Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  CHAPTER 16

  OTHER DEVILS

  PEOPLE IMAGINE LIFE ABOARD a ship at warp, with most of the crew gone to their icy beds, to be a lonely and hollowing experience—but I have not found it to be so. On a ship as large at the Tamerlane, one was never truly alone. Rather those corridors and tramways and mighty holds—which when we were at full capacity thrummed with movement and the sound of voices so that the ship seemed like a city—were quiet as a country village.

  I preferred the quiet.

  Months passed, the days much the same. I awoke early, descending by the lift from the quarters Valka and I shared to the officer’s mess, where I took breakfast. True eggs, when we had them, imitation when we did not, tomatoes from the ship’s hydroponics section, and the customary sailor’s glass of orange juice. Valka preferred to sleep more than I did, and so I would take my morning exercise alone, or else with Siran and Pallino as once we did in the fighting pits of Emesh. Being palatine, my body did not require daily exercise to maintain its fitness, but I find as I have grown older I have become more and more a creature of habit. Even now, in my exile here among the scholiasts, I awake before dawn and take breakfast with the brothers before coming to my cell here to work.

  By the time I returned from my exercises, I would return to our rooms to find Valka awake. We would take lunch together, sometimes poring over old notes. I would help Valka in her efforts to translate the Quiet language in my own stumbling way, but before long I would inevitably be called away on some errand, or else would have to hurry along to instruct the prince or to attend to some small matter. More often than not, I would simply walk the halls.

  For all intents and purposes, I had lived aboard the Tamerlane for more than half a century, and knew its every hall, its every chamber, its every hold and bay. Some days, I would walk along the broad corridors of the barracks high up near the dorsal hull, just below the cubicula where ninety thousand men and one thousand Irchtani slumbered in expectation of the trumpet blast. Other days, I would prowl a portion of the equator, a single path that wrapped around the ship beneath the overhang of the dorsal plate and provided access from barracks above to the launch tubes used by the thousand pilots of our aquilarii. From the catwalk where I would walk as my terminal quietly read in my ears, I could see the Sparrowhawk and Peregrine fighter craft chambered like bullets in a gun. There were five hundred such tubes down either side of the ship, oriented toward the rear. In the glory days of human-against-human warfare, most starship battles were decided by boarding craft. Royse energy shields made ranged assault difficult, and so if one ship could not surprise another from half a solar system away, the fighting came down to whoever could put enough men aboard their enemy’s ships, and so it fell to the aquilarii to run interference, acting as a final layer of defense to repel boarders as their shuttles advanced to cut their way through the hull and into the ship.

  But more often than not, I would walk among the hydroponic gardens, listening to the spray of water hoses and the humming of bees.

  When one imagines starships, one never thinks of bees. But they are there, kept in the hydroponics section by double airlocks and left to their own devices, tending the vegetables, fruits, and herbs alongside human gardeners. And there were fish as well. Much of the Tamerlane’s protein supply came not from the aforementioned eggs or bromos protein, but from the fish that dwelt in the waterbeds that supported the plants.

  “I thought I might find you here,” came the bright, familiar voice.

  I tapped my terminal to cease its recitation of a third-millennium treatise on the Mericanii written by an early scholiast called Ortega. Smiling, I closed the folio in my lap and set the pencil on top of it. “Am I that predictable?”

  Valka cracked a knowing smile, but did not answer, looked instead about the little alcove where I’d set myself beneath a trellis of basil plants to shelter from the lamps. An ironwork table stood at my elbow with a carafe of chilled water. I’d had the chair brought out years ago in order to give myself a quiet place to think, and the sound of bees and running water and the smell of growing things eased something of the chill oppression of the halls outside.

  “’Twas nearly time for dinner. ’Tis not like you to be late,” Valka said, tugging at her collar. “How do you stand it in here? ’Tis so hot.”

  It wasn’t, really. After Emesh, no place ever felt truly hot to me. “What time is it?” I glanced at my terminal. Where had the day gone? “Earth and Emperor, I’m sorry.”

  “Are you all right?” Valka perched herself upon the arm of my chair, looking down at me with worry in her face. She pressed her palm to my cheek, and I took her hand with my false one and held it there.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not.” She tilted her head to get a better look at me. “You’ve been quiet since we got back to the ship. ’Tis the mission bothering you or the assassins you’ve decided to drag along with us?”

  “What?” I looked up at her, surprise blossoming in me. “I thought you approved of my saving the Irchtani!”

  Her hand slid down to my neck. “Not if they’re a danger.”

  “I don’t think they are,” I said, letting my own hand fall to her thigh. “Udax had no idea who I am. It isn’t personal. Besides, they know they owe me now for their lives. Udax in particular.” I pressed my head to my shoulder, trapping her hand. “It’s over, it’s . . . not that.” One of the bees had landed on the side of the carafe, and for a moment I watched it march up the sweating metal before it flew away. “Someone tried to kill me.” I looked up at her, unpleasantly aware of how wide my eyes were. “I don’t want to die again.”

  She drew her hand free, but said nothing. What could she say? Valka had been there by the lakeside when Aranata Otiolo struck off my head, and she had visited the dark Brethren with me in the dungeons below Vorgossos. Of all the people in the universe, she best understood what it was I had been through—and she did not understand at all. She had not seen that luminous Dark, nor had she swum the rivers of time.

  I was alone.

  It was not that I feared to risk my life—I had been risking it ever since I left Crispin bleeding on my mother’s floor in Haspida.

  Valka squirmed and pushed my hand away. “Stop it!” I realized too late that I’d been squeezing her thigh with my fingers. She seized my hand by the wrist. “Talk to me.”

  “They nearly killed Pallino,” I said through tightening jaw. Looking Valka in the face, I said, “They might have killed you.”

  “They didn’t,” Valka said.

  “It isn’t fair,” I said. “After all I’ve done for them. All the battles, all the dead men . . .” I tossed the folio onto the table beside my glass and the carafe. “I should let them rot.”

  Valka made a face I cannot fully describe, equal parts amusement and pity. “You should. But you won’t. ’Tis not who you are.” She put her hand back on my face and turned my chin so that I looked up at her. She had not changed in all the time I’d known her. There were no new lines on her high cheeks or about those golden eyes, and her hair—so red it was black in all but the brightest lights—had not a thread of silver. Though the gap between our ages had closed in our long decades together, I knew I would never quite catch up. I was palatine, and had centuries left to look forward to. How long Valka had, I could not say. Her thumb tracing the line of my cheekbone, she said, “ ’Tis one the things I love about you.”

  “I thought you hated it.”

  “That, too.” She pressed her lips to my forehead and stood. “You’re right. ’Tis not fair. But did you expect it to be?”

  “No,” I replied. I looked up at the herbs growing in the bed above my alcove, feeling the warmth of the artificial sunlight on my face. “No, I didn’t.” Alexander had complained of unfairness when first I brought him aboard.

  I mentioned this to Valka and she snorted. “He reminds me of you, you know.” />
  “He does not!” I said, voice somewhere between sharp and playful. He reminded me of Crispin.

  Valka made a face. “Well, he is less bright than you were. And so boring!” She touched my arm. “Brighten up. We’re safe for now. ’Tis nothing to worry about except whatever is out there.” She waved one finger in a tight circle, indicating the Dark beyond. “Come on, we’re late enough. You know how Pallino is if we’re not on time.”

  “He’s cooking again?” I hadn’t realized. The old soldier hadn’t made a meal for us since we’d left Gododdin. “He must really be feeling better.”

  * * *

  We ate in our quarters—Valka’s and mine—we few friends and survivors of so many trials. Pallino and Elara, Ilex and Crim, Siran and Valka, and myself. Pallino had made the meal himself, and he and Elara carried it up through the lift from the galley.

  “Where did you get the squid?” Ilex asked when she saw the first dish hit the table.

  “Requisitions!” Elara asked. “Gododdin’s a hub world. All sorts of things coming in and out, and the Legions take a bit of everything—mostly so the officers can have nice things. Pal had me put in an order.” She smiled in her matronly way, a smile that still looked out of place to me in that face stripped of its age lines. Elara had been well into late middle age when I met her, catching up with Pallino, but as it was with her man, so too her clock had been turned back.

  Pallino himself took the seat opposite me and said, “And they freeze nice if you do it right, so we’ll have some to hand when we unfreeze. Bread?” He offered Ilex a covered basket.

  Crim took it and held it for the dryad while she selected a roll. “Did men never mock you for cooking when you were in the corps the first time?”

  The old patrician’s eyebrows arched. “Men can’t mock of you for something unless you let them, so no.” Using a carving fork, he pulled a nest of pasta tossed with squid and garlic and tomatoes first onto Elara’s plate and then his own. “And the thing about food, Karim, is that men only mock you for it if it’s shit, which this . . .” he passed the bowl to Siran and fixed Crim with a cutting glare, “ain’t.”

  “Thank you for dinner, Pallino,” Valka said, unstoppering the wine bottle and pouring herself a glass. It was a Kandarene vintage the color of honey, one she was especially fond of.

  He nodded. “Most welcome, doctor. Seemed the thing to do, seeing as I’m for the ice day after tomorrow.”

  “Are you?” I asked. I hadn’t heard.

  “Okoyo just cleared me, said I was all healed.” He tapped his chest just where the Irchtani talons had made their mark. “Honestly, I’ve been fine for weeks. Been going crazy up here with nothing to do except bang my head on the wall.”

  Elara took the serving bowl from him and said with a conspiratorial gleam in her eye, “He couldn’t even put his shirt on until yesterday.”

  “Quiet, woman!” Pallino exclaimed, swatting Elara across the backside as she made to take her seat. Siran saved the serving bowl as the other woman turned and flicked Pallino in the side of his head. The old soldier swore and shook his head as his woman took her seat. Resting one hand on her knee, he said, “She’s a liar, this one.”

  A lazy smile pulled one side of my mouth, and I asked, “But you are all right, aren’t you?”

  “Is rain wet, lad? Is space cold? Is the Empress only the second most beautiful woman in the cosmos?” He grinned at Elara. “Of course I’m all right.”

  Midway through the act of grating some real cheese from Gododdin onto her food, Elara said, “Good recovery, dear.”

  “I’m ready for a rematch with those bird bastards, though. Should have kept one or two of them out of the ice. I’d put them through their paces.” He smiled his toothiest smile. “Damn, doctor, stop hoarding the wine!” He snatched the Kandarene from its place by Valka and laughed, and such was the sound of his laughter—warm and rough and loud—that soon we were all smiling and filling our glasses.

  My friends.

  The seven of us ate and laughed and drank together for a time, and though we smiled and all were merry, I could not help but look at the empty seat at the one corner of our table, a mute and unintentional reminder that our circle was broken. There in a better world Ghen might have sat, but Ghen was dead. How I missed the rough old ox, his quick temper and easy friendship and the grinding sound of his voice. I missed the way he’d called me Your Radiance, an insult become a term of endearment. I missed Switch most of all, and many were the times I’d regretted sending the man away. He always told me the truth, even and especially when I did not want to hear it, and he always did what he thought was right. In that sense, Switch had been a truer knight than I ever was—and perhaps a better man. That had been his undoing, in its way. Switch had betrayed me in the end, as I had betrayed Jinan, and for the same reason: to serve a higher good.

  We need such people in our lives, for without them we have no lives. We live in other people, by other people. They keep us on the ground. Keep us human—and I have needed keeping human more than any king or emperor. In no other company did I feel fully myself.

  And I realized that what I’d said to Valka earlier was wrong.

  I was not alone after all.

  CHAPTER 17

  LORIAN

  THE PRINCE WAS LOSING.

  Crim pressed Alexander back across the fencing round, moving with the fluidity of long practice. The Norman-Jaddian officer was one of the finest swordsmen in the Red Company, perhaps the only one who was a match for me. He aimed a cut at the prince’s head that Alexander just managed to parry, pulsed his arm as he advanced and slashed the prince across the chest. Alexander’s target suit changed from black to beet red where the sword had struck.

  “He’s not very good, is he?” Siran asked, voice low to ensure His Imperial Highness would not hear.

  I peeled my boxing gloves off and set them in the bag at my feet before replying, pausing a moment to watch Crim adjusting the prince’s parry in sixte, demonstrating the correct way to angle his wrist to set the riposte. “The boy suffers from too delicate an education,” I said. His every move was too rehearsed, too mechanical, as if he’d done nothing but drill at half-speed all his life.

  “He needs to get hit more,” Siran said. “He’s skittish.”

  “Can you imagine being his teacher?” I said. “You’d be afraid to teach him properly, afraid to bruise him.”

  “I’d be more afraid of fucking up and not teaching him a damn thing.”

  “That’s because you have sense,” I said.

  The prince overextended on his thrust, nearly overbalanced. Crim caught the attack with the precise parry he’d just demonstrated, stepped inside with a thrust that caught the young aristocrat beneath the armpit. Alexander yelped, but Crim caught him by the wrist and brought his own blade back around and over the prince’s arm to strike the young nobile just below the line of his jaw. The security officer let Prince Alexander go and said, “What did you do wrong?”

  Alexander massaged his armpit and scowled at the other man. “Are all you barbarians so damned fast?”

  “Noyn jitat. If being slow makes a man civilized,” Crim flashed a grin to everyone and no one in particular, “you can call me barbarian as much as you like.” He cut a sweeping arc in the air in front of him with his training sword. “Sort of a weird compliment. Now what did you do wrong?”

  Siran and I watched the prince think it over, still massaging his arm. After a couple seconds a familiar, thin voice rang out from the corner. “You rolled your back ankle and lunged too far!”

  “Black Earth, how does he do that?” Siran hissed.

  I hadn’t seen Lorian Aristedes enter the gym either, but there he was, seated at a machine by the far wall. Had he come from the locker room? Or straight from the hall? I hadn’t seen much of the intus since we’d left Gododdin—indeed I was not sure I’d known he
was still awake. He stood, pausing long enough to pluck his cane from its place by the wall, and hobbled toward the fencing round on its raised platform. I marked the black polymer gauntlets he wore, knew they were laced with tiny electrodes that helped to regulate his delicate nervous system. When he was within five paces of the edge of the round he bowed gracefully as he could and said, “Your Highness.”

  “Commander Aristedes,” the prince nodded, face stony. I had a sudden premonition that things were about to go poorly, but I said nothing, unscrewed the cap on my water bottle, and drank in silence.

  “You want to keep your back straight when you lunge, sire. Otherwise you make yourself easy to knock over.” He did his best to mime the action, and though he moved slowly he carried it off, using the cane for a sword. Still, he had to lean upon the shaft to regain his footing.

  Prince Alexander scoffed. “I don’t need advice from an invalid.” He turned his back. I winced.

  Aristedes barked a short laugh. “I’m not an invalid. I’m a cripple. The rest of me works just fine.” He tapped his temple with one long finger.

  “He is right,” Crim said, tapping the wooden floor with the tip of his sword. “Come again.” The Avent prince chewed on his tongue a moment and settled into his guard. I could understand his irritation. “Thrust and hold it.” He did. Crim batted the attack aside and stepped round. “See your shoulders are out ahead of your hips?” He tapped Alexander in both places with the tip of his sword, turning the target suit briefly scarlet as he demonstrated the way the prince was leaning. “Straighten your back. Good. Do you feel more in control?”