Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  The prince lunged at me, and I pivoted, turning its blow aside. As I parried, the point of my sword cut into the rock face, leaving a cold, dead line in the stone. Black eyes locked on me, narrowed by rage, its slitted nostrils flared.

  “What is it to be, then?” I asked, speaking to the xenobite in its own tongue. “One final stand? I say again: surrender.”

  Aranata Otiolo bared its glass-shard fangs, tucked its head to point its horns at me. “Sagara said you wanted peace! And you, you creatures took everything from me!” It angled a slash at my head, which I parried, stepping inside.

  There was no debating with the xenobite. It was right. Lin and Hauptmann had lied to us, had used us—Smythe and me. But I remembered the way Smythe had died, and the disfigured slave this alien prince had dragged behind it in chains. I remembered Sir William, and saw the spots of dried blood still on Aranata’s throat and chin. Perhaps I’d been wrong to come here at all, perhaps Bassander was not to blame, or Switch, or Jinan. Perhaps there was no one to blame for any of this but me.

  And my dream.

  “I didn’t ask for this!” I said, fending off a flurry of blows like killing rain. Sword held above my head, I turned, pointing my elbow to land a blow in the soft place below the alien’s ribs and armored chest. Aranata staggered back. “I didn’t start this,” I said, “I didn’t start any of this.”

  “You killed Nobuta!”

  A pang of guilt ran through me, and I felt the young Cielcin’s body slacken in my grip once more. Smythe, I told myself, Crossflane. I watched their faces, saw Smythe’s dismembered arm raised once more like a trophy behind my eyes. I heard that cold voice—so like my own, so like my father’s—speak from my mouth again, “Yes, I did.” My hair hung in my face, my teeth stood on edge, my guard was low and ready. I shifted my grip, the segmented plates of my trooper’s armor clinking together.

  The prince exploded toward me, sword pulled back for a mighty swing. I stood no chance of blocking it, not in a thousand years, such was the ferocity of that blow. I ducked instead, angling my own blade so the attack skipped off my blade like a flat stone upon the surface of a pond. I swung high, striking at the prince’s face. Hardly have I seen anything move so fast. My blade—which should have caught Aranata just below the chin—succeeded only in severing one of the prince’s silver-tipped horns.

  “Sosulan!” it swore, feeling the stump of its horn. “You will pay for this!”

  I drew back a pace, situating myself best I could between the rock and the water, and brushed the tip of my nose with my thumb. With a flourish, I raised my sword in a hanging guard, hand high, point down, and waited. I was done speaking, done trying to reason. I was past caring, past hope, past even regret. There was nothing left then in all the universe save the prince and I and the damage we had done one another.

  Snarling, my opponent sprang lightly into the air. To my shock it rebounded off the wall of the cliff to my left, blade thrust out to skewer me. I tucked the point of my sword down, swinging with my feet like a matador to knock the Aeta’s blade aside. It tumbled past, rolled to its feet. I could see just how it was this creature had conquered others of its kind, brought several itanimn together to build its scianda-fleet. It was a terror, as any creature that maintains its rule through force must be.

  I wavered a bit, unsteady on my feet as my opponent regained its own. My arms ached from fighting, my legs from our long run in the dark. I had to end this quickly, had to get back to Valka and the others, had to help them, had to end this terrible nightmare of a day.

  “You are tired!” Aranata said, and gnashed its fangs. “You are weak like all your kind.”

  Strong enough, I thought, but held my silence, hoping it was true.

  The prince advanced, moving with a languid care not there previously. It cut at my head, and I parried, thrust low. Aranata stepped inside, blade stabbing toward my shoulder. I saw it clearly. The end. Knew each action: each thrust, each step, each parry and riposte came a fraction of a second later than the last. I trapped the xenobite’s sword with my own, tried to force the alien’s weapon aside. It was foolishness. I had forgotten just how strong Aranata was.

  It reached out with its other hand and seized me by the hair. I felt its claws biting into my scalp. The back of my head. Felt my hair tear, my head tipped back. Visions of Sir William’s torn throat filled my eyes, the torn trachea and the way the prince had swallowed it.

  I smiled, and bared my teeth as I smiled, realizing that I was going to be wrong after all.

  I was going to die.

  The prince licked its teeth, its breath a horror of bile and raw meat. “I am going to enjoy killing you,” it said, and raked its claws along my scalp, slicing me open in ragged lines. Its fingers seized me by the neck and slammed me hard against the rock wall. I slashed wildly, hoping to catch the prince, but the Cielcin lord deflected my desperate attack with contempt, nostrils flaring.

  My head was ringing, and there was blood upon the stone. Red blood, startlingly red. Why is it that our own blood is always more frightening to see?

  I was going to die.

  Get up, boy, came a voice I had not heard in a long time. My father’s voice. Get up.

  I can’t.

  You will.

  He was right. I was not going to die groveling in the dirt. I was not going to die kneeling at the feet of my foe. I stood, and raised my sword for what I knew was the last time.

  Plasma fire struck the stone around us, and I spied a cluster of figures standing on the far shore. So small were they, so remote and so very far away. Was it Valka? Pallino? But no! Those were white uniforms they wore. Bassander? Aranata had been distracted for an instant longer than I, and hoping to make an end of it, I lunged, thrusting toward my enemy, teeth clenched and eyes open.

  All the noise of battle and trammel of creation fell away, shut out by my waking mind. The world was a distraction. The burning ship through the roof above, the battle and the burning forest, even the rain of plasma fire peppering the stone behind us all shrank from me. I put both hands on my sword, the left pressed against the pommel, the point angled to stab Prince Aranata in the heart. Everything I had was in that final attack. When I had fallen, it was the memory of my father standing over me in his office in Devil’s Rest that made me stand. It was a hundred Colosso fights that guided my hand, and a hundred combats after. It was the memory of Cat, of Ghen, even of Gilliam and Uvanari. It was the thought of how I had betrayed Jinan, and how Switch had betrayed me. It was my friendship with Pallino, with Siran, with all my myrmidon companions and all the Red Company.

  It was my love for Valka, if there was such a thing.

  All blew away like charcoal drawings in the vortex of that moment, brushed aside until I alone remained. The last piece of my life I could not be parted from. The only thing that I—like Theseus—could not replace.

  Myself.

  Prince Aranata did not block my attack. It did not parry. It stepped inside, taking advantage of my awkward slowness. Its six-fingered hand closed about my wrist, talons grinding against my armored sleeve. The smallest tug was all it took to off-balance me, and I fell forward.

  Time fell away as well, for it seemed I was a millennium falling.

  I did not even feel the blade as it fell, cutting through ceramic and titanium and synthetic armorweave. Did not feel it part flesh or sever tendons or shear through bone. There was no pain, only the fountain-flowering of blood, more red than any I had seen. And my arm—my good, right arm—came away in the prince’s grip, and my sword with it.

  Nothing came to me in that moment. No word of Gibson’s, no act of god. None of my training, none of my experience mattered—none of it came to me in the full blossom of my shock. Quickly, almost casually, the prince dropped my arm. It fell with a dull sound, as though it came from far away.

  “Hadrian!”

  Valka had se
en. It must have been her. Who else would have called me by my right name?

  “Marlowe!”

  Was that Bassander?

  I clutched the ruined stump of my arm, only then beginning to feel the rush of pain as my suit tightened to staunch the bleeding. It all seemed a lifetime, a universe of time passing in moments, as though Prince Aranata and I fought inside the event horizon of some black sun. At least I had kept my feet in the end. You see, Father? I remember thinking. Here I am.

  It was very nearly my last thought.

  “Do it,” I said, or thought I said. I am not sure. I am sure of almost nothing, unless it is one thing: that in the end—at the end—I stood.

  Prince Aranata did not do it. It drew back and stooping plucked my sword from my dead hand just as I had taken Bassander’s sword from him. It examined the weapon a moment, and finding the mechanism kindled the shimmering, liquid blade. It said nothing. No great speech, no parting remark. It only raised its sword—my sword—and cut.

  No force in that arm, none of the strength and world-ending rage I expected, though a world ended all the same. One final insult instead: that it took no more effort to kill me than to swat a fly.

  Liquid blue metal shone bright as a full moon. Again I did not feel the blade as it bit into my neck. I felt nothing at all.

  I tried to scream, but my lungs were gone. My body was gone. My eyes bulged, and I fell, tumbling back and sideways, vision beginning to darken at the edges. The taste of blood filled my mouth. Someone was screaming, or was it all creation screaming? I ceased my roll, unmoving eyes looking up at the prince and at my own headless body teetering, toppling like a tower in the fall of some ancient city.

  Like the end of the world. My world.

  So much blood. There was so much blood.

  Then there was nothing but darkness.

  Darkness and a profound, echoing quiet.

  CHAPTER 74

  HOWLING DARK

  DARKNESS.

  Darkness and the sense of drifting in deep water.

  There was nothing. I was nothing, less than a mote lost in blank eternity.

  I knew nothing. No pain, no memory—I did not even know my own name. There were not even fragments, and all I was and had been and might become were hidden, veiled in some corner of that Dark I could not see. Nameless, shapeless and unshaped, I roiled, past things unseen and unremembered. Where was I? What was I? What had I become?

  There were no gates of light nor gleaming city, no empyrean nor mountain crowned by seven walls. But there was something up ahead of me, and shapes I could not see or understand whorled past, moving like the slow drift of continents, such that I was tossed as the lonely plankton is by a passing whale.

  How can I make you understand? I was nothing. There was nothing left of me, of Hadrian Marlowe. I had no sensation, no feelings, no words. Only the vague awareness of a light not wholly snuffed out. One light among many, gently pulled along by unseen tides in accordance with some pattern beyond comprehension. Was I dead? Or were these sensations the spasm of some fast-fading brain function? Was I perhaps still lying at the edge of the lake, lying at the feet of my enemy? Who knows what it is like to die—truly to die—or how long it takes?

  Hadrian.

  My name. That was my name, wasn’t it? It was a word, spoken by some soundless voice thundering in the night.

  Hadrian.

  I had a name again. Memories. The wind howling over the sea-wall at Devil’s Rest. Gibson seated in his high-backed chair in the scholiasts’ cloister. The raw scream of hunger as I cowered in a damp alley in Borosevo. The blood-cry of my fellow myrmidons. Cat’s laughter. Jinan moving beneath me and the scent of jasmine. Valka shivering against me in the cold of our cell. My headless body swaying before Prince Aranata. The last touch of the lake water as it soaked my bleeding head.

  A wind came where there was no air, and I endured it. In all that howling Dark I was myself alone, borne upon its tide. The memory of that final lakeside flashed again across my awareness, and I saw it as an observer might, my head falling to the ground just as I had seen in the Quiet’s vision. I slipped past, watched the moment slide away, as though it stood upon the shores of a river and I was lost in its flood.

  I knew I was going somewhere. Where that somewhere was, I cannot say, but it seemed to me almost that I walked, climbing level by level higher, toward some summit, some heart, some place within that darkness. There was the Truth. The answer. The end. Darkness within darkness, and light underneath.

  A light in the black.

  Almost I felt I crawled then, as though I strained against the flow. Higher. Deeper. On and on. At last I collapsed, and reached out with the right arm I had lost, willing that hand to be, straining for some identity in the darkness. Hadrian, I told myself, echoing the thunder. My name is Hadrian. My hand fluttered before me, little more than strips of skin shuddering against the blackness. It glowed before me, and straining I clenched my fist.

  But my reach exceeded my grasp. My hand blew apart, pieces vanishing slow as cinders thrown into the night, and I was left alone. Whatever I was.

  Hadrian.

  A shadow fell across me, even in that absolute darkness, and looking up I beheld the figure of a man dressed all in black, his armor immaculately sculpted in the best Imperial fashion, breastplate shaped like a muscled torso. Stoic faces peered from the tops of his greaves and from his vambraces, framed by black laurels. The cape that flowed about his broad shoulders was black as the Dark itself, edged in a labyrinth pattern the color of fresh blood, and crimson beneath. The black coat he wore beneath his black armor was trimmed in red and red-lined and fine as the kit of any Emperor. And his face! Pale and palatine and carved as if from alabaster, violet eyes above the knife blade of a nose and twisting lips, the hair as dark as his clothing.

  Hadrian.

  It was me, more richly adorned than ever I had seen before, and the crest upon my breastplate was not the devil of Meidua, but the pitchfork and pentacle I had made for my Red Company, set amid a cartouche of laurels and raven rings. I reached up toward myself, tried desperately to grab hold, but my poor impression of an arm collapsed once more, shreds blowing away to naught.

  That other me looked down upon me, and shook his head. I strained to pull my idea of a hand back together, to seize the hem of my cape if nothing else. My other self shook his head again, and pointed, raising an armored hand with fingers sharp as the talons of the Cielcin. I turned, and turning beheld a single, shining point of light, bright as any I had seen.

  A star, white and infinitely remote.

  My star.

  A sudden warmth filled me like a fire—like a breath. The other Hadrian stepped forward, ceremonial spurs on his pointed boots clinking, ornamental black wings shining about his ankles. He never lowered his hand, one clawed finger eternally pointing. Forward. Back. The way forward is the way back. Back toward my life, my world, my purpose.

  Yes, I thought, I’m ready to go. I turned again to look toward that gleaming star and reached out. My hand appeared again, garments of skin fluttering like battle standards on an abandoned field. I closed my fingers about that distant star, and found that it was no star at all. It was the piece of shell I had received in my vision on Vorgossos. Where I had plucked it I’d left a hole in the Dark, and light came rushing in, brighter than the star had been before it. It spilled in like clear water, and I was carried on its tide, swept past my other self where he stood, still pointing, in the darkness. I strained to keep sight of him, of his red and black cape waving, and of the divine darkness shining quiet behind him.

  Light.

  I had seen the rivers of light before, but here I swam their waters, brushing past memory and the lives I had not lived—the choices I had not made—a rush my merely mortal mind could scarcely comprehend. I felt myself round a sharp corner in that whorl of time and was thrown into em
pty air.

  Falling.

  Falling.

  The sensation of being immersed in deep water returned. And weight. I had weight again. The back of my head was soaking—was I still in the lake? Floating on its surface?

  A great pain lanced through me, and I sucked in a deep breath. I had lungs! My chest ached. My chest. I lay a long time upon the earth, appreciating each ache and terrible pain for the joy it represented: to be alive again. The boughs of trees hung over me, stooping like watchful medics at their task. Was I in the Garden? I turned my head, made sure by doing so that it was attached to a neck. I tried to sit up, and looking down beheld my scratched and dinted white armor. My body, down to my toes.

  My arms . . .

  My left arm was gone, severed above the elbow. My left arm. I had lost my right, had I not? Yet there it was, hand fast-holding the hilt of the sword Aranata had taken from me. Olorin’s sword. Jaddian silver and red leather. I held it up before my eyes, mouth open in wonderment. In confusion. Something had happened. Something had been done. I struggled to sit up, but the pain was more than I could bear, and I fell back into the stream. Far off, I could hear the sounds of fighting: the shouting of men and Cielcin, the cough of plasma fire and crack of burning trees.

  Footsteps.

  Not the tramp of boots nor the scrape of Cielcin claws, only the soft and shuffling tread of slippers. The voice—when it came—was like the gentle turn of pages in an old, familiar book. I should have expected it, and yet the sound of its familiar tones sent a thrill through me.