Chapter 5

Robin had slept for about an hour when Ledger came back. She could see he was not doing well. The day had been long and hard, even with the unexpected help from Andrew in the shop. She got up and took him in her arms to hug him. The following kiss started them towards a love-making session. Still, Ledger pulled back and asked that they wait until later in the evening. “I need a hot meal and some time to talk to you about our progress today. I also want to know if you had any luck improving your control.” She agreed, and they cleaned up and headed down to the lobby. Rather than take up seating in the busy dining room, they left and headed toward the docks. The fishing fleet had come in, and the fish was fresh.

Robin began by telling him how she had the stones circling her head. “I would get one going, then as soon as I tried to pull a second in, the first fell. It took a few tries until I figured out how to make the stone follow the path; I put it on and continued following it even if I ignored it. I could get twenty stones going before I felt I was reaching a limit.”

Ledger looked at her; his eyes were distant in thought. “You made them follow a set path, and they stayed on it until you pulled it in and down?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied guardedly. She had seen that look before, along with the tone of voice. Ledger was on track to something in his mind. She relaxed when he shook his head and said, “No, that wouldn’t work in the long run.” He looked back up at her, “You were saying?”

Robin sighed with relief, “Well, I had them going until I began to tire, so I brought them down. I could feel each stone in the music. I think it is a different way of tapping into the Weave.”

“I never tried to make stones do what you did, Robin. I never saw a use for it.”

“I am learning to control my voice. You have seen what happens when I don’t control it.”

He winced at the memory of the exploded head. “Yeah, I remember.” He took her hands in his, “Robin, how hard is it to control your voice for a small-scale action, like with the stones today?”

She thought about it, “It’s not so much as hard to do, but a concentration effort. Even when I had a stone doing what I wanted, I could still feel the effort in my mind to keep it going, like when you sing a song in your head without...” She froze as what she said suddenly clarified what had been bothering her. “Ledger?”

“Yes, Robin?” He had seen her freeze, and the sudden light of understanding lighted her face.

“You don’t have to actually do anything to use your skill. You just think about it, and it happens.”

“For the most part, that is pretty much correct.” He watched her face as she began a song in her mind. He scanned around himself and saw dozens of tiny bits of dirt and grit lifted off the floor and flowed to a point a few feet off the floor in the center of the room. Everybody who saw this happening moved out of the way of the moving material. She had a loose ball of stone hanging in the restaurant’s dining room, then began pushing it towards the doors. One of the quicker patrons saw what she intended and opened them. It floated out and settled along the edge of the stormwater ledge.

Robin was sweating hard by then and was close to losing control when it finally broke up along the street. The manager of the day had been watching and came over to thank her for cleaning the floors for him. Sweeping was always a losing battle, he informed them. They paid for their meal, and Ledger led Robin away from the wharves. He didn’t want her to draw unwanted attention to herself. ‘So many new abilities have been popping up lately that things could go badly,’ Ledger thought. He had heard a street rumor that a small group had decided that anybody showing any power was evil and should be destroyed. He hoped it was just that, a rumor without any fact to it.

It took a few minutes for Robin to recover from the effort. They were several blocks away from the docks when she was back with him mentally. Ledger had seen some of the looks they had received as they left, some good, most indifferent, other than the manager who loved the floors being dirt-free for a few hours. He missed the one face that would spell trouble for them. As Ledger and Robin discussed what she had done, they failed to notice a figure staying in the shadows, following them far enough back to be undetected.

“Ledger?” Robin began, “You can make things float, and it seems I can too. The difference is I have to maintain an effort; you set it, and it stays as you want it.”

“I guess so. Most of the time, I just reduce the weight to make things easier to carry.” They continued walking, not noticing the figure closing on them more rapidly.

He didn’t notice that he was being followed as well. A figure in all black was leaping from rooftop to rooftop, staying just over his head, out of sight. When he reached a point the roof hopper felt was too close to the two, he was charged with protecting; the shadow dropped into the next alley and waited for the man to pass. The shadow grabbed him, then jabbed him in the neck with a dart before he could struggle. The now sleeping follower was quickly dragged away and dropped into an open tunnel grating. The overwatch scrambled back up the walls and continued his duty to protect these two. The Lady, Brena, had been most emphatic about their safety. He knew this person would be questioned and dealt with. He had made his feelings about all the new talents in the world publicly known recently. Now, they might know how widespread it was and how dangerous it could prove to be.

Robin was also thinking about an upcoming meeting she was going to have at the Bards as they walked back to the Broken Shield. The Bards had some explaining to do.

Weena

Weene had slowly begun to regain her mind. She started remembering who she was and what had happened to her. She had to make every effort to not be found to be waking up from the mind-numbing drug. She recalled everything that had happened to her since that day; how long ago, she wondered. She knew she had miscarried several times now, and the breeders were not happy about it. She seemed to recall that all the women had lost their unborn at about the same time. Whatever the cause, it had the leaders at the tunnel-clearing camp furious at all the women for failing to bear more children. The talking around her had helped her wake up from the drug-induced mind sleep. None of the women knew what was happening either. She had seen several more of the lizard men in recent weeks. They had been angry at the failure to make the women have babies that would grow to be food for the queen later. Weena couldn’t imagine what the queen of these creatures would be like.

Ice Spine Queen

She floated back through her memories. Her long lifetime carried the memories of those who came before her. She remembered the imprisonment in this world. The builders knew what they had found but didn’t want to be the ones to kill off her species. They revered life, no matter how low. She knew that at least one other queen had escaped from the home realm when those vile bloodsuckers had finally tracked them down. They had used a world burner, leaving nothing but ash on the surface. They knew that the queens lived deep underground. To ensure they had destroyed her entire race, they followed up with a sun-killer device. The old red star exploded and turned the world of her home system to ash in hours. The vampires had used living mind slaves to set the weapons off. She had escaped at the last instant with a few breeder males to a random place via her orbital station’s portal. She didn’t want to risk being followed if they detected her use of a dimensional gateway; the portal self-destructed after her party had emerged at their destination. Her race used science over magic, so the vampires had problems killing her race off. This gave her the advantage in her escape. Unfortunately, she and her brood landed in an already occupied world.

The Builders of Worlds. This race was older than the vampires or her race. They would move from system to system, dimension to dimension. Wherever the Builders went, they left worlds ready to be lived on. The world she had been forced into was considered a flawed bit of work they had no interest in maintaining. They always locked a world in and removed the mind that would set it up when completed. This world and the controller mind were flawed, so they abandoned it and the world. It would make an excellent prison for her kind. The dimension had a few oddities in its laws that made it unsuitable for the Builders to live on. She had quickly discovered the limits placed on her by the Builders. She could own the northern reach, but none of her kind could survive further south of the mountain walls.