The Lesser Devil

by Christopher Ruocchio

  He could feel Sabine’s eyes on him. “What?” he said. He knew what. With a sigh he stood, and—moving to the rear of the cart—offered the injured man a hand. Ored took it, and with his other hand under Ored’s arm, Crispin hauled the injured soldier onto the cart. In short order the others were all aboard, and Jean-Louis drew a tarp across the opening, the better to hide them from any prying eyes. Beneath his cape, Crispin kept his sword in his hand, ready for the attack he was just as sure would never come. Kyra peered out past the edge of the tarp, checking the sky. “This valley’s better hidden than I thought,” she said. “You’d think they’d have found the village by now.”

  Sabine leaned to look past the older woman, lips pressed together. “Maybe they think we died in the crash.” Crispin imagined black-clad soldiers picking through the horrors of the wreckage, looking for their bodies in among the mangled corpses of their men. “It could have slowed them down.”

  “Possibly,” Kyra said, letting the tarp fall closed.

  “We’re still not even sure who it was, ma’am,” Ored said, eyes wide in the dim.

  “One of the lesser houses, maybe? Or the Mandari?” Lud suggested, keeping his voice low. Crispin said nothing. He was still thinking of his father’s warning about Aunt Amalia and House Kephalos. If it were House Kephalos, not even these adorators and their ancient pagan god could save them. Nothing could.

  Jean-Louis’s head poked through the front of the compartment from where he sat on the bench behind the horses. “Silencieux! Keep quiet! Unless you want the whole village to know you are here, mm?”

  That moved them to silence, and for a while the only sounds were the slow clop of the horses’ hooves on the village cobbles and the creak of the wheels. From time to time, Crispin would peer out the front of the cart over Father Laurent’s shoulder at the quaint, quiet houses. They passed beneath the arched shadow of the village gate, in whose stones some ancient hand had carved the snarling likeness of a man with the head of a wolf, a cynocephalus. That cursed image put in Crispin’s mind again the stories he had heard of these people, these cultists in the mountains, and he could shake neither the fear he felt of House Kephalos nor the fear of these strange commoners. Were they being led like lambs to the slaughter? Their Father Laurent had said that they were being taken to their church. That temple he had seen at the highest level of Saint Maximus, carved into the very face of the mountain that rose above it.

  Their sanctum.

  The Chantry taught that the ancient gods and cults had required human sacrifices, and that when King William threw down the Mericanii and the machines, he declared that there would be no more such sacrifices. No more human lives would be burned on altars to inhumanity. But was it not that same William—the Firstborn Son of Earth Herself—who had set up these protected places? These reservations for the dead cultures of ancient man?

  “O Holy Mother Earth,” Crispin murmured, “keep us and protect us in Darkness and in the land of strangers.” He blessed himself, making the sign of the sun disc and pressing it to his forehead, lips, and heart.

  And yet the sounds without the covered wagon were only the sounds of any ordinary peasant hamlet. Men and women calling to one another or else speaking in casual tones. The sound of feet and of horseshoes on the cobblestones. He heard a nuncius calling out in that language Laurent had called French, doubtless marking the day and the day’s news. And many times a voice was raised to greet the priest and the young hunter beside him, with shouts of “Abbé! Abbé!” and “Jean-Louis!” and “Bonjour!” Their welcome was as far from the cold salutes his family received when their motorcade rolled through the streets Meidua beneath Marlowe banners a dozen stories high. Far from the chilly blast of silver trumpets and the martial beat of drums. These people loved their eolderman, their leader, their priest. They did not love his father.

  They drew at last within the shadow of that pagan temple, and the horses were pulled to a halt. The sound of feet intruded past the patched canvas walls, and presently Jean-Louis threw back the flap. He had his cape gun slung over his shoulder, and he smiled mightily, “Come on. The church is empty just now. We need to get you in and through to the rectory before the old women start turning up.” He reached up to help Ored down, and then offered a hand to Sabine.

  Another image of the wolf-headed man was carved into the arch of the door, and Sabine asked before Crispin could, “What is that?”

  “St. Christopher,” Father Laurent said, fixing his wide-brimmed hat back on his head as he clambered down from the wagon. “He guards the entrance to the church.” He said this as though it were not at all a strange thing to say. “Protects it from demons.” And here he made a gesture that was familiar to Crispin, pointing with his first and last fingers extended back towards the church yard gate. It was a sign for warding off evil.

  Jean-Louis pushed open the heavy wooden doors and gestured for the others to pass him by, “There’s a door in back and to the right. The rectory’s on a shelf overlooking the village.”

  “What’s a rectory?” one of the soldiers asked.

  “My home,” Laurent said, smiling through his snowy beard. “We can keep you away from any prying eyes while you wait for your people to come find you.” He stopped a moment, and in a tone that would not have been out of place on a Legion decurion snapped, “Jean-Louis Albé! I know you’re not about to carry a loaded weapon into your God’s house.” The adorator froze beneath the shadow of St. Christopher, paused a moment to unsling his rifle and rest it in a niche between two carven pillars of pale stone. “Pardon, Abbé,” he said, and looked down at his feet. “If the rest of you would please leave your weapons at the door,” the old priest said, “you will not need them.”

  “Not need them?” Crispin echoed, suddenly sure these fine people meant to draw them into a trap. He clung to his sword hilt all the harder beneath his long cape. “Not need them?”

  Kyra stepped forward, brushing past Crispin to stand before the old man, by her square posture reminding him that it was she who had the contingent of a half dozen soldiers at her back, and that four of them were hale and whole. “We can’t do that, sirrah. I have a duty to protect the lord and lady, and with respect to you and your religion, I cannot do that unarmed.”

  For a moment, neither the priest nor the soldier moved. Indeed, it seemed to Crispin that they were both soldiers in that moment, their battle lines drawn opposite one another across a vast, flat expanse. Laurent had certainly been a soldier, once, and something of the Imperial iron remained in his bones, for he met Kyra flinty gaze unyielding. Crispin little understood how many times this exchange had played out throughout history: the unarmed priest standing defiant opposite the armed soldier. He little knew how many martyrs were made thus, or how readily Laurent might have joined them.

  Might have joined them, if there were anything at stake more important than etiquette and the placement of arms. But the legionnaire Laurent had been moved inside the priest, and he stepped aside. “Very well. It’s not worth fighting over. This way.”

  A forest of pale columns rose within, supporting rounded arches whose keystones bristled with the relief carvings of devils, of angels, and of human faces. The thin sunlight fell streaming through stained glass windows, and painted statues of men and women both stood solitary in niches like the icons in a Chantry sanctum. Indeed, the whole place recalled a sanctum—or rather the Chantry recalled this ancient faith. An altar stood dead ahead, draped in a white cloth. Though where the Chantry altar stood in the middle of the sanctum beneath the central dome, this altar stood at the back of the temple, behind a rail that separated it from the rows of wooden benches meant for the faithful.

  And above it all hung the cross and the wood-carved body of these pagans’ dead god. Abruptly, Crispin thought of the wooden sculptures that stood beneath the Dome of Bright Carvings in Devil’s Rest, collected from the various townships and hamlets in Father’s demesne. Had any of them come from this place?

  He wa
nted to say something, but the temple hush of the place oppressed him, and their whole party was silent. Laurent and Jean-Louis both genuflected, making a curious gesture. They touched fingers to their foreheads, hearts, and each shoulder in turn, and Crispin was a moment realizing the shape they’d made sketched a cross on each of them. Laurent placed a hand on Sabine’s shoulder, “This way.”

  He led them all under the hanging cross and through a gate in the rail, then back through a door in the rear of the church that opened on what felt more like a cave than a chamber. Wood paneling covered one of the walls, but the flagstones at their feet were uneven, worn by the ritual passage of centuries of slippered feet. There were bottles of wine on racks against one wall, and an antique wardrobe filled with colorful robes: green and violet and white. Laurent opened another door, and presently a wind blew through the old chamber, and they emerged onto a rough stair cut into the pale stone of the mountain.

  “My home is just up here,” he said, not shouting despite the way his back was turned. “I think it’s the oldest part of the village. One of the environmental testing stations the first colonists set up during the days of the terraforming. Bloody prefab structures will outlast the stars, you know? All that metal and heavy plastic.” He grunted with every odd step, and for the first time Crispin noticed the man walked with a limp, dragging his left foot. They ascended through a cutting in the rock carved out plasma burners and onto a narrow stair. Great metal pilings had been driven into the rock at their right, a chain strung between them to act as a meager rail. The cliffs rose to their left. Their going was slow, hampered as they were by Ored’s one leg, but the village slowly fell away beneath them. To the people below, Crispin hoped they were only a line of dark figures climbing up to visit the priest at his residence.

  “Is it much farther?” Sabine asked, pausing a moment to allow Ored and his helpers to catch up. “Your home?”

  “Not far, not far,” Laurent replied, “just around this next bend.” And there it was.

  Despite Laurent’s words, Crispin had been expecting another quaint wooden house like those in the village below. He had not been expecting the sleek, white plastic saucer protruding from the face of the mountain like a pale mushroom from the trunk of some mighty tree. Light still shone from long, narrow windows about its circumference, and the stubs of long-ago ruined comms antennae still bristled from its topside.

  Sabine made an appreciative noise, “You said this was one of the terraforming stations?”

  “That’s right,” Laurent replied, not breaking his awkward stride.

  “Then it must be ten thousand years old!” she said, voice high with astonishment.

  “Well, they were built to last, weren’t they?” Jean-Louis said.

  Laurent stopped at the top of the stair, fiddling with an old keypad beside the recessed lozenge of the door. “They were built to withstand plasma bombardment back when the settlers were reshaping continents,” he said. The door opened, “Come in, then.”

  • • •

  The priest had put them in a large back room that smelled as if no one had used it in centuries. Kyra set those men as could about the business of making the place habitable, which in truth amounted to little more than knocking the dust out of the upholstery while Ored sat facing the door with a plasma burner in his numb hands.

  Crispin stood by the window. Hadrian had always lingered by windows, he recalled. Perhaps something of his older brother had worn off on him. The day was passing, the sun high, the grass so green in the vale below St. Maximus it was almost black, the wheat fields like beds of silver feathers on the back of some hoary colossus.

  “We’ll have a new leg for you when we return to the city,” Sabine was saying, and placed a hand on Ored’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

  Crispin had turned with her words, and a part of him was surprised to find his little sister sitting beside the wounded peltast. Unbidden and despite the trauma of the previous night, Crispin smiled.

  Ored’s face was very pale. He had lost a good deal of blood before the suit could staunch his wound, and in any case he must have been in great pain. But he smiled bravely and nodded, “Thank you, my lady.”

  “We’ll raise Devil’s Rest soon and reinforcements will get here and take us home,” she said, and Crispin could tell she was forcing her voice to be brighter. “They may even have noticed our absence at Artemia already and have sent scouts back along our flight path.”

  “That may not be a good thing,” Crispin said somberly, his grave tone undercutting his sister’s false but airy cheer. Eight pairs of eyes swiveled to face him, and Crispin clasped his hands before his chest, looking at none of them. “Before we left Meidua, Father told me there were rumors that House Kephalos might move against us. They have command access to the planet’s datasphere. They might know about the change in our flight plans.”

  Silence followed this pronouncement, terrible as it was. If it were false, then his saying such a thing was very nearly treasonous—but if it were true, the whole planet would be against them. And if they won free and returned home there may not even be a home to go to, in which case Jean-Louis’s cousin was only riding to Camlen’s Gap to unwittingly hand them to the enemy. For all they knew, Devil’s Rest was already a smoking ruin burned out by plasma fire, and Meidua an ash heap mounded about its walls. Father might be dead, and Crispin’s haughty pronouncement the night before would be made true.

  I am House Marlowe, he had said. Perhaps he was. Him and Sabine—and Hadrian, wherever he was.

  “Do you think Father’s right?” Sabine asked. “Grandmother and Aunt Amalia wouldn’t … would they?”

  “Grandmother? No. But Aunt Amalia might. She’d be just coming into her power. She might think a Delos without House Marlowe would be an easier planet to rule. With us gone she could fold the uranium mining and the Guild back under her, reap the profits and consolidate system power.”

  “But why?”

  Crispin ran tired hands over his scalp, feeling the short bristling of his hair. He needed a wash. The answer came to him unbidden, as if it had fallen out of the sky and onto his head. “Grandmother has always felt indebted to Father for stopping the Orin Rebellion. She was out- system when it happened and Father’s actions helped her maintain her power base here. But suppose you’re Aunt Amalia. Suppose you’re coming into power and you have Father as your neighbor. House Marlowe’s incomes are far greater than House Kephalos’ because we have sole proprietorship of all uranium mining in the system. A monopoly. Father has used that income to build up an armed force in-system nearly equal to Grandmother’s, and Father has a history of using it.” He didn’t have to say much more. Lord Alistair Marlowe had smashed House Orin’s navy, pursued it all the way back to the edge of Delos System, to cloudless Linon: a frigid moon orbiting the gas giant Omphalos. There Father blockaded the moon, and when House Orin begged for mercy, Father had given it. He’d ordered the armored windows of their domed palaces shot out, and House Orin had died gasping in the airless night. Lord Alistair had called that mercy. He might have ordered them tortured.

  When Vicereine Elmira Kephalos had returned from her visit to the Emperor on Forum, she found Lord Alistair seated on her throne in Artemia, a line of coffins spread out beneath the dais.

  “My lady,” he had said, “I have brought House Orin to pay homage to you one last time.” He’d stood then, and stepped aside for the vicereine-duchess to retake her throne. Lord Alistair had been barely more than a child at the time, and already he was the most ruthless and bloody- minded lord in the system.

  Crispin was shaking his head, “If I were Aunt Amalia, I’d be afraid of Father. Everyone was afraid of Father. Except Grandmother.”

  “And Amalia is not our Grandmother,” Sabine agreed. “But do you really think she’d try poine? A house war, Crispin?”

  “She could as easily kill us both and deny Father any further requests for children. Father’s requests wouldn’t make it to His Radiance or the
High College if they didn’t clear with the vicereine. She’s Father’s liege. It would need her approval.”

  But his sister was shaking her head, “Father’s not so old as that. If she did that, he’d have centuries to respond. If Aunt Amalia is behind what happened last night, she’ll have attacked Devil’s Rest, too. Father’s too dangerous to be left alive.”

  She was right about that, Crispin had to admit. He bit his lip, glanced back out the long, narrow window at the vale of St. Maximus. The jagged peaks of the Redtines rose to either side like the broken teeth of a boxer. The silver sun seemed somehow dead in that moment, granting no life to the life it touched. He could see the bell tower of the pagan church below them and all the way to the village walls beyond. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. Some sign, perhaps? But there were no aircraft on the horizon, no carrier pigeon nor dove with olive branch in claw.

  The sky was empty, and—Crispin thought—perhaps their future was, too.

  Chapter 8

  The Lesser Devil

  Much of the day passed without incident, and though to all appearances they were safe, Kyra had them sleep in shifts. The old priest had not bothered them, nor Jean-Louis or the villagers. When it was his turn to sleep, Crispin slept only fitfully, haunted by dreams of dead men hanging from the ceiling—their blood falling like rain. Crispin did not often dream, or at least did not remember his dreams on waking. If the rest were like this dream, he was glad of it.

  Father Laurent appeared around mid-morning with a box of old ration bars. “It’s not much, but I wasn’t prepared to feed so many on short notice,” he said. “I’ve asked Jacqui and her boy to come up and help me make a proper supper this evening for us—seeing as she already knows you’re here.”