THE CROWD APPLAUDED WHEN we survived. My chest was heaving. The
creature’s blood clung to my face, ran into my eyes, cobalt and stinking of
copper. I still had one spear in my hands, forgotten, and the other three were lodged deep in the dying creature’s back. I never knew its name—some pelagic beast dredged up from the seas of distant Pacifica. In truth it reminded me of the Umandh, all tentacles and teeth. In death it deflated like a balloon, the thousand tiny hearts that kept its blood pressurized and its body rigid pumping that same blood into the morning air.
Ghen was cheering, pounding Switch on the back. Even Siran looked pleased, smiling as she stared up into the sky. I spat, sending a gobbet of phlegm mixed with the alien’s blood onto the sand. It tasted like burnt metal, like acid and smoke. I stank of the same, drenched as I was in it. Mine had been the blow that had finally cleaved a rent in the chitinous plates of the beast’s hide and opened a major blood vessel.
In the box above us, the count was standing, clapping as he had on each of the rare occasions he’d been in attendance. His husband, Lord Luthor Shin-Mataro, a plutocrat from an old Mandari family, stood beside him, a
slim figure in silver-green. “Well fought, well fought!” The count leaned against the parapet, speaking directly to us myrmidons. In the shadows behind him, a pair of Umandh waved a series of paper fans to cool the
count and his man, as well as the two children and the collected advisors and counselors who had that day been invited to the royal box. A useless
gesture, as the box was doubtless climate-controlled within its nested shield curtains. The count launched into another rote demonstration of our skill
and gallantry, this time without the reservations he usually made for loss of life and glorious sacrifice.
None of us had died.
None of us had died.
“You are all exemplars of your craft.” He cast an object down from his box, a leather pouch that struck the bricks with the clang and jangle of gold. “A gift.” I was closest, so I approached to take the bag.
In the moment before I spoke, my eyes found the count’s, and he bowed his head, inclining it in the slightest deference which from so great a lord as he was a measure of high respect. By all accounts, Count Balian Mataro
was a man of classic passions. He enjoyed hunting—though there were no forests on Emesh—and fighting—though no subject would give him a fair
contest. Yet whenever his rigid schedule allowed, he witnessed a fight in his coliseum or a race in his circus. Whenever impressed, he doled out bonuses. The others—or those free to leave the coliseum complex—would take the money into Borosevo and spend it on whores and drugs and entertainments of all description. It was my third time receiving such a dispensation. The gold from the previous two remained in my private locker, secured with my few personal possessions, namely my house ring and the new journal I had purchased. It was a luxurious thing: fine white paper and black leather with silver clasps. I missed my drawing, you see.
This time, Pallino was not here to say the words, and so I went to one knee in the dust, a pain reporting in my sliced thigh, and said, “We thank you, Your Excellency, for your generosity. Truly we are not worthy of such honors.” It was a pittance, really, less than a fraction of what I had once
swindled from Lena Balem—and lost in epic fashion. I chafed to grovel like that and chafe more at remembering it. A knee so unaccustomed to bend as mine does not bend easily. Yet they were just meaningless words, expected of my station and the context in which we found ourselves.
But, when in Rome . . .
 |
Though it was in part a prison, the coliseum complex in Borosevo was not like the dungeons of the bastille on Vesperad or the Emperor’s prison planet on Mars. It held its secrets in slack fingers, and time and imprudence jostled them. Rumor was that the priest, Chanter Gilliam Vas—sometimes in the
company of a blindfolded cathar, sometimes not—had been seen in the
coliseum warrens many times since the Obdurate’s arrival and the influx of
foederati and legionnaire dropouts to our ranks. The word was that they were keeping something in the solitary confinement ward of the underground prisons amongst the madmen and the murderers who died in
Colosso in the most spectacular of ways. Some said it was an Exalted, one of the demoniacs who ply the Dark between the stars, as in the tale of
Kharn Sagara. I heard various descriptions: it had two heads, or else six
arms, all jointed steel and exposed bone. Still others said it was a traitorous lord, some maniac who’d turned against mankind and the light of Mother Earth in favor of the Cielcin. They said he broke bread and meat with them and supped on the bones of human children.
They have said the same of me.
Many times I’d pointed out the obvious theory, the one we’d heard from Kogan: that the count had purchased a captured Cielcin from the foederati who’d sailed to Emesh aboard the Obdurate. That theory had caught in the minds of the myrmidons and the gladiators both.
Sweating from a round of exercises in the yard, we all marched back into the musty cool of the coliseum hypogeum. Switch was ahead, laughing with one of the younger recruits. His once-slim form had filled out in the months of our indenture. He looked a proper fighter. Siran made some passing remark to me before she and Ghen—along with five more of our number—were marched back to their cells in the prison block. I waved farewell, returning Siran’s jest with a wry remark of my own.
“Now what?” Switch’s recruit friend asked. “Food?”
Surprising him and most of us, Switch wrapped an arm around the recruit’s waist. “We need to get you clean first!” The recruit elbowed him in the ribs, and Switch bent over, groaning. Pallino and the others all laughed at his expense, and I smiled.
“You two can go wash yourselves, then,” Pallino said, passing his helmet off to one of the others with a knowing look. He always seemed to have a mock attendant at hand, a squire of sorts. The grizzled veteran
adjusted the strap of his leather eyepiece and said, “Food for us, then. And none of that shit they serve upstairs. I’m cooking.” That evinced a small
cheer, for Pallino was as fine a cook as any I’d ever met, in his plebeian way. It always surprised people, learning that of the leathery old man. I watched him go, smiling at the others, but I didn’t move, for a notion had struck me.
One of the others jostled me, and I came to, looking round. “What’s that?”
Erdro, who had been with us since the beginning, repeated his question. “You coming?”
“I . . .” I looked away, down the hall at Switch and his recruit’s retreating backs. “No, no. You go on without me.”
Erdro frowned. “You’ll lose mass if you don’t eat, man.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I waved him off. He wasn’t wrong, but the loss of a single meal would hardly devastate me.
One of the girls grinned. “He’s going to go bathe with Switch.”
“You wish!” I shot back, grinning crookedly. This hit too near the mark, for she blushed. “No, I’ll catch up to you. Might take some of our bonus for that last win into town, get something that’s not vat-grown.” Unbidden, I felt a pang of longing for the sea markets and the bazaars of Meidua, for the old Nipponese man and his fish rolls. I missed the taste of game brought in from our forest and from the valley of the Redtine. Real food, honest and true, was a thing enjoyed only by the wealthy, who could afford it, and the destitute, who were so close to it that no one could take it away.
“All right then, Had.” Pallino sketched a salute—his polite farewell— and drew the others off and away. Over his shoulder he called, “Practice
tomorrow at eighth watch.” I returned the salute with Imperial precision, as if the man were a tribune or legate of the corps. He didn’t see it, but he didn’t have to. They were gone.
I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect time. The convict-myrmidons would be frog-marched through their short shower cycle and returned to their block in time for the evening meal. I knew they weren’t locked into cells after the fashion of a palatine’s dungeon or a Chantry bastille but
simply confined to a dormitory under lock and key.
That key was held by one of two guards in a duty station at the end of the hall where weeks before Gilliam Vas had ordered me stunned by his foederati. Constantly bored, the two gaolers lounged behind their desk, wearing tired expressions and khaki uniforms with the Mataro sphinx
embroidered on their sleeves. I passed them, walking with purpose up a narrow side ramp and into one of the stainless-steel-paneled service
corridors that led to the kitchens. If I was right, the food trolleys would be along with their variously flavored protein pastes and watery vegetables at any moment, pushed in a train by several of the coliseum staff, plainclothes
men who had drawn the short straw that day and so were made to make the long and tedious circuit of the prison block.
I mussed up my hair, changing the lie of it, and on a whim adopted an impression of the chanter’s hunched shoulders, thrusting my head a little forward on my neck to disguise the face of Had of Teukros just a little. You would be surprised how much a little change deflects even those men who account themselves astute. Once I fooled an Imperial auctor with little more than accent and a pair of colored lenses to hide my violet eyes.
“You there!” A thickset plebeian man in a white-striped chef’s costume poked his head out of a side door, framed with steam from a huge pot
simmering on a heating element and glowering in a way that showed off his pronounced underbite. “Boy, come here!”
“Messer?” I frowned, effecting a Durantine accent, Chand’s face and tones coming so readily to mind.
All in all, this disguise would not have fooled an Imperial auctor—it might not have fooled an astute child. But the man wasn’t quite as bright as are most children, and so he swore, “Bloody offworld shit-lickers. You!
Yes, you! Are you deaf, boy? Come here.” He pointed, gesturing violently with a spoon. Committed momentarily to my scheme, I stumped in after him, helped him to hoist the steaming pot into a cradle atop one of the rolling trolleys I’d come to find. Behind him, farther into the kitchens, a team of cooks worked under the big, ugly man to finish the meal. I was
early, so I spent the next few minutes taking the man’s orders in silence, all the while maintaining the hunchback as best I could.
After perhaps ten minutes, a round-faced local woman poked her head in from the back hall. “Protein’s thawed out, Stromos.”
The monstrous chef with the underbite practically snarled at the woman. “Not ready here.”
“They’re prisoners, man. You’re not cooking for the count.”
“More’s the pity,” the man grumbled. But in short order the food— finished or otherwise—was packed into heated pans and marched into the hall. To himself, Stromos said, “No one appreciates food anymore.” My heart went out to him.
I grabbed the sleeve of an attendant as he was leaving the kitchen with a cart of some noodle dish in brown sauce. “I’ll take it.”
The man eyed me, confused. “Really?”
I smiled. “Yeah, you look dead tired, and I got a girl in there. You know?”
“One with the slits?” He picked at his nose, indicating the mutilation. “Why?” He made the question sound one of genuine confusion, as if he
couldn’t imagine anyone wanting one of the felons for any reason whatever. “Look at me!” I shrugged my sloped shoulders, sinking into the
character of the hunchbacked plebeian, and grinned. “And I don’t really have to look at her face, you hear?” I grinned, more a snarl than anything, and the other man laughed and clapped me on the shoulder.
A part of me danced inside when I made it over the threshold, following the line of food workers down a narrow hallway lit by roundels high on the left. Mirrored panels on the ceiling concealed cameras and recording
equipment. Whether or not anyone was watching was another question. The dancing part within me turned over, slowing as I contemplated my next
step. I’d been guessing that this would work for months. I wanted only to see it, to know it was really here. If Kogan’s story was true—and I put the
odds strongly in the one-time mercenary’s favor—I only wanted a glimpse.
Gibson had taken me to one of the teaching rooms in the old library at Devil’s Rest, called up a holograph from the archive’s memory. The Cielcin had appeared from nowhere, materializing in the center of that blank, dark space, glittering in robes of silken fabric, sable and sapphire and white,
every inch covered in circular glyphs that overlapped, interwove, linked. If you have never seen them, the Cielcin have crests that rise like crowns
above and back from their foreheads at a steep angle, the same white as their milk-pale flesh. They terminate just past the spots where their ear holes are, and the back halves of their skulls grow a thick, white hair.
“They have six fingers!” I remember saying, reaching up to transfix the holograph with a finger. “Why do they look like us?”
Gibson had frowned at me then, given me a long and careful look. “What makes you say that?”
Evolution or some power stranger still had fashioned them like us. If one looked past the cosmetic differences, past the epoccipital crown of thorns, past the fangs and the massive, unfeeling eyes, one might almost see it. A kinship between us in the lines of arm and finger, in the face and the general body plan and in the hair that grew upon both our heads. They were far more human than the strange and sub-thinking Umandh to my young mind. That closeness, that similarity somehow made them more alien to me, more
exotic and appealing because already there was a road to understanding them. The Umandh I did not understand, so like were they to corals and trees. The Cielcin I longed to understand.
I have since paid for that mistake.
We set up the trays in a low-ceilinged common space, folded metal side tables from the stainless carts, and locked the wheels in place—couldn’t these border-world primitives spring for suppression floats? Then we
stepped back, our preparations complete, and withdrew into a side room at the behest of our guards, who said it was for our own protection. That was lucky—the last thing I needed was Ghen running his mouth just then. After a moment I faked a need for the bathroom, then faked an inability to understand the douleters when they objected. I gesticulated and shouted in Durantine, reciting stock phrases in the guttural language of that client republic. “Where is the library? Hello, my name is . . . Yes, yes. Where is the library?” And so on. The bastards didn’t understand a word. Needless to say, they let me go. For a moment I feared my guard would follow me, but when I none-too-gently jostled him into the door frame, he tottered back,
clutching his bruised forehead and gasping. “Izvinit,” I said, still speaking Durantine. “You are . . . all right? Straf?”
The man swore, pushed me away. “All right? Shit . . .” I moved to help. “No! You go,” he hissed between his teeth. “Around the corner on your right.”
When I rounded that corner I straightened, rolling my shoulders and setting my jaw back in its proper place, shedding my disguise of posture
and accent. Smoothly now, I hurried down the hall, guessing at the place’s layout, the pattern of it. I hurried past the single-occupant bathrooms clearly intended for the guards and down a switchbacked stair. The cameras were bound to see me, and I was sure that there had to be guards on the Cielcin, or whatever Gilliam Vas and the Whitehorse foederati had down there. But I figured I could always claim to have gotten lost. What could they do? Lock me in the coliseum? Already here, boys. And if it came to it, if things became truly desperate, I would put on my ring and face whatever came.
As I have said, the convict-myrmidons were not confined in oubliettes or pilloried, nor were they kept in cold cells, but rather permitted to share the
common space and the dormitories behind. At first blush, not depriving their felonious charges of the warmth of human contact could be construed as an act of kindness on the part of the gaolers. The reality, as in all of our
Empire, was double-edged. That very openness exposed the convict-myrmidons to assaults, rapes, and molestations, all the cruelties and privations the human mind might contrive. Yet the prisons of the Borosevo coliseum also held a deeper, more icily calculated cruelty.
Recall that Borosevo was a city built upon a coral atoll, on sandbars, and in the lagoon in which these petty masses gathered. Easy to forget, having lived for so long in and around the sunken concrete fastness of the
coliseum. Yet the sea was never far. On a hunch I descended another flight of stairs, knowing now that I must be well below the high-water mark, and followed an arched corridor past empty chambers separated from the hall not by sealed doors but by classic iron bars. The stench of sewage hung ripe upon the air as in midsummer, baked by ambient heat. And something
else . . . salt? Seawater, that was it. Seawater. Something wet and soft struck stone inside a cell to my right, splashing. I stopped, listening. Far above and distantly, I thought I could hear the groan and drag of human feet: the
evening crowd awaiting that night’s skiff jousting. I had nothing to do with the sport, Emperor be praised. It was for gladiators only. The smell of raw sewage intensified, and I looked in growing horror on the muddy trenches carved into the sides of each cell.
It clicked.
There were holes in the ceilings of the cells, shafts doubtless leading up to the public privies just inside the coliseum vomitoria. The prisoners here were literally shat upon by the plebeian and serf clients of the Colosso games. I scowled, distracted by a deep-throated lowing from around one far corner, followed by the hoarse whisper of a man. I set my teeth and moved on, trying not to smell the salt and rotting feces.
Holding my nose, I reached a place where the path split at right angles from where I had entered. The smell of seawater blessedly strengthened, cutting the gutter stink to a manageable level. The cells all stood empty— had there been any great culling action on the killing floor lately? I could
not remember. I felt there should be more guards, but with no prisoners but the rumored one, what need was there for such?
The dull sounds of human voices echoed up from my left, washed out by the misplaced groan of the sea. That was wrong, I decided. It should not have been audible, not this far underground.
“It’s looking at me again,” a gruff voice hissed. Then more loudly, “What did I say about looking at me?” The ringing of metal on metal
sounded up the hall, punctuated by soft splashes and the strange alien lowing I’d heard earlier.
Then a deeper voice replied with words like broken glass: “Yukajji!
Safigga o-koun ti-halamna. Jutsodo de tuka susu janakayu!”
I froze mid-step. The words sounded completely different from a native speaker than they did from old Gibson or myself. Rougher, smoother, harder, edged with a razor’s brilliance. The guards both stepped back from the bars, appearing round the bend in the hall. “Earth and Emperor!” one
swore, then lunged at the bars again with his shock-stick. “Priest ain’t paying enough for this shit.”
A long, startlingly white arm pressed out from between the bars and
seized the guard by his wrist. It might have been a human hand sculpted by some intelligence only vaguely informed on the subject of the original. It was far larger, for a start, the six thin fingers too long and with too many joints. The guard shrieked as his partner surged forward to help. “Yusu janakayu icheico.”
“Let him go, demon!” The other guard’s voice broke as he slammed his shock-stick into the exposed arm. The Cielcin howled, released the gaoler, and withdrew that too-long arm back into the cell. It spat a series of alien curses into the air.
“Iukatta!” I screamed. Stop! It was the command voice I’d learned, Lord Alistair Marlowe’s voice, ringing, resolute, clear, and hard as iron. The Cielcin was only going to get itself hurt.
The guards both turned, sticks raised. “Who the hell are you?”
I ignored them both. I wanted to see. They didn’t resist as I moved forward, something Imperial in my bearing moving them to momentary silence. And there it was, cowering in the muck at the back of its narrow cell, clutching its flash-numb arm, baring its snarl of translucent, glassy
teeth. I wanted to laugh, to weep. To run. I had just gotten what I’d wanted
—a glimpse of the Cielcin—and I needed then more than anything to be away, to be anywhere else.
It was strangely smaller than I expected: a stick sculpture of a man, arms and legs of bundled twigs or of bone. Yet that smallness was an illusion of its posture, and even as I watched, it uncoiled limbs too long for its small
and pigeoned torso. Someone had sawed the horns from its brow and
sweeping crest and sanded the nubs to the quick. It looked at me with eyes the size of tangerines, black as my grandmother’s funeral shroud. I
discerned something in those eyes, but it was no human feeling. I felt only cold.
Whatever spell of command I’d held over the two guards promptly
evaporated, and the nearer man laid a hand on my shoulder. “Who the hell are you? No one comes down here without the count’s express permission.”
“Tell that to Gilliam Vas,” I said, drawing the name from memory. It had its intended effect, lie that it was. The two men shied away, cowed by the mere mention of the hunchbacked priest. Shrugging his hands from my arm, I pushed forward, well within reach of the creature’s grasping talons. In its own language, I asked, “You are a soldier? You were taken in battle?”
“Taken?” the creature repeated, then flared the four slitted nostrils in its weathered face where a nose might have been. “Nietolo ti-coie luda.” You speak like a child. I smiled, the expression meaningless to the creature. It was right, but I was grateful my words were coming at all, however
haltingly. Glad that the Cielcin could speak in a tongue I understood, unlike the Umandh.
Settling onto my haunches, I suppressed a thrill. I was speaking to a
Cielcin—a true Cielcin, not Gibson or the sub-intelligent computers back in the Devil’s Rest library. “I have never spoken to one of the People before.” When the creature in the cell did not respond, only shifted, dragging one pale leg through the grime spattered on the stone floor, I pressed, “Tuka namshun ba-okun ne?” What is your name?
It sat there watching me for what felt like half the life of the sun. Its face was so like a human face—like a skull, with those huge eyes. It resembled nothing so much as a statue left for generations in the rain, its nose and ears worn away—or it would, were it not for the bony crest that evoked some
cell memory of saurian creatures bellowing in some jungle out of geologic time. It was cruelty that had sanded that crest to naught, not time.
“Makisomn.”
“Makisomn,” I repeated, tripping over the nasal digraph, knowing I was wholly incapable of trilling the sound the way they did—I lacked the muscular control of my nasal passages their species depended on to make that difficult sound. I pressed my hand to my chest and introduced myself. “Raka namshun ba-koun Hadrian.” My name is Hadrian.
Where I had failed to pronounce its name, it failed to say mine. The anthropologist I never was might have grinned, and indeed the faintest
smile pulled at my lips. “You speak its language?” one of the guards asked, ruining the moment.
I twisted, looking up into the guard’s flat, dim face. There was a light in those dark eyes, dull and cold and uncomprehending. Fear, I realized. This man is afraid off me. Through my teeth I said, “Obviously.” I knew I
couldn’t keep this up long, that soon the guards watching the other food servers would come looking for me. They would haul me either onto the
street or into a cell. And it had been so easy—too easy. Well, I was too deep in now, and my curiosity had gotten the better of me. I never could resist.
“Why is it here?” I gestured at the creature.
“Thought you were from Gilliam.” The second guard narrowed somewhat sharper eyes at me. “Don’t you know?”
Where before had I played the role of a Durantine serving man, now I played my father, standing to my full height, aware of my sweaty clothes and that I did not truly look the part. “And do you know what will happen
to you when Gilliam Vas and his mother discover how easy it was for me to walk straight into this prison and up to this cell without ever once being detained? Answer my questions, or you will answer them for one of the
cathars.” That’s done it, I thought. A proper threat. Put the fear of God in them, Marlowe.
The second guard—call him Slow—stammered out a response. “He’s a gift, messer. For the count’s son’s Ephebeia. The beast’s to be sacrificed in triumph in the Colosso.”
A dram of contempt passed my lips, and I turned away. At least it
explained why the beast was here, not in the palace dungeons. Here at least it was close to the action, to the place where it would die. I crouched,
eyeing the creature through the crooked iron bars. Behind it and high up, a slitted culvert open to the elements sloshed seawater down the back wall of the cell, coating the bricks with salt. “It,” I said.
“What?” asked the other guard—call him Slower.
“You called the Cielcin ‘he,’” I said to Slow, not looking at him. “The Cielcin are hermaphrodites. It.” If the guards cared at all about this
correction, they didn’t say anything, and I crouched to speak to the xenobite in its own language. “Ole detu ti-okarin ti-saem gi ne?” Do you know why
you are here?
The creature bared its glassy fangs in a snarl, exposing blue-black gums.
“Iagamam ji biqari o-koarin.”
I shook my head. “Kill you? Not me, no. But someone will.”
“Begu ne?” It asked. How? Was that fear in its voice?
In all the stories they have told of me—all the ones I’ve heard, even
some of the ones I’ve started—no one has ever gotten this scene quite right. My first encounter with the enemy. I have heard it said that I slew the beast in Colosso for all Emesh to see. I have heard it said that it was not in
Borosevo at all, that my first meeting with the Cielcin was at Calagah in the south, with the Ichakta Uvanari, amid the ruins. The operas and holographs sing my praises in battle or curse me as a sorcerer, a magus tipping poison into the Emperor’s ear. None imagine—none believe—that our first meeting was amid sewage in the basement lockup of a sweaty coliseum gaol. The meanest, most provincial of circumstances, entirely without pomp.
“How?” It asked again.
“Sim ca,” I said, choosing honesty over comforting illusion.
Not well.
I never heard Makisomn’s reply, because someone—Slow or Slower, I never learned which—thrust his shock-stick between my shoulder blades, and the world went black.
