Cirx sits up. The same ghost he saw last night: a fluttering image of vaporous light with so many jeweled piercings its face looks metallic. The face of the desiccated corpse?
Tegard and Riesbold jolt up, bracing against the walls.
“Stop,” Cirx commands, but the ghost strides out of the room and down the corridor. Cirx paces after it, pulling his longsword a hand’s breadth from its scabbard. “Stop, I say.”
His companions follow him to the aft deck. There, under the green light, the ghost pauses.
Cold fear thrums in Cirx’s veins, as if some dark fiend has seized him with its teeth. “Why are you here?”
The ghost stops, then turns to face him. It floats across the ground toward the aft of the ship. “I was the first one slain by the silver, my body never recovered. It’s why I’m the only one cursed.”
“No, stop!” Cirx reaches out. His sword is somehow fully drawn. Riesbold bumps into him. “I found your body.”
The ghost stops and stares.
“You cannot slay me again,” the bejeweled ghost says. “As you mentioned the previous night, I’m a ghost, a spirit of those murdered on this ship. Murdered by the same men who flew ships of war in and destroyed your castle.”
The same men? “I do not intend to slay you. We’ve come to destroy the station and take revenge.”
The ghost laughs a deep, hearty rumble. “The innocent people working the station near here aren’t responsible for either of our situations. The people known as the Silvergarde are responsible for our deaths and are also responsible for the massacre of your people.”
Something tightens in Cirx’s guts, a constrictor snake coiling around his innards. He remembers the name Silvergarde. The first group of outsiders that visited Staggenmoire … there was a skirmish. The invaders fled, to his knowledge never to return. Animosity for the name persisted.
The ghost says, “The Silvergarde detest the people of Staggenmoire for their inferiority, loathed us, the people of Uden, as well. They boarded us under the pretense of peace and then killed us in our sleep.”
The cold in Cirx’s veins warms and becomes a burning heat, a sweat on the brow.
The dead do not lie.
Cirx feels restraint slipping from his grasp. “With proof, I will chase down these Silvergarde demons and destroy every last one of them until my family is avenged.”
“I can tell you something you already know.” The ghost eyes the aft wall as if being summoned by his maker, repeating his march of purgatory each night. “I must be quick. The diplomat of Uden was a casualty in the attack on your castle, something the people of Uden, the same people who are in the space station, would not desire.”
Cirx waits, needing more.
The ghost continues, “You’ll find the truth of my unending nightmare, from a time before this ship was given to your people. Locate the storage hatch under the galley. Find the keycodes that will allow you to pass the Silvergarde’s defenses.”
The ghost walks through the wall and disappears.
A minute passes.
Cirx turns and races for the galley, the boots of his men thundering behind him. In a hundred heartbeats, they have located the storage hatch and yanked it open.
Mist swarms out, filling the galley. Cirx’s longsword is drawn, raised before him. Another apparition rises, twisted in the face, silver garb covering its form.
Cirx stumbles back.
The apparition shouts, “I curse you, people of Staggenmoire. My people will end all life on your planet. They will drain all of your seas dry.”
The ghost bares fingers curled like talons and lunges.
Cirx swings his blade. Steel passes through spirit. The fiend shrieks and drifts away in a haze.
Cirx heaves for breath, then glances back at Tegard, who shrugs as if he believes the ghost is gone, vanquished, or as if he doesn’t know what to say or what’s happened. The mist dissipates, and Cirx lowers himself below the hatch. Faint green lights illuminate a cramped interior.
Inside the storage compartment lies another body, the supposedly vanquished ghost’s, also desiccated, its face twisted in a silent scream. It’s dressed in silver, the suit forged of some strange material, definitely not wool, cloth, or metal. Something protective but flexible. A patch of the armor-like material has been cut away from the chest, identical to the piece of material clutched in the death grip of the first body Cirx located, the victim.
The Uden victim must have cut off a piece of this person’s silver clothing during their struggle. Before they were both killed. Proof enough there was an altercation.
Beside the missing swath of space armor on the dead aggressor’s chest is a sigil: a trident of silver coral.
Rynn
Rynn jumps between stars again, dreaming, leaping along like some intragalactic giant, balancing on planets and moons. Step. Jump. Land.
A breeze caresses her skin, her hair.
The shadowy figure rises before her, a behemoth of space and time.
Rynn grows cold with fear.
One of its hands conceals something again.
Rynn tells herself this is the make-believe, her world, and alleviates a bit of rising fear. Then she concentrates, attempting to convince this creature to reveal its secrets, and opens her hands.
The creature’s coiled fist slowly, regretfully opens, and tiny bubbles of light float out from between fingers and hover, twirl, and spiral around its head. Hundreds, thousands, then millions, maybe even billions of tiny lights, dancing.
Someone knocks.
Rynn startles and wakes, cracking her eyelid open.
She props herself against a corner and sits defensively on a spindle-fiber mattress, alone.
Two days ago, Rynn arrived at this cabin, and now she feels a bit stronger, a lot warmer.
Voices carry through thin walls of wood.
Rynn creeps to the closed doorway, presses an ear to it, and wipes her perspiring palms on her pants.
“Two thousand marcs,” Gritchon says firmly. “Now you won’t go broke buying beakers from the black-side.”
Rynn eases the door open and tiptoes out to the living space.
Nelm and Gritchon hover by a wooden table. A hefty man with a red beard trimmed to sharp angles stands near the doorway, dressed in baggy pants and a shirt of aquamarine and pink. A dozen feathers of lilac and gold protrude from his rumpled hat and wave as the man shifts or talks.
“Oh, there you are, dear,” Gritchon says, now facing Rynn. “We’d like you to meet someone, our friend Prabel, an intragalactic merchant.”
Rynn stiffens, thinks about slinking back into the shadows, but curtains her face with her hair and stands her ground. “Hello.”
“Hello, Miss …” Prabel says in a proper tone.
“Rynn.”
“Rynn.” Prabel doffs his feathered cap and bows, bending a bit at his hemispheric waistline. “I’m afraid that if you have nowhere safe to go, you’ll have to trust Gritchon and Nelm until you get to know me. I can take you somewhere where you’ll no longer be frightened or hurt.”
Rynn steps back. He cannot just take her away, can he? But she’s still weak; her limbs shake with exertion and she’s hungry, always hungry.
“We’d love to take care of you, dear,” Gritchon says, “but we struggle to feed ourselves. Otherwise, you can go back to wandering the woods or go back to whatever family you ran away from.”
An image of her dad sprawled out drunk in his chair floats through Rynn’s mind. He may be dead already, starved to death in his constant state of inebriation. Or hanged. She has nowhere to go, no one to run to.
Memories strobe in Rynn’s mind: the feel of clinging to her dad’s pants when she was young; attempting some small act together, a dance, a lesson on astronomy—her dad extending an inviting hand to lead her outside, his smile, his glacial blue eyes. His two eyes.
Certain things should not change. Rynn wishes she could go back in time, stick her life with her dad in some vault and
be left alone. Maybe only in memories do things not change, but even then colors seem to fade, faces shift, emotions dull—if only hers did.
“I’ll feed and shelter you if you help with merchandise sales.” Prabel places his cap back on his head.
Does she have a choice? Rynn doesn’t know what intragalactic merchants sell, but the galaxy can’t be as bad as her dad made it seem. It can’t be worse than what her own dad did to her. Real work, maybe long hours, lots of traveling.
Rynn still doesn’t know for certain who the “her” is that her dad referred to but assumes it’s her mom, and maybe this is Rynn’s chance to find her. Trafficking people is illegal throughout the galaxy, so she shouldn’t have to worry about that, should she? And she can handle any work this robust man can perform. She will have to go with him or will have to return to wandering the woods hoping her dad and that shadowless creature don’t find her before she starves to death.
Rynn’s voice trembles, and she wants to kick herself for showing fear. “I-I’ll accept food as payment … to work for you. Only if the work doesn’t go beyond standard sales duties.”
Whatever those are.
Prabel smiles, spreads his arms, and motions for Rynn to lead the way outside.
“I need to stop at the nearby city first.” Rynn intends to show people v-rim pictures of her mom and find out if she lives there.
“Go climb in,” Prabel says.
Rynn steps outside. Across from a line of cedars sits a spaceship of some kind, five times the size of the cabin, all metal and lights and exhaust of blue flame. This merchant traveled far, in luxury.
Prabel converses with Nelm and Gritchon quietly for a moment before catching up with Rynn and leading her through a lighted rampway into the ship. Soft lights, warmth, the smell of cinnamon and tea. Antigravity seats and computers and v-rims lie scattered about like branches in a forest.
“Take a seat.” Prabel smiles, places a bronze v-rim on his brow, and moves his fingers. “I already planned a short flight over to the river city. Some business to do. We’ll deliver a few things, but then we’ll depart. You’ll have the rest of the day and a night to get whatever you need.”
A minute later, Prabel smooshes a pastry between his lips, sugar and cinnamon cascading into his sharply angled beard like twinkling glitter. He holds another pastry out for Rynn.
She takes it and sinks her teeth into the mass of air and dough. So sweet. She devours it, licks her fingers, and sucks them clean.
“Your jeweled eyepatch is beautiful,” Prabel says. “Please, tell me what happened.”
“I was little.” Rynn wipes her hands on her pants. “Supposedly burned it with a hot poker from a campfire. Don’t even remember it.”
Prabel’s lips lift in a suppressed smirk. He sips from an antigravity cup floating in the air beside him. His fingernails maybe flash black but return to normal so quickly, Rynn’s not sure if it was only a trick of the lighting.
“Where do we do business after the river city?” Rynn asks.
“Oh, we’ll have to complete a gathering after that, then sell what we’ve acquired. Standard sales duties only.” He winks.
A gathering?
The ship roars beneath them and lifts, pressing Rynn into an invisible seat.
***
“It’s your duty to gather the sacs,” Prabel says several days later, gesturing to the open doorway and ramp of his ship, the feathers on his hat waving as if to bestow courage.
Everything in Rynn’s life is now so transient, so tentative. She glances outside. It’s completely dark. Her palms moisten.
“Are these sacs valuable?” she asks.
“For those of us who sell them. Elemiscists use them.”
“Is this all legal?”
He dismisses Rynn’s apprehension with a limp wrist, waving her off. “Do it just how I told you. I have a lot of comms to get through, setting up our next meets.”
Rynn inches down the plank into darkness and slides a pack over her shoulder. Her legs tremble; she feels weaker again.
The first few days with the couple in the cabin and then with Prabel, Rynn was growing stronger, and she was eating as much as she ever had, delicious food, so much of it. Then, over the past couple of days, she started to feel weak again, especially each morning when she woke. Probably just the strange environment. She does not feel sick.
She needs to fit in, to earn her keep if she wants to continue as this merchant’s assistant and hopefully find her mom, a woman she doesn’t know. What are the chances she can do this? No customer in the river city recognized Rynn’s mom from her v-rim pictures, nor knew someone by the name Karelia Platinay. Rynn doesn’t know where her mom lives or if she’s even still alive.
Rynn has nowhere else to go. She mourned her dad’s mental if not physical death as much as she could in private, locked away all her emotion when she was in the city with Prabel, helping direct antigravity beds loaded with crates and other hidden merchandise, along with two stone boxes lying on one antigravity cart, boxes the merchant brings with him everywhere but never attempts to sell. The boxes are cut from solid granite and resemble ancient sarcophagi her dad once showed her pictures of.
Images of bodies lying inside those sarcophagi play through Rynn’s mind.
Her new situation will only take getting used to, flying between planets, using Striders to jump their ship to places like this one, even though she didn’t realize the Stride happened until Prabel said they had arrived. An Elemiscist contact of Prabel’s—an Elemiscist who now sleeps inside the ship—Strode them out among the drifters, to some area of the galaxy at the edge of the dead zone.
She will toughen up, like conditioning for her dad’s day hikes. Prabel is gentle and kind and has only really demanded one thing of her so far: that she gather sacs.
Rynn steps onto the planet’s surface. Charred grass and brush.
The sky is dark, indigo, filled with distant stars and planets in one direction, an orange and emerald nebula in the other. An energy screen on Rynn’s new v-rim brightens everything up ten shades.
No living trees, no plants, no water. Rynn’s boots crunch on the charred ground, the available oxygen tainted with rank smoke. She marches on, continuing over a rise.
A scene of savage brutality opens like the petals of some ghastly flower: piles of smashed machines, twisted metal, pools of glowing orange sludge, mangled bodies. The only sound is a gentle wind whistling in her ears. Nothing else moves.
Rynn stands in horror. A battlefield. And everyone is dead.
Prabel said it was an old war site, but he didn’t say the bodies were still warm from the fires or explosions that consumed them. She struggles for breath and looks back for the ship, then out over the expanse of the dead, a drifter graveyard.
Rynn’s feet slowly slide down to the field, leading her onward. She needs to complete her task.
Some bodies are more evident amidst their cloaks of black ash. Pieces of bronze suits glint in the starlight. Most of the bodies are not human as Prabel promised they wouldn’t be, and the majority of the dead are disfigured: absent limbs, gaping torsos, missing heads.
The commanding silence of so much death permeates Rynn’s mind, suffuses her body, and makes her feel as if she’s a ghost or an angel gliding through an entire city stricken with the plague of genocide, the plague of war.
Rynn’s chest expands with a forced breath. She has to do this, or she will have no food, no home, no way to search for her mother. Maybe Prabel would leave her out here with all of this if she doesn’t fulfill her first real duty … Gathering from the dead is strictly an emotionally and mentally haunting act; it has no tangible repercussions for the living or the deceased.
Rynn withdraws a pair of shears from her pack, the arms as long as hers, and marches to the edge of the field of the dead.
A machine lies in a pool of orange liquid. Heat radiating from the liquid washes over her face and arms, growing so hot that she wonders if her eyelashes or t
he fine hairs on her arms will start to singe. She stops. Lava … magma. That is what the liquid is, and a tangled mass of blue metal with remnants of four mobile legs and metal wheels sits in it. Fragments of a thrown incendiary-type weapon lie beside the pool.
Grenades that explode with or coat the ground in magma? Or incendiaries so powerful they cause ground tremors and cracks for magma to work its way up to the surface?
Rynn forces herself to turn to the nearest body. An alien of some type. Humanoid, but its bones appear to be on the outside of its body, not an exoskeleton in the insect sense, but an actual skull, spine, and ribs covering a head and chest, facing her, warning her atavistic inner self that she should steer clear. What looks like a trunk of some ancient animal juts from its shoulder region on both sides, its lower torso completely gone, not even in the surrounding area.
These creatures were monsters. They fought a war with people … but way out here, and the people in bronze uniforms, they butchered thousands of these monsters.
Rynn feels something, as if the remnants of hate still float in the air, an emotion so vast, potent, and toxic it will not leave the bodies that created or summoned it.
Her dad’s voice jogs in her head, and his hands seems to wrap around hers. A more innocent time. Hate and fear are the most powerful weapons man can wield, Stareyes. Those in power often exploit these emotional reactions, ones without conscious thought, in their servants.
Maybe she shouldn’t believe anything her dad taught her though, not after what he did.
This field also reminds her of something else her dad once said, some event he discussed in great detail, something that scarred his psyche.
At the time, Rynn was too young to really understand or care about the related event her dad spoke of and only recalls the feeling of wanting the tirade or lesson or whatever it was he was trying to instill in her to be over. How he loathed the Northrite and their need to control all services in the galaxy, to control all mankind. She was too young, too sheltered to care. He mentioned the soldiers in bronze too, sweavers, the police of the Northrite, their army.
The Forgotten Sky Page 19