Galactic Mage 4: Alien Arrivals Page 44

  “Like, as in, you have to take command of it finally?”

  He nodded.

  Orli rolled her eyes at that, and looked as if she were about to protest. Pernie was glad Orli was mad. Orli was always mad when Altin wanted to do something fun and dangerous. Pernie had seen it more than once. But Altin stopped her before she could speak.

  “You’re coming too. I made sure of it,” he said, which irritated Pernie and seemed to pacify the woman some. “But first there’s something I want to do.”

  “What’s that?” Orli asked.

  “Well, that gets to the other thing. Let’s go have your ceremony right now.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now. We can call up Captain Jackson on your old ship, the Aspect, and have her marry us right this moment. You’ve still got your maid of honor in Roberto”—he paused long enough for them both to laugh—“though he is a bit on the tipsy side just now, and I’ll have Nipper stand in as my best man. Let’s have it done.”

  “Altin, you don’t have to do that. I can wait. Her Majesty will be happier if we wait, and that will only make your life, and our lives, easier down the road.”

  “Perhaps,” he said as Pernie’s heart turned to ash inside her chest—she was actually siding with Orli Pewter’s arguments as she watched, forced into an unholy alliance with the very source of her private agony. “But I see how fate has written it for us. Look how time passes; look how events continue to conspire. We’ve opened up the frothy ale keg of the universe, and it is foaming still. We’ve had this conversation before. So many times. And yet, here we are, unmarried still, once more as the gods see fit to amuse themselves with our lives. I won’t go another day without you as my wife. You must agree, as I will not allow you to refuse.”

  “Oh, really,” she said, laughing. Teasing. “And what will you do if I do refuse? Smite me with lightning? Set me on fire with your nastiest fire spells? Turn me into a horny toad?”

  Pernie could not believe she was saying what she said. Even though, with her whole body, she wanted Orli Pewter to say no, to put it off, to give Pernie a chance to win him for herself, she was simply flabbergasted that the woman could refuse such an offer, such sincerity. Making jokes no less. Killing her would be the greatest favor Pernie could do for him.

  And yet Master Altin laughed as well.

  “Oh,” he said, and his eyes took on this strange, sinister sort of look that Pernie had never seen before. His brows came down, and then he vanished. Right after, he reappeared standing next to Orli’s chair, leaning over her. The gust of air upon his return blew the nearest candle out. She gasped. He lunged for her, like a predator pouncing on prey, stopping just short of her, their faces a finger’s width apart. “You’ll have your fire,” he said in a low voice, “and your horny toad.” She giggled, then he kissed her on the mouth, leaning into the kiss and pressing his face onto hers for far longer than Pernie could abide. She actually found herself halfway to them when he pulled away, saying, “So, what say you?”

  Pernie froze, her heart pounding in her chest.

  “I’ll take it. The ring and the burning toad,” Orli said, grinning. “When do we leave?”

  “Go get your best man and mine,” he said. “I shall go find the royal dressmaker and retrieve your dress. Surely he’s repaired it by now.”

  “Oh, that’s going to piss him off,” she laughed. “This late, plus you’re going to have me married in it while he doesn’t get to watch everybody gape at his epic work?”

  “They can gape at the video the Aspect’s cameras take.”

  She nodded happily. He kissed her again, once more long and awful as viewed from where Pernie stood, now so close she could hear the wet sounds and the breathing that they made. She loved Master Altin an awful lot, but she wasn’t sure about all of that. Still, if Orli Pewter would do it, then she would too if it came to it.

  Then Master Altin was gone.

  Chapter 52

  Pernie froze, still as stone, staring across the room as the remaining candle flames wavered with the movement of air that followed Altin’s teleportation spell. She watched him vanish, watched Orli stare into the vacancy where he had been. Orli had this wistful little smile upon her face that filled Pernie up with hate.

  Orli reached out, as if by reflex, for a wine cup that was no longer there. At first Pernie didn’t realize what she was doing, but it became clear when Orli said happily to herself, “Oh, now they’ve taken the wine away.”

  It took Pernie that long to clear her thoughts, and by the time she was reaching for her knife, Orli leapt up and ran out of the room, giggling as gaily as any child.

  Pernie watched her go and couldn’t believe what she’d just seen. In the span of time required for a dinner, she’d had a victim, lost a victim, discovered she had a chance for a husband after all, and then lost that, and then had a victim and lost it once more, the last costing her yet another shot at claiming Master Altin for herself. How hard could it be to kill one Orli Pewter after all? She’d killed a latakasokis by herself, while in a poison-induced stupor no less. She’d ridden the king of the horned manatees. She’d even gazed upon elven women and not fallen in love!

  But still there was a chance. Altin was gone, and now Orli was alone. Pernie needed to calm herself.

  She set off after her, intent on finally finishing what she had begun a year ago.

  She crept to the massive oaken doors through which Orli had run, and peered out, left, then right. She knew there were patrols in this part of the keep these days, ever since the orcs invaded, so she kept up her invisibility spell. She slipped through the doors and found the shadows of an alcove, pressing herself to the wall so tightly she might have been moss growing there. She listened for Orli’s voice or the sound of her footfalls made distinct by the riding boots she wore. Nothing.

  By the time she got to the double doors leading out into the courtyard, Orli was running back her way, having already gone into Altin’s strange-looking new tower and retrieved the Earth tablet she always spoke into. “Yes, now,” Orli was saying as she walked briskly up the steps. “And no, you cannot wear that ridiculous hat. So comb your hair.”

  “Look who’s talking, helmet head,” Pernie heard Roberto say.

  Orli tapped the front of the tablet for a moment, then laughed before tapping it again. “Yikes, you’re right,” she said, but she was smiling as she acknowledged it. “I’ll fix mine too.”

  Pernie slipped back and hid against the wall, melting into scant shadows beneath one great black iron hinge.

  Orli came through without so much as a glance in Pernie’s direction and turned down the long hall, heading for the kitchens by Pernie’s guess. She couldn’t kill her in the kitchen, so she waited, knowing Orli would either come back this way or go out the back and circle around to Master Altin’s tower once again.

  She heard Orli’s voice coming before she saw her again. “I know, Daddy, but he doesn’t want to wait. And I agree. Those things I told you about on Yellow Fire are going to open up who knows what kind of trouble. It may be nothing. They might even be friendly. But I doubt it. If it is trouble, and the whole universe goes to hell again, well, at least Altin and I will finally be together all the way. It will finally be official, you know? I’ll be Lady Meade. Can you imagine?” She giggled again, and Pernie wanted to jump out right then and go stab her in the heart. But she didn’t.

  The general’s reply came from the tablet, echoing ahead of Orli as she rounded the corner and strode down the hall. “All right, Orli girl. I’ll be there. I’ll get Jackson to agree to it. There are no worries about that. You all come and get me before you go.”

  “We will.”

  Orli’s teeth flashed brightly in the light of the tablet, then right after, she cut the connection and tucked the tablet into the waistband at her back. She was still smiling as she walked by Pernie’s hiding place.

  Pernie drew her knife and moved in behind her. She hadn’t poisoned the blade, which meant sh
e needed to get in quick and be precise with a fatal blow. There were big veins in the throat and the inner thigh. She could get to those easily enough.

  But then Orli began to run. She ran to the end of the hall, down the short flight of stairs, and out into an open hall that led to the base of Tytamon’s tower, the mounting of which, by the time Pernie caught up, Orli had well under way.

  Pernie thought about teleporting up ahead of her, but she didn’t know where Orli was, and unlike Master Altin, she had no magic sight to see her way in advance. So she had to follow on foot instead. She wished she had Knot for this. Orli Pewter was not so swift as an elf, but for a human woman she was terribly fast. Nonetheless, where she was going there was no other way out. So Pernie would go as quickly as her own legs could. That would be quick enough.

  When she found Orli Pewter again, the woman was brushing her hair, standing much like she had that day one long year ago, staring blissfully at her own reflection, her eyes alight with the joy of finally stealing Master Altin from Pernie.

  This time Pernie wouldn’t miss. This time Pernie had mastery of her weaponry.

  There came a blast of air then, a great blast of it that nearly staggered her, and with it a great pain in her right hand, terrible pain all along the fleshy side between the wrist and the first joint of her little finger, so much so that she dropped her knife.

  She shouted, silently in the sealed illusion of her spell just before it broke, and her knife clattered to the ground for everyone to hear.

  Altin shouted as well. “By the gods,” he proclaimed. “Pernie, what in nine hells?”

  He made to pull away from her, shocked to see her standing there right where he’d just teleported to, or nearly so, but he couldn’t quite pull away. The sleeve of his robes was merged with Pernie’s hand.

  As he jerked a second time, not yet realizing what had just been done, Pernie yelped again as her hand sent throbbing agony up her arm.

  She looked down at it, saw the gray silk and golden filigree at the long, loose cuff where it disappeared beneath her skin.

  But she’d known pain before. She spoke the two words of her own teleport and leapt across the room.

  Blood poured freely from her hand. She glanced to the floor where her knife lay, then up at Altin and now Orli, who were both staring at her opened-mouthed.

  “Pernie, by the gods, what are you doing here? You could have gotten us both killed.”

  Pernie looked from them back to her knife. They followed her eyes and saw it too.

  “Oh no,” Orli breathed. “Again?”

  Pernie thought to blink herself to the knife and get it done before Altin could do anything, but she glimpsed into the mana and saw that he was already casting a spell. Too fast for her to do anything about it, the big bed against the wall vanished, only to reappear directly over the knife, separating Pernie from it and from the person she intended it for.

  “Pernie,” Master Altin said. “Stop. Don’t do this. Why are you doing this?”

  Pernie glared at Orli, who stared back at her, the Earth woman watching her like she would a snake that’s crawled into the room. Pernie was glad of it. She was a snake, and she would bite Orli too. Except her fang was underneath the bed.

  She wished she had her spear now. She could have thrown it right through Orli’s face. Right through. She wouldn’t miss. And Seawind wouldn’t show up to stop her this time.

  But she didn’t have it. The only weapon she had was her hands.

  And Ilbei Spadebreaker’s enchanted pickaxe.

  She snatched the shrunken pickaxe from her neck with her wounded hand, and the pressure of squeezing it tight enough to yank it off sent a jet of blood a full span into the air.

  She slid her fingers down the length of the tiny pickaxe. “Serend’orr,” she said, remembering the magic word, and in that instant it was its full size again.

  It clanked heavily against the stone, heavy enough for a strong man, far too heavy for her.

  “Pernie, stop it this instant,” Master Altin said. “What’s gotten into you?”

  Pernie spoke the words again, this time sliding her slick, bloody hand up the haft as she did, shrinking the weapon to the size of a hatchet. Its two steel points gleamed.

  She hoisted it and circled around the bed, but Altin kept moving, keeping himself between her and Orli.

  “Pernie, whatever Orli has done to you, whatever I have done to you, we can make it right. You need to put that down. You’re putting us in a very dangerous place, right now. Please, just put it down.”

  Pernie knew that she would have to be fast. She’d have to cast back-to-back teleports. He wouldn’t be expecting that. And she’d come in from above.

  She muttered the two words, vanished, then reappeared, feinting with the pickaxe even as Altin conjured a wall of ice between them, two hands thick. But Pernie was already gone, behind them both in two words, the pickaxe swinging for the back of Orli’s neck.

  But then Orli and Altin were across the room.

  “Pernie, I swear by all nine planes of hell, I don’t want to hurt you,” Altin said.

  Pernie let her vision shift between the realms of mana and light. She saw the mana move toward him, but again he was gone.

  She spun round and round, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  She ran to where they’d been, reaching out with her hands as much as with her mind for the mana, to see if he was channeling invisibility in the corner of the room. He wasn’t.

  She turned back, looked for movement in the mana, watched for the subtle shifts that she’d worked so hard to learn to see. For the longest time there was nothing, but then came movement from beneath her feet. Just once, a ripple like a teleport.

  He was down below.

  She ran down the stairs, unwilling to let off looking into the mana, and unwilling to give herself away by using it—though she thought it might be possible Master Altin did not know how to watch patterns like she did.

  The door to Tytamon’s study was locked, as it had been before. She blinked in and out of the mana stream, watching. She held Ilbei Spadebreaker’s enchanted pickaxe. “It can cut through anything,” Master Altin had marveled when he read aloud the runes inscribed along its two long, arcing blades.

  She swung it at the door handle, a great iron thing, and it went through it as easily as glass. The lock and handle fell apart, as did a portion of the door. Pernie kicked it in and ran inside, pickaxe raised on high, ready to split Orli Pewter through the head.

  So it was with some alarm that she found Master Tytamon standing there instead. The longtime master of Calico Castle appeared just as ancient and weatherworn as he always had, and he looked up at her with gray eyes as piercing as ever from beneath the partial curtain of his bushy white eyebrows.

  “I should think, child,” he said, regarding the pickaxe and pushing just one of those bushy eyebrows up, “that running about with a thing like that, breaking down doors no less, will get your ears boxed by Mistress Kettle straightaway.”

  Pernie could only stare at him, pickaxe still on high and her little mouth open wide.

  Just then Altin came up from behind her, catching her in that moment of perplexity and snatching the pickaxe out of her slick, bloody hand.

  “Sweet Mercy, but I thought she was going to strike us all down with this thing,” Altin declared. Then he paused, blinking several times at what might be an apparition, before he, like Pernie, began to realize who it was standing there. He staggered back a step, nearly dropping the pickaxe to the floor. “Tidalwrath’s teeth. It can’t be!”

  “Well, it can, boy, and no thanks to the lot of you leaving me out there in that infernal windstorm. It blew me back to spirits straightaway, but you never came back. I thought the worst had happened after you were gone so long. And when you finally did send me back to my windowsill, you didn’t come let me out, so again I was sure you’d met some horrible fate. A long time to worry.”

  Altin’s mouth, like Pernie’s, fell op
en, the two of them a pair of seeming dullards.

  Tytamon saw it, watching Altin closely for several long moments. He harrumphed, then twitched his thin lips around. “You did know what you were doing when you left me up there, didn’t you?” Tytamon asked. “Bringing me up there into all that wind? That was the point, to speed it up, yes?”

  “I …,” Altin began, but had nothing else to add.

  “Well, I’ll be. An accident, then.” He turned and resumed what he’d presumably been doing before Pernie came barging in, which was getting to the window to check the decanter with the spinning palm-frond stopper. “Well, that would explain why you let me sit so long.” He turned back. “How long?” he asked. “How long was I gone?”

  “Nearly a year you were up there,” Altin managed to stammer at last. “But you’ve been dead—or, well, presumed so—for a year and a half. A little more. But I did not know you were—that we had … put you up there on Red Fire.”

  “Hmm. I think the breeze coming off the mountain would have had me back by now anyway.”

  “But how?”

  “A bit of elven gratitude, my boy. Long ago. Right after Duador. The High Seat called me ‘the one human worth saving if such a disaster should ever befall the world again.’ I admit it was vanity that allowed me to agree. And fear, of course. We all fear death from time to time.”

  Pernie watched the old man watching Altin, not daring to turn around. She understood what had happened, though. She realized she actually understood it better than Master Altin did. He’d never been to the forbidden cove before. It all made perfect sense now.

  And while confusion distracted him, she could slip away.

  Two words and she was gone, as far down the stairwell as she could get, and, with four more casts, she was at the bottom again.