Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Switch was right, the whole place stank of sorcery. On Emesh, Gilliam Vas had called Valka a witch. He’d been right, in a sense, for the implant in Valka’s brain had allowed her to access and control the castle’s datasphere and power grid. But the more I understood what Valka could do, the less I thought it magic.

  Not so in dim Vorgossos.

  My first journey to Kharn’s pyramid had left me with the impression that all his palace was empty, a desolate warehouse of drab concrete. It was not so, it was only that the halls were barren. Many doors opened to me, and within I found rooms richly appointed as my own quarters, and the vestibule had been that. Sumptuous carpets covered the floor, and the walls were hung with many priceless things: tapestries and paintings, art and arms and artifacts of all descriptions.

  I tarried a while among a collection of ancient legionnaire armor, bone-white and red. The earliest suits were bulky things, the armor hid beneath the baggy environment layer, hoses wired in from the air and plasma packs worn on the back. The helms of two centurions bore the transverse horsehair crests still worn in formal parades. One proud example wore the high, plumed chevalier’s helm of an Imperial Martian Guardsman, his great shoulders draped in a red cloak, with pteruges hanging at shoulder and hip to recall the image of vanished Rome. Many of the pieces were scarred, many broken, many bearing the proud sigils of the House Imperial, or the standards of legions or houses of great renown. Other examples there were: the mirrored masks of Jaddian aljanhi, their bright blues and greens and oranges resplendent beside the drab and ugly ironwork of the Lothriad.

  There were smaller pieces under glass, epaulets belonging to famed commanders out of history, a roundel showing the Imperial sunburst that had purportedly been part of a suit of armor made for Prince Cyrus the Golden . . . the shattered remnants of the White Sword that had executed the pretender Boniface in the fifth millennium.

  I could hardly believe it.

  Kharn had not exaggerated when he called himself a man of culture.

  Clang.

  A metallic sound reverberated down one colonnade, undampened by any carpet or tapestry. I halted, drawing my sword. Torn between curiosity and the terror of the unknown. But Kharn had offered me the hospitality of his palace, and Yume treated me with every courtesy. I recalled my own words from the landing platform high above and murmured, “I am not afraid.”

  Fear is a poison, the part of me that thought in Gibson’s voice said.

  Buoyed by that thought and the memory of the old scholiast I turned, following a side passage as it curved gently down a kind of horseshoe bend. It emptied me onto a curving hallway, a circle along whose inner wall stood several round doors. Above I heard the roar of a big machine, great turbines turning in the stone above. I’d heard such things in several places about the palace, and reasoned they were part of some great network that powered the installation—though I confess I knew little of such things.

  The inner door opened at my touch, and a blast of warm, wet air rose to greet me like a breath. A shout. Light poured in, not cool and bloodless like the lights in the hall, but true and proper light, such as a sun might make. I thought to turn back, thinking that it must be some mistake, that the door should have been locked and wasn’t, but I heard something then that urged me forward.

  The sound of birdsong.

  Sword in hand but unkindled, I stepped gingerly forward, placing my feet with silent care. The door had opened onto a short hall—and airlock, I realized, though it had not cycled—and I followed it out into golden sunlight. I gasped. I’d emerged onto the uppermost of a series of round terraces that descended—layer by layer—ever downward. Every layer bloomed with flowers and fruit trees and all manner of greenery. Hummingbirds flitted among the branches, and squirrels. And what at first I took for bees I realized with a start were tiny drones.

  I stood a long while by the rail, looking out and down upon layer upon layer of greenery. A strange bird—red and blue, with a hooked beak—fluttered down and sidled up to me, watching me with one beady eye. I tried to imagine Kharn Sagara walking in these gardens, trailing hoses and fiber optics from beneath his yellow robe. I almost laughed aloud. It was a strange vision.

  It was a strange extravagance. Kharn had seemed to me so like one of the kings of ancient myth, lord of a tyranny of stone and not the sort of man to love gardens. There was a clinicism in the way he studied his art and kept it in that place, the way a scholiast kept organs and little animals in jars of greenish fluid. A single flight of steps descended, spiraling ever down and in ever tighter orbits, for each garden terrace had a smaller diameter than the last. Water fell in irregular streamlets from the roof above, and looking up I was astonished to see not the blank concrete so abundant in that hideous place, but the naked limestone of the living rock itself.

  Perhaps it says a thing of me that I tarried here less long than in the museum halls. I do not know what it says of a man that he might linger for hours before a painting of a garden and yet ignore the flowers themselves—but such am I. Perhaps it was only that I expected a serpent to spring from the bushes and strike at my heel, or for one of the infernal SOMs to at last make an appearance. Down nine levels I descended, and so came in time to the very base of the garden, which was shaped like a keyhole: the stairs emptying onto the round center while the single hall stretched on away, cutting under the terraces above.

  Orchids clung to branches above my head, and somewhere a lark cried. The imitation sunlight shone from tiny fixtures bracketed to the roof above, and the mosaic on the floor was treacherous with false rain. The air wafted thick with the smell of flowers, of fruits I could not name. I looked back and up past ascending levels of foliage, and then—sure I was alone—returned my sword to its clip.

  The hall that stretched away, like the rough ceiling high above, was all of native rock, and the pale stone sweated with the hothouse moisture of that garden. I’d come so far down I thought that surely I was approaching the level of the subterranean sea Yume had spoken of, and half expected the tunnel would lead down to some Plutonian shore.

  There was only another door.

  Like the door to the pyramid it was: sculpted of floating metal. It depicted a great, spreading tree, and two great snakes descending from that tree. Their bodies twined into a double helix, tails twined around the stem of the tree, fangs sunk deep in the flesh of a man kneeling about the bowl of the tree. The image filled me with a perverse fascination, and I stood a long while, tracing the contours of the image with my fingers. A light at the corner of my eye caught my attention, and turning I saw a key panel gleaming. It was different than the others. No mere mechanical switch, but a holograph plate. Without much hope, I called it up, was met with an authentication request.

  Disappointed but unsurprised, I turned back, returning up the hall to the stair.

  Yume was waiting for me.

  Or, I thought it was Yume. In truth, I cannot say if the Undying kept but one of the golems or several. The dull gray and unsexed body was the same. The brass clockwork identical. The white mask with its one black eye and weeping golden filigree. In those same cool, patrician tones, the android said, “Lord Marlowe, your meal is ready.” That was supper on the day my companions had left to return to the Mistral.

  A pretext? Surely it had appeared in time with my discovery of the Well and its gardens. I could not help but feel that I was being herded away like some irritating child. That I had seen enough and too much of Kharn’s palace.

  “What is this place?”

  Yume did not look round. “The Orchid Stair. The vestibule to the Garden.”

  “This is not a garden?” I asked, confused.

  “It is not the Garden,” the creature replied, still a statue but for the winking of the light in its black eye. “The Master maintains extensive gardens. For the children, you understand.”

  I did not understand, though I had a sinking
suspicion in my bowels that was worse than true knowledge. Thinking of the snakes carved into the doorway, their heads facing one another as they devoured the helpless man, I asked, “What children?”

  Still the android did not move. “You know what this place is.”

  The creature had a disconcerting habit of not answering questions, as if by avoiding answers it might avoid a lie. Could it lie? I wasn’t sure. It is said that the daimons of old were incapable of mistruth, that the ancient laws which bound and governed their kind prevented it. That had never seemed sufficient safeguard to me, for truth is sharper than falsehood, and just as poisonous. Still, Yume’s omissions were louder than its words. The children. I thought about Baron Song, about the Grand Duke of Milinda and the others. I could imagine a pack of their younger selves living sheltered lives in these gardens, feral as troglodytes, as the children of plebeian families so often are. Each unaware of his fate, of her destiny: of the end that awaited them all.

  The warm garden felt very cold.

  Thus I permitted myself to be led away, back up through the concentric rings of the Orchid Stair, beneath hanging bowers thick with the delicate fragrance of that eponymous flower. When we’d climbed halfway to the top, I asked, “How far down are we?”

  “The entrance above is twenty-seven levels below the outer gate.”

  “We’re near to the sea, then?” I asked, meaning the subterranean ocean beneath Kharn’s pyramid.

  Without breaking stride, Yume pivoted its head fully around to watch me as it ascended the steps. “Oh no, lord. The sea is much farther below.”

  Below.

  Song and the others had talked of being taken below, as well. Had they meant only some deeper level of the installation above us? Or was there yet some deeper hall? Some darker theater where the medical labors that gave Vorgossos its dire reputation played out in grim burlesque?

  I gave up trying to speak to the machine. Its unwillingness or inability to lie made it a difficult interlocutor. But it was comfortable in silence, and I was happy not to speak to it.

  By several stairs and empty corridors we returned to my chambers, and Yume left me at the door. I entered, the heavy portal clanging shut behind me. I left my coat on the back of a chair and found the food trolley waiting by the table. Trusting myself to my solitude, I unclipped my terminal from its gauntlet and set the device on the tabletop, calling up the text of Impatian’s The First Emperors, a biography of the first eleven emperors. I’d finished his History of the Jaddian Wars while locked in Sagara’s vestibule. I set the thing to playing and soon a cool, artificial voice began reciting the text aloud. Forgetting myself, I returned to my coat and pulled my small journal from an inside pocket and returned to the table. That done, I lifted the tray off the trolley and carried it to the table. Beneath the steam lid was a species of strange silver fish, fried in oil and delicately spiced beside an arrangement of red-cap mushrooms stuffed with cheese and onions. A soup there was, too, sweet and smoky, and wine.

  Wine. How long had it been since I’d had wine? Since before Rustam, at least.

  I took a sip. The torpor that had overtaken me during my time among the client lords was gone, and I found it impossible to relax. I doubted even wine could chase my anxieties from me. Still, I meant to try, though I placed my sword on the table as if it were a piece of cutlery.

  Eating slowly, I studied the painting on the wall opposite me while I listened to my terminal read Impatian’s histories. It showed a stone cottage beneath a whorling blue sky. Twining trees and yellow fields. Clumsy brushstrokes and heavy lines captured not the image the artist had seen, not his eye, but some piece of the soul of him. I wondered at it a long time, and so failed to absorb much of the reign of Emperor Victor I. The clear voice seemed a kind of curtain, a pall that drowned the world and drowned myself, so that I sat—like Kharn himself—in contemplation of that image of another age.

  Cottages at Cordeville. A replica, the original had died with Earth. I opened my little journal casually, thumbed past black ink sketch after sketch. How poor they seemed by comparison, how crude and unpleasant. How . . . forgettable.

  Eternity is the chief quality of high art. Depending on no moment, such art belongs to every moment, and so takes us for a time from our time—allowing us to touch eternity for our fleeting instant. I was there, transported by that painting, my reading, my food. Hidden from the world a time, from my cares. From Uvanari and Gilliam. From Bordelon. From Bassander Lin and three aquilarii dead on the Balmung.

  From Jinan.

  Transported as I was, I did not hear the approach of feet behind me.

  Not until soft arms closed about my neck.

  CHAPTER 35

  THE GORGON

  YEARS OF BEING ATTACKED by night in the streets of Borosevo had taught me panic, and taught me the strength to overcome panic. Exhaling through my nose, I tucked my chin and—gripping the thin arms about my neck with one hand—reached back with the other to seize my attacker by the scruff of the neck. I tugged downward, pulling his chin over my shoulder that I might strike his face.

  “Please!” The voice startled me. It was not a man at all.

  Her arms slackened, and I released them, turning quickly and snatching up my sword. I did not conjure its blade, but stood ready, processing. The woman—for woman she undeniably was—stood a head shorter than I. Where she had come from I could not at first guess, for the hall door had not opened, nor any of the doors to the secondary chambers. Only the door to my sleeping room was open, and I’d a sudden, horrible feeling that she’d been waiting there for me. In bed, to judge by the disheveled nature of her raven hair and her gauzy white dress.

  “Who are you?” I asked, not lowering my sword. Completely oblivious, the unthinking circuits in my terminal continued translating Impatian’s text into placid tones. Emperor Victor’s biography filled the silence.

  The invader massaged the back of her neck, eyes downcast, reproached. “Naia,” she said, voice rich as candle smoke. She looked up suddenly, and I felt a lurch. Her pupils were twice the proper size, the irises large and blue as ice. They gave the look of one permanently startled. Or permanently aroused. With exquisite care, she removed her hand from her neck, raked fingers through her fall of black hair. “You hurt me.”

  I did not apologize. “You startled me.” Whatever chivalric impulse had made me free her at the sound of her voice was gone, and I was on my guard. The eyes betrayed her. She was a homunculus, and so designed . . . but designed for what? She was a bed servant, the full and perfect shape of her announced that plain as sunrise. But was that all she was? My own grandfather, Lord Timon, had been killed by a concubine homunculus. And there was always a vague inhumanity to many of them. Something of the machine in the way they were tailored, cut to fit a purpose and design. I supposed that I—a nobile of the Peerage, a palatine—was little different. But like Ilex, I had the freedom of my own thoughts, whereas who knew what impulses had been built into the deep structures of this woman’s brain? No doubt she had been designed to be the perfect courtesan: coy, alluring, but ultimately pliant. She could not choose, could not say no.

  That she might say no would never even occur to her.

  “I did not mean to,” she said, still clutching at her hair as though it was a lifeline. “I only wondered when you would come to bed. You were in here so long.” She took a step, fine gold chains tinkling at wrist and throat and ankle.

  I took a measured step back, circling to put the table between us. “Why are you here?” I asked, as though the answer were not obvious. With my free hand I silenced the chattering terminal.

  “The Master sent me,” she said into the fresh silence, fingers worrying at her neckline, tugging the fabric lower. Her skin was paler even than mine. It shone like milk by moonlight. “He thought you would like me.” I did. There was something in the hard bones of her face, a hawkish severity softened by full
lips and that pouting expression, that reminded me of . . . something. I could not put my finger on it. She took a step closer, following me round the table, one finger trailing on its surface, hunting, teasing. “Do you not like me?”

  Like those brave and foolish men who came before the Medusa, I was transfixed. My sword was at the ready, fingers on the trigger. How small she was, how slight—though in her kind smallness was no guarantee of weakness. She might have overpowered me if she wished, or torn my arms from their sockets for all I knew, or strangled me just like my poor grandfather.

  Her robe vanished, and I realized it was no robe at all. Only a holograph shell: gossamer light spun to conceal what lay beneath. A marble sculpture of a woman, perfect as Pygmalion had made. Dark hair and soft curves and eyes like frozen stars. An anklet she wore—fashioned in the likeness of a gold snake devouring—and gold were the chains that hung between her breasts. Silver would have suited her better, so pale was she. A creature of the night, and with those terrible, frightened and furiously loving eyes she might have been a vampire out of some antique fable. Some monstress to frighten and allure, to teach men fear. How could I have thought her reproached by me? Shrinking? I have seen demons less frightening.

  I did not move, not even when one cool hand closed over mine, or pressed my sword’s emitter to her breast. “Are you going to kill me?” she asked, breathless, mouth open and turned up to my face. “Do you want to? You can.” Her breath was hot in my ear, her voice gone all husky. “It would not be the first time.” She seized me between the legs, and a grunt escaped me.

  My hand moved of itself, shoved her away. I tried not to think on what she’d said about dying, about being killed. Repulsed, I put the sword down on the table, keeping my eyes on the homunculus. She tossed her hair and smiled. I was relieved to see only ordinary teeth. “Are you frightened? Of me?”