Sword of Dreams (The Reforged Trilogy) (32 page)

"It's the lamp we set up," Tiberius grunted. "It's been knocked over."

"The wind, maybe?" Xia suggested.

"I doubt it. I had to help her drag it up here. The thing is damnably heavy. Too heavy to just blow over."

"Either they pushed it over, or there was a struggle." Logan crouched over the lumpiest patch of snow and carefully brushed aside the topmost layer. There was blood beneath, frozen hard during the night.

Gripper stopped chewing his huge claws long enough to gasp at the sight. "Do you think that's from Smoke? Did they hurt her?"

"They probably had to," Logan told the fretting Arboran. "They would not have been able to take her easily."

It was true. He had never fought anyone like Maeve. Coldhand studied the blood. The red was a puddle, not a spray. Whoever was injured had stood or sat here long enough to create a pool of blood. That would not have been Maeve. She would have been moving… Unless she was incapacitated somehow. Logan felt around in the snow.

A few yards downslope, Tiberius had found something else – Maeve's com. The scuffed and dented cylinder was full of ice, useless. Tiberius tossed it to Xia. The Ixthian held it up in the wan sunlight.

"I don't think it's actually broken. These things are supposed to be sealed and good for pressure up to three hundred feet underwater," she said.

"Can I see?" Gripper asked. Xia nodded and held the radio up to him. He took it, scratched his shortened ear and shook his head. "The top's all dented in. It got dropped, but that happens a lot when Smoke's flying around."

"Maybe that's why she didn't call Panna or the captain."

"Panna?" Coldhand asked, still rooting around in the snow. All of the fingers on his right hand were going numb.

"She's one of the archeologists," Duaal told him. "Xen's assistant. That's her, down there."

Logan looked up from his work long enough to see what the mage was pointing at. There was the crack in the mountain that Maeve had been protecting, a crooked and narrow ravine torn into the top of the moraine. Three figures emerged from the dark violet shadows, climbing up a ladder that must have been treacherously icy. Coldhand squinted through tired eyes. There was a long-muzzled man, a Lyran, and then a muscular blue shape. Dailon, though he could not discern the gender from this distance.

The last one out onto the surface was a smaller shape. Slender, with golden hair spilling out from under her hat. That had to be Panna. Logan watched her for a moment. There was something wrong with her movements, how she balanced as she ran to catch up with the others.

Something sharp jabbed Logan's still-questing fingers. He felt more carefully through the snow and found a long hypodermic needle. Tiberius and the rest closed in around the hunter as he shook it free of the clinging frost.

"What's that?" Gripper asked.

Coldhand worked the rubber plunger until he coaxed a tiny bead of black out from the needle's tip. He pulled the glove off his right hand with his teeth. The black stuff felt sticky as he rubbed it between his fingers. He sniffed. It smelled sweet, poisonously sweet.

"Vanora White," he announced.

"I
knew
Maeve was using again," Duaal said.

Again? That meant she had stopped… Logan wondered why.
Are the chems no longer enough? Or maybe she doesn't need them anymore. Even in the face of death, Maeve was still more alive than I ever was. Just like Ballad. Just like Vorus.

"Come on, Shimmer, you know she's been clean!" Gripper said, confirming Logan's private thoughts.

"Yeah? Then what's that needle doing up here?" Duaal challenged.

"I don't know, but I know Smoke. She's been off the stuff for months!"

Coldhand rubbed the Vanora White against his thumb again. This was thinner than it should have been, and faintly grainy on his skin. He inspected the needle. It was bigger than any Logan had ever bought for himself, and was marked on the side with close-packed measure lines.

Most chems came in special unmarked needles, filled and premeasured by the dealer. They were meant to be discarded and untraceable after use. But this needle was probably from a hospital or clinic, stolen for drug use. It could be refilled, and the wear around the edges of the plastic suggested that it had.

You can't just throw things away on Prianus.

Logan pocketed the needle and stood.

Tiberius watched him, fury all across his lined, reddened face. "Well?" he asked impatiently.

The bounty hunter was not used to sharing his thoughts. He hesitated before answering. "Has Maeve been in Pylos since you arrived?"

"We drove though on our way here, but not since then," Xia said.

"What the hells does that have to do with anything?" asked Tiberius. "You think she ran off on her own now? She wouldn't do that!"

"No, I don't think so. Maeve always wanted to keep you safe and out of our battles," Logan said. He remembered her panic the last time they fought as she tried to convince Tiberius to go away. "But unless Maeve made a trip into the city, I doubt this White is hers."

"How's that?"

"It's a local blend. Cheaper than what you get on Axis, and weaker. It needs a much larger dose to do its job. That's why the needle is so big."

"Then what's it doing up here?"

Tiberius was a good man, but not very imaginative, Coldhand decided. "I think they used it to drug Maeve," he said. The hunter held out his metal hand and drew an imaginary line from the crag to the road far below. "If they had to take her to a vehicle down there, they would have had to move her right past your camp. They needed her quiet and still, not struggling. We should check the road."

"See? I
told
you it wasn't hers!" Gripper told Duaal, elbowing the mage and making him stagger a step in the snow.

Duaal did not look convinced, but shrugged and let the matter drop. "What now, then?" he asked, directing his question to Logan.

"We check the road," Tiberius answered before the bounty hunter could. "Just like the God-damn traitor says."

________

The darkness was so complete that Maeve could not tell if her eyes were open or shut. Wherever she was, the air reeked acidly of mold and rot. Her wings were tied tightly by rough, scratchy rope. Her hands were bound behind her, too. Bands of metal hung cold and heavy around her wrists. Handcuffs? She gave them an experimental tug and heard the brittle-hard clatter of a small chain, confirming her suspicion.

Where was she? Maeve sat with her back against a post of some sort. Her wings and wrists were tied uncomfortably around it. The nub of a rivet dug into the sensitive skin between her wings. A support beam?

The close, musty air was not moving much. Maeve must have been indoors. She reached out with one foot. Numb toes through boots felt little. Rubble and something softer – cloth, maybe – was scattered across the floor. Maeve thought for a moment, swallowed against the thick, too-sweet taste in the back of her throat. She hummed a short, high note and listened. There were few echoes, and even those were muffled and close. The room was not large.

So Maeve was not being held in some empty warehouse. The cloth under her left heel could be clothes or curtains. Was she in a store? A house?

Maeve sagged back against the beam. It was hard to hold herself upright. The last of the Vanora White was still working its way through her blood. Maeve's stomach knotted up like the rope binding her wings.

Even when I try to live my life cleanly, I cannot escape these poisons.

She did not want to waste her time in self-pity and recrimination, but she was not sure what else to do. She pulled weakly against her bonds and sucked in a pained breath at the result. The ropes and handcuffs were tight. Maeve felt around again with her feet for something sharp. Maybe she could pick the lock on the cuffs or cut through the ropes…

She needed more information. Maeve wedged one foot under the other and wriggled it free of her boot. The cold raised bumps on her skin. Maeve did not want to feel around in the darkness with bare toes – she could not stop imagining terrible things in the blackness, monsters more accustomed to their blindness than she – but the fairy made her foot inch out again.

The floor was gritty and dirty. There were larger lumps, some hard and some that crumbled at Maeve's cringing touch. She felt the same yielding softness as before, but could make out more of the details now. Thick cloth, heavily textured… Upholstery? Dust clung to her clammy skin, but she could find nothing useful.

"Sa vaeli'i!"
she groaned.

Maeve did not want to give up, but she had no other ideas. She knew only a few battlefield spells and none of them included fire or anything else useful against handcuffs.

She tried to swallow and coughed instead. Maeve needed water, something to wash away the stale-sweet taste in her mouth and wet her swollen throat. She felt dry and wrung out as an old sponge.

The darkness crept with phantom lights in dizzy, geometric patterns. There… Was that a voice? Maeve could make no sense of the faint whispers. The muffled voices might have been someone talking on the far side of the wall or the indistinct musings of her own rising fear.

The Mirran in red. The Cult of Nihil took me. Why?

She did not care anymore who might hear. If it was her captors, what did it matter? Anyone else was a potential ally. Even on Prianus, no one would just leave a half-drugged woman tied and alone in the dark. Would they?

"Help!" she cried. Maeve's voice was thick and much hoarser than she hoped. "Please, help me!"

There was no answer and Maeve slumped back against the beam. It hurt, but she did not care. Only the gods knew where she was. She remembered the cracked and failing city of Pylos. Entire buildings toppled in the huge quake fissure. Swallowed up, as the archaeologists told her, by the unstable leach-mined stone.

I might be buried alive under Pylos… Alive for now, at least.

Pylos. The Waygate… A memory surged suddenly to the fore, of the last hours of the White Kingdom, as Maeve and Orthain battled and crept back toward the Tamlin Waygate. Sneaking and hiding, for the most part. It took a dozen of even the best knights to kill a single huge, smoke-shrouded Devourer with their spears. But for all the horror, all the bloody carnage, there was not a single body left behind. No chance to hide among the dead.

So Maeve and Orthain had hidden behind the shattered stump of a glass tower. Not long ago, the transparent glass would have offered no concealment, but after weeks of fighting the Devourers, it was streaked and opaque and broken. Even fire could not mar Arcadian glass, but the slightest brush of the Devourer's smoky armor seemed to leech something from the glass, leaving it milky and brittle.

Duaal and Xia said that the iron – and several other elemental metals, Phillip told them later – were extracted by no known mining techniques. What if that same magic or technology was used in the destruction of the White Kingdom? Arcadian glass was full of carbon, like coreworld diamonds, Maeve knew. What if the Devourers… removed it?

That does not mean that we know any more about it,
Maeve thought, but she could not stop the shiver crawling up her spine. What else might it mean? That the Devourers had visited more planets than those of the White Kingdom? But Phillip said that the iron was mined long, long ago…

Have the Devourers been here before?

Before she could ponder the horrible question further, light flooded the room. Instinctively, Maeve tried to throw her arm across her face against the shining needles of radiance, but succeeded only in wrenching her shoulder. She blinked until the hot tears faded a little and looked up.

A door stood open and the light that at first seemed so blinding was little more than a green-gray glow. It cast shallow illumination across Maeve's prison – a small, single-room apartment with a collapsed wall that vomited dirt and crumbling rock across the floor.

Someone stepped into the doorway, silhouetted in the rectangular slab of light. Maeve strained forward again, oblivious now to the pain of her restraints. She recognized her visitor at once.

"Xartasia!" she rasped.

The older princess closed the door softly behind her, momentarily sinking everything once more into pitchy blackness. Then Xartasia sang a few short words and a faint, sourceless golden light filled the room.

Xartasia looked just as she had back on Stray, dressed all in immaculate and pristine white. Cavain's raven-black hair spilled smoothly down across her shoulders and between her long wings. She was beautiful, regal as befit a queen… if she would only lead her people. Xartasia lifted the hem of her dress and picked her way across the filth to where her cousin sat bound.

"What are you doing in this place?" Maeve asked in a dry whisper. "How did you survive the fall of the Gharib cathedral?"

"My magics have grown strong, little cousin, and Gavriel's convictions stronger still. I could not let him die just yet. There is work yet to be done," said Xartasia. Her violet eyes shone brightly, passionately. "You are surprisingly alert, considering the dose of Vanora White that Hallax gave you."