Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  A blow went whistling over my head as I ducked, dragging my sword behind me such that it cleaved clean through the body of the xenobite that towered over me. Black blood froze in the air as it fell, tinkling to the ground like the fall of tiny hailstones. Glancing back over my shoulder, I saw line after line of legionnaires pouring out behind me, firing up into the cloud of metal snakes descending like an evil rain. One of the nahute shot at me like an arrow. I swung. It flew past me in two smoking pieces. In the cold, I saw the shimmer of a static field sealing the open mouth of the Schiavona, keeping the helium gas from entering, keeping Valka safe. In my suit’s false color impression of the world, the mouth of the ship behind was fretted with golden fire, gleaming bright and smiling and warm.

  I turned away, turned into the dense fog and sudden snow ahead. The legionnaire beside me fell screaming, clutching at his throat as one of the drones tore through his armor to drink the blood beneath.

  I could do nothing. It was too late.

  Swallowing my heart and feeling its pulse within like the beating of the drum, I marched forward, sword in hand, and the Pale moved to meet me, their language—so familiar to me—made strange by the urgency of their cries, words stretched into the shibboleths of devils. One threw itself at me, and I took its legs from it and, turning left, sliced through two more. Plasma arced past me, projected in great arcs that scorched and sliced at the enemy, Cielcin and nahute drones alike.

  They say it was starflight that brought back the age of the sword. That after a thousand ships were lost to a stray bullet piercing the outer hull or a fuel line, the wise forged anew that weapon so beloved of knights and soldiers, of samurai and chevaliers from every walk and culture unto dawn. Some say it was the shield, that Caelan Royse’s energy curtain demanded the return to traditional arms as a matter of pragmatic necessity. I know not. I am no military historian, but I think there is truth in both explanations. The Cielcin—who never developed the shield—seemed never to have developed the gun. Perhaps they, forever trapped within the delicate environment of a starship, and before that trapped in the labyrinths below the skin of their homeworld, had never wanted to abandon the blade.

  Their ceramic blades were almost invisible in the cold fog, and more than once I was saved only by the armor I wore, enemies barreling out of the dense cold, the light of the heat of their bodies almost lost in the glare of the Schiavona’s spotlights. For every one of the Pale Valka’s trick with the helium had claimed, it seemed there were three whose masks had saved them, and they fought with all the strength and the fury of their kind.

  There came one mightier than the rest, its robes fluttering from its shoulders like wings. I watched it charge past, its sword long as I was tall and flashing in the bitter light. With a single stroke it felled three of our men, a whole trias gone in one, comrades cut to ribbons, their blood mingled like their lives.

  I had been a myrmidon, and knew much of violence. Because I had played a mercenary, I believed I knew something of war as well. But what we had done on Pharos to Admiral Whent, and what had come before and since—even against the Cielcin on Emesh—could not prepare me for that battlefield. I had believed that a true battle would be only like those smaller conflicts I had known writ large, or less composed of many smaller conflicts arranged alongside one another like the cells in a man’s body.

  It is not.

  The phenomenon of war is a different universe. Things ordinary in the light of the everyday sun are changed, taking on context and significance such that it seemed that I—who had stood in that hangar half a hundred times—had never stood there before. The ship behind us became more important than the grandest city, and that we defended it a calling higher than love and baser than lust. The monsters we faced became demons in truth, and the men at our backs—however fiendish or uncouth they were in their barracks and their cups—became no less than the very host of heaven.

  I saw a soldier turn and place himself right in the path of that great Cielcin—a candle he seemed, with my altered vision—before a bonfire. He raised his lance, the blade forward, haft held in the crook of his arm while the men behind him worked to save the lives of two injured, to drag them back to the ramp. To the rear guard. To safety. The Pale advanced, running like a wolf, and leaped as it came within striking distance. The soldier fired. Missed. Snapped the haft of his lance and elbow forward, hoping to turn the beast aside. The Cielcin fell on him like a wave, pale sword angled so the point entered in the soft place beneath the elbow. I fancied I could hear the fabric of his suit’s environment layer sigh apart in the din, though that was impossible.

  But his comrades escaped, and a moment later a dozen men trained lances on that Cielcin captain and turned its form to ashes, gray smoke mingling with the white mists.

  Something struck me from the side, and I fell, sword slipping from my fingers, bouncing across the floor as its blade dissolved into the fog. Something huge and black-clad pressed itself down upon me, one arm thrown across my throat. I saw the red shape of a Cielcin mask peering at me from below, and through it eyes like pots of ink shining in the stark light. My suit’s underlayment stiffened in response to the pressure, hardening to stop the xenobite from strangling me. Still my brain went into a panic, and my breath scrambled against my ribs, hands flapping uselessly against the beast’s body. I tried to trip it, to use what wrestling skills I had to flip it on its back. It was too heavy, too strong. I was going to die. That was a knife in its hand, white as the swords of the Chantry’s executioners. I squirmed, trying to escape, trying not to think about the end that was coming. My end.

  Then it was gone, the Cielcin crumpled on top of me, collapsing like a dead weight. I hadn’t even heard the shot that felled it, nor seen the flash. I lay there a moment, lost and forgotten beneath the body of my foe. Men and aliens warred about me, a sea of legs like a forest of columns marching back and forth, scattering in the winds of cause and effect, attack and retreat.

  Only then did I remember my sidearm, the phase disruptor I’d strapped to my thigh when I’d taken the armor from the ship’s store. “Stupid,” I said to myself, shoving the corpse off of me, “stupid, stupid, stupid.”

  I found my feet, fired as one of the Pale ran past.

  Memories of the battle with The Painted Man and his SOMs came back to me. I had lost my sword then, too. So common an occurrence and so terrible. A kind of nakedness more desperate than nakedness. Where was it? Not for the first time, I longed for a power such as the heroes of yore had, that I might shout a name of command and summon it to my hand with a gesture. A snap of my fingers. I could have screamed.

  Through all that scramble and desperate confusion, I had not noticed that I had wandered out onto unprotected ground. Chance and causality had carved a great void around me where neither man nor xenobite stood. Lonely was the word, alone and isolated, an island in a sea of storm. A lighthouse. A target.

  One of the Pale sighted my solitary standing, and with that strange emotion for which I know no words I knew it marked me and began its charge. I fired, despaired as my shot went wide, fired again. This time I caught the creature in the knee, and it staggered, but did not fall. Some peculiarity in the myelin-like substance that insulated their nerves, I think, protected them from the electrical discharge of the phase disruptor. Still, it was all I had. I fired again, the weapon humming in my hands as it spat lightning, catching the creature in its shoulder.

  Still it came on.

  Snarling with disgust, I turned and ran, stumbling into the mist. The droning of the environment fans lost in the dark above filled my universe, drowning even the roar of the plasma burners and the shouts and screams of men and monsters. Where were those others? Why did they not mark me as I tried to escape the beast coming hard behind?

  Where was my sword?

  I cast about, searching, trying to see where it had tumbled in all that fog. Left. Right. Ahead. Behind. Everywhere but down
. My boot caught on something, and with a yell I clattered to my hands and knees. Whether the body that tripped me was xenobite or human I do not now remember, recall only that I crawled, hands crunching on the rime that frosted the metal floor. I thought then that I had been a liar. That I was going to die then and there, crawling on the floor like a child, like a rat. I could hear my pursuer behind, heavy tread closing in. I fired blindly over my shoulder, pushing myself to my feet. My right foot went out from under me, and I sprawled. It was close now, and the beating of my heart swallowed all sound.

  It was over. It was over. It was over.

  The words to Gibson’s aphorisms would not come, and nothing was left to me to quiet the fear that like a fist of iron seized about my heart. I was going to die, and worse: I was going to die afraid, alone, lost and faceless in a sea of violence. Adrift without a star.

  There!

  By chance or providence, my hand found the hilt of my fallen sword, and I took it up with a cry, rolling to my back even as the Cielcin bore down upon me. Highmatter appeared between us, flowering like the last ray of a dying star. The point caught my attacker in the belly, and cut without resistance. The xenobite fell upon me, and my blade slipped down, cutting armor and flesh and bone as easily as air. Hot blood smoked in the frigid air, rolling off the white of my armor and the black of my tunic alike. The weight of my enemy went dead upon me, and I thrust it aside and regained my feet at last.

  The fog was clearing, settling to the floor. The Schiavona had stopped venting, and through the parting vapors I saw them. The survivors, a host of tall, horned monsters armed and furious. And I saw the bodies of our men dead upon the floor, some still writhing as the nahute churned through their flesh, rising blood-soaked and smoking into the chilly air. Those bodies formed a sort of loose arc about the base of the ramp, two and sometimes three men high in places, as though they were a line of sandbags.

  We were losing.

  Despite the light, despite Valka’s trick with the gas. Despite everything.

  It was the nahute, I realized. There were simply too many of them flying around, cutting into our men from all directions. Above, below, behind. There must have been nearly a hundred of us dead upon the floor. Nearly half the men I’d led from the ship’s hold.

  “Dig in!” one decurion was shouting, shouldering his own lance. He fired, and his men fired with him, laying down a barrage of plasma fire that peppered the Cielcin ranks. Robes cast alight were thrown down, and still the Pale advanced, unstoppable as the tide. Many men went to their knees behind the bodies of their fallen comrades, hoping the still-warmth of their bodies would draw the drones instead. With renewed purpose, I stood alone behind the lines, using my relative isolation to call the serpents to me. I cut one neatly in two. Another. A third. They came at me like arrows, and more than once I would have to let one rebound off my shield, confused, before I struck it down.

  My shields were holding, though others I saw were not so lucky. Sooner or later a drone would take them, scraping through layers of white ceramic and bright metal until the blood leaked from them as from a stone, extracting with it their screams.

  Sooner or later.

  A cloud of the things descended. Three. Five. A dozen. I spun my sword through a neat arc, trying to cleave at them like a blindfolded child clubbing the effigy of a heretic at Summerfair. I took one apart with a clean stroke, felt more than saw the shrapnel of it wing past. The highmatter sword sang in my hand, liquid molecules dancing, throwing out threads like the lines of solar flares. I made quick work of another and another, caught a third as it made to leave in search of some softer target.

  “Fall back!” I heard the cry sound out. “Fall back to the ramp! Form up! Make a line!”

  Shaken from my work by this cry and the despair in it, I looked away for one second.

  One second too long.

  Already close and slowed by that closeness, one of the drones slipped inside, latching itself to the slightly convex disc that shielded my right ear. A horrible sound resounded through my helmet, the grinding of a jeweler’s drill against my skull. I panicked then, and forgot myself, and reached up to try and claw at my ear.

  “Hadrian!”

  The word came through my helmet’s speakers, its timbre oddly flat, like the words inside my head. My fist closed around the floating serpent at my ear, and it wrapped its tail around my arm, anchoring itself. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, my entoptics died, the twin cones of light projected onto my retinas from within my helmet mask sparked out, and I could see nothing but the total blackness within my helmet.

  I had no eyes, and screamed, though none perhaps could hear me. The drill in my ear blanked out my universe, and I struggled with all I had. Insanely, the thought of cutting off my own arm to kill the drone at my ear seized in me, and I raised my sword.

  I fell, feet going out from under me in my panic, and once more I dropped my sword, wrestling with both hands now to pull the evil machine from my face. I smelled smoke, and knew the end had come.

  Then came a sound like distant thunder.

  Lightning, and a smell like petrichor.

  The thing straining against my arm stopped, went limp and fell away, and all around I heard metallic thuds like the sound of empty armor clattering to the deck. Hands on my head. My helmet.

  Light.

  There was light.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Valka . . .” Valka was kneeling over me, my ruined helmet in her hands. “What are you doing out here?”

  She scoffed, tossing the helmet aside. “Saving your life, you idiot.” She swore under her breath in Panthai, but I couldn’t make it out. The nahute was still screwed into the side of my helmet, suctioned on where its teeth had begun to chew their way inside. From the look of things, I had been a hair’s breadth from the end. I shuddered.

  “But the air?”

  “The helium’s all gone,” she said, pointing at the distant ceiling. “’Tis fine.”

  “And the drones?”

  She tapped her forehead. “The Cielcin may not use radio for their ship-to-ship communications, but they do for these.” She stood, and spurned one of the nahute with her toe. It lay limp as a boned fish, and did not rise. “I couldn’t make out much of their code, but I found the off switch.” Valka smiled then, smiled in the middle of all that chaos. It was like someone uncovered a lamp.

  “How?”

  She offered her hand. “What did you think I was doing with Tanaran all that time you were in fugue?”

  “I could kiss you,” I said.

  “Maybe later,” she snapped back. An explosion sounded not far off, and we both jumped. The noise of it was met by the fierce cry of a dozen men, who charged forward toward the disordered horde of Cielcin clustered now by the door of the hold. It was a brave gamble, but a bad one, and I watched four of the men cut down, overwhelmed by the sheer size and mass of our enemy. Valka prodded my shoulder, and I looked round. “You lost this.”

  She held my sword in her tattooed fingers, presented to me pommel forward. “Twice today,” I said, and accepted it from her with a crooked and embarrassed smile. “Thank you.”

  “I’ll see what I can do about the rest of these drones,” she said, and turned to go.

  “Valka.” I threw an arm out to stop her. Only after a moment did I look her in the face. “Thank you.”

  She pushed my arm aside. “You’re wasting time, barbarian.”

  In spite of everything, I suppressed a laugh, breath frosting the air as I exhaled.

  Not a moment later, a great tumult rose up and a cry like the roar of many voices, followed by the thin and scraping noise of the Cielcin as they turned in confusion. And I sensed—rather than knew—that our horrible day was ending.

  That the Red Company had come at last.

  Through the open door I could see
the violet flash of plasma, and heard the enemies’ shouts as they scrambled back for the door, to reinforce their rear, perhaps, or to flee, but with the certain knowledge that if they remained they would be caught between the Red Company and the Schiavona as though in the jaws of some ravening predator.

  “That’s it, lads!” called the second’s centurion, brandishing his lance. “Drive them back!”

  The line our troops had made before the ramp advanced, the flanks bending inward toward the door, tightening like the grasping fingers of some mighty hand. They roared as they advanced, and the back ranks beat their chests and defeat transformed to victory as the Cielcin turned and fled, seeing that their drones had been pulled down from the sky.

  “Go!” Valka said, and gave me a little push. “Go!”

  I went, though for all that she pushed me Valka followed on behind. She did not follow me when I pressed through the line of men holding the door, or turned into the hall hard on the heels of the retreating xenobites. My heart rose at the sight of their retreating backs, and at the sight of the figures rushing to meet me.

  Their armor was ill-fit and mismatched, the enamel on it was chipped and faded, but it was red. At their head came Bassander Lin, stone-faced and shielded, with Pallino beside him, single eye blazing as he fired his lance, every ounce the legionary centurion he had been. And there was Jinan right behind, and Crim with his red and white kaftan fluttering over his armor, and Siran and Ilex.

  “I thought I told you to hold in the ship,” Bassander said without preamble.

  “No choice,” I said tartly, “they were cutting their way inside. We blinded them and vented the helium reservoir on the warp drive’s fuel containment. Killed a lot of them and gave them a fright, but there were too many. And the drones . . .”