Tales of the Sun Eater, Vol. 2 by Christopher Ruocchio

Author:Christopher Ruocchio [Ruocchio, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

He awoke to the sound of clocks ticking. There must have been hundreds of them, each subtly out of sync. Syme forced open bleary eyes. He felt as though he’d just awakened from cryonic fugue, his body sluggish and numb from decades of travel between the stars.

The room around was all crystal and black glass, decorated with timepieces of all descriptions: wood and brass, glass and neon, digital and analog and solar. The noise of them was deafening, rhythmic but without melody.

He must have been put in fugue. There were wires dangling across his vision, and the soft chime of medical diagnostics beeping in time with the ticking clocks. He didn’t remember being put in fugue. He remembered . . .

“Harendotes!”

Mocking laughter rang out. “He’s awake!” He knew that voice. Why did he know that voice? A round moon of a face floated into view, sallow-skinned and soft featured in its cowl of knurled black metal. It was the grubby captain, Zelaz. The strangely fetal creature spread its short arms and smiled a smile that did not touch his metal eyes, “You’re one of us now!”

“What?” Syme managed to say, throat dry.

The hooded black figure of the majordomo, Oneiros, loomed behind him, not speaking.

Zelaz laughed again, “I think it’s an improvement!” His smile was wider than any human smile ought to be. “See?” The floating man extruded a metal arm and seized something off the table to Syme’s right. It was an antique hand mirror, its frame and handle fashioned of bone. He held it up for the assassin’s use

Syme’s stomach dropped. Or it would have done . . . if he had a stomach. His head nestled on a bed of blue velvet, an iron cuff about the base of his ragged neck, the bottom studded with wires and hoses, some red, some blue, still others translucent and filled with a milky substance wholly unlike blood.

He screamed, and the noise of it was not quite like the familiar sound of his voice. It was higher, thinner, alien in his own ears. He kept screaming, screamed until he felt sure there should be no air left in his lungs, but he had no lungs, and whatever machine it was that provided him with air to speak did not pause to breathe. He screamed until he choked instead, screamed until his throat was raw. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be possible. And yet . . . and yet he remembered the Monarch’s sword, the way the darkness and the cold crept in.

Harendotes had cut off his head. Right after he’d said he had a message for the Emperor. Calen Harendotes had kept his word: he had not killed his assassin.

Tell your Imperial master I want nothing of his war, he’d said. Tell him I’ve a war of my own. What war? Against whom? For what? Syme shut his eyes, leaning on these questions like a crutch. They gave him focus, grounded him in a world gone mad.

Mad.

They would kill him when he returned to Forum, his own people.

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