Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) Read online

  He watched through a dark and hazy gauze as Orli dug into the neck of his spacesuit, clawing at his throat like a dog digging frantically to get at something. He wondered what, a slow question, thinking like grasping mist in a dream. He thought it might be his amulet. That was probably it. He dimly wondered what would happen if she broke his contact with Red Fire in that way. If she could.

  That’s when it hit him. He’d never added extra mana to the amulets. There wasn’t enough. Not out here. He was going to do it to her again, going to get her killed this time by his incompetence. If she struck it, they would die. Which meant he had to get her out.

  Die, came the volcanic hatred of Red Fire’s rage and jealousy.

  A teleport. That was what he needed. But even thinking of it was an effort. A spell to take them home. It was all he could do to conceive the idea, his mind so busy sucking down mana still. He could feel the shell of himself beginning to collapse, pressing in and cracking in places like the window in the hangar bay on Earth as it was being shot, the strength of his defense covered with cracked lines like spider webs, just as the glass had been.

  Orli’s hand thrust through the tight elastic material at his throat, her knuckles nearly choking him as she pushed inside. She jammed her arm down into his robes and fished around violently against his chest. He felt her nails cut into his flesh. She was cursing. If she struck the amulet, that would be the end.

  He gulped and gulped the mana. Tried to shape the thought. The spell. Fought for it. The place in Calico Castle where the tower belonged. That place he knew.

  Orli was screaming in his face, the amulet tangled up in his robes and the tight elastic seal of the suit around his neck.

  Shape it. Shape the space. Close it. Put us there.

  Die.

  He slumped to the floor. He could barely breathe, struggling to do it, gasping. His vision swam before him like a cloud of flies. He could smell bread. Phantom smells, he knew. He thought maybe he had died. Or he was dying.

  But then Orli rolled him onto his back. She was leaning down over him, her face ravaged by fear. “Altin! Altin, say something. Are you all right? Say something, please!” He heard it as if she were talking to him through a wall.

  He blinked a few times. Reached up and wiped at the trickle of blood coming from his nose. He could still smell baking bread.

  Orli’s expression softened some. “Can you hear me?” she asked.

  He nodded and tried to sit up. She helped him, and together they got him into a chair. A few more deep breaths came and went before he could speak. “What happened?”

  Orli’s eyebrows fell as her mouth opened in disbelief. “You’re asking me?”

  He blinked off a bit more of the dizziness and nodded.

  “You tell me what happened,” she said. “One minute you were fine and the next you were bleeding everywhere and calling out to Blue Fire. You stumbled, then you fell to your knees for a few seconds and then we were back here.”

  “Back here?”

  “Yes, at Calico Castle. You brought us back. I was about to use this.” She held an amulet in her hand. He closed his eyes and let out a long, agonized breath. How close it had come. And how stupid of him not to make sure he’d put enough mana in them. A hasty mage is a tasty mage upon the tongue of death. How many times had he heard that tired old cliché, and yet there he was. Again.

  But there wasn’t time for recrimination now. He reached out and took the amulet from her. “Give me yours,” he said.

  She looked down at her bosom for a moment, touching the stone absently. “Mine?”

  “Give it, please. Quickly. We must get back.”

  She handed it to him. He spent the next several moments working on them, resetting the destination from Citadel to a safe place in Calico Castle instead, for fear of Orli’s ending up in the middle of a fight if things went wrong. He loaded them with mana, taking advantage of the misty everywhere that the mana was to speed the process along. He need not trickle mana in like he had before, not now. He could pack it in like snow, gathering up great clouds of it and pushing them all in, and endless stuffing like mashing cotton into a box. When he was satisfied there was more than enough, he handed hers back to her. He gave her a grim look, glancing quickly to the sapphire and then back up at her. “It would have been bad. Worse than last time.”

  She looked horrified and suddenly realized what that meant. She stared down at her amulet as if it were a scorpion on her palm. When she looked back up at him, he was nodding.

  “Yes,” he said. “That.” He shook himself and stood up. “Now we have to go back. I know where it is.”

  “Where what is? Red Fire?”

  “Yes, and not just where, but I know where the heart chamber is. Blue Fire showed me.”

  “But how can we go? You can’t do that again. Look at you.” Her gaze painted a path down his face and into his spacesuit, which bore the dark stripes of running blood, smears of it everywhere.

  “Then we’ll have to do it fast. I think this must be the fight Ocelot was talking about. I have to fight him off while you use those things you got from the mine. It has to be.”

  “Altin, you were on the ground in less than a minute. I’m going to need a hell of a lot more time than that.”

  “We have to try.” He looked as if he were about to cast the spell that would send them back again, but Orli caught his face in both of her hands, stopping him.

  “No,” she said. “Not like that.”

  “We have to. You should have felt what I felt coming from Blue Fire.” Speaking her name reminded him of her terrible misery. He reached out to the beleaguered being, intending to reassure her and let her know that help was on its way, but in that moment realized that Blue Fire was gone again, blocked and muted by the strength of Red Fire. Only the constant murmur of her suffering remained, returned to the quiet whimper in his mind that it had been before, like the sound of a brook in the distance, only this one filled with liquid misery.

  “You’re not going to help her if you are dead.”

  He slumped into a nearby chair, absolutely exhausted to the center of his being. “What is left then?”

  Orli stood and turned, pacing to the window and back. She stopped briefly as she made a return trip to the window, stooping to pick up her helmet from where she’d thrown it in her urgency to get to Altin. She came back and set it on the table near Altin’s, nearly knocking over the palm tree decanter that they’d moved from the window not all that long ago. It might just as easily have been a thousand years. Time was moving at such a vicious pace. She caught it reflexively once more and set it right, then continued to pace. They were missing something.

  “So, let’s say you are right, and that is the fight you are up against,” she said. “How can we possibly get into the heart chamber and destroy it if you’ve only got a minute at best?”

  “Ocelot did say I wouldn’t be able to fight for long. Perhaps that is enough.”

  “It’s not. If I’m supposed to sneak in under the radar while you two go at it and set the charges, how can I do it that fast? I mean, when you say you know where it is, do you know know, as in you can teleport us right to it? Or just, you know where to look? A minute isn’t a lot of time for me to be running around trying to figure things out, much less drill holes and set charges.”

  “I know where to look.”

  “Then that doesn’t help us yet. So what are we missing?”

  “Divination is the problem. You can’t count on it for everything. You have to figure some of it out yourself.”

  “We have. That’s why we have the suits and the charges and the drill.”

  Altin looked to where she’d set her helmet next to his. The heavy bulk of the drill lay on the floor beneath them, with the satchel of explosive charges leaning on it, as if casually, as if it were reclining there with no concern for the immediacy of literally everything.

  More out of a desire to buy time to think than to find out what he already knew w
as going to be terrible news, he cast a seeing spell back to Crown City. The situation there was just as he had feared it would be. The army was falling back into the Palace proper now, what was left of the city’s defenders draining slowly inside its walls, orderly and steadily, but clearly retreating inside, into the last bastion of the beleaguered War Queen. As he watched, men moved through the Palace gates in clumps, others guarding flanks that were sorely pressed as the enemy tried to choke off that tiny gap and keep them from safety. The demons themselves tried to gain access to the soft insides of the War Queen’s empire as well, pressing not just to stop the retreat, but to get inside and suck out the last marrow of the kingdom. But the Queen’s warriors held. They somehow maintained discipline even still, worked together as a people and held the enemy at bay, defending one another as the army slowly trickled through the gate, the lake of the Queen’s crimson in the grand avenue beyond the Palace being pressed tighter and tighter together, the body of them surrounded by the black mass of orcs and demons, seeming to be squeezed inside, passing through the gates in a slow osmosis of inevitable defeat, oozing from outside in, into what would be the last stand for them all. But the orderly retreat was painful to watch, too many of them trying to push through that singular opening. There couldn’t be many more than a thousand warriors left out there, two thousand at most, trying to hold off the scourge of that massive enemy long enough for everyone to get in. It was improbable that such a plan would work.

  He didn’t want to watch it any closer than from where he was, at an altitude above the Temple of Anvilwrath. He didn’t want to watch people die. Maybe watching Aderbury die, or someone else he knew and loved. No way. Not now. That would finish him. Looking was a bad idea.

  He glanced up and saw Citadel hovering above, shining like a jewel in the late afternoon sun. Beautiful, powerful, and worthless in the end, reduced to providing a hail of broken stones as the teleporters picked up and dropped giant chunks of debris, broken bones of the city, time and time again. It was effective, but not enough and, in the end, disheartening to watch. The greatest magical achievement of all time, utterly useless. They might as well have no magic at all, really. Their last hopes had lain at the feet of the magicless Earth fleet all along. The irony was painful.

  Which is when he realized how obvious it was. The solution had been there all along.

  He dropped the spell and leapt from his chair. “I know what we’re forgetting,” he said. He strode quickly to the table and pushing Orli’s helmet aside, he picked up the little sprig of peppercorns. “It’s peppercorn! She meant Peppercorn, on Citadel.”

  Orli was staring back at him wide eyed, hopeful, surely, but not understanding what he had in mind. “What about her? You already spoke to her, before we left.”

  “Peppercorn gave us anti-magic,” Altin proclaimed. “Anti-magic was what the fleet was doing to avoid Blue Fire. How could I have been so stupid?”

  Orli caught on immediately, looking excited even. “Yes. Oh my God, I’m an idiot too. That’s how we can get into the heart chamber undetected. You can …” she looked around for a moment, “… you can put it on these suits.”

  “I can,” he said, “with one problem. I don’t know the spell.”

  “Well, you better learn it fast. Can’t you just, you know, drink something or something? Surely your people have ways of doing this.”

  He smiled at her, this time a real smile, one with actual joy in it. She was as brilliant as she was beautiful. “You know my world better than I do. There is a diviner’s trick. Ocelot actually did it to me the other day.”

  She smiled back, but waved her hand in the air, a gesture to say that they should be moving on, not talking.

  Altin contacted Peppercorn immediately, and found that she was awaiting his call, anxious and at first ecstatic to hear him tapping at the edges of her mind. Disappointment followed. She’d been hoping that he was going to direct her to send teleporters to Earth. Finally. But he did not. He told her what he needed.

  “Guildmaster Meste will have it waiting when you get here,” promised Peppercorn, trying to find some hope in the fact that at least Altin and Orli were still trying with Red Fire. “Please hurry. It’s going terribly down there.”

  “I saw,” he relayed back to her. “Orli and I are on our way.”

  A moment later the two of them arrived in a Citadel teleportation chamber in the TGS offices. The last time Orli had been there was during the tour of Citadel, the first time she’d ever seen it before. They stepped out into the torch-lit space of the office proper, and it looked exactly the same, a low-ceilinged room with nothing to decorate it but empty desks that still hadn’t been assigned permanent occupants. Waiting near the exit stood Guildmaster Cypher Meste and the diminutive enchanter Peppercorn. Both women looked haggard and worry worn.

  The guildmaster diviner strode right up to Altin the moment he stepped into view and reached out her hand for his. He gave it to her immediately, palm up. Without precursor or warning, she turned it over and stuck him with a needle, hard and quick, drawing a long thread line down the back of his hand nearly to his wrist. She spoke only four words in doing it. When she finished, Altin knew the spell as thoroughly as if he’d been casting it every day for a year.

  “You’ll forget that by dinnertime,” she said as she looked up at him. “That’s the best I can do with no warning. If I’d had twenty minutes, you could have had it for a week. If we had three hours, you could have learned it properly yourself.”

  “Dinnertime will be enough,” Orli said, taking Altin’s hand from the guildmaster. “Altin, we have to go.”

  He knew that she was right. They all did.

  “Mercy’s favor,” Peppercorn said into the hiss of air where Altin and Orli had been. “Mercy’s favor on us all.”

  Chapter 45

  Altin set the tower down directly on the surface of Red Fire’s world. And true to apparently everything about this system and this bloody span of time, Red Fire the planet was just as red as the last planet Altin had explored, and just as red as the sun. It was also huge, titanic as rocky planets go, a great windswept rust ball with enormous mountains like rusty spines rising up all around, a land of rusty saw blades lying beneath a rusty sky filled with rusty clouds backlit by a bloated, rusty sun.

  The tower settled heavily onto the ground of that alien world, sent straight from Prosperion to this place where, by comparison, the gray stone of that now distant planet seemed bright plumage. The tower thrust itself up amongst the jagged landscape like a rude gesture to Red Fire’s oppressive monochrome, the singular monolith of otherness. In the next instant Altin cast the anti-magic spell on Orli’s space suit. “Taking down the Polar Piton’s shield now,” he said right after. He spoke urgently, his breath quick. “This must be fast, before he finds me again.”

  “Wait. I’m still trying to get a reading for the Higgs prism,” Orli said. “It’s not showing anything. It’s showing no gravity at all. We should be floating if that was true. Which it can’t be.” She fiddled with the dials on the gravity prism for a moment more, growing anxious and hating every moment Altin stood there without the anti-magic spell on his suit. “It should be reading something.”

  “One of my students mentioned once that gravity might be an incidental element of the shield. Perhaps that is affecting your machine.”

  “It might be. I don’t know.”

  “Well we are about to find out. What happens if the gravity is as you feared before, very high?”

  “We get flattened.”

  “Can we test it? Maybe I can teleport something out there.”

  “Like what? It would have to be something sort of vertical, like us.” She looked frantic. Her voice trembled as she spoke. “We don’t have time. He’s going to find you.”

  Altin cast about the room, looking for a surrogate to test the gravity. He spotted the little palm trees on the table nearby. “Here, this is vertical.”

  “It’s too light, it will just b
low over. And it’s made of glass. Altin, quit messing around. He’ll find you.”

  Altin teleported the decanter away, beyond the tower and the Polar Piton’s shield, setting it in view on the ground outside the window. The little palm fronds on its stopper began to spin. They spun so fast they became a blur. Surprisingly, it didn’t blow over. Had there been more time, Altin might have marveled at that. He did have time to notice, however, that it didn’t break. It neither crumbled nor got pulled flat. That would have to be good enough.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s not being ruined out there. So let’s roll the dice, shall we?”

  She sighed, the sound of it a tinny rasp in the speakers inside Altin’s helmet. “Take it down. Please hurry.”

  Altin reached out into the protective shielding he’d become so used to casting around buildings that he brought into space and, with a grimace, dismissed the spell.

  A scouring wind blasted through the tower’s windows the instant the magic shield was gone, nearly hurricane force. Books and parchments and bits of everything began whirling about, the wind circling and collecting violence in the round walls of the room. He immediately felt a tremendous weight upon him, he became that weight, had to fight to remain standing with all his might. His legs trembled and his spine felt as if it might compress. He felt a wrenching pain in his back where it pulled, and his abdominal muscles mashed together as his body began to fold, the very structure of his bones suddenly inadequate. He tried to push up against it, to fight it, but could not for long. For a moment he thought it might actually be an attack from Red Fire, but he saw Orli was folding too.

  Her fingers feverishly worked the controls of the contraption she held, and just as Altin was forced to his hands and knees, the pressure was gone.

  “Shit,” gasped Orli, breathing as hard as if she’d run a sprint. “Five g’s. That was close.” He could barely hear her over the roaring of the wind.

  “I should say so,” Altin agreed. He stood and tried rubbing his aching back, but the boxy unit on the back of his spacesuit made it impossible.