THE REFORGED TRILOGY: BOOK 3 — HAMMER OF TIME
Chapter 29: Bitter Salt
“We want glass to break. Anything we can see right through really should be fragile, shouldn’t it? We prefer to think that obfuscation is stronger than transparency.”
– Xia (234 PA)
Logan dismissed the knights with a wave of his new glass hand. The four Arcadians nodded and took to the air, leaving the Prian alone in the red-dusted Kaellisem street. Well, almost alone.
“Maybe you’ve scared the bomber off,” Gripper suggested. “It’s been days since any of the knights found something scary. Maybe whoever set them is gone.”
Logan shook his head. He began walking down the road, hands in his pockets. The glass one still felt strange, light and cool even through the cloth of his pants. Worn servos and hinges were plainly visible through the transparent Bherrosi glass, a reinforced metal skeleton twined with wire nerves. The finger surfaces and the palm were subtly textured in minute scrollwork to make them viable gripping surfaces, just like the knights’ gauntlets. Even so, Logan insisted on wearing his worn black leather half-glove over the glass. The glove was familiar, comfortable. It was a pointless sentiment, Logan knew. But it just wasn’t so simple to shut down his emotions. Not anymore.
“Why would they stop?” Logan asked. “We haven’t caught them. We haven’t even gotten close. No, it’s something else.”
“Like what?” Despite his longer legs, Gripper had to jog to keep up with Logan.
“They’re changing tactics. The bombs we found, including the one that blew up the theater… They’ve been effective, but all homemade. Simple timers, no complex remote detonators. That means giving us time to find them. And we have, so our bomber is moving on to something else.”
“Like what?” Gripper asked.
Maeve — Queen Maeve — speculated that the first bombing wasn’t an attempt on her life. There were far easier ways to kill her than attacking the enassui theater and the largest gathering of Arcadians in recent history. But it was that very fact that made Maeve suspect the bomb was to shake faith in her rule, to convince the fairies that she couldn’t keep them safe. To chase them away.
And that made sense. Maeve Cavainna was a perceptive woman, Logan admitted with painful pride, and he had to agree with her.
Logan stopped walking and looked back down the street to the red and gold royal spire. A winged shape stood on one of the delicate balconies. Was it Maeve…? He couldn’t tell from this distance. Logan turned away.
A large group of Arcadians stood clustered around one of the larger buildings of Kaellisem, a dark brown dome swirled in rusty red: the food distribution center. Few fairies had money, but Maeve had no intention of letting them go hungry.
Panna had devised, planned and created the supply infrastructure, relying upon a system of digital ledgers and identifications to make sure no one took an unfair portion. There was even a weekly allowance for the occasional humans or other hungry coreworlders who came to Kaellisem in desperate search of food. It built goodwill between the fairies and Alliance, Panna had said.
Duke Ferris required at least two knights to stand guard, to keep away any dangerous alien elements and prevent thefts. Panna had protested, of course. There were not enough knights to protect the sort of widespread distribution she envisioned. What Ferris wanted would require centralizing the process into a single center. That meant lines. That meant waiting and impatience. But in the end, Maeve had reluctantly sided with Duke Ferris. The safety of Kaellisem’s citizens had to come first.
So the food lines became a part of life in Kaellisem. The options were limited — mostly flavored protein powders, basic grains and a few vegetables — but were still better and more generous than what the fairies were used to since the White Kingdom’s fall. Generally, spirits were high in the lines and waiting Arcadians used the time to catch up with their neighbors. The knights inside the dome were rarely forced to involve themselves in any of these exchanges.
Logan and Gripper stopped walking as they neared the glass dome of the food distribution center. There was a group of fairies outside the door, not waiting in a line but together in a close pack. Logan began searching for some Alliance species, maybe a human or Dailon… There had been tensions between Vyron, Kessa and the Arcadians before everyone in Kaellisem became accustomed to the Dailon family.
But this looked nothing like those first encounters. The Arcadians had been afraid of Vyron and Kessa, so much larger than any of the fairies. What Logan saw in their faces now was not nervousness or even fear. It was anger. Logan signaled Gripper to stop. The Arboran did, following his friend’s gaze.
“What’s going on?” Gripper asked.
Logan didn’t answer as he left Gripper at a safe distance and moved quietly closer to the group. They faced each other and did not notice the Prian’s approach. His understanding of the Arcadian language was growing with each day in Kaellisem, but it was still hard to catch some of the quick, hissed words.
“How could she lie to us?” asked one woman with scars on her left cheek that looked like Lyran handiwork. “She is our queen!”
“Maybe it is not true,” said a man standing beside her. Nervously, Logan thought.
“How could one woman be ra’ahadu?” asked another fairy. “Even one of Cavain’s daughters?”
The first woman’s wings rustled. “Someone opened the Black Gate! We sumanni’i they died with the rest, but what if she escaped Tamlin?”
“The queen is guilty,” said a man with a bitter frown twisting his lips. “Why else build all this? She is trying to eru a’malla!”
“What if this is not amends…? If she is gathering the survivors of her destruction to deliver to the Devourers?”
“Queen Maeve slaughtered our people. She opened the Tamlin gate!” the scar-faced woman said, shaking her wings in rage.
Logan grabbed the Arcadian by the shoulder and yanked her around to face him. Her green-brown eyes widened and she gasped. The other fairies scattered with frightened, musical cries. Feathers filled the hot air.
“Where did you hear that?” Logan snarled.
The scarred fairy squirmed in his grasp, but she was tiny and no match for the Prian’s strength.
“All know!” she cried in nearly unintelligible Aver.
“Who told you?” Logan asked.
“Some here,” she answered in a hiss, pointing both wings to the glass food dome. “Long line and we talk!”
Hundreds of fairies passed through the food distribution center every day, most lingering for hours or more with nothing better to do than gossip. There was no way Logan could trace the origin of the information. He released the Arcadian woman, who staggered back and then leapt into the air, beating her wings frantically in her haste to get away.
Logan turned back to the banded glass dome. It was still mid-afternoon and the food center was crowded with hungry, waiting people. The Arcadians inside watched him with a mixture of fear and anger. An old fairy man near the doors squinted suspiciously at Logan.
It was enough to get the attention of the knights inside. Syle and Eranna pushed their way through the angrily murmuring crowd toward Logan. The sight of their glass armor and spears seemed to comfort the fairies, but there were still a great many glares leveled at Logan.
“What is going on, sir?” Eranna asked.
Logan held no official position in Maeve’s court, but most of the knights showed him a certain deference.
“They’re saying that Maeve was responsible for the fall,” Logan told Eranna. Other than Anthem, the knights didn’t know the truth about the Tamlin Waygate. No need to confirm the rumors. “I need to know who first said that.”
The angry muttering rose again. The old fairy Logan had seen before shot out a withered, accusatory wing at him.
“The Gray Queen keeps company with a human bounty hunter,” he said in Arcadian. “She takes an alien to her bed. She spits on her own people. Maeve Cavainna destroyed the White Kingdom!”
There were more shouts and loud songs in reply to this, some in agreement and others arguing, but Logan barely heard them. He grabbed the old man by the wing until the fairy grunted.
“Her lover?” Logan said back at the fairy in his own language — awkwardly, he had to admit. “Her enarri? Maeve has taken her Arcadian king! For you!”
“Hunter! No, stop it!” Gripper was in the door and shouting at Logan. “Let him go!”
Logan forced his glittering glass hand to unclench, dropping the old Arcadian man to the floor. The fairy panted, but wouldn’t be so easily silenced.
“Her Arcadian king? You mean Anthem Calloren? Prince Anthem is a whore,” he said. “Xartasia’s whore and brother to Devourers! Our queen and prince are traitors. Kaellisem is a lie!”
A dented metal cup flew from somewhere in the crowd and hit the hysterical old fairy in the temple, opening a bleeding gash in his thin skin.
The violence erupted as suddenly and explosively as a volcano. There were suddenly dozens of Arcadians in the air, grabbing and striking at one another or simply trying to escape the glass dome. Eranna waded into the burgeoning riot, calling for calm. Syle gave Logan an even, golden-eyed look.
“Leave now,” he told the Prian, loudly over the shrieking din but quite calmly. “You will only make things worse. Tell the queen and Sir Anthem what is happening here.”
Something about the way Syle said that made Logan pause, but then Gripper was grabbing his arm and towing the human outside. Voices and the sounds of blows rang out from the dome. Something crashed inside, and someone screamed.
“What’s going on in there?” Gripper asked as they ran down the road, back the way they had come.
Logan yanked the com from his belt and didn’t stop running.
“Maeve?” he asked. “Maeve, are you there?”
“Logan?” Maeve answered. “What is wrong? Are you alright?”
“They know about the Tamlin gate, Maeve. I don’t know how, but they know. Get knights to the food center now. The Arcadians are rioting.”
“Where are they?” Panna asked.
“Gone,” Ballad answered. He jumped down from the rooftop to land beside Panna. “It’s not like any Arcadian on Hadra has a job to go to.”
“They might.”
Ballad had the same thought. “Like Anthem did, maybe? That’s mostly nighttime work. It’s the middle of the day.”
“Sir Anthem worked days,” Panna protested.
“Really? How do you know?” Ballad asked, frowning. The two Arcadians moved through the glaring light and down the road in search of their own kind. “He doesn’t say a word about his prostitute days to us.”
“Not to me, either. But why should he? It’s between him and the queen. How do you even know about his old job?”
Ballad gave Panna a sidelong look. “Syle told me. I’m not sure who said it to him. Why? Who told you?”
“Xia,” Panna said with a blush. “I guess there were some uh… health concerns.”
Ballad scowled. “Anthem is a right hawk. I don’t mind working with him, but I don’t grasp at all why Maeve left Logan for him.”
Panna blinked. How could he not understand? Rough as Ballad was, he was a royal knight. “If Queen Maeve is going to create a new kingdom, it’s important that she has an Arcadian husband.”
“Why?” Ballad asked.
“Why?” Panna repeated. “What do you mean, why? You can’t have a monarchy without a royal line.”
“There are orphans. Why not just adopt some fledglings?”
“The line of Cavain has ruled over our people — unbroken and undiminished — for ten thousand years,” Panna said. “You can’t just adopt new ones!”
“Even you say that Cavain was a tyrant,” Ballad pointed out.
He was right about that. Panna’s reverence for Arcadian history didn’t mean she was stupid.
“That still doesn’t invalidate his house’s claim to the throne, Sir Ballad,” she said. “Cavain a’Shae built the White Kingdom.”
“Out of pyrad bones,” Ballad answered. “And on the backs of dryad and nyad labourers.”
Panna flushed again and wondered if the bright Hadrian sunlight blotted out the color in her cheeks. She was surprised that such a crass, rough young fairy would know enough about his race’s history to even have an opinion. Panna had to admit — silently and only to herself — that she had misjudged him.
“Yes, but…” Panna stammered. “Well, it’s not as if Logan Coldhand would have made a very good prince.”
“Why not?” Ballad asked her. “Because he’s human? Because he’s Prian?”
“Well, yes. His devotion to Maeve is beyond question, but–”
“You’re telling me,” Ballad said with a slightly crooked grin that made him look even younger.
“–but he doesn’t know very much about the Arcadian culture and history.”
Now Ballad stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and looked at Panna with his brow furrowed under his short, sweaty blond hair.
“Anyone can learn that stuff,” Ballad said.
“Like you have?”
“Logan taught me most of what I know,” Ballad answered. “Back home — on Prianus, I mean — most of the older fairies don’t think I’m much better than a human. They didn’t spend time teaching me our history.”
“How does Logan Coldhand know about Arcadian history and civics?”
“Does it matter?” Ballad asked. “He learned. Logan doesn’t have to be Arcadian to love Maeve or to care about Kaellisem! Is it really better to have an Arcadian prince just because he’s from one of our noble houses than a smart and devoted human?”
Panna walked faster. When Ballad put it that way, it did sound stupid. But lineage was important, wasn’t it? Ten thousand years of history hung in the balance. Not an entirely spotless history, Panna admitted, but a proud and complex one on the verge of extinction. Surely that was worth protecting.
Ballad wasn’t letting Panna off the hook that easily, though. The young knight glided a few steps and landed at her side again. A Lyran walking the opposite way growled low in his furry throat and Ballad growled right back. The effect would have been comical if Panna weren’t so worried about the Lyran’s claws. But he stomped past them with no further incident. Ballad gestured toward the retreating Lyran.
“Doesn’t that bother you?” he asked.
“No,” Panna lied. “I’m used to it.”
“Really? And it doesn’t bother you that you had to cut off your wings to attend an Alliance college?”
Panna snapped her mouth closed so fast that she bit her tongue. “Ouch! Fine, yes! Of course it bothers me, Sir Ballad. I… I hate it.”
“We all hate how the Alliance treats us. But you’re not doing any better, are you?”
Panna glared at him and tasted blood in her mouth. “What the empty pit of the Nameless’ heart is that supposed to mean?”
“What does Logan have to cut off before he can love Maeve?”
Panna had no answer. She walked on, keeping her head down, but her eyes still streamed in the glaring sunlight. Where were the Arcadians? She had only been in the hospital a day.
She and Ballad spent the rest of the day searching Yebdemi, but found no other fairies. Panna pointed out one of the stout buildings where several Arcadians had said they lived. With a grunt, Ballad launched himself up against the heavy gravity and scrabbled over the roof’s edge. A moment later, his face reappeared above.
“You’d better get up here,” he said in a choked voice.
“Why?” Panna asked. “What’s wrong?”
“They’re all dead.”
Panna climbed awkwardly up the fire escape ladder, kicking a window hard enough to make the apartment’s occupant — a barely-dressed Hadrian man — shout at her through the glass. Panna told him to go back inside and call the police. The man grumbled and told her that he sure as hells would, but two minutes later, Panna wished that she hadn’t said anything.
Ballad grabbed Panna’s wrist and helped haul her up onto the apartment roof. The flat, sun-scarred roof was covered in blood. It was dark and dried, but the stuff was everywhere. There were four contorted Arcadian bodies stiffening under Hadra’s relentless twin suns. Their wings had been slashed, keeping them helpless on the ground. Panna covered her mouth with her hand and crept closer. Tiny green ants crawled all over cloudy eyes and into open mouths. Panna turned away, retching. It was a good thing she had skipped breakfast.
“Oh gods,” she gasped. “What… what happened?”
“They must have died fast,” Ballad said. “Look, they’re all sitting around this bag here.”
Panna made herself turn back toward the bodies. Ballad was right. Death had splayed their thin limbs across the hot concrete, but all four Arcadians were more or less circled around a mycolar bag of bread. It was open and dried crumbs stuck in the darkened blood. For all the gore, they had been murdered quickly, attacked in the middle of a meal and unable to defend themselves. Or to make much noise, Panna guessed, remembering the unpleasant Hadrian below — all she had done was kick his window.
Ballad crouched beside one of the bodies and reached slowly toward the man’s bloated, blood-smeared face. The throat beneath had been opened with a long, deep gash. Panna recognized him. He was one of the men who had asked Panna for money just before Xartasia’s knight assaulted her. He must have bought the bread. She choked back a terrified sob.
“Don’t…” Panna told Ballad, who froze. “Don’t touch him. The police are on their way. We shouldn’t be here when they arrive.”
“Why not?” Ballad asked.
“We can’t get caught here. This isn’t murder under Alliance law because they’re not citizens, but there will be an investigation and the cops will make at least a token attempt to catch someone. We don’t want to be their prime suspects.”
Ballad cursed under his breath and stepped back. He helped Panna make her way down the ladder — more carefully this time — and back to the ground. As casually as they could, they crossed the street and walked away. It was several minutes before a shiny white squad car came gliding down the road and parked in front of the building they had just left. A Hadrian officer climbed out, talking on his com. Ballad took Panna’s arm gently.
“That guy at the window got a good look at you,” he told Panna. “Let’s get out of here.”
Panna nodded and followed Ballad. When they had put a few blocks between themselves and the crime scene, they heard sirens, but only faintly. Panna paid a few white cenmark chips and they rode a crowded bus the rest of the way back to their motel room.
“What do you think happened?” Panna asked quietly once they were back inside. She didn’t really think that Ballad would have an answer, but she had to talk about what they had seen.
“They were killed,” Ballad said in a flat tone that Panna usually only heard from Logan Coldhand. He shrugged out of his leather jacket and threw it over the corner of his bed.
“But why? And how? None of them were shot. Those were blade wounds. If they’re going to murder some Arcadians, wouldn’t most coreworlders just… just shoot them?” Panna dropped heavily onto her bed, tired of fighting Hadra’s gravity.
“Plenty of people still use nanoknives,” Ballad told her. “They’re cheaper and easier to get than guns. They don’t use ammunition, slugs or batteries. Maybe that’s–”
Ballad fell suddenly silent and there was a thump from somewhere outside. Panna frowned at the young knight as his eyes went wide. Ballad leapt onto Panna, tackling the girl down to the rough beige motel room carpet just as broken glass filled the air. A winged shape hurtled through the hole where the window had been.
Panna could see only a shoulder and a single arm past Ballad’s wings, but her blood went cold. Plates of glass encircled pristine white scarves beneath and crystal-armored fingers wrapped around the glittering gray haft of a strange, long knife. Panna had a sudden, icy certainty that this was the weapon responsible for those slashed wings.
“Did you kill those people?” Panna shouted at the half-hidden white knight. “They didn’t even go to Queen Maeve! They didn’t do anything!”
“My queen has what she needs,” the knight answered. “Now she flies on black wings to the Tower. Her business here is done.”
“What?” Panna gasped. “The… the Nnyth Tower?”
The glittering arm was swinging the glass knife down at her and Ballad sprang to his feet to meet the blow. His own spear leaned in the corner, but it might as well have been light-years away. By the time he reached it, Panna would be dead. But Ballad grabbed the other knight’s wrist in one hand and jabbed with his other fist. The boxer’s bracelets — when had he put those on? — rang on the glass armor, but it took far more than a punch to shatter Arcadian glass.
Panna rolled out of the way, doing her best to avoid the sharp glass that littered the motel room. Ballad grunted and swore as he wrestled with their attacker. Panna saw him do something complicated with the other Arcadian’s wrist and the knife was almost out of the knight’s hand when it… changed.
The slick gray metal elongated, tripling and then quadrupling its length. It moved with the fluid ripple of nanite reconstruction, but faster than any kind of nanomechanical technology Panna had ever seen before. The white knight swung his spear, forcing Ballad to release his hold and leap back.
Panna heaved herself to her feet. She fought terror and Hadra’s gravity for each step to where Ballad’s spear leaned against the wall. She grabbed the weapon and shouted.
“Ballad!”
The Prian fairy turned toward her as Panna threw his spear, but she had miscalculated the gravity again and it fell short. She also miscalculated that Xartasia’s killer might have heard her shout as well as Ballad did. His spear flicked out and slashed down Ballad’s arm as he reached out. The gray haft swept around in a tight half circle and knocked his legs out from under him. The other knight reversed his grip on his spear and pointed the blood-smeared blade down at Ballad.
Panna screamed and yanked the lamp off the motel dresser. She flung it as hard as she could at Xartasia’s killer. It shattered against his glass armor and sprayed the floor in more broken fragments. The knight glanced up at Panna for just a moment, but it was long enough for Ballad to wrap his fingers around one of the porcelain shards and stab it into the gap between his attacker’s boots and greaves. The broken edge slashed through white scarves and freed a spray of bright blood.
Xartasia’s pale knight hissed in pain and kicked out, but Ballad wrapped himself around the other man’s ankles and spilled him to the floor with a swift jerk. Without his armor to weigh him down in Hadra’s gravity, Ballad was the first back on his feet. He grabbed the white knight’s long hair and rammed his knee into the other man’s face. Blood ran from his nose and Ballad tried again, but the other Arcadian brought his arms up. The kick rang off glass.
The other knight grabbed his spear from the floor and surged up again. He slashed another bloody line through Ballad’s shirt and into his chest. The Prian leapt back as the blade lashed out again. Panna threw herself to the floor. Where was Ballad’s spear? There, under her bed. She squirmed her way across the floor, feeling glass and broken pottery slice through her shirt.
Ballad jumped to one side as Xartasia’s knight lunged at him. His glass spear sliced into the wall just beside the broken window, yellow mycofoam insulation blooming around the blade. Ballad lunged at the knight, throwing a flurry of punches that rang off the plates of glass armor, but which forced him back, to release his grip on the gray spear.
“You fight like a dryad,” spat the strange fairy. “You are no match for a knight of Arcadia.”
“I’m more a knight than you are, hawk,” Ballad answered with a roguish grin only somewhat undermined by the red blood staining his teeth.
Ballad threw himself at the other knight, kicking and punching. Panna couldn’t see anything through the storm of red-spotted white wings. Her sweaty fingers slid off the haft of Ballad’s spear. Panna bit her lips and grabbed it again, yanking it out from under the bed.
She jumped to her feet, spear in hand, just as the white knight threw himself back toward the window and the wall where his own weapon was still impaled. Ballad grabbed for the other man, his bloody fingers leaving streaks like red paint across the glass armor. The knight ignored Ballad and grabbed his spear, yanking the gray haft free.
“Ballad!” Panna threw the spear once more.
This time, she didn’t miss.
Ballad seized the weapon out of the air. His opponent was still wrestling with his own spear and Ballad slashed out at the white knight’s wing, spattering the feathers in gore. Xartasia’s man sang out as he finally wrenched his spear free and brought it around on Ballad. But the other man was too close and he couldn’t retract his spear quickly enough. Ballad slammed a kick into his chest and the knight toppled backward out of the broken window. The knight fought to spread his wings, but the injured one would not hold his weight. The limb snapped and folded, tumbling the white knight down into the street.
It wasn’t a very long fall, but in the high Hadrian gravity, it was far enough.
“Are you alright?” Ballad asked Panna.
“Am I okay? You idiot,” Panna gasped.
She wrenched her eyes from the dead knight below. She wished they had been able to question him. She looked up at Ballad. He was bleeding from a dozen messy wounds.
“We have to get out of here,” Panna said.
“Yeah, the police will never let us out of this one,” Ballad agreed. “And we need to tell Queen Maeve what he said about the Tower.”
That wasn’t what Panna meant at all.
“And we will,” she told Ballad. “But I hope you liked Doctor Xel. We’re going to see her first.”
