Souldancer (Soul Cycle Book 2) (11 page)

“Even if I can open the door,” said Xander, “how do we deal with the Master inside?”

Nahel slapped Xander’s back with a furry hand. “Don’t give in before the battle starts. Arcanadeus used us, and he’s gonna answer for it.”

“We have full confidence in your abilities,” Damus said as he took a step back.

Xander reached for the panel beside the door, trying to keep his hand from trembling. The smoked crystal surface was blank at first, but a glowing number pad flashed into view at his touch.

What if I have misremembered?
Xander’s fingers moved across the panel uncertainly. When he was done the numbers vanished in a blue glow.

The door slid open on a small vestibule. A six-walled chamber lay beyond, clad in sterile white. Arcanadeus’ shrouded form stood out like a man-shaped void near the center. His hands were pressed against a lambent cylinder that spanned from the floor to the low ceiling. Something moved inside.

Every accusation died on Xander’s lips when he saw what the Steersman coveted. He couldn't fully discern the cylinder's occupant; partly due to the phosphorescent vapor supporting its misshapen form, but mostly because he had no frame of reference for such horror. It resembled an infant, but asymmetrical and bloated. The being’s skin was transparent and mottled with purple veins. Its pale striated muscles evoked images of Medvia's fish market. Yet these terrors paled before the bottled creature’s presence. Just as its body surpassed the pranaphage’s deformity, its power dwarfed the predator’s might.

“Arcanadeus!” Xander found the strength to cry out.

The Master seemed not to hear. He longingly caressed the tank whose occupant’s stunted flippers lazily stirred the mist. At length his cowled head turned to face his pursuers. “Do you address Arcanadeus, young Nesshin? No. That name is false. The Master Steersman lies rotting in sandy ground.”

The traitor’s attention wandered back to the tube. He spoke again, this time to the misshapen being whose bulbous head lolled against the glass as if listening. “Yes, he is mistaken to call me by that name. Those who knew me called me Thurif, but there
was
an Arcanadeus whom I once called master. I was but a half-feral boy when he took me in; whether to remedy his loneliness or to expiate his guilt, I never knew. I do know that I would have starved if left to fend for myself.”

Damus’ brow knotted. “You’re just an Apprentice?”

“I am no Master.” A wistful grin curled the edges of Thurif’s mouth. “But I learned well enough to kill one.”

“Will you also sacrifice us to your greed?” Xander asked.

The impostor sighed. “Do not blame me for the wages of your ignorance.”

“You betrayed us!” Xander raged. “What could be worth such dishonor?”

Thurif paused for a moment before answering. “I desire ascendance in this fallen age, that all may be raised up with me.”

“You are a madman,” Xander spat. “And a coward, leading us here to die.”

“Not all of you,” Thurif said. “I had need of you Xander. Perhaps I still do.”

“As your guide? I should have left you to the desert.”

Thurif laughed. “That was the malakh’s job. You have skills far rarer than his brawn.”

Xander felt cold fingers brushing down his spine.

“Don’t feign surprise,” the traitor said. “You may have fooled the uninitiated, but rumors travel far, and I knew them for more than idle tales.”

“You thought me cursed,” Xander said. “You tried to destroy me.”

“I reacted with envy; not hatred, when I knew what you had. It was the glory of a few. Now it’s yours—yours and mine.”

“You want to take it from me?”

“Not from you,” Thurif said as he gazed into the tube. “The Guild spent millennia breeding subjects for nexism. This specimen is the penultimate fruit of their efforts, and it will guide me to the zenith.”

Behind Xander’s left shoulder, Nahel snarled and drew his bow.

Damus stepped up beside Nahel and addressed Thurif. “You’re not the first to try this sort of theft. You’ll die trying.”

“Early attempts were crude,” the traitor said, “but the Transessists had centuries to hone their craft. You could still help me, Xander—help us all.”

“You fed me to a monster!”

“My new associate’s idea,” Thurif said. “Regardless, contact with the pranaphage has lowered your inhibitions. Help me. We can repel the Night Gen; perhaps even save your clan.”

“My clan was right to shun me, as they would shun you.” Xander’s wrath burned like a star. Now it contracted to a single infinitely dense point. “I’ll show you how uninhibited I am.”

The more power Xander used, the more will he required to guide it—like wresting control of a dream from the chaotic flow of his subconscious. His rage summoned a force that would have compressed the pranaphage into a bloody, fist-sized ball, and he unleashed it on Thurif.

A will to move mountains surged from the tube, erecting an invisible wall that Xander felt as pins and needles pricking his skin. The wall drank the wave of crushing force like sand absorbing a water drop. On the other side, Thurif’s robe didn’t even stir.

His head swimming, Xander leaned on Damus to keep himself upright. Nahel shot at Thurif, but another motion of the tube creature’s will erased the arrow in midflight.

Thurif’s smile took in his three foes. “If you make obstacles of yourselves, you can be removed.”

Anger helped Xander focus his clouded thoughts. “I already meant to kill you. I’ll double your dying agony for every hurt you cause my friends.”

“Then my pain will only be twofold,” Thurif said. “The Gen’s knowledge is valuable. The same cannot be said of the malakh.”

Nahel drew a sword and gestured with it. “Come over here and say that.”

The traitor ran a spidery hand over the tank. “My new friend would rather open several discrete spatial rifts where you’re standing.”

Damus pushed his way to the fore. “These savages have more pride than sense, but I can see reason. You offered the power of the Guild. As I see it nothing’s changed. If you want my help, you’ve got it.”

Nahel’s canine jaw dropped. “You can’t mean that!”

“The Guild took someone precious from me,” Damus said. “I’d bargain with Zebel to get her back.”

A shrill hum reverberated through Xander’s head. “Something is coming,” he screamed. “Something’s here!”

Thurif swept nervous eyes upward and tightened his hold on the tube. The thing inside squirmed.

Xander knew that sound as the last he’d heard before losing his clan. A deep-seated reflex usurped his hobbled will. He lunged past Damus and mashed the door controls. The smoked crystal pulsed red as a honeycomb of blue light blazed across the doorframe. The pattern spread toward Xander and his friends, covering the corridor walls and ceiling.

Nahel’s light went out. “What happened?” he asked.

Damus groaned. “Xander’s triggered a ward.”

The chamber filled with what may have been green light, though the ward alloyed it with blue. The awful brilliance enveloped Thurif and his prize but never entered the hall. Xander had covered his ears after pressing the panel. He lowered his hands to find the hum reduced to a barely audible vibration.

Inside the chamber, Thurif and the fetal horror dissolved into blinding lights that shone white through the blue ward. His reedy scream and its watery cry joined in an ear-splitting squeal as the two lights overlapped.

Darkness returned, tempered only by the ward’s hazy blue glow. The chamber was empty.

“There goes your deal,” Nahel growled at Damus.

“Don’t be obtuse,” Damus scoffed. “I was distracting Thurif to help us escape—
successfully
, I might add. With some help from that strange light.”

Xander’s shock finally subsided enough for him to speak. “I think it was the same.”

Damus and Nahel both rounded on Xander.

“What was the same?” asked the Gen.

“My last memory before running in the desert from the wolves. I had left my father’s wagon. There was a hum that could’ve split stone, and a blinding light.”

“I just heard screams,” said Nahel. “Saw the light, though. Looks like it couldn’t pass the ward.”

Damus looked askance at Xander. “A ward the might’ve killed us. I still don’t recommend touching it.”

Xander stared into the darkened room. The empty cylinder reminded him of a body without a soul. “Death may be better than Thurif’s fate.”

Damus knelt and wedged the tip of his sword into a floor seam. “Save the morbid speculation for later, and help me pull up the floor.”

“Damus!” Nahel shouted from across the hall, interrupting Damus’ study of the chart hanging amid cracked paint on the Guild facility’s wall. “Xander’s up. Let’s get out of here.”

Damus frowned. He’d suggested letting Xander rest—mostly to buy more exploration time. Between the boy’s liberal use of nexism and the physical exertion of helping pry up floor plates to escape the ward, his recovery had been remarkably fast.

A duty that transcended Damus’ oaths of fealty urged him to decipher the diagram. It promised answers to his deepest questions, teasing him through its thick glass case. He was stymied, but only until he recalled the shape of Mithgar’s pre-Cataclysm coastline.

It’s a map.

The chart showed each major land mass spiderwebbed with colored lines. It resembled Thurif’s map but for one perplexing detail—the scattered placement of large black squares.

Damus took a step back and started over. He noticed the black icons’ placement at major convergences of colored lines. The pattern had to be significant.

What landmarks stood at every major crossroads on the First Sphere?
He wondered.
Why would a Guild facility display a map of their locations?

Damus cursed himself for a fool. His trembling fingers reached out to claim the only known map to every Guild house on Mithgar.
Let this lead me to her,
he silently beseeched any god that might listen.

“Damus!” Nahel repeated. “Are we leaving this rat trap or not?”

With a sigh Damus rolled up his treasure and slid it into his flute. His boot heels clicked on moldy ceramic tiles as he crossed to the relatively unspoiled infirmary where the others had taken refuge.

“About time,” barked Nahel.

An antiseptic smell lingered under the musk of mold. Damus swept aside the fragments of some broken apparatus with his boot. “Would you rather I rushed the execution of Her Majesty’s orders?”

“My orders are to keep you safe. It’s too dangerous here for just the three of us to rummage around—no matter what Guild swag we might find!”

Xander sat on the padded table where he’d lain, holding his head. “Would you
please
stop shouting?”

Nahel grimaced. “Sorry. Your head still hurt?”

“I have never used so much power before. And that earsplitting hum—but you didn’t hear it. Both of you must think me mad.”

“Not so,” said Damus. “Nexism once occurred quite often among higher species.”

“So I am a…
nexism
?”

Damus resisted the urge to laugh. Though Xander was as bright for a human as he was stout for a Nesshin, he was still young by any standard.

“
Nexism
is the proper term for your ability. A practitioner of such powers is called a
nexist
. They were all thought exterminated. But then again, the Night Tribe escaped the Purges.”

The three friends exchanged uneasy looks.

At length Xander said, “The light—you think it came from a Night Gen nexist?”

Damus shook his head. “I doubt there’s any nexist powerful enough to do what we saw. A nexus-runner is another matter.”

“What is a nexus-runner?”

“A nexic ship. It stands to reason that a militarized, nexically adept people whose foes rely on prana would develop them.”

Nahel crunched his way toward Damus over broken glass and tile. “Your imagination’s running wild again, but this time it’s making sense. The
Isnashi
said his people came here in black ships, and
something
flew over us when we were in the sewer.”

“I heard the hum then, too!” said Xander. His face paled. “And a shadow fell over the caravan just before the light came.”

Damus folded his arms. “Your support is appreciated, Nahel. But at this point all we know is that certain people have vanished; said disappearances concurrent with a bright light preceded by a large shadow and a loud hum only audible to nexists. A nexus-runner is merely the best working theory.”

Xander’s brow furrowed. “If only the Night Gen have nexism, why can I use it?”

Damus shrugged. “They say nexism is the province of gods. But the Cataclysm turned the world on its head, to paraphrase Thurif.”

“Quote him again, and I’ll lay you out,” said Nahel.

Damus turned toward the door. “Come on.”

Xander rose from the table. “Where are we going?”

“As far from here as we can,” said Damus. “Our enemies—whoever they are—know this place. I doubt Thurif and his ugly friend will keep them busy for long.”

“How do we get past them if they’ve got a ship?” asked Nahel.

Damus tapped his flute against his head. “This place is bristling with Guild technology. In that regard, Thurif was quite honest.”