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

  She glowered at him again. He had to be lying. Master Altin wouldn’t go through a wormhole and come out ten thousand years ago. Why would he? That would make him …

  That meant, if it was true … if it really had been ten thousand years ago ….

  She wouldn’t even think it. Ever. It was just a worm’s hole. Master Altin had tamed a dragon. He could easily tame a worm. Or just kill it if he wanted to.

  She glared back at the major, her hatred so hot it melted his smile away.

  “Hey, I didn’t do it,” he said. “I understand your anger, but it wasn’t me. It wasn’t the NTA.” He turned the tablet around and replayed the video. “Look. They went in all on their own. All of them. And that’s what I’m trying to tell you. You glare at me like all of this is my fault, like it’s the NTA’s fault somehow. But it’s not. And I’m trying to help you, if you will listen and hear what I have to say.”

  One of Pernie’s brows stayed low, still crouched there warily, but the other let go a little bit, leaving only some of that rage upon her face.

  “I can give you what you want, Miss Grayborn. You’re a very special little girl. I can make you a pilot. I can arrange to have you taught how to use our weaponry, our systems, our technology. Whatever you want to learn—within reason, I’ll admit; they aren’t going to give you top NTA secrets … at least not right away. But I can teach you what you want to know. All those things you wanted to have and see: the guns, the planes, the starships … the Hostile bodies. All of it. In time. But you have to work with me.”

  “But what about Master Altin? We have to get him back before ten thousand years.” She really didn’t want to have to wait ten thousand years if she didn’t have to. A hundred had already seemed very long. And if he went into the past, somehow, well, how could she wait for that?

  “Well, that I can’t help you with. The NTA isn’t going to throw any ships into that rift. Not until we get some data back from the probes, which, if you and I are going to be friends, I’ll tell you a secret about.”

  Pernie didn’t think she was ever going to be his friend, but she was smart enough to say, “Okay.”

  “They’ve already sent eleven of them through. Top-end equipment, every one. And yet, we haven’t gotten back one lick of data yet. Eleven probes, not one single byte back.”

  Pernie pressed in her lips, thinking about that, about the missing data. She knew what data meant, but who cared if the worm bit the probes? Why would it even want to, given that they were surely made of metal and didn’t taste good? But there was something obvious he was missing. “Did you look in the history?”

  He leaned back, a mildly amused, partially curious expression on his face. “What history?”

  “At Carson-Millerton Junior Military Academy. They keep it there. They were always making us learn history about the past. I thought it was boring and I didn’t pay attention. But if you look, won’t there be data from ten thousand years ago? What if Master Altin came back and needed help? Did you look to see?”

  He tilted his head a little, regarding her seriously, then after a moment of that, he began to laugh. He laughed so long Pernie started to get mad again. She watched his throat as he did, saw how exposed it was, and thought how easy it would be to jump over there and punch his windpipe in.

  But she didn’t.

  What if he really would teach her the things he promised her? What if he taught her how to fly a starship? Then she could go into the worm’s hole and get Master Altin out. She could pay attention to the boring history and learn if Altin came home ten thousand years ago, and she could go back and get him because she would know where he was. All she had to do was learn.

  She gritted her teeth, almost like the collar made her do. The amount of time she was going to have to wait was getting very long. And she had a lot to learn.

  “You’re a clever girl, Miss Grayborn. I hope we can get past our misunderstanding earlier. I don’t like that collar any more than you do. I know you don’t believe me, but it’s true. I hate to have to clip your wings, but you did promise, and your sponsors, Mr. Tytamon, Mr. Seawind, and Ms. Djoveeve, all signed that you would not do magic while you were here. And there were conditions attached for if, well, if you did.”

  He nodded and glanced at her neck, indicating that the collar was one of the “conditions.” A snarl shaped itself on her mouth, but she didn’t give it sound.

  “I know you are angry right now. And you have every right to be. But if you can come to grips with it, then I give you my promise that I will do as I have said. You’ll be a pilot by the time you are twenty. Perhaps even sooner if you work as hard as you have been at Carson-Millerton. Like I said, we’ve been watching. You’re something else.” He stood and looked down at her. “So what do you say?” He put out his hand for her to shake.

  Pernie glared at it. If she had a knife, she would have stabbed him through it, right between the knuckles at the back of his hand and out through his palm.

  He pushed it a little closer. “Come on. You’re going to have to trust someone at some point. And we have the resources you need.”

  She felt like she was walking into a trap. But she had broken her promise. And now Master Altin needed her even more. She had no choice.

  Still glowering, she took the major’s big hand in her little one and gave it a single shake. “Fine,” she said. “But I want to start learning today.”

  Chapter 48

  Dark stone formations thrust up from soupy green fluid, rocky columns built by some natural force and forced out of the quagmire from somewhere deep below. The fluid, once water perhaps, was thick, and it moved like rendered fat, lapping in slow, shallow waves against the base of the stone formations. The columns rose some twenty spans out of the swampy ooze, nine in all, eight of them loosely arranged in a natural kind of symmetry around a slightly larger central one. All of these were surrounded in turn by short black trees, half-starved by the look of them, with twisted limbs and gray leaves like tarnished silver, which glinted in the light of a pea-green sun as it burrowed through hazy gray clouds above.

  Dark shapes darted in and out of the clouds, creatures with two pairs of wings, one in front of the other like dragonflies. They flapped and circled over the formation of stones in the way that vultures do, and they seemed to be waiting for the spoils of the fight taking place below, the resolution of a mighty siege.

  Black Sander shifted his weight from his left foot to his right as he maintained the illusion spell through which the images were being channeled, watching what unfolded right along with all the rest. Conduit Wanderfrond held the spell together, taking the spell from Black Sander just as he took the seer’s feed. The diviners who had found the distant world, Cas 98213a4 the ungainly name given it by the star charts from Earth, had already done their work, and the place was found. The old priest, the Grand Maul of Anvilwrath, sat in a chair atop a small wheeled platform, feeding mana into the concert cast. His eyes were closed, and the loose folds of map-lined flesh dangling from his neck quivered slightly as he worked. Black Sander could feel the smug satisfaction coming from the man, as evident in the cloudy essence of the concert as it had been in his yellow-toothed smile before the casting began. The Grand Maul. The marchioness had found herself some powerful allies.

  Kalafrand’s powerful Z-class seeing spell loaded more imagery into the conduit’s memory. As the seer watched the scene upon the distant world with his far sight, he bundled up memories that he fed to Black Sander telepathically, fed to them all, really, but to Black Sander for his exquisite gifts as a W-ranked illusionist. It was Black Sander’s job to replicate the sequences of events for the small crowd of observers in the marchioness’ private sitting room.

  Between just the three of them, the U-ranked old priest diviner—a Five, no less—Kalafrand, and Black Sander, they had a monstrously powerful bit of work under way; they would have made a more than adequate concert to complete almost any task upon the world of Prosperion, at least in normal time
s. But these were anything but normal. With the inclusion of the two teleporters, the captive T, Paeter, and the marchioness’ man from the TGA, Ivan Gangue, who was an O, and with the introduction of six other diviner priests that Black Sander didn’t know, the concert had finally found the place where the War Queen made her war. And her war was well under way. And so it was that they, and through them the marchioness, observed.

  Atop each of the outer eight columns in the swamp, the War Queen had built small stone fortresses. The stone was dark like the formations themselves, and the blocks rough cut, as if by transmuters and stonemasons in a hurry to get it done. Each of these was joined to a larger fortress, a blocky, three-story structure on the centermost column. They were connected by a series of bridges, which arced high above the soupy currents flowing and sloshing underneath, the high bridges like arcing spokes leading to a stalwart central hub.

  They didn’t have to watch long to understand why the War Queen had chosen such a place, for there were giants sloshing through the muck beneath the high fortresses, their huge feet stomping and splashing as they thrust upward with long spears like men with sharp sticks trying to poke garbage out of the sky. They were enormous and unfamiliar to all who observed, unlike any giant on Prosperion—at present or out of recorded history—just as the diviners had predicted they would be.

  The giants were roughly human-shaped, bipedal but with four arms, and eight fingers to a hand. Their heads could be, in part, called humanlike as well, with two eyes and one mouth, but there were no noses to be found. And these heads sank down between the giants’ shoulders as if pressed down by the enormity of their own weight, with faces that looked out from the center of broad chests, their mouths apparently chanting rhythmic war cries in a pulsing, steady way that made it appear as if their jawbones might grow right out from their beating hearts—although there was no way to say if the creatures had hearts at all. Beyond those marginally humanlike attributes, for the rest of them, these creatures could only be described as alien. They were massive, ten spans tall, and they seemed as if they were made from the same stone that fortresses sat on, though it appeared scaly in places, and striped here and there by something loose and fibrous like shredded rope or even tree bark. Whatever they were made of, it was hard, and when the arrows and spears of the Queen’s men fighting in the towers came down at them, those projectiles bounced off and left no evidence of having caused injury at all.

  Spells and visible magic appeared to fare much the same, and the humans, the Queen’s personal soldiery, were on the defensive. Fireballs rained down amongst shards of ice half as long as the giants were. But these all seemed to do little or nothing to the monstrous things, all of it, arrows and magic alike, crashing and flashing against invisible shields that protected the misshapen monstrosities from harm.

  The Queen’s army, on the other hand, had no shields to save them. And the giants would thrust up with their long spears and spit a soldier through the face the moment he or she looked down to throw or cast. With phenomenal speed and accuracy, this giant or that one might spike a Prosperion fighter on its spear like a fisherman, and just as casually flick with its great wrists and send the caught warrior flying out into the swamp as if throwing back a fish too small to bother cleaning, cooking, and eating. The flailing human would fly off, then splash into the thick soup, where the vomitous liquid would roil and bubble and froth around the body until it was gone, leaving only wisps of black smoke rising from the scene. Black Sander couldn’t know what the soup was, or what was in it, but he was grateful that there were no sounds associated with the divining spell the marchioness’ caster was sharing with him now. Even he did not delight in that much agony.

  The flying creatures swooped down after a body vanished into the goop, and they hovered with their leathery dragonfly wings over the smoke that rose, breathing it in. Their long, toothy beaks opened, and Black Sander was sure the sound must have been awful to hear as well.

  He watched two of these creatures suck up a patch of smoke, then fly away again, rising up to join the circling of their fellows. He allowed himself to watch them as they flocked together above the swamp. That’s when he noticed Citadel. The flock of flying creatures gave it away, the swarm of them wheeling like a dark cloud around some unseen object in the sky, shaping the perfect sphere of its invisibility as they bounced, rebounded, and ultimately avoided it, a bubble of vacant sky in the dark cloud of their circling mass.

  Citadel hovered over the ring of fortresses, and yet it wasn’t doing anything.

  The conduit saw it as well, and he took Kalafrand’s magic and pushed it up to where Citadel was. Black Sander knew he would not be able to push a seeing spell through the space fortress’ magical defenses, though. That was the most impenetrable possession of the War Queen. The attempt was a waste of time, though he could not say it now. He half expected to hear the marchioness shout the conduit down for not going inside anyway.

  But the seeing spell pushed right through the birds and right through Citadel and plunged into the darkness of the stone.

  The vision slid through its many floors after, light, dark, light, dark, up they went. Wanderfrond guided the concert’s vision right through to the core of the place, right to where he knew the mighty concert hall was. The heart of the War Queen’s own giant, it too encased in stone.

  The room burst into view, and Black Sander faithfully rendered it for the marchioness, the rings of plush red stools around a plush red-and-gold ottoman. The concert hall seating spread all around the outer edge, stadium style, wedges of seats filled with robed wizards from every guild. There were supposed to be eight hundred of them in there, and rumored to have the yellow Liquefying Stone, every one of them, if the Queen could force herself to give them out again.

  At least, there were supposed to be eight hundred. That’s what Black Sander had heard. But there were not. Not exactly, anyway.

  At least half of them were dead. Perhaps more than half. Blood ran down the stairs between the sections of the concert hall, dark red smears on the Queen’s bright crimson. Black Sander rendered it all exactly as Kalafrand’s spell revealed, the conduit handling it well, for all his sanza-sap haze.

  The War Queen and a handful of soldiers were beating back the last of what appeared to be an invasion force. There were perhaps eight of them left. The invaders looked human.

  The conduit squeezed Kalafrand some more and chased the retreating scene through the massive bronze doors, out into an area filled with Prosperion plants. It was bright and lit up like a Crown City park in the middle of the day—all illusions, of course—and the battle crashed through the illusions, revealing the untruth of them all. One by one as they watched, the illusions failed, and soon they were simply watching the Queen and her entourage slaughtering what was left of the enemy.

  Four men, and they were men, human in every way and in leather breastplates, hard leather, and draped with bronze chains. The leather was dark, dyed the color of wine, and the men wore helmets that looked as if they were made from some kind of animal shell. They fought with hooked swords and pole arms, bardiches made from something blue like glass.

  But they didn’t fight long, and finally the last of them were gone.

  The War Queen stood panting over the bodies. Black Sander watched as she spat on one of them.

  She turned and reentered the concert hall, having to step over the dead as if wading through the swamp below Citadel.

  Black Sander guessed there were at least as many dead invaders as there were dead wizards. Many of the invaders held wands rather than weapons in their dead hands. The holes in the walls, and the gaps in the red coating of the ceiling with its strange, twisting golden tentacles, all suggested a long magical fight had taken place.

  The Queen’s assassin, the elf called Shadesbreath, appeared beside her.

  “There!” shouted the marchioness.

  The conduit stopped chanting, locking the perspective of the seeing spell in place. The Queen and the elf
moved through the injured, picking up the dead invaders’ wands.

  “That’s him. Now. Now is the time.” She turned to Jefe, who was watching with eyes wide. He’d obviously never seen a concert before. “Now! Do it now, the stunning device. Quickly.”

  Jefe turned to El Segador, who pulled two objects from a pocket of his jacket. One was a stun grenade. The other a flash. He went to the conduit and held them out for him to see. “Tell me when.”

  “Now,” hissed the marchioness. “For gods’ sake, do it now.”

  The conduit nodded. “Now is when.”

  Black Sander watched expectantly. This was the whole plan, the core of its success. Neutralize Her Majesty’s two deadly pets, and she had nothing left: with the Galactic Mage gone well over two weeks now—eaten up by a hole in space, the reports on both worlds had said—he would not appear, and the elf was standing there in plain view. This was the time.

  El Segador handed the conduit the grenades. Wanderfrond took one in each hand, as he’d been told to do before the spell began. He held them up, gripping the triggers, and let El Segador pull the pins. “Be ready, Gangue; be ready, both of you.”

  He picked up the cast where he’d anchored it, staring up into Black Sander’s illusion just before he began. He smirked at the image of the War Queen and her assassin, and then he was lost in the magic again.

  The chants from the two teleporters grew louder, and in a moment after, there came two hissing sounds, ssst, ssst, and the grenades disappeared.

  They reappeared a moment later, a half span in the air before the Queen and the elf. Both flashed before they’d even had time to drop to the bodies lying on the ground.

  Both the War Queen and the elf staggered backward. Both tripped over bodies and fell down.

  “Now!” shrieked the marchioness. “Send them now!”

  Suddenly the draw on Black Sander’s mana was immense. It was beyond immense. The drugged-out conduit seemed to have lost his mind. He sucked mana out of the sky in impossible ways, yanking through Black Sander’s mythothalamus so brutally it burned. He could feel the conduit doing the same to others as well, riding hardest on the Z-ranked Kalafrand. Kalafrand screamed. The teleporters were chanting like maniacs.