Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “You do not deny it?” My father’s voice betrayed no emotion. He might have been talking to an enemy taken in the field, not the man who had tutored his children their entire lives and been his tutor before.

  Gibson found his feet. “I have already confessed it, sire.”

  “Indeed you have,” said one of the guards on the platform above, and I recognized Sir Roban’s voice. Sir Roban, who had saved me from the highwaymen outside the coliseum, my father’s faithful lictor. “I had it from him myself, my lord.” He keyed a playback function on his wrist terminal, his armor interfacing with the plaza’s sound system.

  Gibson’s reedy voice played from every corner of the yard, artificially amplified like the voice of some aged and quavery giant. “Hadrian never would have reached Vesperad. I’d made arrangements . . .” The clip severed abruptly, cutting, no doubt, just in time to preserve Father’s choice fiction involving the demoniac Extrasolarians.

  A ripple ran through the crowd. Scholiasts were regarded with suspicion by the uneducated, as is the fate of every man of learning in every age. There was something of the machine in the scholiasts, a relic of the order’s ancient history and its founding by those few Mericanii who survived the Foundation War. And in every age there is a stigma attached to extreme intelligence, for there are heights to which the human mind may be pushed that astonish those at sea level.

  Ever they have been the first targets of pogrom and Inquisition.

  “Tor Gibson, for attempting to kidnap my son, I, Alistair of the House Marlowe, Archon of Meidua Prefecture and Lord of Devil’s Rest, do deny you and banish you from my lands and from all this world.”

  The scholiast slumped, rattling the chains on the whipping post he clung to.

  “It’s not true.” Everyone on the landing and everyone below who had heard turned to look at me.

  “It is true!” Voice ragged, Gibson took a half step forward, straining his arms in their manacles. “A priest, Alistair? You would throw your son to those charlatans? Your son—”

  “Heresy!” shrieked Eusebia, pointing a gnarled finger down at Gibson. “Kill him, lordship!”

  Lord Alistair ignored the prior. The familiarity in Gibson’s voice tipped him beyond composure—none of his servants called him merely Alistair. Not ever. “He is my son, scholiast! Not yours.”

  One of the soldiers kicked the old man in the back of the knee, and Gibson fell like a tower toppling. The chains stopped him, and he groaned as he hung there. An involuntary cry tore from my throat, and I moved to the railing. “Let him go.” I rounded on my father, tears in my eyes. “Please.”

  “I am letting him go.” Father did not turn to look at me this time; he lifted one hand to snap his fingers. “We are merciful as Mother Earth is merciful,” Father declared to the crowd. “Gibson has served our house long, and in memory of that service, we withhold the White Sword.” He overrode an objection from Eusebia, who caved so quickly I knew their arrangement was preordained. “Sir Felix.”

  The castellan emerged from the shadows, and I paled. Sir Felix, who after Gibson had been my greatest teacher, was dressed not in combat armor but in religious white and black. Beside him was a blindfolded cathar of the Chantry, his head shaved, his skin like porcelain, a black muslin band obscuring his eyes. Unspeaking, Felix led the torturer down the stairs toward where Gibson stood lashed to the post.

  “Stop!” I screamed as I stumbled for the stairs. My guards grabbed me above the elbows, held me back with armored fists. The cathar advanced on Gibson, producing a fine blade that glowed star-hot in the daylight. He did not hesitate but slipped the needle-fine blade up into Tor Gibson’s nose and pulled, plasma-coated edge slicing a wedge in the old man’s nostril all the way to the bone. Gibson let out a yelp and a gasp of pain as he slumped. The wound would mark him a criminal all his life. The plasma knife had cauterized the wound even as it cut, leaving his face bloodless.

  Sir Alistair waved his hand, and the two peltasts holding Gibson tore his robes. It fluttered like two broken wings from his thin shoulders, pale flesh visible between them. Sir Felix accepted a three-thonged lash from the cathar, acting as Father’s proxy for the punishment that was to come.

  “Mercy, Father.” I strained against the men holding me. He ignored me.

  The two soldiers forced Gibson against the post, one pressing his face against the rough grain of the wood. The castellan swung, tearing the scholiast’s flesh like cheesecloth. The sound Gibson made shook me to the marrow: a mewling, wrenching yowl. I couldn’t see his back from where I stood, my arms pinioned, but I could imagine the bloody stripes the lash traced against his skin. It fell again, and Gibson’s sobs turned to cries. For a moment I saw his face, transfigured. Gone was the kindly old man I had known all my life with his endless stream of quotations and quiet admonitions. The pain had reduced him to something less than the shadow of a man.

  The lash fell again and again. Fifteen times it fell, each time punctuating the old scholiast’s sobs with another cry. I have never forgotten his face. By the end he had ceased even to cry but set his jaw and bore the pain of it. When I think of strength, it is not of the armies I have seen that come to mind, nor the fighting man. It is of Gibson, stooped and bleeding but unashamed.

  Father looked down on him, unspeaking. When Sir Felix was once more at his side, the lash in hand, the Archon of Meidua said, “Take him away.” Then to all the gathered logothetes and secretaries of the court he said, “Back to work! All of you!”

  “Why did you do that?” I broke free of the guards who held me, cracking one in the face with an elbow. Below the landing the crowd was draining back into the castle, crushed into silence by the display. As much fun as the sight of blood was in the Colosso, the comedy and the glory of it vanished when one of their own was so abused.

  “Because, Hadrian,” my father said, voice low, no longer amplified by the plaza’s sound system, “it couldn’t be you.”

  I drew up at this, stunned. Stunned less by the cruelty of this revelation than by the fact that my father had used my name again. Father waved Felix back, lacing his hands before him as if in prayer. He had worn his full set of rings that day. Three rings on each hand, all with huge bezels set with rubies or garnets or carnelians, each a symbol of his office or power in some way, red on silver. I did not see his wedding band. I never did.

  “Me?” I finally managed, my voice sounding small and high, like Crispin’s.

  “I know you asked the old man to find a way to get you to an athenaeum,” Sir Alistair said in muted tones. The last of the crowd retreated through the Horned Gate to the path down from our acropolis. “I don’t know how he planned to do it—something involving a shipboard scholiast, I don’t doubt.”

  You believe that, I thought, trying to keep the venom from my face. I thought of Gibson’s letter and knew that a part of it was now useless. Whatever the scholiast had planned, it was uncovered now.

  The Lord of Devil’s Rest took a couple of steps nearer, looming over me. Crispin stood off to one side, watching with bright eyes, a small smile quirking his fat lips. “You will not be a scholiast. Do you understand?”

  I had no words. Nothing. I was leaving in five days, leaving and never coming back. And I had nothing. “Go to hell.”

  Father struck me full in the face again, with a closed fist this time. One of his rings caught my cheek, tore the meat there in a thin, ragged line. “Take him to his chambers. He won’t learn his lesson.” As the two hoplites seized me by the arms again, my father turned and led Crispin up the stairs to the keep. Presently Father stopped, turned with his hand on Crispin’s shoulder. “Do this again, and I will kill the scholiast. You understand?”

  I spat on the tiles at the base of the stair and looked away.

  * * *

  Alone again in my chambers, I had no room for tears. I fell back against my door, sank to the floor, chest heaving. I
shut my eyes for a long time, my mind retreating past sleep and madness to a place of utter stillness where rage smoothed itself to a quiet burning. I sat there a long time, legs splayed out on the tile before me. I could feel the blood in me moving and the tears starting to come. Dimly my dream came back to me: Gibson standing tall, his nose cut. I wondered at that and at myself and so opened my eyes.

  My wonderment vanished at once, buried by cold fear. My coat—the one I had thrown across the top of my footlocker—lay on the furs at the end of my bed. That was wrong. Half crawling, I hurried to it and threw open the lid of my footlocker. I threw clothing and the gathered detritus of my life every which way. I had to punch my leg to stifle a sound that was at once a wail of grief and a howl of fury and a sudden conviction that I too was whipped.

  The Kharn Sagara book was gone.

  CHAPTER 14

  FEAR IS A POISON

  I DID NOT LEAVE my chamber for three days, commanding the household staff to bring and clear away my meals. I do not think I spoke a word in all that time, and I could not have felt myself more a prisoner had I been a guest in any of the Chantry’s bastilles. A frigid, slimy fear had me in its coils, poisoning me with the certainty that I would fall next. Surely Father’s agents had taken my book with its incriminating letter, acting on suspicions or from evidence in security footage from times that Gibson had not been quite careful enough. I hadn’t even read the letter. I hadn’t had a chance.

  Ideas that don’t involve gambling on the charity of pirates. That was what he had said. Gibson would not have contacted the Extrasolarians. How could he? Father’s theory—that he’d worked out some deal with a shipboard scholiast to spirit me away—seemed more plausible. What I would have given to read that letter, to learn the truth of Gibson’s plan. His compromised plan, I had to remind myself. Whatever contacts Gibson might have engaged or suggestions he might have enclosed were now well and properly in the hands of Father’s agents. Those doors were closed. The scholiasts would never admit me without a letter from one of their own.

  So I would join the Chantry. I would learn their hollow prayers and empty rituals. I would be taught the procedures for inquisition and the protocols of interrogation. I would become a torturer, a propagandist. I might see the universe as I had dreamed, but it would only be to crush it under my heel. The thought alone was poison. I have lived a tragically long life, long enough to know the evil that they do and why. I have seen heretics burned and crucified by the score, seen lords brought low by the Inquisition and the vast empires bow to the whim of the Synod. They, who police mankind, who keep her from the sins and the dangers of high technology, command technologies as foul as those they hunt down.

  It was hypocrisy, and I was disgusted as only youth can be by the sins of age and establishment. In my youthful cynicism, I had glimpsed one of those great truths: that for all the Chantry’s talk of faith, they believed in nothing. They committed that ultimate and atheistic error: thinking that there is only power and that civilization arises only from the abuse of the innocent by the powerful. There is no more evil thought, and it was the soul of their false religion. And so I could not be a chanter or prior.

  But I knew I would be.

  The day of my departure dawned foul as any I had seen: overcast with the threat of storms. I was to take a suborbital shuttle south to the summer palace on my grandmother’s land at Haspida to see my mother for what I knew would be the last time. My father was not there to wish me farewell, nor was Felix or any of the senior counselors. A soft rain already licked at the airfield out beyond the city walls in the lowlands where the suburbs died. Crispin was coming with me, eager as I was for a chance to leave Devil’s Rest for a time.

  Devil’s Rest waited on the horizon, a black smear above Meidua’s foggy lights. A strong gust blew across the flatlands to the eastern dunes and the bald limestone formations that crested from them like the hulks of shattered seaships. It gathered my long coat in its fingers and set the awning snapping above us. The concrete darkened with rain.

  “Ready to say goodbye to Mother?” Crispin asked.

  “What?”

  “Are you ready to go and see Mother again?” he repeated, watching me from under those square brows of his, a thin crease forming just above his nose. I wondered what he was watching for in my face, and the paranoia that had grown over the days of my self-imposed exile commanded my muscles to stillness. For a moment I thought I heard Gibson speaking, reminding me that fear was a poison.

  So I stilled my fears and answered, “Ready? Yes, I suppose. I’m surprised you’re coming along.”

  Crispin clapped me on the shoulder. “Are you kidding? I love the summer palace. Besides”—he leaned in, conspiratorial—“home’s a bit of a mess right now. You know?” I just stared at Crispin, not sure what to say. He seemed to shrink before me, the armored gladiator he had been in Colosso became only my younger brother. I stared too long, for he raised those thick brows and said, “What?”

  I pushed a fall of ink-black hair from my face, turning away as I settled my hands into the deep pockets of my coat. My fingers brushed the universal card tucked into the lining of one pocket. Useless now. The scholiasts would accept no one as a novitiate without a letter from one of the order, and tradition demanded that letter be handwritten in a cipher known only to the order itself. I swallowed and shook my head, undoing the work I’d just done on my hair. “I don’t want to go.”

  “What? You’d rather stay here?” Crispin wrinkled his nose, taking in the decade of house troopers standing at attention not far off. “You won’t miss much.” My words failed me, and it took an effort to clamp my jaw shut. I wanted to hit him, to break his jovial composure. I could see it in the casual shrug of his shoulders. He didn’t want to rule. “I hope Father gets his way. He’s angling for a barony in the Veil, you know? Says our house might move offworld when I’m . . . well.” He trailed off, aware enough to realize that his succession might be an upsetting topic for me.

  Through the rain the shuttle appeared. It fell like a raven upon a carcass, the whine of its engines bleeding over the quiet rain. A hollowness sounded in the pit of my stomach, an emptiness that echoed like an abandoned temple. I have felt that desolation several times, but only as strongly one other time: in the dungeons of our beloved Emperor, awaiting my execution.

  Crispin brightened. “But you’re going out there! That’s . . . that’s good, isn’t it? Maybe you’ll see the Pale.”

  I sniffed. “All I’ll see is the inside of an anagnost’s training cell.”

  “Anagnost,” my brother mused, scratching at the fine stubble on his jaw. “Odd word.”

  I grunted. “It’ll be miserable.”

  “Sure!” Crispin replied, adjusting the wine-red jerkin he wore over his black shirt. “Until you become an Inquisitor and you start dropping atomics on the Pale.” He grinned. “They might even have you advising the Legions at the front.”

  Turning away, I made a face. “I wish we’d make peace with the aliens.” Crispin was uncharacteristically silent then, and sensing his flat eyes on me, I turned and found him watching me intently. “What?”

  “You really think the Pale are worth saving?”

  “The Cielcin?” I narrowed my eyes, then turned away from my brother in favor of watching the approach of the shuttle. Our guards moved slightly, adjusting their posture in preparation, their armor flexing, plates scraping softly. “They’re the only other spacefaring civilization we’ve ever encountered. Don’t you think they deserve a bit of”—I gestured at the sky—“all that?”

  Crispin spat on the concrete. “Heresy.”

  I raised my eyebrows at him, sighed heavily. “I don’t want to be a priest.”

  “Father told me.” I could hear the frown turning Crispin’s voice downward.

  “You’ve spoken to Father? Since Gibson’s . . .” I couldn’t get the words out, had to shut my eyes
to stem the sudden upwelling of tears. I tried again. “Recently?”

  My brother shrugged his ox’s shoulders. “Only for a moment. You should be honored. I hear the Chantry doesn’t take just anyone.”

  “Ekayu aticielu wo,” I said. I am not just anyone! He did recognize the language, though, and his pale flesh went paler. “I wish I were going to the scholiasts instead.”

  Clearly thrown off by my little show of Cielcin language, he said, “Heard that too.” The shuttle alighted just beyond our pavilion. Four of our guards hurried forward to secure the craft. “Can’t really fathom why anyone would want that. Shutting down your feelings like that. Don’t you think it’s weird?”

  I kept my silence a moment, fixing my eyes on the distant city through the worsening rain. Devil’s Rest appeared almost a part of the storm, a blacker shape amid all that grayness. The way I felt—the creeping terror that Father was not yet done with me—made me wish I were capable of the scholiasts’ mastery of emotion. I wished I could sink into the stillness of their apatheia and forget myself. “It’s a tool, Crispin.”

  “I know it’s a tool, damn it.” He took a few steps toward the edge of the awning and the approaching shuttle. “I only asked if you thought it was weird.”

  “No.” I pushed my long hair back again, squinted through the rain. I wanted to remember this moment, the way the shadowy castle faded into the rain. I had my sketchbook and pencils in the red leather satchel propped by my footlocker. “There are stranger things out there.” I jerked my thumb at the sky beyond the awning.

  That brought another silence, and my attentions were captured by the descent of two of the guards from the shuttle’s ramp. They gestured an all-clear sign to their fellows in the coded hand-talk unique to our house guard. At once the others turned to take up our luggage. One passed me my satchel with a soft-spoken, “My lord.”