Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  But, if anyone could do it . . .

  Somewhere out there, Crim and Ilex and Lorian Aristedes were sneaking their way onto the Chantry vessel, perhaps disguising themselves as common legionnaires, perhaps walking in the void of space from one hull to another, relying on hardsuits to mask their body heat against the cold Dark outside. Somewhere out there, they slid through camera-haunted halls, past locked gates and countless guards, tampered with security stations and altered footage. Somewhere they fought, somewhere—perhaps—they bled and died.

  And I was useless in my cage.

  Vague images haunted me, like shadows on the walls of my room: Ilex carrying Lorian on her back like a child, Crim standing alone, sword and knives in hand. I saw them flitting from pillar to pillar in a vaulted hold, hurrying in the brief window Ilex had earned them by pointing cameras at the ceiling. Lorian clambering up an access shaft, grease-smeared again, with numb hands in their braces, keeping his fingers in line. The three of them in legionnaire dress bowing as an Inquisitor went by, the confused whispers following.

  Isn’t he short for a soldier?

  Crim’s shadow flowed across the wall before me, an unconscious Lieutenant Casdon over one shoulder, a sword shining in his fist. How would they escape? Steal a shuttle? A lifepod? How would they avoid recapture? Or capture by any of the other vessels in orbit? Security in the skies of Forum was tight enough a stray meteoroid could not penetrate the cloud belt.

  Had I sent my soldiers—my loyal friends—to their deaths to save myself and my dream?

  No. No, not to save myself. To save my ship, my people. To save us all. For surely if Hadrian Marlowe was framed for possession, for profanation, for consortation—all his people would hang, too. And worse than hang. For the possessed and profane, there was no death save death by fire. We each would be given to the kilns in turn, our ashes cast into space. Even the fugue-bound would not be spared, but ripped from their icy sepulchers to burn with us, from ice to fire in an instant. And last of all, the Tamerlane would be destroyed, annihilated by antimatter so that no trace remained of the apostates who had betrayed Earth and Man for machine.

  With no evidence left to cry our innocence if my three soldiers failed.

  Their shadows still danced on the walls of my prison, flowing like the images of a zoetrope, flickering and faint as a dream in the first moments of wakefulness. Crim’s sword flashed, and Ilex fired, and Lorian shouted commands. I saw them leap through hatchways and down shafts and die and die and die until I thought I would go mad from my own inactivity.

  Almost a week passed thus. Six days.

  Six days before my gaoler ceased to make appearances.

  No one brought food, and the remnants of my previous meal—my last?—moldered on my table, forgotten as I was forgotten. When the second meal of the first day did not arrive, I went to the door, and pounding on it, called to the guards. No one answered, but the door would not unlock.

  I did not starve. As in the dungeons of Vorgossos before, I ate ration bars from the case in my sleeping quarters kept there for emergencies. Three days passed thusly. No word. No human contact.

  Then, on the tenth day since Gereon put me to the Question, I was awakened by the whine of the deadbolts peeling back and the grind of the door opening.

  I did not sit up at first, but lay beneath Valka’s woven blanket on the couch. My eyes stayed fixed on the ceiling, not truly seeing it, not truly seeing anything. More than a week without human contact had unmoored my sense of propriety, and I couldn’t be bothered to rise. If it was Gereon, Breathnach, or the Grand Inquisitor, let them drag me to my feet.

  It was not Gereon. Nor Breathnach. Nor the Grand Inquisitor.

  It wasn’t even Oberlin.

  “You look comfortable,” the high voice said.

  It was Lorian.

  The intus looked down at me—a curious reversal—with a strained smile on his patrician face. A black corrective patch covered a plasma burn on one cheek, and he wore again the silvered braces that kept his fingers from falling out of joint as he leaned upon his cane. His torn uniform jacket over his shoulders, sleeves dangling empty.

  “Is it done?” I asked.

  “It’s done,” he answered, and sank down onto the low table beside my couch, surveying me all the while.

  Ashamed that I was lying down when he looked so threshed and torn, I sat up. “Good lord, man—have you been to medica?”

  “In and out. But I wanted to tell you myself.” He put a hand to his chest, parting his shirt to show another corrective along his collarbone. “I wanted you to know it wasn’t easy.” He folded the fabric back into place, smoothed it down.

  “How did you do it?”

  The commander shook his head, unsmiling. “Another time. The Martians have Casdon and Breathnach.”

  “The lieutenant talked?”

  “The lieutenant sang,” Lorian replied. “Chantry’s bound to come out unscathed, of course. Can’t prove conspiracy with the Director. They did ask Sir Lorcan be handed over to them, but Prince Hector and the Council are blocking them. Not sure if His Radiance is involved yet.”

  I cradled my head in my hands. Lorcan Breathnach was gone. The man who’d put a knife in Valka’s chest . . . gone. “It’s a pity I can’t be the one to behead the bastard,” I muttered.

  “It wouldn’t be justice if you did it,” Lorian said, drumming his fingers. “This is better.”

  “And we’re in the clear?” I asked. “Corvo’s been over the ship? Made sure there’s nothing left behind that shouldn’t have been? No daimons? No . . . anything?”

  Commander Aristedes sagged against his cane, braced hands clicking. “Doing it now.”

  “Are Ilex and Crim all right?” I asked.

  “What?” Lorian looked around, clearly exhausted. Was he concussed? What had he done to deliver Casdon to the Martian Guard? “Oh . . . yes. Fine. About as well off as me.” He sucked in a ragged breath, snapped his head up to look me in the eye. “Don’t think we should leave the ship for a while. Let the MG do their work.”

  I was nodding along. “That will make Corvo happy.”

  “Aye,” he barked a laugh, “and on the bright side . . . you can let the doctor out of fugue now it’s safe.”

  The doctor . . . I thought. Valka. She’d been gone for mere days, but I missed her presence more sharply than I had sometimes after years during one of my night journeys. I longed for her presence and the mocking way she smiled. But I shook my head. “No. Not yet.” There was a chance this wasn’t over, and I would not—could not—risk her. I couldn’t let her out of fugue until we were safely off of Forum and far, far away. “What about Lord Bourbon?”

  “What about him?”

  Lorian held my gaze with unfocused eyes as I answered him. “Did his name come up in all this?” The old Lion surely had conspired with the Intelligence Director in this, I felt certain.

  The intus shook his head, flaxen hair floating. He’d lost his tie somewhere, and the usually neat hair with its long tail flew wild and free. Somehow, the wildness aged young Aristedes, so that he seemed half a ghost sitting there before me. “No, no. Nothing.” I fell silent, and after a moment a clawed and silver-braced hand gripped my wrist. How little strength there was in that hand and arm. I should not have sent him into battle. “But this is a victory, my lord. Our victory.”

  Placing a hand over the younger man’s thin one, I said, “The victory’s yours, Aristedes. Go and get some rest. Unless . . . shall I send for a litter?” I wasn’t so sure he could stand again.

  “Just . . . help me up, would you?”

  I knelt, wrapped the little man’s arm around my neck, and lifted. I could not stand, not fully, not without lifting Lorian bodily from the ground. Small as he was and slight, I might have carried him, but I sensed that even to suggest such a thing would be to shame the poor fellow, and I
did not offer.

  “Come on, then,” I said, and holding the man by the shoulders, I walked him to the door. The heavy bulkhead slid aside at our approach. The guards had vanished. We passed out through the vestibule and into the hall beyond.

  A flight technician in informal blacks saw us, and stopped his progress to salute. “Lord Marlowe, sir! Commander Aristedes!” I acknowledged his salute in passing, but did not linger. About us, operations had returned to normal aboard the Tamerlane, and though the work of setting the ship to rights after the Inquisition’s invasion would take days and perhaps weeks—all was right again with the world. Was made right by the little titan who walked beside me.

  In the end, I escorted Commander Aristedes all the way to medica and delivered him into the hands of Doctor Luana Okoyo.

  “See he’s taken care of,” I told her, unnecessarily. “He’s a hero.”

  CHAPTER 44

  ALONG COMES A SPIDER

  MONTHS PASSED BEFORE THE summons came, during which time I oversaw the purging of the Tamerlane’s data banks and their rebuild from backed-up files. Aristedes recovered. He’d suffered serious plasma burns to the face and torso and capped them off with a concussion so severe Okoyo was surprised he was still walking, especially given his fragile state. Crim and Ilex likewise recovered, but none of them—acting, I guessed, on Lorian’s orders—would tell me just how it was they’d managed to escape the Chantry frigate.

  I never saw Gereon again, and the Grand Inquisitor had withdrawn, gone back to whatever ecclesial shadow she’d sprung from. Selene sent messages, and I replied politely, saying that I was not at liberty to discuss my near-assassination or the Inquisition that followed, save to say that I was all right and alive, and would doubtless see her soon. She made no mention of Alexander.

  Each day I suspected word from the Imperial Council, from the Commandant of the Martian Guard, from the Emperor himself. Each day I was surprised, then disappointed, then frustrated in time. I wanted it to be over, wanted finally and at last to be sentenced to my marriage with Selene or else to be ordered offworld.

  The summons came in the form of a Martian escort and a court androgyn with orders to bring me before Prince Hector and the Council.

  And so I went, thinking it was over—not knowing the worst was still to come.

  * * *

  The lords of the eight ministries sat beneath the Lord High Chancellor’s seat with the Synarch and Lord Powers. Not ghosts this time in holograph, but real and solid presences, lords with weight and force.

  “I still cannot believe it,” said Miana Hartnell, the Minister of Welfare, “the Director of Legion Intelligence an assassin. Ghastly. Simply ghastly.” She was a palatine, but as far from the old blood of the great houses as it was possible to be, with a rodent’s pursed face and bird-bright eyes.

  The Lord High Chancellor interrupted her, addressing me where I stood within the bend of the mighty table beneath the holograph. “We apologize for the suffering this incident has inflicted on you and your people, Sir Hadrian. And allow me to extend my personal sympathies to you as well. You must be in need of respite after this ordeal.”

  “It would be nice to get back to work,” I said.

  “Work?” Prince Hector sounded almost affronted. “To the front, you mean?”

  “I am a soldier of the Empire,” I said, repeating that phrase which had become for me a kind of mantra in the decades since Vorgossos.

  Prince Hector’s hands gripped the arms of his small throne. “The Emperor has been entertaining notions of placing you on this council.”

  He said these words as though they were news, and so I shook myself from my contemplation of the holograph floating above my head and found it in me to act surprised. “What?” When I realized how foolish I must have appeared, I added, “Your Excellency, I . . . am not certain what to say. How would I serve?”

  “You would take my seat, my boy!” came a surprisingly jovial voice from the right-hand wing. I turned. Traditionally, the seats to the right of the Chancellor’s throne were held by Lions. Lord Bourbon was there, and Lord Peake, the Minister of Justice. The left side held the less traditionalist wing of the Council, Lady Hartnell chief among them, with Lord Cordwainer of the Ministry of Revenue, and—perversely—the Lord Minister of Rites. But in those days, the council was unbalanced, and save for these three each of the twelve counselors was a Lion.

  The speaker sat at the far right of the Council table, and turning to my left I found Lord Cassian Powers smiling down at me. The former strategos looked so old he reminded me of Tor Gibson, face seamed and folded. He wore a pair of thick spectacles that magnified his eyes to three times their natural size, and unlike Bastien Durand’s I guessed these glasses were medically necessary. He no longer looked like a soldier, more like a species of overgrown owl peering from his perch.

  “Your seat, Lord Powers?” I looked from the old man to the others before circling back to Lord Cassian. I almost laughed. “I could not replace you!”

  “You are far more the expert on the Pale then I ever was!” the Avenger of Cressgard exclaimed. “I’m only an old man who knows how to kill them.”

  Glancing from Lord Powers to the rest of the Council, I hesitated, saying, “I . . . do not wish to compete with the Lord Minister of War where the way we are to conduct our struggle is concerned. I am your servant, counselors. I have served, and wish to continue serving.” I bowed, trying not to look up at the image above me, the ghost of a small woman with short blond hair and a square jaw strapped to a chair.

  Lieutenant Casdon.

  The Council had replayed her testimony at the start of our meeting, and the final image remained on the projector at the focus of the high table beneath which I stood.

  “Our servant would not argue with this Council,” said Peter Habsburg, the Lord Minister of Works. “I remind you, Sir Hadrian, that as a knight, you are answerable to the Imperial Office. We are the Imperial Office, being ourselves servants to His Radiance.”

  I shook my head. “Forgive me, Excellency, but no. I am a Knight Victorian, and answerable only to the Emperor.” Lord Habsburg’s face creased with disappointed anger, and he turned toward the uncharacteristically silent Lord Bourbon. Before he could address his colleague and fellow Lion, I said, “But if it is His Radiance’s wish that I sit on this Council, I will obey. But as his counselor, I would advise that I am of greater use away from Forum.”

  “Why are you so eager to flee?” asked Augustin Bourbon, picking up the baton from Lord Habsburg.

  The Minister of War’s dark eyes met mine, and I studied him for a long moment. The thick, dark hair going to gray, the heavy sideburns, the pale suit with the fleur-de-lis pinned to his lapel, and the golden braids that draped over his azure half-toga from either shoulder. I felt certain he’d been involved in Breathnach’s attack, but I knew I could never prove it. It may have been Breathnach’s hand that directed the knife in my chambers, but it was Bourbon’s that had directed Breathnach, surely. And Sir Friedrich’s note had implied the Chantry was in on the attempt to frame me. I glanced sidelong at Vergilian’s empty chair. The Synarch was away, citing other duties.

  “Frankly, my Lord Minister of War,” I answered after the beat of a heart, “I am not particularly enamored of the capital at the moment. I was falsely accused and nearly framed for a demoniac, an experience I would prefer not to have to repeat.”

  “You believe your life is still in danger?” Prince Hector asked.

  “Excellency, I believe it will be until I die,” I replied, and thought, How’s that for prophecy?

  The sergeant-at-arms banged his fasces against the striking plate. “Order!” he cried. “There will be no disrespect in the chamber!”

  I bowed my apologies. “Forgive me, honorable lords and ladies, but I am under a great deal of strain.” Straightening, I recalled my rhetoric lessons and—placing my left hand behin
d my back—extended my right as though I held a book before my eyes. “But in addition to the threat to my own life, my crew, my officers, and armsmen have themselves only narrowly escaped judgment. I take this threat to their lives very seriously.”

  “Your officers . . .” began Lord Allander Peake. The Minister of Justice sifted papers on the table before him. “In the absence of His Holy Wisdom the Synarch, I have been asked to bring forward a request on the part of the Holy Terran Chantry. They wish for the officers who breached their security during this affair to submit themselves for interrogation.”

  “Not in a million years,” I said, interrupting the minister. “Commander Aristedes and the others are under my protection.”

  Lord Peake raised a ringed hand for calm. “My understanding is they only wish to ascertain the manner by which your men breached their security.”

  “Then I will submit a report if the Emperor so orders,” I said. “You and I both know the methods by which the Inquisition ascertains its information, and I will not submit my people to such examination without explicit command.”

  Perhaps speaking from piety, Lady Hartnell said, “You cannot simply refuse a request made by the Earth’s Chantry.”

  Turning smoothly on my heel to face the weasel-faced old woman, I said, “I am not refusing. But I remind this Council that the good Commander and my lieutenants were acting on my express orders. If the Chantry wishes to question them, they must go through me, seeing as all responsibility for their actions is mine as their commanding officer. I am saying that if the Holy Chantry wishes to reopen an inquisition against me after all that’s happened, the Emperor will hear about it. Were he here, I would remind the Synarch that the clergy allowed themselves to be used by Sir Lorcan Breathnach in an illegal investigation that nearly took the life of a Knight Victorian—namely, myself—and risked the lives of the more than ninety thousand people who serve in my Red Company.” I let this sink in a moment before adding. “This continued antagonism would lend credence to the rumors that the Inquisition was complicit in Sir Lorcan’s scheme, rumors which I am certain the Synarch, Synod, and Choir would like to see dispelled as quickly as possible. However it was Commander Aristedes and his companions managed to breach the Chantry’s quarantine—and I don’t know how they did it—might I suggest the Chantry in particular should be grateful they succeeded, as it has spared them grievous embarrassment and the wroth of His Radiance, who—I imagine—would not have been thrilled to learn that one of his knights and his daughter’s betrothed was killed by mistake.”