Numenera

by Monte Cook

  He hadn’t believed her about the temple at first. “That temple? That nothing-god? That nothing-religion? I dismissed that ages ago as nothing. Beneath nothing.”

  He’d probed, to find the truth, and she hadn’t resisted him. She conjured up image after image in her mind – the base and all of her friends. The temple. The pendant. The star and its strange, living interior. The device that activated the kubrics. How they’d tried to make it work and had been unable.

  “The greatest treasure comes in the simplest package,” he mused, apparently to himself. “I’ve searched for the master control for so long. One more kubric. One more ancient device… somewhere. But in the Gavani temple? But no. In a structure high above.” He looked up. “Always right there, above me.” He grew silent. Then, finally, he smiled. “And now I know.”

  After belief comes his anger, as if on cue. He hasn’t changed. Not one bit. “But first,” he snarls, “you should know that I will destroy all of your people. Your Kyre. Your Night Clave. And then I will take the last step on my long journey. So very long.”

  She doesn’t doubt Rillent has sent Faleineir ahead with his glaives and the destriatch to do just that. Have they made it? She doesn’t know. Can’t ask. Rillent believes that she is broken.

  She feels broken. Her pain is still receded, but she’s exhausted beyond measure. Holding her chin off her chest is an effort she can barely make.

  They close in on their once-hidden base, and night is already falling. She can feel her pulse come alive for the first time since they left the kubric. It beats fear. Fear. Fear in a harsh rhythm.

  All around them, Rillent’s glaives. Some torchlit faces she thinks she might have recognized once. So many she doesn’t. All wearing Rillent’s colors. His stance. His weapons and armor.

  From behind her, the first wail of the destriatch. She doesn’t let it stop her steps, and she wonders when she’ll start shivering. Or maybe she already is. It’s impossible to tell what her body is doing. All she has left is her brain.

  Rillent halts when he reaches the entrance, and she halts too. He holds his silver staff-like weapon casually. He clearly feels no fear.

  Faleineir stands there, at the door. Vines ripped down. Star symbol for everyone to see.

  “There’s no one here,” Faleineir says. Its voice says what its words don’t: it could be a trap. “But we heard some strange noises in the nearby woods. We’re going to go investigate.”

  She wishes she hated the varjellen, but she knows who Faleineir is. It is her. It is Kyre. It is Quenn. All of them, any of them, if they hadn’t gotten out. Somewhere inside is the Faleineir it might have been if Rillent hadn’t put his claws around the varjellen’s neck.

  Rillent glances back at her. She raises her face. The effort it takes. There’s nothing left to resist. His eyes in her head. The star, she thinks. The star. The barriers. The bridges. The power. The power. The power.

  “No, keep everyone here,” he says, gripping the long weapon more tightly. “But stay alert.” His impatience is telling. His desire for power is palpable. Aviend can taste it, bitter and dangerous. “We’re going in.”

  “You lead,” he says to Aviend. And, reluctantly, she does.

  Released from the hold of the worlds, Kyre ran toward the sounds. He’d forgotten the pain in his leg and it caught him up, but only momentarily. His teeth ground each time his foot fell to the earth.

  Through the trees Kyre saw two figures, both dressed in the garb of Rillent’s glaives. One held a torch like a weapon, the other swinging a long axe at a gnarled bush. No, not a bush. A mound of decaying leaves and vines. No. A slistovile. Sil had done his work.

  He pulled himself to a halt. Don’t run, he thought. Don’t scream.

  But every instinct told him to do just that. Green leafy tendrils struck out at the glaive with the torch, and the creature opened a gigantic, horrific mouth filled with swamp sludge and teeth. The glaive screamed and ran.

  Kyre didn’t blame him one bit. The other glaive, clearly realizing she was alone in the dark, followed suit. The slistovile lumbered after them, but its awkward legs were meant for wading through muck, not running through the woods.

  Kyre stayed where he was until he could see neither soldier nor monstrosity. But he could hear more fighting, and more screaming, all around him. Dammit. Rillent’s glaives didn’t deserve to die. He hoped he wasn’t hearing them die.

  His path now momentarily clear, he ran ahead, making his way toward the base. He came to a large clearing and saw more figures. Vesi stood on top of a broken tree stump with her own torch, shouting with surprising volume.

  “These creatures won’t harm you if you just surrender. Or leave. Leaving is fine too.” She was taller than Kyre remembered. “You’re following the words of a liar. Don’t give him your life! He’s not worth it. He’s never been worth it.”

  Around her, Rillent’s dark-garbed followers fled. Slistoviles, like animate piles of swamp filth, trundled after them. More frightening than murdering. Kyre saw Sil standing next to Vesi’s stump. Did he really have this much control over the creatures? Kyre had thought he could just lure them.

  No time. No time for this. He had to get up to the star.

  Less afraid of the creatures, but still giving them a wide berth, he ran to Vesi.

  “Aviend?” was all he could shout.

  She paused in her shouts into the confused melee. She stared down at him from her perch, silently. Intently.

  Only then did he realize he still had his disguise activated. A quick touch at his temple made it fade into a shimmer of reflecting facets.

  “Kyre!” Vesi shouted.

  “Aviend?” he asked again.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  He shot a glance at Sil, who casually motioned behind Kyre.

  Kyre turned, and saw a lumbering mass of rotting vegetation swinging a viny tendril his way. He ducked, heart thumping up into his ears, and then sidestepped away, probably quicker than he needed to. They were just so ghosting big. Sil seemed to make some kind of gesture, and the slistovile ran back toward the now thoroughly routed ranks of glaives.

  Kyre ran off, toward the base. The forest was a sea of confusion. Glaives running about in the near-darkness, some of them injured, all of them terrified. Frantically flickering torchlight. Slistoviles slavering and stumbling through the trees like drunken madmen looking for something to rend apart.

  At the entrance, he saw Delgha and Thorme in the glow of a trio of glowglobes. They were surrounded – cornered, backs up against the door itself – by a snarling, crackling pack of destriatch. There must have been five of the things, but there might as well have been a hundred. Before he could stop himself, he reached down to where he had previously kept the monoblade on his belt. His hand swiped through nothing. Skist.

  To his right, he saw another group of people. They weren’t warriors. They were trenchers. Workers from the kubrics. Runners. He saw Stiler among them. They stared in fear at the destriatch at the entrance, but they didn’t flee.

  Next to them was a large, four-legged beast Kyre had never seen before. The way each foot connected to the ground, it seemed very solid. Sturdy. Dense. Some kind of frills and scales covered its body – it seemed familiar. It lifted its face to the sky and sang, a high, clear howl that wove its way through Kyre’s bones. Not the malignity. Something else. Kinder. Beautiful.

  Had Delgha’s plan worked?

  He turned back to his friends at the entrance. Delgha was adjusting the device that Thorme held in front of them both. In a flash, a half-formed shape appeared, and approached one of the hounds. The destriatch snarled and lunged at it.

  But no, it really more like threw itself at the thing that approached. It wasn’t an attack. The destriatch and Delgha’s creation collided. Limbs thrashed, electricity arced around them. The two things merged into one whole. A very solid, four-legged beast like the one over by Stiler and the others.

  Once the electrical displa
y ended, the new creature walked over by the first one and sat, relaxed but alert. The other destriatch howled and thrashed and bobbed their heads up and down, but didn’t advance.

  By the ghosts, the destriatch weren’t threatening them. They were begging. They wanted Delgha and Thorme to do to them what they’d done to the others. They wanted the merge. They craved it. Like incomplete but living works of art, they just wanted completion.

  It’s a good plan, Kyre.

  If it’s such a great plan, he practically said aloud, then where are you? Are you here somewhere?

  Kyre wanted to run up to Delgha and Thorme and ask them, but what if doing so disrupted the process in some way, or just spooked the destriatch? They were still destriatch, after all. Ravenous murder machines. He got closer, and caught Thorme’s eye as Delgha worked the controls of the device yet again.

  Thorme returned his gaze and shook her head, slowly.

  Kyre held back. But doing so was killing little parts of himself, inside. He’d arrived late. Too late. Where was Aviend? Was the plan still in motion? Why had no one seen her?

  One by one, he watched as the two of them restored each destriatch to its true form. Or, if not true, then at least complete. Each of the horrific beasts not only changed physically, but he could see the relaxation pass through them like a wave across water. It was beautiful, in its own way, if one had time to think about it.

  He didn’t.

  When the last of the destriatch in front of them had merged with the creatures produced by the device and the way was safe, he hurried to the entrance.

  “Where’s Aviend?”

  Delgha pursed her lips for a moment, and watched Thorme set the device down. Kyre wanted to shake her to get the answer to come out faster.

  “Rillent,” Delgha said. “She and Rillent went into the temple. And up to the star.”

  “Skist, I’ve got to get up there,” he said. “Right now.”

  When they’re standing amid the living things within the star, Rillent finally shows his surprise and delight. Like a mask dropping away. He seems younger somehow. There’s an actual skisting sparkle in his purple eyes, like that of a child. “It’s true,” he says, looking at her. “All of it. Everything you told me.”

  For the first time, he looks around the space. He looks at Aviend. Truly looks at her. Not inside her. It’s a weird sensation. He touches his palm to her cheek, and she does not flinch away. He smiles. He trusts her. “Did you give me this by your own choice?”

  She needs him to keep believing her. Needs him to keep her alive. She answers, “Yes.”

  “Why?” he says. His answer is in his question. He has always believed she would be at his side, and now she is. “We will talk about this after.”

  Which means he won’t just kill her now that he has what he wants. Needs. He will focus entirely on the device. Exactly what she wants. Needs.

  Rillent turns his back to her while he stands at the device. Just like Kyre suspected, the technology here is not a stranger to him. More than any of them – even Delgha – Rillent knows what to do. This is a device he has known existed for years, and he has spent his life, others’ lives, figuring out how to use it. He just couldn’t find it.

  And now she has led him right to it.

  She stands at the viewer, which is perfectly zoomed in on the base. Rillent’s people, running about. A handful of destriatch, half-formed, streaming through the woods. Searching. Searching. She can’t imagine what it sounds like down there. The malignity. It makes her heart hurt, thinking about that song. She can’t see Kyre.

  Rillent’s hands glide across the controls like a musician playing a familiar instrument. “Finally,” he says softly. “I’ve been carrying around the key for years. It’s what guided me to the Steremoss in the first place. And now you’ve finally shown me the lock that it opens.” He runs his fingers over the implant in his head as he talks.

  The key is the final piece. The final thing that Rillent himself brings to the plan.

  There is glee in his voice. “The power of a universe, all for my own use.” It’s the voice of a predator who’s been toying with its prey, but knows that now it’s time to kill. And to feast.

  Crystalline rods around the controls begin to pulsate. It’s not something she’s seen before.

  When hunting a monster, use live bait, she thinks.

  He hears that thought, or some of it, and turns. But it’s already too late. His fingers have finished entering whatever codes he needed to. He is opening the barriers. He is destroying the other worlds. He is going to be all-powerful.

  That is not what happens. Not what happens at all.

  The star flickers, shudders. In the viewer, Aviend can see Rillent’s glaives and the destriatch below. But now she can also see Delgha’s counter-creatures, the ones who will complete the destriatch, give them what they’ve been lacking. She can see the slistoviles under Sil’s command routing the glaives in large numbers.

  All around them, the devices whir. They’re doing something. They’re just not doing what Rillent is expecting.

  “What…?” Rillent says. He is flexing his fingers, as if he expects to feel the power in them. He is looking at his long silver weapon as if it has somehow failed him.

  Aviend finds she has the strength to lift her head after all. She brings her gaze to Rillent’s. “We’re doing what you promised to do,” she says. “We’re protecting the Stere.”

  “But the barriers should be down… the bridge should be channeling…” His face shows that he wants to turn away from her, back toward the device, but he no longer trusts her. Which is fine. She doesn’t need him to anymore.

  “You raised the barriers for us,” she says. “Permanently. The bridge – the conduit – is cut off for good.” Somewhere, her mother’s voice has found her. “We couldn’t have done it without you.”

  She can feel her heart thumping, hard and true. Her back straightens. It won’t do to underestimate him. Not now. Especially not now.

  “How?” he asks.

  Aviend looks around but does not let herself think about the part of the plan that’s still missing. Instead, she taunts, “There’s two sides of a coin. Two ends of a bridge. We didn’t know how to activate it, didn’t have the key, but we figured out how to turn it into a wall rather than a bridge when you did. It just took two of us, on both sides, at the same time.”

  He shakes his head. “No. You are mine.”

  “I was never yours,” she says.

  Rillent raises his weapon. Aviend raises her fist. It is all she has left to raise. She will not kneel. She will not cower. This is the end of ends, and she will meet it as she promised herself she would.

  “I will kill you,” Rillent says with a sudden calm coldness.

  She nods. She has prepared for this moment. Killing is what Rillent does. Of course it would come down to this. She trusts Kyre and their entire clave, but most of all herself. She is the contingency plan. She opens her fist just as Rillent throws his weapon.

  The hardest thing Kyre would ever have to do was watch Aviend die in front of him.

  Fortunately, he didn’t have to.

  Rillent’s weapon flew true across the room, suddenly crackling with dire energy. But Aviend’s tiny device in her palm created an energy field that not only stopped the weapon, but held it in place, its pointed, blade-like tip inches from her face.

  As soon as he could move after transmitting himself to the star, Kyre stepped forward. Pain in his leg ignored. His regular blade in his hand. He would have preferred the monoblade. Dammit.

  Rillent saw him arrive. “You,” Rillent said. It wasn’t a word. Anger incarnate. Hatred. And, maybe, fear. Rillent had no weapon. He had no power to draw from. He was trapped here without a way out. That knowledge was beginning to show in his face, in the hold of his body.

  “Us,” Aviend and Kyre said at the same time. They moved together, to stand side by side. Kyre shot Aviend an “I’m glad you’re still alive” look.
Aviend gave him a tiny “I’m glad you came back to me” smile. She looked nearly ghostfallen – he didn’t want to think of what had happened to her in the kubric – but she was here and alive and standing next to him.

  “Let us help you,” Kyre said. He didn’t know what he meant by that exactly, but he needed to offer something. Rillent was backed up to the devices, both hands up. His wide eyes said he understood that he was cornered, in trouble. Had Rillent ever been in this position before? Kyre doubted it. Who knew how he would react?

  “No,” Rillent said. He flexed one hand wide, twining his fingers over the others, giving a tug. The sizzling field holding his weapon dissipated like so much fluff from a seed pod in the wind. The silver staff glided through the air back to his waiting grasp. The weapon made a soft thud as it landed against his palm.

  “Skist,” Kyre whispered. They hadn’t known that he could do that.

  Aviend’s wristblades were suddenly in her hands, her hidden sheaths doing their job. She stepped forward, but not before Rillent’s weapon left his hand again, blazing with danger. This time, however, its target was Kyre.

  Aviend could move like a bolt of lightning at times, and this was one of those times. Kyre barely had time to think about all she’d been through that day. How was she still standing, let alone moving like that? She lunged at the projectile, clearly intending to throw herself in front of it. Any other day, and she would have succeeded. And died. But that day, her body was clearly pushed further than it had been before. Her blindingly fast move was not blinding enough. She struck the weapon’s shaft with her shoulder. Energy blazed. Aviend cried out. The weapon still flew.

  But the force of her body had knocked it a bit askew. Just a bit. But enough. Rather than impaling Kyre’s chest, it sliced through the meat of his upper arm.

  Kyre dropped to his knees, blade clattering to the floor. Aviend lay on the ground just a few feet away. Pain burned down his arm. It was as though lightning had shot from each finger. All he could see was purple. He fell forward onto his face, his chin hitting the floor hard enough to knock his teeth together.