Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  I set myself to exploring the room, and it was then I found our grim toilet and the grimmer crate of ration bars. It felt good to walk around, and though I paced like a lion in its cage I felt a modicum of warmth bleed into me. What water there was to be had came from a truly ancient sink. The water was bitter and oily—not quite saline but with that unpleasant aftertaste that said it had been saline. I tried not to think of the black ocean and of Brethren wallowing in its depths.

  “Hadrian!” Valka called, and at the sound of her voice I returned, hurrying down the long and narrow chamber. “What’s this?” She held up her palm for me to see. I stood puzzled a long moment, unsure. She held a chip of white stone, rough about the edges and sharp. I stared at it a long while, unable to ascertain just why it looked so familiar to me, or why the sight of it sat like lead shot in my guts. Valka frowned up at me and asked, “’Tis some sort of tile?”

  I took it, unable to shake the sense of significance—of meaning—that moved in me.

  And then I realized.

  “That’s not possible,” I breathed, words little more than whisper. I had grown too used to saying those words, that day of all days.

  “What’s not possible?” Valka asked.

  It weighed almost nothing, and yet I bore it with great strain, as though it were some insect I feared to crush in my clumsy hands.

  “It was in the sanctum,” I said, turning it over. “In the cradle. In my dream.” For a moment, I thought I heard again the baroque chiming of the music box in my ears—that lullaby for a child I had not seen.

  Valka stood then, my coat tails nearly dragging the ground, for she was shorter than me and narrower of beam. “But what is it?”

  “It’s a shell,” I said, prodding it across my palm with a finger. I said the words with such conviction. “A piece of it broke off when I touched it in the cradle, I . . . I must have put it into my pocket when the vision crumbled.” I laughed then. “Listen to me: I’ve gone mad.”

  She moved closer to get a better look at the thing in my hand. She was very close then. I could sense the warmth of her in that cold room. “You’re sure ’tis what this is?”

  “What else could it be?”

  “Any of five million different things.”

  Ah, Valka. Ever the skeptic. Still I shook my head, and with tense jaw replied, “I know what I’m saying.” The substance of it was a color brighter than white, so that it made my chalky hand seem red by comparison. Snowfields I have seen—unploughed and untrammeled by feet for a thousand times the life age of our Empire—that were not so white as that pure substance. Indeed I fancied that some alchemist in the forgotten deeps of time—or indeed in the deeps of time yet to be—had extracted some divine essence from some higher world to make that thing I held. Whiter than white. White itself. “It’s as white as the stone at Calagah is black.” I realized that I had spoken before I’d thought, and so surprised myself.

  “’Tis your professional opinion, that?” Valka asked, a glimmer of the steel in her tone behind its velvet scabbard.

  “I don’t have a professional opinion,” I said, “but I’m not wrong.”

  “No?” Valka took a step back. I was unsure if she mocked me or merely prodded me along.

  I was a long time in answering. I’d no notion how long Valka and I were to be locked in that dank and frigid place, and I had no stomach for a protracted campaign against the woman. She could believe me or not, but I had no stomach for mockery. Not anymore. But I would not argue. I knew what I knew.

  “It’s true,” I said, and closed my fist around the white fragment. “It’s all true. There was too much in common between what Brethren showed me and what I saw in Calagah. I don’t understand it, but I think that what Brethren said must be true, and that whatever power reached out to Brethren was the same that touched me then.” I could feel the edges of the bit of shell cutting into the flesh of my palm and eased up, half-expecting to find blood welling up there. “What am I supposed to do, Valka?” Looking up, I found her staring at me, her face . . . utterly unreadable. “They said I was supposed to fight.”

  Her hand found mine, seized me by the wrist. Our eyes met, and she said, “We are fighting.”

  CHAPTER 45

  THE APOSTATE

  THE LIGHTS NEVER WENT out, and so the days and hours blurred, destroying any concept of time. As in the vestibule, my rhythms slipped, and I felt an anguish and confusion that was only worsened by the unrelenting chill of that place. Valka fared better, for it seemed the neural lace which ordered her gray matter and mind kept track of the passing of time. In time, I came to sleep when she slept, or tried to. My dreams tormented me, filled as they were with eyes and grasping hands, but Brethren did not return to ply my dreams. I wondered if Kharn Sagara had ordered it to silence. Or perhaps it was that with its message delivered the beast wanted no more to do with me.

  By the third day of our imprisonment, I’d grown to loathe that miserable cell. By the fifth, the thought of ration bars was a misery. By what felt the tenth or perhaps the ten thousandth day of our imprisonment, there came a pounding at the door to our enclosure, and a moment later that heavy portal ground open and Calvert appeared. The Exalted wore a heavy cloak over his metal frame, obscuring his horrid body and the new pair of legs he’d had installed. These were of brushed steel—not yet matched to the uniform black of his arms and torso.

  “Are you both comfortable?” the chimera crooned, lacing his metal fingers together. His human eyes shifted from Valka’s face to mine, and he smiled his predatory smile. “You’re lucky they had a use for you. You would not have enjoyed the sorts of things my Master does with intruders like yourselves. No indeed!” He stopped, lingering a moment in the doorway, as if taunting one of us to try for an escape. Calvert licked his lips, looked me up and down where I crouched against the wall. “We might have had such fun together. Can you imagine? Ooh, the things I could make you do to one another. Do you know?” He paused long enough to throw his cloak back over one shoulder. “If I disrupt the function of your primary motor cortex, I can turn your own hands against you? They’ll act of their own will. Tear the eyelids from your face and gouge out your eyes . . . break your own fingers. Toes. We used to use the procedure on protestors back in the old days. Anarchists.” By the end, he sounded almost wistful, and took a few delicate steps into the room.

  His feet were like claws, like the talons of some raptor.

  “Not so brave, are you? Not without your sword,” Calvert said, looming over me. “I haven’t had mine in . . . ooh, four thousand years now.” He smiled, and conveyed his meaning by that smile. “I haven’t missed it.”

  Not rising, I said, “You were a cathar.”

  “I started my work in the Emperor’s High College,” Calvert said, and reached up beneath his overhanging rib cage and drew out a small black box. It was all I could do not to recoil. He held the thing like a firearm, like the torturer’s knife. “But they did not appreciate my work, you see. I did a turn researching for the Chantry’s Choir, but I was never a cathar.”

  “Murderer,” Valka said. “Butcher.”

  “Your woman has fire, Marlowe. She should watch herself. I would love to cut her open for her delightful little implants.” He tapped his temple with a finger. For the first time, I noticed the single, blue-eyed drone that had entered with him, and stared. I could not decide if Sagara’s presence was comfort or threat. Comfort because he might be there to curb the excesses of his vicious servant, threat because he seemed likely only to watch. “Of course . . . so much of the poor dear is likely stored on those things that if I were to rip them out she’d be little more than a husk. A drooling little doll.” He turned his smile on me. “Would you like that?”

  “What do you want?” I asked. “What’s to be done with us?”

  “Nothing, more’s the pity.” Calvert’s eyes skated over Valka. Black-eyed as he was, he
had the appearance of some ravening beast. I thought of Naia’s eyes, permanently wide, and shivered. “That was to your second question, of course. The Master heeds Brethren, and if Brethren says you’re to be kept intact, then intact we will keep you.” He hinged the box open with fingers blacker still. In the near silence I could hear the servos whine in his metal hands. “Pity really. You’d have made fine SOMs. Although that hideous tattoo would have had to go, darling.” He craned his neck as he said this last bit, the better to address Valka. He looked away for one second, and seeing my chance—forgetting my place—I rose.

  Nearly every part of the man was machine, and I had only my hands.

  I caught Calvert in the chin with an uppercut backed by all my weight rising from the floor. His head snapped back and he staggered, taloned feet biting into the concrete. He laughed wildly, and clutched his face, shaking his head to clear it. There was blood on his mouth where he’d bitten his lip. Laughing, he said, “My, my! There is fire in the both of you!”

  The chimera’s hand moved faster than I could track. Had Calvert not pulled his punch at the last moment, he would have broken the left orbital of my face. The back of his metal hand bit into my cheek, and I toppled like a statue pulled down in protest.

  “Pah!” Calvert scoffed as Valka hurried forward. “Only human.” At this he plucked an ampule from the inside of the padded box he carried and stood over me. One clawed foot closed over my wrist, and he held me there, talons biting into flesh. “Still. Good enough.” He stooped over me like a vulture over the carcass of some mangled fox. I tried to struggle away, and his free hand shot out—arm extending to nearly twice its length with a metallic pop to pin my other wrist. “Don’t try it, girl!” Calvert snapped, looking up to where Valka had risen to her feet. Even where I lay crucified to the floor, I could see the tension in her, the way her shoulders tightened to pull her arms up in preparation to strike. “The Master says I’m not to harm you. Very well. Very well indeed.” Here he released my wrist—arm snapping back to its proper length—and seized me by the chin. Still grasping my wrist with his foot, he lowered the ampule with his other hand and pressed it to the deep cut in my cheek. “This will not hurt a bit, I’m very sad to say.”

  I could not speak, and tried to get my feet under me to lift the chimera from me, but his body was all steel and weighed more than Atlas could bear to shift. From the corner of my eye I saw the white ampule turn red as some matrix within that glass phial drank of my blood. I tried to shout, to curse, but the iron hand on my jaw kept my mouth shut. My nostrils flared and stretched, sucking air as Calvert said, “Perhaps it will please the Master to wear your face, mm? To replace the children you murdered. Or maybe I’ll keep one of you as a pet. Let it service our other clients like sweet Naia. Would you like that?”

  “Let him go!” Valka said, and to my astonishment there was no fear in her voice. I tried to look at her, though but for a vague presence I could but hardly see her where I lay pinned.

  “You’re next, dearie,” Calvert said, and straightened. I saw him replace the ampule in its padded box. He smiled at her, all teeth, his foot still clamped around my wrist. I sensed those talons could have my hand off if Calvert had a mind, and did not struggle. Never since my first night shivering in the rains of Borosevo had I felt so powerless. I did not know what power I had, or what choice. I could not see all of Calvert’s face, beneath him as I was, but I sensed that he drank in the sight of Valka, for his tone was sanguine with indecent glee. “Ah, were I still a man.”

  “Let her go!” I said, mirroring Valka, though my voice broke.

  Calvert looked down on me, and there was nothing human in those sable eyes, and imitating my own manner, replied, “Oh, I don’t think so. I want the full set.” He pivoted smartly.

  I did not feel the kick until I awoke.

  When I came to it was to the drumming of half a hundred tortured blood vessels. My head ached as though I had been the unwitting target of a Colosso pugilist with hands of studded brass. Valka sat beside me, pressing a rag to my face. She smiled when she saw that I was awake, though there was but small joy in the expression.

  “What . . . happened?” I asked. The sound of my own voice and the movement of jaw and tongue were an agony, and I gave up making any further sounds.

  The Tavrosi woman cradled my head—I realized it was in her lap—and said, “He kicked you. Knocked you out.”

  “No,” I said. “I know. Mean . . . after.”

  Wordless, Valka angled her jaw to reveal two bloody pinpricks—like the marks of some insect—glowing angrily just above where the mandala of black lines and whorls stopped halfway between her collar and her ear.

  “Oh.”

  I tried not to dwell on what that meant, on the fact that a renegade Choir researcher had a sampling of mine and Valka’s genes. The Choir—that source of the Chantry’s power: the college that produced the plagues and poisons by whose properties they kept the systems of the Empire in hand—the Choir was a thing of dread. How had one of that august number, however fallen—come to this place? I wondered at that until my head threatened to split, and I relaxed.

  “Valka, I’m sorry. I should never have brought you here.”

  She sniffed. “You would never have gotten here without me. Or did you forget?”

  Chastised, I closed my eyes. The light pained me, and I thought for sure that I must have a concussion. I reminded myself that Valka was far less troubled by the sort of blood ministration practiced among the Extrasolarians than I was. She did not see the horrors that might be done with her genes as a violation of her selfdom. Still, I remembered Calvert’s threats, remembered Naia and the tree of life in the room where we had first encountered the Exalted former priest, and I knew.

  There are things worse than death.

  It is hard to die.

  Far harder to live.

  And harder still to live a slave, and whatever else they were—me or a part of me or made only in my image . . . or not me at all—whatever horrors Calvert brought forth from that single dram of my blood would be his slaves, or slaves to the commandments writ in their own genomes. How did Brethren describe it? Levers pulled by our genes. Some shadowed corner of me saw Valka’s golden eyes wide and wild and Naia’s—and saw my own. Through the pain I shivered, and might have screamed.

  “’Tis no good dwelling on it,” Valka said, as if she knew my thoughts. “’Twill be all right, we’ll be fine. That fucking monster would have done far worse to us if he’d been allowed. We’re safe for now.” There was a confidence in her tone, a gravity, and it soothed me. I did not question her, though I had my doubts. I felt cool fingertips on my face. The brush and scrape of nails. “I think you have a concussion.”

  I grunted in affirmation.

  “I found an old medical supply kit in back. I think this place used to be some sort of garret. ’Tis mostly useless, but the bandages were good. He cut your arm.”

  With great difficulty—my head throbbed and I nearly vomited—I craned my neck to see. I realized Valka had covered me with my own coat, the one I’d loaned her. My tunic sleeve was slashed and stained, and beneath it the gray linen shone. My left wrist. A weak laugh escaped me, and I regretted it. More scars for that poor arm. The mark of Calvert’s talons would join those of the cathars’ lead sprinkler and my cryoburned thumb.

  “What?” Valka asked, trying to steady me where I lay.

  “It’s always the same arm!” I raised the offending hand, laughed again despite the pain.

  I think Valka smiled, but I remember her hand tightened where it lay on my shoulder. “Get some rest. We’re not going anywhere.”

  Something very important occurred to me, and I said, “It’s cold.”

  “I know,” she said, and leaned her head against the wall of our cell. “I know it’s cold.”

  “No, I mean you.” I tried to tug the coat off myself and
pass it back to her, but Valka seized my hand. Far more gently than Calvert had, I noted.

  In a voice barely more than a whisper, she said, “I’m fine. Here, have some water.”

  CHAPTER 46

  THE LONG COLD

  WHATEVER DAMAGE CALVERT’S HEEL had done had dented my concept of time as surely as it had dented my skull. I slept much, often with Valka near at hand. We spoke little, though oft times when I rose through fog and back to consciousness, I thought I heard snatches of her singing. The lyrics were in Panthai and in an accent I could not understand, but they sounded fevered and angry to me: the grinding sound of rebellious youth long tempered by experience to something comfortable as old leather. I do not think she knew I heard her. I do think she would be embarrassed to know I had.

  Days passed thus, with only the taste of false cinnamon in ration bars and oily water to drink. Time slipped and flowed, stuttered like water over rocks, and slowly the pain in my head went away and my blurred vision sharpened. Without my terminal, without my pencils and journal, I resorted to holding the piece of shell I had found in my pocket. I turned it over in the stark light, watching the shine of it. There were no ripples, no highlights, and the color of it was so pure that the blemishes and irregularities of its broken edges vanished against that purest white. The mind rebelled to look at it, as if it were a hole in perception itself: something the mind could not make sense of.

  But at last I was myself again, and could stand and walk and shout.

  Calvert did not return, and Valka and I spent long hours discussing what we had seen and learned and what it all meant. I am not convinced that Valka truly believed me, but the strangeness of that bit of shell went a long way to quieting the tension that I worried lurked beneath so many of our conversations. It was only when the shock of Brethren and of Calvert began to ebb that the despair set in. We had lost. Lost Tanaran. Lost our one link to the Cielcin. Lost our connection to Captain Corvo and the Mistral—might have lost Captain Corvo and the Mistral entirely. I had lost my place in the Empire: my house, my ring, my posting with the Legions, everything. I’d even lost my sword.