Hammer of Time (The Reforged Trilogy) (64 page)

Maeve threw all of her weight behind her spear as she dove, a deadly precision pinpoint of glass. Would killing Xartasia be enough to stop this? Maeve prayed. But she slammed into something twenty feet above the Waygate, an invisible wall of force as hard as any fibersteel bulkhead, and fell. Maeve landed painfully on one of the huge white steps below her radiant cousin. With a moan, she hauled herself to her feet and pushed, but could not take even a single step closer.

"Xartasia!" Maeve called out again. "Cousin, stop! The Alliance will be here soon. This is over!"

Finally, Xartasia glanced down imperiously from the Waygate. Her eyes danced with the brilliant indigo light. Her crown rose like a circlet of blue-burning blades from the darkness of her hair.

"I can see it, Maeve." Xartasia's voice barely carried to Maeve's ears. It was soft and secretive. Reverent. "I can see the White Kingdom again. I can see my father. I can see all I have lost…"

"Xartasia, no!" shouted Maeve. "Do not do this! You cannot just obliterate a hundred years, a trillion lives! We do not have the right to unmake their existences!"

"They will not suffer. None of us will suffer, Maeve. All will be as it should have been. I will fix it all. There is nothing left now but to end this song and begin anew. I will see you again in our home."

Maeve sang a wordless note of anguish and flung herself against Xartasia's barrier again, but to no avail. She may as well have been trying to cut through the Waygate itself with a feather. Above, Xartasia closed her eyes and spread her arms as though welcoming an embrace. All around her, the Waygate filled the darkness with twisting violet radiance. The Arcadians' song rose, thundering in Maeve's ears.

Someone called her name. Logan had pushed his way through the throng of singing, swaying Arcadians. His Talon-9 was still in his hand, the barrel steaming slightly in the stale air of Axis' long-dark surface. Gripper was a step ahead and leapt desperately at Xartasia, but slammed against the same barrier that had stopped Maeve. He shouted in frustration. Ballad soared out of the darkness toward the White Queen, but could get no closer than Maeve or Gripper. Logan brought up his laser and fired. The beam refracted harmlessly, just like off Arcadian glass. He glanced down at the weapon and then holstered it.

Something was happening. All around, Axis shimmered and wavered like reflections on waves. Cold numbness seeped through her body. Maeve could not describe the sensation except as… as though reality was falling away, a strange sense of distance from her own senses and body, as though time and reality were draining away like blood flowing from a wound.
A wound in time
, Maeve thought,
and we are bleeding out.

The Waygate blazed, pulsed and flared in a nova of cold indigo fire. Another Arcadian dove from the writhing purple shadows to land beside Maeve. Anthem. The knight's armor shone like iridescent flame.

"Titania," he said. There was a century of pain and joy in that single word.

Xartasia's bright violet eyes flew open and she stared. "Anthem…?"

He did not try to hammer or fight his way to the flickering Waygate. He stood in the shimmering final twilight, looking up at Xartasia. "I lived, my enarri. I thought of you every day."

"No, you died on Illisem," Xartasia said. She took a faltering step toward the stairs. "Anthem…"

"I am here." He held out his arms. "But I cannot come to you, Titania. Not while you are doing this."

"Anthem, my enarri… All that I have done, I did in your memory… I have to do this…!"

Xartasia's eyes were wide and shining. She ran out of the Waygate and jumped, gliding on trembling wings. Xartasia fell into Anthem's embrace. He folded his wings around her, love and pain warring across his handsome face. The knight closed one gauntlet into a fist and knocked it hard into Xartasia's temple. The White Queen went limp in his arms, blood trickling from beneath her midnight hair. Her glass crown fell to the ground, rolled along its rim once and then clattered into the dust.

"No. I never wanted this, Titania. For either of us," said Anthem.

The gathered Arcadians moaned as Xartasia fell. Their nexus was gone, the mind that connected theirs to the Waygate. First one and then hundreds of fairies jumped to their feet, filling the struggling shadows with a storm of wings. But the uncontrolled Waygate seared with bruised purple light, gashed through the middle with bloody red. Gripper grabbed Maeve's shoulder.

"She didn't close the Waygate!" he shouted. "If we don't get it under control, it's going to call the Devourers again, just like on Orindell and Prianus!"

"Duaal–" Maeve said.

"Is not here," Anthem finished. He lifted Xartasia's limp body into his arms. "You are the only one left who knows how to manage a Waygate, Maeve. Go!"

"No!" cried Maeve. Her failure on Tamlin had started this whole thing, begun over one hundred years of pain and death that had left her people homeless, that had orphaned Gripper, that had killed Tiberius and countless others. "I cannot!"

"There's no one else, dove," Logan shouted. "Close that thing!"

He was right. Maeve leapt into the air. There were Arcadians everywhere, scattering into the darkness with the fall of their queen. Feathers flickered through red and purple light. The Waygate toned thunderously.
"Szo ghemma b'ho leng. Hotek mev khavvna tek vommen."

Xartasia's barrier was gone and Maeve landed hard on the slick white of the Waygate. She threw her arm across her face as the light blazed. All she had to do was sing the closure spell and then the whole system would shut down. The Devourers probably had some simpler, faster way to interface with their ancient technology, but Maeve had no desire or ability to ask them for help.

She closed her eyes. Spots wavered behind her lids, but Maeve did not need to see. Just to concentrate. She had to get the spell right this time. Just close the Waygate and this would be over. All of this pain and loss and destruction would finally end. Maeve drew a deep breath that tasted of wet earth and feathers and blood. She found the words and opened her mouth to sing… But Xartasia's song, her spell sang through the Waygate. The spell was out of control, but it was not dead.

I can see it
, Xartasia had said. Now Maeve could see it. All of it. The violet light that filled the Waygate washed over her, filaments of time and energy that Xartasia had spread like a spider's web or nervous system across the entire galaxy, across a hundred years. A trillion lives poured into Maeve's mind, uncountable moments and trillions of possibilities. Everything that had happened in a hundred years. Everything that
might
have happened. The White Kingdom restored, never fallen. A shining jewel of glass that never faded, yes…

But more. So much more. She felt it all around her, through her; infinite threads of lives and moments not tangled in time, but a precise and intricate tapestry in a trillion breath-taking, luminous colors. It rippled against Maeve's inspection.

"Glass!" Gripper cried. "Close the Waygate!"

She heard him. Not with her ears… Blood pounded and Maeve was drowning in the dull red roar. But she knew her friend was speaking. She saw it, felt the moment like a tiny, delicate living thing in her hand. Every moment of Gripper's life, from the tiny Arboran's first infant scream, his first steps to that moment he climbed the sick old sycona tree, when it crashed to the ground and he chased Xartasia through the ancient Waygate… She reached out and brushed her thoughts against the tapestry. There were dark threads, pain and loss sewn through the boundless beauty. Maeve gently plucked at a single one and all of time shuddered at her touch.

"I can see it," she said. "I can see them all. And I… I can change it…"

"What are you doing?" shouted Gripper.

"It does not have to be like this," Maeve told him. "You do not have to be alone out here. I can send you home. You will never come here."

"What?" Gripper's eyes were huge and he took an involuntary step closer to the burning Waygate. "I… You can… I could go back to Arborus? But everyone there is dead, Glass."

"I can fix it. I can change time…" she whispered. She could. It would take only a touch, not the crude hammer that Xartasia would have used.

Ballad landed on the huge white stairs. "Maeve, this is exactly what we came to stop Xartasia from doing. Shut down the Waygate!"

"No," Maeve said. "I do not have to change everything. I will not unmake anyone's life. There have been so many horrible moments. So many have died! The Alliance fights even now to contain the last Devourers on Level One. They will win their battle, but at such cost…! Tens of thousands are dead, dying!"

Maeve reached out one trembling hand. She could touch them, trillions of lives, so many points of pain. With just the gentlest nudge, she could fix them all. So many other lives, so many possibilities…

Tiberius alive. Alive.

Gripper perched in the healthy sycona tree, never falling. Living a long life on green Arborus.

Xia married to Xen, with an adorable brood of healthy, well-bred silver children.

Gavriel on Tynerion, a teacher of philosophy once more.

Duaal under the bright sun and approving smiles of his own people.

Logan in his worn blue police uniform, smiling at his wife and laughing son.

"Maeve, stop this!" Anthem said from the dark, distant ground.

She looked at the knight. "I can send you through the same Waygate as Titania. You need never be separated from your love!"

Anthem brushed Xartasia's black hair back from her face. "I am with her now. Perhaps she will hate me when she wakes, but at least I have held my enarri one last time."

"Tiberius does not have to die," Maeve said, turning to Gripper. "Duaal does not have to be taken from Hyzaar. He does not have to die here! Ferris' daughter, Ballad's sister… They can live! Xia need never be taken by pirates. I can fix it. All of it… You can finally go home, Gripper. It is the only thing you have ever wanted."

"No, Maeve," the Arboran said. "I… I just want you to close the Waygate and come down from there. I just want this to be over. We can't play with time. You have to stop."

Logan had climbed the stairs, pushing past Ballad. The Prian hunter was a silhouette, a shadow in the brilliant Waygate light. Except for his left hand. The brilliance broke into a hundred rainbows against the glass. "Maeve," he said gently. "Close it."

"I can give you back your hand," she told him desperately. Why could they not see? All she wanted to do was make things better, just a few small fixes to time so that those she loved did not have to suffer. "Hallax's sword will miss its mark. Reginald will live. You will keep your heart, Logan. I can save you…"

The storm of possibilities whipped around them. Winds of a hundred worlds tore at his clothes and hair. There was rain, water and a spray of some sort of pale yellow acid. Lightning in slashed fragments and sunshine lit the Waygate as Maeve reached through time. Moonlight and the flashing green and red of the Prian police car lights. Just the lightest touch and Logan would be whole again. She could give him that with just a wish…

"What use do I have for a heart but to give it to you?" Logan held his glass hand out to Maeve. "If that Emberguard didn't take my hand, I would have remained a cop on Prianus. I never would have become a bounty hunter. I never would have met you."

"I have hurt you," Maeve whispered.

"Yes," Logan agreed. "But pain shapes us, Maeve."

"It breaks us! Look what it did to Titania, to me… To you, my enarri."

"It makes us who we are. That's why we came here, dove, why so many people have died today. To defend the right to our scars. I wouldn't change a moment of my life, no matter how painful, if it meant I never met you."

Logan still held his gun in his right hand, the Talon-9 that had been at the center of their chase, their hunt for one another for so long. Tears shone in his hard blue eyes. But there were so many lives in Maeve's hands, so many terrible losses and moments of unbearable pain. They drowned Maeve in more tears than Logan could ever shed. How could she turn her back on so much suffering?

"I love you," Maeve whispered. "I only want to help."

"I only want you."

Her hunter raised the gun, aiming it at Maeve. He would kill her now, suffer another terrible scar, rather than live his whole life without her. His hands were steady even as tears streamed down his cheeks. Logan Coldhand would kill the woman he loved to save the world. His scars were still raw, painful. They would never stop hurting. But they had made him strong, too.

Maeve took Logan's glass hand and pulled him into the center of the storm, into the Waygate. The wind and storms of a thousand worlds whipped them as Maeve stood on her toes and kissed her enarri. There was pain, yes, as his cybernetic fingers clutched too hard at her arm, but the pleasure of his touch outshone it all. Her hunter was right. There was no pleasure, there was no
life
without pain. Taking away the pain was just as terrible as anything Xartasia had tried to do. Even the dead had lived. Too short a time for too many of them, but those lives were their own. Maeve could not take them away.

She drew another deep breath and let go. Maeve sang Caith's song perfectly, singing the Waygate to sleep again with Logan's arms around her. At last, the purple light faded and the darkness closed in once more beneath Axis.