Galactic Mage 4: Alien Arrivals Page 16

  “Yes. The water saw might kill his heart.”

  “Water cut kill Blue Fire heart?” It was clearly an inquiry.

  “No. Of course not. Why would it?”

  “No.” The cavern shook for the barest moment with the violence of her frustration with human words. She presented him with the image of Professor Bryant working in her own heart chamber, the narrow place with the glowing yellow walls and the patch of green that she had called the Father’s Gift. He saw the geologist there, and then he saw the gray smoke fill it and snuff out Blue Fire’s heart stone. “Water come Blue Fire. Kill Blue Fire heart.”

  With a jolt he realized what she was asking him. And he adamantly refused. “Absolutely not,” he said. “We will not come kill you.”

  She rumbled all around him again, still frustrated apparently. “Yellow Fire die. Blue Fire die,” she said. She showed him the purple heart fading out, then the green heart that was her own following in kind. “Yellow Fire live. Blue Fire live. Orli Love promise keep.”

  Altin frowned, but he understood it well enough. His first thought was to refuse again, but then he considered all that she had been through. He considered all that he had been through as well, and in doing so, he realized that what she was asking would be the only kind thing left to do. Her misery had already lasted so long. So, so long. So, with another long, sad sigh, he agreed.

  “Fine,” he said. “You have my word. If it doesn’t work, if Yellow Fire dies, then I promise I will make them come here and cut out your heart too. If there can be no peace together in this lifetime, then the two of you can find peace in eternity.”

  She filled him with a swell of gratitude that was so enormous it made him cry. He was still crying when he suddenly found himself back on Prosperion, in the teleportation chamber in Calico Castle’s central spire.

  Apparently Blue Fire wanted to be alone.

  Chapter 18

  The Incredible Spectacularo stood upon a stage that groaned beneath his weight, so much so that the boards creaked at even the least movement with his hands. The stage lights were too bright, and he hated how these damn electrical things blasted their glare at him. He’d long ago stopped squinting into them trying to see out into the crowd—if one presumed to call it such. Oh, for the first two months or so, the room had filled up fairly well, but then the numbers had died away. But, as usual, there were a few patrons here tonight, a smattering of sweaty faces staring up at him, waiting for his next trick, the pittance he gleaned off their working-class salaries enough to keep hunger away … and the authorities.

  “For my next trick,” he said, doing his best to force some stagecraft energy, “I’ll need a volunteer.” He scanned the mangy group, looking for a rising hand. Of course none came. These people were only barely alive.

  He walked up to the front of the stage, raising a hand to shield his eyes, and peered into the gloom. Children were the best, if he could find them at the right age. They at least, unlike their slack-jawed parents, could find some level of excitability.

  There were no children in the crowd.

  “Come on now, people,” he said again, propping up a smile on his face. “Are you not curious about the dark arts of soul stealing, and the secrets of moving time?”

  This perked a few of them up, but a woman in the front row, whose needle-thin body was a dark green mess of old tattoos, yawned and shook her head, whispering to a friend who looked just like her in the seat beside. They both laughed dry laughs that scratched along the backs of their throats like wooden benches being dragged across a flagstone floor.

  “Well, how about you, then?” The Incredible Spectacularo pointed to a young man perhaps not too far beyond his teens. He had the same glassy-eyed look that the rest of the dregs in this part of the city had. It was the drugs they took. Things most of them made themselves in their rat-infested apartments, apartments that were little more than old shipping containers, whole neighborhoods of them, stacked like the boxes of some giant lady’s shoes. “Come on, then,” he said encouragingly. “Surely you’re brave enough to travel just a bit of time. Come along, then. It’s all good fun. You don’t look like the type who is too easily afraid.”

  Two young men seated on either side of the youth laughed at him. One punched him in the arm while the other called him a pussy, and between the two, they got him to get up and approach the stage.

  “Ah, there we go, my good friend,” said The Incredible Spectacularo through a smile as greasy and uncared for as was the hair upon the young volunteer’s head. “So what is your name, my friend? And, please tell us what you do.” It was difficult to keep the smile going in the bright lights. He had to force his lips to shape it, gritting his teeth and driving his cheeks up with conscious and ongoing effort. All of it made the outer corners of his eyes ache.

  “Reggie,” said the youth. “And I’m a ’lectrician’s assistant. Lookin’ for work.”

  “Ahh,” cooed The Incredible Spectacularo, “what a noble trade.” Of course he was looking for work. They all were. The magician had no idea what the career so described was, his command of the language still not spectacular, but he had no interest in finding out anyway. He only knew that in these first five seconds with Reggie the volunteer, he was already developing an incredible hatred for the lad.

  “And so, my dear Reggie,” he went on anyway, “have you ever traveled through time before?”

  “Like, duh, dude. What do you think?”

  Well, there it was. Finally a laugh from the crowd. For Reggie, of course.

  The Incredible Spectacularo summoned all his will and pushed the smile even closer to his ears. He let go several notes of a laugh, “Hah, hah,” adding, “What a great wit you are, Reggie.” The smile died entirely for a moment as he whirled around for effect, grabbing the edge of his tatty black silk cloak by its even tattier red silk lining and giving it a flourish as he spun. “But now, friend Reggie, it is time for your first trip. Come up here, please.”

  As Reggie climbed the three stairs leading up to the stage, The Incredible Spectacularo went to a small plastic table near the back curtain, carefully avoiding the cracked board it straddled—Slick Danny was going to get that fixed soon, or so he’d said. He picked up a large round clock lying on the table, a flat one of the sort these people often hung on their walls. With a cursory sideways glance to another clock offstage to see what time it was, he spun back around with yet another elaborate flourish, so violently, so sped by the growing hatred of having to endure this indignity, he nearly lost his fuzzy black top hat.

  He reached for it, catching it with both hands, including the one holding the clock, and both hat and clock twisted awkwardly and nearly fell. The audience laughed again. He fought back the derision that would have made a hate mask of his face. Or perhaps “a hate window” would be more accurate.

  He got the hat and clock in order again, then handed the clock to his volunteer with a saccharine smile. “Good, brave Reggie, I have here a clock for you. Please show it to the audience so they can all see what time it is.”

  Reggie halfheartedly lifted up the clock, holding it in both hands, arms out and moving ever so slightly side to side.

  “So, my friends in the audience, as you may recall, our dear volunteer was seated right over there.” He pointed to Reggie’s empty seat. “Raise your hands, friends of Reggie, please.”

  Reggie’s two friends raised their hands and let out a series of uncultured whoops.

  “Please take note, everyone, of where Reggie was,” said The Incredible Spectacularo. He gave the audience time to do so. “And now, without further delay, observe as I take us all back in time, back to only a few minutes ago. Keep your eyes on our friend Reggie here, and try not to blink.”

  Offstage, Slick Danny flipped the switch that played a drumroll, the sound crackling ominously from the speakers mounted on either side of the stage lights.

  The Incredible Spectacularo closed his eyes and began to chant a litany of words. “Oh great spiri
ts of the underworld,” he intoned, “oh to the servants of devils long gone and those yet risen. Reach out and open the portals of all time to us that we may send Reggie through.”

  He risked a peek out through barely open eyelids and saw that, at least for a moment, the dullards out there were all watching at least semi-anxiously.

  “Friend Reggie,” The Incredible Spectacularo asked, “are you ready to travel back in time to the moments before you came up onstage?”

  Reggie laughed. “Yeah, dude. Whatever. Just hurry up; I have to piss.”

  More laughter from the crowd.

  “Are you sure you are ready for this, the greatest if briefest adventure in your life?”

  “Bring it.”

  “Watch the seats behind you, my friends,” he told the audience, “for what you are about to see will astound you and change you forever.”

  The magician then began the chant for real. He spoke the words easily, having spoken them hundreds, perhaps thousands of times before. He wove first a careful illusion upon the clock in Reggie’s hands, all but casting it complete, and then he made the teleport, wrapping the ready and willing Reggie in an envelope of mana and sending him right back to his seat. In the instant after he sent the youth on his way, he finished the illusion on the clock, making it appear to read three minutes earlier. “There!” he proclaimed, pointing to the back of the theater where Reggie had just appeared. As an added bit of finesse, he quickly cast a second illusion, this one on Reggie himself, adding for all who had just turned to observe—all but Reggie and his two friends—the illusion of the one fellow punching Reggie in the arm just as he had done before Reggie got up.

  The audience gasped all at once, the lot of them caught entirely off guard. Even the two bedraggled women with the melting tattoos could not yawn that away.

  Reggie sat wide-eyed in his chair, and it was a matter of several long seconds before his friend, the same who had struck him earlier, took the clock out of his hands. He saw the time had gone backward indeed. He held it up for the rest of the room to see. “It’s true; it’s true!” he declared. “He really has gone back. We all have.”

  For a time there was general amazement in the room, but then the skinny tattooed woman turned back around and sent a frown up at the magician on the stage.

  “If he gone back in time, then how come my phone still say he ain’t?”

  Others immediately set to checking their own devices of chronology and, as usual, the magician on the stage watched as the trick ran its inevitable course: the gap-toothed gears in the brains of the inebriated eventually turning out the consensus of disbelief. Skepticism spread through the onlookers one by one, and despite what they had seen, the doubt was soon palpable for them all.

  “Alas, there are tricks to time travel,” The Incredible Spectacularo said as he always did at this point. “No road runs evenly through time or eternity.”

  “Bullshit,” called one particularly burly drunk seated near the back. “Faker. It’s all bullshit.” He threw a half-full bottle of beer at The Incredible Spectacularo, which the magician was just able to avoid.

  “Now, now,” said the magician, his hands out before him, trying to avoid another missile aimed his way. “Let’s not be barbarians.”

  Two more bottles flew his way, and not long after, Slick Danny came running onstage and threatened to throw everybody out. Half the scant crowd seemed more than happy to have it so, but the other half, the belligerent half, began shouting that they had paid for “real magic.”

  In the moments while Slick Danny argued with them, and for certain assured them that there would be no refunds, the caped magician behind him silently uttered another spell. Soon after, the right side of the theater burst into flames, great orange tongues of fire licking up toward the ceiling, the roar of timbers popping loudly in perfect evidence.

  The crowd all screamed in unison, and soon there was a stampede for the doors. The upside of there being so few patrons was that they all managed to get out unscathed. All but poor Reggie, who still sat staring at his hands where the clock had been.

  “That was stupid,” Slick Danny said, turning angrily on his stage performer. “And mean. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “They were growing rabid, as you saw.”

  “That’s it, man. This is your last chance. You blow out another audience like that, I’m turning you in. I’ll go state’s evidence or something. Or I’ll call that guy from that lab that was asking about you. I don’t give a shit what you say you’ll do. You were supposed to make me money, man. You’re just killing me now.”

  “Threaten me again,” the magician said, all the frustration, fatigue, and fear of six months in hiding surfacing in an instant. “Do it and see how it plays out this time.”

  Slick Danny looked like he was going to say something else, but he pulled it back. He took a visible breath, and then looked at the flames burning against the wall. He placed his hands on his hips impatiently. With a motion of the magician’s hand, the illusionary flames were gone and the theater was just as it had always been, run down and filthy, but otherwise none the worse for wear. Slick Danny breathed heavily again, then nodded in the direction of Reggie still sitting there. “Now go tell him your bullshit story before he walks out of here a believer.”

  The magician’s sigh was nearly the measure of Slick Danny’s own. This really was no life for a Prosperion. No life at all.

  Chapter 19

  A quick check of the upper floors of Calico Castle’s tall central tower revealed that Orli was nowhere to be found, so Altin made his way down into the courtyard to check the gardens. She wasn’t there either, so he went to speak to Master Sambua, who was overseeing a crew of masons.

  “Greetings,” Altin called to the stocky fellow. The dull shine of the stainless steel plates on the east tower, his tower, made him squint as he approached. He was pleased to see that at least in some places they were getting the outer walls up. “I see you’ve made great headway these last four weeks. It truly is a wonder to behold. And the tower looks very sturdy with all that iron framework there.”

  “Oh, it’ll be sturdy,” the engineer said. “And we’ve still got a few tricks up our sleeves.”

  “What are all those gray lines snaking all about?” Altin asked, taking a step nearer and noticing more and more of them the longer he looked.

  “That’s conduit. We’re running power in it for you,” he said. “Electricity. We’ll set you up an old-fashioned diesel generator in the basement, something your people can even make fuel for if you need to here on Prosperion once we show you how. It’s pretty primitive technology, but it’s reliable and won’t let you down after a teleport like a fusion genny might—at least from what I’ve heard. With that, some batteries, and some solar panels, you’ll be powered well enough for what you’ll need. If nothing else, well, Orli will have enough juice to do her hair.” He laughed, a great conspiratorial thing, but Altin missed the joke. “We’re putting in hookups for the grid,” he said, pressing on. “That way, when you come to Earth or hit some of the off-world bases, you’ll be set no matter where you go. This here tower will be the only thing like itself anywhere in the galaxy. Magic castle when you want it, technological outpost when you need. Honestly, I’m a little jealous.”

  Altin laughed and watched with wonder as workmen were pulling the long ropes of gray tubing through the lattice of rough iron the men had put in place. “Yes, I expect that it is rather unique. I am very pleased. So do you think it will be another two months?”

  “Well, that depends on whether you allow Mistress Kettle’s new request.”

  Altin’s brows drooped, and he cast a backward glance at the entry to the kitchens behind him. “New request?”

  “Yes. She says the steel plates are too shiny and the glare in the afternoons is ‘frightful,’ to use her word. She says those two plates we put on there yesterday were throwing a sunbeam into the garden and burning through Orli’s melon patch.”


  Altin looked back to the gardens from which he’d just come, then to the tower, which again made him squint. “It looks as if Kettle has a point.”

  “Yeah, she does. She says it’s going to heat up the whole courtyard like that.”

  “So what was her suggestion?”

  “She says she wants us to face the whole thing with stone to match the rest.”

  Altin laughed. That was hardly in the spirit of Calico Castle. “Perhaps if you just painted it black.”

  Master Sambua grinned. “That’s what I said. But she says it will still be too hot in the summertime. And she says she’s got enough in the kitchen that she doesn’t want to come out here and look at a giant metal pot.”

  Altin hummed, then suggested, “Well, perhaps a ring wall, just halfway round to butt up against the battlements. That will get you two stories of stone. It doesn’t have to be too thick, if you don’t think the basement structure will hold properly after a teleport.”

  “Oh, the basement will hold. You could put a lot more than a tower-sized pile of stone on it and it will hold. I think that’s a fine idea. It’s going to look pretty strange sitting anywhere else but here, but I’ll get some plans drawn up and we can go over them.”

  “Right. Thank you.” He turned to go find Kettle, but stopped and asked, having nearly forgotten why he’d approached the man, “Have you seen Orli recently?”

  “Not in the last hour or so.”

  He thanked him and went into the kitchens, where, as usual, Kettle was hard at work. These days, with Pernie gone, and Tytamon gone, and with a much larger group of mouths to feed given the growth of the keep’s staff in recent times, the stout woman made a point of keeping herself heaped with things to do.

  “Kettle,” Altin called to her, “there you are. Have you seen Orli?”

  “She’s gone off ta see her father at the Earth fort near Crown,” Kettle said, straightening herself from her work stirring a giant cauldron filled with stew. “Left near half an hour ago.”