Demon in White Read online

  He narrowed those eyes then, and made a warding gesture at the sound of Kharn’s name. “You think they’ll send us out again?”

  “We’ll know soon enough . . .” I said darkly, watching the brightly clad nobiles flock in the shadows of those impossibly high columns. I felt shabby by comparison in my black tunic and high boots, the tall collar of my greatcoat close about my jaw. I leaned back against the pillar, hands behind my back.

  “Lord Marlowe?” a low voice interrupted.

  I looked round, expecting to see a servant in the Imperial livery. But the man who spoke was not suited in the servants’ white, but in blacks more worn than my own.

  It was the soldier, Carax.

  Before I could answer, the man took a halting step back, mouth half-open. “It is you. God and Earth and Emperor . . .” He sketched the sign of the sun disc then, touching forehead, chest, and lips in rapid succession. “It is you.” His hand lingered on his chest, touching some amulet through the front of his uniform jacket. “I thought it were you in there. When you spoke to me, I . . . I almost didn’t believe you were real.” He glanced round at the nobility flowing around us. At the logothetes in their black and gray suits, at the guards in white and Martian scarlet. He had the air of a man who yearned to be invisible, which was impossible in the Eternal City. Ten thousand eyes were watching us, and ten times ten thousand. Cameras and microphones, hoverdrones and spydust and sensors of all descriptions kept their ceaseless vigil, spying on and protecting the Emperor and the cream of the Sollan Empire from treachery and death.

  No one was invisible. Not even a lowly legionnaire.

  “I’m real enough,” I said, stepping away from the pillar.

  Unheard by all but myself, Pallino muttered, “Enough to be a real pain in the ass.”

  I threw the old soldier a glance, and he flashed a rueful grin. “You spoke well today. I’ve seen many a great lord do worse.” We stood opposite one another a long moment, neither speaking. The legionnaire was bald as any enlisted man, and I could see his identification tattoos standing out black against the dark skin of his neck. More than once he seemed on the verge of saying something, but he kept stopping himself. I had grown familiar with his affliction in the years since I’d risen to knighthood. Offering the fellow my best, most crooked smile, I said, “They said your name was . . . Carax, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir! I . . . lordship.” He stood a little straighter, leaped almost to attention. “Carax of Aramis, sir. Triaster. Second Cohort of the 319th Centaurine Legion, sir. Lordship. Sir.” Only then did the fellow remember his salute and press a fist to his chest.

  Returning the gesture I said, “Just sir will do, Carax. We are both soldiers.”

  When had that happened? When had I become a soldier? I hadn’t set out to be one. I’d left home to study languages—to become a scholiast. Not to fight. Certainly not to kill.

  To die.

  “Is it true?” he asked. I knew what he wanted to know, but I let him ask it anyway. “They say you can’t be killed.”

  Mindful of the cameras all around us, I knew I couldn’t tell him the truth. Even if I could, whatever I said would not be believed. If I said yes, he would think me a fraud, and if no—a liar.

  “That is what they say.”

  Carax nodded as if I’d answered his question. “They say you killed one of their kings with your bare hands.”

  “Princes,” I said, raising two fingers. “Two of them. Though I had a sword.” I caught myself toying with the ring on my left thumb, the ring I had taken from Prince Aranata’s hand after I killed it. I clenched my fists to stop them fidgeting. I had taken the prince’s head after it had taken mine. I could remember the sight of my own headless body toppling before the darkness took me. Before I came back. I felt Pallino stir beside me. He had seen it all. He knew the truth.

  “Will the war end soon, sir?” Carax asked, eyes downcast, as if he feared to look at me. “Only . . . I’ve been on the Emperor’s dole since before the war began. So much time on the ice, you know? Not been home in . . . I don’t know how long anymore. Seven hundred years? Reckon I’m a grandfather a hundred times over. Family won’t even know me when I get back. Lot of lads like me in the service. Lads never going home. Lads got no home. Just want the fighting done.” His hand tightened on whatever it was he wore beneath his shirt.

  Something in me broke for the poor soldier. Just how long had he spent in cryonic fugue, slumbering between the stars? His was the fate of many soldiers: to be locked away in an icebox to await their day, to serve their tenure piecemeal. A month—two months every decade. It wasn’t just, but then, the universe is not just.

  “I don’t know,” I said, and took a step nearer the other man.

  He stepped back, as if afraid I might burn him. “But they say you can see the future.”

  “They say a lot of things,” I said. I couldn’t. I had only been shown the future. I had no power in myself. They say a man should never meet his heroes, and I feared I was letting this poor soldier down, but I could not tell him the truth. I stood in the Emperor’s favor, and that offered me some protection, but to talk too freely in that place was to court disaster. “But the war will end, Carax. One day. And perhaps we will meet again when that happens, eh?”

  I had expected the man to slump, defeated by my lack of a proper response, but he brightened and stood a little straighter. “Wanted to give you something, sir. If you’ll let me.” He spoke as if the thought had just occurred to him, and at once he drew a slim chain from around his neck and offered me the little silver medal on his outstretched hand. “I were at Aptucca, sir. Fifty years back. I only wish it were something better, but I don’t have much.”

  It was prayer medal with an icon of Fortitude embossed on its front. I took it and held it in my palm, trying to keep my feelings from my face. I did not and do not believe in the Chantry religion. But I smiled. “Thank you, soldier. I’m glad you were at Aptucca, I—”

  “How did you do it?” The words came spilling out of him. “How did you get the Pale to retreat without firing a single shot?”

  “I . . .” My words trailed off as I turned the medal over. It was a small thing, no larger than the end of my thumb and round as a coin. On its back side was the Imperial sunburst, twelve rays twisting. But over it—carved as with the point of a knife—was a crude trident, a pitchfork such as a devil might carry. Such as the pitchfork embroidered on my greatcoat in crimson thread. Its shaft passed directly through the heart of the Imperial sun precisely as the one on my chest pierced a pentacle. I shut my fist and hid the thing at my side. “I killed their prince, too.” I smiled, though it was not the whole truth. They had taken me aboard their vessel when I challenged Prince Ulurani, and the Prince had accepted, that it might avenge the death of its fellow prince, Aranata. While I’d distracted them with the duel, Pallino and Lieutenant Commander Garone had managed to place charges throughout the interior of their ship. We had held them to ransom, and they had fled.

  The Cielcin were not human. They could not be reasoned with like humans. I’d learned that on Vorgossos with Aranata nearly three centuries before.

  I realized that Carax was looking at me, hoping for a story. I shrugged, trying not to think about the treasonous, blasphemous amulet he had given me. “The Cielcin don’t have laws exactly. They have rulers—and if you kill one, they don’t know what to do. When I defeated their prince at Aptucca, they retreated to choose a new leader.”

  “A bloodless victory,” the soldier said, grinning ear to ear.

  “Nearly bloodless,” I said, but it was Aranata I thought of, black blood staining the pale grass in the gardens of Kharn Sagara.

  “Would you bless me, sir?” Carax stammered. “Lordship? I thank Earth every day she sent you to us. I’d have died at Aptucca, I know it. I had dreams about it for weeks. But you saved me. Saved all of us.” And then he went t
o one knee, head bowed as one about to receive knighthood, hands clasped above his head.

  “Oh, get up,” Pallino mumbled, but Carax did not hear.

  “Halfmortal Son of Earth, protect us.”

  The edges of the medallion pinched against my hand. I had known for a long time that there were those in the legions who thought of me this way, but none had come to me before. My own men knew me well enough to know that I was a man, though many of them had seen my death with their own eyes. But the legend of me had gone beyond me, traveled with Bassander Lin and his soldiers back amongst the wider legions.

  There were always cults among the soldiers, though worship of any gods save Mother Earth and the God Emperor was forbidden. As in Rome so long ago, when the soldiers worshiped Mithras and the Unconquered Sun, so our soldiers worshiped the Cid Arthur and—like my friend, Edouard, and the Romans before him—the ancient Christ.

  This lonely soldier worshiped me, and I had no power to bestow blessings, and no hope to give.

  I felt at once very, very tired.

  So I took his hands in mine. They seized me with a fervor I had not expected, nor felt in any person save Valka for more years than I could recall. “Get up,” I said, and pressed the medallion back into his hands, imagining that to him it gained some special significance because I had held it.

  It was a relic now.

  There were tears in the soldier’s eyes when he stood. “They say it’s hopeless, master. The war.”

  Master. The word echoed in my ears.

  “They say a lot of things,” I said again, and drew back. “There is always hope.” And I clapped the man on the shoulder and sent him on his way. He looked back the whole while, bumping into court logothetes and women dressed in bright gowns, until at last he was lost in the throng of people and swallowed up.

  I never saw him again.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE FIRSTBORN SON OF EARTH

  A FULL TWO DECADES of the Knights Excubitor marched around me, ten to either side, such that I walked at the center of their column. I must have looked out of place amongst their mirrored armor and red capes, a grim shadow amidst all that bright finery. As was their custom, they marched with highmatter swords active and held in both hands before their faces, ready to kill me if I made any sudden moves. I was acutely aware that I had no weapon myself. My sword had remained on my ship, and they had not even permitted Pallino to accompany me, and no wonder.

  We marched down corridor after gilded corridor, over patterned carpets thick as the centuries, beneath Rococo scrollwork and baroque images old perhaps as Earth herself. Golden light streamed through crystal windows, revealing in narrow slices the shining towers and the infinite, bottomless sky beyond.

  Perhaps you’ve seen it, if only in a dream? The Eternal City: her fair towers gleaming in the sun. Her halls great as cities rearing their mighty faces through banks of rosy cloud. Colossal statues looming like shadowy giants over windy streets and airy plazas. Hanging gardens as in Babylon of old flowering from terraces above a sky ten thousand miles deep. The Eternal City: old and venerable as sages, proud and beautiful as any queen. She was the heart and eye of the galaxy. The axis about which all our worlds turned.

  We passed beneath an arched window, and far below I saw the knife-edged shape of wings where lighter craft patrolled the skies below. They sailed beneath the arched shadows of a white aqueduct that carried water from one floating isle to the next.

  I would have stopped if the Excubitors would allow it.

  They would not allow it.

  The Emperor was waiting.

  * * *

  The approach to the Imperial apartments in the Peronine Palace brought us in time to the Cloud Gardens, where silver fountains played beneath misty boughs lit even in daylight by glowspheres like distant stars. I had walked there but once before, on the day of my investiture, when His Imperial Radiance had made me a knight and restored me to the nobility. Before I had been outcaste, disowned by my father, without title or name.

  The memory of that other day dogged my steps as I went. It had been right after I’d first arrived on Forum, fresh from my confrontation with Prince Aranata aboard the Demiurge. Nearly three hundred years had passed—eighty for me. So long ago, and yet still I heard the ringing of His Radiance’s voice beneath the dome of the Georgian Chapel.

  “In the name of Holy Mother Earth and in the light of her sun, I, the Sollan Emperor William of the Aventine House, the Twenty-Third of that Name; Firstborn Son of Earth; King of Avalon; Lord Sovereign of the Kingdom of Windsor-in-Exile; Prince Imperator of the Arms of Orion, of Perseus, of Sagittarius, and Centaurus; Magnarch of Orion; Conqueror of Norma; Grand Strategos of the Legions of the Sun; Supreme Lord of the Cities of Forum; North Star of the Constellations of the Blood Palatine; Defender of the Children of Men; and Servant of the Servants of Earth, call upon you to kneel.”

  I sank to my knees as I was ordered before the steps of the altar. Incense burned and votive candles, and in the niche above the altar fey shadows danced against a statue of the God Emperor triumphant, one foot crushing a marble cube. His living descendant stood over me, holding in his hands an ancient sword. Not highmatter, but common steel and so black with age that at first I thought it raw iron. The pompous grandeur of his titles still ringing in the air, Caesar stood a moment, and behind him a panegyrist in robes of sable and cloth of gold sang out in Classical English, saying, “In the name of Holy Mother Earth and in the light of Her Sun we pray! May the Mother bless her servant.”

  The soldiers and courtiers at my back—my friends and enemies together—murmured the benediction, “O Mother, bless us all.”

  Then Caesar spoke. “Do you, Hadrian Marlowe, pledge yourself now and forever to our service? To the service of your Emperor and of the Empire which he serves?”

  Knowing what was expected of me, I said, “I do.”

  “Do you believe in our Creator, the Holy Mother Earth? Do you believe in the God Emperor, Her firstborn son and heir—our ancestor? Him who crushed the Mericanii and the machines and delivered the universe once more into the hands of men?”

  “I do,” I said, but I did not believe it.

  “Do you pledge your sword, your possessions, your powers and faculties—your very life—to the defense of our Empire?”

  “I do.”

  “Do you swear to forgo reward, to seek justice for its own sake?” I kept my head bowed all the while, hiding my face, afraid something of my uncertainty or disquiet might show there and be read by His Radiance.

  “I do.”

  “To live with temperance through feast and famine?”

  “I do.”

  “To act with prudence in matters great and small?”

  “I do.”

  “To show fortitude in the face of tribulation?”

  “I do.”

  “To safeguard the honor of your fellows?”

  If they have any, I thought, but said only, “I do.”

  “And of your betters?”

  I hesitated only an instant, thinking of my lord father, of Balian Mataro, and the lords I had met in the vestibule of Vorgossos. Then I thought of Valka, of Pallino and the rest. My friends. My family. And so it was not a lie when I answered, saying: “I do.”

  “Do you swear to respect the honor of any person: man, woman, or child?”

  “I do.”

  “And to defend it?”

  “I do.”

  “To never refuse the challenge of an equal?”

  There were so many oaths. Too many, and I confess that I have had to find a book on the shelves here to get them all down correctly. But I answered, “I do.”

  “Do you swear to despise cruelty, deceit, and injustice?”

  “I do!”

  “Do you swear to see to its end any course begun?”

  I have rued that oat
h more than all the others, though I thought little of it as I answered, “I do.”

  “And do you swear to keep faith with your oath, from this day, until your dying day, in the name of the Emperor, and of the God Emperor, and of the Earth who is Mother and Victim of us all?” And here His Radiance made the sign of the sun disc, holding his saber vertical before him as he touched forehead and heart and lips, and I sensed that everyone behind me moved with me as I mirrored the gesture, moving in a silence deepened somehow by the clink of jewelry and the rustle of human action that disturbed it.

  As I made the gesture, I said, “I do.”

  The Emperor lowered his sword and—laying it first against my left shoulder, then my right—dubbed me, saying, “Then rise a knight, Sir Hadrian, and Lord Marlowe in your own right.” He offered me his left hand then, and I kissed the ring upon his thumb, the one which bore the twelve-rayed sun that was the emblem of his house.

  There is a strength in ceremonies, a power in ritual that is whether or not we believe in the principalities upon which those rituals are founded. So despite my cynicism, I could not help but feel a warm flowering of love in my chest as I stood and the swell of pride. I was a knight, and no mere knight, but a knight of the Royal Victorian Order, one of the Emperor’s own.

  There are not many people in the galaxy who can claim to have visited the Peronine Palace, that palace within the greater palace of the Eternal City where the Royal Family makes its home. There are even fewer who can claim to have visited more than once.

  On that second visit, the great doors swung open soundlessly, and within, the mechanisms of a great clock chimed. Upon crossing the threshold, the pace of the Excubitors changed, flowing seamlessly from a brisk march to a slow and steady goosestep. The ringing of their boots on the tile aligned with the ticking of the clock whose pendulum swung free and mighty above the pointed arches ahead.