Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga 4)

Apollonius is naked in the dim light of his cell. His clothing folded neatly on the floor. It disturbs me, watching him rocking there playing his phantom instrument, his golden hair pouring down his shoulders, eyes closed, face a monklike mask of concentration. A bandage is affixed to his head over a shaved patch from Winkle’s surgery.

I want him dead. Gone from the worlds. He’s taken two people I love and tormented another as a boy. The thought of setting him loose again makes me sick.

“Do you fancy the evil violinist, Tongueless?” Sevro asks.

The Obsidian looks up at us with his dark eyes and shakes his head. He makes a mo

tion of the violin and points to one of the tattoos on his arm of an old man with a long beard and a harp in his hands. It is the Norse god of music, Bragi. “Is he that good?” I ask.

Tongueless nods. He taps his ear and then his heart, as if to say he wishes he could hear him play again. “Not happening,” Sevro says. Tongueless nods, accepting that, and stands to leave us alone with Apollonius.

I watch him go and wonder what he’d say had he a tongue. He’s unique amongst the Obsidians I’ve met. The way he moves is elegant, cultured, like he’s accustomed to finer things. He’s quickly become a new favorite in my pack, owing to his craft in the kitchen. Men don’t ask questions if you feed them well. But I’m beginning to suspect there’s more to the story about how he ended up in an Omega cell than simply getting on the wrong side of the warden’s temper.

“Why does he always have to get naked every time?” Sevro mutters, drawing me back to Apollonius. “Go on. Let’s get it over with.”

I deactivate the opacity on Apollonius’s side of the glass so that he can see us in the dimly lit hall. He’s nearing the end of his song. Rocking and thrashing out a crescendo, then a slow, silent denouement. And when he has finished, he leans back to look at us, an amused smile on his lips.

“Did you like my sonata?” he asks, not waiting for us to answer. “Much approbation is granted Paganini as the great violin virtuoso of the pentadactyl period. Well, before the coming of Virenda, of course. But for sheer Orphian transcendental rigor, I’ve long maintained a true master must attempt Ernst’s Variations on ‘The Last Rose of Summer.’ The fingered harmonics and left-hand pizzicato are facile enough, but the arpeggios are a Herculean labor.”

“I don’t know what any of that means,” Sevro says.

“A pity for you to have such narrow concerns.”

“You’re dying to tell us when you first played it, aren’t you? I know you folks can’t resist a little brag,” Sevro mutters. “Well, go on. Impress us, Rath.”

“I mastered it when I was twelve.”

“Twelve? No!” Sevro claps his hands. “What genius! Reap, did you know that we had a psychotic virtuoso aboard?”

“I had no idea.”

“The mastery of music is its own reward,” Apollonius says. “The process by which one’s heart is entwined with masters of old. You do not know the toil, nor could you suffer it, and so you will never know the reward of understanding it.” He leans forward with slit eyes. “But by all means, dismiss it if you cannot comprehend. Art survived the Mongols. I wager it will survive you.”

“You’re hardly a patron of the arts, from what I’ve heard,” I say. “You broke Tactus’s violin when he was a child. Not very inclusive of you.”

“So full of nuance, families. Would I understand your relationship with your brother?” He gently plucks out several strands of hair and uses them to tie the wild of his mane into a ponytail. “Have you pulled me from my cage just to put me in another? Seems a cruel irony for a man who prides himself on breaking chains.”

“I hardly think your suite on Deepgrave was a cage,” I say. “Did well for yourself.”

“Not so stark as your prison was, I admit. The Jackal was a bizarre creature, pregnant with pain, wasn’t he? Much like his sister.”

“You’re lucky we haven’t spaced you, after what you’ve done,” Sevro sneers. “But talk about Virginia again. Go on. We’ll see how good your violin sounds in vacuum.”

Apollonius sighs. “My goodmen, enemies we may be, but let us not pretend we are bands of troglodytes warring over fire. We are sophisticated creatures who met in conflict under the agreed-upon terms of total war.”

“You’re not sophisticated. You’re a monster wearing a man-suit,” Sevro says. “You boiled men alive.”

“My brother boiled men alive. I am a warrior. Not a torturer.”

“Your brother, you. What’s the difference?”

Sevro looks at Apollonius and reduces him to a gestalt of all the men who have hurt him over the years. He has suffered the likes of Apollonius his entire life.

He forgave Cassius for me, once, because he knew the hope of our rebellion balanced on the fragile notion that a man could change. I suspect he’s worried that I believe the same for the man before us. The Goblin stands close to me now, as if to protect me from the prisoner, despite the sheet of duroglass.

But the deepspine truth is that he’s really trying to protect me from myself. That’s why he came.

He need not worry: I will never trust this man. Cassius was a man who lived for an ideal; Apollonius is too bright and too narcissistic to live for anything but himself. But even that can be useful.