Slowly, Maya nodded. She checked her haken and her panoply, then followed the tunnel up into the darkness, Tanax keeping pace by her side.
Dust still billowed around them from where they’d cut their way into the tunnel. Maya touched her haken and created a small sphere of light, but it still only showed a little ways ahead, as though they were walking into a fogbank.
“This place has been quiet for a very long time,” Tanax said. “Do you think—”
Two figures lurched suddenly out of the murk. Maya recognized them as the strange plaguespawn whose corpses they’d seen earlier—human in shape, underlying muscle black instead of red, with metal skins instead of splintered bone. They looked—better constructed, somehow, than the usual nightmare amalgamations of human and animal parts, as though someone had put them together deliberately instead of simply pressing fresh bits in whenever they could be had. Barbs and blades gleamed all across their metal armor.
Maya raised a hand and sent a wave of fire at the first one. The flames reached it but broke across its surface, withering into nothingness. She glanced at Tanax.
“That’s new,” she said.
He raised his haken, the twisted blade forming. “Let’s see how they like being cut to pieces, then.”
Tanax charged, meeting the second monster head-on, ducking the swing of its bladed fist and slashing up and across its blank faceplate. Part of its head fell away, and it staggered back a few steps but quickly recovered. The other plaguespawn turned to attack Tanax from behind, and Maya ignited her own haken and drove it through the thing’s midsection. The creatures might not have looked like plaguespawn, but they bled the same, thick black gore gouting from the wound. It spun, both arms reaching for her in a bear hug, and Maya danced back out of range.
The monster was smarter than it had any right to be, too. It used the greater reach of its long arms to keep her at bay, as though it were playing for time. Maya chopped a dozen small pieces out of each limb but couldn’t land a killing blow, and in the meantime Tanax and the second monster had vanished up the ramp and into the billowing dust. Frustrated, she feinted to one side, then bulled forward, letting metal blades scrape against her panoply field as she pivoted on one foot and brought her haken around in a horizontal arc. Blood hissed and charred in the flames, and the strange plaguespawn fell into two pieces, bisected at the waist. Even then, it kept struggling, and Maya skirted its remains as she hurried onward. She was breathing hard, the chill of drained energy from her panoply fading only gradually.
The ramp opened onto a flat surface, but she was still lost in the dust. Up ahead, she heard Tanax shouting, and then a boom and a brilliant flash, brighter than a blaster bolt. That wasn’t something she’d ever seen from Tanax’s powers, and she broke into a run, emerging from the dust cloud and skidding to a halt as she tried to take in the vast chamber.
There was a … thing, only barely visible in the gloom, the light from her blade glinting off metal plates running high overhead and far back out of sight. In the gaps, she could see striated black muscle, like what ran beneath the skin of the plaguespawn she’d just defeated. This was clearly something similar, but—
The size of it. She couldn’t see far enough to get her head around it. The closest part, a vast curve, resolved into a limb big enough to crush a good-sized house underfoot. Chosen defend, it must be the size of a city!
“The ghouls are here,” Jaedia had said, and talked about a power that could destroy the Republic. This thing must be a ghoul weapon. Their answer to a Chosen skyfortress, maybe, a plaguespawn big enough to break mountains. And someone wants to wake it up?
A moment later, the eddying dust swirled away, and she saw the crater in the stone floor, with Tanax’s limp body lying beside it. Standing over him, a silver sword in one hand, was—
Gyre?
He looked different than when she’d last seen him. Leaner, more dangerous, unruly dark hair grown long enough to curl at the ends. But when the light of her haken fell on his face, there was no doubt it was him. Pale, shiny scars stood out against his brown skin, overlaying the old wound that had taken his eye. Now something glowed in the depth of the socket, a silver orb shining from within with an eerie green light.
Watching him stare down at Tanax, Maya felt a sudden surge of guilt. I let him go. Because he was my brother. I knew he was a rebel, that he’d killed Auxiliaries, that he hated the Order and the Republic, and I let him go. And now … Now he was here, with this monstrous thing, and she had no idea how badly Tanax was hurt. Her heart triple-thumped, and she touched the Thing with her free hand. It had cooled and was just a hard lump under her fingers.
Tanax is probably all right, Maya told herself. His panoply would have absorbed the attack, even if it rendered him unconscious. And I won’t make the same mistake again.
Gyre looked up and saw her. Something about his expression, in the moment of recognition, tore at her heart, but she pushed it down ruthlessly.
“Maya,” he said. His voice was thick.
“I should have known.” Maya stepped forward, haken raised, flames crackling in front of her. “You as good as told me you were a traitor to humanity. I should have …” She shook her head.
His expression hardened. “Should have what? Killed me? Thrown me in in a cell? Probably.” He sidestepped away from the crater and Tanax, and Maya moved to match him, beginning a slow circle. “That’s what a good Order slave would have done, isn’t it? Judge, jury, and executioner all in one.” He extended his silver blade like an accusing finger. “What gives you the right?”
“We are carrying out the duty left to us by the Chosen,” Maya said. “It’s not a right. It’s a responsibility.”
“You’re the enforcers for a gang of corpses,” Gyre said. “Dogs keeping the flock in line, even though the shepherds are dead and gone.”
Maya raised her hand and smothered him with a gout of flame. Not hard or hot enough to kill—she wasn’t ready for that, even now—but it ought to have blown him off his feet. Instead, when the fire cleared, Gyre was unmoved, silver sword extended without a tremble.
“Of course,” he said. “That’s the Order’s answer to everything, isn’t it? Just burn it, break it, smash it until it can’t talk back anymore.” He slashed his blade, real eye blazing, silver eye still glowing that eerie green. “You know, I never met a Chosen. Maybe they really did deserve to run the world. Maybe they were better than us—smarter, more moral, superior. But you centarchs are only human, with a little fizz in your blood. Just because you can kill anyone who disagrees, that means you have the right to rule?”
Maya thought of Nicomidi, glaring down at her in her cell, casually threatening to have Beq killed. The rest of the Council, broken into warring camps, willing to turn a blind eye to anything that hurt their political enemies. Raskos Rottentooth, representing the Republic and the Order, feeding off the misery of thousands to stuff his coffers. She took a deep breath.
“We’re all only human,” she said. “Centarchs as much as anyone. But the centarchs aren’t the Twilight Order, and neither are the Auxiliaries or the duxes. The Order is a principle. That those with power should defend those without.”
“Defend them by swaddling them. Keeping them like infants, without any way to defend themselves, because that might mean they can stand up to you.”