Howling Dark (Sun Eater)

by Christopher Ruocchio

  We were silent as well, leastways until the massive doors were opened, rising like the portcullis of some medieval castle in the deeps of time. Then the horn blast blew, and the men of the Sollan Empire cried out in one voice. “Earth!” they cried, invoking the mother goddess. “Earth!” And I, who did not pray, who did not believe, cried out with them, “Earth!”

  The sons of men had come.

  But come where? As the gate went up, a white-gold light streamed out, throwing our shadows back against the blackness of Kharn’s Demiurge. I had expected to return to the hall of blue candles, or to some place very like it, dark and dismal. Instead, I thought I’d gone insane. How it was possible I cannot say, but we had returned to the Garden again.

  Or so it seemed, for there was the river, the rolling hills ringed by forest beneath a roof of natural stone—there the lonely tree on the central hill beneath which I had first glimpsed young Ren and found the still-warm tea kettle. I would have wagered that the prayer cards hanging from the branches were the same as well, would have sworn it before an Imperial tribunal.

  But that was not possible.

  Could not be possible.

  I told myself it was only like that other Garden, that Kharn so loved his Garden on Vorgossos that he had replicated it in this massive space at the heart of his ship. For there was a great opening in the roof above us, a mighty window of alumglass beyond which shone the innumerable stars and—was that the ice castle of the Cielcin shining there? I faltered in our march, squinting up at the massive shape shining in the distance, glittering in the starlight, beautiful and terrible as the storm. The man behind me jostled me, and I continued on.

  Ahead, beneath the branches of that mighty, central tree overlooking the sea of grass, someone had erected a pavilion of striped black and cloth-of-gold. The Cielcin had already arrived, and on the far side of the hill I beheld two hundred of their own screamers in black robes and blue, and marveled at the coincidence that had so opposed their coloring to our own. Red and white. Blue and black. Fire and water. Earth and air.

  And there was Kharn Sagara, gold beneath that golden canopy, and beside him the looming Goliath-shape of Prince Aranata with the light of a dozen blue eyes gleaming beneath the hanging fabric.

  “That’s far enough!” Sagara’s voice came from everywhere. “Your soldiers can stay by the treeline.”

  Smythe quieted Bassander’s objections and passed the orders back. Stripped of our entourage, with even the lieutenants ordered to hang back, there were but six of us who climbed the hill to the pavilion beneath the tree. Smythe and Crossflane, Bassander and Jinan, Tor Varro and myself.

  We took our seats at one table, facing a table opposite where sat Prince Aranata, his son Nobuta, and the herald, Oalicomn. At one hand stood the naked slave girl, her chain tied to the xenobite’s ceremonial staff, which stood thrust into the loam. Tanaran too was there, it having been arranged that the baetan should be brought to its master for these negotiations and returned to our custody afterward. Between our two sides sat Kharn Sagara. Not on his throne, but with his back against the bole of the tree, as though he were the Cid Arthur. His children sat beside him, Ren and Suzuha, neither looking like they understood why they were there, neither able to leave.

  At length Sagara spoke, lips not moving, human eyes staring at something on the rich carpet between our two tables. “Here is something I’ve not seen in fifteen thousand years of living. Not since the machines of old has man known an enemy such as this!” His drifting eyes turned to regard the Cielcin at their table. “And not since before the time of those same machines has mankind sought peace with enemies other than herself. History does not happen every day, even to me.” His flesh eyes moved then, taking in the six of us humans seated at our table.

  As he spoke, the slave girl translated, syllables harsh and hacked off, brittle as old iron.

  When the first silence came, Raine Smythe stood and addressed her Cielcin counterpart. “Prince Aranata, thank you for coming. We hope this meeting will allow our people and yours to come to some greater understanding of one another, that we might put an end to this war and forestall future violence.” She had never seemed taller, standing there, both hands fists where she leaned against the tabletop.

  Taking this for some human custom to be mirrored, Prince Aranata stood as well, hands on the table. The xenobite was so tall that—even stooped—his high horned crown brushed against the cloth-of-gold canopy. In a voice deep and cold as the cracking of glaciers, he said, “Your people have claimed six and fifty of our clans in the last nine hundred years.” It took me a moment to realize that surely it meant their years, not ours, for our figure was less than half that total. Varro made a murmured note of this as he translated at Smythe’s ear. “But you talk of submission. Of an end to fighting. What has changed?” Its massive eyes—shielded, I guessed, from the bright light of the pavilion by contact lenses—searched each of our faces in turn. “Yadaretolu detu o-qilem ne?” Why seek peace now? Why submit?

  “We didn’t have the opportunity before,” Varro answered in the xenobite’s own language.

  Or the leverage, I thought, glancing to Tanaran. The baetan kept its head bowed—as did the herald, Oalicomn—listening but trying to remain unnoticed, as though each creature were but a part of the furniture. I have observed such behavior in the junior ministers of many a palatine court, though in the Cielcin I think the behavior was the more extreme. Human beings have their hierarchies, as is only proper and inescapable, but in us it has always seemed to me such deference was built on respect, on the competency of individuals, and their mutual support. But I sensed in these creatures only the morality of the wolf, that if Tanaran or the other were to challenge Aranata, the great chieftain would kill them in an instant and make the other lick his heel. In men, such tyrants are always destroyed. We little tolerate such demons in ourselves.

  In the Cielcin, it seemed, such tyrants thrived.

  I shoved this thought away and listened as Varro continued, speaking from a prepared statement he must have memorized, his Cielcin language more than perfect. “In four hundred years of combat we have never had clear dialogue with your kind, nor taken any prisoner of rank.” Here he paused to indicate Casantora Tanaran Iakato. “Our encounter at Tamnikano—which we call Emesh—has provided us our first opportunity to open such a dialogue. It is our hope and intention that from these conversations we can arrive at a lasting and equitable peace between the Itani Otiolo, your clan, and the Sollan Empire. We are prepared to offer a complete and immediate cessation of hostilities between our Legions and your clan provided that you cease all raids against our colony worlds.” He continued in this vein for another minute or so, outlining the details of such expectations, while all the while Smythe stood serenely by, nodding along as if she understood the alien words.

  When Tor Varro had finished, Prince Aranata jerked its head sideways in the affirmative. “Olo,” he said, signaling that he understood us. He drew his cape around himself again and settled into his seat, the silver chains and platinum that decorated his crest and high forehead swaying as he moved. “But tell me, do you know how many tiatari I have? How many scahari? How many mouths that is between them?” he asked, these being the words for worker and soldier respectively. “Twenty-eight millions, on this and my other ships. Less than half this number did I take from Utaiharo when I conquered him. That was only sixteen hundred years ago. Twenty-eight millions. How am I to feed such a number? Your colonies sustain us. Help us grow. What would you have me do? I will not let my People starve for the sake of you vermin.”

  I felt my eyes wandering to the mutilated slave girl where she stood—nearly catatonic—beside the table.

  “We would be open to trade negotiations with your people. Meat and cattle could be procured—to whatever specifications you require,” Smythe said when this was translated. “We have technologies capable of producing food from raw matte
r should it come to it. Your people will not starve.”

  The slave girl seemed to struggle with translating this, and I saw something like an emotion strain behind her eyes. It was only fear, the emotion she knew best. Aranata’s head turned to regard her, I thought, the way one regards a faulty comms terminal or light switch. At last she said, “Delukami ni o-diuhadiu rajithiri.”

  “Rajithiri wo!” Aranata practically rocketed to his feet. “Trade! What do you take me for? Do you think it is a mnunatari you are dealing with?”

  To her credit, Raine Smythe had not blinked through this outburst and the whirl of motion that accompanied it. She had stood her ground with all the implacable solidity one expected of an Imperial soldier.

  “Mnunatari?” Varro echoed, looking to me for guidance.

  “Merchant,” I said, though I did not understand why the term should inspire such venom.

  I was spared the need to speculate by Nobuta, who said, “My father is not some air merchant, yukajjimn!” The big Cielcin lay a hand on its child’s shoulder to calm it, but said nothing.

  The look on their chalk-colored faces: lower teeth bared, brows pinched above black eyes the size of fists . . . I thought it must be disgust, though even I cannot say with certainty what lay behind those mask-like faces. Still, I thought I saw. “They’re saying they are not merchants,” I said. “We’ve given offense.” I turned my eyes to Kharn, but the Undying might have been a latter-day sculpture of iron and paper where he sat unmoved, his fleshly eyes closed. “Is that right?” Kharn had given the Aeta a gift in return for its visit. That had been a kind of trade, but the semantics were different. Unequal. Kharn had flattered the Aeta in giving it a gift the way a merchant gives a queen a bright gem in tribute. Tribute. The Cielcin, it seemed, had no concept of a non-zero-sum game. It was not enough that one party might gain. The mere act of giving suggested the giver lost.

  One blue eye spied me and drifted down, describing an arc that took in the six of us at our table, but it did not speak. I leaned across Bassander to Varro and said, “It’s as though you offered to trade the Emperor your boots for his velvet slippers.” The Chalcenterite raised one eyebrow, either not appreciating the analogy or merely urging me forward. Struck by a thought, I continued in Classical English, certain that the girl would not understand and so could not translate. “He thinks trade beneath him.” As I spoke, Smythe was placating the xenobites, relying on the slave to translate her words. “Think about what Sagara did, offering him a gift. The Aeta sees us as beneath him. I imagine he’s used to getting his way.” I tried not to think of the depravities implied by the xenobites’ culture of extreme ownership. I felt the same queasy dread I had known in the office of Antonius Brevon, seeing the homunculus he had made for himself.

  Varro stroked his chin. “He may have to get used to disappointment.”

  Quickly he explained what had passed between us to Smythe, who—speaking loudly so the translator might hear her, said, “A gift, then!”

  Tribute, I thought. It would not be the first time civilization paid to keep the barbarians from its gates. But paying in meat? A sacrifice of that oldest sort?

  “What would it take to end the raids?” Smythe asked. “What is it you need?”

  “Need?” Aranata repeated. “Daqami ne?”

  The Aeta grew quiet a moment, and a breeze groaned across the pavilion, doubtless generated by some shaft that ran through the Demiurge like some inhuman throat. The branches of the trees swayed, prayer cards rattling above our heads. At once I felt acutely conscious of the Cielcin warriors standing away and below our pavilion, all in their painted masks, swords held at the ready. And ready too were their nahute, the seeker-drones like flying serpents I had seen put to such terrible use in the blackness beneath Calagah.

  “Iussamneto wo,” Aranata intoned, and the others all repeated him.

  “Iussamneto wo.”

  We must survive. It had the weight of prayer, of the sort of aphorism I myself employed.

  “Do you need settlement?” Smythe asked. “A world could be found. Near to the spaceways but remote.”

  “You would have us penned?” Oalicomn hissed. “We do not submit!”

  But it had spoken out of turn, and, snarling, Aranata struck it with an elbow. The herald yelped, clutching its face as it cowered away from its master, who said, “What world could keep us? Se Vattayu is gone. Our Earth is gone. We do not walk the surface like your kind, like beasts. And we will not take your leavings like a slave. You are not our masters to grant us favors!”

  “That’s not a helpful answer,” Bassander muttered, and privately I agreed with him.

  “Yadaretodo o-fusuem shidu ti-koarin’ta shi,” Tanaran said suddenly, raising its eyes from its fervent investigation of the tabletop. There was something in the tone of its voice, in the stilted way it said the words: We seek for ourselves a new world. Tanaran was a sort of priest, young as it was, and the words had the weight of scripture. “We have been watched from the dawn, since the days of the long tooth, when sulan hunted us in the dark.”

  “Yaiya toh,” the Cielcin said together. Even Aranata hung its head, and to the side I heard Kharn Sagara chuckle.

  “What is going on?” Jinan breathed.

  “We have been watched through our infancy, when the Great carved cities in the bowels of the world.”

  “Yaiya toh,” the Cielcin intoned.

  “When the air was poisoned, they showed us the sky!”

  “Yaiya toh!”

  “When the earth was poisoned, they showed us new ones!”

  “Yaiya toh!”

  “But the new worlds were not as the old, and we could not live upon them. The light of the stars was a poison greater than any we had made at home. Do you understand?”

  It was a moment before I realized that Tanaran had addressed the question to me. I was not sure that I did understand, but in their own language I said, “You evolved underground, we know this. But you cannot live above it.”

  “Tanaran!” Aranata warned.

  Varro murmured a translation to Smythe and said, “Should I stop him?”

  The Cielcin had evolved below ground, in cave warrens and tunnels left by the Quiet—if such a thing were to be believed. Perhaps it was only the rock above that had shielded them from the poison and the bitter radiations of the universe. All the blackness of space seemed to open before me, and I was conscious of where we were, lost in the naked emptiness that stretched between the pages of every map, with only the thin hull of Kharn’s Demiurge about us.

  Struck by a notion, I leaned toward Varro and—switching back to Classical English so as not to be understood by the slave translator—whispered, “The Cielcin ships aren’t ray-shielded. They’re using all that ice as insulation against”—I waved a hand just above the tabletop—“everything.”

  “Radiation shielding?” Varro repeated. “You’re certain they don’t have it?”

  “Of course I’m not certain,” I said in answer. But another image returned to me. A Cielcin combat helmet, taken off a screamer tortured in the black beneath Calagah. Beneath the memory of screaming and the way the nerve disruptor buzzed in my hand, I recalled the antique gasket that had fastened the suit’s helmet to its neck, not unlike the technology of our own primitive suits from before the Foundation War. “But if I’m right, it could prove a powerful bargaining chip.” Assuming, of course, the Cielcin could understand something as simple as a bargaining chip.

  “Nietu ji dein ne?” Aranata’s deep voice cut through my whispers. Turning to his slave girl he said again, “What are they saying, wretch?”

  Sensing some horror coming and fearing for the poor girl, I stood, and speaking more to Tanaran than its prince, I said, “Peace, please.” I wished Valka were present, wished she were not locked away aboard the Mistral with the rest of my friends. There was much I did not understand, much
I did not know. Why should the Cielcin worship as gods the very creatures who had showed me a vision of the Cielcin destroyed? I shoved this aside. “Are we not here for the same reason?” I looked from my party to theirs. “Neither of us wants our people to die.”

  The silence that followed stretched perhaps ten agonizing seconds before Smythe politely said, “Please sit down, Lord Marlowe.”

  I did, not feeling in the least bit sheepish. The slave girl had been entirely forgotten for my interference, and so any embarrassment I might have felt was worth it. Where the conversation turned next I cannot say, for I do not remember. Thoughts of the Cielcin consumed me. Tanaran’s religious cant and the references to the Quiet—the Watchers—combined with the shadow of what followed have come to cloud my memory. Sometimes I envy the scholiasts, whose recollections never fade, though at other times I rather envy the aged, those denizens of the sanitariums for whom the past is a foreign country. To forget . . . to unsee what I have seen.

  That was the first of many meetings, many days . . . and they grew only darker and murkier.

  CHAPTER 61

  VALKA AGAIN

  THE MISTRAL’S AIRLOCK CYCLED closed behind me, and I sagged against the bulkhead, exhausted. Through the heavy metal I could make out the sound of my escort’s retreating feet. “Still a prisoner,” I reminded myself, and allowed myself to slip to the floor. Three days of talks, of politics with little sleep, and it had been going badly. It is not easy to make concessions to someone who cannot trade. Human interactions are based on trade. You cannot maintain a relationship with your fellow man elsewise. But the Cielcin evolved differently. They were apex predators—or nearly so. Predators do not reciprocate; that is what makes them predators.

  Prince Aranata was pleased enough to accept gifts, but balked at reciprocity. We could not make him understand that a peace meant an end to the raids against our colonies. “You would have us starve!” he insisted, as if it could not uncouple the thought of eating from conquest. The tigress is not evil, or so the saying goes, she is only hungry. She is only following her nature. Was it not so with the Cielcin? Was it not their nature to hunt? Were they not only hungry? They say that only men are evil, that only men kill for principle or sport. That only men inflict suffering for the sake of suffering.