by Jack Conner
Ani shoots Sheridan. Avery activates the Device. The Over-City falls. The War of Octung is over. But Avery knows that Sheridan is right. Now the R’loth, denied their puppet Octung, will act themselves. Avery braces himself for the worst.
BOOK SIX
The worst arrives. The R’loth send giant beings that look like starfish to obliterate one island after the other, killing millions. The Starfish drive toward the mainland. Avery and Layanna collect samples of Starfish tissue and mean to analyze them, find some weakness of the Starfish.
The band has been picked up by a whaling vessel, and in its medical bay Avery works on Sheridan, saving her life so that Ani will not be a murderer … and maybe for some other reason, too. Layanna is very suspicious of that other reason and she refuses to sleep with Avery because of it.
Sheridan, once well, betrays them into the hands of pirates, who seize the whaling ship. Pirates have replaced Octung as the R’loth’s power at sea, and the pirate fleet, ruled by Janx’s former boss and old enemy Segrul the Gray, worships the R’loth. The band is brought to Davic, a Collossum and Layanna’s former husband. He attempts to kill them, but they manage to escape, after having seen Sheridan be sent off on an important assignment, something to do with an Atoshan relic. She’d been dispatched to Ghenisa, but for what they don’t know.
They arrive at the mainland to find Prime Minister Denaris at odds with Grand Admiral Haggarty, a puppet of Sheridan’s and an agent of Octung. The Grand Admiral is trying to stage a coup and take over the government. Denaris gives Avery’s band refuge and allows them to set up lab in which they analyze the Starfish samples.
During this time the Voryses make contact with Avery. His late wife Mari was a distant relative of the old ruling family, the Voryses, commonly referred to as the Drakes. Despised and hated, they had been dethroned half a century ago and their members killed or driven into hiding, like Mari. Ani is a descendant and they want her to rejoin her family, led by a man called Idris, who would be King of Ghenisa like his forefathers. He wants to take power, using the turmoil to his own advantage. Avery refuses the request, but Idris asks him if Ani’s been having strange dreams. Sure enough, she has, and they’ve been bothering both her and Avery. She dreams of singing, and a doorway. Could these dreams be shared by other Voryses, and might they have some insight into what they mean?
Meanwhile the Starfish drive ever closer to the mainland, wiping out one island after another. There is no sign of Sheridan and no news of what her special assignment could have been. Finally Avery and Layanna have a breakthrough in the laboratory. They discover that the nectar of the rare “ghost flower” allows Layanna to establish a psychic link with the Starfish tissue. In theory, if she can ingest enough fresh nectar and can “plug herself” into the brain of one of the giant Starfish, she can send a psychic pulse out to all the Starfish, killing them and saving the world from the wrath of the R’loth.
The hitch is that the ghost flower only grows in the Crothegra Jungle, also known as the Atomic Jungle. A man named Losg Coleel holds the sole rights to the nectar, and he resides in the war-torn city of Ezzez. Avery leaves Ani with her “Uncle Id”, patriarch of the surviving Voryses, hoping for the best, realizing he can’t take her into the Atomic Jungle, and the four members of the band depart for Ezzez at once, only to learn that Sheridan knows where they’re going … and why.
BOOK SEVEN
They arrive in Ezzez to find a city torn by war. Octung's presence is strong but heavily disputed. The city is also half-overgrown by the Crothegra Jungle, the so-called Atomic Jungle, which is resurgent due to the recent conflict which has distracted those who'd tended it before. Avery and the others make their way through the chaotic city with the help of local rebels, are attacked by Octunggen-controlled soldiers and scatter.
Avery finds Losg Coleel in hiding in the Maze of Dark Delights, and the doctor and Layanna help the merchant find a place of relative safety in the rebel headquarters. In return, Coleel tells them where they can find the ghost flower. He is out of the flower and Layanna needs the raw nectar, so their only option is to journey into the Atomic Jungle itself to seek out the flower.
During all of this Avery's band is menaced not only by Octunggen-controlled soldiers but by a mysterious new enemy, a group of robed figures that appear to be walking, maggot-infested cadavers. The maggots are unnatural. The Infested beings want Layanna for some reason, though Avery's group doesn't know why.
The band ventures into the jungle, finding one of the villages Coleel employs to harvest the ghost flower, but still the flower's nectar is not strong enough. The band will have to penetrate into the "haunted" quarter of the jungle where the ghost flower "vines" originate.
They also discover more Infested beings and believe the source of the "Infection" may stem from the Gomingdon, the so-called haunted quarter ... the same place the vines originate from.
Troops led by Sheridan attack the village and the band is forced into flight. In the chaos Avery finds himself separated from the others. Lost in the Atomic Jungle, he nearly falls prey to local wildlife, but Sheridan, also separated from her group, saves him, and the two travel together. Along the way, they renew their bond somewhat, although neither quite trusts the other.
The Atomic Jungle ends, becoming a strangely mundane jungle, right where the Gomingdon starts, and there, right in the middle of the Gomingdon, is a long-abandoned, pre-human city of great size and eeriness. Avery and Sheridan explore the outer edge of the city and climb one of the spires to its top. Where are the others? They don't know.
They sleep beside each other that night on the building's rooftop, but Avery vows not to make love to her. Despite this vow, in the morning the two begin to make love ... when they are interrupted by the arrival of Layanna, Janx and Hildra, all of whom are horrified.
Janx begins to strangle Sheridan, but Avery convinces him to at least let her speak. She says that her party arrived by dirigibles and that she'll give the band one of the airships if Janx releases her. Reluctantly, he agrees. Without the airships they'd have to find their way back to civilization through the vastness of the Atomic Jungle on foot, a journey which would almost surely kill them.
It's then that Avery notices that Layanna, Janx and Hildra didn't arrive alone. Several of the "Infested" are with them, and they mean to take the group for an interview with the Colony.
BOOK EIGHT
Avery's group is taken by the Infected to a great maggot-like being who is one of the lords of the Infested, and it reveals that it and the others of its kind have been waiting for one who will "awaken the Sleeper". They believe that Layanna is that being, because only one with otherdimensional abilities can do the job. When the great maggot orders Layanna to be taken to the massive black dome at the heart of the city (where she will "retrieve the Key"), it simultaneously orders Avery and the others to be killed.
With some help from Sheridan, they escape with Layanna and make their way to the Dome, which they enter and seal the door behind them. They find the Key at the nexus of the glowing ghost-flower vines. There Sheridan betrays them. She tries to destroy the essence of the ghost-flower nectar and take the Key, but the others stop her. They can't kill her, though, because only with the aid of her dirigible fleet can they make their way out of the jungle alive.
Layanna absorbs the nectar and Sheridan takes the Key. They rendezvous with the airships and separate, Sheridan going with the Octunggen and taking the Key (whatever it is) with her, while Avery's group goes off on their own. They return to Hissig, which they find to be in turmoil. Admiral Haggarty has tried to overthrow Prime Minister Denaris, who is in hiding. There is fighting in the streets. Avery and the others take refuge in the mutant-filled sewers. There they learn that a cult centered around a Collossum is spreading fear and taking human sacrifices. Worse, the Collossum has threatened the city: either Ghenisa turns to the worship of the Collossum or the Starfish will raze Hissig.
Avery and Janx penetrate the lair of the Collossum,
find Denaris and confront the Collossum, a man known as Rigurd. Denaris has been given the Sacrament and is to be given by Haggarty to Rigurd in an official ceremony in the main city square that evening, a symbolic act signaling that Ghenisa now worships the Collossum. While in the lair, Avery learns that Sheridan had delivered a strange artifact to Rigurd, and that only after activating the artifact did the ghost flower nectar become effective. This makes no sense.
Shaking it off, Avery's group stops the ceremony and rescues Denaris. They receive some unexpected help in the form of the Drakes, the old royal family. Among them is Ani, who, oddly, is treated with deference by the other royals.
Stopping the ceremony, of course, only prompts the wrath of the Collossum. The Starfish emerges from the waters and begins to lay waste to the city.
Avery takes over the last known ray, a massive creature, which had been in Sheridan's charge. She is taken captive. Layanna psychically controls the ray and smashes it into the Starfish. With its exoskeleton cracked, Layanna slips in, absorbs the ghost flower nectar and sends her psychic assault to all the other Starfish through this one's brain, killing them all.
But why did Rigurd make the ghost flower nectar effective in the first place? The Octunggen are up to something. When Sheridan turns the tables and makes her escape, Avery comes with her, which she allows. Layanna helps by "pretending" she is through with Avery. Avery worries that the pretence is all too real. Not only that, but his feelings for Sheridan are more complicated than he would have thought.
He goes off with her to a zeppelin controlled by Octunggen, who have accomplished their strange ends. The Starfish may be dead, but the Octunggen's true motive was to obtain the Key, and that they have. The Starfish could not have survived long out of the water and could only have subdued the coasts. Sheridan and the captain in charge of the zeppelin reveal that the Octunggen mean to prevent the R'loth from activating their doomsday weapon, whatever that is, which they will do if it looks like the war will turn against them.
Wondering if he's been on the wrong side all along, Avery agrees to help.
BOOK NINE
Avery, Sheridan and a group of Octunggen soldiers aboard the zeppelin head into the frigid arctic country of Xlaca, which is embroiled in a vicious civil war led by pro-Collossum elements of its own culture. But somewhere in its capital city is the Codex, which is the artifact that the Key is meant to decrypt. The Key, meanwhile, has been taken to the Flying Fortress, an aerial scientific station of Octung.
Avery and Sheridan penetrate the warzone after most of the soldiers have been killed and locate the Codex, but to retrieve it they must free Uthua, the terrible Collossum that has possessed Muirblaag. The Xlacan warlord Onxcor has abducted him and is trying to auction off both him and the Codex. Uthua was rendered incapacitated by a new enemy that Avery and Sheridan take to calling the “mystery party”. The mystery party also wants the Codex. The members of the mystery party are apparently invisible and can wound, perhaps kill, a Collossum.
Avery and Sheridan free Uthua, steal the Codex and board the Octunggen zeppelin just as the capital city succumbs to chaos. At a big conference meeting involving Uthua, his priests, Sheridan, Avery, and the captain of the zeppelin, Avery learns the Octunggen’s true motive for needing the decrypted Codex: to learn the location of the Sleeper, the last surviving remnant of the race of the Ygrith, who once dominated the world but have since vanished. Only the Sleeper can open the Ygrith’s great and hidden Monastery, where, among other things, the Ygrith kept their terrible otherworldly weapons. Octung wants to seize those weapons and gift them to the R’loth so that the R’loth can subdue the world overnight.
That night aboard the zeppelin the Octunggen and the Collossumist pirates that have come to their aid give sacrifice to Uthua, and Avery trembles to think that he’s made common cause with such people. When he wakes up the next day, his god-killing knife has been stolen.
The zeppelin is bound for the Flying Fortress, there to unite the Codex with the Key.
Chapter 1
The fleet traveled for four days before reaching the Flying Fortress.
Avery was in the library. He’d been spending too much time there. For one thing, it was extensive. Say what you will about the Octunggen, but they were an intellectual people, given to cerebral debate and dense poetry. Most of the books were in their language, naturally, but Avery read Octunggen as well as spoke it, and poring through their history and mythology he developed a reluctant admiration for them. He had always respected them as a strong and sometimes hostile enemy (before the war, of course), but he had never immersed himself in their culture until now, and as a result his attitudes toward them began to change. He still hated them, but he was sad for them, as well, having seen their potential in the stories they told themselves, of warriors with vision, kings with dreams, of proud ancestors battling foes with both strength and wits. They could be so much more than the puppets of alien god-things.
Second, the reason he spent so many hours in the library was because it was the only safe place in the zeppelin for him to go save his cabin, and he’d begun to feel claustrophobic there. Sheridan had been busy the last few days and it had been up to him to fend for himself. The crew gave him dark looks, and he knew some blamed him for the disaster in Xlaca—for the deaths of so many crewmembers. The official story of the men having been slaughtered by a whale met with suspicion by some, who (not incorrectly) considered Avery an enemy agent, and he feared for his life in the halls where anyone could bump into him, puncture one of his lungs with a hidden knife and vanish into an accomplice’s cabin before anyone could raise a cry. So: the library.
On the fourth day, Sheridan found him there reading a book about the history of the Lightning Crown.
“We’ve arrived.”
With some irritation—the history was quite fascinating—he laid the book down, but not before finding an embroidered cloth to mark his spot. “So soon?”
She smiled. “Come on. They might have books aboard the station, too, and if not maybe Captain Marculin will let you come back here to peruse in your own time.”
Avery accompanied her through the halls, noting the eager looks in the faces of the crew—at least until they saw him, and then they were very likely to scowl or droop. Many still wore a black armband around their left bicep in mourning for the men and women lost on the expedition to Xlatleb. So did Captain Marculin, Avery noted, not for the first time, as he and Sheridan entered the bridge and found the captain raptly staring through the great bank of windows. Through them Avery saw something in the near distance and closing that could only be the Floating Fortress. He had expected something like the Over-City but smaller, yet the Floating Fortress looked like nothing so much as its name implied: a castle, all rearing bulwarks and thrusting dark towers. He quickly realized this was more of an optical illusion created by the way the zeppelins, dirigibles and balloons that composed it—along with many great platforms, buildings and other structures—were arranged, but even so it was a more concentrated and formidable construct than the Over-City, dark and ominous.
And it was dark. Few lights blazed from the structure, and much of the material that composed it seemed black or dark gray. For all that lightning struck it constantly, darting up from the sea and down from the clouds overhead ... but not too far overhead. The Flying Fortress floated quite high in the atmosphere and surrounded itself in dense, brooding thunderheads, out of which white flashes unceasingly flickered, many of them channeled into the countless lightning rods that bristled from the structure, giving it a jagged and threatening look. All and all, it resembled the castle of some mad scientist somehow placed in the clouds, staffed with monsters and then abandoned.
“Where’s its fleet?” Sheridan said.
Captain Marculin was watching one of the operators, who presently looked up and said, “Still no answer, sir.”
Air hissed from between Marculin’s teeth. To Sheridan, he said, “The fleet’s not replying. Neither is the s
tation.”
Her face grew hard, and her gaze took in the Flying Fortress anew.
“What’s going on?” Avery asked her.
“The Fortress has an aerial defense fleet. They should have come out to meet us—we should be able to see them; a patrol should have met us and escorted us in—but nothing. And the station itself has gone dark.”
Avery felt a nervous foreboding. “Has it ... is it ... ?”
Sheridan shook her head, and he nodded, trying to quell his suddenly overactive mind. Still, it was hard to dismiss the thought that the mystery party might have reached the station ahead of them.
All in the bridge faced forward, watching nervously, intently, as the brooding dark mass of the Fortress loomed larger in their view until it filled most of the windows. Still no patrol came out to meet them, nor did a radio operator aboard the station hail them, though the operators on the Valanca constantly attempted to contact the station.
Two of the new pirate crewmembers had entered the bridge, and they demanded answers. When Marculin informed them of the situation, they grabbed a radio and spoke rapidly into it in some language Avery wasn’t familiar with—nor, he felt, was he supposed to be. The pirates were communicating with their overseers in the Coalition ... and they didn’t want anyone to know what they said. The crew of the zeppelin slipped them mistrustful looks, but the pirates returned them blankly—no, not blankly, Avery realized: indifferently. The Octunggen’s mistrust wasn’t enough to worry them; they were that confident. This attitude only seemed to heighten the fear of the Octunggen, or perhaps that was Avery’s own projection, as it certainly heightened his fear.