Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) (40 page)

“What do you mean, ‘not fight’? You fought with me before. We sent the fleet all the way back to Earth.”

The thought came as simply a negative, again with the image of him and the blue sun.

Altin growled, frustrated. He didn’t have time for another set of Blue Fire’s riddles. “Fine, then give us Liquefying Stone. Will you supply us with enough for
Citadel
? At least that?” He sent an image of the concert hall on
Citadel
filled with mages, each of them holding a piece of the yellow stone.

His mind, his heart, what felt like it must be his very soul, filled with hatred, envy and greed. It flooded with avarice, lust and need. The wave of it all buckled his knees, and he fell to the floor, clutching his head, shouting, “No!” But despite his plea for her to stop, on it came, a great blast of such horrible emotion, such awfulness, all he could do was collapse and curl into a ball.

The onslaught went on for what seemed like forever, all the while Orli kneeling beside him, shouting his name at first and then weeping, crying out into the void for Blue Fire to stop whatever she was doing to him. But on and on it went, Altin writhing in his fetal knot, shaking, sweating, tears running from the open faucets of his tightly shut eyes.

But at last it abated. The torrent of human depravity went away. It was replaced by the images of the humans Blue Fire had come to know, Altin, Orli, and the priests of Anvilwrath. All twenty-five of them and High Priestess Maul. There was even a flicker of Thadius Thoroughgood’s face, though she’d only known him through the images in Orli’s mind, the taste of his elixir left in the mana cloud that had poisoned Orli’s mind.

Altin came out of it trembling and looked up through horrified eyes at Orli bending over him. She pulled him to her, clutching his head to her breast and holding him tightly. He sobbed for a while, his body shaking and wracked by flashes of memory. His robes were damp with sweat.

Finally he calmed himself, his wits returning to him, and at length, he could think again.

“Are you okay?” Orli asked, hating how empty that question seemed. “I thought she was trying to kill you.”

“I think she nearly did,” he said, his voice weak, his body still twitching in her arms.

Eventually she helped him to his feet and together they got him into a chair. She stroked his damp hair as he fought to breathe normally. Many more minutes passed before he spoke again.

“She knows what my people will do with them,” he said at last. “She knows the forces of greed and lust that humanity will set loose with the Liquefying Stones if they are given out.”

“They won’t,” Orli protested. “This is serious. And we’re not all like that.”

“We are. Look what we did to the dwarves, and we didn’t even have the Liquefying Stone at all. And think of it; look what the orcs have done with only two stones. Imagine a thousand stones in the hands of a people capable of doing what the orcs are doing now. What we did at Duador. Them or us. There’s no difference in the end. Only the stories we tell ourselves when it’s done.”

Her cheeks flushed red. She could see the emotions Blue Fire sent were smothering his ability to reason. “So what you’re saying, what you’re both saying, is that, for fear of your people killing themselves, we should just let them die.” Her eyes widened, bewildered, and she gasped at the very idea. “That doesn’t make any sense, Altin. You’re not thinking it through right now.” She turned and stormed to the window, blowing out an exasperated breath. “Tell Blue Fire that Altin Love thinks she’s making a mistake. Tell her Altin Love thinks Blue Fire is going to do on purpose what she did by accident to the Andalians. Tell her I said she’s about to add two more worlds and billions and billions of lives to the list of deaths she’s caused. Tell her I said I think that’s bullshit. Tell her I think she’s just as bad as any humans have ever been.”

Frustrated tears ran down Orli’s cheeks but she wiped them away angrily. She would not let Altin see them. She had to be strong, she had to stay strong, but this felt like one blow too many for her to take, one too many punches in this whole big fighting joke of a universe. The stupid joke of absent gods laughing at the futile plight of the feeble creatures who never even knew if they were real. She was so sick of feeling helpless all the time.

She stared for a long time out the window, her thoughts running through memories and time. She wondered if Roberto was still alive. If her father was. She hoped Asad was dead but had to take it back. He would take others with him if he died. At least by an attack on the ship. She wondered what kind of person it made her for thinking that, for wishing such hateful thoughts. Maybe Blue Fire
was
right. Maybe it was better if humanity was gone.

She caught herself and shook the feelings off. She liked to think she was one of the good ones amongst her race, and look where she had gone almost in the same breath in which she’d tried to argue that not all humanity was so bad. She had to keep it together.

That’s when Altin’s voice broke into her silent reverie.

“She said she’ll do it,” Altin said. “She says you are right. But first, let’s go talk to Maul.”

Chapter 33

A
ltin stood beneath the vast crimson dome of
Citadel
’s concert hall, the tentacles on the dome’s ceiling high above writhing slowly like golden snakes warming in the morning sun. He was explaining the nature of the Liquefying Stone to the
Citadel
mages, trying as he did to convey the nature of the danger they all now faced. Conduit Huzzledorf, seated as always on the plush upholstery of the ottoman that occupied the very center of the room, turning slowly round as it did and making him seem as if he were some crimson-clad doll on display, seemed bored and impatient to carry on. When Altin began what would have been his fourth repetition of the facts, starting once more to explain how fast the mana would come to them, the conduit could finally take it no more.

“Sir Altin,” he said, running his hands through the frizzy fringe of white hair that, if one counted his eyebrows in the mix, ringed his head nearly perfectly, “you’ve made it quite clear already. And it won’t be them casting, it will be me, so all will be well. Have Miss Pewter hand them out and let’s be on with it.”

“Not until we are there,” Altin said. He looked to Orli, who stood next to him with a small wooden chest at her feet, the container provided by High Priestess Maul at the conclusion of their visit with her in Crown City. The box held the Liquefying Stones that Blue Fire had given them. The chest was filled with eight hundred bits of the frightfully potent yellow stone, one for each mage in the concert hall.

He looked back up into the chamber, so many faces staring down at him that it made his time teaching at the university seem like an intimate gathering. But he didn’t have time to be uncomfortable. “Does anyone have questions? There are no stupid questions, and if you have one you don’t ask, you are stupid, because, as I have said several times, we will all die for your ignorance. Contrary to the conduit’s confidence, the fact that
you
are channeling the mana matters almost entirely. You pull too much, it’s over.”

“As a motivational speaker, Sir Altin, I have to say you are terrible.” This of course came from the conduit, whose rotation upon the ottoman had him facing the other way, and since he did not deign to turn his head, it seemed as if he were speaking to himself in his own reflection in the chamber’s giant bronze doors. He waited until the rotation brought him around far enough that he could look up at the Galactic Mage and raise his eyebrows at him with an irritated air. “Would you like me to get them in a more suitable mood for this undertaking, now that you have sucked all the enthusiasm from the room?”

“No. I would not.” He reached a hand out toward the conduit, his fingers opening and closing twice in a row, rapidly, demanding. “Give me a seeing stone.”

“I am perfectly capable of casting the seeing stones for
Citadel
, young man,” said the conduit.

“Give me the gods-be-damned stone,” Altin nearly yelled. “There is no time.”

The violence of Altin’s command startled the normally implacable conduit, and he reached into a leather satchel that he wore and pulled out a diamond the size of an avocado seed. “No need to get snappish, young man. I won’t tolerate much of that, you know.”

Altin ignored him, and in the span of an instant the diamond was gone, leaving the conduit to stare, blinking, into Altin’s empty hand. Altin glared down at him and gave the barest of nods, all but imperceptible. “Now, Conduit, you may take us to where that stone has gone.”

The conduit was still gaping wide-eyed into the space where the seeing stone had vanished without Altin’s having uttered a single word, but he pulled himself together straight away. “Cebelle, let Aderbury know we’re moving,” he began, speaking to the concert’s primary telepath. “Teleporters get ready. Seers get me that stone. Let’s go, people, let’s go.”

Orli watched in awe as the concert hall mages came to order, and then, looking rather like slices of a colorful pie in the sections where they sat together in matching guild robes, they all moved in unison by school. The gray-robed teleporters sat swaying slightly in their seats, their hands on their laps, their lips sequenced so perfectly they might well have been reflections of a single mouth. The seers in their ochre robes also sat swaying and singing a single song, though their hands were uniformly out before them with fingers splayed, reaching together as if searching for something. The other sections of the hall sat completely motionless, coming at the call of the conduit to stone-like rigidity, no one even so much as twitching or tapping a toe. All eyes were closed, all waiting for the call for mana channeling if required.

“Aderbury is with us now, Conduit,” reported Cebelle. Her eyes were still closed as she spoke from her place at the front row of the seers’ section, veins like purple roads on a parchment map visible through the thin skin of her ancient eyelids. “We can go.”

Conduit Huzzledorf looked straight up then, right into the center of the tentacles twisting slowly above him. His eyes, unlike the concert mages’, were wide open, staring upward as if he saw something in the core of those groping ropes that mortified him.

Orli watched him and could not stop the reflex that made her grip Altin’s arm tightly in her hands. There was something terrifying in the conduit’s look. Something psychotic, she thought. Suddenly she was frightened of the idea that the red-clad man with the crazy fringes of hair and the slightly insane look in his eyes would be the one casting the spell that would carry her across the universe. He struck her as unstable, broken even, his wild-eyed expression seeming near madness or, perhaps worse, mad with a love for power.

And then it was done. His eyes snapped shut, then reopened purposefully, blinking a few more times. He looked to Altin and announced, “All right, we’re here. Now hand them out, my boy.”

Altin ignored the pejorative, but this time Orli did not. It ignited her anger inexplicably. She nearly leapt upon the man. “Knock it off with that crap already,” she snarled through clenched teeth, her face pressed almost into his. “Sir Altin is here to save your sorry ass and the asses of everyone else on your damn planet. Show him some respect. You forget whose ship this is and what your place is on it.”

Altin put a hand on her shoulder and smiled at her, shaking his head in a way that said it was okay. He didn’t want to have to explain the nature of conduits to her, and there was no amount of reason that would make one of the enigmatic mana handlers behave socially anyway, at least not in any consistent or predictable way, much less get them to properly abide by the structures of military discipline. Even the Queen put up with a great deal of insolence from them. They were a sort of magical celebrity, oddities that were well aware of their usefulness and, like mad artists in their way, prone to misbehave.

Fortunately, they were also the sort of creatures who did not care if they were yelled at or insulted very often, at least not when it was convenient to be so cavalier, and so Conduit Huzzledorf only laughed a merry laugh and clapped Altin on the arm, saying, “There’s a keeper for you, lad. She’ll fight your fights for you, and you can lie about the house eating confectioner’s delights and reading low literature as you please.”

Altin ignored that as well and nodded down to the box sitting at Orli’s feet. “Let’s hand them out.” He stooped and opened the chest, then loaded his pockets with as many as he could carry comfortably. With his pockets full, and his robes hanging heavily for it, he then took a large handful to carry as well. “I’ll start up there,” he said, pointing with his chin to the pie-slice section of seats to the left of the concert hall’s large brass doors. “You start back there, Orli, and Conduit, if you would be so kind as to split the difference and get the healers’ and illusionists’ sections.”

The conduit made a big fuss about being told what to do by “children,” but he complied, filling a pouch on the front of his satchel with handfuls of the Liquefying Stone until there were only two layers of the crystals left, stacked neatly in rows in the bottom of the chest. Orli picked the chest up, which was still quite heavy, and went to the section of the room she’d been assigned to, climbing the stairs and directing the nearest mage on each side of the aisle to take one and pass it down until the whole row had been given a stone.