Morden retreated into the meeting room, hand clutched to his chest. Galen turned on the small group of Drakh. He had only seconds before the others caught up to him. The equations flowed out. At the far end of the tunnel, each Drakh was captured within a sphere of darkness. Each Drakh crumbled inward to nothingness.
The implosions split the air with a barrage of sound, then left them in sudden, deafening silence. Only a handful of smooth, scooped formations in the floor marked where the Drakh had stood. John looked up and down the seemingly empty tunnel, his expression a mixture of horror and confusion.
Galen spoke into the silence.
"There is one techno-mage fighting with you. Wait three minutes before you act. Now run."
Galen turned as the first shot of the coming onslaught burned past him toward John. It was the last shot they fired. Equations poured down the screen in his mind's eye, burned through him.
The conjury was effortless, destruction flowing from him like a symphony. He was alive, incandescent, both seized with energy and surging with it. He crushed them in clumps, crushed them as fast as they came, crushed them until they were utterly destroyed. More spheres wanted to form. They wanted to blaze out of him until they encompassed everything. He wanted that too.
He was shaking, overloaded, accelerated. His heart pounded, his mind running with exercise upon exercise, his body burning with the endless, merciless energy. He squeezed the fist of his will around him, the suffocating tunnel narrowing, blocking out the pestilence that he was, and the destruction that he wanted, tightening its grip around his dark heart until all that existed were the numbers, and the letters, and the necessity to be still.
And then, through the heavy gauze of silence, he heard the thump of a plasma gun firing. His leg slid out from under him, and he fell forward, slammed into the smooth scoops that covered the tunnel floor. Morden's hard, even footsteps approached him.
"You belong to us, Galen. Flesh must do what it's told. Or it will die."
"I'll handle this," Elizar said.
Galen lifted his head, saw Elizar's glistening black form move past him. He struggled to rise. There was no pain – the blazing heat of destruction blocked it – but his leg would not move. He conjured a platform beneath himself. Equation of motion. He slipped ahead. Elizar's foot slammed down on his ankle, pinning him in place.
"I can see you. Though I am impressed that you discovered the spell."
The platform slipped out from beneath Galen. Galen dissolved it, relinquished his camouflage. He wanted to crush Elizar more than he had ever wanted anything in his life. The equation was ready to form; the tech was eager to form it. Yet Elizar would evade the spell.
"It's time to pay for all you've done," Morden said.
"It's time to learn who your masters are."
Elizar knelt beside Galen, conjured a platform beneath them. He laid a hand on Galen's back, and the Shadow skin flowed out from his fingers, gripping Galen like a giant hand. The platform carried them back the way Galen had come.
"You don't want to miss the last secret of the techno-mages. You're going to love this one."
At least Elizar was taking him toward the parapet. There he must escape, reach the Eye. He had less than two minutes.
"I know how the tech is made," Galen said.
"How can you plan to rebuild the mages, when the price of every mage is the death of another?"
"In time," Elizar said, "we shall find another way to make the tech. But that's not the secret of which I spoke."
The light increased as they emerged onto the parapet. Elizar raised them up over the wall and sped them across the great cavern. They passed over the towers and buildings of the city within the city, the gaping abyss beside it.
Elizar was taking him far end, where the pit of squirming machine people carried out the work of the Eye.
Galen suddenly wondered if the Eye contained some hidden weapon. Elizar had tried to bring him close to it before, in their initial confrontation. Was this part of the Shadows' plan for him?
A shrill screech sounded through the open space, and a shadow fell over him. He turned his head. Above, haloed by the skylight, Razeel hovered, wearing her mask of Shadow skin and illusion.
She had not been entirely successful in moving Galen's spheres of destruction. One arm was only a stub, and a hemisphere had been scooped out of her side. Though glittering skin had apparently sealed the wounds, the action had not been instantaneous. Dried sprays and trails of blood stained her sides. She should be unconscious, near death.
In the heat of battle, though, the tech would keep her going as long as it could, to allow her to be as destructive as possible. Just as it kept him going. A rippling black cylinder took shape in the air beside her.
Galen would not give her the chance to use it. He focused on her, and the spheres boiled eagerly out of him. He covered Razeel, turned his attention to Elizar. The spheres flew from Elizar as fast as Galen could cast them. As one after another they imploded, a quick fire series of claps boomed through the cavern.
With the collapse of one sphere, Razeel's thigh crumpled into nothingness, and the bottom of her leg fell away. Razeel screeched, blood spattering over Galen. Her dark cylinder swooped down, its top blooming open, revealing a mouth of pure blackness. It swallowed him headfirst. The frigid blackness flowed over him, undulating down his body, sucking out his heat, his energy.
The brilliant incandescence dimmed; his heart stumbled. Then the cylinder vanished. Panting, dazed, he clung to the countdown in his mind. Sixty-five seconds.
"Go," Elizar said.
And then Galen was falling. Far below was the churning pit of the Eye. Galen tumbled downward, the time ticking away. The pit was miles deep, at least, and filled with machine people; how could he destroy it all in time, when crushing only one had disabled him? He could not.
He had sensed an intelligence in the Eye, whispering to him, reveling in the joy of destruction. The Eye was not some collective creation of machine people acting in mindless synchrony; there was an Anna at the center of this machine, coordinating, directing. He needed to find that intelligence, to find the heart of the Eye, to strike there.
The Shadows had wanted Elizar to bring him to the Eye. Perhaps they believed it could overwhelm him, turn him. But he would relinquish control to no being, no power. They didn't know the extent of his control. Galen did. He had learned. And he knew. He knew how to hold himself in control.
He smacked face-first into the squirming mass of machine people. They grabbed on to him, drawing him below the surface, pressing into him, engulfing him in blackness.
Legs, arms, bodies churned, their Shadow skin hot and slick. The closeness made him want to strike out, to fight his way back to the surface. He felt as if he were drowning; he couldn't breathe. But the machine people, he realized, were breathing.
Galen conjured the Shadow skin over himself, and suddenly air was filling his lungs. Then the black light of the Eye pierced him, its latest addition, and the whispers infected him.
Chaos is the way to strength.
Chaos is the engine powering life.
Chaos finds its fullest expression in times of war.
In war all are put to the test.
In war those unfit are exterminated.
Only in bloodshed can true progress be made, can promise be realized.
His tech rose in sympathetic vibration with the Eye, echoing those whispers, his energy blooming anew in a great rush of heat.
He remembered Razeel's thigh crumpling, her leg dropping away. The Drakh in the tunnel pin wheeling into nothingness, or collapsing into a pulpy mass, crushed in the fist of his will. Elizar smiling, hand cupped to his mouth, sending Galen's spheres away as fast as they came. That task still remained. Elizar could not escape him. Not again.
You must have revenge,
the Eye said.
You must have justice.
The urge rose up in Galen.
Conjure a platform, push himself out of this pit, pursue Elizar, chase him through every tunnel on Z'ha'dum if he had to, never mind John or the White Star or anything else.
Destroy Elizar.
Destroy it all.
Destroy it himself.
It would feel so much better that way. Forty seconds. Galen drew his exercises tighter around him, withdrew down the tunnel that they created, blocking out the whispers of the Eye, the eager burning of the tech, telescoping his attention on the task at hand, on finding the heart of the Eye. He reached out with his sensors. In his mind's eye, the energy of this organic machine appeared all around him, in shifting, crisscrossing ropes of dirty yellow, a complex web connecting these machine people, pulsing lighter and darker.
Through his organelles, he'd seen his own tech pulsing a similar gold. As he scanned deeper, the lines of the web converged, the energy growing to dazzling intensity. There was the heart. He twisted so his head pointed downward, conjured a platform above his feet, and propelled himself farther into the pit, arms extended like a diver.
If there was a way to destroy the Eye, he would find it. If there was a secret yet to be learned, he would learn it. He pushed the platform faster and faster, and the machine people cleared the way, sucking him deeper.
Thirty-five seconds. Thirty.
The web grew denser, its center drawing closer, waxing brighter, like a jaundiced sun. Around this nexus, machine people packed tightly, limbs interlocked, unmoving. Yet they shifted aside what little they could, and he approached the dazzling, pulsing orb.
Here was the master who had instructed Anna in chaos, who sent the Shadow ships on missions of mass destruction, who drove the machine people in mindless obedience, who spread the Shadows' pestilence with every whispering breath-the source of the infection, the shadow at the heart of the Shadows.
Galen focused on his target – and received a message, written in the runes of the Shadows. He translated.
At last you have come,
Wierden wrote.
You must take my place.
C
HAPTER 18
Sheridan fled through dark stone tunnels, while inside him, Kosh rose up out of hiding to the surface of his mind. There, a countdown took place.
One hundred ten.
One hundred nine.
One hundred eight.
The seconds remaining to Sheridan's life. Still he searched for a way back to his shuttle, but all ways were blocked to him. All but one. The enemy drove Sheridan into a trap. When that trap closed around him, he would call down the White Star. If the fabulist Galen had done what his words to Sheridan suggested, the Eye would be unable to stop it. Sheridan and much of the enemy stronghold – would be destroyed.
Such a thing had not happened since the ancient agreement had been reached, since the forces of chaos and order had stopped their direct attacks upon each other. It hardly seemed possible.
The war had recurred countless times. Usually its course, its players, were clear. With their disciplined reasoning, Vorlons foresaw much before it actually occurred.
For the first time, Kosh felt the universe falling into uncertainty. He had not expected Galen's path to cross with Sheridan's. If they were successful, the consequences of Z'ha'dum's destruction were unclear. Although many would be killed, the major portion of the enemy's fleet was elsewhere.
Their attacks would continue, would become more vicious and desperate. And with Sheridan gone, the alliance would degenerate into chaos. Kosh feared, too, what the Vorlons would do once they saw the damage that had been inflicted upon the maelstrom.
Those who longed for the extermination of the enemy, their allies, and every trace of their influence, would be encouraged, would feel this was the chance for victory, at last. But any escalation of the war would bring to the younger races only suffering and death. The first casualty would be Sheridan.
Yes, some must be sacrificed, so that all could be saved. Already Kosh had given his life. Did Sheridan have to die as well? The Human had done so much, had come so far. He struggled so with his responsibility, and he had succeeded so well. Kosh did not want him to die.
Sheridan did not want to die either. He had learned, at last, the truth of the war. The ancient enemy had twisted the facts to their own advantage, of course, but in essence what they told him was true. Sheridan was disgusted and infuriated at the actions of both order and chaos. When Sheridan's thoughts dwelled on that, Kosh wanted to strike out at his impudence. At the same time, though, Kosh felt shame at how far he and the others had strayed from their purpose, at how much harm they had brought to the younger races in their attempts to help them reach their full potential.
Sheridan believed he might now have the knowledge to stop the war, once and for all. He would die, though, before he could put that knowledge to use.
Kosh had hoped to sense another one here, an ancient presence with the power to help Sheridan. Kosh's memories of the First One were eons old, but still Kosh knew him as a figure of wisdom. Lorien had been shunned by the Vorlons for his independence of thought, revered by the maelstrom as the first to defy order. Yet he did not embrace chaos either. He had tried, long ago, to mediate between them.
At the time, Kosh had found Lorien's refusal to choose a side maddening; only now did he realize the First One's great foresight in anticipating the ultimate results of their conflict. With his limited abilities, Kosh did not sense Lorien. He lived deep inside the planet, and had not emerged, so far as Kosh knew, for many millennia. He had been important to the ancient enemy, a guiding beacon, when they were young. Still he was important to them as part of their heritage, though Kosh believed Lorien had faded into little more than a legend. Perhaps he had left this place.
If he was here, he would not interfere – not after all these years. He had withdrawn from the war. It was not his war. It was not his fault. Kosh could find no cause for hope. He could communicate with Sheridan, if he was prepared. As Sheridan had comforted him in the moment of his death, so he might do the same. It was only seventy-four seconds away.