Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “And have the Jaddians wait while I pack all my things?” A paper shield, that. “I don’t want to depend on their charity, do you?”

  The girl smiled, teeth milky in the insufficient light, almost blue. “No, I suppose not. Still, I’d like it if you came back.”

  I returned the smile more thinly and nodded. She wanted me to agree with her, to say I wished I were back in Borosevo as well, but I would not lie to her. “Truth be told, Borosevo might not be so safe right now. If the Cielcin are coming, I mean.”

  “You think they are?”

  “Our Jaddian friends seem to think so. ” I turned away, looking back at the black mass of the altar. “And after that first attack, can you honestly say you don’t believe them?” Gods, it was cold in those tunnels, in that chamber, in the darkness beneath the world, and the weight of all that rock above crushed my soul into a space many sizes too small. The Cielcin felt so close at hand, menacing as the crooked pillars of that alien warren. Shadows on the mind.

  The girl came up behind me and wrapped her thin arms around me. She didn’t speak but held me there. She was taller than I, and so she pressed her cheek to the back of my head. It felt good to be held—it had been so long. I didn’t resist, not at once. Cat’s face flickered out of the dark, brown skin paled, drawn with plague. Wincing, I prized Anaïs’s arms off of me. This was the girl to whom I was to be sold.

  “Let me go, Anaïs.”

  She started but did not draw away. The distance between us might have been measured in light-years, parsecs. “Father told me his plan . . .” I pressed my lips together, uncertain what to do. I felt sure now that this was how Kyra had felt. “How you’re to be my consort.”

  “Your brood man, you mean.”

  “Is that all you see in it?” she breathed, words warm on the back of my neck. “It doesn’t have to be like that, you know? We could be . . . good. This could be good for Emesh, for our children.”

  “Our children . . . ?” The thought would not cohere. Children. What could I say to that? They could have their genetic sample of me whether I wanted it or not. I could live out my days in a tower, in a summer palace like Mother. But I had no power, no choice in the situation. My muscles turned to marble beneath my skin, and I stood still as one of those misshapen pillars supporting the darkness above. “Anaïs, I can’t talk about this now. My father cast me out. Your father poached me for . . . for my cells, like I’m some sort of racehorse.”

  Still she didn’t answer, only clung tighter. Was she trembling? Was she afraid? Or was that only me? Wordlessly she reached up, touched my face with one hand and turned me around. Leaden, I turned to face her, to look her in the face through the gloom. I teetered on the edge of further speech, opened my mouth to find the words.

  She kissed me.

  I froze.

  In the chill of that cavern, she was warm, willing . . . and I did not want her. “It isn’t like that,” she whispered.

  I held her at arm’s length, said, “It’s exactly like that!”

  “But you’ll be the lord of all Emesh, at my side. Can you imagine?” I could imagine, and I told her so. But power is like magnetism—it works in two directions, repelling as surely as it attracts. My mother and my father were prisoners of their stations and their blood. They could not choose. So too was I powerless and at the mercy of Anaïs’s attentions. The memory of that moonless night in Borosevo came back to me, men laughing as they dragged me from my hovel. I shut my eyes, willing the memory to go away.

  I don’t want that, I meant to say, but instead I heard a voice identical to mine saying, “What a day that will be.” What else could I say? As the soldier before his legate, as the sailor before his captain, and as Kyra had been before me, I was powerless before this girl and the machinery she represented. I would be hers, and nothing I could do would change that. “But I don’t think your court will accept me, after Gilliam . . .”

  She pulled herself against me, face nuzzling the hollow of my neck. I could feel my body responding, betraying me. I was going to be sick. “I don’t want to talk about Gilliam. We’ll make them accept you. They are my court, my planet. My family’s planet. We’ll show them, you and I.” I was petrified, and for a moment I forgot to move as her lips fixed themselves to mine. Their taste was like the taste of ashes.

  “Hadrian, I—Oh!”

  At the sound of the voice—the voice—I pushed Anaïs from me, feeling the blood that had stirred me darken my face. Anaïs caught her breath and turned round with a giggle even as my heart turned to glass as my muscles had to marble, shattered when it hit the ground.

  Valka stood in the doorway of the sepulcher in silhouette as Anaïs had moments before. Even now I wonder if she scowled or if her knife-edged face smiled in bemusement. “Doctor, I . . . Anaïs came to find me.”

  “I can see that,” Valka’s bright voice said archly. “The Jaddians are waiting for the lady. Come on.”

  Cowed, sick at heart, I swallowed and nodded my head. “It’s not what it . . . We weren’t . . .”

  “I don’t care,” Valka said. I like to think she said it too sharply, too quickly. But then she laughed. “Come on, now.”

  CHAPTER 67

  LOST TIME

  OUR EXPOSURE TO THE oceans of space has made of our vast worlds small islands. Our genetic enhancements have strained our appreciation of time. As you have read, once I dallied in the streets and canals of Borosevo without regard for the cost in years. Crowded by all that noise, that color, the verve and bustle of the city and its dying people, I thought my lost time worth nothing given the centuries my blood assured. How easy it was to believe that I could stay there, stay with Cat in our crumbling tenement until time itself pulled me down like the buildings.

  The man who hopes for the future delays its arrival, and the man who dreads it summons it to his door.

  Augustine once said that if there are such things as the past and the future, they do not exist as such but are only the present in their own times. The past, he says, exists only in memory and the future only in expectation. Neither is real. The past and the future—our lives and dreams—are stories. We are all stories in the end. Only stories. And it is in the nature of stories that times present and past are present in time future, and the future present in the past. Thus all time is always present in the mind, and in the story of the mind, and perhaps in those forces that shaped the mind. The poet wrote that all time is unredeemable. That what might have been is only an abstraction: worlds in quantum space, unrealized, which in turn define events by their exclusion from events.

  What if? What might have been?

  I saw myself in the dusty halls of that athenaeum on Teukros and in the vaulted chambers of the seminary on Vesperad. Other Hadrians tramped the dust of other worlds, unmade, unreal. Footfalls echoed in memory down passages I did not take, toward doors I did not open.

  They were nothing next to the thoughts of where I might be going.

  The future might come only in its own time, but the scholiasts teach that there are many futures, and it is only the crashing of the waves of time and possibility against the interminable now that makes the world. It is not the future that is present in Ever-Fleeting Time but the futures. Freedom—freedom of thought and action—matter and are guaranteed because the future is not. There are no prophecies, only probabilities. No Fate, only chance. The present time is not when we are, but what we do.

  * * *

  Upon these and more material facts I meditated, sitting half-drunkenly upon the strand overlooking a pale turquoise sea. Night on Emesh was never truly dark, for at any given time either Binah or Armand would be visible in the sky, shining green or pink in the dimness. That night both were present: the massive, forested Binah low on the horizon and small, jewel-bright Armand set high in the firmament to outdo the very stars. Wind whistled down the cleft behind me, moaning through Calagah’s fluted pill
ars and out into the world.

  The Empire. The Chantry. Anaïs. Gilliam. Ligeia Vas . . . I fidgeted with little chips of stone, gray against black volcanic sand, making lines of them. The Jaddians. Sir Olorin. Sir Elomas. Lords Balian and Luthor. They were all pieces on a board. I destroyed the line of stones. The Cielcin. The war.

  Must everything you say sound like it’s straight out of a Eudoran melodrama? Gibson’s words rattled out of ancient history, referred from a simpler time. I stifled a laugh, tipped the wine bottle back before screwing it into the sand. I’d walked into a melodrama, hadn’t I? Or rather, I had expected one, created one for myself. I shook the memories away and tried to finish my drawing of Lady Kalima, but I despaired of ever properly capturing the disdain in her eali eyes. The charcoal snapped, and I swore, dropped the journal on the beach beside me, and leaned back against the rocks.

  “You all right?”

  I started and cried out, nearly knocking over my wine. “You need to stop sneaking up on people!” More softly, I swore to myself and closed the journal, took up the broken pencil.

  Valka stood on the rise above me, balanced with each foot on a separate spar of basalt, perched like a Mandari assassin ready for the kill. Many times we’d talked like this before the incident in the tunnels, and many nights since I’d sat alone. “You make it sound like I’ve made a hobby of such things.” She had her hands shoved deep into the pockets of the red leather jacket she’d favored since coming south, its tails flapping about her knees in the night wind.

  A sickly grimace pulled at my face as I recalled her little spate of poor timing in the tunnels a week earlier. We’d not spoken much since then; the truth was that I’d been avoiding her. “Well, don’t . . . start.” My grimace intensified. Great job, Marlowe. Real coherent. I tried to salvage my dignity. “How did you know I was here? And how long have you been standing there?”

  “Not long. And you’re out here about every other night.” She leaped down from the escarpment, kicking up little puffs of sand as she landed. She peered down at me past a fringe of dark hair. In the moons’ light, the subtle red there gleamed like burnished copper, glowing like the burning edges of a sheet of parchment. I think she worried for me, seeing the bottle half-emptied as it was. For when she next spoke, it was in the tone someone might employ when speaking with a plague-stricken family member. “We’ve . . . spoken out here before. Several times.” That was true. Many times since I’d come to Calagah, Valka and I—often with Elomas or Ada or the squire, Karthik, in tow—had wandered the shoreline within a mile or so of the cleft.

  “I know that.” I made a face and looked down at my journal, hauling the sandy tome up into my lap. “I just . . . I was just trying to be alone is all.” I tried to scuff the thing clean with a loose cuff. When she neither moved nor said anything, just kept looming at the edge of my vision, I let the journal drop into my lap and burst out, exasperated, “It’s only that I—I’ve had a lot to think about. Would you mind?” The sea by night was the wine-dark described by old, blind Homer, highlighted a snowy white as Valka’s hair was flame’s honest crimson. She did not move or stir. She didn’t leave. She might have been a stone, one of the basalt spires, but for the pressure of those golden eyes on me. Patience is a great teacher and silence a better one—they prize things from men’s souls without the need for knives. When the lapping of somber waves had been the only sound for too long, I blurted, “About what I saw. In the cave . . . I . . .”

  “We don’t have to talk about it,” she said. “We both said awful things.”

  “We both . . .” I clenched my teeth. That was a lie. This time, at least, I was innocent. But Gilliam’s vulture-blue eye peered at me over her shoulder, and I stopped myself. “As you wish.” Looking for a way out, I said, “And about Anaïs, I—”

  “Hadrian, I don’t care.” She seated herself beside me, and somehow that simple gesture softened the gut-wrenching edge in her words. “I don’t know what you’re so ashamed of. You’re supposed to marry the girl. ’Tis good that you kissed her, better than most of you palatine inmane can hope for.”

  I stiffened at the insult. Inhuman. It stunned me, made me feel rather how I expect a grandfather might if called an ignorant child. “Better than . . . ?” I don’t know what you’re so ashamed of. How could I explain that? I turned my face away, pawed for the bottle beside me, wishing I could vanish up inside it like some djinni and forget the entire world.

  “Well, like your parents.” I’d forgotten I had told her about them. She drew her knees up to her chin, heels digging furrows in the flinty sand. “Cold. You know what I mean. This is good. Better. She’s a good kid.” To hear a count’s daughter referred to thusly was a novelty, and I smiled. “You could do a lot worse, you know? She likes you.” She punched my arm, strangely playful. “She’s gorgeous, too.”

  An incoherent noise escaped me, and I said, “I don’t want to marry her.” I seized a fistful of the little stones I’d been toying with and hurled them at the sea. They thudded into the muck near the water. It felt good to say aloud. “I don’t want to be stuck on this planet. I killed a man, Valka, and they will try to kill me before long. The Chantry, I mean—the grand prior. This place . . . You’re the only reason I . . .” I broke off, embarrassed.

  No words. I stopped and just looked at the sea, at the play of rosy moonlight on the black waters, the stars winking in the heavens, waves pushed by wind and pulled by Binah and Armand. The beauty of it kindled at the base of me, enough to momentarily crowd out the screaming chaos. How fragile it was, that quiet. The lapping waves, the distant scree of some night bird. Away and beyond but near at hand, the lights of orbital ships and satellites scratched a silent procession against the unfixed stars. “I wasn’t supposed to be here, Valka. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.” I tugged the planted wine bottle free, uncorked it.

  Valka snatched it from me before I could drink and took a long pull herself. “I wanted to be a pilot, you know.”

  “What?” I grabbed the bottle back. “You’re serious?”

  “Completely. I wanted to buy a ship, trade up and down the Wisp. Maybe carry passengers.”

  “What happened?”

  “My father died,” she said, her gaze fixed on some point in the sea or sky that I could not name. I bent my head, murmured an apology. “’Tis all right. You did not know.” She did not sound at all rattled, though she hugged her knees more tightly to her.

  “How did he die?”

  Valka turned to look at me. “He was killed. Doing this.” She took another swallow, then glared at the bottle with hooded eyes. “This is not so good a bottle as the last.”

  “Elomas hoards the good stuff for himself.” As I spoke I began sharpening my broken pencil on the scalpel I carried in my leather drawing kit. Valka looked briefly alarmed, as if fearing I might cut myself, but my hands were steady. “Sorry. I wasn’t expecting company.” My hands stilled in my lap, still clutching their tools. “Your father was a xenologist too?”

  “Why do you sharpen your pencils with a knife?”

  “I’m sorry?” I looked round at her, confused. She repeated her question, waved a hand at the utensils in mine. “Oh.” I held the pencil up for inspection, admiring the black point, so sharp. “It puts a better point on.” Crispin had asked me the same question once.

  I could feel her staring at me, not amused. “That’s absurd. They make pencil sharpeners, you know.” Hadn’t Crispin said the same thing?

  All I could do was shrug, gesturing with the scalpel. “It’s not really about that. It’s . . . The tools we use help adjust our thinking.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “When I don’t feel well, I draw.” I opened the book, flipping through a couple of the earlier pages—pages far from the drawings I had made of Valka herself, each dark and minutely detailed, heavily shadowed. “Sometimes I’ll sit and stare at a page forever, but I do
n’t see anything. When that happens, I try to figure out what’s gone wrong. Why I can’t do it.” I put the scalpel down on the drawing kit beside me. “I take time to sharpen the pencil again, even if it doesn’t need it. It’s good to practice the motions. It focuses my mind, helps it—me—work better.” In all this rambling, she had not once made a sound or interrupted to mock me, so I added, “Of course, there are some times when the art comes effortlessly.” I smiled up at her, keeping a hand flat on the journal for fear it would spill open, as in some torpid comedy, to reveal Valka’s portrait.

  She tapped her front teeth against the rim of the bottle, as she nodded. Suddenly conscious of the silliness of the gesture, she put the bottle down in the sand between us. Valka’s eyes did not break contact with the wine-dark sea. “He was. A xenologist. My father, I mean. He ran afoul of your Inquisition while on a dig at Ozymandias.”

  “They’re not my Inquisition.”

  We were both quiet then for a long time, the sea and the faint calling of birds again the only sounds. The wind moaned from the cleft behind us, ragged and lonely and alone. At last I asked, “Do you hate me, Valka?”

  “You do enough of that yourself.” And she favored me with a small smile that bled through the pall that lay on me like ink through cloth. “You don’t need my help.”

  A sort of madness seized me, bubbling up from somewhere lower than my throat, and I started laughing, low and quietly. A hiccup cut it off, and I had to clamp my jaws shut and hold my breath to keep the condition from worsening. “You have me there.”

  “You’re not who I thought you were,” the woman said, words bright-edged as her hair in the moons’ light. I looked at her, she at me. Her smile widened.