Rift in the Races (88 page)

The tiny woman bent and took several long breaths, leaning on her knees. Spirals of dark hair tumbled down her cheeks, and her face and throat were pink and glistened with sweat. After a moment, though, she caught her wind.

“Your Majesty. The anti-magic didn’t work as planned, as we all know—Mercy bless Master Ilbei’s soul.” She paused and pressed the back of her hand to her cheek. She kissed it and then placed it to her heart, briefly bowing her head. Then she looked up and grinned. “But it has an even better use.”

The Queen nodded expectantly and gestured for her to carry on.

“The problem we had—the problem Master Spadebreaker had—wasn’t that the anti-magic failed, but that it worked too well. It couldn’t be teleported. The anti-magic bubble itself. It can’t be done. Not even in a box. It’s inside of itself, but outside of mana. It’s hard to explain, but it works far more effectively at repelling magic than we even considered it might.”

“Yes, I understand all that,” said the Queen. “How does this ‘solve everything?’”

“Don’t you see? We can enchant the fleet weapons with it. Make them invisible to the Hostile seers. I’ve already tested it myself. I enchanted several items just to see.” She pulled a bit of tree bark roughly the size of her hand out of a satchel that she wore and placed it on the ground. “Try for yourself. Try to do anything to it. Anything magical at all.”

The Queen frowned. She did not like to look ridiculous. Altin knew immediately what the expression meant.

“Allow me, Your Majesty?” he said.

The Queen pointed at the bit of bark and waited.

Altin summoned a small fireball, barely bigger than a grape, and tossed it down onto the bit of bark. It hit, splashed across the floor like a broken egg and then went out with a huff of hot air.

The bark was fine. Not the least bit of black or the slightest curl of red ember glowing in a fiber of its length.

“Try something else,” said the giddy young enchanter. “Go on. Try. See if you can teleport it. Even just over to there.” She pointed to a marble column not far from where she stood.

Altin closed his eyes and began to chant the long-familiar spell. But he couldn’t find the bark to attach a thread of mana to. He knew where it was. And he’d seen it. And yet it wasn’t there. No sense of it. No absence of it either. He released the spell.

“Interesting,” he said. He walked over to the scruffy bit of bark and picked it up. “This will make it easier.”

He started again. This time he plucked a wisp of mana up and moved it toward his hand. But even as he did, he realized it was not there. It
was
there, he could feel it physically, but it was not there. There was nothing around which he could wrap the mana, nothing to which it could be bound.

He tried to wrap the mana around it anyway. He spun a coil around the area where the bark should be, fashioned something of a noose around where it ought to exist in space. He then ran the strand of mana across the room to the floor at the base of the column and triggered the spell.

There was a hiss in the space above his hand, followed by a crackling static snap over by the column, but the bit of bark remained in his hand.

“That’s
very
interesting,” he concluded.

“Give it here,” said the Queen, rising and coming down the dais steps.

He handed it to her. She mumbled a few words at it, which Altin recognized as a simple illusionary enchantment. Nothing happened. She laughed.

She climbed back up to the level of her throne and went to a brazier burning brightly near the back wall. She tossed the bark into it. It caught fire almost immediately and burst into bright flickering flame. She laughed again. “Peppercorn, my dear, you have just made two races exceptionally proud.”

A bit of praise for the brilliant innovation and a few cursory plans regarding when, precisely, to tell the fleet about the good news followed, after which Peppercorn was dismissed, carrying with her the added enthusiasm of a hundred-gold-piece-per-annum increase in salary.

When the giddy enchanter was gone, the Queen ordered the two guards to leave and shut the doors behind them, which they did immediately.

“Now, Sir Altin, we have one more matter to discuss.”

Altin was fairly sure he was about to hear some bad news about Orli and Thadius, so he braced himself.

“What can you tell me about the priests in Leekant and the rumors of some elusive yellow stone?”

Chapter 71

O
n the day the anti-magic enchantment was tested on a missile, if the fleet were to have held a contest to see which Prosperion was the most popular of them all, Peppercorn would have won by a landslide, without one vote going to anyone else, not even to Altin or the Queen. Such was the joy and optimism that came with that successful test.

Many of the ship captains had shuttled to the
Aspect
to watch the test in person, and the rest watched anxiously from their ships as preparations were being made for the test, though there was little enough to watch: one tiny woman in a baggy leather jerkin and loose-fitting pantaloons, swaying rhythmically to a song nobody else could hear, speaking a language that nobody understood. The translation enchantments didn’t make any difference for the words of magic, so, to the observers, it was simply alien.

For several hours, the process was anticlimactic in the extreme; in fact that was the joke that ran through the assembled crowd, that “anti-matter was anticlimactic.” They’d all been told the spell was a monster to cast, so they understood, at least as well as anyone from Earth could, but with nothing else to do, and enchanting a poor form of spectator sport, they joked to kill the time. None of the magicians in attendance were offended by it, for they all understood that the Earth folks were blank. They tolerated the jibes and complaints as they might have a child whining about how long the waiting line was prior to a vacation teleport at a TGS depot.

Oblivious to all of that,
Citadel’s
top enchanter was hard at work carefully weaving the shell of anti-magic around the missile as if she were knitting a shroud around the body of a loved one. The missile bay’s bright lights, dimming occasionally, glistened off the sheen of sweat that had formed hours ago on her brow, but still she worked, meticulously shaping mobius loops out of tiny mana threads like a thousand chainmail links and stitching them together so closely they’d have been watertight were they made of steel. When done, the sheet of it would be turned in on itself, sealed around the missile and locked in place. This was the genius of Peppercorn. And eventually, hours after she began, she did it. She completed the spell, “tied it off” in a manner of speaking, and extracted herself from the mana stream. She staggered a little as she came out of it but caught herself and proudly proclaimed, “It is done.”

Eyebrows drooped or raised depending on personalities around the crowd, and more than a few refrains of “anticlimactic anti-magic” echoed once more across the room, although this time with an obvious air of optimism.

An
Aspect
engineer approached the missile and gingerly touched it with an outstretched finger, not sure what to expect, but expecting there must be something dangerous about it given that this was supposed to be the secret to defeating the entire Hostile world—not to mention that they’d all heard what had happened to the man from Prosperion who’d been killed in the first test of this particular spell. Few in the fleet understood what had really happened, so, as misinformation tends to do, several incorrect theories proliferated throughout the ships, growing and changing as they went, so that by the time of the test, there were more than a few who believed a person could be killed by any contact with anti-magic at all.

When no vaporization ensued, no electrical shocks, no flash of fire, no anything untoward, the engineer became visibly relieved and was able to stand close to the missile and go to work. She checked the missile’s electronics and had to restart the onboard computers, which Peppercorn and Conduit Huzzledorf had expected might be the case.

When it was ready, she snapped the panel shut and stood to face the admiral and the crowd that had grown to nearly a hundred in the now very crowded missile bay. “All good on our end, Admiral. The weapon is ready.”

The admiral wore his eagerness like a billboard, and he wasted no time in ordering the test firing to commence. A missile team immediately carted the missile to a tube and made it ready for launch.

The admiral turned to Captain Asad. “Well, Asad, nobody deserves this shot more than you and your crew. Just get in there, pull the trigger, and get out, all right?” He turned to Captain Metumbe of the
Socrates
and Captain Hawthorne of the
Lima
and added, “And you two don’t let him go all cowboy out there if it works.”

All three nodded, affirming their understanding of their respective roles. Two for defense, one to fire, then everyone comes back. Short and sweet. So confirmed, Captain Asad immediately ordered everyone who didn’t belong on his ship off of it. He even smiled a little with one side of his mouth as he added, “You, too, Admiral.”

Unaccustomed to such levity from the stoic Asad, scant as it was, the admiral clapped him on the shoulder and wished him luck.

Eleven days later, all three ships were in orbit above the Hostile world.

“Everyone is in position, Captain,” reported Ensign Nguyen after a thorough sensor sweep. “No sign of inbound Hostiles.” He tapped another control and amended, “No sign of outbound or any other Hostiles, for that matter.”

“Set target for ninety degrees north, Commander.”

“Set and locked,” Roberto reported. “This bitch is going down!”

“Launch.”

Roberto tapped the launch key with an exaggerated press of his finger, and everyone on the ship, as well as those back with the rest of the fleet, watched breathlessly as it streaked away.

“Video,” ordered the captain.

Roberto brought it up on the lower left quadrant of the main view screen.

The planet loomed larger in the eye of the speeding warhead. Larger, and larger, a great expanse of brown and gray.

The nearer it got, the nearer to their monitors everyone leaned, each pair of eyes scouring the view for some sign of Hostile orbs, the telltale “opening hole” appearance of their approach as they flew up to snatch the missile out of the sky and drag it off into the sun. But none came. No dark patches spread like mouths yawning against the ground below, no black spots appeared. No swarms. Nothing at all.

Soon the missile entered the atmosphere, and for a time, the view was lost in the heat and fire of its entry. Everyone grew tense, feeling vulnerable in the blindness of it. Roberto tapped up the missile’s onboard radar. No incoming blips.

Soon the view cleared and there came the long flight down and over what seemed endless and enormous mountain ranges. Lifeless. No cities or towns. No forests or flora of any kind. Not even any lakes or seas. Just empty, undulating masses of rock and sand, the product of an average equatorial temperature approaching ninety-eight degrees Celsius. And the planet was huge. Much larger than Earth. The wait seemed interminable.

Only as the missile neared its target at the northern pole did vegetation begin to appear on screen, the familiar greens and yellows of open plains. Still sparse, but at least alive. There were trees and small forests here and there, and the missile even flew over a herd of some kind of animal, quadruped, gray, but too far off to make out with better clarity, particularly given the missile’s speed. Whatever they were, they must have been enormous, dwarfing anything that had ever roamed the Earth, even in its earliest days.

Onward the missile flew.

The missile’s course had been intentionally plotted so that it would travel across the largest swath of livable space possible. The purpose was to test the anti-magic out. If there were magical counter-measures down there, they wanted to know. This missile was being given the best possible chance to fail. If the Hostiles could muster a defense, they wanted to know.

There appeared to be none.

The missile approached the coordinates Roberto had laid in, the very northern pole. Everyone sat breathless, watching the counter on the bottom of the screen approaching the zero mark.

“In three … two … one …,” Roberto announced needlessly.

The video went blank. The main viewer showed the area well enough, though. The bright flash of the missile marked where it had gone off, and Ensign Nguyen zoomed in the ship’s sensors quickly enough to catch the outbound ring of the shockwave, trees folding and snapping, a great cloud of dust and debris pushing out in a perfectly symmetrical wave. Total destruction of an area nearly fifty miles in diameter. And that’s just the part they stayed long enough to watch.

A collective cry of victory went out across every ship in the fleet, and, once they had gotten word of it, throughout
Citadel
as well.

They’d done it. They’d finally got a missile through. And better, the Hostiles seemed not to have even detected the ships coming in. Or else they realized it was pointless to come out and tangle with the fleet, given that the ships now had the advantage of Roberto’s crushing gravity technique. There was no way of knowing, but either way, there was finally jubilation throughout the fleet. Throughout the alliance.