Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Then a heavy foot fell. Another. A third.

  The Cielcin captain lumbered out of the dark, leaning hard against one of the slanting pillars around the altar, one leg weak beneath it. The alien carried its helmet in the crook of its man-long arm, and it pulled its lips back from its sharp teeth as it appeared. No words of scholiast wisdom came to mind, nothing to stem the tide of rage or fear. But I didn’t need them, for there was no rage. No fear. I felt clean. Unclouded. Ready. As I plunged into the dark, away from the light and order of the world in which I had toiled for so many years, the concerns of that ordered world dropped away.

  “I forget”—the Cielcin sounded dry as straw, as bone, pressed of vitality—“how small your people are.” This one was shorter than the one I had shot with the disruptor in the cavern above, but it still stood nearly eight feet high. The features of its strange face were more pointed than those of that other, its eyes more slanted than round, hair braided at the left shoulder.

  I stopped before I spoke, noticing the hand the creature pressed to its side just below where the kidney would be if it were a human being. “Tuka okarin ikuchem.” You are injured. I used the feminine-receptive, passive construction. The alien did not argue.

  “Eka,” it agreed with a clockwise roll of its head. I am. Then it added, “It is nothing serious. The suit took the worst of it. I can speak for my men.”

  “I believe you.” I gestured to the lieutenant beside me. “Cielcin, this is Bassander Lin, a . . .” I cast about for a word that would encapsulate what “lieutenant” meant. “He is a small captain.” When Lin noticed my use of his name, I repeated the words in Galstani for him, then turned back to the Cielcin. “My name is Hadrian Marlowe.”

  “Hadrian . . .” The xenobite attempted to wrap its toothy mouth around my alien name. “Marlowe.” It pulled back its lips again, and in the stark white light of Bassander’s suit I saw that its gums were black. “I am Itana Uvanari Ayatomn, once ichakta of the ship you shot down.” Ichakta was captain. It pointed one finger at the roof above our heads, groaned, hissed like a wounded cat, and slumped against the column.

  Still in Cielcin, I replied, “Will you surrender?”

  “Can you ensure the safety of my men?” It looked me up and down. I knew what it saw: a small man not dressed for war, haggard, his hair tangled across his face. The details of my dress must have collapsed into some clearer understanding, bridging the gulf between species. I was no soldier and would never be.

  “I cannot, no.” I knew I had said otherwise moments ago, so I curbed this revelation, saying, “But I can try. Will try.” I glanced at Lieutenant Lin and relayed the Cielcin’s concern.

  The lieutenant shook his helmeted head. “I don’t know what the knight-tribune will do with them, Marlowe.”

  Shifting to Galstani in order to better reply to the man, I said, “I can’t tell it that.” He only shrugged, face invisible through his helmet, hands ready on the stock of his plasma rifle.

  “What choice does it have?” I could almost hear the eyebrows rise behind Bassander’s helmet mask.

  I repeated this question for the Cielcin ichakta, who bared its glass-splinter teeth again in a venomless snarl, rolled its head counterclockwise on its neck. “There is always a choice.” It tipped its face skyward, toward the confusion of crooked pillars and black archways that supported the distant arc of the ceiling. “The People never forget how to die, yukajji-do.” It was strange hearing the word People—Cielcin—pronounced in context. They said it differently than we, the consonants hard and grating. Strong.

  “You want to die?” I asked.

  Uvanari looked down on me from its height, lips stretched only a little, like a dog on the edge of growling. Its slitted nostrils flared, and it looked away again. “U ti-wetidiu ba-wemuri mnu, wemeto ji.” It sounded like poetry, like scripture. I was slow to translate it: In the time of dying, we will die. I stifled a groan. If it wasn’t poetry, it was certainly a quotation. Earth and Emperor, it was like talking to myself. I struggled to incorporate this newfound philology into my understanding of the alien captain, who seized my studied silence as an opportunity to add, “There are worse places and ways to die.”

  That was a mistake, giving me something easy to respond to. Aware of the other Cielcin lurking in the dark, I said, “That may be, but not today! None of you has to die today. Surrender!” I injected as much urgency as I could into my tone, praying to I-know-not-whom that the emotion might cross the gap between species. Let Plato be right. “Surrender, throw down your arms, and we will not hurt you. You can walk out of this place. None of you has to die here.” I wanted to explain that I was a lord, that I could offer my protection, such as it was. But if the Cielcin had equivalent concepts in their culture, I did not know them, and so I was mute.

  I heard a stirring in the shadows, a congress of whispers. Uvanari glanced back over its shoulder, shouted something coarse and inchoate to silence them. The one with the deep voice answered back, too fast to catch.

  “What’s going on?” Olorin called from the doorway, seizing his opportunity to mirror the actions of the Cielcin across the way.

  Bassander shouted back, “I don’t know.”

  I waved them both to silence, took a step forward. “This is not our war, Captain. We inherited it, you and I and all of us. It will go on only so long as your people and mine are willing to die for it.”

  “Not one of the People has surrendered to your kind, not in all our generations.”

  “Then it’s time to start.” I said the words without hesitation, without thought. With conviction. “Your sacrifice and the sacrifice of your men will change nothing.” And then I did perhaps the stupidest thing I’d done in all my life—I walked around the captain. I stood between it and its lurking people, whether six or ten I did not know. Bassander made a strangled sound, shocked, but did not move to follow me. I hoped the soldiers’ plasma rifles were more effective against the Cielcin than the stunners had been in case I needed them to be. “Lay down your weapons, Captain. Please.” Briefly Uvanari made that high, cold sound I had heard earlier. It winced, clutched its side.

  I moved forward to catch it before it fell to its knees. Behind me the other Cielcin hissed, and one hurried forward even as Bassander shouldered his rifle and shouted, “Stay back!” The other Cielcin took his meaning, held its long, six-fingered hands up to show it was not armed.

  Mirroring the lieutenant’s order, Uvanari hissed, “Lenna udeo, Tanaran-kih!” The other Cielcin—Tanaran, I guessed—froze where it stood. It was different from the others I had seen, dressed not in an ungainly armored suit like the captain but in a form-fitting wraparound with tight sleeves that reminded me of the combat robes I had once seen on a visiting Nipponese gladiatrix in Meidua in my youth. Its white hair was wild, hacked roughly off at the shoulders, and its mouth hung open, uncertain. Something in the geometry of its face, in the tightness of the skin at the base of its epoccipital crown, perhaps, told me this was a very young Cielcin. When it did not move, Uvanari repeated its command. “Stay back!”

  “Tuka udata ne?” I asked, settling the captain back against the pillar that had taken its weight.

  “It’s nothing, a broken rib.” Black blood, still warm and cloying, clung to the layers of cloth insulation visible between the carbide armor plates. The technology on display in that suit really was ancient, centuries behind anything we had. That struck me as wrong. Surely any species so dependent upon star travel as the Cielcin would work harder at developing their suit technology? The creature might have had a broken rib, but I accounted that the least of its worries. I was no doctor, but it looked like something had punched through suit and skin and meat, pierced the torso and crushed one of the translucent bones.

  I looked up at the Cielcin Tanaran. I wanted to call for a med kit, but I didn’t know the word. “Panathidu!” I snapped, reaching up a hand to the other xenobite, w
ho stood there confused at my inane babbling. “Medicine! Medicine!” I turned to Bassander, who was still crouched, and spoke past him to the soldiers in the mouth of the tunnel. “Bring a med kit! Their captain is wounded!”

  Tanaran looked at Uvanari, massive black eyes narrowing to canted slits. It rolled its head clockwise, said, “What does it want?”

  “He,” Uvanari answered, using an explicitly active-gendered pronoun to refer to me, “is trying to help me.” It turned its attentions back to me. “We have nothing, yukajji-do. Leave it.” It grunted, forced itself to sit up a little straighter. “Perhaps I will die here, peace or no peace.” The alien face composed itself into an expression of nearly human solemnity. “And we were so close . . .”

  “Close?” I asked. “Close to what?”

  Uvanari screwed its eyes shut before answering, and its words grew thin as ghosts and whispers. “They are not here . . . not here.” It rested its head against the pillar, prompting the other Cielcin, Tanaran, to hurry to its side. “You can have your peace, little human.”

  Tanaran sucked air past its teeth. “Veih, no. Captain, you can’t.”

  “Eka de,” Uvanari said. I can. It opened its ink-spot eyes. “Uje ekau.” And I will. It crossed its closed fists over its chest. A salute? A surrender? A gesture of fealty? I couldn’t say. “We surrender, human.”

  CHAPTER 71

  INQUISITION

  AND WE WERE SO close. The words rattled in my head, turning over as they had half a million times since I had first heard the Cielcin captain speak them. Uje ekurimi su keta. So close to what? They are not here . . . I could have broken my hands on the tabletop in frustration, would have given my left arm for a chance to speak with Uvanari again, to wring an answer from it if I could. No, not wring. I had wrung enough. I glanced across the petrified wood of the council table to where Sir Olorin Milta sat beside his satrap, not looking my way. He had not spoken of my interrogation of the Cielcin in the tunnels of Calagah, and I was not about to mention it.

  They are not here.

  They.

  Did Uvanari mean the Quiet? Was that even possible?

  “. . . should be ready in a week or so,” Knight-Tribune Smythe was saying, her blunt-featured face turned down in intense concentration. The subject had just turned from the frequent brownouts in castle power and surveillance to the Cielcin. To my surprise, Centurion Vriell’s pronouncement that the hard-edged Legion officer was running things in Borosevo seemed to be true, though I could not have said whether that was by some Imperial fiat or simply because the count had stepped aside. Balian Mataro sat in the high seat on a dais above the council table, chin propped on one fist like an image of bored Zeus done in black marble. “The creature’s wounds are healing nicely, my medics tell me.”

  “And the others?” asked High Chancellor Ogir, steepling her hands before her. “Have we started on them?”

  The subtext beneath those words dragged my eyes to the one personage at the table whom I’d most struggled to avoid. Ligeia Vas wore her customary black robes. Her face was powdered, drawing further attention to her offworld pallor, and her white hair was in its customary double coil about her thin shoulders. Worst of all, her icy eyes found mine, sharp as knife-missiles—she had been staring at me. They did not stray from my face as she answered, “We have not, per the request of our Jaddian emissary.” At last she turned, glancing briefly at Lady Kalima di Sayyiph. “They requested we suspend operations pending this meeting, a suspension we granted out of respect for our visitors and for their assistance in apprehending the xenobites.” From the way she said the word respect, I gathered that respect only stretched so far.

  I studied the almost celestial Jaddian satrap from my lonely place at the end of the table, a lonely spot of color in a cloud of gray-suited logothetes. Rubies glinted at her throat and from her ears, and so much gold jewelry hung about her neck and from her hair that I was astonished she did not bend from the weight of it. Sir Olorin Milta stood just behind her, hand toying with the three highmatter sword hilts strapped to his thigh, eyes fixed somewhere far away, on a point out to sea through the broad arc of alumglass that made up the opposite wall of the council chamber. I had the sudden sense that the Jaddians really were on my side, willing to try and speak with the captives. To make peace.

  “In any event,” the knight-tribune said, drumming her square knuckles on the tabletop, rippling the water in the glass at her elbow, “thanks to Lieutenant Lin, we find ourselves in possession of ten Cielcin prisoners.”

  “Captives.” I couldn’t help myself. “They surrendered to us. If the ichakta were human, we’d be trying to ransom it back to its liege.”

  The grand prior slapped a hand on the table, demanding attention. “The beast is not human, heretic.”

  “That beast is an enemy officer,” I said, addressing myself to Raine Smythe. The knight-tribune pressed her lips together, but she seemed willing for the moment to hear me out. “There’s no procedure in place for dealing with inhuman officers, is there? Should we not treat it honorably?” I did not add my private suspicion, that Tanaran might be something other than an officer. Whatever it was, the younger Cielcin was no soldier. It was certainly not dressed as one. Nor, for that matter, did I share Uvanari’s implied connection between its people and the Quiet. I would save that little bit of information for Valka when she returned to Borosevo within the week, all activity at the dig site having been suspended in the wake of the attack as the recovery teams worked hard to salvage the wreck of Uvanari’s ship.

  The chancellor looked like she’d been fed a tablespoon of lemon extract. She licked her teeth, ashen face darkening and pinching as she spat, “Inmane! I remind you, Lord Marlowe, that you are here on sufferance.”

  “He is here, Chancellor, because he alone has spoken to the prisoners and can offer insight,” Sir Olorin interjected. I looked to him, bowed my head in thanks. He returned my nod, dislodging a tangle of dark hair.

  The surgical scars that marked Chancellor Ogir as patrician whitened as her lips compressed. “When I want your input, lictor, I will invite it.”

  “Enough, Liada,” Lord Balian said. “That’s quite enough. The Jaddians are our guests.” Somewhat mollified, the reedy little chancellor backed down, seeming to find something entirely fascinating about the pattern of angry veins on the back of her leathery hands. It surprised me then that the satrap did not leap to her servant’s defense herself. It surprises me more now.

  Olorin’s interjection served a secondary function, as was revealed in the next moment when Raine Smythe said, “Lord Marlowe’s done the Empire a service; that cannot be denied. And his consideration is a goodly one. If we seek to negotiate using the captured Pale as hostages, we must consider their treatment.” Feeling I had scored a point, I smiled at the grand prior, but the witch-priestess did not deign to look my way. The knight-tribune drummed her knuckles on the tabletop again. “But we have an opportunity here to extract real tactical information. Why did the Cielcin come here to Emesh? Why now?”

  There followed a moment of pregnant silence punctuated by the drumming of those knuckles and of the nervous sounds of the logothetes at each extreme of the arc of the speckled rose-green table. All of us knew what we were really discussing. Perhaps that was why the count was silent, preferring to let the military and the clergy take the reins. I peered down at my lap, at the hands folded tightly there, recalling the way they’d shaken in the tunnels, recalling the fear that had edged up into panic.

  “The prisoners must be questioned,” said Ligeia Vas into that pregnant silence, lacing her hands on the tabletop, her stillness counterpoint to the knight-tribune’s nervous movement.

  “The prisoners—the captives—must be made to give us something, aye.” Raine Smythe bent her ear to listen to a whispered word from Sir William Crossflane, the white-haired first officer at her side, then shut her eyes a moment.

  �
�The location of their fleet?” suggested the Jaddian satrap, eyes still locked on the city far below.

  Undaunted by this benign interruption, Raine Smythe continued in her rough contralto, “Perforce what remains is to decide what manner of information we believe we can extract.”

  “Without jeopardizing the creatures’ value as hostages,” said one of the count’s ministers, earning a glare from the chancellor.

  “And so,” said the scholiast Tor Vladimir, speaking up from his place near the count at the center of the semicircular table, “we must weigh the value of our prisoners as diplomatic assets against their strategic value.” The man’s soft words, utterly without inflection, filled the room like a kind of sleeping gas.

  I still couldn’t believe we were even having this conversation, and I blurted, “You’re talking about torturing them.”

  “They would do no differently in our place, son,” the elderly first officer beside the knight-tribune said. “This is war. We—” Dame Raine put a hand on his arm, quieting him. He blustered a moment, lips working between massive, bushy sideburns like those of a gasping fish. “They launched two attacks against us in the past few months. Who’s to say they won’t launch a third?”

  Ever the antagonist, Sir Olorin said, “I was under the impression that the first attackers were only . . . what is the word? Outriders? Scouts for the second attack. That it was all one battle fleet.”

  “Was it?” the grand prior demanded, twisting in her high-backed chair to face the Jaddian swordmaster. “For a human, Maeskolos, you seem to be intimately familiar with the plans and intentions of our enemy. Perhaps Lord Marlowe’s heresy is catching.”

  “Lord Marlowe’s dedication to the faith is not the issue up for discussion at the moment, Your Reverence,” the knight-tribune interjected, gazing sidelong at Ligeia Vas but not turning her head. “Please, if we could stow the piety long enough to come to some decision?” She hid her face in her hands, massaged her eyes with short, hard fingers. Everything about the woman was blunt: her features, her manner, her movements. But she was one used to power—not the comparatively small power of a landed nobile, but the fist of the Imperial Legions. Her authority was the authority of the Imperium, of the Presence and the Solar Throne itself, and it did not tiptoe around the priors of provincial chantries. She took a deep breath, expelled it. “While I see the case for preserving the captives for ransom, I believe that they—particularly their captain—are of far greater interest to the Imperium for the information they hold regarding Cielcin fleet movements.”