THE REFORGED TRILOGY: BOOK 2 — SWORD OF DREAMS
Chapter 36: Red & Black
“Inaction is itself a sort of action — a coward’s action.”
– Duaal Sinnay, Hyzaari mage (233 PA)
Logan stood with his back against Maeve’s soft wings. There were Nihilists everywhere, confused and frightened. Some were fleeing, others were fighting. He spun and thrust a kick into one charging cultist. Logan stepped aside to clear the path for Maeve’s spear. It thrust under the man’s ribs and withdrew as quickly as a striking snake.
A new shape vaulted up out of the ravine. But when he brought his Talon around, Logan found Duaal alighting on the wet stone, smeared with mud.
“Duaal? You… flew?” Maeve asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” the boy panted. “None of it matters now! I stopped Gavriel and… and Xartasia killed him! But the Devourers came through the Waygate anyway. Maeve, the Devourers are here!”
The inexorable voice of the Waygate still boomed across the mountain, a cold alien pronouncement of death. “Szo ghemma b’ho leng. Hotek mev khavvna tek vommen.”
That wasn’t Aver or any other language Logan had ever heard. The words meant nothing to him, but it did to Maeve. She turned away from the horror-struck Duaal with silver-gray eyes wide and full of tears.
“I have failed,” Maeve said in a choked voice. “The Devourers have come again and they will tear the Alliance apart.”
Logan could barely hear her over the shouts and shots, but he could read her lips and the despair on her face. He knew the story well enough to know what that meant, and Maeve well enough to know that she would go down fighting. Logan’s fingers tightened on the grip of his gun. No, she would not die and he wouldn’t make her watch another civilization fall. He grabbed Maeve’s shoulder and made her look at him.
“These things can be killed, can’t they?” he asked.
“Yes,” Maeve answered. “But it is difficult. Orthain fought many, but killed only two. Even their own bodies do not remain after death, so we could never discover any frailty–”
A scream and a bolt of red laserfire sliced up from the Waygate ravine, cutting Maeve off. The Nihilists remaining on the surface were either fleeing in horror at the carnage below or flinging themselves over the edge, arms spread wide to embrace their death. Those who tried to run were not getting very far. The Devourers were fast, efficient and… Logan squinted down into the mist. Led by Xartasia, the Arcadian Nihilists were intercepting their coreworlder companions and pushing them back toward the Devourers.
Logan released Maeve’s shoulder. The Raptor hunkered on the mountainside, cleaned of snow by the rain, and he ran toward it. Three Nihilists surrounded the ship, shouting and pulling at something underneath.
“The end has come!” laughed a man with ash on his face. “Time to go!”
Logan’s shot burned through his shoulder from behind. The other two cultists — a scarred Hadrian and a Mirran with tattooed stripes — turned toward him and brandished their weapons. With a sing-song cry, Maeve fell on them from above like an avenging angel. Her glass spear-point slid into the neck of the Hadrian as her feet came down on the Mirran beside them. The force of her landing drove the Nihilist to their knees. She pulled her spear free of the Hadrian and leapt into the air once more. As Maeve landed, she slashed her spear through the kneeling Mirran’s throat.
Even injured and drugged, Maeve moved with speed and grace. Logan felt a smile tug at the corners of his mouth. She was small, but so fierce. The fairy made something inside Logan blaze just like the Waygate, and it was no less dangerous. It was confusing, but he couldn’t afford to be confused right now.
“What the hells took you so long?” growled a voice from under the Raptor.
Logan brought up his Talon and Maeve leveled her spear. Gruth crawled out from underneath the ship, dragging his blood-smeared leg behind him. Duaal ran over and held out his hand.
“What happened up here?” he asked.
“Up here…? What the hells is going on down there? What’s all that noise about?” Gruth asked. He snarled and spat on one of the Nihilist corpses. “Where’s Tiberius? He was supposed to come get this ugly thing!”
Logan ignored Gruth and climbed up onto the metal wing, then pried open the cockpit. The printlock wasn’t working, but Logan jumped down into the pilot’s seat.
“What are you doing?” Duaal asked.
“Taking off,” Logan said. “Get out of the way.”
He toggled a row of switches and the engines began cycling up. There was no time for a full pre-flight check, but he made sure that Gruth’s tinkering hadn’t taken down any of the Raptor’s weapons. Logan would need those.
Gruth was trying to rise on his wounded leg. Duaal helped him stand and pointed to one of the police vans.
“We need to get you in there, with Panna and Xia,” Duaal said. “They can help you. Once you’re inside the van, radio down to the Pylos police. Tell them what’s going on here and then get off the mountain!”
Maeve was watching Logan. He grabbed the interior handle of the canopy and yanked it down, sealing the cockpit. He pulled up on the stick and the Raptor rose steeply.
The mountain fell away beneath Logan, acceleration pressing him back into the seat. He yanked the Long Wings release handle and the Raptor surged into the sky as the weight of the extra engines fell away. The pod slammed into the rocky ground below and crumpled like a fizz can. At the peak of his climb, Logan rolled the Raptor over and let the nose fall.
The whole ravine looked as though it was burning, black smoke crawling unnaturally along the broken stone. Coldhand tightened his fingers on the triggers. Lasers swept the mouth of the narrow canyon, raking the smoke and whatever it concealed. The shots flashed as they hit something, sparking off of solid metal. The smoke was pulling inward, darkening and thickening. And then the lasers burned through whatever it was and the strange black clouds drifted apart like true smoke.
Maeve was right. These Devourers were tough and strong, but not invincible.
Logan dropped his Raptor into the ravine. He had to see what he was shooting, or else his weapon batteries were going to give out. Proximity indicators lit up a warning orange as his fighter slipped between the narrow fissure walls. Coldhand yawed the ship to one side to avoid an outcropping of stone, then pulled back hard as he grazed the ravine floor and came to a hovering stop.
The canyon was choked by black mist. It smoldered in a dozen individual clouds, roiling and churning, but never dispersing. The Devourers had noticed Logan’s Raptor and were forming up into ranks. The huge Waygate rose over the sea of churning black fog, shining brightly in comparison. The lambent stones of the ring pulsed with angry red light in time with the voice ringing off of the ravine’s walls.
“Szo ghemma b’ho leng. Hotek mev khavvna tek vommen.”
Where were the bodies? There had been more than a hundred people down there. The Raptor’s floodlight illuminated a Devourer tearing apart a body in the remains of a blue uniform with a pair of barbed hooks. A badge winked in the fragile light before it, too, was consumed — Captain Cerro.
A hot red laser beam fired up from one of the deep black clouds surrounding a towering Devourer and struck the underside of the Raptor. Logan rolled the fighter away before it could burn through the armor. When the Raptor leveled out, he flipped up the safeties on the missiles and jabbed his thumb down on the button. A flock of missiles sped from the launchers like angry falcons. The warheads fanned out and detonated around the foot of the Waygate. The concussion rebounded from the walls of the canyon, buffeting the Raptor. Logan held the fighter steady and fired another volley of missiles.
The Devourers’ shrouds contracted into smaller black bubbles as the missiles exploded. Columns of true smoke began to rise from the cratered ravine floor and lasers flashed up to answer him. Logan held down the trigger of the Raptor’s own lasers and raked them across the Devourers below.
The police fighter shook as it reached the side of the ravine and the wing impacted the rocky wall. Logan ignored the Raptor’s shrill warnings and centered the targeting reticule on the Waygate. If he could destroy the gate, he could stop the Devourers from coming through. The missile launchers were nearly empty, but he intended to put the Waygate’s invulnerability to the test.
Maeve covered Duaal as he helped Gruth limp down the slope to the van. The rain and fog were closing in again, turning the mountain into a nightmare island floating high over Prianus. Arcadians moved through the mist like ghosts, silent now. Maeve thought she saw Xartasia and called out, but the indistinct shape paid no attention and slid away, out of sight.
“Do you think Logan can destroy the Devourers and the Waygate?” Duaal asked.
“No,” Maeve said.
The Waygates were millions of years old and had weathered the ages without a mark. Maeve doubted that even coreworld weapons could do much to the great monument. Duaal’s lower lip trembled, but he nodded resolutely.
“Fine,” he said. “So what can we do?”
“Logan will fight fiercely.” Maeve gripped her spear so hard that her fingers trembled. Her hunter was down there alone with the Devourers. “I need to take advantage of the time that his weaponry will buy us. I must take control of the Waygate and close it.”
“Like in Tamlin,” Duaal said. “Hurry, Maeve.”
Something cracked and thundered down in the ravine. Lasers whined and then Maeve heard the deeper, harder impacts of larger weapons. She ran to the edge of the ravine and jumped, spreading her wings and diving down. Her tattered clothes flapped against her cold, wet skin. Not for the first time, Maeve was grateful for Xia’s medicines. There would be time for pain later, if anyone survived this.
Logan’s Raptor shook again and sheered to the side, away from the wall. Something impacted hard against one wing and a long-limbed Devourer clung to the fibersteel. Logan couldn’t see the alien’s face — only more swirling, stormy black smoke.
He fought to keep the Raptor level as the cloud swelled and a pseudopod rose up. The smoke condensed into a dark metal axe and crashed down against the canopy. The glassteel cracked and Logan threw his cybernetic arm up to shield his face. The Devourer punched another hole into the Raptor’s canopy and yanked, tearing the whole thing away.
Coldhand pulled his Talon-9 from its holster and fired at the thing’s head. The cloud did its armoring trick again, presenting a solid shield. Logan’s laser threw sparks from the black as it burned. He tried shooting around the edge of the hardened darkness, but the solidified cloud followed his fire.
It reacted to everything that Logan did, anticipating his attacks and responding. The Devourer’s black smoke had to be some kind of nanomachinery. Like cleaning nanites swarming over a fresh stain, the cloud was always moving toward the next problem, the next threat. It made sense… The armor did look for all the worlds like smoke and one hundred years ago, the Arcadians of the White Kingdom had no knowledge of the tiny machines. They would have had no idea what they were fighting.
The glittering black nanite cloud was capable of much more than protection. The Devourer created a long tentacle, tipped in a sharp blade that rippled with oily, barely visible color up and down its length.
Just like Hallax’s nanosword.
The tentacle slithered into the cockpit and Logan tried to dodge out of the way, but his harness held him in place. The Devourer slashed his shoulder and then buried itself deep in the seat back. The blade dissolved into a cloud and retreated, only to be replaced by another, poised to strike.
The Raptor was listing dangerously to the side, grinding the left wing hard against the ravine wall. Logan held down the trigger of his Talon-9, hoping a sustained burn could overwhelm the nanite cloud. The sharpened arm rose and aimed at Logan’s heart.
A white-winged shape dove into the ravine and pounced on the Devourer. The inky cloud of nanites had pulled forward to deal with Logan and the Raptor, leaving the back only thinly protected. Maeve thrust her glass spear into the Devourer. Very familiar red blood splashed the wing of the Raptor and the Devourer turned to face the Arcadian, bladed armor coiled to strike.
Logan yanked the control stick and rolled the Raptor dizzyingly. Maeve and the Devourer slid along the wing and toppled down into the ravine. The Devourer plummeted to the ground and was swallowed by the black clouds of the other monsters as they spread out from the steps of the Waygate.
Maeve tumbled head over heels and Logan’s heart skipped a beat. Then her wings unfurled and she swooped back up into the air, chased by barbed black hooks and searing lasers. Logan piloted the Raptor beneath Maeve as she soared past, placing himself between the princess and the Devourers. Their nanite clouds ripped into his armor plating and the instrument panels began to flicker red. One of the engines exploded. He fought to keep the Raptor aloft, but he was sinking beak-first toward the rocks.
Logan pulled the ejection handle. This low and in the narrow, rocky confines of the ravine, he would probably bounce off the walls and kill himself, but it was better than just letting himself fall into the nebulous black hands of the monsters below. The explosive bolts fired, but the Devourer had done too much damage. The seat whined and would not budge.
His Raptor continued its dying downward spiral, trembling as the Devourers fired into it again and again. Logan ripped the harness open and climbed laboriously to his feet. What now?
“Logan!”
The bounty hunter looked up at the sound of his name. Maeve dove at the Raptor again. Her spear was gone and her arms were open. The fairy touched down briefly on the edge of the cockpit, wrapped her arms around Logan’s waist and then jumped.
Xia’s medicine wasn’t that good. Maeve groaned as she struggled to rise. Logan was laying on one of her wings. The bounty hunter was heavy, even for a human, and his metal hand dug into the sensitive skin of her back.
They had crash-landed to one side of the Waygate, just a wingspan away from the ravine’s wall. The Raptor had crashed into the rock on the other side of the Waygate. Logan’s fighter was a crumpled, torn pile of smoldering wreckage. Two Devourers jumped over the twisted metal and loped toward Maeve and Logan in long, easy strides.
Maeve shoved at Logan, but the bounty hunter’s blond hair was streaked with blood and his eyes were shut. He had hit his head, but was still breathing.
“Logan! Wake up,” she shouted. “I need you!”
The Prian’s blue eyes fluttered and then snapped open. Maeve and Logan pulled themselves up as the Devourers stalked closer.
“I must close the Waygate,” Maeve said. She looked up at Logan. “It will take all of my concentration.”
“I’ll cover you,” her hunter promised. He wiped the blood out of his eyes.
Logan grabbed his Talon off the ground nearby and dashed with Maeve for the stairs of the Waygate. The steps vibrated under their feet as they climbed and the warning voice of the Waygate here was so loud that Maeve’s ears ached.
“Szo ghemma b’ho leng. Hotek mev khavvna tek vommen.”
Behind them, the Devourers broke into a loping run. Maeve’s legs were heavy and tired. They were shorter than Logan’s, too, and she tripped as she struggled to keep up. The hunter hooked his arm around her waist and helped her scale the oversized stairs, but the Devourers were closing quickly. They were tall enough to climb the stairs easily. Logan shoved Maeve away.
“Fly, Maeve. Go stop this,” he told her. “I’ll hold these things off until it’s done.”
Maeve spread her bruised and battered wings as Logan turned to face the Devourers. For a moment, he looked just like Orthain, shoulders squared against the faceless black demons coming for him and golden hair glinting in the fitful light as Maeve flew away. What had she ever done to earn the loyalty of such men…?
Maeve landed on top of the ziggurat. The Waygate yawned open before her. The sectioned ring was full of shadows and flashing red light, but she could see nothing beyond. How many Devourers had come through? No matter the answer, Maeve had little time. She felt it pressing in on her like a lead weight.
Gavriel hadn’t finished even Maeve’s botched spell. Could she close the Pylos Waygate the same way she had the one on Tamlin? Maybe not… but Maeve had no other ideas. She raised her dirty, shaking hands to the huge ring of burning light.
“No!”
In a swirl of angelic white, Xartasia landed in front of Maeve, holding a slim glass dagger with blood still bright red on the blade. Xartasia spun, dancing close, and sliced her blade against the inside of Maeve’s wing. She took to the air again and landed on top of the Waygate.
Maeve tried to follow her cousin, but her injured wing buckled and would not bear her weight. She was confined to the ground, like any coreworlder. It was humiliating, but there was still work to do. Maeve turned back toward the Waygate and raised her hands again. From on high, Xartasia called out to her.
“Turn away, Maeve,” she said in a ringing voice. “What I have done today, I have done for our home and our people. For Arcadia. Do not fight me!”
“You have told me that before, as Gavriel tortured me!” Maeve shouted. “You would have me lie down and die while you sew ruin through the stars!”
“Not ruin,” Xartasia said, “but rebirth!”
Maeve couldn’t listen anymore. There wasn’t time. So she closed her eyes and struggled to recall the words she had sung a hundred years ago to seal the Tamlin Waygate. As Orthain fought, just like Logan did now. Yes, she remembered…
“Ai’ae anna cellia bahn, senna eru vaen’na denno selequa’an…” Maeve began.
Her voice was rough and cracked, but a sweet song didn’t matter now. The Waygate seemed to hesitate. The ember light faded to a cautious orange.
“Szo ghemma b’ho leng… leng… Leng zhoka,” intoned the loud alien voice.
An impossible hope caught in Maeve’s throat. She forced herself to continue singing. “…Ellu oi’va scaeden sen eru’ma–”
On her pinnacle perch, Xartasia spread her wings and began to sing, too. “Alluna s’aelim wain’ii mae shassa keth am’avain!”
Her song reverberated with certain authority as Xartasia fought to keep the Waygate open. The portal burned hellfire red again and throbbed with darkness.
“Scennu varii lae ellu’da eira sessar,” she sang. “Qu’ii laess lai jaisha dii aes’ii soshin mae!”
“Aelex ferro mennal’ae. Aetrix dumma’ii!” Maeve shouted back.
Xartasia slashed through the air with her glass dagger. “Laennal emanuu shoda’aev ailina latam. Aetrix sumanni eleo ana va’an!”
The Pylos Waygate glowered like an angry, sleepless eye.
Logan checked the charge on his Talon-9, ejected the battery and slapped in a new one. He had only one more, and then the hunter was down to his bare hands.
He could pick out individual Devourers now. The cloudy edges of their nanite armor overlapped and turned the aliens into a single seething mass… but it shifted in distinct patterns, with each swarm following the movements of single creatures inside. Logan counted sixteen Devourers remaining in the ravine. He could hear Maeve and Xartasia’s warring songs at the apex of the Waygate. While they were battling for control, at least, nothing more seemed to be coming through. But if Xartasia won, how many more Devourers would descend on Prianus?
Five of the nightmares were charging the Waygate now. Maeve needed Logan to protect her while she sang. She needed him… It was a sweet, painful thought, but there was no time to wonder at it. The Devourers were on him.
The first one up the stairs stabbed a sharp tendril at him, black nanite cloud coalescing at the last moment into a wickedly curved blade. Logan threw himself against the banister. The nanite sword glanced off the edge of the step, actually slicing a deep wedge into what had seemed to be impenetrable white material.
The Devourers certainly possessed and knew how to use lasers, but they seemed to favor bladed or hooked melee weapons, Logan noted clinically. If they were eating the dead, maybe the Devourers didn’t want to burn away any more flesh than they had to. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Logan could stand up against swords a little longer than lasers.
He took aim at one of the Devourers and fired. Its nanite cloud reacted at once, condensing into a shield just like the one that had attacked him in the Raptor. More shots at the same target met with the same resistance. The hand-held Talon-9 wasn’t as powerful as the Raptor’s mounted lasers. By the time Logan could thin out the nanite cloud enough to score a meaningful hit, the others would be tearing Maeve apart.
So Logan changed tactics, shooting at the Devourer’s wide chest instead of the smaller, more defensible head. But in mere fractions of a second, the nanites moved and hardened there, too. Whatever computer controlled the microscopic machines swiftly picked up on Logan’s firing pattern and anticipated him, presenting a shield for each target even as he aimed.
The Devourers were closing in and Logan had to give ground, climbing up another tall step. There were four of them in range now, all reaching for the hunter. He held down the Talon’s trigger and raked a hot line of red light across their indistinct bodies. The nanites hardened to take the fire and the Devourers didn’t slow.
There was no room. If Logan stayed on the stairs, he was going to die. And then who would protect Maeve? Logan jumped and scrambled up onto the wide white balustrade, then leapt over a slice from an obsidian sword. The blade lengthened and arced after Logan as he slid down the wet, steep incline. He fired as he went, burning into the nanite armor over and over again. He had to keep their interest off of Maeve.
At the bottom of the stairs, the wreckage of his Raptor was still smoking. As Logan bolted away from the Devourers, they opened fire with their own lasers. Logan dove behind his crashed ship. It would never fly again, but at least its thick armor was still useful.
More of the Devourers took note of the scuffle at the foot of the Waygate. Nine… no, ten of the huge, dark aliens charged at Logan now. If he was going to keep them away from Maeve, he needed to figure out a way through the nanite armor.
The bounty hunter dashed out from behind cover and emptied the last of the Talon-9’s battery into the encroaching Devourers. He aimed high, for the blurry lumps of their heads. One, two, three long burns and still it wasn’t enough to get through.
The Devourers answered with a blazing inferno of return shots. Logan dove back behind the Raptor. The engines were designed to shut down when they had suffered this kind of damage and probably wouldn’t explode. The heat had melted the last of the snow, though, and left bare, steaming stone.
Logan ejected the battery from his Talon-9 and then loaded his last one. As soon as the indicator glowed green again, Logan leaned over the Raptor’s broken wings and opened fire on the Devourers again. They had closed most of the distance to the fighter’s smoking wreckage and now sliced at the metal with sharp nanite weapons again.
The Devourers couldn’t be operating the vast nanite swarms themselves. There were too many of the tiny machines. They had to be receiving instructions from a computer. As fast as Logan was, he wasn’t faster than a computer… But computers were also stupid. They would analyze Logan’s shots, predicting where the next ones would go and thickening the dark armor accordingly.
He shifted his aim, firing into the Devourer’s cloud at random. They were clumsy shots, but chaotic enough to confuse the computers, making them hesitate. The Devourer howled in pain as one of Logan’s shots struck. The black cloud pulled inwards and a dark patch covered the Devourer’s leg where he had hit it. Administering medical attention? That meant fewer nanites dedicated to defense.
Logan poured laserfire into the black mass, always changing his target. The glittering nanites swirled in confusion, unable to calculate the Prian’s pattern. The Devourer staggered and fell into the melting snow with a loud thump. The last wisps of smoky nanites swarmed furiously around the body. The corpse folded and shrank as the Devourer’s own armor consumed it, leaving behind nothing but a greasy-looking smear on the ground.
The rest of the Devourers hissed in fury. They were all coming for Logan now.
The bounty hunter squinted. The cut on his scalp was sheeting blood again. Rather than fan out and surround him, the Devourers remained close together, their ashy armor reinforcing one another, but there were enough of them to circle Logan, and the ring was closing fast.
Even the overlapping black nanite clouds didn’t seem to help their computers understand Logan’s randomized attacks. A second Devourer fell and vanished, consumed by its own armor.
Two of the towering monsters spared nanites enough to create long, thin spears and jabbed them at Logan. He burned through one of them with a wide shot from his Talon, but the other needled through his pants, grazed the flesh beneath and pinned Logan against his Raptor.
Another giant of shadow was suddenly swinging a huge broadsword with a hooked tip. The Devourer spun and sliced at Logan. He threw himself down to the ground with a grunt, but his leg was still pinned and twisted awkwardly. The huge nanite sword missed, dissolved and formed again.
Logan struggled to rise, but could not get his feet under him. He splayed awkwardly on his back and held down the Talon’s trigger. He would buy Maeve every second he could.
Sweat streamed down the back of Maeve’s neck. She was getting sleepy, as Xia warned she might. A soft, heavy weight tugged at her, urging her to lie down. To just… stop. To stop fighting. Her eyelids drifted down and her song faltered.
Something hissed and there was a sharp crackle. Maeve jerked again as a Devourer reached for her from deep inside the Waygate. She jumped back and fumbled for the words of the closing charm.
“Aetrix dumma’ii!” she cried. “Ma’an ae sua’nii vanni la shannoel vellius en assai!”
The Waygate shivered again and the Devourer vanished into the hollow darkness of the huge ring, unable to pass through. Maeve was barring the door… but she couldn’t seal it, not with Xartasia perched gloriously on high and crooning her own song. They were locked in a magical stalemate. At least until Maeve’s already faltering strength finally failed her.
Logan was already doing all he could, more than she ever would have asked of him. Down below, the bounty hunter had his back against the ruins of his fighter and was surrounded by Devourers, each twice the Prian’s not insignificant size. If he was to die, Maeve could at least ensure that his sacrifice wasn’t in vain.
“A’allu sa–” She broke off the song suddenly, took a deep, cold breath and shouted. “Duaal! Help me!”
Duaal stood alone in the cloudy gray of the mountaintop, waiting. Waiting for salvation or damnation. It could only have been a few minutes since Maeve and Logan vanished into the ravine, but it seemed like an eternity.
Wind tugged at his torn and bloodstained coat, making it flutter behind him like the tattered banner in a losing war. The Waygate’s deafening call filled his ears. It was alien, but Duaal didn’t have to understand the words to know the message. Something was terribly wrong. The monotone thunder had faltered once, but not for long and resumed only seconds later.
But now… Duaal thought he heard his name. He squinted back down the rain-filled moraine, but no one was there. As he had told her to, Panna was driving the police van down the mountain, back toward Pylos. But there it was again. Duaal could just hear a frantic voice calling up from the red-lit fissure. It was Maeve, screaming for his help.
Duaal ran to the ravine’s crumbling edge. It was full of seething smoke and flashing red light. The sharp-salty smell of blood filled Duaal’s nose and he could just make out the tall, impossibly dark and shifting shapes of Devourers below. If he went down there… Duaal shuddered.
But Maeve would never ask for his help unless there was nothing else to be done. Duaal squinted through the gloom. There! He spotted a pair of white-winged figures at the Waygate — one dressed in perfect ivory and the other in tattered rags.
Duaal jumped. It was far easier to lighten gravity’s touch than to completely ignore it. The mage fell through the crimson-lit smoke and landed lightly beside Maeve. Xartasia balanced lightly on the uppermost curve of the Waygate ring and stared at Duaal. Her song faltered, but Xartasia was too confident and too regal to be shaken for long.
Huge, angry shapes strained to push through the Waygate, but the portal was stuck halfway between open and closed. The vaguely humanoid shapes shoved and swirled like ink in a glass.
Maeve’s already white skin was the color of ash on snow. She trembled and one of her wings was spattered in red. Her song was breathless and shook even harder than her body. Maeve turned her bloodshot gray eyes on Duaal.
“Help me…” she gasped between snatches of song, so quickly that Duaal almost couldn’t catch the words. “Su vaenna emmai’i — Xartasia knows my spell too well — Illuna mae kennuva eru fen — She counters me too easily! Hae enna ma jullen aetra’am’ii.”
Metal clanged in a flat tone like a hellish gong. Below, Logan Coldhand was on the ground, his leg twisted up against the side of his smoking Raptor. He had parried aside a killing blow from one Devourer with his cybernetic hand and the black sword gouged a deep, rough furrow in the Raptor’s hull. Coldhand answered with a bright bolt from his Talon-9 that drove the Devourer back, but two more closed in.
Logan couldn’t hold out for much longer. The Devourers knew it, and a single human man — especially one full of metal — wasn’t going to make much of a meal, Duaal guessed. Several of the black shapes separated themselves from the ring and billowed across the ravine, toward the Waygate. Maeve saw them and let out a low, raw moan of sorrow.
Xartasia sang. Her sweet voice cut through all other sound, as sharp as the dagger in her hand. She held the blade up, as though signaling the coming Devourers.
“You keep Xartasia fighting for control,” Duaal told Maeve. “I’ll close the Waygate.”
The mage tried to sound brave, but his voice cracked. The Devourers were halfway up the stairs and would be on them soon.
Maeve nodded, still singing. Logan’s Talon shrilled again, and then there was a snarl of pain from the bounty hunter. Tears rolled down Maeve’s cheeks, joining the sweat and soaking the black hair plastered against her skin.
Duaal stared up at the glowing Waygate. It was… immense. Not just in size. He stood before a hole in the universe, connecting this mountain to… to wherever the Devourers were. This Waygate, this gap in space meant that distance was just an illusion, or at least a rule that could be bent and broken. The distance that separated Arcadia from the Alliance, Prianus from the deep core… None of that meant anything.
The Devourers had reached the top of the white stairs. Duaal heard Maeve’s scream and felt the cold shadow of one of the monsters looming over him. He heard the grinding, buzzing sound of the black cloud reaching for him. So close… but even that distance was an illusion.
What was distance? The space between one atom and the next. But what did distance matter? Duaal found himself smiling. Had he lost his mind? But Maeve and Logan… Even when he had stopped hunting her, even when an entire galaxy separated them, they still found each other again.
Maeve was no longer singing as she fought for her life against a Devourer that had wrapped her in rattling chains. Xartasia’s clear voice crescendoed in triumph as the Waygate rang and seethed, wreathed in scarlet light. The barrier was gone and the Devourers surged through again, a ravenous black storm of death that would rage across the whole galaxy.
A pair of Devourers grabbed Duaal by his outstretched arms. Claws bit painfully into his flesh and freed rivulets of blood that spattered the white ground. But Duaal didn’t need his hands. He could feel the tight-strung power thrumming through the Waygate, thousands and thousands of strands of pure potential that linked the great ring to every other point in the universe. An axis, a center upon which all things could turn, if he would only give it a push.
Duaal closed his eyes and remembered the Waygate as it had been, slumbering in its veil of soft, pale light. Before any of this.
No more, he thought. Go. Leave us in peace.
And then everything stopped. The entire Waygate crevasse fell as still and silent as the void. When Duaal opened his eyes again, he was alone in the ravine with Maeve and Logan. They stared around in disbelief, amazed to still be alive.
Duaal laughed hysterically and then fell to his knees and began to cry. Tiberius had been right. He did it.
