Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) Read online

  He heard it again. Something falling. A pebble perhaps.

  He turned back and let his vision drift once more toward the back of the cavern. A whelpling could crawl faster than he moved. He dropped back down to a span’s height off the floor. He heard it again. Behind him.

  He spun back. Still nothing. So he waited.

  He began noticing a pulse. Not so much a pulse of light, but a pulse of less darkness. Not steady, no rhythm, but visible motion in the darkness, something pale, and small, very small.

  He moved to it. There was the stone. The yellow stone, the purpose of the contest, embedded in the face of the cavern wall. Half in, half out, and perched atop a leaking oblong expanse. Dark fluid ran down the rock. The stone flashed, or more accurately, vanished for a moment and became visible again. This happened twice more.

  He noticed then the face above. An orc’s face protruding from the rock, the rest of its head buried in the cavern wall. He saw a hand above that, poised as if about to hammer down a blow, though the fist was loose and open now.

  The yellow stone vanished and reappeared, as if it were blinking, followed by the sound of a stone chip hitting the floor. This time Kazuk-Hal-Mandik heard a hiss to go with it. A curse. He followed the sound to the piece of rock that had fallen. He watched it skitter to a stop. Then it vanished.

  High above, back up in Warlord’s suite, in the well-lit room with Warlord’s food-laden tables and the soft strum of a lute, the old warlock laughed, his body laughed while his vision watched far below, beyond his open, laughing mouth.

  He watched the progress of the invisible contestant for a while as whoever it was worked at chipping out the yellow stone. He raised his vision up and surveyed the area around them. Three sand orcs were tearing up a lone shaman from the northern tribe, Kazuk-Hal-Mandik’s tribe. There were two others making their way along the wall from the opposite end, though they were moving slowly, cautiously. He could not tell from this location whether they were hunting or hiding.

  He lowered his sight down to the work of the invisible orc again. The stone vanished completely for a time. Two more rock chips fell to the cavern floor.

  Kazuk-Hal-Mandik pulled off the ring, returning his vision to the well-lit suite. He turned to Warlord, who had moved from observing the contest to lean over the book from which a captive human read. The human’s words were a jumble of nothing in Warlord’s ears. He raised his hand to smite the bedraggled creature, but the ancient warlock stopped him, calling, “Warlord, no.”

  Warlord spun on him and glared a yellow-eyed stain of warning at him. Warlord could break Kazuk-Hal-Mandik before he could cast a spell. No one in the room doubted that.

  “Warlord, we need that human’s knowledge of the sounds they keep in those symbols drawn there.”

  “In days gone we beat these things from them. Not this weakness you call for.”

  “In days gone we were chased into these hills and kept here for centuries, Warlord. We must smear ourselves in the excrement of our enemies in order to creep into their camp.”

  “Spoken like a coward,” Warlord said, but he did move away from the reader. He snarled at the orc woman strumming the lute. “You make our women weak with this excrement as well.”

  “The lute compels him to read, Warlord.”

  “And what will you do when he is done? That woman will have your human knowledge in her head. She will summon the demons into your bed, and you will cry out for me to come and save you from them. I will not come.”

  “Yes, Warlord.” Kazuk-Hal-Mandik had no desire to win the argument. He already had what he needed when the massive leader of the All Clans did not mash the human into unconsciousness again. “Their eyes swell shut, Warlord,” he’d told him the first time. “And then they can’t read.”

  Kazuk-Hal-Mandik allowed himself to listen to the human reading from the book for a while, droning on in the common tongue of the humans intermingled with long passages in a foreign language he believed belonged to the elves. He glanced up at the woman playing the instrument, a thick-thighed and broad-shouldered young thing he’d sired eighty seasons ago. She was a smart one. She would learn the song and teach him to sing it. And then, he would have a new power, the power promised him by God.

  Still smiling, he went back to stand behind Warlord, the hulking figure’s massive hands wrapped around the steaming foreleg of a moose. The great warrior snapped it in half, and the sounds of him sucking the marrow from it filled the chamber for a while, blocking out in places the tuneless notes of the lute and the tired muttering of the human bent over the book.

  The whole of the cavern suddenly flashed with light. Bright and orange, and for a moment Kazuk-Hal-Mandik thought a fissure must have opened and the whole mountain was going to erupt.

  The vast flare of light was gone as quickly as it came, leaving behind instead a field of smaller fires where the bodies strewn across the cavern floor now burned like the cook fires of an army encamped down there.

  He heard laughter then. Deep and resonant, rising from below like a dark thing climbing up the walls to mock them. He, like Warlord beside him, leaned out through the opening, peering down the face of the rock to see if they could find the source. There was nothing to see. He looked left, then right. The two orcs who had been creeping along while he was using the seeing ring had come close enough to be observed clearly now. The flash of light had stopped them, however, and they looked about furtively, and obviously considered going back.

  “Cowards,” said Warlord as he watched. He yelled down at them. “Cowards. Go find it and kill it. You stand there like old women. You shame your clan.” He spun back to his ancient companion. “Your powers make you weak. All of you.” He turned away with a contemptuous sound rumbling in his throat, leaning back out to watch, hoping the two orcs would make some courageous move or be slain before they further polluted the air with their enfeebled breath.

  A wall of fire surrounded them as Warlord watched. It rose up and crashed over them like a circular splash, a bright ring of brilliant orange, five spans high, and then, whoosh, it fell in on itself and smoldered in a pool of flame for a while. When it was gone, there was no sign of the two cowards anymore.

  More laughter from below.

  Waves of fire then began to wash out from the area beneath the two observing orc leaders. Enormous waves, five spans high, twice that thick, spreading in expanding arcs that blasted out and swept across the arena for a hundred spans before dying down. Every time a wave faded away, another appeared back at the point of origin.

  The source of the waves began to move away from the wall, and the arcs became rings that radiated out from a central point and washed across the broken bodies, the writhing wounded and the screaming contestants that got caught in them as they passed. And so it went for some time. Wave after wave after wave.

  The unseen source continued to move. It moved around the edges of the arena in a careful sweep. Always blasting out its fiery waves, steady and meticulous. It pushed to one end of the cavern, and then came back through the middle. The rings of fire turned to long straight waves that ran wall-to-wall across the chamber, larger and hotter now, filling it floor to ceiling.

  “What is this?” demanded Warlord.

  “I suggest you move away from the window,” the old shaman said.

  Sure enough, the fire wall eventually came across the opening through which they looked. It did not enter the room, flattening itself as if pressed against an invisible barrier as it passed, but it burned with a monstrous heat that did make its way into the room. Then it was gone, moving steadily toward the other end of the arena, meticulous in its fury, consuming everything in its path.

  The mountain of dead bodies burned brightly as the fire passed over it, a massive pyre of failure, thought Kazuk-Hal-Mandik as he watched. His smile showed all his teeth, or all of them that remained. This would be his legacy. They would chant songs of his glory for centuries. He would be the one who unlocked the secrets of the yellow stone,
God’s stone.

  Soon, anyway.

  He reached down into his rabbit-skin pouch and fingered another fold of vellum, different than the one that had held his ring. This one held his piece of the yellow stone. Together, he and the orc making the spectacular show below would bring a new era of glory to the All Clans. He could hardly wait to find out who it was.

  Chapter 7

  Citadel arrived far enough away from the Earth ships that its Combat Hop abilities would not bring it anywhere near the ships, in part for safety should they be attacked, but mainly for fear the Earth people might see their arrival as an aggressive act. Aderbury commanded the fortress from the tower high above the battlements upon which rested the two hundred and twenty-five redoubts, small towers, made as blocky replicas of Altin’s original space-traveling vehicle, a tower which had been plucked from the corner of distant Calico Castle back on Prosperion. From his lofty perch, Aderbury could see Citadel’s wizards scurrying into position still, the colorful robes of the redoubt pilots making their arrivals from the stairwells seem like little birds emerging from burrows at the edges of a huge square meadow, flitting out and swooping about perhaps in search of something to eat. And they would eat, in a manner of speaking. They would dine on Hostiles if they got the opportunity.

  The redoubt mages ran to their respective towers, many hopping through the sections of the vast grid-work of low stone walls like gymnasts vaulting their way through a human steeplechase. Eventually, the leaping and scurrying slowed, and the fluttering chaos of robed magicians became an even spread of manned redoubts, each tower holding at least three mages, two teleporters and a conjurer for most, or two teleporters and a transmuter for others, although there were a few four-man teams where healers and illusionists seemed optimal.

  Aderbury turned away from the assembling mages and looked out into the space he could see around planet Earth. From his vantage, the battle above the blue world seemed an impossible swarm of activity, and even trying to contemplate so much motion made the muscles that moved his eyes grow warm.

  He sent a telepathic message to the concert hall relay, an old woman by the name of Cebelle. She’d been chosen by Conduit Huzzledorf for her stalwart sense of calm. “Cebelle, is the illusion up?”

  “Yes. We can see what’s going on out there.” For all the urgency in her reply, she might as easily have been reporting on the progress of a teamster hitching up his mules.

  Aderbury picked out two Hostiles at random from the churn of battle and followed them pointedly with his eyes, marking them in his mind. “See them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Send it to Huzzledorf.”

  “He sees them,” she replied.

  “Try a merge.”

  A moment later one of the distant Hostiles vanished and the second bloated and ruptured like a crushed grapefruit, its side splitting open in great rents and spewing glowing orange gore out into the night.

  “It works,” he said unnecessarily.

  “It does,” she agreed.

  “Tell him to start taking them down. My people will handle our defenses from up here for now—at least until I figure out what else we need to do. I may send a few of the boys out, so make sure you don’t merge anything with straight edges out there.”

  “Of course.”

  They might have been talking about sending a few school kids down to play beside a creek, such was the calm she maintained, even as they thrust themselves into war. Aderbury was glad she would be the voice in his head this day. He’d been trained for war, but never one like this.

  The ships from Earth were much more numerous and varied in shape than he had anticipated, even based on the view they’d seen shortly after the fleet had been sent home. But after a short study, he was confident there weren’t any that might be mistaken for Hostiles.

  He turned back and looked down into the field of redoubts again. He saw that more than a few of his wizards were looking up at him, their faces expectant, the altitude of their eyebrows asking, “When do we go?” But he did not know when. And he damn sure wasn’t going to send them out just for the sake of seeing what might happen if he did.

  He’d been given two tasks: save the Earth ships if possible, and find their leader—and he’d been expressly directed to go through someone other than Captain Asad if assistance was required on that front—and from there, his task was to explain what had happened as best he could. He was absolutely convinced he was the worst possible person for the second part, though he was more than willing to do his best on the first. Citadel’s diviners were working on the leader problem as quickly as they could, but the assistant guildmaster had already told him not to expect an answer right away. No surprises there.

  He sent a telepathic message to the X-ranked teleporter Envette, who shortly after appeared standing at his side.

  She stood prepared to receive his orders for several moments, but when none came right away, she turned and looked out into the glare of the bright blue planet beyond, watching the flicker of lights, the explosions, the streaks of laser beams, the whorls of orange Hostile goo. “A lot going on out there,” she said after a time. “Seems like a lot for one space fortress to fix.”

  “It does,” he said. “A million mosquitoes swarming above a pond, and we have a rapier.”

  She nodded. “We’ve got a little more than that, but still, hardly enough. We could swat them all day and it wouldn’t change much.” She watched for a while, then added, “We’ve got to drain the pond.”

  “That’s the problem, isn’t it,” he replied grimly. “High Priestess Maul is going to try to talk to Blue Fire, but Her Majesty isn’t expecting much to come of it. I just hope that’s where Altin went, though I have my doubts about that. At least not while Orli is out there somewhere.”

  She nodded again. Everyone knew about Altin and the comely young Earth fleet officer.

  A huge gout of orange Hostile innards suddenly erupted in a wide sheet, a bright spew smoldering in the black sky for a moment before its rotation began to tear it apart into smaller pieces, all of which drifted away and slowly began to dim. Aderbury gauged by the lumpy mass from which that gout had sprayed that at least ten Hostiles had been merged, probably more. That was good. He wondered how long it would take the enigmatic alien spheres to figure out what the conduit and his concert hall mages were doing to them.

  That answer came immediately as a large group of orbs quickly coalesced and streaked toward Citadel.

  Aderbury snatched the brass cone from its hook on the wall behind him and shouted into its narrow end. “Incoming,” he cried. The sound of his voice, enhanced by the enchantments on the cone, carried clearly to everyone across the vast assembly of battlements. “Watch your sections, keep to your team sequences, and ring your bells if you get behind.”

  “I need to get back to my team,” Envette said.

  “Isn’t Mason an M?”

  “He is.”

  “He’ll be fine for now. I need you to do something scarier anyway.”

  She looked at him, one eyebrow sliding up, creating slight lines in the smooth, youthful flesh of her brow. “Such as?”

  “I think I need you to go looking for someone to talk to. We have to find their leader, or at least someone high enough up the chain of command to get us there, and it obviously can’t be Captain Asad. I don’t think we have time to wait on the diviners.”

  “What about the old woman?”

  “What old woman?”

  “The one with the spectacles.”

  “Captain Eugene,” said Aderbury. “I think her name is Eugene.”

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  Aderbury rubbed his chin for a moment, the stubble of two days’ growth making a scratching noise that he could hear. “You think that’s a good idea? She may have been the least hostile of the fleet captains, but I doubt she’s going to be any happier to see us after what happened than Asad would be. None of the captains that know us are going to want to talk to us at all.”
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  “She struck me as someone who would listen,” countered Envette. She looked out over the balcony railing and gestured at a giant spaceship moving across their view, a vessel far larger than anything either of them had ever seen before. “Trying beats sending every seer on Citadel running around the decks of that thing hoping to find someone in ermine or wearing a crown, or whatever else, which is essentially what you are asking me to do.”

  Aderbury harrumphed. “True.” He looked at her. “This thing I ask of you is as dangerous as all nine levels of hell at once.”

  “I know.”

  “You have your fast-cast?”

  She gave him a sideways look, tilting her head and making a ticking sound with her tongue that suggested the question wasn’t particularly well thought out. She pulled out one of the several amulets that hung around her neck, disentangling it from the rest before stuffing the others back down into the collar of her robe. She held it up for him. The gem in the small silver eagle’s talon mount was almost as red as her hair.

  “Right. I’ll get you a few bodyguards from downstairs.”

  “No,” she said. “I think I’ll be better off alone. I’ll just keep this ready to strike if it looks like Captain Eugene isn’t as friendly as I think she is.” She made a point of fingering the stone she held as she spoke.

  “Get a seer to make sure it’s clear. And I want Combat Hop on you in case they start shooting those light beams at you.”

  “Duh,” she said, and then, with the confidence and enthusiasm of her youth, she teleported herself to the enchanters’ offices on the fourth floor.

  He hoped he hadn’t just sent her to her death. Giving the order made him feel a little sick inside. It wasn’t that he was uncomfortable with command, he’d been doing that since the Citadel project began, before that even, over the course of many construction projects these last several years. Even death was not something he’d never dealt with before. He’d suffered the loss of two crew members on one of those construction jobs, an accident, and entirely the fault of the young man on the transmutation team whose mistake had gotten them both killed—what kind of an idiot puts a liquefaction inflection in a hardening spell? No first-year transmutation student would get that wrong on a construction site; the cadences were as different as black and white. But still the deaths had hung upon him for a long time after.