The Thrones of Kronos

THE THRONES OF KRONOS

Exordium: Book 5

Sherwood Smith & Dave Trowbridge

www.bookviewcafe.com

Book View Café Edition
July 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61138-541-0
Copyright © 2015 Sherwood Smith & Dave Trowbridge

Obeying a law from
which nothing in the past has ever been exempt, evil may go on growing
alongside good, and it too may attain its paroxysm at the end in some
specifically new form.

There are no summits
without abysses.

Enormous powers will
be liberated in mankind by the inner play of its cohesion: though it may be
that this energy will still be employed discordantly tomorrow, as today and in
the past. Are we to foresee a mechanising synergy under brute force, or a
synergy of sympathy? Are we to foresee man seeking to fulfil himself
collectively upon himself, or personally upon a greater than himself? Refusal
or acceptance of Omega?

The Sanctus Teilhard

(Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)

The Phenomenon of Man, ca. 200 B.E.

His mind hazed by drugs, the tempath Norio raced around
the dyplast barrier into the Chamber of Kronos.

He exulted in the rush of energy pouring through him as the
moth-like beats of the Suneater’s hidden life burgeoned into deep drums of
power thrumming to his accelerating heartbeat. He leapt up onto the textured
bulk of the Urian machine, the stalagmitic shape so like a throne on which no
human could sit that cradled the Heart of Kronos. The depth beyond dwindled in
impossible perspective, like a conduit to the heart of the singularity the
station orbited, but the mirrored sphere that held the secret of the Suneater
pulled irresistibly at his mind.

It pulsed with a secret life that seduced his own pulse, his
breathing, and all the inner courses of his body into synchrony with it,
blending him into the substance of the ancient, seemingly organic machine in an
access of mastery and ecstasy beyond anything Norio had ever experienced. Time
and space opened before him as his mind expanded, sweeping effortlessly outward
in a widening vortex of emotions sensed from the inhabitants of the station:
the fear and duty compulsion of the Tarkans, now running through the hatch into
the chamber, terror and fury from Morrighon, apprehension and curiosity from
Lysanter, and then to minds beyond.

And still his power grew.

With rapturous triumph he threw open his mental barriers in
order to devour the minds of every life on the station, the consummation of an
instant, yet in the strange timeless vision he now possessed, a never-ending
pleasure beyond anything his feeble recorded treasures had ever offered him.

But then his perceptions met a numinous flare of light emanating
from the landing bay, ramifying outward from two figures so incandescent he
could not look at them: Anaris achreash’Eusabian, the Dol’jharian heir, and the
Rifter captain Vi’ya, once a Dol’jharian slave, and Hreem the Faithless’s deadliest
enemy.

Norio recoiled, and threw himself against the hateful light
pushing him away from the landing bay. He would eat Vi’ya’s mind first!

He pulled power from the Heart. Jagged pain gored him,
remembrance of the warm obscenity that had stolen Hreem from him, its substance
like the heat-glowing presence now beneath his hands.

Norio shrieked.

His mind ripped along the seam weakened by that stab of
memory, banishing the drug-induced haze that had hidden until too late the true
nature of what he’d sought to waken. He craved the safety of nullity, the
head-blindness of normal humankind, for now he was impaled on an upwelling pain
that no sound he could produce would ever express. The veins ruptured in his
throat and his vocal cords snapped as something vast and terrible sought exit
through his mind and shredded him into a million fragments, every one of them
conscious and alive with never-ending agony in a timeless instant . . .

In the landing bay, the full-spectrum lights flickered.

Vi’ya saw in the sudden wariness of the Tarkan honor
guard—hands tightening on weapons—and in the narrowed vision and hardened jaw
of Anaris, that this was not normal. Her body tensed into readiness as she scanned
the landing bay, then again the heir.

Anaris stood a meter from her. His anger seared like flame,
and she fought to interpose her mental shield against its intensity.
If this is what life will be like on the
Suneater, I’m going to need Montrose’s drugs after all.

The lights flickered again, throwing Anaris’s face into
greenish-gray shadow, then they dimmed and blinked out, leaving him illuminated
only by what could be seen of the red-glowing walls of the Urian station behind
the gray flats. The landing bay blurred into the ruddy gray of stone flushed
with roseate sunlight streaming through colored glass. Vi’ya kept her gaze on
Anaris with her entire focus as she recognized, in horror and revulsion, the
cathedral at New Glastonbury on Desrien.

Fighting to keep her hold on reality—to reject the memory of
that place, and the vision she had experienced there—she reached mentally for
the one tie to reality she could still perceive: Anaris’s figure, a green-gray silhouette
against the light from the walls. But, as though a door were opening, the
shadow expanded and pulled her inexorably into the Dreamtime.

o0o

The gray mist around her cleared, leaving her surrounded
by the familiar hiss and boom of crashing surf.

A shower of salt spray cooled her face.

She jerked her chin up. Above sailed the green and gray
clouds of Dol’jhar. Lightning flickered, and a low mutter of thunder drowned
the pounding of the sea. The strong smell of salt stung her nose. Somehow she
had lost the strange Urian station and was here on the island of the Chorei.

I have been here
before
, she thought, still fighting to regain . . . what? She remembered a
tall building of lacy stone, windows of crystallized light, an old woman . . . Memory
slipped away as her feet sank into sand, and the spray stung her eyes.

She had to do something, and it had to be done at once.

She whirled around, staggering at the drag of heavy gravity
she thought she’d left behind forever. As her muscles tightened, she turned her
back on the dark gray sea of Dol’jhar and clambered up the side of a palisade.
She topped the stony outcropping, breathing hard, and stared at the tiered city
carved into the side of the twin mountains.

Jhargat Choreid.

She stared in amazement at the city’s wide archways, curved
windows, and the patterned mosaics that, as the boiling clouds overhead parted
briefly, glowed golden, ruby, and emerald in the light of the setting sun.

She was not prepared for such beauty. Nothing on Dol’jhar
had ever been beautiful. The concept of beauty itself was foreign to
Dol’jharians, she had always thought—though she had never seen inside the great
fortress towers of the Lords.

She looked up, but there was nothing to see save the clouds.
The asteroid—

It didn’t matter how she’d arrived: the why was clear.

I can warn them.
She began to run.

Wind buffeted her: the beginning of a storm. Warm raindrops
spattered her face and hands and plopped onto the worn bricks of a pathway. She
leapt over a low hedge. Her boot heels rang on stone as she loped, breathing in
the scents of herbs and aromatic shrubs, all unfamiliar. The climate was more
forgiving than that of the north.

When a human form emerged from the slanting rain she
stopped, blinking rain from her eyes.

The man raised a hand palm out in the old gesture for truce
or peace. She mirrored his gesture. He beckoned, leading her off the main path
onto a narrow flagged trail. Beyond a wall of tossing fronds lay a long, low
house with an overhanging roof.

The wind diminished as soon as they stepped onto the porch.
Lanterns glowed in rounded windows, casting light onto a dark face with
light-colored eyes. The man was shorter than she by a hands-breadth, and stocky
in build. His hair, like hers, was long, but flecked with white. He was older
than he had first appeared.

He wore a long tunic woven in bright colors and baggy
trousers tucked into cloth boots. There was nothing martial in his appearance,
nor did he seem to bear any weaponry.

She was aware of a gentle tug of question at her mental
shield, and behind that a steel-smooth control.

“Welcome, daughter,” the man said.

The words sounded different, but the meaning laved her
consciousness: curiosity, a genuine welcome, and under it an urgency and a
sadness which the control could not hide.

“The asteroid.” She glanced skyward. “The mainlanders—”

“It is imminent.” He held up his hand, palm toward the
mountain. “Imminent,” he repeated softly.

A lull in the rain granted clarity, as if a curtain had been
ripped aside, revealing people of every age standing on the balconies of every
house, from sea level to mountain peak. All facing the south.

Again he gestured, and she looked southward, into the
deepening yellow night sky.

The flare of light descended with cruelly inexorable
deliberation. Moments after it disappeared below the southern horizon, a dome
of light blossomed into the darkness, transfixed by a wavering spear of bluish
light that shot up into the heavens as the impact of the asteroid converted a
hundred cubic kilometers of seawater and ocean floor into superheated steam and
vaporized rock.

“It is done,” said the man.

Fury was Vi’ya’s first reaction, at the purposelessness of
it all. She’d arrived too late to save them. If she’d had better timing, had
her ship, she could have blasted it out of space—

But
Telvarna
was
gone, light-years away and centuries distant.

“Do not be angry, daughter,” the man said.

“Why am I here?” she demanded. “If I’d appeared even a day
ago, I could have warned you, at least.”

The man spread his hands, his smile sad; the corner of his
mouth trembled.
He’s afraid.

He was a telepath; of course he knew her thoughts almost as
quickly as she did. “No people wish to die before their natural time,” he said.

“They don’t wish to die at all,” she countered.

He breathed deeply. A tangy herbal scent hung in the air,
like the spices put in wine. Then he smiled. “Before we discourse on
Terev ha’zhad
—” The connotations carried
clearly, the intimacies. “—we must exchange names. I am Math, Lictor of the
Chorei.”

“I am Vi’ya.” Her voice remained steady, though her
heartbeat quickened. A half minute gone.
So
am I to die among them—and he thinks there is purpose to any of this?

“Your name has an unfamiliar sound,” Math said. “Are you
from the Servants of Dol?”

“The name comes from another people, because among them—”
She pointed northward. “—slaves are not named.” When his brows contracted, she
curled her lip. “Don’t waste your pity. The lords think that by keeping us
nameless, and our heads shaved, we have no identity, but those who want freedom
find their strictures merely an added challenge.”

Math nodded soberly.

“So you don’t believe death is the enemy, to be fought at
all costs, for as long as one can fight?” she asked. The image in her mind was
Markham’s laughing face just before Hreem flamed him, and then the burning
corpse falling, falling, and her question came out bitter, but when she glanced
up at the still faces waiting on the balconies, she knew that here, anyway, the
Chorei did believe it.

“The universe does not waste anything,” Math said, his smile
rueful. “But we love our home, our island—and at the last, our planet. We knew
that the Children of Dol would come to destroy us in one way or another, and we
deflected it as long as we could. But when it became apparent their power was
greater, we altered our plans. Though we go together to rejoin Totality, we
will give our gift to the future. And,” he gestured, “should the gift be
accepted, then in the end we all shall win, those who serve Dol and those who
love Chor, alike.”