Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “Don’t kill them all!” I shouted, taking hesitant steps toward where four of the silent mamluks struggled to restrain the Cielcin whom stunners would not fell. “We need to talk!”

  “Talk?” Olorin repeated, flicking his wrist. The bluish molecules of the rippling blade vanished, leaving a faintly bitter stink of ozone where they’d ionized the air around them.

  I ignored him, walking in a wide circle round the Cielcin where it wrestled with the mamluks. I shouted, “Iukatta!” It was a word I was absolutely confident in, and so I spoke it with authority. Stop!

  The shock of hearing its own language stunned the Cielcin to stillness as surely as a proper stunner would a human being. It blinked, turned its helmeted head to look my way. It cocked its head to one side, a curiously human gesture. Still in its language, I said, “Why are you here?” I repeated the question more loudly. “Tuka’ta detu ti-saem gi ne?”

  No answer.

  “Where are the others? How many are you?” I came to a stop just out of lunging distance of the helmeted xenobite, confident in the masked soldiers’ ability to hold it in place, though even kneeling it was taller than they were. They held its arms pinioned, bent back in readiness to break the shoulders should it resist. When it still did not speak, I said, “My friends here will kill you, understand?” Nothing. The helmet’s face plate was an arc of mirrored gray, utterly devoid of expression or detail. “Answer my questions, and I swear you’ll be treated fairly.”

  “Fairly!” The inhuman made a high rasping sound. I knew it was looking directly at me. “Fairly?”

  “Why are you here?” I repeated. “Why come here? To this place?” I turned from side to side, taking in the cavernous space around me. “Detu ne?” Why?

  The Cielcin snarled through its helmet and tried to lurch forward, only to groan as the mamluks twisted its narrow arms. “It is not for you!” This was so far from any response I’d expected that I stood there stunned, hands frozen in the act of forming a gesture as if I were a marionette in the hands of a forgetful puppeteer. This, by chance, was precisely the right thing to do, for the Cielcin said, “This is a holy place.”

  “You worship the . . . the ones who built all this?” The images I had seen in my vision marched back to me: the Cielcin standing amidst the stars, their shining host overshadowed by that massive ship and the light of that murdered sun.

  “It is not for you!” the Cielcin repeated.

  “What is it saying?” asked Lieutenant Azhar.

  I waved her off, attentions focusing entirely on the creature pinioned before me.

  “What is it saying?” Olorin asked, realizing that my earlier bluster was not bluster at all.

  I stayed focused on the Cielcin. Inspired, I said, “They want to hurt you.” I took a step forward, crouching beside the corpse of a mamluk long enough to prize its phase disruptor free of its skeletal fingers. I checked that the thing was set to stun, recalling Prefect-Inspector Gin threatening Rells’s gang outside the corner store in Borosevo. I recalled also the shopkeeper I had stabbed, the dockworker whose arm I had broken. I saw Crispin bloodied on the floor and Gilliam dead at my feet. “I will.” I wasn’t sure I could. Nasty things, phased nerve disruptors. Set high, they could carbonize every nerve cell in the body. Set low, they could cause unconsciousness—or pain.

  It was not hard to figure out the antique gasket that sealed the Cielcin’s more primitive suit. As I removed the helmet, I reflected that the Chantry was not wrong: the Cielcin were so beneath us in so many ways. It was their tenacity, their sheer bloody-mindedness, that elevated them. The seal was like the sort I had seen in historical dramas about the beginnings of spaceflight, the helmet bulky and made of common materials. No nanocarbons, no ceramic. The armor plating was proper metal, clumsy, weighty, and overdesigned.

  “Marlowe . . .” Olorin interrupted. I could not read his tone, had no attention left to pay him.

  Face-to-face, the Cielcin looked shrunken. It had no hair, and the crown of horns on its head was filed to rounded nubs. Its four slitted nostrils flared. “I do not fear you, yukajji-do.”

  I do, I wanted to say, and I clenched my fist to keep the disruptor from shaking as I pressed it to its forehead. “Where are the others?” I asked.

  “No others.”

  I fired.

  The Cielcin rocked backward, baring teeth clear and sharp as glass in black gums. Its lips peeled back in a rictus. It was not stunned, barely dazed. The all-black eyes stayed fixed on me, unblinking. Was that scorn in their depths? Defiance?

  I could not read them. My hand was shaking now. The creature saw it—they all did. “How many of you are there?” I did not wait for an answer but squeezed the trigger again, hand jouncing at the Cielcin recoiled, arms straining painfully against the mamluks that held it fast.

  “Ubimnde!” it wheezed, breath somewhat strained.

  “Eleven?” I repeated, then said it again in Jaddian for the benefit of the humans in the room. “Where?” A part of me believed I could keep going, could press forward, but that part had not told my hand, which rattled the disruptor. I squeezed off a third shot, striking the Cielcin in the face. It slumped, groaning, and I echoed my question. “Saem ne?”

  I’d heard stories about people dying during interrogation, about soldiers botching the job, so unskilled were they compared to the cathars. I had always thought those stories incredible, and yet there I was. I was glad Valka could not see me, though I felt the shame in her eyes, prayed she never learned of that moment. I felt her contempt for violence, for me, and lowered the gun. I tried to tell myself that what I was doing was not really torture. It would recover, would not be like the cripples who lined the vomitoria of the Colosso, begging bowls in hand.

  It was not like that.

  The lies we tell ourselves to guard us from ourselves . . .

  I lowered the weapon.

  “Where are they?”

  CHAPTER 70

  DEMON-TONGUED

  WITH THE CIELCIN BEHIND us stunned or dead and Bassander’s legionnaires hurrying to our aid, we pressed forward, following the vague instructions of the Cielcin, knowing it was likely a lie or a trap. I still held my Jaddian phase disruptor, slack now in my limp fingers, the brass stock glowing in the light from our suits. I watched it as we moved deeper in until the tunnels ran straight and strips of glow tape marked passages familiar to me.

  We were near the sepulcher, the keyhole-shaped chamber where Anaïs had kissed me. The legionnaires met us at a juncture, and after a brief explanation of what had occurred, Bassander sent four of his soldiers back up the tunnel to join Lieutenant Azhar and the mamluks Olorin had left behind to guard our three prisoners and the corpse of the Cielcin the Maeskolos had slain.

  “You all right, lord?” Bassander asked, having heard about my ordeal in the cave above.

  I couldn’t say if it was concern or self-interest that motivated the question, but I nodded, murmured, “Hadrian. And yes. I’ll be fine.”

  The Legion lieutenant nodded, face invisible behind that convex arc of jointed white ceramic. “Lead the way, then. You two!” He pointed at two legionnaires with heavy plasma rifles. “Take point—cover Marlowe and the swordmaster. They’re not kitted out for this.” As if to himself, he added, “Bloody stupid risk.” Olorin, blessedly, did not hear him. He turned back to me. “How’s the charge on your shield?”

  I checked. “Eighty-one percent.”

  “It’ll do.”

  The approach to the sepulcher was a single level hallway, the walls canted slightly inward, creating a trapezoidal cross section and a space wide enough that three might walk abreast.

  “Scanning,” one of the legionnaires said, stopping to check his suit’s built-in terminal. “No life signs.”

  “They hid an entire shuttle,” Bassander said, signaling readiness and ordering more soldiers forward with a flash of his
left hand. The mamluks moved seamlessly forward, some autonomic process in their homunculus brains telling them to slip into the gaps in Bassander’s formation.

  Eyes still downcast, I offered, “There should only be seven. The one I spoke to said there were eleven of them.”

  “Unless he is meaning there are eleven ahead.” Olorin looked round. “I am not liking this hall; it limits us.” I glanced back over my shoulder to where five of Bassander’s men—three kneeling in front, two behind—had walled off the corridor. Somewhere in the chamber ahead, water was dripping, condensation from the humid sea air on the ancient, glassy pillars about the cracked altar structure. I felt transported. Ours was not a column of soldiers but the funeral procession for my grandmother descending once more into the underworld. Strange how such memories dominate our lives, echoing back through time to places where they have no business.

  Drip-drip-drip.

  But for that faint noise and the sounds of quiet feet, a terrible hush lay on that darkened place. How appropriate that it should be there, of all the chambers in Calagah. The Quiet had built the tunnels with but one focus, a series of ascending and descending branches and loops and spirals that all led to this one dead end. As if all their alien musings circled back to this one thesis, this one idea. The Cielcin’s words rang in my head.

  It is not for you.

  For us? Humanity, it clearly meant. I had the sudden impression that I stood at the heart of a vortex, in the eye of a hurricane I could not see or understand.

  “Marlowe.” Olorin nudged me. “Go on.”

  I could have been safely on a shuttle back to Springdeep right now with Valka and Sir Elomas, could have been awaiting another fight in the coliseum or another day of thievery in the canals. I could’ve been hunched over an index in a scholiasts’ scriptorium—as I am writing this account—or else bent over a prisoner in the bastille at Vesperad.

  Drip-drip-drip.

  But I was there, almost crouching in a tunnel beneath meters of basalt upon the margins of a fickle sea, hunting xenobites amid ruins more alien still. The course of my life never did run smooth, its disjointed moments collapsing inexorably toward this single one, caused by all that came before and by my single blunt declaration to the centurion upon the beach: I can help. My hands were still shaking. Help, indeed. But I found my voice, my words. “Kavaa . . .” Hello. The word was small, crushed by nerves and the bile rising in me at the thought of my little episode in the cave. I got my lungs behind me and tried again. “Kavaa, Cielcin-saba! Bayareto okarin’ta ti-kousun’ta!” Hello, Cielcin! You are all surrounded! I pressed forward, moving so that only a thin cordon of soldiers stood between me and the entrance to the sepulcher.

  It was not a literal translation, and I had had to make a presumption. By phrasing the statement as I had—passively—I was made to project the feminine, receptive gender on the group of Cielcin I hoped lurked in the chamber before us. Being soldiers, I knew it was customary to use the masculine, knew I was being rude. Still in Cielcin, I added, “Nasca nietiri!” I want to talk.

  As a child, I’d been taught not only to speak but to orate, and as I had grown, my voice had filled out. I had been groomed to sit in that black chair in Meidua, to sit beneath the Dome of Bright Carvings and rule a continent. I had a good voice, and that night it resounded in that quiet space, rebounding off walls. When I think of myself, oft times it is thus: standing in that darkness, lit from behind by the suit lights of the legionnaires and mamluks. Yet also I feel a shadow fall across that scene, cast not by myself and the shapes of the two soldiers beside me but by the sun of Gododdin, which I would destroy. Sometimes I feel that standing at the mouth of that hall was to stand on the bridge of the sojourner and watch that sun explode. In memory it is not the white suit lights that bathe the scene but the light of that murdered sun, cast backward across time.

  Drip-drip-drip.

  I repeated my declaration a couple of times, my voice rebounding off the hard walls of that airy chamber. After the third time, I tapped the disruptor against my shoulder, rested it there, and shouted in Cielcin, “Is anyone there?”

  “We are here.” And from the dark it came, a voice like the end of the world. “You are few.” The alien voice that replied was higher than that of the one I’d questioned. “And you are small. Some of us might escape.”

  “Past all my soldiers?” I must have sounded like a primitive to them, a child, like Makisomn had said. “I don’t like your chances.”

  A high, cold sound went up from the darkness ahead, like wind brushing through the crenellations at Devil’s Rest in the dead of a Delian winter. Involuntarily I felt myself shiver. Then the speaker spoke again, starting with a long and sibilant hiss like gas escaping a dirigible the size of a small moon. “Canasam ji okun ti-koarin’ta ne?” Are you threatening us?

  “Canasa ji ne?” I repeated, genuinely incredulous, unsure if the emotion would translate well. Threatening you? “Of course I’m threatening you!” I shot a glance over my shoulder at Bassander and Olorin. “Put down your arms. Surrender.”

  “Surrender?” Again, the high, cold sound. Outrage? Laughter? I couldn’t say. “Why would we surrender?”

  “Siajenu iagari o-peryuete, akatha.” I opened my hands in a sort of shrug, letting the weapon go slack in my hand. Because you have nowhere to go.

  “The People do not surrender to animals!” shouted another alien voice, deeper than the first.

  “Be silent!” a third speaker hissed, followed by something I couldn’t quite catch.

  “Listen!” I cried out in Cielcin. “Ubbaa!” The alien voices were silent. I had an insight, a growing realization, a sense of what they might be feeling. “Whatever you’ve heard of my people, whatever stories . . . I will not harm you.” I tried not to think of the Cielcin I’d tormented with the phase disruptor on the floors above.

  “You lie!” the second speaker called down.

  “If you fight now,” I replied without hesitation, “you will most certainly die.” I pushed past the two guards holding position at the end of the hall, took a halting step into suit-lit gloom. “You’ve come this far, soldiers. Don’t throw it all away in some mad final push. Throw down your weapons, and I will see to it personally that each of you returns home alive.”

  Drip-drip-drip.

  At last I saw one of them clearly as it stepped from the inner darkness, disgorged from the shadow like a child of night, all flanged black metal and rubber, face blessedly hidden behind a mask. Too tall, too thin to be real. “And who are you to promise anything?”

  “I have a clear shot,” one of the nearer soldiers said to Bassander Lin.

  “No!” I hissed in Galstani. How did I answer the Cielcin? What could I say to it that would mean anything? I thought of stories I’d heard as a child. Stories about travelers who gave their names to the Cielcin only to be bound in servitude, tricked the way Faust was tricked by the cunning devil into signing away his soul for all time. Only the Cielcin were not devils. I was. Even so, something stopped me from giving my name out immediately. “I am someone fighting a war he did not begin. This is no more my war than it is yours, soldier. We inherited it from our parents, same as you. Surrender and we can make an end of it.”

  That high, cold sound filled the air between us. “Are you a soldier or a priest, creature?”

  Drip-drip-drip.

  “Only a man!” I replied, not stopping to think about my answer. “But I’m the only one here who can speak your words.” In the Cielcin language the word for man, active-gendered, implied a doer of deeds, a creature of action, not merely a sex.

  “A man?” A new voice rang out. “What is this? A joke?”

  “No joke,” I replied, and I threw down my disruptor toward the soldiers and the tunnel at my back. “Only the truth. Will you not treat with me?”

  The muttering reigned above again. Then the fourth voice s
ounded. “I will treat with you. We will speak.” I noted a shift in that instant, not in the alien’s tone of voice but in its choice of words. Until it spoke, the conversation had been ill-matched, each side using the masculine-active gender to describe itself, describing the other with the feminine-receptive. But in that last statement, the fourth voice—the commander, I guessed—had used the feminine to describe itself and its soldiers. How telling that shift was, I realized, how truly indicative. They had lost the upper hand. Until that moment I had not realized how the shape of the language might show agreement, everyone speaking in the same mode. The would-be scholiast within me was quietly fascinated, but the part of me that thought in my father’s voice silenced the fascination. There would be time for it later.

  Speaking Galstani now, I turned and called past the soldiers to Bassander and Olorin. “I’m going to speak with their commander by the altar.”

  If they were at all surprised to hear my news, they didn’t show it. After a second Bassander Lin pressed past his soldiers and said, “I’m going with you.”

  I nodded. “Yes, of course.” I looked down at my hands. The shaking had stopped. “I think this is going to work.”

  * * *

  Eternity is in silence. It is in the quiet of the world, in the darkness and solitude of the heart. These are the things that make forever out of instants. These are the things that turn the time it takes to walk across forty feet of bare floor into eons. As I walked slightly ahead of Bassander Lin, it seemed as though I could feel the weight of those alien eyes on us—on me. If the Cielcin objected to the lieutenant’s presence, they gave no sign. They held their silence close, watchful as the ever-present stars that lurked somewhere beyond the stone that formed the roof of our world. Bassander and I stopped, alone in that empire of silence.