Sword of Dreams (The Reforged Trilogy) (23 page)

The next thief came late on the sixth night, as the excited scholars rested and dreamed of their amazing discovery.

Tiberius heard them coming first and called Maeve with a quiet warning. Over the whistling of the wind, she could just hear a small engine laboring up the barren mountain slope. Something glinted on the darker stripe of the road that wound up toward the mountain peak. A car, maybe? She grabbed the laser pistol in her belt so tightly that her cold joints ached.

Have they come for the Waygate?

The Waygate was huge, far too large to be stolen. The theft Kemmer feared was not quite so literal. But Maeve's raw, jittery nerves would not be so easily soothed.

She glided down over the camp, silent as an owl, but the would-be thieves must have seen her. Arcadian wings were quiet, but large and pale and easy to see. The motor sound slowed and then grew quieter as it retreated back the way it had come.

Maeve landed on the ground beside Tiberius. The old Prian stood in front of an unfolded chair, scratching his bristly chin with one hand. The other was wrapped loosely around the bulky NI pistol under his arm. Orphia perched on the arm of his chair, raking the moraine with her piercing gaze. Finding nothing of interest, she tucked her beak under her wing and went back to sleep.

"Shall I wake Duaal?" Maeve asked.

"Let him sleep. Those vultures must have seen us and changed their minds," he said.

"Perhaps they will warn others that this place is protected."

"Or he's just going back to town to get some of his buddies." Tiberius drummed his fingers on his gun. "There was a time, not so long ago, that you would've been more than happy to start a fight. I'd have been grabbing you by the feathers to keep you from flying after those thugs."

Maeve wrapped her wings close around her. She was shivering already, the heated blanket left on the crag when she flew down into the camp. "I have no particular argument with those men. I am more offended by those under our protection."

"That wouldn't have mattered a year ago. You would have picked something just because your talons were a little itchy, or because they might kill you."

She could not bring herself to look at Tiberius. "I am sorry for… for all I have done. I brought danger upon you simply for the sake of my own pain. You have only been kind to me and I repaid you with selfish recklessness."

Tiberius was quiet for a long time. Maeve could hear him breathing – a deep, steady rumbling like the distant rush and roll of the sea. The stars shined on high, cold and incurious.

"It's not as simple as all that," Tiberius said at last. The words came slowly to him. "Just back on Axis, you were ready to fight over that stupid goose in the bar. That wasn't very long ago. Something else is eating at you."

Maeve realized that she was holding Xia's laser in her hand, clutched so hard that her fingers were going numb. Maeve pressed the safety and thrust the gun back into her belt.

"It has been weeks since my last dose. The withdrawals have faded, but not vanished," she said quietly. Her throat was dry and tight. "And… and I am frightened. There is a Waygate on this very mountain."

"So? God above, shouldn't you be dancing? They found a Waygate!"

"Prianus is only barely part of the core," Maeve snapped, then sighed. "My temper frays. Please forgive me.
Ja'hiraa ilvae!
I cannot seem to help myself."

"What's the problem, then?"

"It was with a Waygate that… that I destroyed my people."

"You didn't do that, dove," Tiberius told her, almost gently. "The Devourers killed the fairies. Bringing them was an accident. Hells, even your bat-crack crazy cousin said that!"

Maeve did not disagree, not really. But she still was not sure she entirely agreed, either. Some of the guilt had to be hers. She
had
failed to properly finish the opening spell, after all.

"Perhaps," she said at last. "But even so, the Waygates are dangerous. How long will this one remain in the possession of the Prians before they wish to use it? Until my own people find out and wish to return home? Until another inexperienced voice tests its power?"

"You think they would do that? Even on Prianus? We've done no wrong by your people. Do you think the Arcadians want to leave that bad?"

She shook her head. "Not for any hatred between our races, though Kemmer seems to have little love for us. But neither are the Arcadians better off than the Prians born under these skies." Maeve swept a wingtip across the two silvery-blue moons in the sky, streaked in fast-moving clouds. "Your world is a hard one, Tiberius. It is cold and it is brutal. Men like you fight to bring justice to Prianus, but your war is an endless and bloody one."

Tiberius nodded, conceding the point, but Maeve was not done.

"Even if Prianus was a lush and lavish world, it is not
our
world. I miss my home." Her voice cracked a little and Maeve paused to steady herself. "
Ma'varri essae na!
But only broken glass remains of the White Kingdom. There is nothing to return to."

She felt a hard hand on her shoulder. Maeve looked up. Tiberius watched her with a raw pain in his eyes. It amazed the Arcadian to realize that she still thought of Tiberius as
old
, though she was almost three times his age. But he was so much tougher and stronger. He wore his age like a thick, scarred armor. Tiberius squeezed her shoulder.

"Home is a hard thing, dove. Coming back can be just as tricky as leaving. Rough as it is, I missed Prianus. I'd be glad to be back here, but bringing Duaal is something else entirely."

"He has been on Prianus before," Maeve said. "He lived here with Gavriel for some time."

"And it was horrible!" Tiberius' voice shook with sudden anger, but he kept his volume down to avoid waking those sleeping in the tent behind them. "I don't want Gavriel to be the only thing he remembers about Prianus, but what the hells else can I show him? One of Kemmer's men is already dead. It's dangerous here."

"Duaal might be offended to hear you say so." Maeve smiled a little. "He enjoys danger, as all young men do."

"I'm not going to let anything happen to him," Tiberius said. A shadow passed over his face. "The next time you start talking about getting him out here to chase after some hooligan, I'll break your wing."

The old captain's affection for her did not extend to putting Duaal in danger. Maeve's smile was warmer this time. "Heard and obeyed, sir," she said. "It makes covering all hours of guard duty difficult."

"We'll get it done, but leave Duaal out of the heavy stuff."

Maeve nodded. "I should return to my post. Call if you have need."

She took wing and flew over the base camp toward her sentry point. When she looked down, the door flap of the Tynerion team's tent trembled like the curtain over a drafty window. Had someone been standing there?

Maeve dropped to the ground and pulled the thick, weighted cloth aside. She reached for her weapon. What if someone had used her conversation with Tiberius as cover to sneak in? But by the dim green nightlight, Maeve counted only the five sleeping shapes of the Tynerion scholars in their ring of heated cots.

Maeve slipped out of the tent and alerted Tiberius to the potential threat. They searched the base camp, but could find no sign of anything amiss. Finally, Maeve bade a second farewell to Tiberius and returned to her perch.

The rest of the night passed in tense, watchful silence.

________

To Duaal's surprise, both the Prian and Tynerion team spent the next day up at the base camp. Only Phillip ventured out into the mountains. At Kemmer's suggestion, Ava accompanied him.

"You may know mountains, but she knows Prianus," Kemmer said. "This area is still unstable. She can help you if the quakes start again."

Phillip smiled shyly at the Prian woman and did not argue. Ava winked at him and went to gather her things. Gripper raised his big brown hand.

"Hey, can I come along?" he asked.

"Um… sure, I guess. But the view from the peak isn't great, if that's what you want," Phillip said. "The ridge there will be between us and Pylos."

"No, nothing like that." Gripper lowered his voice conspiratorially. "Can you show me where the flowers are?"

The geologist nodded. "Sure."

The three of them left shortly after breakfast. Maeve and Tiberius were catching up on sleep. Duaal spent most of the day a hundred yards from the camp, watching over the ravine. He squinted down into the big, dark crack and wondered why he could not see the glowing Waygate. A moment later, he forgot about the question as a sharp pain lanced behind his right eye. He rubbed his temples and groaned. The headaches were back.

They've been twice as bad since we landed on this God-forsaken rock. Men were never meant to be up this high.

Duaal looked up. They were only halfway up the mountain, but even here, the air was as thin as an old man's hair. What was it like up on the peak? Tiberius said that even the Prians could not live up there.

A keening, lonely cry made him look even higher. The sky was clear and blue today. Not that it did anything for the cold, Duaal noted. The Prian sun was a silver-white disc very, very far away.

A dark shape wheeled through the blue, singing her fierce, shrill homage to the free air. It was Orphia, untethered for the day and enjoying the open sky. How hard was it for the old hawk, Duaal wondered, to live in the close confines of the Blue Phoenix? Hard, he guessed, but not as hard as it would have been to live away from Tiberius. She must have been so happy to have both up here…

But Duaal was
not
happy. He kicked a flat shard of stone over the edge of the crevasse. It bounced down into the darkness. His head ached. When Darius came to relieve him, Duaal walked gingerly back to camp. He ducked into the largest tent.

"Xia?" Duaal said.

He tapped the Ixthian medic on the shoulder. She was pouring over some readouts, sitting next to the equally excited Panna. The computer was hooked up to a large white box that hummed loudly. A green graph spiked up and down across the monitor.

Xia looked up. "Duaal. What is it?"

"Do you have any blockers?" he asked. "My head is killing me, and everyone else if I don't get some meds."

"Panna, can you handle this?" Xia asked. The girl nodded. "Thanks. I'll be back in a minute."

Xia stood and motioned for Duaal to follow. She took him across the camp, back to the Tynerion side. Orphia made a tight downward spiral and landed on an upthrust spar of granite. Her talons scraped on the stone and she regarded Duaal with unblinking black eyes.

Are you watching over me, too?

"What were you working on in there?" Duaal asked Xia.

"Gruth finally managed to cut a good sample from one of the Waygate segments. It's only a few microns thick, but it's enough to date."

Duaal stopped. "So… how old is that gate?"

Xia turned and looked at him. She laughed. "I don't know yet. We're not done with the analysis."

They kept walking, quietly as they passed the tent where Tiberius and Maeve slept. Xia went into one of the smaller tents and rooted through her supplies. She found what she wanted and handed Duaal a bottle of blue pills. He tapped a few out onto his palm, swallowed them and then handed the bottle back.

"Altitude sickness?" Xia asked.

"Maybe," Duaal said grudgingly. "I don't think so. They're worse now, but I've had them for months."

"Why didn't you say anything?"

Duaal shrugged.

"Any dizziness? Nausea?"

"No, nothing like that," he said. "Just headaches. Sometimes a sort of… I don't know. A sound, maybe."

"A ringing or buzzing?" Xia asked.

Duaal shook his head gingerly. "No, more like… singing, maybe."

The Ixthian medic frowned. With Duaal's permission, she checked his temperature and blood pressure, peeled back his eyelids and shined a light into his pupils. She looked at his fingertips and ears for any sort of discoloration. After a few more questions, Xia sighed.

"You're right, it doesn't look like altitude sickness," she told him. "I don't see anything wrong. But if the headaches get worse or anything else changes, come tell me."

Duaal agreed and turned to leave the tent, but Xia grabbed his hand and pulled him inside again. Duaal was perfectly happy not to venture back out in the God-awful cold. He sat down on an inflatable cushion next to the door flap. The plastic floor rustled under his feet.

"Aren't you in a hurry to get back to dating the Waygate?" he asked.

Xia smiled. "I've always had an interest in archeology, but I'm a doctor first. It's my job to take care of you. You've been moody, Duaal. The headaches could be stress-related. How are you doing?"

"I'm fine."

Xia waited.

"It's nothing."

Xia blinked at him.

"It's just Tiberius. He's not letting me do… anything – flying the Phoenix, working security here. Any of it!" The frustration came boiling up all at once. He jumped to his feet. "Why not? How do I show him that I can handle this?"