Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Speaking from what I suspected was no more than petty revenge, Kharn Sagara said, “No. We shall take my ship and rendezvous with your Imperial flagship.” The Obdurate, I decided he meant.

  “What about Otavia?” I asked—implored, really. When Bassander did not answer me, when he only stood there like a holograph recording left paused and flickering, I shouted, “What about Captain Corvo and the Mistral? Switch? Pallino?” The legionnaires seized me by the arms, and I recalled—though I thought until that moment I had forgotten it—the way Father’s men held me as I watched Gibson whipped those last days at Devil’s Rest. “Don’t ignore me, Lin. Don’t you dare ignore me!”

  “Hadrian!” Valka interjected. “Calm down!”

  Kharn Sagara’s laughter filled all the world, and though I strained against the legionnaires who held me, I could not break free. Valka—ever the more sensible—offered her wrists without resistance or complaint. A third legionnaire had to hurry forward to assist the two holding me, and though I broke free a moment and drove my elbow up into the softer place beneath the armored jaw of one man, I was subdued in short order. The twin bracelets of the manacles slammed together when the legionary triaster—denoted by the red paint on the left side of the blank white mask of his helm—pressed a button on his gauntlet.

  The Undying spoke in his voice like the voice of God, saying, “You have your fugitives, Captain Lin. Now for the matter of payment.”

  How Bassander shrugged off the preternatural strangeness of Vorgossos I cannot say. I have seen men for whom art has no virtue, men to whom the grand works of genius are little more than furniture. Such men might behold even a relic of Earth’s vaunted Renaissance and shrug, and ask why anyone would pay a steel bit for a scrap of oiled canvas. Bassander was just such a man, and perhaps it is the province and advantage of such men to be deaf to the spirits that fill just such places as that hall.

  He gave the throne room a perfunctory looking-over and said, “We agreed payment was to come when you secured our introduction with the Pale, lordship.”

  I could not imagine that Kharn Sagara was a man much used to being denied, and yet he sat there with his usual chthonic immobility, watching Bassander with a hundred eyes. I knew full well that Sagara might have killed Bassander Lin then and there, might have killed us all and so spared himself the difficulty, were it not for the fact of his and his world’s exposure. Bassander had him over a barrel—or so we all believed, not then knowing the Undying’s inhuman motivations.

  Before Bassander could move to have Valka and myself escorted away, Kharn Sagara spoke. “A moment.”

  At a hand from their captain, the triaster and the legionnaire who held me halted, turned me about. Sagara watched me with one of his inescapably long pauses, black eyes searching for something in my face. When he spoke, it was in his own voice, chest implants whining to lend breath to his words. “I do not know what my pet said to you, Lord Marlowe, but know this: they are never wrong.”

  He meant it to unsettle me, believing I had received some prophecy of doom—as indeed I had—and yet I stood amidst the unfolding of a piece of that prophecy, and despite the binders at my wrists and the implacable chill emanating from our Captain Lin and his faceless entourage, I felt again that sense that I was in the proper place, on the proper path. Bassander had come, just as Brethren had said someone would, and he was bringing the Empire in his wake.

  So I stood a little straighter, as if there were no manacles on my wrists at all, and said, “Good.”

  CHAPTER 49

  TWO TREASONS

  RATION BARS AGAIN, HAVING traded one cell for another. At least these did not taste of cinnamon, nor the water of salt and oil. And I had a proper toilet and shower, though I was this time alone. My ruined clothes had been taken from me and returned mended and laundered. My gaoler—a thickset woman with the shaved head and serial tattoo of an enlisted man—smiled kindly as she returned the garments, saying that such was “a courtesy for a gentleman.” A small courtesy perhaps, and one for which I was appropriately grateful. I had grown used to the rotting fish stench of those black waters, and so found its absence as offputting as new shoes.

  Thus began my imprisonment aboard the ISV Schiavona, an Imperial interceptor temporarily under the command of Captain Bassander Lin. Far from the longest imprisonment I have endured, and certainly far from the least comfortable. The Pharaoh, I later learned, and the Balmung, had been folded into the Obdurate’s massive holds. That terrible dreadnought was bound for a point in space—I knew not where—far from the light of any star, and we were bound to meet it.

  I noticed little of this, noticed little at all . . . for I had seen. Vorgossos had tormented me long enough, but that dark world, on that occasion, had one last horrible surprise. Like the Enigma of Hours before it, Kharn Sagara’s black ship emerged from the night of space like a nightmare darker still. Strapped into a couch in the back of Bassander’s shuttle as we sailed from the orbital platform to the Schiavona, I beheld it in all its terrible glory.

  And I shivered, for I had seen it before. Twice.

  Once in the vision Brethren had shown me—and once before—in Calagah.

  The Schiavona had moved into a parking orbit beneath the great bulk of it, and so we passed frightful close to its hull. What hand had fashioned it—and in what age—I cannot say. It looked as if it was wrought of iron, or else chiseled from black stone. No sign of plastic or of ceramic, nor scrap of adamant. Terrace upon terrace, spire upon spire it rose out of the unending night and sank into it, as though some city of castles rose from the flat of a mighty blade hundreds of miles long. Next to it, the black and brass needle of the Schiavona seemed like a lonely kayak on the river as a mountain range marched by.

  And standing on the hull, massed like the totem army of a buried emperor, were a billion graven forms: statues of men and gods and angels—no two alike, but united by the intelligent design of a single guiding will and intention. They stood upon the terraces, about the spires, they reached forbidding hands out into the darkness. If the great palace and pyramid beneath the world below were terrible, that ship was more dreadful still. Only the vast worldships of the Cielcin fleets were larger, for I sensed that even the Enigma would have seemed a dwarf beside it.

  I had not spoken, but observed the warding gestures and whispered imprecations of the soldiers on board our shuttle. Valka, too, had been silent.

  Bassander had not noticed or cared. He saw that I was delivered to my cell and left to contact Knight-Tribune Smythe with confirmation that we were in custody and for further orders. I had only nodded, knowing that those orders would include a nasty surprise for the stolid officer.

  The truth.

  So when I heard the door cycle in my little brass and black-walled cell, I looked up with a knowing smile—and felt it smash to pieces against the vaulted roof of my soul. Bassander Lin had not come for me.

  Jinan had.

  Three times now I have walked the walls of the cloister here—in the deepest hour of the night—remembering that face. Reader, I have seen battlefields that affected me less, harmed me less. Indeed, to look upon that once-beloved face and see . . . someone else . . . was worse than looking upon the scarred face of Rustam, the battlefield at Senuessa, any of the corpses I have seen. It was as though she were herself a changeling, such as Naia, as if some other will moved the muscles beneath that once-familiar face. The set of her jaw was changed, and her lips—compressed by the effort of restraining her speech—were not the lips I had kissed. The azure ribbon remained, threaded through the braid she wore like a diadem about the crown of her head.

  But I had to speak, or some part of me I did not control had to. “Jinan,” I began. She halted, eyes going hard as chips of marble. “Jinan, I’m sorry.” She did not speak, only glared at me. Gone was the incense softness of that look, gone the velvet that covered the steel of her. Not breaking eye contact, she reac
hed into her belt and drew out a message crystal of the sort used to carry private or classified messages between devices. This she inserted into her gauntlet terminal. A projector lens pinned to the front of her blue Jaddian officer’s kaftan spat blue light into the air between us. It tracked with her movement as she crossed her arms, drifting slightly higher. The holograph showed a familiar set of seals: the Imperial sunburst, the copper eagle of the Legions, the crossed swords of the 437th Legion above the painted fist of the Obdurate. Each flashed in sequence, a three-dimensional image containing deep fractal patterns that flagged the transmission as authentic. I knew what followed. I had requested it before I kidnapped Tanaran from the Balmung.

  Knight-Tribune Raine Smythe’s face appeared, rendered ghostly by the bluish cast of Jinan’s holograph projector. Unlike Jinan, she looked precisely as I remembered: snub nose, wide-set eyes, indelicate, her dishwater hair cut short above the rough, plebeian face belied by the faint tracery of white scars hinting at the genetic and surgical augmentations that marked her for a patrician. Yet there was a strength in her and a surety that was like stone, like the Earth herself. That sense that here was one who could not be moved. I had known her but for a short while, and yet I knew her for a leader of men, and would have followed her.

  “These orders are for Hadrian Marlowe and Hadrian Marlowe alone, acting in his special capacity as my emergency conscript under Article 119 of the Great Charters. He and his foederati are to disregard the order to regroup with the fleet at Coritani and to make for Vorgossos, per his original orders, with all due speed and by any means necessary. Repeat: he is to disregard the order to regroup with the fleet at Coritani and to make for Vorgossos per his original orders.”

  I read a story once—or else Gibson told it to me—about one of the great land empires of Old Earth’s Golden Age. The Kushan, perhaps? The Khmer? Or was it the Russian? It was said they conquered all the lands and tribes of mythic Asia, from the western mountains all the way to the eastern sea. That they did so not because their emperors ordered it, but because the frontier was there—brimming with barbarous peoples and lesser nations ripe for conquest. Those legates and strategoi of ancient days who had the command of those border forts knew they would die in their provincial commands unsung unless they delivered new territory and riches to their imperial masters back home, despite the fact that those selfsame masters had specifically ordered that there be no such territories taken nor riches seized. The empire was large enough, they believed, and the frontier tenuous and difficult to maintain.

  Such were we.

  Raine Smythe might hang for this—and I with her—unless it succeeded. I longed to know who was responsible, who had called Bassander and the fleet, bringing destruction down on me and the knight-tribune, on Otavia and everyone who had helped me betray the Empire to save the Empire. If I could wring the coward’s neck . . .

  When Raine’s holograph finished and vanished, leaving only silence and Jinan’s acid stare, I waited, sitting with my back pressed against the wall of my cell. I have never been a man known for my caution, nor indeed—though it shames me to admit it—for my tact. Despite this, I sensed that it would be disaster for me to try and speak then, and I held myself to stillness, thinking of my father—of Kharn Sagara—and the way they used time to draw words from others.

  It was perhaps three full minutes before Jinan spoke.

  “You think you are a clever man, Lord Marlowe, hmm? You think it is funny, this thing you’ve done?” So it was to be Lord Marlowe, then. I was not surprised, but the sting of it cut like an assassin’s sica. She took a couple steps nearer to me, such that her head blocked the cell’s single overhead lamp. With practiced slowness, she uncrossed her arms, let them hang at her side. “You found Vorgossos. And we found you.” The faint smile that pulled at her lips reminded me uncannily of Bassander. “Is this what you wanted?”

  I didn’t answer. I did not know what to say. Yes? No? Not like this?

  Lightning quick, she seized me by the hair and slammed my head back against the bulkhead. I felt my skull ring and swore as the slow pain followed the crushing smack of impact, swore again as her fingers tore at my hair as she let me go. “I said, is this what you wanted?”

  Certain men believe it is never appropriate to strike a woman, even when she strikes first. I am not such a one, though I respect their dedication to their principle. I had been a myrmidon in Colosso, and a thief and street fighter before that, and so have a principle of my own. If someone strikes you: win. And yet . . . and yet I had loved Jinan. There are places in me where I love her still, even as I sit here writing by the light of my hosts’ oil lamps. I could not strike her. I never could.

  I held up defensive hands instead. I would not be struck again. Sense told me that to answer yes or no to her question was disaster, and so I measured my words carefully before speaking, and said, “I am glad that we have a chance now, but no.” She swung at me. I blocked her with an elbow, said, “No. This is not what I wanted.”

  She jabbed at my face. I swatted it aside. “Then what did you want?”

  Somewhere in the exchange I’d found my feet, and seized her wrists before she could strike me again. “I told you what I wanted,” I said, strangely calm, thinking of Ubar and her family’s spice business and the life of a country squire. Yet no sooner had I imagined it than I heard Valka’s mocking laugh.

  You’re not a spice peddler. You’re . . . more.

  But Jinan must have thought of it, too, for she folded, slinking back a step or two. “Why?” she said. “Why did you have to do it?”

  “You know why.”

  I thought she would strike me again, but whatever bar of iron had propped up her spine was gone, and she repeated, voice now very small. “Why did you have to do it?” I longed to embrace her, to apologize and to take away what part of the pain I had caused that was in me to heal. But I sensed to do so—to touch her at all—was wrong. I had lost the privilege of her, and was not sure if I would ever regain it, and so decency, chivalry argued caution and distance. Not to impose.

  “No one else was,” I said. Only I hadn’t really done anything, had I? If Bassander hadn’t followed me to Vorgossos, hadn’t used the threat of force to coerce Sagara’s cooperation, Valka and I would still be rotting in that cell beneath the world. Everything would have failed. I know now that such thinking is foolishness. If I had not gone to Vorgossos, Bassander would not have followed, and we would not have found ourselves aboard Kharn Sagara’s terrible ship. We would not have met with Aranata Otiolo. Things would never have changed. Thinking of Bassander reminded me of my present concern, and I asked, “Who called Bassander?”

  “What?”

  Taking a step back from her, I said, “I know someone got a telegraph to the fleet. Was it Otavia?”

  To this day, I am not sure what changed in Jinan then. For a moment, I thought I had broken through her rage, past reflective barriers like the mirror-foil that protects the delicate instrumentation of satellites. I thought we were past shouting and blows. But when Jinan looked up again, her eyes were hard as flint once more, and I was glad I had retreated. Perhaps if I had embraced her and not spoken all might have been well. Perhaps if I kissed her instead, or let her strike me . . . perhaps then all might have been different.

  Her soldier’s posture returned, and the steel in her with it. She thrust out her chin and spat, “Is that all you are caring about?” She left me no space to respond. “Really? You want to know who sold you out? Is that it? Hadrian, you left three of our people dead on that hangar floor! You kidnapped a political prisoner from an Imperial battleship and gave it to the Extrasolarians—I don’t care if you were acting on Smythe’s order or not. For all I know you planned the whole damn thing! It’s got your stink all over it!” I could see the way she clenched her fists, the olive skin there white as my own, and prepared myself for another flurry of blows. They never came, or when they did
they were only words. Three words that cut me more deeply than any I had been expecting. “It was Switch.”

  “What?”

  It wouldn’t scan. I felt as if I’d encountered some writing in so poor a hand I could not read it. Smythe’s orders or no, I had betrayed the Empire. I knew that. And I had betrayed Jinan, I knew that too. Two treasons, the second blacker than the first. I had suffered a treason in turn. It always seemed strange to me that the ancients conceived of treason as the blackest sin. Now I understood.

  Switch.

  My oldest friend.

  “No,” I said, and stepped back. “No, that’s not possible.”

  I had shown weakness, and so kindled a spark in Jinan’s eyes. She was lying, I told myself. She was only trying to cut me for what I had done to her. To us. She crossed her arms again, leaned forward. “Yes it is.” There was a vicious glee in her dark eyes like the light I had seen in the eyes of gladiators in Colosso. “He telegraphed us your location. He said you’d gone mad.”

  I would not look at her. I could not look at her. I could hear the sound of pale arms rising in dark water. Brethren had planned this. The daimon had said the Cielcin’s coming was inevitable. How could it have known that if it had not planned such a thing itself? But why? Because the Quiet compelled it? Because it strained against its master? For some reason stranger still? Surely it had permitted the message to get out, betrayed its master and its home to the Imperium. Who can guess the motives of gods and devils?

  Not I.

  I cannot often understand even the motivations of men.

  “It was Switch,” Jinan said, still viciously. “You don’t have to believe me, but it was.” Not looking at her, I could only see the face she had made in the Balmung’s hangar as she shot at me. Tears in her eyes.

  “I should never have come here,” I said, but it was not my voice. Rather some small creature within me—who had its residence near the reptile base of my skull—spoke through me.