Hammer of Time (The Reforged Trilogy) (37 page)

"A'shae!" another knight said in a choked voice. "Why…?"

"For the White Kingdom and all who died there," Xartasia answered the unfinished question. She had to raise her musical voice over the sickening sound of breaking bones. "The price is high, Sir Corrus. You knew that it would be. But remember what we buy with it."

Corrus nodded slowly and raised his spear. Violet and blue ribbons streamed from the haft in the hot, damp wind. Bright orange embers swirled up from the burning village and singed tiny black spots into the green ground like diseased sores.

Xartasia watched Dhozo chew up the last of the Arboran child's entrails with sharp white teeth. She might have agreed to the price, but she did not have to like it and she did not have to remain silent. Dhozo licked his wide lips with a long, dark purple tongue and then his swarming nanite armor obscured his face in smoky darkness again.

"Surely your own people deserve a cleaner death, commander," Xartasia said.

"These are
not
my people," Dhozo snarled.

"They look like you."

"These degenerates are not Glorious. Some of the Anzhotekki researchers objected to our expansion. We thought they would just die out when we left them behind. But they became… herbivores."

He said this last word with such a deep disgust that Xartasia looked down around the Devourer's feet. His nanite swarm was burning, harvesting and consuming the thick layer of foliage, but Dhozo himself ate not a single bite.

"They became the Arborans," Xartasia said. Dhozo's nanites sent their translation of her words to the computer implanted in his brain. "And us. We survived, as well. You created the fairies, servants that look like creatures from your own stories. Why did you leave your slaves behind?"

"There was no room. We needed every ship to save ourselves from the famine. You and your worlds were luxury resources, anyway."

Xartasia nodded shortly. She did not need the Devourers to flatter her, just to obey. "If you have eaten your fill, commander, it is time to move on."

"The Glorious are never sated. But we need data." Dhozo raised his voice. "Form up!"

Fifteen of the hulking black aliens came at once to Commander Dhozo's side, but the last two – Orix and Tekker – did not report until Dhozo repeated his order twice more. The Devourers and Arcadians descended through the huge hole left by the toppled sycona tree, down into the darkness.

The fairies soared easily on the warm, wet air, down below the fires burning above and the billowing black smoke. The Devourers simply jumped. Hook-tipped black tendrils tore through bark and dug deep into the living wood beneath, breaking their owners' falls. They dropped the final fifty feet and landed on glimmering red forcefields that reminded Xartasia of the coreworlders' null-inertia technology.

The fairy queen alighted gently on the spongy loam of Arborus' surface. A little bit of light filtered down from holes in the distant canopy, but not much. Xartasia's knights and her Devourers were nothing but slightly darker shadows in the deeper green-tinged blackness. The great trees creaked and groaned ominously all around, forbidding the invasion in an ancient and indecipherable tongue.

Xartasia sang the short charm and a sourceless glow kindled an aura around her. The other knights echoed their queen's spell as the Devourers triggered bright spotlights in their swirling armor and pierced the ancient gloom with the powerful beams.

Arborus was as dark and mysterious as it had been six years ago, when Xartasia had first found her way to the strange green planet in search of the secrets of the Waygates. The ground was as black as night, barren of any sort of undergrowth. There were the trees felled by the Devourers' lasers to cut off the Arboran's escape, too, columns of wood twenty yards wide and a thousand feet long smashed across the forest floor, but even these had an eerie sort of agelessness about them.

Xartasia could not help thinking of the fallen cathedral in Gharib, the black columns cracked and broken by Maeve's ship when her captain came to save her. Gavriel very nearly died, his old bones crushed by the falling stone and sand. But Xartasia had saved him… only to kill him in the mountains above Pylos. By then, Gavriel had served his purpose. Xartasia could teach magic to those not born to it, force the skills and power into an adult mind. With that, she could buy the Devourers. She had made servants of the greatest predators the galaxy had ever known.

But that night under the graveyard, she had nearly lost it all. It had been a bloody reminder of just how fragile her plans truly were, how tenuous the future was. How easily one woman could shatter everything…

Xartasia had never returned to the place where the black cathedral had stood. It was just one of many pieces of land that she had bought, tools in her long and intricate plan. Not using her own name, of course. Arcadians were not Alliance citizens and could not own land on CWA planets. The fallen black cathedral belonged to someone who did not really exist.

I do not exist,
Xartasia reminded herself sternly.
I am the dream of death. Princess Titania died. Not all at once… But when I lost my home and my love, it began. The first frost of a hundred-year winter.

But it will be spring again. All that has died will grow again.

Xartasia raised her right wing, a gesture for the rest to follow. The Arcadian knights took to the air alongside their queen and the Devourers fell into step below. Even in their own light, they slid like shadows through the darkness of Anzhotek's surface.

Other dark shapes ran between the trees, smaller than the Devourers but still large. They bounded between the towering trees on four legs covered in sleek green and brown fur. There was something lupine in the elongated muzzle and sharply pricked ears, like the Lyra or wolves of Prianus. But the long, sinuously curling tail and slit-pupiled green eyes were more feline. Whatever the creatures were, they were hungry and tried once to swarm Orix and Zhyress at the column's rear.

The Devourers were hungrier.

Xartasia landed once, three hours into their journey, and peered up at the vast cathedral of trees. Dhozo loomed over her. "Which way?" he asked.

"You ask me?" Xartasia flipped her wings and curled them against her back. "It is your research center we search for, commander."

"From four million years ago," Dhozo's nanite swarm buzzed. "It may as well be yours now. You know more about the old science than we do anymore."

"Then be silent and let me find the way. I have been here only once and this world is always growing."

Dhozo quieted. Satisfied, Xartasia turned a slow circle, peering out at the vast, dark forest. Finally, she pointed. "This way," she said.

Xartasia led them between the trees. There was no trail or road and the terrain was rough. Roots thicker than even Dhozo's body twined through the black soil. They flew over and walked under fallen leaves the size of houses.

"Was this forest here when you left Anzhotek?" Xartasia asked as Dhozo sliced a red laser through a tumbled-down branch covered in needles as long as Xartasia's wing.

"This?" Dhozo repeated. "No. When we closed the Anzhotek facility, there wasn't much left."

"But some."

"Some," the Glorious commander agreed. "Enough to–"

Dhozo's heavy boot came down on something hard, something other than the soft, thick loam of Arborus. He shined his light across a road. It was badly cracked and had crumbled away to nothing in places.

Xartasia landed silently. The road was made up of a million tiny tiles that threw back the light with a metallic gray sheen. Xartasia's knights landed beside her and they walked with the Devourers down the ancient roadway. Not much had survived the ages and encroaching forest of Anzhotek. There were buildings, hollowed and cracked, with dark windows like empty eye sockets. The structures were large, where enough of them survived to tell, built to the Devourers' impressive scale. It was difficult to make out the original details. Everything was covered in thick layers of dirt and moss and slimy, decaying leaves. But what Xartasia could see made her glance sidelong at Commander Dhozo. The Devourer engineer swept his spotlight back and forth across the buildings.

The ancient city was beautiful in a severe, alien manner. The lines of the place, even broken and crooked and twisted by age, had a certain predatory grace to them that Xartasia had not noticed before. She had eyes only for the Waygates then, and the mysterious promises that the ageless technology held.

"No," Xartasia told Dhozo, who had turned down a wide, crumbling side road lined in long-broken houses. "This way."

They moved quickly down the vast main street, over a fallen branch that had splintered one of the structures into smooth, steely fragments like a thousand fallen blades. Xartasia led the fairies and Devourers over a bridge. The passage beneath was long since gone, filled with dirt and twisting roots. On the far side were the crumpled remains of what seemed to be a security station. Xartasia flew over the tumbled building and landed in the road beyond.

They moved now between huge warehouses, still standing despite the passage of eons. The doors were gone, but the buildings had been made to last. The walls were as thick as Xartasia was tall, tiled in some sort of high-impact ceramic, torn away in places by the encroaching jungle to expose the metallic mesh beneath. Inside, illuminated by the Arcadians' directionless light and more harshly by the Devourers' spotlights, were Waygates. Pieces of them, at least, dozens of disassembled segments. No two were quite alike. Some were longer or shorter arcs, made up of a hundred different substances. Some glowed with a dim inner light. Others were glass or metal or stone. A few had the geometric golden lines of circuitry, arcane runes or the organized and multi-colored dots of an electronic display.

The warehouses gave way suddenly to a clearing, some sort of plaza. It was circular, as wide across as a coreworld city block, and lined all around with Waygates. None of them had fallen. Every one of the ancient gates stood straight and tall, towering even over Dhozo's indistinct head. From a distance, the Waygates were dark and blank, but as Xartasia and her company drew closer, all twenty-eight began to swirl and glow with blue radiance that cast no light across the plaza. Dhozo strode into the center of the circle.

"The Anzhotek prototype lab," he said in a loud, hissing voice. "It's still here."

In Dhozo's own language, he ordered the rest of the team to spread out and begin collecting information. Threads of black nanites twisted and played over every surface, scanning and collating and transmitting data. Dhozo stood in the center of it all, the nexus of information. The Devourer team was so brutal and terrible… it was hard to remember at times that Dhozo and his alien colleagues were scientists. But it was that very trait that Xartasia needed now. Only the Waygates' creators could tell her whether the great devices could do what she wished, what she
needed
them to. If the Devourers discovered here that they could not, everything – so many lives, so much blood and suffering and horror – would be for nothing.

"What have you found?" Xartasia asked.

"Composition and telemetry of the Projector system. We're learning how the Projectors were developed here and how they work," Dhozo told her. His head was bare as the nanite swarm worked. The alien engineer's gray face twitched and his eyes flicked back and forth as the swarm computer poured information into his brain.

"Is it what I need?" Xartasia's hands were clenched at her sides. Her light wavered.

Dhozo was quiet for a moment. "Orix is in the computer network. It's badly damaged. Only partial recovery…"

"Tell me." Xartasia knew that she should give Dhozo and his team time, space to work, but now that the moment was upon her, Xartasia found that she could not wait. "The Waygates work on memory. Memory of a destination. Will they be able to use ours to alter time instead of distance?"

"Calculating," Dhozo growled. "I'm still sorting the data. There are partial schematics… This is interesting. Temporal stasis. Noted effect of Projector integration."

"Temporal?" Xartasia repeated. "To do with time. Tell me."

"A side effect of the Projector systems. It's why there is no time dilation or contraction when traveling inside the network."

"That gets me no closer to the White Kingdom!"

"That's what I said. Let us work, little queen," Dhozo buzzed back. He opened huge black eyes and fixed them on her. "This would be faster if we didn't need repair to the old systems and manual interfaces. Give me the access to observational impact abilities you promised, Xartasia, and I could interface directly with the structure of the Projectors… the Waygates… and tell you exactly what you want to know."

Xartasia drew herself up and shook her head. "Not yet, Commander Dhozo. You will have your magic and Waygates – your observational impact and Projectors – back only when the White Kingdom is mine once more."

The shadowy commander bared his sharp white teeth. For the next seven hours, he worked in silence. The Devourers' nanite network fired information back and forth as Orix's team dissected the ancient computer network. Zhyress' group actually pulled apart several of the Waygates. Watching the great, glowing rings shiver and then their monstrous creators dissect each segment would have broken Xartasia's heart, but it had been broken a century ago. Still, the glass-armored knights were uncomfortable again and sang softly mournful songs every time one of the Waygates crashed to the ground.