Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  After what I feared was an embarrassingly long moment, I managed to ask, “You work with the Umandh?” I could have melted through the floor then and there. What an astonishingly bland question. If I had known who she was—what she would be—I would have strangled myself from the shame.

  The doctor glanced back over her shoulder, frowning at the three creatures, now intent on scooping up the shattered remains of the broken bulb. “Only incidentally. My primary focus lies with the ruins on the southern continent.”

  “I wasn’t aware Emesh had a southern continent.” What ruins? I made a mental note to steer the conversation in that direction later on. I’d heard nothing about Emesh playing host to alien structures—but then I’d known nothing of the Umandh until Cat had taught me better.

  “Anshar!” Anaïs offered. “It’s not large. It’s where Tolbaran is—the old capital from back before my great-grandfather took the planet and built Borosevo.” That had been a bloody mess, I later learned. Before Emesh had become an Imperial palatinate, it was dominated by Extrasolarian interests and a Norman Freeholder group. When House Mataro descended on the planet more than a millennium ago, backed by three Imperial Legions, they’d built the oldest parts of Borosevo on an isolated atoll, leaving the old capital to molder in the hands of their servants.

  Doctor Onderra smiled again. “Your companion is not from here, is he?” She said it just like that, no honorific, no ladyship. The doctor only clipped the Umandh comms tablet to her belt the way a chanter might his prayer book, jounced by her hip. She had not addressed me directly; she spoke to Anaïs as though she were my handler and I her servitor.

  Her ladyship clutched my arm again, pulled me close in spite of my attempts to maintain distance. “No, he’s from Teukros. He was a myrmidon, did you know? Fought in the Colosso for a year.”

  The Tavrosi academic raised her eyebrows, the sort of hollow, unimpressed expression of an adult entertaining a very small, very irritating child. “Was he indeed?” Gone was her earlier openness, her warmth, snuffed out by this new datum. Belatedly I remembered that the Tavrosi clans took a dim view of blood sport. Among those strange men at the edge of the galaxy, violence was a thing for primitives and machines. War among the clans, such as it was, was almost exclusively economic. I could feel the doctor’s temperature toward me cool. That bothered me, and it bothered me that it bothered me. I threw a glance at the palatine lady on my arm, sharply as I could. She didn’t see it.

  “Tell me, M. Gibson, do you enjoy killing slaves for your masters?”

  It took me a moment to realize the woman was speaking to me. I had forgotten my assumed name. When her words hit me, they did so like a blow to the liver. But then, she was Tavrosi. They did not have the Colosso in that strange and distant country, nor slaves. They had sim games and mandatory public work and a peace maintained by therapy and reeducation, protest where we had order, chaos where we had peace. They discouraged families, so much so that long associations between couples were disrupted by their mongrel state, and they committed that greatest of abominations: mingling their flesh with that of machines. Deciding that she had not understood the myrmidon-gladiator distinction, I said, “I fought with the slaves, my lady. Against the gladiators.”

  “Against them?” Valka Onderra sneered. “Well, I suppose ’tis all right, then.” She pressed a strand of that red-black hair back behind one ear. “And I’m not a lady, I’m a doctor.”

  She was a scholar like me, then, as she had already admitted when she’d said she was a xenologist, but that point had escaped me for the barest second, making my brain numb and the rest of me feel the fool. She broke off a moment and shouted instructions to the two douleters, gesticulating with that intricately tattooed hand. The two men responded, circling the Umandh with their sticks, and Valka tossed them the comms box from her belt clip. “Amateurs.” She said the word like a curse, an effect heightened by the snapping Tavrosi accent, and tapped a finger against her temple, those golden eyes narrowing in frustrated analysis. She burbled a stream of swear words in a Tavrosi dialect. I caught the word okthireakh—Imperials—and another that sounded awfully like barbarians.

  Barbarians, was it? I dusted off my Tavrosi languages, cracking my metaphorical knuckles. I switched to Nordei, the most common of the Demarchy’s languages. I had only the barest understanding of it, but I tried anyhow. I asked, “The device you use to communicate with them—how does it work?”

  Valka Onderra’s fine eyebrows rose in surprise, but the woman responded—not in Nordei, but in Travatsk, another of the Tavrosi languages. Sly. I didn’t know a word of it, so I spoke instead in Panthai, the only other clan language in which I could string together a sentence, though I must have sounded like a thick child. “I didn’t understand a word of what you said.”

  Incredibly, the Tavrosi doctor’s face split into a smile. Anaïs was looking from her to me, bafflement on her perfectly gene-sculpted face. “Was that Tavrosi? Do you two know one another already?” She looked pouty beneath that sheer curtain of blue-black hair. I resisted the urge to tell her ladyship that there was no such thing as Tavrosi.

  The foreigner looked at me again as if for the first time, stroking her pointed chin. “No, no, ladyship. I’ve never seen the man before in my life.” Her attention briefly flickered from my face to Anaïs’s, then returned to me. “Not many Imperials learn a Tavrosi language, much less two.”

  “I’m not many Imperials,” I said, standing a little straighter and—I hoped—taller in the doctor’s eyes.

  “Plainly.” She cocked an eyebrow. Then she changed tack. “The Umandh aren’t like us. They don’t think.”

  “I’m sorry?” I said. The subject change had given me whiplash.

  “What does that mean?” Anaïs said at the same time.

  Valka jerked her head over her shoulder to where the xenobites had returned to replacing the light fixtures under the watchful supervision of their overseers. “They aren’t individuals, really. They’re more like . . . well, like a neural lace.” I had no idea what that was, but I kept my face impassive. In the face of ignorance I’ve often found that silence is the best tutor.

  I wished only that someone had taught Anaïs Mataro that same lesson. “What’s that?”

  The Tavrosi cocked an eyebrow, “Each of the Umandh is like a cell, and they . . . The droning is not so much their communication. ’Tis not a language. They’re . . . networking.”

  Networking? It was a datasphere term, I knew, but I had as little understanding of the arcane workings of a planetary datasphere as a dog has of human mating rituals. This time my curiosity surrounding this semi-forbidden field of study overcame my trepidation. “You mean they’re a combine-organism?”

  The doctor brightened, glanced from Lady Anaïs to myself. Her brows knitted together, and she inclined her head in a slight affirmative. “Not entirely. They’re distinct—they don’t share tissue—but the droning lets them harmonize.”

  “Literally harmonize.” I cracked a thin, crooked smile, which Valka returned. Somewhere in my breast, a shadow of the old Hadrian—the scholiast’s pupil—stirred as if from fugue. This was what I had lived for as a boy. Had it really only been four years ago? Four years for me, I amended. Nearly forty in truth.

  Clearly unhappy to be boxed out of the conversation, Anaïs leaned forward. “Are you staying in the capital long, doctor?”

  “Only until the storms pass. Calagah gets a bit . . . well, ’tis underwater this time of year.” The Umandh were finishing their work, the pitch of their song rising, a steady beat joining the suddenly disjointed sound of their chorus. I still couldn’t see how they made the sound, though I figured they had to have mouths somewhere in their tops, somewhere amongst the tentacles. As one of the tripod creatures trundled past, I marked the thick white glaze it had plastered over itself, daubed in whorls down the length of its narrow trunk and radial thighs. Some sort of tribal m
arking? I wanted to ask about it, but I filed that away too for another time.

  Instead I followed the natural flow of the conversation, resisting the temptation to pursue any number of tangents up their blind alleys. “Calagah? Would those be the ruins you mentioned?”

  To my small amazement, it was Anaïs who replied, not the doctor. “You really don’t know?”

  I really didn’t, and I was growing a bit tired of the pattern of non-answer shaping up in this conversation. Still I kept the edge off my tongue, mindful that one of the ladies was a palatine and that I—in my current guise as M. Hadrian Gibson—was not. “No, my lady, I’m afraid not.”

  Valka ran a thoughtful hand up and down the tangle of lines on her arm before she turned those unlikely golden eyes upon me. “Calagah is the ruins, yes. Um . . .” She eyed Lady Anaïs, biting her lower lip. When Anaïs neither complained nor made a move to stop her, the doctor said, “’Tis very old, not human. The site predates the Norman settlement here by thousands of years.”

  That made me blink. “Umandh, then?” I’d never heard of the Umandh building anything so permanent. Their homes, built along the seacoast in one fenced-off ward of the city and on their island alienage—were accretive structures mounded from debris. They’d taken the wreckage of boats and starcraft, bits of crumbling buildings, and whatever else they could find and lashed them together to make lean-tos. Their village on the water—in the water—looked like nothing so much as a gyre washed up upon the shore. It would not last a decade unattended, much less centuries.

  The doctor wrinkled her nose. “’Tis the obvious conclusion.” Doctor Onderra eyed the palatine lady on my arm and spoke more plainly. “We are not the oldest race in the cosmos, though most seem never to leave their home worlds. Extinction catches them first.”

  “Like the Arch-Builders on Ozymandias?” I asked, naming the first extinct civilization that came to mind.

  Valka blinked. “Quite, but the ruins at Calagah are far older. The Arch-Builders have only been extinct for—”

  “For forty-three hundred years, yes,” I finished, eager to prove my knowledge. Valka looked surprised, and I added, “I’m a bit of an amateur enthusiast.”

  The Tavrosi woman crossed her arms. “Indeed. Well, some of us make a living at this, M. Gibson. Though I’ve several holographs of the Calagah site. If you’re really interested, you could stop by my chambers.” I smiled, sure that she was warming to me—or I was, until she came down for the sting. “That is, if you’re not too busy killing people.” Then she brushed past, leaving me small and sweating in her wake.

  She was in the shadow of the arches back out to the colonnade, following the Umandh and the two douleters, before I found my words. “It was very nice to meet you, Doctor.”

  She didn’t look back, but she waved. “I suppose it was.”

  I had no response for that, and I stood there, Anaïs forgotten on my arm. No words came to me, and for a time only the distant sounds of Borosevo came through from the balcony. The lights the Umandh had installed flicked on. The word that finally came to mind was Classical English: dumbstruck. Literally to be struck speechless, as by a blow. We have no word for it in Galstani, but no other word applied.

  CHAPTER 47

  THE CAGE

  LET US LEAVE THE matter of Valka and my turbulent heart a moment. She has been brought upon the stage, but as I waited for her, so must you. I must approach her now as I did then: cautiously, curious as the azhdarch circling the matador. Besides, I did not see her again for weeks, save in the impressions she made upon my young mind. Instead I attended Anaïs’s regatta, another fight at the coliseum, and two live operas put on by the same Eudoran troupe who had performed at the Colosso’s halftime show. The rest of my time I spent accompanying the count’s children about their business and their lessons, and I was only allowed out of the castle on such voyages.

  It was like the count knew I wanted to leave. I do not think he truly did, but I felt hemmed in, locked like Daedalus in the dungeons of Knossos. And like Daedalus, I sulked in the darkness of my room, scratching new images in my journal. What had I been thinking? That the count would take an interest in my abilities and retain my services? That I charmed my way into his service by mere force of character? That indeed is the story they tell: that Marlowe the coliseum slave talked his way into the count’s service and into the arms of his daughter, that he was seduced by a witch of the Demarchy and turned thence to darkness. I wish I could say it were so. I wish I could say I came to the count’s service by some cleverness on my part.

  Nothing could be further from the truth.

  I was there because I had defeated myself. Hoisted by my own petard, to borrow the Classical English expression. I’d had a plan to escape, to buy a starship for a song and a lie. I’d alienated my only close friend to do it, and I didn’t even have a ship to show for it. I’d been so sure when I walked into that gaol that I’d be able to walk out again. I’d forgotten who I was for a moment, forgotten the secret of my blood. I’d grown too comfortable in the coliseum, sure that Had of Teukros could do as he liked.

  Still, it could have been worse. I could have been in the gaol.

  I wanted to contact my friends in the Colosso. Pallino, Elara, Ghen, and Siran—even Switch, if he would hear me. Palace security would have monitored any calls I made as surely as they monitored my every hour lounging alone in my room. Any talk of our plans to buy a ship might look like an attempt to flee. I’d bought my comfort and fine meals with my privacy, traded my future for that present, if unwillingly. As on Delos, I was aware that I sat in a crystal cage.

  Only this time I had no one to blame but myself.

  I was not leaving Emesh. My stupidity, my cupidity had seen to that. Like Doctor Faustus, I had wanted knowledge—and like Doctor Faustus, that knowledge had cost me dearly, would cost more dearly still.

  CHAPTER 48

  TRIUMPH

  THE MUSIC OF THE parade as it marched out of the vomitorium beneath the lord’s box was deafening, the martial sounds of brass and drums amplified by speaker drones arcing above the heads of the crowd. I stood in one remote corner of the box, sipping a glass of Kandarene red in the shadows of a striped awning, watching as the count and his husband waved from the fore of the box, Anaïs between them. The young lord Dorian, whose birthday it was, stood on a bier at the head of the parade in full combat armor enameled green and golden, a white cape pinned to his shoulders, a highmatter sword glowing in his hand.

  I barely saw him.

  I was seeing Crispin instead, seeing my brother in black and crimson paraded about the Meidua coliseum while my father and mother—had my mother even attended?—watched from the equivalent of where Lords Balian and Luthor stood. Instead of Tor Vladimir and Chancellor Ogir, I saw Sir Felix and Tor Alcuin. Instead of the wiry, hard-eyed Dame Camilla, I saw Roban, who once had saved my life. Only the presence of the Terran Chantry was unchanged: two figures in spectral black, darker than space itself, their chasubles trimmed in iridescent white. Indeed, were it not for Chanter Gilliam’s disfigurement, he and his superior, the tall, hook-nosed grand prior of Emesh, might have been a match for Severn and old Eusebia.

  The woman was Ligeia Vas, Gilliam’s natural mother, made unnatural by time. I tried to look past her withered visage, the long braid of silver-white hair looped about her shoulders like a scarf, the knobby hands resting on their cane. I tried to see the palatine woman who had willingly borne a child to term within herself. I couldn’t see it, but then, who could see such a life in so withered a face? No young man, surely. No young man has ever seen anything in the elderly save the damage done by Time.

  Fireworks crackled from the parade line, fired by hoplites in formal armor. They filled the dusk with colors: bright greens, soft golds, scarlets like falling stars. Each shock of color was accompanied by a deep concussion that shook the eardrums. The blasts were more felt than heard, the noise of t
hem lost in the cheering of the crowd and the blaring of music. The Borosevo Sphinxes—the gladiators I’d spent two years surviving—all stood on the bier a step below Dorian, armed for the combat that was to come. Behind them on similar biers came those house sworn to Count Mataro’s service: Melluan, Kvar, and Veisi, as well as a knight-tribune called Smythe and her officers, representing the Imperial Legions. The biers were followed by a platoon of hoplites in Mataro colors, and next came a full century of Imperial legionnaires in their faceless ivory armor, all of them boxed in by a double line of marching band musicians and by the firework mortars.

  Draining my wine, I left the glass on a stone rail and pressed through the crowd of dignitaries flooding the box, bowing my way around Lady Veisi in search of a better vantage point. Word was that there was to be a melee followed by a staged round of duels between Dorian and the gladiators—Dorian would win, but only just and in such a way that none would question his legitimacy. But before all that the cathars would appear, dragging the Cielcin from its prison to die its sacrificial death.

  I couldn’t have cared less about the young nobile. He was a decent enough sort but vapid as that sister of his, though without any of her guile. My concern was the melee. Not one month ago I would have been fodder. I could not decide if I was ready to see my one-time companions again: Pallino and Ghen, Switch and Siran and the rest. I hoped they wouldn’t all be fighting that day.