Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “I’m going to die, Had.” He said the words with a lack of emotion that shocked me. “Why did I do this? Why am I here?” Switch made a choking sound, and I was about to say something—to commiserate—when he said, “Maybe I should have renewed my contract with Master Set after all. It’s better than dying. Ghen’s right—I’m not a fighter. I’m just some whore.”

  My head between my hands, I looked up, glaring at the featureless white plastic of the shower curtain. “Ghen’s an idiot, and that’s exactly what he wants you to think.”

  “It’s the only thing I’m good for!” He sounded almost defiant in his self-loathing.

  “Well, you’re rubbish at sword work.” I tried to smile, sensing that even a bad joke was better than pity. When the younger myrmidon did not reply at once, I reached out and slapped the edge of his stall. “No one’s going to die, man. And you’ve gotten a lot better since we started.”

  Switch kept his peace a long moment. “I should have stayed on. Master Set wasn’t tired of me yet. I could have done another tour, held out for better pay. I thought this was going to be better, but . . .” His conviction lagged. “But at least I wasn’t going to die there.”

  “Hmm.” I grimaced, glad Switch could not see. Switch couldn’t have been more than eighteen standard. How long had he been in this Set’s employ? A year? Two? Five? It was honest work, legal, which was more than could be said of my past few years of living, but the thought of what he’d been offended me. Sold into indenture by his parents and only a child . . . No child should have to live like that. Again, I did not offer him pity. I did not think he would accept it. “So . . . how’d you end up in this fix, eh?”

  “In the pits?” Switch asked. I could hear him moving in the shower cell, just out of sight. “Thought I’d make a change, only none of the other ships’d hire me. I can’t fly or do hydroponics or nothing. Just . . .” I imagined Ghen making an obscene gesture to fill the silence. “I figured it was this or go back to Master Set. And I’m done with him.” He spat loudly, and there was a hint of fire in his words as he said, “Filthy old man. This seemed like a better idea at the time. Thought I’d learn to fight like . . .” He broke off, embarrassed.

  “Like what?”

  “I can’t say.” A dull thudding came from Switch’s shower cell, and I guessed he was hitting his head on the wall. “You’ll laugh.”

  I quirked a small, unseen smile. “Try me.”

  The words seemed almost squeezed out of Switch’s chest. “I wanted to fight like Kasia Soulier, you know? You ever see those films? Or Prince Cyrus, maybe. I wanted to be a man, you know? A proper man. Someone who could stand up for himself.”

  I did laugh then and pinched the bridge of my nose. I could hear the embarrassed silence boiling off the younger man, and I said, “I know exactly what you mean. I wanted to be Simeon the Red.”

  “Simeon’s not a fighter.”

  “No,” I agreed, thinking of the time I’d told Cat his story that day on the canal. “But he had to be, when the time came. That’s what I’m saying. It doesn’t matter what you are, Switch. You have to stand when the time comes, and the time is coming.” I told him a bit about my mother, about her storytelling, her art. For a moment it was as if all the torment and pain the past few years had gone behind a cloud and I was lit by the rosy light of childhood. “I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a proper man, Switch. My father wanted me to be a priest, but like I said . . . I always wanted to be like Simeon.” I grinned. “I wanted to see the universe.”

  It was his turn to laugh at me, by rights, but he was quiet a long time. “Guess we’re both in the wrong place,” Switch said, a weak humor in him.

  I snorted. “I guess so. But a man’s got to make a living. Money’s not too bad here if you can collect.”

  “If we survive,” the younger man corrected. “We’re not really paid until the end.”

  “None of that,” I said, perhaps too sharply. “We’ll be laughing about it this time tomorrow.” I broke off, glancing at the clock above the door back into the hall. There were just about two watches left of the night—five little hours. So many and too few.

  “No, we won’t.” A tiny choking sound broke from the shower stall, part laugh and part sob. “It’s hopeless.”

  “It’s not,” I snapped back, glaring intently at the shower curtain as if I might burn a hole there with my gaze. “Don’t worry about hope. Hope is a cloud.” It was one of the many balancing aphorisms Gibson used to maintain his scholiast’s apatheia. It felt strange to say such things again. Strange, but right. Looking around that low concrete room, I felt a sudden pang for the loss of the old man. What I wouldn’t give to see him again, to speak to him. But that too was not of the apatheia, and I tried to grind it away, though it would not go. “You’ll do what you have to do. We all will. Hope doesn’t enter into it.”

  “But what if we don’t make it?”

  “What if we do?” I countered, struck by a thought. I pulled my legs up under me and sat like a sage beneath a tree in meditation. “What if you make it through the year and earn your keep? Did you give any thought to that, or did you come in with a death wish and the hope of a few decent meals?” He wouldn’t be the first who had. His silence betrayed him. The boy had no plan, no ambition. Just a dumb, vague hope and a childish fancy—not unlike some other young man I knew. Well, he wasn’t the first for that, either. A heavy sigh escaped me. “Tell you what,” I said, slashing against the fear in his broken voice. “Why don’t we stick together, eh? I don’t have any friends here either. I could use one.”

  “I’d like that,” the other man said. “You’re the only one who hasn’t mocked what I was.”

  I was thinking of what I’d told Cat so long ago: I wish I had my own ship, wish I could travel. “I don’t want to stay here. I’m trying to save up for a ship, or we could at least sign onto one as hands.”

  “I don’t know anything about that!”

  “After a year you’ll know how to fight!” I snapped back. “Ships need security! Guards! You just haven’t thought it through! A year’s a long time.” I couldn’t bear his hopelessness, having so recently overcome my own.

  Switch twitched the curtain aside and glared up at me. He was sitting all curled up at the bottom of the stall, fully clothed, his back against one wall, red hair plastered to the sides of his face. The boy narrowed his eyes at me. “That sounds a lot like a hope to me. I thought you said not to hope.”

  “I said hope was a cloud,” I countered. “That doesn’t mean there’s no hope.”

  CHAPTER 36

  TEACH THEM HOW TO WAR

  THE LIFT CLATTERED AS it carried the twenty of us up into the first event of the day’s Colosso, each fighter sweating and stinking in the confined space. Switch stood beside me, muttering a prayer to himself, a mantra invoking the Chantry icon of Fortitude. “Bless me with the sword of your courage, O Fortitude,” he breathed, voice barely a whisper. “Grant me strength in this time of need. Bless me with the sword . . .” I shut my eyes. Courage is the first virtue of fools, the patron of those too afraid to run.

  The myrmidon on Switch’s other side nudged him with an elbow. “Can it, will you?”

  Switch looked at the man, muttered an apology. I grimaced, adjusting the antique-style round shield I’d been given, same as everyone else’s, a three-foot carbon-fiber hoplon. For all my encouragement, Switch was right about himself—it would take far more than a week to make a fighting man of him. And Ghen wasn’t wrong, whatever Siran and Kiri said. The boy wouldn’t last a nanosecond. I clenched my teeth, biting back a reprimand as the aged and hissing speaker system in the lift carriage let out a high screech and Pallino’s rough voice rushed in over our heads. “Hold together like we rehearsed. Groups of five. Don’t let the enemy surround you.”

  “Do we know what they’re packing, boss?” asked Keddwen, a local boy who’d mad
e it through a few fights already, distinguishable by his bleached, ropy hair. He had to shout to be heard, his voice hoarse.

  Pallino called back, “Same shit we’ve got: swords, spears, round shields. But it’s Jaffa’s team, so expect the fuckers to be throwing javelins.”

  “We’ll throw them back, then!” Siran shouted, summoning up enough raw energy that the men at her end of the carriage cheered, lifting their weapons in the grimy orange light.

  Sensing Switch’s nervousness, I leaned over and knocked on his round shield. “At least we have shields, right?”

  The younger man grimaced, tamped down his helmet over his wild red mane. “Not funny, Had.” I understood him perfectly. I’d have given my left arm for a proper Royse shield.

  There came a moment before every one of my fights in the Colosso, right before we all marched out onto the sand-dusted brick of the killing floor, when all I wanted was to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. I felt it for the first time then. My bowels twisted into knots; the blood hammered against the anvil of my skull. I stared up at the steel girders that supported the arched ceiling at the top of the lift tube, counted the massive bolts that held them in place. Why was I doing this? There had to be other ways to earn passage offworld. It’s for your ship, I told myself, imagining. I could leave the Empire then, leave it and never return, lose the Chantry and Father and the rest. I could travel to Judecca, meet Simeon’s Irchtani, and see Athten Var. I could become a trader in the Outer Perseus. I could turn pirate. Mercenary.

  But the few hurasams I’d stolen from that corner store wouldn’t have bought a broom closet aboard a star cruiser, and anyway I was contracted to the coliseum for a standard year. Sixty-five combat engagements, and any one of them could be lethal. And any attempt to breach that contract, to run, would end with my feet lopped off, my nose slit, my body dragged into the Colosso and thrown at the mercy of the great beasts, fodder in the purest sense of the word. The sponsors—Count Balian Mataro not least of all—would get their value out of me one way or another.

  Standing there, trying to compose myself while my neighbor’s bladder emptied down her thigh, my thoughts turned to our enemy. They would be armored and shielded—truly shielded, not merely given the old-fashioned antiques we carried. We were dressed like it was Homer’s Troy we meant to attack, not five gladiators in advanced sensor armor. The whole exchange was a farce. Our blunted weapons could only dent their armor. The suits they wore would interpret the blows mathematically and inhibit their wearers in simulation of damage without ever truly causing harm. True gladiators rarely died; professional athletes such as they were too great an investment. We could only immobilize them.

  “Shock and awe, Hadrian,” I murmured to myself, kneading my eyes with my knuckles, running my fingers through the sharp stubble of my hair. “Blood and thunder.” A groan escaped past my teeth. I missed Gibson. I missed Roban. I even missed Felix. The castellan would have known what to do, could have thought of at least a dozen ways out of whatever it was we faced. A hundred. I felt suddenly that I should have paid more attention in tactics. I hadn’t learned all I needed to know. Now I never would. Felix was hundreds of light-years away, and Gibson—well, only my father and Mother Earth knew where Gibson was. I took a moment to secure my helmet, tightening the jaw strap.

  The lift juddered to a halt, and almost at once the huge, heavy doors ground their way open, metal grating on stone. I swear the sound hit us before the sunlight did, the great, crashing squall of it deep and crushing as the sea. The animal sound of eighty thousand human voices screaming, shouting with drunken delight and the joyous rage of spectacle. That sound affected each man in a different way, flattening him or lifting him up.

  Fear is a poison, I told myself, repeating the old words as Switch had done his prayer. Fear is a poison. I felt that poison like ice in my veins. Rising, I followed Ghen and the veterans out into the sickly orange sunlight, hefting the carbon fiber shield as I drew my short sword for combat. The floor of the arena stretched nearly a hundred yards long and was perhaps half as wide. We had entered into a forest of stone pillars distributed at random throughout the arena, according the combatants cover. No two were the same, their heights and diameters variable, but all thrust from the brick floor, crowding what otherwise would have been level and open ground.

  Ringing the massive expanse of the arena rose a sandstone wall twenty feet high, pierced at intervals with steel lift doors like the one from which we had emerged. A high-class energy shield shimmered above us, washing out a portion of the cheering, the bellows, and the jeers. It was there to protect the crowd from weapon fire, as it had been on the day I’d seen thirty slaves butchered on stage by the Meidua Devils. Couldn’t have a stray plasma burner slicing up the wall and into some watching logothete or guild functionary.

  None of that registered. The spartan battlefield was so much dead space, mere foreground for the overgrown jungle of color and movement that was the crowd distorted by the Royse field blur. And there they were, arrayed by a gate at the far end of the field: five gladiators dressed in the armor of Imperial legionnaires, the white plate ceramic painted green and gold. Each held a spear taller than he was and watched us through faceplates of solid green, unjointed and without details or eye slits. Patient as mossy stones.

  “The shield’s up,” I said, grabbing Switch by the triceps as we all hurried onto the field.

  Distantly, as if I were hearing her from the bottom of a deep well, I could make out the muddy words of the Colosso master of ceremonies, though what she said was lost in the cheering and the murky effect of the field. We had no need to hear it. We knew why we were there.

  Switch leaned closer. “What did you say?”

  My attention was split: half on the gladiators opposite us, five of the Borosevo Sphinxes in full kit, and the other half on the lord’s box at the midpoint of one wall and on the man seated in it behind still more layers of energy shielding. Balian Mataro, Count of Emesh. I had seen him on city broadcast screens, but there he was in the flesh, seated between his lictors and his Umandh slaves. Even as we entered, a pair of the alien creatures was helping their human douleters drag the corpse of some cephalopoidal land predator through a side gate and onto another lift, trailing green blood on the bricks. We weren’t the first event after all. I made Switch hang back, waited for Kiri and Pallino to join us with a recruit I did not know.

  I jerked a thumb upward, repeated, “They have the prudence shield up.”

  Pallino squinted up at it one-eyed. “Oh, fuck me,” the veteran swore just as the first shot struck the bricks above our heads, violet plasma scorching the wall black. Off to one side, Banks was forming up his cluster of five—three spearmen and two swordsmen—all crouched low to make as much use as possible of their carbon fiber shields.

  “Get down!” I screamed, throwing my arms around Pallino and Switch, dragging them down with me as a salvo seared through the air above our heads. “Will these stop lance plasma?” I asked, propping my shield up in front of me to afford my body some cover where I lay in the dust.

  Pallino grunted. “Aye, but don’t depend on it long.”

  “Then let’s not take long, sirrah,” I said. Kiri and the raw recruit ran forward, somehow having avoided the shots that had nearly claimed us. They kept their shields up even as they helped us all to stand. “This way!” I pointed toward one of the many pillars that rose from the arena floor, hoping to put an obstacle between us and the gladiators with their energy lances.

  “It’s a cull!” Pallino spat on the dirt as we took cover behind the pillar. When I just looked at him, uncomprehending, he jerked his chin to indicate our fellow myrmidons. “Thinning the herd.” Switch had gone deathly silent. Pallino seized me with his free hand. “I should have killed you when I had the chance.”

  My mind went blank. “Me?” I spluttered. “What in Earth’s name has this got to do with me?”

  “Th
ey saw your little speech in the yard. Must’ve done.” The other man released me, drew his sword again. “They’re taking us down a peg.”

  That was an understatement. We were about to be slaughtered. I tried to slow things down. To think things through. To breathe. “Fear is a poison,” I murmured, trying to calm my fast-beating, mutinous heart. We outnumbered the gladiators four to one, but their armament outmatched ours by millennia. Already I knew the original plan would fail. If we clustered into little fighting units the way legionnaires did in ground assaults, fighting shielded, back-to-back, we would all surely perish. “We need to split them up. Try and isolate them.” I peered out from behind the pillar, saw Siran and Ghen pinned down behind another massive column. There was a chance. The pillars were certainly not a default part of this coliseum’s construction. They would have gotten in the way of the horse and dog races common in such places and certain forms of the combat. “Switch, stay with me. The rest of you break left; keep the pillar between you and them.”

  “Since when are you in charge?” asked the raw recruit, the man I didn’t know.

  Fate chose that moment to interfere, and a bolt of plasma fire took the man in his chest. It singed my clothes as it passed, followed by the chemical stench of molten metal and cooked human flesh. The man didn’t even have a chance to scream. I wanted to scream, to cry. Something. Anything. But all I could think was, What is the point of all this armor, then? I gave Switch a shove with my shield, pressing him forward and away from whoever it was who’d saved me the trouble of answering the recruit’s question. Above the floor of the Colosso, the master of ceremonies’ high voice narrated events in rapid-fire, her words still lost through the prudence shield.

  Five. They’d sent five men to kill us. Five professional toy soldiers in their fancy armor, each doubtless kill-ready, blood soaked in testosterone supplements. Five Crispins. That thought nearly brought a smile to my lips even as I half pushed, half dragged Switch around another of the columns. We needed to put space between us and the man who’d killed the recruit. Pallino and Kiri hadn’t followed, had peeled off another way. Whether they’d taken my advice or just been swept away by the chaos I never knew. In memory that first day hangs as if in a cloud, some moments outlined in brilliance, silver-edged and radiant. Others are shadowed, burned, as if those gray pillars were smoke and the clamor of the ground a distant, primal thunder.