Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  The both of us cast long shadows on the ground. The structure the huge lifter shuttle was depositing was the last in a rough semi-circular arrangement some thousand feet from the first ring. Other shuttles hunched on the rocks further out. Personnel filtered between them and the new-dropped buildings on their landing peds, looking like a herd of overgrown iron beetles black and glassy white. I saw one figure bound down the ramp and peel away from the group it was with and hurry up the slope toward us. Slow clouds of dust erupted beneath its feet as it drew nearer, and I recognized the distinctive gait and the enthusiasm in it.

  I waved.

  Valka waved back.

  Another jogged after her, like a shadow still in Red Company gear. The Norman officers never had taken to wearing the Imperial white. Spying the bandoleer with its many knives, I knew it was Crim. He overtook Valka at the feet of the first slopes and dogged her the while.

  “You haven’t gone in, have you?” Valka asked. No preamble. No hello.

  “I was waiting for you,” I said, speaking over the proximity band so all nearby could hear. Though I wore no armor, I retained my sword and shield-belt, and hooked my fingers behind the buckle. “I did take a look at the arches, though.”

  Valka’s helmet was not military issue, and where my suit had a mask fashioned like a human face, Valka’s was only an arc of clear alumglass. I saw her eyes widen. “And?”

  “It’s them, all right,” I said, gesturing for her to join me. “See for yourself.”

  The first arch was easily three hundred feet in diameter, a perfect circle with about a quarter of it buried in the sand. Each successive ring marching upslope looked a little smaller—seven in all—until the gate in the mountain’s face was only about a hundred feet high. And thick! Each ring was roughly square in cross-section, its form complicated by a strangely organic molding along the outer edge, highlight panels inscribed with one of the familiar circular anaglyphs.

  Valka touched one with trembling fingers. “We need to get remote cameras in here to image everything we can,” she said. I could practically hear the gears in her mind turning as she peered through glass at the symbols.

  “What does it say?” asked the aquilarius, Ardi. I’d forgotten the man was there.

  If the question bothered Valka, she gave no sign. “No one knows.”

  “No one?” the man asked. “We came here to find all this and no one can read it, even?”

  I winced for the fellow’s sake, expected Valka to wheel on him. But she turned and—hand still on the arch, answered, “ ’Tis incredible, no?”

  “Incredible?” The fellow shook his head.

  I put a hand on his shoulder. “Ardi, take your ship back up to the Tamerlane, tell the captain all’s well here. She’ll need all the help she can get scouting the system.”

  The man saluted and hurried off, leaving me with Valka and Crim.

  “ ’Twas not underfoot,” Valka said. “You needn’t have dismissed him.”

  I only shrugged.

  Valka pressed her visor to my mask and said, “We found them!” I heard her not only over her suit’s communicator, but faintly through the clear aluminum and ceramic between our faces. “Hadrian, we found them.”

  I held her in my arms beneath the alien arch, pitying Crim now and forgetting him in the moment. “We don’t know what we’ve found, yet,” I said.

  “I know,” Valka said. “If what Horizon said is true . . . if this is their oldest site, or their youngest . . . if ’tis crumbling backward through time, there may not be much to see.” I still could not fathom it: a place where entropy ran backward and order was restored—not lost—with time. Standing on the slope of that mountain, I could almost imagine the ruins rising from the dust like a holograph of a burning building played in reverse.

  Eager to brighten the mood I’d just dampened, I said, “On the other hand—if this is their oldest settlement—their attentions may be more here than elsewhere.” Somehow, it sounded less encouraging out loud. I turned my face to the pale yellow of the sky. Despite the coldness of the day, the red sun was warm against my mask. Almost I felt a sensation of eyes upon me, and I shook myself.

  Despite the way the rings all marked the approach to the door beneath its five pillars, there was no path. No stair along the ridgeline. Perhaps it had crumbled away. Perhaps it had yet to appear. Nevertheless, we climbed, passing each of the rings in turn, pausing by each to allow Valka the time to take in each facet, each glyph, until we came under the shadow of the curling pillars and the mouth of the cave.

  “We really shouldn’t go in, Had,” Crim said, one hand on his shield-belt, the other grasping the hilt of one knife. “Get a mapping team in here.”

  “We will,” I said, placing a hand on my own shield catch, ready and waiting. “We just want to take a look around.”

  The one-time assassin cocked his head behind his faceless helm. “Wasn’t your mother a storyteller? Do you not know how famous a set of last words those are?”

  “We’re not children, Karim,” Valka said.

  “At least wait and let me radio men from the camp for backup, eh?”

  “You’re all the backup we need!” I said, smiling behind my expressionless mask.

  The Norman shrugged. “If I have to carry your corpses down this mountain, I’m not explaining it to the Emperor.”

  “This is not the day we die!” I exclaimed, and clapped the fellow on the shoulder.

  “Those are famous last words, too.”

  But they would not be mine. Valka plucked a glowsphere from her belt and twisted it to activate both its light and its repulsor. The thing was Tavrosi, one she had carried with her since Emesh. Old though it was, it shone bright and followed her closely, slaved to the implants in her brain. I wondered for half an instant how it had gotten past Gereon and the Grand Inquisitor—but perhaps the forbidden praxis was in Valka’s head and not the sphere at all. Lacking for suit lights, I keyed up my terminal’s palm-light and flicked the torch up into my hand.

  Shoulder to shoulder, Valka and I pressed into the dark, lights illuminating buttressed walls and arches like the arches outside. These continued a ways, shrinking and narrowing as the atrium pierced the flesh of that great mountain—a hundred feet, then a thousand—until it terminated in a door but large enough for three men to walk abreast.

  Three men.

  We were three.

  The serendipity of this was lost on me at the time, but now I think it a kind of signpost, an indication that our feet were on the proper path. There are versions of the story, no doubt, where I had not sent Ardi away. Who knows what lay down those paths, and through what strange and undiscovered countries of time were borne upon those currents?

  At once the path began to diverge, wrapping left and right as if in a mighty circle and rising straight before us along a steep gradient, the floor smooth and polished as mirror glass, shining like obsidian in the gleam of our lamps.

  We were human. We climbed.

  “We will need to get drones in here,” Valka said. “ ’Twill save time.”

  In time, we did precisely that. I recall the way the fanning lasers swept the walls, tracing every ridge and ripple of the stone surface, every arch and buttress, every cranny.

  “Calagah would fit in this place half a hundred times or more,” Valka said when the scans were done. Cracked and crumbling in places, the great halls and narrow corridors of the complex ran for hundreds of miles, honeycombing and filling the mountain like the byways of some extraterranic anthill. There were no windows, no doors, no rooms that spoke of habitation. There were no artifacts. Not pottery, not cloth, not chip of paint or shard of bone, nothing to indicate that anyone had lived there but the structure itself.

  Observing the holograph with her in the close gloom of our suite in the campsite, I said, “It’s another bloody labyrinth.”

&nbs
p; Valka shook her head. She wore one of her customary long shirts and a frown. “It looks like no city I’ve ever seen,” she said. “ ’Tis no starport, no way of getting water in here, no lighting . . . just all this damn stone.” She leaned back on the low couch beneath the ugly narrow windows. “I talked to a scholiast on Colchis about the stuff, you know?”

  “About what?”

  “The stuff the ruins are made of.” She waved an explanatory hand. “You remember, I told you on Emesh we can’t break the stuff?” I didn’t. “ ’Twas nothing in the library about it, so I asked an archivist. Lawrence, he was. I told him the ruins are made of a substance that isn’t atomic at all. That it felt like stone but showed nothing on the scans.”

  Not taking my eyes from the spider-web image of the tunnel map between us, I asked, “What did he say?”

  “He said ’twas impossible, that if such a thing were so, they would have record of it.”

  “The Chantry probably blocked that knowledge, even from the scholiasts,” I said. “Easy enough to snuff out or discredit a few renegades like us, I guess.”

  Valka matched my crooked smile. “I guess. But I like to think the truth is more resilient than that.”

  “Maybe it is,” I said.

  The next day, I’d drawn my sword in the hall and pressed the point against the wall. Valka objected, but I moved carefully, eager to remove only the tiniest piece. Valka had said the stone would not be cut, but Valka had never carried highmatter. I pressed.

  And met resistance.

  Slowly, slowly the point of the sword worked into the strange substance. I marveled at the stress fractures we had seen, imagining the titanic forces required to crack stone even highmatter struggled to cut. Drawing the point back, I cut a sliver from the wall and held it in my palm, grinning.

  “We can get it down to camp to study!” Valka said, taking it with trembling fingers. She looked up at me. “I should have brought you along sooner.” She held the chip up to her eyes, grinning all the while.

  And then—without warning—the chip vanished. She did not drop it. It did not melt or disintegrate. It vanished as though it had been switched off.

  Valka’s face went white, and she made a gesture as if to hurl the thing away, swearing in Panthai. “What the hell happened?”

  I ran my gloved hand over the wall where I’d cut, but of the notch I’d made there was no sign. It was as if we’d never acted at all.

  “I think I understand,” I said slowly, unkindling my blade and plunging us back into sphere-lit gloom. “If Horizon was telling the truth, if these ruins really are moving backward through time, then anything we do to them will be undone.” I picked a finger over the precise spot I’d mutilated. The stone was smooth as glass. Kindling my sword once more, I swung. I had to lean my weight behind the exotic metal to cut that alien stone, but cut it did, and no sooner was the cut made then it vanished, the wall restored to its perfect form. “We move forward. They go back.” I cut the wall again. The stripe vanished. “The damage I just did is in our past now. Its future.”

  “Just when I thought I was beginning to understand any of this,” Valka said. “Then shouldn’t we have seen the cuts you made on the wall before you made them?”

  The answer came automatically. “I hadn’t made them yet.” Again I unkindled my sword and clicked the weapon into my belt. “Remember what Horizon said? About time and space and about things moving sideways in time?” I felt reasonably confident that I understood. “There were two pasts—two futures for the ruins—that is. One where I cut the wall, one where I didn’t. We change the future every time we act, but the future for these stones is the past—because they’re running backward.”

  Valka was shaking her head. “ ’Tis madness, all of this.”

  “We hadn’t arrived until we arrived to make the cut in the wall, and so changed the ruins’ future—which is our past.”

  Valka only shook her head, whether from a lack of understanding or from disbelief I was unsure. “It’s the perfect way to protect these sites. Not only do they not decay as time passes, but any attempts to meddle with them are useless.” Beneath my helmet, I was grinning. “Oh, that is brilliant. The Chantry must know all this!”

  “How do you think they’re doing it?” Valka mused. “Sending things backward in time. ’Tis meant to be impossible.”

  I had some elementary schooling in physics. I had never intended to be a magus, even in my pursuit of the scholiasts’ tradition. My interests had been cultural: artistic, literary, historical—not scientific. It was possible, by way of special relativity, possible to travel into the future by flying near the speed of light or by coasting too near a supermassive object whose gravity bent space and time about it. But always forward, only forward.

  “Something in the material, maybe?” I suggested. “These walls aren’t ordinary matter, as you well know. Or maybe . . . maybe the Quiet did something to these sites . . . these entire planets maybe. Made their forward in time back.” I sank to the floor at the base of the hall, looking up through Valka as I thought. The computer god’s words came back to me, and I muttered, “Toward what you call the future . . .” I thought of my visions again, the rivers of light branching through higher darkness. I wondered if perhaps my visions were easing my comprehension.

  Valka completed the picture for me, her perfect memory recalling something else the machine had said. “Time is only another kind of space.”

  “Imagine a map,” I said, sketching a square in the air. “Beginning of time at one end, end at the other, where the line between them is what happens. But to either side there are other lines. Things that don’t happen. Things that might happen. And as the universe runs forward, our choices weave those other threads in. Braid it. Most of the threads didn’t happen because they can’t. Or they can’t happen because they didn’t happen. I don’t know. But there aren’t just other futures. There are other presents, other pasts. I think. And because these ruins are moving backward we can see that. Maybe now . . . if we could come here yesterday . . . the marks I made on the wall would be there.”

  Valka watched me through her clear visor, gold eyes narrow. “I’ll say it again, Marlowe. ’Tis madness.”

  We climbed the ramp that first day for I don’t know how long, ascending until we came to a round chamber where paths branched to all sides. The chamber was easily as large as a floor of the Great Library, half a mile across or more, and the paths that ran away from us varied in width, such that some were wide as avenues and lined with columns like alien trees where others were too narrow even for a child to pass. What must these creatures look like to inhabit such a space, I wondered? My mind went to thoughts of serpents, of trailing robes and tentacles winding in the dark. Of ghosts and green light and my own reflection moving in the dark, glassy surface of the black stone walls. Of mirrors.

  The ruin was large as any city, though it felt larger still, for it switched back and was stacked upon itself level upon level upon dozenth level, filling the mountain. Though we spent years combing over its every byway and avenue, still I am certain I did not walk them all. It was vaster by far than the warrens of Calagah, and though the substance of its construction was the same as on Emesh, the effect in that place was not of dank closeness, but of air and darkness. An enchanted city of the night.

  “There are windows!” I remember Valka exclaiming. “I’ve not seen a window in any of these sites, not in all my years!” The windows stood high on the walls of a great and pillared hall, admitting the crimson sunlight in high-angled beams that tracked across the dusty floor. Aisle upon aisle of pillars marched tilted to either side, some of them cracked by cataclysms yet to come. The ruined city had taken on a curious air to me. No longer funereal and sad, no longer a monument to a vanished people and a glory gone from the world. They were not haunted by the ghosts of ancient kings and emperors, but by phantoms yet to come, phantoms greater
and more strange than any that stalked the west bank of the Nile when man was young.

  Months passed, and at length we found our way—though the journey took days—to the highest halls. There we found the upper gate and came out upon the highest slopes of the mountain.

  The red sun shone in a black and starlit sky. Valka and I went out alone onto the shelf and looked down upon the shield of the volcano stretching dozens of miles out and more than twenty miles down to the rusty plains below. We could just see the camp on the plains below and make out the rings and the pillars like the fingers of some almighty hand beneath us.

  “Do you hear that?” Valka asked, surveying the whole of the site from our newfound vantage.

  There was nothing to hear. I held my breath a moment, and in the moment that followed the only sound was the faint pulse of blood in my ears.

  Nothing.

  “Silence,” I said, finding in myself an ancient scrap of writing. “The great empire of silence: higher than all stars, deeper than the kingdom of death! It alone is great; all else is small.”

  Valka had understood the Classical English perfectly, and said nothing. We had been too long together. She understood my moods, and these romantic moments had ceased to try her patience. She only stood beside me, each of us a piece of that silence, small ourselves.

  But even the very small can challenge empires, or hold them in their hands.

  I broke the silence. “We haven’t named this place, you know.”

  “I’d thought about that,” she said.

  “You should do it.”

  “You’re the one with all the damned quotations and history!” She jostled me.

  Turning, I looked down at her. My mask’s entoptics made it almost seem like I wore no helmet at all, images from outside shining in twin cones directly at my eyes. I wanted to kiss her, but layers of ceramic and alumglass intervened. “You should do it,” I said again.