Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “No,” I agreed.

  Some deepness of thought or memory moved Kharn and Kharn to stillness. Neither seemed to breathe, though both of their bodies yet had lungs to breathe with. Behind them, strange creatures swam.

  “The machines believed that they were a civilization—or an entity, I suppose—that abandoned their material existence to live as energy. As pure force.” The woman crossed her arms, crossed her legs as well.

  That stopped me in my tracks. “The machines? The Mericanii? They knew of them? How?” None of their ruins had been among the colonies settled in those earliest days, surely? Then I remembered: Brethren had said that they had seen the Quiet, perceived it across the great gulf of time, staring back at them from some distant, still-unmade future.

  “Brethren remembers,” Kharn said, though which Kharn it was I cannot remember. “You think the machines were bested by men alone?”

  My mouth fell open, and all the words in me went away without a sound. The Quiet had been watching mankind a long time, steering it to its purposes, whatever those might be. The Cielcin called them the Watchers, Ciehedto in their tongue. What were they watching for? And why?

  Both Kharns smiled their knowing smiles. The woman said, “When I was a boy, they told stories, they told stories about old King William, the God Emperor. They said he could out-think those machines, that as carefully as they would plan, he would outmaneuver them. My mother said angels came to him in his dreams. That was how he tracked the machines to their hidden bases. Like Vorgossos. That was how he secured their weapons caches. You know they say there was a time when there were only ten thousand human beings not under the sway of the machines?”

  “Maybe it was all true,” I said.

  “If I have learned anything in more than fifteen thousand years,” said both Kharn Sagaras together, “it is that all stories are true. We have but to make them so.”

  I was shaking my head. “No,” I said, “no. That isn’t how it works.”

  From the height of all his and her fifteen millennia, the Undying both smirked at me, and held my gaze. I did not blink. High above me as they thought they were, I knew the air was thin up there.

  The woman blinked and set her hands on her knees. “The next question, of course, is determining what exactly you have to do with all this.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, honestly. “You must have spoken to Brethren after . . . after . . .”

  The younger Kharn leaned forward once again. “After you broke into my home, killed several of my children, and nearly killed my chief medical engineer?” It was telling, I thought, that the loss of several of his clones did not figure last and most significantly on my list of offenses. More telling that the boy Kharn did not sound more than merely petulant. “Yes, I did. They told me they had been expecting you.”

  The woman interjected, “Why do you think you’re still alive?” Such venom in those words, such casual disdain. For the first time I feared her more than her younger counterpart. Where the boy glowed with an evil heat, she was cold, assured, and that was the more dangerous thing by far.

  The boy resumed, touching his other self on the knee, and before he could speak, I asked, “What did they say?”

  “The Brethren?” the boy asked, then as if to himself asked, “What did they call you?”

  The other said, “The man to end it all.”

  No sooner did she say that then the words echoed within me, echoed in Brethren’s voice. “You think they meant the war,” I said flatly, having considered the thought before. I saw the image of the Demiurge passing in my mind again, all that apocalyptic light and fire, and drew my good arm up and around myself.

  Both Kharns said nothing.

  I felt a chill settle on me once more, as though some airless wind cut right through all the metal of the Demiurge and swept clear through my soul. I had never felt more naked, nor more afraid. I felt as one feels when one stands below a great weight, knowing that it is only the genius of the architect—a capricious demon, in that moment—that protects them from the final crush.

  “You think they’re playing with our history?” I asked. “To what end?”

  “Who can say?” one Kharn intoned. “But there are things in the universe that even I do not understand. The Quiet are one.”

  I bent the fingers of my weak hand, feeling the heavy bones beneath the raw flesh. “Leopards, lions, and wolves.”

  “Dante again,” the woman said approvingly. “Your Imperium is good for little in my book, Lord Marlowe, but they do keep the classics alive in these benighted times.”

  “It was something Brethren said,” I replied, and briefly recounted my encounter with the oracle aboard the Enigma of Hours. “The creatures that lived inside this seer . . . they’re another of those things you mentioned.”

  “Yes,” the machine voice agreed for both of them. “Your Chantry teaches that man is first and greatest of the powers in the universe, but the cosmos was old even when the Egyptians laid the cornerstones of their first pyramids. The Deeps you found were left behind—I think—by some other power long gone. There are others: whole civilizations dead and broken; others that have not noticed we exist the way that you might overlook an anthill; and still others—like your Quiet—that have taken an interest.”

  A lump had formed in my dry throat, and I struggled to swallow it. “Brethren said—or implied, I don’t remember—that the Quiet dwell in the future, that they’re influencing us from . . . across time.”

  “Who can say?” the boy replied, pointing slowly up toward the ceiling with an open hand. “There are creatures out there that live in gas giants, that burrow in the very quantum foam of space itself. One traveler who came to me spoke of a thing that attacked his crewmen through their dreams. Perhaps your Quiet are in the future; perhaps they are not alone there.” A school of silverfish moved past the glass behind the two Kharns, casting bright, jagged reflections across the medical bay. Cables snaked along the floor, precisely as they had in Kharn’s throne room. The comparison turned my blood cold; I felt in some way that I’d become like the man and woman before me. “It is possible,” they said, the machine voice filling the air. “But be honest with me: is it true what they said? Did you die, too?”

  Too. The word had a special quality in that sentence, I thought. A brightness and a sharpness, a coldness unlike any word I’d ever heard. There we were. Two immortals. Three. How many men in all creation and recorded time had been and gone beyond?

  “Have you seen it, Kharn?” I said, calling the Undying by his name for the first time. Almost I felt like an observer, as though I sat on some stool between the three of us watching, hearing myself speak, for the words seemed to well up from some place in me I could not see. “The darkness?” That luminous Dark threatened to fill me once again, to sweep over my mind and carry me away. I shivered, and knew it was only a memory. The others stared at me, uncomprehending.

  “No silver glass . . .” Kharn mused—the woman, I think it was. I did not understand her.

  The boy spoke up. “My mind—our mind, I mean—is shunted to the new host’s receiver implant when the old host dies. It’s just like going to sleep.”

  “Only we do not dream.”

  “I did,” I said, “of a dark place. Of wind. And I wasn’t alone. There were other people there, but I couldn’t see them. I saw myself, and I came back. And when I came to I was in the river on the far side of your Garden. With my head back on.” The Undying both stifled an amused snort at the precise moment, but the woman covered her mouth with her hand. “I know it sounds mad, but I remember dying. I remember . . .” I massaged my neck, looking up once more at my headless body through the inky fog of memory.

  If I thought about it, I was sure there was no gap between the darkening of my eyes and Gibson’s words as I lay in the river. You look comfortable. Rather, it was as if my memory of that howling Dark
was separate. Hermetic. Atomic. Enclosed. It has never dimmed, not in all my years, uncorrupted and unchanged—unlike my living memories.

  “Do you think you can do it again?” the boy asked.

  There it was. The question these two had waited beside my bedside to ask. The question they had repaired my arm to ask.

  “I don’t have any control over it,” I said emphatically. “It wasn’t me.”

  The Undying both rose in disgust, one after another snorting with derision.

  “You’re already immortal,” I said, trying to move, but the medical apparatus and my useless arm encumbered me. “What more do you want?”

  To my surprise, it was the woman who turned back, a cluster of the floating eyes rotating to track my progress. “I want everything,” she said, and the machine voice spoke with her: chorus and chorypheus. Her wide eyes glared at me where she stood, half-turned. Was that fever in her expression? No. Fear. She had almost died. He had almost died, I realized. After fifteen thousand years and Earth only knew how many incarnations, the immortal daimon king Kharn Sagara, dark Lord of Vorgossos, had tasted mortality, had felt the encroaching Dark and realized that all his defenses, the bodies he wore like sleeves, the machines that held his bottled mind . . . Brethren and Yume and all his safeguards were not enough.

  Undying, yes. But not deathless.

  “I can’t help you,” I said.

  “Tell me, then,” she said, her hand on her other self’s shoulder, blue eyes all shining in the gloom. “Do you think death is the end? For the rest of us, I mean. If I die, what happens to me?” There it was, one of perhaps the oldest questions in human memory. It echoed in the air, resonating like a plucked string. I knew then that I was not speaking to children. Not to Ren or to Suzuha. Children do not fear death; it does not weigh on their minds the way it haunts us in age. Something about having children, I think, or about being conscious of what it means to be able to have children, puts that fear of mortality really in us. All children believe they are immortal. This was not the question of a child, but the fear of the very old man, the demoniac—his body almost all machine—that I had met in the inverted pyramid beneath Vorgossos. I sensed then that it was the answer to this question, among others perhaps, that had set him on that throne and set him to pondering all that great art. He had seen much of the outer world, traveled strange highways, sailed strange seas by stranger stars—but the answer was not out there. The answer was within. Within the structure of literature, of art and meaning that we humans had raised about ourselves like an ark, a curtain wall to block out the waters of chaos and the world. That is why we pray, why we build great temples and write great books: to ask great questions and to live—not by the answers, for such questions are unanswerable—but by the noble process of seeking those answers, that we might stand tall and struggle on.

  If I die, what happens to me?

  “I have died,” I said in answer. “And I don’t even know what happened to me.”

  CHAPTER 77

  THESEUS HIMSELF

  “ARE YOU NEARLY READY to go, my lord?” asked the pinch-faced plebeian lieutenant who had been sent to fetch me. Kurtz, I think he was called. “The shuttle is nearly ready.”

  “In a moment, soldier,” I said, managing to keep my voice steady. Despite the infirmity in my left arm, I had managed to dress myself without help. Clothing had been left for me while I slept, before the Schiavona and all other Imperial personnel had been ejected from the Demiurge. They were the clothes I had worn down to the ground on Rustam. The same high black leather boots, the same black trousers with the red stripes, the same equally black tunic with its paisley liner that zipped up the right side. My shield-belt had been a struggle with my left arm as sluggish as it was, but I managed in the end, clicking my sword back into its magnetic clasp, checking my stunner and the control box.

  I lingered a moment, transfixed by my own image reflected in the dark water of the aquarium. Almost it seemed some phantom surveyed me from the glass, gaunt and gray-faced. Unbidden, my right hand wandered up to my throat, feeling the place where my own sword had bit painlessly into me. I hadn’t even known I had died, hadn’t felt the blow until my head was tumbling from my shoulders. The memory of the vertigo I’d felt falling past my body stole over me, and I shut my eyes, let my hand fall.

  It was still in my sabretache, right where I’d thought to find it. Not where I’d left it, you understand, but where I knew it was. I drew out the fragment of eggshell and held it in my fist. I squeezed, as though I meant to crush the thing. But whatever the substance it was made of, I could not crush it, nor cast it aside. It had been in the inside pocket of my coat, alongside my lost journal, when I’d nearly been caught in the explosion that felled Raine Smythe. How it had appeared in my sabretache I could not say. Perhaps it had traveled back with me out of the howling dark. Perhaps it had been what permitted my passage back in the first place. Or perhaps it had simply been moved when the Quiet interfered with causality to save my life—for surely that was what they had done.

  I cradled it on my palm, a disc no larger than an Imperial hurasam, whiter than anything I’d ever seen, so white it seemed untouched by the blue cast of the light from the aquarium. I caught my reflection in the glass once more, pale and very far away. The same clothes. The same man. The same neat mane of ink-dark hair, the same old violet eyes, too old for the thirty-five-year-old I was. I had not changed, I still knew the face of the man looking back at me, perhaps knew him better than I had before.

  I was myself, and nothing of what I’d been through had taken that from me. I had survived torment and imprisonment, betrayal and pain. Lost friends, protectors, teachers. I had spoken with gods—with the devil itself. I had survived war, survived Extrasolarians and xenobites alike—daimons and demons. I had even survived Death, and lost myself. Every piece of me had been stripped away and returned.

  And I was alive.

  For a moment, it seemed that other Hadrian looked out at me, the one I had met in the darkness, his hand pointing forward, back toward my life and my purpose. He had shown me myself. I said once that it is the purpose of the artist to see not what is or might be, but to see what must be. All creation is such. I had met the captain of my ship in all that darkness, had met myself as I knew I should be, and he had found me wanting. So be it. I had a long road ahead of me, and a long struggle. So be that, too. That other Hadrian gave me something to aim for.

  My star.

  I restored the fragment of shell to my sabretache and putting it there felt something I’d forgotten I had.

  Prince Aranata’s ring.

  It wasn’t silver as I’d thought, but of some darker cousin to it. Rhodium, I guessed, and fashioned in such a way that reminded me of fascia, of skinned muscle and bone. It was a horrible thing, organic in a way that called to mind the creatures in the tank through my window, all membrane and tentacle, the curves of its design embracing a single, egg-shaped garnet.

  A garnet.

  I had thought all the stones the Aeta owned were blue.

  It felt like providence, that I should find a ring to replace the one I had lost. Perhaps it was.

  I placed the ring upon my thumb in the place where my old burn scar once had been. My left hand trembled as I tried to close it into a fist.

  Good enough.

  “Ready, sir?” asked Lieutenant Kurtz when I stepped into the hall.

  “Yes, lieutenant,” I replied. “Lead on.”

  I half-expected Kharn Sagara to appear then. Some final word, some cutting remark, at least to inject some sense of vague unease. But I supposed the Undying need not appear to be present. His eyes—her eyes—were everywhere, watching as we went. I felt those eyes on me as four SOMs led the uneasy lieutenant and me to our shuttle.

  As we sailed away, I watched the Demiurge begin to move, and knew then that Kharn Sagara had received the last of his payment. The sh
ip slipped away like an empire moving, tower upon tower, battlement upon battlement, battery upon battery flowing into the night. The eyes of its legion of iron statues, angels and devils and gods, all weighed heavily upon my mind.

  I did not think I would ever see them again, or that I would want to.

  Strange, is it not? The paths we walk and that are chosen for us?

  The Demiurge vanished. Like the Enigma of Hours before it, that massive Sojourner did not leap to warp with a snap and flash of lightning, nor push away on rockets slower than light. How it traveled I cannot guess. I am no scholiast. But travel it did.

  It was a long time before I saw it again.

  CHAPTER 78

  THE FIRST STRATEGOS

  “HERE HE IS, FIRST Strategos, sir. Lord Marlowe, as you requested,” my escort said when the door was opened. Even aboard the Sieglinde, flagship of the Centaurine fleet, the office door was nearly a foot thick, and I’d been searched thoroughly before being permitted entry, my effects confiscated and kept behind a desk outside.

  I was home indeed.

  A voice came from within. “Very good, Kurtz. You may leave us.”

  The man who had spoken was as palatine as any I had ever seen, gray-haired and serious looking in his formal legionary blacks. He stood as I approached, and standing reminded me just how short I was by the standards of the Imperial palatine caste. He must have been nearly seven feet tall, his hair neatly combed to the side, with impressively coiffed chops that reminded me of Gibson, or of some sleeping lion. His mustache was similarly impressive, waxed and curling at either end. It loaned him a truly old-fashioned bearing, as though he were some knight of the mythic Victoria herself, and should be dressed in Windsor red and not the blacks he wore.