Lonely Castles

by S. A. Tholin

  But Joy was so new to this world, still so innocent. He knew how Bastion thought, and what stories would touch the hearts of the Primaterre people.

  A champion falling to demons would indeed be demoralising, but a champion losing the woman he loved could be spun into a tale of heartbreak and revenge, a dark path meant to end in heroic sacrifice. He had no doubt Bastion could work with that. Sometimes, he even wondered if they'd prefer it if he died. It was a subtle thing, a creeping feeling. It was in the looks the station psychiatrist gave him, and in the way that his superiors avoided him as much as possible. He wasn't popular, but damn them if they thought he cared. They could wish him dead all they liked, as long as they left Joy alone.

  His first instinct had been to keep their relationship a secret, but Scathach was too small and Joy too beautiful. In her company, he'd forgotten where they were, had stopped seeing the curious looks or hearing the whispered gossip. For a time, his universe had been a place entirely without shadow.

  He had been careless, stupid, and now he paid the price.

  Skald had sent him many messages over the past two weeks. He'd known whenever one was about to arrive by the smirk on its vessel's stolen face. Maybe he shouldn't have read the messages, but the choice had felt long-since made for him. The Hecate had taught him to endure, but now, standing inside Station Chief Amager's office, his armour shifting colour to match the aquarium water, he felt as though he stood on the edge of a cliff.

  "Tech have as yet been unable to trace the messages," said Amager. "We could kick the job over to Oriel or Tower, see what they have to say."

  "Pointless." No; not pointless. Cassimer very much saw the point in tracking down and terminating yet another vessel, but bringing in Oriel and Tower would mean more people violating Joy's privacy. "Whichever vessel sent them will be long gone. The demon isn't stupid."

  "We'll give Tech a few more days before we decide on how to proceed," Amager said; the station chief's polite way of telling him that it was out of his hands.

  "Very well." But it wasn't, and he couldn't help but add: "A more important question is how the demon got my private address. Few people have access to that particular channel of communications." His immediate superiors. Joy. Rhys. All people who he trusted implicitly – until he saw Amager's eyelids flutter guiltily.

  "Tech will look into it, Commander."

  A school of crowntail bettas swum in rainbow spirals behind the station chief. Seaweed swayed languidly in the current of a pump, and Cassimer remembered that a vessel had once sat in this very room while another had described it to him on Cato.

  "Station Chief."

  "Yes, Commander?"

  "When Elkhart, Skald's towerman vessel, was here, what did he want?"

  "That's classified."

  "What did he want?" Cassimer's tone left no room for evasion or disobedience. It was a tone that ensured that subordinates followed orders, and a tone that when taken with a superior, ensured a reprimand. But Amager said nothing, squirming uneasily in his chair. "Station Chief. I need to know. I am owed."

  "I..." Amager licked his dry lips. "Look, Commander, when he was here – I didn't know he was a demon. None of us did. How could we? He was Tower. I gave him nothing he wasn't authorised to receive."

  "What did you give him?"

  "He wanted your personnel file, and the files on the banneret men under your command at the time. Yes, I gave him your details – but I didn't know. I didn't know."

  "I should have been informed."

  They all should have. Lucklaw and Hopewell had gone on missions unaware that the demon knew their identities. Florey had quit the service and gone home to his wife and children. Would the gunner have made the same choice if he'd known that a hostile alien entity had his name and address? Cassimer didn't think so.

  "The demon will likely send you more messages, Commander. In the spirit of keeping each other informed, I insist that you report them all, but..." Amager scratched his flaky nose, his face turning in a tortured expression of feigned concern. "...perhaps you shouldn't read them. Some of these... the content is very intimate."

  The finger joints in Cassimer's gauntlets creaked under sudden strain. He found himself unable to look at Amager, focusing instead on a chunk of coral behind the station chief's head. Yes. Intimate. Memories drawn from Joy's mind, harvested to satisfy an abomination's hunger, repurposed to harm and provoke. Memories that were nobody's to know, and what Skald had taken from her, Cassimer was forced to pass on to Amager and Tech. The demon had made him complicit in theft and betrayal, and that hurt far more than the things he now knew about Joy.

  Or maybe that was just a lie he told himself. On some level, he'd always known he wasn't the first man to love her – how could he be? An unloved Joy seemed an impossibility. But he'd never dwelled on it, and he'd never expected to have her past, in explicit detail, shoved in his face.

  And now he couldn't stop thinking about it, possessed by irrational, jealous hatred for a century-dead man who had known how to make a girl smile and who had kissed Joy in lantern-light underneath blooming empress trees, and who had told her that he loved her, and all the other things Cassimer had not done; didn't know how to do. Yes, he hated that man, and Amager, and every Tech officer on Scathach, and Skald and the Primaterre's shadow masters, and inside his chest, the fires rose until they burned as bright as after the Hecate.

  He should focus on the job. He should keep moving. But how, when he could barely even breathe?

  "No filters," Amager said.

  "Sir?"

  "Receive the messages, report them, but don't read them, Commander – and don't reply."

  "No, Station Chief." A half-truth. He intended to reply, all right, but not with words.

  "The demon means to unbalance you, to create cracks in your mind for impurity to slip through. This is good, I think, but you must remain steadfast."

  "Good?"

  "It wouldn't bother unless it feared you, Commander. You are our greatest weapon."

  Their greatest weapon and their greatest weakness. As he left Amager's office, the sideways glances and whispers finally made sense. He was the Primaterre's undisputed champion in the fight against Skald, but he was also Skald's target. To the men and women of Scathach Station, his potential demonic possession was a very real danger.

  Yes, Skald feared him – but not as much as his comrades in arms did.

  * * *

  His quarters were quiet and empty. A display screen activated as he entered, opening one of Bastions Mental Health Self-Care manuals where he'd left off. It was one of many self-improvement books he'd read over the past few months. This one wasn't as bad as some – he'd quickly grown tired of trite inspirational quotes – but though the writer demonstrated a great deal of understanding, his advice was less than useful.

  Endure. Yes, but he'd been doing that for years.

  Focus on other things. No. He could no longer let the ashes pile.

  Talk to someone. That was good advice, but there was only one person he could talk to, and it was for her sake that he was reading all these books. Joy's company helped like nothing else, spilling his soul to her the only balm that had ever soothed. But she deserved better than to carry his burdens, and for her, he was trying to do better. Be better.

  The demon wasn't the only one to have sent him messages, but he hadn't wanted to open Joy's before returning to Scathach. Pain and anger he could bear anywhere. Happiness, on the other hand, was too difficult to manage in the company of others.

  But now he was alone, and now the walls of his quarters filled with pictures.

  He barely recognised Ach-all-Wrong at first. It was a desolate world, little better than Cato, but around Joy, its tawny soil glowed. He knew the glow was just a hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation and stim overuse, but he didn't care. He touched the wall, making the picture bigger or maybe trying to connect. New constellations of freckles dusted her cheeks. Achall's sun was warmer than Cato's, and it h
ad lent her skin some of its gold.

  But her eyes were sad, and he should've been there for her.

  He flicked through the rest of the vacation photos. Joy and Rhys had tagged each with little messages, sometimes writing them together, their language gradually becoming more familiar. White butterflies made a flitting crown on her hair, waterfalls frothed as she leaned over a railing for a better look. Lantern light turned her eyes the colour of deepest honey.

  He shouldn't have been surprised – she had made even Cato beautiful – but around her, the Primaterre Protectorate did not look as he remembered it. She had been born in an era when humans had looked at the stars with hope, and that hope was still with her, bringing colour to the grey.

  She stood on a tourmaline balcony, and her eyes were happy, but he should've been there with her.

  He dismissed the messages, unable to read any more, though he was endlessly grateful for them, and to Rhys, for being there when he could not. He needed to move, to run, to do something – anything – to keep his thoughts from scratching too hard. He needed his muscles to burn so that he did not.

  Or maybe he should do what the self-care manual suggested. Hopewell and Lucklaw were in the common room. He couldn't talk to them, but maybe being around people who carried the same burden might make it lighter to bear.

  But when he left his quarters and descended into the commons, he found only more darkness.

  "Knight to d6." The drifter's voice was muted. His palms were pressed against the habitat's glassy wall, his breath fogging it in puffs. He smiled. "Checkmate."

  "No way." Hopewell sat outside the habitat, cross-legged in front of a chessboard. She made the move for the drifter and cursed at the result. "Son of a bitch. Best out of three?"

  "Chess is a game of the mind, Hopewell, and you just got beaten by a drifter. What does that say about you?" Lucklaw couldn't quite keep the laughter out of his voice.

  "It says that while you may have made lieutenant, I still outrank you, so how about you wipe that grin off your stupid face? Besides," Hopewell said, setting up another game, "have you considered that I might be letting him win? Poor bastard spent who knows how long on Cato. Earth forbid I try to do something nice for him."

  "Liar." The drifter laughed, the sound sharp and clawed.

  "Oh, and how would you know? You're crazy."

  "Crazy." The drifter considered this. "Yes. My thoughts are always on the move, always scratching. Shifting, changing, chaotic. And that is why I win. Not like you; stuck in your ways."

  "He has a point." Juneau was observing the players with great interest. "Note how he trapped you, Lieutenant Hopewell. The smothered checkmate requires sacrifice – something you are consistently unwilling to do. You're defensive and protective to a fault. Bone hardly needed to work to compel you into smothering your king with your own pieces."

  "Leave no man behind, keep the team together. It's called having principles, Major."

  "And your enemy used those principles to destroy you. Sometimes, sacrifice is necessary."

  "Easy to say for someone who spends all their time in a lab. But you're with the banneretcy now. There might come a day you'll be the one whose sacrifice is necessary. Might come a day you'll be glad that I have my principles."

  "Not if your refusal to sacrifice results in the game being lost."

  "The banneretcy doesn't play games." When Cassimer spoke, the room fell silent. The drifter crept into a shadowy corner of the habitat; Hopewell stopped setting up chess pieces, a guilty look on her face.

  "Oh no?" Only Juneau looked unperturbed. "Then how do you win, Commander? Kick over the board?"

  "If that's what it takes."

  "And what if this is what it takes?" She gestured towards the habitat. "As your comms specialist said, chess is a game of the mind, and our enemy preys on minds. It may be that this Skald is a problem that can't be solved with force. To destroy it, we must first understand it."

  "Skald would like you."

  "Pardon, Commander?" Now Juneau did look a little worried, but he couldn't wipe the scowl from his face, nor the edge of anger from his voice.

  "It wants you to understand it. It wants you to ask all of your questions. It'll tell you everything you ever wanted to know, and as it does, as you drown in its sea of knowledge, it takes from you. Everything that you are, that you were and could ever have been. Perhaps you won't even realise until your last thought is blown across the sea like a dandelion seed. One last answer, one last understanding, and then you are gone and your murderer wears your skin until it rots, and makes a mockery of your soul for all eternity. You tell me it's a problem that can't be solved with force, but I'm telling you that force is the only thing it fears. Your broken creature will be of no help. It's touched by corruption, ruined beyond repair. What you see as progress is mimicry. It'd be better off dead."

  "Apologies, Commander, for any offense caused. But Bone has come such a long way. You didn't see him before–"

  "I saw his kind."

  "Yes, of course." Juneau bit her lip. "But understanding how the lichen affects the brain may prove vital in preventing it from exerting control, or allowing us to reverse the effects. Nearly a thousand civilians were evacuated from Cato. They now live in cells, like animals. It isn't humane. If we can save them from the corruption–"

  "You can't."

  "With all due respect, Commander, I heard that one of the civilians rescued from Cato is already a Primaterre citizen. A soldier, I believe, recruited by you. If she could recover, then why not Bone and the others?"

  "She is nothing like them." A pause, a deep breath to stop himself from saying too much. "What happened to her was different."

  "Different how? If we could understand that, it could be key to securing victory." Juneau hesitated, smoothing her hair. She was afraid of him, he could tell, but she wasn't afraid of being afraid. He could respect that, at least, so when she took the conversation to a private channel, he obliged.

  I mean no disrespect, Commander. I understand that Bone's presence may be difficult for you. I know only a little of what happened on Cato, but I saw the aftermath. It can't have been easy.

  He acknowledged the message with a nod.

  But it is my hope that the research I'm doing may one day put an end to the demon threat once and for all. This Skald is like no other demon, but perhaps we only think that because all we see is the surface. What if the mechanics by which it possesses people are the same as those of Xanthe's demons? If we found a way of stopping it, we'd be safe forever.

  A nice hope, he replied, out of sympathy for a clever woman on a fool's errand.

  It could be more than a hope. We have possessed vessels in captivity, as well as people like Bone, who were simply under its influence. The woman you recruited could be the missing link to connect the dots. Requests to bring her in for study have so far been denied, but perhaps if you–

  "No." The anger returned, shot through with icy chips of fear. "No, and you will not ask again."

  * * *

  Scathach smelled of cedar and of fear, and he went to the only place he might find some semblance of peace. The park was quiet woodland and challenging rock; it was the memories of Joy's hand in his, and her unwavering trust when he had taught her how to climb. It was Joy he wanted, but the artificial sun would have to do.

  Then he entered the park and instead of sun saw only smoke, thick and black, rising towards the domed ceiling. Skeletal beech trees smouldered, embers drifting in swarms across charred grass. The pond had been drained, a haze of chemical fumes fogging the muddy bottom. Rolling bursts of fire licked the boulders that he had climbed so many times.

  "Commander." A park ranger wearing protective gear approached in a hurry. The heavy tanks of a flamethrower weighed on his shoulders. "Apologies – the entrance should've been sealed. The park is off-limits for the foreseeable future."

  "You're burning it?"

  "The orders came down from Bastion Command. A precaution,
to make sure there's no lichen growing in the park. Better safe than sorry, I suppose."

  "But..." Cassimer trailed off. Didn't know what to say. The park was burning, and every fibre of his being screamed that it was wrong, but there was nothing he could do about it. The park burned because it was necessary for it to burn, just as the Hecate's crew and passengers had been slaughtered because someone had deemed their deaths a necessary move in the greater game. So many unspeakable acts committed in the name of necessity; so many committed by him.

  "It'll grow back," the park ranger said. "A good wildfire can do wonders for the soil."

  Maybe, but it wouldn't be the same. Would never be the same. He left the park as ash drizzled over memories and wondered if Hopewell didn't have the right of it. Some principles trumped even need.

  He was halfway back to his quarters when a message from Vysoke-Myto came through. The Kalevala had given up the location of their primer facility. A mission was being put together, and though commanders were supposed to take a minimum forty-eight hour rest between assignments, the job was being offered to Cassimer, six hours fresh from Vadgelmir Station.

  Maybe because Bastion thought he'd do whatever was necessary. Maybe because Bastion hoped he'd die a hero.

  His fingertips were smudged with soot from Scathach's park. He looked down at the whorled patterns of his fingerprints, contemplating his own next move. Rhys would've advised him to decline, to take the rest. Joy would want him to stay, and if she had been there, he would have.

  But she wasn't, and Scathach's park was ash on his skin, and if he didn't keep moving, he'd burn too.

  I accept, he told Vysoke-Myto, but he didn't really, not anymore, not any of it.

  9.

  JOY

  Two men stared at her from the other side of a long table. Xanthe was their backdrop, surrounding their black-clad figures with sickly yellow. Hammersmith's hands were folded on the table, one finger tapping the glossy surface impatiently.