The Reforged Trilogy: Book 1 — Crucible of Stars
Chapter 11
Full Circle
“Guilt weighs heavy on the heart, but forgiveness must be even heavier, to judge by how little we give it.”
– Reverend Devin Malone, The Union of Light (163 PA)
It was well into the night, cold and dark outside the Blue Phoenix. By the time the ship had been thoroughly searched for any nasty surprises Coldhand might have left behind — there didn’t seem to be any — it was too late to attend the speech at the black cathedral that Anthem had told Xia about.
“How did this happen?” Tiberius asked. “How did Coldhand get out?”
He was pacing across the medical bay, limping with every step. Xia grabbed Tiberius firmly by one shoulder and pulled him back down to sit on a small operating table. Her surgical instruments were laid out and fixed magnetically into their trays to keep them in place even during bumpy atmospheric flying. Since most injuries were sustained in the air, it was best to be ready to operate even under turbulent conditions.
“Sit down,” Xia told Tiberius.
The captain frowned. “Why?”
“Those pain chems I gave you aren’t helping much if you just make your injuries worse,” Xia said. “Do you want to be laid up for the next month?”
Tiberius grumbled and sat. Xia tipped antiseptic onto a disposable pad and resumed cleaning the burn in Tiberius’ shoulder. His chest was a rug of gray hair interlaced by a network of pale scars mapping out fifty years of service to the Prian police. If only his people had better medical care… Xia sighed.
Gripper held out an old datadex to Tiberius.
“I think Coldhand used this to pry up the access panel and then rewired the door. It must have taken him days. You can’t just rip out a handful of wires like in the shows,” Gripper said, then groaned. “And it’s going to take twice as long to fix. Coldhand knew what he was doing, but barely.”
Tiberius growled and lifted the datadex to fling it across the room, but Xia gave him a stern look until he dropped it into his lap instead. The Ixthian put aside the bloodstained pad and then taped a clean bandage into place over the burn.
“Damnable lasers,” Xia sighed. She hated those things. “They cauterize the shot.”
“Doesn’t that make them easier to fix?” Duaal asked her. “Cauterized wounds don’t bleed as much.”
“No, but they get infected. Antibodies are carried by the blood and if blood can’t reach the burn, it goes septic,” Xia said, looking pointedly at Tiberius. “Especially if the patient insists on pulling off the bandages. Keep the burn covered. It has to stay clean.”
“But laser burns itch,” Tiberius grumbled.
“They itch because they’re healing.”
Tiberius looked down at the datadex in his hands rather than meeting the medic’s irritated gaze. Idly, he turned it on.
“I wonder if he ever even read it,” Tiberius said. “Maybe it could teach him a thing or two about loyalty. But if he didn’t learn it as a police officer back home, I doubt a book would have done it. Damn him to all the hells!”
Tiberius shouted and this time, he did hurl the datadex across the medbay. Xia frowned disapprovingly and Gripper ducked. The datadex hit one of the white cabinets and then fell to the floor. Gripper picked it up by a corner. The broken screen was a muddy spiderweb of cracks.
“I swear I’ll kill that bastard!” Tiberius raged. He heaved himself up off the table and out of Xia’s grip. “He’s betrayed his uniform, his oath to Prianus! And he overwrote my book!”
Desperately, Xia caught Tiberius by his uninjured shoulder and pulled the old captain back down to the padded examination table. Again.
“Calm down, captain,” she told him. “I don’t have a reconstruction chamber to deal with these ribs. You’ve cracked three of them and you need to be careful until they heal.”
“I’ll burn Coldhand so bad there won’t be anything left to put on his pyre!” Tiberius said.
The hunter was a deadly opponent… To books as well as to people, apparently. Xia had been treating Maeve long enough to be familiar with his bloody work. Tiberius had told them about his own fight with Coldhand once the crew had gathered again on the Blue Phoenix. Xia suspected that the injury to the old Prian’s head — which had driven him to the ground and out of Coldhand’s path to freedom — was the only thing that had saved his life.
“Hey, Coldhand wrote something!” Gripper exclaimed.
The mechanic held out the cracked datadex. Maeve took it and angled the screen against the sterile fluorescent lights, squinting to make out the words.
“The Sacred Temple of Creation,” she read. “Vanora.”
“What does that mean?” Xia asked.
“There is a drug called Vanora White,” said Maeve. “I injected Logan with it when we last fought, but it failed to affect him. I can see no reason why he would write it here.”
Gripper rubbed his bald head, thinking. “Isn’t Vanora the old name for Axis? Before it became the capital of the Alliance?”
“He’s right,” Xia said. “Gripper, you know Alliance history better than most natives do.”
“I had to take a citizenship test,” the Arboran admitted.
“But what does that have to do with the Sacred Church of whatever?” Duaal asked.
“The Sacred Temple of Creation,” Kessa said.
Xia looked back at the Dailon, who was perched on a stool in one corner of the medbay. She had nearly forgotten that the girl was even there.
“It sounds familiar,” Kessa said. “I think that I’ve heard it before. Maybe from Xel, the Ixthian who led us. You met her, Maeve.”
“What did she say about it?” Tiberius asked.
His face was still an alarming shade of red, but he seemed to have recovered from his rage enough to rejoin the conversation. Xia took advantage of his distraction to prod at Tiberius’ knee with her fingertips. Swollen, certainly… She frowned and pulled an imager over the strained joint.
“I don’t remember,” Kessa said.
“If I get access to the local mainstream, I’m sure I can find out,” Gripper offered.
He grinned. The Arboran loved absolutely any excuse to play with machines or electronics. He was young and relatively new to the technologies of the Alliance, still awed and fascinated by every wire and blinking light. The computer mainstream must have been a candy store.
Xia cleared her throat. “You didn’t tear anything in your knee when you fell, Tiberius, but it was a near thing. The tendons are strained and brittle. You’re old. I’m going to give you some supplements to help repair the damage.”
“I hate taking pills,” Tiberius grumbled. “Can’t you just give me a shot?”
“No, I don’t have any needles strong enough to get through your thick skin,” Xia answered, but then sighed. “I’m out of injectors. We were supposed to buy some on Axis before we left, so now you’ll have to take the capsules.”
Tiberius groaned and turned back to Gripper. “I’ll give you the colour for an uplink. But tomorrow. I don’t want you out in Gharib in the middle of the night.”
“I am certain Logan gave this information to us for a purpose,” Maeve said. “Perhaps further planning should wait until Gripper has learned something about it.”
Tiberius nodded. Xia handed him a half-full bottle of glucosamine and callosen tablets and then pronounced the old Prian free to go. Tiberius pulled his shirt on and then the crew filed after him out of the medical bay. Once back out in the corridors of the Blue Phoenix, they scattered to find their bunks.
But Xia followed Maeve and caught up with her in the small mess area. She cleared her throat and waited until the fairy stopped walking. Maeve turned on her heels to face Xia, frowning.
“Maeve, what happened to your worlds?” Xia asked.
She was nervous about approaching the temperamental winged woman, but she could no longer contain her curiosity. She had to know. Maeve’s frown deepened into a scowl.
“Why do you ask now? It is not a pleasant song.”
“You’re the only Arcadian I’ve spent much time with… Until that man Anthem today,” Xia said. The memory of the thin, malnourished and mistreated fairy was all too fresh in her mind. “I always figured that you were the only one who was… the way you are. But now I’m beginning to wonder.”
“If we are all inebriated and wasted criminals?” Maeve asked. “Employed under only the faintest façade of legal profession by the graces of a too-forgiving captain?”
Xia sighed, but refused to let herself rise to the bait. She had asked for some of that, maybe, by confronting Maeve like this. But perhaps if Maeve knew that someone cared, she would open up. Maybe even begin healing what was clearly a deep and painful psychological wound.
“The Arcadians’ appearance in the core is well-documented,” Xia said. “But not what brought you here. That all happened before I was even hatched… So what’s the story? What drove all the fairies out of the White Kingdom?”
“All of the fairies out…?” Maeve repeated bitterly. “No, not all of them.”
Xia blinked. “What?”
“Most are dead, yes. Less than one of fifty survived, but all of those were of my kind. The aerads.”
“Aerads?” Xia asked. “I thought you were called Arcadians.”
“That is the name that Cavain gave us, his own species, when he founded the White Kingdom,” Maeve said. “The others retained their original names.”
“There were other species of fairies?” Xia asked.
“Three of them,” Maeve answered, nodding. “Four races before Cavain killed the rebel pyrads to create the White Kingdom. For ten thousand years, the aerads, dryads and nyads all lived in the kingdom that he built. Some aerads escaped to become the Arcadians as you know us now, a shattered fragment of ourselves. But the rest are gone.”
“What actually happened? How did they all die?”
“The White Kingdom of Arcadia spanned all the worlds of our stellar system,” Maeve answered, tracing a circle in the air. “They were connected by the Waygates. We were not alone in their use — the Jinn and the Nnyth know much about them, as well.”
“I’ve heard a bit about Waygates. They were instantaneous transportation portals, right?” Xia asked.
The Ixthian sat down at the table and then gestured for Maeve to take a seat, too. The fairy reluctantly turned another chair backwards and dropped down into it.
“That is correct,” Maeve said. “Waygates are opened as one-way paths to most any destination.”
“Opened by what?” Xia asked. “Or who?”
“Each Waygate requires its own skilled operator. The adepts of the Ivory Spire were trained in those arts. Once they mastered their craft, each operator was paired with a knight to guard and protect both the singer and their Waygate. But a century ago, as you count time, one of these knights damned us all.”
Xia cocked her head. “As we count time? I thought an Arcadian year was about the same as an Alliance CSY.”
“Almost,” Maeve said. “But a natural year is two hundred eighty-eight days, made up of twelve months, each three weeks long. So it has been more than a century by our count.”
“Oh…” Xia answered. She wasn’t sure what else to say to that. “What happened with the knight?”
Maeve folded her arms across the back of the chair and drew a deep breath.
“There was a Spire adept, a young prince of the royal family, assigned to the Waygate in Tamlin, on the planet of Orindell. He was in the city on personal business when his knight companion attempted to open the Waygate alone. She had heard and seen his spells often enough to make the attempt.”
“Untrained?” Xia asked. That sounded like a bad idea — she had experience with the mess untrained medics made of their patients.
Maeve nodded. “When her spells faltered, the knight failed to call for the aid of the other priests. In the end, she opened the Waygate, but the songs were terribly wrong, twisted beyond belief. The Waygate boomed in a strange, terrible tongue. And then what came through the gate… It was nothing less than death Herself.”
“What was it?” Xia asked.
“An endless army of monsters that we named the Devourers,” Maeve answered in a flat voice. “Wingless and taller even than the Hadrians or Ixthians. But much more of their appearance than that remained a mystery. Each of the Devourers was shrouded by thick black smoke… or perhaps that was a part of their bodies. We never knew. But those dark, swirling clouds were far from insubstantial. The Devourers formed great blades and whips that would dissolve back into smoke when engaged. In concentration, these shadows were able to fire lasers more destructive than anything I have seen in the core.”
“Why did you call them Devourers?”
For a moment, Xia wasn’t sure if Maeve heard her. The Arcadian was staring down at the floor.
“There were only a few in the beginning,” Maeve answered at last. “The prince flew to the Waygate, but he could not undo what his companion had done… and he was the first killed by the creatures that she had summoned. They shot him down out of the sky, cut the wings from his back and devoured him.”
“They ate him…?” Xia gasped. “A sentient creature? But Maeve, aren’t you from the royal family, too?”
“Yes. That singer was my younger brother, Caith.”
“Your brother? Maeve, I’m so sorry,” Xia said.
Maeve still didn’t look up. Her face was hidden behind a curtain of tangled black hair, but tears splashed onto the back of her hands and ran across her pale skin.
“More and more of the Devourers poured through the open Waygate. Hundreds and then thousands of them,” Maeve told Xia. “They ate every creature on Orindell. My people fled to other planets of the White Kingdom, but the Devourers followed them through the Waygates. They spread like a plague across our worlds, destroying and consuming all. The Arcadians pulled back in full retreat, leaving the dryads and nyads behind to their fates.
“We fought for three long months as the remaining Spire adepts debated with the king on how to save what remained of Arcadia. Some few argued that the Devourers could be banished from our worlds, that the same corrupted spell which summoned them bound them still to the Tamlin Waygate. If it was closed, they said, the monsters would vanish. But the spell they developed could only be cast from Tamlin, where Devourers streamed through every day.
“But most of the surviving spell-singers agreed that Arcadia was lost and that leaving our home entirely was the only option left to us. They told the king that they could open the remaining Waygates — those in the capital city were the only ones still under our control by then — to somewhere further away.”
“The human worlds, right?” Xia said. That was a part of history she had learned in school at least. “The Arcadians all went to Axis, Mir, Hyzaar, Prianus and Hadra.”
“The Waygates can only be opened to places that their operators remember. It is a part of the magic built into them. We knew no place besides the planets of the White Kingdom, but I am told that the Waygates had… memory of their own, after a fashion. Whatever happened to summon the Devourers was bound up into that same magic, they said, that same memory. I never understood why, but it no longer matters.
“King Illain decided that our people had no choice but to flee and commanded the Spire adepts to open the way into the galactic core. But the defense of the capital was already crumbling and we feared that the Devourers would follow us across the galaxy. So a bold and fierce knight rallied all that remained of our warriors and flew for the Tamlin Waygate.”
“You were a knight back in Arcadia, right?” Xia asked.
“I was a knight, yes,” Maeve answered. She finally looked up at Xia with red-rimmed eyes. “But no, it was not me. It was my teacher, Sir Orthain Fyre, who led the last knights into Tamlin. I flew with him, though, into the heart of the darkness. There were only four remaining Ivory Spire adepts, and all of them stayed behind to hold open the Waygates, to evacuate our people to the Alliance worlds. So since my brother had been such a spell-singer, I was chosen to attempt the closing song.”
Maeve laughed bitterly at this and Xia raised a silvery eyebrow.
“It was a dangerous decision,” the fairy said. “After all, was it not an unpracticed voice singing to the Waygates that began this catastrophe? But the White Kingdom was lost… we did not think that anything could be worse. So Sir Orthain and the last knights of Arcadia protected me as we flew. It was a long and terrible journey across worlds that I had loved, through ruins of pitted and shattered glass. Five of the other knights died before we even reached Tamlin. When we neared the Waygate, there was little time… The rest fell quickly, buying me precious moments to sing the spell I had been given. I sang as they tore Orthain apart.”
“Did it work?” Xia asked. “Did you close the gate?”
“I closed my eyes at the end. But when I opened them again, I was alone,” Maeve said. “Sir Orthain was gone… but so were the Devourers. I flew back to the capital with all the haste that I could, but the monsters had overrun the city before I banished them. All who had not yet fled through the Waygates were dead, some still lying half eaten on the glass streets.”
“But some of the Arcadians escaped,” Xia said. Hundreds of thousands of the fairies had appeared on Alliance worlds. Almost a million of them. “Couldn’t they… go home?”
“The Waygates are a one-way trip and the singers who operated them were all dead,” Maeve said. “King Illain was gone. I found what was left of my uncle beside one of the dead Spire adepts, his spear in his hand. He had died protecting his people… Our kingdom has spanned five worlds and ten thousand years, but within three months, it was all gone.”
“What did you do?” Xia asked.
“I hesitated,” Maeve answered. “There was a single Waygate still open, guttering with the last power of its spell. I did not know where it would go, but what else could I do? So I stepped through and joined my people in exile. I appeared on Hyzaar and you have seen what my life became here in the core.”
Xia didn’t trust herself to comment on that. Maeve was an unhappy woman — for which Xia could hardly blame her — and often seemed intent on making herself even more miserable. But Xia still had a question.
“What happened to the other knight, the one who opened the Waygate in the first place?”
Maeve shook her head. “No one knows, precisely. But her fate will be terrible, if I have any say in the matter.”
“You can’t blame her,” Xia told Maeve gently. “It sounds like the entire thing was a tragic accident.”
“She killed Caith and Orthain,” Maeve snarled. She jumped to her feet and spread her wings. Unabashed tears were streaming down her reddened cheeks now. “My enarrii… my beloved ones… I will watch her suffer! And then she will finally die in pain for what she has done!”
Xia stood up and placed a careful hand on the smaller woman’s shoulder. “Maeve, I’m so sorry for everything that you and your people have been through. But you’re here. You can build new lives and new homes…”
Maeve shoved Xia’s hand away and turn to stalk off deeper into the Blue Phoenix. Xia briefly considered following, but then decided against it. She sat down again and drummed her silver fingertips on the tabletop. It was hard to blame Maeve for trying to drown such terrible memories in narcohol and chems… But the fairy’s depression was dangerous — potentially even suicidal. Xia could never condone that kind of behavior, but she had no idea how to help Maeve.
Xia remained sitting and thinking in the mess for a little while longer, but eventually followed the examples of the rest of the crew and went to her bunk to get some sleep.
Discussion of their plans resumed early the next afternoon. Xia repeated to the others what Anthem Calloren had told her about the Sisterhood on Stray, how they had vanished when the Church of Nihil arrived. Kessa flinched and cradled her belly protectively.
Tiberius was sitting at the mess table, shoveling down a plate of fried minnas from Gripper’s garden. The starchy tuber was native to Hyzaar, but early CWA colonists discovered that the minnas thrived on a variety of worlds and it had become a staple of coreworld diets. Duaal was in a bad mood and didn’t eat much, but Kessa made up for him. Maeve declined lunch, instead taking long drinks from a bottle.
Gripper suddenly brandished a datadex overhead in his claws and let out a triumphant shout. Orphia — who had been perched on the back of Tiberius’ chair — shrieked and vaulted up into the air. She circled twice, but when the hawk found nothing to attack, she finally settled down once more behind Tiberius. Gripper smiled sheepishly.
“Sorry,” he apologized to Orphia, who ignored him. He looked at the rest of the crew. “I found them!”
“Found who?” Tiberius asked.
“The Sacred Temple of Creation,” Gripper said. He tapped the datadex. It wasn’t the one that Coldhand had broken, but a fresh datadex with a screen full of text. “Or, as they’re called these days, the Sisterhood.”
“What?” Duaal asked. “They’re the same thing?”
“Uh, sort of. I never would have found it if Coldhand hadn’t given me that hint about Vanora. It’s a pretty obscure bit of history,” Gripper answered. “It was about three hundred years ago, before the Arcadians arrived. When the Central World Alliance was just being created, there was a religion on Vanora — Axis — called the Sacred Temple of Creation. They weren’t the dominant faith or anything, but they had a few million followers.”
“That’s a fairly small religion,” Xia said. “The Union of Light has adopted and absorbed much bigger ones.”
Gripper nodded. “Yes, but the Sacred Temple of Creation didn’t get folded into the Union. They believed the same stuff as the modern Sisterhood — females are goddesses, males are trash. That sort of thing. They had no desire to join the Union of Light and become a part of the official church of the Alliance.”
“Yeah, that sounds familiar,” Kessa said.
“How did that go for them?” Tiberius asked.
“Not very well,” Gripper answered. “They attacked a few Union of Light priests, got themselves declared a heretical cult, and the Alliance shut them down. Most of the Sacred Temple disbanded, but the ones who wouldn’t give it up were imprisoned. Unfortunately for the CWA, the stuff they taught was pretty popular in prison. It was rebranded as the Sisterhood of Life — mostly just shortened to Sisterhood — and was reborn as a criminal group. It’s been a few centuries and the Sisterhood’s popularity goes up and down, but you can find chapters on just about every planet in the Central World Alliance.”
“So… there’s nowhere for me to go?” Kessa asked. “The Sisters are everywhere?”
“Maybe not,” Tiberius said, looking at Xia.
“He’s right,” she agreed with a nod. “They were here, but if what Anthem told us is true, the Nihilist church has run the Sisterhood off of Stray.”
“We are not yet sure that this new cult is any less dangerous,” Maeve objected. “What did they do to the Sisters here? Would Kessa be in danger from them?”
“I’m not exactly an active member,” Kessa said.
Maeve balanced her fork between her fingers, as if weighing the Dailon girl’s words on it. “That may not matter, if there is a quarrel between the Church of Nihil and the Sisterhood. Your past could be enough to damn you.”
Kessa stopped eating and her blue skin paled a shade. “Really?”
“Maybe…” Xia answered. “But maybe not. We just don’t have enough information yet.”
“We missed the Nihilist’s sermon last night, but there should be another one soon,” Tiberius said. “Some of us should go get a feel for these hawks, see if they’re going to be a problem.”
“I’ll go,” Xia offered.
“So will I,” Maeve said.
Tiberius pointed to Gripper. “Will you be finished with those repairs soon?”
“If it means I get some time on the planet, I can have the SL engine singing the Prian anthem by tonight,” Gripper answered with a broad grin. “I’ve never been to Gharib!”
“A functional air recyc’ system will be fine,” Tiberius told him. “Then you can go with Maeve and Xia. Duaal, I want you here on the ship with me.”
“What? Why?” Duaal asked, sitting up in his seat.
“In case Coldhand comes back.”
“You want me around so you can win the next fight with him?” Duaal asked, scowling. “Or so I’m close by if you have to run?”
“That’s enough, Duaal,” Tiberius said.
“Yes, captain,” the mage answered sullenly.
Kessa looked like she wanted to say something.
Xia gave her a nod. “What is it?”
“Um, what about Vyron?” Kessa asked. “We still need to get him, somehow.”
“I’d forgotten about your man,” Tiberius confessed.
But Maeve suddenly grinned at Kessa. There was a predatory glint in her gray eyes that made Xia nervous.
“If I remember the details of your story correctly, Vyron belongs to a rival criminal organization,” Maeve said. “The… Steelskins? Tell me what you know of them and I believe that I can bring Vyron right to us.”
