Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga 4)

“I sung of Chaos and Eternal Night

Taught by the heav’nly Muse to venture down

The dark descent, and up to reascend!”

He picks up a Gray with one hand and smashes the man’s skull into the hull of the Ash Lord’s ship until there’s nothing to hold on to. Fresh from the kill, he wheels on me, his Minotaur helm blood-soaked and battered, and for a moment I think he will strike me down. But his helm retracts, and from his sweaty face and tangled hair, he stares at me with wild, loving eyes. He helps me to my feet.

“What wrath we summon together!” he roars. “Reaper and Minotaur, legends unholy. We broke them on the beach!”

How in the hell did he do that?

He was outnumbered four to one.

One of his men helps me to my feet. I’ve lost my helmet, but my face is so covered in blood from the attempted scalping that even my own mother wouldn’t recognize me. Apollonius skewers the heart of a wounded Gold and turns to his bodyguards. “Vorkian, Gaul, rejoin the hunt. Slaughter them to the last man.”

His men jump from the tower back toward the battle, which rages inland of their beachhead below. Apollonius comes toward me and extends his arms, taking me into a hug. Bewildered, I stand there as he pulls back. “A divine spectacle, Darrow.” He looks at my men with a smile. “A more glorious band of devils there is none. What a path you cut, like fallen seraphs amongst mortal men.”

Sevro limps toward me. His left arm bends the wrong way at the elbow and I can see charred flesh through fissures in his armor. I scan the remains of my Howlers and realize with a sinking feeling that Pebble and Clown are nowhere in sight. Thraxa sits propped against a retaining wall as Tongueless administers first aid. Alexandar alone is uninjured. His shell is a smoking wreck, but he stands free of it, almost elegant amidst the carnage despite the shell-shock in his eyes. “Alexandar.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Call the Nessus and hold the roof.” I turn to limp toward the security door leading down from the landing pad into the tower. “Sevro, Apollonius, with me.”

I WAKE FROM A FITFUL SLEEP and expect to see Cassius standing there, filling the door, asking me if it’s the night terrors again. But he is gone. I remember slowly, then all at once. There’s a presence in the room. By the window an old Brown watches me. I’m too tired to be startled. His bark-colored eyes smile with deep respect from underneath cirrus-cloud eyebrows.

“Dominus Lune, I beg pardon for interrupting your sleep. But your presence is requested.”

“By whom?”

“A friend.”

Seraphina? He walks past my pallet, careful not to trod on the fabric, and sketches a strange symbol onto the stone wall. It rumbles very softly, dilating inward to reveal a hidden passage through which he seems to have entered. I hesitate, wondering if it could be some sort of trap. He wags his hand impatiently. “Come, come, dominus. She awaits.”

I follow the Brown in silence through the tunnels. He leads on through the darkness till we reach another wall where he sketches another symbol and the wall retracts. The Brown leads me into a sitting room and closes the new aperture behind us. He gestures to several silk cushions on the floor by the hearth.

“Wait here, dominus. May I prepare refreshment?”

“Tea, if you have it,” I say instinctively. Then I feel my hunger. “And food. Anything will do.” He bows and limps away. “Excuse me, steward. What is your name?”

“Aruka,” he says softly.

“Thank you, Aruka.” I dip my head in Rim fashion.

He bows again and leaves me there.

This room reflects the pre-Color heritage of the Raa more than any other. It is traditional and austere but for the use of wood. Tatami flooring, woven from pale igusa grass, stretches to a bank of windows overlooking the frozen waste. Entire tree trunks, stained a warm honey color, support the stone ceiling. A length of cypress forms the tokonoma, a raised alcove where a small tree grows and a razor hangs in midair above a gravWell. I’m drawn to the room’s lone eccentricity: a grand old piano made out of heartwood. It is a marvel. Of course, Ceres and some of the larger asteroid depots have pianos, but those are cheap plastic synth jobs. The wood to make this must have come from Ganymede or Callisto.

I run my hands over the piano’s keys. I was wrong. The piano is old. Perhaps older than the Society. Two golden S-shaped markings are imprinted on the fallboard above the keys. My hands run over the polished fiddleback grain. I close my eyes and imagine I can feel the energy that grew this tree on my face, that I can hear birds in the sky again. After ten years, they sing like I heard them yesterday. A flicker of a memory, no longer than the flash of a lighting match, burgeons in the recesses of my mind. A feeling, a scent of something lost.

Am I just homesick? Or is it something more?

“Do you know how to play?” a woman asks.

I turn to see Romulus’s mother, Gaia, shuffling into the room. Her back is crooked, shoulders slumped. In her youth, she would have been a slight thing. Her wrists are fragile as the stems of wineglasses, and her skin paper-pale and veined like bleu cheese. In fact, it seems all that keeps her from tipping forward and shattering on the floor is a thin wooden cane and the enormous arm of the grand Obsidian who escorts her. She clutches to him as if he were an old friend. He is aged, like her. A hunched gray golem with intense beetle-black eyes buried deep in the folds of an ancient face. His head is a boulder. His ears chipped and pointed at the tips. The lobes filled with gold disks the size of chicken eggs imprinted with the lightning dragon. A long uncut white beard hangs down the front of his gray scorosuit and is tucked into his belt.

“No,” I answer. “I never learned.”

“A child of Hyperion alien to music? What a crime. But you must have been a busy little thing. Your grandmother no doubt teaching you the alchemy of turning moons to glass instead. Or were those lessons the province of your godfather?”