Hammer of Time (The Reforged Trilogy) (7 page)

"Anything out there?" Duaal asked.

Logan raised a wheat-colored brow. "Plenty. There are thousands of ships in the system."

"One of them
must
be here to pick up the Arcadians," Maeve said.

"We won't be able to tell which one with these sensors." Logan told her. "These are mostly atmospheric sensors and densitometers. We need to land and get more information from the Arcadians. If Xartasia is here to pick them up, they should be able to tell us when and where."

________

The flight to Sunjarrah was as quiet as a prowling cat. When they finally arrived, the Blue Phoenix circled to the daylight side of the planet, a mottled brown and blue sphere with irregular patches of polar ice that gleamed pink in the red sunlight. Knotted traceries of green and purple auroras glowed like a crown above the ice.

"Land in New Hennor," Panna said. She was crowded into the corridor outside the cockpit with Maeve and Gripper. "That's where most of the Arcadians on Sunjarrah live."

Panna's knowledge of the fairies was impressive. She might not have grown up in the White Kingdom, but she had made a dedicated study of their ways. Maeve was impressed, but more grateful for the direction. Duaal keyed into Sunjarrah orbital control from a panel in the center of the cockpit.

"This is the Blue Phoenix. We need to put down in New Hennor as soon as possible," he said. "We have urgent business there."

"Please hold," answered a computerized voice. "Please hold for an authorized flight control representative."

Duaal banged his fist into the com panel, but his frustration was no rival for the dents left by Tiberius. Gripper winced.

"Come on!" Duaal shouted. "What part of
urgent
is confusing, you stupid computer?"

"Please hold for an authorized flight control representative," the system answered cheerfully.

Duaal was threatening to pull out its wires one at a time – and Maeve was inclined to join him – when the mechanical voice suddenly cut off and a woman with the same automatic cheer as the computer informed them that they could land in New Hennor. She sent coordinates to the Blue Phoenix navigational computer and bade them a good afternoon. Duaal made a rude gesture at the com.

"Xartasia could have already landed and left in the time that took us," he growled. "Damned bureaucracy."

"Then get us down there and stop wasting time," Logan told the young captain.

Duaal stuck out his tongue but angled the Blue Phoenix down toward Sunjarrah. The view turned white-hot as they streaked through the atmosphere, then dim and gray in the upper cloud layer. Finally, the Blue Phoenix punched through the gloom and into the warm orange sunlight of the Sunjarran afternoon. Logan brought up the coordinates relayed by orbital control. Duaal nodded and turned his ship south.

The light of the twin red suns cast the domes and arched windows of New Hennor in molten colors. The Blue Phoenix raced over the bronzed cityscape and landed in a public field tiled in spiraling patterns like licking flames. As she stepped off the ship, Maeve rubbed her eyes until they adjusted to the orange sunlight.

Panna informed them that New Hennor was not a large city and taxis were expensive, so Maeve flew. Panna, Logan and Duaal moved briskly below, casting long, sharp shadows in the afternoon sun. Gripper and Xia had remained behind. There was work to do on the Blue Phoenix. And Gripper was scared, Maeve knew. The Arboran was just a boy and they were going in search of dangerous enemies. Logan, Duaal, and Panna hurried to keep pace with Maeve, occasionally glancing skyward at the Arcadian.

New Hennor looked and felt much like the cities on Mir. Other than the scorching suns – the back of Maeve's neck felt brittle and baked – it was almost as though they had not left Mir at all. The glaring afternoon light cast garish rainbows through the glass blade of her spear.

"Hey!"

Maeve looked down at the shout. A Mirran cop leaned out the window of his green- and yellow-banded car. The null-inertia field generator hummed, motionless against the curb. The cop peered at Panna, Duaal and Logan through darkly tinted sunglasses. He waved Maeve down to the ground. She landed on the sidewalk, in a spot cleared by suspiciously watchful pedestrians. Maeve had been in New Hennor for less than ten minutes and she was already in trouble.

"Where are you going with those weapons?" He nodded to Logan's Talon-9 and Maeve's spear. "You have permits for the firearm, I assume."

Logan hesitated. He did not have a license to carry the weapon, Maeve knew. He had not even wanted to bring the laser, but if they found Xartasia and her Devourers, they could not afford to be unarmed. But the cop's mirrored gaze moved from the Talon-9 to its owner's illonium hand. The Mirran's mouth worked under his green and brown mustache.

"Mister Coldhand?" he asked hesitantly.

Logan's pale eyes flickered down to his own hand for a moment and then back to the police officer. "Yes."

"What brings you to Sunjarrah?" the officer asked. His tone was not subservient – strictly speaking, his authority far outstripped a bounty hunter's on his own planet – but it was respectful. "Business or pleasure?"

Duaal and Panna exchanged a look. They remained carefully silent.

"I'm looking for someone, actually," Logan said. "An Arcadian."

"A fairy?" The Mirran looked to Maeve, who did her best to look like an appropriately stern bounty hunter's companion.

"They tend to stick together, to live in a single community. Do you have something like that in New Hennor?"

"Sure," the cop answered. He said it with a slightly buzzing burr.
Zure.
"Over by the old settlement. No one can grow anything there anymore, so it seemed like as good a place to put the immigrants as any. They have a sort of camp out there."

A camp. Fury kindled on Panna's face and Duaal had to grab the girl's shoulder. "Great," Duaal said quickly. "Which way?"

The Mirran cop twisted in his seat, looking at the street and getting his bearing. "Uh, about fifteen or twenty miles down Penton Road."

"What's the address?" Logan asked. "We can just put it in my com."

"There's no system out that far. Positioning doesn't bother to keep real close track of things out there. Just follow the road out until the pavement stops off. You can't miss the fairy camp."

With a respectful nod to Logan, the police officer brought his window up again and pulled the striped squad car back out into the street. Every other vehicle on the street slowed noticeably as law enforcement's attention turned back to them.

"Fifteen miles?" Panna said. "That's a long walk."

"Yeah," Duaal agreed. "Let's get back to the Phoenix. If it's as empty out there as he says, there should be plenty of room to land."

They hurried back through New Hennor, attracting more stares and mutters. Duaal called ahead and Gripper had the airlock open for them. Maeve landed with a ringing thud on the fibersteel and ran inside. Duaal was already climbing the cargo bay stairs, taking them two at a time.

"Where are we going, Glass?" Gripper asked, hanging from the edge of the catwalk by one huge hand.

"To an Arcadian encampment outside New Hennor," Maeve answered.

Xia pressed herself against the wall as Duaal ran by. "And you think they can tell us where to find Xartasia?"

"There are more Arcadians in New Hennor than anywhere on Sunjarrah," Panna said. "One of them has got to know something about Xartasia's pickup."

The Blue Phoenix rumbled and then jolted beneath them. Sun-washed cityscape raced beneath the ship and swiftly gave way to flat plains. Maeve steadied herself against the wall and stared out the airlock porthole. The ground was a patchwork of tough, pale grass and the lumpier green of scrub. The occasional solitary tree rose suddenly from the ground, casting a long, dark blue shadow and then was gone as the Blue Phoenix flew past. Logan and Panna looked over her shoulder.

"There," the Prian said, jabbing one of his metal fingers at a geometric smear of wan color below. Logan held down the green intercom button beside the raised cargo ramp. "Duaal, there are some buildings to our port side."

"I see them," the captain answered. "I'll take us in closer… if I can. The sky is full of fairies."

Maeve squinted into the twin suns' light. He was right. She could just make out hundreds of pale-winged shapes circling through the bright sky. Circling? Arcadians were not vultures to fly circles over the dead and dying. They were watching something. What?

"There is something down there," Maeve said.

Logan pushed the intercom button again. "Get us on the ground, Duaal."

The Blue Phoenix dropped precipitously, tumbling Maeve and Panna against the airlock. The window filled with pale green grass and brown stone as the ship turned sharply and swooped down to the ground. It landed with a hard thump. Maeve recovered her balance and slapped the airlock button. The reinforced old doors creaked and groaned, then grated open.

Maeve was in the air in a moment, flying low and fast. Shouts and the clatter of footsteps followed her from the Blue Phoenix, but Maeve did not slow. There was the old settler housing that the cop talked about. The buildings were long and low, with peeling siding and cracked solar panels lining the roof, cloudy and grayed by the years. An old quick-sink well sat crookedly in the middle of the old settlement, surrounded by plastic buckets and cut-open mycolar bottles that looked recently used. But there was no one on the ground. All of the Arcadians arced and swooped through the white sky, casting flickering shadows on the ground below.

Maeve beat her wings and crested the three-story common building, where Sunjarrah's early settlers would have gathered for meetings and emergencies. The overgrown cornfield was full of a hundred or more of Arcadians, wheeling this way and that and crowding the skies with white wings. The dark, sleek shape of a starship crouched in the field's center, crushing dead brown stalks beneath it. An ember-red light glowed next to the closed airlock. Maeve landed hard, spear in hand. Logan and the rest of the Blue Phoenix crew sprinted around the corner of the common building and stopped beside her. Duaal and Logan took in the sight of the black ship and looked at Maeve.

"That's the Oslain'ii," said Logan.

"Xartasia's ship," Duaal finished. "She's already here."

"You need not carry a spear to fight for your king. Your trust and your loyalty are all I need."

– Cavain a'Shae (11,978 MA)

"That's Xartasia's ship?" Xia asked. "Did she beat us here?"

Maeve just shook her head. She did not know. Her heart slammed against her ribs and her pulse pounded a deafening drumbeat in her ears. Her chest felt too small for her lungs and Maeve found herself panting. For all the blood she shared with Xartasia, it gave Maeve no better idea where her cousin might be. Was she inside that black ship?

"Gripper, call in the New Hennor police," said Logan. He stood beside Maeve, right hand on the laser at his hip. "Get them out here and we'll have the proof we need."

"Yeah, Freezer," Gripper answered, voice shaking. "I… I'm on it."

A scattering of feathers fell from the sky as the Arcadians circled, staring and calling to each other in their own language. There was a click and the airlock light flashed twice, then turned green. Glossy black doors slid slowly open. Two shapes stood in the Oslain'ii's blue-lit hatchway – one slender and winged, the other huge and shrouded in black smoke. A Devourer.

The circling Arcadians moaned and drew together, rising higher into the pale Sunjarrah sky. Duaal's green eyes took on the glassy, unfocused look that Maeve was beginning to associate with the young mage working on a spell. Logan tore his Talon-9 free and aimed at the Devourer. Gripper stumbled hastily back, his com pressed to one long brown ear. Panna and Xia stood shoulder to shoulder, each with unsteady fingers wrapped around one of the medic's two lasers. The Devourer's Arcadian companion stepped out into Sunjarrah's blinding sunlight.

The fairy was not Xartasia, but a man in full and brilliantly sparkling glass armor. His lean body was wrapped in scarves beneath, as was Arcadian tradition, but they were sooty black slashed with red like bloody wounds. His face was twisted and scarred across the brow and one cheek, turning his flesh into a reddened knot of welts and lumps. The strange knight raised his spear skyward. Sunlight caught the glass and flashed brightly.

"Asi!"
he called in Arcadian.
Wait. "Your queen summons you, sons and daughters of the White Kingdom. Titania Cavainna, heiress to the throne, lives and calls you to her court! All who were born of the White Kingdom shall have a home with her."

Maeve crouched and prepared to spring into the air, to fall on the knight in black and his oddly unmoving Devourer, but Logan knelt and grabbed her shoulder. "Wait," he said. "He's talking. Fast, but that's more than we've been able to get so far. What's he saying?"

Maeve's jaw clenched so hard that her teeth ached, but she had to admit that Logan was probably right. The knight in black was ignoring them entirely, focused instead on the flock of Arcadians overhead.