Sword of Dreams (The Reforged Trilogy) (20 page)

"Lord Gavriel! My lord, they're at the doors!" The Nihilist threw herself at her master's feet.

Gavriel kicked her away. "Who is here, woman?" He was in a foul mood and had no patience for her wailing.

She raised her hands imploringly. "The police! They've come for us, my lord. They'll take us away and send us to rot in prison," she cried. The woman's eyes were full of terror. "They'll put us on suicide watch!"

He curled his hands into impotent fists at his sides. The beads and sigils that covered his elaborate robes flashed in the lamplight. "Where are my Emberguard?"

She shook her head. Strands of gray hair escaped her hood. "They stand at the doors, my lord, but the Prians are coming through."

Already, Gavriel heard angry voices arguing outside. Laser fire whined and bullets cracked, but not as many as he expected. They were trying to take the Nihilists alive, after all, to face trial. Hallax leapt through the door and slammed it behind him. His green hair was disheveled, his nanosword naked in his hand and shone wet red with blood.

"The Prians are closing in, Lord Gavriel," the Emberguard said. "You must go. If you die here, nothing we've done will mean anything."

The woman was still at Gavriel's feet, weeping and screaming. "Kill me, Lord Gavriel," she pleaded. "Send me down into the sweet, endless dark!"

He could do it. Even now, even without the boy. Gavriel still kept the silver-bladed knife tucked in his robes. It was a ritual implement, but it would do as a weapon. He could slit her throat and probably many more before the police could stop him. But how many wretched souls would live on?

No, he would not give up so easily. Hallax was right. Gavriel had to leave. He had to survive until the end.

Gavriel took the Nihilist woman's hand and pulled her to her feet. "Death will come for you another day," he told her. "Now, you must be brave. Go. Help the others hold the Prians back."

"Are you coming?" she asked in a tremulous, frightened voice.

"No, dear one," Gavriel said. "I must go, but I will not forget how you fought for me."

She rose unsteadily and ran back the way she had come, out the door and toward the sounds of fighting. Red and orange flashes lit the hall in staccato bursts as the Prian police closed in. Hallax raised his gleaming sword.

"What of me, my lord?" he asked. "I have killed many Prian cops and can take many more with me into the darkness."

"No," Gavriel told the Mirran. "You will come with me. We are not done yet and I will need new Emberguard. You need to get us out of here."

"Yes, Lord Gavriel." Hallax shouldered the window open, filling the room with Highwind's fetid air. "This way."

Together, the Nihilists fled.

Now Gavriel stood at the window, high above Pylos. His smile faded. Though it felt good to be strong again, he still had not found the memories he needed. All he had was another dead Arcadian. Another failure. How long did Gavriel have before the Prian police found him again? The wind howled outside the empty window.

"If we learned anything, it's that we still have a lot to learn."

- Phillip Arno, Cyran geologist (232 PA)

Duaal stared at the Waygate. His head rang with sudden agony, worse than ever. He had to be dreaming or… or something. As suddenly as it had come, the pain was gone. But the Waygate remained, stark and graceful and impossible.

"How can that be here?" Duaal's voice was shockingly loud in the stunned silence. He winced.

"You recognize it?" Kemmer asked curiously.

"It's a Waygate. I heard a lot about them from Gavriel. There were loads of them all across Arcadia."

"As well as on the worlds of the Jinn and within the great Nnyth hive," Maeve said. The Arcadian's gray eyes were fixed on the Waygate. What could she be thinking?

"But no one's ever seen one in the core," said Kemmer. He sat perched atop the generator powering the floodlights and grinned in delight at the other archeologists. "I'm sure you understand now why I've kept this thing such a secret. The discovery of a Waygate on an Alliance planet is going to change absolutely everything."

Xen was walking dreamily toward the Waygate. "This is fantastic! My God, it's amazing. The foundation is cracked, but the structure has remained completely intact!"

"We've been able to find a few shallow scratches and chips here and there," Kemmer said, "but no more damage than that. The material is pretty well indestructible."

"Simply amazing! How old is it? Phillip, how far down the strata are we?"

The geologist shined his flashlight along some lighter stripes in the fissure wall. The stone was flattened in places, cracked and blasted away to clear the rock from around the Waygate. Probably microexplosives, Dannos' contribution to the dig before his death.

"I couldn't tell you for sure without some testing," Phillip said. "But I'd estimate about thirty feet below that old volcanic flow. If the surveys are accurate, then we're about three million years down."

"Three
million
years?" Xia gasped. "Are you serious?"

"It could be even more than that," Phillip said apologetically. "It depends upon how much things have shifted."

"Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that the Waygate itself is that old." Kemmer motioned and they all followed the Prian archeologist to the pyramidal base of the gate. "It could have been placed here at some more recent point. One of the things I've been unable to do is get an accurate age on the structure itself."

"Have you gotten samples?" This question came from Gruth.

"A few, yes, but the materials are all very hard to cut."

The Lyran examined one of the sculpted stairways. Duaal looked over his twitching pointed ears. From a distance, the uniformly white carvings had been difficult to make out. But closer now, he could see the designs raised in relief from the smooth, milk-white… whatever it was. Stone, maybe? Ceramic? The decorations were all celestial in theme: intricately rendered stars and planets, nebulae and comets. There was no mistaking the Waygate's purpose.

"Each Waygate is unique. Their structure and purpose remains the same, but each one is subtly varied," said Maeve. She came to look at the same part of the banister as Gruth and Duaal. "This one is similar to the Waygate in Kiarra'Na, on Wynerian. I… I went there often."

Kemmer crossed his arms. "Well, what else can you tell me?" he asked. "I've questioned several Arcadians, but they won't tell me a damned thing about the history of the Waygates. How did you build them? Why is there one on Prianus?"

Maeve shot the Prian archeologist an irritated look. "You are hardly the first to assume that Arcadians are simply unwilling to share our secrets," she snapped. "There are none! We did not craft the Waygates. They existed on our worlds even before Cavain's time, ten thousand years ago. We learned the secrets of their use, but neither we nor any of our cousins – the dryads, nyads or long-dead pyrads – claim to have built them."

Maeve hesitated now. High above, the slithering, multi-colored glow playing over the surface of the segmented Waygate ring flared and swirled, but did not seem to illuminate the ravine at all. Maeve took a step back, away from the Waygate.

"The Arcadians are not the greatest scholars of the Waygates' workings," she said reluctantly. "The intricacies of their operation were taught to us by the Nnyth. The star-wasps know more about the gates than any race we have ever encountered, but even the Nnyth do not claim to have built the Waygates."

"So you don't know what they're made of?" Kemmer asked.

"My brother was an adept of the Ivory Spire, named in honor of the Nnyth Tower. The Spire was dedicated to the training of those who open the Waygates. Caith and I spoke often of his education." Maeve nodded to the great blue-white ring. "Some of the sections of the gate itself are of a kind of glass, akin to the glass we used to craft our armor and cities."

"Our refraction tests seem to bear that out, as far as we can tell," Kemmer said. "Do you have any of that glass armor? Captain Myles mentioned that you were some kind of knight."

"I… My armor was shattered in the final days of battle against the Devourers. I still possess the blade of my spear, though I have not replaced the shaft."

"And that's Arcadian glass? I'd like to examine that."

Kemmer sounded only slightly more respectful now that he wanted something from Maeve. Duaal did not like Maeve, either, but it was not because of her race. Kemmer's unexpected bigotry annoyed Duaal. The Prian had no right to hate Maeve. He did not even know her enough to hate her for the right reasons.

"Is this Waygate any different than the Arcadian ones?" asked Enu-Io.

"Other than the decorations, I don't think so," Kemmer said with a shrug. "And it sounds like even those in the White Kingdom varied between sites."

"Then it seems safe to assume that this specimen is at least ten thousand years old, if the Arcadians have documented their age at least that far back."

"We can certainly start there," Xen said. "What else do you know about it?"

Kemmer showed them the eastern face of the Waygate's base. The floor of the crevice was rougher and bore the circular marks of recent cutting. The ashy scent of cold stone filled the ravine. "Not much yet. We've spent the last six weeks just clearing away the bedrock."

Phillip squatted and inspected the ground at the base of the Waygate, then angled his flashlight up at the fissure wall. "There are stress fractures all throughout the matrix. It must have shattered in the quake."

"And that didn't break or crush the Waygate?" Xia asked curiously.

"No structural damage that we've found so far," Kemmer told her. "Whoever did create these gates built them to last."

Xia grinned at Tiberius. "Still want to go to bed?"

"Yes," he grunted. "Sounds like this thing has been down under these mountains for thousands of years. Maybe millions. It'll still be here when I wake up. Maeve, are you coming?"

The fairy stared up at the Waygate for a moment longer, and then nodded. "Yes. A Waygate requires able and rested guardians."

"This thing is going to make every one of us rich and famous," Kemmer said. "I don't want anyone stealing it out from under me."

Maeve shot him an odd look. That was not what she meant at all. Duaal shuddered. Suddenly, he did not want to be down here, either. Something about the gleaming oil-on-water light of the Waygate made Duaal feel like there were insects crawling up his spine.

"I'll come back up," he said. "It's quite a sight, but now comes a lot of dirty, tedious work. I think I'll leave that to the experts."

Duaal followed Tiberius as the old captain followed the ravine back to the ladder. Maeve simply spread her wings and flew away.

________

Panna stood on the steps of the Waygate. It was… amazing. She had never seen anything like it. Heard about them, read about them, yes… But the truth of the gates was something else entirely. It was monolithic, beautiful. Alien.

The strange alien, Gripper, stood nearby. Even after most of his crewmates left – of them, only Xia remained – he stood still, jaw hanging open. Kemmer cocked his head toward the Waygate.

"Want a closer look? I need all of you to be familiar with this thing before we begin," the Prian archeologist said.

Xen grinned. "I thought you'd never ask."

Following closely behind the two senior scholars, Panna climbed the smooth white stairs. They had a polished, perfect finish – like porcelain plates. Even through her thickly cushioned winter boots, every step sent a jolt up Panna's spine. She felt dizzy. Was it the Waygate or just the altitude? Or maybe just her balance failing her. It had not been good ever since the surgery.

Perhaps it was the unnatural spacing of the steps. They were huge and deep, as though meant for much larger creatures than humans. Only Gripper could climb them easily. The balustrades were as tall as Panna. They seemed more like walls than guide rails as they closed in around her.

Panna examined the carvings. Designs, really, since she could see no signs of tooling. Had they been poured or cast? Regardless, Panna did not recognize the arrangement of stars. She made a mental note to see if they corresponded to the constellations anywhere in the galaxy. Was this the Prian sky or something else altogether?

The star and planet patterns grew fewer and further between as the archeologists made their way up toward the Waygate ring. Panna wondered if the gate's creators had simply lost interest in the designs, but doubted it. Everything about the Waygate seemed very… deliberate.

The flat top of the stepped pyramid was the size of a small lecture hall, as seamlessly smooth as the rest. The bottom segments of the ring – one of a translucent ice-blue substance and the other what looked like copper fish scales – seemed simply to be submerged in the white floor, as though dipped in cream, and leaving the inner surface flat and even with the ground.