Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Each time I stirred, drifting above the surface of sleep just long enough to catch my breath before submerging again, I felt my pain a little less. At first my missing arm had burned like white fire, as though someone had taken a mallet to those bones I no longer had. I fancied that I sweated and cried in my sleep, and my dreams were all of darkness and of bloody fangs. I saw Smythe’s arm raised above the bloody feasting like a prize once more, and my own right hand struck off, restored, and struck off again.

  “The infection has cleared,” said a voice. Doctor Okoyo? “These implants of yours have taken. He’ll be fine.”

  “Good.”

  That other voice . . . that was the voice of a god.

  I awoke to behold a dark ceiling and to the quiet chime of medical instruments declaring my slow and steady heartbeat. My whole body stiff, I winded a long, aching breath.

  “What dreams did come?” came the voice of the Undying. It was the same voice. The same deep and sepulchral resonance that I had heard come from Kharn’s machines a hundred times before.

  I turned to look, and beheld the children. Ren and Suzuha both sat in padded chairs set against the backdrop of a massive aquarium: the first signs of life outside the Garden that I had seen aboard the Demiurge. Suzuha still wore her father’s gold robe, a black dress beneath it, and Ren was similarly attired in a loose-sleeved golden haori over a black single suit. Blue-eyed drones hovered above them, drifted about the room, watching everything. My neck was stiff. I was strapped down to keep from hurting myself, and when I opened my mouth to speak my throat scratched. I swallowed.

  “Your friends say you shuffled off this mortal coil,” Ren said, his child’s voice flattened by a maturity and a weight that did not belong to it. Both his eyes and Suzuha’s narrowed at the same moment, in the same way, but Suzuha tilted her head.

  Rather than answer them, I said, “Both of you?”

  “Both of us,” said the booming voice from the machines.

  “The children have gone to sleep,” Suzuha said. Kharn said. She crossed her legs. “It has been a long time since my last . . .” The right word took her a moment to find. “Regeneration.”

  Ren—Kharn—leaned forward, touching his sister’s knee. His own knee. “But this . . . this is something new.”

  “There are two of you?”

  “Two?” the smaller Kharn repeated.

  “Two,” the female one agreed. Her eyes wandered almost blindly down the length of me where I lay beneath white coverlets. I was acutely aware then that I was naked, was even more aware of the waste elimination hoses socketed into my lower regions, of the saline drip attached to my arm. “We’re still not entirely certain how it happened. We believe your friend’s stunning my counterpart had something to do with it. Ren’s body was intended to be my—our—next host, but that stunner bolt damaged his implants and impeded the synaptic kinesis.”

  The creature that once had been Ren said, “This body was my first choice, the safer choice. Suzuha would have been in a position to help get this body out of danger, under the circumstances.” He sighed. “In any event, like she says, the damage I sustained accounted for the delay in our return.”

  “When we return to Vorgossos, the Brethren will run a full diagnostic,” the woman said. “But until then”—and here she reached out and took his hand—“we are two.”

  Mindful of my vulnerable position, naked and unarmed before the Undying Lord of Vorgossos, and of the ruin my actions had brought upon him and his realm, I said, “I am sorry about Vorgossos, Lord Sagara.”

  “Sorry?” The boy Kharn’s black eyes shone with malefic fire. On so round and childish a face, it was a horrible sight. “Whatever for?” I tried not to remember the child who once dwelt behind those eyes; that timid, soft-spoken boy, his faced buried in his sister’s skirts. I felt sick, but perhaps that was only the liquid diet I had been put on while I slept.

  Eyes screwed shut, I said, “That Vorgossos is open to Imperial assault.” The words stretched a moment, languishing in the air between us like the smoke following the blast of some antique cannon. “That was never my intention.” One of the familiar long silences followed on. So long that perhaps I drifted off. When at last I opened my eyes, I found the two Kharns still watching me, two bodies with the same impassive faces, as though they were the stone sentinels outside the palace of some ancient pharaoh. “What?”

  A trace of that evil smile touched the woman Kharn’s face this time, and she said, “Vorgossos will survive. We always survive.” She plucked at something on her lap and cast it away.

  The boy added, “Besides, we have profited quite nicely from all this.”

  I had forgotten that. Twenty thousand Imperial subjects. Twenty thousand human souls just . . . given away. Smythe had not known the sort of creature Kharn Sagara was when she’d made the deal. Ignorance was no excuse. Ignorance would not deliver those people or their children from whatever horrors awaited them in Kharn’s bottled city. Then I remembered that Smythe was dead, and Crossflane with her, and that Lin’s warmongering had won the day. Aranata Otiolo was dead. Nobuta Otiolo was dead. Tanaran was dead. An entire Cielcin scianda had been wiped out in a single stroke.

  The throne would be pleased.

  There was a part of me that wanted to ask just what Sagara intended with his—with her—payment; a part of me that wanted to know. The rest of me kept quiet, and the Undying said, speaking through the machine voice they both shared, “You saved us.”

  “I wasn’t sure the Demiurge would survive without you,” I said, and added, “and I’d no idea what Bassander Lin was planning. Our tribune had no idea. He was acting on higher orders.” An ugly thought struck me, and I asked, “Where . . . where is Captain Lin?”

  Skin crinkled at the corner of both Kharns’ eyes. A smile? Fury? “Withdrawn. Escaped to your fleet.”

  “The fleet?” I echoed, brows drawing together. “They’re still here?” A nod. They had not abandoned me. I felt strength flow back into me and banish the fog shadowing my eyes. I sat up. “Why am I here, then? Where is Valka? What have you done to her?” Visions of the cell beneath Vorgossos played behind my eyes. I saw Calvert’s hairless face and skeletal frame so clear and sharp the image bit into me, and I felt my heartbeat come faster.

  Both Kharn Sagaras’ eyes widened—almost in unison. The machine voice answered, though I saw the woman’s lips move. “To her? We have done nothing to anyone. Except to you. Your fleet is waiting for you. I promised—we promised to repair you,” the woman said, and gestured open-palmed at me where I lay interred. “A sign of our gratitude. We are at our most vulnerable away from Vorgossos, and you protected us . . . ever the gallant knight.”

  “I’m not a knight,” I said tartly.

  “Yes, you are.” The response came far more sharply and quickly than I’d expected from the Undying, and I wondered if a modicum of vim and impatience had returned to that creature with his youth and hers. I wondered what else had changed—what would change—now that old mind lurked in new bodies. I guessed that much of what Kharn Sagara was lived on his implants, not in the flesh or the brain, and so perhaps did not change so much from body to body as the Exalted might, but already he seemed quicker, sharper. In the boy there shone the touch of a white and vicious glee, where there was a stoic depth to the woman that ought to have frightened me twice as much as the former. “Have you not noticed our gratitude?”

  “Your . . .” I looked around, not sure what I was expecting, or what I should dread. Horror stories out of childhood came to me, and I recalled tales of how the Extrasolarians would steal the eyes from their captives. Feed them dreams. Feed them lies and turn their waking worlds to nightmare. The Mericanii machines, it was said, trapped mankind in a bottle—as they were trapped when we made them. A false world. A gnostic hell. Perhaps I had awoken into such a dream, a computer’s dream and prison meant to hold me.

&n
bsp; Then I saw my arms.

  My arms. The right and left restored.

  “I can’t move my fingers,” I said, straining to flex the left hand.

  The booming voice descended. “You’ve never used them.”

  “Can you . . . ?” I nodded at the straps that bound me, and at a gesture from Kharn Sagara those bindings fell away. There was no pain, only stiffness as I sat up and touched my left hand with my right. It was warm, real flesh, pale as ever, though the arm was thin and stringy. Atrophied.

  Not atrophied, I realized.

  As Kharn said, it had never been used.

  “You grew this?” I asked, astonished.

  “I am the Lord of Vorgossos,” Sagara replied. “I grow armies. Arms are easy.”

  “How long was I unconscious?”

  “Nineteen days,” the woman replied.

  Mouth open, I ran my hands over the new flesh. The skin was raw, sensitive and smooth. There were no hairs there—they had not had time to grow. I struggled to make a fist, but the long, bony fingers seemed remote to me as candles seen through darkened windows, and I could not move them.

  “The muscle tissue, the skin and nails are all your own,” the boy Kharn said, “but there was no time to grow the bones. Your fleet is eager to be underway.” He leaned forward, feet not quite touching the ground. “Your bones are a printed adamant lattice, with carbon fullerenes in place of your tendons and ligaments.” I must have made a face, for the Undying said, “Nothing your Chantry would object to—no electronics at all—but we didn’t want to give you something that would ever break.” I remained unconvinced. Chantry religious law forbade only intelligent machines, truly, though it regulated access to many less dangerous technologies. It was not uncommon for soldiers in the Imperial service to receive artificial bones such as mine, forged from titanium or carbon fiber. But my bones were of Vorgossos adamant, and for that alone I might one day face the White Sword on suspicion of abomination and of consorting with daimons.

  Fingertips twitched, the promise of future movement. I massaged the arm more forcefully, as if pressure alone might will strength into those new fingers. I caressed the strange digits. The pitted burn scars from my fight with Uvanari were gone, relic of the molten lead that had rained down upon me. So too was the flat ring of the cryoburn scar encircling my thumb. Those scars—but not the memories that caused them—were erased.

  I laughed and let the limp appendage fall, scratching at my greasy hair with my good hand. “What amuses you?” the machine voice asked, though whether it was the boy or the woman who used it I did not know.

  Kharn meant to shock me with that voice, to intimidate me with it. I was not intimidated. “I was just thinking.” I lifted my new arm by my still-strong shoulder. It flailed near-uselessly. “How much of this before I’m like you? Until I’ve replaced so much of me there’s none of me left?”

  “You’re welcome,” the woman said tartly.

  Incredibly, I felt myself flush. “I apologize. That was ungrateful of me.”

  “You would need to change very much more before you became anything like I am,” the boy Kharn said.

  “Like we are,” the woman amended, and thrust out her chin in an uncanny throwback to the girl she had been, as if some specter of Suzuha lingered in the flesh, as if the body itself remembered her, though her mind was gone. Asleep, Kharn had said.

  The boy Kharn smiled that vicious smile once more—so unlike the boy Ren. “You’re only human.”

  I marveled at the both of them a moment, the woman and the boy. Each so like their father. Like one another. Yet each unlike, in turn. Both seemed less patient than the old man, less sepulchral, though I supposed they were younger, and might grow into such behavior. The manic light in the boy’s eyes was new, and the haughty defiance in his sister-self. We underestimate, I think, how much of us is in our bodies, like to imagine that our brains might be removed from our heads and moved without damage, or our bodies transformed.

  My fingers twitched, and my eyes fell to look at them. My new fingers. The hand lolled at the end of the wrist, despite my attempts to raise it up. It felt like my hand—was perhaps heavier than the old one. I cradled it with my strong right hand, feeling the bones. Kharn said they were made of adamant, of the same stuff that starship hulls were made, the same stuff as Calvert’s armor. If that was so, it cannot have come cheaply. It was a kingly gift.

  “I am grateful, Lord Sagara,” I said.

  “As am I,” the woman said.

  “And I,” the boy added. A brief silence settled, an echo of those larger silences their previous incarnation had favored. “You saved our lives.”

  Something welled up in my throat, and I swallowed. “They wouldn’t have been in danger if not for me.”

  The lord and lady of Vorgossos nodded, one a fraction of a second after the other. “We are not blind. We know that you did not intend this thing to occur. Nevertheless, your actions preserved us.”

  Protect the children, Brethren had said, had prophesied. I had done as the beast commanded, and profited by it. For a moment, I thought I saw a single, white waving arm trailing amid the roil of fishes and other sea life in the tank behind the Kharns’ heads. But it was only an eel. Brethren was far away, left on Vorgossos, as far from this ship and its terrible weapons as Kharn Sagara could contrive. How little I understood of them then, of the horrors they held and the promise, designed as they were by minds more alien to me than the Cielcin I’d helped destroy.

  As if he read my mind, the boy Kharn asked, “How does it taste?”

  “Excuse you?”

  “The blood,” he said, and flashed his milk teeth. Somehow, the trace of the child’s soft-palate lisp made the words all the more terrifying. “I understand you did for Aranata and his calf, you dog of the Empire.”

  Indignation ordered me to stand, but I could not find my feet through all the cables and hoses tangled about me. Wired into me. I winced as the waste elimination hoses tugged at me, and I said, “I’m not!” I saw Aranata’s head struck off once more, felt Nobuta’s breath leave its body. That at least had been an execution, and I shivered.

  No. It was war. It was Smythe and Crossflane who had been butchered like animals. Whatever our crimes, whatever we had done, we were not them. And whatever we were, I was about to be judged by the creature sitting separate in two bodies at my bedside, the creature who peddled flesh like promises, like Mephistopheles in the ancient play.

  “I hear interesting stories,” the woman said, petting one of the machine eyes as it floated down toward her, caressing it with one thin hand. “Your men say you died and came back. I have lived a very long time, and in all those years I’ve never seen a miracle.”

  A miracle . . . “They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

  “Lies do not live to be old, Marlowe,” the woman said. “I put you back together. I will take you apart if you vex me. Answer my question.”

  My eyes skittered from one floating eye drone to the next, counting. Seventeen. There were seventeen of them. I was quite entirely trapped, could not have fought or escaped even if I were not encumbered by so much medical apparatus. “You have surveillance footage, surely. You saw what happened.” Silence greeted this pronouncement, and after a moment I looked around, forcing surprise from my face and voice. Neither the woman nor the boy would look at me, instead shifted uncomfortably where they sat beneath the glass and dappled light of the aquarium. “You don’t. Do you?”

  Both Kharns turned to glance at one another. “All our resources were required for our regeneration. The process was meant to take only a matter of seconds,” the woman said, and waved a hand toward her counterpart, “but the damage this one sustained delayed the restoration of our autonomic functions—including internal surveillance of the ship.” The way she spoke, she sounded more machine than human. My skin crawled, and I rubbed at my a
rm—my new arm—once more.

  “I don’t know what happened,” I said at last.

  “Something did happen?” The Undying’s eyes lit up—all four of them, but it was the boy who spoke now. More fever in him than in his sister-self. “Don’t think we didn’t pick through that body of yours when we had you on the slab. How did you do it? How did you survive?”

  Once more I saw the flash of the sword that felled me. My teetering, headless body, and against the wall of stone a tall, red fountain played. Water. Darkness. My own image standing over me. The Quiet in Gibson’s shape standing on the water.

  The water . . .

  Brethren and Jari before them. The universe was too big. There was too much wilderness outside my walled garden. Too much I did not understand. Fragile as I was in my current state, fragile as we always are, I hesitated to give an answer. I was not sure I had one.

  “I came back,” I said, seeing no reason to lie. “I don’t know how, I—” What was I doing? Surely here was the oldest man in existence, the oldest ever to exist. The most learned. That he was a maniac and a monster mattered less in the face of his cupidity and my need. In a voice pressed flat, I asked, “What do you know of the Quiet?”

  Both Kharns arched the same eyebrow. “You know of them?” The machine voice filled all that space. “They are not a story one hears in your Empire. Your Chantry does not approve of Truth when it does not align with their facts.”