Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

“What was it?” Valka asked, hurrying up beside me.

  “I’m not sure!” I replied, and hurried off. I let my sword melt away and dashed after it, Valka in tow. Yume had said the Garden was for the clone children, but I couldn’t be certain. Whatever it was was quick, and twice I tarried to find my bearings as we crested a low rise. How Valka had not seen it with her augmented vision I never knew, but we followed all the same. We stumbled down a rocky slope, kicking up black loam as we stumbled down to the bank of the river.

  Valka swore in Panthai and leaned against me to catch her breath. A soldier she may have been once, but that was long ago, and the run had winded her.

  “I lost it!” I said, pointing nowhere in particular with the hilt of Olorin’s sword. Valka’s breath was hard in my ear, and at once I was all too pleasantly aware of the weight of her against me. Above us on the opposite bank, a metal bulkhead loomed beneath the shadow of the white stone of the cave chamber. By the false and shrinking twilight, it looked red as old blood. Gone to black. I heard the grind and pneumatic hiss of a door cycling, and saw a light stretch across the roof of the world.

  “This way!” I hurried down into the river, which was broad there and shallow, feet splashing in the slow current.

  “What are you on about?” Valka demanded, splashing after me.

  “There was someone there!” I said, scrambling up the rocky scree toward the black wall of the cave. Valka was a little behind, and I seized the moment to shake the stray droplets loose of my hydrophobic clothing. I reached down to help her up the rise, but she swatted my hand away, forcing me to catch her as she stumbled on a loose stone. “I didn’t get a good look at him.”

  “Him?” Valka asked.

  I shrugged. “Whoever it was.”

  We had arrived on a narrow platform that ran parallel to the wall of the cavern above the bend of the river. Off to our left, the waters vanished around another bend, moving toward the far wall where I guessed another sluice gate fed the river further down on its descent toward the subterranean sea. Little runner lights glowed at intervals along the edge of the platform, each no larger than a gold hurasam. The door I’d expected to find was to our left, a heavy, hexagonal portal that would not have looked out of place on a mining ship.

  “You’re sure someone was there?” Valka asked. “I didn’t see . . .”

  “Two teacups,” I said, holding up the matching number of fingers. “Still warm.” I tried the door panel. “It’s locked.”

  “Give it here.” The doctor brushed me aside, fingers working over the glass panel to the right of the door. She muttered to herself in Nordei, such that I could not make out the words. “Ramphas geit!” she swore. “I can’t! ’Tis locked.”

  No sooner had the words escaped her lips than the control panel cycled blue. The door ground open, bifurcating down the middle. “Let me guess,” I said coolly, trying to master the beating of my mutinous heart. “That wasn’t you?”

  “’Twas not I.”

  I shifted Olorin’s sword to the ready. “Stay back.”

  The faint whine of plasma coils charging in Valka’s gun sounded over my shoulder. “I’ll cover you.”

  The hall beyond was hexagonal, like the door, interrupted at intervals by pillars which divided the walls into niches. My boot heels clacked on the metal floor, the sound rebounding off the hard walls so that Valka and I sounded like a whole century of troops. Doors opened to either side, and through them I could see drab metal chambers with banks or machinery I could not name.

  “’Tis more like what I expected,” Valka said.

  We entered a wide, high-ceilinged chamber, an arcade supported by several glass pillars.

  No, I realized, not pillars.

  Enclosures.

  The largest of these stood three meters to a side, the smaller ones—nearer the edges of the room—were no more than a cubit in diameter. In some, birds bright as jewels flitted among branches with bark like burnished gold. In others, fish with scales of nameless hues chased one another in clear water or between the trailing fronds of kelp-like plants. The larger enclosures—still small by the standards of most of the menageries I have known—held larger creatures: grasping monkeys, lazing cats, and creatures stranger still. A pair of furry creatures with eight radial arms tumbled like acrobats down a slope of artfully arranged stone, and opposite them a trio of creatures like the ancient nautilus floated in an orange gas, their chitinous shells covering what seemed little more than a balloon. Another of the great glass ampules seemed to hold nothing but shadows, but the bronze plaque claimed it held the dreaded tokolosh, the umbra comedens, the animalcule that could strip flesh from bones faster than any piranha out of mythic Amazonia.

  “I take it back,” Valka said, “’tis not what I expected after all.”

  “It’s a zoo,” I said, running my hand over one of the bronze species plaques.

  Valka’s face fell. “These pens are too small.”

  “Not this one,” I said, lingering by the set of magnifying lenses that stood beside a display of tardigrades in what appeared otherwise empty water. We proceeded past baroque ironwork and deeper into the installation, along another hall and past larger enclosures—cells really—where stalked panthers and a beast like a human hand large as a mastiff. Terranic and extraterranic lifeforms stood in discrete chambers, or else mingled in biomes like surrealist paintings, green leaves and grasses interspersed with colors unknown to Mother Earth.

  We saw no one, not even Kharn’s hovering eyes. But for the sounds of the various creatures and the distant thrum of great engines deep beneath the world, the place was silent. I strained to hear the sound of retreating feet or a door opening—any sign that the eyes I’d seen beneath the tree were real.

  Chamber after chamber passed in this fashion, both of us expecting some trick or attack at any moment. We passed through Kharn’s menagerie and out under a dome like the smaller cousin of the dome of the City far above. Crushed stone, white and black and brushed into patterns, formed a mandala beneath that dome. Pale statues stood in concentric rings about and throughout the design, arms raised in imprecation, in supplication, toward the black finger of a broken obelisk in the center of the dome. It was another garden, a rock garden such as the scholiasts and their Zen precursors were fond of.

  “This place doesn’t make any sense,” Valka said. “A menagerie? Gardens? Why lock all that away? Why not have them in the City for the other people here?” She had holstered her sidearm, and approached the nearest of the statues in the outermost ring. High above, a wind from ventilation shafts unseen stirred the trailing beards of moss that hung like temple banners from the crumbling masonry.

  “Still not much of a laboratory.”

  Valka screamed and leaped away from the statue. Acting on reflex, I went to her side. “What is it?”

  “It moved!” Her gun was in her hand again, but was not pointed at the marble image. It was a woman, naked but for some gauzy shawl that failed to hide her high breasts. Time and water had eaten at her, and great chunks were absent in an arm and one smooth thigh. Whole pieces of the shawl, too. I cannot say if she had moved, only that there were cracks along the delicate line of her neck. Something red as the ink by which I record this welled there, thicker than blood and brighter, and at once I was reminded less of stone and more of the flesh of some ghoulish mushroom.

  “You’re sure?” I asked, and prodded the thing’s shoulder. It didn’t feel like stone, felt spongy, soft. A red welt rose on her shoulder where I’d touched her. Valka did not answer me, but I could feel the reproach in her eyes, though I did not turn to see it. “You don’t think these were people, do you?”

  “I have no idea,” Valka said. “Let’s get out of here. We need to find Tanaran and free the lock on the Mistral. There’s no time.”

  Shaking myself, I looked round, noticing for the first time that several doors opened
along the circumference of the wall. I could not help but feel that we were not in any real place at all, but lost amid some kind of dream, or that we wandered Kharn’s memories, or some other construct of his imagination. The Garden seemed jumbled together, arranged without any grand architectural plan, as if each room were made to some secret scheme and separate from each of the others, each door opening onto a random scene in a new play. The next we opened revealed a water garden, argent nenuphars and lotuses pink as maidens floating in pools black as ink; butterflies haunting still airs. Behind the next door a single finger of rock overlooked a pen where an azhdarch feasted on the fresh corpse of a lion.

  At last we found a door that opened onto another hall. Overhead lights cycled on at our approach, and our feet disturbed little clouds of dust, as if no one had been in that place for a very long time. Doors stood open to either side, revealing chambers with rows of old cots bolted to the floor. I was reminded, with an acute loss and longing I had not expected—of the Colosso hypogeum on Emesh, where first I’d met Switch and Pallino and the others.

  “It’s a dormitory,” I said, running a hand over a peeling decal stuck to the wall beside one metal door frame. Inside was a single bed, long since bare, with woodcuts black with time hanging indiscernible on the walls.

  “What is this place exactly?”

  The handwriting on the decal was badly faded and written in Nipponese. I could not read it, though I thought the characters looked disjointed, child-like. “Yume told me the gardens were for the children.”

  “The children?” Valka shifted to peer over my shoulder. I could sense her frown, imagine the furrow forming between her sharp brows. “Ichirou.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “That’s what it says.” She gestured at the sign. “’Tis a name.”

  I peeled off and went as far as the next door. The room beyond was identical, save for the wooden toy horse lying on its side on the floor. Unbidden, my fingers tightened about the hilt of my sword. “They must have kept the children here once. The ones meant for Sagara’s clients.”

  “But where are they now?”

  “No idea.”

  “I don’t think we’re in the right place, Hadrian,” Valka said.

  I didn’t hear her. I felt . . . something. Even still I cannot fully describe it. It was as though I had heard a loud noise in a distant room, and yet I was certain that all was quiet but for the still-beating of my heart—so close to my mouth—and the soft rustle of Valka moving. And yet like a noise it hurt me, and wrenched my attention round.

  “What is it?” Valka asked, but I put a finger to my lips. Undeterred, the doctor hissed, “Hadrian, what is it?” For she knew that mine were the ears of a palatine, and sharper than hers. Witch she may have been, but whatever Tavrosi praxis she possessed her ears were only human. Yet it was no sound I’d heard, but a sensation that gripped me as though I stood on a tramway and—frozen—knew the train was coming. Every muscle in me seized in expectation of some attack that never came. What came was stranger.

  Hadrian . . .

  My eyes went wide, and I must have spoken, for Valka said, “What?” It was not possible. I was mad, or else dreaming again.

  You.

  You.

  You are close now.

  “Hadrian!” Valka seized me above one elbow. “What the hell is going on?”

  “You don’t hear it?” I lurched forward and staggering fell to one knee. “It can’t be . . .”

  This is not the way.

  Come . . .

  Come!

  Her fingers bit into the flesh of my arm, and even through the fabric of my tunic and coat I winced. “Can’t be what, Marlowe?” She tried to help me up to no avail.

  “The voice from my dreams,” I said, and struggled to stand myself.

  “Your what?” I could hear the edge come back into her tone, the old and unforgiving skepticism. The intolerance. I half-expected her to drop me.

  “Not important . . .”

  Listen!

  I saw instead, saw a blur and tangle of corridors—as if my eyes had leaped from their sockets and were pulled along, through high chambers and dark and down an ancient and rattling lift to a stony shore and the darkness out of my dreams.

  As suddenly as it had begun, it ended. I reeled, and at last fell over.

  Valka shook me. “Open your eyes.” I did. When I did not immediately speak, she shook me again. “If you don’t tell me what’s going on, I swear by all my ancestors I will slap you.”

  My face went hard as stone, and I turned my head to look at her. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me.”

  I stood up before she could follow through on her threat, leaning against the wall. The voice had fled, leaving only images. I shuddered, feeling violated almost so much as I had by Naia the night Kharn had brought her to my chambers. There was a thought in me that was not my own. I did not know what to think or to believe. I did not think about it at all, because I knew what I must do.

  I tried her, saying, “I’ve been having dreams. Twice since we arrived here. Once on the way down from orbit and then again after we met Kharn. I did not think much of them—I often have strange dreams, but . . .” I trailed off, unable to look Valka in the face and to see the reflection there of how insane I sounded. “There is a voice calling out to me, asking me to listen. It’s dark . . .” I felt the pressure of her eyes, her judgment, recalling the way she’d scorned me at Calagah when I told her of my vision. “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I’m mad.”

  “You’re not even looking at me.”

  “I don’t have to,” I said, a touch too coldly. Echoing the voice I had heard, I said, “Listen. Let me prove it to you. That I’m not mad.” I clicked my sword back into its holster at my hip and straightened the wide lapels of my coat. “I know where to go.”

  CHAPTER 41

  THE TREE OF LIFE

  THE DOOR WAS RIGHT where the voice had shown me. Like the others in that strange Garden, it was hexagonal, as though it were the portal of some antique starship. Unlike the door by the lonely tree where I had seen . . . whatever I had seen . . . it opened without protest. Still I paused, as I pause in writing this. At many times in our lives we find ourselves in a strange place, a place where we are certain we have never been, and yet know every detail, every line and facet, as if some eidolon bridged time to set the stage—as indeed one had. You must think it strange how little I questioned my vision, but the mystic who has been devoured by flame and has lain with deathless women beneath the waves knows that what he experienced is real, though every scholiast name him mad. I had been granted a vision, and though I knew not whether its source was wicked or divine I could not but trust in it, for through each door and around each corner was only what I expected to find. With each passing chamber I believed.

  “’Tis the place,” Valka said, peering through a window in the hall that opened on a medical examination room.

  “Not yet,” I replied, conscious of the need for haste. “Further on and down.” I could almost hear her glare at me as I brushed past and added, “Trust me.”

  The hall emptied into a wide space supported by square pillars. We had only to cross through it to another massive door and to take a lift carriage down to the deepest levels. There, I knew—and knew with the conviction of the most devoted vate—we would find . . . what? Tanaran? Kharn’s computer? I have heard it said that such machines required cold to operate, and it had been very cold in the dark on the tram that led to Kharn’s throne room.

  “Hadrian.”

  There was something in Valka’s voice that made me turn. She stood pale in the yellow light, mouth half-open, half-pointing at the ceiling. I had been so intent on moving forward—and I had seen the room already—that its strangeness and its
horror escaped my notice at first. My eyes followed Valka, and found what I knew I must find. Glass bell jars like fruit the size of sarcophagi hung from ribbed arches which grew from the pillars like the branches of unholy trees, so that we stood in another sort of garden.

  “Are those . . . ?” Valka’s voice broke.

  “Children,” I finished, and knew as I spoke that it was so. Each hung suspended in pinkish fluid, and from the smallest fetus to those ephebes in the full flower of their youth each was connected to hoses and electrodes and monitored by devices I could not name. They were none of them alike: male and female, pale and swart and bronze. Raven-haired and golden or with hair so red as flame. Each of them was different, and yet I knew. “They’re all him.” I shivered, for the duplication of the flesh was an Abomination. One of the Twelve, and a great sin.

  “Sagara?” That crease appeared again between Valka’s brows. “What makes you say that?”

  I didn’t answer at once, so lost was I in thoughts wandering among the branchings above my head. “Just a feeling.” But I knew I was right. If the legends were real—and the legends were real—then Kharn Sagara was nearly fifteen thousand years old. How many lifetimes was that? How many generations? How many bodies had he worn? Above us, the body of a girl—she looked no older than twelve—waited to be born. Great needles like the ones I had worn after my mugging in Meidua at the start of my journey burrowed under her skin. Dozens of them. They were knitting muscle, maintaining the soft tissues against the day of its master’s needs. She had the same bronze complexion as Kharn himself, the same high cheekbones. Beside her, a boy—very much younger—possessed the germinal form of the Undying’s heavy brow and black hair, though his skin was coffee and not bronze at all. I could see shadows, echoes of the man on the throne in the faces of each of the children there, and recalling the flesh merchants at March Station, I shuddered, for it seemed I was not looking at children at all, but at features. Genes. The scattered components of a man played out in disjuncted symphony, the theme of him repeated endlessly and altered so that it seemed lost in the chaos.