The Thrones of Kronos Read online

  THE THRONES OF KRONOS

  Exordium: Book 5

  Sherwood Smith & Dave Trowbridge

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Edition

  July 24, 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-541-0

  Copyright © 2015 Sherwood Smith & Dave Trowbridge

  PROLOGUE

  Obeying a law from which nothing in the past has ever been exempt, evil may go on growing alongside good, and it too may attain its paroxysm at the end in some specifically new form.

  There are no summits without abysses.

  Enormous powers will be liberated in mankind by the inner play of its cohesion: though it may be that this energy will still be employed discordantly tomorrow, as today and in the past. Are we to foresee a mechanising synergy under brute force, or a synergy of sympathy? Are we to foresee man seeking to fulfil himself collectively upon himself, or personally upon a greater than himself? Refusal or acceptance of Omega?

  The Sanctus Teilhard

  (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)

  The Phenomenon of Man, ca. 200 B.E.

  SUNEATER

  His mind hazed by drugs, the tempath Norio raced around the dyplast barrier into the Chamber of Kronos.

  He exulted in the rush of energy pouring through him as the moth-like beats of the Suneater’s hidden life burgeoned into deep drums of power thrumming to his accelerating heartbeat. He leapt up onto the textured bulk of the Urian machine, the stalagmitic shape so like a throne on which no human could sit that cradled the Heart of Kronos. The depth beyond dwindled in impossible perspective, like a conduit to the heart of the singularity the station orbited, but the mirrored sphere that held the secret of the Suneater pulled irresistibly at his mind.

  It pulsed with a secret life that seduced his own pulse, his breathing, and all the inner courses of his body into synchrony with it, blending him into the substance of the ancient, seemingly organic machine in an access of mastery and ecstasy beyond anything Norio had ever experienced. Time and space opened before him as his mind expanded, sweeping effortlessly outward in a widening vortex of emotions sensed from the inhabitants of the station: the fear and duty compulsion of the Tarkans, now running through the hatch into the chamber, terror and fury from Morrighon, apprehension and curiosity from Lysanter, and then to minds beyond.

  And still his power grew.

  With rapturous triumph he threw open his mental barriers in order to devour the minds of every life on the station, the consummation of an instant, yet in the strange timeless vision he now possessed, a never-ending pleasure beyond anything his feeble recorded treasures had ever offered him.

  But then his perceptions met a numinous flare of light emanating from the landing bay, ramifying outward from two figures so incandescent he could not look at them: Anaris achreash’Eusabian, the Dol’jharian heir, and the Rifter captain Vi’ya, once a Dol’jharian slave, and Hreem the Faithless’s deadliest enemy.

  Norio recoiled, and threw himself against the hateful light pushing him away from the landing bay. He would eat Vi’ya’s mind first!

  He pulled power from the Heart. Jagged pain gored him, remembrance of the warm obscenity that had stolen Hreem from him, its substance like the heat-glowing presence now beneath his hands.

  Norio shrieked.

  His mind ripped along the seam weakened by that stab of memory, banishing the drug-induced haze that had hidden until too late the true nature of what he’d sought to waken. He craved the safety of nullity, the head-blindness of normal humankind, for now he was impaled on an upwelling pain that no sound he could produce would ever express. The veins ruptured in his throat and his vocal cords snapped as something vast and terrible sought exit through his mind and shredded him into a million fragments, every one of them conscious and alive with never-ending agony in a timeless instant . . .

  In the landing bay, the full-spectrum lights flickered.

  Vi’ya saw in the sudden wariness of the Tarkan honor guard—hands tightening on weapons—and in the narrowed vision and hardened jaw of Anaris, that this was not normal. Her body tensed into readiness as she scanned the landing bay, then again the heir.

  Anaris stood a meter from her. His anger seared like flame, and she fought to interpose her mental shield against its intensity. If this is what life will be like on the Suneater, I’m going to need Montrose’s drugs after all.

  The lights flickered again, throwing Anaris’s face into greenish-gray shadow, then they dimmed and blinked out, leaving him illuminated only by what could be seen of the red-glowing walls of the Urian station behind the gray flats. The landing bay blurred into the ruddy gray of stone flushed with roseate sunlight streaming through colored glass. Vi’ya kept her gaze on Anaris with her entire focus as she recognized, in horror and revulsion, the cathedral at New Glastonbury on Desrien.

  Fighting to keep her hold on reality—to reject the memory of that place, and the vision she had experienced there—she reached mentally for the one tie to reality she could still perceive: Anaris’s figure, a green-gray silhouette against the light from the walls. But, as though a door were opening, the shadow expanded and pulled her inexorably into the Dreamtime.

  o0o

  The gray mist around her cleared, leaving her surrounded by the familiar hiss and boom of crashing surf.

  A shower of salt spray cooled her face.

  She jerked her chin up. Above sailed the green and gray clouds of Dol’jhar. Lightning flickered, and a low mutter of thunder drowned the pounding of the sea. The strong smell of salt stung her nose. Somehow she had lost the strange Urian station and was here on the island of the Chorei.

  I have been here before, she thought, still fighting to regain . . . what? She remembered a tall building of lacy stone, windows of crystallized light, an old woman . . . Memory slipped away as her feet sank into sand, and the spray stung her eyes.

  She had to do something, and it had to be done at once.

  She whirled around, staggering at the drag of heavy gravity she thought she’d left behind forever. As her muscles tightened, she turned her back on the dark gray sea of Dol’jhar and clambered up the side of a palisade. She topped the stony outcropping, breathing hard, and stared at the tiered city carved into the side of the twin mountains.

  Jhargat Choreid.

  She stared in amazement at the city’s wide archways, curved windows, and the patterned mosaics that, as the boiling clouds overhead parted briefly, glowed golden, ruby, and emerald in the light of the setting sun.

  She was not prepared for such beauty. Nothing on Dol’jhar had ever been beautiful. The concept of beauty itself was foreign to Dol’jharians, she had always thought—though she had never seen inside the great fortress towers of the Lords.

  She looked up, but there was nothing to see save the clouds. The asteroid—

  It didn’t matter how she’d arrived: the why was clear.

  I can warn them. She began to run.

  Wind buffeted her: the beginning of a storm. Warm raindrops spattered her face and hands and plopped onto the worn bricks of a pathway. She leapt over a low hedge. Her boot heels rang on stone as she loped, breathing in the scents of herbs and aromatic shrubs, all unfamiliar. The climate was more forgiving than that of the north.

  When a human form emerged from the slanting rain she stopped, blinking rain from her eyes.

  The man raised a hand palm out in the old gesture for truce or peace. She mirrored his gesture. He beckoned, leading her off the main path onto a narrow flagged trail. Beyond a wall of tossing fronds lay a long, low house with an overhanging roof.

  The wind diminished as soon as they stepped onto the porch. Lanterns glowed in rounded windows, casting l
ight onto a dark face with light-colored eyes. The man was shorter than she by a hands-breadth, and stocky in build. His hair, like hers, was long, but flecked with white. He was older than he had first appeared.

  He wore a long tunic woven in bright colors and baggy trousers tucked into cloth boots. There was nothing martial in his appearance, nor did he seem to bear any weaponry.

  She was aware of a gentle tug of question at her mental shield, and behind that a steel-smooth control.

  “Welcome, daughter,” the man said.

  The words sounded different, but the meaning laved her consciousness: curiosity, a genuine welcome, and under it an urgency and a sadness which the control could not hide.

  “The asteroid.” She glanced skyward. “The mainlanders—”

  “It is imminent.” He held up his hand, palm toward the mountain. “Imminent,” he repeated softly.

  A lull in the rain granted clarity, as if a curtain had been ripped aside, revealing people of every age standing on the balconies of every house, from sea level to mountain peak. All facing the south.

  Again he gestured, and she looked southward, into the deepening yellow night sky.

  The flare of light descended with cruelly inexorable deliberation. Moments after it disappeared below the southern horizon, a dome of light blossomed into the darkness, transfixed by a wavering spear of bluish light that shot up into the heavens as the impact of the asteroid converted a hundred cubic kilometers of seawater and ocean floor into superheated steam and vaporized rock.

  “It is done,” said the man.

  Fury was Vi’ya’s first reaction, at the purposelessness of it all. She’d arrived too late to save them. If she’d had better timing, had her ship, she could have blasted it out of space—

  But Telvarna was gone, light-years away and centuries distant.

  “Do not be angry, daughter,” the man said.

  “Why am I here?” she demanded. “If I’d appeared even a day ago, I could have warned you, at least.”

  The man spread his hands, his smile sad; the corner of his mouth trembled. He’s afraid.

  He was a telepath; of course he knew her thoughts almost as quickly as she did. “No people wish to die before their natural time,” he said.

  “They don’t wish to die at all,” she countered.

  He breathed deeply. A tangy herbal scent hung in the air, like the spices put in wine. Then he smiled. “Before we discourse on Terev ha’zhad—” The connotations carried clearly, the intimacies. “—we must exchange names. I am Math, Lictor of the Chorei.”

  “I am Vi’ya.” Her voice remained steady, though her heartbeat quickened. A half minute gone. So am I to die among them—and he thinks there is purpose to any of this?

  “Your name has an unfamiliar sound,” Math said. “Are you from the Servants of Dol?”

  “The name comes from another people, because among them—” She pointed northward. “—slaves are not named.” When his brows contracted, she curled her lip. “Don’t waste your pity. The lords think that by keeping us nameless, and our heads shaved, we have no identity, but those who want freedom find their strictures merely an added challenge.”

  Math nodded soberly.

  “So you don’t believe death is the enemy, to be fought at all costs, for as long as one can fight?” she asked. The image in her mind was Markham’s laughing face just before Hreem flamed him, and then the burning corpse falling, falling, and her question came out bitter, but when she glanced up at the still faces waiting on the balconies, she knew that here, anyway, the Chorei did believe it.

  “The universe does not waste anything,” Math said, his smile rueful. “But we love our home, our island—and at the last, our planet. We knew that the Children of Dol would come to destroy us in one way or another, and we deflected it as long as we could. But when it became apparent their power was greater, we altered our plans. Though we go together to rejoin Totality, we will give our gift to the future. And,” he gestured, “should the gift be accepted, then in the end we all shall win, those who serve Dol and those who love Chor, alike.”

  “They taught us you were demons.” Vi’ya started, then shut her mouth. Why ruin the dreams of the condemned?

  Math’s quick intake of breath made her jerk around to look at him: had he lost his faith so quickly, then?

  But his eyes widened, his face suffused with joy. “You are from the time that is to come?” He read his answer in her mind before she could form it, and she saw the gleam of tears on his lashes. “The gift! The gift!”

  And from above, carried on the wind, came an eerie sound, voices singing a sustained note, from high to low, a chord so beautiful its effect was searing.

  Math’s eyes flickered to the south, where the horizon seemed subtly different. “Above us, deep in the other side of the mountain, await those who will try to win through,” he said swiftly. “At least one for each Talent.”

  Vi’ya winced, thinking of what was to happen to the survivors. She was resolute in not wanting to speak, but Math was reading her closely, and he said, “We know the nature of the Servants of Dol. The ones above are volunteers. My wife is among them—”

  Wife. The word gave her a third shock.

  “It appears that the talents will not die,” he murmured, concentrating on her. “For you do hear us, unlike the Children of Dol in our own time. And there are others?”

  She understood their “gift” now, and assented with a quick nod. The wave was coming: she could hear the sea hissing out beyond the point any tide had ever gone. “Yes. There are others.” She spoke as quickly as he. “The mainlanders will come and enslave those Chorei they find, but the talents endure in their descendants. Tell me! If you truly don’t believe in war, how did you make their ships of conquerors disappear?”

  “They never disappeared.” Math raised his hands. “They are among us. We convinced them to lay down arms and join us.” His gaze lifted. “You have our gift, You-Who-Hear. Carry the rest of our gift: remember us.”

  The chorus of voices swelled, both heard and in the mental realm, all voices joining together in a psalm of joy and unity, spirit linked to spirit, as the Chorei gazed out at the kelp-veined wall of steaming water, its top frayed by the shock wave just behind, and awaited annihilation.

  Vi’ya closed her eyes as the roar intensified, drowning the sound of the voices on the air, but not in mind, and at the last she surrendered the guard on heart and spirit and reached to join . . .

  . . . and the wave passed, silent and cold, and faded into nothingness.

  PART ONE

  ONE

  ARTHELION

  Moira ran down the broad corridor in the Mandala, the busts of long-dead Panarchs and Kyriarchs to either side raking her with the blind gaze of patient stone. She stopped and stared up hopelessly at the colossal doors that barred her path. The eyes of the bird of flame inlaid upon them seemed to glow forbiddingly down at her; from behind came the hard, frightening voices of the invaders from Dol’jhar. The girl paused to glance down the long corridor behind her, then desperately reached up and yanked at the huge handle on one door.

  There was no give to it, and she had begun to turn away, fighting back tears, when a deep-toned hum commenced, and the huge doors began to swing open. She stuck a foot through the skinny crack, then her basket as the crack widened slowly, then squeezed the rest of herself through as soon as the opening was big enough.

  Moira ran a few steps, then faltered, relief at her escape turning to fear at the immensity of the gloomy room. She stepped back, and back, but when she whirled around to run, the gigantic doors were already swinging shut. The soft boom of their closing seemed to come from everywhere.

  She had seen the Throne Room before, but only on a holo, which didn’t give a hint of this vast space ready to swallow her. She didn’t see a ceiling, just an infinity of stars. Still air chilled her, and voices seemed to whisper among the shadows in the distant corners—as if the room was full of lots and lots of ghosts
.

  She scrutinized the walls. Nothing there. So she braced her shoulders and looked at last across the polished floor to the emerald gleam of the Throne. It, too, was shadowed—it looked to Moira like a towering tree twining its branches among the stars.

  A tree. She felt safe with trees.

  She ran toward it, clutching her basket against her chest.

  There had to be doors at the other end of the huge room. Meanwhile, if the Dol’jharians figured out which way she’d gone and came after her, she could hide behind the Throne.

  She ran faster, her feet making whispery echoes. She tried to ignore those creepy shadows, and kept her gaze firmly on the safety of the tree.

  Then she saw the man who was seated on the Emerald Throne.

  She stopped, breathing hard.

  “If they catch you, pretend you’re lost. Cry.” The Masque’s voice rasped vividly in memory, bringing the image of the red cloth that covered his lower face. Above that his dark eyes, that stared right into you. But this man wore no mask.

  “Come forward.”

  The voice was soft, barely louder than her sandals on the cold, polished floor.

  Moira managed to draw in a shaky breath and walked toward the Throne. It wouldn’t be hard to cry. She’d seen what Dol’jharians were like, there on the beach when their ruler had destroyed the Havroy and his soldiers had shot people down for no reason.

  But as she neared the huge Throne, she perceived something strange about the man sitting on it. The Throne gleamed with dull light, but she couldn’t see a source. The man gleamed with the same kind of light; his clothes weren’t like anything people wore now, but he didn’t look at all like the Dol’jharians.

  Was he the ghost that all her friends whispered about? Nionu actually claimed to have seen it once, but Moira thought that was just her friend’s jealousy making her fib, because she never got to visit the Havroy. Moira had been the last girl to take flowers to her; since the Evil Dol’jharian’s cruiser-weapons had melted the ancient statue, no girl and her family would ever make that happy journey again.