Galactic Mage 4: Alien Arrivals Page 28

  “Where’d it go?” Orli asked.

  “I put it back where it’s always been. In Tytamon’s window, right where he himself left it last.”

  “Good. Now let’s go. With luck, we can be working on Yellow Fire before dinnertime.”

  That, however, would not be the case, for upon their arrival in Crown City some half hour later, they found Her Majesty locked in a private audience with officials from the Transportation Guild Services, including the entire TGS council and the master operators of the three currently functional TGS space depots.

  “I’m sorry, Sir Altin,” apologized the herald standing between two guards outside Her Majesty’s private audience chamber. “But no one is admitted.”

  “He’s the Galactic Mage,” Orli reminded him. “There wouldn’t be any TGS space depots without him.”

  “All the same, Miss Pewter, orders are orders.”

  “It is fine,” Altin said, mildly annoyed. The two of them took a walk around the Palace while they waited for a chance to speak with the Queen. When finally word came, the sun had already fallen off the edge of the world, and the Palace glowed like a golden mountain for all across the city to see.

  Her Majesty met them in her audience chamber, staying there after the last of the TGS officials had gone. She was finishing off a lamb chop as they came in. Altin bowed and Orli curtsied as was proper in the royal presence.

  “Yes, yes,” the Queen said, seeing all of that. “So what news have you brought? I’m sure you’re going to get on with begging me about Blue Fire’s mate again, so let’s be on with it so we can be done again.”

  “Your Majesty,” said Altin. “You asked that we gather more information. And we have. It’s been several months’ work, and at considerable personal expense, but we now have everything we need. Orli has prepared a document that breaks down all the sciences and principles at work, and she details how they have been verified, including the work of several brilliant men and women of science from planet Earth.”

  Orli lifted the tablet she’d been carrying since they’d come. She pulled up the presentation she had put together, beginning with a brief video in which Professor Bryant explained some of the core geologic principles in language that Her Majesty would surely understand. That was the advantage of having a professor along, as making such explanations palatable to various audiences was part of his job.

  But before the professor managed to get even a full sentence out, the Queen waved it away. “Turn it off; turn it off. I already know you’ll have the tedious details worked out, assuming it’s possible at all. Spare me all that nonsense. I’m too old to try to learn the wearisome workings of another world in that sort of detail. That’s what young people are for.”

  Orli paused the display, but couldn’t quite get her mouth closed all the way, so stunned was she by that. “But Your Majesty,” she started to protest, but the Queen cut her off again.

  “You already know what I want. So say it, and you’ll have my permission. I’ve already talked to Director Bahri about this at length. I was on Earth several times last week, if you didn’t know. His opinion on the Blue Fire–Yellow Fire matter remains the same. He wants precautions in case things go wrong, but the rest is up to me. So if I say so, it will be done.”

  “Fine,” Orli said. “We’ll wait. I don’t care anymore. It’s already been a year since Altin proposed, so what’s another one? The lives of two living worlds are at stake, and I won’t let them be bargaining chips in the debate over a party on our behalf.”

  “It’s on all of our behalf, my dear. You have no idea how much people love these sorts of things. The blanks and commoners just adore celebrity, and it will win me a great deal of goodwill. Goodwill that I have lost. You may not be aware of it, but there are many who blame me for the losses we incurred in the war. Many. And I have to give them something to prove that things are returning to the happy, untroubled way they were before it all went wrong.” She forced a smile at the end of it, but there were stress lines around her eyes.

  “Well, you could have married off a duke or something,” Orli said. “It didn’t have to be my wedding you kept ransoming.”

  “That insolent tongue sounds an ugly thing in such a pretty mouth as yours, and it would be a shame to lose it.”

  “Your Majesty,” Altin interjected, knowing well how tenuous the relationship between Orli and the War Queen was. There had simply been too much stress put on it since they’d first met. It was going to take time to heal it back to where it should be, if such was even possible. “There is something you should know. It is about the Liquefying Stone.”

  Her Majesty pushed her plate away and leaned back in her regal chair rather abruptly. The disinterested smile that followed was obviously forced. “Well, go on?”

  “Your Liquefying Stones, the eight hundred you have locked up in your vaults, the ones you took from Citadel for safekeeping, well, it seems they will no longer function if Blue Fire dies.”

  That sat her up again. “They what?”

  “Yes,” Altin went on. “We’ve seen it firsthand. Orli and I and, of course, the science team that the professor brought with him agree: when they die, the Hostile worlds, or the beings, whatever they may be, when they die, the crystals no longer function for channeling mana. They don’t even draw light the way they did. They become little more than hazy gray rocks. If the heart stone is destroyed, they become brittle as glass.”

  “Well, then you certainly won’t be keeping your promise to kill her, should the attempt to revive the other one go bad. In fact, I rescind my permission in that regard.” Her tone made it clear that there was no room for argument with that. She even smiled again. “There, you see, Miss Pewter, just like that, you have your argument back.”

  “I don’t want my argument back.” Orli looked at Altin and shook her head, exasperated and seeming to say, “Why in the hell did you tell her that?” with her eyes. “Your Majesty, Blue Fire will die anyway. Somehow she’ll find a way. Surely at some point simple despair will kill her, whether she believes it or not.”

  “Perhaps, but for now we have hope that somehow she will revive her spirits, and until such time, we shall just pray to the gods for her quick recovery. Now, if that is all, I have a great deal of things to attend. Your teleporting guildmates at the TGS are a demanding lot and nearly extort gold from me these days. And it appears that Miss Pewter’s people remain all aflutter in fear of what will happen if magicians are allowed on their world. I’ve just come back, and I can tell you, everywhere we went the lights dimmed and the buzzers buzzed and doors opened randomly at times. They actually had the audacity to ask that I take off my armor. I should think more than a few assassins would enjoy such an opportunity.”

  “Who on Earth would want to kill you? There’s no reason for it.”

  “You are aware of the number of lives that were lost there, are you not?” she said. “Hundreds of thousands. Their previous director paid the price and will rot in jail for life. They’re still fighting over his fate, as many are calling for him to be executed publicly, although they’ve made a big fuss about that not being appropriate. They are a people squeamish about death in that regard. I can hardly believe they considered doing anything but. However, it’s not my world, so if they want to feed him until he dies, so be it. But there are those who feel I should be sitting in that cell with him, and it seems I have many enemies on both worlds these days. I have this from Director Bahri’s own … master-at-arms or whatever they call them. It is a threat that, of course, comes with the territory, so to speak, but it was an astonishing moment of clarity when I found them all bewildered by the fact that I would not take off my armor. What was it, did they suppose, that had me wearing it to begin?”

  “Your Majesty,” said Altin. “I realize that ruling a continent, exploring space, and engaging in interplanetary diplomacy is stressful and time consuming, but we really must bring Yellow Fire back. In the name of decency, you must give us your permission. Orli has a
lready agreed on the wedding ceremony. That is what you said. Please. There are so many people who have worked on this. And, if we are being frank with one another, you are right about my intentions to keep my word. I promised her that if our attempt to bring Yellow Fire back to life failed, I would end her suffering. If you refuse to let us try, then I will have failed to bring him back. You would trap me in my own honor, and so fate will write the rest. So I beg you not to set us on this course.”

  “I could have my assassin finish you in an instant.”

  “I can be gone in half of one. Please, Your Majesty. It is the right thing to do. She gave so much to us all. And if somehow it doesn’t work, I’ll find you another Hostile world. We’ll get you more of the stone.” He hated saying it even as the words came out. He hated the fact she’d ever found out about the stones at all. Everything that was happening was exactly why Tytamon had gone to such lengths for so many centuries to keep the secret of the Liquefying Stone his own. And now the Queen had eight hundred of them. Hells, the priests of Anvilwrath even had one, the one they’d found, the one he’d lost—assuming they’d dug it out from under the wreckage of the temple somehow. He was fairly sure they would have made a point of it.

  The simple truth was that Liquefying Stone was a secret that somehow Tytamon had just known Altin would let out, as if he’d resigned himself to it, even though he’d hoped otherwise. It was a lure to corruption that the great mage knew Altin would release. And now Altin had just vowed to get the War Queen replacements, even more than the eight hundred she already had. He was the pawn of the very corruption he wanted to avoid.

  It was a thought so perverse and horrible that he might even have recanted his promise. But he couldn’t. And, he hoped, the prospects of finding another Hostile world were unlikely to the point of being impossible.

  The Queen glared at Altin for a time, her eyes narrow and her lips taut as bowstrings. Altin was prepared to teleport himself and Orli out, the spell poised in his mind, shaped and ready to go off with a thought. The least flick of her finger, the least movement of her head that might have the assassin moving, he would be gone.

  But she did not.

  “You are either very brave or very stupid to talk to me that way, Sir Altin. But since the day I first met you, I have never known anyone to be more honorable and worthy of tolerance than you. So, very well. I grant my permission—on the condition of the wedding, just as before, of course.”

  Orli rolled her eyes and shook her head, but she said that she would agree. Like she already had.

  “And with so much at stake, I will provide what assistance I may,” the Queen offered, as if she hadn’t just run them both through the gristmill. “Do you need anything from me to ensure the success of the work?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’d like to have Aderbury do the transmutation that will bind Yellow Fire’s heart in place.”

  The Queen harrumphed at that, the sound resonant beneath the bright golden breastplate. “That is impossible. He is busy.”

  “But he is the best transmuter in the land. His hand is the one we need.”

  “Well, his hands are full on Citadel. Find someone else.”

  Altin shook his head. There was no one else. No one he knew well enough to trust. He was better off doing it himself if they couldn’t get Aderbury to do it. His own transmutation abilities were made better than his rank would indicate due to his access to seven of the eight magic schools. What he lacked in the artistry of Aderbury, his raw power could make up for. Or at least they had to hope so, given that there was a life at stake.

  “Then there is nothing that we need beg of you,” he said. “Except perhaps that you might get word to Director Bahri that you have given your permission for us to be under way, and that it has begun.”

  “Done,” she said. She whisked him away with a backhanded flick of her fingers. “Now be off with you. The two of you have given me a headache, and I wish to close my eyes.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.” He bowed, Orli curtsied, and together they backed out of the room.

  When the doors were shut behind them, Orli allowed herself to grin. “Finally,” she said. “Finally Blue Fire has a chance at happiness.”

  “Yes,” agreed Altin. “So long as I don’t botch the transmute.”

  “You won’t.”

  “Let us hope that you are right.”

  Chapter 34

  Annison lay beneath the strange spotted tiles, staring up into them as he had so many times before. So many days had passed that he’d lost count. He’d developed a reflex for looking up there during the first few months of his capture, a revulsion reflex that made him want to look away from the monitor showing the exposed dome of his brain where they had cut away most of his skull. But he was over that now. Mostly these days, he looked up there dimly absent of thought, the horror of what they did to him numbed to passivity. It was almost as if he watched from a distance, as if his mind had gone elsewhere and locked itself in a different room, someplace inside his head where things like having people peeling away parts of your brain didn’t matter anymore.

  He looked back to the monitor anyway. The big one showed the table behind the reclining chair he still occupied, the same chair he’d been in since he first arrived. The upper part of his brain had been removed, the parts halved, pulled out, and chopped up like some sticky gray cabbage. The parts now floated in shallow trays of fluid, connected by shimmering strands of tiny silver wires to the portions of his brain that remained in his hollowed-out skull. The wires, thin as spider web, were attached to metal pins and long needle probes, each of which was nearly as thin as the silver fibers themselves. All of those things, those alien wires and probes, had been stuck into his butchered brain.

  At night the people in white coats filled up his skull cavity with the same fluid that was in the two trays holding the left and right portions of his upper brain, but when they came in during the day to monitor him and investigate, they’d suck it out with a loud, rasping tube.

  He found that he couldn’t channel mana anymore, not even with the pain-inducing electrode now removed from his throat. Whatever they’d done when they pulled out those brain parts seemed to have snipped his ability to do magic anymore. Though that’s not quite what they said.

  Doctor Gaspar, the taller and leaner of the two women who worked on him, came in just as he was moving his gaze from his pared brain to the smaller monitor, which showed his emaciated body lying there. He doubted he even made five stone’s weight anymore; four might be a stretch. To his eyes, he looked like nothing more than a skeleton lying beneath a drapery of skin.

  “Good morning, Annison,” the woman in the white coat intoned as she came to his side and looked down at him. “How are you feeling today? Strong enough to do some magic for us this time?”

  He knew better than to let hope rise.

  “So today we’re going to try communicating with your friends again. I want you to try to communicate with those men you told us about, the ones you said were trying to find you. Are you ready to try?”

  Oh, he was so ready to try. But he knew it wouldn’t work. He’d tried a thousand times since that lost contact on the stage. He could remember it so clearly, more than any other memory. It was the clearest memory he had: him lying there, staring at El Segador’s shoes as the theater lights dimmed. And to think how much he had hated being there, doing those magic shows. He would have done anything to be The Incredible Spectacularo now. He could have loved those patrons if he’d wanted to. They were just people after all, perhaps victims of circumstance like he was. But now it was too late.

  “Speak up, my friend. Are you ready, or do you need a jolt to get your energy up?”

  He didn’t need a jolt. They’d attached the electrode that had once been in his throat to a pair of them in his feet. “I can try,” he rasped.

  “Good,” she said. “One second while I pull up the telepathy file. Now be a good boy and don’t try anything else. We already know what th
e patterns look like. Jefe is very pleased with you, but El Segador thinks you are stonewalling us a bit.”

  If there was anything like humor left in him, any place in his soul where the possibility of mirth, or even irony, remained, he might have laughed. Stonewalling? The energy for any such thing had died in him well over a month ago. Probably longer than that.

  “All right, that’s got it. Go ahead. Try to call them up. And give me the name of which one you are going for.”

  “Black Sander,” he said, his voice barely audible.

  “You said you can’t reach that one. Do the one with the Z. You seem to do better with that.”

  Annison just lay there. The effort of speaking made him tired. He started to drift off to sleep, but the short zap of electricity in his feet snapped him awake again.

  “Go on. The Z. Do it.”

  He let go of the breath that had locked in his lungs when the electricity hit and exchanged it for a fresh one. He closed his eyes and let the air out slowly as he once again reached out for the marchioness’ telepath, the man with the frenetic undertones in his mind. He reached for the mana as he had done so many times throughout his life with hardly more effort than it took to see something or notice a sound, the effort of smelling something cooking on a stove, hardly so much effort as even that.

  He felt nothing, though. The familiar sense of probing, of finding resistance or acceptance of his thoughts, all of that was gone. He could try to smell the pot on the stove, could even feel the air passing through his nostrils, but there were no odors there. So it was with his attempt to communicate. There simply wasn’t anything there.

  “Very good,” she said. “Now keep it up; don’t let it die down like you did last time.” She looked up from her monitor, where zigzag lines striped a chart in one quarter of the screen and lines of data scrolled in the bottom half. “Carmen,” she called, “reduce the filter another six hertz. Give him a little help.”

  “Okay, he has it,” the other woman said from her place at a workstation across the room.