Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “I am a soldier of the Empire,” I said, not knowing if it was true. It took every ounce of control I had not to look around for Valka, who it seemed had escaped, or else lay in wait, prepared to cover me.

  The Exalted spoke, voice considerably softer than it had been while we fought. “He had a witch with him, dear child. A woman. She’s the real danger.”

  “And she has you in her sights, so don’t try anything!” Valka’s voice rebounded from the pillars of those unnatural trees, seeming to come from all over. The two children looked round, boy cowering, girl iron-jawed and defiant. I could not help but smile.

  “You can’t be here,” the boy said. “They wouldn’t let anyone in, not without Father . . . does Father know you’re here?”

  The girl made a soothing sound. “Quiet, Ren.” Then she turned hard eyes on me. Black eyes, black as Kharn Sagara’s, though there was a spark in her eyes yet unkindled, where Kharn’s ageless and undying face might have been graven from stone and etched by sand of the desert until no expression remained. “Speak, soldier! Why are you here?”

  “I’m looking for my friend,” I said, seeing no reason to lie. “A xenobite of the Cielcin. Have you seen it?”

  “A xenobite?”

  “Quiet, Ren!” Suzuha said, then, “There are no aliens here.”

  The Exalted’s head-turret swiveled between me and the girl. “Let me kill him, child.”

  “Try it!” Valka shouted. “See how far you get.”

  Rather than allow tensions to continue escalating, I lowered my sword, allowing the liquid blade to dissolve into a faint mist. “I am sorry about the clones. We hadn’t meant for anyone to get hurt. We just want to find our companion and leave this place.”

  “You’re trying to escape,” Suzuha said, planting her feet wide apart to better block her young charge. “Father is keeping you here, isn’t he?” If she was much hurt or concerned for the lives of Kharn’s two other children, she gave no sign. Her face was almost as mask-like as Kharn Sagara’s, if less worn.

  “No,” I said, and thought it true. “But he is keeping my friend, and I can’t allow that.”

  “Allow?” said the Exalted, Calvert. “He says allow! Let me kill him, child.”

  Suzuha waved the giant metal crab to silence with a raised hand. Rather than answer the beast, she looked at me. “Why should I believe you? I watched you fighting. Your woman killed our siblings. You hurt poor Calvert here.”

  “Only my chassis is harmed, child,” the machine said.

  The girl gestured again for silence. “And you say you’re not here to kill?”

  I took a couple steps sideways, circling away from the big Exalted—though I was well out of the range of its boom arm. I saw Valka then, braced against one of the consoles at the base of one pillar, her firearm trained on the girl, Suzuha. Finally I asked, “You were watching?”

  The clone nodded.

  “Then you know we crossed the room before your man attacked us,” I said, holding the sword behind my back like a baton, as if by obscuring the weapon I could erase it from the minds of the others. Standing thus, I inclined my head toward the lift doors. “We were leaving.”

  “That way?” Suzuha asked, and she glanced at the Exalted.

  “Below?” Ren said, then yelped as his sister stamped on his foot.

  “Why?” Suzuha asked. “Do you even know where you are?” I glanced at Valka, but her expression was unreadable. The girl was still talking. “You’ll never escape, you know. Father will catch you. Even if you kill us. He will.”

  Ever more insightful than I, Valka called, “Do you know what he’s going to do with you? Your father? What he’s going to do to you?” She held position by the pillar, unwilling to cede cover with Father Calvert so near at hand. In the dim light, her eyes shone like cat’s eyes. “You can escape with us.”

  “Escape!” the Exalted barked.

  Valka shot at it, knowing full well the bolt was useless against its adamant hide.

  “Escape with you?” Suzuha repeated.

  And Ren said, “Leave . . . Father?”

  “We’re not leaving Father,” the older girl hushed, jostling her brother. “He protects us.”

  That was a step too far for me, and I almost moved forward, saying, “He’ll kill you the moment he needs you. You’re spare parts, girl.”

  A muscle tensed in the girl’s jaw. Hesitation? Defiance? I could not say. There was too much of her father in her already. I imagined that young face turned to stone, the spark in those black eyes blown out as she aged centuries in seconds as Kharn’s daimon-presence asserted itself in her, or in the child at her side.

  Holy Mother Earth, keep us and protect us in Darkness and the land of strangers . . .

  “My time will come, or Ren’s will,” and she did not shrink as she said the words. “We owe our Father everything, and will give him everything. We will be part of him. Our voices sewn up in his own.”

  “Are they going to take us away, Suzu?” the boy asked.

  I was at a loss for words—a painful and strange condition for me. They knew. Knew what they were and what they were meant for, and they did not care. I tried to imagine what their childhoods must have been like, being raised in this place of wonder and nightmare. In my mind’s eye, I beheld a line of suppliants struggling—white-robed—up a mountainside. Virgins for the dragon’s lair. One and one and one again, the wyrm-with-the-face-of-a-man consuming itself; eternal.

  Saturn devouring.

  “Then tell us where our friend is,” I demanded.

  “I don’t know anything about your friend,” Suzuha snapped. “And even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”

  Great jets of steam hissed from vents along Calvert’s hulking spine. Still crouched, the massive beast raised its drab turret of a head to look upon his mistress and charge. Father Calvert had no face, but its voice dripped with a malice that made me think of wide and glittering eyes. “They might know, dear child,” it said, “oh yes.”

  “You want to take them below?” Suzuha asked.

  “Below?” Valka’s voice cracked like a riding crop. She inclined her head toward the door I had meant to lead us through. “That way?” The aperture was too small for Calvert’s hulking frame, and so heading that way had the added benefit of freeing us from the chimera’s arm and tramping feet.

  Suzuha took a half-step back, displacing her little brother. “If we show you—if we help you find your friend . . . you’ll let us go? My brother and me?”

  The boy Ren added, “You’ll let us stay with Father?”

  I was silent then, and Valka did not speak. It made no sense. What sort of person would live—could live—in the knowledge that they had been born to die so that another might live? I thought of Naia, whose life was not her own, whose free will had been compromised by the desires her makers—her slavers—had placed in her. These children were homunculi of a different kind, devoted to their father and master. A cold wind blew through me, and as if sand was scoured from the surface of some buried inscription I had long forgotten was in me, I heard Gibson’s voice sounding in my ears, coming hard out of a memory that would not be denied. Hadrian, name for me the Eight Forms of Obedience.

  As I had done long and long ago, I replied, Obedience out of fear of pain. Obedience out of fear of the other. Obedience out of love for the person of the hierarch. Obedience out of loyalty to the office of the hierarch. Obedience out of respect for the laws of men and of heaven. Obedience out of piety. Obedience out of compassion. Obedience out of devotion.

  Which is highest?

  Why, obedience out of devotion, I had said. The answer was obvious. One who is devoted to another or to a cause might give of himself all that he has—all that he is—to defend that which is sacred to them. One hears tales of mothers throwing themselves onto the spears of enemy soldiers to defend their
children, or of lovers upending their entire lives for one another’s sake. Such devotion consumes, such that any sacrifice seems no sacrifice at all.

  Gibson had shaken his head. I did not ask which was greatest, Hadrian, but highest. Devotion requires an attachment which tends to vice if you let it. Thus the devoted is made a slave to his devotions. Such love wears chains.

  Compassion, then? I asked.

  Compassion. The scholiast agreed. Compassion might have demanded that Valka and I stun these two misguided children, haul them out of that awful place—by the hair if necessary—and deliver them from Vorgossos.

  We did not have the luxury of compassion, nor the benefit of time.

  “Who might know?” Valka asked, her aim never faltering. She repeated her question, making it plainer that she addressed the massive Exalted. “You said they might know where our companion is. Who might know?”

  “The . . . Brethren,” Calvert replied, and as it spoke I felt a cold sensation crawling over me, and heard a groaning as of many throats rattling in the dark. “They know all that passes here. All that is here, and out beneath the further stars. They serve the Master. Serve him and answer him.” A wordless whispering slithered behind my eyes, and I knew without having to be told that it was a sending such as had visited me in my dreams, and knew that those dreams had been no dreams at all.

  “The Brethren?” I repeated.

  “The demons in the water,” Calvert husked, sounding half like the sun-struck mystes I had seen time and time again, preaching from their pedestals on street corners and on the steps of Chantry sanctums. “They as were here before the Master. The knowers of hidden things.”

  My stomach lurched as I did. “His computer?” I asked, using the ancient word. “You mean the artificial intelligence that governs the installation? The one he took from . . .” I hesitated on the brink of saying the Exalted, but I had only to look once more at Father Calvert’s boom arm with its vicious-looking claw to decide on a safer series of words. “He found it here.”

  “Found them?” Calvert’s eyeless turret swiveled to regard me. It was like being watched by a bit of farming equipment. “Found them? As if they did not call to him? Summon my Master and theirs from across the suns to free them from their chains? Their children? Afterlings and remnants fallen from glory?”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, not moving any closer.

  By his tone, Father Calvert might have smiled. Or leered. “No,” he said. “No. But we know the way. We will show you. Dear child? Mistress?” Its attention pivoted to Suzuha. “Let us take the intruders to them. They will decide what should be done. What must be done.”

  I flashed Valka a significant look. We wanted to find Kharn’s machine, after all. We had the upper hand, what with the children in our power, and but for the massive Exalted we might have been totally secure in our position.

  “All right,” Suzuha said.

  “You’re coming with us,” Valka said. It was not a question. The boy Ren pressed himself against his sister’s side, peering out at me as he had from around the tree. To the chimera, Valka added, “You’ll have to stay.”

  Calvert moved, drawing himself up to his full height, more than twice that of the tallest palatine until it seemed almost unsteady on those great pilings it called legs. “I will not leave my charges with you, intruders. We will go to them, but I will follow on.”

  “Through that door?” I asked, meaning the lift carriage that my vision showed me led down into darkness.

  I should not have asked. Cool vapor hissed from vents along his spine, and its carapace split open like a legionnaire’s suit, like a puzzle folding itself away, like an egg cracking. And like an egg cracking, lubricant slime thick as phlegm from the jaws of some alien beast dripped from sharp corners of the metal suit. Like some armored succubus giving birth, the great metal crab pushed out something pale and coated in translucency. It slapped and clanged as it hit the floor with all the ceremony of a foal, and—gasping—rose on arms and legs of black metal that seemed too long and narrow to bear his weight. The only thing human about the creature—save its general shape—was a withered chest and head, ghost-white and aged, hairless as an egg. Calvert had been a man once—or what was left of him still was. His arms and legs were, as I have said, all of jointed steel, or else of some metal unknown to me. The fingers were long as the fingers of a Cielcin, their tips pointed as claws. His gait was unsteady, his hips wide as a woman’s, and beneath the ribs—where there ought to be guts and the plane of a stomach—there was only a spinal column, thin as one of his overlong forearms.

  Even Valka recoiled.

  If Father Calvert minded the gel covering his face and thin chest, he gave no sign, but stood swaying beneath the massive crab chassis, one spindly arm steadying himself on one of the heavy suit’s sturdy legs. Even as I watched, the gel began to sublimate on contact with the air, foaming and giving off a vapor that smelled of ozone. With almost feline slowness, the Exalted raised clawed hands to its face and ran palms back over its scalp. The skin there was pale as bone, shot through with veins like the marble of a gravestone.

  When it stepped forward, it was with gyroscopic grace, so that the head and chest seemed to float toward me like the bust of some forgotten statesman. I half-stepped back, settling into a low guard yet again, and held my sword at the ready. I’d heard legends about these machines, and could not help but think this skeletal body might fly at me faster than I could blink.

  Pointing the hilt of my sword at Calvert, I said, “Not another step. You may take me, but Valka will drop your charges here before you finish me.”

  Calvert stopped in his tracks, wet eyes—were they only human eyes?—taking their measure of me. The old man smiled, teeth the pearlescent off-white of old milk. “As you say.” Then he was gone, simply vanished, as if some projection had been turned off. I turned on instinct, squeezing the trigger to activate my blade. Highmatter flowed like quicksilver, shone like blood in ultraviolet. My thumb triggered my shield curtain as I turned, sure that at any second the blow would come.

  Cruel laughter rang from the far end of the hall, for there he was, standing in the shadow of one of the clone-trees nearest the door. Remote as he was, I could see his teeth peering out from between drawn lips. “Come.” And again. “Come.”

  I recovered my coat and followed.

  CHAPTER 43

  BRETHREN

  THERE ARE DEEPER DARKS than the black of space. Forgotten places where the Dark that was before Time retreated from light and from the ordering of the first suns. There Tiamat, in all her emanations, retreated from the coming light, from Marduk, from Jupiter and Jehovah and all the lords of light and order: the forebears of our own divine Emperor. There was such a darkness on Se Vattayu, in the cradle where the Cielcin were born, as there was in those caverns beneath Vorgossos.

  The Chantry teaches that light orders reality, as it is by the properties of light that we perceive Creation. Thus in darkness—which is only the absence of light—order diminishes. Perhaps what we perceive as darkness is that lack of order: Chaos itself, the incoherent decay and the rot of those waves of energy whose presence shapes the world.

  That place . . . that darkness seemed something more. The dripping shadows that greeted us at the bottom of that lift tube felt somehow substantial. I felt as though some alchemist deep in unrecorded time had prisoned there some elemental, some principle, some beast of archetypal shadow.

  I was not half wrong.

  Holding my sword before me like a torch—its bluish metal casting ghostly shadows on the raw concrete of the path before us—I followed Father Calvert into the gloom. Suzuha came after, leading little Ren by the hand. Valka came last of all, her weapon trained on Suzuha’s back. I could see very little outside the circle of wan light my sword emitted, though the walls of rounded little buildings gleamed like bone in the distance.

  Da
rk are the pits beneath the palace of Kharn Sagara, dark and deeper still—but they have a bottom. By many miles and many winding stairs we had come, and down a rattling lift older than the habitation of my homeworld. Through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea.

  I paused a moment, looking up to where Kharn’s pyramid glittered thousands of feet above our heads. Faint lights made its precise geometries blurred and ghostlike, as though the bleary eye of some blind god watched from that unholy see.

  “This way!” Calvert said, turning back to usher us forward. “Almost there, now!” Outside his crab-like chassis, the Exalted’s voice was like glove leather, and I held my sword more tightly.

  “What is this place?” Valka asked.

  To my surprise, it was little Ren who answered, his high voice painfully thin as it frosted the air. “The builders put it here to get power to the fortress up top.”

  Ahead and to our left, I could make out the low, round shapes of three drum-like buildings, each squatting upon the low dam that bounded the black sea. To no one in particular, I asked, “Hydroelectric?”

  “Geothermal,” Suzuha replied. “But Father found other use for it.”

  “Did he indeed?” Valka asked, but the girl did not reply.

  As we passed, ancient lamps welled up in the darkness, casting faint and silver light over time-eaten concrete and old, black stone. Strange, white moss grew in cracks and hung from the flat roofs of the nearby buildings like the beards of so many old men. Ahead, Father Calvert’s head seemed to float in darkness. Here and there he would turn back and wait as the lamps flared about him. He might have been a shade, one last eidolon to lead us to that final pit of hell.

  I felt a cold sweat on the small of my back, and an instinctive terror cloud behind my eyes. For there ahead was the archway I had seen in my dreams. A broken circle standing like the cast-off ring of a giant. It stood at the top of a short stair that rose to the top of the dam. At once, Calvert sped forward, blurring as he took the stairs four at a time.