Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Getting the sense that this was going somewhere I didn’t want to hear, I asked, “What happened?”

  “Prachar terrorists took control of a Durantine trading cog out past lunar orbit.”

  “Prachar?”

  “Religious nationalists.” She waved a dismissive hand. “Edda orbits pretty far from her parent star, uses mirrors to keep the surface habitable. The Prachars meant to smash the mirrors, force the rest of us to negotiate.” Valka looked at a point just over my shoulder. “They had captives on that ship. Foreign captives. More than two thousand of them. Most of them in fugue. We had poll data flooding in over the datasphere, everyone on the surface saying ’twas only a mirror. We could rebuild it, better to negotiate. But the orders came from Command. Told me to take the shot.”

  Her eyes were very far away.

  “Did you?” I asked.

  “To my everlasting shame,” she said, and blinked for the first time I think in all her narration. “I did.” She swallowed, turning to the rack of books behind her. “None of them survived. I resigned the next day, moved offworld to get away from the datasphere—the things people were saying about me.”

  “You saved their lives.”

  “I saved their quality of life.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” I said. “I’ve seen orbital mirrors. Any part of that could have dropped from orbit and leveled half a city. You did the right thing.” For once, Valka didn’t fight back. She just stood there, her back to me, shoulders drawn together the way a prisoner’s did before the cathar struck off his head. Not knowing what else to do, I placed a hand on her shoulder. I felt her tense, but did not move my hand away for a long moment. “Why are you telling me this? Do you want me to stop all this? Now?”

  Valka inhaled sharply, as if banishing the beginnings of tears. Presently she turned, and whatever hole there had been in her armor was closed. “No, I . . . never want to be in that position again.”

  “You won’t be,” I said.

  “No one should have to be in that position.”

  It was my turn to look away. “Valka, I had no idea.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” she snapped, sounding herself again. “I didn’t tell you.” She lifted her chin in defiance, as if expecting some judgment from me. I only managed a weak smile, seeing her—as it were—by the light of a new sun. Her cold disdain for my life as a myrmidon, her dislike of the way Imperial life codified violence, her displeasure at being the subject of a duel. Even the stiffly formal way she carried herself, ramrod straight and square as laser-cut crystal; the stance of a soldier at attention, or at parade rest, proud as any queen.

  “I’m glad you did,” I said, one awkward hand plucking at the frayed jacket of an old tome on the shelf beside us. “For what it’s worth, I understand.” The harsh silence of the comms channel going dead as I ordered Emil Bordelon and his ship wiped out of the sky thundered in my ears. Valka knew what I meant. Whether she was thinking of Bordelon or of Uvanari—or even of Gilliam—I could not say, but she pressed her lips together and did not contravene me. It was a strange conversation to be having in a place so open as that one, but we were deep in the stacks and alone.

  “No one should understand.”

  Something Jinan had said to me came drifting back, and I said, “It’s better if good men do what we do than bad ones.” I have told you I once believed that wars are fought with words, not soldiers. I have told you I was wrong. Here was my first glimmering of that realization. For when a war is done, no matter how small, pieces of it remain. Most of this shrapnel is carried in the hearts and souls of those who visited that strange country we call battle. Wherever such people go—be it to the brightest garden—they are at war. To say that such people do not fight wars, as I had, to say such do not win them, was a dishonor. A dismissal of their struggle and pain. I understood that then, as one can only learn by experience.

  “Are we?” Valka asked. “Good?”

  I thought about that a long time, distracting myself with the labels on the shelves, finding it easier to look at my hands than into her eyes. I realized then that I’d long ago stopped thinking of myself as good or ill, as if those bright categories had dimmed, one flowing softly casual into the next. When had that happened? I knew. It was in a torture cell in the Borosevo bastille, and before that: tormenting a Cielcin prisoner in the dark beneath Calagah.

  “I think the fact that we’re asking that question is a good sign,” I said, not fully confident in my answer. Perhaps I was troubled by some presentiment of my future—recalling the horror in Jari’s eyes when he looked upon my future and my past. It did not take an oracle to know that violent lives end so often violently. In lonely places. Down lonelier roads. “In any case, someone has to keep me from making a fool of myself.”

  “That’s my job, is it?” She thrust out her chin, all herself again.

  I smiled. “Well, someone has to do it.”

  CHAPTER 28

  THE DARK WORLD

  WITH MY OWN EYES I beheld the white curve of her beneath the black and baleful eye of her dead star. Never before had I seen such an undead sun. Stillborn, a pitiful brown dwarf glowing less than the meanest ember, vaster than the vastest world. The planet itself was almost as dark, illumined only by the ghastly white lights of what I took for cities. Many times I have read of sailors lost out airlocks or through fractured hulls, their bodies burst by vacuum, faces drawn and pale as the faces of men drowned at sea. In the tales, these ghouls cry out to torment their living crewmates. I have seen many such faces myself, and heard their silent song. The planet cried out to me the same.

  Dim Vorgossos.

  We were not permitted to land, nor to pilot our vessel ourselves. At first, I believed that a pilot would come aboard to take us out of the Enigma of Hours. Nothing of the kind happened. Our systems gave no sign of interference, but without warning we unclamped from our berth in the Sojourner, drifted out into the naked center of the massive starship’s main hold, joining a slow procession of ships leaving the Enigma’s drum.

  Around me, all was chaos as Corvo and her people attempted to ascertain what was happening. Clearly some power had seized control of our systems and was piloting her and the other ships in grim parade.

  We came in time out beneath the stars, and then it was I first beheld that whited sepulcher of a world beneath her black-dead star. The surface of that dark world drifted mere dozens of degrees above absolute zero, and whatever atmosphere there might have been was choked to frost. Words were said, but I do not now remember them, recalling only the vision of the strand ahead of us. The hightower.

  A single spar of adamant, black as hell, reached up from that pale and shadowed planet like a pillar of smoke, like an accusing finger aimed at heaven. Impossibly thin it was, hanging like a thread of evil gossamer between the planet and the stars, rising mile upon thousandth mile into the Dark. It was toward this tower we sailed, each ship silently guided into its berth about a station platform which sat atop the lift column the way an insect sits atop an antenna. We did not see the Enigma of Hours vanish behind us, disappearing with the telltale glimmer of warp before it vanished into the superluminal. We had a mind for nothing but the sound of docking clamps seizing the hull.

  We had arrived.

  Pallino was first through the doors when they opened, body shield shimmering about him. Crim went after, one hand resting casually against his sidearm in its holster.

  There was no one to greet us. No customs officer, no police. There weren’t even other merchants in all that bare and echoing hall. Stars shone through massive windows, and the smoldering wheal of the brown dwarf smote above and near at hand, larger than any true star I’d ever seen. It filled half the sky above and beneath us. And beneath it? Forty thousand miles below our feet? The lone and level snows stretched far away.

  “I get cold just looking at it,” Ilex said from behind me.
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br />   “This feels wrong,” Pallino said, as if in answer. Around us, dark metal scrolled like vines and distended human statues buttressed the arching ceiling, great chunks and stripes chewed out of their time-eaten surfaces. I wondered how old they were, and for how long this ancient elevator had stood high above the surface of this planet. “There’s no one here.”

  Crim—ever bravest—hurried on ahead, soft boots padding on the marble tiles. “Hello?” he called, raising his clear, richly accented voice. “Hello?”

  Nothing.

  Switch pressed out of the airlock behind and around Valka and myself. “Had, you and Doctor Onderra stay here, we’ll look round.”

  “Rot that,” I said, throwing out a hand to bar his way. “We’ll go together. Everyone, shields.” Those who had not activated body shields did so then.

  “Why wouldn’t there be anyone to greet us?” Pallino asked. “This place is for business, isn’t it?”

  “They don’t need anyone,” Valka said coolly. “We’re being watched.”

  I’d felt it, too. Raised as I was in a castle, I’d known what it’s like to be observed. One could feel the pressure of the cameras in the way our ancientmost ancestors sensed wolves watching in the forests by night.

  The entry hall opened without ceremony or corporate distraction onto a high, domed place. There were no holographs, no advertisements, no booths. No vendors selling food or religious icons.

  Nothing.

  A battery of several dozen lift carriages stood waiting beneath fluted pillars and the protective arms of giant statues. Three of them, with arms longer than those of any man and faces blank and pitiless as the dead sun seen through the glassy dome. We were the first to enter—or else the last—for no others appeared by the other doors, and many a lift carriage was absent, having descended through the floor and out an airlock.

  “I have a bad feeling about this,” I said, looking down at the floor. White stars, five-pointed, studded a ring which encircled that mighty hall, fringed with brass inlay in marble so black it was almost blue. Why was that familiar? I cursed myself for never becoming the scholiast I wanted to be. A scholiast would have remembered and trembled. I trembled all the same, and murmured one of Gibson’s aphorisms to quiet my nerves.

  “We should head back,” Switch agreed. “Get a decade together. We should have done in the first place.” As if in answer and proving Valka’s suspicion and mine, the door back to the loading dock irised shut. Switch whirled, roaring, “Black Earth and damnation!”

  “Steady, boy!” Pallino said. “Steady on.”

  I pressed a finger to the comms patch behind my ear. “Captain Corvo, this is Marlowe. We’ve been locked in. Repeat: We’ve been locked in. Do you copy?”

  Nothing.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. I imagined there were no signals getting in or out of a place like this.

  “I guess we’re left with no choice then,” Ilex said, sounding completely unafraid. The dryad checked her weapon calmly and, satisfied, awaited instruction.

  Shaking my head, I said, “We never had a choice. We’ve come this far already.” I pushed past companions and lingered a moment, looking up at the three faceless statues that stood above the lift carriages. Almost they seemed women to me, so slight were their forms. Almost the figures of Furies, so horrible were they. What hand had wrought them? And in what age? To what purpose? Like Cielcin they seemed, so tall and frail-seeming . . . and like the Exalted, crafted all of jointed, flowing steel. They made me think of Jari and his prophecies, and of one prophecy older still, words in a wordless voice whispered in the dark.

  This must be.

  I steeled myself, squaring my shoulders. I drew Olorin’s sword, held the handle quiet at my side and ready.

  “I am not afraid.”

  CHAPTER 29

  THE PROFANE CITY

  LONG WERE THE HOURS of our descent, and little of them shall be writ here, for there is little to say. We sat on couches, or stood in numb anticipation, watching the witch-lights shine from the depths. Pale green they were, or white, or sulfurous yellow. We were alone in our descent, climbing down our cable with all the patience of a spider at her web, unaccompanied by the lights of other lift carriages. Switch sat sweating, sick at his guns, staring at his hands more than out the windows. Ilex and Valka exchanged quiet words with Crim. Pallino stood by the window, said, “In all my years in the Legions, I ain’t never seen a place so desolate as this,” and was silent.

  I must have dozed a while, and dozing dreamed. I was lost in dark waters, with no inkling where light or the surface might be. All was dark as space, as our approach to that lightless world had been, without even the unfixed stars to ameliorate. I did not know which way was up, and so fancied that perhaps I was in space after all. I could not breathe but . . . did not need to. For a moment, I thought I saw the funeral masks of my forebears shining like swamp gas.

  Hadrian . . .

  They seemed to speak in voices dry as desert sand.

  Hadrian . . .

  Those white faces . . . each in turn opened like the lid of some horrid eye. Vanishing . . . vanishing until none remained, leaving me alone. Only then did I realize I could not breathe, and realizing—panicked. I tried to swim, to fly, to cry out. No words came. Then the hands came, emerging from the inky dark beneath me on arms long as lift cables. Fingers hard as iron seized me, closing over my mouth, around my wrists and ankles.

  Hadrian . . .

  I awoke with a start, glad none of my companions had seen. I could still hear the awful voice ringing in my head.

  Hadrian . . .

  It spoke again.

  Listen!

  I shook myself and ground my teeth.

  How fast we descended I couldn’t say. There was no wind, no atmosphere to slow our descent, and so we fell like a meteoroid, buoyed by the protective curtain of suppression fields. Most hightowers, I knew, took days to make their climbs. Ours took hours. In all that time we couldn’t get a communication through to the Mistral, no matter what we tried. As we sank lower, the ghost-lights revealed themselves as markers on the doors of sealed blast pits, half-concealed by snow so that the ice itself glowed ethereal in the deep and endless night.

  I don’t know what I expected. A city perhaps, sprawling and strangled, with buttressed walls and high towers. A piece of me, I think, suspected the place out of the vision I had seen in Calagah: that ancient city, Gothic in its ruinous splendor, limitless in scope, its halls echoing to the sound of that terrible infant I had heard in the dream. But on the surface there was nothing, nothing but the trackless snows and a single obelisk of white stone—more than a mile high—through whose open summit was threaded our lift cable and all the others. All was dark within, lit by faint service lights that recalled for me the crimson lamp in Jari’s forehead.

  We stopped.

  “Are we down?” Switch said, voice high. He sounded almost the boy of seventeen I’d met in the Colosso.

  Ilex shook her head. “Airlock.”

  Sure enough, the whole lift carriage rocked on its cable a moment after, and the sound of rushing wind overwhelmed us. Then we resumed our descent, more slowly now. Down into darkness.

  Boom.

  A deep sound reverberated up the shaft around us. Light—soft and with the faint gray of rainy sunrise—rose from below us.

  Thus we entered the unholy City: through an oculus near the side of a massive concrete dome. I tried to imagine the building of such a structure—whose mad hands had hollowed such a space beneath the surface of a world. It must have stretched for miles, and from our great height I could see the arched mouths of great tunnels leading away to what I guessed were other domes, other chambers. It must have been two miles from the apex of the dome to the ground. A river ran through a sluice gate high in the dome wall and through streets and plazas of white stone. Crumbling ten
ements of gray concrete stood in grim file along one wall, dwarfed by the great turrets and pyramids that looked almost childlike next to the massive scale of the ancient dome.

  “Well,” Pallino said, crossing his arms, “there’s a thing you don’t see every day.”

  Even I was speechless, watching as a pair of albatross dove past us through cloud—cloud—toward the tops of towers below.

  “It must have taken centuries to build all this,” Crim said, pressing himself against the glass. “The dig alone . . .”

  Ilex stepped up to join him. “They could have built the dome over a crater. Ice might have stacked up over the years.”

  The Norman nodded. “Fair point.”

  “I see people!” Valka interjected, pointing.

  She was right. Far below, the insect shapes of men and women moved along streets and about fountains, or else stood in the shadow of a street corner or leaned against a column. The relief I felt at the sight of them! To know this was a true city and not some grim necropolis of pale white . . . I felt tension ebb from my shoulders that I had not known I had.

  “Stay sharp, everyone,” I said, watching the tops of the towers sink past our eye level. “And stay close.”

  The air smelled damp and mossy, and everywhere was heard the cry of birds. A deep-throated warbling greeted us as we left the lift carriage, stepping out onto a marble plaza not unlike that in the station above. Here the tiles were cracked, or worn by the passage of uncounted feet, and the bronze statues were green with time. Every building was of the same white stone, or fronted by it, and the very air seemed faintly to glow with reflected light.

  Our passage across the square disturbed a flock of pigeons, and it was they who led our procession down a short flight of stairs to what I took for the main street, which rose smoothly up an incline and across an arched bridge toward a massive gate in the wall of the dome. A great many people hurried along the street, many of them only human, still others homunculi or chimeras. Almost instantly I felt the old hair-prickling sensation steal over me, as though my every inch was begrimed by a thousand grasping hands.