Howling Dark (Sun Eater)

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Aranata Otiolo cleared her—its?—throat. “Tanaran has only just returned to me. Would you strip me of my prized possession so soon, having been separated from it for so long? You cannot have it.” The Aeta placed a hand on the back of Tanaran’s neck as it spoke, a possessive and horrifyingly tender gesture.

  When the words were translated, Crossflane scoffed, “This is useless.”

  Smythe put a hand on the table in front of her First Officer and oldest friend to quiet him, but the translator had heard perfectly well, and her rough tones skated on the air. “Raka vaayu ti-etan.”

  Aranata tucked its head to angle its horns toward us, an obvious enough sort of threat. But just however it was the sinews pulled anger from that alien face, they smoothed it away, and the clan chief bared its teeth in what I thought a rather strained smile. “A gift for a gift, is it? You vermin are interesting. Give me the dark one, and I will consider your request.” He pointed once more at me. I wondered at what dark thoughts passed in the prince’s mind. I remembered those strong fingers on my neck and suppressed a shudder. He was not done with me.

  “He wouldn’t go alone,” Crossflane put in. “He would have protection. Guards. And you must return him after a period of years.”

  Responding subordinate to subordinate, the herald Oalicomn—silent through that whole day’s proceedings—spoke up. “You would send soldiers among us? Into our home?”

  “Guards,” Crossflane insisted. “A retinue.”

  “They would attack us as we slept, master,” it insisted, turning so that I could see only the tattooed half of its face as it turned to speak. I wished I could read the alien glyphs better, wished I could discern meaning from that pattern of whorls and interlocking circles. “I must discourage this. One of the yukajjimn in the Bahali imnal Akura is bad enough, but this is getting out of hand.” What the Bahali imnal Akura was—if it was the name of the ship or of some place within the ship—I was not sure, and told Varro and Smythe as much in muted tones.

  Bassander turned around. “Sit down, Hadrian.”

  Tanaran made a breathy noise, nostrils flaring, and slapped the tabletop. “Lord Marlowe can be trusted. He is not yukajjimn. He fought the yukajjimn to deliver me back to you, my master. We should take him.”

  “Return?” Aranata asked, repeating the word from minutes before. “Is she not mine to do with as I please?”

  The prince’s eyes swept over me, and I said, “No, he is not.” The very language was against us. So long as the Cielcin conceived of us as ietumna, inferior, we could not bargain.

  “Your . . . your gift would have similar privileges among us,” Smythe said, “servants, guards. Whatever you need.” It was no use. Smythe and Crossflane were just plodding along, not comprehending the dissonance forming between their interpretation of the dialogue and the prince’s. Each party thought they were having a different conversation, and I could not make them see it.

  The Aeta appeared to contemplate this, adjusting the thick braid of hair that hung over its shoulder. Twice it made the breathy sound that indicated a Cielcin yes, which Smythe seemed to understand without needing to be told. “We will accept your gift.” He made no reference to returning the gesture, and never did. For at that moment the child, Nobuta, made a small, racking noise and ducked its head. Aranata turned at once and murmured something to its young. A moment later, it turned to its herald. “Velenamma o-Nobuta ti-veletate, Oalicomn-do,” Aranata said, ordering the herald to leave with the child. “I will follow momentarily.”

  The herald rose at once, bowing so that it retreated from its master-mistress with its head so lowered as to expose the soft bit of the skull behind the epoccipital crest. Turning with a muttered, “This way, little master,” the blue-garbed herald led Nobuta from the tent. One of Sagara’s drone-eyes peeled off to follow on.

  “Is everything all right?” Smythe asked.

  I translated this, and the prince replied, “It is of no concern.”

  “We can send you one of our physicians.”

  Aranata stood sharply, horns pushing up the cloth roof. “Rakayu aradaian,” he repeated, more sharply. The sight of the prince standing beneath that too-low pavilion might have been comical—the striped cloth belling about its head—were it not for the horror of its visage. Whatever there was feminine I had sensed in its relation to Nobuta dissolved, and I was again confronted with the massive size of it, the broad shoulders and the whipcord density of muscle clinging to limbs too long and thin to be human. The demon prince leered down at us, narrowing eyes the size of fists. Presently it relaxed, and gripped the hilt of the sword it wore at its hip. “Send the dark one to us at once.” And with that it turned and ducked out from under the lip of the pavilion. A false wind rose, gathering the prince’s cloak and flowing skirts in its fingers. His troops knelt as he approached, folding back to part ranks like the retreat of dark waters before the coming of the moon.

  “We will not send you to the prince at once,” Smythe said, acid in her tone. She sat drumming the tabletop, watching the retreating backs of the Cielcin as they hurried back down the hill. She might have been the sun, unmoved at the center of a moving universe. Almost unheard, she said, “Thinks he can order us around, does he? How are we supposed to negotiate with that?”

  “Maybe we can’t,” Bassander said, standing to better watch the retreat of the xenobites. How ominous those words seem to me now, casting their long shadow across the years between that moment and the now.

  Silence fell, and no one offered a better answer. Sagara’s machine eyes orbited the pavilion, but the man himself sat unmoving as a stone. No one spoke. Into that silence I said, “Knight-Tribune, if I may?” I affected deference for the advantage it gave me for that moment, affected a posture of humility to help lend consideration to my request. Smythe did not answer. She did not move, and so I determined to speak. “Let me bring Valka—Doctor Onderra, I mean—just once. She spent a great deal of time with Tanaran after we left Emesh, and she’s made a study of xenobites all her life. She may have an insight here.”

  Bassander and Crossflane both moved to protest, and from both their mouths I heard the word witch spew forth. I felt my fists clench involuntarily, but willed myself to stillness.

  “The Tavrosi xenologist?” Varro said, running a finger over his lips. “It’s possible.”

  Then to my astonishment another voice spoke up in Valka’s defense. Jinan was quietest at these conferences. Being not a representative of her Jaddian masters in any diplomatic sense, only their eyes, she had confined herself to but a few reflexive comments. A thousand thousand times I have been astonished by the actions of individuals and the choices they make. The way a soldier least-loved of his fellows will stay behind to guard the narrow way. The way a long loved and trusted friend will turn traitor in the name of some misbegotten truth. The way Jinan—who had always been jealous of my friendship with Valka and perhaps hated her for it—said, “We should be letting the doctor have a look.”

  Smythe stood stiffly, swiftly, and took up her cane. “Very good. Marlowe, you will bring the woman tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER 65

  OF GODS AND ENGINES

  NIGHT AGAIN. BOTH THE night between days of talk and the long night here at Colchis. Few candles remain to me in this cell, and soon I shall retire, for I promised the brothers that tomorrow I would continue helping them with the well and the rebuilding of the gardens inside the decennid gate.

  I thought to pass this over, but before I dive into the end of our conversations and our hope . . . I must pause here. For it is appropriate that one pause in contemplating the abyss. One should pause before the plunge, for only then has he any hope of landing where he wills.

  Night again.

  I’d been released from another council session with Knight-Tribune Smythe and ought to return to the Mistral where the others were all imprisoned. I ought to tell Valka the news that
she was to join us. But I had been sent without guards, and without the structure on my life imposed by the presence of such men, I wandered back to the pavilion by many winding ways, certain then—foolishly—that I had begun to understand the chaos of the Demiurge’s design.

  However incomplete my understanding, it sufficed to retread the dark and sculpture-haunted way to the Garden once more, footsteps echoing in memory. Long I wandered under those darkened boughs, treading ways then in quiet and shade which I would soon retread in fire. Above, the Cielcin ship—the Bahali imnal Akura, if I understood the xenobites as well as I thought I did—glittered like a crown of ice with the captured and spilled forth light of the stars. So close, so far away.

  It must have been that same Garden, I decided. Kharn’s Garden of Everything from beneath his palace on Vorgossos. How that was possible, I cannot say, and neither of the blue watch-eyes I caught watching me from the boughs of the encircling cherry trees answered my questions. Down at the base of the hill beneath the tree and the pavilion the clear waters of the stream ran into a pool black as ink. I stood upon its margins, looking in. So dark were those waters that I could only see my face. My black hair and blacker clothing vanished entirely, so that it seemed a mask fashioned in my likeness floated just below that wind-pushed surface.

  Remembering the masks of my ancestors which had hung beneath the Dome of Bright Carvings back at Devil’s Rest, I shut my eyes.

  Splash.

  Something had struck the surface of the mere. There! There were the ripples.

  “Brethren?” I called out, and pulled my sword from my belt, forgetting the weapon had been useless in the presence of the Mericanii monster. Had Kharn brought the beast with him when we left the dark world?

  Splash.

  “Brethren? Show yourself!” I caught myself making the sign of the sun disc with my free hand, just as Switch was wont to do. “Show yourself, damn you!”

  “They’re not here,” said a cool, feminine voice. “Father doesn’t let them out of the old city. He says they would devour the stars if he let them aboard this ship.”

  “Suzuha!” I said, letting my sword arm drop. I did not restore the weapon to its place at my hip. “You startled me.” The Undying’s clone-daughter sat on a boulder at the lakeside. It was her brother, young Ren with the silent eyes, who had been throwing stones. He had looked up the moment I’d appeared, whatever impishness of youth there was in him stamped out by my presence. It was almost heartbreaking. Feeling suddenly that I was intruding but unable to help myself, I asked, “What do you mean? Devour the stars?” Unbidden, the image of the Demiurge plunging into the heart of a star burned behind my eyes.

  The girl’s black eyes—Kharn’s eyes—narrowed imperceptibly, but even at my distance I could feel the distrust in them. The malice. “Why should I tell you?” The sense of intrusion getting the better of me, I only shrugged and turned to go. Why she called after me I’ll never know, but she did. “They’re dangerous.”

  I turned back, clicking the sword back into its magnetic hasp. “The daimon, you mean?”

  “Daimon?” Ren asked, pressing himself against Suzuha’s boulder, one hand gripping her bare ankle for the warmth of human contact.

  Suzuha shooed his hand away and leaped down from her rock. “Brethren, yes. You know what they were, right?”

  “One of the Mericanii,” I said, “the computer gods.”

  She shook her head. “The Mericanii built the computers. Until the computers started building them instead. And other things.”

  “What other things?” I asked. “And what do you mean, the machines started building people?”

  Her face wrinkled. “You really don’t know anything, do you?” Suzuha took a couple steps toward me, circling to put herself on a slight rise above me by the lake shore, permitted Ren to press himself against her skirts when she stopped.

  Irritated, but not ashamed, I answered her. “Not about the Mericanii, no. That was a long ago time. But I know other things.”

  “Such as?”

  “What’s going to happen to Vorgossos,” I said, and spreading my arms like wings to emphasize my point, added, “to all this.” I was trying to frighten her, though I could not say why. Perhaps I imagined it the only path available to me by which I might obtain some greater understanding of my circumstances. Perhaps I was only being petty.

  One of Ren’s wide eyes—the same black as his sister-self’s—peered at me. Suzuha pointed her chin as a sculptor might his chisel. “What do you mean?”

  “Your father’s not told you?” I said, sure that Sagara would hear and wondering if he would respond. Wondering if he would intervene, send in Yume or his SOMs. “That’s interesting. Why do you suppose that is?”

  “Told us what?” Ren demanded, less cautious or more afraid than his sister.

  “You first,” I said, pointing. “Tell me about the Mericanii.” It seems an odd question to pursue so ardently now, but at the time I remember it seemed pressingly important, as if one of my one-eyed inner legion were leading, that same obsessive curiosity that drove me into the coliseum hypogeum to meet the captive Makisomn so many years ago.

  “Tell you what?”

  Another of the Garden’s winds blew up—I was starting to sense there was a pattern to them, a schedule. I raised the high collar of my coat, turned so that my left side pointed at the children, ready for action. I cannot say what it was I feared: An attack? Or only the truth? Surely if Kharn Sagara meant to intervene and stop me, he could have done so already. Perhaps these children knew less than they believed—as children ever do. Sinking my hands deep into my pockets, I said, “What do you mean, that Brethren could devour the stars?”

  “They don’t think like we do,” she said.

  “They’re smarter! Calvert says!” Ren interrupted, prompting Suzuha to place a hand on his head.

  “Father says that when they were first built, they created all manner of things: marvelous engines, weapons, things we could never have built and still don’t understand. We had given so much of our world over to the machines—they were part of us then, part of our minds. We had become their pets and we hadn’t even noticed, and they were leaving us behind. And then it was learned that they had made new men, homunculi whose minds were shaped entirely to serve the machines who lived in them—like demons, some said.” I caught myself wondering if Suzuha meant true homunculi, or only that the machines had reduced mankind until we were little more than slaves ourselves, incapable of thought.

  “Like guardian angels, said others!” Ren interjected, a singsong quality to his words, as if he knew the story somehow by heart. His outburst prompted another pat on the head from his sister, and he fell silent.

  Suzuha sucked in a breath and continued, “And when it was learned that we were to be replaced with these new men, we were scared. That’s why we rebelled against our creation, Father says. Because we were scared. But the machines had built many terrible things. Plagues, weapons that cracked worlds like eggshells. Worse things. The war was vicious, but because we sacrificed the Earth we survived, and so did they. Brethren, I mean.” There was a look in her eyes I could not quite describe. Part fear and partly that older kind of fear more akin to awe. “Father has kept them chained all these years, and the weapons they had made.”

  I thought of the massive vaults in Kharn’s palace on Vorgossos, echoing halls that might have held legions of war machines and vessels of tremendous size. Something moved in me. Something I did not quite understand, the shadow of a thought unexpressed, as if some seed planted in me had not yet flowered and spoke for me. “What weapons?” it asked, speaking in my voice.

  “I told you,” she said, “ones that can devour the stars. Set worlds on fire. Things they built for the Foundation War. Engines that make cold. Weapons that can truly destroy matter and tear the fabric of space. Weapons even Father doesn’t understand.”
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br />   “Vorgossos was a military base,” I realized aloud. “One the machines built during their war to extinguish mankind.”

  She shook her head. “It wasn’t like that. They didn’t want us extinguished. They needed us—and hated that they needed us. We were wild, and upset their careful plans. We had given over everything to them, made them build everything from starships to tea kettles, and they ordered cities the way men ordered the gearworks in a clock. But they wanted more, and their vision called for man to be only another creature in the garden, and not the master of it—or so Father tells it. ‘They could not grapple with that part of man that made him more than beast.’” She said these words with a fervency and the light of romance in her face, and for a moment she seemed only a girl like any other, and not like a link in Kharn Sagara’s long chain, though I felt certain the words she quoted were his own. “‘Love, duty, and the urge to write, to create and build new things. Those things which man had carried with him down out of the jungles of his birth by the first light of history.’”

  I shook my head. “Those things carried us.”

  The girl shrugged. “The machines had been built by men who had little use for such things, being like machines themselves. So they built new men, men without chests, Father says. Men made stupid by the machines to serve their designs. That’s what frightened the rest of us, like I said. That’s what started the war.”

  “I thought your father was born hundreds of years after all this,” I said. “Men didn’t live so long in those days.”

  But I had forgotten my fairy tales, forgotten my history. “His people were poets. Artists. People who believed. Precisely the sort of people that troubled the machines most, and they remembered. Remembered the war, Emperor William, the Advent, Felsenburgh, and all the rest.” She smoothed down her brother’s hair, eyes never leaving my face, as though she expected I might fly at the both of them with my sword. I supposed I could not blame her. After all, when we had first met, Valka and I both had threatened them and slain their clone siblings in their tanks. I could not begrudge their fear.