The Lesser Devil

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Then a voice rang out, rough tones made rougher by the cheap amplification of the troop carrier’s speakers. “Lord Marlowe! Surrender!”

  Shots rained down from the rock face above the old church, but the depleted uranium of the MAG rifles broke against the Kingfisher’s Royse shield to no effect.

  And all was still. The wind in the vale had died, the sounds of the fighting in the ruined village below quieted, and no birds sang.

  Crispin took a step forward, kept his sword ready in a low guard. The voice rang out again, crackling through feedback whine. “Surrender, and the rest of your plebeians will be spared.”

  “Is that you, Lord Orin?” Crispin spoke from his diaphragm, filling the air between him and the hovering ship. But no, that fellow Medved had said the surviving member of the disgraced house was a woman.

  “I said surrender!” the voice said. “If you don’t, we will wipe the rest of this village off the face of this planet!”

  “If you were going to do that,” Crispin snarled, “you’d have done it first and at no cost to your men.” Silence. No answer from above. Crispin took another half-step forward, so that he stood at the very edge of the steps that led into the church. “Tell your mistress she’s overplayed her hand! Your orders were to capture us alive!” He paused. There was still no answer from above, and Crispin imagined the mercenary captain or whoever it was on that Kingfisher relaying communications to the Orin serpent in the dark tower. So he added, “Tell your mistress if she wants to speak to me, she can come down and face me like a man! Tell her I’ll fight her. One to one! Only spare these people and this place!”

  The silence pressed on for five unending seconds. Ten. With nothing left to say, Crispin waited.

  “Like a man.” It was not the mercenary captain who spoke. It was a woman’s voice—high and cold and nasal—sneering with the acute derision of old age. “Like a man, you say? I am not a man, boy, nor will I play your idiot games. I have you right where I want you.”

  “Then come down!” Crispin shouted, and beat his chest with the hand that yet held the plasma burner.

  The Orin woman’s voice came back sharply, “This is not a negotiation, boy! Surrender, and the lives of your peasants will be spared.”

  Crispin faltered, looking past the bulky shape of the Kingfisher, past the low buildings and the columns of smoke and the blasted outer wall to where Lady Orin’s ship hung like the Sword of Damocles above the middle of the vale. Though it was dark and cold for the moment, he remembered the blue-white glare of its primary cannon like a single, evil eye.

  When he did not speak, the old woman’s voice came back more sharply, “You have nowhere to run. Not for you or your sister.”

  At the word sister, Crispin felt his hands clench. He looked round, at the bodies about him—the men he had killed—and the bodies dead in the yard. He saw the dead boy not far off, and the shattered head and helmet of the man that boy had helped kill. And he beheld the smoke of the village burning, and remembered the spray of stone and shout of plasma as Kyra and her tower were smote from on high.

  And he knew what he had to do. Knew this Orin woman would not refuse, knew it might just buy them the time they needed. What was it that mad priest Laurent had said?

  All those who take up the sword will die by the sword.

  So Crispin put his down. He clicked the blade and watched the exotic matter transmuted to pale vapor his hands. Reversing his grip on the hilt, he passed it to Lud standing beside him. The peltast took it on reflex, and when he started to object, Crispin squeezed his hand into a fist to silence the other man’s objections. Lud fell silent and stepped back, “Give it to my sister. Keep her safe until reinforcements arrive.”

  “Sir, I—”

  Crispin made the silencing gesture with his fist again, then saluted the soldier, pressing that fist to his chest. Lud returned the gesture, extending his hand. “You can’t have my sister!” Crispin exclaimed, “But you can have me!” He held his hands out—not above his head—but straight out to his sides, defiant as a gladiator in Colosso. Crispin took the steps down from the church one at a time. He felt the eyes of the congregation behind him and the gaze of the soldiers ahead, and all at once he felt very much alone, as if the space between him and the men at his back and the one between him and foes were light-years across.

  “That isn’t the deal!”

  “This isn’t a negotiation, woman!” Crispin shouted, mirroring her tone and her derision. “Besides, you’re too late! Sabine isn’t here! We went our separate ways two nights ago!”

  “No Marlowe would lay down his life for a pack of plebeians!” The words came back. “You lie!

  “If I lie, you can’t risk shelling the village!” Crispin said hotly, “If ransom is your plan, ransom me! But you will not have Sabine. But if you swear to call off your dogs, you can have me now!”

  Silence on the other end once more. Then a word: “Agreed.”

  “Swear it!” Crispin said, “Swear it by the masks of your ancestors!” “My ancestors’ masks were destroyed by your father!” the voice returned.

  “Swear it on their names, then! On your blood!” Crispin shot back, not lowering his hands. “Leave these people alone! Take me instead!”

  He half-expected the Kingfisher and the army of mercenaries to fire on him and the church, half-expected the dark tower to fire and kill them all. He shut his eyes and waited for the word to drop like the executioner’s White Sword.

  “Agreed.”

  Hands seized him, for as he spoke a full half dozen foreign peltasts came forward, armor rattling. They seized his arms and one man forced a pair of manacles onto Crispin’s wrists. They tore off his wrist terminal and stamped on it. The delicate mechanism crushed on the paving stones. The Kingfisher was sinking lower, descending towards the level of the yard. Crispin had to shut his eyes as he was frogmarched forward to keep grit from getting in them. After a moment, he dared to look back. Lud was standing in the doorway with the surviving defenders. The man who looked like his brother Hadrian was there, too. Crispin offered his lone soldier a small smile and jerked his head as if to say: Go.

  Chapter 15

  The Afterling

  They must have stunned him.

  Crispin groaned, tried to sit up, plastic sheet creaking beneath him. Someone had put a slipcover on the massive winged armchair he sat in to keep the blood off. His arms were still behind him, and from the way they ached he guessed they would remain numb even after the effect of the stunner wore off. And yet aside from the manacles at his wrists, he was unbound, and might have stood if he trusted his legs to work.

  He did not trust them, and so he remained seated, studying his surroundings.

  And what surroundings they were!

  He was a palatine lord of the Sollan Empire, and used to finery— but still, the place was fine. For a few confusing moments, he wondered where he was, only slowly remembering the dark tower that had watched the village from afar. The walls and mouldings were of dark wood, hand-carved and intricate, and the floors were marble. There were marble statues to match—white and black alike—and bronze ones decorating the iron rail of the staircase that wrapped up and marched around the upper level, showcasing a collection of books and antique china under glass. A great arched window stood at the wider end of the trapezoidal room, admitting Delos’s silver sunlight and a vision of the mountains all around.

  They hadn’t moved, then. Hadn’t left the vale and village of St. Maximus. That meant the Orin woman had not believed Crispin when he said Sabine had fled. Crispin tried to laugh, but his lips were numb, and he spluttered piteously. That was just as well. Better this stalemate—assuming, of course, that the Orin woman had called off the fighting as they had agreed.

  Crispin tried to rise, but it was harder to stand than he thought with his hands secured behind his back. The armchair was too expansive, and his limbs were still sluggish and stun-lame. That was just as well; he didn’t look forward to regaining sen
sation in his arms. And his head was starting to pound from the thrashing he had received earlier. He tried again, fell back against the slick plastic, swore loudly.

  “Awake, are you?” came the voice—her voice—from somewhere behind Crispin’s chair. There came a hissing sound, as of several snakes disturbed at once, and Crispin tried to turn his head to see, but was stopped by the upholstered side of the seat.

  Thump.

  “Do you know how long I’ve waited? How far I’ve come?”

  Thump.

  “How far I’ve come to find you?” Her voice was coming closer on uneven feet with the accompanying hiss of serpents. “How far I’ve come for vengeance?”

  Thump.

  A hand curled around the side of Crispin’s chair, gray and liver-spotted. Never before had Crispin seen so old and withered a limb. It was a skeleton’s hand: gnarled, knob-knuckled, and blue veined. Great rings weighed down those ancient fingers; scratched, old gold set with amethyst and alexandrite. Golden chains hung upon her wrist, and pearls. “My family is dead, Marlowe. My son. And his poor sons. His wife and her sisters. And their children. Do you know how many nobile children there were on Linon when your father sucked all the air out of the palace?”

  Thump.

  Crispin remembered an old joke Hadrian told him once—or had it been Gibson, the old tutor?—about a horse that each day went past a hole in a tall fence. First the head, then the tail. A boy watching through the fence—Crispin thought that maybe it had been the Cid Arthur, for the boy had never seen a horse entire before—saw this and proclaimed, “The head causes the tail!”

  On second thought, perhaps it was not the Cid Arthur in the story. It was a stupid thing to say. Nevertheless that aged and withered hand caused an aged and withered arm in gold and white brocade. The arm caused a shoulder, and the shoulder …

  Crispin almost fell out of the massive chair.

  The woman before Crispin was ancient, skin the color of old parchment stretched and hanging from the bones like spiderwebs. The eyes— though sunken—were bright as if with fever, the irises so pale a blue they were almost white. She was totally bald, and she gave the impression of one suffering from a long and unrelenting illness. But it was not her death’s head visage or the witch-light of her eyes that so startled Crispin.

  It was the machine grafted to her chest, hissing beneath the white brocade robe she wore. Beneath the garment, Crispin could tell that Lady Orin-Natali was horribly thin, and by the shape of the machine she wore, Crispin guessed that parts of her flesh had been pared away. The thing wheezed and hissed, and as she moved fully into view, Crispin saw the mechanism that encased one withered leg. It was that leg which had made the thumping he had heard.

  “What are you?” Crispin asked, stunned.

  “I asked you a question, boy,” she wheezed, leaning one hand heavily on the arm of Crispin’s chair. “Do you know how many children your father killed that day?” Crispin did not answer her. And when his silence held, she slapped the chair so hard she staggered, and Crispin saw a guardsman stir against the far wall. Crispin had thought him a suit of armor on display a moment before, but realized that he’d been foolish to imagine this Orin-Natali woman would allow herself to be alone with her prey, even bound as he was. “How many?”

  Crispin bit the words off. “I don’t know.”

  “Nine,” she said, cradling her hands, “nine babies. And Gerard no more than a year old. I hadn’t even met him yet.” Those bony hands tightened, each trying to strangle the other. “But your lord father had only three!” She stretched that last word into a doleful wail and stepped away, putting distance between herself and Crispin. “It isn’t fair! There’s not enough blood in your miserable house to repay mine drop for drop. And you!” She rounded on Crispin once again, pointing a crooked finger at him, “You hide your sister from me!”

  “You’re Lyra Orin-Natali, aren’t you?” Crispin asked, remembering the name at last. The name had come back to him out of some half-forgotten memory. “Lord Orin was your son.” This was no distant cousin, no forgotten member of a forgotten branch of her house, but Lord Thaddeus Orin’s own mother. She must have been out-system when her son went to war against House Kephalos and House Marlowe.

  The old woman’s shoulders sagged, and she turned back to look at him, leaning on a gilded ebony cane for balance. “He could have spared the children. Your father.”

  Crispin wondered if this was even the same woman who had spoken to him through her shuttle on the steps of St. Maximus. She seemed somehow less cogent, less sane. Or was it only that she was coming unglued in the presence of her enemy? He tried to sit up in the engulfing chair, thrust out his chin. “Your son started the war. He attacked Delos when the vicereine was offworld attending the Emperor.”

  “I know that, you idiot!” she snapped, words coming with such force that her guards stirred along the outer wall. “I told him to! Thaddeus was a dear boy, but he had no head for politics. No ambition. He was happy to sit on Linon with his girls and his boxing matches.”

  Thoughtlessly, stupidly, Crispin said, “He’d still be there if you hadn’t opened your mouth.”

  Crispin had not thought it was possible, but Lyra Orin-Natali turned even whiter. “You think I don’t know that?” Black painted nails sank into her fleshless arms. “But what your lord father did was uncalled-for! There are rules in poine!” she exclaimed, using the ancient word for a vendetta, an inter-house civil war. “My family should have been ransomed! Thaddeus may have been a loss under the circumstances, but the children? Your father is a murderer!”

  “So are you!” Crispin snapped, and found he had regained enough mobility to sit up. “I left Meidua with half a hundred men. Almost all of them are dead! And you’ve nearly destroyed an entire village!”

  “Peasants!” Lyra Orin-Natali spat. “Plebeians! These you weigh against the lives of my children, my grandchildren, and great-grandchildren? Our blood was as old as this star system! And now it’s gone!” And in a small voice—almost not to be heard—she added, “Except for me.”

  Crispin had to admit that she was right. Sharply as he felt the deaths of his men and of the Catholic adorators, he had to admit it was not the same. The peasants would be replaced. They would have children by the dozen each generation, and in a matter of decades it would be like war had never been to St. Maximus. And when Father Laurent was gone and Jean-Louis and Jacqui and her son and all the others were old and died, they would speak of this day as though it were ancient history, while all the while the palatines who remembered it—long-lived, their memories undimmed—lived on, mere miles away.

  “You’re right,” Crispin admitted. “It’s not the same.”

  But even as he spoke, he heard a little voice far off in the bowels of his skull whisper, You don’t believe that. He had given himself up to stop the shelling of the town—or had it been only to protect Sabine? Her life was the only one in all the village below that really mattered, wasn’t it? Sabine was palatine. His sister. A sibling to replace the sibling he’d lost. Had he been a hero when he handed his sword to Lud and stepped into no man’s land? Or only her brother?

  Was there a difference?

  Lady Orin-Natali had not spoken, so Crispin did. “Why haven’t you killed me already?” He knew the answer. He’d been angry enough at other times in his life to understand a fraction. Sometimes, it is never enough to merely kill your enemy. Sometimes vengeance is too poor a coin. This woman had spent decades—centuries—in anticipation of this moment. How much of that time had she spent in fugue? Dreaming in cryonic suspension between the stars of this moment? If it were over too quickly, it would seem almost like she had come all this way for nothing.

  All of this he saw written on the folds of that ancient face.

  The old woman’s chest implants whined, and she staggered. Presently, a pinch-faced man with olive skin and long, black hair appeared from some corner could not see. He steadied Lyra, then opened her robe enough to check th
e dials beneath one arm. The grand dame leaned on her cane the while, not speaking—or perhaps unable to speak. But through it all those white eyes never left Crispin’s face, and it seemed that each crease and wrinkle was a line written in a language Crispin half-remembered, singing of her rage.

  When at last she could speak again, Lyra Orin-Natali croaked, “Where did your sister go?” Crispin said nothing, but looked away from the old woman and out the arched window overlooking the vale and the village. “I won’t ask again. Answer my question, Marlowe, or I will raze this miserable little town of yours.”

  He clenched his jaw. The old woman shifted, moving back into his line of sight, stumping towards the window. Her body cast a misshapen shadow against the bright day without, like the shape of some broken- winged old bird. “Carlo!” the woman said, raising one claw-like hand, “Take aim at the sanctum! Prepare to fire on my mark.” Whoever Carlo was, he must have heard her, for deep in the bowels of the yacht, Crispin could hear a deep, whining drone. As if she were responding to some message that only she could hear, Lady Orin-Natali said, “Very good. You may fire in five.” She glanced back at Crispin, white eyes shining with their fevered gleam. “Four.” Crispin clenched his jaw. The rectory where Sabine was hiding had been designed to withstand the explosive forces of terraforming. Surely it could withstand a plasma cannon? “Three.” But what if the villagers had compromised the building’s safety somehow in all the centuries they’d occupied it? “Two.” What if Sabine had left the building entirely? “One.”

  “Stop!” Crispin almost shouted. “Stop! Stop! Stop!”

  “Hold your fire!” the old witch snapped, rounding to leer at Crispin. She raised a finger, shook it at Crispin accusingly. “You! You lied to me! Your sister hasn’t gone anywhere! She’s still in the village, isn’t she?” Crispin said nothing; he didn’t trust himself to speak. “You know, I al- most believed you down there? When you said she’d left, and handed yourself over? I thought about taking you and leaving the system. Mailing you back to your father. Piece. By. Piece.” She clutched her robe about her, wavering a little on her feet. “No matter. Your little performance earned the plebs a few hours. No more. I had thought of feeding the girl to my drophids while you watched, but like I say: no matter. No matter. Now that I know I have you both! Carlo!”