Antrax

27

Enveloped by the slow, steady thrumming of Castledown’s machinery, Ahren Elessedil walked back through the long rows of towering metal cabinets and spinning silver disks that occupied the cavernous chamber outside Walker’s smoked-glass prison. He did not like leaving Ryer Ord Star alone to look after the Druid, did not feel at all certain that he was doing the right thing, but knew, as well, he could not turn back. The voice inside him generated by the magic of the phoenix stone was firm and compelling. The missing Elfstones lay ahead, somewhere else in the complex, waiting for him to retrieve them. He must do as the voice insisted if he was ever to find himself again and be made whole. He must go to where the Stones were. He must take them back.

He watched the dark glass of Walker’s chamber disappear into the warren of cabinets behind him, and when it was out of sight, his loneliness was palpable and his feeling of vulnerability acute. The haze of the phoenix stone’s magic was beginning to dissipate, to lose its consistency, to become more penetrable. It was a gradual change, and at first he was not certain he was seeing it accurately. But as he got clear of the brightly lit central chamber and walked back into the darker corridors beyond, it became increasingly apparent that he was not mistaken, that the stone’s magic was failing. He immediately felt pressed and harried by the knowledge, as if he must move faster than he would have liked or than was reasonable. It was an irrational response, because he had no real idea of what the magic’s lifetime might be. Then again, not much of what he had done since entering Castledown had anything to do with being rational.

He knew that Ryer’s magic would be lessening, as well. When it was gone, she would have to rely on her connection with Walker to survive. In a way, she was better off with the Druid. At least Walker could offer her protection once he woke and freed himself. Without the magic of the phoenix stone, there was little that Ahren could do for her. Little that he could do for himself, for that matter.

Still, he would listen to the voice and go on, because the voice was all he had to rely on.

He climbed the stairs to the overlook they had come upon earlier, then moved back into the maze of corridors beyond. He took the path his instincts told him to take, keeping close watch over the shadows pressing close about him. The flameless lamps threw down their light in dim pools, but the stretches between were like quicksand. He repeatedly encountered creepers on their way to other places, and each time he stopped where he was and waited for them to attack. But the creepers still did not see or sense him, and they did not slow. He heard the skitterings of their approaches and departures, scrapings of metal that raised the hair on the back of his neck. He wished again he was braver and stronger. He wished he had Ard Patrinell to assure him that he would be all right. He kept thinking how comforting that would be. But Patrinell had taught him everything he would ever teach him and told him everything he would ever tell him. Patrinell was gone. Ahren’s comfort, if he was to find any, would have to come from somewhere else.

As he walked deeper into the catacombs, the sound of the machinery grew louder, a steadily building whine. Without knowing anything else, he could tell that he was moving toward the power source that was the heart of Castledown. It was there that Antrax fed off the energy stored for its use by the safehold’s machines. Ahren felt himself shrink as the sound increased in volume, its dull roar filling up the corridors like a river at flood. He saw himself as tiny and insignificant, impermanent flesh and blood trapped inside changeless, unyielding steel walls. He thought again about his hopes in coming on the journey—to prove himself to be more than the callow boy his brother believed him, to accomplish something that would warrant respect and even honor, to become the man his father had wanted him to be. Foolish, impossible hopes in light of his cowardice in the ruins, yet he clung to them still. Some part of what he had dreamed of accomplishing could still be realized if he could keep himself steady.

He passed out of the corridor into a vast, cavernous room in which two giant cylinders stood side by side amid a cluster of smaller pieces of equipment. The cylinders were fifty feet across and a hundred feet high. Metal pipes and connectors ran from their casings to the equipment and surrounding walls. The sound of the machinery was deafening, a pounding throb that buried everything else in the wake of its passing. It was Castledown’s power source, and Ahren wanted nothing so badly as to get away from it.

Then he looked to his right and saw a pair of chambers similar to the one that had been used to contain Walker, except that they were much larger. The dark glass fronting them was recessed into the chamber walls, and the bulbous doors were rimmed with sleek metal bindings. He stared at them, and he knew without having even to question it that one of them contained the missing Elfstones. He could feel it the same way he had felt the need to go there. The phoenix stone’s magic was still at work inside him, giving him his direction, telling him what to do.

Yet for a long time, he didn’t move. He didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to do it, and didn’t really want to try. His fear returned in an enveloping wave. To go on was too much to ask of anyone; it was too overwhelming to consider. He stared at the doorways, the magic of the phoenix stone prodding at him, and fought to keep himself from bolting. He had never been so scared. His fear wasn’t of what he thought might be waiting; it was of what he couldn’t imagine. His fear was of the unseen, of the unknown danger that would cause him to flee once more. He did not think he could bear to have that happen again, and he did not know how to prevent it. He could sense the possibility of something lurking behind the dark glass, a predator, anxious for him to step inside and be seized. Anticipation alone was enough to freeze him in place, to render him hopelessly immobile. He thought in his unspeakable terror that he would never move again.

It was his sense of shame that saved him, reborn in the unavoidable memories of his flight from the ruins days earlier, recalled again and again in the long hours afterwards while he huddled in the debris and thought about what it would be like to return home after what he had done. His chance to redeem himself from that misery, his only chance, lay in recovery of the Elfstones. In the hauntingly inexorable nightmare of his failure to save his friends, in the cold realization of how frail a creature he was, he had come to understand that it was worse to live with fear than to die confronting it.

He remembered that, and broke free of his terror. He started forward without stopping to consider what he was doing, knowing only that he must go then or he would never go at all.

In the next instant, alarms went off everywhere, shrill metallic sounds that cut through even the suffocating roar of the machines.

Ahead, one of the doors opened and a giant creeper scuttled out, all crooked legs and sharp pincers, a war machine looking for a fight. It did not see him, but moved to take up a position between the chamber doorway and the corridor through which Ahren had come. Another creeper followed, and then another, stationing themselves in a defensive ring. The entry sealed itself tightly behind them.

Ahren kept moving ahead, making for that closed door, striding into the midst of the creepers. He held the long knife before him protectively, knowing it was all but useless should they discover him. But, just barely visible, the failing magic of the phoenix stone still clung to him in thinning wisps. Ahren imagined the alarms sucking it away, smoke caught in a breeze. He moved between the creepers for the door, bolder than he had believed he could ever be, feeling buoyant and paralyzed at the same time. He felt himself watching his own progress from somewhere outside his body, removed from the act. His thoughts were reduced to a single sequence—get to the Elfstones, take them in hand, summon their power.

He reached the door with the shriek of the alarms ringing in his ears and was surprised when it gave to his touch. The creepers behind him didn’t seem to notice. He stepped into the room, a darkened chamber paneled with banks of blinking lights, tangled wires, and flexible metal cords that cast shadows over everything in inky pools. It was so black in the room that Ahren couldn’t distinguish any of the pieces of apparatus that were scattered everywhere, couldn’t make out the comings and goings of the cords, couldn’t even tell what the room was supposed to be. He groped forward, being careful to touch nothing, picking his way toward the center of the room as his eyes tried to adjust to the abrupt, momentary flashes of illumination.

When they did, he saw the first signs of movement, faint stirrings to one side. He froze instantly, and as he did so he caught sight of something moving to his other side. At first he thought it was nothing more than the shadows that flickered in the dim light, but then with heart-stopping certainty he recognized them. They were creepers. He couldn’t hear their skittering over the blare of the alarms, but even in the absence of that he knew them for what they were. They were all around him, all through the chamber. He had stumbled into their midst before realizing what he was doing.

He held himself as still as he could manage, barely daring to breathe, while he considered his next move. He could not tell how much of the phoenix stone’s magic remained to him; it was too dark to measure what traces remained of its distinct haze. Some, certainly, or the creepers would have had him already. He tried to think, to ignore the alarms and the creepers and the chaos around him, to hear anew the voice that had brought him there.

A second later, he saw the chair. It was big and padded and reclined, and it sat in the center of the room, surrounded by a cluster of freestanding machines. The cords were thickest there, snaking out in every direction, all leading from parts of the chair. There was an odd box set into one armrest to which many of the wires ran, and Ahren recognized it. He had seen the same sort of apparatus in Walker’s prison, siphoning off the Druid magic through his good arm. The chamber Ahren was in was where Kael Elessedil had been drained of the magic of the Elfstones in the same way for almost thirty years. It was the place in which his uncle had wasted his life.

The Elfstones, he knew instinctively and with overpowering certainty, were inside that box.

He moved over to it quickly, sliding through the nests of wires and past the bulky pieces of equipment, praying he couldn’t be detected. The creepers continued to shift position in the open spaces of the room, sidling a few feet this way, then a few that. He could not tell what they were doing. They didn’t seem to be doing anything that mattered. Perhaps they were only sweepers, harmless attendants of the machines rather than sentries and fighters. Perhaps his presence meant nothing to them.

He swallowed against the dryness in his throat, pausing as he passed close to one of them. It was not very big, but it sent a ripple of fear down his spine. He waited for it to turn away, then eased his slender body past, stepped into the maze of wires that surrounded the chair, and knelt next to the mysterious box.

In the flash of panel lights and the muted illumination through the dark glass windows, he peered into the box. He couldn’t see anything but shadows. He wanted to reach inside, but he didn’t like doing that without knowing what waited. Wouldn’t there be restraints of some sort, if that was how the magic was siphoned off? Wouldn’t there be needles of the sort that had been inserted into Walker to keep him connected to the machines? What if it was the trap the little sweeper had been leading him to all along?

But the Elfstones were in that box, not two feet away from his hand, and he had to get them out.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, the alarms went silent and the chamber’s ceiling lights came on. Ahren froze, exposed and unprotected, crouched by the padded chair amid the clustered machines and creepers. The magic of the phoenix stone was gone; the last traces of its concealing haze had vanished. Aware of his presence, the first of the creepers was already turning toward him. The ends of its metal arms lifted to reveal the deadly cutters that marked it as a sentry and fighter.

Ahren glanced swiftly into box, and amid its smoky shadows spied a glimmer of blue.

He thrust his right hand inside and snatched at the Elfstones. He seized the first two as iron bands clamped about his wrist, but the third one skittered away, just beyond his fingertips. A new alarm went off, this one inside the room, a whistle’s shriek of warning. He jammed his left hand into the box, as well, caught hold of the loose Stone, and clasped both hands together as a second set of bands immobilized his left hand. Creepers moved toward him from everywhere, metal legs scraping wildly against the smooth floor, cutters snapping at the air.

Ahren didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know how to summon the power that would save him. He couldn’t even make himself speak as he fought to bring the magic to life.

Please! he begged voicelessly as his hands tightened about the Elfstones. Please, help me!

A needle at the end of a flexible arm flashed past his face. He felt its sting in his left arm, and a slow numbing began to spread outward with languorous inevitability. Metal digits closed about him from every quarter, holding him fast, making him a prisoner. It was happening all over again, he thought frantically, just as it had to Kael Elessedil.

Help me!

As if heeding his silent plea, the Elfstones flared to life within the darkened recesses of their confinement, their blue light so blinding that he closed his eyes against its glare. He felt, rather than saw, what happened next. The restraints on his wrists shattered, and the box was blown apart. The creepers lasted only seconds longer, then the magic caught them up and swept them away, hurtling them against the walls of the chamber and reducing them to scrap. His eyes were opening again when the padded chair exploded. The banks of machinery were shattered, as well, one after the other, engulfed in a sweep of blue light that circled the room and turned everything to useless shards and twisted wire.

Arms outstretched, hands clasped together, fingers tight about the Elfstones, Ahren lurched to his feet. The needle was gone from his arm, but the numbing hadn’t lessened, and it took all his concentration to keep that arm from going limp. He fed it with the power of the Stones, with the peculiarly pleasurable pain they engendered, a burning rush that seared his flesh and left him dizzy. He staggered across the room, the Elfstones’ power incinerating everything, burning it all to molten slag. The dark glass windows blew out, leaving the twisted interior of the room exposed. He saw the massive cylinders that housed the power source become ringed in blinking lights and fire threads that crisscrossed everywhere. He saw the creepers that had taken up watch outside wheel back again to deal with him.

Shades!

He had time for a single desperate exhortation before the juggernauts barreled through the doorway, all sharp edges and brute power. He sent the magic of the Elfstones hammering into the nearest and threw it backwards into the others. He struck it again, then again, advancing on it now, light-headed and humming with the magic’s power. He was transformed by its feel, made new and whole, as if he had never been powerless, as if he had never had to flee from anything. He pursued the creepers with single-minded intent and smashed them one by one, disdaining their cutters and their blades, unafraid of what they could do to him because it seemed now that they could do nothing.

They went down before him like trees caught in a hurricane, ripped out by their roots, toppled and left to die. With a final glance back at the destruction he had visited upon the machines that would have sapped away his life, Ahren Elessedil stalked from the room, consumed by a killing rage.

Antrax became aware of the intruder’s presence only seconds before it felt the ruptures in its metal skin. No pain was involved because it could not feel pain, only a sensation of being opened where it knew it should not. The intruder was the one that had disappeared earlier while in the company of its probe, the one for whom the Stones were intended. Somehow it had found its way to the extraction chamber. Somehow it had gotten hold of the Stones while still aware of who and where it was and had used them against the chamber and its equipment.

Alarms were already triggered all through Antrax’s domain, set off by a power surge generated in the extraction chamber where the earlier intruder had been imprisoned. It had taken Antrax precious minutes to determine the cause of the surge, and by the time it had done so, the earlier intruder was already free of its connectors and gone into the complex. Now there were two of them loose, and either was capable of doing great damage if not stopped.

Antrax spun down its lines of power in milliseconds, gaining the capacitor housing before the latest intruder was in possession of the Stones and free of the extraction chamber. With the alarms shut down again and reset, the immediate danger was to the storage units that housed its lifeblood. Triggering the screen of laser beams that the creators had installed to protect the capacitors against damage, Antrax summoned the strongest of its battle probes to bring this newest intruder to bay. It might not be possible to immobilize it without killing it, but Antrax was prepared to accept that alternative. There would be others that could use the Stones, that could summon their magic, others that could be lured to Castledown. It was more important to protect against damage to the power Antrax had harvested already.

It felt the presence of the intruder moving through the shattered doorway of the extraction chamber to confront the laser beams and the probes that had already responded to its summons. Extraction ports were housed throughout the complex, and Antrax began siphoning off the raw expenditure of the Elf’s power, feeding on it as it left his body. Energy was not to be wasted, whatever its source.

Computer chips processed and analyzed with blinding speed. Antrax was informed and its course of action determined accordingly. The intruders would do battle with its probes in the mistaken belief that they could somehow prevail. They could not. They would simply feed Antrax more of the precious energy it needed, just as they had been meant to do while sedated. Still thinking they had a chance to get free, they would struggle until they were overcome.

Antrax, incapable of emotion, feeling nothing for the humans it hunted, prepared to immobilize and terminate them.