THE REFORGED TRILOGY: BOOK 3 — HAMMER OF TIME
Chapter 25: Anzhotek
“The end of night is the beginning of day.”
– Titania Cavainna (220 PA)
The sun had set hours ago and the thickly overlapping leaves were beginning to curl at the edges for their nocturnal retreat. Within an hour, the thick, verdant green shell that covered this part of Weh-Weh would become unclimbable, tightly furled spears of vegetation until the sun rose again. If Anandrou didn’t get back to the branches of the village tree in the next hour, he would be stranded in the branches of the old sycona.
But that was an entire hour away. Anandrou picked another large purple flower and pulled off the petals one by one with his teeth. They were soft and sweet and far tastier than anything his mother made for dinner. She would probably scold her youngest child for spoiling his appetite, but it was more than a fair trade, Anandrou thought.
Something bright streaked across the darkening sky. A meteorite…? Anandrou’s father always said they were celestial seeds falling through the sky to plant themselves in Weh-Weh’s rich, dark soil. But others said they were pieces of the distant stars. No one knew for sure… When they burned all the way down into the forest, the meteorites seared blackened holes through the trees and down onto the surface. Once down below the canopy, they were gone forever.
Burning light blazed in the sky for a moment and then was gone. Had it landed? Anandrou wondered if he could find it. He was the best and fastest climber in his village. Anandrou swung up into a higher branch and stared after the fallen star. He could find it. He could see for himself.
But Anandrou picked a handful of sweet blossoms and began making his way home, chewing slowly on one of the purple sweets. What did it matter what the stars were made of? He would never reach them.
Another great tree toppled, smoking from the laser burns that seared through its huge trunk. The sycona tree crashed through the branches of smaller trees, down to the distant ground and filled the air with long spears of shattered wood. Delicate purple flowers fell through the fire-hot air, curling and blackening all around Xartasia. The toppled tree left a deep, dark chasm in the thick green canopy.
Dhozo and his Devourers had surrounded the frightened aliens of Anzhotek. They were almost as tall as the Devourers, all with the same long arms and ears. But they lacked the slick, utterly hairless gray skin. Instead, they had rough brown hide and patches of dark green fur, usually around their forearms, but Xartasia saw some of the mossy-looking hair sprouting from shoulders and heads. For all their size and massive, impressively clawed hands, the Arborans cowered among their leaf huts. They screamed in a language that Xartasia did not know as Dhozo and Orix and the rest tore them apart. Blood ran bright red across green Anzhotek.
Fifty of Xartasia’s knights surrounded their queen, spears held at the ready. Some of the aliens — Arborans, as she knew them, degenerate cousins and food to Dhozo — had already tried to run. They weren’t warriors, but they were large and frightened… Their blood already dripped from some of the knights’ glass spear blades. The bodies through which it once flowed were gone, of course. Dhozo’s Devourers preferred to kill their food themselves, but no meat could be ignored.
An Arboran child — young but still as tall as Xartasia herself — broke from her terrified parents as Orix descended on them in a storm of black barbs and blades. The Arboran girl was naked, skin bare to the warm yellow suns. She bolted across the thick layers of leaves that made up her village’s foundation and under Orix’s curling, cutting nanite storm. Her parents cried out. Were they calling her back or urging their child on, to run and climb away? Whatever their words, they didn’t last long as Orix’s gleaming black nanites stabbed a hundred tiny serrated blades into the two adult Arborans.
The girl wailed, tugging her long ears with her hands, and kept running. The rest of her treetop village was in flames and the Devourers had cut away the trees to close off their escape, so she fled the only way left to her — toward Xartasia. Her knights shared uneasy glances but lowered their spears in a defensive ring of blades. The young Arboran skidded and stumbled to a stop, her green eyes huge and terrified.
“Drive her back into the Devourers,” Xartasia ordered. “Kill her yourselves if you must.”
“But my queen, she is only a child,” said one of the knights. Her spear wavered. “Surely she does not have to die…”
Several other fairies hummed their agreement. Dhozo stalked across the thick, overlapping leaves toward the circle of Arcadians. The green surface turned brown and then black around him. The Arboran girl whimpered and scrambled away from Dhozo.
Xartasia pushed through the line of her knights and seized the terrified alien girl by her knobby shoulder. She screeched, gaping at the approaching Devourer commander. But the Arboran’s mass was much greater than Xartasia’s and she was wriggling rapidly away. Xartasia drew the dagger from her white sash and slid it across the girl’s throat. Her thick skin was no match for the glass’ razor edge. Xartasia stepped swiftly back as blood sprayed into the humid air. Dhozo’s nanites swirled, catching the salty, iron-rich red from the air and the blackening leaves under his feet. She did not let herself turn away as Dhozo dissected and consumed the Arboran child.
“A’shae!” another knight said in a choked voice. “Why…?”
“For the White Kingdom and all of our people who died there,” Xartasia answered the unfinished question. She had to raise her musical voice over the sickening sound of breaking bones. “The price is high, Sir Corrus. You knew that it would be. But remember what we buy with it.”
Corrus nodded slowly and lifted up his spear. Violet and blue ribbons streamed out from the haft in the hot, damp wind. Bright orange embers swirled up from the burning village and singed tiny black spots into the green ground like diseased sores.
Xartasia watched Dhozo chew up the last of the Arboran child’s entrails with sharp white teeth. She might have agreed to the price, but she did not have to like it and she did not have to remain silent. Dhozo licked his lips with a long, dark purple tongue and then his swarming nanite armor obscured his face in smoky darkness again.
“Surely your own people deserve a cleaner death, commander,” Xartasia said.
“These are not my people,” Dhozo snarled.
“They look like you.”
“These degenerates are not Glorious,” Dhozo said. “Some of the Anzhotekki researchers objected to the empire’s expansion when we left this galaxy. We assumed that they would just die out. But they became… herbivores.”
Dhozo said this last word with such a deep disgust that Xartasia glanced down around the Devourer’s feet. His nanite swarm was burning, harvesting and consuming the thick layer of foliage, but Dhozo himself ate not a single bite.
“They became the Arborans,” Xartasia said. She looked back up at the Devourer. “And we survived, as well. You created the fairies, servants that looked like creatures from your own stories. Why did you leave your slaves behind?”
Dhozo’s nanites carried her words to be translated by the computer implanted in his brain.
“There was no room,” he answered. “We required every ship to save ourselves from the famine. You and your worlds were luxury resources, anyway. Delicacies.”
Xartasia nodded shortly. She didn’t need the Devourers to flatter her, just to obey.
“If you have eaten your fill, commander,” she said, “it is time to move on.”
“The Glorious are never sated. But we need data.” Dhozo raised his voice. “Form up!”
Fifteen of the hulking aliens returned at once to Commander Dhozo’s side, but the last two — Orix and Tekker — didn’t report until he repeated his order twice more.
They descended through the huge hole in the canopy left by the toppled sycona tree, down into the dark. The fairies soared easily on the warm, wet air, down below the fires burning above and the billowing black smoke, but the Devourers simply jumped. Hook-tipped black tendrils tore through bark and dug deep into the living wood beneath, breaking their owners’ falls. They dropped the final distance and landed on glimmering red force fields that reminded Xartasia of the coreworlders’ null-inertia technology.
The queen alighted gently on the spongy loam of the planet’s surface. Some sunlight filtered down from the distant canopy, but not much. Xartasia’s knights and the Devourers were little more than slightly darker shadows in the deeper green-tinged blackness. The great trees of Arborus creaked and groaned ominously all around, forbidding this invasion in an ancient and indecipherable tongue.
Xartasia sang a charm and a sourceless glow kindled around her. The other knights echoed their queen’s spell as the Devourers squinted, muttering at the Arcadians. It was good to remind them that Xartasia still had knowledge the Devourers needed.
Arborus was just as dark and mysterious as it had been six years ago, when Xartasia had first found her way to the strange green planet in search of the secrets of the Waygates. The ground was as black as night, barren of any sort of undergrowth. There were the trees felled by the Devourers’ lasers to cut off the Arboran’s escape, too, columns of wood like starscrapers smashed across the forest floor, but even these had an eerie sort of agelessness about them.
Xartasia couldn’t help remembering the cathedral in Gharib, the black columns cracked and broken by Maeve’s ship when her captain came to save her. Gavriel very nearly died, his old bones crushed by the falling stone and sand. But Xartasia had saved him… only to kill him in the mountains above Pylos.
By then, Gavriel had served his purpose. Xartasia’s purpose, in truth… She could teach magic to those not born to it, force the skills and power into an adult mind. With that, she could buy the Devourers. She had made servants of the greatest predators the galaxy had ever known.
But that night beneath the graveyard, Xartasia nearly lost everything. It had been a bloody reminder of just how fragile her plans truly were, and how tenuous the future was. How easily one woman could shatter everything…
Xartasia never returned to the place where the black cathedral had stood. It was just one of many pieces of land that she had purchased, tools in her long and intricate plan. Not bought in her own name, of course. Arcadians were not Alliance citizens and could not own land on CWA planets. The fallen black cathedral belonged to someone who did not really exist.
I do not exist, Xartasia reminded herself sternly. I am the dream of death. Princess Titania died. Not all at once… But when I lost my home and my love, it began. The first frost of a hundred-year winter.
But it will be spring again. All that has died will grow again.
Xartasia raised her right wing, a gesture for the rest to follow. The Arcadian knights took to the air alongside their queen and the Devourers fell into step below. Even in their own light, they slid like shadows through the darkness of Anzhotek’s surface.
Other shadows moved between the huge trees, smaller than the Devourers but still large. They bounded between the trees on four legs covered in sleek green and brown fur. There was something lupine in the elongated muzzle and sharply pricked ears, like the Lyrans or wolves of Prianus. But the long, sinuously curling tail and slit-pupiled eyes were more feline. Whatever the creatures were, they were hungry and pounced, trying to swarm Orix and Zhyress at the column’s rear.
The Devourers were hungrier.
Xartasia landed once, three hours into their journey, and peered up at the vast cathedral of trees. Dhozo loomed over her.
“Which way?” he asked.
“You ask me?” Xartasia settled her wings against her back. “It is your research center we are looking for, commander.”
“It’s four million years old now,” Dhozo’s nanite swarm buzzed. “It may as well be yours. You know more about the old science than we do anymore.”
“Then be silent and let me find the way. I have been here only once and this world is always growing.”
Dhozo quieted. Satisfied, Xartasia turned a slow circle, peering out at the vast, dark forest. Finally, she pointed.
“This way,” she said.
Xartasia led them between the trees. There was no trail or road and the terrain was rough. Roots thicker than even Dhozo’s body twined through the black soil. They flew over and walked under fallen leaves the size of houses.
“Was this forest here when you left Anzhotek?” Xartasia asked as Dhozo sliced his red laser through a tumbled branch covered in needles as long as Xartasia’s wing.
“This?” Dhozo repeated. “No. When we closed the Anzhotek facility, there wasn’t much left.”
“But some.”
“Some,” the Glorious commander agreed. “Enough to–”
Dhozo’s heavy boot came down on something hard, something other than the soft loam of Arborus. He shined his light across a road. It was badly cracked and had crumbled away to nothing in places.
Xartasia landed silently next to Dhozo. The road was made up of a million tiny tiles that threw back the light with a metallic gray sheen. Xartasia’s knights landed beside her and they walked with the Devourers down the ancient roadway.
Not much had survived the eons and the encroaching forest of Anzhotek. There were some hollowed and cracked buildings, with windows like empty eye sockets. The structures were large, built to the Devourers’ impressive scale, though it was difficult to make out the original details. Everything was covered in thick layers of dirt and moss and slimy, decaying leaves. But what Xartasia could see made her glance sidelong at Dhozo. The alien engineer swept his spotlight back and forth across the buildings.
The ancient city was beautiful in a strange, severe manner. The lines of the place, even broken and crooked and twisted by age, had a certain predatory grace to them that Xartasia hadn’t noticed on her last visit. She had eyes only for the Waygates then, and the mysterious promises that the ageless technology held.
“No,” Xartasia told Dhozo, who had turned down a wide, crumbling side road lined with long-broken houses. “This way.”
They moved quickly down the broad main street, over a fallen branch that had splintered one of the empty buildings into smooth, steely fragments like thousands of fallen blades. Xartasia led the fairies and Devourers over a bridge. The passage beneath was long since gone, filled with dirt and twisting roots. On the far side were the crumpled remains of what appeared to be a security station. Xartasia flew over the tumbled building and landed in the road beyond.
They made their way between huge warehouses, still standing despite the passage of ages. The doors were gone, but the buildings had been made to last. The walls were as thick as Xartasia was tall, tiled in some sort of high-impact ceramic but torn away in places by the encroaching jungle to expose the metallic mesh beneath.
Inside, illuminated by the Arcadians’ directionless magical glow and more harshly by the Devourers’ sweeping spotlights, were Waygates. Pieces of them, at least, dozens of disassembled segments. No two were quite alike. Some were longer or shorter arcs, all made up of a hundred different substances. Some glowed with a dim inner light, others were glass or metal or stone. A few had the geometric golden lines of circuitry, arcane runes or the organized and multi-colored dots of an electronic display.
The warehouses gave way suddenly to a clearing, some sort of plaza. It was circular, as wide across as a coreworld city block, and lined all around with Waygates. None of them had fallen. Every single one of the ancient gates stood straight and tall, towering even over Dhozo’s indistinct head. From a distance, the Waygates were dark and blank, but as Xartasia and her company drew closer, all twenty-eight began to swirl and glow with blue radiance that cast no light across the plaza. Dhozo strode into the center of the circle.
“The Anzhotek prototype lab,” he said in a low, hissing voice. “It’s still here.”
In Dhozo’s own language, he commanded the rest of the team to spread out and began to collect information. Threads of glittering black nanites twisted and played over every surface, scanning and collating and transmitting data. Dhozo stood in the center of it all, the nexus of information.
The Devourer team was so brutal and terrible… it was difficult to remember sometimes that Dhozo and his alien colleagues were scientists. But it was that very skill which Xartasia required now. Only the Waygates’ creators could tell her if the great devices could do what she wished, what she needed them to. If the Devourers discovered here that they could not, everything — so much blood and suffering and horror — would be for nothing.
“What have you found?” Xartasia asked.
“Just composition and telemetry of the Projector systems so far. We’re learning how the Projectors were developed here and how they work,” Dhozo told her.
His head was bare as the nanite swarm worked. The alien engineer’s gray face twitched and his eyes flicked back and forth as the swarm computer poured information into his brain.
“Is it what I need?” Xartasia’s hands were clenched at her sides. Her light wavered.
Dhozo was quiet for a moment. “Orix is accessing the computer network. It’s badly damaged. Only partial recovery…”
“Tell me,” Xartasia said. She knew that she should give Dhozo and his team time, space to work, but now that the moment was upon her, Xartasia found that she could not wait. “The Waygates work on memory. Memory of a destination. Will they be able to use ours to alter time instead of distance?”
“Calculating,” Dhozo growled. “I’m still sorting the data. There are partial schematics… This is interesting. Temporal stasis. Noted effect of Projector integration.”
“Temporal?” Xartasia repeated. “To do with time. Tell me.”
“A side effect of the Projector systems,” Dhozo said. “That’s why there is no time dilation or contraction when traveling inside the network.”
“That gets me no closer to the White Kingdom!”
“That’s what I said. Let us work, little queen,” Dhozo said. He opened huge black eyes and fixed them on Xartasia. “This would be faster if we didn’t need to repair the old systems and manual interfaces. Give me the access to observational impact abilities that you promised, and I could interface directly with the structure of the Projectors… the Waygates… and tell you exactly what you want to know.”
Xartasia drew herself up straight and shook her head. “No. Not yet, Commander Dhozo. You will have your magic and Waygates — your observational impact and Projectors — back only when the White Kingdom is mine once more.”
The shadowy commander bared his sharp white teeth. But for the next seven hours, he worked in silence. The Devourers’ nanite network fired information back and forth as Orix’s team dissected the ancient computer network. Zhyress’ group actually pulled apart several of the Waygates. Watching the great, glowing rings shiver and then their monstrous creators dissect each segment would have broken Xartasia’s heart, but it had been broken a century ago. Still, her glass-armored knights were clearly uncomfortable again and sang softly mournful songs every time one of the Waygates crashed to the ground.
“We have it,” Dhozo said at last.
Xartasia thought for a moment that she had imagined it, but the Devourer commander was gesturing her over.
“Tell me,” she said.
“We abandoned the Projectors and all of the technology surrounding them because it had flaws,” Dhozo explained. “That’s why they’re lost technology.”
“To you,” Xartasia said.
“To us,” Dhozo agreed. “They don’t operate on memory, exactly, but observation. Memory is data only for places you’ve been and can accurately recall. The ancient Glorious Empire used sensors to collect that data from distant locations and then to calibrate the Projectors. There was a problem, however. The observational effect caused time lapsing.”
“Lapsing?” Xartasia asked.
Dhozo’s dark nanite swarm had closed up over his head again, obscuring his face, but Xartasia did not need to see it to read the irritation in his posture. The fairy queen could read it, but didn’t care. She had to know.
“Emissions — light, radiation, radio waves — can only travel at the speed of light,” Dhozo said. “The worlds and stars we observed were hundreds or thousands of light-years away. Our observation of planets in another galaxy were already centuries old or more when they reached our instruments. So when we opened the Projectors based on that information, it opened a portal up to that particular time, hundreds or thousands or more years in the past.”
“You stepped through the Waygates not only into the world you saw,” Xartasia said, “but the time you saw.”
Dhozo nodded.
“It scattered the fleet through space and time,” he rumbled. “We never did find them all and that’s why we stopped using the Projectors. The losses were unacceptable.”
“But time…” Xartasia said. Her heart raced. “Our memories of the White Kingdom… We can use them to open Waygates to the time we knew. That we loved.”
“Yes. But what you want is more complicated than that. Just like I warned you. Since you will be working at such a large scale from memory, not observation, the Projector will need to cross-reference a lot of minds to sift out errors. If there are problems in the destination index, the Projector will just error out and call for technicians again.” Here, Dhozo’s nanites thinned enough to show off a chilling, sharkish grin. “And I’m not ready to share with any other teams just yet. Not until you’ve taught me observational impact.”
“What else?”
Dhozo’s face vanished behind a veil of swirling black nanites again. “We can’t do it here. These are prototype Projectors. They’re not what you need.”
“This is not the answer that I seek,” Xartasia told him in a soft, dangerous voice. “If you cannot deliver what I require, commander, then you win nothing.”
“Not here, little queen,” Dhozo said in a growling rasp. “Not even in Mysarex, your own star system. But the Glorious fleet didn’t step through the Waygates. We flew.”
“Waygates large enough for starships to pass through?” Xartasia asked.
She narrowed violet eyes, thoughtful and curious. Done with their work for the moment, the Devourers were slowly gathering around their commander and his queen.
“There were… are two major nodes in the network,” Dhozo said. “One on our homeworld in the core, where our species evolved, and the other on the galaxy’s edge, where our fleet and listening posts were stationed. I’ve collated the data and corrected for galactic drift.”
“Show me.”
Dhozo waved his arms and a sheet of his nanites solidified into a screen. A map of the galaxy lit up across it. A star on the end of one curving arm was circled in red. Xartasia stepped closer and peered at the glowing label. She couldn’t read it.
“Display the names you referenced from the Alliance computer systems,” she told Dhozo.
The map flickered, rippling more like a sheet of shining fabric than any monitor Xartasia had ever seen, but the angular Glorious script was replaced by blockier Aver names. Dhozo pointed to the red spot on the galaxy’s edge.
“From here, the rim Projector is closer,” the Devourer said. “You bring enough memories of your beloved White Kingdom, enough to remember your entire home, and you’ll have what you want.”
“Closer,” Xartasia repeated, “but not by much. The journey is still a long one.”
“You can always stop,” Dhozo suggested.
“Never.” She turned to her knights. “Recall our champions and those they have found to the fleet. Our recruitment is done.”
“Yes, a’shae!” Corrus answered.
“She has what she wanted now,” Orix said. The young Devourer was standing very close. Xartasia could feel the heat of his swiftly burning metabolism baking off him. “We’re done. Give us the magic you promised, aerad!”
Xartasia looked up from Corrus and pointed to the map. She did not actually touch the seething nanites.
“You are not done yet,” she told the Devourers. “Your great old Waygate has not remained empty since you abandoned it. I will require one last thing of you.”
“What?” Orix snarled.
“There is a long flight yet ahead of us. Take us there,” Xartasia said. “Protect us on this final journey and then I will give you the magic that you want, to burn and destroy your enemies and to use the Waygates once again.”
“What about Anzhotek?” Dhozo asked, gesturing with one huge black claw to the plaza. “We’ve collected every morsel of information from the lab systems.”
“I have sent Syle to destroy Maeve’s young kingdom, but we cannot risk that my cousin or anyone else may find what we have.”
“Has your man reported in? If he’s done, we don’t need to worry about Maeve.”
“Syle will send us no messages. He is not a common soldier or even a knight. Syle works in absolute silence. Any transmissions or messages run the risk of interception. I trust in his work, but I will risk no failure so far into this song. Are the fleet’s lasers powerful enough to attack the surface?”
“Of course,” Dhozo said.
Xartasia spread her wings to fly back up to the canopy. “Then burn Arborus to ash. Leave nothing to find.”
