“Which ass?” I grinned, stooping to touch my toes, voice creaking a little with the strain. “The one between his ears?”
Gibson’s thin smile vanished. “You’d do well not to speak of your brother thus.”
I shrugged, adjusting one of the thin straps that kept my dueling jerkin flat over my shirt. Leaving Gibson where he stood, I crossed barefoot to the rack where the training weapons waited on display by the fencing round, a slightly elevated wooden disc about twenty feet across, marked for dueling practice. “Did we have a lesson this morning, Gibson? I thought it wasn’t until this afternoon.”
“What?” He tipped his head, shuffling a little closer, and I had to remind myself that though he moved well, Gibson was not a young man. He had not been a young man when his order commissioned him to tutor my father, who was himself nearing three hundred standard years. Gibson cupped a gnarled hand to one ear. “What was that?”
Turning, I spoke more plainly, straightening my back as I’d been taught in order to better project. I was to be archon of that old castle in time, and speechcraft was a palatine’s dearest weapon. “I thought our lesson was later.”
He could not have forgotten. Gibson forgot nothing, which would have been an extraordinary quality were it not the basest requirement for being what he was: a scholiast. His mind was trained to be a substitute for those daimon machines forbidden by the Chantry’s holiest law, and so could not afford to forget. “It is, Hadrian. Later, yes.” He coughed into one viridian sleeve, eyed the camera drone that lurked near the vaulted ceiling. “I was hoping I might have a word privately.”
The blunted backsword in my hand slipped a little. “Now?”
“Before your brother and the castellan arrive, yes.”
I turned and placed the sword back in its place between the rapiers and the sabers, spared the drone a glance myself, knowing full well that its optics were trained on me. I was the archon’s eldest, after all, and so subject to as much protection—and scrutiny—as father was himself. There were places in Devil’s Rest where two might have a truly private conversation, but none were near the training hall. “Here?”
“In the cloister.” Distracted a moment, Gibson looked down at my bare feet. “No shoes?”
Mine were not the feet of a pampered nobile. They looked more like the feet of some bondsman, with sheets of callous so thick I had taped the joints of my largest toes to keep the skin from tearing. “Sir Felix says bare feet are best for training.”
“Does he now?”
“He says you’re less likely to roll an ankle.” I broke off, all too aware of the time. “Our word . . . can’t it wait? They should be here soon.”
“If it must.” Gibson bobbed his head, short-fingered hands smoothing the front of his robe and its bronze sash. In my sparring clothes I felt shabby by comparison, though in truth his garments were plain: simple cotton, but well dyed to that hue that is greener than life itself.
The old scholiast was on the verge of saying more when the double doors to the training hall banged open and my brother appeared, grinning his lupine grin. Crispin was everything I was not: tall where I was short, strongly built where I was thin as a reed, square-faced where mine was pointed. For all that, our kinship was undeniable. We had the same ink-dark Marlowe hair, the same marble complexion, the same aquiline nose and steep eyebrows above the same violet eyes. We were clearly products of the same genetic constellation, our genomes altered in the same fashion to fit the same mold. The palatine houses—greater and lesser—went to extravagant lengths to craft such an image so that the learned could tell a house by the genetic markers of face and body as easily as by the devices worn on uniforms and painted on banners.
The craggy castellan, Sir Felix Martyn, followed in Crispin’s wake, dressed in dueling leathers with his sleeves rolled past his elbows. He spoke first, raising a gloved hand. “Oy! Here already?”
I moved past Gibson to meet the two. “Just stretching, sir.”
The castellan inclined his head, scratching at his skein of tangled gray-black hair. “Very good, then.” He noticed Gibson for the first time. “Tor Gibson! Strange to see you out of the cloister at this hour!”
“I was looking for Hadrian.”
“Do you need him?” The knight hooked his thumbs through his belt. “We’ve a lesson now.”
Gibson shook his head swiftly, ducking into a slight bow before the castellan. “It can wait.” Then he was gone, moving quietly from the hall. The doors slammed, sending a temple-hushed boom through the vaulted hall. For half a moment, Crispin did a comic impression of Gibson’s stooped, lurching step. I glared at him, and my brother had the good grace to look abashed, rubbing his palms over the coal-dark stubble on his scalp.
“Shields at full charge?” Felix asked, clapping his hands together with a dull, leathered snap. “Very good.”
In legend, the hero is almost always taught to fight by some sunstruck hermit, some mystic who sets his pupils to chasing cats, cleaning vehicles, and writing poetry. In Jadd, it is said that the swordmasters—the Maeskoloi—do all these things and might go for years before so much as touching a sword. Not I. Under Felix, my education was a rigor of unending drills. Many hours a day I spent in his care, learning to hold my own. No mysticism, only practice, long and tedious until the motions of lunge and parry were easy as breathing. For among the palatine nobility of the Sollan Empire—both men and women—skill with arms is accounted a chief virtue, not only because any of us might aspire to knighthood or to service in the Legions but because dueling served as a safety valve for the pressures and prejudices that might otherwise boil into vendettas. Thus any scion of any house might at some point be expected to take up arms in defense of her own honor or that of his house.
“I still owe you for last time, you know,” Crispin said when we had finished our drills and faced one another across the fencing round. His thick lips twisted into a jagged smile, making him look like nothing so much as the blunt instrument he was.
I smiled to match his, though on my face I hoped the effect was less swaggering. “You have to hit me first.” I flicked the tip of my sword up into a forward guard, waiting for Sir Felix’s say-so. Somewhere outside, I heard the distant whine of a flier passing low above the castle. It rattled the clear aluminum in the windowpanes and set my hairs on end. I placed a hand on the catch of my thick belt that would activate the shield’s energy curtain. Crispin mirrored me, resting the flat of his own blade against his shoulder.
“Crispin, what are you doing?” The castellan’s voice cut across our moment like a whip.
“What?”
Like any good teacher, Sir Felix waited for Crispin to realize his error. When the realization didn’t come, he struck the boy on his arm with his own training sword. Crispin yelped and glared at our teacher. “If you rested highmatter on your shoulder like that, you’d take your arm off. Blade away from the body, boy. How often must I tell you?” Self-conscious, I adjusted my own guard.
“I wouldn’t forget with highmatter,” Crispin said lamely. That was true. Crispin was no fool; he only lacked that seriousness of person that predicts greatness.
“Now listen, both of you,” Felix snapped, cutting off further argument from Crispin. “Your father will hand me to the cathars if I don’t make first-class fighters out of the both of you. You’re damn decent, but decent won’t do you any good in a real fight. Crispin, you need to tighten your form. You leave yourself wide open to counter after every move, and you!” He pointed his training sword at me. “Your form’s good, Hadrian, but you need to commit. You give your opponents too much time to recover.”
I accepted the criticism without comment.
“En garde!” Felix said, holding his blade flat between us. “Shields!” Both of us thumbed the catches to activate our shields. The energy curtains changed nothing where the human speeds of swordplay and grappling were concerned
, but it was good practice to get used to them, to the faint distortion of light across their permeable membranes. The Royse field barrier would deflect high-velocity impacts with little difficulty; it could stop bullets, halt plasma bursts, dissipate the electrical discharge of nerve disruptors. It could do nothing against a sword. Felix dropped the blade like the headsman he sometimes was, dull point clipping the floor. “Go!”
Crispin boiled off the line, blade tucked back to put the power of his elbow and shoulder behind it. I saw the blow coming from light-years away and ducked under it as it whistled over my head. Spinning, I came back to guard at Crispin’s right with a perfect angle to strike at his exposed back and shoulder. I shoved him instead.
“Stop!” Felix barked. “You had a perfect opportunity, Hadrian!”
We continued in this vein for what felt like hours with Sir Felix laying into us at intervals. Crispin fought like a whirlwind, striking wildly from above and the sides, aware of his greater range of motion, his power and strength. I was always faster. I caught the turn of his blade against my own each time, stumbling back toward the edge of the round. I have always been grateful that my first sparring partner was Crispin. He fought like a freight tram, like one of the massive drone combines whose arms sweep entire fields. His superior height and strength prepared me to do battle with the Cielcin, the shortest of whom stood nearly two meters high.
Crispin tried to trap my blade, to force it down and so allow himself time to strike my ribs. I’d fallen for that gambit once already and could feel the bruise blossoming beneath my jerkin. My feet scraped against the wood, and I let Crispin have his way. All the force behind his blade made him slip, and I clouted him on the ear with an open hand. He staggered, and I struck him a blow with my sword. Felix clapped, calling a halt. “Very good. A bit less focused than your usual, Hadrian, but you actually hit him.”
“Twice,” Crispin said, rubbing his ear as he returned to his feet. “Damn, that hurt.” I offered him my hand, but he swatted it away, groaning as he rose.
Felix gave us a moment, then squared us up again. “Go!” His blade clipped the wood floor, and we were off. I circled right as Crispin charged, sweeping to my right and into the first parry to bar his attack as he slipped by me. I clenched my jaw, whirling—too late—to strike his back. I heard Felix expel his breath through his teeth.
Crispin spun wildly, slashing a wide arc to clear space between us. I knew it was coming and leaped away. Sword low, I lunged. Crispin slapped my blade down, aimed a cut at my right shoulder. Recovering, I turned my wrist and parried, catching Crispin’s sword with mine. He kept hold of his sword but twisted, exposing his back.
“Crispin!” The castellan purpled in frustration. “What the hell are you doing?”
The force of Sir Felix’s voice gave Crispin pause, and I thumped him soundly across the stomach. My brother grunted, glaring at me from under heavy brows. The knight-castellan stepped up onto the round, dark eyes fixed on my brother. “What part of ‘tighten your form’ do you not understand?”
“You distracted me!” Crispin’s voice went shrill. “I was getting free.”
“You had a sword!” Sir Felix shook his open hands before himself, palms up. “You had another hand! Go again.”
He sprang off the starting tape, sword high in both hands. I pivoted to the right, slapping hard to the left to block my brother’s wild slash. I cut in, striking at Crispin’s back, but my brother turned and caught my riposte on counter-parry. His eyes were blazing, his teeth bared. He knocked my sword aside and rammed into me with his shoulder, crouching to throw me up and back off the round. I hit the floor, the wind knocked out of me. Crispin loomed over me, six feet of angry muscle dressed all in black.
“You got lucky, Brother.” His thick lips quirked into that jagged smile. He threw a kick at my ribs, and I winced, gasping for air. I ignored him as he continued, saying how if I’d fought fair, I never would have hit him. If Sir Felix said anything at all, I took no note of him. Crispin was close, towering over me. He finished talking and turned to go. I hooked one foot around Crispin’s ankle and pulled. He came tumbling down, landing face-first on the edge of the fencing round. I was on my feet in a second, snatching up my sword. I planted one bare foot on Crispin’s back and tapped him on the side of his head with the edge of my sword.
“Enough,” Sir Felix snapped. “Go again.”
CHAPTER 2
LIKE DISTANT THUNDER
THE NARROW WINDOWS OF Gibson’s cloister cell stood open, looking twelve stories down upon an inner courtyard where servants tended the topiary in the rock garden. White sunlight streamed in from an eggshell sky, casting highlights on the clutter in Gibson’s study. The walls were given over to bookshelves stuffed so to bursting that they leaked paper onto the floor like snow, the sheaves fallen amid piles of yet more books. Some shelves held racks of crystal storage and spools of microfilm, yet all of these were outnumbered one hundred to one by Gibson’s books.
The scholiasts read.
Technological injunctions filed against their order for long-ago heresies forbid the scholiasts unfettered access even to the limited technologies permitted Imperial houses by the Earth’s Holy Chantry. They were allowed only the pursuits of the mind, and so books—which are to thoughts as amber to the captured fly—were their greatest treasures. And so Gibson lived, a crooked old man in his flattened armchair, taking in the sunlight. To me he was a magus out of the old stories, like Merlin’s shadow cast forward across time. It was all that knowledge which stooped his shoulders, not the passing of years. He was no mere tutor but the representative of an ancient order of philosopher-priests dating back to the founding of the Empire and further, to the Mericanii machine-lords, dead these sixteen thousand years. The scholiasts counseled Emperors; they sailed into dark places beyond the light of the Suns and on to strange planets. They served on teams that brought new inventions and knowledge into the world and possessed powers of memory and cognition beyond the merely human.
I wanted to be one, to be like Simeon the Red. I wanted answers to all my questions and the command of things secret and arcane. For that reason I had begged Gibson to teach me the language of the Cielcin. The stars are numberless, but in those days I believed Gibson knew them all by name. I felt that if I followed him into the life of a scholiast, I might learn the secrets hidden beneath those stars and travel beyond them, beyond even the reach of my father’s hand.
Hard of hearing as he was, Gibson did not hear me enter, and so he started when I spoke from behind his shoulder.
“Hadrian! Earth’s bones, lad! How long have you been standing there?”
Mindful of my place, that of the student before his teacher, I performed the half bow my dancing master had once taught me. “Only for a moment, messer. You wanted to see me?”
“What? Oh! Yes, yes . . .” The old man noted the closed door behind me and tucked his chin against his chest. I knew the gesture for what it was: the deeply ingrained paranoia of the palace veteran, the impulse to check for camera drones and bugs. There should be none in a scholiast’s cloister, but one could never be sure. Privacy and secrecy: the true treasures of the nobility. How rare they were, and how precious. Gibson fixed one sea-gray eye on the brass fixture of the doorknob and shifted languages from the Galactic Standard to the gutturals of Lothrian, which he knew none of the palace servants understood. “This should not be said. There are orders, understand? It is forbidden to speak of it.”
That held my attention, and I seated myself on a low stool, pausing only to displace a stack of books. Matching my tutor’s Lothrian, I said, “It’s a mess in here.”
“There’s no correlation between the orderliness of one’s work space and that of its mind.” The scholiast flattened his flyaway gray hair with one hand. It didn’t help.
“Is not cleanliness next to godliness?” I struggled with the strange language. The Lothrians had no personal prono
uns, recognized no identity. I had heard their people did not even have names.
The old man snorted. “Lip today, is it?” He coughed softly, scratching one bushy sideburn. “Well, enough. This news won’t wait. It was received last night, else it would have been shared sooner.” He sucked in a deep breath, then said in measured tones, “There’s a retinue from the Wong-Hopper Consortium due here within the week.”
“Within the week?” I was so stunned I forgot my Lothrian for a moment and said, “How is it I’ve not heard?”
The scholiast eyed me seriously along the crook of his nose and replied in Lothrian, “The QET wave only arrived a few months ago; the Consortium diverted from its usual trade routes to make the trip.” What Gibson said next, he said without preamble, without softening. “Cai Shen was hit. Destroyed by the Cielcin.”
“What?” The word escaped me in Galstani, and I backpedaled, repeating myself in Lothrian. “Iuge?”
Gibson just kept looking at me, his eyes intent on my face as if I were an amoeba in some magi’s petri dish. “The Consortium fleet received the telegraph from the Cai Shen system just before the planet fell.”
Strange, isn’t it, how the greatest disasters in history often feel hollow and abstract, like distant thunder? A single death, wrote one ancient king, is a tragedy, but a genocide can only be understood through statistics. I had never seen Cai Shen, had never left my own homeworld of Delos. The place was only a name. Gibson’s words carried the weight of millions, but my shoulders carried none of it. Perhaps you think me monstrous, but no prayer or action of mine could bring those people back or quench the fires on their world. Nor could I heal every man and woman mutilated by the Chantry. Whatever power I had as my father’s son stretched only so far, and only so far as he allowed. Thus I took the news without eulogy, my initial shock ebbing into numb acceptance. Then something deeper, something cold and pragmatic, took hold of me, and I said, “They’ve come for a new source of uranium.” I sounded like my father.
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