And then someone passed through, and out, and into our little valley.
An alien. Another one of the same species as Istari. Slightly taller and heavier-set, he was still freakishly slender and spindly by human standards. He wore a shimmering black tunic of metallic fabric and loose-fitting pants that appeared to be made from the same type of material that Istari wore. His face appeared regal, somehow, with a long, thin nose and arched brows over a bone-white face.
In his right hand he carried a sword.
It was long and somewhat ornate and heavy-looking, and the thought passed through my mind that it might weigh more than he did, leading me to further speculate on how he was so easily able to carry it.
Above all else, though, it was golden. Lord, how golden it was. It gleamed, it shone, it practically radiated gold. A very real, visceral sense of power emanated from it.
The alien took a second and then a third step through the doorway and his eyes focused upon me and he halted and stared. He appeared startled at the sight of me, waiting there.
And then his eyes rolled up in his head and he dropped to his knees. The sword fell from his grasp and landed on the cushioning grass with scarcely a sound.
Istari had done something to him. What, I wasn’t entirely sure. I saw no wounds, had heard no discharge, and Istari held no weapon. Probably safe to assume it had been some sort of mental attack.
Evidence to support that, a moment later: the air had grown colder, just as it had back at the dome. My breath a cloud, I leaned down and reached for the golden weapon where it lay.
“Stop!”
Startled, I looked up. Istari was moving toward me, his eyes glowing orange.
“The sacred sword is not meant for one such as you to wield,” he snapped.
He reached down to grasp the sword himself.
I started to hit him with a retort—or just hit him. I didn’t get the chance to do either.
Another shape had come into view behind him, passing through the still-open doorway. It was big and gray and it roared something I couldn’t understand as it rushed up behind Istari and drew back its right hand.
“Look out—!” I cried, too late.
The big gray hand swung out and slapped Istari in the back, sending him sprawling.
This time it was anger that swelled inside me. Anger that I had been right—that we were not as prepared for this conflict as my erstwhile companion had believed. Anger that I had told him that, only to have him dismiss the very notion. Mostly, though, anger that once again I was going to have to fight one of these gray giants, and this time I was entirely unarmed—no pistol, no handy surgical lasers, nothing.
As I scrambled away from the giant I saw Istari recover, flip back onto his feet—he was a much more nimble figure now than he had been in the moments after I’d first rescued him—and direct his right hand out in my big adversary’s direction. “Kratok,” he murmured. “You should not have interfered.” His eyes flared orange and the giant emitted a muffled “Ooof” before stumbling backwards, nearly tripping over his feet. Istari motioned again as the big gray guy tried to get up. The giant spun sideways and went down hard.
Okay. Some sort of psychic power, obviously—not just to read minds but to affect the physical world. Call it telekinesis. Istari was more formidable than I’d thought.
Then he flew off his feet and sprawled on the grass, tumbling head over heels.
The other alien—my companion had called him Udasi, I remembered then—had recovered at least somewhat and was climbing back to his feet. His hand was outstretched and his eyes glowed as orange as Istari’s had. He turned his attention towards me and I backed away quickly, possibly more afraid of him than I had been of the giant. The giant, after all, represented a very visible, physical force, but the gaunt, slender Udasi did his damage within the realm of the unseen.
Udasi advanced upon me but then an invisible hand smashed him in the back and hurled him to the side and down. Istari stood revealed behind him, both arms outstretched and eyes glowing brighter. The cold now was almost overwhelming; frost covered the dead grass.
Udasi recovered instantly and the two slender aliens squared off, both crouching low, both with arms extended before them, both with nightmarish luminous eyes. The golden sword lay on the ground between them. Each time one would make a move for it, the other would lash out with a violent gesture, and the first would react as though struck with a mighty blow. Then the sequence would reverse itself. They circled one another, trading these psychic bolts and blasts and reeling each time the other’s attack got through. It became a dance, almost hypnotic in its bizarre choreography, and it caused me to momentarily forget the fourth player on our little drama. Forget him, that is, until he very violently reminded me of his presence.
Kratok reared up and smashed his massive fist into my back. My golden mesh shirt did little to protect me from the full force of the blow. I was driven forward and down, sent tumbling across the now-crunchy, ice-cold grass, and for a couple of seconds I lost all sense of where I was, who I was, or what I was doing. All I knew at that moment was shock and pain. My vision filled with stars and explosions—and they, incongruously, reminded me of the war probably still going on back home, from which I had abdicated myself for too long now—and I cast about, blinking furiously as my eyesight slowly came back. My hands were splayed out to either side as I tried to rise, and my fingers closed on something. I had no idea what it was but it felt solid and heavy.
A roar of fury. My vision cleared enough that I could see Kratok the giant charging at me, his big, grasping hands reaching out, murder clear in his eyes. My hand clasped firmly the object that lay to my side, and without further thought I raised and swung whatever it was at the oncoming giant.
The roar ceased abruptly. And I was not tackled.
As my swing carried the object around and past Kratok, my vision cleared. I hadn’t struck him—of that I was certain—and I therefore couldn’t imagine what could’ve caused him to stop. Then I saw.
Kratok stood only a short distance from me, his expression one of unmitigated shock. His mouth hung open; his dark eyes were wide and they flicked between the object I held and a spot in midair about halfway between us.
The spot in midair drew my attention and I stared at it, puzzled. So strange was it, I nearly forgot my deadly foe and all else that transpired around us. It was a slice, a gash, carved in the very air itself. Within its jagged boundaries I glimpsed, as though very far away, a sheet of flames.
A second later Kratok overcame his distraction and this time as his gaze fell upon me I saw that it contained some small element of—was that fear?—along with the hatred and rage. He hesitated, then came at me again. Instinctively I swung what was in my hand a second time.
Another gash ripped open in the air before me, this one larger, wider. A gaping maw, it hung there like a crudely cut version of the doorway through which our foes had arrived. It was filled with roaring flames.
Kratok the giant attempted to halt his progress but his momentum was too great. He stumbled, twisted—and then his great bulk fell through. There came the briefest of screams—a sound utterly at odds with the massive, imposing being that emitted it—and he was gone. The flaming portal snapped closed, along with the smaller one I had opened just before it.
I stood there reeling, not entirely certain what had just happened. Glancing over at the two aliens I saw that they had paused their sorcerous duel and were both unabashedly gawking at me. And particularly at what I held in my right hand.
The sword. The golden sword. I had somehow used it to carve holes in the very fabric of the universe itself. Now I held it out to my side and its weight was as nothing; as a feather in my grasp. It felt as if I’d been born to hold it, to wield it.
Istari was first to recover his senses. He leapt up, came at me, seized the sword from my hand and spun about, dropping lower as he did so. The other like him, Udasi, reacted a second later—a second too late. Apparently a fra
ction slower to switch from mental to physical combat and action, he was just rising to his feet when Istari brought the golden blade around in a wide arc and took his head—still bearing its look of stunned outrage—clean from his shoulders.
SEVEN
Our relationship changed a bit after the incident with Kratok and Udasi.
Istari retained possession of the sword but he seemed deeply troubled by the revelation that I could use it. He made it very clear to me that such a thing should not have been possible.
I was getting a bit fed up with him leading me around and expecting me to do his bidding—which today had mostly consisted of rushing blindly and unarmed into fights against vastly superior forces. So I put my foot down and demanded answers.
To my surprise, he acquiesced. “That is fair,” he said. “I promised to help you with your problem once the sword came into my possession, and now it has.”
We climbed back onto our horses, both now awake again after Istari had freed them from his hypnotic spell, and my companion regarded me as if seeing me for the first time.
“There is also the fact that our separate problems are now merging together,” he added.
This took me aback. “They are?” I asked. “How so?”
“My enemies—my former associates—are now working with individuals who are your enemies, but whom you still believe to be your allies and associates,” he said.
I attempted to parse that out, failed. I was very tired at that point. I’d been up a full day even before the attack on the Victoria moon and the murder of my father, and then add on everything that had happened since then... I had a hell of a headache, to say the least.
“Can you run that by me again?” I asked, rubbing my bloodshot eyes with my fists.
He looked away for a moment as our horses moved lazily about in slow, meandering circles, nibbling at the parts of the grass that weren’t still frozen. “Haven’t you asked yourself,” he said at last, “what my former captor was doing riding his horse away from your world in the first place? Why was he there?”
I shook my head, feeling chagrined to have overlooked such an obvious thing. Of course I had thought about it at the time, but so much had happened since then that the question of that first alien’s presence there on Victoria had slipped my mind entirely. And, as I’ve said repeatedly, I was extremely tired.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” I told him. “Do you?”
“Of course,” he said, flashing me that thin smile I’d seen from him so many times already in our brief acquaintance. Then his look turned more serious. “He was there meeting with someone,” he said. “Someone who is in league with him and his associates—my former compatriots.”
I stared back at him, a sick feeling growing in my gut. “What are you saying?” I demanded.
“I am saying precisely what you think I’m saying. What you fear most.” He chuckled softly. “You harbor a traitor within your ranks.”
“Someone on my world?”
“Someone in your family,” he replied.
+ + +
Needless to say, we raced back along the cosmic Paths to Victoria with all the speed I could muster from Istari’s mount and my own. I still didn’t understand in the slightest how we were doing that, but it worked, and at the moment that was what mattered.
The light had faded to a sort of twilight effect all around us, even before the fog that was our constant traveling companion returned. The ground was firmly packed and Comet moved along its surface easily. Despite all that I’d asked of him since we’d departed the palace, he seemed none the worse for the wear. I suspected it had to do with the sleep spell Istari had placed on both animals twice so far. If only he could do the same for me. But I knew I needed to be alert now—more than ever before.
Along the way, I at last managed to coax some answers out of my reticent associate. Perhaps he believed at that point that I needed to be better informed in order to be a more effective ally. Or perhaps not. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now, and I don’t much care. At that moment, all I wanted was more information. I got it.
How much of it to believe was another question entirely.
Of course, when he pointedly accused someone in my immediate family of being a traitor to the rest of us, I wanted to call him a liar. I wanted to, but I knew it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. For one thing, I remembered seeing that strange, lone figure on the balcony in the palace, seemingly interacting with someone—perhaps one of my uncles—prior to our family meeting. And I could scarcely deny that it might very well have been the same figure that led me along the Path to where I found the captive Istari.
For another, I knew my relatives all too well.
“Who was it, then?” I asked as we galloped along. “Who was it that I saw in the palace? One of your people?” I paused, then, “For that matter, who exactly are your people?”
“We are the Immortals,” he replied.
“The what?”
“The Cabal of Nine, if you prefer,” he added. He looked away for a second, then amended, “Six now, I suppose. Five, if you subtract me from the equation.”
“It’s looked to me like they’ve pretty much subtracted you. Every time we run into one of them, they want to kill you. And me.”
“I told you before, I am the Renegade. They have rejected my counsel and revoked my membership in their club.” He scowled over at me, seemed to think better of it, and smiled again. “Not that I care, because I wanted nothing else to do with them or their twisted agenda.”
“Immortals, you say.” I thought about that for a moment and snorted. “We’ve encountered three of them on this trip so far. Not a one of them turned out to be immortal. Pretty darned mortal, every one of them, in fact.”
“We have been fortunate.” He glanced down at the sword, which now hung from his horse’s left flank in a scabbard that fit it perfectly. I hadn’t noticed the scabbard before and wasn’t sure where he’d acquired it. “Extremely fortunate.”
“Tell me about that weapon,” I said. “What is it? What exactly did it do to the gray giant, back there?”
“It hurled him into hell,” Istari said matter-of-factly.
I blinked. “It what?”
Istari glanced at me and laughed. “I continue to fall back on the colloquialisms I took from your mind when we first met,” he said. “I find them colorful and quite useful.”
“You’re avoiding my questions.”
He was silent for a few moments, then sighed tiredly and looked at me again. “Very well. Where to begin?”
“The beginning.”
He shook his head. “No. Too far back. Not helpful to the present situation.” He pursed his thin lips. “We must begin a bit more recently in time.”
And so as we trotted along through the mists, Istari the Renegade began to lay out for me a tapestry of galactic history about which I and the rest of the human race until that moment had known nothing.
+ + +
Ages ago, before the human race had climbed down from the trees; before even my own kind, the Dyonari, had risen to become the most advanced and dominant life form in the galaxy, there existed the Machine.
A vast and powerful artificial intelligence, we can only assume the Machine was built by some race now long-vanished. They are gone, but it survived. And the job its creators left behind for it was a simple one: to enforce their vision of peace upon the cosmos.
Some saw the Machine as benevolent and therefore obeyed its laws and prospered, within the strict guidelines it laid down. Others saw it as a malevolent and oppressive force, tyrannical and authoritarian. They refused to follow its laws. They suffered the consequences.
The Machine, you see, had created an army of genetically engineered and cloned warriors called the Hands. It trained them via forced memory download and armed them with the most advanced weaponry ever seen. And it sent them out in sentient ships by the thousands to enforce its laws, its will for all living beings in the g
reater galactic society.
None could stand before the Hands. Chosen and bred from a race of powerful gray giants, they swept across the spiral arms of the Milky Way and systematically dismantled all opposition.
Were they truly benevolent, or did they represent tyranny and conquest? Who can say? The answer lies in the eye of the beholder. Many races and worlds welcomed them. Some did not.
My own race, the Dyonari, fought back. We were among the last of the holdouts. Our technology had grown and developed to the point that we could fight them more successfully than most. Our warriors became masters of the blade as well as the firearm, because the Hands were proficient with both. Our seers, expanding our people’s existing latent psychic skills, developed precognitive abilities useful for early warning. And the most powerful among us discovered how to walk the Pathways of the lower Above, and thus travel from world to world without the need for spacecraft—thereby avoiding the Hands’ ceaseless patrols.
Thus we and a few other races challenged the tyranny of the Machine. It was a long and costly war. It raged for centuries and consumed the resources and inhabitants of countless worlds. And, in the end, it was unsuccessful. In short, we lost.
The Hands of the Machine blamed my species above all others for this rebellion. In retribution, they ravaged our home world and all of our colony worlds. Our population was reduced to a fraction of its original size.
Some few of us survived, though. Deprived of our planets, we found or created... alternate places to live. And there our people remain.
But a small number of us refused to yield, even then. We formed a secret group—a cabal—to work in secret against the Machine. I counted myself among their number. We rallied the people on a hundred worlds. We preached against our enemy’s tyranny. We formed insurgencies on dozens of planets. We struck without warning, we sabotaged, we disrupted the Machine wherever possible. Our greatest coup came when we recruited three disaffected former Hands—Dormor, Kratok and Hadog— into our ranks, bringing with them invaluable strategic and technical intelligence. They had lost faith in the Machine’s vision, or felt some degree of sympathy for the dominated peoples, or were simply outraged at its growing tyranny.
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