Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “Beautiful, is it not?” asked a voice deep as the darkness.

  I had been just about to touch the sculpture, and so turned sharply out of guilt.

  Kharn Sagara—if that was who he truly was—had not stirred. A tiny drone, leaf-shaped and smaller than my fist, sped back and away from me, its one blue eye gleaming. “It is,” I said, unsure whether I should address the little drone or the man in his chair. Between Brevon and Jari I felt I had grown accustomed to speaking to strange creatures in strange rooms. And yet this was different. Brevon, for all his mechanical abstraction, had been a man, and Jari had been a monster inside and out, hardly human at all. This was different. I felt . . . I felt as I imagined some ancient Achaean might have felt, standing in the shadows of the temple at Olympia before the gilded statue of Zeus. Waiting for the god to speak.

  “She is a tree of life to them that lay hold on her: and he that shall retain her is blessed.”

  “What?”

  “That is why they come here. Your . . . ilk.” The voice was all around me, emanating in chorus not from the mouth of the man in the chair, but from a swarm of little, blue-eyed drones descending in formation like comets from the dark above. “They wish to live again. Anew.” His words were halting, fractured, as if each was painstakingly selected and not without cost or pain. “Not you.”

  “You clone them,” I said, accusing—knowing I should not accuse. “You clone them and . . .” And what? “You destroy the clones so the original might live.”

  Nothing.

  I walked around so that I stood in front of Kharn, looking up into his hooded eyes. He might have been Mandari, or perhaps Nipponese, though he was pale almost as I. He had the eyes. He did not speak again for minutes, and when at last I could bear it no longer, I said, “I wish to make contact with the Cielcin Prince Aranata Otiolo. I am told you’ve had dealings with its kind.”

  Kharn’s eyes—his human eyes, which were black and not blue at all—swiveled to regard me. The light in them was very far away. Remote as the faintest stars. His voice coming like the grinding of stones beneath the earth, he said, “Knowledge, then. Not life.” Then in a voice barely more than a whisper, a voice which came only from his human lips, he added, “But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat. Did no one tell you?”

  He was quoting, I realized. Quoting from an antique religious text, one with which I was not at the time very familiar. But Gibson had been a thorough teacher, and I’d a fair grounding in the literary canon of Earth’s Golden Age, and so replied, “The day thou eatest thereof, my sole command Transgressed, inevitably thou shalt die . . .”

  “Milton.” One of the drones orbited smooth and silent about my head, a mere hand’s span from my face. “I see you are a man of culture.” I angled my chin, determined not to shrink or scrape in the face of this dark lord. Kharn sat up straight, hands gripping the arms of his chair. “But what else are you? An emissary? An apostol of the Empire? Speak your words, ambassador.”

  “The war has gone on long enough,” I said shortly, holding my hands out in formal entreaty. “Nearly four hundred years of conflict now. Dozens of worlds lost, billions of lives. It has to end.” I paused, expecting the other man to interrupt, but he never did. The black drones moved in slow spirals, all watching. The King with Ten Thousand Eyes. I wondered what perverse God there was to have chosen that book of all the books Gibson owned to give to me. “A Cielcin captain surrendered to me at Emesh. I have hostages, among them a priest-historian of their kind. I am trying to arrange contact with their leadership. To make peace.”

  That xanthous king surveyed me with eyes like coals. He reached inside his robe and adjusted the drape of one of his many hoses. I’d had my next series of remarks prepared, but they fled me. What I had taken for flesh beneath Kharn’s yellow robe was paneled, segmented like a carapace, so that his ribs were separated from the flesh beneath. The hose he’d rearranged ran up under his ribs, toward whatever organ there passed for a heart.

  Still he did not speak.

  “The Cielcin captain itself informed me that you have had dealings with its kind in the past, that you might be able to arrange a meeting with them.”

  “An interesting design, this,” Kharn said, lifting an item that had lain unseen in his lap. “Jaddian, I believe.” It was my sword. Olorin’s sword. I’d lost it when I was taken, brought to the waiting room with Song and his fellow Titans. Her silver fittings and emitter shone brightly in the dim air.

  I stood a little straighter, braver now I was growing used to that strange room and the man before me. “It is. It was a gift from a Maeskolos of Jadd.”

  “Ah,” Kharn said haltingly, “only a Maeskolos?” He triggered the blade, turned the weapon in the air before him. It shone its familiar lunar blue, star-bright in the gloom. The highmatter surface rippled, flowing like quicksilver. “I have always admired their order. The Maeskoloi understand the art of violence because they understand that violence is art. It is a lovely weapon. I don’t suppose you would part with it?”

  The question caught me by surprise, and almost I stumbled. “I’m sorry?”

  “I’ve a collection of Jaddian weaponry; yours would make a fine addition,” Kharn said. “I would pay you, of course.”

  “It’s not for sale,” I said, a touch too sharply, I think, for the Undying raised an eyebrow. Backpedaling, I said, “The Maeskoloi do not sell their arms.”

  “Si fueris Romae . . .”

  “Do as the Romans do.”

  “He speaks Latin as well!”

  “Modo paulo,” I said. Only a little.

  The Undying’s flock of eyes all orbited me by then, disregarding the chamber and the art around. When Kharn spoke again, it was from everywhere, as if all the air of that immeasurable hall trembled by his word. “You have come by a long road to find this place. Why?”

  “I’ve already told you,” I said. “To make peace.”

  We stood thus a long while, like two pieces on Song’s Druaja board, though how close we were to the center of the labyrinth I could not say, nor could I guess what sort of piece I was. Kings and pawns, I thought. Kings and fools.

  After what seemed a very long time, Kharn said, “But why?”

  The reasons were so self-evident that I could not articulate them. I tried to remember, to recall what it was I had said to Sir Olorin and Bassander that night by the wreck of Uvanari’s ship. I could not quite recall, and so said, “To end the war. To save lives. To make a better world . . . and because there is room enough in the galaxy for both the Pale and us.”

  “Is there?” Kharn smiled, his human eyes still fixed on the blue glow of my sword. “A tiger might prowl over miles and within her bounds, and no lamb is safe, though their flock asks only for one pasture.”

  “How many worlds should burn?” I demanded. “How many billion lives? We could end this war.”

  “War,” Kharn repeated, and leveled my blade at me like some medieval judge. “There is always war. As well struggle against it as against gravity. You will fail.”

  “Wars end,” I said coldly.

  “Wars end,” Kharn agreed, more coldly still. “War does not. And I am not much troubled what form our wars take. For over fifteen thousand years now your Empire has warred across the galaxy. I have watched your sun rise over half a billion worlds. And before that, before me, it was the same, only it was smaller.” He lowered the weapon, and lowered his eyes. I would have thought them closed, but Kharn Sagara never seemed to blink, only to stare sightless and all-seeing and at all times. “What is it to me who sits on your Solar Throne, or how long is its sway?” With a click, the King of Vorgossos deactivated my sword and turned the hilt over in his long-fingered hands. The nails were long, neglected, claw-like.

  I took a step forward, forcing his eyes to widen their orbit. “What is it to you if the Cielcin come here? What if they
decide they’ve dealt with you enough? What if they decide to deal with you instead?” The ageless face only smiled. And with painstaking care he lay my weapon on the arm of his chair. He did not blink, nor turn his eyes away. “The war is spreading, lord. How long until you are yourself affected?” Somewhere between the start of this sentence and its ending, Kharn’s black eyes glassed over, as if the man had vanished from whatever room the soul occupied behind those eyes. “The war affects us all.”

  Distantly, a fountain burbled.

  The Undying did not move, and again he did not seem even to breathe. The man had the patience of a statue. And why should he not? Every statue in our necropolis underneath Devil’s Rest was younger than the man before me. Small wonder Song and the others were left to wait so long in that chamber far above.

  To Kharn, it wasn’t long at all.

  “Once,” Kharn said at last, speaking only with his own lips. His chest rose and fell. “Once it was so. Once mankind had but the one neck and war the hands to squeeze. No more. The Cielcin may pillage as they please and not destroy mankind. This storm shall pass like all the others.”

  Recalling his earlier quotation, I marshaled myself and—speaking, it seemed, to Dis himself—said, “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain neutrality in a crisis.”

  “And if you had truly read Dante, Marlowe,” Kharn said, voice issuing once more from the drones around me. “You would know the deepest pit of hell is cold.” He lifted his chin, staring up into the darkness at things I could not see. I wondered then what else he saw, and through what eyes. I thought of his SOMs, of the light shining through their dead and sagging faces. I felt certain then that there was no place on that dreadful world where Kharn Sagara could not look. From the highest dome through caves of ice and down to that sunless sea, every square inch and stray atom passed beneath Kharn’s lidless gaze. How his mind endured the strain I cannot say, but I had not then seen the ceramic shine of implants beneath his ear and that wild fall of hair.

  “So you will not help?”

  “Five hundred standard years I’ve traded with the Cielcin. With Otiolo, Hasurumn, and Dorayaica,” Kharn said. “I see no reason to jeopardize these arrangements in the name of your Emperor.”

  I blinked. “Five hundred years is . . . before first contact.” I meant the Battle of Cressgard in ISD 15792, when the Cielcin attacked our colonial fort settlement on the edge of the Marinus Veil. The loss of that colony had sent its horrible message careering across the Imperium, the temple fires burning on every world and the priests beside them crying out those fateful words: We are not alone. I had come too far to give up so lightly, and stepped forward, placing one boot on the lowest step of Kharn’s white dais. “Do so many deaths mean so little to you?”

  “Yes,” Kharn said, speaking for the first time without hesitation. “When you’ve seen as many lives as I have, you learn how little they are worth.”

  “Then why do you cling to yours so tightly?” I demanded. “Or is it only other lives that are meaningless?”

  Kharn’s lips twisted into some septic impersonation of a smile. “When you have seen enough of other people, you will learn that it is they who believe their lives are meaningless. Why should I value them, who do not value themselves?” I had no answer to that, only a vague sense of righteous indignation. “Flesh is the cheapest resource in the human universe, Lord Marlowe. It spends more easily than gold.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Because you are a child,” said the Undying. “Thirty-five, was it? Thirty-five . . .” He meant my age. He had heard my conversation with Song, of course. “I have lived more than four hundred of your lifetimes, boy. Your belief means almost nothing.” He lifted my sword from the arm of his chair and—leaning forward—presented it to me pommel first. “Take your Jaddian weapon.”

  I had to climb the dais to accept it, and so came close enough to really see the man. The myth. He stank of unwashed flesh and hair, of machine lubricant and something . . . sweet. Myrrh? Blue lights pulsed beneath his left ear in time with some unheard signal. It was the chest, I decided, and his ribs that were prosthetic. The flesh there was not flesh at all. Veins stood blackly out on his neck, and again he did not seem to breathe. Some mechanism, buried perhaps beneath the flange of his ribs, breathed for him.

  “Thank you,” I said, taking the sword. I was eager to be away. Sagara frightened me, I am not ashamed to admit. Halfway down the nine steps—sword yet in hand—I turned. “This is not like other wars, lord. Unless we can communicate, our two sides will tear one another apart.”

  Kharn did not look at me, but folded his hands in his lap as he contemplated the dark above. “You may have the hospitality of the palace, naturally. It wouldn’t do to turn so august an ambassador away at the door when he has only just arrived. Yume will find rooms for you. Yume!”

  “Here, Master.” The golem appeared from the shadows—the red light in its black eye leading. I would have sworn the door had not opened. It padded forward, silent on metal feet. Without being given instruction, the android placed a hand on my shoulder and prepared to lead me away.

  I turned to go, sick with the weight of my failure. But I did not protest, I did not grovel. So august an ambassador . . . He was mocking me, and I had no choice but to be mocked. I’d not come in a strong position, had nothing to trade. I had counted on the humanity of the least human man I have ever met, a man whose consciousness perhaps resembled my own even less than those of the Cielcin.

  “A moment.” Kharn’s voice was like flint. The golem stopped beside me, and shrugging free of its iron hand I turned. “Approach.”

  I did, aware that—surely—I was a pawn in some dominance display but not caring. If this man, this creature, wished to humiliate me, I could not stop him. Nor would. I had need of him and his connections, and though I’d already thought them closed to me, I was not about to make matters worse by arguing. So I stopped at the base of the dais, mindful of the automaton at my back. It was my turn not to speak, and so I waited.

  “Your Cielcin prisoner. You said it was one of the baetan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bring it to me. We will hear its case.” Kharn’s flock of eyes dispersed, each vanished up and into the darkness, and lonely Saturn’s head drooped. He must have sent some silent communication to the android behind me, for now I heard its quiet advance. In the scant seconds before it took me by the shoulder, I found myself moved again by that same awe and fear I’d felt on entering. Not even the halls of our Sollan Emperor would later fill me with such disquiet. I felt again that sense of time, and the sense that here was the oldest man in existence—perhaps the oldest ever to exist. The silence that fell and folded about his throne comprised millennia. There thickly lay the frozen years, so that the very air seemed a kind of amber, and I the prisoned fly.

  CHAPTER 33

  DIVIDE AND CONQUER

  “HADRIAN!” VALKA HURRIED FORWARD the moment after Yume opened the doors. “What the hell’s been going on?”

  Switch leaped to his feet, Crim and Ilex looking up from where they’d been watching some holograph opera off the latter’s terminal. Only Pallino was unmoved, leaning against a pillar against the far wall of the suite. I was glad to see they’d been left together. For the many days of my imprisonment I’d imagined each of them locked in separate cells—or worse. But all things considered the rooms were comfortable. Void of decoration, yes, but richly appointed after a fashion identical to the waiting room where I had met so many monstrous lords and fine people. The remains of a meal stood on a large service cart, the used plates still fragrant with the smell of rosemary and thyme.

  “I only just spoke to him,” I said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “I’d been trapped in a sort of holding pen the past . . . how long has it been?”

  “Twenty-three days, standard,” Pallino barked. “Thought they’d turned y
ou into one of those . . . hollows.”

  Squaring his shoulders, Switch said, “We were thinking of a way to come rescue you . . . only we couldn’t get out ourselves.”

  Ever attentive, Valka said, “With whom did you speak?” Her brows contracted. “You said you spoke with someone?”

  “The Undying,” Crim said.

  “Was it Kharn Sagara?” Pallino asked. “Was it really Kharn Sagara?”

  I pressed my lips together.

  Ilex shook her head. “Impossible.”

  His voice still shook in me, emanating as from the very air. I could still smell the antiseptic stink of him and the fragrance of myrrh; see the gruesome patchwork of his flesh and the black eyes so very far away. “You would not say that,” I told the dryad, “if you had seen him.”

  That stopped her doubting, and something in my face stopped all questioning on the subject of whether or not it was the real Kharn Sagara whom I had met. I supposed it was possible that the creature in the pyramid was some usurper, some pretender to Sagara’s name, but I did not believe it was so.

  “Can he help us?” Valka asked, looking from me to the machine still waiting in the door. “Can he set up a meeting with Tanaran’s chieftain?”

  I did not say no, though Sagara had as good as done so. The truth was, I’d come away from my audience not knowing where I stood. Kharn had rebuked me, mocked me, and left me no way forward, and yet . . . “He wishes to speak to Tanaran. We have to go retrieve it from the Mistral.”