The Reforged Trilogy: Book 1 — Crucible of Stars
Chapter 13
The Black Cathedral
“The cost of war is not measured in blood alone.”
– Xui the Firstborn, Ixthian priestess (288 MA)
A week of food and mooring in Gharib bit deeply into Tiberius’ funds, and Xia worried about it over meals. Most of that color would be needed to pay for Vyron when he was delivered to Stray according to the instructions of their anonymous bounty posting. The first payment alone would leave their accounts on Axis practically empty, Xia pointed out. Tiberius only shrugged at dinner each evening and asked if anyone knew when the next Church of Nihil sermon would be held.
One afternoon, Duaal finally nodded. “I hear around the bazaar that the pastor is back in Gharib tonight and going to give another speech.”
Duaal had been venturing out to the city’s central market every day — but usually came back with nothing — and Gripper wondered what he was up to out there. Whenever he returned to the Blue Phoenix, Duaal always seemed both relieved and frustrated.
Was he chasing a man? Maybe that Arcadian guy, Anthem? Or a woman…
Gripper could never predict who or what might catch Duaal’s perpetually wandering eye. Alien mating rituals continued to baffle and exasperate the Arboran and Duaal’s eclectic tastes didn’t clarify matters one bit. It wasn’t for lack of trying to understand… Gripper glanced sidelong at Xia, but then Tiberius demanded his attention again.
“Are you done with the recyc’ repairs?” the captain asked.
“Days ago, Claws,” Gripper answered. “Does that mean I can go outside and play? Oh please, may I?”
“This isn’t a game,” Tiberius said. “But you can go with Maeve and Xia tonight.”
Gripper scratched his cheek with a massive claw, wondering if the Prian’s sense of humor needed repairs, too, or if it had never been installed in the first place. Gripper glanced around the table and found Maeve watching him. Her expression was sad and angry, but distant. Whatever turned Maeve’s eyes that stormy, it wasn’t in there in the room with her.
Duaal wasn’t laughing, either. Whoever sold humor packages, Gripper hoped they shipped in bulk.
But Kessa and Xia were both smiling at him. The Dailon gave Xia a knowing look, then dissolved into gales of laughter. At least they thought he was funny. Gripper smirked, flushed and got to work finishing his dinner.
Maeve, Xia and Gripper dressed in layers against the cold Stray night and made their way out of the landing crescent, into the city. The faded red sun slipped below the horizon as they left the jigsaw of ships and fueling pylons behind and joined the evening crowd of Gharib.
The two women had to stop frequently as Gripper stared in wonder around at the city. He had only been away from his homeworld for about a year, and half of that time was spent on Kahl, learning the difference between a fern and an FMS relay. Gripper’s first glimpses of Stray left him on fire with curiosity. Gharib was nothing like the structured bustle of Axis or the quiet shipyard colony of Merrid. He couldn’t wait to see the entire galaxy…
“What’s that?” Gripper asked, pointing to the front of a shop.
The storefront was dominated by a flickering hologram of a large insect, about as long as Gripper was tall. It was striped in delicate bands of brown and gold, with a slender stalk connecting a round thorax to a tapered abdomen with a huge, curved stinger. The wasp had six skeletal, triple-jointed legs and two incredibly long pairs of yellow-veined wings.
Best Wasp Traps in the Core, boasted the neon sign beneath.
“That’s a Nnyth,” Xia answered. “It’s not actual size, of course. They’re about twice that big, I think.”
She looked to Maeve for confirmation, but the Arcadian was glaring at the sign.
“I’ve never actually seen one, you know,” Gripper said, staring at the hologram rotating in the window. “Just amazing! And they can fly through space without a ship!”
“Nnyth traps? That is a brutality,” Maeve snarled.
The other two gave her startled looks.
“But the wasps tear apart spaceships that get too close to their hive. Those ships have the right to defend themselves, don’t they?” Gripper asked.
He tried to word his objection carefully. Though Maeve stood only about as high as his navel, she could frighten Gripper badly and often did.
“The Nnyth will only defend the Tower, and do not range far from their home,” Maeve answered. “Merchants profit from the unfounded paranoia that the Nnyth will someday attack the Central World Alliance. Traps like those are expensive and ultimately useless fear-mongering.”
“The traps make those who live and work on the edge of the core — places like Stray — feel safe,” Xia told Gripper more calmly. “The Rynn system, where the Nnyth Tower is located, is out on the end of one of the galactic arms. Ship captains who have something to prove claim to have made the trip, but most of them are probably lying. It’s a long flight. A lot of things can and usually do go wrong. Except for Tiberius, I don’t personally know anyone that’s done it. Or who would want to.”
“It was the work of centuries and great diplomacy for the White Kingdom to reach agreements with the Nnyth Tower,” Maeve said. She stood next to Gripper at the window and pressed her small fingers against the glass. “The Nnyth are wise. But they are secretive, and slow to trust.”
“Trust? You mean they’re intelligent?” Gripper asked. “I thought they were just… bugs!”
Xia frowned at him and waved her own insectoid antennae. Gripper blushed for the second time and looked away.
“The Nnyth are the oldest and most skilled Waygate operators in all the worlds,” Maeve said. The fury was suddenly gone from her voice. Instead, Gripper thought he heard longing. “If we had only forged a stronger alliance with the Tower, maybe they would have helped us when the Devourers came. Perhaps something of our kingdom could had survived.”
“Um… what?” Gripper asked.
He was having a hard time following the fairy’s swiftly changing moods, but Xia took his arm and whispered into Gripper’s ear.
“Later,” she said.
Gripper glanced back at Maeve as the fairy plodded along behind them and wondered what exactly Xia knew that he didn’t. Whatever it was, it made Maeve so very sad. Gripper wanted to comfort her, but she was volatile and prickly. Trying to help Maeve was like playing with live wires. Gripper might find out something interesting, but he would more than likely get painfully zapped in the process.
They resumed walking through the dusty yellow city toward the Nihilist cathedral. But Gripper was still distracted by worrying about Maeve and bumped into someone. Two someones, actually — a couple walking hand in hand, Gripper realized. He was acutely aware of how much larger than the other species he was as the pair looked up at him, the streetlights revealing human faces. They both flinched and moved quickly on. Would he ever understand this place? Gripper suddenly missed the Blue Phoenix and wished he hadn’t been so eager to join Maeve and Xia tonight.
Gripper barely felt Xia’s hand on his arm, squeezing reassuringly. Ordinarily, any attention from the jewel-eyed woman would have made Gripper light-headed and warm. But he was far from home on Arborus, far from his people. Here, the ground was dizzyingly close, and the air was dry and choked with dust. Gripper fought down a wave of panic.
But the new worlds that he had discovered were full of wonders, Gripper reminded himself. They were inhabited by other species that had found and colonized dozens of other planets long before Gripper’s arrival. And he was the first Arboran ever to travel off-world. Gripper was a brave explorer, he hoped, if not voluntarily.
By the time they were leaving Gharib’s central market, Xia had let go of Gripper’s arm. Maeve remained sullen and silent, but Gripper didn’t seem inclined to question her anymore, erasing the need for Xia to lead him away. The Arboran was even taller than she was, and Xia had to admit to herself that it was hard for her to adjust. Ixthian males were much smaller than their female counterparts. Large men seemed so very… alien.
Xia looked across the market. Most of the vendors’ stalls were closed, all dark and covered with charged sheets of plastic to repel the dust. But tonight, the marketplace was still alive with people, though only a few of the booths remained lit and open for business in the plunging temperature and rising indigo shadows. Most of them sold food, long coats and veils to those who had not thought to bring their own. A few customers hovered around the market stalls, but most of the crowd was making its way to the eastern edge of the plaza, where the cathedral of the Nihilists stood silhouetted starkly against the fading scarlet stains of light on the horizon like a looming giant.
The mood of the gathering was somber. As they followed the rest of the crowd, Xia estimated that about five hundred beings of all species filtered through the bazaar toward the cathedral. But in spite of their numbers, the audience was quiet. Xia’s multifaceted eyes widened, whirling a deep, worried red as she and her companions neared the steps of the black church. She doubled her estimate to almost a thousand in forebodingly silent attendance.
At least half of the gathered throng were Arcadians. What were so many of the fairies doing here? They were crowded off to one side, Xia noted, the other species drawing away from the unseemly number of droop-winged Arcadians with disgust and superstitious fear. The dying sunlight painted the forest of rustling white feathers in bloody red.
“Shae ina Shae!” Maeve swore.
She pulled her hood further down over her face and tucked back a few strands of loose ebony hair. That mane of black identified Maeve as a princess of the Arcadians’ ruling house. Why would she want to hide it?
“Smoke, is this an Arcadian church?” Gripper asked in a hushed voice, staring out across the rustling sea of wings.
“No,” Maeve said, shaking her head. “At least… I do not think so. By all appearances, this place could be dedicated to the Nameless, our goddess of death. But none have dared raise a house to her in thousands of years. It is blasphemy.”
“Besides, it’s illegal to worship the rimworld gods,” Xia pointed out. “The Union of Light had the Lyceum outlaw Arcadian temples a hundred years ago.”
Maeve gave the looming cathedral a long look, so full of speculative hunger that it made Xia shudder. It might have been blasphemy to worship the Arcadian death goddess, but Maeve seemed to do it anyway.
Distance had disguised the cathedral’s true size. It was massive, built all of black basalt and slate. Four needle-like steeples crowned the tall, blank walls. Each of the towers were inset with empty windows that made Xia think of old, open wounds; a dark, bloodless rending of dead flesh.
Xia squinted, trying to take advantage of the swiftly fading light. The entire cathedral looked crude and unfinished. Though most of the Nihilist church was built out of rough siltstone blocks, long stretches of wall were little more than patches of metal bolted haphazardly into place and hastily painted black. The dark rock wasn’t fitted and left jagged, broken corners jutting out in all directions and covered in Stray’s ubiquitous dust. Xia guessed that, for all its great size, the cathedral had been built quickly and could be torn down just as fast.
A broad set of uneven stairs led up to the gaping entrance of the Nihilist’s church. Like the windows, it was open, with no doors or even a plastic static sheet to keep out the sand and dust. A patch of sooty orange light filtered out of the arch from the cathedral, illuminating a robed figure as it detached itself from the deep shadows inside.
The Nihilist that made its way into view appeared to be human, as far as Xia could tell. He was too broad of chest and shoulder to be an Ixthian, too tall to be Lyran, and he lacked the solid, planar build of a Dailon. In fact, he seemed hunched by age or disease, though it was hard to determine which. Like so many other citizens of Stray, the figure at the top of the steps was hooded and robed against the cold and dust. There was no marking of rank or status on his plain robes — just dusty black cloth.
“Listen,” the robed Nihilist said in a rich, booming voice.
He raised his hands to the crowd. The man’s strong, sonorous voice carried easily across the crowd without any visible means of amplification.
“Listen, you forgotten children of the stars,” he said. “Listen, you forsaken exiles of the heartworlds and distant kingdoms. Hear me. I know that you feel alone and forsaken. And you are. The worlds of this universe are only unfeeling stones set to spin mindlessly in the void. The planet that birthed you cannot feel your pain, taste your tears or hear your prayers.
“Our evolution has bred into us the need to eat, to breathe and to breed. Afraid to learn the emptiness of our own existence, we have given myth and meaning to our needs. We eat in celebration, in companionship, to give some meaning and comfort to our base, animal needs. We expel breath in useless songs and prayers to a god who doesn’t exist. We have named our rutting needs love and drive ourselves to destruction in its tender name. But lies cannot give our lives purpose.”
Xia glanced sidelong at her two crewmates. Maeve was listening raptly to the Nihilist’s smooth voice, her silver-gray eyes half closed. Gripper was paying attention, too, but his expression was troubled. The audience was silent and Xia shifted her weight uncomfortably.
“In our desperate loneliness, we reached up into the heavens,” the Nihilist preacher said, gesturing up at the star-dusted sky overhead.
Stray had only a single moon, and the system’s weak sun barely managed to illuminate Stray, let alone its satellite. The moon was a flat, colorless disk in the sky of Stray, outshone by the glittering suns of distant worlds.
“Perhaps we hoped to find our god, but we only found other lonely, hungry species: the five races of humanity, the Dailons, the Lyrans and the Ixthians. In time, we discovered the outer kingdoms, each floating alone in the cold void.”
The robed man’s words thrummed with almost palpable energy, an electric excitement as though he were making the discoveries instead of merely narrating them. He brought his hand down, closing it into a fist. Xia had to admit a grudging respect for anyone who could make hopelessness sound so captivating.
“We found power in the distant stars, but not answers. Because there were none to find. Though we searched the galaxy, we know no more than we did when we first raised our eyes to the heavens. There is no ignorance, for there is no meaning for us to discover or understand.
“And this struggle, clamoring across the sea of stars for food, for air and space to multiply, ultimately yields nothing. Death finds us all in the end. It finds us tired from a lifetime of ceaseless toil, pain and emptiness. Years of struggle and suffering… all for nothing.”
The Nihilist’s voice was gentle, like a loving father explaining a sad truth to the child on his knee. Xia felt the weight of thirty years of life like lead in her chest. She swayed, suddenly exhausted by the idea of another seventy stretching out ahead of her. Next to her, Gripper reached out to steady Xia.
“Are you alright?” he whispered.
Xia nodded and waved the Arboran off. Like most Ixthians, she had spent her existence protecting and perfecting life. It would take more than a single sermon to convince her that it was all in vain, but she did feel tired. How much harder it must be for Maeve and the hundreds of other homeless and hopeless Arcadians.
“The child who cries over her mother’s body, dead that very night of starvation for the food she gave up to her daughter,” said the Nihilist on the steps of the black cathedral, his arms open imploringly to the crowd. “The man who stares through the bars of his prison cell, tried for crimes he never committed and dreaming of the day he may return to his lover, unknowing that he has taken his own life in grief. The lost who cradles their father in their arms, knifed by a desperate thief for money he didn’t have. They scream out for help, but no one comes. Their tale is that of every tormented soul that screams out in pain and begs for release. But is greeted only by silence.
“Yet there is an end to this pain. Reflect on my words, my children, and if a hot meal, prattling talk or a night in your lover’s arms does not soothe you, return to me. I can show you another way. The doors of the Church of Nihil never close.”
The Nihilist preacher bowed his head to the gathering, then turned and vanished once more into the crooked cathedral. There was no applause, no hissing or cheering, only a subdued hush.
Xia shook herself and patted Gripper’s arm. The big Arboran glanced down at her.
“I… don’t know if that told us anything useful,” he said.
“Neither do I. Did you get something helpful, Maeve?”
Xia looked around. The crowd had begun to disperse, melting away into Gharib, but the Arcadian princess was already gone.
Maeve crouched on top of one of the cathedral’s jagged black spires. The shingles were still hot under her bare feet from the heat of the day, but the nighttime chill was quickly leeching away the warmth. Her boots sat next to her, the dry cracks in the plastihide invisible in the darkness. Maeve pulled her knees up against her chest and wrapped her wings around herself.
The sky was full of Arcadians, all flying back into the city, many to sleep in alleyways and refuse piles. Some would return to cheap apartments and illegal squatters’ camps. Maeve’s vision blurred and she wiped her eyes with her sleeve.
How the great had fallen. The greatest. The Arcadians had been rulers and protectors of the other fairies for thousands of years, trusted and revered as knights and leaders. Under Cavain’s guidance, they had left behind their rings of stone and built beautiful, glittering cities of glass. In time, the Arcadians coaxed other fairy races from their primitive dwellings to join them.
Dominion of their entire stellar system for ten thousand years. No coreworld nation had lasted for a third of that. Even the great Alliance was less than three centuries old. Maeve’s father had lived longer than that. But now he was dead, and the White Kingdom was rubble while the rest of the galaxy… well, they didn’t thrive, but they survived.
All we have left is death.
The nyads and dryads were gone. In the end, the Arcadians had failed to protect them. Only a handful of Maeve’s people remained, perhaps a million across the worlds of the core. She watched the dregs of her race spread their wings and fly away into Gharib. But what of their queen? Maeve was the last of Cavain’s blood, wasn’t she? What did she owe her people now?
My mother promised me I would never be queen, Maeve remembered as she cried, honking without dignity into her dusty sleeve. I was only a distant cousin to the throne. Mother swore it to me in the lily gardens of the Sua’ii Na. I was supposed to be nothing.
And nothing I will become.
Maeve buried her face in her hands, shuddering with ragged, hiccuping sobs. The surviving Arcadians deserved a queen, but it could never be her. Maeve could only give them her death, and even that was long overdue. Maeve’s com chirped and she choked down her tears.
“Yes?” she answered.
Xia’s voice crackled on the other end of the channel. “Maeve, where are you? We need to get back to the Phoenix and report to Tiberius.”
“I will meet you at the ship,” Maeve told her. “Do not linger on my behalf.”
“Are you alright?”
Maeve didn’t answer. Only small knots of the Nihilist’s audience remained, drifting slowly through the central market toward their homes. Perhaps half of those who lingered were Arcadian. Maeve pulled her boots back on, then jumped off the rooftop, spreading her wings to catch the turbulent evening air. The Arcadians were vagabonds. Vagabonds had no need for a queen, and she had more important things to worry about, like her own life.
When she was done talking to Maeve, Xia slipped her com into her pocket again. Gripper followed her through the thinning crowd filtering back into Gharib. They walked together in silence, mulling over the Nihilist’s speech. He wondered why a church had chased out the Sisterhood, as Anthem had told Xia. In studying for his citizenship exam, Gripper remembered reading about religious wars. Centuries ago, the different faiths had fought one another for dominion of worlds.
Such things had been common in the early days of the CWA. Each of the founding worlds had several religions, warring constantly even before they encountered other species. The discovery of alien faiths had only served to add fuel to an already dangerous flame. The Sacred Temple of Creation had been one such religion, but Gripper couldn’t remember the Church of Nihil anywhere on his study list. It must be new.
Thirty years of slaughter back and forth convinced the Central World Alliance that a unified church was vital to their survival. One that was lenient, accepting and could incorporate all other known religions. The result was the Union of Light, a vaguely monotheistic faith generally accepted by the worlds of the CWA.
Gripper watched Xia’s shapely backside sway as she walked out ahead of him, then wrenched his eyes upward. The Ixthian was ticking something off on her long-fingered hands.
The Sisterhood was barely a religion anymore, wasn’t it? Their priestesses were scattered and practices buried under decades of repression. Kessa hadn’t even realized that her family group wasn’t a gang, but a congregation.
Something was wrong with this picture. The Sisterhood that Kessa described was all tough, hard women. They wouldn’t have given up their hold on the city without a fight.
“Hey, Silver?”
Xia hurried to catch up with Gripper. The stars were fewer and distant on the edge of the core, and shed little light across the city as they walked through it. Streetlamps arced over the walkways, but a thick layer of dust covered them and the lights didn’t offer much more illumination than the stars.
“What exactly did that Arcadian guy say about the Nihilists and the Sisters?” Gripper asked.
Xia pursed her burnished lips, eyes narrowed as she struggled to remember. “Anthem told me that the Arcadian men stopped disappearing after the Church of Nihil opened up. They never ran into the Sisterhood again.”
Gripper gave Xia a worried look. “We’ve been assuming that this is some sort of gang turf war, that these Nihilists sent the Sisters packing because they don’t like troublemakers. But what if it’s something else?”
“What are you talking about?”
“What if it was a religious war?” he asked. “Like in the old days? What if the Sisterhood didn’t get chased off because they were another gang, but because they were a rival religion?”
“God, Gripper,” said Xia. “I hope you’re wrong.”
The interior of the black cathedral was barren, but it wasn’t empty. There was a little bit of light, provided by a few small lamps with filaments burned down to thin, starved orange lines that barely divided light and darkness. The floor was littered with piles of fallen debris from the cathedral’s hasty construction. Nothing here was built to last.
Sitting atop one of the jagged heaps of stone and scraps, the master of the Nihilist order pulled back his hood and squinted into the shadows. The exertion of the evening’s sermon had left a thin sheen of sweat on his pale forehead. He was an ancient human man, with short hair like yellowed ivory and sad lines etched deep into his face. Despite the translucent thinness of his time-worn skin, and the tremor of his long-fingered hands, the old man held himself with a subtle poise.
He had a cause, a reason. A great purpose.
In the corners or huddled against the rising evening breeze, the converts to his religion — if it could properly be called a religion — slept or spoke quietly to one another. Like their leader, they wore simple robes of a rough black weave. The clothes weren’t comfortable or warm, but the discomforts of the body were useful, a reflection of the greater suffering of life.
A slender figure in white glided across the dusty cathedral floor. Every voice in the church fell instantly silent as she approached its founder.
“Your congregation is devout, Gavriel,” Xartasia said in lyrically accented Aver. The white-clad Arcadian had removed her veil and her lips were painted perfectly. “I am impressed.”
“And their numbers grow every day,” he answered.
For all of his years and frailty, Gavriel’s voice remained strong and smooth, the voice that had swayed thousands all across Stray. Xartasia sat down lightly beside him, an exquisite snowy gown fanning out around her. Even in the ruddy lamplight, she was still breathtakingly lovely. The fairy woman wore intricate glass beads in her perfectly arranged ebony hair. They caught the orange light and glinted as Xartasia turned her head to look at the Nihilist.
“You have grown old,” she said.
“And you haven’t changed at all, princess,” Gavriel replied.
“I have changed in more ways than you can imagine,” Xartasia said. She looked around the cathedral and the dark horizon outside the windows. “You have chosen a new world, a place to begin our campaign once more.”
“I needed to start over again, in a place that could receive my message. The Prians are too damned stubborn and I don’t have the strength or time to fight every unbeliever from Prianus to Giadeen. But that’s why I’ve summoned you, Xartasia. I could have done it, once. I need that power back.”
Xartasia nodded. There was a rustle as she extended one of her long, soft white wings and then wrapped it intimately around the old Nihilist’s shoulders.
“Have you told them?” Gavriel asked. “I’ve heard rumors about an Arcadian princess. Is that you?”
“Perhaps,” said Xartasia. “But I have not called my people to me, no. If anyone recognized who I am, it is merely by accident. There is time yet before I am done and I have striven long in the shadows between worlds to my own ends.”
“And what are those?”
“I desire an end to our suffering. You know that,” Xartasia said. “This universe has wronged us. You have won the hearts of many to a cause we both hold dear. I believe that once more, we have much to offer one another.”
“You’re actually offering to help me this time.”
It wasn’t a question, but Gavriel was actually curious. The old human was far too proud to plead like a servile whelp. Even half a century ago, when they first met, Gavriel asked for Xartasia’s help, but never begged. He needed the Arcadian princess’ secrets, but he would never beg.
“I can aid you, old friend,” Xartasia said. “But the skies to which I guide you are stormy indeed. You will need strength and I shall restore to you the power that I gave you once before. After all, it deserted you. When all is sung and done, I owe you the power that you earned. And it will be yours. But there are things we must do to prepare.”
Gavriel’s eyes burned hungrily. “Tell me.”
