Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “It isn’t funny.”

  “ ’Tis a little funny,” Valka answered. Her smile widened until it lit her golden eyes. Suddenly she broke eye contact and turned away to look once more out the window and over the balcony at Catraeth.

  Feeling suddenly that I was laughed at and not the prince, I stood. “What is it?”

  “You,” she said simply. “Standing up for Ilex. You didn’t used to be this way.”

  “Yes I did,” I said, “you just didn’t know me very well.”

  The shade of Gilliam Vas floated in the air between us, the old brute of a priest glowering with mismatched eyes. If the dead can be said to live on at all, it is in our memories. Thus ghosts exist, though they are but a part of ourselves. He was the first man I had killed—though I had fought in Colosso for many months before that, and stabbed a shopkeeper in Borosevo. I had killed him for Valka, though she had not wanted it.

  I knew what Valka was thinking, and so said, “I didn’t hate Gilliam because he was an intus.” That was only partly true. Gilliam had been deformed, hunchbacked and twisted, with mismatched eyes and a misshapen head. He had frightened me, as Lorian frightened me. The inti were reminders of just how fragile we palatines are, how much we are indebted to the Emperor, and how much his slaves. And they were reminders—painfully—of why I was not a father. Why I could not be without Imperial consent. That was no fault of Lorian’s, or of Gilliam’s for that matter, but perhaps I can be forgiven my fears. Perhaps that was why I still served the Emperor—though I did not guess it at the time. Perhaps I hoped that for my services I might be permitted to marry Valka and to have the family I wanted. “I hated him because of how he treated you.”

  That was the proper truth.

  Valka’s eyes glazed over, chilled. “I know. ’Twas still wrong.”

  “I can’t bring back the dead,” I said, placing a new specter between us. That of my own headless corpse. The fingers Kharn had given me twitched at the thought, and I shut my fist. The false bones did not ache as I squeezed.

  “No,” Valka agreed, coming closer, “but you treat the living better now.”

  “I was only a boy then,” I said. And a stupid boy at that.

  Something of my thought must have reached my face, for Valka said, “You were an idiot.”

  I kissed her, holding her face in both my hands. When we broke apart she pressed her cheek against my palm. “Thank you,” I said after a moment’s silence.

  Large eyes looked up at me. “For what?”

  “For not hating me,” I said. “You’ve had every right to.”

  “I could never hate you,” she said, voice small. Then she smiled out one corner of her mouth. “But you are an ass.”

  Matching her crooked smile I kissed her again and said into her ear, “What do you say we sweat off the fugue toxins?”

  Her answer was to give me a little push and turn toward our borrowed bedchamber. She made it there before my brain caught up, and she stopped in the doorway to glance back. “What’s taking you so long?”

  CHAPTER 10

  PINION AND CLAW

  EACH DAY SPENT AT Fort Din the sun rose fair and bright, and the wind off the mountains was clean as any day in the blessed autumn of my childhood home. Rarely in all my travels have I known a world so lovely to walk upon as was Gododdin, as if she were some image caught in a looking glass of the Earth that was and was lost. If only her sky were blue and not the foggy white it was, the impression might have been perfect. How well I remember the snapping of red banners above the wall of that fortress and the gentle lift of awnings above the streets of the Grand Bazaar. I can picture the darkly wooden bookshop Valka and I visited, and the musty vanilla smell of old paper and the sugar of the pastries I bought for us when we walked in the city as common people unknown to the citizens of that world.

  “So there I was,” Pallino said, gesticulating, “standing in the middle of the starport terminal, covered in blood and high as hell on that shit they give us to keep us from falling over, holding my fucking eye in my hand, mind you—and we’ve got to go through the scanners to get on this tram, yeah? Full kit and everything.” The wind kicked up, rustling the tall grass that grew to either side of the walk that ran parallel to the main road back up toward the gates of the fortress. Content to listen to Pallino’s tale, I squeezed Valka’s hand.

  The old soldier continued, “And I’m centurion then, so I take point and go up to the civilian at the security kiosk—and remember we have full clearance, being Legion and all. We can use the bloody tram. Only this toady’s got a real hard-on for security. Like you wouldn’t believe. And I give him my pass and the letter the duke’s given us says we’re needed down south—and we’ve just come from a combat zone. Again: blood everywhere. And this fucker—my hand to Earth’s tit—this fucker says I need to put my kit through security. I’ve got a plasma rifle, the standard disruptor, a couple grenades . . . so I say ‘Why?’ and this man—this unit—says he’s supposed to scan for weapons. Weapons!” Pallino laughed, paused long enough to scratch his nose.

  “What’d you do?” Valka asked, throwing the question back over her shoulder as we passed beneath the shadow of the main gate.

  “I slapped the rifle on the belt—still holding my eye, which is no good anymore, by the way—and I tell the man to scan it. ‘Wouldn’t want to be smuggling a gun in my gun, now would I?’ And do you know what happens next?”

  Valka stopped laughing long enough to ask, “What?”

  We never found out.

  A terrible cry went up, filling the air above us with a high and grating noise like the hunting cry of a hawk. Some instinct I think that has been in us since our ancestors parted ways with the ancestors of the mouse moved me, and I crouched, thinking of the winged serpents that had dwelt on Emesh.

  “The hell was that?”

  “Flier?” Pallino asked, hand ready on his shield projector.

  Valka had not flinched, but stood craning her neck. “ ’Twas no flier. I’d have picked up the electronics.” She pointed with her tattooed hand at her own head, indicating her demarchist implants.

  The cry sounded again.

  “We should get you inside, my lord,” said one of the two plainclothes men Pallino had brought with us on our little expedition to the city.

  I brushed the fellow’s hand away, placing my own hand on the catch to trigger my own body shield’s deployment. Despite the precaution I said, “Nonsense. We’re a hundred yards from the keep.” Inclining my head, I pointed to a pair of junior officers taking their lunch on the steps of one of the fort’s outbuildings. Neither of them appeared frightened. “You there, soldier!”

  The poor fellow practically leaped to his feet, dropping the remaining bits of his sandwich into its paper tray in his haste to salute. “Sir!”

  “What was that just now?”

  The man blinked, confused. “What was what, Sir Hadrian?”

  “That sound, I—” I clenched my jaw shut as the awful cry went up again, wailing like the scrape of iron on stone. It set my teeth on edge.

  The man’s confusion vanished at once, and he brightened, “Oh, that! It’s the auxilia.”

  “Auxilia?” I frowned. Auxilia were irregular soldiers, recruits not of Imperial extraction. Foreigners. “What do auxilia have to do with all that?”

  The man stared fixedly at a point over my shoulder as he answered, “They’re flying, sir. It’s the Irchtani unit. Got a thousand of them in from Judecca. They’re shipping out to the front.”

  “Irchtani?” I repeated, feeling a thrill move through me. “You have an Irchtani unit here?”

  “Yes, sir. Sir Amalric has the birdos planetside for a year’s seasoning with the men, see if they can hack it with the rest of us before he ships them out to the front. Surprised you haven’t seen them already, they’re over on the south side, got a barracks to thems
elves. Keep to themselves, too. Guess that could explain it.”

  I let the poor man return to his meal and turned to the others.

  “O Earth and Emperor,” Pallino swore. “He’s got that look again.”

  The Irchtani. When I was a boy on Delos, my mother would tell me stories. Stories of the Cid Arthur, of Prince Cyrus the Fool. Stories of Kharn Sagara, of Sir Antony Damrosch and Kasia Soulier. But it was the stories of Tor Simeon the Red I liked best. How after centuries of sailing his ship had discovered the planet Judecca and its native Irchtani—a species of flying xenobite nearly so intelligent as man—but the crew had revolted, killing their captain and leaving Simeon for dead. They planned to capture the Irchtani and to sell them into slavery, for such noble savages were always curiosities at the courts of a certain kind of nobleman. Thus they would end their miserable journeys rich and comfortable and might retire to the frontier. But Simeon had survived, and with the help of the Irchtani natives he defeated his former crewmates, avenged his fellow officers, and saw to it that the Irchtani were protected when Imperial settlement came at last to Judecca. He was buried in their holiest shrine, the black temple of Athten Var, a temple that was old when the Irchtani were still dumb animals. A temple that had been built—like Calagah on Emesh and the Marching Towers on Sadal Suud—by the Quiet, if built was the right word. They’d called him Unaan Kril, the Red Worm, for their alien eyes perceived the green of his scholiast’s vestments as red, and because we humans do not fly.

  As a boy, he’d been my greatest hero. A man of learning who had taken up the sword only out of necessity, and had saved an alien people from the predations of man. I had set out to be like him, thinking the Cielcin like the Irchtani. Noble creatures misunderstood. That was why I had gone with Bassander Lin and Sir Olorin into the tunnels of Calagah to save Uvanari and the Cielcin survivors. Because I had thought they could be saved, as Simeon had saved the Irchtani. But the Cielcin were not the Irchtani, and I was not Simeon. I could not save Uvanari. It had manipulated me, I know that now. Tricked me into giving it a fighting chance. A warrior’s death. Its surrender to me in Calagah had been only the desperate gamble of the cornered wolf, waiting with its foot in the trap to kill the hunter on his return. And it had tried to kill me in the end. The Cielcin only submit when they are beaten, and they do not submit to animals. Like men.

  The southern spur of Fort Din stood farthest from the city, looking out upon the Green Sea and the ruddy buttes rising from it. The wind off the mountains smelled of rain and tugged at the dry branches of those few trees the Legion permitted to grow within the fort. The barracks themselves were an ugly, L-shaped building of steel and cement white-washed and flat-roofed, bristling with antennae and comms equipment. The yard between the two arms of that building had been rolled flat in construction, and was barren but for the stray weeds.

  And there they were, drilling upon its surface.

  Despite my years, I have not grown used to the sight of xenobites. There is something of Earth in our genes, I think, which tells us how life is meant to look. And when we encounter something otherworldly the mind rebels, reacts with horror in much the same way as when confronted with something that is like humanity but not nearly like enough.

  Man-like but not man they were, and less than man-high. The tallest of them might just barely have looked down its nose at Lorian, who was hardly five feet tall. But they were as broad as men and rounder in the shoulder, so that they seemed to huddle and slouch as they went about their business. Each wore a dun uniform, cousin to the black fatigues of our soldiers and not at all unlike those worn by human auxiliaries, though each had a deep, pointed hood in lieu of the berets sometimes worn when the men were out of their armor. I stood at the edge of the yard, watching like a child as one of the Irchtani spread out arms that were longer than it was tall, great pinions flexing, emerald feathers long as swords. Then it leaped skyward, wings kicking up a wind as it rose, and the noise of its cry split the air like a wedge as it chased after another of its fellows. As it drew near it swung, and against the pale gray sky I discerned the flash of steel.

  “It has a sword,” Pallino said, voice strangely hushed.

  “They fight with these cutlasses,” I said, pointing. “Tall as you or I. Call them zitraa.”

  “But where are their hands?”

  Valka answered before I could, and I guessed those machine eyes of hers had magnified her vision to give her a better look. “Ever seen a pterosaur?”

  “A terra-what?”

  “Middle of the wing,” I said, cutting them both off. Holding my own arm up for examination, I went on. “The pinion folds out from the wrist like a second elbow.”

  “Hoi!” came a deep-throated sound, and turning I saw one of the creatures waddling toward us from the field, a wing raised in greeting. Its hood was up, but the beak protruded from it, black but red at the edges. A double gold chain looped across its chest, pinned to either shoulder, and I saw the familiar oak cluster gleaming at its throat to mark it as a chiliarch. Here then was the captain of the entire auxilium, all thousand soldiers. “Greetings, sir knight! And good day!” The Irchtani extended its wing in salute. Its beak did not move as it spoke, only opened. I was surprised at how well the creature spoke our tongue—I knew next to nothing of the Irchtani language, and I was struck, also, by how very like our terranic birds the creature was, and wondered what fluke of nature had made something so seemingly familiar beneath an alien sun. “What brings you honoring us?”

  What was I to say? I’d had no plan save to see the creatures that had peopled my childhood stories with my own eyes. I had not thought much further. Grasping for words, I bowed. “I only wanted to meet the Ishaan Irchtani for myself. I have never met one of your people before.” I had seen one but for a moment a long time ago, aboard the Enigma of Hours, the day Switch and I had been separated and I had met the prophet, Jari. Shaking myself to rid my mind of thoughts of Jari, I said, “I am Sir Hadrian Marlowe, Lord Commandant of the Red Company.”

  As I spoke, two of the others came up behind their commander to listen, and the senior xenobite replied, “I am called Barda. I am kithuun. Chiliarch of these.” The creature bowed awkwardly, and I guessed the xenobite’s legs were not meant to bend as ours. I returned the gesture. “You are the Devil?” Barda spoke haltingly, not confident of its Galstani.

  Put that way, I had to stop myself from smiling. “The Devil, indeed.” A small knot of the creatures came up behind their kithuun to see what was going on. I could not tell which of them was male or female—or what passed for male and female among the Irchtani, who like us and unlike the Umandh of Emesh and the Cielcin have two separate sexes. Some of them were unhooded, and without the garment in place their heads looked oddly small, eyes dark and beady above hooked beaks. “Forgive us for intruding, I’d only just heard your people were here and wanted to see you . . .”

  “See us?” asked another of the birds, a shorter, squatter one with grayer plumage who held a zitraa in one scaled claw. “This isn’t a zoo, human!” This one’s voice was deeper than Barda’s and rasped like the voice of crows, but its Galstani was better.

  “Show respect, Udax!” Barda squawked, and cuffed the younger xenobite before chirruping something in its native tongue. A mingling of quarked words and trilled music it was in my ears, and hearing that sound I smiled, wishing that I could play a flute as Simeon had to learn the music of their words. Udax snapped its beak in reply.

  Raising my hands, I said, “It is only that I grew up on stories of your people. When I was a boy my mother used to tell me tales of Simeon the Red and Prince Faida at the Battle of Athten Var.”

  “He talks to us of history!” Udax sneered. “We are not of your storybooks, unaan. We are here. Now. And we come to fight these Pale worms of yours.” The younger Irchtani thumped its chest, talons flexing against the earth. “We are the fighting Irchtani! We’re here to kill, not to amuse yo
u!” This set several of the others cawing along with it, wings flapping in agitation. Not knowing the Irchtani well, I did not know how dangerous a sign this was.

  Unaan, I thought. Worm. It was the same word the Irchtani had used to speak of the Cielcin, but then I supposed that neither their species nor ours could fly. “Peace, man!” Pallino said. “We’re all soldiers here.”

  “Soldiers?” one of the other young ones exclaimed. “If we are all soldiers, why are we kept apart from your kind?”

  “Be quiet, Udax! Morag!” Barda said, rounding on his subordinate. “This is one of their Bashan Iseni.” Bashan Iseni, I later learned, were their words for palatine. Literally it meant Higher Beings. Gods.

  But Udax was not quiet. “I am tired of these unaani gawking at us, Kithuun-Barda. Every day they are watching. We are not on display!” The soldier shifted its long cutlass in its grip.

  “We’ll go,” Valka said, tugging gently on my cape. Then, more softly, “Come on, Hadrian.”

  But I did not understand how I had offended this young alien, and it felt wrong to leave without first trying to make matters right. “Kithuun-Barda,” I said, addressing the commander, “I did not mean to offend your people.”

  “He does not even speak to us!” Udax called, speaking up before Barda could reply. A chorus of alien noises rose to greet this pronouncement, birds talking over one another until I discerned the repeated word.

  “I-da! I-da!”

  I did not know its meaning then, but know it now.

  Get him.

  I did not see Udax’s zitraa move. I heard it first and threw my arm across my face, pulling my cape with it. The armorweave embedded within the white-on-white brocade stopped the alien edge from cutting into me, but did not stop the kick Udax threw at my chest. God Emperor—the strength of it! I must have knocked Valka over as I flew backward, skidding on the flat earth. Pallino swore and leaped over me, but before he could strike Udax in the face two more of the young Irchtani’s compatriots were on him. I was bleeding. The xenobite’s talons had sliced through jacket and tunic alike, and for a moment I feared the silver chain I wore to hold the shell the Quiet had given me was broken. Udax pulsed its wings once, gray feathers kicking up a cloud of dust as I thumbed my shield and found my feet again. I was torn between casting my cape away for greater mobility and keeping it for the defense it offered.