Sword of Dreams (The Reforged Trilogy) (55 page)

"Help me," she gasped between snatches of song, so quickly that he almost did not catch the words. "
Su vaenna emmai'i
– Xartasia knows my spell too well. –
Illuna mae kennuva eru fen
– She counters me too easily!
Hae enna ma jullen aetra'am'ii.
"

Metal clanged in a flat, ugly tone like a hellish gong. Behind them, Logan Coldhand was on the ground, his leg twisted up against the side of his smoking Raptor. He had parried aside a killing blow from one Devourer with his cybernetic hand. The black sword gouged a deep, rough furrow in the Raptor's hull. Coldhand answered with a bright bolt from his Talon-9 that drove the Devourer back, but two more closed in.

The bounty hunter was not going to hold out for much longer. The Devourers knew it, and a single human man – especially one full of metal – was not going to make much of a meal, Duaal guessed. Several of the gritty black shapes separated themselves from the ring and billowed across the ravine, toward the Waygate. Maeve saw them and let out a low, raw moan of sorrow.

Xartasia sang. Her high, clear voice cut through all other sounds, sharp as the dagger in her hand. She held the blade up, as though signaling the coming Devourers.

"You… you keep Xartasia fighting for control. I'll close the Waygate," Duaal said, but it did not seem to help at all against the breathless fear caught in his throat. The Devourers were halfway up the ziggurat and would be on them in seconds.

Maeve nodded, still singing. Logan's Talon shrieked again, and there was a snarl of pain from the bounty hunter. Tears rolled down Maeve's cheeks, joining the sweat and soaking the black hair plastered against her skin.

Duaal stared up at the Waygate. It was… immense. Not just in size. He stood before a hole in the universe, connecting this mountain to… to wherever the Devourers were. This Waygate, this gap in space meant that distance was just an illusion, or at least a rule that could be bent and broken. The distance that separated the White Kingdom from the Alliance, Prianus from the core… None of that meant anything.

The Devourers had reached the top of the stairs. Duaal heard Maeve's scream and felt the cold shadow of one of the monsters looming over him. He heard the grinding, buzzing sound of the black cloud reaching for him. So close… but even that distance was an illusion.

What is distance? The space between one atom and the next. Being far apart doesn't change anything.
Duaal found himself smiling. Was he mad?
Look at Maeve and Logan… Even when he stopped hunting her, even when an entire galaxy separated them, they never stopped thinking of each other.

Maeve had stopped singing and struggled in earnest against a Devourer wrapping her in rattling chains. Xartasia's sweet voice crescendoed in triumph as the Waygate rang and seethed, wreathed in scarlet light. The barrier was gone and the Devourers surged through again, a ravenous black storm of death that would rage across the whole galaxy.

A pair of Devourers grabbed Duaal by the arms. Claws bit painfully into his flesh and freed rivulets of blood that spattered the white ground. But Duaal did not need his hands. He could feel the tight-strung power thrumming through the Waygate, thousands and thousands of strands of pure potential that linked the great ring to every other point in the universe. An axis, a center upon which all things could turn, if he would only give it a
push
. The mage closed his eyes and remembered the Waygate as it had been, slumbering in its veil of soft, pale light. Before any of this.

No more,
he thought.
Go. Leave us in peace.

Everything… stopped. The entire crevasse fell still and silent as the void. When Duaal opened his eyes again, Maeve and Logan were alone with him in the ravine. They stared around in stunned disbelief, amazed to still be alive. Duaal laughed in shock. Tiberius was right. He had done it.

"Anyone who says that facing your friends is worse than facing your enemies has never fought the Devourers. There is nothing more frightening. Unless, of course, the Devourers
are
your friends."

- Duaal Sinnay, Hyzaari mage (233 PA)

Maeve spent the first night under the watchful but often interrupted care of an overworked Prian doctor. By the next evening, Xia moved her to the city of Pine Spire, back to the Blue Phoenix for observation. The Ixthian medic tended to Gruth, too, whose leg was still in bad shape. He would need a replacement and was threatening to crawl back to Tynerion himself rather than face the prospect of a Prian cybernetic.

"I've seen that bounty hunter's hand. No way," Gruth said.

Even with the Blue Phoenix's limited facilities – a little dusty from weeks of disuse – Xia was able to stabilize Gruth for the journey back to Tynerion and close the cuts in Maeve's skin. Her bones would take longer to knit, but the breaks were clean and Xia administered daily injections to help them heal faster. Gruth spent most of his time asleep, medicated into unconsciousness against the pain of his ruined leg.

On the second morning after the battle at the Waygate, the newly promoted Captain Felsus made the journey from Pylos to Pine Spire. He limped up from the skypad into the Blue Phoenix. Panna brought him up to the mess, where Maeve, Duaal, Xia and Gripper sat around the table.

Panna took a seat across from Maeve. Her eyes were bloodshot and puffy from weeping. Duaal was not the only one to lose a beloved mentor in the battle for the Pylos Waygate.

Captain Felsus' cybernetic leg whirred and clicked as he sat. "I got my hands on the information you were looking for," he said.

Xia was sitting beside Duaal and took his hand. He squeezed her fingers. "Yes?" she asked.

"Tiberius Myles had no will on Prianus or in any Alliance records," said the officer. He paused and looked at Duaal. "He listed you as his only relation. It all passes to you, Mister Sinnay. Everything Tiberius had is now yours, including this ship."

Duaal closed his eyes and Maeve watched twin tracks of tears trace their way down his dark cheeks. He nodded. "Thank you, Captain Felsus. But I'm sure you didn't come all the way down to Pine Spire just to tell me that."

"No," Felsus agreed. He looked around the table. "Where's the bounty hunter?"

"Freezer said he wanted to see what he can salvage from his Raptor," Gripper supplied.

Felsus frowned. "He's not going to find anything at all. There's a lot we need to talk about, and among those is the Waygate."

Panna rubbed her eyes and sat up straight. "What's going to happen to it?"

"It's already been done. For now, the Waygate is too dangerous to Pylos and to the rest of Prianus. This morning, I had demolition charges set in the ravine. We've collapsed the mountain back over the Waygate."

Maeve released the breath that she had not realized she was holding. The Pylos Waygate was gone; a stony grave for the source of such pain and such loss.

Panna was not so pleased. "What? But what about Doctor Kemmer's discovery? Professor Xen's work?"

"All of their data will go back to Tynerion, as Professor Andus requested. If Vostra Nor University can send new archeologists and enough CWAAF soldiers to protect Prianus against more of those creatures, we would be happy to let them back into the site," Felsus said. "But until then, it stays buried. Miss Sul, I assume we can entrust the delivery of the professors' files and samples to you?"

"I can take them back to Tynerion, along with the… the bodies," Panna said. She chewed her lip. "But I don't know if I'm going back right away."

"Why not, Sprite?" Gripper asked.

Panna smiled at the nickname he had finally chosen, but was still nervous. "Well, it depends upon Xartasia and the Devourers. What's happened to them?"

"They're gone," Felsus said. He did not look displeased, but not entirely comfortable, either. "They've all vanished. Xartasia, too, along with all the Nihilists who flew off. According to your reports, many of them escaped the initial slaughter, but so far, we haven't found a single one in Pylos."

"Are they… gone? Really gone?" Gripper asked.

All eyes turned to Duaal, including Maeve's. She had never seen magic like what Duaal had displayed in the ravine. At the head of the table, the young Hyzaari man shook his head.

"I banished them," he said. "It wasn't the same spell that Maeve used on Orindell a hundred years ago. I don't know that one. What I did down there was a guess. I sent all of them away. The Devourers and the Cult of Nihil. Just… away."

"Where did they go?" Felsus asked.

"I don't know," Duaal admitted. "I had to choose a destination, a place I knew and remembered. But I couldn't decide. The Devourers are a danger to any city on any planet that we've ever been to. I had only a moment and I was thinking of several worlds, trying to choose one. They could have ended up on any of them."

"What about the Waygate?" Gripper stopped chewing on his blunt claws and suddenly looked at Duaal. "It was saying all sorts of things. Did that have anything to do with it?"

Maeve started. "The words of the Waygate? You… you understood them? I heard that voice before, in Tamlin, but could make no sense of it. I believed then that it was some result of my poor spellweaving, but Gavriel never finished my song…"

"That Waygate wasn't speaking Aver or Arcadian," said Xia. "Maeve, you told us that the Nnyth know the Waygates best. Was that their language?"

"No," Maeve said with a shake of her head. "They have no verbal language."

"It was like… Arboran, I guess you could say," Gripper explained. "The language we use back home. It was different, but I understood some of the words."

"Can you tell us what it said?" Maeve asked.

"Sort of." Gripper thought for a moment. "
Error. Opening word
– that might have been
command
or maybe
story
–
has not been completed. Please select destination.
"

Maeve and Panna stared at each other. "That… Are you sure?" Panna asked.

"There's more," Gripper said. "
Gate
– or
door
–
operation interrupted. Technicians have been called to fix the problem.
I actually understand it better than I would have before I left home. We don't really have words for things like
technician
, but now I know ideas like that. It must have been a recording or something."

"My gods," Panna breathed. "It was an error message! It must have been triggered when Gavriel didn't finish the spell. He didn't need your memories at all, Maeve. All he had to do was fail to complete the opening ritual."

"The Waygate was just trying to contact its builders for technical support," Gripper said.

"The Devourers?" Maeve asked. "They built the Waygates?"

"I thought you said that no one knew who created the Waygates," Xia interrupted. "If this thing has recordings in Gripper's native language, doesn't that suggest that
his
people created them?"

Panna pursed her lips and gave Gripper a speculative look. "I'm not sure, but it's a fascinating question."

"It is very interesting," said Felsus, tapping his closed fist on the top of the long table. "But what about this Xartasia woman and the Cult of Nihil?"

"She wasn't just following Gavriel," Xia said. "Xartasia seems to have some plan of her own. Maeve, do you know what it is?"

"Me?" Maeve asked, blinking. "No, I fear that I do not. I am as surprised as any that she turned on Gavriel."

"Duaal, I suppose it would be too much to hope that Xartasia and those monsters were banished out into empty space?" Felsus asked

"I'm afraid not," said the mage. "It had to be a place I knew. Space doesn't exactly have a lot of useful landmarks. They're somewhere in the core."

"That's not going to go unnoticed," Panna said. "The Alliance and CWAAF have got to know what's going on."

"We sent word to Axis as soon as your call came in," Felsus told them. "The only answer we've gotten is confirmation of transmission. As far as I know, they've seen not tail or talon of the Devourers."

"Whatever Xartasia's design, it is not so simple as Gavriel's," Maeve said. "She seeks something besides total destruction, else she would have let Gavriel do as he wished. There is more to this than we know and the Alliance must be warned. But Xartasia is of my own blood. I must fight her in this."

"Whatever Xartasia wants, she was willing to let a lot of people die to see it done." Duaal stood and circled the table to stand next to Maeve. "We haven't always gotten along and a crew this small really doesn't need a first mate, Maeve. You know nothing about managing a ship or flying or fixing it."

"No," Maeve agreed softly. After everything else, was she about to lose her home, too? Duaal was captain of the Blue Phoenix now and had the authority to send her away.

"My ship and my crew are at your disposal, princess," he said with a sad, pleased little smile. "We'll take you wherever you need to go."

"I'm coming, too." Panna stood as well. To everyone's shock, she bowed deeply to Maeve. "If you'll let me, princess."

"It is not my place to allow anything," Maeve hurried to answer. "But I would be grateful for any help offered to me. I do not know what Xartasia plans, but she is older, wiser and far more powerful than I am. I can refuse nothing and no one that may help me in stopping her."