Collision: The Alliance Series Book Three (19 page)

A sound from behind as Ada stumbled over her feet, bringing me back to the present. “Oh, God…”

“I told you not to come,” I said to her. “I’m going to take a look down there.”

“Are you mad?” Her eyes were round, horrified, her face deathly pale.

“I want to check on something.” But I drew my weapon all the same and took one careful step after another, avoiding the thickening blood. Three bodies were heaped on top of one another. A woman shielding two children.

Rage ignited and my hand clenched on the dagger. Ada made a choked noise, and when I looked back at her, she’d pressed her hands over her eyes.

“Who would do this?” she whispered.

Monsters. Human ones or non-human, it didn’t matter.

More bodies. This must be the centre of camp. People lay every which way, where they’d fallen over one another trying to escape. And in the centre, furrows marked the ground. Blood filled the gaps where a glyph had been carved.

A familiar symbol. Not Aktha’s. I had to think for a moment. This belonged to one of the other gods. Veyak, the sky god.

Fury mingled with a cold, primal terror, and I froze to the spot. Magic sparked from my hands, though I hadn’t consciously used it. The ground shifted under my feet, the rocks grating against one another, and the sky overhead darkened to a deeper red. I let the magic drop, stumbled forwards. An old man lay sprawled on the ground in front of me, eyes open, perpetual horror carved into his face.

I closed my eyes. “Come on.” My voice sounded distant. “Let’s go back.”

Ada didn’t need any encouragement. She shook all over as we headed to the still-open doorway, where the blue light from the Passages cast an odd glow to the blood-soaked rocks. I was one step from the door when a shadow moved in the corner of my eye. I spun on the spot, dagger slashing at–nothing.

Nothing was there. Nobody but the dead.

CHAPTER TEN

KAY

None of us spoke as we left the Passages and walked back to Central. Raj and Iriel had stayed long enough to see the first body. Ada walked apart from the group, not speaking to anyone. And try as I might to block it out, the image of the massacre was burned into my brain.

And that symbol. I could think of two possibilities, and neither meant good news.

First things first. We had to tell Ms Weston what we’d found out. And we needed to get hold of another tracker.

Never mind those carvings or Kevar’s end-of-days prophecies. They had nothing to do with the here and now. They sure as hell didn’t seem to have anything to do with the brutal slaughter of a hundred travellers. No. The monster, the killer, wasn’t some vague myth. The gods were real, and present in Vey-Xanetha.

Magic surged, without warning, for the second time since we’d left the Passages. Must be acting up again. The swarming crowd in Central’s entrance hall confirmed my suspicions. It looked as though every offworlder in London had come to complain to the Alliance. A group of claw-footed men like Avar had even bought a flock of multi-coloured birds, which flew around shrieking and shedding feathers over the crowd.

Ada flicked one out of her hair, staring. “Wow.”

She appeared a little less dazed, at least. But I wished she’d stayed behind the door. Stupid, considering I knew full well she’d been helping people escape from war-torn worlds over half her life–but one look at her face and I knew she’d never seen anything like that close-up before.

Back to Ms Weston’s office. She was less snappish with us than earlier, though I gathered from hearing Markos talking to a couple of novices that she’d taken her rage out on the unlucky guards who’d let the girls with the griffin into the entrance hall. Turned out they’d been new recruits and had panicked at the sight of the giant eagle-lion hybrid, and had no chance to reconsider the idiocy of letting it into Central before they’d been called into the Passages.

Still didn’t mean they weren’t morons.

Careful,
I thought. How much to tell her? I decided against pushing my luck any further, and explained everything we’d heard, both in the town and from Mathran and Avar at the base. But I left out how I’d used magic to track the slaughtered merchants.

My suspicion that the deities were linked to the myth of the world coming to another cataclysm earned me raised eyebrows from Ms Weston.

“You’d put stock in superstitions?”

Exactly what I thought she’d say. I’d be the same, if I hadn’t seen the magic with my own eyes and known Vey-Xanetha didn’t operate on the rules we were used to.

“It’s one possibility,” I said—after all, most superstitions had some basis in reality, however distant.

“It fits with what we’ve heard,” said Ada. She hadn’t expressed an opinion on my theory about the deity being involved in the merchants’ deaths until now, and to be honest, I half-thought she’d dismiss it as superstition, too. Not that it worked for Ms Weston, even after I explained how Mathran made that symbol appear when he’d used magic.

“We told Mathran we would check the other villages.” I handed her the world-key. “But this has run out of battery. Is there another one here at Central?”

“No, but West Office has one. Earth’s other world-keys were used to track Vey-Xanetha down in the first place. They were recharging, but the magic level issues have forced us to switch off our offworld tech.”

That figured. “Should we go back, then?” I asked. “If Kevar’s story is to be believed, we don’t have a lot of time. Superstition or not, is that really something we want to risk?”

As if to emphasise my words, another surge in the magic level made the hairs on my arms stand up, and a muffled shriek sounded from downstairs. Human, but I tensed all the same.

“That would depend upon whether you have a plan,” she said, eyes flashing, in the way they did when she was incredibly displeased. “If time’s as limited as you say, acting fast is our priority. We need to find what went wrong in the first place, ideally. Seek out the problem at its source.”

Source.
The word brought to mind the image of shining black rock, buried deep underground on Aglaia. Might there be something similar on Vey-Xanetha? The source of these gods? I didn’t know if Ms Weston’s choice of words was deliberate or not, but there was so little information.

“Right,” I said. “Should I go to West Office?”

“Hold on,” said Raj. “Mathran said the sun’s about to go down, and the monsters come out at night. It’s not safe.”

“Is that so?” asked Ms Weston. “Their days run in short cycles, of course. When does the next begin?”

“Six hours after,” I said. “It’s a ten-hour cycle, more or less.”

“Crazy,” Raj commented. “How are we supposed to solve anything in that time?”

“Then you’ll have to temporarily relocate to their base,” said Ms Weston. “I believe the world-key at West Office is more equipped for long-term use than our last one, but I’d prefer not to over-use it. It’s the best Earth has, and sad to say, none of the other worlds in the Multiverse are making any effort beyond their own worlds.”

“They’re not?” Iriel blinked in surprise. “None of them at all?”

“Magic levels have stabilised… everywhere except Earth.”

I stared, as did the others. “What? How’s that possible?”

“I thought it was high-magic worlds which would be the worst affected,” said Raj. “Why Earth?”

“It was recently the seat of a magical disturbance,” said Ms Weston. “The Balance must still be fragile. In any case, only Earth seems inclined to act, aside from those already based on Vey-Xanetha, of course.”

Seriously?
“And they aren’t concerned about the Balance, at all?”

“They are,” said Ms Weston, “but we have no conclusive answers. The council will act only upon evidence, and our tracking the world down in the first place was purely coincidental.”

“Coincidence?” I frowned. “How’s
that
possible? I thought the council actively went out
looking
for what caused the disturbance. Or, someone did.”

“Actually… it’s very strange. I didn’t want to tell you any more without proof, but our scanners picked up on an odd magic signal. That’s what led Carl to that particular door, and he crossed paths with Avar, who’d tried to relay a message to the Alliance but was attacked by one of those magic-creatures. The kimaros.”

“A signal?” I said, thinking of the way using my own amplifying ability to tune into the tracker led me after any magic-wielder, and how much it was like crossing radio signals. I could track any magic-wielder, even those without an internal source. But I couldn’t find a pure source by signal alone–could I?

Damn Earth’s total lack of information. Ms Weston paused before answering my question. “A magic-trace, yes. I don’t pretend to know in detail how magi-tech works, but in any case, it certainly led us to the probable source of the trouble. I don’t know if other worlds with similar devices picked up on it, but we were the only people to act.”

That seemed odd, given the level of the chaos the other day. But people tended to look out for their own first. Even the Alliance, especially as Vey-Xanetha wasn’t a member and had little to offer in way of compensation. If this had happened on Valeria, one of the most important worlds in the Alliance, every guard this side of Cethrax would flock to help out in the hope of getting a massive paycheque for it. Even if we spread word across the Multiverse, few would want to risk their necks in a hostile world, without further proof. Proof we didn’t have, not really.

“Then what next?” I asked. “There’s no way we can risk leaving this be. Especially if it’s affecting Earth like this. We’re lucky nothing more serious has happened.”

“I think the council, at least, are aware of the dilemma. With the level of risk, Mathran has agreed to act representative authority for Vey-Xanetha and temporarily upgrade its position in relation to the Alliance so you have permission to go back. I would advise you to hold by the Alliance’s noninterference rules wherever possible, but in the event of a threat to the people of that world, you can step in as authority with Mathran’s permission.”

I blinked. He must really think we could deal with this.

“I’ll have someone from West Office run over with the spare world-key.”

As I left, she asked the others for written reports. Apparently, even with the Balance crumbling around our ears, Central needed to keep the paperwork up to date.
Like it matters,
I thought, the image of the slaughtered merchants flashing before my eyes again.

My fists clenched. I was damned if I did
nothing
about that.

“What’s the plan?” asked Ada. “I was going to check on my brother. The Chameleons might come in handy if we’re going back.”

“Good idea,” I said. I’d reluctantly handed mine in, but it wasn’t much use with the battery drained anyway, and only the tech team had the resources to recharge it. Of course, Raj and Iriel didn’t know my own invisibility worked even with the device switched off. Out of our group, only Ada did.

The tech office was predictably chaotic. I went to fetch the Chameleons from the store room—to suspicious looks from the rest of the department, like they expected me to steal their tech. Or maybe they’d heard about the griffin.

When I got back to the main tech room, Ada and the others gathered around a computer monitor, with the other staff looking on from the side lines.

“Well, it isn’t Klathican,” Iriel was saying. She leaned over the keyboard and typed one-handed while using her other hand to swipe the communicator’s touch screen on the desk. “I swear it
looked
like it, for a moment, but I’ve never seen that script before. I studied ancient codes, maybe that’s why.”

Oh. They were checking the images on the carved spheres against the Alliance’s records. Iriel had scanned the images into her communicator, and now they filled the computer screen. I squinted at them, frowning. They weren’t remotely like any language I could read… so why did they give me a strange sense of familiarity?

“That’s odd,” said Ada, leaning forwards. “Because I swear I’ve seen something like it before.”

I caught her eye over the desk, navigating my way around a tangle of wires to join them.

“I don’t,” said Raj. “Never seen it before in my life. It’s got to be pre-Alliance, if the systems don’t recognise it, but you’d think there’d be a record somewhere. Earth has experts in ancient languages.”

“Not every world does,” said Iriel. “Most Alliance worlds do, of course, but if a large-scale disaster wiped out the entire population of Vey-Xanetha, the newcomers wouldn’t have known where to start.”

Yeah. Unless there was something else at work. The Alliance had formed of worlds who wanted to learn from history, not erase it, but that wasn’t the case on some of the outlying non-Alliance worlds. Not that the Vey-Xanethans were under any Orwellian totalitarian government, but maybe some kind of erasure had taken place. Or maybe it was the paranoia talking.

Maybe I wanted to distract myself from the other possibility–that the glyphs looked familiar to Iriel, Ada and me because we had internal magic sources. They had magic written all over them. I didn’t need a translator to prove that.