Year of the Black Rainbow Read online

  Year of the Black Rainbow

  THE AMORY WARS

  Year of

  the Black Rainbow

  Claudio Sanchez

  with PETER DAVID

  EVIL INK

  NEW YORK, NY, USA

  Copyright 2010

  To my family, who with their patience and understanding have nurtured my will, determination and wild imagination.

  My wife, Chondra, whose love and help cannot be measured. My music and concepts are riddled with you. Here We Are Juggernaut.

  Blaze James, my friend and manager, whose help facilitates my crazy ideas. Don't know where I'd be without you.

  To the Children of the Fence who have allowed me to do these things I do. You'll never know the depths of how much I appreciate you.

  And Mr. Peter David who has helped bring this chapter of the mythos to life. Without you, I'm sure I wouldn't have written past Page 10. Thank you, sir.

  --Claudio Sanchez

  Prologue

  1. Obscurity Has No Hero

  2. Cleanse This Useless Identity

  3. Guns of Summer

  4. The Worst These Worlds Will See

  5. Torn to Pieces

  6. The Black Rainbow

  7. Give Us the Monster

  8. A Wretched Design

  9. The Same Old Story

  10. Magicians

  11. The World of Lines

  12. Pearl of the Stars

  13. Made Out of Nothing

  14. Everything You Love

  15. While You Were Sleeping

  16. All Falls Apart

  17. In the Flame of Error

  18. This Shattered Symphony

  19. New in Town

  20. When Skeletons Live

  21. I'll Be Your Ghost

  Epilogue

  Year of the Black Rainbow

  Prologue

  In the beginning, the universe held nothing but cold, obscure darkness and a longing for something greater than itself.

  Then light fractured shadow, thus spawning many worlds, each as magnificent as the next. They spun out across the cosmos, far too many to be named, and many of them doomed to obscurity. But of particular interest was a unique system comprised of seventy-eight planets, aligned in a triangle, with each planet bound together by a beam of blue light known collectively as the Keywork.

  In all other systems of the universe, life was a scarce commodity. But in this system, life thrived on every single one of the worlds, perhaps because the Keywork nurtured them in a way that no other force in the cosmos possibly could. Whence came that life was an issue of debate, although its origins were detailed in mystic books considered to be God’s first-person testimonial. To believe those words was to be at peace, for the vast game of reality made perfect sense if one accepted that the hand of God was maneuvering all the pieces. But not believing in God meant that matters were more…

  …problematic.

  Along with this celestial triangle came its division and rule. Twelve sectors were appointed and given equivalent power. The system they comprised was named Heaven’s Fence, although, again, who might have named it remained an unresolved matter of perpetual contention.

  Beyond ensuring planetary stability, the Keywork served as a bridge between the planets and their main energy sources: The Stars of Sirius. The stars were so named since they had been discovered, written about, and ultimately comprehended by one Sirius Amory, who postulated the Keywork was generating the essential elements needed to sustain life on all the planets.

  There were three main inhabitants of the Fence:

  The worker bees of the colonies, Man, spent their days tilling the soil, growing the crops, building the machines and helping them to work.

  Then there were the Mages with their gray skin and horned shoulder blades. More than mortal were they, although less than gods, for they could be hurt and killed, although it was not an easy endeavor. Mages were born to rule, and there was one positioned to govern each of the twelve sectors. As was consistent with the mysterious origins of Heaven’s Fence, there was no central, agreed-upon recollection of how the Mages had come to acquire their position in the grand scheme of things. They simply knew that they had always been there and always would be. The Mages came from different sources; some were born fully formed, as it were, pure in their lineage, while others had the potential but needed to be nurtured. In the end, though, they were nearly indistinguishable, one from the other, all equal in their potency.

  Finally there were the Prise. Just as the Mages kept watch over mortals on the ground, the Prise maintained rule over the air, appearing to the naked eye as blue-skinned, golden tressed women with great wings mounted upon their shoulders. They were eternally burdened with the crucial responsibility of guarding the Keywork. God -- or what they believed to be God, and that too was a matter of conflict for some—had given them strict orders in the course of their creation:

  “If Man should decide to dabble in my affairs, then guardians must intervene. But, should I come forth to change the face of Man with you there to challenge me, then I shall return with the stars to destroy all I have made. Whether Man or I present that danger will not be told in the coming.” The Prise spent their days in fear of this riddle and their abilities to decipher it if and when the need should arise; they were afraid they would get it wrong and wind up challenging God himself.

  So was it written in the Ghansgraad, the book purportedly scribed by God Himself…although again, as might be expected amongst people who wielded free will, there were some who disputed that belief as well. Most such unbelievers could safely be ignored.

  One of them, however, could not.

  We will speak more of him shortly.

  Somewhere in the Middle…

  Chapter 1

  Obscurity Has No Hero

  The Howling Earth was aptly named; that much was beyond dispute. Why it howled, on the other hand, was a matter of very active discussion.

  The theologically minded saw the hand of the Lord in everything that existed throughout the entirety of the Keywork, which linked all the worlds of Heaven’s Fence into one great, vast, triangular whole. They claimed that the Howling Earth was the province of the eternally damned. That there had been those who, throughout the lengthy and occasionally muddied history of the Fence, had sought to attain power that was on par with that of the creator Himself. In punishment for their defiance, their souls (their bodies having been reduced to floating bits of dust) had been exiled to the Howling Earth, there to serve as eternal examples of what happened when one aspired for a station that was hopelessly beyond one’s reach.

  Then there were those of a more scientific bent. They would have been the first to tell you that such legends were nothing more than fanciful nonsense. They would say that the Howling Earth’s perpetually mournful state was simply a combination of the planet’s unique atmosphere, its position in its particular sector relative to other worlds in the Fence, and its terrain and the exact manner in which the many mountain ranges that dotted its surface were arrayed. There had been an entire dissertation entitled, “The Myth of the Howling Earth” which had resulted in much head nodding in the scientific community and screams like unto the damned from the religious community. The author of the text had been excommunicated, which would have bothered him had he gone to church anytime within the last three decades.

  And there were a few who did not purport to know the whys and wherefores of the Howling Earth’s origins, but shared one conviction: that ever since a particular ebony celestial phenomenon had made its presence known, the voices were howling louder than ever.

  Coheed had no idea which was the truth and which was the fiction. It had been his experience
that reality typically lay somewhere between the two. Nor did he ponder the volume relative to the aforementioned phenomenon that hovered high above. He preferred to leave such considerations to Cambria.

  At this moment, Coheed was lying flat on his stomach on top of a mountain outcropping that gave him a fine view of the valley spread out below. He wasn’t pondering the nature of the incessant wind and its howling accompaniment so much as he was pissed off that it was blowing his thick black hair into his eyes and little bits of debris into his patchy beard. He kept shoving his hair back, then shaking his head like a dog shedding water to get the dirt out.

  There was a soft chuckle from next to him. Cambria was studying the valley through a pair of binoculars, and yet somehow she had managed to see his obvious annoyance with her peripheral vision.

  “What’s so funny?” said Coheed.

  “Hard to say. I’m torn between your pathetic grooming antics, or that poor excuse for a beard.” Her voice was soft and melodious; when she spoke it almost sounded as if she were singing. He loved listening to her speak. He could do so for hours. Coheed had never said as much, though, because it sounded…well…

  “Like romantic nonsense?”

  He fired an annoyed look at her. “You were in my head.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “You were. You were poking around just now.”

  “My abilities don’t work that way.” She continued to study the landscape but the edges of her mouth were tweaked into a small smile. “And besides, even if I were in there, there’d be plenty of room for me since there’s not a lot else going on in there.”

  “Oh, ha ha.”

  “Plus if I did read your mind, it’s just a light read—“

  “I get it, okay? I get it. You’re smart, I’m not.”

  She looked away from the binos for a moment. “You’re smart, Co. Just about different things.”

  “Like?”

  She considered it, and then shrugged. “No clue. I’ll get back to you.”

  “Seriously, Cam, you—“

  “Shut up.”

  “—can be such a—“

  She clamped one hand over his mouth. “Seriously, shut up.”

  Coheed mumbled something.

  “What?” she said with impatience, and then remembered and removed her hand from his mouth.

  “I said, ‘What have you got?’”

  “Look for yourself.” She handed him the binoculars and he gazed through them.

  At first he didn’t see it, but then he spotted it. Or, more correctly, spotted them.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said under his breath.

  “Quite possibly you and me both, but that’s a problem for another day,” said Cambria. “Maybe you should report in--”

  Coheed was ahead of her. Activating his comm unit, he said, “Grail Arbor? This is Coheed.”

  A voice crackled back over the unit. “This is Grail Arbor. Inferno here. Go ahead, Beast.”

  Coheed and Cambria exchanged looks, Cambria slightly rolling her eyes. “You’re the only one who calls me that, Inferno. You know that, don’t you? What’s wrong with ‘Coheed’’?”

  “I could answer that in detail, but we don’t have that kind of time.” From anyone else, it would have come across as a joke. In the case of Inferno, Coheed knew that he was perfectly serious. “You have something to report?”

  “We might have found something.”

  “Specify.”

  “Looks to be miners of some sort. About five of them. They came out of a door that was carved right out of a mountainside.”

  “There’s nothing to mine on the Howling Earth,” said Inferno. “Nothing of any value, at any rate. Plus there are no scientific mining expeditions slated for this world.”

  “That leaves military,” said Cambria. “They could be part of the MMC, the Military Mining Corp. Typically they don’t wear uniforms. They like to stay low profile. Doesn’t make them any less dangerous, though.”

  “How large a door?”

  “What do you mean?” said Coheed.

  He could hear a growl of impatience. “How large is the opening they’ve created?”

  Coheed looked to Cambria, his eyebrows arched. Cambria studied it and then said, “At a guess…five by ten meters.”

  “Large enough to fit equipment through.”

  “What sort of equipment?”

  “Digging equipment. Mining equipment.” He paused. “Sizable weapons. Could be some sort of underground weapons facility.”

  “A weapons facility wouldn’t explain the low level of Keywork bonding,” said Cambria. “That is why we’re here, after all. The level of the bonding has been diminishing rapidly. If this keeps up, the Howling Earth could break off from the Fence.”

  “God forbid that should happen,” said Coheed sarcastically. “This being such a popular vacation spot and all.”

  Cambria fixed him with a look. With that look. The look that said, I know you’re a smart guy. Why do you say dumb things sometimes? “If this world broke loose of the Fence…”

  “Then it could start a chain reaction that would send every planet crashing into every other planet, yeah, I get it,” said Coheed.

  “Which—assuming that the individuals you’re watching are somehow involved with that—means one of two things. Either whoever is behind this believes that they are precise enough to drain just enough Key energy without endangering the entire Works, or else—“

  “Or else,” Cambria said, interrupting Inferno, “whoever’s doing it doesn’t care about the integrity of the Fence.”

  “What would happen?” said Coheed. He was trying to imagine such an eventuality. “If that were to come about, I mean. Would they fall into orbit around the stars of Sirius? Would they survive? What…?”

  “We don’t know,” said Cambria. “Nobody knows for sure.”

  “I am all in favor of not finding out,” came Inferno’s voice.

  “Agreed.” Cambria looked to Coheed. “So…best if we go take a look.”

  “Excellent. Let’s kick some ass.”

  He began to raise his arm, but Cambria gently put her hand on his forearm. He looked at her questioningly. “I think,” she said gently, “we can hold off on the ass kicking to start. We can at least try for subtlety.”

  “It’s not as if they know who you are,” said Inferno. “There will be plenty of time to take direct offensive action if it’s subsequently deemed necessary.”

  “Sometimes,” said Coheed, “you two just suck the fun out of any situation.”

  “There is nothing fun about the destruction of the Keywork.”

  “Fine, whatever you say,” and he lowered his arm. “The subtle approach it is.”

  “Good. If I don’t hear from you within the hour, I’m going to come in with guns blazing.”

  “It’s nice to know you care.”

  “It is less about caring than it is making certain that the mission is accomplished. Still…” he paused and then added, “Be careful, Cambria. You too, Coheed.”

  “Thanks for that, brother,” said Coheed, unable to keep the smile from his face. But the moment that Inferno broke the communication, the seriousness returned. “All right then, Cam. Subtle. Except I don’t do subtle so good. So what’s the plan? We can’t just walk right up to them.”

  “Can you fly?”

  “Uhm…no.”

  “Then walking it is.”

  “Cam, wait—!”

  She utterly failed to wait. Instead she backtracked, heading for the narrow path they had taken that wended through the low mountain and enabled them to reach the overlook they’d been using for observation. Realizing that she wasn’t going to stop anytime soon, Coheed followed her. He made loud, impatient noises to convey his annoyance to her. She ignored him. He had noticed that she was quite adept at ignoring him when she felt like it.

  Minutes later, they were in the valley and heading toward the miners. Cambria was walking slightly ahead of him, with
a relaxed stride that was accentuating the sway of her narrow hips. Her long black hair swept back and forth along her back. She might have been out for a stroll on the beach. Coheed realized that that was exactly the look she was going for. He tried to look as casual as she, minus of course the swaying hips. In doing so, Coheed appeared exceedingly awkward in his efforts to appear relaxed. After a few steps he gave up and settled for his normal pace. He doubted it was going to present a problem, since their gazes would doubtlessly be fixed on Cambria.

  He was, as it turned out, correct.

  The miners had gathered in front of the entrance and seemed to be speaking with each other very animatedly. Apparently something had happened that was prompting a good deal of discussion. Two of them were nodding their heads, two were shaking them, while the fifth—the largest and, presumably, the leader—was watching the two sides and seemingly assessing what the others were saying. So invested in their conversation were the miners that Coheed and Cambria had covered half the distance between them before they were noticed. It was the leader who did so, and he pointed with one hand while gesturing with the other for the miners to fall silent.

  Coheed noticed that one of the miners’ hands was drifting toward the inside of the loose work jacket he was wearing. A word from the leader prompted the miner to withdraw, but Coheed immediately interpreted the gesture to mean that the miner was going for a gun. Coheed’s eyes narrowed and he felt his pulse beginning to surge. When faced with a dangerous situation, typical humans had to wrestle with their fight-or-flight impulses. The “flight” half of the equation was not in Coheed’s makeup. Upon seeing a potential threat, Coheed wanted nothing more than to charge straight at the enemy. But he reined himself in because he was willing to trust Cambria’s means of handling the situation.

  “Hiiiii!” called Cambria cheerily. “Are you guys in charge here? We are so lost.”