Sword of Dreams (The Reforged Trilogy) (26 page)

A song taught to take away pain, one popular among the knights and healers of the White Kingdom. It took so little to turn its purpose to something more useful. Just a few words, just the will… The captive Arcadian's wail rose to a razor shriek of absolute agony as the spell plucked her nerves like harp strings. Gavriel let the last notes of his spell linger. He gave himself a moment to savor the satisfaction of the single pure, powerful tone.

And then silence fell again, ringing in Gavriel's ears. He stroked the fairy's cheek again. Her golden hair was streaked in bright red blood, the colors of sunset. The last bright flare of light before night came.

"I can kill you, dearest one," he said softly. "I can deliver you to death, but there are things you must tell me first. Tell me, were you born on Prianus?"

"No." It was a dry whisper, quiet as her feathers as they sifted through the air and floated to the stained floor.

"Where were you born?"

"Orindell."

That confirmed what Gavriel had heard. She was from the right planet, the first world attacked by the alien Devourers one hundred years ago. Gavriel's heart sped in his fragile old chest.

"Do you remember the Devourers?" he asked intently. "Did you see them? Do you remember them?"

"The skies were full of smoke and they tore the very ground apart," she moaned. The memory wounded her almost as much as Gavriel's spells. "I saw demons in the skies. They flew as though on black wings, like the pyrads, and armored themselves in living ash! One of the great shades leapt down and tore my mother away. Erris forgive me, I flew. I fled and left her behind. I did not look back."

"You did not look back," Gavriel repeated slowly, disappointed and then angry. "Then you did not see them."

"Shadows enough to me…" She was crying again, but Gavriel had not raised his voice again. This pain was her own. "I could not look back."

Gavriel moved his fingers down the side of her throat. The fairy's pulse fluttered under his touch, swift and delicate as the beating wings of a hummingbird. So lovely… and so useless. Still, he was not without pity for the girl.

"Such pain you have borne, my dear. Such pain and such terror. Such guilt for your own weakness. You have suffered enough. I release you." Gavriel closed his eyes and sang again.
"Anu'aa quai eru oraiva'i na!"

The Arcadian strained against the nails in her wrists, freeing new streamers of hot red blood. She twitched once more and then stilled.

When he was done, Gavriel called for one of the Nihilists standing silently beside the door. "Korso, go get Xartasia," he instructed.

"She is busy with Arkan. It seemed important. He wanted to come to you, but Lady Xartasia told him that you were busy," Korso said.

"And so I was. But no longer. Bring them both here."

"Yes, my lord." Korso hurried off to do as he was told.

________

"Surely such news would have reached us by now," Xartasia insisted with a frown.

Arkan gave her an angry look, but had better sense than to argue with Gavriel's favorite. He sneezed and wiped his reddened nose. The Prian weather did not agree with him at all.

"I'm sorry, Lady Xartasia, I have no idea why no one's told you," he said. "But I swear it's true. Someone is up in those mountains and one of them is a bird-back."

Xartasia ignored the slur. "And you believe that this requires Lord Gavriel's attention?"

"Yeah, I do."

There was a challenge in his tone, but not enough. Arkan was clearly still nerving himself for something more volatile. They stood at one end of the apartment block's littered hallways. A crowd of other Nihilists watched from the doorways and further down the hall.

A Lyran with patchy fur growled at Xartasia. "You don't have to take her shit, Arkan."

"Watch it," said a tall human from a leaning doorway opposite the hall. The Nihilists gathered around him murmured and nodded in agreement. "Lady Xartasia doesn't answer to you!"

"Why isn't she working with the rest of the bird-backs down in the valley?" the Lyran barked at the other Nihilist. He turned his attention back to Xartasia. "Or are you such a worthless slat that you have to wait up here?"

The princess turned her violet eyes on the Lyran and smiled coldly. He laid his ears back angrily along his skull. Wiry fur bristled down the length of his spine, all the way to his bottlebrushed tail. Xartasia raised a fine, pale hand and pointed to the rude little dog-man.

"Anu'aa quai eru oraiva'i na,"
she sang in a clear, pure voice.

The Lyran's snarl turned suddenly shrill. His eyes rolled back and he thumped to the floor. Blood poured from his open mouth. A white-eyed Hadrian woman kicked the Lyran's body once, then dragged him out of the hallway.

"Damn it, Mrell," she sighed. "You lucky furball."

"Arkan! Lady Xartasia!"

Xartasia looked up the nearby stairwell. A shaven-headed man in Nihilist black was calling to her.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Lord Gavriel wants to see you," he said. "Both of you."

Xartasia vaulted into the air, landing high on the stairs. Arkan and Korso huffed their way up the stairs after her.

She lifted the hem of her gown as she made her way down the hallway and stopped through the door of Gavriel's latest torture chamber. He had been at his task for some time. Xartasia stepped over a still-wet spatter of gore and several teeth, probably where another Arcadian prisoner had fought back. Whether the blood and teeth belonged to aggressor or victim, she did not know.

Xartasia found Gavriel silhouetted against a flickering fire burning right in the middle of the bare concrete floor. An Arcadian girl sat nailed to a wooden chair nearby. Xartasia noted the cuts and bruises all over her very exposed skin. Gavriel had been playing with his new spells.

"She didn't remember enough to be of use," the age-spotted old Nihilist said, his back turned to the door.

Xartasia glided across the room, still eyeing the dead girl. "What did you expect, Gavriel? I warned you that the memories would be difficult to obtain."

Arkan and Korso came in behind her. They bowed and waited for their master's attention, but Gavriel was not done with Xartasia. He turned and advanced on her in a few swift strides. He was aged and frail for a human, but his passion and fervor lent a powerful, purposeful weight to his movements.

"There were millions of Arcadians," he said, his voice rising to a shout. "Millions of fairies across five worlds! And not one of you can remember the faces of the Devourers?"

Xartasia thought of the dead Lyran downstairs, Mrell, the way his ears flattened in obvious anger and could almost imagine hers doing the same. She
had
warned Gavriel. But trading a few snarls and killing a Nihilist was one thing. Challenging their master was another. Xartasia did not dare meet Gavriel's anger with her own. She spread her wings and held them low in a gesture of submission.

"As you say, Lord Gavriel, there were millions of my people. The Devourers ravaged the entire White Kingdom in less than a month. A month," Xartasia said, gently emphasizing the words. "There is no force in the Alliance or the rim kingdoms that could ever match such savagery."

"You fought them."

"And lost terribly. The Devourers killed every one of our knights, tore them down from the skies with their black smoke. All of those who came close to the monsters are dead. Finding one who remembers more than shades and nightmares will be difficult."

"So you said," Gavriel rumbled, still as ominous as a storm but no longer shouting. "And so I came to Prianus to find more Arcadians. We climbed into ice and broken mountains because there are more of your fairies here than anywhere else in the galaxy. But none of them remember any better than you do, princess!"

"We have not yet spoken to all of them," she said. Xartasia's twilight eyes were drawn inexorably back to the broken, mutilated body just a few feet away. She was just a girl. An innocent girl. Xartasia closed her eyes.

"Princess Titania?"

At the sound of her name, she looked up from her sketch. The likeness was a rough – she could not seem to get his eyes quite right – but it looked enough like Anthem, her beloved enarri, to make her heart surge painfully in her breast. Titania had brought no images of her lover from the White Kingdom and had to content herself now with these clumsy pictures.

How I miss you, my love,
she thought.
Erris All-Singer, hold my Anthem close and protect his spirit until I join him.

Titania's young handmaiden, Alarra, knelt at her feet. The overturned crate on which the princess sat was hardly a throne, but Alarra always acted as though it were a majestic seat of her mistress' power. The girl's curly hair was a beautiful gold, even under the flat, colorless daylights of Axis' lower levels. Titania was affectionately jealous of Alarra's lovely hair. The black mane of Cavain's bloodline was a royal mark, but she always thought that it lacked that sunny vibrancy.

Titania had been using a dusty piece of charcoal to draw and now wiped her hands carefully on a scrap of cloth. She touched her fingertip to her own hair. It was lank and greasy. How long since she had been able to wash it?

Alarra's eyes were wide and frightened.
"They are back! The Sisterhood has returned!"
she cried in Arcadian.

A tall, powerful-looking human woman came around the corner. She flexed bulging biceps tattooed with gruesome scenes of male debasement. A sheathed knife hung from her belt, but the two women who flanked her carried naked blades in their hands. They were short and dull, but were still better weaponry than the Arcadians had.

The Sisterhood's approach startled the other three fairies – the rest of Titania's tiny court – who had been sleeping fitfully on the ground nearby. Wanni spread her wings protectively around the other two.

Titania stood and faced the humans. "What you want?" she asked in fumbling Aver.

The Sisters laughed harshly. "We're here to collect your dues," said their leader.

"You take money already!" Titania's face burned with shame that she should be barking at these women in such an ugly language, only half understood. Alarra buried her face against the princess' knee and whimpered in terror.

"It's dangerous around here, bird-back," the gangster sneered. "Especially for aliens like you. It isn't easy to protect fairies from so many enemies. Unless you want
us
as enemies, you'd better pay up."

"Have no money!" Titania protested.

"No money, eh? Well, you better find some, little bird queen."

Again, Titania regretted telling the Sisterhood of her royal lineage, but she had been desperate to stop them from slaughtering her people. It had worked… in part. The Sisters only killed the men now and demanded money not to do the same to the women.

How can we get money?
she fumed impotently, unable to voice her fury to the gloating Sisters.
No one on this metal planet will hire us! They hate us simply for existing. These coreworlders will never pay us for jobs that can be done by their native friends.

"No money," Titania said, struggling with the alien words. "No jobs!"

"Then you better learn to steal," the tattooed Sister said. She prodded the princess with a thick finger. "From somebody else. If you take anything from us, you're going to find yourself paying a lot more than you can afford. Got it?"

"I… I understand."

When they had finally gone, Alarra looked up from Titania's skirts. The girl's wide eyes shined with frightened tears.

"What can we do, my lady?"
she asked.
"The people of Axis defend what is theirs and all of our knights are gone. They put Savel'an in prison when he tried to steal bread for us!"

Wanni stood, bowing her head. She was much older than Alarra, a wise crone with gray-streaked hair who had served Titania's father, the king, as an advisor before the princess was ever born.
"Your handmaiden is right, princess. We are ill-equipped and ill-suited to theft."

Titania hated the Sisterhood, but she hated the Alliance even more for failing the frightened, hungry Arcadians. She
had
to pay the Sisters, but what could she do? Wanni was right – Titania would make a miserable thief.

"We cannot steal or find jobs on Axis, but we have one service we may sell here. We are women,"
Titania said slowly.

Wanni's eyes widened.
"Princess, you cannot be suggesting that we sell ourselves to these… these alien men! We know nothing of their appetites!"

Alarra stared at the older women, understanding creeping across her pretty face.
"Prostitution? But, my lady, you cannot! You are of the blood of Cavain. It would be an affront to the gods!"

"I must protect my people, whatever the cost,"
Titania said.