Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “What do you mean?” I asked, who had changed quite entirely.

  “You’re still dramatic as ever.” Gibson brushed one eye with a finger—had there been tears there? “Forgive me, I should not laugh, but scholiast or no . . . All these things you say have happened . . . and here you are.” He broke off, still chuckling. “So you are in exile here, too. Hiding from the Empress and—which Bourbon did you say it was?”

  “Augustin,” I said. “He was Minister of War.” I hoped he was dead, though word of the assassins Crim had found for me had yet to reach my ears.

  “Poor repayment indeed,” Gibson said. The silence spread between us, master and student at momentary peace on the bench. I watched a thin rivulet run along the veined wall of the stone opposite, disturbing a smaller pool. “Augustin . . .” he chewed the name. “You said he was Minister of War?”

  I’d stopped short in my story of recounting the orders I’d given Crim. It felt wrong to confess that to anyone alive. A life of violence was one thing. But murder—an assassination—that was something else entirely, though neither my hand nor Crim’s had wielded the knife. But if I could not confess to Gibson in the privacy of a scholiasts’ cloister, whom could I confess to?

  “I killed him,” I said. “Or . . . I hope I did.” I explained the orders I’d given Crim. The bomb he’d arranged be placed in the Lord Minister’s shuttle. Gibson did not react, did not comment. “He tried to kill me,” I said. “Tried to kill my people. I couldn’t let him try again.”

  Still the scholiast said nothing, passing no sentence, handing down neither judgment nor absolution. I did not feel better having spoken the truth aloud. I felt exposed, raw, as if I expected some small gasp from behind a stalagmite and to see Sister Carina rushing away to tell someone.

  But we were alone.

  I crossed my arms, covering the scarred one with the other. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Perhaps not,” Gibson said, an odd brittleness in his tone. Was it horror? Disgust? Worse . . . was it pity? Turning, I found the old man staring at his lap and at the hands twisting in it, each massaging the other as though they pained him. Was it my imagination? Or had the tears returned to those misty eyes and seamed cheeks? “I am sorry, my boy. I wanted to give you a better life. This life.” He gestured round at the Archivists’ Grotto.

  Shutting my eyes, the distant dripping of water might have been the drip of water in the limestone pools of our necropolis. When I opened my eyes again, I almost expected the black funeral statues of the ancient Lords Marlowe to be standing about me in their ring, black against natural white, but there was only the statue of Imore, unfeeling as ever above the mirrored pool.

  “It’s true?” Gibson asked, after a long while. “All of it?”

  “I know it is incredible,” I said, looking down at my own hands where I clenched them between my knees, feeling the scarred palm flex oddly. “But I swear it is the truth.”

  Gibson’s voice—familiar to me as my own even after all these years—replied, “It is more than incredible. You ask me to believe the impossible.”

  “You don’t believe me?” Almost I thought the bench and the stone on which it sat might crumble beneath me, that I should be swallowed by the world. Gibson had to believe me. He was Gibson. “I have footage. I can have you evoked from athenaeum . . . bring you to my ship.” I turned to look my old tutor in the face. Where had I gone wrong? This could not be happening! I needed him, needed him to understand, needed him to make sense of the strange net I’d fallen into, to make sense of my life.

  “Footage could be fabricated,” Gibson said, and looked me square in the face. His eyes were shining. “Hadrian, I do not doubt your tale, but I do not understand it.”

  “I don’t understand it either. Sagara said there are forces in the universe older and stranger than humankind. Brethren said these Quiet exist in the future. That’s why I’m here: to make sense of it all. To see if the Mericanii knew something we’ve forgotten.” I was almost crying again, but I crushed the nineteen-year-old part of me in my adamant fist and held my tears at bay. “I need your help.”

  The old man was smiling—though I knew he should not be. “This is beyond me, Hadrian,” he said simply before adding, “Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps you are not the same boy I knew on Delos.”

  “I’m not,” I said, and remembered, “Valka! Valka is here! You have to meet her. And the others, Pallino and the prince are here. The rest are in orbit, but they’ll be coming down to the Sevrast Islands. The governor-general’s granted my people shore leave. You’ll have to meet them all!”

  And at once Gibson’s skepticism did not matter. Here was my first and oldest friend in all the universe: the man who made me what I am, for better or worse. My teacher, my tutor, my father in all but name. Skeptical he may have been, but our reunion seemed to me another sign of those secret powers that moved the universe and me through it.

  “Tomorrow, I think,” he said at last. “It is past midnight.”

  He was right. The Grotto was empty.

  CHAPTER 56

  MEETING OF THE MINDS

  VALKA DID NOT RETURN from her ventures in the stacks until long after I had fallen asleep. Something about her implants allowed her to sleep only a little when she had a mind. An hour or two was enough to sustain her, despite her languorous schedule of sleeping late and working in her undergarments in our apartments aboard the Tamerlane. When the fire was in her, she hardly slept at all.

  “I found the xenology section!” she told me. “ ’Tis up on the thirty-seventh floor. Thirty-seventh! And no lift! You can’t imagine how my legs feel just now. They have Carter’s original journals from the Rubicon digs in the fourth millennium! The originals! ’Twould not let me read them—I had to look up the phototypes in one of the slide catalogs.”

  “Gibson’s here,” I said, cutting across Valka’s mania for old things.

  “What?” Valka froze. “You mean . . . alive?”

  I told her everything.

  * * *

  It took some doing to find my way back down through the bowels of the Library’s main silo, but in time I found the hall with its coral pillars and scrolls and paintings under glass. Valka stopped me only once to admire an ancient sketch, red on yellowed vellum, of a bearded old man.

  “Da Vinci!” she said. “Hadrian, this is from Earth!” Many of the things in the archives were, and ordinarily I would like nothing better than to spend an hour or a day with Valka exploring the storied past.

  But Gibson was waiting, impossible though I still found it to believe.

  He wasn’t in the Archivists’ Grotto when he arrived, and our progress was delayed by Valka’s awe of the caverns themselves. At length I asked an older scholiast—a flat-faced man in over-washed green—where I might find my old tutor. He directed us back along a winding passage to a solitary door embedded in the rock. I knocked. When no one answered, I tried the handle. It opened, and I stepped through into a small apartment. The Archivists were accorded better lodging than the novices were in their barracks on the surface. Glass globes full of the white-glowing algae hung on the walls, casting rippling lines on the rough stone walls like sunlight on the surface of the water.

  It was nothing extravagant. An old couch flattened by decades of service, a coffee table before it, a writing desk in one corner beneath hollows in the rock into which metal shelves had been placed. Books lay about everywhere—evidence that Gibson, too, had not changed in our long separation. His chambers were still cluttered, the chaos of his living space a necessary sacrifice to build the order of his mind.

  Smiling, I called out, “Gibson?” I paused a beat to take a step into the chamber, pitching my voice toward the arch that opened in the back of the room. “Gibson, it’s Hadrian.”

  “Perhaps he’s working,” Valka said.

  “Hadrian?” The familiar voice rose from the back room
. “Just a moment!”

  All at once, a strange uneasiness gripped me, as though I were a plebeian day laborer bringing some farm girl home to meet his parents. A giddiness and an odd fear mingled in my chest, wrestling with one another.

  I needn’t have feared.

  The old scholiast appeared a moment later, still barefoot, robe belted about his waist, brass badges gleaming on his sash. He stopped short when he saw I was not alone. “Oh!” he said.

  Two chapters of my life—two very different lives—stood represented in those two people: the woman I loved, and the man who had raised me. Seeing each of them at once I felt at once the boy of nineteen and the man of six score and three.

  “You must be Valka,” Gibson said, coming forward, his scholiast training keeping the old face flat. Despite the cane he held, he took Valka’s hand in both his own. I could tell he was smiling beneath his mask of composure. “I am so pleased to meet you. Hadrian’s told me so much.”

  “Only the good parts, I hope,” she said, smiling up at the old man who, stooped as he was, still had an inch or two on her.

  Gibson patted her clasped hands with his free one. “There was only good. Please sit! Please!” He gestured toward the flattened sofa with his cane—and it was the same cane he’d used on Devil’s Rest, preserved after all these years. “I don’t keep much here by way of refreshment—we all eat in the refectory—but I can put tea on, if you would like. But Hadrian doesn’t take tea, of course.”

  “I do!” Valka said. “Let me help you.”

  The scholiast denied needing help, but Valka insisted, and at once the two busied themselves with the process of steeping the evil beverage. I sat bemusedly by, toying with the glove on my left hand.

  “You know,” Valka said when the kettle was filled and boiling, “I never thought I’d meet you.” Gibson turned to look at her, smiling politely. There was something of the owl in the way he turned blinking to regard the lady, and I was reminded of old Lord Powers. “Hadrian said it’s only been four years for you.” Gibson bobbed his head, but did not interrupt. “ ’Tis been a lot longer for us, but he’s never stopped talking about you. I’ve always wanted to see where he came from. ’Twas not sure what to expect.”

  Gibson held two teacups in his hands while they waited for the kettle to boil. “Only an old man. No great mystery—certainly not after everything you both have seen.”

  “He told me you didn’t believe him,” Valka said, looking down. “I didn’t believe him, either.”

  They were talking about me as if I weren’t there, and I felt suddenly that I’d intruded on a conversation not meant for my ears. That I did not belong.

  The old man glanced at me a moment before responding—and I wasn’t sure if that heightened my sense of intrusion or dispelled it. “I told him I did believe him. I only don’t understand.”

  “He told you why we’re here?”

  “Delving into the secrets of the universe, was it?”

  Valka laughed suddenly and looked at me. “You come by your sense of drama honestly, then!”

  Was it my imagination, or did Gibson actually flush to hear that?

  I chuckled. “You should meet my mother.”

  Scholiast composure reasserted itself, and he said, “You’re waiting for access to Gabriel’s Archive. You hope to find some record of contact between the Mericanii and these . . . Quiet. You say the Mericanii artificial intelligences could perceive time and communicate across it. I am not a physicist, but I do not see how that is possible. One can move forward in time at varying rates; the ancients demonstrated that quite soundly. Einstein, Royse, Rosier, and so forth. But backward? Impossible.”

  “But if what Brethren told me is true,” I said, “it would explain my visions. The Quiet are showing me things that have happened in its past, or that might happen.”

  “Your visions don’t sound like visions to me,” Gibson said. “They sound abstract. More like dreams than a holograph recording.” The scholiast shook his head, and though his face remained impassive, I sensed the tiredness, the deep sadness in him. “You have grown beyond me.” Valka took the cups from him and poured the tea. “Why do you suppose the creatures take my appearance?”

  He had not turned to look at me, but I knew Gibson addressed his question to me. I could sense the familiar whip-crack quality of his questioning.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Because I thought you were dead?” No sooner had the words escaped my mouth than I realized I had only assumed Gibson was dead because the Quiet had worn his face. “I’ve read too many ghost stories,” I said darkly, and shook my head.

  Valka set her tea on the table while it cooled, crossed her arms. “Perhaps they wanted to communicate in a way you would understand?”

  “Or because you trust me,” Gibson said, lowering himself into his seat. “Who can say? The Chantry regulates knowledge of these ruins of yours outside these walls.” He waved his stick round at the walls of the little apartment. “But even in here I never studied them.” Gibson’s eyes lingered on Valka’s face a moment before jumping to mine. “I could never have imagined . . . this.”

  “No one could have,” Valka said. “There are days I don’t believe it myself. But ’tis true. I saw him die, M. Gibson.”

  “Tor,” I corrected her, made uncomfortable by the talk and reminder of my death. I massaged my neck, remembering the painless bite of the blade as it struck off my head. The very blade that even then lay in a lockbox in the complex’s barbican.

  The scholiast took up his tea, face dark and strangely sad. “Just Gibson will do. Hadrian is the nearest thing to a son I have left, which I suppose . . . makes you family?” He twisted the last few words, making them a question. Gray and misty eyes flitted from each of us to the next in polite turn.

  Valka understood before I did. “We’re not married. I’m Tavrosi.”

  “Ah!” Gibson put a hand to his forehead. “I had forgotten, apologies.” But Gibson was a scholiast, and scholiasts do not forget. “I am getting old . . . more than six hundred now. Please forgive me.”

  “We’re as good as,” Valka said, and smiled at me. “ ’Tis been almost . . . seventy years for me? Not all at once! I’ve been in fugue more than he has.”

  My old tutor looked into the depths of his tea, as though he were some primeval sorcerer hoping to learn some secret from the leaves. “Then you know him far better than I,” he said somberly. Not looking up, he continued, “I can’t begin to tell you how many times these four years I’ve asked myself if what I did was right: helping you escape your father. I’m still not sure. But I am glad that some good has come of it.” His eyes moved to Valka. “He was so lonely as a boy, you know? That castle was no place for a child. Much less two.” Valka said nothing, and Gibson turned his eyes on me. “You have a sister, you know?”

  “I what?” I was glad I’d no teacup of my own, for surely I’d have dropped it on the rough stone floor. A sister?

  “Alcuin sent word here by telegraph pending my arrival, telling me all sorts of news from home. Your parents commissioned her from the High College shortly after you left. A replacement.”

  “Replacement?” I echoed lamely. I’d had no idea.

  “Sabine Doryssa Marlowe,” Gibson said, pronouncing the name with grave formality.

  “Sabine,” I said. My great-great-grandmother had been a Sabine. It was a good name, ancient, old as Earth herself. “I had no idea.” How in nearly a century of service on Forum had I failed to learn that Alistair Marlowe had petitioned for and been granted the right to birth another child? A sister. I had a sister. “Alcuin told you?” I had not thought about Tor Alcuin in decades. My father’s chief counselor and I had never been terribly close.

  Tor Gibson recharged his tea from the pot and restored both cup and teapot to the table. I still could not believe it was really him, really alive and in the same room w
ith me. “Only once. The telegraph arrived shortly before I did . . . as a courtesy, one scholiast to another. Just to let me know what had happened while I was asleep. I knew you’d fled, but there was little other reference to you in the letter. Alcuin said you were fighting the Cielcin—but I didn’t think that could be true. It didn’t sound like you at all.”

  “A lot’s changed.”

  “I know.”

  A question occurred to me. “Does my father still rule?”

  “Yes,” Gibson answered. “He did some time offworld, it seems. Traveled to the Consortium offices at Arcturus and suchlike. He’s not quite an old man.”

  “And Crispin?” I asked. “My mother?”

  “Alive,” Gibson said. “Crispin married one of Lord Albans’s daughters—they have children. Your mother has all but quit Devil’s Rest for Haspida. She’s quite old. Word is your sister will inherit your father’s seat.”

  I could not help myself. I laughed, the sound of it catching on the stone walls and hurled back as something hollow and tinny. After all my father’s hard lessons, after the way I’d been pitted against Crispin every day of my life until I fled Delos—after my flight and our final combat in the guest suite of the Summer Palace—none of it mattered. Lord Alistair Marlowe was giving his lands and castle away to a sibling I had not even known I had. It was too rich. Still laughing, I said, “Of course she will.”

  Imperial lords were under no obligation to pass their title on to their eldest child. As Father had passed me over as unqualified in favor of Crispin, so it seemed Crispin had been discarded, though for what reason I could hardly guess.

  “Alcuin says your sister is every inch her father’s daughter,” Gibson said. Was that sympathy in the old fellow’s eyes?

  “Of course she is.”

  Sensing my irritation, Valka chimed in. “On the other hand, Doryssa makes Anaxander seem almost tolerable.”