Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Nobuta yelped as my fingernails bit into its arm, and Aranata hissed. “What are you doing?”

  I released the Cielcin, and it shied away from me, shrinking down so that almost I was taller than it was. “Marlowe, if that’s you,” Smythe said, and I felt sure that she hadn’t properly heard me. I saw Sir William lean in to whisper something to her, and her words grew more insistent. “Marlowe! Don’t give in! Listen!” One of her guards kicked the stretcher on which she lay such that she tumbled into Sir William’s arms. The older first officer moved to restore her to her place, whispering softly.

  I looked round to the others, but the soldiers’ faces were all hid by their helmet masks, and Valka only shook her head.

  Eager to remind me of her presence, the Prince Aranata Otiolo raised her voice. “Return Nobuta to me and your masters will yet live!”

  My eyes ran up and down the line of prisoners arrayed before me. “That’s everyone?” I asked. A mere dozen, maybe two—of the more than a hundred we had lost on the long chase from Kharn’s Garden to the Schiavona. At least Bassander was not among them. I risked a glance at my terminal, knowing that of all the Cielcin perhaps only Tanaran would understand the gesture or the purpose of the device. It had been a little less than half one standard hour since Bassander and Jinan had left through the service umbilical. Surely they had made it to the Mistral by now, surely Captain Corvo was mustering her troops and preparing to return with what little of the Red Company remained.

  I don’t need to negotiate, I told myself. I only need to play for time. But how much time?

  “You expected more to survive us?” the prince boasted, and beat its chest. “Your kind build cleverly, yukajji-do, but you are small and break easily.”

  I pushed this jibe aside, recalling the ease with which I’d killed Oalicomn. “If you want your child, you will withdraw your men to your ship and leave only enough to guard your prisoners. I can come down and meet you.”

  “And leave me defenseless with your army near at hand? Never!” the prince barked.

  “We must have assurances that the violence is at an end,” I said. “If I returned to the Garden, what promise could you give to me and my people of safe conduct?”

  The Prince of the Itani Otiolo bared its fangs like shards of ice. “It is not my people who broke their word, Lord Marlowe. It is you, your kind, you who are faithless.”

  Damn Bassander to the Outer Dark, I thought, looking round. He had taken any hope of the moral high ground from me with his little act of martial piety. But of course he was only acting on Hauptmann’s orders. On Hauptmann’s orders? How many commanders in how many ages had claimed just such an excuse? How many criminal actions and actions of criminal stupidity had been glossed over by that sheen of mere and muscle-minded obedience? Sir Olorin’s words came back to me out of the remotest past: In Jadd we say a man must be either a swordsman or a poet. I looked round at the soldiers, thought of Bassander, of Jinan, of Corvo and my friends: Pallino, Siran, Elara. Of Ghen, who was dead—and Switch, whom I could not forgive. My companions.

  Swordsmen all.

  How many of these others would have done precisely as Bassander had when ordered to do it? How many would have killed Kharn Sagara and crippled the Demiurge just as the strategos emerged from warp and set fire to the Cielcin fleet? Even Valka, who had become a sort of poet in this second life of hers . . . even she had fired upon the Prachar terrorists when she had been a ship’s captain defending her native Edda. A swordsman herself, for all her bluster. They had ordered and she had obeyed.

  “I am not Bassander Lin,” I said, as much to myself as to the Aeta, for all the good it did. “But I will not open my ship or my people to attack for the sake of a few prisoners.”

  The Aeta snarled. “Not even your masters?”

  Rather than argue and say that Smythe was not my master, I only shrugged. “Mnado ni ti-tajarin’ta wo!” Not even for them.

  The prince snarled at me through the holograph, snatched something from its belt. Highmatter blue as starlight flared there, rippling in the beast’s alien fist. A sword. Smythe’s sword, I realized, recognizing the brass pommel—so like the head of her cane. The blade looked almost comical in the Cielcin’s hand. By proportion too short to be a true sword and too narrow.

  It didn’t matter.

  Prince Aranata turned and brought the sword down hard—harder than it needed—onto the shoulder of the nearest of our legionnaires. The man didn’t even have time to cry out. Exotic matter cleaved through the segmented plate at his shoulder, through his shoulder, his sternum—came out the other side. His torso fell sideways, tumbling in two pieces to the deck at Aranata’s feet.

  Blood everywhere, the red of it so much worse than the black of the Cielcin. I could almost smell it, even through the holography booth. Behind me, Valka swore and Nobuta shivered where I held it close. Fangs glittering, Aranata Otiolo rounded on me, eyes narrowed to crescents. “Yukajji! Belnna uvattaya ba-kousun ti-koarin!” Give me back my child.

  I shut my eyes for the space of a heartbeat. Two. Enough to marshal myself, my resolve. Fear is death to reason, I told myself, words tinged with Gibson’s leathery timbre. Rage is blindness. In the space of my silence, Aranata had seized another soldier, a triaster, still helmeted and in full kit, held him by the crest of his helm as though it were a handlebar. The man strained, but for all his galvanically boosted muscles could not pry free the xenobite’s hand.

  “Give me back my child,” Aranata repeated, and lifted the soldier bodily from the ground by his helmet as easily as a little girl might raise her doll by the hair. “Or I will kill every one of your people left to me.”

  My eyes drifted shut once more, and I felt another, colder voice speak through mine. “Do that,” it said—I said, “and you’ll find yourself with nothing to bargain with at all.” I realized then that all the soldiers behind me had gone still as stone. Even Valka seemed not to breathe. “So spare the trouble. Order your soldiers back to your ship, and we will make the exchange. Our captives for yours. But if you so much as—”

  Smythe’s sword moved in a flat arc through the body of the hanging man, cutting him in half just above the waist. The prince continued to hold him for a moment, just long enough for his entrails to wetly spill from beneath his tabard and splatter with his fallen legs to the ground. I clenched my teeth, one hand squeezing Nobuta’s arm so tight the creature yelped. Aranata, fangs bared in the xenobite’s most vicious smile, tossed the torso back over his shoulder as easily as it were a cherry stone, making the other prisoners flinch and shy away. Three of its subordinates hurried forward, making as if to crouch by the dead man’s side.

  “Veih!” Aranata barked, whirling toward them. “No!” It snarled, recalling some memory I had almost forgotten. What was it?

  The way a starving dog growled at its pack, defending its claim to food.

  I suppressed a shudder. “Stop this!” I said. “Stop this now!”

  “Belnna uvattaya ba-kousun ti-koarin!” Aranata howled, repeating its refrain, and as it rounded once more to face my image projected outside the ship, I saw its jaw hinge forward, teeth angling forward, protruding past Aranata’s lips like the fangs of some terrible sea monster. In spite of myself I recoiled, taking a half-step back and dragging Nobuta with me. I hadn’t known the Cielcin could do that.

  “I don’t think you understand,” I said, and once more I spoke in that cold, unfeeling voice. “You may have our soldiers, even our commander, but I have your son.” I emphasized the word uvattaya. Son. “Make your threats, Aeta. Kill. It won’t change that. I’ve given you my terms. Withdraw. Your. Men.”

  The Aeta gnashed its protruding fangs and turned, hand going for another soldier.

  “Stop right there!” Sir William Crossflane said, scrambling to his feet. “Stop, I say!” He waved his arms, trying to draw the Cielcin chief’s attentions to himself. He’d
been slow to rise, to unfold himself from where he’d knelt by Smythe’s bier. For a moment, the knight-tribune lifted her face, and I saw the bloody burns there, the burned-off hair, and the single white and sightless eye. I shivered. But for another thirty feet or so that might have been me.

  Crossflane appeared so very small before the prince, despite his nobile standing. Aranata Otiolo stood almost half again as tall as the old man, who nevertheless staggered forward, saying, “I’ll not stand by while you butcher my men in front of me.” He thumped his chest with one fist—as though he meant to start a salute. “Take me instead.”

  I found my voice at once. “Sir William, I—”

  Prince Aranata didn’t hesitate, didn’t pause to honor the knight’s sacrifice. Nor did she raise her—his?—sword. Instead, the Cielcin seized Sir William by the hair, yanked his head back like an assassin, like a lover in the throes of some violent romance. I cried out, took two steps forward before I remembered that it was only a holograph I saw before me.

  Too late.

  The Aeta fastened its massive jaws about Sir William’s throat. Like a lover, I thought again, perversely. Like a vampire. But it bit harder, and even in the hissing holograph I saw the blood well up about its fangs and the way Sir William’s eyes bulged in their sockets—the way his hands beat on Aranata’s arms and shoulders. Twitched. Went still. The prince tore its jaws away and the throat with it. The knight fell backward and—to the side, almost unseen—I saw Smythe’s hand go out from the edge of her bier, straining toward the body of the man who had served her so faithfully and for so long.

  Blood ran down Aranata’s chin as the prince turned to regard me, startlingly red against that flesh like chalk, that snow-white hair. As it leered at me, the Aeta’s teeth retracted, collapsing once more into a semblance of something like a flat, human face. And then, worst of all, it swallowed. Glass teeth dyed red. Black eyes shining beneath a crown of silver horns. It made a gesture with one hand, and three of its minions advanced, half-stooped already, and dragged Sir William’s body—I tried not to think his carcass—away.

  For a moment, all I saw was the thick and angry line of red smeared on the black floor.

  Red and black.

  My colors.

  “Give me back my child, Marlowe!” Aranata said, and stood over the dying shape of Raine Smythe where she lay, nothing in those horrible dark eyes at all.

  “Master!” Tanaran hurried forward, hurling itself to the ground. “Do not kill this one! The others are worthless to the yukajjimn!” It pressed its face to the tile beside the red stripe of Sir William’s blood, hands clawing toward its master’s ankles.

  Aranata kicked at its servant’s hands. “Iagga, Tanaran-kih! Iagga!”

  I’d had enough. The quiet piece of me—the part with that cold and unflinching voice—moved forward, kicked Nobuta in the back of the knees. The prince’s child fell, unbalanced by the way its hands were bound behind it. I caught it, steadied it by the thick braid that sprouted from the base of its skull.

  “Hadrian, no!” Valka said, coming forward.

  But the sword was already in my hand, its blade quiet and stowed. Still, I pressed the emitter against the xenobite child’s breastbone at the base of its neck. Angled the way a Colosso myrmidon might make the killing blow. Aimed that it might descend past bone and sinew to pierce the heart and lung. “March your men back to your ship, Aranata,” I said, abandoning title or pretense. “Now.”

  The Cielcin prince bared its teeth again. “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “I would dare all.”

  “Marlowe wouldn’t!” Tanaran said, coming to its knees, hands pawing at its master’s robes. “He is weak, master. A coward. He would not allow the other yukajjimn to harm us on Tamnikano. He will not harm Nobuta. He does not have the spine for it.”

  The word spine made me stand up the straighter, and I ground the emitter’s rain guard into Nobuta’s shoulder. The child cried out, “Abassa! Please!” I tightened my grip on its braid, mindful that Valka stood mere microns from the edge of the projector’s pickup, microns from where the Cielcin could see her.

  Nobuta began to cry.

  A coward, I thought, and the word echoed like a chorus in me, like Brethren’s voice.

  Coward

  coward

  coward.

  Cowards and faint-hearted runaways look for orations when the foe is near, I thought, quoting that first Marlowe, that ancient poet whose name and devil sign my ancestors had taken for their own. Cowards negotiate when the fighting is thickest. They retreat into terror and call it principle. Once, I might have done the same, and clung until the bitter end, hoping for peace. The boy I’d been in Meidua, on Delos . . . he might have tried forever. So too the young man who had charmed Cat with stories above the canals in Borosevo. He might have tried.

  But Raine Smythe’s words—her last words—sounded in me again, clear as if she’d spoken in my ear. Don’t give in!

  I saw Smythe’s ruined face again, lost in the clutter of the projection, her fire-blinded stare unseeing, its lens to glass. Dead then. Dead for true. I had no way to be sure, and yet knew it must be. How she’d survived the blast in the hangar to begin with I’d no idea.

  She’s dead, I thought, and knew that this time it was so. Smythe’s dead.

  I bared my teeth.

  I made a choice.

  The breath left Nobuta with a wet sound. Every muscle tensed, and blue light shone where the point of my sword sprouted from the creature’s opposite side. I deactivated the weapon an instant later, moved as much by regret as by the recognition that what was done was done—as if by stowing the sword I might undo its striking.

  Aranata screamed, a deep-throated, wordless bellow I heard through the hull of the ship as much as through the holograph pit’s sound system. A cry of anguish. Of pain that could be understood by man and xenobite alike.

  Pain.

  The idea that pain is evil is the basis for all morality. Ours. Theirs. Everything’s.

  But was I evil, then? Or had I only done evil?

  No matter. I had done what needed doing. Always forward, always down, and never left nor right. I let Nobuta fall, let its face strike the floor of the holography booth. How long did I stand there, gathering the darkness of that chamber to myself like a cloak that I might cast over the body at my feet? I cannot say. I’d lost my coat in the hangar bay, lost it to the blast that killed Smythe. I had no shroud for Nobuta, nor words to say. No orations. No negotiation.

  Aranata shouted something—words I cannot recall, did not understand. It pointed at the other prisoners, at Smythe’s body. The Cielcin behind tore off their own masks and fell upon the prisoner, upon Smythe on her bier. Claws out, teeth extended.

  Blood. And the sounds of feasting. One of the Cielcin seized Smythe’s arm and straining tore it from its socket, raised it dripping above its head like a trophy, then pressed the morsel to its face and tore. The sound of it was a horror, and more than I could bear. Amid it all I saw Aranata turn on Tanaran, on its own kind, and cut it cleanly in two. I think I understand now: Tanaran had advised that I would not harm Nobuta. Tanaran had been wrong.

  Valka swore behind me in her native tongue.

  I switched the booth off, banishing Prince Aranata and its kind. And to myself—to no one—I said, “The Sword, our Orator!”

  My family’s words. I remembered my family’s colors—the red blood smeared on the black floor. Later—when all was said and done—I would see it again, see the bodies of our dead and theirs mutilated all over that ship. Red and black. Black and red.

  As it was for so many soldiers on so many battlefields from that black ship back to the first sunrise over Uruk at the dawn of time, as it was when Techelles spoke to Tamburlaine in that dead, first Marlowe’s words, those words we took for our own when we took the name:

  Our swords sh
all play the orators for us.

  CHAPTER 71

  HOPE IS A CLOUD

  “IT’S ONLY A MATTER of time before they try and cut their way in with Smythe’s sword,” I said. Looking round at the others I said, “Ah . . . can they?”

  “Cut their way in?” Lieutenant Cartier repeated. “With highmatter? Yes. Most of the ventral hull is ceramic, not adamant. It’s lighter.”

  As we spoke, a team of medtechs busied themselves with Nobuta’s corpse, wrapped in mirrored foil. I watched them go, vanishing down the brass hall. It was only then that I noticed my hands were shaking, and I balled them into fists. Valka saw, and there was something in her face then I didn’t understand. Pity? Anger? Love? I ought to have given up trying to read her years before, so minute was her expression. One of the medtechs brushed past, and I tapped her on the shoulder. “Anything from the children? Kharn’s children?”

  The woman blinked at me with round, green eyes, brows contracted. “I . . . oh! No, my lord. They’re stable, last I heard, but no change. They’re in some sort of coma, but their heads are so full of praxis none of us can guess what the hell’s going on.”

  “Keep them safe,” I said, and I touched her shoulder again, more seriously this time, “and if they wake, let them know who it was saved them. Tell them it was me, not the Empire. That will make all the difference.” She nodded and was gone, following her fellows up the hall.

  I turned back to find that Lieutenant Cartier and her officers had moved off a ways down the hall and were speaking among themselves, leaving me—for the moment—alone. I swayed where I stood, struggling to stay upright. There was nothing left in me, no force, no pain, no time to cry. The walls of the Schiavona canted inward toward the top, such that the ceiling was narrower than the floor. Almost I felt those gleaming walls might fall and crush me like a wave. I raised a hand to shield my eyes, saw the blood on it. Choked. I tried to clean my hands, but succeeded in only smearing the ichor further.