Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

“It’s not the Chantry.”

  “You’re sure?”

  The same air blew my cape about me and my hair. Face tipped up to catch the last light of the sun I would one day unmake, I answered him. “Why would the Chantry act so flagrantly? Sending a cathar to hire the Irchtani? It’s too obvious.”

  “It obviously was not the Chantry. You’ve a talent for making enemies, my dear boy.” I could hear the wry tone in the old fellow’s voice so clearly that it brought a smile to my lips, even in the shadow of those grisly pillars. “You recall the story of Icarus?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “No,” the Gibson part of me replied. “You’ve risen too far too quickly, and too many of the soldiers worship you.” I thought of Carax, of the way Osman threw himself at my feet. “The Empire does not want a hero, and you’re giving them one anyway. They’re finding they’ve lost control of the narrative, and it scares them.”

  Bootprints marred the grass about the whipping posts, pale green stalks smashed flat. Human feet and Irchtani. “The Emperor.”

  “It is possible, but unlikely. He would not have given Alexander into your care if he meant to destroy you.” I could imagine the way Gibson might tap his cane on the ground to punctuate his remarks, see the wrinkled face just hinting at a smile. “Though he certainly meant to marginalize you by sending you here. To take the momentum out of your flight.” I heard the smile break for true as the words came. “It won’t work.”

  “Why?” I asked, watching the shadows and mine run away in the gloaming. I knew why. “Because the soldiers will keep telling stories about me. All the years I’ve been away will be more years for the stories to grow longer, too.” I nodded at the shadows, thinking of just how much longer they were than the pillars that cast them, thinking about the lie built around my victory at Aptucca. The lie that enhanced my legend. “It might be enough.”

  “Particularly if you succeed here.”

  “There’s no guarantee of that.”

  “Kwatz!” Gibson barked, a nonsense word to mark my nonsense. “Nothing is guaranteed, but if you return triumphant, you may find yourself far too close to the sun.”

  Too close to my enemies.

  I hooked my thumbs through my belt and shut my eyes, faces peering at me out of the darkness. Breathnach. Bourbon. Caesar. The Empress. Others. I saw gaunt Synarch Virgilian, high priest of the Chantry, and Titus Hauptmann. Princess Selene, Crown Prince Aurelian, and Princess Irene. A hundred faces. A thousand. Any one of them could have paid Udax. Any one of them could want me dead.

  “Or all of them,” Gibson said, speaking as I moved my lips.

  CHAPTER 14

  REQUEST AND REQUIRE

  “AS YOU CAN SEE, we’ve begun receiving data from our scouts. They arrived at the datanet relay three days ago and deployed probes. The telegraph drip has begun compiling, but as of right now we’ve received no positive intelligence.” The same gawky analyst stood by the conference table, gesturing at the holograph display where it charted a growing nimbus of gold-highlighted space about the scarlet node of the relay satellite.

  Tor Varro rapped his knuckles on the tabletop and so took the floor. “That’s no surprise at the very least, it’s only been three days. We shouldn’t expect to find anything for the next several years.”

  “The scouts will deploy light-probes at several locations throughout this volume. We should have nearly a complete map in the time it takes to send an expeditionary force.” The analyst keyed a command into the tabletop, highlighting several blue nodes distributed like the stars of a constellation throughout the empty volume surrounding the relay sat.

  Hundreds of cubic light-years of empty space. Thousands. I pictured the light-probes deploying, tiny scanners no larger than the pupil of a human eye accelerating almost instantly to within a hair’s breadth of the speed of light, slowly expanding through the bottomless dark until they found . . . something. Space is cold and empty, and the ships of the lost legions should appear bright and hot as stars against absolute zero. But next to stars our ships are small, swallowed up by the Dark until we chanced close enough to feel their heat.

  Assuming they were there at all.

  Assuming there was anything to find.

  “Then it is decided,” I said, speaking to no one and everyone at once the way my father used to. My eyes never left the holograph above the table. “We will depart by week’s end.”

  Sir Amalric sounded startled. “So soon?”

  “Soon?” I echoed, turning my attention on the man, arms crossed. “There are men dead or frozen out there, castellan. You would have me wait?” I understood, of course. It would take years to reach the relay near Dion Station, had taken years to get to Gododdin in the first place. The odds were those men were dead and lost already. Osman thought the venture lost already. Was his desire for us to stay then a kind of charity? Enjoy your time as a guest here while you may, Lord Marlowe, for you will return a failure. Maybe it was charity.

  I did not want charity. I wanted to win.

  “A few more weeks would not hurt, surely.”

  So I stood, knowing the impression this would make, and moved away from the table toward the polarized window. Despite the darkened glass I could see the city of Catraeth below the mountain and the Green Sea beyond. I can see it now—though no one will ever see it again, and before long there will be few alive who remember it. White domes and towers, and chime and blare of life moving through them. The wind on the grasses and the oat fields where the bromos grew. I clasped my hands behind my back and stood there silent a moment, practicing a portion of the patience I had learned waiting on my father and on Kharn Sagara. Charity or no, I had had enough of Sir Amalric Osman. I wanted to make him uncomfortable, and so I waited. Ten seconds. Twenty.

  Thirty was good enough.

  “How long a journey from here to the relay, M. Durand?” I asked.

  Durand cleared his throat. “About eleven years. We can’t make as good time as the scouts. The Tamerlane’s fast, but . . . not nearly fast enough.”

  “Eleven years . . .” I repeated. And another two to Nemavand. I was going to be away from Forum for far longer than twenty-four years. Perhaps twice as long. Maybe more. “If we depart at once there is a good chance your scouts will have located our quarry by the time we arrive. I grant that a week or two will make little difference—but then again, a week or two will make little difference.” Back still to the room, I raised one eyebrow. “Given events here you will, I hope, forgive me if I am not eager to remain.” I did not add that I was concerned there might be a second attempt on my life while I remained on Gododdin. Osman knew full well what had passed between Udax and me in the prison cell, but the mere whisper of a Chantry plot to kill me had been enough to scare the man to secrecy. The warden and the staff monitoring the security recordings had been quietly reassigned, sent to a polar research station or else shipped offworld. The recordings had been destroyed, lest someone discover what I knew. “Still, a small delay may be necessary.”

  Osman did not offer a response, and I felt a twinge of pity for the man. Surely my coming had made his life more difficult. Running logistics and managing a supply depot like Fort Din was no easy thing, but the presence of a Knight Victorian and an Imperial prince—to say nothing of the assassination attempt I had so narrowly escaped—were not a part of the man’s day-to-day.

  Two fliers circled overhead, Peregrine lighters by the sharply angled look of them. “My squire has suggested that we launch a second convoy to Nemavand, one which the Red Company will escort in the Tamerlane.”

  “And you want to leave in a week?” I recognized the voice over my shoulder. It was not Osman or Verus, but a senior officer called Ruan. He was director of Gododdin’s orbital station, a glorified dockmaster, and a miserable little cretin. “It’s not possible, whatever your squire thinks.”

  “I remind you, Command
ant Ruan, that my squire is Prince Alexander of the Aventine House, and I happen to think his plan a good one.” I turned to regard the round-faced little man, pausing only to nod at Alexander himself, who sat a little straighter in his chair. “So I will give you two weeks,” I said, raising a hand to forestall any further argument on the subject. Ruan spluttered, his image flickering slightly in the gloom. The fellow had commuted by holograph broadcast from his place in orbit, and his head and shoulders floated ghost-like in the air above one of the chairs, the rest of him lost in shadow. “I trust you have the men.” Facilities like Fort Din maintained gross thousands of Imperial troops in cryonic suspension; I did not doubt that in the mountain beneath the fort and in orbit high above it, tens of thousands of Imperial soldiers slumbered.

  Who knew how many soldiers slept in Imperial storage? I tried not to think of them as corpses waiting to rise again, or of the thousands of colonists Titus Hauptmann had authorized Raine Smythe to pay to Kharn Sagara to build his undead army.

  “Yes, yes, we have them,” Ruan said. “You just don’t appreciate the complexity of what it is I do—what needs to be done. Finding the ships, allocating resources, fuel . . .”

  I raised a hand. “Not interested. You may have two weeks. No more.” I turned my attention on Osman, who sat at the far end of the table, nearest the door. The castellan looked exhausted; his scarred and leathered face seemed almost to cave in on itself like a failed soufflé. “Unless the castellan wishes to gainsay those orders.”

  Sir Amalric shook his head. “No. But what makes you think this expedition will succeed where these others failed?”

  “Even if we fail to discover what happened to the previous convoy, we will have successfully seen reinforcements through to Nemavand. But to your question . . .” I paused long enough to make eye contact with Alexander and give the boy a small nod. “We will awaken our ships’ full complements as we approach Dion. If we are attacked, we won’t be taken by surprise like the others doubtless were. And with respect, your other convoys did not have the Tamerlane.” Only seventeen Eriel-class dreadnoughts had ever been constructed by the Red Star foundries at Hermonassa and Lasaia, and for good reason. They were, to quote one of Lord Bourbon’s predecessors in the Ministry of War, expensive and over-designed. The Tamerlane boasted a crew of more than fifteen thousand, with seventy-five thousand legionnaires in cryonic fugue, and another five thousand aquilarii and their lighter craft: Sparrowhawk and Peregrine fighters, Ibis troops carriers, Shrike boarding craft. There were more than five thousand individual gun emplacements studding the hull to defend against boarders, and that was without counting the dorsal plasma cannons, the magnetic grapnel, missile bays, high energy laser and maser arrays, the arsenal of atomics and antilithium bombs, and the mile-long mass drivers powerful enough to shatter a large asteroid with a single shot.

  All of this seemed to register in Sir Amalric’s guttering eyes. He glanced at Ruan’s holograph and gave a little wave. “Get it done.”

  “Sir?”

  “Get it done, damn you,” the castellan said, then returned his gaze to me. “Damn your eyes, my people will be working round the clock to meet that deadline.”

  Looking round at the conference table, I saw that it was so. The station commandant was not the only one dismayed by my demands; most of the men and women there—two dozen perhaps, or more—fidgeted in their seat and shuffled papers and crystal tablets, or else sat staring empty-eyed at the blank table before them. There was nothing Osman could do to stop me, not really. Though he was the ranking officer in Fort Din—and thus in all Gododdin system—he would have had to be a much braver sort of man to gainsay the request of a Royal Knight. I was not an auctor, did not speak with the Emperor’s voice, but they knew I had his ear, knew there would be consequences for disobeying so august a servant of His Radiance. And worse, I was not any servant. I was the Red Devil of Meidua, the Emperor’s own black knight and pet sorcerer. I was the Halfmortal, the man they said could not be killed.

  I could not apologize.

  “I hope so, castellan. The Emperor does not suffer disappointments.” I allowed my cape to settle, concealing me but for the slash at my left shoulder. “Neither do I.”

  A deep voice spoke up from midway down the table. “Castellan Osman, sir. If ships are required for this new expedition to Nemavand, I will gladly volunteer.” It was Mahendra Verus, the dark-haired, olive-skinned captain of the ISV Mintaka. “We’re fully repaired and operational and can serve as escort for the troop transports.”

  “How many men are on station with you, Ruan?” Sir Amalric asked, propping his head on his hands.

  The round-faced man on the holograph answered at once, “Twenty cohorts.”

  “One hundred twenty thousand.” Osman worked the words over in his teeth, chewing them like gristle. “We’ll lift twenty thousand from the vaults down-well. Those twenty cohorts . . . not from a single fleet, are they?”

  Rian shook his head. “Survivors from Bargovrin.”

  “We’ll have to incorporate them into new legions.” Osman pinched the bridge of his nose. I did not envy the man. Paperwork would have to filed with Forum and the Legion Command on Ares. Old legions would be rendered defunct, their numbers put back into circulation to be assigned to one of the new legions being raised at forts just like this one. I really hadn’t given them much time.

  But I was not finished pushing, either.

  “One other thing,” I said, glancing now at Valka, who had been sitting silently at the nearer end of the table, closest to my seat beside Varro. It had been her idea. I watched the castellan and his aides compose themselves, bracing for whatever demand this fey and terrible knight might make of them. Valka gave me the smallest smile and nodded. “The Irchtani soldiers.”

  “What about them?” the station commandant asked.

  “I want them,” I said sharply. I wanted to get them away not only from whoever it was had coerced Udax into attacking me, to protect them from reprisal, but from the local soldiers as well, men who might be inspired to take revenge out of fear.

  Fear of the other.

  It was likely that whoever had tried to kill me would try to remove any links back to them, and once I was gone and the memory of the attempt on my life faded from the public consciousness, it would be only a small thing to make a few auxiliary soldiers disappear, Irchtani or no.

  Sir Amalric struggled with my words for a long moment. “You . . . want them?”

  “I have been extremely clear, castellan. I want the Irchtani unit assigned to my command for this mission.”

  Bastien Durand cleared his throat and said, “The Tamerlane can accommodate as many as one hundred thousand personnel in cryonic fugue. You must have the Irchtani’s creches on station, yes?”

  “I . . .” Amalric cast about, eyes tripping incredulous over the face of one subordinate to the next.

  Verus saved him. “My lord, with respect, they tried to kill you.”

  I offered the table my brightest smile, all teeth. “They did.” I said no more. I did not need to give an explanation, only to make demands. I locked eyes with Osman. The castellan, at least, understood my motivations. Let the others assume it was whim or madness. Let them assume it was greed. Let them think I wanted to punish the Irchtani personally, that I was vindictive and cruel. Let them think I only wanted—if you will pardon the synecdoche—another feather for my cap. It did not matter.

  “Give him what he wants,” said a sharp voice from midway along the table. Prince Alexander leaned in, attention on Sir Amalric. In all our time on Gododdin, the prince had kept studiously quiet, both before and after I’d told Osman who he was, and so the shock of his speaking out was severe.

  Osman pressed his forehead to the tabletop between his hands, and a moment later several of the others followed until the entirety of the Fort Din senior staff were bowing in their seats. My own people did
not. Alexander was my squire, not their prince. But these legion officers? They could not refuse. Any request from the Imperial blood was as good as an order. How was it the Emperor made his demands?

  I request and require . . .

  Valka laughed brightly and muttered something that might have been, “Anaryoch.”

  Barbarians.

  I cracked a trace smile, as much at Valka’s naive condescension—which had grown into a comfortable point of disagreement for me as much as my stolid traditionalism was for her—as at the officers themselves. I thought again about what the Irchtani call us palatines. Higher Beings. I am not sure I believe we are such a thing, but one need not believe in a thing for it to be real and have power, and the same belief that made Osman press his forehead to the tabletop made his voice shake as he said, “Honorable Highness. We will do as you command.”

  Alexander turned to look at me, the smile on his face clearly proclaiming, If I’d known it would be that easy, I’d have spoken sooner. I gave him the thumbs-back gesture, tapping my chest with my thumb, that indicated approval in the Colosso. His smile widened.

  * * *

  “It . . . is decided, then?” the Irchtani kithuun asked, tucking his chin against the wind. I stood beside him and Udax and a few of the others—his centurions, I guessed—on the ceremonial wall that surrounded Fort Din with Alexander, Crim, and a small number of guards. Barda shuffled his wings as though he were cold, and fixed me with one beady eye, the bird-like xenobite moving with so credible an impression of the jerky, stuttering way birds flit from one posture to the next that it kindled in me thoughts of parallel evolution and the panspermia theory.

  And of the Quiet.

  Thoughts of the Quiet brought again thoughts of the howling dark, of my own headless corpse and my two right hands. I shut my eyes, willed the sunlight to banish such horrors from my waking dreams, and said, “The castellan has agreed to cut your seasoning short. You will accompany us to Nemavand.” I opened my eyes and, fixing them on Udax, I said, “You will be joining the fight a bit sooner than you hoped.” That pronouncement brought a chorus of chittering and clicking beaks from the Irchtani, and something in the noise made me smile, recalling the holograph operas I had seen, tales of Simeon and Prince Faida and the mutineers.