Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  A familiar feeling came over me as I sat amid all that gold and silk and velvet: the desire to leave. Rocket contrails streaked the southern sky over the flats of the artificial island that rose just beyond Borosevo’s canal warrens. The graceful lines of the Uhran starship traced themselves against the blackness of my thoughts, and I sat stonily in a padded chair beneath the whir of air conditioning and the piping of soft music while bare-chested slaves served chilled wines from fluted cups. Below, Umandh slaves were dragging Erdro’s body from the field, and—unnoticed—I set a full cup of wine on the rail for him. No one disturbed it.

  But I couldn’t leave. Anaïs and Dorian were near at hand, introducing me to the sons of archons and the daughters of guilder magnates. I could not leave without risking tremendous affront, which I could not afford in the present climate. Anaïs in particular was never far, and she foisted drinks on me in the hopes of wringing tales of the arena from me, and because I was young and somewhat drunk and attended by a woman of no small charm, I will confess I boasted. What’s more, I lied. Where had I learned to fight? Why, from a Jaddian Maeskolos with whom I traveled for years. Why had I fought as a fodder myrmidon before finally earning my court appointment? That was complicated. I’d lost my letter of introduction, you see. It had taken some time to track down my father’s ships and get a new draft delivered to Castle Borosevo, and a man had to make a living. How had I lost it? Well, Borosevo had its grimy underbelly, didn’t you know?

  I told a version of my mugging in Meidua without the motorbikes and transported to the canals of Belows. This titillated my audience even more than the stories of arena combat had, and since it is the peculiar quality of danger to excite those who have never experienced it, Anaïs was not alone in hanging on my arm by the end of the tale. Chained by social convention, by politeness, I knew I had lost the stars. The hangars that held the Uhran starship and the clunky Andunian were as good as empty. The count had me now. I had made my choice, traded one future for another.

  Seeing Erdro die, I couldn’t help but feel I’d made a mistake.

  “Is it true, Dorian?” asked a heavy patrician girl with a round face, pouting ever so slightly. “Is it really?”

  “You know I can’t tell you, Melandra!” Dorian said, and he pulled the girl a little closer on the swallowing couch on which they reclined. “My fathers would have me in a gibbet if I talked about the triumph!”

  Triumph. The Cielcin. They were talking about the Cielcin. Makisomn. Dorian glanced at his sister, then up at the canopy above us. I recognized the reflex to look for cameras, but no sooner had he done it than he looked round at us all and winked.

  “You’re serious?” Melandra asked, leaning closer against the young lord. Her lover? “How’d they catch one?”

  Anaïs answered for her brother, as she often did. “Gilliam Vas procured it from the foederati attached to the visiting Legion!”

  “Did he really?” asked the son of an industrial guild factionarius from Binah in his thick lunar accent.

  Melandra made a face. “That gargoyle?” I snorted under my breath; gargoyle was exactly the right word for the intus. “I suppose that only makes sense. The mutant has demon blood himself.” This was not the first remark I’d heard about the chanter at court. You must understand—inti scare the nobility. They are what we would all be but for the grace of Earth and Emperor, and a reminder that the palatines have no control over their genetic destiny, lest they risk such mutation. Gilliam Vas was a reminder that we were bound to the Emperor, and a reminder of Saltus’s words to me so long ago: We are both homunculi. I had rejected the statement at the time, but there had been truth in the creature’s words and in the chanter’s mismatched eyes. And like most truths, it was not easy to learn.

  Dorian swatted his paramour with a playful hand. “Watch yourself—that’s a priest you’re talking about!”

  “He’s a beast, Dorian!”

  I had not known Erdro well and had seen many of my fellow myrmidons die since I’d started in the Colosso, but that didn’t make his death any easier to brush aside. Feeling I had nothing positive to contribute to the discussion of the mutant priest, I drifted away from the conversation, carrying my half-finished wine back to where I’d left the spare for Erdro’s shade on the rail. One of the oiled, nearly naked servers moved to clear it away, but I dismissed her with a wave that felt too comfortable. I leaned against the rail next to it, watching a troupe of Eudoran mummers performing a scene from Bastien’s Cyrus the Fool—part two, I think, where the prince survives atmospheric reentry by hiding beneath his mother’s skirts. They played the farce in classic style amid holographs and pyrotechnics. Mother would have approved despite the players’ Eudoran blood—she had no love for that itinerant people. Their masks were brightly painted, visible even from our height, and looked splendid on the massive screens for the convenience of the crowd.

  “Did you know him?”

  I started for the folding knife that was not there. But it was only Anaïs, who flinched, nearly dropping her wine.

  “I’m sorry!” she said, clutching a hand to her breast. “I didn’t mean to scare you! You didn’t get any on you, did you?”

  “What?” I wasn’t following. She meant the wine. Some had spattered the tiles at my feet, red as the ink with which I write this account. “No, not at all, ladyship. Forgive me, I startle rather easily.”

  She laughed then, the hand on her chest relaxing as she withdrew it. “That makes sense. The fighting pits . . .”

  I eased back, leaning against the box railing again to watch the Eudorans perform. “I . . .” I thought of my time in the streets, of the times I’d flinched away from the prefects whether I was innocent or not, of the other criminals, of broken ribs and crying in the night. “The fighting pits . . . yes.”

  “Did you know him?” She repeated the question, inclining her head toward the field, toward the spot where Jaffa had felled Erdro with the antique bow. One of the Umandh slaves busied itself scrubbing the blood from the brick while the troupers performed Bastien’s play at the other end of the field. When I nodded numbly, Anaïs said, “What’s that like? I can’t imagine.”

  Though I was somewhat drunk by that time, I knew enough to hold my tongue. A pained smile cut across my face, and I kept my intent focus on the Umandh slave, its trunk stooped, tentacles scrubbing at the spot on the ground where Erdro had bled from his arrow wound. Her question, the callous detachment of its premise, froze in me. I turned it over in my mind as if it were a particularly dubious gift, examined its intent beneath the crass disregard. I decided she had meant to give no insult, though I had taken it. “I didn’t know him very well. You get used to it . . . down there.” I swept a hand over the field, the brick studded with the concrete caps of the terrain pillars. “We weren’t really friends, I suppose.”

  As I spoke, I thought of those myrmidons I did count as friends, and though I was not a religious man I thanked heaven it had not been Switch or Pallino fighting Jaffa that day.

  “He fought bravely.”

  “He did,” I agreed. Bravery had nothing to do with it. Erdro needed money, so he fought. I looked down over the edge, down bare meters of stone wall to the floor of the coliseum. Just past my arm’s reach, a Royse field glimmered, rippling almost invisibly in the air but with enough latent force to stop a bus launched from a rail gun. And yet I felt exposed, recalling my failure to remain in my father’s box at the Meidua coliseum and how visible that failure had been.

  Anaïs leaned against the rail beside me, making me conscious of the smoky smell of her perfume. I could feel those green eyes on me, but I found I could not turn away from the coliseum floor. It all looked so different from the box. I replayed Erdro’s demise, saw Jaffa cock his crossbow, only to become Crispin as he fired. Anaïs spoke, shaking me from my vision. “At least you don’t have to risk your life anymore, right? Or do you miss it? We could get you in as a glad
iator. Dorian would love that! He’s always wanted to be friends with a gladiator—”

  “No!” I said too loudly. Suddenly it was not Crispin with the crossbow at all but me, and it was Switch they expected me to kill. Siran. Ghen. Pallino. “Black Earth, no.”

  She drew a bit away from me, surprised by my vehemence. I wanted to fling myself from the balustrade, to dash myself to pieces on the bricks. Why had I gone into the coliseum gaol after Makisomn? I was just as trapped as I’d ever been, a prisoner now of the count’s pleasure more than I’d ever been a prisoner of poverty.

  The rest of what Anaïs said to me washed by unremembered. When she went away again—called back by her brother or one of the other patrician socialites to some passing fancy or other—I stood alone again and watched Cyrus the Fool survive fire and death by blind luck and pure simplemindedness. Everyone laughed. I swatted Erdro’s wine cup from the ledge, watched it pass slowly through the Royse field and shatter on the killing floor.

  CHAPTER 46

  THE DOCTOR

  NEITHER ANAÏS NOR DORIAN was aware of my proper identity, or so I thought—they believed me the son of a minor merchanter engaged in trade with Jadd. Before long their scholiast tutor insisted I speak to them only in Jaddian as an exercise. I was not truly their friend, not truly anyone’s friend. My possessions were recovered from the coliseum dormitories by house guards. Emperor knows what Switch and the others thought about that. I was confined to the vast palace atop its concrete and steel ziggurat, a thousand feet above the city and sea level. From my room in the outer wall, I could see all of Borosevo rolled out like a dirty carpet, a stain upon the green waters of the world.

  I left an engagement with the two noble children, crossing a mosaic floor in a quadrangle decorated with tinkling fountains with green copper statues in the centers. A pair of collared Umandh stumped past, wobbling on their three legs, their scaly, coralline hides cracking in the air as they carried a massive statue of a Mataro sphinx in their strong feelers. A float palette might have been easier, but using the xenobite slaves was something of a status symbol. House Mataro kept several hundred in the palace. Mostly they performed aesthetic chores such as waving fans at important personages in the open air or carrying things about the palace as visibly as possible. Emesh may not have had much in the way of material wealth or political significance, but it had the xenobites. I watched them retreat down a colonnade, their soft droning fading with their progress.

  “M. Gibson! Hadrian!”

  I turned, recognizing the voice. “Lady Anaïs.” I bowed almost before I’d turned round. “Forgive me, were we not through for the day?”

  The count’s daughter was taller than me by a head, the perfect blend of her two fathers. She smiled down at me, hands on the soft swell of her hips. “No, we were. I was hoping I’d catch you is all.”

  “Catch me?” I pushed a fall of hair from my eyes, the strands already damp with sweat from the damnable press of the air.

  She smiled—she smiled like an open flame—and said, “There’s a boat race around the harbor at the end of the week, you know?” I hadn’t, and I told her so politely as I fell into step beside her, matching her long stride as best I could. “Everyone from the city attends. It’s the event of the season—not counting Dorian’s Ephebeia, of course.” That announcement had been made weeks before, along with the revelation that a Cielcin would be sacrificed in a Chantry triumph to commemorate the occasion. Perhaps that was why the lady’s boat race had escaped my notice. “Lord Melluan’s sons are down from Binah”—that was the green moon, a place said to be covered in woods as vast as the fabled forests of Luin—“and Archon Veisi himself is up from Springdeep. Everyone who matters in-system.”

  I nodded politely. “It sounds like quite the showing.”

  She linked her arm through mine, laughing sweetly. “It will be, M. Gibson, truly.” We descended a curve of staircase, passing through the shadow of a square tower from one of the inner, higher sections of the palace toward the lower, outer wall. High above, the Spear Tower rose like a column of smoke into the firmament, tall as the ziggurat on which it sat. It looked narrow as a reed, as if the wind might bowl it over. I stopped a moment, looking down on the shaded garden where it wrapped beneath the wall of a higher terrace. Sailcloth awnings decorated with the dyed patterns of dragons and manticores snapped above our heads.

  “Is there much sailing on Emesh, then?” I stopped to let a decade of household soldiers march past, a group of peltasts with familiar energy lances. “I confess I’m not much familiar with the culture. Short of my time in the Colosso, I’ve not had much time to experience your fair planet.” I did not mention my time in the streets. Would not.

  Anaïs squeezed my arm, leaned against me a little. “Oh, you must come with me, then. Any one of the ships would be honored to have me aboard. You could be my escort, if you wanted.”

  “My lady, you honor me.” I inclined my head in a slight bow.

  “It might be fun!” she laughed, then released me. Around the corner the droning of more slave Umandh hummed softly as they were directed by a pair of servants calling instructions in raised voices. Doubtless one or the other had one of the droning communications boxes I had seen years ago with Cat in the fish warehouse.

  Then a voice—the voice—first broke into my universe. There are moments, instants that divide. Time fractures about them so that there is a time after . . . and so that all that was before is a kind of dream. “No, no, damn it—you’re doing it wrong.” I did not know it then, but my life had split, was cloven evenly in two from the moment I heard those words. I peered round the sandstone pillar of a colonnade and out onto the balcony beneath a vaulted ceiling overlooking the parade ground. In a few months’ time Dorian Mataro’s Ephebeian triumph would begin there, processing through the streets and along the canals of Borosevo to the coliseum, where at last the Cielcin Makisomn would be sacrificed by the Chantry grand prior, Gilliam’s mother.

  Three Umandh were attempting to replace light fixtures in the ceiling, their cilia struggling to manipulate tools and electronics meant for the five-fingered. Even as I turned the corner, one dropped a huge fluorescent rod, shattering the bulb to dust. One of the douleters, a fat man in a house uniform of muddy green, slammed his shock-stick into one of the creature’s legs. It went to two knees, dropping tentacles to brace itself as the human screamed, “Fucking squid-tree-looking filth!” Off to one side, his companion twiddled the dials on one of the droning boxes used to communicate with the Umandh.

  The man pulled his stick back for another blow, and suddenly there she was, her tattooed hand closing around the man’s wrist. “Go ahead, try it.” Her voice rang clear and high and polished, strangely accented. Hearing it, I recalled the tattooed doctor from the Eurynasir on my fateful trip away from Delos.

  The fat douleter tensed as the slender woman held his arm, eyes wide. The strength went out of him, and he shook her off, casting a violent look over his round shoulder at the woman. I like to imagine now that he cast a warding sign her way, superstitiously fending off his demons. Anaïs came up just behind me. “Oh! Hello, Doctor Onderra!” she said, surprised. “Repairing the lights?”

  The slender woman snatched the Umandh comms terminal from the second douleter, who was too busy bowing to Anaïs to protest, and fiddled with it for a good five seconds before responding. When she finally spoke, it was in even tones, the voice airy, musical and amused. “Lady Mataro, good afternoon!” She did not bow, curtsy, or make any gesture of deference or obeisance. She only smiled, full lips parting as she clasped her hands behind her back. “And yes, there was another brownout in this wing of the castle late yesterday. I thought I’d offer my assistance with the Umandh since some people”—and here she glared at the douleters—“don’t understand them worth a damn.”

  “Brownouts?” I asked, looking to Anaïs to explain.

  The palatine girl bobbed her head,
wiping the newborn sweat from her hairline. “Castle generators have been a bit broken since the storm season started.”

  “Things break,” the foreign woman said hastily, eyes sharpening on me. “Messer . . . ?”

  Anaïs squeezed my arm. “This is Hadrian!”

  “Hadrian . . . Gibson,” I managed, offering my hand as I had learned to do in the coliseum.

  She was nearly as pale as I was myself—a sailor’s pallor, though so white and unblemished that I decided her skin must be proof against solar radiation, like my own. In high boots and simple trousers, she looked drab next to Lady Anaïs Mataro in her flowing kaftan, but she wore them proudly as any queen. Her arms were bare to the shoulder, the left tattooed in a dense intaglio of fine black lines, whorls, and angles spiderwebbing from deltoid down to the start of each finger. Still smiling, she moved forward, extending her right hand—which entirely lacked tattoos—and took my hand in hers. “Valka Onderra Vhad Edda, xenologist.” I don’t know how I responded, though I guessed I’d said the correct thing, for Valka smiled again and said, “Lovely to meet you.”

  I do not consider myself a great artist, though she made me wish I was. I could not have known at this first meeting how many times I would fail to capture her, in charcoal and in life. The brazen declaration of her: the pride in that upturned chin, the pointed nose, and the tidy carelessness that put her above the opinions of lesser men. There’s little sign of her wit—so close to cruelty—in any of the drawings I made of her, and this poor prose cannot contain her beauty, body or soul. Even holographs fail. They are only echoes, as is this.

  Any Imperial aesthete would have told you she was too much of too many things: too severe, too serious. Her skin too pale. Her eyes too wide. Those eyes. Golden eyes. I have never seen their like, before or since. They knew things, and they laughed at what they saw even as they cut it to ribbons. There exists no word for the color of her hair, such a deep red it looked black in all but the brightest light. She wore it short, and what excess there was she gathered into a bun at the top of her head, loose strands playing across her forehead and about her small ears. She smiled like a razor at a joke only she ever understood and stood like a soldier at parade rest, waiting patiently with that terminal clasped behind her.