Chains of Mist (6 page)

For the first time, Roger looked at the ring with appreciation rather than irritation or anger. “This is how I’m gonna find Fa’ix.”

* * * *

Wind swirled around Roger as he stood outside of Meg’s repair yard, and he shivered in the chill Pattagaxian air. Clutching his spacer’s jacket tightly about himself, he took two steps forward into the center of the road and stopped. His heart pounded, and the certainty he had felt moments before suddenly wavered.
What if this doesn’t work?
He had no guarantees that it would, only his intuition—something which, admittedly, rarely failed him, and had kept him alive through these five harsh years. But he had never dealt with something like this before; here, he was a novice, guessing at matters beyond his understanding, like someone trying to put together a puzzle without knowing the shape of the pieces. He had a guess, a hunch…but not a guarantee.

Roger set his jaw, forcing back his doubt.
It
will
work. It
has
to. Otherwise, I really will be out of options…with the SmugCo hunters closing in around me.

Roger glanced down at his hand.
I’ve been going about this the wrong way all along. All this time, I’ve been looking for outside help, trying to find someone else to take me into the Grays. But I should have realized that I already had everything I needed—and I had it right from the start.

To find
a magical being, you can’t stick to the normal methods. You need to have some magic of your own. And it helps when
your
power is the same as the power of the person you’re trying to find…because magic, it appears, knows its own.

Roger thought back to those moments waiting outside of Arakk’s inner chamber, when he had inadvertently triggered…well,
something
that lay dormant within his ring. He recalled the
tugging
he had felt, some unseen force pulling him towards…something.
And what else would that
something
be than the one who gave me the ring in the first place?

A new image formed in Roger’s mind—that of a short humanoid alien, her scaly skin faded and blotched. Huge golden eyes were deep-set within the wide triangular head, looking at Roger with a gaze that resonated with awesome power and ancient wisdom.
Follow the tugging, find Fa’ix.

Taking a deep breath, Roger closed his eyes and…
relaxed.

At first, he felt nothing. Forcing himself to be patient, Roger focused on the sound of his own heartbeat. As he sank deeper into relaxation, he became aware of a strange sensation around his finger, emanating from the ring fused upon it. It was not pain, exactly, that he felt—more of a
numbing
, a
sluggishness
. He tried to flex that hand and found that he couldn’t—and, at the same instant, he felt the numbness begin to creep up his arm, moving faster and faster, and now there
was
pain, pain like fire erupting out from the ring and burning through his veins, searing a path straight up his spine. Fear gripped Roger, as his mind screamed,
no more no more let me out let me out LET ME OUT—

His eyes flew open—

And he gasped at what he saw.

The whole world seemed awash in flame. Fire leapt from buildings, vehicles—but the fiercest flames engulfed the living beings walking by. Some burned a dull red, while others were blinding white, but all were alight in their own individual pyres. Roger stared at them in horror, wondering what had happened, wondering how such a terrible fire could have ignited so quickly, and only then did his brain register that the others seemed oblivious to the flames surrounding them.
It isn’t real—it can’t be real. But if it isn’t real…then what is it?

What is happening to me?

As that thought crossed his mind, Roger suddenly realized that he, too, was on fire. A rainbow of flames crackled around him, blues and reds and yellows mixing together seamlessly…but beneath the colors lurked a terrible halo of shadow. In terror, Roger began to run, pushing like a madman through the crowds. All around him, people turned, whispering to each other and pointing at him, their fingers tracing tendrils of fire through the air. Roger ignored them. Like a man possessed, he ran, moving faster than he had ever run before. Soon he found himself back in the wasteland of the Grays. Flames spurted from the desiccated skeletons of buildings that lined the roads. Rat-like thonia, their bodies pulsing with violet fire, scurried to and fro, sharp talons digging through the refuse for whatever biological waste they could salvage.

Beyond the burning husks of the buildings, larger, more dangerous creatures lurked. Roger could not see them—but he could feel them.

Roger sped on, his footsteps guided by the strange tugging, which pulled him forwards with an urgency he had not felt before. He was
needed
, somehow; something was happening, something huge and momentous. Something happening…
there!
Suddenly Roger saw a beacon of light manifest barely a hundred meters in front of him. It seared up to the heavens, brilliantly bright, radiating waves of power that dwarfed what Roger felt coursing through his own body. Within dwelt a being with the power of a god.

A god—but a hunted god. A dying god.

As the revelation flashed through his mind, Roger felt another presence erupt as if from the depths of the earth, belching forth a palpable cloud of malevolence. Like a volcano, it expanded, burgeoning outwards to engulf the other being.

The two forces clashed. Roger could practically taste the conflicting magics; the first was mild, soothing, calm…while the second burnt at his throat like bitter acid.

Ahead, a single building erupted in shadow. A shockwave of power swept out, and Roger was hurled back—

When he opened his eyes, the strange flames were gone. He stood in the midst of a sea of ruins. Waves of heat washed over him, forcing him to turn his head to shield himself from the onslaught, but he could not see their source. A single building—nearly destroyed, with only a single wall left standing—stood before Roger, and from within its ruins Roger could feel the emanations of a power struggle occurring on a plane of existence beyond the tangible. Light flashed from beyond the single remaining wall, somehow casting silhouettes of the combatants through the stone—a small figure crouched with face upturned, hands raised…against a looming behemoth without definite shape or figure, a formless mass churning like the surface of a star.

Against such a creature, none could stand. Roger knew that to be true, as sure as he knew anything. He wanted to flee, to vanish back into the night and leave this terrible place behind, but his feet seemed to be rooted to the stone. He could only stand, helpless, and watch.

Watch a battle whose outcome was all but assured.

Pain suddenly erupted in his hand, burning now with frigid coldness—

A final crack split the air, and the crouching figure staggered…staggered…

Fell.

The invisible forces bombarding Roger vanished, and he too staggered forward, gasping for breath. He felt as though he had been cooked in a nuclear reactor, and when he raised a trembling hand to brush against his face it came away streaked with red. Strips of dead skin fluttered down like blood-soaked leaves, scraped loose by his touch.

This is insanity! This…thing…is killing me, and it doesn’t ever know I’m here. When it discovers me…

For the first time in years, Roger Warbanks felt true fear. His normal, constant self-assuredness melted away in a heartbeat and vanished into oblivion. This was not the fear that came from scrounging out a meager existence far from the glitter of society, ringed on all sides by cutthroats and other dangerous criminals, nor even the fear of lurking in the shadows, wondering if tonight would be the night when the hunters finally caught up to you. This was the fear of the anathema, of the unknown and the incomprehensible. The last time Roger had felt such fear had been on that freighter five years ago, when he had woken up with no knowledge of who or what he was.

Every instinct screamed at him to flee. But he could not so much as blink.

From the ruins, a…
presence…
emerged.

In the fading light, shadows loomed large everywhere, but this new creature stood out among them. It was somehow darker than the night, and it seemed to absorb everything around it, stripping the world bare as it moved. Smaller shadows swirled around it, probing tendrils constantly searching for new prey.

Wraithlike and as silent as death, the creature slipped through the night. Roger found himself unable to turn away. His gaze was held affixed to the phantom. His hand was in agony, the pain surging from the onyx ring and coursing through his body greater than it had ever been before, but he could barely breathe, let alone cry out. Unbreakable bonds grasped his limbs and pressed against his chest.

The demonic specter moved on. Flames sputtered out as it passed them, and rubble crumbled into dust before the creature’s advance. The questing tentacles coiled outward in an expanding web, stretching ever nearer to Roger’s immobile form. But the creature seemed ignorant of Roger’s presence, though it seemed impossible that it had not sensed him.

The behemoth reached the edge of the ruins, moving away from Roger. It began to contract into itself, sinking and dissipating into the ground as if retreating into some subterranean lair. Roger felt the pressure on his body relax the tiniest fraction.

A whistle of air escaped his lungs.

In that instant, the swirling mass of shadows froze.

Oh,
stek
…

Like a predator tracking upwind prey, knowing that its quarry is near but unable to locate it, the creature was still. It seemed to sniff the air, though Roger doubted that it was using its sense of smell; it had far more powerful methods of detection at its disposal. The shadows surrounding where its head should be swirled and rippled.

Twin spots of yellow fire erupted from the depths of the shadow, points of unholy light that blazed like primordial suns.

The dread gaze fixed squarely on Roger, who had time for one thought—

Oh,
stek
—

An explosion of shadow and fire engulfed him.

-3-

Drogni Ortega sat at his desk in his office at Leiran Sarrek Naval Base. Datacards were strewn across the desk’s thin metal surface like fallen leaves. Their flickering screens displayed information on troop numbers, fleet deployments, resource ledgers, and much more. Everything that a military commander could ever hope to need was gathered here at his disposal.

Drogni could focus on none of it. He fidgeted in his chair, beset with a bizarre sense of claustrophobia. The office was large, befitting the Supreme Commander of the Tellarian Fleet, and two high windows behind him let broad beams of bright sunlight play across the room. But that did nothing to dispel the feeling that he was trapped in a cage. The walls seemed to weigh on him like a shroud, squeezing out the air and pressing down around him.

It was a very peculiar feeling, to say the least, especially since he’d had the office for over a decade and never felt anything like this before. But something had changed, and he knew what it was. He had grown comfortable in his command role, giving orders from behind the lines, organizing ships like pieces on a game board. But then Leva and Hilthak had thrown him suddenly back into the field. For the first time in over a decade, he had felt the rush of action, the surge of adrenaline that could not be duplicated sitting behind a desk in a command center. He had gotten to stretch his legs, so to speak, and now it was no wonder that his previously spacious office should suddenly feel so confining.

Drogni suspected that the feeling would pass, given time. But at the same time, some small part of his mind could not help but pose the question:
Do I want it to?

Drogni wasn’t sure of the answer. He enjoyed being Supreme Allied Fleet Commander. The responsibility, the challenges. He did the job and he did it well. Reaching the pinnacle of the naval hierarchy was a goal that he had worked towards for his entire life. Yet he had to admit that this was not the first time he had felt that his lofty rank was more of a prison than an achievement. On Leva, and even more so on Hilthak, he had felt the
rightness
of being back on the front lines, back in the thick of the action. That was where he truly belonged.

Of course, in his first foray back onto the field he had surrendered his mind to Rokan Sellas’s dark sorcery, brutalized enemy combatants like some rabid beast, and gotten nearly his entire team killed. Hardly anything to be proud of.