THE REFORGED TRILOGY: BOOK 2 — SWORD OF DREAMS
Chapter 7: Pieces
“Every truth is a lie in someone else’s eyes.”
– Enu-Io Crath, Varnum archeologist (220 PA)
Coldhand spent the next three days in his hotel room, sorting through every available report on the Cult of Nihil and using his E3 status to request more. Where were the Nihilists now? There were speculations and panicked police reports of suspicious strangers in black, but very few actual facts.
It made sense. If there were enough easy leads to track down the Cult of Nihil, local authorities would have found them already. There would be no need to post bounties. The Nihilists had gone into hiding.
Logan sat at the hotel room desk and ran his right hand idly over the smooth wood — actual wood, alternately banded in light and dark brown. It was probably the most expensive thing in the room and Coldhand supposed most of the hotel’s guests were there on business. How many contracts had been written and reviewed at this desk? Logan probably wasn’t the first to spend more time here than in the bed.
Coldhand pulled up one of the police reports on the monitor. The video of a woman’s hysterical testimony was full of low-resolution rude gestures, but the audio was clear enough. Her husband had run off with an Arcadian — “A bird-back slut!” — that she was convinced was a Nihilist. The husband turned up two days later, floating face-down in one of Giadeen’s huge violet lakes. Someone had remotely emptied his accounts, using his codes. They found his Arcadian mistress a week after that, dead from a chem overdose.
But despite his widow’s loud and adamant accusations, Giadeen police found no evidence of Nihilist involvement. The Arcadian appeared to have been working alone. After rereading the report for any overlooked details, Coldhand found no reason to doubt their conclusion and moved on.
There were other stories of Nihilists appearing throughout the galaxy — some substantiated by other witnesses — but none with any more evidence than the Giadeen case. Coldhand pulled up the four most likely reports side-by-side on his computer display: a pair of self-proclaimed Nihilists giving death sermons on Glaw, an Arcadian looking for converts on Koji, and a series of brutal murders on the Devros moon, Frast.
In most cases, the local authorities had caught the culprit, only to have each one of them kill themselves before questioning. On Frast, another bounty hunter found the Nihilist and cornered him in front of a crowded restaurant. Fifty-eight witnesses confirmed a short, brutal fight between the hunter and a tall human in a dirty red robe.
An Emberguard?
Coldhand swiped a bead of sweat from his forehead before it could drip down into his eye. The other bounty hunter had been no match for his opponent and was still laid up in a Frast hospital, recovering from multiple deep lacerations and a major concussion. Of the Emberguard, there had been no further sign.
Logan checked the clock. It was getting late again.
He sat back in the desk chair, making the leather creak. Each of the incidents was suspiciously public. The first three gave their speeches on street corners, in the middle of parks or even on the steps of Union of Light churches. The Emberguard on Frast had never made the slightest attempt to conceal his crimes, usually killing in plain sight and dropping the discarded bodies in front of busy public centers.
Even back on Stray, when the Nihilists were at their strongest, they never acted so openly. Gavriel gave his sermons, but never let his subordinates so blatantly criminalize themselves. The abduction of Kessa’s baby was done quickly and quietly. Gavriel kept his people under careful control.
Coldhand closed down the four reports. They didn’t mean that the Nihilists weren’t hiding, only that these ones were acting on their own, outside Gavriel’s authority and influence, if he was still alive. They still believed in the old bastard’s teachings, but without his guidance, they couldn’t fly straight.
That didn’t mean they were dead ends, though. Coldhand read over the planets again: Glaw, Koji and Frast. He kicked his feet up onto the desk and frowned up at the shadowed ceiling.
The colony of Glaw was being extensively mined. A pulsar only a few systems over swept the planet with frequent radiation bursts and the colonists lived far underground in an expansive network of caves and tunnels. It was an easy place to hide and was a popular smugglers’ stop.
The CWA always sought out new planets to venaform, to feed and settle their ever-growing populace. Koji was the most recent to become a full member of the Alliance. Thousands of ships came and went from Koji every day, carrying colonists and the multitude of supplies needed to sustain the young world.
The two planets didn’t seem to have much in common. What about Frast, the innermost moon of Devros 2? Much like Hyzaar, oceans covered most of Devros 2’s surface and made dry land a rare commodity. Starports were too large to put on such expensive real estate and most ships landed on the nearby moon. Passengers and cargo moved down to the planet on hourly shuttles.
Coldhand closed his eyes. They were sandy and dry from hours of staring at monitors. Fractal patterns in red and green danced in the darkness behind his lids. There was a pattern to all of this, if he could just see it. The hunter pressed his fingers against his closed eyes, making the shimmering shards of color jump and spin.
Had the Cult of Nihil fragmented? Devros, Koji and Glaw were nowhere near each other. Maybe the church simply dissolved, scattering among the stars. One of the first accounts Coldhand had read was a police report from Stray. The Nihilists arrested in Gharib killed themselves shortly after capture, just like those on Koji and Glaw. But when the Stray police stormed the other cathedrals, they found only dusty, empty buildings. The Nihilists were gone.
Coldhand cracked his eyes open again and frowned at the dark hotel room. There had been hundreds of the death-worshipers in Gharib. Half of those escaped the collapsing catacombs, but the Stray police only managed to arrest ninety-three of them.
And that was just one of Gavriel’s cathedrals. There must have been thousands of Nihilists. So why could Logan only find four?
The remaining cultists must have gone somewhere. The ones on Glaw, Koji and Frast had to be stragglers, fledges fallen from the nest. But all three worlds were major ports. What if these cultists were part of larger groups, left behind because they arrived late or were troublemakers?
Coldhand brought up images of the four known Nihilists. None of them were Arcadians, but the majority of Gavriel’s following on Stray had been made up of fairies. The hopeless and unhomed Arcadians made perfect targets for the cult’s escapist preaching. So where were they? Was Gavriel trying to keep the Arcadians close? Why? To remain in Xartasia’s good graces? Did the princess care at all what happened to the broken fragments of her people?
Or maybe Logan was trying to build a nest from a single twig.
It was a possibility. Coldhand had very little information and could have been taking it all in the wrong direction.
A quiet sound distracted the bounty hunter from his thoughts. Only after a minute sitting in stony silence did Logan hear the noise again and realize that it was his stomach gurgling. He hadn’t even noticed the empty aching in his gut.
Coldhand pulled up the hotel’s internal node and ordered some food at random from the room service menu. It would be expensive, but he had no desire to leave his desk long enough to find something else.
The Cult of Nihil was moving off of Stray, or had already done so. Where could they go that such a large influx of fairies wouldn’t attract notice? One of the sparsely populated colony worlds, like Koji? No, the Central World Alliance watched their new colonies closely. They farmed and manufactured important products and foodstuffs for the older worlds.
Axis, maybe? The vast capital city-world was home to ten times more Alliance citizens than any other planet. The appearance of a few hundred or even thousands more would never be noticed. The lower levels of the megatropolis were a mystery even to natives of Vanora and were an easy place to hide. The idea of finding the cult on Axis was a daunting one, but Coldhand didn’t think about it for long. He had found Vyron Fethru there, and that was just one man. If the Nihilists were there, Logan could find them.
There were only a few other civilized planets where Gavriel’s cult could go and escape the notice of the CWA. Glaw might have been a good choice, full of places to hide away from prying Alliance eyes. Those places were all located underground, however, and unlike even the lowest levels of Axis, Glaw was made up of close tunnels and caves.
It seemed unlikely that even the most lost and depressed Arcadians would be willing to make their homes in a place where they could never fly. And even if they endured the interminable tons of stone burying them away from the sky, someone would eventually notice the Arcadians in a place so alien to them.
Coldhand had almost forgotten about the food he ordered until the door toned softly. He quickly pulled on a shirt and answered. Out in the hall, a human girl held a covered tray and squinted into the darkness. Her freckles stood out starkly against her pale skin in the bright light of the hallway.
“Having a nice night, sir?” she asked.
Coldhand took the tray and tapped the glowing lock. The door slid shut in her face.
Through the uncovered window, red and amber light filtered up from the city. It was beautiful but illuminated little in the shadowed hotel room. Coldhand carried the food back to his desk. His legs were stiff and prickled unpleasantly as blood flowed back into them after sitting for so long.
Dinner turned out to be some sort of white fish on a pillow of brown rice and drenched in a pale wine sauce. Coldhand picked at the unfamiliar meat. Fish was never a common food on mountainous Prianus. There were fish in the fast-flowing rivers, but not enough to ever become a major staple of Prian diet. Even after five years away from his homeworld, Logan still found meals in the rest of the core ridiculously extravagant. How many kinds of food could one man need? Whether it came from fish or cloned algae, it all ended up in the same place and served the same purpose.
Coldhand began eating quickly and returned to his work. It seemed unlikely that Gavriel would choose Axis as his church’s new home. While the lower levels of the city might make for excellent — if dangerous — hiding, it was the capital world of the Central World Alliance. Transporting that many wanted criminals onto Axis might be difficult, but far more problematic was the proximity of the CWA Armed Forces, whose center of operations was located there. A single Lyceum dictum could flood even the dankest, darkest recesses of Axis with CWAAF soldiers.
But Prianus had a much lower population, and with less habitable surface area than the gleaming globe of Axis, it suffered even worse overcrowding. Still, there were Arcadians everywhere. The fairies on Prianus never met with the same hatred that they had on other planets. Despite their long wings, though, the Arcadians who appeared a century ago were no more able to leave Prianus than the native humans. Most of them were still there, living in the same poverty and desperation as the Prians themselves.
Coldhand wasn’t finished eating, but the fish no longer looked appetizing. He replaced the cover and pushed the food away to the corner of his desk.
“Miss Carmine, there’s a call coming in for you. Miss Carmine?”
Alexa Carmine sat up with a groan. The previous night’s dose of Frag left a thick, sweet taste at the back of her throat. She coughed and then gagged, certain that she was about to be sick. Alexa tried to rise, but a lean masculine shape lay draped across her, holding her down.
She picked up the boy’s wrist and let go. His arm flopped bonelessly into the tangled sheets. He wouldn’t wake for hours yet. Frag always hit males harder. Alexa scratched her head. The young man looked familiar.
“Miss Carmine?”
Another man stood in the doorway of Alexa’s small but lavish bedroom. This one was human, too, but older. Much older and much uglier. A cave-in three years back had broken his cheekbone and ripped most of the scalp from that side of his skull. The entire right half of his face was twisted and scarred, crumpled and hairless as a discarded wrapper. For some ridiculous reason, he would never let Alexa send him to her favorite surgeon to repair the damage.
“God, you’re enough to give any woman nightmares, Harrell,” she groaned.
“Very sorry, Miss Carmine. There’s a call waiting for you.”
Alexa flopped back into the inviting warmth of her bed and the comatose younger man. Her dark hair fanned out around her head.
“I don’t care, Harrell. Take a message. I’ll deal with it later,” she said, then gave her bedmate a half-hearted prod. “Who in the seven hundred hells is this, anyway?”
“That’s your new secretary,” Harrell said. “Miss Carmine, you really should take the call. It’s Coldhand.”
Alexa jerked upright and the color seemed to drain out of the room. She felt suddenly hot and prickly all over, as though she had just taken another shot of Frag.
“How long has he been waiting?” she asked.
Alexa gave her unconscious secretary a hard shove. He groaned and curled into a ball on the corner of the bed. She kicked her way out from under him and wrapped herself in a thick, wine-colored robe.
“A few minutes,” Harrell said. He frowned with the left half of his face. “It was very hard to wake you, Miss Carmine. You had too much last night.”
She didn’t have time to argue with him. Besides, Harrell might have been right. Alexa could remember nothing of the night before. But if she didn’t give Logan Coldhand what he wanted, Alexa suspected she would be spending a lot of memorable nights in prison. She ran from the bedroom and into the adjoining office. The stone floor was cold and hard against her bare feet.
Alexa leaned over her desk and told her computer to open the call. Coldhand appeared on the screen, sitting so still in the deep shadows on the other end that Alexa wondered for a moment if it was a photo-mask. The Prian bounty hunter looked just as he the last time he had been on Glaw: short, dark blonde hair framing those glacial pale blue eyes that alternately made Alexa want to run in stark terror or else rip off his clothes.
Right now, she could do neither. Alexa Carmine, the self-made smuggler queen of Glaw, needed to remain a more useful ally than a bounty.
“What do you need, Coldhand?” she asked. Did the quivering in her stomach come through in her voice? “More phenno? It’s hard to move goods off Glaw right now. There’s a burst covering the whole eastern hemisphere tomorrow.”
“No. I need information, Carmine.”
“What kind of information?” Alexa asked suspiciously.
If Coldhand was after one of her smugglers, giving him any information would cut into her profits and might make her look unreliable to the other captains. Alexa didn’t like it. The answer came after a tense moment, the delay between transmissions from Glaw to wherever the hunter was.
“I’m not interested in your people,” Coldhand said, perhaps reading something of Alexa’s fears in her voice. “I’m just verifying a theory. Has anyone new come into the Glaw tunnels?”
“A lot of people come and go every day,” Alexa answered. “Can you be more specific?”
Another transmission delay. Coldhand seemed to be considering how much to reveal to Alexa. She couldn’t blame him. If he ever tipped his hand too far, if he ever revealed some useful vulnerability, it would be a lot safer to remove the hunter than to keep working with him.
“There would be a lot of them, probably upward of a thousand, and many would be Arcadian,” he said at last.
Carmine thought about that, drumming her long red nails on her desk.
“I had a large group of passengers come through a few months back. Not in the numbers you’re talking about, but two or three hundred. I noted them because almost all of them were bird-backs. I don’t like it when anyone makes trouble in my tunnels.”
“Came through?” Coldhand asked. “Are they still on Glaw?”
“No,” Alexa said. “They left again a few days later on another ship. Nice Narsus thing, custom job. Crewed by more bird-backs,” Alexa said. “The whole thing was more than a little strange.”
“Tell me.” Coldhand’s voice was icy and intense, like falling into cold water.
“They had color. Enough for fuel and supplies, but they were going to Prianus. If they had the money, why fly out to that God-forsaken place? Anyone who can leave Prianus never goes back.”
Alexa realized what she had just said and fell uncomfortably silent.
“Like me,” Coldhand answered a few seconds later. “Did they do anything while they were on Glaw?”
“Do anything? Anything illegal, you mean? No. They were quiet and kept to themselves. They all stayed together in one of my caves and never complained.”
When Coldhand received her answer, he didn’t seem surprised. He nodded once and cut the transmission without another word. Alexa flopped down into her chair and wiped a sheen of sweat from her forehead. Harrell stood in the door of the office, curiosity on his ugly face.
“What did he want?” Harrell asked.
“If you weren’t already listening in, then you’re as stupid as you look,” Alexa snapped. Unfairly. She sighed and waved a hand. “Go take my secretary home. I’m not in the mood for him anymore.”
Harrell inclined his head. “Yes, Miss Carmine.”
Coldhand had woken up early, after only a few hours of sleep. When he was done talking to Alexa Carmine, he called the CWAAF router on Axis, requesting similar information. A business-like young private verified the bounty hunter’s clearance and promised to get back to him soon. Logan sent a message to the Stray police, too, but it went straight into an automated file collection. He didn’t expect any information back from them, but doubted that he needed any.
It was just verification, anyway. Carmine had already confirmed his theory. The Cult of Nihil had gone to Prianus. Three hundred quiet Arcadians with the money to fly out to the edge of CWA space? It had to be the Cult of Nihil. Still, Coldhand was curious where the money came from. The crooked, patchwork cathedral in Gharib didn’t exactly conjure images of vast wealth.
There was something else — the Mirran Emberguard who had taken a younger Logan’s hand and heart in battle one cold, frozen night… The Nihilists had been on Prianus before. Now they were going back.
It made sense. The Alliance chased Gavriel off Stray, so he was retreating to old and familiar territory.
While Coldhand waited for information from Axis, he ordered the fuel and water he would need to make the flight to Prianus. Twenty days in the cockpit of his Raptor was going to be uncomfortable, but finding a larger ship to make the journey would take too long. It was already hours past dawn and Coldhand wanted no more delays.
It didn’t take long to order everything he needed for the flight and even less time to pack up the handful of scattered clothing, datadexes and his Talon-9. Logan held the gun, feeling the weight of it in his mismatched hands. The Talon was huge and heavy. It weighed twice as much as a similar weapon manufactured anywhere else in the galaxy. Prian construction was sturdy, but no one could accuse it of being stylish or sleek.
Deep scratches scarred the length of the Talon’s barrel, a long and violent history etched in a primitive script that only he could read. Coldhand traced his fingers over three parallel grooves. They were shallow and rough at the edges. Those were left by Orphia, Tiberius’ aging hawk, back in Gharib as Coldhand circled Maeve in the hold of the Blue Phoenix.
Maeve was trying to bait Logan into killing her then, he remembered. She tried to trick him.
She never succeeded, of course, but the attempt was admirable. Maeve poured more effort and passion into death than most people put into life.
Logan turned his Talon-9 over. A single deep line sliced straight and clean along the back end of the refraction barrel, from the sight and down almost to the stock. Unlike the marks left by Orphia’s curved talons, this cut was deep and smooth. Maeve had left that scar during their first battle, a single overhead blow from her glass-headed spear. On that first day, the small, skinny Arcadian princess had seemed so sick and strung out on chems… How could she be any kind of challenge? But underestimating Maeve almost cost him another hand.
Logan held the Talon in his illonium hand and flexed the good one. A slender white scar ran down the back of his hand where Maeve’s spear had grazed him. Only a cool head and fast reflexes had prevented that glass blade from sheering away everything past his thumb.
Those weren’t the only scars Maeve had left. She was a skilled warrior and a wily mark. Not for the first time, Coldhand found himself wondering where she was. Maeve hadn’t put out a new bounty on herself yet, Logan knew. He checked frequently. Had she finally tired of trying to taunt death — her Nameless goddess — into taking her and done the deed herself? Or was she still aboard the Blue Phoenix, ignoring orders from her surly old Prian captain?
Coldhand ran his fingers down the length of the barrel again. There were other fainter marks in the gray metal. Many of them were older than he was, carved there long before the gun passed to a young Logan Centra. It was an heirloom, like all police weapons. Three generations of Prian cops had worn it before him. But even this Talon-9 had been the newest, most powerful laser pistol in the Highwind precinct.
When I graduated, the others insisted I take it, Logan thought. I was the best shot. I deserved to carry the newest Talon, they said. When I showed Vorus, he grinned and slapped my back so hard I almost fell over. They were all so proud of me.
Returning to Prianus would be complicated. There were people who remembered him there, who would recognize Logan as a traitor to the Prian police. If any of the other cops knew Logan was back on their homeworld, there would be duels, at least. They might even try to arrest him. He was a thief, after all. Both his gun and ship were the property of the Prian police.
Coldhand dropped the Talon into its holster. There were other considerations, too. Being a criminal on Prianus meant that he wouldn’t be able to use the controlled landing fields. There were plenty of other places to set down his Raptor, but not many where it would be safe. Prians would steal anything that wasn’t nailed down, camouflaged and protected by force. Securing the Raptor was going to be expensive, considerably narrowing the profit margin on the endeavor. But if the Nihilists proved half as interesting as Maeve had been, then they would be worth it.
On the desk, his computer chirped to let Coldhand know that it had received a file. He went to the desk and opened it. The screen glowed with the blue and green Alliance auroch masthead above a short notice of compliance from the Axis officer on duty.
The attached file was small and Coldhand read through it in a few minutes. Sunlight streamed in through the window behind him and reflected no glare across the polarized monitor, but prickled warmly against the back of his neck.
Police and CWAAF confirmed Coldhand’s suspicions, or at least offered no contradictions. The Alliance had picked up a few Nihilist sympathizers on Axis, but further questioning revealed no actual connection to the cult. Gavriel and his madmen were not on Axis.
There was nowhere left to look. It was time for Logan to make the long flight back home.
