Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  It hadn’t changed, as if the metal walls and rickety catwalks were a museum exhibit, their artful disrepair well tended. Entering, I looked up, half expecting to see Cat crouched nervously on the walkway above. A pang spasmed through me, and I caught my hand forming the sign of the sun disc discreetly at my side—a damned stupid superstitious thing to do. Rest easy, and find peace on Earth. A sudden laugh threatened me, and I fought it down, imagining what Cat would say to see me dressed as I was in fine silks and high boots.

  My distress must surely have colored my face, for I caught Valka watching me. Seeing her only made me feel worse. Had I truly forgotten Cat so quickly? No. No, life must move on, surely. I was no ascetic. I should not be alone.

  “Are you all right, Gibson?”

  Hadrian, I wanted to say, as I had said at Ulakiel alienage. Call me Hadrian.

  “Yes, I . . .” What could I say? That I’d once robbed this place years ago? “I was just thinking, sorry.”

  “The workers all come in from the offshore compound, Your Excellency, as you know,” said gray-faced Engin, all cordiality and polite deference. His khaki uniform was freshly pressed, pinned with medals and the collar tabs of the civil service. The uniform made him look paler, more ashen than he already was. He wrung a billed cap in his hands; the headwear might have been formal had it not been crushed in the vilicus’s square-fingered hands. He glanced nervously to where a team of his people had clustered a pod of droning Umandh along one wall of the musty warehouse.

  Gilliam pressed his kerchief to his face. “How many of the beasts do we still have?”

  “At Ulakiel?” Engin frowned, glanced to his aide, a woman even thinner than me.

  She had the look of one of Emesh’s northern tribesmen, denoted by the tight braids that ran in rows to the nape of her neck. Her twanging accent confirmed my guess as she said, “Seventeen hundred and forty-three, Your Reverence.”

  “And globally?” The count frowned, crossing over to inspect the gathered coloni slaves. Balian Mataro was no small man—was indeed among the largest palatines I had seen—and still the aliens dwarfed him, their waving tentacles and finer cilia waving higher, swaying on their three legs.

  The northwoman said, “Approximately eight million, Your Excellency.” The light flashed on her collar tabs, the left with the notched wheel symbol of her rank, the right with a silvery open hand against a black enameled background, sigil of the Imperial civil service. Not an aide, then, but Imperial oversight in the Fishers Guild’s offices. They may have served the count, but all their books flowed straight to the Imperial office on Forum. I ruminated on split loyalty, and on the plight of the Umandh. What was it Engin had said when Valka and I had gone out to the Umandh alienage? That they had sold a breeding population offworld? I imagined the beasts disseminated throughout the Empire, ornaments of human superiority like the homunculi wealthy men sometimes ordered as wives, the features of the women’s bodies crafted to suit their desires. Hollow, childish, cruel. Prophet that I was, I imagined the Cielcin meeting the same fate. Man is a wolf to man and a dragon to the inhuman.

  “That number is up since my last report on the matter. Significantly.”

  Ligeia Vas swept silently across the floor, staying between her son and the lord she served. “It is my understanding that you yet allow the beasts their rituals.” How she wasn’t sweating through her brocade chasuble I couldn’t tell you, yet she appeared completely untroubled, examining the vilicus and his assistant with those witch-bright eyes.

  One of the junior ministers, a layman I did not know, exclaimed, “They ought to be brought to the light of the Chantry.”

  I suppressed a snort, unwilling to cite the obvious logical fallacy inherent in the man’s piety. Luckily I didn’t have to do so. Valka glared at the man, then spoke as if over the heads of everyone in the count’s party. “Why would a xenobite ever consent to be embraced by your faith?”

  The your was not lost on the dough-faced functionary, nor did it pass the prior and her chanter son unnoticed. Ligeia and Gilliam both held their tongues a moment as the stupid minister blundered in, “What . . . whatever do you mean, Doctor?”

  Valka’s nostrils flared, and she looked ready to strike the man. Gilliam visibly sneered beneath his kerchief. “You’d have better luck getting rats to worship cats.”

  The grand prior raised a bony hand and turned to address the vilicus and the count together. “I believe our mandate was clear when we accorded your house the terraforming technologies you required, Lord Mataro.”

  That had been well over a thousand years earlier, and Balian knew it. Still the weight of those years hung from him, though he had not lived them. His shoulders slumped, compressed as by a yoke. “Yes, of course.”

  “The native culture must be obliterated. Take the children from their parents if you must, but we need no rebellions. We can tolerate no gods but the Earth herself and her Son.” She meant the Emperor.

  Unseen, I glanced sidelong at Valka. The doctor stood with her hands clasped behind her back, chin angled upward as if baiting a boxer to strike. I thought of what she had shared that day at Ulakiel—what she had shown me in her holographs. That simple, secret fact, terrifying and terrible: we were not first. Did Ligeia know? Did Gilliam? Even if the Quiet were a secret known to only a few in the Chantry—those tasked with guarding their secret—surely the mother-and-bastard pair must know. After all, they were the highest ranking members of the Chantry on Emesh. No wonder the woman was squeezing so hard. It made we wonder why they hadn’t glassed the site from orbit, why none of the ancient sites had been obliterated by the Chantry over the years.

  “Leave the doctor alone, Ligeia.” Balian Mataro placed a hand on his prior’s arm. “The girl is a foreigner and unused to our ways.”

  “The girl is an infidel,” Gilliam put in, leering at Valka.

  “And you’re a self-righteous little hobgoblin,” the count said, perhaps still angry and rattled by the comment about terraforming equipment.

  I smiled in spite of myself, glancing down at my feet to hide my expression.

  “Balian, please.” The grand prior swept forward. “A measure of decorum.”

  “I am lord of this planet, grand prior. Have a care how you address me.”

  From the far wall, the Umandh’s droning changed in pitch, warbling with a strange, constant rhythm. There must have been half a hundred of them, all swaying like coral polyps in a strong eddy. The noise of them was incredible, rattling the cheap glass panes in the windows. “Would someone please shut them up?” Gilliam snapped his fingers in the general direction of the coloni, then used his kerchief to dab at the beads of sweat forming on his brow.

  At the chanter’s command, one of the douleters clubbed the nearest creature to quiet it, doubtless counting on the message to translate to the others, linked at they were. It trumpeted in pain, splintering its portion of the great harmony it shared with its brethren. I felt a terrible pang of déjà vu, remembering the last time I’d been in this place. But instead of meekly turning to aid their fallen comrade, this time the Umandh stretched their feelers far as they would go, their droning turned to a dry rattling like air through a busted trachea.

  Beside me Valka sucked in a breath, tore her tablet from her belt, and glared at it in confusion, tapping at the screen with a forefinger. The count, not recognizing that the sound was a bit odd, turned to address Engin. “Quiet your beasts, vilicus.”

  Engin slashed the air, shouted an order at his douleters, who began fiddling with their tablets. “Get them under control and back on the ship, double-time!”

  Among the adorators who dwell in the mountains above Meidua, it is said that pride is the greatest sin. I have not always agreed with that supposition, or with my friend Edouard, who first shared it with me. But it was so here. The first of the Umandh boiled from behind its invisible line, breaking from its pack like a Jaddian
dervish. It spun, twisting on its three legs in a strange, whirling charge, its own drone stretching to a high shriek as it threw itself toward our party like a frenzied beast. It caught one of the count’s guards, wrapping its tentacles around the man and falling atop him. They had counted on their weapons and a thousand years of oppression to cow the creatures.

  Pride.

  The dam broke, and the pack of Umandh threw themselves upon us, shrieking like the tearing of metal in some deep pelagic hell. Gilliam staggered back, then turned with surprising speed to shepherd his mother away. The remainder of the guards gathered together, forming a cordon between the suddenly animated horde and their count. I turned to look at Valka just as the other guards—the ones who had been dutifully holding positions outside—stormed in. The man the Umandh had tackled, whose green armor was slashed with white to mark him as a lictor, struggled, but the Umandh held him with countless arms, the tentacles squeezing tighter, immobilizing the man. I heard bones crack beneath that armor, or dreamed I did. One of the other guards fired a plasma burner at the creature, burning a smoking wedge out of its side.

  The Umandh howled like a deflating elephant, but it struggled on, kept squeezing until the fifth round from the plasma burner felled it.

  “Get His Excellency outside!” shouted Dame Camilla, voice amplified by speakers embedded in her breastplate. Rounding on Valka and myself, she exclaimed, “You two, come with me!”

  Valka was standing hunched, slightly aloof, fiddling with her tablet. She was not panicking, was barely sweating despite the sweltering heat in the warehouse. I nearly tripped over an upended crate of fish getting to the knot of soldiers. “Give me a weapon!” I didn’t know what I was saying, but when they hesitated, I snapped, “I’m not going to kill your bloody lord, just give me something!” I snapped my fingers, held my palm out. Something huge and scaly struck me, the rough texture of it tearing my fine silk robes, scraping the flesh over my ribs. My head struck the ground and rang like a bell. I snarled, fingers trying to find purchase on flesh as hard as coral, as stone. The cloying stink of raw fish filled my nostrils, and then thin tendrils filled them, stopping my air as another appendage forced itself down my throat.

  My vision blurred, and in my panic I bit down on both the tendril and my tongue. Copper blood filled my mouth, mingled with the sulfurous ichor from the Umandh’s veins. I was still choking, could not remove the thing from between my teeth. I could not move.

  I could not move.

  The pressure was too great; my every limb felt stressed to breaking, and I imagined glass pillars splintering under weight. At once I went blind, went weak, felt the world slipping away. Would that I had died there, died and spared the universe the stink of me. Another monster strangled in its crib, snuffed out before I could be inflicted on the universe. The blood slowing in my ears carried with it the sound of tramping feet, the fall of starships, and the burning out of suns. The world faded into darkness, the true Dark of which the chanters sing. White faces bloomed like flowers in that darkness, only to be snuffed out and blown to dust. I saw my father’s face and Crispin’s. Cat’s and Valka’s and my mother’s. And Gibson’s, nose slit, back straight, eyes undimmed.

  He shook his head. “Go back!” he said, then shrank into shadow, leaving only green eyes that turned to glass. To starlight. To darkness and no more.

  No more.

  * * *

  Light.

  There was light. Light and the air came rushing back into me, and the glass-splintering feeling in my bones turned to raw aching. Valka had tugged the Umandh tentacle I’d bitten off free. “Are you all right?”

  Why, Doctor Onderra, fancy meeting you in a place like this. My oxygen-deprived brain made me giggle at the thought. Two creases formed between her eyebrows, and she started when I sat up abruptly. “Yes.” My eyes widened. “Down!” I seized her by the shoulders, nearly blacking out again as I tugged her down and rolled atop her just as another of the Umandh tumbled past, tentacles lashing. Valka lay frozen beneath me, eyes wide. I didn’t want to move, but I staggered to my feet with a groan, the fat sash that held my robes in place coming undone and the garment tangling about me. With a growl I shrugged out of the garment, stripping down to my cream shirt and trousers. The shirt clung to my torn side where the blood flowed hot and sticky. I hauled Valka to her feet. “You all right?”

  That I had deliberately mirrored her tone was not lost on her, and she found a small smile. I nearly missed it; she played it off as a compression of the lips, skin whitening. “Yeah.”

  “Come on.” I seized her by the wrist, moving toward the very ladder I’d once descended to steal fish. “Up that way! Quickly!” Where was the count? I couldn’t see through all the confusion, through the tangle of Umandh slaves and humans, through the haze of plasma smoke and the beginnings of fire. Valka was still lingering on the first rung of the ladder. “Go, damn you!”

  Her eyes widened, and she climbed. One of the Umandh must have heard our escape, for it hurtled straight at me, nine feet of stone skin and waving tentacles. Stupidly I dove sideways, rolling as I hit the ground on the far side of a row of open fish containers and slamming into the next. The Umandh crashed into the boxes, tumbling over them in its blindness. I scrambled to my feet, seizing a pair of frozen carp.

  Numb, confused, I threw them at the staggered creature as I backed away and sought some sort of weapon. Maybe one of the douleters had left a shock-stick lying around or some injudicious dock worker had abandoned a pry bar for the refrigerated crates. Or maybe there’s an Imperial Legion waiting in ambush, buried under all the fish.

  I looked about for the soldiers, but they were too busy completing their massacre by the doors to help with my stray. There were so few of them. Most of the reinforcements who had come streaming in to supplement the men who’d been there from the start had vanished, retreating with the vanished palatines. I thought I saw Engin’s gray-skinned body face down and bleeding on the concrete floor, but I didn’t waste time on him.

  The Umandh was on its feet, hissing past the tentacles snaking from the mouth at its crown. Translucent golden slaver flew from its mouth, and as it tipped forward I saw the little studded fangs orbiting the lining of its trunk. From that perspective I realized the tendrils weren’t arms—they were tongues. I scrabbled backward and nearly tripped again over the carcass of a seven-meter-long congrid. Something metallic clattered against the row of boxes. When I saw what it was, I almost laughed aloud. The machete was one of several used to gut the massive congrid eels and the terranic sharks harvested by the Fishers Guild, no doubt left there by some careless slave or douleter, just as I’d hoped. I could have kissed whoever had left it there, and I snatched it up, rolling to face my opponent. The edge bit through two of the Umandh’s tendrils, notched another, kinked a fourth. The creature bellowed and body-checked me, trying to sweep my legs with one of its own. I twisted, catching one of its tentacles in my fist. I brought the blade down, then slammed my booted foot against the inside of one of the colonus’s three spindly knees.

  I felt the bone break, and the Umandh’s war cry warbled in pain as it fell. I placed the point of the machete against the creature’s bony exoskeleton and raised my other hand to slam the pommel and pierce the tough hide. It groaned, made a sound like the crying of brass whales in the waters of my home, and lay quiescent. My hand hung there, raised like an executioner’s sword, my shadow like the shadow of a cathar cast across the body of the guilty. As I hesitated, I glanced upward and saw Valka watching me from the catwalk, just where Cat had once watched me, where I had watched the douleters beat an Umandh with no name.

  I pulled the machete away, raised the blade in silent salute to the doctor above me.

  Then one of the count’s soldiers shot the creature at my feet.

  * * *

  “It was the foreign witch!” Gilliam was shouting when at last I emerged into the sunlight. He was irritating
ly unharmed, one arm sheltering his mother. The grand prior, looking more the part of a witch than Valka ever could, nestled against her son in spite of the heat. “She can use that terminal of hers to talk with those . . . those . . . creatures!” he sputtered. “And Mother knows what else she’s capable of!”

  The count wiped his sweating forehead on a patterned sleeve. “We’ve used those tablets since the colonization. They have nothing to do with our Tavrosi emissary.”

  “Then she’s sullied it with some foreign perversion. Some device of Tavros!”

  Dame Camilla strode forward, smoothly cutting the intus’s stream of implications off at the head. She saluted and bowed to her lord, said, “All dead, Excellency.”

  Lord Balian Mataro sagged against a crate. “Very good. Cut them up and throw them in the sea, Camilla.” He waved his dismissal, hand heavy with the weight of rings and orders.

  She didn’t leave, and I imagined those jewel-hard eyes of hers locked on the count beneath her helmet. “And our own dead?”

  “How many?”

  “Three,” the knight-lictor replied, as if it were just a number. “Engin and two of ours.”

  I glanced at Valka, raised my eyebrows at her as if to ask, Did you have anything to do with this. She shook her head, more tired than affronted, and the count addressed one of the surviving slave-handlers. “What the hell happened?”