by Mick Fraser
“I couldn’t say.”
“Tell me truly: if I release you from your bonds, with the promise that I mean you no harm, will you calm yourself, or will you try to kill me where I stand?”
Angela glanced at Varo. “I guess we’ll all find out together.”
Evayne nodded at the Endrani, and he deactivated Angela’s restraints. Her arms sagged, aching, and she rubbed her wrists, taking a slow step away from Varo. It would be easy enough to get away. She could arc back to the transport before they even knew she’d left the room; chances were that her training with Gaelan would enable her to start up the engines, maybe even pilot it out, but then what? Were tractor-beams real? Would they shoot her down? If they chased her and caught her they’d never let her out again. No. For now she bit it back, the way she’d been taught.
“Leave us, Four-Claws” Evayne told the Endrani, who called his guards to heel. “You as well, Lord Marshal. Though don’t stray far; you and I have things to discuss.”
Angela felt a tiny pang of satisfaction at Varo’s uncomfortable expression as he forced a perfunctory bow and left the room with the Exethan. Once alone, Evayne visibly relaxed. She turned her back on Angela and crossed the room to where a transparent table was furnished with two high-backed white chairs. The Sceptress poured herself into one and offered the other to Angela. “If you’ve decided not to kill me after all, come and have a seat. Hear my side.”
Her smile was warm and seemed genuine, but Angela had seen such a smile before. She felt like a seal struggling against a current while hungry sharks circled in the shadows below. She crossed her arms defiantly. “Let me guess: you didn’t kill the Founders, and the Firebrands are the real enemy.”
Evayne sat back, watching Angela intently. “No,” she said at last. “I lied to you before. I did everything Rathe told you I did.”
Angela was taken aback, and though she tried to hide it, Evayne must have seen it.
“The Founders were a disease,” said the Sceptress. “They were a burden. History will teach you that they were noble, altruistic. They taught us to speak, to build, they showed us the stars and put us amongst them. But none of it was for us. They gave us only what they deemed us worthy of receiving. And then they kept us there, to be governed; worse, to be studied. Without their deaths there could be no true Unity. Without their deaths, we would never find life beyond the Reach.”
“And have you?”
“Only Earth. But consider the size of the Galaxy, Earthborn. Observe.” She tapped the desktop and a lightsphere rose, within which hung a map of the Milky Way, a huge spiral of white, green, gold, blue and red. She tapped again and the image zoomed in to show a handful of bright stars, maybe fifty, linked by golden lines. Compared to the galaxy at large, it was tiny.
“That is the Reach as it exists today. That tiny pocket of systems, within each of which exists at least one inhabited world. It’s a melting pot. But the Iniir have searched countless systems around it and found nothing. Humanity is not alone in the galaxy, Angela Strange, but the Reach is. There is nothing left here to conquer. No more wonders to recover. Twenty-five years ago, my father led a Senate review to reopen the search for life beyond the Reach. It was denied, and my father, a healthy man, died of a wasting disease just months later. With him gone, no one appealed the Founders’ decision. But I knew, even then, that they were hiding something. And I found out what.”
Angela walked to the chair and sat down, keen to let Evayne keep speaking.
“The Iniir came here from beyond the Rim, a place we cannot even reach. They came from another galaxy, millions of light years away, and they were running. Whatever wonders or horrors they had seen in the beyond were denied to us because they deemed us unworthy. That is not ruling, nor protecting. That is tyranny.”
For a moment, Angela swallowed her disgust. If she was to survive whatever was coming, if she was to escape back to the Shadowstar, avenge Gaelan, she needed answers. She bluntly interrupted Evayne’s rhetoric. “What does the Unavenged want with me?”
Evayne narrowed her eyes, the smile fading. “You spoke to the Seraph then? Don’t deny it. Only she would have been privy to such information. How much did she tell you, I wonder?”
“A lot,” Angela replied. “She told me about the wars, and the Hexen Crusade. She told me what they did, and how they were stopped.”
“Really? And I wonder which version she told you.”
Angela’s patience was wearing thin. “Maybe she told me the truth? Maybe she made it up. At this point, I couldn’t give a shit, I’ll still believe her over anything that comes out of your mouth. I’m a catalyst, right? For what? That machine?”
Evayne stayed silent a moment, watching her. Then she blinked. “I’m sorry, what do you think this is? You’ve never met a Queen before, have you? I could have you killed where you sit and the mess would be gone before you even knew you were dead. If I haven’t done that already, then you should really consider that I might be a friend.” She paused. “The Unavenged is not mortal. He is the closest thing you will ever see to a God. And he has chosen you. The Machine is a lock, and you are the key. He is the one who will unify all the peoples of the Reach, and lead us to our true Destiny, not the false one conjured by the Iniir.” She paused, looking at Angela as though taking stock for the first time. “The Unavenged is the reason you were born, one way or the other. He is the reason you breathe at all.” She leaned forward on the desk, her emerald eyes sparkling. “Tell me: do you have… abilities?”
Angela swallowed. “What… what do you mean?”
“You have Iniir DNA. Traces, in your blood. One part to every one-hundred, as far as my docking scanners can fathom. The blood must manifest somewhere. The Iniir were, for want of a better word, technomancers. Their technology requires a DNA catalyst, and you have an Amp, so we know that your blood is active. Remnath, my chief Seeker, would like nothing more than to cut you into pieces for study. I told him ‘no’, for now.”
“For now…”
Evayne smiled again, then her face softened. “I envy you. You were given an extraordinary gift. You’ve seen things that no other living person on your world will ever see. And you’ve an innocence in you that you cannot suppress, even with the snarling and posturing. You’re beautiful, too, and believe me, that’s important.”
As Evayne spoke, Angela was surprised to hear something genuine in her words. Not sorrow, but, perhaps, a form of jealousy. When she said she was envious she was telling the truth. What the hell did they want with her?
“What the hell do you want with me?” she said aloud. “I mean, you’ve got me. You had to kill to get me, but you’ve got me. And the Machine. So where do I fit in?”
Evayne continued to stare, then, as much to herself as to Angela, she said, “What an ironic choice of words.”
CHAPTER 44
~CRY WHEN YOU’RE DONE~
AFTER THEY HAD removed and destroyed her databand, Evayne’s guards led Angela to a small yet surprisingly comfortable chamber somewhere within the labyrinthine depths of the city-sized ship. There were no restraints, but an obviously placed camera and the guards on the door made it painfully clear that she didn’t exactly have the run of the place. They had removed her hypersuit, which had been a wonderful experience, and made her wear what looked like a black kimono and slip-on shoes. Perhaps they expected to torture her with pure embarrassment. At least they had left her Saint Anthony and medallion alone. When they closed the door, she kicked it. Then she kicked it again. For a moment she paused, wondering if it were possible to arc through metal, before she resumed her kicking.
Cursing, she sat down on the surprisingly comfy bed, and turned towards the small porthole. The sleet cloud floated formlessly, a beautiful but insubstantial blemish on the star-spangled blackness of eternity. She wondered where the Shadowstar had gone. Had they given up, after all this? Was Gaelan’s death the final straw? Even if they hadn’t, the Shadowstar could dock comfortably in any one of the Uncommon H
ero’s guest rooms. It was unlikely they would risk any kind of assault. It was unlikely they’d get close enough to do any damage if they did. At the thought of Gaelan’s face she felt her stomach knot. With practiced effort she forced it down, held it back. Angela had been losing people all her life, which wasn’t half as upsetting as the fact that she was beginning to get used to it. She gritted her teeth and focused on the problem at hand.
Whatever Evayne wanted her for, Angela knew it wouldn’t be benign. The Sceptress had admitted, freely, that the Firebrands, that Illith and Rathe, had been right: she had murdered the Founders, regardless of her supposed reasons. She had spent twenty years denying it; she would never have admitted it so willingly to someone who could ever utter it to another soul. As far as Evayne was concerned, this was the end of the road for Angela.
So why wasn’t she dead? What were they keeping her alive for? Was she to power the Machine, to catalyse it? Was that her purpose? Was she, after all she had been through, merely a component? And had the Founders truly designed her just to die? She knew little of the Iniir, but what she had learned so far didn’t amount to a positive opinion. Everyone who discussed the ancient Celestial race used words like “arrogant” and “control”, and Angela was beginning to build her own picture of the Founders of the Reach.
Time passed in her comfortable prison. With no databand and no clock, she had no way of measuring the seconds as they grew into minutes, matured into hours. She thought about screaming the place down, kicking up shit, but what good would it do? She needed a plan. She needed help. A ship three miles long, and she didn’t have a single friend on it.
After an indeterminate length of time, her cell door opened, and the guards admitted an adolescent Silsir bearing a tray of food. She was tall, her skin as pale as a death shroud, her slitted eyes as bright blue as summer ice. She wore her rich green hair shaved on one side of her cranial ridge, and the shorn skin was tattooed with indigo dye, a pattern of circles and stars. Her clothes were high quality, her flared, pointed ears were adorned with golden rings, but her feet were bare, and Angela recognised a servant when she saw one. The young girl, maybe seventeen in human terms, laid the tray beside the door and said nothing, but as Angela rose to question her, talk to her, scream at her, whatever the hell she was going to impulsively do, the girl fixed her with a diamond-cold stare that halted her as surely as Illith’s would, flicked her sapphire eyes once towards the food, and left the room.
Alone, Angela examined the food from a distance as though her proximity might cause it to explode. It looked like rembah and chak, with a beaker of water. There was some kind of berry, too, grape-sized but bright yellow – and something else, something flat and metallic that glinted as it caught the light. She looked nervously toward the door, then crossed to the tray. Pushing aside the berries, she found a small, metal-edged rectangle of glass. It was dense, rough to the touch, and Angela recognised it as “light-glass”. She squeezed it once, front and back, and it lit up along one edge, projecting writing across the face. It was in Orrenian, of course, but thanks to the Amp she had retained many words Gaelan had taught her. She glanced furtively at the door again before sitting on the bed. After a moment, she gave in to her growling stomach and grabbed the bunch of yellow grapes. She sat cross-legged on the bed, facing away from the door, and popped a piece of the fruit into her mouth. It tasted like apple.
She struggled to piece the words on the light-glass together. There were only four, and the fifth was a symbol: a burning arrowhead, somewhat crudely designed, yet at the same time striking. It was the symbol of the Firebrands, and Angela’s heart fluttered. She concentrated on the words, although thanks to the brand symbol, she already knew what they said.
HOPE IN THE LIGHT.
Before she had time to ponder it, the message warped and vanished. She pressed the touchpad over and over, but nothing happened. It was dead. Suddenly remembering the cameras, she slid the inert piece of glass down the back of the bed. She ate a little more fruit, drank some water, and sat back on the mattress. Someone somewhere decided that it was bedtime, and the lights went out.
Angela reclined on the thick mattress, eyes on a point somewhere in the darkness above. She saw Gaelan’s eyes in the shadows, peering out from within the black. Her throat ached as she choked back a sob.
“You’re not done,” she told herself. “Cry when you’re done.”
Too much had happened, and too much was yet to happen, to fade away now. Whatever Evayne had planned for her, she wasn’t about to go to it willingly. They still didn’t know she could arc, and for now that remained her only trump card. Well, that and whoever was putting hidden messages in her food. She could only assume that she had an ally somewhere on the ship, and that ally might yet be her way out.
She rolled over, facing away from the tiny square of light in the door. Above her, the porthole showed only the endless night-time sky of deep space. She remembered her first moments aboard the Shadowstar, how new and frightening everything had been. She couldn’t pinpoint the moment when it had changed and she had put away the fear, but she wondered grimly if the time would come when the horrors and wonders she had seen would suddenly come rushing back to unseat her mind. If she wasn’t really “coping”, but was simply storing up the shock and awe for later. The thought almost made her fear the quiet.
With some effort she cleared her mind, focusing on home. Home meant music, and she found herself thinking of David Bowie’s We Could Be Heroes. The lyrics rolled through her mind, and she was no longer a prisoner lying in the dark, but a girl in a bar, maybe a cafe, drinking alone, gently swaying her shoulders to the song. The door opened behind her, pouring in sunlight like spilled honey. The chair beside her moved, and she looked up. The girl with purple skin and hair like fresh snow leaned in, her golden eyes bright, and kissed her cheek. “Hey.”
Angela placed one hand on the side of the girl’s face, cupping her cheek, her fingertips softly brushing through the ends of her hair. She leaned closer, pressing soft lips against soft lips. The kiss lingered, but just as it began to stir something hot and desperate inside her, she pulled away, pressing her nose against Gaelan’s. “Hey, yourself,” she said.
And then she slept.
CHAPTER 45
~WISH~
A SOUND LIKE a rasping breath echoed in the darkness. Angela opened her eyes. She was already standing but that didn’t seem strange to her. She began to walk, listening for the sound. It came again and she followed it.
She walked through the darkness for what seemed like an age, listening. The ground beneath her bare feet was cool, damp, but smooth as glass. The rasp echoed, and this time she became aware of a sound beneath it, on the edge of her senses, a pulsing almost like half a heartbeat. She recognised it: the last time she had heard it – no, felt it – had been on Nix, when Evayne had come to her.
She was back inside the... What had Evayne called it? The “resonance aperture”. Resonance implied sound, frequency, an aura given off by something. An aperture was an opening. It was how Evayne had spoken to her, via her Amp, once before. But if Evayne wanted to speak to her now she would simply come in person.
Someone else had brought her here this time.
Angela continued to walk, waiting for the rasp to give her direction, when suddenly it stopped. She stopped too, feet side by side on the cold ground. She went rigid when a voice spoke from within the swirling darkness, a deep growl like several voices rasping together. It was a voice conjured within nightmares and assigned to something timeless and terrifying, something powerful and ancient. It was a voice she would give to the devil in her darkest dreams.
“Welcome, Child of the Sinisfarn,” it said. “I have been searching for you for longer than you can imagine.”
Sinisfarn? That was new. She emboldened herself against the chill in her blood. “Who are you?” she demanded. Silence came back and Angela became aware of a presence that flowed around her like liquid, hot, dark, but predatory. It glided
like a shark, circling her, shrouded by shadows thicker than oil. Its hidden gaze made the hairs on her neck and arms vibrate. Her flesh began to glow softly, creating a corona of white-gold light that seemed to cling to her. The presence pulled away, but only slightly, showing its defiance.
“So it is true,” it said cryptically. “You possess the Light of the Old Ones.”
“The Iniir?” she said, trying to sound like she wasn’t completely uninitiated. Her words were countered by a scornful laugh.
“Older than that, Earth-child. Much older.”
Irritated, she folded her arms. “If you’re going to answer everything cryptically, there’s no point us talking at all.”
Another laugh, this one without rancour. “I can smell no fear on you. Is that not strange? Should you not be afraid?”
“I don’t scare easily.” She felt herself being reappraised. It was not a pleasant sensation. “Who are you?” she asked again.
“My name and title are unpronounceable in your tongue. If you must label me, do so as others have in aeons past. Call me ‘Wish’.”
“Wish? Okay. And what are you, Wish?”
“Ancient. Hungry. Now hopeful.”
She hung on the word “hungry” for a few worrying seconds before pushing through. “Are you... the Unavenged?”
The presence recoiled as though she’d slapped it. “Illumiel is only the beginning, Child of the Sinisfarn,” it snapped. “You cannot comprehend the horror that approaches.”
“So you’re not? Is that what you’re saying?”
The chamber they were in, whatever it was, shook violently.
“The Weave is fraying,” Wish warned her, echoing what Guin had told her. “The Grim is stirring. You must not allow Illumiel to return. His vengeance will prelude an era of violence and bloodshed the likes of which you cannot imagine. Wake now. I will seek you out where the resonance permits it. Trust the Flame, Child. The Flame is Light, and there is hope in the Light.”