Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  He pulled back, grinning at us like an enthusiastic uncle might on greeting his family at the starport. He was pretending, of course. At least he was pretending that I was not someone of importance. I clapped him on the shoulder. “Didn’t expect to be coming, Crim.” I looked round at the crowd around us, and so leaned in to ask, “Where is he?”

  “Samir?” he asked, rubbing the back of his head, his black eyes darting across our faces in turn. He smiled when he saw Ilex under her hood, then said, “There’s a jubala den in the Murakami, not far. He said he’d meet us in about three hours.” He checked his wrist-terminal. “Make that about two and a half.”

  Greenlaw pressed forward. “What do you know about our man?”

  Crim looked around startled, as if just noticing Greenlaw for the first time. Then he smiled toothily at her and said, “Samir? He’s a local, survived the sack of Suren. God only knows how it is he fell in with the . . .” He glanced at me. “Should we perhaps . . . go somewhere more private?”

  I nodded, and frowned at the back of Greenlaw’s pale head. Crim turned and led us aside, past the main avenue of shop stalls and out from under the metal canopy onto an emptier front street that paralleled the bulk of the Murakami. The great grounded ship loomed over us like a mountain, balconies rough-welded to its surface rising, rank upon rank, into the foggy day above us. A single cable car bobbed directly above us, descending toward a platform five stories above our heads. I watched it go, noting the graffiti that covered its surface, the letters too stylized to read.

  “I’ve not been able to work out the relationship between Samir and this Painted Man of his. How they met,” Crim said, seating himself on a retaining wall that surrounded one of the huge spars that held the Murakami level, like the ribs that supported a sailing ship while under construction. He rummaged in his pocket, produced a white paper bag. “Those Sanoran pirates we met made it sound like The Painted Man’s been here a good long while. How long I don’t care to guess. Samir’s plebeian as they come, and he sure talks like The Painted Man’s been here forever . . . but I’m inclined to think he’s only really surfaced since the Cielcin burned Suren ten years back.”

  Ilex sat beside Crim, green hands folded in her lap. “Makes sense. With the Empire gone from here there’s got to be all kinds of opportunities for an arms dealer that wouldn’t exist under the Imperium’s thumb.” Her amber cat’s eyes gleamed from the shadow of her hood, watching Greenlaw as she spoke.

  “Reckon he’s has some good years,” Switch said soberly.

  My hands deep in my pockets, I looked up at the confusion of bent shapes that passed for buildings in this mad parody of a city, at the rust and the defaced surfaces and the dirty balconies. “There are some places that just feel you’re standing at the edge of the world,” I said. “Like any second they’ll crumble over the edge and . . .” I waved an inarticulate hand. “Chaos.”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Greenlaw hissed, and I could feel her eyes on me.

  “You want to try that again?” Switch asked, rounding on her.

  I raised a hand, and looked the rigid Imperial lieutenant in the face. She was plebeian herself—pure-blooded human, no tinkering, with a square face and heavy cheekbones. The flesh had already begun to hang heavy from them, though she was not yet forty standard. “It’s all right, Switch,” I said with a smile, then to Greenlaw, “You don’t read very much, do you?”

  Greenlaw turned away with a huff, ushering in an uncomfortable, if agreeable, silence. Crim proffered the white bag to Ilex, who took one of his candies without a word. Smiling, he held it up to Switch, who declined. “Would you like a gel, boss? They’re rose flavored.”

  I took one of the gels, a little lump of sugar with the consistency of wet clay. Crim was always carrying them. He made them, I think, on the Mistral. “This one’s cherry, actually.”

  “You’re kidding!” Crim said, aghast. “I thought I’d eaten all of those!”

  Jubala smells like coffee tastes: bitter, dark, and unpleasant. The drug house into which Crim led us was thick with the smoke of it, lit by holographic flames that danced ghost-like through the air to the wailing of rebec and sitar. Worse drugs there were to be tasted on the air: denwa, hilatar, and ancient opium. Men and women lay about on pillows—in varying states of undress—or at tables with wine cups and tankards near at hand. It was not the first such place I had been, nor would it be the last. I longed for a kerchief such as the nobiles of the court might use to mask an unpleasant stench, but that put me in mind of the intus Gilliam, and I overcame my desire out of shame and loathing.

  As Crim had said, the plagiarius Samir sat in a booth in the back, bent over a cup of some liquor cartoonishly small in his round hands. He smiled when he saw us. The expression of a rodent imitating a snake. He was taller than I expected, and larger than Jinan’s phototypes could show. Grossly obese and hairless, he looked like a caricature of the Mandari plutocrats, such as one sees in Eudoran masque comedies, grown fat from his excesses. Crim and I settled down opposite him with Lieutenant Greenlaw while Switch and Ilex settled into the adjacent table—all the better to keep an eye out for trouble.

  Samir licked his lips, as if tasting something there. His eyes darted from my face to Greenlaw’s like a frightened bird—I was struck by how close together those eyes were, as if he had some cyclops in him a few generations back. “Which one?” He addressed his words to Crim, and jerked his chin at Greenlaw and myself.

  “This is Hadrian Marlowe, Samir,” Crim said in a conspiratorial tone, leaning in over the table. “Commandant-Owner of the Red Company.”

  The plagiarius looked sidelong into the crowd, touched his cheek with damp fingertips. He hesitated a moment, as if struggling with some thought. “You’re brave to come yourself. Arslan is a dangerous place. A very dangerous place.”

  “The price you pay for your freedoms, I assume,” I said, smiling not unkindly. “A failed state like the Rustam Barony offers men like you and me a set of rare opportunities.” I felt Greenlaw stiffen next to me, uncomfortable with my small treason. “Karim here has made you aware of our . . . interests?”

  Samir’s eyes were so close and squinting that they seemed little more than ink spots in his face, like buttons sewn onto an overstuffed doll. He had no eyebrows, making his expression very difficult to read. At last he bobbled his great head, said, “Yes. Yes indeed. You want to meet him.” The way he said that word—him—made it seem as if it were made of crystal, delicate and precious, posing danger to any as spoke it, should they drop it. “Guns Samir could procure for you, yes, but atomics?” His voice went soft, and he lifted his tiny cordial glass to his lips. “These the Empire would burn us for. The black priests . . . they watch even still, though the Baroness is dead. They keep their ways, and keep from us.” His pinprick eyes widened, sable as the night between the suns.

  “Only the houses palatine may keep them legally within Imperial borders,” I agreed in hushed tones, my words lost beneath the wailing of the rebec.

  Crim put a hand on the table, rapping his knuckles for attention. “We’d want to arrange a pickup out-system, in the heliopause.”

  “That is for him to decide,” Samir said.

  “The Painted Man?” Greenlaw put in.

  Samir whistled and made a sharp gesture with his hand. “Don’t say his name again.” He looked round, as if expecting some sinister prefect to emerge from the crowd of drug addicts. “The priests’ eyes are everywhere, even where the cameras cannot be.”

  I looked briefly down in my lap, shook my head to clear it. The drug smoke was getting to me, making me lightheaded and just the smallest bit numb. My palatine metabolism would break it down soon enough—I wondered what it was like for Greenlaw and Crim. “The Chantry have taken control then?” I asked.

  “And the urban prefects, everyone who escaped Suren. A man called Zhivay set himself up as interi
m Consul, but it is said the Chantry keeps him. What is left of them, at any rate.” He looked like he wanted to spit, but smiled instead, revealing too-small teeth. “But their grasp is not yet so tight as it might be.”

  Greenlaw hissed through her teeth, “Which is it? Have they got eyes everywhere or not?”

  “Caution, girl,” the plagiarius said, leaning back affronted, his brows pulled down, “is never a mistake. You want to see him, we must be careful. They do not know where he is. That is . . . better. But they know of him . . . people come asking. Asking Samir. People who are not what they claim.” He eyed me the way a snake might, contemplating the rodent, which I found entirely unsettling at the time, despite the hand I kept firmly around the hilt of the sword Sir Olorin had given me. After a brief hesitation, he said, “You have a palatine look about you, M. Marlowe. Like you were whelped in a castle somewhere, from one of those cold replicators. No one’s got skin like that.” He held up a finger, as if he meant to stroke my face. “Not even lifelong spacers are so pale.” I seized his wrist before he could touch me and held his gaze. He smiled his wet smile, but took no obvious offense. Slowly, I forced his hand down. When I released him he asked, “You’re Empire, aren’t you?”

  “I was born there,” I said, wiping my hand on the leg of my breeches—his flesh had been moist to the touch. I felt instantly unclean.

  Greenlaw’s tension was palpable, but Crim only laughed, an easy, bored sound. “Where’d you think the money came from, Samir?” He flashed his toothy smile at the plagiarius and at myself, clapping a big hand on my shoulder.

  “My father owned a mining contract with the Vicereine of Delos,” I said, and that part was true. “Uranium, mostly. A monopoly on all in-system trade with the Mandari. I’ve a line of credit but no other inheritance.” Reflexively, I touched the hoop of burn scar around my left thumb. Once, I had worn a silver ring there, square and with a carnelian bezel inscribed with the sigil of my house: a prancing devil with a trident in its hands. I’d lost it years ago, had thrown it away on Emesh after it had gotten me into trouble—into my mad duel with Gilliam over Valka.

  Samir’s piggish eyes widened. “A monopoly? The Solar Throne does not hand those out lightly. Why would a scion of such a house turn pirate? Samir wonders.”

  It was my turn then to smile, showing my teeth in a very Cielcin display. “Samir will keep on wondering. I came for business. I want to meet your man.”

  The plagiarius matched my smile, ran a hand back over his scalp. In his rasping, nasal voice, he said, “I don’t like you much, high-born. I don’t like nobiles, even black ones with no family. You think as you’ve not been shoved out of some woman that you’re better than we are.” He glanced at Crim, as if for support. “But there’s a demon in you, like in all the rest of you. It’ll make someone want to put you down.”

  My smile didn’t falter. “Does this mean you and yours won’t take my money?”

  “Oh, no,” Samir said. “Money spends, and it’s not in his interest or mine to turn away so . . . exalted a customer. I’ll take you to him.”

  I had seen wolves broadside one another in my grandmother’s menagerie, displaying their size and fangs. I knew what this was, what Samir was. A predator trying to cow me. His softness did much to disguise it, but it was there. I did not back down, for one cannot back down in the face of such a challenge and yet remain a man. Like Dante, I was thirty-five—the midpoint of life to primordial man. Like Dante, I stood upon the edge of a dark forest, where the true path was lost . . . and here was the wolf, slavering, on the hunt, and ready to drive me into darkness. Where the leopard and the lion were then I did not know.

  I did not doubt they were out there, and that they were hungry.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE PAINTED MAN

  A CHILDHOOD FILLED WITH Mother’s operas had led me to expect that The Painted Man would have entrenched himself in some grimy brothel, in a dance club or winesink. I was prepared for carbines and chunky plasma burners and tattooed faces, for women naked and abused. I expected the angry music of revolution, the synthetic noise I’d so often heard in such places in the Norman Expanse throughout the past twelve waking years.

  I was not expecting the stately tea house at all.

  I have never much cared for tea. It seems almost unpatriotic for a palatine nobile of the Imperium to confess such, but it is so. The tea house had been built recently, on the back of a great starliner that stretched for nearly a mile in the shadow of the vast Murakami. Indeed, several such structures flowered there, like limpets on a rock at low tide. Artificial terraces had been added, transforming the leeward side of the old starship into a stepped hill that rose—level upon level—to a neighborhood of fine brick houses and whited roofs cracked already by the constant damp.

  The tea house itself was an imitation wood structure built in the Nipponese fashion: slope-roofed with heavy beams, clean-lined and open. It perched upon the very edge of the grounded vessel upon which it sat, on a platform overhanging the level and the street far below, supported by heavy steel struts tied into the superstructure beneath.

  We were ushered in by two willowy women in black uniforms, their hair—one black, the other golden—tied back and secured with long wooden pins. Samir led the way inside, his huge bulk seeming to bend the walls closer to him like a planet warping space. I followed with Greenlaw, expecting at any moment that the big guards I imagined would appear and search us for weapons—or for comms devices such as the sub-vocal transmitter Ilex wore under her cloak and behind her elongated ears.

  None came.

  Samir said nothing as he led us through a crowded central chamber, past chatting patrons and laughing men and around a large brazier where staff were boiling coffee in sand after the Jaddian fashion. “Just this way,” he said, mounting a wooden stair that arced up the back wall and onto an open portico under the sky of early afternoon.

  The fitful vapors of the morning were gone, and though columns of steam yet rose from Arslan all around, the orange sun was bright and clear, and fretted only a little with the fitful clouds. The portico, too, was crowded, with small tables and small conversations, some hushed and private, others expansive. Paper screens painted with the images of birds and of women blocked one corner from view, and beyond the railing I could see the whole of the city rolled out like a man new-woken from fugue.

  For someone supposedly hiding from the Imperium, the place Samir and The Painted Man had chosen for their meeting seemed terribly exposed. One could easily imagine a Chantry remote camera flying overhead, driven by some poor anagnost in an office somewhere in town. Yet there was no real sense of secrecy about the place. With the crowd so near to hand, it was almost public.

  Two men emerged from behind the screens, and I was almost relieved to see their thick muscles and black suits. They did not take our weapons, but stepped aside with a nod and opened the screens wider for Samir to pass. The fat plagiarius blocked my view, and so the first thing that struck me about the Extrasolarian arms dealer was his voice. High, cold, drawling and nasal. “Here you are. Brought the mercenaries, have you?”

  A shadow of the menace that so frightened Samir moved in me, and I stopped moving forward at once. Switch nearly banged into me and had to steady himself. Hearing its voice, I froze: sick, cruel, imbued with a poisonous quality, as if one might expect fangs in the mouth that spoke with it instead of teeth. Not even the Cielcin were so disturbing, for this voice used the tongues of men. Samir bowed his head, shoulders hunched. “Yes, master.”

  “Well, stand aside then, my dear. It’s them I’m here to speak to, not you.”

  Neither of The Painted Man’s two minions were looking at us, or looking anywhere. It was like they’d gone away inside. I stood looking at one of their faces for a good few seconds, confused by that deep emptiness. What sort of man engendered that kind of fear and self-control? Not even my father’s guards had been such, an
d he was the hardest man I’d known. Not even Emil Bordelon—for all his depravity—had shut down his own people so.

  Samir stepped aside, and I saw The Painted Man’s face, and it was like no man I had ever seen.

  Inmane. Inhuman.

  It was a homunculus, like Ilex and yet as far removed from Ilex as a man is removed from a shark. Red-haired it was, with skin like time-eaten porcelain: translucent, veined with blue. But the worst part was the eyes. All-dark they were, putting me in mind of the Cielcin. But where those xenobites’ eyes were black and empty as caverns, this was something far worse. They were pupil-black—as if its whole eye were dilated in the throes of some deep arousal. Its was the face of ancient terror, of the predator in love with the hunt. And worse yet, it knew what it was, for it had painted itself to heighten the terror it engendered. Neither woman nor man it seemed to me, but some monster fashioned in man’s image. The lips were red, like a clown’s parody of a Jaddian cortigiano, and when it smiled it revealed far, far too many teeth. What black magus had grown and designed such a being and why I did not care to guess. For some sadist’s pleasure house on some planet whose name I did not dare imagine, I daresay.

  But here it was . . . in the open air under the sun. In a tea house. How it had walked in past all those ordinary people and not driven them off with the sight of it I could not say. Indeed, how it could be present and not sensed by those same ordinary people the way we know there is a snake in the grass I cannot begin to guess. I wanted to scream, to turn in terror. To draw my sword.

  My hand flitted toward the hilt in its leather holster strapped to my thigh. Seeing this, The Painted Man smiled, and in that drawling voice said, “You must be the one, then?” It bit its lip. “What a looker you are, boy.” The smile widened past anything any human face could achieve, revealing every one of the Extrasolarian’s teeth—there must have been a hundred of them crowded behind those carmine lips. “Marlowe, was it?”