But Adaeze Feng only smiled sidelong at my mother. “It’s quite all right, Lady Liliana. We were all children once.” But Crispin was no child. He was fifteen, an ephebe on his way to manhood.
Completely unaware of his faux pas, my brother said, “I heard from a sailor once that it was true. That they use people for food. Is it true?” He leaned in intently, and for all the gold on Forum I could not have said that Crispin had ever looked so interested in something.
Another of the Consortium executives spoke up in a voice deeper than the trenches of the sea. “Like as not, it is true, young master.” I turned to watch the speaker where he sat beside Gibson and Tor Alcuin midway along the length of the dining table, near a bowl of steaming fish soup and a collection of wines in red-figure ewers. He was the darkest man I had ever seen—darker than the director, darker even than my hair—which made his teeth appear white as stars when he smiled. “But not always. More often they carry off a colony’s native population and use them as slaves.”
“Oh.” Crispin sounded disappointed. “So they aren’t all cannibals?” His face fell, as if he had been hoping the aliens were all monstrous, man-eating, murderous.
“None of them are cannibals.” Everyone looked at me, and I realized it was I who had spoken. I drew a slow breath, composed myself. This was my area of expertise, after all. “They eat us, not one another.” How many hours had I dedicated to studying the Cielcin with Gibson? How many days had I spent dissecting their language, extrapolating from those few texts and communications intercepted during the three hundred years of war? They had fascinated me ever since I could read—perhaps even sooner—and my tutor had never balked at the extra lessons I asked of him.
The dark-skinned scholiast nodded. “The young master is quite correct.” I wasn’t, I later learned—the Cielcin ate one another as readily as anything. It was only that no one knew it in those days.
“Terence—” Junior Minister Gong Sun placed a hand on the dark-skinned fellow’s sleeve.
The other man, Terence, shook his head. “It is an ugly matter to discuss at table, I know. Forgive me, Sir Alistair, Lady Liliana, but the young masters should understand what is at stake. We’ve been at war for three centuries now. Too long, some would say.”
I cleared my throat. “The Cielcin are nomads and carnivorous almost to a fault. Raising livestock in space isn’t easy, even if you simulate gravity. It’s easier to take what they can from planets. And the average Cielcin migratory cluster averages about ten million strong, so surely they can’t have taken all the people on Cai Shen.”
“It was a very large cluster, the reports say.” Terence’s nonexistent eyebrows rose in surprise. “You know the Cielcin well.”
Gibson’s reedy voice carried from farther down the table. “Young master Hadrian has had an interest in the Cielcin for many years, messer. I’ve been teaching him the aliens’ language as well. He’s quite good.”
I looked down at my plate to hide the smile that had flickered onto my face, afraid Lord Alistair had seen it.
Director Feng twisted in his seat to look at me. I sensed renewed interest in the foreigner, as if she were seeing me for the first time. “You’ve an interest in the Pale, have you?”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak until I remembered my courtesies. This was a director of the Wong-Hopper Consortium speaking to me. “Yes, Madame Director.”
The director smiled, and for the first time I noted that her teeth were metallic, reflecting the table’s candlelight. “Most commendable. It is a rare interest for a palatine, particularly for one of the Emperor’s own peerage. You ought to consider a career with the Chantry, you know.”
Unseen beneath the table, the knuckles of my left hand whitened against my knee, and it was all I could do to force a smile. Nothing could have been further from my desires. I wanted to be a scholiast. One of the Expeditionary Corps. I wanted to travel on starships, to go where none had gone before, to plant the Imperial flag across the galaxy, and to see things wondrous and strange. The last thing I wanted was to be chained to an office, least of all to the Chantry. I tossed a glance at Gibson, who offered a weak smile in return. “Thank you, madame.” A brief look at my father was enough to know I should say nothing else.
“Or with us, perhaps, if your father could spare you. Someone will need to do business with the beasts once the war’s over.”
Father had been notably quiet during all this, and I could not help but feel his wrath was imminent. I looked to him where he sat beside my mother, head slightly bowed as he listened to a footman who’d come to relay a message. Father muttered an instruction and was thus distracted when Crispin said, “You could sell them food!” My brother’s face split with a macabre grin, and the director smiled sharp as a scalpel blade.
“I expect we will, young master. We sell everything to everybody. Take this wine, for instance.” She gestured at the bottle from which I’d been drinking, a Carcassoni St-Deniau Azuré. “An excellent vintage, Archon, have I said?”
“Thank you, Madame Director,” Father said. Without looking, I knew his eyes were on me. “Though I do find it curious that you have such an open mind where the Cielcin are concerned, particularly given the recent tragedy.”
The director waved the suggestion away, setting her knife and fork on her plate. “Oh, the Emperor will be victorious, Earth bless his name. And Mercy’s cup is overflowing, or so the priors say.”
One of her junior ministers—a woman with golden streaks tattooed on her pale scalp—leaned round the director and said, “Surely after the war is ended the Pale must become subjects of the Solar Throne.”
“Must they?” asked my mother, elegant brows arched. “I’d feel better with them gone.”
“That would never happen,” I said sharply, knowing I had made a mistake. “They have an advantage over us.” Both my parents’ faces had gone hard as stone, and from the tightness in Father’s jaw I knew he was about to speak.
But the Consortium junior minister spoke first, smiling sweetly. “Whatever do you mean, sirrah?”
“We live on planets. The Cielcin are like the Extrasolarians,” I said, referring to the backspace barbarians who plied the Dark between the stars, always moving, preying on trading vessels. “They have no home, only their migratory clusters—”
“Their scianda,” said Gibson, using the Cielcin term.
“Exactly!” I skewered a morsel of pink fish with my fork and ate it, pausing for effect. “We can’t ever be certain that we’ve wiped out the Cielcin. Even if we break a whole cluster—an entire scianda—all it takes is a single one of their ships escaping to ensure their survival. They’re atomic, Protean. You don’t crush that with military force, Mother. Messers, ladies. You can’t. Ultimate extermination is impossible.” I took another bite. “Now the same is true of us, but most of our population is planetbound. We suffer attacks harder, is it not so?” I looked to the director, counting on the lifelong sailor’s vision of the Empire to vindicate me.
She seemed about to do just that when my father said, “Hadrian, enough.”
Adaeze Feng smiled. “Not to worry, Archon.”
“Do let me worry about my son, Madame Director,” Lord Alistair said softly, setting down his crystal goblet. A servant hurried forward to refill the glass from a clay ewer decorated with wood nymphs. Father waved the woman away. “Particularly when he flirts so with treason.”
Treason. It was all I could do to keep the surprise from my face, and I clamped my jaw more tightly. Across from me, Crispin pulled a face and mouthed something that looked rather like “Traitor.” I felt the flush creeping up my neck and the embarrassment running down like so much wet clay.
“I didn’t think—”
“No,” Father said, “you didn’t. Apologize to the director.”
I looked down at my plate, glaring at the remains of my baked salmon and roasted mushroom—I had avo
ided some of the more exotic fare prepared specially for our offworld guests. Glowering, I held my silence. It struck me then how my own father never called me by name, how he spoke to me with commands or not at all. I was an extension of himself, his legacy made flesh. Not a person.
“There is nothing to forgive, sir,” the director said, glancing briefly at her juniors. “But enough of that. This has been a lovely meal. Sir Alistair, Lady Marlowe . . .” She bowed her head low over the table. “Let us forget this conversation. The boys meant no harm—either of them—but perhaps we could return to business?”
CHAPTER 5
TIGERS AND LAMBS
THERE WAS A CLEAR pattern of events emerging, but I was little more than a child, and could not see it. Perhaps you do; perhaps you understand exactly what was being done to me. Why I did not see it when I had been trained for such things almost since I could speak, I will never know. Perhaps it was arrogance, the sense that I was better than Crispin, better suited to rule. Perhaps it was greed. Or perhaps it was because we are blind until the knife first takes us, because we believe ourselves immortal until we die. The world into which I’d been born was a wilderness of tigers playing at lambs. A wise man once told me that flesh was the cheapest resource in the human universe and that life spends more easily than gold. I laughed when I heard that and denied him.
I was a fool to do so.
How little I knew.
The arch that led into the rotunda beneath the Dome of Bright Carvings stands forever in my mind, imperishable, as the symbol of my failure. Awoken late by a maidservant, I hurried through the outer gate and into the circular gallery that enclosed the council chamber, moving with deliberate haste toward that awful portal. Poisoned sunlight fell in strange colors through the stained glass mosaic in the roof above, casting sickly shadows on the ancient statues—their bright paints cracked and fading—that decorated that curious place. It had been the custom in my family for generations to commission wood carvings from all the peoples of our prefecture every decade. The greatest of these decorated the room, standing in niches and upon shelves, bolted to the wall, or suspended in the air on wires so that their shadows cut the colored sunlight to ribbons. The rest were given to the flames at Summerfair.
It was as if someone had taken all the color from our dark castle and pressed it into this one place like some dreadful secret. Birds and beasts, men and ships and demons all cavorted about the space, lit only by the filtered light of Delos’s sun. The door was worst of all. Like most doors in our castle, its arch was pointed, and on the keystone—carved from brass whale ivory—was the likeness of a human face, aquiline and severe. It might have been my own, but it was the perfect twin of the face on the statue before the Great Keep, the face of Julian Marlowe, who raised the castle and our name to glory. Other faces clustered about his, pressed to the wall and down the frame so that thirty-one watched from about the doorway, all bone-white but for their violet eyes. Funeral masks taken from the catacombs where my family’s ashes lay interred.
I knew them all, had memorized them as one of my earliest lessons.
My forebears, their features locked in time, put up for all to see.
The guards at the doors did not resist me as they had outside the throne room but opened the heavy wooden doors at a sign from me, their hinges quiet so that the only sound was that of my shoes scuffing the flagstones. The sound was lost at once beneath the murmur of conversation that rose like the tide to meet me, and I stopped short as half the faces at the round table looked up at me. Only Tor Gibson smiled, though it was brief and strained, smoothed away almost at once by his emotional discipline. The Consortium ministers regarded me with cool indifference, and Crispin—for there he was, seated to father’s left—grinned that jagged, toothy grin of his.
My father did not even break stride. “. . . license permits us sole ownership of all uranium mined in the Delos system, not just from along the Redtine. The outlanders in the belt can be brought up to quota with the right persuasion.” He glanced over his shoulder at Sir Felix, who stood on guard behind his lordship. The castellan wore his best armor, the Marlowe sable and crimson cut with the bronze of his own lesser house. “Send Sir Ardian if the workers continue to hold out on us. He’ll know what to do.”
“The belt workers are in rebellion?” asked Adaeze Feng, her rich voice carefully modulating surprise and contempt. “I’d been given to understand you were a bit firmer in your grip than that, Lord Marlowe.”
My father’s face evinced less reaction than a scholiast’s might have. He smoothed his hair back with an idle gesture. “The belt workers are always in rebellion, Madame Director. They make their puerile complaints, we grant them a few concessions, then take them away when that generation fades out of the workforce.”
“Life expectancy amongst asteroid belt miners is only about sixty years standard,” added Tor Alcuin, the pitch-skinned scholiast who was my father’s chief advisor. “We can afford to cycle concessions in and out for new workers over the next century or so to keep their rebellions to a minimum. Take and give.” While he spoke, I seated myself between two logothetes of the family treasury a full quarter turn around the massive round table from Father’s oversized chair. I sensed the tension in the logothetes, saw the blond-haired woman at my left briefly turn in my direction. I ignored her, hoping to keep my lateness off the table as a matter for discussion.
The minister with the gold tattoos on her scalp frowned, looking directly at Tor Alcuin. “The vicereine approves of this?”
“The vicereine,” Crispin interrupted, putting his tablet facedown on the table, “is content to let us do her dirty work. If we’re putting down rebellions at home, that allows Her Grace to manage the sector.” It was a struggle to smooth the surprised frown from my face. Crispin had these moments, these startling instants of clarity.
“Our true focus must be on the Cielcin,” said Eusebia, the Chantry prior in Meidua. “All this must serve the Earth’s chosen Emperor.” The old woman was frighteningly pale, like moonlight, her face seamed as crumpled paper, her voice like the blowing of spiderwebs in a slow wind. I caught Gibson watching me, and he shook his head, scratching one cheek. I knew what the Chantry was. Power dressed as piety.
The director waved one ringed hand, precious stones glittering as she smiled with those silver-metallic teeth. “Of course, Prior, but thought must be given to the situation after this war is over. When the war is won”—here she splayed that hand flat against the petrified wood of the tabletop—“we wish arrangements with Delos and House Marlowe to be as . . . amicable as possible.”
“When the war is won?” Eusebia’s soft voice rose in pitch and volume, and her cloudy eyes widened. “And should we not attend to the small matter of securing such a victory, Madame Director?”
Adaeze Feng’s smile did not falter. “That is a question for the Legions, surely. And your Emperor. I am a businesswoman, Prior. I am here to make a deal with the archon for a share of his exports, not to strike at the heart of our mutual enemy.”
“The Cielcin grow closer every day,” said a minor functionary in the black robes of the Chantry seated not far from aged Eusebia. “Lord Marlowe, I must urge you to consider the alternative. You must arm the vicereine’s legions with atomics.”
Lord Alistair Marlowe did not look the Chantry toad in the face, but his deep voice undercut the sudden burst of chatter that followed. He did not raise his voice, did not shout, but spoke beneath the others and so undermined them, saying, “The Lady Elmira pulls fifteen percent in raw materials off our yield every standard quarter. She does not need more atomics, Severn, nor do we. The system is armed.” He glanced at Gibson. “Scholiast, how many ships is Elmira capable of fielding in-system?”
The old man coughed, surprised to have been called on. “At last inquest by the Imperial Office? One hundred and seventeen ships total, discounting lighter craft.” He rattled off a list of demographic
s, citing the subdivisions of that list by type of ship.
My father gestured for Gibson’s silence with an open hand, his attentions now squarely on Eusebia. “You see, Prior?” He returned his attentions to Adaeze Feng. “Is there something about the state of local affairs that disquiets you, Madame Director?”
Feng looked hard at my father for a moment, sucked on her words before answering. “The offworld workers . . .”
“Will accede to our demands the moment they start to starve on those airless rocks they call home,” my father finished, resting his chin on his folded hands. “The planeted workers are a larger concern. The Mining Guild claims a series of systemic breakdowns in their mining and refinery equipment. The enrichment centers are of gravest concern—we lack the means to replace them and so must buy them from your manufactories.”
“And we’ve a Guild factionarius here who wishes a word, Director Feng,” Alcuin added. “She has the details of the situation among the planeted miners.”
Junior Minister Sun leaned forward. “What proportion of uranium . . . er . . .” He broke off, murmuring to his neighbor in Mandar, the Consortium trade language. Apparently finding the word he wanted, Sun said, “Harvest. What proportion of the uranium harvest comes from planeted mines?”
“Thirty-two percent,” said Gibson and Alcuin in tandem, the trained mechanics of their minds responding with nearly identical degrees of precision, but it was Gibson who went further, saying, “We’re not operating near that capacity at present, sad to say. The attrition rate amongst the miners in the absence of proper drilling equipment has increased threefold in the past century.”
Lord Alistair rapped the tabletop with his knuckles. “Enough, thank you.”
The director pursed her lips. “Delos is not so rich a vein as Cai Shen was; repair to those enrichment crawlers is absolutely necessary. You wouldn’t want to fail our quotas, after all. Would you?”
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