THE REFORGED TRILOGY: BOOK 3 — HAMMER OF TIME
Chapter 41: Kahazzek
“Life is worth dying for.”
– Xia (234 PA)
With the rest of the Glorious assaulting Kahazzek far above, Dhozo and Xartasia met little resistance as they moved down toward the planet’s long-buried surface. While the sky of Axis burned with nanites and lasers, they landed in an unremarkable stolen Starwind bulk freighter. The ship was slow and unwieldy, inferior in every respect to the Devourers’ but for its anonymity.
And its size. The hauler was large enough to move twelve thousand of Xartasia’s aerads, if not in comfort. But as their queen reminded them, pain meant nothing. Soon, none of it would ever have happened.
As soon as they set down on a Starwind manufacturing block on Level Six, private security tried to stop the unwelcome bird-backs. The Starwind guards protecting their factory were numerous, but poorly prepared for what faced them now.
Dhozo, Orix and Zhyress fed well, and now reaching Kahazzek’s surface was a simple matter of their nanite swarms eating their way through the artificial upper crust of the ancient homeworld. Twelve thousand aerads flew down behind them, a blizzard of wings that sang their victory over the world that had rejected them.
Level Ten of Axis was a tangle of darkened streets, full of trash and humans that came closer when they saw the Arcadians — easy pickings — then fled screaming into the shadows when they caught sight of Dhozo. The Glorious engineer ignored them and consulted his cross-referenced maps. He pointed to a dark, dilapidated motel. Most of the windows were already broken, but a handful of frightened faces peeked out from behind the shattered, dusty glass.
“This is the thinnest spot near the old Projector,” Dhozo said. “Cut through here.”
Xartasia’s fairies filled the filthy street, standing wing to wing, but they found the room to flinch back as Orix and Zhyress tore the building and its inhabitants apart to carry out Dhozo’s order.
Duaal led the way, following some sense that Logan did not understand. He pointed to one road and then another. They raced down spiraling ramps that led further into the ancient megatropolis. They were on Level Eight now, searching for a route down that wasn’t collapsed or closed off for repairs.
Logan turned their stolen car down another ramp. There were glowing barriers set up on this one, too, warning of some far-future resurfacing endeavor. Logan drove over the warning lights. Gripper looked back once, but didn’t complain. The red Gallex bumped and shuddered along the uneven road. It really did need work… Sparks flew and metal squealed in protest as the road scraped along the car’s undercarriage.
Logan spared a glance up at Anthem. The knights flew a mobile perimeter around Maeve, soaring above and laboring to keep pace with the car.
What would Anthem do when they confronted Xartasia? Could he bring himself to fight or kill the woman he still loved? If their positions were reversed, could Logan do the same to Maeve…? He didn’t think so. It might damn him and a hundred years of history, but without Maeve none of that had any meaning at all.
The descent ramp finally let out into the dark, filthy streets of Level Nine. A group of even more dented cars raced past, ignoring the red-lit traffic signal. Duaal told Logan to keep going straight, but then waved his hand.
“Stop!” Duaal shouted. “Stop here!”
Logan hit the brakes and then jumped out of the car, pocketing the keycard. Chances were slim that he would have much use for it later, but Logan Coldhand always planned ahead. He whistled to Maeve and the Arcadian queen landed, surrounded by her knights in glass.
“This is it,” Duaal said. “Now we just need to find a way down through to the surface.”
“Gripper?” Maeve asked.
The Arboran pulled out his computer and shook it a few times. “Mainstream signal is pretty weak down here. Give me a minute…”
“We may not have it,” Maeve said. “Please, work quickly!”
Gripper chewed his lip and didn’t waste energy on an answer. He turned the computer this way and that, then pointed off down the street.
“This way, I think,” Gripper told Maeve. “There should be an access shaft… According to the mainstream, it’s left over from some old construction.”
“Move,” Logan said.
They sprinted the direction Gripper had pointed and finally found the pitted metal hatch half-buried by trash and generations of lumapaint gang tags. Logan and Gripper strained to lift the metal door, but if it were that easy, the hatch would have been pried up long ago.
Logan waved everyone back and set his Talon-9 on a continuous beam. He drained half of a battery cutting through the thick metal, and then Ballad and Anthem grabbed the still-glowing edges of the hatch in their gauntleted hands, heaving it free. There was a ladder built into the side and Logan began climbing.
It was a long descent down through the metal that made up the floor of Level Nine. Every level of Axis felt huge and stable, a world unto itself. But they kept moving down deeper and deeper. How long would it take to reach the surface? Would Xartasia already be done by the time Logan finally felt dirt beneath his feet? A war raged up on Level One, but down here, it was impossible to tell.
They climbed through abandoned maintenance ducts, tunnels full of pipes and wires and ancient, darkened computer terminals. Stinking, slimy things grew in the darkness that didn’t invite closer inspection. The Arcadian knights hummed uncomfortably, unable to use their wings in the tight confines, but not one of them complained.
Finally, Gripper curled his blunt claws around a cover painted over in peeling yellow warnings and lifted the heavy grate out of the way. Duaal crawled to the edge and peered over into the pitch-black emptiness.
“We have to get down there,” he said. The mage’s voice echoed faintly.
Logan cracked a chemical light in his glass hand and dropped it. The pale green rod tumbled for several seconds and then stopped. It glowed like a tiny wound in the absolute darkness.
“That’s too far to jump. We need to fly,” Logan said. “And watch your footing when you land. I’m not sure what’s down there.”
A pair of fairy knights took Xia by each arm and flew her down. The rest helped those without wings, one by one. Six of the Arcadians labored to deliver Gripper down to Axis’ dark surface. But Duaal simply stepped out and drifted as gracefully as if he had his own wings.
Logan drew his Talon-9 and a flashlight, holding it parallel to the barrel and sweeping the narrow yellow beam over Axis’ long-abandoned ground. Maeve and a few of the fairy knights sang brief charms that conjured a pale, sourceless illumination.
Whatever the Devourers’ ancient homeworld had been — jungle or grassy plains or mountains like Logan’s own planet — there was little left of it now. The ground beneath Logan’s feet was barren, stripped gray dirt and stone utterly devoid of life. Was it the Axials who had done this? Or the Devourers before them? Logan turned a searching circle, peering through the darkness.
“Which way?” he asked.
Duaal pointed into the deep, shapeless shadows and Anthem gestured with his wings, giving the knights the signal to move out. Logan followed, keeping close to Maeve. He felt their time ticking by, counted out by the mechanical metronome of his heart. Was Xartasia still on Level One with the Devourers? Or was she already down here on the surface? Logan found himself staring uselessly up at the distant floor of Level Nine as he wondered.
“Stop,” Logan said just loud enough to be heard over the sounds of their footsteps and wingbeats.
Anthem whistled softly and the Arcadian knights extinguished their lights. Maeve leaned close to Logan.
“What is it?” she asked.
Logan pointed.
There was a large, ragged hole torn or melted through the floor of Axis overhead. The opening let in a weak but broad shaft of light from Level Nine. But that wasn’t what had arrested Logan’s attention — even the faint light sparkled off glass and lit white wings. Dozens of armored Arcadians perched in the shadow of a fibersteel stanchion so vast that several shining Level One starscrapers could have fit comfortably inside. They crouched among heaps of rubble and bare gray stone. At the edges of the rainbow reflections was a dark blot of swirling darkness. A Devourer.
“Duaal?” Logan asked.
“That’s the way we need to go,” the mage whispered.
“Xartasia is not with them,” Maeve said.
“This can’t represent her entire force. She recruited thousands of Arcadians for their memories. This is just her vanguard,” Logan agreed. He looked down at Maeve. “We need to get you and Duaal through to the Waygate. If this thing has already begun, only you two have any idea how to stop it. We cut through as fast as we can and we don’t stop.”
“Can’t we just go around?” Gripper asked.
Logan shook his head. “Not without losing time we don’t have. They’re covering Xartasia, which means she’s nearby. By the time we avoid this group, she could be done unmaking half of Alliance history.”
“Those knights outnumber us three to one,” Xia gestured to the flat, dry ground. “And they’ll see us coming.”
“No,” Duaal said. “They won’t. Is everyone ready?”
The young mage didn’t wait for anyone to answer. Duaal fell to one knee and slapped both palms into the cracked ground. Dust rippled and then rose up in a tidal wave, racing through the shadows toward Xartasia’s waiting knights. Logan sprinted behind the moving wall of dust.
“Go!” he shouted.
Maeve beat her wings and leapt into the air. Ballad and Anthem flew at her side, the rest of the knights arrayed around their queen. Duaal, Xia and Gripper ran as the dirt billowed before them.
What lay beneath wasn’t entirely flat. There were large, geometric shapes scattered across the ground. Squares and rectangles, but circles and large tetrahedrons, too. The tops of buildings, Logan realized. They were running over the ancient, buried remains of the Devourers’ city.
And then there were other shapes moving through the dust — Arcadians jostling and struggling to rise above the rolling brown-gray cloud. Logan held down the Talon-9’s trigger and raked the dirty darkness with the molten red laser beam. Xartasia’s knights were armored and even helmeted in glass, but their wings were spread wide as they readied to fly. Logan caught eight of the Arcadians in his burst. The laser sheared through their wings and set feathers on fire. Crimson light splashed off the glass as it passed over their armor and the other Arcadians quickly scattered away from the bloody red light.
Anthem and his knights pounced on Xartasia’s surprised forces as they struggled to get off the ground. Spears flicked out and rang against each other or shrieked off plate armor as they circled and climbed. Each knight sought the higher position in the air to make diving strikes on the gaps in armor at neck or wing.
A pair of Xartasia’s knights dove at Logan. He fired up at them, but the laser flashed off glass armor. One beam found a gap under a shoulder plate and the knight spun off into the deep shadows, but the other kicked at Logan from the air, catching him in the chest. Logan staggered and barely managed to pull his feet back beneath him before the knight thrust his spear at the scar Hallax had left years ago.
Logan grabbed the blade in his glass hand and yanked as hard as he could. The fairy knight struggled to retain control of his spear, beating his wings hard and kicking up a cloud of dry gray dust. As he tried to wrest the spear out of Logan’s hand, the Prian hunter brought up his Talon and fired through the fairy knight’s unprotected throat. The Arcadian fell limp to the dry ground and blood turned the dry ground to dark, sticky mud.
Arcadian bodies littered the cracked ground. Several of Xartasia’s knights had Anthem surrounded in a cage of glass spears. The handsome knight dove and wheeled with shocking skill, actually landing for a moment on one of his attackers’ backs. The added weight buckled the woman’s wings and sent her tumbling to the ground. Anthem leapt free and rose steeply into the shadows.
It was difficult to make out who was who in the flurry of wings… Logan wasn’t sure if they were winning or not. He fired once at one of the banking knights chasing Anthem, burning through feathers and wings.
Xia shot at a pair of Arcadians who had driven Eranna down to the ground and pried at her armor with their spears. The Ixthian landed only a glancing hit that scattered across their glass armor, but both fairies vanished into the high shadows again. Xia knelt next to Eranna, spraying chemical cauterizers into several deep, bloody gashes. The young knight groaned and stood, leaning on her spear and dove back into the fray. Gripper loped through the dirt and darkness toward another fallen knight, scooped up the bloody fairy and carried him back to Xia.
Another trio of knights circled and dove at Logan. He shot one in the wing and then under the arm as she fought to regain altitude, but Logan couldn’t get a good angle and his laser just glanced off the other two’s armor. He threw himself to one side as they closed, but there was no cover in the flat expanse of the buried city. With a musical war cry, Maeve fell on one of the other fairies, burying her spear to the fluttering ribbons between the glass plates. She leapt free as fire blossomed around the last knight. It washed over the attacking Arcadian, incinerating wings and glass. The dead knight fell to the ground in a sizzling heap.
Duaal winked at Logan. But then his smile slid away and the mage flung a lightning bolt off into the darkness. The Devourer slid through the shadows, nanite armor reaching out. A tentacle of inky metal lashed and caught one of the Kaellisem knights around the ankle. He shrieked in pain as the nanites ate through his glass armor and into the flesh beneath. One of Xartasia’s fairies drove her spear through his back and bright blood splashed inside his glass armor, dripping down the transparent plates. The cloud of nanites yanked him down to the ground, where the Devourer began to eat.
“Get off of him!” Duaal shouted.
A crackling fork of lightning flashed blue-white through the mechanical swarm. The nanites contracted into a slick black shell over the Devourer’s body. It was a female, Logan saw. Much bigger than any woman he had ever seen before, but this alien’s waist was narrow and her hips wider. Logan trained his Talon-9 on her and fired rapidly. The black swarm hardened against the assault. It was hard to vary his targets in this darkness without simply missing them.
“Can you do something about her armor?” Logan asked.
“I’m thinking!” Duaal shouted.
Fire and lightning blazed over the alien’s ebony nanite shield. Pieces of glass and debris levitated and hurled themselves at the Devourer as though fired from a cannon. The Devourer crouched, reducing her profile and both energy and missiles broke over the hardened surface.
Logan pointed his laser at the ceiling. The glowing indicator set into the grip showed red, already flashing in warning. He squeezed the release and slid in another battery from his dwindling supply. Logan aimed high above the Devourer again and held down his Talon’s trigger, pouring energy into the thick, aging alloy far above. Sparks turned into molten droplets and then larger pieces began to fall like glowing rain. Logan moved the beam in a careful circle, trying to carve out a large enough chunk. It was up to Duaal to keep the Devourer busy.
Duaal saw what Logan had in mind, but it would take some time. Time that was now the mage’s job to buy.
Without the Prian hunter and his Talon-9, the Devourer woman took the offensive again. She lashed out with blades and tearing hooks. Duaal blasted them back with fire, lightning and barriers of brittle solidified air. He tried to reach into her nervous system and wrap his will around some vital blood vessel, but Duaal didn’t know enough about Devourer anatomy.
The Devourer snatched a knight — Duaal wasn’t sure if it was one of Maeve’s or Xartasia’s — from the air and tore the screaming fairy in half. White teeth flashed in the darkness.
Did these creatures ever stop eating? No, Duaal supposed. Glass crunched and vanished into the nanite swarm. With her energy renewed, the Devourer’s black armor was reforming into some kind of red-glowing laser weapon.
“Logan,” Duaal shouted. “It’s got to be now!”
The circle of molten metal above closed and a massive plug of the Level Ten ceiling crashed down onto the Devourer. Tentacles spasmed and then fell in long lines of black dust. The power indicator on Logan’s laser flashed red, and cracks radiated out from the fallen slab of fibersteel.
“Duaal!” Maeve landed hard on the crumbling ground. Several of her long pinions were charred black. “We need you!”
Several of Xartasia’s Arcadians weren’t carrying spears. Instead, they hurled fire and lightning. Mages. Ballad folded his wings and arrowed at one of them, but the Arcadian sang a song that Duaal knew all too well. Ballad shouted out as agony suddenly racked his nerves. Anthem reached out for the thrashing, falling fairy, but another one of Xartasia’s knights slashed a bloody wound through Anthem’s wing, forcing the knight down.
Duaal gathered himself and leapt, leaving the ground far below. Logan was already slamming a fresh battery into his Talon-9 and Maeve covered him with her red-stained glass spear. At the apex of his leap, Duaal hung in the air for an impossibly long moment, over the heads of the flying knights. With a smirk and a thought, he extinguished the other mages’ flames and sent their lightning to ground harmlessly on the huge metal stanchion. Duaal pushed the air out below him in a billowing cloud, clearing a path through the jockeying Arcadians and landed in the middle of the spell-singers.
Trained in the same rote spells that Xartasia had taught Gavriel, the Arcadians rained fire and electricity on Duaal. But he knew those songs, recognized them from the first notes. It was a simple matter to slip aside or counter them. His nerves itched as the fairies tried to kindle agony in his body.
“Oh, no,” Duaal said. “I don’t think so.”
The Hyzaari mage swept his arm in a broad circle, pointing at one Arcadian after the other. He reached into their brains, dilating a single blood vessel and sending a sudden rush of blood too hard, too fast. One by one, Xartasia’s spell-singers dropped unconscious to Axis’ cracked gray surface.
“I hope you all saw that,” Duaal said.
But none of his friends seemed to have appreciated Duaal’s cleverness. Maeve’s dwindling knights were still badly outnumbered. Logan had acquired an Arcadian spear and fought back to back with Ballad, who had shaken off the effects of the spell and recovered his feet. Xia knelt over Anthem Calloren, hastily sealing the hole in the delicate membrane of his right wing while the knight grimaced in pain.
“Duaal!” Logan shouted. “You and Maeve have to keep moving. Go! Get out of here!”
Maeve opened her mouth to argue, but instead, she grabbed Logan by the front of his bloody shirt and pulled the hunter into a short, fierce kiss. Then, with a keening note of anguish, she flew toward Duaal.
“Which way?” Maeve asked over the screams and crash of glass on glass. “Where is the Waygate?”
“This way!” Duaal said.
He ran along the flat, packed ground in Maeve’s shadow as she flew, following him. There was a crackling sound off to Duaal’s left. The huge pieces of Level Ten’s metal ceiling still glowed sullenly around the melted edges where Logan had burned it free of Level Nine, but the ten-ton slab of fibersteel was moving.
The metal turned duller, lighter and crumbled like chalk. Black fog rose up from the collapsing metal and Duaal threw himself backward as the Devourer stood up. Patches of slick black clung to her body here and there, tending to wounds. Smoky tendrils floated out cautiously. The Devourer was taking no chances. Duaal knotted his fingers and hurled lightning. The nanite cloud opaqued against the crackling bolt, but did not waver.
Maeve banked and circled back, but Duaal waved her off.
“No!” he shouted. “Keep flying, Maeve!”
The little queen’s jaw set and she rose once more into the darkness. In a moment, Maeve was gone. Duaal threw himself high over the Devourer and landed out of reach of its tentacles again. She turned and advanced once more. Could he simply knock the alien killer unconscious as he had the Arcadians? No, he just didn’t know enough about her anatomy.
A huge black scythe suddenly formed in the Devourer’s hands and slashed out at Duaal. It whistled through the stale air, driving him back. Nanites swirled and formed a laser cannon that glowed with hellish light and Duaal heaved a buried piece of ancient wall up from the ground just in time to be blasted apart into blackened rubble. The burning chips of something like concrete pelted Duaal and he had to shield his eyes from the smoke.
He coughed. Where was the Devourer?
A dark spike as big around as his thigh shot out from the smoke and dust, spearing Duaal through the stomach. The mage gasped and blood poured across the ground. The spear of nanites changed form inside him, dividing and curving into hooks, and then tore free again. Shiny wet shapes looped around the barbed nanites. His intestines…
Duaal smelled the hot copper tang and the acrid scents of blood and acid leaking from his torn stomach. All the strength went out of his legs and he fell down to his knees. The Devourer stalked toward Duaal through the smoke and shadows, moving confidently now. Tendrils of smoke flowed along the cluttered ground, seeking the splattered gore. Duaal felt a tugging from somewhere deep inside and he realized that his guts were still attached inside of him. The Devourer was eating him alive.
Pain boiled through Duaal, but he silenced his searing nerves with a thought. Her nanites condensed and clung to the Devourer’s body like an oily garment. She held Duaal’s viscera in her hand, chewing on the end with relish while his blood ran down her chin. The Devourer smiled with her mouth full of sharp white teeth as she ate him.
Tearing me into pieces while I watch, Duaal thought. But aren’t we all just pieces…? Swarms of molecules? Particles held together by electrons and atomic bonds?
Duaal smiled right back into the face of the feasting Devourer as he dissolved those bonds. Her molecules, free of the forces that bound them into proteins and tissue, blew away in a fine red-black mist. The young mage fell onto his back in the dust and stared up at the shadowed underside of Axis.
Xia ran toward him, skidding to a stop beside her captain with eyes blazing red. He winked at her.
“Tell me… you saw that,” Duaal said before darkness took him.
