Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “Are you always like this?” The Painted Man sneered.

  “Melodramatic? Oh yes,” I said with my customary lopsided grin. “Ask anyone who knows me.” At this I seized the meteor on the table beside me, sinking fingers into the bubbled holes on its iridium surface. On Emesh, my strength would not have availed me, but here on Rustam, it weighed less than two-thirds what it might, and the massy stone lifted easily. Rocking to my feet, unsteady, I threw the weighty thing straight at The Painted Man’s face before it could stun me. The creature yelped and fell back onto the couch, its fingers prisoned in the loops of the stunner handle, its body wrapped in its terminal cord.

  Lurching to my feet, I became suddenly aware of the way the office rocked. It moved, slewing slightly as on a short chain. The homunculus made a choking sound, and I said, “Stupid of you not to keep me stunned, really. But I suppose you wanted a gloat.” I picked up the munitions chest that stood on the floor between us; it wouldn’t open. “I can understand that, but you weren’t very careful. I might have been content to sit out my rescue if I didn’t know where I was, but when I woke you said ‘we’ve a ways to go yet,’ meaning we’re in transit to whatever miserable little hole it is you call home. This is a private cable car.” I nodded at the curtained windows.

  Hefting the heavy chest as the executioner does his sword, I had a brief impression of the homunculus. It had fallen to the floor, its face a bloody mess, one long hand clamped over the ruin of its mouth. I might then have truly pitied it, but for the back of that hand. A tattoo had formed there, the image of a grinning mouth. Its face bubbled and pitted, flowing through a series of impressions. It did not speak, perhaps it could not. It raised its stunner to shoot me. I stomped on its hand as a man would a snake. “You shouldn’t have taken Ghen’s face,” I said, and slammed the crate down on the homunculi’s own face with all the force I could muster.

  There was ink in the blood as it soaked the fine carpet, so many colors joined together they were only black. I kept the box atop the body—I did not want to see what remained of the face. Hurriedly, glad to be alone for now but certain that this office pod was traveling somewhere I did not want to be, I retrieved Olorin’s sword and found my shield-belt on the corner shelves. Unwilling to leave empty-handed, I returned to the body. Regret is stronger than fury, and is comparably immortal. I bit my lip as I knelt by the homunculi’s corpse and fished the wire out of its head. I tucked the silver terminal disc into a sabretache on the back of my belt and—lacking a stunner—took its for my own. Then I turned and went to the door.

  It would not open, and so I took up my sword and cut my way out. The door tumbled onto a crowded street thirty feet below. Air rushed in and sound. I heard people gasp and shout, but no one screamed. At least I had not crushed anyone. After the gloom of The Painted Man’s mobile office, the orange daylight was striking. We passed by at the level of advertisements: great billboards—painted and electronic—depicting groundcar and alcohol sales. A smiling woman, red-haired, naked but for a sarong about her generous hips, hawked genetic enhancements for as low as ten thousand marks. In the lesser gravity, I might be strong enough to leap the three or so meters to the scaffolding about the base of that massive image. I stood in the mouth of the doorway for a long moment, one hand on either side of the frame. “Come on, Marlowe,” I whispered. “Come on.” Then I leaped out of that dismal office pod and into the free and vaporous air.

  CHAPTER 7

  THINGS UNSEEN, THINGS REMEMBERED

  WITHOUT A TERMINAL, I had no way of contacting my fleet. I had no way to home in on my shuttle. I had no map of this impossible labyrinth they called a city. Where had I lost my terminal?

  “It was in your coat, Marlowe, you damn fool,” I muttered, shoving my hands in my pockets and hunching against the inconstant wind. “And now your coat’s on a balcony uptown surrounded by Earth only knows how many dead daimons.” I was not having my best day. The adrenaline high of my brief battle with The Painted Man had worn off and—as I say—regret is immortal. At least I had some money. I could find a holography booth and wave the fleet above.

  I must have cut a strange figure, dressed in a black tunic-jacket of semi-military cut, with high boots and a high collar and the shield-belt with its sabretache and the Jaddian sword hilt bouncing against my thigh with every odd step. Despite having been so long removed from Delos and my home, I never had quite shaken my penchant for black clothing.

  “And how well did that work out?” said the part of me that spoke in my father’s voice.

  My knee twinged from where I’d banged it against the scaffolding jumping out of The Painted Man’s mobile office pod, and with the stunner numbness fading it ached as I walked. People kept looking at me, eyes wide before they averted their gazes. After a mother moved her children across the street to get away from me, I turned up a side alley and tried to get a look at myself in the dark reflections of a low shuttle that served as the foundation for a large, prefabricated structure made of interlocked storage units like a tesselated pile of old crates. I couldn’t see a thing, just a dark blur.

  There was a rain barrel open not far on, filling where a gutter dripped down from on high. Standing over it I saw the blood on my face, turned black by the orange light of afternoon. It wasn’t mine. I cannot say how long I stood there, hunched over the water. Hardly did I recognize the young man peering out at me. When did I get so tired? Time had not yet traced her delicate channels on my face, nor frosted my hair, but something lurked behind my eyes: something aged and thin as old parchment. As if a painting of Hadrian Marlowe watched me out of the rain barrel, and not the man himself.

  “Pull yourself together, man,” I breathed, cupping water in my hands. I splashed my face and neck and waited. When the water quieted, it was still a pale shadow of myself that loomed out of the darkness, not the image of myself I held in my mind, young and wryly smiling. “You’re alive. You’re alive.” My hair defied my attempts to fix it, even damp. I wished I wouldn’t look at myself like that. With Gilliam’s eyes peering out from behind my own. And Uvanari’s, and Bordelon’s, and The Painted Man’s. Other eyes there were, staring out of mine—back at mine.

  Grief is deep water. Gibson’s words sounded in my head, and almost it felt he was at my shoulder. The scholiasts’ aphorism was an injunction, a reminder that the extremes of emotion were destructive by their nature.

  I can swim, I thought, flippant.

  No one can swim, Gibson said. Had said. The rightly tuned mind does not deny its emotions, but floats with them. It accepts what it feels and so incorporates that feeling to itself. Thus the mind is not subject, but rules itself.

  I had been perhaps eight when he told me that.

  It was after my grandmother had died. Against my father’s orders my brother Crispin and I had stolen into the porphyry chamber where her body lay for its customary three days after the surgeons had removed her brain and heart and eyes, before the flesh was taken to the crematorium. Sir Roban had been on vigil, and tried to shoo us out, but I had stayed. A tenebrous cloth—blacker than space—lay across her eyes, those same eyes I would carry in their canopic jar for the funeral procession. I had wanted to see, to know that my grandmother was gone.

  Gibson had found us. Crispin was too young truly to be much affected or to remember, but the leonine old scholiast had taken me aside. “It’s all right to be sad,” he said in that serious way of his; all eyebrows. “It’s all right to be angry or sick or scared, or whatever it is you’re feeling. But you can’t let it crush you, all right?” I’d nodded then, and rubbed the tears from my eyes. “Sad is like a big ocean, and you can’t breathe deep down. You can float on it, you can swim a little, but be careful. Grief is drowning. Grief is deep water. Say it.” The way he’d said say it told me it was a lesson, another of his incantations for trying times and hard thoughts.

  I knew I was not going to be a useless child wailing in the corner, sm
ashed to pieces by his first brush with death. Funny thing about lessons: the idiot student thinks when he is given a little fact that he owns it—that two and two is always four no matter the circumstance. Just as it was not true for Orwell, it is not true for anyone. True lessons require not only knowing, but that the student practices his knowledge again and again. Thus knowledge becomes us, and we become more than the animal and the machine. That is why the best teachers are students always, and the best students are never fully educated.

  I had forgotten Gibson’s lesson for a moment, but stood a little straighter, shouldering as a pack my grief, my regret and self-loathing. I carry Gibson with me even still, and often it is with his eyes that I see myself, and through them that I have come to know who and what I am.

  “And the others?” I asked. “They all made it back?”

  Comms latency with high orbit was less than a second, and Jinan’s voice crackled over the line almost instantly. “Yes, they are all right. Switch, Crim, Ilex, the soldiers . . . even Greenlaw.”

  “Shame about that last one, eh?” I tried to laugh, but the sound wouldn’t come. The relief was almost too much. Jinan laughed, and to my shame I crushed that sound, asking, “Did you get Ghen’s body?”

  “No,” she said, and I could see her shake her head in my mind’s eye. Far better it was than the grimy view through the glass of the telecomms booth. I picked at a peeling sticker with the number for the Free Traders Union’s quantum telegraph service printed on it, available to anyone with a membership number.

  It took me a moment to respond, to compose myself. “We’ll have to do . . . something. He’s a long way from home.” I didn’t know if he had any family. He’d never spoken of them, and I’d not thought to ask.

  Jinan’s words came slow, heavy with their own weight. “I’m just glad you’re all right. When they came back without you . . .”

  “I’m all right, my captain,” I said soothingly, hunching against the wall of the booth. “I’m a little banged up but it’s nothing Okoyo or one of the junior medics can’t patch up.” It was all I could do to force a laugh into my voice. “I got the one that got Ghen, though. The Painted Man.”

  “I’m heading down now, you just stay put now, mia qal.” I’d told her where I was already.

  A weary nod was all I could manage for a moment, then realizing it wasn’t helpful with no video link I added, “Will do,” and closed the line. I stood in the booth in silence for a moment, until an angry man in a leather coat made a rude gesture and motioned for me to clear out. After the day I’d had, I considered stunning him, but settled for a glare instead.

  A little cafe crouched beneath the landing peds of an old freighter, built to fill the gap between earth and hull. Like much of the ground-level building in Arslan, it looked slapped together, pressed up into that gap like insulation foam, expanding into every joint beneath the ship.

  No one looked at me as I entered and seated myself by the windows in the storefront. I must have sufficiently fixed my appearance. I sank into the plastic armchair without a word, hoping to go on unnoticed until Jinan found me.

  Jinan.

  This was not the first time she’d had to pull me out of a bad place—even if it was the last, though I did not then know it. She had come for me on Pharos, after I’d let Marius Whent get the best of me. She’d pulled me out of Whent’s compound alone and through the capital city with the warlord’s reavers on our tail. We’d each saved the other’s life a dozen times by the end of that awful month. No plan, no backup, no weapons but my sword, which I’d taken off Whent’s desk as we made our escape. We’d been hired to kill the admiral, to help the rebels who supported Imperial annexation. The campaign had taken another three months, culminating in Bordelon’s death and Whent’s surrender. Its success had marked the high point of the Red Company’s short career. Bassander had resented it. It took away from our central quest, though we had strengthened the Empire’s hold on the Veil of Marinus and better prepared our position against the Cielcin.

  And Jinan . . .

  She hadn’t said anything that first time, alone in the sweating dark after our victory on Pharos, after Whent’s surrender. Only held me. Hands. Mouths. The iron scent of her skin thick in the close air. I do not know if it was love for her at first, as it was not for me. Relief, yes, and the animal joy of life having laughed in the face of Death and her many-fingered hands. The hunger of that life for life and the cellular ecstasy of that oldest of biological imperatives: Create. Create. Create. And through that the acute awareness of the self not as spirit, but as an embodied thing, complete not in itself—as no man is—but by its sharing in the spirit and body of another.

  “Messer, if you are going to sit there, you must order.”

  “I’m sorry?” I looked up into the face of a smiling young woman in a tidy uniform. “Oh! I’m sorry!” Promptly I ordered a bowl of noodles—the first thing I saw on the menu printed beneath the glass of the tabletop—and the woman went away.

  Satan had his companions, fellow devils . . . I had told The Painted Man. My hand went to the shiny wheal of scar about my left thumb where my old signet ring had burned in cryonic fugue. Fellow devils, indeed. I’d paid homage to the Marlowe devil in the logo of my Meidua Red Company: the devil’s trident piercing a five-pointed star. My devils.

  The noodles swam in some light and salty broth with bits of some fishy protein and green onions. Simple. Clean. I ate quietly, fishing mouthfuls from the clay bowl with a flat-bottomed spoon. No thoughts came to me, who thought too much and too often. I could not escape the image of the machine-woman—the SOM, or so The Painted Man had called it—who had nearly stabbed me in the back during the fight at the tea house. She would have stabbed me just where Ghen was shot. Between the shoulders, just right of center. There is a reason that Many-Fingered Death is depicted in stygian robes. She is our shadow, ever at our back, ever at our feet.

  She is never far.

  Food helps.

  Fish.

  I had eaten a great deal of fish in Borosevo, on Emesh. In the streets. I had stolen fish from guild warehouses with Cat and off the back of float palettes and freezer carts. Cat was dead, too. Dead not because of my efforts, like so many others, but despite them. Sometimes, it is only nature who is cruel, not mankind.

  The dinner hour came and went, and patrons filtered in and out and past me. The waitress, too, came and went and was increasingly frustrated that I did not leave. She bore it well, as so many of that unloved profession must, and kept my water cup filled. Once, I would have had wine and in great amounts after a day such as mine, but I had not the money for it; had only a couple dozen kaspums left in a pouch of my belt by mistake. I had not thought to need money for the meeting with The Painted Man.

  “You look awful, love.”

  I shook myself awake—when had I dozed off? And why had the waitress not come to yell at me? Jinan was smiling at me from across the table, dressed in her Red Company uniform and wearing . . . “Is that my coat?” I asked, massaging my temple.

  “And a good evening to you, too,” she huffed, but her smile did not waver. “Switch brought it back from that disaster at the tea house.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Then thinking of the tea house, I added, “Did they get Samir?”

  Jinan propped herself up on one fist, eyes never leaving my face. “The plagiarius? No. They had to leave in a hurry.” I could sense that she wanted to say more, about the machines—the SOMs—that had attacked us. About Ghen. She didn’t. I can only assume there was something on my face that stopped her, some shadow of exhaustion or pain. Or of both. “Are you all right?”

  A weak laugh ran out my nose, and I rocked forward in the little seat, cradling my head a moment in my hands. I worked stiff fingers through my tangled hair and, inhaling sharply, said, “I will be.” I could feel the frayed gaps in my smile, though.

  “How di
d you escape?” she asked. “Switch said you were taken.” She pawed at the blue ribbon in her heavy braid, hard fingers straightening the bright silk against the dark strands.

  “I was,” I said. “I did. I . . . I killed him. It. Whatever it was. The Painted Man, I mean. The homunculus meant to ransom me to the fleet, or so it claimed.”

  Jinan took my hand where I’d left it on the table. Warmth bled into me from her. She smiled, warm and constant as a main sequence sun. “Nómiza ut ió uqadat ti,” she said in her native tongue. “Avrae trasformato hadih poli hawala an eprepe.” She’d meant it as a joke, but the thought of Jinan taking the city apart to find me was not amusing at all, it was . . . precious. Indescribably so.

  “I know,” I said in Jaddian. “I would have done the same.”

  She ran her thumb along the back of my hand, tightening her grip before she broke away, reaching across to hold that hand to my cheek. The rest, the obvious, did not need saying, but she said it. “Ti ahba.”

  “I love you, too,” I replied, then, “Can I have my coat back, please?”

  Jinan’s black eyes widened. “What? You were not letting me keep it? Some gallant knight of the Empire you are!”

  Standing, I left a five-kaspum note on the table—it was far more than the noodles were worth—and said, “I’m not a knight, dear captain.”

  “Clearly not!” she said, pretending outrage.

  I let her keep the coat.

  The growing night was cold, and the days short on Rustam, as days so often are. And I was of Delos, and used to colder climes than she, who hailed from hot and arid Ubar worlds and worlds away. See us as we go, arm in arm, she walking tight beside me, my arm about her slender waist. We might have been two lovers returning from the opera—were it not that we were armed. You might think nothing of us at all. Arslan was, after all, a place for hard people in harder times. Two drunks perhaps, or two sailors recently out of freeze. Yet when I look back upon that moment, I can point to but few moments that are as shining and simple as that warm and gentle quiet we shared . . . or the small pressure of her hand on my arm, or the way I nestled against her shoulder in the back of our shuttle and for a moment forgot that my friend was dead.