Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Bassander paused a moment to order pursuers down the hall after the Pale. “And Prince Aranata?”

  I shook my head. “Gone, I don’t know where.” I did not mention what I had done to Nobuta to agitate the prince, or what had happened to Smythe and Crossflane. There would be time for that later, time to make Bassander appreciate just what he had done later.

  “Find the prince!” Bassander shouted, and gestured for us to pursue.

  “I’ll go too,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Tor Varro’s watching Kharn’s children. We need someone who can talk to them. That’s Valka or me,” I said, pointing at the ground, eyes flitting to where Valka waited with the soldiers.

  Bassander’s black eyes found Valka, and he turned back to me. “Very well.”

  “You look like hell, Had,” Pallino said, stepping forward and clapping me on the arm.

  I knocked my fist against his shoulder two times. “I feel like it.”

  “The battle’s not done yet, boys,” Siran said.

  “Right, then,” I said. “Forward.”

  CHAPTER 73

  BROKEN

  WE CAME AT LAST again to the Garden, having passed once more through the bowels of the Demiurge. Only this time it was we who were the pursuers, and the Cielcin the pursued. The trees were burning now, and Kharn’s SOMs lay all quiescent, the witch-light behind their eyes dimmed. Almost I wondered if they had died, so still were they as they lay mounded beneath those smoking boughs.

  “The hell is this place?” Pallino asked, touching his forehead, mouth, and heart in rapid succession. “All this . . . on a ship?”

  “It’s beautiful,” Ilex intoned, somehow seeing past the carnage and the flames.

  Valka came up behind her—having followed after all—and said, “You should have seen the one on Vorgossos, ’twas so much more.”

  Bassander pushed past them at their gawping, pointing toward the treeline—yet unburnt—at the far end of the Garden. “The Pale entered from there. Their ship must be beyond somewhere. I want that door secured and mapping drones sent through. I’m not losing my men in those tunnels.” He moved on ahead, four guards dogging his steps, and I heard him mutter, “Blasted ship.” We had been to the Cielcin’s docking bay once before, but not from this direction—through the Garden—and at any rate it seemed those endless halls shifted, redesigned by the animus of their king, Kharn Sagara.

  I could make out little and less of the chaos above. Through the Garden’s massive skylight I discerned the ruined shape of the Cielcin ship. The Bahali imnal Akura looked like a shattered moon, great pieces of it starting to spread apart and flatten. Here and there a light still gleamed as some emergency system—still intact—struggled to maintain its function, dumbly unaware that its world was ended.

  “Bassander!” I called, and the officer half-turned, and I could just make out the limn of his face by the firelight, as though it were the edge of a planet entering into day. “Where’s the fleet? What’s Hauptmann doing?”

  The captain only shrugged. “Destroying their fleet.”

  “And after that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I imagine he’ll come cut us free. Why?”

  Despite the heat off the burning trees around me, I felt a sharp and sudden chill creep through me, creaking like breaking ice on the surface of a lake. “The Cielcin don’t have anywhere to go, and with Nobuta dead, Aranata has nothing left to fight for.”

  Captain Lin turned fully to face me, eyes narrowing to mere slits. He looked a wreck, gore spattering his white armor, hair plastered to one side of his face, sweat and blood—his blood?—mingling there. Two of the pteruges that shielded his left shoulder were gone, torn off in some struggle. “What do you mean, ‘with Nobuta dead’? What happened to the hostage?”

  I told him.

  “Smythe was alive?” His voice shrank away. “And Sir William . . . no. No, I don’t believe it.” And how could he? It was his fault, his and Lord Titus Hauptmann’s. None of this would have happened if they had but left things to take their course. I might have gone to the Cielcin as Smythe intended, into whatever horrors awaited me there, but gone all the same, to bring what peace and understanding I could.

  There was a time when I might have leaped on the chance to say such things to Bassander Lin with vicious glee, that part of me which was closest to my brother shining through after all. Indeed, I opened my mouth to say just such a thing when a triaster approached, saying, “Sir, we found her.”

  “Greenlaw?” Bassander’s fists clenched as he spoke the name. “And?”

  “Dead, sir.”

  I had little known and less liked the cold lieutenant, even less than I liked Bassander. She had been an officious brute, wielding her authority without concern or compromise. But the way Bassander’s shoulders slumped, I felt myself reliving Ghen’s death on Rustam. It seemed another life entirely, as if everything that came before Kharn and Vorgossos were a sort of dream, as if the ordinary world of the Empire were some quaint if unpleasant fable next to this new world of machines and xenobites, daimons and demons.

  I could not hate Bassander.

  I could only pity him.

  “I’m sorry about your friend,” I said. “She was a good soldier.”

  Were there tears in those black eyes?

  No, it could not have been. Bassander had the eyes of a statue, and statues do not weep. He blinked, and though he moved naught but those eyelids, it seemed he stood again a head taller. “What, then? What do you think the Pale will do?”

  I had an awful vision. Whatever reactor or great engine that powered their alien ship gone critical, and all of us washed away by nuclear light and fire. Would Aranata do such a thing? Would any parent in the depths of their despair?

  What parent would do less, human or xenobite?

  It seems a clear enough thought, but it took my brain a moment to articulate it, to clarify it into a kind of warning. The world was quiet around us, but for the smoldering of the trees and the muffled sounds of distant men calling orders to one another, remote enough to seem less than true sounds. The very air was still.

  Too still.

  “Everybody down!” someone bellowed. Maybe it was Pallino. In my panic, for a desperate moment, I thought it was Ghen, so deep and booming was that command. Not thinking, not reacting, not sharing my horrible guess with Bassander, I threw myself to the ground. An instant later, explosions ran up the line behind us. Grenades. The same grenades that had destroyed the door to our hangar.

  They destroyed our men, then.

  We’d made a mistake. Two mistakes.

  One: we had followed the road through the Garden toward the pavilion and the lonely tree. Precisely as we were expected to do.

  Two: we had left the bulk of our force massing near the doors, near where that first brave line of hoplites had sacrificed themselves to cover our escape from that lovely and terrible place. That meant the few dozen men who had stretched out along the road were our most important. Our scouts and technicians, the ones required to run the mapping drones Bassander had called for; our centurions and officers, among whose number I counted virtually every friend I had left; and myself. And Valka.

  How all my friends survived that first assault I have no idea, nor how we pulled together in a little knot separate from that main force as the scahari fighters of the Itani Otiolo appeared from the trees to either side. How many vast armies had been destroyed under precisely these circumstances in how many wars throughout all of time? I watched them smash into our line from either side like the snapping of almighty jaws, men turning to either side, desperate, unsure of the way.

  “To me!” Bassander cried out, raising his sword. “All men, to me!”

  The bulk of our troops hurried forward to join us, drawing the attackers’ attention. Many of them hurled nahute like javelins,
and the evil worms flew, tearing into the unshielded peltasts with a fury like hell itself and the gnashing of teeth.

  I shouted for Valka, shouldering my way past Pallino as he trained his lance on the foe, moving through all that grinding chaos. She stood fast by Crim, shielded and with only her plasma repeater to defend her. But the hand clutching the weapon hung at her side, and it was the other she raised like a magister calling for silence in a court of law. I saw the nahute start to fall, or go still midway through their attempts to destroy the bodies of our men.

  Three of the xenobites saw her too, and whether or not they understood what it was she was doing or saw only a woman standing apart and mostly unguarded I cannot guess, but they turned, white swords in hand, and charged up the path toward her.

  “Crim!” I screamed, pounding toward them fast as my feet would carry me. “Behind you!”

  The Norman did not hear me, distracted as he was by the greater force behind. Valka saw them, too late. She wore no armor, and her Royse shield would not stop the white points of those swords. Valka fired wildly from her hip, went wide.

  I had not known I could move so fast, nor leap so far. For a moment, I flew parallel to the ground, diving so that I crossed the first Cielcin’s path with arms outstretched, my sword the lonely quill of a single outstretched wing. It sliced cleanly through the body of the scahari warrior, and I crashed into the ground a moment later, hitting shoulder-first with a flower of pain. Without a moment to stop, I regained my feet and stood with legs apart between Valka and the other two.

  And I knew, knew I was precisely where I belonged. As I had done with Calvert, I pointed my sword directly at the nearer of the other two Cielcin, the quillions of my sword gleaming flat to either side, shining with the same light as the blade.

  “Tukanyi deni renutayan ne?” I said. Who’s next?

  One of the two snarled, the other circling like a wolf, trying to get around me. I tracked it, sword tip questing back and forth like the head of an angry snake. Closer. Closer. They leaped, not understanding the danger posed by Sir Olorin’s highmatter sword. Valka fired, and the purple gleam of hydrogen plasma caught one full in the chest. I felt the air boil past me after the shot was gone, hot enough to sear. I stabbed toward the other, sword pushing neatly through the black armor on its chest.

  “Good shot,” I said to Valka, closing the ground between us.

  “We need to get out of here,” she said, meaning the path between the trees. “Where did Lin go?”

  I cast about, pointed. “There!” We’d been swept apart when the Cielcin closed in, and Lin had cut his way toward his men as they battled up the trail toward us. We’d been left alone, Valka, Crim, and myself, alone with a small tangle of troops—both red and white—and separated from the main host.

  “We’ll have to push our way through!” Pallino said, appearing as if from nowhere.

  “No!” I said, seizing the centurion by the arm to stop him running off, then keyed in a command line on my terminal. We were close enough to communicate now without the Demiurge’s superstructure in the way. “Lin, it’s Marlowe. I think I know where the prince is. I’m going after it.”

  It was a moment before Lin’s response came, and his voice was strained when it did. “No! I need you here.”

  “I think it might be planning to destroy its ship and us with it,” I said, not sure why I felt so certain I was right. Something in the way Prince Aranata had screamed when I’d killed its child, a despair deeper and darker than any human feeling. That scream had been the sound of the end of worlds, and a kind of promise.

  Bassander’s response did not come at once, took so long, in fact, that I looked over the field again to see if he had fallen. No! There was the flash of his sword, the same blue as my own. A moment later, his words came. “Are you certain?”

  “No,” I said, and speaking with a conviction I now rue, added, “but it’s what I’d do.” I did not wait to hear what Bassander might have to say, nor to be ordered to stand down. “Pallino, Crim, Valka—everyone, with me.”

  The path was never clearer than in that moment. Across the Garden to the far exit, through whatever halls there were to come to the Cielcin ship, there to battle the prince and her inmost guards, there to shut down the alien ship and save us all.

  And if I was wrong? Better to be wrong. Better to assume the threat and look the fool than die and remove all doubt. Who could say when Kharn Sagara might awake reincarnated, or if he would? Or if Hauptmann’s fleet might arrive to save us?

  I remember running, remember the snap of the pavilion cloth on its poles, and the brief glimpse again of Oalicomn’s body on the hill. The path out of the Garden ran down past the lake and toward the far side. The fighting had spilled onto the meadow, with the legionnaires backed into their triases and my Red Company soldiers in their little bands. I could make out the shape of Bassander Lin on a knoll above and behind us where we hurried down toward the lake.

  What is it about deep water? Some memory of the womb? Or is it only the fear of drowning? None can say, but that place—even the memory of it—chills me. I found myself remembering the prophet Jari, transformed by water. The priests of Edouard’s cult rebirthed people into their mystery by immersing them in water.

  It was down to the waterside we went, retreading the very ground where I had encountered Ren and Suzuha just the night before. That place where I had my first intimations of the end. Fitting that it would be the site of an end in itself, and a beginning.

  “Okun-se!”

  You!

  The word came like a bolt of lightning, and each of us was struck to stillness. There it was, standing on the rise overlooking our path: tall as sin and shadow, crowned in silver and white, surrounded by its proudest warriors.

  “Aeta Aranata,” I said, “Tsuarose oyumn petunodai ti-velatadiu ba-okarin.” I thought you’d withdrawn to your ship. I did not hint at my deeper fear, at the end the prince might have planned for all of us, driven as it was to this final, desperate stand and time. “You can still walk away from this.”

  The prince bared its fangs. “As your prisoner? Your slave?” It reached toward its own throat, claws unsheathing, and plucked the brooch from its armor, tugging the cape free with a sound like the flutter of raven’s wings. “I would rather die here—and will—and will see my child again, but not before I kill you.” Its men made to advance, but Aranata raised a hand and whirling hissed until its soldiers backed down. “Kill his friends and servants, but the Oimn Belu is mine.”

  The Dark One. I almost laughed. I hadn’t asked for it, but the melodrama was unfolding around me. The Aeta’s men drew their scimitars and leaped from the rise above.

  “Go,” I said to the others, “draw them off.”

  “I’m not leaving,” Valka said.

  “She means we’re not leaving,” Pallino said, hefting his lance.

  “Go!”

  Still standing on the rise above us, Prince Aranata Otiolo drew out its stolen sword. A blade blue as moonlight flowered in its grip, and it pointed the sword down at me. “What marvels you beasts create,” Aranata said, and brandished the weapon.

  I pointed my own blade up at the Pale prince, precisely as I had at Valka’s assailants mere moments before. “That sword belonged to Raine Smythe. You have no right to hold it.”

  Snarling, the prince leaped down from on high, swinging Smythe’s sword like an executioner. I swung sideways, moving to get out from beneath the falling xenobite, bringing my sword across to parry a blow aimed at my side.

  Valka fired, but her shot went wide, just grazing past the Aeta. Aranata hissed through its teeth, and pulled a silver nahute from its belt. It hurled the thing at Valka, and at that distance she didn’t have time to strike it down. It rebounded off her shield, and she staggered back even as the scahari closed in about her and the others.

  “I said go!” I shouted,
and lunged at Aranata. Smythe’s sword was little better than a knife in its grip, so short did it seem. But it was a match for my own, and the prince was as fine a fighter as any I had seen, and blocked my strike with ease.

  I had grown complacent, too used to fighting against those who could not truly fight back. No weapon or armor the Cielcin had to offer could stand against highmatter, not for an instant. It had been months since I’d fought with Calvert, and longer still since I had battled Bassander aboard the Balmung, when last it could be said I’d fought a proper duel. Already the weight of my sword was a burden, my arms aching from all the struggle of that long and bloody day. I held the sword with two hands, and my shoulders creaked with the strain of resisting Aranata’s blows. Strong as I was, the beast had more strength in one hand than I might have had in three.

  Red light fell all about us, streaming through the skylight from the wreck of my enemy’s entire world, shining from the trees about us as the Garden burned. I caught an overhand blow against my sword’s crossguard, one foot splashing in the shallows of the lake, stabbing back at my opponent’s face where it leered demonic above me. Without its cloak, Aranata Otiolo seemed terribly thin, a distended shadow of a man, arms and legs too long, hips too narrow. I danced past it, trying to put the lake at my opponent’s back, but the prince retreated. The terrain might have played to my advantage, the narrow way between the lake and that artificial cliff of stone too tight for the xenobite and its gangling limbs, but the prince fought tight as the mechanisms of a Durantine clock, fought with the precision of the most effete Sollan courtier, tempered as it was by its berserker’s fury.

  Fury.

  Fury I understood, that emotion clear as glass across the gulf between our two species, a bright, coherent thread between us. Fury I could use. Aranata Otiolo gave ground, feeling its way over an uneven patch of the lakeshore. It batted my attack aside with ease, made cautious only by its unfamiliarity with and fear of the highmatter it held. We stood apart a moment, the battle raging around us, sheltered by the rise to my left and the lake at my right, isolated from the others. I could see knots of our soldiers pressing and pushed back against tides of the Cielcin’s scahari. Here the glimmer of a nahute thrown by one, there the flash of plasma, the hiss of disruptor fire, the clash of lance and sword.