Rift in the Races (39 page)

“We can’t do it,” the doctor said again. She looked at Tytamon. He confirmed the truth of it with a nod. Both mages looked a little baffled by her response.

“Well then let’s get him back to the
Aspect
. Singh will do it.” She turned to Roberto. She was furious, felt betrayed, as if they were keeping the technology to themselves. And she was so tired.

Roberto smiled with half his face. “Yelling at them isn’t going to help. If they can’t, they can’t.”

“They can fix a broken back. A totally crushed spine. We can’t even do that. So why not a stupid arm?”

“Orli. Relax. Let’s just get him up there, okay? You’re tired. You’re hurt. You should still be in bed.” He stood and gripped her by the shoulders, making her look at him, into his eyes. “Orli. It will be fine.”

“His magic is everything to him.” She stood there, frustration raging, her chest expanding visibly with each breath, but she allowed herself to be calmed. Roberto held onto her until he knew the seismic emotions were at least under control. He hugged her. “It will be fine.”

She nodded into his neck, letting the emotions spend themselves in a brief wave of tears.

Roberto pushed her away gently and turned to Tytamon. “So how do you want to do this? You want to, you know…,” he wiggled his fingers like ten strands of ribbon fluttering in the air, “give it the magic treatment, or do we carry him to my shuttle?”

“He’s been teleported enough for now,” insisted the doctor urgently to that. “He’s better off being bounced through the streets on a stretcher than subjected to another teleport. The infusion of mana will disrupt some of my spells before they are done playing out.” He turned to Lena who sat rapt, watching the whole thing, the giant painting of the Queen hanging on the wall next to her, making it seem as if Her Majesty in her golden armor were present and as interested in the outcome as everyone else. “Get Mik and Breg out here with a stretcher,” he told her. “I’ll go tell the constable we need the way cleared.” He looked back to Orli. “You’ll need to get moving if you want to make it out of town before the rains.”

“The way cleared?” Orli asked.

“You can’t hear them?”

She listened then, listened intently, trying to pick out some unusual noise. She couldn’t hear anything that seemed out of place—though she supposed there might be more noise in the street outside than before. She’d gotten here rather early in the morning, so that was hardly a surprise.

The crowd erupted when they finally carried Altin outside. Oblivious to the chill wind of a coming storm, many of the townsfolk had come hoping for a glimpse of him, the local hero, the Galactic Mage. A press of spectators surged forward for a better view of the assembled celebrities as they came out, the added thrill of aliens from Earth and, of course, the world-renowned Tytamon. Shouts of Altin’s name dominated the cacophony, but so too were there shouts for Orli and even for Roberto—who, unlike the rest of the group, found the time to smile, wink at women and even flourish his blaster gun-slinger style.

As the group emerged from the doctor’s office, Tytamon took the lead, causing the crowd to spread like ice before a great ice-breaking frigate. The litter-bearers followed in his wake, carrying Altin between them, with Orli keeping pace protectively alongside the unconscious green-eyed mage. Kettle, with Pernie in hand, walked behind while Roberto hammed it up at the rear, drawing as much “fire” as he could, so to speak, and flirting shamelessly.

Awe and respect for Tytamon made the going fairly easy, and the constable’s men did a good job of helping him as the group made its way along the creaking, wood-planked sidewalk and down the corner ramp. Once on the cobblestone street, Altin was loaded into the back of an open-air ambulance drawn by two chestnut draft horses.

Orli put her foot on the step at the back of the wagon and, gripping the side rail, tried to climb up after the litter-bearers as they began settling Altin into place. Her still-recuperating leg didn’t quite have the strength she thought it did, however, and as quickly as she seemed about to make it up, she began to fall back.

Roberto’s electric reflexes kicked in as efficiently as his sense of Prosperion propriety did not, and his hand shot out, caught her on the left buttock and firmly shoved her up into the cart.

This brought gasps from many in the crowd, hoots from a few others and laughter from the rest.

Orli turned and scowled at him, the correct public response, but beamed a private “thank you” with her eyes.

Roberto turned and presented the crowd with a mischievous smirk and a shrug that conveyed his willingness to accept whatever censure decorum intended for him. All in the name of a day’s work, his expression said. The old ladies in the crowd continued to frown and frump, but the old men joined the younger folk in laughter and lewd remarks. The fact was, the entire city was simply happy that Altin was alive. Rumors had been spreading that it was going to turn out differently.

More hoots and hollers came from either side of the avenue as they began their trek toward the city gates, the
clip-clop
of the shaggy hooves against the cobblestones muffled by so much noise. People leaned out of the windows of the huge Patient Peacock Inn and shouted down at them cheerfully. Their waving arms and foam-sloshing mugs competed for visual space with the inn’s bright red roof tiles and the gaudy peacock painted on its sign—the perfect likeness of which danced across the roof in glowing colors, an illusion cast at week’s end to draw attention to the fact that the day was a particularly good one on which to drink. Gauging by the number of mugs being hoisted out of the windows, gripped in wet fists and splashing rivers of wine and ale down the tiles, over the eaves and onto the street, the Patient Peacock was going to do remarkable business today. Altin’s recovery added yet another reason for the locals to celebrate—and spend.

Orli flashed a polite smile to a few of the onlookers as the wagon continued along the endless-seeming line of waving arms and reaching hands, and more than once she was struck by a flower thrown by an adoring fan. Had she been in a better mood, she might have enjoyed it, but she was not, and so the ride through town was almost all a blur for her, a smear of images, of faces with mouths contorted in every expression of adoration and, more than once, other things.

She watched the children most. There were lots of them, many dressed up nicely to come to town at the work week’s end. They stood with their brawny agrarian families in finery that was brightest nearest to the doctor’s office and then less and less colorful and less and less fine the farther the wagon rolled along. The crowds thinned to nearly nothing as they went too; the diminishing of affluence seemed to diminish enthusiasm for coming out, or perhaps these folks just hadn’t gotten word.

She hadn’t been to Leekant enough to know the boundaries of the Guilds Quarter or the beginning of the Blanks Quarter, but she could sense it well enough as bright dyes and fancy ruffles gave way to faded patterns and tattered hems and, for a few blocks anyway, devolved to little but homespun and coarse open weave. Faces grew dirtier, hair unkempt, and for a time, she noted that none of the children dared go up on the walks at all, perhaps for fear of a cuff or kick from one of the many dour, dirty men who leaned and swayed against the walls of taverns whose owners took no interest in employing the frivolity of dancing illusions above their doors.

In the dingiest part of town, the children watched from beneath the walkways where they skulked and scuttled amongst the pilings that held the buildings up and out of the frequent floods of the nearby Sansun River. She noted these pilings were not so tall as those in the other parts of town had been, nor so great of girth. Many showed signs of rot. But they seemed almost infested with children, dirty little things who hid in the shadows of the graying wood and peered out like mice from beneath a discarded old chest of drawers. Some looked frightened, some awed, others simply curious. And there were a few, just a few, who looked out through narrowed eyes with expressions of avarice so clearly drawn that Orli was frightened by its intensity. It seemed a thing sinister. Wicked, even.

She chided herself for thinking it, blinked the idea from her head, her conscience condemning her for such unenlightened thoughts. They were children. Of course they weren’t wicked. She realized how tired she had become, figured her emotions raw, made evident by the way she’d acted toward Doctor Leopold. She promised herself she would apologize to him.

At length, as they neared the west gate, the neighborhoods got cleaner once more. Potted plants began to appear near doors and in windows again, and paint no longer fell in flakes from the aging wood it once protected from the elements. No large crowds appeared to gawk and greet them, though. Every so often a little knot of people might gather, the chance discovery of the ambulance and its occupants’ passage sending a handful of folks running out from this doorway or that, talking excitedly in hushed voices and every so often calling out, “The Galactic Mage lives. Huzzah!” Not many, though. Mostly surprised pedestrians stopped to stare if they noticed who it was passing by. Some would wave. Some would gape at the weapons and uniforms of the two people from distant planet Earth. Nothing like the raucous adoration they’d been met with in the more prosperous parts of town.

Near the gates, a pair of priests took the time to watch them pass. They stopped, folded their hands into the rust-colored sleeves of their copper-gilded robes and stared. Glared, really. A long, narrow gaze that watched the people in the ambulance pass as a victim watches an assailant being led up the gallows stairs. Contempt filled the space between the observers and the observed as dark thoughts, apparent and unashamed, shone out from the shadowy cowls of both priests. One of them, perhaps in response to the dawning horror on Orli’s face as she recognized such hostility, made an attempt at covering his malice with an acidic smile and the polite inclination of his head. Then both men turned away.

Orli could not help but wonder at the encounter with the priests as the wagon trundled down the bumpy road, out of the city and on its way toward the shuttle that would take them to the ship and then to Doctor Singh. She looked up at Tytamon once the priests were well out of hearing range.

“What was that about?” she asked.

He didn’t hear her. He seemed very lost in his own thoughts. Kettle nudged him with an elbow. “Master, the lady is a speakin’ ta ya.”

He blinked free of his rumination, glanced at Kettle, then to Orli. “I’m sorry. What did I miss?”

She repeated the question, adding, in case he’d missed it, a description of the priests and a recounting of what she’d taken to be more than simply unfriendly looks.

“Ah, that,” he said. He frowned. “A minor problem for now. It seems our friend’s travels into space have kicked the hornets’ nest in the Church, and the devotees of Anvilwrath more than most.”

It was Orli’s turn to frown, and the tilt of her head incited Tytamon to go on.

“Space travel is creating distinct problems for the Church,” he explained. “They fear that Altin’s work and, frankly, your very existence, represent some great blasphemy in the making.”

“Why would we do that?”

“It’s a long story,” he said. “A very long story. But it does have some bearing on why you were assigned the royal assassin as a bodyguard when you first arrived. I’m still working on that.”

Orli waited in silence, expecting there would be more, but Tytamon’s thoughts had gone elsewhere again. She couldn’t remember seeing him so distracted before and wondered if it might be due to his great age. She had a bad feeling it wasn’t, though.

“There,” Roberto told the ambulance driver. “It’s behind that farmhouse. The farmer said I could hide it behind the barn to cut down on the curious.”

“Just in time,” the driver said, looking up at the darkening sky. The clouds were thickening, and he wanted to be home before nightfall and the heaviest of the rain.

They turned off the main road and onto a dirt lane that bounced and jostled them too severely to be conducive to conversation. Orli spent the rest of the trip helping Kettle, Roberto and the two orderlies keep Altin’s stretcher from bouncing out of the retaining hooks, masking as she did how much each jolt and jostle hurt as they sent bolts of pain shooting through her leg.

When they had Altin loaded onto the shuttle and strapped in, Orli went back down to the end of the loading ramp and gave both Kettle and Pernie a hug. She looked for Tytamon to hug as well, but he was already gone.

He hadn’t even said goodbye.

She looked to Kettle for an explanation, but Kettle’s expression only made Orli’s bad feeling worse.

Chapter 25

A
s Tytamon moved through the muddy rows of the soldiers’ camp outside Calico Castle’s walls, the hems of his robes sopped up the muck and wet his ankles with the gritty soup. The gods had picked a great time to bring the deluge. But he didn’t have time to worry about his discomfiture; there were bigger problems at hand. Much bigger. He’d been at his inquiries all the previous evening and then all through the night, waking soldiers one tent at a time, rousting them from sleep as the hours grew late, and then early, right into growing light again. As the morning brightened beneath the gray sky, fewer and fewer were in their tents, which made it harder to be meticulous in the course of his interviews. He would have to pass through this most recent section of the camp again tonight to be sure he hadn’t missed anyone, which he knew he had.