Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga 4)

“I can’t take that….Your fiancé…”

“Gave it to me so I’d remember wherever I went I had him with me. But I don’t need a pendant for that. But you should be reminded that wherever you go, you’re not alone. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“I think you’re my only friend.”

“And what do friends do? Friends help each other. You carry my shadows. I carry yours for a spell.” I take an imaginary necklace from her neck and put it on myself and buckle my knees like it’s a great weight. She laughs. “Maybe then we’ll both be a bit lighter when next we meet.”

“Do you think he’s watching you? Your fi—your husband. Not from the Vale, course. I know you lot don’t believe. But from some

where?” She stares up at me from under her mop of red hair.

“No, I don’t.”

“I think you’re wrong. I think he’s watching you. And I think he’s smiling and got a twinkle in his eye.” She bundles her coat and heads to the depot, but turns around and runs back to me to give me a small kiss on the cheek. “You’re not alone either, Philippe.”

Sweet little rabbit, if only that were true.

SUNGRAVE, THE GREATEST CITY of Io, surges up out of a white, frozen plain riven with fissures venting heat from subterranean magma. We fly toward it looking out the forward windows of one of Dido’s chimeras.

Carved into Io’s highest mountain, the eighteen-kilometer-high Boösaule, Sungrave is a city of black stone obelisks and spires that rides the shoulders of the mountain range. Centuries ago, after the use of Lovelock engines was deemed inefficient for Io, great mirrored lasers carved much of the mountain and part of its attending 540-kilometer-long range into a city of jagged towers. The builders followed the draconic predilections of their great progenitor, Akari, bringing creatures of childhood fables and ancient campfire stories to life in the stone.

A necropolis of animalistic spires flecked with topaz, zircon, and myriad nesosilicate rocks looms above us, blocking the sky like the petrified remains of a great dragon host. They perch rank upon rank along the Boösaule’s crest, some of them encompasing whole peaks, legs straddling frosted valleys, their wide wings buttressing their great heights as they crane their stone necks up as if to drink the gases of marbled Jupiter. Duroglass windows glitter with internal light, like scales. And deeper in the heart of the mountain, where long ago Red drillcrews dug out the interior, lies the city itself.

The city, like all the other mountain cities of Io, draws its energy from the tidal heating caused by the war of Jupiter’s gravity on Io against the gravitational pull of Europa and Ganymede. The cities of Raa need no helium-3 to survive or power the pulseFields that shield them from radiation and Io’s poisonous air. That is why they survived my grandmother’s siege ten years ago—their shields could resist bombardment longer than the helium-3 power generators of the Sword Armada’s ships could keep them in orbit. Still, I expected Io to be a desolate backwater, beset by rationing and scant starship flight; but the ship that captured the Archimedes was brand new. As are many of the trade and war vessels that flow into Sungrave’s high stone docks like itinerant gnats.

I look over at Cassius and feel his unease.

How were those ships built? On what dock?

New Olympic Knights, new ships, a new generation. The Rim has not been sleeping. And now, if they gain Seraphina’s evidence, they will awaken.

—

The scent of foreign incense fills my nose as the steam from the caldarium walls filters soundlessly up from the hypocaust beneath the floor into the dim room. Two sets of hands knead the knots of tension from my shoulders and legs. The bruises inflicted by Pandora’s men are now faded pools the color of sulfur on my shoulders and jaw. Somewhere in the steam, Cassius bathes alone in the solium, a large pool sunken into the rough-cut stone. Since Dido’s wafer, time has passed like a dream, my body flushed again with the life of water and food which Dido’s men gave us on the flight to Sungrave.

As a child, I surrendered to the disappointing reality that I would never see fabled Sungrave in person. It would be too great a risk to send the heir to a place where he might be captured and held for ransom. But I am heir no longer, and my eyes are greedy for all Sungrave’s sights, to see her depths, her botanical complexes, her great mountain cisterns filled with Europan water.

It is so different here from my home on Luna. Not just the acrid air and the dim sky, but the unforgiving stone, the Spartan decor—empty rooms, no chairs, and an incredible adherence to cleanliness and martial virtue. Seraphina gave me an all-too-brief tour after we arrived and I was taken to my quarters, but in her presence I noted less of the city than I would like. My eyes would drift to the back of her proud neck as she led me through her childhood corridors, like she was a black hole, pulling all light, all attention into her, not just from me, but from the servants, from the guards. She is much loved.

Little Hawk, they call her affectionately. Barely twenty. Not a Praetor or a Legate—those titles must be earned—just a woman of worth and promise. Yet despite her mother’s consolations, the guilt of her actions against her father seems to weigh heavily on her. She said little before depositing me in my quarters and disappearing before the door had closed.

When the Pinks have finished their massage, they scrape the oil and dead skin from my body with strigils, flattened bronze hooks, which they put into a clay pot for some recycled use. Nothing here goes to waste. One offers me a pipe of dried tharsal root. Head already woozy from the steam, I decline the mild hallucinogen. Then the slaves ask me how I would like to take them. Their legs are eerily long from the low gravity of their home. Their skin, unblemished by the sun, is burnished and smooth and without hair. The hair of their heads is thick, the male’s silver, the female’s a black so deep it shines blue near the lamps. She’s older than he is, with quartz eyes and the frailness of a small bird. But her mouth is truculent, her eyes not so empty as they should be. They startle me when they meet mine, and the spell the warmth and their hands cast is broken. She sees me.

A deep revulsion, physical and intellectual, twists the lust into a knotted, blackened thing.

I can’t look at them as my ancestors did, as consumable treats.

One could argue for the necessary industry of Reds or the cultlike military religion instilled in Grays, or the efficiency and neutered emotions in Coppers, but this…Pinks were not needed to make my grandmother’s world function. They were built for lechery, subjected to centuries of systematic breeding, abuse, psychological and sexual domination. Chemically neutered and twisted inside so that their suicide rate is eleven times higher than that of any other Color.

Gold is to blame for that. Gold lost its way.

And now this Pink woman looks at me with eyes too ancient for her face.

“What’s your name?” I ask her.

“This one’s name is Aurae,” she says.

I gently take the Pink’s hand from my thigh. “That will be enough, Aurae.” The male Pink looks awash with shame, thinking himself not beautiful enough; but in the woman, I see a small tell, a spasm of relief at the corners of her eyes. Then she feigns shame like the other one. Strange.