Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  Darrow jerks on his reins, angling to his left as if to pass on my right. Predictable. I anticipate he will swerve to my left at the last moment and toss his slingBlade to the other hand to turn my lance and decapitate me with a passing backhand. Or he’ll crash our horses together to maim us both.

  But he does not see that I brought Kalindora’s razor as well as Alexandar’s. I clutch Kalindora’s out of sight behind Blood’s neck instead of the reins. I steer with my knees as Atalantia taught me to as a boy. As I saw my father ride when I was not even as tall as his knees.

  At ten meters, just as Darrow swerves to my left, I swerve right and take my shot. I flick Kalindora’s razor in an underhand toss. It carries forward and disappears into Darrow’s chest. Just as the horses draw even, I swing Alexandar’s razor with my left arm, digging my toes into the stirrups and driving with my legs to meet his slingBlade as we pass.

  Metal cracks.

  The world upturns.

  My arm goes numb. The razor shatters and flies out of my grip. My head slams against the ground as I skid across the street. I stumble up and fall, concussed. The world tips back and forth as I pick up the hilt of my shattered razor and look for Darrow. Somehow, impossibly, he was not unseated. He slumps from his horse, Kalindora’s razor protruding through his chest and out his back.

  Praetorians are galloping toward him down the street. His left arm flops unnaturally at his side as he pulls the horse around and kicks it down an alley to disappear into the city.

  Rhone and the Praetorians rein the horses in as they reach me. A dozen set off after Darrow.

  “My liege, are you wounded?” Rhone cries. I stare after Darrow.

  “He got him through the chest,” a Praetorian says. “Razor straight through the heart.”

  “He’s dead. He has to be.”

  “It was his lung,” I say.

  “My liege, are you prime?”

  I only just realize my teeth are chattering. Needles of pain shoot up my left arm. Beneath the armor, the bones must be shattered from the force of the collision. But lying between the hooves of the Praetorians’ horses is a blood-smeared object. I pick it up with my good hand and hold it close to see it better as the street fills with my advancing army.

  It is the hilt of Darrow’s slingBlade, and its killing edge lies in shattered pieces upon the stone.

  I’M IN A NIGHTMARE.

  Lysander’s riders hound me through the labyrinth of dark streets. Searing pain digs deep into my chest. I did not see the hidden blade until it was inside me. My teeth chatter together. Each breath froths with blood. I have no weapon. Only my right arm works. My left is shattered along with the slingBlade. The gift my wife gave me almost twelve years ago lies upon the ground to be a trophy for Lysander’s mantel. One day, he will tell his son how he took it, as I told Pax of how I took Octavia’s.

  The city itself becomes a devil and the prisoners surge south. Lysander’s sunbloods have broken the other strongpoints. They trample men in the wide boulevards as his Golds flow across the roofs. Few escape the nocturnal predators. His infantry is comprised of all those prisoners we took in the Battle of the Ladon. Over a million join with Heliopolitan mobs to butcher survivors in sunless gardens, underneath the striped awnings of abandoned markets, and on the steps of old amphitheaters littered with refugee trash. The Heliopolitans seem to be killing Tychians as well.

  I escape back to the Mound only by virtue of the chaos.

  My horse’s hooves clomp over cobbles deep with blood. Ragged survivors from the other strongpoints pour across the mall toward the steps of our last refuge. There are so few. There is no way to tell if the sacrifice was worth it. If the quarter hour we bought saved any lives at all. The city is lost. Lights glimmer in orbit from Atalantia’s arriving ships. My men are fractured. Did Rhonna make it back to the Morning Star? It will be a tomb. Those at the ships will never reach the tunnels. And on foot, how far could they go? It’s up to Colloway to lead them. But lead them to what? It’s all ruins, and Atalantia will be coming with real weapons very soon.

  Thraxa and Red Sniper wait for me at the bottom of the Mound steps. Thraxa looks nearly dead herself. “Did you get him?” she asks.

  “No.”

  The strength holding her up evaporates. She slumps in the saddle and barely manages to follow me up the Mound’s steps. I dismount inside the atrium, where Harnassus is organizing the survivors. Legionnaires rush to help Thraxa down from her horse. It takes four of them. Harnassus rushes to me, slowing when he sees the razor sticking through my chest.

  “Are you—”

  “Screwface,” I demand.

  “He hasn’t returned.”

  I say nothing.

  “They broke through his lines. Only four men have come back. They say they saw him fall to a Gold.”

  “They were going wild trying to get him,” a man adds. “They were Fulminata.”

  Fulminata. The legion in which he embedded himself at my command.

  I hang my head, dazed from my wounds and exhaustion. I don’t know if I can move another muscle. My hamstrings and lower back are cramping so bad I have to have men help me out of my armor. I almost pass out as they take the vambrace off my shattered arm. They leave the breastplate on, for fear of disturbing the razor in my chest.

  There’s a commotion as they take off my dead boots. I stand barefoot in blood to see men stumbling in carrying Screwface. A shout goes up when the men see him pass. He’s missing his right leg from the knee down, and the skin above his hairline. He’s been scalped by a Fulminata Obsidian. As the medici tie off the wound, Screw stares at the murals on the ceiling of the antechamber and moans. His eyes are wild and distant. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “We tried to hold. We did. They had horses. It was a bloodydamn cavalry charge. Mowed us down like wheat. They’ll catch the support. Some of them. Horses! Horses!”

  “He’s in shock,” one of the medici says and then sees the razor in my chest. “Sir…”

  “No time. It’s just a lung.”

  Screwface grabs my good arm. “Clown. Pebble. Are they safe?”

  “Aye,” I say. “They’re safe. They’re with Sevro.”

  “If anyone could make it out, it’s that ugly bastard.”

  I whisper to the medicus, “Will he live?”

  “Hopefully not,” Thraxa says. She’s slumped on the statue’s pedestal as Reds help her out of her armor. She’s bleeding badly from the hole Lysander and his men put in her belly. “It’s over. Here. Back home. No shame in it. We gave it a rugged shot.” Her hammer is gone. Her reserve razor sits in her lap. “But I won’t be tortured by that creature. Atalantia will vivisect us. There’s only one honorable end to this.”

  I walk over and take her razor.

  “It is not over,” I snap. Several hundred weary faces look at me. “It is not over!” I shout to them. “If you can fight, assemble at center.” The few able-bodied men assemble.

  “Darrow.” Thraxa reaches out her hand for her blade. “I’ll die my way. You die yours.”

  For loyalty to the end, it is the least I can do. I give the razor back.

  Tired beyond words, I arrange the able bodies with what remains of our guns to constitute a defense for the Mound. As if it will matter when Atalantia comes. A hand settles on my shoulder as I send snipers to the gallery. I wheel around to kill the man, but find Harnassus standing there, shrunken and tired, arms caked to the elbow in blood from the wounded. “Darrow. Enough. There’s nothing more to do.”

  I say nothing because I know he is right.

  One of the Red snipers I sent after Lune joins us, a nasty wound on the side of his head. “Might be able to get you out underground, sir.” Alone amongst my men, he seems to think there’s still hope. I disabuse him of it.

  “The tunnel entrances are collapsed. The ships are dead. There�
��s nowhere to go.” Hearing a noise, I look back to Harnassus. “Did you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “A ship engine.”

  “Where are you going? Darrow!”

  It takes me a full two minutes to climb the stairs to the Mound’s tower. I throw up halfway to the top. The sick is dark with blood. My limbs are cold and trembling. The razor in my chest hurts so bad it’s all I can do to focus on breathing as I look out over the city. There is nothing to see in the darkness. No lights break the spell Lysander has summoned. Only the soft, ocean-like sounds of screams. No lights illuminate the sea. No ships over the water. It was my imagination. A phantom hope. Harnassus mutters a curse for his aching joints as he joins me, breathing heavily.

  “I’m sorry,” he says after a moment.

  I say nothing.

  “Glirastes did something to the EMP. Built in a back door. We should have seen it. We should have stopped it. I told you we could. I thought we could keep up with him…” I look over at him at the very moment where the stalwart commander breaks. It is a single shudder, one that comes from the hidden, substantial depths of the man, and reveals for just a moment the insecure child within as he realizes what he always suspected is true: he treads in waters far too deep.

  All this time, I shied from his disapproval. In the absence of Dancer, he became my father figure, in a way. I didn’t even know it until now, because there is nothing like seeing a father shudder. And then he buries the child and is Harnassus again, Hero of the Vox, scowling leader of men.

  “You know the curse of this world?” I ask, looking at the body the Carver made for me. “The greatest gifts were given to the worst of us.”

  “Not realizing they are gifts is what makes them the worst,” he replies as the first of Lysander’s legions begin to fill the mall below. My men die as they scramble up the steps, as if there were any safety inside with us. “You know I envied you.” I look over at him. “Why him? I asked. Why did Ares choose an arrogant pisspot miner and not me? It was pettiness. Pettiness that made the Vox. Pettiness that brought us to this. But your wife believed in the Republic, didn’t she?”

  I nod.

  “You didn’t. I saw you lose faith one step at a time. Looking to solve it all yourself. That’s why I stood in your way. I thought this was what you wanted. A glorious end. Now that it’s here…” He searches my eyes. “If not for the Republic, if not for a hero’s end, why…why keep going?”

  Sometimes a simple question wakes a sleeping answer.

  “I had this picture in my head where I would wake beside Virginia. I’d let her sleep and rise to make coffee, breakfast. And when they woke, my wife and son would find me reading at the kitchen table, or maybe making something out back.”

  “That’s it?” he says.

  “That’s it.”

  He bellows a laugh.

  As insult, the sky begins to glow. Individual friction flames from descending starShells coalesce into a throbbing furnace of light. “Well…I imagine one of those friction trails is Atalantia or Ajax. They’ll want us alive.” He nods. “I won’t risk being taken in a last charge. It will smell like cloves and melting rubber as the celtex comes in. We’ll pass out. Then we’ll wake up in hell.”

  The reflected light from the friction trails carves across Harnassus’s eyes. “I’ll be damned if I let this be the last thing I see. You shouldn’t either.” He pauses. “I don’t think any of my men will be taken prisoner. It would mean something to them if you were with them in the end.” When I do not reply, he goes back down the stairs.

  “Harnassus.” He pauses and turns. “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “Being my conscience.” I smile at him. “My wife says I sometimes need that. I know it isn’t an easy role.”

  “But what a role.” He laughs before he departs. “What a role.”

  I stand alone in the tower watching the friction trails glow over the city, and wonder if this was not inevitable. If all our hope was nothing more than a feeble religion that could not stand the test of time. I sigh onto the railing and work my good hand through my hair. A tinkle comes from inside my armor. I pull my son’s key from within and look down at it and feel an ache. How can something so small mean so much? Even now, when I know I will never see my boy again, I feel as if he were here with me. As if my wife were by my side in these last moments. The world was too cruel to them. I was too cruel, in my own way. But there was beauty. For a moment, there was real beauty.

  I look down at the lost city and feel small comfort.

  I kept looking for hope in the world. Expecting the world to supply deliverance if I plucked the right chords. Demanding that it supply validation to my labor if I just gave enough effort. But that is not the nature of the world. Its nature is to consume. In time, it will consume us all, and the spheres will spin until they too are consumed when our sun dies.

  Maybe that is the point of it. Knowing that though one day darkness will cover all, at least your eyes were open to see moments of light.

  I pry open my thigh pack and pull out a canister. I pour Dago’s Lykos soil into my hands. I would have liked to see home once more before the end.

  There is a gust of air behind me.

  “Oh gods. Brooding again? Some things never change,” a voice says.

  I turn to see a vision from the past. “Cassius?”

  “Hello, goodman. Kavax said you might need a hand.”

  THE STREETS RUN RED with blood and echo with screams.

  Darrow’s army is in full rout. Mechanized soldiers from Atalantia’s orbital forces leave vapor contrails in the air. Along the Bay of Sirens there is a great slaughter as men flee the city on foot or swim out into the bay only to be microwaved by dropships buzzing over the water. TorchShips descend on the dark spaceport. And in the courtyard before the Mound of Votum, thousands upon thousands of freed prisoners of war and mechanized legionnaires fresh to the fray congregate.

  I watch after Kalindora as she is lifted away by Ash Legion medici. The wounds Darrow left her with are gruesome, but not beyond the ability of the trauma wards to mend. She will survive. But I feel a sense of guilt for how I left her there to chase Darrow. I could no more have stopped the bleeding than the Praetorians I left her with, but leave her I did, and there is little nobility in that. There is little nobility to any of this.

  There is a thump behind me. Rhone’s hand drifts to his rifle. I turn to see Ajax landing with a cadre of Ash Guard.

  The irony of his leopard helmet slithering back into its collar when his own Iron Leopards flow past, bloody and triumphant, my name on their lips, is lost to no one. Least of all the insecure boy inside the dreaded man.

  He abandoned his men before the storm wall of Heliopolis.

  Only to find me here, alive.

  Devilish in fifty kilograms of advanced armor and weapons, he looks up as I sit tattered and filthy upon Blood of Empire as the courtyard swarms with ragged legionnaires and hi-tech soldiers. He takes in my melted face, the steed, the chanting of his own Leopards. Whatever he planned to say is concealed within the tight formality: “Salve, Lysander.”

  But it is hate in his eyes. As if I did all this to mock and spite him and steal his place in Atalantia’s bed. For a flicker of a moment, he considers whether gunning me down before the army may be worth the cost in the long run, but the arrival of the Votum Peerless stays his hand.

  I salute his rank. “Praetor Grimmus, the enemy is split into four groups. The most numerous gather within the Morning Star, where Atlas au Raa is being held. I recommend sending a party immediately before they execute him, if they have not already. The next most numerous have taken to the mountains, where they have constructed tunnels. Others hide within the city and sewers. But Darrow is in the Mound. He is grievously wounded.”

  “By whose hand?” Ajax asks.

/>   “Mine.” I pull Darrow’s hilt from my saddle and toss it to him. He blinks, unable to comprehend. The officers around him mirror his disquiet.

  “How?” Ajax asks.

  I lean forward. “Which part?”

  “Who are you, boy?” a Falthe Praetor demands.

  “He is the blood of Silenius,” Cicero says from behind him. The Votum heir is alive and covered with grime from his exploits in the prison break. He stalks up surrounded by a dozen soldiers in tattered prison regalia. His sister is at his side with a flock of glittering knights. As Atalantia’s legions take their city, they see another play at hand.

  “The heir returned from the maw of chaos,” Cicero says. His knights stiffen to attention and salute me. “Hail Lune!”

  The hate in Ajax’s eyes darkens and he shouts for his Peerless to assemble. They form a glittering knot and make for the Mound.

  “They’re trying to seize your glory, Lune,” Cicero says. “Shall we join them?”

  I look at the dangerous knights around Ajax, likely friends of those I killed in the desert. In the chaos, it would be only too easy for one to slash my spine as they flew past. “I think not.”

  Four hundred Peerless Scarred of the Votum and Ash Legions move on the Mound. I sit with my Praetorians in the middle of the square as the doors evaporate.

  Rhone sulks beside me, ignoring the sweet wine throngs of Heliopolitans bring the soldiers. A party one-half celebration, one-half slaughter rages through the city as it seeks catharsis on the invaders after the long weeks of siege. I imagine the wine will flow alongside the blood for many days yet.

  “Something wrong, Legate?” I ask.

  “You should be the one to take the Slave King.”

  The soldiers flood into the Mound.

  “We have had our glory today, Praetorian. Let us not drown ourselves in gluttony. The legions know who opened the gates,” I say loud enough for the other Praetorians to hear. They tip their cups of wine and pass burners through the ranks. One thousand Gray shock troopers came to me in the desert. Barely three hundred remain. Not one is unwounded.