Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Maybe it was my tone—as calming as I could make it. Or maybe it was the hand on its shoulder. That fleeting human contact in this world of wire and steel. Jari opened its eyes, and they were only the eyes of a man. Perhaps his humanity was not so far gone as I’d thought. They were not flat obols as Brevon’s had been, not the glassy spectacles of Marko the nuncius, or Cento’s monocular. They were only human. The red light in the center of Jari’s forehead dimmed, and its fleshly eyes went wide, as if it were the Exalted who saw a monster and not I. “What are you?”

  “What?”

  Jari tried to push itself backward, but it had no limbs to escape on. “What are you?”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, looking round. “What do you mean?”

  The oracle looked at me, struggling to control its breathing. “It’s . . . broken. Behind you.”

  “What’s broken?”

  “Your river!” it said, and the dismembered hands pointed accusing fingers in random directions on the dais beside it. “Your beginning. You have no beginning.”

  I laughed, ran hands back through my hair, cast my gaze up at the ceiling. “Excuse you?”

  “In Earth’s name, girl, get a fucking mop!” I froze, hands stopped halfway between my head and my sides. The way it’d said those words . . . he had imitated in tone and cadence some of the first words I had heard on Emesh. I could almost smell that horrid flophouse by the starport. The old woman. Her ragged voice and the alkaline bite of verrox on her breath. But Jari wasn’t done. In a small voice, barely to be heard, it said, “Tell me a story, would you? One last time.”

  I felt my blood beat against my ears, forgetting myself. My feet advanced on their own, closing the distance between me and the shattered hulk on its platform. “What did you say?” I breathed, knowing full well what it was. Tell me a story, would you? One last time. Cat’s words, whispered in a storm drain beneath Borosevo’s White District, her body consumed by rot. “What did you just say to me?” I mounted the dais again, less concerned suddenly for the terror in Jari’s eyes.

  “You buried her in a canal, just like she wanted. Just like so many others. But you never went back.”

  “Don’t speak of her! Don’t you ever speak of her.” I had never spoken of Cat to anyone. To speak of her was to trouble her memory, and she had suffered enough. “Was it the Quiet that made you this way?”

  Jari looked at me, and for a moment it did not speak. When it did, it was in a voice I have never forgotten, with words that have never left me. “Leopards,” it said. “Leopards, lions, and wolves . . .” I did not understand.

  “What does that mean?”

  “We are not them.” Its eyes did not move, yet I perceived it turned them another way, as though it looked over my shoulder and around some corner only it could see. I felt something cold seize my guts. I was sure then I was not talking to Jari at all, but to some . . . colony. To some thing that had crawled inside the Exalted that wore it like a skin. I should not have touched it, even with my gloved hand. Having forgotten my question, the thing that wore the face of a man said, “Your past is broken. There is a hole in it through which we cannot see. The ship . . . your ship was taken. Wiped clean.” He looked at me the way common men look at a flier crash, the way new soldiers look at a battlefield. At length he said again, “Your past is broken.”

  “And my future?” I asked the question reflexively, not knowing what I meant by it, not understanding any of this strange conversation. It seemed some dream, some mad fiction I’d stumbled into.

  The seer’s eyes moved again without moving—as if the light hitting them had changed.

  The pupils shrank, and the whole great metal construct of him shook and fell backward with an almighty crash. “Light!” it shrieked. Its disconnected limbs flailed. One hand seized the hem of my cape, and I staggered back. Jari kept screaming. Fans whirring in its chest kept air flowing through its throat. “Light! Light! Light!”

  Marko appeared as if from nowhere. I expected him to barrel past me to see to his asset, but the other Exalted seized me above the elbow, kicking Jari’s arm free of my cloak. “What did you say to him?” he demanded, spittle flying past his gold teeth.

  “Nothing!” I said. “I asked him to look at my future. That’s all.”

  “Light! Light! Light!”

  I was speechless. I didn’t know what to say, only stood there in numb confusion, remembering. This must be. Words in an unheard voice echoing out of Calagah. A black ship vast as cities, her surface bristling with the forms of men and gods and angels. How she turned sunwards and plunging down drowned in light.

  I remembered, but did not understand.

  Marko shoved me back the way I had come. “Get out of here! Go!”

  “But . . .”

  Bone-white scalpel blades clicked out from beneath the nuncius’s fingernails. “Leave!”

  I fled. Jari’s words followed me, rebounding off the metalwork.

  “Light! Light! Light!”

  CHAPTER 27

  VALKA

  MY ENCOUNTER WITH THE oracle left me rattled, and I spent much of the next day alone on the Mistral. I found I could access the Enigma’s datasphere and—if I was willing to foot the bill—I could have access to all manner of information. I read what I could on these Deeps, found little more than Marko had told me. On certain worlds, there is a certain animalcule that grows like algae in water. Where it came from none knew, whether it was some bastard child of Red-Handed Evolution or the artifice of some antique intelligence greater than man’s none could say, nor did any know how it was the creatures had found their way to nine disparate worlds. There was no reference to ruins in any of the short documents I could find, nor any help to be had on the datasphere fora.

  I’d said nothing to Switch, not knowing what to say. After Valka had not believed me when I told her about my vision in Calagah, I had said nothing about the experience to anyone. I decided that this, too, would go on the list of things I did not talk about. But for many days after, and many years, I would awake to the image of Jari’s eyes, mad in their bloodless face, and to the haunting words he’d spoken.

  Your past is broken. There is a hole in it through which I cannot see.

  What does one say to that? What did it even mean?

  A knock sounded at my door, and I keyed it open without getting up from my desk.

  “Here you are!” Valka said, entering. “Are you all right? Switch said he hadn’t seen you in days.”

  I shut my journal before Valka could see the charcoal I’d done of the oracle, Jari, and—smiling—turned to face her. I’d had an excuse forming but on seeing her could only manage, “Are you going somewhere?” She’d donned a jacket over her customary vest and sleeveless blouse, and swapped her shipboard slippers for the high boots and jodhpurs she’d so often worn at Calagah. An awful thought struck me and I asked, “You’re not leaving, are you?” My thoughts jumped to the Tavrosi ship we had seen moored from the Mistral’s observatory.

  “What?” The xenologist frowned at me. “No! Corvo’s letting me out on the concourse. I thought I might go look around. ’Tis all manner of strange folk out there—I saw through the window. And one never knows what one might find. Besides!” Valka put her hands on her hips and stood a touch straighter. “I thought I could use an escort. That’s what you big, swaggering Imperial lads are for, is it not?” I think she expected me to rise to the bait, for when I did not immediately punch out with a response, she rocked back on one heel and said, “Are you all right?”

  My attention had drifted, eyes wandered to somewhere over her shoulder. Shaking myself back to myself, I said, “Hmm? Yes, I’m fine. I’ll be all right.” Not my best performance.

  Valka was not convinced. I could see it in the brittle quality of her smile, held on her face long after the feeling that had put it there was gone. “Shall we, then?”


  The concourse was more crowded that day than when Switch and I first ventured out. A piece of me wanted to return to the alleyway where Marko lurked and sold his companion’s visions. I stuck close to Valka, walking slightly behind to better keep an eye on her. The people were nominally unarmed, but Marko’s talons had demonstrated just what unarmed meant to these people. I didn’t trust them. Not with my own life, certainly not with Valka’s.

  “You know there are other Tavrosi aboard?” she asked, pointing up in the air where the road curved in a great arc ahead of us, ascending into the dimness. Following her gaze, I beheld a sleek ship, porcelain-white save where the ceramic was scored black or stippled by micro-impacts. “That ship there’s the Jayavarman, out of New Angkor. I spoke to her captain a couple days back over the net.” Here she tapped her head to indicate the computer enmeshed beneath her skull.

  “Is that where we’re going?” I asked, keeping close.

  She didn’t answer at once. “Mayhaps. I only wanted to see what we were getting into. Corvo wouldn’t let me ashore in March Station, and I’m curious to see what I can of these people before we get where we’re going.” We had to stop a moment to allow a street sweeper to pass us by. The massive vehicle huffed steam into the damp air, holograph plates to either side blue-flashing the words KEEP CLEAR. Once it passed, we proceeded along the road in silence for some time. Privately, I was glad to be going in the opposite direction from the way I’d gone with Switch, climbing the road toward the Tavrosi ship and not toward Jari’s sideshow. Valka spoke again. “Why so laconic? ’Tis not like you. We’ve been out here more than an hour and you’ve not so much as disagreed with me once.”

  This remark stuck to me, and I was a minute shuffling it off. “You . . . want me to disagree with you?”

  Briefly, Valka looked back over her shoulder, a wicked smile on those cruel lips. “No, no! I want you to roll over and surrender, Hadrian—of course I want you to disagree with me! That’s why we’re friends.”

  That wicked smile softened so quickly it was like the cracking of ice in spring. I felt its warmth, said, “Are we?” All these years and I’d never really asked. Why was I afraid of her answer?

  “Friends?” Valka turned away. “Of course we are!” Not knowing what to say to this, I held my silence, which must have vexed Valka, who asked, “What’s up ahead?”

  “I’m not rightly sure. Switch and I went the other way last time,” I said darkly, scowling as a woman moved past, a queue of glowing wires dangling from a socket in the back of her head. I could see hollow space inside that socket, as though her skull was empty behind her face. “I don’t much like it here.”

  The Tavrosi made a small oh sound, before half-turning to say over her shoulder, “Is it the machines?”

  I tried imagining what it must be like to be Nazzareno, or Jari trapped on his dais, unable even to stand on his own. To be anything other than I was. To be inhuman. I felt ill. “Yes.” Anticipating her next comment before she could make it, I added, “And I know you have a neural lace, Valka. You don’t have to mention it. It’s . . . you’re different.”

  “Am I?” she asked, slowing a moment that I might catch up. “How am I different, exactly?”

  I stopped, not sure how to answer, sensing—as I often did—that the waters around the Tavrosi woman were dangerous ones. Echoing Switch, I blurted out, “You’re not an eight-foot metal spider.”

  The doctor turned and looked at me, an unreadable expression in her eyes. Then she laughed, and the music of it drove away a piece of the shadow hanging over me since last I’d walked the concourse. “What?” She hid her mouth behind her hand—the way Nipponese women are wont to do. “Do the Exalted scare you? Did they frighten the Lord Commandant of the Meidua Red Company?”

  She meant to shame me. I was not going to be shamed. Swallowing, I stood a little straighter. “Yes. They do.”

  “They’re more human than Tanaran.”

  “Tanaran I can read,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “These chimeras . . .” I could only shake my head.

  Valka and I lingered a moment beside a ship that seemed to be selling nothing more exotic than clothing. Not looking at me—her attention rather captured by a black silk shirt—she said, “I’d not be so sure you can read Tanaran.”

  “No?” I stepped out of the path to stand beside her, watching her as she studied the fabric with her fingers. “I think we understand each other.”

  “I think you have an understanding,” she corrected, arching her eyebrows for emphasis. “’Tis not the same thing. I spent a long time with Tanaran while you were in fugue. Its facial expressions are unreadable.”

  Pressing my back against the rack of clothes, I looked at her. “Not completely. I can understand a few of them. The way they smile is very obvious.”

  “You’re sure ’tis a smile?” She smiled at me, though there was no amusement in the expression. “As if smiles were all the same.”

  “You think I shouldn’t trust Tanaran?”

  “I think you shouldn’t be afraid of the Exalted.”

  “Afraid is an ugly word.”

  “It’s an ugly thing.”

  “It’s the wrong word,” I said, tugging the collar of my old coat up around my face. “I’m horrified.”

  That stopped our conversation a time, and we walked on in silence. The ground felt always to rise up to meet our feet, and the great chatter and haunt of human voices filled the air of that long bazaar. I tried to imagine the place empty—as perhaps it never was—stripped of all that light and color and the thrum of human activity. Only bare, black metal remained. Rusted grates and fluted ironwork, puddled coolant in dim corners. The drip from unseen pipes.

  “Otavia is right, you know,” Valka said at last. She said Otavia, not Corvo. Somehow I did not think that a good sign. I got the sense she had been screwing herself up to say that since she’d entered my cabin earlier that day.

  “About what?”

  We had stepped off the main concourse and out under a striped awning set up in front of an open hold that sold—to my amazement—a collection of printed books. The smell of them! The smell of pulp and glue! Of paper aging in yellow light, turning from white to that species of gold which is to me more precious than gold itself. I could sense Valka looking at me, and so I replaced a heavy volume of Golden Age Classical English poetry on the shelf where I had found it.

  “About how you need to be thinking past Vorgossos, about what you’re going to do if this doesn’t go the way you think.”

  “Ah.” I turned away, finding it easier to examine the curling letters on the displayed spines than whatever emotions curled in the doctor’s face. “Switch told you about that.”

  Without having to look, I could see the small, sad smile on Valka’s face. “He’s worried about you. I’m worried about you.”

  I let my fingers drop—having been about to pull down a biography of Emperor Winston the Good, thinking it strange to find such a thing in an Extrasolarian bookshop . . . thinking it strange that there was such a thing as an Extrasolarian bookshop. A piece of me hoped I might find a copy of the old book Gibson had given me so long ago, The King With Ten Thousand Eyes. But it did not appear. “She wants me to stay on. Rebuild the Red Company. Figures it’s better if I don’t set up in any one place. Stay ahead of whatever Bassander or Smythe or Hauptmann send after me.”

  “You think they would?” she asked, leaning against the bookshelf beside me. I could just see her eyes from the corner of my own. I didn’t want to look.

  “Send someone after me?” I made the mistake of glancing her way. “Are we talking about the Sollan Empire here? No. Otavia’s not wrong.”

  “Where do you think Bassander and the others are now? You don’t suppose they could have followed us to March Station? They had the coordinates.”

  Crouching, I pretended to examine a row of colorful vo
lumes that turned out to be an encyclopedia of erotic Jaddian poetry. I made a face. “No, no. Bassander’s gone to Coritani, I’d bet my life on it. Regrouped with the 437th.” I knew for a fact that that was what he had done. He’d told me as much before I stormed the Balmung and made off with our star prisoner. Straightening, I turned to look at her, smoothing the fronts of my greatcoat. “Smythe will have recommended no pursuit on the off chance this little gambit of mine succeeds.”

  “And if it does not?” Valka’s eyes hadn’t left my face. “’Tis all you want? A life of violence?”

  Unable to suppress a weak smile, I said, “If you’re asking me to go with you when you leave, you could just ask.”

  That did it. Valka stood straighter—coming off the rack of books—and crossed her arms. “I said nothing of the kind.”

  “Ah, but you were thinking it!” I said chidingly, wagging a finger at her. Lacking the courage to hold her gaze, I pivoted and continued down the aisle of books. The stacks rose high to either side, higher than even my palatine advantage could aid me. I’d seen hovering drones with dangling claw-arms flying among the shelves, retrieving books—I guessed—for customers not interested in the hallowed rite of browsing.

  Valka clutched her left arm just above the elbow, massaging the tattoo that covered her left arm as if it hurt her. I broke off my half-hearted perusal of the bookshelves to look at her. At last she said, “I told you once I wanted to be a pilot. I was one for a time. Did five years in the Orbital Guard back home. Everyone has to put in their time, but I stayed. Renewed after my three years were up.” As she spoke, her sentences grew shorter, voice drifting further and further away. “’Twas before my father . . . well . . . He was so proud. Not many in the Demarchy stay in the Guard once their term’s up. He always joked that I’d be chief of defense in a few decades.” She smiled, eyes far away as her tone. “He used to talk a lot of nonsense like that.”