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

  He spent quite a while in cursing the alien, using every threat and epithet he knew in the languages of two worlds. He was helpless. All alone. Orli was lying somewhere below, dead, or if not dead, horribly broken and dying. In agony.

  He realized as he thought it how many times he’d thought it before. He was trapped in a loop of stupidity, a moronic cycling repetitiousness in which he was incapable of learning a most singular and essential thing, dating all the way back to a dead mouse, so very long ago. His curiosity the death of fragile things. And here he was again, so many deaths later, once more responsible … and this time it was Orli. Again. He’d actually thought it was a good idea to approach the ship. How could he possibly have thought that was a good idea?

  Orli had tried, over and over and over, to talk him out of it. But, as always, some insipid and inescapable part of him just had to prove it could be done. Always. He just couldn’t stop trying to push just a little more. One more step. One more planet. One more star.

  He’d challenged the gods that day upon his tower, not so long ago, a few years really, him all alone, barely off Prosperion’s moon, Luria. He challenged them, defied them, dared them to be real.

  And what had they done? They gave him the gift of Orli. They gave him love. They brought love all the way across the damned galaxy. And what did he do with it? He killed it. He killed her.

  He wept until his eyes were dry and then begged the gods to forgive him. He begged them not to take it out on her. Why should she suffer for his arrogance? For his stupidity? He begged and pleaded that somehow she be kept safe, that she was safe. That somehow, someway, something had happened, something she deserved.

  Maybe some of the aliens were like her. Maybe these aliens here with him now—there were two of them—maybe they were like him: stupid, selfish, and cruel. Curiosity burning in their guts like poison fire. Maybe they waded into worlds like this one and cut out beating hearts and threw away the shells. Maybe these two aliens were like he was, inquisitive tools of hateful, destructive gods. But maybe, just maybe, there were aliens like Orli here too, somewhere on the ship. Maybe there were kind and gentle ones. Compassionate creatures who would find her and nurse her to health, scoop her up, and carry her back to safety as he’d seen Orli do so many times herself. Every cricket, spider, and moth … they all were treated so gently at Orli’s hand. She’d gasp this little gasp when she saw one. “Oh, look,” she’d say. “There’s a fuzzy spider there. Look how cute he is. Look at his eyes.” She’d taken one onto her hand once, a little colorful thing, and smiled so happily as she showed it to him. “Look, he’s staring right at you,” she’d said of it. “He looks like a little clown.”

  It was a tufted little invader in Altin’s eyes, more like the demons they’d fought along the Palace walls than some “cute little clown.” But she’d cooed and sighed at it, told stories about how hard it must have worked to get all the way to the table in the dining hall. Even Kettle, whose heart was as big as they come, couldn’t be made to feel sympathy for the thing. She’d have smashed it just as Altin would have. But not Orli. Orli took the damned thing all the way outside Calico Castle’s gates, setting it free in the grass of the meadow beyond. “Go make baby spiders,” she’d said to it.

  Tears burned again as he thought about it. Babies. That’s what she wanted. A family. A life. Not this. Not this. Never this. It had to be the hundred billionth time he’d had these exact same thoughts. Again. It was hard to imagine a universe could contain selfishness the size of his.

  He wanted her to be safe somehow. But he knew it couldn’t be. He’d seen her flung away. She was in the arms of Mercy now. Or perhaps some version of Mercy that looked over the very best of planet Earth. She would be fine. The gods would see to that. But him, no, him they were going to leave alive. Long enough to drag himself through the hell of a Seven’s lifetime, century upon century knowing what he had done.

  Better that he had been a Six. They only killed themselves.

  Motion drew his attention, and he saw that one of the aliens was dragging itself away, drawing itself away from the machine and upwind. It passed over him, out of direct line of sight, but he was able to watch its departure reflected in the black glass dome of the inspection machine until he lost it in the distance.

  Then there was only one alien nearby.

  It was the one that had thrown Orli out over the edge of the tabletop. It was the one being in all the universe he hated most. He reached for the mana, wanting to melt the monster with fire drawn from the very center of a star. He couldn’t hate hot enough to burn it as it should be burned. There was nothing that could cause it enough pain.

  Movement caught his eye again. He thought perhaps the alien, as it looked into the eye-shaped viewing screen of the bulky machine and pressed its controls, had set the prong with the glass dome in motion again. But it had not. Something was moving in the reflection.

  He strained to see it, but the damned machine was too far away to make out fine detail. The surface of the glass too dark and too curved for clarity.

  Whatever it was, it was small, like him, and creeping up behind him. He thought for a moment it might be Orli. He prayed it was. But then it vanished in the darkness, lost behind the warped image of himself—the image of a stupid mage trapped in ochre jelly while his brand-new wife was dead or dying.

  He thought absently that it might be Roberto come to get him. It had been man sized. But it was all warped and bent and shadowy in the reflection. It could have been anything. It was probably nothing. He was delirious. Racked with grief and self-loathing. He needed to get it together. He needed to think. There was still a possibility. There really might be nice aliens. Maybe he hadn’t been totally wrong in that. He and Roberto both had felt that there were at least some odds that such might be true. He and Orli had worked out rather famously from opposite ends of the galaxy, after all; surely there was some evidence in that.

  He had to keep trying. He had to hope. That’s what Orli would do. Orli loved hope. It was her favorite star. So he would not give up.

  He drew in a few deep breaths, talking himself down from the heights of anger and sorrow that had driven him to unproductive thoughts. There was always a chance. For gods’ sake, Tytamon was alive after being dead for over a year. Anything was possible.

  Something moved behind him again. A little black dome shape behind him in the shadows. It moved. It was obviously someone’s head. But whose? If it was Roberto, then he wasn’t wearing a spacesuit. At least not the helmet. But of course, Altin knew he wouldn’t necessarily need one. And the steam did condense on it and make it hard to see.

  He wanted it to be Orli. That almost made sense, despite what he had seen.

  He spent a long time hoping for that. So long that he might have dozed off. He couldn’t tell. Someone was pushing against his back. He could hear the sound of something shifting against the dorsal unit on the back of the spacesuit. He felt it again, definite pressure.

  Orli, or maybe Roberto, or … well, someone might be trying to get to him. He could hardly allow himself to hope for such a thing.

  He looked up at the alien. Was the alien watching? Did it know?

  It was looking at more images of Altin’s brain. Altin hoped it could read his thoughts. “I will kill you when I get out,” he thought as clearly as he could. He thought it in words and in images, as if he were communicating the idea to Blue Fire. He thought it and filled with a whole galaxy’s worth of hate. He knew what that felt like too. He’d felt hate from Blue Fire before, and thought that an enormous, crushing sentiment. But then he’d felt hate from Red Fire, and discovered a whole new form of it, hatred of such volume that it dwarfed Blue Fire’s to relative nothingness, malice on scale to fill galaxies. Altin poured all of that out at the alien as it watched the images of his brain. If the creature had felt it, it would have died.

  Instead, the creature shut down the machine. A few flashes of light on its own skin, a wave running down one of the tentacles it
had jammed into the machine’s holes—which Altin assumed were filled with various controls—and all the lights went off. It got a lot darker on the tabletop. Only the glow from distant lights on machines several hundred spans away, and a few others on objects up above, prevented him from being plunged into darkness.

  The creature sent out a few tentacles to the grate above, and others off behind, to where, Altin couldn’t know. Another tentacle came down and wrapped around the jelly blob he was in. Then he was flying, or at least that was the sense of it.

  He dangled and whipped about. He thought he was going to bounce once off the tabletop, the alien carried him so casually.

  He saw Orli kneeling there. Right there. Not fifteen paces from where he was. He could just barely make out her face through the filter of the ochre jelly. Her beautiful face.

  She’d been the one digging him out. It was her. She was still alive.

  She was still alive!

  He shouted back to her. Shouted with every ounce of his strength. “Orli!” What else could he say? He just wanted her to stay alive. She had a fast-cast amulet, he knew. His hand tried to lift itself so he could point to his own neck, get her to use it.

  Although, he realized it wouldn’t work. There was no mana here. It wasn’t just being channeled into a different form here. It was gone all around the damnable ship. What he found was absence. The amulet wouldn’t work. The thought of it horrified him. It occurred to him she’d probably already tried.

  If she had, then she was trapped down there. If they shut off the mana block somehow … if he shut it off somehow once he finally worked out a way to get free, she’d still be trapped.

  She wouldn’t know. She hadn’t known, most likely.

  In one moment he hoped she’d think of it, in the next he hoped she would not … that she had not.

  By the gods, the universe was cruel.

  But she was alive. That was all that mattered. He would get out of this damn jelly box, and he would burn the aliens to slag. Then he would get her home. He would get her home, and he would never leave Prosperion again. He would give her babies. As many babies as she wanted. They’d fill up Calico Castle with babies until they overflowed the walls and spilled out into the meadow beyond, if that’s what she wanted to do, so many that even Kettle would beg for no more. Then he’d bring home puppies and kittens for them all. Maybe some of those little desert drakes whose breath was glitter dust. All of Calico Castle would sparkle with rainbow sand, and the kittens could piddle in it while the puppies barked and all those babies laughed.

  Altin watched Orli fade into the distance. He laughed. “As many as you care to have,” he promised. “You’ll see.” Then he cried.

  Altin Meade had finally learned. The cycle would be broken this time … if he was not too late.

  Chapter 34

  “She wants what?” El Segador asked, stopping midway through his inspection of the O-class magician Black Sander had just delivered to him. The middle-aged woman trembled in his grasp, tears running down her cheeks to be soaked up by the knotted cloth tied tightly in place as gag. “Mechs? Does she have any idea how much those things cost, even just one of them?”

  Black Sander looked to Jefe, who was stooped over and staring into the crate where the satyr was. The fact that the mustached man did not look up indicated that he either hadn’t heard or didn’t care. Or perhaps that he was very good at making deals.

  “Yes,” Black Sander said. “I told her. She was adamant. We have received new intelligence, and our requirements have changed. We understand the cost may be greater than the number of magicians we can supply, or perhaps that you even require. I understand that gold is not without value on your world.”

  El Segador glanced back to the woman for a moment, then shoved her toward a short, stocky man holding a projectile rifle in his hands. “Take her to Gaspar,” he said, “before she tries to call someone telepathically.”

  “She won’t,” Black Sander said. “She’s kindly sacrificing herself for her children. She and I have an arrangement.” He sent a smile toward the woman, which caused her to sob.

  El Segador nodded and waited until the guard had led the woman from the room. He regarded Black Sander for a moment, drawing in a long breath that filled his chest all the way. He hummed once, audible in the expanse of that expanded cavity, and exhaled.

  “I don’t know that it will be possible to get them for you. Those are NTA machines. There’s no black market for them because there is only one company making them. Rifles and small arms, that’s one thing; the networks of suppliers for global skirmishes are wide. The NTA keep them going, even as they talk about fighting to shut them all down, because the money is good in keeping the arms trade alive, even air power to a degree. But not in mechs. No way they’re going to risk anyone getting ahold of one of them. You can bomb a town into rubble from the sky, but to take it and hold it, you have to be on the ground. There is a very large difference.”

  “I was not under the impression that your NTA feared any entities on Earth. It was my understanding it has total dominion via the economy and very little territory to hold. Is the NTA not rather like your credits currency, all existing only in the machine?”

  “Yes, but part of how that all works is that they keep people believing they are the good guys. If video gets out showing NTA mechs marching around burning down third-world slums and hosing babies with fifty-cal Gatling guns, well, it can become harder to keep people drinking the Kool-Aid.”

  Black Sander frowned. “I am unfamiliar with the last word, but I believe I take your point all the same. However, my employer has no interest in preventing anyone on Earth from drinking whatever the NTA chooses to serve them, and her operations have always been discreet. Not to mention, no one is taking video on our world anyway.”

  “Oh, don’t fool yourself about that, my friend,” El Segador said. He went to the crate and looked in at the satyr as Jefe was pushing the end of an electric cattle prod through one of the small air holes. Black Sander heard the arc of the spark, followed by a goatlike bleat and the crate thumping and rattling for a time. Jefe laughed and jolted the creature again. El Segador straightened and came back to stand before his Prosperion counterpart once more. “You have a strange world, Mr. Sander, but I’d be surprised if the NTA hasn’t already mapped every inch of it and counted your population twice.”

  “I don’t imagine that will please the War Queen if she ever learns of it.”

  “I gathered you are planning to make your employer Queen.”

  Black Sander watched him for a time, not surprised by the deduction he had made. He supposed at this point it was obvious. “I will not confirm it or deny it. But if it were the plan, it wouldn’t happen until we got our hands on those mechs. If you are unable to deliver them, perhaps you can refer me to someone who can.” He made a point of maintaining an air of absolute cordiality. He even smiled as if they were two friends chatting over tea.

  El Segador’s expression narrowed, and there flashed for a moment a sinister shadow in his eyes.

  “I can get them for you,” Jefe said from his place at the crate. He didn’t look up. He was still jolting the satyr with the cattle prod.

  “You are certain it is not too difficult?”

  After one last shock, Jefe pulled the cruel device out and laid it atop the crate. He came to stand beside El Segador, a full Earth foot shorter than his hired man. He looked up into Black Sander’s eyes, and unlike those of El Segador, Jefe’s eyes gleamed with greed. “Nothing is too difficult for the right price.”

  “That is as my employer sees it as well. Name your price and you shall have it.”

  “How much armor does she need?”

  “How many of them can you supply?”

  He thought about it for a moment. Then put one finger up, and left the room. Black Sander and El Segador spent a few moments in silence, neither man the sort to be uncomfortable in it.

  When Jefe returned, one curled end of his mustach
e rode a little higher than the other. He regarded Black Sander through smiling eyes. “Forty-three,” he said. “I can get you forty-three.”

  “Is that all?”

  Jefe laughed aloud, a great, hearty laugh that filled the room, booming from him as he held onto the big silver buckle on his belt. “You see,” he said to El Segador. “This is why I like him. He makes me laugh sometimes because he is a funny man.” He looked to Black Sander then. “I like you, Prosperion. You remind me of me.”

  “Thank you,” Black Sander said. “I am honored by such a compliment. Now, about that number, is that all?”

  “Yes, amigo. That is all.”

  “Very well. How much? What do you require in exchange?”

  “How much gold does your would-be Queen have to pay?” He looked around the basement, which was not large, but a good ten paces on a side at least, the ceiling a half span above Black Sander’s head. “Could she fill up all of this?” He swept his hand out to shape the space. He pointed to the ceiling. “All the way?”

  It was Black Sander’s turn to laugh. “Done,” he said.

  “Not done,” Jefe said.

  “What else?”

  “I want armor too.”

  “Armor?” He nearly stammered, adding, “What kind of armor? And why?”

  “I want the golden armor. I have seen it in the net feeds. They say that it is magical. I want the armor of the War Queen.”

  “You what?” That he did stammer. The request was absurd. “I should hardly think that is possible. It is magical. Deadly magical. And she is the most guarded person on the planet, besides. It is rumored that she never takes it off. She certainly doesn’t put it up for trade.”

  “You said your employer is going to take her seat. I heard you say it just now. You have hinted at it many times before. Is your fight real, Prosperion, or do you want my mechs for toys? I am not in the business of selling toys to toothless dogs. Weak dogs are undependable.”