Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Sword in hand and unhelmed, I strode back across the tarmac, Udax and Barda both at my side. “Still not much we can do about that armor,” I said.

  “We can take its other eye,” Udax snarled, beak snapping.

  “See it done,” I said, little knowing what I asked.

  Taking his cue, Udax let out a piercing, savage cry and spread wide his vast wings. The centurion leaped into the air, his kinsman after him, pinions beating about my head. For a moment, Hadrian Marlowe stood alone in no man’s land, no company but the wind. Valka remained behind with the rearguard, Bassander ahead in the van.

  For an instant, it was almost peaceful. The smoky wind blew across my face, carrying on it the stench of war and stink of burning.

  Shots flashed against Bahudde’s shield but left no mark. I was doubly certain now that the power generator the chimera carried was powerful enough to run a small starship, for rarely have I seen a Royse shield so resilient. It advanced almost as if Bassander were not there, slouching toward Deira and the Storm Wall with clockwork certainty.

  “Explosives, damn you! Use explosives!” I heard Bassander cry.

  In the instant that followed, the starburst flash of a grenade filled the air, the noise of it bruising eardrums. The giant stumbled, one mighty knee crashing to the tarmac. But twisted as the minds of the Extrasolarian designers doubtless were, their craft was true. Bahudde brought its fist down like a hammer and pulped a legionnaire who had come too close and used the hand to push itself to its feet. A spray of missiles filled the air from the giant’s shoulder. A dozen Irchtani fell mangled from the sky; still more vanished in a constellation of orange flame. Through it all flew Udax and his team, cutting tight spirals through the air. In the false night, the silver of the swords flashed like stars. I saw the centurion duck beneath a feral swipe of the general’s arm, his actions according Bassander and his men on the ground a chance to draw back.

  The Mandari captain drew close to me. “We need to buy Valka time,” I said. “She has some sort of plan.”

  “Is she all right?” the captain asked. He had heard her screaming, too.

  I only shook my head. I dared not answer, for to answer was to acknowledge that the answer was no. “We have to keep it from the Wall,” I said. “It has orders to overload its own power cells!”

  “How do you know that?” Bassander looked at me, and I could imagine the look on the face beneath that faceless mask.

  “Valka,” I said in answer. “How much time can you give us?”

  The captain studied the earth for a short moment. “A few minutes. No more.”

  “It will have to be enough,” I said. Remembering myself, I added, “You saved my life.”

  A piece of the old Lin asserted itself. “We have work to do!” Then he raised Whent’s sword and ordered his men forward. There was something admirable in the stolid, simple directness with which he did all things. His enemy stood thirty feet high, weighed several tons, and even crippled was more lethal than a platoon.

  But Bassander Lin did not hesitate, nor could I.

  I pressed in his wake, following at a jog. A lope. A dead run.

  We ran together, and the flashing of our swords in that darkness was like the coming of lightning to a desert with the threat of rain. The general’s scahari fell before our blades, for no weapon or armor of Cielcin make could withstand the bite of highmatter.

  Above our heads, Udax and the Irchtani wheeled, drawing the ire of the general. Bahudde’s massive hand caught one of the birds in its fingers and crushed the auxiliary as a man might crack a walnut. The giant’s huge feet crashed around us, and another of the birds wheeled overhead and struck a grenade to the general’s side. The explosion made Bahudde stumble, and it roared something incomprehensible in its native tongue. Bassander hewed at the damaged foot—but to no avail.

  Ignoring him, the giant took one uneven step away, tracking a duo of Irchtani as they swooped about it. They all had sheathed their cutlasses and aimed their plasma burners at Bahudde, peppering its shield with fire. The light and heat clouded the chimera’s vision, flooded its sensors and overwhelmed them on infrared and visual light alike.

  I parried a blow from one of the crawler pilots and sliced the Cielcin in two. One of the others’ nahute snapped at me, teeth latching onto the flanged plates in my left shoulder. I cut away and peeled the dying head from my shoulder, glad that only the armor layer was damaged, not the undersuit or the flesh beneath.

  “I think ’tis working,” came Valka’s voice in one ear. I forced down the welter of emotion that came with the weak sound of that voice and flinched as a foot vast as the bole of some ancient tree cracked the pavement not two yards from where I stood. There was a crack in the adamant plate on the calf above the shattered ankle, a hairline break where some flaw in the long-chain molecules of the armor had broken through. I pushed my sword through it, the liquid metal flowing, compressing through the gap. Something sparked, and Bahudde twitched and pulled the leg away, nearly tearing the sword from my grasp.

  The great machine rested its weight gingerly upon the damaged limb, surveying the small force arrayed between it and its suicidal goal. It kicked the nearest of our men out of its way, toe hitting with the force of a freight train. The man was dead before he hit the ground.

  In rushed Bassander Lin, sword held high, a magnetic grenade clutched in his off hand. The captain slapped the explosive to the giant’s calf near where I’d cut and made to leap away.

  He was only a little luckier than the last man.

  The same leg lanced out and caught Bassander beneath the ribs, striking him with enough force to lift him bodily from the tarmac. He sailed less far than the last man, but hit the tarmac and tumbled, sword flying from his hands. His grenade exploded an instant later, obscuring the enemy’s limb from view. The wind carried black smoke away, and a moment after I saw what the captain had bought with his sacrifice.

  Nothing at all.

  “Lin!” I shouted, but there was no time to see if the captain was dead or alive. Another of the Irchtani struck the pavement at my feet. Dropped there. I looked up, and saw Bahudde’s horribly neotenous face peering down at me, one-eyed and teething.

  “We cannot be stopped,” it said. “You will stand before the Prophet, devil! Just as he has foreseen. Kill me, and our fleet will still land. You will fall. If not today, then the next, or the next, or the next!” It took one limping step toward me, joints whining, and spoke the last words I ever wished to hear from one of its kind. “Oyade ni.”

  This must be.

  Choking back unholy terror, I drew myself up to my full height and called back. “If I stand before your master,” I said, “it will be to give it your head, and to tell it how you failed.”

  Brute fury overcame all thought, and Bahudde howled and pulled back its enormous fist to strike me down.

  A curious calm stole over me, a serenity empty as the wind. It was a serenity I’d felt only once before, in the instant before Aranata struck me down. I stood there, sans hope, sans fear, sans fury, sans . . . everything. Everything but that deep quiet of the soul that is in all men if we but listen.

  I raised my left hand to guard my face, making a bar of my forearm.

  The man-high fist struck me a moment after, a vicious hook powerful enough to smash stone to powder.

  I didn’t flinch.

  I stood unmoving as the hills, knees bent, wind rising about us.

  Bahudde recoiled and broke the stunned silence. “Veih!” it said. “No, it’s . . . it’s not possible!”

  Not likely, I thought, vision fading with that inhuman serenity and focus.

  Into the shocked stillness there came a scream, and a dark shape plunged out of the heavens above. Looking straight up, I saw a phalanx of the Irchtani fall out of the darkened sky like a bolt of lighting, wings tucked, claws extended. And their point c
ame Udax, the tip of his zitraa extended like a lance. The others fired their plasma burners, filling the air with light and heat enough to blind the giant.

  Udax flew on.

  Bahudde roared, and the noise of it shook the Wall from its foundations to the white pennons snapping upon the battlements of its uttermost crown. And when the light had faded and the smoke rose to the blackened sky I saw our winged centurion standing with its claws clamped tight to the giant’s face, and its sword?

  The razor-pointed zitraa quivered, buried to the hilt in the sputtering red ruin of Bahudde’s last remaining eye.

  The vayadan swayed, and I felt certain that it would topple and fall dead.

  I cheered and raised my sword to heaven.

  We had won.

  The Irchtani crowed about me, voices raised in a piercing cry that was both scream and song of victory.

  But Bahudde did not topple or fall dead. It held still for only an instant, swaying like a tree in the wind, for it was no living thing, and though Udax had struck true, there was no brain behind that shattered red eye. No life to take. Bahudde reached up with its lone remaining hand and seized Udax where he stood upon its face. The blind general did not hesitate, but clenched its fist and crushed Udax between its fingers.

  Once more, the giant roared, and there was fury and triumph both in the sound.

  It dropped the ruin of Udax’s body at its feet and crushed the centurion beneath its claws.

  All that remained of Udax of Judecca was a red smear on the pavement. That, and a few brown feathers still dancing on the air. Eyes wide with sorrow and rage, I watched that redness spread.

  Red blood, I thought. So like the red of man.

  We are men, Udax had said to me once. Not things.

  So he was. So he had been. Human or not, he died a man.

  The Irchtani whirled into a frenzy and screamed with vengeance for their fallen comrade. They flew at Bahudde, who—though blind—fought back with tooth and claw and what weapons remained to him.

  I ran, lest I be crushed beneath its feet. “Valka!” I spoke into the collar baffle of my suit. “If you’re going to do something, now would be the time!”

  Blinded, the giant stomped and cracked the pavement, shaking the world with the thunder of its fury. I kept running, moving back toward the Wall at an angle that carried me still away from Valka. The soldiers with me, fearing to share in either Udax’s or Bassander’s fate.

  “Jakaku totajun kizaa wo!” Bahudde shrieked. The same threat it had made to me on the inner wall of the city. “He will scratch you all out!”

  I turned.

  Bahudde was running, stumbling blind over the field. Not straight at the wall, but toward it. Its furnace heart still burned, I knew, with fire enough to shatter our Wall. Perhaps the eyes of its master in Dharan-Tun above directed it.

  “Shoot it down!” I screamed. “Lorian! Shoot it down!”

  But we had no lighters, no missiles, and the plasma cannons on the Wall were too few and too short-ranged to avail us.

  “Destroy it!”

  The Irchtani still flocked about Bahudde, firing where they could. I realized the plasma cannons on the Wall were useless anyhow. Useless as the burners the auxiliaries carried against something so shielded and so well engineered.

  It was over, after all.

  It had all been for nothing.

  Hauptmann’s death. The loss of the fleet. The division of our forces. The destruction of the city, the deaths in the starport tunnels. Udax’s sacrifice. My quest to Annica. What Urbaine had done to Valka.

  All of it for nothing.

  Nothing.

  One of the giant’s knees buckled without warning, and it fell, crashing into the pavement like a mountain falling on the plains.

  And I heard a voice—a small, bright voice stretched taut with pain—whisper in my ear.

  “I have you, you bastard!” Valka spat.

  A thrill went through me, and as I stood there—formerly helpless—I watched as the Vayadan-General Bahudde of the Iedyr Yemani fell to hands and knees, its titanic form gouging the earth with its convulsions. Too many times, I have seen the bodies of dead men burned to cinder in bombed-out cities in the wake of a Cielcin attack. As men burn, their muscles shorten, cords tightening until the body is crabbed and crouched low like a boxer. The titan folded in on itself the same way, metal body and artificial voice groaning as legs buckled and neck bent and the remaining arm curled tight.

  I looked back across the great emptiness of no man’s land and saw her. She had fallen beside an Irchtani who crouched to aid her. Her legs were all a tangle, but her back was straight, and she was so far off I could not see her palsied movements or the fever in her eyes. She raised a hand and pointed. Something behind me hissed, and turning I saw the giant’s chest cavity open and reveal what remained inside.

  Of Iubalu nothing of the flesh remained save the brain and the smile. Of Bahudde there was little more. No face, but the black matter of its brain floated in azure fluid, still connected to the coiled spinal nerve in its glossy sheath—the whole thing shot through with needles and glass wires finer than any hair. There were no heart or lungs to speak of, but three dried fruit-looking organs I took for kidneys hung in suspension, doubtless to clean the blood they supplied to the scant remaining tissue.

  “You think this is victory?” The voice that issued from the chassis’s internal speakers was thin and airy, nasal almost as Urbaine’s voice. “He will . . . be the end of all of you.”

  I approached the giant, facing the open cavity and the ruins of the creature inside.

  I had only one question. “Why?”

  Bahudde did not move. It did not answer.

  “Why?” I asked again. “Detu marerra o-koun wo!”

  “So that he . . . can become like Them.”

  For the thousandth time that day, my blood ran cold. “The Watchers?”

  But the lights on the general’s chassis were gone. Whether by some art of Valka’s or by its own hand I was not sure, but Bahudde was dead. All was quiet but the wind and the burning of the crawler and the distant thunder of the greater battle away by the Cielcin landing fleet.

  Lifting my right hand, I kindled my sword again, meaning to scratch out what remained of our enemy. To avenge Udax. But the Irchtani were watching. I let my hand fall and turned away. Gesturing sharply at the ground, I said, “It’s all yours.”

  Huge wings filled the air, and the day was filled with the noise of birds.

  CHAPTER 86

  THE SCOURGE OF EARTH

  THE GENERAL’S DEATH SENT shockwaves through the Cielcin vanguard on the ground. Without any clear leader, their command fragmented as groups turned on one another, commanders who had been equally subordinate to the vayadan each refusing to follow the other. Pallino told me later that he saw groups of the Pale tear at one another even as our soldiers cut into their ranks, slaughtering as they were slaughtered by man and Cielcin alike. Thus it was he made a wedge of his smaller force and cleaved through the enemy ranks and set fire to their fleet of black ships.

  I feared for them. Nearly two miles of open landing field separated them from the Wall. With nothing left to lose, the Cielcin might open fire on the army from orbit at any moment. There was nothing we could do to save them, not cornered and defanged as we were.

  Some of their commanders retreated. I saw their rockets streak heavenward from my place beside Bahudde’s corpse, believing them the first sign of some new devilry from the black fleet above. For I knew that whatever else had happened—it was only their vanguard that had failed. Out in the Dark beyond the top of the sky the enemy waited. Their black fortress still blocked out the sun. Above us even still was arrayed the greatest fleet of the Pale that mortal man had ever seen. We had cut another finger off the White Hand, but in the dark halls of Dharan-Tun, the Prophet watched
us all with academic malice.

  And our fleet was still more than a day away . . . it would never reach us in time.

  Dorayaica had won, and knew it. It had but to reach out its hand and take us, and there was nothing any son of Earth could do to stop it.

  The gates of the Storm Wall loomed dead ahead. With not a one of the enemy within a mile of our position, I ordered Lorian to open them. “Get the wounded through!” I said, waving the others on. A knot of men staggered past, some carrying men on their backs or over their shoulders between them. Still more carried men prostrate and lifted them above their heads and bore them like the bodies of conquering heroes passed off hand to hand. Two of the Irchtani carried Valka on interlaced wings. I had walked beside, hurrying our bruised and bloody little convoy back to our doomed fortress to await the final blow of the hammer.

  Last of all, eight men carried the unconscious and broken body of Bassander Lin upon their shoulders. His suit had hardened completely, but the triaster trained in field medicine told us his back and ribs were shattered. How he had survived none could say, and yet there was a pulse.

  The gates—huge panels of green bronze decorated with relief images of the Exodus from Old Earth—ground steadily open. I drew aside to let the others pass, lingering long enough to shout orders at the men inside that Valka and Lin should be seen to at once. The surgeons might do for Lin, but the hurt on Valka was deeper than anything a medic of the Imperium could heal.

  She drew level with me, limping between her Irchtani supporters. Her shoulders shook, and her head lolled to one side, the left eye still sputtering, pupil dilating and contracting as it darted left and right. She looked mad, as mad as any of the beggars I have seen broken on Chantry steps.

  “Go on,” I said to them. “I’m right behind.”

  “You aren’t coming?” She looked at me confused.

  “I want to make sure everyone gets inside,” I replied. “I’ll be right there.” I seized her hand, but her fingers would not close. They fluttered against the back of my hand, weak as sparrow wings. I held her there, not wanting to let go. “Can we fix this?”