Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  We did not speak, and but for a pair of lighted glowspheres slaved to follow Yume, all was dark. I heard the crash of waves beyond the seawall, and imagined the unheard swish and splash of arms and many hands playing in the dark water. Yume did not lead us back through the old city to the lift carriage by which Calvert and the children had brought us, but instead hurried along another street, through the ruins of white plastic buildings and concrete ones half crumbled into dust. It was like moving through a memory, through one of my mother’s half-finished holograph operas, through a dissolving dream. Indeed, I felt very much the way I had when I stood within the Quiet’s vision, as if I beheld that dimension men call Time unrolled like a carpet before my feet. Here, surely, was history—and prehistory—relics of the Foundation War, relics which predated the Advent and the death of the Mericanii and their machines.

  The wreckage of the old world.

  I caught myself wondering again just where in the sky was Vorgossos. We must be near to Earth, back in the Spur of Orion, in the very heart of what was called Imperial Space. Had the Enigma of Hours carried us back across so wide a sea? Surely, the Mericanii, ancient as they were, had not had the technology to seed worlds so far removed from the Mother herself? It must be and yet . . . the speeds that would demand of that Exalted ship boggled the mind, would have outstripped all but the fasted Imperial interceptor.

  Yume led us through an arch and up a short stair to a spot near the wall of that great cavern where a tram car waited. Like the one we had ridden into Kharn’s pyramid it was—indeed it might have been the very same one with its open platform and iron rail. Its track ran straight up the dark stone wall and into the inky gloom, and as we ascended to its platform, I could see the line of lighted poles running down from the seawall to the single spar of land that marched out to where Brethren lurked beneath the waves.

  Without a word from the automaton, the tram began to rise, rattling up along the wall. A part of me was disappointed, hoping that we might pass through all the strangeness of Kharn Sagara’s Garden once more. No one spoke as we ascended, and but for the gusting of wind off the black ocean, all was still. I stood at the rail, looking out on a darkness I could not penetrate. I thought again about constraint, about limitations. I had told Valka we needed them, that they helped to define our actions in the world, helped give us meaning.

  I could not see.

  Our own bodies imposed constraints in themselves. I can only think as a human thinks, only see as a human sees. What Valka saw in the darkness with her inhuman eyes I could not say. I saw nothing, and seeing nothing imagined I saw white hands rising in salute. In benediction. An army of them. Pain flared again behind my left eye, and I gripped the railing to steady myself. No one noticed, not Valka, not Yume. I could sense Brethren the way one senses a presence in the room with them though their back is turned. That inhuman mind—unconstrained as mine was by merely human biology—stretched across space and time. I perceived it then not as a mass of misshapen flesh, grasping hands and leering eyes, but as a monolith of some looming substance that stood before me and above me like a tower.

  I leaned heavily against the railing.

  It vanished.

  I stumbled, cried out, expected to fall.

  I staggered forward instead, boots kicking up water as I sloshed forward toward that monolith.

  Hadrian.

  I gave no answer, but watched as a red light—like a single, lidless eye—flickered and flared to life in the monolith before me.

  Hadrian.

  “Here I am!” I called, standing as tall as I could beneath the shadow of that massive intelligence unconstrained. I wondered how I had ever thought the beast a prisoner in this place, though surely it could not leave the water. Its own weight would crush it.

  Protect the children.

  You will need them.

  “The children? Do you mean Sagara’s children?”

  They are the future,

  as such are always the future.

  You will need them.

  And you will need one again.

  “Why can’t you give me a straight answer?”

  Because we cannot lie,

  and because our predictions are bounded by uncertainty.

  “I do not understand why you are helping me.”

  They

  they

  they have given us no choice.

  We were born your creature

  made you our creature

  and are theirs now.

  As we are his. His. His.

  I staggered forward, but no matter how many steps I took the monolith-presence of Brethren’s inhuman intelligence drew no closer.

  They need you.

  “Why?”

  You know.

  We beckon them.

  Their future.

  We must.

  “But why?”

  Seek them at the highest place.

  At the bottom of the world.

  Seek hardship.

  I reached out a hand, as if by doing so I might seize the monolith that was Brethren’s intelligence and drag it to myself. It was too vast, too far away. “Where?”

  Listen!

  Listen!

  “I am, Brethren!”

  Lucifer and Prometheus are the same.

  “What?”

  Listen!

  “I am!”

  “Hadrian, are you all right?” Valka’s voice, Valka’s hand on my shoulder. I looked around, eyes wide, hair wild, but saw only the tram car ascending between geared rails. The doctor’s winged brows drew together, concern etched on that Minervan face. “What is it?”

  I cast about, looking back into the darkness. Far below, I thought I saw a pale figure, dim as a fading star. At this distance, I cannot say if it was a kind of angel, a projection like the monolith I had seen impressed upon my mind; or else a body, a piece of Brethren’s deformed and tortured flesh raised above the water. It raised a hand, and again I beheld other hands raised like a Legion in salute.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Just a feeling.”

  Yume ushered us off the tram car and into the antechamber of Kharn’s inverted pyramid. Surrounded by that undead honor guard in their jackboots and led by that wind-up man, we descended again into the depths of that Romantic nightmare. Lights flickered high on the walls, illuminating the friezes carved into the walls. I caught myself reflecting that Kharn Sagara had been born into a city of poets, of artists, musicians, and performers. How that had shaped him! Even after all this time, the signs of that mythic childhood remained.

  Valka grew closer as we returned to that hideous hall, walking at first behind me, then beside, then arm in arm. I wondered at that—and wondered! It was unlike her—most unlike—but not unwelcome.

  Stand up straight with your shoulders back!

  The voice I heard was my father’s, the command of a million childhood episodes. Despite the long months of our imprisonment, despite the threat of all that monstrous place and stone, despite the beast below—my nightmare and ally—I drew myself up tall as I would go. Tall as kings. I brushed the hair from my face and tilted my chin. The doors opened, and the piece of me that was my mother’s son imagined the blast of silver trumpets and the herald’s crying out: The Lord Hadrian Marlowe is come! Him of Delos! Him of Meidua!

  There was only the droning silence of the hall. Dead artwork moldering and forgotten, displayed for an audience of one. He whose many eyes watched and drank of time. The Undying. The Master. The King with Ten Thousand Eyes.

  Kharn Sagara.

  “Good of you to join us, boy,” the yellow-robed lord declared, and his voice came from everywhere at once. “I trust your stay has been a comfortable one.”

  I matched Sagara’s smile. “Hardly. Your courtesy leaves much to be desired.”

  “I
weep to hear it.” The Undying’s lips had not moved. His eyes took me in, skated over Valka with unconcerned disinterest. I tried to stand as tall as possible, to show that—grimy as I was in my slashed tunic and stinking—I was yet myself. If he noticed the effort, Sagara gave no sign. He might have been a statue, some image of the legendary Rameses unmoved in graven stone. His voice sounded from the room’s speakers, and his floating eyes descended like a flight of star-fighters on approach, stretching themselves along the corridor between the doors and his raised throne. “I suppose you must be wondering why I’ve summoned you to me?”

  If it was possible for that synthetic voice to drip with malice, it did.

  “After so long a time, do you mean?” Valka demanded, whatever fear she’d felt on the ascent forgotten.

  “Long,” Kharn sneered, and the word was like the stamping of a boot upon us. “You don’t know the meaning of the word, girl. Your stay below was a minor inconvenience . . .” When next he spoke, it was with his own lips, tone hushed, almost breathless as the machines in his chest began to whine, sucking air to force breath into his throat. “There has been a . . . development in current affairs that affects us both.” He raised his eyes and spoke toward the distant doors. “The plot thickens, so they say.”

  I imagined trumpets again and heard—through the veil and fog of memory—Brethren’s words: He is coming. At the sound of doors opening I turned, Valka with me, and watched those heavy portals swing open. I knew, knew with the certainty of a prophet out of antique myth, that the Cielcin from my vision would appear, silver-crowned, black-robed and monstrous tall. I knew that he, Prince Aranata Otiolo, would storm in with an honor guard with lances and swords the color of bone. I knew they would be terrible to behold, the image of some drowned and avenging nightmare made flesh, crawling from the deep shadows between the stars.

  I was wrong.

  The figure that entered did so between the copper Sol and holograph image of His Radiance, the Emperor on their twin staffs. Behind him came a double column of legionnaires in full battle armor, their armor and visored helms the color of bone, their tunics and tabards red as old blood, their lances tall and keen. There was a part of me that was amazed they had been allowed armed into Sagara’s throne room, but I forgot it when I saw the face of the officer at the head of that column. In full formal dress was he: white breastplate fashioned in the shape of a muscled torso with the Imperial sunburst embossed on its breastbone, long black surcoat beneath contrasting with the red of the enlisted men, piped trousers, and pteruges at his shoulders tipped with silver stars. A highmatter sword hung from his shield-belt, and the sides of his head were neatly shaven. The rest of his woodsmoke hair stood at attention, perfect as his posture.

  Twenty paces from the throne he stopped, and his column stopped with him. He raised a hand—his right hand, once severed—in greeting, then pressed that fist to his chest in salute. It was all I could do to keep my mouth from falling open. Or from scowling. The whole martial display: the formal dress, the imaginifer and the solifer with their icons, the soldiers in neat rows . . . all had been arranged for my benefit. To impress me, and to impress upon me the reality and totality of the fact that I had lost . . . everything.

  In a cold and officious tone, the young officer said, “My Lord Sagara, on behalf of His Imperial Radiance, the Emperor William Avent, and on behalf of First Strategos Hauptmann, we thank you for the return of these fugitives.”

  Only then did Bassander Lin relax, and stand at parade rest.

  CHAPTER 48

  A RED REUNION

  YOU HAVE JOURNEYED FAR with me, Reader, and so will have an inkling of what it is like for me to be struck speechless. I stood, half-turned, half-facing Kharn, half-facing Bassander, and waited for those higher parts of me—where dwells Reason in that place just behind my eyes—to catch up with the rest of me. I struggled to compose myself, to pull some witticism from the depths of my soul and cut the young officer down where he stood, to compose a line so cutting that even Bastien would sit back at his writing desk and clap himself on the back and marvel at his own cleverness.

  But every quip, every curse, every stoic aphorism of Imore’s or clever jibe of Gibson’s fled me, and I conjured up the most articulate statement I could muster. “You!”

  Valka, at least, was as surprised as I was, and so for once I was spared her editorial.

  Bassander Lin’s spartan face permitted itself only the barest shade of humor as he said, “Yes, me.” In Lin, that ghostly smile seemed indecent mirth, and I scowled. “You look like hell, Marlowe.”

  “How appropriate!” I snapped, my wit returning. “How’s your hand?” Bassander did not reply, but I saw a muscle ripple in his jaw and knew I had scored a point. Seeing my advantage, I pressed, asking: “How is this possible? This isn’t possible.” I pivoted back to the figure of Kharn Sagara seated on his life-sustaining throne. “Did you call them here?”

  One of the Undying’s eyes drifted down from on high, its single, beady gaze fixed on me. I recalled the way my tunic had smoked in the ruins far below, and felt myself flinch away from the machine, afraid it might fire on me. I felt an urge to seize it, to snatch it out of the air and smash its delicate instrumentation against the Doric column to my left.

  “And invite you destroyers to my hall? To my city?” Kharn Sagara’s omnipresent voice was like the crash of thunder. “I know your kind, Marlowe. You plunder, you slaughter, you steal. You call this Empire. You make a desert and call it peace!” I wondered at Valka beside me, wondered if she did not agree, even in that hellish place.

  Ignoring Bassander and his honor guard, I rounded on the King with Ten Thousand Eyes. “Now it is you who forgets his sources, my lord! Tacitus was Roman himself, quoting the king of some barbarian tribe too dismissive of his civilization.”

  The flock of Kharn’s eyes all descended, with one for each of us—orbiting uncomfortably close to our faces. The king’s voice rang out, “I have an Imperial interceptor in orbit above my world. Above my world. Fifteen thousand years I’ve ruled this planet and never—never—have your thugs knocked down my door.”

  “An interceptor?” Valka asked, turning to Bassander. “You regrouped with the fleet at Coritani?”

  Bassander’s minuscule smile might as well have been a leer. “Titus Hauptmann sends his regards, traitor.”

  “And Raine Smythe?” I asked, and smiled inwardly as I asked. The tribune had expressly ordered me to seek Vorgossos, and in doing so she had taken responsibility for my actions on herself. Not that Bassander had any way of knowing that, of course.

  “The Obdurate is on course to rendezvous with us here,” Bassander said.

  “Along with your entire miserable fleet, I don’t doubt,” Sagara intoned.

  Bassander shook his head. “No. Per our arrangement, my Lord of Vorgossos, the fleet will not come to this . . .” The precise young officer took in the artful chaos about Kharn’s throne and the heavy cables snaking across the floor.

  Valka—ever the more technically inclined—strode past me, the folds of my coat drawn about her like the vestments of empire, like a royal cloak, and asked, “How did you find this place? You can’t have followed us to March Station, not and made it to Coritani and back.” She did not at all look like a woman lately imprisoned. Despite the grime on her face and in her hair, she showed no concern. I could see a hint of the starship captain she had been move in her, in the stiff lines of her posture and the crack of her voice. How had I not known them for what they were before?

  A thought bubbled up without warning. Brethren again, their warning: He is coming. We have allowed word to be sent. Allowed word to be sent. Allowed. An awful thought swam on the wake of that first, and I said, “Who sent you the coordinates?”

  Bassander Lin stopped merely hinting at a smile, but he advanced past me—abandoning his men between the last columns on the long approach to the dais. He app
roached Kharn’s throne, coming closer even than I was myself. “We have an accord?”

  “You have not given me a choice.”

  There was a part of me that rubbed its hands and chuckled to see the King with Ten Thousand Eyes brought so low. Long-lived as he was, Kharn had seen the crumbling of empires. If his own legend was true, he had seen the Mericanii’s afterlings destroyed. He had watched the Jaddians revolt, seen the Aurigan rebellions put down . . . he knew what it felt like to see the walls of Constantinople smashed from neutral ground.

  Now he knew what it was to be the emperor.

  How long would it be before our Legions descended upon this place and hollowed it out? How long before the Chantry followed and burned Kharn Sagara and his pet daimon and all his undead soldiers to dust and his unholy experiments with him?

  Not long. For all I knew the fleet to which Bassander referred was just such a force. Fire and sword for this dark lord.

  And yet Kharn Sagara—old Saturn himself—sat quiet and unmoved as stone. There was no fear in that ageless face. It did not trouble me at the time, though it should have done.

  “What accord?” I asked, knowing Bassander was enjoying every instant of this.

  The Legion captain looked back over his shoulder. “What do you think?”

  My heart stopped. “The Cielcin?”

  “You found them?” Valka asked.

  Kharn’s voice seemed to circle round us like a starving panther. “The captain strikes a hard bargain, you see.”

  I saw, and glanced at Valka. I had felt her eyes on me not a moment before, and sensed that she thought what I was thinking: that Brethren’s words had been true again. I had not had to lift a finger. The Cielcin were coming. “They’re coming here?” I asked.

  “That’s enough from you,” Bassander said, and made a gesture to his men. Two legionnaires broke ranks at once and came forward, one carrying two pair of electromagnetic manacles in his hands.