Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  The ships did not belong.

  “What’s going on?” I demanded. “Have they moved?”

  Lorian Aristedes—who from his stooped posture and hooded eyes seemed not to have slept in eons—answered me. “They haven’t moved. They’re still in their towers, waiting.”

  I pushed past a pair of junior logothetes, advancing toward the false windows that showed the vista beyond and below the wall. Lorian was right, the Cielcin hadn’t moved. Their fleet of landing craft still stood like a forest of alien trees along the rim of the landing field, black and implacable, unmoved by the wind. Turning, I spared a glance for the ruined city behind, smoke rising to lick the sky.

  Above it all, the white sun rode high and silent, light untouched by the burning of our world, touching all. Though I beheld only an image of that morning sun, the pristine beauty of it smote my heart. There was still light, higher and brighter than any evil or act of man could deface. Though hell had come to Berenike, our world was not yet ended.

  The ground shook beneath us, and I gripped the edge of the holograph plate. A rush of voices filled the room at my back as consoles began to chime.

  “Movement on the field below!” cried one of the men.

  I rounded from the sun and the burning city and turned back toward the landing field.

  A solitary figure approached from the arrayed vessels, striding out into the emptiness between siege towers and wall. It was not Bahudde—though that the vayadan-general lived I had no doubt. It was a single Cielcin clad in ceremonial white, its cloak and robes snapping and pushing in the hollow airs. Clouds stood overhead, and a colorless light fell through them, muting all the world beneath that distant sun to blacks and whites and dull grays.

  “Enhance,” I said, moving to stand before the false window.

  The image grew, tracked a moment until I beheld the figure plain as though it stood a dozen yards away. Dust and smoke burned about it, threading the fingers of its crown of thorns. One of its two primary prongs curled back and inward, the other straight and tall, giving it a curiously lopsided appearance. Bands of pale gold encircled the horns, hung with chains and gemstones black as night. It wore no mask, only a pair of ornamented goggles with slits over the eyes that gleamed dully red even over the camera feed.

  In one clawed hand it clutched the ceremonial spear, tiny silver bells and chimes tied to cords beneath the headpiece. Here then was a coteliho, a kind of herald and cornicen come to announce the doom of its master: the Scourge of Earth. Here then was the mouth of Syriani Dorayaica, the Prophet, the Prince of Princes, the great enemy of man.

  Some ceremonial number of steps having been taken, the herald stopped and thrust its staff toward the heavens. The fetish rattled, and I saw the familiar broken circle symbol—like two curling horns—flash atop the spear. And between those curling prongs of metal, wrought of the same iridium by vile and detailed craftsmanship, was the open-fingered sculpture of a six-fingered hand.

  The coteliho offered no words, for where it stood in no man’s land neither its own people nor we could hope to hear its speech or the chiming of its bells. But I saw its fanged jaws part and hinge forward as I had first seen Prince Aranata do so long before.

  We could not hear its scream, but we heard the screams that joined with it. All at once that mighty host of the Pale lifted up one voice and shook the very clouds. And from atop each of the hundred-and-more of their dark towers a snapping banner unfurled, not black but a deep, startling blue, each displaying the clawed White Hand that had been the last sight of so many million men across the galaxy. I felt certain then that the heart of every man who held the Storm Wall must break with terror, and the mettle in them melt, for I knew that at that very moment our last defenders each looked out from the fortifications with ashes where their hearts should be. And if they did not break then, surely they broke the moment after, for all in time there arose an evil chanting from the earth below in time to the stamping of feet.

  “Velnun! Velnun! Velnun!”

  “The hell are they doing?” Pallino asked, keeping his voice low where he stood beside me. The chant was like a distant thunder heard through the walls, barely discernible. But I knew what they chanted by the shape of the herald’s mouth on the holograph plate.

  “Velnun! Velnun! Velnun wo!”

  “What are they saying?” Aristedes asked, half-rising from his seat.

  In a dry voice, I answered him. “He comes.”

  The herald raised its staff toward the Storm Wall once more, and once more the vast army of the Pale shrieked from the shadows of their landing craft. And then something terrible happened, something I could not have predicted.

  Night fell in mid-morning, as though some god-like hand had blotted out the sun.

  Men gasped and panicked cries sounded on our comms. On the field below, the Cielcin roared again.

  “What happened?” an officer asked aloud, terror evident in her tone. I imagined what Leonid Bartosz might say, had he still been among the waking.

  “The sun!” came the voice of one of the techs. “Look what they’ve done to the sun!”

  “Black planet, what is it?”

  “It must be massive!”

  Horror waited and watched in the Dark beyond the stars, and in its time had come to that smoldering city of man. Just how vast it was, no man could say—for no man had seen its black face and lived to tell of it. I alone of all men yet living have stood upon its surface and trod its evil halls. I had seen Cielcin worldships before, fought in warrens carved out in the hollow bowels of an asteroid, but this! This was something on a scale I could scarce imagine. A moon had appeared in Berenike’s sky, and the sudden shock of its presence had shaken the shallow seas and set the whole world to shuddering.

  “I’ve seen smaller planets!” Lorian whispered.

  That we had no sign of its coming until it blocked the sun was a sign of just how devastated our sensor network was. It should not have existed at all—for surely something so massive could not sail between the stars—yet there it was! I knew it not then, but for the first time I looked with my own eyes upon that greatest citadel of the enemy.

  Fortress of iron. Palace of bone. Castle of ice and torment.

  Dharan-Tun.

  How many soldiers waited aboard or how many slaves toiled in its depths I cannot guess, nor could I wonder in that black instant in what age or place or by what hands it was forged. I could only stand slack-jawed in mingled awe and horror at the sight and the pale limn of the sun shining about its edge.

  A small voice murmured, “I guess we know what they were waiting for,” and it was a full five seconds before I realized the voice was my own.

  Marshaling my wits, I rounded on the officers in the room at my back. “Shoot the herald!” I said, speaking from impulse. The officers around me all hesitated, swaying as if stunned. “Are you deaf?” I howled. “Fire on that Pale!”

  A moment after, something coughed through the Storm Wall’s superstructure, and a line of smoke and fire blazed across no man’s land and struck that solitary figure. Not a plasma shot, not a bullet. A missile. A rosette flowered on the tarmac, a dull and angry red. Inky smoke pulled away from the smooth plain, revealing cracked concrete and scorch marks.

  I nodded to myself, satisfied.

  A piercing wail sounded from the Cielcin host arrayed against us, and as I watched bright flashes filled the heavens above. A moment later sirens sounded on several consoles.

  “Direct hit on the wall shields above Whitechapel Gate!” one of the technicians shouted.

  Lorian kicked his chair sideways and craned his neck to peer at the young lady. “What did they hit us with?”

  “Don’t know, sir!” she said. “Vaporized on the shield curtain. Some kind of slug.”

  The little man hissed through his teeth. “Bastards are throwing rocks at us.”

 
“They won’t throw anything too big,” Bancroft said. “They know we’re shielded.” The commandant had been strangely silent for some time, shocked I think into a species of defeatist catatonia not unlike the demon that had gripped poor Bartosz.

  Commander Aristedes snarled, “Right, then. We’ll be playing this one bloody damn close to the chest. There’s nothing we can do about that worldship.”

  “Even if the fleet returns there’s nothing we can do about that worldship,” dared one junior man.

  For a moment, I considered ordering the man from the command center. Rage is blindness, I told myself, and paused a moment to master my breathing. “This is not the end,” I said, speaking just loud enough to be heard. “Do you hear me? This is not the end! I have not given my life to this fight once already to die cowering here like a worm beneath a rock!”

  The silence that followed was punctuated only by the distant howling of the Cielcin at their landing field. For an instant, no one in the command center moved or made a sound.

  Then it happened again.

  “Halfmortal,” one man whispered.

  “Halfmortal.” Another.

  I cut across the whispers, halted them in their tracks. “Do you want to die?” I rounded on the lot of them, cape swirling about me as I turned. “Do you?” I waited them out, waited for them all to realize the question was not rhetorical. These were officers, technicians of the ODF, not fighters. These were soldiers like Valka had been: men and women enlisting with little expectation of violence. Until recently, Berenike had been a minor transit hub on the road to the frontier. They had not expected to be fighting for their lives against the largest host the Cielcin had ever brought to the field. They had expected to live their short, plebeian lives before trouble came to their shores—if it ever came.

  “Fuck no!” Pallino said. Bless him.

  “Do you want to die? I said!” I nearly shouted, taking two steps into the room.

  “No!” came the choral response.

  “Of course not!” I said. “Our fleet will be here in two days! Our angels of retribution! Two days!” I held my fingers up—the first and last in the old warding gesture against evil. “We can survive for two days.”

  Then the voice of one man was lifted up from the rear of the dim command center. “Are the stories they tell of you true, lord?” I never saw his face. “Did you really die?”

  I was about to deny it again, to say that no, that story was simply foolishness.

  But Pallino spoke. “Aye, it’s true. All of it.”

  The silence rushed in again and filled the low chamber. The gruff chiliarch had lit a spark in the men about us, an electric tension. In those times when he was silent, all was dark. Something had changed. Looking left and right with my strange vision across that crashing wave of time, I saw the answer I should give—or thought I should give—and gave it.

  “I will die again if I must.”

  Snatches of the uproar about me filtered through, voices tumbling, rising and falling over and under one another as men stood and turned and swore.

  “That’s impossible!”

  “He’s mad!”

  “—expects us to believe that . . .”

  “Halfmortal! Halfmortal!”

  “It’s true? It can’t be true . . .”

  And yet beneath the words and loud doubt the tension lingered, wound up as a spring. Belief, of a kind. Hope. “Enough!” I shouted. “We have work to do. Prepare for battle!”

  The instant the words escaped my lips, a peal of thunder shook the station, and a signal flared. “They fired on our shields again!” one of the technicians said.

  “Bastards’ll have to attack the wall overland if they want in here,” Pallino said.

  “Let them come,” Lorian said coolly. “The wall’s fortifications will hold. And there’s still the colossi.”

  Commandant Bancroft cleared her throat. “Do we have eyes on that . . . that mothership?”

  One of the ODF men answered her. “No ma’am. Orbital Defense grid is gone.”

  Looking out the false windows, I saw streaks of red and pale gold illuminating the artificially darkened sky and knew it to be the wreckage of our fleet. One of those stars is Titus Hauptmann, I remember thinking. The proud lion of the Veil was no more, and it was left to the devil to avenge him.

  The false night flared red with the glare of fire, and looking up I saw a red streak falling from the sky. Not the shriek of weapons and wicked flash of impact, but the blaze and heavy burn of descent engines fighting the inexorable tide of gravity. For a moment, the brightness overpowered the holograph plate’s adjustments and the whole thing whited out. The earth trembled as something far more massive than the siege towers struck the tarmac with the weight of a mountain landing.

  It was a siege tower, but that was not all it was. The behemoth stood on three bowed legs, each a pylon a hundred feet high and bent like the leg of some leaping insect. I recognized it at once, had seen such engines used in battle against our starships to devastating effect.

  Though it was more massive than the siege towers, its central spire was not filled with scahari fighters, but was dominated by a single shaft whose magnetic coils—more than thirty feet in diameter—were designed to accelerate a rod of meteor iron to titanic speeds over a remarkably short distance.

  It was a ram.

  Cielcin engineers had wrought the evil thing to clamp onto the hulls of starships and crack them open. It had been one way to bypass our shields. I had never seen the things deployed on land before, and yet a moment after the first another landed with a crash and the low growl of descent rockets. Then a third.

  “Concentrate fire on those siege engines!” Lorian shouted.

  Red light flashed in the false darkness, and the nearest of the rams burst into flames and fell. I felt a thrill of success rush through me. “What are they trying to do?” I asked. “They can’t hope to use them on the wall . . .”

  “They won’t get close . . .” Lorian said.

  It turned out they didn’t have to.

  Thunder cracked the sky, but the thunder was false as the night. It was the sound of the ram hammering. Hammering against the ground. The tarmac buckled, and the steel beams beneath it bent and cracked as the hammer fell again, opening a yawning gash in the surface. The ram exploded in the following instant—too late.

  Lights flashed on consoles and alarms filled the command center. In a panicked voice, one of the ODF men said, “They’ve breached Terminal G!”

  In a full, deep voice I’d not known him capable of, Lorian Aristedes shouted, “Pull yourself together, man. Are there people in that terminal?”

  “Some of the refugees,” said an older woman in ODF grays who had not quite lost her head.

  “Soldiers?”

  “Captain Lin’s men are nearest,” said a round-faced tactical officer, one of Lorian’s staff. “Guarding the tramway between us and the starport terminals.”

  “Get them out there!” Lorian said. “And order the refugees back before the Pale get their troopers in. Seal what inner doors you can.” He pointed his cane at one of the junior officers. “You. See it done.” The man leaped to obey. Lorian hunched in his seat. “We are going to lose people now.”

  I let those words hang on the air like smoke, and fancied I looked through them down on the ruin before us. Arms crossed, I looked down upon the field, upon the smoldering rams and black forces of the Prophet arrayed behind. Swarms of nahute flew like clouds over the heads of the enemy, visible at this distance only as a kind of flashing shadow, dark against the dark of the eclipted air.

  “We have to send in the colossi,” I said. “And whatever air support we can muster.”

  “Can they fly that side of the Storm Wall?” asked Pallino, speaking for every man in the room.

  Looking square at Lorian, I answered hi
m, “We can’t afford for them not to.”

  The intus nodded and gave the order. “What about the terminal?”

  “Leave the terminal to me.”

  CHAPTER 81

  THE LABYRINTH AGAIN

  DARKNESS AGAIN, BUT NOT the darkest I have known.

  The tramway stank, and the red shine of emergency lights above revealed the sure footprint of humanity. Trash plastered the ceramic tiles: food wrappers, sanitary napkins, bottles, and bits of abandoned clothing. I lingered a moment over a plebeian child’s toy, a plastic doll dressed like a Sollan legionnaire in faceless helm and red tunic, white mask and armor scuffed and soiled. Its owner must have dropped it when the overflow of refugees had been pushed down the tunnels to the starport from the safety of the Storm Wall fortress.

  “Movement ahead!” Pallino shouted, snapping his lance to attention.

  “ ’Tis one of ours!” Valka said, gently pressing the weapon down.

  My own men moved past, forming ranks. The Cielcin could not have reached us so far from the starport—more than three miles of tunnel separated the Storm Wall’s hypogeum from the terminal complex—but it never hurt to be careful.

  A single trooper emerged from the gloom, armor rattling as he ran. He stopped five paces from my foremost guards. “Lord Marlowe!” He snapped a salute. “Captain Lin sent me to escort you. He’s gone on ahead to the starport.”

  “And the refugees?” I wasted no time. They’d only been sent to the starport in the first place because the fortress was already well past capacity. The Deira bunkers had been designed in an age when Deira’s population was a mere four million and projected to double in the coming years. Now it was ten, and space beneath Berenike’s last fortress was cramped and close. It would not be long before water would need rationing, and less time before the stink would be enough to kill.