Hammer of Time (The Reforged Trilogy) (62 page)

Anthem and his knights clashed with Xartasia's surprised forces as they struggled to get off the ground. Spears flicked out and clashed against each other or shrieked off plate armor as they circled and climbed. Each knight sought the high position in the air for the diving strike on the gaps in armor at neck or wing.

A pair of them dove at Logan. He fired up at them, but the laser flashed off glass armor. One beam found a chink at a shoulder plate and the knight spun off into the deep shadows, but the other kicked at Logan from the air, catching him in the chest. Logan staggered and barely managed to pull his feet back beneath him before the knight thrust his spear at the scar Hallax had left years ago. Logan grabbed the blade in his glass hand and yanked as hard as he could. The fairy knight tried to retain control of his spear, beating his wings hard and kicking up a cloud of dry gray dust. As he tried to yank the spear from Logan's hand, the Prian hunter brought up his Talon and fired right through the knight's unprotected throat. The Arcadian fell limp to the dry ground. Blood turned the dry ground into dark, sticky mud.

Arcadian bodies littered the cracked ground. Several of Xartasia's knights had Anthem surrounded in a cage of glass spears. The handsome knight dove and wheeled with shocking skill, actually landing for a moment on one of his attackers' back. The added weight buckled the woman's wings and sent her tumbling to the ground. Anthem leapt free and rose steeply into the shadows. It was difficult to make out who was who in the flurry of wings… Logan wasn't sure if they were winning or not. He fired once at one of the banking knights chasing Anthem, burning through feathers and wings.

Xia fired at a pair of Xartasia's Arcadians who had driven Eranna to the ground and pried at her armor with their spears. The Ixthian landed only a glancing shot that scattered across the fairies' glass armor, but both vanished into the high shadows again. Xia crouched beside Eranna, pouring chemical cauterizers into several deep, bloody gashes. The young knight groaned and stood, leaning on her spear and leapt back into the fray. Gripper loped through the dirt and darkness toward another fallen knight, scooped up the bloody fairy and carried him back to Xia.

Another trio of knights circled and dove at Logan. He shot one in the wing and then under the arm as the Arcadian fought to regain altitude, but Logan could not get a good angle and his laser just glanced off the others' armor. He threw himself to one side as they closed, but there was no cover in the flat expanse of the buried city. With a musical warcry, Maeve fell on one of the other fairies, burying her spear to the fluttering ribbons between the glass plates. She leapt free as fire blossomed around the last knight. It washed over the attacking Arcadian, incinerating wings and glass. The dead knight fell to the ground in a sizzling heap.

Duaal winked at Logan. But his smile slid away and the mage launched a lightning bolt into the darkness. The Devourer slid through the shadows, nanite armor reaching through the gloom. A tentacle of inky metal lashed out and caught one of the Kaellisem knights around the ankle. He screamed as the nanites ate through his glass armor and into the flesh beneath. One of Xartasia's fairies drove her spear through his back and blood splashed inside glass armor, dripping down the transparent plates. The black cloud of nanites yanked him down to the ground where the Devourer finished the job.

A crackling fork of lightning flashed blue-white through the black cloud. The nanites contracted into a slick black shell over the Devourer's body. It was a woman, Logan saw. Much bigger than any woman he had ever seen before, but this alien's waist was narrow and the hips wider. And those were definitely breasts. But Logan trained his Talon-9 on her and fired rapidly. The black swarm hardened against the assault. It was hard to vary his targets in this darkness without simply missing them.

"Can you do something about her armor?" Logan asked Duaal.

"I'm thinking!" the mage shouted.

Fire and lightning blazed over the ebony nanite shield. Pieces of debris levitated and hurled themselves at the Devourer as if fired from an NI cannon. The Devourer crouched, reducing her profile and both energy and missiles broke over the hardened surface. Logan pointed his laser at the ceiling. The glowing indicator set into the grip showed red, already flashing in warning. Logan squeezed the release and slid in another battery from his dwindling supply.

He aimed high above the Devourer and held down the trigger, pouring energy against the thick, aging alloy far above. Sparks turned into molten droplets and then larger pieces began to fall like glowing rain. Logan moved the beam in a careful circle, trying to carve out a large enough chunk. It was up to Duaal to keep the Devourer busy.

________

Duaal saw what Logan had in mind, but it would take some time. Time that it was now the mage's job to buy. Without the Prian hunter and his Talon-9, the Devourer woman took the offensive again. She lashed out with blades and tearing hooks. Duaal blasted them back with fire, lightning and barriers of brittle solidified air. He tried to reach into her nervous system, to wrap his will around some vital blood vessel, but Duaal didn't know much about Devourer anatomy.

The Devourer snatched a knight – Duaal was not sure if it was one of theirs or Xartasia's – from the air and tore the screaming fairy in half. White teeth flashed in the blackness. Did these creatures ever stop eating? No, Duaal supposed. Glass crunched and vanished into the nanite storm. With her energy renewed, the Devourer's nanites were reforming into a long, red-glowing laser.

"Logan…!" Duaal shouted. "Now!"

A ten-foot circle of the ceiling, molten around the edges, crashed down onto the Devourer. Tentacles spasmed and then fell in long lines of black dust. The power indicator on his laser flashed red. Deep cracks radiated out from the fallen slab of fibersteel.

"Duaal!" Maeve landed hard on the crumbling ground. Several of her long pinions were charred black. "We need you!"

Several of Arcadians were not carrying spears. Instead, they hurled fire and lightning. Mages. Ballad folded his wings and arrowed at one of them, but the Arcadian sang a fluting song that Duaal knew all too well. Ballad howled in sudden pain as agony wracked his nerves. Anthem reached out for the thrashing, falling fairy. Another one of Xartasia’s Arcadians slashed a bloody wound through Anthem’s wing, forcing the knight down.

Duaal gathered himself and jumped, leaving the ground far below. Logan was already slamming a fresh battery into his laser, Maeve covering him with her red-stained glass spear. At the apex of his leap, Duaal hung in the air for an impossibly long moment over the heads of the flying knights. With a smirk and a thought, he extinguished flames and sent electricity grounding harmlessly into the huge metal stanchion. He pushed the air out below him in a billowing cloud, clearing a path through the jockeying Arcadians and landed on the ground under the spellsingers.

Trained in the same rote spells that Xartasia had taught Gavriel, the Arcadians rained fire and light on Duaal. But he knew those songs, recognized them from the first notes. It was a simple matter to slip aside or counter them. His nerves itched as the fairies tried to kindle agony in his body.

"Oh, no," Duaal chuckled. "I don't think so."

The young Hyzaari mage swept his arm in a broad circle, pointing at one Arcadian after the other. He reached into their brains, dilating a single blood vessel and sending a sudden rush of blood too hard, too fast. One by one, Xartasia's spellsingers dropped unconscious to Axis' cracked gray surface.

"I hope you all saw that," Duaal gloated.

But no one seemed to have appreciated his cleverness. Maeve's dwindling knights were still badly outnumbered. Logan had acquired an Arcadian spear and fought back to back with Ballad, who had shaken off the effects of the spell and recovered his feet. Xia knelt over Anthem Calloren, hastily sealing the hole in the delicate membrane of his right wing while the beautiful knight grimaced in pain. Anthem sang to his remaining knights to keep moving.

"Duaal!" Logan shouted. "You and Maeve have to keep moving. Go!"

Maeve opened her mouth to argue, but instead, she grabbed Logan by the front of his bloody shirt and pulled the hunter into a short, fierce kiss. Then, with a keening note of anguish, she flew toward Duaal.

"Which way?" she cried over the screams and crash of glass on glass. "Where is the Waygate?"

Duaal pointed and ran along the flat, packed ground in Maeve's shadow as she flew, following his directions. There was a crackling sound to Duaal's left. The huge pieces of the ceiling still glowed sullenly around the melted edges where Logan had burned it free of Level Nine, but the ten-ton slab of fibersteel was
moving
. The metal turned duller, lighter and crumbled like chalk. Black fog rose up from the collapsing metal.

Duaal threw himself backwards as the Devourer climbed out of the cracked hole pounded into the dry ground. Patches of slick black clung to her body here and there, tending to wounds. Smoky tendrils floated out cautiously. The Devourer was taking no chances. Duaal knotted his fingers and hurled lightning. The nanite cloud opaqued against the crackling bolt, but did not waver.

Maeve turned sharply, banking and circling back, but Duaal waved her off. "No!" he told her. "Keep flying, Maeve!"

Her jaw set and she rose once more into the darkness. In a moment, she was gone. Duaal threw himself high over the Devourer and landed out of reach of its tentacles again. She turned and advanced once more. Could he simply knock the alien killer unconscious as he had the Arcadians? No, he just didn't know enough about her anatomy.

A ten-foot scythe suddenly formed in the Devourer's hands and slashed out at Duaal. It whistled through the stale air, driving the Hyzaari mage back. The nanites swirled and formed a short-barreled laser cannon that glowed with hellish light. Duaal heaved a buried piece of ancient wall up from the ground just in time to be blasted into blackened rubble. The burning chips of something like concrete pelted Duaal and he had to shield his eyes from the smoke. He coughed. Where was the Devourer?

A black spike as big around as his thigh shot out from the smoke and dust, spearing Duaal through the stomach. The mage gasped and blood poured down his legs. The spear of nanites changed form inside him. It divided, curved out into hooks, and tore free again. Shiny wet shapes looped around the barbed nanites. His intestines…

He smelled the hot copper tang and the acrid scents of blood and acid leaking from his torn stomach. The strength went out of his legs and he sank to his knees. The Devourer stalked toward him through the smoke and shadows. It moved confidently now. Tendrils of smoke flowed along the cluttered ground, seeking the splattered gore. Duaal felt a tugging from somewhere deep inside and he realized that his guts were still attached. The Devourer was eating him alive.

The pain boiled through him. Duaal silenced his searing nerves with a thought. Nanite smoke condensed and clung to the Devourer's body like an oily garment. She held Duaal's viscera in her hand, chewing on the end with relish. His blood ran down her chin. The Devourer smiled with her mouth full of sharp white teeth as she ate him.

Tearing me into pieces while I watch
, Duaal thought.
But aren't we all pieces…? Swarms of molecules and atoms? Just particles held together by electrons and magnetic bonds?

Duaal smiled back at the feasting Devourer as he dissolved those bonds. Her molecules, free of the forces that bound them into proteins and tissue, blew away in a fine red-black mist. The young mage fell onto his back in the dust and stared up at the shadowed underside of Axis. Xia was running toward him, skidding to a stop beside her captain with eyes blazing red. He winked at her.

"Tell me… you saw that," Duaal said before the darkness took him.

"It is not until we face death that we truly live."

– Duaal Sinnay (234 PA)

Logan had lost the spear. He lifted his glass arm and parried a thrust upwards. The blade missed his heart, but the point stabbed through the muscle of his shoulder. He gripped the haft to keep the Arcadian from ripping through to his neck and kicked out. His legs were longer than the knight's reach and Logan's kick landed solidly against his groin. Xartasia's knight fell back, staggered but protected by his armor. Logan yanked the spear from his shoulder, but the bloody glass slipped through his fingers and fell. As the knight lurched to recover his weapon, Logan grabbed the knight's helmet and twisted with all his strength. Dead or paralyzed, the Arcadian dropped to the ground.

Logan ejected the spent power pack of his Talon-9 and slid in his last replacement. Anthem was not far away. The knight's colorful glass armor was streaked with even more scarlet than usual and his long blond hair had come undone from its beaded braids.

"How many made it?" Logan asked.

Anthem's expression was sad. "Seven. Only four still fit to fight, including myself." He swept his wing across the underground plain. None of the glass sparkled any longer. It was smeared in dust and mud, scratched and stained. Bodies were strewn across the fractured ground.

"What about the Devourer?" Logan asked.

Ballad landed hard. He was limping badly and a cut on his scalp sheeted blood down the side of the young fairy's face. "Duaal got it," Ballad said. "But it got him."