Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Must have been . . .

  A gaping hole smoked in his back, put there by a plasma burner. But whose? None of the machines had carried weapons, except those they took from us. Had someone taken Ghen’s? And where was the other peltast? I had sent two with him.

  The taste of copper filled my mouth, dry and thick and fuzzy. I sagged to my knees, and a chilly laugh echoed in that close and candle-lit space. I had heard it only minutes before, on the portico.

  “Put up quite the fight, that one,” The Painted Man said. “Ooh, the balls on him, tearing those poor girls to pieces, can you imagine?”

  Stunned, I thought, falling onto my side. The creature must have come up behind me, gotten its stunner inside my shield curtain. I was lucky my own sword didn’t fall on top of me—what an end that would have been.

  I could still move my eyes, could just turn my head. Footsteps sounded on the floor behind me, and looking up I saw . . . I saw the second peltast I’d sent with Ghen looking down at me, a Jaddian woman with copper skin and short, dark hair. She looked not a little like Jinan. All at once I wasn’t sure of the ground on which I stood. Or lay, as the case was. I had fallen out of the ordinary worlds and into some space other and mysterious. Why was the peltast just standing there? Why was she holding the stunner?

  She made a hushing sound. “Don’t try to move, you’ll hurt yourself.” When she smiled, I saw the glint of far, far too many teeth. I was hallucinating. I must be. The stunner had damaged my perceptions, perhaps. “Good of you to come down here after the big oaf. Makes my life just that much easier.” The smile widened. The gray cloak and the combat armor beneath it vanished as if switched off. Holograph? Beneath it there was only a skintight suit, darker than black and studded with little silver lenses. The Jaddian bronze leeched out of her skin, and as I watched, astonished and unable to speak, the curve of hip and breast and slope of shoulder narrowed, slimming to something lean and less than human, a trim and sexless silhouette. The black hair grew at an alarming rate, turning steadily to crimson, and the whites of the eyes went dark as coals.

  The Painted Man grinned at me, its lips blossoming to scarlet. “You’re mine, lordship.”

  The second stunner blast—when it came—felt like nothing at all.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE ROAD TO VORGOSSOS

  I SWAYED IN A soft dream, buffeted as by wind, floating on Lethe’s gentle forgetting out of a province deeper than sleep. The current rocked me, and I dozed, limbs sluggish as they had been when I awakened from fugue aboard the Pharaoh. The light ahead dimmed, as if we’d passed under an overhang or into the mouth of some cave. Mouth. Remembered terror jolted me to wakefulness, and I lurched for my feet. I couldn’t find them. My legs gave out and I fell back into the deep bowl of the seat.

  “Why don’t you get comfortable, Lord Marlowe? Since you can’t walk,” the drawling voice said, punctuating the deep quiet. “We’ve a ways to go yet.”

  What sounded like a tram rattled overhead, shaking the office—if office it was—in which I was undoubtedly a prisoner. A pair of couches stood in the corner opposite, along with a rack of shelves glittering with bottles and crystal storage chips neatly ordered. The walls hung thick with Eudoran theater masks, brightly painted and wildly emoting. The Painted Man itself reclined on the couch opposite, perhaps five yards away. It held a strange device in its too-long hands, an oblate silver disc bristling with buttons and switches. A cable ran from it in a tangle to a spot behind the homunculi’s ear. As I watched, it pulled the wire free of its head with a mechanical clicking sound.

  Saying nothing, I focused on my injuries instead. I felt fairly certain that I was only stunned. That meant functionality would return before feeling. I tried to lift one leg, to cross it over the other. I thought I felt a brief twitch, then . . . nothing. My arms moved, though—that was something. When at last I was sitting straight, I asked the obvious question. “What are you going to do with me?”

  “With you?” The homunculus grinned evilly, setting its silver device—some sort of terminal, I didn’t doubt—aside. “Nothing at all, dear boy. If by with you you mean to you, that is. You’re no good to me dead.” It reached into a bowl on the table beside its seat and produced a set of silver and bone-white rings, which it began fixing about its fingers. It eyed me over its long red nails, licked its teeth. “We might do something together.”

  Teeth clenched, I said, “I beg your pardon?”

  The creature rolled its eyes, painted smile vanishing a moment. “My my, you Imperial palatines aren’t all so serious, are you?” It swung lightly to its feet, pressing its hand against the wall for balance as it crossed the distance between us, passing a heavy metal trunk of the sort used to carry small-grade firearms straight from the manufactory. “You’re very valuable, don’t you know?” It reached down and ruffled my hair. “I’m sure the rest of that mercenary outfit of yours will pay to have you back . . . the way you were just throwing money around.”

  “Ransom, then?” I asked, massaging my legs. “That’s your plan?”

  It shrugged, turned away, its spindly arms akimbo. “For my trouble.” It sank back into its seat. “You destroyed nearly all my SOMs. They’re not cheap, you know.”

  “Your what?”

  “My little helpers.” It waggled its fingers. Reaching back with one hand, it rummaged in the folds of its couch before drawing something out. My sword. Olorin’s sword. The homunculus poked a hole through the fingerloop in the rain guard and twirled it about its finger. “Now this is a pretty thing.” The Painted Man tightened its fist around the grip, and silently the exotic matter of the blade sprang forth with its faint iridescence, reflecting moonlight that was not there. The homunculus reached up with one finger and gently pressed it against her single gleaming edge. The silver-blue metal rippled, shimmering, recoiling as if burned by the inmane creature’s touch. The Painted Man’s huge black eyes widened, and it drew its finger back. Briefly I saw the blood incarnadine against skin like aged china. “Where did you get a thing like this?”

  I saw no reason to lie. “It was a gift, from one of the Maeskoloi of Jadd.” What Sir Olorin Milta might say about a blood-born homunculus touching so sacred an object to his order as a sword I did not like to think. Nothing good.

  The Painted Man spat and—turning off the weapon—cast it aside. It landed on the other couch. Watching it, I leaned forward in my seat. Beside my chair a small table stood, displaying an assortment of what I took at first to be art: blobs of metal or of stone pitted and melted. Meteors. I kept trying to move my legs. The numbness had transitioned from no feeling to a red tingling.

  “What happened to my friends?”

  The Painted Man propped its head on one fist. It didn’t speak at once, but the red shape of its mouth grew, spreading across its face, lips turning white in a tattooed imitation of teeth. “Dead.”

  I sat a little straighter, tried to stand. I felt my legs spasm, but they didn’t move. “You’re lying.” It was all I could do not to hurl one of the meteors at the beast.

  The homunculi’s red smile retreated from its face entirely. It shrugged. “I’ve no idea. You did abandon them in not the best of circumstances.”

  “I didn’t abandon them!” Again I tried to stand.

  “And yet here you are!” The creature laughed full in my face. “Some friend you turned out to be.” It leaned back against its couch and with a languid motion drew its stunner from some fold of the loose robe it wore. The Painted Man admired its weapon a moment. It was of a design strange to me: black and geometric and slim, with a looping handle more like unto the iron knuckles of lowlife thugs than the mythic praxis of the Extrasolarians, those technocrats of the Dark. It set the thing aside with a deliberate gesture, its threat clear.

  “They’re not dead,” I said.

  “Keep telling yourself that,” it replied, “but that big bastard certainly is.” It ti
lted its head back as if basking in the glow of some music only it could hear. To my horror, the crimson hair retreated into the creature’s scalp, the shoulders broadened, arms thickened, the bones of cheek and jaw grew more robust. How it did such a thing I could not guess, but even before the ink flooded its pale skin and turned Emeshi brown I knew what it was doing.

  I wanted to scream. To break something.

  Ghen’s face stared at me from where The Painted Man had sat. It wasn’t quite right: the constant stubble was missing, and the notch in the old myrmidon’s nose. But the damned grin was the same, rueful and rude at once, coarse as the man himself. “Too bad you weren’t faster, eh boss?”

  The voice wasn’t quite right, but it lodged in my heart and tore. I ground my teeth. “One more word, mutant, and you’ll wish your masters never pulled you out of whatever tube you crawled out of.”

  Ghen’s laugh—and not Ghen’s laugh at all—filled the office. I had to close my eyes not to see my friend’s laughing face, but when I did I saw his dead one instead, and the smoking hole in his back. Still in Ghen’s voice, the monster said, “I’d love to see you try it.” An involuntary smile pulled across my face, and I snorted. My knee twitched. The legs began to ache. I tightened my hands into fists until they went numb as my legs. When I didn’t speak, the homunculus grinned, and Ghen’s face shrank and melted away back into the likeness of The Painted Man, pale as a Cielcin, as Death herself. “That’s what I thought.”

  “What sort of name is The Painted Man?” I asked, slashing across the beast’s amused superiority.

  The creature hissed loudly, baring its too many teeth. “Not a name, little man.” It ran hands back again through its shaggy red mane.

  “But what are you?”

  “Homunculus,” it said, pronouncing each syllable like a word. “The same as you.”

  I bit off the smallest smile I could manage. “We’re not the same.”

  “Aren’t we?” The total black of its eyes resolved, whites blossoming, the iris emerging as if from a deep gloom. My eyes. “Tell me, little man, which tube did you crawl out of, eh?” As it spoke its voice shifted to a pitch-perfect mockery of my own, the Delian nobile’s accent—like the villain in so many bad Eudoran operas—dripping with every dram of my disdain.

  We were not the same. Whatever my genetic augmentations, they were within the limits prescribed by the Chantry and Imperial law. None of the gene complexes that elevated me above common humanity were imported from other species. I was not part tree like Ilex, nor the product of anything so clearly artificial as this creature. I could not change my face, could not breathe underwater as the undines of Mare Aeternus could. Nor had I received any medical enhancements after my birth. Some homunculi did not even have free will, were born instead with crippled minds and bred to service. Whose hand had wrought The Painted Man or to what purpose I cannot say, but they had not meant to make a traditional human being. That was the heart of the difference between us. The magi who crafted my embryo for the tanks so long ago meant to create an exemplar of the human form.

  The Painted Man was a mockery. A monster.

  I waited for its face to change, but it never did. It only watched me with my own eyes.

  “You’re from Vorgossos, aren’t you?” I cannot say how I knew it, but knew as the words escaped me that I was right. It blinked, posture hardening to alertness, and when its eyes opened they were black again. Blink. Violet. Blink. Black. I sat a little straighter, knee shifting a little of its own volition. “No . . . you escaped from there, didn’t you?”

  It was quiet for a moment, nothing but the rattling of the tramway above us and the shifting of light through the curtained windows. “You don’t know a damned thing.”

  “True,” I said, rocking back, curling my toes within the security of my boots. “But that’s not something you’d say if I weren’t right. What were you? Someone’s pet?” The Painted Man took up its stunner and brandished it at me, grunting low in his throat and deeper than that thin chest should allow. It stood. I shielded my face. “I was serious, you know. I mean to find Vorgossos.”

  The Painted Man did not lower its stunner. But it did not speak or mock me.

  “When you’ve sold me to my people, sell them the road to Vorgossos.”

  “Were you not listening?” the creature said. “I do not know where it is.”

  “You must know something,” I said coldly. “Put us on the path. We’ll pay for it.” It was all I could do not to choke on the words. I could still hear Ghen’s laughter echoing in that low-ceilinged space, and if Switch and the others were dead . . . My eyes flickered to the displayed meteors, to the theater masks on the walls, the neat display of bottles and storage chips in one corner. “Please.”

  At that small courtesy, the homunculi’s mouth widened to its full and impossible extent, revealing easily one hundred little teeth in its head. It sat back down, hand going to the silver tablet it had wired into its skull not long before. “Put you on the path,” it repeated, and laughed. “You’re one of them, aren’t you? The pilgrims?”

  “I’m sorry?” I said, shutting my eyes. I felt suddenly motion sick, like someone not at ease on the water. “Pilgrims?”

  “You Imperial palatines were the worst. You came seeking immortality. Youth. To change your sex. Whatever your Imperium would not allow, the Undying would give you. For a price. The bonecutters would make anything for you. Anyone. Soldiers. Slaves. Sex objects.” Its tongue flitted obscenely past its thicket of white fangs.

  “Which were you?” I demanded, flippant. I had to keep it talking. I could feel my legs returning to me, my palatine’s overclocked nervous system restoring itself faster than a normal man’s. And I’d noticed something about the office—perhaps you’ve noticed it, too? Noticed it was no office at all.

  The Painted Man’s obscene smile faltered a moment—all its art and artifice fell away, leaving a shrunken, subhuman thing in fine robes before me. “I am as you see me. An idea. Any idea.”

  “That thing you do,” I said, gesturing at the creature. I flexed my calves. “Your . . . changing. Is it holography? Some daimon?”

  “I am a Painted Man,” it said. “I am whatever I need to be.”

  A skin-changer.

  “There are more of you, then?” I asked.

  The homunculus did not answer. It drifted to the window beside its couch, and peered out around the curtain. I could see nothing. Whatever the answer was, yes or no, it did not matter. Wordless, The Painted Man unspooled the cable from its terminal and clicked the jack back into its skull behind one ear.

  Here was a creature of the most unfortunate kind. Unlike Ilex, who was a homunculus as well but as free of will as any palatine, this Painted Man had been tailored body and soul, its mind shaped by its makers to serve their purposes. What that use was—as assassin or plaything, spy or idle fancy—I dared not guess. It had rebelled, but I sensed it was still acting out the patterns other men had put in it, still living out a life of criminality and deceit.

  Surely it had been sequenced by some vile magus in the very pits of Vorgossos, wearing the faces of others because its own was abhorrent. Almost I could pity it, but for the fact it had escaped and made for itself a mean, vile heaven of the hell of its life. Master though it was of its own destiny, the world had turned it cruel, or perhaps cruelty had been its nature. Evolution would not have shaped a beast with such teeth for kindness, and Evolution is blind. Men are not. Those teeth then and the vileness of its shape were either a cruel confirmation of purpose or a maleficent jape, like poisoning the thorns on a rose.

  “What a farce,” I said to no one in particular, shifting my heels up against the base of my chair. I could still not quite feel them, but the mind commanded the body now, and instantly it obeyed. Thank the High College and whoever sequenced my superior nervous system when I was but an embryo. I recovered fast. “You remind
me of the monster in Shelley’s Frankenstein,” I said, referring to a novel in the Classical English Gibson had suggested to me long ago. “A reminder that mankind’s reach exceeds her grasp.”

  The homunculus jerked its attention onto me. “What?”

  “It’s a story about a scholiast who creates a homunculus. This was before there were homunculi in truth. I think it was before we understood genetics, before Apollo gave us the Moon.” I reached out a hand and grabbed one of the larger meteors and tested it. It might have massed thirty-five kilos, so dense it was. The inmane told me to put it down, so I only turned it to give myself a better look. “The scholiast makes his homunculus from the bodies of the dead, sewing their parts together. He imagines—as all artists must—that his work will be a masterpiece, more beautiful than nature. Quite like a palatine, I suppose.” I smiled, allowed myself a moment to let the insult sink in. “Only it isn’t. His skill was not up to the task. He made a monster. The scholiast spurned his creation out of loathing and fled, and the monster fled itself. And here you are.”

  “You’re projecting, palatine,” The Painted Man said, fiddling with the wired connection behind its ear. The tramway rattled above our head, and I felt the sensation of seasickness again. “Like I said, you’re only as human as I am, and we are both very far from home.”

  It was my turn at last to grin. “You have me there. We are both uncommon.” Hesitantly, I rolled my ankles inside my boots. I would have only one shot at this. Only one. “But there is a difference between us two, I think.” The creature only cocked red eyebrows at me and for once did not speak. I quoted, changing a couple of the words, “Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him, but you are solitary and abhorred.”