Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “I don’t know what to do!” I said for the millionth time.

  “You can’t do anything,” Valka replied, tone sour. We had been down this road before. “I can’t open the door. There’s no other way out, and even if there were, we’d have to fight our way out through Earth-only-knows how many levels and through an army of those SOM guards.”

  I was pacing then, my injury faded and energy restored. I’d taken the bandages off my arm, but the tunic sleeve was still slashed and crusted with blood, and I recall I picked at it as I marked out the length of the room. “There just . . . has to be something I can do.” I caught myself looking around, as if expecting some window or lever I had not seen before, tucked away in some corner.

  “Hadrian,” Valka said, opening her eyes. She had been sitting cross-legged on the floor, her hands on her knees. Reviewing some memory or set of data in her mind, I did not doubt. I envied her her implants. They were a kind of escape. I stopped my pacing to look at her, one hand self-consciously covering the gash in my left sleeve. “Sometimes there is nothing you can do. That . . . thing in the water said the Cielcin were coming, did it not?” I was forced—reluctantly—to admit that it had. “Then wait.”

  I stood there a moment, eyes still casting about for an exit that was not there.

  At last I relented, and lowered myself to the floor opposite her. When the silence stretched to its breaking point, I asked, “Do you think Captain Corvo is gone?”

  Valka did not answer at once. She wasn’t looking at me, was tracing the lines of her tattoo where they made a triple spiral on the back of her hand. She stopped moving, cradling her tattooed hand in her plain one, and said, “I hope so.”

  “You hope so?”

  “Better that than still here, no?” she asked. “If I were Otavia, I’d have jumped out-system at the first opportunity.”

  “Assuming Sagara released the hold on the ship.”

  She picked at a spot on her jodhpurs only she could see. “Assuming Sagara released the hold on the ship.”

  I tried to imagine what it must be like for Corvo, for Pallino, Switch, and the others. I suspected no word had been sent to the Mistral, figuring that any man who left his guests to languish in a waiting room for weeks at a time would not bother to send a message to the ship. Short of what Switch and the others must have told them when they returned thence, they had no notion of what had transpired. They knew of Kharn, but not of Brethren or the fact that—if the daimon intelligence was to be believed—the Cielcin were coming.

  Understand: I dwell on this because Valka and I spent months in that room, though it seems to me only an instant in remembering. That enclosed space encircles time and memory with it, compresses it so that the passing of weeks—which seemed as eons to experience—remain for me as little more than a single memory that I might hold, examine, and . . . discard. Those constant and never-fading lights, that puddled floor, those miserable ration bars, and that toilet more miserable still . . . stand in a corner of my mind smaller than that cell itself.

  Calvert had come upon the stage and departed, and so too the beast with many hands, and though I struggled with the mystery of the Quiet and the apocalyptic vision that had been given to me, I found that with each passing hour these . . . high matters retreated from my world. So deep underground, the vanishing stars and the smoke of a thousand worlds seemed far away, and the war too. The unheard voice telling me that I was a soldier seemed easy to ignore.

  “What would you do?” Valka said, speaking up for the first time in a long time. “If the galaxy were at peace and you could do anything you wanted?”

  We had had several conversations like this since our imprisonment began . . . talking of little things, of ourselves and our histories. I looked up from where I’d been scratching an image of Tor Gibson in the soft concrete with a nail I had found. The wall to its left was similarly covered in images: of my father, my mother, of Crispin and Devil’s Rest. Demetri and his wife were there, and Sir Olorin, Pallino and Jinan and Switch, too. Even Bassander.

  “Go to athenaeum, like I wanted to,” I said. The words were autonomic, like breathing. They came of themselves, like a prayer. I stopped scratching in Gibson’s left eye and studied it a moment. I was thinking about my vision—the version of Gibson I had seen there, walking with his brass-headed cane along the cubiculum of Demetri’s ship. I heard a voice, my voice—like the dry croaking of ravens, it seemed to me—say, “No.”

  “Hmm?” I heard Valka moving behind me, soft boots on hard stone. “Then what do you want?” she asked. I heard an echo then, Kharn’s voice asking Tanaran the same question.

  What do you want?

  “I wanted to be a scholiast,” I said, emphasizing the past tense. “Now I’m not sure. I know I’ve said it before, but Otavia wanted me to join her. Turn mercenary. But I’m not sure . . .” Here I turned, setting the nail aside and leaning so that I rested with my back against my mural. My hair had grown in the months of our imprisonment, so that it fell past my jaw and almost to my shoulders. “In the dream, the . . . the Quiet told me that they wanted me to be a soldier, but that isn’t what I am.” Looking up at Valka, I found her smiling down at me. “What?”

  She shook her head. “You are one.” Valka shifted her weight from one foot to the next.

  “Excuse me?”

  “’Tis what you told the children, you know?” she said. “When we fought Calvert the day we came down here. That girl Suzuha asked who you were, and you said: I am a soldier of the Empire.” And here she affected so uncanny a reproduction of my tone and manner that I had to look away.

  When I had mastered the impulse to laugh or to deny her mockery, I said, “You know, Jinan wanted me to retire to Ubar with her, take up her family’s spice business.”

  Valka barked a laugh. “You? A spicer!” She snorted. “You can’t be serious.”

  I was glad then that I had not said it was my idea, that I had volunteered to retire to Jinan’s family holdings while she finished out her term as a soldier of Jadd. Perhaps she was right to laugh, but all the same I said, “What? It’s an honest life!”

  Still smirking, Valka said, “You’re not a spice peddler, Hadrian—I don’t know what you are—but you’re not a spice peddler. You’re . . . more.” Here she trailed off, taking in my handiwork where it stood scratched into the bottom yard or so of a stretch of wall. I felt suddenly self-conscious—knowing that my work and all its imperfections would be recorded by her perfect eyes in her perfect memory—and so I looked down at my feet instead, feeling at once naked and vulnerable. “These aren’t as good as your usual, you know?”

  Never a simple compliment—and yet there was a warmth in her tone and a smile I missed in my studious examination of my own boot toes. Despite this, I felt blood flood my cheeks, and I turned to the wall, running a hand across the clustered figures of Gibson, Bassander, and Siran. “I . . . I’m not used to drawing on walls! And the concrete’s not—well, I’m not used to it!” When at last I looked back at her, I saw she was biting her lower lip to keep from laughing, and then—in a sense—we weren’t in a cell anymore at all. Aghast but not angry, I leveled a finger at her. “You . . . you were winding me up!”

  She did burst out laughing then: a high, clear sound like the ringing of bells that rebounded in that grimy, low-ceilinged place. “’Tis not exactly difficult, now is it?”

  When at last she finished laughing I said, “I’m really not, though.”

  “Not what?”

  “A soldier.”

  Valka did not argue. She often argued, but there were times—times when she believed herself to be beyond all disputing—when she did not condescend to argue. Why should Minerva argue with the unwise? She only shrugged and—walking backward with light steps—seated herself with her back against the wall.

  “Then what are you?” she asked, and shook her head as she did so, eyes narro
wing in confusion and not in scorn.

  Recalling an earlier conversation, I answered her: “A good man?”

  But it was only a question. I did not know.

  “No, really,” she said, and leaned forward in a way which told me she had abandoned pretenses. “What would you do if you could do anything?”

  It was my turn to shake my head. “I’m not sure I have that choice anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  I could hear the Quiet speaking in my memory, speaking in Gibson’s voice. We are sending them you. It took time to shuffle off the weight of that memory, but at last I answered. “There’s work to be done. Good to be done.”

  “But you could be free,” Valka said. “You could come with me instead. If we get out of here. We could go to Judecca, see your Simeon’s tomb, meet the Irchtani. We could visit Rubicon, Ozymandias, Sadal Suud. Wherever we wanted. We could try to find this . . .” She struggled over the word, not because she could not pronounce it, I think, but because Valka knew her perfect memory frightened people and disconcerted them, and so feigned imperfection the way a tumbler feigns to fall only to make a cartwheel of it. “This Akterumu.”

  “I’d like that,” I said, and saying it knew it was true. “I would, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Besides the walls of this cell, do you mean?” I smiled in spite of myself and cast my eyes about that low and narrow chamber. “But I’m not sure freedom is a good thing. Or good enough.”

  Valka tipped her head, pushed a fall of unwashed hair back from her face. “Black planet! What the hell does that mean?”

  Sometimes we say things and do not understand them. In doing so, like Dante, we step off the path and enter into a dark and dangerous new world. There, our lies and wrong turnings swallow us like the sands of the desert. The world objects, or other people do, and we are left desolate and alone. But one need not know Truth to speak it. Truth is, and may be found as readily as disaster and by the same process. One need only put one’s finger on it, or one’s foot in it.

  “It’s only . . .” I struggled to marshal my thoughts like soldiers scrambling for rank and file at the horn’s call. As was so often the case, I felt a piece of myself hand up the words from someplace deep down, and replied with Gibson’s words, “Freedom is like the sea.” It was another of Imore’s aphorisms, taken from the Book of the Mind.

  Valka propped her chin on her hand and leaned forward. “I say again: What the hell does that mean?”

  “Just something Gibson used to say to me,” I said, and stretched my legs out on the floor before me, no longer really mindful of the cold press of the cement through the fabric. “Imore wrote that to be truly free is to be like one who is adrift on a raft in the middle of the sea. One can sail anywhere, in any direction . . .” I held out a hand to her, palm up. “But what good is that by itself? You’re in an ocean, no sight of land, no knowledge what the right course might be. You can do whatever you like, maybe, but if you make a poor decision, you’ll drown.”

  “But ’tis a terrible analogy!” Valka said. “You wouldn’t just go anywhere. I doubt you’re much of a sailor, but if you were you would know how to steer your way to land.”

  “Ah! But I have no water! No food!” I said, playing on Gibson’s terrible habit of complicating the plot. As a boy, I had hated the practice, for it seemed always unfair to me that he should add new details to the story right after I’d been so certain that I had outsmarted him.

  I took a positive delight in it then, and smiled as Valka scowled, saying, “’Tis changing the rules, that!”

  “No,” I said, “it’s illustrating my point. Pure freedom isn’t so good. You need constraints. You need to know which way to sail, you need to know how far you can sail with whatever meager supplies—abilities—you have.” Here I looked pointedly around the cell. “Just now . . . that’s not very far.”

  “So you’re saying freedom is a bad thing?” she asked, eyes narrowing. I could see her working herself up to a sneer, could hear the word twisting on the air two seconds hence. Anaryoch. Barbarian.

  I laughed at her instead, hoping to wrong-foot her long enough to get another word in. “Of course not! You think I like it in here? That I liked being trapped in Count Mataro’s palace? Or in my father’s house? No, no. I only mean that you can be too free. That’s chaos. You have to have a goal to aim at and to orient yourself to. Imore says the properly lived life is one which draws the best path between that goal—who you could become—and who you are today, but that this is accomplished by sacrificing certain freedoms. By making choices.”

  Valka was shaking her head now. “Why could you not just answer the question?”

  I had only a smile for that question. “I ran away from home, you know? I could have gone anywhere, done anything. I chose the athenaeum. Now, I never got there, but . . .” I faltered, for saying those words aloud conjured images of what the Quiet had shown me: the stars changing outside the Eurynasir’s windows, Demetri and his crew vanished into thin air. Shaking myself, I said, “I never got there, but when I chose to become a scholiast, I sacrificed everything else I might have been. I made myself less free.”

  “’Twas not the point of my question, Hadrian.”

  “I know that,” I said, and looked down at my boots. “I do. I don’t mean to be difficult.”

  Valka’s faint smile returned. “I suppose if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be yourself.”

  “I’m just not sure I can do anything anymore,” I said. “I made that choice . . . and I paid for it. And now this . . .” I waved a vague hand, as if in doing so I might encapsulate everything I had done since the Cielcin landed at Calagah and every year of the war by that gesture. “I think I have to see this through.”

  The doctor turned her face away, as if in doing so she could hide her bemused smile. But I had seen it all the same. “That there?” she said, rubbing her tattooed hand again. “’Tis why you’re a soldier.”

  “I don’t know . . .” I said automatically, unconvinced. But through the sudden silence I remembered—or else heard again—the words of my vision: I thought you were a soldier, they had said. We need a soldier.

  We grew quiet then, and for a time I returned to my work carving Gibson’s aged and leonine visage into the wall. I felt Valka’s eyes on me all the while, but felt no irritation in that gaze. We were trapped, after all, and as far from the ocean of chaotic potential that Imore described as it was possible to be. Or so it seemed. There are always choices, and it is ofttimes precisely those limitations—those un-freedoms—which show them to us.

  “You haven’t done me,” Valka said.

  I looked back over my shoulder to where she sat against the far wall, buried in the folds of my greatcoat as though it were a blanket. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Drawn me,” she said, and inclined her head to the wall. “You’ve done practically everyone else.”

  Turning away from her again—to hide my expression more than anything—I said, “They aren’t here to criticize me.”

  The Tavrosi woman sniffed, though whether in approval or derision I cannot say. “You would let criticism stop you?” I heard an edge in that bright voice. Mockery? Criticism itself?

  No, I realized, with that slow foolishness that is the hallmark of men everywhere. She’s playing with me. I was glad then that my back was turned, for surely the blood must have drained from my face at the prospect and thought. Suddenly the cell was no cell at all, but a stage, and I the poor player meant to strut and fret his hour upon it. To perform and be judged. I hefted the nail, weighed it in my palm.

  “All right,” I said, and set to work.

  CHAPTER 47

  ONE VILLAIN AND ANOTHER

  THINGS END. EMPIRES, KINGDOMS, stars. Even the terms of imprisonment end, though I think each prisoner knows his cell longer than he knows his whole lifetime. The schol
iasts and the Chantry both teach that all things end. That in time the very stars shall flicker and fade like the coals of an untended fire. And so at last after months of neglect—a period whose length I scarce recall—the heavy door to that cell ground open on mechanisms old as the Emperor’s ancestral palace on Avalon.

  It was not Kharn Sagara who stood in the doorway, or any of his clone children.

  It was not even Calvert.

  It was Yume.

  “If you would both stand and come with me, please. The Master has instructed that you are to be brought to him.” Behind the golem stood six of the blank-faced SOMs, their facial muscles slack as corpses.

  Valka dozed, her body pressed against mine—back-to-front—for warmth beneath the shelter of my coat. Gently I waked her, and gently offered her my hand as I stood. She refused it, as she always refused it, but accepted my coat when I offered it to her instead.

  “What’s happened?” I asked, hand clutching the shard of eggshell in my trouser pocket as though it were an amulet. “What’s changed?”

  The golem’s head swiveled on its clockwork neck, single eye glowing red within its ring of gold filigree. “I am instructed to provide no details regarding your summons. Only to bring you directly.”

  “Directly?” Valka said.

  “Directly, madam,” it said, and gestured that we should move out into the compound again. Valka hung back, holding my coat tight about herself. I took the lead then, not arguing, but allowed myself to be shepherded from the cell, Valka just behind. Though we were marched between twin lines of SOMs and led by the whirring automaton, I felt Valka and I were alone. Like Orpheus, I feared to look back, for to do so would be to see the undead faces.