Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  I—who am old—cannot help but think that the creature which kills, which consumes by its nature, is more evil than that which kills by its principles. The tigress has no choice, it cannot be reasoned with. The Cielcin are the same. If there existed no possibility of understanding, what hope was there for reconciliation? If one cannot domesticate the tigress, if one cannot make her change her stripes, what is one to do besides shoot her?

  After a long while I stood, mindful of the deep quiet of the ship: funereal but for sound of the ventilation systems. With the ship impounded, her drive cores were down, and what power she drew she took from the Demiurge, to whom she was bracketed. Walking the halls, I realized I had never seen her so empty, with all but about a dozen crewmen locked in icy fugue. Corvo had been given orders to stay the decanting of her people for a few days—our dialogue with the Pale was strained, but not so strained as that.

  Possessed by that archdemon, Sleep, I made my way from the airlock and out into the hall beneath the canopy of captured battle flags, crossing the width of the Mistral toward the starboard dormitories. I rounded the corner, keeping one hand on the padded wall.

  The door to the starboard gallery stood open, and through the round arch I saw a lonely figure sitting at a table, the shape of her framed by the hard edges of the windows, curving lines against square. I hung there a moment, unaware of the smile on my face.

  Valka looked around, perhaps sensing some change in the light from where I stood in the doorway. Her eyes stood out in the gloomy light of the gallery, and she set aside the book she’d been reading as she smiled. “What?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said, stepping into the room. “I just escaped another round of talks.”

  “Escaped,” Valka repeated the word, shifting sideways so that she looked up at me from her place on the couch.

  It was my turn to say, “What?”

  The Tavrosi woman seemed to roll her words in her mouth as though they were some strange morsel, and she said, “You’ve wanted this so long as I’ve known you, and now you have what you want and you’re unhappy.” She shook her head. “’Tis funny. What is to be done with you?”

  Moving past her to stand by the windows at the Demiurge outside, I answered, “I think Smythe and Bassander are asking themselves that same question.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “No,” I said, and found that it was true. I was not afraid, though the weight on my shoulders had never been heavier. “Not for myself, at any rate.”

  She made a small sound, agreeing, and I heard her stand behind me. “Any changes?”

  I had been sharing progress with her each night when I returned from Kharn’s pavilion beneath the tree, once I’d spent another long series of hours in consultation with the knight-tribune and her people.

  “Not really,” I said. “Smythe’s not put ray shielding on the table, and I’d swear that’s about the only thing that could get through Aranata’s thick skull.” I banged a fist against the window frame, but when I spoke again my voice was level as still water. “I don’t understand how they think, Valka.”

  She stood beside me then, the both of us looking out at the Gothic fractal of the Demiurge where it stretched out into the unending Dark. I was aware—acutely aware—of how close she stood to me. Had she always stood so near? The scent of sandalwood hung on the air. Not a perfume—she had no time for such things—but after the awful smell in Kharn’s dungeon it stuck out like a rose in the desert.

  “’Twas never going to be easy,” she said, and crossed her arms.

  “I know that,” I said. “It’s like trying to communicate with an animal. I can make myself understood, but I’m never really quite sure they take my full meaning.” I pressed my forehead to the glass. “It’s like they understand one word in twelve, even when I use their words.”

  Pivoting, Valka put one shoulder against the window. I could almost see her smile, but I shut my eyes instead. “You’re surprised? You should know as well as I that our languages are rooted in our brains, which were shaped by Earth’s environment. That the Cielcin look like us and speak is . . . a coincidence. Surely you’ve noticed? The only places where we fully understand one another are where the language refers to material things. Objects and actions.”

  I twisted my head to look at her, at the small lines that formed against the border of her smile. “Things stronger than our words for them.”

  “What?” The flash of white teeth. A wrinkling of the eyes.

  “Gravity. Fire. Stone. You know.” I slapped the window with my hand. “Things that exist if we did not. Not things like hope or love or exchange.”

  Valka twitched, and I could sense she was about to try and score a point. I guessed what she was about to say, but let her say it anyway. “I thought you believed in Truth,” she said, putting special emphasis on the word so that I knew she meant it after the fashion of the priests and magi.

  “I do . . . I did.” I turned back to the window, retreated a step. “Of course I do. But I’m not sure it isn’t human truth that gives words like hope and love meaning. The scholiasts say that living in accordance with the Truth means living in accordance with our nature. You and I can have an argument about what that nature is, but I think that we can both agree that whatever else is true, the Cielcin have a different nature entirely.” I laughed. “Maybe they are demons.”

  Still in pursuit of that point she looked to score, Valka said, “So there are two truths? Ours and theirs? Because there are two natures at play?”

  I thought of what Varro had told me about sticking to the official story, to use the Empire’s truth—which was itself a lie. Repeating myself, I said, “No,” and took another step back, away from her and the window. “There is only one Truth: that our nature and theirs don’t align.”

  “And you . . . what?” Valka turned her back on the black ship out the window behind her.

  The staring iron statues that lined its ramparts stared over her shoulder with hollow, pitted eyes. I shivered, and closed my own eyes. “If I can’t make us understood?” I felt myself sway where I stood, and steadied myself as one who stands in a canoe. “Then all of this will have been for nothing, and we return to the way things were before.” I took another step back and found myself resting against the arm of the couch. “Are we . . . ?” I gestured up at the air around us, indicating whatever cameras might be listening.

  Valka cocked one eyebrow, and the door to the gallery closed with a metallic glide, locks clicking into place. “We are now,” she said, and frowned. “What’s the matter with you? You’ve gone whiter than usual.”

  Suddenly self-conscious, I drew my coat up and around myself, as though I might vanish beneath the assault of those eyes—as though they were the eyes of an entire Legion or of some goddess in judgment remote and cold as stars. They were no such thing, of course. They were only Valka’s eyes. And we were alone. “It’s my visions,” I said, and trying failed to crush my shame like a serpent beneath my heel. I kept seeing her face as I had seen it at Calagah, when I’d first tried to tell her what it was I’d seen. I never wanted to see that face again. “They show us at war—they show me at war. Planets burning and . . . everything.” I had not told her that I’d seen my own headless body thrown down, or how many times I had seen the end of me. “They said it must be. The war must be. I just . . . I don’t understand, Valka. I don’t understand. Does that mean we fail here? Does that mean we should fail? Do we even have a choice?” I rubbed my face with both hands. “I wish we’d been able to get more out of Tanaran, too. It’s clear they worship the Quiet, but why? What do they know? And I can’t just ask with Smythe and Tor Varro right there. What am I supposed to do? Why are you smiling?”

  “Breathe, Hadrian,” she said, tossing her head in—laughter? Irritation? Why was she so difficult to read? “Just breathe. One thing at a time. You’re looking at too much.”

 
I massaged the back of my neck, rolling my head around. “You sound just like Gibson, he said to just . . .” I pointed inarticulately with one hand, miming forward. “Keep going. To keep my eyes on the task at hand.”

  “Gibson?” Valka’s face darkened. “I thought he was dead.”

  “Likely,” I said, and remembering that I had only seen him in a dream I looked away. “It was a long time ago. It’s stuck with me is all.” I tried to scrub the tiredness from my eyes, but it would not come out. “I just wish you could be there. I wish it were us doing the talking, not these . . . soldiers and bureaucrats. If Switch hadn’t . . .” Hadn’t betrayed me . . . But still I could not say it. Still I could not believe.

  Valka only watched me, lips pressed together. Silhouetted as she was against the window and the shape of the Demiurge beyond it, she seemed almost one of Kharn’s statues herself, face in shadow. The slight and curving form of her stirred the artist in me, or might have done, were it not for the shadow resting heavily on my heart.

  “Hadrian . . .” There was something in her tone I hadn’t heard there before, but I did not notice it at the time.

  I was still speaking. “I just . . . I just want it done. I don’t understand how I got here or what I think I’m doing. I don’t understand the Cielcin and I don’t know how to make them understand me or how the Quiet fits into this. Smythe doesn’t trust me—and why should she? And I’ve lost Switch, I’ve lost Jinan. Bassander would kill me in a second if he had his way, and maybe he’s right. Maybe I shouldn’t be here. Maybe I should have stayed on Emesh and let Anaïs Mataro have her way with me.” I was rambling and I knew it. And knowing it, was ashamed. I hung my head so as not to see Valka, as if in doing so I might not be seen by her and be judged for my insufficiency. My humanity. “Am I a good man?”

  I didn’t even know.

  I had forgotten that she had once asked me that very question.

  But she—who forgot nothing—replied with my own words: “I think the fact you’re asking that question is a good sign.” I was a long time recognizing my own words, and a longer time recalling that day in the bazaar aboard the Enigma of Hours. When I did, I snorted. While still I was shaking my head, she added, “Of course you’re good, or you try to be.” And in a voice smaller still, “You’re good to me.”

  How was I to respond to that?

  “I never thanked you,” she said, tone oddly muffled. “For trying to defend me from Calvert. For everything.”

  “I thought you didn’t like being defended?” I asked, too sharply.

  A dram of Valka’s usual biting quality returned to her sharp-edged voice, and she said, “I don’t like anyone fighting my battles for me. I never said I didn’t like help. But it’s more than that, it . . . you took care of me. In the cell. You’re . . . you’re always kind.”

  I looked up, as surprised by the delicate tremulousness in Valka’s voice as I might have been if a bird had flown through the vacuum of space to perch upon the sill of our window. Quite astonished, I replied, “I’m not.”

  “You are,” she said, more forcefully. “More than I deserve, the way I’ve treated you.”

  “You’ve never done anything wrong,” I said, reassuringly, forgiving the slights and insults, the disbelief and petty misunderstanding. I was sure that I had not always been kind to her, whatever she said. She did not argue with me, and that was a kind of miracle in itself. Thus we both agreed to lie to one another, or else to embed those lies in some other, higher truth—just as the future is embedded in the now.

  In that moment.

  “I don’t know if ’tis good, what we’re doing,” Valka said, “but I know we have to try.” She leaned against the windowpane, fidgeting, unsure just what to do with her hands. “Do you know . . . I didn’t know why I stayed here so long? After Emesh, I mean.” She almost laughed. “I’m not a soldier anymore. I don’t want to be one. Fighting Calvert in that laboratory . . .’tis not who I want to be. I . . . should have left a long time ago. After Pharos, maybe earlier. But I didn’t.” She did laugh then, weakly, almost shyly. “I’m a scientist! I should be back at my dig site on Emesh, or on to the next one not . . . not here.”

  Into the momentary silence, I asked, “Do you want to go? You’re Tavrosi. Smythe wouldn’t stop you.” Being a Demarchist, Valka was accorded all the rights of a foreign diplomat: political immunity, freedom of travel. She could leave, she could always have left. But she hadn’t.

  She pushed off from the window, seemed to hesitate on the spot between it and where I leaned against the couch. “No, I . . .” It was her turn to look away. “There’s still a chance I can learn more here than I could anywhere else. The Cielcin know things we don’t. About the Quiet, I mean.”

  “I can’t guarantee you’ll learn from them, not anymore. Not with the Legions taking control of the conversation. I don’t stand a chance.” The next words I spoke cost me dearly, but wanted saying all the same. “I wouldn’t blame you if you went. This isn’t what you signed up for—then again, I’m not sure it’s what I signed up for, either. But I mean to see it through . . .” Just like Gibson would want . . .

  Half-seated as I was, she was almost taller than I. Still she did not look at me, and I imagined curiosity vying with her hatred of the Empire behind those artificial eyes. She never seemed small to me, though I suppose she was: shorter than I by a head and shaped as if from soapstone.

  “They might kill you,” Valka said.

  “It’s possible,” I said. “I betrayed the Empire. Smythe’s protection has gotten me this far, but if these talks fail . . .” My voice shrank away to nothing as a spark vanishes in the winter air.

  The woman rubbed the clan intaglio on her arm. After a moment she said, lamely, “I don’t want you to die.”

  A small and bitter laugh escaped me, and I said, “Neither do I. It’s only Bassander I’m worried about, but he would never do anything without the knight-tribune’s orders.” Only after had I spoken did I realize the words were meant more to reassure myself than anything. “Besides, the situation’s not hopeless. Not yet.” I could hear Gibson admonishing me in my head, and continued, “It’s only been a few days. I’d be a fool if I expected two species to reconcile their differences in a few days. I was a fool to think it could be otherwise.”

  “You really think Captain Lin would kill you?”

  “He told me as much,” I said, and managed a strained smile. There had been places—little pools spinning off the rivers of light I had seen—where Bassander killed me. Places where he chased me down an echoing corridor, white banners all around, and planted a shot in my back. “Do you think these visions are real? That what Brethren said is true? Really?” Back in the Mistral again, in the waking world—away from the cold and the nightmare of Vorgossos—it seemed almost I could ignore what I had seen. If only the looming mass of the Demiurge with its buttressed spires and legions of black statues would go away, they would take the last of that nightmare with me.

  Was a shadow on Valka’s face? A glimmer of the old scorn? She let out a weighty sigh, eyes wandering the paneled ceiling, taking in I knew not what. “Hadrian, I don’t know. I don’t think you’re lying, if that’s what you mean.”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s . . .” But I could not tell her about what I had seen. Understand, it is not that there was some compulsion in me, such as that which animated poor Naia. Nothing Brethren or the Quiet themselves had placed there. It was only fear. Fear and a kind of truly primitive superstition that I—speaking of the deaths I had seen for myself in my vision—might make them real. By keeping silent I imagined that I might banish the black memory as most nightmares are banished by the sun. “I don’t want them to be true. I don’t.”

  I didn’t have time to think.

  Valka stepped forward again and seized me by the shirtfront with one hand, and I realized my soapstone impression of her had been an illusion.
A mistake.

  Our lives can change at any moment, but they change so drastically only a few times.

  Valka pressed her lips to mine, and pressed me back against the couch so that almost I might have tipped backward—and her on top of me—had I not found my feet. Had I not seized her by the shoulders and held her at bay. “Valka, I—are you sure?”

  She did not answer, but kissed me again. The strength went out of my hands, and she pulled me to her. I forgot time for a moment. Forgot the many futures I had seen: the bright ones and the dark ones and the ones in between. I forgot the past: forgot my childhood on Delos, my suffering on Emesh, Calagah and Vorgossos, Pharos and Rustam. Gilliam and Uvanari, Jinan and Switch. All fell and faded in that feminine Dark. I forgot to breathe, and she pulled away, pressed her forehead to mine. “Listen,” she said. “You’re not going to die. I’m not going to let you.”

  Breathless, I believed her.

  CHAPTER 62

  THE LIMITS OF REASON

  THE MEMORY OF THE previous day’s work hung thick on me. Wind strained through the branches of that aged and mighty tree, tugging at the roof of the pavilion and making the ropes that secured it snap as though we were aboard some sailing ship lost in the middle of a wood.

  “We might consider limiting their campaigns to the Norman territories,” Varro suggested in muttered tones.

  Crossflane had frowned. “Are you sure they could make that distinction?”

  They had not noticed that the Cielcin already were making that distinction, referring only to we Sollans as yukajjimn and exempting Kharn. If they could distinguish between the Extrasolarian king and ourselves, it stood to reason they could as easily mark the Empire from its Norman counterparts. But the memory of Valka’s kiss still moved in me, and even if it had not, I would never have proposed so viciously calculated a posture.