Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Gibson had taken me to one of the teaching rooms in the old library at Devil’s Rest, called up a holograph from the archive’s memory. The Cielcin had appeared from nowhere, materializing in the center of that blank, dark space, glittering in robes of silken fabric, sable and sapphire and white, every inch covered in circular glyphs that overlapped, interwove, linked. If you have never seen them, the Cielcin have crests that rise like crowns above and back from their foreheads at a steep angle, the same white as their milk-pale flesh. They terminate just past the spots where their ear holes are, and the back halves of their skulls grow a thick, white hair.

  “They have six fingers!” I remember saying, reaching up to transfix the holograph with a finger. “Why do they look like us?”

  Gibson had frowned at me then, given me a long and careful look. “What makes you say that?”

  Evolution or some power stranger still had fashioned them like us. If one looked past the cosmetic differences, past the epoccipital crown of thorns, past the fangs and the massive, unfeeling eyes, one might almost see it. A kinship between us in the lines of arm and finger, in the face and the general body plan and in the hair that grew upon both our heads. They were far more human than the strange and sub-thinking Umandh to my young mind. That closeness, that similarity somehow made them more alien to me, more exotic and appealing because already there was a road to understanding them. The Umandh I did not understand, so like were they to corals and trees. The Cielcin I longed to understand.

  I have since paid for that mistake.

  We set up the trays in a low-ceilinged common space, folded metal side tables from the stainless carts, and locked the wheels in place—couldn’t these border-world primitives spring for suppression floats? Then we stepped back, our preparations complete, and withdrew into a side room at the behest of our guards, who said it was for our own protection. That was lucky—the last thing I needed was Ghen running his mouth just then. After a moment I faked a need for the bathroom, then faked an inability to understand the douleters when they objected. I gesticulated and shouted in Durantine, reciting stock phrases in the guttural language of that client republic. “Where is the library? Hello, my name is . . . Yes, yes. Where is the library?” And so on. The bastards didn’t understand a word. Needless to say, they let me go. For a moment I feared my guard would follow me, but when I none-too-gently jostled him into the door frame, he tottered back, clutching his bruised forehead and gasping. “Izvinit,” I said, still speaking Durantine. “You are . . . all right? Straf?”

  The man swore, pushed me away. “All right? Shit . . .” I moved to help. “No! You go,” he hissed between his teeth. “Around the corner on your right.”

  When I rounded that corner I straightened, rolling my shoulders and setting my jaw back in its proper place, shedding my disguise of posture and accent. Smoothly now, I hurried down the hall, guessing at the place’s layout, the pattern of it. I hurried past the single-occupant bathrooms clearly intended for the guards and down a switchbacked stair. The cameras were bound to see me, and I was sure that there had to be guards on the Cielcin, or whatever Gilliam Vas and the Whitehorse foederati had down there. But I figured I could always claim to have gotten lost. What could they do? Lock me in the coliseum? Already here, boys. And if it came to it, if things became truly desperate, I would put on my ring and face whatever came.

  As I have said, the convict-myrmidons were not confined in oubliettes or pilloried, nor were they kept in cold cells, but rather permitted to share the common space and the dormitories behind. At first blush, not depriving their felonious charges of the warmth of human contact could be construed as an act of kindness on the part of the gaolers. The reality, as in all of our Empire, was double-edged. That very openness exposed the convict-myrmidons to assaults, rapes, and molestations, all the cruelties and privations the human mind might contrive. Yet the prisons of the Borosevo coliseum also held a deeper, more icily calculated cruelty.

  Recall that Borosevo was a city built upon a coral atoll, on sandbars, and in the lagoon in which these petty masses gathered. Easy to forget, having lived for so long in and around the sunken concrete fastness of the coliseum. Yet the sea was never far. On a hunch I descended another flight of stairs, knowing now that I must be well below the high-water mark, and followed an arched corridor past empty chambers separated from the hall not by sealed doors but by classic iron bars. The stench of sewage hung ripe upon the air as in midsummer, baked by ambient heat. And something else . . . salt? Seawater, that was it. Seawater. Something wet and soft struck stone inside a cell to my right, splashing. I stopped, listening. Far above and distantly, I thought I could hear the groan and drag of human feet: the evening crowd awaiting that night’s skiff jousting. I had nothing to do with the sport, Emperor be praised. It was for gladiators only. The smell of raw sewage intensified, and I looked in growing horror on the muddy trenches carved into the sides of each cell.

  It clicked.

  There were holes in the ceilings of the cells, shafts doubtless leading up to the public privies just inside the coliseum vomitoria. The prisoners here were literally shat upon by the plebeian and serf clients of the Colosso games. I scowled, distracted by a deep-throated lowing from around one far corner, followed by the hoarse whisper of a man. I set my teeth and moved on, trying not to smell the salt and rotting feces.

  Holding my nose, I reached a place where the path split at right angles from where I had entered. The smell of seawater blessedly strengthened, cutting the gutter stink to a manageable level. The cells all stood empty—had there been any great culling action on the killing floor lately? I could not remember. I felt there should be more guards, but with no prisoners but the rumored one, what need was there for such?

  The dull sounds of human voices echoed up from my left, washed out by the misplaced groan of the sea. That was wrong, I decided. It should not have been audible, not this far underground.

  “It’s looking at me again,” a gruff voice hissed. Then more loudly, “What did I say about looking at me?” The ringing of metal on metal sounded up the hall, punctuated by soft splashes and the strange alien lowing I’d heard earlier.

  Then a deeper voice replied with words like broken glass: “Yukajji! Safigga o-koun ti-halamna. Jutsodo de tuka susu janakayu!”

  I froze mid-step. The words sounded completely different from a native speaker than they did from old Gibson or myself. Rougher, smoother, harder, edged with a razor’s brilliance. The guards both stepped back from the bars, appearing round the bend in the hall. “Earth and Emperor!” one swore, then lunged at the bars again with his shock-stick. “Priest ain’t paying enough for this shit.”

  A long, startlingly white arm pressed out from between the bars and seized the guard by his wrist. It might have been a human hand sculpted by some intelligence only vaguely informed on the subject of the original. It was far larger, for a start, the six thin fingers too long and with too many joints. The guard shrieked as his partner surged forward to help. “Yusu janakayu icheico.”

  “Let him go, demon!” The other guard’s voice broke as he slammed his shock-stick into the exposed arm. The Cielcin howled, released the gaoler, and withdrew that too-long arm back into the cell. It spat a series of alien curses into the air.

  “Iukatta!” I screamed. Stop! It was the command voice I’d learned, Lord Alistair Marlowe’s voice, ringing, resolute, clear, and hard as iron. The Cielcin was only going to get itself hurt.

  The guards both turned, sticks raised. “Who the hell are you?”

  I ignored them both. I wanted to see. They didn’t resist as I moved forward, something Imperial in my bearing moving them to momentary silence. And there it was, cowering in the muck at the back of its narrow cell, clutching its flash-numb arm, baring its snarl of translucent, glassy teeth. I wanted to laugh, to weep. To run. I had just gotten what I’d wanted—a glimpse of the Cielcin—and I needed then more than anything
to be away, to be anywhere else.

  It was strangely smaller than I expected: a stick sculpture of a man, arms and legs of bundled twigs or of bone. Yet that smallness was an illusion of its posture, and even as I watched, it uncoiled limbs too long for its small and pigeoned torso. Someone had sawed the horns from its brow and sweeping crest and sanded the nubs to the quick. It looked at me with eyes the size of tangerines, black as my grandmother’s funeral shroud. I discerned something in those eyes, but it was no human feeling. I felt only cold.

  Whatever spell of command I’d held over the two guards promptly evaporated, and the nearer man laid a hand on my shoulder. “Who the hell are you? No one comes down here without the count’s express permission.”

  “Tell that to Gilliam Vas,” I said, drawing the name from memory. It had its intended effect, lie that it was. The two men shied away, cowed by the mere mention of the hunchbacked priest. Shrugging his hands from my arm, I pushed forward, well within reach of the creature’s grasping talons. In its own language, I asked, “You are a soldier? You were taken in battle?”

  “Taken?” the creature repeated, then flared the four slitted nostrils in its weathered face where a nose might have been. “Nietolo ti-coie luda.” You speak like a child. I smiled, the expression meaningless to the creature. It was right, but I was grateful my words were coming at all, however haltingly. Glad that the Cielcin could speak in a tongue I understood, unlike the Umandh.

  Settling onto my haunches, I suppressed a thrill. I was speaking to a Cielcin—a true Cielcin, not Gibson or the sub-intelligent computers back in the Devil’s Rest library. “I have never spoken to one of the People before.” When the creature in the cell did not respond, only shifted, dragging one pale leg through the grime spattered on the stone floor, I pressed, “Tuka namshun ba-okun ne?” What is your name?

  It sat there watching me for what felt like half the life of the sun. Its face was so like a human face—like a skull, with those huge eyes. It resembled nothing so much as a statue left for generations in the rain, its nose and ears worn away—or it would, were it not for the bony crest that evoked some cell memory of saurian creatures bellowing in some jungle out of geologic time. It was cruelty that had sanded that crest to naught, not time. “Makisomn.”

  “Makisomn,” I repeated, tripping over the nasal digraph, knowing I was wholly incapable of trilling the sound the way they did—I lacked the muscular control of my nasal passages their species depended on to make that difficult sound. I pressed my hand to my chest and introduced myself. “Raka namshun ba-koun Hadrian.” My name is Hadrian.

  Where I had failed to pronounce its name, it failed to say mine. The anthropologist I never was might have grinned, and indeed the faintest smile pulled at my lips. “You speak its language?” one of the guards asked, ruining the moment.

  I twisted, looking up into the guard’s flat, dim face. There was a light in those dark eyes, dull and cold and uncomprehending. Fear, I realized. This man is afraid off me. Through my teeth I said, “Obviously.” I knew I couldn’t keep this up long, that soon the guards watching the other food servers would come looking for me. They would haul me either onto the street or into a cell. And it had been so easy—too easy. Well, I was too deep in now, and my curiosity had gotten the better of me. I never could resist.

  “Why is it here?” I gestured at the creature.

  “Thought you were from Gilliam.” The second guard narrowed somewhat sharper eyes at me. “Don’t you know?”

  Where before had I played the role of a Durantine serving man, now I played my father, standing to my full height, aware of my sweaty clothes and that I did not truly look the part. “And do you know what will happen to you when Gilliam Vas and his mother discover how easy it was for me to walk straight into this prison and up to this cell without ever once being detained? Answer my questions, or you will answer them for one of the cathars.” That’s done it, I thought. A proper threat. Put the fear of God in them, Marlowe.

  The second guard—call him Slow—stammered out a response. “He’s a gift, messer. For the count’s son’s Ephebeia. The beast’s to be sacrificed in triumph in the Colosso.”

  A dram of contempt passed my lips, and I turned away. At least it explained why the beast was here, not in the palace dungeons. Here at least it was close to the action, to the place where it would die. I crouched, eyeing the creature through the crooked iron bars. Behind it and high up, a slitted culvert open to the elements sloshed seawater down the back wall of the cell, coating the bricks with salt. “It,” I said.

  “What?” asked the other guard—call him Slower.

  “You called the Cielcin ‘he,’” I said to Slow, not looking at him. “The Cielcin are hermaphrodites. It.” If the guards cared at all about this correction, they didn’t say anything, and I crouched to speak to the xenobite in its own language. “Ole detu ti-okarin ti-saem gi ne?” Do you know why you are here?

  The creature bared its glassy fangs in a snarl, exposing blue-black gums. “Iagamam ji biqari o-koarin.”

  I shook my head. “Kill you? Not me, no. But someone will.”

  “Begu ne?” It asked. How? Was that fear in its voice?

  In all the stories they have told of me—all the ones I’ve heard, even some of the ones I’ve started—no one has ever gotten this scene quite right. My first encounter with the enemy. I have heard it said that I slew the beast in Colosso for all Emesh to see. I have heard it said that it was not in Borosevo at all, that my first meeting with the Cielcin was at Calagah in the south, with the Ichakta Uvanari, amid the ruins. The operas and holographs sing my praises in battle or curse me as a sorcerer, a magus tipping poison into the Emperor’s ear. None imagine—none believe—that our first meeting was amid sewage in the basement lockup of a sweaty coliseum gaol. The meanest, most provincial of circumstances, entirely without pomp.

  “How?” It asked again.

  “Sim ca,” I said, choosing honesty over comforting illusion.

  Not well.

  I never heard Makisomn’s reply, because someone—Slow or Slower, I never learned which—thrust his shock-stick between my shoulder blades, and the world went black.

  CHAPTER 43

  THE COUNT AND HIS LORD

  WAKING, I EXPECTED RESTRAINTS, but found none. I was seated, slumped in a fat armchair in a chamber dimly lit and climate controlled. I could not recall ever being quite so comfortable and sore at the same time. The shock-stick—it was all coming back to me—had not been nearly so gentle as the Whitehorses’ stunners. I felt almost as bruised as I had in Meidua after that gang had nearly killed me. I was only glad to be without corrective braces this time. A quick series of motions revealed no broken bones, and I set myself to studying my surroundings. After several years amid the mass-produced, neon-and-plastic world of the plebeians, the room was a sybaritic revelation, sumptuous beyond all my dreams. The walls were paneled not in imitation print but in genuine teak—so much of it that it had to have been flown in from offworld. The minutely tiled floor was draped in Tavrosi carpets in shades of green and gold and brown, showing hunting scenes in timeless fashion. Silk hangings billowed around an open set of double doors, stirred by winds slowed by the faint shimmer of a static field. All of it looked handmade, for in our world of machined perfection where even gemstones can be generated to order, craftsmanship is the greatest treasure.

  “You’re awake.” That deep voice—operatic basso profundo, darkly polished as the wood paneling on the walls. I knew it, but from where? “You must forgive my men, Lord Marlowe. They were under orders to protect Chanter Vas’s little prize.” Count Balian Mataro walked slowly into view, a snifter clutched in one massive hand. His scalp shone where it had been recently waxed, black as a chess piece, and he glowed in a pale-green-and-off-white suit whose jacket trailed almost to the floor, held shut by a fat silk sash detailed in gold and cream. “Though I understand you nearly had them fooled.
A fine performance, by the way. I’ve been watching the recordings.” He drummed one fist in applause against a sideboard as his lictor—a wiry woman with skin nearly so dark as his own—moved into position by the billowing curtains. “Though I must confess I am a bit confused as to why the son of a Delian archon is playing myrmidon in my Colosso. What is it you call yourself? Had of Teukros, isn’t it?”

  Of course he knew. The moment I was unconscious and in his power, he would have had his scholiasts blood-type me and checked the entry against the High College’s Standard Registry. He knew I was palatine, knew which house I was from, what year I’d been decanted. Knew my family history, my relations. Knew I was part of the Imperial peerage, my blood distantly conjoined with the Emperor’s own. A thousand stories, all lies, spun like prayer wheels in my mind. What could I say? The man had read my blood. There were no lies I could tell at this point, no matter how clever I thought I was. Sometimes, if you’re very, very unlucky, there is only one answer.

  “No, lordship. It is as you say—I am palatine. My name is . . . is Hadrian Marlowe. Of Delos.” I swallowed, the words strange, almost painful on my tongue. Still sore from the shock-stick, I realized that I had not answered his question, though it was only after the big man raised sardonic eyebrows, gold chains tinkling about his bull’s neck, that I added, “It is a long story, lordship.” Those eyebrows did not lower. I had to remind myself that this was a palatine, that patience was his native language.

  Lacking in options, aware of the lictor to my right, her muscles like whip-cord, and imagining hidden guards behind the hunting tapestry on the inner wall, plasma burners trained on my chest, I told him. About Demetri, about the flophouse clinic and the old woman, about Cat and the plague, about Teukros and the letter Gibson had written for me. It took less time than I imagined, nearly three years of my life covered in some twenty minutes. I left out the adventure with the Umandh and any reference to truly criminal activity. I was not about to confess to the near murder of a plebeian shopkeeper or serial theft in the count’s hearing. But in short order I was done, and after a brief pause, I asked, “You haven’t waved Delos, have you, lordship?”