Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “She was awake?” I asked, lurching toward the small man—the boy.

  “No, m’lord,” he said, “she were having some sort of fit, like. Didn’t see the Jaddian, though.” That was something. I cannot say how I was certain, only that I had an . . . an intuition. I kept seeing the implant glowing behind Kharn’s ear when I approached his throne, kept remembering the way his spirit had moved behind Naia’s eyes.

  He wasn’t dead, I knew it.

  “What is it?” Valka asked.

  I shook myself. There wasn’t time for introspection. “It’s nothing, I—”

  A sound went up like the hissing of a nest of vipers, and I turned. We all turned.

  They were there among the trees, tall shapes pale and terrible as Death herself, dressed in black and deepest blue, horn-crowned and staring. They were much too tall to be men, and much too thin. Only then did I realize the depth of the quiet that had fallen, with no sound but the slow-catch of flames in the wind-tossed branches. For a moment, Bassander’s eyes found mine, and both of us knew that Greenlaw and the rear guard were dead.

  Valka’s fingers tightened on my upper arm, and in her native Nordei she whispered, “’Tis time to go.” I did not need telling.

  Of Prince Aranata there was no sign, but one Cielcin—whom I had not seen before, a surprisingly broad-shouldered one in a deep blue cloak—raised its hand and shouted a single word: “Uiddaa!”

  Throw.

  There must have been a couple hundred of them standing among the trees, and each of them hurled one of the fanged nahute. I could hear the hum of them on the air, hurtling toward us like a volley of arrows in the woods of Agincourt twenty thousand years before.

  “Retreat!” Smythe’s word went up like the voice of God, amplified by her suit to a superhuman scream. She drew her sword—highmatter gleaming in the darkness—and waved everyone on. “Back to the Schiavona! Go! Go!” Behind me, the remaining mass of our people—perhaps a hundred and fifty or so legionnaires—began to move. To the untrained eye, it must have seemed a rout, but I saw the way the troop triases held together, men moving shoulder to shoulder, lances on their backs, plasma burners low and ready.

  I was one of the last to leave the shadow of the gate, one of the last to turn as a single line of hoplites—shielded and with phase disruptors raised—closed ranks beneath the carved archway. Many of the nahute drones—confused by body heat, I guessed—turned aside, burrowing into the SOMs who lay comatose all about. That was a mercy, I decided. Still more hurried on, some shot down by the hoplites’ disruptor fire, electrical discharge frying the drones’ delicate circuits.

  “Marlowe!” someone yelled. Was it Crossflane?

  And yet I found I could not look away as the first wave of drones crashed into the armored hoplites. My sword was in my hand.

  “Uiddaa!” the Cielcin commander shouted again, the word a kind of curse. A second wave of nahute came hissing to life.

  “Hadrian!” someone yelled. Valka?

  Never have I forgotten the bravery of those men, those hoplites standing in the mouth of the Garden gate. The way they dug in, squaring their shoulders even as the Cielcin advanced, loping like wolves out of the firelit darkness.

  Like leopards.

  Like lions.

  Would that I had known each of them and all their names, for they deserved a monument and commemoration here. The boy who had addressed me was one of them, who had told me Tor Varro and Suzuha yet lived. He died there, him and his fellows. He gave his life to cover our escape, and I cannot even record his name for you and for posterity. The greater part of war, I think, is such forgotten acts of heroism. You sing your songs of Hadrian Halfmortal, of the Phoenix of Perfugium, of other heroes, but I tell you we are nothing, nothing next to those ordinary men who lay down their lives—who are not ordinary at all.

  Because, you see, I was wrong. Wrong when I told Sir Olorin and Bassander that wars aren’t won with soldiers, on Emesh long ago. That, I think, was the start of Bassander’s dislike for me, and rightly so. To say such a thing was to dishonor men and moments such at this: when two dozen hoplites turned without argument, without complaint, and died.

  Rough hands seized me, and I was dragged back, pushed and spurred on. It wasn’t Valka at all. She was far ahead, had turned with Smythe and Crossflane and the soldiers dragging Nobuta.

  It was Bassander.

  “Move, you nobile fool!” the soldier barked.

  I moved, the two of us hurrying along the hall, more or less the last in line. Behind, the humming sound of the nahute droned above the din of battle behind. The sounds of feet and scuffle. Shouting. Screams. I ran faster, sword silent in my hands, shield on and invisible around me. Black pillars sped past, and the grotesque motifs of human faces and limbs sculpted into the walls. In the dark, it was almost as though I had returned to the tunnels of Calagah, save that here there shone the dying-ember glow of emergency lighting.

  Feet on the path behind. Feet and the echoes of harsh laughter, cold and high and thin.

  Ahead, Smythe shouted an order, and men turned back. Triases—entire decades—turned back and took up positions in the shadow of the pillared hall, waiting in ambush. We turned, running—or so I thought—along the length of that baroque nightmare of a ship. Here the hall opened up so that ten men might walk abreast, the ceiling above supported by black arches and the statues of naked women blacker still. Thence it ran through several gates and open bulkheads toward the hangar where the Schiavona waited.

  But could we even escape? Was it possible to fly out with the Demiurge in its current state? Without Kharn Sagara?

  Our group fanned out, filling the wider hall. I hurried forward, breath aching in my chest.

  More sounds of gunfire came from behind with the violet flash of plasma. Cielcin howled, and I felt sure Smythe’s men had done some damage.

  “Faster!” Sir William called out. “Faster, you dogs!”

  Despite these encouraging words, I saw that we were slowing down. We had caught up to the front of our party, to Jinan—still carrying the unconscious Ren in her arms—and to Tor Varro with Suzuha strung between himself and a tall decurion. Nobuta had begun to struggle, and despite its youth its great size meant that now four men struggled to restrain it.

  And then the cry went up. Not the blood-cry of the Cielcin coming fast behind, nor the scream of dying men. No, this came from ahead. A cry of dread and cold despair. I saw it then, a moment later, and nearly stopped my run.

  The door was shut.

  Perhaps it was in response to the battle outside, some emergency protocol. Perhaps it was because Kharn was dead. The why did not matter then, only that one of the hall’s emergency bulkheads was shut.

  “Out of my way! Out of my way!” Raine Smythe said, sword still raised imperious above her head. Bone-colored soldiers parted, turning dutifully back to face down the hall in expectation of the coming tide. I did not turn with them, but watched as Smythe plunged her sword through the heavy metal of the door. It made no sound, nor fume nor vapor was there as blue metal carved gray like paper. I turned, hearing once more the sound of loping feet, and felt sure at any second I would see the Cielcin resolve out of the darkness, fang and horn and claw, and with them a churning cloud of their nahute.

  “Push!” Smythe shouted, gesturing her men forward. A dozen of them threw their shoulders against the bulkhead. “Heave!”

  Nothing happened.

  Nothing moved.

  “Push, damn you!” Smythe yelled, but it was no good. Perhaps the door was too heavy to move, or perhaps it was thicker than Smythe’s sword could cut through. I never learned. Somewhere in the confusion, someone found the side door, a narrow passage leading deeper into the bowels of that evil ship.

  We’d had no choice. Better lost in the Demiurge than stand there—backs against the wall—to fight and die. One-to-one, the
Cielcin were more than a match for a Sollan legionnaire. Their lowliest screamer outsized and outmassed ours and possessed the idiot strength of the damned. For they had been raised out in the black between the stars, their bodies strengthened by elixirs, decoctions made to arrest the slow atrophy of muscle tissue in the absence of gravity. I have since seen scahari lift a man bodily in one hand, tear the arms from a man’s sockets, and crush his skull with their fingers. Against a tide of them in a hall, backs against the wall? Armed as we were, with the nahute bearing down faster than any of us could track . . . I could see the blood already, the bodies at my feet.

  “Go! Go! Go!” one of the centurions was shouting, shepherding Tor Varro with a now-unconscious and unmoving Suzuha through the gap. “Knight-Tribune!”

  Smythe waved him on. “Take the hostages and go. Lin, take the lead!” For a moment, I thought Bassander would argue, but he nodded and hurried on. “You too, Marlowe!”

  “But I can help!”

  “You can help by getting that prince of yours to safety so we can negotiate from safety, now stop your arguing and go!”

  “But—”

  “This is not a committee, boy!” She shoved me.

  I went.

  Dark the halls of that trackless ship and orderless. The shapes of men and demons, angels and furies snarled from the walls, clung to pillars and to the rails of galleries we stumbled upon. Only the white beams of suit lamps lighted our way, jounced and swaying with the passage of our bodies, so that the world around was seen only through half a hundred juddering keyholes. Worse, none of us knew where it was we were going. Halls spiraled off to either side, rolling with the axis of gravity. Stairs ran at odd angles, descending toward the ceiling and rising down halls to either side, and twice I saw the end of our column running along the ceiling above. Valka ran beside me, and every dozen steps I heard her swear. “Damn,” she said. “Do we know . . . where we’re going?” She was tired. We were all tired. And she was right: we were lost.

  “This way!” Bassander called out, blind leading blind. Were it not for the artwork and the mad geometries, we might have been lost in the halls of Kharn’s palace on Vorgossos. I saw Bassander duck through a pointed arch, momentarily silhouetted against the snarling shape of a gargoyle, his hand grasping one of its arms.

  Stalled a moment by the crush of people trying to follow him, I gripped Valka by the arm. “Can you . . . can’t you do something? With the ship? The lights?” She looked at me, a little wide-eyed, breast heaving. “With Kharn gone?” I could see Smythe’s sword shining in the darkness behind, and knew the rear of the column had come.

  “Maybe,” the doctor replied. “I tried the door. Didn’t want to say. Didn’t work.”

  Another scream rang out, and turning I expected to see Smythe and the men about her overwhelmed. But there was nothing, only the white beams of suit lights surrounding the blue line of her glowing sword. Nothing.

  “Back!” Bassander Lin’s voice rang out. “Back!”

  They were coming at us in two directions. I felt fear like iron fingers close upon me, and I shut my eyes. Forward. I heard the words again, Always forward. Between the fear and the exhaustion I could hardly breathe, could hardly think for pounding in my skull.

  Fear is death to reason, I told myself.

  Reason.

  “This way!” I called, pushing past a pair of legionnaires. Bassander had tried to take a turning, but the path we’d been on ran straight—along what I guessed was the length of the Demiurge, though it was impossible to say. I couldn’t be sure, but from outside the ship had seemed larger even than the Enigma of Hours had been, and that Sojourner might have swallowed the city of my birth a dozen times.

  I pressed straight ahead, pulling Valka in my wake. There was Jinan! And Crossflane just behind, leading the men struggling with Nobuta. Where was Tor Varro?

  “What about Lin?” Valka asked.

  I checked my advance, letting the soldiers around me surge past. She was right. Teeth grinding, I turned back. “Go on!”

  Her face darkened. “Oh no, not again.” Only then did I see that her plasma burner was in her hand, its light reflected in her burning eyes. “Don’t you dare.”

  I did not dare to argue with her, and turning to follow Bassander—dared less.

  Bassander.

  The man who’d burned it all. The man who’d sold my dream of peace—and Smythe’s—for the promise of fire. That zealot, that miser-minded templar of a man. Him with an abacus where his heart should be, whose scales of justice tilted always guilty. Given my will, I might have taken both his hands this time. I could have torn his arms out myself.

  But I went, ducking through that side door past retreating men.

  Perhaps it was Fate, or perhaps it was only that I had obeyed Valka, moved by her judgment of me. Without seeing, I sensed the darkness above me stretched for meters, for miles, maybe.

  Violet plasma spat in the air, illuminating the bloody scene like a thunderbolt. Almost I tripped over a broken body—whether human or xenobite I cannot say. Smoke curled, lending the din and darkness a dimension darker still. A shot flew past me, close enough that I could smell the bitter stink of ozone. I cursed my lack of a suit, for without one I had only my meager terminal light to guide me.

  And that of my sword.

  Highmatter leaped in my hand like a fountain, casting an azure glow in the darkness.

  Pale faces leaped out at me, hissing.

  One leaped at me, a white sword in its hands like the one Aranata had tried to use and failed. The piece of me that did not think—that did not have to think—took over. Old Sir Felix’s training and hundreds of hours in Colosso moved in me, and I parried the blow with ease, without regard for the fearful strength and size of the beast opposite me. White ceramic struck the wall behind. I drew the blade across its torso, cleaving cloak and armor and flesh as easily as tissue paper.

  Something slammed against my shield, and I jumped, knowing already that one of the nahute snakes had struck at me. I turned, parried wildly, and found nothing but air. The dread machines were programmed to attack again, to batter an opponent until they found a weakness and entered in. It would return and return until it found a way past the Royse field.

  I never saw it coming.

  I only saw the flash of violet plasma as the shot reduced the drone to a shred of glowing scrap metal. Behind me, Valka made a small, officious sound. She did not rest upon her laurels, but fired again and caught one Cielcin in the chest. It did not touch my mind at the time, but now I wonder at her—at the marvel of her. She who had so abhorred violence in my hearing, loudly and often, fought then with a conviction every part the equal of my own. This was the Valka I had seen in the Garden, who had stood with me against the Exalted Calvert. Even as I write this—so many centuries later—I am not so sure I knew her, or ever fully understood.

  “Back, everyone!” I yelled. “Back! Back!” I ran forward, waving my sword for attention, heedless of my danger behind my shield. Where was Bassander? The ground rattled beneath me, and I drew up a moment, body frozen as my mind tried desperately to process this new sensory data. We had stumbled onto some sort of catwalk where the baroque and horrible majesty of the Demiurge was lost. The rails were simple steel, and the floor beneath our heels.

  Plasma burners flashed behind me, splitting the dark like a wedge that closed with a thunderclap. Violet light splashed upward, revealing a tableau of forms not unlike the hideous friezes that paneled the walls of the Demiurge’s interminable halls. Men and Cielcin locked in combat, weapons raised, arms outstretched, white swords and the bladed ends of energy lances tangled.

  And more.

  There were giants in the night.

  I saw then that we stood above the floor of some massive hold, cousin to the central void of the Enigma of Hours. Far from finding the exterior holds and the Schiavona, we had f
ound the ship’s heart—and it was not empty. Black shapes hung in blackness, horrors without name. The machine shape of them stuck in my mind like splinters, hanging from the Demiurge’s massive skeleton like the fruit of some horrid vine. Like Kharn’s clone children in their gestation pods. I beheld them for only an instant, but I knew them at once, knew I stood upon the lowest level of the terrible armory. Fortress. Furnace. Font of Kharn’s power.

  The Mericanii weapons.

  The full scope of their terror and power I could only guess, not knowing then the nature of those dreadful titans or the dumb minds that moved them to their master’s whim.

  I know now.

  Suzuha’s words resounded in me. Weapons even Father does not understand. Seventy-two of the dreadful machines were there. Some smaller than the Mistral, some large as mountains. The dreadful Leviathans and Behemoths which dwarfed even the colossal war machines of the Imperium. Alien minds had built them, creatures strange and stranger than the dark Brethren of Vorgossos, beings whose intelligence exceeded man’s, perceiving creation with senses beyond my meager comprehension. They had their names, though I was ignorant of them. Kenotikon. Bleteira. Crymainecca.

  The Astrophage.

  The Astrophage chief of all.

  “Bassander!” I called out, those terrible engines forgotten as one of the nahute caromed past my head. “Pull back! Back to the hall!”

  The captain stood further out along the catwalk, his men about him, sword in hand. Beyond him, I could see the shapes of more Cielcin coming on like a tide of the damned.

  “They must have come from their ship,” Valka said, close behind me. “They must have called for reinforcements.”

  “Bassander! Come back!” I shouted.

  As I watched, the Mandari captain drew his sword across two of the Cielcin warriors, their bodies crumpling over the rails. I heard the xenobite commander call for greater care, ordering its men to stay back.

  “Nahute!” its cold voice rang out. “Uiddaa! Uiddaa!”