Howling Dark (Sun Eater)

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Smythe gave a little nod, shrugging with her lips as if to say, Good enough. And perhaps it was. “Leave us,” she said, and with a sidelong look at one another, both Bassander and I turned to go. “Not you.”

  I knew by her tone that she was speaking to me, and so lingered even as the hatch cycled and Bassander Lin vanished into the hall. Without needing to be asked, I retrieved the tribune’s thrown cane. Heavy built it was, graven of some wood black as jet, its grain the color of temple-smoke. The head and tip were brass, and unadorned. How like its owner it was. Without comment, I propped it against the side of Smythe’s desk and resumed my seat.

  She watched me in silence a while, arms folded, her first officer mirroring her in that way old companions everywhere have always had—that way in which they had each, in part, become like the other. At last she spoke. “You really are a cliché, you know that?”

  “My teacher used to call it melodramatic,” I said lightly.

  “He wasn’t wrong.” She picked at some spot on her desk that only she could see. Brown eyes found mine, and she chewed her tongue. “I take it you understand how much difficulty you placed me in with this?” She sketched a circle in the air with the tip of one finger. “You’re my responsibility, and now I’ve my legate and the First Strategos breathing down my neck. Leonid agreed your adventure was worth the risk, but Hauptmann . . . Hauptmann is not so convinced, and it is to Hauptmann I must account in the end.”

  I thought about my response a long moment before saying, “If I may, it was never my intention to place you in a difficult position. Only to hold to the mission, as I have done and will continue to do.”

  “Even when the strategos ordered otherwise?”

  “Respectfully, I know when you took me from Emesh you said it was with the understanding that Bassander would be made to check my, ah . . . my excesses. But it’s unclear to me why you would have wanted me along at all if you wanted another Bassander.” Was it my imagination? Or was the knight-tribune smiling ever so slightly? Still, she did not speak, and I added, “In any case, ma’am, it was my opinion that Strategos Hauptmann’s new orders were defeatist, and I felt the Empire and mankind both were better served by my actions than they would have been had I obeyed the strategos and returned with Captain Lin to Coritani. I am prepared to pay for my actions on the Balmung, should it come to that.”

  Smythe’s eyebrows preceded her smile by half a second, and she turned and smiled at her first officer, who reached into his belt and passed his superior officer a single hurasam. Turning to me, she said, “I hope it does not.” I had been the subject of a bet, I later learned. Crossflane had expected that I would grovel, Smythe that I would stand. The two often made such bets, or so Bassander told me much later. “We are on the verge of history here. Peace talks with the Cielcin, and peace after.”

  “Peace in our time,” Crossflane affirmed.

  For how long had these two been fighting? How many waking years? Had the white in Crossflane’s hair been dark when they began, and Smythe’s face unscarred? Whatever love of battle or glory—whatever desire to serve—had called them forth from their unknown homes had faded, became the duty of all old soldiers and that sense of family and loyalty which comes before even a love of country.

  They dreamed of peace, as soldiers often do, knowing the cost of war.

  “Well, I’m with you, Tribune,” I said in answer.

  “Good,” she said, reaching into her desk. “Which means you will be needing this.”

  She placed my sword on the surface between us. I opened my mouth.

  “Yours, I believe?”

  “How did you . . . ?”

  “Bassander had it from Lord Sagara. Don’t lose it again,” she said, and with a sigh rose and turned toward her door. “You may return to your people.” I took up my sword and rose to depart. The weight of it in my hands and the sensation of worn leather against my fingertips was like a homecoming in itself. “And Hadrian?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Tell Captain Corvo to prepare her people. You’re right. We may have need of them.”

  CHAPTER 56

  LIKE CASTLES OF ICE

  I FOLLOWED HARD ON Yume’s heels as we ascended a sweeping spiral staircase. The golem had not spoken for minutes, and ignored my attempts to question it, and so I’d surrendered and followed it from the Mistral into the bowels of Kharn’s dark Demiurge. Gargoyles watched from above, and the walls were covered in scenes of battle and creation, but I had not the time to linger in appreciation.

  We hurried out onto a narrow bridge that ran across a great, echoing emptiness. I tarried, and peered out. Far below, I could see the gray shapes of cargo freighters parked like eggs in a carton, coolant vapor wafting from exhaust ports. They were Smythe’s payment, I assumed, judging by the Imperial sunburst stenciled on their hulls.

  “This way, sir,” Yume said, and hurried me on.

  The ancillary bridge served as a sort of meeting place, more intimate and less theatric than the hall of blue candles. It was dark, and might have been a cave were it not for the deep red lights that shone low on the circular walls, casting their hell-glow up on chairs and consoles like the light of dying fires. Kharn Sagara sat above a projection well at the center of the room, like some medieval king above a gameboard. His children hung back in the shadows of his chair, ever-present, ever-watching. Smythe, too, was there, and Crossflane.

  “Here he is,” the Master said, and smiled. One of his blue eyes dogged my progress from the minute I crossed the threshold. Yume had vanished into thin air—though I saw no other door by which the golem might have exited. The constant malice of Sagara’s voice gave me pause, and despite myself—despite the presence of Smythe and Crossflane and their guards—my hand went to my sword. Sagara sniffed. “There is no need for such heroics here, boy.”

  “What is happening?” I demanded, not moving my hand.

  “The Cielcin have arrived,” Crossflane replied, clipped tones cutting into Kharn’s customary delayed response. I looked up to Kharn for confirmation, and after a moment, he waved a lazy hand to say that it was so.

  No holograph plates shone like windows on the encircling wall, nor did any porthole pierce the dark material of the Demiurge to open onto the blackness of space. I looked around, searching for some solid recognition of what was said. As if on cue, the projection well lit up, a faint wire frame depicting space around us in little cubes scaled a thousand miles to a side. The Demiurge sat in its center, and from this distance I understood the shape of her: flat and pointed, like the blade of an antique sword, but save at the extreme edges she bristled her entire length with a profusion of towers, bridges, and buttressed spires, with here and there the open mouths of docking ports gleaming amidst the shapes of statuary and weapons batteries.

  Far to one edge of the projection, like the body of some fattened game bird, sat the Obdurate, flanked now by the knife-edged shapes of Balmung and Pharaoh, as well as two other Imperial destroyers whose names I did not know. The great super-carrier herself was an ugly thing, squat and more square than the deadly forms of the ships at her side, and pathetic-seeming next to the graceful bulk and horror of Kharn’s Demiurge, but she was a hundred miles from bow to engine-clusters, and fierce as fire if engaged.

  “I don’t see them,” I said, walking around the projection pit, so that I stared through the ghost-images of the ships at Smythe, who had not moved since I entered. At some silent command of Sagara’s the image scaled, zoomed out until the little thousand-mile cubes shrank small as bouillon. And there it was.

  If the Obdurate was massive and the Demiurge more massive still, the Cielcin vessel was enormous. At first, I thought it a moon, approaching us from the side opposite the Imperial ships. Even scaled to fit Kharn’s map, the size of it was breathtaking, and I gasped. I had always known the Cielcin ships were large, guessed that they were called worldships for a reason,
but the reality was more than I had prepared for. Somewhere in the deeps of time the Cielcin had carved a ship from the rock of some mighty asteroid, some dwarf planet frigid and lifeless. Facing us she seemed only that—or would have but for the gleam of towers and lights pointing out from the surface straight at us. Behind, where the dark side of her should be were she only a moon in truth, extended the great machinery itself: the bays and engines, instruments and docking ports to whose umbilicals clung—like remora to the skin of some leviathan—the shapes of smaller, darker craft, too blurry to make out at this range.

  Smythe, Crossflane, and Kharn all had seen such sights before, and so it fell to me—alone and uninitiated—to say, “Holy Mother Earth protect us.” I tried to count the distance to it and the size of it, but my eyes kept slipping. At last I surrendered, asked, “How far off are they?”

  “More than two hundred thousand miles,” the Undying replied, using his stage-voice once more, the words falling from everywhere like the voice of God. “There they will stay.”

  Raine tapped her cane against the edge of the projection pit for attention, though when she spoke it was in a dry and quiet voice. “Any closer and we’d have to take up a parking orbit around it.” She glanced at Crossflane. “That’s one of the big ones.”

  “Now you see why I insisted they meet away from Vorgossos,” Sagara intoned. “Chaos.”

  I tried to imagine how the sudden arrival of a new moon might torment a lonely planet like Vorgossos, locked as it was about its dark star. Unable to stop myself, I circled round the projection, passing on the side opposite Kharn’s chair to keep space between myself and the Undying. The image of that Pale ship drew closer, and I tipped my head, taking it in. The great spires of her prow and the mass of the asteroid itself were locked beneath a layer of rime that glittered even in the projection, as though it were spun from crystal or grown in some deep cave, a mushroom beneath whose protective cap sheltered spire upon spire, bank upon bank, terrace upon terrace of alien pilings, their shapes organic and unnamed.

  In my mind’s eye, I saw it too. Not as I saw it there, ghostly and flickering on Kharn’s display, but as it was. Truly was. Out there, swallowing the stars. I saw again what I had seen in Calagah, was shown again by Brethren: the Cielcin host marching through the heavens, and behind them stars and planets going down like cinders and cooling down to black. And I saw the Cielcin who led them: taller than any man I had ever known, tall and terrible as Death herself, crowned in silver and sapphire, its fangs like the very ice of its palace.

  Prince Aranata, I thought, and knew it with a certainty I could not explain. I remembered my own head tumbling from my shoulders, and had to grip the edge of the projection pit to steady myself. My gorge rose, and I feared I might be ill there on Kharn’s darkly mirrored floor. Fortunately, no one noticed my distress, so taken were they with the events unfolding around them.

  “Can we hail them?” asked Raine Smythe.

  “There is no need,” Sagara replied, and pointed.

  The lights went out, and for the briefest instant the only lights—besides the glow off my terminal, and Crossflane’s and Smythe’s—were those of Kharn’s chorus of floating eye drones. The red glow of the bridge lights and the laser-bright images of the holograph pit went out. I half-expected to hear the sound of canned thunder rattling from just offstage, waited for the peasant boy to hammer his sheet of tin or for crystal clarions to sound.

  The prince, when he—when it—appeared, did not simply materialize above the holograph plate. No. It strode into frame, appearance slowly resolving to clarity as the Demiurge’s communications equipment constructed the image, compiling it in real time. “We will speak to Sagara and no other!” It shouted, speaking the language of the Pale. I could feel both Crossflane and Smythe looking at me, but I was unsure whether or not the Cielcin could hear me, and so held silent, not wanting to jeopardize whatever strange alliance the demoniac had with the demons.

  “Eka ti-saem gi!” Kharn’s voice boomed through the speakers, though I was close enough to the man himself to hear him whisper through his own lips. “Here I am.”

  The creature was not the one I had seen in my visions, though it was tall and high-crowned, and dressed in robes of stunning blue that left arms bare save for the drape of fine, silver chains. In one hand it held a staff crowned with a broken circle, the symbol of some office I did not know or understand. I felt a brief surge of relief, for surely here was Prince Aranata Otiolo. This Cielcin’s face was broader, flatter, with a tattoo in black ink covering the left side of its face from the base of its crown of horns to the tip of its chin.

  The joy I’d felt and the relief shattered. “I am come on behalf of my master,” the creature said, “Aeta Utsebimn Aranata Otiolo, Viudihom, Prince of the Itani Otiolo, Keeper to his People, Master to his Slaves.” As it spoke, the Cielcin rattled its staff, so that chimes wound about its orbit just below the headpiece clanged their hollow tones. When it finished, it slammed the staff down with such force that the staff stayed standing, and I guessed the creature stood not upon tile or stone, but earth. It beat its chest with both hands. “He who fashioned our world, who brought forth life from dead stone! He who brought us out of the Chains of Utaiharo! Who Sees the Watchers! Who knows the Mind of the Makers! Who leads us through the emptiness and the light!”

  It was not the Prince, after all.

  I looked up at Kharn Sagara, ageless and Undying, expecting from him a litany of equal magnitude, such as our Imperial heralds so often shower upon His Radiance. Kharn did not reply. Unimpressed, he leaned back in his seat, one hand patting young Ren on the back of his head, mussing his hair. His silence allowed the coteliho, the herald, to say on. “We have seen the ships of the yukajjimn! You told us there would be no fleet! Only their spokesman!”

  “It’s a cohort!” Smythe exclaimed. “Not a fleet!”

  The Cielcin herald did not respond. It had not heard.

  Kharn replied, “The humans had to travel here as well. I have asked their ships to hold their current position, the same as yours. Only their representatives and a token force have been allowed aboard my ship.”

  Five hundred aboard the Schiavona, I thought, and three hundred on the Mistral. A token force. Then something else that Kharn had said struck me. The humans had to travel here . . . The humans. He had not counted himself among our number, or else the Cielcin word for humans—yukajjimn, vermin—applied not to humanity as a class, but to the Empire in particular.

  In either case Kharn considered himself a third party, and the coteliho did not challenge this claim, but rather swept its braided queue over its shoulders and raised one taloned fist. “This will be acceptable to the Aeta Aranata, who sits on a throne of his slaves.” It spread its fingers then, each longer than a man’s and tipped with a claw enameled a deep and vital blue.

  “Tutai wo,” came Kharn’s reply, and his lips murmured, “Very good.”

  Knowing now that the herald could not hear us, I ran over the entire conversation with Crossflane and Smythe. “It’s saying that they will send security staff to investigate the Demiurge for traps. Kharn’s arranging the details.”

  Sagara raised a fist in a gesture identical to that the coteliho had used, and for the first time I realized that it was no true hand. Like his chest, the left hand and arm were of pale metal. And like his chest, some crude simulacrum of flesh—plated and interleaved like the plates of a suit of armor—was stretched tight in panels over the metal skeleton beneath, so that it seemed a stylized impression of a hand he raised, and not a hand itself. And Kharn said, “Wananbe o-caradiu ti-Aeta ba-okarin shi, kajadi-se!” I have prepared a gift for your master, slave!

  “A gift?” Raine asked, leaning toward me. “What gift?”

  My eyes darted from her confused face to Crossflane’s bland one, wondering. “I’m not sure.”

  The Undying master paused, and I swear each of
his blue and shining eyes turned to look at us. “Yukajjimn kajadin bi thumdein. Yuramyi caramnte ti-kousun ti-yukajjire, eza rakanyi caramnte ti-osun jia.”

  I felt the blood go from my face, replaced by something bright and cold as steel drawn at dawn. I glared at Smythe. “What?” she asked, confusion coloring that bland stone she called a face. “What is it?”

  “What have you done?” I asked, voice flat as I squared to face her, looking down my nose.

  Kharn did not notice, continued speaking to the Cielcin coteliho.

  Smythe shook her head. “I don’t . . . what are you talking about?”

  “What have you done?” I repeated.

  Crossflane grabbed me by the shoulder, tried to turn me from his commanding officer. “What did he say? Talk sense, Marlowe.”

  The first officer’s hair and chops shone snowy white in the light of the holograph well, his face and Smythe’s pale as ivory masks. I snarled. “Sagara said he will give the Cielcin five thousand human slaves. Slaves that you”—and here I, against all sense and caution, prodded Smythe in the chest—“gave him.” Ivory masks transmuted to marble. I jerked my head at Sagara where he sat between his silent children. “Is that what you gave him? Was that the promised price, Smythe?”

  The knight-tribune looked away. “Twenty thousand. From our colonial stores.”

  “Twenty . . .” It was all I could do not to strike her, to strike the lip of the projection pit beside me. “The colonial stores?”

  “From the storehouses,” Crossflane interjected, as if this were some sort of justification. The Empire maintained millions of prospective colonists, plebeians who had signed up for resettlement when their prospects ran out at home. Like our soldiers, they might sleep on ice for centuries before they and their families—or they alone—were decanted and deposited beneath the light of some new and alien sun. Twenty thousand of these, it seemed, would not wake at all, unless it were under the eyes and grasping hands of Kharn Sagara in the black pits of Vorgossos.