Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “We’re going to need it.”

  A muscle rippled in Valka’s pointed jaw, transmuted to steel there.

  “Lord Marlowe!” It was Brux, the deck officer I’d spoken to before ascending to the cubiculum. His easy voice had found an edge of cold fire. “I don’t know what’s going on, but you need to lay down your arms, son.”

  Not poking my head out from behind the forklift, I called back, “I can’t do that.”

  “Captain’ll be here in a minute, lordship. Both of them. Put down your arms!”

  “Hanas said the same thing!” I returned, catching Pallino’s eye across the way. The old man cocked his head once, recalling so many Colosso melees, dodging amongst the pillars of the killing floor. “He’s asleep in the hall just now.”

  Vwaa! Vwaa!

  With a stay here gesture to Switch, I burst out and to the right, drawing a barrage of stunner fire. I couldn’t see Brux—decided he was up in the bay’s panopticon overlooking the action. My shield ate a full five of those stunner rounds, and I returned just as many. Must have dropped three of Brux’s men. Glancing back, I saw Pallino break for the shuttle, pushing Doctor Okoyo ahead of him, their heads low. Elara half followed with Siran, Crim, and our Norman tag-along, the four of them strung out between the storage crates. It was a start.

  I dove behind one of huge support pylons that held the Sparrowhawk lighters in place above us, firing wildly at Brux and his men. Valka, Switch, and the Cielcin were still pinned down behind the forklift, and with my momentary distraction’s usefulness played out, the others were stuck. We should have all worn shields, conspicuous as that would have been. It did no good now.

  Vwaa! Vwaa!

  The rest of the hold was acclimating to the chaos, and more and more legionnaires in their black fatigues hurried from where they’d been at work loading the other shuttles. I poked my head out around the pillar. At least they weren’t shielded, either. That was something. There were too many of them. They would outmaneuver us, flank the others where they hid and stun them down, unless . . . unless . . . I looked round, casting my attentions about the crowded hangar, at the stacked crates, the lifting equipment, the stowed gear and half-packed shuttle craft. At the Sparrowhawks neatly stowed overhead like so many sleeping bats.

  Ignoring the alarms, I scrambled round the pylon to where a red-painted ladder ascended to the grillwork catwalk that serviced the attack lighters. The pylon offered some small protection from Brux and his men and hid me from their eyes and the blue glow of their stunners. Holstering my own weapon, I climbed.

  “I’m not sure you know what you’re doing, Marlowe,” Brux said in his kindly plebeian drawl, “and I’m sure you think it’s right. But you best come out now.”

  I didn’t answer. Any second now one or two of the legionnaires would round the base of the pylon and figure out where I’d gone. The gangway rattle gave me away instead, but there was nothing for it. Stunner bolts spun about me, and I surprised a flight tech as she hurried out of a service room to my right. She staggered back as I barreled past her, and I felled her with a stunner bolt and a curse as I flew by.

  “He’s on the gangways,” I heard a trooper call.

  “Come down, Hadrian,” Brux said coolly. “You’re palatine, so they won’t have you hanged or nothing. You’re only hurting your friends with this.”

  That gave me pause, and I slowed my advance for half a step. It was true enough. I wouldn’t be hanged—the Indexed punishment for treason on the part of an Imperial palatine in Legionary service was decapitation on the White Sword, following the shattering of both hands. Such are the privileges of the nobility. But he was not wrong about the others. Valka might escape unscathed—she was a Tavrosi national, and therefore a member of their mad government. The others would hang. The others would at least hang. Provided I didn’t do something terribly clever.

  Or stupid.

  The Balmung housed a dozen Sparrowhawks, each massing thrice the size of the standard groundcar, each perhaps eight meters end to end, each secured by a set of electromagnetic grapnels that could be deactivated once the ships had repulsors active and were under thrust—or when someone cut the power.

  Which is precisely what someone did.

  Lacking Valka’s faculty with machines, I drew Olorin’s sword and slashed the power conduits for the first lighter cleanly in two. The fiber optics and the fuel lines parted with ease—and the support pillar, too. There was almost no sound as the electromagnets fell dead, no cracking as of timbers in the shipyards of old, no clangor of metal. The lighter dropped like an anchor in the Balmung’s heavy gravity and fell like the hand of God. I tried not to think about the men on the ground as the machine fell, banging into the catwalk on its way down. Its huge dart shape smashed atop a stack of crates, alumglass cracked, and a sound went up like the roll of awful thunder. And men screamed.

  “Bring him down!” I heard Brux call, voice amplified by the public address system now. I hurried to the next lighter berth, sidling now to watch as Crim and Siran moved toward the shuttle. Valka had pushed Tanaran on, and the two had found cover just as the soldiers on the ground opened fire again.

  No more words from Brux on the comms. No more placating or reasoning. No gentle attempts at peace. The line was drawn—as lines are always drawn—in that shade of red which no careful scribe may wipe away. Thus I dropped a second lighter on the floor below. I did not slash the next in line, nor the one after that. I aimed to break up a cluster of Brux’s men below, and break them I did. They scattered as I shouted a warning, and a breath of relief escaped me when the shouts this time were of fury and not of pain. As I turned from my work, my eyes scanned the opaque windows of the deck office panopticon, an armored observation blister high in the far wall. I fancied—as it were—that I beheld the Imperial eye, unveiled, and that it beheld me with all the scorn of the funeral masks that hung about the entrance to the Dome of Bright Carvings. It saw me. And it knew me. And it loved me not. So observed, I deactivated the highmatter sword and slipped the hilt back into the pocket of my long coat.

  “Hadrian!”

  The voice slashed across my impression of the eye, buried by and yet somehow louder than the constant bleating of the alarm.

  Rarely does the universe match my capacity for drama.

  Rarely is not never.

  Bassander Lin stood alone on the catwalk behind me, blocking my way back to the pylon. Where he had come from I wasn’t sure—whether from the other end of the bay while I was out on the finger of metal beside the smaller ship, or else from one of the side hatches opening onto the upper hall. But there he was, glittering in his officer’s blacks with their silver rank insignia. He took a step forward, and from the shimmer about him I detected the faint curtain of a shield.

  “Captain.” I holstered my phase disruptor. The stunner was useless with his shield up.

  “I should have known you’d do this.”

  Below, I watched Valka help a limping Tanaran dart from cover to cover. Switch was nowhere to be seen. I spread my hands. “And yet here we are.” I put my hands into my coat pockets, fingers closing about the hilt of the knight’s sword, momentarily deaf to the shouting from below. “You’re in my way.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Lin said, taking a step forward. “You’re done, Hadrian. The only place you’re going is before the admiralty.”

  There was no one on the walk behind me. I might have turned and run, made a break for one of the other ladders. Not before Bassander could catch me. Nor could I throw myself over the rail: the fall was too far in the Balmung’s higher-gee environment. This was not Rustam, not The Painted Man’s palanquin of an office.

  Bassander took another step forward, then another.

  I drew Olorin’s sword, held the hilt forward with the emitter end up. “Get out of my way.”

  That gave the captain pause. He raised a hand an
d said, “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because someone has to.”

  “You killed three of my men,” Lin said, and pointed down to where the first Sparrowhawk had surprised the soldiers. In the red flashing of the alarms, Lin’s eyes gleamed with a wild light hinting—not for the first time—that here was a man who had seen things beyond retelling and done them, too.

  He didn’t wait for an explanation. My actions were explanation enough. He lunged, and as he did so he snapped Admiral Whent’s sword loose from his belt and thrust it out even as the blade coalesced, the exotic matter rippling pale and bloodless in the bloody light. I leaped back, my own blade springing forth like a shard of lunar crystal to snap his lunge aside. There we stood a moment, the line of fire drawn again between us, eye to eye, swords like shards of ice glowing with a light of their own. Bassander recovered forward, and I swept my sword around my head and down through a rolling cut that should have cleaved him from collarbone to hip.

  It felt strange to meet resistance with that highmatter sword. The blade would cut almost anything: stone, metal, wood, and flesh. It parted those power couplings easily enough, and would part me as if I were a piece of the air. It had never known resistance, much less a weapon like itself—not since it came into my hands, at any rate. Bassander slashed at my face, and blocking it I stepped inside, moving smoothly to heel-stomp the arch of his foot, unbalancing him as I pushed past. He snarled, chopped down as I moved so that his blade sliced clean through the rail at the edge of the catwalk. Whirling, I managed to recover my guard in time to block an overhanded swing.

  Bassander was an Imperial officer, and fought like one. Broad movement. Power in precise application, lacking in the finesse of the palatine tradition. He was trained, that couldn’t be denied, but he lacked subtlety—nor did he need it. His teeth flashed as he snarled, forcing me back a step. His hair—loosed from its smooth order—fell rough across his face. I could hear shouting from below, knew there wasn’t much time.

  The fluid metal of the blades rippled as I took a parry, lunged into the riposte. Bassander beat the thrust down and the point of my sword carved a notch in the metal floor. I leaped back, catlike, glad that none of the legionnaires had found their way up to our level. I gave ground all the same, fading back toward the pylon and the ladder I’d ascended. Bassander came on like the tide, each step a blow, each blow a step. Whent’s sword was cut differently than my own: broader, flatter, squarer, without the finger-loop by the rain guard or the quillions of gleaming crystal. It seemed unsafe, without the hand protection mine afforded, and rough without the delicate point control. But it was heavy, not usually a quality that mattered in a blade that cut without resistance.

  It mattered then.

  Bassander battered my weapon aside, and before I could recover smashed me across the face with a haymaker that sent me reeling. He’d overbalanced in his attack, and so I had enough time to spin away, staggering as I rubbed my jaw with my free hand. I’d not lost a tooth—which was fortunate, as I was not like to grow new ones for another thirty years or so. He followed on fast, swinging broad so that Whent’s sword cleaved the wall at my right hand, carving a cold bite in the titanium. Wrapping my finger though the loop, I took the weapon in both hands and so blocked his remise even as he redoubled his attack, thrusting at my eyes. I thrust upward, using the highmatter crossguard to push his weapon up and away. Then I slammed my sword down. The flowing metal hissed as the blades clashed, and spat strange vapors into the noisome air. Bassander got his head out of the way just in time, but I nicked his shoulder and he winced, recovering back.

  “Blood,” I said, meaning I’d scored against him. The captain touched one hand to his shoulder where I’d cut through epaulet and tunic and shirt. It came away red. He said nothing, only snarled and threw himself at me. I leaped back as he swung—blade slicing the floor. Sharp as they were, I was not about to risk any sort of infighting with Bassander, not again. He chased me backward along the catwalk while stunner blasts fell around us, sparking in the air and off our shields.

  He rolled his shoulder, air hissing past his teeth. Memory of another duel welled up in me, of Gilliam dead on the white grass field in Borosevo. I had hated him, hated that he was a priest of the Chantry, hated him for trying to get Valka killed, hated that he was an intus, a genetic defect. A cacogen misborn. Though I regret his death now—I did not regret it then, though it haunted me. And all that surety, all that disgust and contempt ran through me and from me and left me in the grip of one clear and stunning thought.

  I did not hate Bassander. I did not want him dead.

  “I should have liked to work together, Lin,” I said, shouting past the alarm.

  “You had your chance!” he called back, and leaned into a heavy slash that might have cut me cleanly in half even if the blade were common steel. He overextended, and I was accorded a clean opportunity to stab the Mandari in the back.

  I didn’t take it.

  As with Gilliam—so long ago—I hesitated in the final moment. With the priest, it was my own cowardice that slowed me. Now it was something else. Something deeper, truer. Respect? Pity? Compassion? I did not want to kill the man. But the swords were out, the decision made. The time for speech was done. I’d made my choice when I dropped that Sparrowhawk on the deck workers, when I’d opened Tanaran’s crèche. I’d made my choice in Otavia’s ready room.

  And on Emesh, years before.

  Bassander charged forward, the blood soaking his uniform shoulder. I stood my ground as Sir Felix taught me, years and years ago, and turned each blow aside. Weakness crept into Bassander’s arms. I could sense it. A slackening of the fingers, perhaps it was, for his blade sagged in his hand. I pushed my advantage, threw a cut at his head, his wounded shoulder. The captain raised his sword to block, caught himself on the rail as he stumbled. He swung low, and I trapped his blade with mine. There we stood. Locked. Strength for strength, the long bones of my right arm seeming to wheeze and spit within me. But I had the leverage, the control. Slow as geologic time I pressed his arm down, kept his blade prisoned there. Just a little further and I’d drive my elbow into his chin. It was all so plain.

  Bassander slammed his forehead into my nose.

  For a moment, I forgot to think, forgot to breathe. The move was so utterly surprising that I fell fully to the ground before I could so much as scrape a thought together. I hit the floor square on my back, the wind knocked out of me. Hot blood dribbled down my face from my shattered nose, and the whole region felt warm and soft. The pain came after, distal—as though it were some other Hadrian who ached.

  Good, Crispin, Sir Felix’s voice cracked, whip-like, in the vaulted space of the training hall of my youth. Again! I had been knocked down before. At Colosso in Borosevo, on missions with the Red Company, on black nights starving in the streets. And by Crispin, my brother, time and time again. Almost I fancied it was my brother who loomed over me. The black uniform of the Legions was so like unto the uniform of my house: the belted tunic glittering with badges of rank, the piped trousers tucked into high boots.

  “This isn’t one of your stories,” Bassander said, stopping just out of the reach of my sword. He looked down at me, and with steady fingers combed back his ridiculous fall of hair. “You’re not some sort of hero. The Empire’s fate is not in your hands. This is not a play. Put up your sword. It’s done.”

  To my inward self it seemed I lay again on the floor of the Colosso, as I had many times in life, beaten by some gladiator or gladiatrix of the Count’s. Beaten I knelt at their feet while they pressed the point of their sword into the hollow of my shoulder, awaiting the judgment of the crowd and of Lord Balian Mataro. Ever had I fought well, and so their judgment was good. Thumbs back. Life spared.

  No crowd on that lonely catwalk. No cheering, no jeers. Only the howl of the alarm and shouting from the bay below. I made no response, for even then I fought for a way free, a
way to win. The vision faded, and the ghostly coliseum in my mind’s eye gave way to my grim reality. There was only Bassander, sword ready to fall. No gladiator. No crowd.

  We were alone.

  We were not alone.

  The shot caught Bassander full in the face, and the azure light of stunner fire twisted the energies of his shield and shocked him back a step. He was not harmed, but he was momentarily distracted. It was enough. Calling to mind Crispin and the Emeshi gladiators both, I rose, and it was Hadrian the boy who rose with me, and Had the myrmidon, and together with the man I was we three slashed Bassander’s sword hand from his wrist and plunged forward, cracking his own nose with the heel of our hand. Two times we struck him, then a third, and he staggered back nerveless and crumpled like a wall of stones whose mortar had long gone to dust.

  I fell atop him, one knee on his chest, one hand at his throat. There was nothing to say, no argument to make. We had argued with a language other and more honest than words. “Yield.” For a moment it seemed he might argue, and my fingers tightened and almost I heard my father speak in my own voice: growling, imperious. “I said yield.”

  The good captain was bleeding badly then from wrist and shoulder, and weak he seemed and shrunken, his nose cracked even as was mine, his almond eyes starting to swell. He moaned, but said no word, nor offered any objection. “The medica will find you,” I said, releasing him. “They should be able to reattach the hand.” I tried to stand, but my legs gave out.

  Strong arms caught me, and a familiar voice said, “Careful, man.” His hand closed over mine and depowered the highmatter sword, lest I maim us both. Switch pulled me to my feet and steadied me. It had been him with the stunner, I realized. The one who’d shot Bassander in the face.