“It was my Will alone who inhabited your sister,” said the voice from the mask. “He offered her as honey to lure you into our fold.” Xander pointed at his masked face. “This, in part, is your punishment for spurning my friendship—and only a sample of your coming woe.”
Anger and sorrow left Astlin speechless, but Nakvin faced Xander again.
“Enough bragging about your convoluted plans. You want to claim my kingdom? There’s just one way to take it, and that’s by killing me right here and now.” Nakvin hooked her thumb back over her shoulder. “But if you’d rather go on posturing, we can do that inside.”
Three silver stars burst to life over Xander’s brow. Nakvin raised an arm to shield her eyes and stepped back from the terrible radiance.
Horror crushed Astlin’s other warring emotions. Shaiel’s control was complete enough to make Xander unveil his light.
“I will speak as I wish, where I wish,” Xander said for Shaiel. “My terms are these—the bastard of my Right Hand will relinquish her throne and dominions to my host. She will dismiss her army and grant my forces safe entry into and free movement throughout Avalon. She will surrender herself into my servants’ custody in advance of her trial for rebellion against my rightful rule.”
“You left me out of your equation,” Elena said.
The silver stars died. The dead eyes behind the mask turned to Elena. “I needn’t account for what is unworthy of consideration. You are beaten, my sister. You were beaten the moment you begged me to save Cross’ life. I revoke my offer of alliance and renounce our kinship. Your only choices now are to resist me and die, or to flee the dawn of my perfect order. I care not which corner of my world you choose for your cloister, so long as it is sufficiently remote.”
Anger burned through Astlin’s fear. “You already disowned me. Do I get a show trial and a cell, too?”
Xander stabbed an accusing finger at Astlin as Shaiel spoke. “You are an interloper with no further claim on this world. Zadok was a fool to permit your meddling. It will be his undoing, for he shall be the last obstacle removed. You who bear his name shall quit my world forever—by one means or another.”
“And Xander?”
“I have broken him. He will serve as my host for as long as it pleases me. Perhaps when his usefulness is done, I shall send what is left of him back to you.”
“Or what?” Nakvin asked. “Extravagant demands like that always come with an ‘or else’. What will you do if we don’t fold like laundry maids?”
A joyless laugh sounded from under the mask. “You live in hell in the company of a goddess. Need I elaborate on the penalties of defiance? You and all your people will know torments beyond what mortal souls were heretofore thought capable of enduring.”
“I just wanted to make sure,” Nakvin said. She thrust her open hand toward Xander.
Astlin heard a sound like a rush of air and felt sudden pressure emanating from the landing pad, as if a tidal wave were confined within the stone circle.
Xander didn’t move.
“I’m reweaving space to hold him,” Nakvin said, her voice strained. “You two drive Shaiel out!”
Astlin exchanged a look with Elena. Then she turned the full brilliance of her light on Xander while Elena filled the platform with a pillar of prana that rose beyond sight into the sky.
I love you, Xander. Astlin’s light carried the fire of her longing. I won’t let Shaiel keep us apart!
Though nothing moved on the platform, golden light that made Astlin feel sick just looking at it flared, rising up through the prana column. The white and gold lights never mixed, but intertwined like wrestling serpents. The winner would claim all of Avalon.
At the pillar’s base, silver light shone out of the gold, pushing back Astlin’s sapphire glow and answering her love with rage that strove to crush her spirit.
Once more, passion leads reason astray! The cold vengeful thoughts could only be Shaiel’s. You were already lost. This vain disobedience will only magnify your suffering.
“I can work with suffering,” Astlin said aloud.
She embraced the pain and loss of Xander’s captivity, offering it to the light beyond the world that had burned away the shadow of her sin. She reflected that pure radiance onto Shaiel’s corruption.
The tainted stars’ silver rays had almost reached Astlin. Now the brilliance of her sapphire crown pushed them back. But her light’s advance met immovable resistance halfway to the landing pad. Silver and blue strove for dominance; neither able to take ground from the other.
Nakvin has Xander’s body trapped, thought Astlin, and I’ve got his power in check. Then again, he’s canceling out mine. It’s up to Elena to drive out Shaiel.
Astlin spared a quick glance to her right and immediately wished she hadn’t.
There, on Elena’s normally placid face, she saw fear.
Shouts went up from the army at the base of the hill. What started with a few voices raised in alarm quickly became a massive uproar.
Astlin risked looking over her shoulder. The sky over the plain seemed to be boiling, as if dozens of bubbling plastic sheets had been hung in the clouds. The warped patches of sky bowed outward as invisible misshapen forms pushed through from a realm of pure chaos.
Oh no, Astlin thought, and Xander’s stolen light took back the ground it had lost.
The plastic bubble masses took on textures and colors that blended those of animals, plants, and machinery. Astlin had seen them before, but she still had no better way to describe them than flying jellyfish stricken with some kind of metallic cancer. These dwarfed the blobs she’d seen on Temil, and their bloated sacs drifted toward Seele trailing forests of ropy tentacles.
“We’ve got to get rid of those things!” shouted Astlin.
“I’m a little busy,” Nakvin said through gritted teeth, both arms stretching toward the writhing white and gold pillar. “Elena, close the gate!”
“I did,” the goddess said. “Every quality of these anomalies is undefined—including location. Inside and outside are the same to them.”
As a mercy, I offered you death or banishment, Shaiel projected. Astlin knew from the other women’s groans that they’d heard him, too.
But out of pride, he accused, you clung to this realm. Now you will subsist forever within a vile confusion of living and inanimate states. Now the Anomians refashion Avalon into a hell worthy of the name!
33
The biggest obstacle Teg faced on Cadrys wasn’t the greycloaks patrolling the streets, the ships patrolling the system, or even the unmentionable horrors haunting the House of Law. It was the fact that everyone on the whole sphere was effectively a spy for the tyrannical god he’d come to rob.
Elena had warned him that Cadrys was Shaiel’s sphere in every sense of the term. Vaun made sure the place was populated solely by facets of his nexus. That meant he could see through anyone’s eyes and hear through anyone’s ears.
Teg had to laugh. He and Vaun were the only men in the world.
Luckily, Vaun’s major advantage brought several disadvantages. Between the Cataclysm and the culling or exile of anyone not cut from Shaiel’s cloth, the sphere’s population was barely enough to support the old capital city of Serapium. That left Teg plenty of unguarded suburban real estate for a landing zone.
Things got even better from there. Cadrys had been settled by frontiersmen fleeing the rigid class systems, lack of upward mobility, or just plain monotony of Mithgar and Keth. Although Cadrys had no more mineral wealth than the other Cards, and a quirk of the atmosphere meant the sky stayed black around the clock, Serapium had enjoyed a respectable boom period that saw its growth explode.
The bust that followed had hit Cadrys hard, ending with Temil snatching Third Sphere status and bumping Cadrys down to Fourth. The locals had soldiered on as they always did—dour, fatalistic, and pragmatic to a fault. About the only thing Teg liked about Cadrisians was their dark sense of humor, but he doubted Vaun’s rule had impr
oved it much.
Come to think of it, nothing ever seemed to improve on Cadrys, which was why Teg found himself in the empty parking lot of an abandoned concrete warehouse deep inside the vast expanse of urban blight that locals called the Desolation.
The blacktop was more cracked than an aging Temilian waitress’ face, and looked to have been superheated and cooled. The odor of sulfur and burning oil didn’t so much hang in the air as cling to every surface, along with a dusting of soot. It was almost three in the afternoon, local time, and the stars were out.
Yep, thought Teg. Elena got me to the right place.
The people of Serapium had once flowed out from the city center in waves, building until the metropolitan area had expanded to three times its current size. The Desolation was what happened when the wave broke and receded, leaving the exposed wrecks of roads, homes, and factories.
Even before the Cataclysm the only ones left in the Desolation—ignoring tales of Gen from the Transessists’ Mill escaping into the tunnels to become blind, mute cannibals stealing kids from basements—were old-timers holed up in crumbling homes, riffraff squatting in forsaken tenements, and smugglers like Teg’s old crew.
Serapium had never had a Guild house. Word was the Transessists had warned the Steersman to stay clear of their order’s headquarters, and the ether-jockeys were only too happy to oblige.
Guild Customs had to make due with operating out of the local spaceport. Most Enforcers avoided the city’s outskirts unless someone important caught fire there, and smugglers had used the old rail tunnels to run contraband through the Desolation.
Like the tunnel under this warehouse.
Unless Vaun had devoted most of his manpower to sealing the vast warren of tunnels under a part of town that even the Guild had written off, Teg could walk right into the heart of the kingdom with no one the wiser.
The going was apt to get bumpy after that. Teg would almost certainly face increased security; probably active patrols, once he got near the House of Law.
That was where Celwen came in. Unfortunately, there’d been no sign of a major disturbance in orbit or among the stark steel and glass towers on the horizon. Hopefully she’d arrange one before the locals caught on to Teg’s presence.
No use standing around all day. Teg walked along the warehouse’s perimeter until he found a rolling steel door. Applying the Formula, he failed to tease any meaning from the decades of overlaid graffiti but saw to his approval that no new vandalism appeared above the Cataclysm-baked layers.
A steel plate set into the concrete threshold featured a sturdy ring that lined up with another bolted onto the door, but the broken padlock lay rusting on the asphalt nearby. Satisfied that the door was no more dangerous than could be expected, and taking one last look to make sure that no one was around, Teg squatted down, grabbed the lip of the door, and heaved.
The segmented shutter resisted at first, but as Teg steadily applied pressure it inched upward with a sharp squeal of corroded metal. The rolling door was a quarter of the way up when the door and its rollers snapped free of the ceiling and came crashing to the floor.
Teg waved away the resulting cloud of soot and rust. To get the matching taste out of his mouth, he took a swig from his plastic canteen and spat into the black doorway.
There were no alarms. No one cried out. The certainty of being utterly alone weighed down on Teg as if transessence had turned the air to lead.
The warehouse door yawned like the rotting mouth of some gigantic dead beast. Teg recalled having seen one of those years before and shuddered. He pulled a thumb-sized flashlight from his pocket and aimed it through the door.
Dust motes danced in the conical beam above the ruins of the door and its rollers. Otherwise, the rust-stained concrete floor looked clear. The stench of an old oven dumped in a junkyard seeped from the building.
Teg drew one of his pistols from its shoulder holster. The gun’s ether metal construction nearly gave it the lightness of a toy, even though it was stronger than steel. He made sure there was a round in the chamber, activated the aura projector on his belt, and stepped into the dark.
Locked in a struggle of light and will against Xander and the wicked god controlling him, Astlin could only watch as the Anomian blobs swarmed around Seele. Their dangling tentacles descended upon the hill. Trees, buildings, and men gave up what they were to the hideous mass and became what it was—everything and nothing.
Avalon’s army was rallying to Seele’s defense. Anti-aircraft weapons hidden on its slopes and those of the surrounding hills flashed and boomed like thunderclouds, but the hovering jellyfish simply absorbed anything shot at them.
“We need to end this!” Astlin shouted to Nakvin and Elena, who stood with her a stone’s throw from the pillar of prana and Void that filled the landing pad.
You may end this farce at your leisure, Shaiel mocked from inside the column of light. Or persist in your obduracy. You will be executed for attempted deicide in the former case; subsumed by the Anomians in the latter. It is all one to me.
“Speak for yourself,” Nakvin called out. “I’d much rather be eaten by mutant space jellyfish than bow to you, Vaun!”
“No,” Elena said with absolute authority. “Everyone, stop.”
The prana vanished, briefly turning the pillar of light solid gold before it faded entirely. The Kerioth’s black hull steamed with melting frost.
Like the nexus-runner above him, Xander stood unharmed upon flagstones cracked and buckled in strange swirling patterns. Silver radiance streamed from his masked brow to impact Astlin’s sapphire light at arm’s length from her face.
“Elena!” Astlin cried. “What are you doing? We can’t hold him alone!”
“Mother, Astlin,” Elena said calmly. “Release Xander.”
Nakvin grumbled in disgust but lowered her arms. Xander raised his to the overcast sky and laughed.
It wasn’t despair that convinced Astlin to cover her light then. It was an oddly calm sense of resignation.
Xander’s silver stars faded, giving a clear view of Vaun’s emotionless mask. “Well done, sister,” he said with false praise. “I admit that you have surpassed me in one respect—convincing your harpy of a mother to quit her career as an irritant so she can accept her due punishment.”
“That’s not why we let you go,” Elena corrected him. “This is.”
Nakvin stepped aside to reveal Jaren, crouching on one knee; his left hand aiming a shiny rodcaster at Xander’s head.
Shaiel could have willed Xander out of the way, but doing so required imagining him somewhere else. Astlin felt Xander’s will surge, wresting control of his imagination from Shaiel’s hands. For an instant she saw her husband’s mind and the vivid mental image that rooted him where he stood.
There was a loud click as Jaren pulled the trigger and a sound like a swarm of bees. A tight cone of distortion resembling a heat haze streaked from the rodcaster’s barrel and blasted into the white mask. Two voices cried out—one Xander’s; the other what an arctic storm would sound like if it could hate—as Xander fell backward onto the scarred stones.
The need to be with Xander overpowered all of Astlin’s other thoughts. In an instant she was kneeling beside him. Her heart leapt when she saw that he was still breathing, and without any concern for the possible dangers of touching Shaiel’s relic, she tore off the cold porcelain mask.
He looks so peaceful, Astlin thought as she caressed her beloved’s beautiful sleeping face.
Sensing a vast nexic power from Xander reminded Astlin that the Kerioth’s shield wouldn’t block her telepathy now that she was inside it. She delicately searched Xander’s mind and rejoiced to find that he was alone.
Astlin was so caught up in the joy of Xander’s rescue that she gave a small cry when someone stepped up to Xander’s other side and crushed Shaiel’s mask under a thick-soled boot.
“Sorry if I scared you,” said Jaren. He returned his rodcaster to the oversized holster at the h
ip of his dark grey pants.
“No,” Astlin said with a relieved laugh. “It’s okay. Thank you for freeing my husband.”
“My pleasure,” Jaren said.
“It’s just…” Astlin searched for a diplomatic way to ask her question. “How did you break Shaiel’s hold on Xander when Elena, Nakvin, and I couldn’t?”
Jaren crouched down and frisked Xander. Astlin was about to object, but the Gen pirate cut her off.
“It’s all about having the right tool for the job,” said Jaren. “You and Teg weren’t the only ones getting ready for Vaun’s visit. Me and Tefler rigged up a new rodcaster and some Malefaction disrupting ammo.”
“So that’s where you kept sneaking off to,” Nakvin said.
Astlin glanced at Nakvin and saw Tefler standing a short distance behind her and Elena. He looked like an ancient soldier ready to fight a holy war in his white pants and shirt under steel armor and a red cloak. His multicolored eyes stared daggers at the shattered mask.
“When did you and Jaren get here?” Astlin asked him.
Tefler blinked as if roused from a daydream and smiled at her. “Right before you said, ‘We need to end this’. Talk about convenient.”
Astlin furrowed her brow. “You knew Jaren and Tefler were here,” she said to Nakvin and Elena. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tefler is my priest,” Elena said. “I learned of his plan through our special bond and telepathically informed Mother.”
“We didn’t tell you the plan because Shaiel might’ve overheard it through Xander’s bond with you,” added Nakvin. “And because it involved shooting Xander in the face.”
“That was probably smart,” Astlin said.
“What have we here?” Jaren wondered aloud as he drew a clear lavender rod from Xander’s robe.
The sight of the hateful device made Astlin’s blood boil. That’s the nexic power source I felt.
“It’s the partition rod,” Astlin said darkly.
The Secret Kings Page 29
