Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  How easy it was to forget.

  “Show him.”

  She did, and for the first time I saw what had been done to me through Valka’s eyes.

  Advancing to the console, Valka pressed her fingertips against the display. I am uncertain just how her praxis functioned, but there must have been something in her hands as well as her head, for without preamble the booth darkened, and once more I beheld the gardens of Kharn Sagara, the dark trees beneath the bloody sky and the flaming wreck of the Bahali imnal Akura, Aranata Otiolo’s massive worldship.

  And Aranata itself, its hulking form wielding Raine Smythe’s sword like a knife, hunched shoulders, one mighty horn sheared away. There I was also, clad in legionary white and barely holding my ground. How small I seemed, like a candle flame against Aranata’s night. I raised my sword to parry, and lost my arm instead.

  “Hadrian!” Valka’s own voice shrieked over the sound system.

  “Marlowe!” That was Bassander Lin, voice far off and remote.

  Moments I thought had taken centuries passed in seconds.

  “Do it,” I whispered, clutching the bleeding ruin of my right arm. “Do it.”

  Highmatter flashed. My head tumbled from my shoulders. The body stood a moment thereafter. Toppled. Hit the ground with a strangely hollow clattering.

  The image vanished as Valka took her hand away. She shut her eyes, but not before I saw the tears in them.

  “This is witchcraft,” Alexander said, stepping back. He had not noticed the arms were reversed, that Aranata had taken my right—though I was missing my left. I hoped he would not notice. “Trickery.”

  “ ’Tis not,” Valka said. “Ask any of the others.”

  “It isn’t real,” he shook his head. “You still think I’m a fool.” And with that he turned and strode out the airlock, helmet unfolding from the collar baffle of his suit as he shut the inner door behind him.

  * * *

  Night had fallen. The Annican night was deep, without the noise of bird or beast or even the sound of wind. The only sounds were those of the environment pod’s air cyclers running and the noise of Valka’s slow breathing from the other room. Sleep had not found me abed, and I’d returned to the holograph console in the far corner of the front room. For a time I’d stood and peered out the round window at the mountain, the pillars, and the rings. I’d watched two of our Sparrowhawk fighters circling overhead, quietly at their patrol. There had been little to see, and by night seeing anything was hard, unless it was the low light of the other camp buildings.

  For the dozenth time, I pressed the play button on the holograph.

  “The death toll was catastrophic . . .” Sir Friedrich Oberlin said, his holograph’s eyes staring through me at something no living man could see. “Four million dead in orbital storage. Surface estimates are higher than seven million and climbing. More than twenty thousand shipmen.” Images showed behind Sir Friedrich’s head: the destruction of one of the orbital medica that housed hundreds of thousands of soldiers sleeping on ice, a dreadnought larger than the Tamerlane blown to pieces, a city turned to molten glass. “We are getting reports of survivors. Certain remote settlements were spared in the attack. The governor-general survived in bunkers beneath the capital. We’re arranging for evacuation and relief missions as we speak. The Cielcin are gone. They didn’t stay for the usual rape and plunder.”

  “That’s because the orbital troop stations were their target,” I said, as much to myself as to Oberlin’s ghost. Legion Intelligence knew that full well, in any case, and did not need me to tell them.

  The images behind Oberlin showed Cielcin ships like broken circles descending from the sky. Landing craft fell like meteors, smashing buildings as they fell in fiery rain. The capital had been ransacked, a million people taken. From city grid footage I saw them crowded aboard lifter rockets and carried back into space. I remember the looks on their faces. The cold fear, the tears. Something huge and winged flew across the sky, blotting out the sun.

  Maybe Alexander and Durand were right. Maybe it was madness to stay.

  I switched the machine off.

  CHAPTER 68

  ANNICA

  “I THINK WE’VE NEARLY finished this level,” Valka said, coming back to join me where I sat near the gravitometer in the center of a round chamber off one of the massive, pillared halls. In Calagah, on Emesh, there had been entire chambers separate from the main network of halls and chambers, spaces sealed off and inaccessible. The gravitometer—a metal tripod twice the height of a man with a pendulum hanging from it—probed for minute fluctuations in the planet’s gravity that hinted at empty spaces. We’d set up two dozen of the things throughout the ruins, hoping to discover features of the Quiet site that our initial scan with the mapping drones had failed to detect. “Are you all right?”

  It took me the space of several heartbeats to realize that I’d been staring, that I hadn’t moved. Behind my suit’s expressionless black mask, I might have been sleeping.

  “Sorry.” I shifted where I sat, more to let her know that I was awake than anything. “I was just thinking about Marinus.”

  Several months had passed since Oberlin’s telegraph and the order to make for Berenike, and a listless quality had descended upon our expedition. Durand and the rest of our Norman contingent—up to and including Otavia—were understandably prickly with me, and I was glad that Alexander had retreated to the Tamerlane. Valka had said nothing, and I pushed ahead. “I keep thinking about Simeon the Red—you know the story. The way the crew mutinied and he ended up stranded on the surface . . .”

  Sighing, Valka seated herself on the floor beside me, back against the wall. We watched the gravitometer tick a moment in companionate silence. “You think they’d betray us?”

  “No,” I said, and furiously shook my head.

  “Otavia wouldn’t do that,” Valka said.

  “I know.” I flexed my right hand beneath the suit glove, feeling the ache and tired stiffness in the bones. “But I wouldn’t blame them if they did. They’re men without country now. It isn’t right. A man should have a people. A home.” I sensed Valka disagreed. They weren’t high on patriotism where she came from, and even clan allegiances had weakened in time, each become no more than an unfortunate extended family.

  But she did not argue. “I suppose if Edda were attacked I’d . . . feel it,” she said.

  “Do you miss it?” I asked.

  “Home?” She glanced at me through her helmet visor. “You know I don’t.”

  “I miss mine . . .” I said, thinking of Tor Gibson.

  A hand squeezed my knee through the suit. “Hadrian, you hated it there.”

  “I did,” I said, “but it is home. Whatever else I may be, I am a Marlowe.”

  Not unkindly, Valka added, “Your father disowned you. The Tamerlane is your home—and ’tis home for the Normans all now, too.” She rested her helmeted head against my shoulder. “We’re your people.” What I’d have given for a bottle of wine in that moment and the air to share it in. “I just hope we find something here to make it all worthwhile.”

  “We will,” I said, wrapping an arm around her shoulders.

  “Are you playing prophet again?”

  The word prophet made me think of Iubalu and Syriani Dorayaica.

  I hadn’t told her about the wind on the mountaintop—the story was simultaneously so fabulous and so trivial I didn’t know how to bring it up and be believed. “I’ve been having dreams again,” I said. “First when we arrived . . . when we were scouting the planet. I dozed in the scout ship. Then again maybe half a dozen times . . .” I told her about the black dome, about the pillars spiraling toward it across a plain paved flat. About the Cielcin army standing beneath banners bearing the emblem of a white hand. About Dorayaica. About myself.

  “Sometimes, the others are there. Pallino, Elara, Crim, and the
rest.”

  “Not me?”

  “Not you.”

  Valka was silent a long moment, her head still on my shoulder. “I thought you couldn’t see the future.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I don’t.” I shifted, turning to face her. “I mean I don’t have any control over what I see. They’re dreams.”

  Valka smiled. “They are just dreams, Hadrian.” She laid a reassuring hand on my arm and smiled.

  “But you remember my vision? The one on Calagah?” The one I’d received from Brethren—the message the Quiet had forced the daimon to deliver to me—was something else entirely.

  “When you were lost for hours inside the ruins and we all thought you’d fallen down some shaft and broken your neck?”

  Remembered pain flashed across my face, and I was glad that Valka could not see it through my opaque ceramic mask. “Yes.” She had called me a liar that day. An unbelievable barbarian. “These dreams feel the same. I’m not like you, Valka. I can’t remember everything, but these dreams . . . They’re so vivid. They don’t fade, just like the Dark.” She knew exactly what I meant. “If I concentrate, I can see them like they’re happening again.”

  She was nodding slowly, one hand still against my thigh. “What do you think they are?” she asked. “These dreams of yours?”

  I’d had a lot of time to think about it. We’d been on Annica for months. I looked away from Valka. “Do you remember what Kharn Sagara said about Akterumu?”

  “ ’Twas Tanaran,” Valka said.

  “What?”

  “ ’Twas Tanaran that spoke of Akterumu,” she said. “Not Sagara.”

  I waved this aside. “I’ve thought about that word a lot these past several years. Suppose Akterumu is Akumn ba-terun. The place of the rock. Or the dome, maybe? I don’t know. There was a dome in the vision. And the Cielcin were out beneath the sky in broad daylight. They don’t do that without good reason. Tanaran spoke about it like it was someplace sacred to the Cielcin. Like the site of some pilgrimage. That’s how it felt in the dream. Like a . . . a festival.”

  “Like one of your triumphs.”

  Snatches of the propaganda films played in my head.

  Demon in White.

  White demon. Pale demon. Like the Emperor on his chessboard, Dorayaica and I were matched pieces. White and black.

  “Dorayaica’s general—Iubalu—talked about a sacrifice. It said Dorayaica had foreseen my death.”

  “ ’Twas trying to frighten you,” Valka said, waving a dismissive hand.

  “What if it wasn’t?” I asked. “What if Syriani Dorayaica is receiving visions from the Quiet, too? The Quiet or . . . something else?” I put my face in my hands. “We need answers, Valka. We need them now, before Berenike becomes the next Marinus. Before Edda and Delos and all the human universe burns.”

  She had no answer for that, and we sat together unspeaking for a long while.

  “I told you,” she said, and I felt her eyes on me, “a long time ago . . . that I won’t let you die.” Her fingers squeezed mine. “You can have all the dreams you like. All the visions. ’Twill not matter.”

  Her confidence—hollow though perhaps it was—made me feel better, and the nightmares seemed a little farther away. As if embarrassed, Valka stood and paced toward the gravitometer.

  “What do you think we’re looking for?” she asked, not turning back to face me.

  Thinking of the wind I’d witnessed when we’d first climbed the mountain and of my reflection moving in the walls of Calagah, I said, “I don’t know, but I’ll know when I see it.”

  Valka nodded, but did not speak.

  “There is something here, Valka,” I said. “I can . . . well, not quite feel it. But the dreams are getting worse. More vivid. And the wind . . .”

  “Wind?”

  I hadn’t meant to say it, but I’d put my foot in it, and said, “The first day we climbed the mountain, you went up outside to wave the shuttle in. I went back to get the men. There was a wind.”

  Valka turned to face me, eyes narrowed with skepticism. “Hadrian, there’s no air here.”

  “I know!” I said, feeling the long shadow of her skepticism. “I know that! I know it sounds mad, I . . .”

  She crossed her arms. “I believe you. I just don’t know what to say.”

  I felt myself relax. Valka had not believed me when I told her of my vision at Calagah, and though decades had passed between us since then, still a piece of me had feared her scorn. Somewhat ashamed, I hung my head, forgetting that she could not see my face through the suit mask.

  “I wish I knew,” I said to her. “I wish things were simpler.”

  “So do I,” she said, and offered me her hand. “But smile . . . ’tis what we wanted, this. No?”

  I swept the chamber with my eyes, the two of us alone, heading a small expedition on a strange world. It was all we’d ever talked about, and if it was stolen time—like our time in Thessa and on Colchis generally—then so be it. For most of us, stolen time is all we ever have . . . if we can take it.

  “You’re right,” I said. It was what we’d always talked about. Doing this sort of thing together, arm in arm.

  Valka stood over me, eclipsing the light of the glowsphere above the gravitometer’s slim shape. “We have nearly four years here, you and I,” she said. “We’ll figure it out.”

  * * *

  Four years is a long time.

  Too short.

  Made shorter by the deceptively long Annican day, days which passed without regard for the standard calendar or the rhythms of our respective bodies. Alexander did not return from the Tamerlane, and though Varro joined us from time to time, more often than not Valka and I were alone in the cyclopean city, charting pillared halls and twisting passages, scanning every canting buttress or ribbed ceiling we could. As in Calagah, nearly every surface was covered in round anaglyphs, some larger than my outstretched arms, some no larger than a human eye, each marked and textured with characters no human mind had read, slithering over the black stone in unfathomable patterns.

  And yet we tried.

  But Valka had tried for decades—for her whole life after her service in the Tavrosi guard—to translate the speech of those ancient others. She had not succeeded, and where the work of decades had failed her, four years would not avail us.

  We knew we toiled in vain, poring over the scans we made of the city in our sleeping pod by night, leaving the drones to their slow, steady work. In time, we had one of the camp buildings moved to the top of the mountain as well, to spare our pilots the trouble of ferrying us day after day from the mountain’s base to its highest slopes.

  Our first year ended, and in time our second was nearly gone. In time we traced more than five thousand miles of tunnel and hall, mapped hundreds of chambers. The gravitometers revealed still more, and though we did not attempt to bore through the rock between and could not cut the stone as it slid by us into the past from its genesis in the distant future, we added them to Valka’s rendering.

  “You know,” Valka said, leading the way along one of the massive vaults. Pillars rose to one side, each marching at an advancing angle, so that at one end of the chamber they stood vertical and at the far end lay almost flat as the ceiling drooped lower and lower above our heads, its surface damasked with anaglyphs. “I think the sealed sections aren’t sealed at all.”

  “What do you mean?” I kept close behind her, the tripod of one folded gravitometer over one shoulder like a crucifix.

  Valka stopped, forcing her slaved glowsphere to circle back and orbit her head like a tiny moon. She paused, sweeping golden eyes along a line of glyphs carved into the surface of the nearest pillar. “If what Horizon said is right—if these ruins are traveling backward through time—then they’re decaying in reverse, yes?”

  “Cave-ins,” I said.

>   “Only ’twas no sign of such in the surrounding rock,” Valka said, and resumed her pace toward the low arch at the far end of the hall. I let her go ahead. Despite our long sojourn on Annica, the twists and byways of the ruin remained in part a mystery to me, and I relied on Valka to lead us out again.

  I watched the glowsphere chase after her, shadows dancing on the shape of her and on the walls. Our own shadows stretched out behind us, massive phantasms licking at the outer dark. “I suppose they haven’t caved in yet.”

  Ahead, Valka shook her head. “Can you imagine? When they do cave in, the halls will open up, and the stone just . . . won’t have anywhere to go. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “But it does explain the isolated chambers,” I said, remembering the scans of Calagah Valka had showed me long ago. Odd chambers had extended from the tunnel complex there. Little spaces sealed away in the midst of solid rock, left there as if by some cutting glitch as happens sometimes with holographs, displacing one element of the image inside another.

  I could hear the ruin-lust in her voice once more. “I wish we had the time to put ourselves in fugue for a century or two!” she said. “Now we know to look for it, we could compare the ruins then to today, see what’s grown!” Valka reached out both arms as if to encompass the hall. She spun, walking backward so I could see the infectious smile on her beloved face. Holding out one hand, she said, “We could go back to Calagah! I took a rendering of it, too! It must have changed since we were there! ’Tis been . . .” she did the arithmetic in her head, “more than four hundred years.”

  Hearing the figure aloud, I almost skipped a step. I suppose some part of me had known so many years had gone by since Emesh, but to hear it spoken aloud was another thing.

  “We can’t go to Emesh,” I said stonily, realizing I’d been quiet for the space of a dozen paces. As I spoke we passed beneath the arch and out into a narrow hall that stretched left and right, gently curving in a broad circle.

  Valka went right, and I followed. The hall curved ahead and to the left, where I knew it encircled several inner chambers and storied galleries that spiraled upward through the heart of the mountain. “I know we can’t,” Valka said. “But we should. That Mataro girl is certainly dead and gone. She won’t be taking you from me!”