Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Apparently recognizing the language, Lord Mataro laughed. “What did I tell you, Ligeia? The boy’s a proper talent.”

  The prior sniffed but did not take her hands away from the back of my chair. “This was the Colosso slave?”

  “He wasn’t a slave, Reverence,” said young Dorian, gallantly swooping to my defense. “He was a myrmidon. Quite a good one.”

  I turned my attention up the table, looking past Bassander and the scholiasts, past the foederati, past Gilliam and the Veisi couple. Gilliam was smiling, a lopsided gash in his lopsided face. Recalling that old maxim about never letting the enemy see you bleed, I returned a smile just as crooked. It was all I could do not to break that smile when Ligeia Vas intoned, “Would not a man who speaks the language of demons be a witch?”

  The temperature in the room—chilly for Emesh—practically froze. Gilliam, damn him, laughed. Lord Luthor’s lips quirked in acknowledgment of the fact that the old woman had scored a point.

  Yet there is a response to such absurd accusations—I retreated into absurdity. Speaking round the rim of my wine cup, I breathed, “I prefer the term magus, if it’s all the same to you.”

  Elomas broke out laughing, a tinny, false sound that nevertheless invited his neighbors to join in. I could have kissed the man. A poor joke and an awkward one, but it had been my only recourse. “You’ve some stones on you, lad!” Sir Elomas barked, still grinning.

  I risked a glance back over my shoulder to look at the woman. Despite the suddenly warmer climate in the dining hall, the grand prior’s face was icy. “Have a care, my child.”

  “Always, Your Reverence.” I bowed my head, turning away from her, all too aware of her hands, like talons, grasping the brass knobs decorating the corners of my seat’s backrest. “Though it is kind of you to worry about me.”

  That withered ice crystal of a face looked incapable of evincing such mortal emotions as worry or concern. Glancing at Gilliam’s uneven face, I decided it was no small wonder the creature had turned out as unsavory as he was, victim of so unnatural a mother.

  Then, like a bolt of sunlight, salvation. Valka cleared her throat. “Beg pardon, priestess, but M. Gibson was about to tell us a story when you walked up. Might he continue?” Story? What story? I scrambled, mind doing a mad dance to sort itself. Obligingly Valka said, “You said: ‘They aren’t demons, madame. You know, when I was a child, I—’ and then our friend here interrupted you.” She indicated the factionarius. Was it my imagination, or had Valka imitated the precise tone and cadence of my earlier delivery? The basic fuzz of memory jarred my sense of déjà vu. I frowned at her.

  And then it came. I had been about to tell a story about Gibson sharing the holograph images of Cielcin warriors, but I thought better of it. A new thought was flowering in the shadows of my skull and growing fast. That inner part of me capered and rubbed its hands together. I went for it, saying, “When I was a boy my . . .”—My lictor? My bodyguard?—“my uncle Roban took me to a Free Trader fair. A troupe of Eudorans were in-system at the time, and I recall that there was one man, a trainer, who pitted animals against one another while men gambled.” I broke off, permitting the mousy server to recharge my glass. “A strange fellow, as I recall. Not a homunculus, but blue-skinned. While we were watching, the man paired a mongoose against a snake, one predator against another.”

  One of the foederati captains cut in, “What’s a mongoose?”

  “A sort of terranic mammal not unlike a cat, I’m told.” Taking a deep breath, I continued, turning my eyes up-table toward the lords and Archon Veisi. “I begged my uncle to let me place a bet on the contest, which I did, backing the snake despite his insistence that I vote for the mongoose. Five kaspums—my monthly allowance. The creatures battled in a damp culvert by the roadside while we looked on. Most of them left disappointed. Can you guess who won?” I looked round the table, hands open in a gesture of invitation. “Anyone?”

  Elomas—increasingly the good sport, though somewhat ignorant of terranic ecology—spoke up first. “The snake?” This elicited a chorus of nods and faint agreements from the assembled guests.

  In the far corner, the string band changed its tune to something ever so slightly familiar, and I smiled before continuing. “That’s what the onlookers thought. Obvious choice, really. The thing outmassed the mongoose three-to-one without question, and that’s to say nothing of the venom.” I took a moment to explain for the edification of the foederati captain and some others that terranic serpents carried powerful toxins in their fangs. “But no, it was the mongoose who won.” I took a sip of wine, made an appreciative face, and half turned in my chair to study the still-standing prior. “The onlookers all cursed the man for a swindler, but they left when he threatened them with another of his snakes.”

  “Is there some point to your story, M. Gibson?” asked Ligeia Vas, arching ghost-thin brows.

  “There’s not. Not truly,” I said, revisiting my crooked smile. “Except for an observation my uncle made at the time.” The laws of proper delivery demanded my silence then for a space of some seconds, my own brows arching. “He remarked that the behavior of animals should not surprise us. They are, after all, only animals, and a tiger cannot change his stripes, if you’ll pardon the cliché. Mongeese have always been great hunters of snakes, as any student of literature might tell you. This alone is not remarkable, but the Eudoran, it turned out, had altered his mongoose so that it was proof against the snake’s venom.” I smiled brightly at the grand prior, hoping she would see this insult for what it was. “The problem, you see, was that the Eudoran was a kind of snake himself, rigging the fight. My uncle said that that was the trouble. You never know which men are snakes and which are mongeese. Not until you bite—or have been bitten.”

  Silence floated like smoke, punctuated by the soft strains of harp and viola. Somehow the music enhanced the quiet more than it broke it. After a moment I tore my gaze from the star-eyed prior and focused on my plate. Valka was smiling at me—smiling—the lone candle flame in a sea of ashen faces. By that token alone I decided the whole gambit had been worth it, whatever else happened. The band—true soldiers—had not missed a note through that awful quietude. Then the count laughed, pounding his empty tumbler against the tabletop in raucous applause. “A proper talent indeed! It would seem, Reverence Vas, that we must not make the mistake of considering the myrmidon a fool.”

  With kneading motions the grand prior tightened her rope of uncut white hair about her time-weighted shoulders. Her nostrils flared, but she smiled, paying me what she doubtless believed a fine compliment. “You would make a good priest.”

  CHAPTER 54

  GASLIGHT

  AFTER ANOTHER OF MY evening visits with Valka, I walked alone along a colonnade that overlooked one of the castle’s inner courtyards. Below, a trio of brightly dressed courtiers sat inside an ironwork gazebo, playing at some holograph game by the soft twilight. The day had been a soaking one, not rainy but thick with steam—as was only too normal in Borosevo—and my clothes clung to me like seaweed to the body of a drowned man. A logothete stopped me, and we chatted awhile. My performance at dinner with the grand prior had garnered me some small, brief celebrity. Ligeia Vas was not well loved, it seemed, as is often the case with the Chantry’s elite. But that fellow was a Colosso fan and also recalled me from my time there. When we parted ways, he left with a photograph of us both taken with his terminal, and I with a thin, amused smile.

  A new place is like new shoes, I’ve often found, and having lived in Castle Borosevo for some months now, I felt the place breaking in around me, growing comfortable. The rounded arches of the colonnade and the pale sandstone walls beneath their red tile roofs were warm and inviting, scored in places with crawling vines and decorated with iron statues of dancing nymphs and legionnaires. Even the Umandh had become less strange, droning on their work crews as I passed them by. What is more, the servants smiled or bobbe
d their heads as I went by. I may have been a prisoner, but I had the run of my prison. And if my attendance on Anaïs and Dorian was tedious, my evening studies with Valka were anything but. We had shared a bottle of Kandarene red, as was our custom, and a laugh at the prior’s expense, though I was careful not to give too plain an insult to the Chantry Synod’s appointed representative on Emesh.

  Valka was under no such censure, and she had laughed, saying, “The look on that old ruin’s face! She looked like she would have had you shot if she could’ve!”

  “She could have,” I said soberly, unable to keep down a smile of my own. Valka’s laugh was a deep, musical sound that escaped her chest from somewhere near her heart. It was not the laugh of some churlish courtier, trained to demure and girlish precision. No, she laughed like a storm cloud, like the sea. And she had broken on my grim demeanor like a wave against the sea wall at Devil’s Rest.

  Thus I was deep in the question of her—in her foreignness and the way she made me feel half a fool—as I crossed the castle grounds on my way toward my chamber and bed. Perhaps an hour or two of drawing before sleep, I thought. Just the thing.

  Valka was still a mystery. Despite her diplomatic status, she was no kind of ambassador. What I did not then recall was that since everyone in the Demarchy of Tavros holds voting power, any Tavrosi clansman might be considered a representative of that strange, distant people. It was one of the many reasons Tavrosi guests are so often frowned upon at the courts of the Imperium. They complicate matters.

  My rooms lay on one of the middle levels of the Sunglass Hall, one of the newer, less opulent buildings on the palace grounds, somewhat removed from the diplomatic apartments in the north wing. There were gaslights in the yard below the edifice, and I passed a lamplighter with his wick. I had thought the lights a symbol of opulence, as servants had to be paid to man them, but I realized later that they were only a safety precaution. With the palace’s power grid prone to outages, the gaslights ensured good visibility on the wall-walks and in the colonnades of the castle by night.

  The man waved at me, smiled, and doffed his cap. A bird chirruped in one of the castle’s ever-present bits of greenery, and not long after, an ornithon rattled in answering challenge. I stopped, standing a moment in contemplation of the unfixed stars. Pallino and I had met again a few times, on each occasion advancing our plans to buy a starship. Switch’s bond with the coliseum was nearly up, but Pallino had renewed his more recently, meaning we had something like another nine local months before he was freed from his obligation. That was more than a standard year, which meant it was in Switch’s best interest to renew himself, to earn another year’s pay and allow the smallest overlap in their contracts. It was longer than I’d have liked.

  But I let it go. For the moment I was fed, comfortable, and safe. And I harbored a flickering, private hope that when and if my plan came together and I left Emesh behind that Valka would come with me. It was not impossible. I wanted to travel the stars, meet xenobites. She was an expert in xenobitic cultures. Was there a future there? She was so much less cold toward me now than she had been at our first meeting, but though I dreamed, I did not delude myself. She had her own path to follow. But perhaps you will forgive a young man his dreams. I had suffered much; I had a right to dream.

  “Boy!”

  Mere steps from the door to the hall and solitude, I froze. I knew that voice, that lisping, aristocratic drawl. Before I could turn fully round, a hand seized me by the shoulder. Turning, I found myself face-to-face with Gilliam Vas. His mismatched eyes caught the gaslight, making the blue one shine. His white-blond hair hung lank across his misshapen face, and his teeth flashed between lips pulled back into a snarl as he backed me into the nearest lamppost.

  “I don’t know who you think you are.” His breath smelled of something sweet—mint or verrox stimulant or both. I turned my head away, trying not to cough. “The count may find your baseborn antics amusing—Earth only knows why—but I will not tolerate such offenses. Not from you, and not at the expense of my family’s dignity. I pray you remember who it is we are.”

  Deliberately slow, I placed a hand over Gilliam’s, prepared to duck at the waist and break his wrist if I had to. “If your family’s dignity hangs by so thin a thread, Your Reverence, that such as I threaten it, well . . . you should rethink exactly how much it’s worth.” My words were a little breathy with surprise.

  The priest blew air from his nose like a bull about to charge, and he rattled me against the lamppost so that I struck my head and cried out. “You dare to mock me? Me?” His uneven fingers twisted in the fabric of my tunic, as if it were a throat they held. “My family is older than you could possibly comprehend, you up-jumped little plutocrat.” He was stronger than I’d imagined. “If the count didn’t want you for whatever reason, and if you were not so beneath me, I would kill the man who so insulted my family.”

  His hand still twisted at my shoulder, I drew myself up to my full height and looked down at him. I marveled at the fact that he—who should have been acutely attuned to the blood of those around him, intus that he was—could not guess my lineage. But then, I was short for a palatine, and whatever else was unusual about my appearance could have been explained by the mere fact that I was an offworlder. No one in the palace had guessed my secret, so why should he?

  “Perhaps you and yours should not act so belligerently. The prior interrupted a personal conversation with her rhetoric, and I am trying to go to bed, Reverence.”

  From the spasm of muscle beneath Gilliam’s jaw, I knew it was the wrong thing to say. His hand shifted, and his face swung even closer to my own, though he was now looking up at me. Up close in the light of the lamp, I could make out the heavy sheet of makeup he wore to mask his pitted complexion. Well applied as it was, his sweat had caused it to bead and run a little about the hairline and shine. “I’ll release you when I’m done, pissant,” he said. Then, incongruously, he released me, staggering back one uneven step. At arm’s length now, he spun and backhanded me across the face with his other hand. I gasped in pain. The man had lived on Emesh all his life, and the intense gravity had put a strength behind that arm that was amplified by the thick ring he wore on his middle finger.

  Not speaking, I massaged my mouth with one hand, glaring at the shorter priest. There was only a little blood when I pulled that hand away. Had I been myself—Hadrian Marlowe, the son of a landed archon—I might have challenged the man to a duel for his insult. But I was not Marlowe, not anymore, not that day. Hadrian Gibson hung his head, his lips compressed into a thin, hard line. “You were a spacer,” the priest snarled, shaking out his hand as he glowered at me, “and so you’re barely better than a barbarian, so I will explain it for you.” The blue eye shone brightly in the firelight, but the black one drank that same radiance and seemed a socket, a hole in his waxen face. He raised that twisted hand again, as if to strike. I flinched and could have cursed myself for flinching. The chanter laughed, and it was a sound like the smashing of priceless instruments. “There it is.” He pointed one finger directly at my face, the black mass of his ring gleaming wetly in the gaslight.

  Gilliam put his hands behind his back and leaned forward, pointing his chin at me, offering it like a target. I think I turned to stone for a moment, paralyzed by social convention. I could not strike him and remain here as Hadrian Gibson. Gilliam’s smile did not falter, and he said, “Aah, you can learn. You see, this is not the Colosso, myrmidon. We expect civility at court, and no matter how well trained Balian thinks you are, a half savage is a half savage. Blood tells all.”

  “Your Reverence is an expert on half savages, surely.” I was careful to enunciate the half, inclining my head to reference his condition. “It is good of you to stoop to my level. And such dedication! Tell me, were you born thus, or did you pay a bonecutter to better relate to such as me?” Not for the first time, I wondered at the fire in the man. The hatred. Was it that his
deformity spurred him to act twice as viciously in his role as palatine and priest? Or was it only that he saw in me someone beneath him? Was he what all palatines looked like to the plebs?

  Is this what Switch saw in me?

  Gilliam hauled off and struck me again with the ringed hand. This time I did not gasp in pain, did not cry out. My hair fanned across my face, but I kept my eyes on the man. His chest was heaving, his blood up. “You’re lucky the count likes the look of you. Otherwise I’d have my cathars carve that pretty nose of yours for your insolence.”

  “What do you want of me, priest?” I asked. “I want nothing of you.”

  Gilliam looked at me as if his chair had asked why he’d pulled it from the table. Instead of rebutting with the usual snide remark, he asked, “Why are you here?”

  I blinked at him, confused. “Excuse me?”

  “I ask again: Why are you here? What lies did you tell the count? How have you suborned him? You and that Demarchist witch?”

  Though the air was hot as ever it was in Borosevo, I think my sweat changed to ice and imprisoned me; suddenly I could not move for cold. So that was it. There it was at last. An answer. Gilliam believed I was plotting some mischief with Valka, a spy and saboteur.

  I scowled at the intus. “What are you talking about?”

  “You consort with that Pale demon and cozy up with that backspace whore . . .” He lurched toward me, teeth bared. “You insult the Holy Terran Chantry. Blaspheme at His Excellency’s table, and you think we’re all too stupid to notice? I know what you are, heretic.” He raised his hand again, but I was ready this time. I didn’t even blink when he struck me, didn’t turn my head away. His eyes bulged with fury, but there was a spark in them—a spark, I think, of fear. “Why are you smiling?”

  “Do you really think the count would let me free if that were true?” I spat red on the tiles. “Be realistic, Reverence.” He swung at me again, but I was more than ready now and bent away. His hand struck nothing, even on the backswing. Strong as he was, I was fast. I’d had to be, not only as a child when Crispin was my only opponent, but again above the canals and on the rooftops of the city, and in the coliseum, too. I kept backing away, toward the stairs and my bed. Perhaps guards would come soon. They would not stop the chanter, would not lay a hand on Gilliam, but audiences changed performances, and though everything we’d said and done had been recorded for the castle’s ten thousand eyes, the mere presence of other eyes might change the man’s behavior. The lamplighter was watching us, face fallen, and from my vantage on the steps to the hall I saw a pair of servants in the shadow of a colonnade, but they were all remote as stars. “I’m not your enemy, priest. I didn’t ask to be here at all.”