Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  I stumble down the line to see the faces of the dead, thinking obscurely that someone should witness them here. All the families they represent. All the strands of life that are linked to theirs. Cruelty will travel down those lines, ensnaring more and more.

  No one has come to take them down. No footprints have even come within a hundred meters. There is a whispering. It comes from a young Red man.

  A sound comes from one of the Red bodies. A whispering.

  He is alive. Barely more than a boy, a faint bit of hair covers his top lip. His cracked lips part, trying to say something more. I give him the remaining water from my pouches. Most of it spills down his chest. He tries to speak again. I edge closer to hear him. “The…Vale. Send me…”

  It’s then I notice perhaps as many as a dozen still wheeze, their burned skin rising and falling with each insidious breath. I do not care if they are enemies. If impaling is an effective tactic. Or even if they deserve this judgment. It is not the jurisdiction of any man to deliver it.

  I go closer to the boy. My mouth is so dry I barely manage the words. “Are you certain?” He cannot reply until I spill some of my water into his mouth.

  “Send…me.”

  There, so close to him I can see the flecks of copper, brown, and even gold in his Red irises, I feel a terrible sadness. I wish I knew that the eyes of his spirit looked upon his Vale. That his ancestors were waiting for him in their cool highland valley. But I know it is not so, because I know the Vale was created and cultivated by the Board of Quality Control in order to provide an important sociological prerequisite for obedience: a carrot at the end of a hard life. That very same belief that made them able to endure untold hardship in the mines has become a militant faith. He begins to whisper as I draw my razor. “My love, my love, remember the cries, when winter died…”

  He is joined by the others until there is a rasping chorus there upon the pale.

  The Bellona razor’s leather hilt is warm from the sun. Tension travels down my arm as the blade penetrates his chest and then his heart. “Go to your people,” I whisper. He jerks and then is still.

  More men and women beg for mercy down the line. I move to the next man. He’s an older Red, with a thick beard shot with white and a face like a bulldog’s. He begs for mercy, but when I stand in front of him, he and several others begin to laugh. I blink in confusion. Their faces swim in the heat. Why are they laughing?

  “Burn with us, ya golden cunt,” he manages from a mouth crusted with blood. “Burn with Mars.”

  Then I understand the trick.

  I do not move. I look down, knowing what it must be. I push lavender out of the way and blow down into the dirt. A thin mat of pressure-sensitive material lies under the topsoil. If I move my foot, the mine hidden beneath will make me a shower of meat. Even if I dive away, only two mines of the hundreds this war employs have a blast radius I’d be able to clear.

  “I was trying to help you,” I say. “I was trying to be decent.”

  The Red just laughs through teeth shattered to the nerve.

  Without a way to apply equal pressure to my weight on the pad, I dig a small tunnel through the dirt adjacent to the pad to reach the mine. Blindly reaching into the hole, I graze the side casing of the munition. It’s a Lotus-13, judging by the octagonal top rim. If I can slide my razor between the pressure pad and the mine, I should be able to sever the hardwire connection. With hands shaking from adrenaline, I toggle the razor’s edge to the thinnest setting possible, so the blade is narrow as a piece of paper, a hand’s width wide. I slide it sideways down into the hole and trip a countermeasure.

  Bweeee. Bweeee.

  Dirt and shredded lavender explode up into my face. I’m blasted upward. I lose my razor. The air rushes out of me as I land hard on my back. Something constricts around me, ensnaring. I push at it, but it cuts my fingers and the more I push, the more it constricts. A tacNet, I realize in relief, not an explosive.

  But the relief is short-lived as I realize my predicament.

  I lie there in the morning sun, the only shade cast by the poles, the lavender stalks, and the bees. The meters to my razor and water might as well be a thousand. Every time I try to roll or wiggle closer, the net constricts more until it breaks the skin of my scalp. Soon I am immobilized with blood trickling down my face. For hours I lie there as the sun traces its way across the sky, leeching my body of water as it forms blisters on my exposed skin. I’m the color of a tomato. The lavender sways. The bees buzz. The buzzards chew. I drift in and out of consciousness, woken only when the buzzards engage in a hearty squabble for a choice piece of thigh meat. The Red man is dead. They feed on him and watch me.

  If I could laugh, I would.

  Heir of Silenius, eaten by birds at the feet of Reds, because he tried to be merciful. Lesson learned.

  It was my guilt for the Vindabona and the helpless people I left for the Obsidians that distracted me. I should have known about the mines. I see those victims I abandoned now on the hill, lying in tacNets, watching me with smiles, waiting for me to join them in death.

  All those lives lost so I could save Seraphina, who ran to her own slaughter with a smile.

  “Well, look at this, fresh catch,” one of the victims says to me.

  “And a blood traitor by the looks of it,” says another. “He killed some of the bait.”

  “Scar?”

  Heavy desert boots stop in front of me. A child’s face bends down from the sky and peers into mine. Something is wrong. It is the color of a dust moth’s wings. Oh. It’s a mask. Purple works its way into the mask as its wearer crouches near the lavender. “He’s missing half his gorydamn face. Eyeball’s all mush.” A gloved hand twists my head. “No scar. We got ourselves a Pixie, lads.”

  They’re Gorgons.

  “Rising?”

  “Who else? We don’t send unscarred boys to battle.”

  “Let’s leave him to bubble. This trap’s done. Shit to show for it. Stragglers are all herded into Heliopolis for the big hammer.”

  One of them whistles. “Look at the detailing on his big iron. Sciantus-made, bet my life.”

  “Slag off. How would you know what a Sciantus blade looks like? You wouldn’t even be able to afford the hilt.”

  “The Minotaur had one. Treated it like a thirsty lady. Always running his fat mouth about it. See the flower petals?”

  “Where?”

  “Over the wing.”

  “If you say so. What’s a Pixie doing with a piece like that?”

  “If it don’t fit, it’s Howler shit. Search him for trackers and let’s ride. Fear’ll sort it.” The child’s face looks down at me again as I try to speak. “Time to take a nap, traitor.” The last thing I see is his boot coming down.

  THE GORGONS TRAVEL VIA GRAVBIKE. The ride is long and covers several hundred kilometers back the way I walked. Back into the damn desert. In the late afternoon, they make a stop in a high-desert town surrounding a large mine. I watch tied to the back of a gravBike as lowColor townsfolk run out to greet the butchers like heroes. Children run along as we trail out of the town heading toward the snowline of the mountains.

  Clouds eddy across the darkening sky as the gravBikes slow to go single file along a mountain track. We come to an abrupt halt. Boots crunch the snow and something hits me again on the head.

  When I regain consciousness, I am cold and wet. The floor is stone. I do not open my eyes yet. My hands are chained above me, bracketed into the wall of a cave. Streams run to either side. Hushed voices converse.

  “He never asks us any questions. Never any. He just takes something away. I told him all I could think of. I just wanted it to stop.” The man sobs.

  “Spare us your weeping, Hadrian. It’s bad enough already without you bubbling like a Venusian harlot.”

  “Let him be, Ignacius. We’ve all told
him something, Hadrian. It’s prime, brother.”

  “He made…time slow down. Something he gave me. I could feel every molecule as he took…as he…” The words are lost in the sobs.

  “How many guards have you counted, Drusilla?”

  “He hoods me every time.”

  “What’s it even matter what we’ve seen? We know he’s listening right now. That’s the only reason he’d let us stay together. How many Howlers has he caught? How many have been retrieved? One—and Orion was so mad she fucked a continent. We’re dead, goodmen. Go with dignity at least. Soon we’ll be upon the pale.”

  “Sure, dignity with a metal pole up your ass. Sounds like a Tuesday for you, Ignacius.”

  A beat of silence.

  “The boss will come for us,” the leader says.

  “Faithful to the end, Alex? Your Red god is drowned by now or blasted to bits. The only grace we’ll receive is the Void. But that’s prime. It’s just nothing, after all.”

  “He’s not dead.”

  “You really did go full lupus. The whole army is dead, because of the Senate Vox. Taking our ships, the tiny bastards. Heliopolis will have fallen in the siege, and the army will have been trapped in the desert under the guns of the Ash Armada. They’re probably already nailing Darrow to the bow of the Annihilo to sail on Luna.”

  “Then why are we still in a cave?”

  There are at least five around me. All of them Golds. Martian accents mostly, Elysian with a faint flavor of the Jovian Moons. I listen a little longer. Europan dialect. Howlers, Darrow, Alex, the accents. It leaves little left to guess. There’re two others sleeping. How many more, I can’t tell because of the sound of the stream. I would guess nine.

  “Scarface is awake and listening to us,” the one called Ignacius says.

  “Are you awake, my goodman?” another asks with more authority. The leader. His accent would be near-cultured but for how he mumbles. “Don’t be afraid, we’re all fucked here. Eyes open or closed, doesn’t much matter.” He laughs with thin confidence. I make a show of opening my right eye. There are ten other prisoners chained as I am against the wall. Two are sleeping. Two Gorgons sit about thirty meters off in the throat of a tunnel that is the room’s only exit.

  “Told you he was awake,” Ignacius says. He’s a huge, handsome brute.

  “I don’t see a scar,” the woman says. Drusilla.

  “Like they weren’t wise to that after year one,” Ignacius says.

  “What’s your name?” Drusilla asks. Her face is darker than the rest. Kind eyes watch me from swollen eyelids.

  “Easy now, my goodman,” Alexandar says. “You’ve been mauled rather gruesomely.” Even with both his ears missing, and half his face grotesquely swollen, I can tell he is around my own age and that he used to be a handsome man. Staggeringly, I wager. His shoulders are incredibly broad for his frame. Legs meant to eat kilometers are folded under him. The last time I saw him was in a holo Cassius and I watched on the Archi as he stood behind Darrow during a speech.

  Alexandar au Arcos, Lorn’s grandson, my estranged cousin, and Kalindora’s nephew on his mother’s side.

  “What’s your name?” he asks. “Take your time. Concussions befuddle the best of us.”

  I heed Octavia’s ministrations and fall back on an identity with long-term upside, which I can defend and they will be unable to verify. Can’t be Rising. Can’t be Society. I have no scar on my face, and can properly emulate the Mercurian dialect popular in what counts as high society in Erebos. The identity is natural, and a little hilarious. But I’m half mad from dehydration, so I dive in.

  “Cato au Vitruvius,” I say. The identity I used for security reasons when I would visit Glirastes for studies. It belongs to a fictional son of a real local family of high history and middling future.

  “Salve, Cato. I’m Alexandar. Drusilla, Ignacius, Crastus, Hadrian.” In turn, he nods at the kind-eyed woman, the giant, a pretty man in his thirties, and a squat bull of a Gold male. “The Knights of Elysium at your service, such as we are.”

  “Oh, now you’re a Knight of Elysium,” Drusilla mutters.

  “Arcosian Knights,” one corrects.

  “Who are you?” Ignacius demands of me.

  “He means how did you end up in this hell?” Alexandar asks. He smiles crimson. Not one of his teeth remains. I’m surprised by the kindness of him, considering. He looked haughtier on camera, and Grandmother’s Securitas file said he was incredibly arrogant, intelligent, if not too creative, with a paternal deficit complex after the death of his father. His defensiveness of the Reaper suggests the complex’s newest placeholder.

  I tell them a nervous story of the dam breaking at Erebos. Ordnance falling on the city accounts for my burns; trying to rescue survivors, for the sunburns; and trying to take the impaled victims down, for the tacNet wounds. Drusilla asks me sly, trick questions about my home, suggesting she’s been to Erebos. But so have I, and I trapped it all in amber. I can still see the silk market, and the bright belts of the citizens, and the gold filigree in every single street sign.

  I pass their meager tests.

  “You’ve been here a while, haven’t you?” I ask.

  “Yut,” Alex replies, with another trap.

  “Pardon?” I ask, flummoxed.

  “You’re not a soldier, are you?” Alexandar says.

  Another assumption trap. “I don’t understand.”

  “Never mind.”

  “I hardly know a single mate who’s enough money to pull the Institute,” I reply. “My parents are…were silk merchants, and not grand ones by any judge.”

  “Then what did you do?” Drusilla asks.

  “Drank mostly,” I reply. “My father bribed the magistrate to let me stay in Erebos after the Conscription as a civil engineer magistrate. War is such a ghastly affair.” I give a little shudder.

  “So he’s a duty-dodging Pixie. I’m not swallowing this snakeshit,” Ignacius says. “He’s a plant or, at the very least, a slaver by participation.”

  “So’s every person on Mercury according to you.”

  “They all act like it. Only thing you get out of hugging a Mercurian is a knife in the back. They’re all swindlers and drunks, the sundark lot of them.”

  “I’m darker than him,” Drusilla says.

  “Semantics.”

  “Will you two hens stop pecking?” Alexandar snaps. “Why’d you want to know how long we’ve been here, Cato?”

  “It’s just that Heliopolis hasn’t fallen,” I say. “You said it must have.” Even Ignacius listens intently. “I heard from a man who’d been in the Ladon that Darrow led his army across the desert under the cover of the storm. He hit Ajax au Grimmus as he was besieging the city.”

  “That madness worked?” Alexandar asks. He grins hideously with empty gums at Ignacius. “I told you. The boss has everything under control.”

  Or he’s lost control completely.

  XENOPHON LEADS ME INTO the skuggi hangar with a bored expression on that wan face. “Gods, it’s quiet,” I mutter. Not in the city below, where construction crews work night and day to bring Olympia to its former glory, or in the lands around, which vibrate with the sound of Obsidian flocking to the Volkland, or on the coasts where Alltribe ripWings eye Republic fighters across the Thermic, or in the mines where Reds and Oranges hijack Quicksilver’s robots to continue helium operations. It is quiet in Eagle Rest and only Eagle Rest because Sefi and Valdir have taken the children to hunt, my skuggi are off on missions, and I am left like an old man to rattle around an abandoned house.

  “Walk faster, please, we mustn’t be late to the kill,” the logos says.

  “Maybe we should be heading to the landing pads then, genius.”

  “We are…in a way.” We turn the corner and I stop dead in my tracks. One of the most beautiful ships I
’ve ever seen sits beside ugly skuggi tactical ships like a two-comma Pink in a frontline brothel. She is sixty meters long, sleek hulled, equipped with twin-ion engines, two railguns, sensor-resistant hull, and is shaped like a sideways hammerhead shark. She is painted jade green. “Apollo’s cock, that’s a beauty.”

  “A gift from Her Majesty,” Xenophon says, handing me the slim omnicard.

  “Naw.”

  “It is in your contract. A top-tier flier. It was collected from Quicksilver’s mansion in Nike. I daresay you’ll get more use out of it than he will.” I put in the contract because I thought I’d need an escape route out of here. I never expected to actually get it just when I’m thinking I may not need it. Still, I snatch the omnicard and practically levitate toward the ship. She’s not just a racer, she’s a deepspace tigress. Could probably run from Mars to the sun in two weeks flat. Well, maybe not that fast. “Keep in mind, tracking measures have been installed. And the children are not allowed within a kilometer of it.”

  “Uh-huh.” I run my hand over the hull. “What’s the catch?”

  Xenophon smiles as a gaggle of dignitaries comes around the corner. “I fear her maiden voyage will be as a taxi. What will you call her?”

  I turn back to grin at the White. “Snowball.”

  “It’s green.”

  “Still a Snowball.”

  * * *

  —

  As the South Pole slumps toward the gloom of winter, a wind the Obsidians call Breath of the Underdark moans through the glacial valley. This slow, incessant current will freeze the eyelashes off a man and blacken the skin in twenty minutes. It signals the beginning of darkness for the Pole.

  From the warm confines of my thermal gear, two-thirds the way up a young mountain, all I feel is the gentle tug of nature telling me I don’t belong. I look around and the crouched braves behind give me a nod and murmur, “Kalt, Grarnir?”