Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) (8 page)

“Let’s just get going,” said the conduit. He was sitting up straight now, and his eyes were open and alert, if as red as his robes. “You, T class, what’s your name?”

“Paeter,” said the trembling man.

“You’re doing this, so you start the spell and feed it to me. Master Sander and the dullard Z, send me yours after. Just channel the mana. Don’t start thinking about spells. You hear me?” The conduit was looking directly at Kalafrand. Black Sander didn’t blame him. Kalafrand nodded that he understood.

Black Sander hoped he hadn’t just signed on to something that was going to get his mythothalamus burned out, but, well, the gorgon was already at the ball. Nothing left to do but put your head down and dance.

The teleporter calmed himself, closed his eyes, and started chanting. The conduit’s eyes flared a little wider than before and took on an elsewhere look.

Black Sander hesitated long enough to see if Kalafrand set himself to work channeling mana rather than casting a spell. The seer’s eyes were closed and his lips pressed loosely together in a dull smile. Good.

Black Sander closed his eyes and opened his mind up to the mana too. He could see the pink and purple whorls of it churning all around. There was some movement sliding toward a vacancy that pulsed like a candle nearby, a flickering nothingness. He figured that slide was Kalafrand. Z-class mana draw was truly something to behold, even from an idiot and an idiot that was only a One. He gathered up mana on his own, swept it up, and pushed it toward the flicker that he knew was the conduit’s beacon. He pushed the mana to it and watched it be pulled in like water down a drain. He pushed more and more until he was channeling constantly, as much as he could. It was more mana than he’d ever channeled before. But he kept on, channeling at max.

The river of mana he channeled grew faster and faster, sucked into the conduit’s mind with more and more force. The river thinned, stretched out. Thinned more. He tried to channel faster so it wouldn’t thin out and break. He couldn’t channel more. He was a W-ranked illusionist, very powerful, rare power even. He even had a D class in sight, the second school adding more strength, but he was at his max. That was all he could give.

The line of it stretched out farther and farther. The conduit’s flickering, lightless flame pulsing more and more. Then the flame burst in the silent, thunderous way of massive spells being cast. The mana thread broke too. He couldn’t be sure if it broke before, after, or during the concussive release of the spell.

There followed in the next instant a very loud pop, a singular sound like someone had dropped a huge slab of marble flat upon the floor. He felt the brim of his hat flex as air sucked toward the sound.

He opened his eyes and looked to where the crate housing the animals, orphans, and whore had been. It was gone. That was a relief. He turned back to the conduit. “Well, Conduit Wanderfrond, have we done it?”

Wanderfrond shrugged. “I’m not sure. It didn’t feel quite right.”

“Kalafrand, quick. Have a look. Is it down there, in the basement?”

Kalafrand set his powerful sight magic to work, looking across the galaxy to distant planet Earth. He mumbled the seer’s song for a time as he looked around. Black Sander clenched his jaw and waited impatiently. Even the disinterested conduit appeared interested in the result.

Kalafrand’s eyes opened and looked to Black Sander. “I seen it,” he said.

“Well?”

“Best I show you, sir. I’m not as good with words.”

Black Sander nodded and lowered the telepathic block he normally kept in place. “Go on, then.”

The seer sent him what he had seen, delivering the images right to Black Sander’s mind. A few boards lying on a sunlit lawn. Half a canvas thrown over a bush by a window. Another board half-stuffed through a wall near a bright red smear of blood.

The image twitched, and then he was looking into a basement. There was a heap of boards on the floor and half a body sticking out of the west wall: the fourteen-year-old boy. A few of the boards moved, and the younger boy crawled out of the heap looking bewildered. He pushed part of the pile off the old prostitute. Black Sander could see her breathing regularly as she slept. She’d missed the entire thing.

Chapter 8

A
ltin held his breath as the giant creature wrapped a tentacle around his helmet. The sinuous tendril snaked around the seal at his neck, and with a
pop, pop, pop, popp
ing of the clasp, the helmet was off. He was sure he was about to die, and he wasn’t looking forward to the searing in his lungs he was certain would come upon his first breath, which he delayed as long as he could. He reached out for the mana for perhaps the fiftieth time in the last ninety seconds, but it just wasn’t there. It was out there, all around them, but he was trapped in this damned bubble of a ship. He felt as if he’d been embedded in a crystal ball, like being stuck at the center of great
Citadel
, with no way to get out. And Orli was down there all alone. Once he was dead, she would have no one. He hoped that somehow Roberto had gotten away. Roberto was Orli’s only chance now. He’d come through before. Altin had to believe he would again.

He held his breath until primal biology kicked in and forced him to gasp. He steeled himself for the agony, the fire of some toxic atmosphere.

There was none. Oh, it burned, that much he got as he thought he would. It just wasn’t how he’d thought. The air felt as if it were on fire. Like, actually so. Immediately his lungs felt the heat of all the steam, and there passed a span of time where he wondered if he could possibly bear that kind of heat.

But, with each successive breath, he realized that he could. Uncomfortable, yes. Wet, even more so. He suspected if they kept him here very long, he would either drown by slow accumulation of fluid in his lungs or simply die of pneumonia in time.

But he could breathe.

He stared up at the alien staring down at him. He could see himself reflected clearly in one of the creature’s eyes. He would have kicked in the silvery ocular bulge were it not still twenty spans away—and if his legs weren’t bound together by a damned coiled tentacle. He thrashed around in its grip, or tried to, anyway, then relented. He swore aloud.

The cylindrical object that had been lowered down over him, seemingly a device being used to examine him somehow, descended even closer than it had been. The half dome of black glass at the tip got so close he was sure it was going to crush him, press right through his chest and smash him into the brightly lit table upon which he was being held.

But it stopped, only a hand’s width above him. Whirring noises came on dim vibrations from somewhere inside. The light at his back was so bright that it reflected blindingly from the dome. He squinted and turned his head.

The tip of a tentacle flattened itself out and wriggled close to his head. It slid under his cheek like a spatula, all the way under, then wrapped around the back of his head, where it gripped him, rotating by force until he was facing the black-domed prong again.

The machine whirred and vibrated for a while.

Altin could see the second alien better than the first. It was reflected in the dome of black glass. He saw images of parts of his spacesuit on the creature in the reflection. He couldn’t decide if the images were in the glass or actually being created by the creature’s skin.

Or perhaps fear was turning his brains inside out.

Colorful patterns crossed over the creature’s body, over the image of himself, like the sort of thing in a children’s kaleidoscope. Some were very intricate. Altin thought that, were he not being looked over like some specimen in Doctor Singh’s laboratory back on the fleet ship
Aspect
, he might have been able to spend more time appreciating how beautiful they were.

“Listen,” he said, his lungs sore with the brutal humidity. “I’m not sure what you have in mind, but I think that unless you wish to give the wrong impression to my people and the people of planet Earth, and not to mention our Hostile friends, you ought to go about getting to know us a bit more slowly.”

Neither of the creatures made any indication that they had heard a word he said.

“Really,” he went on. He had no other choice but to try. “I don’t know what passes for courtesy on your world, but where we come from, one does not simply snatch someone up and begin poking and prodding about their bodies. Not only is that considered poor diplomatic policy, it’s downright rude. And, as I understand the nature of diseases and that sort of thing, it might be dangerous if your medical skills are not up to it. Not only for me, but for you. Who knows what innocuous bit of ….” He paused, tried to remember what Orli called all the invisible bits of contamination that got into making a disease, but he couldn’t recall just then. “Well, whatever it is, you might have already caught it. So if you don’t want it all the worse, perhaps you could set me down, and we can have another go at this in a less offensive way. I promise not to hold this against you, as I am sure you can’t possibly know how things are done on my world. If there’s anything I’ve learned in my brief excursions in space, it is that there are ample opportunities to get off on the wrong foot—or tentacle—and purely by mistake.”

He knew he was rambling, and he hoped he didn’t sound hysterical. He didn’t feel hysterical, but he didn’t suppose it was too far off.

The giant aliens did not reply.

“Orli!” he shouted. “Orli! Can you hear me?”

He got no reply from her either.

“Orli, are you all right? Have they taken you for inspection too?” He looked about as best he could, which incited the tentacle tip to clutch his head more tightly and hold him still.

Orli did not answer. He hoped she wasn’t doing something reckless. She wasn’t much different than Roberto when it came to these sorts of things, and she was as likely to start shooting as her friend was if other options did not present themselves right away.

“I would also like to warn you,” he said to the alien, “that if you hurt my wife in any fashion, your best option right after will be to kill me straight off. For if you let me live, and if I manage to get out of this mana hole you’ve built around us here, I can assure you, I’ll put you and your gods-be-damned ship straight into that mountain you’ve parked beside. And what sort of diplomacy will that be, eh?”

Neither of the aliens appeared to be much concerned with his threat. And so, for some ridiculous length of time, he lay there waiting to either die or be released.

He thought for one brief moment that he heard Orli cry out, the sound startling him, piercing like a rapier through the heart, but then it passed. He strained to hear it again for quite some time, but nothing came. He told himself it was the wind.

That wasn’t so much of a stretch. There was a lot of wind. It was nearly as windy in this infernal ship as it was outside on the surface of Yellow Fire.

He wondered how Yellow Fire might be doing just then. He wondered why these aliens were here. Why were they digging for Blue Fire’s poor, unlucky mate, digging for Yellow Fire’s newly rekindled heart? After perhaps millions of years lying dormant, his planet-sized wife bereaved and mourning for all that time, the moment he is brought back to some semblance of health, along come more aliens going after him. The poor Hostile chap hardly had time to hug—or whatever constituted a hug—rapturous Blue Fire, and now it was all on thin ice again.

Not that anything like ice could survive in a steam bath like this ship.

He wasn’t sure if he’d dozed off or been hallucinating, but all of a sudden he was flipped on his face. Something rough happened to the back of his spacesuit, and he saw the three tubes slide away, apparently under their own weight. All three open ends went right off over the edge of the table, two of them leaving trails of liquid, one trail clear and watery, the other not far from the hue and texture of the ochre jelly he’d been in. Something made a snapping sound right after, and then something jarred him at the back. The alien snatched him off the table, and for a time he was being waved about in the air as if he were being held by a pampered noblewoman trying to dry her freshly painted fingernails. The motion was not frantic or violent, but it did seem at least careless to treat him so. At least at first. It turned out that the creature was moving, shifting and unwinding the tentacles that locked it to the grate upon which the machine sat and heading off for somewhere else. The next thing Altin knew, he was flying. He and the alien.

It happened so fast Altin hardly had time to realize what was happening. First, the creature, which had apparently swallowed the ballooning billow into a smaller bulb near the top of its body while it worked, reared back and, well, spat the thing back out. It blew out like a giant bubble, much in the way children on the islands of Angrost and Pengrost blew them with chewed-up wads of
hgat
leaf. But this one was so large, and it blew to full size so quickly, that the violence of the inflation filled the air with a thunderous noise, loud even over the roar of the wind. In the instant that followed, the creature was snatched off the grate, and Altin snatched with it. It occurred to Altin in the moments right after that he might have been hurt by such sudden velocity, but somehow the tentacle that held him did a fair job of mitigating most of the shock, at least the physical variety.