Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  It was heavier than I expected, like a slice of meteor iron, and turning it over I saw the sharp Tavrosi runes carved there. I did not recognize the symbols at first, but realized Valka had etched the letters H and M atop one another on one half, the letters V and O superimposed on the other.

  “It comes apart here,” she said, and pressed two small buttons on either end with her nails.

  The object sprang apart in my hands, as if some magnet had been undone. She took the half with my initials on it and—holding it palm up herself—said, “We don’t marry in Tavros.”

  “I know.”

  She hushed me. “ ’Tis a phylactery . . . my phylactery.”

  I almost dropped it.

  It was a sample of her genetic material, a crystallized blood sample and a digital copy laser-etched in quartz. A piece of her, preserved forever. “At home we . . . give them to one another. When one of us amasses enough social credit to . . . to have a child.”

  “But . . . we can’t,” I said, and had to shut my eyes to stop the tears from welling up. “I’m palatine. The High College . . .”

  Valka spoke over me, “I know we can’t. I still don’t . . . don’t want that anyway. But I thought . . . well . . .” She held the other half up, showing my initials etched on its face. “Among the clans, ’tis forbidden to exchange them, back and forth. I thought . . . I thought it a fitting compromise.” And with that she closed my fingers over her phylactery. “A symbol.”

  “A symbol!” I almost laughed, and stooped once more to kiss her, fingers tight about the metal sliver she had given me. That piece of her heart. And as we kissed upon the Storm Wall above the fields of Berenike and the Valles Merguli, a wind came out of the west and gathered my cape in its fingers. It took our hair—raven and wine-dark—and braided it together. At length we broke apart, and taking Valka by the hand I led her down from the Storm Wall, where we came together never again in this life.

  CHAPTER 75

  THE NOISE OF THUNDER

  ARMORED ALL IN BLACK with Valka’s phylactery secure beside the Quiet’s eggshell on its chain, I peered from the shadow of the arch at the unquiet sky. Behind me, the tunnel loomed three times the height of a man. Pallino stood fast nearby with Oro and Doran and the men of our First Cohort, each masked and suited and pressed into the vestibule of the tunnel network like ants in the tracks of their hive.

  “See anything?” came the bright, beloved voice.

  Valka moved to stand beside me. She looked strange in the crimson ceramic and black tunic of an officer. She had no insignia, wore no cape. She looked wholly unlike herself, though she had been a soldier once.

  “Not yet.”

  “We’ll hear ’em ’fore we see ’em, doctor!” Pallino said, leaning on his lance. “Tearing up the sky.” Far off, the thunder rolled, threatening another of the constant storms. A piece of me wished I’d taken Corvo up on her advice and stayed in the command center in the Storm Wall with Leonid Bartosz and young Aristedes, but I am no great commander, not a Pyrrhus or a Wellington, and certainly no Hannibal.

  I was right where I should have been; I only hated that I was blind.

  Speaking into my terminal patch, I said, “How are things above, Aristedes?”

  A single xenobite craft had emerged from warp near the edge of the system, just beyond the heliopause. We had detected the flash of radiation as its warp bubble collapsed, but before Hauptmann could scramble lighters in response or launch missiles across the interplanetary desert the vessel was gone.

  But it had lingered long enough, a few hours. Plenty of time to sweep the system, to know our strength and numbers and the distribution of our powers. Dark as space is, there is nowhere in its folds to hide.

  “No sign,” the intus said. “Hauptmann’s taken the fleet to full alert. Shields up. Says he’ll hold them in orbit best he can.”

  Eyes raking over Valka and the others in the tunnel behind, I said, “He’ll fail. They’ll hit us hard and hit us fast. If I’m right . . . if the main force of the enemy is waiting in ambush . . .”

  Lorian finished the thought for me. “Then the purpose of this first wave will be to divide our attention.”

  “To make us panic. They’ll hit the city. Not the Wall. They’ll want to pillage.”

  “ ’Twill give them a chance to frighten us,” Valka said darkly, eyes glowing in the dim.

  Looking back, I saw the ranks of faceless men stretching back in the gloom. There must have been a couple hundred of us in that tunnel, with the rest of the men lurking in similar access ways along the terraces on the wall-ward side of Deira city. I gestured to Oro and Doran and another centurion who had come up from his place. “Back to your units, all of you. It won’t be long now.”

  They went, and the thunder greeted them as they left the shelter of our cave. I followed them, peering with naked eyes up at the clouds. I could not see the sky, and Berenike’s wan white sun lay hid beyond the Storm Wall.

  “Keep me informed,” I said over the link.

  Lorian answered, and I could hear the lazy salute reflected in his tone. “Of course.”

  Looking down, I saw bridges and towers rising below, and birds flying, roosting in trees that flowered in the valley all the way down to the level of the fat, brown river that ran away south toward shallow seas.

  “Lord Marlowe?”

  I had wandered almost to the rail overlooking the lower terraces, a good dozen paces from the tunnel mouth, and I was surprised to find the common soldier standing there, a woman by her size and by the lightness of her voice. I know it seems odd to say—and perhaps it is only a trick of the memory—but I had thought it was Carax of Aramis for a moment before I turned, and no woman at all.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “Is it the day, lord?” she asked, shifting her weight unsteadily.

  I did not take her meaning. “What day?”

  “The men say you are the Chosen. The Son of Earth come again,” she said, and kneeling set her lance at my feet. “They say you will reveal yourself in battle here and drive the Scourge back into the Dark.”

  The old vision of myself enthroned with Selene at my feet blossomed before my eyes once more, and I fancied the arch of the tunnel behind the girl was the Arch of Titus itself and heard Selene’s words.

  The first steps.

  I did not move. The other soldiers had come forward, crowding past Pallino and Valka in their officers’ red. I sensed them listening through their helmet pickups, and felt the weight of so many eyes.

  What could I say? To deny her was to rob her of hope and of belief in me in this hour when it was needed most. I looked to Valka, but there were no answers in her face—and nothing whatsoever in Pallino’s.

  “Take off your mask,” I said, words springing to me unbidden. The Quiet’s words.

  Somewhere in the distance below, a bird cried.

  The young lady saluted and—holding her fist to her breast—keyed the release on her helmet. It unfolded like a paper sculpture, revealing a plain, blunt-featured face, but one without the weathered statue appearance I have so often marked in members of the plebeian caste. Her eyes shone bright, blue as any palatine’s beneath the rubberized coif, which she pulled back to reveal short, bronze hair.

  “What is your name, soldier?”

  “Renna, lord.”

  “Renna. A good name.” I held her gaze a moment and looked to the others. I was trapped. “I do not long for the throne!” I said, unsure whether or not I spoke in front of cameras or only to the men and women there gathered. “I do not want power, but peace.” The men shifted, leaning on their lances and against the walls of the tunnel. I wished that all my Company might have been present, but the few centuries I had would do. “I sense fear in you! Be not afraid. The men, the women and children—the people of this world—in the caverns behind you are afraid! Take heart! Have c
ourage for their sakes!” Pausing, I gathered myself for fear that my tongue would run too fast and far ahead of me. I am not a pious man—but piety was called for. “You ask when the Earth will return and Her Chosen with her! I do not know! But I know this: this is not the day! This is not the hour!” I almost added, I am not the man! But prudence and the look in Renna’s bright eyes stayed my tongue.

  She believed, and would fight because she believed.

  “It is our hour!” I said, “Our fight! For them!” And here I pointed at the caves behind their heads. “Some of you will have heard stories about me. Some of you were there and know that they are true! I do not deny them. But this is not my hour! It is ours! We must stand together with the men of our Legions against what is to come!”

  Looking down upon the woman kneeling at my feet, I said, “Will you fight with me, Renna? Not for prophecy, but for the people of this world?”

  The soldier bowed her head. “I will, lord.”

  “They cannot hear you, girl!” I said. “Will you fight with me?”

  “I said ‘I will, lord!’” she nearly shouted.

  “Will you all fight with me?” I called, and raised my good right hand.

  “Aye!” the men cried out, and the thunder of their voices rang in answer to the thunder of the heavens above. And more than thunder, for in that instant the bottoms of the clouds flashed red and white with the light of fires blazing in the void beyond the circles of that far-flung world.

  Aristedes’s high voice crackled over the suit link, disrupted by the cosmic radiation that moved behind the new visible light. “Contact! Cielcin fleet emerged from warp in high orbit. They’re closing on the fleet.”

  Frustrated still by my blindness, I asked, “Worldship?”

  “No, my lord. Looks like . . . twenty . . . twenty-two ships? A dozen medium-size attack cruisers, Class-3, perhaps Class-4. Bigger ships look to be about Class-8. They’ve engaged the fleet!”

  Too well I knew the vessels Lorian described. Cielcin starships—the truly big ones, at any rate—were not built in factories. They did not come off assembly lines, were not built to standard technical specifications. Each was unique, and categorized by us not according to any factory model, but by sheer mass. I pictured them emerging round the limn of Berenike to attack our fleet and our orbital platform behind its Royse field curtains: knuckled, shapeless things like bits of bone or the severed fingers of some massive, skeletal hand.

  “We have incoming!” Lorian said. “The Class-8s dropped siege towers, they’re heading our way.”

  I made to push past Renna. I had to order everyone back into the tunnel mouth to withstand the shelling that was to come, but the young soldier seized my hand.

  I looked down at her, ready to say some harsh word and send her running to her place. She seized more tightly, and almost I feared to feel a poisoned needle embedded in her palm. But this was no assassin. “Are you the Chosen?”

  So shocked was I by the fervency of her question that I answered without thought. “We are all chosen for something,” I said, and laid my free hand on her shoulder. Coming to my senses I added, “On your feet, Renna. Into the tunnels! Everyone back!”

  No sooner had I gotten the words out when the whole sky erupted with white light and the hellish scream of atmospheric entry. I lingered on the threshold, peering back at the sky. Great pillars of fire raked across the heavens, slicing through the morn. The air vibrated as if the clouds were the surface of some immeasurable drum. Screeching metal answered, and turning I watched a flight of Sparrowhawks tack their single wing-sails and wheel to intercept, missiles blazing like flying sparks.

  One of the pillars of fire exploded, and another, black clouds erupting to mark the places where our missiles felled them. But the horde kept coming, and I saw one clip the wing of a Sparrohawk and smash it out of the sky.

  The Cielcin horde fell like a heavy rain, ships like dark towers a hundred feet high. As I watched, the blue flame of retro-rockets flared and slowed their descent. Slowed . . . but did not stop. The armored base of the nearest siege tower smashed through a white arch and the outer wall of a block of townhouses. The earth shook again and again as if beneath the impetus of some mighty hammer, and the whole of the Valles Merguli rang to the sound of its blows. Looking out from our place on the ramparts, my men and I beheld a changed city. Black towers stood amid clouds of dust and the smoke of new-set fires.

  Too late, the raid sirens began their unholy wail: a high, keening, and ceaseless drone that caught on the towers and terraces of the city and echoed off the pale walls.

  “Target the towers!” I said, and pressed back into the tunnel with my men to await the coming firestorm.

  In the brief moment before Lorian’s response, I heard the frightened whispering of one of the soldiers at my back. “Bless us with the sword of your courage, O Fortitude . . .”

  “Targets acquired,” came the tactical officer’s reply.

  From the relative safety of the tunnel mouth, I had an excellent seat for the violence. I saw Lorian’s Javelin missiles rain down from the wall above us with fire nearly equal to the fire that had brought the towers. The tower nearest us—the one that smashed the arch and the townhouses up the street to our right—exploded in a torrent of flame so great I felt the shockwave and the fading heat half a mile distant. I was grateful to my body armor for dampening the sound.

  But other towers resisted, and it was not until afterward that I realized how the unshielded vessels had stood up to Lorian’s artillery.

  A faint haze wrapped itself around the towers, colorless and vaguely oily. Not the fractal shimmering of a shield curtain. From my distant vantage, it seemed almost to writhe and twist about the Cielcin towers, a disturbance that put me in mind of the way magnetism warped iron filings into mighty coils, of eels contorting. Of serpents.

  “Snakes!” the cry snapped over the line.

  “Nahute,” Valka said, peering out past me. Her inhuman eyes, I knew, could magnify her vision, resolving details over distances no human eye could fathom. “Thousands of them.”

  The snake-like drones had emerged from ports high in the landing towers. They set to orbiting about them, weaving themselves into a dense screen that insulated the towers against attack.

  “I’ve never seen them do that before,” Pallino said.

  Lorian interjected, voice high and tight from the command center. “They only delay the inevitable.” Another salvo fired from on high, missiles arcing at their targets. But there were hundreds of the evil drones, thousands, and I’ll wager it took more than two or three to block the incoming missiles.

  Above, the flight of Sparrowhawks circled back, all guns blazing.

  I was glad the city had been emptied, was doubly glad when I saw more drones stream out of the siege towers and fly out across the city, threading their evil way through the streets, drill-bit mouths whining as they quested for meat. They would latch onto any source of heat or movement they could find and bore their way to the center of mass. I pitied the stray dogs, the birds and other creatures that remained in Deira, and knew the gutters would run red with the blood the nahute left behind.

  “Bless us with the sword of your courage, O Fortitude . . .”

  “I’ve never seen them do anything like this,” Pallino said again, as if for emphasis.

  High above it all the sirens played, the scream filling the air from river to terrace to cloud and back. Lighters streaked overhead, firing on the next wave of towers falling from the sky like slow meteors. The smoking wreckage of alien drop towers and broken lighters rained and smote the pale towers of the city, or else kindled the groves and gardens that grew on narrow ledges or upon the roofs of mighty buildings.

  Hell had come to Berenike, seeped down from the stars and set the city to burning. How fortunate that the starport and so much of that ancient city had been built below ground. T
hose ancient builders—eager to shelter from Berenike’s coriolis storms—had inadvertently saved so many million souls.

  So long as we could hold the gates, that was.

  “Movement on the towers!” came one centurion’s words. An indicator flashed the man’s location and call sign in the corner of my helm’s entoptic vision—two levels down and three miles south. Our troopers were spread thin: five thousand men distributed in clusters no greater than the hundred men who stood at my back were stretched along the two-dozen mile length of the emptied city.

  “Ramps deployed below Eighty-Seventh Street!”

  “Hatches opening!”

  “Contact, contact!”

  The muted sound of gunfire played across the common channel, louder and more present than the ethereal keening of the raid siren. Without having to consult other men’s entoptic feeds through my helmet, I knew the Cielcin had emerged, marching out from their dark towers beneath the swarming murmurations of their evil machines.

  From my vantage point, I could make out the violet muzzle flash of plasma discharge in the streets above and below.

  “Won’t someone kill that fucking siren?” Pallino half-shouted, voice amplified by his suit speakers.

  I wanted to scream. What good was I, standing there above it all, waiting for the nahute or their Pale masters to find us? I should have been on the terraces above, fighting with the Irchtani and Hauptmann’s fusiliers, or in the streets below locking blades alongside the men of my own Red Company.

  A horrific buzzing rose beneath the siren’s wail, high and deep at once and grinding, and as I watched, the cloud of nahute spreading out upon the city about us rose, sweeping up to where the artillery stood on the lip separating the industrial quarter from the lower districts in the valley itself, directed there by some unseen hand—a Cielcin ground commander, no doubt watching from the shielded safety of one of the siege towers. I reminded myself that these were more than killing machines. They were reconnaissance. The Cielcin were mapping the city as surely as we mapped their vessels when we managed to land a boarding party.