Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “Food looks wonderful, sir,” I said, prising a brown roll free of the bread basket. “Thank you again.”

  Sir Elomas poured himself a cup of tea from a red china pot before pouring for Tor Ada. “I’ve always believed,” he began, having said something to this effect every time we sat down to have a meal together, “that food is meant to be shared. Come, come.” Thence Ada launched into a description of the day’s work, the bulk of which at that early stage comprised cleaning out the flooded sections.

  “The truth is,” I said, “I’m afraid I’m little more than a tourist, Sir Elomas. My expertise—as you well know—is limited to linguistics and getting in everyone else’s way.” This elicited a short laugh from the old knight and the two women.

  Elomas boomed, “Nonsense, dear boy! Nonsense! Maros was telling me you were instrumental in getting the pumps running down Tunnel C! ‘Couldn’t have done it without Marlowe,’ she said. By my word as a Redgrave!”

  I smiled and worked carefully to skin the fish Karthik had placed on my plate. “That’s kind of you to say, but I’m little more than a glorified day laborer.” I put the knife down, hid my frustration with the task behind a drink of water. “Still, I want to say again how grateful I am to have been invited here.”

  The old knight set his teacup down and began sawing the head off his fish entirely without ceremony. “You’ve certainly livened things up. And after what you did to that bastard priest . . .” He shook his head sadly. The rancor in his tone visibly startled Tor Ada, who took a moment to reassert her customary scholiast’s blankness. “I was a duelist in my day, you know? I say, there was this one time I was a guest of this Mandari minister. He was from some bioengineering firm or other—defunct now, glad to say—who specialized in one-off homunculi. Concubines, you understand, were the primary output of such an industry.” He shuddered, and I was content to let him ramble. “You see, I am afraid I offended one of the man’s senior staff at dinner. Just a slight joke about the man’s, ah, preference for his own work, shall we say?”

  “His own work, sir?” asked young Karthik, taking a seat at the far end of the small table with his own fish.

  “Implying that he was cloning himself, of course!” said Sir Elomas, giving us all earnest looks. “Revolting vice, but the Mandari deal in revolting vices. As you might imagine, the fellow challenged me to a duel, and, well . . . here I am, so . . .” He at last severed the head of the fish, crunching through the spine before he set to butterflying the carcass, revealing the mixture of tomato and spinach and fine white cheese where the organs had been. “Needless to say, the minister looked askance at my having killed his underling, and when my accusations of self-buggery turned out to be true, well . . .”

  “He tried to kill you?” Valka asked, having finished—more delicately—the fine work of opening her own fish. She smiled above the rim of her water glass. Like me, she abhorred tea. Just one of those biographical minutiae that made me feel, subconsciously and stupidly, that we were more similar than different.

  Elomas nodded brightly. “Poison! Can you imagine? So quaint! It’s good you’re here, Marlowe. Safe and sound. The priests are fond of poison, and old Ligeia has a long memory.”

  When I had finished, Karthik rose and began to clear my plates away. Rarely had I observed so dutiful a squire. After he took mine, I turned to Valka. “How long have you been here again?”

  She finished a bite—she was eating more slowly than the rest of us—and said, “Four local years, but the flooding interrupts us.”

  “Since those awful storms in ’68, wasn’t it?” Elomas asked, pulling a face as he cut into his fish. “Nasty storms, those. The Borosevo power grid’s never been the same.”

  Valka finished chewing before responding, “Yes. That’s right.”

  “But this planet’s been settled for nearly a millennium. Surely there’s nothing left to discover here.” The thought had been bothering me since we’d arrived, since I’d spent more time walking around Calagah. In the intervening weeks, I had seen almost nothing of note in the ruin save for the black halls themselves. It was a place of ghosts inhabited by no culture I could see, no people.

  Tor Ada took the liberty of answering me, saying, “It’s been in Imperial hands for a millennium, aye, but it belonged to the Norman United Fellowship of Emesh before that. Only Earth and Emperor know what they carried off or sold.”

  “No,” Valka said, at last permitting the remains of her fish to be cleared away. “No, there’s no record of secondary artifacts at any of the sites built by the Quiet.” She cleared her throat, slipped back for a moment into her native Tavrosi.

  “Purportedly built,” Ada corrected with a raised finger. “We cannot confirm the Quiet hypothesis, given Chantry regulation of all data regarding extinct xenobites within their protectorate. We may never know if it’s true. And everything we discover here will be sequestered too, once the Chantry gets its claws in.” A slight frown creased her plain patrician face. “Calagah is a minor site, and the Chantry seems unwilling to commit a warden presence out here in the Veil. Too costly. But that means they’ve also deemed this place a minor risk, theologically speaking.” At this she glanced sidelong at me, as if afraid I would denounce her for a heretic. I smiled encouragingly. “Their people went over Calagah in the first century of our occupation. They tolerate us because they know our expedition is fruitless. And you won’t be allowed to leave with any notes or recordings except for your memory.”

  She directed these last words at Valka, who only smiled in that mysterious way she had—as if the two women shared in some secret joke—and drummed her long fingers against the faux wood of the table. “Every Quiet site I’ve visited was empty when ’twas found. ’Twas probably nothing for the Normans to plunder in the first place save ticket sales for viewing the tunnels.”

  “Truly!” Elomas agreed. “The Normans certainly knew how to put a price on everything. Bloody mercenaries!” He set down his cup. “Speaking of foreigners, the Jaddians arrive soon, do they not?” He glanced to Ada, who quickly swallowed her water, coughing.

  “Yes, sir. Within the fortnight, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Very good! You know, I’ve not been to the Principalities in centuries.” He rounded on me, pointing one finger around the bowl of his goblet as he brandished it at me. “Marlowe, you must visit Jadd, or at least one of the other worlds. Samara, perhaps. Remarkable people, truly.”

  Karthik returned from the kitchen then. He looked oddly crumpled, his square, unassuming face closed off. I failed to process this for a moment as I listened to Valka describe the problems with the Chantry’s politicking. It was sobering, the stranglehold they had on knowledge in the Imperium and even in Jadd, where the icona and Mother Earth were not the only gods. What had begun as an Imperial propaganda machine and a threat wielded against the lords palatine had grown beyond the Imperium, had grown beyond all control and recognition. Even our Emperor knelt at the Chantry’s altars and received his crown and staff from the Synarch himself.

  “What is it, boy?” Elomas asked, noting his ashen-faced squire for the first time. Karthik hesitated, eyes flickering from his shoes to the face of his knightly master. He took a mincing step forward. “Out with it, Karthik!”

  Starting, the boy stood at attention. “It’s the wave, sir. Orso and Damara had it going in the kitchen. It . . .” He glanced sidelong at Valka before fixing his eyes on me.

  “Come on, boy, they’re just words. String them together, now!”

  “There’s been an attack, sir. A battle.” He looked at me as he spoke, though the words were for Sir Elomas.

  Whatever else he had been—a duelist, a dandy—Elomas was no soldier. He blanched. “The Cielcin?”

  Karthik only nodded. Such gravity in so small a gesture. The turning of worlds.

  “Where?”

  Karthik swallowed. “Edge of the system.”

/>   Elomas stood, nearly knocking over his chair in his haste, its clawed feet catching in the thick, colorful carpets. “You’re not serious.”

  “Should have the audio in here in a second.”

  All five of us maintained a grave silence. Years of rumors brought to Meidua by merchanters, of Chantry proclamations, of Legion reports relayed to Father’s council—all of them converged in that single moment, falling like game tiles, and it all became real. I looked down at the table, wishing I could turn my water into wine like the magus of legend.

  The prefab hut’s speakers all clicked on, carrying the slightly tinny voice of the announcer reporting the sanitized public dispatch via planetary broadcast. A man’s voice, his deep tones heightened by nerves. “—that thirty-three hours ago a joint action of the Emesh Defense Force and the 437th Centaurine Legion under Knight-Tribune Raine Smythe annihilated a Cielcin incursion force in the heliopause, marking another glorious victory . . .” I didn’t hear the rest, only silence, as if I were in the eye of a hurricane. Valka’s nose wrinkled, a frown line forming between those arching brows. I confess I felt a portion of that same scorn welling up within me. Another glorious victory? I knew the sorts of men who wrote these dispatches, the logothetes of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment. Cheap men, brassy little cynics defined by their dislike of their fellow man. The practiced ear could hear the calculation behind every word like fishhooks in the mind. We have all been those men, but most of us have the decency not to make a career of it.

  I listened to the broadcast in silence, hands tightening around my glass. I envisioned the wreckage of Cielcin ships hauled back to Borosevo, alien bodies and weapons mounded at the feet of the icona in the city Chantries. There would be another triumph, this one through the city, along the streets and canals. I saw Makisomn beheaded again and again behind my eyes, heard Count Mataro’s basso profundo rumbling through the speakers: “This is a glorious day for Emesh, my people! The enemy was at our gates, bent upon the destruction of our home! Let this be a warning to all those beasts dwelling in the outer Dark! We will not . . .”

  Sitting in that little hut at the end of the world above the black tunnels of Calagah, it felt as if nothing at all had happened. Had Orso the cook not been listening to the planet’s broadcast, if another autumn storm had wiped out our communications uplink, if he’d simply been turned to another channel, the evening would have gone on unchanged, and the world with it. A world is large, a solar system larger still. However close the war truly was, Emesh was unscarred. Strange, the way the larger world casts its shadow on our own, our moments fleeting and small when measured against the roaring thrust of time.

  “That’s enough!” Elomas called out, loud enough that his servants could hear him in the back room of the tiny house. The speakers clicked to silence, drowning us in quiet.

  CHAPTER 65

  I DARE NOT MEET IN DREAMS

  “WHY KEEP COMBING OVER the site if the whole place has been mapped and cataloged?” I asked, clambering up the black steps after Valka and Sir Elomas. We had been at Calagah for some weeks, and each day I went down into the cleft with Valka, Tor Ada, or Elomas. We walked the close, darkened halls for hours. I was only a guest, an amateur, and so I mostly shadowed Valka and the scholiast or assisted the technicians in moving equipment.

  Sir Elomas stopped at the top of the stairs, shaking his tea flask to activate the heating element embedded within. “Because we’re not sure if it is, boy!” He grinned, white teeth flashing as he unscrewed the cap. Above us, the angled, irregular pillars stretched and curved like thorns. The man seemed so ordinary, so common, so out of place against that alien blackness, drinking his tea. “Whoever built the damn place . . .” He shook his head. “There are entire chambers we’ve found with neutrino detectors sealed behind meters of solid rock. Not buried, but built that way, like someone cut in through the bedrock and slipped space inside. That’s why I’ve got people hauling gravitometers all over.”

  My muscles still ached from helping to carry those gravitometers the day before. I’d known they were scanning for new chambers, but . . . “Sealed chambers?”

  “Entirely separate. Built sealed,” Valka put in. She popped one of her glowspheres and set it drifting, faerie-like, in her wake.

  Curiosity piqued, I asked, “Was there anything in these chambers? Or were they—”

  “Empty as the rest,” she replied. “Emptier. The main halls had some Umandh stuff when the Normans first moved in. We’ve drilled down to a few along the countryside, enough to get probes in.”

  But for the light of Valka’s glowsphere, it was totally dark in the tunnel. I fumbled in my coat for my hand lamp, following the spectral forms of my companions down and around a bend. “Why would they build separate chambers?”

  “I think ‘how’ is the far more interesting question, do you not?” Valka asked, glancing back over her shoulder.

  “I’d swear the tunnels move, Doctor,” Elomas grumbled, planting his hands, tea flask and all, on his hips. “I’m already lost.”

  The Tavrosi glanced back over her shoulder again. “We’re not even to the dome yet, sir.”

  Elomas laughed too loudly for the close hall. “I know, I know. But you know what I mean.”

  “I do,” she murmured, leading us out into the domed chamber I’d seen on my first visit to the ruins. “’Tis easy to lose one’s way down here.” One of the gravitometers stood on its tripod in the middle of the floor, pendulum swinging steadily back and forth, indicators blinking red and green.

  We went on for a little ways, following Valka’s light deeper into the tunnels, past a couple of technicians applying new strips of glow tape to the walls. The air hung chill upon us, and here and there we splashed through puddles on the floor where it stepped down or lay cracked and sunken by time. Nothing seemed to move, and the only sound besides our own was the faint drip of water. Condensation fell from the ceiling to patter on the floor as the glowsphere and my hand lamp sent awkward shadows juddering over walls thick with circular anaglyphs like the ones from the dome, like the ones from the Umandh hovels at Ulakiel. I caught myself imagining the blind, tentacled creatures feeling these marks left by Valka’s ancient xenobites. What had their strange communal mind thought of this place? Of the beings that had built it?

  “I still can’t believe this is real,” I whispered. We’d stopped in another branching chamber, this one low and rectangular with a forest of pillars sprouting with no pattern from the floor. Some didn’t make it fully to the ceiling, and others tapered before touching the floor, useless as broken fingers.

  “You’ve been here for weeks,” Valka breathed.

  “You never really get used to it,” said Elomas at the same time. He shivered. “I’m just glad the Chantry hasn’t decided to frag the place from orbit. Inquisition has some nasty weapons, you know.”

  I ran a hand over one of the columns, feeling the faint tracery of lines there, both embedded and raised and without pattern. “If they did that they’d be saying there was something to hide. Say what you will of the priests, but they’re not fools.” Valka snorted, though whether with amusement or derision I knew not. I moved off toward the far end of the hall, keeping my hand lamp pointed in front of me to avoid the tangle of black pillars. “I don’t think they care what those of us stuck on this miserable rock think.”

  “Easy now!” the affable old knight chided. “I live on this miserable rock!” He broke off a moment, and I heard the rattle of his tea flask unscrewing. “You are right, though. It’s trade over the gravity well that concerns them. Let old Elomas and the foreign witch dig in the ground, so long as they keep their heads down and don’t find anything.” The knight’s voice sounded far away, muffled. “And don’t get me wrong—I’m keeping my head down. I like my blood on the inside.”

  A circular arch broke the wall ahead of me, opening into darkness. I turned, speaking over my shoulder. “Why
do you do this, sir?”

  “Sponsor the dig?” Elomas asked. I could just make out his white hair haloed in the light of Valka’s sphere. “Are you seeing the same ruins I am seeing? I thought you were a scholar, Lord Marlowe. Look at this place! And besides”—he spread his arms as if he might embrace the forest of black stone all around us—“this place is a mystery. The only mystery worth solving on this world, at least. You know, when I was your age—this was before the Cielcin invasion, mind you—I used to travel all up and down the Perseus, where I was born. Out on the frontier at the rim! I saw everything I could. Dozens of worlds. But I’m old now. I’ll take a quiet adventure in my own backyard, thank you. Even if the bleeding galaxy’s falling apart.”

  It was the sort of thing that was not easy to respond to, and I covered my quiet by wandering a ways away from the two of them. I was standing nearly in line with the round door when I said, “You don’t think the war will really come here, do you?”

  The silence that fell on the chamber could have choked a man. We were all thinking back to the radio report nights before. Cielcin in the heliopause. In the system. But Valka surprised me, saying, “’Tis not the first time the Pale came in-system. Your Home Defense Force caught a scout several years back, right after I arrived.”

  “I didn’t know that!” Elomas exclaimed. “Where’d you hear that, girl?”

  I could almost feel Valka’s shrug in the inky air. “In the palace, a couple of high tide seasons ago. Elomas, come and look at this, would you?” Her tone was perfunctory, almost disinterested, and so I did not hurry to follow the older man but stood as a lost child in that place of alien stone. It may seem strange to say—after all, I had been in the place for weeks and had stood in that very room many times—but still I could not take it all in. I felt the unknown architects like an oppressive weight, not on my mind but on my genes. The press of my augmented mortality hung on me like a yoke when I contemplated the length of time these ruins had been here, nearly a thousand times the lifespan of human civilization. What had they been like, these ancient builders and gods? Had they been mightier than we? A great power bestriding the stars in their fiery youth? Or were they weaker? They had colonized fewer worlds than man, it seemed, and terraformed none. Perhaps they were only early and not great at all.