Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “Reverence?” one of the guards asked, glancing from the priest to his superior.

  “Stun him!” the priest shouted. “And leave him here!”

  I don’t even remember the weapon coming free of its holster, nor do I remember hitting the wall.

  * * *

  Something struck my face, forcing my eyes open and admitting the damned light. All I could see was brightness. For a mad instant I thought I was waking up in the accursed flophouse by the starport landing field, that I would see the red-faced old woman and her twiggy assistant, that my time on Emesh had begun again. “The hell’d you go passing out for, momak?” An old woman’s voice, thickly accented. She slapped my face again, shone the light in my eyes. But it was only a penlight, checking my pupils for head trauma. It was only Doctor Chand. Switch stood behind her, worry evident on his face, his arms crossed, chin tucked.

  “Is he all right, Doctor?”

  “The priest,” I said, the whole world swaying as I tried to sit up. Chand clamped her hands hard against my arms to steady me, nails biting flesh. “Ow! Let go, damn it!”

  “Only if you stop trying to move.” She let go of my arms, brow furrowing, blurring her tattoo. The slave-doctor checked the scanner on the floor beside her, then pressed it to my skin. It tingled, sent a short pulse through me. “Conductivity’s up. If I weren’t wise on so much common sense, boy, I’d say you were stunned.”

  “I was stunned!” I insisted, allowing myself to rest against the rough stone at my back. “By the priest. Where is he?”

  “What priest?” Switch and Chand asked at the same time.

  I described him, massaging my face with my hands. My side ached, a portion above the ribs still thick-feeling and sluggish. My clothes all clung to me. I ran a hand up through my shaggy hair, which had grown back in the months since my indenture in the Colosso began. When I broke into a fit of coughing, Chand passed me a bottle of the blue-green drink they always served at the coliseum. I drank it down, grimacing at the cheaply sweetened chemical taste of it. By the time I’d finished recounting the episode, Switch had gone the color of milk—or would have, were it not for the omnipresent freckles. His fine-featured face looked drained. He sucked the inside of one cheek, arms still crossed over a chest broadened by months of fighting and strength training. I knew he was having the same thought as I, and I said, “If what that Kogan fellow says is true, I think there’s a Cielcin in the prison block.”

  “But why?” Chand closed her medical kit, snapped her fingers up at Switch.

  He didn’t move, just stood there nodding, pale eyes wide as he worried at a thumbnail. “I hope you’re wrong.”

  Before I could answer, Chand glared up at the younger myrmidon. “What’s the point of all those muscles, lad, if you won’t help an old woman off the floor?” Mollified, Switch helped her stand. I swear I heard her bones creaking. She sucked on her teeth, leaning on Switch’s arm. “I’d say let it go, lads. Chantry ain’t worth fucking with.”

  Still sitting with my back to the stone wall, I looked back up the hallway, following the direction the nameless chanter and his Whitehorse guards would have taken out of the complex, back to the street and the Red Canal. “Any idea who he was?”

  “You said he was a hunchback?” Switch asked.

  “Eh?” Chand looked up at Switch; next to her the boy looked half a giant, she was so small. She patted the boy’s arm absently. “Patrician blighter, was he? Face that makes you want to step on it?”

  Unbidden I thought of Severn, old Prior Eusebia’s aide. The knife-faced chanter had possessed much the same air of cruel dignity, and I had no difficulty imagining that Eusebia herself must have sneered thusly in her youth. Perhaps they learned that at Vesperad, in seminary. “Golden hair, two-colored eyes.” I pointed at my own eyes, waggling my fingers.

  Chand hissed air through her teeth. “That’s the grand prior’s bastard. He’s in all the time with the count’s party.”

  “The grand prior’s . . . bastard?” I frowned. That didn’t make any sense. Palatines didn’t have bastards—not often, at any rate—and the grand prior was certainly palatine. It simply wasn’t done. The High College vetted every palatine couple’s request for a child, ensured that the parents’ extravagantly altered genetics did not result in a stillbirth or in just such a monster as this. That was how the Emperor kept the control of his nobiles: by controlling their genetic destiny through their children, by ensuring that any palatine seeking an heir would have to kneel and scrape before the throne. I thought of the myriad failings of the priest’s flesh: the hunched shoulders, the crooked nose, the swollen brow and mismatched eyes. Mutations caused by the untended flowering of his palatine genetic inheritance, the excess chromosomes soured in his blood. We have a word for what he was. “He’s an intus?”

  “Don’t let him hear you say that,” Chand said sharply. “Gilliam Vas sits on the Count’s council. He’d have you pilloried before you could bow an apology.”

  “No, he couldn’t,” I snapped. “You don’t get pilloried for slander. The Indexed punishment is no more than twenty lashes.” No more than fifteen, in truth—I had to consult a copy of the Index. There was a time when I knew the formal punishment for every sin, crime, and disobedience in the Chantry canon. Father had insisted. That was long ago. I have forgotten much that once I knew. “And it’s not slander if it’s true.” The soreness from the stunner charge was ebbing, turning into a pain more akin to hate, thick and ulcerous. Groaning, I tried to stand but gave up with a shake of my head. I had to push Switch and the doctor away. “Just stay here a minute,” I murmured, shutting my eyes. A moment later, I asked, “Is it true?”

  “About Chanter Vas?” Chand spat, grunted something in Durantine that I didn’t quite catch. “Reckon so. I mean, you saw the man. Something’s clearly crossed in his nucleotides.”

  We humans have always ascribed moral virtue to beauty, we palatines most of all. I wonder now if such mockery and abuse shaped Gilliam in spirit to match his mutation or if his petulant cruelty was native-born. I can almost, almost pity him now, but the stunner ache and aching pride made such emotion impossible for me at the time.

  I wasn’t listening to her; my attention had gone back to the hall, the one leading down to the prison section. Sweating as I was from the stunner bolt, I wanted that bath, but now the place was likely to be crowded with the other myrmidons, and I was still enough the palatine to seek solitude for such things. My old curiosity had me in its talons, and something of it must have bled onto my face, for Switch said, “Had, don’t.”

  “Don’t what?” I looked up at him and Chand, trying to sound innocent.

  “Leave it be,” Switch said, prising himself free of Chand to stand over me. “Kogan’s full of shit.”

  I didn’t answer him but sat in silence, legs thrown out across the hall. Dimly I thought I heard the sound of sandals scuffing on the rough floor, but when I looked up there was no one. Unbidden I thought of Gibson, whom I had not thought of for months. Kogan’s story. The chanter. The foederated companies. The Legion carrier in orbit around Emesh. Rumor, truth, or total fiction: each datum was a piece of colored glass, a mosaic’s tessera. Gibson would have had me step back and try to discern the complete picture. I was not a scholiast, but still I glimpsed what was going on.

  “There’s a Cielcin in the coliseum dungeon.”

  CHAPTER 39

  A KINGDOM FOR A HORSE

  “THESE OLD ANDUNIAN MODELS will outlast the sun,” Gila said, wringing her hands in a servile fashion that clashed with my memory of her from my first days in Borosevo, when her workers had tossed me out after salvaging the Eurynasir. She had no memory of me, Earth be praised, though in her defense, I was no longer barefoot, no longer a recent-thaw, scuffed and cryoburned. I wore my best, which while not especially fine still set me far enough apart from the urchin I had been. She was as ugly as I remembered, her balding
head scabbed and covered in uneven patches of black-and-gray hair, her squashed face purpled by a wine stain across her nose and one cheek. She was as plebeian as they came, her jumpsuit soiled, the green patches of the Mataro County service peeling from its shoulders.

  I, on the other hand, pretended I held some vague higher status. Despite what I’d said, I was not there to buy that day but to get a sense for what sort of ships one could find in salvage. The Eurynasir was long gone, and I stood beside the squat crew boss on the cargo ramp of a Blowfish-class Andunian light freighter. She was an ugly bird, fat-bellied and cast of pitted adamant. Flat-nosed and inelegant, she had all the qualities of a brick.

  “You know, I’d heard that about these old beasts,” I said, running a hand along one of the huge pistons that raised and lowered the ramp.

  Switch was nodding, arms crossed. “How much will she carry?”

  “Payload?” Gila asked, rubbing her chins as she checked something on her terminal. “Just under three hundred tons. She’s a good old-fashioned workhorse.”

  I bit my lip, stumped up the ramp to stand on the cusp of the echoing hold. It was all square lines, ugly as the outside and just as plain. Rings of rust glowered like eyes from a floor scraped clean as could be, and the whole thing stank of use and age. “How old is she?”

  Gila swore. “Mother’s bones, man, that’s a question.” She broke off, narrowing her eyes at a pair of her subordinates as they hurried by on the tarmac outside. “Andun shipyards ain’t made shit in four centuries, easy. Ilium put them out of business, and Monmara.”

  “Fucking Normans,” Switch said, sounding disgusted.

  It must have been some manner of joke—a sailor’s meme, perhaps—for Gila spat, “Fucking Normans. Build cheap, build fast, but only Empire’s built to last.” She said this like it was some kind of slogan, but I didn’t know it. Switch was nodding, and the two of them went on in this vein for a moment. I was glad I’d brought the other myrmidon, though it had taken some convincing.

  What’s the point? he’d said. We’ve still got months left! I was even considering renewing my commission with the Colosso—another six thousand hurasams wouldn’t hurt, after all. But I had a powerful need for more information. I had to do something. Now that I had a plan, I couldn’t just waste time loitering about the coliseum. I needed action, needed to do whatever I could to move a step closer to escape. Though the threat of them had faded in time, I still feared the Inquisition, still woke up sweating in terror of whatever punishment might befall my mother if her role in my escape were ever discovered.

  I fingered my family’s ring through the front of my shirt as if it were a talisman that might keep them away, not a lodestone to call them down upon me. I turned a thought in my fingers, one that had been growing for months. The same thought that had brought me back to these criminals and this chop shop on the edge of Borosevo. My secret weapon, if I played it right.

  “These things are ancient!” Switch exclaimed, shaking me from my reverie. “I’d come out grayer than my grandfather if I rode in one of these!” He knocked on the acrylic lid of a fugue crèche. I couldn’t guess what the boy was seeing, but Switch had spent his entire life aboard starships, and between his nights of entertaining he’d acquired a fair bit of practical knowledge—so much that he had the makings of a fair spacer, whatever he thought of himself. He and Gila argued about the crèches for a long while, and I made a show of wandering around the hold, examining the place up and down before returning to the entry ramp.

  I looked out over the tarmac where I’d once broken a man’s arm to the low line of hangars opposite. There was the one where the Eurynasir had been all those years ago. As I watched, one of the hangar doors rolled upward, rattling in accompaniment to the shouts of the work crew. And there it was.

  It was a ship, but it was as unlike the Andunian lighter in which I stood as my grandmother the vicereine was unlike the plebeian woman at my back. For a moment my hands ached for want of my pencils to capture the image of her in the orange sunlight, her crimson hull—dinted and scorched—turned the color of wine. She was no yacht, not gaudy and rare, but beautiful in the way that a sword, well made and unadorned, is beautiful. She was vaguely deltoid in shape, like an arrowhead or one of the mantas I have seen in the aerial rivers of the Mandari stations with viewports of mirrored alumglass. She had no wings, for her whole body was one large one, lifted not by fusion burners but by Royse repulsors silent as space itself.

  “Hadrian!”

  “I’m sorry?” I turned around and was almost surprised to find that I was not alone. “Did you say something?”

  Gila opened her slash of a mouth, but Switch spoke first. “Do you want to see the rest of the ship?”

  “What?” I glanced at the other vessel across the way. “I . . . What about that one?”

  The crew boss frowned. “The Uhran? That ain’t hardly a cargo hauler.”

  I waved her away and hurried across the yard toward it, only half listening as the crew boss rattled off a list of specifications: payload, acceleration, maximum warp. “How much?” She said a figure. I almost swore; it was nearly twice the price of the Andunian, which was still several times more than the paltry six thousand hurasams Switch and I each had been promised as chattel myrmidons. In a pained voice I asked, “And what’s the price in Imperial marks?”

  “That was the mark price,” Gila said, shrugging. “The county won’t take specie unless you’re willing to pay in full up front.” My heart sank: 3.2 million Imperial marks. Even with Pallino and Elara, we couldn’t hope to put so much as a down payment on the ship—either ship—much less pay for the whole thing. I might have despaired—would have but for one little thing.

  I crossed my arms, tucking my chin as I looked up at the red sweep of the Uhran lighter. I had badly misjudged the price of a starship. Father had always talked of such purchases with a cool detachment bordering on disinterest. But I still had my secret weapon. Nervous, I eyed Switch. I hadn’t mentioned it to him, and I wasn’t sure how he would react.

  “I don’t suppose you’d take a loan from the Rothsbank?” I said without much hope. “Or set up a payment plan with a Mandari account?” I had neither and no way of getting either, but it was all part of the dance. Switch was watching me, arms crossed. Was I losing him? Surely I was. There was no way we were going to come up with 3.2 million marks—not by year’s end, not by the end of the decade. Not in a hundred standard years.

  “That is the normal way of doing business,” Gila said, moving to stand beside me as I admired the Uhran lighter. “Only had one man—a Lothrian—pay in hard coin in all my years working for the county. Damnedest thing.” She was shaking her head. Behind her Switch was slashing at his throat, silently asking me to cut it short. It made sense. This was always meant to be just an exploratory visit to confirm my suspicions.

  As a young man I’d witnessed my father and the house staff bargaining with the Consortium, with other Mandari trading houses, with others of the Imperial houses’ palatine. I knew how business was done. What’s more, I had been a beggar, and I knew the intonations and the mannerisms of the desperate as intimately as I knew the languages of the Commonwealth and of Jadd. I’d misstepped in my obvious appreciation of the Uhran starcraft. I ought to have continued my mask of disinterest. “That’s still rather more than my associate and I are willing to pay.” Unwilling, but not incapable. Switch’s face went studiously blank. I imagined the conversation we were bound to have later.

  We don’t have any money, Had! Not any! Did you forget?

  “What about trade?” I asked, fingering the fine chain about my throat.

  Gila took half a step back, looking up at me. “Excuse me?”

  I hesitated a moment, glancing up at the rafters of the hangar and searching for cameras. I did not see any, but this impound shop belonged to House Mataro and the Empire. Just because I couldn’t see them did not
mean they weren’t there. But then, perhaps there were no cameras. These were, after all, the very criminals who had left me for dead in some back alley. You should be up and up, you know? Cat’s words turned over inside my chest, and my fingers tightened around my family’s ring. Way you talk, you belong in a castle. Well, I had belonged once. I looked at Switch for a moment, and I felt a smile touch my lips, thin and ghostly as hope. But hope didn’t enter into it. “I have the title for twenty-six thousand hectares of land on Delos, held in my own name under the seal of the prefecture government and the sector vicereine. It’s worth more than either of these.” It was worth both, worth more than that.

  For a moment Gila’s eyes widened in surprise. Surprise, I hoped, and greed. Her commission would be handsome, I guessed. Then that dream died, smothered by the narrowing of her eyes. “You’re not serious.”

  This was the critical moment. You see, there was a chance that Gila had seen my ring years ago. I drew it out, held it before her slitted eyes. They widened, dark and muddy as a dried-up puddle. There was fear there, but no rage. No recognition. Switch said nothing, but over Gila’s shoulder I saw his eyebrows shoot up. His eyes darkened to something terrible even as Gila’s widened in surprise. For the first time in a long time, the crooked smile stole across my face. I put Switch’s reaction aside a moment and focused on the woman before me.

  “This real?” Gila asked, reaching out to touch it.

  I jerked my hand back, summoning a piece of Crispin’s ire. “Don’t touch it!” I nearly slapped her hand away, as would have been only proper. My uncle Lucian, dead before his time, used to carry an antique riding crop for just such occasions. I’d hated the man, but a piece of him moved me. After a beat had passed, I said, “Can a trade be made? Would you be willing to hold the ship until such time as my business in Borosevo is complete?” She made to speak, but I raised one finger. “Before we proceed, be honest: is this even a transaction you’re authorized to make? Or shall I fetch the logothete pluripotentis?” At home, use of a pluripotentis incurred a fee that was levied not from the buyer but from the merchanter’s commission. It was meant to prevent or at least curtail predatory practices on the part of the salesman and was a privilege reserved only for palatine and patrician customers.