Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Homunculi were not fully human—Ilex shared as much of her genome in common with algae and aspens as she did men and women—but then neither was I. Like every palatine, Prince Alexander included, I had been born in a tank, grown to order by the natalists of the High College to produce a perfect man.

  They’d made me instead, and while my long life and other improvements could not be denied, I was not without handicap. I could not have children without the oversight of the Imperial High College—unless I wanted to father misshapen inti like poor Lorian.

  “And she’s not a homunculus. She’s a dryad,” Valka added.

  “That’s a kind of homunculus,” Alexander snapped back.

  “Enough!” I said, raising the same hand I’d raised in the meeting. “I’ll think about sending for her. We should give their people a chance. It wouldn’t do to just take the work from them the minute we arrive.”

  Crim was still watching the prince when he answered, “Understood, boss. Just thinking out loud.”

  Lowering myself onto the gray armchair the others had pointedly left for me, I said, “It may come to that, but we’ll give them a week or two.”

  “Are we really staying here for two months?” Pallino asked.

  “You have a better suggestion?”

  The old soldier planted his hands on his hips. “Sure. Take the fight to them.”

  “The fight?” Valka echoed, swinging round on the sill to face the room. “Pal, they may be long gone. These scouts are most likely to find nothing.”

  “We don’t know that, either, Doctor Onderra,” said Tor Varro. “Remember: this isn’t the first convoy to disappear between here and Dion Station.”

  That remark brought us all to stillness for a moment, though I could still feel the simmering resentment percolate between Crim and Alexander. I would have to do something about that.

  “We should call Corvo,” Durand suggested. “She should hear the news.”

  We all agreed that was a good plan, and I clicked my terminal free of its wristband and placed it on the coffee table before my chair. “Windows, Crim,” I said. Valka vacated her seat as the lictor drew the drab curtains. A conic projection formed above the terminal face, ghost-white in the sudden gloom. An ouroboros turned in the air to a faint, bright chime as the call went through, and a moment later Otavia Corvo’s Amazonian form blossomed into view. She was sitting at a table in what looked like the Tamerlane’s ready room, dressed in exercise fatigues that left her arms bare. To my surprise, she was not alone. Elara sat with her, and young Lorian, too. Evidently they’d been discussing some thing or other.

  “Bad time?” I asked, motioning for the others to come stand behind me as they willed.

  “Take it you just got out of a meeting with them?” Corvo asked.

  “Done and done,” I said, and told her everything we’d learned.

  When I finished, the captain replied, “Two months? That’s not so bad. Won’t make much difference on the other end and maybe we won’t go in blind.”

  Uncharacteristically, Elara spoke up. “And it’d be good to get some of the crew some shore time.”

  “It looks a likely spot,” I agreed. As a rule, I did not permit the crew to go ashore at Forum. Better to keep the Devil’s Cohort—as the nobiles sometimes called my Red Company—away from high society. The last thing I needed was any fabulous tales of the Halfmortal spreading in the Eternal City, and from his own men, no less. But here? Despite its placement along a major shipping lane, Gododdin itself was relatively obscure, little more than a refueling stop for vessels not tied to the Legions, and though the cities saw their fair share of offworlders, there was little harm in letting the men loose for a week or two.

  “And it will give them time to comb through the emergency transmissions and see what they can recover,” I said, repeating the earlier point. “Which leaves us with the question of what to do next.”

  Silence both in the room and on the holo answered, and I glanced round at the others where they stood watching me. When no answer was forthcoming, I raised my eyebrows to indicate that I wanted a response.

  Varro took a half step forward. “I counsel delay. It would be foolish to commit to a strategy absent all available data.”

  Aristedes’s drawling, aristocratic tones sounded over the holograph, “But we will have to head out after their scouts, won’t we?”

  “We should put together a second convoy.”

  I turned to face the speaker, one eyebrow still raised. Prince Alexander had retreated toward the wall after his slight run-in with Crim, and stood opposite my chair and the holograph pickup, and was thus invisible to Corvo, Elara, and Aristedes. I don’t think he’d meant to speak, for when he realized we were all watching him, he whitened.

  Lorian barked out a laugh. “I was going to suggest the very same!”

  The thought had occurred to me as well, but I was glad that Alexander had suggested it first. It seemed the time we’d spent together on the voyage out had not been wasted, after all. I gestured for the prince to continue. Alexander gathered his wits before continuing, buoyed perhaps by Lorian’s support. “We might be able to bait them into attacking us, but we can be ready.”

  “Ready for an attack with a magnetic grapnel that knocks our systems offline?” Crim interjected.

  But the prince stood firm. “There must be something we could do. If we were to not put the soldiers into fugue, we’d have a full army ready when the enemy boarded.”

  Speaking slowly, words sliding like a wedge beneath the prince’s more fevered tones, Tor Varro said, “You’re assuming that the attackers—whoever they are—are boarding these missing vessels.”

  “In His Highness’s defense, Varro,” Lorian said, “they never did find the wreckage from those earlier convoys.”

  Captain Corvo frowned and tucked her chin, face lost in shadow. I watched her and Prince Alexander both, the latter visible through the former’s ghostly image. “It might be easier than trying to hunt these bastards down,” she said.

  “Do the locals have the ships and men necessary to attempt a resupply?” Lorian asked.

  “Unclear,” Tor Varro said in answer, “but it is something to consider.”

  “We don’t have to come up with any solutions today,” I said. “Varro, will you find out the disposition of forces in orbit here? I’d like to know if they have enough to outfit a second convoy.” Though seated, the scholiast sketched a small bow. Turning to Corvo, I asked, “I trust that everyone’s coming up from fugue without incident?”

  The captain made a shrugging motion with her lips that did not reach her broad shoulders. “No casualties, if that’s what you mean. Everything’s perfectly routine.”

  Still seated, I arched my back, still feeling the residual effects of the thaw myself as stiffness and a phantom weight in my limbs. I needed to go for a run. A swim. Anything. I needed a fight, something to push hot blood back into capillaries long pinched shut with cold. With a glance to Crim, I said, “We may need technical staff sent down later this week. We’ll keep you apprised. Let us know if there’s any trouble up there.”

  Aristedes’s pale eyebrows arched in surprise. “Are you expecting any?”

  “No,” I said archly, propping my elbows on the arms of my chair. “This should all be fairly routine. Hold off announcing shore leave until I’ve had a chance to see the city myself.”

  “Don’t enjoy the planet too much,” Elara said, smiling, eyes darting to Pallino. I just caught my lictor and friend’s returned smile fading. Had he winked at her? I suppressed a smile of my own.

  Thinking of all the tedious hours coming to be spent at that conference table hearing synopses of what the analysts could find, I said, “We won’t.”

  “We’re here if you need us,” Corvo said.

  “Thank you.”

  The holograph vanished a momen
t later, leaving the room strangely dark and close. Someone—Crim probably—opened the curtains without my having to ask him to do so. Into the tired silence, I said, “Go and rest, everyone. We’ve had a long journey, and I can’t speak for you, but the fugue toxins are still dragging me down.”

  Knowing what must come next, I shut my eyes, listening for the shuffle of feet toward the suite’s vestibule and heavy double doors. When the words slipped out, they sounded like my father speaking, as if the mouth that spoke them were cold and very far away. “Not you,” I said, just as Lord Alistair might.

  I opened my eyes, and saw that despite my not being specific those words had found their target. The light of that window cut a wedge clean across those spartan apartments, illuminating the young prince where he stood opposite me at the far end of the coffee table. Valka’s shadow fell across him, and glancing to one side I saw she’d resumed her place in the window seat.

  Writing this now, I am struck by the strange reversal. That I was seated as a lord in his throne with Prince Alexander standing before me like a suppliant, lips compressed, shoulders hunched. Was the boy afraid of me?

  Carrot, I decided, then stick.

  “I like your idea of sending a second convoy to bait whoever is out there,” I said. “I was about to suggest the same thing myself. And if Aristedes was on the same page as well, then we should take it as a sign that the notion is good one. You’ve done well. I can tell your time learning on the trip here wasn’t wasted.”

  The prince’s posture visible relaxed, and he stood a little straighter. “Thank you, sir.”

  “But I will need you to be mindful of how it is you speak of my crew. That bit just now with Lieutenant Commander Garone cannot happen again.”

  “I understand.” The prince looked down at the table between us, trying to avoid whatever it was he feared to find in my eyes. I remembered that feeling, had felt it in my father’s presence, in Valka’s when I was young—truly young. His was the fear of the convict before the judge, as all sons are before their fathers, all men before women, all mortals before gods.

  I rapped my ring against the brass lip that sealed the upholstery on the edge of the chair’s armrest, clear, bright sound ringing. “Do you?” I asked, and putting on a tone that reminded me of old Gibson, I said, “Tell me what you think you understand.”

  If the prince balked at my presumption, he swallowed it and shut his eyes. I thought I recognized one of the breathing exercises the scholiasts used to quell their emotions—I knew them well. How like his father he looked: high-cheekboned, strong of brow and jaw. He’d begun to grow long, thin sideburns in imitation of his Imperial father, though his red hair was wild above that royal countenance, lacking the coterie of court androgyns to oil and style it each day. Though I knew then that Alexander would never sit the throne, how clear I saw the knight he might become, garbed in the Imperial white and shining like the sun. He might lead men and ships into battle against the Cielcin one day, or stand on the steps of the Solar Throne as captain of the Knights Excubitor.

  Alexander opened his eyes, and the fear that had been there earlier was gone. “I disrespected your servants, sir. I disrespected you, and I am your squire.”

  “No,” I said, and heard Gibson’s voice at my shoulder. Kwatz.

  The prince twitched. “No?” Behind me, Valka stifled a laugh.

  “Three things,” I said, and held up so many fingers. Ticking them off one at a time I said, “Firstly, they are not my servants. I am theirs. Second, you are not disrespecting me at all. And thirdly, you are not only a squire. That is why this is important.” I shook my fist at him, lingering a moment to see if he would reply. When he did not, I plowed ahead: “One thing at a time. To the first: I do not have servants. I am not their master. If you must rely on rank to command then you’ve already lost your people.”

  “But they do serve you,” Alexander said. “They hang on your every word.”

  “Because I have earned their respect. Rank only formalizes relationships between people, Alexander. It does not create them. One has rank because one deserves it, and if one does not deserve it, he will lose his rank. Or his life. A man would do well to become worthy of his honors, else he will be deposed as a tyrant.” I crossed my legs, fiddled absently with the silver buckle that kept my boot snug about my calf. “If I were to treat my people like slaves they would rebel. In subtle ways at first: not following my orders properly, failing to carry out tasks . . . Then in larger ways. Do you know the story of how it was Otavia Corvo came into my service?”

  The question caught Alexander by surprise, and he blinked. “I heard the story. She helped you defeat a Norman tyrant on . . . Pharos?”

  “She served that Norman tyrant for ten years,” I said, glancing at the terminal where Corvo’s holograph had floated just a few minutes before. “But she served under a captain called Emil Bordelon, a vicious brute. When his soldiers disobeyed him, he’d tie them in the brig and starve them ’til they learned their lesson. Sometimes he’d rape them.”

  Alexander blanched, horrified. “He what?”

  “Otavia saw it happen one too many times, so I made her an offer . . . and we killed him.” I clenched my fists on the armrests, remembering the way the ship’s comms went dead when I ordered our men to fire. When I was younger that silence—the way Bordelon’s holograph had snuffed out on the projector as he died—had haunted me. Now I only felt the vague warmth of satisfaction at a job well done. Corvo and I had rid the world of a monster. I call that good.

  “Sic semper tyrannis,” I continued. “You cannot lead as a tyrant. The people under you will not let you. To lead is a kind of service, a duty you owe to those who follow. Noblesse oblige. I need you to understand this because—to skip to number three—you are not a squire. You are a prince of the Aventine House and a high lord of the Imperium. If I teach you nothing else, it is that you should treat the people under you like family, and that if you’re very, very lucky they may do the same. It is the obligation of those of us born to power or who earn it to wield that power with virtue, because power is no virtue unto itself. Do you know the Eight Forms of Obedience, Alexander?”

  “What?”

  “The Eight Forms of Obedience. They’re a part of the scholiasts’ stoic tradition.” I shut my eyes and recited. “Obedience out of fear of pain. Obedience out of fear of the other. Obedience out of love for the person of the hierarch. Obedience out of loyalty to the office of the hierarch. Obedience out of respect for the laws of men and of heaven. Obedience out of piety. Obedience out of compassion. Obedience out of devotion. You see? Love is higher than fear.”

  But Alexander’s face contracted and he crossed his arms. “But you’ve said loyalty to the office is higher than love of the hierarch himself.” He spoke as one who has caught his teacher in mistake and is embarrassed to point it out.

  My memories of Gibson had the answer for me. “Because sometimes the hierarch is himself disloyal to his office, and in those cases it is incumbent upon his servants to correct him. That’s what I am doing now, Your Highness. Which brings me at last to my second point.”

  Here I paused, letting the silence stretch a moment, surprised that Valka had not spoken, though I could feel her eyes on me. But Alexander was listening intently, and had not stirred from his place opposite me.

  “Your blood and your name do not make you more than other people. Those things belong to your ancestors, and if you are to inherit them properly, you will honor those ancestors by being a good man. When His Radiance made me a knight of his order, he made me swear to despise cruelty and injustice. Do you mean to be a knight, Alexander?”

  The young man swallowed and at last looked me in the eyes again. “Yes, sir.”

  I leaned forward, glancing back at Valka as I said, almost conspiratorially, “Then I will tell you a secret.” She grinned and shook her head. “The best men are not necessarily found
in palaces. Pallino was a farmer before he was a soldier. Siran’s family owned a planetbound shipping company on Emesh. She was rich—by the standards of the plebs. My friend Switch, who is no longer with us, was a prostitute. Corvo was a traitor and a mercenary—Durand, too. Ilex was a dockworker on Monmara, and the Legions had Aristedes riding a desk for fifteen years. Fifteen years. With his talents. If they’d the sense to park him at a desk in some intelligence office they might have gotten some use out of him, but they had him keeping Strategos Beller’s appointment books. And why?”

  Perhaps he thought I was going to give him the answer, but if he did he was mistaken. I wanted to hear him say it.

  The prince chewed his tongue, perhaps thinking I meant to trick him. “Because he’s an intus.”

  “And Ilex is a homunculus,” I said. “Intus, homunculus, plebeian, patrician, palatine. Doesn’t matter. Our ancestors became palatine because they did great things. They smashed the Mericanii and saved mankind. But we are not them, and must do our own great things, eh? The others deserve their chance, as well. They did not ask to be born as they are, and so you and I will not punish them for it. To be a good knight, a good leader, a good man for that matter, you must judge a person by his or her actions. By their character. Do you understand?”

  Alexander nodded stiffly. “I do.”

  I uncrossed my legs and sat as the Emperor sat, palms flat against the chair rails. “Good. Then you will go and speak to Lieutenant Commander Garone, and you will beg his pardon.”

  “Sir?”

  “And I will ask him about it, so you will do it, won’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.” The prince gave a stiff nod that was more akin to a bow and—sensing the end had come without my having to say as much—turned and followed the others from the room.

  When the door at last clicked shut, Valka let out a quiet laugh. “Ooh, ’twas well done! Did you see his face?”