Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  At last I spoke, my baritone restored to a portion of is former polish—one of the benefits of proper food and clean water. “Look, you must shore up your footwork.”

  “Oh,” Ghen cackled, “you must. You hear that, whore-boy? You must.”

  “Shut up, you,” Kiri put in. “Leave him alone.” The woman took a couple of steps closer to the big man, a fierceness in her that I wouldn’t have challenged had I been called to do so. A mother’s fierceness. A thing I’d not truly seen before, except the once.

  “Or you’ll what?” Ghen said, pressing toward Kiri so they stood chest-to-chest, the laborer-turned-convict staring down his wide nose at the woman below him. “Old bitch like you?” Kiri didn’t move, didn’t strike the bigger man. She didn’t retreat either. She just fixed her jaw and glared at him, her amber eyes flinty.

  Siran moved forward. “The hell’s gotten into you, Ghen?”

  The big man broke away from Kiri, looked to his fellow criminal. “This is the worst group we’ve had since we got here, Siran. Look at them!” He gestured, taking in Switch, Kiri, myself, the others scattered in training knots about the field. There were a few scarred veterans like himself, like Siran, mixed into that group. Most were criminals. Borosevo had produced a terrific multitude of criminals since the plague, and many had found themselves in the coliseum’s hypogeum, in the sweat-soaked concrete dormitories we called home. Better that than hang or face the full extent of the cathars’ corporal punishments.

  A part of me started to question the wisdom of my scheme. When at last I’d convinced Doctor Chand to sign off on my application, listing me only as Had of Teukros, I imagined that I’d be put on a team replete with leathery convicts. Men of grosser blood. I hadn’t expected the desperate, the hungry of Borosevo. I hadn’t expected the concerned mother, the male prostitute, or the one-armed gondolier who, lacking for family, had come into the coliseum to go out in glory. I wondered what Father might have said about the company I kept now. I suppose he’d have been glad to find me in the Colosso at all. I suppose there is an irony there. My disgust with the fighting pits had—in a dramatic sense—started off my whole misadventure, and now there I was, dressed in the nearly medieval armor of a fodder myrmidon. Not even a proper gladiator, I reflected, imagining Father’s contempt.

  Ghen was still talking. “This is a shit show, Siran. You know it; I know it. Banks knows it; Pallino knows it.” He jerked a finger at a pair of older myrmidons training opposite fresher meat. “And you can bet your ass the promoters know it too. They’ll be advertising our slaughter on public broadcast.” I had seen such advertisements, plastered on the huge screens that dominated street corners all over the city. He cast his eyes around at Switch and Kiri, at a few of the other myrmidons who’d peeled away from the crowd to hear what all the ruckus was.

  I kept my mouth shut through all of it, watchful not of Ghen but of the gathered dozen myrmidons in their scratched and dinted plate. No two suits of armor were quite the same, though the faces the men made were identical. Each had the same drawn-lipped, wide-eyed look of a deer in sight of the hunter. One didn’t have to be a Legion psychologist to see that Ghen was scaring them. None of the other veterans were in the little knot of onlookers, I noted. All were green as I.

  “Maybe it won’t be so bad,” Switch said, no real conviction in his high voice. I was struck by how young he was. Younger than me—young enough that his beard grew in patchily on his narrow jaw. I was young myself, though how young was a mystery. Twenty-one? Twenty-two? I had only ever seen local calendars, wasn’t sure of the Imperial Star Date. How many years I’d been in fugue aboard Demetri’s ship I could not say.

  Ghen’s hairless eyebrows rose, incredulous. “Maybe it won’t be so bad?” He sneered the words, repeated them more loudly. “You’ll go ass-up for the enemy the minute you get a chance.” The great ox pushed forward past Siran with an outthrust arm. He seized Switch by the throat. “I don’t want to get plowed, boy. Do you?”

  There. That was my cue. I laughed. Not boisterously, not so much as to deliberately call attention to myself. I confess I learned the trick from my father, if not the laughter. The quiet noise caught in a brief space of silence, snagged and yanked Ghen around. The nearest trainees cleared a space around me, and I shook my head to dispel the canned laughter. The yard had gone deathly silent, and the only sounds came from the other groups training at the far side of the yard, steel clashing in the shadow of the columns.

  “Did I say something funny, Your Radiance?”

  I laughed again, more shortly this time, and spread my hands. “You’re the only one here talking about being plowed, Ghen. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were lonely,” I said. Siran barked a short laugh, and a couple of the trainees tittered nervously.

  The big man shoved Switch back, letting the younger man tumble into the dust and the dry grass. Ghen rounded on me and drew his sword with a rasp. “You want to do this, boy?”

  “What?” The man was so predictable he might have been reading off a playbill. “Right here? In front of everyone? Without even dinner first?” The laughter was a little stronger this time, strong enough to make Ghen angry. To make him stupid. “You’re hardly for me . . .”

  I saw the blow coming from parsecs away, a wild slash that would have cleaved my bare head in half had it come anywhere close to landing. I ducked the blow easily and sprang back up, catching the man by the wrist and by his hyperextended shoulder. My own sword bumped my thigh in its sheath as I torqued the bruiser’s weapon down and away, overbalancing him. He staggered, and I seized the opening to draw my own blade. “Too slow, friend.”

  When Ghen whirled, he found me waiting, sword held in a high guard, angled before my face in the warm air between us. The whites of his eyes stood out in his dark face, as did his bared teeth. He didn’t speak, just charged me again. It was, I noticed, much like fighting an angry Crispin: all size, no sense. He fought like a man used to winning and winning quickly. My years on Emesh had hardened me, but Ghen was born there, his flesh shaped by its invisible hand. He was built like an ancient tank, square and squat and solid.

  That solid mass fell on me, and for a moment I nearly folded under it. Then I slipped sideways, bringing my sword in hard to slam the man in the stomach. Ghen gasped, but his steel breastplate took the brunt of the attack. The blade was blunted anyhow: a training implement. I danced behind Ghen, planted a booted heel on his ass, and kicked him into the dust. All too easy.

  Instinct would have had me speak only to Ghen at my feet, but I was moved by greater necessities, so I held my blade threateningly beside Ghen’s face as he lay quiescent. Instead of addressing the beaten man—he was only a symptom—I raised my voice, calling on hundreds of hours of oratory training at Gibson’s hand. “Would you divide our strength when we need it most?” Like my father, I let my eyes strafe over the crowd, fully aware of what I was doing and who I was emulating, my heart going leaden in my chest. But I was not my father. I did not want them to fear me. The faces of the recruits watching me—men and women as new to this as I was—were jaundiced with that same skin-tightened expression of fear I’d observed moments before. “People are expecting to watch us all die. You!” I pointed at a young woman with pale hair, her skin red and peeling in the sun, nearly obscuring the word THIEF tattooed across her forehead. “And you! And you! And me.” I struck my chest with my fist in imitation of a salute. “I aim to disappoint them.”

  “Brave words from a first-timer!” shouted Banks, a lantern-jawed, leather-faced man near the back of the crowd. This was met with cries of agreement from the more seasoned gladiators, all but Siran, who watched me with an unreadable expression. “You don’t have the gravitas for command, son!”

  “Gravitas?” I smiled. “Fancy word.” But I’d expected the response, had even guessed it would be Banks who’d say it. It would have been Ghen, but embarrassment and rage had the other man seething at my
feet. “I don’t have any fancy words for you all,” I said, “only desperate ones. I don’t want to die, do you?” I paused only for the barest instant, hoping someone would respond but not counting on it. No one did. “None of us would be here if we had another choice.”

  “That pretty nose of yours says different!” said the pale woman with the peeling skin, voice older than I’d expected.

  This surprised me, and for a moment I stood, blade still pressed against the side of Ghen’s head, chewing on my tongue. “That doesn’t mean I’m here by choice. We’ve all got our reasons. I think Kiri is the only one of us here who doesn’t have to be.” I waved my free hand to take in the peasant woman, her dark face lined with care. How old was she in truth? Forty standard? Fifty? So young. My own mother was nearly three hundred and appeared almost less than half this woman’s age. “But even she is here for a reason. We all are.”

  “Shut your mouth, lad, or I’ll shut it for you!” called Pallino, an old veteran with the solid build of a career soldier and a leather patch over one eye.

  Planting one foot on Ghen’s back, I raised both arms, sword still in hand. “You are welcome to try me, sirrah.” I took my foot off of Ghen and stepped forward, a little closer to the crowd.

  This pronouncement sent a surge of whispers through the gathered crowd. One small, rat-faced man leaned toward his companion and murmured, “Bastard.” I ignored the whispers, narrowed my eyes at the one-eyed veteran.

  The distant scream of a flier passing toward the massive shadow of the palace ziggurat filled the air. Pallino didn’t step in to challenge me. When the droning of the flier had ceased, I stooped, offered Ghen my hand. In a stage whisper aimed at the man I had bested, I said, “Here, man.”

  Ghen rolled onto his side, caught sight of the lowered hand. He seemed to chew his thoughts, to literally work them in his teeth like he was worrying at gristle. Then he took my hand and allowed me to help him up. “You’re fucking fast, Had.”

  I allowed myself a shadow of the old Marlowe grin. “That’s ‘Your Radiance,’ to you, old-timer.”

  I should have been a librettist, a playwright like my mother. The man’s emotions played in him precisely—precisely—as I’d imagined, as I’d hoped. I should have been an actor. I should have been . . . something else, anything other than whatever I was or became. A soldier? A sorcerer? An explorer like Simeon the Red?

  Ghen looked for a minute as if he wanted nothing more than to strike me. Then the emotion was gone, crashing back beneath the surface or behind a cloud as a wild grin stole over his coarse features. He laughed, not as I had moments ago, but loud and long and clear. Pallino’s threat was forgotten, erased by that clarion instant. “Back to work, everyone!” Ghen bellowed, clapping me on the shoulder. “The kid here’s right. It’s those cowards in the nice armor we mean to kill, not each other!” A halfhearted cheer went up from the gathered trainees, overwhelming the quiet veterans. Ghen sauntered off, Siran peeling off with him for a spate of quiet conversation.

  Groaning, I stepped forward and stooped to collect my helmet by the broad flange that guarded the neck. It was an ancient-looking thing, more than medieval, made of beaten steel and shaped in the same fashion as the helms of the Imperial legionnaires. Only where theirs had faceplates of seamless white, mine was open, the cheek guards swinging off hinges at the temples. This one wasn’t forged, of course, but had been printed in the coliseum armory, the steel threaded with carbon wire—finer than the finest hair—to strengthen it. I screwed the thing onto my head, tapped Switch lightly on the leg with my sword. “Come on, we’ve got to sort out that footwork.”

  “I need practice,” Switch moaned, not looking up from his boots.

  “Aye,” I agreed, glancing over at where Ghen and Siran were talking to three of the raw recruits. Siran had found a long spear—a dummy lance without the plasma burner housing attached—and was leaning her weight on it. Seen from the left without the scarred ruin of her right nostril, there was something in the lines of her face, in the shape of the high cheekbones and the narrowed eyes, that made me think of royalty. She was nothing like Cat had been. Thinking of Cat darkened my mood, and I chewed my tongue, distracted. “We all need practice, Switch. That’s why we’re here. We’ve got a week.”

  He shook his head, red hair fanning about his face; he’d forgotten his own helmet in the barracks when we’d all kitted out to practice in the quad. “It isn’t enough time, Had. It isn’t.”

  Pressing my lips together in mute conciliation, I clapped the younger man on the shoulder and stalked away. I whirled into a low guard: knees bent, back straight. Earth and Emperor, to hold a sword in my hand again! I had not thought I’d miss it. The blood was still pounding in me, drumming as surely as the beat of some martial parade drum. Brief as it had been, my fight with Ghen had been a proper fight, not some back-alley squabble. I suppressed a grin and lied, “Of course it’s enough time. We’ve got a week, Switch. You can do loads in a week. Here, front foot forward, and keep your back straight—that’s why you’re overextending. Makes you lean. See?” I showed him, performing a wild, vaudeville impression of his mistake, unbalancing myself so that I dropped to one knee, entirely too vulnerable. That accomplished, I repeated the move correctly, careful to keep my back straight. “Your go. Show me.”

  CHAPTER 35

  PROPER MEN

  I DID NOT SLEEP. Could not. I sweated instead. No rarity on that sweltering world, save that the sweat ran cold as the blood in me. I left the other contract myrmidons to their fitful dreams and wandered out into the corridor where sconces flickered in the dull cement walls, solid and close. I did not mark it as I padded into the hall, but mine was not the only bed left empty in our vaulted and pillared hall. I was not alone in my dreamlessness.

  The world was different at night, and the coliseum hypogeum even more so. By day it churned with activity, with the shouting of men and the braying of beasts and monsters. Ghosts, I thought, were only the echoes at night of that which we expected to find by day, haunting our consciences.

  The coliseum was built somewhat above sea level. In most coliseums, the dormitories, kennels, and dungeons of the hypogeum were literally that: underground. But Borosevo had its peculiar quirks, built as it was on a marshy atoll. Still the stone walls dripped, and here and there runnels of condensation could be seen collecting on the metal piping of overworked climate control systems and on weeping windowpanes. The arched ceiling hung so low above me that I could trail my calloused fingertips along the smooth stone, and I did. I walked a long time, heart in my throat as it had never been before. I felt as the prisoner feels on the eve of his execution, praying that the prior or his lord will pardon him—a feeling I know all too well now.

  Cat’s plague-shrunken form seemed always to lie at my feet or just behind my back, and I found my gaze dragged constantly downward. It didn’t seem real, death. None of it did. Not the coliseum hypogeum, not the city without, not the rotten years since I’d awakened there in chaos and in fear. If you have ever awakened in the dead of night and questioned the cosmos down to the space between its atoms, you will know how I felt. In my dread and in the sickness of my heart, even the flesh of my own two hands seemed alien. I found myself thinking of the morrow’s combat—my first—but I could not dwell on it, and always I would retreat to some other memory. To Mother’s operas, to tales of Simeon the Red and Kharn Sagara. To Gibson’s lessons, to sparring matches with Crispin. To Cat’s smile and our time in that abandoned tenement. I remembered the pain of broken ribs and the night when Rells’s thugs had dragged me from my cardboard hutch in the streets of Borosevo.

  I stopped outside the entrance to the showers, listening. There was a faint sound of water running, droning over something scuffling, snuffling—an animal sound almost too quiet to hear. I froze then, cocked my head. The door was open, and it swung silently inward, spilling harsh white light in a wedge upon the opposite wall. Barefoot as I
was, I made almost no sound as I stalked into the gray bath chamber. The shower stalls ran along the far wall, each fronted by an oily white curtain. The last one in the row was running, belching steam into the quiet air, not quite masking the animal sound I’d heard from the hall. There were no clothes upon the single metal bench, nor any other sign the place was occupied by anyone but my ghosts.

  But once I was inside, the scuffling noise was clearer.

  It was weeping.

  “Hello?” I decided I’d best announce myself, feeling suddenly that I’d intruded too far upon something private. I cannot say what made me do it or why I did not simply leave. Perhaps it was my native curiosity, perhaps I was simply nosy, perhaps . . . perhaps I was lonely and very, very scared.

  The occupant of the shower started, and I heard a dull thunk followed by a curse, a sniff. “What?” After another moment of snuffling, “Is that you, Had?”

  It was Switch, of course. I moved to shut the door to the hall. Ghen was secure in the prison block on the lower levels with Siran and the other criminals, but I dreaded the thought of someone like him interrupting. Not that night, not before a combat. In a voice pressed as dried flowers, I said, “Switch? Yeah, it’s me.”

  The young boy cleared his throat. “I . . . I couldn’t sleep, you know?”

  Seating myself on the low steel bench between the bank of showers and the bank of lockers, I nodded, not thinking that the younger man could not see. After a moment had passed in silence, I said, “I know. I’ve never done this before either. Fought in the Colosso, I mean. I had a chance once, a long time ago, but . . .” The words caught in me, and I looked down at my hands. I heard Switch suck in a breath, and I knew I’d made a mistake. The younger man was just starting to believe in me, and here I was undermining that.