Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Crossflane grunted a curse when he heard the translation, but held his peace for fear the broken girl would translate him.

  “The humans wish a peace with your scianda,” Sagara said, allowing the girl to translate. I found I could not take my eyes away from her empty face, nor turn my ears from the sounds of her harsh and barking words. Her teeth flashed, seeming too small behind her thin lips. With a start, I realized they’d been filed into points. I clenched my own teeth. They had shaped her like themselves, visited pain and other violations I dared not imagine upon her. Long ago, in my own home, I had seen eunuch myrmidons painted to resemble the xenobites for the Colosso. This was worse.

  “Genuri o-svanar ne?” Aranata repeated. “Make peace? They wish to surrender? To serve us?”

  “Surrender?” Smythe echoed when she had been told the prince’s words. “We wish to stop fighting. To make peace as equals.”

  “Equals?” Aranata said. “The Aeta have no equals.” I should have recognized that statement for what it was: a warning that our negotiations were doomed from the start. But I had come too far and hoped for too long to see the truth I would not hear. I had hoped the Cielcin would be all like Uvanari. But Uvanari had been beaten, and the prince was not the captive soldier I had killed. “You would have us serve you!” he said. “And for this they will expect me to turn on Hasurumn, on Pagoramatu, and the others? Is this the way?”

  “You would not have come if you did not wish to speak.” I spoke for the first time, and had spoken out of turn. I felt Bassander tense beside me, and half-expected a blow to the back of my head.

  None came, but the Aeta rounded on me, nostril slits flaring. “Raka deni ne?” He addressed the words to Sagara, but towered over me. Who is this?

  I did not bend or shy away.

  One of Sagara’s habitual silences seemed to have fallen on him, and it was Tanaran who answered, saying, “This is Marlowe. It was he who saved us on Tamnikano. He gave ndaktu to the Ichakta.” It had taken its eyes from its master’s face, and looked straight up at the ceiling, baring its throat in a kind of submission, such as wolves are wont to do.

  “Asvatada ne?” the Aeta asked, tilting his head in the direction that indicated affirmation, approval. “Did he indeed? Then you have my gratitude. Itana Uvanari was one of my most prized possessions. It is good to know it died a good death.”

  Uvanari’s death played behind my eyes, the Cielcin bleeding out on the floor of the Chantry’s interrogation cell while the klaxons blared and flashed their warnings. It had fought to the last, slipped its bonds, murdered its torturer, and come for me. Only chance and my meager skill had saved me.

  “A good death,” I agreed. If there is such a thing.

  The Aeta’s nostrils flared again, and he tucked his chin, angling his horns in a way I think meant as a kind of threat or dominance display, the way strong men might square their shoulders and thrust out their chins. “I would speak to my baetan alone.”

  “That can be arranged,” I answered in the Cielcin tongue, speaking without thinking. I saw Bassander and Smythe both snap their eyes to me when Varro translated, faces dark. Switching to the standard, I added, “As a show of good faith.” I should not have spoken, I knew that full well, but the damage was done. The whole party glared at me: Smythe and Bassander, Crossflane and Jinan, even the impassive Varro.

  Hurrying into the gap left by my outburst, the knight-tribune said, “I intend for you to leave these meetings with your baetan, Aeta. Provided we come to some arrangement.”

  “Arrangement?” Aranata echoed. “You presume to threaten me?”

  “Threaten?” Smythe asked, genuinely baffled. “Not at all.”

  She did not see—none of us did, then—that any challenge to the Aeta’s supreme authority, even the barest murmur that we had a right to refuse it anything, was seen as an assault against that authority, or worse: a grave insult.

  “You think we will deal with you like some common merchant?” Aranata asked, saying the word merchant with all the venom of a prelate denouncing whores.

  “We will not just hand over our captives,” Crossflane said.

  The herald, Oalicomn, spoke from its master’s shoulder. “Hostages, then!”

  “Of course hostages!” Crossflane snapped, unable to contain himself.

  “Danagayan wo!” the broken girl intoned, indicating Crossflane’s scorn by her choice of words. Inflamed, Aranata whirled and struck her soundly with the back of his hand. She hit the ground like a wet towel and did not stir.

  “Abassa-do!” said the Cielcin holding her chain, the thin one dressed as Aranata was dressed. “No!”

  I started, gaze lost halfway between the chaos with the xenobites and my own people. Abassa-do. Abassa . . . Father. I turned, taking in this new fact. Father. Parent. I had never seen a Cielcin child before—I was not sure if anyone had. Looking again at the creature called Nobuta, I saw. The shape of its face was rounder, softer, the horns shorter, eyes wider. Though it was nearly so tall as its parent, it had not achieved the breadth and fullness of adulthood.

  A child.

  Earth and Emperor forgive me.

  Tor Varro hurried forward, saying to the xenobites, “I’m a physician. You’ve hurt her.”

  He had the scholiast’s talent for understatement, it seemed. But Varro was blocked by Nobuta, who said, “No, it’s mine!” The scholiast’s fists tightened—a display of feeling that astonished me in one of his order. But he backed off all the same.

  “Do we want peace with creatures like this?” Bassander said softly. Raine slashed an arm across his path as he took a step forward. Jinan quietly swore in Jaddian. Privately, I felt myself agreeing with Bassander. I found myself staring at the cleft soles of the girl’s mutilated feet, a black feeling in the pit of my stomach, wondering what awaited Kharn’s gift of five thousand. Raine’s gift.

  “Okun-se!” Prince Aranata’s voice cut through the commotion, cold and dead as Brethren’s hands. “You!” It took me a moment to realize that the Aeta was speaking to me. Behind him, the child Nobuta crouched beside the translator, stroking her scarred face. “Tanaran says you have honor. A beast’s honor, but honor all the same. By that honor and by what you did for my Ichakta, tell me the truth now. What do you want?”

  “What do we want?” Raine Smythe echoed when I translated, “For it and its people to stop preying on our colonies.”

  I turned, faced the Cielcin Aeta where he towered above me. Varro was distracted with the injured girl and so I had a chance—a passing chance—to speak the truth and not as I’d been scripted. “I wanted to see your kind with eyes unclouded,” I said, giving the answer I had given Gilliam Vas so very long ago. “And to make peace.” “Peace!” Aranata barked. “Qilete!” Only when I heard the word spoken back to me did I realize the problem.

  The Cielcin word for peace was submission.

  CHAPTER 58

  THE CHALCENTERITE

  “THAT WENT ABOUT AS well as could be hoped,” Smythe said when we returned to the Schiavona, eyes downcast.

  No one answered for a moment, aware of the shapes than moved in the silence between us like wolves. We were in one of the upper halls, at a place where environment suits hung from hooks on the wall and the dorsal airlock opened in the ceiling above our heads. We’d just watched a workman clamber through it from the service umbilical that attached to a service catwalk that ran above our ship in the Demiurge’s massive hangar. Smythe had dismissed the laborer with a brusque command. We might have met in her office, only we had not made it so far before the knight-tribune turned back fuming.

  She was thinking of the deal she’d made. I could see it in her eyes. Her devil’s bargain with Sagara, and the way he’d turned her gift over to the Cielcin. She was seeing the poor, tormented translator again and again in her mind—was wondering what she’d done, was wondering just what fate awaited them and
the remaining fifteen thousand she’d granted the Undying Lord of Vorgossos.

  “Well?” To my astonishment, it was Bassander Lin who spoke, echoing the thoughts in my own mind. “Knight-Tribune, did you—” He remembered himself at once, stood a little straighter. “Permission to speak candidly, ma’am.” This Smythe granted with a wave of her cane. Bassander Lin still looked uncomfortable, but he fixed his eyes on a point just above his commander’s head and said, “Did you see what they had done to that poor slave girl?”

  Crossflane scowled. “It was difficult to overlook, captain.”

  “What sort of animal could do that?”

  I have since learned that among the Cielcin, it is considered a great honor to depend upon another, for to do no work among a people whose very lives depended upon the upkeep and careful maintenance of their starships was a mark of supreme opulence. More honorable still was to keep such slaves, such living ornaments, such beings without qiati, without utility. And to torment the humans so held the added relish of domination and pride, to have broken mankind—the great enemy—over the Cielcin knee. I have known men who are no different, though I did not say such a thing to Bassander.

  “It was horrible,” Jinan said, almost under her breath.

  “Nevertheless,” Smythe said, mustering all her soldierly pragmatism, “we have work to do.” She took a moment to gather herself, looking like a child’s figurine all folded in on itself. What must she have felt? At the time I did not—could not—consider it, such was my fury with her and my frustration. But now I think old Smythe, born a serf herself, imagined that when Sagara had demanded payment in the form of twenty thousand human souls that he intended naught but serfdom for the lot of them. Whatever she was, she was an Imperial tribune, and could not image the macabre and inhuman uses to which a demoniac like Sagara might put such poor souls.

  She turned her attention to me. “I mean to make a liar of you, Lord Marlowe.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “You promised the Pale a tête-à-tête with our chief prisoner,” she said. “This cannot be allowed, not least of which because our Cielcin friends may have . . . opinions regarding the events at Emesh other than—shall we say—the official version.”

  Jinan cleared her throat. “Forgive me, Knight-Tribune, but how do you intend to keep them from sharing those opinions once these negotiations are finished?”

  Not eager to call Jinan’s attention down on me but unable to hold my tongue, I interjected, “I do have a hard time imagining the Aeta would privilege our word over Tanaran’s.” I was being simple, and as is the nature of such simplicity, I was unaware of it.

  “Knight-Tribune, if I may?” said Tor Varro, stepping forward. He was dressed strangely for a scholiast. Still in verdant greens, but not in the flowing robes and togas which befitted his station or dignity, but rather in a long, slitted tunic more akin to a knight’s surcoat, this worn over a close-fitting shirt and loose trousers cinched below the knee, where they gave way to hose and the customary soft slippers. The bronze badges that signified his competency were not sewn onto a sash worn crossways like a bandoleer, but pinned to his tunic front like a soldier’s medals. He had a patrician’s bearing—though none of the scars—and the rock-steady confidence that comes from knowing many things. “When we are finished, it is hoped the personal account of our Cielcin prisoners will matter far less to the Aeta than those incentives he gains by his association with the Empire. We have every intention of this being a . . . felicitous relationship between our two peoples.”

  “Felicitous . . .” Bassander repeated, unable to hide his scorn. But he held back, not saying the rest of what was on his mind.

  Sensing where this might be headed, I asked, “What exactly are we planning to offer them?”

  I had directed this question to Smythe, but it was the scholiast who continued at a sign from his commanding officer. “An immediate cessation of hostilities, naturally, contingent on the prospect of further dialogue. Exactly as you described at Emesh.”

  “And what else?”

  Varro glanced to Smythe, seeking permission. She made a gesture with the hand holding the cane and he said, “What you’d expect, introductions to the Aeta of other Cielcin clans, the opening of trade agreements . . .” As he spoke, I remembered how, long ago, I had spoken of just such things to Director Adaeze Feng and the other representatives of the Wong-Hopper Consortium, imagining a day when it was trade that defined relations between our people and the Pale, not violence. But then . . . hearing it from lips other than mine, hearing it after the sight of that mutilated girl and the visions I had seen . . . it seemed only the naive dream of a child, like morning dew banished by the first rays of the sun.

  I doubted, and doubting took little note of what else was said, but nodded along with the directives and specifics of that meeting. I needed time alone, needed time to think, to put the broken pieces of my mind back together again. I needed sleep. Most of all, I needed to be away. I could feel the net—the noose—tightening around me. The Cielcin. The Empire. The Extrasolarians. Kharn Sagara. My Red Company. My duty to my friends and their faith in me. My betrayal of the Empire. My betrayal of Jinan. Switch’s betrayal of me. I had conjured enough rope to hang myself, called down enough wolves to be sure I’d never leave the woods. When I had left Vorgossos, ascended that hightower once more and regained my place on the Mistral, I had thought I’d returned to the ordinary world. But that familiar ship—those familiar faces—everything had changed.

  You cannot twice step into the same river, Heraclitus once said. There is no coming home. I had not returned to the Mistral of my memory, had not gone back to my friends unchanged. There is no going back. I have seen the rivers of time, and tread their lucent waters. They flow in but one direction.

  Forward.

  I had changed. And they had changed. And everything had changed.

  I felt . . . upside down. Disquieted. Upset by the thought of the very peace I had myself pursued so ardently. But I resolved to do what I must, and so bowed my head when at long last the knight-tribune said, “That’s enough for today, then. We’ll reconvene tomorrow at oh-seven-hundred. Dismissed.”

  But as we turned to go, the scholiast Varro took me by the arm. “Lord Marlowe, a word.” It was not a question, though in any event I saw no reason to deny the man. I hung back until all the others had filtered out of the room, staring absently at the ladder leading to the service hatch in the roof above. When we were alone, Tor Varro said, “I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Yes?”

  “When we were speaking with the Aeta just now, there was a moment—I was trying to help that poor girl the Cielcin mutilated—when he asked what we wanted out of all this,” he said, and I felt a knife twist in my back, but kept my expression as blank and open as I could manage. “Smythe told you that we wished for the xenobites to stop preying on our colonies, but you . . . you said you wanted—what was it? ‘Oretiri vaa ti-orruu sucoriyuyaya.’”

  To see with eyes unclouded.

  He quoted me perfectly.

  Still I said nothing.

  Something flickered in the scholiast’s patrician face. Amusement? Irritation? There ought to have been nothing at all. That disturbed me as much as anything I had seen that strange day, for it impressed upon me the strangeness of my circumstances, when even the scholiasts smiled.

  “I have to ask that in future you hold to the tribune’s script and obey instruction.”

  “Did she ask you to have this conversation with me?” I said.

  Apology. That was the name of the expression he bore. Embarrassment, even. It was subtly done, such that were I any other sort of man I might have missed it and thought Varro as expert in his mastery of emotion as any other of his order I have known. But I—who long have studied human faces and rendered them in ink and charcoal—saw the expression for what it was. “She believed you would be more a
menable to one of our order. I understand that once you wished to join us.”

  In a voice pressed as dried flowers and without any warmth, I replied, “That was a very long time ago.”

  “Yet you are not so old, I think.”

  “It’s not the years,” I answered, “it’s the light-years.” Was that a smile on the scholiast’s pointed face? “Does Smythe know?”

  “That you said something you shouldn’t have? Yes. But for what it is worth I do not believe your actions endangered our mission in any way.” The scholiast crossed his arms. They were not the arms of an anemic scholar, but shaped by labors I could not guess at, and I wondered at the nature of his order. The Chalcenterites were then unknown to me, an obscure sect of the scholiast tradition, given less to navel-gazing and to the quiet study of the self and stars. Rather they embodied their labors, and moved through the world of living men. All scholiasts must work to maintain their colleges and monasteries. Being forbidden all technology more sophisticated than electric lamp, they are condemned to toil, and yet Varro seemed more akin to the gladiators I have known than to the farmers and masons of the country.

  “There is something I don’t understand,” he said.

  “What’s that, counselor?”

  “Why are you here?” he asked, and there was no confrontation in his tone, though one might easily have heaped scorn upon such words. “You. The son of a lord. You might have had any sort of life you chose. Why this peripatetic existence?”

  I was quiet a long moment, chewing the inside of my cheek. The voiceless words I had heard in my dreams sounded in my mind, backing reflected images of the horrors I had been shown.

  This must be.

  But when I spoke, it was not of visions. I could not have explained Brethren or Calagah to Varro if I had wanted to. And I did not want to. I wanted to tell the truth even less. The truth was only that I had wanted to leave home out of a child’s desire for adventure, because I had heard stories of Simeon the Red, of Kasia Soulier, and Arsham, Prince of Jadd. Of Kharn Sagara. How foolish he seemed—that other Hadrian—to have dreamed such dreams.