The Ashes of Worlds

The faeros come to Theroc along the very link that was meant to join people together. Kolker’s movement has bound green priests’ telink to the Ildiran thism, and the newborn fire elementals race along those threads: Kolker’s converts suffer first, a green priest bursts into flame, and then the fungus-reef city catches. The Teacher compy OX carries baby Reynald out through the fire in a wet blanket, his polymer face smeared with soot, and Estarra snatches her son back; while Theroc burns she shelters with him inside the sealed hydrogue derelict.

The faeros possess the worldtrees themselves, which shine like torches because heartwood will not burn. Celli, Estarra’s youngest sister and now a green priest, fights for them through telink beside Solimar, and her uncle bursts into flame trying to help. Beneto, Estarra’s brother, long since fused with a verdani treeship, rallies the treeships in orbit, and the faeros leap into him too. Then wental thunderheads roll in faster than any wind and rain living water on the fires, while Admiral Willis’s newly arrived crews bombard the torch trees with water. In the end Beneto and the treeships drag the tainted trees up into space, beyond rescue, and Beneto goes with them. Celli shares his last moments through telink and weeps against Solimar’s chest.

Ildira is already lost. Rusa’h, the faeros incarnate, sits in the seared Prism Palace like a coal at the heart of a bonfire, and the faeros demand more soulfires. Mijistra burns. Prime Designate Daro’h, Jora’h’s warrior daughter Yazra’h and Nira’s five half-breed children, Osira’h among them, hide in caves and mine tunnels in the mountains. The boy Ridek’h, Designate of Hyrillka, joins the fugitives with his blinded mentor Tal O’nh.

General Lanyan’s battle group ransacks the Golgen skymines for ekti, with Patrick Fitzpatrick in his hands. Jess Tamblyn and Cesca Peroni, both wental-infused, stand on the smoking ruin of Charybdis and resolve to teach the wentals to fight. Tasia nurses her damaged ship from Llaro to the Roamer shipyards at Osquivel, and Rlinda Kett, now the Confederation’s Trade Minister, flies to Earth under a false call sign. On Earth, Basil watches his Archfather, a former actor, preach Unison, and notices the first doubts in him.

Jora’h was ambushed by Admiral Diente on his way from Theroc and is held with the Ildiran captives on Earth’s Moon. Now Diente parts him from Nira, the only green priest among them; Jora’h touches her cheek one last time, and the admiral takes him alone aboard a warliner, beyond the reach of the thism. Jora’h edges toward catatonia and sets his chamber’s lights to maximum against the dark. Far away in a rock alcove, Osira’h and her four siblings join their minds and find his drifting thoughts: captive, but alive. Held by his daughter’s thread, Jora’h is flown back to Earth, takes Nira in his arms on the landing field and declines the Chairman’s terms.

On Llaro, where Margaret Colicos has been left alone since the colonists’ escape, the new breedex summons her, and the face it assembles out of its countless components is Davlin Lotze’s. Davlin threw himself on the breedex larva in the last book; now some part of him is fighting from inside the hive mind.

“Stay here. Do not let me forget my humanity.”

On Earth, Sarein and Captain McCammon fetch Nira from the Moon to the Whisper Palace so that she can relay news by treeling, and Basil plays his boldest card. The Archfather crowns a young man as King Rory while Basil and Cain watch from a hidden balcony. On Theroc, when the news arrives, Peter turns pale at the name: Rory was his little brother, believed dead with the rest of his family years ago.

At Osquivel, Willis’s eleven ships have their EDF markings blasted off for the Confederation’s. When Lanyan arrives over the rings demanding surrender, Tasia and a reluctant Robb Brindle help drive the EDF off in an embarrassing retreat. Basil sends Diente to Pym to negotiate with the Klikiss, and Sirix, his plans for Relleker ruined by the bugs, turns his robot fleet toward Earth.

At Pym, with a single cruiser and an Ildiran translator taken from Jora’h’s warliner, Diente tries to parley with Klikiss warriors. The translator returns nothing. Expecting to die, Diente feels an odd release, because with him gone there will be no reason to hold his family hostage. He is killed, and Basil keeps it quiet. Sirix reaches Earth, and Basil, sure he can outscheme the black robots, makes a pact: the robots will rebuild damaged EDF ships, and he will give them a hundred new robots for every ship. The robots refit the ships and quietly begin ships of their own.

Patrick and his wife Zhett Kellum visit his grandmother Maureen, the old Battleaxe and once Chairman herself, at her Rocky Mountain mansion. She warms to Zhett, agrees to become the Confederation’s liaison, and lets the couple keep her yacht, the Gypsy, as a wedding gift. Basil orders Admiral Pike to stop her reaching Theroc, and Pike’s Mantas destroy the private yacht carrying her within sight of Theroc as Patrick watches.

On Earth, Sarein, Deputy Chairman Cain and McCammon meet beside a mossy canal and agree that Basil must be stopped, while Basil reviews the tapes of the night Peter escaped. Sent back to the Moon with Nira under McCammon’s escort, Jora’h makes a desperate move: his guard kithmen fight, EDF soldiers cut several down, and McCammon ends it with his ceremonial dagger at Nira’s throat. Colonel Andez’s clean-up crew drags Sullivan Gold’s wife Lydia away as a hostage so that he will take a Hansa post at the Golgen skymines.

Jess and Cesca bring two contained wentals to the Roamer inventor Kotto Okiah to turn into arms, and Orli argues that her synthesizer music once shut down a hive mind and that Kotto should build on it. In the Ildiran caves, the fugitives hit on a weapon nobody wants, the empty orbital shipyards. Ridek’h slips away alone to confront Rusa’h in the Prism Palace; Osira’h and her siblings shield him with thism and telink, and the faeros incarnate cannot take the boy’s soulfire. Lanyan attacks the Klikiss at Pym, where a swarmship opens a pit in its middle like a giant cannon.

The Archfather, writing his own script at last, tells the crowd that Unison has been hijacked, and is assassinated on Basil’s orders. Above Ildira, blind Tal O’nh, alone in the abandoned shipyards, drives the spacedocks and four unfinished warliner frames down onto Mijistra. The Prism Palace, the Hall of Rememberers, the museums and the fountains are vaporized in one fiery flash. Daro’h weeps on a hill, Ridek’h staggers out alive, and Adar Zan’nh’s nine warliners escape. Rusa’h survives his palace.

At Pym, where Willis’s ships are scouring the Klikiss from the surface, Conrad Brindle, Robb’s loyalist father, deliberately puts his Manta in the line of Lanyan’s fire at Willis’s flagship Jupiter, relieves the general of duty and takes the battle group home; Lanyan’s Juggernaut is hit, and the Klikiss swarm over him.

Cain, who has never committed outright murder, hides an automated gun on a rooftop to kill Basil at a public appearance with Sirix. The shots spark off the robot’s black body core, and Basil survives. Eighteen Freedom’s Sword scapegoats are executed in public, and King Rory confirms Conrad Brindle as commander of the EDF. Then Basil confronts Cain, Sarein and McCammon together, and McCammon takes the whole blame:

“It was me. I let the King and Queen escape.”

Sarein cries that he is lying, and Basil has him executed on the spot.

Zan’nh’s Solar Navy raids the lunar base and frees Jora’h, Nira and the Ildiran captives; Sullivan, Lydia and their family escape with them. But Rusa’h has learned from the children that his brother is on the Moon, and he sends a faeros armada. Thousands of fireballs strike, and Earth’s Moon breaks apart.

Lunar fragments rain on Earth: one takes out half of Buenos Aires, two strike the Arctic, one the middle of Australia. Basil, watching from underground, sees Peter’s offer of help as a taunt and a trap. Rememberer Vao’sh, isolated on Earth and cut off from the thism, poisons himself, and tells Anton the choice is his own.

Rlinda, who flew alone to Llaro to find Davlin, leaves aboard BeBob’s Blind Faith with Margaret, who wants to reach Anton. Nikko Chan Tylar and his father Crim fly the Aquarius to icy Jonah 12, find Jess’s marooned uncle Caleb, and run from nine fireballs. Patrick and Zhett broadcast Freedom’s Sword messages from Maureen’s mansion, including footage of Pike’s Mantas killing her. Robb, now a commodore, escorts his father aboard the Jupiter, and Conrad half admits he was wrong.

At Golgen, where Kotto has brought wental weapons to Del Kellum’s skymine and the freed Jora’h has come with his Solar Navy, Osira’h, over her father’s protest, goes down into the clouds in the hydrogue derelict to call up the hydrogues once more. The warglobes rise shrouded in glittering wental mist against the faeros, and Jess and Cesca, as wental avatars, meet Rusa’h’s fireball.

Peter and Estarra come to the Whisper Palace and meet King Rory face to face. Peter watches for a flicker of recognition and gets none, and needles Basil about his rumoured underground bunker. On Theroc, Roamer water bearers come home with restored wental seedpools, and the worldtrees and the warrior wentals hit on a new weapon: treelings sealed inside bubbles of living water. Cain prepares to cross his Rubicon.

With Basil away to meet Peter, Cain frees the hostage families of Admirals Diente, Pike and San Luis, frees Patrick and Zhett, and puts Andez on notice. Aboard the Jupiter, Basil demands that Peter abdicate, with a reminder that he holds Estarra’s sister Sarein as well; but Sarein is already fleeing Earth, leaving Basil a recorded last message. Basil comes home to find Cain gone and the freed families denouncing him on the newsnets.

Then the Klikiss come. Eleven swarmships halt outside the rubble zone of the broken Moon, and Sirix flees with forty-two robot ships and fourteen stolen EDF vessels. Basil flies out to the swarm with Margaret and Anton, told on the way by Admiral Pike that he has no hold over the admirals any more, and finds that the One Breedex is the Davlin-breedex, which means to sterilize Earth for cooperating with its enemies. Two swarmships hunt down Sirix’s fleeing ships and blast them to scrap; Basil had hidden microscopic booby traps in the new robots. The robots, it turns out, had their own: the EDF ships they repaired begin to explode, one after another.

Peter lands a Manta in the Palace District, and demonstrators fill the plazas. Andez orders her troops to shoot the King, and they hesitate. In the Throne Room, Rory steps down from the throne and sits on the dais steps, and Willis broadcasts Peter on the throne. On dead Llaro, Kotto’s Klikiss Siren gives off its drone and the Klikiss freeze like short-circuited robots; inside the swarmship over Earth, the breedex mass quivers and shuts down.

At Ildira, Zan’nh’s warliners return shielded by cocoons of wental water as the faeros pour out of all seven suns, and Daro’h rallies the refugees back toward Mijistra. Jora’h orders Zan’nh to take him down to Mijistra, whatever is left of it. In the ruins Rusa’h comes to face his brother:

“His flesh was molten, his hair twisted like thick smoke, his eyes novas”

The children, Nira’s treeling, the worldforest and the wentals join in a shield, and Jora’h demands that the stolen soulfires be freed.

Basil walks out of the frozen swarmship and storms into the Throne Room with five of his clean-up crew to arrest Peter. He orders Conrad Brindle to use the guillotine codes, and every ship Willis took from the EDF goes dead in space, though not BeBob’s Blind Faith. When Basil threatens Brindle’s wife, Natalie, Brindle refuses him. Basil turns on Rory, who cries that Peter can have the throne; then the Chairman draws a weapon on the King. OX makes his own body a barricade in front of Peter, and at the foot of the dais Cain draws McCammon’s ceremonial dagger and stabs Basil in the heart.

Brindle cancels the codes and formally surrenders to Willis. Basil’s funeral is subdued and poorly publicized; nobody weeps, Sarein stays away, and his boardroom portrait names him the last Chairman of the Terran Hanseatic League. Peter keeps Rory on, King Rory for good or bad, and Cain suggests some ceremonial role; the young man seems mostly relieved that he no longer has to be afraid. Cain, rather than seeking power, wants more classic paintings for his Velázquez collection. OX, his purged memories restored from data Cain saved, stands at the King’s side.

On Ildira, Jora’h stands restored as Mage-Imperator over the ruins of Mijistra, with Daro’h as his Prime Designate. Rusa’h is left a mere shell, and someone Jora’h does not expect asks to take him away. The faeros are sealed back inside their stars, their transgates closed by the wentals and the verdani, balance rather than destruction as Nikko reads it. Nira takes her children back to Dobro aboard the Voracious Curiosity and finds the fences gone and the breeding barracks burned down.

Margaret goes back to the hive and finds Davlin in full control. Only the Klikiss nearest the One Breedex at Earth stayed functional; the rest fell into hibernation, and that sudden attrition let him take the hive mind for good. She tells him he may have saved them all. The Davlin-breedex shares the Klikiss story songs with her and Anton, then leads its hive through a transportal to a world of grey cliffs and steaming geysers:

“I do not expect to meet any of my old race for thousands of years.”

On Theroc, Celli and Solimar marry as treedancers. DD stays with Orli, who takes him to visit an old woman, Dahlia, who knew him long ago. Sullivan and Lydia settle into a new home. Jess and Cesca, the wentals gone from them, are ordinary Roamers again; the wentals touch their minds one last time to say that balance has been achieved, and Cesca presses a hand against her belly. The two visit the ruins of Rendezvous, then fly to Theroc, where Peter relaunches the government of humanity as a truly unified Confederation, with Estarra holding Reynald up to witness it. Peter takes her free hand for the last words of the saga:

“Together, we build a new future for all, and together we can achieve the impossible.”

The sequel trilogy, The Saga of Shadows (Tor, 2014–16), opens twenty years later with that Confederation governing humanity and the exiled Klikiss robots finding an ally in the Shana Rei, creatures of darkness. Among the faces it brings back is Nira’s half-breed son Gale’nh, captain of an Ildiran exploration ship.