Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “We’re not at war with the Normans,” I said.

  “And I mislike the thought of using the Cielcin to single out foreign powers,” Jinan added, who of course represented a foreign power. Smythe took this all in with a waved hand, indicating the arrival of the Cielcin contingent at the far treeline. Kharn’s eye drones hurried away to corral his children from where they’d wandered down to the river.

  We had not, in the end, offered the Cielcin free range of the Norman Freeholds.

  I’d had another idea.

  “Prince Aranata, let me be clear about one thing,” Raine Smythe said pointedly once the xenobites were all present. “This is not a war you will win.” When the Cielcin balked, she asked, “How many fighters have you? Two hundred thousand? Half that?” I wondered if the prince’s delay were not an admission that the number was very much lower than that. “My legion numbers twenty thousand alone, and we have thousands of them.” She made my play then, and placed a projector on the table before her. An image of the galaxy sprouted in the air before us, detailing the spiral arms. “We’re here,” she said, and a point glowed red near where the Norma Arm brushed against the bulge of galactic center. “And here is everywhere your people have attacked us.” Orange points flared in a tight cluster against the white stars, stretching across the whole Veil of Marinus. Hundreds of worlds. Thousands. Billions of lives. “Here is our domain.” The entire Empire glowed then, highlighted a friendly blue, with green areas demarcating the Principalities of Jadd, the Lothrian Commonwealth, the Durantine Republic, Demarchy of Tavros, and a dozen dozen smaller human polities that stretched from the Perseus Arm at our galaxy’s edge to that same narrow place in Norma where the fighting was thickest.

  Billions of stars. Tens of thousands of worlds. Untold trillions of lives.

  I could see what I thought was shock in the Aeta’s face. Horror. And I knew my plan had had teeth. The Cielcin were predators, so we treat them like predators. We teach them humility. It might just be possible to shame them into a peace—to subordinate them—without bloodshed. Uvanari had surrendered on Emesh because it was beaten. It had been amenable to our demands because it was in our power—impressed by our power. If the only language the Cielcin truly understood was power, then we would speak the language of power.

  “So many . . .” the prince said, voice thin and far away. He bridled almost at once. “We will not bend to you! We will not be slaves to yukajjimn!”

  There really was no middle ground, it seemed. One was either master or slave. There was no partnership, no friendship. The concept of equanimity itself seemed as alien to the Cielcin as they were to us.

  “Not slaves,” I said pointedly, speaking Galstani for my companions’ benefit and allowing the slave to translate for the Pale. Ignoring the pointed looks from Smythe and Crossflane, I pressed on. “Neutral equals. We simply end the fighting between us.”

  Aranata’s lips peeled back over glassy teeth. “Neutral,” it said, repeating the word as though he had never heard it. “There is no such thing. We would be your puppets.”

  I pressed my lips together, remembering the discussion from mere minutes before about using the Cielcin to target the Normans in our ever-expanding conquest of the Veil. I was spared the necessity of responding by Smythe, who offered, “You would be left to your own devices. We would help one another.”

  “Serve one another?” Aranata’s face wrinkled. “Degeneracy.” The word he’d used, serve, suggested something more personal than a mere diplomatic relationship. We were talking past each other, each using words the other party did not fully understand.

  Smythe rapped her knuckles against the tabletop, frustration evident but perhaps meaningless to the xenobites opposite us. “An arrangement could be found that’s mutually beneficial.”

  The slave translator struggled with mutually beneficial for more than a minute. Through the stammering and the babble I caught the word serve again. To serve. To give anything was to serve the receiver, and the Aeta only take. There is no reciprocity, no obligation, no noblesse oblige among the Pale. Only power and those too weak to hold it. Oppressor and oppressed. Finally, the slave girl said, “We could find a way to service one another.”

  Aranata hissed like a bushel of snakes and lashed out, striking the slave girl on the flank. His talons tore her flesh and she fell gasping, clutching at her side. I was nearer the edge of the table and rushed to help her, ignoring both Crossflane’s command to halt and the sudden tension that rippled through the Cielcin line. I did not know what I was doing, only that I could not stand by. I had no bandages, no medical expertise, but some instinct moved me. Aranata pushed himself to his feet. “Service,” he spat. The word carried clear sexual overtones, things I did not understand. “We will not be your slaves. I will not.”

  The girl was not bleeding badly. For all the force of his blow, the prince had pulled his talons, and the wounds were little more than scratches. I helped her to sit up, careful not to look at her ruined, spidery hands or the way they pawed uselessly at her wounded side. She was so light—it felt like lifting driftwood—and insubstantial that I half-expected her to float away in my hands.

  Nobuta wailed. “No, get away! She’s mine!” it said, and yanked the chain. I caught the silver thread in my fist. Years of strength refined in Emesh’s heavy gravity held fast, and I did not flinch, but glowered up at the alien child with flinty eyes. It quailed.

  Not releasing the chain, I asked the girl, “Are you all right?”

  She did not answer. Perhaps she could not. Her eyes! Reader, her eyes! They were like deep pools, mirrors reflecting . . . nothing. What light had been in them at birth was long quenched, and she only murmured my words back at me in the Cielcin tongue. “Are you all right?” Those eyes found mine, and for a moment I sensed the faintest, quiet spark in them, a lonely cinder hidden in the ash of a long-dead fire. She was not the woman from my vision, but then Aranata was not the dark lord I had seen. One of her ruined hands found mine, too-long fingers struggling to close. In a faint voice dry as old leaves she murmured two words I have never forgotten. So small were they, I strained to hear them. But heard them I did. “Kill me,” she said. It was the only time I heard her speak the tongues of men. Horrified, I yanked my hand away.

  The spark in her went out.

  Nobuta yanked the chain again, and I pulled. The little Cielcin came half out of its chair and let the chain go. A cry of surprise and pain escaped the xenobite, and rough hands seized me. I was pulled unceremoniously to my feet, felt the needlepoint prick of talons on my shoulders and arms. Two of Aranata’s men held me, forced my arms behind my back. Smythe was shouting for my release. One of the guards seized me by the hair, forced me to look up.

  I thrust out my chin, straining against my guards. These Cielcin were not weak as the child had been, and I could not escape. Aranata stood in a rush, horned bulk towering over me. One massive hand seized me by my tunic front, and the Prince hissed, “Apologize.”

  I did no such thing, fists clenched behind my back.

  Prince Aranata’s hand slid upward, overlong fingers closing round my throat. “I said apologize.” I glanced at Nobuta Otiolo. The herald Oalicomn had helped the child back to its seat, and it was watching me with eyes deeper and darker than—but just as lifeless as—the eyes of the slave girl. I clamped my jaw shut, knowing that to apologize was to lose the argument, to lose face in these debates.

  The whine of plasma burners being primed filled the pavilion, and glancing to one side I saw Smythe’s guards had turned weapons on the Pale.

  As if from very far away, I heard the sound of Kharn Sagara’s laughter. “What a farce!” he said, voice shaking the very air. “Release Lord Marlowe, my prince. And you, Knight-Tribune. Order your men to put down their arms. There will be no violence here.” One of Kharn’s eyes slid in an arc to glower at Aranata from over my shoulder, the threat there plain as day. Kharn hi
mself had found his feet, machine hand holding shut his golden robes. His lips did not move. “I said release him!”

  To my surprise, Aranata did as he was told. I only just managed to keep my footing as the prince unhanded me. The Cielcin lord drew back, looking down at me with an expression I could not read. “I should kill you,” he said, and there was no emotion in its voice that I could name. “Harm my child again, and I will.”

  I could not show weakness. I could not apologize. I took a step forward instead, eyes never leaving the prince’s face. I said nothing. It was enough to signal that I was not afraid of him, however hard the blood beat in my ears. I have done many brave things in my life, and many more foolish. Which this next was I still don’t know, but I turned my back on the prince and returned to my seat without another word. For a brief moment, I alone of all that party—save only the alien child—sat in my seat. Even Kharn was standing, and in that instant the entire audience focused on me.

  By refusing to apologize, I’d asserted myself in the alien dominance contest that passed for politics among the Pale. How diplomacy was done between their clans I didn’t dare guess, but I suspected that it had more in common with the way two rams butted heads or two lions fought than it did an international summit. We’d had to assert that we were a party worth honoring. We’d had to show some teeth and a backbone. The backbone had been mine, the teeth the weapons the others all carried and their willingness to use them.

  “Enough posturing,” I said in Cielcin, posturing myself. “Please, take a seat, my prince.”

  I felt an almost imperceptible shift in the air between the prince and myself, a respect and a grudging . . . wariness? Caution? We had not come to surrender to him, that much was coming plain, but he did not understand yet what arrangement might be made between us.

  He never would.

  But—desperate or merely hungry—he took his seat again.

  CHAPTER 63

  THE APOSTOL

  IT HAD BEEN DEEP in the middle of ship’s night when Lieutenant Greenlaw came to fetch me for a meeting with Smythe. I had not been sleeping—too much filled my head for that, and I had dressed hastily and followed. The confused route through the Demiurge matched the confusion in my heart: warring images on the walls and the horrid pattern of human faces leering out of black metal.

  “Do you think it worked?” Smythe asked, once Greenlaw left us alone in her office aboard the Schiavona.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “It certainly had an effect, but just what that effect was I can’t rightly say.” I took the seat offered me opposite Smythe’s desk. “Where’s Crossflane?” The First Officer was conspicuously absent. Why that should unsettle me I cannot say, and yet it did. The old knight was never far from his tribune’s side, a stiffly formal shadow, the textbook image of the old Imperial officer with his neat black uniform and immaculately groomed sideburns.

  Smythe moved her cane from its resting place at the arm of her chair and propped it against the wall behind her. “Sleeping, Earth bless him. William’s not so young as he once was.” The use of the old knight’s name—Switch’s name—stung me more than I care to admit, and it was all I could do to suppress a flinch. Smythe looked like she could stand to sleep herself. There were deep circles under her eyes, and the scar-streaked skin had a quality like wax paper over drying meat. I might have pitied her, were it not for her devil’s bargain with Kharn Sagara. “But then, neither am I. Truth be told, I never expected to live so long as this.”

  “How long is ‘this’?” I dared to ask.

  Groaning, Smythe pushed herself to her feet and stumped over to a sideboard. “I thought you palatines considered it rude to ask after someone else’s age?” I made a half-hearted noise of apology, and she waved me down. “Ah, but I’m not a palatine, and nearly three hundred,” she said. “Me. Three hundred. Can you imagine? My mother was a solar farm technician, and here I am. Brandy? I had it brought from the Obdurate.”

  “Please.”

  “Have you heard of Churchill? He was King of Britain at the end of the Golden Age,” she said, filling two fat glasses with the stuff. I said that I had, but did not add that it was contested whether or not Churchill had been king or only some manner of logothete. “Winston the Good was named after him, you know? He was fond of brandy, or so William tells it.” She offered me one glass and, taking the other in one hand said, “Your health, Lord Marlowe.”

  “And yours.”

  “And Earth and Emperor!” she said, and drank.

  “Earth and Emperor!” I murmured, a bit half-heartedly, and drank. I confess I never developed much of a taste for the old nostrum myself, but as Kharn had said . . . Si fueris Romae . . .

  We sat then in companionate silence, each cradling a glass of brandy. The taste of oranges hung on my tongue, erasing better things, stifling conversation. At last Smythe cleared her throat and—setting aside her snifter with a weighty sigh—said, “I have . . . a proposal.” I let these words stretch without interruption, in expectation of some proper announcement to come. Often I have observed this habit in important persons: in nobiles, in their advisors and logothetes. Even in certain scholiasts I have known. That habit of announcing things which it is better one come out and say. I am guilty of this particular pattern myself. Smythe, I think, was less motivated by stagecraft than she was slowed by the weight of her office. Many are.

  Smythe started again, fingering some object on her desk while she spoke. “Varro has suggested that given the . . . the cupidity of our alien friend and his demanding nature, that it might flatter him to post an apostol to this Aeta’s court—if they have courts.”

  “An apostol?” I repeated, processing. An emissary. And ambassador. I felt a faint glimmer of where this headed and felt my stomach turn over. “Do you think they would accept?”

  She sucked her teeth. “I’m not certain. But I should like to have a plan of action sorted out on our end before I made any offers to the Pale. There remains your ray shield suggestion as well, though I think pairing the two gifts might go a long way.”

  “Flattery may be our best option,” I said. It seemed to work well enough for Kharn. “Though we have gained some form of toehold.”

  “We have!” Smythe stared down into her drink. “That little stunt of yours with the map earned us some respect—and the rest of it didn’t hurt.”

  Seeing just where she was heading, I said, “You mean to appoint me as apostol to the Cielcin, don’t you?” I tried to picture it: me, an ambassador among the Pale. It was the sort of thing I had dreamed of for so long, and yet now it tasted of ashes to me. Of ashes, and that poor woman’s desperate prayer.

  Kill me.

  “The thought had occurred to us, yes, but there is a danger.” She turned the glass in her hands and eyed me as a bird eyes a worm. “Varro is not certain the Aeta would understand a diplomatic posting. Might interpret it as a gift.”

  Unwilling to dance this dance, I said, “You want to post me to the Cielcin. Give me to him. Like you gave away five thousand plebeian serfs.”

  “Don’t recriminate me!” She thrust a finger at me. “Don’t you dare. Those plebs sold themselves to the Migration Office, and I’d no notion Sagara meant to sell them to the Pale.”

  “What did you expect?” I asked. “That he’d set to farming on that ice ball he calls home?” I had to struggle to keep my voice level. “Those were our people, Smythe.”

  The knight-tribune had the good grace to look away. “I imagined he’d put them to some proper labor, yes. Even pirates need someone to work the farms and factories.”

  “He has those, or haven’t you seen?”

  Understanding and a species of pain flickered behind Smythe’s face like the light of the SOMs she was imagining. “I did make a mistake,” she admitted, “but that was the price of doing business with Vorgossos. Without it . . .” The rest went unsaid. Without it we would no
t have been brought aboard the Demiurge, without it Bassander would have been sent packing as surely as I had, and with hands just as empty.

  “You should not have come here,” I said, setting the glass down with a solid clink. “If you’d but let me do my job, ma’am.” I broke off, aware of what I was saying. I was no proper soldier, and I was lord, besides, but I ought not speak in that way. Not to her.

  Smythe’s face darkened, and I saw her lips go white as corpseflesh. But she smoothed the emotion away with a display of control I might have expected from a scholiast and not an officer of the corps. “What you’ve done and what I’ve done are not at issue here and now, Marlowe. What we will do, is. I propose to send an apostol to the Cielcin—on their terms, if need be—to mediate and advocate for us, and to observe. As you have already guessed, I think you would be well suited to the position.”

  “You mean that I am expendable,” I said. Anger flared in me, pushed along by a deeper fear I had not yet named. “I didn’t take you for a grocer, Smythe.”

  The older woman—who perhaps had worked in a grocery as a peasant child—bridled. “Excuse you?”

  “If you gift me to Aranata,” I said, “how long before I’m cut up for his table, or worse? How long before he’s done to me what he’s done to that poor girl of his? Eh?”

  Her nostrils flared. “Are you so poor a diplomat?”

  I threw her my sharpest smile, one of the sort I had learned from Valka in the earliest days of our acquaintance. “I wouldn’t know, I’ve barely been able to speak to them. You know, on Emesh, I did more with Uvanari in five minutes than the Chantry managed in weeks.” Privately, I resigned myself to stop drinking Smythe’s brandy. Let the dregs stand! “But I don’t understand what they’re like. Their concept of a diplomatic posting might look more like the gift of a new slave than that of a visiting dignitary.” The words cut me as I spoke them, though they were true. Had she offered a younger and more foolish Hadrian such a posting, I would have thrown myself upon the opportunity as women throw flowers and undergarments at gladiators as they emerge onto the killing floor. The old romance stirred in me, and despite myself I imagined a sojourn among the xenobites, learning their ways, speaking their tongues. I could have my answers, both about the Cielcin and about the Quiet gods they worshipped.