In Her Name: The Last War (110 page)

“Come on, boy! Come on!” 

She didn’t see the laser blast that killed Race. She only heard a brief thrumming sound before the horse make a strange grunt and he fell. Allison went sailing over his head as he went down, and the rifle flew from her hand.

Rolling as she hit the ground, just as her father had taught her, she quickly got to her knees and looked back at her fallen horse.

Race stared at her with dead eyes. His body had been sheared in half, just behind where she’d been sitting. Smoke rose from the blackened ends of his severed body, and she smelled the stench of burning meat and hair. His rear hooves twitched.

The tree next to her crackled with heat and burst into flame as the ship fired again, and she caught sight of several warriors running toward her. She couldn’t see how the ship could have missed her with the laser as she knelt there. They must have killed Race just to keep her from getting away.

“Goodbye, boy,” she whispered before she turned and fled into the woods.

* * *

It took Allison nearly six hours to make her way home. Kreelans were scouring the area, and Allison had been forced to hide in a secret spot along the creek until the aliens went away. Waist deep in the burbling water of the creek, she cowered in a tiny cave formed by a group of rocks. Before her father had built the shelter, it had been her favorite hideaway when she played with Elena and the other girls, although her parents and Shaun knew perfectly well where it was.

But the Kreelans didn’t. She heard them moving around in the woods outside, but stayed put until late at night, long after the voices of her alien pursuers had faded away. 

There, in the dark, she had listened to the continued sounds of gunfire coming from town. The defenders weren’t giving in easily. She didn’t know anything about armies and fighting, but she knew the Territorial Army, her townsfolk, would probably lose. A lot of Kreelans had come out of those boats.

At last, she forced herself out of the little cave. She was afraid that if she didn’t go now, she never would.

After looking and listening carefully for any sign of the aliens, she made her way along the creek that formed the northern boundary of the farms on this side of town, careful not to make any noise. 

Finally reaching her own farm, she paused again. Kneeling in the gently burbling water, she carefully watched the barn, which was only a short run from the creek, and listened. 

There was nothing but the sounds of battle coming from town. She also heard more shots being fired from the west and south.

Getting up, Allison crept across the open ground to the rear of the barn, then slipped inside. The other animals were still there, and after a moment’s deliberation, she freed them. The four cows and two horses wandered out the open doors and began grazing, unconcerned that aliens had invaded their world. 

Opening the door to the shelter, Allison entered the stairwell, then closed and locked the door behind her, shutting away the awful sounds of the fighting. 

Leaving the lights off, as if the aliens could somehow see them here underground, she crawled into the small bed that was hers. She didn’t bother to take off her wet clothes.

After a moment, shivering with cold and the agony of all she’d lost that day, Allison quietly wept in the darkness.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

Ku’ar-Marekh, high warrior priestess of the Nyur-A’il, walked alone on an airless world whose existence in the cosmos was unworthy of an entry in the Books of Time, save that she had set foot upon it. 

She stopped a moment and looked up at the protostar that was forming far above, an accretion of gas and dust that someday would achieve sufficient mass for fusion to begin, for a star to be born. It was a swirling, glowing cloud whose beauty had never been witnessed by any sentient being other than herself.

Her armor, a light-drinking black that was so smooth it could be used as a mirror, except for the cyan rune of the order of the Nyur-A’il in the center, reflected the subtle hues. The reds and yellows and blues that she could see, but whose beauty could not touch her soul. 

Her jet black hair, woven into the braids that were an ancient tradition of her people, hung down to her waist, glistening in the ghostly light. Her eyes, flecked with silver, looked at the scene through slitted pupils. Her skin, a cobalt blue, in this light was so dark as to be nearly black. Black as the empty space around her, a reflection of the emptiness within her.

Around her neck she wore the black collar of living metal that every one of Her Children wore, the many rows of pendants that hung from it proclaiming her accomplishments for the peers to witness. The front of the collar also bore an oval device of glittering metal, the same living steel from which Kreelan swords were made, with her order’s rune etched into the surface. It proclaimed that she was a priestess, although the warriors around her knew who and what she was through their very blood. They could sense her spirit in the Bloodsong that united their people across the ten thousand suns of the Empire, and across the boundary that separated life and death.

Indeed, she was a high priestess, but it was an empty honor, the name of her order ash on her tongue. The Nyur-A’il was not the oldest of the orders that served Her, the Empress, for that honor was accorded to the Desh-Ka and its last living disciple, the great priestess Tesh-Dar. 

But while the Desh-Ka might be considered the most powerful in the Empire, it could be said that the Nyur-A’il were the most feared. 

Yet fear was an emotion that Ku’ar-Marekh no longer felt. Nor was love, joy, or anger. Among the peers she had heard whispers of a name that some had for her. They called her Dead Soul. 

Had they spoken the name to her, she would not have taken them to task for it, for it was too close to the truth.

Reaching out her hands toward the protostar, she yearned to touch it, to become one with it over the ages yet to come. The invisible energy bubble surrounding her body flexed, matching her movement. It held the air she needed to breathe and shielded her from the radiation of the star-to-be, but it was not an artifact of technology. It was an act of will, a gift of the Change that had made her far more than a mere warrior, just as was the ability to flit among the stars, merely by wishing it so. Few high priestesses had that particular power, for the sacred crystals which powered the Change were fickle, their gifts not easily predicted.

For her, the Change had not been as expected. While it had brought her powers that made her greatly feared, even among the other warrior priestesses, it had robbed her of much more. 

She knew she could not touch the cloud, but yearned to be part of it, to be reborn. To have been chosen to take her place as a warrior priestess among the Children of the Empress had been a great honor, the greatest to which any of the peers could aspire. 

But for Ku’ar-Marekh, it had been the end of her happiness. The great cloud of glowing dust at which she longingly stared would know more of happiness than did she.

For long cycles after the Change, after she had become her order’s highest and last priestess, she had wandered the galaxy far beyond the Empire’s vast domain. She had walked upon a hundred worlds such as this, had floated through great rings of fire and ice, and had seen sights among the stars that no other of her race had ever glimpsed. She sought to find something, anything, that would kindle the faintest emotion in her heart, the tiniest sense of wonder or awe. Even fear or loneliness. 

Yet she had felt nothing. Views that would have paralyzed her sisters with their celestial grandeur left her unmoved. 

All she could do was live, to survive from day to day without hope or solace. She breathed the air she took with her during her leaps through space. She ate and drank when her body demanded, rested when her endurance was at an end. She existed. No more.

Even the Bloodsong, the emotional river that flowed from the Empress and bound Her Children together, was like a fire that cast light but not the warmth that Ku’ar-Marekh remembered from before the Change. She could sense her sisters, their joys and sorrows, the fierce ecstasy of those fighting the far-distant humans. But their fates were bound to the Universe around her, and in the end did not matter to Ku’ar-Marekh. Nothing did.

Nothing...except the Empress Herself. From Her alone could Ku’ar-Marekh sense in the Bloodsong a trace of the love that she had once known, as if the Empress were a great star, now far distant. That was the only reason Ku’ar-Marekh had not surrendered her honor and taken her own life. Even the eternal dark beyond the love of the Empress could not be worse than the dark and empty torment of her existence.

Ku’ar-Marekh lowered her arms, letting them fall to her side. All she felt now was a great weariness. It was a familiar sensation, and meant that it was time to move on yet again. 

That was when she felt a sudden surge in the Bloodsong, a great upwelling that could only have one source, the Empress Herself. Ku’ar-Marekh sighed as she opened herself to her sovereign’s power.

She knelt and closed her eyes as she felt space and time whirl around her, bending to the will of She Who Reigned. There was but a brief moment of freezing emptiness as she crossed the vast span of the galaxy to her destination. Toward the home of her race.

“Rise, priestess of the Nyur-A’il.”

Ku’ar-Marekh opened her eyes to find the Empress standing before her. She wore only a simple white robe and a golden collar around the deep blue skin of her neck. Unlike the peers, Her collar bore no embellishments, no testimony to her feats from the time before she had surrendered her Collar of Honor and her birth name, things every Empress gave up when ascending to the throne. 

The braids of Her hair, unlike that of the peers, was white, not black. It was a rare trait among Her race, and only those warriors born with white hair could ever become Empress.

She Who Reigned had once been a powerful warrior, but since ascending to the throne had become far, far more. She was the heart and soul of the Empire, and embodied the souls of all those who had reigned before Her. All except for Keel-Tath, the First Empress, and the most powerful. The Empress who had cursed Her Own people in a fit of rage and anguish, and whose spirit Her successors had sought for tens of thousands of generations.

Ku’ar-Marekh and the Empress were alone in a corner of the Imperial Gardens that were part of the palace on the Empress Moon orbiting the Homeworld. 

Ku’ar-Marekh did as the Empress commanded and rose, yet kept her eyes downcast in respect. 

“Walk with me, child.” The Empress turned to follow the winding path made of stones taken from all the worlds the Empire had ever touched. Somewhere, Ku’ar-Marekh knew, there was a stone from each of the dead worlds she herself had set foot upon in her travels, and that someday the Empress would touch those stones with Her feet as she guided the Empire with Her words and the power of the Bloodsong. 

The thought of how long Ku’ar-Marekh had been away, how she had intentionally shunned the peers, even the Empress herself, should have made her feel great shame. She knew this, but did not feel it.

“It has happened before.” The Empress walked slowly, one hand on her belly. She was heavy with child, one of many she had borne. She was older than most of the peers, but would yet outlive nearly all of them, and would bear children for many cycles more. For She was bound by the same curse as were the others of Her people. Fertile adult females had to mate every cycle or they would die. Powerful as She was, the living Empress, too, fell under the same Curse.

“What has happened before, my Empress?”

“What happened to you, child.” The Empress stopped and turned to face Ku’ar-Marekh. “I know the emptiness you feel, priestess of the Nyur-A’il. It is a rare thing, for when a priestess passing on her legacy dies in the Change, as did yours, the disciple nearly always dies, as well. But sometimes...”

“Yes, my Empress?”

“Sometimes, the body lives.” 

“I...” Ku’ar-Marekh stopped, her mind grappling with the unpleasant possibilities. “I do not understand.”

“Your soul is caught between life and death, child. That is why you feel no fire in your heart from the Bloodsong, why joy and sorrow have no meaning. Why even pain has no sting. Why you do not feel this.”

The Empress raised Her hand to Ku’ar-Marekh’s face, and as their flesh touched, Ku’ar-Marekh was flooded with the power of the Bloodsong as she remembered it, with feeling, emotions. With life. It was as if one of the great tapestries that hung in the throne room, drained of color, was returned to its original glory. 

“Oh,” she gasped, instinctively covering the Empress’s hand with her own, pressing it firmly against her cheek, never wanting to let Her go. 

Ku’ar-Marekh fell to her knees, and it took all her will not to cry out in joy that she could feel again, and in anguish at the knowledge that this was but a fleeting moment that would vanish as soon as the Empress took away Her hand.

She bit her tongue, one of her fangs piercing it clean through, to keep from begging the Empress to take her life, to not consign her to another moment of living death. For Ku’ar-Marekh was a warrior priestess, and she could not dishonor herself or her order. She would not.

“Your Way is a difficult one, child.” The Empress gently ran the fingers of Her other hand over Ku’ar-Marekh’s black braids. While the priestess was not a child of Her body, she was a child of Her spirit, and the Empress felt the fear and anguish in her heart now. Yet She was warmed by Ku’ar-Marekh’s strength and her refusal to give in, to beg for mercy. “It is a path that very few have been fated to walk during the long ages of our history. Yet it is a path that you must follow to its end, where you shall find peace.”

Slowly, the Empress took away Her hands, and Ku’ar-Marekh felt the warmth fade from her heart. In but seconds, her soul was as it had been since the terrible day of the Change. Dead. Empty.

“What must I do, my Empress?” Ku’ar-Marekh’s tongue felt heavy, wooden in her mouth.