Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” I said, tapping Crim on the shoulder. “The princess asked to meet some of my companions.” They came apart and bowed—though Ilex bowed clumsily, being foreign and unused to the motion. They ought each to have knelt, properly, but Selene didn’t seem to mind. I introduced them, saying, “Highness, here are Lieutenant Commanders Karim Garone and Ilex, my Chief Security Officer and head of Engineering.” I gestured to each in turn with an open hand. “Crim, Ilex, this is the Princess Selene of House Avent.”

  The princess did not offer her hand for the foreigner and the homunculus to kiss, but smiled politely and said, “I am honored to meet you both.” She looked Ilex over with a critical eye—I could feel the tension building in Crim, but he said nothing, nor did I. This was Alexander’s sister, after all, whatever that may mean for so large and strange a family as the Aventine. “You are very beautiful,” Selene said, touching Ilex’s sleeve. “I love your dress.”

  “Thank you, Majesty.”

  “Only Highness,” Selene said.

  “Highness,” Ilex amended. “You’re very kind.”

  Crim squared his shoulders, one hand on the small of Ilex’s back. “She’s a fine officer, ladyship.”

  Princess Selene nodded with Imperial slowness. “No doubt. I am very much honored to meet two of Sir Hadrian’s worthies.” Her politeness did not ebb for an instant, and yet I sensed a hollow, brittle quality to it, as though Crim and Ilex were not what she expected, as if the romance of meeting two of the Halfmortal’s famed Red Company had faded when confronted with the real thing.

  “Have you seen Valka?” I asked, needing something to fill the air and eager to find her again, if only to put a barrier between myself and this princess and the implication that I suspected some political hand was building between us.

  The dryad brushed back her woody hair. “I haven’t.”

  “Not for a while,” Crim added. “She was talking to some Consortium representative a while ago, but she might have gone outside. Said the noise was a bit much for her.”

  Outside.

  “This is your paramour, yes?” Selene asked, recapturing my arm.

  I turned to look at the princess, smiling my best, politest smile. “She is.” There was no denying the Princess Selene was beautiful, powerful, the product of countless generations of refinement and genetic engineering. Perfect as a statue, lovely as Venus and Artemis together distilled through the hand and eye of a thousand painters.

  She wasn’t Valka.

  Anaïs Mataro might have pouted, but if Selene Avent was threatened by mention of Valka she gave no sign. Turning to Ilex and to Crim, she said, “Excuse us. It was lovely meeting you both. I’m sorry for interrupting your dance.” Then she led me away, still holding my arm. We came in time to the shallow stair at the end of the ballroom opposite the platform where the highest lords still mingled—where the Emperor had made his brief appearance. She disentangled herself from me then and held my left hand in both of hers. Head bowed, she said, “Thank you for the dance, sir.”

  I went to one knee then, kissed the ring on her hand. “It was a genuine honor, Your Highness.”

  “Please rise, Sir Hadrian. You needn’t kneel, today of all days.”

  I rose. She released my hand and—looking down, her hands still folded before her—she added, “I do hope that I might see you again.”

  All the Imperial armor fell away from her in that moment—for that moment—and I beheld that here was a girl not yet full-come to womanhood. I sensed how much effort it had taken her to utter those nine words. Was it fear? Nerves? Or merely the expression of someone else’s will?

  I could not say.

  Bowing, I retreated up one of the shallow stairs and so gained the high ground and the advantage of her. “As my lady commands.” But she was not my lady. My lady had left the hall, if Crim was to be believed.

  And I wanted to find her.

  CHAPTER 31

  THE CLOUD GARDENS

  THE PERONINE PALACE BY night shone with the light of stars and of lamps just as remote. Above the gardens and open colonnades, great empires of cloud rose thousands of miles into the seeming-topless sky. I hurried along a gallery lit by a warm and steady glow and out into the dewy night. Black ivy, silver-edged, grew on an iron trellis to one side, and silent Martians stood sentinel in red and white, their lances keen and flickering with the violet hint of plasma.

  Somewhere in the gloaming a minstrel plied the strings of a harp, and the silver sound of it filled the space beneath the columns and the gardens beyond with quiet music. There it mingled with laughter and the hushed murmur of voices.

  “Hadrian!” a high voice called. It was Aristedes.

  Precisely as I had imagined, the little intus was seated on a sill beneath an arch among a dozen or so men in the black and silver of the Legions. He had a bottle of wine in his hands and brandished it like a scepter as I approached. How had he convinced the servants to part with an entire bottle from the Emperor’s collection? He hadn’t stolen it, surely?

  “My friends! You know Sir Hadrian, Lord Marlowe, surely!” He brushed back a limp fall of white-blond hair. “Knight-Victorian, Grass Crown, Order of Merit, honors honors honors . . .” With one hand he sketched an incoherent scribble in the air. “Hadrian, these fine gentlemen and I were just discussing which classical military commander would be best suited to warfare in the here and now—assuming of course they were given a full understanding of the tools and personnel at their disposal. You’re a classicist—a classist? Classicist. What say you?” He thrust the wine bottle upward like a sword in challenge.

  Surprised by the tangential cut of the question, I blinked at Lorian. “I say I don’t know enough about military strategy to answer the question. Besides, wouldn’t any ancient commander be at a disadvantage? Combat in space is not the same as combat on sea or land. That rules many of the ancients out.”

  Aristedes waved this down as though it were an irritating fly. “That was precisely Lord Gannon’s point, here—and Lord Carrico had agreed! But they have declined to play my little game and are holding out for more sensible topics of conversation! So forget them!” Here he indicated a pair of quiet nobiles, one with graying hair and the other bald and mustachioed. “But you see, my friend Commodore Massa has insisted on old Lord Wellington—a classic—while M. Cambias insists that someone like Gustavus Adolphus, with his readiness to accept and incorporate new technology into his strategy, is suited perfectly to this fish-out-of-water scenario!”

  “That all sounds well and good, Lorian, but—”

  “But indeed! We’ve completely neglected the boarding element! Any ship-to-ship situation that’s not ended at once and by stealth must come down to boarding once shields are in play. Who then! There are any number of pirates we might choose. Drake, for instance! Someone mentioned Regulus—was that you, M. Rinehart?”

  “I said Don John!” said a thin man in the plain black suit of a Legion Intelligence officer. “Drake was someone else.”

  “You’re forgetting Harrington!” said the lone woman in the group, an older officer with hair like curling steel.

  Aristedes brandished his bottle. “Harrington wasn’t real and you know it, M. Feder! And neither was Wellington! Everyone knows that!” Privately, I thought Aristedes mistaken on that first point, but I said nothing and hooked my fingers into my belt to wait out the manic commander’s drunken lecture. “If it comes down to the long knives, you need someone who’s good on the ground! Good for his men! Someone like Lord Marlowe here! You know he killed that Pale demoniac with his own hands? I have the suit footage! You should see it!”

  “The footage is classified, Lorian.” The intus’s face fell, and eager to catch him while he gathered himself and bring this digression to an end, I asked, “And who’s your answer?” Better to have it over with.

  “Pyrrhus!” the commander
said.

  Both Lord Gannon and Commodore Massa groaned, and one of the others, Rinehart, I think, or Cambias, said, “Pyrrhus got himself killed by a falling roof tile!”

  “Pyrrhus set the gold standard in castrametation for centuries—per Hannibal himself—and preparation is nine-tenths of ship-to-ship combat—as you well know. Give the man a fleet and the personnel to fly it and you’d be hard pressed to find an equal.” Aristedes pointed his bottle squarely at one of the other men’s faces. “And don’t you start in about McClellan again, Mann! McClellan couldn’t win a fight with his enemy’s battle plan literally in his lap. He’s not a fair comp to Pyrrhus at all and you know it. I don’t care how good he was at running drills. You’re not proving anything.”

  “Lorian!” I almost shouted, needing to stop the man’s manic rush. Any other time I would have found it interesting just how much historical detail had been preserved in the study of war, names and persons remembered at a level of resolution lost in the broader study of things. So much data had sunk into the morass of time, history transformed to legend and myth, and yet certain names and data remained like grains of sand in a broth. But I had no time to reflect on this. I was on a mission, and asked, “Have you seen Valka?”

  It seemed to take Aristedes a second to come down from whatever plane he’d rushed onto, but after a moment he said, “Where do you think I got the wine?” He smiled lazily, and I nearly smiled myself. That was one mystery solved.

  “Where is she?”

  He pointed over his shoulder, deeper into the gardens. “She went that way.”

  “Thank you. Gentlemen.” I bowed slightly and hurried on, ignoring Lorian’s words as they followed me out over the garden path.

  Great banks of cloud clung to the walls and streamed from the spires above like banners, casting fingered shadows on the starlit glass. Forum had more than a hundred moons, each barely larger than the unfixed stars and twice as bright, filling the night with radiance. The gentle picking of the harp followed me out among the hedges and the blossoms, and somewhere in the gloom a silver fountain played.

  I found her at last, sitting on the lip of that fountain, a wine bottle in her hands. She had not been hard to find. The path ran straight past openings in the hedge maze and up a white stair that led back from these lower wards to the palace entrance and the Galath Tree. A lone watch-eye patrolled the airs above, and I thought I spied two of the Martian Guard at their posts on the balcony above.

  “Crim said you’d left the ball,” I said. “What are you doing out here alone?”

  “ ’Tis perfectly safe,” she said, glowering. “You don’t need to worry about me.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I asked, taking a seat on the sill beside her. The night was cool but not chilly, and over the ramparts I could see the great shoals of cloud rising level upon level, spire upon spire into the night air. Off in the distance, dry lightning coiled, and further out the orange gleam of ship drives burned in the night.

  She did not speak, but tipped the bottle of wine back and drank, fingernails clicking on the green glass.

  “I am sorry about the princess,” I said, feeling I should clear the air of that fog at once.

  “I don’t care about the princess,” Valka said, enough venom in her words that I could tell she lied. “ ’Tis this place I can’t stand.” She watched me then with one golden eye peering out from beneath her red-black hair. “I can’t stand what it does to you.”

  Not prepared for this avenue of conversation, I shifted on the seat, angling to look at her better. “What do you mean, ‘what it does to me’?”

  “You are different,” she said, resting the bottle on one knee. “Than you were.”

  “I thought that was a good thing,” I said, trying to smile. “I seem to recall you didn’t think very much of me, once upon a time.”

  She snorted, took another swallow of the wine. “ ’Tis this place,” she said again, and swore in Panthai with such force it raised my eyebrows. “Everyone has a knife behind their smile, and you smile along with the rest of them. ’Tis not who you used to be.”

  “Who did I used to be, Valka?” It was not the sort of conversation I’d have liked to have in the Cloud Gardens of the Peronine Palace, but I weighed being overheard and recorded against Valka’s displeasure. Valka won.

  “Du var pen anaryan,” she said. You were a barbarian. “You hated Emesh as much as I did. The Mataros, that old witch woman . . . Gilliam Vas, and the rest. You weren’t one of them.”

  I placed a careful hand on Valka’s knee, but gave no pressure. “Yes, I was.”

  Had Valka not said as much herself? Was not all the strain in our earliest acquaintance born of this very fact? That I was a palatine lord of the Sollan Empire—exiled and demeaned, but a lord—and she a Tavrosi demarchist?

  “ ’Twould not have said that, then,” she said, and I knew she was right. “What changed?”

  “You know what changed,” I said, and to my own ears it sounded as though my words came from a great distance, heard as it were from the depths of some impenetrably dark well. I felt that darkness again, howling in my mind, and saw my headless body tottering before the hulking shape of Aranata Otiolo on a stone shelf beside a lake like glass. I saw too Raine Smythe’s torn arm raised above the feasting Cielcin, saw Sir William Crossflane’s throat torn out, and heard the screams of dying men. The Cielcin were not the angels I had prayed for, though mankind had proved herself to be the devil I knew.

  Neither of us spoke a long while. At length, I reached for the wine. Valka snatched it away, eyes reproachful. “I wish . . .” She trailed off, peered down the neck of the bottle. “I wish things were different.”

  “Everyone does, in times like these,” I said. “But we do not choose the challenges of the day. Only our answers to them.”

  Quiet again. Wind in the branches and the scent of flowers. The distant sounds of merriment. The splash of the fountain at our backs. The harpist had stopped his playing, and though the world was neither silent nor wholly still I felt as if Valka and I were the only living things on Forum. Though we sat in its beating heart, the Empire was far, far away.

  “You should have let me come with you. In the battle.”

  I felt Valka grow tense beside me, as though she were the string pulled tight on an ancient bow. There it is, I thought. There was the thing that bothered her.

  “I told you I was sorry,” I said. We’d fought about it on Nemavand, and on the Tamerlane before we’d gone into fugue for the return journey. “I made a mistake.”

  “Those soldiers didn’t have to die,” she said, and I could feel her eyes on me. “I should have been there. You should trust me.”

  At once it seemed I was falling, as though I’d hurled myself from the ramparts and into endless sky. “I do trust you,” I said, flailing for a handhold. “I just don’t want to lose you.”

  “I don’t want to lose you,” she shot back. “You’re the one who runs head first into these things.”

  What Aristedes had just said echoed in my ears. “If it comes down to the long knives . . .” I murmured, twisting Aranata’s ring on my thumb.

  “What?”

  “I have to do it, Valka. I have to be there for the men. I need to lead them.” I broke off, mindful suddenly of the cameras all around us and the ears behind them. Somewhere in the bushes, a nightingale sang. The sensation of falling had passed, was replaced by the feeling that I floated in some unseen current. The thing the world called Hadrian Marlowe was like a suit of armor, a colossus in which I rode that moved of itself. Without me. “What sort of person would I be if I ordered other men to die, without risking myself?” My hand found hers, and I squeezed. “I want nothing more than to leave with you, here and now. Walk beneath the arches at Panormo . . . see the Marching Towers. But you know we can’t.” And I could say no more, for the ears of the palace w
ere listening, and our talk circled all too near the Quiet, and knowledge of the Quiet was forbidden. Indeed, to talk of leaving Forum with Valka was perhaps dangerous in itself, if Princess Selene’s dance was more than a dance, if my guess as to the hand that moved her and its aim was correct.

  I was a tool, a faithful knight, a pawn moved by other hands, with no will of my own. And pawns move only forward.

  Always forward.

  “You still shouldn’t have left me on the Tamerlane,” Valka said, circling back, as if all I’d said were meaningless. “I am not made of glass, Marlowe. I was a soldier, too.”

  Valka had been a ship’s commander for a planetary defense force. She was no fighter, no one to lead a sortie against the enemy. They were not the same thing. But I was not about to tell her that, because she was right. She could have operated the Cielcin machinery better than Cade ever could. But she was wrong, too. She was made of glass. It was how she cut me.

  I took my hand away from her knee.

  “I’m sorry, doctor,” I said, answering her distancing language with my own. I wanted to tell her about Selene, about the plans I thought had been set in motion—about what they meant for us. But of all the things we should not talk about in that garden, that was perhaps the chiefest. But the weight of those worries rested heavily on me. “I don’t want to lose you,” I said again. It was the whole truth, and so there was nothing more to say.

  Neither of us moved for a long while, each mindful—or I at least was mindful—of the space between us. Wide as the no man’s land between armies, though a child might have struggled to fit between. Looking down, I discovered that I’d been clenching my left hand. The knuckles stood out white in the dimness, but the false bones and carbon tendons did not ache with strain. I felt nothing, as though it were the hand of a stranger. I studied my hands then. The left that Kharn had given me, the right Aranata had taken away. The hand the Quiet had restored. The white scars from the corrective brace I’d worn as a child shone like stars beneath the marks of newer wounds. The left hand was clean. I cradled the left with the right, felt the brush of my thumb against the palm. I tried to crack my knuckles, but the false bones would not be moved.