Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “You look comfortable,” it said, as if it had found me lying on the training mat before practice.

  I turned my head sideways. Green slippers stood firmly planted on the surface of the waters beside my head, the hem of his viridian robe held with his cane in one hand to keep it from trailing in the stream. Tor Gibson smiled down at me, his eyes shining, a muted smile barely visible on his thin lips.

  “Gibson?”

  The apparition shook its head, and I knew.

  The Quiet took another step nearer to me, gaze wandering the branches above our heads. It cast no shadow on the streambed, or over me. Still lying flat in the shallow water, my mutilated arm aching, I asked, “What happened to me?”

  “You died.”

  I shut my eyes and saw the blue glow of my own sword flash across my neck, saw my headless body wavering, saw the blood. “That isn’t what I mean.”

  The light shone through that old, familiar face like sunlight through the branches of a tree. The Quiet stooped over me, careful to keep its robe from trailing in the river. It offered a hand. “We are not done with you.”

  I narrowed my eyes, but clicked my sword back into my belt and took the hand offered me. There was nothing there, yet I was wrenched to my feet as though I’d been lifted by a freight crane and set on my feet. My head swam, vision stretched and blurry. How much blood had I lost? I might have fallen, but something very like an invisible hand steadied me, and I heard the shadow of my voice ask, “What do you mean, you’re not done with me? What do you want?”

  To exist.

  The words echoed through the clearing and over the clear stream; they echoed inside my mind. But Gibson—the Quiet—was gone.

  CHAPTER 75

  THE ELEVENTH HOUR

  HER REPEATER’S PLASMA RESERVOIR was nearly empty, and her shield was starting to flag. Nonetheless, Valka fired, her shot catching one of Prince Aranata’s scahari in the shoulder. The skin of the xenobite’s face boiled away, and it fell back as two of its brethren hurried forward, weapons raised. Pallino leaped in, slapping one of the alien swords aside with the haft of his lance and clipping the other in the jaw. The polearm was well suited to combat with the taller creatures in that open place, giving the old centurion the reach he needed to compensate for his lesser height and shorter arms. Old as he was, Pallino of Trieste moved like a Jaddian dervish, like the Son of Fortitude himself, and plunged the bayonet of his lance-head beneath the jaw of one as Valka shot at the other.

  One of the scahari cut inside, darting past Pallino where he held the line. It ran straight toward her, scimitar raised—and caught one of Crim’s throwing knives in its overlarge eye.

  Valka told me she’d been weeping, that her teeth were aching from the force with which she’d clenched her jaw. She had seen what Aranata had done to me. How the prince had taken off my head with my own sword and stomped on my head until it broke like an underripe melon. I think I had heard her scream, and I believe I have learned something of her despair—so close to anger.

  Bassander and his troops were fighting toward them where they were embattled on the stony way down to the lakeside. Valka had seen the light of his sword flashing in the red gloom of the Garden, his commands carried on the dead air. He had seen it too, and seen the remnants of the prince’s royal guard turned on what was left of my people. He was trying.

  My blood still soaking one clawed foot, Prince Aranata climbed up from the lakeside and took control of its men even as Crim and Pallino together did for another of its blue-cloaked champions. It came slowly, inexorably, as Death is said to come, dogging each of us one step at a time in her black robes. It still held my sword in its hands, and with it parted one Red Company soldier from her head.

  “Pallino, down!” Crim yelled, firing over the centurion’s head as he leaped away, escaping a strike that might have ended his long campaign. The lieutenant’s shot went high—just as he’d intended it. Crim only wanted to shake the Cielcin lord’s attention free, to allow Pallino a chance to escape the reach of the prince’s sword.

  “We should pull back,” Ilex said, tapping Valka on the shoulder. “Lin’s not far.” The dryad jerked her head toward where Bassander Lin’s weapon could be seen flashing in the gloom.

  They both crouched in the shadow of one of the megaliths that lined the path from the tree down to the lake, backs against the stone to spare them any ambushes from behind. Pallino had cleared a space between himself and Prince Aranata, and turned back, lance tucked into the crook of his arm.

  The prince ignored him, and with the flick of a ringed hand ordered his champions to deal with the old man. Three of the scahari advanced, circling the myrmidon captain like sharks.

  Valka would not look at me as she recounted the story much later, as though the moment still cast long shadows on her waking mind. “No,” she told Ilex, “I’m not going to die chased down like prey. Are you?” I like to think she’d held Ilex’s gaze until the homunculus faltered, though I doubt either woman had the time. One of the scahari charged from the right side, and Ilex fired toward it. It took three shots before it went down, and by then Ilex had moved, drawn off to focus on the threat, leaving Valka alone.

  Aranata’s shadow preceded it, horns stretching like fingers across the uneven ground. “You,” it said, and pointed at Valka, “you were with Marlowe when he killed my Nobuta.” Nictitating membranes flicked shut over the prince’s eyes, making them seem to glisten like twin spots of new ink. “You are his, aren’t you?”

  Valka didn’t answer. Valka shot him instead. The first shot caught Aranata squarely in the chest, but the prince wore armor, and it grunted as diffused heat scorched its chin. What Valka had been thinking in that moment she never told me. I never asked. Her second shot flew past the prince’s shoulder, as tears welled in her eyes. The third was nowhere close, and by then her pistol’s plasma reservoir was empty, and the weapon beeped its complaint each time she pulled the trigger uselessly.

  Empty.

  Aranata raised its sword—my sword—for the killing stroke. Silver flashed in the ruddy light, and the prince howled. The sword tumbled from nerveless fingers, lost amid the tall grass. The Cielcin prince clutched its hand to its chest, lips peeled back from its teeth. Groaning, it plucked something from the palm of its hand, drawing it out with excruciating slowness.

  “Got you!” a voice rang out, triumphant, almost grinning. “Valka! Run!”

  The prince dropped the thing it held to the earth with a snarl.

  It was one of Crim’s knives.

  But Valka hadn’t run. She hadn’t moved. Her legs had failed her, would not obey. She told me she kept seeing my head fall from my shoulders again and again, and some force—part fear, part fury—had her in its talons.

  With its uninjured hand, Aranata Otiolo reached into its sash and drew out Raine Smythe’s sword. Blue light flared, and it drew closer to Valka, heedless of the chaos around it. Of the end.

  “Raka idate,” it said. It’s over. It towered over Valka, peering down at her with shining dark eyes. It raised its sword to strike.

  Another blade sprouted from its chest, shearing upward to slit the alien torso from navel to collarbone.

  “No,” I said, and swept the prince’s head away with another stroke of my sword. An eye for an eye. “Now it’s over.”

  The prince’s body lay at my feet, just as its child’s had. Black blood soaked the ground, and afterward the thick grass would wither from the poison loosed from the xenobite’s veins. I barely noticed. I had eyes only for Valka. She’d turned white as the alien dead between us, eyes wide as ever I’d seen them. Her Norman plasma pistol tumbled from stunned fingers, hands shaking.

  “A tear, doctor?” I managed to say, swaying where I stood, and canceled the thrum of the sword in my hand, aware suddenly just how still things had grown around us. Pallino braced the head of his lance against the skull of a f
allen enemy and fired, the skull exploding as the brain within boiled away. I barely noticed.

  If Valka’s eyes had been at all human, they might have been red and swollen. As they were, the tears ran down her cheeks, and she choked back a sob. Or was it laughter? “Barbarian . . .” she said, and there was not the faintest trace of scorn in the old insult. “You idiot . . . I . . . how?”

  “I don’t . . .” My knees gave out, and I sagged to the ground. Prince Aranata’s hand lay before me, six fingers curling over the wounded palm. Gems glittered there, silver rings set with sapphire, emerald, and lapis lazuli. So much blue. Why was that? Moved by some compulsion I cannot name, I took my enemy’s hand in the only hand I had left; squeezed.

  Her shadow fell across me, and I looked up. Her mouth hung open, hands clasped over her heart. “I saw you die.” She shook her head, red-black hair flowing loose about her severe and elf-like face. “Your head, it . . .”

  “Valka.” I squeezed the Aeta’s hand until I felt its jewelry bite even through my gloves, but when I spoke my voice came lightly. “It’s me.” I let the hand fall from my own, and it was a moment before I realized I’d worked one of the prince’s rings free. A keepsake? A trophy? A memento mori? Memento mori . . . “Where is Raine Smythe’s sword?”

  “What?”

  “Her sword. We should find it.”

  “Found it, boss,” Crim said as he approached, holding the weapon up in one hand. I could see the horror and awe mingled on the lieutenant’s canted face. Horror of me, I realized, awe of me. But Crim kept to the matter at hand, stuck to business. “He had yours, too.”

  “I have mine,” I said, and thudded my sword with my fist. I had seen Crim save Valka, as well, seen my sword go flying into the grass, but I knew without having to be told—without having to go in search of that other blade—that they would not find it. I knew also that there had been a moment where there had been two of Olorin’s sword in the Garden. One in my hand—returned with me out of the howling dark—and another in the prince’s.

  “It’s really you . . .” came another voice, flattened by exhaustion and holy terror. “Holy Mother Earth, how? How?” I looked up at the figure of Bassander Lin, his armor dinted and bloodstained, hair askew from where it had spent so long inside his helm. “You were dead. I saw it, I . . .” He swallowed. “I saw you die.”

  At that exact moment a sound swept through the pavilion, a quiet wind rising. No—I realized. Not a wind. A breath. A groan as from a thousand throats together. My miracle momentarily forgotten, we all cast about for the source of the sound, grown loud enough now to drown the din of the fighting still joined on the ground about and above us. I slipped the prince’s ring into my sabretache and made to draw my sword, but Valka placed a hand on my shoulder to stay me. I held her hand instead, trying to hold myself up.

  Greenish lights were shining under the trees, lurching, shuffling, shambling about.

  “The SOMs,” Valka breathed, and I gripped her hand more tightly. “They’re awake.”

  They were. I saw them coming out into the open, a horde dressed in olive and dun. A moment after, a great humming ran through the Garden, and the wind blew once more. A moment after that, the environment lights came on, and we all heard a distant, metallic groaning shake the vessel beneath us, as though a million souls were loosed from some technologic hell. The Demiurge was waking up, which could only mean the Undying was awake as well.

  Kharn Sagara was coming.

  “Help me up,” I said to Valka and Crim, who were closest.

  “You can barely stand!” Valka protested.

  “Do it!” I gripped her wrist, felt her fingers close around mine, and raised the stump of my left arm toward Crim. They held me between them, kept me steady as the swarm approached.

  Bassander, Pallino, and the others all formed up around the three of us, the captain shouting orders. “Down to the lake! Quickly! Don’t let them surround us!”

  I did not have the strength to tell the captain that I did not believe we were in any danger, and permitted myself to be led—practically to be dragged back down to the place where I had died. They thrust me on ahead of the others, Bassander and Pallino bringing up the rear.

  “How did you do it, boss?” Crim asked me, mindful of my ruined left arm.

  I didn’t have an answer for him.

  They set me on a flat stone by the edge of the water, my back against the stone. Almost I could still hear the clash of highmatter on highmatter, sword on sword, that resounded through that narrow place. There was the slice I’d carved in the bare stone, and there the silver-tipped horn I’d cut from the Aeta’s head.

  “I’ll leave you with him, doctor,” Crim said. “I’ll go help the others.” He reached into his paisley kaftan and drew out a second, smaller plasma burner, cousin to the one he carried. “Since yours is dead.” And then he was gone, hurrying around the bend to where the others clustered along the beaten path.

  “It won’t matter,” I said, as if to no one. “If the SOMs are really coming for us, they’ll just jump down from above.” The memory of that cafe in Arslan, the day Ghen died, came back to me, the way the inhuman things had clambered over one another, over tables and chairs, moving more like a swarm of insects than an army.

  Valka was checking the configuration on her unfamiliar firearm, but she glanced up long enough to say, “I know you’re probably right, but leave off the all-knowing routine, would you?”

  I smiled at her. “As you wish, doctor.”

  “And don’t you go stiff and formal on me—” She stood, practiced sighting along the plasma burner, one eye squeezed shut. “—Lord Marlowe.”

  “They’re coming!” Bassander’s voice was raised up over the heads of those of us clustered by the lakeside. “Form a perimeter!”

  “There are hundreds of them!” Pallino snapped. “The hell good’s a perimeter going to do?”

  It took everything I had to stand again, head swimming in black fog. Valka swore and tried to catch me, but I waved her away. “I just want a look is all.” I staggered along the shoreline, moving to where I thought I might be accorded a better view of the hill running down above us from the wreck of the striped pavilion. But I’d had another reason for my walk.

  The blood was still there, covering the stones, though my headless body was nowhere to be seen. I looked around, half-expecting to see Gibson’s spectral image smiling green-eyed from the surface of the waters, but the Quiet was nowhere to be seen. I lingered a moment by the rocks, watching the lap of the water carry away the blood, heedless of the chaos coming behind, so sure was I of what was soon to come.

  There was something in the water. Distracted, moved as if through a sort of dream, I stood in the shallows of the lake, water rising up beyond my ankles. I stood over it, looking down. There were no thoughts left in my head, only shock and a hollow, echoing Quiet.

  It was an arm. An arm armored in white ceramic, its bicep cloven clean through with a highmatter sword.

  My arm.

  I clutched my stump again, mindful of the pressure cuff in my suit. There was something wrong about the arm in the water, so wrong that my concern swallowed the noise of the fighting behind me. I stared at it a long time before I realized.

  It was my right arm.

  I stared down at that right hand, holding my own out before me, palm up. The pattern of scrapes and dents in the white armor were the same. I flexed my fingers, looking past that closing hand at the one lying limp and cold at my feet.

  The same hand.

  A sudden panic stole through me, and I kicked the arm deeper into the lake, water splashing around me. I stood watching the ripples settle. There had been two of my sword for a while. My body had vanished. Why had my arm remained? To assure me that it all was real? And where had the other sword gone? And my body?

  What had happened?

  What
had the Quiet done?

  “Hadrian!” The noise had drawn Valka’s attention, and she hurried back to me. “What are you doing?”

  Ripples still stirred the dark water, a concrete reminder of what it was I’d just seen. I opened my mouth to answer her, but the truth would not come out. I shook my head. “Nothing, I—”

  “Come on.” She took me by the hand, marching me back to the shore. The weight of her at my side was a comfort—a powerful comfort. I felt stronger just for the nearness of her, no matter the black fog coming in at the edge of my eyes. “’Twill roll over us,” Valka said, pointing her hand over the low shelf rising above the lakeside toward the approaching SOMs.

  “No,” I said, nodding my head. “Look.”

  The SOMs swept down the hill, falling upon the remaining Cielcin like a wave, tearing them limb from limb as the Cielcin had torn our men apart. They made no sound as they went about it, as though we were watching some security holograph played at half speed. They left our men standing, skirting round them as though repulsed by some magnetic charge. And there, behind them all, standing before the collapsed pavilion in the shadow of that lonely tree, I saw a figure in a golden robe. As Valka and Crim held me up, so the golem Yume—where had it gone in all this commotion?—supported her.

  Suzuha.

  The new Kharn.

  She had taken her father’s robe—her robe, I supposed—from the corpse of her previous incarnation. We had both died this day, both changed. I saw Kharn raise her arm, and the SOMs swept down like a tide obeying her command.

  Protect the children, Brethren had said. I guess my actions had not gone unnoticed.

  “Put down your weapons,” I said, voice barely more than a whisper. “Put them down.”

  I sagged in my companions’ arms, and fell once more into a softer, brighter Dark than I had known before.

  CHAPTER 76

  THE THREE IMMORTALS

  SLEEP, SO THE CHANTRY teaches us, is the half-brother of Death. Having visited Death before, I tell you they are not even cousins. Rather sleep is the nurse of life, for often in sleep we are healed of the hurts we suffer and so find new life again. How long I slept I did not know, though many times I think I woke to cool air and the soft beep of machinery. Hands on my body, on my face, and a warm presence at my bedside. Valka, I knew it by the pressure of her hand. I remembered eyes smiling at me. Pale gold. Black, black, and black again. Bassander and Jinan and the Undying herself. Siran’s brown and Otavia’s. Pallino’s single blue. And green. Green eyes in the fog, with no face to accompany them. Once I awoke and thought my father sat beside me, arms folded, saying no word. But the Lord Alistair Marlowe was kilolight-years away, and would never have come for me in any event.