by Adam Burch
Twelve nobles, winners of the Upper Circuit, and twenty-four winners of the Under Circuits will enter the arena on Combat day. The nobles will have trained their whole lives for the event; the underclass competitors, some who have never held a weapon before being forced to step into the sands of the ring, will fight their way to the top by killing their opponents.
Edric wanted me to prove myself in the Under Circuit as he had done, but now that I’ve won my first match, he transfers me to the Upper Circuit, where bouts are determined by stun harness or first blood. He wants no chances that I will be less than perfect in the final Combat, where I will surely face my foster brother, Phaestion of the Julii.
I no longer think of escape. If I left Tao, there would be nothing for me. The music of the universe is dead. Even in my darkest moments, I could hear the music, the voices of my mother and Nadia. Even with revenge, I could go on. I have nothing now. I am bereft.
The pretty boys of lesser noble houses fall to my skill. I’m declared the “Silent Assassin.” Some doubt it’s truly Edmon Leontes returned from exile. Rumors persist that Edric found some lowborn from the slums to pose as his long-lost son. Gossip is beside the point because I win again and again.
At night, I wake from sleep in cold sweats, panicked because I don’t know where I am or who I am.
Father glares, but he no longer terrifies. His pale eyes are faded by the inevitability of his death.
At dinner after my latest win, the others argue about the state of the Pantheon and the food lines in the arcologies while I stuff meat into my mouth. I chomp, letting bits dribble down my chin in a flagrant display of disrespect. Edmon Leontes is no more. The animal left in his place will soon follow.
“Come, Alberich. I’ve lost my appetite.” The seneschal helps the hobbling old Edric from the room. The rest follow.
“Champion of the Combat?” Lavinia whispers as she passes. “A pig porpoise would be more suitable.”
If any of them had hopes that my return from the Wendigo could help change the political state, they have surely become disillusioned.
“Phoebe.” Beremon holds out his arm to his wife as he flicks his gaze at me then toward the balcony. He taps his wrist with his finger twice and exits. Meet in two hours.
I do not acknowledge the signal.
The twilight is full of faint stars, ever waiting for true night. I’ve seen true night. It’s not wondrous.
Ruska stands in a flowing cape, overlooking the cityscape. “You think he’ll come?”
Phoebe’s auburn hair swirls around her plump face. “Who’s to say? He’s not the man he was.”
I watch from a ledge above, listening to their pulses. They’re nervous. They don’t want to be overheard by Lavinia’s or Edric’s spies. Camglobes constantly hover around the Wusong-Leontes Palatial Towers; Mentor records everything on the training level. I’ve escaped my quarters for this brief time, but tower security will soon be alerted to my absence from the barracks. I silently drop from above to land between my sister and her husband.
“By the twisted star!” Ruska jumps back. “Edmon! You frightened the ancestors out of me.”
I feel a light touch on my shoulder, and I whirl on Phoebe. “Edmon, please. We mean you no harm.”
I know that. She’s right, though. I’m jumpy. Years of prison and torture have turned me into a frightened, instinctual thing. Damn them all.
“The preliminary bouts have ended,” Beremon begins. “You’ve been declared victor in your division—”
“Do you plan to face Phaestion in the arena?” Phoebe blurts.
“Phoebe! We agreed not to press him.”
“It’s the crux of everything, Beremon,” she insists.
“I know.” Ruska softens. They look at me expectantly.
Do I plan to kill my childhood friend? What will I do if I win? What will they do if I lose?
I shrug.
“That’s no answer, Edmon!” Phoebe clenches her fists.
Ruska plays the diplomat. “Can you win?”
I’m not sure. I’m not sure I’d want to if I could.
“I see,” Ruska says solemnly. “Then we make preparations.”
I cock an eyebrow.
“We believe in you, Edmon, but our belief doesn’t matter tomorrow. You either win or die. I’d hoped that you’d be sure of victory. As things stand, events will move quickly once Phaestion claims the garlands.”
I look at Phoebe. “Beremon believes that should Phaestion gain position in the government—”
“There won’t be a government,” Beremon finishes.
Phaestion will have the power to claim himself supreme ruler like the Great Song.
“He may even seek to take Miranda’s hand once you’re out of the way,” Phoebe laments.
“Some of us don’t wish to serve a new dynasty.” Beremon wraps his cape around his portly torso as a chill sweeps over us. “House Ruska is a minor player, but we aren’t without resources. We’ve reached out to Lazarus Industries of Lyria to pioneer some joint ventures. The business opportunity shows there is possibility to move the base of operations of a noble house away from Tao. I’m moving House Ruska to Lyria, Edmon.”
“House Ruska is wherever the Patriarch goes,” Phoebe says, nodding. “Come with us, Edmon.”
They are defecting!
“We’d hoped that the course of government here could be turned, but we cannot put all those hopes on you,” Beremon admits.
“There’s no life left for you here, but maybe out there.” Phoebe looks at the sky.
That was my dream long ago, when I could sing. Now there’s only one tie I’ve left loose, an oath to an old man who may have betrayed me, who I’m not even sure is still alive. I shake my head.
“If you change your mind, contact us,” Beremon says. He places a hand on my shoulder. It’s all I can do to tamp down the instinct to tear his fingers off.
Phoebe tentatively reaches out as well, but she stops just short of touching my face. “Goodbye, poor Edmon,” she says. “I’m sorry for what they did to you.”
They are good people, too good for this place. I finally learn I have a sister, family who might actually come to love me one day, who might be worthy of my trust. Ironically, it is too late for me to care. They leave, and the stars wait to shine.
The beetlelike passenger screamer twists and turns round the city high-rises. Alberich sits on my left, my father, cloaked and hooded on my right. Edric’s once lustrous silver mane has thinned to mere strands. He is practically bald now, so he has taken to wearing the hood. We actually look like father and son for once, I muse.
He should be in a regeneration tank, but tonight is the semifinal, the last match before the yearly games. He’ll be there to witness my triumph even if it means dying sooner. I’m touched.
I grip the hilt of my siren sword. I’m anxious. I’ve fought against lowlifes and addicts and the sons of lesser houses. I’ve yet to face the elite. And tonight, he will be there. I’ve watched the aquagraphics. I’ve studied him. His speed is frightening. His skills uncanny. If we confront each other, it will be death for one of us. I open my eyes as we approach the rotunda. Its round shape looks to me like a cancerous boil on the surface of the cityscape, ready to burst.
A huge throng gathers on the steps leading to the grand entrance. They clamor over statues of past champions, threatening to tear them down. A man steps from their ranks and ascends with arms outstretched. The pilot banks away, so my hand whips out and grabs Alberich’s forearm.
“Edmon?”
I cast my gaze toward the rioting crowd.
“Don’t concern yourself with them,” he says.
I clamp down on the pressure points of his wrist.
“Stop! Stop the vehicle!” he cries out.
I point to a roof landing pad just above the parade.
“Lord Edmon commands that you set us down,” Alberich says to the pilot.
“What’s going on?” My father awakes from his stupor.
> “Edmon, sire,” Alberich grumbles. The pilot lands, and I bolt through the hatch before the sonic wings even retract into the scarab’s carapace.
“Edmon!” my father calls after me, but I’m already racing to the roof’s edge.
I see him, Phaestion, at the top of the rotunda stairs.
“For too long your fathers and grandfathers have scrounged for scraps cast down by the nobility. For too long have they bowed their backs and thrown their hands up in what? Gratitude? While all these so-called great houses, Wusong, Flanders, Mughal, Ruska, Leontes, and yes, even Julii, have made their children fat. Is the wealth of Tao for them or for the strong?”
The crowd screams, “The strong!” Phaestion nods, his hair the color of a flame in the breeze. When he speaks, he commands the attention of the mob like a king of old.
“The Great Song founded our society on an ideal we’ve strayed from. Food lines so long that children starve? Natural resources depleted? An interstellar trade so impoverished that even a working man cannot clothe himself? What would our emperor say now?”
My father coughs as he hobbles up behind me, leaning on Alberich for support. “He denounces the very system that grants him an audience. He includes the name Leontes when it was I who climbed from the muck of the arcos.”
A fit seizes Edric as Phaestion continues.
“You may say, ‘Phaestion, you’re prince of the Julii,’ and I will proclaim that I am. But I am not my father, or my father’s father, or kin in mind to any ancestor save the founder, Bushi Tamerlane Song. I, my companions, and you—we are the new generation. Together we proclaim the Pantheon is not birthright. It’s every man’s right. You are the new Pantheon!”
Cheers erupt from the crowd. I have to get closer and look him in the eye. I jump onto the roof ledge and run along it to a drain pipe that rides the edge of the scraper all the way to the street below. I leap into the air and snag the pipe. I slide down, zooming toward the city floor.
“I’ll win this Combat and claim my place among the Electors,” continues Phaestion. “I’ll face the challenges and defeat any opponent thrown my way. I’ll fight without enhancers or off-world narcotics. I’ll kill with weapons or bare-handed. I’ll fight without magical techniques . . .”
I hit the pavement and push through the crowd.
“When I win, I will not be silent. I will speak for you!” Phaestion proclaims. “We’ll end corruption and injustice perpetrated by these indolent blood-suckers on the Synod. These so-called Wusong-Leonteses, these Ruskas, these Angkors, these Temujins. We’ll end their reign and usher in a new order of the true master race of Tao!”
I shoulder my way up to the steps.
“Workers of the shipyards, farmers of the kelp forests, you are the product of a thousand years of breeding. We’ll not stop with Tao. Our armies will sweep through the Nine Corridors, Lyria, Thera, Nonthera, Albion, Eruland. We’ll claim Market and the realms of the dead Miralian Empire that drove our forefathers from the stars. We will save all of humanity for the pure!”
I race to the top of the stairs amid thundering applause. It pounds in my head. I block it out, and I focus on a single heartbeat, the one that ticks like a metronome, unwavering.
“We’ll cleanse humanity’s blood, cull those who have diluted and deluded themselves, spliced themselves with false genes. Mutants, spypsies, all those who have fragmented humanity and weakened it. We’ll make a unified galaxy carved in the pristine image of the Nightsider. We start here at home. The impurity of these Daysiders—”
I burst through the crowd, slam through two Julii shock troopers, and come face-to-face with my foster brother. The crowd gasps. The boy who taught me to use a spear, the child I played music with, and the friend I braved the leviathan with stands before me. He’s an inch or so taller, which is quite tall for someone from a high gravity planet. I hate that he’s taller. Then again, I’m used to being the ugly one.
He regards me with his cool gray eyes. “Edmon of House Leontes, do you join us in this holy crusade?” he shouts to the crowd. “Do you join your strength to ours to overthrow corruption?”
I stand perfectly still. Any movement I make will be seen as an answer.
He lowers his voice and says for my ears alone, “I will find a way to give you your voice back. I swear it, brother.” Then he turns to the crowd. “Yours is the strength we need, Edmon. Even with your mixed blood.”
I see fire. He would not find my voice; he’d replace it with another voice that would owe him.
Shame on you. Warmonger. Racist. Hypocrite. Shame on this place that made you. I condemn him with my eyes.
“War then,” he whispers.
CHAPTER 29
ARISTEIA
Alberich massages my muscles and kneads the knots from my back, readying me for the fight. He fastens greaves to my shins and gauntlets to my arms. He holsters the siren sword in the obi around my waist. “The cape is leviathan skin,” he says as he cinches the garment over one shoulder. “A sea dragon hasn’t been speared for over a hundred years, but your father swears it is true.”
The smooth scales do remind me of the creature. Could the monster have appeared to Edric as well?
“We’ll be watching from the box.” The seneschal smiles like a proud parent. “When you are Patriarch, my debt to your family will have been paid in full.”
You helped kill my mother, helped kill Nadia, and helped poison Edric. I’ll remember your service.
He stares as if he heard my thoughts spoken aloud. “I should let you alone before the fight.” He leaves.
I hear sounds of the other semi bout in the rotunda above. The obstacle machinery rumbles. The crowd roars as someone falls. My skin tingles. I know that Phaestion fights now. There’s no killing today, but if he wins and I win, death will be all that’s between us tomorrow.
I don’t know if I can do it. If I can, I don’t know that I should. I don’t desire the vengeance I once did. I only desire to somehow not . . . succumb. I wave my hand over the aquagraphic sensor in the middle of the room. Images of the current bout appear.
The Julii prince moves like a predator. He leaps over streams of fire, twists midair over a spear’s thrust, and barely touches the ground before he flies again. He lands behind an opponent and places a palm on the man’s back. Each competitor wears an undergarment outfitted with technology that registers the pressure of any strike. If a touch is delivered to a vital part of the body, the garment electrifies, shocking the opponent out of the match. Phaestion’s opponent screams as the radiating stun paralyzes him and he drops.
“Brilliant, isn’t he?” Talousla Karr’s electric-blue eyes shine at me from the doorway. “You do remember me, Edmon of the Leontes? Of course you remember. You have the bones I gave you.”
I ignore him. How the spypsy got into the competitors’ room, I don’t know.
Phaestion scissors his legs midair around a man’s neck and sends the man spinning head over heels into an electrified pool. The combatant’s stun harness activates and shocks him out of the fight.
“Flawless. I designed him that way.”
I turn to him.
“So I have your attention now?” he asks. “It was inevitable that a culture so obsessed with physical prowess would eventually break its outdated moral code. An entire race that invented an entertainment based on principles of evolution, the genetics of a thousand years of environmental pressure at my fingertips. How could I say no?” The man curls his long nails in the air. “A champion gray, old, and wanting a son. A snip of adenine here, a tuck of cytosine there. I take the extraordinary and make it beyond human. The result is more than a copy. It’s a demigod.”
By the twisted star! The truth of what he’s saying sinks in. Phaestion is a clone. He’s not even human. If the people knew the truth . . .
“Others have tried with more and achieved less. Still, I was able to introduce a few of my own little inventions. You two were very close once. Brothers? Lovers?”
Get to the point, serpent.
“I created several of his designer genes from scratch. A pheromone that makes him all but irresistible, and a neural enhancement, a precognition of sorts.” The alien smiles coldly.
Phaestion can see the future?
“Speed and agility are augmented, of course, but his mental faculty works subconsciously. He reads body language. He calculates probable outcomes without thinking.”
I suspect it’s more than that. Phaestion saw things that were far beyond body language. He knew our friendship would lead to disaster the day he pressed his forehead to mine. He foresaw the sword I carry now years before my father robbed me of my voice and gave me its siren steel. Whatever this alien thinks he did, the outcome is far worse than he could have imagined. I grab the man’s robe and hoist him off the ground. I slam him into the wall so hard it knocks the wind from him.
“Seven Mothers!” He laughs. “You surprise me. I remember you as a boy—weak, dying. But I knew it was inside you, Edmon. I just had to unlock it.”
I lower him to the ground and back away, horrified. This strength is not strength. My mother was strong, Nadia was strong, and The Maestro who wrote songs of rebellion—he was strong. All my physical capability is nothing compared to their love.
“All your abilities were there from the beginning. All I did was switch them on. Pain and trauma created the precise conditions. The torture you endured conditioned you beyond the limits of normal men.”
You made me a freak! I want to scream.
“Because of me, you live to bear witness to the next stage of human evolution. Phaestion is the future. I envision all humanity becoming a race of such supermen like him and then perhaps even greater than him.”
In the aquagraphic, Phaestion climbs to the top of a massive tower of steel pipes. He runs along girders to face his final opponent.
“You know why your Pantheon identifies themselves with sea creatures? They spliced their own DNA with those animals. Hybrids, you called them.”
I know this tale. Under the rule of Empress Boudika Wusong, the Pantheon put human DNA into the creatures of the oceans and created animals with intelligence. They did it for profit but also for fun. It was a disaster. The creatures’ increased intelligence caused them to turn on the humans who had created them. They wrecked harbors, hunted fishing vessels, and murdered their crews. They destroyed Meridian’s kelp farms, cutting off a major food supply for years until it could be replenished. The Pantheon acted swiftly to hunt the creatures down, but politically the damage was done. The empress was forced to abdicate, and the High Synod came to power. Genetic experimentation was banned for all time.
