Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I have no idea,” I said, and spoke truth. “It feels like the wind’s changing, Otavia.”

  “Good,” she said, and from her tone I knew she understood my meaning and meant to ignore it. “It’s been against us since we joined you. It’s about time it changed.”

  I did not share her optimism.

  CHAPTER 53

  THE THIRD TREASON

  IT IS ONLY WHEN the world places no burdens on our hearts that circumstance allows us time to make decisions. By contrast, too often when there is some trial which we would give the price of a palatinate to avoid, we find we are already at court.

  My fist slipped under Siran’s guard, uppercut clipping the side of her chin. She grunted in surprise as I caught her in the back of the neck, catching her with my gloved hand in a sling that—as I pivoted with my hips—sent her tumbling to the floor. Never one to let a loss slow her down, Siran rolled smoothly to her feet and came right back swinging. She wasn’t much of a boxer, truth be told: tended to swing too wide and too wildly. I covered my head to take an overhand punch on my elbow as I cracked her in the face with a jab. I saw her stumble and stepped in, dropping a hook to her ribs. She grunted and got off a shot to my shoulder before I moved in, smothering her assault as I swung in, ducking another punch to get behind and beside her and planted my open hand against the side of her head to make my point.

  “Not bad, kid, not bad!” Pallino said, leaning on the ropes at the edge of the ring. The Mistral’s small gym was practically empty. Crim and Ilex were meant to join us, but of those two there had been no sign. The old myrmidon captain slipped a finger beneath his eye patch and rubbed at his missing eye. “Siran, hop out, would you? I owe His Radiance here a beating for leaving us high and dry while he was all cozied up to the doctor in that cell of theirs.”

  “For the last time!” I exclaimed, using my thick glove to push hair from my eyes. “Nothing happened!”

  Pallino ducked the ropes and thumped Siran on the shoulder. “I thought I told you not to lie to your elders, son!” He knocked his fists together and grinned. “You were down there a long time.”

  “For the last time, drop it!” I said tersely.

  Too tersely, for Pallino threw his head back and laughed. “Face it, lad, you can’t lie to me!” He raised his fists, tilted his head to keep track of me with his one good eye. I had fought Pallino before. The man had been a soldier of the Empire for forty years and a fighter all his days. Even half-blind and old as he was, he was dangerous. He hadn’t survived so long in the fighting pits of Borosevo by luck alone. Flashing a smile, he tapped at his eye patch with his glove. “Doesn’t take two eyes to see right through you.”

  Siran laughed. “He’s not wrong, Had. Everyone knows you’ve had eyes for the doctor since we left Emesh.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said, pointedly looking away.

  Pallino snapped a searching jab in my direction, grabbing my attention. I stepped back, batting it away. The old myrmidon let out a laugh. “I think His Radiance is embarrassed.”

  “Don’t call me that!” I said, struggling with feelings I had almost forgotten. “Ghen called me that.”

  The older man’s one eye darted to Siran, as if seeking approval or permission. “Maybe you’re right, lad. It’s been hard without the big guy around.” To this I only nodded, squaring my stance to suggest readiness. Taking my meaning, Pallino lashed out with a straight punch that I brushed aside, stepping in with a straight of my own that took the old man in the jaw. He grimaced, but ducked my next shot, sank two blows just under my armpit in rapid succession. Grinding my teeth, I stepped inside so that the third hook scraped my back instead, and I struck Pallino’s chin from below, landing to uppercut in such a way that I drove my elbow into his sternum. That blow was hard enough that Pallino staggered backward—not quite to the ropes. It was the kind of blow that fills the ensuing seconds with a solid, impressed quiet. I smiled approvingly.

  “Think that was good, do you?” Pallino said, holding his hands lower in the classic pugilist stance common to every back street behind every bar in every city and township of the Imperium. “Lad, my father was Fortitude himself. You’re going to need to try a lot harder than that and you know it.”

  There are certain activities one may lose himself within. I have heard from the soldiers who are made to run great distances as part of their training that running is such a one, and certain mystics of the Jaddian fire cult seek passing reunion with their fravashi spirit in the other world through dance, and so forget materiality. For the scholiasts, such escape is in contemplation of the self and of the logos, the logic and the language in all things. For myself, often I had found—in my drawings—that I have passed by several hours without so much as a passing thought.

  Fighting—really fighting—is just such a pursuit. The universe blackens around you, converges so that only the combat remains. In true battles, the effect is one of terror. As I have said of my time in the Colosso on Emesh long ago, everything you are is forced through the eye of a needle and you emerge—or you do not. In practice and in play, the effect—I think—is no different than that of the contemplation of the scholiasts, the dance of the Jaddians, the distance run by our soldiers. Everything that troubled me simply fell away. I stepped under a hard cross and shoveled Pallino in the ribs, wove beneath his arm and popped up to send a cross of my own scrubbing clean down over his shoulder to strike the side of his head again.

  Pallino’s own fist connected with my ribs in the same instant, and even as he reeled, he threw his arm out to make space between us. “Not half bad!” he said, working his jaw. It was more than half good, and we each knew it, but I smiled all the same.

  “You’re letting your loaded hand drift too much, Had,” Siran said. “If it wasn’t, you’d not be taking it like a dockside whore.”

  “He gave better than he got, though!” Ilex said. She’d appeared with Elara sometime during the fight, and the two women stood by Siran near one corner of the ring. “You all right there, Pal?”

  Pallino massaged his jaw. “I best not lose a tooth for this, Marlowe. Mine don’t grow back like yours do.”

  “I’m sure Doctor Okoyo can put any you lose back in,” I said, smiling. “Does the Son of Fortitude need a lie-down?”

  The old soldier’s right cross was not to be laughed at. I went reeling—would have fallen were it not for the ropes at my back. Ilex and Siran clapped. Elara whooped more loudly still. “Looks like you need to lie down there, Had,” Pallino said, arms akimbo, inviting retribution. “You going to let this old man beat you?”

  I didn’t, and when we had gone five rounds, I swung sweating out of the ring as Siran rotated back in. After so long in Sagara’s cell and Bassander’s afterward, it felt good to move again, to fight. I had never wanted to be a fighter, had never enjoyed fighting as a boy, but I have found that as one grows older, one develops an attraction for those things which he performed in his youth, even unwillingly. Thus often do we return to those childish things when the weight of responsibility and of trial becomes too much to bear alone. Once, I had fought with Crispin under the watchful eye of my father’s castellan, Sir Felix Martyn. I had fought because it was expected of me, because I had to. Later, I had fought for my life, in the streets and in the fighting pits. I would fight for my life again, and for higher things—but in that moment, I fought among friends and for the love of it.

  Laughing at some jape of Siran’s, I swung away from the ropes and turned—thinking to get water from the font built against one wall—and there he was. In truth, I do not think he expected to find me in the gymnasium, or to find anyone. He wore simple exercise kit: tight trousers and a sleeveless tunic done in drab olive, contrasting with his red hair. He stood frozen, the conduction tape halfway to his ear, the music already playing from his terminal. Unspeaking, he quieted i
t.

  Everyone else had gone quiet as well.

  He turned to go.

  “Switch!” I hadn’t meant to speak, and yet I had. There was too much to say, too much to leave unsaid. The man twitched as if I’d stabbed him, and half-turned back. He wasn’t facing me. His fists were tight at his sides. I found suddenly that I could not speak. I—who had counted on the clarifying light of some emotion when I’d opened my mouth.

  The rage didn’t come. The outrage.

  There was only sorrow.

  “I’m glad you’re all right,” Switch said, not looking at me. “When you and Doctor Onderra didn’t come back, I didn’t know what to do.”

  I dropped the towel I’d been holding and closed to within about five paces of the younger man. “You’re glad I’m all right? Really? Do you know what you’ve done?”

  The accusation in my tone snagged on some corner in the other man, and he turned. There were tears in his eyes. “What I’ve done? I got you out of prison.”

  “Don’t play the fool,” I said, not raising my voice. “You know exactly what you’ve done, or else you wouldn’t have come back here to the Mistral.” I took a breath, a step forward. “You called Bassander. You called the Empire.”

  Switch turned fully to face me then, shoulders raised. His face could not decide if it wanted to flush or pale. “I saved your life! Valka’s life!”

  “You sold it!” I snarled, still deadly quiet. “Sold it and the lives of everyone on this ship. Lin told me! And for what? To save your own hide!” I had, in fact, been shown the holograph Switch had sent to the fleet, seen his plea for mercy. “You said I was mad.”

  “You’d lost your way, Had!” Switch said, looking to Pallino and the others for support. “Demoniacs, Extras? It’s too much. It’s been too much since Rustam. Since Ghen. It’s a miracle we haven’t lost more people, Earth be praised.”

  I looked back around at the others. I could see the concern etched on their faces, and from the way Pallino’s one eye followed my progress I knew he was remembering a younger Hadrian, remembering how I had beaten three myrmidon recruits in a fury.

  That fury wouldn’t come.

  “We’re going to lose more people,” I said, my back to the younger man. I shut my eyes. “Do you understand that?”

  Footsteps behind me. Switch moving closer. “You don’t know that. Captain Lin is an Imperial officer, not a . . . Norman warlord. He can be reasoned with.”

  “Can he, now?” Pallino said, butting in for the first time. “Is that what you did, lad? Reasoned with him? Get him to forgive you for stunning his ass on the Balmung? What was his promised price? A spot in the stands while the rest of us hang? Or do you just get a nice fugue couch while the rest of us get blasted out an airlock?”

  I opened my eyes. I hadn’t expected Pallino to leap to my defense, but there he was, leaning against the ropes, watching Switch with that piercing blue eye. Elara moved toward her man. “Pal . . .”

  “You too?” Switch asked, words drifting over my shoulder like the shadow of the executioner’s blade. “Pal, you were a soldier. You don’t think any of this is right!”

  “Aye, I was a soldier,” Pallino replied, shrugging out of Elara’s grasp and swinging out through the ropes. “That’s what makes what you’re doing so wrong, lad. You’re loyal to your people first, your commanders second, and the Empire third, damn it!”

  Switch’s voice was close—he couldn’t have been but a yard or so behind me, but still I didn’t turn. “I was just trying to help!”

  Help. I clenched my jaw, tried not to shout the word. After a moment I spoke, my voice small so that the meaning of my words overshadowed their volume. “And just what sort of help do you think you’ve been?” I could see the watchfulness in Elara’s face. In Siran’s. The ready concern. They thought that at any moment they were going to have to pull me off of Switch. That thought—the recognition of it—sobered me further still. I saw my brother, Crispin, unrolled like a carpet at my feet. The last I’d ever seen of him. Rage, I thought, is blindness.

  I saw.

  I heard Switch say, “I got us to the Cielcin, didn’t I?”

  “At what cost?” I asked, and at last I turned. Switch stood little more than a yard away. Just out of reach. “You say Ghen’s life was too much.” I paused, and here glanced at Siran, whose face was as impassive as those of the stoic statues who watch me even now. “Maybe it was. But you have put the lives of everyone on this ship at risk, Switch. Do you understand that?”

  “You already did that!” he said sharply, eyes wet and wide. “The moment we betrayed the fleet, our lives were forfeit!”

  I took a step closer, by doing so emphasizing the difference in our heights. I am not so tall as many among the palatine class, but I stood more than a head above my plebeian friend.

  When men contend, it is always with the underlying threat of violence. I have known some women who insist it is the same, and having sometime seen the nail-scratched faces and torn hair I think perhaps it is so—if less commonly. But I think men found their communication on the threat of that violence. We must speak, they say, raising their hands to emphasize the point, lest we use these. Stepping into Switch’s space as I did, I knew my unspoken threat for what it was and stood upon it as though it were a podium.

  To his credit, the other man did not flinch. As I have often remarked, there was nothing of the scared catamite in him any more. He thrust out his chin as though it were a target, projecting by that motion that he was unafraid. Tears shone in his eyes, unfallen and furious. I took them for a sign that he understood me. More weakly now, Switch said, “You already risked our lives when you took Tanaran. When we fought Bassander for you.”

  I didn’t miss a beat. “I meant to return to Bassander—to Smythe and the Empire—only after I’d made peace with Prince Aranata. You handed us back as failures. It’s not the same thing.” I may have made us outlaws, but Bassander would never have found us, never have found Vorgossos, if Switch hadn’t summoned him. We might have returned on our own terms, in a superior position. We might have returned with peace.

  “You don’t see it, do you?” Switch said. “You trust the Cielcin more than your own people. Do we mean nothing to you?” He practically spat the words.

  There was the moment my father would have struck the man. I felt it with the clarity by which one speaks his most cutting retort—by which one hits the riposte in a fencing match. I let it go. I remembered how I had felt when I fought Bassander on the Balmung. I had not hated him, who had treated me with naught but contempt since the Cielcin invasion of Emesh. I could not hate him.

  But I could not trust him ever again.

  I could never forgive him.

  Friend that he was, his friendship was not worth the lives of all those he had risked by his cowardice: Pallino and Siran, Otavia and Bastien Durand, Ilex and Crim and Elara and all the rest. And Valka, Valka most of all. Even his own life, for he had gambled that as well. All to save himself from the Inquisition. I studied his face, the high cheekbones and bright eyes, the red hair neatly combed, the resolute anger and the unfallen tears. I could not hate him, who had been my friend for so many long years.

  But neither could I look at him without pain.

  Eyes shut, I said, “You need to go.”

  “Go?” Switch echoed, voice breaking with a sound like incredulous laughter. “Go where, Hadrian?”

  “I don’t care,” I breathed, the last word shaking from me like a windowpane in a thunderstorm. “Go to Bassander, if he means so much to you. Go back home to Danu. Go back to your Master Set.” I bit that last one off, knowing it would sting and hating myself for it. The shame I felt at that wounded my own pride further still, and as we so often do when our own actions cut us so deeply, I doubled down. “Go to hell.”

  I turned my back, not opening my eyes. Even through my lids I felt P
allino’s eye on me. Felt Siran’s. Elara’s. Ilex’s. Felt Switch’s hand on my shoulder. “Had . . .”

  “Why did you come back here?” I said, bowing my head. “Why did you come back to this ship after what you’ve done? Was it for judgment? Justice?”

  My friend did not answer me.

  “Get your hand off me, William,” I said, voice tight as bowstrings. The fingers tightened on my shoulder. I’d used his name, his real name. The nickname had vanished, and all familiarity with it. “I said . . . go.”

  “Please, I . . .” Switch said, and I could hear by his voice that his tears had started to fall. “I was scared, Had. Scared you were dead down there and that Bassander would kill us all when he caught us. I didn’t want to die! You don’t mean it, don’t send me away!”

  Inhaling sharply through my nose, I threw my head back and said, “I wish I did not have to. But I can’t trust you anymore. Not again. Not after this.” Grief is emptiness, I thought. Grief is deep water. Grief. It felt less like Switch had betrayed me and more like he had died. That he was lost to me, forever sundered by some ocean vast as the ocean of stars through which we wheeled.

  Vaster still, as though we traveled so fast in opposite directions that the one’s light would never reach the other, not until time ran down and the stars burned out like candles, leaving all the universe in darkness and in cold.

  Cold.

  “I was trying to help. I was trying to save you, too! To save everyone!” Switch said into the silence.

  “You were trying to save yourself!” I snarled, brushing his hand from my shoulder and moving away. Still I would not look back. “Do you think I’m a fool? Do you think I don’t know what we risk here? What I’ve risked? It was me in that cell, Switch! Me and Valka! If you knew what I’d seen down there . . . what I’d met! If you knew even half of what I know . . . you’d have gone to Bassander even faster. You talk about demons—I’ve met them! Kharn keeps worse things than Cielcin in the dark, and you have—” I broke off, shaking my head. “I’m sorry Ghen died, too, but everyone who came with me—everyone who’s here—knew what they were getting themselves into, do you understand? They knew.”