THE REFORGED TRILOGY: BOOK 2 — SWORD OF DREAMS
Chapter 18: Answers
“Protecting yourself is the first step in protecting others.”
– Braxan Arms advertisement (135 PA)
Logan Coldhand returned to the Arcadian quarter early the next morning. Once the morning fog burned away, the day was bright and clear. In spite of the oppressive chill, the sky was full of winged shapes. Those Arcadians lucky enough to have jobs went to and from work much like any other Prian citizen.
But most of them had nowhere to go. They sat on rooftops and balconies, spreading their wings to warm in the sun. Even on the ground far below, Coldhand heard their songs. They seemed to be prayers and filled the morning with a slow, sad sound.
Logan was familiar with the Arcadian language, but could pick out only a few words here and there, snatches of song carried on the wind. Erris, Aes and Anslin, the fairy gods. Alla’si, which seemed to mean both food and drink. Wyner’ii meant dragons, but as far as Logan knew, even the Arcadians didn’t actually believe those creatures were more than myth. It seemed instead to be a metaphorical term for all manner of evil.
And then Lae Marnavae. The Nameless, the Arcadian goddess of death and destruction.
Logan remembered hearing Maeve’s story of the cruel, deceitful goddess. Down in the Nihilists’ tunnels, Maeve had said that no one prayed to the Nameless, that it was forbidden by some ancient law. Perhaps by Cavain himself, for all Logan knew. But he heard her name now. Had Maeve been wrong?
Back on the Blue Phoenix, all those months ago, Maeve was so perversely pleased to share her people’s mythology. It was a sacred tale of Arcadian creation, of their deaths, and finally of their own capacity to create life.
But the Arcadians didn’t make much anymore except trouble. Where were the fabled glass towers of the White Kingdoms? They hadn’t built a single one anywhere in the core. There were a few glass weapons — like Maeve’s spear — and suits of armor that had come through the Waygates, but none manufactured since they fled from Arcadia. The fairies never even crowned a new monarch for their kingdom…
Coldhand wondered who that would be. Titania, that raven in white? Maeve?
The hunter drove up one street and down the next, exploring the Arcadian quarter. In the case of Pylos, it was something like an actual quarter of the city… Logan had never seen so many of the golden-haired fairies before. They were everywhere, on every sidewalk and rooftop, filling every window and alleyway.
Thin lines of smoke rose from crumbling chimneys and holes cut directly into the upper story ceilings. Heat lamps glowed orange and yellow between the boards nailed over windows. But it wasn’t enough. Never enough. As Coldhand drove slowly by, he heard the sounds of crying and hoarse, sickly coughing.
Coldhand spent the entire day scanning the Pylos streets with a predator’s eye. If he were to hunt these Arcadians, as the Nihilists did, where best to corner them? Like all Prian cities, Pylos was full of crooked roads built around obstacles where there was no money to remove them. The constant groundquakes jostled the city further askew.
Logan slowed as he drove by a shop and postal office half-sunk into a fissure. Even under the midday sun, everything inside was murky and steeped in shadows. After a moment’s inspection, Coldhand could make out piles of rubble and refuse choking the hallway beyond, but little else. It would be an easy place to hide. For a human, at least. With their long wings, an Arcadian might find the close confines difficult.
Another part of Maeve’s story suddenly came back to Logan. Her people’s oldest myth held that the Nameless, made wingless by her creator’s angry curse, went on to mother a race of her own. Like her, the Nameless’ children were bound to the ground and could only stare longingly up at the heavens.
It was just a myth, of course. Coldhand believed in no gods, not the Arcadian trinity or the old Prian ones or the all-encompassing conglomerate god of the CWA Union of Light. But could that story have some basis in truth?
Logan pulled his streetcycle away from a curb and back out into the road, watching other Prians drive and swerve past. A blonde woman perched on the back of another bike looked not unlike a wingless Arcadian. Much larger, of course… But did humans share some common ancestor with the Arcadians? The Ixthians would know — and if it were true, it would be all over the news.
Coldhand stopped at a shop to buy a cheap dinner of canned petrimeat stew, complete with orange cubes that were supposed to be carrots. The hunter ate mechanically, sitting on the corner and watching the street carefully. Gavriel was not a fool. If he wanted Arcadians, he would send other Arcadians — not humans — to get them. Vorus had said as much. The fairies were going missing, but there were no fewer in the city.
Vorus told Logan so much, even when he only said a little.
An aching, nauseating sensation made his small meal sit uneasily. Coldhand tried to ignore it.
Gavriel was looking for Arcadians. An Arcadian, maybe. He was killing or taking them, but there was no drop in the fairy population because Gavriel had brought his own. But if the Nihilists were done here, they would leave… So if they were still in Pylos, that meant that Gavriel was still searching.
Coldhand tossed the stew can into a full trash bin and climbed back onto his bike. There were no easy clues to find, no simple way to identify the Nihilists. He hadn’t seen a single black robe all day. The cultists were hiding themselves too well for that. They wouldn’t wear the telltale signs of their faith in public.
Logan remembered the smell of the cultists, the twin stinks of infection and decay. Many of them were sick, painfully dying. But so were an unsettling number of the local Arcadians. They were twig-thin creatures with no fat to keep them warm and caught ill easily in the Prian cold. Without the black robes, there was no way to tell the Nihilists and locals apart.
Coldhand’s last chance was an old-fashioned stake-out, just like in his police days. He would watch from the shadows and wait for the Nihilists to strike. The work would be tedious and held no promise of success. Logan was only one man. If he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, a hundred Arcadians might be snatched out from under his beak and he might never know. He would need patience and a lot of luck.
It was late in the afternoon. The sun sank early behind the tall Kayton Mountains that surrounded the city and violet shadows stretched across Pylos, frost blooming in the deepest of them. The long twilight would come soon, and then the deep black night. The best time to hunt.
Coldhand found a narrow alley between a pair of buildings that leaned so close their roofs created an uneven but unbroken surface. He parked his streetcycle and then threw a tarpaulin over the shiny metal frame. At a glance, the dark cloth blended into the growing shadows. It wouldn’t deter a serious thief, but most should overlook it.
If someone stole the streetcycle, it was going to cost the bounties on five or six Nihilists just to repay the rental yard. This hunt could get expensive… It already was. Coldhand would have to bring in at least fourteen Nihilist bounties to break even.
More if anything went wrong.
Logan buttoned up his black wool coat and stepped out into the street. He looked no different than any other Prian and the Nihilists shouldn’t notice him at all. Their attention would be on their prey, the Arcadians.
Over the next days, Coldhand witnessed several crimes against the Arcadians, but none for which the Nihilists appeared responsible. There were thefts, some in the fairies’ homes and others at gun- or knife-point out on the street. They had so little… If he hadn’t grown up on Prianus himself, Logan might have wondered who could be desperate enough to steal cheap, patched cooking pots and gray bouillon cubes. But there was always someone colder, hungrier and more desperate.
Some of the thieves were Prian humans, but almost as many were other Arcadians. Coldhand was surprised to see any of the fairies taking such an active hand in their own fates. Most of the winged aliens were as passive as water… but not as many as Logan had first thought. He remembered the Arcadian on the rooftop who supervised his first visit.
But there were no abductions or kidnappings on Coldhand’s watch.
The hunter stood at the corner of a small theater, long since closed down and flooded with silty mud washed down from the Kayton Mountains. A flock of buzzards had taken up residence in the rafters and shrilled indignantly at Coldhand’s intrusion. They ruffled their striped feathers, but retreated meekly further into the darkened recesses of the rotted ceiling, unwilling to do more than scold the intruder.
The setting sun was only a distant glow behind the mountains. An evening mist rose from the street in colorless tendrils, as though some ethereal, tentacled creature stirred beneath Pylos.
Logan stepped out of the sunken theater. He was watching the warehouse across the street, where several Arcadian families were living in makeshift tents huddled up against the remaining walls. But in the thickening fog, he didn’t have a good view. He needed to get closer.
Coldhand waited for a dented truck to drive past, then slipped silently across the road. A supervisor’s nest hung crookedly from one corner of the warehouse. It would be an uncomfortable place to spend the night, but Logan had endured far worse. He grabbed the bottom rung of the ladder leading up to the nest. Vorus’ bruises were stiff and ached in the cold.
Something passed between Coldhand and the streetlamp. The shadow flickered over him like fog in negative. Logan whirled and whipped his Talon-9 free as an Arcadian man alighted on the sidewalk with his feet and wings splayed in a ready fighter’s stance. He didn’t wear the gauzy scarves and skirts that seemed to have been their native dress back in the White Kingdom, or even the sorts of stained, disheveled winter clothes that were all most fairies could afford. This one dressed in dark denims and a leather jacket slit up the back over his wings. Most Arcadians — men and women alike — wore their pale hair long, but the fairy facing Coldhand now had cut it short. In the Prian fashion, actually, not unlike Logan himself.
Other shapes landed behind the hunter — two more Arcadians dressed much like the first. Coldhand slid back against the crumbling wall. The fairy in the street advanced cautiously, fists balled and fingers laced through strips of flexible fibersteel that covered his knuckles in metal. Boxer’s bracelets, as they were often called.
“You’ve been perched here for days,” the Arcadian said in perfectly clear Aver.
Coldhand kept his gun trained on him, but watched the other two. They were closing, too, but more slowly than the first.
“I saw you a few nights ago outside my flat,” said the fairy.
He was close enough that Coldhand could make out details. He was a small man, like the rest of his species, and quite young. Much younger than Maeve, Logan guessed.
“I saw you, too,” answered the hunter. “What do you want?”
The young Arcadian stopped at a distance, eyeing the Talon-9 leveled at him. “I was going to ask you that. You’ve been haunting these streets day and night. What do you want?”
“That’s my business,” Coldhand said.
“Anything you play against mine is my business. Ballad’s boys keep this block.”
The fairy thumped the heel of one hand on his chest proudly. The other two in Coldhand’s peripheral vision nodded their agreement with this sentiment. The first Arcadian’s weighted words and proud, erect carriage seemed to suggest that he was the Ballad in question. Coldhand glanced skyward, through the fog. How many other Arcadians lurked nearby?
“Go away,” Coldhand told them. “I’m not interested in territorial pissing matches. I’m just doing a job and then I’ll be gone.”
“A job? What kind of job?”
Ballad’s Aver was very good. In fact, he spoke it with the Prian inflection, Coldhand realized. There was no trace of an Arcadian accent. Interesting though that was, Coldhand still didn’t feel like answering the boy’s questions.
But their confrontation was attracting unwanted attention. A bent-backed old Arcadian woman perched on the edge of a crack in the warehouse wall and shouted something down to Ballad that sounded scolding. He shook his head and yelled something back. The old woman sang a sad note and then vanished back inside.
“Vellania worries too much.” Ballad had never taken his attention from Coldhand, but now he glared at the hunter. “She wouldn’t have to worry if buzzards like you would just go away and leave us alone.”
“I don’t have time for this,” Coldhand said.
He holstered his gun — the kid was annoying, but hardly worth shooting — and headed back toward the street. He would have to find another place to wait and watch.
Ballad didn’t get out of the way. The Arcadian spread his wings wide so they blocked the entire alley.
“Hey, I’m not done talking to you!” Ballad said.
“Yes, you are.”
Coldhand was much larger and shouldered his way through Ballad’s feathers. The fairy boy spun and grabbed his shoulder. The other two Arcadians took to the air and dropped down in front of Logan, but kept their hands in the pockets of their leather jackets. They were cutting off his exit, but let their leader handle the rest.
Ballad grabbed Coldhand and yanked him back hard, intent on answers. The hunter turned into the pull and drove his right hand into a low punch. Ballad twisted to avoid the worst of it, releasing Logan and stumbling back.
The boy sucked down a gasping breath and came at Coldhand again. But not in a light, aerial leap as Logan had come to expect after a year of fighting Maeve. Ballad’s stance was solid and low. His feet moved at right angles from each other, always keeping his weight centered and balanced — a Lowland fighter’s stance. One of the styles that Vorus taught, one that Logan himself had spent his youth studying.
Ballad was a good fighter, but not as good as Vorus. Coldhand parried aside punches that impacted hard against his forearms — Ballad was using his slight weight to its best advantage — and moved in close to jam the Arcadian’s strikes. Ballad had the warm-soft smell of feathers, just like Maeve. It had been months since Logan’s last fight with the princess, but he remembered her scent so clearly.
Ballad brought his knee up between them and shoved to create some distance, to make his opponent reach and chase. But Logan had spent most of his boyhood being the smaller combatant. He knew the strategy well. Coldhand brought his cybernetic arm down and let Ballad’s own kick slam his knee into the metal. As the boy recovered, Logan landed a solid punch against his ribs, just under his arm.
“That’s a sharp hook you’ve got,” Ballad said grudgingly. “Lowland boxer?”
Logan let the boy slide back a pace and nodded.
“You’ve had training in it, too,” he said. “Good training.”
Ballad threw out a few light, range-finding fist jabs. Coldhand brought up his illonium hand and parried the harder follow-up. Metal rang on metal as the fairy’s fibersteel-striped knuckles hit hard against his cybernetics. Ballad uncurled his fingers and shook them out as he circled Logan, searching for a gap in the hunter’s defense.
“How did you learn this?” Logan asked.
“Jocasta Lux had a palaestrum here,” Ballad said. “She taught us to fight.”
Coldhand remembered Jo. They had spent long years together on the mat, listening to Vorus’ lectures on honor. So she had gone on to open her own school…
“She had a palaestrum?” Logan asked, pausing but not dropping his guard.
“Miss Lux was killed about a year ago.”
“How?”
“A duel,” Ballad answered. Both his fists were still up, his boxer’s bracelets flashing in the orange lamplight, but he was keeping his distance for the moment. “Someone tried to steal her man and it came down to hawks.”
The news was unexpectedly painful. Jocasta had been a good woman. She didn’t deserve to die. Something must have shown in Logan’s face and Ballad cocked his head curiously.
“You knew her?” he asked.
“Yes,” Coldhand said shortly. “Vorus taught us both.”
Now Ballad dropped his hands and a smile lit up his youthful face. “Vorus? Arctan Vorus? In Highwind?”
Coldhand nodded slowly. Where was this going? Ballad thrust his hands into his pockets and when he withdrew them again, they were bare. He extended one toward Logan.
“Any student of Arctan Vorus is good with us,” Ballad said seriously. “Miss Lux told us he was the best and only trained the best.”
Logan stared at the young Arcadian’s outthrust hand. Just like that, he offered trust to a strange man? Coldhand couldn’t imagine such faith from anyone, much less an Arcadian in a Prian slum. Was it a trick? Logan searched Ballad’s face for some sign of deception, but found none. Hesitantly, he took Ballad’s offered hand — his left one. The fairy’s eye widened a little when he felt cold metal against his palm, then nodded and grinned.
“Cybernetic, right? I thought you were a falconer, but it felt too solid, even for a good glove,” Ballad said. He shrugged and gestured for Coldhand to follow. “There’s a pub not far from here. It’s not good, but it’s better than standing out here.”
Logan didn’t move. “I have work to do tonight.”
“Looking for something, right? Well, no one knows Pylos better than we do. We can tell you how to find whatever or whoever it is.”
That was an exaggeration, Logan knew, but it was the best lead he had. He followed Ballad and his winged friends down the street.
The pub was small and dark and smelled of smoke, but at least it was warm and dry. At a table in one corner, Ballad introduced his companions as An’assi and Kashan.
“My highest and sharpest,” he boasted of them. “If you took me down, they would have finished what I started.”
If Coldhand’s unusual — and obviously assumed — name struck the fairies as odd, they made no comment. They drank their beer and listened quietly as the hunter got down to business.
“I heard that Arcadians are going missing. What do you know about it?” Logan asked.
“Just about that much,” Ballad answered with a shrug under his leather jacket. An angry glint in his green eyes undermined the casual gesture. “Almost a hundred are gone. I don’t know where. Maybe just flew away. There have been a lot of new fairies. Might have been turf spats.”
Coldhand leaned against the table and it wobbled on uneven feet.
“Can you tell me where to find the new fairies?” he asked.
“Sorry, I’ve got nothing on them,” Ballad answered apologetically. He hissed a short Arcadian oath. “They come and go quickly. I don’t know where they’re going or who they are.”
The boy lapsed into silence, but he chewed his lip.
Logan tapped his fingers on the tabletop. “What else?”
“I have some guesses,” Ballad said. “One guess, really.”
“What is it?”
Was there something eager in Logan’s voice? Desperate? Ballad gave him an odd look. He seemed only half Coldhand’s age, but appearances were deceiving. Arcadians lived long lives.
“There’s this camp up in the mountains,” Ballad answered at last. “When we first heard about it, Kashan and I flew up there to ask about work. It’s not easy to find a job, see? But no one would talk to us. There was a big crack down into the mountain that had everyone there really interested.”
“What was in it?” Logan asked.
“No idea,” Ballad said. “There wasn’t any work, so we left. I’ve taken a wing over a few times, in case someone changes their mind, but it’s all under guard these days. There’s an old human guy and a black-haired woman watching over the whole thing.”
“An Arcadian woman? With black hair?”
Ballad nodded and Logan’s fingers tightened on his drink. He remembered flying over a camp in the Kayton Mountains. Was that the one?
An old man and a black-haired Arcadian. Gavriel and Xartasia. They were alive and they were here on Prianus. Hiding? Searching? Coldhand intended to find out.
He thanked Ballad curtly and started to rise, but his curiosity finally got the better of him.
“You speak Aver better than most Arcadians. Why?” Coldhand asked.
Ballad exchanged a look with Kashan.
“Most the others insist on using the old tongue. They say Aver’s an ugly language,” Ballad answered. “But it’s about what you say, not how you say it.”
“My dad says there’s no point in learning,” Kashan said, shaking his head. “That we’re all dead anyway.”
“Not many of the older Arcadians want to live here on Prianus,” Ballad told Coldhand. “Or at all. They just sing their songs and wait for something to come along and kill them. Hells, some of them do it themselves.”
“But not all of us,” Kashan said. “We were born on Prianus. This is our home.”
Coldhand had to admit that Ballad certainly talked and fought like a native.
“If you’re so intent on being Prian, then why do you stay in the Arcadian quarter?” he asked.
Ballad took a long drink, emptying his beer, and then stared down into the glass as he answered.
“We’re not all ready to give up. Sure, it’s terrible what happened to the old kingdom, but it wasn’t the only star in the sky. We’re not dead and it’s stupid to act like we are. I keep trying to convince my mother of that, but…”
“But that doesn’t mean we don’t try,” An’assi finished.
“The old ones may have given up on themselves, but we haven’t given up on them. We protect them,” Ballad said. He finally looked up and his pine-colored eyes were intent. “Morningfire Court might be gone, but that doesn’t mean there’s no one willing to fight.”
“Morningfire Court…?” Logan asked. He had heard the name from Maeve.
“That’s where they trained the knights back in the White Kingdom,” Ballad said. “When Miss Lux started her palaestrum here, she always told us that you didn’t have to wear the glass to be a knight. She offered training to any Arcadian who wanted to learn.”
The three young fairies shared a moment of silence for their departed teacher. Logan regarded them with a hard, heavy sensation in his chest.
Vorus would be proud of them. Jocasta taught them well. They were good, strong young men. Strong even for those who couldn’t be strong for themselves.
But a painful thought followed close behind. They had lost so much. The White Kingdom and the Morningfire Court. An entire cultural identity. Their teacher, too, and their families.
Logan clenched his metal hand in his lap. Ballad had lost much more than twenty percent, but he found a way to live. Something twisted inside Logan… Shame. It hurt, far more painful than the Emberguard’s sword or Vorus’ fists.
He turned away and stalked from the bar, ignoring Ballad’s startled questions.
