Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Gila bowed with surprising grace. “I’d not realized sire was palatine.” She stayed bowed. “My apologies.” The crew boss paused for a sour moment, then glumly said, “The county might trade offworld holdings, but as your lordship says, that’s not for me to handle.”

  I nodded. “That’s all I need for now. You can hold it for me?”

  “It’s still being repaired,” she said, wringing her stubby hands. “It isn’t for resale. Not yet.”

  “Capital!” I said, speaking as if the issue were decided. “It’s good land—been in my family for generations.” My gaze flicked to Switch. His expression was inscrutable. “Father left it to me when my brother inherited, you understand.” I did not so much as look at Gila as I spoke, knowing my father would not have.

  Even if Father had frozen my assets on the occasion of my disappearance, the ring would still register my ownership of them. He hadn’t had an opportunity to change that. The ring carried the authority and weight of my house and name. If I used it to promise something, House Marlowe was legally bound to deliver on that promise. Because of this, the merchanter would not delay me and my departure, for it is the privilege of palatines to be trusted in such transactions even as it is our duty to uphold the pledges we make under the sign of such a ring—pledges enforced by the very Inquisition I hoped to avoid.

  But Father would doubtless contest the trade. I didn’t doubt he’d already reclaimed my land holdings following my disappearance. I hoped he had—that would rob Emesh of any gain in this situation. What’s more, I could be on my ship and on my way out of the Empire before Gila or the Emeshi pluripotentis realized what I’d done to them, before the news of the sale even reached Delos and home. The Chantry would come and discover that the dock workers had not only abetted my escape but had decanted the missing lord Marlowe in the first place. In a single stroke I would buy myself a ship with land I had no right to sell and revenge myself upon the very people who had thrown me into the street and robbed me of Gibson’s letter.

  As revenges go, it would have been perfect, had it ever played out.

  CHAPTER 40

  A MONOPOLY ON SUFFERING

  “YOU COULD HAVE SAID something!” Switch hissed when we left the lot. The sun hung near its zenith, and the daylight beat on me like a rain of fists. I drew out my stolen dark glasses and pushed them up my nose, tucking my shoulders as I hurried along the canal, eager to be home. I had a lot to think about, but Switch granted me no time to think. The younger man seized me by the shoulder and turned me around. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Tell you what, Switch?” I demanded. I wasn’t playing stupid. I knew what he meant. I just didn’t know how to say it. “Tell you what?”

  His cheeks flushed nearly red as his hair, pointed jaw working as if he were trying to crush a pebble between his molars. “I get wanting to play the merchanter, but you could have told me!” He twisted the fabric of my shirt in his fist, then repeated more softly, “You could have told me you were one of them.”

  He said that last in barely more than a whisper. Almost on reflex I pulled myself up to my full height, angling my chin so that I looked down at him. I’d not registered it until that moment, but I was much taller than he. Had I grown so used to being surrounded by plebeians that I was now blind to their smallness? I am not tall—not by the standards of the court—but I felt myself a colossus then, and clung to my palatine height like the emblem that it was.

  But Switch was not cowed, not the scared boy he’d been a year ago. He jabbed me in the ribs, eyes wide. “You’re supposed to be my friend, Had.” I can still hear the reproach there, see the way he bared his less-than-white teeth. “You’re supposed to tell me these things.”

  Something twisted in me, a fraction of the old nobile’s rage brought on by bargaining with the dockyard foreman. “Tell you what? About this?” I drew the ring out and held it up for Switch’s inspection, the silver transmuted to bronze by the bloody sun. “What did you want me to say?”

  The younger man worked his jaw again, struggling for words that would not come. He looked away, up at the looming wall of the White District fifty feet above our heads. A series of cable cars bobbed overhead, carrying people from the richer part of the city down into Belows. I felt I should say something. Anything. Everything. About my father, Crispin, Kyra. About Gibson and what had been done to him. About my mother and what I feared might be done to her. About the Chantry and what I was sure they’d do to me.

  In the end I told him none of these things.

  Instead I said, “It . . . didn’t seem important.” The words sounded dismissive to my ears, shadows cast by these higher concerns. They were small things, and I was made smaller by saying them. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Didn’t seem important?” Switch still hadn’t let me go. He shook me. “Didn’t seem important?” His voice shot up, drawing stares from a passing courier and a young couple in matching sarongs. “Why are you even in the Colosso? You don’t need the fucking money!”

  My jaw clamped shut, and I placed a conciliatory hand on Switch’s arm. “It’s not that simple, Switch—”

  “Of course it is!” he hissed, pulling so that I bowed at the waist. “You’re one of them. Don’t tell me it doesn’t matter.” I saw something move just beneath his face, a shadow coloring his face. The memory of what he’d been came to the front of my awareness, and recalling the houris in the vicereine’s harem and the way Crispin and my mother used them, I shuddered. What had Switch’s experiences of the palatines been like? Thinking of Kyra, of how she had frozen in my arms, I froze in turn. “Is this a game to you?” he demanded. “Slumming it with the rest of us?”

  “No!” I snapped. “Damn it! No. Don’t be absurd!” Absurd. It was not a plebeian word. Switch’s face twisted at it, or perhaps at my clipped Delian accent—recognizing it now as a token of what I was.

  “Ghen was right about you, Your Radiance,” he sneered, and he shoved me back.

  “It’s not like that!” It was all I could do not to scream at him. A couple of people were staring openly now, so I hissed, “I wouldn’t use this unless I had no other choice. The minute I do it’ll be nothing but trouble until I leave the Empire! Do you understand?”

  Switch was practically snarling. “What’d you do? Beat one of your father’s concubines when you couldn’t get it up?” That touched a nerve, lighting on my grandfather’s murder at the hands of one of his concubines.

  “I never touched one. I never would. I don’t know what you went through, Switch, but it wasn’t at my hand. Do you think we’re all monsters, is that it? I am the same man I was two days ago. The same man who saved your ass in the coliseum a hundred times over. The same man.”

  “You’re not,” Switch said. “You’re one of them, and you lied about it.”

  “I couldn’t tell the truth!” I spat. “I can’t. It’s too dangerous.”

  “It didn’t look dangerous when you were waving that ring around!”

  I did not have the patience to discuss the finer points of financial transactions between planetary houses. “They would have had to give me the ship because of who I am. They would have trusted the ship to me.”

  “Because of who you are,” Switch sneered.

  “I was trying to steal from them, to put one over on my father and these Mataro people,” I growled, gesturing to the grimy street and the tin-roofed houses and storefronts around us. “You think I want to be here? You think I wanted this? Do you really think I’d be here if I had another choice?” It was the worst thing I could have said.

  “What’s so wrong with us?” Switch countered, barely keeping his voice at a growl. “This is what life’s like, Your Radiance. Real life. You don’t know!”

  “I don’t know? Really? Me?” I countered, but choked on my explanations. I could feel the blood pounding in my head. My lips were pulled back in a rictus more snarl than s
mile. “You’re not the only person who ever suffered! Three years I ran around this city sleeping in gutters. I’ve been beaten, stabbed, nearly raped. I survived the damned Rot. I buried my . . .” My what? My lover? My friend? “I lost people in this city. Just because some perfumed merchanter buggered you up and down the spaceways doesn’t give you a monopoly on suffering!” From the way Switch’s face went white, I knew that this was truly the worst thing I could have said. I felt all my explanations, justifications, and pride rush out of me. I could handle my pain; I shouldn’t need it to make a point, even a fair one. I folded like a jewel box closing, shoulders caving in. How I wish I could say that it was my father’s voice speaking from my mouth. How I wish I could say it was Crispin’s, my mother’s, Uncle Lucian’s . . . but it was only my own.

  I didn’t see the blow coming until it landed square against the side of my chin. It snapped my head back, and I almost lost my footing, staggering back against the wall of a bakery. Someone gasped, and as my vision adjusted I saw two young men in the silver livery of some ship or other fiddling to get their terminals out to record. I spat. Was there red in it? Or was that only the indecent sunlight? For a moment I was made especially conscious of the way my clothes stuck to me in the damp and smoking air. I did not respond at first, just straightened my brown shirt. Switch was glaring at me, the color slowly rising into his face. He held his fists at his sides, but they remained clenched. The scholiasts tell us that the flow of time is absolute, but standing there with half the street looking on, I felt the seconds dripping by like eons.

  “I’m sorry,” I said at last. Weakly. However I had suffered—and I had suffered—it didn’t give me a monopoly on suffering. I thought of that night Rells’s gang had dragged me from my hovel, of the many times I’d been stunned and beaten by the city prefects. We were not so different, Switch and I, whatever our breeding. And here I was, accusing him of exactly my failure. “I’m sorry. I just can’t talk about it.”

  “Why not?” Switch glowered at me.

  I rubbed my mouth with the back of my hand. “That was a good hit.” I looked at my arm. There was red in the sputum. “I deserved that.”

  “Why won’t you talk to me?” Switch moved a step closer, blocking the sailors recording on their terminals from view as they circled like the masked crows in a Eudoran dumb show. He practically whispered, “Did you kill someone?”

  I shook my head, glaring past him at the onlookers, the vacuous fools with naught in their lives but to peck at the lives of others. I sucked air past my teeth and shook my head again. The first was a denial, the second a refusal to say more. Switch spat—not quite at my feet, but near enough as made no difference. My jaw ached, and I wondered with some detachment if I’d lose a tooth. One felt loose. It would grow back. I am palatine. They always grow back.

  I cleared my throat. “Switch, I . . . I can’t. I’m sorry, I . . .”

  He raised a hand. “Save it.”

  Then he turned and went away. I watched him go, lowering myself slowly until I sat with my back against the wall of the shop, just like the beggar I had been.

  CHAPTER 41

  FRIENDS

  SWITCH WASN’T SPEAKING TO me. It had been two days, and he hadn’t said a word, not even at practice. I couldn’t blame him. To his credit, he had not betrayed my secret to Pallino or any of the others that I knew of, for even in the depths of his displeasure he was loyal, the sort of friend everyone wishes for but no man deserves. A cloud hung over me. I had lost my only true ally and with him my momentum. It was like losing Gibson’s letter all over again, but worse because I had done it to myself and my friend.

  Three myrmidons—newcomers all—stood opposite me with blunted short swords. They wore printed steel armor and looked like medieval impersonations of Imperial legionnaires in their knee-length red tunics, their scratched plate painted pale ivory, flaking in places. The first rushed me, eyes wide. I sidestepped him easily, kicked him to the ground as he passed. The second came in then, blade held high. I caught the blow against my vambrace and rang the girl’s helmet like a bell. She tumbled away. The third fared a little better. I parried a blow with a neat twist of my wrist and lunged. He managed to outdistance my riposte, but I caught his wrist when he followed through and yanked him forward, laying the edge of my blunted sword against his throat.

  “Yield!” he said, voice surprisingly high.

  I shoved him away, face turned up in disgust. “Is this it?” I demanded, looking round. “Is this all?” I held my arms akimbo, laying myself wide open. A black humor was on me, an anger difficult to dismiss. I glowered at the three of them, two sprawling in the dust of the training yard. “You three won’t last five minutes in your first bout.” I flapped my arms. “You have a distinct advantage, you know?”

  The girl had her feet under her, and she advanced, more cautious this time. I kept my arms wide, willing her to make her move. She slashed at my head. I didn’t parry. I leaned. The blade whistled by my ear, and I twisted away from a second blow. She was so slow. It wasn’t her fault. She was only human. She fell again in due course, cursing in the dust. I rotated, taking in the other two myrmidons-to-be. I flew at one, batting his sword from his hand, turning just as the other tried to catch me from behind. I seized him by the cuirass just under the arm and hurled him away from me.

  “None of you seems to get it,” I sneered, taking a few lurching steps toward the one who had yielded. He staggered back, jerking his sword up to guard. Laughing, I turned aside. “There are three of you! In Earth’s name! You’re meant to work as a team!” I turned on my heel, letting them surround me in the light of the lamps. Above us, the sky hung dark and pondering, the two moons like mismatched eyes half-closed in shadow. “We always outnumber the proper gladiators. It’s our only advantage!”

  “That and our winning personalities.” Pallino’s voice cut the night like a whip. “Back off, Had.” The old legionnaire glowered at me with his one dark eye, white hair standing on end in the thick breeze. He helped the girl to her feet. “You three go clean up. You’ve got time before your first bout. We’ll get you straight before the time comes for knife work.” He watched them go, and I spied Elara and Siran hanging back in the shadow of the pillars that ringed the training yard like actors waiting in the wings. When the trainees were gone, Pallino rounded on me. “What in nuclear hell’s gotten into you, boy?” I stood, momentarily dumb, my sword in slackened fingers. “Those firsters don’t need you beating the piss out of them. Damn it, you’re supposed to be training them!” I expected him to hit me. I wanted him to hit me. I wanted him to try.

  “They won’t last a round,” I said finally, my words as measured and controlled as I could make them.

  “I seem to recall a certain red-haired boy Ghen used to say the same about.”

  That stopped me. I cast my eyes around at the nearly empty yard, then down at my hands. They’d toughened in the years since Delos, thickened. They almost looked like Crispin’s hands. I swallowed and let the rage ebb until I could see again.

  “Don’t talk to me about Switch,” I growled, guarding my shattered pride as I sheathed the practice sword at my hip.

  The two women were advancing as I spoke, and Elara’s eyebrows arched. “Lover’s quarrel?” I glared at her but said nothing. “The boy’s been downright sulky the past few days. Should have realized you’d be at the bottom of it.” Though silent, Siran was smirking at me in a way I did not like. “What’d you do?”

  “What do you mean, what did I do?” I twitched my chin up, an unconscious gesture of defiance. “He’s the one who had a problem.”

  “You’re the one’s gone all backed up with rage, though,” Elara said, clapping a hand on Pallino’s shoulder. “Says guilty to me.”

  I held a finger up to respond, opened my mouth. The words wouldn’t come, though, so I shut my mouth again. The finger remained, a broken metronome. “Did he put you up to this?�
�

  “Up to what?” Pallino crossed his arms.

  “This . . .” What was the word? “This!” I waved my hands in a broad sweep, then tugged my helmet loose, hair streaked across my high forehead. There was something in their eyes. Pity? Suspicion? No. “We went to look into buying a starship. Visited one of the repo docks down in Belows.”

  Pallino sighed through his nose, derision made plain. Siran cocked her head. “What were you looking at ships for?”

  Pushing her short fall of hair back from her squarish face, Elara cut in, “Had here and his pretty friend been planning to jump offworld fast they can once their term’s up.”

  The prisoner-myrmidon looked affronted. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  I blinked. I hadn’t wanted to tell Siran—or Ghen, or any of the prisoners, for that matter—for the simple reason that they wouldn’t be allowed to come. They were not here by choice, and only a writ of pardon from the count’s office could have unchained them. “I . . .” I looked again from one face to the next, trying to decipher that strange tightness of expression wound up in the three of them. I sighed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want you feeling left out.”

  “So you left me out?” Siran smiled wryly, and I could feel that I’d lost the exchange already. And yet she didn’t seem hurt. That was one relief, at least.