Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  After a long while, we emerged—not into a hold like the one which held the Schiavona, but onto a glassed-in bridge, an umbilical which stretched out from the hull of Kharn’s Sojourner, the Demiurge, toward where the Mistral stood at port. Knowing my escort would not approve if I tarried, I tried my best to crane my neck to see.

  Behind us, the ship bristled with uncounted black spires, towers and turrets and buttressed halls rising behind the rank and file of grim statuary. Black hands stretched from the hull behind us, and stood watch above the great boom arm that held our ship in place. The unseeing eyes pressing down with such gravity I thought they must have masked suppression field generators behind those sightless lenses, such a force was in the terror of their gaze. Behind all that black metal and stone, the unfixed stars stretched, each one transmuted to a whorl of light and colored more blue than anything I had seen. To violet.

  But the doors at the end were only of common substance, and the light behind them when they opened was warm. I was thrust inside without ceremony, without salute, and I stumbled against the inner door. The airlock cycled, turning from warning red to serene blue, then opened on a familiar hall: round and white-padded.

  “There you are!”

  Familiar faces, too.

  Pallino hurried forward, Crim and Ilex following in his wake. The old soldier embraced me without preamble. “The doctor told us what happened down there,” he said, and drew away, studying me with that single, piercing eye. “What the hell happened to you? Was it Lin?”

  “Jinan,” I said, and shook my head.

  Crim hissed, “That jitatin bruhir! She beat you?”

  “No more than I deserved,” I said darkly, not sure if I really meant it. “Valka made it back to the ship, then?”

  Ilex stepped forward, touched my shoulder. “About half an hour ago. She’s resting.” With Pallino stepped aside, the homunculus embraced me. “We were worried about you.”

  I held her at arm’s length a moment, clapped her on the shoulder before speaking to all three. “And I about you all. We weren’t sure if you were still up there.”

  “Are you kidding?” Pallino asked, brows arching. “Corvo wasn’t going anywhere.”

  “It’s not Corvo I was worried about,” I said. “It’s Kharn.”

  That quieted the conversation long enough for me to get my bearings. I’d entered by the port airlock, the same airlock the Exalted Nazzareno had used when it came to pilot us into the Enigma of Hours. I felt suddenly very tired, and swayed a little where I stood. Switch was not there, nor Siran, nor Captain Corvo and the others. I wondered if it was ship’s night, or if perhaps the others had some more pressing concern.

  “What happens now?” Crim asked, brushing back his hair.

  “Are we still to rendezvous with the Pale?” Pallino asked.

  And Ilex wondered, “Is it true this Sagara keeps a Mericanii daimon?”

  More questions piled on, words stacking one atop the next like water, like sand poured on a prisoner in an oubliette until I thought I might drown in them. Their voices overlapped, stacked atop those inward questions that had haunted me since I’d wakened Tanaran from fugue. I raised a hand for silence, and to my astonishment, silence fell. Doubts rushed into that quiet like water into a breach: about myself, about my situation, about Raine Smythe and Titus Hauptmann, about Switch and Brethren, Kharn and Jinan.

  It was all too much.

  “I just need rest,” I said. “Our problems will still be here in a few hours.”

  My room in the Mistral hardly felt like my room at all. I’d never stayed long on the ship until we’d escaped with Tanaran. Still, Switch had managed—with help from his erstwhile lover—to wrangle together a portion of my possessions, most of which still occupied the three footlockers that lined one wall of the small chamber. Clothing mostly, and a few old books. Despite the fact that I had spent so much time alone in my cell aboard the Schiavona, and so much time before that with Valka in our frigid cell beneath Kharn’s palace, it was good to be alone again.

  To be alone on my own terms again was a blessing.

  Had I been trained in the scholiasts’ art, I might have seized that time to unpack my emotions, then to pack them each away behind doors of clear glass, to understand but to be safe from the corrosive power of them.

  I couldn’t do it.

  There were holographs buried in my laundry, little wall-mount sconces meant to cycle old images one to the next in endless procession. I knew what they would show. Images of Jinan and me from happier times, times stolen between periods of conflict and pain. Between Pharos and Vorgossos. I knew I could not bear to see them. Still, I plucked one of the projectors from its box. It was a small thing, if weighty. A silver-metallic button perhaps an inch and a half across—you know the type—magnetized so as to clamp itself to the walls of my cabin. I felt an impulse to hurl it across the room, but squeezed my hand around it instead. The beveled edges bit into my hand.

  I had done the right thing.

  Had I done the right thing?

  I had betrayed the Empire. I had betrayed Jinan. Switch had betrayed me.

  Was it worth it?

  They were good men, Bassander said again, words inescapable when they came from my own head. My men. And you murdered them.

  I must have tripped some switch or pressed some button, for the projector beeped, startling me. I let it fall, and it bounced and rolled across the floor, coming to rest near the sealed door. It loaded almost instantly, revealing an image of Jinan and myself from our brief stay on Nagramma. Mountains behind us—we had hiked from the capital up to the site of a thirteenth-millennium Cid Arthurian temple to take in the air. Jinan had taken the image, holding the terminal away from us with one hand as she pressed her lips to my cheek. I clenched my fists, determined not to cry. The image changed, showing me at a distance, wandering beneath the white-flowered champak trees beneath the mighty statue of the Arthur Buddha. How small I seemed, dwarfed as I was by that mighty carving, the bearded king sitting upon his lotus throne. Just a little mote of deepest black moving against all that white and beatific stone.

  I moved, but not before the image changed, showing Jinan—just Jinan—laughing with champak blossoms in her hair, her eyes closed. I snatched a wadded tunic from the top of the nearest footlocker and cast it over the image, as if to obscure the holographs. That was easier than moving to turn off the projector. I could not bear to see one more moment of it, one more memory. I held my breath and slumped onto the end of my bed, and there—for a time—sleep destroyed me.

  CHAPTER 52

  BORA

  THE NOISE OF THE door cycling awakened me, and I sat up where I had fallen asleep: fully clothed at the foot of my bed. I managed a cracked, “What’s going on?” as I fumbled both with my hair and for my sword—remembering, too late, that Kharn Sagara had confiscated my weapon the day I’d faced Brethren.

  But it was only Otavia.

  The Norman woman had to duck to clear the door frame as she stepped into my cabin. She had at last eschewed the old Red Company uniform in favor of simple garments in close-fitting black and green. She looked somehow older than when last I’d seen her, though I knew she’d endured no more time than I, having been awake for the duration of our time at Vorgossos. I wondered what I looked like.

  Captain Corvo’s face turned down in a slight frown, one eyebrow arched. “I’d heard you were back.”

  I rubbed my eyes with the heels of both hands. “I . . . yes. Sorry. I’d have come for you sooner but I needed . . . needed time.” Sitting up straight, I did my best to look composed. No easy task, for I’d abandoned my boots by the door and unbelted my tunic. “I fear I look a dreadful mess.”

  The Norman woman waved this away without comment and propped herself against the far wall, arms crossed. “What happened down there?”

  “Kharn Sagara wouldn’t negotiat
e,” I said ashenly. “Took Tanaran from us. Valka and I tried to find it and find out how the Mistral was being kept at anchorage. We spent about four months in a cell, if Valka’s reckoning is good.” I could see from the look on Corvo’s face that it was, and swallowed. “We couldn’t get word to you. I’m sorry.”

  Corvo was nodding her head. “I’d figured it was something like that when you never came back, or worse. Bastien thought you were dead.”

  “Where is Durand?” I asked, unable to keep myself from looking round, as though I expected the small, bespectacled man to appear from behind a curtain in that small and sealed little room. “I thought he’d want to hear this.”

  “He’s on the bridge,” Corvo said, tossing her floating yellow hair. “We may not be going anywhere, but I’m not about to have us asleep at the wheel.” A shade self-conscious in my rumpled clothing, I smoothed my tunic front as a way to cover the silence. After a moment, Corvo said, “We thought you were dead, Hadrian.”

  Thinking of Bassander Lin and his threats, I said, “It’s too early to tell, you might be right after all.” I felt myself smile in spite of the oblivion in my tone, then laugh when I remembered dear Gibson’s criticizing me for being too dramatic as a boy. Checking myself, I said, “But you stayed? I thought for sure Sagara would have released the ship.”

  Corvo crossed her arms and—never one to mince words—said, “We might have done it, but Vorgossos never released control of the ship to us. I had to put the ship down to a skeleton crew. Ration resources.”

  “You didn’t try to cut your way loose, or . . . ?”

  “We couldn’t operate our own airlocks, Hadrian.”

  “Noyn jitat!” I swore in my finest Jaddian, drawing Otavia’s eyebrows a shade higher. “I didn’t know.” I told her the same version of events I’d told Bassander, leaving out a description of the beast, Brethren, and the vision it had shared with me. I left out, too, a description of the Exalted, Calvert, and how he had taken Valka’s blood and mine. It didn’t bear thinking about.

  When I had finished my account, the captain—who had settled into the low stool bracketed to the room’s small desk—said, “What have you gotten us into, Hadrian Marlowe?”

  I brushed my unruly hair back out of my face, chewing on my answer. “I wish I knew. Lin says Sagara’s agreed to take us to rendezvous with the Cielcin away from Vorgossos. I assume that’s where we’re going now.” A touch of the dark humor returned to me, and looking away from Corvo’s face, I said, “If not, I imagine we’re all in for a rather awful surprise.”

  “I’m sure we’re going to rendezvous,” Corvo said. “I don’t know much, but from what I understand Lin has this Sagara on a leash.”

  “Do you know what the problem with a leash is?” I mused, propping my chin on one hand. “You’re left holding the other end of it.”

  Otavia took this in quietly, nodding to herself. “You think it’s a trap, then?”

  “You can depend on it. I don’t like how this is falling out. As if Sagara weren’t bad enough, there’s Lin.”

  The Norman captain propped her chin on both hands. “I can handle Bassander Lin, but this . . . did you see the size of this ship of his?”

  I turned away, and felt again the awareness of eyes licking the back of my neck. Kharn Sagara was watching, he had to be. Through his own cameras if not through the Mistral’s own internal security network. Suppressing a shudder, I said, “It’s bigger than the Enigma. Much bigger.”

  “Valka said he’s got a SOM army.”

  “Oh, he has legions,” I said. “I’ve no idea how many. And worse. I saw one Exalted, but for all I know there may be more. And Earth and Emperor alone know what he’s got on this ship.” More than I could imagine. Trying to think, I looked up at the ceiling, at gray metal and pale lights. “If we get out of this . . . does your offer still stand?”

  “My . . . ?” Otavia’s voice trailed off, lost as she tried to remember.

  I wrenched my attentions away from the ceiling. “To travel with you and rebuild the Red Company.”

  The captain almost chuckled, and leaning back she crossed her corded arms. “You think they’ll let you leave? Bassander, Smythe, and this Hauptmann character?”

  I knew what I was about to say was desperate. “I’m hoping.”

  Otavia’s jovial aspect dissolved at once, and growing too serious she said, “I don’t think either of us is getting out of this. If Lin had his way he’d have slagged this whole ship already, and all of us aboard. You’re nobility, boy. I’m a pirate. That blood of yours is covering all our asses right now. That and whatever you said to Smythe.” I had nothing to say to that—there was nothing to say.

  “Switch shouldn’t have opened his mouth,” I said. “How did he get a message out?”

  The captain shrugged. “Honestly? I don’t know. We weren’t watching the telegraph wave . . . gave up on it after the first week or so when we couldn’t get anything out. He must have gone in and queued it up when no one was looking. How the message got out I’ve got no idea.”

  “I think Kharn’s daimon took care of it,” I said, reiterating what I’d said to Bassander.

  “Why would it do that?”

  I shrugged, ran quickly through a version of the same conversation I’d had with Bassander Lin. While I spoke I rose, padding barefoot to where I’d let the holograph projector fall beneath my laundry. Moving carefully so as not to make a conversation piece of the holographs, I balled the device up in my loose tunic and—deactivating it—threw the projector and the garment back into my trunk.

  “There’s too much going on,” she said at length, following my progress up and down the narrow chamber from her place at the stool. “The Empire, the Extras, the Cielcin . . . this machine . . .” She didn’t even know the half of it. I could see—over her shoulder, as it were—the blooming dark of my vision, and the Cielcin horde marching across the stars. I saw the woman named Man tormented by them, her raiment radiant as the sun, and heard once more the noise of an infant wailing, its hour come round at last.

  I shook myself. “I’m sorry?”

  Patient as a stone, Otavia Corvo repeated herself, saying, “I said, ‘And we can’t even control our own people.’”

  “Where is Switch, anyway?” I asked. An awful thought took me and I asked, “You didn’t lock him up, did you?”

  “We didn’t even know he’d done it until the airlock onto the Vorgossos starport opened and Lin’s lieutenant swept in with three decades of your Empire’s finest.” She frowned, rubbed her face as if to mask some feeling. Anger perhaps? Or embarrassment? “They pulled William out of here for his safety, but the bastard asked to come back. Can you believe that?”

  I could. Plain as I see the bust of that original Gibson looking down on me as I write these words, I could see Switch—my friend—standing, shoulders hunched outside the airlock . . . waiting to be let in with the air of one who turns his back on the gunman, knowing not the moment or the flash.

  He wants me to kill him, I thought. “He knows I can’t forgive him for this. We might have returned to the Empire with a full peace accord and the Inquisition might have looked the other way, but now . . .” I clenched my fists. “If anyone is executed over this . . . I can’t forgive him.” I couldn’t forgive him even if we all came out of this alive. “Lin said he came begging for his life.” He had chosen to save his own skin rather than stay loyal to his people—to me. How could I ever trust him again? Tight-jawed, I asked, “Where is he now?”

  “He’s in his cabin,” Otavia said, voice dark. “I haven’t told him you’re here.”

  “Good,” I said. “I don’t want to see him. Are all of our people on the ship now? Bassander doesn’t have anyone in interrogation or anything?”

  Standing suddenly, Otavia half-turned away. “No, no, we’re all here. All prisoners together. I thought for sure he’d keep u
s locked up, though.”

  “Raine’s orders.”

  “That’s a good sign,” Corvo said. “That means she’s still on your side.” She pivoted sharply, and looking up I found her dark eyes glaring at me with intent. “This is not a very large ship.”

  Her meaning was plain. “What would you have of me?” I asked, genuinely asked. I did not know what to do. Not about Switch.

  Betrayal is the blackest sin.

  I should have been furious, but I was beyond fury, lost in some country ruled by a spirit blacker still. Sorrow?

  Regret.

  It was strange. As a boy I had derided Crispin for his passions, his rages, but now I think the rage was a genetic marker of a sort. A Marlowe family style, as much a part of us as our black hair, our violet eyes, and our crooked smiles. As much a part of us as that red devil, rampant on sable—as much a part of us as our uranium and the funeral masks beneath the Dome of Bright Carvings. I knew I should be angry. Switch’s actions may have led to the meeting we had worked so desperately for, but at what cost? My life and the lives of all my companions, maybe. Long was the reach of the Imperial hand and relentless its grasp: strong and unforgiving. And yet I found I could not be angry. I had no anger left.

  I had no forgiveness either.

  “What would you have of me?” I asked again, retaking my seat at the foot of the bed, hands on knees.

  The captain replied, “Just don’t do anything you’ll regret.”

  “I won’t,” I said in answer, eyes tracking once more toward the ceiling. “I only wish he hadn’t done something I’d regret.” Corvo was silent. What she read in my tone I cannot say, but her hard face was closed as the windows of a peasant’s shack in winter, her lips pale and pressed together. A horrid thought turned in my stomach, and rejecting it I said, “I’m not going to hurt him, Otavia.” I held my face in my hands, both of us silent a long while. Presently I took in a great breath, and forcing it out—my words more groan than anything else—I said, “I know he acted out of desperation. Fear. But he put all our lives at risk. Your lives. I can’t abide that.”