THE REFORGED TRILOGY: BOOK 3 — HAMMER OF TIME
Chapter 36: Time & Truth
“A queen armed with truth needs no spear.”
– Titania Cavainna (234 PA)
The Blue Phoenix descended into the darkness. Maeve could make no sense of the numbers and vectors that Logan read off to Duaal, but the young mage nodded at each one and made tiny corrections to their course. The Blue Phoenix’s lights played off the tunnel’s flat side and the ragged edges of cracked and torn stone. A few Nnyth crawled and flew along the passage’s sides.
Unable to help with the navigation, Maeve studied the wasps instead. Like their guide, most of them seemed to be injured. Their wings were torn and limbs were missing. Several had lost eyes or antennae. All of the Nnyth watched the ship pass with huge multicolored eyes.
The tunnel ended suddenly and Maeve’s stomach lurched. The Blue Phoenix was in a large chamber, one so vast that the ship’s bright dorsal spotlights couldn’t reach the side… Ceiling, in truth. There was gravity inside the huge cavern. Not strong, but enough to tug against the artificial network inside the Blue Phoenix.
Duaal rotated the ship to align with the local gravity. Maeve pressed her hand to her mouth and stared around. The Nnyth that they followed had landed on the only thing that Maeve could see — a pentagonal pillar of stone rising from the darkness far below.
“Can we land on that?” she asked, pointing.
“I… think so,” Duaal said. “It looks just big enough for the Blue Phoenix. Is there anything else out there?”
Logan scanned the readouts. “More Nnyth. About two hundred of them. But that’s all I can see.”
“Two hundred is more than enough to kill us if we set foot out there,” Duaal said.
“Two hundred is more than enough to kill us inside the Blue Phoenix, too,” Maeve pointed out. “Is there atmosphere?”
“A little,” Duaal answered. “It’s pretty thin, but there’s enough oxygen for us to breathe. Xia might have her own opinion, though.”
Maeve wiped sweat-damp hands on the thighs of her pants. “Let us discover what the Nnyth want, then.”
Logan followed Maeve out of the cockpit as Duaal set the Blue Phoenix down on the black stone pillar. Anthem, Gripper and Xia waited in the mess. They all stood.
“What’s going on?” Gripper asked. “Are we inside the Tower?”
Maeve nodded. “Yes. It is broken… There is no sign of Xartasia, but that may mean nothing. The surviving Nnyth seem to want something of us. They have brought us to a place to land. We will go to meet them. Be careful — there is little gravity or air outside.”
“I’ll get the emergency canisters,” Xia said.
“We’ll meet you down in the hold,” Logan told her.
Anthem was already wearing his glass armor and held his spear at his side. He fell into step behind Maeve and Logan as they made their way down into the Blue Phoenix’s hold. It wasn’t hot or even particularly warm on the ship, but there were beads of sweat along the knight’s hairline. Maeve had not spoken with Anthem since she and Logan had exchanged their oathsongs. Teasing but genuinely pleased comments and smiles from Gripper and Duaal led Maeve to believe that the entire ship had overheard the aftermath, if not the songs themselves. Maeve blushed.
They reached the nearly empty hold just as the Blue Phoenix jolted gently underfoot. Duaal had landed. He jogged down into the cargo bay a moment later, coattails flapping, followed swiftly by Xia. She held six small yellow canisters and handed them out.
“There’s about an hour of extra air in each of these,” she told everyone.
“Thanks,” Duaal said. “But if Xartasia’s got something sneaky up her dress sleeve here, I suspect air is going to be the least of our worries.”
“Better not to have to worry about it at all,” Xia answered.
Maeve tucked the extra air into a pocket of her pants and went to the airlock controls. She was no expert in coreworld technology, but the door was simple enough. Her hands hovered over the red-lit button. Maeve looked at her friends.
“None of you need to go with me,” she told them. “This journey was my decision and is my responsibility.”
“You’re not going alone,” Logan said.
Maeve smiled. She did not expect her enarri to let her face the Nnyth on her own. But she waited for the rest. Sir Anthem stepped wordlessly toward the airlock. Duaal held out gloved hands in a helpless gesture.
“I promised you my ship, Maeve,” he said. “Until this is done, we’re all yours.”
Xia and Gripper nodded. Maeve pressed the airlock button. The inner doors slid open and they stepped through. Duaal pressed the next large, glowing rectangular button and the doors closed again. There was a hiss and then the outer door slid to the side. Thin, damp air filled the airlock and Maeve felt dizzy. Gripper had to lean against the side of the airlock until he adjusted. And then, one by one, they stepped out into the Tower.
Duaal was right. The stone column was barely large enough for the Blue Phoenix to land on top of. At the back of the ship, they stood right next to a deadly plunge down into utter darkness. Lights studded the vessel, but none of them did much to illuminate the shadows.
Maeve took a step, spread her wings and leapt easily into the air. Duaal shouted for her not to go far and then broke into a fit of coughing. The air was thin, but the Tower’s gravity was even weaker and Maeve beat her wings slowly, hovering above the Blue Phoenix. She searched the inky shadows for the Nnyth who had brought them, but there was no sign of the great wasp.
“Now what?” Duaal asked when he had recovered his breath.
“Now we speak,” answered a hundred voices. Each one was just a fluttering, rasping whisper — but together, they became a hissing thunder that made Maeve want to clap her hands over her ears.
A pale blue glow rose from far, far below and filled the chamber with light. It wasn’t as large as Maeve had supposed. The ceiling was far above, yes, but the walls were much closer than she originally guessed. It was not so much a chamber as a vast shaft.
And it was full of Nnyth. Two hundred star wasps clung to the vertical walls, overlapping one another until the whole thing was a cathedral of long diaphanous wings and graceful striped bodies, studded all over by the whirling rainbows of Nnyth eyes. Antennae waved like grass in the wind.
“What happened to the Tower?” Maeve asked, gasping to catch breath enough for the question.
“Titania came here,” said the whispering, shouting answer. The Nnyth spoke together, in perfect unison. Each single voice was soft, but together, they were a storm.
“Is Titania here still?” Anthem asked. His question was raw and desperate.
“Titania came here,” the Nnyth said again. “She came with the First, the eldest of this galaxy. They call themselves Glorious, but you call them the Devourers. The first life known in these worlds, the firstborn who left the galaxy behind.”
“How the hells do you know so much about the Devourers?” Duaal asked. “We’ve tried our best, but all we have are guesses.”
“Our individual lifespans are not as long as those of the aerads,” the Nnyth said together. “But the memory of the Tower is ancient. Together, we remember.”
“A hive mind,” Xia breathed. Her short antennae twitched.
“As you and your kind have long since forgotten, little cousin. The Ixthian passion for life, for the perfection of their families and worlds is no mystery to us. You were once a part of the Tower. You knew the thoughts and needs of one as those of all. The health of one was the health of all.”
Maeve beat her wings slowly. It didn’t take much to remain aloft in the Tower’s low gravity, even in the thin air.
“Xartasia,” she said. “Please, can you tell us why she was here? Were there Arcadians with her, too?”
“Yes, many,” the Nnyth answered. “Xartasia and the First came with ships full of aerads.”
“What did she want?” Maeve asked.
A rattling, hissing sound echoed through the ruins of the Tower. “At the heart of the Tower is a Waygate. The largest of the Waygates, built by the First to carry their ships out of this galaxy in search of food. Only the greatest gates would serve her purpose and Titania demanded its use.”
“Did you let her?”
There was another great hiss like thousand warning snakes.
“No,” said the Nnyth.
Maeve waited, then asked, “What did she want with it? There are a hundred Waygates across the White Kingdom. What need did she have for yours?”
“Was it a matter of size?” Logan asked, raising his voice to the Nnyth. “We interrupted her work on Pylos. Did she summon more Devourers? With a Waygate this size, she could have summoned entire ships. A fleet of Devourers.”
Maeve’s blood ran as cold as ice. If Logan was right, there was nothing that they could do. With an army of Devourers behind her, Xartasia would destroy the entire galaxy. Even if the Alliance rose up against her now, it would be far too late.
“Is… is that what happened here?” Maeve asked. “Did Xartasia summon the Devourers and then destroy the Tower?”
“No,” the Nnyth whispered. “Xartasia did not break the Tower. We did. We would not let Titania take the Waygate.”
“You did this?” Duaal said loudly. “We could barely get samples from the Pylos Waygate! It sat through a million years of quakes in the mountains. How did you crack yours in half?”
Hundreds of multicolored eyes fixed on the young Hyzaari man. “Power is as creative or destructive as its wielder. What burns in the heart of stars exists within us all to summon forth. You know this, Duaal Sinnay. You have felt it.”
“How do you know my name?” Duaal asked. “How do you know about any of us? Hells, how do you speak such good Aver?”
“The Tower remembers,” buzzed and hissed the Nnyth. “We remember what has happened, what will happen… And what might have happened. The Tower stands high above time and space. We see far.”
“But why did you destroy the Tower?” Maeve asked. She didn’t understand. “What could Xartasia possibly have asked that would make you destroy your own home rather than give it over to her?”
“She wishes the return of the White Kingdom. She would tear time apart,” said hundreds of dry voices in perfect unison. “Titania would unmake history.”
“What?” Maeve landed on the sharp nose of the Blue Phoenix and stared into the impossible column of Nnyth. “How?”
“Through the Waygate. Like all the First’s greatest creations, the Waygates depend upon thought and memory. We taught your Ivory Spire to hold in thought the place they wished to go, to open your Waygates to those locations. Titania would open our Waygate to another time.”
“That’s what she wanted the Arcadians for,” Logan said. “Why she didn’t want anyone born after the fall. She needs the old fairies’ memories of the White Kingdom. Her own memory isn’t enough. It’s too unreliable. She needs as many witnesses as she can get.”
“Yes,” whispered the Nnyth. “From the First, she has learned the secrets of the Waygate, secrets not even known to the Tower. From the aerads, she has gathered the memories of thousands to build her new kingdom of brittle sorrows and glass. And from us, she intended to take the greatest Waygate in the stars.”
“But why did you not let her use it?” Maeve asked. “If all that Xartasia wants is to go back to Arcadia with her people, let her!”
“She does not simply want to return,” came the echoing answer.
“The kingdom would still fall,” Xia said. “She wouldn’t want to live through that again.”
“Titania would turn the power of the Waygate not in but out, all across the galaxy,” the Nnyth said. “Further, if she can reach. She would unmake all that has happened since before Arcadia’s fall to prevent it. And then she would reforge time anew, in the form of her choosing.”
Maeve’s head was light, spinning, but it wasn’t from the lack of air. “But that is more than a hundred years! Trillions of lives have been born and ended across dozens of planets in that time. What happens to them?”
“They will never have been,” the Nnyth said in rustling agreement. “Some variation, some similarity will be born, but those lives which exist now will end.”
Gripper, who had been silently wringing his hands through the whole eerie conversation suddenly burst out. “But… but that’s not fair! She can’t just wipe out a hundred years of life because she’s homesick!”
The Nnyth fixed their eyes on the Arboran now, all rippling with deep blues and reds.
“Her world is lost, Anandrou,” the wasps said. “The destruction we have wreaked on the Tower can never be repaired. The Waygate was the heart of the Tower. Without it, we cannot summon new air, new food. We are dying. We know the pain that Titania feels. And you will know it, too.”
“Wait, what?” Gripper asked. He scrambled to the edge of the pentagonal pillar and stared out at the gathered Nnyth. “What does that mean?”
“Weh-Weh has met the same fate as the White Kingdom,” they answered. “Titania and the First flew there to find lost knowledge of the Waygates’ most secret workings. When their research was done, they consumed all living there and burned the rest.”
“A… All?” Gripper gasped. “All of them? They’re all dead?”
“Yes. You are the last of your people, Anandrou.”
Gripper fell to his knees on the gray stone and wailed in heartbroken agony. Logan put his hand on the Arboran’s huge shoulder and said nothing.
“Why?” Gripper cried. “If she just wants to go home, then why is Xartasia doing all these horrible things?”
“These horrors mean nothing to her. If she succeeds, then the last hundred years will be destroyed,” hissed the Nnyth all around. “None of it will have happened.”
Maeve remembered what Xartasia had told her back in Pylos, as Gavriel tortured her. Be at peace, cousin. Soon, none of this will matter. She had thought that Xartasia only meant that Maeve would soon be dead, but the older princess was being more literal than that.
Maeve jumped down from the Blue Phoenix and went to stand beside Gripper. The huge alien’s whole body shook as he sobbed for his lost home.
“I am so sorry,” she told him, then raised her eyes to look at the Nnyth. The great wasps were dying, she realized. That was why the air was so thin. They were running out. How much of it were they wasting talking to Maeve and her friends? “But you destroyed your Waygate before Xartasia could use it. You said that your gate would do what she needed. You have stopped her. Is this not done?”
“No,” the Nnyth answered. “Only the most powerful Waygates are capable of a gate inversion. One of those was here, the largest gate ever built by the First. But there is another. We have denied her the Tower, and so that is where Xartasia is bound now.”
Anthem finally spoke. He gripped his spear so hard that the glass of his gauntlet cut into the weapon’s carbonide haft. “Where is she going?”
“Kahazzek,” the Nnyth whispered. The star wasps’ voices were quieter now, Maeve thought. Was that fear? Reverence? “The original homeworld of the First, the seed of all life in the galaxy. Where they built the most powerful Waygate to take their people away into the stars. The world you call Axis.”
“Axis?” Maeve repeated. “She is taking the Devourers and the Arcadians to the capital of the Alliance?”
“There’s a Waygate on Axis?” Logan asked. “Where? Axis is the most heavily populated planet in the CWA. Are you saying there’s a Waygate there that no one noticed?”
“Humans have lived on Kahazzek for millions of years,” said the Nnyth. “But long before that, it belonged to the First. Humans have buried the old world under uncounted tons of metal and concrete, but the seeds of life remain there, on a mountain at the shore of the sea that birthed the first life.”
“The surface,” Logan said, nodding slowly. “The actual surface of Axis. There may be sun- and starlight on Level One, but the Axis’ real surface is Level Ten. It’s been sealed off for centuries.”
“But that’s not going to mean very much to Xartasia,” Duaal said. “Not with her Devourers. They’ll cut a path for her right down to the surface of Axis and then Xartasia can take her Arcadians to this Waygate.”
“And a hundred years or more are just gone,” Xia finished. “Trillions of lives are erased.”
“Wait, how is any of that going to help her?” Duaal asked. “If she uses the Waygate not to go back through time, but to turn back time, isn’t the same thing just going to happen again? The fall of the White Kingdom, the Arcadian refugees? All of it?”
“The Waygates are anchors in time,” the Nnyth told him. “That is why your chronologists did not find the time dilation in superluminal travel that they expected. That is the effect of the First’s great engineering. And it will preserve Titania’s memories of what has been. With that knowledge and the Kahazzek Waygate’s power, it will be simple to reforge the last hundred years to fit her own desires. It will take only thought, a wish.”
The Tower full of slowly dying insects rustled like a great tree in the autumn wind. Gripper turned his huge, tear-streaked face up toward Maeve.
“But… but we can stop Xartasia, right?” he asked. “We can keep her from hurting anyone else, can’t we? Now that we know where she’s going and what she’s doing…?”
Maeve didn’t know how to answer that, but everyone else was looking at her.
“When did Xartasia leave?” she asked the Nnyth. “Can we catch up to my cousin?”
“Thirteen days ago,” whispered the Nnyth. “Her ships are of the First’s design and their speed is far greater than yours. Titania and her army will reach Axis in eight more days.”
Gripper whimpered like a wounded child. “Eight days? We can’t even get back to Stray that fast, to say nothing of Axis.”
“What about a message?” Xia asked. “Could we at least warn the Alliance?”
“Any transmissions would take almost two weeks to get to the core from here,” Logan answered. “And that’s assuming that anyone would listen to it.”
“What about Arcadia?” Gripper asked desperately. “There are Waygates there! Can’t we just use one of them? There must be something we can do!”
“Our worlds are on the other side of the galaxy,” Anthem said, shaking his head. The beads woven into his golden braids clattered against his armor. “It would take the Blue Phoenix over a month to reach Arcadian space.”
Maeve bit her lip so hard that she tasted blood and turned back to the Nnyth. “What of your Waygate? Can it not be repaired?”
“The machines built by the First are ancient and strong,” the Nnyth answered. “It required powerful magics to break the Tower and our hive will never be whole again.”
Duaal stepped to the edge of the pillar beside Maeve and then… off. Maeve shouted and reached for him, but the young mage stood quite steadily on the empty air. The Tower’s gravity was weak, but not that weak. Duaal should have plummeted into the deep darkness, but he did not.
“You’re right,” he told the Nnyth. “Even broken, this Waygate is powerful. I can feel it.”
“Yes.” The Nnyth’s rasping, dead-leaf voices echoed through the Tower. “You can.”
“I can use it, can’t I?” Duaal asked, raising his face to the Nnyth. “All of those broken and frayed edges… There’s still enough of the Waygate’s power for me to grab onto. You can’t use it anymore and neither could the Arcadians or the Jinn. But I can.”
“Yes.”
The blue glow from so far below flickered like firelight.
Duaal pivoted on nothing and looked back at Maeve, who still stood staring from the stone. He grinned. “I can do this. I can take you to Axis, Maeve. I can drop us right in front of the Lyceum, if that’s what you want.”
Maeve began to nod, but Logan grabbed her shoulder. He shook his head.
“There are only six of us,” he said. “Xartasia has an army. She’ll cut right through us and we won’t even have slowed her down. We need your Arcadians, Maeve. We need to go back to Kaellisem.”
“But Xartasia is flying to Axis!” Maeve protested.
“Flight time from Stray to Axis is between five and nine days,” Logan pointed out. “Depending upon the ship. If we move quickly, we can still beat Xartasia to Axis.”
“There are only nineteen knights in Kaellisem,” Anthem said.
“Nineteen…?” Maeve asked. “But I thought that we had twenty knights.”
“Nineteen, a’shae,” Anthem repeated firmly. “More than there have been in a long time, but still far from an army. We cannot hope to match Xartasia with such small numbers.”
“The Arcadians back in Kaellisem know next to nothing about combat,” Xia said. “They’re no army. That’s why we’ve needed the CWAAF since the beginning.”
“We don’t have the Alliance army. We have Arcadians.” Logan looked at Duaal. “But maybe we can use one to get the other. Can you get us back to Stray?”
“Inside five minutes,” the mage answered confidently.
“One last thing,” Logan said and raised his glittering glass hand to the Nnyth. “I need one of your dead.”
“Logan!” Maeve gasped.
What could her enarri have in mind? She knew that Logan was clever, an intuitive and skilled hunter, but…
Two Nnyth unfurled their long, delicate wings and then glided silently to the Blue Phoenix. Between them, they carried a striped, curled shape. A dead Nnyth. They set it down gently on the stone pillar and then flew off once more, into the darkness.
Logan ran his fingers over the Nnyth’s black and russet-striped skin. One of the legs was shorter than the others, black ichor hardening over the stump that remained. Maeve wiped her eyes. When Logan lifted his hand, it shone with a faintly iridescent wetness.
“Phenno,” Gripper said. “You want fresh phenno? Why, Hunter? Are we going to be flying into another star?”
“No. We don’t need phenno. But we do need money.”
“Money?” Maeve asked, frowning. “We have money.”
“Not in the amounts we’ll need. We need to get thousands of Arcadians to Axis inside eight days. For that, we need the biggest and fastest ships on Stray. Xyn’s redprint is breaking down. We can buy a lot of captains for the cost of a fresh source. Help me get this loaded into the hold, Gripper. And then it’s time to go back to Kaellisem and your people, Maeve.”
She nodded. Gripper and Logan wrapped the dead Nnyth in its own limp wings and carried it carefully to the airlock. Xia followed. Duaal stepped back onto the stone. He bowed once to the dying Nnyth.
“It’ll be easier to move us all if we’re inside the Blue Phoenix,” he said.
“I will be there in a moment,” Maeve answered.
Duaal nodded and vanished into the ship. Maeve looked up into the dimming light of the Tower.
“I thank you,” she told the remaining Nnyth. “You have given so much to protect life and time. I do not know that I could sacrifice what you have.”
“You have given much,” the star wasps whispered. “And you will give up more, Maeve Cavainna, before this is done. Fly now. Time grows short.”
Maeve turned away and made her way to the airlock. When she reached the door, she glanced back. Anthem still stood on the black and gray stone, holding his spear tightly.
“Did you speak with Titania?” His question was meant for the Nnyth… Maeve didn’t think she was supposed to hear Anthem ask. “As you did to us?”
“Yes.”
“Has she… Does she have a new enarri?”
“She remembers you, Sir Anthem Calloren. And she misses you every day.”
Anthem’s wings sagged and he shook his head, confused. But without another word, he returned to the Blue Phoenix. He paused in the airlock, looking at Maeve with such pain in his dark eyes that she couldn’t hold his gaze. She pressed the glowing airlock controls and the door slid shut. Maeve squinted out through the window, but the Tower had gone entirely dark outside and she saw nothing.
And then everything blazed with blue light.
