Empire of Silence

by Christopher Ruocchio

  A breeze blew soft against the back of my neck, ruffling the wild hairs there and making me turn. The yawning doorway stood open at my back, the hall beyond lit by the greenish glow of the tape striping the walls. Frowning, I left Valka and Elomas to their examinations and passed through the arched doorway into the round hall. The floor rolled beneath me, for the hall there was a tube, and I splashed through what little seawater had not been drained away. I had not been this way before, so I moved slowly, casting the beam of my hand lamp up and around, carving deep shadows on the anaglyphs. They coated the walls here, circles of varying sizes lying tangent to one another like clumps of soap bubbles. They looped up over my head and under my feet so that I stood inside a tubular passage covered in shallow, graven circles, some recessed and others convex, stippling the surface of the stone.

  Remembering the safety protocols Elomas had drilled into me during our stay at Springdeep, I shouted something back to the others about where I was and waited for a reply. Satisfied, I pressed ahead, pulling a small glowsphere from the pocket of my bridge coat. Hand lamp in my teeth, I popped the seal and shook it to activate the light source and the tiny Royse repulsor. I tossed it gently down the hall, watched it go past rank meters of tunnel until it slowed in the air and stopped. Mindful of the chill waters along the bottom of the tunnel, I followed the wall, running my fingers along the black stone, feeling the ridges and grooves the Quiet had carved there in a time beyond counting.

  After a few minutes of slow walking, I came to where my glowsphere had slowed to a crawl, hovering in the air. So I snatched the orb and tossed it farther ahead, scanning for pitfalls as it went. I repeated this process for a couple of minutes, moving farther up the passage. Having done this a full six times, I elected to turn back.

  And froze.

  A crack yawned out of the wall I’d just passed, wide enough that a man might fit through it sideways. I stood utterly still for a long moment, sure I had not seen it when I’d first come that way. The entire tunnel was little more than two meters wide. I could not have missed it, I swear it by all the art in me. One boot splashed into the water as I staggered toward it, having doubled back to snag my glowsphere. A light in both hands, I peered into the crack and saw that it was not a crack at all.

  It was a passage. The walls were smooth and glassy, unmarred by the carved anaglyphs, and reflected the light in ripples starkly white against the inky stone. This was no stress fracture but an intentional feature of the ruins. How had I missed it? I aimed the hand lamp inside, catching sight of a chamber beyond and what looked like steps. That was strange. In all my time in Calagah, I hadn’t seen any steps except the ones leading into the ruins outside. I squeezed through the crack and looked around. The meager beam of my hand lamp couldn’t pick out the roof above. I knew from studying Valka’s holographs that we weren’t much more than a hundred feet underground at this point, but it seemed the darkness above was the naked Dark of space, forever open, starless and yawning above me. Curious and in need of better light, I threw the glowsphere upward, knowing I would not be getting it back. It sailed higher, spreading its white-gold light over the trapezoidal room I had just entered. The gleaming orb sailed up and up and up—and did not stop. Unsettled further, I stood staring at what the light had illuminated.

  There were steps, but they were only the steps of a dais—three of them—that fronted the . . . the mural on the wall opposite. I only caught a glimpse of it by the light of the glowsphere, for a moment later the device went dark and crashed to the floor not four meters from where I stood. Dead. That could not be—these glowspheres were meant to shine for days down in that abyssal dark.

  “Valka!” I called out. “Sir Elomas! Have you seen this?” I broke off, embarrassed, sure they could not hear me. “Of course they’ve seen it, Marlowe,” I spluttered, looking back over my shoulder. “They work here.” I was talking to myself—never a good sign. I would turn back in a moment. Just a moment. My hand lamp had not gone out, and I turned it on the image embossed on the far wall. I widened the beam of my lamp as far as it would go, but even so I could not take in the totality of the single glyph carved fifty feet high.

  It was a circle like the others, and yet unlike them, for within its boundaries was carved no subdivision, no geometric form or arc. The circle was plain and smooth save for where at the lowest point of its arc it was broken by a single ray that widened to a wedge as it approached the floor. I moved toward it. For a moment I thought I heard footsteps, thought Valka and Elomas had come looking for me, but when I turned I could see no one. The light reflected from my lamp seemed to shine out of the black stone as if it had come from within its depths, and I saw my thin reflection there, a ghostly shape. I mounted the three steps of the dais, reaching out a hand to caress the single ray carved into the wall. The stone within the wedge had been chipped back two inches from the smooth face of the wall, marbled and rough beneath my fingertips.

  I almost felt I could see the ancient mason with his chisel, so undimmed was the carving on that wall. It struck me then that this whole chamber was dry. Not drained as the tubular hall had been, but dry, as if the waters of the sea had never made it to that place. I let out a breath, and it misted the air, turning white as temple smoke. How did we ever think we were alone in the universe? How did we ever think we were the princes of it? What antique arrogance had driven that superstition and cast the Chantry in its image?

  As that carving dwarfed me, so its implication—the implication of all that strange stone—dwarfed us all. Again my breath frosted the air, and I felt a sudden chill steal over my bones. I decided that I had tarried long enough and was about to leave and find my companions again when I saw something move out of the corner of my eye, or thought I did. There was nothing. Only my reflection. Then the cold took me, bright and piercing as it had been that first afternoon on the steps outside, as if someone had driven a spike of clearest ice through my arm and crucified me. For a moment all thought fled me, even the instinct to pull my hand away from the wall.

  My reflection moved, stirring in the wall. It looked right at me, and its eyes were not violet like my own but perfectly, astonishingly green. Though I did not move, it reached out its other hand for me, and I felt the cold wash over me like a wave, pouring from my extremities to my deepest core. The pain shone in me, not white-hot but blue, so agonizing that I forgot to cry out, so brief I did not have to, though I knew it must stop my heart.

  Those green eyes fixed on me, and I half imagined I felt a hand take mine where it splayed against the wall. I tried to scream, but my jaw would not work. My knees buckled, but I did not fall. Those eyes. Those terrible green eyes staring at me out of my face—was it my face? I could see nothing but those eyes. They filled the universe, became the universe, and behind them and through them I beheld countless suns. They scattered like embers and blew out, all but one. Toward it I fell and into a city whose spires and bell towers recalled the castle of my home, but all the buildings were strange. I heard a great wailing, as from an infant, as I stood beneath the vaults of a mighty chapel. There a cradle stood amid shattered statuary, and I approached, but the cradle held nothing but air. The image crumbled, and I fell backward through thick mist. As it parted I beheld a great ship studded with statues of men and gods and devils. She stretched across the heavens and drowned the unfixed stars.

  And I saw the Cielcin standing in rank and file amidst the black of space itself, marching in the night. How bright their spears! And the song of them was like the flash of cruel lightning. Where they passed, the stars fell and planets went up like smoke. And I beheld one greater than the rest. Silver was its crown, and silver the inlay of its black armor, and its eyes were terrible as the worlds burning in its wake. The great ship with her statues overshadowed that Pale host and plunged into the nearest star like a knife descending.

  Light.

  I was blind, though in that brightness I sensed a presence. Shapes moving
invisibly, casting no shadows. I tried to cry out, but the words would not come, for I had forgotten them. I felt nothing, heard nothing. Knew nothing.

  Save three words.

  This must be.

  I fell backward from the dais like a toppled tower and skidded on the smooth floor as if I’d been thrown. My body ached from remembered cold, though the sensation itself had altogether fled. Groaning, shivering like a dead leaf as the hot blood hammering in my veins, I sat up. I had thrown my hand lamp in my terror, and I crawled over the cool stone to recover it like some frightened bait beast in the arena before the azhdarch or the lion pounces.

  “Valka!” I cried, forgetting Elomas in my astonishment and pain. “Valka!”

  I needed to tell her, to tell her what I had seen.

  * * *

  She was not in the room with the forest of columns, nor was Elomas, and though I called for both, neither answered. Nor were they in the room where the gravitometer stood on its tripod under the graven dome. I ducked down several of the side passages, following glow tape and the light of floating spheres until I felt sure I should have found them, crying out all the while. I resolved instead to return to the surface and followed the slanting passage back up into the light of day. The sun blinded me after my time below ground, and I stood in the thin southern sunlight, remembering the cold.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Turning, I saw Valka hurrying across the sandy base of the cleft, her red-dark hair snapping in the wind. She picked up speed as she approached me, grinding to a halt mere feet away. I tried to speak, but she punched me in the shoulder. “I thought you’d fallen down a shaft and broken your neck! Elomas went to wave Springdeep for a search party!”

  I blinked at her. “What are you talking about?”

  Valka didn’t seem to hear me. “Do you know what the count would have done if we’d let you die out here?” She combed her fingers through her hair in agitation.

  Taking a careful step away from the doctor, I raised placating hands. “Valka, what are you talking about? I couldn’t have been gone more than twenty minutes.”

  Her mouth hung open, and I could only stare at her as she said, “Hadrian. You’ve been gone for six hours.”

  I opened my mouth, closed it. My denial died on my lips when I noticed the sky. The sun was setting, had already vanished behind the top of the cleft. A few broken words spluttered out of me, and I shook my head. “That’s not . . . There was a room off the round hall. I . . .” What was I supposed to say? My reflection stirred again in my memory, moving in the blackened stone without me.

  This must be.

  I had never seen Valka frown more deeply. Confused, she said, “Hadrian, there isn’t a room off that tunnel.”

  “What?”

  “’Tis the way to the eastern complex. There are no branchings.”

  I shook my head. “No. There was one.” And I described the massive glyph above the dais and the narrow door. Valka’s face darkened, confirming my worst fears. I withheld the rest—the voice, my vision—for the moment. I still shook with the memory of it. A thin, hard line formed between her brows, and I broke off my narrative, saying, “You must have walked right past me.”

  Her nostrils flared. “Walked right . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she half turned away.

  I looked down at my feet, taking a moment to reevaluate the situation. Had she been afraid for me? Worried? Had she been acting out of fear? Was she still? I did not want to lie to Valka. I knew what I had seen: the mysterious door, the too-high roof of the chamber. I had seen my reflection move, had seen its eyes, green as death and alien. Had seen . . . other things.

  It could not be real. I must have dreamed it. We returned to the tunnel, water pooling about our ankles. Four times we walked the length of it, and four times we found nothing. “It doesn’t make sense,” I said, shaking my head. “It was here. It was right here.” I pressed my hands against the black stone wall, fingers digging into the Quiet anaglyphs. Then, more weakly, “It was right here.” Looking round, I caught her staring at me, the light reflecting in her golden eyes like a cat’s. She had a quizzical look on her face, as if she were trying to frown and chew the inside of her cheek at once. “I’m not lying.”

  “I don’t think you are, but . . .”

  “There was a dais just through here.” I pointed at the wall. “A huge chamber the size of Chantry sanctum. Maybe . . .” I was getting desperate. “Maybe Elomas is right. Maybe the walls move.” She shook her head, half turned to go. “I’m serious, Valka! Really! There’s this . . . mural. One of the glyphs, only it must have been fifty feet high. I touched it and—Do you remember when we first got here? When I touched the step and it froze my hand?” Her face darkened, but she said nothing. “It happened again. I touched the glyph, and . . .” I told her everything. Earth and Emperor protect me, I told her.

  She didn’t speak at first. That was the worst part. She didn’t laugh or strike me. She didn’t even cross her arms. Valka stood there like one of the statues from my vision, unmoving and unmoved. It was dreadfully quiet in that tunnel with only the dripping of water and the faint sounds of our breathing to break the silence. There was a mountain of it. An ocean, concealing by its mass and charge all that I had seen and learned.

  Her nostrils flared, and she looked away, lips pressed together. “You’re unbelievable.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “After everything you did with Gilliam, after I let you come down here to Calagah, you have the audacity to lie to my face. If you got lost in the tunnels, just say so. You don’t have to posture for me. I’m not impressed. ’Twasn’t even a good lie!” She broke off before her voice could rise to a shout. “Visions? Visions! Marlowe, your idiot people might call me a witch, but that is your superstition. I am a scientist; I believe in verifiable, measurable things. Not ghosts. We are dealing with an extinct civilization here. Not . . . whatever the fuck you’re playing at.”

  I bit back a rebuke and implored, “Why I would I lie? Especially after Gilliam?”

  “Because you are an ignorant savage from a backward country who still believes in fairy stories,” she snapped. “Because you’re bored. Is roughing it in the country with us small folk not enough for you, my lord? Do you miss your fancy wines and oiled houris?”

  “That is not me,” I almost snarled, and for all her stridency Valka stepped back a pace. I did not point out that we were hardly roughing it with Sir Elomas’s servants in tow. I did not point out that it was she, not I, who made use of the palace body servants. I was crushed, but I would not be petty. “That’s not me, and you know it. If you don’t believe me, fine. I’m sorry I told you, but by Earth herself, I am not lying to you.”

  Violet eyes held golden ones, but only the gold ones blinked.

  “Say what you like,” she sneered, and she turned away, muttering, “Barbarian.”

  CHAPTER 66

  THE SATRAP AND THE SWORDMASTER

  “MY DEAR SATRAP!” SAID Sir Elomas when the heralds had finished announcing our august guests, affecting his deepest, most courtly bow. “Welcome to Calagah! You honor us with this visit.” He straightened, pressed his straw hat back onto his head. “Such an honor indeed that you would take time out of your sojourn to see our little hole in the ground.”

  The long-awaited Jaddian contingent had arrived at last.

  The woman Elomas had addressed—the Lady Kalima Aliarada Udiri di Sayyiph, Satrap of Ubar and ambassador from the prince himself—stood nearly seven feet tall, her oiled copper skin and dark eyes the personification of Jaddian genetic purity. Surely she was one of the eali al’aqran, the pureborn of Jadd, more palatine than palatine. You could sense it in the way her slippered feet spurned the very ground on which she walked, in the subtle way she turned up her nose at Elomas as he spoke, in the tense carriage of her shoulders beneath their silk shawl. Her gown was samite, umber and gold, and go
ld were the chains that decorated her throat and forehead and dripped from her ears. Her sable hair fell in a thick plait, braided with golden ropes and hung with little phalerae that glittered like stars.

  Behind her was a double column of Jaddian mamluks, their armor mirror-bright beneath their striped blue-and-saffron kaftans, their faces concealed by deep hoods. They moved wordlessly in perfect lockstep. I caught sight of Anaïs Mataro close behind them, flanked by lictors in her house’s green and gold. She smiled at me, and I acknowledged that smile with a nod. After the incident in the tunnel—after Valka’s reaction—I did not have a smile in me.

  The satrap’s deference to Elomas was confined to the lifting of a single eyebrow.

  “I should hope it is a good deal more than a hole, lest all this has been a waste of time.” The speaker was not the satrap but the black-clad specter of a man at her side. The swordmaster’s face was impassive, but his eyes were smiling, black as black. While he spoke, his gloved hand fingered the gold clasp of his belt where it held fast his ceremonial mandyas, the half robe of his order. The garment covered his left side fully, falling to his ankle, hanging loose from his left shoulder and burying his arm in folds of cloth the color of blood at night. “You are this Sir Elomas Redgrave?”

  “I am, Sir . . . ?”