Elementis 1: The Heir to the Stone (32 page)

Twain's foot slipped off a piece of rock and his mind returned to what he was doing—hanging on to the side of the cliff, again! He had a quarter of the way left to go, and by now his climbing was as good as it was going to get. He grabbed a hold of the next suitable rut and pulled himself along onto a handy foot rest. His left cheek pushed up against the cool rock side. His eyes scanned the wall for his next move. There was nothing. The wall was completely flat from as far as he could see upwards to as far as he could see down. Even a genius couldn't climb across a flat rockface.

A heavy whooshing sound stopped his brain from ticking and he twisted his head around to press his right cheek against the rock. He looked up to where the sound originated in the sky. There was nothing there. But there was an airy sound coming from somewhere. He moved to his left for a better grip and leaned away from the rock. He smiled. "He's back!" Twain said out loud to himself, seeing the smoking carcass of Mercron falling through the sky.

The problem was, if Jonas was back, so was the Zohr. Twain needed to find his mother; she was in one of these last three units. He would call out to her if he could, if the dydrid weren't right above his head with their mechanical ears. That's what he would have to do if it became too late, he decided. He had to say goodbye to her; he wanted to see her face just one last time. It was a sad thought, but Twain was sure his mother wouldn't survive dydrification; he didn't even know if he would. He didn't know if he wanted to.

There is always another way, he told himself, looking around for inspiration. He didn't have to look for long. A thick cable that he'd never even noticed ran across the cliffside, hanging above the units. The cable looked securely stapled at several points along the cliff. If he could climb up to it and shuffle across, he could cut it at the right point, swinging down on the cable to the next conveyor. It was more dangerous than Twain would have liked. If the staples didn't hold out, who knew where he could end up. Swimming with the exopedes, he supposed, but it was the only other way across.

Twain climbed with the ease of a mountain rat up to the cable. Reaching up, he tugged on the line to check how secure the binding was to his right. Secure enough, he thought. He held on tight with one hand and scrambled around in his pocket to bring out his tekron. Putting the tool between a firm bite of his teeth, he pulled out the wire cutters and braced himself for what he was about to do. He grabbed a hold of the wire with both hands, keeping the tekron between his teeth. His mouth filled up with saliva, being almost unable to swallow with his mouth wrenched wide open. He held on tight and slipped his feet off of the ledge, groaning as he dropped a foot or two, bouncing up and down on the cable's elasticity. He shuffled his arms along a few times until he reached the point in the cable where he wanted to cut. He twisted the cable around the back and the inside of his right hand. He let go with his left hand and took his tekron from his mouth, hacking at the rubber coating. Four cuts in and he knew the next one was the last. "Here goes nothing," he said, squeezing the cutter handles together. He tensed his grip around the cable as he teased away the final strands of rubber. The air lifted through his hair as he fell. The cable took hold of his weight and swung him round with a jerk. He bounced off the cliff wall, hung over his landing spot for all of a millisecond, let go and dropped, rolling across the soft conveyor attracting the attention of the crowd inside. Twain picked himself up, and a death defying relief shook through his legs. He took a couple of steps further in from the edge just in case they decided to give way.

"Twain!" Lora called from within the crowd. His head shot round, his heart pounded, and he saw his mother running for him.

"Ma!" he gasped, with an instant tear forming in his eye and the feeling of love settling in his throat.

She scooped him up into her arms like he was still a little boy. They laughed and hugged as she spun them around. She squeezed him tighter than she'd ever done before as if she never wanted to let him go. Lora pushed him back to look at him. "I thought I’d never see you again—have you heard from your father?" she asked. "What's going on out there!?"

Twain looked at his mother with all the sadness of the world. "I’m sorry, Ma, it’s just us two now."

Lora pulled her son into her shoulder and a tear ran down the path of her nose, falling from a trembling eye as she held on tight. She put on a brave face, wiping her tears dry and settling Twain down on the floor, kneeling level with him. "What are you doing here son?" she snivelled. The last she knew, Twain had been on Obitrum with the junior Guard.

Twain felt his pocket, and another pocket, and another. Panic set his face on fire.

"What is it?" she asked.

He looked up at her as if death was now there only choice. "My tekron, I dropped it!"

The ground and the metal cave around them shook for all of a brief moment. The cythereans gasped, holding onto their loved ones. Twain knew what had returned. He kept his eyes locked on his mother. "I don’t know how much time we’ll have left!"

Chapter XXVI

Death

Mercron's failing power had diminished to nothing more than a free fall, pulled downwards by the gravitational drag of the planet. The silver city fell through the sky. A wall of air tore between its claws as it headed back towards the great forest between the ashes of Enterra and the gaping hole of Mercron's lot. Inside the city, the fighting ceased. The speed of the fall made it nyon impossible to do anything else but be stuck to a wall. The converted and the pure bloods were tossed around the ship as it turned, clambering to find something to hold on to.

Jonas watched the craft going down, gliding behind it through the streaming wake of the fall. The Tylis appeared, flying by his side. It was a comforting thought to know that his father was with him.

The unexpected scenery of the forest returned to the Zohr's eyes as the ship turned over for him to enjoy the view. He placed the stone on his forearm and strapped himself down, sitting silent, gripping his fingers around the arms of his throne, waiting to reach the ground, waiting to face his newest enemy.

A crash of crushing metal vibrated through the air. Trees as tall as Mercron's girth were torn from their roots and flung aside like nothing more than hollow sticks. The sound of destructive energy filled the forest with a rapture of snapping wood and falling trees and the weight of ten million megatons of metal ploughing up the land. Mercron slowed its charged, sliding into a backwards turn. The powerful hull absorbed the impact, creaking as its speed diminished. The five giant claws at the ends of the city lifted into the sky, holding themselves impossibly upwards against the gravity of the world, and with one lasting creak they crashed to the ground in a swill of soiled-wooden dust.

Jonas set his koble fighter down a distance away from the point of the longest claw. He climbed out of his seat looking around at the flat plain of mud and soil the ship had left behind it. The Tylis settled down as an empty sphere and Hawk's dydrid transporter flew over the tree line, floating down to a patch of dirt beside Jonas. The Tylis laid numerous ramps to the ground as units of airq infantry poured out alongside soldiers of the Guard. A constant stream of men ran beyond Jonas forming a barrier dozens of rows deep and hundreds wide to take aim at the battered city, as its metal cooled in the open air.

Jonas jumped down from his fighter, and Hawk appeared behind him smiling. His head shaking from side to side. "It's good to see you, kid. Looks like you’ve had some help!" he gestured, flicking his head to the exiting soldiers of the Tylis.

They greeted each other with a strong arm hold. "Where's Twain?" Jonas asked, as soon as their arms met.

"We found our people at Gulga. They're trapped at a dydrification plant above a river of pure carbotanium. He’s with them now," Hawk told him.

"By himself?" Jonas said.

"His idea, not mine!" Hawk confirmed.

A look of worry clouded Jonas's face. "I hope he knows what he’s doing."

The king approached Jonas and Hawk at the back of the stream of running soldiers. The Tylis retracted its ramps and returned to the sky to collect the koble fighters from the final dogfight in space.

"This is where you'd usually stand to attention, old friend," Uly said to Hawk.

Hawk tensed up at hearing the voice. A shiver wangled down his spine. "Uly?" he said, turning to see a ghost. "A walking dead man, now I have seen everything!"

Hawk and Uly slammed their hands together, followed with a firm embrace. They smiled at each other with a warmness only true friends possess. The air pressure around them seemed to change with a sucking breeze, disturbing the moment of friendship. They turned to see a giant, square-cut chunk of curved metal fall to the ground from the side of Mercron's main claw. A cloud of smoke poured out into the air.

Flashes of light lit up the smoke in the resumed battle between the converted and the purebreds. A scurry of fantom soldiers fled from the toppled city to the tree cover of the forest as ranks of fantoms fed out from the smoke, blasting at the converted as they fought and ran.

The Zohr walked with a calming strength out through the middle of his soldiers, dragging Princess Willow beside him, wanting her to watch the boy die, ensuring that her mind was once again implored to his service. Mutus and his ever loyal conscience followed on with the look of anger that forever ruled his face.

The Zohr cleared his way towards the mind that he was driven to murder before it grew any stronger and before it connected with all of matter, becoming too powerful for even him to stop. The Elementis was alive again in his veins as he sent waves of thought drifting through the air towards the defences of the allied soldiers, melting them to molten magma as the men glowed red, sank down into an orange liquid and cooled to grey stubs of rock where they had stood. The airqians ran, seeing the fate that awaited them but fate was fate and they melted to the soil alongside the brave hearts of the Guard who stayed to fight. An army of darkness marched behind the Zohr. With every step he walked closer to destroying Jonas and the king.

*

Calyx waded out of the blackness, his dirty face sooted from the burning fumes of metal inside. He saw his brother in the distance through lines of marching soldiers. And he saw what he never thought he would see again; his father's imposing figure. He's still alive, Calyx realised, standing for a moment to take in the king's distant face. He couldn't face him, not after everything that had passed. He hated him so much and he loved him so much. But his love had not been returned; it was too late. The boy who now stood by his side was the only son he cared about. He did not want his father to look into his silver eyes; he was no longer the eager son that had hung on every word that his father had ever said to him since he was a child. Calyx wanted his father to feel the pain that hit deep inside of him when he'd discovered that his brother was chosen above him, after everything he had done. He deserved more. He was the true heir and here he stood powerless. His mind was not as advanced as Jonas's. The Zohr possessed the stone, the king had the hearts of the people, and Calyx was now the one with nothing. His only thoughts that remained were that once the Zohr had killed his brother and his father he would make his plans to take the stone for himself. He turned his back one more time on his family and disappeared into the woods.

Jonas looked at Hawk, thinking of a friend. "Hawk, get to Twain, take your men and do what you can!" he ordered.

"It’s a thousand against a hundred!" Hawk said, advising on the hopelessness of the situation.

The king smiled at his head protector. "That’s never stopped you before!"

Hawk returned the grin, giving a cytherean salute before running onto his ship to return to the valley of Gulga.

Uly put a hand on his sons back, they stared across to where the Zohr walked on through the muddied field, sinking his boot prints into the soft steaming mounds of melted rockmen. His thousand-year-old hair flapped like weaves of white cotton in the wind, and his ugly grin sat etched with terror into every silver vein that coloured his face with grey. He threw Willow's arm away from his grip and stopped at a shouting distance from Jonas. Standing there in silence with all the posture of the deity he had become, all the arrogance of a divine being and with all of the evil strength of the silver blood that pulsed through his self-manufactured body, nothing stood between Jonas and the Zohr but the air of Aquilla.

"Will you fight forever, Oreaus?" Jonas called out.

"Once you and all who oppose me are dead, I will not have to," the Zohr replied. "There is just one last thing I wish you to see."

The Zohr spoke with the coldness of his mind to the soldiers in the control room at Gulga. "Dydrify them." he ordered.

*

The fantoms heard his voice, pulling levers and pressing buttons to activate the machinery of the units in the rock beneath their feet.

Twain and his mother felt the spongy rubber of the conveyor belt rumble against the soles of their boots. A solid wall shot down from the ceiling to seal the back of the room. The cythereans screamed and moaned as the floor began to drag them towards the edge. The outer walls pressed inwards. And there was only one way out, into the exopede-ridden river below.

Twain took his mothers hand. She squeezed his. "It's okay, Ma, it's okay," he said to her, looking up with a forced smile. She smiled back. She knew that she would die sooner or later and since the war had begun she had hoped every second to see her son just one more time. Her wish had come true but she would give anything now for him not to be there; there was nothing she could do. Twain pulled his mother towards the back of the crowd. The panic of moving floors and walls drove everyone backwards in an attempt to live as themselves for just a few seconds longer. The walls pushed in closer. They had two choices; be crushed to death or fall into the silver and be turned into one of them, perhaps dying in the process. Falling over themselves to stay back, most of them were choosing to be crushed. The walls came close enough to begin to push thousands of bodies together. The tighter the walls pushed, the louder the screams became.