Empire of Silence (The Sun Eater #1)

by Christopher Ruocchio

For a moment I realized that being the younger brother, he had expected to come into nothing. Just as I had thought Devil’s Rest had always been Crispin’s, he had believed it mine. He had toiled in my shadow, and I in his, neither of us knowing the shadow was really just that of our Father, drowning us both.

Crispin’s blunt features betrayed nothing of the mind sparkling behind his flat eyes, and my own blood ran cold.

I stood immobile, the ice in my veins turned to granite. Through a jaw so tight it might have been wired shut, I hissed, “I don’t want to talk about that.”

Rage is blindness, I told myself, Gibson’s voice rolling over in my head, muttering the old scholiasts’ mantra. But another voice—my own voice—answered Crispin. “He was my friend.” Crispin looked at me, incredulous. “He tried to ship you off to be some limp-dick scholiast. He was going to give you to the Extras!” “That isn’t what happened, you imbecile.” My nostrils flared, and I could feel the muscles in my face tighten dangerously, hardening into a grimness two steps from fury. I knew as I spoke that I should not have said it, that some officer of the house intelligence corps could hear and alert security, but I was past caring. Crispin colored red, face flushing all at once, a startling transition from his accustomed paleness. “Don’t you dare.” “Call you an imbecile?” I stepped inside the reach of Crispin’s arms. The bones of my right hand ached, drawing attention to themselves and the danger I was putting myself in by coming within striking distance of a larger Marlowe. But I was leaving the next day—that night, if I had my way. It needed to be said. “You’re an imbecile.” The poets speak of rage as a fiery thing, consuming, destroying, twisting a soul to mistaken action. They sing songs of revenge, of lovers killed in the night, of passions inflamed, of houses torn asunder. But there is little heat in rage. The scholiasts have it right. Rage is blindness. A red color blurring out the world. It is light, not fire. And light, when finely tuned, can cut as surely as steel...

I smiled again, the grin unintentionally crooked, as all my family’s grins were. I was conscious then of my accent, the polish of the old Imperial elite, scion of the elder houses of the inner worlds. It was a voice associated with villains in the sort of operas portrayed on the rather tasteless posters that plastered the wine-sink’s walls.

Karch lay at the edge of the globe, as far from civilization as was possible on a planet like Delos. If our cartographers had shared the romance of the ancients, they might have drawn dragons and sea serpents in the waters encircling her. Where Meidua was tall, her proud towers stretching like supplicating fingers toward the gray heavens, Karch was squat, a rambling tangle of two-and three-story buildings along the stony rise above the bay. On those blue-gray waters, floating like so much garbage, lay a tangle of pontoon bridges and floats anchored to concrete piers like bones in a fish. A great many ships gathered there: sail and steam and star.

Even Gibson, whose life had retreated so far into age that it was lost within it, looked young next to the little goblin.

Homunculi weren’t human, not truly. They represented a loophole in the Chantry’s technological regulations—their religious decrees—and like all loopholes, greed and human cruelty poured into that space like wine.

Beside and behind us, the Eurynasir began to whine, her engines shifting from a low and crunching growl to something high and steady, as if deep water were coursing through the veins of the world.

So enthralled was I by this mechanical precision—and at such speed—that I failed to note that I had seen the surface of my world for the last time, vanishing as light does through the aperture of a camera: split into wedges, then slivers, then darkness.

And there it was: the faint sensation of my stomach dropping away through blind depths, the rage of the twinned fusion drives far to aft. We were flying. Rising along the curve of an invisible chain through air and darkness toward a darkness greater still.

I dragged my hands down across my face, hoping to still the emotions there. Gibson’s voice rasped in my ear, so close I almost felt him at my shoulder. Joy is a wind, Hadrian. It will pick you up only to smash you against the rocks again. I latched onto the beginning of that statement, murmured, “Joy is a wind.”

The suppression field was not proper gravity or even true artificial gravity. It only pinned us to the deck as butterflies are pinned under glass.

“The hell was that about winds?” the big helmsman asked, turning about and unbuckling his restraints. I looked past him, out at the untellable beauty of the cosmos: eternal, untouchable, and clean. “Something my tutor used to say,” I replied. When the three merchanters kept watching me, I added, “He was a scholiast.”

Suspended as they were in darkness, I thought of biological samples, flayed and plastinated or else packed in formaldehyde, pickled like onions and left on the shelves of some mad scientist’s laboratory. They looked dead, and in a sense they were: the processes of their lives suspended, forwarded to another day. I had known this moment would come, and yet nothing could have prepared me for the unnatural horror of it. Fear is death to reason, I told myself, and again it was Gibson’s voice, quieting me with the familiar words. Reason, death to fear. This was only cryonic fugue, routine and commonplace. I wasn’t going to die. Not there. Not today. I took in a deep breath, and when I exhaled it, I nodded. “I’m ready.”

I froze, taking in the grinning captain, his beautiful wife, the wax-faced doctor, and their little pet monster. “Could I get some privacy, then?” Except for the doctor, they all laughed, and Saltus said, “We’ll all be able to see your little cock once you’re in the freeze, cousin. No point getting shy now.” The creature bared its too many teeth. Juno kicked him again, and he yelped, falling sideways into the wall.

Obedience to necessity already had me removing my coat,

He guided me toward the open crèche and helped me step inside. I pulled myself up with one hand, using the other to cover myself. Seeing my ring, the doctor caught my free hand. “You will want this off. ’Twill burn you.” I shook my head vigorously. “Then it burns me.” I looked at the locker, thinking of the universal card. Mother had hired these people, and apparently Adaeze Feng had recommended them, but that didn’t mean I had to trust them. And the ring was all I would have left of the boy I had been: a single loop of silver, the carnelian bezel with its laser-cut devil sigil masking terabytes of crystal storage. It held both copies of the contract I’d made with the Mining Guild as well as all manner of other documents, my identification not the least of them. I would not part with it.

That made him laugh. “You really don’t want to be wearing that ring when you go in.” “I’m keeping it.” I tightened my jaw, lay my head back in the cradle meant for it. “Let’s get on with it.”

It hissed as it pierced my arm, and he fastened the securing strap about my biceps. “ ’Tis going to get cold rather fast.” It already had. The freeze crept from the needle site in my arm, the blood transmuting, cells hardening without tearing. My brain began to go fuzzy, and as if from far away I heard Doctor Sarric say, “He’s ready. Seal the crèche.” I heard rather than saw the dark glass slam down over me, trapping me as in a sarcophagus. Something coolly gelatinous began to rise about my ankles. Darkness blossomed behind my eyes, and through that darkness I again perceived the funeral masks of my ancestors as they hung above the doors to the council chamber beneath the Dome of Bright Carvings, their violet gaze accusatory and unkind. The preservative gel rose about me even as I froze from within. I wanted to scream, to slam my fists against the walls of the tank, but the strength was already gone from me. I was drowning—I knew I was drowning, knew there was nothing I could do. I was going to die in that tank. And then the worst part of all happened. My breathing stopped. The fluid was not even to my chin, and my breathing stopped. Then it was in me, black water thick as oil flooding down my throat, up my nose. That outer dark took me, and I plunged into blackness and cold. And when I awoke, my world had ended.

THE FIRST THING I noticed was the stink. Wherever I was, the stench of rotting fish and raw sewage was overpowering. Then it was the heat, damp and oppressive, clinging to me like wet canvas. And light. There was light. A universe of it, almost as bright as the light of Gododdin’s sun; perhaps it was that light, cast backward across time to blind me in my childhood, to turn me back. I could not see.

The gods only knew how far I was from home, how lost, and how much time had fled from me. I shut my eyes, squeezing out tears as another more horrible realization struck me. Worse than my situation; worse than the fact that I was lost and alone on a world I had never heard of; worse than the loss of my hard-won universal card. I had lost Gibson’s letter. The letter of introduction he had drafted to the scholiasts at Nov Senber. The letter of introduction without which I would never gain admittance at the athenaeum. I’d be turned away at the gate. I tried to tell myself that a scholiast would not cry. But I was not a scholiast, would never be a scholiast. I slammed my fist into the mattress. Once. Twice. I hit my thigh, wordless sounds leaking out from between my teeth, anguished and accursed. Maybe it was only a dream. It had to be. It all had to be a dream, some awful nightmare. Maybe you did dream in fugue. Maybe I was dreaming then. Maybe I would wake up in a minute to Demetri’s irrepressible grin. On Teukros. I never did. The thought of my family consumed me. Of orders shunted by QET wave between the stars. I could imagine my father demanding the local prefects hold me until I could be retrieved. I wondered where he would deliver me. To Vesperad? Back to Delos? Or simply out an airlock? I had shirked my duties, abandoned my role as a son. By the Great Charters, by all the laws of the Empire, I was his to command. Hadrian, name for me the Eight Forms of Obedience. I wou...

A rat scampered across the space, causing me to start. I watched it go; so like myself it was, stealing into the night.

At long last I stopped, slumped against a rubbish bin outside a bakery, a lone figure in stolen clothes, crouched against the night. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide. And I realized that it was not rain on my face, but tears.

Still bent over it, he said, “I’m not seeing a ship by that name.” His small smile sharpened until it could’ve cut glass. “You’re sure you have it right?”

My mind plugged through the steps of understanding with mechanical slowness, my thoughts bent by the heat and by hunger. But I had not yet abandoned hope. For all I knew, Demetri and his crew were waiting, lurking in some blast pit or other on the extreme edge of the starport landing field. Or, a little voice said within me, sounding too much like Crispin, or . . . they’re all dead. That thought stilled me, chilled me in spite of the heat of that infernal planet. Like Cid Arthur, I sat a long time in the shade of that tree, watching boats wend their way up the canal opposite me. Row on for home, my lads. Row on for home. I’m not seeing a ship by that name. Not the starport, then. Not the starport. Maybe they scrapped the junker.

The woman had been on the edge of arresting me for vagrancy, but my manner kept her from pulling the trigger on the stunner at her hip. Growing up, there were always stories, you see. Tales of crews gone missing in the depths of space, their empty ships scudding into ports and into systems on dying warp wakes. Men said it was pirates, the Extra-solarians preying on merchant vessels, kidnapping the crews to serve aboard their massive, black-masted ships, forcing machines into their flesh to enslave them. I have seen those black ships, have stalked their halls. I have seen their deathless armies, machine-men hollow and unfeeling. There is truth in those tales. Still other men say it was Cielcin that preyed on the wandering ships, harvesting the crews the way you or I might net a school of fish from the sea. I suspect both are true, and more besides. I suspect that ships disappeared in the throes of poine, in interhouse warfare, the familial vendettas that typify our Empire. I suspect misfortune, mismanagement, mistakes, or perhaps an accident that caused the captain to abandon his vessel. It does not matter what happened, and I am now too old to care. There are always empty ships and dead sailors. As the ancient sea was cruel, so too is that blacker sea, vaster by far, that fills the void between the suns like water. But I cared then, and so I found myself—ravenous and in pain—at the gate of a massive series of hangars that sat upon the very margin of the sea and the city. T...

Empty ships. There are always empty ships. They whispered to me, droning of battles, of pirates, of xenobites howling out of the Dark. Of old, such sunken vessels were lost at sea, swallowed by harsh waters and destroyed by the weight of them. Space sought no such equilibrium, allowed its wrecks to remain pristine, untrammeled. There were whole corporations dedicated to the salvage of such damaged ships.

Memories of a thousand sparring lessons with Felix came to mind, with Crispin. They retreated just as fast, fading as distractions must in the heat of such moments, retreating until the only memories were those of muscle and blood. A wild hook took me in the ribs, sending me staggering. Too slow, I thought, more angry than in pain. Too weak.

THREE DAYS AND NIGHTS have passed since last I put pen to vellum. Long have I pondered how to proceed, how best to relate those days and years lost to the streets of Borosevo. They say that when he was a boy, the prince Cid Arthur was kept in a pleasure palace by his father’s faithful archon, isolated from death, disease, and poverty, for a vate had prophesied that if he should see the ugliness of the world, Cid Arthur would renounce his father’s throne and become a preacher himself. I had always wondered at this, for I had grown up in a palace myself, and I knew of poverty and sickness and had had my own brushes with death—first with my grandmother, then later when Uncle Lucian had died in his shuttle crash. I could not understand how Arthur had been so blind. I understood it now. Just as there is a difference between the news of a distant planet’s destruction and the bloody death of a coliseum slave, it is one thing to know there is poverty and illness and another to walk among the poor and suffering. Often I saw beggars covered in black sores and peeling skin beseeching the Chantry for deliverance not from evil, but from sickness. The Rot was rampant in the city, the gift of some alien animalcule very like a bacterium. It blackened skin and wasted flesh and hardened lymphs and lungs. The city prefects piled bodies in squares and burned them, and the smoke carried votive lanterns to a heaven that seemed deaf to all prayer. My own palatine blood defended me, but there was...

It was a good spot. Dry, unless one counted the channel in the bottom of the storm drain. Enclosed, unless one counted the open mouth of the tunnel that spilled out onto a canal some twenty feet below.

A flight of terranic pigeons rose from the street corner, and I watched a paper votive lantern rise above the rooftops. They were always rising from the city, carrying prayers toward Mother Earth, entreaties for the souls of the Rot’s victims. I leaned against the side of the drainpipe, resting my head on the whitewashed concrete. “You!” How is it you can always tell when a word is directed at you? Every muscle in me tightened like bowstrings ready to fire,

THE RAIN SHEETED OFF the canted roofs, over choking gutters, and into canals so bloated they swallowed the roads.

I needed shelter. I needed food. I needed to stop hurting.

As a child I had wished for an adventure. I had wanted to see the galaxy, to plumb the hidden depths of the human universe and prize secrets from the darkness between the stars. I had wanted to travel like Tor Simeon and Kharn Sagara in the old stories, wanted to see the Ninety-Nine Wonders of the Universe and to break bread with xenobites and kings. Well, I had gotten my adventure, and it was killing me.

A small, dark face peered down at me, plastered with sodden hair. I wanted to slink away, to vanish. I had not spoken to anyone in weeks, not since the time a sailor on shore leave had given me half a sandwich when I asked for a kaspum. You may think it odd, but if you have ever been well and truly alone for any length of time, you will know how hard it is to come back to the world of people. So I just stared at her.

But the truth is poor poetry, and my mother had taught me better.

As is so often true in cases of exhaustion or hurt, rest was the best and worst thing for me. I couldn’t make myself move. “You don’t have any painkillers, do you? Nothing heavy. No narcotics.”

Cat and I sat there a long while, unseen by the world, seeing all of it.