Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  I let this jibe about Anaïs Mataro—about whom I’d not thought in years—drift by unremarked upon. “We might try remapping the lower entrance,” I suggested. “It’s not been quite two years, but there might be subtle changes.”

  “ ’Tis worth a try,” Valka said. “But we’re not like to see much change, you know? Maybe none.”

  She was walking normally again, trailing one hand along the wall. The glowsphere kept close behind, throwing the anaglyphs into relief. The beams of my own suit lamps bobbed as I moved, following Valka’s swaying progress. She was just barely visible, a dozen paces or more ahead, right where the bend of the tunnel might hide her from view.

  “Maybe we could leave mapping drones here,” she said. “Set up a transmitter. Do we have extra telegraph equipment aboard?” It was almost as if I were not there anymore. Valka had entered a proper dialogue with herself. “Of course, ’twould take eons to transmit something the size of these renderings via telegraph . . . but if we have the technology . . .”

  One of the cross-spars at the top of the gravitometer caught on the inner wall of the tunnel and pinged, and I half-dropped the machine. Valka seemed not to notice, for her monologue did not abate in my ears. She vanished round the bend before me, light retreating with her while I stooped to recover the fallen instrument, pausing to check that the clasps were all in place and nothing was damaged.

  Everything looked all right. I checked the delicate pendulum, ensuring the mechanism had stayed snug between two of the tripod’s legs. A short scratch marred one gunmetal thigh. I rubbed a finger over it.

  “I don’t think anything broke,” I said, hoisting the tripod over my shoulder once more and securing it against my neck, checking this time that the cross-spars stood vertically. “Valka?”

  Only slowly did it dawn on me that she’d been silent for a good dozen seconds. That ought not to be. The short distance she must have traveled was not far enough to cut off our suit radios.

  Or her light.

  “Valka!” I leaped forward, rounding the corner, picking up speed as I went. “Valka!”

  The hallway turned, but no light came. Glyphs sped by, and the gravitometer bounced against my shoulder. I knew the way. There were no side doors, no passages, no branchings for perhaps half a mile before the route ran back to a steep and stairless climb to the upper gate.

  The hall was not supposed to straighten, not supposed to run for so long it vanished into a darkness absolute as hell. Even my suit’s sonar could not show me the end. The walls converged into infinity.

  And Valka was gone. Or I was gone from her.

  “Valka!” I called her name again.

  No one answered.

  There was only quiet.

  Quiet . . . and the gentle rush of wind.

  CHAPTER 69

  THE HIGHEST PLACE

  “VALKA?” I CALLED AGAIN. There was nothing wrong with my transmitter. It was the world that had changed. The wind blew again, beckoning from the tunnel ahead, pushing at my high collar and the tails of my coat.

  Holding the cross-beam, I shouldered the device and trudged on, marking the sensor readouts in the corners of my vision. The temperature had increased by nearly five degrees, warm enough that—had there been air—a man might walk in but a light jacket.

  “Valka?”

  Still nothing.

  I pressed on, walked for what felt like half a mile with no change. The gravitometer was not heavy, but the cross-beam cut into my shoulder. How far had I come? I looked back, but the darkness had closed in behind, and the bend in the hall was lost. My universe was a straight line, a single dimension that seemed to march to infinity, limited only by my light.

  What else was there to do?

  I walked on, the only sounds the clatter of my boots and the rasp of my breathing.

  “Valka!”

  Eventually, I ceased to call out. Valka was gone, but gone where? I remembered my encounter in Calagah, the way the door to the vision chamber had opened out of nowhere. Had we crossed some threshold in time, perhaps? Opened some path previously hidden? Or was this something else entirely?

  The hall ran for miles, or so it seemed. It did not bend or stray, but held the course straight as any laser, running tangent to the circular hall I’d known. I thought of the branching rivers of light I’d seen and swum, the way they shifted and split, showing a million million possible tomorrows; here dividing, there flowing back into the same channel. The tunnels felt to me like those watery passages, the way they ran and changed.

  I trudged on, knowing that I was like a tram upon its rail, for I felt certain that were I to turn back I would come not upon the hall of slanting pillars, but to wherever the path willed. I knew—and cannot say how I knew—that either way was forward.

  Always forward.

  Light ahead.

  Light.

  The sight of it pulled me forward, and—gravitometer still over one shoulder—I hurried toward it. Ahead an archway loomed, round as all the rest, but mighty, for as I approached the door the close walls and ceiling of the tunnel fell away, and the floor of the corridor became a narrow bridge that ran out straight into clear air, striking out away from the mountain across the open, rusty plains.

  It wasn’t possible. We’d scanned the site a thousand times. There was no bridge.

  Without banister or rail of any kind it was, a mile long or more, but no wider than the hall had been, wide enough that a man standing in its center might reach his hands over the edge to either side, and I was glad of the lack of wind, for at our height a gust was sure to knock me from that span and send me falling nearly a mile to the ground below.

  I lingered a moment in the shadow of the archway, eyes tracing the bridge where it ran across the wasteland to where another mountain rose in the distance, mightier even than the mountain which Valka and I had explored for so long. Peering up, I could not see the Sparrowhawks circling on patrol, and switched comm channels. “Sphinx Flight, this is Marlowe. Do you copy?”

  Silence.

  “Sphinx Flight, this is Marlowe. Are you there?”

  No answer came.

  “Valka?” I stepped out onto the bridge, knowing as I did so that none of it had been there when we’d arrived on Annica. Narrow as it was, the bridge was easily a mile off the ground—far further down the mountain than the level I thought Valka and I had been on—and ran across the uneven desert below, supported curving pillars, each like half a thin and graceful arch.

  “Sphinx Flight,” I tried again, “this is Marlowe. Have you got visuals on a bridge extending from the . . .” I broke off, checking the sky and the course of the sun, “west side of the mountain?”

  Still no answer came. Shouldering my burden, I turned back, afraid of the long walk and fall from the bridge. I went back along the hall, back into darkness where the last of the sunlight failed behind me . . .

  . . . and found a wall barring my path.

  The too-long hallway was gone, sealed behind black stone.

  I turned back.

  The sunlight fell cold and colorless about me, red as the red landscape, and so added nothing. Looking back, I saw the arching columns above the lower gate rising black against the natural stone far below.

  The campsite was gone.

  My chest tightened, blood and adrenaline forced into every extremity with such force it ached. “Valka!” I called out again, toggling channels via my helmet’s heads-up display. “Sphinx Flight? Tamerlane? Anyone? Can anyone hear me?”

  They were gone. Everything was gone. And there was nothing to do but walk.

  More mountains stood upon the horizon, crowding in like hunched colossi. I moved out upon the bridge, marveling at the way they had all appeared as if from nowhere. Was I still on Annica?

  Lingering near the midway point of that mighty span, I looked round. The mountain th
at before had shown only a rough landscape of red stone and dust capped with the frost of frozen airs was utterly changed. Mighty terraces stood upon its face. Black-walled and beautiful, crowned with towers like the crumbled teeth of giants.

  There were giants, too.

  Faces vast as starships watched from the mountainsides. Impassive and expressionless, their flat eyes—carved in black stone—watched me as I went.

  I came at last to the new mountain, and climbed. No path was there, nor stairs. Only the ruins of that once and future empire ruinous about me. Black canals split the desert below, high-walled, deep, and dry. I climbed for what seemed like hours. My arms turned to lead and I was forced to use the gravitometer as a kind of staff. The sun did not seem to move, and hung always in the east and high above the mountain I had come from, as though time were standing still.

  Onward I climbed, higher and higher, not really knowing why, knowing somehow that up was forward, feeling the soulless pressure of those stone faces watching me. How high I climbed or for how long none can say, for no man before me had made that climb, nor any after.

  * * *

  So high was the summit that from its edge I might turn back and see the curve of the world bend back at the horizon. Upon that lofty height the air was so thin the stars peered out of endless night. There heavens and earth met upon the summit of the world, the highest place.

  The highest place.

  Brethren’s voice sounded in my ear, the memory so sharp and present in my exhaustion I almost expected to find pale hands crawling across frost-rimed stone toward me. I was going mad. My legs screamed with exhaustion from the climb, and I leaned against the gravitometer, thrusting its legs through the rime and deep into the soft earth.

  I fell to my knees, exhausted, hungry, utterly spent. I would have been dehydrated were it not for the osmosis plant in the thigh packs recycling my body’s wastewater. Had I been days climbing? Or only hours?

  For nothing.

  There was nothing on the mountain. Not even the wind. I rolled onto my back, longing for my bed in the camp environment pod, for our rooms aboard the Tamerlane. For food.

  “Valka?” I had been so sure when I climbed that mountain. So sure I was meant to. I had been given no other choice.

  Stars wheeled overhead, and I think perhaps I dreamed. The sun—faint and flickering as a dying bulb—hung fixed in the firmament, watchful as a lidless eye. How long had I been without food? Two days? Three?

  If I sat up, I could see the faces of the mountains below watching me, blank eyes staring at me and through me and past me. The shadow of the instrument that I’d carried all this way—that had supported me in my final ascent—fell across my face.

  Light. Darkness. Silence. Night. Day.

  Always forward, I told myself, but did not move. How long had I been lying there? Get up. Get up! The voice that sounded in my ear sounded like my father. Like Gibson’s. Like my own.

  Seek hardship.

  Brethren’s voice joined them, whispering in my ear, and almost I fancied I heard the tread of white hands slapping on the stone around.

  Seek them at the highest place.

  At the bottom of the world.

  The bottom of the world . . . I tried to sit up and failed. My strength was gone from me.

  Get up! It was the same inner voice—the same spirit—that had ordered me to stand before Aranata in my final moments. I tried. Tried and succeeded only in rolling onto my belly, my face in the frost.

  I could not stand. So I crawled instead. I could go a little higher. The peak of the mountain was a simple crown of bare stone, its surface thick with frost. I crawled, and then I dragged myself toward the summit of that mountain that had not been there when we arrived. At last, I could go no further, and lay myself upon the mountaintop. I prayed for sleep to come, or Death. Alone or hand in hand. The mountain would be my pyramid, my tomb, and no one would ever find me there.

  My last thoughts were of Valka and the Tamerlane. Where had they gone? Where had I gone? I saw the faces of the mountains watching me with black eyes and green. Dreaming, I saw them stand and bow their mighty heads in silent vigil. But I blinked and they were gone, and the mountains slept beneath me like the wreck of empires broken upon the sand of Annica’s endless desert.

  Face in the dirt, I slept and drifted in and out of consciousness often long enough only to drink from the water tube in my mask. To try to stand. And fail.

  A faint breeze brushed my coat and rasped in my suit’s audio pickups. I think it was the noise that woke me. A breeze again where there was no air. I opened my eyes, beheld the dirt and frost. The vile dust. The bottom of the world.

  And there it was, impossible as it is to believe.

  There upon the mountaintop on that airless, waterless world, amid frost beneath the gaze of a dim sun, grew a single white flower.

  For a moment, I thought I was mad. Then I thought it was the blossom of the Galath tree that I had taken from the Cloud Gardens of the Peronine Palace on Forum. Had it fallen from my coat?

  But no. This flower was something new, something growing from the cold and lifeless soil. Reaching out, I touched it with gloved fingers. It was real.

  So often we don’t see the truth because we won’t look low enough, Gibson had said at our parting. I could look no lower than the dirt. And looking, I had found a miracle. The wind picked up again and whirled about the summit. Fingers still touching the impossible flower, I looked up, craning my neck to see.

  Hadrian . . .

  The word was barely a whisper, a noise carried on that wind that should not be.

  Hadrian . . .

  I put my hands beneath me, and found—to my surprise—that I’d the strength to find my knees. To stand. Turning back I saw where I left the gravitometer standing by the edge of the mountain and the landscape unrolled beyond. The watchful mountains and the crumbling terraces above the first mountain I had climbed, the bridge and pillars that marked the entrance by our vanished camp.

  “I can hear you!” I told the Quiet, and spread my arms. “Here I am!”

  CHAPTER 70

  THE AGONY

  THE WIND ROARED IN answer, scouring the mountaintop with such force that—helmeted as I was—I raised an arm to shield my eyes.

  Hadrian.

  “You called!” I exclaimed, wheeling about as if I might track the gale with my eyes. “I came!”

  Take off your mask.

  My hands were moving before I was fully aware of it, and I stopped their progress. I could see the indicators in the bottom left of my suit’s entoptics. There was still no air outside my suit’s protective shell.

  There was nothing. And it was very, very cold.

  “If I do that,” I said, “I’ll die.”

  Silence.

  I had come so far. Too far, in truth, for I was not sure I could survive the journey back. I had bent all my efforts for so many years, fought and killed and served the Empire, all to stand on that mountaintop. Looking round, I saw the faces on the stone mountains encircling us. My eyes searched for the lonely flower, but it was gone. Torn out in the wind? Or had I only imagined it?

  Was I going mad?

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  Silence.

  “What do you want from me?” I asked to no avail. “Tell me!”

  The silence was deafening. I wheeled on the spot, taking in the crumbling splendor all around me. I swore. There was nothing for it.

  I gripped my wrist-terminal with my opposite hand. “Fear is a poison,” I told myself, and tried to master the panic in my heart.

  Fingers keyed the orders into my terminal, sending warning alarms blaring inside my suit so loud they nearly deafened me. Grinding my teeth, I found the hardswitch behind one ear, exhaling as my helmet seals broke and the mask and helm unfolded like the petals of an iron flower
, exposing my face as the material collapsed into my collar.

  Nothingness hit me like a freight tram, driving what little air remained from my lungs. I tried to breathe, but there was nothing there. Adrenaline’s cold fingers closed about my heart and squeezed. I felt the slap of cold and the steady drum of blood running through my veins. Panic seized me, and I fell, vision going dark.

  I must have been centuries falling. Eyes veiled in gray mist, I lost sight of the mountaintop, my only sense of place the double impact of my knees striking stone, chest heaving.

  Air.

  There was air.

  I stayed on hands and knees a long while, staring at the ground. Ages passed before I could see it, and I did not move. When at last I could breathe more easily, I rasped, “Was that . . . some kind of test?” I looked up, and my next words died on my tongue, for the sky had changed. Gone was the black of night and the subtle shimmer of starlight. The same red sun hung miniscule in the sky, but it shone somehow brighter and more warmly, its radiance spread through a pale, white daylight that veiled the face of the stars. “Where are we?”

  Behind the stage.

  I had almost expected to get no answer. The voice—coming as it seemed from a spot just above my shoulder—startled me, and I scrambled to my feet.

  “I don’t understand!” I said. “I have so many questions! I’ve come so far!” Still searching for the source of that soundless voice, I spun round, one hand flitting to my sword. “The mountains! The bridge, the flower! I—” My words died on my tongue.

  Standing on the edge of the mountain’s top—right where I had ascended and right where the flower had grown—stood a massive finger of stone. Half a hundred feet tall it stood, and perhaps ten across. The marker was black as the stone of the ruins below and covered in the same circular marks, some small as coins, some large as dinner plates. It had not been there before.