Invoking Darkness Read Free Page A

rest. She narrowed her focus on the nearest structure, and excitement gathered in her throat. The anticipation, the thrill remained as great as the first time.
    With wild intensity, she shrieked out her war cry, her body rushing with the red rapture. Energy blasted firm her mouth in a brilliant torrent. The target was vaporized, replaced with a black, glassy crater. Three of the town's inhabitants ran off through the fields, and Anna turned her attention to them, destruction boiling up into her mouth. Her shriek sliced through them.
    Anna fell upon the town, drawing energy into her mouth, screaming it out in blazing red, swirling in a dizzying dance of death. Then everything was reduced to smoking black ruins, everything but the single being in the single, unremarkable building. She would have liked to destroy it, too.
    "Take us to the landing site, Anna," Elizar said.
    Anna wanted to revel in the ecstasy of victory, to whirl among the clouds. She suppressed her resentment. She preferred to take direction from the Eye, not Elizar. But the Eye had told her that on this trip, once again, she must obey him. He aided in their victory, and by carrying him, she helped to attain victory.
    She passed over the smoking ruins of the town like a shadow, and found the moss-covered rocky plain that overlooked the sea. She landed there, in the mist, and opened an orifice for her passengers. She would be glad to have them out of her, even for just a time. She carried three: the techno-mages Elizar and Razeel, and the telepath Bunny. Though she had carried them a number of times now, she still did not feel comfortable with them inside her, particularly the hated Bunny, whose very presence seemed a threat to Anna. They left her, heading into the mist, and she turned her mind to more important things. It was time for her systems check.
    The machine was so beautiful, so elegant. Perfect grace, perfect control, form and function integrated into the circuitry of the unbroken loop, the closed universe. All systems of the machine passed through her. She was its heart; she was its brain; she was the machine. She kept the neurons firing in harmony. She synchronized the cleansing and circulation in sublime synergy. She beat out a flawless march with the complex, multileveled systems. The skin of the machine was her skin; its bones and blood, her bones and blood.
    She and the machine were one: a great engine of chaos and destruction. The Eye informed her they had won a great victory here today. She and her sisters had found their targets. They had generated vast destruction. The liberators were pleased. A thrill ran through Anna.
    Chaos through warfare, the Eye said.
    Evolution through bloodshed. Perfection through victory. Now they were one step closer to that great, ecstatic triumph. For the planet Soom lay in ruins.
    * * *
    Galen walked the narrow gray corridors of the hiding place. Harsh light shone off the plain, artificial surfaces. The curved passages carried him endlessly around.
    Built in haste on a desolate asteroid, their retreat was too crowded, too close, small rooms packed together in two nested circles. Even in the quiet of early morning, while most still slept, the presence of the other mages pressed at him, and the walls seemed to constrict around him.
    The regulated temperature remained several degrees below his comfort level. He buttoned the long black coat that he wore over sweater and pants. The tech echoed his discomfort. It had been twenty-one months since he had walked outside, since he had felt the wind on his face and smelled fresh air. Those things, he would never do again. Although the others might eventually return to the universe, he would never leave this place.
    He finished one mind-focusing exercise and began another, a mathematical progression. He calculated one element after the next. One. Three. Six. He maintained the exercises from the time he arose in the morning until the time he went to sleep. For the most part, he