Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

“Guards?” Song said, uselessly.

  “I need to know what happened to my friends,” I said. “I had five companions. Three men and two women. They must have been taken with me.”

  Kim Hae Song patted my shoulder in what I assume was meant to be a fatherly way. “They’ll have been quartered appropriately. They’re fine. You could probably have a message carried to them. They have to wait separately.”

  “Wait?” I snapped.

  “Well . . .” The old man blinked. “Yes!”

  “Wait for what?” I began stumping toward the door, conscious of the plush give of the fine carpets beneath my feet.

  Song tried to dig his heels in, but I brushed him off, stumbling only a little before I fell against the wall. There I remained. It was all I could do not to slump over, and I struggled to stop my knees from shaking. “Surely you’re here for the same reason we all are? To petition the Undying? This is where to meet him.”

  “Not a prison?” I asked.

  “You’re free to leave, boy!” shouted another, older man. “Looks to me you’ve more time than the rest of us, and the golem doesn’t take us in any sort of civilized order. I’ve been waiting two weeks for an audience.”

  A silver-haired woman in a white evening gown spoke up. “Two weeks, Archibald? I lost count of how long I’ve been here at six weeks. That was weeks ago!”

  “And I’ve been here the better part of a year,” called another whose face I could not see.

  Baron Song leaned toward me. “We’ve all been waiting a long time. The Undying sends his golem for us when it pleases him.” The old Mandari wrung his hands. “It pleases him for us to wait.”

  “I am the Marquise of Sarmatia!” the woman in the white dress announced, banging her cane undramatically against the thick carpets. “It’s an affront, I tell you! An affront!”

  A hulking man, reduced only somewhat by age, said, “And I am the Grand Duke of Milinda, Marquise. What of it?”

  “We are all lords here,” said Baron Song diplomatically.

  “I am only a spice merchant!” said another man whose gray-faced complexion reminded me of the old vilicus on Emesh. “And Pardos here is an artist!”

  “Who are you, newcomer?” asked the Marquise of Sarmatia.

  Trusting my knees at last to stop shaking, I stepped forward—only then becoming aware that my sword was missing—and said, “Hadrian.” I was patting down my coat pockets reflexively, searching for the lost weapon. The guards must have taken it. Remembering myself and bolstered by the effect the information had had on the old Mandari Baron, I said, “I am Hadrian Anaxander Marlowe, of Delos and the Star Victoria.”

  “Nonsense!” said one of the lords. “And what’s a stripling like you doing in a place like this?”

  “It’s not nonsense, Frederick,” said the dark-skinned woman. “The Viceroys of Delos are Star Victoria, the Auriga branch . . . some Princess Imperial married one of the Delian Viceroys millennia ago. If House Marlowe was a local house, married to the Viceroyalty, it could be the boy’s of the Peerage.”

  “He has the look . . .” said the Grand Duke of Milinda, adjusting his saffron cape.

  I clenched my jaw, not terribly thrilled to have my family history debated before my eyes. Only it seemed very trivial to me after so many years a mercenary, though I knew it was not. Of old, perhaps, it was so. In ancient days a king was only a man who believed himself king and made others believe by the strength of it until the people took that strength on faith even after it was gone. It is said that no less than Alexander, considered by many the forefather of our Empire, once asked the scholiast Diogenes why it was he searched through a pile of bones. Diogenes rebuked the young Emperor, and sent him away saying that he sought the bones of Alexander’s father, but that they looked no different from those of a slave.

  It is not so any longer.

  We believe our civilization the product of our struggles, when in truth we are its products. We are its children, raised behind its walls. When the first magi of the High College altered the genetic makeup of the first palatines, it was in the spirit of Imperial civilization: to answer the demands of their age and to reward the heroes who conquered the Mericanii. When it came time for those new palatines to conceive children of their own, it was in that same spirit they acted, until that tradition was as ossified as natural law. Until it was natural law. Humanity parted ways with our cousins, the late, lamented chimpanzees, because the differences in our behaviors—our cultures—drove us apart.

  How long, I wondered, before we palatines are similarly sundered from native man? Forget Diogenes. How long before even blind Homer could tell the bones of our Emperor from those of a slave? Not long. There are many amongst the old houses of the Imperium—dowagers, mostly—who make a study of the genetic markers that define our constellations. These old women can identify a nobile’s family from the smallest detail of body or face. In my youth, I’d believed it a kind of game. I am wiser now. Nothing old women do is a game, and it is a profound mistake to believe that one must care about a thing to be subject to it.

  “He does look Imperial,” said the Marquise of Sarmatia. “A bit on the severe side, but he reminds me of Prince Faustinus—did you ever meet him, Sendhil?”

  The Grand Duke of Milinda shook his head. “What’s he, then? The Emperor’s eighty-third son or the eighty-fourth?”

  “Seventy-eighth.”

  “Well, excuse me!” The Grand Duke threw up his hands. “How am I supposed to keep track of a brood like that? Ye gods, Marietta, who has the time?”

  It was like they’d forgotten I was there.

  In time, food was brought to us, and what strange food it was. No proper meal, no feast. Two homunculi: one with skin like milk and hair like onyx—the other reversed—escorted a train of several carts through the chamber. Briefly I saw four guards without. Dun-uniformed SOMs with their blurry faces. They held the massive doors for the serving girls, but otherwise were unmoved. The homunculi went about with trays bedecked with canapes and airy vols-au-vent. Coffee was to be had in abundance, and tea, but no wine. No water. I watched as the others all took fulsomely from the trays—none speaking to the girls who carried them.

  “Take what you can,” Song advised, plucking a round dozen of the things onto a small plate. “There’s never enough . . . Tea please, there’s a good girl.” The homunculus with skin whiter even than mine curtsied and returned with a ceramic cup.

  “Do you know where my companions are?” I asked her.

  She watched me with eyes amber as her thin robes, but said nothing.

  “They would have been brought in with me.”

  “Don’t waste your time, Lord Marlowe, they don’t speak,” said Baron Song. “Let’s resume our game, shall we?”

  I teetered a moment, keeping eye contact with the pale homunculus, who after a moment bowed demurely and moved away. Given no choice then, I returned to the couch and the table beside it. Druaja—labyrinth chess—is a very old game, played as much with the board as the pieces on it. I’d never mastered it, having not the patience or the puzzle-solving mind for such things. But Song had invited me, and I’d seen no other choice.

  “Your move, I believe,” said the old baron, popping a piece of salmon pastry into his mouth.

  In Druaja, one races one’s opponent to the center of the labyrinth, all the while trying to capture your opponent’s emperor. The labyrinth shifts—or can be made to shift—depending on varying arcane rules. I moved one of my centurion pieces round a corner, blocking one of Song’s cataphracts from advancing further toward the center. Myself eating a roll stuffed with onions and some fine cheese, I asked, “How long have you been here, Lord Song?”

  “I don’t rightly know,” he said. “My terminal died a long time ago, and those delightful serving girls don’t come to any schedule I’ve noticed, so I can’t use them to keep time.” With a
ringed hand, he captured one of my legionnaires and—having taken a piece—used it to depress a switch on the edge of the board. This altered the shape of the ridges running between the board’s hexagonal tiles. My centurion was cut off, freeing his cataphract. “But I should think several months now.”

  “Several months?” I repeated. “Sitting in this room?”

  “Where else can I go?” he shrugged.

  “Earlier . . . one of the others mentioned a golem?” I said, studying the board.

  The Mandari looked at me a long time. “His servant. Yume.”

  “Yume?”

  “It’s a daimon. An android,” Song said, responding to my next move with a quickness that made me feel inferior. “The Undying keeps an android majordomo. When it is our time for an audience, he sends it for us.”

  “But . . . months?” I said, confounded, forgetting the Druaja board for a time. “I don’t have that kind of time.”

  The Baron looked at me seriously, folding his hands across his chest as he leaned back. “What’s this, then? Are you ill?” His face darkened. “Are you an intus? Is that it? You don’t look like an intus . . . unless it’s your mind that’s afflicted. That’s something only the Undying could cure?” He made this last a question, though it seemed to me not to be so.

  Chewing on another of the canapes, I was able to bite back a harsh retort. Doctor Cento had asked me the very same question, and I found it grating. The Baron, too, should have known that back home such an insinuation would have been grounds for a duel.

  But I checked myself. “I’m not an intus,” I replied, moving my hierophant to capture one of the Baron’s knights. I held the captured piece in my hand, feeling the weight of it. The fine details of the knight’s medieval shield were worn down, and his face was a dull, featureless oval. It was old. Very old. I wondered just how old it was, and for how long it had moldered in this hall, a part of the furniture.

  “Why are you here then?” the man asked.

  Kindly or no, I was not about to tell the old Baron about my mission, about Tanaran and the battle at Calagah, about Raine Smythe and Bassander Lin. I smiled my thinnest smile, but said nothing. I slammed the knight down on one of the buttons, shifting the labyrinth’s shape again, trapping three of the Baron’s pieces.

  The Baron swore, changed his plans, his question momentarily forgotten.

  Eager to push the conversation away from myself, I asked, “You really think it’s true, then? That they have a cure for dying here?”

  Song’s eyes lit up like those of a fanatic. “Oh, yes. Without a doubt.”

  This shocked me, and I fear that I recoiled slightly at the vehemence in Song’s words. I had heard the stories, of course. Dim Vorgossos, where dark sacraments are performed to twist the blood. Lost Vorgossos, where of old Kharn Sagara revenged himself upon those who’d murdered his family. That bit of the story seemed true, if what I’d learned could be believed, and yet . . . and yet the rest of it still seemed to me a black fable.

  “If immortality were possible, surely the Emperor would possess it,” I said. “It was my understanding that we were pushing the limits of the possible anyway. Something about the brain.”

  Song rocked back in his chair, our Druaja game forgotten. He took a drink of his tea, smacked his lips. “Memory.” He smiled. “The brain struggles with memory as it ages—among other things. In we palatines this is stretched to the very limit, but we cannot go much beyond seven or eight hundred years, even if the heart and other organs can be kept young.” He smoothed his velvet jacket, darkening the green fabric.

  I saw where he was driving, and frowned. “What’s the solution? A new brain?”

  “A new brain! A new body! That is what the Undying offers. A new you.” He leaned forward again, leaping his hierophant over one of the walls to threaten my emperor. This done, he raised his eyebrows at me. “This is why the others are so confused to see you, young as you are, ah . . .” He looked me up and down. “How young are you, exactly?”

  “Thirty-five,” I said evenly. “I was born in ’117.” That was more than a hundred years ago, I realized with a start. I’d spent more than two-thirds of my time alive frozen in cryonic fugue. This moved me to silence, and I looked down at my plate, selected another of the dainties on offer and ate it, hoping the food would drive away this existential crisis.

  Song was still speaking. “Thirty-five! Why, you are only a child!” He smiled. His teeth were very white. “No wonder you are such a poor hand at labyrinth chess!”

  The serving girl chose that moment to return, offering me a selection of small fruit tarts. Recalling Song’s advice that I should take what I wanted while I had the chance, I selected a pair of raspberry ones with chocolate and thanked the homunculus. She departed in a swirling of bronze silks.

  “Thirty-five . . .” the Baron said again, shaking his silver head. “You know, when I was thirty-five, there were no Cielcin? No Crusade!” He made an expansive gesture, nearly upsetting his tea. “It was different in those days . . . ah, but where were we? Your move?”

  Days later, I had very much improved at labyrinth chess.

  CHAPTER 31

  TARTARUS

  THE LEGIONS HAVE A code regarding the treatment of prisoners. They are to be fed twice daily and to a schedule. They are to be provided a place to sleep—even if it is only a blanket and a patch of floor—and they are to be provided some semblance of day and night. There are other rules, but it was upon these I meditated in that concrete vault of a chamber. As I have said, the twin serving girls appeared at random intervals. I timed them. Sometimes they would appear within hours of one another, sometimes almost a standard day would pass without their arrival. And each time they did appear, the crowd of old men and women would stand and turn in expectation of something other than the food carts . . . of this golem Yume who served the lord.

  Through all this, the yellow light in the chamber went on unchanged. And, but for the varnished paintings so dark as to be almost opaque and the dusty velvet hangings, there was nothing to look upon, no change in the environment. It was enough to drive one mad, to be so deprived of darkness. I could handle the irregular eating schedule. The darkness was harder, but I made do, using my coat as a kind of tent.

  No one bothered me. Not even the Grand Duke of Milinda.

  On the ninth day or the tenth of my soft captivity, the doors opened. The palatines all stood and flocked to the doors like cats at the arrival of their master. Even I stood—canceling the holograph I’d been reading off my terminal, a bit of Impatian’s History of the Jaddian Wars. I meant to try again to implore the serving girls to have a message sent to Valka and the others, as, contrary to Baron’s Song’s assertions, I had not been allowed to send a message to my companions.

  But the food carts did not appear, nor the twin girls in their translucent gowns. No one appeared for a good five seconds, prompting a wave of excited muttering from our herd of cats. The palatines all muttered, equal parts nervousness and expectation, and moved toward the door.

  The figure that entered did so with a quiet whirring. There should have been hissing, clanking, the grinding of awful gears.

  Far from the nightmares I had seen on the Enigma of Hours, the creature that entered the waiting room was elegant in its design and execution. Perfectly human in its mechanics, of androgynous design: narrow-hipped and narrow-chested. It wore no clothing, having no flesh or shame to cover. Much of its form was dull gray, with here and there a band of bright electrum reflecting the light around it. Crystal panels in hip and shoulder exposed glittering brass clockwork.

  “Yume . . .” Baron Song whispered, shuffling up beside me.

  The golem turned its head back and forth—pistons and chords in its neck stretching. The face was a convex arc the color of bone. It had only one eye: black and painted on the surface where the left eye ought to be, gold filigree playing about
its edges. It would have looked hardly out of place at a masquerade ball on Renaissance.

  Smoothly—moving with the grace and poise of a member of the Avalon ballet—the machine raised an arm. “Would the Lady Catherine Domitia Harfleur, the Baroness Varadeto, please step forward? The Master will see you now.”

  A pulse went through the crowd, murmurs intensifying. The elderly black-skinned woman stepped forward as the group stepped back until she stood in a sort of no-man’s land between the crowd and the android. She looked very small, stooped as she was by age in her soiled finery, glittering though it was with jewels. Yet despite the silver cane on which she leaned, she hurried, and despite the native trepidation I felt at the sight of the golem and its one black eye, she seemed unafraid.

  The android pivoted smoothly on one heel, offering the nobile lady its arm. Being less affected by a Sollan fear of machines than she was an eagerness to be getting on, she took it without complaint.

  “Sir,” I said, stepping forward. I didn’t know what else to call the thing. “A moment.” Servos whirred as the android Yume turned its head—a little too far, I thought—to look at me. It did not speak. Only then did I realize that the filigree rimming that mask’s one eye described a stylized tear running golden down the robot’s blank cheek. “I was . . .” I would not say arrested. “I was brought here with five companions. Three men, two women—one of them a dryad. I have been here for more than a week. I do not know what’s become of them. I do not know how they fare. The others here say they are permitted to send messages to their entourages. Might I not send one of my own?”

  A dim red light, like a cinder, burned in that black eye. In its polished court accent, the android replied, “You are not permitted.” It swiveled its head away.

  “Why not?”

  The machine very gently released the Lady Catherine Domitia’s arm and turned to face me. Its head pivoted first, one hundred eighty degrees. Its body followed. “I can assure you that your companions are quite well.”