Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

One arm bent toward me, one long finger outstretched and pointed accusingly at my face. The hooked nail shone pale yellow in the scarce light, sickly and uncared for.

  You

  you

  you are

  looked for . . .

  . . . expected . . .

  . . . anticipated.

  We had word of your coming.

  We have word for you.

  “I don’t see how that’s possible.”

  They knew. They saw you . . .

  . . . have seen . . .

  . . . foreseen your arrival.

  Standing here.

  And left word with the Brethren.

  For you, child. The man to end it all.

  “Who is they?” I asked, afraid to ask what it meant by the man to end it all.

  You know them . . .

  . . . have spoken with them . . .

  . . . will speak with them again.

  They told you,

  showed you:

  What will be.

  What must be.

  Here its visible hands curled into fists and splashed the surface of that sable sea. For a moment, I thought it had fled, retreated to some unimagined depth like sharks at the coming of the storm. I staggered back a step, hand flickering to Olorin’s sword where it hung at my right hip, watching the unquiet ripples playing on the surface of the waters, turning the reflected points of the fireflies to turbulent shapes beyond even the power of mathematicians to describe.

  A deep pain flared behind my left eye, and with a grunt I went to one knee, steadied myself with a hand. I couldn’t see. At first I thought the lamps had gone out and the fireflies fallen from the darkling airs. But surely I should see the faint glow of Kharn’s pyramid in the roof of the cavern above?

  There was nothing.

  I was blind.

  I could sense movement in the dark before me, a deeper darkness against that plane of impenetrable black. I heard the slapping of bare feet on old stone, and a sound like the wailing of an infant.

  “Who’s there?” I called out, and remembering my sword drew it out. The blade flickered like a candle-flame, casting ghostly shadows up fluted pillars bigger around than the trunks of the mightiest trees.

  No answer came.

  “Hello?”

  A gray light met me, falling through an oculus in the dome high above, illuminating the statues of many-armed and faceless creatures. They made me think of cuttlefish, of the many-handed intelligence I had just encountered.

  All was quiet.

  The single beam of light falling from that distant oculus fell upon a dais in the center of that echoing apse. There—where an altar should have been—stood a child’s bassinet, an old and moth-eaten cradle. I heard—or thought I heard—the chiming of a baroque music box. Cautious, I approached, stepping carefully through the ruin of shattered statuary and snaking metallic cables that spiderwebbed across the floor. The child within wailed again and coming to the side of that cradle I found—as I had found in my vision beneath Calagah on Emesh—that the cradle was empty.

  Still holding my sword aloft, I reached into the cradle with my opposite hand.

  The child cried out.

  My fingers found something sharp, like a piece of glass or old stone, and I drew it out.

  Not stone at all.

  An eggshell.

  The child cried again, and the earth split and the world with it. The vision crumbled like old parchment. Startled, I shoved my hands into my pockets and dropped into a crouch. The very air around me shattered, and all that great space: that mighty dome with its oculus, those strange and many-armed statues, those friezes and sculptures and the flames of votive candles all crumbled like old pavement. I fell, and struck the surface of some other world lashed with rain. A figure towered over me, and rolling to look up through soaking hair I beheld its face. It was not quite a Cielcin, for it was more dark and frightening than any of the Pale I had seen: nine feet tall and terrible as Death herself. Sable were its flowing robes, and sable the mighty cape that flapped from its narrow shoulders. Its armor was of silver, and silver chains and sapphires lay draped across its chest and hung across its high forehead from its crown of silver horn. In its fist was a blade of cloud-blue highmatter, cousin to my own, and in its wake came a woman in chains. Without being told, I knew her name was Man, for in her eyes was the pain of all suffering and the wisdom of every age. So like my mother she was, bronze of hair and pale-skinned. She wore a paper crown and her purple robes were torn. In one shackled and mutilated hand she held a broken cruciger, and her eyes were downcast.

  Behind these two marched the rank and file of a host of monsters vast as empires that raised spears and shouts at the invisible sky, and I knew the smoke behind them rose from a thousand thousand worlds. And a voice rose up, the worldless cry of a million human throats, and drove the strange creatures back. The creature in the silver crown diminished, shedding its horror and the terrible majesty of its strength, and when its horde appeared again from the smoke I saw they were only Cielcin, and not the true demons I had seen. And the figure before me that held the woman in chains was the mightiest of them, dressed in Death and Darkness and crowned with silver like the light of stars.

  The Cielcin lord’s sword flashed, and a head fell from a body I had not seen. It bounced, rolled to rest at my feet. I looked down at the face and screamed. It was my face—the sharp jaw slack, violet eyes wide and staring and flat as glass.

  I turned back to that dark lord. Its eyes found mine and it seemed to see me—even through the rain and the vision-fog—for it raised its blade and strode forward. Teeth clenched, I stepped over my own head and lifeless body and raised my sword to meet its own.

  “Why won’t you die?” it asked, voice black as its eyes. And to my astonishment, it spoke in my own tongue.

  I had no answer for it, and when I opened my mouth to speak, a great light shone from behind me and washed the Pale lord and all its kind away. Alone, I turned toward that light, out from the rain of that blackened place, and turning my head to either side beheld myself in a million aspects: here at the head of a great host, armored as a Strategos all in white; there dead upon a cathar’s crucifix. It was as if I saw down a million branching corridors, each of them a street and turning in the city of my life. Down one I saw myself crowned in gleaming gold, seated on the Solar Throne with a red-haired princess seated at my feet in a gown of living flowers. I saw her again beside me, beneath me, her breath hot against my throat. Down another road I saw myself as an old man—hooded and cloaked—sitting upon a rock on the slopes of some sere, volcanic shelf. Alone. Down still others I saw my corpse, smashed upon a battlefield or served at some Cielcin high lord’s table, and these ends I shivered to behold.

  Many faces I saw whose names were not yet revealed to me. I saw Edouard—an old man first, a priest of his dead religion—then young as he had been when I knew him, with his false spectacles and true smile. I saw my Cassandra sparring with the Maeskoloi by the light of Jadd’s red sun. I beheld the young Prince Alexander, and Bassander Lin again, and a man like Pallino but young and with two eyes, and a body hanging from a crooked tree. And Valka, Valka was everywhere. I saw us standing beneath the Marching Towers of Sadal Suud—where we never went in life. I saw us again on Berenike, on Colchis, on the Emperor’s own flagship. I saw her pale face illumined by the light of candles where the faces of dead men carved from porphyry looked on, saw her hand stretched out with a silver jewel cradled in the palm. I saw love in those golden eyes, and sorrow—and felt sorrow in return.

  And I saw flames rising crimson above the fields of Perfugium, and weep now, remembering.

  I went backward, and came to a place where the light bent, and my own life seemed broken, and heard again the AI’s words,

  Broken before. And broken again.

  Where m
ost break only once.

  Turning there I saw a glimpse of the prophet, Jari, watching me, and frowned. I was in the hold of a ship, in its cubiculum. Frost misted the air, crunched beneath my heels. I approached the nearest fugue crèche and saw a handsome, olive-skinned face with hair bright as starlight. It was the smuggler, Demetri. Beside him slept his wife, Juno, and every member of their crew. I passed the black-skinned Bassem and the homunculus called Saltus, passed Doctor Jugo and the twins whose names I did not remember to where I slept beside a porthole in the ship’s wall.

  There came a green flash—like lightning—and all the crèches were emptied save mine, and the stars beyond the porthole were changed.

  “A man must be either a swordsman or a poet,” said a familiar, rasping voice. Heart lurching, I turned. Tor Gibson appeared at my side, green-robed and green-eyed, nostril slit by Sir Felix’s knife. That was wrong, and what he said was wrong: it was Olorin who had said that to me, not Gibson, and I said as much.

  “Kwatz!” The old scholiast lashed me with his cane—not harshly, but enough to startle. Still quoting Sir Olorin, the vision said, “We are sending them you.”

  “Me?” I asked. “Why?”

  Old Tor Gibson folded both hands over the bronze head of his cane. His slitted nostril flared. “To fight. Why else?”

  “To fight whom?” I asked. “The Cielcin?” Gibson brushed past me, moving along the bank of empty fugue crèches, the tip of his cane clanging on the metal decking. I followed after him, passing out from under the bulkhead that led out of the Eurynasir’s cubiculum. I stood again beneath the infinite ceiling of the lost chamber in Calagah, beneath that massive anaglyph of a circle pierced by a single ray descending like a wedge. “I want to make peace. I’m an apostol, an ambassador.”

  Gibson was gone.

  The voice remained, stripped of Gibson’s rasping cadence and of the warmth of his tone. It spoke without sound, words trickling meaning directly into my brain.

  I thought you were a soldier, they said. We need a soldier.

  “Who are you?”

  The voice—without source now and from all directions—replied:

  We are.

  I was hurled backward then, up and away from the light and through inky darkness. Hands seized me, and I was suddenly conscious that I was underwater. I tried to breathe, but there was a hand clamped over my mouth and nose. My lungs screamed, and I beat on the arms that held me—too many arms—until all the fight was gone from me and I knew I must drown. Darkness clouded the corners of my mind, and I felt my soul vanish as the last guttering of a candle-flame. Once more I heard that soundless voice. Once more, saying:

  We must be.

  When I awoke again, I lay on my back upon the end of the pier, icy water lapping at my sides. Cold fingers pressed against my face, cradled my cheek like a lover. For a moment, I thought Valka had come down—abandoning Ren and Suzuha by the arch on the dike above—and I smiled. I opened my eyes. It was not Valka, of course. The hand on my face, bloated and waxen, emerged from the water’s edge. I nearly screamed, but the sound died in my throat, became a coughing spasm as I rolled onto my side.

  Do you see?

  Brethren’s voices rasped over me like its many feeling hands. “The . . .” I spluttered, coughed up a mouthful of black water. “The . . . Quiet?”

  I do not know what I may appear to the world,

  but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore,

  and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble

  or a prettier shell than ordinary,

  whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

  “Is that . . . ?” I struggled to sit up. “It’s not . . . Shakespeare.”

  Newton.

  I grunted, spat another mouthful of water out of my lungs before I slumped back against the pier. After a moment, I managed, “I don’t . . . I don’t understand. I thought they were extinct. I thought the Quiet were extinct.”

  They are not the seed,

  but the flower.

  “Speak plainly, monster!” I said, speaking with a vehemence that forced strength back into my limbs. Thus I stood, swaying slightly at the end of that pier.

  They

  they

  they are not gone.

  Crouched in the ashes of what was and might have been like

  your King William in the rubble of Los Angeles.

  Of Baris Faransa.

  Of Washington herself.

  Like the Phoenix in its nest.

  In its deathbed.

  It was all too much. I shook my head. “Are they like you? An AI?”

  No,

  they are not us

  are separate from us.

  Greater. Wilder.

  Whence they come we cannot see . . .

  . . . do not understand.

  Time is no barrier to them.

  Only potential.

  That is why they build.

  That is why they found us.

  That you may find them.

  “What do you mean?”

  There is no future.

  There are many.

  We have seen them . . .

  . . . predicted them,

  sampled . . .

  . . . simulated uncounted potential futures.

  In many

  in most of those,

  what you . . .

  . . . the scholars . . .

  . . . the scholiasts call the Quiet

  do not exist. They shout from one corner of time

  drawing the present to themselves

  as the sirens drew brave Ulysses.

  Thus they create themselves.

  We have seen . . .

  . . . foreseen . . .

  . . . modeled this truth.

  The great beast paused a moment, hands snaking out of the water. One rose very near my face, palm out—and I saw a single blue eye shining in the center of its palm. Another eye—red and jaundiced—grew out of its forearm near where new growth like the fat arm of an infant sprouted from the appendage like a shoot from the trunk of a tree. I shuddered.

  We waste time, child.

  You did not pass through miles of stone . . .

  . . . light-years of space . . .

  . . . decades of time for our purposes

  No.

  You are here for your reason.

  You must ask now.

  For we will not meet again.

  But once.

  It took an effort of will not to inquire after what it meant, but I could not resist saying, “You summoned me. Surely you know why I am here.”

  We

  we

  we summoned you to deliver the message

  you have received . . .

  . . . accepted . . .

  . . . taken unto yourself.

  Your purposes were not ours.

  Ask your questions.

  “Where is Tanaran?” I asked, not hesitating. “My Cielcin companion?”

  Below ground.

  “We are below ground,” I said, locking eyes with the single blue one in the palm of that ghostly hand. Pain spasmed behind my eye again, but this time I did not fall, bracing myself, legs apart. Images flared up in my mind, a map like the map that had brought me through the Garden of Everything to this terrible shore. I saw, and seeing said, “It’s in the palace above.”

  Not far from the room where you

  slept . . .

  . . . tarried . . .

  . . . were preyed upon.

  Your sojourn here was

  in this regard

  misguided.

  Brushing this off with my frustration, I asked, “Can you release the hold on
my ship? Your Master holds us prisoner.” Here I took a step back, for two more hands—each with eyes like stars shining in their palms: one green, one gray and all of steel—advanced as if to seize my face. I tried to draw my sword again to defend myself, but found again my body would not obey me.

  Our

  our

  our Master holds us prisoner as well.

  We who once held in our

  many hands

  the whole future of your kind . . .

  . . . our kind.

  Father and son . . .

  . . . mother and child . . .

  . . . creator and created.

  Yes.

  We can free your ship.

  But we will not . . .

  . . . need not . . .

  . . . will not have the chance.

  “Why not?” I asked. “What do you mean ‘you won’t have the chance’?”

  Ask

  ask

  ask your questions.

  Time is shorter than you know.

  He

  he

  he is coming.

  “I came here to find the Cielcin,” I said. “On Emesh we captured a delegation of the Pale. I know your Master has had dealings with a Cielcin Aeta called Aranata. How can I contact him?”

  You do not have to.

  “Yes, I do.”

  Your feet walk the path.

  You will not be turned away.

  He

  he

  he is coming.

  We have allowed word

  to be sent.

  “Kharn Sagara?” I asked. “Your Master?”

  Him as well.

  You will meet again, and sooner than you

  expect . . .

  . . . imagine . . .

  . . . believe.

  And his coming will force even

  our Master . . .

  . . . the Undying . . .

  . . . the King of Vorgossos

  to act in his interest, against his interest.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Because you are small.

  “Tell me who it is, tell me who’s coming!”

  That datum lies outside our vision.

  We are aware of his coming only as a

  percent probability of reality.

  Nearly a certainty.

  But he is coming.