The Kindling opens a Stride tunnel, and, beside a golden mortar wasp, disappears.
Those loyal to him follow, vanish, leaving an emptiness seeming much vaster than that of the open air of the cavern, emptier than the people beside Nyranna could allow for.
***
Nyranna exits the cavern system, the cold day sliding behind a horizon of rocky crags, a descending tear of white.
The others have all Strode away, but Nyranna needs to wander for a bit. Neither the Northrite nor Uden have summoned her back, probably preoccupied with their impending war.
Was she at all successful in inciting the Elemiscist resistance, or did she only drive them further apart by underhandedly not inviting the Kindling? Especially while inviting a Beguiler who was also an overseer.
Nyranna watches tattered clouds streak by: gray, torn remnants of something more, suffused with darkness. She pulls her hood back over her head for warmth. This was the home of her youth, where she hid, and for what? The subjugators found her and forced her into service anyway, her father doing nothing to stop them.
Her mind seeks relief and settles on her happier time. She sits on the branches of the stalactite tree. Content. Carefree. The green fluorescent glow surrounds her. Warm and soft. Cave swallows sing, bees hum. But the cavern draft doesn’t blow. She waits. Kicks her legs to bow the branch, but it’s unforgiving. The sting of a biting insect pinches her neck.
Nyranna rubs her throat. This isn’t helping, and she cannot stay here too long.
She summons the power of the elements and opens a portal. Golden liquid runs up its mirrored surface. A golden fox nudges her hand.
“If you take one more step,” a male voice comes from behind her, tearing through the planet’s stillness, “or try to jump on that golden fox, you’ll be shitting blood within an hour, then die slowly over the next couple days. There’s nothing known to man that can curtail the process.”
Nyranna glances over her shoulder.
There’s a man she’s seen before, the sexy, dangerous looking man from outside the Northrite palace. Some kind of nondescript, long case rests on his shoulder like a launcher but it’s unintimidating and unassuming, except for a cone head that’s pointed at her.
“I’ve come a long way looking for you and those spiders of yours,” he says.
Elion
If this hooded woman is Nyranna of Uden, she appears calm, in control. She’s wearing the autumn-glass robes of an Elemiscist. She doesn’t know what awaits her. Radiation poisoning. Seared organs, like all of the others.
Don’t worry about it. Be jealous of the dead. They do not suffer with relentless thoughts, memories, and emotions like the living.
Which part she played in it all eats at Elion. He bets she took the pearl.
“Slowly remove your hood,” Elion says. He doesn’t know what Nyranna looks like exactly, has only a blandly descriptive profile, and needs her to verify her identify before bringing her to the Northrite.
She faces him: tall, average build, graceful under the lengthening fingers of shadow crawling across the rocks. The hood falls back.
Elion’s body tenses, every muscle arching into contractions and opposing forces. The woman he saw outside the Northrite’s chamber. Long brown hair shimmering like rivers of starlight. A face of sculpted beauty.
A woman who looks exactly like her, the ghost girl in his head. A mature, living rendition of her. The kind he immediately falls in love with …
Not physical attraction, something else, something deeper. Something below his conscious that he can’t explain.
Elion’s hands shake as he clears his throat. Blood howls in his ears, each pulse vibrating the plates of his skull.
He’s not supposed to talk to her, couldn’t even find words the first time he saw her alive again at the Northrite palace.
Alive again?
Natani. That was her name. She’d been a ghost for so long he’d forgotten it.
Nyranna’s posture slackens a bit: a shift of the hip, an elbow, a knee.
“Spiders, Mister …?” A smile creeps across her lips. She senses his weakness, probably sees his eyes.
“How the king of Staggenmoire was assassinated,” he says. “Call me Elion.” No. Too nice. He’s supposed to retrieve her for the Northrite and receive his massive payment and completion bonus.
“I think you’re missing a big part of the picture. Didn’t the Moonriders sweep in, pillage the place, and bomb the castle?”
Elion’s damn feet grow unsteady on the rocky shale edged like prehistoric weapons. He’s being trapped by invisible spiderwebs now; they seem to spool around his forearms and neck.
“Y-yes … I mean no,” he says. “Spiders were crawling in his abdomen. Goldhammer was already going to die. The attack was probably a cover because someone found out how he was poisoned and was going to confirm it and release the information to the galaxy. Release the evidence of what you did. What you did so that spiders could wipe out a civilization and Uden could lay claim to the entire planet and its mining rights. And take that pearl.”
Nyranna pauses, her eyes wandering as if lost in thought.
Why this woman? If she was recently at the Northrite’s palace on Grendermane, about the same time they offered him his contract, why were they now hunting her? Did they not know of her involvement at the time?
“We’re all going to die,” Nyranna mutters under her breath then pauses.
Elion shifts back in defense. He needed to get it together, be wary. No, she’s not a Beguiler influencing him, nor a Sculptor. She wouldn’t be able to do anything but Stride away, and that would take longer than it would for him to pull a trigger.
“No, that’s impossible,” she says. “The Northrite sent me to Anihelios after I Strode the diplomat and Beguiler to Staggenmoire to meet with the king.”
“I have a contract to take you in or, if needed, to give you a dose of radiation that’s guaranteed to kill any human.” I’m not sure I can do either. “I’ll need to secure-encrypt document the evidence for the Grendermane courts … unless you’re willing to admit that you have one of those assassin spiders or that pearl on your person, or if you want to Whisper a full confession to the galaxy and save me time.”
“Don’t make us do it, Elion.” The floating ghost, Natani, hovers with Nyranna as if they are the same person, the hood of her green cloak also pushed back, revealing her identical features. “Don’t take us to the Northrite. They will just kill us and you know it. This is your chance to make up for everything—with me, with the galaxy.”
Elion grits his teeth. He expected all of this to play out much differently, be so much easier. This woman, these women, or are they the same person? How are they messing with his mind like this?
Elion shakes his head in utter confusion. His brain isn’t firing properly. He knows it but can’t remedy it.
They can’t be hiding a pearl the size of a human head on their body.
“If you tell me where you stashed Goldhammer’s pearl,” Elion says, “or show me that spider so that I can document the evidence, maybe I can say you Strode away before I could apprehend you.”
Then someone else can chase her, the one or both of them, through the midst of an intragalactic war. Maybe then I’ll finally be free.
Nyranna
“Let me pour you a drink,” Nyranna says.
The black hem of night has veiled the sky, leaving only the winking of stars and a single moon as large as a sun, pink and white and sleepy.
Nyranna’s insides are niggling at her, her brain screaming to get away. She hides all of her inner turmoil. This is the man who kills women in a grisly fashion. And he’s finally caught her.
A light flickers in Elion’s eyes but is quickly extinguished as he studies her face, searching for something. His eyes are earnest and sad, full of emotion and deep as wells, something he cannot hide, something that conflicts with his appearance like a beloved daughter beside a serial killer father. A gentleness han
gs for a moment, then is concealed.
Was it something she said, or is he truly infatuated with her when most men are not? He seems infatuated, the same as when he saw her at the Northrite palace: too uncomfortable to speak properly, nervous, tense. This man’s infatuation with women leads to ritualistic murders.
“No drinks for me.” Elion’s eyes seem to yearn, to almost beg for one.
Drinking and women … his weaknesses so easily revealed.
Nyranna pours from her crystal blue decanter that she hoped to share with her fellow Elemiscists if things had turned out more promising for the insurgency. Dark liquid drains into a cup; a smoky and acrid aroma wafts out.
She proffers the cup to Elion. “I don’t have any pearls, definitely not the one the king of Staggenmoire possessed. My Royal Father, Medegair, ordered me to offer my services to the Northrite council in return for a treaty debt to Uden. The Northrite requested my aid.”
Elion stares at the plain cup as if in a battle of immense will with another man at a card table. His face flushes red. Two heartbeats later, he snatches it and dumps its entire contents down his throat.
He has no control.
Nyranna pours him another. “Now, who sent you after me with this tale of using spiders as a poison on King Goldhammer?”
“I can’t tell you those details.” He drains another cup, then another, and sits on a rock in the pinkish white light of the full moon.
Nyranna sits across from him, slumping to appear defeated, to relax his suspicion. “What’s that case you were pointing at me?”
“A radiation gun, a miniaturized linear accelerator. I can deliver up to fifty gray in a single shot.” Elion pulls a smaller gun from a shoulder strap beside his pulser. “This is another tiny version that can deliver enough for suffering and intimidation.”
Nyranna feigns interest. “I’ve never even heard of such a thing outside of research and medical usage.”
“I designed and built them myself.” Elion burps and hands the cup back for another refill.
Nyranna hopes he will be inebriated before her decanter is empty, her mind hashing out a plan and an alternative.
“My employers know my abilities,” Elion says, “but don’t take any interest in how I fulfill my contracts, or how a target dies.”
He drains two more cups. His fingers linger on hers as he hands it back.
Nyranna allows him to hold her fingers, her mind screaming to be careful and not let him get any closer or she will end up like all the others. But she must make him trust her.
“You’re as beautiful as any woman I’ve ever laid eyes on. I see you and I …” He cups his hands into a bowl, as if trying to catch some falling emotion or sensation.
He seems a bit odd, his sad eyes alight with a burning fire now. Some danger lurks in the depths of these wells, a murderer of women, a coward. Now her drunken admirer. And she needs information.
“Tell me how the Grand Patriarch died,” Elion says.
Nyranna briefly describes her visit with the Uden doctor and of witnessing the Patriarch’s body.
“Not by spiders, then?” Elion asks.
“Not that the doctor could tell, but he recommended an autopsy. The Grendermane palace is one of the safest and most protected places in the galaxy. No one should’ve been able to kill him. The Northrite said he’d been sick, more so than with his familial disease, ever since his visit to the drifting moon of Jasilix, which they hinted was a strange and abrupt interest.”
“Jasilix? That name’s familiar … I was there not long ago.” Elion rocks back and leans against the jagged rocks around him, his eyelids sinking.
He appears to be listening to something or someone for nearly a minute, his face contorting as if he’s even in an argument, but Nyranna cannot hear a thing. A v-rim comm?
Elion swallows and nods. “Listen carefully, Natani. Someone knows that I have a gun capable of delivering a targeted blast of radiation, and after I pass out, they use my weapon on others. Mostly women. It seems we’re both being set up, and I want to know why.
“We should try to work together and wade through the bullshit. Because I’m confused as fuck right now. If we don’t uncover who’s after us and why, we’re both as good as dead.”
***
The strange bounty hunter passed out against his shale chair, nearly twenty cups of the decanter drained.
Quite the tolerance. He’s worked up to it plenty of times, no doubt.
Why did he call her Natani? A drunken slip of the tongue, a slurring of Nyranna? Or something else?
Nyranna worries he will wake suddenly, kill her in a fit of rage, then paint her body with strange images.
What he said while inebriated was true: someone who knew the king was poisoned with assassin spiders wanted Elion to find and document the evidence. Then have him document that she carried this unlikely murder weapon. Why did this murderer ask her those questions if he killed all those women? Is it possible that this dangerous man is being used as well? Is something bigger and darker, something she could not yet comprehend, arising in the galaxy?
The Northrite council sent Nyranna to Anihelios as the planet was about to be devoured by the Ruin, not seeming to care much about the Ruin itself. Someone did their best to make sure she found the assassin spider, made sure she knew details about the species, that they would become extinct, that they were of great value—with the article and attention-grabbing title planted fortuitously on her entertainment v-rim as she waited for the Northrite’s audience. Then, once she picked up those spiders, she was framed.
Someone is sowing dissidence across the galaxy, and it centered around the beating sun, the Ruin, this newly discovered medieval world, and the likely assassination of the reigning Grand Patriarch.
Some implicated the Moonriders, some the Northrite or Uden.
The Northrite council.
They probably had King Goldhammer poisoned to pin the murder on someone else: her. Because if they could pin it on Nyranna, then Uden—the Northrite’s only real rival for wealth and power—would be the responsible party for the assassination of the king of Staggenmoire. This would either criminalize Uden and take away their power, or Uden could resist and instigate a war. Then, the Northrite could claim unlimited governing power through the War Times Act. Which they did. Either scenario was a win for the Northrite.
All Uden could gain by destroying the castle and killing all of Goldhammer’s royal line would be control of the planet and unlimited mining rights to Staggenmoire, which they already had to a lesser degree and were in the middle of negotiating larger terms without violence. If Uden killed the king, Uden would be criminalized and lose all those mining rights as soon as anyone in the galaxy found out. Falsely pinning the poisoning on Nyranna would not benefit Medegair and Uden at all.
The Northrite claimed that the Grand Patriarch grew deathly ill after a surprise visit to Jasilix, but the Northrite gained the most from his death, probably using that destination to place blame on the Frontiersmen, another reason for war and to legally consolidate power.
What of the assassin who attempted to kill the Messiah when she was at their palace? Could Uden be behind that? Probably not, the sweavers killed the Paladin assassin with only the Messiah appearing to be superficially injured, although the Messiah would not let anyone look at the wound, claiming it was to retain their anonymity. Could anyone recognize another by seeing the skin of their arm? The timing of the supposed assassination was also very convenient: when ambassadors from across the galaxy were visiting and could witness the event and back the Northrite’s decision to enact a state of war under the influence of flowing adrenaline … and possibly under the subconscious influence of Beguilers as well.
So twisted. Now it’s untangling.
Nyranna feels brave enough to step up to Elion and prod his cheek. His head wobbles as if a puppet with sagging strings.
As far as anyone knows, this Elion works for the Pearl, the most disreputable and widely hat
ed organization in the galaxy. The rumors about the Northrite controlling the Pearl were probably true, even if they could never be proven.
How can I use him to my advantage to help the Elemiscists and our insurgency?
Nyranna sits for several minutes contemplating what to do, where to strike, how she could hide.
How she wishes her father never directed her to this point in her life. She sees him in splendid detail in her head, like a herald, reading some cryptic prophecy and pointing down a path amidst a multitude of branches. Now he’s hooded like the people in the recent meeting, dust swirling in the air, gathering around her ankles, carrying her onward as if she rides a palanquin carried by pixies, unable to steer herself in her own voyage. Unable—
A flash of light flares and rolls across the landscape in a blinding sweep. Ships hover overhead, silent. Something storms in around them, booted feet punishing the shale as men appear, solidifying in the night air.
Sweavers. Led by a man with a rat tail of hair that snakes around his neck, and a black eye. The Northrite had come for her.
Nyranna glances around, searching for a method of escape. She’s surrounded. And they are close enough to stop her from Striding.
The leader points at Elion. “I’ll deal with him. Shudderlock her and get her in the ship.”
***
Two days later, Nyranna’s impatience and the dimness of a room press in on her as if looming guards are shadowed in the corners, the emptiness threatening to swallow her raw.
Her Star Map has been confiscated, her power to Stride gone. Her Whispers have largely gone unanswered. She paces for hours in uninterrupted silence and pale lighting, broken only by trains of thought: how did she end up here, why, how could she escape?
A knock sounds outside, followed by a muted conversation. The door of her confinement room sucks inward and slides up. In the entryway stands a gray-haired woman: suit, metal antigravity case, golden tri-circular pendant of Uden.
Nyranna’s assigned attorney. Their first meeting, other than the quick introductory affair a day ago.
The Forgotten Sky Page 33
