Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Valka fired past me into the dark, hoping to catch one of the creatures on the far side.

  “Bassander!”

  The captain seemed to hear at last, and for an instant I saw the whites of his eyes by the purple glow of plasma fire. I heard him shout an order, and his men retreated, pulling back along the catwalk to where we stood. His men came thundering back along the bridge, metal rattling beneath the tumult of their passage. Last of all came Bassander Lin himself, the Pale hard on his heels. Valka fired, and those men who’d made it back our way with her. Violet flame took two of the advancing Pale, and they fell. The quiet hiss of flying snakes turned to screaming, and I watched three of our men tumble screaming over the rail into the bottomless night. The shape of their convulsions as they fell and the noise of their screams has never left me.

  Bassander moved past us, clapping a hand on my shoulder as he passed. He said nothing—there was no time for words. I took a step out, a step toward the approaching enemy. I could see the blue light of my sword reflected in their eyes, off their glassy teeth like the fangs of deep-sea fish. I raised that sword like an executioner and—like an executioner—swung.

  The catwalk buckled, and I leaped back to the safety of the edge.

  The Cielcin were not so lucky. The single spar bent, buckled like a tree branch burdened by the first ice of winter. Snapped. Bassander sliced one of the nahute clean in two. “Where’s Smythe?”

  “Gone on ahead,” I said. “Back down the hall.”

  “We need to hurry!” Valka said. “’Twill be another way for them to cross.”

  At last we burst through a door onto familiar ground. Blue candle flames burned to either side, and the high seat upon which Kharn had first greeted us was empty. “The ship’s not far!” Sir William said. “Is that everyone?” He looked around. There were perhaps a hundred of us left. A hundred and twenty? We’d lost perhaps a score when Bassander took his wrong turn into the great hold.

  “I think we’re on the right side of that door,” Jinan added, shrugging Ren’s weight in her arms.

  “It’s a straight shot back to the bay, ma’am,” said one of the centurions, an especially broad man with a voice like breaking stones. “A couple of those odd turnings, but no side passages.”

  Raine Smythe hurried toward the open doors at the far end of the hall, brushing past the centurion with a gesture. “Very good, Mozgus. You and Crossflane with me.” The centurion saluted and fell in as the tribune gestured at a group of the others. “You lot, see if you can’t secure these doors. They won’t hold long, but we’re out of time. Lin, Marlowe, take the hostages and hurry on, straight to the ship now. Quickly!”

  “Abassa-do!” Nobuta was crying then, struggling against its captors. “Father!” There were other words after, choked and strangled. Its captors struggled to hold it as it squirmed. Young the creature may have been, but the beast was strong. It flailed, one arm breaking free to club the legionnaire that had restrained it. The man grunted, kicked Nobuta in the ribs while the others held it.

  “Stop!” I shouted, too late.

  The man had drawn his stunner and fired before I could get to him. Some eccentricity in the xenobite’s nervous system kept it from passing out, but it went limp as a boned fish, allowing its four captors to hoist it to their shoulders like pallbearers carrying a dead man. A motley crew we made: Tor Varro with Suzuha slung upon his back, Jinan cradling Ren, the soldiers with their alien cargo, and Bassander and I leading the column. The soldiers followed on: Smythe and Crossflane and the big centurion, Mozgus, bringing up the rear. The hall ahead bent sharply down with the axis of gravity, but I’d grown used to such distortions in the time since we arrived, and didn’t break stride.

  A long boom sounded far behind, and I knew the ceremonial doors to Kharn’s hall had been blown apart and that the men left to hold them were dead. I saw them in my mind’s eye: Prince Aranata stepping over the broken corpses of our soldiers, coming like black Death herself with her army behind her.

  There! The hangar doors were open, and I could see the golden glow of the safety lamps to either side of the Schiavona’s ramp. The guards hurried forward. “Captain Lin! Lord Marlowe! What’s going on? We’ve been trying to raise you on comms since the ship went dark, but nothing’s gotten through!”

  “No time!” Bassander bellowed, for what could he say? That he had betrayed Knight-Tribune Smythe? That even now Titus Hauptmann led the fleet against the Cielcin in the black beyond? He gave orders instead: “Take the children to the medica and throw the Pale in the brig! And one of you run to the bridge and tell Commander Sciarra to raise the shields! The Pale are right behind us!” He turned back, as if he made to rejoin the fight.

  “Where in Earth’s name do you think you’re going?” Smythe bellowed as Mozgus and Crossflane strung a cordon in the narrow hangar door. “Lin, get your ass on the Schiavona and sit on it.”

  He shook his head. “I can help, ma’am.”

  “You’ve helped enough!” she spat. “Go!”

  The door from the hall was narrow, a round portal set within the open mouth of a giant, sculpted face, wide enough only that three men might walk abreast. “Take the hostages on board!” Smythe said to me. “Lin’s right. We need to buy time until the ship’s defenses are online.”

  I nodded, watching as the centurion and his hoplites formed ranks to reinforce the gate. Why had Bassander killed Sagara? I wanted to scream. I knew the answer, of course. With Kharn alive, he might have deployed the power of the Demiurge against Hauptmann and the fleet, but here we were stuck aboard a dead ship, unable to so much as seal a bulkhead door. “What about you?” I asked.

  She was already halfway back to her men. “We’ll hold the door, go!”

  Boom!

  Bodies flew like gravel. Metal and bits of stone. The lips of the statue about the doorway crumbled away. I saw Mozgus—what was left of him—spatter the roof of that graven mouth, turned to pulp within his armor.

  “William!” I heard Smythe cry, and I made to follow her.

  How she heard my feet in the aftermath of that concussion I’ll never know, but Raine Smythe whirled, sword pointed straight at me from ten paces away. “Get your ass on board my ship, Lord Marlowe!”

  I staggered. Turned, took three steps back toward the ramp.

  That short distance saved my life.

  Boom!

  Another explosion rocked the hangar, and I was lifted bodily from the floor, thrown by the shock and heat of it to tumble sprawling at the foot of the ramp. I smelled burning wool, and threw my coat off of me before I scrabbled to recover my sword. Hands seized me, and looking round I saw Valka—what was Valka doing here?—and a faceless legionnaire pulling me up the ramp. I looked back, looked to the shattered remnant of our force by the door, looked for Sir William Crossflane.

  For Dame Raine Smythe.

  There was nothing and no one but flames.

  CHAPTER 69

  DIVIDE AND CONQUER

  “SMYTHE’S DEAD,” I SAID to Bassander’s unasked question when the Schiavona’s ramp had closed. “Crossflane, too—and that centurion.”

  “How many did we save?” Valka asked, looking round at the shattered remnant of the escort force that had marched to the Garden and our meeting mere hours before.

  Tor Varro swept his eyes over the collection, subitizing, taking in everyone with the ease with which you or I might count a handful of dropped coins. “Seventy-three, not counting these.” He indicated Ren, Suzuha, and Nobuta, who lay on the black floor at his feet. “Someone needs to get them to medica. I don’t know what’s wrong with them.”

  I managed to stand, leaning heavily on Valka, glad of her support. “There’s nothing wrong.” Everyone looked at me. “They started like this the minute you killed Kharn Sagara.” I directed my words to Bassander Lin, who sat cradling his head on a supply crate against one wall. “
I’d wager this is exactly what’s meant to happen.”

  Valka—who alone of all those assembled knew as much about Vorgossos as me—paled. “You don’t mean . . . ?”

  “Kharn’s survived so long as he has by possessing the bodies of his children.”

  “Surely that would require some procedure?” Tor Varro asked.

  “Not necessarily,” Valka interjected. “It could be done remotely. I’ve no idea what sort of implants either Sagara or the children might have.”

  “And you’d know, witch,” Bassander said, glowering.

  Pushing past Varro and Jinan, I pointed a finger in the captain’s face. “Back off, Lin! None of this would be happening if you hadn’t interfered.” It was all I could do not to seize him by the lapels, by the throat, to throttle him with my own two hands. “We’re here because of you! All those men are dead because of you! Smythe is dead because of you!” I was shouting by the end, stooped so that I was hardly two feet from his face where he sat recovering.

  The Mandari captain did not rise to my provocation. He did not rise at all. At that precise moment five soldiers dressed in the darker-than-black of Legion officers stormed into the hall followed by perhaps three decades of ship’s security. Bassander’s dead eyes slipped sideways to regard these newcomers. “Lieutenant Cartier, are we able to leave?”

  Lieutenant Cartier, a tall, pale woman with golden hair cut in precise bangs across her low forehead—very like Lieutenant Greenlaw—answered at once. “No sir, there’s no emergency override on the hangar doors and we can’t disengage from the service umbilical either. Their system’s dead.” Only then did the lieutenant realize the awful facts of our situation. “Where’s the knight-tribune?” No one spoke. Outside, the sounds of scuffling as the Cielcin did Earth-only-knew what to the hull. “And Sir William?”

  The captain shook his head.

  “Dead?” Lieutenant Cartier’s voice broke.

  “Along with the prime and second-string centurions and about eighty men,” Bassander said. To his credit, he was steady as new clockwork. “How long will the shields hold?”

  “We’ll run out of fuel first,” Cartier said, “unless they’ve brought something heavier than small arms. We’re safe enough. Hull’s an inch and a half of solid adamant. They’d need heavy artillery.”

  “They’ll find a way in,” Jinan said. “They always do.”

  The ship rocked, dull thunder sounding from below. I could hear the sound of muffled shouting from without. Harsh voices, sharp as windows breaking. An empty space encircled Bassander Lin, as though the silence within his chest leaked outward. “We’ve three hundred left aboard the ship?” he asked.

  “Plus the ship crew,” Cartier said.

  Jinan stepped forward, looking a little the worse for wear. There was blood on her cheek, but whether it was her blood or the blood of some fellow I couldn’t say. I felt certain I looked as bad, but tried not to dwell upon it as she said, “It would be suicide to go charging down the ramp again. We’d be moving right into their line of fire. Even shielded we’d be mowed down.”

  “What about ship’s weapons?”

  Cartier shook her head. “Nothing we could use without risking the ship.”

  “The Mistral!” I exclaimed. “Can we get word to the Mistral? The Red Company! Captain Corvo has three hundred soldiers—and they’re not far. With the Cielcin focused on us we might be able to catch them unawares!”

  The lieutenant could only shake her head again. “No, no we can’t. Our internal comms are still working but we can’t get a message out. We tried raising the Obdurate the moment the lights went out, but . . .” The ship rocked again. I had a sudden, vivid image of the Cielcin prowling about beneath us, hurling their small explosives while some of them went off in search of cutting equipment. I realized then how little I knew of war, how little of the enemy. Their tactics, their capabilities. Could they cut their way inside? For all the talk of our ship’s adamant hull, even adamant can be shattered with enough force. I didn’t know, and knew again the sensation of swimming atop deep waters, ignorant of their depth and certain that at any moment some dread leviathan would emerge from the deeps to swallow me whole.

  Valka rounded on Lieutenant Cartier. “You said the service umbilical was still attached?” I recalled the open hatch in the Schiavona’s highest level, the ladder rising up into shadow. I’d not climbed that way myself, but I knew it ascended to the maintenance catwalks that ran along the top of the Schiavona. We might escape through there, back into the endless, fractal corridors of the Demiurge with their mad turns and impossible directions. At length, the lieutenant nodded, and Valka looked round at me. “We should go. Someone has to.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, surprised but not upset to be so volunteered. I was about to volunteer myself, and smiled at her, even through that tense and dreadful moment. I had known there was steel in her, knew also that she had served a time in her homeworld’s Orbital Guard. She’d had her pains, but they’d not bent her. She returned my smile, and I loved her then and said, “A couple of us might get by unnoticed. If we can get the Red Company, we’ll outnumber the Pale.”

  “We can trap them between us,” Tor Varro said, seeing what I intended, “take them unawares.”

  “Precisely!” I said. “They’re already out of fugue and ready. Smythe—” My words stumbled over the name, and I heard the awful crash of the explosion that had felled her, had hurled me bodily across the hall. The stench of blood and burning wool filled my nose again, and I shuddered, pushing the memory aside. Smythe had planned for this, I realized. Exactly for this, to trap the Cielcin between the Schiavona’s men and the Mistral’s. That was why she’d ordered the retreat from the Garden the instant Hauptmann’s fleet engaged the enemy. That was why she’d stressed to me that Corvo should keep her mercenaries at the ready. Had she known the Empire was going to make its move? Was that why she’d sold so many thousand human serfs to Kharn Sagara? As bait? Had she and Hauptmann cooked all this up between them? A plot to catch and kill a prince of the Cielcin?

  I didn’t know.

  “Smythe ordered the Red Company out of fugue and ready,” I said at last, forcing the words out, eyes tight shut.

  “No.”

  That lonely word fell like the White Sword, and silence with it. Eyes tight shut, I knew who had said it, and without opening them I turned to face Bassander Lin. Fists tightened, too, would have tightened on his neck—his treasonous, patriotic neck—but for the warning in my heart and the knowledge that dozens of soldiers would have peeled me off of him and pummeled me for my trouble.

  As blade for blade, I met him word for word. “Why?” Only then did I open my eyes, sure that I would find his on me, and the line of fire drawn between us.

  I was wrong.

  Bassander Lin stood, eyes downcast, shoulders hunched. The brass pipes and the black walls and ceiling of the hold seemed to retreat from him as fast as stars red-shift behind a ship at warp, so that he seemed a solitary figure carved on a hill of his own making. A solitary monument. What must he have felt, then? He who had caused the death of his mistress? Of his men? Of peace itself? Flickering, a solitary spark of pity caught in me for the Mandari captain. It caught against my will and better judgment.

  Presently he spoke, taking in a long and rattling breath. “With Smythe gone and . . . Crossflane, I am the ranking officer on board this ship. I am in charge here, Lord Marlowe.”

  The flame died, the pity with it. I opened my mouth to speak, but the words would not come past the sudden numbness in my chest, that pause in feeling that is the retreat of the tide before fury’s wave.

  Into that pause, Bassander spoke. “So I’ll go.”

  The wave died, too. “What?”

  “It’s my responsibility,” he said. “Lieutenant Cartier, inform Commander Sciarra that he will retain control of the Schiavona. I’ll take a doze
n men out the service umbilical and make for the Mistral. Tell him he is to hold here until I return.” No sooner had he said this than he began shrugging out of his coat.

  I stepped forward, reaching out a hand to take Bassander by the shoulder. “You’re the ranking officer now, Lin. You can’t go—”

  “I am the ranking officer, Marlowe,” Lin’s voice snapped like a broken harp string, “so shut your mouth.” He spoke with such force that I stood stunned. Not long, just long enough to allow Bassander to vault onto the stacked supply crates so that he stood up above the heads of the eighty or so men and women in the hold. He raised his hands for silence—not noticing or caring that, but for the noise of the Cielcin outside, silence had already come. “We’re pinned down here!” he said, planting one booted foot on the next crate up. “I’m going to the Mistral for reinforcements. I need volunteers.” The silence stayed unbroken. Bassander pointed to the ramp. “There are four hundred Cielcin outside that door and they are coming in.” His eyes surveyed the crowd, but for all the force in his voice the light of the ceiling lamps might have fallen on spheres of glass for all the good it did Bassander. His seemed the eyes of a dead fish surveying us. “There are three hundred Norman mercenaries sealed on that ship by Smythe’s orders. I mean to bring them back here and catch the Cielcin unawares. It’s bloody work and dangerous with those beasts out there, and I don’t want anyone going who doesn’t have the stomach for it.”

  To my relief, Valka did not step forward to offer herself.

  “We’ll do it!” said a triaster with his helmet off, moon face shining in the stark light. He clapped his partners on the shoulders. “Won’t we, lads?” His subordinates were still suited, and what they might have felt I could only guess. Slowly, painfully slowly, four others moved to join Captain Lin, standing in his shadow where he stood upon the crates. It was perhaps the least inspiring speech I had ever witnessed, and so I was hardly surprised when it did not attract a torrent of supporters, but at last a decade and more stood by Captain Lin, leaning on lances or adjusting suit seals beneath their red tabards. Apparently satisfied, Bassander leaped down.