Empire of Silence (Sun Eater) by Christopher Ruocchio

Author:Christopher Ruocchio [Ruocchio, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2018-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 46

THE DOCTOR

NEITHER ANAÏS NOR DORIAN was aware of my proper identity, or so I thought—they believed me the son of a minor merchanter engaged in trade with Jadd. Before long their scholiast tutor insisted I speak to them only in Jaddian as an exercise. I was not truly their friend, not truly anyone’s friend. My possessions were recovered from the coliseum dormitories by house guards. Emperor knows what Switch and the others thought about that. I was confined to the vast palace atop its concrete and steel ziggurat, a thousand feet above the city and sea level. From my room in the outer wall, I could see all of Borosevo rolled out like a dirty carpet, a stain upon the green waters of the world.

I left an engagement with the two noble children, crossing a mosaic floor in a quadrangle decorated with tinkling fountains with green copper statues in the centers. A pair of collared Umandh stumped past, wobbling on their three legs, their scaly, coralline hides cracking in the air as they carried a massive statue of a Mataro sphinx in their strong feelers. A float palette might have been easier, but using the xenobite slaves was something of a status symbol. House Mataro kept several hundred in the palace. Mostly they performed aesthetic chores such as waving fans at important personages in the open air or carrying things about the palace as visibly as possible. Emesh may not have had much in the way of material wealth or political significance, but it had the xenobites. I watched them retreat down a colonnade, their soft droning fading with their progress.

“M. Gibson! Hadrian!”

I turned, recognizing the voice. “Lady Anaïs.” I bowed almost before I’d turned round. “Forgive me, were we not through for the day?”

The count’s daughter was taller than me by a head, the perfect blend of her two fathers. She smiled down at me, hands on the soft swell of her hips. “No, we were. I was hoping I’d catch you is all.”

“Catch me?” I pushed a fall of hair from my eyes, the strands already damp with sweat from the damnable press of the air.

She smiled—she smiled like an open flame—and said, “There’s a boat race around the harbor at the end of the week, you know?” I hadn’t, and I told her so politely as I fell into step beside her, matching her long stride as best I could. “Everyone from the city attends. It’s the event of the season—not counting Dorian’s Ephebeia, of course.” That announcement had been made weeks before, along with the revelation that a Cielcin would be sacrificed in a Chantry triumph to commemorate the occasion. Perhaps that was why the lady’s boat race had escaped my notice. “Lord Melluan’s sons are down from Binah”—that was the green moon, a place said to be covered in woods as vast as the fabled forests of Luin—“and Archon Veisi himself is up from Springdeep. Everyone who matters in-system.”

I nodded politely. “It sounds like quite the showing.

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