Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Valka pulled away and followed the edge of the precipice a ways, testing her footing with light steps. After a dozen paces or so, she turned back. “Annica,” she said. “We’ll call it Annica.”

  “Isn’t that the name of those musicians you like?” I asked, pointing at my chest as if to indicate some graphic that was not there. “The ones with the skulls?”

  She flashed a wry grin through her visor. “It means impermanence.”

  “Annica . . .” I said again, not meditating overmuch on the meaning of the name Valka had given our new world. “Annica it is.”

  Significant though any naming seems to me, Valka had moved on. “I’ll radio the shuttles. We’ll need to set up a second camp here, work the site from both ends. I want to complete the holography model of the city by the end of the week if we can.”

  I let her go, watched her mount the slope, climbing higher in search of a place the shuttles might put in. Already I could see the line of reflective stakes that would be hammered into the red stone to mark the path to the upper gate. Valka could handle the shuttles. I turned and moved back toward the gate, thinking that I would return to our men in the upper atrium where we’d left them before clambering out.

  The noise of rock crunching beneath my heels resonated through my boots, punctuating that eerie silence. I had not known it was possible to miss the wind, or even to miss the whir and constant whine of air compressors and climate control.

  But we had been uncertain where else or whether the ruins might emerge on the mountain. Quick flybys by Sphinx Flight had revealed another door here and there, but Valka had wanted to be sure, hence our long climb through the dark past the place where the thin and poison air ran out. Though I have stood upon the topless towers of Forum and looked down upon a bottomless sky, never before had I felt so on top of the world. Not even atop Vorgossos’s hightower had I felt so tall, for that narrow strand was a cheap construction of human hands, but the mountain was something else entirely.

  A seat of gods—empty, quiet, and clean.

  I was alone for one brief instant, and stopped on the threshold to look out once more upon our base camp far below. One hand on the round arch, I lingered, delaying my task. The men would keep another moment.

  I should not linger in this account—which I fear is too long already, even for one who has lived so long as I. I would not linger and waste this fine red ink were it not for what happened next.

  A wind rose and swept the mountaintop, gathering my long coat in its arms. I pressed myself against the arch, for a moment not processing the miracle I was witnessing.

  There was no air.

  I called out for Valka, but no answer came.

  “My lord?” One of the soldiers stood in the hall behind. “Is everything all right?”

  “Did you feel it?” I asked. “The wind?”

  The man cocked his head, voice flattened by the suit. “Wind, sire?”

  It was happening again.

  CHAPTER 67

  THE SUMMONS

  “DID YOU SEE IT yet?” Captain Corvo’s holograph asked me. The captain was still in orbit, Durand, Halford, and Aristedes alongside her, their four ghosts hovering life-size in the camp suite’s holography booth.

  “You know I have,” I said, uncrossing my legs to lean forward.

  I sat upon a low stool on the edge of the booth, image transmitted to orbit with the usual second or two of lag. Valka sat behind me—just out of frame—with Prince Alexander not far off. My young charge had spent most of those first three years on Annica in fugue, but we’d taken him out, thinking it wise that he should see the truth. Valka and I led him, wide-eyed, through the ruined city and its strange halls.

  That had been before the summons came.

  It lay paused before me, Sir Friedrich Oberlin’s—now Director Friedrich Oberlin’s—image frozen mid-sentence, dossiers and reports projected in the black glass of the console to me and the ghosts of my four officers.

  Casualty reports. Star charts. Video footage transmitted via the datasphere sat grid.

  The records of the crushing defeat at Marinus.

  The Veil had fallen and with it—though the rest would be slow in falling—the entire Imperial presence in the Norman Expanse. The freeholders were on their own, and few dozen colonies. Without Marinus to act as a central hub and critical trade nexus—like Gododdin—the region could not resupply itself. Troops could not be moved from front to front as the Cielcin attacked. Logistics became difficult—perhaps impossible—and most people fail to understand just how many battles and wars are won by logistics.

  Castrametation, just as Lorian had said.

  “They’re ordering us to join the fleet at Berenike,” said Bastien Durand. In a rare twist, the fellow had removed his glasses. He looked young without them. “They’re planning an expedition to retake Marinus.”

  “They’ll be a while gathering their forces,” I said.

  “It’ll take the better part of a century to mass the fleet at Berenike,” Corvo agreed.

  “Seventy-eight years,” Durand said. “Oberlin says they mean to launch in ISD 16710.”

  “I read the dispatch,” I said. Berenike was on the road to Marinus, a colonial supply depot and Legion fortress world that had played Marinus’s role in Imperial conquest and expansion before Marinus had. All ships making for the freeholds and the inner rim followed that ancient road through Gododdin and the Centaurine provinces, through Berenike, to the Veil and Marinus. It was following that road that had called the Cielcin down upon us centuries ago, for beyond Marinus lay Cressgard—burned now to glass to erase the Cielcin and the holocaust they’d visited upon that once-green world. “Berenike,” I repeated. I had been through Berenike before—as I had Gododdin—but I had never set foot there. “How quickly can we get there?”

  Durand glanced at Corvo, and the captain answered in her gruff way, “Too slow.”

  Halford cleared his throat. The night captain was clearly still uncomfortable around the main crew. “We’re closer to Berenike than we were to Colchis. Our flight here carried us most of the way around the core, so if we wrap around . . . sixty years at full burn, maybe?”

  I raised one eyebrow. It was less time than I’d expected, given the long bar of the galaxy’s core lay between us and we would have to sail around. The practical wisdom was that flying through the core was a fool’s errand. The stars were too numerous and too close together to fly through at warp.

  Not answering at once, I ran my hand over the console, swiping through images of the ruined world. Burned cities glowed like the embers of dying fire from the console screen, crashed starships lay broken and shattered on hilltops.

  “Was it Dorayaica?” I asked, changing the subject. Attacking the provincial capital smacked of the Scourge of Earth. The Prophet had been silent since the deep plunge into Imperial territory that cost us the shipyards at Hermonassa, unless one counted Iubalu. I filtered the documents before me as I spoke, finding the reports that the orbital troop storage stations had all been fragged. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers died in fugue without ever knowing it.

  Aristedes massaged his shoulder with one hand. “Or one of his generals.”

  “Its,” I corrected. Once, I might have insisted on the masculine in reference to a Cielcin chieftain, but I’d learned my lesson with Aranata. No sooner had Aristedes spoken did my hand scroll across an image of a black banner snapping from the spar of a crashed Cielcin landing craft, the White Hand plain to see upon its surface.

  Iedyr Yemani.

  Corvo cleared her throat. “What should we do?”

  Not looking either at the ghosts before me or the people present behind, I asked, “This message arrived by telegraph?”

  I could almost hear the confused blinking of my audience’s eyes, but did not raise my own from my contemplation of the carnage. It felt somehow wrong to
avert my gaze from the horror, felt like I needed to see.

  “Yes, lord,” Halford answered.

  I glanced at the night captain and the other officers. “Then they won’t be expecting us for some time.” The decision made itself, and I clenched my fist against the console top, closing down the reel of images beneath my fingertips. “We have come too far to turn back empty-handed. We are not done here.”

  “We can’t!” Alexander stirred behind me, and I turned to see him closing the gap between us. “Sir Hadrian! You saw the footage, we have to go!”

  I fixed the princeling with my firmest stare, and the boy’s progress halted as if someone had pinned him in place. Putting Alexander from my mind, I turned back to the holograph. “Signal Forum. Tell them we are en route from Colchis. That will buy us time.”

  “Colchis?” Otavia echoed.

  Aristedes was grinning. The quantum telegraph relied on pairs of entangled particles to achieve instantaneous communication at any distance, relying on relays to transmit messages between endpoints not sharing a matched particle pair. It wasn’t possible to divine our location from a telegraph reply. When Switch had summoned Bassander Lin to Vorgossos, he had had to manually reveal our location—a feat made possible only because Brethren had been watching the situation from the planet below and allowed word to get out.

  “That should give us the time we need to conclude our affairs here and still make Berenike before we’re expected there.” I had told no one—not even Valka—of the wind that had swept the mountain’s top. I’d kept my silence in part because I knew how ridiculous the story would sound, and because I feared they would believe me. “This is the place, ladies, gentlemen. This is the planet.”

  “The planet for what?” asked Halford.

  “I don’t know,” I said, and sensed something huge and shapeless move beneath those words. “I have no more answers than you do,” I said simply. “But I have worked too hard and for too long to get here to leave empty-handed.”

  “But we could already be too late!” Alexander nearly shouted. He’d overcome my glare and lay a hand on the back of my seat to rotate the console’s chair. I planted a foot on the ground to halt my progress.

  I did not raise my voice, did not turn to look up at the young prince. “Step away, Alexander. Thank you.”

  “You’re making a mistake.”

  “So are you,” I said, voice gone cold and far away. Focusing my attention on the officers in the booth before me, I asked, “What say you?”

  Unsurprisingly, Lorian spoke first, spreading his hands in their silver wire braces. “I’m for it,” he said. “I don’t see much harm in staying. We could finish here in ten years and still be early.”

  Halford was nodding, but said nothing. I could hardly blame him. Of all the Tamerlane’s officers, he’d had the least contact with me personally and so the least contact with all this difficult business. The Quiet were strange to him—though perhaps not so strange as they were to me, who knew them best of all the company. Better then to stay, well . . . quiet.

  The greater part of wisdom is in silence.

  “I agree with your prince,” Durand said, ever the prescriptivist. “Without Marinus, the Veil won’t hold. Our people,” he put a hand on Otavia’s shoulder, “our people are doomed. I’ve no love for the Empire, but the freeholds can’t fight the Cielcin alone.” I had never heard the fellow speak so candidly. Bastien Durand was the sort of man who guarded his thoughts like gold, kept his mind in shadows because the shadows were safe. Officious, efficient, the consummate middle manager, he was and had been as effective as he was invisible. So often as I have written this account I have forgotten he was even there. But he looked at me then, and I believe I saw him for the first time. “We have to go, my lord, I beg you. My home on Algernon is not two dozen light-years from Marinus. My family may be long dead by now, but it is my home.” He leaned forward in his seat, hands clasped between his knees. Beside him, Otavia Corvo was strangely silent, her eyes downcast. Did she feel the same? She must. This was like Vorgossos again. Like Jinan and Bassander.

  “We will go,” I said. A brief and terrible flash of relief spiderwebbed across Durand’s face. But I was not finished. “We will go when we are done here.” A raised a hand to forestall the First Officer’s protest. “Bastien.” I do not think I had ever called the fellow by his given name. “Bastien, there are things involved in all this I do not understand. You’ve seen what happened to me. You know people who saw it with their own eyes. With their own eyes!” I stood then, in part to underscore my sentiment but in part also to get away from Alexander, who yet loomed behind my chair. “I do not understand it. But I do know that it is happening for a reason. If I can find out what that reason is, then maybe I can make a difference in this damned war. No one has given more to this fight than me. We can avenge Marinus, and if we cannot save your homeworld, then we can avenge it, too.” Speaking of vengeance made me think of owl-eyed Cassian Powers, the Avenger of Cressgard, and despite my utter seriousness I felt for a moment that I was half a fool.

  Durand’s eyes narrowed. “That is cold comfort, my lord.”

  “I understand your frustrations, Bastien,” I said, and sensing that Alexander was about to interject, raised a hand to silence him. Even as I did so, I heard him choke off the words he’d been reaching for. “And yours, Your Highness. But consider what we know. I died on the Demiurge.”

  “That’s true?” Alexander asked, voice small.

  “It’s true,” I said, glancing to Valka. There was no point hiding it, not anymore. “All of it. And we know the Cielcin understand things about all of this.” I gestured at the dark walls of the unit and at the Annican sands beyond. “The Quiet. The Watchers. Leopards, lions, and wolves. They have the tactical advantage over us. Better intelligence. We are losing, friends. Vorgossos, Aptucca, that business with Iubalu . . . we may be winning battles, but we are losing the war. We’ve lost an entire sector now, and yes—your freeholds will pay for it. I may not be able to stop that. We may not be able to stop that. But we are here. Now. Now!” I slammed my fist against the console, making the images flash back onto its surface and dance. The holographs flickered in their booth. “I do not know what we will find here, but we are here for a reason. I am alive for a reason. I ask you all to have faith. We are this close!” I held my gloved fingers—the false fingers of my mutilated hand—mere microns apart. “Leave me here if you must go then, and come back. But here I remain.”

  My speech concluded, I stood silent watching the others, chin thrust out. I was commander of this expedition, and counted each of them my friends. But I would not be the first lord or captain to fall to mutiny, or the first man in history to be betrayed.

  I might have been another, for in that moment my fate and the fate of my quest—and perhaps even the fate of humanity itself—lay, though I did not quite see it until after the moment passed, in the hands of Otavia Corvo.

  May we all be so fortunate.

  “Five years,” she said. It was not the response an Imperial officer would give, was not obedience. But it was not mutiny either, nor was it the lizard-brained demand of a union mob. Hers was not the demand of some disgruntled subordinate holding a club over her betters, nor the mealy-mouthed request of a sycophant.

  It was the offer of an equal. Of a friend.

  “Five years,” I agreed, and would have shaken her hand if not for the thousands of miles that lay between us. It was perhaps enough time. It was certainly enough to still arrive early at Berenike, early enough perhaps to satisfy the rational Bastien and even impulsive Alexander.

  It would have to be.

  The call ended shortly thereafter, and I stood still facing the empty holography well.

  “We should go now,” Alexander said again.

  “This is enough from you, Your Highness,” I said.

  “Hadrian . . .” Valka interjected,
speaking for the first time since the call started. She’d been uncharacteristically quiet, and was uncharacteristically defending the prince then, reminding me to check myself.

  I did, and took a deep breath. “I must ask you not to challenge me in front of my officers, Alexander,” I said, voice level. Only then did I turn. The prince had filled out in his time with us, some of the softness had boiled away, and he seemed more sure of himself.

  Too sure.

  “But you’re making a mistake,” he said. “You saw the reports, Sir Hadrian. We just lost the Veil. We don’t have time for this!” Alexander flailed his arms at the environment pod around us, at the dining space and the low couch, the airlock with its suits hanging in niches, the door to the bedchamber. “You died? I thought Halfmortal was just because you’d survived so many battles. But these people really believe it?”

  “ ’Tis true, Alexander,” Valka’s voice came from behind, and the prince whirled. “I was there.”

  The prince spun to face her. “Not you, too. This is ridiculous. There is a war on, we just lost an entire territory, and you’re digging in the dirt on the edge of nowhere! Why?” He looked back over his shoulder at me. Gesturing to Valka, he added, “Does she have you on so short a leash?”

  I took a step toward the boy, and was pleased to see him recoil. Good. He had not unlearned all wisdom. I almost, almost seized him by the environment suit. There was a bracket just above the sternum on the prince’s suit for attaching a safety line that would just about make a handle, and in Annica’s nearly one-gee gravity I could lift him with one hand.

  But again, Valka checked my advance. “We could show him.” She’d spoken in Panthai to be sure the prince did not understand.

  I shook my head, and answering her in the same tongue, I said, “It’s on the Tamerlane.”

  Valka frowned. “ ’Tis in my head, too.”