Hammer of Time (The Reforged Trilogy) (30 page)

"Me? That will not make for a very interesting performance."

"Do not underestimate your importance, a'shae," Ferris told her. "You are not only Kaellisem's leader, but her heart. And all songs, as they say, are sung first in the heart. The enassuanii wish to speak with you, Queen Maeve, and better learn of you for their songs. May I bring the singers to you?"

"Yes," Maeve said, torn between reluctance and excitement. "I would be happy to see them."

________

For all of its glittering sunset-colored glory, Kaellisem was still a small city and it took Logan less than ten minutes to drive across it. Hyra or one of his glassingers could have paved the road in glass, but Xia had recommended against it. Arcadian glass was strong, but vehicles were heavy and the sand beneath was far from stable. Shattered glass in the road was a recipe for trouble.

Logan found Gripper just where the young Arboran said he would be, standing in the meager but colorful shade of a half-built tower. One of the slender spires leaned at a dangerous angle. The endlessly shifting sands of Stray were not just trouble for the streets. Gripper was watching the road and waved rather limply to Logan as the Prian parked. The Arboran's thick brown hide was wet with sweat and the big alien looked miserable.

"What is it?" Logan asked when he had climbed out of the car and approached the circle of new towers. None of the Arcadian workers were anywhere to be seen.

"Hey, Hunter," said Gripper. His wide shoulders slumped and he sat heavily on the flat red ground. "Glass isn't coming. She called just before you arrived. She's going to be busy for the rest of the day."

Logan nodded, unsurprised, and peered at Gripper. "What is it?" he asked again. "What's wrong?"

The mechanic pulled on his thick, furry fingers and sighed. "I asked all the glassmiths to go away so it would be… you know… private out here. And with the knights gone, I thought you and Glass could um… be alone."

The pale, hot sun beat down mercilessly against the back of Logan's neck. It was nothing like the small, bright and distant star of his homeworld. This glowering red sun filled the sky and made the glass towers shimmer like impossibly tall flames. Logan sat down beside Gripper.

"This was a trick?" he asked. "Just to get Maeve and me together for a while?"

"Yeah," admitted Gripper. "It was Shimmer's idea."

Logan combed his illonium fingers through his hair. He needed a shower. "That's why Anthem is on his way to Bherrosi, isn't it?"

"Sort of. There really are problems for Arcadians in the north, but I doubt anyone will even notice the Blue Phoenix up there. Bherrosi is three times bigger than Gharib."

It was silly, Logan knew. Gripper and Duaal were teenagers and their ploy was ridiculously juvenile. But Logan could not help wishing that it had worked. He closed his eyes and let his head thud back against the glass wall of the unfinished fairy tower.

"Do you miss her?" Gripper asked. "I mean, I know you just saw her, but…"

"Yes," said Logan.

They sat quietly together in the heat. Eventually, Gripper speared one finger into the sand beneath them and spoke. "What do you know about this enassui thing, Hunter?"

"Like Maeve said, it's something like an opera," Logan told him. "It's a traditional Arcadian format. They closely follow the five oathsongs, actually."

Gripper cocked his wide head at Logan. "And you were studying them. That song that's so popular in the city… You wrote that, didn't you? For Glass?"

Logan nodded. "I mangled some of the words."

"Does Glass know?"

"That the words were wrong? Yes."

"That's not what I meant."

"No," Logan answered. "She doesn't."

"You should tell her, Hunter."

"Why?"

Gripper didn't have an answer for that. He scooped up a handful of sand. It sifted out from between his fingers. "I haven't seen you with your guitar for a while. Actually, I meant to get you to bring it out here with Glass… but I sort of panicked and forgot."

It was Logan's turn not to answer. It had been weeks since the last time he played. Only twice since Maeve had left him… No, that wasn't fair.

I
was the one who told Maeve to do it.
I
pushed her into Anthem's arms.

Logan stood. "I'm going back," he told Gripper.

"Why?" the Arboran asked. "Glass will be working."

"So will I."

Defeated, Gripper followed Logan back toward Kaellisem.

________

"The fleet has reached twelve thousand."

Xartasia looked up at Dhozo. The smooth black floor reflected her white silhouette. The Glorious commander, by contrast, cast no reflection. The slick layer of nanites against his skin absorbed most light to supplement its power supply. Only one in a hundred photons escaped the nanomachines' metallic surface. They were not actually black, but reflected so little light of any color that they might as well have been.

"Is that number sufficient?" Xartasia asked.

Dhozo shrugged his huge shoulders. The observation deck was more than large enough for more distance, but he stood close to the little aerad queen, looming over her. Xartasia did not flinch or back away from Dhozo.

"I don't know," he rasped. "Until we go to Anzhotek, we won't know how many of your little aerads you will need. It could be ten or ten million."

"There are not that many Arcadians in the galaxy."

"Then I suggest we get the information, little queen."

Xartasia turned away from Dhozo. Not out of fear or even distaste, he sensed, but just to enjoy the view. The black fleet had caught another small freighter. The crew had provided an all too small meal. Dhozo's stomach ached again already. Now, the ship was being rapidly torn apart for metal and minerals. The fibersteel that seemed so popular in the old worlds was flexible but easy to tear. Zhyress and her team would restructure the metal into strong and thick armor, slick and black and invisible to all but the most sophisticated of sensors, the kind of instrumentation that this galaxy had not seen for millions of years.

"We will set a course for Anzhotek, Commander Dhozo," Xartasia said as the ship outside broke apart into three ragged, disintegrating pieces. Even those dwindled swiftly away to skeletal struts and supports, barely visible in the darkness. "I visited that world once, years ago, in search of secrets. I did not ever think to return."

Xartasia turned to one of the silent knights that followed her everywhere. Unlike Dhozo and his men, their armor was brightly polished glass. Too shiny, too visible. When the time came to fight, how long would these aerad knights last? They were slaves; bred to serve, not to fight. But Dhozo was older and smarter than Orix. Underestimating Xartasia and her kind – as his young subordinate did – would not put meat on the table.

Dhozo remembered the first time the old Projector had flared and opened in the forgotten bowels of VSS Forge. Dhozo remembered the feasting that followed. He was a junior engineer in those days, without enough rank to earn fresh meat. But he remembered the smell of blood, coppery and salty. It had been months since the Forge's last kill and there was near madness across the ship. The Glorious tore at each other in their desperation to get through the Projector, to hunt and to kill and to taste meat again.

Even after it was over, Dhozo never forgot the feeling of fresh, unprocessed air on his face as he brought down aerads, dryads and nyads by the dozens. Nothing else ever tasted as good as that feast in the old galaxy. When it closed again, when the same protocols that had allowed them through yanked the Glorious home again, Dhozo became obsessed with opening the Projector again. He studied the ancient technology every waking moment, pouring over files so old that the computer no longer even indexed them. And when the gate opened again, he was the first one through. But for all Dhozo had learned, it was not enough. He needed the information on Anzhotek.

Xartasia spoke quietly with her knights. They nodded and a pair flew away to carry out her orders. There were fifty ships in the fleet and it would take some organization to take them all to Anzhotek. Fifty starships full of aerads… These fairies were thinner than those Dhozo had hunted a century before, and many of them had diseases, but his mouth watered as he watched Xartasia stride toward him again.

"You are staring," she said in her musical voice.

"You are tempting, little queen," Dhozo told her.

"Focus, commander. I would make a small meal. But the use of the Waygates will feed you for millennia to come."

"It is darkness that sends us in search of light."

– Anya Bowden, Quarran Minister of Education (193 PA)

"What's Varrth charging us to haul this stuff?" Ballad asked.

Panna squinted at him through her sunglasses. Stray's sun was dim as ever, but the bright white sand of the Bherrosi managed to make it blinding. Panna hoped that boded well for its future as Arcadian glass.

"Three hundred cenmarks per ton," she told Ballad. "Less than half the next best offer Vyron managed to find."

Ballad stood a few feet away, leaning on his spear. "Why the hells did we get such a discount?" he asked suspiciously.

"Varrth wants to turn all of this into farmland," she said. "He's already got a contract to irrigate it with polar runoff. Now he just needs to change the nitrogen content of the ground to support plant life. He's tried twice, but this sand just absorbs the infusions and doesn't do anyone any good. So we're actually doing Varrth a favor in hauling the stuff away."

"And he's still charging us?"

"Do you have any idea how much seven hundred tons of fertilizer costs?" Panna asked, giving the short-haired fairy boy an irritated frown. "Varrth threw away a lot more into this land than he'll make off us. If he's lucky and gets a good rate, we'll be buying him one quarter of his next nitrogen infusion."

"Still seems like we're being cheated."

Ballad squinted at the Arcadians working the snow-colored dune, laboring under Duaal and Sir Anthem's direction, filling large blue plastic canisters and dragging them onto the null-inertia loader. The white sand hill hid the Blue Phoenix from view. Panna wondered if she would be able to see it when they had sifted and removed enough of the dune to fill the old hauler's hold.

"Is the nitrogen going to be a problem?" Ballad asked suddenly. "When Hyra and his birds make all this into glass?"

"What? No," Panna answered. "Have you
ever
taken a science class?"

"No," Ballad shot back. "There aren't lots of schools on Prianus and I sure as hells wouldn't cut off my wings just to go."

Panna scowled at Ballad. "It shows."

"Wait, are you calling me stupid?"

"Nitrogen is a gas, Sir Ballad," she told him. "Unlike the heavy metals in Gharib sand, the nitrogen will vaporize as soon as the glassingers begin working the molecules."

"How the hells was I supposed to know that?" Ballad asked.

"That's what school is for!"

Ballad fumed, grasping his spear tight enough to turn his knuckles the same white as the dunes. "I'm going up there," he said. "I may be stupid, but I can haul sand."

"You're supposed to be watching for trouble from the city," Panna protested.

She pointed to the barely-visible silhouette of Bherrosi in the distance. Ballad flicked his wings. "We've been here for a day," said the rough young knight. "No one in Bherrosi has even noticed. I'm just standing here and getting a sunburn, not doing anything useful."

"If Sir Anthem needed you up there, he would call," Panna pointed out. "You stay right here."

"Yes, ma'am," Ballad said sourly. "Because I need another old fashioned fairy ordering me around."

Panna was so pleased that Ballad was obeying her that it took her a moment to register what he had said. "Old fashioned? Me? I had my wings removed and went to a coreworld college. I'm the most progressive Arcadian you'll ever meet!"

Bored or maybe just showing off, Ballad spun his glass-bladed spear in a flashing circle. A pair of blue ribbons streamed from the haft, probably awarded for success in some sort of training exercise. "Really?" Ballad asked, arching an eyebrow. "Queen Maeve left my friend for Sir Anthem. Let me guess where you stand on that."

"Hey, I like Logan, too," Panna protested. "But it's important for the queen to have an Arcadian consort!"

"Why?" Ballad asked. He twirled his spear again and then thumped the butt down into the sand.

Panna shook her head in disbelief. "Because she's our queen! Because she is the living embodiment of ten thousand years of history and culture.
Arcadian
history and culture."

"So?" Ballad asked plainly. "He was a whore!"

"What? Who told you that? It doesn't matter! Sir Anthem is an anointed knight and one of precious few noble-born Arcadians left in the universe. Queen Maeve needs him!"