Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Or until it is not made, and death or deed does them part.

  Pulling me to my feet, she stood, her hands tugging my shirt from my trousers. Cold air plucked at me, pulling hairs tight. She led me toward the bed, and there was something in the sway of her walk that held my attentions. Kissing me, Jinan pushed me onto the mattress. The gold accents on the tapestry glinted in the steady light of the room. A word from Jinan dimmed those lights but for a few safety lamps low and red, marking the exit and the way to the washroom. “Do you really think I would let them take you from me?” she husked, and threw aside her own shirt. There was nothing underneath. Her high breasts rose with her breathing, and she lowered herself atop me.

  They won’t give you a choice, I wanted to say, but her tongue was in my mouth, and it didn’t seem so important all of a sudden. There were hands in my hair, down my sides. My own hands found her smooth length of muscled thigh. I undid the clasp of her trousers, and she almost snarled, squeezed me through my pants. A breath vibrated from me, and I took her face in my hands. She pinned me back when I tried to roll on top of her, and for a moment I could see the familiar contours of her face, the high cheekbones, the mocking eyes beneath that mass of curling hair dark even as my own. “Don’t you dare.” She bit her lip. The hand she wasn’t pinning rested on her flank. She kissed me. My mouth, my jaw, my throat. Released the hand she’d pressed to the mattress—it was like sparring, really. Her hair trailed against my skin. Tickled. Itched.

  I wasn’t cold anymore.

  They say the ancients believed that one day the universe would contract. That time would run backward and all the world would shrink again to its native form and angels dance on the head of that pin. For a moment, I say it did, for all the worlds beyond our bed and that little room were banished, and all Creation made to house just her. And me. The rest of it: the Cielcin, The Painted Man, the Empire and Jadd, Bassander and Otavia . . . and Ghen. All vanished, obscured by Jinan as relic radiation obscures the very beginning of time. For the fever and flame of that moment and the strength of her arms I would have given all of myself. I was in love, and we were in love, and that love built the whole of our world—if only for that private moment. A paradise for us two. A walled garden sheltered from the world.

  But every garden has its snake, and every light its shadow.

  It did not last, nor did I.

  It could not last.

  But nothing is beautiful because it lasts.

  She tasted like a soldier, like iron and sweat, and every cord of her was lean as the bronze statues of the Icon of Fury on the Chantry altars. And when it was ended, we did not speak, but faced one another. Those unspoken facts lingered between us: that a return to the fleet would very well be the end of us, of these nights.

  There were faint lines at the corners of Jinan’s mouth. Lines her laughter eased in waking life. So too was the crease between her black brows, a perfect line folded as if by some logothete in confirmation of her burden. She had only put that burden down for a few short hours, but she knew it was there. I shuddered to think what I must have looked like. I do not shudder now. Reader, I have woken often in the night of my exile here soaked and shivering and alone. There are burdens one cannot put down, even in sleep.

  For what I have done, there is no respite. Even in Death, you would pile scorn upon my grave.

  CHAPTER 11

  YOUR RADIANCE

  I PUT OFF MY visit to the Mistral for a day and a half after word reached me from Otavia’s medtechs that they’d taken Siran out of fugue. I told myself I was still grieving, still lost inside memories of the horrible, flat eyes of the SOMs and the way they moved even cut to pieces. The truth was that facing Ghen’s closest friend was something I did not think I had in me. The big ox and Siran had been myrmidons together, prisoners together, criminals together—and both had left Emesh and followed me together, and that at least had cost Ghen his life.

  They would have followed anyone out of bondage, said the part of me that sounded like Tor Gibson. You cannot blame yourself for offering the road, no matter where it ends.

  Grief is deep water, I told myself, and the voice of the telling was mine. Grief is deep water.

  We shuttled over—Switch and I—through the static field and out of the Balmung’s hangar bay toward the smallest of our three ships. Three and a half hundred meters from end to end and shaped like a spearhead, the Mistral gleamed like a shard of silver by firelight. Like the Pharaoh, she was of Uhran manufacture, and her incept plates bore a date harking back to when there were still kings on that distant world. By far the fastest of our three ships, she was rated for 0.8 Kc. Eight hundred times the speed of light. The Pharaoh could barely manage 0.6.

  “You want me to go with you?” Switch asked.

  We were alone in the rear compartment, sealed off from the pilot officer in her ventral blister. The hum of the drives only complementing the oppressive quiet.

  I shook my head for the better part of five seconds before I realized I hadn’t said a word. “No. You don’t have to.”

  “That wasn’t what I asked, Had,” Switch said, pressing his lips together.

  Plowing past that, I said, “Does she know? Did Corvo tell her?” The fact that Ghen was dead was becoming an existential fact to me, and so—as in the parable of the fish who do not see that they are in water—I had not thought to ask again.

  “I’m not sure,” said my closest friend, leaning forward to get a better look at me.

  “. . . should have died hereafter,” I said, slipping into the Classical English.

  Switch’s face twisted into a melange of confused frustration and amusement. “What?”

  He hadn’t understood. In Galstani I said, “Sorry. Being ridiculous.”

  The older-looking, younger man smiled and clapped me on the arm. The light of that smile did not touch his eyes, but froze on the lower half of his face, stiff as the joke: “Well, what else is new?”

  “I’m losing Jinan.”

  The words came as if from some spinal reflex. I hadn’t thought them, or known they were so coldly in me until I’d spoken. It was as if I’d held some peculiar sculpture in my hands and, rotating it until its facets aligned and revealed its secret image, I had not known what it was.

  “What?”

  I chewed my lip, eyes torn from Switch’s narrow face to the sliver of planet I could see through the triangular window. “If we go back to the fleet, she’ll return to her people. Smythe won’t let me go.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  I didn’t feel like arguing.

  “Maybe she will,” Switch said.

  “She’s made me her immunis,” I said, using the formal word for a kind of special attaché. “Jinan will sail off to regroup with her satrap’s forces and we’ll be folded into the 437th, mark my words.”

  My lictor frowned. “You might be right.”

  “I am right,” I said with the certainty of a scholiast’s mental arithmetic—though I had perhaps little right to that certainty. “I don’t want that to happen.”

  “Empire will take what it wants,” Switch said. “I’m no patriot, but I’d rather work for them than end up one of those . . . drones.” It was his turn to break eye contact and stare out onto space.

  “They won’t thank us,” I said, “particularly if we go back failures the way Lin’s setting us up to do, William.” I hadn’t meant to use his right name, but I had conveyed the depth of seriousness that moved me.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, though the thought had occurred to me: I would not be the first palatine lord to turn renegade in the name of some higher cause. Would you go with me if Bassander refused? Did I dare ask Switch, as I had asked Jinan? I almost held my breath as I tried—really tried—to articulate my vision. The desire was there—but not the plan—and he who desires without a pla
n is like the man who leaps from a high place, though his hands are bound. It was as if I stood again in that dark forest, with no sign of the path. Dante was lucky. He had Virgil.

  But I could not say anything. It was not that I did not trust my friend, but there was a pilot officer on the other side of that bulkhead, and he would report anything he heard—or would hand Bassander any in-flight recordings there may be. Though we were in the depths of space, in Norman territory, we were in the Empire still, and the Empire was always watching.

  So I shook my head. “Nothing. Never mind.” I glanced at the sealed gray of the bulkhead, indicating the pilot. “Have you spoken to Siran?”

  “No,” Switch said, pressing back into his seat. “I hope they told her.”

  “So do I,” I said, and my voice was the voice of a man very much older than my thirty-five years.

  “So let me ask again.” Switch’s voice turned down, growing weighty and without any pretense at mirth. He was a man speaking honestly to another, without mockery or pretense, with concern and the love borne of old friendship. “Do you want me to come with you?”

  Inside, the Mistral had the same industrial design as the Pharaoh, bare metal and rounded halls and door, all white-padded and with handles to facilitate movement in the event the suppression fields failed or were turned off. Unlike on the Balmung, we entered through a docking umbilical and climbed up through a port in the ventral hull. Switch went first, nominally to secure the room above, though there was no danger aboard our own ships. I followed soon after, smoothing my tunic front once I regained my feet.

  Commander Bastien Durand, the ship’s First Officer, was waiting by the door to the ship proper. The small Norman bowed when I approached. “Welcome aboard, Lord Marlowe.” He wore a pair of antique wire spectacles whose exact function was a mystery. He could not possibly need them.

  I inclined my head. “Commander.” I did not much feel like talking.

  “The Captain would have been up to meet you herself, but she is closeted with Lieutenant Ilex going over the data from The Painted Man’s terminal.”

  That had my attention. “Is there news?”

  Durand adjusted his spectacles. “No, lordship. The dryad tells me the device is encrypted. They’ve had Doctor Onderra in for a look, too, but she’s made no headway, either.”

  We exchanged small pleasantries, then, and Durand led us out of the vestibule and along a low hall barely higher than my head. Faces peered out of side passages, pale and bronze and Norman dark. I returned salutes casually, with a smile stapled to my face. My family. Otavia’s lot were the strangest of the bunch. Only a few of Bassander’s soldiers and Jinan’s had been shuffled over to the Mistral, leaving the interceptor in the hands of Whent’s defectors. The Red Company uniforms seemed ill to fit them—I saw one woman who had torn the sleeves off her jacket to bare arms covered in bright, Nipponese-style tattoos. Jackets were not buttoned to the throat, or not worn, or other garments were worn instead. The ship was more relaxed in itself, even with the climate of concern flashing in the odd face.

  “Are we for the freeze again, Lord?” one man asked. “We just come out!”

  “Is it true the Mandari has us turning back?” called a woman—one of the Jaddian aljanhi by her accent.

  It stung to say nothing, but say nothing I did.

  We passed out along a catwalk overlooking the main hold; a high, open space that ran nearly a third the length of the ship. The ceiling arched gracefully, humming with the gentle thunder of the fusion reactors above. On the bulkhead to our left hung more than a dozen battle standards, each the emblem of some other company or Norman freehold—and one Imperial house—the ship had toppled in its long service. Admiral Whent’s gold standard hung amongst them, the black, eight-winged angel there still defiant, though its master was gone. The large door in its center led along the main access shaft to the bridge at the far end of the ship.

  Siran was waiting in the starboard gallery, a relatively large space that was part recreation space, part mess. She was not alone. Some dozen others of Otavia’s mercenaries lounged on the couches and at the game station, perhaps wondering why it was they’d been brought out of fugue only to be shoved back in again.

  “Eat it, you bastard!” One laughed, punching her companion in the arm over some sim game. “Eat it!”

  “Hey, stuff it! The Commandant!”

  The laughter collapsed to murmuring as I entered, the others suddenly feeling they intruded on something not meant for them. From the corner of my eye I saw two duck out into the hall, and another scarper through the door to the mess.

  Siran of Emesh sat by one of the holograph plates that imitated a window against the outer wall of the ship, silhouetted against the orange eye of the planet. The black scar of the city of Suren could just be seen, kissing the terminator as our orbit carried us round into night. She smiled when she saw me, set aside her clay drinking cup. If there had been tears, there were none now. She’d shaved off all her hair—she’d always worn it short, but her scalp gleamed nut-brown in the steady fluorescence.

  I didn’t say a word, but went to her and—stooping—threw my arms around her. No one spoke, and for a time there was no sound but the distant shuffle of feet, the awkward sounds of men and women witnessing something too private or too uncomfortable for them. Siran stood when I released her and held me at arm’s length. After a pause she said, “Are you all right?”

  “Am I all right?” I almost laughed. “Are you all right?” Her clipped nostril reminded me of Ghen’s, and I had to look away.

  “Otavia said you were there,” she said, one hand still on my shoulder. “I was an ice cube.”

  After biting my lip, I replied, “Yes, but he was your . . .” Her what? Had they been lovers? I’d never thought to ask, never known. On Emesh, the two of them had been squirreled away to the prisoners’ block and did not stay with the rest of us, save in combat or training. After Emesh, well, they’d been mostly on different ships.

  She didn’t answer, but held herself a long time. “Was it bad?”

  How was a man to answer that? My boots were at once very interesting, and I said, “He fought bravely.”

  “That isn’t what I asked.” Brown eyes flashed at me, and I was sharply reminded that she was still the elder of us two. She bore the intervening years better than Switch had done, without the graying or leathering. I wondered if she had patrician blood in her, so remote did she seem—as a queen of men.

  I clenched my jaw, seeing the smoking plasma wound and The Painted Man’s mocking theft of Ghen’s face. “There were daimons, machines wearing men’s bodies, Ghen . . .”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Marlowe!” she said, drawing murmurs from the crowd. “That isn’t what I asked.”

  “Siran,” Switch said, stepping forward, hand raised to grasp her shoulder.

  “Don’t Siran me!” she snapped, stepping back.

  “What do you want me to say?” I asked.

  She glared at me, not speaking.

  So I told her everything. About the battle and my ordering Ghen downstairs. About the SOMs, about The Painted Man and its horrible tricks. About how I had avenged Ghen’s death.

  Switch had not heard it all, and listened just as intently. When I finished there was a knot of people gathered as close as they dared about the four of us—Switch, Siran, Durand, and I. They shrank back the moment I ended, pretending never to have been listening at all.

  Siran was nodding. “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For smashing that bastard’s head in,” she said, baring her teeth.

  Switch shrugged with his mouth and ran hands through his graying hair. “We should have brought some wine over from the Balmung. I wasn’t thinking.”

  The other myrmidon lifted her cup. “This is just fine.”

  “Tea?” I made a face.

 
; She snorted. “Vodka.”

  “But it’s not even noon!” Switch exclaimed, blinking. “The hell did you get it, anyhow?”

  The woman made a rude hand gesture, then grinned. The cloud that had hung over us since I’d entered dispersed a little, and we all smiled, well and truly. “Crim sent a case up while he was doing his intel work, apparently. While I was still frozen . . . Speaking of,” and here she narrowed her eyes, retaking her seat by the window plate. “Is it true Lin’s putting us all back in the ice, that we’re to rendezvous with the Imperial fleet off Coritani?”

  “That seems to be his plan, unless Ilex can turn up something really good.”

  “And Jinan?”

  I glanced sidelong at Switch before answering. “She’s playing like she doesn’t have a say. Word is Legion brass has ordered all ships to Coritani, like you say. I keep trying to tell Jinan she’s not Empire, we could split off, take the Jaddians and make for Vorgossos without Imperial support, but . . . she won’t gainsay Bassander.”

  Siran hissed and crossed her legs. “Sounds to me like she’s made up her mind and doesn’t want to say.”

  “Maybe not,” Switch put in, looking to Durand for support. The First Officer kept his silence. “I’m sure Jinan is just being careful, Had. She is stuck between you and Bassander, you know. That’s not exactly a fun place to be.”

  A faint smile stamped Siran’s lips, and she said, “It is a bit of a cop-out, though. She’s a captain, too.” It was at about this point that a call came for Commander Durand over his wrist-terminal, and the First Officer begged leave to answer it, hurrying from the room. After he was gone—when it was just we three veterans of the Borosevo Colosso remaining—Siran asked, “How’s Pallino taking it?”