73 pages • 2-hour read
Empire of Silence
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Chapters 56-66Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, xenophobia, graphic violence, and death.
Chapter 56 Summary: “Witches and Demons”
Hadrian joins an official visit to the fisheries, along with Balian, the overseer Engin, Valka, Ligeia, and Gilliam. To his dismay, they visit the same fishery that he once snuck into with Cat. Overwhelmed by the memory, he grieves Cat’s death and feels guilty for forgetting her in favor of Valka.
Meanwhile, Engin discusses the Umandh with Balian and the Chantry representatives. Ligeia admonishes Balian for allowing the Umandh to keep their native rituals. She reminds him that part of his mandate from the Chantry is to eradicate their culture and to bring the Umandh into “the light of the Chantry” (480) by any means necessary.
The Umandh begin making a strange noise. Valka realizes that something is wrong and tries to warn the group. When Engin orders the Umandh to be silent, they lash out and attack. Chaos ensues, and guards usher Balian to safety. An Umandh grabs Hadrian and strangles him with its tendrils, but Valka saves him. The group retreats outside.
Gilliam calls Valka a witch and accuses her of instigating the attack. She argues that the Umandh could understand them when they referred to Balian as the Count; she posits that they decided to attack the primary source of their torment. Gilliam continues his accusations and attacks, growing more fevered until Hadrian finally punches him, at which point Gilliam demands Hadrian’s arrest. Knowing that he could be executed for the assault if he maintains his alias, Hadrian reveals his true identity and demands a duel of honor against Gilliam.
Chapter 57 Summary: “Second”
With his identity out in the open, Hadrian visits Switch and tells Switch his entire story. He then asks Switch to be his second in the duel. Switch teases him for being stupid enough to hit a Chantry priest over a woman, but agrees. Even as Hadrian worries about what will happen, he is glad to have repaired his friendship.
Chapter 58 Summary: “Barbarians”
As Hadrian and Switch train together, Hadrian is impressed by how much Switch has improved and hardened. Suddenly, Valka bursts in and demands answers. She is angry with Hadrian for lying and for causing a scandal over her honor. She did not want him to fight for her, and she objects to his chauvinistic posturing. He apologizes and agrees that he should not have attacked Gilliam. Valka does not want death and murder on her conscience and demands that he stop the duel. However, it is too late to withdraw, and he must go through with it. His plan is to draw first blood, but he promises not to kill Gilliam.
Chapter 59 Summary: “On the Eve of Execution”
The narrator-Hadrian reflects on the experience of awaiting execution in full knowledge of imminent death. He recalls facing this feeling for the first time on the night before his duel with Gilliam. He then ponders whether Gilliam deserved to die or not. He believes that Gilliam was a cruel man, but in the years since the due, he has decided that he has no right to decide who deserves to live or die. That day, however, his younger self was caught between not wanting to kill and not wanting to die, and he had to make a choice.
Chapter 60 Summary: “The Sword, Our Orator”
The duel arrives. As is customary, Switch and Gilliam’s second discuss the possibility of reaching conciliation without a fight, but Gilliam’s second refuses. The rules dictate that whoever draws first blood may declare themselves satisfied and end the fight. However, if this person chooses not to do so, the fight must continue until one combatant is dead.
As the duel begins, Hadrian is surprised when Gilliam is faster and stronger than expected. Gilliam shocks Hadrian with a swift strike, drawing first blood, but the priest does not accept this as victory, instead demanding that the duel continue to the death. Hadrian berates himself for thinking that the duel would be easy. He was so certain that he would draw first blood and put an end to it, but now, he must fight with his full strength. He has several opportunities to kill Gilliam but hesitates each time because he has never killed before. The crowd jeers, accusing him of toying with Gilliam. Finally, Gilliam presses forward, and Hadrian has no choice. He stabs Gilliam through the chest, then kneels by the dying priest.
Chapter 61 Summary: “A Kind of Exile”
Balian is furious with Hadrian for killing Gilliam and warns that Ligeia wants to execute him despite the legality of the duel. Hadrian offers to leave the planet, but Balian has other plans. He reveals that he contacted Hadrian’s father the moment he and Hadrian first met. Alistair has since sent back an official document disavowing Hadrian and removing him from the Marlowe family. Hadrian is heartbroken by this revelation. Despite Hadrian’s lack of title or wealth, Balian wants to mix Hadrian’s superior genetic makeup into his own family line. He plans to marry Hadrian to Anais after her Ephebeia in two years’ time, and their children will eventually inherit Balian’s title. While they wait for Anais to come of age, Balian intends to send Hadrian away from the court in order to protect him from Ligeia. Hadrian objects to being turned into a breeding stud but has little choice in the matter.
Chapter 62 Summary: “The Gilded Cage”
As Hadrian sits in his room after the duel, he feels defeated and angry, and he is also haunted by Gilliam’s death. Valka visits, hoping to bring him to his senses. She now realizes that despite her image of him as a Colosso fighter, he has never killed before. He apologizes again for the situation and explains what Balian now expects of him. Removing his signet ring, which is now worthless, he throws it across the room. Valka says he has no one to blame but himself. Hadrian asks if he can join her when she leaves for her work at Calagah, as such an arrangement would satisfy Balian’s desire to send him away. Hadrian also wants to see the ruins left by the Quiet.
Chapter 63 Summary: “Calagah”
Four weeks later, after a brief stop at Sir Elomas’s castle of Springdeep, Valka, Hadrian, Sir Elomas, and several staff members travel to Calagah. They arrive at the site, and while Elomas sets up camp, Valka shows Hadrian the enormous black structure that she believes was built by the Quiet. It consists of a massive tower and a series of tunnels embedded in the rock along a cliff. Valka explains that they cannot scan the black material or break a piece off to study its molecular structure. Hadrian is awed by the size of the structure and the inhuman wrongness of it. He touches a wall and is stung by a sudden, bone-deep cold in his hand. When Valka says the rock feels warm to her, he shrugs off the incident.
Chapter 64 Summary: “The Larger World”
For weeks, Hadrian helps Valka and the others and wonders why they continue studying the place. He reasons that if the ruins are nearly 1 million years old and the Sollan Empire has controlled Emesh for nearly 1,500 years, surely previous studies would have found anything that is of interest. He also muses that prior to the Sollans’ dominion, the freeholder Normans controlled Emesh and likely would have taken anything of value from the ruins.
One night, news on an audio broadcast announces that the Cielcin have attacked a legion on the outer edges of the Emesh planetary system, but that Balian’s forces have defeated them.
Chapter 65 Summary: “I Dare Not Meet in Dreams”
One day, as Valka and Elomas work, Hadrian wanders down a tunnel branching off the main one. He fears becoming lost and turns to make his way back, only to find that the way has changed and that a large passage now stands before him. He enters it and finds an enormous circular chamber featuring a 50-foot mural of the same circular anaglyphs that Valka showed him before. In the shiny black stone, he sees his own reflection, but his eyes are the wrong color and the reflection seems to reach out to him.
He feels a sensation of overwhelming cold and sees a vision of a castle, an empty cradle, a large ship in space covered in statues, and an army of Cielcin marching across space. Where the Cielcin pass, planets and stars die. Then he sees a single Cielcin, greater than the others, wearing a silver crown. The large ship covered in statues passes overhead and plunges into a star “like a knife descending” (558). A blinding light flashes, and when the vision clears, Hadrian hears the words, “This must be” (559).
Hadrian runs out, calling for Valka. He finds her in the camp, and she says he has been missing for six hours, not 20 minutes as he believes. He tells her what he saw and tries to lead her back to the chamber, but it is gone. Valka accuses him of lying for his own amusement. She calls him “an ignorant savage from a backward country who still believes in fairy stories” (562). He insists that he is not lying, but she sneers and walks away.
Chapter 66 Summary: “The Satrap and the Swordmaster”
Weeks later, Jaddian delegates visit Emesh and make a trip to see Calagah. The head of the delegation is Lady Kalima Aliarada, the Satrap (governor) of Ubar. Her personal bodyguard is Sir Olorin Milta, one of the Maeskolos (famed Jaddian warriors and sword masters). Anais accompanies them, to Hadrian’s chagrin.
Kalima and Olorin are haughtily unimpressed until Valka shows them the massive black structure. Kalima remarks that the ruins share similarities with the insides of Cielcin ships, and this piques Hadrian’s interest. Olorin explains that they captured a Cielcin vessel during a battle some time ago, near a planet called Obatala. Hadrian remembers that Obatala was on the route that his Jaddian transport ship was supposed to take from Delos to Teukros, but he does not have time to consider the implications further. Olorin adds that their ship is cutting across the galaxy, from their home on the outer edge to the Norman-held frontier near the center. They suggest that the Cielcin are headed in that direction and may attack again.
Hadrian stays behind as the delegates return to their ship, but Anais finds him. She knows about her father’s plan for their betrothal and wants Hadrian to return with her. She wraps her arms around him and kisses him. Feeling trapped, Hadrian realizes that this is how Kyra must have felt when he kissed her so long ago. As he tries to find a way to politely extricate himself, Valka appears. Hadrian stutters, but Valka replies that she does not care about his actions with Anais.
Chapters 56-66 Analysis
As the Umandh riot and the subsequent confrontation between Hadrian and Gilliam trigger a severe reversal of Hadrian’s fortunes, the narrative once again makes it clear that in many ways, his own temper and impulsiveness are to blame for his downfall. Just as he attacked Crispin in retaliation for his brother’s cruel comments about Kyra, Hadrian now lashes out at Gilliam over the priest’s insults to Valka, proving his tendency to leap into protective action in order to shield the women in his life. As Valka notes in Chapter 62, the ensuing mess is one of his own making, and this recurring pattern suggests that Hadrian’s rash impulsiveness is his very own tragic flaw—the imperfection of character that ultimately leads to his greatest woes in life.
Although the duel between Hadrian and Gilliam is anticlimactic from an action standpoint, it forces Hadrian to reveal his identity publicly. At the same time, he is doomed by his own ego because he is so certain that he will draw first blood and control the outcome of the duel. When he underestimates Gilliam, he once again displays his misconceptions about his own genetic superiority, and as a result of his arrogance, he is forced him to kill for the first time in order to ensure his own survival. The stark contrast between Hadrian’s horror over this first kill and the genocide that he is foreshadowed to commit emphasizes the novel’s focus on The Tension Between Fate and Choice. Pointedly, the narrator-Hadrian argues that no one has the right to decide who deserves to live or die, but the actions of his younger self suggest that in some desperate situations, choosing to live is synonymous with choosing to kill. This grim reflection contributes to his ongoing conflict over the forces of fate and choice, and Hadrian places more emphasis upon his personal choices and their impact on his life and the lives of others.
However, the discussion with Balian that follows the duel soon disabuses the young Hadrian of the notion that he holds the power to choose his own fate. By using his true name in order to invoke his right to a legal duel, he has backed himself into a corner. Likewise, when he learns that his father has officially disavowed him, he loses all remaining vestiges of political relevance, and with the symbolic power of his signet ring erased, his only value to his opponents lies in his elite genetic makeup. Thus, he ironically finds himself further imprisoned and ensnared in intrigue due to the very attributes that once defined his rarified social status as a palatine. In a world of constantly shifting political loyalties, his sole remaining currency lies in his ability to sire children whose genetic inheritance will imply that they have the innate right to rule—as Hadrian himself once did.
With Hadrian’s feud against Gilliam now resolved and the threat of his enforced betrothal to Anais relegated to the background for the time being, the author moves on to develop a more pointed interpretation of The Tension Between Fate and Choice as Hadrian encounters the black structures built by the Quiet. The scene in which he experiences a strange vision of a violent, war-torn future foreshadows his eventual act of destroying the sun over Goddoddin and earning the epithet of Sun Eater. Given the omnipresence of the novel’s frame story, in which an older, more embittered Hadrian awaits execution, this scene implies that Hadrian was always meant to become the forbidding figure that his narrator-self has proven to be. The scene also hints at the narrator-Hadrian’s inherent bias and potential unreliability, for his account of this vision implies his belief in the power of fate, negating his pronouncements about the importance of choice. The story as told thus implies the narrator-Hadrian’s attempt to deny accountability for his crimes—at least to a certain extent.
However, the true details of these weighty matters yet lie far in the future, and for the meantime, the young Hadrian is more deeply concerned with the fact that his moment in the tunnels hinders the growing relationship between himself and Valka. Although their relationship has not been romantic in nature, it is nonetheless built upon mutual respect. Now, however, when Valka accuses Hadrian of lying and playing games because he is nothing more than a bored palatine, her accusation echoes the one that Switch made when he first discovered Hadrian’s identity. The recurring pattern suggests that Hadrian will face similar accusations no matter how many times he refutes the point. Valka’s disbelief also hints at her own unbending pride, suggesting that she is unwilling to entertain the notion that she has missed something so vital after so many years of studying the ruins. Her anger also shows her resentment over the fact that Hadrian would accidentally stumble upon such a discovery in mere weeks. When their friendship dissolves after the incident with Anais, it is clear that despite Valka’s pretense otherwise, she has also succumbed to a measure of jealousy and insecurity. Taken together, these issues shatter the nascent relationship completely.
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