The Galactic Mage (22 page)

Chapter
22

A
fter celebrating the discovery of landing on the moon, Altin turned over to Aderbury the project of announcing that progress to the Queen. He figured including Aderbury in the event, and using Aderbury’s access to the stoic monarch as an excuse to avoid having to deal with her himself, he could guarantee Aderbury’s position as lunar amusement park project-director should that idea pan out. And with that task underway, Altin began the work of moving beyond Luria and out into the night.

If the astronomers were right, the planets should be the closest lights up in the sky and therefore the most obvious places to target next. There were seven planets besides Prosperion, and Naotatica was not the nearest one. But, according to the Church, Naotatica was the planet upon which the elves had originally evolved. As the story went, Melgon Tidalwrath, a second-generation and upstart god, had angered the older Prosperion gods with an act of selfishness and had been banished to Naotatica as punishment for a span of five hundred thousand years. Apparently, again according to myth, when the young god got there, he found the haughty race of elves, for whom he grew an instant hatred, and subsequently banished them to Prosperion, to the islands known as String, where they have lived ever since.

Altin wasn’t sure he believed the story, but at least it gave him a place to start, more hope than the other planets had. Given the inhospitable climate and lack of breathable air here on Luria, it made sense to seek out a world that had a surface usable by an elf. If the elves could breathe on Naotatica, Altin could breathe. So, with that bit of logic behind him, he began the work once more of casting seeing stones blindly into space.

At least this time he had the Liquefying Stone and some small concept of the distances involved. He figured that the other planets had to be much farther from Luria than would be convenient, just as Luria had been from Prosperion. So, with that as a starting point, he cast his first stone out in the direction of Naotatica’s tiny green speck of light, casting it twice the distance between his planet and its moon. He knew the planet would be farther than that, but it was a distance he could hold in his head better than just trying to cast it out with nothing shaping his thoughts at all. Going to the scrying basin in his familiar routine, he was a bit disappointed, but not entirely surprised, to see that Naotatica’s light was no larger than it had been a moment before. Perhaps skipping a few of the solar system’s other planets on the way to Naotatica was not such a good idea, he thought. Still, the hope of the elven origins kept him at the task, and he spent the remainder of the night trying to improve his casts.

He repeated the process for the next several nights: exhausting blind casts, sleep, a nibble from his diminishing loaf and starting over again, casting stones as far as he could make them go. His skill at casting into the unknown, despite the prohibitive nature of such a thing in teleporting spells, grew with each successive cast. He was actually doubling and tripling his range by the end of every working night as his mind began to conceive of distances that never in all his life had he imagined could possibly exist. And by using the skipping stones technique along with the Liquefying Stone, he could really cover a lot of interplanetary ground.

By the end of his sixth day trying, he finally had Naotatica clearly in the scrying basin’s view. He stared down into the water, panting from the effort of several hours of casting against the winds of no-known place, and grinned as he saw that Naotatica had grown from a spot like all the rest of the stars into a round light roughly the size of a grape and just about the same shade of green. “Hah, there you are,” he said into the water, rippling it with his breath. “I finally found you. I’m coming to get you next.”

Energized by his new success, he resumed his casting of the seeing stones. He launched his next stone at the last, intending to skip this one off of that, and have it hop twice again the distance he’d just made. He checked it in the basin and sure enough Naotatica had once more increased noticeably in size.

He repeated the process again, this time skipping off the farther stone. Naotatica was now half the diameter of the basin. He cast another stone. This one had the planet’s bright green face filling the basin from edge to edge. Altin was ecstatic. He was going to land on Naotatica tonight.

He cast another stone, this time his excitement giving him strength as if this were his first cast of the night. His seeing stone shot way out past the previous one, and when Altin checked in the water, hoping that he had landed there at last, he found himself staring into a basin filled with glowing green.

“What in the nine hells?” he muttered.

He decided to cast a full seeing spell on the location of the seeing stone and immediately went into the chant that would bring his vision to the little rock. Once there, he looked about and dropped his jaw in awe. Naotatica was enormous.

He could tell that his seeing stone was still very far away from the planet, now that he was here and could move his view about. By tilting his view up or down, or wide to either side, he could see the black of space around Naotatica, but looking straight at it, it completely filled his vision, peripheral and all. But regardless of how large it loomed, the angles required to see the stars behind told him that he was still extremely far away.

He released the seeing spell and decided to cast another stone. He’d try to double the last distance and see where he ended up. He figured he might go right past the monstrous planet, but he was anxious to get there pretty soon. His strength was quickly giving out.

He cast the stone and returned to the basin to see where it had gone. Once again the water was filled with glowing green. This time, however, there was a slightly different look to the color in the water: it had an element of mist, a visual texture of a sort. He quickly chanted the improved seeing spell and once more joined his sight with the actual location of the seeing stone. He immediately felt that he was falling, and, for the first time since seeing anything out here in space, he actually heard some noise.

The stone was apparently falling through a cloudy, windblown mist, and Altin allowed his vision to fall with it, retaining his visual anchor on the stone and feeling as if he were there. The wind was violent up there, and Altin could see the stone, a rather good-sized chunk of rock, being buffeted easily about as it continued to fall through the blinding mist. And everything was green and seemed to glow. Everything. Or nothing. There was not one dash of another color anywhere to be found. Just green. There was enough gradation of texture within the whirling blasts of mist to give him the sense of downward motion, but nothing more. And the volume of the wind was incredible. He had to adjust the auditory portion of the spell after a while as the intensity grew painful in his head. And so he fell.

And he fell.

And he fell.

It seemed he must have fallen for an hour, although he doubted it had been that long, and with every passing moment he kept anticipating, at last, some contact with the planet’s surface. But it just would not arrive. His seeing stone continued to plummet for what seemed an impossible length of time, and after pushing himself to the limits of his magical strength, he had to let the vision go. He was exhausted. He simply could not go on. With the last of his energy, he conjured the image of the falling stone back in the scrying basin and locked it there with a simple enchanter’s stream. It was all he could do to stagger downstairs and tumble into bed.

He woke the next morning—or what felt like morning given how different the concept became up here on the moon where both the sun and bright Prosperion lit up the sky on schedules of their own—and ate the last of his now quite stale loaf of bread. Losing his access to a fresh daily loaf was an unexpected downside of being out in space. He would have to load up on food the next time he went down.

He took a drink of water from the pitcher on his nightstand and noted that it too tasted rather old. Looking into the pitcher reminded him of his scrying basin on the battlements, and he trotted up to have a look at the stone which was now surely lying on Naotatica’s solid ground.

But it was not. It was still falling. Altin could not believe his eyes. Nothing could fall that long. Such a thing was absolutely impossible. It was as if the entire planet was made of air. Green air. He couldn’t believe such an absurd idea. How could a planet be made of nothing but howling winds and mist? What kind of planet was that? Surely not one that had spawned the race of elves.

His mind began to wrestle with the new problem that he’d found. It couldn’t really be a planet if there was no planet in all that mist, could it? And yet, it certainly looked like a planet when viewed from high above. He thought about it some more. Naotatica had seemed shockingly large as he’d been casting his stones closer and closer during the approach. It was possible, he supposed, that Naotatica could be, well, really, really large. Amazingly large. Perhaps incredibly larger than Prosperion could ever hope to be. Maybe, given the enormity of the distances he was discovering out here in space, perhaps there were sizes of all kinds to be fathomed here as well, not just distances from point to point. He realized that Naotatica might not be subject to all the same size paradigms that Prosperion and Luria had caused him to unknowingly embrace.

Given that idea, he decided that it was at least plausible that the sky on Naotatica was vastly larger, or deeper, than was the sky around Prosperion, much thicker than Prosperion’s little translucent shroud of glowing mist. And if this were the case, extrapolated outward by Altin’s new respect for possible distance, it stood to reason that a stone falling through a sky that large might take considerably longer to hit the ground than would a stone dropped into the air above Kurr.

But still… all night?

He was willing to believe, however. For now. And so, leaving the basin enchanted with the view of the plummeting seeing stone, he decided that this was a perfect time to take the tower home. He needed to stock up on a few supplies anyway, and he was really hungry for something substantive to eat. He looked up at Prosperion and saw that Kurr was nowhere in his field of view. Judging from the position of the sun, he realized that it was evening back at home and suddenly hoped that perhaps he might be in time for dinner; a hot meal was exactly what he needed after so much time away.

It turned out he was in time for the evening’s repast, and it was over a huge roast turkey, heaps of fresh vegetables and a pudding that rivaled the turkey for size that Altin regaled not only Tytamon but Kettle too with his stories of Naotatica and its seemingly endless sky.

When he got to the part about coming home for want of food, Kettle’s face took on a stern and focused look, as if she’d been stewing on this for days. “Well, sir, if ya are goin’ ta be flyin’ around in space, ya needs a proper bellyfull ta keep yer strength. Any fool knows as much.” She shook her finger at him as if he were five years old and had gone out into the snow without putting on his coat, and her momentum began to build. “Gone fer days,” she trudged on, “An’ not one word ta me about it. And here, me havin’ ya—the lad I’m charged with feedin’ mind ya—starvin’ ta death out between the stars. The hearth goddess herself will have my soul fer failin’ ya.” With that she got up and stomped out of the room, the two mages smiling at one another across the plentitude of food.

“I can’t tell if she’s mad or impressed,” Altin admitted as he heaped another portion of pudding on his plate.

“Both,” Tytamon said around a mouthful of the spectacular dessert. “Mostly impressed, I’d wager. But if she’d boxed your ears on her way out, I wouldn’t have been surprised.”

Altin nodded and grinned as he took another bite, but when he’d finished his meal and a half hour of discussion with Tytamon about his plans, he found that he had a messenger waiting at the stairwell leading up into his rooms.

“Master Altin, sir,” Pernie said, carefully repeating the message word for word, “if ya would oblige, Kettle has need of yer services to fetch yer coldstone box up into yer rooms.”

He gave her a quizzical look, but nodded that he would follow as she scampered off into the dark. She led him back to the kitchen where Kettle was still heaping leftovers and loaves of bread and flasks of water and wine into a large wooden crate that she had lined with enchanted cold stones. She speared him with a look as he walked in, and he knew that he was about to receive a lecture from her in no uncertain terms.

“Now yer goin’ ta listen ta me, boy. Ya may be the young master in this here castle, but I’m not without some say about what goes on, and there isn’t gon’ be no flying up in space without no food. Ya hearin’ me?” She didn’t even give Altin time to nod. “This here crate is gon’ be yers. I know enough ‘bout yer teleportin’ to know ya can send this crate right over there under that table any time ya like.” She pointed with her chin at a stout wooden table in a far corner of the room. “So from now on, if’n yer gon’t be off fer days and weeks at a time, yer sendin’ it back fer me ta fill with food whenever ya need. Do ya hear me, lad? Ya send it right back there. Won’t be no starvin’ mages on my watch, or it’ll be the rollin’ pin fer ya I tell ya true. And don’t think I won’t do it, ‘cause I will.”

Altin started to protest, to explain about accidents and how Pernie might be playing under the table when the crate came back or something of the sort, but he could tell by the look on Kettle’s face that she already knew all about that and would not be hearing his excuses. It was safer to just say, “Yes, ma’am.”

She stuffed some carrots into a small basket and loaded them into the crate, then set its lid back on, pounding it down tight with a fleshy, flour-covered fist. “There ya go. Now get this thing out of here, it’s takin’ up too much space.”

Altin smiled and happily obliged. With a few words and a gesture, the crate was sitting near his bed. “Thank you, Kettle,” he said when it was done. “You are very kind.”

“Don’t I know it,” she said. “Now get along. Yer taking up too much space too.”