Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

It is his personal chamber. A thin thermafoam mattress with a field blanket serves as his bed. A small solar stove sits in a nook carved into the wall along with several weapons and a long-range com. A thin black hasta hangs on the wall beside a filthy wolfpelt. A second nook is home to several dozen figurines carved from disparate stones. Beside it is a map of what looks like a cave system. I join him to sit on two small pads facing each other.

Atlas au Raa is a vaguely alien man. It has been years since I’ve seen him in the flesh. After the death of my parents, he was sent to the Rim to harry the Ascomanni in the Kuiper. Whatever he did to displease my grandmother must have been grave. In his absence, she gifted his office to another.

I am struck by how soulful he now seems. Was it the distant dark that did it? Or was it the war he returned to find raging in his absence?

Behind the sunburnt eyelids lurks an intense intellectual presence. He is masculine like his son Ajax, but nowhere near as thick. He is taller and leaner than his brother, Romulus, but less dramatic in posture. His eyes are wider and a clearer gold. A scar encircles his neck where his throat was once cut ear to ear. His long hair is black shot with gold and held back in a ponytail.

I probe deeper with the Mind’s Eye.

Forty-nine years of age. Left-handed. Limp originating from the left knee. Multiple hidden knives in his moth-colored light armor. Lack of ego projection, indicating absence of insecurity in body and deeds. Sociopathy? Delusions of heroism? No. That’s usually supported by zeal. Why so distant? Extremely lonely? Tired? Bored? Distracted? Absent in his personal presentation is the theatricality of his public work. Which suggests a sophisticated system of operation, likely supported by the books in his library, and perhaps a personal philosophical treatise. This is a philosopher-torturer with the practical detachment of a pig butcher.

“Stop that,” he says. “Unless you want me to do it back.”

I go still.

Grandmother said I was her only pupil. Could this be why Apollonius wants it so bad? He knows Atlas is yet beyond him?

The man’s cold eyes search the burn on my face and continue to assess without yet coming to a conclusion. So he is humble too, or at least experienced enough to have been wrong more than once before. “Salve, au Lune,” he says in formal highLingo.

“Salve, au Raa,” I reply.

“How did my brother die?” he asks, abandoning the argot before it becomes laborious. “Of course I have been told, but I hear you saw it with your own eyes.”

“He walked to the Dragon Tomb. He died several steps short.”

He is quiet for a full minute.

“All men who live for their ancestors do. How long did he talk before he walked?”

“Too long.”

He chuckles. “Romulus to the end. I hear my niece and nephew are on the Annihilo to talk alliance.”

“Diomedes is. Seraphina is in the desert.”

He doesn’t flinch. “Dead?”

“Yes. Atalantia demanded a Raa participate.”

“Did you see her corpse?”

“I saw her ripped in half by a rail slug. What remained was buried in the sand.”

“Shadows and dust,” he murmurs without irony.

“No grief? No laugh for the dead traitor?”

“She did not betray the Society. My father and brother did. I held no malice for Seraphina. I would have liked to have known my kin.” He sighs and takes the Bellona razor from a pouch on his thigh and lays it between us. “This, on the other hand, is filthy with the blood of Aja and Octavia.”

“I do not believe a man like you should ask anyone to explain themselves.”

“Ah. That’s right. You’ve seen one of my forests. I’m sure you have an opinion. The Two Hundred had many at first. None to my face, of course. They prefer smiles and innuendo.”

“I remember you used to make my father laugh,” I say.

His eyes soften. “Do you?”

“I wonder if he would laugh at your forests.”