Howling Dark (Sun Eater)
Page 1
Also by Christopher Ruocchio:
The Sun-Eater
EMPIRE OF SILENCE
HOWLING DARK
Copyright © 2019 by Christopher Ruocchio.
All Rights Reserved.
Jacket art by Kieran Yanner.
Jacket design by Katie Anderson.
Interior design by Alissa Rose Theodor.
Edited by Katie Hoffman.
DAW Book Collectors No. 1828.
Published by DAW Books, Inc.
1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Ebook ISBN: 9780756413057
DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED
U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES
—MARCA REGISTRADA
HECHO EN U.S.A.
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
Version_1
To my parents,
Paul and Penny.
For always being there.
I’m going to be all right.
CONTENTS
Also by Christopher Ruocchio
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: The Red Company
Chapter 2: Suspended and Undead
Chapter 3: The Sunken City
Chapter 4: The Painted Man
Chapter 5: Eyes Like Stars
Chapter 6: The Road to Vorgossos
Chapter 7: Things Unseen, Things Remembered
Chapter 8: The Council of Captains
Chapter 9: Absent Friends
Chapter 10: Jinan
Chapter 11: Your Radiance
Chapter 12: A Journey’s End
Chapter 13: Obedience
Chapter 14: Conspiracy
Chapter 15: The First Treason
Chapter 16: The Tomb
Chapter 17: The Breaking of the Company
Chapter 18: The Other Edge
Chapter 19: The Gates of Babylon
Chapter 20: The Bonecutter
Chapter 21: A Matter of Price
Chapter 22: Blood and Water
Chapter 23: The Pilot
Chapter 24: The Enigma of Hours
Chapter 25: Becalmed in Motion
Chapter 26: The Oracle
Chapter 27: Valka
Chapter 28: The Dark World
Chapter 29: The Profane City
Chapter 30: The Suppliants
Chapter 31: Tartarus
Chapter 32: Saturn or Dis
Chapter 33: Divide and Conquer
Chapter 34: In the House of Kharn Sagara
Chapter 35: The Gorgon
Chapter 36: The Devil and the Golem
Chapter 37: Tanaran
Chapter 38: The Face of Failure
Chapter 39: The Last Story
Chapter 40: The Garden of Everything
Chapter 41: The Tree of Life
Chapter 42: The Children of Saturn
Chapter 43: Brethren
Chapter 44: Understanding
Chapter 45: The Apostate
Chapter 46: The Long Cold
Chapter 47: One Villain and Another
Chapter 48: A Red Reunion
Chapter 49: Two Treasons
Chapter 50: The Devil and the Honest Man
Chapter 51: Lost Time
Chapter 52: Bora
Chapter 53: The Third Treason
Chapter 54: Bringing Storm
Chapter 55: The Verge of History
Chapter 56: Like Castles of Ice
Chapter 57: The Prince of Hell
Chapter 58: The Chalcenterite
Chapter 59: No Man an Island
Chapter 60: The Pavilion
Chapter 61: Valka Again
Chapter 62: The Limits of Reason
Chapter 63: The Apostol
Chapter 64: A Devil’s Bargain
Chapter 65: Of Gods and Engines
Chapter 66: A Bloody Star
Chapter 67: Traitor and Patriot
Chapter 68: The Narrow Way
Chapter 69: Divide and Conquer
Chapter 70: Play the Orator
Chapter 71: Hope Is a Cloud
Chapter 72: The Pit
Chapter 73: Broken
Chapter 74: Howling Dark
Chapter 75: The Eleventh Hour
Chapter 76: The Three Immortals
Chapter 77: Theseus Himself
Chapter 78: The First Strategos
Chapter 79: Departure
Chapter 80: Halfmortal
Dramatis Personae
Index of Worlds
Lexicon
About the Author
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
What a first year this has been! Since its release in the summer of 2018, Empire of Silence has found its way into the hands of several thousand readers, people to whom I will be forever grateful. If the last set of acknowledgments was for the people who saw me to publication—my family, my friends, my agents, the good people at DAW Books and my coworkers at Baen, to my teachers and the rest—this page is for you and yours, Reader. Without all of you the first book would be rotting away on a shelf or in some warehouses and I would be forced to take up some honest trade. Let me thank several of you who didn’t make it into book one in particular, but in no particular order.
Firstly, to the booksellers! To the folks at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh—especially Rene and Tim—and the good people at Anderida Books in the UK, for their kindness and support. To Glennis of The Missing Volume and Alexi of Bard’s Tower, for their friendship and for helping me navigate the labyrinth of conventions.
To the reviewers! To Petros, Tracy, Emily Grace, Nils, the folks at Unseen Library, and more. I am touched that you all enjoyed the book and hope that this one is all you were hoping for. It has been nice getting to know the lot of you.
To the readers! Many of you have reached out to me online and off, and though I cannot possibly list you all, I am grateful to each and every one of you. To David K, TJ, Lena, Alex, and MaryAnn, to Luca in Italy, and Emil in Sweden, and Nathan down in Australia. And of course to my online friends. I couldn’t do this without you all.
To the new friends I have made (if I may so claim). To Gerald Brandt, Ed Willett, EC Ambrose, Joshua Palmatier, and Julie Czerneda, for making this new kid feel welcome at the DAW family get-togethers. To Dan Stout and Cass Morris—for being the new kids along with me. To my Baen family: the Webers, the Drakes, the Correias (thanks for helping me hit my single biggest day of sales, Larry!), Ka
cey Ezell, Jody Lynn Nye, Mike Massa, Griffin Barber . . . and everyone. To RR Virdi and LJ Hachmeister, for being the coolest. And of course to D.J. Butler, one of the finest and most generous people in the entire industry.
And lastly, to Jenna, who in the last year and a half has gone from my friend to my fiancée. I will always be grateful to Jenna. For everything. I love you, dear lady.
CHAPTER 1
THE RED COMPANY
DARKNESS.
Green eyes watched from the darkness like statues in a fog. I felt them like fishhooks in me, dragging me upward. I felt wrong. Cold. The image of Bordelon’s face on the holograph—moments before I wiped it from existence—seemed to float on the air. His was not alone. Gilliam’s was there, lips twisted as he was, a sneer made flesh. And Uvanari. A confusion of sound filled my universe: the screams of dying men, the cheering of the Colosso crowd, my own blood pounding in my ear.
I knew then, knew that I had been dead, and that all this sensory weight was the cost and burden of consciousness returning. Of being alive. I was alive. Again.
“Lord Commandant?” A familiar voice, strangely accented, hinting at a language I could not remember—if indeed I knew it at all. “Lord Commandant?”
I was hiding in a basement on Pharos, that was it. There was a woman with me, a woman I loved, her hair blacker than the shadows. We were hiding from Bordelon and the Normans after they sold us to Admiral Whent. No. No, that was a long time ago, and a long time since Emesh, but my confused brain drank the scent of her and of burning wood, recalling the warmth of her and the taste of the ration bars we had shared alone in the darkness.
“Lord Commandant?”
The fog was clearing, retreating into the depths of history and of time as yet uncounted. I could still hear shouts, sobs, and I knew they were my own, conducted through bone and time to make me feel and see the horrors of my past because to know them was to be alive. Hard fingers tore my clothes that night in Borosevo, Cat’s body sank into the canals . . . At once sharp as new experience, my memories retreated from me like votive lanterns to the skies. I grasped at them, and found my arms like trunks of lead, unmoving. Warmth was rising in me, chasing out that pelagic cold, bleeding in from both my arms.
Bleeding.
I was in a bed. Or else in something very like a bed, and someone was standing over me. I beheld old Tor Gibson, his gray eyes green in my delirium—green as his robes—his leonine mane and whiskers bristling in the wind off Meidua’s waters.
“Dead?” I croaked, unsure if I meant himself or me.
The old scholiast smiled. “Not yet. We might avoid that yet.”
“Lord Commandant, lie still please.” That strange voice. Familiar. It came from Gibson’s mouth, or so I thought. “You’re still fugue-blind.”
“No,” I said, looking at the scholiast. “I can . . . can see Gibson.”
“There’s no one here but us!” The voice had moved, was opposite Gibson now, but the scholiast had not changed.
When Gibson spoke, his lips did not move. The actor knows he is on stage. The character knows there is no stage. It sounded like one of his scholiast’s aphorisms, but I could not remember it.
I was going mad. I was in a basement on Pharos—or was that years ago? She had been there with me, with Admiral Whent’s thugs out after us, and we had come out alive. And Gibson was dead. And I’d been dead—or nearly so. Frozen.
“Do you know where you are?”
A question, a question that spoke to the oldest exploratory and orienting circuits in the ancientmost corners of my brain. Do you know where you are?
As if the curtains on a stage were pulled back and the holography of the set pieces generated, the fog cleared and the real world took form. I was in medica. White walls, white floor, white ceiling. Too clean. I lay in the opened husk of a portable fugue crèche that someone had floated in here and bolted to the slab for revival. Turning, I saw that Gibson was gone. A hallucination? A vision brought on doubtless by the fact that there was still a part of me that thought in Gibson’s voice.
Twelve years since Emesh.
It came back to me. “We’re on the Pharaoh.” We had acquired the ship on Pharos, had taken it after that business with the Normans and Admiral Whent, after Bordelon betrayed us. We had been hired—alongside Bordelon’s company—to run weapons to freedom fighters attempting to overthrow the planetary dictator Marius Whent, all part of our efforts to build our credibility as a mercenary outfit as we hunted for Vorgossos. But Bordelon had betrayed us, and we had been forced to fight our way out. Marius Whent had been forced to surrender. Emil Bordelon had been killed, betrayed in his turn by his own soldiers—because I’d made them an offer they could not refuse.
The woman at my bedside, an ink-skinned Norman with hair like curling steel, nodded a judicious little nod. “Yes. And do you know who I am?” She wore a set of burgundy fatigues, form-fitting. A uniform. My uniform, I had designed it, with the flapped pockets and piped sleeves.
“Doctor Okoyo,” I said, an address and not an answer, “I don’t think there was any cryoburn.” I tried to sit up, at once aware as Adam of my nakedness.
“Don’t move, Lord Marlowe.” She pushed me down, gentle but firm, and said, “I’ve not got all the TX9 out of you.”
Turning, I saw the blood bags hanging from their staff beside me. AB Positive. Opposite was a drip pan emptying the anti-freezing agent from my veins. It shone cerulean in the too-white light; almost black. After a moment, I said, “You could have left me for a medtech, doctor.”
Okoyo snorted. “Commodore Lin would skin me if I did that, and you Imperial types actually skin people.”
“You have a point,” I conceded, “but you’ve nothing to fear from us, surely.” We sat in silence a moment, the doctor busying herself with a diagnostic terminal while I pretended I was not naked and aware of it. I tried to sort the visions I had seen. Waking from fugue was never easy. The men who had abandoned me on Emesh had shoved just enough blood in me that they could not be accused of murder, and I had been unconscious for that ordeal, but on each occasion since, I had passed through a warren of memory and noise to the quiet of the world. The brain hyper-acted, so they said, on returning to consciousness. It was like dying, I thought, for in fugue the processes of my life were suspended as in formaldehyde, and that was as good as being dead. I was little different than a corpse, or a side of meat in a freezer.
I was wrong, of course. It is nothing like dying. Nothing at all.
“What’s the standard date?”
“Sixteen two-nineteen point one-one.” She did not turn her head.
“November,” I mused. Of the Year of our Empire 16219. Forty-eight years since Emesh, though I had lived but twelve of them. Forty-eight years pretending to be mercenaries. Forty-eight years free of Count Mataro and his designs on me for his daughter. Forty-eight years a special conscript of the Legions of the Sun.
Forty-eight more years of war. Of the abortive, genocidal crusade against the Cielcin, the xenobites who drank of human worlds and preyed upon our people like wolves among sheep. Forty-eight years hunting for Vorgossos, carrying Cielcin prisoners and the hope of parley. Of peace.
“Is there some news?” I asked, sitting up now that the doctor could not stop me. My head swam, and I braced myself against the hard edges of my crèche. After a moment I stabilized, and tore a folded robe from the slab beside me. “Did we get a lead on that arms dealer the pirates gave us back on Sanora?” The doctor turned at the sound of my movement and hurried to my side. Her voice strained, she tried to lay me back down, but I held up a hand. “I’m just trying to cover myself.”
Okoyo glowered. “You’re just trying to make yourself pass out, Lord Marlowe.”
“It’s all right,” I murmured, voice suddenly faint. “It’s all right.”
She kept an arm around my shoulders, and it was all I could do
to puddle the robe in my lap—but that was enough. My own breathing consumed my attention, thick and wet. Rolling, I bent over the drip pan and coughed up a glob of the violet suspension fluid that yet settled in my lungs. “You’re not all right,” Okoyo said. “You’ve been an ice cube for the last six years.”
“Six years?” I asked, surprised. I had not done the math. “Where are we?”
The doctor shook her head. “Best leave that to the Commodore, Lord.”
Bassander Lin looked older than I remembered, and I wondered just how much of the intervening travel time the prickly captain had spent awake. I say captain, of course, because that was what he was. His role as Commodore was a mask, a persona, as much as was my position of Lord Commandant. The change in him was a subtle thing: no creasing about the eyes or mouth, no gray at the temples. But then, Lin was patrician, a bronze-skinned Mandari from an old family, his blood nearly so elevated as mine. The only real change lay within those black eyes of his. Something had hardened in them, the slow venom of our long association transmuted to amber; crystallized. His quarters aboard the Pharaoh had belonged to the Norman Commodore Emil Bordelon, and Bassander Lin had made some effort to remove all signs of the rooms’ previous occupant. The pornographic artwork was all gone, the ornate frames discarded, the carpets removed. I could still see the fixtures in the floor where the Commodore’s too-large bed had been, replaced by a simple soldier’s cot. There were no blankets.
“Sleep well?” he asked, surveying me from behind his desk. “Okoyo gave you a clean bill of health.” He had an annoying habit of answering his own questions. So I didn’t speak, but slumped low in my chair, uncomfortable in my crimson uniform. Bassander was dressed identically, but on him the high collar and tokens of rank seemed to rest easy. I at least had no badges to wear, save the sigil I had made, picked out in gold thread on the left bicep. Bassander toyed with a heavy mug on his desk, not looking at me. “That woman Corvo thinks she’s found our man.”
I sat upright, leaning over the edge of the desk. Lin’s flinty gaze tripped over my face, and he took a drink. “The Painted Man?” That was what the Sanoran pirates had called him.