Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  “I lost my razor on the rooftops. Find it.”

  By the time the skinniest of them returns with my slingBlade in his trembling hands, another crowd has formed down the street. They’re trying to decide whether it’s worth rushing me. I take the blade from the boy. They see its shape. They run.

  I nod to the Red and, weighed down by forty kilos of dead armor, rush to find my men.

  My miracle has turned into bedlam.

  Heliopolis is in chaos. Screams drift over the city. The streets are pitch dark. Gunshots crackle from conventional arms. Downed ships smolder and send black clouds of smoke twirling up into the darkness. Bands of citizens armed with improvised weapons answer Lune’s call and begin to rove the streets, dragging sympathizers from their doorways to stab metal in their guts or cave their heads in with rocks. A band of rubble-armed Heliopolitan highColors eyes me down a boulevard before carrying on, looking for easier kills. Each street is a new horror. I watch from a stone balcony looking down into an arcade as one of my citizen outreach patrols is cornered by a mob. With their pulseRifles dead, they have only their long utility knives to protect them. The mob keeps their distance and stones them to death before I can find a way down.

  I encounter bands of my men and frantic stragglers in the streets. Six have conventional weapons. By the empty magazine pouches, I see they’ve been using them. Most stragglers come from downed ships or local strongpoints. Panic grips the army. When they hold their ground, armies suffer, but when they retreat hysterically they die. We can’t all retreat at the same time. Guessing Lysander’s force, when it comes, will cut off my two million support troopers billeted in the city, I order a Red centurion to send runners to the other strongpoints and tell them to marshal at the Water Plaza.

  I follow the directions of a medicus who says he saw the Howlers forming up in a square nearby. Before I make it there, I’m drawn by the glow of a fire in the mouth of an alleyway.

  Turning the corner, I find a gang of highColor youths standing over someone in armor, dumping mechanical oil on the blaze they’ve set. They take off running when they see me. I look around the alley for something to put out the blaze. Shouting comes from the street. Three White Fleet pilots, bleeding from a crash landing, tear around the corner, chased by a dozen men with clubs and a young Gold with his heirloom family razor. They skid to a stop as they see me standing there covered in blood. I pull my razor and they run.

  They’ll find more of my men, so I hunt them down. In the armor, I’m too slow to catch the Gold and a Red, but I kill the rest from behind.

  The pilots have put out the blaze by the time I return. I brush the sand they piled on Thraxa’s armor and twist the hidden emergency release. She’s not breathing. The flames would have prevented oxygen from entering her helmet. I perform mouth-to-mouth until she gasps against me.

  “I’m prime,” she says, eyes still wild. “I’m prime. Get off.” She sits up in a daze and looks around at the darkness in ill temper. “That little odious shit. The ships?”

  “Dead. Seems the EMP hit orbit too. No telling the range.”

  “I’ll wring that overbred prat’s neck!”

  “We got to find him first.”

  I help her to her feet and she staggers with the pilots and me to the square. We find Screwface and most of the other Howlers giving orders to several thousand infantry from a dozen different legions.

  “Boss!” Screwface shouts over the chaos. He rushes to me.

  “What’s what?” I ask as Thraxa helps me roll open my helmet.

  “Hazard bedlam,” he says. “Whole city, looks like. Ships too. Strongpoints are solid, but there’s shuttles down all over the city. We got half the pack looking for you. Been sending out teams for them and bringing the wounded back here.” He nods to the wounded at the far side of the market as the rest of the Howlers form a semicircle around me. For a moment, I feel as if I am back at the Institute, though of their number only Screwface still has the stink of dead horse about him. Not for the first time, I’m thankful for my peculiar education. I know what to do when the lights go out.

  “The city is lost. But looks like the EMP hit orbit too,” I tell them. “It’ll be hours before those dreadnoughts are back online. The fact that the skies are empty means her ground forces got hit—given the range. She’ll have to bring her other ships from picket or far-side to send armor, but once it comes she’ll have two thousand years of tech on us. Then it’s game over. We have to get as many men out of the city and into the mountains as we can before Atalantia brings those ships around. We have far less than an hour.”

  I sketch a quick map of the city in the dirt with my slingBlade, making triangles for armories holding conventional weapons. They crouch to see it better in the gloom. I draw a circle for the Hippodrome to the northeast.

  “Lysander knew the EMP range. If he were practical, he’d hold for reinforcements. But he’s going for glory. He’ll try to take the city while Atalantia is knocked out. He landed here.” I draw a rectangle to the south for the Water Plaza. “The POWs were held here.” I draw an X west of the Hippodrome, north of us. “Soon we’ll have several hundred thousand veteran troops pouring south with unknown armaments.” I mark several circles five kilometers south of the Hippodrome, two south of us. “These are our support barracks and administrative offices. They have not yet been evacuated. I’ve sent runners to tell them to move south en masse. The fleet is dead, so they’ll be heading for the mountain tunnels. They are hackers, medici, clerks, engineers, orderlies. Those prisoners are Iron Leopards and XX Fulminata, some of the toughest sons of bitches in the Core. With no tech, those Obsidians and Golds will be murder machines. We will not let them catch our friends. They’ve held us up, now we get their backs.

  “Six main boulevards lead south. We will barricade them and hold the line here.” I draw a line across the sand south of the Water Plaza. X. On that line, what remains of my infantry in the city will die to buy the rest time. “The strongpoints have gunpowder weapons and grenades, but only enough for one man in ten. Give them to the Gray and Red snipers. All guns should be on the rooftops—expect the Golds to be running the roofs, so fortify your men the best you can between the plazas, and give them melee support. Remember they can jump streets. Use your dark-age training. This isn’t the first time gear’s been down. You fight a Gold alone, you die. Fight together.”

  I give a boulevard apiece to four different Howlers, putting Screwface on the right flank, nearest the tunnels and farthest from the Mound.

  “And what about you, boss?” he asks.

  I put my finger in the center of the map at the Water Gardens.

  “Thraxa and I will hold the Via Triumphia. Lysander is too young to go anywhere else. If he wants to make a name for himself slaughtering my men, he has to go through me. If your line breaks, do not head for the tunnels. It’s too far. Their Golds will run you down. Retreat to the Mound. We’ll make our stand there.” I look into their faces. Not a man or woman amongst them expects to survive the hour. But as the waiting has ended, so too has the fear. Not one quibbles or shies from duty. I could not be prouder. “If I do not see you at the Mound, I will meet you in the Vale. Goodspeed.” I grab Screwface as the rest disperse. “Be safe.”

  He just laughs.

  “Legion!” Thraxa roars.

  All across the market, the infantry slam their heels together and raise their fists as we jog past. “Hail libertas! Hail Reaper!”

  FRAGMENTS OF SCATTERED LEGIONS join my procession as we rush to secure the Via Triumphia, swelling our numbers to upwards of twenty thousand if I had to guess. Five thousand join us from the district’s strongpoint bearing crates of gunpowder weapons, which are disbursed to our snipers and riflemen. We have six hundred working guns in total, fifteen gas-powered grenade launchers. Though they are little more than clubs now, many cling to the energy weapons that never made them equal to Go
lds on the killing field, but at least gave them a chance. Conventional rounds just don’t pack the same punch.

  To give our men polearms, we hew down fences and signposts with our razors as we pass. Another swell of men come from the now-useless artillery batteries. Thraxa waves to a little Pink girl who fogs her apartment’s window as she watches us. We have failed her like we failed those Red boys who came to my aid. Soon they will know the mines and she will be returned to the Gardens where she will know only the pleasure of others, and one day think of her childhood when the Rising came as little more than a fantasy.

  We make it to the choke point just as scouts from Lysander’s force reach the rooftops on the other side of the Water Plaza. Through the legs of the mighty statue of Poseidon, I see them moving roof to roof. The fastest have already summited the stone wreckage of Poseidon’s fallen plates. They double back to report our movements as our snipers start picking them off.

  “So he is pushing,” Thraxa says.“That unctuous twat. Why wouldn’t he just wait for armor?”

  “He wants to make a name for himself in slaughter,” I say. “I thought better of that boy.”

  “Of course you did. Sevro was right. Should have ended the line in the Maw.”

  Together, we look north. The cityscape lies in darkness. The Hippodrome like the bent head of a shadowy giant. Through the roots of those buildings, Lysander’s army will be moving south. The Golds rushing ahead for glory and revenge. No doubt thinking our humane treatment of their radiation sickness to be some kind of genetic moral weakness on our part. The Obsidians won’t be far behind. And then a sea of veteran Gray killers from the shores of Venus, the furnace of Mercury, the old lands of Earth, the megahoods of Luna, and even the highlands of my home.

  All coming to kill my men.

  Should we not have fed them? Should we not have healed them?

  The Water Plaza itself is a kilometer-by-kilometer square of white marble, in the center of which Poseidon stands over whitewashed sandstone and flowering sunblossom trees. The fallen plates make a stack of rubble to the north, but between Poseidon’s legs the plaza is flat and open. The Via Triumphia encircles the Water Gardens in a roundabout littered with dead vehicles. I send snipers into the buildings on the southern edge of the plaza and on the rooftops, putting my Howler snipers in two stone bell towers and atop a triumphal arch. Gunshots crackle as they continue picking off Lune’s scouts. I see the men of our adjacent force climbing the rooftops to the east.

  A thin line of resistance forms across Heliopolis.

  Far to the west, gunfire echoes. “Screwface is already under assault,” Thraxa says. “If Lune masses there, we’ll be flanked.”

  “He won’t. I want you on the roof.”

  She looks at our few Golds and Obsidians. “You need me as a bulwark. To hold the line.”

  “We’re not going to be able to hold it,” I say. “But that boy out there can rally the whole bloodydamn system behind him if we let him become a hero. We’re here to kill him.” I shout at a group of three Rat Legion snipers. The Reds bob up to me like jackrabbits. “You any good?” I ask them. The dourest of them answers first.

  “It’s our calling, sir.”

  I take the gas rifles I reserved in case we ran into more Howler snipers. The three men drop their improvised weapons and cradle the guns like diamonds. I toss them the armor-piercing magazines.

  “There are sixty-six bullets in these magazines. All sixty-six are for Lune.” I point to three windows. “I want you there, there, and there. Expect snipers. Do not reveal your position, not for any reason, until you have him in your sights. Do you understand?”

  “Do you know what he looks like?” Thraxa asks.

  They nod. “His face was on a broadcast before the EMP,” the handsome one says in the same accent. Two of them even look alike.

  “You all brothers?” I ask.

  “Yessir.”

  “If this goes tits-up, use the roofs to get to the Mound. Bag me a Lune.”

  They take off. Thraxa stares across the plaza. I put a hand on her shoulder. “If they don’t drop him, crush his skull on the way down.”

  “Got it.”

  She jogs off. Blood sprinkles down from above. I look up and see a man falling from a rooftop. A centurion shouts a warning for enemy snipers. “Where the hell did they get gunpowder?” someone shouts. Where else but from the Heliopolitans. Muzzles flash on northern rooftops.

  As the sniper duel rages, the Golds and Obsidians help me drag abandoned ground transports and civilian hovercraft just shy of the southern mouth of the Triumphia where it exits the plaza. We’ve blocked only half of the fifty-meter-wide artery when a spotter calls to Thraxa on a rooftop and she calls down to me: “Enemy cavalry spotted!”

  I look to the air instinctively. It is empty. And then I hear the thunder on the ground. My insides twist. He’s emptied the stables. The last time I heard hoofbeats and felt anxiety was nearly sixteen years ago.

  The oceanic sound of an army shouting with one voice drifts from the northern city. I can barely make out the words.

  “…Invictus! Per ordo…”

  “Form up!” I bellow. “Form up! To me! To me! Reds to the roofs! Reds to the roofs! Thraxa!” As the Reds rush up stairwells along the Triumphia, Thraxa peers down at me. “Let them hit, then fall on: red rain!”

  She understands what I mean and ducks as a fusillade of enemy fire chews into the façades of the buildings. The Howlers in the bell tower are gone, killed already. Long shadows sprint along the rooftops west and east of the plaza, hurtling six-meter-wide streets as easy as children hop over brooks. Some are shot mid-leap and spin down between the buildings, but in a world without electricity, the Peerless Scarred are kings. They clash into my rooftop elements along our flanks.

  The sea of voices is a creeping tide.

  “Lune! Invictus! Lune! Invictus! Per ordo. Per ordo…”

  I roll up my helmet.

  On the ground, every legionnaire without gunpowder rushes for the meager security of our barricade. They look to each other, mouthing the dreaded word: “Lune.” I stand in the empty center around a lone family hovercraft. My thirteen Golds and forty Obsidians cluster around me in their dead armor to make a hedgehog of bristling razors. I wish Alexandar were with me. I wish Sevro had my back. I wish Ragnar were here, and Orion in the sky. But these are my brothers and sisters too.

  We toggle the razors so they take on their leanest and longest form, nearly a meter and a half. Not nearly long enough. The lowColors gather on our wings, sixty men deep behind the vehicles, some few holding polearms of metal fence posts or signs, and they shiver in dread as they see what’s coming. Even the droning death chant of the Obsidians stutters when they hear the sonorous lament of the initium horn.

  Once, on a mission for Nero, I had the privilege of witnessing something no lowRed of Mars had ever seen before: a race in the Hippodrome of Heliopolis. The sun was bright, the streets filled with music, honey wine, and the smell of spiced ginger locust sweets. Out of respect for my patron, the Votum allowed me backstage before the initium horn to see the riders preparing. In the shadowy recesses of the underground stables, I saw sunblood stallions for the first time. Until then, I’d only known the horses of the Institute, animals of sixteen hands. They were terrifying enough to my mine eyes. But they are little more than donkeys compared to sunbloods. Weighing nearly one ton and twenty-three hands tall, with bone-pale coats and fiery manes, capable of speeds up to eighty kilometers per hour at full gallop, the beasts I saw race were barely horses at all. Monsters, I thought, feeling a kinship with that unnatural bloodline. Beautiful monsters made for one purpose.

  The race I watched ended in catastrophe, with the winner’s prize stallion biting off the head of a competitor when he came at the winner waving a whip. The Gold owners were horrified, but how the crowd cheered.


  How did I ever think these people would embrace liberty?

  Now two, three, four hundred, maybe more, of the most powerful chariot horses that have ever lived have come to war. They rumble into the northern mouth of the Via Triumphia in an avalanche of white muscle and fiery manes and multihued festival saddles, ridden with terrible grace by the equestrians amongst the prisoners of war—Grays and Golds. They’ll go through us like an anvil through glass.

  But glass can cut. And if we run, it’ll be massacre.

  “Stand fast!” I roar at my veterans, conjuring the only trick I have left. Bullets smack into our armor, sending some stumbling. Grenades detonate amongst the horses, sending some screaming. “When I give the command ‘Line,’ form a line three deep! When I give the command ‘Flat,’ go flat and hold your razor like this! Trust your weapon. Trust your armor! Stand fast!”

  Gunshots rattle through the plaza. Ours and theirs. Men are kicked back from windows and duck on the rooftops from precision shots by Lysander’s escorts, dying as they desperately fire down at the horses. Riders spill from saddles. Horses go down with shattered fetlocks and inhuman screams. One takes more than a dozen shots to the neck before it falls full speed into a transport, crumpling the hull and throwing its rider dozens of meters through the air for him to land in a human smear. But the tide does not break. It quickens. The sound of thunder is all. Rattling my eardrums, filling my gut with dread.

  “LINE!”

  My cluster of armored men unfolds to stand in a thin line at the center of the formation.

  Then I see him amongst them, riding at the fore of the charge in white armor, the reins in one hand, a razor in the other. The boy whose grandmother I killed in front of him. The boy I spared for the sake of decency. The boy Aja trained and Cassius raised, who looked me in the eye and mocked me with lies before returning here like a demon to haunt those foolish enough to practice mercy. Frozen in time atop a monstrous steed, bald from radiation, face set not with vanity but grim determination, leaning forward in a saddle that flutters with ribbons of a hundred colors, he looks magnificent.