The Lesser Devil (The Sun Eater, #1.5)

by Christopher Ruocchio

Even after thirty years, he could still feel Hadrian in the old place; his brother who was gone, fled to the edge of known space. Maybe even kidnapped. No one really knew. No one had heard from Hadrian in over thirty standard years. Crispin hoped he was all right.

Now Hadrian was gone—had been gone for over thirty years—and Sabine had taken his place more than a decade later, born when at last the Emperor and his High College deigned to approve House Marlowe’s request for a new child. Sabine. Sabine was nearly half Crispin’s age, more a kind of daughter than a sister. Twenty-five years was a small enough gap in age between palatine siblings, yet Crispin found he could not think of his sister as anything but a child. And yet she was a woman grown: fully thirty years standard, and no longer an ephebe.

“Crispin,” he said, voice deep as hell.

High College for a child.” A black lump rose in Crispin’s throat, and he nodded. They were palatine. Their genetic code was so complex, so over-written that it was impossible for any palatine to have a child in the old way, without the decoctions and uniquely tailored enzymes that protected against deformity or the stillbirths so common amongst those palatine nobiles who sought to have children outside state control. He shuddered, imagining his father living out his days alone in Devil’s Rest, his house destroyed by political maneuvering: denied fruit or flower. It was enough—almost enough—to make one envy the plebs.

It was almost beautiful—for a moment—if in a stark and unforgiving sort of way, if only for a moment. Then Crispin remembered: there had been two metallic noises before that crippling blast. Two. He didn’t remember until the second charge blew. If anyone screamed this time, he never heard it, For a brief moment, he thought that he was flying. The mountains and the plateau ahead seemed to rise, marching up the side of the window as the shuttle began to spiral. There were no sounds in all creation but for the rushing of the blood in his veins and a silent screaming like a wind through his soul. He was going to die. He was going to die and there was nothing he could do to stop it. And not only him: Sabine was going to die—and, if Father was right—their family would die with them. Too soon. It was all too soon. Crispin’s last thought was of Hadrian. Hadrian would survive, at least. Hadrian would avenge them.

“Hell, is it?” Crispin said when at last they’d finished, fidgeting all the while with the platinum signet ring wound round his left thumb. It depicted a devil in capering outline, a trident raised above its head, poised as if to throw. Hell. Devils. “How long did you say this community has been here?” In a certain light, the pagan story sounded almost treasonous. The Marlowes were devils, after all.

“Twenty-one thousand years,” Crispin repeated, and blind to the antiquity and memory of so ancient a tradition, unmoved by the fact that here were members of a living culture older than the Sollan Empire and space travel itself, he grinned. “In all that time you lot didn’t realize this god’s mother of yours just got herself with child off some other man and told her husband ‘Oh, God did it?’”

He could almost imagine his lost older brother answering with the priest as he said, “I was a stranger and you took me in. Our Lord asks us to care for those who need it. Quamdiu fecistis uni de his fratribus meis minimis mihi fecistis. What you do to the least of my brethren you do to me, He says.” “The least?” Crispin echoed. Father Laurent raised a defensive hand, “Even the least. Jean-Louis is a good man. His father taught him well. He would have helped you if you were a beggar or the Prince of Jadd.” His father . . . Crispin’s father had taught him to rule. To rule over his people, regardless of whether or not they wanted him or obeyed. What you do to the least of my brethren you do to me. Such a lord would have the love of his subjects, and they would serve him willingly. By the sound of it, these villagers yet served their Lord God twenty thousand years after his death on Old Earth. What reason other than love and devotion could there be for such a thing? “You’re only helping us because you think it’s the right thing to do?” Crispin said, unable to keep the edge from his voice. His lips curled. “You expect me to believe that?” The old priest only shrugged, “My beliefs do not require you to.”

“We could be all that’s left of our house.” “Well,” Crispin said lamely, “and Hadrian.” “Hadrian!” Sabine’s voice broke, and for a moment Crispin was afraid she might laugh at him. “Hadrian! What do you think? That your long-lost brother might come back and what? Save us? Avenge us? Hadrian isn’t coming back, Crispin. He doesn’t care about us. You said yourself he ran away the first chance he got.” He tucked his hands under his arms and studied the labyrinth pattern embroidered along the outer edge of his cape. “I didn’t mean he’d come save us, Sabine. I only meant he’s still out there. Besides!” He inhaled sharply and looked up, caught her staring at him. How small she seemed, lost in the shape of that great chair. “We’re still alive.

He thought about the way Kyra had crouched down in front of the amputee, her sidearm in her hand. She had intended to kill the wounded man then and there. To spare him whatever torments their pursuers might have visited on him and to keep him from betraying them. That took a coldness Crispin was not sure he had. That surprised him. He had killed men in Colosso and thought of little save the glory of it, but he was certain that had he been in Kyra’s shoes he could not have done it. The thought would not even have entered his mind. Was he going soft? Or had he always been soft? Always a child playing at war?

Crispin had known Hadrian was the better fighter, but he’d always been bigger, stronger. Always more willing to fight. Fighting had been a part of who he was—or at least a piece of who he’d like to be. That piece had been slow dying. Dying. How much of life consists of such deaths?

Crispin felt a shadow of disquiet move in him. “We’ve always been in this together, little sister.” He closed his hand over hers and squeezed, feeling her signet ring press against his palm. “Always.” Crispin caught himself wishing that he had had this conversation with Hadrian thirty years ago, when they were boys together. Perhaps things would have been different if they had. But he reminded himself that this was not Hadrian. This was Sabine. And Hadrian was gone—would always be gone. The river of Time flows in but one direction, and does not turn back.

Crispin smiled. He had always been the lesser devil. Always in Hadrian’s shadow, or his father’s. It had taken years, decades, to realize that it was this that had made him angry as a boy. This that had made him . . . whatever he’d been.

“You know how the Chantry started, don’t you? It was a project launched by the Imperial Ministry of Public Enlightenment in the . . . second millennium? Or the third?” He held a hand to his chin, eyes seeming to read something written along the inside of his brow line. “They wanted to venerate the first Emperor. Old King William. So they borrowed from old religions. Your prayers are Christian, your sacrifices are Hindu. Your architecture is Islamic, your icons pagan. Your scripture is plagiarism, and your canon is politics. And yes, the robes your Chanters wear are only imitations of this.” He touched the gold crucifix and the front of his dark robes. “Even that devil you wear on your ring. That was our symbol before it was yours. Cultures are always built on the bones of the cultures that come before. But your Chantry made those decisions by committee. They walk around in our clothes, pretending to have our authority.” He did set his wine cup down then, and leaned back in his chair. “They say theirs is a crusade to wipe out the Cielcin. We fought crusades once. When men were children. We fought to reclaim what was stolen from us, and to liberate our people from foreign rule. We fought because our people were dying.”

If you answer violence with violence, you will inherit violence without end. Whoever slays the killer quickly discovers that killers are avenged sevenfold.” Crispin was made aware again of just how quiet everyone at the table had become. Wide eyes watched from all around the long table, bright in the clinical light of the repurposed terraforming station. He saw what the strange priest meant. “My brother would like you,” he said at last, and that ended the conversation.

All his life—every little hour of it—he had spent in control. In his Father’s control, yes, but in control of others, too. There was nothing he had needed that could not be gotten by a word. A shout. A command. He had not needed to be alone. He had not needed to pray as he prayed now. For his father. For his sister. For himself. But he was surprised that it was himself he thought of last—least—and he knew that if he had to choose, he would choose Sabine’s life over his own. Sabine. She was the more cunning, the more temperate, the more learned.

“You almost died, Crispin!” He felt his brows contract, but busied himself studying her knee-high boots. “Yes, I had noticed that. Thank you.” Sabine was about to start yelling. He could sense that, too. He needed to head that off. He stood up quickly, reminding Sabine just how much taller he was. “These people could not have stopped two men on skiffs armed with plasma burners.” He gestured towards the shattered windows on the church, the burned trees, the wall he had ruined, and the greater burning in the village beyond—to say nothing of the smashed columbarium and the wreckage of the skiff still smoldering on the paving stones. “Two men did this. Two, Sabine.” He held up the corresponding fingers.

“Your life isn’t worth this village,” she said sharply. “You’re palatine.” “These are our people,” he said. “They’re on our land. And besides . . . ” his voice broke as his resolve wavered a moment, teetering on the precipice of too much emotion, “they were after us anyway. Waiting would have done no good. More people would have died.”

Hers were Marlowe eyes, and unused to tears.

Thus it was with the dust of Kyra’s funeral pyre filling the sky behind him that Crispin rounded the gatepost to the churchyard with Lud firing in his wake.

Thump. A hand curled around the side of Crispin’s chair, gray and liver-spotted. Never before had Crispin seen so old and withered a limb. It was a skeleton’s hand: gnarled, knob-knuckled, and blue veined. Great rings weighed down those ancient fingers; scratched, old gold set with amethyst and alexandrite. Golden chains hung upon her wrist, and pearls. “My family is dead, Marlowe. My son. And his poor sons. His wife and her sisters. And their children. Do you know how many nobile children there were on Linon when your father sucked all the air out of the palace?”

“You’re right,” Crispin admitted. “It’s not the same.” But even as he spoke, he heard a little voice far off in the bowels of his skull whisper, You don’t believe that. He had given himself up to stop the shelling of the town—or had it been only to protect Sabine? Her life was the only one in all the village below that really mattered, wasn’t it? Sabine was palatine. His sister. A sibling to replace the sibling he’d lost. Had he been a hero when he handed his sword to Lud and stepped into no man’s land? Or only her brother?

Crispin saw blood—alarmingly red against the gray paleness of her skin, and he grinned viciously, watching her sway and swear, clutching her face with both hands. She had dropped the knife—where had it fallen? Not that it mattered; it was no good to him with his hands bound as they were.

Get up. A voice urged him. Go again. How many times had he heard those words before, sparring with Sir Felix when he had Hadrian were boys together? How many times had his older brother put him on the ground? Get up. He could remember lying on the floor in Hadrian’s room at Haspida, could remember the Summer Palace. Stay down! Hadrian had screamed. Stay down! Get up. A shadow fell across Crispin, a figure standing over him, dressed all in black. Get up, Crispin! He said in a voice that Crispin had not heard in more than thirty years. Hadrian stood above him, thin as a blade. His hands were in his pockets, in one of those long, black coats he always wore. Crispin had forgotten so much of what his brother had looked like: the knife-edged lines of his face; the pointed nose and chin; the slanting, saturnine eyebrows. Why was he here? Was this what the gladiators meant when they said they saw their lives flash before their eyes when Death came near? Were those Death’s feet coming towards him? Or only Lady Lyra’s guards? Hadrian looked down his nose at Crispin where he lay, but he smiled that crooked Marlowe smile. Get up, he said again. Fight, if you have something to fight for. Get up? Crispin thought. That wasn’t right. Hadrian had said Stay down!

Frustrated by Crispin’s still-free hands, he let go with one of his own and pulled back to strike Crispin a blow that would have knocked the teeth from his head. Crispin tried to get his hands up to block it, shut his eyes despite decades of fighter’s instinct. The blow never came. Warm blood splashed Crispin’s face, and opening his eyes he saw that Lud had stepped in and interposed the highmatter blade between between Carlo’s arm and Crispin’s face, severing the Durantine’s appendage at the elbow. And the blood . . . it wasn’t blood at all. Whatever it was draining from the stump of Carlo’s arm, it had the texture of oil and the color of milk. The tissues visible beneath Carlo’s skin were egg-yolk yellow, the bones black and fibrous. He wasn’t a man at all. Too late Crispin remembered that the Durantines did not share his Imperial hatred of machines. Carlo was one of their strojeva, a golem. What was the old English word? An android.

“You know, I always wanted to be like him. When I was a boy. He was always better than me. A better student, a better fighter, a better everything. He could be an ass . . . ” He laughed a little. “But I loved him—love him, I suppose. I don’t think he’s dead. But it did always seem like I was in his shadow, you know?” “I do,” Laurent said, “but shadows shrink in time.”