands of the Ministry of Welfare and the cathars—had been more than sufficient to kit me out in new clothes, plain but functional. I had paid in cash. I’d even sprung for a room in a flophouse near the starport that had once thrown me out on my ear. The room was little more than a shelf, just tall enough to lie down in, but I was sleeping in a proper bed for the first time since before Cat’s death.

  On a whim I’d regretted almost instantly, I’d purchased a cheap razor from a dispensary in the hotel lobby, glad of the cool air and the safety and the fact that no man or woman looked at me with suspicion. My hair was a nightmare, a monstrous tangle controlled by a rubber cord that kept it pulled back behind my head. I shaved it off, every scrap, until I was bald as an egg, then cast the leavings in an incinerator just outside one of the hotel’s pay toilets, glad I no longer looked like a complete fool.

  Indeed, the figure I cut striding up the vomitorium beneath hanging banners painted with the jade sphinx of House Mataro was one gaunt and terrible to behold. I caught glimpses of my reflection, distended in the massive brass gongs that lined the crowded space. Thinking back, I half looked like a Cielcin, all height and lean muscle, my skin still pale despite the past years of abuse. I lacked only the horns and massive eyes.

  A line of women with casks balanced on their heads moved out of my way, and even one huge homunculus in the red uniform of the Colosso service backed away, bowing its head in something like deference. My ring hung heavy on its cord about my neck, reminding me of its presence, almost calling out to be worn again. But that would have been disastrous. I knew this plan of mine would get me off the streets of Borosevo, but I would need to be extremely careful. I could not enter as a proper gladiator. I had no references and did not want to be subjected to rigorous examination. What I did have was nearly two standard decades of combat training, to say nothing of my years on the street dealing with Rells and his gang.