THE REFORGED TRILOGY: BOOK 2 — SWORD OF DREAMS
Chapter 23: Remember
“Any man who can torture another is himself tortured.”
– Dailon idiom
“What are we looking for up here?” Gripper asked.
“Evidence,” Logan and Tiberius said at the same time.
The hunter raked his eyes across the fresh-fallen snow. The climb up to Maeve’s sentry point was difficult for anyone without wings or an Arboran’s climbing claws. Logan’s pants were soaked in snowmelt and stuck heavily to his legs. But the snow the whole way up was uneven, churned up last night by several sets of feet and then imperfectly smoothed over by storm.
So whoever came after Maeve would have had to climb. They couldn’t fly.
That didn’t help Logan very much… Many of the Nihilists were Arcadian, but there were plenty of others who flocked to Gavriel’s tattered banner. That meant vehicles to transport them and then to move Maeve once they caught her. From here to Pylos was too long and too treacherous a journey to make on foot. Assuming they were even in Pylos and not somewhere in the mountains…
Behind him, Duaal, Xia and Gripper shivered and watched, not sure what to do. Only Tiberius was proving himself useful, walking a careful spiral from the top of the stone and probing the snow with his toes. His boot hit something under the ice and the old cop swore, but dropped to creaking knees and felt around.
“It’s the lamp we set up,” Tiberius grunted. “Knocked over, just like Panna said.”
“The wind, maybe?” Xia suggested.
“I doubt it,” Tiberius said. “I had to help her drag it up here. The thing is damnably heavy. Too heavy to just blow over.”
“Either the Nihilists pushed it over, or else there was a struggle,” Logan said. He crouched over the lumpiest patch of snow and carefully brushed aside the top 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 wouldn’t have been able to take her easily.”
He had never battled anyone like Maeve. She fought hard, with true passion.
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 wouldn’t have been Maeve. She would have been moving… Unless she was incapacitated somehow. Logan felt around in the snow.
Downslope, Tiberius had found something else — Maeve’s com. The scuffed and dented device was covered in ice, useless. Tiberius tossed it to Xia. The Ixthian held the com up in the wan sunlight.
“I don’t think it’s actually broken,” Xia said. “These things are supposed to be sealed and good for pressure up to five atmospheres underwater.”
“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,” Xia suggested.
“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 said. “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 furry, long-muzzled Lyran man, and then a muscular blue shape with black hair. Dailon, though he couldn’t tell gender from this distance.
The last out onto the surface was smaller. Slender, with golden hair spilling out from under her hat. That had to be Panna. Logan watched her closely. There was something odd about her movements, how she balanced as she ran to catch up with the others.
Something sharp jabbed into Logan’s still-questing fingers. He felt more carefully through the snow and discovered a 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 from the needle’s tip, then 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,” Logan announced.
“I knew Maeve was using again,” Duaal said.
Again? That meant that she had stopped and Logan wondered why. Were the chems no longer enough? Or maybe she didn’t need them anymore. Even in the face of death, Maeve was still more alive than Logan ever was. Just like Ballad. Just like Vorus.
“Come on, Shimmer, you know she’s been clean!” Gripper said, confirming Logan’s private thoughts.
“Oh really? Then what is that needle doing up here?” Duaal asked.
“I don’t know, but I know Smoke,” Gripper said. “She’s been off this stuff for months!”
Logan rubbed the Vanora White between his fingers again. The substance was thinner than it should have been, and slightly grainy against his skin. He inspected the needle. It was bigger than any Logan had ever bought for himself, and was marked along the side with close-packed measurement lines.
Most chems came packaged in unmarked needles, all 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 wear around the edges of the plastic suggested that it had.
You can’t just throw things away on Prianus.
Logan pocketed the used needle and stood. Tiberius watched him, fury all across his lined, reddened face.
“Well?” he asked impatiently.
The bounty hunter wasn’t accustomed to sharing his thoughts with anyone else. He hesitated before answering. “Has Maeve been in Pylos since you arrived?”
“We drove through the city on our way up here, but not since then,” Xia answered.
“What the hells does that have to do with anything?” Tiberius asked with an accusatory jab of one finger. “You think she ran off on her own now? She wouldn’t do that!”
“No, I don’t think she would. Maeve always wanted to keep you safely 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 down into the city, I doubt that this White is hers.”
“How’s that?” Tiberius asked.
“It’s a local blend,” Logan said. “Much 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 asked.
He was a good man, but not very imaginative, Logan decided.
“I think the Nihilists used it to drug Maeve.” 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 said.
He elbowed Duaal, making the mage stagger in the snow. Duaal didn’t look convinced, but he shrugged and dropped the matter.
“What now, then?” he asked, directing his question to Logan.
“We check out the road,” Tiberius answered before the bounty hunter could. “Just like the God-damn traitor says.”
The darkness was so complete that Maeve couldn’t 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 and her hands were bound behind her, too. Bands of metal hung cold and heavy around her wrists.
Handcuffs? Maeve gave them an experimental tug and heard the brittle-hard clatter of a chain, confirming her suspicion.
Where was she? Maeve sat with her back to a post of some sort. Her wings and wrists were tied uncomfortably around it, the nub of a rivet digging into the sensitive skin between her wings. A support beam?
The musty air wasn’t moving very much. Maeve must have been indoors. She reached out with one foot, but numb toes through boots felt little. Rubble and something softer — cloth, maybe — was scattered across the floor. Maeve thought for a moment and swallowed against the thick, too-sweet taste in the back of her throat, then hummed a short, high note and listened. There weren’t many echoes, and even those were close and sharp. The room was small.
So Maeve wasn’t being held prisoner 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 into the support 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 she strove to live her life cleanly, she couldn’t escape these poisons.
Maeve couldn’t afford to waste time on self-pity and recrimination, but she wasn’t 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…
Maybe. She needed more information. Maeve wedged one foot under the other and wriggled it free from her boot. The cold raised bumps on her skin. Maeve didn’t want to feel around in the darkness with bare toes — she couldn’t stop imagining terrible things in the blackness, monsters more accustomed to their blindness than she — but the fairy made her foot move slowly out again.
The floor was gritty and dirty. There were some 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 Maeve’s clammy skin, but she could find nothing useful.
“Sa vaeli’i!” she groaned.
Maeve didn’t 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 as dry and wrung out as an old sponge.
The deep, dark shadows crept with phantom lights in dizzying, geometric patterns. 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?
Maeve didn’t care who might hear her now. If it was her captors, then 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!” Maeve cried. Her voice was rough and much softer than she hoped. “Please, help me!”
There was no answer and Maeve slumped back into the metal beam. It hurt, but she didn’t 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. Maeve 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 and all the bloody carnage, there wasn’t a single body left behind. No chance to hide among the dead.
So Maeve and Orthain had concealed themselves 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, opaque and broken. Even fire couldn’t damage 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 Kayton mountain 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 had removed it?
It didn’t matter to her current problem, Maeve thought, but she couldn’t 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…
Had the Devourers been on Prianus?
Before Maeve could ponder the horrible question further, light flooded the room. Instinctively, she tried to throw her arm across her face against the shining needles of radiance, but succeeded only in wrenching her shoulder. Maeve blinked until the hot tears faded a little and looked up.
A door stood open and the light that had seemed so blinding at first was actually little more than a dim green-gray glow. It cast shallow illumination across Maeve’s prison — a small, single-room apartment with one collapsed wall that vomited dirt and crumbling rock out across the floor.
A lone figure stepped into the doorway, silhouetted against the rectangular slab of light. Maeve strained forward again, oblivious now to the pain of her restraints. She recognized her visitor at once.
“Xartasia!” Maeve rasped.
The older princess closed the door behind her, momentarily sinking the apartment once more into utter darkness. But then Xartasia sang a few short words and a faint, sourceless golden light filled the room.
Xartasia looked just as she had 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 was 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 magic has 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,” Xartasia said. Her violet eyes shone brightly. “You are surprisingly alert, considering the dose of Vanora White that Hallax gave you.”
“I have used these chems for a century to blunt the pain of my deeds,” Maeve answered. “I am accustomed to them. What do you want of me? Do you wish vengeance for the cathedral’s fall? For the death of the White Kingdom?”
Xartasia shook her head slowly, sadly. “No, Maeve. I have told you that you are not to blame for the death of our people. I doubt that you are the first to sing the Waygate songs improperly, not in a history as long as ours. The Devourers are to blame for the carnage, Maeve. They answered the Waygate’s call and came to our worlds.”
Maeve wasn’t sure what she meant.
“The Waygate’s… call?” she asked.
Xartasia ignored her question. “As to Gharib, I cannot afford to linger in anger. You did what you believed best, as I did. We can ask for nothing more. What needed to be done was done.”
Maeve remembered tiny blue Baliend under the Nihilist graveyard, crying for his mother.
“Did you… kill another child, then?” Maeve asked.
Xartasia flicked her hand in a small, dismissive circle. “Not a child, but a woman. Elsa. She knew you. Her mind was so much like that of a child that it served our purposes. Now Gavriel’s magic is stronger than it has ever been.”
Xartasia flexed her pale wings. Her glowing light charm flared, making Maeve’s eyes water, and then dimmed once more. When she could see again, Maeve found her cousin’s black brows knit in apparent worry. Maeve didn’t trust herself to speak.
“Gavriel is driven by deep passions, little cousin,” Xartasia said, but she wasn’t just making idle conversation with her prisoner. “You have not been brought to answer for some obscure matter of honor or vengeance. Gavriel desires something from you and he will have it. Do not fight him.”
“What could he want from me but revenge?” Maeve asked.
She wanted to keep her voice strong, but Gavriel frightened her more than she could ever admit.
“None living know the Devourers as you do,” Xartasia said. “You were there when they came through the Tamlin gate. You fought them and banished them from Arcadia when you closed the gate.”
“What is that to your master?”
Xartasia pressed her full red lips together into a thin, unhappy line. Was she angry at the interruption, or that Maeve had called Gavriel her master?
“He wants what you have seen,” she said. “Gavriel wants your memories of the Devourers and he will tear them from your mind if he must.”
Maeve’s mouth went as dry as dust. “Why?”
“Gavriel will summon them, Maeve,” Xartasia answered. “Using your memories, Gavriel will bring the Devourers back once more to destroy all life in this galaxy.”
