THE REFORGED TRILOGY: BOOK 2 — SWORD OF DREAMS
Chapter 35: Symbols
“The ready student will find a teacher, even if they aren’t looking.”
– Desson Felix, Orsin author (198 PA)
“Claws out in sixty!” Captain Cerro shouted.
The close confines of the van suddenly became even closer as the other cops prepared, freeing weapons and unhooding birds.
Maeve inspected herself. There was still blood crusted unpleasantly at the shorn edges of her ruined clothes, but Xia’s drugs had done their job admirably. She would be able to fight.
Xia sprayed an astringent-smelling adhesive onto the fairy’s broken foot and then dabbed it with powder from a small canister. The glue flared with chemical heat and set into a stiff, surprisingly resilient shell.
“Take it easy on that,” Xia warned. “This cast is good enough for light protection, but I don’t know how it’s going to hold up under any stress.”
“It will serve,” Maeve said. “Thank you.”
“You’re medicated, but just because you don’t feel pain doesn’t mean the injuries are gone,” Xia reminded her while she worked. “Gavriel and his butcher did a whole lot of damage. And there’s the Vanora White to consider, too. I don’t know how much of it is still in your bloodstream. I would have liked to give you dylominol for the pain. It’s safer when there are other chems in your system. But with this many injuries, I had to give you isophelle. If you start getting sleepy, Maeve, you need to tell me.”
“We have worse concerns than medicine,” Maeve answered in a tight voice.
Her mistake in Tamlin had not only destroyed Arcadia, but unless they could stop the Nihilists, would now kill trillions more. The Alliance never welcomed the refugee Arcadians, but Maeve had no desire to see another civilization wiped out.
And Maeve didn’t want to die. Not anymore, not here in the gray cold, at the fangs and black blades of the Devourers. She wanted to see the sun again. Any sun…
Maeve was interrupted by a sudden pained shout from Duaal. The young mage leapt to his feet, smashing his skull against the well-worn ceiling. But when Duaal fell to his knees, clutching his head and streaming tears down his cheeks, it didn’t seem to be from the pain.
“Duaal?” Xia asked. She abandoned Maeve and grabbed Duaal by the shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
“Tiberius!” the boy cried.
“What the hells?” Cerro asked. He put a heavy, reassuring hand on his nervously twitching falcon. “What’s wrong with that boy?”
“He’s kind of connected to Gavriel,” Gripper answered. “Did you see something, Shimmer?”
“It’s Tiberius. He fought Gavriel… and lost,” Duaal said.
Cerro’s scarred face went hard and he leaned over to the reinforced window.
“We’re here,” he announced. He spoke into the radio clipped to his shoulder. “Keep close and move fast. Our goal is the Waygate. Punch through and hold it. Go!”
“We have to get to Tiberius!” Duaal shouted over the clamor. “Find him!”
The Blue Phoenix crew nodded in agreement, and so did both Logan and Panna.
They were at the bottom of the rising moraine. The police van swerved and screeched to a stop beside a huge, empty hauler. Cerro shouted and kicked open the doors, throwing his falcon up into the gray fog. Thirty more cops poured out of the vans with guns held at the ready.
“Tiberius!”
Maeve heard Duaal’s heart-wrenching shout before she could follow him out across the mountaintop. She jumped out of the van and ran past the cops toward the figure laying slumped in the snow. Maeve dropped her spear as she fell to her knees beside Tiberius. Xia and Gripper were close behind, followed by Logan.
Duaal skidded through the ice and snow to kneel over Tiberius, who lay in a spreading halo of red. There was another long line of blood in the snow behind him, leading back toward the ravine.
“Tiberius? Captain, can you hear me?” Xia asked.
A burn cut deeply into the old Prian’s chest and his blackened right hand lay curled over the wound. Blood streaked his beard, but his blue eyes were open. Orphia perched on his boot, keening unhappily and pulling at the laces with her beak. Tiberius looked up at Cerro and managed a small nod.
“Captain,” he wheezed.
Cerro inclined his head.
“Captain,” he greeted the other man gravely.
“Behind you…” Tiberius said.
A wild-eyed man ran screaming out of the mist, a hatchet held over his head, and charged at Cerro. The Prian cop brought up his Talon-4 and put a lance of red laser through the Nihilist’s knee. The zealot’s scream rose in pitch and pain as he tumbled down into the slush. Another officer holding a shotgun at his hip rushed forward and cracked the matte black stock across the back of the cultist’s head.
“Attention all members of the Cult of Nihil,” Captain Cerro said into his com. His voice boomed from speakers bolted to the sides of the green and red vans. “You are all under arrest! If you lay down arms, you will be taken to Pylos Station Three to await trial. You–”
Shrieks of fury rang out through the gloom. Tattered shadows loomed up all around, closing quickly. Stones flew out of the fog at the police piling out of their vans, and then the Nihilist opened fire.
“Spread out! Make as many arrests as you’re able, but we’re not here for tea! We’re going to stop this. Now fly!” Cerro ordered.
Twenty-nine cops fanned out around him and charged into the mist. Duaal had taken Tiberius’ uninjured hand and held it in both of his. Tears shone on his cheeks as he stared at Xia.
“You can help him, right?” Duaal asked.
“There’s no fixing this,” Tiberius answered. He coughed, blood bubbling from his lips. “Gavriel’s down there, at the Waygate! Go!”
Duaal’s face paled and his jaw set in a hard line.
“You have to stop Gavriel,” Tiberius said.
“The captain is right,” Maeve agreed. Her voice caught. “I am a knight and know only a handful of simple charms, Duaal. You are the only true spell-singer among us. We must go.”
Tiberius pulled his hand free and pushed at the boy’s shoulder. He left a bloody handprint on Duaal’s coat.
“Don’t waste time, little hawk,” Tiberius said. “Go!”
Duaal’s eyes opened and he took a deep, cold breath. He stood and pushed his wet hair back from his face.
“Xia, do what you can for the captain. Stay with her, Gripper.”
The Arboran sobbed and nodded. Rain and sleet dripped from his drooping ears. Panna had emerged from the van and stood staring, with hands pressed to her mouth in horror.
“You stay, too,” Duaal told her. “All four of you should get into one of these vans and lock the doors.”
The whine of lasers and the flat cracks of lead rounds pierced the thin mountain air. Maeve grabbed her spear from where it had fallen in the snow.
“They will manage,” she said. “It is time to join the battle.”
The police were spreading out in teams, moving forward in low crouches with weapons in hand. As the dark silhouettes of Nihilists came running and stumbling down the rocky slope, the Prians took careful aim and fired. Sharp whistles rang out as the cops called out attack commands to circling hawks and falcons. The sound of it was almost musical and reminded Maeve of the battle songs she had learned from Orthain.
Maeve’s newly repaired glass spear caught the wan sunlight and sliced it into rainbow shards. She sprinted a few steps through the snow after the police and leapt into the sky, but something caught her wrist and she was pulled back to the ground.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Logan asked.
Maeve found herself facing her hunter. The icy gaze that she knew so well, that had protected her memories from Gavriel’s spells — for a time, at least — was gone now. Logan’s blue eyes were wide and he looked… frightened. His metal fingers were locked around her wrist.
“Release me, Logan! I must find Gavriel,” Maeve cried. “It is my memory he wields!”
“There are two hundred Nihilists up here. If you fly out ahead of the police, you’re only going to get yourself shot,” Logan said. His face resumed the cold mask Maeve knew so well. “You can’t stop anyone if you’re dead.”
“I cannot remain and do nothing!”
“Then be smart,” Logan said. “Let me go with you.”
Slowly, Maeve nodded and folded her wings against her back again. She ran with Logan and Duaal to catch up with the cops. The two human men could have easily overtaken her with their longer legs, but they matched their strides to Maeve and remained close. They picked out the lighter blue of Cerro’s uniform and ran toward it. The Prian police hadn’t made much progress up the slope.
“Captain! We must reach Gavriel and the Waygate,” Maeve said when they were close. “There is no more important goal.”
“I know,” Cerro agreed. “But they’re thick up ahead, and we’ve got Arcadians above us.”
As if to prove his point, several Arcadians wheeled down from the clouds, black robes flapping in the rain and making them look more like bats than birds. Cerro whistled sharply. The smaller dark shape of his falcon flew out of the mist and intercepted the closest cultist. There was a splash of crimson blood and the Nihilist veered off course. With a sonorous cry of pain, he collided with the Arcadian beside him and they crashed together to the ground in a tangle of limbs and wings.
But that still left two more to fold their wings and dive at the police. Cerro fired at one of the falling fairies, who veered off and vanished into the stormy gray clouds again.
The remaining Arcadian slammed into the ground, landing in a low crouch. It was a woman, with lips skinned back from her teeth as she sang an angry battle chant. She flung herself at Cerro with a crooked nanoknife, but a larger foot came down on her heel and then a sharp blow across the back of her neck sent the Nihilist sprawling in the snow, wheezing shallowly. Cerro looked at Logan, who stood over the fallen Arcadian with his Talon in hand.
“Can you hold the southern end of the slope?” Cerro asked.
Logan scanned the shapes racing through the mist.
“Yes,” he said.
“Good. Go and then we can break their ranks.”
“In sixty,” Logan said.
Cerro whistled and seven of the other cops darted with him toward the ravine. Maeve and Logan turned and sprinted through the slush along the southern edge of the flat moraine.
“Logan!” Maeve shouted.
Two Lyran Nihilists were scrambling through the snow, falling to all fours for better traction. They were closing fast. Maeve leapt, beating her wings as the paired Lyrans pounced. The cultists slid under her and she dove. Maeve fell on one of the wolfin Nihilists, driving her spear through their back. She landed and leveled her glass blade at the second, but Logan was already standing over the Lyran, a thread of steam rising from his laser.
“Fifteen seconds. We need to go,” he said.
Logan spun and they dashed for the southern position. Maeve counted silently and right at fifteen, she heard a high, trilling whistle. From Cerro’s position, she saw a group of police charge forward, red laserfire clearing the way.
But what was that flash of purple and gold? For the first time, Maeve realized that Duaal was no longer with them. The mage was following Cerro down into the Waygate ravine.
Duaal watched Maeve and Logan’s departure in silence. They could handle things down to the south. When he made no move to follow, Captain Cerro looked over at Duaal.
“What’s your plan, then?” he asked the young Hyzaari.
“Same as you. I’m getting down to that Waygate,” Duaal said. His green eyes were dry now. “That’s where Gavriel is.”
Cerro nodded once and then whistled, first to his falcon and then again to the small squad of other cops. One of them was already limping on a badly wounded foot, but his attacker lay in a black-clothed heap nearby. A woman with a lined face checked the battery on her Talon.
Cerro looked at the other cops.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Yes, sir!” came the chorus of answers.
“Yes,” Duaal said.
The fog was finally fading, torn apart by the wind and washed away by the rain. Cerro raised his hand. The ravine’s edge was lined by Nihilists, like rows of diseased gargoyles. At least fifty of them were already caught in close, bloody combat with other squads of Prian police. There were far fewer cops than Nihilists, but each of the officers was of the toughest Prian stock and trained to fight beak and claw for their homeworld. All that the Cult of Nihil had were numbers, but they had those in abundance.
They spotted Duaal, Cerro and the Prians charging the line and turned to face the new threat. Duaal sprinted to keep up.
“Na illya ma’naari su!” he sang.
Blue-white lightning snapped out like a serpent’s forked tongue, following Duaal’s gesture, smaller than the jagged bolts jumping from cloud to cloud over the Kayton Mountains, but no less deadly. The curling electricity grounded on one of the Nihilists, who went ridged and fell twitching into the snow.
Imitating Cerro, the young mage ran in a low crouch. There was the occasional crack of a gun or the sizzling whine of a laser, but the Nihilists were armed mostly with simple clubs, knives, and an utter lack of regard for their own safety. They threw themselves at the advancing Prians with rapture on their reddened, disease-pocked faces.
A black shadow leapt at Duaal. The mage flexed his fingers into the symbol for fire, but before he could open his mouth to sing, the cultist collided with him. They fumbled on top of Duaal and raised a dagger, but a screaming falcon fell out of the sky and tore bright spurts of blood from the Nihilist’s face. His dagger went flying and Captain Cerro appeared out of the rain, shooting the flailing cultist through the chest.
“We’re clearing a path down to the ladder,” said the Prian cop. “Come on!”
A sudden burst of laserfire from the south cut through the pack of cultists, forcing them to split their attention.
That must have been Logan and Maeve. Another pack of police hit the Nihilists from the north, two others harrying the Arcadian reinforcements swooping out of the clouds.
Cerro whistled. Duaal couldn’t tell if it was a command for the birds or the police, but when the cops charged, he stayed close. A burly Prian took point, his shotgun held at waist level and booming continuously. Nihilists scattered before him, falling or retreating.
But one of the wounded cultists still clutched his own gun and returned fire. Duaal was close enough to hear the wet, meaty thuds and then the air whooshing from the officer’s lungs as the bullets tore through him. The big cop wobbled, regained his balance and gave the Nihilist the death he wanted so much with a shotgun blast in the gut.
A howling human with an axe took the cop’s arm and landed another deep blow into his ribs. With a roar of fury, the Prian staggered the final distance to the edge of the ravine and heaved himself forward. The cop reached out with his remaining arm as he slammed into the line of Nihilists, taking two of them down over the edge with him.
Duaal felt sick. The Prian police were just as relentless as the Cult of Nihil. And for now, at least, it had earned them control of the ravine. One of Cerro’s men gave the reattached ladder a cursory check and then began climbing, but it would take far too long for thirty cops to make the descent that way. Cerro pulled bulky cylinders from their belts and fired pitons into the rocky ledge of the ravine with a pneumatic charge. Without hesitation, they leapt over the edge, down into the crevice.
“Move!” Cerro shouted to Duaal.
The mage swung his legs over the ladder and clambered down the wet rungs as fast as possible before the cultists above could regroup. By the time Duaal reached the ravine’s uneven stone floor, Cerro and his remaining officers were hunkered together behind a heap of dig tailings. The rain had turned the ground into a sodden mire of mud. Duaal fell to his knees in the muck with Cerro and the rest of the police. Dirty rainwater soaked into his expensive clothes.
The Nihilists had gathered around the base of the Waygate to adore their leader, but then they spotted the invading police and turned together, swarming out toward Cerro’s position. Duaal could just see two figures standing before the Waygate, on top of the great white ziggurat. One in ragged black and the other in perfect white. Gavriel and Xartasia.
Duaal didn’t think. He just charged at the Waygate. He had to stop Gavriel. Tiberius had told him to.
An Arcadian pounced on him. The ragged fairy was too thin and dirty to make out any sign of gender, but it hissed at him in its own lyric language and swung a nail-spiked club clutched tightly in pale fingers. The mage jumped back, slipped in the mud and fell.
The Arcadian Nihilist swiped their club down at Duaal in an inexpert but still potentially lethal strike. Duaal rolled over onto his back and kicked up at his attacker. He hit, forcing the fairy to drop the weapon, but not before one of the nails gouged a ragged, bloody line into his boot and the foot beneath.
It wasn’t a terrible wound, but it bled and it hurt. The Nihilists ran through Cerro’s staccato shots and grabbed at Duaal, holding him as the Arcadian pulled a carving knife from their belt. With an effort, Duaal yanked his hands free and hooked his fingers, but couldn’t seem to make his stiff, numb hands properly form the intricate spell symbols.
But the symbols weren’t important, Duaal thought frantically. Maeve said that they were for children. Panna said they were just to help Duaal visualize what he needed to happen.
“Ka li’ae avael!” he said.
Red light smoldered sullenly for a moment in the misty afternoon, faltering and fading.
They were just symbols. Duaal concentrated and fire blazed out in a widening ring. The flames drove the Nihilists back, shouting and swatting at their burning robes. Duaal jumped to his feet and pressed forward again.
Gavriel stood haloed in the circle of the Waygate, hands raised over his head. His expression was exultant, victorious as he sang his stolen song. Xartasia stood at his side, a long-bladed glass dagger in her hand. She watched over Gavriel, like Maeve must have guarded her brother so many times. All around them, the lights of the Waygate swirled and pulsed.
Duaal felt Gavriel’s magic echoing painfully back along his own thoughts, resonating like a plucked string. The boy dove under a clumsy punch from a stout Axial, and then he was on the oversized white stairs of the Waygate.
“Na illya ma’naari su!” Duaal sang out.
Xartasia’s eyes snapped from Gavriel to Duaal and she held the glass knife out, singing a short counter-charm. The crooked line of electricity changed direction and arced into the ravine wall. Stone popped with a sharp retort and flung granite into the air. Distracted by the crack of lightning and the shower of rocks, Gavriel turned away from the Waygate, interrupting his spell.
For a moment, the entire ravine went still. And then the Waygate blazed with light. The pale colors flowing over the segmented ring turned suddenly an angry, fiery red and the Waygate hummed like a tuning fork. The note rose deafeningly, then broke and shattered into booming words.
“T’sachka! Klova min hotek szo. Kreng vizizt gzdan k’mella. T’sachka, t’sachka! Klova min hotek szo. Kreng vizizt gzdan k’mella.”
The voice was loud enough to make the mountain shiver under Duaal’s feet, but it was flat and toneless. It overlapped with its own echoes and rebounded from the ravine walls. Gavriel’s single eye blazed with fury.
“What are you doing, boy?” he shouted.
A dozen Nihilists turned away from the Prian cops and charged at Duaal.
“No! He’s mine,” Gavriel said. “You never should have stopped running from me, boy!”
The Nihilists parted, but they were’t still. Black and the occasional red robe swarmed at the foot of the Waygate, locked in battle with the Prian police. The freezing wind reeked of ozone and gunpowder, heavy and metallic in Duaal’s nose.
“Ka li’ae avael!” Gavriel sang in a voice only slightly less thunderous than that of the Waygate.
Flames filled the stairs and forced Duaal back, down to the cold, muddy ground. Gavriel descended the steps of the Waygate toward the boy as the frozen Prian wind whipped his black robes around him. Gavriel’s pale, age-spotted skin was like an ancient shroud pulled over the long-dead skeleton beneath. But there was power there, confidence and certainty in every step, glowering there in his lone eye.
Xartasia stared and then spun to face the angrily pulsing Waygate. Gavriel stepped down from the final ivory stair and narrowed one eye at Duaal. The other wept red blood.
“You fled me and took my power with you,” he said. “You were mine, boy. You belonged to me.”
Duaal staggered back from Gavriel. He longed to say something, anything to the old man. To challenge the one who had taught him magic, who had taught him fear. Who hurt Tiberius. But Duaal’s mouth was dry and every nerve in his body screamed at him to run, to get away.
Cerro was here somewhere. Wasn’t it his job to save Prianus…?
“I’ll kill you myself, boy,” Gavriel said. “You deserve that much. And then I will finish what I began so long ago.”
Duaal fell back another shaking step. Fear choked him and sent the whole world spinning. He was eight years old again, cowering before his master. Gavriel twisted his aged hands into the symbol for fire.
But Duaal wasn’t a frightened little boy anymore.
Xia didn’t think Duaal was a child… Gripper had mooned after her for years, but she chose Duaal. Xia had broken all her species’ genetic purity taboos for him. Maeve was alive because of what Duaal had seen. He had saved her! Even Tiberius… Tiberius told Duaal to stop Gavriel. That only he could do it.
“Ka li’ae imali!” Duaal sang, the counter-spell to Gavriel’s fire.
Smoke curled up around the ancient mage, but nothing more. Gavriel’s long knobbed fingers spread and twisted.
“Na illya ma’naari su!” he chanted.
Duaal hesitated for an almost fatal instant as the air crackled. So many times he felt those same words echoing in his own skull, watching Gavriel’s helpless victims writhe as the electricity seared through them.
“Na illya ma’naari osa vae!” Duaal answered barely in time.
He shifted the fork of blinding blue lightning away. It snapped into the wall of the ravine again, bringing down a miniature avalanche of ice and stone.
Gavriel held his ground while the rain and snow swirled around him. Flame billowed out from his hand, racing toward Duaal. The rain sizzled and the air rippled with heat. Duaal threw his hand up to shield his face from the heat as he countered again. The flame guttered and vanished into steam.
But… it hadn’t just vanished, Duaal thought. Nothing just disappeared. The words to the song were steal the fire’s breath. Breath. His spell removed the oxygen that fire needed to burn. Magic had rules, Panna said. Rules Duaal could understand.
Above, Xartasia stood with her wings and arms raised imploringly toward the portal. The Waygate’s terrible voice came again.
“Szo ghemma b’ho leng. Szo ghemma b’ho leng. Hotek mev khavvna tek vommen.”
The flashing, swirling Waygate ring was no longer empty. Something dark moved in the vortex of light. Roiling black shadows were seeping out, low to the ground, like a heavy smoke.
“Lord Gavriel!” Xartasia called triumphantly. “The Devourers come!”
“What?” Duaal asked.
But he had interrupted the opening spell. Had Xartasia somehow completed it? No, only Maeve and Gavriel knew how. That was the whole point of the Cult of Nihil’s work in Pylos. What the hells had happened?
The cultists abandoned their attack on the Prian cops and fell to their knees in the red-churned mud. Confused, the police lowered their weapons and began making arrests. The Nihilists didn’t even seem to notice. Gavriel didn’t turn his back on Duaal, either, but grinned like a child at the fair.
“It is done!” he shouted. “At long, long last…”
“No!” Duaal cried.
All around them, the Nihilists stared up at the growing shadows oozing from the Waygate. Even the police were still now, watching. A soft, sad song rose from the Arcadians. Loss and pain, all about to be ended…
“No, it’s not over yet,” Duaal said. He ran at Gavriel, singing and flinging fire. “We’re not finished with this!”
Gavriel waved the flames aside, still smiling. “Death is coming through that door for you, boy. Yet you insist on meeting it early! Very well, I will give you oblivion.”
He raised his fingers over his eyes like a spidery mask and sang in a powerful baritone.
“Anu’aa quai eru oraiva’i na!”
Gavriel was done playing games. Duaal twitched as the charge built in his brain, the electric spark that would trigger an aneurysm and kill him instantly. Duaal had only a fraction of a second, not nearly enough time to sing a counter-spell.
But the words… They were just symbols, too. Just a way for the Arcadians to create the memories, the thoughts that they needed. Tools, symbols… No more necessary than the hand gestures or the arcanery Duaal used to wear.
With a thought, Duaal pushed and Gavriel’s deadly spell discharged well short of its target, no more than a green zap of static. It was… easy.
Gavriel’s eyes went wide in his lined face. He tried again, calling for fire and lightning and blinding light. But Duaal knew all of the old man’s spells, all of those terrible songs that consumed the boy’s mind years ago.
Sweating but silent, Duaal sucked all the air out of the billowing fireballs, grounded the lightning into the stone, soothed his nerves before Gavriel could finish the charm that set them ablaze with crippling pain. Gavriel grimaced with concentration.
Those were all the magic Gavriel knew. The spells that Xartasia taught him, the songs composed by the Arcadians thousands of years ago. Whatever trick Xartasia used to give Gavriel the clarity of mind, that blank screen upon which a mage could write their will… Gavriel still knew only the spells that she could teach him.
But magic could do so, so much more than this handful of rote charms. Duaal didn’t know the words in Arcadian or even Aver to describe what he wanted, but he found that he could simply see it. Just as Panna said…
Duaal pointed at Gavriel. It was no more necessary than words or a song, but it felt good to level his finger at the old nightmare.
There you are, Gavriel. You’re not a monster in the darkness, just a broken man singing in the rain.
The falling rain began to bead up on Gavriel’s shoulders. The drops of water grew, merging and pooling across his sodden black robes. He raised his hands, splaying his fingers to rupture Duaal’s brain once more, and saw the water along his sleeves. A wet film was building up, stubbornly refusing to soak in or run off as it was supposed to.
“What is this?” Gavriel asked.
He shook his arm and a few drops of water scattered into the air, but the surface tension held. The cloak of water grew thicker and heavier. Gavriel tried to sing out his spell, but Duaal sent the water flowing over the old man’s face.
Gavriel choked and spluttered, his spell forgotten. He tried to swipe the water away, but couldn’t raise his arms against its growing weight. The rain dragged Gavriel to his knees, unable to move in his liquid prison. Duaal stood over his old master.
I… I did it. I beat him…!
A pale blur of motion made Duaal look up. No longer singing in her vain attempt to control the Waygate, Xartasia had taken wing and landed behind Gavriel. She still held her glass dagger in one white-gloved hand.
Duaal shoved wet hair out of his face, ready to fight her, too. But Xartasia smiled dazzlingly as she slid the knife through the water and between Gavriel’s ribs.
Shocked, Duaal lost control of his spell. The water broke and red-stained rain splashed down around Gavriel’s feet. The old man tried to draw a breath to speak, but blood poured from his mouth and the only sound he managed was a strangled gasp.
“You wished so long for death, Gavriel,” Xartasia said. “You have served your purpose. Now go.”
Gavriel’s body fell to the ground. Duaal stared, full of impossible questions, but Xartasia’s unexpected betrayal wasn’t the most important thing going on in the ravine.
Inky smoke had entirely obscured the Waygate and was now crawling in indistinct tendrils down the sides of the ziggurat. And then something stepped through the Waygate.
It was taller than even the biggest Hadrian that Duaal had ever seen, towering high over the mage. The thing had long legs and arms — two of each, like the Alliance species — but any other details were obscured by the faintly glittering black smoke that clung to the figure like clouds shrouding a mountain peak.
Every eye was on the blurry black shape as it slowly descended the white stairs and then stood wavering at the edge of the crowd. It raised one long, smoky black arm as though to greet the Nihilists, and then the darkness congealed into ebony claws. Without a word, the Devourer grabbed the closest cultist and sheared his arms off. Blood spurted up through the air and vanished into the midnight mist surrounding the alien creature.
The Nihilists’ ecstatic moans turned into primal screams. The death that the Nihilists had waited for so long to greet, as eager as expectant lovers, had finally arrived… and it was terrible. More of the huge bipedal shapes surged from the Waygate. Smoke-turned-metal snaked out, sinking long spikes and barbed hooks into flesh, pulling the Nihilists into the spreading darkness. Duaal was desperately grateful that their gruesome deaths were hidden in the swirling black smoke.
“Don’t just stand there!” he shouted to Cerro. “The Devourers are coming for Prianus!”
The cop bled from a dozen shallow wounds and stared up at the Devourers. But he shook himself and raised his gun.
“You heard him,” Cerro called out. “You know your job and you do it here, now! These things don’t go any further!”
The Prian police opened fire, pouring lead and lasers into the closest Devourer. The cloud swirled and hardened into something that looked like obsidian, but none of their weapons seemed to affect the great black monster at all.
“Aercaidae a’na, ellu la wexalli! Marnavae eru sha’narii bae!” Xartasia sang across the ravine. My Arcadians, stand back from the aliens! Let them die first!
All across the ravine, fairies spread their wings and took to the air, rising up into the rain. A dozen Devourers swarmed out through the ruined camp, grabbing Nihilists and police alike in claws and hooks. The crevasse was full of screams, but no blood or other gore. The Devourers left no remains.
Duaal fell swiftly back, but he slipped in a puddle and fell to the wet ground. Something hooked under his arms and pulled, but before he could lash out with summoned lightning or fire or anything else, he recognized Cerro’s scarred face.
The police officer dragged Duaal back behind one of the tailings piles. There were only eight cops left. Duaal recognized the woman with the eyepatch he had seen in Pylos only days before. She cradled a bundle of feathers and blood to her chest. Tears ran from her intact eye.
“It won’t take those Devourers long to finish this,” Cerro panted.
He pointed back toward the Waygate, where the smoky monsters were still tearing apart kneeling and fleeing Nihilists. Cerro grabbed Duaal’s shoulder.
“We don’t have mainstream access down here,” he said. “I need you to get up to the surface and call the station. Tell them what’s happened. We’ll hold this position, but it won’t be for long.”
Cerro was right. The screams of the Nihilists were rising up into a frenzied crescendo, but even that was beginning to fade out as they died. Two of the Devourers that had come through the Waygate were striding out into the ravine. Xartasia and many of the Arcadians perched high on the stony walls. The princess’ eyes were wide, but she didn’t look frightened. Her lips moved, but over the wind and screaming and the thundering voice of the Waygate, Duaal couldn’t hear a word.
The black cloud that surrounded the Devourers billowed outward, rushing toward the Prian cops. The one-eyed officer dropped the corpse of her hawk and aimed her Talon. Her shots bit into the leading edge of the Devourer’s fog, but merely struck deep black patches of smooth metal that vanished as quickly as they appeared. The strange smoke coiled into long tendrils, tipped with all-too-solid-looking blades.
The Devourer’s smoky shroud wasn’t limited to blades, though. Cylinders extended from the cloud, each as thick as Duaal’s wrist. Lasers burned out from them and swept the rocky heaps where the police took cover. Duaal threw himself to the ground.
When he lifted his face slowly out of the mud, the cop still knelt behind the tailings, both hands bracing her Talon, but her head was gone. Her blood sizzled and boiled as it dribbled through her cauterized jugular. Barbed obsidian hooks snapped out from the Devourer and yanked the still-twitching body away. Bones cracked and there were wet, tearing sounds.
“Get out of here!” Cerro bellowed. “Move!”
Duaal turned and ran again as Cerro and his remaining officers unloaded their guns into the Devourers. The alien monsters’ own weapons answered loudly.
Duaal didn’t look back, but bolted as fast as he could for the end of the ravine. The ladder hung precariously from the upper ledge, half dislodged by a stray shot. Duaal didn’t like the idea of trying to climb it. If it didn’t just fall off the wall, he would still make a slow-moving and exposed target for the Devourers. If only he could fly.
And why not…? We’re all flying through space on the surface of this planet anyway. Just… forget the gravity for a moment, the force that holds me down to the ground.
Duaal jumped. The ground fell away, rose steeply and then he was landing on the top of the crevasse.
