Binari did not reply for several seconds. He continued to stare straight ahead, as if lost in thought. When finally I started to ask him again, thinking perhaps he had not heard my question, he turned and looked up not at me or at Davos but at Mirana.
“We require one thing more for the Counter-Machine to become powerful enough to succeed at its task,” he said. “We require the cooperation of the Dyonari.”
Mirana frowned at this.
“Why them?” I asked.
“Their psychic powers are second to no one’s in this galaxy today. But, for whatever reason, we cannot access them—cannot harvest their telepathic energies the way we can those of other races. Never have we been able to do so.”
“Certainly not,” Mirana said, indignant. “Our star-cities are completely surrounded in shields that contain not only our atmosphere but also our mental energies. Otherwise each of the star-cities would radiate across the galaxy in loud, blasting psychic waves. We would be turning on homing beacons for our worlds, attracting the gods-only-know what sorts of enemies.”
“I understand your precautions,” Binari said, “and I approve of them. But we need all the raw power your people possess. With it, we can defeat the Machine once and for all. Without it…”
“I can imagine no circumstances whereupon the star-cities would ever lower their psychic shields,” Mirana told him.
Binari snorted. “Then the Machine will continue to dominate all our worlds forever,” he said.
I started to interject something here, afraid we had traded our former Binari-Davos animosity for a newly brewing Binari-Mirana antagonism, when our situation once again changed dramatically.
The first sign was a howling as of storm winds. At first I hoped it was the Time Tomb returning, but a quick look revealed that the crystal box remained disappointingly dead and inert.
The sound grew louder, and I realized then that it had been building slowly for some time; we simply had not noticed because of the intensity of our conversation. All around us the gray clouds had moved in closer, tighter, constricting us. Now we occupied a narrow cylinder of clarity in a world of chaos. It was like standing in the eye of a hurricane, surrounded by gale force winds.
But what swirled around us was not wind. It was raw entropy. And after remaining at bay for hours, it had at last decided to close in on us. To consume us.
Our open space reduced to merely a hundred meters in circumference, we moved in closer to one another. The Time Tomb seemed to be the center of the remaining bit of reality within all this chaos, so we stood next to it, standing back to back in a small circle.
Why had Solonis abandoned us here? I resigned myself to the fact that I would never know. Not even a god can survive complete immersion in raw cosmic entropy.
So loud was the storm, at first none of us heard the other wailing. It was the orange light we noticed, flaring from beside us, from within the crystal box. From within the heretofore empty and inactive crystal box.
“Oh, thank the gods,” Binari said, his voice panic-filled. “I knew he would come back. I knew it!”
We all stared at the box, hoping against hope it represented the return of our erstwhile ally. Yes, I’d been contemplating ways of torturing him—slowly, slowly torturing him—but at the moment I was willing to set grudges aside and accept his assistance gratefully.
As we watched, the orange light faded, and with it the sound, and now the box was no longer empty.
But the Solonis we had traveled with before was not inside.
The door slid open and a much older figure stepped out. He still wore brown robes, but they fit him more loosely now. His hair was no longer black but streaked with gray, and dark circles shone under his eyes. He looked first beyond us at the wall of encroaching chaos and shook his head worriedly. Then, upon seeing us standing there, he smiled and raised a hand in greeting.
“My friends,” he said. “You are safe now. Come aboard, come aboard.”
We wasted no time in complying with his request, and filed into the box.
“You abandoned us,” Mirana said to him, her hand still on her sword hilt. “You left us there, surrounded by annihilation.”
“Yes, yes,” he replied. “I recall that. And I am very sorry. But I had no choice. Forgive me for my long absence. Though I assure you,” he added with a weary smile, “it has been far longer for me than for you!”
SEVENTEEN
“I had to leave you,” this older Solonis was saying, “that I might join you later. Don’t you see?”
I waved a dismissive hand at him. “Stop. You are here, now—or some version of you is, at least. We are no longer marooned at the end of the universe, about to be swallowed up by a wave of entropy. That is enough,” I said, “for now. I require no more of your time travel babbling.”
We were moving; moving into what Solonis assured us was the past. The past from which we had come. The past that had not yet been swallowed up by the onrushing wave of entropy we had so narrowly escaped in the future.
The interior of the Time Tomb was not large. We could scarcely miss that Solonis was not alone this time. He had brought someone with him: the same man in red and gold that had emerged from the Time Tomb during its very first arrival, in the atrium, during our battle with the sorcerer Garvael. The man I had been certain I recognized as one of the rulers of the largest human empire.
Solonis seemed to become aware that he needed to introduce us. He named each of us in turn and then nodded toward the mystery man. “This is General Marcus Ezekial Tamerlane,” he told us.
So I had been correct. He was Tamerlane.
Even dwelling as I did on a remote world along the fringes of human space, I was as familiar as anyone with Tamerlane’s name, and with most of his story. Along with Arnem Agrippa—a mortal man with whom I was all too familiar, albeit from a distance—Tamerlane had in the past few years seized control of the Anatolian Empire. This had happened at the height of the apocalyptic Nightfall War, when most of the human worlds had been overrun by a horde of alien Phaedrons and Skrazzi, and after the old imperial family had been killed. With the war won, though at tremendous cost, Tamerlane and Agrippa had laid claim to the surviving worlds and thereby solidified their control over a vast portion of the galaxy.
In addition to his military and political power, Tamerlane was renowned for possessing some sort of actual flame-related powers. He was said to be able to unleash flames similar to the cosmic fire of my fellow god, Vashtaar—and we had all seen him do just that earlier. Was that why Solonis had gone and retrieved him? For his unusual abilities? And, if so, why in turn had Tamerlane agreed to come?
Mirana, meanwhile, gasped. “General Tamerlane,” she said, her voice filled with something like awe. “You are the ruler of all the human worlds. It is an honor to meet you.”
Tamerlane smiled and bowed his head respectfully. “A pleasure,” he replied. “But allow me to correct a couple of things. I rule only the Anatolian Empire. And I am not sole ruler. General Agrippa shares power with me, as well as the legislative assembly.”
“Do not be coy or modest, General,” Davos interjected in his rumbling tones. “It is well known that you have come to rule all the human worlds—with the exception of those now annexed by the Machine and its Hands, of course.”
“That is something of an exaggeration,” the general said, eyeing the big gray alien warily. “But I will not argue the point.”
It clicked for me. “You have the Sword,” I stated, locking his eyes with my own. That had to be it. “You have it or can retrieve it for us.”
“I do not have it,” he replied, shaking his head. “Unfortunately.”
“Your associate, General Agrippa, has it, then,” I said.
Again he shook his head. “Agrippa no longer wields the Sword. No one is unhappier about that situation than he is.” He shrugged. “It is lost to us.”
I stared back at him for a long and tense moment, then turned to Solonis. “If this man no longe
r possesses the Sword or knows where to find it, why is he here?” I asked.
“I believe I was taken to the general for multiple reasons,” Solonis said, “some of which do not concern you. He will be of assistance in a conflict we must immediately resolve, and then I believe he can help us again after that, to find at least one of the Cosmic Weapons. Or else help us locate someone who can.”
“Again your lack of control over this box of yours confounds us,” I pointed out. “Otherwise you might have traveled back to when he or Agrippa yet possessed the Sword.”
“The Fates alone steer my path,” Solonis snapped back. “Only they know why places and times such as those are beyond my grasp.”
Outside the glasslike walls of the Time Tomb, the future sped by in a full blur, then gave way rapidly to our old present, and then to our immediate past.
Binari grinned up at Tamerlane, ignoring my bickering with Solonis. “If that is all true, and you can be of great assistance,” he said to the general, “I for one welcome you to our little team.”
“Already I begin to doubt his value,” I stated coldly. Something about him—something I could not yet identify—bothered me. Nagged at me. I remembered a glimpse of him during our earlier battle with Garvael’s robots, doing something that involved fire manipulation. That only increased my wariness of him. Was he one of us? A god of the Golden City—or at least a demigod? Masquerading as a planetary ruler?
And that thought in turn bothered me even more. For I remembered someone who had done exactly that—taken on the guise of a political leader in the mortal realm, when in actuality he was a god. The dark god.
Why was it this Tamerlane kept making me think of Lucian?
I continued to regard him with suspicion—something of which he was well-aware.
“I’m here as a favor to Solonis,” Tamerlane said, growing testy. “Additionally, he’s told me I’m needed—that the galaxy faces a crisis of massive proportions. And since that’s something I have plenty of previous experience dealing with, and because he aided us tremendously during the Nightfall War, I agreed to come.” He met my cold eyes again. “But if you think I’m causing more harm than good, I will happily return to what I was doing before he showed up to recruit me.”
I looked him up and down. He was admittedly a striking figure, clad in his dress red Legion I uniform with gleaming gold buttons and trim. His hair was short and black and his complexion olive. I recalled he had served as a sort of apprentice, if not an adopted son, of their great General Nakamura for many years. Still, that annoying sense wouldn’t go away. That sense that I knew him better than I thought I did, and that I shouldn’t like what I knew. Or rather didn’t know.
I offered him a sour expression to see what he would do with it. “So am I to understand you can hurl fireballs? And you believe such a trick will be helpful?”
He shrugged.
“Do not underestimate the general,” Solonis said. “While he does not at present know the location of the Sword of Baranak, I believe he may subconsciously possess certain insights that will help us locate it. After all, he did once steal it out of the most secure facility in the galaxy.”
We all stared at Solonis, and then at the man in red, wide-eyed.
“That was you?” Mirana asked, clearly surprised and a bit skeptical. “You stole the Sword from the Candis vaults?”
“Why would you do that?” I asked, gazing back at him levelly. “Did you simply covet power?” I shook my head. “Would that the golden god were here to redress the situation personally.”
“No, no.” He waved away my suppositions and appeared to be considering ways to answer my question. At length he replied, “It was complicated. Suffice to say, I was ordered to do so by the emperor himself.”
At this I frowned. “The emperor? Your Anatolian emperor? Why would he order such a thing? His family already held claim to the Sword. It makes no sense.”
Tamerlane shrugged. “At the time it made sense.” He frowned. “Sort of. As I said, it was complicated.”
“Clearly,” I said. “And you believe you can help us find it now?”
“Solonis thinks I can,” he replied. “We shall see.”
I wanted to press him on this point, but my apprentice had questions of her own. She faced Solonis. “You said there is a conflict we must immediately resolve, and that the general can help us with it. What did you mean by that?”
Solonis closed his eyes a moment, as if thinking hard about something, then reopened them. “In a short time we will appear in the midst of our earlier battle with the robots belonging to the sorcerer Garvael in the Spire. With no help during that conflict, we would all have been defeated. But now we can see to a different outcome. The outcome we all survived.” He looked at Binari. “Assuming of course you have completed the calculations for your writing of the robots’ deactivation coding.”
Binari gawked at him. “My coding?”
“Otherwise we may soon join our earlier selves in death,” Solonis added.
Eyes widening, Binari drew his little drone from within his cloak and bent over it, setting to work.
A moment later the Time Tomb wailed and flashed orange and the world outside our box solidified.
But it was not the atrium where we had fought the robots. This was somewhere different.
I recognized it quickly. This was the room near the top. The space where Cevelar had found the Shield of Sevenaya, and had taken it away before we could stop him.
“We have overshot,” Binari noted, sounding disappointed.
“No, no,” I said. “This is precisely where and when we want to be. Look.”
The others all followed my pointing finger, and they saw it. The golden circle of the Shield, resting on its pedestal.
“Move aside,” I commanded, and they did.
Out the door of the box I went. I intended to brook no delays, allow no opportunities for interference. Who could say how much earlier we had arrived this time? Might Cevelar appear at any moment, just as we had? Could he not use the Knife of Alaria to open a doorway directly into this place?
No, I would allow no delays here.
I strode across the room, reached out and grasped the Shield. I lifted it from the pedestal where Garvael or one of his fellow sorcerers had kept it—likely after they had stolen it from its rightful owner. Turning, I moved very quickly back toward the box.
“Stop! Return that!”
The voice boomed out, shaking the very foundations of the Spire, obviously artificially boosted. This time it wasn’t Garvael, though. This voice was female, but carrying as much anger and arrogance as his had.
I saw movement in the corner of my eye and whirled about, just as a wave of green flame blasted out at me. Instinctively I brought the Shield up and it succeeded beyond my wildest expectations: It deflected the fire away, so effectively that I never even felt the heat, had there been any.
When the flames died down, I could see another figure standing across the broad open space. A woman. She wore an outfit similar to Garvael’s, but it cycled through a different set of colors. She raised her hands, probably to attack me again, but this time a blast of orange flame shot out from behind me and struck her full-on, knocking her back.
A wail sounded from behind me.
“Come on,” Solonis shouted. “There is no time to waste in meaningless duels with these charlatans. We are on the move once more!”
I looked and, indeed, the box was glowing orange.
I moved.
Crossing the open space back to the Time Tomb in several long bounds, I passed through the waiting open door just behind the others. Another blast of green flame came at us but I managed to deflect it away before Davos slammed the door closed. No sooner had he done this than the world outside disappeared and we were flung into the timestream once again.
* * *
The journey was very brief this time, and it terminated in the place we had been expecting to arrive before and remembered only too
well: the vast steel and glass atrium of the Spire.
All around us, big gray robots were in action, and they were fighting against….us.
Not the us that had just arrived, though. They were battling slightly younger versions of ourselves; versions that were already there when we appeared. As I looked out through the transparent walls of the box, I saw the two Templar women were there, too—and one of them was wounded, just as before.
Solonis opened the door and Tamerlane was the first one out. Clearly he understood the purpose for which he had been brought, for he blasted away at the robots with gouts of intense flame that flashed out from his hands. I looked on at this and was very impressed.
“Have we overshot again?” Binari asked.
“No—no,” Solonis replied. “This is just when we want to be.”
I understood clearly then. Blinking, I looked down at the Shield of Sevenaya I carried on my left arm. One of the six most powerful objects in the galaxy.
“Here,” I said, and handed it to Mirana.
She accepted it, surprised, and looked back at me questioningly.
“You had it before,” I told her, remembering when we had been the other group here.
She frowned as she strapped it on her arm, not quite comprehending my meaning. I simply waved her on. “Go, go.”
We all followed Tamerlane out the door and into the heat of battle.
* * *
Long story short: We won—just as we had the first time, when we had been our earlier selves in need of help. We destroyed many of Garvael’s robots. Binari’s codes disabled the rest. Solonis again admonished half of us not to speak with or interact with the other half, though this time he was speaking to us, not to our earlier selves. It actually started to make sense to me. We then picked up the two Templar women—one of them wounded, as before—and carried them away, to a place where they could receive medical treatment.
Once that had been accomplished, and as we zipped along through time and space in Solonis’ glass box again, we finally paused to take a breath and consider our next options.
Karilyne- Heart Cold as Ice Page 20