73 pages • 2-hour read
Empire of Silence
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Chapters 23-33Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness, death, and enslavement.
Chapter 23 Summary: “Resurrection in Death”
The planet Emesh is closer to its sun and much hotter than Delos. It also has stronger gravity. Hadrian is in the capital city Borosevo, which is built on steel pilings driven deep into the ground. The structures are now covered in cracks and the buildings in the poorer areas are often below the water line.
Hadrian finds the space port and tries to search for the Eurynasir, but there is no record of the ship, and he does not know how long it has been since he was placed in the fugue creche. The workers chase him off. Next, he visits an old ship scrapyard. He does not find the ship, but he discovers one of the workers wearing his signet ring and demands it back. The owner of the yard tells him that the ship has already been processed and refitted, and its contents burned. He fights with the workers and is badly beaten but manages to escape with his signet ring.
Chapter 24 Summary: “Those Mindless Days”
Hadrian thought he understood poverty and suffering, but only after begging on the streets of Borosevo does he understand that there is a difference between knowing that suffering exists and experiencing the reality of it. During this time, an illness called the Rot ravages Borosevo. It turns skin black and rotten until the person wastes away, their organs destroyed.
He could escape this suffering by approaching any official with his ring and offering a blood scan to prove his identity, but then he would be returned to his father, and he refuses to let this happen. Despite his pain and poverty, he feels free for the first time. However, with Gibson’s letter gone, he will never go to Teukros, and he fears that he will never go anywhere.
Chapter 25 Summary: “Poverty and Punishment”
Weeks later, Hadrian hides in a storm drain. He is trying to save enough money to buy shoes. Suddenly, two city prefects (police) order him out of the drain. When they discover that he does not have identification, they try to arrest him. He knows that if the city officials process him, his father will find him. He tries to run, and the prefects beat him, then decide that he is not worth their time and leave him on the street.
Chapter 26 Summary: “Cat”
A storm sweeps through Borosevo, so Hadrian hides in an alley. Starving and injured, he is nursing broken ribs from another recent beating. A girl appears and tells him that he will drown if he stays there, as the alleys flood during storms. She invites him to share her shelter beneath the solar panels on the building’s roof. Her name is Cat; she is 16 years old. She can tell instantly that Hadrian is an off-worlder. He asks if she has any medicine or painkillers, but before she can answer, he passes out.
Hadrian wakes after the storm has passed. Cat is gone but returns soon with a trash bag full of things she has found, including discarded bottles of medicine. Hadrian finds a painkiller among them.
Chapter 27 Summary: “Forsaken”
Hadrian and Cat become partners, begging together on the streets and sharing their resources. Charity is encouraged during the weekly Litany from the Chantry, so beggars crowd the public plaza. Meanwhile, a street preacher shouts that Mother Earth has abandoned them all because the nobile have rejected nature. Hadrian expects prefects to arrest the man for heresy, but they leave him alone.
Chapter 28 Summary: “Wrong”
Having just stolen a purse from a wealthy woman, Hadrian runs from prefects. He sneaks into a cafe and sits at a table, pretending to be a customer. The prefects do not notice him and keep going. An old man in the cafe notices, however, and invites Hadrian to sit with him. The man promises not to reveal him. He is an off-worlder and will be leaving soon. He suggests that Hadrian join the pit fights at the Colosso, which would be dangerous but would at least get him off the streets. Doing so would require leaving Cat, however, so Hadrian dismisses the idea.
Chapter 29 Summary: “Less Wings to Fly”
Hadrian and Cat talk about his old life. He has told her the story of who he is, why he ran away, and how he ended up on Emesh. She likes to hear about his family’s castle. Hadrian tells her the story of Simeon the Red, a scholiast and a science officer who found freeholder colonies and xenobite planets. Simeon once discovered xenobites called the Irchtani and befriended them, learning their language and customs. However, the others on his ship were sick of their long journey, so they mutinied, killed the captain, and tried to turn Simeon to their side. Instead, Simeon rallied his Irchtani friends and retreated with them to a black stone temple. Then, they defeated the mutineers and retook the ship. The Legion made Simeon captain, and he continued his adventures.
Hadrian wants to buy a ship, travel, and meet xenobites. Cat is upset that he wants to leave her, but he promises to take her along. Then she adds that he does not need to leave Emesh to see xenobites.
Chapter 30 Summary: “The Umandh”
Cat leads Hadrian to the fisheries, where humans have enslaved the local xenobites, the Umandh. As Hadrian learns, the Umandh are a species native to Emesh and were conquered by the empire and the Chantry millennia ago. Humans have discovered intelligent xenobite races across 48 planets, but none have been “more advanced than the discovery of bronze” (242), and all have been destroyed, conquered, or integrated. The Chantry believe they have the right to conquer because they also believe that humans were the first to use interstellar travel.
The Umandh are a strange species with three legs protruding from a thick torso, along with “fleshy cilia wide as a man’s arm” (246), which they use to manipulate objects. They make sounds like singing whales. They are collared and controlled by human overseers. Cat and Hadrian watch as one overseer beats an Umandh. Hadrian is disgusted with the overseer and with himself for being too afraid to interfere.
Chapter 31 Summary: “Mere Humanity”
Hadrian and Cat enjoy two years of friendship and become lovers, but then Cat succumbs to the Rot, wasting away within weeks. Hadrian cares for her as she lies dying. She asks him for a story, and he tells her the story that he remembers from The King with Ten Thousand Eyes. When she dies, he carries her body to the water and weighs her down with stones.
Chapter 32 Summary: “Stand Clear”
Sometime later, Hadrian briefly allies with a group of thieves. Together, they break into a corner store. However, Hadrian hates his partners-in-crime, who are vicious and beat their victims, so he betrays them, taking their loot and tripping the store’s alarm as he flees. He watches from a hiding spot as the prefects swarm the store and arrest the thieves. The prefects offer their prisoners the choice of mental reconditioning or fighting the Colosso. As the prisoners balk at the threat of being sent to the Colosso, Hadrian decides to take this path himself.
Chapter 33 Summary: “To Make a Myrmidon”
Hadrian volunteers to join the myrmidons at the Colosso. Myrmidons, who are used as fodder against the higher-ranked gladiators, are often prisoners, but some join voluntarily for the money. He is surprised to learn that joining requires a physical examination. The doctor intends to do a blood scan, so Hadrian bribes her to approve him without one. The doctor realizes that he is a nobile, but he begs her to let him through, and she does.
Chapters 23-33 Analysis
As Hadrian faces ostracization and deprivation on the streets of Borosevo, he now faces the “ugliness of the world” (110) at every turn, from the dock workers who initially pulled him out of his creche and stole his belongings to the city precepts who harass and beat him merely for being poor and unhoused. The grim, gritty reality of these experiences force him into a deeper understanding of hardships that he once only thought of in abstract, academic terms, and he therefore begins to appreciate the true depths of his former privilege as a palatine. Thus, the author uses Hadrian’s predicament to deliver a distinct social commentary on the traumatic effects of classism and extreme social stratification. Yet although he, like the plebeians, is suffering from deprivation, starvation, and sickness for the first time in his life, he nonetheless holds himself apart from the beggars whose ranks he has joined. Likewise, the Emeshi poor astutely mark him as something “other,” noting the telltale genetic markers of his white skin, his “proper fancy name” (189), and his educated mannerisms.
This section lingers over the task of establishing the social and political realities of the planet Emesh, and this new setting contrasts greatly with Hadrian’s home world and adds depth and nuance to the sprawling universe described in Ruocchio’s broader series. Emesh exists in an area of space called the Veil, which is so far from Delos that Hadrian does not know where he is in relation to his home or his intended destination, Teukros. Notably, although Emesh is part of the Sollan Empire and has the same basic aristocratic structures—the palatines, the Chantry, and the plebeians beneath them—the specific environment and its people are vastly different from those of Delos. The trope of strange new worlds to explore, with new environments and lifeforms, is a defining feature of space opera, and in this case, it is also crucial to the plot, as the hardships of this planet divorce Hadrian from familiarity, deprive him of his goal to become a scholiast, and place him on the path that leads him to become the Sun Eater.
Moreover, by placing Hadrian on a new world in a new context, Ruocchio gives the protagonist opportunities to utterly change his outlook on the world, and Cat is instrumental to this crucial inner shift. Although she is essentially a flat character, her impact on Hadrian’s development renders her a significant presence despite her mere six chapters in the novel. Specifically, she becomes Hadrian’s first real friend, other than Gibson, and in addition to becoming his first lover, she teaches him how to thrive on the streets of Borosevo. In this, she serves primarily as a plot device to ensure the protagonist’s survival, but her emotional influence is deep enough that her untimely death haunts Hadrian throughout the rest of the story. Though they idly daydream about leaving, Hadrian makes no effort to join the Colosso or earn enough money to leave Emesh until after she is gone. This is one of several examples demonstrating the priority Hadrian places on human companionship over his larger goals. However, her sudden death also reflects the more pragmatic aspects of Ruocchio’s storytelling, for her death occurs just when her presence becomes more of a hindrance than a help to the progression of the plot.
The novel’s focus on The Violence of Imperialism and Religion can be seen in his first encounters with Emesh’s native xenobites, the Umandh. The humans’ decision to subjugate and enslave the Umandh exposes the deeply violent, colonialist nature of the Sollan Empire and of humans in general. Along these same lines, the Chantry’s stated rationalization that humanity is the first species to achieve interstellar travel, while currently portrayed in the narrative as true, also smacks of dogma and foreshadows the later discovery that humans do not, in fact, enjoy this distinction. Thus, even though the full extent of the Sollans’ imperialist propaganda has yet to be revealed, these early chapters deliver a sharp social critique on cruel practices such as enslavement. Significantly, even the poverty-stricken plebeians believe they are better than the Umandh; Cat calls the Umandh “demons” and has no objections to their predicament. Notably, although Hadrian is horrified by the brutal treatment that the Umandh receive from their human overseers, he reflects that in comparison to these strange creatures, even the Cielcin seem relatable and human. Thus, because the Umandh are completely “othered” by their human conquerors, they are wrongly viewed as creatures of lesser value rather than as sentient beings with their own culture or rights.
The novel’s focus on The Violence of Imperialism and Religion is even more explicitly highlighted when the narrator-Hadrian comments, “We had found intelligent creatures on forty-eight worlds: some bright, some dim, others strange. Forty-eight times we had enslaved them” (242). In this universe, humans are the scourge that sweeps through and conquers everything in its path. This colonialist spread is an inherent aspect of imperialism, and in many cases, religion becomes the weapon that justifies and empowers this spread, as is the case for the Chantry. Within the world of the novel, the insidious power of the Chantry is built upon the concept of human primacy in space, and the avatars of this forcefully disruptive faith use this misguided idea to claim ownership of the stars and seize the opportunity to conquer any species they discover. Their religion not only justifies but also demands the continued spread of humanity to every planet they can reach, fueling the self-righteousness and xenophobia that keep even the poorest plebeians loyal to this dubious cause.
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