Copyright © 2018 by Christopher Ruocchio.
All Rights Reserved.
Jacket art by Sam Weber.
Jacket design by G-Force Design.
DAW Book Collectors No. 1792.
Published by DAW Books, Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Eboo ISBN: 9780756413026
DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED
U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES
—MARCA REGISTRADA
HECHO EN U.S.A.
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
Version_1
To my grandparents:
Albert and Eleanor. Deslan and James.
This took too long to finish.
I’m sorry it’s late.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Hadrian
Chapter 2: Like Distant Thunder
Chapter 3: Consortium
Chapter 4: The Devil and the Lady
Chapter 5: Tigers and Lambs
Chapter 6: Truth Without Beauty
Chapter 7: Meidua
Chapter 8: Gibson
Chapter 9: Bread and Circuses
Chapter 10: The Law of Birds and Fishes
Chapter 11: At What Cost
Chapter 12: The Ugliness of the World
Chapter 13: The Scourging at the Pillar
Chapter 14: Fear Is a Poison
Chapter 15: The Summer Palace
Chapter 16: Mother
Chapter 17: Valedictory
Chapter 18: Rage Is Blindness
Chapter 19: The Edge of the World
Chapter 20: Off the Map
Chapter 21: The Outer Dark
Chapter 22: Marlowe Alone
Chapter 23: Resurrection in Death
Chapter 24: Those Mindless Days
Chapter 25: Poverty and Punishment
Chapter 26: Cat
Chapter 27: Forsaken
Chapter 28: Wrong
Chapter 29: Less Wings to Fly
Chapter 30: The Umandh
Chapter 31: Mere Humanity
Chapter 32: Stand Clear
Chapter 33: To Make a Myrmidon
Chapter 34: Men of Grosser Blood
Chapter 35: Proper Men
Chapter 36: Teach Them How to War
Chapter 37: Might Never Die
Chapter 38: Blood Like Wax
Chapter 39: A Kingdom for a Horse
Chapter 40: A Monopoly on Suffering
Chapter 41: Friends
Chapter 42: Speak Like a Child
Chapter 43: The Count and His Lord
Chapter 44: Anaïs and Dorian
Chapter 45: Lose the Stars
Chapter 46: The Doctor
Chapter 47: The Cage
Chapter 48: Triumph
Chapter 49: Brothers in Arms
Chapter 50: Without Pretense
Chapter 51: Familiar
Chapter 52: Little Talks
Chapter 53: A Game of Snake and Mongoose
Chapter 54: Gaslight
Chapter 55: The Quiet
Chapter 56: Witches and Demons
Chapter 57: Second
Chapter 58: Barbarians
Chapter 59: On the Eve of Execution
Chapter 60: The Sword, Our Orator
Chapter 61: A Kind of Exile
Chapter 62: The Gilded Cage
Chapter 63: Calagah
Chapter 64: The Larger World
Chapter 65: I Dare Not Meet in Dreams
Chapter 66: The Satrap and the Swordmaster
Chapter 67: Lost Time
Chapter 68: Help
Chapter 69: Of Monsters
Chapter 70: Demon-Tongued
Chapter 71: Inquisition
Chapter 72: Pale Blood
Chapter 73: Ten Thousand Eyes
Chapter 74: The Labyrinth
Chapter 75: Mercy Is
Chapter 76: Deathbed Conversions
Chapter 77: A Rare Thing
Chapter 78: Quality
Dramatis Personae: House Marlowe of DelosThe Sword, Our Orator!
On the Planet Delos
House Mataro of Emesh
On the Planet Emesh
The Wider World
Index of Worlds: A Note on Astrography
Lexicon: A Note on Translation
About the Author
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The word author conjures up impressions of solitude, of the rugged individualists of the mind. One imagines the old and near-blind Milton hunched over his writing desk by candlelight. But while solitude is certainly a mainstay of this profession, it is a mistake to imagine that anyone is truly alone. It is fitting, therefore, that I take this small space to thank all those persons who have helped me to see this through.
Any such list that did not begin with my parents—Paul and Penny—would be a mistake. Though I did not always appreciate it, they always supported me, no matter my bad behavior or ingratitude. I am truly blessed to be their son, and humbled, too. My brothers deserve special mention as well. Matthew, Andrew, and I were not always friends, but we are now, and that has been unspeakably important to me in recent years. If I were to list every family member to whom I owe some depth of gratitude, I would have to publish a genealogy, so here’s a short list: to Uncle John, for his help understanding contracts; to Brian, for reading the book before anyone else in the family; to Uncle Pete, for indulging my requests for artwork when I was little and for showing me it was possible to be an artist and a success in life; and to my mother’s mother, Deslan, who bought me my copy of The Lord of the Rings, which along with Star Wars made me want to tell these stories. And to everyone else, for being truly the best family—and a better family than I truly deserve.
I would be remiss in mentioning family without mentioning my friends, the additional family that I have chosen, or who have chosen me (for reasons I don’t quite understand). As with my true family, I have been more fortunate than I feel I deserve. To Erin G., my oldest friend and chiefest critic; to Marek, D’Artagnan himself; to Anthony; Michael; Jordan; and Joe—brothers all; to Victoria, captain of the beta-readers; to Jenna, for all her help and hard work on my website (and for much more besides); to Erin H. and Jackson; and to Madison and Kyle, for their long friendship and support. And to Christopher-Marcus—from whom Tor Gibson took his name—perhaps most of all, for a lifetime of discussion and illumination. Arete, my friend.
To certain of my teachers I owe special thanks: to Anne Sweeney, Diane Buckley, Chris Sutton, and Nik
ki Wright, for encouraging my proclivity for literature. To Priscilla Chappell, for enduring four years of me in high school—when I was at my most insufferable; to Dr. Joe Hoffman, for putting history in a context and clarity I had not imagined possible; and to Craig Goheen, for showing me there was far more in science fiction and fantasy than the likes of Tolkien and Herbert. To Drs. Marvin Hunt, Cat Warren, and Etta Barksdale, for making college worth the time and money. Extra special thanks should be paid to Sam Wheeler, for helping me figure out exactly how one might eat a sun, as well for helping with other physics problems well beyond this English student’s abilities; and to Dr. John Kessel, for his mentoring, his help with my query letter, and for telling me to cut out that stupid frame narrative.
Lastly, I should thank all those involved in the production of this book. First, to Betsy Wollheim and Sheila Gilbert of DAW and to everyone on the team there, most especially to my editor, Katie, for her insight and her patience in dealing with me. To Sarah, my first editor, and to Gillian Redfearn and everyone at Gollancz. To my agents, Shawna McCarthy, Danny Baror, and Heather Baror-Shapiro for their incredible support. I could not ask for better agents, truly. And finally to Toni Weisskopf and all my co-workers at Baen, and not just for employing me.
Thank you.
BEING THE ACCOUNT OF THE SUN EATER,
HADRIAN MARLOWE
OF THE WAR BETWEEN MANKIND
AND THE CIELCIN.
TRANSLATED INTO CLASSICAL ENGLISH BY
TOR PAULOS OF NOV BELGAER ON COLCHIS.
CHAPTER 1
HADRIAN
LIGHT.
The light of that murdered sun still burns me. I see it through my eyelids, blazing out of history from that bloody day, hinting at fires indescribable. It is like something holy, as if it were the light of God’s own heaven that burned the world and billions of lives with it. I carry that light always, seared into the back of my mind. I make no excuses, no denials, no apologies for what I have done. I know what I am.
The scholiasts might start at the beginning, with our remote ancestors clawing their way out of Old Earth’s system in their leaking vessels, those peregrines making their voyages to new and living worlds. But no. To do so would take more volumes and ink than my hosts have left at my disposal, and even I, who has more time than any other, have not the time for that.
Should I chronicle the war, then? Start with the alien Cielcin howling out of space in ships like castles of ice? You can find the war stories, read the death counts. The statistics. No context can make you understand the cost. Cities razed, planets burned. Countless billions of our people ripped from their worlds to serve as meat and slaves for those Pale monsters. Families old as empires ended in light and fire. The tales are numberless, and they are not enough. The Empire has its official version, one that ends in my execution, with Hadrian Marlowe hanged for all the worlds to see.
I do not doubt that this tome will do aught but collect dust in the archive where I have left it, one manuscript amongst billions at Colchis. Forgotten. Perhaps that is best. The worlds have had enough of tyrants, enough of murderers and genocides.
But perhaps you will read on, tempted by the thought of reading the work of so great a monster as the one made in my image. You will not let me be forgotten because you want to know what it was like to stand aboard that impossible ship and rip the heart out of a star. You want to feel the heat of two civilizations burning and to meet the dragon, the devil that wears the name my father gave me.
So let us bypass history, sidestep the politics and the marching tramp of empires. Forget the beginnings of mankind in the fire and ash of Old Earth, and so too ignore the Cielcin rising in cold and from darkness. Those tales are recorded elsewhere in all the tongues of mankind and her subjects. Let us move to the only beginning I’ve a right to: my own.
I was born the eldest son and heir to Alistair Marlowe, Archon of Meidua Prefecture, Butcher of Linon, and Lord of Devil’s Rest. No place for a child, that palace of dark stone, but it was my home all the same, amid the logothetes and the armored peltasts who served my father. But Father never wanted a child. He wanted an heir, someone to inherit his slice of Empire and to carry on our family legacy. He named me Hadrian, an ancient name, meaningless save for the memories of those men who carried it before me. An Emperor’s name, fit to rule and be followed.
Dangerous things, names. A kind of curse, defining us that we might live up to them, or giving us something to run away from. I have lived a long life, longer than the genetic therapies the great houses of the peerage can contrive, and I have had many names. During the war, I was Hadrian Halfmortal and Hadrian the Deathless. After the war, I was the Sun Eater. To the poor people of Borosevo, I was a myrmidon called Had. To the Jaddians, I was Al Neroblis. To the Cielcin, I was Oimn Belu and worse things besides. I have been many things: soldier and servant, captain and captive, sorcerer and scholar and little more than a slave.
But before I was any of these, I was a son.
* * *
My mother was late to my birth, and both my parents watched from a platform above the surgical theater while I was decanted from the vat. They say I screamed as the scholiasts birthed me and that I had all my teeth in my head. Thus nobility is always born: without encumbering the mother and under the watchful eye of the Imperial High College, ensuring that our genetic deviations had not turned to defects and curdled in our blood. Besides, childbearing of the traditional sort would have required my parents to share a bed, which neither was inclined to do. Like so many nobiles, my parents wed out of political necessity.
My mother, I later learned, preferred the company of women to that of my father and rarely spent time on the family estate, attending my father only during formal functions. My father, by contrast, preferred his work. Lord Alistair Marlowe was not the sort of man who gave attention to his vices. Indeed, my father was not the sort of man who had vices. He was possessed by his office and by the good name of our house.
By the time I was born, the Crusade had been raging for three hundred years since the first battle with the Cielcin at Cressgard, but it was far away across some twenty thousand light-years of Empire and open space, out where the Veil opened on the Norma Arm. While my father did his best to impress upon me the gravity of the situation, things at home were quiet, save for the levies the Imperial Legions pulled from the plebeians every decade. We were decades from the front even on the fastest ships, and despite the fact that the Cielcin were the greatest threat our species had faced since the death of Old Earth, things were not so dire as that.
As you might expect from parents such as mine, I was given into the hands of my father’s servants almost at once. Father doubtless returned to his work within an hour of my birth, having wasted all the time he could afford that day on so troubling a distraction as his son. Mother returned to her mother’s house to spend time with her siblings and lovers; as I said, mother was not involved in the family’s bleak business.
That business was uranium. My father’s lands sat atop some of the richest deposits in the sector, and our family had presided over its extraction for generations. The money my father pulled in through the Wong-Hopper Consortium and Free Traders Union made him the richest man on Delos, richer even than the vicereine, my grandmother.
I was four when Crispin was born, and at once my little brother began to prove himself the ideal heir, which is to say that he obeyed my father, if no one else. At two he was almost as large as I was at six, and by five Crispin had gained a head on me. I never made up that difference.
I had all the education you might expect the son of a prefectural archon to have. My father’s castellan, Sir Felix Martyn, taught me to fight with sword, shield-belt, and handgun. He taught me to fire a lance and trained my body away from indolence. From Helene, the castle’s chamberlain, I learned decorum: the intricacies of the bow and the handshake and of formal address. I learned to dance, to ride a horse and
a skiff, and to fly a shuttle. From Abiatha, the old chanter who tended the belfry and the altar in the Chantry sanctum, I learned not only prayer but skepticism and that even priests have doubts. From his masters, the priors of the Holy Terran Chantry, I learned to guard those doubts for the heresy they were. And of course there was my mother, who told me stories: tales of Simeon the Red, Cid Arthur, and Kasia Soulier. Tales of Kharn Sagara. You laugh, but there is a magic in stories that cannot be ignored.
And yet it was Tor Gibson who made me the man I am, he who taught me my first lesson. “Knowledge is the mother of fools,” he said. “Remember, the greatest part of wisdom in recognizing your own ignorance.” He always said such things. He taught me rhetoric, arithmetic, and history. He schooled me in biology, mechanics, astrophysics, and philosophy. It was he who taught me languages and a love for words; by ten I spoke Mandar well as any child of the interspace corporations and could read the fire poetry of Jadd like a true acolyte of their faith. Most important of all, it was he who taught me about the Cielcin, the murderous, marauding alien scourge chewing at the edges of civilization. It was he who taught me a fascination with the xenobites and their cultures.
I can only hope the history books will not damn him for it.
* * *
“You look comfortable,” said Tor Gibson, voice like a dry wind in the still air of the training hall.
Moving slowly, I pulled out of the complex stretch I’d folded myself into and flowed through the next position, twisting my spine. “Sir Felix and Crispin will be here soon. I want to be ready.” Through the small, arched windows set high in the stone walls, I could just make out the calls of seabirds, their noise muffled by the house shields.
The old scholiast, face impassive as a stone, moved round into my line of sight, slippered feet scuffing on the mosaic tile work. Stooped though he was by time, the old tutor still stood taller than me, his square face smiling now beneath his mane of white hair, side whiskers making him look like nothing so much as the lions the vicereine kept in her menagerie. “Looking to put the little master flat on his ass, are you?”
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