Beyond the Gate (The Golden Queen) (Volume 2) (43 page)

Gallen, Ceravanne, and the others were running over the ground, and now that the hole was opened, the transport’s AI began emitting a cloud of Black Fog, a harmless aerial dye that blocked nearly all light.

At this moment, Maggie was supposed to move the hovercar, begin circling on a path around the Harvester’s subterranean throne room, collapsing the tunnels leading to the room so that the harvester and the Inhuman would be sealed off from aid, and from any avenues of escape.

Maggie swung the hovercar forward in a long arc, covered a kilometer in a matter of seconds, and watched as her aircar’s antigravity collapsed the tunnels ahead, leaving furrowed ruins.

Tunnels fell in and chambers opened in a regular pattern. Maggie had made nearly half the circle when an alarm sounded. Her AI flashed an image of two approaching aircraft, smart missiles blurring toward her.

Maggie had no missiles left to fire back, and it was too late to escape.

Orick was running up the hill behind Ceravanne and the Bock, with Gallen in the lead. A gritty rain hammered his snout, and red pillars of fire blazed across the countryside. All around them the ground had collapsed in pockets as tunnels and chambers caved in. In those places, Orick could see slabs of broken stone protruding from the ground. In many places across these fields, there were fires coming up out of the horrific rents, and dust rising from the earth. Armageddon. It looked like some vision of Armageddon.

Orick had seen that much of the damage was already done before their transport even landed—apparently the explosive power of the starships had been more than the architects of this city could have planned for.

Orick was running full tilt when suddenly the ground at his feet began to give way, and he lunged forward just as a tunnel collapsed beneath. In front of him a hundred yards there was a sound of splitting rock, and almost all of the face of the cliff just before the group began sliding down, as if it had been a sand castle dashed apart by a child’s foot.

The sounds of the splitting rock, the roaring infernos of the distant mushroom clouds, the blasts of lightening, the cries of people, the shaking of the earth—all rose together in an incredible tumult, and for one breathless moment Orick stopped to watch in the distance as one of the starships—a gigantic globe nearly half a mile across—lifted from the ground without any visible means of propulsion, heading upward for the safety of the stars.

Gallen stopped for a moment, and Orick could feel the ground weaving and bucking beneath his feet. The movement bothered the humans and the Bock more than it did Orick, and they stood balancing precariously.

Where the rock wall had collapsed, they could see at least six levels of rooms that had been in that part of the Tekkar’s city. At the highest level was a tall chamber, with forty-foot ceilings. The Harvester’s throne room. But to reach it they would have to climb the wall of broken rubble that lay before them, scaling the stones.

“That way!” Gallen shouted, pointing out a path over the rocks.

The whole world smelled of fire and smoke and broken stone.

Orick was vaguely aware of Tekkar running through those apartments, of wounded people crying out, but suddenly a wall of Black Fog swept over them as Maggie released their camouflage. And then they were swallowed by utter darkness.

Ceravanne pulled the glow globe from her pocket, and even its brilliant white light would not let them see more than five yards ahead. The aircar made a deep thrumming, grinding noise as it swung around to the southeast.

Gallen called to the others, telling them to form a group as they climbed. He was merely waiting for the ground to stop shaking, for rocks to quit sliding from the cliff wall above, and Orick hoped that as Maggie moved the aircar, it would become safer for them to begin running again.

And suddenly Orick heard the whine of rockets accelerating toward them, off toward the aircar. The rockets slammed into the car with a pinging noise, and a huge explosion lifted them all from their feet.

Orick looked toward the aircar for any sign of a flash or burning. But in the inky darkness, Orick could see nothing but a brief lightening of the darkness, and then bits of metal and rock and ash began to rain down upon them.

“Maggie!” Orick cried, and Gallen stood watching the empty space, a look of utter desolation on his face. “Maggie!” Orick called again, and he began to run toward the car.

“Stop!” Gallen shouted at Orick’s back, and when Orick turned to look at his face, Gallen turned away. “She’s gone,” he said. “She’s gone, and there’s nothing we can do.”

For one brief moment, it looked as if Gallen would crumple under his own weight. It looked as if some invisible support had been kicked out from beneath him, and he dropped partway to one knee. But then he lifted himself and began scrambling up the rocks. Orick heard Gallen sniff, saw him wipe at his eyes with his sleeve. Then Gallen pulled his dronon pulp gun, and his robes suddenly used their chameleon abilities to turn jet-black, to match the darkness.

Somehow, Orick found that he was unprepared for this. He’d imagined that if anyone would die in this battle, it would have been frail Ceravanne or the Bock or that maybe even Gallen would take on more than he could handle—but not Maggie.

“Gallen?” Orick cried at his back.

“She’s gone,” Gallen shouted, and he leapt forward to a boulder, then another, running up over the broken field of rubble without thought of stones still tumbling and crashing from the face of the cliff. Ceravanne ran behind him, calling for him to slow down, holding the light aloft, but she soon lost him in the dark.

And so she stopped and waited for the Bock and Orick to catch up. With his mantle, Gallen could see in the full darkness better than any man, and within seconds there was no sound of him.

Orick stopped beside Ceravanne, and the Bock made his way slowly over the rocks. Ceravanne nodded up toward where Gallen had run, and she muttered, “He’s in a foul mood. Can you track him for us?”

Orick grumbled, “Not with those damned robes on. They mask his scent. I can’t smell him.”

Ceravanne sighed in disgust. “Then we’ll track him by the corpses he leaves behind.”

They began scrambling up over the fallen rocks from the cliff, and it seemed to take minutes upon minutes to get anywhere. As they passed beneath the cliff, they could still hear boulders and scree falling through the darkness around them, but they did not see the dropping stones. By now, between the thunderheads, the Black Fog, and the deep shadows of the Tekkar’s city, the air around them was darker than any night.

And as they rushed through the rooms, Orick smelled blood ahead. The rooms were like nothing he had imagined: they had a peculiar fluid form to them, and the walls were covered with some white plaster. Orick could almost sense the sleek lines of some living creature, and he realized that the walls reminded him of nothing more than bones, as if they were in some vast hollowed-out bones.

There were torches lying about here and there, bodies crushed under falling rocks, tapestries sitting in heaps on the floor, wide silver washing or drinking vessels. And along the walls were thousands of small clay pots with long stems. Many had fallen over, and lay broken, with bits of ash and bone spilling out.

“What’s this?” Orick called as they ran.

Ceravanne said, “The dead. It is said that the kings of Moree were protected by the spirits of their dead.” And Orick saw that it was still true, more so than ever, for the Inhuman also relied upon those who had died for protection.

The group passed a Tekkar servant woman whose head was horribly crushed, part of her cheek ripped away, and she cried out from a swollen mouth, grasped the fur on Orick’s leg, begging aid. Orick looked into her deep purple eyes as he passed, saw how they were not focused, and knew that she would die whether he helped her or not. They reached some smoothly undulating stairs with golden handholds fastened to the wall, each shaped like the head of a dog. They rushed up several flights, climbing over debris, and Orick saw Gallen’s tracks in the dirt.

A moment later, they reached a landing and found the body of a Tekkar guard, his chest blown apart. And from up ahead there came shouting, followed by the burp of gunfire and the explosion of shells.

“This way,” Ceravanne cried, leaping over the corpse, and she redoubled her speed as she chased the sound of battle.

And Orick suddenly realized that Gallen was doing it all without him, that Gallen had rushed ahead and was avenging Maggie by killing the Harvester and the Inhuman. Always in the past, he had been left behind. He’d let Gallen fight the great battles and get the glory, and never had he minded.

But over the past days, he’d lost three friends. Grits had been left behind, and Tallea was now food for the Derrits, and Maggie had just been blown apart, and Orick decided that he’d rather be damned in hell than let Gallen take all the vengeance this time.

They reached a huge set of double doors, twenty feet tall and ten feet wide, made of thick wooden planks with great brass rings to pull on. The doors were already opened just wide enough for a thin man to squeeze through.

Lying at the foot of the doors were eleven or twelve Tekkar, sprawled in a bloody heap. Orick leapt up and grabbed a brass ring in his teeth, then pulled back the door, swung it wider.

Ceravanne held up the glow globe, and peered inside. There was a great chamber, sixty feet long, with ceilings forty feet high. The dim red lights scavenged from a dronon hive city glowed at the far end, and beneath the lights on a broad-backed throne of gold sat a small woman, her shoulders hunched, a golden mantle cascading over her shoulders.

Gallen himself was kneeling before the throne, his mantle spread before him on the floor, his dronon pulp pistol discarded at his side. Orick’s heart skipped a beat. Gallen had come all this way to protect them, to fight for them, and now Orick saw him kneeling, helpless before the Harvester. The heavy scent of the Harvester’s pheromones filled the room, sweet and cloying.

For her part, the Harvester seemed to be staring into Gallen’s face, and she looked up as Ceravanne and Orick entered, her sad green eyes gazing at them, so much like Ceravanne’s eyes.

All along the walls were doorways, and at each doorway stood a Tekkar guard, draped in black robes that were longer than the norm, holding a sword pointed down toward the floor. Four guards lay sprawled upon the carpet just inside the door, where Gallen had killed them.

The Harvester reached out toward them, made a pulling gesture, as the Inhuman’s agents often did when greeting one another, and said softly, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

The room’s lights shone over her platinum hair, sparkled in her pale green eyes. Ceravanne looked at herself, the Harvester.

The Harvester glanced about at Gallen and the others in confusion. “It took only four of you to cause so much destruction?”

Ceravanne nodded, and her heart pounded in her chest. She looked to both sides. The air in here was still heavy with the scent of the explosive charges from the dronon pulp gun, but there was a mustier smell of things long dead. As Ceravanne scanned the room, she recognized the source. What she had first thought to be Tekkar guards lining the walls were in fact the dead, mummified remains of Tekkar, their bodies dried, their faces painted over with some preservative lacquer. Gallen had already killed the living guards, yet he knelt before the Harvester’s throne, unmoving, and Ceravanne’s heart pounded within her.

“What are you doing?” Orick growled at Gallen. But Gallen did not move, did not answer.

“You have damaged him,” the Harvester said, and she reached down and removed Gallen’s mantle. “Someone tried to remove his Word, but enough of it is still intact. He is Inhuman still, and here in Moree, he cannot harm me.”

Ceravanne looked at Gallen in horror, saw that he was breathing heavily. He grunted, a faint cry, and Ceravanne realized that he was only holding still with a great struggle. The Inhuman held him.

“Who is he?” the Harvester asked, looking at Gallen’s face.

“Don’t you know?” Ceravanne asked. “He is Belorian.”

“No,” the Harvester said angrily. “Belorian is dead. His memories are lost.”

“Yet his genome lives,” Ceravanne said. “You know that much. And this one was reborn on a world like ours. He is Belorian in all but name.”

The Harvester looked at him thoughtfully. “I shall keep him, then, as my own.”

There was an electricity between the two women, almost sizzling. For long years, Ceravanne had wondered if even she could be subverted by the Inhuman, and now she saw the proof of it. If this woman remembered Belorian, then she could not be some empty-headed clone created by the dronon. This had to be Ceravanne’s older self, the woman who’d been lost a year ago. Ceravanne, with all her memories intact. Here was a Tharrin who proposed to rule a world of slaves, who claimed that she would keep Gallen as her personal pet, and yet Ceravanne wondered. Ceravanne and the Harvester were of the same flesh. How could they take such divergent paths? Though Ceravanne often felt the tug, the desire to manipulate others to her own ends, she had rejected that path a million times. It seemed to Ceravanne that at the very core of their being, there must be some commonality, some shred of decency that they still shared.

“We share much,” Ceravanne said, “but we do not share a belief that we can own others. I have come to reclaim you, my sister-self. I suspected that you could not be lost among the Tekkar. Even taken as a slave, you would soon make yourself queen.”

“There is nothing here to reclaim,” the Harvester whispered vehemently. “I am Inhuman now.”

“A lover of war?” Ceravanne whispered. “Then why have not the Tekkar already been unleashed on Northland? Instead you send spies, carrying copies of the Word. It is a frail weapon indeed, for one who professes not to value life. No, you lead a peaceful war, a beneficent war, and you tame the dogs that serve you.

“Even now, I suspect that you have guards ready to do your bidding. Have them cut us down, if you can. But I know that you can’t. No matter what the Inhuman has taught you, no matter how it has sought to turn you, we still share something.” Ceravanne pointed to her heart.