Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “Same as ever, really,” Switch said. “Stoic son of a bitch. Nothing makes him blink.”

  “Well,” I said dryly, “he only has one eye. He can’t blink.”

  Switch’s eyes flashed daggers, but he restrained the impulse to hit me, and said, “That wasn’t funny.”

  I snorted. “Yes it was.”

  “Go to hell!” he muttered, mindful of the other soldiers in the room. It would not do for the Commandant’s lictor to strike the Lord Commandant.

  Siran was grinning, and that—at least—was good. “Have you spoken to that Smythe woman about all this? Just go over Lin’s head and your girl’s?”

  I had been so intent upon solving the problem myself that I had not stopped to think there were other powers in play. Powers that—while not so great as the First Strategos—were greater than Bassander Lin.

  Raine Smythe.

  Knight-Tribune Raine Smythe.

  “No,” I said. “No, I hadn’t.” I felt the grin spreading across my face.

  “I know that look,” Switch said with dour humor. “Stop it.”

  I composed myself, rubbing my face with my hands. I could have kissed Siran, then. There was a way forward after all. Always forward, always down, and never left or right. We were in the labyrinth again—or else had never left it—beneath the shadows of those dark trees in my mind.

  “Don’t listen to him, Your Radiance,” Siran said, peering up at me from where she sat. “I like it when you get this way.” She smiled, threw back what was left of her vodka. “You boys want a drink? To send Ghen off proper?”

  She’d already begun to move, for which I was grateful. She missed the tears. Switch grabbed my wrist, and startled I looked round at him—at the concern deep-carved in the lines of his face. I shook him off and dried my eyes, muttering, “Your Radiance.”

  CHAPTER 12

  A JOURNEY’S END

  “AS YOU CAN SEE,” Bassander said, speaking through the constellation of holographs from his place behind Emil Bordelon’s obscene desk, “the star charts the dryad recovered from The Painted Man’s terminal contain no reference to Vorgossos.”

  The volume map glimmered like frost on spiderwebs in a cylinder projected by hardware in the ceiling. Beside it, an index of names and coordinates scrolled on permanent loop. Holographed stars hung like gems in that gleaming web, motes large only as my thumbnail. They were too large for how close they were together, connected by the major trade routes in glittering white. But all my attentions were given to what hung between them in venomous, fructant red.

  Drawing attention to them, I asked, “These are the dark worlds?”

  “Dark worlds?” Greenlaw sneered from Bassander’s side. “This isn’t an opera.”

  I sniffed, turning instead to Ilex where she stood beside Captain Corvo. She’d forgone the heavy uniform jacket, wore a white vest tucked into red fatigues and high boots. Presently she uncrossed her green arms and answered me, saying, “It’s a list of Extrasolarian outposts in the Veil and the Expanse. I’m sure it’s not comprehensive.”

  My eyes skipped from the dryad’s face to Jinan’s, and I said, “Well, it doesn’t have to be.” My captain’s eyes fell, interested suddenly in something near her shoe. “Thank you, Ilex. You’ve done a fine job.” The dryad stood a little straighter, beaming, and I said, “Is there any sign of a March Station?”

  “It’s not the nearest of the outposts,” Ilex said, crossing from Otavia’s side to stand beside me. Her finger jabbed at a red cube some few hundred light-years distant. “We could make it there in about about eighteen months, normal cruising speed. There are closer sites, here and here”—she pointed—“but I don’t know what made the arms dealer reference March Station in particular.”

  “Kremnoi and Tanais,” Jinan said, reading the names. “They sound like planets . . .”

  “Enough!” Bassander said coolly. “You promised me Vorgossos, Marlowe. This is not Vorgossos.” Muscles worked in his jaw and temples, drawing attention to the fact that he’d newly shaved the sides of his head again almost to his crown.

  I ignored him. “Captain Corvo, do you have any idea why The Painted Man might have named March Station over these others?”

  Improbably tall Otavia Corvo brushed back a strand of her flyaway blond hair and shrugged. “It could be a larger outpost, or else allied with Vorgossos in a way the others are not. It’s hard to understand the allegiances of these backspacers.”

  “Even as we stand,” Bassander said, crossing his arms, “it will take some fifteen years to reach the fleet. This mission is a failure.”

  “No, it’s not!” I said, voice going high. I pointed at the holograph projected before us. “We have a list now. A list of—” I counted. “Seventeen backspace sites.”

  “And you propose to search them all?” Bassander asked.

  “If that’s what it takes,” I said.

  The Commodore snorted, dropping into his chair behind the huge desk. He reached out and took the leather-wrapped hilt of his sword—Admiral Whent’s sword—from where it lay like a paperweight. He waved the hilt like a baton, shaking it in my general direction. “We don’t have the time. Our colonies do not have the time.”

  “Then go back, captain,” I said, sidling past Jinan to face Bassander across the desk. The use of his proper rank stung him—and in front of the Normans, no less. It was a mistake, I knew, but I had decided not to care. “Give me the Balmung and the prisoners. I’ll find Vorgossos myself if need be.” I glanced at Jinan, but my captain stood silent. I did not want to do this alone.

  “Find it yourself?” he sneered. “As if you could fly so much as a rusted tub without my officers to assist you.”

  This stung as much as my calling him captain had. I could, as it happened, fly one of the Sparrowhawk-class lighters we kept in the Balmung’s bays perfectly well, thank you. But I didn’t mention that. Instead I said, “You are throwing away everything we’ve done since Emesh. Everything we’ve built.”

  “Everything we’ve done?” Bassander raised his eyebrows, tightening his grip on the sword-hilt he held. “What? Toppled a Norman dictatorship and scrambled a few pirates? You may not know this, being a perfumed palatine, but those deeds hardly account by the standards of the Empire.”

  “Then give me the Balmung,” I said again, not retreating. The others . . . Jinan, Otavia, Ilex, Greenlaw . . . vanished as if in a gray mist. Bassander and I stood at the center of a dim universe, neither bending.

  Presently he reversed his grip on the weapon and slammed it emitter-down into the surface of the table. “I am not giving you the destroyer or any of my officers.”

  “Then I will go,” Otavia said, stepping forward to place a hand on my shoulder. “You lose nothing but the coin you were already paying me and a ship you did not have when you parted with your fleet.” By her words, I stood a little straighter, knowing I had such support. Whatever else I’d done, winning the Norman mercenaries was my accomplishment. It was I who had rid Otavia of Whent—and of Bordelon. Bordelon. That she’d been willing to enter this room at all after what that creature had been and done . . . It spoke of a strength of will and a force unlike any I knew in myself.

  The universe has no shortage of mad dogs, Corvo had said when I told her the vile Commodore was dead. She had not wept, only nodded her approval.

  Bassander stood, an entirely undramatic gesture given that he barely rose to the level of Otavia’s breast. He narrowed those eyes like coals. Before he could speak, I stepped forward, freeing myself from Otavia’s hand. “Bassander, listen. Please. Give me the prisoners, if not the Balmung. We can shuttle them to the Mistral, then. She’s faster anyway. I can find them. The Cielcin. I know I can.”

  “Give you the prisoners?” he repeated, incredulous. “We have a Cielcin nobile on ice—or have you forgotten? We should never have come out here. We should be holding h
im hostage and waiting for the Pale to attack.”

  “That’s a lovely plan,” I said, unable to suppress a sneer all my own, “but if the colonies are not attacked by its fleet then Tanaran is good as useless, and the others more so. You’d do as well trying to negotiate with Jadd for a peace with the Commonwealth.”

  I could see Bassander’s grip tighten on the sword he held, and old fencing instinct had me take a step back from his desk. “And what,” Bassander asked in a voice small and deadly as spiders, “makes you think the Extras on Vorgossos can contact his fleet in particular?”

  “Its,” I said, unable to help myself. “Its fleet.” He’d used the wrong pronoun; the xenobites had no sexes as we understood them. Before he could brush this aside as meaningless, I pressed on. “Because the captain I killed at Emesh named Vorgossos itself. If it has been there, then the Vorgossene must have some knowledge of how to find them. You know this. We have discussed this a hundred times.”

  Unwilling to admit his error, Bassander said, “I cannot give you the prisoners. Look—” He raised a hand. “I understand. You do not wish to be returned to Emesh. To Count Mataro and his daughter.”

  I blinked. “What?” I looked round at the faces of the others around me, at Ilex and Corvo, who looked confused, and at Jinan, who alone understood what the captain meant. “That has nothing to do with this.”

  “The fleet is massing at Coritani. That’s more than two kilolights from Emesh. You have my word I’ll do all in my power to keep you from the Lady Anaïs’s amorous intentions.” The smirk that took over his face was like the first cracks in a pane of glass. I suppressed the urge to smash it.

  Anaïs Mataro. The girl—woman now, she was almost certainly decades my elder—had all the makings of the classic palatine lady: beautiful, clever, ambitious. Her fathers had sheltered me when I washed up on their doorstep from the Borosevo streets, had agreed to keep me from my own family. But it had been a trap, a gilded cage. Like the princess in some antique fairy tale, I was kept for political reasons. For my blood. For distantly through my mother’s line I was cousin to the Throne itself, to the Emperor William XXIII and the House Avent, and a member of the Peerage. My forced marriage to the Lady Anaïs would have brought his out-land house into that most high and ancient constellation, and so elevated the blood of the children his house would sire through me. I would have been little more than an old racehorse, prized for one part of me and set aside to live my life as Count-Consort of that miserable swamp of the planet where I had met with so much misery.

  “Your charity is overwhelming, captain,” I said coldly, “but that wasn’t my primary concern. Like I said, we can change the nature of this war. Peace with one of the Cielcin fleets could open doors to peace with the others. We can understand them. Trade with them. We don’t have to fight.”

  “You would have me forgive the slaughter at Tyras? Bannatia? Idun? Lycia? Here at Rustam?” Bassander growled. “You would have peace with creatures that eat us, Marlowe? That butcher children as you might a pig? Holy Mother Earth! We hardly butcher animals at all anymore. We’re not dealing with people, Hadrian. They’re monsters.”

  I smiled a smile to scratch the glass of that smirking face. “And how many times has that been said across human history? About how many peoples?” In my mind I beheld the long roll of time; the oppressors’ wrong. At once I recalled the pit-slave I had seen that day in the Meidua coliseum, his face smashed by the gladiator’s boot until all semblance of humanity was crushed out of it. Homo hominis lupus. How many men had died thus? How many genocides had our ancestors committed? How many cities burned? Gods defaced?

  Xenophobia.

  That was what they called it.

  Fear of the other.

  It’s the wrong word.

  That ancient impulse to slam the gates against the other has no foundation in fear, nor was there terror in Bassander’s black eyes. Only cleansing fire and the reflection of fires yet to come. Fires I would light myself. Would have to light.

  “They are not people!” Bassander growled.

  “They’re as good as!” I said.

  How little I knew.

  It is strange, is it not, that there are always people such as I? Men who believe the stranger is always more trustworthy than their neighbor? When we were young we looked to the stars with hope, praying that what gods or kings there were in the unpastured Dark were greater than Man, and so moral and righteous beyond imagination. We imagined they might descend from heaven and bless us with their gifts, and that it was only human nature that corrupted, for evil required the black hearts of men to create it. In my flagellatory arrogance I could not conceive of evils other than our own—darker and stranger—nor could we conceive that what was evil to us was natural to others. Incidental. But Satan sprang not from Adam, and it was from the blood of Kingu that Marduk made the first men—and not the other way round. Evil is older than we, other than we—or is greater than, extending back and forward across all of conscious Time. Reader, there are other devils than Man. And by our evolved reason we may be sure of understanding human devils only.

  In my youth, I believed that language might bridge the gap between our species and any other; that human reason and Truth—the Logos of Aristotle, of the Museum Catholics and the vanished Sufi—were principles greater than our human biology, and so held by all life. But now I know. And know this: every thought had by every philosopher and scholiast, every scientist and priest, is framed by the human mind.

  Do not mistake me. I do not dismiss facts. But that two and two are four requires first that a mind has conceptualized two as two and four as four, and understands addition. Of this, there is no guarantee. The laws of nature do not bend, but—like the image that appears as a rabbit to one man and a duck to another—might be differently construed by one species than it is by another. Our logic, our reason, and most especially our morality—grounded as it is in the Uncreated Gods of old—have little in common with those creatures evolved on other worlds than Earth. So I might reconcile and understand, respect, admire, and love any man, be they Jaddian or Tavrosi, swart or pale, man or woman or androgyn. But the inhuman? No. They are outside our comprehension, our trust and faith. And so Bassander’s zeal was justified.

  I did not know this yet, to my shame. And I would suffer for it, and others would suffer for it. And worlds and peoples burn.

  “They are people!” I repeated, more strongly. “They speak, they reason. They know honor. You can’t just deny them their . . .”

  “Their what?” Bassander interrupted. “Their humanity? They’re not human.”

  Reader, I have seen things you cannot imagine. Things the Cielcin have done. Children—human and Cielcin alike—plated and served at table. I have seen slaves mutilated for the sake of art, partners maimed because it is a mark of status that one be made dependent on another, and the Black Feast to mark the coronation of their dark lord. The banality of that which we might consider monstrous writ casually as a night at the opera. Not because they are evil—though that is also true. But because they are not us.

  Desperate and ignorant, I turned from Bassander to Otavia. To Ilex and Greenlaw.

  To Jinan.

  “We’ve come too far,” I said, crossing to take Jinan’s hand. “You said you had to wait to make a decision, captain. It’s time.”

  “This is not a democracy!” Bassander said, though in a sense it was. Otavia served by contract, and like all foederati might break faith and run. Jinan served her own loyalties, to her satrap and prince. We were held together only by mutual purpose, by mutual respect. If we were to break with one another, I needed to break on the side of the mission. My mission. Promises I had made in the dark of the Chantry bastille floated back to me, rising like a chorus in my ears.

  “I promised I would take them home,” I said, looking Jinan in the face, forgetting Bassander. My fingers tightened about hers, willin
g her to see. To understand. Her lips pressed together, the flesh about them gone pale, her eyes flickering from my face and back again. “We can change this war, Jinan. We’re close. March Station, then Vorgossos. Then we’ll find the Cielcin.”

  If I had been like to other monsters and beheld the naked curves of the future, I might have turned away, for here was the crossroads. Down Bassander’s path was the long holocaust. The crusade. The war. Down Bassander’s path was battle and battle after battle. And death by fire and sword. For how many centuries would we have fought? On how many worlds? How many cinders? How many billion lives ended? And to what end? Whose bodies would lie upon the bonfire at the ashen end of time? War is chaos, and between our people and the Cielcin—though I knew it not, then—there could be no peace. A single tumulus lay at the end of Bassander’s path, though whether it marked our end or theirs I cannot say.

  I never learned.

  What lay down my path, I now know: precisely that cleansing fire I felt in Bassander’s eyes. There was battle, and battle after battle. And fire. And sword. But there are strange places on my road, Reader, and my turning toward them lay in Jinan’s hand as she pulled hers from mine. She left me no choice, though I had already decided in my blindness. Horror and horror. Those were my only routes, though I groped unaware toward them. Knowing the future, would I have chosen at all? Or turned myself to stone as Perseus might have done to spare himself the effort?

  And then she spoke, words descending like the cathars’ White Sword to strike me down. “We go to Coritani,” Jinan said, shutting her eyes. Dark eyes. Black like Bassander’s. I forgot to breathe a moment, and for just as long it seemed my blood had stopped in my veins.

  But it was done. Said. And there was no force of nature that could return the instants past. Not for want of trying. “No.” I tried to take her hand, to seize it. “Jinan, no. Listen.” She batted me aside in blind reflex, caught my wrist.