Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Otavia Corvo adjusted her tight jacket, waved a hand in such a way as summoned a holograph in the air above her central console. “The station? Here.” She stepped a little to the side, revealing an enhanced, false-color image of the space out in front of the ship. Nestled against the backdrop of the accretion disk—orbiting just above the plane of the ecliptic—was a ring. From the holograph, I had no way of estimating whether the ring was a mile across or ten thousand, and the massive, nameless blue sun offered no frame of reference my human eye could grasp. Even enhanced, the image was faint, brought to light by only the faintest emission of infrared and ultraviolet.

  I looked through the holograph, out the window. There was nothing ahead. Only darkness. “You’ve communicated with them?” I asked. “Successfully?”

  She nodded. “We’re under pilot control. They’re bringing us in remotely.”

  “With a daimon?” I asked, unable to help myself. Behind me, Valka scoffed.

  Corvo shrugged. “Could be. Don’t know.”

  “How long until we dock?”

  “Nine hours,” the captain replied. “Long enough for you to sleep. You look like you need it after the freeze.” I acknowledged this with a slow nod, returned my attentions to the holograph. Something of my thoughts must have shown in me, for Otavia said, “It’s an Extra ring city.”

  Valka approached, Tanaran close behind. In her bright-edged voice, she said, “I’ve never seen one. How large is it?”

  The Norman woman didn’t have to check a readout before answering. “Some six hundred miles.”

  “The diameter?”

  “Yes.”

  Valka made an appreciative sound. “They must have been building it for centuries.”

  And what centuries those must have been! I could scarce imagine them, clambering in the Dark, hoping the Empire or some Mandari prospector would not find them at their work. How many such stations were there between the cracks in the Imperium? How many cities? How many million souls? How tempting it was to imagine our Empire lay thick upon the stars. I thought again of the spider’s web, our Empire like gilded filaments veining the settled universe. Tenuous, delicate.

  The ancients used to people the edges of their maps with monsters. Leviathans and sea serpents. The world was strange. Grew stranger as you traveled farther and farther from the walled cities of civilization. Yet maps had other edges. Inner edges. Cracks.

  Here there was one.

  Here there be dragons.

  CHAPTER 19

  THE GATES OF BABYLON

  THE MIST—WHEN IT THREADED its way from between the teeth of the hangar gate—looked like smoke from the mouth of a dragon, and I raised the collar of my long coat. I felt Switch stir beside me, retreating with Siran half a step. I kept my hands in my pockets, one of them clenched around the hilt of my sword. Cautious, I took a step toward the opening portal, mindful of the bluish light ahead and of the docking umbilical behind us that led back to the Mistral.

  I’d no notion what to expect, and not knowing conjured monsters. I remembered my mother’s operas, and expected some nightmare to come crawling out of the fog. Some rough beast, once human perhaps, with metal legs and dripping hoses. Some shambling nightmare like the SOMs we’d fought on Rustam weeks and years before. The blue light changed to pink, and golden points flared through the fading fog, and faintly could be heard the sound of voices.

  And beyond them—the crying of birds.

  The fog vanished, turned—I think—to dew upon the metal walls where the air of the docking bay brushed the air of the city, the world, beyond. Crim moved past me, and I followed, without track or plan, my own words echoing after me.

  “Otavia,” I had said, “if this doesn’t work. If we don’t find anything. You have to leave me here.”

  The thought had come to me in the hours of waiting, while I’d watched our approach to the ring station. March Station had emerged from the darkness, twisting like the ouroboros from its bed of chaos. I could not go home. If I did not return victorious, not even Raine could save me.

  I could not go home.

  “What?” She’d looked at me like I was very mad or very stupid. “Why would I do that?”

  “It’s not you they’ll come after. Bassander. The Empire.” I’d watched as running lights like false stars studded the surface of the great ring. “Any of my people who want to sign on with you can do so. They’re not sworn to me. But I can’t leave here except by Vorgossos.” I had money, credit left me from the Pharos affair, enough to book passage . . . somewhere. Suddenly the absurdity of what it was I was doing impacted me. The madness of it. Here I was, past the end of the world. Chasing a place out of legends on the word of a creature out of nightmare. I’d become like the mad pirates of Old Earth, drunk on stories of the golden city and the waters of life. Like those pirates, I’d lost much of what I had in pursuit of my goal—my title, my position with the Mataros, my place with the Legions . . . Jinan. Like those pirates, I knew what I sought was real, even when the world did not. I wonder if old De Leon still believed—dying of poison in his promised land—that there was yet some power to save him. I like to think he did.

  “I couldn’t make your people leave you if I held a gun to them,” Otavia said, “but I’m not going to leave you, either.” I’d tried to argue, and she said again, “It’s my worlds that are burning in this war. My people.”

  Burning.

  We stepped out into pouring rain. Rain. On a station.

  I froze.

  Above and around us rose the obscure figures of gray buildings, some short, some rising through the clouds above, looming like the pillars of some drear and dreadful hall. I cannot say how far above that ceiling waited, but I felt it. Felt it the way a man feels the thunderhead. The roof of the world. Like Damocles’ sword aimed just above the shoulder blades. I heard Switch swear, and forced myself to look up into the oily rain. As in Rustam, the buildings here were dominated by holograph advertisements, text shining out in Galstani and Nipponese, in Lothrian Cyrillic and the right-to-left scrawl of Jaddian script. The image of a vate in the saffron robes of a Theravada bhikkhu glimmered in the rain, and I heard a mighty droning carried on the wind. His image faded, replaced by that of a woman with a white-painted face. She smiled as words appeared in Nipponese beside her and she too faded into the rain.

  Almost I failed to notice the people beneath the crush of that city and the blue-white light glowing through cloud from the roof above. They emerged from the ultramarine twilight, crouched beneath umbrellas, huddling in slick coats, untroubled by the holograph advertisements. In among them, a man as tall as a Cielcin lumbered, leaking steam from some huge device on his arm. Only when it moved did I realize the thing was his arm and shrink away. We were among the crowd, then, and though none paid us any mind, I could see the indicator lights glowing beneath their skin; the white porcelain of hardware contacts gleaming behind ears and on hands; and false hands of ceramic or jointed steel or polycarbon. One woman wore an armored suit with a collar up to her jaw line, and only as she passed did I see the exposed fibers—black and blue—that stood beneath in place of sinew and cord.

  Even I—who am not a religious man—prayed.

  Holy Mother Earth, keep us and protect us in Darkness and in the land of strangers, I thought. From the grip of the machines, O Mother deliver us.

  Where was Switch? Where were Crim and Siran?

  From the perversion of the flesh, O Mother deliver us.

  There was no face, but six glowing apertures like camera eyes in a sheet of black glass. A helmet? And there was another whose jaw was of gleaming steel, his teeth chrome.

  From the destruction of the flesh, O Mother deliver us.

  That was a glass cable shining with light strung between two girls, their eyes like empty windows. One bumped into me, but said nothing and moved on.

  From the replacemen
t of the flesh, O Mother deliver us.

  From the dominion of steel, O Mother deliver us.

  From the tyrant in silicon, O Mother deliver us.

  From the ghost in the machine, O Mother deliver us.

  I thought of Valka, of the machine that crouched at the base of her skull, reminded myself that here were no monsters. These were only men. Mutilated and transformed by their machines, yes, but men underneath. This was a city, whatever else it may be. This was only rain. Yet I could not quiet my thundering heart, only seized it and forced it down. I could not make myself believe the shapes around me were men, but steadily I acclimated to the horror, and my pulse slowed.

  No one hindered us or barred our way, nor plied us with questions. No port authority had come to us, no guard received us. That we were marked known by things alien I’d no doubt. Growing up as I had in Devil’s Rest beneath the watchful eye of uncounted cameras, I knew the sensation on the back of my neck for what it was. A lumbering trolley made its way up the dark street, throwing out plumes of white vapor even as a crowd of men and women in clear plastic raincoats tried to cross the street.

  Bereft of any clear goal, I permitted myself to be led, to follow Crim into the city. The Norman-Jaddian looked out of place in his garish red and white kaftan, so bright against all that gray. “You walk like you’ve been here before,” I said.

  “That, lordship,” he said with a pointed smile, “is because I am a liar.” He tapped his nose, leaned toward me conspiratorially. “But I’ve been among the Extras before. We are not so afraid of them as you.”

  I wanted to deny this, but I caught the glowing red eyes of a young man across the street and only grunted. Pivoting topics, I said, “You probably shouldn’t call me that here.”

  “Lordship?” Crim repeated, shaking his head. “Wouldn’t do much good. You have ‘lordship’ stamped all over that face of yours.”

  “True at that!” Switch agreed, unhelpful.

  “No no, don’t worry!” Crim said, clapping me on the shoulder. “No one here will care. It’s freedom they love, Marlowe. Not bloodshed. Free people, free markets. Not so different from we Normans.”

  “Not so different?” I repeated, looking at a woman with glittering wires woven beneath her skin.

  Crim watched the woman go by with appreciation. “Chantry has it wrong. Human blood doesn’t thin so easy as that. Their machines just make it easier for them to be what they want to be.”

  I let this go without argument. It was neither the time nor the place. Somewhere about, the droning sound returned, and I guessed the holograph of the bhikkhu had returned with it, advertising who knew what. Points of light like stars shone through the roof of cloud, and between clouds I saw the faint lamps which lighted the azure gloom of that city and portholes opening onto rooms in the ceiling above. How many people lived here? How many thousands? The Mistral’s sensors had said the ring stretched six hundred miles across, fifty from edge to edge, and five high. Many years and decades later—when I would stand as guest to Aldia, Prince of Jadd—he showed me the Celestial Gardens in the Alcaz du Badr. There, sealed in floating crystal spheres three meters across were little worlds. Perfect microclimates like a child’s snow globe, replete with bonsai and living flowers and tiny animals designed and bred by the bonecutters and chiromancers of that strange kingdom. Perfect little worlds. I was reminded of the ant farms kept by peasant children and the bottled ships built by enthusiasts given the benefit of too much time.

  March Station was that on an extraordinary scale.

  “Still,” I said, “I’m not sure trumpeting my name is the best approach.”

  “On the contrary,” my companion said, “you palatines are always running out to backspace seeking some bonecutter or gene tonic.”

  The four of us stopped in the shadow of one building, out of the rain. Switch and Siran were quiet, eyeing the crowd with that same religious suspicion I felt. Crim’s words had shaken a memory loose in me, words I’d heard in a cable-car office above the streets in Arslan. “On Rustam, The Painted Man said that palatines would go there seeking . . .” I almost laughed, thinking again of ancient pirates and the waters of life, “life extension. The sorts of therapies the Chantry’s forbidden.” There were techniques available to those willing to flout the Chantry. Cloning. Machine implants. Certain retroviruses. Things that went beyond the precision genetic tailoring we palatines receive. Things that could bring a man before the Inquisition and beneath the White Sword. I felt myself reconsidering Crim’s suggestion about using my name, but suggested, “I could be in the market.”

  I felt Switch’s face darken without having to see it. My friend and lictor knew enough of the decadence of Sollan palatines to fill a lifetime. As a child, he’d been sold into indenture on a Mandari brothel ship, forced to work as a catamite, to service those men and women who came to treat with his masters. He took a dim view of the upper class, knowing well what the worst of them were like. Those casual dealers in other men’s sorrows, spending blood or spilling it like wine. Though it is a mistake to imagine all aristocrats are thus, I could appreciate his disgust.

  “We could just say trying to sell the Pale,” Siran said, meaning Tanaran. “These Extras are slavers, yeah?”

  “But there’d be buyers here,” I said, looking round with a grim expression at the gloomy city. “No good.”

  “We could ask,” Switch said, crossing his arms so that his hand rested just beneath the handle of his nerve disruptor where it hung inside his jacket just below the shoulder. “Someone’s got to be sailing for Vorgossos.”

  Siran bobbed his head. “Could do.”

  Teeth clenched, I shook my head. “I don’t think it’ll be that easy. The place wouldn’t be a myth if it were.” I tried not to think about what The Painted Man had said, that Vorgossos was only ever found by those people its ruler wanted to find it. The words had the flavor of a cultist’s invocation. Of a prayer. A promise. I shook my coat to clear away what drops remained on its hydrophobic surface, feeling suddenly cold.

  “We have to start somewhere,” Crim said.

  CHAPTER 20

  THE BONECUTTER

  IT DIDN’T LOOK LIKE a clinic, leastways not any more than the flophouse had where I’d first awakened on Emesh so long ago. The words Cento’s Biotechnic spat in neon frames above the corner door, the letters red in Galstani and blue-green in Lothrian. There were no windows, as there had been no windows on most of the street-level buildings in that dark city, and piping and heavy ductwork crowded about the entryway and along its walls. The place hadn’t been hard to find, was only the fourth or fifth such establishment we’d entered that day. The bonecutters were everywhere, peddling tonics to change the color of skin or eyes or hair, to enhance hearing and sight beyond the normal range, or to implant terminals or praxis stranger still. One peddler advertised the regrowth of fingers—or the growth of additional ones. Still more focused only on genitals, complete with dancing holograph displays of the improvements on offer, and advertised their ability to change one’s sex completely, rebuilding the body from new cells.

  The whole show disgusted me, filled me with the same contempt I’d felt for Crispin and for my own mother with the way they used their concubines. Indeed, I’d felt a similar distaste for Valka, who for all her talk of equality and of the dignity of life had used the body servants on offer at Borosevo Castle. The commodification of the flesh. To reduce to transaction and whim one’s own life and body seemed to me a violation sure as any slaver’s whip. And worse, for it was one’s own hand that held the lash. You are a body, all of it screamed. Nothing more, and it is not enough.

  From the perversion of the flesh, O Mother deliver us.

  But we are not bodies. We have bodies. And though who we are is rooted in that animal matter we rise higher, growing like a tree toward heaven. I can think of no greater evil than the insistence that we are only meat. How ma
ny lives have been demeaned—destroyed—by that insistence? How many millions? That city, what it offered, suggested that we were nothing more, and so the men who traded in flesh—offering surgery, therapy, and replacement—offered people a vision of their best selves. As if identity were fluid. As if who we are is only granted to us by others and is by others taken away. As if no part of us is our own. I saw signs selling memories and offering dreams, selling experiences and emotions wholesale. Those buying such services imagined they improved themselves, when in truth it was their selves they destroyed. Their souls. Traded piece by piece for pieces unrecognizable, until, like the ship of the legendary Theseus—who replaced his vessel part by part until all of it was changed—they had replaced all of themselves, and who they were born was dead.

  As a man who suffers a stroke is forever changed by the event, so too the addition of arms or of a new kind of sight or the complete transfiguration of the body was not the actualization or purification of self, but a kind of death. Not the caterpillar becoming the butterfly, but the spider devoured by her own children. No mind could undergo such changes to the body and remain itself, any more than an uprooted tree can make its home in hostile soil.

  Yet it was to one of these flesh peddlers, these surgeons of the human soul, that I had turned. For the road to Vorgossos, it seemed, was paved with such depredations. I combed back my wet hair, shook the spare droplets from my clothes. Crim and the others filed in behind me.

  The room shone a polished white, starkly lit in contrast to the urban gloom without, the age of the place belied only by the deep scrapes and scuff marks etched into walls and floor. For all that, a pleasant music softly played, and under it the sound of water falling, though there was no fountain to be seen. It had every appearance of a grubby place trying to be pleasant, and so disarmed my trepidations after the casual inhumanity of the street.