Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “You’re turning your backs on everything we’ve done so far,” I said, and it sounded like another man’s voice, as if I were watching some recording or an opera about some other Hadrian, some poor fellow against whom all had turned. “Forty-eight years, Bassander. Jinan. Forty-eight years. If we go back now, what was it all for?”

  Bassander stood with a fluid grace that infuriated. How dare he be so calm? So at ease? That laser-bright line that connected our eyes had transferred his earlier chaos and fury to myself, and so he had grown strong, and I diminished. “Giving up?” he asked in a voice flat and dispassionate as glass. “Like you said, Marlowe: it’s been forty-eight years since we left Emesh. That’s long enough! We should regroup with the fleet, come up with a new plan of attack.”

  “At least wave Smythe on the telegraph first!” I said, glancing at Jinan, who had suggested it. “We should hold position here until we have orders. We shouldn’t incur the time debt of another journey until we’re sure.”

  Jinan—my Jinan—was nodding, and I found myself wondering if she and Bassander had been discussing this before this meeting, before even she’d come to retrieve me from the planet. “We ought to,” she said in dry tones. “Bassander. It may be that your tribune has ideas of her own.”

  “I say again,” Otavia put forth, “if you set sail for a rendezvous with the Imperial fleet, you do so without my ship or my people.”

  “Your ship?” Bassander repeated, pursing his lips. “The Mistral is the property of the Meidua Red Company—that makes it the Empire’s property, mercenary. You retain your captaincy so long as we retain your services. If you wish to part company, I will see to it that you and your people are shuttled to Rustam and given severance.”

  The muscles flexing in the Norman woman’s jaw might have been the pistons of some great locomotive. I had my private doubts about Bassander’s ability to deliver on that threat, but held my peace. I was still standing at my end of the table, still trying to find my way out of the dark I’d fallen into. Jinan had been a source of light, and for that moment that light was veiled. I had needed her, needed support, and she had supported Bassander.

  Captain Corvo was diplomatic enough not to respond, but the look she gave Bassander could have stripped paint from steel. Jinan spoke again, and her lilting Jaddian accent fell foreign as a stranger’s on my ears. “We have much to consider. Perhaps it is best we wait, and hold our position until we can get a response from Smythe and the Legion. I should like to get word to my lady as well.” She meant Kalima di Sayyiph, the Satrap Governor of Ubar whom she served, who had loaned her to the Legions and the Company after the Emesh affair. Her black eyes turned themselves on me. Once, they had seemed the color of ink illuminated by candlelight. Now I saw only Bassander Lin’s cold professionalism reflected in those black pools. “Are we agreed?”

  She found me when it was over. I had not gone far. I had wandered the gray corridors of the Pharaoh in a grayer fog, as if I had never seen the place before . . . as if I had not lived in them for twelve and forty-eight years. How fast familiar ground becomes unknown territory when our world breaks down.

  “Hadrian!”

  Her voice—trying for warmth—burned instead. I ground to a halt, shoulders pinched together. It was only with a great effort that I straightened myself and, turning, said, “Jinan.”

  The Jaddian lieutenant hurried toward me, high boots pounding the deck plates. In spite of myself, I felt an autonomic smile pull my lips, but banished it. She caught me by the wrist as I stepped back. “What is the matter with you?”

  “Really?” I asked, ducking my head and glancing up at her from under heavy brows. “You have to ask?”

  “I didn’t propose anything that was not reasonable!” she insisted, fingers tightening on my arm.

  “Unreasonable?” I echoed, taking a step closer. “You enabled Lin. He’s been trying to drag us back since we left Emesh. He doesn’t want to be here.”

  “Enabled Lin? Hadrian, he has orders. We have orders.”

  Tugging free, I jabbed my finger at the ground. “We have the best chance of winning this war, Jinan. The best chance. We have a Cielcin nobile frozen on the Balmung. It’s willing to work with us to make peace.”

  She tried to take my hand again, but I clasped my hands behind my back and squared my shoulders to her. “I know . . . I know, Hadrian.”

  “Isn’t that the whole point of fighting?” I asked, conscious at once of the cameras in the Pharaoh and certain that Bassander would hear. “To make peace? Or is it to fight until there’s no one left? Because so far as I can tell, that’s all that will happen if we go back now. And I understand that Bassander’s developed some sort of survivor’s guilt because he’s here and not on the front, but that’s a personal problem and not something that should be directing our actions. We have a solid lead, Jinan. If Ilex can crack The Painted Man’s terminal, then . . . then maybe Ghen won’t have died for nothing.”

  There it was. Spoken and made real. I had not even known why I was so upset until I spoke the words. Ghen of Emesh and I had not met as friends. Convicted of a series of violent crimes, the Chantry and the County had sentenced him to a term of combat as a fodder pool myrmidon in the Borosevo coliseum. Destitute as I was and desperate, I had signed up for the same treatment. Switch and I had met there, and Pallino and Siran, Elara and the rest. Ghen had been a terror, the loudest voice in the smallest room. He’d counted on his tremendous size and strength to win his battles, and bullied the others—save Siran, who knew him best. Siran. I would need to speak to Siran. Did she even know? Was she still in fugue aboard the Mistral?

  “Dolá Deu di Fotí!” Jinan swore. “Mia qal, I am so sorry. I did not think.” She touched my cheek and this time I did not flinch away. I did not move either, but permitted her to pull close, to press her forehead to mine and wrap her arms round me. The embrace lasted five seconds, or perhaps it was five years, but when it was over the gray fog had cleared a little, and I saw that it was behind my eyes and not before them.

  “It’s fine,” I said. It wasn’t. “I just . . . it wore his face, Jinan. The Painted Man.”

  “What?”

  “After it killed him, it changed.” I heard the words—my words, my voice—but I felt I witnessed them more than spoke them, as if the whole scene were playing out on a holograph plate, or on a stage such as the Eudorans still use for their masques. “It could make itself look like anyone it wanted. Change its size. Its voice. It put on his face, Jinan. Ghen’s face. That’s why I killed it.” I spoke into her hair, finally embracing her in return. She smelled like jasmine and old metal at the same time—like that first night on Pharos, drunk on Admiral Whent’s wine and our victory.

  She said nothing—and what could she say? She was of Jadd, the daughter of a wealthy spicer and a retired military officer. We were both creatures of the known world, but we were beyond knowing now, touching the very edge of the infinite space where lurk those things the lights of Empire and of Jadd destroyed. All my life before the Red Company—even on Emesh—I was a denizen in a walled garden. For all the hierarchy of the Imperium: its imposition of caste and class, the surveillance, the Chantry, the violence and violent suppression of dissent . . . it would never allow The Painted Man to menace its heart, or to let its people be taken, hollowed out and made into SOMs. It shames me none, Reader, to say that I was afraid. Not just of what monsters I dreamed might lie in wait—machine or man or blood-drinking Cielcin—but of the thought that I was and would ever be unequal to the task of facing them, so deep was that Dark before me.

  At last I pushed her away. “I need to sleep, Jinan.”

  The Jaddian lieutenant rubbed at her eyes. “Yes, of course. I’ve got a shuttle ready to take us back.” Her hand slipped down, caught my wrist, and half she turned away, started to move.

  I didn’t. Stalling, she turned back and leaned in to kiss me. I turned my head
down and said, “I’m going to stay here tonight. In my room.”

  “I’ll come with you, then.”

  The words took a moment to come, had to shake my head to loosen them. “No, I . . . I need to be alone.”

  The way her lovely face collapsed broke a piece of me, but there was another piece yet too angry with her to be ashamed. The broken part squeezed her hand and smiled its sad and crooked smile, and the rest of me turned to go.

  CHAPTER 9

  ABSENT FRIENDS

  ONE ENCOUNTER WITH BASSANDER the next day drove me from the Pharaoh again—this time in possession of the black leather pencil kit and folio I’d left in my room, along with a few others of my possessions. I shuttled over to the Balmung, intended to spend the rest of my time there before the jump to warp and my inevitable return to fugue. It was easy to pretend—as the days went by—that Jinan’s siding with Bassander had not rattled me. I knew she was only doing her duty, and I was grateful we were holding position instead of returning to the Imperial fleet.

  Superluminal communication takes time. Only a single pair of slaved particles is shared between our telegraph and the other; data dripped across the uncounted light-years one bit at a time. Short messages, text, were quick enough. But images, video, complex files . . . these took time to compile, and longer for the fleet to reply to. If our little meeting had been a nightmare, it was nothing next to whatever Raine Smythe and the high officers endured. Secure as we were in our position, we might hold out for days.

  And we did.

  “I don’t know how you deal with it,” Elara said, setting the serving board on the center of a glass dining table. “That Lin gives me the creeps, him always watching those security feeds.”

  I glanced at Jinan and smiled despite myself. “Well, mostly I try not to sleep there.” Jinan squeezed my knee under the table. “I like it here better. It’s all his people over on the Pharaoh.”

  Pallino came through the arched bulkhead from the small kitchen that serviced the Balmung’s executive dining room. With his paramour and Switch in tow he finished setting the table. I was grateful for Elara’s statement; it had broken the tense silence with Jinan and myself and whatever it was between Jinan and Valka.

  “Well, we’re all much better looking,” Switch said, taking the seat opposite me with a huge serving bowl filled with a pasta tossed with onion, pepper, and mushroom pulled from the hydroponics section. “But that’s mostly me.” Valka snorted, and Elara hit him in the back of the head with a spoon. Switch yelped.

  “Lin’s a right peacock. Parents were Legion, probably their parents were Legion and that’s how he got his commission. Got his baton shoved up his ass more than in his hand, you take my meaning,” Pallino said, settling in between Switch and Elara at the round table. Over their shoulders, a holograph plate projected a vision of the Pharaoh and the smaller Mistral ahead of us in orbit above weeping, umber Rustam. “You get his like all the time. Competent, but he lets his . . . his principles run him into bad decisions. The sort of officer who thinks using his dead mates for sandbags is glorious.”

  At my left hand, Valka took the water pitcher from Switch and poured for herself. “’Tis nothing glorious in that.”

  “In using your mates for sandbags? Nah,” Pallino said, working a finger under the strap of his eyepatch and adjusting it against his stiff white hair. “The glory’s in being the sandbag, in saving your brother’s life.”

  “We’ve hit a dead end. Don’t be too hard on him,” Jinan said in her Captain Azhar voice, a little more stiffly than the woman I knew. “Bassander is acting on the intelligence he has.”

  Valka passed me the water pitcher, saying, “Indeed, but therein lies your problem, captain.” She held her hands like the pans of a scale. “Military intelligence can make up for the other kind, and vice versa, but Lin’s short on both.”

  “That is not true,” Jinan said. “He’s overworked. You know he spent the whole flight from Sanora awake, yes? Coordinating with the fleet? He’s exhausted. Anyone would be.”

  “Then he should put himself in fugue for a while,” I suggested. “It’s not an excuse for running back with his tail between his legs.”

  My Jaddian captain did not look at me as she said, “We still have no idea what intelligence is on The Painted Man’s terminal. Once we know that, we can make an informed decision.”

  I bit back the retort that came to mind, stared down at my empty plate. Thinking better of saying anything further, I busied myself serving Jinan and then myself. Ordinarily, my captain would have slapped my hand away and served herself. That she did no such thing struck me as a bad sign.

  “You made all this yourself?” Valka asked Switch, lifting the serving dish to spoon the short noodles from their golden ceramic bowl and onto her plate.

  The lictor grinned ruefully. “No, it was mostly Pallino. I was just the fetch and carry.”

  “The kid doesn’t give himself enough credit!” said one-eyed Pallino. “He did the roast this time, and the sauce for the pasta. I mostly glared at him and chopped things.” Valka grinned, passed the bowl to Jinan with a polite smile, and shook her head. Seeing this, Pallino asked, “What?”

  “You never cease to astonish, you saichdattr,” she said, meaning those of us who came from the coliseum. “’Tis not a chef one envisions when one pictures an Imperial fighting man.” She raised her glass in salute.

  “Meaning no disrespect, doctor, you’re not what one pictures when he thinks of a Tavrosi sorcerer.” Pallino mirrored the salute. “Besides, grow up with a grandmother like mine and see how far you get without learning to cook. Woman would die of shame if any nipote of hers couldn’t make a proper meal.”

  “Nipote?” Jinan repeated. “Was she Jaddian, you grandmother?”

  Pallino frowned, taking the serving bowl from Jinan. “No, I don’t think so. My family lived on Trieste, well . . . since the beginning. I was the first of my village to go to the Legions in over five hundred years. They knew they would never see me again, but my old nona was so proud. Her boy out there fighting for the Emperor. She were right pious, that one.”

  “It is a Jaddian word,” Jinan said. “Perhaps we are cousins somewhere far back.”

  The one-eyed old soldier shrugged, ladling the pasta to his plate without ceremony. “Might do, aye. Might be there was something of what went on to be your people as settled on Trieste on their way out from the old-old Empire. Might do . . . might do.” He set the serving bowl on the table. “Ask His Radiance, here. Had’s got the head for this sort of thing.”

  I flinched and almost dropped my fork. The His Radiance hit me too close to where I lived. Ghen had called me that, and it was catching. It seemed almost a sacrilege that it could still be said, now that Ghen was gone. I did set my fork down with great care. “It’s possible. It’s not easy to track migration patterns anymore, and I don’t know so much about your homeworld, Pallino, but . . . sure.” I looked at my plate the entire time, at the dripping slice of imitation beef beside the pasta in its red sauce. Becoming aware of this, I inhaled sharply and sat a little straighter. “Sorry. I . . .” I took up my cup—water, not wine—turned it in my hands. “I wanted to say something.” All eyes turned to me as they had in council, though here the effect was of warmth, not coldness.

  My friends, such as I had found and had found me. Switch, transformed from boy to man, victim to victor. Pallino, who had been like a father to us both, or at least a gruff old uncle. Elara was there beside him, younger and quieter than Pallino and with an easy smile and a laugh the years have not obscured from me. And there were Jinan and Valka, who mattered to me and would matter more than all the gold in Avalon—though I paid more dearly than any Emperor. My friends. My family. Made and not begotten. Only Siran was missing, who was stationed on the Mistral and had not joined us.

  And Ghen, who was dead.

  “I wasn’t sure what to say
,” I began, voice tripping over itself in a way that sounded very much not like the Hadrian Marlowe I knew. “And to be honest I still have no idea. But we’ve an empty chair at our table, and we’ll always have that empty chair.” At once I found I could not look the others in the eye, and focused instead on my reflection in the gleaming dark of the wall between Switch and Pallino’s shoulders. “He died brave as he lived. Pulled two of those monsters apart with his bare hands, I think. But I sent him down those stairs to try and find us a way out. He didn’t question me—and Earth knows the bastard had questions in him. But he went.” I was lying. Trickery had killed Ghen. Trickery and cowardice. He’d been shot in the back by The Painted Man while the vile creature wore the face of a friend and Ghen had grappled with those SOM demons. And so I turned my lie into blame. “I should have been faster . . . If I’d gone with him.”

  “Now hold on, Had,” Switch said, who alone of the company had shared the last horrible adventure with me, “That wasn’t your fault. That homunculus would have killed Ghen anyway when it took you. There wasn’t anything you could do.”

  That drew a sad smile from me, but I suppressed the urge to say that yes, it was my fault. Instead, I shook my head and said, “Ghen was a good man. Hard to learn to like but easy to keep liking.” His face flickered before me, laughing in the coliseum, then again in the dark of The Painted Man’s office. My knuckles whitened on the cup. “He gave his life for us, same as the others, but was our friend. He was my friend.” I found the strength to look at Pallino, at Elara. Switch. The cup, when I raised it, weighed some amount I could not gauge. Too heavy, as if it held all the blood in a man’s body and not the little water there was in truth. “Ghen. We will never see his like again.”

  “Ghen!” all said.