Galactic Mage 4: Alien Arrivals Page 45

  She recast her illusion and snuck out of the castle proper, heading straight for the armory. There were other weapons there.

  The door was locked. It never had been before.

  Easy enough, however. She’d been in there a thousand times. She knew it was dangerous to teleport without looking—her throbbing hand was proof of it—but she had to take a chance.

  She appeared just inside the door, in one piece, unmerged with anything else.

  As if to remind her just how much of a chance she’d taken, her hand throbbed. She looked down at it. It hurt terribly, but she didn’t care. But she did see that it was still bleeding a steady stream. There was already a pool nearly the size of a silver piece on the floor beside her foot.

  By the time she realized that Master Altin and Tytamon would see the blood trail leading here to the armory, that they would see the blood dripping right out of her onto the ground, ruining her illusion, Master Altin was standing there. “Pernie, stop at once. I demand it. You are not going to harm Orli, do you understand? I won’t allow it. I don’t know what’s got into you, but I won’t stand another moment of this. There are places where bad wizards and magical lunatics go, and there are no ways out of them, elf tricks or not. Do you hear me?”

  Pernie muttered the teleport and was back in the courtyard again. Where Master Tytamon grabbed her by the scruff. His sticklike fingers, gnarled and ancient as they were, were strong and powerful, and he lifted her right up off her feet. She made to speak the teleport again, but he clapped his other hand over her mouth, pressing his thumb and middle finger into her cheeks, pushing the soft flesh between her teeth.

  “Enough!” he shouted, and there was something terrible and compelling in the sound of it, something thunderous that reached right inside of her. She could not explain it, but she knew she couldn’t disagree. It was as if he’d cast a spell on her. She was stunned into compliance by the raw force of that command.

  Altin appeared beside him even as the command was rebounding off the high cliffs of Mount Pernolde, in whose shadow Calico Castle dwelled.

  “She’s lost her mind,” Altin said. “She needs to be taken to Goffa House in Hast.”

  Tytamon studied her then, looking into her face like she might have done were she looking into the face of some bug she’d found, some inexplicable little creature with too many eyes or curious pinching mandibles, some thing.

  She could see it then, see it in Tytamon’s eyes, sure. And worse, far worse, she could see it in Master Altin’s too. It was a look very far from love. Nothing like the way he looked at Orli Pewter.

  Pernie realized in that moment that she had made a terrible mistake. He was looking at her like she had looked at Knot. Like the lady elf that Djoveeve fell in love with must have looked at her.

  Thinking of Djoveeve made her realize another mistake: she’d gotten caught. Djoveeve said the Sava’an’Lansom must never be caught. Seawind had said it many times too. It was practically the definition of the term.

  And here she was, caught. Tytamon looking at her like a bug. Altin looking at her like a bug. Some stupid creature to be stepped on or smashed with an old book.

  He’d never love her now.

  “Pernie,” Tytamon said. “If I put you down, are you going to tell us what is driving you to such things? No magic, now. Just the truth.”

  She wanted to cast another teleport. She was sure she could get outside the castle wall. Run off into the woods and hide. She’d get another chance at Orli Pewter some other day. She really hated her now. She’d ruined everything. Everything.

  But she couldn’t cast the spell. She tried to. She started the words, but she couldn’t speak them. They wouldn’t come out.

  “I’ve trumped your magic, girl,” said Master Tytamon, looking very grizzled and severe. “You won’t cast that spell for ten minutes at least. Perhaps even a week, for all I know, as I’ve never cast it on a child. And if you try too hard, too soon, you’ll get it halfway out and hurt yourself. So be a smart girl and don’t try for at least five days.”

  Pernie growled at him, her brows lowering slowly, deliberately, like that first considered placement of the executioner’s axe before the killing swing. She aimed her hatred at him for a time.

  “By the gods, look at that,” Tytamon said. “Have you ever seen such a thing?”

  “I’m not sure what the elves have done to her,” Altin said, “but they’ve certainly begun sharpening her into a nasty little knife. By the gods, it’s rather unsettling.”

  She heard him talking about her as if she wasn’t even there, and the tears burned in her eyes. She tried to stop them. She didn’t want Master Altin to see her cry. He might not ever love her now, but she didn’t want him to think she was weak.

  Tytamon saw the first of those tears as they began to run, and he set her gently back on the ground. “Go get Kettle,” he said to Altin, then he knelt down next to her and looked her in the eyes. “This is the girl without the elves inside.”

  Pernie watched Master Altin go; he went so quickly and obediently it made the anger burn even worse. She didn’t want his pity, and she didn’t want to see Kettle looking at her like they had. Like an insect.

  “Come now, Pernie. It’s okay.” He made to pull her into a hug, thinking to console her, but she pulled away. She looked down at her feet instead. She fidgeted with her hands, fumbled with the cords of the sling she’d tied around her waist. She reached for her hair, curled a strand around her finger, fussing with it. “Well, at least talk to me, child,” he said. “What is it?” She pulled the mint leaf from behind her ear as he repeated the question a second time, even more gently than the last.

  She looked past him, saw Kettle coming out into the courtyard. She could already hear the mutters and admonitions of the woman’s worry shaping up.

  She looked back to Tytamon and shook her head, blinking dry her eyes as the last tear fell to the flagstones, splashing unseen into the pool of blood she was standing in. “What is it?” he asked yet again. And then she was gone, the tearing of a leaf quite beyond the scope of even the great Tytamon’s compulsion spell.

  Chapter 53

  Pernie appeared in the cave that had been her home for over a year, the one that was her only home now. There was no one around, the room empty but for the table-topped boulder, the coral seats around it, and her spear, which someone had brought back and leaned against the wall. She snatched it up and went out, calling for Knot telepathically. He arrived in a matter of minutes, flowing like a short, silvery river over rocks and roots as he swept in on his silent feet.

  She jumped on him and stooped long enough to snatch the length of rope, winding it around her wrist reflexively. She set him off at full speed, the two of them rushing through the jungle like a demon breeze. They arrived atop the cliff that overlooked the manatees, and Knot hadn’t even come to a complete stop when she leapt over the edge, using his momentum to sail out over the rocks. She was already falling before she looked to see if the sargosaganti were there. They were.

  She didn’t know whether it had been ten minutes since Tytamon had stolen her ability to cast the spell, and she didn’t care. She spoke the words anyway.

  She landed barely fifteen steps from the head of the great bull that dominated the group, and she took three sprinting steps toward him before casting her teleport a second time. She hadn’t bothered looking into the mana to see if the great beast’s horn was about to be cast at her.

  It was. The horn flew through the empty space where she had been as she reappeared closer to her prey. She vanished a second time just before the monster’s second horn was whistling through the space, the snap of air when she vanished the only thing that the horn encountered as it flew.

  The sargosagantis’ natural defenses had it teleporting out to sea just as Pernie reappeared, falling toward the water, ten feet above the surface, ten spans beyond the edge of the surf. Her spear was already on its way. Not headed for where the creature was, but for where she
knew it would be.

  Sure enough, the sargosagantis reappeared right where her spear was. It appeared around her spear, in the same place, like her hand and Altin’s robe had. And it was not in the same place she’d stabbed into the creature’s back. Not this time. Her spear was in the same place as its brain. Aimed by instinct.

  The momentum the sargosagantis had taken with it when it teleported was still with it when it reappeared, and it carried it forward anyway, despite the fact that it was in that instant dead. Its great bulk sliced through the water for another hundred spans, slowing like some fleshy sailing ship that’s lost its wind.

  Pernie landed upon it with her teleport, near the bubbling scar she’d made in its thick, blubbery hide the day she’d tried to ride it not so long ago. She looked down at it with contempt. That time had been failure, but not this time. She looked back toward the beach, at the surf that was drifting farther and farther away as the sargosagantis drifted away, the momentum of its last teleport already nearly arrested by the incoming waves. She let go a breath that felt as if she’d been holding it for an entire day.

  She’d finally ridden the king of the sargosaganti, and this time he did not get away.

  When she returned to the cave, it was well after dark, but the long shadows and golden flickers coming from the mouth of the cave proved that she would not be alone inside. Upon entering, she saw that Djoveeve sat with her feet up on the central boulder, and Seawind sat across from her taking a turn at some sort of elven game. Both looked up at her as she came in.

  “You’ve come back,” observed Djoveeve needlessly. “And you killed the sargosagantis king.”

  “He’s not a king. He’s just a big, stupid animal like all the rest.”

  “You were told the elves consider them sacred.”

  “The elves are stupid too.”

  Seawind smiled. “Then you have passed your test.”

  “I already passed my test. That’s why you sent me home.”

  “Sending you home was the test.”

  Pernie frowned at that, looking from the elf to Djoveeve, who had raised one eyebrow and the better part of one cheek. The old woman nodded that it was true. Pernie didn’t care anymore.

  “I want to learn how to kill Orli Pewter,” she said.

  “That is what you asked when you first arrived,” Seawind replied.

  “You said you would teach me how to kill her. But I can’t. I tried.”

  “I said you would be able to kill her,” Seawind said. “That is not the same as succeeding in your attempt.”

  Pernie frowned again. She knew he was playing word games with her, but she had spent enough time on the Island of Hunters to know she didn’t want to play it back. She was too tired. Her whole body ached like it used to ache in the early days when she’d first come here, the days when she’d spent all that time running and climbing, trying to keep up with the hunt hopelessly.

  She looked at the elf sitting there, so calmly, the absolute image of deadly confidence, and somehow it exhausted her too completely to contain. She simply dropped to her knees and began to cry, tears of fatigue more than anything, but also of frustration, waning anger, and more than a little broken heart.

  No one came to comfort her, and so she was allowed to sit and pour it all out, the hot, salty tears running from the pools in her palms and down her wrists, soaking her elbows before running into her pants, where they mixed with the salty water that remained from her having had to swim back to shore.

  When she was finished, when her sorrow and rage had finished washing out, she looked up to see that Seawind was gone, leaving only Djoveeve sitting there, just as she had been, with her feet up on the boulder still.

  “Welcome back, little Sava,” she said, a smile warm upon her face.

  Pernie’s lips wriggled as she got up and sat herself down across from the woman somewhat glumly. “I suppose the other elves will kill me now,” she said. “Since I killed their dumb sargosagantis.”

  Djoveeve’s smile grew a little wider as she shook her head. “Oh, I don’t think it is as bad as that. And I expect they’ll all know about it very soon. It’s not easy to kill one of them without Fayne Gossa, you know.”

  “They could kill it with a lightning bolt or a fireball. A big bolt of ice.”

  “Sargosaganti don’t suffer the effects of fire and electricity. And elves don’t conjure the elements at all.”

  “They don’t?”

  “Have you ever seen an elf cast a fireball? Throw an ice spear or summon lightning?”

  “No,” she admitted. Her little brow wrinkled beneath her bangs, which were plastered to her forehead by the salty sea. “But I’ve only ever been with them on the hunt.”

  “Well, they don’t. And without poison, you’ve done something just short of impossible for many of them, I should think.”

  “Shadesbreath could kill one with his pinkie nail,” Pernie said.

  “Perhaps,” Djoveeve said. “But I certainly would never try. Not even when I was young and fast like you.”

  Pernie looked up, her eyes still luminous with remnant tears, glittering in the light of the torches Djoveeve had placed in sconces on the wall. The old woman nodded, confirming it was true. Pernie shrugged and started fidgeting with her hands. The one where Master Altin’s sleeve had been throbbed miserably.

  “Kettle will hate me forever now,” she said. “And Master Tytamon too. He’s back alive, you know.” She looked up then, her features momentarily alight with the thought of that. “He came back because of the ghost tree. Just like you said he would. Except that you never said he would. But he was a ghost, and now he’s real. I saw him. He even grabbed me by the neck.”

  Djoveeve leaned forward in her chair, her own expression contemplative for a time. “That explains the missing tree the elves were discussing this afternoon.” But she spent only another half second on the thought before asking, “And why did the old master grab you by the neck? Caught you on at that Miss Pewter, did he?”

  She nodded, looking back into her lap. “He did. And Master Altin took my pickaxe. The one that Master Ilbei gave to me. And he almost appeared right on top of me too.” She held up her hand for the old Sava’an’Lansom to see. The edge of it was swollen and puffy, a mottled mixture of purples, blacks, and blues. Most of the crusting blood had washed off, showing only a raw pair of splits where the skin had burst open to accommodate the pressure caused by the fabric of Altin’s sleeve, rents like an overdone sausage.

  Djoveeve took the child’s small, battered hand in her own cracked and leathery ones, turning it slightly so she could see it better in the light. “I’ll call Seawind back,” she said, starting to rise.

  “No, I can fix it for myself,” Pernie said. And she did so, though the spell nearly exhausted her to unconsciousness before Djoveeve could stop her from beginning to sing it yet again.

  “You need to learn better healing magic than that,” the old woman said. “You may never be a great healer, but you can certainly do better than a child’s song. That magic, however, is one you’ll have to learn at a human school. The elves can’t teach you, and I haven’t got the gift.”

  “I’m not going to a human school,” she said. “I want to learn how to kill Orli Pewter from the elves. I want to marry Master Altin, and now he’s married her. They were going to do it this very night. So now I have to kill her and wait for him to be sad for a long time before he’ll ever love me again.”

  Djoveeve watched the intensity of the look that came upon the child’s face. The old woman’s expression clouded some as she did.

  “He’ll not love you after, child. You won’t win him that way.”

  “Yes I will.”

  “Saying so won’t make it true. You can’t kill her and expect him to fall in love with you simply because she is gone.”

  “But there isn’t any other way.”

  Djoveeve considered that for a time, her wrinkled face wrinkling all the more. “I was told that Earth people o
nly live a hundred years or so before they die. Their ‘technology’ is weak in that way.”

  Pernie looked up at that, her face a question of hope and possibilities.

  “It’s true,” Djoveeve went on. “Their ancient ones reach a hundred and thirty years; perhaps one or two make a hundred and fifty at best.”

  “Who told you that?” Pernie asked, her little blonde brows drooping skeptically. “Even blanks live longer than that. Orli Pewter says her people are all blanks. Not even one of them has got any magic at all.”

  “I have my sources,” the leather-clad master assassin said. “And I get more day by day.”

  Pernie fell to thinking on that for a while, and Djoveeve rose and got Pernie something to eat, salt fish and a bunch of wild grapes.

  “My point, dear girl,” she said as she sat back down and pushed the food at her, “is that you’ll have a better chance if you simply wait. Patience is your ally, young Sava. You’ve learned that as a hunter, both at home and here. How is this any different?”

  Pernie’s lips set to wriggling again, which in turn wriggled her nose. That was true, she knew. And it was likely that Master Altin, as a Seven, would live very long. And Pernie was a Three. Threes lived a very long time, especially if they could heal or had close doctor friends.

  But still, a hundred years was a long time to wait. She didn’t want to wait that long. She was fairly sure that was too much patience for something as important as this. Besides, what would happen if she died before Orli Pewter did? She’d almost died several times since coming to the island, after all. The world was a very dangerous place. What if she died before Master Altin finally had a chance to love her again?

  What if he died? There were likely very many monsters out in space!

  But it was possible. She didn’t know why, but it seemed like he must have loved her at some time, so it only made sense that he would love her again. She’d rescued him from the tree that had nearly killed him and taken off his arm. She saved him from the Hostiles out in space when he was all but dead. Granted, she had just tried to kill Orli Pewter again, so he might not love her right now. But she would make up for that somehow.