Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Behind her was her First Officer, Bastien Durand, wearing his wire-rimmed glasses and his usual, put-upon expression. At his shoulder was Tor Varro, the Chalcenterite scholiast in his green surcoat, bronze degrees glittering on his chest like a soldier’s medals. Behind them were gathered a smattering of the ship’s more senior officers. There was Crim—Karim Garone—a Lieutenant Commander now and ship’s Security Officer, and behind him was the dryad, Ilex, green-skinned and mossy-haired. Then there were my myrmidons, my armsmen. Pallino, Elara, and Siran stood near the back. The women each had been raised to patrician, standing when Pallino had been, and looked as hale and young—younger, even—than they had the day we’d met on Emesh centuries ago. Nearly four hundred years had passed on Earth since I’d left Delos, nearly a hundred of which I’d faced in the waking world.

  Further down were a smattering of other officers: Luana Okoyo, our Chief Medical Officer; the navigator, Adric White; and Helmsman Koskinen, among others. And bringing up the rear was young Aristedes leaning on his cane.

  Only Valka was absent, which was no surprise. What use had she for princes?

  “We have our marching orders, boss?” Crim asked, hand waving in lazy salute.

  “Off to Gododdin,” I said airily, seizing Crim by the forearm to shake his hand. Pivoting, I positioned myself to stand between Crim and Corvo and the prince following on my heels. “Otavia, Bastien, Crim—this is Prince Alexander of the House Avent. My prince, may I introduce Captain Otavia Corvo, Commander Bastien Durand.” I gestured to each in turn. “And this is Lieutenant Commander Karim Garone.”

  “Call me Crim, Your . . .” he glanced sidelong at me, “Excellence?”

  “Highness,” I corrected, then to Alexander said, “He’s Norman.”

  I took Alexander down the line, introducing those present one at a time.

  “The prince is with us at the Emperor’s personal request!” I said, raising my voice. The sound of it rebounded off the distant ceiling and the arches and pillars that held up the gangways that ran to the various shuttlecraft. “You are to treat him with every courtesy. He’s our guest.” I put a hand on Alexander’s shoulder for emphasis. “The Emperor has asked us to season him. He’ll be squiring for me and bunking with the junior officers.”

  “What?” The prince flinched, turning to look at me. “You’re not serious.”

  A piece of me had expected this from the young nobile, and I was ready. “Quite serious.”

  “That’s . . . outrageous! It’s not fair!”

  “Fair?” I repeated. “You’re my squire. A squire is a junior officer, so you will bunk with the junior officers.” The prince’s face had hardened, and he darted a glance at the officers, some part of him perhaps aware that he was making a spectacle of himself. I had suspected this, despite his assurances that he would not let me down.

  Alexander set his teeth. “I am your prince!”

  “You are my squire,” I said calmly. “You told me you wanted to be a knight. This is the first step. Did you think the road would be easy? Do you want it to be?”

  A frown folded the corners of Alexander’s mouth, and almost I thought I could hear the sound of little gilded gears turning in his skull. “I suppose not.”

  “We will talk about this later,” I said before rounding on Elara, who had taken up the role of Quartermaster when we’d been given the Tamerlane. “Would you get him sorted and see that his effects find his cabin?” As I spoke, those very effects were being unloaded from the shuttle: three heavy composite crates fronted in dark wood richly carved. They looked incongruous on the metal grating of the gangway and against the spare lines of the shuttle and the hold. Like their owner, they did not belong. Still looking at them where they stood at the end of the pier, I said, “Alexander, I will send for you as soon as I’ve seen to our departure. We’ve much to discuss.”

  Mollified, the young man permitted himself to be led down the catwalk and through the heavy doors to the ship’s tramway beyond. The more junior officers went with them, leaving me, Corvo, Durand, Crim, and my myrmidons. I waited a few seconds, half-afraid the boy would come charging back in for a final word. When he did not appear, I let out my breath in one great rush and sagged against the railing. “Earth and Emperor,” I swore, staring down level by level toward the cargo storage at the base of the vast hold, “this is going to be harder than I thought.”

  “It could have been a lot worse,” Crim said, and though I did not look back to face him I heard the smile encircling those words. “Valka could have been here.”

  “That’s not funny,” I said, watching a trio of workers servicing another shuttle two levels down.

  Crim barked a short laugh. “It’s extremely funny.” Despite myself, I pictured Valka slapping the prince for his behavior the moment before and almost laughed. Perhaps it would have been funny, after all.

  Siran’s low voice slid into the silence. “The pup didn’t look like much.”

  Turning to face my officers at last, I said, “Pups never do.” I undid two silver buttons on my greatcoat and let the garment swing free. Thinking of the Empress and of Emperor William, I added, “You should see the wolves.”

  A high, aristocratic voice answered. “Do you think he’ll work?”

  For a moment, absurdly, I thought it was Alexander returned, though I knew better. The speaker sat slumped against the wall of the hold, thin hands wrapped around the shaft of his crutch, serious face looking up at the rest of us. When I did not answer him at once, young Lorian Aristedes went on. “It would be good to have an Imperial prince in our camp.” All was quiet for a moment after, and the little commander realized that all eyes were on him. “That is the plan, isn’t it? The Emperor’s pawned one of his spares off on us, and we’re trying to win him over?” He grinned knowingly, pale eyes darting from my face to Corvo’s and the next.

  “Are you all right, Aristedes?” I asked, indicating his place on the floor.

  “Leg gave out, that’s all.” He slapped the offending limb with the flat of one hand. Young as he was—he was less than half my age—Lorian Aristedes had his problems. His father was the Grand Duke of Patmos, his mother a patrician knight. He had been born out of wedlock, and being the child of a palatine, into a cursed life. Lorian was an intus, the result of his parents’ encrypted genes mingling without the consent of the Imperial High College. By rights his mother should have killed him before he was born, but Lysandra Aristedes had refused. She had chosen life for her cursed little boy, and against all odds Lorian had survived. He was small—no more than five feet high—and frail. Even in his padded uniform jacket he seemed half a ghost, a wasted skeleton left to rot against the wall. His one leg was lame and at times whole limbs would paralyze and go numb for reasons no doctor had ever adequately explained. His mother had begged his lordly father to find a place for Lorian at his court, but the Grand Duke—mindful of the constant scandal his deformed son brought upon his name—pushed Lorian into the Legions instead, where despite his infirmity he had ridden one desk and another until he found his way into my service.

  Lame Lorian might have been, but his mind was sharp as any sword, and three times as fast.

  Standing over him, I said, “Who said anything about trying to win the prince over?”

  “Well, you wouldn’t have scolded him, otherwise,” Lorian put in. “And you’d definitely not be quartering him. You’d have popped him right into fugue and not disturbed him until after work was done on Gododdin.” He grinned wolfishly. “Am I right?”

  Matching his smile, I asked, “Did your leg really give out? Or were you looking for an excuse to ask that question?” Aristedes’s smile did not waver. Laughing, I shrugged off my greatcoat and tossed it over the rail. Thumbs tucked into my shield-belt, I leaned beside it. “You should have joined the scholiasts, Aristedes.”

  “My father had a cruel sense of humor,” Lorian said. We had tha
t in common.

  “You think he’ll work with us?” asked First Officer Durand, giving up the game. “He seems a bit too . . .” Durand had the courage of a scribe, and so trailed off.

  “Arrogant?” Crim suggested, stroking his pointed chin. “I don’t think he’s ever come down from heaven to walk with the rest of us mortals.”

  I said nothing to this. I could sympathize with Alexander’s culture shock, for I too had been raised in a castle, and I knew all too well—as did Lorian—that the privilege of one’s birth is no privilege at all, only another kind of cage.

  Alexander had some growing to do.

  I prayed it would be less growing than I had been forced to endure, for his sake, and reassured myself that he at least would not be scraping a living from the underside of Borosevo’s streets.

  How long ago that was! Years running and cowering in the wretched warrens of that awful city, the ziggurat castle of House Mataro staring down like the specter of some unearthly judge, daring me to rise up.

  I had risen, and had not fallen again.

  “He’ll be all right,” Pallino said. “A few weeks in the ring with me will knock some sense into him.”

  “We’ll want that,” I said. “But he’ll be all right. He’s lived his whole life on Forum. He won’t know who he really is until he gets away from home.”

  “No one ever does,” Corvo agreed. “I need to make the final preparations for departure.”

  “And I need to see Valka!” I said, sensing the curtain closing on our impromptu meeting.

  Ever the professionals, Corvo and Durand made to leave at once, bootheels rattling on the catwalk. Siran moved to let them pass before falling back into place.

  “There is one thing I don’t understand, Marlowe,” Aristedes said. No preamble, no Pardon me, lordship. Straight to business. In truth, it was one of the things I liked most about young Lorian. He did not waste time. “What is this in aid of?”

  “Alexander, you mean?” I took my coat up and folded it over one arm.

  The young officer shook his head. “That’s part of it. I mean all this trouble with the court. Surely there must be those on Forum who think you look too ambitious. They must wonder what it’s all for.”

  “I’m not hearing a question, Aristedes.”

  “They’ll think you’ll make some play for the throne. Marry the prince, perhaps.”

  “Marry the prince?” Pallino repeated, clearly surprised by this new wrinkle. But Lorian was right. I could imagine the logothetes and politicians spinning their fantasies about the upstart knight seducing the impressionable princeling, filling his head with lies so that he begged his royal parents to marry the knight, who would then have climbed from nothing to the role of prince-consort, and so advanced another step up the political ladder.

  Lorian raised one bony hand. “It will have crossed their minds.” He turned his pale eyes—so blue they were almost white—on me. “They’re wondering what your game is—what our game is. What we’re going to do.”

  I matched the young officer’s wolfish smile with a bemused one. “There is no game. We’re fighting to end this war. One way . . .” I paused, and once again the blood from Raine Smythe’s dismembered body splashed against my brain, “. . . or another. This isn’t about politics.”

  “Try telling them that,” Crim drawled, looking down over the railing at the levels below.

  “You’re right,” I said to Lorian, “that is what they’re expecting.” Unbidden, my mind raced back to Princess Selene, and past images of her unclad and lovely as the day to the vision I had seen of us seated together on the Solar Throne. “That is not what I want.” And certainly I did not want such a thing with Alexander, though it would have been the more convenient route, assuming I was the thing the Imperial socialites no doubt accused me of being.

  The young officer bobbed his head and lay his cane across his knees. “It’s not me you have to convince.”

  CHAPTER 6

  ALONE

  THE CABIN DOOR HISSED shut behind me, and briefly I heard the whine of air systems.

  I was alone at last.

  I left Hadrian Marlowe the Halfmortal’s coat in a compartment by the door and hung the Devil of Meidua’s belt on a peg. Stooping, I unfastened Sir Hadrian, Knight Victorian’s boots and left them in a bolt-hole underneath the coat. Unshod and unbelted, whatever was left of me crossed the vestibule. The inner doors were only wood, and opened at my touch.

  Home.

  My suites aboard the Tamerlane were large by the standard of such things. The lounge was an open, high-ceilinged chamber complete with a small dining area to the right and a concealed lift that allowed servants to carry our meals up from the officer’s mess four decks down. Doors in the left-hand wall led through a sort of airlock to our sleeping quarters and the private bath, while a short stair ascended to a loft that ringed the entire lounge with shelves stuffed with books, microfilm reels, and storage crystals. There were no windows, though the massive holograph plate that dominated one wall showed an image of the gas giant below the Tamerlane turning slowly against the night. Its planetshine fell pink and golden on the dark furniture and richly patterned carpets. A dinted myrmidon’s helmet sat atop a mannequin’s head on a side table. High on the wall to my right a golden banner hung, displaying the eight-winged angel that once had been the battle standard of Admiral Marius Whent, the erstwhile dictator of Pharos I had destroyed. A macabre trophy. A memento mori made all the more appropriate by the black skull the angel had in lieu of a face.

  A hundred other relics there were of the life I’d lived and Valka with me. There was a ceramic laving basin that Jinan had given me, cracked and repaired with silver solder. Beside it on the sideboard table stood a holograph depicting Valka and myself standing above the cleft at Calagah. Sir Elomas Redgrave had taken that holograph. That had been more than almost four hundred years ago. Sir Elomas was probably dead. The table itself concealed the controls for the room’s holography suite, disguised to look like ordinary wood. Carved flowers acted as dials for volume and lighting control, while pressing a whorl here or a leaf there would conjure control plates or activate the table’s recorder. Often I would dictate to it, recording drafts and pieces of what has become this book.

  All of it vanished in an instant when she spoke from the armchair at one corner of the antique rug. “How did it go with the prince?”

  Valka Onderra Vhad Edda set aside the tablet she’d been reading and rose. To judge from the tangled mess of papers on the drinking table at her elbow and the half-concealed holograph, she had been up to her elbows translating an inscription from the ruins at Calagah on Emesh. In the long decades we had spent together, she had identified several patterns in the alien inscriptions, but even with the computer laced through her brain, she could not read them.

  “He’s fine. Whined a bit when I told him he was rooming with the junior officers.”

  The doctor smiled and, reaching up, brushed my hair back with delicate fingers. “You used to whine a bit, too.” She leaned in and kissed me. When at last we separated, she asked, “Are you all right?”

  I let my hand fall, and turning, crossed the carpet to a sideboard where a wine collection waited behind glass. I drew out of bottle of Kandarene red and poured it into the decanter. Priorities thusly ordered, I looked back at her. “I’m just tired. I don’t like being on stage so much.”

  She snorted. “ ’Tis a lie!”

  In spite of my tiredness, I smiled. “Maybe. Not for these people, anyway.”

  “Anaryoch,” Valka swore in her native Panthai. Barbarians.

  “The Emperor isn’t so bad, it’s the bloody ministers,” I said, “Breathnach and Bourbon.” I pulled Aranata’s ring from my thumb. I placed it and the ivory ring I wore about my third finger in lieu of a wedding band in Jinan’s basin by the door to our sleeping quarters. Remembering suddenly, I
drew the Galath blossom from my pocket and lay it in the bowl as well.

  Valka and I had been together longer now than most plebeians could live, but she had refused my offers of marriage. She was Tavrosi, and they had abandoned such institutions. I told myself it did not matter, that I was palatine and palatines did not marry for love. That a palatine’s true relationships were had outside marriage. I told myself that this was better, or at least good enough.

  We lie to ourselves all the time, but there remains a piece of us near our heart that whispers, You don’t believe that. That part often spoke to me when I thought of Valka and of the bond between us, but she had a way of silencing it with her presence. I stood there a while, cradling my now-naked hand with the other, feeling the false bones Kharn had given me. Valka hardly looked a day older than when we’d first met: pale-skinned and sharp-featured, her red-black hair pulled messily up from high cheekbones. She wore only a long gray shirt that left a length of ghostly thigh exposed beneath prominent hips, the sharp points of her clan intaglio chasing down her arm in fractal patterns. Valka had slept in fugue far more than I had since we left Vorgossos, and the gap between our ages had closed. No longer was she the worldly stranger, the fey sorceress of far-flung Tavros, but a living woman. My woman.

  Pretense had dropped between us.

  “What?” She smiled at me. She never used to smile.

  “Nothing,” I said, and it was true. “I love you.”

  “You’re not wrong,” she said, and her smile returned my words to me. “But are you all right? Really?”

  I returned to the decanter and—unwilling to wait any longer—poured myself a glass. I gestured at Valka with the crystal bottle, but she shook her head. “I’m fine,” I said, “really, I . . . the Empress asked about you.” Valka said nothing. She had enough experience dealing with me to know I would speak my piece in time, that I was only working myself up to say what it was that was bothering me. “She called you a witch.”