David Farland - Lords of the Seventh Swarm

It was Maggie, his niece-he felt sure. He could smell her wool shawl, the scent of her dark red hair, all mingled with a rich fragrance of perfume she’d got off-world.

The sense of smell is such a strange thing. Most people hardly notice how much they rely on it, how easily a scent is remembered.

After all these weeks, all the answers the dronon had forced from him, Maggie was here.

Thomas’s heart sank. Captured. She’d been captured; held prisoner with him. The dronon would kill her. The would force Gallen to fight, for Gallen and Maggie held the title of “Lords of the Sixth Swarm.” The dronon imagined that by winning this title, they would gain legal claim to the worlds of man.

Of course when Gallen lost the battle, the dronon would also kill Maggie. Thomas’s ignorance would lead to the death of his only kin.

“Maggie?” Thomas cried, straining against his blindfold. “I’m sorry! They made me tell. I tried to hold back. I tried to be quiet! Can you forgive me, lass?”

She did not answer. Only circled him, lightly brushing his shoulder with her woolen shawl, padding around him.

“Maggie?” he pleaded once again.

She reached out, tugged vainly for a moment at his blindfold, then pulled it away, raking the skin around his eyes with her long nails.

The figure standing before Thomas was not Maggie. Instead, a man all dressed in black robes stood, a man in a golden mask. It was the kind of mask common on Fale, a thin film of incandescent material. Behind the mask were deep brown eyes. Thomas’s interrogator, Lord Karthenor.

“Forgive the minor deception,” Karthenor said. “The wanted assurance that they had Maggie’s scent right.”

Karthenor raised a small perfume bottle, then sprayed it on his wrist, held it up for Thomas. It smelled like Maggie, as true and clear as if she were in the room.

“A person’s scent is marvelous,” Karthenor said, “as distinctive as a retinal scan, as individual as genetic mapping. Yet we leave it wherever we go.”

“How, how did you do this?” Thomas asked.

“ You did it,” Karthenor laughed. “We had only to send emissaries to Tihrglas, to collect samples of her body oils from the comforter on her bed. Recreating her scent is a minor thing.

“For this, I thank you. Now our dronon Seekers will be able to track Maggie across the worlds.”

“Och, damn your sorry hide!” Thomas shouted. “I hope you never catch her. If I were free, I’d break your spine!”

Karthenor smiled benignly, glanced up to the silver circlet weighing on Thomas’s head. With the Guide on, Thomas could not fight, could not flee. Yet Karthenor still kept Thomas chained. Thomas could only imagine one reason for the shackles: meanness. A minor torture.

Karthenor mused, “If you were free, I’m sure you would do more than merely break my spine. But you will never be free again.”

“Och, this is no proper place for a bear,” Orick growled. He sniffed at the dead monster at his feet.

The creature looked like some huge gray slime mold. It had just come slithering out of the stream not forty feet distant, and Gallen had been forced to fry it with his incendiary rifle. Now it lay, burned and quivering, just outside camp. It was the third monster Gallen had killed in the past three hours.

Orick shook his head, wondering if the slime was edible. “My mother always said that you’d bring me to Ruin, Gallen, and here we are.”

“It’s just the name for the planet-because of all the alien ruins hereabouts,” Gallen said. He grunted, pulling at some vines near the edge of camp, trying to get them from the ground so that he could burn them for a campfire. The little bear, Tallea, went to his side and began pulling with her teeth, trying to help Gallen out.

Orick glanced off at the skyline. Ruin was a strange world-too far from its primary sun, which sat directly overhead like a child’s purple ball. It gave the landscape a violet hue.

Here, strewn across the desert, were huge red boulders, shaped like eggs, lying in the sand, and farther in the distance, a wind-sculpted sandstone mesa rose above the desert floor like some castle. Odd bushes grew all around-some sprouting like hair, others all thick and rubbery. The plants filled the air with alien scents.

Only the sound of the stream, burbling as brooks will, reminded Orick of home. No, Ruin was no proper place for a bear. Still, Orick wouldn’t have minded it so much if he could actually see some of these famous ruins that the planet was named after, but Orick had no such luck. It was, after all, just another alien landscape.

The gray mold at Orick’s feet quivered, whether in dying throes or in an attempt to escape, he didn’t know.

“Maybe we should move the camp away from the brook,” Orick said. “I think it attracts predators.”

Gallen didn’t answer. He’d got some of the dead vines over in front of the spaceship and was trying to set them afire. Tallea was out looking for more wood. Perhaps Gallen was building a fire in the hope of scaring off predators. Perhaps he did it because they planned on camping here, next to this stream, and Gallen was just used to having a campfire. They didn’t really need a fire, as far as Orick could tell. Though he’d grown sick of riding in a spaceship these past few weeks, he still thought it safer to sleep in there than to sleep out here in the open, on an alien world.

Why couldn’t Gallen find some nicer planet to camp on? Surely there were worlds in the process of being terraformed hereabouts, places where forests grew and the grass was green. Proper places for a bear. But, no, Maggie wanted this planet because it wasn’t listed as inhabitable on the star charts: “A good place to hide from the dronon,” she said. They were already well quit of the Milky Way. Here in the Carina Galaxy, they’d come to the fringe worlds, on the edge of civilization.

Gallen quit fiddling with the wood, looked up at the ship. The Nightswift’s landing lights blinked violet and ivory. It was a sleek ship, some sixty meters long and thirty wide.

The headdress of black ringlets that Gallen wore over his long hair glittered in the soft lights, the crystal disks of memory for his mantle jiggling as he drew ragged breaths. A single sapphire gem began to glow in the center of Gallen’s mantle. Gallen had just chosen that moment to download his memories into his mantle so that if he died, his memories could be placed into a clone.

After a few heartbeats, the gem quit blazing so fiercely. Maggie was still in the ship, resting. Being nearly five months pregnant was taking its toll on her energy levels.

Gallen gazed down at Orick. “I’ve been thinking,” he said softly, so as not to be heard through the ship’s open door. “We could move this ship to another camp-or maybe we could go back the way we came. It’s time to quit running from the dronon. I have to fight them sometime.”

Orick had been Gallen’s friend for years, yet he felt no less loyal to Maggie. He didn’t like having to side with one or the other.

Orick said, “Fighting is too risky. For every minute you keep running, that’s another moment of freedom you give to every man and woman in the galaxy.”

“That’s where Maggie is wrong!” Gallen said, voicing an argument that had been going on for weeks. “The dronon are setting outposts on every world, searching for us. They’re killing those who help hide us. The very threat of invasion keeps our people in fear: what kind of freedom is that?”

“It’s a devil’s bargain,” Orick agreed, “but you have to admit, Gallen, you don’t have an answer to this problem.” He looked down at the quivering mold, pondering.