Sword of Dreams (The Reforged Trilogy) (52 page)

"Na illya ma'naari osa vae!"
Duaal answered, barely in time. He shifted the fork of bright blue lightning away. It snapped into the wall of the ravine again, bringing down another miniature avalanche of ice and stone.

Gavriel stood erect in the snow. Flame billowed out from Gavriel's hand, racing toward Duaal. The rain sizzled and the air rippled with heat. Duaal threw his hand up to shield his face from the heat as he countered again. The flame guttered and vanished into steam.

Except it hasn't just vanished,
Duaal thought.
Nothing just disappears. The words to the song are
Steal the fire's breath
. Breath. It removes the oxygen that fire needs to burn. This isn't mystic, Panna said, not like we think it is. There are rules, rules I can understand…

Above, Xartasia stood with her wings spread and arms held up imploringly to the portal. The Waygate's terrible voice came again, harsh and hissing.
"Szo ghemma b'ho leng. Szo ghemma b'ho leng. Hotek mev khavvna tek vommen."

The flashing Waygate ring was no longer empty. Something dark moved in the vortex of light. Roiling black shadows were seeping out, low to the ground, like a heavy smoke.

"My lord Gavriel!" Xartasia called triumphantly. "The Devourers come!"

"What?" Duaal cried. But… but he had interrupted the spell! Had Xartasia somehow completed it? No, only Maeve and Gavriel knew how! That was the whole point of the Cult of Nihil's work in Pylos. What happened?

The cultists abandoned their attack on the Prians and fell to their knees in the red-churned mud. Confused, the police lowered their weapons and began making arrests. The Nihilists did not even seem to notice. Gavriel did not turn his back on Duaal, but grinned like a child at the fair.

"It is done!" he crowed. "At long, long last…"

"No!" Duaal shouted.

All around them, the Nihilists stared up at the growing shadows oozing from the gate. Even the police were still now, watching. A soft, sad song rose from the Arcadians. Loss and pain, all about to be ended…

"No, it's not over yet!" Duaal ran at Gavriel, singing and flinging fire. "We're not finished with this!"

Gavriel waved the flames aside, still smiling. "Death is coming through that door for you, boy. And yet you insist on meeting it early! Very well, I will give you oblivion." He raised his fingers over his eyes like a spidery mask and sang in a powerful baritone.
"Anu'aa quai eru oraiva'i na!"

The old Nihilist was done playing around. Duaal's limbs twitched as a deadly charge built in his brain, the electric spark that would trigger an aneurism and kill him in an instant. He had only a fraction of a second, not nearly enough time to sing a counter.

But the words… They're just symbols, too,
Duaal realized in a flash. They were just a way for the Arcadians to create the memories, the thoughts that they needed. Tools, symbols… No more necessary than the hand gestures or the arcanery he used to wear.

Duaal
pushed
. Gavriel's spell discharged a yard away, no more than a tiny green zap of static. It was… easy.

Gavriel's eyes went wide in his sallow face. He tried again, calling for fire and lightning and blinding light. But Duaal knew all of Gavriel's spells, all of those terrible songs that consumed the boy's mind years ago. Sweating but silent, Duaal sucked all the air out of the billowing fireballs, grounded the lightning into the stone, soothed his nerves before Gavriel could finish the charm that set them ablaze with crippling pain. Gavriel grimaced with concentration.

These are all he knows!
Duaal thought. The spells that Xartasia taught him, the songs composed by the Arcadians thousands of years ago! Whatever trick Xartasia used to give Gavriel the clarity of mind, that blank screen upon which a mage could write his will, he still knew only the spells that she could teach him.

But magic could do so much more than this handful of rote charms! Duaal did not know the words in Arcadian or even Aver to describe what he wanted, but he found that he could simply
see
it. Just as Panna said… Duaal pointed at Gavriel. It was no more necessary than words or a song, but it felt good to level his finger at the old nightmare.

There you are. You're not a monster in the dark, just a madman singing in the rain.

The falling rain began to bead up on Gavriel's shoulders. The drops of water grew, merging and pooling across the sodden black robes. He raised his hands, splaying his fingers to rupture Duaal's brain once more, and saw the water along his sleeves. A film was building up, stubbornly refusing to soak in or run off as it was supposed to.

"What is this?" Gavriel asked.

He shook his arm. A few drops of water scattered into the air, but the surface tension held. The cloak of water grew thicker, heavier. Gavriel tried to sing his spell, but Duaal sent the water flowing over the old man's face. He coughed and spluttered, the words forgotten. He tried to wipe it away, but he could not raise his arms against the growing weight. It dragged Gavriel to his knees on the ground, unable to move in his liquid prison. Duaal stood over him.

I… I won…!

A pale blur of motion made Duaal look up. No longer singing in her vain attempt to control the Waygate, Xartasia had taken wing and landed behind Gavriel. She still held her long glass dagger in a white-gloved hand.

Duaal shoved dripping hair out of his face, ready to fight her, too. Xartasia smiled dazzlingly as she slid the knife through the water and between Gavriel's ribs.

Shocked, Duaal lost control of his spell. The water broke and red-stained rainwater splashed down around Gavriel's feet. The old man tried to suck in a breath to speak, but blood poured from his mouth and the only sound he managed was a strangled gasp.

"You wished so long for death, Gavriel," Xartasia told him. "You have served your purpose. Now go."

Gavriel fell dead to the ground. Duaal raised his eyes to Xartasia's, full of impossible questions, but there was… something else… The inky smoke had entirely obscured the Waygate and was now crawling in indistinct tendrils down the sides of the ziggurat.
Something
stepped through the Waygate.

It was taller than the biggest Hadrian that Duaal had ever seen, towering ten feet high. The thing had long legs and arms – two of each, like the Alliance races – but any other details were obscured by the faintly glittering black smoke that clung to the figure like clouds shrouding a mountain peak. Every eye was on the blurry black shape as it slowly descended the white stairs and then stood wavering at the edge of the crowd.

It raised one long, smoky black arm as though to greet the Nihilists, and then the darkness congealed into six-inch long ebony claws. Without a sound, the Devourer grabbed the closest cultist and sheared his arms off. Blood spurted into the air and vanished into the midnight mist.

Ecstatic moans turned into primal screams. The death that the Nihilists had waited for so long to greet, eager as expectant lovers, had finally arrived… and it was terrible. More of the huge black shapes surged from the Waygate. Smoke-turned-metal snaked out, sinking long spikes and barbed hooks into flesh, pulling the Nihilists into the spreading darkness. Duaal was desperately grateful that their gruesome deaths were hidden in the swirling smoke.

"Don't just stand there!" he shrieked to Cerro. "The Devourers are coming for Prianus!"

The police captain was bleeding from a dozen shallow wounds and staring in shock at the Devourers. He shook himself and leveled his gun at the monsters. "You heard him! You know your job and you do it here, now! These things don't go any further!"

The police opened fire, pouring lead and lasers into the closest Devourer. The cloud swirled and hardened into something that looked like obsidian, but none of the weapons seemed to affect the great black monster at all.

"Aercaidae a'na, ellu la wexalli! Marnavae eru sha'narii bae!"
Xartasia sang across the ravine.
My Arcadians, stand back from the aliens! Let them die first!

All across the ravine, fairies spread their wings and took to the air, rising up into the rain. A dozen Devourers swarmed out through the ruined camp, grabbing Nihilists and police alike in claws and hooks. The crevasse was full of screams, but no blood or other gore. The Devourers left no remains.

Duaal ran. He slipped in a puddle and went sprawling. The mage screamed as he felt something hook under his arms and pull, but before he could lash out with summoned lightning or fire or anything else, he recognized Cerro's scarred face. The police officer dragged Duaal back behind one of the tailings piles. There were only eight cops left. Duaal recognized the woman with the eyepatch he had seen in Pylos only days before. She cradled a bundle of feathers and blood to her chest. Tears ran from her good eye.

"It won't take those Devourers long to finish this," Cerro said. He pointed back the way Duaal had come, where the smoky monsters were still tearing apart kneeling and fleeing Nihilists. Cerro grabbed Duaal's shoulder. "We don't have mainstream access down here. I need you to get up to the surface and call the station. Tell them what's happened. We'll hold this place, but it won't be for long."

Cerro was right. The screams of the Nihilists were rising to a frenzied crescendo, but even that was beginning to thin as they died. Two of the Devourers were striding out into the ravine. Xartasia and many of the Arcadian Nihilists were perched high on the stony walls. The princess' eyes were wide, but she did not look frightened. Her lips moved, but over the wind and screaming and the thundering voice of the Waygate, Duaal could not hear a word.

The black cloud around the Devourers billowed outwards, rushing toward the Prians. The one-eyed woman dropped the corpse of her hawk and aimed her Talon. Her shots bit into the leading edge of the Devourer's fog but merely struck deep black patches of smooth metal that disappeared as quickly as they appeared. The smoke coiled into long tendrils, tipped with all-too-solid-looking blades.

They were not limited in their weaponry, however. Long cylinders extended from the cloud, each as thick as Duaal's wrist. Lasers burned out from them and swept the rocky heaps where the police took cover. Duaal threw himself to the ground.

He lifted his face slowly out of the mud. The cop still knelt behind the tailings, both hands bracing her Talon, but her head was gone. Blood sizzled and boiled as it dribbled through her crudely cauterized jugular vein. Barbed obsidian hooks snapped out from the Devourer and yanked the still-twitching body away. Bones cracked and there were wet, tearing sounds.

"Get out of here!" Cerro bellowed.

Duaal turned and ran again as Cerro and his remaining officers unloaded their guns into the Devourers. The alien monsters' own weapons answered loudly. Duaal did not look back, but bolted as fast as he could for the end of the ravine. The ladder hung precariously from the upper ledge, half dislodged by a stray shot. Duaal did not like the idea of trying to climb it. If it did not just fall off the wall, he would still make a slow-moving and exposed target for the Devourers. If only he could fly.

And why not? We're all flying through space on the back of this planet anyways if you think about it. Just… forget the gravity for a moment, the force that holds me down to the ground.

The ground fell away, rose steeply and then Duaal was at the top of the crevasse.

"Inaction is itself a sort of action. A coward's action."

- Duaal Sinnay, Hyzaari mage (233 PA)

Logan stood with his back against Maeve's wings. The Nihilists were everywhere, confused and frightened. Some were fleeing, others were fighting. He spun and thrust a kick into one charging cultist. Logan stepped to the side to clear the path for Maeve's spear. It thrust up under the man's ribs and withdrew, quick as a striking snake.

A new shape vaulted up out of the ravine. But when he brought his Talon around, Logan found Duaal alighting on the wet stone, smeared in mud.

"Duaal? You… flew?" Maeve gasped.

"I… it doesn't matter," he panted. "None of it matters anymore! I stopped Gavriel and… and Xartasia killed him! But the Devourers came through anyway. They're here, Maeve! The Devourers are here!"

The inexorable boom of the Waygate still echoed across the mountain, a cold alien pronouncement of death.
"Szo ghemma b'ho leng. Hotek mev khavvna tek vommen."

Logan listened to the strange voice. It was not Aver or any other language he had ever heard. It meant nothing to him, but it did to Maeve. She turned away from the horror-struck Duaal. Her gray eyes were wide and full of tears.

"I have failed," she said in a choked voice. "The Devourers have come again and they will tear the Alliance apart."

Logan could barely hear her over the shouts and shots, but he could read her lips and the despair on her face. He knew the story well enough to know what that meant and Maeve well enough to know that she would go down fighting. Logan's fingers tightened on the grip of his gun. No, she would not die and he would not make her watch another civilization fall. He grabbed Maeve's shoulder and made her look at him.

"These things
can
be killed, can't they?" he asked.