Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) Read online

  “You won’t get them going between the red world and Earth, but the others could be done. However, your problem is still the TGS. And the enchanters. What you are asking for will require a small concert. You’ll need a conduit—hard enough to find—and you’ll need a whole stack of teleporters and enchantment mages. The TGS has gobbled up every teleporter beyond what is absolutely necessary for commerce and intra-continental travel, and all the best enchanters that weren’t already on Citadel have just been sent to Earth as part of the student exchange. I really do want to help you, but what you are asking for is simply not feasible.”

  “Well, then you didn’t come to the bargaining table with much, did you?”

  “Why not get your friend Tytamon to make your stones? There is no other wizard on Prosperion who could do it on his own—other than Sir Altin, of course, and he’s not on the planet, which is rather the problem you and I both share so exactly.”

  Roberto was fairly sure Lord Vorvington couldn’t give a crap about Altin, but he didn’t call him on it.

  “Well, if you can’t do that for me, what can you do?”

  “I can help you find, and hopefully free, your friends. I realize that does not give you any more than I am getting out of this, but, well, I think it still has value. Don’t you?”

  Roberto shook his head again. He knew that he’d been played. But Vorvington was right. And he was offering more than the Queen.

  “Fine,” he said. “So where’s the wizard with the maps and the 3-D spell?”

  “Why don’t we meet outside of Murdoc Bay, an hour after sunset tonight. That will give me time to get the last bit of divining done. There’s a good stretch of flat land above the cliffs at the top of the Decline. Perhaps you could land a measure west of the road. We’ll meet you there.”

  Roberto exchanged glances with Deeqa again. She shrugged. It was his decision to make.

  “We’ll be there.”

  They sat in silence all the way back to Crown, forgoing the rhino ribs in favor of ending the façade.

  Chapter 23

  Sophia Hayworth didn’t shriek. She didn’t wail or cry. She didn’t even put her hands on her hips like Kettle would have. In fact, Sophia Hayworth in anger was the exact opposite of Kettle in every way. Where Kettle would have been all red faced and shouting—and a couple of whip-strike smacks on Pernie’s backside with that big, nasty wooden spoon she had—Sophia Hayworth was the very picture of calm. In fact, not only did her voice not go up in pitch or volume like Kettle’s would, it actually came down.

  She sat across from Pernie and stared at her seriously, but she did it in this patient sort of way that irritated Pernie to no end. Don Hayworth was still talking to the man from “Reno PD” at the front door. They were talking about baseball, though, so Sophia Hayworth was free to come look at Pernie now in her annoying, patient way.

  “I only asked one thing from you,” Sophia Hayworth said. “I asked that you come straight home. Can you explain why you were unable to do so?”

  “I already told you. I wanted to find a dead Hostile.” Pernie let go a patient breath of her own. How many times was she going to have to answer that question?

  “You went downtown. You knew that it was dangerous. Even the bus driver told you it was dangerous.”

  “But it wasn’t,” Pernie said. She fiddled with her fingers on the tabletop.

  “Yes, Pernie, it was. Those hoodlums you encountered were dangerous. The young man the police arrested is a known criminal.”

  “He didn’t seem dangerous to me,” Pernie said. “And he and his friends even chased a bad man away.”

  Sophia closed her eyes and seemed like she had to concentrate very hard for a moment. Pernie thought she might be going to get mad, but she didn’t. When she spoke again, she was still talking in that calm way. “He was dangerous, and you put yourself at great risk, young lady. Not only yourself, but the rest of us: me, Don, and even your guardians back at home, Mr. Tytamon and Ms. Kettle. We are all trying to do our part, building history and trust between worlds, and if you run off and do something reckless like that again … if you were to be hurt, a lot of hearts would be broken, and a lot of work on the part of many people doing other things you cannot conceive just yet—it would all be put in jeopardy.”

  The surface of the plastic table was textured to look like wood. Pernie scratched her fingernail into the little ruts of the faux wood grain. To the touch it felt hard enough to be wood, but it seemed silly to make plastic wood when wood wood was just as good. Jeremy had showed her how there were many things that could be made from plastic, too many to count. He said there were even plastic bones in case something bad happened to your regular ones.

  “Are you listening to me?”

  Pernie looked up. Sophia Hayworth was obviously waiting for an answer, because her eyebrows were both high up on her forehead. “No,” Pernie said.

  Sophia’s mouth dropped open, and between the raised brows and the dangling chin, her face looked very long. Pernie wondered if they could make plastic jawbones, which she knew were kind of bendy and had teeth in them, or only just straight bones like leg bones and arm bones. She’d seen her own leg bone once, back on the Isle of Hunters. It broke right out of the skin. It hurt a lot, but it was also very interesting.

  Sophia eventually closed her mouth and started talking again. Pernie only heard the last part about “what are we going to do with you?” because Don Hayworth came in. The Reno PD man was gone.

  Don looked down at Pernie and grinned at her, a proud thing, the same look he’d given her when she was hitting all the baseballs he threw at her. “The lieutenant says you damn near knocked that guy out. Says you kicked him into a garbage can.”

  Pernie shrugged. “I only tripped him. They were trying to take me to a seen-o to get Sophia’s chips.”

  “Ca-sino,” he corrected. “And either way, that was well done. You should always stand up for yourself.”

  Pernie nodded and smiled back at him. “That’s what Kettle and Master Altin and even Master Tytamon always say. Djoveeve and Seawind showed me how.”

  He laughed, a few notes anyway, wry and with a tinge of admiration beneath. “Yes, that they did.”

  “And you are going to encourage this behavior?” Sophia said. “She was nearly abducted by a gang of thugs, and you think that is a laughing matter?”

  “But she wasn’t abducted by a gang of thugs. She knocked one half out, and the rest ran away.” He turned his gaze back to Pernie. “But you do need to stay away from down there, okay? At least by yourself. Your mothe—Sophia is right that it is too dangerous. You were lucky the cops came along.”

  Pernie made a face at that and wrinkled up her nose. She didn’t know what that word, “cops,” meant. Don saw it.

  “Cops are the guys that brought you here. Reno PD.”

  She shrugged. That was good to know. She planned on avoiding cops from now on.

  Sophia looked sideways at her husband before regarding Pernie once more. “So, the lesson here is that we won’t be running off downtown again, right?”

  “But I didn’t get to the broken buildings where the dead Hostiles are.”

  A pained expression, the flicker of a flinch, crossed Sophia’s face, but her voice remained calm. “There are no dead Hostiles down there. Only drugged-out dirtbags and transients. There are bad people on our world, Pernie. Please, promise me you won’t try that again.”

  Pernie shrugged again.

  “I need you to promise,” Sophia insisted.

  Pernie didn’t want to promise. She looked back to the table and fussed with it again. She wondered if a plastic bone would be stronger than a regular one. Some plastics were strong but also flexible. She’d read that much. She might be able to jump very far if she had plastic bones. She decided she’d ask Jeremy if that was possible. If it was, maybe she could get her bones changed. They did lots of things like that on Earth.

  “You see?” Sophia was saying to Don. “She just tun
es me out. Angela never tuned me out. How am I supposed to talk to her?”

  “I’d start by giving up trying to find comparisons,” Don said.

  That made Sophia scowl, and for the first time she actually looked mad. Pernie was glad she was mad. She would rather have her mad than talking to her in that stupid quiet way. The quiet way made Pernie feel stupid somehow. Pernie thought Sophia might be more mad at Don, though.

  Sophia got up, and for a moment Pernie thought the woman was going to put her hands on her hips. Pernie thought it might be funny to see her mad like Kettle finally. But she didn’t. Instead, Sophia glared down at Pernie, took another one of those closed-eye breaths, and said, “Go to your room. You are grounded and will not leave this house alone again until I say so. And you can forget about walking back from the bus stop on your own as well.”

  Pernie would have laughed at that as well, but she didn’t. She knew how to be patient when she needed to. She shrugged yet again.

  Sophia turned narrow eyes on Don, then spun and left the room.

  Pernie looked to Don, who shrugged like she had. “Well,” he said, “you better get in there so we don’t both end up in the doghouse.”

  Confusion contorted Pernie’s features. The Hayworths didn’t even have a dog.

  Chapter 24

  Pernie lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling. She’d tried to watch some net shows on the monitor up there, but they were boring. She was too busy thinking about real things. Things that happened outside. She’d wanted to see a dead Hostile was all. Sophia was making a sea out of a flooded cellar, as Kettle used to say. Pernie still wanted to see a dead Hostile. And she didn’t like being “grounded.”

  Sometimes the NTA fighter pilots got grounded. Pernie had watched a net documentary about them. If they did bad things or made mistakes, they got grounded and couldn’t fly. Gryphon riders in Her Majesty’s armies got grounded too. They didn’t call it that, but it was the same thing. Pernie was glad she was grounded like a fighter pilot. Someday she would learn how to fly, though. Faster than sound. That would be fun. She could shout “hello” into the wind and then fly in her fighter to the other end of Earth, stop her plane, and get out in time to hear herself. She could have a whole conversation that way.

  Jeremy told her she could even go faster than light if she flew in a spaceship. Then she could hear herself and see herself too. That would be fun.

  What wasn’t fun was sitting in here watching the world on ceiling video. That was boring. And it was still early. It wasn’t even nine o’clock.

  She got up and went to the window across the room. There was electricity running through it. That’s why the alarms went off. She’d looked it up on the net and knew that it was true. But Pernie also knew how electricity worked now. She just had to jump the window connection so as not to break the closed loop. Either that, or she had to shut it down at the power source.

  She looked around behind the desk and the dresser for some kind of access. She thought there would be a panel of some kind that she could pull off somewhere like there were in the cars she’d crawled inside. But there wasn’t.

  She thought about the printers she’d seen pouring out all the new houses along the street her bus drove on. All that stuff was printed right into the walls.

  She stood up on her bed and looked along the edge of the ceiling. Sure enough, there was a narrow seam, sealed with something soft. She could just reach it if she stood on her tippy toes.

  She pushed a fingernail into it. It gave way a little bit, like the bark of the sacred trees in the cove. Like rubber and some plastics here on Earth. She needed something to cut it with.

  She looked through her drawers, Angela Hayworth’s drawers, but there wasn’t anything she could use.

  She went out of her room, intent on sneaking into the kitchen for a laser knife. Sophia was coming down the hall and spotted her. The woman started to say something, but Pernie pointed to the bathroom door nearby and went in.

  She hated being under guard.

  She rummaged through the drawers and found a small pair of scissors in one drawer and in another a small box that read Light of Luxury—Laser Depilatory Kit. The front of the box showed a lady wrapped in a towel, sitting on the side of a bathtub, rubbing something oblong down her leg just below the knee. The lady looked very happy doing it and had a great big smile on her face.

  Pernie opened it and found an oblong object just like the one on the cover of the box. She turned it over. There were three dark lines, barely two millimeters wide, running opposite the object’s length. That was it. There was a button on the side. Of course Pernie pushed it.

  All three lines lit up, bright blue, glaringly bright. Pernie reflexively jerked it away so it wouldn’t hit her in the eyes. Jeremy had warned her about laser light. She wasn’t sure the object was really emitting lasers, since the lady on the box was smiling and all, but that’s what it said, so it must be.

  She wondered if she could use it to cut through the soft stuff on her wall.

  She took the object and the scissors and hid them under her blouse, tucked into the waistband of her skirt. She took the precaution of flushing the toilet before she exited and went back to her room. Sure enough, Sophia Hayworth was standing there waiting when she came out, and watched her until her door was closed.

  Pernie dragged the dresser to the window, first tipping each end up and tucking a blanket under it to reduce friction and noise and also to make the work easier. She jumped up onto it and looked at the joint along the ceiling and the wall. She pulled out the scissors, opened them, and, using one sharp edge, cut through the seam.

  The soft material sealing the seam where the wall covering and the windowsill met gave way easily enough, and in short order, Pernie had cut a line the length of the window plus a foot and a half on either side. She carved out as much of the soft stuff as she could along a three-inch stretch of the cut, making a gap into which she could get her fingers, albeit little more than her fingernails. She pulled down on it, bending her knees and giving a few trial yanks as she tried to peel the wall covering away from the wall beneath. She knew there was concrete behind it if she could just get the outer layer off.

  The material buckled a little, bending and warping as she tugged on it. That proved that it was as thin as she suspected, but it wasn’t as flimsy as she’d hoped. It didn’t peel away at all, which meant she’d have to cut into it as well. That was going to be harder than cutting the soft sealer in the seam.

  She tried with the scissors, even though she knew it likely wouldn’t work. She dragged the tip of the scissor blade in a long line, several times in rapid succession, each stroke on top of the path of the last, all halfway down the length of the windowsill. No luck, barely a scratch.

  She set the scissors down and retrieved the Light of Luxury. She placed it against the paneling, laying it so that its length was parallel to the ceiling. She pushed the button. Filaments of blue light, thread-thin, radiated a short way out from the edges of the device, marking where the three bars of laser light were. Or at least that’s what Pernie hoped was happening.

  She didn’t know how long she ought to wait, but since the lady on the box was shooting herself in the leg and not screaming, Pernie left it there for quite a while. After a period of time had passed to challenge patience, she pulled it away, hoping to see the panel burned right through.

  There were three faint brown marks. They were more like smoke stains than incisions cut with a laser knife.

  “Hmmph,” Pernie grunted.

  She jumped down from her perch and took the scissors and the Light of Luxury to her bed. She’d seen Jeremy take enough stuff apart in the lab to know how it went, so she used the scissors to pry the top and the bottom of the Light of Luxury apart. Soon she was looking at its insides. She didn’t know what much of that was.

  But she was getting pretty good about using the global net.

  By midnight, she had swapped out the power source for the one in her tabl
et and routed all of it through one of the three lenses on the Light of Luxury. The new contraption was rather a mess of wires, and it all hung apart, but Pernie didn’t care. Her first trial with it melted a two-inch gash into the plastic surface of her desk. Victory!

  Cutting the paneling away from the window was the work of less than a half hour, and when she finally pulled the veneer back, all the pipes and conduit were exposed exactly as she had known they would be. It didn’t take her long to figure out which wires went to the window alarm after that, and jumping the connection was the work of only a minute and a half.

  Moments after, Pernie was headed back downtown. She was going to see a dead Hostile today, and no attempts by Sophia Hayworth to be her “guardian” were going to keep her from it. No way.

  Chapter 25

  “They’re still alive,” Tytamon called to Roberto as the ship’s captain came down the Glistening Lady’s ramp. “I know that much for certain.” The ancient magician’s relief was evident as he reported the findings of his divination spell. “I can hardly tell you more than that, but it’s something. I saw them both in a fog of yellow. They stared back at me, unblinking, motionless, but I sensed no fear. I tried to discern the nature of the fog. I thought it might have something to do with the Liquefying Stone. I cast another version of the divination spell with the stone as the center of the inquiry, but that didn’t seem to resonate, so perhaps not. I want to say the fog is heat. It feels like heat, as if the color of the heat or the fog is hot and yellow, or something of that sort. I know little, but I am encouraged. So much so, I’ve invited Doctor Leopold to come for dinner tomorrow night that he might help me try again. These damned divination spells are fraught with vagaries in the worst ways, but the man is brilliant. I cannot do it alone. The gods throw our wisdom and our ignorance back at us together, all in a knot. But I think between the doctor and me, we can figure it out. Or perhaps at least get you something you can use.”