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Howling Dark

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by Christopher Ruocchio




  Also by Christopher Ruocchio:

  The Sun-Eater

  EMPIRE OF SILENCE

  HOWLING DARK

  Copyright © 2019 by Christopher Ruocchio.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Jacket art by Kieran Yanner.

  Jacket design by Katie Anderson.

  Interior design by Alissa Rose Theodor.

  Edited by Katie Hoffman.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1828.

  Published by DAW Books, Inc.

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780756413057

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  Version_1

  To my parents,

  Paul and Penny.

  For always being there.

  I’m going to be all right.

  CONTENTS

  Also by Christopher Ruocchio

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1: The Red Company

  Chapter 2: Suspended and Undead

  Chapter 3: The Sunken City

  Chapter 4: The Painted Man

  Chapter 5: Eyes Like Stars

  Chapter 6: The Road to Vorgossos

  Chapter 7: Things Unseen, Things Remembered

  Chapter 8: The Council of Captains

  Chapter 9: Absent Friends

  Chapter 10: Jinan

  Chapter 11: Your Radiance

  Chapter 12: A Journey’s End

  Chapter 13: Obedience

  Chapter 14: Conspiracy

  Chapter 15: The First Treason

  Chapter 16: The Tomb

  Chapter 17: The Breaking of the Company

  Chapter 18: The Other Edge

  Chapter 19: The Gates of Babylon

  Chapter 20: The Bonecutter

  Chapter 21: A Matter of Price

  Chapter 22: Blood and Water

  Chapter 23: The Pilot

  Chapter 24: The Enigma of Hours

  Chapter 25: Becalmed in Motion

  Chapter 26: The Oracle

  Chapter 27: Valka

  Chapter 28: The Dark World

  Chapter 29: The Profane City

  Chapter 30: The Suppliants

  Chapter 31: Tartarus

  Chapter 32: Saturn or Dis

  Chapter 33: Divide and Conquer

  Chapter 34: In the House of Kharn Sagara

  Chapter 35: The Gorgon

  Chapter 36: The Devil and the Golem

  Chapter 37: Tanaran

  Chapter 38: The Face of Failure

  Chapter 39: The Last Story

  Chapter 40: The Garden of Everything

  Chapter 41: The Tree of Life

  Chapter 42: The Children of Saturn

  Chapter 43: Brethren

  Chapter 44: Understanding

  Chapter 45: The Apostate

  Chapter 46: The Long Cold

  Chapter 47: One Villain and Another

  Chapter 48: A Red Reunion

  Chapter 49: Two Treasons

  Chapter 50: The Devil and the Honest Man

  Chapter 51: Lost Time

  Chapter 52: Bora

  Chapter 53: The Third Treason

  Chapter 54: Bringing Storm

  Chapter 55: The Verge of History

  Chapter 56: Like Castles of Ice

  Chapter 57: The Prince of Hell

  Chapter 58: The Chalcenterite

  Chapter 59: No Man an Island

  Chapter 60: The Pavilion

  Chapter 61: Valka Again

  Chapter 62: The Limits of Reason

  Chapter 63: The Apostol

  Chapter 64: A Devil’s Bargain

  Chapter 65: Of Gods and Engines

  Chapter 66: A Bloody Star

  Chapter 67: Traitor and Patriot

  Chapter 68: The Narrow Way

  Chapter 69: Divide and Conquer

  Chapter 70: Play the Orator

  Chapter 71: Hope Is a Cloud

  Chapter 72: The Pit

  Chapter 73: Broken

  Chapter 74: Howling Dark

  Chapter 75: The Eleventh Hour

  Chapter 76: The Three Immortals

  Chapter 77: Theseus Himself

  Chapter 78: The First Strategos

  Chapter 79: Departure

  Chapter 80: Halfmortal

  Dramatis Personae

  Index of Worlds

  Lexicon

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  What a first year this has been! Since its release in the summer of 2018, Empire of Silence has found its way into the hands of several thousand readers, people to whom I will be forever grateful. If the last set of acknowledgments was for the people who saw me to publication—my family, my friends, my agents, the good people at DAW Books and my coworkers at Baen, to my teachers and the rest—this page is for you and yours, Reader. Without all of you the first book would be rotting away on a shelf or in some warehouses and I would be forced to take up some honest trade. Let me thank several of you who didn’t make it into book one in particular, but in no particular order.

  Firstly, to the booksellers! To the folks at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh—especially Rene and Tim—and the good people at Anderida Books in the UK, for their kindness and support. To Glennis of The Missing Volume and Alexi of Bard’s Tower, for their friendship and for helping me navigate the labyrinth of conventions.

  To the reviewers! To Petros, Tracy, Emily Grace, Nils, the folks at Unseen Library, and more. I am touched that you all enjoyed the book and hope that this one is all you were hoping for. It has been nice getting to know the lot of you.

  To the readers! Many of you have reached out to me online and off, and though I cannot possibly list you all, I am grateful to each and every one of you. To David K, TJ, Lena, Alex, and MaryAnn, to Luca in Italy, and Emil in Sweden, and Nathan down in Australia. And of course to my online friends. I couldn’t do this without you all.

  To the new friends I have made (if I may so claim). To Gerald Brandt, Ed Willett, EC Ambrose, Joshua Palmatier, and Julie Czerneda, for making this new kid feel welcome at the DAW family get-togethers. To Dan Stout and Cass Morris—for being the new kids along with me. To my Baen family: the Webers, the Drakes, the Correias (thanks for helping me hit my single biggest day of sales, Larry!), Kacey Ezell, Jody Lynn Nye, Mike Massa, Griffi
n Barber . . . and everyone. To RR Virdi and LJ Hachmeister, for being the coolest. And of course to D.J. Butler, one of the finest and most generous people in the entire industry.

  And lastly, to Jenna, who in the last year and a half has gone from my friend to my fiancée. I will always be grateful to Jenna. For everything. I love you, dear lady.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE RED COMPANY

  DARKNESS.

  Green eyes watched from the darkness like statues in a fog. I felt them like fishhooks in me, dragging me upward. I felt wrong. Cold. The image of Bordelon’s face on the holograph—moments before I wiped it from existence—seemed to float on the air. His was not alone. Gilliam’s was there, lips twisted as he was, a sneer made flesh. And Uvanari. A confusion of sound filled my universe: the screams of dying men, the cheering of the Colosso crowd, my own blood pounding in my ear.

  I knew then, knew that I had been dead, and that all this sensory weight was the cost and burden of consciousness returning. Of being alive. I was alive. Again.

  “Lord Commandant?” A familiar voice, strangely accented, hinting at a language I could not remember—if indeed I knew it at all. “Lord Commandant?”

  I was hiding in a basement on Pharos, that was it. There was a woman with me, a woman I loved, her hair blacker than the shadows. We were hiding from Bordelon and the Normans after they sold us to Admiral Whent. No. No, that was a long time ago, and a long time since Emesh, but my confused brain drank the scent of her and of burning wood, recalling the warmth of her and the taste of the ration bars we had shared alone in the darkness.

  “Lord Commandant?”

  The fog was clearing, retreating into the depths of history and of time as yet uncounted. I could still hear shouts, sobs, and I knew they were my own, conducted through bone and time to make me feel and see the horrors of my past because to know them was to be alive. Hard fingers tore my clothes that night in Borosevo, Cat’s body sank into the canals . . . At once sharp as new experience, my memories retreated from me like votive lanterns to the skies. I grasped at them, and found my arms like trunks of lead, unmoving. Warmth was rising in me, chasing out that pelagic cold, bleeding in from both my arms.

  Bleeding.

  I was in a bed. Or else in something very like a bed, and someone was standing over me. I beheld old Tor Gibson, his gray eyes green in my delirium—green as his robes—his leonine mane and whiskers bristling in the wind off Meidua’s waters.

  “Dead?” I croaked, unsure if I meant himself or me.

  The old scholiast smiled. “Not yet. We might avoid that yet.”

  “Lord Commandant, lie still please.” That strange voice. Familiar. It came from Gibson’s mouth, or so I thought. “You’re still fugue-blind.”

  “No,” I said, looking at the scholiast. “I can . . . can see Gibson.”

  “There’s no one here but us!” The voice had moved, was opposite Gibson now, but the scholiast had not changed.

  When Gibson spoke, his lips did not move. The actor knows he is on stage. The character knows there is no stage. It sounded like one of his scholiast’s aphorisms, but I could not remember it.

  I was going mad. I was in a basement on Pharos—or was that years ago? She had been there with me, with Admiral Whent’s thugs out after us, and we had come out alive. And Gibson was dead. And I’d been dead—or nearly so. Frozen.

  “Do you know where you are?”

  A question, a question that spoke to the oldest exploratory and orienting circuits in the ancientmost corners of my brain. Do you know where you are?

  As if the curtains on a stage were pulled back and the holography of the set pieces generated, the fog cleared and the real world took form. I was in medica. White walls, white floor, white ceiling. Too clean. I lay in the opened husk of a portable fugue crèche that someone had floated in here and bolted to the slab for revival. Turning, I saw that Gibson was gone. A hallucination? A vision brought on doubtless by the fact that there was still a part of me that thought in Gibson’s voice.

  Twelve years since Emesh.

  It came back to me. “We’re on the Pharaoh.” We had acquired the ship on Pharos, had taken it after that business with the Normans and Admiral Whent, after Bordelon betrayed us. We had been hired—alongside Bordelon’s company—to run weapons to freedom fighters attempting to overthrow the planetary dictator Marius Whent, all part of our efforts to build our credibility as a mercenary outfit as we hunted for Vorgossos. But Bordelon had betrayed us, and we had been forced to fight our way out. Marius Whent had been forced to surrender. Emil Bordelon had been killed, betrayed in his turn by his own soldiers—because I’d made them an offer they could not refuse.

  The woman at my bedside, an ink-skinned Norman with hair like curling steel, nodded a judicious little nod. “Yes. And do you know who I am?” She wore a set of burgundy fatigues, form-fitting. A uniform. My uniform, I had designed it, with the flapped pockets and piped sleeves.

  “Doctor Okoyo,” I said, an address and not an answer, “I don’t think there was any cryoburn.” I tried to sit up, at once aware as Adam of my nakedness.

  “Don’t move, Lord Marlowe.” She pushed me down, gentle but firm, and said, “I’ve not got all the TX9 out of you.”

  Turning, I saw the blood bags hanging from their staff beside me. AB Positive. Opposite was a drip pan emptying the anti-freezing agent from my veins. It shone cerulean in the too-white light; almost black. After a moment, I said, “You could have left me for a medtech, doctor.”

  Okoyo snorted. “Commodore Lin would skin me if I did that, and you Imperial types actually skin people.”

  “You have a point,” I conceded, “but you’ve nothing to fear from us, surely.” We sat in silence a moment, the doctor busying herself with a diagnostic terminal while I pretended I was not naked and aware of it. I tried to sort the visions I had seen. Waking from fugue was never easy. The men who had abandoned me on Emesh had shoved just enough blood in me that they could not be accused of murder, and I had been unconscious for that ordeal, but on each occasion since, I had passed through a warren of memory and noise to the quiet of the world. The brain hyper-acted, so they said, on returning to consciousness. It was like dying, I thought, for in fugue the processes of my life were suspended as in formaldehyde, and that was as good as being dead. I was little different than a corpse, or a side of meat in a freezer.

  I was wrong, of course. It is nothing like dying. Nothing at all.

  “What’s the standard date?”

  “Sixteen two-nineteen point one-one.” She did not turn her head.

  “November,” I mused. Of the Year of our Empire 16219. Forty-eight years since Emesh, though I had lived but twelve of them. Forty-eight years pretending to be mercenaries. Forty-eight years free of Count Mataro and his designs on me for his daughter. Forty-eight years a special conscript of the Legions of the Sun.

  Forty-eight more years of war. Of the abortive, genocidal crusade against the Cielcin, the xenobites who drank of human worlds and preyed upon our people like wolves among sheep. Forty-eight years hunting for Vorgossos, carrying Cielcin prisoners and the hope of parley. Of peace.

  “Is there some news?” I asked, sitting up now that the doctor could not stop me. My head swam, and I braced myself against the hard edges of my crèche. After a moment I stabilized, and tore a folded robe from the slab beside me. “Did we get a lead on that arms dealer the pirates gave us back on Sanora?” The doctor turned at the sound of my movement and hurried to my side. Her voice strained, she tried to lay me back down, but I held up a hand. “I’m just trying to cover myself.”

  Okoyo glowered. “You’re just trying to make yourself pass out, Lord Marlowe.”

  “It’s all right,” I murmured, voice suddenly faint. “It’s all right.”

  She kept an arm around my shoulders, and it was all I could do to puddle the robe in my lap—but that was
enough. My own breathing consumed my attention, thick and wet. Rolling, I bent over the drip pan and coughed up a glob of the violet suspension fluid that yet settled in my lungs. “You’re not all right,” Okoyo said. “You’ve been an ice cube for the last six years.”

  “Six years?” I asked, surprised. I had not done the math. “Where are we?”

  The doctor shook her head. “Best leave that to the Commodore, Lord.”

  Bassander Lin looked older than I remembered, and I wondered just how much of the intervening travel time the prickly captain had spent awake. I say captain, of course, because that was what he was. His role as Commodore was a mask, a persona, as much as was my position of Lord Commandant. The change in him was a subtle thing: no creasing about the eyes or mouth, no gray at the temples. But then, Lin was patrician, a bronze-skinned Mandari from an old family, his blood nearly so elevated as mine. The only real change lay within those black eyes of his. Something had hardened in them, the slow venom of our long association transmuted to amber; crystallized. His quarters aboard the Pharaoh had belonged to the Norman Commodore Emil Bordelon, and Bassander Lin had made some effort to remove all signs of the rooms’ previous occupant. The pornographic artwork was all gone, the ornate frames discarded, the carpets removed. I could still see the fixtures in the floor where the Commodore’s too-large bed had been, replaced by a simple soldier’s cot. There were no blankets.

  “Sleep well?” he asked, surveying me from behind his desk. “Okoyo gave you a clean bill of health.” He had an annoying habit of answering his own questions. So I didn’t speak, but slumped low in my chair, uncomfortable in my crimson uniform. Bassander was dressed identically, but on him the high collar and tokens of rank seemed to rest easy. I at least had no badges to wear, save the sigil I had made, picked out in gold thread on the left bicep. Bassander toyed with a heavy mug on his desk, not looking at me. “That woman Corvo thinks she’s found our man.”

  I sat upright, leaning over the edge of the desk. Lin’s flinty gaze tripped over my face, and he took a drink. “The Painted Man?” That was what the Sanoran pirates had called him.

 

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