Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “You haven’t answered my question, though,” I said, though perhaps she had tried. I repeated myself. “Brethren could devour the stars?”

  “I told you,” she said, “they built weapons more terrible than anything you can imagine. Weapons that—”

  “That’s quite enough, Mistress Suzuha.”

  Right on cue, I thought, pivoting on my heel. Where Yume had come from I cannot say, but the golem had appeared on the rise of stone above the shoreline, looking down on us with its one red eye.

  “Come away from Lord Marlowe, children,” Yume said, its crystalline voice as erudite and polished as ever. “He has had a busy day.” Ren peeled off his sister’s side and hurried up toward his machine servant, offering no objection or word of protest. Suzuha did not move. “Mistress Suzuha, please.”

  Still, she did not move, ignored the golem’s next requests that she accompany him. She did not know what to do with her hands, as if she could not decide between crossing her arms and some other, vaguer gesture. “What did you mean? When you said you knew what was going to happen to Vorgossos?”

  “Mistress!”

  I cannot say why, but I felt only a little threat from Yume, though I felt certain the beast could move at least as fast as Calvert had, with that blinding, nightmare speed of the inhuman. Feeling safe, then, I answered, “It will be destroyed.”

  The color drained from her face a moment, for I had spoken with the casual air of one who merely answered a question, making no threats. But the blood returned to her lips a moment later and the fire with it, and she almost shouted, “You lie!”

  “I may be mistaken,” I conceded, sparing a glance to the impassive machine in its one-eyed masquerade mask. “I do not lie.”

  “How?” Were those tears unfallen in those pitiless eyes? Or only my reflection?

  “You have to ask?” I paused, expecting again that Yume would interfere. It did not. “The Empire has found you. Found Brethren and your father and all his works. Do you think they’ll let you go?”

  The fear in Suzuha’s eyes vanished at once, and I understood why Yume had not interfered. “Is that all?” Again she pointed her chin like a weapon, unafraid. “You haven’t been listening to me, have you? Father has their war machines at his command. Send your legions. Send a thousand of them! Father will feed them to Brethren and stack their bones beneath his palace.”

  “I said that’s enough, Mistress Suzuha!” Yume said, disentangling itself from Ren and stepping smartly from the rise. It fell like a marionette descending from above stage on unseen strings, crossing one hand over its chest as it bowed. “Your father has summoned you and Master Ren. It is time for supper.”

  The girl lingered a moment, just long enough to smile at me and say, “You think too much of yourselves, you Sollans.” Her smile widened, displaying her teeth as though she were some manner of wolf. Then she turned to go.

  “Lady Suzuha!” I said, ever needing the last word and ever determined to have it. “You forget one thing.” She half-turned back, but Yume had its iron hand on her and kept her moving forward. She did not say anything. “We defeated the daimons once before, we Sollans. We will do it again.” I was boasting. I should not boast.

  They vanished into the night, passing like a line of statues—like ghosts—leaving me alone, a ghost myself, as we always are in our solitary moments. That ghost named Hadrian turned back to the water, fancying he saw the shape of some pale fish swimming near the surface.

  And not a gull in sight.

  CHAPTER 66

  A BLOODY STAR

  “THIS . . . EMISSARY OF YOURS,” Prince Aranata was saying, using the Galstani word—though I suspected he did not grasp its precise meaning. It leaned far over the table. “This gift. It would fight for us? Speak with the Aeta of the other clans? With the Hasurumn, the Dorayaica, the Gadaritanu, and the rest?”

  “Fight for you?” Smythe asked.

  Aranata held one hand over the table, made it into a fist. “It is to be ours. It must fight.”

  “We were hoping that he might travel among your other clans,” Smythe said, “make peace with all of them.”

  Aranata Otiolo made a disgusted face. “One cannot serve so many masters. It is uidyryu. Unclean.” It jerked its head in the negative.

  “And what of your gift?” Smythe crossed her arms, unimpressed by the Prince’s looming bulk. “An end to the fighting between your clan and our Empire? And Tanaran?”

  The herald hissed, “She would starve us, my prince!”

  The Aeta swatted Oalicomn with casual disdain. The herald yelped and fell silent in its seat. “You cannot have Tanaran,” he said. “And if your gift will fight with us, we shall feast on the other itanimn. Long have I dreamed of drinking the blood of the Koleritan. Perhaps the dark one will deliver them to me as he delivered Tanaran.”

  “You want me to fight for you?” I was shocked.

  “Lord Marlowe is meant to secure a ceasefire between our two peoples, not to fight your wars,” the Knight-Tribune said. She did not add that if human soldiers were to carry out attacks against the other princes on Otiolo’s behalf, the Empire would be blamed and hell would follow.

  Aranata bared its translucent teeth. “I do not speak for the clans, but if they were mine . . .” The implication was left trailing in the air.

  “You want our help to conquer them?” Crossflane asked, astonishment clear in his tone. He sat up straight.

  I felt Valka tense beside me, sensed the anger snap in her like a reed. That was the third day since Valka had begun sitting in on our talks, and like Jinan had been little more than a quiet observer, having pored over the recordings we had made of previous days. She had latched onto Tanaran’s references to the Cielcin religion, but she had said nothing—and how could she? The Chantry may have been far away, but their shadow fell everywhere the light of the Empire shone, and their threat with them.

  “Your lot did the same in the Mathuran Campaigns,” she said to me under her breath. “Funding the Prachar separatists, pitting the clans against one another.”

  I didn’t answer her. It was not the proper time to get into a debate about Imperial foreign policy with the doctor. I only nodded, placed a hand on Valka’s knee for a passing second. “Later.” She pressed her lips together. If a smile can be irritated, hers was.

  “Anaryoch . . .”

  “That’s me,” I said tartly.

  Aranata pounded its fist on the table. “You said you wish to serve us. This is the service we require.” We had said no such thing. Days of dialogue and still the Prince did not understand. Maybe Bassander was right. Maybe it would never understand. I despaired. The Prince massaged its jaw, the fine chains that hung over the back of its hands glittering in the light. “You would make us—”

  Red light blazed from all directions, so bright it turned the shadows into solid things and cast all the world into stark relief. Every limb, every blade of grass took on dimension, weight. The Cielcin hissed like an army of boiling snakes and cast arms over their sensitive eyes.

  “What’s going on?” Tor Varro asked, reacting faster even than the soldiers around us. “What’s happening?”

  Kharn Sagara’s floating eyes sped out from under the shadow of the pavilion cloth, and the man himself lurched to his feet, chest implants whirring to life beneath his golden robe. Moving with a speed I’d not have credited to his aged and machine-addled body, the Undying moved down between the opposing tables and out the far end of the pavilion, for he knew and saw more than we and understood what was happening.

  “What is it?” I asked, rising, moving with Valka to stand beside the Lord of Vorgossos. I came out from under the striped awning before the others and so saw what there was to see.

  Red light fell silent through the Garden’s open skylight, angry as the gaze of some wrathful god. It was as if the targeting laser of some great w
eapon were pointed through that aperture straight at us, ready to fire. Not since the Cielcin crash at Calagah had I felt so small, an insect beneath the boot of some wanton boy. I felt almost that a new star was born in the heavens above us. A bloody star, vile and violent as War, and bearing her colors. Red and red and redder still.

  “What is this?” Raine Smythe demanded, rounding not on Sagara, but on the Cielcin prince. “Some weapon?”

  “Hutun nesuh?” Prince Aranata repeated.

  “Weapon?” the slave girl barked.

  Aranata stood, and everyone in the tent with it, all still more stunned and confused than angry. “Why would we turn a weapon on our self?” Aranata said. “This is you. This is some yukajjimn trick!”

  The Cielcin was more right than it knew. The light dimmed, and I saw it was not the light of some weapon, but the angry light of that fire which burns brighter than any star. It was only that the glass of the Demiurge’s window had polarized the worst of it, sparing us all the blaze and the pain of it, turning it more red than white.

  Atomics. And worse than atomics.

  Antimatter.

  I had seen that clean light but once before, when Emil Bordelon and Admiral Whent had used it against us on Pharos. Brighter than the gates of heaven itself, more deadly than the mouth of hell. And this time, it was the Cielcin ship that was consumed. Light—brighter than any light I have seen save one—had chewed its way across the ice-domed cap of the Bahali imnal Akura, chewed through it with all the fury of some wasting disease, as easily as highmatter through paper. Matter and antimatter consuming one another as the ouroborous devours its own tail, leaving nothing behind but great, ragged holes and the smoldering red of fusion fire from the assault of hydrogen bombs large enough to boil away entire seas.

  The Cielcin vessel had been larger than a small moon, and it was broken.

  All this passed before my eyes in less time than it takes to write it. Mere seconds. Two, perhaps, and no more. Someone behind me swore, and I heard the shuffling of feet. The light blazed as a second barrage flared up, and for the briefest second before the flash I saw the mushroom-flowering of nuclear impact hundreds of thousands of miles away, and thought, Oh, it’s beautiful.

  It is said that Death herself was present at the first summoning of that nuclear fire, and that she had smiled in her lipless way and pronounced that she was mighty then, mighty enough to destroy worlds and not only nations. The magi who had summoned her quailed, and wrung their hands, and wept for the evil they had done, but did it all the same—for ever are magi so consumed by the question of whether a thing can be done that they ignore the matter of whether or not it should until it is too late, being the sort who sells his soul for knowledge, forgetting it is the soul which craves that knowledge in the first place and makes life worth living.

  Death must have smiled then, for surely she stood among us, unseen amid all our strange companions: xenobites, demoniacs, witches, and soldiers. And me, the lost and lonely devil, innocent for once in his life.

  A third flash came, driving the Cielcin howling to the ground, for they were creatures of the night and loved the light not.

  “What in Earth’s holy name is happening?” Crossflane’s voice, but in the confusion I could not see him when I looked around.

  It was Kharn Sagara who answered, omnipresent voice shaking the very air about us. “Someone has attacked the Cielcin ship,” he said. The slave girl—too frightened now to speak and cowering I knew not where—did not translate this for the Cielcin, and so Aranata and its fellows crouched low for fear of the light.

  And the light came, and I threw my arm across my eyes, sheltering Valka with my other arm. I could feel her warm against me, and hear her murmur, “What have you done?”

  “It wasn’t me!” I hissed, dumbly. “It wasn’t me.”

  But it had to be us. The Empire.

  The Empire had come.

  “Smythe!” I rounded on the knight-tribune, who stood at the end of the pavilion not three paces behind me. “What’s happened? What’s going on?”

  Whatever I had expected to see in her I was disappointed, for when I turned and looked the tribune in the eye I saw not the old soldier, not the Imperial knight, nor the Knight-Tribune of the Third Cohort of the 437th Centaurine. No. No. For all her armor and the pomp of her uniform, it was only Raine who stood there. For the briefest instant, all her roles were stripped away and she stood numb and naked and confused, an old woman openmouthed before the deluge. A pillar of salt.

  And when she opened her mouth, she could only say, “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” Kharn Sagara sneered, speaking both with his machine voice and his throat. He rounded on her, shrugging the golden finery from his shoulders so that he advanced bare-chested with his arms free. The segmented, paper-sculpture flesh of his torso flexed, plates sliding one over the other as he advanced, chest implants whining. “You don’t know?”

  Crossflane appeared as if from nowhere, stepping between the Undying and his friend and superior. “Stand down, sir!” he said, and drew his phase disruptor from his belt. “Stand down, I say!”

  Kharn snarled, and a lance of blue light shot from one of his unseen drone-eyes, coruscated off Crossflane’s shield. Snarling again, the Lord of Vorgossos seized old Sir William by the throat-seal of his breastplate with one hand and hurled him bodily down the hill. Standing mere inches from Smythe and towering over her, he demanded, “You don’t know what you’ve done? Don’t lie to me, human. You mean to tell me the fleet that just emerged from warp isn’t you?”

  “What?” Valka exclaimed, the word an involuntary reflex.

  “That’s impossible,” I said, forgetting reason in my surprise and blind panic. I heard the sounds of shouting, both human and alien, and looking around saw the shapes of SOMs pouring out of the trees at the edge of the Garden. Imperial legionnaires and Cielcin scahari both whirled.

  “Father, stop!” Ren ran forward, leaving his sister petrified by the bole of the tree, and stopped a few paces from where Kharn stood by Smythe. “Stop! I’m scared.”

  The Undying turned to regard his son a moment, and seemed to remember himself then. The Cielcin still cowered on the ground, their unprotected eyes not proof against even the polarized light from above and still barred from understanding by the language barrier. Something in his bearing changed, and he drew himself together, composed enough to ask, in a voice taut as piano wire, “What have you done?”

  “I don’t know!” Smythe said.

  “An Imperial fleet just emerged from warp and destroyed the Cielcin worldship, and you plead ignorance?” His metal and paper-fleshed arm lanced out, seizing Raine Smythe by the jaw. Like Crossflane, he lifted her bodily from the floor. Smoothly, easily, as though it were a child’s doll he hefted. “Do not lie to me, Knight-Tribune.”

  “She’s not!” said another voice, cold and clear as ice in that moment of fire. A stunner shot rang out, and Ren fell like a rag doll himself, like a puppet with its strings cut. Bassander Lin stepped from the shadow of the pavilion, cycling his phase disruptor away from its stun setting. “She knew nothing of this. That was the plan.”

  Still holding Smythe with one hand, Kharn Sagara pivoted his attention to the young captain, mere feet away and growing closer. “What are—”

  He never finished his thought. Bassander didn’t give him the time. Bassander didn’t even break stride. He raised his phase disruptor and fired.

  I shouted.

  Suzuha screamed.

  Raine Smythe fell to the ground, legs crumpling beneath her.

  Kharn Sagara went to his knees, hair smoldering where the current had fried it, his machine components dead as old stone. He tried to rise, tried to turn toward Bassander. His face was turning blue, and I saw capillaries bursting in his eyes. How he had survived a disruptor shot at all I cannot say. He almost, almost found his
feet.

  Bassander shot him again, full in the face—and turned that face to cinders.

  Suzuha screamed again, but the sound was strangled and vanished in the still air.

  And the Undying . . . died.

  CHAPTER 67

  TRAITOR AND PATRIOT

  SILENCE REIGNED.

  No one moved. Not the humans, who were stunned and speechless. Not the Cielcin who still cowered in confusion and the fear of the light. Not the SOMs, who to a man had fallen listlessly to the earth. Even I—whose mind raced faster than ever before—could not so much as wrench my eyes away from the wreck and ruin of the machine-man dead and smoking before me. Not for three seconds. Not for five.

  Only when the light from the heavens above faded did the world and time begin to move again, or rather with the light from above vanished did those things moving in the world come into focus. Prince Aranata pushed itself to its feet slowly, glassy teeth clenched. “Dein . . .” it said. “What is happening?”

  No one had told it, though surely the seeds of understanding must have begun their flower. I wanted an answer myself, and so made a move toward Bassander, thinking to shake answers from the man.

  “Something is wrong with the children!” Tor Varro’s voice broke across my world, and I turned. He was right. Smoke still curled from the ruin of Kharn’s body, and I thought his tangled hair smoldered. Sprawled at the edge of the carpet unrolled in the pavilion, Ren’s tiny form convulsed, and Suzuha’s beneath the bole of the tree. The scholiast knelt beside her, trying to restrain her thrashing limbs.

  Raine Smythe had found her feet—she had lost her cane when Sagara had seized her, and did not bother to find it again. “Captain Lin, what have you done?”

  He turned, stepped smartly over Kharn’s body as he approached his commander. “It’s First Strategos Hauptmann and the fleet, come to make an end to all this.”