Empire of Silence

the armoured peltasts who served my father. But father never wanted a child. He wanted an heir, someone to inherit his slice of empire and to carry on our family legacy. He named me Hadrian, an ancient name, meaningless save for the memories of those men who carried it before me. An emperor's name, fit to rule and be followed. Dangerous things, names. A kind of curse, defining us that we might live up to them, or giving us something to run away from. I've lived a long life, longer than the genetic therapies the great houses of peerage can contrive, and I have had many names. During the war, I was Hadrian Half-Mortal, and Hadrian the Deathless. After the war, I was the Sun-Eater. To the poor people of Borisevo, I was a Myrmidon, called Had. To the Judeans, I was Alniroblis. To the Cielcen, I was Oimbelu, and worse things besides. I've been many things, soldier and servant, captain and captive, sorcerer and scholar, and little more than a slave. But before I was any of these, I was a Sun. My mother was late to my birth, and both my parents watched from a platform above the surgical theatre while I was decanted from the vat. They say I screamed as the scoliasts birthed me, and that I had all my teeth in my head. Thus nobility is always born, without encumbering the mother and under the watchful eye of the Imperial High College, ensuring that our genetic deviations hadn't turned to defects and curdled in our blood. Besides, childbearing of the traditional sort would have required my parents to share a bed, which neither was inclined to do. Like so many nobiles, my parents wed out of political necessity. My mother, I later learned, preferred the company of women to that of my father, and rarely spent time on the family estate, attending my father only during formal functions. My father, by contrast, preferred his work. Lord Alistair Marlow was not the sort of man who gave attention to his vices. Indeed, my father was not the sort of man who had vices. He was possessed by his office and by the good name of our house. By the time I was born, the Crusade had been raging for three hundred years since the first battle with the Sielson at Kresgard, but it was far away across some twenty thousand light-years of Empire and open space, out where the Vale opened on the Norma Arm. While my father did his best to impress upon me the gravity of the situation, things at home were quiet, save for the levees the Imperial Legions pulled from the Plebeians every decade. We were decades from the front, even on the fastest ships, and despite the fact that the Sielson were the greatest threat our species had faced since the death of Old Earth, things were not so dire as that. As you might expect from parents such as mine, I was given into the hands of my father's servants almost at once. Father doubtless returned to his work within an hour of my birth, having wasted all the time he could afford that day on so troubling a distraction as his son. Mother returned to her mother's house to spend time with her siblings and lovers. As I said, mother wasn't involved in the family's bleak business. That business was Uranium. My father's land sat atop some of the richest deposits in the sector, and our family had presided over its extraction for generations. The money my father pulled in through the Wong-Hopper Consortium and Free Traders Union made him the richest man on Delos, richer even than the Vice-Reign, my grandmother. I was four when Crispin was born, and at once my little brother began to prove himself the ideal heir, which is to say that he obeyed my father, if no one else. At two he was almost as large as I was at six, and by five Crispin had gained a head on me. I never made up that difference. I had all the education you might expect the son of a prefectural archon to have. My father's castellan, Sir Felix Martin, taught me to fight with sword, shield belt, and handgun. He taught me to fire a lance and trained my body away from indolence. From Helene, the castle's chamberlain, I learned decorum, the intricacies of the bow, and the handshake and of formal address.