Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  The gaol had been carved into the rock beneath the great keep with plasma cutters, and the walls still bore the glassed-stone shine of that long-ago workmanship, worn by the passage of years. But for the stink of living men and rotting food and shit, I felt almost as though I were descending into the necropolis my family kept in the grottoes beneath Devil’s Rest. It reminded me also of the Chantry bastille in Borosevo, close and sweating, though the air here lacked the humid oppression of Emesh. It even reminded me of the watery cell Valka and I had shared on Vorgossos, but then perhaps all prisons are the same—each a shadow of each.

  “Ho there!” a man called from the bars. “High-born! What day is it?”

  Another man with a busted eye oozing pus peered out from a space beside the first fellow. “It’s true. The Halfmortal!”

  “The Halfmortal?” a third voice said. “What’s the Halfmortal doing down here with us mortals?”

  “That’s not the Halfmortal! That’s some fucking catamite. Fuck, he’s pretty.”

  “That don’t make any damn sense, Lodge. Can’t you see he’s high-born?”

  “What day is it?” the first man demanded again.

  I did not stop to speak to them, not even when one of them cried out, “Halfmortal! I was at Thagura! Do you remember me?”

  Quietly, I asked the warden, “What are they here for?”

  “Drunk and disorderly, mostly. They’ll be out end of the week,” the woman said. “The others? Assault. Murder. Couple rapes. That lot’ll be in here a few months, just until we can freeze them and pack them off to Belusha.”

  I grunted my understanding. Belusha was one of the Emperor’s prison colonies, one of the cesspools into which the filth of the Empire was inevitably drained. I’d heard stories about the chain gangs and the salt mines, the skies black with soot. I felt a stirring of pity for the men, whatever their crimes. Most people die before they go to hell.

  Udax’s cell lay at the end of the hall. I stopped a ways back from the bar—allowing an extra foot behind the red line painted on the floor that marked the minimum safe distance from the prisoner. If the Irchtani noticed me it gave no sign and lay on its cot with its broad back to me. That cot notwithstanding, the cell’s only furnishing was the sink and toilet facilities in one corner—a luxury I had not expected given the smell of the place. An empty food tray lay in one corner of the floor.

  Still studying the scene, I drew my new cape around my body as the warden withdrew to the far wall, making herself as inconspicuous as possible. Speaking low and clear, I said, “Your Kithuun-Barda says you are his best fighter. I don’t know if that’s true—it may only have said so to make me consider sparing your life—but if it is true, it would be a shame to destroy a specimen like yourself over a misunderstanding.”

  “Specimen,” the bird quarked, venom in its tones.

  “Exemplar, if you prefer.” I let the cape swing free again, hooked my thumbs through my belt. “You nearly beat me.”

  Udax rolled over, bead-black eyes sharp in the gloom of its cell. “I did beat you. You only won because you had a better sword.”

  “And you lost because you picked a fight you could not win,” I said, and fixed the creature with my most Marlowe smile: crooked and toothy. “Good fighters don’t start fights they can’t win.” I must confess I rather liked the vicious xenobite. He reminded me of so many of the recruits and brave men who came to the Colosso.

  The Irchtani snapped its beak at me. “I could win if you fought me fairly.”

  “Fairly?” I echoed. “You suckered me with that sword of yours and you say fairly? No, no, no.” I paced back and forth in front of the bars, careful to keep my distance in case the taloned creature leaped at me but playing calm. “You have put your people in an unfortunate position, do you know? For that little stunt of yours the castellan here has locked your whole unit in their barracks. He thinks your tribesmen mean to rebel.”

  Udax stood and half-shuffled toward the bars. “Osman locked them up?” It croaked something in its native language I could not discern. “Why?”

  “Why did you attack me?” I countered, pivoting to face the Irchtani square on.

  The xenobite wrapped its scaled and taloned hands about the bars, pushing its beak out between them. “Because I hate you.”

  “You don’t know me,” I said, matching the deadly cold in the bird’s voice.

  The Irchtani screeched and said, “You humans are all the same. You think you own the universe. And you Bashan Iseni are worse.”

  You humans are all the same. The words echoed in my head. Uvanari had said precisely the same thing to me in its cell in Borosevo. History repeats itself—would keep repeating itself, if I did not have my way. Udax would die as surely as Uvanari had unless I did something.

  “And you wanted to throw your life away? Did you think it through? If you had killed me, what then? You could not have gotten far.”

  One taloned finger pointed squarely at my chest. “But I would have gotten you, bashanda.”

  “Me?” I arched my eyebrows, placed a hand to my chest. “What did I do?”

  “You’re just like the rest of them, treating us like pets.” The creature’s talons flexed.

  Unimpressed, I said, “You’ve anger in you. But it’s nothing to do with me. I am not those men.” I resumed pacing, idly twisting my ring. “Do you know who I am?”

  Silence. I ceased pacing. I studied the creature’s face, the way the gray feathers crested to twin peaks above its eyes. I could not be sure—the Irchtani was not human, after all—but I sensed no recognition in the xenobite.

  “No?” I asked.

  “Am I supposed to care?”

  “You should,” I said, turning once more to face the bird in its cage. “I’m the only person here trying to stop the castellan from ordering your unit decimated.” I paused to let this piece of information sink in a beat before adding, “And I’m the only person here trying to save your neck.”

  Udax croaked softly—a sound I took for laughter. Beak snapping, it asked, “Why would you save me?”

  “Because I think we’ve had some kind of misunderstanding, soldier,” I said, stepping pointedly over the red line on the floor and well within range of the Irchtani’s claws.

  The warden spoke up. “My lord, you must stand back!”

  Flashing a glance at the woman I said, “Say those first two words again, madam.”

  “My lord?”

  “Quite right.” I took another step nearer the bars. Beneath my cape, I held my sword hilt in my hand, emitter aimed squarely at the xenobite’s bowels. The moment called for bravery, not foolishness. “And because it would be a shame if your kithuun were to lose its finest soldier.”

  Udax squinted up at me. “His.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We are men,” Udax said. “Not things.”

  I frowned, recognized the linguistic error. The Cielcin were hermaphrodites, every one of them possessed of the same organs, but sliding between sexual roles as social context demanded. The Irchtani were two-sexed, and though those sexes were neither male nor female as we understood them, the division of labors and powers was not so unlike our own.

  “I beg your pardon,” I said.

  Udax exhaled sharply and drew back from the bars as if satisfied. Feet apart, he crouched in the middle of the floor. He did not speak for a long time, did not move. I wondered if he was in shock, so stunned to hear an apology from one of us Bashan Iseni, we Higher Beings. Taking a step forward, it was my turn to seize the bars. I did so with one hand, the other still grasping my sword should the bird man decide to attack me. I hoped my closeness was a show of trust, given the warden’s enthusiasm for keeping me behind the line.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said, almost to himself. “Maybe you aren’t like them.”

  My fingers tightened on the bar
, and I was strangely conscious of the fact that I had not blinked in a long while. “I need you to answer a question for me, Udax, with the understanding that your life and the lives of a hundred of your fellows may depend on the answer.”

  The bird man looked up at me, eyes wary and narrow once again, but he did not speak.

  “Did someone put you up to this? You and your compatriots? The ones who attacked my man, Pallino?” Almost I pressed my face between the bars. “Did someone pay you to kill me?”

  Udax nodded.

  I felt my chest tighten, vasoconstriction forcing blood into my extremities—the ancient response of the prey animal primed to run. But I am not a prey animal. Gibson’s voiced chanted in my ear. Fear is death to reason. Reason death to fear. I held my breath long enough to take control of it and forced my blood to relax.

  “Who?”

  “Some human, never learned who. Offered enough for me and the others to buy out and go home rich. Never saw him again.” He reached up and smoothed back his feathered head. “I think he could have been one of your priests.”

  The Chantry. I felt a shard of ice slide knife-like down my spine. Not again. The religious order had been against me on Emesh, even before I’d killed Gilliam Vas. I’d suspected their hand had turned against me before, but after Aptucca I’d hoped I was too high in the Emperor’s favor for them to risk something so flagrant. I remembered the blessing Carax had asked of me. Did the Chantry suppose I was some threat to their religious authority? Did they think I thought myself a prophet?

  “How do you know he was a priest?”

  “ ’Cause he called us inferior beings, just like that. Soldiers don’t. They say birdo. And I never saw his eyes.”

  A cathar? I thought. The priest-torturers wore muslin blindfolds in strips across their eyes. They were servants of Justice, and Justice is blind.

  Thinking of eyes, I was suddenly, sharply aware of the eyes on the back of my own head. It took a measure of doing not to turn and glare at the warden. Without turning, I said, “You.” I pitched my voice to make it clear I was addressing her. “Wait at the end of the hall.”

  “My lord?”

  “You said those words again!” I snapped, too harshly perhaps. The woman had not done anything wrong, though her ears could as easily belong to another. “Go!” Small good such harshness would do me. Even if the woman were not aligned with my enemies, it was possible that someone who was was watching through the prison’s camera system at that very moment. What I would not have given then for a share of Valka’s power, even at the cost of inviting a machine into my head. I glared up at the nearest camera with enough force that I almost expected the lens to crack beneath my gaze.

  But it didn’t. It remained cold and impersonal as iron—and as threatening as steel.

  I leaned toward Udax, wishing I shared some secret language with the Irchtani as I had with the Cielcin on Emesh. “You realize, of course, that you were never going to be paid. Whoever is behind this meant for you to die along with your friends. It was supposed to look like a pack of . . . of inhuman savages had turned against a knight of the Empire. Your people would be blamed.” Udax sat hugging his knees with his overlong arms. I wondered if the Irchtani could turn white beneath his feathers, if the blood could drain from his face. “You said they didn’t tell you who I am?”

  He shook his head.

  I told him.

  “You important, then?” Udax asked. He hadn’t heard of me. That was unusual, even in those days, but not unheard of.

  “Important enough to them to destroy your life and the lives of your companions.” But not important enough to conjure a better plan. This didn’t feel like a Chantry job at all. It was clumsy, haphazard. The Chantry would have poisoned me, crashed a shuttle. They would have sent a Mandari assassin in the dead of night, or contrived to have the Tamerlane’s antimatter reservoir breach containment and lose the ship with all hands. But this? I knew again the sensation of being lost in the dark of the labyrinth, alien feet behind. We are always blind, though our eyes see clearly. We are always blind to those things we do not know. Best to assume there are knives in the darkness, because there might be anything in the darkness.

  Best to be safe.

  Udax drew his arms tighter around himself, great pinions wrapping like the wings of a bat. “What’s going to happen to them?”

  Staring once again at the camera, at the officers I knew were listening in, I said, “You have to give me the names of your fellows. The ones who helped you attack me.” This was the information I had agreed to get for Osman, to dispel his fears of an Irchtani uprising—ludicrous as they were. I realized I did not need to worry too much about the ear in the wall. If they were Osman’s men, I could buy them or bully Osman into submission. He was already terrified in light of mine and Alexander’s presence after all. I felt sure that it was not his hand behind Udax’s attack on my life. I did not think him so fine an actor.

  He could be bought.

  “Are they going to die?”

  Still speaking into the camera, I said, “No. But they will be whipped. And you will. I can’t stop that.” I did not add that whoever it was they had dealt with might come back around and kill them. It was possible, but I did not think it likely. They would want to tie up loose ends, but I was about to make as large a spectacle of their whipping as I could, not out of cruelty, but because people would notice if the Irchtani soldiers who had just been so visibly punished were to disappear. If my nameless enemies tried anything, they would only be calling down greater attention on themselves. “I’ve convinced the castellan to treat this as just a fight between soldiers. You won’t be treated any differently than a human would for the same crime.” He would, in fact, be treated more leniently. Any human would have been killed for assaulting a palatine, without question. Being a minority had its privileges.

  The Irchtani stood, beak tucked against its barrel chest, arms crossed.

  “If that’s what has to happen,” he said, and hesitated a moment. “I understand.” He offered a hand. A test? No ordinary palatine would accept a handshake from a peasant, much less a xenobite auxiliary like Udax. But I was no ordinary palatine. I had been in places far worse and far lower than that measly cell. Smoothly, unseen, I shifted my sword from right hand to left beneath my cape and took Udax’s claw in my hand. The scaly flesh was cold and dry, and the talons pinched. It did not squeeze as a man would—it did not need to. “There were four of us. Me, Gaaran, Ivar, and Luen. If anyone else joined in, they thought it was a scrap. They didn’t know.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and drew my hand away.

  “When will it happen?” Udax asked.

  “The whipping?” I drew back, replaced my sword in its magnetic clasp. “Not for a day or two. You’ll have ample time to contemplate just when you should draw your sword and when you should keep it in its sheath.”

  CHAPTER 13

  TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN

  THE SHADOWS OF THE whipping posts stretched across the yard, pushed by the setting sun. I can still see those pillars, shadows themselves of the pillar where dear Gibson was whipped. I stood on the steps of the barracks beside Sir Amalric while his men stood guard as the four Irchtani were whipped by four of their own. Kithuun-Barda stood to one side, watching his four soldiers. They did not cry out—not at first—and when they did their screeching set the whole pack of xenobites to cawing, screaming at the sky.

  From my vantage point on the stairs, how clearly I saw the line of division between our two peoples. Human and Irchtani, xenobite and man. Though the Irchtani fought for us and willingly, it seemed to me the space between the platform and the yard would never be bridged—could not be, so far apart did we seem.

  Yet those pillars were not the back wall of a firing range; those four xenobites were not a hundred. No coins with Death’s head had been paid to soldiers who had done nothing to earn them. Th
at at least was good.

  Men have come to me for prophecies, asking after the future. I never could answer them. What we may become is ours to choose, and we may choose badly. I know only that we must choose—as I have chosen—and live by our choices. In ages hence perhaps the Irchtani will dwell across the Empire. They may captain ships or council lords as scholiasts—and perhaps be lords themselves. Or perhaps they will vanish, like the Arch-Builders of Ozymandias—like ancient Ozymandias himself. I cannot say, can say only that I saved the lives of four—or of a hundred.

  I hoped it was enough.

  We had made a proper spectacle of the moment, however. The main yard was flooded with Fort Din personnel, and I had even convinced Osman to allow civilian broadcast in. Light, they say, is the best disinfectant. It is an antiseptic as well. With any luck, the scourging of the Irchtani would be the biggest story on Gododdin. Udax and his compatriots would be safe, I hoped, at least so long as I was there. I hoped that was enough, too.

  I remained in the yard a long time after the prisoners were led away and the crowd departed. It was the dinner hour, but I did not feel like eating. Alone but for my guards—who kept their distance—I moved to stand among the pillars. Reaching out, I traced the deep gouges in the posts where the Irchtani’s claws had bit into them, careful to avoid the greenish blood drying on the surface.

  As I often did, I imagined my old tutor, Tor Gibson, stood just out of sight, interrogating me as he so often had when I was a boy.

  “Whose hand directed your would-be assassin?” his imagined voice inquired.

  “It could be anyone,” I murmured, putting my hands in my pockets to keep from touching the blood. I was alone in the middle of the yard. The only other people visible were my four guards standing several dozen yards off and a few personnel hurrying about their tasks between the fort’s white buildings. On the wall, a banner bearing the Imperial sun snapped in the mountain air.

  I could almost see old Gibson shaking his head. “Not anyone.”