Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “Would be disgrace,” Svatarom spat, then actually spat. “You did this. You promised we would not be harmed. You gave your word.”

  The safety lights flickered, causing me to glance at Agari as I said, “I know! Why do you think I’m here? I understand what I have to do, but I need your help to do it.” I had told Valka much the same thing the night before, whispered beneath the wind on the garden terrace beneath the terranic palms. I need to get them to leave me alone with Uvanari. That’s when you sort the cameras, and I . . . I . . . My voice had broken then, choked off into something very, very small.

  Valka had lain a hand on my arm, had murmured that she understood. But you don’t have to do it.

  I can’t do this anymore, I can’t. I tried to explain what I thought the Cielcin had been trying to tell me: that it wanted—needed—to die.

  “What are you going to do?” Tanaran asked.

  “What are you saying to it?” Agari demanded.

  I waved her into silence. The cool air in the cell stank of rot, as if something damp had died and taken up residence in the concrete. But I breathed deeply, eyes never leaving Tanaran. The lights flickered again, and I heard the faint whine of distant generators coming online. No time. No time. “I am going to kill Uvanari. Ndaktu. Mercy.” I tried to find refuge in a scholiastic aphorism, something to reassure me that I was on the right course. Mercy is . . . Mercy is . . . There was nothing, or none that I had ever learned. “I need you to do something next time these lights go out.”

  And I told them.

  The lights came on again within a minute of the end of my little speech, and the cameras with them. “Another thing, Tanaran,” I asked, stopping as I pretended to turn away. “Uvanari called you baetan. What does that mean?”

  The young Cielcin’s chalky skin flushed a dark gray, black blood flooding capillaries in its cheeks. The other xenobites nearest Tanaran hissed, startling the guards nearest me. I held up a calming hand, repeated my question.

  “It means I belong to him. To the aeta.”

  “I thought all Cielcin belong to their aeta, to his dominion.” I caught Agari watching me, nodded as reassuringly as I knew how, though I am sure now the expression was strained. “Are you not all his slaves?”

  That outrush of breath, the slitted nostrils flaring yes. Tanaran took a mincing step back toward the bars. “I am his.”

  A concubine? A wife? I squinted through the bars. I had begun to think of Tanaran as male—had begun to think thus of all the Cielcin, truth be told. I reassessed, reminding myself that neither was this a woman before me but something more, something less . . . something else entirely. I was beyond humanity here, beyond the grasp of translation. The Cielcin’s sexual modes did not even map onto ours, not biologically, not sociologically. It was only our desire to humanize them that did. “What does that mean?”

  “I am his. He is carried by me.” It pressed a hand to its stomach in some gesture I did not understand.

  “Carried?” I repeated. “Does this have something to do with children?” It occurred to me that I had no notion of how the xenobites reproduced.

  And I still have none, for Tanaran stepped back, startled. “What? No!” It rolled its head in a furious negative. “I carry a piece of him. His authority.”

  Images of the Imperial auctors flashed before me. Those elite were gifted with all the Emperor’s authority, the ability to act in his stead, in his absence, so titled that they were equal with the Emperor in authority, though they had none without him. They shared in the Imperial Presence, spoke with its voice. Was this like that? Or something else? Perhaps it was like that, and so Tanaran was the leader of this . . . expedition? Pilgrimage? I did not inquire further, pressed as I was for time.

  “One other thing,” I said hurriedly, conscious that I was once more under the ten thousands eyes of the state. “Uvanari said you came here to pray. To the others? To the . . . first ones?” I wanted to say “the Quiet” but knew the label would mean nothing.

  “The gods,” Tanaran agreed. “The Watchers.” It seized the bars. “They made us, yukajji. Us.” It bared its fangs, somehow fierce all in an instant.

  Sensing the change in Tanaran’s attitude, the inquisitor approached. “That’s long enough, Marlowe.” Agari grabbed me by the elbow. “What did it say?” She jerked her shaved head in the direction of the cell.

  “Nothing—they told me to go to hell,” I said, shaking my head. “I thought I was getting through to them, but . . . they blame me for it all. I can put together a transcript. Did you get a recording?”

  “Partial,” the inquisitor said in answer. “Another one of those brownouts. They’d been localized up in the castle, but . . . It shouldn’t be possible.”

  I tugged my arm free, bowed my way into the lift carriage that would take me back to the bastille’s processing level and the exit. “I’ll get the transcript written as fast as I can. It isn’t much, but I’ve confirmed one thing.” There was nothing for it; I had to give Agari something. Something to distract her and her superiors from what the Cielcin wanted of me.

  “What’s that?”

  I opened my mouth. Anything, to mask the true purpose of my visit. I only hoped that I was not dooming the young xenobite to hang on a cross of its own. Perhaps its baetan status would protect it. I hoped so as I said, “The one without the armor? The little one?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s nobile, or whatever passes for nobile among the Pale.”

  CHAPTER 76

  DEATHBED CONVERSIONS

  ALWAYS FORWARD, ALWAYS DOWN, and never left or right. I needed a way to deliver Uvanari from the torment I had brought it. I needed to appease the other Cielcin by following a cultural script I barely grasped. I needed to protect myself from my own people when my translations were inevitably compared against the recordings. I needed to protect Valka, my accomplice now, a machine witch guilty of one of the Chantry’s Twelve Abominations. Most of all I needed to get myself away from Emesh, from the count and the grand prior and all the people who insisted I was a fly in their web.

  I think Gibson was right about me—melodramatic to the end. Besides the Cielcin, I told no one of my plan. No one but Valka.

  I walked into that interrogation cell for the last time with acid where my blood had been. Nerves fired in every fiber and tissue I possessed. I had to be careful, so careful. We were flying blind. If Valka failed to hack into the bastille’s network a second time, if Tanaran and the others moved before Valka had worked her technologic wizardry, if Uvanari was too injured to play its part . . . well, there’s a minotaur in every labyrinth, sometimes more than one.

  “We are aware,” the inquisitor began, “that the one called Tanaran is the leader of your expedition.”

  When I translated this, Uvanari bared its teeth, strained a little against the electromagnetic clamps that held it wrists and ankles. It looked at me. “You told them?”

  “Ekaan,” I said, adding the breathy sound that meant yes in their language as best I could. I continued, “I had no other choice. Is Tanaran related to Aeta Aranata, your master? His . . . child?” While I spoke, I studied the bandages wound about the flayed arm and the patch that leaked anesthetic through the back of the ruined hand and into the bloodstream. My hand closed about the knife I wore, a main gauche like the ones I’d worn at home, purchased during one of my infrequent trips to the city.

  “Why would Tanaran be his child?”

  I repeated the question to Agari, adding, “However they manage succession, it isn’t hereditary. If that’s what this is.” While interesting, the information was academic, and the inquisitor was no scholiast.

  The inquisitor sniffed, and instead of allowing me to answer its question, she asked a new one. “Would your master negotiate for Tanaran?”

  “Reverence,” I said, brows rising and pulling together, “are you serious? I had not b
een told we were considering—”

  Agari’s nostrils flared. She glanced briefly to Cathar Rhom before answering. “Just ask the question.” My heart weighed a little lighter then, and I turned to do just that.

  Uvanari clicked its jaw a couple of times, jerking its chin upward. “It is possible. But the aeta has other heirs.” It used the same word it had earlier: baetayan, roots. But here the context was clearer, and I saw the word for how we might use it. “Masvii iagami caicane wo ne?”

  “It asks if you will let the others go free,” I said, wanting to hear the answer for myself.

  Agari’s flinty eyes narrowed to slits, the wheels in the mind behind them turning in ways I preferred not to understand. The muscles in her jaw worked as if trying to chew through gristle, teeth grinding. It was as if her brain were powered by the friction of them. “Tell the inmane we’re considering all our possible options.”

  This I did, omitting the Imperial slur. Uvanari’s inhuman face split into the snarl that passed for smiling. “I see you have politicians amongst your kind too.”

  I grinned, realized what I was doing, and instead bared my teeth in as close to the Cielcin smile as I could manage. Uvanari seemed to get the point, for it returned the gesture as I said, “Yes.” When Agari asked for clarification, I said, “It said it knows that line is nonsense.”

  The inquisitor sniffed in understanding, then toggled the holograph panels, advancing her questions another step. While she read over the change of direction, I took a long, calming breath, listened as the inquisitor took notes into her terminal. “. . . way to salvage the prisoners. The one cataloged as prisoner A009 is to be detained privately pending further deliberation. Recommendation: Agari, KF . . .” She rattled off the date. For a moment I suspected the horror was over. I glanced at the holograph panels on the wall, each depicting an identical live feed of the other Cielcin in a holding pen. I felt an absurd desire to wave, though they could not see us. Maybe all my planning was for naught.

  “Captain,” Agari said, voice suddenly so cold that I felt my spinal fluid crystallize as I straightened, “if we are to attempt such a negotiation for your people, we will need their location.”

  A lump formed in my throat. Of all the lines of inquiry, I knew this one would bear no fruit, no matter the near politeness the inquisitor had just demonstrated. Every detail of the room snapped back into focus then: the cross with its adjustable beams, its magnetic clamps; the grating on the floor; the sterile walls; the array of tools on the cart, instruments of both medicine and torture. And then there were the cathars themselves, identical in their baldness, their black robes and aprons more clinical than liturgical, darker than any fabric had a right to be. This was not a place for jest, even in defiance. I closed my hand around the hilt of my knife until the bones ached, waiting for Uvanari’s response.

  The Cielcin refused. “I cannot tell you this.”

  At a sign from the inquisitor, the cathar lifted a device from the rear of the cart, long as my forearm and with a knob at one end so that it resembled a mace. Wordlessly it held the thing out for the ichakta’s examination, then triggered some mechanism in the haft. The composite material at the head of the item heated rapidly until it glowed like a coal fresh from the fire. Fear lighted in Uvanari’s eyes, and it tried to shy back, spluttering curses.

  The second cathar stooped, tugged the cloth that covered the xenobite’s genitals away. Then it worked on the leather straps that secured the Cielcin, leaving only the electromagnetic clamps in place. In a Eudoran masque, the character of the Torturer always speaks in mustache-twirling detail about the excruciations he intends to perform on his victim, usually the Heroine. He winks at the audience and rubs his hands together, cackling all the while. The cathars did not speak, did not offer explanations. They only acted.

  “What are they doing?” Uvanari asked, deep voice at once much higher. “Hadrian, what are they doing?” When the last of the flammable belts were removed, the second cathar stepped back from its victim, its charge, and stood with hands folded.

  I did not have time to answer. The first cathar swung its mace, showering the Cielcin with cherry-red droplets fine as tears. Uvanari screamed, and the cold air of the cell filled with the smoky metallic stink of burning flesh. Its thin chest heaved, sucking in air to fuel more screaming, the sound collapsed and sunken through pain into the vestibule of madness. Angry welts began to rise on the creature’s white skin, gray and black and jaundiced a sick yellow at the edges. Blood like ink leaked from the wounds, and something else, something silver.

  Lead.

  The bastards had used lead.

  “Inquisitor!” I couldn’t stop myself. “No!”

  Uvanari gasped something as thin tongues of smoke coiled upward toward a sucking vent in the ceiling. Agari ignored me, the whites of her eyes too visible in the stark cell. I expected her to rebuke me, to scream at me, to ask how I dared say a word against her. Instead she only asked, “What did it say?”

  I listened again, shook my head. “I can’t make it out, you maniac. You’ve gone too far.” Only a tremendous effort kept me from drawing my long knife then and there.

  The inquisitor actually shrugged, then repeated her question, her order. “Tell us the location of your fleet.”

  “Air rot you!” Uvanari managed. Some sort of curse? There was no way to be sure. “Would you betray your own?”

  The inquisitor waved a hand, and the cathar struck the Cielcin with his mace, leaving a medallion of burned flesh larger than my fist. “Tell us the location of your fleet!” the inquisitor repeated, and I echoed her in my smallest voice, eyes on the cathar and not the prisoner bracketed to its cross. I only hoped Valka would not be much longer.

  My eyes met Uvanari’s. Glass teeth shone in black gums, thin lips pulled back. To the untrained, the panting wheeze of its breathing might have been the Cielcin word, “Yes. Yes. Yes.” I took a breath of my own, knowing that it was not that. Any time now, any time, Valka would knock the power out in the lower levels, and Tanaran and the others would turn on one another.

  “Tell us the location of your fleet.”

  Screaming.

  “Tell us the location of your fleet!”

  Smoke.

  “Tell us the—”

  Screaming.

  Uvanari hung limp on the cross, face sunk to its chest so that only the horns of its epoccipital crest presented itself. Without the leather restraints, tied at only the wrists and waist and ankles, it looked barely attached to the cross at all. As we watched, all silent as the cathars, Uvanari vomited, blue fluid spattering the grate. It vomited again, spat to clean its mouth. “You humans. Are all . . . all the same.”

  I frowned, caught on the verge of delivering this statement to the inquisitor. “You said that before!” I said in Cielcin, cutting the inquisitor out of the loop. “You said that before! At the very beginning.” I had missed it. How had I missed it?

  “What is it saying?” Agari demanded, raising a hand to forestall her cathars. “Marlowe?”

  “Shh.” I did not turn to look at her, so distracted was I by the implications. I forgot the Chantry, forgot ndaktu, forgot the plan. “You’ve spoken with humans before?” It wasn’t a figure of speech, surely? “Where?” I brushed past the cathar, repeating the question, the word. “Saem ne? Where? Saem ne? Saem ne?”

  Agari was not so thick as to miss that. She grabbed me just above the elbow and hissed, “What the hell is going on?”

  I told her what it had said, added, “If they’ve met other humans before, then maybe those people know how to find their fleet. We don’t need to do this.”

  At a gesture from Agari, the cathar with the sprinkler mace slammed the head into Uvanari’s stomach, just about where a navel should be on a human. The wheal it left grayed the white skin to bubbled slickness, and Uvanari clamped down on its teeth, hissing, “Tell him to sto
p.”

  It meant Agari. I shook my head. “She won’t.”

  “She?” It bled from half a hundred tiny wounds, and looking on I was as numb as Uvanari was in agony. Valka was taking too long. Had she changed her mind? Had she abandoned me and the whole plan? She wouldn’t, surely. Surely not. With a tremendous effort, as if it were lifting a portcullis and not a head, Uvanari looked squarely up at me, eyes narrowing. “Your kind . . . monsters, taking what you want.”

  “We are not monsters. We don’t eat your kind,” I shot back, and all the stories I’d heard in childhood came back to me, all the tales of men spitted and roasted over plasma fires, of the Pale eating brains and children in the night. Chantry propaganda, or so I then believed.

  “We do,” Uvanari hissed, “if we have to.”

  “This is useless,” Agari said, closing out of her terminal’s holograph prompts with a wipe of the hand. “Useless!” She turned to the cathars, hesitating on the cusp of some unvoiced decision, unsure how to proceed. She was in the labyrinth too, just as lost as I was.

  Vwaa! Vwaa!

  Warning lights pulsed scarlet from the corners of the cells, klaxons blatting their wordless alarm. Uvanari’s eyes—two wells of deepest dark—swiveled to look me in the face. Agari froze, glaring at the ceiling. I had expected the interruption, and even I jumped. I was careful to speak first. “What’s this?”

  The inquisitor checked her terminal, cursing under her breath. “Another brownout. I don’t care how much damage the generators took in the plague riots—I’d swear this is deliberate.” I struggled to keep my face intent, thinking of Valka and her heretical Tavrosi implants. Diplomatic status or no, I’d asked her to cross a line.

  Vwaa! Vwaa!

  Agari’s terminal started blaring an alarm too, and she slapped a button on it, held it to her lips. “What?” I couldn’t hear the response—it was relayed to the inquisitor through the conduction patch obscured behind one ear—but the color drained from her dusky face, and she said, “Well, stop them! No! No, damn it! Use the stunners. The stunners.” Her eyes darted between the two cathars and myself. “No! I’m on my way!”