Gathering Storm (The Salvation of Tempestria Book 2) - Gary Stringer (read e book TXT) 📗

shoes, bags and jewellery. The smell of food mingled with that of perfume, and the noise was deafening: A million conversations, constant background music, announcements and strange sounds made by technology and gadgets at whose function neither my mother nor Aunt Mandalee could begin to guess.

True to his word, the presence of people from the ‘sci-fi convention’ did seem to provide excellent cover for their Tempestrian clothing and Cat’s half-Faery features. Indeed, there were several people – native humans, they assumed – dressed in outfits far more outlandish than Mandalee’s white leather and Catriona’s red robes. Catriona’s usually feint Faery spots seemed to glow under the strange lighting, but people just thought they were done with make-up. Most of the crowd never even gave them a second glance, although there were a few smiles, and several people asked to perform what the girls assumed must be some kind of religious or cultural ritual known as ‘taking a selfie.’ Keen to fit in with local customs, they saw no reason to refuse. When these people showed them the end result of their ‘selfie,’ Catriona recognised it as a form of photography, but clearly far in advance of what their world had yet developed.

Mandalee was quite happy to soak up the atmosphere and enjoy the experience, while Cat had to restrain herself from continually asking how things worked. She was especially interested to learn that these people had taken Calin’s core concept of making knowledge accessible to all, to a whole new level. They had found a way to make knowledge instantly available from anywhere, as she understood it, by storing all their information in clouds in the sky. The sky that, she realised as she looked through the glass dome in the ceiling, was totally free of void storms.

Catriona filed that away in her mind under ‘things to discuss later.’ For now, she needed to focus on what Daelen was telling them, and his answer to Mandalee’s question definitely brought her mind back down to, well, Earth, she supposed.

Daelen spoke two words, “Heaven’s Surrender.”

“What’s that when it’s at home?” Mandalee wondered.

Whatever it was, Catriona was positive of one thing: it did not sound good. Still, she was momentarily distracted by her friend’s turn of phrase.

“‘When it’s at home’?” she asked, with a puzzled frown.

Mandalee explained that she’d been trying to discreetly listen to snippets of conversations in the crowd, and she’d overheard that expression.

“Did I use it right?” she asked Daelen.

The shadow warrior grinned and nodded.

“Spot on,” he assured her, “and if you’re interested in learning Earth expressions, you’re going to love Jessica. She uses them all the time.”

Bringing the conversation back to more important matters, Mandalee repeated her question.

“So, ‘Heaven’s Surrender’?”

Daelen reminded his friends that Kullos had once been both his people’s Chief Engineer and their greatest Champion.

“Heaven’s Surrender was a weapon he devised in a desperate attempt to win our ongoing war.”

It had been his responsibility to deploy the weapon against their enemy, only their enemy found out about it and took it from him before he could use it. He was severely injured in the process, and while he was evacuated to a medical facility, his shadow warrior unit tried to wrest the weapon from her. The weapon was damaged in the struggle, and a fraction of its power was unleashed. It wasn’t enough to harm their enemy, but the entire two-dozen-strong shadow warrior unit was totally obliterated.

“Any further development on the weapon was banned from that moment on,” Daelen explained. “It was deemed too dangerous.”

“So, how can Kullos use it, if this enemy of yours took the only one?” Mandalee asked.

“Because there was a prototype,” Daelen explained as he continued to guide them around the mall. “There was no known safe way to dispose of it, so it was entrusted to, guess who?”

“Kullos!” his friends chorused.

Daelen nodded. “He kept it safely locked away in his own personal vault.”

“Don’t tell me,” Cat groaned, shutting her eyes and cringing at the thought. “A pocket dimension.”

Again, Daelen nodded. “Right.”

“And with a repaired control device thing, he’ll be able to pull that prototype out of mothballs and use it,” Mandalee deduced. “That’s why you recombined with your dark clone? So, you can get there quick and stop him before he gets all the pieces?”

Daelen shook his head.

“It’s too late for that, isn’t it?” Cat surmised.

Daelen confirmed it.

“He already has enough pieces to activate the weapon; it’ll just be unstable. Trouble is, he’s unstable. If I confront him before his device is complete, he’ll just use the weapon anyway. But if we wait until he does have all the pieces, at least the weapon will be controllable.”

“Oh great, he’ll be in control when he blows us all to bits,” Mandalee sniped.

“My clone and I agreed we’d have only one chance: our recombined power might just be enough for me to take it from him and use it to destroy him, or least the part of him that’s in this mortal plane. Nothing I can do about the rest of him, but if I can re-shatter his control device – assuming it doesn’t blow itself apart anyway, due to Heaven’s Surrender, he will be cut off just like the rest of my people.”

“As you are cut off from them,” Cat realised. Of course, she already knew that Alycia’s Barrier prevented all travel between the mortal realm and the higher planes. She just hadn’t framed the thought in quite that way to see it from Daelen’s perspective. She knew what it was like to lose a home. She was lucky – her ‘Angel’ had given her a new one. “With Kullos gone and you recombined, you’ll be the last of your kind in our world,” she realised, further. “The last living shadow warrior.”

Daelen nodded. “I’ll be alone.”

Cat hugged him tight, tears in her eyes.

“No,” she insisted. “You won’t.”

Daelen smiled, weakly, at the sentiment.

Even Mandalee, though she still wasn’t sure she should trust him, at least felt sympathy and refrained from any remarks about her