Rift in the Races, page 66
part #2 of Galactic Mage Series
The Queen nodded that this last part would be true, but it was such a trifle it hardly made a difference. However, she was not without mercy either. Orli was presenting her with an option she hadn’t considered before. And Thadius, idiot that he was, did have a touch of royal blood. The gods did not take lightly to the spilling of it, no matter how thin it might run, or how she might equivocate about how she herself would not technically be the one spilling it when Thadius landed on Duador or String. It was not a precedent she liked setting either.
“You may make your case to the fleet,” she said at length. “I’ll have Thadius taken to the dungeons on Citadel and arrange for you to accompany me when I go. I’ve been advised recently that your old ship, the Aspect, has just completed a successful attack on the Hostile home world. I intend to be there to congratulate Peppercorn and Captain Asad when they get back.”
Orli, at first relieved that she had a chance to save Thadius, became suddenly horrified. “An attack?”
“Yes. One of your exploding devices has been enchanted with my new anti-magic. It worked famously, according to reports. We intend to enchant as many of them as your people need, and both our worlds will be done with the Hostile problem for good.”
Orli staggered back, her jaw dropping. She clutched at her chest where her heart seemed to have stopped beating. “You can’t have. Please tell me it isn’t so.”
“My dear, it is so. This war will be over in less than a score of days.”
Orli’s pale flesh became even more so as blood drained from her face. Blue Fire would think that Orli had lied. She’d think she’d betrayed her.
“Did she even fight back?” Orli asked. “Did she even try to defend herself?”
“Who, child?”
“Blue Fir—the Hostile world. Did she do anything at all to prevent the attack?”
“Why no, Miss Pewter. That was the entire point. The Hostiles rely on magic to see everything, it seems. So, they mustered not one bit of defense. They never saw it coming. Which is why this victory will be swift and effortless. All the sacrifice is behind us now.”
“What sacrifice? You haven’t lost a thing. You haven’t lost a single soldier in this war. How can you not see?”
“They attacked our allies, your people, and have killed thousands of them already. And there is the small matter of them having eradicated the population of an entire world.” She smiled sarcastically. “What else do I need to see?”
“She didn’t defend herself because I told her we would stop.”
“Well, if we entertain your delusion for a moment, that was foolish on your part, wasn’t it? What could possibly have made you think you had that kind of authority? Did it not occur to you that was the sort of thing to bring to me?”
Orli started to speak again, to point out the Queen wouldn’t have believed her, but the Queen waved her off.
“Miss Pewter, I’ve indulged you long enough. You need medical care. My doctors or those in your fleet, whichever you prefer, but someone. On that, I will relent, for now, but I have not got time for this foolishness any longer. I will send for you in two days when the Aspect has returned. Perhaps you’d best consider what you are going to say on behalf of your most recent lover, and make a better case of it than this one you have made for the Hostile world. If you can’t pull it off, your dear Lord Thadius will likely be the uninvited guest of String. I should like to see him try to win his way into elven hearts as easily as it was for him to win his way into yours.”
Orli bristled, but she knew it was pointless to argue. She bowed, forcing herself to be happy with the ground she’d won, then remembered she was supposed to curtsy, so she did that too before she silently withdrew.
Back in the rooms she’d been given upon being brought to the Palace, she threw herself into a massive loveseat and curled up in a ball. She clutched her knees to her chest and tried to calm the storm of frustration churning there.
Everything was going wrong. Altin was against her. The Queen was against her. The whole world, the whole universe, was turning upside down, and it hadn’t been so long ago that she’d thought things might finally be going her way. But not now. Everything had changed. In the span of one day, one terrible day, one that seemed so long ago now, so much emerging happiness had been instantly undone. And not just for her. Now her father was in it. For some reason, he was being given the legal runaround. He might end up in jail, or worse, given the temperament of the Queen, beheaded or some other antiquated form of punishment. And that was her fault. The price of her having sought happiness.
And, making it all even worse, she’d somehow managed to break Altin’s heart. She hadn’t intended to. She hadn’t even known it was happening. That was still a strange jumble in her head. She could clearly remember the torrential emotions she felt for him before, could still feel them in a way, but they were like an ocean trapped in a vast glass box, the surf beautiful and magnificent, great shimmering waves of it crashing and foaming wonderfully inside the panes, but merely something to look at. She could feel the waves thump against that impossible barrier, feel the pulse and the physicality of it, knew it was real, and yet, it did not wash over her any anymore, did not fill her as it once had. Somehow that was simply boxed up and put away. Gone. The place where it had been was filled with thoughts of Thadius.
She closed her eyes and let herself drift into the images of him, the memories of her rescue. She could see him riding across that rocky shelf, the gleam of his armor, the sound of his warhorse’s iron shoes sparking across the stone. The flash of his sword and the dull, meaty thump of falling ogres and crunching bones. She could hear the fire crackle, see him silhouetted against its brilliance as he darted in and out of the fray. So many enemies to kill. And yet, there he’d been. For her. Brave and heroic against them all. Her rescuer.
How could she not love him? And his beautiful house. And his horses in the stable. It was everything she’d ever wanted. He’d even promised her a pegasus someday. She smiled as she thought it. Imagined herself flying on one, like the Royal Sky Knights on their gryphons, high above the ground, in the cold air thousands of feet high, cutting through the icy wind, higher than the birds. She saw herself diving down, hurtling so fast the tears coursed straight back along her temples into her hair. Flying through canyons, feet dipping into snow-cold melt waters, skimming the tops of forest trees.
A gray shadow passed over as she flew, as if the sun had blinked. She looked up and behind her. A great green dragon was swooping down at her out of the blinding glare. It roared at her as it dove. A silhouette of man upon its back had his hand up in the air, but she couldn’t see who it was so bright was the sun’s radiance.
The dragon’s mouth opened, and she saw the orange light of the oncoming fire. The gasses reached her first, heavy and acidic, the smell of them strong and suffocating, tinted with the stench of bile and digesting flesh.
She screamed and then Blue Fire was there.
The great black orb filled her vision even as she realized she was dreaming again. Blue Fire, once more, had found her in the heart of the dream. She saw the shape of darkness, the pinkish glow, and with it all came the sense of betrayal and lies. The sense of pain. A burning pain of body and the searing of a soul. Agony wrought by truth that was not truth. A thing that was but was not. There was accusation there.
Blue Fire had no image for a lie. No context to understand.
Orli had to plead with Blue Fire through dream images to explain. She had to try not to wake in her sense of urgency. The awareness of the dream, in her frustration, and despite weeks of practice now, nearly made the contact disappear.
She carefully reined herself in. She recalled the desperate emotions of her conversation with the Queen, tried to shape the image of the Queen denying her request, the sense of helplessness, her ignorance of the attack and, in that, the inability to stop it. She couldn’t have stopped it anyway. She tried to shape Altin’s face for her, to show her she’d tried to let Altin know. She tried to feel the frustration outwardly, to project it across the space between her dream and Blue Fire’s reality. But the vision of the dragon, of Taot, swooping down on her, of the shadow flitting across the sun, somehow came back into it, overbearing the things she wanted to convey. The dragon came at her again. That was Altin on his back. She knew it had to be him. It was Altin, and it was Blue Fire putting him there.
Betrayal, swelled the black mass of Blue Fire. Betrayal of Blue Fire. Betrayal of Orli Love.
She knew immediately what it meant. Definitely an accusation. A condemnation. And such a brutal absolute in it. Orli’s mind staggered beneath the weight of it, the spite of it.
Betrayal of Orli Love. It came again, and there could be no doubt. Blue Fire knew about Altin. About their love. Altin was “Orli Love” and Blue Fire knew about them somehow. Orli felt her awareness of it like an electric shock. A black dumping of scorn and hatred.
No, no, it wasn’t me, she tried to send back. It wasn’t me. She woke shouting it. “It wasn’t me.” But it was too late. Blue Fire had let her go. Set her adrift back into the cold spaces where she’d found her. Betrayed.
For the next two days Orli tried desperately to get Blue Fire to come back into her dreams. She tried every trick she’d learned, everything she thought she’d figured out. She asked her maid to bring her scented candles. She tried napping next to plates of food and, near the end of the second day, even asked for the room to be filled with flowers of every kind, heaped with them even, every table, every surface that might hold a basket or a vase. She crushed petals, steeped them, even chewed on them. But none of it worked.
Making circumstances worse, the point and origin of the flowers were not reported to the Queen, only that they were there, and in quantity. And so it was that, when the day came to leave for Citadel and the rendezvous with the fleet, the Queen had only disparaging things to say.
“I see you wasted little time in finding replacement suitors, Miss Pewter, now that Lord Thoroughgood’s fate teeters at the brink of doom. A contingency plan, eh? I confess I am seldom so completely wrong about people as I have been about you.”
Orli’s face contracted in confusion at first.
“Oh, don’t play coy,” said the Queen. “I know all about the gardens heaping up in your rooms. If you’re going to be a tart, at least have the dignity to be a proud one.” That’s when Colonel Pewter was brought in.
“Ah, well, there we are,” said the Queen, her voice strained and her faced pinched as if there were a foul odor in the room. “The whole lovely family together again.” She turned to the teleporter standing near the waiting Shadesbreath and lifted her chin. “Let’s be off, shall we?”
Soon the five of them were standing in the concert hall on Citadel. Admiral Jefferies and most of the ships’ captains were already there.
Chapter 73
An unfortunate outcome of Altin’s nearly fatal return from the Hostile solar system was the loss of many of his magic books. In the end, he’d gotten a little over half of them back, but the rest were either lost in Great Forest or gone: kept for personal use, given to magician relatives or sold on the black market. One of the missing books was his book of basic divination spells. This loss in particular was unfortunate because, if he needed familiarity with any books of magic, that one was the most important to him. He was too new to the school to want to start with a book he never studied before. Having a book whose spells he had been through several times helped shape his understanding of what it was that he was working toward. Most spell collections were made with some theme, or at least one suggested itself through the reading. He would have a better understanding of what came next if he could master the spell before, so learning spells had the advantage of having a sense of direction, a heuristic, making it all easier to understand. But his was gone. So, nice as all that might have been, he was forced to find a new book and a new set of divining spells to use.
He began in Tytamon’s library. Being there, amongst all those ancient texts, floor after floor of them, made Altin melancholy. These were Tytamon’s books. Despite having done so many times before, this time Altin felt like a thief rifling through them as he was. Like a jackal or a vulture picking at the bones of a fallen friend, profiting from the loss of someone he’d once been beholden to. He knew it was foolish to feel that way. He knew that Tytamon would have wanted nothing more than for Altin to have them all, had said as much many times. But that didn’t change the fact that Altin felt like a grave robber as he sifted through the ancient shelves.
The work of finding the right book gradually took over and pushed aside the mourning and the mood. It was the toil of magic that had always kept Altin safe, and the labor filled him with purpose and distracted him from dwelling on miserable things. Altin’s strength was in his work, and so to it he went with focus that grew with each turn of a page.
However, Tytamon’s seemingly random system of storing his books vexed Altin to no end, and by the end of the fourth day of research, he had determined to make a point of reordering the library when the wars were done. It would be a start to making the place his own. But first, the wars must be won. And to do that, at least to try to end the Hostile war, he had to find out what Orli was talking about. He had to find out how to speak to Blue Fire—if there really were such a thing, such a “she” out there to be spoken to. Which meant he had to determine what Orli really meant when she said Blue Fire had “found” her.
He decided it most likely meant that Blue Fire had seen her in the magical sense, and that she’d then somehow gotten access to Orli’s thoughts, much like telepathy worked between magicians. However, Orli had no mythothalamus, so that meant whatever Blue Fire was doing had to be different in some kind of way. That, or Blue Fire had to be vastly more powerful than any mage on Kurr. Which was certainly possible given how much mana he’d seen moving into the solar system when he was at its edge—and how oddly it had been channeled.
Despite the accident, he could still clearly remember the tarry, taffy-like effect. How the mana had been moving so quickly yet, in its own impossible way, thickened so that it seemed slow. Fast and slow simultaneously. Paradox. And yet he’d seen it, defying everything he knew of mana and how it worked.
But given that he’d discovered a race of people traveling in the stars using nothing but what they could build with their hands and their creativity, and given that he’d also found a race of people that weren’t even people at all, instead some kind of … rock things, well, it no longer seemed like a stretch to assume he knew almost nothing about how anything worked anymore. On one hand, the wonderment of that for a mind as curious as his was vast. Such a revelation was exhilarating and humbling all at once. Unfortunately, on the other hand, the press of the circumstance, the overwhelming sense that he might lose Orli’s love forever, the loss of Tytamon and the fear he had for the safety of Kettle and everyone else at Calico Castle all stole the joy from this particular mission of discovery.
And so he had only the work.
On the sixth day tunneling through the textual mountain, the work paid off. He finally uncovered a divination spell he thought might suffice. It was a spell called “Lover’s Dream.” He couldn’t decide if the name was appropriate or ironic, but it seemed to be just what he needed, or at least close enough to start.
Lover’s Dream
Find the dreams of your lost love. See them as your lover does. Cast into the wind of souls, and seek where lover’s spirit goes. Don’t be proud. Get off your feet—love is humble in the lotus seat. Chant yourself into this trance; cast it slow to have a chance:
En ez mertimon cal’sombea ee, enez tosee semble seep
Kover mo’ver mendle lei, parsin larsin ekle wepe
Sengle mengle mor du tuk, fendle kodum hade
Forgar morgar hay’dee eg, fendle koduck fayde.
You must sing this sixty times and not a single more, and you must sing it sleepily but well before you snore. Focus on the mind of one whom most you wish to find, and you will see that lover’s dreams come silently to mind.
Which sounded great, except that Orli was not really the one he was looking for. But, since this was the closest thing he’d found to usefulness, he hoped that somehow he could find one of Orli’s dreams and trace it back to the mind of Blue Fire, if such a thing were possible. Frankly, anything was worth a try given how much time he’d spent in research. And it seemed a simple enough spell to do, though written in a somewhat childish hand. He hoped it wasn’t the ridiculous notion of some love-struck adolescent who fancied himself a magician far greater than he actually was. Altin had no way of knowing because the spell was in a tattered book he found in a stack on a bottom shelf of the second floor of Tytamon’s vast library. It seemed almost cast aside, shoved off amongst others like it, thin volumes, written less than three hundred years ago, and absent much of the formality of the epic works. Still, it was a start.
Except he wasn’t tired. He expected that was going to make things difficult. “Sing it sleepily, but well before you snore.” He figured he’d have no problem with the “well before you snore” part, but the “sleepily” thing was going to be tough.
He glanced out a window that looked back upon the shadowy gray wall of Mt. Pernolde rising out of site high above. He could see the scraggly arms of the stunted pines growing from the cracks and narrow ledges in its sheer face. They reached out into the coming night like slow brown lightning, defying the convention of their forest brethren with the same single-mindedness that made them ridicule gravity. Though night approached, there was quite enough light to reveal them and, with them, the fact that sunset was still a long way off, as was Altin’s inclination for sleep.
Still, he would try. He figured it would probably take some time to get the spell’s particular cadences down anyway.
