Rift in the Races (90 page)

For the next two days Orli tried desperately to get Blue Fire to come back into her dreams. She tried every trick she’d learned, everything she thought she’d figured out. She asked her maid to bring her scented candles. She tried napping next to plates of food and, near the end of the second day, even asked for the room to be filled with flowers of every kind, heaped with them even, every table, every surface that might hold a basket or a vase. She crushed petals, steeped them, even chewed on them. But none of it worked.

Making circumstances worse, the point and origin of the flowers were not reported to the Queen, only that they were there, and in quantity. And so it was that, when the day came to leave for
Citadel
and the rendezvous with the fleet, the Queen had only disparaging things to say.

“I see you wasted little time in finding replacement suitors, Miss Pewter, now that Lord Thoroughgood’s fate teeters at the brink of doom. A contingency plan, eh? I confess I am seldom so completely wrong about people as I have been about you.”

Orli’s face contracted in confusion at first.

“Oh, don’t play coy,” said the Queen. “I know all about the gardens heaping up in your rooms. If you’re going to be a tart, at least have the dignity to be a proud one.” That’s when Colonel Pewter was brought in.

“Ah, well, there we are,” said the Queen, her voice strained and her faced pinched as if there were a foul odor in the room. “The whole lovely family together again.” She turned to the teleporter standing near the waiting Shadesbreath and lifted her chin. “Let’s be off, shall we?”

Soon the five of them were standing in the concert hall on
Citadel
. Admiral Jefferies and most of the ships’ captains were already there.

Chapter 73

A
n unfortunate outcome of Altin’s nearly fatal return from the Hostile solar system was the loss of many of his magic books. In the end, he’d gotten a little over half of them back, but the rest were either lost in Great Forest or gone: kept for personal use, given to magician relatives or sold on the black market. One of the missing books was his book of basic divination spells. This loss in particular was unfortunate because, if he needed familiarity with any books of magic, that one was the most important to him. He was too new to the school to want to start with a book he never studied before. Having a book whose spells he had been through several times helped shape his understanding of what it was that he was working toward. Most spell collections were made with some theme, or at least one suggested itself through the reading. He would have a better understanding of what came next if he could master the spell before, so learning spells had the advantage of having a sense of direction, a heuristic, making it all easier to understand. But his was gone. So, nice as all that might have been, he was forced to find a new book and a new set of divining spells to use.

He began in Tytamon’s library. Being there, amongst all those ancient texts, floor after floor of them, made Altin melancholy. These were Tytamon’s books. Despite having done so many times before, this time Altin felt like a thief rifling through them as he was. Like a jackal or a vulture picking at the bones of a fallen friend, profiting from the loss of someone he’d once been beholden to. He knew it was foolish to feel that way. He knew that Tytamon would have wanted nothing more than for Altin to have them all, had said as much many times. But that didn’t change the fact that Altin felt like a grave robber as he sifted through the ancient shelves.

The work of finding the right book gradually took over and pushed aside the mourning and the mood. It was the toil of magic that had always kept Altin safe, and the labor filled him with purpose and distracted him from dwelling on miserable things. Altin’s strength was in his work, and so to it he went with focus that grew with each turn of a page.

However, Tytamon’s seemingly random system of storing his books vexed Altin to no end, and by the end of the fourth day of research, he had determined to make a point of reordering the library when the wars were done. It would be a start to making the place his own. But first, the wars must be won. And to do that, at least to try to end the Hostile war, he had to find out what Orli was talking about. He had to find out how to speak to Blue Fire—if there really were such a thing, such a “she” out there to be spoken to. Which meant he had to determine what Orli really meant when she said Blue Fire had “found” her.

He decided it most likely meant that Blue Fire had seen her in the magical sense, and that she’d then somehow gotten access to Orli’s thoughts, much like telepathy worked between magicians. However, Orli had no mythothalamus, so that meant whatever Blue Fire was doing had to be different in some kind of way. That, or Blue Fire had to be vastly more powerful than any mage on Kurr. Which was certainly possible given how much mana he’d seen moving into the solar system when he was at its edge—and how oddly it had been channeled.

Despite the accident, he could still clearly remember the tarry, taffy-like effect. How the mana had been moving so quickly yet, in its own impossible way, thickened so that it seemed slow. Fast and slow simultaneously. Paradox. And yet he’d seen it, defying everything he knew of mana and how it worked.

But given that he’d discovered a race of people traveling in the stars using nothing but what they could build with their hands and their creativity, and given that he’d also found a race of people that weren’t even people at all, instead some kind of … rock things, well, it no longer seemed like a stretch to assume he knew almost nothing about how anything worked anymore. On one hand, the wonderment of that for a mind as curious as his was vast. Such a revelation was exhilarating and humbling all at once. Unfortunately, on the other hand, the press of the circumstance, the overwhelming sense that he might lose Orli’s love forever, the loss of Tytamon and the fear he had for the safety of Kettle and everyone else at Calico Castle all stole the joy from this particular mission of discovery.

And so he had only the work.

On the sixth day tunneling through the textual mountain, the work paid off. He finally uncovered a divination spell he thought might suffice. It was a spell called “Lover’s Dream.” He couldn’t decide if the name was appropriate or ironic, but it seemed to be just what he needed, or at least close enough to start.

Lover’s Dream

Find the dreams of your lost love. See them as your lover does. Cast into the wind of souls, and seek where lover’s spirit goes. Don’t be proud. Get off your feet—love is humble in the lotus seat. Chant yourself into this trance; cast it slow to have a chance:

En ez mertimon cal’sombea ee, enez tosee semble seep

Kover mo’ver mendle lei, parsin larsin ekle wepe

Sengle mengle mor du tuk, fendle kodum hade

Forgar morgar hay’dee eg, fendle koduck fayde.

You must sing this sixty times and not a single more, and you must sing it sleepily but well before you snore. Focus on the mind of one whom most you wish to find, and you will see that lover’s dreams come silently to mind.

Which sounded great, except that Orli was not really the one he was looking for. But, since this was the closest thing he’d found to usefulness, he hoped that somehow he could find one of Orli’s dreams and trace it back to the mind of Blue Fire, if such a thing were possible. Frankly, anything was worth a try given how much time he’d spent in research. And it seemed a simple enough spell to do, though written in a somewhat childish hand. He hoped it wasn’t the ridiculous notion of some love-struck adolescent who fancied himself a magician far greater than he actually was. Altin had no way of knowing because the spell was in a tattered book he found in a stack on a bottom shelf of the second floor of Tytamon’s vast library. It seemed almost cast aside, shoved off amongst others like it, thin volumes, written less than three hundred years ago, and absent much of the formality of the epic works. Still, it was a start.

Except he wasn’t tired. He expected that was going to make things difficult. “Sing it sleepily, but well before you snore.” He figured he’d have no problem with the “well before you snore” part, but the “sleepily” thing was going to be tough.

He glanced out a window that looked back upon the shadowy gray wall of Mt. Pernolde rising out of site high above. He could see the scraggly arms of the stunted pines growing from the cracks and narrow ledges in its sheer face. They reached out into the coming night like slow brown lightning, defying the convention of their forest brethren with the same single-mindedness that made them ridicule gravity. Though night approached, there was quite enough light to reveal them and, with them, the fact that sunset was still a long way off, as was Altin’s inclination for sleep.

Still, he would try. He figured it would probably take some time to get the spell’s particular cadences down anyway.

He climbed off the rough wooden chair he was seated on and sat on the floor. He crossed his legs as the spell directed, spreading the book out in his lap, and went to work memorizing the chant. With an investment of time, it was simple enough to do, its rhythms easy enough to find. When he was comfortable that he had it, he set the book aside, leaned back against the chair and went to work chanting it the sixty times through.

He lost count somewhere around thirty-three.

“Ox horns,” he swore. “How am I supposed to go nearly to sleep and count exactly sixty refrains at the same time?”

He remembered why he hated divining more than any other magic school.

He started again.

Twenty-six or so was where he lost count that time. The next try he got to forty-eight before he realized he’d skipped forty-seven. Or else he’d done forty-eight twice. There was no way to know. He botched it at only fifteen on the next attempt and, after another twenty or so tries with similar results, realized he was too frustrated to find anything resembling semi-sleep now, even had it been the middle of the night.

He needed wine.

He jogged down to the kitchens and arrived out of breath, his body made whole by the
Citadel
healer but his endurance still largely lacking after his time in the amniotic tank. He glanced about, almost dreading to find Kettle or Nipper there, which would cost him time in conversation he didn’t want to have. He immediately cursed himself for the selfish thought. Nonetheless, neither was about, so he went quickly and opened one of the large cold-stone boxes near the far wall and pulled out the first jug he found. He was not concerned with vintage or taste. He simply needed to get himself closer to slumber than he was.

He heard Kettle’s voice coming as he closed the lid on the cold-stone box. Nipper was with her, the two of them arguing about how much honey to order now that the keep’s occupancy had grown so precipitously. Nipper didn’t want to pay what the apiarists were charging this late in the season. Kettle argued that the price didn’t matter at all. Hearing that and fearing the tedious quagmire such a mundane topic might become, Altin had an urge to bolt, to sprint the few steps that would get him through the door before they saw him and mired him down in the sticky subject of Calico Castle’s honey stores. But he stopped himself. He owed them a greeting. They needed him, if not really for the honey issue, for the familiarity of his presence, and for the sense of security that came with knowing there was a Seven on the grounds, a powerful master, if not so much so as the last had been. Besides, he was not in so much a hurry as all of that, he supposed, given how far off sleepiness would likely be.

In came Kettle and Nipper, as anticipated, but with an unanticipated third, a short, freckle-faced woman covered in mud. The bright yellow jacket and the strips of green ribbon tied around her upper arms identified her as a post rider from Leekant. Nipper carried a wide, flat box in his arms that was as mud-speckled as the rider was, suggesting to Altin’s eye that this was what the woman had brought. He set it on a cutting board near the door and wiped the label clean enough to read.

“Who’d be sendin’ anythin’ ta young Pernie?” the old man asked even as he began prying up the lid with a heavy knife taken from a wooden block nearby.

Kettle, getting the post rider something to restore her strength for the ride back to Leekant, heard the creak of the nails and turned in time to scold him. “Nipper, ya gnarly old stump, if’n ya bend that knife I’ll be skinnin’ ya with the bent end, ya hear me? An’ such a mess it’ll make.”

The lid was off, however, so Nipper was able to accomplish his task and do as instructed all at once. He shot Altin a look of triumph, smiling wide but showing no teeth, given that he had forgotten to put them in again.

He reached into the box and pulled out an item Altin had no explanation for. It was a miner’s pick. A well-made one by Altin’s guess, for the metal was bright and polished as if it were brand new, though the haft was dark and smooth, worn in a way that could only have come over the course of years of use.

Kettle saw Nipper pull it from the box and immediately burst into tears, burying her face in her apron.

Nipper looked from her to Altin, who returned the glance with a shrug, and then looked to the messenger as if she might have something to add.

The freckled rider shrugged as well. “All I know is it came from the old diviner out at Leekant Cemetery.”

“There’s a note,” Nipper said. He pulled it out and walked it to Altin.