Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “You don’t think he built it all?”

  “You’ve heard the stories.” She made a small noise of assent, and pressing on, I said, “I suppose the Exalted built it. Back when the Empire was young. Before Jadd. Before Tavros. Before everything.” I could not conceive of so remote a time. Kharn had been born mere centuries after the Foundation War, after the Advent and the Assumption of Earth. It had been a time not unlike the myths my mother told, for the past is to us little different than a story, and the great figures of ages past are little different than the heroes in storybooks. Being in that place, speaking with Sagara . . . it was as if Cid Arthur himself had greeted me in that throne room. Almost I might have expected the Sword of Mars plunged into a stone at the bottom of the Orchid Stair.

  Those who say stories are only stories are only fools.

  “Do you think the stories are true?” Valka asked, “That he built this place with the help of a Mericanii artificial intelligence?”

  “A daimon?” I said, feeling a twinge of the old fear that we were being observed—whatever Yume’s assurances and Valka’s insistence that we were alone. “Anything’s possible. And it would explain . . .”

  Valka interrupted me. “Explain the override on the ship after we left the Enigma.” She traced her lower lip with one finger. “And why they can’t get control of their systems.” The doctor was pacing back and forth now, moving along the end of the room nearest the door, hands behind her back. “You’re making that face again.”

  “What face?” I said, turning my expression studiously blank.

  “The face you make when you’ve had an idea any normal human being would discard out of hand.” She placed her hands on the back of the winged armchair and leaned over to look at me. When I still said nothing, she said, “What?”

  I raised my eyebrows, “What does a face like that look like?” The doctor pursed her lips but did not reply. Struggling to keep my expression studiously blank, I said, “Supposing it were some type of daimon holding the Mistral in place. Couldn’t we use it to access Sagara’s records, free the Mistral from lockdown, find Tanaran, and escape?”

  “How do you propose to do that?” Valka asked. “You don’t know a thing about where you’re going, or what you’re looking for, or how to use an AI.”

  I spread my hands, shrugged. “I have you.”

  “Aren’t we presumptuous?” Valka’s smirk was audible, was almost tangible. I’d been looking at my hands and at the space on the tabletop between them, as if I expected to see some blueprint in the scratches and the grain of that wooden tabletop. I thought of the oracles I have seen in bazaars across the Empire, old women and toothless ones claiming to see the future in the lines of the palm of one’s hand.

  Meditating on that, I closed my own hands, erasing such lines from sight. Drumming the table, I toyed a moment with the thought of kidnapping Yume. The golem would have much of the knowledge we needed, but I knew that the moment we attacked Kharn’s prized android, the Undying would know what we’d done. Assuming what the machine had said was true about the installation’s security cams, we stood a chance of making it below—assuming below was where we wanted to be. I dismissed the idea, reminding myself that Valka hadn’t even seen the creature in the datasphere.

  “It’s only presumptuous if you say no,” I said, then, “Are you? Saying no?”

  “No.”

  CHAPTER 39

  THE LAST STORY

  THERE CAME A TIME when we could wait no longer. Three days had passed, with nothing of note to mark them save that Valka accompanied me on my wanderings through storied galleries and along the packed exhibit chambers. Yume had declined to speak to us of all but the most cursory things, and so we had taken to exploring the labyrinth instead. Perhaps I’d hoped to find Tanaran in among the collection, wandering itself as we were permitted to do. Thrice I saw one of Kharn’s roving eyes gleaming in the gloom. Only once did it stop as I called out to it, and it did not stay to hear my words.

  Wet air blew against our faces as the door to the Orchid Stair opened. The eponymous flowers hung from tree branches and the Nipponese-style arches that stood along the winding path down to the level of the gate. The artificial lighting was more umber now than golden, though whether it simulated sunset or sunrise I couldn’t say. Cicadas screamed in the false gloaming, and the nightingale sang.

  “’Tis beautiful!” Valka breathed, pushing into the dim and fading light. I noticed lanterns hanging on the torii arches starting to glow, and despite the weight of where we were and the slender thread by which we held on, I smiled. Joy is rare, a thing always of the now, existing without regard for time past or time future, and without depending on them. Despite the long road and its troubles—despite the horrors that lay ahead—I have never forgotten her smile then or the sound of her voice. It was . . . a perfect moment, cut as crystal from the cloth of time. I was only an observer, and so felt I should be elsewhere, as if I were intruding like a storm cloud on midsummer’s eve.

  The Stair was beautiful, and the descent was beautiful—as if sunset had transported that stepped grotto from Vorgossos to Faerie, as if the gate on the bottom opened onto Oberon’s court and not the deepest circle of hell. How else should it be? Milton’s Satan had raised for himself a palace greater and more lovely than any in creation, after all.

  Pale lights winked to life amid the branches and hanging flowers, silver and pale gold. They twinkled, drifting like dandelion pods on the air. As the bloody sunlight dimmed, powering down, it was as if the stars themselves had passed through thousands of feet of stone to roost in the air of that cavern.

  Yet ahead of me, Valka stopped. “What are they?” she asked, incredulous.

  I knew. I heard stories about them time enough from Cat.

  “Phasma vigrandi,” I said, “the fairy-lights of Luin.”

  “Are they really?” Valka’s eyes were wide as moons as she turned in place, drinking in the impossibly lovely sight. “I’ve never seen them!”

  “Neither have I,” I admitted. They seemed less to fly than to float, blown like embers or snowflakes. Many settled against the trunks of trees, or onto the high grass and bright flowers like a phosphorescent dew. “I had a . . . friend, once upon a time, who always wanted to see them.” I reached out a hand—hoping that one might settle on it like butterflies in a lepidopterarium. They never did. I could not make out their forms, so bright were they and so small that they seemed composed of light alone.

  Tell me a story, would you? One last time.

  I could almost hear Cat’s voice, her words small and sick-shrunken even as herself.

  I’d told her the story of Kharn Sagara at the end. Our last story. I had told her how Kharn Sagara had avenged his mother’s death and the death of his people. How he had turned the Exalted against themselves and made himself their lord. They said he had conquered a daimon and made it his thrall. I had not believed it.

  Sometimes I think that Edouard was right, that there is a God, and that he mocks me. Why else would Cat’s fairies mark the road to that last and dreadful gate? And why would the road to its door run through that last story I had shared with her?

  Rest easy, Cat. And find peace on Earth.

  Beautiful as the moment was, it could not last. We grew accustomed to the sight of the fairy lights as we descended the rough stair, mindful of the wooden ema hanging from the branches and from the torii. I could not read the painted letters, nor divine their purpose. Where before I had been unmoved by the beauty of that garden, now I understood—understood that every temple, sanctum, and palace hall was an imitation done in lifeless stone of the living world. That pillars were only the poorest imitation of trees and the ribbed vaults of arches and galleries nothing next to the canopies that hung overhead.

  We had come to do a thing, and to see what we could see. Valka was first onto the mosaic at the bottom of the Well, and here she rai
sed a hand. I had been speaking—about what I cannot say—and fell silent as a stone.

  “I have something,” she said, voice hushed, and lowered all her fingers but one, as if she tested the wind by it.

  I have little understanding of machines, and almost none of that networked kind with whose operation Valka was so familiar. So when I say that she was a witch to me it is because there was no difference to my perception between the arts she practiced and the incantations spoken by sorceresses in the most antique fables. I have heard it said there is no magic in all Creation. That what passes for magic is—to those initiated in its sacred mystery—only a species of knowledge. In this, Valka’s thaumaturgy was a skill little different from my abilities with a sword, only an art or science whose workings were alien to me. So too are the arts of the scholiasts, or the vaunted powers of the Maeskoloi, the genetic wizardry of the High College and the horrors enjoyed by the Exalted. All stand as the swordsman to his quarry: to be conquered by their arts.

  I have reason to doubt this belief.

  There are mysteries in Creation which do not break down, which defy our capacity. There exist walls beyond whose gates no art or reason can serve, and questions which cannot be answered. Of these, some exist only by our own failures—such as my ignorance of machines—but others, others only are. I know what Valka did was not truly magic, though it seemed as such to me. But next to the things that followed, mysteries in the truest sense, her display of power strikes me as a perfect thing: the image of human authority ordering the chaos of Creation.

  In all our time together, I had had little chance to watch Valka work her magic, and though I saw much of it after, it is to that false twilight in the Orchid Stair my mind first goes when I think of her: striding silent across colored tesserae. She never lowered her hand, though her head tilted to one side, as though she was trying to locate each bird singing in the trees on the levels above us. She told me once that navigating a datasphere was like trying to catch water in cupped hands. So much information traded past her, so many points and nodes working at once, that the narrow eye of her attention—widened as it was by her neural lace and trained to handle such things—strained to apprehend them.

  “You said the android turned you away last you were here?” she asked.

  I walked around her, hands at my sides, until I stood between her and the heavy door at the end of the rough tunnel. Her eyes were closed, and deep creases traced the shape of her struggle on her face.

  “You’re sure you want to do this?” she asked, cracking one eye.

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  “Several,” she said, but the grin that stole over her serious face was like a ray of sunlight in the dark of night.

  The lights in the hall before us flickered and went out. My hand went to my sword where it hung familiar against my belt, ready on the electromagnetic clasp that held it in place. I turned, keeping myself between Valka and the darkness where the graven door had been, my off-hand ready on the catch that would activate my Royse shield. “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “Ssh!” Valka hissed. A wet wind sighed down the hall, seeming to carry the shadows with it as it sighed about the bottom of the Well. “That’s the door!”

  Something clattered against the mosaic tiles at my feet, and it was only my long combat experience that kept me still. It was one of Kharn’s eyes, a little silverfish no longer than the blade of my hand. I didn’t hesitate, and crushed it beneath my heel. Red lights slammed on along the floor of the tunnel, and turning to Valka, I asked, “Does he know?”

  She was silent a long moment, face drawn down like a book slammed shut. Presently it opened, and she pulled a face. “I don’t think so. The door was on a closed system. Isolated. ’Twasn’t even hard.”

  “And the eye?”

  “The what?”

  I spurned the thing with my toe.

  Horror and confusion warred across her marble face. Confusion won. In a voice dry as old parchment, she said, “’Twas not I.” Gold eyes found mine. For an instant, neither of us moved. Something else had interfered, had knocked out Kharn’s eye. Not Kharn himself, surely.

  After a disquiet moment, I said, “We should go.” And waiting for her to fall in beside me, hurried down the red-lit hall toward the burgeoning dark.

  CHAPTER 40

  THE GARDEN OF EVERYTHING

  THE ROOM BEYOND WAS all of natural stone, pale in the dimness, lit only sparingly by fixtures in among the stalactites which like unfeeling fingers hung from the ceiling. It was as though—having pierced all the strange layers of that world—Vorgossos at last gave up pretense and became only another part of Creation. Ordinary.

  Valka and I hurried along a creaking metal catwalk that stood inches above the wan stone floor with its shallow pools. Eyeless fish circled in the waters beneath us, small as my smallest finger, perhaps oblivious, perhaps marking us by our tread, and marking by the hesitancy in our steps that we were not Kharn Sagara, but intruders in the deepest heart of his palace. At the end of the catwalk and down a broad stair which passed between graven stalagmites, there was another gateway. Not a door, but a natural fissure, higher than it was wide and rippling, so that none might pass straight through it, nor any ray of light. I became terribly conscious of the sound of my footfalls, and of the thin sweat on the palm of my sword hand. Some piece of me, the foolish piece that fancied itself a storybook hero, half-expected a serpent—a great dragon—to come spilling from that sticking mouth, and so I went in front of Valka, sword raised but quiet in my hand.

  None came.

  Kharn’s single weeping eye lay carved above that pointed entryway, not finely but with a clumsy hand, its lines long faded by the running of water whose droplets soaked the lining of that passageway, glittering with the faint glow that emanated from within. Behind me, I felt Valka hesitate and held out my hand.

  She did not take it, and I covered my embarrassment by turning it into a gesture that said, “Stay back.”

  Alone and mindful of the slick floor, I pressed forward, first left—sinister, to use the fencing word—and then right along the passage. Left again. Not twenty paces in I found the ending, and emerged into a dream.

  I stood upon the margin of an unpastured meadow, the grass rising almost to my waist, the pale green sea dotted with the white blooms of snowdrops and here and there the yellow sunstars which bloom on a hundred million worlds. A river—belike the very one that flowed through the City of Vorgossos high above—entered by a sluice gate high in the stony wall and flowed, through many windings, beyond the shadow of the next rise. We might have stood upon the surface of any of a billion worlds, but for the roof of white stone above our heads and the unmoving air.

  “What is this place?” Valka had appeared at my shoulder, holding her plasma repeater against one thigh.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, and bit my lip. “I expected—”

  “—some kind of laboratory,” Valka said, finishing my thought. “As did I.”

  It was twilight in the glade, as in the Orchid Stair. It made me wonder why the cave chamber had been made to separate them. If there were birds in that glade I heard none, only the torrential fall of water from the sluiceway. All was still.

  Valka ran her hand through the tall grass, feeling the stalks with her fingertips. “Why would you lock this away?”

  One tree stood taller than all the others, perched as it was on a rise at the end of a beaten path between the grasses. I could sense . . . something. A sense of quiet unease settled in my bowels as I moved toward it, cousin to the cold feeling of eyes on the back of my neck with which I was so familiar. Kharn had spoken of trees when I’d first met him. Of the Trees of Life and Knowledge that stood planted in the deepest corner of the human soul. Almost I imagined it was toward one of those trees I walked, sword in hand, or the Merlin Tree at whose bole Cid Arthur found enlightenment. Beneath the sha
dow of its branches was a great slab of rough stone, nearly flat and just large enough that an ascetic might sit cross-legged upon it.

  Beside it, on a wooden tray, was an antique tea service of plain white china—the type any peasant family in the Imperium might own—and two cups to match its plainness. Beside it was a Druaja board—its pieces neatly stowed—and a pair of long sticks, their twigs peeled off. I stood there a long while, listening. Almost I thought I heard the whispering of invisible voices in among the branches, as if the tree itself were speaking, and the hairs on my arms stood on end, even beneath my tunic and coat. Though there was no breeze, I fancied the wooden prayer cards painted and hung there rattled like the tongues of vipers.

  “What is it?” Valka asked, still a ways behind me.

  I went to one knee, touched the bowl of the teapot. “Someone was just here.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Hand still on the teapot, I said, “It’s warm.”

  I cannot say exactly what the nature of the sound I’d heard was. An indrawn breath? A scuffling? A misplaced stone tumbling among the roots of the great tree? Perhaps it was only a pressure on the mind, a relic of those days in the streets of Borosevo when it paid to know when one was not alone. Still, I jerked my head around, staring across yards of rooty ground, drinking sight and sound for the source of what disturbed me.

  I fancied I saw two eyes, bright as diadems, peering at me from behind the tree. “Hey!” I sprang to my feet, coat tail nearly upsetting the white teapot. The eyes vanished. “Hey!” Ashamed as I am to admit it, I conjured my sword. Highmatter blue as moonlight shone in my hand, quillions flowing like sun dogs from the stuff of the blade. Feeding off my energy, Valka raised her gun and followed. I skidded round the tree. “Hey!”

  There was only a rustling of grass, as if some small creature was darting away among the blades.