Empire of Silence (The Sun Eater #1)

by Christopher Ruocchio

Honestly THE BEST chapter 1 in my life

Dangerous things, names. A kind of curse, defining us that we might live up to them, or giving us something to run away from. I have lived a long life, longer than the genetic therapies the great houses of the peerage can contrive, and I have had many names. During the war, I was Hadrian Halfmortal and Hadrian the Deathless. After the war, I was the Sun Eater. To the poor people of Borosevo, I was a myrmidon called Had. To the Jaddians, I was Al Neroblis. To the Cielcin, I was Oimn Belu and worse things besides. I have been many things: soldier and servant, captain and captive, sorcerer and scholar and little more than a slave. But before I was any of these, I was a son.

tales of Simeon the Red, Cid Arthur, and Kasia Soulier. Tales of Kharn Sagara.

“Knowledge is the mother of fools,” he said. “Remember, the greatest part of wisdom in recognizing your own ignorance.”

“Which ass?” I grinned, stooping to touch my toes, voice creaking a little with the strain. “The one between his ears?”

“En garde!” Felix said, holding his blade flat between us. “Shields!” Both of us thumbed the catches to activate our shields. The energy curtains changed nothing where the human speeds of swordplay and grappling were concerned, but it was good practice to get used to them, to the faint distortion of light across their permeable membranes. The Royse field barrier would deflect high-velocity impacts with little difficulty; it could stop bullets, halt plasma bursts, dissipate the electrical discharge of nerve disruptors. It could do nothing against a sword. Felix dropped the blade like the headsman he sometimes was, dull point clipping the floor. “Go!”

We sat there a long while, neither one moving. “Cai Shen’s not in the Veil,” I said at last, referring to the frontier beyond the Centaurus Arm of the galaxy comprising the bulk of the war front against the Cielcin. I looked down at my hands. “They’re getting bolder.”

No fanfare accompanied my entrance, unless one counted the nods of the peltasts just within. There is a limit to the vastness of space which the human eye and mind can fully appreciate, beyond which the impact of grandeur overwhelms. The throne room exceeded that limit, being at once too tall, too wide, and too long. Rank and file of dark columns retreated left and right, supporting frescoed vaults depicting the death of Old Earth and the eventual colonization of Delos. Though human senses could not detect it, the distance between floor and ceiling subtly shrank between the doors and the dais at the far end so that the supplicant was deceived into perceiving the archon as larger than any human ought to be. It is said the Solar Throne on Forum makes use of such a trick, that the Emperor might dwarf even the lordliest duke of his constellation. The throne itself sat wreathed in shadow, and the two curving horns at its back—in reality the ribs of a great brass whale—towered halfway to the distant ceiling, blocking the light from the rose window behind the throne so that the figure seated upon it was veiled.

“Forgive my lateness, father.” I used my speaking voice, bringing the full force of the rhetorical training Gibson had given me to bear. “The Mining Guild representative went on a little longer than intended.” “Why are you here?” The sound of that voice in this place curdled within me, and I felt a cold wind blow through my soul. Not only had Crispin known about the visitors from the Wong-Hopper Consortium, he had been invited. I ignored Crispin’s petulant question and approached within ten paces of the line of Consortium guests as they stood beneath my father’s throne. I was not yet in the shadow of that great chair, and my father was only a darker shape amid the blackness of that ebony and wrought-iron seat. Going to one knee before the throne, I bowed my head before the Mandari visitors. “Honored guests,”—the practiced depth of my voice pleased me after Crispin’s whinging—“forgive my lateness. I was detained by local matters.”

My brother only raised his eyebrows, gambling—quite correctly—that I would not push the issue in front of our guests. I didn’t. I was too much the gentleman for that. But I was enough the child to pick up the small bloodwood chair next to him and carry it two steps up onto the dais. I sat, ignoring the muted outrage I could sense pouring from my father on his dark throne.

Stars, I thought, were born and died before dessert. I maintained my silence through the toasts, through the salad course, through cycles and cycles of servants setting and clearing the table. And I listened, all too aware of the anger that, like gravity, bent time and space around my father.

I had loved drawing ever since I was a child. As I grew up, however, I realized there was something singular about the process. A photograph might capture the facts of an object’s appearance, colors and details rendered perfectly at a higher resolution than any human eye could appreciate. By the same token, a recording or RNA memory injection might convey a subject with perfect clarity. But in the same way that close reading allows the reader to absorb, to synthesize the truth of what he reads, drawing allows the artist to capture the soul of a thing. The artist sees things not in terms of what is or might be, but in terms of what must be. Of what our world must become. This is why a portrait will—to the human observer—always defeat the photograph. It is why we turn to religion even when science objects and why the least scholiast might outperform a machine. The photograph captures Creation as it is; it captures fact. Facts bore me in my old age. It is the truth that interests me, and the truth is in charcoal—or in the vermilion by whose properties I record this account. Not in data or laser light. Truth lies not in rote but in the small and subtle imperfections, the mistakes that define art and humanity both. Beauty, the poet wrote, is truth. Truth, beauty. He was wrong. They are not the same. There was no beauty in that arena, but there was a truth. There, while men shouted and died on the killing floor, executed for the diversion of seventy thousand spectators, I saw it...

As I said, I felt almost a part of another species. Because of my family’s long history of genetic modification, I was—despite my short stature—taller than most of the plebeians I passed, my hair darker, my skin paler. Though I was still but a child, barely twenty years standard, I felt ancient beside those prematurely aged merchants and laborers, not because I was ancient but because I knew those wrinkled faces and leathered hands were scarcely older than my own. Their bodies had already betrayed them. Perhaps it was the barbarity of the Colosso, or perhaps my feelings have been clouded by what followed that walk, but thinking back to that moment I remember the faces of the Meiduans as little more than caricatures. Each seemed but a child’s sketch or primitive carving done by one who had only the barest inkling of what a human was meant to be. Their heavy brows and large pores, oily skin mottled and sun-leathered as mine would never be. I did not then stop to ask myself which of us was truly human. Was it me, with my College-tailored genes and regal bearing? Or were they more human than I could ever be, their state the state of nature? I believed at the time that it was me, but as in the parable of the sea captain who repairs his ship plank by plank until it is new again, I cannot now help but wonder how many lines one can rewrite in the blood before a man is no longer a man, or human at all.

Hands tugged my signet ring from my left thumb and started on my terminal’s magnetic clasp. Then I heard it: “Guys, we’re fucked. Look.” I smiled, though my face was in the pavement. I knew he was showing them the ring. “He’s a fucking Marlowe. We’re fucked.” I wanted to smile, but my lips would not respond. A palatine’s ring is everything. It holds his identity; his genetic history, both of his family and his constellation; his titles; and the deeds to his personal holdings. If they took it and tried to use it anywhere on Delos, Father’s men or Grandmother’s would find them. Fools. I don’t remember anything else except darkness and the absolute certainty that I was dead. Crispin would rule. No question about it now. Let him have his throne, his place in the Imperium. Let Father grow to lament his choice. I didn’t care. Certain scholiasts teach that each experience is only the sum of its parts. That our lives may be reduced to a set of equations, that they may be factored, weighed, balanced, and understood. They believe the universe is one of objects and that we are only objects among objects. That even our emotions are no more than electrochemical processes carried out in our brains, accessories to the pressures of Bloody-Handed Evolution. This is why they struggle for apatheia, the freedom from emotion. This is their great failing. Human beings do not inhabit a world of objects, nor did our consciousness evolve to live in such a place. We live in stories, and in stories,...

IF I HAD DIED in that alley more than a thousand years ago, things would be a good deal different. There would still be a sun in the skies above Gododdin; there would still be a Gododdin. The Cielcin would not be forced to live as our thralls, in our alienages. But then, there would still have been a Crusade. I know what it is they say of me. What they call me in your history books. The Sun Eater. The Halfmortal. Demon-tongued, regicidal, genocidal. I have heard it all. And as I have said, we are none of us one thing. As in the riddle the sphinx asked of poor, doomed Oedipus: we change. If you seek my baptism, look to that moment when I lay dying on a lonely street in Meidua, my hand and ribs shattered, my skull cracked, my spine fractured. Seek the time when I was cut down while Crispin ascended to glory and the adulation of the crowd. I would watch the holos later, recovering in my rooms in Devil’s Rest, and see how flowers and banners were hurled at Crispin on the coliseum floor, how the people laughed and cheered for the gallant son of their archon and his stupid cape.

In my dreams I was alone, passing under the narrow arch that led from the necropolis to the mausoleum where my family’s ashes lay interred. How many times have I walked that way in dreams, who in life stood there only once? That had been for the funeral of my father’s mother, Lady Fuchsia, when I was yet a boy. I had not known her well, but hers was the first body I had ever seen. My first encounter with Death. The stink of it and the memory have never left me. It haunted me, and often when I witnessed Death again I recalled the cloying smell of myrrh, the smoke of the incense tapers, and the drone of the chanters and of old Eusebia as she led the funeral march down the echoing steps to our necropolis. To my young mind it was less that my grandmother had died and more that Death had visited us, so that each death that followed hers recalled that procession, those steps, that walk into the underworld. In the dream, Father went first behind the prior, carrying Grandmother’s ashes, while we, her family, followed with the canopic jars. I had her eyes, suspended in cerulean fluid; mother had her heart; my uncle Lucian—dead now seven years himself, killed in a flier crash—carried the brain. A shroud of some hue darker than black concealed the statue of my grandmother erected on the rough floor amongst the stalactites. I could hear the water dripping from the stone ceiling, dropping into pools flat as mirrors. In my dream, when I tore that pall away, it was my father’s statue ben...

My father’s basso voice came from within. “Send him in.” Curious that he did not address me, though I was well within hearing. But then, he did not look up either or at all bestir himself from the constellation of holographic diagnostics that englobed him at his monolith of a desk. I crossed from the mosaic onto Tavrosi carpets an inch thick. Father’s high-backed seat was framed by a massive round window that looked out over Meidua and the arcing seaport. The sky across the southern country was streaked by the contrails of rockets carrying payloads into orbit and beyond. The two side walls were packed with bookshelves. But where the shelves in Gibson’s study were stuffed, described by the chaos of long use and loving attention, my father’s were ordered and—I suspected—only free of dust because of the fleet of house servants who tidied the place. I stopped almost in the precise center of the square room, just on the edge of the high-angled sunlight, kneading my toes into the carpet. Like a penitent before the altar of a jealous god, I waited, head bowed. At long last he noticed me, setting his tungsten stylus on the black glass desktop and dismissing the holographs with a wave of his hand. With the light behind him, he sat in shadow. He did not speak at first but contemplated me in silence. After what felt like eons, he only said, “Take a seat.” I stood for a moment, a beat, no longer than a couple of seconds. Father just watched me, unmoving, unspeaking. So I relented, fal...

“Gotten myself beaten.” “Forget the beating.” Father waved a hand, leaned back in his seat like a Chantry inquisitor about to issue judgment. Forget the beating. I looked down at my hand prisoned in the corrective brace. Would that it were so easy. Eyebrows raised, I said, “I’m having difficulty with that at the moment.”

There aren’t two connected neurons in that boy’s head!”

“You want to be a scholiast? Master that fear of yours or you’re no better than the rest of them.” Here he waved a hand in the vague direction of the castle as if to encompass all of lay humanity. “Imitate the action of the stone. Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it if you have to with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”

“The frightened man eats himself.”

“Chess pieces.” I spat on the strand. “I don’t want to be a pawn, Gibson. I don’t want to play.” I have always hated that metaphor. “You have to play, Hadrian. You’ve no choice. None of us has.” “I’m not his.” I said the words as a snake might, glaring at my teacher, venom dripping from my tongue. The scholiast’s dim eyes narrowed. “I never said you were. We’re all pawns, my boy. You, me, Crispin. Even your father and the vicereine-duchess. That’s the way the universe works. But remember!” His voice cracked upward, and he jounced his cane against the weathered white stone. “No matter who tries to move you, be it your father or any man of power, you have a choice, because your soul is in your hands. Always.”

I moved forward to help him stand. Even with his back bent by untold centuries, the scholiast was taller than me, clear evidence that his was some antique bloodline old as empires.

Living as I did in a world of servants and masters and politics, I was a stranger to real friendships. My relationship to my parents could not at all be described as a loving one. So too my relationship with Crispin was characterized by my distaste for him. My bonds with the others of my father’s court—with Sir Felix and Sir Roban, with Tor Alma and Tor Alcuin and Eusebia the Prior and all the rest—were only the attachments of student and teacher or of master and servant. Even my nascent feelings for Kyra—though I did not know or appreciate all of what that meant—were passed through the sanitizing membrane imposed on my life by my station. Only Gibson had broken through. He was, as I have said, the closest thing to a father I ever had. And that damned us both.

I THINK NOW THAT the old rascal wanted me to do it, that even during our little conversation by the strand he was pushing me, needling me so that I’d come round to my convictions on my own. I set myself quite privately to the business of escape, having only the vaguest notions of how to accomplish such a thing. I, who had never once been out-system, dreamed up ways to charter or steal starcraft and pilot them somewhere besides Lorica College on Vesperad. I entertained notions of bribing the sailors aboard whichever ship Father chartered for the voyage or of slipping away at some intermediate stop on our long cruise and lighting out for the territories. I knew it had been done, but the logistics were quite beyond my limited experience. As I understood it, I had two essential problems: figuring out how to get offworld and how to pay for it. Perversely, the second problem proved far easier to solve than the first. I was, after all, the son of a palatine lord, and I had access to certain avenues of wealth that the peasantry couldn’t even imagine. You will imagine, perhaps, chests of precious gems and gold diadems. While gold retains enough value for its scarcity as well as for its myriad practical functions, it is a relatively common thing, and the coined specie of the Imperium—gold hurasams, silver kaspums, and the rest—circulate primarily amongst the lowest strata of our civilization. Gemstones, which are little more than carbon in most cases, have not held value in elite ci...

Now I had the other problem to consider, and it was by far the more complicated one. In a sense I had less right of travel than the meanest plebeian. Any common dock worker or urban farm technician not planetbound by blood might earn passage offworld, or else enlist in the Legions—there was a war on, after all. But I . . . I was scrutinized, guarded, protected. At least when I wasn’t getting myself pummeled nearly to death by a bike gang in the streets of Meidua. And yet that particular episode did inspire in me a measure of confidence. I had slipped away from my watchful sentinels once, hadn’t I? I could do it again. The sun was sinking, yellowing to gold above the western mountains, and below and about me the lights were coming alive in the city of Meidua, the snaking trains of groundcar traffic slowly flicking their running lights into night mode. A holograph panel taller than a house began to glow brightly from the tower across from me, first advertising the Meidua Devils—the gladiators—and then displaying a recruitment ad featuring a strong-jawed woman in the bone-colored armor of the Imperial Legions. I leaned heavily against a carved stone balustrade, sagging against the rail. Already my guilt over blackmailing the factionarius was fading, and a part of me was giddy with my success. I had twenty thousand marks in my possession, totally unknown to my father, and when or if the logothetes and the house bankers checked my accounts, they would see only my generous donat...

“My lord?” “Lieutenant?” I started, stepping away from the rail. Kyra stood primly just outside the door to the penthouse proper, hands clasped before her, eyes downcast. “Is something the matter?” I smiled at her and found that hers was a face I could keep looking at without glancing away as I must with Father. Her hair was the color of beaten bronze, curling like some Petrarchan vision about her heart-shaped face, the curves of her body gone to slimness. “I only came to tell you the suite’s locked down. No one’s coming in or out without triggering house security.” “What?” It took the words a moment to penetrate the clouds in my brain thrown up by her beauty and my shame. “Oh, yes . . . Very good, Kyra.” I smiled again, more weakly this time. “Tell the two hoplites they may retire, then. Or take up shifts, if they wish.” “Sir?” “The shifts thing,” I said, wagging a finger. “Have them do that.” The lieutenant pressed a fist to her breast in salute. “Of course, sire.” She turned to go. “Kyra.” She stopped, shoulders tense, though the meaning was lost on me. “My lord?” Her voice was soft. Then a moment of bravery: “Why do you do that?” “Do what?” I blinked, genuinely lost. Her back still to me, she said, “Call me by my first name. It isn’t proper.” My father’s voice echoed within me, cold. It isn’t proper, my lord. I silenced it, unsure how to answer that. But caution outweighed desire, and I said, lamely, “I wanted . . . to feel close to someone, is all.” She turned back, a...

“I understand that particular pain. Periods of change can be most upsetting, but they present the most opportunity for growth, I find. You’ll face what comes—” “Or I won’t,” I cut in. The scholiast sniffed, permitted me to lead him down the wall toward the knobby finger of Sabine’s Tower, almost a full mile around the arc of wall from the scholiasts’ cloister and the lower gardens. After a second of this progress, Gibson—in Classical English again—breathed the words, “Fear is a poison, my boy.” “Another aphorism?” I smiled my best Marlowe half smile. “Well . . . yes,” Gibson almost grumbled, “but it applies.” “Don’t they always?” I mused,

His hands were tucked into his voluminous sleeves, and they fidgeted with something concealed there. “Do you know, my boy, that we live on a truly beautiful world?” That was not the sort of question one expected of a scholiast, even of one as human as Gibson of Syracuse, and so I was taken aback and turned to look at him. There were dark circles under his eyes and a profound weight upon his stooped shoulders. He seemed an aged Atlas, nearing the end of his heroic struggle to carry the weight of the world. Overcoming my surprise and the previous moment’s grief, I said, “Yes, I suppose we do.” Gibson smiled, a gesture fine as gossamer in the burnished light. “You sound unconvinced.” Against my wishes, I turned back and looked at the edifice of black granite and mirror-glass that comprised the Great Keep and bastion of my home. That same sunlight that frothed the sea to silver glass had no luster for the castle of my forefathers, which—though it was perfectly sunny—seemed cast in cloud-shade. I heard the scholiast laugh. “I suppose you don’t believe me, but you haven’t seen this.” And without looking, I knew he meant the ocean. “I’ve seen it.” “Kwatz,” the scholiast spat, rebuking me. “You are only looking. You have not seen.” I looked. The ocean was as I have told you: a sheet of rippled glass edged with leaden fire. The Wind Isles were invisible at this hour and from this altitude, and what few clouds there were cut deep shadows on the sea, turning the silvered water to a b...

MY WORLD CHANGED WITH the ringing of the bells. Deep as the cracking of stones beneath the earth they rang. High in my chambers, I dropped the white shirt I was folding for my trunk and listened. The sound shook the very stones of the mighty keep, clear and low and loud. I checked my terminal.

Lord Alistair Diomedes Friedrich Marlowe, Archon of Meidua Prefecture by the order of Her Grace, the Lady Elmira Kephalos, Vicereine of Auriga Province, Duchess of Delos, Archon of Artemia Prefecture;

Recorded martial trumpets played from the court speakers, and their fanfare clashed against our dark towers, rebounded off buttressed walls and pointed windows to drown out the unquiet crowd. My father appeared, bracketed by Sir Roban and Sir Ardian in their best armor, Dame Uma and the other lictors behind him, their lances held ready in defense of their lord. Crispin was there too beside Tor Alcuin and the ever-present Eusebia and Severn, dressed like Father in the black frock coat and red toga expected for such formal appearances, his block of a face oddly expressionless. No one had sent for me. Had I been forgotten already? And where was Sir Felix? Surely the castellan ought to be among the assembled party. The trumpeting ceased at a raised hand from Father, and I could just see the shield glimmer faintly around his party. Father’s eyes took in the crowd but skipped right over me unseeing as he lifted up his voice and said, “My people, I come before you with disturbing news.” He paused, ever the master, just long enough to allow the possibilities to begin forming in the minds of the gathered hundreds, building up until they leaked out in whispers. He allowed just enough time to let them believe it was the Cielcin and that their world was ending. I believed it, too. Believed that an invasion had come, if only for a second. But it was only my world that was ending. “As many of you know, my eldest son, Hadrian, is set to be leaving us in but a few days’ time.” I almost mi...

Alone again in my chambers, I had no room for tears. I fell back against my door, sank to the floor, chest heaving. I shut my eyes for a long time, my mind retreating past sleep and madness to a place of utter stillness where rage smoothed itself to a quiet burning. I sat there a long time, legs splayed out on the tile before me. I could feel the blood in me moving and the tears starting to come. Dimly my dream came back to me: Gibson standing tall, his nose cut. I wondered at that and at myself and so opened my eyes. My wonderment vanished at once, buried by cold fear. My coat—the one I had thrown across the top of my footlocker—lay on the furs at the end of my bed. That was wrong. Half crawling, I hurried to it and threw open the lid of my footlocker. I threw clothing and the gathered detritus of my life every which way. I had to punch my leg to stifle a sound that was at once a wail of grief and a howl of fury and a sudden conviction that I too was whipped. The Kharn Sagara book was gone.

A frigid, slimy fear had me in its coils, poisoning me with the certainty that I would fall next.

We were leaving right on time. If Crispin meant to argue with me still, our rapid acceleration drove it from his mind. The bells in the castle banged again: Three. Four. Five. For a moment I felt the thrill I’d wanted, a brief and shrilling glee as the shuttle burned hard and lifted into the air. Six. Seven. We were pushed gently into our seats for only an instant, and then the shuttle’s suppression field came online and countered our change in inertial mass. More distant than the thunder, I could still hear that massive bell ringing. Eight times it rang. Nine. Ten. Though my inertial mass felt normal again, I imagined that my heart sped on forward, launched from my chest and out into the storm, soaring up and away . . . and was gone, leaving me entirely. While I would come down again, it vanished as a ship at warp, slipping faster than light toward worlds I would never see. Below the mighty bell rang on. The clock was striking thirteen.

“Memory betrays most people.” Gibson’s words echoed back to me so clearly that I could see the man standing by the arched window, back stooped and face withered. “It fades, leaving them with dull, soft impressions of a life more like a dream than history.” He always said I was so sharp I’d cut myself,

My memory is to the world as a drawing is to the photograph. Imperfect. More perfect. We remember what we must, what we choose to, because it is more beautiful and real than the truth. I can hear Gibson scoff at that, saying, “Melodrama is the lowest form of art.” I never had a rebuttal for that.

My brother shrugged, threw himself unasked into a green armchair, one leg draped over the arm.

I was having difficulty enduring anything by this point, so I found myself sleeping as much as I could. As I have grown older, I find I need sleep less, but in those early days I found it a blessing, a way to escape the worldly indecency of time. Asleep I could forget my nervousness and the blind terror of my situation. I could forget what I was.

No one as observed as I was is free. Like light particles, the unobserved man is free to become whatever is in him and the world allows. But beneath the eye and auspice of the state, he can be only what his betters demand of him. Pawns, knights, bishops. Even the king may move but one step at a time.

Seven words. A single question. I was as a man balancing on a wire, ready to fall either left or right. Never to climb back up.

“My mother”—she tipped her head back, summoning all the aristocratic hauteur she could muster—“is the duchess of all Delos and one of His Radiance’s own vicereines. She has your father’s balls in her hand.” “Why are you doing this?” She thrust out her chin. “Al never once asked me about this Vesperad business. So damn him to the Outer Dark. You’re my son, Hadrian.” She ran her tongue over her teeth like a bored lioness, her attentions captured by something only she could see. “Is this what you want? Life as a scholiast? With the Corps?” I cleared my throat, desperate to stifle the swelling of emotion the words You are my son had placed in me. “Yes.”

THE DAY BEFORE MY departure came at last, dawning a sunny silver and painting the green-black countryside with its glow. The sky above was the color of turbulent, storm-tossed seas, but it was sunny and fair as any I’d ever seen.

Focus blurs, Gibson used to say. Focus blinds. You must take in all of a thing by seeing the totality of it, not by focusing on minutiae. This is as important for a ruler as it is for a painter. A lump settled in my throat as I stood with my brother watching the approaching shuttle. It appeared at first as a tiny shape, birdlike, a blur at the edge of my vision, falling from the sky like a lance. The bird shape grew, became a dragon, and brought with it a scream of metal fury grinding at the sky—first a low rumble like thunder, then the sound of several hundred swords being sharpened on the firmament. It slalomed back and forth across the sky, shedding massive amounts of speed with every turn, just as we had on our arrival.

Deep beneath my surface, an ember of hot ash blew into flame, a fury with this man—this adding machine—who felt nothing, nothing at all for the brutality visited upon his comrade and brother-in-arms by the man they served. Alcuin must know the story, must know that Gibson’s treatment was a gross injustice. And he didn’t care—couldn’t care. Caring was an alien notion to him, as alien as the Cielcin xenobites in their labyrinthine worldships. As alien as any of the coloni races, enslaved on their own worlds. As alien, indeed, as the dark gods that whisper quietly in the night.

Giving the lictor a smile that I fear failed to reach my eyes, I said,

Only my serenity was skin-deep, a layer of ice atop turbulent waters. Alcuin was frozen solid. I could hear Gibson’s cries of pain as the lash bit into him resounding in my ears and felt myself slipping further away from this meet-and-greet on the landing field. I felt an instant need to be alone.

Often I have found that liars do this: they watch their dupes closely, searching for the moment when belief sets in.

THE FIRST KNOCK CAME late that evening, when the silver sun had fattened to gold and was setting over the western hills.

The man was sharp as nanocarbon wire and just as dangerous to someone moving fast and carelessly.