Her gaze returned to the lone figure standing before the Throne. All sound in the great room ceased as he began to speak. Emotion thrummed through every nerve as Brandon’s voice rose and fell in the cadences as familiar now as her own breathing. She did not hear the words, but it didn’t matter. It was a political speech, one moreover she had helped him to fashion, for he wanted to speak words that would adjure to unity not just his war-shocked citizenry but the Rifter over-culture.
“There’s the gnostor,” Montrose interrupted, as on the screen Sebastian Omilov brought forward a book, symbolic of secular wisdom. “Looks like he just discovered a fortune under his bed. Brandon piling on the awards?”
“He’s going home,” Sedry murmured from her place at the weapons console. “Didn’t you know? He’d had some kind of falling-out with his own family, during Gelasaar’s reign, but that’s been made right. He’s retiring and going home to his birthplace.”
Sebastian Omilov stepped back, and his son moved forward, bearing a sword; then Vannis Scefi-Cartano, with a silken sash; and then, finally, the High Phanist, with the Arkadic signet, reforged from the mold interred with Jaspar Arkad nearly a thousand years before.
As the High Phanist stepped back, last of the Semiotes of the ancient ritual, bearers of ancient regalia symbolic of the Panarch’s source of authority, Vi’ya turned her attention to Vannis. Poised and beautiful, she looked like a polished jewel. Does this bring us full circle? Vannis had asked that only yesterday, though it seemed longer ago than that.
There is no circle, Vi’ya thought as Brandon stepped up to the Throne, turned, and faced the room. A circle implied a blending of beginning and end into one, a cycle that made its rounds without change. And in greater sense that might be true, but within the perspective of their lives the circle was actually a spiral, winding round and upward, much like the tree branches reaching toward the stars. Her own life had changed forever, bound to theirs; she thought of Jaim, sitting silent and alone in the engine room, watching Vannis on his screen. Was Vannis thinking of him as well?
Was Anaris watching?
No. For of course he would never betray the slightest interest in any of this to his own people, and yet he had not come away from his years on Arthelion unmarked: she knew that much about him. But Vi’ya suspected he would watch this sooner rather than later, making comments meant only for the hearing of Morrighon.
Next came the words of the Panarch’s oath, clearly spoken, and this time her crew did not interrupt. It did not take long. After all the hours of ceremonial, the actual oath was short, and simple, and unchanged from when Jasper Arkad first penned it.
Brandon finished, then took a step backward. She could see his face now, and read in the uplifted gaze and the curve of his mouth the profound triumph he felt as he sank down onto the Throne of his ancestors.
Sebastian and Osri, Vannis and the High Phanist, made a low obeisance, and behind them all the others in the great hall, as Brandon’s eyes looked out over them. Vi’ya had a visceral sense that he saw past them, past the Palace—that he was looking for her. And then she saw his right hand move slightly in a gesture of promise.
She knew it was for her; he knew she was there, watching.
Her hand moved, a twin gesture to his, and then she tabbed the screen off. The crew looked up expectantly at her, their expressions characteristic, from Lokri’s smiling challenge to Sedry’s steady regard.
“Let’s go,” she said.
EPILOGUE
Ehyana Bengiat opened her eyes and thought herself still dreaming, for above her stood a naked young man of supernal beauty, and next to him a large beige-striped cat, its slitted eyes gleaming.
She looked down her body—she, too, was naked, yet she felt no shyness, for the young man looked at her in a way that made her feel he really saw her, not the beauty that everyone else never looked beyond.
“How long?” she asked, and knew it must have been quite some time, for her voice was husky with disuse. As she raised her head, she felt the weight of her hair, which had always been cut short.
Weeks, or months, I guess, she thought.
But the young man didn’t reply. Instead, he gestured, and to her surprise, she understood him as perfectly as if he’d spoken—every line of his body, every movement of his perfect limbs, was absolute and sure. She had a sense that until now she’d seen only clumsy imitations of the human form.
She rose and followed him, amazed to find no stiffness in her limbs, no scars upon her body. Her last memory was the tunnel walls slamming together behind her, the Dol’jharian heir looming over her; she put that memory away.
They walked for some time through the strangeness of the Suneater. The air was cool on her flesh, the deck strangely affectless underfoot.
He led her through an adit and she stopped, gasping, for there was no floor. Instead, below their feet, the hellish fury of sun-hot plasma raved and swirled, and beyond, as if through white-hot mist, the singularity glared with almost unbearable brilliance. With a shudder of awe, she realized that they were in the heart of a supernova. There would be no escape.
The young man took her hand and led her out onto the invisible floor, toward a strange vertical beam of radiance lancing down from the organically groined ceiling far above. She shrank from it, noting how it dwindled away toward the singularity, visible even against its searing light.
He dropped her hand, and at that moment, a memory surfaced.
“Ivard?” she asked. “You’re Ivard, aren’t you?” For the first time she noticed the emerald band around his wrist.
But he merely smiled and stepped into the beam, while the cat sat and began to clean itself, clearly unimpressed.
Her eyes widened as the white-hot gases whipped away underfoot, leaving the black hole clear to her sight. What had he done? Then she gasped as blackness dilated at the heart of the singularity. For a moment she saw stars through the lightless void; then it dwindled and was gone.
And arrowing out from it came two ships. Her breath caught in her throat—within seconds they were directly outside the station, their forms inhumanly strange, their movements even stranger, darting about and changing direction instantaneously, as if stripped of their inertia.
They moved out of sight, and the deck shuddered slightly underfoot.
She gazed helplessly at the youth in the beam of light, his face shining with unnamable emotions.
The cat butted her leg and began to purr.
Copyright & Credits
The Thrones of Kronos
Exordium 5
Sherwood Smith & Dave Trowbridge
Book View Café edition July 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61138-541-0
Copyright © 2015 Sherwood Smith & Dave Trowbridge
First published: Tor, 1996
Cover illustration © 2015 by Sherwood Smith
Production Team:
Cover Design: Pati Nagle
Copy Editor: Phyllis Irene Radford
Proofreader: Brian Quirt
Formatter: Vonda N. McIntrye
This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Digital edition: 20150719vnm
www.bookviewcafe.com
Book View Café Publishing Cooperative
P.O. Box 1624, Cedar Crest, NM 87008-1624
About the Authors
Sherwood Smith writes fantasy, science fiction, and historical romance for old and young readers.
Dave Trowbridge wrote high-tech marketing copy for over thirty years, which made him an expert in what he calls “pulling stuff out of the cave of the flying monkeys,” so science fiction comes naturally. He abandoned corporate life for good in 2013, but not before attaining the rank of Dark Lord of Documentation. He much prefers the godlike pow
ers of a science fiction author (hah!) to troglodyte status in dark corporate mills, and the universe is slowly coming around to his point of view.
Dave lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains with his writer wife, Deborah J. Ross, a retired seeing-eye German Shepherd Dog, and two cats. When not writing Dave may be found wrangling vegetables — both domesticated and feral — in the garden.
The Exordium Novels
The Phoenix in Flight
Ruler of Naught
A Prison Unsought
The Rifter’s Covenant
The Thrones of Kronos
About Book View Café
Book View Café is a professional authors’ publishing cooperative offering DRM-free ebooks in multiple formats to readers around the world. With authors in a variety of genres including mystery, romance, fantasy, and science fiction, Book View Café has something for everyone.
Book View Café is good for readers because you can enjoy high-quality DRM-free ebooks from your favorite authors at a reasonable price.
Book View Café is good for writers because 95% of the profit goes directly to the book’s author.
Book View Café authors include New York Times and USA Today bestsellers, Nebula, Hugo, Lambda, and Philip K. Dick Award winners, World Fantasy, Kirkus, and Rita Award nominees, and winners and nominees of many other publishing awards.
www.bookviewcafe.com
THE PHOENIX IN FLIGHT: Sample Chapter
Exordium: Book 1
Sherwood Smith
&
Dave Trowbridge
www.bookviewcafe.com
December 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-161138-059-0
Copyright © 2011 Sherwood Smith & Dave Trowbridge
PROLOGUE
We are the children of conflict. We have been shaped by struggle: against the Collective and its descendant, the Hegemony; against the Adamantines, machines turned masters; against the Shiidra, ancient and implacably hostile; and against the diluting force of interstellar distance. To the student of humanity, it often seems that what we are depends as much on what opposes us as on what sustains us.
We are the children of the Exile. No matter how far diverged by their singular histories, every human culture in the Thousand Suns resonates to its tragic echoes. How else could it be? All of us—Downsider, Highdweller, even Rifter—are descended from the many and varied groups who rejected the sterile conformity of the Solar Collective and chose instead to flee in primitive starships through the Vortex.
We are the children of a mystery. We do not know what the Vortex was. Perhaps it was an artifact of the sophonts we call the Ur, or of the unknown enemy that destroyed them so long ago. The Vortex opened only twice: once, to bring humankind here from the other side of the Galaxy, scattering us through both space and time; once more, to disgorge a cybernetic horror engendered by the Hegemony. We do not know if it will ever open again. Without it, there is no return to Earth, if Earth even still exists.
Thus we are a deeply praeterite people, fascinated by the bits of Earthly life our various ancestors carried with them through the Vortex. In the face of all the forces arrayed against us, these fragments keep us human, for they are sacraments of the deep realities that made our forebears choose Exile and remain rooted in the fertile ground of their natural cultures. Our languages, religions, social and political structures are grounded in these fragments; to the extent that an innovation departs from these roots, it is recognized as false, and fails.
We are the Phoenix, ever regenerate from the flames of conflict, which burn away the dross to reveal the gold of true humanity. Sundered from the mother of humankind by an immensity of space-time, we yet remain the children of Earth.
Magister Davidiah Jones
Gnostor of Archetype and Ritual
The Roots of Human Process
Torigan Prime, A.A. 787
What would we do without our enemies?
The Sanctus Teilhard
(Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)
The Phenomenon of Man
Lost Earth, ca. 200 B.E.
N!Kirr was out of catalepsy into second sleep before he felt his own mind again. He fled the awareness of his other lives and rose slowly toward consciousness.
Pushing his way through first sleep, the aged Guardian folded himself upright, his movements almost involuntary through habit, and locked his secondary knees against his thorax with the deliberate grace of twenty millennia.
The air tasted foul, like a moldy klopt egg, and N!Kirr flexed his mandibles irritably. The harsh clatter echoed through a thousand images of the vault, as he registered the dust-laden sunbeams lancing into the cool darkness through the Sunset Arch.
Sunset? he thought. Disbelief wrenched his eyes into focus, and their iridescent facets glinted as the Guardian peered about, hissing with vexation. Had he lost a night and a day, then? Where were his under-bearers, and his acolytes? Such a thing had never happened before!
“They shall have their shells broken for this! Sunset!” N!Kirr, confused and dizzy, spoke at last, his anger leaking away.
“Sunset,” returned the vault, its echoes blurring the chattering syllables, and N!Kirr swayed, overcome by a sudden sense of wrongness. The sunset light was the color of an offworlder’s blood; the setting Egg was entering Red Victory, one phase of the patient pulse of life that would one day hatch another demon.
A swarm of acolytes scurried toward him, the edges of their chelae pale with confusion and fear, but N!Kirr ignored them. A successor will see the hatching, thought the Guardian dispassionately, in that timeless instant before the star-born demon shall swallow him and all our race into its consuming fury.
“All the stars shall mark our passing, and the fulfillment of our vigil and our trust.” The Guardian spoke to himself, but the acolytes milling about his dais subsided into a respectful silence, except for those who started scribbling on the writing plates hanging from their necks.
Droogflies! he thought angrily, vexed by their dependence on him. He had seen too many of their generations fleeting past him, their brief lives blurring into anonymity, and he was tired.
Still confused by the apparent loss of a day, N!Kirr looked down at the focus of the Shrine and of his people. At the base of his thorax lay the Heart of the Demon, partially sunken in the spiral-incised stone of the Guardian’s dais. Its perfectly-reflecting surface mirrored in curved distortion his anxious face as he bent over it, and the faces of his frightened attendants, waiting silently for his guidance. His age-reddened chelae stroked his throat patches in a rasping sigh, and he cautiously sank his mind into the small sphere, seeking the Pattern. The feeling of wrongness intensified and the stone-prisoned sphere assumed a numinous clarity to his eyes as he found only emptiness.
N!Kirr brought his forearms down and stabbed at the Heart of the Demon with his killing-thumbs. There was a muffled pop and the mirror-sphere vanished, leaving only its shape in the stone and a few silvery tatters. The acolytes shrieked in unison and fled in all directions, their limbs clattering in noisy terror against the inlaid stone.
The Guardian stilled as the shock overthrew the haze of ancient ritual endlessly repeated, and left him completely alert. The Heart of the Demon had been stolen, and a simulacrum placed in its stead while he slept. The offworlders!
N!Kirr closed his eyes. Twenty thousand years he’d watched, and generations of Guardians before him, and the Heart was gone. The Devourer would wake again.
The vault seemed to echo to many voices, all familiar though never heard before, multiplied by the carven wall of the Shrine to a tapestry of compulsion and demand. N!Kirr surrendered to them gratefully, yielding up the crushing knowledge of his race’s failure, so near the end of their long vigil, and the voices swelled into a cold, blinding light that took him into oblivion.
The next day, at the urging of its fellows, an acolyte crept timidly back into the Shrine. It found the Guardian still standing there, its carapace cold and lightless. Shortly after that, for the fir
st time in ten million years, the Shrine was empty of life and movement, a hollow shell abandoned in the bloody light of a dying sun.
PART ONE
ONE
ARTHELION ORBIT
Soft music played in the Suite Royal of the glittership Luxochronus. The immense monocrystal viewport that made up one wall of the suite’s richly-appointed parlor displayed a spectacular view of cloud-swirled Arthelion. The planet curved away vast beneath the ship; above, the Highdwellings in synchronous orbit were a golden arc disappearing over the terminator into the planet’s shadow.
Eleris vlith-Chandreseki ignored the panorama from long habit. As a girl, born a Highdweller and raised on a vast inside-out world where the emptiness of space was unseen and underfoot, she’d found such views threatening in a way that her Downsider cousins couldn’t understand. By the time she’d returned home after her schooling and Grand Tour, she’d seen its like too many times to be impressed.
To Eleris the glory of space existed merely as a backdrop for the slim figure standing in front of the viewport, his hands loose, his head a little to one side as he gazed out at the planet below—from which his family had ruled the Thousand Suns for nearly a millennium.
Eleris shook back her tumble of curls to lie across her naked back, and grinned as she padded barefoot across the floor of living mosses, remembering a party in this same room seven years ago, when she turned twenty. Life is too short to waste on men who are not rich, pretty, and powerful, she’d said to her cousin.
You’ll never get all three, Leda had retorted.
Brandon nyr-Arkad had proved Leda wrong . . . or was going to prove her wrong. He was easily the handsomest of the three royal sons, and his name brought wealth and prestige enough for the most discriminating taste. Together they could lead Douloi society, which the rest of the Panarchy emulated.
The Thrones of Kronos Page 69
