The Lesser Devil

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Sabine had thanked him, and Crispin had eaten two of the old bars in sullen silence. They tasted like someone had soaked sawdust in raspberry juice and baked it. He knew legionnaires ate such things daily. He pitied them, and was privately afraid the villagers would offer him vat-grown meat next, oily and a week from the grocer.

  At least they had talked no more of Aunt Amalia and of the possible death of their father. Crispin found he could not believe it. His mind would not even close around the potential that something might have happened at Devil’s Rest. For surely home and his father were fixed stars, the axes about which his world revolved.

  I would know, he told himself. If Father were dead, I would know.

  How he would know—or how he knew he would know—Crispin couldn’t say, but he repeated the words silently himself when the dark cloud grew lower, closer to the sea level of his soul. He sensed, though, that a similar cloud hung over Sabine. She sat quietly by herself in a corner, having peeled the dust-covering from a sleek-looking armchair that looked more at home on a starship than in this old priest’s home, idly fussing with her dead terminal.

  Crispin caught Kyra watching her, a look like motherly concern on her face. Then Kyra looked at him, then back to Sabine, her meaning clear enough. Sighing, Crispin rose from his seat at the windowsill and crossed the room. He lowered himself onto the ottoman that Sabine had pushed away—the better to curl into her little throne—and said, “It’s going to be all right, you know.”

  “I don’t know that,” she snapped. “And neither do you. Father could be dead for all we know. Devil’s Rest destroyed. If it is Aunt Amalia …” she broke off, curtains of dark hair obscuring her face. “We could be all that’s left of our house.”

  “Well,” Crispin said lamely, “and Hadrian.”

  “Hadrian!” Sabine’s voice broke, and for a moment Crispin was afraid she might laugh at him. “Hadrian! What do you think? That your long-lost brother might come back and what? Save us? Avenge us? Hadrian isn’t coming back, Crispin. He doesn’t care about us. You said yourself he ran away the first chance he got.”

  He tucked his hands under his arms and studied the labyrinth pattern embroidered along the outer edge of his cape. “I didn’t mean he’d come save us, Sabine. I only meant he’s still out there. Besides!” He inhaled sharply and looked up, caught her staring at him. How small she seemed, lost in the shape of that great chair. “We’re still alive. If anything has happened to Father … we’ll avenge him ourselves. And whoever attacked us last night will pay for the men we lost. I swear it on Earth’s bones.” By the end, he was practically snarling, remembering the mangled limbs of the men who had died in their seats hanging down as if to touch him.

  A muscle rippled in Sabine’s jaw, and she nodded. “I guess we’ll know soon.”

  “Whenever that peasant gets back from Camlen’s Bite or … wherever it was.”

  “Camlen’s Gap,” she corrected smoothly. “We’re lucky we found Jean-Louis and those hunters when we did. I don’t think we could have gone much further with Ored in his condition.”

  Crispin’s eyes wandered over to the injured man, who was sitting with his back to them, speaking to Lud and Van and the others. “We would have had to leave him.” He thought about the way Kyra had crouched down in front of the amputee, her sidearm in her hand. She had intended to kill the wounded man then and there. To spare him whatever torments their pursuers might have visited on him and to keep him from betraying them. That took a coldness Crispin was not sure he had.

  That surprised him.

  He had killed men in Colosso and thought of little save the glory of it, but he was certain that had he been in Kyra’s shoes he could not have done it. The thought would not even have entered his mind. Was he going soft? Or had he always been soft? Always a child playing at war?

  He realized then that he’d been silent a long while. They both had. The soldiers were talking, trying to make light of Van and Ored’s injuries, and now and then their laughter rose above the low level of the conversation.

  “What was he like?” she asked. “Hmm?”

  Sabine was working her long fingers through her hair in preparation to braid it. When she saw he hadn’t understood her, she said, “Hadrian, I mean.”

  “Hadrian?” Crispin leaned back, pressing his back against the plastic wall of the room. “More like you than me. He had the head for politics … and Father’s coldness.” Realizing that he’d just accused Sabine of the same thing, he hastened to add, “Sorry.”

  His sister’s smile was thin enough to draw blood. “It’s not an insult.”

  Crispin matched her smile. “Hadrian … didn’t belong here. Sort of like Mother doesn’t belong.” Liliana Kephalos-Marlowe never stayed with her husband at Devil’s Rest for long. She and Father lived separate lives, and so she spent her days at the Summer Palace at Haspida in the south. “You know—we could try fleeing to Mother instead.” Crispin had always suspected their mother had played a role in Hadrian’s escape. Perhaps she could help them, too—if all was lost. Perhaps they might all flee together into exile, if her family had turned against them. Or would she choose her sisters over her children? No ordinary mother would, surely. But they were palatine, and so was she—and while Lady Liliana may have been many things, an ordinary mother was not one of them.

  “Mother could be involved in all this,” Sabine said soberly. “If we tried that, I’d want to be very careful. And we should know what’s happened before we make any move. There is a chance Mother’s in on it. She has no great love for our lord father, after all.”

  Crispin swallowed. “I’m sure she helped Hadrian escape. You know she called off the hunt for him just a day after he disappeared? Father tried to freeze all offworld travel the moment he turned up missing.” Was it his imagination? Or had Kyra been watching him intently as he spoke? Her attention was turned away now, but he’d thought—for a just a moment—that she’d been listening.

  “This was after he tried to kill you, wasn’t it?”

  “He didn’t try to kill me,” Crispin said shortly. “That’s just something Father told you.” He could have, though. Hadrian had always been the better fighter. He had beaten Crispin senseless and left him with a fractured skull and three broken ribs. It had taken weeks to heal, even with medical correctives. Even slower to heal had been his pride. Crispin had known Hadrian was the better fighter, but he’d always been bigger, stronger. Always more willing to fight. Fighting had been a part of who he was—or at least a piece of who he’d like to be.

  That piece had been slow dying. Dying.

  How much of life consists of such deaths?

  He realized Sabine was waiting for him to say … what? He opened his mouth, searching for words that would not come, as if they had turned their faces and pretended not to see him. “I always felt like he was better than me,” said a voice that sounded like his own. “Our tutors liked him better. He learned faster, fought better, spoke better than I ever did. And he was older, so I was certain he was going to inherit the place.” Primogeniture was no guarantee of succession, not in the Sollan Empire, not when it might be centuries before the father died, by which point it would be plain enough which child would make the best ruler. “But Father turned him out. I still don’t really understand why. Hadrian had been attacked in the streets. Nearly killed. Father said he’d shamed our house—but you know all this.”

  Sabine nodded slowly and tied off the end of her braid with a red band she’d produced from somewhere in her long coat. “I do, but … it helps to have something to talk about.”

  “Father may still not pick me, you know,” he said, not adding if Father is alive.

  “Maybe not,” she said, leaning forward. She placed a reassuring hand on his knee. “But we’re in this together, you and I. We’re the only people we can trust, really. Aren’t we?” There was a shrewd light in his sister’s eyes, measuring. Measuring?

  Crispin felt a shadow of disquiet move in him. “
We’ve always been in this together, little sister.” He closed his hand over hers and squeezed, feeling her signet ring press against his palm. “Always.” Crispin caught himself wishing that he had had this conversation with Hadrian thirty years ago, when they were boys together. Perhaps things would have been different if they had. But he reminded himself that this was not Hadrian. This was Sabine. And Hadrian was gone—would always be gone. The river of Time flows in but one direction, and does not turn back.

  May Time, Ever-Fleeting, forgive us … He prayed silently, picturing the Icon of Time carved on Chantry altars, incense tapers burning all around. Time was always depicted as a young woman running naked with wings on her feet, looking back over her shoulder. She had an old man’s face on the back of her head, and it was that face that looked in the direction she ran—forwards—and the youthful face that looked forever back.

  • • •

  He could hear Hadrian’s voice in his mind, There stand we all, little brother.

  Crispin smiled. He had always been the lesser devil. Always in Hadrian’s shadow, or his father’s. It had taken years, decades, to realize that it was this that had made him angry as a boy. This that had made him … whatever he’d been.

  “What is it?” his sister asked, turning her hand over to better hold his.

  “Nothing,” he said, not wanting to say it aloud, not wanting to make it real. Internally, he turned his face to look forward. “It’s nothing.”

  Chapter 9

  The Dying God

  Dinner had been a pleasant enough affair. The food was plain, but genuine: Jean-Louis had brought venison from the previous night’s hunt, and it seemed the woman, Jacqui, had been in the house most of the afternoon stewing vegetables in a sauce of tomatoes and carrots. Father Laurent had insisted on saying some benediction in another language Crispin did not recognize—it didn’t sound like French—before the meal. The old priest and the other adorators had all bowed their heads, twice making that same cross-like gesture with their right hands. Crispin had made unsteady eye contact with his sister across the table, but Sabine had only smiled. Laurent had also insisted that the soldiers join them, and they all ate at one table: peltasts, peasants, priest, and palatines. Such a thing would never be done at Devil’s Rest, where the common servants and soldiers dined at the low tables furthest from the high seat, or else dined in their barracks unseen and unrequired.

  Despite their injuries and exhaustion, Crispin found he enjoyed the plebeians’ company. The soldiers were rough men, but honest and unpretentious, and the commoners were not the clods he’d expected.

  And the wine was good.

  “We make it here!” Jean-Louis said with a wide smile, eyes flashing. “My third cousin, he runs a vineyard at the far end of the valley. We do not make much, but … there is not much land here suited for it.”

  “There were plenty of it in that cave we passed through behind your temple,” said one of the men.

  Father Laurent set his knife and fork down pointedly, “For the Blessed Sacrament, lad. And don’t let me catch you lot dipping into it.” He said the words with a smile, but it was the sort of smile a commander officer used to soften orders given to his men. “There’s some you can have if you’ve a need after this, but those down in the church are for the faithful.” He adjusted his wire-rimmed spectacles, such that the harsh light of the overhead fixture turned the lenses white, lending him the momentary affect of an evil scientist in some dreadful holograph drama.

  “When this is settled,” Sabine said, studying the dusty old bottle with affection, “I’d be happy to have a case of this stuff ordered down to Meidua.”

  “The food is lovely, too, ma’am,” said Lud, who like the other soldiers had skinned out of his ceramic armor and wore only the padded thermal underlayment beneath. “Better than anything I’ve had in a month of Mondays.” Noises of general assent rose from the others as Lud passed a basket of warm brown bread back towards them.

  Jacqui pressed a hand to her breast. “I should hope so! I am French, after all!”

  This drew laughter from Jean-Louis and the cousins he’d brought along to fill out the priest’s long table, but it fell to Kyra to ask the obvious question. “French?”

  To Crispin’s surprise, it was Sabine who answered. “They were a people on old Earth, from a place not too far from Britannia, where the Imperial House is from.” She turned to Laurent, “I knew this settlement was an adorator reserve, but I didn’t realize you were all French.”

  “I’m not,” Laurent said. “I was born on Almonhas. I only came here after seminary.”

  “But Laurent is French, isn’t it?” Sabine asked, doing a credible impression of the accent, forcing the name’s second syllable out through her nose.

  The priest stopped his wine cup halfway to his lips, “My proper name was Lorn before the Church took me in.”

  “You were a soldier, weren’t you?” Kyra asked, inclining her head towards the man, “I saw your tattoo.”

  Laurent’s hand went reflexively to the side of his neck. “I … yes. I served His Radiance for twenty years. That was before this crusade against the Cielcin.” He said the word crusade with a venom Crispin didn’t fully understand. It would have been one thing if he’d fought the xenobites out beyond the farther suns, but he seemed instead to direct his anger towards the word crusade, not Cielcin. “As if the black priests had any concept of what the word crusade was meant to mean.”

  Crispin found this statement entirely inscrutable, and said as much. “Black priests?” he asked, taking in the old man’s dark cassock.

  Father Laurent seemed to understand Crispin’s scrutiny, and said, “Your Chantry wears black because of us. There’s hardly any piece of their false religion that isn’t borrowed.”

  “False religion?” Crispin echoed, unable to keep the anger from his voice. Had he been less tired he might have stood. “False religion?” Everyone else at the table had grown very quiet, he realized, and a piece of him wanted nothing more than to take back the outburst, but he was in it now.

  The Catholic priest only smiled. He did not even set down his wine. “You know how the Chantry started, don’t you? It was a project launched by the Imperial Ministry of Public Enlightenment in the … second millennium? Or the third?” He held a hand to his chin, eyes seeming to read something written along the inside of his brow line. “They wanted to venerate the first Emperor. Old King William. So they borrowed from old religions. Your prayers are Christian, your sacrifices are Hindu. Your architecture is Islamic, your icons pagan. Your scripture is plagiarism, and your canon is politics. And yes, the robes your Chanters wear are only imitations of this.” He touched the gold crucifix and the front of his dark robes. “Even that devil you wear on your ring. That was our symbol before it was yours. Cultures are always built on the bones of the cultures that come before. But your Chantry made those decisions by committee. They walk around in our clothes, pretending to have our authority.” He did set his wine cup down then, and leaned back in his chair. “They say theirs is a crusade to wipe out the Cielcin. We fought crusades once. When men were children. We fought to reclaim what was stolen from us, and to liberate our people from foreign rule. We fought because our people were dying.”

  “That’s exactly what we’re fighting for,” Sabine said, trying to smooth the conversation. “The Cielcin are destroying colonies by the hundred. Entire worlds, priest.”

  “Not our worlds,” the priest said. “I was a soldier, girl. A centurion. I fought through three Norman annexations: Casla, Tyras, and Omana. I believed as you do now, that I was fighting for god. But when your god is the Emperor, and not the Lord of Emperors, you need only do what he says to be righteous. The things I did in the name of that god …” His eyes fell. “Let us say only that I am grateful that there is another God. One who forgives.”

  Crispin scoffed, “You’d rather we leave the colonies to fend for themselves, then?”

  “Did I say that?” Laurent sna
pped. “I’m saying that it would be better if your Chantry didn’t call their bloodlust a crusade.”

  “Bloodlust?” It was Kyra’s turn for outrage, “Messer, the Cielcin are killing people by the million.”

  “And they should be stopped,” Laurent said. “It isn’t the stopping them I object to. It isn’t even the fighting. It is the attitude towards the fighting. There is a difference. If you answer violence with violence, you will inherit violence without end. Whoever slays the killer quickly discovers that killers are avenged sevenfold.”

  Crispin was made aware again of just how quiet everyone at the table had become. Wide eyes watched from all around the long table, bright in the clinical light of the repurposed terraforming station. He saw what the strange priest meant. “My brother would like you,” he said at last, and that ended the conversation.

  • • •

  The sun had set by the time they finished, and the night was growing cold. Crispin had slept more than he ought during the day, and when he tried to sleep once more the memory of his nightmares clawed at his eyes and kept them open.

  “Can’t sleep?” Kyra said softly when he sat up on the couch he’d claimed for his own.

  “No. No,” he said, each word a sentence. He didn’t mention his nightmare. He didn’t want the pilot officer knowing. Like his thoughts about Hadrian, speaking about his fears would make them more real, and he hoped that keeping silent might allow his nightmares to fade back into the Dark whence they had come. “You can, if you like. I can stay up a while.”

  The plebeian woman watched Crispin for a long while, and he found himself remembering a threat he’d made to Hadrian that last night. Hadrian had loved this woman when she had been a girl, if you could call it love. Crispin had threatened to hurt her out of petty revenge when Hadrian had beaten him. The memory made him vaguely ashamed. She was only a servant, but that was no excuse.