Hammer of Time (The Reforged Trilogy) (52 page)

"The Tower remembers," buzzed, hissed the Nnyth. "We remember what has happened, what will happen… What might have happened. The Tower stands high above time and space. We see far."

"Why did you destroy the Tower?" Maeve asked. She did not understand. "What could Xartasia possibly have asked that would make you destroy your own home rather than give it over to her?"

"She wishes the return of the White Kingdom. She would tear time apart," said hundreds of dry voices in perfect unison. "Princess Titania would unmake history."

"What?" Maeve landed on the nose of the Blue Phoenix and stared into the impossible column of Nnyth. "How?"

"Through the Waygate. Like all the First's greatest creations, the Waygates depend upon thought, upon memory. We taught your Ivory Spire to hold in thought the place they wished to go, to open your Waygates to those locations. Princess Titania would open our Waygate to another
time
."

"That's what she wanted the Arcadians for," Logan said. "Why she didn't want anyone born after the fall. She needs the old fairies' memories of the White Kingdom. Her own memory isn't enough. It's too unreliable. She needs as many witnesses as she can get."

"Yes," whispered the Nnyth. "From the First, she has learned the secrets of the Waygate, secrets not even known to the Tower. From the aerads, she has gathered the memories of thousands to build her new kingdom of brittle sorrows and glass. From us, she intended to take the greatest Waygate in the stars."

"But why did you not let her use it?" Maeve asked. "If all Xartasia wants is to go back to the White Kingdom with her people, let her!"

"She does not simply want to return," came the echoing answer.

"The kingdom would still fall," Xia said. "She wouldn't want to live through that again."

"Titania will turn the power of the Waygate not in but
out,
across all the galaxy. Further, if she can reach. She would unmake all that has happened since before Arcadia's fall. And then she would reforge time anew, in the form of
her
choosing."

Maeve's head was light, spinning, but it was not the lack of air. "That is more than a hundred years!" she cried. "Trillions of lives have been born and ended across dozens of planets in that time. What happens to them?"

"They will never have been," agreed the Nnyth. "Some variation, some similarity will be born, but those lives which exist now will end."

Gripper, who had been silently wringing his hands through the whole eerie conversation suddenly burst out. "But… but that's not fair!" he shouted. "She can't just wipe out a hundred years of life because she's homesick!"

The Nnyth eyes fixed on the Arboran now, all rippling with deep blues and reds. "Her world is lost, Anandrou," they said. "The destruction we have wreaked on the Tower can never be repaired. The Waygate was the heart of the Tower. Without it, we cannot summon in new air, new food. We are dying, Anandrou. We know the pain that Princess Titania feels. And you will know it, too."

"Wait, what?" shouted Gripper. He scrambled to the edge of the pentagonal pillar and stared out at the Nnyth. "What does that mean?"

"Weh-Weh has met the same fate as the White Kingdom," the star wasps answered. "Titania and the First went there to find lost knowledge of the Waygates' workings. When their research was done, they consumed all living there and burned the rest."

"A… All?" Gripper gasped. "All of them? They're
all
dead?"

"Yes," said the Nnyth. "You are the last of your people, Anandrou."

Gripper fell to his knees on the mottled gray stone and wailed in heartbroken agony. Logan put his hand on the Arboran's huge shoulder and said nothing. "Why?" Gripper screamed. "If she just wants to go home, why is Xartasia doing all these horrible things?"

"These horrors mean nothing to the White Queen. If she succeeds, then the last hundred years will be destroyed," hissed the Nnyth all around them. "None of it will have happened."

Maeve remembered what Xartasia had told her back in Pylos, as Gavriel tortured her.
Be at peace, cousin. Soon, none of this will matter.
She had thought then that Xartasia only meant that Maeve would soon be dead, but the older princess was being more literal than that.

Maeve jumped down from the Blue Phoenix and stood beside Gripper. The huge alien's whole body shook as he sobbed for his lost home.

"I am sorry for your losses," she told him, then raised her eyes to look at the Nnyth. The great wasps were dying, she realized. That was why the air was so thin. They were running out. How much of it were they wasting talking to Maeve and her friends? "But you destroyed your Waygate before Xartasia could use it. You said that only your Waygate would do what she needed. You have stopped her. Is this not done?"

"No," answered the Nnyth. "Only the most powerful Waygates are capable of a gate inversion. One of those was here, the largest gate ever built by the First. But there is another. We have denied her the Tower, and so that is where Xartasia is bound now."

Anthem spoke. He gripped his spear so hard that the glass of his gauntlet cut into the weapon's carbonide haft. "Where is she going?"

"Kahazzek," the Nnyth whispered. Their voices were quieter now, Maeve thought. Was that fear? Reverence? "The original homeworld of the First, the seed of all life in the galaxy. Where they built the most powerful Waygate to take their people away into the stars. The world you call Axis."

"Axis?" Maeve repeated, aghast. "She is taking the Devourers and the Arcadians to the capital of the Alliance?"

"There's a Waygate on Axis?" Logan asked. "Where? Axis is the most heavily populated planet in the CWA. It's got ten times the habitable space as any other world."

"Humans have lived on Kahazzek for millions of years," said the Nnyth. "But before that, it belonged to the First. Humans have buried the old world under uncounted tons of metal and concrete, but the seeds of life remain there, on a mountain at the shore of the sea that birthed the first life."

"The surface," Logan said, nodding slowly. "The actual surface of the planet. There may be sun- and starlight on Level One, but the Axis' real surface is Level Ten. It's been sealed off for centuries."

"That's not going to mean much to Xartasia," Duaal countered. "Not with her Devourers. They'll cut a path for her right down to the surface and then Xartasia can take her Arcadians to this Waygate."

"And then a hundred years or more are just gone," Xia finished. "Trillions of lives are erased."

"Wait, how is any of that going to help her?" Duaal asked. "If she uses the Waygate not to go back through time but to turn
back
time, isn't the same thing just going to happen again? The fall of the White Kingdom, the Arcadian refugees? All of it?"

"The Waygates are anchors in time," the Nnyth told him. "That is why your temprologists did not find the time dilation in superluminal travel that they expected. That is the effect of the First's great engineering. And it will preserve the White Queen's memories of what has been. With that knowledge and the Waygate's power, it will be simple to reforge the next hundred years to her own desires."

The Tower full of slowly dying insects rustled like a great tree in the autumn wind. Gripper turned his huge, tear-streaked face to Maeve. "But we can stop Xartasia, right?" he asked. "We can keep her from hurting anyone else, can't we? Now that we know where she's going and what she's doing…?"

Maeve did not want to answer, but everyone else was looking at her. She turned her face up to the Nnyth. "When did Xartasia leave?" she asked loudly. "Can we catch up to my cousin?"

"Thirteen days ago," the Nnyth whispered. "Her ships are of the First's design. Their speed is far greater than yours. The White Queen and her army will reach Axis in eight more days."

Gripper whimpered like a wounded child. "Eight days? We can't even get back to Stray that fast."

"What about a message?" Xia asked. "Could we at least warn the Alliance?"

"Any transmissions would take almost two weeks to get to the core from here," said Logan.

"What about the White Kingdom?" Gripper asked desperately. "There are Waygates there! Can't we just use one of them? There must be
something
we can do!"

"Our worlds are on the other side of the galaxy," Anthem said, shaking his head. The beads woven into his long braids clattered against his armor. "It would take the Blue Phoenix over a month to reach Arcadian space."

Maeve bit her lip so hard that she tasted blood and turned back to the Nnyth. "What of your Waygate? If it is truly so powerful… Can it not be repaired?"

"Those things built by the First are ancient and strong," answered the star wasps. "It required powerful magic to break the Tower. Our hive will never be whole again."

Duaal stepped to the edge of the pillar beside Maeve and then… off. Maeve shouted and reached for him, but the young mage stood quite steadily on the empty air. The Tower's gravity was weak, but not
that
weak. Duaal should have plummeted into the deep darkness, but he did not.

"You're right," he said to the Nnyth. "Even broken, this Waygate is powerful. I can feel it."

"Yes." The Nnyths' rasping, dead-leaf voices echoed through the Tower.

"I can use it, can't I?" Duaal asked, raising his face to the Nnyth. "All those broken and frayed edges… There's still enough of the Waygate's power for me to grab onto. You can't use it anymore. Neither could the Arcadians or the Jinn. But I can."

"Yes." The whispering storm. The blue glow from so far below flickered like firelight.

Duaal turned on nothing and looked back at Maeve, who still stood staring from the stone. He grinned. "I can do this. I can get you to Axis, my little queen. I can drop us right in front of the Lyceum, if that's what you want."

Maeve started to nod, but Logan grabbed her shoulder. "No," he said. "There are only six of us. Xartasia has an army. She'll cut right through us and we won't even have slowed her down. We need your Arcadians, Maeve. We need to go back to Kaellisem."

"But Xartasia is flying to Axis!" Maeve protested.

"The flight time from Stray to Axis is between five and nine days," Logan pointed out. "Depending upon the ship. If we move quickly, we can still beat Xartasia to Axis."

"There are only nineteen knights in Kaellisem," said Anthem.

"Nineteen?" Maeve asked. "I thought that we had twenty knights."

"Nineteen, a'shae," Anthem repeated. "More than there have been in a long time, but that is still far from an army. We cannot hope to match Xartasia with such small numbers."

"The rest of the Arcadians in Kaellisem know next to nothing about combat," said Xia. "They're no army. That's why we've needed the CWAAF since the beginning."

"We don't have the Alliance army. We have Arcadians." Logan looked at Duaal. "But maybe we can use one to get the other. Can you get us back to Stray?"

"Inside five minutes," the mage answered confidently.

"One more thing," Logan said and raised his glittering glass hand to the Nnyth. "I need one of your dead."

"Logan!" Maeve gasped. What could her enarri have in mind? She knew that Logan was clever, an intuitive and skilled hunter, but…

But two Nnyth unfurled their long, delicate wings and glided silently to the Blue Phoenix. Between them, they carried a striped, curled shape. A dead Nnyth. They set it down gently on the stone pillar and then flew off once more, off into the darkness. Logan ran his fingers over the Nnyth's black and russet-striped skin. One of the legs was shorter than the others, dark ichor hardening over the stump that remained. When Logan lifted his fingers, they shone with a faintly iridescent wetness.

"Phenno," Gripper said. "You want fresh phenno? Why, Hunter? Are we going to be flying into another star?"

"No," Logan told him. "We don't need phenno. We need money."

"Money?" Maeve asked, frowning. "We have money."

"Not in the amounts we'll need. We need to get thousands of Arcadians to Axis inside eight days. For that, we need the biggest and fastest ships on Stray. Xyn's redprint is breaking down. We can buy a lot of captains for the cost of a fresh source. Help me get this loaded into the hold, Gripper. And then it's time to go back to Kaellisem and your people, Maeve."

She nodded. Gripper and Logan wrapped the dead Nnyth in its own limp wings and carried it carefully to the airlock. Xia followed. Duaal stepped back onto the stone. He bowed once to the Nnyth.

"It'll be easier to move us all if we're inside the Blue Phoenix," he pointed out.

"I will be there in a moment," Maeve said.

Duaal inclined his head and vanished into the ship. Maeve looked up into the dimming light of the Tower.

"Thank you," she said to the remaining Nnyth, those few who were still alive. "You have given so much to protect life and time. I do not know that I could sacrifice what you have."

"You have given much," whispered the star wasps. "And you will give up so much more, Maeve Cavainna, before this is done. Fly now. Time grows short."

Maeve turned away and made her way to the airlock. When she reached the door, she looked back. Anthem still stood on the mottled black and gray stone, holding his spear tightly.