Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “Why are you here?” I asked instead. “You might have sought an appointment anywhere other than the Legions, but here you are.” It was a presumptuous question, but then so was Varro’s.

  Varro didn’t hesitate. “I have a duty.”

  “To the Empire?”

  “To mankind.”

  “And you think I’m any different? Why? Because I grew up in a castle. I’ll wager you did as well to judge from the look of you. I’m here because it’s the right thing to do, and because I can do something about it.”

  The scholiast held his flinty eyes to mere slits, as though he sought something in me he needed a microscope to see properly. In measured tones, he said, “Smythe was right about you. You’re an idealist.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.” I had heard enough. I sensed that Varro had said all that Smythe had tasked him to say, and that the rest of this was . . . what? A pleasantry? An inquiry? A warning?

  “Oh?”

  I’d turned to go, and so was made to turn back. “I never said I could do it. Bring peace, or . . . whatever it is we’re here to do. I can only speak the truth.”

  “The truth, ah . . .” Varro shifted his posture, not quite looking at me anymore. “You need to speak our truth. Stick to the program. Or you’re no use.”

  “Your truth?” I echoed, now turned fully back to face the Chalcenterite. “Forgive me, counselor, but I thought you were a scholiast. There is only one Truth.” I could hardly contain my surprise, my distaste. You may think it strange that I—who have lied a thousand thousand times—might take issue with such a perspective. But he was a scholiast. A man of learning, of science, of philosophy natural and unnatural. He should know better than to engage such sophistry.

  Varro dismissed this with the wave of a hand. “These are difficult times, Lord Marlowe, and ours is a difficult task. You should understand this. I’ve been over the records from the Emesh affair. I know your regard for Truth.”

  The shadow of something like my brother Crispin moved in me, and it was all I could do not to seize the scholiast by the tunic front. I backed off instead. Rage is blindness, I told myself, made to recall Imore’s aphorism by the familiar green of Varro’s clothes. I was a liar. I am a liar. I have no illusions about this. But I am a liar in the service of Truth, or so I tell myself. In service of the Good—which is the same thing. I had told my lies because they ennobled me, whereas lying in service to the Empire, to an Empire that might sell its own people to the Pale . . . such lies diminished me.

  I could explain none of this to Tor Varro. At the time, I could not have explained it to myself. I knew only that my affront and instinct for rightness rebelled at his words, and I said, “I do my duty.”

  “That is all we ask,” he said, but I was enough the veteran of court on Emesh and on Delos before that to hear the words inside the words spoken. We will not ask again.

  CHAPTER 59

  NO MAN AN ISLAND

  A DAY PASSED, AND I have passed three days here without writing. The brothers and sisters of the cloister requested my help digging a new well inside the decennid gate, and I—who have eaten off their board for some months now and squandered their ink—could not refuse. I mention this not to cry my virtue, but to demonstrate that even such as I, who am all alone now, am not wholly isolated. Some people believe that the painter who works his canvas is not an individual because he acquired his skills at the knee of some earlier master. That the soldier who stands before the enemy is not a hero, but a pawn—and one of many. There is no truth to this. Each of us contains multitudes, but it is not that we are cells in the body of humankind. Rather we are clay, shaped as the mountain is shaped: by the wind, the tramping foot, and the rain. By the world. The mark of other hands is on us, but we are ourselves alone.

  One may be part of a community. One is an individual.

  They are not mutually exclusive. It is only that the soul, the self, should lead, and our allegiances follow. To do otherwise—to be otherwise—is to make oneself a slave. Often when we speak, it is with the breath of dead men. Yet we build ourselves on such tradition. We tell only the one story after all, over and over. Through us that dead air is lent new life, and we remember, that we might one day understand.

  I remember it was difficult waiting on that ship, waiting on word from Sagara or Smythe. I had ferried over briefly from the Obdurate to recover those of my effects which had been left behind when first I fled. I was remembering then. Have I said that what we perceive as darkness is only the chaos that came—without light’s order—before Creation itself? That is why we imagine anything might be lurking in the darkness. In the dark of my cabin on the Mistral I slept—or thought I slept—and dreamed . . .

  . . . or thought I dreamed.

  “What is the matter, Hadrian?” The old, rasping voice filled my room like the sound of pages turning and the scuff of old leather. I pushed myself into a sitting position and drew my legs up under me. I had not felt the weight of the old man sitting at the foot of my cabin bed, but there he was: wild gray hair standing on end, viridian robes tidy and brighter than the dim light of my chamber could account for. Tor Gibson sat stooped over his cane, leaning on it as the icon of Wisdom leans upon his staff. He smiled, and reaching out seized my wrist. “Bad dreams, is it?”

  I felt no warmth in those papery fingers, though the smile was like thin sunlight on a day of rain. That was strange in itself, for Gibson was a scholiast, and seldom smiled. “This is a dream,” I said, “another vision?” The old man did not answer, gray eyes twinkling beneath beetling brows. He released my hand and looked away, staring through the darkness of my room at I knew not what. “I just wish it were over. All this waiting, all these . . . pieces on the board.”

  “Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig,” Gibson intoned, speaking in such a way that I knew he cited some ancient sage, though I knew not which one. “Tell me you desire a fig, and I answer: these things take time.” He rested his chin on the head of his cane. “This is what you wanted to do, what you always trained to do, is it not? To sit across the table from the Cielcin—to bring them to that table—and to speak?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Then you have nothing to complain of, eh?” he said. “What is it you’re always saying? Always forward, always down.”

  “And never left nor right.” I do not think I had ever said that to Gibson in life, but then something need not have happened to be real. The wall of my cabin was cold against my back as I reclined, watching the apparition watch me. “I know. I know. But it’s too much. It’s difficult.”

  The cane whistled round, slapped the bed near my knee. “Kwatz!” Gibson exclaimed, his favorite rebuke, cribbed, I think, from the manuals of some old religion. “It’s difficult, is it? What made you think it would be otherwise?” When I did not answer, he pressed, “You hope to reconcile mankind with that other kind. The Cielcin. Why should your burden be light?” Often in dreams we cannot answer, and perhaps such a thing had happened to me, for I sat mute and—listening—heard: “This is well. We are beasts of burden, Hadrian, we men. We struggle, and by that struggle are filled, and so define ourselves. That is the way.”

  “Seek hardship,” I said, and saying it heard Brethren’s voice behind me, rising up—as it were—through the wall of my cabin. Seek hardship. So real was the sound of that voice and so sharp the threat of it that I lurched to my feet. The walls of my cabin vanished, and my bed and Gibson stood in the middle of an unresolved black. Certainly dreaming, then.

  Gibson’s eyes were sparkling, and once more he rested his cane on the ground between his slippered feet. “The world is made—and the self is made—by the conjunction of opposites. Nature and culture breed civilization. Men and women: children. Protons and electrons: atoms. The ego and its shadow: the self. Order and chaos: opportunity. And so on. What humanity and the Cielcin might bring forth b
y this process . . . who can say?”

  “A better world?” I asked. “Can it be done?”

  “That is the wrong question.”

  I wore naught but a pair of trousers, and beneath that crushing Dark I felt naked as a newborn, and it was all I could do to stand. Great figures moved unseen in the darkness, like the colossi whose massive feet tramp the battlegrounds of a hundred worlds. “What is the right question?” I asked, raising my arms. “What am I to do? I’m walking a fine line with the Empire. Switch has betrayed me, and Jinan . . .” I had betrayed Jinan, but by the pity in the old scholiast’s eyes he understood and I did not have to explain. “And Kharn Sagara. He could kill us all if he had a mind.”

  My tutor raised a hand. “He would not have summoned the Cielcin if he meant to destroy you. You may yet have your chance. Be patient.” He was right. “Panic avails nothing. It is not panic that will aid you.”

  Fear is death to reason.

  “And reason death to fear.” Gibson clenched his raised hand into a fist. “These are clouds, Hadrian. These feelings. Move through them.”

  “When this is over,” I began, unsteady, and half-stumbled back toward the old man. “When this is done, I will be at the Empire’s mercy.”

  Gibson’s thick brows contracted. “Is it over already? I’m sorry, I thought it was too much.” He tapped his cane against the unseen floor. “You have always been at the Empire’s mercy, Hadrian. We all are. That is the price we pay for civilization, the price I paid for you. Do you understand?” Had I not said much the same thing to Valka not so long ago? “Would you rather there were no Empire? Rather the Cielcin pick us off one planet at a time? We could never organize to stop them.” His eyes never left my face. “You are not playing the game well enough.”

  “It’s not a game, Gibson,” I said with force, “of course I’m not playing.”

  “Of course it is a game,” the scholiast insisted. “Everything is a game. But that does not mean the consequences are trivial.” He stood, and I saw how tall he was—taller than many of the palatines I have known. “How do you play a game, Hadrian?”

  It was to be the questioning again, I saw. Quaestio disputata. Very well. I straightened my back, tucked my chin, and clasped my hands behind me. “What game?”

  “Which game. And it hardly matters. The answer is the same.” He did not walk as he had in life, shambling or shuffling, but stepped—as those in soft shoes are wont to do—toe first, so that each step pointed his foot like a barb. He jounced his cane at me. “Think, boy. Think.”

  Well, the answer was obvious. “You follow the rules, whatever those may be, at least as far as you can. You bend them if you have to, break them if you must. You play your opponents off one another or work with them—whatever the game calls for.”

  “To what purpose?”

  I sensed the trap but not its shape, and so reined in the way an outrider might ahead of his column, the horse frightened by the stink of men lying in ambush. But the question was itself a game, and there was no danger in it. “To win.”

  Gibson slapped my leg with his cane, as though he were a grandmother and I an unruly boy. “Kwatz!” He scowled. “Winning. Nobody wins for long. You need something better.”

  Better.

  I squeezed my wrist hard with the other hand. I had no idea. In life, perhaps, Gibson would have waited an eon to tell me, but Gibson was dead, or gone beyond all knowledge, and this was only a kind of dream—or perhaps a vision. “You have to play like you mean to keep playing. You have to play in a way that protects your self.” He placed special emphasis on that word, let it linger long enough, like a slap, that I might feel the next blow when it came. “Who are you?”

  I blinked. “I am Hadrian Anaxander Marlowe, the son of Alistair and Liliana—”

  “No.” He jabbed his cane at me so that the brass tip bounced off my bare chest. “Thus you were born. Who are you?”

  Some other voice spoke for me, ragged, malnourished, and afraid. “Had,” it said, and again more strongly, “I am called Had of Teukros, a myrmidon.”

  “No.”

  A different voice, like the first but deeper, more strained: “Hadrian Gibson.”

  Then my father’s voice, sneering. “Boy.”

  My mother, speaking in the light of her studio at Haspida. “You are my son.”

  Pallino, grinning and concerned at once. “Lad.”

  Switch, who had been my friend. “Had.”

  And there was Ghen. “Your Radiance!”

  “Your Radiance!”

  “Hadrian!”

  “Barbarian!” That was Valka.

  “Mia qal!” My captain, my Jinan, her voice breathless as so often I had heard it. “Mia qal! Hadrian!”

  “Hadrian! Hadrian!”

  Gibson waved a hand, dispersed those voices like smoke. “No.”

  “What, then?” I demanded, and approached him where he sketched his little circle about me in our unseen arena. “Who am I?”

  “You are what is left when all of that”—he gestured over his shoulder, as though all my names and the people who named me were smoke as well—“is gone. You are the part of you that survives these changes. The only part in his ship old Theseus could not replace.”

  “Was Theseus himself.”

  “Just so,” Gibson said, and reaching out placed his hand upon my shoulder. “Do you understand?”

  I thought I did. “Forget the escape. Forget the Red Company. Let Switch and Jinan go.”

  He shook his head, once. A denial? Or only amusement? “You have a duty and an aim. Aim.”

  Without moving to do so, I sagged back onto the edge of my bed. “I don’t know how.”

  “Always forward,” Gibson said, wringing his cane in both hands. “You’ve only to keep pulling on the thread.”

  “Like Theseus?” I asked, imagining the old Greek unspooling his thread as he wandered through the labyrinth, creeping in fear of the minotaur.

  “Just so. These”—he waved a hand—“other concerns of yours are distractions. A man may cup water in his hands, but only a few drops.” He held one palm up to indicate his meaning. “You are on the proper path; you have only to hold to it.”

  My fingers tightened on the bedclothes. “It’s not so easy. The thread is tangled.”

  “You are making complications for yourself. Tying the knot tighter.” He turned his back, carried his cane behind him with the air of a professor at his lecturing—which I supposed he was. “In Phrygia of old, King Midas lashed his father’s cart to a post with a knot so tight and so complex that no man could undo it, and it was said that he who could untie it would one day rule all of Asia. For five hundred years men tried: drovers, farmers, soldiers—the sons of the sons of Midas. None succeeded.”

  I knew the story, but the familiar cadence of Gibson’s voice was a comfort even in dream. I could almost see the dusty ox cart before me, lashed to a pillar of white stone. I mumbled the words even as Gibson spoke them: “Until Alexander came.”

  “Until Alexander came, his eyes on all of Persia and on the stranger lands beyond. For he had heard the prophecy and—being Alexander—knew it spoke of him. And knowing this, he was frustrated by failure, for the knot that Midas had tied in the ancient past was all the legends said, and would not be undone. Long he struggled with the knot, knowing already that dominion was his destiny. He sought only for a sign, for Fate to confirm what he knew was right. And because he knew he was to rule, he knew the knot only stood in his way, and so took up his sword . . .”

  “. . . and cut the knot in two,” I said, murmuring into the pillows. I do not know if it was a dream, or an oracle such as the one which had led Midas to lash his father’s cart to that pillar in the first place. I did know that when I awoke Gibson was gone, and that I was alone. And yet . . .

  Gibson had been gone a long time al
ready. Already I had lived my life without his tutelage for almost as long as I had lived with it, and as I write this those meager years we shared are as nothing next to the centuries I have counted. But Gibson is with me still, even in the solitude of this writing cell. Alone as I am, he is with me—part of me now—as are all those we meet and who matter to us.

  A man is the sum of his memories—and more—he is the sum of all those others he has met, and what he learned from them. And that is an encouraging thought, for that knowledge and those memories survive and are part of us through every storm, and every little death.

  CHAPTER 60

  THE PAVILION

  OUR COLUMN MARCHED DOWN a hall so wide that ten men might walk abreast and still leave room to either side—and that was just what we did. The knight-tribune had mobilized her first and second centuries of troops, and they followed on behind her and her high officers: Crossflane, Lin, Greenlaw, and other lieutenants I could not name. Jinan was there, and her lieutenant, Hanas. There was the cornicen with his crystal clarion, and the solifer with the Imperial standard, red-on-white. There was the imaginifer carrying the holograph likeness of His Radiance on a staff, and the signifer bearing the copper eagle and crossed swords of the 437th. Behind them came the chiliarch and the prime centurion, with his optio at his right hand, and behind them—each to a column—came the ten decades of the first century: decurions, triasters, and legionnaires. A sea of red and white.

  The second century followed on, and we all passed between banks of Kharn Sagara’s SOMs, the undead massed to either side, watching with sightless eyes, witch-light glowing through the slack skin of their faces. Some wore the khaki uniforms I had so often seen, though still others were naked, the black metal of their implants dull, indicator lights gleaming in flesh flush with fever. All of them were silent, their heads turning as they tracked our progress toward the looming arch.