Legacy of Shadow

by Gallant, Craig;

  He focused on those scattered remnants and knew, immediately, where each one was. He knew, as well, that if he closed his eyes he would be able to conjure an image of them in real time.

  The Skorahn burned against his chest, the heat palpable through the tunic. He recognized its touch in his mind, but he had never felt it so strongly before. He recognized, also, the echoes of the power he had touched dealing with the blast door into the primary docking bay during their escape. Somehow, through either his own heightened need, their separation, or whatever Taurani had been doing while he had been away, the medallion was establishing its connection to him more strongly than it ever had before. He felt almost as if the thing were staking a claim on his soul.

  Beneath the constant murmur of information, anything he could think to wonder about throughout the city, there was a soft whispering that he could not decipher. These whispers seemed to carry even more weight than the initial surge of information that had flattened him, and it sent a chill down his spine.

  He looked down at the glowing blue jewel in wonder, and recoiled slightly as he saw that the image cut deep within the gem, the shape that had been swimming toward the surface since he first looked at it, was clear now. It was shaped like an X, with intricate details within each of the bars. There was something at the junction of the two lines, like a swelling or a circle.

  Looking at it gave him a headache. He felt like the thing was trying to drive the design into his brain, but it wouldn’t fit.

  He heard words as if from a great distance. Shaking off the mesmerizing hold of the Skorahn, he looked up to see Angara shouting into his face. As he focused on her, her voice came pounding at him with full volume.

  “We need to get moving! They’re coming!” She gestured back to her downed shuttle with one glittering knife. When had she drawn her weapons?

  But just the mention of the approaching enemy was enough to call them to mind, and he was presented with a mental map of the Sanctuary and the surrounding plains. The Ntja were, indeed, moving forward. They were going to be inundated by alien dog soldiers within a matter of moments if he didn’t do something.

  He looked from the crazed and fractured windows and the glowing mosaic of containment fields back to the enormous wall that had stood, silent and inviolate at the bottom of the ramp for more thousands of years than anyone could know. When he looked at the wall he felt a faint pull, the medallion drawing gently at his hand.

  A calm part of his brain wondered why the detailed map he could conjure up in his head stopped at the slick black wall. He didn’t know if that was bad, but he couldn’t come up with any reason to think that it was good.

  He took several hesitant steps down the ramp into the Alcove, the others huddled together just behind him, and finally stood before the wall. He felt as if he had spent hours staring at the featureless darkness before him, pleading, to no avail, for it to open.

  It opened.

  At the first thought of the wall opening, the heavy black surface shuddered apart, a fall away like a layer of thick water that washed up either side, forming a doorframe that beckoned silently before them.

  Beyond was only darkness. He moved up to the verge of the doorway and tried to pierce the shadows with the force of his will. The map in his mind had not expanded as the door opened, but as he squinted into the gloom, a series of bars overhead began to glow with a soft, green-tinged light.

  It was a hall, the walls, floor, and high ceiling made of the same bronze-like material of the plains around them. The lights appeared in a haphazard pattern that made him think not all of the bars were functional. The sheer height of the opening made him wonder who it might have been built for.

  “We don’t have a choice. We have to follow it.” Angara edged past him to stand just inside the doorway. She looked back at him, her dark skin blending into the hollow behind her, her white hair and light eyes giving her the aspect of a ghost, emerging from a tomb on some mysterious, vengeful mission. The sorrow was still there, locked silently behind her eyes, giving her an even more frightening visage.

  A blast shook Sanctum, and as he shrank away from the sound and the pressure wave, he was treated with the distinct image of the Council forces blasting a hole in the crystalline wall, taking advantage of the breach Iphini’s shuttle had made when it crashed through.

  Scores of the soldiers were forming up to flood through as soon as the smoke cleared.

  He gasped as he emerged from the vision, nodding his head frantically. “We do.”

  Ve’Yan spun him around, her face cold and hard. “What’s down there? What are we running into?”

  “What does it matter?” Angara’s exasperation was almost a physical force in the confined space. Behind them, the surviving Variyar got off several shots, accompanied by the gruff screams of their targets, before the air around them took on the heavy, oily feel of a suppression field. He could probably raise it, he realized, but didn’t think that would be wise, given how badly they were outnumbered.

  “I’d rather not die cornered in some dusty old tunnel like a trapped rodent!” The Diakk woman’s face was twisted with rage. “I’d rather not die here at all! But that path has been closed to me!”

  The enraged mask turned on master Nhan, who cringed away, unable to meet her eyes.

  “We need to get in now.” The Ntja were surging toward them with their howling, barking war cries. The Variyar discarded their own rifles, rising to meet them. Angara grabbed Marcus by the arm and pulled him into the tunnel. “We shall keep going until we cannot. There is always time for a hopeless last stand when you have tried everything else first.”

  Marcus and Angara were several steps into the tunnel now, Khet Nhan near them, looking despondent. Outside, the Variyar were fighting with fatal abandon, the clash of their long blades ringing off the crystal roof high overhead.

  “Go!” One of the warriors called over his shoulder, a terrible grin twisting his hard lips. “We will hold them here!”

  Sihn Ve’Yan stood between the two groups, looking first at the press of battle at the top of the ramp, then back at the three of them standing in the shadows.

  She shook her head, and a hard, cold fire igniting in her eyes. “I will stay with the Variyar.”

  That brought Nhan out of his silence and he looked up at her with wide, disbelieving eyes. “No! Sihn, you cannot! Do not throw your life away because of my mistakes!” He moved to her, his little hands clenched together in a silent plea. “Your path must not end here, like this!”

  Marcus winced away from the scornful edge to her voice as she snarled her reply. “You held all of my trust, master. I followed you willingly across the galaxy, taking your words to heart and seeing the galaxy through your eyes.” She flicked her glance back to Marcus and then away. “You have betrayed everything you have ever taught me. You have broken the cycles through your intervention. You have shattered everything.” She shook her head, looking down, a soft disappointment visible for just a moment through the armor of her anger and distress. “I do not wish to live in a cycle rendered worthless through the failure and apostasy of the very being who gifted me with my faith and knowledge.”

  “No … no …” Nhan’s head was shaking back and forth as if he was having a fit. “No. Sihn, you can’t.”

  She stood up straighter, her balled fists clenched at her sides. “I can. It is the only choice you have left me.”

  She turned without another word, and they watched her leap up to the lip of the recessed area, coming around to take the attacking Ntja in the flank. She bounded into the air with a terrifying shriek and her foot lashed out to take one soldier in his massive head. The force shattered an enhancement dome and sent pressurized gas boiling out of the rent in the metal. She was a whirl of fists and feet. She fell deeper into surging battle, and disappeared.

  Nhan collapsed, one hand grasping out after his novice as if he could pull her back through sheer force of will.

  But she was gone.

&nbs
p; “Go!” The Variyar’s voice was a growl, exhaustion obvious in it despite the fierce joy of combat.

  Angara nodded, pulling Nhan’s loose frame in after them, and Marcus turned back to the door. He imagined the doorway surging closed behind them, sealing them into the dimly lit corridor, coming between the onrushing enemy and whatever mystery lay behind them.

  Aside from a slight tremor that shook loose a streamer of dust from above, the glistening substance did not move.

  “No.” Marcus jerked toward them, placing a hand on the cool material of the door. “No!” He tried to imagine it slamming closed with all the power of his mind, but there was no response. The doorway was not going to close again. He knew, without knowing how, that some mechanism deep within the Relic Core had broken, succumbing to the weight of millennia.

  “Go!” The battle had pressed the last three Variyar down the ramp, there was no room now for doubt or hesitation.

  “Go!” Angara shoved him roughly down the hall and he began to stumble into the darkness. She pulled Nhan after her, and the three of them were soon dashing down the high metal corridors, lights snapping on before them and fading into darkness behind. They moved through a bubble of greenish light, the sounds of deadly battle behind, nothing but cold, mysterious emptiness ahead.

  Chapter 29

  The stink of the Ntja soldiers was starting to wear on his nerves. He had been forced to growl more than once, now, to keep them out of his space. He had never been able to abide having his elbow jogged while he was working, and now, as everything fell into place for him, he found it rankled his dignity even more.

  With the final dissolution of Marcus Wells and his compatriots, Penumbra would be his, for as long as he wanted it. The last refuge of those too obtuse, archaic, or ignorant to understand the full benefit of living beneath Council rule would be removed. In the scale of the galaxy as a whole it was a small thing, really. Fewer than fifty thousand souls resided within the dusty towers of this outpost of egotism. But as a symbol, its impact was incalculable.

  As would be the glory of removing it, once and for all, from the galactic game board.

  The Kerie, in the ascendant within the halls of the Galactic Council now for generations, would be the first among equals. They would take their rightful place at the head of the galaxy’s sentients, and he, as the being placing the last great keystone upon the successes of his race, would reap the greatest of the rewards. With the treasures even now stored in the holds of Ochiag’s command ship, the shape of the galaxy itself was about to shift.

  And as there were those races and systems the Kerie knew needed to be more firmly put in their place once the power was there, Khuboda Taurani knew of many of his fellow Kerie who likewise could stand for a reminder of the true order of things.

  And all of that would fall into place with the death of a single Human barbarian, here and now.

  His viewing field was keyed to Sanctum and the forces raging around it. The ancient ship was laid out beneath him like the subject of a dissection, its bulbous forward observation bridge the distended head of the diseased body. Even from this height, he could see several breaches in the complex of clear panes that made up the enormous forward bulkhead of the chamber.

  Ochiag’s forces were pressing in close. There had been no visible blaster fire since right after the second shuttle had crashed through the entrance wound of the first. He could admit, now, that the appearance of that second shuttle had been harrowing. Clearly an Ntja attack craft, his soldiers had not fired upon it as it approached. But when it dropped the fire bombs upon his heavy infantry, gunning them down with its chin gun and then swerving back around to attack the main body of his force, it had wreaked havoc with their formations.

  He had feared treachery for a moment. He had worked with Laksamara Ochiag before, and had never known the Ntja admiral to betray an ally. But the stakes had never been higher, if the admiral was aware of them, and he dared take nothing for granted. Ochiag most likely did not understand the rewards on offer here today, but still: rivals could be hiding anywhere, and Ochiag might well be a cat’s paw for another player that had not yet made their presence known.

  But no other space craft had arrived. The lone Ntja shuttle had taken a second run at his main force and then plunged into Sanctum … admittedly with far more grace than the civilian craft that had crashed through earlier.

  He watched as the Ntja swarmed around the forward section of Sanctum like metal filings around an activated electromagnet. They were disappearing through breaches in the crystal wall, but he could not follow their movements within Sanctum, unable to pierce the combination of solar glare off the surviving panes and the shimmering blue of straining containment fields.

  “Ambassador, they seem to have breached Sanctum. Shall we approach?” The pilot’s voice was muffled by a large enhancement dome emerging from the side of his cheek.

  Taurani leaned in to his viewing field. The fighting appeared to be over. Also, he needed to keep in mind that Ntja did not follow blatant cowards. It would do his reputation no harm to be seen heading into the battle before the all clear was officially given.

  “Take us down. Land just outside the dome, however. I feel no need to prove points of heroism or superior ship handling today, if you please.” The skin around his bright eyes tightened in amusement. Word of his calm demeanor and soft words would enhance his reputation as well. When the time came in Council, it would help to have as many loyal soldiers at his back as possible.

  The diplomatic shuttle drifted down over the blackened wreckage and field triage centers that had been hastily thrown up to deal with the casualties of the shuttle’s recent attack. His ship made a gentle landing before the devastated exterior shell of Sanctum’s observatory, and his detail leapt out to take up defensive positions, their heavy rifles seeking targets as if an entire friendly army had not scoured the site clean only moments before.

  He stepped from the shuttle lightly, almost oblivious to the personal field that snapped up over his head. He did not venture into hard vacuum often, but he had done it enough that he felt no fear of the sensation.

  Ntja sentries stood at each of the breach points, and they all saluted him as he approached, dipping his head to receive their homage. He had only visited Sanctum once, but he was shocked at the state in which he found it as he stooped to enter through the blasted hole. There were Ntja bodies piled up all along the lower tiers, and almost every ancient command console had been shredded, either by the crashing civilian shuttle or during the fire fight that had engulfed the chamber. One entire side of the huge hall had collapsed, a tangle of metal and glittering crystalline shards burying more bodies of both sides.

  The enemy dead had been left where they fell, and he gazed with grim satisfaction upon the twisted and still forms of the giant Variyar warriors. Their armor was distinctly individual, not the comforting, disciplined uniformity of a true military force. Their rifles and tall long blades were scattered across the floor.

  One body lay at the head of the dead-end ramp at the back of the bridge chamber, wrapped in sheeting and far too small to be a Variyar. One of his soldiers had torn the wrappings aside, and the serene, still face of Iphini Bha had been revealed. Her big eyes were shut, her skin unmarred by any visible wounds, but pale pink stains seeped through the wrappings.

  His stiff mouth twisted. He had envisioned some amazing things he wanted to have done to the Iwa’Bantu woman for all of the annoyance and frustration she had caused. It was some relief that she was dead, however. And there were always more Iwa’Bantu to be found to slake his needs.

  He resolved to find one as soon as he returned to the core systems, to celebrate his victories and leaving the benighted rim behind.

  “Ambassador, should we follow?” A high-ranking Ntja with many facial enhancement blisters of varying sizes lurched up to him. “We’ve secured the rest of Sanctum, sir.”

  Taurani glanced around. He had expected to see Marcus and his minions laid
out before him, their bodies torn and cold. There were less than ten Variyar, and the little Iwa’Bantu body, but other than those, the visible dead were all Ntja. They might be beneath the collapsed portion of the dome, he thought.

  “What? Follow who? Follow them where?” His innate sense of self-preservation was starting to tingle. If the Human and his allies were not here, safely dead, then where were they? And if Sanctum had been secured, where had they fled?

  “The doorway, Ambassador. There is a hall leading downward? It would appear from the placement of the bodies that the final Variyar were guarding that doorway when they fell.”

  Taurani’s body temperature dropped. He whirled, his robes flaring about him, and rushed up the tiers to the highest level. A veritable wall of Ntja bodies surrounded the recessed area known as the Alcove, heaped around the fallen Variyar defenders. They were scattered across the ramp leading down to the bronze wall with its door, as well.

  The door that had never been opened.

  The door that all records and myths said could never be opened.

  The door that was open now, nothing but darkness beckoning beyond.

  His mouth fell open and he nearly choked on the fear rising in his throat.

  He tried to reason with himself. There was no telling what was down there. The city was thousands upon thousands of years old. Anything down there was probably eons past its time of usefulness.

  But still … why take any chances?

  A cold hand gripped his heart and without a word he strode up to the tiny, shrouded form of Iphini Bha’s corpse. He knelt down beside it and wrenched the sheeting away.

  Her throat was bare.

  “Go! Get in there now! Send the heavy infantry and kill them! Now, before they find anything!” He could hear the edge of fear in his voice. There was nothing in that voice to earn the admiration and loyalty of these soldiers now. But damn them, anyway. They were little more than slaves, in the grand scheme of things. “And bring me back that damned medallion!”