Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  The governor-general had permitted us to build a camp on the deserted island of Thessa. The first of our vacationers set about landing prefabricated dormitory units and outbuildings to accommodate approximately five hundred troops at a time, with each group given six months’ leave to enjoy the island, to swim and fish and hunt in the high grove. Smaller groups were permitted to sail—literally sail—from Thessa to the surrounding isles of Racha, Jara, and Gurra, where there were small towns that welcomed half a hundred soldiers for their stories and their coin. How many pleb bastards were conceived on fishermen’s daughters in those years I dare not guess—though I saw the girls when my time to visit Thessa came, young things vanishing into barracks or the shadows of tall trees for an hour or a night. In Aea, to this day, it is not uncommon to hear a man boast or woman say with pride that the blood of Marlowe’s soldiers runs in his veins or through her heart.

  The blood of the devil.

  The devil . . . I have been called a devil since the day I was born, praised as the Emperor’s Demon in White. But I have met true demons—Cielcin and machine.

  I am not one of them.

  CHAPTER 58

  ISLAND IN TIME

  GABRIEL’S ARCHIVE WAS LESS an archive and more an attic. It was an uncurated museum of artifacts taken from Old Earth, things which now the Chantry and Throne had decided were better left buried.

  But there were reports, records put down by technicians of Avalon’s service dating back to the first millennium: accounts written by men and women who had stormed the great pyramids of the machines on Earth. But even these records are confused. The microfilm damaged or pages time-eaten, whole passages redacted, the originals lost or else buried in some other file in the chamber around us. They spoke of bodies bracketed to beds, wired together, kept alive with feeding tubes. Banks of them.

  Matrices.

  Faded prints showed distended bodies and corpses swollen with strange growths. They reminded me of Brethren, the way that eldritch horror’s arms had split and branched. Too many hands. Too many elbows. Failed genetic experiments? Other reports detailed empty cities, empty continents. All of Earth emptied to fill those ghastly pyramids.

  None of the old documents said why.

  I have told you Gabriel’s Archive carved a ring around the base of the great library’s silo, but this is too simple a picture. Paths split from the main ring-walk and branched inward and out like the spokes of a wheel, leading to outer wards and sections kept behind sealed doors. These took months for the scholiasts to labor at opening, careful always not to disturb the artifacts. But the halls behind contained only more of the same.

  If I was frustrated, Valka did not seem to notice. Three years passed and her ardor did not dim an instant. More often than not, I would wander the halls of Gabriel’s Archive, charting its side passages and turns, returning after hours to find her still patiently flipping through page after page of material, or sitting at a rusted stool before a microfilm terminal, cells clicking one to the next. She hadn’t even noticed I’d left.

  “I never realized the Mericanii established so many offworld colonies,” she said, looking up from her careful study of a dossier printed on translucent crystal paper. “Fifty-two! And all slower than light!”

  I rose from the spot on the floor where I’d been seated, my eyes worn out from reading, mind spread thin from the day’s labor. “Fifty-two?” The number sounded familiar. “That number’s popped up a few times.”

  “The daughters of Columbia,” Valka said, not stirring from her work. “There were fifty-two daughters of Columbia. Other . . . well, you would call them daimons. But then, what don’t you anaryoch call daimons?”

  Other daimons . . .

  Other devils . . .

  “One for each colony?” I crossed my arms, peered over her shoulder.

  “Olympia, Denver, Baltimore, Atlanta . . .” Valka wasn’t reading—not the page before her, at any rate. I couldn’t see her face, but I knew from her tone that she recited some page she’d read before. “Utah, Yellowstone . . .”

  “I know Yellowstone,” I said. “We call it Renaissance now.”

  “Epsilon Eridani,” Valka said, naming the planet’s star. “ ’Tis near Old Earth.” She shuffled the crystal pages on the reading desk. “A lot of these colonies have Imperial cities built overtop them. Your Avalon was one of very few offworld colonies not established by the Mericanii in the early days. You took the rest from the machines.” Avalon had been the ancestral home of the Aventine House, where the kings of lost Britain—driven from Old Earth by some nameless enemy in the years before the Mericanii conquered Earth—had fled.

  Our studies were punctuated by such conversations, some detail catching our attention once or twice a day for days on end. I kept expecting to find references to figures or places from history I knew. But of Marcus Aurelius and Alexander there was no sign, and I wondered if the shortness of life common to all men in those days had not narrowed their appreciation of time, so that the Caesars seemed as remote to Washington and Felsenburgh as they seemed to me, though the ages between myself and the Mericanii stretched ten times so long as between the Mericanii and classical antiquity.

  Increasingly, I was amazed by the fact that anything had survived at all. There were no holographs of Earth or her devastation in the archive—such things, I imagined, were hoarded by the Chantry on Vesperad or on one of their other planetary holdings. But there was documentation of the Aventine House’s—then still House Windsor’s—efforts to salvage the wealth of Earth’s history. Expeditions to Rome, to London, to Washington—this time clearly a place and not the elderly lord in the paintings—to Jerusalem and Constantinople, to Beijing, Tokyo, Singapore, and beyond. They told of the efforts made to evacuate libraries and museums. One document alluded to Avalon’s helping the Museum Catholic adorators transport their holy city brick by brick from Earth to Caritas, where it remains in medieval splendor to this day.

  More than the rest, that detail connected these ancient myths to the present day. There were Museum Catholic adorators dwelling in the Redtine Mountains above Meidua. Gibson had taught me about them as a boy . . . That was how I’d come to recognize Milton and Dante in the mouth of Kharn Sagara.

  Gibson . . .

  Gibson joined us so often as he was able, perhaps once or twice each week. Despite his age and fading vision, he had his duties as an archivist to keep up. Because of his age, the climb down to—and worse, back up from—Gabriel’s Archive was a torment, but one the old man endured because I went.

  But every evening, when Valka remained in the archive below, I would climb up again into the misty twilight and walk the gardens and the yards with Gibson as I had when I was a boy. If Mother Earth does indeed hear our prayers—or if there is a God in some heaven to administer perfect justice—I am not certain what I did to deserve those years. I had been given an island in time, a haven and refuge from all that had passed before and what must follow. I had done violence, and suffered violence in return. Cassian Powers once said to me that we are lucky no man gets what he deserves . . . or perhaps it was Raine Smythe. I no longer remember. Whoever it was, I understand them. For what I’ve done in my time—even so long ago—I did not deserve such happiness. My father had taken Gibson from me, and Fate or Chance had restored him. I had him back, and Valka with me—her and all my friends. Those years on Colchis were perfect, or nearly so.

  I only wish that Switch had been there.

  I should not have sent him away.

  He had betrayed me. But what does it say of a man that he cannot forgive his closest friend? That I was young, I suppose. The fury that once had filled my veins with white light was faded to dull twilight, and regret came like the dawn.

  “Is something the matter, Hadrian?” Gibson asked me, his cane picking out joints in the stone before us as we walked. The sun was emerging from behind Atlas where the gas giant hung
heavy in the sky, falling through a narrow slice of sky between planet and horizon, carving deep shadows across the athenaeum’s low towers and the face of the planet above, throwing two smaller, distant moons into sharp relief.

  Were it not for the strangeness of the sky, the salt wind and spray of the sea might have been that of home. “No, no!” I said, and told him the truth. “I wish we’d found more in the archives, but for the first time in a long time . . . I really am . . . happy.”

  Happy. The word didn’t even seem real.

  “It’s only been four years!” Gibson said. “No one’s been through the materials in that archive since they were brought here. It’s no wonder you’ve not had more success.” He was right, and I knew it. I had, I think, expected some great revelation, the truth unrolled before me like a map. We imagine the archaeologist as an intrepid explorer, penetrating dark jungles, plumbing mountain caves for lost cities and gold. My first adventure with Valka at Calagah on Emesh was such a thing, culminating in the vanishing chamber and my first vision. But much of Valka’s stock and trade was simply this: ages of dreary scholarship with no developments to speak of.

  We tarried a moment in the espaliered shadow of a stone wall. “You don’t think the Chantry went through the archive before it came here, do you?”

  Gibson frowned. “Anything is possible, my boy. But this place . . . you did not see the orbital defenses? The fleet protecting this place? Nov Belgaer is one of the places that things go to disappear. If what you seek is not here . . . then where is it?”

  “Kharn Sagara didn’t know,” I said.

  “Vorgossos doesn’t have it. Suppose we do not have it. Perhaps no one knows.”

  “Sagara’s daimon knew something,” I said. “I wish I’d had more time with it . . .” Frustrated fingers ran through my hair, seeming of their own accord. “Seek them at the highest place, they said. At the bottom of the world. What does that even mean?” Unlike the Gibson of my visions, the real one only raised his eyebrows. “I hate riddles,” I snapped, and leaned against a clear patch beneath the trailing vines.

  My old tutor kept walking, leaving me to feel the fool beneath the trailing plants. “I won’t hazard a guess,” he said evenly. We began climbing a narrow stair that pierced the wall of an inner courtyard and climbed upward. “You’re leaving for Thessa soon, are you not?”

  “End of the week,” I said. “Going on five years here now, most of the crew have had their shore leave. The officers are in for their turn soon. Our ship’s doctor’s insisted I join them.” I paused, expecting that Gibson would have something to say to that, but he surprised me by keeping quiet. “It’ll be a challenge dragging Valka away from her studies.”

  Gibson did speak then, saying, “She is tenacious, that one.”

  “If there’s anything in the archive to find, she’ll find it.”

  We came to the top of the stair and followed a covered wall-walk over the inner yard to where the outer wall of the compound sat in splendor upon the crown of the mesa. The monastery on the crag loomed above like a crooked finger, a spur of the mountains thrust toward the sky. Gibson spoke after a moment’s pause to collect his breath. “I must say, I am surprised that you are not keeping up with her. I seem to recall a certain young man who wanted nothing more in all the universe than to be a scholiast.” Gray eyes twinkled at me through their fog.

  “I am not that young man.” Again, Gibson said nothing, only turned and kept walking. I followed after him.

  “Perhaps not,” Tor Gibson said, halting a moment in the shadow of a rounded arch. It was easy to forget how tall he was, despite his years. Tall as any king. “But I am not convinced these things change us, Hadrian. Our experiences are only garments. You are not the Ship of Theseus.”

  I twitched, peered into Gibson’s face. The eyes were still a misty gray, not green and shining. His nose was still slashed with the criminal’s mark. Only a coincidence. But there are no coincidences, only incidents converging on truth, pointing as if to some higher world.

  “Theseus . . .” I turned away. “I suppose he didn’t change, even when his ship did.”

  “The whole tree is present in the seed, they say,” said Gibson, one hand on the stone rail. “The whole man in the embryo.” I could feel his eyes watching me through their dim haze. “You are not so different now than you were then. Only grown into yourself.”

  My left hand flexed beneath the glove. After so many years awake, the scars were familiar and comfortable. “Well then, I’m not who I expected.”

  “We have had this conversation before,” Gibson said. “Who is? I’d wager Crispin is not the man you expected him to be either.”

  “Crispin was always Father’s son.”

  “Crispin was not your father’s son at all.” Gibson clicked the brass nib of his cane on the ground, reminding me suddenly of Raine Smythe—though the late tribune had her stick only as an affectation. “You are.”

  I felt the word escape through a jaw suddenly wired shut. “What?”

  Face in shadow, Gibson smiled. “Peace, boy.” He reached out and patted me on the shoulder. “You forget, I knew Alistair when he was young. His father’s death shook him. Lord Timon was a kindly man, but indulgent. Alistair was afraid of becoming him, just as you are afraid of becoming Alistair.”

  “I’m not afraid of him.”

  The scholiast smiled, another breach of his expected composure. “Of course you’re not. You’re afraid of you.” He’d taken a step or two back and prodded me in the chest with his cane. “Eh? You look in the mirror and see those eyes of yours and worry that you are him. But that worry makes you more like him than anything else. He feared to become your grandfather . . . so that core?” He held two fingers a micron apart. “That trait? That’s the same.” He inclined his head at the next set of stairs behind me. “I’d like to go up on the wall.”

  When we’d climbed the spiral stair in one of the wall’s drum towers and come out on the ramparts, he said, “There is one important difference between you, though.”

  “What that?”

  “You are not alone. Alistair always was. Your mother never wanted him. They were married young and that hurt him more than he let on. His father was murdered, his mother locked herself in Devil’s Rest and never came down from her tower. He had no friends.” Gibson fell silent a moment, before adding, “Your doctor redeems you.”

  I smiled, came to a stop overlooking the water as we had done together a thousand times, here on Colchis and on Delos before. “Valka,” I said, suddenly unable to keep down my crooked smile. Below us, the water of the reservoir washed against the foundation of the mesa. I could see some brothers of the Order fishing on a pier far below—and below them and water, Tor Aramini’s atomics lurked at their grim posts should some evil seek to escape the vaults of Gabriel’s Archive with Valka deep below.

  “Do not lose her, Hadrian,” he said, speaking in a voice I’d never heard before. The familiar sparkling serenity was gone, and it seemed it was not Tor Gibson who spoke to me at all, but some other, older voice. “We live in other people,” it said. “They keep us human.”

  “I won’t lose her,” I said, smiling warmly at the older man. “I won’t lose you, either.” I looked at Gibson, astonished at the gravity—the emotion—in that so-familiar voice. Looking at him, I saw only the scholiast I’d always known, and dared for the first time to ask. “Who were you? Before?”

  “Before I was embraced by the Order?” Gibson asked. He looked out over the reservoir, and for a moment I thought he would say nothing. “What does it matter? I am what you see.”

  “It matters to me.” I placed a hand on his arm.

  Gibson did not move except to turn his face toward the setting sun where it ran between Atlas and the horizon. “No,” he said. “It doesn’t.” But when he faced me again, he smiled. “Perhaps one day.”

  Neither of us
spoke for a long time. The distant cry of gulls might have come from the waters of childhood, and though the sky was strange the wind tasted the same. Perhaps Gibson was right. Standing with the old man beside me and the waters below, I felt like the boy who’d stood upon the ramparts of Devil’s Rest the day Sir Felix scourged Gibson for the crime of abetting my escape. The seed and the tree, I thought. Maybe Gibson was right, maybe they were not so different after all.

  “I wish you were going to Thessa with us,” I said without preamble.

  Gibson rested his cane between merlons like worn-down teeth and leaned against the ramparts. “So do I, dear boy. So do I. But I will never leave this athenaeum. Never again.”

  “I could file to evoke you,” I said. A Writ of Evocation would allow a bound scholiast to leave his cloister. Varro had such a thing, as did every scholiast who served outside the walls of an athenaeum.

  “Arrian would not grant it,” Gibson said. “And he should not. A year’s sabbatical on an island is not cause to suspend my vows.” He was right.

  “Never fear,” he said, and patted me on the back. “I will be here when you return.”

  CHAPTER 59

  ISLAND IN THE SUN

  THOUGH GODODDIN WAS MY destiny, Thessa is where my story ends.

  Like Emesh’s stony southlands, the Sevrast Islands on Colchis were the remnants of long-extinct volcanism, craggy climes snarling from the sea like the teeth of some forgotten dragon. Though towns and fishing villages dotted the others, Thessa stood alone, apart, and uninhabited, a wide and mossy crescent protecting a beach of black sand.