Ashes of Man (Sun Eater, #5)

by Christopher Ruocchio

I had seen a different ocean, had watched it recede along a shore of crushed bone. Mirrored knights stood silent sentinel about a bed draped in red silk in which a man lay dying. I lay in that same bed, Selene beside me. Selene and Valka. Valka alone. Myself alone. Alone. A woman with eyes like black suns sat draped in cloth of gold. The vision turned, and Dorayaica, the Shiomu Elusha, strode along beneath the colonnades of the Eternal City, Vati and Attavaisa beside it. It turned again: the Emperor’s face smiled down at me, then—as if in a kaleidoscope—split in two. I blinked, and saw Alexander’s face and mine looking back at me, each of us on golden thrones. The ocean receded again, waters running from my advancing feet, and I stared out into darkness. A square of darkness framed in light, blacker than anything I’d ever seen, blacker than the stones of Annica, blacker than the Howling Dark.

Vision to remember.

The ugliness of the world does not fade, nor are fear and grief made less by time, nor is any suffering forgotten. We are only made stronger by its blows.

So often we don’t see the truth because we won’t look low enough.

“Charles Bourbon would not execute his brother. Prince Philippe and his Septembrines were exiled to Belusha. I understand that most of them died there.” “And Gibson was one of them,” I said, in a desperate attempt to divert what I knew must be coming. “One of the Septembrines.” I wished at once that I had not come to the athenaeum. I knew what Tor Arrian was about to say. “Oh no,” the elder scholiast said, eyes hugely magnified so that twin moons shone down on me, green as his robes. “He was the prince himself. He served most of his time on Belusha in cryonic fugue—a benefit of his rank—and appealed his way into athenaeum on Syracuse. The Imperial Council commuted his sentence, in part at Prince Charles’s urging, and he was permitted to embrace Stricture and join the Order.” I closed my mouth, had hardly heard any words after that first sentence. He was the prince himself.

And I had killed his son. The thought ran through me like the wind rushing out an open airlock, and I sat half-frozen in my chair. Only the cheery crackling of the fire could be heard, strange counterpoint to the unheard roaring in my mind. 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. But I had killed Gibson’s son.

But the old man—Tor Gibson, Prince Philippe—was not quite done. There was a postscript. Please find enclosed a replacement for the gift you so carelessly lost leaving home all those years ago. Be careful. I do not think I will be able to replace it a second time. You may yet find a use for it.

All things are always in motion. That is why it is the highest good and cause of civilization to preserve—to conserve—what is good. It is for that reason we plant new seeds, that if we might not preserve the trees, we might preserve the forest. If Earth is truly lost—as I believe—and not returning, then it is good that we plant her children across the stars.

May Time, Ever-Fleeting, forgive me.

How vast and dark is our universe, how arrayed against us—not indifferent as the ancient magi would have it—but hostile and cruel.

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

Doubtless you find this meeting strange. I did not. I did not then know the name of Sir Hector Oliva, Champion of the Battle of Taranis, captain of the Siren, commander of the last defense of Nessus, Hero of the Empire. The only man besides myself to stand in single combat against the Dark Lord of Dharan-Tun and live to tell the tale.

Important note on Sir Hector Oliva.

We have need of heroes, however broken, however terrible, however insufficient they may be. And we have need of more than one hero, for heroes do break, you know.

“Do you not have your answer a hundred times over?” A brief tremor shook her arm, but she hid it behind her back and shook her head again. “Monsters don’t have doubts.”

“Three hundred eighty-four actual,” I said, unable to keep the note of sadness from my voice, “but it’s been nearly a thousand years since I was born.”

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.”

The Magnarch and the Emperor both had not forgotten how the Chantry tried to kill me on Thermon, or set Udax against me at Gododdin. Nor had they forgotten Irshan and the Empress’s little plot. The Emperor’s man Hector Oliva may have been, and though I was myself the Emperor’s man, I was still Hadrian Marlowe.

some wounds never truly heal.

I did smile then, for there it was, undisturbed these last eleven decades, right where I’d left it. Right where I’d hoped it would be. Valka’s phylactery.

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. Or perhaps . . . it is only that we are human, and that our human lives are woven together, and are more tightly bound by the action of the loom of human drama.

“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.

The dead become ever closer companions as we grow old ourselves and nearer eternity. And afterlife or no, they live on in us. Perhaps that is why it seems we have ghosts. Because we carry them in ourselves.

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

“There’s the Demon in White!”

Dust would gather in Maddalo House once more, and there the dust would remain . . . until fire fell upon Nessus like rain. As fall it would. You have heard that story, heard how the Cielcin came to Nessus and set the hills ablaze. You have heard how it was that Lynch and Kartzinel organized the last defense, and how the great shipyards were burned and the city of Sananne was harvested and brought low, its men and towers threshed like grain. Some of you will have seen the footage, will have seen the great fleet commanded by the Grand Vayadan Vati Inamna, and seen the Grand Vayadan itself standing on the steps of the Magnarch’s palace as the black banners of its king snapped against the sky. 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. But that was all to come,

Fall of Nessus.

“The Lord Hadrian Anaxander Marlowe-Victorian, Supreme Commandant of the Imperial Red Company, Knight-Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, Bearer of the Grass Crown, Holder of the Order of Merit, Hero of the Empire, and escort!”

Hadrian's titles.

“Just so,” spoke the voice Imperial, sotto voce. Emperor William XXIII raised his voice then, speaking to the whole assembly. “Lord Marlowe speaks the truth! The Lothrians have betrayed us.” Looking up, I found the Emperor standing upon the lowest steps, one foot a step above the other, his snowy cloak trailing behind him, his hands behind his back. “We believe they mean to make their war against us. That they will cross the Rasan Belt and strike at the heartlands of Empire while their masters chew about the fringes. This we cannot allow.” Here he pressed his lips together. “What is more, Lord Marlowe is right. Without him, without his people’s sacrifice, this treachery might have taken us unawares.”

“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 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. Theirs was the single greatest dynasty in all our human history.

Info on the ruling family.

CHAPTER 17 DISQUIET GODS

The next book title!

Grief is deep water. Rage is blindness.

“He did not love his wife,” the Emperor said. “And she shared neither his bed nor his counsel. No. The Acts was written by Catherine the White. She was his closest companion, and the mother of his son. His real mother.” My understanding only grew sharper. “Victor Sebastos?” I asked, naming the second Emperor. “Victor the Bastard,” the Emperor replied with bloody emphasis. “Impatian’s histories are mostly lies, I fear. Victor’s pedigree was common knowledge in his day, but the Throne and the Chantry both have painted over it in the eons since.”

CHAPTER 18 SHADOWS UPON TIME

Name of the 7th book.

the ashes of war

Book title!

Caesar’s polished red boots slid into view. “No rest for the wicked, Demon in White.”

You give them hell now . . .

Pallino's final words.

“Nothing lasts forever, Hadrian,”

“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”

Always I had led from the front, and in that moment—after all those years—I finally understood why. We believe war is waged by heroes and brave men, and it is so. But war is waged as much—and more—by those not brave at all. I am not Pallino, I am not sure I ever was. No Son of Fortitude, me. Only an old man too afraid and too tired to run.

“Get her into one of these rooms and bind her,”

Mistake.

Lost Vorgossos? My mind reeled. Kharn Sagara at war with himself? When I left the Undying, it had been as two people. His consciousness had duplicated, received by two of his clone children. They had elected to coexist, to rule Vorgossos together. Evidently, that peace had not endured.

Power sharing never works out.

Urbaine’s head exploded like an overripe fruit, blood and brain and bits of metal spattering the holography well. The bastard had not even bothered to don his shield. No last words from him. No quarter from me.

Some wounds can never be healed, not by the powers of this world.

The ugliness of the world does not fade and pass away. Have I told you that? That fear and grief are not made less by time? All life is tragedy, for all life must end—and so no life grows stronger by its ending.

That brought a smile to my face. “It’s Latin, aryabite.” Jaddian was—in a sense—a Romance language, a bastard descendant of the almost-forgotten Latin, offspring of Spanish mingled with Arabic and the Persian whose speakers crowded together in the mad scramble from Earth. The forefathers of the men who would become the princes of Jadd had retained their ethnic fraternity against all odds, against light-years of distance and millennia of time, and time and blood and toil had declared their independence from the culture of the greater Imperium. The first princes of Jadd had done the impossible. They had cracked the genetic mysteries of the High College, wrested control of their generations back from the Emperor and the Council, so that the eali—their palatines—might give themselves heirs, and not beseech the Solar Throne for progeny. For six thousand years our two cultures had grown apart. While the Empire remained more or less centralized, the palatine houses dependent upon the Emperor and Imperial bureaucrats for heirs, the Jaddian principalities competed with each other, stretching the bounds of human potential. The porphyrogeneticists of Jadd had elevated eugenics to an art form, while we Sollans considered it a mere science.

Interesting lore about Jadd.

In starting out afresh in scholiast vermilion, I meet Pallino and Switch, Siran and Elara again in the fighting pits of Emesh. I meet Valka for the first time upon the balcony in Castle Borosevo. I see Corvo again through the bars of my cell in the dungeons of Marius Whent. I see the Tamerlane rising above the skies of Forum like a new sword shining in the sun!

So Hadrian is in exile as a scholiast on Colchist?

“Oft hope is born when all is forlorn.”

The cosmos is not cold or indifferent because we are not indifferent, and we are a part of that cosmos, of that grand order which has dropped from the hand of He who created it. Every decision creates its ripples, every moment burns its mark on time, every action leads us ever nearer to that last day, that final last battle and the answer to that last question: Darkness? Or light?

I had always been useless, powerless as a father at birth.

“Hadrian!” I do not know what made her call out then, her voice strained by the force of her acceleration. Turning from the display of the aerial battle, turning my back on the Emperor, I returned to Lorian’s side. To Valka. Finger pressed behind my ear, I asked, “What is it?” She never answered. I gripped the back of my seat, glanced away an instant to Lorian. The intus was looking up, bereft as I was of any task. Valka shifted in her seat. Her ship shook around her. Sir Tristan’s medal gleamed. Her lips parted, shaping the unheard word. “I—” The holograph went dead. Every cord in me contracted, and my heart collapsed like a dying star. “What happened?” I asked, seizing Lorian by the shoulder. The intus winced, and I recoiled, rounding on the display board. “Bring her back!” E-05. Red. E-09. Red. E-17. Red.

Valka's death.

How well I remember my reflection in that broken holograph, that table of shattered glass. Jari the Seer had spoken of my broken road, my ruined path through time. Brethren, too, had seen it, had marked the ways in which the Quiet had interfered with me, had moved me to his purpose. He had shifted Demetri’s ship from Teukros to Emesh, had traded my right arm for my left, had brought me to that mountaintop on Annica, and from Annica to . . . where? To Eue? To Perfugium? To hell itself? And for what? I had seen that Black Feast and sacrifice in memories of the future a thousand times in as many nightmares, but never once had I seen her death. But it had happened. Was I beyond my visions? In escaping the net of Akterumu, had I gone beyond the Quiet’s sight? He had said I would, had he not? Upon the mountain on Annica? Or had the Quiet withheld Valka’s fate from me? Kept her death a secret to steel me to my purpose, to hold me to the mark? These thoughts warred in me, droning beneath the wailing emptiness of the pain and terrible truth. That Valka was dead.