David Farland - Beyond the Gate

“Quickly!” Gallen shouted. “Cut us free! There is no telling how long the mantle will be able to control him!”

Maggie grabbed the fallen knife from the road, went to Gallen and cut his bonds, then did the same for Ceravanne. Before Maggie could finish with Ceravanne, Gallen went to the Tekkar Lord, pulled the man’s knife, and plunged it into his heart.

The Tekkar dropped with a sigh, and Gallen grabbed the pulp pistols and his mantle. In moments he had hurried to the flier, and they began throwing in the packs that the Tekkar had carried, then leapt in and closed the doors just as the Derrits charged up the road.

“Vehicle, rise eighty yards and hold position!” Maggie commanded the flier’s AI.

The flier rose up in the air and hovered.

“I don’t understand.” Orick grumbled. “What happened?”

Gallen had already put his mantle back on, and he whispered, “Not any man can wield the power of a Lord Protector’s mantle. The mantle is a living machine, and it partakes of the desires and intents of its makers, and of those who use it. And like a Guide, it has some measure of control over its wearer. Most of the time, it gives me free rein to do as I please, but I have felt it tugging at my limbs, using me in battle as much as I use it. So when the Tekkar asked me to surrender it, I asked my mantle if it could protect me. It said that it could not serve an evil man. It warned me that it might be able to battle the Tekkar, once one of them put it on. I knew that the Tekkar would covet the thing, and eventually one would try to claim it, so I had only to wait my chance.”

Maggie looked out the window at the dead Tekkar strewn across the road. She recalled how the Tekkar Lord had innocuously obtained both the guns. She realized that Gallen’s mantle had been prodding him even then.

Maggie had understood that her mantle was designed for a special purpose, and that its abilities and memory were all aimed at fulfilling its own desires and objectives. She had felt her own mantle tugging at her mind, filling her with curiosity when she’d studied dronon technology, but she hadn’t quite grasped how symbiotic the relationship between man and mantle might be until now. And Maggie realized that she would need to begin studying mantles more explicitly, learning more of their creation, abilities, and desires.

Down on the road, the Derrits fell upon the bodies of the dead Tekkar, grabbing them and scurrying away. Food for their babies, Maggie thought.

“Where to now?” Maggie said.

Gallen looked at her quizzically, the green running lights of the flier soft on his face, and she smiled. “I’m not Inhuman, if that’s what you’re wondering, Gallen O’Day!”

“I didn’t imagine you would be,” Gallen said. “But one can never tell.”

After a moment of thought, he said, “We’ve got air transport, and we’ve got food. We might as well fly to Moree.”

“Surely we can’t just fly into the city,” Ceravanne said. “They’ll be waiting for us.”

“We can land nearby,” Gallen said. “Close, but not too dose.”

Ceravanne dosed her eyes, thinking. “I’m not sure, but I believe I know just the place.”

* * *

Where should we go?” Maggie asked again, staring hard at Ceravanne, but Ceravanne was still thinking, unsure if hers was the right course.

“If I judge right,” Ceravanne said, “we cannot just go straight into Moree in this vehicle. We will have to set down outside the city. Is that right?” Gallen nodded curtly.

“And I have seen the dronon aircars streak across the sky like meteors,” Ceravanne said, “so that a journey of a thousand kilometers takes but an hour.”

“More like six minutes in this car,” Maggie said. “We need rest and food before we go into Moree, and a place of safety,” Ceravanne continued. “Could we go back to Northland for one day, to the Vale of the Bock on Starbourne Mountain?”

Maggie and Orick both dropped their jaws. They had been struggling so hard to reach Moree that both of them thought only in terms of that small goal, and so they had imagined landing as close as possible to that place.

“It might not be a bad idea,” Maggie said. “When this aircar doesn’t return on schedule, the Tekkar at Moree are going to become suspicious. They’ll close the gates tight, and start looking for us. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to stay away for a while.”

Gallen stared out the window, considering. “But every moment we waste only allows the Inhuman’s agents to get stronger. They’ve already got the Dronon hive cities, and now they are building armed and armored air transports. I think we should go in immediately.”

“It is hours till dawn,” Ceravanne said. “The Tekkar are awake, but most of them will be sleeping by morning. We should wait to infiltrate the city by daylight.”

Gallen nodded in acquiescence, and Maggie told the aircar to take them to Northland, to Starbourne Mountain. The aircar did not know the coordinates, so Ceravanne gave it an approximation, and the transport rose in the air and swept away. Ceravanne looked out her window and saw the small campfires and lights of villages down in the cities below, and she watched the clouds, like floating sheets of ice on a swollen winter river, sliding away beneath her. She had never been in an aircar before. Though the thing sounded noisy from the outside, there was absolute quiet within the vehicle, and this seemed somehow wondrous to her.

Gallen sighed, then said, “With all of their military buildup, I don’t understand why the hosts of the Inhuman haven’t attacked Northland yet.”

“Perhaps they are afraid that Northland is stronger than they know,” Ceravanne said. “In the City of Life, we have long allowed our guards to carry weapons that are restricted elsewhere on the planet, and our resistance fighters became expert at using those weapons on the dronon, and at sabotaging the dronon walking hive cities.”

“Even with that,” Gallen said, raising a brow, “I suspect that the Inhuman has amassed enough weaponry to wipe out your people. Something else is holding it back.”

There was a long moment of silence, and at last Ceravanne said, “Could it be compassion?”

Gallen studied her a moment, wondering. “Why would you say that?”

Ceravanne shrugged a little. “It was something the Tekkar said when Orick told him that I was the Swallow. He said that the Swallow had already returned to Moree, and had gathered her armies.”

Gallen whispered, “And she was set to harvest the stars?”

Ceravanne nodded. Gallen had been so convinced that the Harvester was a machine that for a moment he did not understand what she implied.

“Could it be that the dronon have set up an imposter?” Maggie asked Ceravanne. “Someone who could take advantage of your reputation.”

Gallen blurted out, “Why would they bother, when they could have the real thing? They would only need to clone Ceravanne and fill her with the Inhuman’s memories-and they’d have their Harvester.” He spoke the thought as quickly as it came to him. And finally, she saw that Gallen understood.

Orick gasped, and Maggie looked crestfallen as together they saw the simplicity of it. Ceravanne turned away, for she could not face them.

Gallen looked into Ceravanne’s eyes and said more gently, perhaps only realizing the truth now, “And that is why you insisted on coming with us, isn’t it? You knew that the Harvester is not a machine. You came to face your darker self?”

Ceravanne hesitated to speak, and Maggie shook her head in denial. “Certainly the dronon couldn’t turn a Tharrin-even with the Inhuman’s conditioning. It wasn’t able to turn me!”

Ceravanne wondered, as she had wondered on countless nights, just how susceptible she herself might be to the Inhuman’s persuasion. The Inhuman had come after her again and again with such persistence, and always she’d managed to kill herself to avoid being taken. But she had not been able to defend her dead body. The dronon had had countless opportunities to recover her genome, create a clone, and fill it with whatever thoughts or memories they desired.