Ashes of Man (Sun Eater, #5)

by Christopher Ruocchio

So too I believe the evils you have seen must serve some good in time.”

So often we don’t see the truth because we won’t look low enough. Gibson’s words resounded across the waters, as if falling from his tomb.

My friends were dead, and Gibson was dead. Their souls were gone into the Howling Dark, never to return as I had. As I had . . . I was not dead, nor sailing to my death—I knew—but back to life and the worlds of men, and not alone.

I thought the death of Hadrian the Halfmortal to be the sort of thing the Imperial propaganda corps would prefer be kept secret. Rumor—it seemed—was faster than light.

“You are primate of the Imperial Library. He was one of your archivists.” Scholiasts were expected to command enormous swaths of information. They were masters of mnemonic. Asking me to believe he simply did not know was ridiculous.

“Most of us are here not because we choose to be, or because we are capable, but because we are embarrassments.”

“We have so much history now, even controlling for the Cielcin. We have too many worlds. Soon even we will not be able to account for all of it. You know I sometimes think the Empire must crack under its weight?”

“As I say,” Arrian said, “exiles, refugees, and criminals. Why do you think we strip away our old names? As Tor Gibson, Prince Philippe was permitted to live out his days anonymously, and in a role where he could do no more harm to the Imperium, and where it could do no harm to him.”

Augustin Bourbon had tried to kill me. Him, and Sir Lorcan Breathnach, and the Empress herself. They had armed the assassin, Irshan, and bought Lieutenant Casdon’s loyalty, helped her to smuggle a knife-missile into my cabin aboard the Tamerlane. They had nearly succeeded, and nearly killed Valka as well. I should not feel horror, or pity.

I had become something else instead, and time moves in but one direction only. Only the past is written.

I think of you often, and meant what I said: you are your father’s son. What I have not said, what I should have said, is that you were ever a son to me. The son I always wanted. Yours, Tor Gibson

Was it purely for dramatic effect? Had I so polluted her?

She had suffered—not as I had suffered—but in her own way, and suffering is not quantified or measured. It only is.

There was too much, entirely too much, of Hadrian Marlowe in the young Hector Oliva, and I hated him for it.

But there are women and women, commander. Some ask nothing of us, and so we are nothing to them. But there are those women who ask all of us. Those are the ones worth giving all for.”

“I am old, Sir Hector,” I said, using the young man’s given name for I think the first time. “I have fought in more than thirty battles on as many worlds. Spoken with gods, battled demons. I’ve broken bread with the Scourge of Earth itself, and treated with Kharn Sagara. I have served the Emperor loyally for more than three hundred years, and I have loved only three women.”

One cannot step in the same river twice, and home is not home when you return, for you are not yourself. The man you were yesterday died yesterday, and is only a piece of the man of today, as you will be tomorrow.

But there is little right in all the universe, and none which we do not fight for and make for ourselves.

The universe is infinite, or so the scholiasts say, and I have seen that it is so. But it is infinite only in certain ways: in space and in potential. It is bounded in time, for time had a beginning—all magi agree—and so it must have an end. As will we. Something in this asymmetry between infinite space and finite time, I think, explains all coincidences, conserving fact as readily as other laws conserve matter and energy.

“The other Hadrians I’ve met have called the Quiet he.”

“When I try, I can reach them. Their memories. These other Hadrians . . . these lives that never happened. Some of them know things, things I’m sure I never learned. I remember . . . being a slave on Emesh. And you and I, we were on Echidna—or was it Typhon? The Cielcin worldships. The ones the Empire impounded.”

“What is a god?” If a god were only something greater than the seeker, more developed than man, then the Quiet was a god beyond all doubt. But by that token, we men were gods to the Umandh, to the Cavaraad, and the other lesser races that dwelt among the stars. And what gods! Zeus and his debauched cabal of bloody-minded psychopaths could hardly be more degenerate.

You said yourself the Quiet comes from the future. That it’s born at the end of time. How can it create the universe if the universe created it?”

“Some men love a thing so much they hide it away, others love a thing so much they boast of it at every opportunity.”

Who can see the tree written in the seed, or know its fruit? Only the Quiet one, whose hand did the writing, and whose eye sees all the universe as you or I apprehend the words on a page.

“There he is!” he said, and thrust his sword in my direction. “There’s the Demon in White!”

You will have heard how a certain Captain Hector Oliva stood against the enemy when all was lost. And you will have heard, too, how when his Empire needed him most, Hadrian Marlowe did not appear.

The mighty engines that drove them across the light-years took far longer to spin up to warp speeds due to their tremendous size, but that same huge volume allowed them to fold space much faster once the engines started to burn.

The Quiet had shown me the future, but he had shown me all of it: every instant of time past and time present, every possible state of time future. I had seen so much, too much to ever answer that or any question.

I could not tell him the truth: that the visions I remembered most clearly were not of the future—not anymore. I had seen my death at Akterumu, seen it a thousand times. And I had seen other moments, seen myself ignite a sun—but I had been young then. In all the visions I had seen, I had seen nothing beyond the dome and the massacre on Eue. Nothing that could still happen. Do what must be done.

Who was it said you could move planets with a big enough lever? Shakespeare?” “Archimedes,”

“How is it you always know?” “I read,” I said, and shrugged. “People always accuse me of wasting my time, but they don’t complain when I have their answers.”

“The world’s changed,” I allowed, and glanced back to where Prince Rafael Hatim sat with Garan Peake and the others. “But men have not. Nor will.” I clapped him on the shoulder. “We keep making the same choices. The same mistakes. So the same wisdom will ever serve us.”

The Aventine House. Seventeen millennia of them now, since the God Emperor put Old Earth to fire and the sword. Seventeen thousand years. Two hundred and fifty-one monarchs. One family.

“How can we ever hope to prevail against such demons, I ask you?” “By being demons ourselves, sire,” I said.

“You know the old stories perhaps better than I,” I said into the fresh quiet. “Angels are only demons that kept their oaths . . . and still serve good and truth.”

“There was no single ancient civilization. The Quiet Ones did not exist. Their hypothesis was wrong. The people—or the person, if you are right—who built the ruins on Emesh and Judecca and the rest were but one of three, possibly four, great ancient civilizations that have left ruins across our stars. We’ve known this for thousands of years.”

“I am sovereign of half a billion suns, Marlowe. Half a billion suns, and still the Dark is vast enough to swallow us whole and not even notice . . .” He turned his back, returned to the ruined city. “I mislike this waiting,” he said then. “The Cielcin have not attacked in decades. Not since you went away.”

Dorayaica was right about one thing. Time runs down into darkness. Even the stars burn out. And scars . . . there are scars that not even Death can wash away.

In Jadd it is said a man must do three things: Fight well, seek beauty, and speak truth. With you I failed this third charge. But in this at least I spoke truth: I am Maeskolon, a Swordmaster of the Second Circle. But I was not sulshawar—not lictor, you would say—to my Kalima.”

“Hadrian, it was a gift! And it would be no gift had I expected its return. I have lost nothing! And we have gained the death of an enemy. Though I see it was hard bought.”

“These are grievous times. But perhaps so great a darkness calls for even greater light. It is written that no guide is known that can shelter the world from grief, for no man knows what God intends.”

“I hate that bastard for what he did to Valka,” Lorian said. “It’s enough to make a man pray there is hell . . . even at the risk of ending up there himself.”

“I do not want your sister,” I said. “I do not want power. Or the throne. I want . . .” I choked. I wanted my family back. Pallino and Elara. Ilex and Crim. Corvo, Siran, and Durand. But that was beyond the might of our holy Emperor, beyond the might even of Kharn Sagara and his black sorcery. Time does not turn back, and not even the gods of night our pale enemy worshiped could grant my dearest wish.

“I have never wanted power—unless it was the power to end this war.”

he was Emperor in an age that begged more than greatness of its lords. And he was only great.

“I suppose I should thank you.” “You never have to,” I said. “Just be careful. You and Valka are . . . all I have left.”

“Do you think my life means more to me than the lives of all the millions on this world?” “Of course you don’t!” I said, regaining my footing. “Each life matters, Radiance. Each. But I have a mind also for the trillions of lives across our Empire to whom your life matters! You are not only a man, sire, but Caesar, and Caesar is a symbol. Of stability! Of civilization! Of everything!”

Valka stood silent over the Emperor’s shoulder, her eyes very wide. All her life she had ridiculed the nobility, dismissed them as craven, as eaten out with greed, with cruelty. And here at last she saw the Emperor of Man himself moved to fury at his inability to save the lives of the very lowest. Farmers. Settlers. Pioneers.

We had put our faith in Bassander Lin, and the Mandari officer—solid and dependable as ever—had not let that faith fall from his hands.