Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “It’s too late,” said Jinan, and I knew she spoke Truth. “You betrayed me, Hadrian. You betrayed all of us.” She did not strike me again, and I slumped so that I sat once more on the edge of the cot bracketed against the wall.

  “What’s to be done with me, then?” I asked, and realized I did not care about the answer. “The White Sword? Or does Bassander only mean to throw me out the airlock?”

  Only then did I look at Jinan. The spark of anger was there still, yes, but it was cooler now. Tempered by something else. Something worse: pity. I did not want her pity. I longed to throw it back in her face, to scream as she had screamed, to rage as she had raged.

  She shook her head, drew back toward the door.

  “Captain Lin is coming to speak to you,” she said, and pounded three times on the door to be let out.

  Only after she had gone did I realize that I was bleeding. That my lip had split where she had struck me.

  I hardly felt it, nor could I be bothered to wipe it away.

  CHAPTER 50

  THE DEVIL AND THE HONEST MAN

  “DID SHE DO THAT to you?” asked Bassander Lin from across the table, touching his face to indicate the bruises that had flowered on my own.

  Chained as I was to the interrogation table, I only nodded.

  The Mandari captain rocked back in his steel chair. His beetle-black eyes never left me. “She should not have done that. It violates protocol on the treatment of prisoners.” Highborn prisoners, he meant.

  “A courtesy for a gentleman,” I murmured, recalling the words my gaoler had used.

  Bassander took no note of the bitterness in my tone, said, “Quite so. She asked to see you and in deference to your . . . relationship I allowed it. I thought she might get something from you.”

  “Did she?” I asked, looking at my hands in their electromagnetic binders and not at the man across from me.

  “I did not think that she would hit you.”

  “Then you do not know women very well,” I said bitterly.

  The captain did not have a reply to that, but examined some holograph hovering beneath the black glass surface of the table. He sucked on his teeth, eyes wandering from the tabletop to the tangle of brass pipes bracketed to the ceiling. At length he said, “What happened down there, Marlowe?”

  I tried to rattle my manacles, but they held fast to the tabletop. “I don’t know what deal you’ve struck with Sagara, but you should be very, very careful around him.” Bassander did not look impressed by my warning. “He has a Mericanii daimon in his power.”

  Bassander blinked, but appeared otherwise unmoved. In another life, he’d have made a perfect scholiast, so controlled was he. “You’re serious.”

  “I lie less than people believe,” I said, leaning against the table, watching for a glimmer of understanding—of acceptance—in the other man’s face. When he did not reply, I pressed on, telling him what he needed to know. I did not describe Brethren, believing that without my explanation he would—as I had—imagine only banks of computer terminals and crystal storage. I did not tell him of my vision, or make any reference to the Quiet. I told him only what was practically relevant.

  “And you think this . . . daimon allowed your man to get word to me?”

  It was not in me to reply at once. Thinking of Switch just then was like biting into sand in an oyster. Like a slap in the face. I swallowed, said, “I think so. I can’t imagine how else Switch could have communicated with you. The Mistral was under remote control from the moment we disengaged from the Extrasolarian ship that brought us to Vorgossos system.”

  “But why would the daimon turn against its master?” Bassander asked. “I don’t understand.”

  To this I could only shrug. “I’d wondered at that myself, but I imagine the ancients asked the same question when their machines rebelled.”

  “Perhaps it thinks it can escape its prison when the Empire comes to destroy it.”

  “You really think Sagara doesn’t know you intend this?” I asked.

  Bassander shrugged. “Who is he to stop us? One planet against the Legions? I don’t like his chances.”

  “You underestimate him,” I said, and shook my head. “You don’t know him. You don’t know what he’s capable of.” In truth, I did not know all Kharn was capable of. “He knows you will move against him. For all we know it was he who allowed Switch to leak the location of Vorgossos to you.” Thinking about Switch sent a spasm of pain through me, and I shut my eyes for a moment, just long enough to marshal myself. “Have we docked with his ship?”

  The other man’s eyes wandered among the pipes on the ceiling once more, as if he expected to find some answer writ there among the brass and black sheet metal. “The Demiurge? Yes. We’re in one of her landing bays even now, en route for rendezvous with the Obdurate and your Cielcin friends.”

  “My friends?” I repeated, unable to keep the acid from my voice. There was a threat implicit in Bassander’s choice of words: the threat of the Inquisition and a charge of consorting with the inhuman. A threat he could carry out.

  “You’re a traitor, Marlowe. If it were up to me I’d have you out an airlock for what you’ve done. You defied a direct order from the First Strategos and from me. There is a chain of command and a protocol that must be obeyed. These are the Imperial Legions, Marlowe.” Bassander walked the line between quietude and rage with the precision of a Durantine clock. He never raised his voice, betrayed his fury only by the tension beneath his words and by the tense way he held his shoulders.

  I held my hands palms up. “I am not a legionnaire.”

  “The tribune conscripted you as her immunis.”

  “Yes,” I said sharply. “Her immunis. She ordered me to Vorgossos despite yours and Hauptmann’s orders. I obeyed.”

  “Did she also order you to butcher my men?” Bassander asked, raising his right hand. “Or to maim me, for that matter?”

  I felt the shadow fall across my face and—for the briefest moment—lost my composure. “No, of course not.”

  “They were good men,” Bassander said, and there was a gravity in his voice that drew my eye against my will to look him in the face. “My men. And you murdered them.”

  The Legionary captain stood, movements so rigid you might expect oak in him instead of bones. He looked down on me, eyes like lit coals. “What did you think was going to happen?”

  “What did I . . . ?” I pulled against my restraints, frustrated that I could not rise and face Bassander on his own level. I suppressed the urge to defend myself, resenting the other man’s posturing. “I found Vorgossos, Bassander. I found Kharn Sagara, the link to the Cielcin we were after, a hotbed of illegal genetics work, and a surviving Mericanii daimon. What do you mean, ‘what did I think was going to happen’? Where exactly did I fail to deliver on what I promised?”

  “You were in a cell,” Bassander sneered. “You failed, Hadrian.”

  I hoped that Bassander had not spoken to Valka at length or to Tanaran, hoped he did not know how right he was. Gathering the ruins of my pride to my chest like firewood, I said, “We were still . . . negotiating.”

  “Negotiating?” Bassander turned and walked toward the wall of the chamber, his image reflected darkly in the polished surface. “You looked like you’d been in that hole of yours for eons when Sagara brought you out. Don’t pretend.” He was fidgeting with his hands, the reflection of his face downturned, eyes narrow. “Was it really him?” he asked. “Was it really Kharn Sagara?”

  “I think so,” I said, “or maybe it was him. Once. How he’s managed to stay alive I don’t quite understand. He can . . . parasitize his own children, move his thoughts from one body to the next. Whatever he is, he’s not the Kharn Sagara in the stories, even if he used to be.”

  “Do you think he transplants the brain?”

  The blue light that shone behind
Kharn’s ear and the ears of his children—and of Naia—glowed from some dark recess of memory, and I looked away from Bassander. “Nothing so primitive, but I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine.”

  The captain’s fingers sketched the sign of the sun disc at his side, and after a moment Bassander Lin shook himself and turned once more to face me. “I don’t like having to work with such a one.”

  “What did you offer him? Besides the safety of his planet, of course?” I leaned forward, thinking of what Kharn Sagara had said at our first meeting. “You must have made a deal.”

  “That,” said Bassander Lin, “is none of your concern.” But there was a shadow on his face, and a drawn quality to his expression that concerned me quite a bit. The young captain looked half a skull as he added, “I don’t like this position you’ve put me in.”

  “I’ve put you in?” I repeated. “These were as much your orders as mine. Just because I wasn’t as quick to abandon my mandate as you doesn’t absolve you of responsibility. Knight-Tribune Smythe entrusted this mission to the both of us. We had a duty.”

  A muscle pulsed in Bassander’s jaw, and I sensed that if he clenched his teeth much harder they might all shatter in his gums. “You presume to lecture me on duty? You? Remind me, Marlowe, which of us abandoned his family in pursuit of his own selfish ambition? Which of us decided to play at soldiery rather than wed Anaïs Mataro as he was troth?” He raised his eyebrows. “Don’t. Lecture. Me. I came after you precisely as the knight-tribune ordered. I have brokered a deal with that Extrasolarian demoniac, and we’re going to meet with this Cielcin prince of yours. You are getting everything you hoped for.”

  “Not bad for a failure,” I said, and it was my turn to sneer.

  Bassander dismissed this casually. “You were saved by your friend William. He has more sense than you. He came to us begging for his life.”

  “His life?” I echoed.

  “He seemed to think your lives were all forfeit no matter what happened,” Bassander said, ice in his words. “That the Chantry would execute all of you for coming so near to machine daimons. He wanted to save himself.”

  I squeezed my hands into fists. He’d betrayed me. Something black and oily seethed in my guts, and I clenched my jaw to quit from cursing. “Coward.” He’d sold me back to the Empire, and why? Out of fear. And Earth only knew what might come of it. Had I not seen my own dead body along an uncounted number of those rivers that flowed into the future? The manacles seemed to grow tight about my wrists, and I shuddered, shoulders hunched over the edge of the glass table. It wasn’t just my life he’d put in danger—indeed it was my life he’d least put in danger. I was a nobile of the Imperium, a distant cousin to the Emperor and an asset in my own small way. But Otavia Corvo? Pallino? Crim and Siran and all the rest? They were mere foederati and accomplices in what I’d done. Even Switch himself might not escape punishment. At last I asked, “What’s been done with him?”

  “All your compatriots have been locked aboard the Mistral. Kharn Sagara has agreed to ensure they remain there until such time as your ship can be transferred to the Obdurate when we make rendezvous.”

  “They’re unharmed?”

  “For the moment.” Bassander turned back to face me, brushing his long coat aside as he placed hands on his hips. “Yes.” I saw he had retrieved his sword, the sword that once had been Admiral Whent’s, the sword I had taken from him when I struck off his hand. “Their fates will be decided by tribunal once all is said and done.”

  I swallowed, trying to get a grip on the black anger coiling within me, but it twisted away, and no amount of Gibson’s old teaching or Imore’s scholiast aphorisms could banish that embryonic fury. “And Doctor Onderra?”

  “She’s safe.” Bassander’s nose wrinkled in customary dislike. “She’s Tavrosi and so once this is done, we’ll release her. Her part in all this is not worth trouble with the Demarchy.”

  A sigh of relief escaped me, and only then did I ask the question which—while most pressing—seemed to me the least important. “What of myself, then?” I asked, and held up my chin as defiantly as I could. “Airlock?”

  Bassander did not hesitate. “If it were up to me, yes.” His eyes never left my face as he spoke. Ye Gods, he was a cold one. “But it’s not up to me. You’ve outmaneuvered me, because you’re right . . . you’re Smythe’s immunis. You’re her problem. Your fate lies with her, and with whatever Hauptmann will want done with her.” He made a face like he’d tasted something deeply unpleasant, like he’d bitten into a pastry and found oil instead of cream. “How you suborned her I’ll never know.”

  “You flatter me!” I said with equal bitterness. “Bassander, she’s a tribune of the Imperial Legions. I could no more suborn her than I can turn air into gold, and you demean her by merely breathing those words.”

  To my slight astonishment, Bassander looked down at his hands, mollified. “You’re right. That was not worthy.” He appeared to chew on some thought for a long moment—or perhaps it was only his tongue. “She’s ordered that you be confined to the Mistral with the rest of your miserable band.”

  I looked up sharply, struggling to contain my surprise. Not the airlock. Not even the brig. Stifling a smile, I said, “You’re serious?”

  “When am I not?” Bassander said, evincing a degree of self-awareness I had not known he was capable of. “She seemed to think it would be safer than keeping you on my ship. Sagara has the Mistral under lock and key.” Bassander squared himself opposite me, glared at his boot toe.

  Eager to move the conversation away from myself, I asked, “Is it just the Obdurate coming?”

  Bassander paused a moment before replying, as if unsure whether or not he could trust me with the answer to that question. “She has the Pharaoh and the Balmung with her.”

  “But the fleet’s not coming? Hauptmann?”

  The captain’s face was stone. “Not to a negotiation.”

  “There will be a negotiation then?”

  “Yes,” Bassander said shortly, retaking his seat.

  A thought struck me, and I asked, “I don’t suppose there’s a chance that word of this hasn’t reached Hauptmann? Smythe might have kept word to herself?” I dared to hope, and my words ran on ahead of me. “It’s what I would have done.”

  The Mandari officer drew a small black remote from his pocket, turned it over and over in long, blunt fingers. “The knight-tribune is not like you.”

  I had nothing to say to that. Bassander leaned in, still turning the remote over in his fingertips. The faint line of a scar gleamed white about his wrist where the hand had been reattached. The shine of it seemed at once very bright to me, brighter than the white lights of the interrogation room or the way they shone off the brass piping on walls and ceiling. I could see the gears turning behind his eyes, the archaic machinery of him working itself to some new statement. “If she dies—Raine Smythe, I mean—if Hauptmann executes her for your part in all this . . . you won’t see the scaffold or the block.” He looked me in the eye, and I felt the line of fire drawn once more between us. “Am I clear?”

  “As air,” I said. Bassander Lin brandished the remote before disappearing it inside a pocket of his coat. The electromagnets that held my manacles shut switched off and the binders fell open. Suddenly free, I massaged my wrists. “You’re letting me go?”

  “There are six men outside who will take you directly to the Mistral,” he said. “If you try anything, they’ve been given orders to stun you like a feral dog and drop you right back in your cell. Do we have an understanding?” I was not about to play the meek dog for Bassander, and so clenched my jaw. “Do we have an understanding?”

  “Oh,” I said, standing so that now it was I who looked down at him, “I understand you perfectly.”

  CHAPTER 51

  LOST TIME

  HOW VAST WAS THAT terrible ship? And how many secrets did
it hold?

  Bassander’s escort marched me down the Schiavona’s landing ramp and into the Demiurge’s hold, a hold so massive that I think all my home at Devil’s Rest might have fit within it, save perhaps the uppermost third of the tower of the Great Keep. I half expected to see clouds pooling near the gloomy ceiling when I looked up and felt the drear wind on my face. Behind us, the Schiavona did not look so out of place in that darkened hall. A brass and black-metal arrowhead bristling with guns and sensor blisters. Craning my neck, I could make out the shapes of men and women moving in the bridge-castle that rose from the back of the vessel. All told, she looked like a thinner, meaner Balmung, and should she not? The interceptor had made good time getting to Vorgossos. I tried not to think of the monstrous cost—in antimatter and in Imperial marks—entailed in the operation of so speedy a vessel. There was a reason such interceptors were few and far between.

  Gold metal gleamed in the lights from high above, and I confess I lingered, awestruck. Terrible faces looked down on us from the inner wall of the hangar, and the black forms of men and monsters battled in a Gothic frieze like those on the heavy doors in Kharn’s palace had done. But the legionnaires—less impressed than I was, or perhaps it was only that they had not shared in my strange visions—chivied me along with rough hands. It was toward one of these faces we moved, following a ghostly holograph line spun like a string of spider’s silk through the air. As we approached, I saw its mouth was open, forming an obscene O through which we passed, swallowed by Kharn’s monstrous vessel. The holograph line pulsed, leading us through corridor after black corridor, beneath ribbed supports where strange winds blew like ragged breaths, some hot as breathing, yes, and others cold as the night winds which howled through the merlons of the walls of my home.

  I felt the oppressive weight of ten thousand eyes upon me, and knew that Kharn Sagara was not far away. My guards felt it, too, for I heard the muffled sound of their voices through their full masks and knew they communicated one to the others. One of the red-faced triasters made a warding gesture and signaled for quiet.