Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  We were not the first.

  That basic cornerstone of the Chantry’s faith was—and is—a lie. I felt myself, my world, shrink in that moment. I became smaller than an atom, crushed beneath the weight of all that space and time, and mankind shrank with me. All its proud kings and emperors; all its warriors; its great poets and artists; its farmers and sailors; its great accomplishments; its greater atrocities. All vanished into the context this conclusion provided. And it was all confirmed, rendered for me as immutable and natural law by Valka’s consecrating word: “Yes.”

  Yes.

  The Chantry knew. The Chantry had to know, or else why would they so police our words, our thoughts, in the name of our souls? This fact threatened the very foundations of their belief, of their power, and so they held on tighter, limited offworld travel, limited datasphere access. Datasphere access. Valka’s own terminal was disconnected from the planet’s network—dark, unmonitored. But that thought drained the blood from me. We were speaking heresy.

  I imagined the Inquisition cutting out tongues, saw the tattooed foreheads and the branded ones. I imagined men and women sitting blind and hunched under bridges, hands out for alms, the word HERETIC large and dark against their skin, ragged cheeks torn in the agony of the blind and dumb. How often had I seen such people in Meidua and in Borosevo, their truth cut down by the cathars’ knives, turned to rumor and folklore in the whispering of crowds? Too often. I clammed up, knowing the damage was done, knowing that Valka and I would both be questioned, that I at least would join those mutilated husks on the steps of the city temple where once I had begged with Cat. I half expected armed guards to burst through the door at any moment.

  Nothing happened. And Valka, for all the worlds, seemed unconcerned. She understood what we were saying, surely! She must know what would happen. But she only smiled at me and drank her priceless wine.

  It was all mad. I heard a voice—my voice—speaking anyway. “What do you call them?” I gestured weakly, nearly sloshing wine from my cup. “The builders?”

  Valka glanced upward, as if checking something written under the arch of her skull. “Ke kuchya mnousseir.”

  “The . . . Grave?”

  “The Quiet,” she corrected. “I really shouldn’t be telling you this.” Her tone shifted, turning almost wooden, as if she wanted the words out of the way. “The diplomatic suites aren’t officially monitored, but I don’t trust a one of your bureaucrats.”

  Ordinarily I might have argued with that. This was the palace and seat of a palatinate. Every room was monitored. Every one. When the next day and the next dawned with neither of us tortured or tormented, I would decide that Valka had been right. But in that moment, my longing for knowledge—that same impulse that had driven me down into the coliseum’s gaol and into the hands of Balian Mataro—pinned me to my seat like a butterfly to the mounting board.

  “Why do you call them that? The Quiet?” I bit my lip, glanced nervously at the door. “It’s a bit . . . dramatic, wouldn’t you say?” And I would know, eh?

  “Because at all their sites—here, on Sadal Suud, on Judecca, Rubicon, Ozymandias, Malkuth, and all the rest—there’s nothing.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “No tools, no ships, no bodies, no artifacts of any kind.” The whole time she was speaking, those gold and amber eyes never left my face. At any other moment, I might have enjoyed that contact, but then it only chilled me. “Just the buildings. They’re mute. Quiet.”

  This slammed another wave of silence down upon us, and we sat, me processing, Valka allowing me to process. Something she had said juddered into place, and I asked, “No bodies? Are you serious?” I took up my wineglass again. “How is that possible? Where did they go?”

  Valka performed the least eloquent shrug I have ever seen, an achievement in itself. “No idea. It does make the Chantry’s job a fair bit easier, wouldn’t you say?”

  “You suspect them of carrying off everything? Looting the sites?”

  “What?” Valka’s eyes went wide as dinner plates. “No! ’Twould be impossible.” Those brilliant eyes narrowed. “Your Chantry is composed of men, M. Gibson, not gods.”

  I had to stop myself from grinding my teeth. “It’s not my Chantry.”

  A small sound escaped Valka, the seed of laughter. “If you say so, barbarian.” I looked up at her to bite off a retort, but her eyes were smiling. Only then did I note that she had said the word softly, almost teasingly.

  That caught me so much by surprise that I stammered as I pressed ahead. “But surely the bodies can’t be gone. They must have done something with their dead. Must have left—”

  “Nothing,” Valka finished and shrugged again, “Nothing, M. Gibson. Just the structures themselves.”

  I frowned, opened my mouth. When the words did not at once come to me, I disguised the failure with a swallow of wine. “That’s not possible.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  Valka waved a hand. Once, twice, several times, each gesture cycling her terminal from holograph image to holograph image. “Just the carvings I told you about, the ones the Umandh emulate with their story knots.” With another gesture she conjured projections of the objects in question, though I recalled them well enough, have even drawn one in my journal. “Completely unreadable, of course.”

  My heart sank. “No one knows how to read them? Outside the Empire?”

  “Not that I’ve ever heard of. Some rogue scholiasts have tried, but without any idea how the symbols relate to the spoken language, or if they do . . .” She trailed off.

  “It’s a Rosetta problem,” I said, and when she raised curious eyebrows at me, I explained that on Old Earth there was once a people whose writing could not be read. Not until a monument was found that showed the ancient writing alongside two other known languages of the time. It was like a key that opened up all the writings of that lost empire. “And the strangest part,” I added, babbling now to mask the welter of emotions churning in my stomach, “was that the hieroglyphs weren’t ideograms at all, but a system of comingled logograms and alphabetic elements . . . What?”

  She was smiling at me. Not with her eyes alone, but properly smiling. It lasted only a moment, then collapsed under the weight of my gaze. She shook her head. “Nothing.”

  “But why come here?” I gestured inchoate at the glimmering holographs, at the stone facade of Calagah, black and smooth as poured glass. “There have to be a dozen sites outside Imperial space where the Chantry doesn’t hold power.”

  At last she answered, “Not that aren’t controlled by the Extras.” She jabbed a finger at me, words slurring from Markarian’s strong wine. “Only barbarians in the universe worse than your lot.” She snorted, and I could not tell if it was in derision or with laughter.

  “My lot?” I knew what she meant, but it helped me to distance myself. Outside the narrow windows an ornithon hissed at the setting sun.

  “The Sollan Empire.”

  My lips pulled back from my teeth, snagging briefly on the chipped end of one incisor, relic of a bout in the Colosso. “I don’t know anything about the Extrasolarians.” I wasn’t sure how to continue this line of conversation, so I changed tracks instead. “So these . . . the Quiet. They’re the object of your study? Not the Umandh?”

  Doctor Onderra took a more measured sip, conscious now of the value of the vintage. She gave an insistent nod, pushed the hair from her high forehead, fingers lingering in the red-black whorls. “As you say.”

  “I still can’t believe this is a secret, that it’s true.”

  Valka sniffed. “Your great houses control information. They control datasphere access and restrict offworld travel to a few and allow the Chantry to run roughshod over them at every turn. You can’t have known.”

  “We—The great houses don’t let the Chantry run roughshod over them. They j
ust can. The Inquisition would sooner destroy a planet than let it go to heresy, and they have the means. Plagues, atomics, weapons the Mericanii left behind. Things that crack planets, Doctor.”

  “Heresy . . .” Valka snorted again, a decidedly unladylike sound.

  “Truth is treason and all that.” I waved a hand, trying to recall the source of the quote. Gibson would have known, but Gibson was gone.

  The woman’s face composed itself into a grave mask. “Sin.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You Sollans have made crime and sin the same thing. You couldn’t see the truth if it danced naked in front of you.”

  “I could,” I snapped, defiant, a trace of my old palatine hauteur—Hadrian Marlowe’s demeanor, not Hadrian Gibson’s—creeping though. I gestured at the twinkling holographs, still glittering treacherously in the air above the low table.

  Valka stood, leaving her emptied wine glass on the drinking table between us. “Maybe you could, at that.”

  My tact momentarily discarded, I asked, “Why haven’t they killed you?”

  She looked down at me over her shoulder. “Excuse me?”

  “All this!” I waved a hand over the shimmering holographs. “You know all this. I don’t believe they’d let you just . . . walk around. Breathing Imperial air.”

  “You think you own the air?” Her accent congealed around the question, making her seem somehow stranger and more foreign.

  I waved this aside as strenuously as I could. “The Chantry can’t want this spread about. If they knew you were telling me . . .” What was I saying? Of course they knew. “We’d both be dead. Worse than dead.” I had to stop myself from spiraling off into a description of exactly what worse than dead meant.

  Valka repeated her peculiar gesture of staring up at the ceiling. She scratched at the back of her neck, exhaling sharply. Presently she crossed the space between us and placed a hand on the side of my neck. I flinched but all too quickly relaxed into her grip. “They aren’t going to find out, Hadrian. Peace.” She smiled, but in that way that older people reserve for children who do not know any better. “I’ve been here for years. I told Elomas right here in this room.” Her smile transmuted, turning from wood to mocking moonlight. “He’s just fine, isn’t he?”

  CHAPTER 56

  WITCHES AND DEMONS

  IF IT WAS TO be believed, my little stunt with Ligeia Vas at dinner seemed to have endeared me somewhat to Lord Mataro even as it condemned me to walk on eggshells whenever I was not in the personal company of His Lordship or the royal children. Lord Mataro, I think, was one of those lords who chafed under the yoke of Chantry oversight. How many lords palatine, how many planets does that theocratic institution hold in the palm of its hand, quivering for fear of retribution, of the cathars’ knives? For fear of invoking the atomic wrath of the Inquisition, the planet-burning might of weapons they would not permit even the Emperor to command? And yet, like Valka said, the Chantry is composed of men, and men can be outmaneuvered, tricked, mocked at table.

  Gray-skinned vilicus Engin and the factionarius from dinner were all bows and scraping when the count, led by a trio of lictors armed and shielded, exited the conference room to rejoin those of us in his train left to wait in the hall. Doctor Onderra and I stood, ending a conversation with a junior scholiast regarding the native life forms on Emesh that everyone called bugs. “Not insects at all, really,” as he put it. A quintet of logothetes in drab brown uniforms scurried toward their lord, holograph tablets projecting, preparing audio recordings and ready to make annotations with glittering light-pens.

  I fell into step beside Valka, sandwiched between a double line of green-armored guards. Ahead, Ligeia and Gilliam Vas shadowed the count, the former saying something to His Excellency in a dry monotone. How many times had I followed Father thusly as a boy? How many hundreds of times? The signet ring on its new chain was clammy against my chest, hidden by the cream shirt and fashionable silver silk robe I had been given for the occasion. As the count’s train resolved from chaos into a line, a logothete dodged out of my way with a muttered, “Court Translator, sir.” I could not say if that was my proper title or if the man was merely confused. Self-conscious, I busied myself with fixing the wide sash that secured the light robe about my narrow waist. I wished they’d permitted me a shield-belt, some sort of weapon. But no, only the palatine were allowed to carry weapons in the presence of other palatine, and I’d my role to play. It may have won me a measure of friendship from the count, but my stunt with Ligeia Vas had put me in a precarious position. Tor Gibson did always say I was melodramatic. One day that mouth of yours will get you killed. Well, it had certainly gotten me exiled, and now . . .

  “You know, I think I was wrong about you, Gibson,” Valka said, steadying the Umandh comms box that swung heavily from her belt. We cut impressive shadows across the mosaic on the floor of the Fishers Guild’s main hall, tiles patterned artfully with images of men and Umandh pulling fish from the sea to feed a hungry city. It took me a moment to recall that Gibson meant me, as if some part of me expected the old scholiast to speak up from a dingy corner, eyes bright but glassy, faded with time. He never did. By the time I realized I’d taken too long to answer, I decided to keep my mouth closed and wait the doctor out, using my silence to pull her into further speech. Presently she cleared her throat. “You aren’t a barbarian.”

  “Not just a barbarian, you mean.” We passed under the shadow of a holograph plate mounted on the wall, its ghostly panel displaying footage from a Colosso melee not two days old. The sound was muted, but the anchor’s words were captioned along the bottom in Galstani.

  Valka snorted, glanced up at the screen just at it flitted to the face of the anchor, a handsome native woman, dark complected but with waving hair so blond it was nearly white. In Panthai, her native language, Valka said, “Everyone here is a barbarian, but you’re all right.” She nudged me as we stood there watching the holograph.

  In a stage whisper and in Imperial, I said, “That’s sweet of you to say.” By my smile I made it clear I was teasing her, and she looked away, frustrated.

  The doctor cocked her chin upward, mock-offended. Still in Panthai, she added, “But you’re strange for an Imperial, you know.”

  “We’re not all the same,” I said, the riposte coming out before I knew what I was saying. “There’s an ocean of difference between the count and myself.”

  “You’re both palatine men.”

  “Is that all you see?” I asked, darting a look her way. “My class? My sex?”

  “’Tis what you are.”

  Something twisted in me at those words. Was it not a species of the same argument used by the Chantry to dismiss the Cielcin as devils? Or by my father to dismiss his plebeians? By myself to dismiss Gilliam? These latter two were lost on me at the time, but their seeds were there, stirring that I might one day see. For the moment I saw only that Valka was blinkered herself because she did not see me.

  “There’s more to us than that,” I objected. “More than where we’re born or how. We are . . . more.” I finished lamely.

  That brought a frown to her strange but lovely face. “What do you mean?”

  I shrugged. “You should judge people by their actions, by what they do, not who they are.”

  The Demarchist twitched to hear this and scratched at her tattooed arm. I didn’t appreciate its full meaning at the time, but the intense fractal intaglio decorating Valka from shoulder blade and breast to the base of her graceful fingers contained in its whorls and geometric angles the coded history of her line. A cultural, visual representation of the genes native to her very bones. She wore her history and her clan’s history on her sleeve, written in ideograms I could never understand. All this moved behind the lines of her fine-boned face in mute contradiction to the words I’d uttered. “’Twould be nice if you applied that generosity to anyone who’s not one of your nobile
s.”

  “I do! I try to.” She was still speaking Panthai, so I replied in kind, halting and thick-tongued though I doubtless was. “Where do you think the patricians come from? They’re plebeians who have been rewarded for their actions.” I had to remind myself that I was playing the role of a patrician.

  “Whereas you were rewarded for being born in the right place.”

  I set my jaw. “Would you punish me for who my parents are? They worked for what they had, built upon what their parents gave them, the same as anyone else: palatine or plebeian. I have stolen nothing.” I stopped short, afraid I was close to revealing my palatine identity.

  “Enough,” she said breezily, following the swish of the viridian-robed scholiasts ahead of us. “I never thought I’d see the day an Imperial prior was shamed at a lord’s banquet.” I took the change of subject to mean I’d scored a point, but I did not gloat.

  Bogged down by my unfamiliarity with her language, I shook my head. “Is where you come from truly so different?”

  “Yes.” We stepped through a static field and into the cloying air. The scream of fliers greeted the new day, their noise rebounding off the low buildings of Borosevo. “The Wisp’s far enough away that it can afford to be.”

  I looked down at my boots past the hem of the silk robes. “I would like to see it someday.”

  She stopped a moment, nearly colliding with the logothete behind her. She was looking at me strangely, as if I’d said I wanted to destroy her Demarchy and not visit it—or as if that were what she had expected me to say. After she stumbled her way clear of the logothete, we had to hurry to rejoin the line.

  * * *

  Perhaps the Chantry’s icona are real. Perhaps those spirits hear our prayers. Perhaps not. I have always considered myself agnostic, but you see, to a peasant, a serf who has never seen the Emperor—to him, our Emperor and those gods are the same. His Radiance laws still affect the provincial, even when there is no Emperor at all. It is a mistake to believe we must know a thing to be influenced by it. It is a mistake to believe the thing must even be real. The universe is, and we are in it. And by whatever strange forces move us through time, God or otherwise, our tour of the fisheries brought us to the same warehouse where I had first seen the Umandh years and lifetimes earlier.