Armies of Light and Dark (2 page)

He couldn't remember the last time he had slept soundly. Once he had entered the techno-mage vessel, however, the female named Gwynn had led him to a seat and told him in no uncertain terms to go to sleep.

"Sleep," he had said bitterly, the stink of the dungeon still heavy in his nostrils. "You can't be serious. Sleep, my dear woman, is absolutely the last thing that I'll be capable of. Thanks anyway."

Whereupon Gwynn had touched two fingers to his temple, and suddenly the room was swimming. Vir's eyelids had been unable to sustain him, and in an instant, he had passed out. It was not, however, anything remotely resembling a peaceful dream state. Images of Mariel, Londo, Timov, Durla, all tumbled one over the other, fighting for dominance in his mind. There was Londo, white-haired and tired, many years hence, with a glass of some sort of liquor clutched in his hand. He appeared to be waiting for someone. And then someone was approaching him. It was Vir, and he had his hands out, and they were around Londo's throat, strangling him. Suddenly Vir's hands were transformed into Narn hands, and Vir was cast outside of the moment, watching as G'Kar stood over Londo with murder in his eyes... no. In his eye.

...Durla was there as well, and he was dancing ... yes. He was dancing with Mariel, while Chancellor Lione plucked away an aimless tune that Vir could not identify. Curiously both Mariel and Durla were covered with blood. There was a full-length mirror standing nearby. Vir stared into it, and he saw himself clad in the imperial white. He turned back and there was Londo, with no G'Kar in sight. He looked as he had when Vir had first met him. He looked so young.

Only nine, ten years had passed since that day, but Great Maker, what a decade it had been. Londo, who had seemed so burdened with his crushed expectations of what the Centauri Republic should be, nevertheless seemed relatively carefree compared to what he would eventually become. He raised a glass to Vir and tilted it back. Blood poured from the glass and splattered all over Londo's face. Then he placed the glass down and reached toward Vir with a blood-covered hand. Vir stepped back, back, then bumped against a wall. There was nowhere for him to go, nowhere for him to retreat. Mariel and Durla waltzed past, onto a balcony, and then went over the railing and vanished from sight. Vir opened his mouth to cry out, but his voice was not his own. Instead it was the cry of millions of souls issuing from his single throat. Outside the balcony off which Mariel and Durla had just plunged, he could see Centauri Prime ... and it was burning. Great tongues of flame were licking a sky thick with inky black smoke.

Vir startled himself awake. He realized, in a distant way, that he should probably have cried out when he woke up. He did not, however. It was as if nothing could scare him anymore.

"–foolishness," he heard a voice saying. It was the female, the one called Gwynn. "Foolishness, Kane. That's the only word for it. This isn't what we're supposed to be doing."

"It is an adventure, Gwynn. If we were not interested in adventure, we would be better off using our abilities in some truly appropriate manner ... like standing on street corners and pulling rabbits from hats while people throw money."

That was Kane's voice. Vir knew it all too well. Although Kane had saved his life, Vir had already come to hate him. For it was Kane who persisted in telling Vir the truth of things, and these truths inevitably served to make Vir's life all the more difficult. There was something to be said for the bliss of self-delusion.

"Finian, tell him we should turn away from this course," Gwynn demanded.

"I don't know that we should," replied Finian, the third of the techno-mage trio. "A situation needs to be investigated. We're on the scene. We should investigate."

"You always agree with Kane! There's no point in talking to you."

"If you know that for a certainty, why did you bother asking me in the first place?" Finian replied reasonably.

"Because I'm as great a fool as you, that's why."

"Then it's fortunate that you're with us. Who else would want to be seen in the company of such a fool?"

Gwynn made an impatient noise and turned away from them. Her gaze went to Vir and she blinked in surprise.

"Oh. You're awake. He's awake, gentlemen."

"I thought you said he'd be asleep for at least another hour," Kane said as he moved to stand next to Gwynn. "So I thought."

"Sleep," said Vir, "is overrated."

He looked at the three of them, struck by the similarities and yet also by the differences. They all had their hoods back, and Vir could see that they all wore their hair, or lack of same, in an identical manner. In all three instances, what little hair they had was trimmed so close that it might well have been done with a razor. Starting at a point just above their foreheads, the hairstyle angled back in two strips like a "V," with a third band starting at the same point and running straight back.

Gwynn was the tallest of the three, and certainly carried herself with the most imperiousness. She seemed the type who not only did not suffer fools gladly, but also gladly made fools suffer. Vir found himself hoping that he didn't fall into her personal definition of a fool. Kane's jaw was pointed, as if perpetually outthrust in challenge, his skin dark and his eyes deep set and unreadable. Finian, by contrast, was the shortest of the three, with a round face and remarkably pale blue eyes that seemed sad ... or amused ... or perhaps amused by the sadness of it all.

"So, Vir," Kane said briskly, rubbing his hands together as if he were anticipating the start of a truly engaging game of chess. "Are you ready to help save the galaxy?" Gwynn rolled her eyes and shook her head. Kane pretended not to notice.

"You mentioned that before," said Vir, "without going into any detail. I don't suppose you'd, ah ... care to tell me now, would you. Just how, specifically, we're going to be doing the rescuing of the galaxy."

"We are heading to the Centauri dig on K0643," Kane told him. "And there–"

"There what?" Gwynn interrupted him. "I think it best we get that settled here and now, Kane. When we discover the true nature of the dig – or, I should say, when we confirm our suspicions – what is it your intention that we do? You say `save the galaxy' in a way that could only be considered blithely overconfident. You are aware that you're exceeding the parameters of our assignment, are you not?"

"As are you," Finian pointed out.

"Be quiet, Finian. I'm simply here to make sure that he," and she stabbed a finger at Kane, "doesn't get into any trouble."

"Oh, of course not." Gwynn looked up, startled. It was Vir who had spoken, and he was making no effort to stop the sarcasm dripping from his voice. "No, Kane never gets into trouble. Just me. I'm at the forefront of every one of his efforts." He rose from his seat and, as he spoke, shook his head, as if he were having trouble believing what he had been through. "There was an assassination attempt on Sheridan, and Kane could have stopped it with no trouble. Instead he let me almost get killed before he stepped in. Then Kane wanted to convince me that there is a `great darkness' on Centauri Prime and set me up so that I got myself thrown in prison."

"And yet, here you are," Kane pointed out.

"No thanks to you."

"Actually, I seem to recall–"

"All right, all right, yes, on at least one occasion, it was thanks to you," Vir allowed. "And maybe there were more occasions that I didn't know about. The point is this: I don't mind throwing myself into danger at this point."

"You don't?" Finian raised one nonexistent eyebrow. "I wouldn't have fancied you the heroic type, myself."

"No, I'm just tired, and I'm fed up," said Vir. "Sometimes I think a hero is just a coward who's too tired to care anymore."

"There's something to be said for that," admitted Gwynn.

"As I was saying, if I'm going to throw myself into danger, this time you're going to be right beside me, Kane. You, too, you two. I know that Kane is only a cloister techno-mage. That he's been kind of... of stashed away all this time, off in your hiding place. That he hasn't really spent much time in the outside world, so he's not as proficient ... no offense..."

"None taken," Kane said calmly.

"... he's not as proficient," continued Vir.

Kane cleared his throat loudly.

"You didn't have to repeat it," he informed him.

"Oh. Sorry. Anyway, he's not well ... well ... you know, it's what I said. That way ... in the whole techno-magic and -mage thing. But with you two along, we–"

"Actually, I am only a cloister as well," said Gwynn.

"You–?" He couldn't quite believe it. He turned and looked at Finian, who nodded sheepishly. "Guilty as charged."

"Oh, perfect," said Vir. "We're going into a dangerous situation, and none of you is an upper-echelon techno-mage." He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Perfect. All right, then, remind me: Why are we going to K0643?"

"Because the Drakh are interested in something that's there, which is probably Shadow-related. Oh, and because diggers have been dying, trying to get to it."

"Oh, well, of course. Naturally. If there's someplace where evil is hovering and people are dying, that's certainly the first place I'd want to be."

"Then you're in luck," said Kane. "I was kidding."

"So was I" Vir shook his head and – not for the first time in his life – the words "Why me?" echoed within it.

As always, no answer was forthcoming, although he fancied that he could hear Fate laughing deliriously and rolling on the floor somewhere, amused by his predicament. Laughing. Yes, he could hear the fates laughing at him. He stood before the energy gate, his thoughts pulled momentarily from the past to the present, and not only could he hear laughing, but also he could detect an eerie howling.

It was the voices, the voices that were crying out their contempt for his ambitions, as if to say, "Pathetic little creature ... thinking that you – you of all people – could save the galaxy? What makes you more worthy of living than all those around you, who died in witnessing the power before you?"

"Nothing. Nothing makes me more worthy," said Vir, and he knew it to be true.

The howling increased, and Vir felt himself being lifted of his feet, dragged toward his death. He was surprised to discover that his death was, in fact, something he wasn't looking forward to ...

C
HAPTER 2

Vir hadn't been entirely sure what he was expecting to find when he arrived at the dig site, but whatever he did fancy he'd see, it didn't match up with what they actually found down there. Empty buildings. Lots of them. The entire dig had a ramshackle feel about it, as Vir and the techno-mages made their way through the narrow streets. Actually, "streets" might have been too generous a word. There were assorted pathways that ran helter-skelter through the settlement, but nothing had actually been paved. At some points the paths became so narrow that, if Vir and the others had encountered someone coming in the opposite direction, there would have been a considerable problem in dealing with it. However, that situation never actually presented itself.

There were others around. They heard them more than they saw them, and voices floated to them, carried upon the breeze. It was a very stiff breeze, almost a steady chill that Vir could feel slicing through right to his bones. Occasionally there were people congregating at street corners and in makeshift pubs. Vir caught scattered words here and there, and the words were quite disturbing. They were words such as "disappeared," "dead," "quit," "afraid." "Dead." That one was said quite a bit. There was only one other word that Vir heard with any greater frequency, and that word was "haunted." Haunted.

Once upon a time, Vir would have laughed derisively at such a word. But his time on Babylon 5 had served as a serious education into the realm of the supernatural ... or, at least, it had given him an introduction to the notion that there was more in heaven and earth than was dreamt of in his philosophy. He had lived in a place where people who captured souls and nightmare beings from unknown realms of space had been all too real. For the men he passed in the settlement town of K0643, it seemed, the line between truth and fiction, between the easily understood and the incomprehensible, had become blurred. For Vir himself, the line had long ago been completely erased. Anything was capable of happening to him. He felt that this was the only possible mind-set for him to maintain, since anything – more or less – generally did have the habit of happening to him.

"I know you." The voice startled him.

He turned and saw a fairly unremarkable, but nonetheless instantly identifiable Centauri who had just emerged from one of the pubs. Months earlier, a Centauri citizen had been used as a helpless pawn in an assassination attempt on John Sheridan, the president of the Interstellar Alliance. He had been unaware of the part that had been assigned him, and it had only been intervention on Vir's part that had prevented the citizen from carrying out the murderous design that had been thrust upon him. The individual's name had been Rem Lanas, and it was Lanas who was now standing in front of Vir, with clear astonishment on his face. Before Vir could say another word, Lanas grabbed him by the front of his heavy coat. Vir thought for a moment that it was an attack, but then he realized that Lanas was, in fact, imploring him.

"Please," he said, "Don't take me back to Babylon 5. You ... you said we could keep it between us. Don't tell anyone I'm here. I'll ... I'll leave if you want, I'll–"

"Calm down! For pity's sake, calm down!" said Vir, gripping him firmly by the shoulders. "Will you take it easy? I have no more intention of turning you over to the authorities now than I did then. What are you doing here?"

"Working," Lanas responded, appearing surprised that Vir would even have to ask. "Why? What else would anyone be doing here? For that matter what are you doing here?"

"Well we're here to check into some ... things. We've heard that this place was, well ... haunted. And we felt that it would be in the best interests of the Republic to look into it, as ridiculous as the whole haunting thing might sound." He forced a laugh to underscore the alleged absurdity of the notion.