Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Gilliam threw himself at me, spitting. His sword lanced straight at my eyes, and I was saved from blindness or death only by a reflexive slash-block that left me open to remise, and I was lucky that the speed of my defense had startled Gilliam into stillness. We stood there a moment, watching one another. If there were a moment to talk, to come to an understanding, it was then and there. But we never did.

  The little man snarled and threw himself at me again. I parried his blade, binding it, slicing down and across to jab Gilliam in the right hip. The point of my sword hit bone, and he bit down a cry. For a moment there was a clear line of attack open to his throat. I didn’t take it but backed off—as I had a thousand times with Crispin—and waited. One of the officiants murmured something to his square-faced compatriot. I couldn’t make out the words, but the tone was one of anxious disapproval. I glanced at the crowd. Elomas’s wizened face darkened as he watched me, sipping his tea.

  “Could have ended it . . .”

  I circled Gilliam, blade in a low guard, pivoting to keep my right side oriented toward him. “En garde!” I said. Stand and fight, you bastard. “En garde!” I cried again, and I rattled my saber, tip jouncing in anxious little circles. I wanted to goad him, to bait him into making a mistake. Crispin had gone for it nearly every time, his brain chemistry blanched in its own androgens, blinkered as surely as a horse on parade. It didn’t work. The limping priest held his ground, jaw set, shoulders square as he could make them.

  I could wait no longer and moved forward, sword falling in blow after blow against his guard. The priest was fighting carefully. No more of the spastic movements and quick footwork I’d come to expect. With a snap of my shoulder I brushed his blade aside and again exposed a clear line of attack, baring the man’s pigeon chest.

  I didn’t take it. Couldn’t take it. I didn’t even see my opportunity, blinded as I was by sentiment. I had not killed, and so I could not. I gave ground, retreating to the safety of guard. I sensed the watchers’ disquiet, though I did not then understand it, confusing it for the discomfort anyone would feel knowing they were to witness a killing. “I don’t want to kill you,” I said at last, crouching lower in my guard.

  Gilliam circled to my right, and I followed the arc of him, keeping my leading foot pointed in his direction. “Hadrian, you’re playing with him!” The voice belonged to Anaïs, high and sick with nervous tension. There followed a moment of supreme stillness, the holo of our lives paused, suspended. Only the flowers moved; only they breathed.

  Something like a shadow passed across the chanter’s uneven face, worming its way through his eyes to his soul. Like gravity, it could not be seen save by its effects. The twisted lips twisted, the dark eye darkened, and the blue one froze over and cracked. Every cord in the man was taut as a bowstring, and he snarled, “I’ll kill you, heretic. I’ll not let you twist this place. These people. My people.”

  Long have I sat in my cell here at Colchis without writing a word. The vermilion ink which my hosts provided for me had dried, and the candles guttered out. I sent for a fresh bottle and new light—the night here is interminable. Perhaps there is some meaning in all this.

  Gilliam’s rage moved him, blinded him. It nearly blinded me, so fast did that sword move. His haste and fury made him sloppy, and thrice more could I have slain him: once with a strike to the abdomen, once with a wide slash to the throat, and again with a blow that would have staved in his ugly skull and dyed his blond hair red. Yet I couldn’t do it. You must think it strange that I, who has supped on more blood than have most empires, could not kill a single man. I say again: a single death is a tragedy.

  I stabbed him in the hip again instead, steel grating against bone. The point of my sword came out red, startlingly bright in the morning air. Gilliam flashed his teeth at me, and I half expected to see blood on the gums. But he spat, “Demoniac! Abomination!” What was he talking about? I staggered back, keeping my sword between us, trying not to think of the blood on its point. “Threat . . .” he was saying. “Spy . . .” He still believed me part of some conspiracy against the country, against his faith. And all because I’d been interested in his Cielcin.

  Sometimes there is no climax. A thing happens, and it is over. Gilliam lunged again. I parried, extended into the riposte. In a simple motion, my blade swept across my chest, point still aimed forward to brush the wild thrust aside. I stepped forward, tucking my right shoulder to bring the point in line with Gilliam’s ribs, metal grinding on metal. On leather. On bone. And then red blossomed there, black against the black of his jerkin, and the breath went out with it in a wordless groan. Red and black, I thought. My colors.

  Gilliam’s forward momentum carried him straight onto my sword. He sagged there, transmuted to dead weight. He wheezed, a wet sucking sound deep in his chest. I must have punctured a lung. There was nothing for it. I shoved him back, had to plant a foot on his chest to free my sword from his ribs. He hit the grass with a moan that turned to burbling. I had to suppress an urge to throw my sword aside. I was on display, my silent audience vigilant. My knees turned to water, and I fell, propping myself on the treasonous blade in my lying hand. Valka, forgive me.

  The intus’s sword had fallen from his slackened fingers, and I had enough presence of mind to toss it aside. Tradition forbade medical intervention. We walked onto the field knowing what we were about to do. I could feel Valka’s scorn already. My hands were shaking, and each beat of Gilliam’s heart spat blood upon the earth. It was hot. Too hot. The chanter raised a hand, and unlike mine, it was steady. He reached out slowly, and I thought he was about to make the sign of the sun disc in final benediction. Instead he reached for the crowd, for the royal children. “My lady . . . Lord Dorian. Do not . . . trust . . .”

  I looked up sharply, glaring across the swath of field with burning eyes. Anaïs and Dorian stood bracketed by Elomas and the prefect officiants. Her dark face had gone somehow white. She shook her head furiously, then darted for the arched exit. Her brother called out after her, and a pair of armored peltasts rattled in her wake. I knelt openmouthed, watching her go.

  The priest was a long time dying, chest rising and falling in smaller and smaller increments, diminishing by decay. Smaller, smaller, smaller.

  Still.

  I was still kneeling beside the priest’s corpse when the soldiers came for me. Their leader, a tall woman I did not know, her pauldrons marking her as a centurion in the count’s personal guard, said, “Lord Marlowe, you must come with us.”

  I did not answer, only shut my eyes and—with a tremendous effort—stood.

  CHAPTER 61

  A KIND OF EXILE

  “THE INTUS WAS RIGHT,” said Lord Balian Mataro coldly, gathering his orange silk robes around him as he sat behind his desk. “That Tavrosi woman’s got you by the balls.” The small obscenity coming from the mouth of a palatine lord of the Empire cowed me more than the anger in his voice. At a sharp gesture from him, I seated myself across the desk, glancing around at the tinted glass walls of his office.

  I remembered Father’s office in the capitol in Meidua. The two rooms had almost nothing in common. Father’s office was all dark stone and dark carpet and darkly polished wood, stuffed and cluttered in such a way that indicated a person of immense discipline, a man who dwelt in his mind more than in the wider world. This place, though, was all clean lines and modern whiteness; it might have been the combat information center on a Legion battle cruiser. I could not have said what kind of man it indicated had he not been sitting before me.

  “I made a mistake, lordship, but you know the law.”

  “As did you when you boxed that chanter into a duel.” Mataro’s face darkened. “My grand prior wants your head. Strike that—she wants you alive.”

  Swallowing, I looked down at my hands, picked absently at the simple bandages glued to my forearm. I needed no medical correctives for this truly minor injury. “I know.”

/>   “The boy was her son.”

  “I know.”

  “Then why in Earth’s holy name did you—” He broke off, bit the inside of his cheek as he shook his head. “I need you out of my city, away from all . . . this.” He waved a glittering hand. “Away from her. Until it quiets down.” A servant entered then, evidently part of some routine, for the bronze-skinned young man’s eyes widened in surprise to see that his master had company, and he bowed out again, carrying the tea service with its single cup out with him as discreetly as possible. “The Chantry has me by the balls, you know. And I can’t rule my planet with the Chantry turned against me. If I don’t give Ligeia what she wants, she’ll stymie my trade agreements, subject my ships to search and seizure, hold my officers—anything and everything short of invoking the Inquisition. You killed her son, damn it!” He slapped his desk, emphasizing this refrain.

  “Respectfully, sire,” I said mildly, unable to look the man in the face, “I was angling for first blood.” I watched my hands shake in my lap; I couldn’t get the priest’s eyes out of my head, black and blue, unchanging.

  “You didn’t get it.” The count’s knuckles whitened against the edge of his desk, then relaxed suddenly. “If I didn’t need you, I’d give you over to Ligeia right now.” He glanced toward the heavy metal doors, beyond which the guards who had dragged me from the sanguinary field waited. How easy it would be for them to drag me across the castle complex to the Chantry temple, to hand me over to Ligeia’s cathars and have done.

  I shuddered. “I could leave. You could—” Then something the count had said clicked, and I straightened. “If you didn’t need me?”

  The count lifted a jeweled box from one corner of his desk, disturbing a stack of leaflets and a holograph image of himself and Lord Luthor on a hunting expedition. He turned the thing in his hands, said, “Yes . . . well.” He cleared his throat. “I’d meant to keep this quiet for a few years, but this little spate of idiocy has forced my hand.” He swore violently, making me jump, and nearly crushed the jeweled box in one massive fist. Seeing that display, the size of him, I felt grubby and mean in my own genes. “Damn it, boy! I thought you were supposed to be clever.”

  “Smart,” I said cleverly, “is not the same as clever. Like you said, I . . .” I had let Valka get into my head. She was still there, crouched just behind my eyes, scowling daggers. I clenched my fists in my lap to stop them shaking. I couldn’t stop seeing Gilliam’s face, the mismatched eyes gone hollow as glass, relaxed, fixed on some light beyond the confines of mortal sight.

  With forced slowness, the count set the little jeweled box back on the polished glass surface of his desk, brows knitting as he examined me from his considerable height—by Earth, he was huge. “I was hoping to marry you to Anaïs after her Ephebeia.”

  I was a minute closing my jaw and another collecting the potsherds of my wits enough to stammer, “Marry? Your . . . your daughter?” For a moment the glass-eyed specter of Gilliam Vas and the crouching, furious impression of Valka both blew away like smoke, clearing the air to reveal the figure of Anaïs Mataro, slender and full-breasted. Beautiful as an ice sculpture, dull as a puddle.

  “Or my son, if you preferred. I only thought—”

  “No! No, lordship.” I hoped my haste was not a reproach to him and softened it with a more politic, “I am honored, of course, but . . . me?” Married? To a palatine lady? I supposed it had always been among my possible fates, but it had been so many years since I’d been Hadrian Marlowe proper that the whole thing felt like a lying dream. A nightmare. Trapped on Emesh, on the world where my life had gone to pieces. A thousand half-formed objections blossomed like weeds, and like weeds they choked me, permitting the count to continue.

  “It wouldn’t have been for at least three years,” he said, suddenly more awkward than angry. The change alarmed me. “Two until the Ephebeia, then another for the betrothal period, per custom. I had hoped to keep this quiet, give you time to acclimate to life here in Borosevo, to know the girl, but this lunatic behavior of yours . . .” He broke off, hissing air through his teeth.

  Still drowning in the ringing noise sounding in my ears, I spluttered, “But . . . me? Sir . . .” It was not the correct address, and a flicker of contempt spasmed across Balian Mataro’s brick-chiseled face. “I have nothing to my name. I left home in some difficulty, as you know. And my father is only a petty lord, an archon. Landed, I’ll grant, not posted, but all the same, I—”

  “How old is your father?”

  The tangential question shocked me, sent me spiraling off along a new track. “My father! Dark take me! Excellency, if he were to find out where I am—and the Chantry! They’d kill me for running!”

  The count raised a hand for quiet. “How old?”

  After a moment I composed myself and said, “I . . . I don’t know. Just shy of three centuries, I think?”

  “And his father?”

  “He would’ve been four hundred and twenty-some? But he was assassinated by the Mandari—”

  “Why?” the count asked, then waved a hand. “Doesn’t matter. His mother, then?”

  I squinted at the count, trying to follow this bizarre tangent to its logical denouement. “Six hundred and . . . ah . . . eighty . . . two?” I had to struggle to remember. “What is this in aid of?”

  “And how old do you think I am?” Again he lifted the tiny jeweled box, made it vanish in his huge fist.

  I took a shot in the dark. “Two hundred?”

  “One hundred and thirty-three next fall.”

  “What?” I blurted, unable to contain my surprise. That was entirely too young. There was gray in the black of his hair, and the lines about his mouth seemed too firmly pressed into the skin of his face.

  The day’s sins temporarily forgotten, the count spread his massive hands in innocent defeat. “We are a minor world—a minor house—and our blood is not so nobile as yours. I had that lovely genome of yours scanned when we took you in. What you carry in there”—he pointed at my face—“would cost my house its title to obtain. How your family came into such patterns—how it’s been able to hold onto them—is beyond me. Do as I ask, and I’ll make you consort to the highest post in this system. All I ask is your genes.”

  “Uranium license,” I said simply.

  “What?”

  “The wealth,” I clarified, not knowing what else to say. “We have a uranium mining license.” That was part of it, but I’d also inherited a great number of hyperadvanced gene complexes from my mother, daughter to a duchess and an Imperial vicereine and a distant cousin, some dozen times removed, to the Imperial house itself. Those complexes, reinforced across generations of breeding with House Kephalos and House Ormund, who had held the duchy of Delos in Lord Julian’s day, made my family line as desirable as that of many lords far greater than my father. Things grew quiet between the count and me, and again I clenched my hands, this time as much to clutch my anger as to squeeze off the palsy of horror and grief attached to Gilliam’s death. Something twanged within me, tinny and broken. I should have known, should have realized. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Then another thought, almost as dark as the first, rose from my chest and burst from me. “I’m not your damn stud!”

  “Yes, you are!” The count slapped his jeweled box down on the table with such a crack that I expected to see shatter marks, but the surface was unmarred. “You are whatever I say you are. You’re not in a strong bargaining position, Lord Marlowe. You’ve killed a member of my senior staff!” His voice grew stronger with each word, hands planted on the arms of his chair.

  My fists clenched convulsively. I could still feel the sweat there, caked on from my duel. I looked into Balian’s eyes, black as the one of Gilliam’s. “By law that was no murder.”

  “By law!” the count echoed. “Do you think that will matter to my grand prior? If you think the writ of law will protect you from what you�
�ve done, you’re a fool. You need my help.” In tones suddenly soft and reasonable, he said, “I am not asking anything unpleasant of you. You should be glad. You know the girl, and she’s fond of you, which is more than can be said of many arrangements.”

  Ligeia Vas’s frozen gaze haunted me as I sat there, hands fidgeting in my lap. There was nothing I could do, nowhere I could go. I could not refuse, could not run. I frowned and nodded slowly. “But what of Anaïs herself? Does she know about all this?”

  The count scowled. “What do you take me for? She’s known since you arrived here.” At last he opened the jeweled box, peeled a sheet of candied verrox leaf from a sticky bundle. Since I arrived. At once her actions since we’d met came into sharper focus: the way she’d always been around me, always asking me to social events, touching me, clinging to my arm. It was all so obvious, so . . . calculated. I felt cheap, less than a person because it wasn’t about me after all. “Moving forward, her children by you will inherit your gene complexes, and my grandchildren will be admitted to the peerage.”

  I saw a flaw in the count’s plan and jabbed a mental finger at it. “But Dorian is your heir, is he not?”

  “Presumptive.” The count flashed a smile. “But the complexes in your blood are worth a slight change of plans. Both of the children are young; there is time yet to make a proper lord out of either of them. Wouldn’t you say?” He slipped the verrox leaf into his mouth, chewed. Unbidden, his eyes drifted closed, then snapped back to alertness as he swallowed.

  That dramatic expression triggered something in me, for I almost rocketed to my feet. “But sir, my father!” I’d been about to bring the question up earlier, but the tangent about age and gene complexes had driven it straight from my stress-addled brain. I needed sleep, needed focus. “He’ll never approve!” I was desperate by then, grasping at straws, at whatever means of escape I could find.