Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  A piece of me—the piece of me that doubted everything—rejoiced.

  I was myself and no changeling.

  But the Inquisitor was not done. “There are those who think you are some kind of god. I am afraid this proves otherwise. You are just a man.” He glanced pointedly at my left hand. “Rather, less than a man.” His airy demeanor collapsed into something tighter, colder. “Tell me, the stories they tell about you . . . why do they tell them?”

  “Surely you should ask them, Your Reverence,” I answered.

  “They say you died.”

  Had this man found the recording I’d entrusted to Crim? Relying on scholiast techniques Gibson had taught me, I kept my face studiously blank, jaw clenched to stop the pounding of my heart in my throat from the drugs. “They say a lot of things,” I said.

  “You deny it, then?”

  “Deny what? That I’m dead?” I spread my hands. “What do you want me to say? I cannot speak for such people.”

  Gereon’s smile returned. “Very good. Very good. You are to remain in your quarters until I or the Grand Inquisitor send for you. Sir Friedrich, my work is done.”

  Sir Friedrich Oberlin nodded and rearranged the papers he’d left on the table. “Yes, Reverence.”

  Inquisitor Gereon turned and swept toward the door, his men in tow with their kit. Friedrich frantically finished his last bit of writing and creased the page, folding it in half. This he tucked beneath his papers and left on the table when he picked up the rest. Our eyes met a moment, and I said nothing. I didn’t move.

  He was gone a moment after, vanishing through the portal behind Gereon and his men. I caught a brief glimpse of the two legionnaires standing at their posts in the hall. Then the door was closed, and the deadbolts whined.

  A moment passed, marked by the clattering sound of feet retreating in the hall, muffled—barely to be heard through the bulkhead. Another moment passed. My heart had not stopped hammering. I wondered how long the Inquisitor’s adrenal cocktail would linger in my bloodstream. Hand shaking, I seized Sir Friedrich’s paper.

  It was not a contract or report, nor any sort of formal document. Only a handwritten note.

  I read its contents over once, read them again to ensure I’d understood.

  Knife arranged by Director. Priests involved. Bought one of your lieutenants. Castor/Castle, don’t know. Mean to plant daimon on ship. Not sure how.

  Lorian was right.

  But it wasn’t the revelation that gave me pause. It was the glyph scrawled on the bottom corner of the note, more hastily than the knight-logothete’s neat block lettering. He’d drawn my pitchfork and pentacle through the watermarked Imperial sunburst seal at the bottom of the page.

  Just as Carax had carved it on his medallion.

  Sir Friedrich was a believer.

  CHAPTER 42

  IMPOSSIBLE TASKS

  I HAD NO WAY to get the note to the others. For all I knew this Castor or whatever his name was and the other officers were locked in their quarters as I was. I had no notion of what was passing on the Tamerlane or in the wider world, what lies the spiders were weaving, what nets to ensnare. Was there even a Castor among Crim’s lieutenants? Or a Castle? I struggled to remember their names. I was not familiar with the junior staff. There were simply too many of them, and they rotated so quickly, falling in and out of fugue like plants through their seasons.

  Crim would know, but I could not contact Crim. I had no way of communicating outside at all, unless it was to shout through the heavy metal bulkhead to my guards, who I did not doubt would be deaf to my cries, or worse, would report them to Breathnach and the Grand Inquisitor.

  I was in check.

  A day passed. Two. Three.

  I hoped at least that Valka still slept in her coffin of ice, forgotten. I despaired. Despaired because my enemies held my ship and my people in their grasp. Despaired because—holding us—those enemies doubtless had disappeared this Castle or whatever his name was and covered their tracks. Despaired, because I could not hear the faint tapping of metal on metal.

  Not at first.

  Tap-tap.

  But there it was, a faint grinding scrape as of a knife dragged across the ground. Dressed only in a shirt and trousers—without boots or belt—I rolled to my feet and padded across the carpet, retrieved my sword from the dining table where I’d left it. I’d cleaned it the day before, polished the fittings.

  Tap-tap. Scrape.

  I said nothing, certain that to cry out would summon my guards even through the plate metal door.

  Unless it’s another knife-missile, I thought. Or worse. Tilting my head, I listened, trying to find the source of the sound. It was somewhere on the upper level. Sword held at the ready, I moved toward the curving stair and—one bare foot softly after the other—began to climb.

  Scrape-scrape. Tap.

  “Who goes there?” I said, voice low but edged with command.

  Nothing.

  Thoughts of assassins, of knife-missiles again and of Nipponese shinobi splashed across my mind. I kindled my blade, highmatter streaming forth, liquid metal throwing out vapors that chased along the tight force lines of the weapon’s magnetic field. The blade gleamed like stars, like moonlight in the Cloud Gardens of the Emperor. Like silver and glass.

  “Who goes there?” I said again, more forcefully now I was far from the door.

  Tap-scrape. Tap-tap.

  There were vents high along the wall that pumped conditioned air into the chamber, but they were only a couple inches across—no wider than my fist. Seeing them again, ideas about knife-missiles took root and flowered. Crim had been certain the weapon had entered my chambers through one of those ports, though no damage had been detected in the grating that covered them. That was before we had come to suspect someone in ship’s security of tampering with sec footage. But there was another vent, large enough that a child might fit through it. That was the return duct, the one that pulled air out and filtered out the dust.

  “Is someone there?” I asked.

  “Hadrian?” a thin voice answered.

  Not a child at all. A man, albeit a small and very thin man.

  “Lorian?” I asked. “How did you know to come?”

  “Know what?” he whispered in response. “No one had heard anything from you since they got here. Corvo sent me.” He paused. “Do you mind helping me with this grate? The air in here is . . . not good.”

  Unkindling my weapon, I clambered up on a reading table and helped open the grating. It folded downward, exposing the dusty filter membrane. Removing this revealed the slightly less dusty Commander Aristedes squeezed into a space nearly too small even for him. Dust coated his black jacket and hung thick in his long, pale hair. “What are you doing?” I hissed.

  “Just . . . get me out of this thing,” he said, wriggling forward.

  I seized him under the arms as though he were a child and pulled him free. Discounting my high-gee-reinforced musculature, I was astonished at how little the man weighed. He couldn’t have been more than a hundred pounds. He’d worn no boots to make his climb quieter, and his socks were thick and foul with dust and what looked like some kind of lubricant.

  When he’d caught his breath sitting against the rail, he said, “We saw the Inquisition come in a few days back. When we didn’t hear anything else we thought they’d . . . done something to you.”

  “They tested me for possession,” I said.

  Lorian looked up at me with one ghost-blue eye. “Did you pass?” No humor in that question. No smile on that face.

  Recalling an ancient conversation with the good commander and his skepticism regarding my death and regeneration, I answered him. “I did.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser.”

  “You sound almost disappointed,” I said.

  The fellow almost pouted. “I o
nly hoped it might have been something more interesting.”

  “Things are interesting enough.”

  “Fair.” I let Lorian sit a moment, recovering his breath and from the humiliation of being lifted like a child. He massaged his right leg with those skeletal fingers of his, eyes downcast. “Can’t feel the bloody thing again,” he groaned. “Mother Earth and Emperor . . .” He leaned back against the railing, eyes tracking back across the open grate. “I am not excited about climbing back in there, I hope you know. It’s your damn books. Things collect dust like a pleb collects exotic bacteria, I tell you.”

  “Did something happen out there?” I asked him, crouching so that we were almost at eye level.

  Aristedes shook his head, pawed dust from his hair, and straightened the thin ponytail at the base of his skull. “No. I told you. Corvo sent me. After so long with nothing, we were starting to worry they’d . . .”

  “. . . done something interesting?” I finished for him.

  “Well . . . yes!” Lorian shrugged. “They’ve spent the last three days turning the ship inside out. Peeling off deckplates, crawling around inside. They had Corvo in interviews until yesterday. Don’t know what took so long with her.”

  I had an idea or two. Otavia Corvo was nearly seven feet tall and could lift nearly three times her body weight. There was no way her Amazonian musculature was natural. Homunculus or no, she was the product of genetic sorcery. I guessed the inquisitors were testing her for perversion, checking to see if her genetic tinkering remained within accepted bounds. That she was a foreign national might not matter to an Inquisition intent on nailing me to the wall.

  “They let her go?”

  “This morning.”

  Corvo’s genetic abnormalities would be just another strike against me when the sentence came. Consortation with the daimonic. Consortation with the perverse. I let out a ragged sigh. “Do you know a lieutenant named Castle? Or Castor? One of Crim’s men.”

  “What?”

  Wordless, I stood and hurried down the row of shelves, located a dusty omnibus titled The Compleat Annuna. It was a collection of fantastic stories, not true myths, but adventure romances of the kind popular among certain young men and women who—like me—dreamed of being somewhere and someone other than themselves. The book had been banned by the Chantry nearly a thousand years before, but I’d found a copy in a vendor’s pile decades previously. One of the dying nobiles on Vorgossos had mentioned it: tales of ancient xenobites who ruled the galaxy before the coming of man. Thinking it might contain some gram of information about the Quiet, I’d snatched up the omnibus, but it had been good as useless.

  Unless it was as a hiding place.

  I’d not destroyed Oberlin’s note—hoping to show it to someone—and drew it out. Hurrying back, I presented it to Lorian, who read it over and asked, “Where did you get this?” I told him. “He just slipped it to you? In front of the Inquisition?” He whistled softly. “If I had balls like that, I’d have more children than the Emperor. Looks like we were right about LIO, too . . .”

  “Do you know who he’s talking about?”

  “Castor? Castle?” Lorian pronounced the words with a careful frown. “There’s a Casdo? Casdon! Forget her first name. You think she’s our man?”

  “Oberlin thinks so,” I replied, “but she’s probably long gone. Spirited away or killed.”

  “Breathnach’s people did take some of our lot onto their frigate, but I don’t think anyone’s left the Tamerlane. She could be aboard.”

  “Their frigate?”

  Lorian handed the sheet back to me. “Inquisition docked a frigate on the ventral locks after they put you in here. Easier to bring in all the hardware they need.”

  “Hardware?”

  “They’ve got something plugged into every computer bank, terminal, access panel, and port on the bloody ship, Hadrian. Looking for daimons.” Lorian resumed massaging his legs, feet crossed beneath himself. I could picture dozens of black-robed, blindfolded cathars poring over my ship, stripping wall panels and crawling through access hatchways to check storage banks and power conduits.

  Planting their evidence, I thought. An insane thought reared up from the surface of my mind, and unable to stop myself, I asked, “Do you think you could get her out?”

  “Casdon?” The intus blinked at me, blue eyes wide. “From a Chantry ship?”

  “If Oberlin’s right, she can testify against Breathnach, I—no.” Whatever our Lieutenant Casdon might know, she almost certainly was ignorant of Breathnach’s hand in all this, and it would take more than Oberlin’s note to prove conspiracy on the part of one of the Emperor’s own counselors.

  Lorian appeared to be having the same thought. “But it might clear you with the Inquisition. If they are trying to frame you—which Oberlin seems to think they are.”

  “But can you get her out?”

  “If I had a Martian Legion, a colossus, and enough atomics to melt the Earth again in case she thought we were sorry, sure,” Lorian hissed, unhanding his numb leg to look frantically around at the books. “You’re the wizard, not me.”

  “Lorian.” I allowed my frustration to edge into my voice. “Be serious.”

  “I’m being serious. I don’t know anything about their ship, its floor plan, its personnel. How am I supposed to attack it?”

  He looked up at me while he spoke, seeming so small where he sat on the floor in his grime-smeared and dust-covered uniform. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.” I extended the note toward him, pausing only a moment to tear off the watermark in the bottom corner. The last thing I needed was to drag in my . . . supporters, or to tar Oberlin for a mystagogue.

  “No!” Lorian raised a finger to object. “Oh no, no, no!”

  “Take Crim and Ilex with you,” I said. “Between the three of you, you should be able to get Lieutenant Casdon out of her cell and down to Forum.” Ilex’s technical expertise would help with any obstructions they might encounter, and Crim—since he was a boy, Crim had taken to the assassin’s trade like Crispin to the harem. If anyone could infiltrate a Chantry frigate in Forum orbit, kidnap a treasonous officer, and live to tell about it—Karim Garone could.

  “They should go without me,” Lorian said. “I’m a liability.”

  “They might need someone to climb up a ventilation shaft,” I countered, and felt the manic gleam creeping back into my eye. “You might be essential.”

  The little man glowered up at me with eyes electric. “I don’t like this.”

  “Do you have a better idea?” I asked, and held Oberlin’s note out for Lorian to take.

  “No! I . . . not yet!” He ran fingers through his thin hair, mussing up the tight way he’d pulled it back from his forehead. “Just give me time.”

  Shaking the paper in his face, I asked, “How much time do you think we have?”

  The intus had not stopped glaring at me. I caught myself hoping the man would so much as blink. One claw-like hand reached out and snatched the note from me again. “Fine,” he said at last, “but if they catch me I’m saying it was all your idea. They’ll still kill me, but maybe they’ll torture you first.” He grinned savagely.

  I smiled back.

  A thought occurred to me a moment later, and I drew back. “Wait here.”

  “Black planet!” Lorian swore. “What in Earth’s Holy Name now?”

  I left him sitting by the rail and padded back down the stairs. Tossing my sword onto the couch as I went, I moved to the sideboard and opened a panel on the side. A holograph panel appeared before me, and I flicked through it with a finger, found the recording I needed. A moment later a glass slide clicked out of a slot on the exposed panel. Collecting it, I returned to Lorian. “Here.”

  “What is it?” he asked, eyeing the slide.

  “A recording of my questioning,” I said. “In case they subm
it a faked version.”

  “They let you record it?”

  “I didn’t say that.” I looked over his head and out across my chamber toward the sideboard and the door to mine and Valka’s sleeping chambers. “They took my terminal, but . . . I guess when they realized my rooms weren’t watched by the security cameras they figured there was no one listening.”

  Lorian snorted. “Idiots.”

  I waved this away. “Can you do it?”

  “Are you giving me a choice?”

  “No.”

  “Then help me get back into this blasted vent.”

  CHAPTER 43

  PURGATORY

  I WAITED, AND NO one came. Hours turned to days, then days to hours. Nothing happened. I thought for certain to see Inquisitor Gereon again, or his mistress, the nameless Grand Inquisitor. Lord Augustin did not even appear to gloat. Of all the cells I’ve occupied in my life, my chambers were certainly the most comfortable, though never—not in the dungeons of Vorgossos, nor in the clutches of the Cielcin, nor in the bastilles of the Chantry—have I felt time move so slowly. For I had nothing but time, and nothing to do but to wait.

  The interruptions to my solitude came when twice a day the door to the lift opened and a legionnaire entered with a tray and deposited my meal, pausing only to clear away the remnants of the previous one. No word passed between us, nor any sign. I was told nothing, learned nothing. I dared not ask.

  I hoped Lorian had succeeded, but then if he had, why had I not been freed?

  As the Emperor had given me, I had given Lorian an impossible task: storm a Chantry frigate, capture Lieutenant Casdon, escape to the planet below. Boarding the vessel alone was asking the impossible; no institution in the galaxy prided themselves on security more than the Chantry. But to successfully infiltrate the ship, raid the dungeons, and steal a landing shuttle without detection? They’d deserve a triumph of their own if they succeeded. Of all the places in the universe to break into, only the Peronine Palace, Caliburn House on Avalon, and the ruined Earth herself were harder to access than a Chantry starship.