Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “What?” half the table shouted in unison, though for Varro and Aristedes the effect was limited to a raised eyebrow and a feral smile.

  “I paid him a grievous insult the night of the triumph. He overheard me talking to Valka.”

  “I remember that!” Lorian said. “You went looking for her.”

  A terrible thought occurred to me. “I think you’re right, Varro. I think Valka was the target. She started the talk on Alexander . . . I only agreed with her.” I laid my hands on the table before me, framing the knife-missile between them. “I hope I’m wrong.”

  “If it is the prince,” Crim said, speaking for the first time in minutes, “there’s nothing we can do.”

  “I need to speak to him.” I flicked the knife away, watched it grind to a halt before it reached the other side of the wide conference table. “No getting around it.” Rage flared white behind my eyes, and I pounded the metal surface. Snarling, I said, “Give me a straight fight any day.” Thinking of Valka, I blinked back tears. “I need to be with her. Gentlemen, captain, excuse me.”

  * * *

  “Hadrian, wait!”

  I looked back at the sound of my name, halfway along the hall to the tram that would carry me down and back along the Tamerlane’s equator toward medica and Valka’s bedside. Crim was already kneeling. I should have found that strange from a Norman, but the man was Jaddian-born, and so the custom was perhaps not so unusual. He looked up at me with glazed eyes, but if he expected me to speak first, he was disappointed.

  One hand grasping the hilt of his long knife in its sheath, he ducked his head. “I am sorry. None of this would have happened if I had done my job properly. I will figure out how the weapon got aboard. You have my word.”

  “Your word, soldier?” I repeated, not using his name to reassert the distance between us. I wasn’t being fair. We had no notion of how the weapon had gotten aboard the ship yet. There might have been no way for Crim to know. And yet I could not stop thinking about Valka lying in her cot in medica. Still, I shut my eyes, murmured an old aphorism to quiet my nerves and calm the brewing fury. This was Crim, and not my enemy. In a voice pressed flat of emotion by sheer will, I said, “Very good.”

  “I won’t fail you again.”

  “See that you don’t,” I said, and turning left him without another word.

  CHAPTER 38

  VALKA AWAKES

  THE MEDICAL CELL PULSED to the gentle chime of the heart monitor, its rhythm counting the seconds, parceling time into pieces for delivery to the past. The glass door sealed behind me with a whisper, the only thing in all that space—besides Valka herself—that did not gleam a snowy, sterile white.

  I stood there a long moment, looking down at her where she lay, her shadowy hair pulled back into an uncharacteristic tail, her hands both out on top of the white sheet. Corrective tape showed black high on one cheek where the knife-missile had cut her. A similar black stripe ran up her right forearm, and a larger, heavier rig stooped over her breast like a vampire, humming faintly.

  As I had done in the hydroponics section, I seated myself beside her and took her hand. Her left hand, for the left had taken no damage in the attack. That at least was a small blessing, for I guessed that damage to her clan crest would be a terrible blow. Her fingers did not close on mine, but lay there soft and warm. I studied the translucent cables that ran from the drip on the staff beside her into the crook of her elbow. Saline and anesthetic.

  I slept.

  And dreamed of darkness. Of darkness and pale hands.

  Arms long as trees reached toward me, past me, climbing into the night. I turned, straining for their source, expecting to see the bloated, swollen mass of the daimon Brethren, but there was nothing.

  They were not arms at all, but fingers, fingers of a great white hand stretched across the blackness all around me. And though I fell toward its mighty palm, I drew my sword and struck off the nearest finger, hearing as I did so Iubalu’s mocking laughter.

  I did not dare hope it would be you.

  I fell down a gleaming channel, washed along by the flood. Branches and tributaries opened all around me, each leading up or down another avenue of time. What lay down those branchings I never knew. The waters ran red around me. Drowning. Drowning. Screaming, I cried out for air and climbed upward—back the way I had come—back through some narrow aperture onto a stone shelf beside a lake of glass. Exhausted, I rolled over, looking for the hole through which I’d escaped . . . and saw only my own severed head, blood soaking the lakeside like a birthing bed.

  “Hadrian?”

  Often I have wondered if my death changed me, or if my experience with Brethren had. Though I dreamed before the Demiurge, I have dreamed differently since. More frequently, more vividly, even under the fugue-ice, which they say should not be possible. Perhaps I was different in some fundamental way, or perhaps it was ordinary trauma. It doesn’t matter. How often had I awoken sweating in the heat of the night, cowering in the dark of my own bedchamber?

  Night terrors?

  Or memories I’d not known I possessed?

  “Hadrian, are you all right?”

  I did not think them visions.

  “Hadrian?”

  Warm pressure on my hand, strength and life returning.

  Valka watched me from beneath hooded eyes, voice thick from the anesthetic. Her eyes were far away. But her eyes were always remote. Her smile shone near at hand, and the sudden strength of her left hand in my right was like the blossoming of new flowers in Delos’s brief spring.

  “Just a dream,” I said.

  “The nightmares?” she asked, not letting go.

  I took her hand in both of mine. “Don’t worry about it. How do you feel?”

  “My chest hurts.”

  “You punctured a lung,” I told her, glancing at the apparatus that presided over the tissue repair. Okoyo had repaired the damaged organ, inserted a matrix to accelerate cell regrowth and staunch the bleeding. “She says you won’t be on your feet for a week or two. What’s so funny?” She’d been smiling the whole time I spoke.

  “You,” she said. “You’re usually the one in this bed.”

  I returned her smile. “Well, don’t get used to it.” I took my hands away a moment and passed her a drinking bulb filled with cool water. “Before long I’m sure someone will take a shot at me and you’ll get to feel like all’s right with the universe again. Just you wait.” I smiled crookedly down at her.

  She laughed, groaned.

  Watching her, I tried to imagine what it must have been like. The knife-missile flashing out of the darkness. Okoyo had told me that if the shot had been an inch higher, the knife would have pierced her heart. Even that might not have been fatal, if help had arrived soon enough, but such weapons were known to brutalize their victims, to keep stabbing until some better target presented itself. But the blade had found a lung instead, and somehow—incredibly—Valka had fought back, had managed to fend the thing off with one of my folios for a shield until the batman, Martin, had entered via the lift to collect our laundry and tidy away the remnants of Valka’s lunch. The thing had gone for him instead, pierced him a dozen times before it got caught in his sternum, before Valka caught it and smashed it like a serpent beneath her heel.

  Now it was her turn to ask, “What?”

  I could only shake my head. “Okoyo says you’ll be all right.”

  “Of course I’ll be all right,” she cut back. “You’re not getting rid of me so easy, Lord Marlowe.”

  My smile slid a little, thinking this a reference to Selene. “You don’t think . . . that I . . . ?” I could not finish the sentence, could hardly finish the thought. You don’t think that I did this?

  Valka read my face and mind, and her own fell in horror. “No! Blood of my fathers, Hadrian! How could you ask such a thing?”

  Horror tur
ned itself to shame, and for once I was glad of the unpleasant feeling, and took the drinking bulb back when she seemed unsure what to do with it. The silence that stretched between us was an ugly thing, yawning and brittle. I looked down at my hands, remembering my dream, the way my right hand and my left had flickered as I turned back to contemplate my severed head. I toyed with Aranata’s ring, the blood-red stone and rhodium band twinkling in the harsh light of the medica.

  “Hadrian.” Her voice broke the quiet, faint and far away. “Never ask me anything like that ever again.” There was iron in those words, but when I looked at her, her eyes were kind.

  A sob escaped me, and I clamped it down.

  Grief is deep water, Gibson’s voice said within, forever stoic.

  But it wasn’t grief I felt. Was it relief? At once I remembered another bedside, another victim. I remembered lying in bed, my arm prisoned in a corrective brace, my tongue thick and dry, and Gibson watching over me. The old man had not left my side in days.

  Forever stoic, indeed.

  The scholiasts play the role of the impassive machine, void of all feeling—but it is a lie. However disciplined, however trained, the scholiasts are human still. They share our feelings, and our pains, though they wish they did not.

  It was not grief that pained me then, but love.

  Love consumes, so the aphorism goes.

  I have not found it to be so. Love is not a burden—though it is a responsibility. A duty. Love is an honor—an office we hold. An oath.

  I swore an oath, then. “Men will die for this.”

  Once, perhaps, Valka would have rebuked me. Once, she had hated me for fighting in her name. But here she smiled and—reaching out—put her hand on mine. A kind of blessing, that. Not so unlike the way a great lord might lay hands on his faithful knight before sending him out in service.

  “They attacked us both,” she said. Her nails bit into the backs of my hands. “I’m glad you weren’t here.”

  “I wish I was,” I said. “If I had been, it might have ended differently.”

  “If you had been,” she countered, brows contracting, “it might have ended differently.” She squeezed my hands again, more gently this time, and turned her head away. She was right. There was no telling how things might have gone if I had been there. Any number of factors could have changed the outcome. Valka might not be lying on a cot in medica, but in the morgue. Or I might be. Or both of us together. “We should be grateful,” she said, “that this is all that happened.” The silence rushed back between us like water, and we sat there side by side. When a long while had passed thus, she asked, “Do you think it was your princess?”

  My princess, I thought, and echoed, “Selene?”

  Valka’s eyes shone bright and flat as the eyes of statues. How had I ever thought them merely human eyes? “Killing her rivals. Perhaps the knife was never meant for you.”

  “You don’t have rivals,” I said, trying to cheer her.

  It didn’t work. “Perhaps she does not know this,” Valka said. “Perhaps she is the jealous type.”

  “I don’t think Selene would . . .”

  “ ’Tis Selene, is it?” Valka asked. “Hadrian, think. She knew you were not on the ship. She summoned you. ’Twas the perfect time to strike at me.”

  Swallowing, I pressed my lips together. She spoke sense, and yet I did not want to hear it. “I am sorry this happened to you.”

  “ ’Twas not your fault.”

  “Yes it was!” I said, voice harsh. Her words—spoken to me on an Emeshi night so very long ago—echoed back to me across the decades. “It’s not happening to me,” I said. “To us. It’s happening to us because of me.”

  Valka’s memory was perfect. She knew what I referenced better even than I. “Maybe,” she said, “but you didn’t put that knife in our room.” She squeezed my hand again.

  I could not stop looking at the apparatus stooped over her chest, at the black corrective tape on cheek and forearm, at the medical holographs that showed the disposition of her recovery and her punctured lung. Looking, I found I could not shake the thought, the evil, crippling certainty that I was responsible. I did this, I thought. My dream did this. My ambition.

  A better world.

  What did that even look like? I’d thought once that a better world meant peace between humanity and the Cielcin. I was no longer sure I believed such a peace was possible, or even good. Monsters the Cielcin may be, but was humanity any better? A pack of miserable, backstabbing ingrates. I had delivered them the heads of two Cielcin princes and the vayadan-general of a third. I had delivered them knowledge of an alliance between the Cielcin and the Extra barbarians, had fought for them on more than a dozen worlds.

  And for my pains they paid me with a knife almost in the heart of the woman who mattered to me more than all the rest together.

  “Will you smile?” she said, voice almost stern. “I’m alive.”

  “We should leave,” I said, staring past her to the blank white of the wall. “We should leave now. Take the ship and run.”

  I could see her shake her head. “You know you can’t.”

  A hollow laugh escaped me. “No, we can’t. I may never leave Forum again. I’ll be trapped here like a princess in some fairy tale. May as well lock me in a tower. Chain me to a bed.”

  “Hadrian, stop.” Valka glared at me.

  Suddenly, I felt ashamed—felt that shame running like cold slime down my face and neck. I was being ridiculous. Petulant. I was not thirty anymore; I should not act the child.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Crim and Aristedes are finding out how that thing got on board, who smuggled it in and how. I’m going to start with my list of enemies and work backward. We’ll untie this thing from both ends.”

  Valka said nothing for so long that I thought she’d fallen back asleep, claimed by the anesthetics coursing through her veins. But her eyes were open, though what she saw with those glassy orbs I could not guess. I knew that look, that glazed and vacant stare, as one lost in memory. She was lost in memory, but her memory was sharper than mine, sharper even than the memory of the best-trained scholiast. Valka forgot nothing. Everything she had seen, everything she had learned and experienced, everything she knew was hers to recall with perfect clarity by virtue of the machine that nestled in the brain behind those jewel-bright eyes.

  “We’ve forgotten Udax,” she said, voice coming as if from the bottom of a deep well.

  “Forgotten . . . ?” I trailed off, trying to remember. What did the Irchtani centurion have to do with any of this? He was safely returned to fugue with his brothers and would not awaken unless called for.

  I had forgotten he once had tried to kill me, had nearly killed Pallino. This may seem strange to admit, Reader, but consider: it had been eight and thirty years for me since Gododdin, nearly half of that conscious—though you turn these pages in a matter of hours. Much had happened. Much had changed. Iubalu and the Battle of the Beast, everything we’d learned about Syriani Dorayaica, the Iedyr Yemani, plus the business of my triumph, my not-yet-official betrothal to Princess Selene and what that meant for Valka, the Lions, and the news of the Extrasolarian Monarch . . .

  . . . I had forgotten about Udax the assassin.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “He said he thought the person who promised to pay him was a Chantry priest,” Valka said. I had told her everything. I always told her everything. “This could be them, too.”

  At once, Alexander and Selene seemed less likely culprits.

  The Chantry. The Holy Terran Chantry. But for my mother and a Jaddian smuggler, I’d be one of them. Instead, I was a threat to them, a kind of prophet myself, though I tried not to be. Legends of my battles, my victories—and of my death most of all—went before me like a host of heralds trumpeting the truth and the lies that were stronger than
the truth.

  We saw Hadrian Marlowe beheaded.

  We saw Hadrian Marlowe crushed beneath a falling building.

  We saw Hadrian Marlowe blown out an airlock.

  We saw the Halfmortal gunned down.

  We saw the Halfmortal live again! We saw . . .

  We saw, we saw, we saw . . .

  Often I have thought there were three Hadrians. There was the one who died in the garden of the Demiurge, the one who sat at Valka’s bedside, who was like the first and yet unlike him, both living men made of flesh made separate by the circumstances of their births—one in water, one in blood. And there was a third Hadrian. One born only of voice, one never really born at all. There was Hadrian the myth, not the man. And Hadrian the myth was truly immortal.

  It was the myth the Chantry needed dead, though killing the man would not accomplish this. Again I thought of Carax, of the medallion he’d offered me with my pitchfork carved across the face of the sun. How many soldiers in the Imperial service carried such medallions? How many thousands? The Emperor’s plan to wed me to Selene took on new dimension, then, for in doing so he wedded my legend to himself.

  It was a more elegant solution than a knife.

  And yet someone had sent a knife, a blade with neither handle nor hand to grasp it.

  “We don’t know anything yet,” I said darkly, looking past Valka and through the wall behind her. But where Valka’s eyes saw the past with crystal clarity, I saw only possibility. Like the rivers of time branching in my dream I beheld the faces of my potential enemies and met each of them in turn, eye to eye. The Lions, Lord Breathnach, Princess Selene, Prince Alexander, and the Chantry—the Chantry last and greatest of them all, a clawing shadow on my heart.