Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “And what of us?” I asked, close to shouting. “I did not come here to lose a prisoner, Sagara.” I’d abandoned the Cielcin tongue, and spoke once more in clear Galstani, finding strength in the familiar sounds. I could almost hear Gibson at my shoulder, reminding me to stand straight, to speak clearly.

  “What you came here for is of little concern to me,” replied the King of Vorgossos, one of his gleaming eyes jabbing at my face like an accusation. “You will be paid for your trouble. You may depart on the morrow.”

  I wasn’t finished. “If the Prince Aranata is coming here, let me remain!” I held one hand extended, palm up in entreaty. “Let me speak to him. In the name of Mother Earth, Lord Sagara, in the name of our common humanity.”

  “Humanity!” the Undying shouted, and with horror I perceived he spoke the word with his own lips. He reached a hand up under his robe and with a hissing sound pulled the snaking gray hose out from beneath his floating, plated ribs. The other hand he planted upon the arm of his chair—and with a surge like the ocean fleeing a rising colossus—Kharn Sagara stood.

  I had not known he could do that.

  “What about our humanity is common, Hadrian Marlowe?” he said, arms thrown wide so that the ruin of his surgically altered torso was on full display, the black socket of a hose connection sucking light above his heart. Disconnected from his throne, some praxis deep in Kharn’s chest breathed for him, ragged and rattling, pulling on the air like a plasma burner. “You bring war to my doorstep and say it is in the name of peace. No.” With glacial care, he adjusted the drape of his shimmering golden robe and clasped his hands behind his back.

  I shook my head, unwilling to give up so easily. “I came here in good faith. I have not lied to you about my purposes. Whatever you believe about the Empire and its motivations, I am here of my own will and against the wishes of the Imperial Chantry.”

  When was the last time Kharn Sagara had been surprised? Not merely presented with some novelty, but startled? His mouth opened, eyes narrowed—his cloud of eyes swiveled all to look at me. “Against the Chantry, you say? Curiouser and curiouser.” From the dark they came, the men with sagging faces. A dozen of Kharn’s SOMs in their dun uniforms. No sound of doors opening had heralded their arrival, and I had the awful sense that the creatures had been waiting just outside the circle of light surrounding the Undying’s high seat. They all stopped ten paces from us, their presence felt, their threat clear. “Marerosah oyumn baram Tanaran-se o-namshem ba-okarin ne?” Kharn asked our Cielcin companion. You said your name is Tanaran? When the xenobite said that it was, he continued, “We will have a place set aside for you.”

  “Lord Sagara, please!” I stood nearly at the first step of the dais by then. “Give me a chance!”

  The king in yellow raised one hand—steady as a stone.

  As in the city plaza beneath its pale gray dome, the SOMs surrounded us. Valka raised her hands smoothly, demonstrating by the gesture that she meant no threat or resistance.

  “Listen to me!” I shouted.

  Clammy hands seized me, turning me away. Kharn did not answer me. His face was far away.

  CHAPTER 38

  THE FACE OF FAILURE

  “WILL YOU SMILE IF I say I was wrong?” Valka asked. I had been silent for minutes, almost so silent as Kharn. The remains of the meal we had found waiting for us in the diplomatic suite stood between us, and I was reminded of those many nights or evenings we had spent on Emesh, talking of archaeology and politics and other things. Even my somber attitude was the same.

  I pushed my plate away. “About what?”

  “About there being no danger here,” she said. The memory of the SOMs and their iron hands shone in her eyes. I felt them, too. Chewing on my tongue I nodded, but did not smile. “We came all this way for nothing.” She wasn’t looking at me. Her bright eyes tracked across the dim gray rooms around us, over the priceless furniture cracked and aging, and over the reproduction of that cheery painting behind me. Only after a Kharn-like pause did those eyes find me again, and she asked, “Are you all right?”

  That question took me by surprise. Inhaling sharply, I shook myself. “Yes. Yes, of course,” I lied, rubbing my eyes with one hand. “I’m not sure it was for nothing. If that was really the case, we’d have been sent away.” It was my turn to take in those crumbling accommodations, the well-maintained wood and leather of the tables and chairs belied by the cracked cement and peeling plaster in walls and ceiling. “I suppose it could be Kharn’s having the Mistral searched. Perhaps he thinks he’ll find the other Cielcin prisoners despite what Tanaran said and solve all his problems in one.” As I spoke, I remember I’d kept lifting the end of my fork and dropping it against the edge of the plate so that it made a tinny ringing sound like an offbeat metronome.

  “We’re not under guard,” Valka said. “I could sense those drones of his, and there’s nothing at the door.” I hoped she was right. Valka took my plate to stop my noise with the fork and placed it and hers on the ever-present trolley. As she turned, I caught her profile in the light of a glass-shaded lamp. Regal as any queen was she, as the image of the Empress Titania Augusta which still adorns the odd hurasam one finds. Not for the first time, I thought a man might dash himself to pieces against her as a ship is thrown against rocks. The moment did not last, for it is the nature of black moods to leap from one tragedy to the next, and seeing Valka again in that light brought Jinan’s anima howling within.

  I looked away.

  “I hope you’re right,” I said, seeing in my mind’s eye a platoon of Kharn’s undead troopers cutting through doors and turning over beds in the Mistral. “Otavia would fight if he tried to take the ship. She’d think we were dead.” My head fell into my hands, combed fingers violently through my hair. “I wish we could get a message to them. Tell them to stand down, or . . . you can’t reach them with your . . .” I pointed at the spot on the back of my own head where Valka’s neural lace had its external contact.

  The Tavrosi woman gave me a tight smile, lips curled into an amused V. “You can say ‘implant,’ Hadrian.” She shook her head, muttered, “Anaryoch.” Barbarian, she called me, but there was no malice in the word. “But no, even if I could through all the rock above us, ’tis behind layers of ice, our ship.”

  “Ice?”

  “Network defenses,” she said, imitating the gesture I had made in pointing at her implant. “When I was up there to get Tanaran, Durand said they’d had no luck trying to get the ship’s datasphere working again. There’s the quantum telegraph—that’s analog—but it only communicates with your fleet, and I’m not sure about you, but I’m not eager to meet Bassander Lin again.”

  Chewing my tongue again, I said, “No indeed. And it’s no use to us anyway. It’s on the ship.” We were alone then, alone and at the mercy of the Undying. “Besides, it’s Jinan I fear to see most. Not Bassander.”

  “I had not thought on that,” Valka said, betraying by the speed of her words that they were not quite true. She had been looking away from me, I recall, her hands in her lap. Her eyes found my face then, if only for a moment. “Are you really all right?”

  Unable to speak past clenched teeth, I forced a weary nod. The look Jinan had given me as she knelt in the Balmung’s hangar to fire on me played behind my eyes, superimposed with other images of my captain: illumined by safety lights in the dark of her cabin; glowing with sweat on the training floor; hair astray as she fussed, bent over her paperwork. All faded, washed out by the anguish of that moment, washed away by her tears.

  I realized I had been clenching my fist on the table, the knuckles white. Valka noticed, eyebrows raised, and I spread my palm flat as I looked away. “It’s done.”

  “I know ’tis done. ’Twas not what I asked you.”

  There was iron in her. Arguing with her was like arguing with a scalpel. “I will be fine, thank you. I made my choice, and she didn’t
make it with me.” I had tried, but Jinan had refused me.

  We go on to Vorgossos, you and I.

  You should not be joking about these things.

  I had not been joking.

  Valka finished off the last of her wine in contemplative silence, lips pursed, her chin propped against her tattooed fist. “I don’t suppose ’tis time.” Her voice was ashen.

  “Time to take Otavia up on her offer, do you mean?” I asked, leaning as far back as my chair would allow. “Give up on all this?” I clasped my hands behind my head and broke eye contact, staring at a patch on the wall where the plaster had flaked away in ages past. “I’m sure Sagara wouldn’t stop us leaving. We could just walk out now, you know?” I jerked my chin at the door, yet even as I did so I knew I couldn’t leave. I was haunted by the sound of Uvanari’s screams beneath the cathars’ knives, by the black scar on Rustam where a city had once been . . . by the list of all the worlds so similarly scarred.

  There was still a chance.

  “You could come with me,” Valka said, taking her chin off her hands. “I’m no mercenary. Without the Cielcin, this little expedition has little to offer me.” She paused, shifting in her seat, and turning her head offered a sly smile, watching me out the corner of her almond eyes. “You could be my assistant.”

  I snorted. “Your bodyguard.”

  A shadow fell across her face, cast by Gilliam’s shade, and her mocking smile turned to lead. I’d meant the remark to salvage a portion of my dignity, but it had only cut her—and cutting her, myself. I looked away.

  Valka stood, and turning paced toward the far wall, where a display case fronted a collection of antique glassware. Without her customary vest and short jacket, Valka seemed small to me, though she was not much shorter than I. Her flared jodhpurs made her torso seem oddly shrunken, as though the smallest weight might bend those narrow shoulders.

  How tired she seemed.

  “What is Akterumu?” she asked.

  Her reflection moved in the glass, eyes on me. Meeting those eyes, I let my hands fall. “Another Quiet ruin?” I suggested. “Tanaran said they ‘recovered’ Emesh’s coordinates from Akterumu. That suggests, well . . . some sort of recovery operation, does it not?”

  “I suppose it could be a person,” Valka mused, “or a Cielcin colony.”

  “The Cielcin don’t make colonies.”

  She clasped her hands behind her back. The gleaming spots of her eyes reflected in the cabinet were shuttered. “A ship, then. Or one of their clans?” She was trying to distract herself, I realized, from our current predicament. I wondered if Valka had ever been a prisoner. On Emesh, I had grown so used to the idea of her as a demoniac and a foreign witch—with all the glamor that implied—that it had not occurred to me that her upbringing among the Demarchists, but for the matter of the Prachar terrorists, had been a comfortable one. She had not lived in the streets, in fear of the urban prefects, nor fought in Colosso, unable to leave without breach of contract, knowing that but for an act of God you would be killed before that contract was up. She had not taken up arms as a mercenary, had not been Whent’s prisoner on Pharos, as had I.

  Was it possible that Valka, herself carved of adamant and sardonyx, was afraid?

  “Are you all right?” I asked, not rising from my seat.

  Valka jerked as if I’d startled her, but did not turn and face me. “Yes, yes, I’m fine. ’Tis you I’m worried about.” I could see her reflection watching me. “You’ve given so much to this peace of yours . . . and it hasn’t gone like you thought.”

  “I’ll be all right,” I said, meeting those reflected eyes. We both held our silence, both comfortable in our lies. Still faintly I could detect the crushed-flower smell of Naia’s perfume, was glad that Valka could not—or could not place it. I feared to see judgment in those golden eyes, however unwarranted. Women are ever the judges of men, our jury and, though their hands seldom grasp the knife, our executioners. I think now that a large, quiet part of my motivations for seeking out peace and parley with the Cielcin came from my youthful desire—in the court of Balian Mataro and at Calagah before it—to impress Valka. In our earliest meetings she had thought me a butcher, then merely a cad. She was a Demarchist, and her dislike of me was motivated by a dislike of all hierarchs, and of hierarchy itself. She, who claimed to resent all class and privilege, resented me for mine. Her prejudice against me, her judgment, had in part shown me my own prejudices, my own failings. I, unwilling and unable to apologize for being what I was, sought to prove that she had not understood me.

  That I was more. So I became more.

  True, I had wanted peace as well, but only in that abstract sense in which most people want peace. I had loved the thought of the Cielcin because they were alien, exotic, strange. I had thought these my reasons for descending into Calagah, for offering my services to Sir Olorin Milta and to Bassander Lin that night Uvanari, Tanaran, and their people crashed on Emesh. Now I wonder if Valka had not given those desires a gravity and a goal.

  Perhaps that was why it hurt so much, to hear her speak of surrender. I did not want to go. Did not want to give up. Or perhaps it was the faces burning in my memory, Uvanari’s and the others’. Or perhaps, as I had always claimed, it was because I believed it only the right thing to do, as if I—a boy of thirty-five—had any notion what right was or how it might be achieved.

  “Did you ever learn just what it is they do here?” Valka asked, changing the subject. She turned at last, leaning up against the cabinet, hands resting on a little lip that separated the glassed-in portion from its base. “Or how they do it, I mean?”

  I could feel Song and the crowd of nobiles milling about us, smoky forms haunting the gloomy airs. I fancied I saw the Baroness Harfleur of Varadeto, the black-skinned Lady Catherine, vanish as into a vat of ink. In my mind, she emerged again thin and straight, clean-limbed and smiling with all the flush of youth. Baron Song followed, his white hair turned to black.

  “Not exactly,” I confessed, “but I know he grows children—new bodies—for his clients. How he transfers their minds I’ve no idea. Some praxis like yours I’d imagine.”

  To my relief, a look of horror crossed the Tavrosi woman’s face, and she breathed, “Children . . .” If she took offense at my linking Kharn’s practices to herself, she gave no sign.

  “I was kept in a vestibule with the rest of Sagara’s clients. Lords and ladies of the Imperium, rich merchants, Mandari. That ilk. They spoke of being taken below.”

  “Below?” Valka asked. Her eyes drifted far away in thought. “Those buildings Tanaran and I saw? Below the tram?”

  I could only shrug. “It’s possible. I couldn’t see them.” I shifted in my seat. “How could you?”

  Valka’s knowing smile and the spark of it returned, and she crossed her arms, fingers tracing the contours of her clan tattoo above the left elbow. That smile sharpened, and she said, “A girl has her ways.”

  I made a small, unimpressed sound with my nose and flashed my teeth. “They’re machine, aren’t they? They can see in the dark.”

  “And other things,” Valka said. “Does that frighten you?” The way she said it, each syllable a sunburst in her bright and airy voice, cold and sharp as winter ice . . . I remembered why Mataro’s courtiers called her a witch.

  “No,” I said. “You don’t frighten me. You’re the only thing here that doesn’t frighten me.” I noticed then that she had neither confirmed her eyes machine nor denied, and I marveled that if they were such—a construct of metal, perhaps, or of crystal set in porcelain—that none on Emesh had discovered it. But then, the neural lace which haunted the gray matter of her brain had itself gone undetected.

  Valka’s smile faltered only a bit, softened. Crossing her arms, she said, “Do you think that’s how he’s lived so long? Kharn Sagara, I mean.”

  To be honest, I hadn’t even considered it,
though it seemed right the moment she’d spoken the words. I pictured serial lives, each running back like the links in a chain anchored to the boy of legend whose mother had died under Exalted guns.

  “Possibly,” I said. “That and his machines.”

  “Children . . .” Valka repeated, shaking her head. Strands of dark hair came loose from behind her small ears. A piece of me stirred, longing to return them to their proper place. I fixed my own hair instead, as if some act of sympathetic magic might neaten hers with mine. “That can’t be all they do.”

  “I’m sure it’s not,” I said. “But whatever else they do here could be had elsewhere. From the Exalted, or on March Station maybe. I can’t imagine someone going through all the trouble it takes to get here for something one might have elsewhere.” Valka agreed with me, and I added, “I think I found a way down, actually.” And I told her about the step-well I had found, and the door where Yume had accosted me. About the Orchid Stair and the strange creature there.

  Valka massaged her jaw, eyes lost amid the corridors of thought. Her voice, when it came, sounded just as remote. “You think it goes down to the sea?”

  “There was a tunnel in the bottom cut into the rock. Not like this.” I waved a hand at the concrete box of a room. “I think these tunnels and the domes must have been here originally.” As I spoke, I recalled that Ilex thought the dome had been built over a crater, and that the planet’s surface ice had built over the dome in ages since. It was not hard to imagine that an early settlement might have used such a crater as a blasting pit for departing rockets, or else sheltered from whatever winds there were as scoured the surface. “I think Kharn added his pyramid and some of the rest. They don’t feel like they belong.”