Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  A great weight lifted—I hoped invisibly so—from my shoulders. “I understand,” I said, thoughts turning to Valka. “And Prince Alexander? He has asked to accompany me again.”

  Surprise flickered on that regal visage. “Has he? Has he indeed?” He clasped his hands once more behind himself. “Very good. Take the boy. Now go.” There was a finality in that go which brooked no further argument. I turned and retreated past the armed Excuitors to the high pillars that surrounded the shining pool.

  “Halfmortal!” the Emperor called as I reached the iron gates.

  I stopped. I did not turn, did not speak. What had possessed the Emperor to use that name of all my names? The sound of it from the Emperor smote me like a brand, conjured memories of Carax’s medal, of Oberlin’s scribbled seal, of the cult of rumor and personality that followed me then everywhere I went.

  “Are all the stories they tell about you true?”

  The stories, I thought, and in my mind a bloody fountain splashed against a stone wall as darkness swallowed the world. Though he did not ask the question like so many others had done, I heard it all the same.

  Is it true you can’t be killed?

  Still not looking back, I answered, “I’m afraid so.”

  CHAPTER 51

  THE MERCHANT OF DEATH

  I MUST LINGER A moment on Forum as we sailed away. Our course charted, for once I slept, unwilling to endure the sense of mingled anticipation and hope. For the first time in decades, I felt joy’s warm light fill my chest and stretch my heart wide. I had left Delos to join the scholiasts. I was sailing to an athenaeum at last. Not to meager Teukros, but to the Imperial Library on Colchis itself. To Nov Belgaer, in whose dusty halls I sit even now and record this account.

  But as I say, I linger and recount a tale heard from men I dare not name.

  * * *

  Three years after the Tamerlane’s departure, three years after the assassin’s sword could not cut the Halfmortal down in the Colosseum, Lord Augustin Bourbon clambered aboard his shuttle for a ferry ride from the Sun King’s Hall to the palatial apartments kept by House Bourbon in the Eternal City. He was alone but for his guards, and seated himself on his couch in the rear carriage amidst azure hangings and gold leaf to await takeoff. There he waited.

  And waited.

  In time, the Minister of War grew impatient. “Pilot!” he called in his bass rumble. “Pilot!”

  No answer came.

  The large minister rose, groaning I do not doubt, and pressed through the hangings to the cockpit where—so my nameless men tell me—he found his pilot. Dead as my own had been. Blood for blood. The great lord cried aloud, tapped his terminal to summon his guards, but no guards came. No signal went out. The jamming device affixed to the ventral hull of the shuttle saw to that. Returning to the rear compartment, Lord Augustin tried the hatch, but the ramp would not deploy, and the door was shut. The Minister of War pounded against the bulkhead, slapped the door with his soft, damp hands. No one answered him.

  No one came.

  The nameless men tell me he panicked, just as they knew he would. The War Minister tore the cushions from the benches in a frenzied effort to locate the missing emergency kit.

  That was how he found it, precisely as it looked when he’d given it to Irshan three years before, mere days before my fateful hour in the arena.

  A highmatter sword. The very sword that had failed to cut me down. The very sword I had clutched in my bleeding hands as I staggered from the Colosseum. The very sword I had given to Crim after Valka had visited me in medica, after I reassured myself that Siran was alive. It was no Jaddian weapon, though what hubris had possessed Augustin to arm his assassin with his own blade I will never know. Perhaps he too had been only a pawn in the Empress’s scheme to rid her daughter of me. Perhaps his hatred of me ran so deep. Perhaps he thought himself above reprisal—scion of so ancient a house as he was.

  “I want you to kill a man,” I’d said to Crim. “Make the arrangements for it after we’re gone.”

  The Lord Minister tried to use the sword to cut his way out. He squeezed the trigger, squeezed it again. No good.

  I’d had the weapon’s highmatter core removed.

  No one ever learned who did it. Who planted the bomb on the landing pad. Some blamed the Extrasolarians. Still others blamed the Mandari, angry over some unfair arms contract. There were whispers of a feud between Bourbon and Habsburg, but nothing ever came of it. There was no one to bury, nothing for the canopic jars. Prince Charles Bourbon mourned his cousin and in time another man was named to the War Ministry.

  No one blamed Lord Hadrian Marlowe.

  CHAPTER 52

  FALLING OFF THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

  COLCHIS.

  Once, the colony farthest from Earth—first of the worlds settled when our ships limped across the Gulf from the Spur of Orion and Earth into the great space of Sagittarius. Not a planet, but a moon larger than the homeworld, thick with oceans and the primordial algae whence sprang an atmosphere perfect for human life. Explorers named her for the ancient homeland of the Golden Fleece, whence sailed Jason with his mighty Argonauts. To the Greeks, it was the edge of the world, and we had made it the edge of ours, for a time. Now it lay comfortably inside Imperial borders, near the point where Orion and Sagittarius almost met nearer the core of the galaxy.

  A wild frontier it was no longer.

  The mottled face of the planet the locals called Atlas hung in the sky above our descent, umber, amber, and pearl. High clouds obscured it, casting gossamer nets across the roof of the sky as we fell, descending over gray seas and craggy uplands toward the lonely city of Aea beneath the mesa upon which stood the Imperial Library.

  Of all the worlds I have visited, the planets, stations, and moons, I think I love Colchis best. Her skies perpetually gray, forever threatening rain, her airs forever damp and chilly, she was not the most beautiful world. Compared with the hanging towers of the Eternal City, the Library was a mean thing. It sat upon the heights of the mesa overlooking broken highland moors like the crown of some sunken king half-buried in the earth with its low, round turrets. Lights burned in its windows even in daylight, for the pale orange sun was high and partways shrouded by the planet in whose orbit Colchis spun.

  Aea itself was unremarkable. Despite the colony’s great age and former importance, Colchis’s days as a trade nexus with the Sagittarine colonies were long ended. Better warp drives and better fuel economies had made crossing the Gulf where it was wider more tenable, and the old roads nearer the core were abandoned. And so the city spoke not of decay, but of quiet homeliness that seemed copied from some sleepy seaport of Earth’s Golden Age. This was despite the presence of the Imperial Library, which for all its cultural import was barred but to a select few.

  “How many people live here?” I asked Tor Varro where he sat across from me, strapped into his flight seat.

  The scholiast turned from his own contemplation of the gray seas and craggy landscape. “On the planet? Less than a million, more than half that in this city.”

  “And in the athenaeum?”

  Varro pursed his lips. “I don’t think I know the answer. Several thousand cloistered brothers and sisters, I should think. Nov Belgaer isn’t the largest of our institutes, but the Imperial archives make it one of the most important. Our scholars travel from across the Empire to study here. In the order, we like to say we all end up here eventually.”

  “Have you been before?” I asked.

  “Me?” Varro arched his eyebrows. “Never, my lord. Hence the saying.”

  * * *

  The day was cool, but pleasantly so to my mind, and a silver mist drifted on the breeze, bringing with it the salt of the sea below. Somewhere in the heavens, gulls cried, and the noise of them transported my soul to Delos and Meidua and slashed a century’s weight from my shoulders. Given the presence of the Li
brary, Colchis—like Gododdin—was held by a governor-general appointed by the Colonial Office and not by any landed nobility. I forget the woman’s name, but she received us with full pomp in Aea’s quiet landing field, where I made it known that I intended to make the climb up the mountain to the athenaeum at once.

  “Impossible, my lord,” the governor-general said, bowing and touching her forehead apologetically. “The scholiasts have closed the gates for the day. They will not open them. Not even for you. Better to go in the morning.”

  And so it was that despite my best efforts to avoid it, we were hosted in the governor’s mansion that night. I should not complain. The food was plain, but of that unpretentious quality which is finer to the well-adjusted mind that the most extravagant dishes, and for the first time in what seemed like eons I shared a bed with Valka in the night.

  But I did not sleep.

  Tall curtains blew through the open arch at my back, and the stones of the balcony were slick beneath bare feet. The Imperial Library loomed a mile above and far away, lights flickering on the crown of the mesa like distant candles.

  I imagined another Hadrian, the boy who had fled his home, the boy who’d left his brother bruised and unconscious on the floor of the Summer Palace. He had dreamed of standing on just such a parapet, staring up at just such a collection of lights. Had he made it, in some other life? Come in time to the sands of Teukros and the gate of Nov Senber? I had wanted to be a scholiast more than I wanted anything, but those desires were gone. They’d died when I had—if not before.

  How small that other Hadrian seemed, flickering himself like a candle against the Dark, clutching in his hands a small envelope—the letter Tor Gibson had given him, the key to open that gate and admit him to the cloistered realm of the scholiasts. The key he had lost on Emesh.

  Small as Aea was, the city cast virtually no light upon the heavens, and the stars—so often veiled in too many Imperial cities—shone in all their glory, slowly dancing about the pale spray of the galaxy. The same Greeks who had named Colchis the edge of the world taught their children the galaxy was the milk of Hera, queen of the gods, splashed across the sky when she hurled the infant Heracles—her husband’s son by another woman—from her breast. The Sumerians said it was the severed tail of Tiamat, the dragon-mother of chaos, which Marduk, the first hero, had set among the heavens when he defeated her and carved up her body to rebuild the shattered world.

  I liked that story better.

  Standing by the rail, I twisted the Emperor’s ring on my right hand’s first finger, watching the lights above me in the night. I glanced at its face, at Sir George slaying his dragon. Not for the first time, I wondered what the Emperor’s motivations were in choosing this particular ring to hand to me. I didn’t know it then, but the Kings of Avalon—who had been the Kings of England before the coming of the machines—had worn Sir George’s ring since at least the time of old Victoria.

  George and Marduk.

  Beowulf and Turin.

  Dragonslayers, all.

  It was all one story, eternally retold.

  “Can’t sleep?”

  Valka stood in the arch behind me, naked but for the blanket she’d brought from the bed. Her nakedness called attention to my own state, unclad but for a pair of loose pants snugly cuffed beneath the knee. She moved to join me, and as she did, she shivered. “ ’Tis too cold for this.”

  “Is it?” I was so used to the icy chill of star travel, I hadn’t noticed.

  “What is the matter?” She drew close, leaned against the railing. Below, the mansion’s yard and motor pool were quiet save for the rare sentinel keeping watch for trouble that never came. Colchis was so far from the fighting, closer to the Lothrian Commonwealth than the Normans, thousands of light-years from danger.

  Letting my hands fall, I turned to face her properly. “Nothing. Nothing, really. Just . . . memories. You know I wanted to be a scholiast.”

  She smiled up at me, tattooed fingers fussing with my hair. “Are you excited?”

  “About a library?” I asked. “It sounds strange to say, but . . . yes.”

  Valka made a face. “Hadrian, you are talking to someone whose idea of a good time involves climbing over ruins and poring over holographs, trying to translate a language no one has deciphered in ten thousand years.” Her smile widened as she tapped me on the chin. “I get it.”

  That made me smile.

  She wrapped her arms around me, blanket enfolding like wings. She was warm beneath. “And we’re away from that xenathta city,” she said, words brushing my chest where she held me. “I thought it was going to kill you being there.”

  “You’re one to talk,” I said, arms about her narrow waist. “How’s your chest?” Drawing back, I traced the spot beneath her breast where the knife-missile had pierced her. Only the faintest scar remained, barely detectable beneath my fingers.

  Valka shot a look up at me. “You ask me this? You? Your arm looks like ’tis been through a meat grinder.”

  I matched her smile. “Well, I know I’m fine,” I said. “I’m not worried about me.”

  “You’ve not to worry about me.”

  “Maybe,” I allowed, “but worrying about you is a privilege.”

  She snorted. “You are such a relic.”

  “You like me because I’m a relic, doctor.” My hand went lower, and she thumped me. “What was all that about climbing over ruins?”

  She thumped me again. “You’re a ruin now?” Her eyes trailed over the deep scars in my arm, and her expression took on a somber cast.

  Eager to distract her and save her mood, I pulled Valka’s face to mine and held her close, felt her warmth and the tips of her breasts against my bare chest. When we came apart, I said, “We really should get some sleep. There’s a lot to do tomorrow.”

  “A lot for me to do, you mean,” she said, smile returning. “You’re in my world now, Hadrian Anaxander Marlowe.” She drew away, taking the blanket with her, and went back to the open arch with its static field invisibly crackling, keeping the warmth inside. In the shadow of the keystone she turned. “Maybe I should send you back to the ship, mm? Give you a taste of your own medicine?”

  “That isn’t funny.”

  “ ’Tis,” she insisted. “Maybe ’tis your turn to go in the box.” When I did not smile, she folded. “I am sorry. You apologized. I should not pick at these scabs.” She hugged the blanket more tightly about herself. “We should both be happy. ’Tis not Panormo or Athten Var, this place, but ’tis better than your war.”

  I did smile then. “It will be like Emesh again. Before, I mean.”

  “Oh, ’twill be better than Emesh,” she said, and turned her back once more.

  She dropped the blanket.

  * * *

  The next morning, the governor-general had arranged for two groundcars to carry us along the narrow road upcountry to the athenaeum. It was not far, perhaps half an hour’s drive to clear the outskirts of Aea. We passed stone-fenced pastures and sheepfolds dominated by sail-mill towers creaking in the breeze. In the distance, the city’s fusion plant belched cloud, its column rising to support the heavens where Atlas’s mighty face peered over the horizon.

  “This is it, my lord!” the driver said, bringing us to a halt at the base of the mesa.

  There was no one there, only a small, paved lot—weeds growing between the flagstones, and a gray stone arch that hugged the base of the mesa. Correctly taking my silence for confusion, he said, “The greens wouldn’t let us build a lift or ramp up the mesa. You have to go by stair.” An apologetic note crept into the fellow’s voice, and he added, “I thought the governor-general had told you, lordship. A thousand pardons.”

  “ ’Tis quite all right, messer,” Valka said, opening the clamshell hatch. “We will walk, won’t we, Hadrian?”

  Truth was, I’d have had it no other way.
To the scholiasts—and to eccentrics like me—the Library was a kind of sacred space. It would not do to come to such a place by shuttle or groundcar. Pilgrimages should be carried out on foot.

  “We left our effects at the manor, sirrah,” I said to the driver. “Will you see they are collected and brought up?”

  “You’re staying with the greens, lord?”

  “That is my intent.” And with that I climbed from the groundcar and drew my long, black coat about myself as I turned and helped Valka stand free. Varro followed, alongside Pallino and one of his centurions—the same Doran who had fought with us aboard Iubalu’s ship. The second car opened, and the other eight of my guard emerged, dressed not in legionary armor, but in the black and scarlet of Red Company semi-formal dress. They wore shield-belts and carried phase disruptors, and each man and woman wore a short white sword, but the effect was that of a security detail, not an honor guard.

  The climb took the better part of two hours, and by the end my still-fugue-sick legs ached from fatigue toxins. But the day was cool and the weather fair, and the ever-present mist—of which Pallino and his men complained—was for me a refreshing balm, and strangely bracing. Valka held my hand, and so when we passed the final marker with its green flag flapping in the wind and came to the final stairs, we climbed them together.

  Rough-cut stone gave way to laser-quarried perfection, field-stone to gray granite.

  So precisely engineered were the final stairs and the gate and walls to which they led that no weed or blade of grass grew in their joints. The curtain wall stood ten times the height of a man, describing a perfect circle atop the mesa, circumference interrupted in regular intervals by the short drum towers that looked down upon the world, guarding against attackers that had never come.