Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “Timid? Er . . . skittish?” I pushed the dossier away. “He’s a criminal, I suppose skittishness is to be expected.”

  “Indeed.” She pulled away from me and reshuffled everything on the table. “Crim will pull through.”

  Without Jinan holding me up, I slumped onto the tabletop, pressing my forehead to the cool, black glass. Jinan stood and moved about the table, dragging files and storage chits that had slipped further away than arm’s reach. I stayed there a good while, not moving while Jinan shuffled about with her work. At long last I said, “Bassander and Valka both think this whole misadventure is a waste of time.”

  “So do you,” she said, standing over me, “if you are calling it a misadventure.” Her eyes were heavy on the back of my head.

  Inhaling sharply I sat up, rubbing my face. “Are they wrong, Jinan?”

  The Jaddian did not answer me at once, and my gaze tracked from her face to the gaunt reflection of my own in the smudged glass of the table. Despite the exhaustion and the fact that I could barely have been considered alive mere hours before, I could have looked worse. The reedy youth from Delos was gone, burned out by the ragged piece of gutter trash I had become, by the myrmidon I had made of myself, the courtier-prisoner, the Cielcin translator, and the Lord Commandant of the Meidua Red Company. What once had been a hawkish sharpness of feature had transformed into a profile regal and aquiline, with thick black hair falling in short waves halfway to my chin. It wanted cutting.

  “Tell me they’re wrong.” I watched my mouth form the words, and it seemed they came from some other part of me, not the Commandant of the Red Company or the Lord of Devil’s Rest, but from the part of me that wore those masks. My soul, Hadrian himself. Chin resting on one hand, I looked up.

  Jinan leaned her stack of files against one pointed hip, lips slightly downturned. She looked like someone preparing to tell a very sick relative that none of the news from the doctor was good. She set down her stack instead and resumed her seat. Her hand found mine. Another, unnamed piece of me felt healed almost at once, but the rest lamented as she said, “I understand where it is they are coming from.”

  I shut my eyes and half-turned my face away. “I see.”

  She squeezed my hand. “Do not you worry about Lin and the Tavrosi.” I might have laughed at that if I’d felt up to it. Jinan never called Valka by her name. My captain was no fool—and I had been honest with her—regarding my past and complex feelings for Valka Onderra. “We have come a long way out into the Dark. It is not easy, what we are doing, and no end in sight.” She smiled, and flipped her short braid back over her shoulder. “Besides, I am not ready to give up, mia qal.”

  Few words in all the galaxy had more power to heal me at that point in my life. It was an innocent time, a period of happiness between two oceans of storm, and the skies were getting darker. She leaned in and kissed me again, this time on the cheek. Standing, she dragged me by the hand, and unwilling to be parted from her I rose and permitted myself to be led out of the observatory to her cabin and bed.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE SUNKEN CITY

  THE BLACK OF SPACE gave way to a sky the color of old cream as our drop-shuttle roared around us with the force and friction of reentry. Our decade of peltasts—their gray armor hidden beneath dusty cloaks—stood in the central compartment, grasping handholds in the ceiling. I glanced sidelong at Switch, who was similarly garbed, but with a body shield strapped to his waist. He fidgeted with his plasma burner, checking its air-scoop for when the reservoirs ran dry.

  “Corvo’s man is meeting us at the landing site?” asked Bassander’s executive officer, Prisca Greenlaw, her pale eyes narrow with her customary dislike. Greenlaw had come over from the Pharaoh just as we were preparing to depart. She was one of the officers Raine Smythe had sent along with us from Emesh. Less precise than Bassander, less fastidious, but with as little love for me.

  “Nah!” Ghen said from where he stood at the head of the decade, bucking as the shuttle slalomed around an aerobraking curve on our rapid descent. Not speaking, I kept my eyes focused out the small window, watching the rocky landscape arcing nearer. “Crim’s a little further into town. Don’t look far, though.” Turning to me, he asked, “You still want us hanging back?”

  Looking up, I nodded. “We’ll look too military if we all go in at once. Let’s stick to the plan. I’ll go in with Switch, Greenlaw, and Ilex. Once we find Samir and get a location on The Painted Man—if he’s here—you follow on. If this lot catches a whiff of the Legions on us we’ll be in for a real bad time.”

  Ghen leaned toward Greenlaw where she sat strapped in opposite me and said, in a stage whisper, “He means you, lieutenant.” He grinned, his teeth crooked but very white against his dark face, which only made the smile more infectious, despite the slit in his nose from his time on Emesh. Soon his troops were grinning too, a motley collection of Imperial legionnaires and Jaddian aljanhi. Greenlaw said nothing.

  “I’ll put us down on the edge of the city, Lord Commandant,” said Ilex, who had shuttled over from the Mistral last minute to accompany us. The Norman homunculus sat in the pilot’s chair, green arms darting across the controls. She was a dryad, one of an ancient people made before the rise of the Imperium and the Writ of the Chantry. Her skin glowed thick with chlorophyll, so that she was green as Midsummer in the forests of Luin. She ate little, save what she drank of the sunlight, and could always be found in her place aboard the Mistral, busy with some machine beneath the light of heat lamps.

  Abruptly we came out of our steep bank and leveled off on our approach to the city. Safety lights clicked on, allowing that those standing could step out of their clamps and unstrap themselves, and that we in the few crash benches might stand. I did, and retrieved a travel-worn greatcoat from one of the overhead lockers. Pressing toward the cockpit, I was conscious of the rattle of the metal grating beneath me and of the sway of the deck as the shuttle gently circled down toward the city in gradual spirals. Ilex was an excellent pilot, had grown up in space, amid the stations that cluttered the orbit of her homeworld—before she’d been captured and sold to bonecutters who wanted her for her hide.

  Shrugging into the heavy black coat, I held onto straps in the ceiling just behind Ilex. I could hear Ghen moving behind me, and so was not surprised when he said, “The fuck’s gone on with this city?”

  I had known and so was not surprised. “It’s not really a city, you know.”

  “It wasn’t even here before the invasion,” Ilex said, her voice light but measured.

  Beneath us stretched a flowering ruin, a tangle of crooked domes and leaning towers hanging together like old bones, some held up by taut cables misty in the orange light of morning, others pressed against one another like the shapes of men spent by long exhaustion. Greenery sprouted on rusty terraces beneath, where the bodies of what once had been massive starships lay sunken and cracked upon the surface, falling into the hills.

  “Captain said that after the Cielcin attack, the interim governor ordered what ships were left grounded to build this camp,” Switch said, hanging back by the doorway. “I’d seen a couple of scans, but Earth take me . . .” He broke off, made a sign of the sun disc to ward off evil times.

  We dove lower, and I could see where bridges and the cords of cable cars had been built up between the grounded ships, turning what had been a collection of cargo carriers and mining ships into a confusion of old metal sagging under its own weight. The camp city of Arslan was built on the edge of a vast plain, sheltered on one side by the ice-capped face of a nameless mountain, huddled there as its people huddled within its walls.

  “How can something so new look so ancient?” I asked. Ten years. No time at all for us. And an eternity for those who had lived through it. It was like looking at the bottom of the sea. This new city had been built to no plan save necessity, its component ships pressed together as closely as possible. One migh
t have thought it a graveyard, such as the mythic elephants made of their bones, were it not for the circumfusion of meaner structures built upon the backs of those massive vessels. New growth had sprouted about the ruined ships like mushrooms after a heavy rain, clinging to them as to rotten logs. I could make out the passage of fliers and of shuttlecraft—of more than I had seen in Meidua or in Borosevo or in anywhere since.

  Ilex pressed her headset against her ear, said, “Understood, Arslan control. We will comply.” She glanced briefly up at me, then took us lower, circling down below the level of the highest towers, past plumes of steam venting from the reactors along the back of what once had been a mining rig.

  “These boats ain’t flying again,” Ghen said, pointing. “See all them stress fractures?”

  “They weren’t ever meant to carry their own weight,” Ilex said, voice trilling in that strange way she had. “Any flight down-well for something that large is a one-way trip.” She was right, those vast ships were far too massive to ever climb back to space again. Their own weight would tear them apart as they ascended, if one could even find an engine mighty enough to lift so great a load.

  Switch spoke up. “Anyone tried raising Crim?”

  “Said he’d meet us at the Murakami,” Ilex said, pointing toward an ugly, cuboid supercarrier nearly a mile high and several times as long. It dwarfed one side of the city, despite its cracked and crumbling edifice and the rust stains that ate through the steel fixtures of its hull. “That Nipponese ship, there.”

  “That don’t exactly narrow shit down, green,” Ghen pointed out. The look Ilex flashed Ghen would have withered him, were he half as like a plant as she, or if Ghen were capable of shame. The dryad took a dim view of people pointing out her difference, and no wonder. It was no easy thing to ignore, between the color of her skin, her orange-yellow eyes, and the woody growth that passed for hair—or a crown—upon her head. Switch reached up and flicked Ghen in the side of the head. He yelped, “What in the Dark was that for?”

  I was first down the ramp when we landed, and turned my collar up against the damp and the chill. The air felt oily against my face, and tasted faintly acrid, like aluminum. It made me want to spit. There was no one to greet us at the gate from the landing field, and the street beyond was only sparsely populated, with here and there a bent figure hurrying along, an umbrella over their head. Vents and great stacks studded the street and the faces of the ships-turned-buildings, belching steam and worse vapors into the cloudy day. The orange sunlight I’d spied on descent was gone entirely, turned to an umber gloom made weighty by the great steams of that place and the knowledge that the very city hummed to the pulse of several dozen nuclear stardrives.

  “Earth and Emperor,” Ghen said, pulling his hood up over his bald scalp to shadow his disfigured nose. “What a shit hole.”

  Clothes hung from lines across the streets, high above the ground, and higher up still a massive cable car swayed on a carbon cable, carrying the sort of people too well off and dignified to walk upon the ground.

  “I don’t like it either,” said Lieutenant Greenlaw. “Visibility’s low.”

  I couldn’t decide whether I agreed or not. The place was a warren, to be sure, but as we stood there I watched a pack of children chase a lighted hoop down a side alley, dodging beneath the landing peds of a small freighter. Up above, beneath the dripping clotheslines, hydroponic planters bulged with new growth—green and gentle black—with here and there a flowering plant thick with blossoms. Humanity was trying, as it always did, to make the desert bloom. Still, I was glad to be only visiting.

  Turning to Ghen, I said, “Wait til you hear from us about the meeting place, then you and the others follow on. We’ll have specifics, and we’ll need cover. None of us has any idea what we’re getting into, so stay sharp.” I clapped the big man on the shoulder, staggering a bit in the new gravity. Rustam only pulled point-eight gees, far less than the Emeshi one-point-three I had made standard on the Red Company ships. I felt strong but . . . clumsy. It would take some getting used to.

  “Don’t seem right you lot all going in,” he said darkly, and patted his plasma howitzer where it hung beneath his rain cloak. “Without the heavy artillery and all.”

  “We’ve got plenty of kit, Ghen,” Ilex said from inside her own hood. Homunculi such as she were not uncommon sights on the border worlds, but she never did like the staring.

  Switch shrugged his own coat tighter. “He means him. Not the guns.”

  “I am the guns,” Ghen said with a wry smile that drew matching smiles from Switch and myself. It was a tired joke, but comfortable as only old jokes between friends can be.

  “All right,” I said, checking the drape of my highmatter sword against my hip, “let’s move out. Ilex, Switch, Greenlaw: shall we?”

  “Watch yourself out there, Your Radiance,” Ghen said with a half-hearted salute, tapping his fist against his chest. “Try not to have too much fun without me.”

  “And you just stay with the shuttle until we find Lieutenant Garone,” Greenlaw said, not looking at the big centurion. She moved off then toward the neon lighting at the gate, Ilex trailing after.

  When she had gone, Ghen leaned toward me, voice hushed. “You best watch yourself there, Had. You got competition for the ‘Your Radiance’ thing if she keeps on like that.”

  We must have walked for an hour as the streets grew increasingly thick with foot traffic. The vast hulk of the starship Murakami filled the sky ahead, casting the world beneath it into deep gloom. It wasn’t long before I began to wish for a cable car, a flier, some mode of conveyance. I found I had difficulty getting my bearings. Meidua had been arranged along city blocks, and though the streets had wandered with the hills they still had a precise logic to them: streets and avenues ran perpendicular to one another—at least in a less-than-Euclidean sense. Borosevo, too, had had a logic to it, with the White District divided into neat blocks and the canals of the lower districts cut radially and in great circles. But no two cities are the same, and this one had been less planned than accrued all at once in a desperate need for shelter. If the Murakami had not dwarfed most of the other vessels piled together beneath its shadow, we might never have found our way through.

  Stranger still was the way the protocols of the Imperium had relaxed. Great holographic advertisements moved like ghosts through the streets, or else towered like the buildings. A school of jewel-bright fish larger than my head followed us for a hundred meters down a street, projected from a lensing suite above the door to a supermarket, and further on the colossal image of a fashion model in a fluorescent dress turned this way and that. She must have been fifty feet high.

  Switch seemed to know where he was going, and I followed him as he pushed through a line of people waiting for a noodle cart operated by a huge, hairless man in grimy whites. Further on, I saw a man with the silk robes and twin swords that marked him as a Nipponese knight, and a group in the drab purples and blacks of the Durantine Republic, merchants I did not doubt. Two women in red latex stood upon a corner and lifted their skirts as we passed. I could sense Switch’s disquiet, and we hurried on. There was something in their painted faces—white and blue—that struck me with a sense of unreality.

  Beyond, a monorail line rattled uneasily past us, winding upward toward the summit of the ship-buildings where distant trees flowered above the gloom and vapors of the lower streets. Somewhere—over loudspeakers, perhaps—the prayer call of a Chantry sanctum rang out.

  Attend! You Children of the Earth!

  The Sun and hour is now!

  Through sacrifice, there is rebirth,

  through prayer! And disavow

  the evils of your heart and age!

  And by your faith renew

  what Mother Earth and Emperor

  themselves made green for you!

  We had to stop for more than a minute as a
throng of suppliants passed, making their way along the street and up an arcing stair toward the clear and chanting voice, which even then was chanting still: “Attend, O Child of Dust! And come on bended knee!” Switch made the sign of the sun disc, as he always did when he heard the call to prayer. I turned away, thinking of the torture chamber in the basement of the Chantry bastille on Emesh, of the cross they’d tied Uvanari to, and of the mutilated people I had seen . . . on sanctum steps or in the streets. Victims of the Chantry’s forgiveness, their mercy.

  This, then, was Arslan, the sunken city. Her ships would never fly again, and in later days perhaps, when the grime and chaos of her birth was washed away and her streets ordered, she might be something strange and wonderful.

  Something like a plaza had been left open near the center of the vast ship Murakami, where a jointed structure of sheet metal and new plastic had opened up into some sort of mall, sprouting from the side of the Nipponese cruiser. The crowd here had grown to a thick press, and all manner of men and women moved past. None speaking to one another, unless it was at a shop booth or between friends. Elsewise they hurried about their business as if the rest of the humanity about them was no different than the holographs that flickered, little better than ghosts, about the stalls and storefronts.

  “William!” A voice called out as we passed a vendor selling imitation handbags from the back of a groundcar. Karim Garone emerged from the crowd, dressed in a flowing red kaftan covered in white paisleys. He looked every part the Jaddian merchant, with a gold medallion at his throat and a diamond stud in one ear. He grinned and embraced Switch. “It is exceedingly good to see you again, my friends! Hadrian!” He embraced me in turn, long enough to whisper, “I did not expect for you to be here, boss.” I liked the young lieutenant. He was one of the finest swordsmen I ever knew, with the easy humor of a dockworker. The son of Jaddian immigrants to the Norman Freeholds, he was a man of two worlds, with one foot firmly planted on the ground of each.