The Lesser Devil

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “Yes,” Crispin said, and shut his mouth before his voice could break, and screwed shut his eyes. In a smaller, weaker voice, he said it again: “Yes.” His sister reached out a hand to touch him, but drew it back at once, shyly—or maybe out of fear. “Orin,” he said, with a terrible effort. Crispin nodded at the pavement where the assassin Medved had died— where he had killed him. “He said House Orin sent him.”

  “House Orin?” Sabine repeated, “You can’t be serious.”

  He seized her still-outstretched hand with his own, smearing drying blood on it. “I am serious,” he said in a voice that brooked no argument. “And what else?” Suddenly Sabine’s own voice had gone terribly quiet. “Did he say anything else?”

  “That was it,” Crispin said. “I panicked. I … killed him.” He shut his eyes, but he could feel Sabine’s frustration all the same, and couldn’t bear it. “Orin-Natali, he said. Or Natalie Orin. I don’t know.”

  Kyra’s voice cut in, “Orin-Natali? So one of House Orin survived? Married into another house?”

  Crispin opened his eyes in time to see Sabine turn to the older woman. “Not possible. Father hunted them all down and had them killed.”

  “She must have married out-system,” Crispin said. “The man I killed was … was Durantine. That doesn’t mean anything, of course, but you don’t see many Durantine foederati in Delos system, do you?”

  Sabine hugged herself, posture hunching as she mulled this over. Dew had settled on the mossy statues and the limbs of trees, as if the world and very air were trying to balm the village’s fires. “I didn’t think the Orins were wealthy enough to marry out-system, but I guess it must be true.” A breeze gathered her hair and her long coat and pulled them with gentle hands. In his bloody clothes, Crispin felt suddenly cold. “Did you see my cape?” he asked stupidly. “It was in a niche by the church doors.”

  The captain bobbed a short bow and went in search of it, and for a moment both brother and sister were alone. “I’m glad you’re all right,” Sabine said. Crispin smiled weakly, but could find no energy for a more thorough response. He could sense that Sabine was working herself up to say something, and let her have the silence she needed to find the words. “Don’t ever do something like that again.”

  “I can’t promise that,” he said, not really knowing where the words had come from.

  “You almost died, Crispin!”

  He felt his brows contract, but busied himself studying her knee-high boots. “Yes, I had noticed that. Thank you.” Sabine was about to start yelling. He could sense that, too. He needed to head that off. He stood up quickly, reminding Sabine just how much taller he was. “These people could not have stopped two men on skiffs armed with plasma burners.” He gestured towards the shattered windows on the church, the burned trees, the wall he had ruined, and the greater burning in the village beyond—to say nothing of the smashed columbarium and the wreckage of the skiff still smoldering on the paving stones. “Two men did this. Two, Sabine.” He held up the corresponding fingers.

  “Your life isn’t worth this village,” she said sharply. “You’re palatine.”

  “These are our people,” he said. “They’re on our land. And besides …” his voice broke as his resolve wavered a moment, teetering on the precipice of too much emotion, “they were after us anyway. Waiting would have done no good. More people would have died.”

  Sabine chewed her tongue, made a face as if she’d tasted something deeply bitter. She knew he was right. “You have guards for this sort of thing.”

  “Enough of my guards have died already, too, dear sister,” he said, then threw up a hand. “But we have more important matters to attend to.” Kyra returned at that moment, carrying his wadded cape in one hand. He took it from her gratefully and shook it out, clicking its magnetic clasp into place as he huddled beneath it, sheltered now against the cool breeze. “The man I killed said there were more coming.”

  “More?” one of the locals had stopped just within earshot from where he’d been passing towards the church. “There are more of these fils de taupes, did you say?”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Crispin said. He was tired of the locals and their ancient, barbaric language, tired of being made to feel like a foreigner on his family’s own lands. “But if that means more of these mercenaries, then yes.” He shouldn’t have told the peasant anything. Should have saved it for Jean-Louis and the old priest, but he couldn’t help himself.

  Something seemed to kindle in the peasant’s eyes, for they widened, and he went to his knees, “Sire! But you are palatine!” He shaded his eyes, but through the gaps in his fingers Crispin could see them darting between his sister and himself. “Are you not … are you not both devils of Meidua? Lord and Lady Marlowe?”

  Despite all he had been through and the exhaustion weighing on him like chains, there was a part of Crispin that was abstractly pleased with the man’s recognition. But for the woman Jacqui’s curtsy the day before, he and Sabine had had little by way of the respect and the deference their blood and station deserved in this strange place.

  “They are, Pierre.” Jean-Louis’s voice carried across the yard. He moved quickly, gun over his shoulder, the boy Léon at his side. “The Abbé’s looking for you, Marlowe,” he said, and made a gesture to Sabine, as if he were touching some invisible cap. His roguish smile returned.

  Just Marlowe again. Crispin decided not to bristle at the other man’s over-familiarity. “Very well. Where is he?”

  “In the church.”

  • • •

  Father Laurent was standing amidst several dozen of his congregation when the two Marlowes entered the church. He had dressed, and someone had swept away the shards of the broken windows, and still more men were hanging canvas over the ruined arches. The priest stood on the step by the rail so as to give himself a slight height advantage over the throng. Crispin hadn’t seen him in hours, not since the attack began. He’d been helping to hide the refugees in the caves behind the church, and while Crispin had sat unmoving on the bench outside, he had been directing the others.

  Still the centurion.

  “Lord Marlowe,” the priest said when Crispin was within speaking distance. “Are you hurt?”

  “No, sirrah,” Crispin replied, mindful of the way the adorators carved out a space around him and Sabine. Jean-Louis and Kyra hung back, letting the palatines stand free as murmurs blew up around them.

  “Lord Marlowe?” one voice said.

  “Not the Lord Marlowe?” said another. “He’s old!” And a third, “Le Seigneur d’Meidua?”

  “Here?”

  “Father, if you have the room, you need to get your people to safety. Your man Jean-Louis and I took care of the assassins, but more are coming.”

  The word echoed through the crowd around them. More. More. More. Laurent raised a hand for quiet, and steadily quiet came. “More?” he himself repeated. “Do you know who they are?”

  Crispin glanced sidelong at his sister, and a great relief washed over him. It was not Aunt Amalia who wanted them dead. Whatever Father’s agents had suspected—whatever they’d heard—it was not their mother’s house and their grandmother’s that had tried to kill them. That meant the planet’s datasphere had not been turned against them, and the odds that Devil’s Rest was still standing and Father still alive were good. But there were eyes on him, and people anxiously awaiting an answer. Crisp- in had never been one for public speaking. That had been Hadrian’s talent. In the Colosso, all he ever needed to do was raise his sword and smile.

  “The assassins were Durantine, I think. Their armor was cheap, almost tourney grade. I think we’re dealing with a mercenary company, and not the best equipped one in the galaxy, either.”

  All soldier now, the priest replied, “They did always say the Durantines would work for a steel bit and a hot meal.” He stroked his beard, looking almost like a Chantry Inquisitor in his long black robe with its bright black sash. Crispin felt incongruously sh
abby standing before the old man in his bloodstained finery, and the old Catholic’s resemblance to the priest-torturers of the Holy Terran Chantry disquieted Crispin in ways he could not begin to articulate. “Did you get anything about numbers out of the man before he died?”

  For a moment, Crispin was certain that Jean-Louis would speak, that the adorator would reveal the way that Crispin had panicked and killed the assassin Medved. But the hunter was silent, and when Crispin glanced over his shoulder to look at the younger man, he found the fellow standing with arms crossed and eyes downcast.

  “No,” Crispin finally said. “Only who they were working for.”

  “Who?”

  He felt Sabine’s hand on his arm, and Crispin shut his mouth, allowing her to speak for him. “House Orin.”

  “Orin?” one woman called from the crowd. “The rebels? But they’ve been dead for centuries.”

  “Apparently not,” Crispin said darkly. He tried to imagine what that must have been like. It wasn’t very difficult. He and Sabine had—after all—started to fear that they might be the last survivors of their own house, not counting the long-gone Hadrian. What might he be like after centuries of such loneliness? He pictured an old crone bent as much by hatred as Time, crouching in some starship or on some foreign world. Did she stare angrily into the night, and watch for Delos’s star through the lens of some telescope? Dreaming of the day of her revenge? Just then Crispin understood something of what Father Laurent had meant about killers being avenged sevenfold. Violence begetting violence. Marlowe and Orin and Kephalos. The old bloody canvas of the human universe painted in a hundred shades of red.

  Sabine raised her voice, “Has there been any word from your rider, yet? The one you sent to Camlen’s Gap?”

  “Renaud? He should reach the town this afternoon if he makes good time.”

  Crispin swore. How did these people survive without the datasphere and comms technology? Everything was so slow. Through tight jaws he said, “Then the earliest reinforcements can reach us from my father is this evening.”

  “We might not have that long,” Laurent said.

  “It did take them a while to find us,” Kyra put in, “but we have no reason to think it’ll take the rest of them as long to get here. Crispin said your people have a place they can go to be safe?”

  The priest was nodding, and half-turned to indicate the rear of the church, behind the white altar and carved wooden screen that hid the rear doors and the way the careful carving and masonry of the church proper gave way to the natural grottoes and tunnels beyond. “The caves. There’s the one you saw last night, but there are catacombs here that run deep into the mountains.”

  “They’ll fit everyone?”

  “Oh, we Christians are right at home in catacombs,” Laurent said. “We’ll manage.”

  Crispin thought that was a strange thing to say, and a stranger one to smile about. Ever practical, Kyra said, “That won’t do you any good if these Durantines can just waltz in here and trap you in the caves.”

  “Do you have weapons?” Crispin asked, playing off the captain’s line of thought. “More than your hunting rifles, I mean.”

  Nothing.

  No one answered. “Well?” Crispin asked.

  • • •

  The catacombs were lighted only by strips of phosphorescent green tape placed in odd patches along the walls, so Lud and one of the other peltasts went ahead, their suit lights dialed high as they would go. Crispin’s breath frosted the air, and he was doubly glad he had not lost his cape the night before, for he drew it tight around himself.

  “Your house’s forces were stationed here during the Orin Rebellion all those years ago,” Jean-Louis was saying, moving just ahead of the lighted soldiers. “Your father wanted troops all through the mountains. To protect the uranium miners, you know?” They rounded a bend in the tunnels, and the Frenchman slowed a little to allow Crispin and the others to keep up. But his voice carried well enough, rebounding off rough stone walls and the ossuaries placed in recesses that honeycombed the walls. “But when they left, we discovered that they had left all this behind.”

  Damn, the fellow had dramatic timing. He finished speaking just as Crispin rounded the corner … and there they were. Stacked before the tomb of what Crispin guessed was an older priest, untouched—it seemed—for decades at least, were five armored crates. Despite the thick caul of dust and the cobwebs draped over their once-glossy surfaces, Crispin could make out the symbol of his house embossed there. The capering devil with his trident raised above his head. Seen by the light of his soldier’s body armor, that familiar symbol seemed horribly alien. The demon he’d always associated with home and safety felt as threatening as once it must have been for Faust in the old story, and he paused to ask, “What are they?”

  “I’ve never opened them!” the adorator replied, and, grinning, blew the dust from the locks. Crispin helped him throw back the lid and smiled. Packed in foam with as much care as a Nipponese tea service, shining as the day they were made were a dozen phase disruptors. Crispin touched one of the bulky handguns, pulled it free. His thumb found the activator, and the thing hummed to life; icy blue indicators glowing down the sides of the barrel. He toggled a switch, forcing the rectangular barrel’s extenders forward. The indicators shifted red as the weapon transitioned from stun to kill, and he knew the narrow coin slot of a muzzle glowed with the same evil fire as he pointed the thing at the ground.

  Satisfied, he powered the weapon down and restored it to its proper place before helping Jean-Louis to shift the box. “You!” he said to the soldier that wasn’t Lud, “Go get the other two and get them in here. I want all these carted back up to the temple. Double quick!”

  “Sir!” the soldier punched his chest in salute and hurried away. “Lud, can you shift this out of the way?” Crispin indicated the crate of disruptors, moving to the next crate.

  More disruptors. Crispin had Lud pull them aside.

  The third crate was longer than Crispin was tall, and as he suspected it held a half dozen energy lances. Crispin did not linger to test and see if these were working. The lances would require some assembling, and he didn’t fancy trying to do that in the dark. Altogether, each would be perhaps seven feet long, with a blade at one end like a glaive and one at the other like a bayonet that extended past the firing lens of the beam weapon. They were the traditional weapon of ceremonial guardsmen, but fearsome for all their ornate quality.

  Jean-Louis let out an audible gasp when they opened the fourth crate. Three magnetic acceleration rifles lay packed in black foam, gleaming dull silver in Lud’s light. Fully assembled, they would be almost as long as the lances, and capable of putting a tungsten rod clean through a meter of stone from more than a kilometer away. Only the rifle case wasn’t loaded with ferric tungsten.

  “Do you see this?” Jean-Louis was holding a yellow plastic box of the ammunition. Violently yellow. Crispin could see the black trefoil icon on the casement, a symbol old as history itself, and a vicious grin stole over his face as he snatched the box from the peasant.

  His terminal bracelet—as good as useless these past two days—began to tick softly, and without having to look Crispin knew it was the machine’s built in radiation detector. Radiation. His grin widened. “Depleted uranium.”

  “This would have gone right through that skiff last night,” Jean-Louis said appreciatively. Peasant though the man was, he knew his weapons. Crispin wondered if his father had been a soldier—or if the boy had learned instead by hassling Laurent for war stories. He didn’t ask.

  “This will go through a dozen skiffs,” Crispin said, drawing out one of the rounds, “and it won’t even slow down.” He closed his fingers around the bullet as though it were a talisman. It was half as long as his forearm. “Our Durantine friends had best hope their shields hold up.”

  The adorator was nodding, “I can use one of these. Station myself in the bell tower and cover the village.”

  Crispin was
shaking his head before Jean-Louis had finished speaking. “They’ll knock that tower down the moment you take your first shot. If they have the artillery for it. And they do have the artillery.” The crash replayed itself for Crispin, the deep explosions rattling the shuttle, the mines that had penetrated the shield. He clenched his jaw and placed the uranium round back in its casing. No sooner had he handed the ammunition box back to Jean-Louis did his terminal stop beeping. The depleted uranium was still radioactive, but not terribly. The greater part of its deadliness was in its density. It would shatter steel like glass, even armor ceramic. It might even crack cheaply manufactured adamant.

  “What about the last one?” Lud asked, nodding past the others to the final, largest crate. “What do you reckon?” The thing was nearly a perfect cube, a meter or more to a side.

  “Could be artillery?” Crispin said, but Jean-Louis was already undoing the clasps.

  The Frenchmen let out an oath in his native language, and Crispin leaned in to see what it was that had so moved the other man.

  He felt it, too.

  “Is that a plasma howitzer?” Lud asked, bringing the light closer. It was.

  Lud’s suit illuminated a gleaming black barrel with an aperture big around as Crispin’s neck, and so long that it only fit inside the box stretched corner-to-corner, and beneath its dark mass Crispin could see the three folding legs that it would walk upon once activated. Jean-Louis bent closer, but Crispin threw an arm across him to halt his progress, “Don’t.”

  “I wasn’t!”

  “Don’t turn it on.”

  The adorator drew his hands back.

  “If that thing goes off in here,” Lud said darkly, “there won’t be a here.”

  The howitzer was an anti-tank weapon, designed to put holes clean through shuttles and the many-legged colossi that strode upon the battlefield like mountains. It fired from plasma reservoirs heated until they burned hotter than the surface of an E-class star. It would annihilate the catacombs around them, boil the lot of them where they stood, and burn all the useful oxygen out of the tunnel just to underscore its point.