Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Your time here will end.

  You will have your meeting.

  Your chance.

  It is inevitable.

  If you survive.

  “Tell me where to find the Cielcin!” I demanded.

  With the Master.

  “Hadrian!”

  I tensed. I had forgotten the world but for the beast in the water before me. Its eyes and questing hands, swollen and scabrous. Brethren had said its kind used human nervous tissue for processing substrate. I imagined, or perhaps I sensed—in the same way that the beast itself could sense my thoughts—that below me and beneath all that water lurked a mass of brain matter and nerve and the pieces needed to sustain it. I thought of the way deep-sea creatures are crushed by their own weight when pulled onto dry land, and shivered.

  The cry came again, shriller now: “Hadrian!”

  Valka bounded down the seawall from the place of the broken arch, abandoning Ren and Suzuha, whose shapes were lost to me in the darkness.

  He is here, child.

  Brethren’s voices were like the chanting of some dusty chorus.

  “Valka!” I turned, splashing halfway back along the pier. “What is it?”

  She stopped where the waters began, unable or unwilling to go further. Dark hair streaked her face, and her eyes glowed in the dark. “We’re not alone!” Somewhere on the shoreline, unseen and long forgotten, I heard Calvert laugh.

  The lights went out. The crooked lamps, the fireflies, even the gleam of the pyramid high above. I was blind then, blind as I had been when Brethren pulled me below the waves, though I knew I yet stood at Brethren’s side. What light remained came from the soft glow of my terminal bracelet and from Valka’s machine eyes. I fumbled for my sword.

  A wet hand seized my wrist, gentle but firm.

  Your weapon.

  You do not need it.

  We

  we

  we will speak to him.

  The Master.

  Blue lights like stars gleamed above the dike and about the shape of the arch, brighter than the vanished fireflies, so bright I half expected the blue points of lasers to trace their arcs across us. So slim were their beams that they illuminated almost nothing, though I made out Valka’s Galatean profile by the faint glow there.

  “I warned you,” came that horrible, deep voice, “that the tree of knowledge is not that of life.”

  A light flared up in the darkness.

  And there he was.

  Kharn Sagara stood beneath the broken arch, left hand wrapped around one of the crooked lamp posts. His golden robe hung on him heavy as the vestments of any judge, and there was nothing in his eyes whatever. “Yet here we are.” He raised a hand, and two of his eye drones descended, moving toward Valka and myself. “Children!” he spat, voice issuing from speakers in the little drones and not from his own lips. “I invite you into my home! Feed you! Give you shelter! Ply you with wine and servants! And this is how you repay me? Two of my children dead, another two kidnapped! My chief geneticist abused! My palace violated!” With each staccato burst his anger rose. The lights on the drones flared, became coherent beams of light. My shirtfront began to smoke, and I braced myself, knowing the shot would come faster than I could move to activate my shield.

  I shut my eyes.

  Bang-bang!

  Two dull explosions resounded in that echoing place. I flinched, knowing I was dead.

  But there was no pain, nothing at all save the sound of something wet splashing into the water. I opened my eyes, and by the light of the returning lamps I saw the stumps of two bloody arms rising out of the water.

  Brethren’s arms.

  They must have snatched Kharn’s drones out of the air and crushed them, breaking the containment on their microfusion cells.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Kharn demanded. “Brethren, explain yourself.”

  On the hill behind Kharn, I could see the blurred shapes of his SOMs standing at attention like so many candle-thrown shadows. Behind and about me, wet hands slapped the pier, gripping the edges of that lonely spar of black stone.

  They are required.

  Valka drew closer to me, and I half-raised my arms as if I could protect her from both the monstrous AI in the water below and the Undying with his army of undead soldiers. I reached for my sword, but found that when Brethren’s telepathy had compelled me to put the weapon down I had not returned it to its clip, but had placed it in my pocket. In my haste to draw out my sword, my fingers brushed something hard and sharp-edged in my pocket. Confused, I let it lie and drew out my weapon. Waited.

  “Required by whom?”

  There are externalities.

  You will require them

  if this place . . .

  . . . your empire . . .

  . . . you yourself

  are to survive what is coming.

  “Explain.”

  The silence that followed could have lasted no more than three seconds, but to me it felt like decades. Kharn and his slave machine must communicate mind to mind, I realized, through whatever species of implant the King of Vorgossos had in his own brain.

  What was shared, I cannot say, but when what was done was done, Kharn turned and with his own mouth shouted, “Bring them!”

  The SOMs advanced, marching in lockstep around their lord, dun uniforms muddy in the gloom. I drew my sword, conjuring the blade as I slipped into a low guard. There were five of them.

  “Enough with the schoolyard heroics, Lord Marlowe!” Kharn Sagara shouted. “Come away from the water, and neither you nor the woman will be harmed.”

  “Her name is Valka!” I snapped, still defiant and disbelieving. “I can kill five of your puppets, Sagara!”

  Kharn Sagara did not answer, unless it was to send five more of his SOMs marching forward.

  Surrender, child. You

  you

  you will not be harmed.

  Before I could argue, my sword fell from nerveless fingers, and I staggered. I might have fallen from the pier if three white hands did not rise to meet me. My sword fell into the ocean, the highmatter dissolving. A fourth hand plucked it out and slipped it gently back into my coat pocket as the SOMs advanced and seized us. As they carried Valka and me away, Brethren’s words came after, floating like mist above the wine-dark waves.

  The price of life is death.

  With what will you pay, Halfmortal?

  At the time, I thought it a quotation, and paid it little mind. I did not know it was my name.

  Or would be.

  CHAPTER 44

  UNDERSTANDING

  WE DID NOT HAVE to go far.

  Kharn’s SOM guards marched us toward the low concrete structures that clung to the rocks below the seawall like mushrooms. Ren and Suzuha had said there was a geothermal power station that fed the pyramid and the old Mericanii installation up above. I expected heat, but the room they packed us into was cold almost as the greater cavern outside. Our breath frosted the air as we were hurried inside, and though I shouted at the soldiers, neither they nor the Master who moved behind their lifeless eyes listened.

  They stripped me of my sword, naturally, and of my pencil kit—for the scalpels, I assumed—and even my terminal, small good it would have done me. Valka was similarly stripped of her weapons, though the nature of her praxis was such that it could not be taken from her without killing her.

  They left without a word, and the heavy metal door ground shut.

  And we were trapped.

  Alone.

  Though the water had long since run off my clothes, my hair was still soaked from my black baptism and my experience with the monster, Brethren, and I shivered, collapsing onto a bench beside the door to our cell. How long I sat there I cannot say, staring at nothing, not taking in my surroundings.

&n
bsp; “What the hell was that?” Valka asked. From her tone I knew it was not the first time she’d asked me.

  I shook myself, trying to shake off the memory of Brethren and its grasping hands. “I’ve no idea.” I clenched my hands, distracted as I often was by the hoop of cryoburn scar that circled my left thumb. “No, I . . . sorry,” I coughed, then punched myself in the chest a couple times to try and clear it. “It said it was a daimon. One of your AI.”

  “’Twas no AI,” Valka said, half-turning away.

  “It . . . they said they were made of sinew. Or . . . well, they implied they were made of”—I felt my voice falter, and the next word emerged as little more than a breath—“people.” I found suddenly that I could only look at my hands, only doing so recalled those other hands, paler than my own, their flesh mottled and scabrous with new growth, and I closed my eyes entire.

  The sound of Valka’s boots on the concrete floor tapped against my awareness, and I heard her say, “Neuronal tissue, yes. That makes sense.” I looked up at her. She was hugging herself, head bent, hair covering her face. “It makes for better processing substrate than dry computers.”

  “Dry?” I asked, then, “Oh.”

  “You know, my neural lace is made of my own cells, except the shunt,” she explained, and here tapped the back of her head just at the base of her spine, where I knew the delicate porcelain node lay hid beneath her red-black hair. She hugged herself again. “But that . . . thing.”

  My tongue was very dry, despite and perhaps because of the memory of the water I had swallowed. “It said it was one of the Mericanii.”

  “Impossible!” Valka said shortly, dismissing the notion with a hand. “They were all destroyed.”

  I was shaking my head. “This place is ancient, Valka. Look around you.”

  We both did, then, for the first time. The room into which we’d been placed had the look of some ancient guardhouse or dormitory, though what beds there once had been were long since gone. All was drab concrete, cracked and crumbling, and where here and there the floor was worn and uneven from the eons’ passage of too many feet, water puddled. Scant light shone its sickly silver, making the whole place flat and uninviting as the hall of some ill-kept sanitarium. There were no windows, though in the dark outside I could not be sure what we would have seen. Later exploration would reveal a poor toilet—little more than a hole in the floor with a seat over it—and a crate of old ration bars hard as shoe leather. Such was to be our only fare for the long weeks of our imprisonment.

  After an unsteady quiet, I said, “It is possible this place is . . . or was some sort of Mericanii colony. A fort, maybe.”

  “From the Foundation War?” Valka shook her head. “Only if we traveled farther than we thought. Those Mericanii colonies weren’t much more than fifty light-years from Old Earth system.”

  “I’ve no idea how fast the Enigma could travel.”

  “But thousands of light-years?” Valka drummed her fingers against her upper arm. “The Exalted’s warp drives would have to be . . . well, orders of magnitude better than anything I’ve ever heard of.”

  I had nothing to say to this, and so—for once in my life—said nothing. You might imagine that I could not shake off the horror of those grasping hands and the sound of those ragged voices on the water, but it was the other part of my experience, the vision Brethren had showed me, that lingered more strongly. I never achieved the perfect clarity of recall that the scholiasts boast of, nor was I ever such a one gifted with the clearest of memories. Perhaps that was what first drove me to my art. Whatever the reason, the memory of my vision beneath the waters of Brethren’s sea has never left me. I can recall the falling of each raindrop as I battled that Cielcin lord, every petal of the white-flower gown my princess wore as she sat at my feet. I can recall every death I saw myself endure, and feel the way my body shook beneath the murmur of those unheard words as clearly as I see the busts of the ancients in their niches above the desk where I write this account.

  They are of porphyry, that stone most prized by Justinian of old. They are—in fact—the same statues I saw in my vision: the chiseled faces of scholars long dead. The obligatory sculpt of Imore is here, placid and wide-eyed beneath the bust of Zeno. There are Hypatia and Lovelace, and the patron of the chapter here: old Peterson with his knowing smile. There is even a bust of Gibson. Not my Gibson, but his namesake: an especially gaunt-looking fellow, not unlike myself, with a severe widow’s peak and pointed chin that made him look like nothing so much as a kindly if befuddled vampire.

  Looking at them now, in my exile, I see them as part of the vision Brethren shared with me, and hear myself say, “Valka . . . it, they—the AI, I mean—did you hear what it said?”

  She shook her head, leaned against the wall. “No. I was too far away.”

  “It told me about the Quiet,” I said. And explained.

  All the while, I watched Valka’s face, waiting for a trace of the old scorn and condemnation to flicker in those bright eyes, to tighten a muscle in that sharp jaw, to wrinkle her nose. They never did. Her face was unreadable as those of the statues watching me as I write these words. She did not interrupt or grow cold. Only stood there unmoving while I felt myself shrink beneath her gaze.

  “It sounds mad, I know.” I ran hands through my still-damp hair. The water smelled foul. I smelled foul. Like the storm drains in Borosevo in the midst of plague. “You really didn’t hear any of it?”

  She shook her head again. “I was too far away.”

  “You must think I’m mad,” I said. I could not look at her.

  Valka let out a long, almost whistling breath before saying, “Hadrian, after what we just saw . . . I think we’re both mad.” Without looking, I could hear the smile in her voice. I smiled too, in spite of all that I had seen and the direness of our situation. Whatever else we were, we were not alone. “But . . . the future?” Valka said. “How is that possible?”

  I cleared my throat. “When we were on the Enigma, Switch and I went exploring. We got separated, and I found this sort of . . . carnival sideshow. The sort the Eudorans set up when they come to a new world. It was run by this Exalted with skin like rough plaster. He showed me his crewmate—I think they were mates, at any rate. The other chimera was damaged. They said he’d encountered some sort of alien microorganism that altered his perceptions. They said he could . . . could see time. Like it were some other sort of space. And so they were using it as a kind of fortune teller.”

  All the while I looked at my hands, certain that Valka would laugh. Would scorn me. Would turn away in disgust and stony silence. She did no such thing. Instead she said, “Was it the Deeps?”

  My head snapped upward. “You’ve heard of them?”

  Her lips quirked. “Hadrian, I’m a xenologist. Of course I’ve heard of them.”

  “They’re real, then?”

  “I’ve never seen one, but . . . yes, they exist.” Here she lowered herself to the floor, sitting with her legs apart, knees rising almost so high as her shoulders. “They’re on about a dozen worlds, all fairly close together in a cluster in the Upper Centaurus. There are signs of an ancient civilization on those worlds: a few pieces of what we think are statues, an old building or two buried in the mountains. But it’s been so long there’s almost nothing left.”

  “Not the Quiet, then?”

  “No, they’re much older. We don’t really know anything about them, except that they left the Deeps.”

  “Leopards, lions, and wolves,” I repeated, and shrugged my coat around me.

  Valka arched one eyebrow. “Excuse you?”

  “Just something Brethren said.” I waved it away, asked, “What are they? The Deeps, I mean.”

  Valka shrugged. “Some kind of microorganism, like you said. A kind of living computer, maybe? They’re supposed to have the power to change life on the atomic level. You hear stories
of people who wade in wanting to be young or beautiful—”

  “—or to see time?” I interrupted.

  “Or to see time,” Valka agreed. “You think Brethren was like that?”

  “Only in that they could perceive time,” I replied. “But I’m not sure. It’s just all so strange.” I saw my own head looking up from the ground at my feet, felt the rain lash me as I drew my sword to face the lord of all Cielcin—the lord of all Cielcin? That made no sense. The Cielcin were scattered, divided, without central authority or power. Earth knew how many disparate clan-fleets then sailed between the stars. They had no leader, and yet I knew what I had seen.

  We must be.

  “We must be,” I murmured.

  “What’s that?”

  “Just . . . something they said.” I leaned my head against the wall at my back. The concrete was cold, and with my wet hair I began to shiver. I was glad at least that my clothes had dripped dry. “What do you think Kharn will do with us?”

  Valka pulled her jacket tight about her and tucked her chin. “Leave us to rot, likely.” She crossed her arms. “Until he needs us—imbal sida, it’s cold!” Without thinking, I stood and swept the greatcoat from my shoulders. I still wore my black tunic beneath, and passed the jacket to Valka without a word. She looked up at me, a crease forming between her brows. “Are you sure?”

  Chafing my arms to warm them, I gave a weary nod, then took a moment to button the side closure of my tunic all the way up to the throat. It wasn’t much help, but it was something. “Brethren said Kharn would have a use for us,” I mused, watching Valka pull my heavy coat around herself. “So I don’t think we’re in any immediate danger.” For a moment, I considered seating myself beside her, but I thought better of it—fearing Valka would resent such closeness—and resumed my spot on the bench.

  We were quiet then a long time, neither speaking, neither knowing what to say. I might have slept—so exhausted was I—but I feared to sleep, feared to dream whatever dreams would come in the wake of that day’s revelations. I feared, too, the eldritch creature that slumbered in the depths. I half-imagined its snaking hands would slip through some crack in the walls or floor and find me, or else its words would slither again into the dark recesses of my brain.