Phoenix Ascendant - eARC

by Ryk E. Spoor

But in that moment, five figures simply materialized in front of Rion. “You are going nowhere, jerk,” Xavier said.

  “Out of my way!” A fountain of stones and gravel roared towards them—

  —and stopped dead in midair. Aurora lowered her hand, and the rocks dropped straight to the ground. “Oh, not that easy.” Her voice was low and furious; not waiting for her comrades, Aurora lunged forward, leaping up and slamming an axe-kick down.

  Rion barely evaded it, but the concussion blew him off his feet and staggered Tobimar, who hadn’t yet caught up; a crater ten feet wide and three deep surrounded Aurora, radiating from her foot. Great Light, she’s strong.

  The false Rion did not look intimidated, though; strangely, he looked sad. “Then I must fight.”

  The figure blurred into motion, so fast that Tobimar actually lost track of him. Aurora was suddenly toppling, wincing, and Xavier tumbling backward, one of his swords actually flying from his grasp. Gabriel had barely managed to get his own huge blade up in time, and the false Rion was again visible, driving Gabriel Dante back with sheer strength. He disappeared again, speed incarnate, as Nike and Toshi took aim, and Toshi was abruptly defending against strikes that came from every direction.

  Concentrate. The power of Terian lies within me now. Call it up. Channel it with the meditation of High Center.

  He could see his power within, now, a spark of blue-white energy that surged into a flame as he touched it.

  Speed blazed through him, and he accelerated forward. His adversary was fast, but now Tobimar could follow his moves, track his strategy. Even as his shield smash sent Toshi’s bow spinning aside, Rion stiffened and whirled, just in time to catch Tobimar’s swords, one with his own weapon, one with his shield, and Tobimar saw him wince as the blue-white aura touched him; a wisp of white smoke rose from the unshielded hand.

  His adversary sprang into the air, impossibly high, twenty-five, thirty feet, running through the sky now, heading for the shelter and cover of the trees.

  Without warning, the earth heaved skyward, stone and soil forming a barrier that was three hundred feet tall in an instant. Rion was unable to completely halt, smacked into the solid obstacle, and then was dashing down as bolts of fire, accompanied by sharp, ear-shattering reports, chased barely inches behind him; out of the corner of his eye, Tobimar could see these came from Nike, who was holding a weapon that must be one of the “rifles” that Xavier had told him about once; but the rifle was spitting what looked like solidified flame, cutting holes in the rocky bulwark as though it were a hay-bale.

  Tobimar wasn’t sure whether it was wise for him to reenter the combat. He definitely didn’t want to get in the way of either Nike or Toshi, who was now firing arrows at an impossible rate, arrows that shone like the stars and hit like bludgeons. These five know what they are doing. They’re coordinating as well as we do!

  “Don’t kill him!” Kyri’s shout echoed across the battlefield. “Keep him alive!”

  Rion threw a vial into the air that detonated and sent uncountable metal spikes spearing down. “Easier said than done,” Poplock retorted. “He’s not worried about us!”

  At first Tobimar was inclined to agree, but…High Center. Find the danger, the menace. What is the shape of the battle, the outline of possibility and peril?

  The vision finally began to flow for real, Tobimar now at one with himself, and he could see, not just what was now but in a sense what might be a few split seconds later, link that with action, and move.

  And as Rion sent Nike sprawling—yet with a blow that stunned, not the easier strike that could have killed—Tobimar was already there, twin swords passing his opponent’s defenses, coming to rest on his throat. “Stop.”

  For just an instant he thought that Rion wouldn’t stop—that he’d fight on, let himself be killed, a near-perfect way to maintain his silence. The impostor’s eyes flickered to the one direction he might escape in, saw Xavier there, and his shoulders slumped. He let his weapon fall and dropped to his knees. “Then finish me.”

  “No,” Kyri said, anger, confusion, and obvious shock warring for dominance on her sharp features. Blood smeared her face and Tobimar couldn’t tell if it was hers or Rion’s. “No. You knew so much. You spent so much time with us. You were so much him. You’ll tell us the truth.”

  “Or…what?”

  Even through the blood, Tobimar saw the teeth flash in a tired, uncertain grin. “A good question. I won’t torture you. A part of me wants to. Maybe I should. But…”

  “No,” said Toshi, studying the false Rion with an analytical gaze that if anything was sharper even than Poplock’s own. “No, he could have killed several of us. Instead I don’t think any of us are even seriously injured.”

  Poplock bounced over and looked up. “Why not show your real face? It’s not like there’s any point in continuing the lie.”

  The impostor gazed down, and then he gave a low, tragic sigh. “Yes. The matrix is shredded beyond recovery now. I’ve failed completely.”

  With a shimmer, Rion Vantage faded away, replaced by a more slender youth. Long white hair, with perhaps a faint touch of lavender, cascaded down straight and true. The new features were definitely more delicate and defined, almost as pretty as those of Toshi, but in the straightness of the hair and something about the shape of the face there was something that echoed Xavier far more closely.

  The eyes were the only inhuman feature, glowing yellow, dark-irised. But the glow was fading, less a lambent threat and now a faint flicker.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Tashriel,” he answered.

  “Tashriel? Why is that…Oh!” Kyri nodded, even as Tobimar remembered where he had heard that name before too. “You were Wieran’s assistant. Miri mentioned you, but we never met you.”

  “So what in the world got you stuck into a bottle pretending to be Rion? That doesn’t seem anything like what that crazy old man would be doing,” Poplock said.

  Tashriel hesitated, then shrugged. “You’re not going to kill me?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” Kyri said; her voice was not steady, and Tobimar stepped to her side, put a hand on her shoulder; she reached over and gripped his fingers tightly. “Personally I would like to cut you apart for what you’ve done—this false hope you’ve given me and taken away. But…you must know something about our enemy. If you can tell us something…” Her sword slid back into its sheath. “We’ll decide…I’ll decide…afterward.” She wiped her face, looking even shakier, and sat down on a nearby stone.

  Tashriel looked around at the whole group, and suddenly gave a low, rueful laugh. “It was all a trap. A trick.”

  “Hey, we’d always planned on us coming back after apparently leaving,” Xavier said. “Or, to be honest, Toshi always planned on that, he’s the brains in this outfit. Stood to reason that if their enemies were going to do something, they’d do it when Kyri, Tobimar, and Poplock were basically on their own. Poplock just orchestrated the timing. He figured you’d move as soon as a couple hours had gone by, because most people would be expecting you to wait a little longer, maybe a day or two.”

  Kyri shook her head. “And…And you had guessed he had some influence over me. I can feel it fading away now.”

  “Not much influence,” Tashriel said. “Just…increasing your own reactions, mostly. Exaggerating them.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t have any choice. But…I’ll tell you everything I can about everything I know…what I did with Wieran…what my mission was…and especially what I know about your enemy…about Viedraverion.”

  Chapter 23

  Poplock looked at Kyri, who was clearly weakened and shaking with reaction from the attack and shock, and Tobimar standing near her. Right, I can take this myself.

  “Okay, you’ve got a chance to talk. Better make the talk good. So you’re a demon under Viedraverion’s command?”

  Tashriel’s face twisted in half-amusement, half-misery. “I was…on loan to Viedraverion. He
made my real master, Balinshar, give me to him for a special project—and used his father to put pressure on Balinshar to do it.”

  “So the first big question is…why you?”

  “Because I’m…not really a demon. Not entirely, not in my…what’s left of my soul. I was a human being, once. Then I became a vampire, then the demons came for us and they captured me instead of killing me. At the time,” another twisted smile, “I almost thought they did me a favor. I was deep in the madness that all the Cursed get when the blood takes hold. I…I think I’d killed some of my own people, it’s all blurred, but I know that when I came to myself I really was grateful for a moment. Before I realized they’d simply killed everyone anyway and were making me one of them.”

  “Interesting,” said Toshi. “But you must have had something special about you that made you worth saving.”

  Tashriel paused, then swallowed, looking at the others. “Yes. It was a huge secret. Balinshar kept that knowledge absolutely hidden from everyone; he figured that I might be a hidden weapon, a blade from nowhere, if he played things right. Realizing that Viedraverion already knew about it…that was a shock.”

  “Well?”

  He took a deep breath. “I was trained in Thanalaran—I don’t know what to call it in your language, exactly. It combined alchemy, sorcery, the powers of the mind, and mechanisms of science, devices—”

  “Technomancy!” Xavier blurted out.

  “Technomancy? Well…I suppose, yes, that’s not a terribly bad way to put it. It was an ancient and secret discipline even in my era, long, long ago.”

  That makes sense. Poplock gave a satisfied bounce. “Okay, so now I understand why you were sent to Wieran. He was doing a lot of that technomancy stuff already.”

  “I found it almost impossible to believe when I saw it. He seemed to have singlehandedly reconstructed things not seen since Atla’a Alandar. I was there as an assistant.”

  Gabriel was nearby, leaning against one of the unbroken trees. “Pardon me for saying so, but you’re being very pleasant, apparently forthcoming, and so on. If you’re such a pleasant fellow, why were you working for these people?”

  The yellow gaze dropped, Tashriel’s expression went nearly dead. “They…made me what I was. They can…are…making me do things. You’ve beaten me for the moment, I can think and act for myself for a little while…but soon I’ll have to go back.” He bit his lip hard enough to draw blood with one of his sharp fangs. “I…don’t want to. But it’s so hard to fight. Now that the matrix is gone and my service to Viedra’s failed, I’ll have to return to Balinshar, and I don’t want to do that. But…I’ll have to.”

  “Not if you’re dead,” Aurora said grimly. “And you haven’t said anything that makes me sure you’re leaving alive.”

  “She’s got a point. We still don’t know how you got in that tube, and whatever you have to say about Viedraverion.”

  “I…Speaker’s Name, this is hard for me! I am fighting…very hard…to try to tell you. If I wasn’t sort of between masters, not formally returned to Balinshar, I wouldn’t be able to act at all!” The white-haired youth’s hands shook; he clenched them into fists. “The tube was prepared by Wieran to Viedraverion’s precise specifications and secured as you found it. Wieran was simply told to leave it available for later use. I was told to enter the tube, and what part I was to play and how I was to disguise myself, when it became clear that the ‘endgame,’ as he put it, was starting. At that point Wieran would be far too focused on his own work to worry about my location.”

  “So Master Wieran had no knowledge of this trick of Viedraverion’s at all?”

  “None. Well…I’m sure he knew that there was a much larger purpose in the tube’s presence, but not what it was, nor did he care much.”

  Poplock saw Kyri’s head come up. “How did you manage to play Rion so well? You knew things that only he should know. How?”

  “That was the ‘matrix’ I mentioned. Viedraverion transferred it to me when he sent me to Wieran, but didn’t activate it until I entered the tube. It was…” He met Kyri’s gaze; Poplock saw more sorrow there than he had expected. “You had already guessed the essence of it, really. It was a part, a scrap of the real Rion’s soul, that I could…well, wrap around my own like a cloak and make into a sort of front that reacted on its own, using my soul and strength to translate its echoes of memory. I’ve never seen anything like it; I didn’t think it was possible to do that so…perfectly. When I spoke as Rion, I almost was him. If I didn’t let myself think too much as myself, if I didn’t try to look ahead or behind like an actor, but rather let ‘Rion’ act…it could be nearly perfect. There were only a few minor gaps in its memory, but you already noticed and discounted those.”

  “What about our truthtelling? It covered that, too?” Kyri demanded.

  Tashriel shook his head again, a slow, disbelieving motion. “In truth, I thought I might be discovered then. The matrix was already breaking, I had become too…caught up in it, too interested in becoming part of what I saw, for it to remain untouched. I…I didn’t want to PLAY the part, I was trying to make the part follow what I wanted, and that stressed it too much. It managed to still hide my nature, but I had to be very, very careful about how I answered and literally force the remaining matrix to help in the answers. Some of them were…evasive, at the least, such as whether I attacked Helina—I made myself believe it was not really an attack, because she was cooperating with me—or whether I was your brother, because I was, with the matrix, the only part of your brother left. But at that point I knew that I had very little time left. Days, perhaps not even that. So…”

  “Let’s go back. Tell us about Viedraverion. We’ve heard the name, we know he’s a demonlord and a plotter and all, but can you tell us more about him?”

  Tashriel nodded vehemently. “Oh, yes. Balinshar hated Viedraverion, so he made sure I knew all about him, and spent time studying him to find weaknesses and blind spots.” He looked at the others regretfully. “But…he doesn’t really have any.

  “Viedraverion is the first son of Kerlamion Blackstar himself. He has served a key role in many plans by the King of All Hells. After Atlantaea was brought down and the Sauran Kingdoms shattered, Viedraverion was sent out to scour the galaxy for remnants of the old civilizations and destroy or neutralize them…until there was effectively no chance for anyone out there to learn the truth.”

  Toshi looked up sharply. “That would have taken nearly forever. Galaxies are big.”

  “He knew that too. So—according to the records—what he did was let civilizations rise to a certain level, where they started locating and collecting the relics themselves…and then arrange the civilization to collapse. In effect, he got literally trillions or quadrillions of people to act as his searching parties.”

  Oh, mud and drought. “He’s a long-term thinker.”

  “Very long-term. He spent over a hundred thousand years on that assignment.”

  Nike stared at Tashriel. “I know Khoros was that old, but I still have a hard time imagining something living that long without changing.”

  “Oh, it can change even Demons some. Balinshar used to rant about that; apparently before he spent a hundred thousand years manipulating civilizations, Viedraverion was really bright and manipulative but had a cold, hard approach that tended to drive people away. After he came back, he had learned how to work with people.”

  “I see,” said Toshi. “Then when he sent you to Wieran, he had already planned your integration with Kyri’s party. He was certain they would triumph over all odds, and return here.”

  “He wasn’t certain,” Tashriel corrected. “He believed things would work out as they did—with many, many contingencies prepared for various alternative outcomes.” A corner of his mouth curled upward, and the yellow eyes were distant for a moment. “He…it was one of the good things about working with him, that I could see something so incredibly…well, beautiful as his strategies, laid out like a map of the
future, illuminated in gems and gold.”

  “Screw your admiration for the artist,” Aurora snapped. “What had he ‘mapped’ for you?”

  Tashriel looked at her and Poplock saw what seemed honest guilt in his eyes. “I was supposed to gain your complete confidence, let you ‘help’ me regain myself, er, well, Rion’s self, and then lead you to the Retreat where Viedraverion and the other Justiciars would be waiting for you.”

  “Then what were you doing—”

  For the first time, color flamed on Tashriel’s cheeks. “Rion loved his sister very much. And I was playing him for months. But I’m not her brother, and those emotions going through me…being near her…I found I didn’t want to lead her into danger. I didn’t want to. And my feelings…weren’t brotherly, really, not once I started feeling them myself. Combined with everything else…I stopped thinking.”

  There was a moment of silence; Poplock could see that most expressions were a combination of sympathy, anger, and revulsion. Complex situation. “So,” he said, “The important questions: what’re his powers, and do you know any weaknesses or quirks he has we might be able to use?”

  “Powers are easy. He’s…really powerful in most areas. In his natural form—which is about seven feet tall, really broad, gray-skinned—he’s phenomenally strong and fast, even for a demon. He’s very resistant to most forms of magic and very tough against weapons of all kinds. He’s also a rannon master—what you call psionics, powers of the mind—with a lot of experience in using it to kill, control and so on. Telekinetic, telepathic, self-enhancement, he knows how to use it all at an extremely high level of power.”

  Tobimar looked grim. “When you say ‘extremely high,’ what—”

  “That big wall of stone Aurora threw in front of me? He could just think at it, and it’d fly up a mile and come down on top of you. That’s ‘extremely high.’ And he might be a lot stronger than that.”

  “Great Balance,” muttered Kyri. “I…don’t know if we can face this.”

  “Maybe you can,” Tashriel said. “If he has any weakness, it is that of all demons: the power of the Gods of Light is a major weapon against them, and you are Myrionar’s only real representative, now. Tobimar…I know he has true holy power as well. Together you might…”